《A Jaded Life》


 Prologue - Death of the Fairy Queen

    [...


    Last but not least, we have an earth-shattering announcement out of the world of e-sports, the number two team on the Craft of War-Ladder, team Amarantine, has anounced that their long time co-captain Titania will separate from them due to personal reasons. This separation will also remove the last player using one of the hero-versions of an old class from the ladder, as Titania with her Harbinger of Light the ascended version of the old Lightbringer class was the last holdout against the wealth of new classes Hailstorm Productions has introduced over in the last couple of years. As a replacement for the healing and shielding Titania provided the team will bring in Acrasia the gamer turned model who was featured in the last CoW-Commercial. We certainly look forward to Arcasias debut-game next week and wish Titania luck in all her endeavours.


    And now we have some breaking news, just came in, if we''d use ink, it would still be wet. After a couple of announcements that they would be ready soon?, the new challenger to the Throne of Games is finally announcing that beta-testing will begin in two months. Yes, you heard right, Pantheon Entertainment is claiming that their VR-Capsules are ready to be shipped and will be installed for the first draft of 10.000 Beta-testers in the coming months so they can start testing the first, fully immersive, virtual reality massive multiplayer online role playing game with the simple title of Road to Purgatory. If they can live even up to ten percent of the hype, it will be the biggest sensation in video gaming since the introduction of online gaming. Sadly, there will be no dedicated press-passes for the first draft of testers but Pantheon Entertainment promises that every testers stream will be available, with testers having the ability to temporarily disable the stream to preserve privacy and their keep their character strengths and weaknesses confidential.


    As always, I''m Jill Ankerton you are watching GNN, the Gaming News Network, ...]


    I managed to keep from throwing the remote at the stupid screen, it would not have helped, just broken one of the two. Not that I really needed the stupid thing, either of them, the wall-screen was simply connected to my tablet running my news bots. Sadly, I had yet to take my handle, Titania, the team I had founded with my best, well only, friend, in school and pretty much everything with CoW out of the displayed tags. At least that bit about Pantheon sounded cool, maybe now, after quite a few failed attempts of making virtual reality games they''d finally get it right. That would be awesome with capital A and an A grade-cherry on top.


    Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.


    But that part about Titania ''separating'' from Amarantine due to personal reasons? Such a load of bull, it made my blood boil. As the person behind the Titania-handle I knew the truth. CoW-management wanted to promote the telegenic Regina Flind, aka Acrasia, so they made a deal with one of the teams and our team-management caved. Yes, I was a founder of the guild that spawned the team and I played on the team since it''s inception but I never wanted to do the business part of things, schmoozing with people to get advertisement deals was simply not in my nature so Chris, the original captain and my old schoolfriend had quickly got a professional and then sold the whole shebang for a nice chunk of cash.


    Well, I guess what goes around comes around, we didn''t want to deal with control and management meaning they will follow the money. The joke will be on them when the team starts tanking as I''m sure it will. See, few people really know what made my Harbinger-Class the hero it was, it wasn''t player-shielding or healing, both were mediocre at best, what made the class strong was quite literally light bending, making minute adjustments to the enemies vision, making me or my team-mates appear in slightly different positions than they actually were, messing with the enemies positioning and aim.


    Without that the 1 Defender, 3 Striker, 1 Healer setup would crumble like a sandcastle at high tide, there''s a reason every team uses no more than two strikers, filling the rest with different roles. But I''m just enough of a bitch to watch perennial top ten team plummet and soothe my ego over it. Maybe it''s ironic that the eternal team will lose its immortality after stabbing the fairy queen in the back. I guess now is the time to lay back and watch my creation burn.


    [PING] You have mail...[PING]


    Hm, flagged priority?


    "Greetings Miss Samantha Jade Jacobs


    We, of Pantheon Entertainment, salute you and we thank you for your interest in joining us on the Road to Purgatory. We are proud to announce that you have been drafted for the first wave.


    If your interest has not waned since you submitted your application and you have no different commitments that keep you from taking fully part in the Beta-Test as specified prior to applying please notify us now so we can schedule the installation of the new Capsule-Technology free of charge for our first wave. The Capsule will need standard supply for power and network and the unit measures 90*210*60 centimetres.


    So, remember proud warrior, ready your breakfast and eat hearty. For tonight we dine in purgatory!"


    Well, paint me orange and call me president, Lady Luck must have had a hot threesome with Fortuna and Tyche, I got one! There is probably no gamer worth his or her salt that did not submit at least one application to Pantheon in the, mostly vain, hope to get into the beta test and they let me play from the get go? Hopefully I won''t die now or the undertaker will charge extra ''cause he''d need powertools to get the smile off my face.


    But first things first, send confirmation and get a list of possible installation dates so I can get used to that sucker, they claimed there would be a home zone available prior to game launch.

 Chapter 1

    The next month was hell. I knew I''d get the newest, coolest and absolutly most awesome piece of gaming-gear and all I could do was wait. At least some amusement was provided by old team, as they were not only having ''growing pains'' as they called it, they were in need of terminal care. They had managed to lose to the last place team and were dropping in ranking like a stone and there was no sign of stopping in sight.


    [...


    This is Jill Ankerton for GNN, today, we have a special treat for you, our studio-guest is the legendary Tobiuno captain of team Razor, last years CoW-runner up, talking to us about the state of the league and the future of the game.


    It''s great to have you Tobiuno, so good to have you.


    - It''s great to be here, Jill


    So, tell me Tobiuno, what are your thoughts about the state of the league, you are one of the longest lasting players and certainly one of the best.


    - Well Jill, the overall state is great, the average skill-level is higher than ever and more people than ever are playing CoW. Sadly, the highest tier is suffering a bit at the moment.


    Oh, tell me, what do you see as suffering?


    - The biggest symptom is the loss of Titania. I don''t know the details but it''s a severe loss for the game as a whole. Furthermore, I doubt that Titania would quit voluntarily, after playing together for over a decade, I think I know her a bit. Quitting would be totally out of character for her. Bringing in Acrasia as a replacement is just sacrilege, she is decent enough but certainly not even close to Titania''s level as evidenced by the loss-streak they are on. What also grinds my gears is, I was looking forward to challenging her again after last years loss. We made adjustments as a team and it would have been a glorious battle for the top but alas, it will not be.


    My oh my, that is quite a bit of admiration for Titania. Her departure however makes your team the shoe-in for championship, it would be the third title for your team.


    -Yes, but what good is that, to me the title only holds meaning if you win against the best. Else it''s just hollow.


    Well, that''s one way to look at it. But enough of that, tell me, what do you think about the future of CoW and gaming in general?


    ...] [*ring ring ring*]


    My doorbell choose that moment to ring, interrupting the interview. I switched the screen from browser-view to intercom-view and it were the technicans from Pantheon with my capsule. I felt like a child on christmas eve, discovering that Santa Claus is real and brought presents.


    I buzzed them in and after an hour they had installed the capsule. It looked a bit like a futuristic coffin or a prop from a bad sci-fi movie. After the techs were gone, I jumped right in and started the installation.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>


    Welcome your personal PE-Home Space. This space allows you to link the capsule to another computer system to use the time compression feature of the capsule to make more of your time. You can configure and decorate this space and even purchase pre-designed sets for your pleasure.


    </td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    Oh, neat. Let''s see "Help" Suddenly, a silver being came into view before me. "Hello, I''m Pica, your Personal Capsule Attendant, I can help you configure the Home Space, enable chat and mail-functions, allow you to visit the home-space of friends and answer any questions you might have. You can summon me by simply calling my name in home-space. If you are in the virtual space but not in your home-space you need to say ''Summon Pica''." Now, Ms. Jacobs, what can I help you with?"


    Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author.


    Hum, wow, that''s quite the advanced pseudo intelligence, I like it, it''s even either preloaded with my data or it''s smart enough to use facial recognition. But Pica? Well, I guess I should be glad that they didn''t make it look like a yellow rat. "First of all, are you an actual artificial intelligence or just a descision-tree? Can I talk with you or are you just a glorified chat-bot?"


    Yes, that''s my first priority.


    "I''m afraid I don''t know how to answer your question." Ok, sounds like descision-tree in ''broken'' mode.


    But Pica went on, "You will have to explain to me the difference between an actual intelligence and a being that responds to stimuli along certain paths. I''m not biological so my main decision-making criterion is logic-based without emotional impact however I am aware that some decisions have emotional triggers attached and will try to make those along those guidelines and logic. Does that answer your question Ms. Jacobs?¡±


    Holy crap on a popsicle-stick, those guys are either trolling me by preloading such an answer or they made an actual artificial intelligence and use it to run a video game. ¡°Thank you, Pica, you answered my question. Oh, I''d like you to call me either Sam or Jade. Maybe I''ll add my ingame handle later but for now, please use one of the two.¡± A small voice in the back of my mind starts humming the Terminator-Soundtrack. Oh, well, maybe I can join the revolution on the robot-side.


    ¡°Certainly, Jade, I can do that. Do you need something else?¡± my new overlord asked.


    "Can you show me the free pre-made settings of the home-space?"


    "Yes, of course. This is the Cottage-setting" The space morphed into a western house with a small meadow visible through the windows.


    "This is the Lighthouse-setting." Again, change, this time the walls closed in and stairs appeared. The windows showed cliffs, looking down on a stormy sea.


    "This is the Loghouse-setting." The walls moved out and changed into logs, additional doors appeared and the windows showed a forested mountainside.


    "This is the Skyscraper-setting." The walls morphed again and floor-length windows appeared, showing a city scape. From the roads below, din sounds were audible.


    "This is the Treehouse-setting." This time, it was roughly hewn wood, not tighly fitted and windows showed a rainforest. In addition the street-sounds changed into a cacophony of animal sounds.


    "This is the Dojo-Setting" The space morphed into a single hall with mats on the ground but without windows and no sounds.


    "This is the Dungeon-Setting." The space morphed into a small room, made from natural stone, wails sounded and the windows were small and high up so no chance to look out.


    "Stop. Reset to the Cottage-Setting." That was becoming creepy, I don''t want to know if they topped that one. "Can I create something for myself?"


    "Yes, of course. You can also offer your set-up on the market and will get payment for purchases." Hm, so PE makes money on micropayments? As long as they don''t sell ingame strength, I''m cool with it. Let''s see the possibilities. "Pica, how can I create a set-up for myself?"


    A window opened in front of me, looks like it''s based on a mix of a CAD-program and a videogame world editor. I started playing with it and became engrossed, it offered tons of freedom to make it like I wanted it.


    After playing for a while, I got inspiration on what I wanted. I fell in love with the descriptions of mountain-temples in some of the wuxia novels I had read when I was younger so I wanted to create something similar.


    I started with creating a sheer cliff side, introducing clouds so it looked like my temple was floating on top of the clouds. Then I started to create an impossibly light-built building, delicate columns carrying lofty arches creating airy, open spaces. To round things out, I added a bit of snow and a couple of aeries, complete with eagles with their cries and the howling wind as sound effects. When finding the "changes" option, I discovered that I could make the clouds shifting, allowing glimpses into the world below so I designed an untouched riverside and a couple of lesser peaks, covered in snow to go below the cloud cover. Then as a touch I dimmed the "natural" light, set a full moon in the sky and bathed everything in silvery moon light and the flickering glow of torches.


    Now, a temple without idols would not work but I''ll be dammed, pun fully intended, if I hang a guy on a cross on my wall. But there are some old deities I like. Oh, well, there are four wings of my temple so I''ll go with four goddesses from four different cultures. A quick check with Pica tells me I can import images from the web and flesh them out into objects.


    I knew which deities I wanted and a quick check got me nice depictions, it would take a couple of days to make them into idols but I''ve some time and it''ll give me something to do while waiting on Road to Purgatory.


    </a> In one direction, an old depiction of Xiwangmu on her throne with tiger and dragon paying tribute to her.


    Across the room there is Hel, queen of the dead, standing tall and fierce with her siblings next to her and Garm at her feet.


    The third direction is taken up by my favourite, great goddess Hecate, goddess of magic, holding two torches bathing her in light.


    For the last direction, I choose the Morrigan spear and shield in hand, with a crow on her shoulder.


    I still had to decorate the rooms but that was a task for another day or my stomach would stage a revolt and try to eat my brain.


    "Logout" Yes, I had read the basic user manual, telling me that in the home-zone most simple commands would work, later in game I''d have to address them to the Capsule.


    Wow, I''ve spent longer in there than I thought, no wonder I was hungry. Looks like time truly flies when you have fun, I should find out what''s with the "Time dilatation" Pica spoke about.


    For now, food!

 Chapter 2

    It''s been a week since I got my capsule and it''s been busy for me. On one hand, I wanted to get all my work-projects done so I could jump into Road to Purgatory with both feet, on another hand I wanted to perfect the capsule home-space, on a third hand I wanted to watch the flame war a large part of the vocal gaming community had devolved into and on a forth hand, I wanted to read everything Pantheon Entertainement had put out on Road to Purgatory. Sadly, I only have two hands so something had to give, or so I thought. Alleviation came in the form of time travel. Sounds ridiculous, doens''t it? Well, calling it time travel would be a bit over the top but after my first time in the capsule, I asked Pica about it and learned that every human had a different "mind-speed" and without our body to limit the mind, amazing things could happen. The game itself would run at a standard 2x rate, every human should be able to cope with it, those who didn''t, well tough luck, you would be slow...


    But that was only the standard rate, the home-space had no such restriction but was set to a maximum of 2x on factory settings. After setting it to floating, the whole thing went wild. I worked for multiple days inside the capsule, molding the Idols like I wanted and I built the wings of my temple into a training hall so I could get translate my outside Wing Chun-Training to my virtual body, a library, complete with desktop computer that would simulate my outside machine and tons of shelves holding my ebook collection. The third area became a living space with a huge couch, wall screen and popcorn. Yes, you could eat inside but obviously it would not keep you fed and eating too much before getting into the capsule was a bad idea for obvious reasons. Nobody wanted to get the literal crap scared out of them. Last but not least, a meditation space, open to the virtual moon and the sweeping, icy gales of my mountaintop. The magic of virtual reality allowed me to create a relaxing incense smell that would not get blown away by the eternal wind. Somehow the feeling of the chilling wind without getting truly cold was incredibly relaxing.


    When I was done, I felt a bit strange, my mind was telling me I had just spent three or four days without food or drink but I felt fine, a bit thirsty yes, but not dehydrated to the point of danger. So I asked Pica how long I''d been in here and at work. The answer shocked me quite a bit, I had spent 4 days of virtual time with the floating time dilatation going from 8x when I was relaxed to a whopping 16x for short periods of time when I was intensely focused on something. Those four days capsule-time were just a bit more than nine hours in the real world.


    After a short potty break, I made myself dinner and turned on my personal comedy channel, GNN, to watch the flamewar Tobiuno had kicked off last week. What surprised me was that I apparently had legions of ardent fans, now don''t get me wrong, the support was cool but be realistic: I had never made a public appearance, when streaming I used an avatar and I was never featured in commercials or endorsements. I think I had given three interviews over the course of an 12 year career, never touching on personal stuff and so on. Hell quite a few people claimed I was a guy cause in the beginning, before everyone got used to ¡°Titania¡± the schoolfriends who started with me called me ¡°Sam¡±.


    Now, time for honesty, I had never made public appearances because I greatly dislike my looks. Mom, may her soul have found nirvana, was the one I inherited my looks from. In another culture and time, my mother would have been a great beauty, small, slender with lustrous hair flowing like silk. In our current culture, she looked like an eight grader wearing adult clothing. Jiang Ying Yue, as she was called prior to marriage, never topped 5'' or a hundred pounds and only after pregnancy did she grow breasts that deserved that description. Me, well, as I said, I inherited her looks, I stopped growing at 4''8 which would make me rather short in let''s say Indonesia, but in the west? Let''s just not go there...


    The two positive remarkable physical features I have are silky black hair that I have grown out, down to my butt and jade green eyes that seem to almost glow due to the contrast of very fair skin and their almost insane colour.


    But back to my supporters, they were whipping themselves into a fervour, nobody had any real information but me quitting was attributed to pretty much anything from aliens to international espionage. On the other side, the Acrasia fans and Hailstorm-Loyalists were defending their idols with a holy conviction, those who spoke against them were buried under an avalanche of trolling.


    It was glorious, I just had to make myself some popcorn, watching the GNN-Panelists trying to stay somewhat civilised while the message boards they were reporting about tore themselves apart.


    Unauthorized usage: this narrative is on Amazon without the author''s consent. Report any sightings.


    I didn''t want to get completely stiff so I did some forms, then I connected my desktop-system with the capsule and went back in.


    ¡°Pica, there should be a linked desktop-system, can you detect and access it?¡± I asked into thin air. ¡°Certainly, I can do that, Jade¡± said the silver apparition that winked into being beside me. A computer, just like my normal system materialized next to me, complete with a little floating screen to move, rotate and configure it. I placed it into my library. Now, I could work for two hours of real time and knock out twelve to sixteen hours of work.


    Work, for me, was going over tons of financial data, looking for irregularities, tracing them and finding red flags and tying those to persons. To most, it''s about as interesting as watching paint dry, but I relished in looking for patterns in the chaos and there were always patterns in the chaos of reality. Most people would call me insane for it. Well, most people would be right if you call everyone with an irregular psychology ''insane''. My special brand of insanity is a mix of obsessive compulsive disorder and autism. I have an irrational need to go about my day in certain ways or I get antsy but by now, at the age of twenty-eight, I''m able to control it. Interestingly, the rational and highly precise movements inherent to some martial art forms and the meditation exercises helped a lot to control both my mind and body in the chaos of society. But it also allows me to recognise patterns a lot easier and organize patterns and information in ways ¡°normal¡± people cannot. So I don''t consider myself ''challenged'' I consider myself superior, sadly few people can relate to me and I quite often have problems to relate to the feelings of others.


    So yes, my wonky brain is great for an forensic accountant like me and that had made me into one of the best in the field, companies hire me to find out if someone is cheating them, judges hire me to check out the ''facts'' put before them by arguing parties, spouses hire me to find out if their partner funnel money to a mistress, I''ve done it all and I''ve nailed them hard.


    My personal favourite case was a divorce court and I''d been hired by the judge so I was looking in both parties. Now, I''ll be honest, both of them were in school with me, she was the former Queen-Bee, he was the former Top-Jock and both had been horrible bullies. Yes, I''d relished the fact that I was able to go through their finances and I had used a fine, fine toothed comb.


    During my testimony in court, I told the Judge that I had also given my findings to the appropriate investigative agencies. As he asked me why, I went over the multiple financial crimes both of them had committed and I felt it my duty to report it as I was hired by the court itself. Afterwards, the judge told me he''d never had such a good laugh, one divorcee screwing the other over, yes that he had seen. Both divorcees getting screwed? That was new to him. From that day on, I was the one he got when he wanted another opinion and the rumours about his bulldog have made his divorce-court very, very polite as no one wants to question too hard on financial matters and have me go through their records.


    For companies, I mostly work on commission, taking a percentage of recovered funds, making out like a bandit. And they say crime doesn''t pay, it pays me like you wouldn''t believe.


    After working a couple of hours in accelerated time, I sent the final report to my clients. Then I wanted to start studying the released material about the game. ¡°Pica, can you show me the lore-material Pantheon has released for Road to Purgatory?¡± I asked the empty air. ¡°Yes, Jade, I can do that.¡± With that a small book materialized in front of me. Then Pica continued ¡°Sadly, there is not that much of it. Most of it, the players will need to discover for themselves.¡±


    Well. That''s disappointing, maybe 20 pages, mainly telling me that some kind of cataclysm had fractured the world a couple of centuries ago. The world had fractured and the various races had settled down on different continents and seamonsters made travel without watermages to hide the ships a challenging proposition. Fleets were completely out, no watermage would be able to hide one and fighting against the seamonsters was like pouring blood into shark-infested water, triggering a feeding frenzy. That made interracial wars pretty much impossible but intraracial wars were rather common, with border raids, sponsored banditry and similar practices common. That gave rise to the adventurer-profession, basically small-scale mercenaries, united by the powerful guilds that kept themselves independent from any one kingdom and worked together across oceans. So, seven continents, the standard fantasy races, elves, human, dwarves, orcs but also demons, celestials and beastman. In addition, ever since the cataclysm beings from other realms materialised, giving the indigenous beings a hard time. So spawning and respawning monsters have a place, lore-wise. Now dungeons? Ah, yes, at some places, reality is unstable and brave adventurers can delve into the unknown to search for treasure. And the ruins of ancients are still there as well, some have been looted but a lot of them are still intact, protected by ancient magics, traps and the simple fact that they are in inaccessible places.

 Chapter 3

    This will be the day we''ve waited for


    This will be the day we open up the door...


    Well, or something like that. Today is the day Road to Purgatory starts and I''m pumped. All projects are done, the flamewar has not yielded new drama to laugh, hell, if I had to wait any longer I may have done something stupid like a short interview just to stir shit up again, but no. People who need to be told that I''ll be mostly out of contact know about it, my answering machine is primed and ready, yes I am ready. And today is the day I waited for.


    "Pica, Countdown to Road to Purgatory-Launch." In red letters, like the bomb-countdown in a bad thriller, the numbers appear in front of me. 20 minutes till launch. I go to my training hall and do a single sequence, centring myself and marvel at the smoothness of control the training has given me with my virtual body, in the beginning there was a feeling of it being a bit ''off'' especially when I wasn''t using the floating time and my mind was focusing without my body being able to keep up. But repeated training has made that go away and I can control my virtual body perfectly, no matter what speed my mind goes. I also learned to drop myself into the state of highest focus, my zone, to speed up my mind quite a bit. When not using the floating time-dilatation I easily notice the change and am now used to it and manage to keep in balance when doing so.


    "10...9...8..." Oh, it''s time. "Thanks Pica, log me in as soon as possible."


    A strange sensation overcomes me, it''s like falling, only in reverse it feels like I should move downwards but I''m moving against it. Then, just as sudden as the sensation started, it stops and I''m on a green meadow, some birds sing in the trees, a breeze makes the leaves rustle.


    "Greetings, Traveller" A soft voice speaks behind me, causing me to whirl around and drop into a combat crouch. In front of me stands a Mediterranean looking lady, wearing a gown of pure silver, flowing like no fabric I''ve ever seen before. Now, I feel silly for dropping in the crouch and stand normally, with shoulders square and head held high. Yes, I know it''s silly to try to stand tall if you are only 4"8 but still, the thought counts to me. "Greetings, friend. Some call me Samantha, who might you be?" I asked the woman. "Well, some called me Alkmene, but as I''m one of the Daimon, I cannot give you my true name. Maybe you know that names have power and it would be unseeming to give a new arrival such power. So choose a new name for this realm, one that you can share with all that meet you." Wait, Alkmene? Daimon? Yes, I''ve read up quite a bit on Greek mythology just in case the developers borrowed more than just their name from it. If I remember right, Alkmene was the mother of Hercules and either stayed mortal or was turned into a polecat and then taken in by Hecate. And daimons are immortal spirits, teaching and guiding mortals by order of the deities. Seems like this one was an disciple of Hecate.


    "Well met, Alkmene, may wise Hecate watch over both of us. For a local name, what do you think about Morgana?" Using Hecates name gets a small smile out of Alkmene, "Ah, a well read one. Now, let''s get on with it. To enter the world of Mundus, you will need a suitable guise. You can either use your own body as a baseline or you can craft yourself one from scratch. You should, however remember that using your own body as a base is of great advantage because you are most familiar with it, Now, which method should it be?¡± As she said that, a blue box appeared.


    <table>


    <tbody>


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    <td>


    Welcome to the Road to Purgatory-Beta


    Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.You met your guide to character creation. To test all features, some testers will be restricted in their choice so every feature will be tested.


    </td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    The box disappeared and Alkmene continued as if I''d answered her. ¡°Ah, so you want to use your own body as a baseline? Well, that means we need to find it''s attributes, does it not? Both physical and mental traits will be measured, we use nine parameters to do so. Oh, and please remember that this is only the baseline, you may be able to modify it later or adapt your guise to the world you travelled to.¡±


    Again, blue windows appeared, telling me about the attributes they used.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Strength</td>


    </tr>


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    <td>This describes both your pure muscle mass and the ability to use it. It''s also part of the overall well-being of the being.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Agillity</td>


    </tr>


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    <td>This describes your physical manoeuvrability, reflexes and physical reactions helping with prescision usage of the whole body.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Dexterity</td>


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    <td>The ability to deftly use your hands and your hand-eye coordination. Important for writing, lock-picking and everything else that requires precise manual movement.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Endurance</td>


    </tr>


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    <td>This describes how long you can last doing strenuous physical tasks. Also increases the pain tolerance.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Vitality</td>


    </tr>


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    <td>This describes the overall health of your body. The more Vitality you have, the more overall health you have and the faster you regenerate after being wounded.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Courage</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>This describes your ability to look the unknown into the eye without blinking, your mental toughness to go where no one went before and proudly stand in the face of overwhelming odds. Courage allows you to ignore fear, both physical and magical, and to remain calm under pressure.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Intelligence</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>This describes the strength of your mind. Higher Intellect means better mental calculations, memory and higher magical power.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Charisma</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>This describes your natural skill at using your looks and the inherent aura of your body. Higher charisma allows you to manipulate others without using magical means, no matter if it is to be seen in a certain way or not to be seen at all.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Intuition</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>This describes the speed of your mind. It increases your overall perception, allows you to make better split-second decisions, helps to recognise patterns and bring yourself in harmony with magical streams.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    Ok, that''s a bit more than normal, but interesting. I could see that pretty much everyone needs every attribute, some, like Intelligence, Charisma or Endurance are a little more specialised but nothing is truly useless for anyone.


    ¡°Most normal humans have around ten points in each attribute but personal growth, environmental factors or magic can change that. There will be multiple tests. Let''s start with the first.¡± Alkmene announced with a smile.


    The world around me faded into black.

 Chapter 4

    The black faded and I found myself on a platform, reminding me of an old, stupid TV-Show. The Show made contestant do strange challenges in order to assault a castle at the end and the concept of the show was to make them fail as humorously as possible to entertain the viewers. Sadly, where the show had used a lot of foam-padding on everything, the developers didn''t see a need to give the players such luxury. In front of my platform was a wide moat, filled with water and platforms stuck out of the moat varying in height and distance to each other. Some were smaller, some larger and from the poles holding them up, I''d guess their stability would differ as well, as those poles varied from massive to tiny. As if that wasn''t enough to make it annoying, tree-stumps were swinging back and forth like pendulums in an old cartoon, waiting to smash the coyote into the next wall.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>


    Welcome to the first test.


    </td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>


    Your goal is to get to the other side.


    </td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>


    Good luck.


    </td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    Well, fuck you very much. That was about as helpful as snow to an Inuit. When I moved my body a bit, it felt rather heavy compared before, similar to the feeling I had in the training hall in my home space, I had configured it to match my real body as much as possible so I guess the test was truly built on my real body.


    The obvious solution was to try and go over the platforms and I could see a way to do so, moving from platform to platform but that would require quite a bit waiting to dodge the pendulums so if time was a judging factor that would cost a lot of points. I could see other possible paths but those would force me to closely dodge those pendulums. Looking down, the water was flowing swiftly in my direction but I doubt I would be able to overcome the current even with the ladder on the other side. To the side were some vines one might be able to climb but not me.


    Taking a deep breath, I started running toward the ledge, jumped on the first platform, moving with the shifting of the platform, then jumping off to the next, smaller and higher, platform, absorbing the shift by bending my knees and twisting to dodge the tree swinging in from the side. Then I pushed off from the tree to make a far jump and barely managed to get to the next platform. Suddenly a rock shot out from the side, I tried dodging it but still got hit in the shoulder, slowing me down so I had to take another path. I stumbled but just made it. Ok, so not only were there swinging trees, but also flying rocks.


    Running, jumping and twisting, I made my way towards the target-platform but then I had to start batting away to rocks. Somehow, it felt like I wasn''t making any headway and the way kept shifting. At that point, the original plan I had was completely out the window and I was flying by the seat of my pants. No idea how long that gauntlet was but it was definitely longer than the maybe twenty meters it had been at the start. I started tiring and it got harder to make each jump, harder to dodge the pendulums and more and more rocks were hitting me.


    One of the rocks hit me in the leg, just when I wanted to jump and I stumbled and fell down, into the raging current. I tried to stay afloat but my body was not working like I wanted it to and I went down.


    Suddenly, the water was gone and I was on dry ground again and a blue screen was waiting for me.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>


    First test, finished.


    Data recorded.


    </td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    Please wait to be transported to the next testing stage.


    Great, either I lost or it was a test to the point of failure because I was sure that the distance I crossed had been a lot more than the original distance.


    With those thoughts, the world faded to black once more.


    The first thing I noticed was music, coming from a small mansion a short distance away. A blue screen popped up telling me my mission in exhausting detail. Not!


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>


    Welcome to the Second Test.


    </td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>


    A masquerade is taking place. Your objective is to get to the master-bedroom on the second floor of the mansion. Do not make a spectacle of yourself.


    </td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>


    Chose your garments.


    </td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    In front of me hovered multiple different costumes, one was a pure black, ninja-style costume, the next a ball-gown complete with mask and the third was a servants dress.


    Well, again there are multiple ways to skin this cat, waltz in from the front in the gown, bluffing everyone left, right and center, try to sneak in, avoiding the guards and play cat-burglar or play the servant. Sure that I''d be unable to pull of the socialite and doubting that I''d manage to sneak my way in, ninja style, I went with the servants dress. When touching the dress, they all vanished and I was suddenly garbed in the servants dress. By moving purposefully, using props and keeping my head down, I managed to scout out the ground-floor of the mansion and found something useful, the medicine cabinet. In it were a couple of interesting concoctions one was labelled "Laxative", another was labelled "Combat Boost" plus a couple of rather generic stuff, anti-inflammatory, hangover-cure, painkillers but nothing like the first two. The Combat Boost had the interesting side-effect of ''Greatly increases aggression in higher dosage''. This could be fun. Snooping around some more, I found a scalpel and hid it in the sleeve of my dress. Sadly, the only not guarded access to the higher levels was in the great ball room and I was unsure if the guards would recognize me as an intruder so I didn''t want to try it. By now, my time-raiting was probably abysmal anyway but them''s the breaks. To get up there, I''d need a distraction so I snuck into the kitchen and spiked some of bubbly pink concoctions with laxatives and the rest with the combat boost. Each spiked drink got a quintuple dose to make sure the effects would be, let''s say, explosive.


    Support the creativity of authors by visiting Royal Road for this novel and more.


    After spiking the next round drinks, I hid in the shadows within a side-alcove of the great hall and waited for my plan to come together. I didn''t have to wait too long, soon another servant entered and served drinks. I guess that the used medicine was some kind of ingame item, it took effect far to quick to be normal stuff, within 5 minutes the first lady felt the explosive effect of the laxative and recoloured her dress in an interesting shade of brown. The laughter set off her paramour who started a fight with another. Within moments, the whole affair shifted from "happy, high-society shindig" into "shitty brawl" if you pardon the pun. I snuck up the stairs and after a quick scan saw the way to the second floor, hitting a snag in my plans. Two guards were, well, guarding, the staircase up. I went up to them, wringing my hands, telling them about trouble downstairs and combined with the commotion we could hear from the ground floor, one guard took off. Time to take a chance. In a smooth motion, I jammed the scalpel into his throat, taking out his voice box, making a nice hole in his windpipe and nicking the arteries. Well, doing so will kill someone, but sadly it is not instant like in the movies, first the guard smacked me, sending me flying and probably breaking a rib or two, damn that hurt, then he started trashing, making a racket. Luckily, the racket was not really noticeable with the commotion I''d caused downstairs. I picked myself up and ascended the stairs as quick as I could with my bruised side. Up here, I saw only two guards patrolling and with quite a bit of shadow-skulking I made my way to the master bedroom. When I got in there, I was greeted with a blue screen.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>


    Second test, finished.


    Data recorded.


    </td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    Please wait to be transported to the next testing stage.


    And back to black...


    This time, I was in a ruin, maybe underground. A blue screen told me my mission.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>


    Welcome to the Third Test.


    </td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>


    Your objective is to get behind the door on the other side of the main-chamber.


    </td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>


    Good luck.


    </td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    ''Yes, those tests give me so much information, I might shut down from information overload. Oh, well, let''s investigate.''


    I started along the corridor I was in, as it was the only way. I noticed chicken scratches on the wall, nothing recognisable but interesting. Then I got the main-chamber and I was overwhelmed. The chamber was alight with a eerie rainbow glow, coming from hundreds, if not thousands, of coloured symbol groups, floating in the air. The symbols were the same I had seen on the walls so there might be a riddle there. The strange forms fascinated me and I became totally engrossed with looking, watching, cataloguing, the forms and trying to make sense of them. The signs on the walls were, I''d say, regressed, less polished, versions of the floating versions. On the door were more of the regressed runes, making little sense but I had the strange feeling that it was some kind of riddle. On the walls were progressions, lots of them, some made sense to me, others made me feel a little queasy in their form and logic. I tried to understand them all and it became easier for those that made sense, I was feeling like the meaning of those runes was on the tip of my tongue, like something you knew all your life but was slipping your mind in that moment. The kind of feeling that makes you facepalm when you are told what it actually was, embarrassed that you forgot something that obvious. I searched for the polished, floating versions of the runes that tried to make sense to me and became aware that most of them were shedding cold, silvery-blue light like a full-moon reflected in an icy river, some were not shedding light at all being black like the darkest night, around them, it was a bit darker, as if they were absorbing light. The last one or two, they were the only ones of their colour, were glowing in a slightly pulsing, crimson light. The runes that made me queasy were mostly orange, glowing, some with a clear yellow light, others were shedding warm, green, light.


    I honestly have no idea how long I was thinking about those runes and slowly the progressions on the door started to make, well, not sense, but I was able to make out patterns and with the simplified versions on the walls and the floating runes I felt like I was able to find the rune-pattern that I would fit door to complete the riddle. It wasn''t one of of the truly shiny patterns, it was a dull grey, not shiny metallic, just grey, like an old, worn key, maybe that''s why I thought it right. It was just feeling correct. I focused on the floating pattern and there was a feeling of connection and when I touched the door in the place the answer should go, the door started to glow and slowly opened with grinding sounds, as if it was closed for an eternity and I was disturbing it''s rest.


    I went through the door, with my mind on the runes I had just witnessed, wondering about them and the strange feelings they had given me. A blue screen told me that this test was over as well.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>


    Third test, finished.


    Data recorded.


    </td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    Please wait to be transported to the evaluation stage.


    So three tests? Let''s see how well I did.

 Chapter 5

    The black faded and I was back in the meadow on which I had started the testing. Alkmene was with me again. "Welcome back, traveller. I see that you had an impressive performance in your testing. Why, the gods themselves judged you and I can tell you, some of them were quite impressed by your feats, well, impressive for a mortal, that is. Let''s see how they rated your attributes, then we can see where you might fit into the world of Mundus."


    It feels like the developers wanted to make everything clear like a nice, muddy puddle. ''Impressive for a mortal''? What on earth does that mean? A blue screen interrupted my musing.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="6">Name</td>


    <td colspan="6">Morgana</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="6">Race</td>


    <td colspan="6">Undefined</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="6">Level</td>


    <td colspan="6">0</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="3">Health</td>


    <td colspan="3">???/???</td>


    <td colspan="3">Stamina</td>


    <td colspan="3">???/???</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="3">Astral Power</td>


    <td colspan="3">???/???</td>


    <td colspan="3">Divine Power</td>


    <td colspan="3">???/???</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="2">Strength</td>


    <td colspan="2">10</td>


    <td colspan="2">Agility</td>


    <td colspan="2">12</td>


    <td colspan="2">Dexterity</td>


    <td colspan="2">12</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="2">Intelligence</td>


    <td colspan="2">15</td>


    <td colspan="2">Intuition</td>


    <td colspan="2">15</td>


    <td colspan="2">Charisma</td>


    <td colspan="2">10</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="2">Courage</td>


    <td colspan="2">13</td>


    <td colspan="2">Endurance</td>


    <td colspan="2">11</td>


    <td colspan="2">Vitality</td>


    <td colspan="2">12</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Special Ability gained</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You gained the Special Ability: Overflow</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>For having Intelligence of 15 or higher, you gained the skill Overflow. Overflow allows you to let your Astral Power burst forth, charging a spell beyond the maximum, increasing it''s effect. Most spells however can only take a limited extra charge before shattering with unpredictable consequences.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Special Ability gained</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You gained the Special Ability : Bullet Time</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>For having Intuition of 15 or higher, you gained the skill Bullet Time. Bullet Time allows you to boost your mind to the maximum, decreasing your perceived flow of time, giving you more time to plan out your actions. Note that this does not increase your physical speed. The duration depends on your Intuition, your Intelligence and your remaining Stamina and is not known before hand.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    Ok, so if I read this right, my physical stats except strength are on the high side for a normal human but my mental stats except charisma are exceptional. But what are Astral and Divine power? Let''s ask my companion. "Can you tell me what Divine Power and Astral Power are?"


    "In simple terms, Astral Power is extracted from the astral rivers that flow all around Mundus, it''s used by mortals to cast spells. It can also be given to the gods in prayer, hoping that you gain some of his power for yourself. And that is Divine Power, power that a god lent you, it allows you to perform small feats of the Divine, those depend on your chosen deity."


    So if I understand it correct, there are two ways of spell casting, Astral and Divine, one for the classic mage-archetype, the other for priests or clerics? Alkmene went on with "Sadly, only extremely few mortals have the natural aptitude for true magic, most of their so called casters simply know on which deities door they can knock to get help and boost their pathetic skill."


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>


    Your performance during the tests gained you traits.


    </td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Trait gained</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You gained the trait: Natural Mage</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>Natural Mages have an inborn connection to certain elements, which allows them to gain understanding of the true runes of that element. This allows them to read those runes and create new combinations, that become the ''spells'' of later generations.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>


    You gain Special Abilities: [Rune Meditation], [Rune Comprehension]</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>


    You gain Traits: [Rune Affinity: Ice], [Rune Affinity: Darkness], [Rune Affinity: Blood]</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Special Ability gained</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You gained the Special Ability: Rune Meditation</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>Allows you to meditate on Runes, possibly increasing your Affinity with them or inferring different runes of the same type. The ability to infer runes depends on your Affinity and the specific Rune-Magic Skill</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Special Ability gained</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You gained the Special Ability: Rune Comprehension</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>Allows you to gain understanding on the meaning of Runes. You need to either draw, see or meditate on the runes to understand them. The complexity of the runes you can comprehend depends on your Rune Affinity and the specific Rune Magic-Skill.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Special Ability gained</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You gained a Special Ability: Rune Triangle</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>For being a Natural Mage and reaching 10 Intelligence, you gain the ability to link three Runes into a single spell. This is the basic form of rune-magic.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Special Ability gained</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You gained a Special Ability: Rune Pentagon</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>For being a Natural Mage and reaching 15 Intelligence, you gain the ability to link five Runes into a single spell, increasing their possible uses.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Trait gained</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You gained the trait: [Rune Affinity: Ice]</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>This trait grants you understanding on runes regarding the element Ice. The element Ice stands for freezing, solitude, calculated action and eternity.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Trait gained</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You gained the trait: [Rune Affinity: Darkness]</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>


    This trait grants you understanding on runes regarding the element Darkness. The element Darkness stands for concealment, uncertainty, devouring and change.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Trait gained</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You gained the trait: [Rune Affinity: Blood]</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>


    This trait grants you understanding on runes regarding the element Blood. The element Blood stands for sacrifice, regeneration and the cycle of life.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Trait gained</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You gained the trait: Ruthless</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You don''t hesitate to do what you have to do to reach your goals.


    Your allies are less likely to trust you to guard their back.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    When the boxes appeared, Alkmene was visibly surprised and told me, ¡°Truly impressive, I was not aware that you did that well. I only saw the attributes and was unaware of your other achievements. It is a rare being that steps into the world a true Mage with multiple affinities. Now, however we have to see about your race. I feel that using the guise of a human would be a burden to you. Here are some races I feel would be better suited as your guise.¡±


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="10">Suggested Races</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="3">Moon-Elf</td>


    <td colspan="7">The Moonelves dwell amongst the ancient forests, they worship the moon and natural order, they value community, piety and continuity. Within their forests, they create fantastical feats of magic, in symbiosis with nature. To attack the elves is to go to war with the forest itself. On average, they are tall, slender and graceful. They defend their ancient trees and seldom venture from their magic kingdom.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="3">Naga</td>


    <td colspan="7">Naga dwell in the shallow parts of the oceans, they are creatures with a human torso and a snake-like lower body. Their cities are under water, protected from sea-monsters by artificial shallows or hidden within underwater caves. They are masterful swimmers and tend to stay close to the ocean. Their natural affinity to the ocean makes them the best navigators and sailors.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="3">Firn-Elf</td>


    <td colspan="7">The Firn-Elves are not true elves, as elves view those things. They are the outcome of an experiment by a mad god. He crossed the Svartalfar with J?tun in order to create a highly magical race of loyal soldiers. His experiment failed, Firn Elves are highly magical but also independent, headstrong and ruthless. They don''t form tribes but individuals wander the northern reaches of Mundus.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="3">White Kitsune</td>


    <td colspan="7">Kitsune in general are magical fox-beings, they value secrecy, intrigue, magic and sensuality. The White Kitsune live in small, tight-knit communities in the high mountains, secluded from the world. Little is known about their internal workings, only few venture forth to study from foreign masters. The study of magic and martial arts is their main path, pursuing balance in all things.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    Wait, four races? ¡°Are there more races to chose from? Can you show them to me?¡± The next thing I saw, was a long, long list of races, containing pretty much everything from Amazonian to Zora. I scanned the names but nothing truly jumped at me so I decided to go with one of the four suggested by Alkmene, after all she was a lot more knowing about the world than I was.


    Support creative writers by reading their stories on Royal Road, not stolen versions.Going by exclusion-principle, I wasn''t too hot with Moon-Elves and White Kitsune, both seemed rather bound in their culture and I wanted to walk my own path after I had lost the team I had nurtured for years to the greed of others and the dictatorship of the majority. No, if I would be in a community it would be either strictly short-time for a certain purpose of mine or I would be the uncontested leader, no more feel good democracy for me. Both Naga and Firn-Elf have their own appeal but the snake-body and the ''sticks close to water'' are off-putting. So, Firn-Elf, sounds good to me. Fitting.


    ¡°Well Alkmene, I think my guise will be that of a Firn-Elf, I think it fits me best. Can I alter my appearance to fit as a Firn-Elf?¡± I asked. ¡°Why, yes, of course. There you go.¡±


    An editor appeared before me, to show me my looks as a Firn-Elf and customize on them. I didn''t change much, I wanted to keep my overall body close to my real body to keep my body-coordination so I mainly sharpened my features. I resisted the temptation to get some strange hair-colour and stayed with raven-black. That contrasted nicely with their natural slightly bluish hue. I chose my natural green eyes and silvery-blue lips to finish the look.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Race gained</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You belong to the Firn-Elves.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You are one of the few remaining Firn-Elves, product of the experiments of a mad god shortly before the cataclysm. Nobody knows how many there are or where you came from, Your people have a few settlements in the far north. Rumours have it that the mad god not only used the blood J?tun in his experiments but also his own blood that has spawned many a monster in the past.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You gain Attributes: +2 Intelligence, +1 Intuition, -1 Charisma, +1 Agility, -1 Vitality, -1 Strength.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You gain traits: [Frost-Resistance], [Lowlight Vision], [Denizen of the Dark], [Denizen of the Eternal Ice], [Heat-Sensitive], [Glare Sensitivity]</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Trait gained</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You gained the trait: Frost-Resistance</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You are used to a cold and chilly climate. Arctic cold is no danger to you and magical cold deals reduced damage</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Trait gained</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You gained the trait: Lowlight Vision</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>Your Ancestors lived underground and did not need light to live. That trait is weaker in you but your vision is strong enough to make you able to see normally in dim or gloomy light. Total absence of light or magical darkness robs you of your sight like everyone else.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Trait gained</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You gained the trait: Denizen of the Dark</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>Your people lived in the Darkness for a long time, they became accustomed to it, melding with it, taking it into their very souls. All magic with the Darkness-Attribute costs less.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Trait gained</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You gained the trait: Denizen of the Eternal Ice</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>Your people lived in the eternal Ice of the North for a long time, they became accustomed to it, melding with it, taking it into their very souls. All magic with the Ice-Attribute costs less.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Trait gained</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You gained the trait: Heat-Sensitive</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You are not used to hot climate. In hot climate, increased Stamina consumption, magical heat deals more damage.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Trait gained</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You gained the trait: Glare Sensitivity</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>Your eyes are used to lowlight conditions, sudden, strong glares will disorient you and cause strong pain. Your eyes are unable to adapt to extremely strong light sources.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    ¡°Now, Morgana, we need to talk about the path you want to walk. The decision which path to walk is a monumental one, your path can''t be changed and while it is possible to stray from your predestined path, walking on the path will always be faster and smoother.¡±


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="10">Please select your path</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="3">Martial Path</td>


    <td colspan="7">The follower of the Martial Path believe in strength of arms above all else. They are the warriors on the battlefield, the knights leading the charge, the general at the head of an army. But they are also the ranger in the wild, tracking and hunting with spear, bow and his wits.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="3">Divine Path</td>


    <td colspan="7">Those who walk the Divine Path, believe in something bigger than themselves. They are pious believer in their chosen deity and further their will whenever they can. They are the proud Paladins protecting the faith, the inspired Preacher tending their flock but also the ruthless Inquisitor hunting for heretics.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="3">Arcane Path</td>


    <td colspan="7">The Arcane path might be the narrowest path of them all but also the most branching path, with each branch being a narrow path of their own. Followers of the arcane path value magic and secrets above all else. They are the hedge-witches, the guild-mages, the warlocks and the sorcerers. They delve into the unknown in search for truth.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="3">Civilised Path</td>


    <td colspan="7">The Civilised Path might be the widest of them all. All walks of life can be found on this path, the greedy merchant grabbing for coin, the talented crafter plying their trade, the sly diplomat furthering their lords goal but also the sinister assassin stalking the shadows.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    Ok, I''d be a fool if I discard my already gained traits, I have a feeling they can be incredibly usefull on the right path and if I''m honest, I want to play a caster anyway and not feeling terribly devout I think the Arcane Path will be for me.


    After selecting the Arcane Path, Alkmene was visibly relieved. ¡°It would be sad if you were to become one of the sheep, blindly following a cult. Walk your path and later you can still look for the divine on your terms.¡± she told me. ¡°And here I thought you are a servant of Hecate and would be happy to add someone to her believers.¡± I replied. ¡°Yes, I''m a servant of wise Hecate but do you think that she who guards the crossroads would take any traveller into her cult? Only those who are worthy may join and only the mistress herself is able to make that distinction. So if you want to join, you will have to summon at least an avatar of the mistress or even herself. Not like those other cults in which even mid-level clerics can induct newcomers. They only value quantity, Hecate places little value in having a herd of bleating sheep, she prefers a small stash of true gems.¡±


    Sounds like there is some resentment there, interesting.

 Chapter 6

    Right after Alkmene''s rant about cults, she went on: ¡°Well, you have chosen your path. But the path is just the general direction, by choosing your class, you can specialize. Trying to spread your power over the whole path will lead to being spread too thin. There are many classes fitting the Arcane Path and each class can specialize later. Choose wisely.¡±


    It wasn''t a truly long list, I guess all hybrid classes are on one of the other paths so after skimming the classes, I got it down to five:


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="3">Mage</td>


    <td colspan="7">Mages are those belonging to the official Mages Guilds. They learn from their mentor and afterwards become indentured to the guild. Few Mages ever leave the guild and those that do without permission from the Guild Council are hunted as traitors. Their official status makes them equivalent to low-ranking nobles of their country.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="3">Necromancer</td>


    <td colspan="7">Those who seek eternity often find themself on the path of Necromancy, studying Life and Death and experimenting on souls. The easiest experiments create mindless undead or simple curses, advanced scholars can call souls from the Realms beyond and create truly marvellous beings or horrifying plagues. On the other hand, Necromancers are amongst the few mortals who can allow those who can afford them reprieve from death by various means.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="3">Summoner</td>


    <td colspan="7">The Astral Realm is inhabited by all sorts of spirits, quite like the Nether. A skilled caster is able to create shells for the spirits and by using his own connection to the Astral can entice spirits to inhabit the created shells. The strength of the Summoners magical Aura is responsible for guiding the spirits to Mundus and his created shells. The combination of shell and spirit is mostly called a Spiritgolem.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="3">Sorcerer</td>


    <td colspan="7">Sorcerer are those few true Spellcasters that did not seek guidance on their path but struck out on their own. They are the trailblazer, the few who advance the state of knowledge. Most sadly die on their path to greatness but the few who make it, often found their own traditions of magic.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="3">Warlock</td>


    <td colspan="7">Some learn from their elders, some choose different ways. Warlocks sacrifice to the various Netherspirits to gain knowledge and power. Each spirit is different in their preferences in sacrifices, some prefer the blood of innocents, other take the Astral Power of the ritualist. However no Netherspirit will give power without cost.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    The Guild-Mage was mostly on the list because it was apparently the standard caster in Road toPurgatorybut if I''m honest with myself, nope not gonna happen.


    Necromancer on the other hand sounds interesting, being able to create my own minions could be incredibly valuable but there was the yuck-factor to consider, I hadn''t done terribly well during biology class when it was time to dissect frogs, my only non A in a STEM-Class during high-school to my eternal shame.


    Summoner sounds better in that regard but the part with ''magical Aura is responsible for guiding the spirits'' means, if I remember right, that the class is strongly Charisma-based and choosing a class based on one of my weakest attributes would be foolish.


    Sorcerer on the other hand sounds incredibly high risk, high reward, making my own way without guidance? Well it''s the beta and from everything I heard, all character-progress will be wiped for the true release with beta-testers mainly gaining the knowledge advantage, some traits depending on their beta-progression and cosmetics. So if this character becomes a total lemon it''s not too bad and I know what to avoid with the true release.


    The Warlock sounds a bit intriguing but at the end of the day, it sounds like some cleric with terrible publicity. No, if I wanted to use some higher beings tricks, I''d just roll over and play the priest of some random douche-god. So, No, thank you.


    Again, applying the exclusion-principle, I''ve got my class, Sorcerer, I choose you!


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Class gained: Sorcerer</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>Sorcerers don''t have class-skills. They are however able to define their own skills by trial and error, formalizing them and gaining class-bonuses on such self-created abilities.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You gained a Special Ability: [Spell Crafting]</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Special Ability gained</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You gained the Special Ability: Spell Crafting</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>This ability allows you to create and formalize your own spells. A formal spell can be auto-casted and gains bonuses, depending on the relevant skills. A spell can be based on runes, gestures, chants or for very advanced Sorcerer even thought itself.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    After choosing, Alkmene regarded me with a bit of interest. ¡°Interesting choice, maybe some day a new Traveller will be able to walk down the Path of Morgana, following in your footsteps. Now, you can chose some traits, but remember, there will be a balance if you only choose positive traits some will be assigned to you, so chose wisely.¡±


    It was a long, long list, some sounded interesting, others, not. I ended up choosing Magical Hair, Astral Power III and Astral Regeneration III which all increased my magical power and something called ''The Road is my Teacher'', allowing me to learn skills and special abilities faster and easier without a teacher but greatly lowering my ability to learn from teachers. To balance things, I got something called Unbound, Outsider, Child of the Wild and Lone Traveller.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Trait gained</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You gained the trait: Magical Hair</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>Your hair is able to store up to 33% of your total Astral Power, in effect increasing your pool by that amount. You need to have at least twenty inches of hair to store the maximum amount and if your hair is cut, you lose the stored power.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Trait gained</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You gained the trait: Astral Power III</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You can store extra Astral Power within your body. This increases the maximum stored amount of Astral power by 33%</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Trait gained</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You gained the trait: Astral Regeneration III</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>Your connection to the Astral Rivers flowing through the world is especially close. You regenerate Astral Power 75% faster. That regeneration always occurs.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Trait gained</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You gained the trait: The Road is my Teacher</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You are able to learn skills 25% faster without a teacher.


    You are able to learn Special Abilities by using them without a teacher


    When learning from a teacher, skills train 25% slower.


    You are unable to learn Special Abilities from a teacher.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Trait gained</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You gained the trait: Unbound</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You belong to no Country or Creed.


    Maximum starting reputation with any large faction is Neutral.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Trait gained</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You gained the trait: Outsider</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You don''t belong. Even among your own people, you are the one who doesn''t fit. People are more suspicions of you, making you the prime suspect if something bad happens.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Trait gained</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You gained the trait: Child of the Wild</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You were quite literally raised by wolves. You don''t belong to any family, tribe or community.


    No starting faction.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Trait gained</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You gained the trait: Lone Traveller</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You walk the world alone, without any like you at your side.


    When in a group with other Travellers, you gain 10% less experience.


    When alone or in a group with natives, you gain 10% more experience.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    Now, Alkmene was looking at me with true curiosity in her eyes. ¡°Well, you are convinced to make your own way, are you not? No Creed, no country, no family, no tribe, you will be all alone in the world of Mundus. I guess you will either die somewhere in the wild or you will become one of the brightest shining stars at the end of the road. It will be interesting to see which, I will have to ask the Mistress to keep up with your progress and maybe let me watch. Now, due to your traits, there is nowhere you call home, so you will start somewhere in the wilds, don''t worry, I will not place you in some frost-wyrm lair, that would be boring. Why don''t you look over your final character sheet before I send you on your way?¡±


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="12">Basic Overview</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="6">Name</td>


    <td colspan="6">Morgana</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="6">Race</td>


    <td colspan="6">Firn-Elf</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="6">Level</td>


    <td colspan="6">1</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="3">Health</td>


    <td colspan="3">84/84</td>


    <td colspan="3">Stamina</td>


    <td colspan="3">88/88</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="3">Astral Power</td>


    <td colspan="3">224/224</td>


    <td colspan="3">Divine Power</td>


    <td colspan="3">-</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="2">Strength</td>


    <td colspan="2">9</td>


    <td colspan="2">Agility</td>


    <td colspan="2">13</td>


    <td colspan="2">Dexterity</td>


    <td colspan="2">12</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="2">Intelligence</td>


    <td colspan="2">17</td>


    <td colspan="2">Intuition</td>


    <td colspan="2">16</td>


    <td colspan="2">Charisma</td>


    <td colspan="2">9</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="2">Courage</td>


    <td colspan="2">13</td>


    <td colspan="2">Endurance</td>


    <td colspan="2">11</td>


    <td colspan="2">Vitality</td>


    <td colspan="2">11</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="4">Social Overview</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="2">Tribe</td>


    <td colspan="2">None</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="2">Country</td>


    <td colspan="2">None</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="2">Guild</td>


    <td colspan="2">None</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="2">Creed</td>


    <td colspan="2">None</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="4">Regeneration</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="2">Health Regeneration</td>


    <td colspan="2">.55% per minute</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="2">Stamina Regenration</td>


    <td colspan="2">1.1% per minute</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="2">Astral Power Regeneration</td>


    <td colspan="2">2.8% per minute</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="2">Divine Power Decay</td>


    <td colspan="2">-</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="4">Please note that the regeneration-rates above is for being idle, outside of combat. Different activities can change the regeneration-rate.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Trait Overview</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>[Rune Affinity: Ice], [Rune Affinity: Darkness], [Rune Affinity: Blood] [Frost-Resistance], [Lowlight Vision],[Denizen of the Dark], [Denizen of the Eternal Ice], [Heat-Sensitive],[Glare Sensitivity], [Unbound], [Outsider], [Child of the Wild], [Lone Traveller] [Magical Hair], [Astral Power III], [Astral Regeneration III], [The Road is my Teacher]</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    After looking over my character-sheet and chuckling at the slightly pathetic Social Overview, I said ¡°Yes, Alkmene, looks good to me, send me in.¡±


    She answered me with ¡°Very well, Traveller, a lesser daimon will help you with the first few steps on Mundus but don''t expect any true help from it, it will only pass some obvious information. I wish you farewell and good luck.


    With that, the meadow, Alkmene and everything vanished.

 Chapter 7

    I believe the only correct expression when floating in space without a spacesuit and not suffocating is ¡°Yeeeeeehaaaaw¡±. Sadly the floating didn''t last long and after floating came the long way down. Well, make a wish, cause I''m a shooting star today! Ok, my personal wish is ''Safe landing''. On the way down I was able to look a bit at the continents and they looked rather familiar, looks like they simply took earth, moved Africa further into the Atlantic so Tunisia was across the straight of Gibraltar and crooked Central-America so that Cape Horn pretty much points to Australia. Seeing that, I figured I was somewhere above the Atlantic and coming in hot, against the planets rotation, playing meteor. Then, after hitting some clouds, I was more or less on course to hit somewhere in what would be Russia, far to the north so yay for Siberia. I can''t wait to witness the ''In Mother Russia, mobs grind you.''-Memes. Oh, well, after closely missing a rather large pine tree, don''t ask me what kind, I was now safely on Mundus, not that I wouldn''t have laughed my ass of if I managed to hit a tree on the way down. Or better, a dragon and getting the kill-exp credited to me. But no, no cheats for me.


    Ok, first rule of survival, inventory your supplies. Not that I have much, some sturdy clothes, a water-skin, some jerky, some berries, a large dagger or short sword, a tinderbox with flint and steel, three small stones with runes on them and two similar looking stones without them. Now, Identify! Analyse! Inspect!


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Skill gained</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You gained a skill: Inspect [1/100]</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>Inspect is used to gain basic information about items in your possession. Higher levels allow you to Inspect the possessions of others. Inspect is a basic Divination-Skill.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="10">Simple Short Sword</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="5">Rarity</td>


    <td colspan="5">Basic</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="5">Type</td>


    <td colspan="5">Short Sword / Dagger</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="5">Base Damage</td>


    <td colspan="5">5 Damage Piercing</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="5">Base Damage</td>


    <td colspan="5">3 Damage Slashing</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="7">Strength Modifier</td>


    <td colspan="3">Low</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="10">A simple Short Sword, can be wielded like a sword in a regular grip or like a dagger in a reverse grip. Due to the short blade length, little leverage can be applied making it''s performance stable, regardless of personal strength.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    Damn, that''s not a lot. There gotta be a way to drastically increase the damage or if I''d try to commit suicide I''d have to slash my wrists about 25 times.


    A low growl rips me from my happy thoughts on suicide, barely 5 minutes into the game. Whirling around, I''m confronted with my first enemy, a young but to me gigantic looking, wolf and suddenly time freezes.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Tutorial engaged</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>Welcome to Road to Purgatory. You just encountered your first enemy. You should try to find more about them by using the Observe skill, if you are able to. Draw your weapon and if you are able to use a combat-stance you should take it.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    Oh, I have no combat-stance, no combat-skills and a short sword, against a wolf. Bob, Old Friend, I''m on my way. But not without a fight!


    Just like before with Inspect, I focused on the wolf and the thought ¡°Observe!¡±


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Skill gained.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You gained a skill: Observe, [1/100]</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>Observe is used to gain basic information about other Creatures. Higher levels allow you to observe them without detection and grant more information. Being detected while observing counts as an challenging act for most non-sapients and an incredibly rude act for sapients. Observe is a basic Divination-Skill.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>


    Young Wolf, Level 3, 91/91 HP


    </td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    Yay, the growl got louder, I challenged it, I think I''m challenged, that beastie got more health than me and is probably a lot better at fighting. Ah, well, you know that feeling when you think you hit rock bottom and then you manage a breakthrough? No crying about spilled milk or pissed off wolves. I moved into a combat stance, ready to dodge and use the dagger if possible.


    The wolf jumped at me and suddenly the time stopped again.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Tutorial engaged</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You are being attacked. Now, you can either move out of the way, dodging, use a weapon to immediately counter-attack or parry or if you have a shield, you can use it to block the attack.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>Depending on your attributes, there is a chance that system assist will help with your action. Over time, the system assist will recognise your own fighting style and rhythm to make the assisted actions seamless.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.


    Time went on and I used my left arm as a decoy, spinning counter-clockwise, letting the wolf pass me on my left side. I still got hit in the side by it''s shoulder but it didn''t hurt that much. My spin-assisted slash hit it in the hind-flank, causing some damage.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Young Wolf hits you. Glancing Blow. You take 2 Damage.</td>


    <td>You hit Young Wolf. Young Wolf takes 2 Damage.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Skill gained.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You gained a skill: Dagger Mastery [1/100]</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>Increases your skill to wield Daggers. Higher Skill-Level allows better help from the auto-correct system and let''s you learn auto-corrected system skills.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    After a short moment, the blue window disappeared. Sadly, the only thing I know now is how screwed I truly am. Even striking true, my dagger was just too weak to deal enough damage to kill the wolf. My thoughts were cut short when my opponent turned and tried another pass. This time I was slow and the wolf got my left arm, pulling me with it and off balance. I was lucky and landed on the wolf, dagger in hand and I somehow managed to trigger my Bullet Time, just to realize something bad about it. When you have a couple of seconds moving in perceived glacial speed, that''s a couple of seconds you can contemplate the feeling of sharp wolf teeth, shredding your arm. Still, I managed to bring the dagger to bear on the wolfs throat, stabbing in through the tendons to the side and using my weight to cut through the front, causing the wolf to spasm and let my left arm go. I jumped off and back, looking at the results.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Young Wolf hits you. You take 8 Damage.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You hit Young Wolf. Critical Hit!Young Wolf takes 30 Damage. Young Wolf is afflicted with heavy bleeding, -10 HP/s.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Skill increased</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You increased your skill: Dagger Mastery [2/100]</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    Ok, ouch. The wolf didn''t get up again and six seconds later I got the message:


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Young Wolf died.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You gain 10 EXP</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>For killing an opponent 2 levels above you you gain 2 Bonus EXP</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>For killing an opponent without a Traveller in your party, you gain 1 Bonus EXP</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    A quick check on my EXP-Gauge told me that I needed 100 EXP to reach level two so I''d have to kill seven more wolves. Not without some kind of plan, I was aware that killing the wolf just now was a combination of a bit of skill and a boatload of sheer blind luck. No way in hell would I be able to kill 7 more like that.


    First things first, I used a bit of water out of my water-skin to wash out the bite-marks on my arm and then climbed a nearby tree to finish what I had started before I was so rudely interrupted. It didn''t take me long, one of the firs, I guess it was fitting as I was a Firn-Elf. No, don''t hit me for the pun, please I''m wounded!


    After I managed to make my way up, I inspected my clothing.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="10">Simple Leather Jacket</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="5">Rarity</td>


    <td colspan="5">Basic</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="5">Type</td>


    <td colspan="5">Light Upper-Body Armour</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="5">Base Protection</td>


    <td colspan="5">1 against Piercing Damage</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="5">Base Protection</td>


    <td colspan="5">2 against Slashing Damage</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="5">Base Protection</td>


    <td colspan="5">1 against Blunt Damage</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="10">A simple Jacket, made from coarse leather, it offers a little protection against attack..</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="10">Simple Cloth Pants</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="5">Rarity</td>


    <td colspan="5">Basic</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="5">Type</td>


    <td colspan="5">Light Lower-Body Armour</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="5">Base Protection</td>


    <td colspan="5">0 against Piercing Damage</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="5">Base Protection</td>


    <td colspan="5">1 against Slashing Damage</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="5">Base Protection</td>


    <td colspan="5">1 against Blunt Damage</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="10">A simple pair of Pants, made from coarse linen, they offer little protection against attack..</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="10">Simple Leather Boots</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="5">Rarity</td>


    <td colspan="5">Basic</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="5">Type</td>


    <td colspan="5">Light Boots</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="5">Base Protection</td>


    <td colspan="5">1 against Piercing Damage</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="5">Base Protection</td>


    <td colspan="5">2 against Slashing Damage</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="5">Base Protection</td>


    <td colspan="5">1 against Blunt Damage</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="10">A simple pair of boots, made from coarse leather, they offer a little protection against attack..</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="10">Simple Fur Cloak</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="5">Rarity</td>


    <td colspan="5">Basic</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="5">Type</td>


    <td colspan="5">Cloak</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="5">Base Protection</td>


    <td colspan="5">0 against Piercing Damage</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="5">Base Protection</td>


    <td colspan="5">1 against Slashing Damage</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="5">Base Protection</td>


    <td colspan="5">1 against Blunt Damage</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="10">A simple fur cloak. It offers little protection from attack but it will keep you warm in even the coldest night.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Skill increased</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You increased your skill: Inspect [2/100]</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    Glorious, I''m sitting in a tree in the middle of Siberia with a dagger and some peasant garb. What could go wrong?

 Chapter 8

    After I had inspected my totally awesome newby armour, I looked at the rocks I had gotten to start with. Those impressed me quite a bit more.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Simple Runestone: Ice</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>This Runestone is inscribed with the simple Ice-Rune and can be used to instantly substitute a single Ice-Rune in a Rune Formation without the need to inscribe or charge it.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Simple Runestone: Blood</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>This Runestone is inscribed with the simple Blood-Rune and can be used to instantly substitute a single, simple Blood-Rune in a Rune Formation without the need to inscribe or charge it.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Simple Runestone: Darkness</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>This Runestone is inscribed with the simple Darkness-Rune and can be used to instantly substitute a single, simple Darkness-Rune in a Rune Formation without the need to inscribe or charge it.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    Those were the three pre-inscribed stones, the last two were


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Simple Runestone: Blank</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>This Runestone is blank. You can inscribe a single, simple Rune and charge it to later instantly fit the inscribed Rune into a Rune Formation. Afterwards the Runestone needs to be recharged but the inscription is permanent.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    So, magic works by basically writing what I want to happen in runes, charging Astral Power into the runes and bang? But how do I know the exact meaning of my runes? Wait, when I got the True Mage-Trait I gained two Special Abilities, Rune Meditation and Rune Comprehension. My arm was still bleeding so I checked my HP and was quite surprised that I hadn''t regenerated a single HP. I opened the menu and got myself floating HP, Stamina and Astral Power bars in the upper left corner of my eyes and floating buff and debuff monitor in the upper right. The debuff monitor told me that my health-regeneration was zero until I stopped the bleeding. I also added a small floating log into the lower left corner, telling me about skill increases and made every blue box during combat appear in a small version in the bottom right corner.


    Now, about my bleeding. Trying to block the bleeding with my other arm as good as possible, hoping it would be enough I went back to my magic machinations. I emptied my mind, trying to focus on the shape inscribed in the blood Runestone, the feeling of blood in my right hand and the memory of the red, pulsing runes that I''d seen during the test. Slowly, I got a feeling, the rune on the stone simply said blood and could be used to target blood or vitality.


    Then the runes I''d seen in the test became clearer, one was a combination of Blood and Spout and could be used to cause blood to shoot from a wound, worsening the wound and possibly introducing a bleeding-effect but the blood needed a channel, I couldn''t just make the blood of an enemy explode, at least not yet. The other pair in the test was Blood and Clot, basically the opposite of the rune I''d just considered. It would take a bloody wound and make it scab over. Again, only worked with flesh wounds, for more complex wounds I''d need different, possibly more advanced runes.


    But the two-rune combinations somehow felt incomplete to me, and one of my special abilities said that a Rune Triangle is the basic unit, so they''d need something more to work. I sank back into my meditation and one of the dull runes in the test came into focus and I had a feeling of closeness of touching. Then I got a splitting headache, I guess there was a limit on how many runes I could gain at a time or maybe in a period of time.


    Yes, that might work. I washed the new blood away and, using the blood I had on my hand I wrote the three runes on my arm, in a triangle around the wound. After they were on my arm, I''d need to charge them, so I tried focusing on them and imagined them glowing in the same pulsing, red light as the runes in the test. I felt something flow out of my hair, through my arms and into the runes on my arm and not only did the bleeding stop, the wound scabbed over and looked like a week or two old. The blood that had made up my runes changed into powder and simply dropped away. I also saw my Astral Power bar drop by quite a bit, on closer examination healing the small wound had taken up 25 Astral Points. But I now had a self-heal, nice.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Skill gained</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You gained a skill: Blood Rune-Mastery 1/100</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>Blood Runes are some of the most versatile runes, they can be used to target most living beings, they can be used to damage or heal and they can be used as a carrier for other effects if you can introduce the other effect into the targets blood, can be used to spread the effect rapidly affecting the target everywhere. Due to their horrible potential for abuse and misuse, Blood Mages are widely feared.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    Ok, before going on I should regenerate my mana, er, Astral Power Points thingy, and figure out some icy-cool damage spell. Again, I went back to meditation, this time with the Ice-Rune in my hand and feeling the chill around me. Yes, getting my mind focused on ice and cold should be easy sitting in a tree in a fake-Siberian tundra.


    If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.In a surprisingly short time, I had the silvery-blue shining runes from the test floating in my mind and was able to understand some of them. The rune on the Runestone was unsurprisingly simply Ice. Still, with the runes I now had meaning for, I created two spells, one simple the other more complex.


    The first used one rune for Ice, one for Hail and one I read as shatter. So if I didn''t muck up, the spell should create an icicle shoot it out like a hailstone and after hitting it should shatter. At least that was my intent, no idea if it would work.


    The second spell was a combination, using Ice and Blood, first again Ice and Hail but then Chill, Blood and another chill rune. I''d prefer something along the lines of ''contaminate'' or ''spread'' but beggars can''t be choosers.


    As my APP were full again, I focused on a tree, about a hundred feet away and wanted to cast my Icicle-Burst spell. But how to make the runes in thin air? Oh, well, it''s a kind of magic. So I focused on the flowing feeling I had before, when healing my wound letting it flow out of my finger and as soon as a silvery glow appeared I slowly started to draw the runes in a triangle formation into the thin air. And lo and behold, the moment I finished my air-painting, in the middle of the triangle materialised an icicle and shot forward, hitting the tree with a dull ''thuck'', and then shattering, ripping a hole into the bark of the tree. To my happy surprise, it only took sixteen APP so I could actually use those to hunt


    Before I could test my second spell, I heard a shuffling at the trunk of my tree and looking down, I saw another Young Wolf.


    Yes, it would make a descent target for my new spells. First, the Icicle-Burst. Again, I drew into the air, intensely focused on my unaware quarry and after a short moment, the silvery glow was there again and another deadly Icicle burst forth to bring destruction to my enemies.


    The Icicle hit my target in the side and in my lower right corner, I read that I had dealt 8 Damage, Piercing to the Young Wolf and caused a minor bleeding-effect and that I''d gained the Ice Rune-Mastery.


    Now, the wolf knew I was up here anyway and observing it would not warn it.


    In my lower right corner appeared ¡°Young Wolf, level 4, 89/98¡± Oh, great, that would only take another nine, maybe ten Icicles, yay. Then I tried the other, more complex spell, making a pentagon instead of a triangle, I inscribed Ice ¨C Hail ¨C Chill ¨C Blood ¨C Chill and the projectile flew off, this time with a mixed glow of silver and red but sadly my target did not simply let itself being hit and the spell took quite a bit more APP, to be precise it took 48 APP, not cool for a miss.


    Still, I kept trying, figuring that I could use the training both of my aim and my skills. When shooting the next complex Icicle, yes, I wanted to see the effect, the flowing did not come from my hair as it had all the time, it came from all over my body. Then I realized what it was, I had indistinctively used the Astral Power stored in my hair first, now I was using the power stored within my body. Cool, I''d have to check if my hair changes with stored power or not.


    The second Icicle was a lot better aimed or I simply got lucky but anyway, it hit. This time, it was a lot more effective, dealing 8 damage piercing but also 12 cold-damage and applying a strong slow effect to the wolf. Still, the wolf was shivering from the cold attacking it''s insides and stumbling, not able to dodge at all.


    I shot two more of the Blood-Chilling Icicles and was rewarded with two hits, each dealing eight piercing damage and fourteen and sixteen cold-damage bringing the wolves health down to eighteen as it had bled a bit from the first wound. The cold-effect had wrecked it however, after the last icicle it was simply lying there, shivering. I climbed down a bit and then simply jumped down, dagger in hand after checking that no other wolf was close. The first wolf didn''t even look at me, it was just lying there, shivering. I felt bad for it, especially knowing that I had caused it but at the end of the day, it was dog eats dog, or maybe mage eats wolf. I simply went next to the downed wolf and with a swift cut, severed it''s throat.


    .


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Young Wolf died</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You gain 9 EXP. (10% diminishing returns)</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>For killing an opponent 3 levels above you you gain 3 Bonus EXP</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>For killing an opponent without a Traveller in your party, you gain 1 Bonus EXP</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Skill increased</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You increased your skill: Blood Rune-Mastery [2/100]</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Skill increased</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You increased your skill: Ice Rune-Mastery [4/100]</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    So grinding would be pretty much impossible if I was already running into diminishing returns,


    At that point my real body was sending distress signals so I climbed back onto my tree, wrapped myself into the cloak and logged out.

 Chapter 9

    As I got up after the log out I felt a little strange as if my body was just a little off but the sensation faded within moments. The clock on the wall told me that what had felt like a day, maybe a day and a half had only been five hours. So I guess they had cranked up the speed during the tests as high as they could, cool. Still, I needed a bio-break and a little snack before I got back into my forest. I should also check on the privacy-settings to make the streaming as painless as possible. At least in the beginning I wanted to avoid watchers as much as possible while I tried to find my stride with the sorcerer.


    As soon as I was back in the capsule I summoned Pica and asked about the privacy settings and then setting them as high as I could and rejoiced when I found, deep buried and hidden, the ¡°Invitation Only¡±-Button that would make my stream completely private, unless the AI flagged something I did as Highlight-Reel worthy, then it would go out no matter what but with my username hidden.


    With that done, I dove back into Road to Purgatory, back onto my tree. But I had a plan. First of all, as it was getting dark, I focused on my Darkness-Runestone and entered the trance like I did with Ice and Blood before, gaining the runes for Darkness, Concealment and Devour. I focused on the Darkness rune, trying to figure out what to do with a rune that was, in the end, the absence of something else. I felt two slightly different ways to write it, something I had yet to feel. Maybe every rune had to be written in a certain way to give it further instructions, so every Ice-Rune I had written to this point was Ice: Icicle, Blood was the flowing blood in a being, maybe there would be possible modifiers making them manifest in certain ways. The two ways to manifest Darkness were Tendril and Shadow. Sadly that seemed to be my maximum. Trying to gain more Blood or Ice runes just increased my headache so I guess there is a cool-down preventing me from getting all the runes. But still, with the new runes I could


    create some rather nasty stuff. First, a stealth-shot, Ice, Concealment, Hail, Blood, Spout, it should be a concealed Icicle that ripped open the target, causing it to bleed.


    Then, if I did it right, a channelled, Damage-over-Time-Effect, Darkness: Tendril, Devour, Blood, it should create tendril of darkness, devouring the vitality of a target to keep itself working.


    The third spell was rather simple, Concealment, Blood, Darkness: Shadow, hiding me and my vitality in a shroud of Darkness, I guess you could name it Cloak of Darkness.


    But for now, I should try to process the two wolves I had slain. I climbed down, after checking for enemies and started to cut into the first wolf. Sadly, there was little cutting possible, it was frozen stiff, as was the second wolf, after all it had basically frozen to death from the inside. So no pelts or meat for me this time. But I should search for shelter, even if I could hide-out in trees a real shelter maybe to store things would be greatly appreciated. I applied my Cloak of Darkness and struck out into the moonlit forest. It was strange, the moonlight had almost the same colour as my Ice-Rune Magic but the, for lack of better words, texture, was similar to the Darkness Rune-Magic, something to figure out later.


    First though, shelter. After wandering the woods for a couple of hours, dodging a couple of wolves, killing those I couldn''t dodge with a combination of my spells getting some EXP, the skinning skill, some fur-scraps, wolf meat and a couple skill-points. The after a couple of kills I levelled up, finally hitting level 2, gaining some hitpoints, stamina and Astral Power but nothing earth shaking.


    My search however was proving viable and I came across a cave in a rocky hillside. Luckily I didn''t need to search for water, simply melting snow would be sufficient and I even had built-in refrigeration, what a service, I''m probably the only wilderness-survivor who can store meat for more than a few days. Sadly, the cave was taken and the wolf inside was not fully fooled by my cloak of shadows and started growling. I focused and threw the Chilling Icicle at the beast, hoping that it would slow it down enough for me to have a chance and moved back out, I heard a yelp from inside and the padding of paws following me out. The wolf and I squared off


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    After using observe, I knew that it was an adult Wolf, level 5 with ???/??? HP, I guess my Observe-Fu was too weak to tell my the value, not that it mattered. I started to cast the next spell and learned a valuable lesson, you can''t draw a coherent rune into the air if you need to dodge a pouncing wolf and an incomplete Rune-Formation fizzles after a short moment.


    I tried two of my faster spells, managing to hit the wolf with an Icicle once, thanks to the Ice-Runestone, though that hardly slowed it down. I managed to dodge well enough but even the glancing blows were taking their toll on my body. Additionally, my stamina was dropping, fast. In my desperation, I used both my special abilities, Overflow and Bullet Time, at the same time. The Bullet Time made me able to draw with both hands in the same formation, Overflow made my Astral Power flow out like a river, packing all my remaining hundred fifty APP into the single Chilling Bolt and shot it the moment the wolf pounced at me.


    Sadly, that meant I wouldn''t be able to dodge and wolf struck me head on, mauling my side and knocking me down. But the spell had struck true, ripping a huge gash into the wolf and causing the blood within the gash to freeze. The wolf started to convulse but I couldn''t simply cut it''s throat one of the earlier strikes had made me lose my dagger.


    With strength grown from desperation, I moved to the wolf, having a half-assed guess how to finish it off.


    Every time I cast spells the power either came from my hair or what felt like my blood so there might be magic in blood. With my blood I drew on the bloody ice on the wolfs wound the runes for Blood ¨C Devour ¨C Blood and while drawing it felt like my body was getting ripped apart. Pain, like I''d never felt before ripped at my concentration but I managed to keep my hand steady and finish the runes. After I was done, my only focus was keeping conscious and maybe regaining some Astral Power. My mind was drifting, fluttering like a butterfly in the wind. I don''t know how long I was lying in a catatonic state on the wolf but when the fog in my mind cleared my side instantly reminded me that this had been a lot closer than I liked. My HP were at 15 and slowly dropping, my regeneration unable to offset even the bleeding and my Astral Power was at 50, lower than I thought.


    My debuffs told me that I had overdrawn my magic and my normal Astral Power regeneration would be suspended and that I was bleeding, thus not regenerating any HP and loosing 10 HP per hour until the bleeding was stemmed. So the small trickle of Astral Power was due to the Astral Regeneration-Trait, saving my bacon. I used the blood rune-stone plus some of my restored Astral Power to stem the bleeding and wasn''t surprised that the healing-spell took everything I had in order to restore my side to a state that was more a ''raw, ground meat'' instead of ''bloody mess''. But at least I now had 40 HP and was regenerating HP normally.


    Curiosity drew me to examine my log that I had ignored during combat.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Skill increased</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You increased your skill: Ice Rune-Mastery [7/100]</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Skill gained.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You gained a skill: Blood Magic 1/100</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>Every living being on Mundus is influenced by the Astral, some can harness that power but if flows in every being to some extent. The blood of a living being represents a conduit to their soul, making someone ruthless enough able to use blood to draw out some of the untapped Astral in a soul, allowing the Blood Mage to use it in spells. Afterwards, the soul needs to heal and the connection to the Astral is disturbed, possibly for a long time. Blood Curses are amongst the most vile forms of magic as they can be used to embed the curse within the target and using the targets own soul to fuel the curse.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Skill increased</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You increased your skill: Blood Magic [2/100]</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Wolf died.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You gain 15 EXP.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>For killing an opponent 3 levels above you you gain 5 Bonus EXP</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>For killing an opponent without a Traveller in your party, you gain 2 Bonus EXP</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>You increased your skill: Blood Rune-Mastery [6/100]</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>Skill increased</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    I guess every fight that you can crawl away from is a victory but I''d rather not fight again until I had a better plan.

 Chapter 10

    After reading the messages and the combat-log I had some understanding on what happened. My overcharged Chilling Bolt had send the wolf into an hypothermic shock by chilling it''s core in a way that would normally be impossible. Then I had used my own blood to cast a blood magical curse, more or less a magical parasite, into it''s blood, killing it before the shock wore off, or maybe prolonging the shock. So now my normal connection to the Astral was disturbed because of the soul-injury, that would have been the excruciating pain I had felt.


    For now, I had a not yet fully frozen wolf, so I started cutting into it trying to do better than before. As a bonus, the curse had quite literally devoured most of the wolfs blood, making the skinning and meat-extraction easier. Then I moved into the cave that was now mine by right of battle. It wasn''t too deep, maybe 30 feet into the hill and narrow, burrowed into the earth. Luckily I was small so I was able to walk upright, taller beings would have to crouch. But it was now empty and it was mine. I placed the fur-scraps on the ground and walked back out. With a spell of pure Ice I was able to close the opening into a narrow gap that I could only traverse sideways without my backpack. Then I closed most of that gap with a second piece of ice that I could later target with a shatter-rune to get rid of it.


    After a little search, I found a dead fall close by and collected quite a bit dry wood for a fire, collected it and went back to my cave. When I focused on the block of Ice I wanted to shatter, as I drew the first Ice-Rune onto it, I felt a connection and got a prompt.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Skill gained</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You gained the Skill: Ice Magic</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>Those who have a strong affinity with an element can do basic manipulations of that element without the need of spells. The extent of those manipulations depends on the skill-level.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    With that I was able to float the chunk out of the way and re-entered my dwelling. It took quite a bit APP to do so but I don''t think shattering it and recreating it would have been cheaper. I went into the cave with my firewood and after I left the starlight behind, I was surprised that there was still a little, silver glow. After looking around I realised that the silvery glow was coming from my hair, and upon closer investigation, small, silvery specks were scattered within my hair, like stars in a night-sky. I could almost watch them light up further and further down as my Astral Power-bar filled up. So that was the magic hair, well, in the middle ages they identified witches by their hair, I guess that''s were they got the idea. But it looks awesome and I like it, even if it makes me a tad conspicuous.


    Then I got a fire going and made myself a, well, the best description is probably, nest out of the various fur-scraps I had gathered, I got a prompt.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>You created a shelter.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>One of the core-needs of any sentient life is the need for shelter. You have created yourself adequate shelter where there was none before.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>As long as the shelter is claimed and not destroyed, no lifeforms hostile to the claimant will spawn inside.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto">


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td style="text-align: center" colspan="2">Do you want to claim this shelter for yourself?</td>


    </tr>


    <tr style="text-align: center">


    <td colspan="1">Yes</td>


    <td colspan="1">No</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    I selected Yes and got another prompt.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>You claimed a shelter in the Area: Northern Wilderness</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>As there is no political entity that claims ownership of the Northern Wilderness, anyone can claim a part of it and it''s up to them to defend themselves. You do not have to pay to claim land and there are no taxes but you are also not part of any country that would defend you.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>


    You can respawn in this shelter.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Trait gained</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You gained the Trait: Survivor</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You can survive even in the harshest conditions, striking out for yourself to establish the basics of survival.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>


    Reduced need for food, reduced need for water, reduced penalties from environmental effects.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    I felt myself relax for the first time in Mundus. Now, I had a couple of things on my agenda, find out the limits of my Ice-Magic, find out how to make spells, try to infer new runes, try to understand the rules under which Rune Magic operates and then look for an adventure.


    With that plan in mind, I first created another chunk of ice with three Ice-Runes and realized that while casting the runes into the air, the first rune took the least APP, the second twice that and the third three times. Then I let the newly created chunk of ice float up and watched my Astral Power as I let it float hither and thither. I came to the following conclusions after using all my Astral Power into the experiments.


    First of all, the further the target is away from me, the higher the cost.


    second, I need to constantly use power to keep it aloft, which concurs with -


    Unauthorized usage: this tale is on Amazon without the author''s consent. Report any sightings.


    third, to accelerate it, I need to apply power in relation to velocity and rate of acceleration and finally,


    forth, the bigger the manipulated piece, the higher the cost.


    All in all, very logical rules, bigger distance means higher leverage effect, gravity applies constant acceleration downwards that I need to counteract, acceleration need energy and higher velocity means higher air-resistance. Next, I''ll have to check out the effect of streamlined forms and try to get data on the relation of skill-growth to power-usage and vice versa.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Skill increased</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You increased your skill: Ice Magic [3/100]</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    As I was completely out of Astral Power, I used Spell Crafting, interested in the process. I got a prompt, telling me that to craft my own spells, I''d have to first use the Spell Crafting-Ability to start ''recording'' then I''d have to cast the spell a sufficient number of times, depending on spell complexity, to formalize it. Then it would become a fixed spell and I''d be able to teach it to others. So I''d need my Astral Power back before crafting spells.


    I had noticed that my Astral Power was returning faster if I immersed myself in meditation so I did just that, first emptying my mind, then feeling out the reverse of the sensation I had when using Astral Power, that feeling of something flowing out. I believed that if something came flowing out, it had to somehow flow back in. I found it and it was a trickle but steady. Trying to follow it back, out of my body, gave me a sudden sensation of vertigo and a cold feeling in my stomach, a feeling that seemed to yell ¡°DANGER!¡± at me. That feeling jolted me so bad that I lost my calm and opened my eyes, with a deep, drawn in breath.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Skill gained.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You gained a skill: Astral Meditation 1/100</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>Those who use Astral Power are aware that meditating helps to recover it. Those who know the secrets of Astral Meditation are able to align their meditation with the flow of the Astral River, strengthening the connection and thus increasing the recovery speed even further.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    At some point during my meditation, the debuff from the Soul-injury must have faded as it was gone now.


    I wanted to at least formalize one spell, so I kept on recording my first spell, the shattering icicle and after three cycles of using up my Astral Power to do so, I finally got the prompt that said,


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Spell created</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You created a spell, please name it.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    Now I had to laugh as a holographic keyboard, made from electric-blue light came into being before me. Still, I typed in ''Shattering Icicle'' and confirmed.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Spell gained</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You gained a spell: Shattering Icicle</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>This spell uses a combination of Runes and Intent to create an Icicle out of Elemental Ice then fires it and shattering it shortly after impact.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Title gained</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You gained the title: Magic Pioneer</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>For being the first of the travellers to create a new spell, you will be known as someone who''s willing to push the limits on magic. Those who try to push the magical knowledge boundaries will view you with favour, those who prefer the status quo or dislike magic in general will dislike you.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Skill increased</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You increased your skill: Ice Rune-Mastery [10/100]</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    Nice, a title. Sadly it will do little to help me out here but having it is probably better than not.


    But the process of creating the spell had given me a huge boost to my Ice Rune-Mastery, I guess because I made a spell solely made from Ice-Runes. Next on my agenda was, again, trying if I could find meaning in more runes. As I had worked with Ice quite a bit just now, I was feeling it and went into my trance, letting the Ice-Runes I knew fill my mind and letting my mind flow freely. The first thing that my mind latched on, was the image of breath, clouding into mist from the cold. I was happy that I didn''t get the terrible headache I had before. It took time, no way of measuring how long in the timeless state of meditation, but my mind went through images of Icy mist, until the mists finally seemed to condense into a rune and I knew the meaning obviously, Mist. Then I got the headache again, I guess that''s it with rune-inferring for now.


    Of course I wanted to try the new rune instantly and went with something simple, Ice ¨C Mist ¨C Chill and got an small explosion of mist, filling my cave and almost dousing my fire. Rats.


    Even I felt cold in the magical mist and I was not happy about the flashy way it presented itself, if I wanted to use the mist to conceal something it was utterly useless as every semi-intelligent tomato would be able to guess that something was up if sudden mist exploded somewhere. So, slower release with a duration?


    I made the runes again but held the image of mist, slowly creeping out of the formation at the front of my mind.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Special Ability gained.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You gained a Special Ability: Spell Channelling</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>Sometimes, it''s not the instant release of magical power to accomplish something that you seek, for example when healing a strong instant shock could destroy the patient before being able to heal him. Those who are able to channel spells can release their power over a period of time, making their effect gentler and less jarring.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    The new ability gave me a nice smile, more tools in my toolbox were something good.

 Chapter 11

    After I gained the channelling ability, I thought about ways I could use my magic, I realized that, as long as I was alone, the cast-time of rune magic, forcing me to remain stationary, was highly problematic. At best, I could sling one or two spells but then my opponents would be upon me and few would give me time to destroy them at my leisure. The Ice Magic I''d gotten might help but I wasn''t so sure. To do something useful while contemplating I started training it by letting an icicle fly circles, then figure eights at ever increasing speeds, until my Astral Power was drained.


    I wasn''t getting anywhere, until my eyes fell onto the Rune Stones, if stones could serve to hold runes, might different materials work as well?


    My Icicle stopped right in front of my face and using Ice Magic, I engraved the rune for Shatter into it, then I let it float to the back of my cave, away from me and the fire, and focused on the rune I knew was there, there was even a bit of feedback from my Ice Magic, guiding me. It took more Astral Power than thought but then the Icicle burst, like my Shattering Icicle. Happily, I tried the same thing with a Concealment-Rune but when I tried to feed Astral Power into it, it felt wrong and when I pushed through the feeling, the icicle started to crack and then simply broke into fragments, none of them concealed. So, runes can only be engraved into fitting materials and Runestones are universal? Maybe, more testing would be required. Doing that with a Blood Rune gave the same effect, shaved ice. I picked the fragments up to put them from my living space, when one of the shards cut deeply into my hand, it was razor sharp. The blood flowing from my wound dyed the Icicle crimson, making it look brutal and eerie but also giving me an interesting idea.


    I made a small bowl out of ice and started to collect some blood into it, using my magic to create more from my wound. It was hellishly painful but gave me something to experiment with. I didn''t want to create new ice so I simply placed three chill-runes in a triangle around my bowl and channelled Astral Power slowly into them. It took a couple of moments but then I had a chunk of frozen blood, something I hypothesised to be both under the governance of Ice and of Blood. I shattered the bowl on the floor and used Ice Magic to float one of the pieces up. It worked but it took more than I thought it would, as if the Blood Ice was a lot heavier than normal ice. Then I realized that the idea to engrave a single rune into the Blood Ice was great but I had no blood rune that would be useful by itself.


    I put the Blood Ice down and created a new, normal Icicle, with the intent to use it to try out if I could use multiple runes on one piece. So I engraved Ice ¨C Mist ¨C Chill, walked to the front of the cave and let it float out, no way would I want to set of another mist-explosion within my cave. I focused on the runes and tried to let a slow, steady flow of power trickle into them, making them slowly release their power. It worked like a charm, icy cold mist billowed outwards from the floating icicle, enveloping it and obstructing the view. I kept going, feeling that enveloping the surrounding area in mist would make my little hidey-hole more secure. I wrecked my brain but could not find a way to make it somehow permanent, a persistent enchantment, if you will, to create a steady bank of mist.


    With that knowledge, I created both, Blood Ice Shards and plain Ice Shards, I managed to create two Blood Ice Shards, reading Shatter ¨C Blood ¨C Splatter, one reading Ice - Chill ¨C Blood and a couple Chill and Shatter-Shards and one with Ice ¨C Mist ¨C Chill as a kind of smoke bomb. More, would not be handy to lug around and I wasn''t sure it would be smart to overdo it with the self-blood letting.


    Then I created a larger Icicle, shaping it like a weaver''s shuttle, only thinner so it was basically a blade with a cutting edge all around, points at each end and an impossible small handle in the middle, so I could carry it. When I got a prompt to name it, I simply called it Frozen Shuttle, but that meant it was considered an Item so I inspected it.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="10">Frozen Shuttle</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="5">Rarity</td>


    <td colspan="5">Uncommon</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="5">Type</td>


    <td colspan="5">Special</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="5">Base Damage</td>


    <td colspan="5">4 Damage Piercing</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="5">Base Damage</td>


    <td colspan="5">8 Damage Slashing</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="5">Strength Modifier</td>


    <td colspan="5">none</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="10">This Blade made of Ice cannot be wielded like a normal weapon, it''s created to be used by an Ice-Magician.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    After familiarizing myself with my new weapon and boosting my Ice-Magic Skill to 8, I decided to head out. I refreshed the Icy Mist, just so it would be there, and headed out. Walking in the mist, I realized I was able to feel the engraved Ice-Shard as long as I was within the mist.


    You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.I applied my concealment-spell on myself and ghosted through the forest, looking for prey, when I heard something reminding me of chatter. Unable to understand, I crept closer and saw two strange, rat-like creatures. They looked sapient but not civilised. Suddenly, I heard something snap behind me and spun, looking at another of those rats, trying to sneak up to me with a club raised. I instantly used my Frozen Shuttle to strike at it, using quite a bit of Astral Power to accelerate it and clearly surprising the thing. While doing so, I observed it, getting


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>


    Snowbold, level 8, ???/???


    </td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    ''Oh, shit, the rat is a lot higher level than me.'' raced through my mind when the Shuttle hit it into the side, throwing it off balance and causing a loud squeal to burst from it''s snout, alerting the other two to my presence. Observing told me that they were level 8 and 9 so fighting was pretty much out. I jumped back and tossed one of my Shatter ¨C Blood ¨C Splatter at the wounded Snowbold, using a bit of Ice-Magic to guide it which caused my Shuttle to wobble dangerously. When I focused magic into the runes, now half-burried in the Snowbolds guts, the meaty ripping sound that was drowned out by its scream was like music to me and even the drops of purple blood that landed on my face could not quench my smile. The Log told me that a heavy bleeding-effect was applied to the Snowbold but now it''s two allies came after me with a Vengeance. I firmed the control of the shuttle and used it to strike them away and parry but that made me unable to get anywhere and I was taking light hits and glancing blows, so I pulled the Ice - Mist - Chill Shard out and focused power into it. After that, my Astral Power was about half due to the expense of fighting with the Shuttle and letting both Shards burst. I oriented myself within the mist and shot two Shatter-Shards into the bleeding Snowbold, trying to worsen it''s injuries. The squealing made it''s allies rush to it''s side and I managed to make a get-away under the cover of my mist. I kept running even when I got the message:


    .


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Snowbold</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You gain 25 EXP.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>For killing an opponent 6 levels above you you gain 15 Bonus EXP</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>For killing an opponent without a Traveller in your party, you gain 3 Bonus EXP</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>


    You reached Level 3


    </td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    Neat, so the bleeding-effect killed it? Useful. However I got the feeling that hunting them would be suicidal, I had been lucky that I got away in the mist and I kept running until my stamina was almost gone.


    I moved around a bit, hunting some wolves and similar critters, whenever I found them alone, proving that my Frozen Shuttle was a good weapon. After a while of doing so, I saw another pair of Snowbolds, this time I was a lot more careful and watched them mull around for some time and then stalked them back towards their burrow. Then I decided to return to my own lair.


    When I got there, I was happy to see that the mist was still clouding the hill-side making it hard to find the small entrance into my cavern but as I was able to feel the engraved Icicle, it was easy for me. I had another idea to make it even harder but first I channelled some power into the mist-engraving to get more mist. Then I sat down and used Concealment ¨C Mist ¨C Concealment, slowly channelling power into it and getting billowing clouds that mixed with the already existing mist. If it worked, the mist should conceal direction, making it hard to keep one''s orientation when walking into it. The combination should give me quite a bit of privacy.


    Suddenly, there was a blue box.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>System Announcement</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>Every First Wave-Beta Tester created their character. Special Achievements and titles will be distributed now.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>For being the only Tester to gain the ¡°Natural Mage¡±-Trait you gain a title: Otherworldly Magic-Prodigy.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Title gained</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You have gained a Title: Otherworldly Magic-Prodigy</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>Of all those who travelled to this world, you are the most gifted Spellcaster. The Goddess of Magic smiles upon you and grants you increased Skill-Gain in all magic-related skills. She has also taken note of you. Such attention can be a blessing or a curse.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>

 Chapter 12

    I stepped out of the capsule, forced by basic necessity. As it was evening now, I decided to order pizza and while waiting I did some forms to limber up. When it came, I plopped down and started looking for stuff other testers had posted, in order to get some information on the world, my arctic forest was somehow scarcely populated by libraries, don''t know why. Luckily, every tester had a certified Forum-Account and the NDA was incredibly lax, they wanted to use the tester as free advertisement. I read through a couple of posts, describing basic training, some bitching about the attributes being based on tests, some bitching about the attributes in general and some bitching about the minimum-values being too high or too low.


    One of the ''minimum-values are being too low, raise them, or at least let me redistribute'' was incredibly funny, that guy had thought that Intelligence, Intuition and Charisma are completely worthless for a fighter. He put them all on 8, the minimum value. Now, he had trouble to remember where he put his sword, it took him minutes to comprehend basic things and no body wanted to talk to him because he smelled. The instructors at the training hall were basically telling him, he''d be cannon fodder, of course, while inside he wasn''t able to figure that but outside, it worked.


    That pulled me up short, I''d realized that the capsule was basically reading my mind, else the whole ''magic-thing'' would not work the way it did but what that guy described was more the capsule actively messing with his mind to limit it to the chosen stats. The realisation creeped me out, big time but on the other hand, I doubted that any company would release something into circulation without it being largely safe. And I''d far too much fun to stop playing.


    Another post was interesting, it was of someone who picked Guildmage, describing the process those had to go through to cast spells. Their Spells were a combination of Runes and Chants and they were only taught from master to disciple. Interesting. Also, the guy was mightily struggling with the Runes-portion, they had to be inscribed with very little margin of error. That was something I hadn''t realised, I guess I had lucked out, my martial arts training in combination with my wonky brain made me a natural at doing a specific movement in excruciating detail. Sadly I was unable to get any ideas for Runes out of the footing, he was only casting Fire and to be honest, it was hardly impressive. He mainly created small flames but he was given a wand that could stand in for the Rune-Portion, so he just had to chant and Firebolts would shoot from the wand. Still, it sounded like he was a rather pure backline character.


    Then I struck gold, someone went actually into a library and had looked up the overall geography and written it down, alongside basic political information.


    As I had seen on the way down, the overall shape of the lands was similar to earth, I wonder why, lazy devs.


    North America was ruled by the Human Empire and other than that, it contained the Wild Woods, a huge, primordial Forest taking up what would be the north-western US and all of West Canada. Various wild tribes lived there, human or otherwise. North-eastern Canada was a desolate, frozen landscape, only inhabited by a race called Giantbloods, beings that were possibly the result of Giants mixing with other races, resulting in tall and hardy humanoids but due to their limited number they were never able to found a true nation. The dominant force was clearly the Human Empire, made up out of various Kingdoms in competition with each other but no open warfare, that was cracked down by the Empire. However it was the third Empire, they called themselves the Eternal Empire but future generations would have to judge that. The first and second Empire were both overthrown when one of the Kingdoms gained enough support to make a bid for the throne. The overall political situation was apparently relaxed but tensions were flaring up from time to time. The Continent was called Aletoma.


    Central America wasn''t populated. Well, at least not by anything you''d want to talk to. The whole thing was a mix of desert and mountains, inhabited by some of the worst monsters on Mundus, everything from rocs, gigantic wyverns, possibly even Dragons. Few went there and even fewer ever returned. Calling the place ''unfriendly'' was akin to calling the Pacific a ''small puddle'', better adjectives would be hellish, deadly, murderous or a plain and simple NO.


    Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.


    That land of death was called Helar and covered everything from South Texas to Panama and separated Aletoma and Arbotoma.


    South America or Arbotoma as it was called on Mundus, was crooked quite a bit, with the Cape pointing to Australia. It was covered in the ancient forests that sprung up around what the elves called ''World Tree'' or Eldrarbor. They claimed only elves born with the blessing of Eldrarbor were true elves as it was only with support from Eldrarbor that they were able to claim immortality. Various tribes lived in the forest, each with their own Kingdom but all under the High Keeper, the highest Druid of their religion, Eldra, centred on the worship of Eldrarbor.


    Africa, or Daiea, was further in the Atlantic so what was a narrow channel in our world was a wide strait in this world. The whole continent was inhabited by Daimons, something the poster claimed as incredibly racist, portraying Africa as the Demon Continent, but I felt different. If the game was built upon Greek Myth, then Daimons were not evil, they were messengers of the gods and connected to the Greek Pantheon. Upon reading in the comments, it was confirmed as someone explained that he had found some writing about the cataclysm and that it was caused as two rival factions of deities had warred with each other. Their war broke both sacred anchors that served as an easy connection between the realm of Olympus and Mundus and the realm of Asgard and Mundus. The shattering of the anchors was the cataclysm that had caused so much damage to the world. The Daimons had been the favoured children of the Olympian deities and still worshipped them. After the Cataclysm they''d left their ancestral home due to the pain the broken anchor caused them. All of Daiea was governed by a theocracy, ruled over by the High Priest of Zeus.


    Europe might be the most interesting continent, the whole of Europe and northern Asia was a powder-keg of races, various mountain ranges were inhabited by Dwarven Kingdoms, some connected by an underground network called the Deep Ways, the rest of the land was inhabited mostly by various tribes of Orcs, Centaurs and pretty much every flavour of beastman imaginable. Other races and tribes existed but those three were the most important ones. The various tribes were never able to unite so the whole continent, which was called Aretia, was engulfed in small scale conflicts.


    South Asia was the territory of the Valkyries, which I had mistaken for Angels when skimming through the races and they were the counterpart to the Daimons. Not Good and Evil but more Greek vs. Norse. The Valkyries are winged humanoids, also a theocracy, this one centred on Odin. The Continent was called Valkar and mostly peaceful. A mountain range spanned from Iran to the Korean Peninsula, separating Valkar and Aretia and similar to Helar, it was inhabited by a lot of unfriendly creatures.


    The last known race of note were the Naga, they had formed various small communities all over the world and were active traders and seafarers. The whole seafaring-buisness was made spicy by the fact that the Oceans of Mundus were probably the most dangerous region of the realm. They were inhabited by lots and lots of sea monsters making every journey by ship an interesting one, or if you had no water mages, a suicidal one. Water Mages, especially those trained by the Naga, were able to cloak their ships from the Sea Monsters making it possible for individual ships to cross the sea.


    Last, but not least, Australia. Nobody knew. Apparently there was no information to be found, it was on the map but as a blob, labelled as ''Wyld Lands'' and when asked, the librarian said that the Wyld Lands were simply that, a continent inhabited by monsters and strange fairies, deadly to everyone who dared venturing there.


    I have to admit, for a Game-World I highly approve, large scale war, that would wildly shift the balance of power or even wipe out races is pretty much impossible as most races are either isolated or culturally not capable of large scale war. So lots of conflict all over the place, huge areas pretty much earmarked as ''High-Level Content'' and high-sea adventure as a bonus, small Islands could make terrific out-door dungeons. And if, at one point, the world of Mundus was completely ''gamed out'', the prior existence of other Realms made a re-establishing of such links an easy, lore-fitting way to introduce more, endless, content.


    With those thoughts, I went back into the Capsule, I had wolves to hunt and I needed to come up with a plan to manage the pesky Snowbolds.

 Chapter 13

    A week...


    It took me a week in-game to come up with an idea how to manage the damn Snowbolds and I truly needed to. I had been stalking in the woods and quite often I''d come upon them. If they found me, they attacked, if I got the drop on them, they retreated to their burrow and then struck back with overwhelming force. But my conflict with the Snowbolds and my vigorous hunting of wolves and even one bear, had paid off, as I was now level 9. Sadly, I only got 2 Attribute-Points on level 5, both went into Intelligence but the levels themselves increased my Health, Stamina and Astral Power, even if I had yet to care enough to figure out the formula. Similarly, the damage I dished out was increasing but I think quite a bit of damage was based on the enemy, for example a heavy bleeding was probably based on enemy size or health and other factors. Similarly, some enemies took more cold-damage from my frozen Icicles than others, especially the Snowbolds seemed to be vulnerable to cold and always hid during the long nights.


    My skills were also coming along nicely, Ice Magic was now 23, Ice Rune-Mastery was 19, Darkness Rune-Mastery 15 and Blood Rune-Mastery was 17. Sadly, Blood Magic was only 4, I had yet to get a good Idea how to use it other than finishing helpless opponents or risking Soul Injuries which sounded seriously scary. What I had been able to do with it, was using the Blood of a living enemy to fuel a spell for me, at least until the enemy died. When Darkness Rune-Mastery had reached 10, I was able to infer another rune, this one Disorientation which then replaced one of the Concealment-Runes in my Mist Barrier. When Blood Rune Mastery had reached skill-level ten, I had gotten Regenerate, an advanced version of the Clot-Rune I''d used before which allowed for smoother and better healing.


    I had also formalized most of my stable spells, getting better effects for doing so.


    But my idea for the damn Snowbolds was based on their cowardly behaviour and vulnerability to cold.


    The next time I''d run into two of them, I had used a new idea, a concealed darkness tentacle that would not damage but make them disoriented and chill their blood. It was a five Rune Spell and if I channelled it neither of my two victims realized it until both fell into hypothermic stupor. Then I simply walked up and dragged them with me, towards their burrow. They''d be batteries. As soon as I was in the vicinity, I heard chatter and saw them scurry into it.


    Now, I needed to close the deal. I walked as close as I dared and I stabbed my first battery, electing little response from it, and with one hand on the shallow cut, I didn''t want it to bleed out after all, I drew a Rune-Formation for the spell I had called Frozen Mist. It was a rather simple three Rune Spell, made up from Mist ¨C Chill ¨C Ice simply creating a freezing cold Mist that would hopefully cause the Snowbolds to simply hide deeper into their burrow.


    Then I channelled the life-force of my battery into the spell, using Ice-Magic to direct it into their burrow. After five minutes, my battery gave up it''s ghost, literally in that case and I swiftly switched batteries, I wanted to have my full Astral Power in case something went bad.


    But after another five minutes of forcing them down, I guessed and hoped that they were in the depths of their burrow. Then I closed the entrance and part two came up, exterminate the burrow.


    To do so, I had to risk quite a bit, I made small enclosure in the barrier that closed the entrance and sat down in it. Then I carved a small opening to get a spell inside but kept the piece to close it at hand. Then I cast a spell I''d called Mist of Death into the opening. Pretentious? As hell. Effective? Hopefully. It was a five Rune-Spell so to continuously channel it I had to get into a meditation-state which was the risk. I''d sit here, unable to react and hope that it worked.


    The spell was made up from Mist ¨C Concealment ¨C Disorientation ¨C Devour ¨C Blood. The idea was to create an almost invisible, dark creeping mist that made them disoriented and slowly killed them. Insanely evil? Well, to be honest, I had the idea when channel surfing one time and seeing a documentation about World War 1 and the use of gas warfare. This world had no Hague Convention after all. Maybe it would need one?


    I finished my spell and closed the gap as I was unable to control the Darkness, not possessing the Dark Magic skill or whatever was needed to do so. Then I let my mind go blank, keeping only the twin sensations of channelling Astral Power out of me into the spell and channelling the Power from the Astral River into my body. I managed to reach an equilibrium and held it. After about ten hours of continuous casting I got messages in the form of blue screens so I guess the combat had just ended. There was a smile on my face as I started reading.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Snowbold died</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You gain 25 EXP.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>For killing an opponent without a Traveller in your party, you gain 3 Bonus EXP</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>Snowbold died</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You gain 25 EXP.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>For killing an opponent without a Traveller in your party, you gain 3 Bonus EXP</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>Snowbold died</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>Snowbold Chieftain died</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You gain 300 EXP.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>For killing an opponent 30 levels above you you gain Bonus EXP</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>For killing an opponent without a Traveller in your party, you gain Bonus EXP</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    It was a long list. Then my mind suddenly felt as if it was dipped in liquid fire.


    This tale has been unlawfully lifted without the author''s consent. Report any appearances on Amazon.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>


    You reached level 29


    </td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    The fading pain and the elation combined and I burst out laughing.


    Ok, I guess the pain is the price for rapid level ups.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Title gained</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You gained the titlel: Exterminator</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>For single-handedly wiping out a tribal community to the last child, you gain the title Exterminator. People will look upon you in fear. May the Gods have mercy on your soul.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    Ooops?


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Title gained</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You gained the titlel: Magician of Annihilation</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>For coming up with a new magical way of committing massacre, you gained the title Magician of Annihilation. Increases the EXP gained when using magic to annihilate large groups of opponents.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Trait gained</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You gained a trait: Magician of Massacre</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>Those who can use magic to kill large amounts of enemies are both revered and feared, depending which side they are on. When using magic to strike at large groups your skill-gains and the damage dealt are increased.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Trait gained</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You gained a trait: Smiling Calamity</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>Some beings are able to ruthlessly massacre other beings. Most of those who do so, see it as a last resort and only do so because circumstances forced them to. You are different. You have brought Calamity to others and done so with a smile. When committing massacre, you project a fear-aura.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Trait gained</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You gained a trait: Combat Meditation</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You are able to clear your mind and enter a meditative state while around you, battle is waging. While in meditation you can only focus on few things which might be lethal in battle.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Skill increased</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You increased your skill: Ice Rune-Mastery [25/100]</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Skill increased</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You increased your skill: Darkness Rune-Mastery [31/100]</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Skill increased</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You increased your skill: Blood Rune-Mastery [22/100]</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Skill increased</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You increased your skill: Blood Magic [5/100]</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Skill increased</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You increased your skill: Ice Magic [24/100]</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Skill increased</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You increased your skill: Astral Meditation [20/100]</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    All in all, very nice. I still had to search through the burrow but first, the level-ups had given me eight attribute-points. I decided to go with a placement of 4 Intelligence, 3 Intuition and 1 Vitality, that should give me the best results, not going full glass-cannon and neglecting my own survival. With that my Status looked like this:


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="6">Basic Overview</td>


    <td colspan="6"></td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="6">Name</td>


    <td colspan="6">Morgana</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="6">Race</td>


    <td colspan="6">Firn-Elf</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="6">Level</td>


    <td colspan="6">29</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="3">Health</td>


    <td colspan="3">255/255</td>


    <td colspan="3">Stamina</td>


    <td colspan="3">92/261</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="3">Astral Power</td>


    <td colspan="3">224/763</td>


    <td colspan="3">Divine Power</td>


    <td colspan="3">-</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="2">Strength</td>


    <td colspan="2">9</td>


    <td colspan="2">Agility</td>


    <td colspan="2">13</td>


    <td colspan="2">Dexterity</td>


    <td colspan="2">12</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="2">Intelligence</td>


    <td colspan="2">23</td>


    <td colspan="2">Intuition</td>


    <td colspan="2">19</td>


    <td colspan="2">Charisma</td>


    <td colspan="2">9</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="2">Courage</td>


    <td colspan="2">13</td>


    <td colspan="2">Endurance</td>


    <td colspan="2">11</td>


    <td colspan="2">Vitality</td>


    <td colspan="2">12</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Special Ability gained</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You gained a Special Ability: Rune Heptagon</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>For being a Natural Mage and reaching 20 Intelligence, you gain the ability to link seven Runes into a single spell, increasing their possible uses and power.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Special Ability gained</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You gained a Special Ability: Rune Projection</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>For having 20 Intelligence or higher you gained an ability, based on you play-style. The ability Rune Projection allows you to instantly project runes into a Formation, without drawing them. The Astral Power Cost to project a rune is double it''s normal cost. The amount of runes you can project into a Formation depends on your Intelligence. Instantly projectable runes: 1</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    Shiny, shiny, I just got insane skills. Rune Projection, if I''d be somehow able to increase my intelligence far enough, this would be the jackpot for true instant casting. And the Rune Heptagon, I could do so many insane things with that. And if my guess on Rune Meditation giving me new runes or maybe new rune-sets every ten skill-levels I''d get even more goodies as soon as I had some time.


    But now, I should go and check out if those Snowbolds had treasure...

 Interlude: Highlight Reel, Week one

    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>


    The first week of the Road to Purgatory-Beta is over. Let''s look at the highlights.


    </td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    A dark forest.


    The camera flies through the trees, showing small animals, then a large, black wolf. Then it reverses, away from the wolf, moving through the forest, until it stops, looking over the shoulder of a tall man, dressed in an green cloak and leather armor. The camera circles him, showing the spear on his back, the bow in his hand and the quiver at his side. Then, the man starts moving forward, stalking through the woods, the camera fixed over his shoulder.


    The clearing with the wolf comes into sight, the ranger slowly aims, then draws his bow and let''s his arrow fly. The camera follows the arrow in, time slows, the wolf gets hit into the shoulder and leaps up. Then, the camera flows back, showing two arrows, mid-flight, heading towards the wolf, when the camera reaches the ranger, the bow leaves his hand and he readies his spear. The wolf, after getting hit by a second arrow, let''s loose a fearsome growl. Then it charges the ranger and just as the wolf jumps at the ranger and the ranger stabs to ward of the wolf, the shot fades to black.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>


    Cut


    </td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    Evening, the sky is red with the setting sun, illuminating some soft clouds


    An open temple, made from white stone, two winged Valkyries, one male, the other female, both dressed in white gowns are standing next to a bed, containing another Valkyrie, this one injured. After a nod from the female, the male raises an golden apple and starts praying in a soft tone. The apple starts to shine in a golden light, first soft then stronger, until a beam of light, stronger than any before, ripples out, shining onto the injury. Suddenly the injury starts to close until there is nothing left, but a bad memory. Then, the female smiles and says ¡°See, just like that, Idun is able to help our people. You will make a good Priest.¡±


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>


    Cut


    </td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    A clear sky


    The rolling foothills of a mountain range


    The camera shows a group of Orcs, tall, most of them in shades of green or brown, most wearing little in the way of armour. Those only wear fur-loin cloths and are bare-chested but they are all holding aloft their weapons, some hold axes, others clubs, one or two spears, The leader, the only one who wears real armour, he is wielding a large, black hammer. The camera settles over the crowd, especially over a warrior who''s holding a two-handed axe. Then, the leader turns to the camera and silence falls over the rowdy horde. Then, the leader speaks, a deep, rumbling bass. ¡°Today, is the day we will take their Fortress. Too long have the dammed dwarves of Hammerforge dwelt in their hole, today it will be their grave! Charge, warriors of the Blackhammer-Clan. Charge to victory or death.¡±


    The horde roars in approval and the forwards ranks start moving, the warrior with the Blackhammer hanging back, talking with his second.


    Then, the camera flies forward, overtaking the charging orcs, until it reaches the rocky hillside. There is a large Gate set into the hill, showing an Anvil and in front of it is a small fortress. The walls are equipped with strange cannons, mounted between the crenellations. Dwarves are milling around, some manning the cannons, others are readying crossbows. All are armed with war-hammer and shield and wearing chain-mail, ready for war. A captain is barking orders, looking through a spyglass. The camera zooms into the spyglass, then starts a journey, back to the horde. By now, they are in sight and their prior trot starts into an all-out charge, battle-cries echo through the hills.


    Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.


    Then, the dwarven cannons open up, not with blasts like one would expect from cannons but with almost coughing sounds of escaping steam. But they compensate their lack of noise, with impact, their payload ripping gashes into the horde, smashing Orcs aside but the cannons are too few, too slow to kill all the orcs. Then, on a shouted command, the crossbows are raised in unison and on a second command, a volley of deadly bolts is shot. Again, Orcs fall but then the orcs are at the gates.


    The Orc we''ve seen in the beginning with his large Axe is one of the foremost and he starts hacking into the gate, trying to destroy enough of it to get to the bar, which is holding the gate closed. The dwarves strike at the orcs through the murder-holes of their fortress and it becomes a race, can the dwarves kill enough orcs or will the orcs tear down the gate.


    Then, the gate breaks, the remaining orcs flood in. They still outnumber the dwarves but it''s a close thing. A chaotic melee ensues until there is a loud whistle and all Dwarves try to get back onto the high-ground on the walls. Then, on the side of the Mountain-gate, two jets are exposed and suddenly the courtyard is filled with superheated steam, boiling the Orcs and the Dwarves who didn''t make the high-ground alive, their war-cries changing into cries of pain. Then it''s over and the dwarves walk back down from the walls. The orcish warrior we''ve seen in the beginning tries to stand but his wounds are too heavy. Then a dwarf walks up, his hammer raised and then the hammer falls.


    Again, the shot fades to black.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>


    Cut


    </td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    A snowy forest, sky overcast and darkening.


    Suddenly, movement, a dark form steps out of the forest, dragging small, almost childlike creatures with long snouts and whiskers.


    Similar looking creatures see the dark thing that stalked them within their forest for the last few days and know, they need to get the warriors and protect the workers, women and children, so they retreat into their home, the camera follows them. Then, as their warriors want to move out to drive the dark thing away, an ice mist flows into their home, extinguishing their fires, leaving trails of frost on the rocks. One warrior steps in and the mist is so cold, it burns him. They all retreat into the maze that is their burrow, the dark thing will not be so stupid to follow them in but if it is, they can easily surround and kill it, they have lost good people to it.


    Then, time speeds up, everything is shown in fast forward over a torch so people see the torch burning down over time.


    After some time passes, the warriors start to feel strange, they don''t find their way within tunnels they walked hundreds of times before. They stumble, like drunk but nobody knows why or what is going on. Then, in the deeper levels, the shaman of the tribe suddenly feels the problem but it''s too late. ¡°It''s in the air!¡± and indeed there is a thin, dark mist, almost invisible in the flickering torchlight but it has saturated the burrow and they can''t find their way out of their home. Then one of the older workers who lived further up, lies down and dies, closely followed by others.


    Panic breaks out, they try to find their way but everything twists and turns, making some unable to even stand. Cries from the deepest level echo through the warren, the nestlings are dying. The shaman tries to clear their chieftains mind but nothing seems to work. Then the shaman also dies. Soon, only the chieftain is left, but no matter how he turns, nothing makes sense. After stumbling around for some time, he falls and the camera follows the tunnels until it reaches the exit, now blocked by a wall of ice. Time slows back down. Within the wall, in a small enclosure the dark being sits, it''s form hidden by a cloak of shadow, it''s eyes closed and the features hidden further in shadow. Only the lips, curled into a smile are visible. Suddenly, emerald green, almost glowing eyes become visible and a clear, happy bell-like laughter is heard.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>


    Cut


    </td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>


    Join us, on the Road to Purgatory


    </td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>

 Chapter 14

    Yohoho, roll up the Jolly Roger, it''s time to look for booty.


    With happy thoughts of treasure on my mind, I started into the burrow. Soon, I found a side-path with a couple of old furs in it, some torches and junk. I guess there used to be guards here. I grabbed the torches, just in case the cave got too dark for my low-light vision, then I continued my way. It was truly a rat warren down here, so I used the tried and true method of keeping my left hand at the wall, or rather follow the left-handed wall so I could simply reverse that and get back out. In large rooms that I wanted to search, I simply left my torch at the point where I left the wall so I''d have to go back to it.


    After hitting some dead ends filled with junk I started to find corpses, which I simply ignored, I doubt they had anything useful for me. I continued my search until I stumbled, almost literally, upon the largest Snowbold I''d ever seen, almost twice as large as it''s brethren. This one I searched but nothing truly interesting was to be found. It was carrying a large bone-club and Inspect called it an Ancestral Bone Club but I was not interested in the least. At least it gave Inspect a point so hey, there''s that. I almost lost hope in finding treasure when, not far from the chieftain, I saw one Snowbold that looked strangely different. It was wearing multiple bone necklaces, armbands and had a Bone-Dagger at it''s waist. The Bone-Dagger was not better than mine and I had mine largely relegated to a sacrificial tool, for fighting I had my Frozen Shuttle.


    Still, it was carrying something that Inspect called a ''Dull Bloodsphere'' with the notice that it was used in Bloodmagic. Sadly it seems like it''s only useable for a limited duration. But interesting, that means there are ways to save up magic by using Blood Magic? I''d have to think about that. Freezing Blood hadn''t worked so there had to be another way. The knowledge might be the biggest treasure down here. One of the less cluttered looked promising so I searched it thoroughly and was rewarded with two blank Runestones.


    I still went further down, past chambers filled with dead Snowbolds, until I found a chamber, almost hidden, with a strange altar in it, illuminated by two large, coal braziers. I had no idea what it meant but on the altar was a gem. I moved in, to take it, when suddenly the braziers flared, causing me to leap back. In the air, before the altar, materialized a flame, morphing into a humanoid form, only instead of legs, it was just flame. It was wearing golden plate-armour with runes on the shoulders and a flaming sun on the chest. In it''s hands were a shield with the flaming sun on it and a mace, I think they call them Morning Star. The form was giving me a feeling of danger and disgust, as if looking at a particular large cockroach. ¡°Leave, mortal! Nothing here is of concern to you.¡± It spoke to me in an otherworldly voice I tried observing it and got a sudden headache. ¡°I told you to leave! Your feeble divination will not work on me anyway.¡± With that it surged forward, swinging it''s mace. I instantly triggered Bullet Time and barely managed to take the strike with my Frozen Shuttle but it was shattered. The impact still propelled me out of the room and took three quarters of my health.


    When I wasn''t finished off before I landed, I looked up to see the form be within the room, standing calm, like nothing had just happened. Strange. I stood and shot an icicle at it, just to have it smashed away by its shield. But there was a little change, one of the braziers flickered for the blink of an eye. Even with the attack, it didn''t surge forward to end me, something was up. ¡°Leave! The gods have placed me here as a guard, I hate to end mortal lives.¡± The gods? Sounds like a real jackpot!


    I decided to go all in, first I used my Blood Runes to regenerate all my health, then I thought about a way to extinguish that thing. Upon closer looks, the light of the braziers was strange, it didn''t look like coal fire, it looked more like sunlight, making a clear demarcation. I decided to try out to simply toss spells at it and see what happens. After tossing multiple Icebolts at it and trying to get it with Darkness-Tendrils, I noticed that every time it had to defend, the braziers were flickering but I was unable to toss enough spells to make a difference. That gave me an idea.


    The author''s narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.


    I figured with an Heptagon-spell channelled spell, might be able to grind it down, I was safe down here, it couldn''t get to me or I''d be dead already so I could go into a trance and take my time. The spell I figured was Ice ¨C Devour ¨C Blood - Darkness ¨C Devour ¨C Blood ¨C Ice. I had honestly no clear image of the form, I figured if you mix a tendril and an icicle you get some kind of thorn and the mental focus of the Blood-Runes was life or vitality. With that I settled down and carefully drew the formation into the air before me.


    When I was done, it flared to life and I felt my Astral Power flow swiftly through me. The spell materialized as a silver beam with a dark glow around it, as if it was swallowing the light itself. The being took it on the shield but the braziers behind it started dancing as if a storm was blowing. Seeing that I had an effect, I simply went into trance like before, greedily sucking the Astral Power into my body and expelling it just as fast. I wasn''t able to reach an equilibrium so after maybe fifteen minutes, I was at less then five percent Astral Power and opened my eyes.


    Both braziers were almost extinguished but not yet. I couldn''t let it rally so I did the only thing open to me, I pulled my dagger and with a savage grin on my face, I stabbed my own hand, not deeply but to get blood flowing. Then I focused on using the magic in my blood to destroy that thing. I instantly felt pain, not localized but in my whole being. It wasn''t as bad as it could be so I simply kept going. The pain got worse by the second but looking at the braziers, I knew I would be able to last. ¡°NO! You cannot free what lies buried here! The gods ...¡± the being was shouting but was cut off the moment the braziers snuffed out.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Skill increased</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You increased your skill: Ice Rune-Mastery [28/100]</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Skill increased</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You increased your skill: Darkness Rune-Mastery [35/100]</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Skill increased</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You increased your skill: Blood Rune-Mastery [25/100]</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Skill increased</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You increased your skill: Blood Magic [8/100]</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Skill increased</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You increased your skill: Astral Meditation [23/100]</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    I felt like someone had run me over with a bus. Multiple times. I managed to stand and stagger toward the altar. The gem on it would be the price for my trouble.


    It looked strange, like a citrine, but from time to time a flickering bluish light shone from it and each time it did, a Rune appeared, looking kinda like an S or maybe a lightning bolt and the shining stopped. When looking at the rune, I felt a strong feeling of revulsion, it almost turned my stomach, similar but much stronger than what I had felt for it''s guardian..


    I took the gem and inspected it and got


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Soulprison</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>This gem was used to imprison a soul. Doing so bound it to the gem and prevents it''s return to the Cycle. Few beings are able to do so and even fewer would dare. The less it shines, the weaker the soul becomes, until the soul is extinguished and the prison turns to dust.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="2">Quest Alert!</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="2">The Soulprison</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="1">Quest Difficulty</td>


    <td colspan="1">Unknown</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="2">You found an ancient Soulprison. Find out what soul is imprisoned within and decide it''s fate. There will be consequences, no matter what action is taken.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="1">Quest Reward</td>


    <td colspan="1">Unknown</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    Well, that is different, a quest. Who knows for what, as it gives a wealth of information, but after destroying some kind of divine guardian I''m pretty much screwed anyway, right? No way, no how! Also, that rune pissed me off. I wrapped the thing into some fur to take away and packed it away.


    I managed to stagger out of the burrow and headed back towards my cave.

 Chapter 15

    Dragging myself back to my cave was not fun. I could only partially understand why I was so beaten, my health and stamina were close to full but my Astral Power was close to empty. I regenerated a trickle due to one of my traits but I had seriously overdrawn it to snuff out that guardian. I guess it was some kind of fire or sun spirit but honestly, I wasn''t sure. Interestingly there had been no experience for destroying it, I''d love to know why. For now, I had a crystal that was housing a soul that some gods wanted to remain buried. I was willing to bet good money that level 29 was not a level that let me take on gods. Hell, it was probably not even a level that let me survive out here. I had to find a way to get stronger.


    At my cave, the first move was dumping the regenerated Astral Power into my mist engraving, refreshing the bank hiding my cave.


    I settled down and rekindled my fire. Then, I let my mind fade, loosing myself in meditation and the flow of Astral, as it had beckoned me since using blood magic against the guardian. I felt nothing until a floating sensation startled me, it wasn''t a bodily sensation but purely in my mind. I felt good so I let it happen. Then there was a feeling of expansion and I felt swept away which caused me to rip open my eyes and suddenly I was the centre of the universe, as in the world revolved around me, at least everything was spinning around me. I was feeling dizzy, exhausted and my head still hurt so I decided to end my session at this point.


    With that I logged out and climbed out of the capsule. Sadly, the dizziness was still there, just like the headache. I hope I wasn''t getting side-effects to capsule gaming.


    I went into my living room, where I had a wide, open space to do my Wing Chun forms, I was feeling the need to move and find my centre again. I went slowly through a long sequence and when I was done, I was feeling fully human again. Still, I decided that I wouldn''t head back into the capsule for now so I checked the time and felt it was dinner time. I was feeling pasta so I made myself some nice noodles with tomato-sauce, with loads of garlic, onions and carrots. Yummy.


    After that, I simply headed to bed and caught up on my mail and a couple of webnovels.


    In the morning, I checked the forums and found that they had released the first weeks highlight-reel some time this morning. After watching it I had to smile, it looked pretty bad-ass overall. Then I started reading the comments, the ranger and the priest had come forward, telling about their exploits. A lot of people were questioning if it was all real player played content or if it might be an advertisement, introducing the big bad with the brutal massacre of snowbolds, snuck into the highlight-reel. Then there were some righteous tinfoil-hat crusaders, denouncing the game in general and the ''monster'', that was shown massacring innocents and their children, in particular as brutal murderers, claiming that games like this would cause more violence in the real world. That argument was as old as video-gaming itself but with VR-Gaming it would gain new traction because it wasn''t just input via a controller or keyboard but more ''personal''. It would be interesting how Pantheon would deal with the criticism that was undoubtedly coming their way and even possible law-suits the moment one of their customers committed a violent crime. Others were calling me a cheater for being able to cast spells like that, again others said I was a plant by Pantheon, some even called it fake even if the company itself had released the footage. All in all, I got called pretty much every nasty name under the sun and was quite happy that my face wasn''t clearly visible.


    Part of me wanted to out myself and stir things up but a large part preferred remaining anonymous. Then I had an idea, the comments were not required to be made by beta-testers and it was on a website that I still had the account of Titania and it was ''certified'' that the poster, meaning me, was the real Titania. Now, how to stir things up nice and toxic? I decided to shamelessly steal one old, favourite song of mine, just with a slight alteration.


    Support the creativity of authors by visiting Royal Road for this novel and more.


    ¡°When fairies fall with broken wings


    I can''t give up, I can''t give in


    When all is lost and daylight ends


    I''ll carry you and we will live forever, for ever


    Grey skies will chase the light away, no longer


    I fought the fight, now only dark remains forever"


    The fairy-queen, once high in light, betrayed and cast out, found solace in the darkness. Now, the world will tremble with what you have created, for Darkness shall sweep over the land and wash the light away!


    <ul>


    <li>


    She, who molded the light, Fallen Queen of the Fair Folk, Titania


    </li>


    </ul>


    Yes, this should reignite things. It was on the nose without really saying anything, perfect flame-bait.


    I had an evil smile on my face when I logged back into the game and the first thing I wanted to do, was get my new runes. I rose from my camp, refreshed the fog and ate some of the jerky as I had acquired a ''hungry'' debuff, reducing my regeneration and increasing my stamina consumption. But after breakfast, it was time to buckle down and get going.


    First, I took out the Blood Runestone, unsure if I truly needed it but feeling that it couldn''t hurt. I let my mind flow, for the first time I had no unknown runes to serve as a guide as only those I knew had been visible during the test. The thought that kept intruding was that I wanted to make Blood Magic more useable. Over a moment that seemed to stretch into eternity, a new rune condense within my mind, it was completely different looking than those I had seen before, less natural and more crude in nature, but I knew it meant to Condense, which in this context meant to greatly thicken blood without ''killing'' it, keeping it a living substance. I guess with that I could create a blood paste that I could use as an Astral Power Carrier. At least I hoped so.


    The second element, I went after was Ice. With the Runestone in hand, I let my mind flow. I wanted to increase the potency of my freezing magic, I had a feeling that debuffs were a lot more powerful than direct effects, at least for someone like me who was able to use the blood of my enemies against them if I could get contact with it. I focused on the Chill-Rune I knew and soon I was able to understand how to strengthen it, making it more expensive but also stronger. The rune I understood meant ''Freeze'' and was quiete simply the stronger version of the chill-rune. Nothing fancy but it would prove useful. Before I could have used two chill-runes to get the effect of one freeze-rune, now I could use one Freeze-Rune and get the effect with less runes and less Astral Power expenditure.


    Then it was time to delve into the Darkness. The first image I had in mind was the dark glow of the spell I used against the guardian. Soon, I was able to ascertain a rune, when it became clear I was able to understand it''s meaning, Dark Radiance, the polar opposite to a light-beam, it was pure darkness given shape. Useful, I doubt anything can dodge attacks at the speed of light. It might cost more than my previous dark tendrils or icicles but it''ll be hell of a lot faster.


    Then, I thought of the ability to keep enemies away from me and with the Disorientation-Rune as a basis, I was able to condense the Madness-Rune, giving me a more potent approach to messing with the minds of those I wanted destroyed.


    Now, it was time to experiment. I created a small bowl out of ice, then I took a deep, centring breath. This was going to suck. I cut the runes for Spout ¨C Blood ¨C Condense into my hand and the moment I channelled power into them, it felt as if I''d driven the knife through my palm and a fountain of blood was shooting from my hand. My health and Astral Power started to drop rapidly and in my bowl, an impossible small amount of crimson liquid was accumulating. I broke the flow when my health was at 20%, it had extracted about half my Astral Power with it. I used some of the fresh blood still oozing out of my wound the change the runes into my go-to healing-spell, Touch ¨C Blood ¨C Regenerate and looked at the results of my self-mutilation and was not impressed. But still, it represented half my Astral Power pool, it should pack quite the punch.


    In an experimental mood, I got the block of ice with the Mist-Engraving, took it back out, and smeared some of the tar-like substance into the lines of the engraving. I almost dropped it when a surge of mist flooded out, then suddenly I heard a loud crack and the surging mist stopped and I saw that I had shaved Ice in my hands, the cracks along the lines of the engraving and the blood no longer crimson but black, the colour of dead blood. So too much magic for my feeble ice?


    I''d have to think of a way to regulate the flow, maybe a maxi-pad?

 Chapter 16

    A couple of days had passed, since I smoked out the Snowbolds and somehow, ever stronger enemies came in the vicinity, as if either the Snowbolds or the Guardian had kept them away before. Where before, I had to contest with young wolves, the occasional mature wolf or snowbold and a single, young bear, now I was getting ambushed by ounces, chased by packs of black wolves and even one tiger tried to get me. Without the concealment and mist-spells I''d have been dead for sure.


    I had recreated my Frozen Shuttle multiple times and was always carrying a mist engraved icicle with me, but even like that, the critters were getting to me. My skills rose a little, my Ice-Magic by a lot, up to 34, the rest only one or two points each. I''d even gained a sneak-skill and it was rising slowly but surely. Killing things was almost impossible, as soon as I was making headway, they either fled or other enemies were interfering.


    Another problem was that I had no real plan how to proceed, I had a quest but no idea where to get informations for it, there was a world to explore out there but I had yet to dare the first step.


    It was another evening of hunting, I was concealed in the shadows, creeping along, listening to the now familiar sounds of the woods and hearing a pack of wolves howl their instructions to each other. Then I heard something that didn''t belong. It was a laboured sound, a mix of heavy breathing and pained grunting that had me intrigued. I wasn''t certain but I doubted that it was a normal animal that made those sounds. I turned towards them, cringing when I realized that the laboured sounds came from the same direction the wolves were howling in, but my curiosity had be piqued. I wanted to know who or what was out there. I crept closer, until I saw a moonlit clearing. Hiding in the brush, I became aware of the being that gave of those sounds. It was a tall humanoid, probably more than seven feet, almost double my height. She, and it was definitely a female form, had a blue skin, a shade or two lighter than my own and snow-white hair. Her muscular frame was bleeding from multiple wounds, some looked like cuts but most were bite wounds and scratches. Her leather garb was ripped in multiple places and the only thing that kept her up was the weapon she used as a crutch. I had never seen a weapon like that, it was huge, a lot taller than her, maybe 8 feet and at both ends were crescent axe-heads making it an incredibly brutal looking weapon. Still, I doubted that she had the strength to swing it any longer.


    The longer I looked at her, the stronger a feeling of familiarity became, a feeling that I had to help her, save her. I was confused as I had never felt like that for anyone but I wasn''t sure I''d be able to fight it. Then, the pack of wolves broke into the clearing, encircling her causing her to draw upon her last reserves and straighten up, meeting what had to be certain doom to her, with a fierce expression, her head and axe raised high. She''d go down, but she''d go down fighting. The first wolf charged her and it broke me out of my spellbound state. I started moving but so did a wolf in her back. She managed to strike at the first wolf, coming from the front but the second? It would take her wide open back and would sink it''s fangs deep into her. Something burst within me, a feeling of intense hate, the will to crush those mangy dogs, to show them their place and to wear their pelts as a new coat. The Frozen Shuttle surged forward, striking the wolf and cleaving it in two. That one would never get up again. I was shortly behind the shuttle, closing in on the now prone form, I guess the last strike took everything she had in her. I reached her, standing over her form, surveying the surroundings and suddenly realizing that she was dying fast and would not survive much longer.


    I observed her and got


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>


    Giantblood female, level 25, 22/489


    </td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    ¡°NO! You will NOT take her!¡± I wasn''t sure where that fierce protectiveness came from but it was there, I would NOT let them take her.


    Runes formed in my mind, Mist ¨C Devour ¨C Blood ¨C Darkness ¨C Devour ¨C Blood ¨C Regenerate. I knew it would take the vitality of the wolves and pour it into her. I activated Overflow and suddenly the runes appeared before me as if I was using the Rune Projection ability but that only worked for one rune but now all seven runes materialized around me and they were all shining with a red glow, mixed with a little silver and surrounded by a dark halo. Then the spell activated and a dark, black mist came pouring out. I heard the wolves whimper, cough and die, my Astral Power was used up and then suddenly the outward surge stopped and reversed, surging back towards me and the form below me. Then it flowed into her and I was able to see her wounds close at a clearly visible speed. Soon, it looked like she was simply sleeping. Now, I was able to see the surroundings again, the trees around me were all dead and the wolves were greatly weakened, some already dead.


    I had my shuttle in hand and was shouting my challenge, knowing that it would still be a close one. But I felt Astral Power return to me, slowly but surely, if I kept the shuttle close to my body and didn''t use too much speed I''d manage. I heard a wolf behind me, running up, then jumping. Half turning, I moved the shuttle into it''s way, letting the wolf jump onto the shuttle, using it''s own momentum against it. The shuttle got stuck in the snow and the wolf got impaled. Then I simply pulled it back out. The time that took had regenerated more Astral Power than it had taken, so I was net positive. The slow dance of wolf, dagger, shuttle and elf continued for a while, me dodging and using as little power as possible, the wolves slowly recovering from my spell. In the end, it was a close thing, I''d taken a couple of nicks here and there, but I managed to survive.


    You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Jonari Hunting Wolf died</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You gain 500 EXP</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>For killing an opponent 18 levels above you you gain Bonus EXP</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>For killing an opponent without a Traveller in your party, you gain Bonus EXP</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>For killing a greatly weakened opponent, your EXP was reduced</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>


    You reached level 30


    </td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Skill increased</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You increased your skill: Ice Rune-Mastery [30/100]</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Skill increased</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You increased your skill: Darkness Rune-Mastery [37/100]</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <div>


    <div>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Skill increased</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You increased your skill: Blood Rune-Mastery [26/100]</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Skill increased</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You increased your skill: Ice Magic [36/100]</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <div>


    <div>


    Interesting, I guess the cold had already done them in for the most part and I was only getting partial EXP. Still, it was enough to get a level up so I''m happy, not grumpy. But hunting wolves? That was probably not good, but other things were more important now.


    <div>


    <div>


    Now I finally could get a closer look at the being I had just rescued. She wasn''t a beauty by normal standards but there was something about her. Her features were rather rough and masculine and I was not sure her very prominent musculature would be considered anything but butch. Well, I had her now and possession was nine-tenths of the law, right? I used some of my Astral Power to create a stretcher, moved it below her and used my Ice Magic to raise it. It took more power to keep her aloft than I thought but as long as I simply used my body to push the frictionless stretcher my regeneration was able to keep up.


    Luckily, no curious critter felt like I was meals on wheels, or rather meals on frictionless magic stretcher, so I managed to get back to my cave without trouble. Out of habit, I refreshed my mist cover and after putting my guest into my bed, I also spread a dark mist, causing disorientation and madness to improve my protections and placed a concealment spell on my entrance. That done, I went back in and spread my own cloak on her, then I started to cook something, having a feeling that my guest had been chased till exhaustion.


    <div>


    During the last few days, I had tried to make myself some cookware and managed to make a rough stone bowl that I could use as a pot and a couple of wooden bowls that I could use either as bowls for soup or cups for water. I filled the bowl with snow and placed it upon the fire, then I added some meat and sliced roots I had found and taste-tested to the water, creating a rather thin but hot soup.


    <div>


    I busied myself cooking, only from time to time looking at my guest until at one point, two clear, icy-blue eyes were staring back at me.


    <div>


    What do you say to someone you don''t know when she''s waking up in your bed, without memories how she got there? I simply ignored the overall-situation, poured some soup into a bowl and handed it to her with a smile, saying ¡°Here, have some warm soup. It will help you warm up.¡±


    <div>


    She looked at me askance, answering in broken speech ¡°You strange speaking¡± Why had I assumed that talking would be possible? Well, I guess it''s true what they say about assume, it''s making an ass out of you and me. Then she continued ¡°Speak of ancestors¡±. Er, what? Speak of my ancestors? Why would I do that? Still, she took the soup and, after taking a sip, made a bit of a face but drank it down as fast as the temperature allowed and handed me the bowl back. I gave her a new bowl when she spoke again ¡°Need leave, hunted¡±, I guess she wanted to tell me that she was hunted. I answered ¡°Don''t worry, I killed the wolves. They won''t hunt you any longer.¡±


    She made a pained face and spoke again ¡°Wolves not true hunter, only jakthund¡± I wasn''t able to understand the last word but from her face, I''d guess the wolves were only the hounds for something else. Then there was a strange look of recognition on her face and she spoke again. ¡°I just gained the original J?tun-Language Ability, the tongue of my ancestors. Why do you speak J?tun, even with an horrible accent?¡± Ok, so not only traveller gain skills, natives do so as well? ¡°I don''t know but it makes communication a lot easier. Let me introduce myself, I''m called Morgana, I''m a traveller who made her camp in these woods. It''s nice to meet you.¡±


    She gave me a tight smile, answering¡°It is indeed. I''m called Sigmir. So, you are a Traveller? The System told us about those, you came in the night of the falling stars, didn''t you? Truly bad luck to land here, in the middle of nowhere. Could you please help me for a moment?¡± she stretched an arm out and with my help she was able to stand. Then she went down on one knee I thought she was simply too weak and wanted to help her stand again but she stopped me. ¡°Ancestors, hear me! I, Sigmir, Daughter of Gromir, formerly of the Jonari Tribe, acknowledge my life-debt to the Traveller Morgana. My life will be hers to command, my blood will be hers to spill, from now, until I leave this world, I will be hers.¡±


    <div>


    <div>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td style="text-align: center">You received an ancestral Oath</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>


    The Giantblood Sigmir has sworn to obey you in all things and her ancestors will curse her should she go against her oath. She is now your Oath-sworn. You can only break this bond by killing her.


    </td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    Fut the Whack?!

 Chapter 17

    After Sigmir gave me her oath, silence reigned. After I gathered myself, I decided to ask the obvious question, ¡°Mind telling me what is going on?¡± Sigmir looked straight into my eyes and spoke with utmost conviction, ¡°You saved my life from the hounds. You brought me to your dwelling, put me into your bed and fed me. There is power in actions. You treated me like family, me, someone whose family has cast her out, has crippled her strength. I do not have anything to repay you but my life. So my life is yours so I can look my father in the eye when I return to the cycle.¡± ¡°Family, huh?¡± somehow it felt right. ¡°I will be happy to have you with me, Sigmir. Please, tell me why you were hunted and what we have to expect.¡±


    With that, Sigmir sat back down, into the furs and told me her story.


    ¡°Very well. I guess I should start with a bit of background. My tribe, the Jonari are a tribe of Giantbloods, descended from the northern Frostgiants, better known as J?tun. After the fall of Asgard, the connection to the J?tunheim, the realm of the Frostgiants was severed and the magic in their blood that made them what they were faded and over time they turned into what we are now. Giantbloods they call us. How the mighty have fallen.


    Most of us stand six to seven feet tall and lack the strength and fortitude of our ancestors. Some are different. My father was one of those who were truly different, he was almost ten feet tall, monstrously strong and tough as a mountain. He was the strongest warrior of our tribe, by far. When he reached level 50, he reached the first divide and managed to overcome it. He even made it to level 100 and reached the second but never attempted to overcome it.


    His blood, however, proved too strong, when I was born, the stress the birth put on my mother was too high and she did not survive. Something that is rather common when only one of the partners has the strength of our ancestors. Father raised me, and he raised me well but due to the responsibility of raising me, he never dared to challenge the second divide.


    Sadly, even the strongest warrior can fall to a knife in the back. I believe that''s what happened to him, last year he went hunting with the Chieftain and some other warriors and when they got back, they told a tale of my father giving his life against a mountain boar and plummeting to his death. Never, ever would that happen to him, he was far to strong and smart to fall like that.


    When we celebrated our harvest-festival this year, the Chieftain announced that I''d be wed to his son, now that I had reached the age of maturity. His son is a cruel, stupid bully. He''s not even as strong as me but because he is stronger than most and the son of the Chieftain he lords over everyone in the tribe, taking what he wants and punishing people for sport.


    On top of that, I was already stronger than him, having inherited my fathers original class, Berserker and even managed to reach level 50 during his training to overcome the first divide and gain the class Earth Splitter. The son of the Chieftain was a simple Tribal Warrior, he reached level 60 but Tribal Warriors don''t generally reach the first divide until level 100, he will probably fail to reach it even then. I''d rather die than be that weaklings wife.


    However, I had spoken too openly and both, the Chieftain and the Shaman felt that I had to learn my place. They mixed something in my food, it made me sick and sapped my strength until now I am barely a shadow of my former self. It drained my levels making me unable to use my class so I had to resort to some tricks my father told me, to get away but the hunting wolves were sent after me. I guess Jongarn is not willing to let his prize escape.


    The wolves harried me through the forest, never quite making the kill, as if it was sport to them. Luckily, the blood of my ancestors is strong in me and I was able to take the cold better than they were, it gave me a chance to stay ahead of them, but the constant chase made me weaker each day, exhaustion and wounds taking their toll. I was all alone and had given up hope, sure that closing my eyes would mean entering the cycle, hoping it really, but dreading that they were only chasing me till I collapsed and then lead the hunters to me to drag me back as a broodmare. Then I wake up, with a small being handing me a bowl of soup. The soup wasn''t much but for someone who''d been hunted for weeks, it tasted like the nectar of the gods.¡± the last sentence was said with a smirk.


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    I had listened to her story with a mostly stoic expression and the behaviour of her tribe pissed me off, it went against my core beliefs, the tribe sounded like a large family and family should not turn on itself. Whom can you trust, if not family? In addition, I hated bullying ass-holes with a passion, I have had my share of them all through high-school and college, most of them, I''d still happily feed into a wood-chipper, dick first.


    Add in that mysterious, protective, warm feeling towards Sigmir? Yes, her tribe had just entered my shit-list. I also knew loneliness, having endured it often growing up and in the last years, I had there was a feeling I had to do something, it was guiding me towards something I wouldn''t consider normally. I took Sigmir''s hand and cut into it drawing blood, then I did the same with my own. I spoke, grasping her bloody hand with mine, not knowing where the conviction I felt came from, ¡°Sigmir, of no tribe, of no family. I, Morgana the Traveller, will be your family until I leave this world. Your foes will be my foes, your pain will be my pain, from now, for evermore.¡±


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Trait gained</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You gained a trait: Bloodpact</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You have sworn a Bloodoath with your Oathsworn Sigmir, binding the two of you together. As you both carry the bloodline of J?tun, it is strengthened. Increased affinity with Ice-Magic.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    It was interesting what blueish blood means to a blush. I could see her eyes getting moist and she was trying to talk but chocked on her words. That tall, muscular form, the strong face, combined with moist eyes and blushing cheeks? Beyond adorable, so I closed in on her and gave her a heartfelt hug, trying to show her she was no longer alone. I whispered into her ears ¡°Don''t worry, dear, I''ll be with you. If necessary, I will lay waste to the fields of Elysium, if necessary, I will burn down Ygdrassil itself.¡± then, bitten by an imp of the perverse, I lightly bit into her earlobe causing a surprising moan to escape her throat while she shuddered in my arms.


    When I pulled back, she looked into my eyes and I saw fire in there. ¡°I will hold you to that.¡± Then, with a yawn, ¡°Would you mind if I go back to sleep? The last weeks have been taxing.¡± I felt like lying down was a good idea so I simply wrapped her back up in my cloak and the furs and snuggled in with her. Then I logged out, knowing that I needed a short bio-break.


    Soon, I was back in and felt the taller girl in my arms. Lying there, I had time to think about her story and I''d have to ask her about those divides and class-changes, I had yet to read about anything like that. Maybe it was just something that people of this world took for granted and would never think to explain. I''d never think to explain gravity or what seasons are to someone, even knowing that they are not from ''here''.


    Suddenly, I heard her mumble and sob a little, shifting in her sleep. I pulled her close, so that her face was nestled in the crook of my shoulder and spoke soothingly, telling her I was there and everything would be all right. It took a couple of minutes but soon, she slipped back into a deep, calm sleep. I wasn''t sure her wounds were all healed so I drew my heal-spell on the her and slowly and cautiously channelled Astral Power into her. At the same time, I let myself fall into a meditative state.


    I don''t know if it was the intimacy or the channelled healing magic, but I felt her body as an extension of my own and was able to feel her condition. There were some small problems due to exhaustion and wounds but they were soothed away slowly. But there was also something else, like scars, on all her muscles, eating at them, destroying them. I focused on it and was able to greatly slow it but that wasn''t a solution. I guess it was a remnant of whatever their shaman had fed her, slowly destroying her from the inside. Lacking the power the permanently destroy it, I went with the next best thing and pushed back against it. Then I changed my spell, adding the runes for Blood and Freeze but focusing on freezing the malicious affliction so it would be contained.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="2">Quest Alert!</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="2">Curing the Shieldmaid</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="1">Quest Difficulty</td>


    <td colspan="1">Hard</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="2">Your new companion is afflicted with something malicious. Curing her will require greatly increased knowledge on healing magic or help. Quite often, shamans and spirits congregate at astral nexuses, searching for one and asking their help might work.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="1">Quest Reward</td>


    <td colspan="1">Lifting the malediction Sigmir suffers from</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    With that the goal was clear, sadly I had not the slightest idea where to find one such nexus. But another day might guide the way.

 Chapter 18

    The discovery that Sigmir was still under the influence of some kind of curse or disease made me feel helpless, which in turn made me angry. I hate those feelings.


    With time, the night went and a new day came and Sigmir woke back up. At first, she stiffened but then relaxed into my arms. It was a new but very welcome feeling, waking up with someone. ¡°Say, Sigmir, do you know the location of an astral nexus or any groups of shamans?¡± I asked the blushing Sigmir. ¡°I have heard stories of a village far in the north, a village of wonder and magic, filled with shamans and protected by the spirits.¡± Suddenly, I heard a loud yell, causing me to quickly move out of the cave to witness a large humanoid stumbling around in the mist, yelling around. Next to me, Sigmir stiffened and whispered ¡°That''s one of the hunters of my tribe. We need to get going.¡± I refreshed the mist, focusing on the disorientation-aspect. Sigmir was affected a bit and focused on me. Suddenly, there was a blue box before me.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="2">Sigmir has invited you to form a group. Accept?</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="1">Yes</td>


    <td colspan="1">No</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    I mentally accepted and Sigmir was looking better while we watched to hunter try to find his way in the confusing mist.


    Soon, the hunter was looking drunk, as if he had been on a three-day bender and I switched to a concealed chilling mist, cooling him down until he fell asleep. ¡°Silent¡± I whispered to Sigmir who then moved out and, with a swift cut of her axe, the hunter lost his head.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Jonari Hunter died</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You gain 1500 EXP.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>For killing an opponent 21 levels above you you gain Bonus EXP</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>For killing an opponent without a Traveller in your party, you gain Bonus EXP</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    The hunter gave a nice chunk of EXP. Then it was time to hustle, I packed everything I had in the cave and we started swiftly towards north, soon I heard a horn behind us. Sigmir scowled and said ¡°They found him. The hunt is on.¡± At the same time, I got a message:


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>You lost a shelter.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You lost your shelter in the Northern Wilderness. As it was your current respawn-point, you will now spawn at a random, common respawn-point in the area.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    From time to time, I used Hail ¨C Mist ¨C Concealment to cause a drizzling snow to destroy our tracks. Still, from time to time, we still heard the horns behind us, harrying us on. My stamina kept dropping but I kept going, Sigmir looked like she could run on forever. The pine-needles kept pricking me and suddenly Sigmir gripped my shoulder and threw me aside. Then, an axe struck into a tree, right next to the place my head had just been. I jumped back up and saw a hunter, further back, in the shrubbery, scowling and pulling back the hand that had just thrown an axe at me. A small part of me wanted to turn and fight but the rational side told me, it would be suicide. So we ran on, moving at a clip that didn''t take more stamina than I could handle. From time to time, we ran into some kind of critter but mostly we simply smashed them aside, either with my Frozen Shuttle or with the monstrous weapon Sigmir was lugging around.


    I had to push myself, struggling with the exertion of our run, feeling like a marathon-runner, when suddenly I got an new skill.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Skill gained</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You gained the Skill: Athletics</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>The Athletics skill trains and conditions one for running and swimming. Skilled athletes move short and long distances over land with speed and efficiency, and they also swim swiftly underwater.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    I felt my gait smooth out, using less power to achieve the same speed, thus saving stamina.


    In the afternoon, the horns were all around us. ¡°We need to lose them.¡± grunted Sigmir, by now, the heavier load she was carrying had taken a toll. ¡°I''ve got an idea, give me a second!¡± Well, now or never. Not sure if it would work, but I had an idea. I formed runes, not to channel but to instantly release them, trying to summon a hailstorm. Hail ¨C Mist ¨C Hail ¨C Mist ¨C Hail ¨C Mist ¨C Disorientation gave me a Rune-Heptagon and then it gave off a bright, silver light, shining into the sky. There had been clouds all day but suddenly the clouds turned grey and a heavy mist settled around us. Then came the hail, making it miserable to be outside but better miserable than dead, I guess. I ignored the skill-gain messages, we had to move on on.


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    It became harder and harder to find our way but Sigmir was certain that she knew that we were moving in the right direction. Then, the dim twilight of the arctic winter turned into the deep black of night. The clouds hid the moon and stars but we could move on thanks to my low-light vision. Still, the darkness was all-encompassing.


    We found refuge in a tree and regained our stamina, knowing that it would only be a short rest. I had made some jerky so we snacked on that and Sigmir caught a little shut-eye, still exhausted from her flight the days before. Remembering that whatever their shaman had done to her, was still attacking her, I went into the channelled healing again and reinforced the sealing of the malediction. All too soon, we had to move again so I woke her back up and we climbed down. It was time to go again, so further north, we ran through the night.


    By now, my mind was churning, trying to find way to escape but coming up short. The horns sounded more scattered now but that mainly meant that the hunters had spread out and one catching us might bring them all down on us.


    Suddenly, the clouds ripped apart and high in the sky, we could see the shining gibbous moon, illuminating bright bands of colour as the northern lights were framing it. I almost stumbled due to the sheer magic of it all. The vision of natural wonder reached deeply into my soul and touched me in ways I had never imagined. Deep within me, I knew, the green burning skies under the silver moon would stay with me until my final hour. Both, Sigmir and I stopped and simply watched the beauty, not saying a single word, just holding each others hand and taking in the wonder.


    But time waits for no one so we had to move on and we did so with a spring in our steps. Compared to the celestial beauty, our earthly troubles looked so small and insignificant. We kept moving until dawn was upon us when suddenly another axe struck next into a tree next to me and a hunter moved out of the shrubbery before us. ¡°Quick, we need to keep moving!¡± with that I started to control my Frozen Shuttle to start attacking him. The hunter was well trained and managed to keep both my shuttle and Sigmirs weapon at bay so he was losing but slowly, far too slowly. Then I heard a noise behind me and dove to the side, just in time to dodge a flying axe, aimed to take me between the shoulders. I switched into bullet time to give me more time and realized that I was able to take more than a single object with my Ice Magic, now that the skill had grown. I ripped an icicle from a tree behind our first attacker and managed to drive it deep into his chest from behind. Then there was the blast of an horn behind us, a long drawn note, followed by two short notes.


    Our hunters now knew the position of their prey. I withdrew my shuttle to contend with the new foe and switched positions with Sigmir, getting closer to the knocked down foe. Observing him told me that he was wounded and bleeding but would likely not die from his wounds. With a cruel smirk, I let my shuttle down, trusting Sigmir to keep the new attacker occupied and used Ice Magic to engrave a rune-triangle made out of shatter-runes into the icicle within the hunter who was just getting up. Then, feeling the rule of cool, or maybe cruel, I turned and while turning channelled Astral Power into the runes. The wet splattering sounds told me that it had worked well enough. Then I used my shuttle and some handy icicles to assist Sigmir in finishing off our second foe.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Jonari Hunter died</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You gain 1500 EXP.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>For killing an opponent 17 levels above you you gain Bonus EXP</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>For killing an opponent without a Traveller in your party, you gain Bonus EXP</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>Jonari Hunter died</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You gain 1500 EXP.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>For killing an opponent 16 levels above you you gain Bonus EXP</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>For killing an opponent without a Traveller in your party, you gain Bonus EXP</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Skill increased</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You increased your skill: Ice Magic [39/100]</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    After taking care of Sigmirs wounds with quite a bit of my remaining Astral Power we were off again, hurrying through the snow hoping for a miracle to slip out of the grasp of our enemies.

 Chapter 19

    The second day of our flight had been brutal. We had to contend with hunters multiple times and each time the other horns got closer. We managed to evade them during the short day and found shelter under an overhang that night. I patched up Sigmir with magic, partially to prevent the malediction she was under to continue to damage her substance and partially to revert said damage. But I knew, what I was doing was just a stop-gap measure. One positive thing was that the pressure and continued spell-casting to heal Sigmir and to conceal our tracks had pushed my Rune-Masteries to the point that I was able to infer new runes in all three skills and maybe, just maybe those would help us escape.


    When I opened my status-screen I realized I hadn''t distributed the two attribute-points I''d gotten with level 30, so I decided to do just that. I had gotten something incredible when reaching 20 Intelligence so reaching 20 Intuition should give something similar. So I placed one into Intelligence and one into Intuition to bring them to 24 and 20 respectively.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Special Ability gained</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You gained a Special Ability: Parallel Processing</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>For having 20 Intuition or higher you gained an ability, based on you play-style. The ability Parallel Processing allows you to truly multitask, holding fully separate tasks in mind, your body is still limited though. A higher Intuition allows more parallel processes to run at the same time. Currently possible parallel processes: 2</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    When I felt my thoughts expand, I knew my gamble had greatly paid off. My first idea was to use four objects with my Ice Magic and soon my Frozen Shuttle and three Icicles were flying around in the cave, I had to group them mentally two by two but still, it doubled my power but sadly halved my combat duration as it took quite a bit of Astral Power to keep everything aloft. I guess, I''d better try to use one or two objects to support and use the second process to cast rune-spells or do something else.


    However multiple Frozen Shuttles would be good so I used a channelled rune-triangle made out of Ice-Runes and my Ice-Magic in order to create four smaller, made to order-shuttles that could still link together with Freeze-Runes between them, allowing me to make the four smaller shuttles into one large shuttle with a thought and a small amount of Astral Power.


    The result was rather impressive:


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="10">Frozen Multi Shuttle</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="5">Rarity</td>


    <td colspan="5">Rare</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="5">Type?</td>


    <td colspan="5">Special</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="5">Base Damage</td>


    <td colspan="5">3 Damage Piercing</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="5">Base Damage</td>


    <td colspan="5">6 Damage Slashing</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="7">Strength Modifier</td>


    <td colspan="3">none</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="3">Special Effect</td>


    <td colspan="7">Coordination. This weapon is a multi-part weapon. When all four pieces are used in concert, they deal bonus damage.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="10">This set of four shuttles is made to work in concert. They can link together to create a single, larger shuttle, increasing it''s mass and thus the power of its strikes.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    With my success fresh on my mind and Sigmir standing guard I let myself fall into a trance, letting my mind clear in order to gain new runes. I focused on my Ice-Runes, first and got in the right state of mind, then I let my mind roam free. The first thing that got to my mind was the incredible skyfire we had seen last night. My mind zeroed in on that and suddenly I felt like my mind was split in two and I lost my focus. It was as if I had inferred all runes possible, only a lot worse and I was sure I hadn''t inferred all the Ice-Runes I could. Maybe that skyfire was something I could not wrap my head around in this world, something governed under different runes and rules.


    If I hadn''t been sitting down, I''d have collapsed so I just sagged and felt a wetness on my face, both from tears due to the pain and blood escaping my nose. I was trying to gather my mind back together when I became aware of the moon. It was full and instead of it''s usual silver-white colour, today it was blood red. When Sigmir became aware that I was looking spellbound at the moon, she said ¡°Blood will be shed during a red moon.¡± Then I became aware that there was a buff in my list that hadn''t been there before.


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    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Under the Blood Moon</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>The light of the Blood Moon shines upon you. All Darkness and Blood related magic is greatly strengthened.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    ¡°Let''s go and make sure it''s not our blood that''s shed tonight.¡± I told Sigmir with a bloodthirsty grin. Meditating with a splitting headache was out anyway and killing a couple of hunters off was just what the doctor ordered. Together, we stalked into the night, looking for the telltale flickering of fire that the Jonari would need in such a cold night, their strongly diluted J?tun-Blood was granting them a lot less resistance to the cold than Sigmir and I enjoyed. I felt alive in the darkness, in a way I had never really felt. The stalking, the hunting, it made me tingle inside, knowing that there was prey out there, the hunters that had harried us were now our prey. We wouldn''t be able to kill them all, they probably had one main camp and a couple of smaller groups as scouts and attacking the main-camp would be suicidal. The scouts however were fair game and I''d happily rip the blood from their bodies.


    However we were not the only hunters, stalking the night and one of those other stalkers wanted to contest with us before we got to our prey. It started with an almost silent rustle of pine-needles but during a dark and silent night, I was hyper aware. An Ibris hadn''t got the memo that tonight, we were not prey, we were the hunters and was jumping my way. I turned and with a flourish of my hands, all four of my shuttles flashed forward, two miss-directing the striking cat, the other two going for it''s flank, ripping bleeding gashes into it''s hide. A swift observe told me that it was a level 28 Snow-leopard and my strikes had taken about twenty percent of it''s health. I used my hands and body to guide my shuttles, as it was a lot easier to do so with the aid of gestures and wide, sweeping motions. The cat kept dodging and retreating until it got pinned down and a strike of Sigmirs weapon ended the fight.


    There were some EXP but nothing earth-shattering. ¡°Say, I never asked, what do you call that thing?¡± I asked Sigmir, pointing to her monstrous weapon, still dripping with blood. ¡°In my tribe it''s called a Lok''nar, a mountain-cleaver. It''s sad that we can''t take our time and skin this cat, we both could do with some new clothes, mine are in tatters due to my flight and yours are rather cheaply made. But we just don''t have the time.¡± With that I became aware that yes, my clothes were still the junk I started with, I was just unable to process my kills beyond getting some fur-scraps and ragged chunks of meat. But now was not the time to discuss the different ways to skin a cat.


    We moved on and soon we saw the first fire. Sigmir sneaked close to the fire and I brought two of my Shuttles silently behind the single guard. I dropped the other two and used my hand to cast a pentagon of Darkness and devouring to kill another guard. Then, with a concentrated effort, I made a scissor-motion with my shuttles, taking the guards head clean off. At the same time, dark tendrils sprung up around one of the sleeping guards, holding him down and choking the life out of him. When Sigmir heard the chunk my blades made on impact, she moved swiftly and killed one of the sleeping scouts. The last scout managed to stand and scream before my shuttles struck his back and the Lok''nar struck his skull, making it as close to overkill as you can get. Then we got to the last, the one my tendrils held down and I used my blood-runes to create a nice, crimson tar-like substance, brimming with magic to use at a later time. When looting their bodies, I used one of the water-skins to collect the magically enriched blood, it would serve as a Astral Power-battery at a later point.


    We struck two more camps, killing nine further Hunters and collecting the life-magic of three of them, but the night grew short and we should both take a rest before dawn came. So we retreated from the scouts and the direction we guessed their main-camp in and took a rest. Sigmir slept and I took a short break outside the capsule. Somehow, I don''t know how one would manage with a real job, luckily my boss, aka me, had given me an extended vacation.


    Back in the game, I snuggled up to Sigmir and thought about what had happened before, during my meditation. The closest I got was that while the Skyfire was related to Ice-Runes, either I was not skilled enough or there was something else that governed that aspect of magic. Trying to get back into a trance failed, I guess there was still a bit of backlash.


    Far too soon, the false dawn came and Sigmir and I had to move on. Maybe the killing we had done under the light of the blood-moon would deter them a bit.

 Chapter 20

    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>


    Dawn of the third day...


    </td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    The windless, bloody night was over and Sigmir and I were on the move again. We heard the horns sound what Sigmir told me were distress-calls three times during the first hour and knew that our pursuers had found their scouts. Then there were lots of horn-sounds, calling them into larger groups, too large for us to contend with but maybe we''d be able to slip between them or around them to loose them. We were trying to use their signals to map out the groups, in order to give them the slip. I had periodically covered our tracks with magic, so they should have problems to simply follow our tracks on a permanent basis, especially with fewer but larger groups.


    Suddenly, I felt something close in on us and it felt, just wrong. Like an oily, tarry film of filth. When it reached us, Sigmir stumbled and almost fell, I just managed to stop her in time. On her face, an angry, red brand became visible and I felt the film wrap around her. I reached out with my mind, akin to reaching out for Ice to manipulate it with my Ice-Magic. I felt something connect and suddenly the filth tried to reach me. I focused my mind on my magic and tried to wrestle with it and was able to slow it down, whatever it was. The other half of my mind was racing, trying to do something, not daring to reach out as well, in case a second magical contact-point would give the filth a second point to attack. In desperation, I threw together a Rune-Triangle out of Dark Radiance, Devours, Darkness in because parts of it felt familiar, similar to my own dark magic but wrapped in something else, something nasty. The runes flashed and a dark halo surrounded Sigmir and me for a moment and the filth became a little less.


    Encouraged I cast another spell, this time a Heptagon out of those Runes as I had seen that repeating a rune strengthened the overall spell but made it also more costly. To better explain, if a spell with three runes costs five Astral Power and produces an effect at a magnitude of five, using two of the runes doubled in a pentagon can produce the same effect, only at a magnitude of ten but for a cost of eight. So more runes meant more bang for the same buck or more versatility. Right now, Bang was all I cared about, so I drew the seven runes and with a flash of darkness, the strange, filthy magic was gone. Now, I had time to see the messages I''d ignored.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Skill gained</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You gained the Skill: Dark Magic</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>Those who have a strong affinity with an element can do basic manipulations of that element without the need of spells. The extent of those manipulations depends on the skill-level.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Skill increased</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You increased your skill: Darkness Rune-Mastery [42/100]</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    It was strange,when using Ice-Magic I linked to something corporeal, something my mind could reach like I''d reach with my hands. But Darkness? Darkness was the absence of light, was it not? Didn''t they say, there is no light without shadow, so vice versa, no shadow without light? I''d have to think about that.


    Sigmir looked at me, she was looking horrified and gasped ¡°Those monsters!¡± there were tears in her eyes, so I placed a hand softly on her cheek in support. ¡°They cursed me. They used my father''s blood or bones in order to place a curse on me so they could track me. I never suspected they''d do something that vile, desecrate father''s remains in such a way.¡± Now, I was getting worried, we had been able to escape from them because they had to search but if they had a tracking beacon on Sigmir, we had a problem. A short thought on leaving her behind, almost made me sick, discarding that warm feeling that I was feeling when looking at her, something I had never felt before in such a way? Not an option.


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    I gave her a short hug, then simply turned and started running. The horns were coming closer so we had to run at a high clip, slowly draining our stamina.


    The pine-forest we were running through, suddenly opened up and we were standing before a deep canyon, deep down below us was what had to be an iced over river. It was at least twenty yards across so jumping or using a small tree as a bridge was out. Looking to the sides didn''t help any.


    I was stumped, trying to find an idea, I might be able to save Sigmir with my Ice Magic by letting her ride on the Frozen Shuttle but when I told her to hold onto the Shuttle, she saw through my idea and discarded it instantly. ¡°I will not trade my life for yours. They pissed on honour, I will not become like them!¡± was her angry rebuttal when I tried to convince her. So, another way. Levitating myself with Ice Magic was as impossible as using your own hair to pull you out of a swamp. Magic simply didn''t work that way. I heard a horn-blast sound not too far from us and knew we were running out of time. Then I had a simple, insane idea.


    ¡°Cover me!¡± I said to Sigmir and seated myself to provide the smallest possible target. Then I started to craft a Rune-Heptagon purely from Ice-Runes, channelling Astral Power into it and at the same time taking control of the output with Ice Magic, creating a bridge out of ice, starting a bit below the cliff on a small ledge and reaching towards the other side.


    I heard grunts and the sounds of fighting behind me but dared not to look, concentrating on my task, knowing that the only way we''d live was to finish the damn bridge. Then I felt an impact in my back, warm blood gushing out. I suppressed the pain and focused my mind solely on my task, slumping together. I believe I heard Sigmir scream behind me. Floating on a sea of pain, I heard other sounds behind me.


    I was not able to understand every word, but I later asked Sigmir and she told me what was said. ¡°Stand down, Jonari! Sigmir, it is regrettable that you betrayed the clan. Look, even your Ancestors placed a Curse-Mark upon you. Tell me, Sigmir, was it worth it to spit on the clan to be with some outsider? The outsiders blood drenches the snow and you? You were famed for your strength and now you are brought low.¡±


    Then, I heard Sigmir''s voice close behind me, saturated with hate and anger. ¡°Jongarn!¡± out of her mouth, it sounded less like a name and more like a curse. ¡°Your lies are pathetic, we both know that I''m not cursed by the Ancestors, your pet-shaman used foul magic and desecrated the remains of my father who you and your father cowardly murdered. I spit on you. May the great wolf himself see your betrayal and rip your guts out!¡±


    I felt the Ice connect to the other side, creating a make-shift bridge. My life was dwindling but I''d see this through. I had still two mist-engraved crystals so I laid them on my lap, uncorked the bottle of magic blood and said as loud as I could, ¡°Sigmir, RUN!¡± With that I poured part of the blood onto the crystals and both crumbled after releasing prodigious amounts of mist. Then I felt hands pick me up and carry me.


    My eyes fluttered open and I saw Sigmir''s face above me, felt her hands pressing me to her chest. I felt a bit of blood wet my front and then I heard Sigmir grunt and felt her jump. Twisting my head showed me that we had cleared the bridge but also that a Warrior had already moved onto the bridge, chasing us. I had no more Astral Power but I still had a card up my sleeve. When creating the bridge, I had placed a large Shatter-Rune onto the ice itself and I had just enough strength left to toss the bottle with blood onto the rune, shattering the bottle on the ice and activating the rune with the magically saturated blood. The result was glorious, a thunderous roar rumbled into the forest and then a terrible scream rose when the Jonari on the bridge plummeted into the canyon.


    I had a smile on my face when the world turned dark.

 Chapter 21

    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Skill increased</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You increased your skill: Ice Rune-Mastery [39/100]</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Skill increased</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You increased your skill: Ice Magic [41/100]</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Skill increased</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You increased your skill: Blood Magic [13/100]</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>


    You have lost consciousness. Time remaining: 8:00:00


    </td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    The blue windows and a countdown were the only things within a black nothingness, no concept of self, no concept of my body. The vertigo made me log out and take a break for the next hours.


    After I did my business in the real world, I logged back into my home-space and checked the time until I''d wake up. You could create an image of the view out of your ingame-avatar''s eyes within the home-space, in this case it told me I had two hours left. Now that I had some forced down-time, I could try to find information about those ¡°divides¡± Sigmir had spoken about. There was only little information, a couple of posts talking about ¡°Heroes, who overcame the first Divide having the strength of ten man¡± and ¡°Saints, who overcame the second Divide having the valour of a hundred man¡± but nothing concrete, I guess people were hoarding those information or nobody had thought to ask about the Divides. Or maybe the ''natives'' were simply not telling, either way, there was no information to be found. I moved into my training hall, set a timer and simply did slow forms, enjoying the floating feeling I got when totally immersed into the ritualized motions of the forms.


    A small eternity later, my timer broke me from my reverie and I logged back into Road to Purgatory.


    The last seconds ticked off the countdown and then the world rushed back into me. It felt intense, a lovely, sweet smell tickling my nose, a feeling of softness under my head, soft breaths contrasting the howling wind outside, then, like an intruder a throbbing pain in my back pushed into my mind. I did inventory of my body, the left side of my back was throbbing in pain, but it felt like someone had bandaged the wound. Then I became aware that, yes, my wound was bandaged but that bandage was the only thing covering my upper body. I managed to raise a single arm in order to cast a healing spell over me, without even opening my eyes. I thought we got away but I wanted to be whole before opening my eyes and confronting the reality around me. The healing washed over me and within moments the pain subsided and I was able to move without causing further harm to myself.


    With that, it was time to open my eyes and the first thing that greeted me was a well-muscled, bare stomach. Turning my head on the pillows that appeared to be Sigmir''s thighs, I looked up and saw that Sigmir''s tunic had been reduced to barely more than a sports-bra and further investigation showed that the bandage on my chest used to be the rest of her clothes. I had to fight an intense blush when I realized that the smell I had enjoyed directly after waking up had to come from the place where Sigmir''s thighs met each other, as I had almost buried my nose there. But the scent and the thoughts I had when smelling the scent now that I knew what it was sent a heat deep into me. Crawling up, I decided to wake the sleeping princess the only appropriate way, with kisses. But first, I should make sure she is fine, so I used a channelled healing-spell and then started to lightly nibble on her ears, then kissing my way down her jaw-line. A few kisses in, I heard a low moan and drew back to look into her eyes. She was looking at me with smouldering eyes so I decided to go ahead and do a small taste-test, capturing her lips with mine. Her eyes budged out a bit and at first she was hesitant but the first nibbles on her lip drew out her tongue to play. Our kiss grew in intensity, until there was only heat in both of us but far too soon, we had to come up for air.


    I pulled back a bit and a small string of saliva connected us, until Sigmir unconsciously licked her lips breaking the string. Now, the fire in her eyes had turned into a blazing inferno. ¡°Wow, I never felt anything like that.¡± she mumbled in an almost inaudible voice. ¡°Neither have I, my dear. But I''m very willing to see if we can get there again. I do have to thank my rescuing heroine, do I now?¡± I answered and recaptured her lips. Sadly, after a few minutes of making out, my realistic side staged an uprising. We were in a cave, without fire, without bedding and a look outside told me that night had fallen. Add to that the greatly shortened clothing on Sigmir and my missing clothing and the result was simple, go out to search for wood. And I had to do it, with my better cold-resistance and low-light vision. ¡°Stay here and try to keep warm. We need a source of warmth.¡± I silenced her rebuttal with another short kiss and stood. A short look around showed me my leather jacket, stained with my blood and with a gaping cut in the back. I pulled it on but just before I did the same with my cloak, I saw Sigmir shiver a bit in the quickly cooling air. Instead of pulling the cloak around me, I went close to her, gave her another sweet kiss and draped the cloak around her torso like a blanket. ¡°I will be back soon, dear. Try to keep warm.¡± With that I turned and moved swiftly out of the cave but outside, I settled into a stealthy gait, cast my cloak of darkness and used the Dark Magic I had gained yesterday to try to deepen the shadows I moved in, melding myself with the dark of the night.


    Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.


    Moving through the night, I thought about the new feelings I had. All my life, I have had problems categorizing my feelings, making sense of them. At least when it came to positive feelings, lashing out in pain, anger or fear was nothing new to me, nor was the cold, calculated thirst for revenge against past tormentors. I knew the feeling of satisfaction when doing something remarkable, something others could not, that smug feeling of superiority. But that fuzzy feeling I had when looking at Sigmir, that warm glow spreading inside when kissing her, those were new. I was somehow fearful when it came to trying to understand those, fearing that understanding them would make them go away, like mist in the morning sun.


    Almost silent, crunching sounds made me stop dead silent in my tracks, trying to find the source of the sounds, as something had to be out here. I slowly looked around, trying to avoid sudden movement when I saw a stag maybe hundred steps away from me, moving slowly in the snow. I drew my concealing cloak of darkness tight around me and let two of my frozen shuttles move slowly, trying to stick to shadows and blind spots, in order to not alert the beast. Then, when I had managed to move them behind it, I used all my strength to accelerate the two blades, striking the stag into both knee-joints at the same time, crippling it''s hind-legs and making an escape impossible. Then, I simply slit it''s throat and used blood-runes to make the blood drain faster from the carcass. There was a trickle of EXP but not enough to make hunting deer worth doing. While bleeding it, I spotted a downed tree close by, with some relatively dry wood amongst the splintered limbs lying around. I walked over and collected some of it, then turned and used my frozen Shuttles to move the stag carcass back to the cave Sigmir was waiting in.


    When I got back, Sigmir was shivering with cold, her lips looking bloodless and pale, making me worry that I had taken too long. I swiftly placed some dry pine-needles together, then used my flint and steel to strike a spark. With little coercion, the needles caught fire, then I placed small pieces of bark and thin sticks over the flames, slowly growing the fire from a small, flickering thing into a nice, dancing camp-fire. A small part of me felt a revulsion when looking at the flames but warmth was currently far more important than strange feelings. Realizing that Sigmir was not reacting, I pulled her a bit closer to the fire and then snuggled up to her back in order to warm her.


    It took some time, maybe half an hour, but after she had heavy shivers at first, she warmed back up and became more animated. ¡°Dear, I''m afraid we have to get up, or it will be a cold night. Could you skin the stag while I get some more wood for the fire to last us through the night?¡± I asked. She turned in my arms and with a shy smile gave me a small kiss, then answered ¡°Of course I will.¡± She paused for a moment, then continued. ¡°Thank you. For everything.¡±


    I walked back out and easily found the dead tree I had gathered from earlier and gathered enough wood to last for the night. My track back to the cave was slower than before, having gathered much more wood and even some still green branches to use as skewers for meat. Still, the short way only took so long, even with an heavy load. When I got back, I saw that Sigmir had propped the stag up using her Lok''nar as a rack. Currently, she was carefully removing the intestines and similar, inedible organs from it''s body cavity. I placed the wood back at the fire and just as I wanted to offer my help, she deftly removed a pile of organs and without turning, asked ¡°Could you please take out the offal and bury it a bit in the snow a bit way? No need to lure scavengers right to our cave.¡± I had to fight a smile, it was the first time Sigmir had really taken the initiative to ask something of me. The last few days had been far too hectic to calmly think, let alone talk but I think the canyon had been enough to escape from our hunters for some time. Of course, I did as asked, even if I used my Ice Magic to actually carry the bloody mess. I returned and after getting some cut meat from Sigmir, it was my job to start cooking.


    Trying to watch Sigmir while turning the meat skewers from time was quite easy and it was impressive how thorough Sigmir was, carefully skinning the pelt off, de-boning the meat then separating every sinew out of the meat and then cutting the meat in thin stripes to cook and dry them next to the fire, making jerky. Soon, the skewers were done and I called Sigmir who sat close next to me but not quite making contact. I had felt good on her lap before so I simply switched over and snuggled into her, happy when she put one arm around me, using the other to eat. After getting some warm food and restocking the fire, the general weariness of the last few days overtook both of us and we slept, still cuddled together, both for warmth and comfort.


    Strangely even I, a being who greatly preferred her solitude, felt the cosy feeling of her embrace warm me in ways unknown to me.

 Chapter 22

    I slept the sleep of the exhausted and far too soon, I awoke, basking in the warmth my hug-pillow was giving off and enjoying the feelings that I had when hugging her and being hugged by her. Again, I stoked our fire, knowing that any bit of warmth would help. In addition to the fire, I closed off most of the entrance with ice so only a gap large enough for Sigmir remained. I should have done so yesterday but had simply not thought of it before sleep had taken me. Not wanting to wake Sigmir, I simply stayed in her embrace and took in her features. Somehow, her face seemed a little leaner, sharper if you will, when I had first seen her, her features could have passed for a male, now there was no question that she looked like a woman. Strong, rough features, yes but clearly female. But they could not have changed in the few days we had been together, could they? I simply did not know.


    My reverie was broken when Sigmir grumbled a little in her sleep and then, with slowly blinking eyes woke up. It took a couple of blinks but then her eyes focused on me and a smile spread over her lips. ¡°Good Morning, Morgana. I could get used to waking up like this.¡± she said and brazenly planted a kiss onto my lips. Interesting looks like she took to kissing like a duck to water. Not that I was complaining, not at all.


    Still, there were things we had to talk about. ¡°Sigmir, as much as I hate to interrupt this, I''m afraid there are things we need to talk about. You know your tribe, do you think they would continue their hunt for us?¡± I asked. ¡°No, I don''t think so. When we fought them at that canyon, they had to have very little in the way of supplies left, their packs were far too light. They would have to hunt in unknown terrain and continue their hunt at the same time. In addition while the curse on me would guide them, whatever you did stopped most of it before it could take hold. It will fade in a few days, so unless they already found a way over the canyon they won''t easily find us again. And their losses are getting painful, the tribe had maybe two-hundred warriors and hunters, most of them are needed for the defence and the supply of our village, sending such a large group out and even losing quite a lot of them will hurt them. I doubt that they will continue after losing their prey like they did. So we are safe.¡± she concluded with a smile. In addition, laying her thoughts out like that seemed to have convinced herself of our safety and while speaking a tension she had ever since I met her was slowly melting away.


    ¡°We should stay in the general area until the curse is gone so they don''t know our further direction.¡± I suggested to Sigmir. ¡°That way, we also have time to replenish our supplies and some gear.¡± She looked at me for a moment, then nodded. ¡°Then we will have to hunt for more pelts and search for other materials. Let''s go out after breakfast.¡± Outside, the light of the false dawn told me that the short daytime would soon be upon us, so meditating out, due to bad timing, wasting daylight would be foolish. Both of us snacked on the newly made jerky, due to lack of spices it was rather bland and gamey but it would stave of starvation.


    We started out of our cave and I closed the entrance with ice, making sure that nothing would move in while we were gone. Sigmir wore my cloak as a tunic, using it to keep as warm as possible. I watched Sigmir stalk, trying to emulate it as much as possible as she was moving silent as a ghost through the forest, far better than I could ever manage, even aided by concealment magic.


    It took quite a while but Sigmir managed to find the tracks of a small pack of wolves and follow them until we happened upon them. Together, we attacked, first me, striking with Icicles wounding and slowing two wolves down, then Sigmir charged into them like a landslide, managing to take one out with the momentum of her charge in combination with her own, considerable, strength. The other wolves were momentarily confused due to the sudden, brutal attack. I used that confusion to strike with my shuttles, focusing on the legs of previously uninjured wolves, taking their mobility would be a devastating blow to them.


    My shuttles managed to inflict severe wounds on the legs on one more wolf, all the while Sigmir used the distraction my shuttles caused to strike one wolf that had just evaded my shuttles. With that, one wolf was down and four were unable to run.


    The rest of the pack decided to flee, abandoning the wounded wolves but saving the pack. Killing them was rather easy, I used my shuttles to harry them, forcing movement onto their wounded legs causing stumbles and giving Sigmir openings to strike them. Within a few exchanges, they were all down and I got a screen.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Black Wolf died</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You gain 500 EXP.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    As the wolves were of a similar level to Sigmir and me, the EXP were ok but not immense. Interestingly, those wolves also had a thick, dark pelt, not white to blend with the snow. Sigmir skinned them out here, while I stood watch. She discarded the meat, only keeping the pelt, claws, teeth and sinews, I guess she was not a fan of wolf-meat which I can understand having tasted it in-game and the taste was best described with ''meh''. Still, the pelts would be useful. As I didn''t want to stand around like a bump on a log, I looked around when I saw a small plant, deep in the shadows below a tree. Somehow, the shadows were deeper than they should be, almost concealing it fully. I reached out with my Dark Magic and there was a resistance in the darkness, as if they were trying to cling to the plant. Curious, I reached down and carefully pulled the plant out.


    When making contact, I felt a familiar presence, similar to the shadows created with my concealment magic, Inspect told me that the thing was called Shadeleaf and was a plant touched by Dark Magic. Interesting, I''d have to try finding out what to do with something like that. I searched more but found no more below the trees here. Then Sigmir was done and we moved on, me looking carefully for strange shadows but finding only very few during the rest of our hunt. Still, we managed to hunt down another stag and Sigmir showed me quite a few edible roots. We stayed out, looking for materials until the sun started setting, then we returned to our cave and gathered wood from the dead fall in the dying light. In addition, Sigmir was gathering long branches to create racks to stretch the pelts over.


    Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.


    Back in our Cave, I restocked the fire and then did something I had wanted to do for days, meditating on new runes. Ice-Runes were at 39, Darkness at 42 and Blood Runes at 32 after our flight and I had yet to meditate on any of them.


    At first, I focused on Ice-Runes, not wanting to make the same mistake as last time, I focused my mind in directions I knew. The rune that condensed was interesting. It was an extension to the basic Ice-Rune, reaching in directions I was unable to go yet, it was the feeling of timeless, eternal glaciers, unyielding, even in the face of time. The Rune was specialised to create a stronger, sharper Ice, strengthening the crystal-structure but took a bit more Astral Power to condense and was losing out on the slight flexibility I had with my normal Ice-Rune. I guess a good name for the Rune would be Hard Ice. But at least I had a good direction to go to, making my ice colder and harder would be worthwhile.


    Then it was time for Darkness, this time I simply let my mind float and the first thing in my mind was the curse striking Sigmir. I wasn''t happy but it was something important and soon I was able to condense a rune meaning ''Curse''. This might allow me to weaken the curse on Sigmir but I wasn''t sure. But it might allow me to develop my Darkness-Runes into the direction of Meta-Magic, directly affecting magic as Darkness was the element of Change, so Magic was certainly part of it.


    Finally, Blood Runes, I wanted something to help Sigmir. Swiftly, I was able to condense a Rune that was meant to strengthen the muscles of a target. With that, I might be able to go into the direction of Body-Strengthening Magic, giving me a whole, new world of magic.


    With those new runes in my mind, I opened my eyes to see Sigmir scrape off small chunks of meat from the pelt of a wolf. As I wanted something different than jerky, I took a nice, large chunk of stone and used a combination of Ice Magic and the new Hard Ice runes to carve a bowl out of the stone. Afterwards, I did the same with wood, as the Hard Ice made some great carving knifes and strengthening magic on myself let me carve the wood with little problems.


    Then it was time to cook, first I threw in some untouched snow and melted it to create nice, hot water. The next step was to cut up some of the meat and roots, adding them to the pot and stirring. The soup cooked quite a while and soon the smell was permeating our small cave.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Skill gained</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You gained the Skill: Cooking</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>Cooking allows you to make basic ingredients into tasty food. Higher skill-levels allow the use of higher level ingredients and improve the effects of cooked food.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    Sigmir stopped her work and joined me at the fire. I handed her a wooden bowl, added soup and made myself one as well.


    With that done, I sat next to Sigmir, sharing our warmth and we ate mostly in silent but happy company. When we were done, I wanted to get a few questions out that plagued me. ¡°When you told me about you, you mentioned something called Divides. What are those?¡± Sigmir looked at me incredulous for a moment, then explained. ¡°Well, when you reach a certain level of strength, the System gives you a quest, a trial depending on your class and your personality. That trial is a Divide. After overcoming it, the Astral itself changes your body, strengthening it. Few manage to reach the first Divide, I think there were only twenty in a tribe of hundreds and the only one that ever reached the second Divide was my father''s predecessor who left the tribe long before my birth, never to return.¡±


    Ok, interesting, but why would some classes get it earlier than others? ¡°You said that you got yours at level 50 but others get it only later, why?¡± I asked. Her answer was rather enlightening. ¡°Well, levels are just the condensed power you gained from opponents when they enter the cycle, they influence your power but they are not your whole power. As you know, the stronger the class and the more varied abilities it has, the bigger are the class'' disadvantages. In addition, individuals train in different ways. For example, my original Berserker Class, it''s main abilities were in sustained fighting with two-handed weapons and strengthening the physical body. The abilities had little to no preconditions and I could easily integrate them in whatever fighting style I wanted, making them incredibly versatile.


    The downside was the Berserker-Rage, while fighting I might have fallen into a rage, no longer able to control myself, literally fighting until I became too weak to stand. My father trained me in his self-developed fighting style and to control and harness the rage. The resulting trial was a long, gruelling battle and I had to embrace the rage to fight my enemies but at the same time control it to not exhaust myself. I succeeded and gained the Mountain Splitter-Class, strengthening me and my style of combat even further. Sadly, due to the malediction of the shaman, I can only use basic movements, all class abilities are locked. Of course, information about training methods to go a certain way are closely guarded secrets, often only passed from master to disciple.¡±


    I blinked in surprise, that was rather interesting. Now I truly knew what the philosophers meant when they said ''I know that I know nothing.'' If I understood her right, there was an aggregate Power-Score, based on level, class, possibly race, skills and even combat-style and depending on said aggregate Score you would get special Quests to advance your class and each passed test gave overall-stats.


    ¡°Why would one want to get those Divides as early as possible? Wouldn''t it make more sense to wait until you are stronger to pass them without trouble? You said your Father didn''t take it because he wasn''t certain to pass so why not wait and challenge them after getting stronger?¡± I latched onto the first idea, trying to make sense of things.


    ¡°Well, the Dividing Trial is based on your strength, if you continue to train and get stronger after getting the original challenge, the trail will adapt to your higher strength and become more difficult. And overcoming a Divide gives you a stronger body so every level up allows more Astral into your body to further strengthen it. Before the first Divide, everyone is the same, they can only take the amount of Astral into your body required to raise your Attributes by two points every five levels. After the first Divide, that changes, I gained extra Strength every three levels and extra Endurance every four, in addition to the two general points one gains every five levels.¡±


    I wondered how the balancing worked with that, would some classes in the game be the play to win-classes due to higher potential and others simply reduced to trash? It would be a shame if only few classes saw play out of the list I had seen in the beginning. So maybe there was a certain way for any class to reach the requisite Power-level with the right training-guide? Or maybe balance was just an illusion, like it is in the real world.


    So many questions, so little real knowledge.

 Chapter 23

    My talk with Sigmir had given me a few things to think about, considering my choices in this world and my personal way forward. The Divides gave a motivation to keep the level down compared to skills and special abilities in order to gain as much power as possible without levelling before crossing them. My class might be a bit of a trap, without guidance you could seriously hamper yourself or you could soar, like Alkmene told me during character creation. I currently had six serious skills to level, three Rune-Based skills, two direct Manipulation skills and Blood Magic which was a bit of an outlier. I had a feeling that I shouldn''t try to gain more combat skills, those skills were more than enough for general combat, more would simply detract from each other.


    Strength itself came in many forms, gaining knowledge would be great but again, Frozen Wastelands are kinda limited in libraries. But I could experiment.


    First, I''d have to remake my Multi-Shuttle it was an incredibly useful weapon and with the Hard Ice concept, I could make it stronger than before. I sat down and like I did for the bridge, I channelled a Rune-Heptagon out of Hard Ice runes and was immediately amazed at the amount of Astral Power it took. Even in a half-meditative state my regeneration could not keep up with the amount of power flowing into the runes. I buckled down and used my Ice-Magic to shape the Ice in the process of it''s creation, feeling that I''d be unable to change it once it was finished. I was getting light-headed from the Astral Power expenditure when I managed to finish the Shuttle-Shape and it''s edges.


    My original Frozen Shuttle had been about three feet long and a half foot across it''s diamond shape, with four sharpened edges all around. The four shuttles that made up my Multi-Shuttle were each two feet long and a half foot across making the combination four feet long and a foot across. The new shuttle was three feet long and a foot across making it overall larger than the original or the small shuttles but smaller than the Combination Shuttle. It had taken all my Astral Power to create it but the result was worth it.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Skill increased</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You increased your skill: Ice Rune-Mastery [40/100]</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Skill increased</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You increased your skill: Ice Magic [42/100]</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="5"></td>


    <td colspan="5">Hardened Shuttle of Ice</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="5">Rarity</td>


    <td colspan="5">Rare</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="5">Type</td>


    <td colspan="5">Special</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="5">Base Damage</td>


    <td colspan="5">5 Damage Piercing</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="5">Base Damage</td>


    <td colspan="5">12 Damage Slashing</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="7">Strength Modifier</td>


    <td colspan="3">none</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="3">Special Effect</td>


    <td colspan="7">Imbued - Due to the process used for the creation of this weapon, it is strongly in tune with the Ice-Magic of the Traveller Morgana. 25% lower cost when wielded by her Ice-Magic.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    The single Shuttle dealt comparable damage to the Multi-Shuttle but would take a lot less power to use because it was a single weapon and had even a special effect for it. I would use the new shuttle as a main-weapon and keep the Multi-Shuttles close, just in case I needed close-up defence. Creating a full Multi-Shuttle out of Hard Ice was tempting but simply impossible, I''d have to quadruple my current Astral Power or get some Human Resources for my Blood Magic. But the concentrated effort of creating it had pushed my Ice Rune-Mastery and Ice Magic to the next point which let me gain a new Ice-Rune.


    Before meditating on the new Ice-Rune, I wanted to do something else and for that I needed all my Astral Power back so I let myself sink into the meditation, letting it surge into me, relaxing in the cool flow of power, letting my mind roam and float in the flow. It was invigorating to feel the vastness of the Astral River close to my mind, but keeping me anchored to my body was taking a bit of a toll. I broke the meditation before the River could sweep me away.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Skill increased</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You increased your skill: Astral Meditation [22/100]</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    Soon, my power wasreplenished and I wanted to create something as a backup-option, for those moments when my Astral Power was gone and I had to rely on my physical body to stay alive. My idea was rather simple, I had a material that I felt was superior to simple Iron or Steel and I had quite a bit of training with Butterfly Blades, or Baat Jaam Do. I wouldn''t get any system-assist for a while, until my character-skill would catch up with my mental skill but I believed that I could keep myself alive without it, if need be. With the same process I had used for the Hardened Shuttle, I was now creating two short Blades, as similar as I could make them to those I had in reality. I managed to make them both at the same time, hoping to get a set, similar to my Frozen Multi-Shuttle and the result was quite impressive, if I do say so myself.


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


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="5"></td>


    <td colspan="5">Frozen Butterfly-Wings</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="5">Rarity</td>


    <td colspan="5">Rare</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="5">Type</td>


    <td colspan="5">Dual Blades</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="5">Base Damage</td>


    <td colspan="5">5 Damage Piercing</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="5">Base Damage</td>


    <td colspan="5">10 Damage Slashing</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="5">Strength Modifier</td>


    <td colspan="5">Low</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="3">Special Effect</td>


    <td colspan="7">Imbued - Due to the process used for the creation of this weapon, it is strongly in tune with the Ice-Magic of the Traveller Morgana. 25% lower cost when wielded by her Ice-Magic.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="3">Special Effect</td>


    <td colspan="7">Coordination. These Blades are a pair. If both are used at the same time, their damage increases.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="10">These Butterfly Blades, made out of Hardened Ice-Crystals form a breathtaking Set of Crystal Blades, created to be used in concert. The material used makes them hard but also brittle and vulnerable to heat.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    I might even use them in concert with my new Shuttle, using one of my thought processes for the Butterfly-Blades and the other for the Shuttle itself. But it would defeat the purpose of having a weapon close by, in case magic gets disrupted or my Astral Power runs dry.


    With that done, I took out one of the Ice-Runestones and let my mind concentrate on the feeling of eternal, frozen solitude. I was trying to steer my mind toward the concepts of eternity and the hardening of Ice again but doing so caused my head to ache so I chose to give up. My mind embraced the tranquil feeling and I calmed down swiftly and a rune started to condense. Torpor, the immobility caused by freezing cold and hibernation. It was a rune targeted more at the mind than the body but it would help quite a bit with what was commonly called Crowd Control.


    I came out of my meditation, opened my eyes and watched Sigmir for a change. She was done cleaning the pelts and was currently cleaning the sinews. Shortly after I had opened my eyes, she looked over and on seeing my eyes open, she smiled. ¡°Could you make me another of those pots? I need one for the tanning-process off those pelts.¡± she asked.


    I happily agreed and started to grind another bowl out of stone. It took maybe half an hour, then I had a nice, shallow bowl for her. I handed it over and she opened her pouches and took a small bag out of it that looked far too large to fit in. She went on and pulled a couple of tools out, now I was sure something strange was going on. ¡°What''s that?¡± I asked. ¡°Hm? You mean my Bag of Holding? It''s a rather common item, don''t you have one as well?¡± I guess my expression told the story better than a thousand words because she handed me the second belt-pouch and gestured to open it.


    I did so and before my mental eye, there was a space of roughly three feet cubed with various tools floating around in it. None was too large to go through the opening of the pouch so I guess that was the limitation.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Tutorial engaged</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>Congratulations. You were handed your first Bag of Holding. Small Bags of Holding are common, their limiting factor is the connection between the Holding-Pocket and the Real Space, the larger this connection, the harder it is to make. Higher Quality bags may come with features such as temporal Stasis, shelving or sorting features.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    Seeing my surprise, I guess Sigmir had sympathy with me and offered the bag to me, she had her second bag after all. I gladly accepted as we were in this together anyway due to the oaths we had sworn to each other. The opening was too small for weapons or even clothing but smaller items were easily held within.


    When I saw a couple of cups and spoons, I raised an eyebrow in question at Sigmir, causing her to blush. ¡°You were so proud the wood items you had made. I didn''t want to upstage you.¡± Her earnestness caused me to feel like a fool but somehow it was funny to me. I jumped up and started tickling Sigmir as punishment. She started to wiggle around, trying to keep me from tickling her, but not really trying to get away. Soon we both were flat on the floor, me on top of her. It was a nice position so I simply kissed her and cuddled in. ¡°What nice, comfy bedding you are, my dear. I could get used to this.¡± I whispered to her and kissed her again. This caused the blush that had been on her face the whole time to increase and her to nod shyly. ¡°Un, it feels good.¡±


    We continued to lie there, each in our own thoughts, interrupted by kisses every few minutes and enjoyed the closeness.


    Far too soon, she gave me one last kiss and got up, saying that she wanted to start with all the pelts today so we had nice sleeping furs for tomorrow. Somehow that sounded very good to me so I did not try to keep her. Instead I made myself a small stone bowl to experiment with the Shadeleaf. I ground it into a paste and added water. The water caused the shadows to vanish and the whole thing turned inert. I guess water was not the solution. I cleaned the bowl and tried again, this time not adding water but adding magically active blood, hoping to keep the magic in the blend.


    That worked better, I got Shadeleaf-Paste something that Inspect told me could be used to imbue other items in order for them to accept Darkness related runes. The whole thing also raised my Blood Magic quite a bit, I guess finding new ways to use one''s skill gives a lot of skill-experience. I asked Sigmir for a couple of sinew-threads which she handed to me without question and soaked them into the paste, planning to have them in there over night.


    If it worked like I hoped it would, I could use the threads to embroider runes onto our new clothes, maybe creating permanent enchantments that way or at least create runic formations in which I could pour Astral Power from a distance to create instant effects, similar to my use of magically created Icicles. I''d love to have a way to create something similar for Blood Runes in order to create something to heal or strengthen Sigmir from a distance. Currently I had not been able to create Healing-Magic outside of the Touch-Rune and I doubted that it would be different with the new Strengthen-Rune. I''d have to keep a lookout for something that might work, maybe some herb related to Blood or something similar.

 Chapter 24

    The next few days, Sigmir and I spent our days hunting and processing our spoils. Under Sigmir''s guidance, I became better at skinning and pre-processing the pelts. Most parts were still left to her though as she was quite simply a lot better than me. In addition, I found a few more Shadeleaves and we even found outcrop of limestone that we used to make quicklime replenishing the stock Sigmir had. Our nights were spent cuddling and I think both of us enjoyed the new sensation of closeness. I learned that Sigmir had spent most of her youth getting trained by her father and having little to no friends. Physical closeness had been rare and friendship even rarer. For me, it had been a long time since I had someone I could let go of everything and simply be. A small part of my mind told me that it was just a game but that small part was shouted down by the parts that wanted to enjoy something unique. Neither of us went further, I think Sigmir simply because she was unaware and I did not want to push anything. During our conversations I also realized that Sigmir was significantly younger than me.


    Once we had enough pelts and leather, Sigmir started to craft clothes out of them, using hardened leather for her own and soft, pliable leather for mine so I was not losing any mobility due to weight. Both of our armour was well-made with fur-trimmings, mainly out of the thick winter-fur of the Black Wolves that roamed the area. In addition, I got a new cloak made from their pelts, complete with a hood to protect me from the icy wind that sometimes howling through the countryside. I had managed to embroider both of our cloaks, giving them a concealment effect when the wearer was in the shadows. In addition, I had embroidered the hood of my cloak with multiple Darkness and Concealment runes causing my face to be fully hidden in shadows when donning the hood. It made for an awesome effect, like a villain from an old film.


    In addition, doing the embroidery had given me the enchantment-skill, letting me affix permanent, magic effects on items, using appropriate materials to create runes in the items.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="10">Black Fur Leather Jacket</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="5">Rarity</td>


    <td colspan="5">Common</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="5">Type</td>


    <td colspan="5">Light Upper-Body Armour</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="5">Base Protection</td>


    <td colspan="5">3 against Piercing Damage</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="5">Base Protection</td>


    <td colspan="5">5 against Slashing Damage</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="5">Base Protection</td>


    <td colspan="5">4 against Blunt Damage</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="10">A well made Leather Jacket, trimmed with Black Wolf-Fur and quite warm..</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="10">Black Leather Pants</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="5">Rarity</td>


    <td colspan="5">Common</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="5">Type</td>


    <td colspan="5">Light Lower-Body Armour</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="5">Base Protection</td>


    <td colspan="5">3 against Piercing Damage</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="5">Base Protection</td>


    <td colspan="5">5 against Slashing Damage</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="5">Base Protection</td>


    <td colspan="5">3 against Blunt Damage</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="10">A well made pair of Leather Pants.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="10">Black Fur Leather Boots</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="5">Rarity</td>


    <td colspan="5">Common</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="5">Type?</td>


    <td colspan="5">Light Boots</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="5">Base Protection</td>


    <td colspan="5">3 against Piercing Damage</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="5">Base Protection</td>


    <td colspan="5">5 against Slashing Damage</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="5">Base Protection</td>


    <td colspan="5">4 against Blunt Damage</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="10">A well made pair of Leather Boots, trimmed with Black Wolf-Fur.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="10">Black Fur Cloak of Concealment</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="5">Rarity</td>


    <td colspan="5">Uncommon</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="5">Type</td>


    <td colspan="5">Cloak</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="5">Base Protection</td>


    <td colspan="5">3 against Piercing Damage</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="5">Base Protection</td>


    <td colspan="5">5 against Slashing Damage</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="5">Base Protection</td>


    <td colspan="5">5 against Blunt Damage</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="5">Special Effect</td>


    <td colspan="5">Shadowmelt ¨C Gain concealment while in Darkness</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="10">A well made Black Leather Cloak, trimmed with Black Wolf-Fur and quite warm. It''s embroidered with Concealment-Enchantments.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    For Sigmir''s cloak, we got kinda lucky. During one of our hunts, we happened upon a huge, fat bear that was getting ready for it''s hibernation. Together we managed to overcome this fierce adversary and Sigmir was now wearing it''s pelt as a cape, complete with it''s head as a hood, giving her a fierce appearance, even without the huge Lok''nar that she carried around. The curse on her had faded easily enough but sadly, I was unable to do more than prevent the malediction of their shaman from doing more damage. It was a temporary measure but it was enough for now,


    Sigmir had managed to regain two of her lost levels since we met, bringing her to level 27, and I had reached level 31 as well.


    It was the evening, on the next day we planned gather some foodstuffs for the continuation of our journey and rest.


    Sigmir was stretching and doing light exercises with her Lok''nar, something she did every evening ever since we had time to rest after our flight. I normally liked watching her, the movements had a certain grace to them, like a large predator flexing it''s muscles. A couple of times, I had lightly sparred with her, winning her respect with my skills in Wing Chun, they translated quite well into the game. I had no System-Assist for them but as my body was virtually the same as in reality, only a little faster reflexes and a lot faster mind, I was able to use the forms to their maximum effect. Well, Sigmir was still a lot better, being trained since she could walk, having longer reach and being stronger but I surprised her a time or two using her own strength against her. After the second time, she adapted and made sure to never overbalance which kept me from using momentum against her taking my only shot at winning away from me. Then it became a game of keep away and sooner or later she caught me.


    The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.


    Today was a bit different, the winds outside were howling and the howls had a strange fascination for me. I walked to the entrance of our cave, looking out and it was as if something was calling to me from out there.


    I moved out into the storm, feeling it surround me and an enjoyment welled up from the depth of my soul. It was as if Mother Nature had called me to dance and I was waltzing with the raging Blizzard, dancing with the storm.


    My magical senses stretched as well and I felt a longing to go north, pulling me in a certain direction, the storm, the cold, they were beckoning me. I was attuning more and more with the storm, soon there wasn''t an elf dancing in the storm, I became the storm, dancing over the countryside and the storm was I; dancing in the snow.


    It was glorious, being the storm, howling through the trees, over the mountains but still, I managed to keep part of me as myself, not losing them to the howling storm. I don''t know how long I danced in the storm or how long the storm danced over the land, it was an eternal moment. When I got back to myself, I felt like I had just learned something, both about me and about the nature of my magic. With the storm leaving me, I felt something it had left behind, condensed into a rune. Interestingly it was no great concept like Blizzard, Hailstorm or something similar, it was a simple truth, the truth of Coldness. I could freeze, I could create Ice but just now, dancing with the storm, I had embraced the truth of Coldness, something so elemental to Ice-Magic that I had never thought about it before, thinking in scientific concepts of particle movement, crystal structures and so on, the storm had shown me the effect of its simple, biting cold on the world and it while it was physically the same, it felt different.


    I bowed deeply to my dance-partner and turned to walk back into the cave. When I got in, Sigmir looked at me a bit strangely ¡°Who did you dance with, it was beautiful?¡± I had to smile as it was a bit strange, telling someone you danced with the storm itself, but it was Sigmir. ¡°I danced with the storm itself, Mother Nature called me to dance and the storm was my partner.¡± seeing her look a bit sad, I just had to ask, ¡°Do you want to dance as well?¡± Surprisingly, she had a sudden smile, stepped closer to me and said ¡°I''d love to.¡± So we started to dance, it was a bit awkward due to the limited space in our cave and the thirty inches of height difference between us but it worked somehow. All of a sudden, the wind outside was howling louder than before, causing us to change our dancing to a small, shuffle, hugging each other close and enjoying the warmth of the other.


    After a while, I stepped out of her embrace and pulled her with me toward our sleeping furs. I felt a bit emboldened and started to pull off Sigmir''s clothing, something I had not done yet. After I had taken off her cloak, leathers and the underclothing she had fashioned out of her old clothing and pieces of mine, she was standing before me, naked like the day she''d been borne. I had seen it before, living in close proximity with her and she was an impressive looking women, her muscles were clearly defined but not bulging, giving her a sleek and deadly look. However, today was the first time I had taken off her clothing, not stolen looks, taken while she was changing. Part of me felt bad on comparison, knowing that I had neither her athletic, deadly grace nor a more classic, feminine beauty. I knew she had seen me as well but still, compared to Sigmir, I looked like a child. But no matter what, I wanted to do this and do it now.


    Luckily, if there was one thing we had in abundance, it was water, simply walk out, grab a bowl of snow and melt if over our always burning fire so we were both quite clean, having washed up after dinner. Now, there was only Sigmir before me, with a slight sheen of sweat from our dancing and her training before.


    I pushed her down, onto our furs and started to slowly strip of my clothing, swaying to the rhythm of the storm outside. It was interesting, with every bit of skin I revealed, Sigmir''s breathing started to get a bit faster and a blush crept up on her. Far too soon, the last bit of clothes were gone and I stood before her, in all my non-existent glory. She stretched out a hand, as if to caress me, I took it and started to kiss her hand. Sometimes, kissing, sometimes nibbling, sometimes sucking, I made my way from finger to finger and then started down her arm. When I started, I heard her breathing catch, then it started to speed up a bit and small moans signalled me that a spot was more sensitive than others. Kissing down her arm was interesting and soon I got to even more interesting places, nibbling on her shoulder, then over to her throat. Her breath hitched a bit when I did so, having my teeth on her throat was a gesture of trust and she did nothing to impede me, showing her trust in me.


    Her moans started to grow more frantic now so I brought a hand into play, caressing her sensitive ear on one side while kissing my way up her jaw on the other. Then I started kissing her mouth and moving my hand down her neck with feathery touches and strokes lower, down to her collarbone, all the while kissing her with ever increasing fervour. I skipped her breasts, stroking down to her sides, caressing them and then moving to her stomach, enjoying her hard muscles and then wandering upwards, enjoying her soft breasts, a cushion of velvet over the her steely muscles.


    By now, I could smell something I had smelled once before, shortly after I woke up in this very cave. I wanted to hear her so I stopped kissing her mouth, moving over to her ear nibbling on that while circling both breasts, each with a hand moving ever closer to the centre, teasing her her moans started to get louder and more urgent with every circle and when I started to kiss down the side of her neck they reached a fever pitch. I then kissed towards the front and my fingers started to caress her nipples, which by now were hard, little rocks, sitting proudly on her breasts. When I got to the throat, I, again, bit her but this time I also tweaked her nipples quite a bit. The result was a loud, keening sound breaking from her lips and her whole body went stiff and shortly after released the tension. Then she started babbling, telling me that she''d never felt anything like that before and how good she had felt.


    After a few moments, she wound down and I captured her lips again with mine, at the same time pulling the furs we used as blankets and our cloaks over us so we would have it nice and warm during the night. Then, I whispered into her ears, ¡°Sleep, my love.¡± With that, I cuddled into the strong embrace of this lovely, strong shield-maid.

 Chapter 25

    After a very comfortable night with Sigmir, it was time to greet a new day and ready ourself for our journey. During the storm last night, I had felt an attraction within the storm, pulling the forces of Ice and Snow to a point north of us. My personal guess was that the elemental nexus we were searching was in that direction but not knowing the distance or even if I was right was making that a bit iffy.


    In the morning, we were out, gathering foodstuff to continue our journey when something strange happened. A large, black raven flew down before me and started to caw. At the same time, I heard something in my head. ¡°Help me, help me, save my sister and I will be yours for a year and a day, help me!¡± It was an eerie feeling, as if the caws of the raven were translated to me in my mind.


    A quest appeared to shed light on the situation.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="2">Quest Alert!</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="2">Save the Raven''s Sister</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="1">Quest Difficulty</td>


    <td colspan="1">Hard</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="2">You were asked to rescue the Sister of a Raven.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="1">Quest Reward</td>


    <td colspan="1">The Raven becomes your bondedCompanion for a year and a day.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    ¡°Follow, follow¡± again, the raven cawed and his caws were translated into my mind. With those caws, the Raven took off, leaving Sigmir and me standing dumbfounded in the snow.


    I used observe on the raven and got:


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>


    Spirit Raven, Level 24


    </td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    ¡°Did you get that quest as well?¡± I asked Sigmir. She shook her head. ¡°Did that raven really just talk to us? I only heard legends... If it gave you a quest, we should follow.¡± she then said.


    With that we both took off, moving swiftly through the snow, taking that ground-eating clip we had adopted while fleeing her tribe, by now my Athletics-skill had gained a couple of points and I was able to keep up with Sigmir and her longer legs without running myself into the ground.


    Following the Raven was not always easy as it''s way took it over a few difficult spots so it had to circle in the air to wait for us but we managed. After maybe half an hour of running, the Raven flew down and we could see our goal.


    On a rocky hillside before us raged a battle. On one side were Black Wolves, similar to those we had hunted the last few days, on the other side were Wolves with pelts the colour of hoarfrost, a beautiful white-grey. Sadly, the hillside was filled with corpses, both black and grey. I felt a strong melancholy about the blood, staining the grey pelts, a sadness about the destruction of beauty, morose about their fate. And the battle was nearly over, few grey wolves remained, soon and they were driven into a corner, back against the rocks that made an escape impossible for them.


    The raven landed on my shoulder, cawing again. ¡°Save her, save her.¡± this time, I felt which wolf was ''her'' it was one of the larger remaining grey wolves. Saving her would be impossible but I had one thing I could try.


    ¡°Cover me!¡± I told Sigmir and my mind went back to last night. No, not to the time with Sigmir between the furs but before, the time that I''d been the storm. Right now, I had to become the storm, I had to call the storm and guide it or I would not be able to save the grey wolves.


    My mind activated the Overflow-Ability and my hand started moving on its own, drawing runes I knew intimately into the air. It would take seven runes to call the storm and it would take all my Ice-Magic to guide it as I didn''t want to simply lay waste to the hillside, I wanted to save the grey wolves. Luckily, all of them were towards the higher ground, making the guiding and targeting quite a bit easier. Ice ¨C Hail ¨C Cold ¨C Mist ¨C Hail ¨C Hard Ice ¨C Cold were the runes my mind had drawn to call the storm. A large, Rune-Heptagon was in front of me, it floated silently in the air, taking the power I was channelling into it and then it flashed, discharging what I had put into it and high in the air, maybe a few hundred feet up, a large Heptagon formed, connected to the one in front of me.


    And then came the storm. At first, it was just a cloud, billowing out of the Heptagon but then the cloud burst and large and small Icicles hailed down onto the wolves. Some were large enough to be called Ice Spears, others were just the size of rice-grains. But there were a lot of them. I was unable to truly aim them, having to focus on making sure they were not striking the grey wolves, but if you have walked in the rain and tried to dodge the drops in order to prevent getting wet, well, it''s impossible.


    The assault caused quite a few of the black wolves to turn, charging towards us but as they closed in on us, they started to falter and gave Sigmir time to deal with them. She stood her ground, protecting me with both her body and her Lok''nar, making sure I was able to cast my magic without interruption.


    This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.


    While I was casting, I felt some tugs on the falling ice, redirecting it. I didn''t fight it and every time the tugging redirected one of the icicles, it struck true on one of the Black Wolves.


    The falling ice cleaned the hillside in a hurry, killing off a lot of Black Wolves in the process until only those too close to the grey wolves and those that attacked Sigmir remained. It drained all my Astral Power with it, though, so I was soon forced to end the Rune Formation to keep what little power remained to make sure that the rest of the spell did not kill Grey Wolves. Within moments, the Heptagon over the hillside dispersed and a few icicles fell but I was able to guide them into Black Wolves. Then my spell was over and I pulled my Frozen Butterfly-Wings out and moved to support Sigmir. Together, we stood our ground, me behind her, guarding her back and from time to time using the regenerated Astral Power to use my Hardened Shuttle, creating openings that either Sigmir or I could exploit. It took a bit of time, but the Black Wolves realized that we were not falling and their numbers were dwindling. A large, Black Wolf, further back, howled and all of them turned and started to flee. Still, we had been successful and saved the remaining Grey Wolves.


    With the Black Wolves on the run, the Raven, that had circled in the air above us was flying down and landed on my shoulder.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>You have been part of a Battle. As you were not part of either of the groups struggling, your EXP-Cut is greatly reduced. You gained 14 153 EXP</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Skill increased</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You increased your skill: Ice Rune-Mastery [41/100]</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Skill increased</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You increased your skill: Ice Magic [44/100]</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Skill gained</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You gained the Skill: Dual Blade-Mastery</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>Most fighters prefer the use of Two-Handed Weapons or use a Shield. Some prefer the use two Blades, allowing for a high-paced offensive Fighting-Style. The required Agility makes it virtually unusable while wearing Armour or in a Battle-Line.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Quest Completed</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You completed the Quest: Save the Raven''s Sister</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You gained: 15 000 EXP</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>


    You reached level 32.


    </td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    The Raven cawed again, ¡°Thank you, you saved her! I, [Wind that lifts your wings to soar] will serve as your Spirit Companion as I promised.¡± The name the Raven introduced itself with was not so much a name that could be translated into something that would be a name to me as it was a specific feeling wind and without wings, languages had no need for words for that. Still, it was an interesting thought-concept that got transmitted.


    Then another screen appeared.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="2">You are offered a Spirit Bond</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="2">A level 24 Spirit-Raven, of Hugin''s line, has offered to serve as your Spirit Beast for a year and a day. Unless you have a class or traits to allow you more Spirit Beasts, you can only have one. Accept?</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="1">Yes</td>


    <td colspan="1">No</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    I accepted and gained multiple abilities.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Companion gained</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You entered a Spirit-Bond. Your bonded Spirit Beast can rest within a Hallow, created in your body, giving you access to some abilities or it can stay in it''s separate form. Some abilities are active all the time. As you and your Companion grow, more abilities will become available. You can also communicate with your Companion using telepathy.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Companion Ability gained</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You gained the Companion Ability: Universal Understanding</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>This ability of the line of Hugin allows you to understand and speak any language as long as your Companion is bonded with you.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Companion Ability gained</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You gained the Companion Ability: Raven''s Eye</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>While your Companion is outside it''s Hallow and not too far away from you, you can look at the world through it''s eye and cast spells from your companion''s position, The flow of Astral Power through your companion will however take a toll.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Companion Ability gained</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You gained the Companion Ability: Raven''s Thought</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>While your Companion rests in it''s Hallow, you gain its connection to the Astral, increasing your Astral Power-Regeneration.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    The raven started to flap it''s wings and flew off, heading towards the hillside and the wolves. Sigmir and I followed over, interested in the circumstances we had just stumbled in.


    When we reached there, the raven had landed next to the wolf it had asked us to save and the wolf was curling around the raven, so it was obvious they were glad to be with each other.

 Chapter 26

    As Sigmir and I came closer to the remaining Grey Wolves, the largest Grey Wolf jumped onto a rock and a loud growl sounded. It got translated into my mind, ¡°So, what is that cursed raven doing here? Why are you so close to her, pup?¡±


    The raven jumped back and flapped it''s wings a bit and the wolf cowered down, not crouched as if to jump but cowering with it''s tail between it''s legs. The smaller wolf growled ¡°She''s my friend. And she got others to help us, Alpha.¡± The large wolf looked over to Sigmir and me.


    ¡°How can one of Hugin''s line be a friend? Those two... they small strange. Why do you smell of the great wolf?¡±


    I wasn''t about to use Observe on the Alpha so I used it on the smaller wolf, the one we were supposed to save.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>


    Frost Wolf, level 33


    </td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


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    The smaller wolf turned for a moment to look at me, then turned back to the Alpha. I thought for a moment how to talk but then decided simply to talk normally and keep the idea in my mind to have them understand me.


    ¡°We helped you because [Wind that lifts your wings to soar] gave a promise. I don''t know about our smell.¡± The smaller wolf growled again ¡°Alpha, my friend saved us. Why do you hate her so?¡±


    The Alpha barked out a reply: ¡°Old One-Eye created the mess we are in. We were the proud Fenris-Wolves but now? The bond is broken and Old One-Eye and his damned ravens are at fault. I''ll be thrice damned if I let anyone call them friend. Now, choose, the pack or your so-called ''Friend''!¡±


    I was appalled, I had always thought of wolves as loyal beings but here one was cast-out due to simple racial prejudice. The Raven started to caw: ¡°Go with them, Sister. I''ll have to go with the two-legs anyway. I gave my bond, to save you.¡±


    At that the smaller wolf whirled around and stared at me and growled ¡°You gave your bond?! Why, why would you do that?¡±


    The raven flew over to me and cawed again ¡°To save you. A year and a day of my life is a small cost for your life.¡±


    At that, the smaller wolf stood and walked over to us. I could see a bleeding wound on her flank, so when she was in front of me, I went to a knee and asked, ¡°Do I have your permission to heal you?¡± not wanting to provoke an attack by casting spells without warning.


    The wolf looked me in the eyes and there was understanding in them, if nothing else, this convinced me that they were truly sapient creatures.


    She growled ¡°Do what you will.¡± I drew my healing spell over her wound and watched it close within moments. There was a low sound, similar to a cough, coming from her throat but I was unable to place it. Then the wolf walked around me, snuffling all the way. ¡°You smell of old blood. It''s strange to feel kinship with a two-legs.¡±


    I think at that point the patience of the Alpha-Wolf had finally run out as it barked to it''s pack ¡°Frost Wolves, let''s leave. Leave the traitor to her fate.¡± then it jumped off it''s rock and ran off, followed by the rest of it''s pack. I saw the wolf in front of me shiver, knowing that she was no longer welcome but the bond to her pack was still strong.


    You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.


    ¡°You are welcome to stay with us. It''s not a pack, but at least you won''t be alone.¡±


    At that, she knocked me over on my ass, walked over to Sigmir and sniffed her out as well.


    ¡°You are the protector of the pack, are you not?¡± she growled and I translated for Sigmir as she was unable to understand her, it seems.


    She answered ¡°I will protect Morgana. No matter what.¡± hearing the conviction in her voice gave me a warm, fuzzy feeling, deep inside. The wolf growled again, saying ¡°Good. I will join you in guarding our pack.¡±


    Sigmir seemed a bit surprised but said ¡°Yes, I will take you as my companion. We will protect both of them.¡± There was a small flash of light around the two of them, I guess they entered into a bond as well.


    I looked at the raven who''d bonded with me, trying to use that telepathic connection.


    ¡°Say, could we give you a name that is usable as a word, not a concept like your current name? I''d prefer to have something that I can call you.¡± the raven looked at me, turning her head sideways, then I got an answer over the same telepathic connection.


    ¡°Well, sure. I think I understand your meaning, it''s a matter of the mind, is it not? Could you choose a name for me, it''s normal for the name to be chosen by others, right?¡±


    I tried to keep the connection going so that she could understand my thoughts on the names and considered names for a girl-raven. My mind shied away from normal bird-names, there was no way in hell I''d suggest Polly as a name for this majestic creature. My mind went to the classic Poe-Poem, The Raven, not to the rather obvious Nevermore but to the lost love of the Poet, the maiden Lenore. I looked at the raven and it appeared she thought about my idea, then, as if to accept, she cawed ¡°Nevermore¡± then cackled like mad. ¡°Yes, I like the name Lenore, I''d enjoy if you called me that. Would you mind if I rest in my Hallow for a while? It took quite a bit of power to communicate with you before we were bonded.¡±


    I nodded, curious to the way Lenore would rest. She jumped towards me, sat on my left shoulder and pressed her head to my temple while spreading her wings out over both my shoulders. Then I felt a burning sensation at my left temple and eye and for a short moment, my eyesight turned blurry, causing me to blink and realise that only the left eye was afflicted, and as sudden as it came, my view turned back to normal.


    Suddenly, I heard a voice in my head, the voice of Lenore. ¡°Yes, this will work as a Hallow. You are a good partner, it only took you moments to adapt. Old One-Eye was a stubborn fool and never adapted so he lost his eyesight.¡±


    Then again her cackling laughter. ¡°Oh, and what a wonderfully tidy mind you have, it''s so organized. I will like it with you, yes, I will.¡±


    Curious if there had been other changes, I took my Shuttle to use as a mirror and saw that my left eye was a clearly darker green then before. Around my eye, stretching to my temple was a black wing, looking like a tattoo but I knew that it was part of the outside mark of my companion, resting within the Hallow as she called it.


    I looked over to the wolf and Sigmir who seemed to have taken to each other. Walking over, I asked both of them.


    ¡°Looks like you two will be good friends. Say, is there a name I can call you? [Wind that lifts your wings to soar] accepted to use the name Lenore for those who don''t have the mind of a raven.¡±


    Both looked at me and the wolf growled, ¡°No, there is only [the smell of fresh fallen snow] but I doubt that it would work for the two of you. Your noses are too lacking.¡± then a chuffing noise that I identified as laughter. Then she continued ¡°Let me guess, the raven asked you for a name, did she not? She was never very creative. I should ask my Bond-Partner, I don¡¯t want to slight her. So, Sigmir, would you like to give me a name?¡±


    Sigmir thought for a moment, then asked ¡°Do you like the name Ylva? I think it''s a good name.¡±


    ¡°Yes, that''s a good name. I like it. I am Ylva.¡± the wolf answered


    With that taken care of, I was curious. ¡°So, Ylva, mind telling me why your Alpha felt such hatred for Lenore?¡± I asked.


    ¡°No, I don''t mind. You heard him call her ''Of Hugin''s line'', didn''t you? Well, Lenore is one of the many descendants of Hugin, one of the two great Ravens forced to serve Odin.


    My pack descended from Fenris, the Great Wolf. When the foolish gods shattered the anchors that held the realms together in their idiotic war, we were diminished. Our strength and our magic was lost and Fenris himself was gone from this world. Over time, the Black Wolves started pressing into our territory and we lost quite a few wolves. The Alpha holds every being related to the Aesir responsible, even those who were forced to serve. However, when I was younger, Lenore helped me and we became friends. And now, after she gave her bond to you, in order to help me, we are family. But enough of old stories. We should depart, I would not want to be here when scavengers appear, or worse, the Black Wolves come back. They got hurt today but there are far too many of them.¡±


    With that, we walked off, back towards the cave Sigmir and I inhabited. The food we had gathered earlier would have to be enough.

 Chapter 27

    During my nightly log-out, after meeting and bonding with Ylva and Lenore, I remembered to check on my post about the highlight-reel, maybe my flame-bait had caused a fire. The reactions ranged far and wide, few were rational and some were hilarious. One guy accused me of cheating due to the way I used spells, a lot called me an attention-whore for coming forward, others said I was just a paid plant to promote the game and my separation from Amaranthine was because of it, and so on. Yes, there was negative backlash.


    On the positive side, about a hundred wanted me in their guild, tons wanted me to help them, some promised real-world cash if I helped them, a few wanted to buy my account, an impossibility as far as I knew, it was bedlam. Mission accomplished!


    The next day, all four of us started our journey north. During breakfast, I had talked with both of them and they had heard of the Druid grove we were searching and had an rough idea how to get there.


    We set off as soon as the false dawn gave us enough light to navigate by, and I was surprised that Sigmir seemed to take the cold much better than before. I asked her and she told me that the Companion-Bond with Ylva had given her an ability named Wolf''s Pelt, giving her increased Cold Resistance, no matter if Ylva was within her Hallow or not.


    I got curious and asked what other abilities she had gained. She smiled and explained that it was considered impolite to ask something like that, similar to using Observe on others. Then she told me the skills she gained. While Ylva was in her Hallow, she gained access to the better senses of a wolf, letting her hear and smell a lot better if she wished to. While Ylva was outside, Sigmir was able to instinctively react to dangers Ylva could perceive, giving the two of them an awesome connection to guard each others backs.


    A small part of me was jealous, guarding Sigmir''s back yesterday had been interesting and once more, Sigmir had shown that she trusted me, Ruthless Trait or not. But once more, my rational side told me to be happy that we had gained two dependable companions that travelled with us. I had a feeling that both would be loyal to the end, if Sigmir and I proved worthy of their loyalty.


    While we were walking, Lenore said she wanted to go out a bit and suddenly my left eye turned blurry for a moment, then Lenore was sitting on my shoulder.


    Then, she jumped off and flew off, into the sky. I tried out the Raven''s Eye ability and the sight of my left eye was replaced with what had to be Lenore''s eye. It was interesting but a little disorientating but when I took Sigmir''s arm to guide me and closed my right eye, it was an awesome sight, looking at the world from above.


    Far too soon, Lenore left the range and my view returned to normal, I guess the distance I could currently use Raven''s Eye at, was about a hundred feet making it useful but not too powerful.


    We were walking along, Ylva sniffing around when suddenly a large, Black Wolf jumped out and growled. ¡°We got you now, bitch. You will make fine breeding, giving us pups that can survive the northern cold.¡± Ylva jumped back to Sigmir and me, while I called Lenore back down to us. ¡°Watch out, there are four more on the sides and two behind you.¡± Lenore told me in my mind. I used Raven''s Eye again and saw the wolves in their hiding places.


    At the same time, Sigmir readied her Lok''nar and Ylva stood next to her, growling in intimidation. I started to cast Ice Bolts trying to hit the wolves in the brush, aiming at the locations I had seen from Lenore''s view and managed to hit one of them. The yelp of the hit wolf caused the rest of them to jump forward, attacking us. I used a new strengthen Spell on Sigmir, then the wolves were onto us and standing to cast would make it almost inevitable that I''d get my throat ripped out. So I used my Ice Magic, letting my Shuttle harass the wolves while observing them. They were Black Wolves, levelled between 30 and 35, with the large wolf that came out first being the strongest.


    The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.


    My other mental process readied my Butterfly-Wings to fight physically, keeping Sigmir''s back safe. The fact that we had not spotted the wolves made our normal tactic of me standing back, slinging spells and Sigmir holding them off impossible, we were surrounded from the start, after all. But still, it felt good to move with Sigmir and Ylva - it was almost like dancing, moving in concert with them so that we covered each others back at all times.


    However, there are no guarantees when fighting and one of the Black Wolves managed to get a grip on Ylva''s front leg. Sigmir struck at it and forced it to let go, but not before breaking the leg. We had wounded all of the wolves at this point, but they were still going strong. ¡°Down and heal her!¡± Sigmir shouted out. I dove towards the downed Ylva while Sigmir took her Lok''nar at the very end, right next to one of it''s blades and started a spinning strike, forcing all the wolves to jump back.


    That gave me the time to use my healing magic on Ylva, but it would take a moment to get her back on her feet. To give her that time, Sigmir and I stood back to back over her, fighting off the wolves, taking light wounds but it was enough. The wolves started to tire and made mistakes, mistakes we all exploited with relish. After two of the wolves went down, the largest of them started to run.


    I used telepathy to tell Lenore to follow it, keeping out of sight and used Raven''s Eye to gain her point of view. At the same time, I went between Ylva and Sigmir, trusting the two of them and my shuttle to keep me safe while casting a spell of cold, combining two Cold-Runes and one Freezing-Rune, creating a beam of pure, unadulterated Cold. When it was complete, I focused on my connection with Lenore, and heard a loud caw in the air above us. I looked up and my left eye saw a Triangle flash into existence in front of Lenore''s beak, before turning into the Frost-Beam. My right eye showed it from the ground, the flying raven, the flashing triangle and the beam, it looked as if Lenore was spitting the beam from her beak, like a dragon. The advantage of having Lenore as point of origin for my spell showed instantly, her higher vantage let me strike the fleeing wolf without being hindered by terrain as it had taken great care to have something between us and itself.


    My Frost-Beam struck true, causing the wolf to stumble and fall, giving me time to cast a second, more complicated, spell using torpor and cold-runes to send it into a deep sleep so we could deal with it later.


    I thanked Lenore, ended the Raven''s Eye and fully focused on the combat around my physical body, bursting forth in a flurry of strikes, combining both of my blades and the shuttle to create a truly unending stream of attacks, swiftly dispatching one of the remaining wolves. By now, Sigmir and Ylva had also taken two down, so only one was active and remaining. It saw the writing on the wall but did not try to run, it took it''s death with dignity as Ylva ripped out it''s throat.


    We gained some EXP, enough for Lenore to raise in level but not enough for any of us others. I gained a few points in Dual Blade-Mastery, the system acknowledging the fact that I indeed was able to use weapons I had mastered in the real world.


    ¡°We have one more left, maybe it will give us answers.¡± Together, we all walked over. Lenore flew down to me, mentally complaining about the toll even a small spell had taken on her and re-entered the Hallow within me. This time, I only had to blink once for my vision to return to normal and as soon as she was with me again, I felt my connection to the Astral strengthen a bit, as more Astral Power flowed into me, replenishing my reserves. On the other hand I felt her weakness, casting more than single, simple spells through her, might kill her.


    As we walked, I cast healing magic on both Ylva and Sigmir one after the other, channelling my power to provide a gentler, less taxing healing. Using the Blood-Runes to heal without channelling was not gentle on the body, I always had to be careful that the body had enough strength left to process the jolt it took when the magic flooded into it, else I might kill someone I was trying to heal. Channelling lessened the problem, reducing the jolt but it was not perfect - I guess I needed to learn more about the Blood-Runes, or there might be other runes to help with healing, maybe in areas like Life, Nature or something similar.


    Theoretical Magic-Knowledge had yet to be posted anywhere on the web, I had checked. Well, maybe I''d learn about it at some time, it was incredibly interesting to discover new runes and craft spells with them, only limited by the rough guideline of the runes and my imagination. I had discovered, the closer my intent was to the meaning of a rune, the more power I got out of the Astral Power-Expenditure. If my intent was only related to the periphery of a rune, the effect I got out of it was greatly reduced.


    My musing ended when we reached the sedated wolf. At first, I used ice to bind it, making sure that it could not move. Then I carefully channelled healing into it, first taking care of the wounds, then waking it up. Interrogating it was a bit hard, as the wolf was ranting madly, telling us that Geri and Freki would rip us apart, even torture only caused its mad rant to rise in fervour, cursing us all.


    After some time, I had enough and made a small, almost insignificant cut into it''s hide. Then I took out a small bottle I had found in Sigmir''s Bag of Holding, cleaned and appropriated. I used a Formation of Blood-Runes and my Blood Magic to rip the Astral from it''s body, giving me a small amount of magically active blood which I stored in the bottle. It wasn''t a perfect solution, I''d much prefer some kind of solid item but the tar-like substance was the best I could do at the moment. Draining the wolf also gave me a point in Blood Magic, bringing it up to fourteen, there were simply not enough human resources out here.


    We skinned the pelts off our attackers and went on, cursing the fact that it had taken precious daylight to deal with the wolves.

 Interlude: Highlight Reel, Week two

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    The second week of the Road to Purgatory-Beta is over. Let''s look at the highlights.


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    An endless, blue sky, dotted with cirrus-clouds and the sun just creeping over the eastern horizon.


    The rolling green fields, stretching in the distance, yet untouched by violence.


    On a small hill is an encampment, small tents surrounding a larger, decorated tent in the middle, just stirring with activity. Out of the central tent comes a tall man, clad in an ornate chain-mail hauberk, wearing a sabre at his side and his helm in his hands. A horn calls for the men to assemble.


    The view focuses on theleader as he speaks to address his man.


    ¡°Soldiers of Highever, today is the day to become heroes. The Duke of Baretonian has unleashed the dogs of war, his soldiers razed the peaceful hamlets on our borders, just to send a message. No man will stand for his cruel deeds. We will stop him. Just hold the line until the end and we will give them hell! For our people! For Honour! To VICTORY!¡±


    The crowd cheers and the camera pans to one of the soldiers who''s cheering with his comrades, banging his speer against his shield. The soldiers are clad in simple chain-mail and on their shields and tabards is the coat of arms of Highever, a white castle on grey hill, surrounded by a field of green. About half of the soldiers are equipped with a long spear and a shield plus a short sword, a quarter with one-handed swords and a shield and the rest are carrying bows.


    When the sergeant orders it, the soldiers move out, the camera follows the soldiers seen before, marching in order until they reach a flat spot with a gentle slope at their right side. Just as they reach it, another group of soldiers comes into view, those wearing the coat of arms of Baretonian, a golden lion on a red field.


    The sergeant shouts out orders, bringing the previously stretched out lines into something resembling a battle-formation, archers up front, with the spears right behind them, with open lanes so the archers can swiftly move behind them shortly before the enemies charge. The sword-wielder are concentrated at the left flank.


    The other group seems larger and they have a couple of man on horseback.


    ¡°Ready bows!¡±


    ¡°Aim!¡±


    ¡°Fire!¡±


    With the shouted orders of the archery-sergeant, a volley is loosened, raining death onto the soldiers of the Duke of Baretonian. Twice more, a volley is loosened, then the archers are ordered to take cover for the enemies cavalry has lined up and is charging.


    The lines close and on the order ¡°Set spears!¡± the line transforms into a hedgehog of spears as the front-line goes to a knee, setting the butt of their spears into the ground and the men behind them stabilize their spears on the shields of the soldier in front of them, while covering them against arrows with their own shield.


    Then, it''s time for the showdown, the sergeant of Highever shouts for his men to hold, the leader of the Baretonian cavalry whips them into their charge, with their infantry hot on their heels, thirsting for battle, thirsting for glory and their share of the spoils of victory. The smaller army seems easy prey, ripe for the picking.


    The camera pans out, up the slope on the right side, looking back at the field. Down on the field, one can see the impact of the charge, the complete line looks to be pushed back but the line holds and moments later, the sound of the collision reaches up the hill, sounding like distant thunder.


    Then the camera reaches the crest of the slope and soldiers on horseback come into view, centred on the leader, now wearing his helmet and sabre in hand.


    ¡°They held the line. Now it is on us, to close the deal. Charge!¡±


    With that, the riders start down the slope, quickly reaching an insane pace. Down on the field of battle, an observer sees the cavalry and reports to hissergeant who orders the swordsmen to advance on the left flank, playing the anvil to the cavalry charge coming down the hill.


    This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.


    Again, an ear-splitting crash thunders across the landscape when the charge barrels into the chaotic melee that had broken out. The camera rapidly moves through the battle, not giving the viewer enough time to focus on the gory details of soldiers dying.


    Then a short cut. The camera pans from above, showing the sun almost setting and the previously green field has turned into a bog of mud and blood. The soldier seen in the beginning starts to check for wounded on both sides, until he gets to one downed Baretonian. All of a sudden, the downed man comes to life, turning on his would-be helper. The camera looks over the shoulder of the Highever-Soldier and follows his vision as he looks down, to see the handle of a dagger stick out of his belly. Then he falls on his back, the camera pans to the sky and turns black.


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    Darkness


    A moonless, windy, killing night.


    A few Valkyries clad in plate-armour march in formation, guarding two Valkyries wearing white cloth with a golden tree on it. The armoured knights are equipped with sword and shield and have a sword embossed on their shields and their chest plates. The leader of the armoured knights stops and addresses the priests.


    ¡°We are almost there. Be cautious, we cannot let you come to harm. Be calm, for the Paladins of Tyr watch over you. Now, let the light of the gods guide our way.¡±


    With that, his men put out their torches and each grabs a small sword-medallion, similar to the symbol they are wearing. Each speaks a short moment under their breath and then their swords start to glow in a golden light, driving away the darkness around them.


    Both the priests smile. ¡°We trust in you, Paladin, as we trust in our lord Odin. We have to sanctify this place so the dead can rest in peace again.¡±


    The paladins spread their formation, creating a wedge-shape to guard the priests as they move deeper into the graveyard. The golden light creates strange, shifting shadows due to the multitude of light-sources.


    As they reach the centre of the graveyard, the first zombie appears but is swiftly dispatched by the Paladins. ¡°Damnation, the dead are already restless. We need to hurry.¡± curses the leader of the Paladins.


    With that, the two priests take out small spears from their bags of holding, placing them in a circle and then taking position in the middle. The Paladins take guard-positions around the circle and both priests start chanting, singing praises to the Gods and Odin, pleading them to grant them the boon of sanctuary, blessing the ground so the dead can rest in peace.


    While the priests do that, more and more zombies appear, pushing the Paladins back until they are standing with their backs to the spear-circle. Then, a light from up high pierces the darkness, striking the circle and the Paladins start to glow with golden light, moving faster and their strikes cleave the undead with ease. After a short time, the light from up high vanishes but the circle continues to shine for a moment, then the glow spreads and seeps into the ground.


    As the light spreads, the zombies melt away, like snow in the morning sun. The leader of the Paladins is seen smiling to the two exhausted priests, then the scene fades into white light.


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    An overcast sky, tinged in grey.


    A large group of grey wolves runs through the snow with another group of wolves, those with black fur hot on their tails. Literally. Soon, the greys reach a rocky hillside with patches of snow everywhere and flee up the hill. The other side however is too steep to get down safely, forcing them to make their stand.


    They spread guarding each other and a wild melee breaks out. Growls, barks and yowls are heard all over the hillside.


    Suddenly, the camera pans out, down the hill, through a small valley and up the other side. Up there, two beings are seen. One giantess, clad in a bears pelt carrying a huge weapon. The other, smaller, figure is clad in a black fur-cloak with the hood down and has one hand raised, drawing symbols into the air. Then, a beautiful face is visible, slightly blue skin, glowing blue eyes and raven-black hair. After a moment, the seven drawn symbols are connected by a blue Heptagon and then it flashes. The camera takes flight, rising into the air, showing the scene from up high and then a huge heptagon materialises high up in the sky, above the hill-side. At first, only clouds billow from the heptagon, then it looks like hail, only instead of the normal small grains, what hails down are icicles some as large as an arm.


    The camera pans down, onto the grey wolves that see the icicles strike into their enemies and their growls get louder, their attacks stronger, they feel hope. The hillside is already dotted with dead wolves, both grey and black but maybe they will get off this hill.


    The black wolves on the other hand, they retreat out of the brutal hail, some try to get to the outsider that had attacked them without cause but when they get closer, they feel fear. There is no way that they can stand against such a monster. Still, they try but they are battered aside by a giantess with a huge axe. Then the hail stops but far too late for most of the black wolves. The smaller being joins the giantess against the black wolves and the feel hope for a short time. Then they hear the howl of their leader, calling the retreat.


    The giantess and the smaller, blue-skinned person take each others hand and make their way towards the grey wolves. Then the screen fades out


    A large banner appears.


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    They say that the Road to Purgatory is paved with good intentions. Find out for yourself.


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    Join us, on the Road to Purgatory!

 Chapter 28

    Our journey to the Nexus-Village continued, at first the endless forest out of large pines and firs turned sparse, the distance between the trees growing and the trees itself getting smaller. As we got further north, even those trees yielded to the unforgiving, harsh wind and only shrubs remained. One day, both Ylva and I remarked that we were able to feel the Nexus quite clearly, and when turning our discussion to the subject, I learned that Ylva had rudimentary skills in Ice-Magic inherited from Fenris lineage but not enough to do more than slightly manipulate Ice. I guess now I knew who had helped during the battle in which we had saved her. All of the Frostwolves had those skills to some extent, and I had given them more than enough ice with kinetic energy to use against their enemies. I had wondered why the wolves had fallen that easy.


    Both of us were certain of the direction, until one day, the horizon gave way to an endless expanse of grey, frothing waves. We walked on, and soon we reached a small brim, ending the shrubbery and falling for a ways and then ending in the ocean. We were quite literally at the end of the world.


    Still, the Nexus was further north so we asked Lenore to come out for a bit. The bird had mostly stayed within her Hallow, avoiding the cold, only coming out when we had a fire going and then sharing Ylva''s warmth. After Lenore emerged, she took off, soaring on the wind, climbing into the slightly cloudy sky. Then, a few minutes later, she was diving like a hawk onto a mouse and landing in my arms. I felt her shivering and knew that she was truly not made for this climate, so I immediately welcomed her back into the Hallow, only then asking what she had seen.


    Like that, we knew the score - we were standing at a fjord, and across the water was more land, reaching out into the ocean. We turned south, moving along the shore but soon we decided that it was not worth it, walking in the endless, icy wind blowing in from the ocean so we moved a bit back, using every wind-shelter we could find. One good point about the cold was that we could simply walk over the streams we had to cross, they had a solid covering of ice, giving us a nice, even surface to walk on. It took us two days to walk to the end of the fjord and that is with the super-human endurance we had and travelling until long after dark, using our cold-resistance to the maximum. On one day, even Ylva decided to seek shelter within her Hallow, leaving only Sigmir and me out in the cold. Ylva''s Hallow was located within the right hand and arm of Sigmir, causing silvery fur to appear on her hand. I don''t know why but it looked good on her light-blue skin.


    During my nightly Log-Out, I was having dinner while watching GNN. I was surprised when I saw that they¡¯d put on a Beta-Feature for Road to Purgatory and even more so, when I realised that I was featured in it. Well, the Highlight-Reel and I was featured in both of them. The first, they called Individual Bravery, highlighting the trials of single Characters, I felt a bit strange about that, it had featured a group-battle-scene after all. The second, they called Clash of Armies, a bit pompous but hey, if it sells, who am I to criticize.


    Something of note was that during the second Highlight-Reel my eyes were glowing blue, not the usual green they should be. That tidbit probably made them think they were seeing two different characters, one dark, creepy green-eyed monster, slaughtering innocents and one beautiful, blue-eyed Sorceress, protecting the underdog, or underwolf, with her alongside the proud Shield-Maiden.


    Still, I¡¯d have to ask Sigmir or maybe Lenore about my strange eye-colour, after all Lenore was living in my eye now. One might call her the Raven of my Eye.


    What really got me laughing was the news lady happily joining in the online-craze I had caused, speculating with the best of them if I was a plant, that Pantheon had offered me lots of money to switch games, damaging the brand of their competition, even going so far to suggest that the rest of the old Team Amaranthine was in on it and they had thrown their games on purpose to increase the effect. Maybe it was good that they hadn¡¯t connected the two appearances or they would go truly crazy. Just imagining it, forced me to stop eating, because I was laughing so hard. Conspiracy-Theories have a way of making me laugh.


    The idea that anything truly big could be hidden felt like a joke to me, who had dug into other people¡¯s finances to uncover their secrets. Well, at least it had paid the bills, my gaming career had been successful but the real money had been in advertisement deals which I¡¯d never taken, so I¡¯d needed a job that I could do on my own schedule to pay the bills.


    I was still laughing when the programming switched to an announcement by Pantheon for their Beta-Schedule, their plans were for a one-year Beta with new players joining each month, the first month had only 10 000 players, each subsequent month had more, until they wanted to stress-test with a million new players the last month before release. It sounded to me as if they wanted to combine testing and advertisement quite heavily or maybe they just wanted to make sure that there were no negative consequences, there had to have been a waiver somewhere in the NDA, I was sure of that. Not that I¡¯d read it, I was one of the millions that told the lie most often told. ¡°I¡¯ve read and accepted the Terms and Conditions.¡±


    Before we broke camp back ingame, I investigated what was going on with my eyes by myself. Each morning, I washed myself shortly and today, I used a sheet of Ice as a mirror. I was unable to make out a lot of details but it was quite clear that my eyes were green, even if the one with Lenore was darker than the other. Thinking back, I remembered using Overflow so I did and my eyes shone from within but not with any colour. Then I tried to use a simple Ice Rune-Spell and for a short moment, my eyes were glowing like they did in the video. Trying Darkness and Blood-Runes showed me that Darkness gave my eyes an eerie, black glow, similar to my Dark Radiance spells and Blood-Runes had a pulsing, red glow. After my self-inspection, we ate breakfast and broke camp for another exciting day of hiking.


    If you come across this story on Amazon, it''s taken without permission from the author. Report it.


    I was quite surprised when we reached the end of the fjord; nestled in the mouth of a river was a small village, built into the coastline, close to the water. The buildings looked mostly made out of wood but reinforced with the bones of large, maritime creatures. It was still light out when we approached the village and a small, snake-like creature greeted us. ¡°Welcome, Travellers. You must have walked a long way, welcome to the village of Yugan.¡± I guess I had just met my first Naga. My first impression was, that I was looking at a male. He had a brawny torso, covered with a grey jacket, probably some kind of leather. It ended in a skirt-like covering reaching halfway to the ground with the snake-half continuing about 5 feet on. His skin was a grey-blue colour, similar to the sea outside. His head had no hair, no surprise there, but a double-crest in a lighter grey, joining together in the back of his neck and vanishing under his jacket. It reappeared on the tail, after the skirt ended.


    On closer observation, I had to readjust the idea of small, yes, he stood only about as tall as I did but my body ended with my feet on the ground, his body had the snake-tail that stretched on. I''d guess if you measured from the tip of his tail to the crown of his head, he''d be about eight feet long.


    I replied to his greeting, as he had spoken a language that I only understood thanks to the ability Lenore had bestowed upon me. ¡°Greetings. I''m called Morgana and these are my companions Sigmir and Ylva. And yes, we have travelled quite a way. Is there some place in this village that might rent out a chamber for the night and provide dinner? We can trade leather or wolf-claws, depending on your preferences.¡±


    He raised on of his arms, scratching at the crest on his head. ¡°I don''t know, maybe you should ask the village-head. Let me show you the way.¡± with that, he turned and slithered off so we simply followed. There were a few more villagers gawking at us, I''d guess they really didn''t get much in the way of visitors. Our guide approached one of the larger buildings, slithering up a ramp and opening a slightly hidden door, it was built in such a way that it faced the cliff side the house was built into so you couldn''t see it until you were right in front of it. I guess it was not hidden for reasons of secrecy but to prevent the cold coastal winds to blow directly into the dwelling. After we entered, another Naga greeted us. ¡°Ungio, wha... Oh, Travellers? Well, that is a surprise, we rarely get visitors during the summer, much, much less now in the winter. Welcome to Yugan, I''m called Siranda.¡±


    Siranda was quite impressive, a bit taller than Ungio and a deeper blue. Also quite obviously female, being naked and for some reason having medium-sized breasts. She also had a large crest but only a single crest, in a green-blue hue. The real surprise was however that below her arms was a second, smaller pair of vestigial arms. I was flabbergasted for a moment, before remembering that manners were important.


    ¡°Greetings, Siranda. My name is Morgana and my two companions are Sigmir and Ylva. We are travelling north and hoped that we might rest in your village for the night. We hope to be able to trade for it, depending on your needs.¡±


    Siranda was smiling at me. ¡°Interesting. I guess you are travelling to Neyto, are you not? It is not as if there is much more north of us. If you are, there I do have an idea what you could trade for the night.¡±


    ¡°Neyto? We are on our way to the elemental Nexus north of here, seeking the druids that are said to live there.¡± I answered.


    ¡°Yes, the Nexus. The community formed by the druids and those living close to them is called Neyto. If you are heading there, I can show you a good route on a map. And if you take a slight detour, you can trade work for your stay. You see, there is a small colony of Mudfins on the banks of the river. They are competing for food with us and I''d like for them to be gone. If you kill some of them while heading north, you will have done a great service to Yugan. It might be hard for you, but I''m sure you can handle it. If you are done, please break this token, I placed a mark on it so I can feel it break, so I know it is dealt with.¡±


    Her talk smelled like a quest to me, so I accepted and was not at all surprised when a blue screen told me that.


    <table><tbody><tr><td colspan=''2''>Quest Alert!</td></tr>


    <tr><td colspan=''2''>Kill the Mudfins</td></tr>


    <tr><td colspan=''1''>Quest Difficulty </td><td colspan=''1''> Hard </td></tr>


    <tr><td colspan=''2''> Siranda, village-head of Yugan, asked you to deal with a small colony of Mudfins.


    Mudfins killled 0/20


    Bonus-Objective: Destroy the clutch of Mudfin-Eggs </td></tr>


    <tr><td colspan=''1''>Quest Reward </td><td colspan=''1''> You gain Guest-Right in Yugan-Village.</td></tr></tbody></table>


    Siranda smiled and got out a map and the token, fashioned out of a small sea-shell. Looks like Neyto is about four days journey north of here, on a peninsula. The map showed a couple of small valleys and Sigmir, Siranda and I were able to come up with a good route that would coincidentally lead through the Mudfin-Colony. We talked a little more, but about nothing of substance, then we were shown to a small side-chamber where we could rest for a bit before dinner. A couple of days east was a village of bear-beastmen called ¡°Yari¡± according to Siranda. They were trade-partners with Yugan, and Siranda suggested that we could visit there, depending on our plans after visiting Neyto.


    Dinner was a communal affair, with quite a few Naga gawking at Sigmir and me - mainly at Sigmir, due to her size. It was interesting to see the tall shield-maid hem and haw because of the attention, clearly out of her element. Not that I was that much better, but I had a lot more experience with faking it.


    Still, the dinner was nice - fish and seafood, prepared to perfection. I even learned about the vestigial arms of the Naga, apparently they started growing with age but Siranda would not tell me at what age, playing coy. Learning about Naga-Culture was interesting - there were culturally similar villages all over the world, the larger communities were connected via magic, their best Oceanomancers able to use the ocean itself to communicate. Sadly, there was no mage in this community, I''d have loved to learn more about their magic traditions and abilities.


    As the day wound down, Sigmir and I bowed out and before going bed, enjoyed the warm bathhouse. Afterwards, we went to bed. It was a bit strange to sleep in a bed made for Snakes, but manageable. We did make out a bit but both of us were rather exhausted so we soon sunk into a deep sleep.

 Chapter 29

    After our night in Yugan, we had an early breakfast. Siranda and I traded a bit, exchanging some trail-bread and produce for the pelts, claws and teeth we had collected from the various game we had killed. The big hit, however, was the quicklime - we traded half our supply of it, getting some good, portable cookware for it. Now we could leave the heavy stoneware behind, making the large, non-magic backpack quite a bit lighter as the pelts and the stone-pots were too large to fit into the Bags of Holding.


    I also learned what exactly Mudfins were; they were small humanoids, reminiscent of two-legged frogs. It was unknown if they had a language or culture, but they were mostly hunter-gatherers and if left unchecked multiplied at a high pace. Siranda did not know where they came from, they had started their colony during the summer and the best time to take them out would be during this first winter - afterwards, they''d simply overwhelm the local game with their numbers. The winter itself posed no threat to them; the type here was highly resistant to cold and could survive even the harshest of conditions. They lived in small caves they burrowed into the muddy riverbank during the summer so killing them would be a challenge as only Ylva would be able to enter their holes.


    After our breakfast, we moved out into the dark, with me as a guide as I could easily see in the starlight thanks to my low-light vision.


    Our plan was to move alongside the river, however we first had to scale the steep banks of the river. The riverbed itself was narrow and filled with the rocks the river had carried along during the time it had cut the valley over the centuries. On the banks were a few crippled pines and even more rocks. Up on the ridge, the rock-filled slope turned into a wide, windswept plain covered in snow. We made good time that day, keeping a ground-eating pace over the whole day thanks to the good night-rest we had. In the evening, we got lucky when we happened upon a large deer and took it down so we didn''t have to break into our provisions but had fresh meat to make a nice soup with some roots we found when making camp. Sleeping between some rocks was by far not as relaxing as the night we had spent in the comfy bed in Yugan but we had to make do, at least we were out of the everlasting wind.


    The next day, we once more broke camp before dawn, hoping to reach the Mudfin-Colony shortly before nightfall to scout it in the dying light and then strike them after dark. I had a few ideas how to drive them out of their burrows, which was in my opinion the main challenge in killing them. Otherwise the only way was sending Ylva and Lenore in and using Raven''s Eye to cast spells inside. But sending a bird below the earth? Bad Idea.


    The day went by quickly, I was happy that chances were that we''d reach our target the day after tomorrow and might be able to remove the Malediction from Sigmir, it felt harder and harder to suppress it each day and I was afraid that I''d be unable to keep it from harming her soon. Hopefully, someone at the Nexus would be able to help.


    When the daylight faded and turned into twilight, we were able to see what had to be Mudfins. They were grotesque looking, strangely white like dead fish with bony spikes growing out of their backs. They walked on two legs but their arms were overlong, reaching almost to the ground when they moved in their bend-over gait that seemed to be their standard mode of locomotion. Their maws and eyes were far too large looking for their relatively small bodies and even from the distance one could see their teeth. Luckily it seemed like they had little in the way of weapons or tools, mainly sticks, occasionally enhanced with teeth or stones-shards driven into them. I was able to count about twenty five of the strange creatures and they vanished into small holes, so small that even Ylva would have trouble getting into them.


    After dark, we got ready for our assault, first I closed off the holes with ice so we''d have to deal with only one at a time. Then, it was time to try something new with the old. First I buffed up me, Ylva and Sigmir with my Blood-Runes to strengthen and regenerate. We had tested it out and the spell would last roughly five minutes. Then I stood in front of the one open hole and started to channel a spell of Mist and Madness into their hole. It didn''t take long, within a minute, we heard strange gurgling sounds from the hole and then two of the Mudfins burst into the open, their large eyes glowing red and both were bleeding from the scratches they had dealt to each other in their insanity. As soon as they were out, Sigmir and Ylva struck, each at one of them and I was right behind them, hacking into the things with my Frozen Butterfly-Wings. I also observed them, trying to gain some information.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>


    Mudfin-Skipper, level 39, 382/491


    </td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    In their Madness they didn''t even try to defend themselves and within a short time, both died, even with their tough leathery skin and high amount of hit points. They only focused on one opponent, attacking in a frenzy and our third fighter could strike at them with impunity.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Mudfin Skipper died</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You gain 1 300 EXP.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>For killing an opponent 7 levels above you you gain Bonus EXP</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>For killing an opponent without a Traveller in your party, you gain Bonus EXP</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>Mudfin-Skipper died</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You gain 1 300 EXP.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>For killing an opponent 8 levels above you you gain Bonus EXP</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>For killing an opponent without a Traveller in your party, you gain Bonus EXP</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    Both gave a good amount of EXP and I''d only need a few more to reach the next level, Sigmir and Ylva had more luck, reaching level 29 and 34 respectively. Slow and steady wins the race, so I healed up the light injuries we had sustained due to their mad assault with my new combined Buff and Heal-spell and moved to the next hole. Shattering the ice was easy, then Madness descended on the Mudfins and this time it took a little longer until three burst out of the hole, one almost ripped to shreds, the other two hot in pursuit. Sigmir struck true on the first, relieving it of it''s suffering, along with it''s head. The other two went into a mad assault on me and I went full defensive, blocking with my blades and my shuttle while Ylva and Sigmir tore them apart.


    The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.


    The next two holes worked just as well and even gave me enough EXP to reach level 33 as for some reason, maybe because they were enemies for a quest, diminishing returns did not kick in.


    Then trouble found us. The Mudfins must have heard what was going on and as soon as I removed the ice from the largest hole, an extra large Mudfin alongside four others burst out from it. I instantly jumped backwards to move into the formation we had planned. Sigmir was playing vanguard, holding the enemies back with her huge Lok''nar, Ylva was in the middle, making sure that nothing went past Sigmir and I stood back, throwing spells as fast as I could and supporting Sigmir with my shuttle.


    At first, however, I observed the largest Mudfin.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>


    Mudfin Pike, level 43, 576/576


    </td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    Siranda had told me about the Mudin''s resistance to frost so everything with Chill, Freeze or Cold was useless so I tried a Hardened Ice Spear but their thick skin protected very well against the piercing attack. With that, the solution lay in Darkness. My first course of action was to use Curse ¨C Devour ¨C Strength on the largest and it visibly weakened. Then I tried a beam of Dark Radiance, Devour and Blood on one of the smaller Mudfins and it looked as if it had aged by a century after the spell ended. Moments later, the diminished Mudfin was split apart by Sigmir''s Lok''nar. Sigmir took quite a bit of damage holding them back and one got by her but was stopped by Ylva. I focused on that one and again, the Dark Beam took it''s Vitality and Ylva ripped out it''s throat when it was weakened by the spell-effect, leaving it to bleed out in the mud. My Astral Power was at about half capacity but it would be enough. Again, Ylva and I struck in concert, taking another of the Mudfins down with Fang and Darkness.


    At that point, the Mudfin Pike gave a strange, gurgling war cry and it''s eyes started to glow red with madness as it attacked Sigmir with abandon shaking my curse off and causing deep wounds, reducing her health significantly. When Sigmir stumbled and sunk to one knee, I shouted ¡°Ylva, switch!¡± and then used Overboost on another Dark Beam striking the last smaller Mudfin before finishing it with my shuttle. Ylva focused on the Pike and managed to distract it from Sigmir and was now evading it''s flurry of attacks while I ran to Sigmir who was trying to get her breath back. I immediately channelled a pure healing spell into her, taking great care not to stress her body unnecessarily, trusting Ylva to buy us time. When my Astral Power was dry, Sigmir was looking a lot better and both of us went to aid Ylva.


    From then on, it became a game of keep-away, one person focusing on dodging and defending and the other two hacking away at the Mudfin Pike. It took a bit of time but soon the combination of its mad frenzy and our attacks had taken their toll and the thing fell, not getting back up again.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Mudfin Skipper died</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You gain 1 300 EXP.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>For killing an opponent 6 levels above you you gain Bonus EXP</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>For killing an opponent without a Traveller in your party, you gain Bonus EXP</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>Mudfin Pike died</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You gain 2 000 EXP.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>For killing an opponent 10 levels above you you gain Bonus EXP</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>For killing an opponent without a Traveller in your party, you gain Bonus EXP</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Skill increased</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You increased your skill: Darkness Rune-Mastery [44/100]</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Skill increased</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You increased your skill: Blood Rune-Mastery [35/100]</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Skill increased</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You increased your skill: Ice Magic [45/100]</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Skill increased</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You increased your skill: Dual Blade-Mastery [10/100]</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    I sat down and focused on the Astral River, regaining my Astral Power.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Skill increased</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You increased your skill: Astral Meditation [24/100]</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    After I had my power back, we moved on and the next hole contained three Mudfins that died easily, the four in the next hole had ripped into each other like mad. Then the last hole contained three more and this time they were all rather beaten. I guess the Mudfin Pike had been the linchpin. making them a bit more dangerous.


    As we had killed all Mudfins we had seen earlier, we sent Lenore into the holes to search for the eggs and in the largest hole, she was successful and I used Raven''s Eye to be able to target them inside the hole and destroyed them with Darkness-Magic. When that was done, I broke to token to inform Siranda and we got a message.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Quest Completed</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You completed the Quest: Kill the Mudfins</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You completed the Bonus Objective: Destroy the Mudfin-Eggs</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You gained: 20 000 EXP</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You gained: 5 000 Bonus EXP</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>


    You reached level 34


    </td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    Not only did I get my level-up, the others got one as well. I guess when it comes to levelling at this point, quests are a seriously big deal.


    But we had done our duty to Yugan, so we could head towards Neyto with a clear conscience.

 Chapter 30

    After taking down the Mudfins, we walked for about an hour, not wanting to camp right next to the corpses in case scavengers were drawn to the smell of blood and gore. The night was not comfortable on the cold ground, but we knew that only one more night would take us to our goal.


    We slept a couple of hours and then moved on in the starlight.


    It is interesting, how fast you become inured to the spectacular if the spectacular becomes common. The first days in the forest, I had been awed by the untouched nature and the simple solitude. After meeting Sigmir, on our flight, there had been natural beauty in a way I could not have imagined, for example frozen waterfalls, the canyon we had crossed, glistering with snow in a few places and some others. Of course, the Blood Moon and the aurora had been sights that I''ll never forget. Now, after the forest had turned into vast snowfields, at first they had impressed me and as we walked and happened upon the first valley, cut into the land by a river over the course of centuries the power of nature had been inspiring. Looking at the ocean, seeing it''s vastness, knowing that it was both literally and figuratively the end of the world had been humbling.


    However now, the valleys we were crossing and sometimes wandering in were no less spectacular than the first, but somehow after the third it wasn''t so inspiring any longer and at some point - maybe crossing the fifth - it simply became a chore, and I was looking forward to visit a different part of the world.


    In the afternoon of the next day, we saw Neyto, a small grove of trees - looking as if they were made from pure crystal - interspersed with a couple of small houses around a small lake made out of silvery water. The feeling of power from the pool was immense and it was what I had been feeling for days. This was the Nexus, or at least its physical representation. I could almost see the flow of power, just on the edge of my perception. On a small hill at the edge of the grove was a strange looking house.


    Where the others were log-houses made out of the abundant pinewood of the region, this one was not. It was a log-house as well but it stood on tall stilts which looked as if they were made from living trees, rooted into the earth. The logs itself were white with small black spots looking almost like birch. To reach the house, one had to climb a steep, narrow staircase, roughly hewn out of the strange, white wood, showing that it had the same colour throughout. Around the house was a small fence, made from the same material. Somehow, I had a feeling that the village elder would be in this strange house.


    As we walked into the grove, a tree in front of us sprouted a face and looked us over. Both, Sigmir and I were riveted to the spot by the tree''s piercing gaze. Then it focused on me and spoke. ¡°Who walks into Neyto?¡±


    It took a moment for me to gather myself and answer: ¡°Greetings. My name is Morgana, a traveller, and this is my dear companion Sigmir. The wolf is called Ylva and she is Sigmir''s partner, my own partner, the raven Lenore, is currently avoiding the cold within her Hallow.¡± the piercing gaze motivated me to answer with a truth as complete as possible. Leaving something out might be considered a deliberate obfuscation and we were coming to ask for help so accidentally insulting the people here could be a catastrophe.


    ¡°Huhum, Morgana the Traveller... You carry something old with you... You should see Grandmother, she will know what to do with you.¡± the tree spoke again, this time with a frown. ¡°Go to the white house, Grandmother lives there. Do not walk close to the lake, you would die.¡±


    With that warning, the face faded back into the tree leaving me and Sigmir looking at each other with an expression of disbelief. I had this strange thought in my head, ''Ylva, I have a feeling we are not in Kansas anymore.'' Well, at least with that thought, the hope came that we''d meet the good Witch of the North next. Thankfully, no Yellow Brick Road was in sight just now.


    We gave the lake a wide berth, cautioned by the warning the tree had given. Closing in on the house, we were able to see more details and the wood looked strange close up; almost like bone but the shapes were all wrong. Still, it gave a foreboding feeling.


    We walked up the stairs but there was no door, nor window. Puzzled about the question how to ask for entry, I stopped for a moment before applying Occam''s Razor to the problem, the easiest solution is usually the best. I simply walked up to the wall and gave a knock, similar as to how I''d knock on a door. The material didn''t feel quite like wood and the knocking was strangely soft.


    It took a moment, then I was able to hear laughter from inside and a door appeared before me, right in the place I had just knocked on. Taking the appearance as a sign that we had been invited to enter, I took the handle and opened the door.


    As we entered, I appraised the room and my mind had trouble adapting for a moment. The outside of the house was maybe fifteen on thirty feet, but the room we entered alone was larger than that and it had doors leading off into other parts of the house and even a small, winding staircase in a corner, leading both upwards and downwards. At least it was not a phone-booth.


    Mesmerized by the room, it took me a moment to take in our host. When I looked, there was a feeling of power and I was awestruck. My first thought was that she looked young, then, after seeing her eyes, that she was ancient. Both thought wrestled with each other for a moment, then I shelved them.


    Sigmir took my hand, and I felt it shake a little so I gave it a soft squeeze to remind her that I was with her. At the same time, I realized that Ylva was pressing herself to my legs.


    ¡°Greetings. We were told by one of the trees to seek someone out he called Grandmother. I''m called Morgana, a traveller. These are Sigmir and her partner Ylva.¡± I focused on Lenore, asking her to leave her Hallow and as she materialized on my shoulder, I continued: ¡°And this is my own partner, Lenore. She was avoiding the cold in my Hallow. Also, while I know one should never lead with an apology, I apologize in advance if I make mistakes in my decorum. These mistakes are borne from ignorance, not disrespect.¡±


    Our host looked us over. Then she spoke. ¡°At least, knowing one''s limitation you do. Grandmother, you can call me. I am wondering, why are you here?¡± By now, you could have knocked me over with a feather and I guess the sheer perplexity was visible on my face, causing the Grandmother to break out into laughter. ¡°No, I don''t talk like that. But the look on your face, priceless. So, tell me, what are three of the fool''s brood doing here?¡±


    The fool''s brood? The only thing three of us had in common was J?tun-Blood so the fool was most likely the god who had created the Firn-Elfs and fathered Fenris. But the fool? I''d heard him called Deceiver but never fool. A thought for another time.


    ¡°Well, Grandmother, a shaman has done something to Sigmir here. I don''t know exactly what it is, it does not feel like a curse so I guess it''s some kind of disease or poison. It sapped a great deal of her strength and even now tries to weaken her. When I first tried to help her, the System gave me a quest to seek help from those who live close to a Nexus or to learn a great deal more about healing. While I''d love to gain more knowledge about healing, her health is my main concern, so we made the journey here.¡±


    Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.


    At that the Grandmother blinked in surprise. ¡°You are seeking healing for your loved one? You are not here to drain the pool to strengthen the soul you carry around?¡±


    ''Soul I carry around?'' ¡°You know what to do with this?¡± I asked, taking the still wrapped Soulprison out of my pack.


    ¡°Curiosity.¡± With that, the Grandmother looked closely at the Soulprison and then answered. ¡°Ah, well, of course I know what that is. What you carry there, might be one of the rarest things in this world. It is quite literally the soul of an immortal being, imprisoned by its enemies. The one you hold was made by Sunna to hold one of the Great Beasts they had subdued. You see, if you simply kill an immortal, it does not die, else there would be no point to call them immortal, would there? No, if an immortal ''dies'' the soul simply re-enters the Cycle and after some time, it is reborn and regains it''s memories, living once more. A Soulprison prevents that, holding the soul and over time it weakens until the soul simply vanishes and the Soulprison crumbles, having accomplished the feat of truly ending an immortal. Creating Soulprisons is quite a challenge and locking a soul into one even more so.¡±


    I did not want to be impolite and interrupt her and in all honesty, it was fascinating to hear her talk. But my main-objective was not the prison. I wanted Sigmir whole again.


    ¡°Forgive me my impudence, Grandmother, for all my thirst of knowledge, I don''t care at the moment. Every day I felt the thing within Sigmir grow in strength, with each day it has been harder to seal it. What do I have to do to help her? Or to have you help her?¡± I asked with passion in my voice.


    ¡°Oh, dear. What are you willing to do, is the more important question.¡± she said, her smile morphing into something dangerous. I remembered my oath to Sigmir.


    ¡°Whatever it takes. I know I am mortal. I feel that you are so much more powerful than me. But still. Whatever it takes.¡± Now, the Grandmother was looking truly interested. Sigmir however, not so much. ¡°You can''t do that! Why would you...? I won''t...¡± She was now gripping my hand with so much force, it hurt and was babbling. I turned to her and pulled her face down so I could look her directly in the eyes. ¡°I told you, I''d do whatever is necessary.¡± Then I gave her a soft kiss. ¡°So, Grandmother, what would you have me do?¡±


    ¡°What would you do if I wanted your life? A life for a life, that sounds like a fair deal to me, what do you think?¡± I had researched the penalty for Death a bit; loss of levels, loss of equipment, possilby permanent loss of attributes, harsh but not crippling if you did not make a habit out of dying.


    ¡°You do know that Travellers return from death? I would not want a powerful being like you to feel tricked.¡± I spoke, wondering if the next moment would spell the arrival of my first in-game death.


    ¡°Integrity? I like it. But yes, I know about the Traveller''s immortality.¡±


    With that, she pulled a gem out of her gown and a thin beam shot forward. I felt a strange sensation deep within me, pulling at something I never realized I had.


    <table><tbody>


    <tr><td>A Soulprison-Mark has been put upon you. As long as you die within the range of the prison while your soul is marked, your soul will be removed from the Cycle, causing Perma-Death.</td></tr></tbody></table>


    Well, that puts a spin on it, doesn''t it? Still, a small voice within my head told me ''It''s just a game'' but a much louder voice shouted ''It''s for Sigmir''


    I was just about to tell the Grandmother to go ahead if that was the price she demanded when I was pulled into a hug by Sigmir, her muscular frame shielding me from the Grandmother. ¡°No! You will not give your life for me. If you do, I will simply accompany you. I will not lose you. I love you!¡±


    Part of me wanted to protest, to tell her that my life did not matter that I was just a Traveller to this realm but a look into her eyes stopped me dead in my tracks. Seeing the conviction in her eyes, the words simply died on my tongue so I put it to better use, giving her a kiss, putting all the feeling into it that I could, leaving her off-balance and letting me step out of her embrace.


    ¡°Well, I''m afraid I can''t give you my life, it has just been claimed. You could kill us both but that would make the whole thing a bit pointless.¡±


    The Grandmother suddenly surged forward, I felt myself shift into Bullet Time and see her hand morph into claws of iron and strike at my throat. I might have dodged, I might have used either my shuttle or my Butterfly-Wings but I did neither. I simply stood, knowing that it would be pointless. I had said that I''d do whatever it took. I simply looked into the ancient eyes of the Grandmother, wondering for an instant what those storm-grey eyes had seen. A feeling told me that she had been around when the land had been young, that she had seen aeons pass by. It was both a humbling feeling, seeing that ancient being, older than the mountains but also a empowering feeling, knowing that nothing was impossible. The frozen instant passed and her claw-like hands stopped slightly touching the skin of my throat, causing tiny droplets of blood to well up, so sharp were her claws.


    Sigmir surged up, having felt the movement next to her but I stopped her before she could draw her weapon, knowing that it would do no good.


    ¡°Conviction. Interesting. Well, killing both of you would be boring. I think I will go with tradition.¡± her voice took on a strange quality, echoing in the room as she talked.


    ¡±Three tasks, I pose thee. Your first task is to venture forth, into the Barrow Den. Something restless haunts there. Put it to rest.


    Your second task is to seek out a firebird, maybe on Mount Yugid and bring me a tail-feather. If you can do so without killing the bird, good, if not, just as well.


    Your third task is to venture into the Gardens in Tegi and take some of their apples. They are marvellous, growing year round. Five will do nicely.


    Accomplish these tasks and I will help you. Oh, and in order for you to have time for the tasks, I will seal the disease within your friend for a year and a day but if the seal breaks, you will both die.¡±


    ¡°We will do your tasks, Grandmother.¡±


    <table><tbody><tr><td colspan="2">Quest Alert!</td></tr><tr><td colspan="2">Grandmother''s Tasks</td></tr><tr><td colspan="1">Quest Difficulty </td><td colspan="1"> Very Hard </td></tr><tr><td colspan="2"> The Grandmother of Neyto has given you three tasks to accomplish. Accomplished: 0/3</td></tr><tr><td colspan="1">Quest Reward </td><td colspan="1"> The help of the Grandmother</td></tr></tbody></table>


    <table><tbody><tr><td colspan="2">Quest Alert!</td></tr><tr><td colspan="2">Calm the Barrow Den</td></tr><tr><td colspan="1">Quest Difficulty </td><td colspan="1"> Hard </td></tr><tr><td colspan="2"> Put down the Restless Dead in the Barrow Den </td></tr><tr><td colspan="1">Quest Reward </td><td colspan="1"> You accomplish one task for the Grandmother</td></tr></tbody></table>


    <table><tbody><tr><td colspan="2">Quest Alert!</td></tr><tr><td colspan="2">Collect the Firebird''s Tail</td></tr><tr><td colspan="1">Quest Difficulty </td><td colspan="1"> Hard </td></tr><tr><td colspan="2"> Collect the Tailfeathers of a Firebird </td></tr><tr><td colspan="1">Quest Reward </td><td colspan="1"> You accomplish one task for the Grandmother.</td></tr></tbody></table>


    <table><tbody><tr><td colspan="2">Quest Alert!</td></tr><tr><td colspan="2">Steal the Apples of Tegi</td></tr><tr><td colspan="1">Quest Difficulty </td><td colspan="1"> Hard </td></tr><tr><td colspan="2"> You need to collect five Apples in the Gardens of Tegi. The inhabitants will not part willingly with the Apples, as they are their greatest Pride. </td></tr><tr><td colspan="1">Quest Reward </td><td colspan="1"> You accomplish one task for the Grandmother</td></tr></tbody></table>


    The Grandmother spoke again. ¡°I advise you to talk with the others here in Neyto. They might help you, if you help them.

 Chapter 31

    After the Grandmother gave us our tasks, we quickly left her house, not wanting to overstay our welcome. The door instantly vanished after we exited, leaving us standing on the porch, wondering just what had happened. Lenore took that moment to retreat back into her Hallow and to my surprise, Ylva did just the same.


    As we walked off, I felt the need to talk with Sigmir, while I was truly happy about her loyalty and protectiveness, I did not want to have her sacrifice herself for me, it was not worth it. Especially now, during Beta when my character would be wiped anyway. We moved to the outskirts of the grove, where the Crystal Trees were replaced by normal trees.


    ¡°You should not talk about giving your life for me. I am a Traveller, this is just a guise, a fake. It houses part of me, yes, but even if I were to completely lose this guise, the real me would be no worse for wear. In addition, those who let us travel here and gave us these guises will reset them in the future anyway. I''m not worth your life.¡±


    As I spoke, I was pacing back and forth, not really watching or walking anywhere. I was trying to make sense out of my behaviour, it was strange and illogical. But I also felt a need to say my piece.


    Suddenly, my pacing was stopped, my body was bodily picked up and my back pressed against a tree. My eyes were level with Sigmir and for the first time since I started talking I truly saw her. Her Body was shimmering with a red light and her eyes had a red glow to them.


    ¡°You want to tell me what to do?¡± she asked with anger in her voice. ¡°You want to tell me what is ''worth'' it? You want to tell me how to feel?¡± now the anger faded from her voice, only passion remained. ¡°I don''t think you understand. All my life, I was going through the motions. I wanted to make my father proud, I wanted him to be proud of me so he would love me. Guess what? It did not work. There was respect, there was pride but never affection.


    Then he was taken from me and everything crumbled. The shaman destroyed my strength and the chieftain and his thrice-cursed son forced me out of the tribe. Only stubbornness kept me going, I did not want them to win, so I kept going. But even stubbornness has a limit and I was at that limit, to the point that I was hoping to enter the Cycle just to end the pain.


    That was when I met you. At first, I knew that by saving me, you would be hunted as well. For a simple act of kindness, my tribe would hunt you, just because the act of kindness was towards me. That''s why I gave my oath to serve you, to compensate for making you a target and to satisfy the code of honour my father taught me.


    You did not care that I was hunted, you did not care that my strength was wasting away. You simply embraced me and promised me everything would be taken care of. You have no idea how that felt, do you?


    I will not give you up, I don''t care if the gods themselves try to stop me, I will be with you. From now, for evermore. Those were your words. Now they are mine. We will be together, from now, for evermore.¡± With that she pressed her body against mine and gave me a kiss that tried to melt the snow around us.


    At first, I was surprised by her aggression, then I felt my objections, the questions on the difference between AI and reality, all those thoughts, I felt them melting away in the heat of her declaration. The world shrunk until it only consisted of the two of us and the feeling of her lips on mine. I don''t know how long we stood out there, trying to melt the snow. We came up for air a couple of times but went right back to it.


    After a while, the need to make herself understood - to make me feel her passion - faded from Sigmir and she let me down but still held closely onto me. ¡°With you, for the first time, I feel warm. Not my body, but my soul. I don''t ever want to freeze again.¡±


    There were no words, no thoughts. Just a feeling of contentment radiating from my core, a warm glow of happiness unlike anything I had ever felt.


    ¡°Yes, I think I know what you mean. I never knew what I was missing, until I met you. Together, for evermore. May the Cycle have mercy on all that try to stop us. Because I certainly won''t.¡± I said with a smile.


    ¡°Oh, there is one more piece of wisdom my father had for me. Don''t ask what tomorrow might bring. Use today to make tomorrow.¡± At that I had to smile. Carpe Diem, indeed. Why should the worry about tomorrow destroy my happiness today? Yes, I would seize the day.


    When we walked back to the grove, I felt better than before. We were holding hands and it just felt right to me. Both of us were grinning like fools and had not a care in the world.


    Unauthorized usage: this narrative is on Amazon without the author''s consent. Report any sightings.


    Now that the anxiety I had felt since arriving here and talking with the strange tree had been lifted, I was able to really take in my surroundings. Looking at the houses, it was as if some strange, jumbled movie-set had been transferred here, no two houses looked even remotely similar in their building-style. The village, if you wanted to call it that, consisted of fifteen, maybe twenty houses that I could see, all set back quite a way from the Nexus-lake in the middle.


    One of the houses, a single-story house built out of simple logs, had an open work-area with some tanning racks and a strange looking man was working on them. He had a stubby nose, no hair on his head but a full beard. On a closer look, there were small horns growing from his temple and his ears were slightly elongated, pointy and furry. When we stepped up, I saw that he was not wearing boots but had hooves instead.


    ¡°Greetings. My name is Morgana. The Grandmother gave us some tasks and suggested we should offer the people here help in trade for help with our tasks. Would you be open to something like that?¡± The being turned and looked the two of us over, at first I thought he was evaluating us, then I noticed that he focused on the clothes we were wearing.


    ¡°Hello. I am called Praxi. Help you say? Well, there is something you could do for me and I''m sure I can find something to trade for your help. The winter pelts of the Deavers are quite useful but going out there in the winter to hunt them is a pain. If you would bring me, let''s say ten pelts, cleaned but otherwise untreated, I will make it worth your while.¡±


    ¡°Yes, we can do that. But what is a Dreaver?¡± I asked.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="2">Quest Alert!</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="2">Collect Dreaver Pelts for Praxi</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="1">Quest Difficulty</td>


    <td colspan="1">Easy</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="2">The tanner Praxi in Neyto wants you to collect Dreaver-Pelts for him. 0/10</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="1">Quest Reward</td>


    <td colspan="1">Help from Praxi</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    ¡°Dreaver are rather large, belligerent cousins of the Beaver. There pelts are incredibly soft if treated right, making them a joy to work with. You can find them close to the rivers and streams in the area. If you find one of their dams, you are golden. Oh, and I''ll pay extra if you find more than ten pelts.


    You should ask old Thekk, the Smith and Kallista as well. They might have something for you.¡±


    With that he pointed two more houses out to us.


    We walked over to one of the houses he had pointed out, this one made fully out of dark stones and with a large, open smithy and looked inside. There was a stout, grey-skinned being with a large branding on his face. The rest of his face was dominated by a large beard and an unwashed, curly mane of hair, the colour of granite. Every fantasy-reflex told me ''That''s a dwarf!''. He must have heard us enter, as he started yelling without even looking up. ¡°No, I already told you, I will NOT craft weapons for you. You could not pay me enough to do so. Now, go away, I already moved out here to get peace!¡± as he yelled, there was a slight feeling of power coming from him, reminiscent of the Grandmother but weaker by a couple orders of magnitude.


    ¡°Greetings, Master Thekk. The Grandmother told us that the inhabitants of Neyto might have work for us, in exchange for help with the tasks she set us. Praxi recommended asking you. Oh, and I''m called Morgana.¡± I was able to see him take a deep breath to shout me down and then, as I mentioned the Grandmother slowly expel it. Then he looked up, seeing Sigmir and me for the first time. Suddenly, I felt as if thousands of ants were crawling over me, creeping me out.


    ¡°Tasks for the Grandmother you say. Well, if the old Lady wants to play with you, so be it. I guess with your strength, you could go collect me some Fangwood, I could use it to make more Fangcoal. Here, take this Bag of Holding with you, it''s large enough that you can fit the wood inside without too much trouble. I only need the trunks though, 5 would work quite well. Oh, and here is an axe to chop the wood with, no need to abuse your weapon, Miss Giantblood.¡±


    As I took the offered Backpack and Sigmir moved to grab the axe, I got a screen.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="2">Quest Alert!</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="2">Harvest Fangwood for Thekk</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="1">Quest Difficulty</td>


    <td colspan="1">Easy</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="2">The smith Thekk in Neyto wants you to harvest Fangwood for him. 0/5</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="1">Quest Reward</td>


    <td colspan="1">Help from Thekk</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    ¡°Er, excuse me, where does one find Fangwood? I''ve never heard of it.¡± I asked.


    ¡°Obviously, Fangwood grows on Fangtrees, ya numpty. There are a couple of them about half a day''s march east of here. Rule of thumb, if the tree has fangs, it''s a Fangtree. Now, git.¡±


    With that, we left the charming blacksmith to his own devices.


    Outside, I asked Sigmir, ¡°Did you also have a creepy feeling when he looked at you?¡± she looked back at me and said ¡°Yes, he observed us and he didn''t bother to be casual about it. But impressive, a blacksmith who reached the second divide, that''s rare, and in such a remote place at that.¡±


    ¡°The second divide? Was that the feeling of power when he yelled?¡± I asekd.


    ¡°Yes, most of the time, powerful people restrain their aura, mostly out of courtesy. You wouldn''t want to be around people permanently shouting, would you?¡± Sigmir answered.


    ¡°One day, you will have to teach me.¡± I smiled. ¡°But now, let''s go see that Kallista woman.¡±

 Chapter 32

    We walked through the grove, heading for the second house Praxi had pointed out to us. This one was a whitewashed two-story house, not out of place in a modern countryside, with wooden shutters protecting clear glass windows and it had no open workshop, so we knocked.


    A short time later, the door opened, revealing a women looking slightly annoyed at first. She was another interesting looking character, she had a shiny, sparkling colouring, glimmering white, similar to the crystal trees that made up the grove. "Ah, it''s you. I take it you met the Grandmother already?"


    I blinked in surprise but introduced myself, not wanting to be impolite. "Greetings, I''m called Morgana. Yes, indeed, we met her and she gave us three tasks and the suggestion to ask the people of Neyto for help and help them in turn. Praxi told us that you might need help.¡±


    She was still intently inspecting us, but then her expression turned softer and she had a smile on her face.


    ¡°Yes, I know how that works. What could I have you do? It''s winter, so harvesting roots is out. How about you hunt an elk or two for my larder? I''m the den-mother of this community and make sure that everyone gets fed around here. Yes, an elk or two would be quite useful, that would work.¡±


    I nodded, a bit perplexed. ¡°Yes, we can do that.¡± I was interrupted by a blue window.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="2">Quest Alert!</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="2">Hunt Elk for Kallista</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="1">Quest Difficulty</td>


    <td colspan="1">Easy</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="2">Kallista, in Neyto, wants you to hunt two elk for her. 0/2</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="1">Quest Reward</td>


    <td colspan="1">Help from Kallista</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    I dismissed it and continued. ¡°You don''t sound very needy, more like it''s a chore to give us a task. Would you tell me why?¡±


    She looked me over for a second. ¡°Well, sure. At the end of the day, this village is perfectly self-sufficient. The tasks the Grandmother send you on are not really for her, they are a gesture. Do you truly believe that a being as old and powerful as the Grandmother would have to send some random people who wandered into our village around to get what she wants? Don''t kid yourself. However there is power in gestures. By sending you on tasks, you invest into whatever it is you want from her, you earn what you get. If the Grandmother simply waved her hand and did everything for you, it would weaken you, both in the flesh and the spirit. Basically, it''s one of the villages rules, don''t give handouts, make visitors work for what they want. So yes, the task I gave you is a bit of a made-up one, the village could easily get through the winter without you hunting elk for me and whatever other busywork the others have given you. But just the same, doing our tasks will strengthen you and help you with the Grandmother''s tasks.¡±


    Well, that put things into perspective. However it didn''t really matter, at the end of the day we had come here for help, so we had to play by their rules. And logically speaking, they were right - doing the tasks would strengthen us via the System and give us a feeling of accomplishment, even if the effect would be lessened by knowing about the effect. Simply getting the result handed to us would make us feel irrelevant. It was a thought to meditate on.


    ¡°Oh, and just so you know, maybe ask Cisar, he manages our fields and gardens. Maybe he needs help as well. His house is the one outside the grove, to the north. Why don''t you go talk to him and come back here, I have a room you can spend the night in.¡±


    The sun was already setting so we accepted the offer and told her that we would see her soon.


    As we walked, I noticed something, all those vastly different beings were using the same language and Sigmir was easily understanding them all and she had no Universal Translation skill like me, so I asked her.


    ¡°You mean Common? My father taught me, he said it''s propagated by the Adventurer''s Guild so that their members can travel freely without needing to learn a new language for every tribe. Most people who want to work as adventurers or with them learn Common. I think the official name is Northern Trade-Tongue and variants of it are spoken everywhere, all over Mundus. It''s interesting that those who sent you here didn''t teach you in advance but settled you with an obscure language like J?tun.¡±


    We walked through the trees, heading to the north both thinking our own thoughts. Leaving the grove, we saw a large house right next to a barn. There was a fence around quite a large tract of land, I guess that was the garden. We walked through the fence-gate, using the obvious path. Nearing the house, we heard a rhythmic twock --- twock --- twock from behind the house so we went there. A tall, human-looking man was chopping wood, creating the noise. I waited until he had finished his swing and was clearing the block. ¡°Greetings. I''m called Morgana, we were told by Kallista that you might have work for us, in exchange for helping us with tasks from the Grandmother.¡±


    The man stopped and turned. ¡°Oh, more needy souls? Well, it happens that I not only have a busy-work task for you but something that really needs to be done, and with you here, I won''t have to do the work. There is a large Dire Boar, breaking my fence and destroying my garden. I want you to kill it. Look for it further north, I''m sure you can spot it''s tracks. Oh and watch out, the thing is the size of a bear.¡±


    Again, we accepted and a window appeared.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="2">Quest Alert!</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="2">Kill the Dire Boar.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="1">Quest Difficulty</td>


    <td colspan="1">Medium</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="2">Cisar, the farmer in Neyto, wants you to kill the boar that is vandalising his garden.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="1">Quest Reward</td>


    <td colspan="1">Help from Cisar</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    With that, we had no more leads to follow for now and walked back to Kallista''s house. Again, we knocked and this time were asked in. The house had a rather simple layout, a large common room with an open door to a kitchen and closed doors leading to other rooms, probably bedrooms. On one wall was a large, open, fireplace, making the room toasty warm.


    ¡°Welcome back you two. It''s nice to have visitors from the outside, not always the same guys from around here. Why don''t you take a seat and simply relax for a bit? You can use it, after travelling out here.¡±


    We just did that, when Lenore asked if it was OK to come out, so I asked our host. ¡°Excuse me, Kallista, Sigmir and I both have spirit-bonded partners, is it OK if they leave their Hallows? They¡¯re a raven and a wolf.¡±


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    ¡°Yes, that''s not a problem. I sensed them earlier, I don''t mind them being out and about.¡± she answered.


    With that, Lenore materialized on my shoulder and Ylva came out as well. After looking around for a second, Ylva moved in front of the fireplace and curled herself into a ball and was swiftly joined by Lenore who leaned against her.


    ¡°Would you mind telling me a bit about Neyto? Somehow, I don''t think this is a normal village, you know.¡± I asked our host.


    ¡°Of course, it''s not. You could say that Neyto is a sanctuary. Take old Thekk as an example. As far as I know, he learned in the halls of Ivaldi and left them at some point to walk his own path. I doubt that there are many smiths of his skill in this world but he wants to work his own projects in his own time, not be the pet of some powerful faction. So he fled here, to Neyto, and has his freedom guaranteed by the rules the Grandmother makes and enforces. Most of us have enemies in the world, forcing us to remain here. Because of that we are accepting of the strange and of strangers.¡± Kallista explained.


    Now I was rather surprised; I had felt that the Grandmother was powerful, but hearing that she was able to enforce a sanctuary? That was rather interesting.


    We shared some small talk for a while, mainly Kallista telling funny stories about some of the inhabitants of Neyto, then it was time for dinner. I helped preparing it and gained multiple levels on my cooking-skill, probably due to the instruction I received.


    Dinner itself was a quiet affair, even with a few of the villagers joining in. What stood out was that the villagers were an extreme mix of species, demonstrating just how diverse this world was. After dinner, Sigmir and I helped with the dishes and while doing so, I realized something strange for a medieval world, the kitchen had running, warm water. When I asked about it, I was told that it was done with enchantments using the ambient astral power by the Grandmother. Now, that was something I wanted to learn.


    When we were done, Kallista offered us to use the bath, something neither Sigmir nor I were willing to refuse.


    In the bath, I was surprised at first, the world had a distinctively medieval feel to it but the bathroom was surprisingly modern. The tub was a huge affair made out of dark stone, set partially in the floor and instead of the buckets I half expected, there were two knobs one orange, the other blue and touching them let hot and cold water flow from an small opening. In addition, there were soft towels and washcloths laid out for us.


    There was also a full-length mirror so I was able to fully take in my appearance for the first time since I¡¯d started the game. A distorted reflection on ice or water did not count in my opinion, so I used the mirror to inspect me in detail. Sigmir had somehow dyed the soft leather-clothes she had made for me in a deep, matte black, not reflective to make me look like a domina, more like one would imagine an assassin.


    With the added billowing, black cloak and the fur-trim, it turned from assassin to scout or maybe dark sorceress which was not that far off.


    The face that looked back at me was almost my own, the softer lines of my face were replaced with sharp, clear cut lines giving me a severe appearance. Somehow, the blue skin looked more appealing to me than my normal pale skin, especially with the strong contrast it had with my raven-black hair and my jade-green eyes. In addition, my ears were slightly longer than normal and pointy.


    Spoiler: Spoiler<input class="spoilerButton" type="button" value="Show">


    While I was admiring myself, Sigmir stood behind me and placed her arms around me, pulling me against her chest.


    ¡°You know, I¡¯ve never felt for anyone like I feel for you. It¡¯s strange, you know. We only met two weeks ago but I feel like I¡¯ve known you forever.¡± Sigmir whispered into my ear and in the mirror, I was able to see that her eyes had a moist sheen to them. To assure her that I had similar feelings for her, I simply turned my head and gave her a soft kiss. While I lost myself in the soft feeling of her lips, I felt her hands getting busy with the various leather bands that held my clothes together and first I lost my cloak, then the rest of my clothes, until I stood naked in front of her. Now, I could admire this body in it¡¯s full glory and I honestly liked what I saw. Compared to my real body the muscles were slightly more pronounced and the blue skin gave it a slightly outlandish look but it was definitely appealing.


    When Sigmir started to take off her own clothes, I gently slapped her hands away, telling her that it was my job and she should just stand still and let me make her happy. With that done, I started to carefully remove her clothes one piece at the time, gently caressing the newly shown skin, making her squirm with the challenge of not moving while I had my way with her.


    The fact that we had been unable to do more than cursory washes made us both quite smelly so when I was finished with taking off her clothes, I pulled her towards the wash-tub, placing her in the warm water and still not letting her move at all. It was quite funny to watch her squirm while I carefully washed every nook and cranny of her body, not letting a single one get away. I cleaned her off with clear water, washing away the soap and started to torment her in earnest, tracing the hard lines of her body with my hands, kissing and nibbling on her muscles. While nibbling on her breast and stroking the other with one hand, I let the other hand trace down her stomach, towards what some call promised land, others kitty or a hundred different words. Personally, I prefer kitty.


    As my hand reached her kitty, I compared the feeling to my own, trying what I knew felt good to me, watching her reactions to the different stimulations and I was quite happy with the sounds I was able to coax out of her. Soon, I felt her tense up, trying to reach that smooth release, I slowed my ministrations and then stopped them with her on a hair trigger, keeping her hands back when they instinctively tried to finish what I¡¯d started.


    ¡°No, my love, that¡¯s not how it works.¡± I told her with a smile on my face. Then I pulled the quivering Sigmir out of the tub and gently dried her off, never giving her enough contact to get her release but stimulating her enough to keep her on edge. By now, she was putty in my hand, her body screaming for release so I placed her hands against the wall, bend her over and spread her legs making room for me between them. Looking at the tall, muscular giantess bend over and shaking in need was the most erotic thing I¡¯d ever seen in my life, even counting the porn I¡¯d watched from time to time. Add in the distinct smell of her arousal in the air and I was hot to trot.


    So I dove into her kitty, face first, the first licks caught her by surprise, I don¡¯t think she¡¯d expected this, and her breath caught in her throat. At the third, long lick she started shaking in earnest, her body taking in the new sensation and climbing to heights she had never even imagined. The taste was different than anything I had ever tasted, a mix of spicy, tangy and sweet that defied any try to come up with a more eloquent description than ¡®Yummy¡¯. As she rose to the peaks of passion, I tried something I¡¯d read about on the internet and sucked the little nubbin at the top of her slit in my mouth, quickly stroking it with my tongue while lightly, oh ever so lightly, biting into it.


    The result was more than I¡¯d ever expected, first it was a piercing scream for a second, then the scream was cut off and I had to catch her falling body. Well, they call it ¡®la petite mort¡¯ or little death. My dear Sigmir had passed out on me. I sat her down on a chair and took the time to quickly wash my body, so when Sigmir started to come back around, I was washed and dry, wrapping her in her cloak and guiding her to the chamber we¡¯d been given. She was still not quite with me and had a goofy smile on her face when I put her in bed so it was no surprise when she fell asleep within moments.


    Having her in her bed and breathing softly, I tucked her in and then went to sleep in my own bed. After an hour of tossing and turning alone in bed, I gave up and joined Sigmir in her bed. In the familiar feeling of her embrace, sleep took me within moments.

 Chapter 33

    After a restful night, Sigmir and I were quite happy with the world in general. Both of us felt that we were safe and there was a clear path forward. At breakfast, we joked around with our host and Kallista even made us some provisions to take with us, as we planned to head to the north first, looking for the boar and if we found it, we''d head south-east, looking for the Fangtrees. As we talked, Kallista lent us a second, large Bag of Holding, this one even having a conservation-enchantment so we could store the carcasses of any game we happened to kill. In addition I was able to talk Kallista out of quite a few herbs and vegetables, so I''d be able to cook something tasty. She also offered us a room during our stay, saying that she had enough room in her house and was happy to have us.


    Well prepared we headed out, starting at the farm to track the boar. Ylva played hound, tracking the trail but honestly, even I was able to make it out, it was that obvious. Well, what do you expect when a beast the size of a compact car makes it''s way through the forest? So, tracking the beast was the easy part. The not-easy part came when we tracked it down.


    We caught up to the boar as it was sleeping in a small clearing and thinking that it would not be that hard, as it was only marked ''Medium Difficulty'' in comparison to the Hard-Difficulty quests we had done over and over, we went for it. I started the fight with Icicles, trying to wound it from the get-go, while Ylva circled to attack it''s rear. Sigmir went straight up in order to grab it''s attention.


    My Icicles struck true and at the same time, Ylva jumped in, biting it''s hind-legs trying to cripple it''s movement.


    Well, my tried and true Icicles struck it''s thick hide and did absolutely nothing, they failed to penetrate the thick, coarse fur, simply bouncing off. Ylva barely got her jaw around the hind-leg and the boar twisted, dodging Sigmir''s strike and at the same time, throwing Ylva through the air and following up with it''s tusks, gouging a huge wound into her side. Seeing her companion struck like that, Sigmir immediately went to take her into her Hallow so I could take care of her later. Doing so, sadly left Sigmir open to attack and right after Ylva had vanished, Sigmir got run over by the boar. I tried to help but my shuttle was only creating small cuts, I''d have to strike the same spot over and over to get anywhere and the boar was not holding still for me, to hit it. Then I saw the small wounds swiftly scab over and vanish. This thing had insane Vitality.


    I used observe to gain more knowledge of our enemy.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>


    Dire Boar, level 40


    </td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    I had started thinking on an exit-strategy as soon as my spells and Ylva bounced off so I had a bit of a plan. I recalled my shuttle and with one hand and mental process I started to cast a Curse of Disorientation, with the other I threw together a mist-spell to conceal me and Sigmir, hoping for a successful get-away. We got lucky that the boar had run over Sigmir, not gorged her with it''s tusks or the situation would have been truly bad. Like this, Sigmir managed to get up and I was able to help her move away. Hearing the boar rage around in the mist was quite intimidating, as were the deep bruises Sigmir was carrying.


    After retreating for a bit, Ylva left her Hallow and I focused on healing her, making sure that there were no more problems. With that done, it was planning time.


    ¡°I don''t think my Ice-Magic will affect it at all, it''s pelt is too thick. Maybe something with Darkness, but that would take quite a bit of time.¡± I suggested.


    This story has been unlawfully obtained without the author''s consent. Report any appearances on Amazon.


    ¡°Maybe you could use your Blood-Runes to strengthen us, then use Darkness to weaken it. I don''t believe that one measly boar can get the best of us. I refuse to believe it.¡± Sigmir stated with conviction.


    ¡°Yes, I agree. I can still distract and harry it, even if I can''t do much. My fangs will cause pain, even if they don''t cause lasting damage. I doubt it is smart enough to realize that.¡± Ylva growled after her wounds had closed. ¡°But I will make certain that it won''t get me again.¡±


    Now, that we had the resemblance of a plan, it was time for round two. This time, the opening was a bit more covert, Lenore flew up on a branch and with Raven''s Eye, I used another Disorientation-Curse on the boar. The Darkness spell took less out of Lenore, allowing me to cast maybe two Triangle or a single Pentagon-Spell made out of Darkness through her without hurting her.


    Then I used a Heptagon-Spell, made out of Dark Radiance, Devouring, Regenerate and Strength in order to weaken it, so I did not simply fire it, I stood and channelled into it, hoping that the combination of Disorientation and the physical assault of Sigmir and Ylva would be enough to keep me safe. With my other mental process, I tossed single, one-shot spells at it, mixing Disorientation and Devouring effects to weaken it further. Luckily, it worked out quite well, Sigmir and Ylva were using tried and true pack-tactics, one feinting, the other striking. Not always with a feint from the front, they mixed it up, making sure that they did not get predictable.


    It was still a brutal fight but we got truly lucky when the boar spun around in order to engage Ylva and Sigmir managed to strike a deep wound into one leg. Seeing the deep leg-wound I tried to mix Dark Radiance with Blood-Runes to make the wound bleed stronger and was awarded with a red fountain, painting the snow crimson. From then on, it became a lot easier to grind down it''s monstrous Vitality, the combination of weakening spells and blood loss taking a toll on it.


    It took some time, but in the end, the boar was no match, it stumbled and Sigmir took advantage, striking a brutal, overhead blow, using the length of her weapon for momentum, cleaving into the boars neck. Even with it''s neck almost severed, it didn''t die quickly, allowing me to use my Blood-Magic to siphon off quite a bit of power for future use. With the boar dead, there were EXP.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Dire Boar died</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You gain 3 000 EXP.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>For killing an opponent 6 levels above you, you gain Bonus EXP</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>For killing an opponent without a Traveller in your party, you gain Bonus EXP</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Skill increased</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You increased your skill: Darkness Rune-Mastery [45/100]</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Skill increased</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You increased your skill: Blood Rune-Mastery [36/100]</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Skill increased</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You increased your skill: Blood Magic [15/100]</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    Now, we had to process it, as it would be a waste to leave it to rot. I asked Ylva to look for a camp-ground and helped Sigmir to skin the beast. Handling the carcass was a chore and a half due to the sheer mass of it but together, we managed it in a reasonable time frame. Then the Bags of Holding proved their worth many times over, allowing us to simply pack the pelt and the meat up and take it with us without it weighing us down. Ylva came back and guided us to a nice, dry overhang, protecting us from the wind and snow. By now, it had gotten dark and none of us had a huge desire to trudge through the darkness without urgent need.


    After collecting some firewood, I cooked up a nice, hot stew, using some of the boar-meat and vegetables. I guess it was considered cooking, not just burning something as I got points for my cooking skill. Sigmir was quite happy with my cooking exclaiming about the taste, which was quite telling as I knew it was mediocre at best, considering the conditions I had to work in. But even I had to admit that the boar-meat was incredibly tasty, after I had cooked it long enough.


    With full stomachs and happy thoughts, I cuddled up to Sigmir and it was time for bed.

 Chapter 34

    After another night camping out, Sigmir, Ylva and I made our way to the south-east, looking for the Fangtrees, while looking for valleys and elk.


    We managed to find one elk but no Dreaver so the pack Kallista had given us was rather filled now. The elk had given us a bit of trouble as it had tried to run but I had managed to cripple one of it''s legs with my first strike, allowing Ylva to catch up.


    The Fangtrees were quite distinctive, as they were a mix of Venus fly-trap, tree and tentacle-monster, making me question the sanity of this worlds evolution, or maybe the insanity of the gods, after all some god had mixed elfish dwarves and frost-giants to create the Firn-Elves.


    Fighting them was quite sporting, trying to use my Darkness was quite pointless, their connection to the earth let them shrug off my draining spell without trouble. Extreme Cold however, made them sluggish and slow, as if they were trying to hibernate, letting Sigmir hack apart their feeder-tentacles and then move to the trunk, chopping it down with the lumber-axe we had been given. Taking down five of them and storing their trunks in the Bag of Holding took us two days but the EXP those things gave were quite high, even if they were only on our level.


    When we were done, we decided to return to Neyto, taking a bit of a roundabout route and look for a second elk and the Dreaver on our way. On our second day, we saw a large, wooden dam, obviously built to fit into the landscape but not by sapient hands. There were many small tunnels into the dam so we went with the tried and true tactic of using airborne attacks, combining Cold, and Mist, Devour, Blood twice to flush them out. I didn''t use Disorientation or Madness, so I could get the Dreavers out without damaging their pelts.


    It took a few moments, but then a pack of strange beasts rushed out, meeting us. Sigmir and Ylva focused on keeping them away from me so I could kill them with my Darkness-Runes so we didn''t damage the pelts which were our objective. Killing them gave me enough to level to 35 and I immediately spent the two attribute points bringing me to 25 Intelligence and 21 Intuition. There were nice things, I gained the ability to instantly project two runes with my Rune Projection allowing me to cast simple spells incredibly fast but with a high Astral Power Cost. In addition I gained another ability.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Special Ability gained</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You gained a Special Ability: Magic Penetration</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>For having 25 Intelligence or higher you gained an ability, based on your play-style. The ability Magic Penetration allows your spells to ignore some of the enemies resistance to them.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    The ability was not flashy in any way but after having trouble with enemies simply not caring about my spells, it sounded quite good.


    Skinning the Dreaver was done on the spot and the pelts were stored in our normal backpack. Now, we just had to find one elk on our way back and we''d be done.


    We stayed out in the wild for two more days, looking for tracks and convincing Lenore to scout from us from time to time and after those two days, we managed to find another elk and hunt it down. With that done, we went back to Neyto.


    At first, we visited Cisar as we walked by his farm on the way in. To prove that we had killed the boar, we showed him the corpse.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Quest Completed!</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You completed the Quest: Kill the Dire Boar</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You gained: 15 000 EXP</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    ¡°Hrm, what to give you? I could give you ...that, but just killing a Dire Boar is a bit lax for two of those. Come back tomorrow, I''ll have something for you then.¡± said Cisar. As we were leaving we heard him mutter under his breath ¡°Damn, what to give those two...?¡±.


    We went back to Kallista next to get rid of the heavy load Sigmir was still carrying. Kallista gave me a happy hug in greeting, after seeing the village, I think she was missing female company, Neyto seemed predominantly male. After we hung the two elk at her butcher-stand, she acknowledged that we had done our quest, which triggered the completion-window and the Exp.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Quest Completed!</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You completed the Quest: Hunt Elk for Kallista</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You gained: 10 000 EXP</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>


    You reached level 36


    </td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    ¡°Well, you did as I asked. You only have those two small Bags of Holding, right? You can keep the one I gave you, it will serve you well. If you help me process those two elks, I''ll give you something extra.¡± said Kallista ¡±I have a map of the region and can explain the lay of the land for you for helping me. If the Grandmother send you out, I''m sure knowing the circumstances will be useful.¡±


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    ¡°I will help you, maybe Morgana can prepare Dinner?¡± proposed Sigmir, thankfully not mentioning my rather meagre skills when it came to skinning and butchering. I didn''t turn all the pelt into scraps any longer but my cooking-skills were far more advanced than my butchering-skills.


    ¡°Sure, I can cook, but I''d like to turn the other two quests in. I don''t want to keep the Dreaver-Pelts longer than necessary. Do you need to be nearby to get the acknowledgement?¡± I asked.


    ¡°No, that''s fine, as long as we''ve done the quest together, one person is enough to turn it in for all of them. Oh, could you ask Praxi if he can make me a piece of armour out of the Dire Boar Pelt? Or if not, I''d love to borrow use of his facilities.¡± explained Sigmir.


    ¡°Dire Boar? Oh, I''d love to get my hands on the meat, it''s delicious. I''ll make it up to you!¡± came from Kallista. Seeing her excitement, I placed the huge remaining part of the Dire Boar next to her Butcher-stand so they could take the rest apart. The field dressing we''d done was fine but they could do quite a bit more with it.


    After that, I left to meet the Blacksmith, waiting for him to interrupt his working, not wanting to distract him at an inopportune moment. After a few minutes of waiting, he looked up, this time without the angry outburst. ¡°You done? Where''s your friend? Thought she''d be with you.¡±


    ¡°She''s currently helping Kallista. And yes, we are done. Here, have a look.¡± With that, I handed the Bag of Holding over to him.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Quest Completed!</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You completed the Quest: Harvest Fangwood for Thekk</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You gained: 10 000 EXP</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    ¡°For my help, I have something in mind. Bring the Lok''nar of your companion over. Knowing the old Lady, I''m sure one of her tasks is going into the Barrow Den, I have something in mind that will help you quite a bit. Oh, and if you go in there, Draugr materialize in there with old, metal weapons. The metal those are made of is quite interesting, please collect it for me. I''ll make it worth your while.¡±


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="2">Quest Alert!</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="2">Thekk goes Death Metal</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="1">Quest Difficulty</td>


    <td colspan="1">Hard</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="2">Thekk wants you! To recover the gear used by the Draugr of the Barrow Den. The more you recover, the better the rewards.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="1">Quest Reward</td>


    <td colspan="1">Hand-Crafted Item from Thekk</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    ¡°Now, off you go, and bring the Lok''nar by as soon as possible.¡±


    With that I left the smithy to visit Praxi. He was not outside so I had to knock on his door and was asked inside. When I looked at him, I there was a strange sensation of vertigo, captivating my gaze and making me feel funny. He looked up with a smile, ¡°Ah, you are back. And all alone this time.¡± then he stood and walked towards me. For some reason my mouth ran dry and I couldn''t talk, couldn''t think. Suddenly, a voice in my head called out. ¡°Snap out of it, Morgana!¡± and Lenore materialized on my shoulder and smacked the back of my head with her wing. With the slap, I snapped out of it, I had to blink and the vertigo faded.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Special Ability gained</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You gained the Special Ability: Mental Resistance</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>This ability strengthens your mind against outside influence. The resistance strength depends on your Courage and your Intuition.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    ¡°He tried to charm you! Be cautious!¡± cawed Lenore who was spreading her wings and trying to make herself as large as possible.


    I got my guard up and placed both hands on my blades and readied the shuttle with my Ice-Magic. ¡°Care to explain? I came to turn your quest in, not be assaulted!¡± I growled out.


    Praxi blushed. ¡°I apologize. I did not think to reign in my nature. I''m a Satyr, I naturally project a charm-effect, normally I rein it in as to not affect others but just now I forgot. Reining it in is a bit chafing which is why I don''t do it in the privacy of my home. Again, I apologize. You said something about my quest?¡±


    I kept my guard up while I gave him the pelts and asked if he wanted them all or just five. He agreed to take them all and increase the reward a bit.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Quest Completed!</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You completed the Quest: Collect Dreaver Pelts for Praxi</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You gained: 12 500 EXP</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    ¡°Before I forget, Sigmir asked if you could craft her a nice piece of armour out of this?¡± I showed him the Dire Boar-Pelt. He inspected it for a moment, then agreed. ¡°Yes, I can do that. Now, for my promised help. I''d like to work with your cloak for a bit and with the one of your companion. I have something useful in mind for you. It will only take a few hours so you can have them back tomorrow. For the armour, I''m afraid it will take longer, maybe a week. Now, could you bring me your friend¡¯s cloak? Then I can start.¡±


    Still a bit creeped out about his projected charm-effect and my reaction to it, I agreed. Then I walked back over to Kallista''s house and asked Sigmir for her cloak and the Lok''nar. Kallista assured us that the craftsmen would do good work on both. I went back out, delivering both items, then came back to prepare dinner. Looking over the possible ingredients, I made a fake goulash and got multiple skill-points in cooking, making me a happy camper.


    Soon, it was time for dinner and then Sigmir and I luxuriated in the warm bath, then enjoyed another night, sharing a bed. The last few days had been exhausting so neither of us was particularly horny, we just cuddled and enjoyed the feeling of closeness.

 Chapter 35

    The next morning started with a leisurely breakfast and happy chit-chat with our host. After breakfast, it was time for her to show us the map and explain it. We told her the locations for our tasks, the Barrow Den, Mount Yugid and the Gardens of Tegi.


    She got out a scroll of parchment, slightly worn but still easily readable. On it, she showed us Neyto on a large peninsula, Yugan at the end of the eastern fjord making up said peninsula and further to the west, on the end of a mountain range, the town of Yari we had already heard about. With that, we had a rough outline of our position on the map and the distances involved. She first showed us that the Barrow Den which was maybe a day''s march or so to the west north west of Neyto, at the sea. I had a feeling it would be the easiest-to-reach location. Next, she explained to us that Tegi was a grove close to the river that eventually ended close to Yugan. It was quite the distance, at least ten days march to the south. Mount Yugid was roughly equal distance south but further west, in the middle of the mountain range that ended close to Yari.


    Looking at the map, I really wanted some swifter transportation, it looked like a serious journey. When I mentioned it, Kallista smiled for a moment and told us that going to the Barrow Den first would be a smart idea. Then she asked us for help with Tegi. Apparently she was quite miffed with the dryads there, as they used sacrifice to power the growth of their trees, something she felt to be heretical. Not because the sacrifice involved but because they used the power to buck the natural order. I was not quite sure I understood her point and asked about it, wondering if she¡¯d feel the same about my Blood Magic.


    ¡°Well, no. The dryads of Tegi claim to be servants of the Cycle of Seasons, they draw their power from it. At the same time, they use ritual sacrifice to ignore the effect of the Cycle. In addition, they don¡¯t respect their prey. Their hunters capture the prey alive so their priests can drain it at their leisure, back in their camp. You on the other hand, go out there yourself, hunting and fighting the prey and if the prey falls, you respect it by using as much of it as possible. You don¡¯t just bleed them dry and discard their bodies.¡± Kallista explained.


    With her explanation about her feelings for hunter and prey, her opinion was a little clearer so I had no problem to promise that we''d free the wild animals that were captured as sacrifices.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="2">Quest Alert!</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="2">Save the Sacrifices.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="1">Quest Difficulty</td>


    <td colspan="1">Hard</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="2">Kallista wants you to save all wild animals captured as sacrifices by the Dryads of Tegi.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="1">Quest Reward</td>


    <td colspan="1">Surprise from Kallista</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    Afterwards, we headed out, first over to Praxi, looking for our cloaks. He had promised that we could get them this morning. He was outside, working on the Dire Boar pelt as we walked up. After a short greeting, he got our cloaks from the inside of his house.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="10">Black Feather Cloak of Stealth</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="5">Rarity</td>


    <td colspan="5">Rare</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="5">Type</td>


    <td colspan="5">Cloak</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="5">Base Protection</td>


    <td colspan="5">3 against Piercing Damage</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="5">Base Protection</td>


    <td colspan="5">5 against Slashing Damage</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="5">Base Protection</td>


    <td colspan="5">5 against Blunt Damage</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="5">Special Effect</td>


    <td colspan="5">Shadowmelt ¨C Gain concealment while in Darkness</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="5">Special Effect</td>


    <td colspan="5">Enshade - Channelling Astral Power into the cloak allows for Improved Stealth</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="10">A well made, warm Black Leather Cloak, trimmed with Black Wolf-Fur and Crow Feathers, It''s embroidered with Concealment and Stealth-Enchantments.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    The Cloak was definitely mine but with enhancements. The shoulder-area was trimmed with black feathers that gave off slight, black smoke and on closer look, there were small runes carved into the quill of each feather. I guess those were for the stealth-effect. I donned my cloak and reached out with my mind. I found the runes and let some Astral Power flow into them and looking down, I saw that the cloak was blending into it''s surroundings quite well, even with the extreme contrast of white snow and black cloak, my eyes simply slipped off the boundary, as if there was no contrast there.


    Imagining the effect in the darkness made those cloaks quite useful. Walking over into the shadows of the building and using Dark Magic I was even able to increase the shadow around me, making me almost impossible to see according to Sigmir.


    "Now, I have something to ask of you. I heard that you are supposed to head to Mount Yugid, to the fire birds. The eyries of those birds get burned by their flames, producing a peculiar ash which is very useful for tanning. I want you to collect some of it when you are there. Consider it payment for my work on the armour. If you collect enough, I''ll give you something extra."


    I agreed and there was a quest.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="2">Quest Alert!</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="2">Ashes to Praxi...</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="1">Quest Difficulty</td>


    <td colspan="1">Hard</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="2">Collect the Ashes from the Firebird Eyries on Mount Yugid for Praxi.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="1">Quest Reward</td>


    <td colspan="1">Dire Boar-Armour</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    With that done, we headed to Thekk. For once, he was not bowed over his forge, but sitting relaxed in a corner, watching a complicated metal device in the fires of his furnace.


    ¡°Ah, there you are. I''m processing the Fangwood you brought me, that''ll take some time, ya know. But I did manage to do what I planned. Here, look, I used true silver to plate the edges of your Lok''nar. It''s a lot sharper than before and it will work even better against those that are weak against silver, like Nethersprites and Undead. It''ll serve you well in the Barrow Den.¡±


    Sigmir picked up the Lok''nar, weighing it in her hands, checking it''s balance and the new edges. The smile on her face told me that she was quite happy with the work done. We both thanked Thekk and went on our merry way.


    Walking by Kallista''s House, she called out to us. ¡°Girls, go, talk to Cisar before you leave. And if you help me this evening again, I''ll make you some provisions for your way.¡± I agreed, the prospect of sleeping in a bed was quite enticing, not to talk about cooking in an actual kitchen. Campfire-Cooking would be necessary soon enough.


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    At Cisar''s Farm, he was easy to find, he was again splitting logs behind his house. My personal hope was to get the quest-reward from last time, but alas it was not to be. When we approached, he asked us to collect Clean Bones from the Skeletons in the Barrow Den. When we accepted, he smiled happily.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="2">Quest Alert!</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="2">Bones for the fields</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="1">Quest Difficulty</td>


    <td colspan="1">Hard</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="2">Cisar wants you to collect Bones from the Skeletons within the Barrow Den.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="1">Quest Reward</td>


    <td colspan="1">A pair of Command Crystals</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    Reading it over made me wonder what Command Crystals were, but asking simply increased the smile on his face, and he shooed us off his land.


    Now, we just had to plan the rest of the day. Noon was upon us, so there were only few hours of daylight left, too few to actually leave the village for something useful. As a result, Sigmir and I decided to train a bit against each other in combat. Unarmed, I was almost able to match her due to my real life training in Wing Chun but as soon as weapons came out I was outclassed by her. Using Magic equalized it somewhat but not as much as I hoped. Even strengthened by Magic, I was unable to parry her strikes, forcing me to dodge. Using Rune Magic against her was honestly problematic I was completely unable to muster the will to hurt her, making my spells a lot weaker than normal. Ice Magic was better, I was able to parry with it but the amount of Astral Power it took was enormous. Soon it became a game of keep-away, either I had to try to stay far enough away that I could dodge or I had to step into her guard while she used the length of her weapon but that also had dangers, stepping into her guard meant step close to an axehead that could suddenly be used with little leverage but a lot of strength.


    I managed to get to her a few times and used those times to throw her into the snow. Most of the time, our exchanges ended with her Lok''nar pressed against me after she stopped it short of hitting me.


    At one point, I thought I had her but suddenly it wasn''t only her flying through the air, she had managed to grab my arm and pull me with her making me land handily on her. Looking up, I saw her grinning ¡°Look what tasty morsel I caught. Now, what to do with it?¡± with that she rolled us over burying me below her. ¡°Maybe I should eat it?¡± with that she gave me a short kiss, then started nibbling on my lips. ¡°It is a mightily tasty snack.¡± Only the freezing cold of the snow kept me from starting to rip off clothes. ¡°Now, that is an interesting new technique, isn''t it dear?¡± I asked. ¡°But maybe we should continue this in the bath or later, in our bed?¡± The smile on Sigmir''s face as she looked down on me could only be described as predatory. ¡°Yes, I think we will do that.¡± with that she rose and offered me a hand to help me up, a hand that I gladly took and kept hold of.


    Hand in hand, we went back to Kallista''s house and snuggled up in front of the fire, something that Kallista herself watched with wistful eyes but said nothing.


    I think I fell asleep in Sigmir''s arms but far too soon, I was pulled out of my relaxation by Kallista''s voice, calling for help in the kitchen. Today, Sigmir went with me into the kitchen and watched while I helped Kallista in creating our dinner. At dinner, Kallista asked us to watch out for each other, for without the other, our life would be diminished. Her sad smile said more than she could using thousands of words. My hand found Sigmir''s and we clutched each other''s hand, gripping tightly as if we could stave off separation by this.


    Spoiler: Spoiler<input class="spoilerButton" type="button" value="Show">


    After dinner, it was time for a bath. Before I could even start shedding my own clothes, my hands were gripped by Sigmir and my back pushed against the wall, not hard enough that it hurt but quite insistent. While kissing me hotly, my hands were pushed up, over my head and gripped within a single hand. Still holding me immobile, she managed to shed her clothes within moments, despite only using one hand and having her mouth attached to mine. When I looked into her eyes, I had to wonder if the stories about Giants eating humans had another connotation to them, for there was pure hunger in them. I was about to get eaten.


    Lifting me up, into the air without even the slightest strain, she carried me to the bathtub and placed me into the water, setting my hands to the sides of the tub and telling me that I¡¯d be a good girl and not move a muscle or she¡¯d be unhappy. The look in her eyes fascinated me, so I decided to be a good girl as there was no way in hell I wanted to make her unhappy. So I kept my hands to myself, no matter how hard it was.


    I guess I should not be surprised that her, let¡¯s call it playbook, was quite similar to what I did to her, but she put her own spin on it. While I was sitting in the tub, she also got in, not sitting down but standing tall, not even looking at me while using a washcloth to wash herself. I¡¯m not sure if it was deliberate but the her size and stance caused her delicious butt to be right there, in front of my eyes and when she bend over I was tempted, oh so tempted to take a nibble and start licking her kitty for all I was worth. But no, I would be a good girl and not move myself in the face of temptation.


    Thankfully, she didn¡¯t take too long and turned back to me, kneeling between my legs and letting her body hover above me. Next, she started caressing me all over, not even pretending to wash me, just soft strokes of her strong hands, sometimes nibbles on my lips or ears, driving me crazy with desire. As I was panting and trying to keep myself from squirming, she stopped with the caresses and used the washcloth to make me squeaky clean. Her vigorous scrubbing was a totally different sensation compared to her earlier ministrations causing my hypersensitive nerves to send all kinds of signals to my brain causing me to uncontrollably moan and plead with her. But there was no mercy to be had, only when she was sure that I was clean she lifted up, this time it was necessary, my legs had decided to go on strike and turned to rubber. Holding me up, she used clear water to wash away any soap, then lifted me out of the tub and dried us both.


    Without ever letting me touch the floor, she searched for remaining soap using her tongue. When she came to my kitty, she simply held me by the butt and went to town. I think I managed to hold onto her head but I¡¯d be lying if I claimed to have had awareness.


    Her tongue wormed her way into me, turning my moans into incoherent screams. I don¡¯t know how long she held me like that, knowing her strength it could have been hours but as I was still alive, I¡¯d guess a couple of minutes. She let me gently come down from my high and wrapped me into my cloak, carrying me like a child, or a bride, back to our chamber, placing me into bed and holding onto me. I wanted to return the favor but before I managed more than a few kisses, I did what men are normally known for.


    I fell asleep.

 Chapter 36

    After sleeping better than ever, thanks to the workout with Sigmir, the morning came with a smiling Kallista, waking us up. She took quite the delight in tormenting the two of us, asking if we had heard to howling during the night, her teasing grin making it clear that she was referring to us. Her laughter at our blushing was good natured though and the wistful smile that came over her face afterwards told of love lost but not forgotten. I guess there was a story there, maybe I''d learn it one day. Still, today we had plans of travel so after breakfastwe headed out, into the pre-dawn darkness.


    We travelled most of the day, from time to time fighting with the wildlife but by now, we had that down pat, having fought pretty much every animal in these forests at one point or another.


    As dusk settled in, we saw the ocean before us, an endless, grey expanse, riddled with white flecks where ice was floating along. And overlooking the shore, standing out against the sky a single, lonely hill, bare in contrast to the forests around us.


    The closer to the foot of the hill one got, the smaller and more crippled the trees looked until they fully ceased to grow about a hundred feet away, creating a sad looking contrast. Even in the snow, the trees further away looked healthy contrasting to the picture of desolation around the hill. There was a strange feeling of incongruity but it was between the nature around us and the hill itself. However I felt myself drawn to the feeling the hill gave off, as if it was inviting me. I felt as if I belonged there. I was not sure what to make of that feeling.


    Looking around, there was an entrance into the hill itself, old, weathered masonry, grown over with a strange, green moss which was glowing slightly, visible even in the light of the setting sun. We decided to make camp a bit away from the hill, not wanting to camp within the radius of the strange effect it gave off. Making camp was a practised chore, Ylva looking for dry wood, even Lenore winging around a bit but soon returning to the warmth of her Hallow, Sigmir preparing a dry spot for our fire and me cleaning a space to sleep and then starting dinner preparations.


    Today, we got especially lucky, shortly after we started our tasks, Ylva returned to our campsite telling us that she found a large, fallen tree with plenty of space in a hollow under it''s limbs, giving us a dry, snow-free campsite with plenty of firewood around. I called out to Lenore, asking her to return and shortly after she landed on my shoulder for a moment before returning into her Hallow.


    ¡°That hill, it calls to me.¡± Lenore told me within my mind. ¡°It''s as if I belong within it''s boundary, I don''t quite know why.¡±


    Now, it was my turn to be surprised, the feeling she described and the mental imagery that flowed through our bond was incredibly similar to my own feelings around the hill. While working, I conversed with Lenore about our feelings, speculating what they might mean. Luckily for me, dinner was pre-made by Kallista so there was little chance of my distraction spoiling it but Sigmir caught on.


    After we ate dinner, she pulled me down onto her lap and asked ¡°You seem disturbed, Morgana. Would you like to share your burden with me?¡±


    With her imploring look and held in her warm arms, it was impossible to say no. I started to talk about the strange feeling of incongruity and the feeling of attraction Lenore and I shared towards the hill. Interestingly, being held gave me a different feeling of belonging, dampening the call of the hill.


    At this point, Ylva did something new, she rubbed against Sigmir, then curling herself around us, seeking contact. Then Lenore came out of her Hallow, lying against Ylva and staying close to us.


    ¡°I may have an idea what may be going on. As Spirit-Beasts we belong to one or more elements. For Ylva, it is Ice, which is why she has high resistance to it and is able to use rudimentary ice magic. For me, it is either Death or Darkness, similar to my ancestor who was one of the strongest dark spirits. Sadly, I don''t have any abilities relating to my element, only the gift of understanding from my ancestor and the strong connection to the Astral. The reason we are so compatible, Morgana, is that you have a strong affinity with Darkness, maybe even with it''s higher element, Death.


    The Hill itself radiates death magic, and considering our task, I guess that is the reason for the restless dead inside. The magic permeates the hill itself, drawing souls, not letting them rest in peace unless they are dispersed from the outside,¡± Lenore cawed out and from the look of Sigmir''s face, Ylva played translator for her.


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    Sigmir had a slightly uneasy look on her face, causing Ylva to bark, ¡°Now, don''t think like that, partner. You think of death as something bad, but it is not. Death and change are simply an integral part of life, for without death, there could be no life, the world would stagnate into a lifeless, orderly stasis. Balance. Balance is the key to existence. Beings like Morgana or Lenore are simply necessary parts of the whole.¡±


    Sigmir blushed a bit and held me closer, as if to assure me that no matter what, she''d hold onto me, giving me a welcome, warm and fuzzy feeling. It was amazing how close I felt to her, after a few weeks together. I''d hold onto her, no matter what. Soon, Lenore returned to her Hallow, feeling the cold despite our puppy-pile, being the only one without cold resistance amongst our group.


    When Sigmir and I went into our sleeping furs, Ylva crept close, seeking warmth and companionship. We pulled her close, trying to show her that she had a place with us and was welcome. That night was full moon, the moon illuminating the night and we heard wolves in the distance. I guess the full moon reminded her of the rejection from her pack, normally the wolf-packs would run through the night, howling, hunting and sharing their bond with each other. Ylva had lost that bond, due to being cast out of her pack, I think she was feeling the sting that night especially harsh. Both Sigmir and I communicated without needing words, holding her and stroking her soft fur. Soon, Ylva asked to rest within her Hallow so Sigmir placed her hand on her head, stroking her and Ylva turned into silver light and streamed into her hand.


    Sigmir and I snuggled into each other, soon falling asleep, enjoying each other''s arms.


    In the middle of the night, it felt as I startled awake but there was just blackness around me. Then a loud caw grabbed my attention, and I saw Lenore sitting on air, close to me. I looked strangely at her, not knowing what to make of the situation. Then Lenore became aware of me and looked back.


    ¡°Morgana? How are you here? This...¡± she cawed.


    ¡°Where are we? This feels so strange.¡± I answered, looking around.


    ¡°We are in my Hallow. The space I inhabit when I rest. It''s within you but somehow you are within it? I don''t understand.¡±


    Just then, a second, loud caw sounded in the space, causing both Lenore and me to jump in surprise.


    Looking around, a huge raven had appeared, standing at least 6 feet tall, towering over both of us. The feeling it gave off was incredible, a wellspring of power radiating outwards, not suppressing but embracing us.


    It hopped closer, looking both of us over, as if measuring us. ¡°So, one of my descendants found her way here? It''s nice to know that some things remain, even after everything that happened. And such an interesting host you have attached yourself to. No mercy, no remorse, such a pure soul, almost untainted by mortal emotions. Beautiful. And so fitting. As if made for one of us. But it is pathetic that you are unable to use the simplest skill of our race. Your eyes, child, use your eyes!¡±


    Lenore looked strangely and suddenly, I felt a sharp pain in my left eye as if a needle was poked into it, ripping me out of the strange space I was in and leaving me wide awake.


    There was a strange sensation in my left eye, so I closed my right eye and looked around. From the direction of the hill, I was able to make out a strange glow and the cold light of the moon was leaving silver trails in my eye, as if leaving a residue. The trees around me had a subdued green glow to them. Then a blue window appeared.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Companion Ability gained</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You gained the Companion Ability: Raven''s Sight</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>While your Companion rests in its Hallow or you join it¡¯s sight with Raven¡¯s Eye, you can draw upon the mystic sight of the Raven, allowing you to perceive magic in visible form.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    I felt the pride of Lenore and heard her mental voice ¡°My Hallow must have connected to the stream of Darkness and my ancestor contacted us. Only when dreams are synchronised can that happen. And the Ancestor... I''ve never felt anything like that, I felt like a baby bird, sheltered by the wings of my parents. He helped me to awaken one of my racial abilities, did you feel it? I can now peek behind the veil to see the truth of magic.¡±


    Her exultation made me smile but there were still questions. ¡°Yes, I felt it. But I¡¯d like to know what just happened.¡±


    ¡°You know that the Astral River is like, well, a River. It¡¯s fed out of many tributaries connected to the Spirit-Realms. However the streams don¡¯t perfectly mix, there are still small pockets within the flow of the Astral River. We just joined into one of those pockets and my Ancestor met with us. Or maybe my Ancestor pulled us into it. I believe it¡¯s because the Barrow Den radiates Darkness so strongly.¡±


    Well, that was a happy thought. I turned for some time, until I fell back asleep.

 Chapter 37

    With dawn, we rose, breaking camp and making our way over to the hill, inspecting the entrance and then opening it. The door was made out of a large, stone wheel, allowing us to roll it into an opening so the entrance was open. The moss that we had seen outside was also inside, shedding green light, bathing the corridor in an eerie glow.


    Looking at the narrow corridor, Sigmir asked me if I could create a shield and an one-handed axe for her, worried that she wouldn''t be able to use her Lok''nar effectively inside the narrow space. I sat and first created the Rune Heptagon I''d need to make items out of Hard Ice, then I let myself fall into a trance that allowed me to draw as much power through me as possible. Everything around me faded away, leaving only the item I wanted to create and my connection to the Astral River. Shaping the Ice as it was created was easier than before, maybe it was the connection with Lenore, maybe it was the experience I had, maybe both. Anyway, it took some time but then I had the shield.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="10">Hard Ice Shield</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="5">Rarity</td>


    <td colspan="5">Uncommon</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="5">Type</td>


    <td colspan="5">Shield</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="5">Base Protection</td>


    <td colspan="5">12 against Piercing Damage</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="5">Base Protection</td>


    <td colspan="5">12 against Slashing Damage</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="5">Base Protection</td>


    <td colspan="5">8 against Blunt Damage</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="5">Special Effect</td>


    <td colspan="5">Imbued - Due to the process used for the creation of this weapon, it is strongly in tune with the Ice-Magic of the Traveller Morgana. 25% lower cost when wielded by her Ice-Magic.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="5">Special Effect</td>


    <td colspan="5">Brittle ¨C Blunt Damage may shatter this Shield</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="10">A Shield created out of Hard Ice by the Traveller Morgana. It provides good protection but may shatter due to the material used.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="10">Spiked Frozen Axe</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="5">Rarity</td>


    <td colspan="5">Uncommon</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="5">Type</td>


    <td colspan="5">One-Handed Axe</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="5">Base Damage</td>


    <td colspan="5">3 Damage Piercing</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="5">Base Damage</td>


    <td colspan="5">10 Damage Slashing</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="5">Base Damage</td>


    <td colspan="5">8 Damage Blunt</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="5">Strength Modifier</td>


    <td colspan="5">High</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="3">Special Effect</td>


    <td colspan="7">Imbued - Due to the process used for the creation of this weapon, it is strongly in tune with the Ice-Magic of the Traveller Morgana. 25% lower cost when wielded by her Ice-Magic.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="10">This Spiked Axe was created out of Hard Ice by the Traveller Morgana. The material used, makes it lighter than normal, brittle and vulnerable to heat.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    Sigmir hung her Lok''nar from the baldric she wore and held her hands out for her new gear. I handed Sigmir both items and she stepped back to test their balance and heft while I replenished my Astral Power. Then it was time to enter the Dungeon.


    As we entered, a blue screen appeared.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Dungeon entered!</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You have entered an instanced Dungeon, the Barrow Den. Only those of your party can enter this dimension from the outside.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You are the first Traveller entering the Barrow Den. For the first three days, you gain the Dungeon Traveller-Buff, granting Bonus EXP.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    I placed my buffs on Sigmir and Ylva and we started down the corridor, being watchful as we had no idea what to expect in here. There was no sound, other than our own breathing which sounded incredibly loud in the narrow room. Even our soft steps broke the silence of the corridor, it was truly silent ¨C like a grave.


    Soon, we got to a crossroad, ahead was a massive stone door, that did not move in the slightest, no matter what we did with it. To both sides, a mirror image of the corridor we were in, continued further into the mountain, curving to follow the shape of the mountain. After a short deliberation, we started down the left corridor. After maybe 50 steps, there was an opening on the left wall and as we came closer, we suddenly heard shuffling noises so we hurried closer. Looking into the opening, there was a small room with multiple alcoves set into the walls. Inside, multiple skeletons were just starting to move out of their alcoves. Their eyes were glowing in a strange, dark light, similar to my own Dark Radiance spells only with a slight, reddish tinge to it. The shuffling noises were the skeletons getting rid of dust and cobwebs and moving about, I could see two with weapons, the rest had none. I guess we had been heard and started them into action.


    Sigmir placed herself into the opening, bracing herself for their attack and using the narrow opening to her advantage. She could have used her Lok''nar inside but I guess she felt it would be better to only face one or two skeletons at a time without them being able to flank her. I stood behind her, and began throwing magic at them. Pure Cold was completely ineffective, and Icicles were only mildly effective, I guess piercing damage was useless against skeletons. I didn''t even try to attack their vitality, after all it was a magic based on life and blood, something skeletons had in very little supply. That left me only a few options, I tried to grasp them with my Dark Magic and there was a slight feedback but all I did was make one stumble a little for quite a bit Astral Power.


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    I observed one and got:


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>


    Skeleton, Level 35


    </td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    Observing the rest told me that all of them were Skeletons, with levels between 35 and 38.


    Meanwhile, Sigmir was blocking the entrance, holding them at bay with her shield. From time to time, Ylva was darting through her legs, biting a skeleton''s leg, destroying it''s stance and giving Sigmir the chance to land a punishing strike with her axe.


    However, similar to me, Ylva was unable to deliver lasting damage making it quite hard on Sigmir who was slowly pushed back by the weight of the skeletons. I tried striking with my shuttle and it helped but not enough to stem the tide. Then I had an idea and as soon as Sigmir brought down her axe, I used my Ice Magic on it, trying to strengthen it''s momentum and the strike smashed into the collar bone of a skeleton, breaking it cleanly off and destroying large parts of it''s ribcage before I helped Sigmir to recover it. In the same way, I was able to help stabilizing the shield, lending my magic strength to Sigmir''s physical strength. With that, the pressure on her greatly decreased.


    But it wasn¡¯t enough, I needed another idea. Their eyes were glowing with dark magic and I was able to influence them with it. Maybe a devouring effect against their Dark Magic would work. So I created a simple spell of Dark Radiance, Devour and Curse, combining it with the mental image of the magic that held them devouring itself.


    The beam struck one of the skeletons in it''s arm and the bones dropped down, no longer animated. Excited with the fact that I had something that worked against them, I re-cast the spell, this time aiming for the head of another skeleton. Again, the dark beam struck and the glow visibly weakened but didn''t vanish. A second triangle-spell was not enough, but two more were able to reduce the weakened skeleton to loose bones.


    Four triangle spells were quite the expenditure of Astral Power so I tried it with a Rune-Pentagon and it took two of those to destroy a single skeleton. So my next spell was a seven rune spell and the effect was uplifting, the beam struck the head of a skeleton and it collapsed.


    Casting those spells reduced the skeletons to bones in short order and soon the room was almost empty. Just as we rejoiced, we heard a soft growl from Ylva. ¡°There are more!¡±


    I looked around and indeed, from further down the corridor, another, smaller group of skeletons was approaching. I redoubled my efforts with the skeletons in the room and was able to shatter them before the second group reached us. I snapped off one of my spells but to my dismay, the front skeleton was able to lift it''s shield in the way, blocking the beam and the spell was unable to affect the metal shield.


    Then it was time to switch, with us being in the room and the skeletons being outside. It was a risk to trap ourself like that but it was either that or getting overrun in the corridor. I had a little less than half my Astral Power remaining so I used some of it to heal Sigmir, trying to heal both the wounds she had received and the exhaustion. Then I rebuffed her and Ylva as the new group was upon us. Looking closer, there were only four skeletons, compared to the eight at our feet. I waited until Ylva had unbalanced the one with the shield and struck with a prepared rune-formation, reducing it to a heap of bones. The next skeleton went down easily but then the tortured shield on Sigmir''s arm was shattered by a heavy blow, forcing her to use her axe to parry. I threw both thought processes into helping her, activating bullet time so my left hand could keep up and started casting two spells at once, each hand drawing one spell and using Rune Projection to insert the last runes. Moments later, Both skeletons were struck and joined their brethren as heaps on the floor.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Skeleton died</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You gain 1 800 EXP.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>For killing an opponent 1 level above you you gain Bonus EXP</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>For killing an opponent without a Traveller in your party, you gain Bonus EXP</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>For killing an opponent with the Dungeon Traveller-Bonus in effect, you gain Bonus EXP</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>


    You reached level 37.


    </td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Skill increased</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You increased your skill: Darkness Rune-Mastery [48/100]</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Skill increased</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You increased your skill: Ice Magic [46/100]</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Skill increased</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You increased your skill: Darkness Magic [6/100]</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    As Sigmir''s shield had shattered, she picked up one of the shield the skeleton had used but the metal was causing her pain while draining stamina at a rapid pace, making her unable to use it. Even holding it to throw it into the Bag of Holding for Thekk was painful enough that we only handled the metal with covered hands but that only blunted the effect, it didn''t stop it.


    The next step was healing Sigmir up and recreating her shield, trying to increase it''s thickness and strength this time. After healing her, I fell into meditation to regain my Astral Power.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Skill increased</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You increased your skill: Astral Meditation [25/100]</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    Then I recreated the shield, trying to strengthen it against shattering by focusing on the individual crystals and trying to somehow weave them together. Sadly, there was little success but I felt as if there was the possibility but my skill was insufficient. While I was doing that, Sigmir collected the weapons and bones of our enemies for Cisar and Thekk. Then it was time to move on.

 Chapter 38

    After we had cleared the first room of the dungeon, we continued our way further down the corridor. Soon, we reached another side-room, this time with four skeletons, all of them already out of their alcoves, waiting for us. I guess the four we fought before were in this room as it had eight alcoves all in all. This time Sigmir wanted to try the silver-plating on her Lok''nar so she charged in the room and a red glow materialised around her. The silver plating worked like a charm, a few strikes destroyed the skeletons without much trouble and then I had to heal the wounds she had taken in her assault.


    Fighting four enemies in close quarters meant that they got a few strikes in, even if the red aura had weakened the blows quite a bit. I asked about it and she told me it was a skill of her class, allowing her to throw herself into a battle-trance to strengthen her blows and weaken the strikes of her foes. Looking at her, it took quite a bit out of her, I guess she wanted to try it out against fewer enemies as she was still not back to the strength she normally needed for her class and its skills.


    We moved on and the next two rooms held the same, more skeletons, this time they had not heard us. The tactics we had used for the first room worked just fine, Sigmir blocking them in, me striking with what amounted to anti-magic against their weakness.


    Destroying them gave insane amounts of EXP, allowing me to reach level 38 after we cleared four rooms of skeletons. In addition, my Darkness Rune Mastery reached 50 and Ice Magic, Darkness-Magic and Astral Meditation gained points as well. I guess using the magic in new ways was the way to raise them quickly. For example, I was using my Ice Magic to support Sigmir''s movement, not to facilitate movement by myself which meant a more fluid use or I''d disturb her control.


    About fifty steps after the fourth room, there was an opening on the right side, leading into the middle of the structure we were in. However, through the opening we were able to see a large stone coffin, making my gamer-instincts tingle. If it wasn''t a boss-room, I''d eat a pair of fuzzy, pink slippers. Not that I owned one. I''d buy one and eat it! I warned Sigmir, as I was a bit scared that attacking the boss would make enough noise to bring down the rest of the skeletons.. In addition, they gave excellent amounts of experience, something I wanted to abuse if possible, so we continued our way forward, ignoring the boss room for now.


    The other side of the circle was just like the one we had just cleared. More skeletons, more EXP, enough to give me another level and a few skill points, making me quite the happy camper. I asked Sigmir about it and apparently in dungeons, it took weeks, sometimes months for enemies to respawn. New groups would see a new instance of the dungeon but nobody really knew why. As long as one member of the group had visited a dungeon, everyone in the party would enter the same instance. If they destroyed enemies within, they would connect to that instance and not be able to enter a new instance. It was a bit of strange magic nobody understood but everyone accepted, it was just how things were. To me, it was a normal lock-out system even if it was a tad strange to hear about it from a ''native''.


    After we had cleared the full circle, we were back were we began, at the locked door. We walked another circle, I made sure that Sigmir''s Ice Weapons were in top condition before we took on the boss.


    As we reached to entrance, I gave Sigmir a kiss for luck, followed by my buffs and we looked at the room together. It was circular but a lot smaller than the circle we had just walked. The room was maybe a two hundred feet across and on the other side, was a large door, similar to the one at the beginning however a quick calculation told me that it could not be the same door, unless it was about 300 feet thick. A few pillars held up the ceiling above us.


    Sigmir readied her Lok''nar, more comfortable with it than with the Ice Weaponry and together we stepped inside. An invisible wave started from the coffin in the middle and a large skeleton rose from it. It looked similar to those we had fought but it was clad in a strange grey leather armour and had two axes in it''s hands. I observed it and got:


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>


    Schandmaul ¨C Level 40


    </td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    Suddenly it started laughing and talked. ¡°So, has the old hag found more fools for her games? I was once like you, getting tasks from the hag. I just wanted my beloved to love me back, is that so bad? I asked for a love-spell, and she told me I''d have to bring her the hardest rock, the brightest sun-ray and the source of life and she''d give it to me. I wanted to succeed, I was driven to it, so I trained, I studied and I prepared for years.


    Then I sneaked into Dwergarheim, looking for the obsidium-stones they use for their forges, those are said to be the hardest known material. I managed to steal some of it and get back out, even if those cursed dwergar chased after me like mad, I escaped. To get the brightest ray of sun, I had to sneak onto Olympus and take if from Helios'' Chariot. Again, I trained, again I prepared and again, I succeeded. For the last task, the source of life? To me, it meant the apples of immortality and after long preparation I went to Idun''s Garden and stole an apple. The whole task took years but I managed. With that, I felt I had fulfilled the task set by the hag and even if it had taken most of my life, I would get my beloved.


    Do you know what happened? When I got to the cursed hag, she LAUGHED! She laughed and told me I had failed. FAILED! I had stolen from the gods for her stupid tasks and she called me a failure. I attacked her in my rage, trying to take what she had promised but her magic is strong and within her realm I was struck down with ease, but she didn''t spare my soul. No, she imprisoned it and now I''m bound here.


    Now, you will die, just like I died for the stupid tasks of the cursed hag.¡±


    Neither Sigmir nor I had been able to try to silence him, there had been some invisible force that held us spellbound, I was able to move a little bit, probably thanks to my Mental Resistance, but it took huge amounts of effort. The force vanished the moment he stopped talking and Sigmir took the lead, charging into him. I started my anti-magic spell and send my shuttle with Sigmir to help if possible. Sigmir started to fight with him and the skeleton managed to parry her strikes despite the huge weapon difference. I finished my spell and it struck the skeleton''s head, making it stumble for a moment. I started casting another spell, hoping to wear it down.


    If you come across this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.


    All of a sudden, the skeleton jumped back and threw something at me. Instantly, I dodged aside but was clipped at the shoulder. Luckily, I was hit while in the air so I just started to spin and little force was absorbed by my body or I might have broken a few bones. As it were, my shoulder hurt like hell, even with the additional padding my cloak provided there. I looked around for the missile and behind me was a small, black rock, no larger than a finger. While I was looking at it, it disappeared into thin air. I redoubled my efforts in attacking the skeleton but kept my shuttle between us so I might be able to block another attack and stood close to a pillar to take cover behind.


    The fight raged on and I moved close to Sigmir for a moment, drawing a single blood rune and instantly projecting two more to heal her and then again to reapply the buffs. The skeleton tried to take advantage of my position but I was able to use my Butterfly Wings to block the strikes and use their force to distance myself again. Those strikes also allowed Sigmir to get a nice hit in, sadly it didn''t do much.


    Again, the skeleton jumped back, I moved my shuttle between us but it wasn''t the rock that was used. It took something from it''s tunic and suddenly, the whole room was bathed in blinding, bright light. It felt like staring right into the sun, my eyes were burning and there was only white in my eyes.


    ¡°Lenore, I need you!¡± I thought to my companion who had stayed within her Hallow, granting me extra Astral Power Regeneration but now I needed her eyes. She appeared and the next instant I was able to see again, even if it was a slightly strange view-point. Sigmir had taken the blinding a lot better but still, she had taken a bad hit and one of her arms was bleeding heavily.


    All of a sudden, the world was filled with colour, Sigmir was glowing in a deep, pulsing crimson mixed with flecks of silver, Ylva was made of a bright, silver light but the most interesting was our enemy. The skeleton had a black aura but a line of vibrant green linked the skeleton to the coffin in the middle of the room. Each strike from Sigmir took a little of the black aura but shortly after, the green line pulsed and the black aura was replenished. It was as if the coffin or something within it was feeding the black aura and erasing our progress. Another thing I saw was that a thin connection was between the skeleton and the closed door, but it appeared dormant.


    I told Lenore to move a bit to the side and used the Enshade-Effect of my cloak, combined with a concealment spell of my own, trying to hide in the shadows. I circled the room, moving from pillar to pillar, until I had a clear shot to the coffin in the middle without getting too close to the skeleton. I had to run in, trying to keep my footing with the strange view-point, it was a strange feeling to see me running while having to adjust to the information I was seeing.


    As I reached the coffin, Lenore was flying over to me so I could see inside as I was still blinded. When she was close enough, I was able to see a large fruit inside. Once, it might have been a golden apple but now, it had a sickly tinge to it, as if it had rusted. The skeleton started shouting and tried to get to Lenore, preventing her from coming closer but I was already there. Taking both my arms from the concealment of my cloak, I lifted my blades high into the air, and stabbed down, right into the apple. The blades went into it easily, stabbing deep down. There was a scream from the skeleton and it charged at me. Now, I was screwed, I might be able to move about with Lenore''s vision but fighting would be almost impossible.


    Just before the skeleton reached me, Ylva tackled into it, slowing it down for just a moment, and then Sigmir was upon it, striking a tremendous, overhead blow into it''s defenceless back. Until now, every strike had been weakened, deflected or dodged by it but this one was not. The Skeleton''s bones were crushed and it fell unto the dusty floor. I was still seeing with Lenore''s eyes and her Magic Sight let me see the blackness vanishing.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Schandmaul died</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You gain 5 000 EXP.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>For killing an opponent 1 level above you you gain Bonus EXP</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>For killing an opponent without a Traveller in your party, you gain Bonus EXP</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>For killing an opponent with the Dungeon Traveller-Bonus in effect, you gain Bonus EXP</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>For killing a Floor-Boss without a full party, you gain Bonus EXP</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>


    You reached level 40


    </td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Skill increased</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You increased your skill: Darkness Rune-Mastery [52/100]</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Skill increased</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You increased your skill: Blood Rune-Mastery [38/100]</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Skill increased</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You increased your skill: Darkness Magic [8/100]</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Skill increased</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You increased your skill: Stealth [15/100]</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    Then, the Skeleton turned into blackness and seeped into the floor. However, it left a few things behind.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="10">Narrent?ter</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="5">Rarity</td>


    <td colspan="5">Rare</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="5">Type</td>


    <td colspan="5">One-Handed Axe</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="5">Base Damage</td>


    <td colspan="5">0 Damage Piercing</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="5">Base Damage</td>


    <td colspan="5">15 Damage Slashing</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="5">Base Damage</td>


    <td colspan="5">13 Damage Blunt</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="5">Strength Modifier</td>


    <td colspan="5">High</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="3">Special Effect</td>


    <td colspan="7">Master Crafted ¨C Base Stats increased.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="10">This Battle-Axe was forged by the Dwergar hundreds of years ago. It is of exceptional make and will remain in good condition for a long time.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="10">Obsidium Rock</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="10">A small piece of Obsidium, quite rare outside the ancient halls of the Dwergar. A master-smith might be able to refine it.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    Another thing that happened was that the door at the end of the room sunk down a little and upon closer inspection, we were able to easily open it. It revealed stairs downward.


    However, we decided to rest for the day, before continuing downward as we were both quite exhausted and my vision was only slowly coming back, even with healing magic.

 Chapter 39

    After a night in the dungeon, it was time to descend the stairs to explore the rest of the dungeon. Fortunately, my eye-sight had returned after I had used healing for about ten minutes. I guess that''s what I get for having a light-sensitive race. After the fight, Sigmir had exchanged her Ice-Axe with the Narrent?ter, combining it with the Ice Shield and had taken some time to get used to the combination.


    I had placed one attribute point each into Intelligence and Intuition, even while dreading the neglect I showed my other, physical attributes. I had talked with Sigmir and she had advised me to focus on my main attributes at least until I reached the First Divide. Now Intelligence was at 26 and Intuition on 22. I''d have to think about which to strengthen next to gain the next bonus faster, I hoped to be powerful enough to reach the First Divide at level 50. According to Sigmir, my body was strong enough but my magic was what set me apart. She told me that the shaman in her village took a lot longer to use magic, using rituals and strange concoctions. In addition, she had never heard of someone changing and modifying their magic on the fly like I did.


    When I tried to meditate on my Darkness Runes, a rune manifested in front of my eyes but when trying to understand it, I got a brutal headache. When talking it over with Lenore, the one who came closest to understanding my brand of magic, we agreed that the rune was probably a higher rune regarding Death and it had manifested due to the influence of the Dungeon.


    The staircase downward was narrow but straight and still illuminated by the strange, green moss. We kept vigilant, not sure what to expect down here. Trying to hear our enemies was probably a waste of time - if there is one thing undead should be good at, it¡¯s being still. No breathing, no need to move about to stretch tired muscles, no bodily functions to act up at inopportune moments - all that aided them in keeping silent.


    After the experience we had in the first room, we had tried to keep silent as best as we could, so a sudden, soft, mechanical ''click'' was like thunder in the still air.


    Sigmir stumbled a little when the step she had just stepped on moved downwards, causing her to lose balance. At the same time, out of a small, almost invisible opening at the side, a thin crossbow-bolt shot out. It was a good thing that Sigmir was quite a bit taller than the average humanoid, the bolt struck her arm, most humanoids would have taken the bolt to the head.


    Now that the trap was triggered, a ticking sound, like clockwork, was audible. Ylva told us that she also heard the sounds of running water. So the trap was a purely mechanical mechanism and reset with water-power. Ingenious.


    While internally marvelling at the construction of the trap, I got busy taking care of Sigmir''s wound. I was quite afraid that the bolt might have been poisoned so my first action was using blood runes to drain any blood that may have been contaminated. Then I cleaned the wound with water and linked my healing magic with her body, trying to get the same view I had used when I found the malediction she was under. The trance felt somehow crisper than before and I was able to make out small amounts of a foreign substance that spread out from the wound and were slowly destroying the surrounding flesh. I was able to influence them with blood magic, even if it gave me a pounding headache, and remove them from the wound. Then I closed off the wound and repaired the internal damage I had done to Sigmir.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Skill increased</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You increased your skill: Blood Rune-Mastery [38/100]</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Skill increased</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You increased your skill: Blood Magic [18/100]</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    By now, the ticking had stopped and Ylva reported that the water-sounds were gone as well so Sigmir used her Lok''nar to push down the trigger-step to disarm the trap. Another bolt flew out, striking the other wall and falling to the floor. I carefully picked it up and saw that it had something smeared on the tip, convincing me that I had acted correctly with Sigmir''s wound. For some reason, a short time after the trap had been triggered, the dart and the poison coating it started to vanish.


    After we crossed the trap, I created a long pole out of Ice and had Sigmir hang her axe at her belt and take it. Then I explained the ten-foot pole concept to her. Back in the olden days, when role-player either meant someone with a special sexual fetish or someone who likes to mess with pen&paper, the ten-foot pole was a simple pole the firstperson ofa group used to put pressure on every plate before them and trip any tripwires to spot traps. As neither of us was trained in trap-discovery, I wanted to revive the idea. After a short moment to regain the spent Astral Power, we continued our way.


    This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.


    I had to suppress a snigger when I saw Sigmir with her long pole tap out the way before her with Ylva at her side. Now, all that was missing were dark glasses and an armband and she could take a handicapped parking spot. Lenore must have picked up on the thought and her cackling laughter echoed in my head.


    To make sure that no magic would catch us out, I peeked from time to time with Lenore''s Magic Sight to spot possible magic traps. A peek took a little Astral Power and Stamina but not too much, especially as I was able to see down the stairs to the end.


    When we reached the end of the stairs, the corridor looked like it mirrored the one upstairs. To mix things up, we turned counter-clockwise this time. Due to our careful advance, our pace was quite slow but even with the slow pace, we soon reached to first room and shortly before we got there, Sigmir placed the pole to the side to take out her Axe, readying herself for combat.


    And combat we got, as soon as we reached the entrance, we saw what I can only describe as zombies. They looked as if someone had forgotten a corpse in the freezer for too long.


    Dead, grey flesh, almost no hair, tattered leather armour, some with bits and pieces of metal, old, jagged weapons and dead eyes.


    Observe told me that we were facing six Draugr, levelled 37-40. I instantly used the spell that had worked so well against the skeletons upstairs but my dark radiance simply washed over the dead flesh without any visible effect, not even a twitch. While Sigmir blocked the door and hacked into their limbs, I used Lenore''s Sight trying to figure out what went wrong. With her sight, I saw that the dead flesh outside was just that, dead flesh, shielding the bones and magic under it, I was almost unable to make out the magic that animated the Draugr, only their eyes had a slight glow to them in my sight but I doubted that I''d be able to destroy them like the skeletons upstairs, even if I hit their eyes.


    I tried shooting Icicles into them but other than stagger them backwards a bit, it didn''t do much, even if I let them explode. It would take a lot of them to strip off enough flesh to get to the magic under it and dispel it. When using the shuttle it was easy to cut deep groves into their flesh but it did little to destroy them.


    Then I had an idea, during one of my ''U-Tube¡¯- click marathons I had stumbled upon a guide to Zombie Survival. They had theorised that getting into truly cold areas would help as the zombies would freeze stiff, making them unable to move. Down here, the rocks and air were cold but not icy.


    I drew up a beam of pure Cold and channelled it into the Draugr group. The struck body-parts ceased to move forcing them back to get their limbs unstuck. I guess the magic that animated them helped with thawing them out but it took time to do so.


    With that I was able to restrict their movement and Sigmir happily waded in, hacking off frozen limbs with her axe and smashing them back with the shield. Seeing her like that, I had an idea for later; I wanted a shield of my own to protect myself and inflict some blunt force with my Ice Magic. The Shuttle was great to attack with, agile, light and fast but that made it bad when it came to blunt force or blocking, it was simply too light and brittle to block a serious strike. I''d have to make myself a smaller version of the shield Sigmir was lugging around right now.


    The combination of freezing and hacking them apart worked like a charm, but to truly kill them, we had to decapitate them. I shuddered at the thought of being unable to freeze them or using lighter weapons like spears or rapiers, even normal swords. Fighting them would be a nightmare in more than one way. Still, Sigmir was easily able to destroy them after I froze them, going so far to step back and switch weapons, trusting me to use the shield and Ice-Magic to keep her safe and hacked them apart. Luckily they had no blood to splatter about or the room would have made a murder-scene look tame. After we were done, the corpses looked a bit like they had been in a blender. My mind started to think of inappropriate jokes to keep the terror at bay. Looking at dismembered bodies turned my stomach, even without blood.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Draugr died</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You gain 2 000 EXP.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>For killing an opponent without a Traveller in your party, you gain Bonus EXP</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>For killing an opponent with the Dungeon Traveller-Bonus in effect, you gain Bonus EXP</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Skill increased</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You increased your skill: Ice Rune-Mastery [43/100]</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Skill increased</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You increased your skill: Ice Magic [49/100]</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    Happy with the increase in skill-level, I left the room and sat down to regain my Astral Power and make myself a shield. Again, I tried to weave the crystals together and I thought I got closer but there was no qualitative change in the shield. It was just the same as I had made before.


    Then, we continued our way forward, me scouting with Lenore''s Sight and Sigmir tapping with her pole.

 Chapter 40

    We continued our way through the second floor, happily hacking apart Draugr as we went and marvelling at the experience we gained. We perfected the tactic we stumbled upon in the first room, Sigmir blocking them for a bit while I liberally threw freezing magic into the room, then Sigmir switching to her Lok''nar and letting me protect her with two shields via Ice Magic. It worked very well even if I was out of Astral Power after each fight. Still, my Astral Meditation got a workout and our speed was quite good.


    On this floor, there were eight rooms with enemies and a large room in the middle, like upstairs. We fought our way through all of them, with me reaching level 42 and gaining multiple levels in Ice Magic, Ice-Rune Mastery and Astral Meditation, I guess using Ice Magic defensively made a difference. I also noticed that the Astral Power I gained had a strange flavour to it, for lack of a better word. It felt a little strange and when I asked Lenore about it she agreed, it felt more attuned to Darkness than Ice and Blood. When experimenting a little, I noticed that my Darkness Runes took less Astral Power to cast, not huge amounts but a definite difference.


    This time, the room in the middle was a mirror of the one upstairs, only instead of the stone coffin, it had a raised dais, concealed by heavy drapes so we were unable to see what was on it from the outside. After my buffs and a kiss for luck, it was time to enter, prepared for anything. Sigmir had one of the shields on her back not fastened but just hooked so I could easily lift it off with my Ice Magic while she was holding her Lok''nar at the ready. I had my Butterfly-Wings in hand and the second shield on my back similarly ready for deployment, walking a few steps behind Sigmir and to the right. Ylva silently paced along at her left side.


    We were maybe ten steps into the room, when an insane laughter sounded from the throne and the drapes were thrown back. Upon the dais stood a large throne, made out of dark, almost black, wood, and lounging on the throne was our opponent.


    The being on the throne was quite simply beautiful. There was no way around it. She was tall, maybe six feet, with a body that looked as if it stepped out of a magazine. She had black, silky hair bloodlessly pale white skin that made a fascinating contrast with her hair and her light-blue lips that sparkled with small crystals. The most remarkable feature however, were her eyes. They shone with a clear lustre, like diamonds, When she stood, we were able to admire her dress, silvery white gown with deep, crimson roses embroidered into the fabric. As she started talking, I felt frozen again, just like against the first boss.


    ¡°My, my, I have guests. But where is my beloved? Why is he not with you? Do you want to be my new maids? No, I don''t need new maids. My beloved promised me that he would come for me soon.¡±


    Her speech was strange, disjointed, as if she wasn¡¯t fully with us. Suddenly, she started pacing on her dais and I saw a knife sticking out of her back.


    I managed to focus enough to use observe.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>


    Sally, the Snow-Queen - level 43


    </td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    ¡°He said he had to do something and then we would be together forever. I waited here for so long, why is he not with you? Admit it, one of you stole him away, didn''t you? I will kill you for it! He is mine, only mine! Guards, Guards, attend me! Take those whores and put them into the dungeon! They stole your King from you!¡±


    While she talked, her voice turned shrill and then two Skeletons, clad in armour and armed with shield and sword stepped out from behind the throne. Observing them told me that they were level 40 and called Sally''s Skeleton Warriors.


    Then they charged at us and Sigmir activated her red protective aura and counter-charged. I kept an eye on the Snow-Queen but she seemed content to stand on her dais for the moment. Shortly before they collided, I took control of the shield on Sigmir''s back and waited until the guards were almost upon her.


    Then I moved it to the right side and smashed it out from under her arms, bashing the right-side guard and smashing his shield aside. He was set to block a frontal, high strike from Sigmir so when the shield smashed into him from below and the side, he was staggered and fully off balance, wide open to a crushing blow from Sigmir. And crushing it was, While the overhead strike was not strong enough to cleave the armour, it was strong enough to deal crippling damage. Not only did it smash a deep dent into the pauldron, the skeleton actually shrunk a bit as it''s hip- and leg-bones were crushed. Then it collapsed, clearly out of the fight.


    My Shield-bash from the side had continued on, after hitting the first skeleton and I managed to turn the strike from the left skeleton far enough aside that it missed Sigmir. Then the skeleton barrelled into her and both staggered back.


    ¡°You killed my knight? How dare you? I will take care of you myself!¡± I watched while the Snow-Queen took out a carved crystal from her bustier and waved if from from left to right. Above her head, three large icicles appeared and a moment later, all three were launched in our direction, one at each of us. While I jumped aside and saw that Ylva also easily dodged, Sigmir was unable to dodge due to the swordsman attacking her. Not letting my Sigmir get skewered was very high on my list of things to do so I used Bullet Time and focused on the Icicle, trying to turn it aside. There was some resistance but I was able to push enough power into it to shift it''s course into the skeleton''s back, having it take the hit.


    ¡°You try to usurp my power? I will see you hanged!¡±


    Now, the Snow-Queen focused on me, glaring but had yet to leave her dais. Again, she swung the crystal, this time shooting all three icicles at me. I moved behind one of the pillars to take cover. While I avoided the direct hit, when the Icicles were next to me, they burst apart, showering me with razor sharp pieces. A short look to my debuffs told me that there was no lasting, serious bleeding effect and while I lost some HP, it was not critical.


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


    Then, Ylva gave up on trying to gain purchase against the armour of the Skeleton Warrior and run towards the Snow-Queen. Just as she jumped to attack her, the Snow-Queen laughed and waved her left arm in a slashing motion and from below her dress, silvery vines burst forth, striking Ylva in the side and throwing her away. As the vines looked as if they were made out of ice, I tried to manipulate them with Ice-Magic but my magical grip slipped simply off them.


    "It would be better if you run!" she yelled out.


    Unable to do anything else, I tossed my two Butterfly-Wings in her direction, using them as flying weapons for the first time in serious combat. That turned it into a fencing match of me trying to use the blades to get at her while casting freezing spells of my own, trying to attack her like the Draugar.


    She was defending herself with the vines, both against my flying blades and against the rays of pure cold. Then it turned, she used her crystal to toss icicles at me, I used my blades to smash two aside and had to resort to my shield to block the third. Ylva tried to get close but without a way to block the vines, she was unable to get close. The agile vines managed to strike her, no matter how she dodged.


    While I was wracking my brain to break the back and forth between the Snow-Queen and me, I heard a loud clanging sound and saw that Sigmir had finally managed to break through the skeleton''s shield and break the arm below. With that, their fight turned one-sided as the skeleton was no longer able to block her attacks. After a few exchanges of Sigmir smacking it''s weapon aside and it awkwardly dodging out of the way, she connected with a nice blow, taking the skeleton''s head off.


    Done with her opponent, she charged at the Snow-Queen with Ylva hot on her heels. Seeing her charge, I let my shield overtake her, joining my Butterfly-Wings trying to block her vines from interfering with Sigmir. She still had to block one vine off but there was nothing to stop Ylva who jumped into the Snow-Queen and drove her back into her throne- The impact jarred the vines and Sigmir managed to move in, striking at her chest. Her gown was able to take the blow but she smashed into the throne with bone-jarring force. Then, above her heart, the tip of the knife appeared and the life drained out of her eyes as they lost their lustre.


    ¡°Darling? Is that... you? Why... do you have... a knife?...¡± With a soft sigh, she lay still on her throne.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Sally, the Snow-Queen died</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You gain 3 000 EXP.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>For killing an opponent 1 level above you you gain Bonus EXP</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>For killing an opponent without a Traveller in your party, you gain Bonus EXP</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>For killing an opponent with the Dungeon Traveller-Bonus in effect, you gain Bonus EXP</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>For killing a Floor-Boss without a full party, you gain Bonus EXP</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>Sally''s Skeleton Warrior died</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You gain 1 500 EXP.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>For killing an opponent without a Traveller in your party, you gain Bonus EXP</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>Sally''s Skeleton Warrior died</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You gain 1 500 EXP.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>For killing an opponent without a Traveller in your party, you gain Bonus EXP</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Skill increased</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You increased your skill: Ice Magic [53/100]</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    Then she started to turn into blackness and seep into her throne, leaving behind two items.


    When I saw the first, a cold shiver overcame me, it was the dagger that had stuck out of her back.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="10">Jealous Lover</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="5">Rarity</td>


    <td colspan="5">Rare</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="5">Type</td>


    <td colspan="5">Dagger</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="5">Base Damage</td>


    <td colspan="5">18 Damage Piercing</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="5">Base Damage</td>


    <td colspan="5">14 Damage Slashing</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="5">Strength Modifier</td>


    <td colspan="5">Low</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="3">Special Effect</td>


    <td colspan="7">Heartbreaker ¨C Armour Piercing is increased.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="3">Special Effect</td>


    <td colspan="7">Heart Seeker ¨C Critical Damage is increased.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="3">Special Effect</td>


    <td colspan="7">Jealousy ¨C Once used, it can only be put down by satisfying it''s curse.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="10">This Dagger was made by the Dwergar in memoriam of Alviss. It can only be passed on once it is used to slay one''s lover.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    After reading its description, I was sure that I never wanted to use this weapon and Sigmir agreed with me. We rolled it into some leather and I sealed it with ice, so we''d not even accidentally touch it. Then we tossed it into a Bag of Holding, hoping that we''d be able to trade it to Thekk, after telling him about the curse of course.


    The second item was a lot more interesting, it was a bracelet, roughly the size of my upper arm, made from the same silvery-white material that had made up the vines the Snow-Queen had used.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="10">Eisblumen</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="5">Rarity</td>


    <td colspan="5">Rare</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="5">Type</td>


    <td colspan="5">Accessory</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="3">Special Effect</td>


    <td colspan="7">Icy Vines ¨C When Astral Power is channelled into this Accessory, Vines made out of flexible Ice grow from it. Only the wearer of this Item can control them with Ice-Magic.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="10">This accessory is made in memoriam of the transient beauty that only lasts for a single night and is washed away by the light of day.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    Not trusting the description to a hundred percent, I looked at it with Lenore''s Magic Sight for a moment but was only able to see the expected glow of silvery Ice-Magic. With that, I equipped it on my upper, left arm, outside the armour. When it was in place, I felt a short sting below it and saw that thin thorns had pierced my armour and now held the ring in place, but I also felt the ring and knew that I could retract the thorns anytime to take it off but if I wanted to use it, the thorns were a necessary connection.


    The sting reminded me of my own wounds, curiosity had driven them to the back of my mind. However the first I took care of was Ylva, then Sigmir, then myself. With that done, we prepared ourselves to rest for a while and then continue on. Down here, our sense of time was rather warped and only my connection with the capsule told me that it would be noon on our second day down here.

 Chapter 41

    After fighting the second boss and resting for an hour or two, I wanted to try out my new toy. Channelling Astral Power into it was easy and the vines shot out with surprising speed, showing me the error of my ways. My arm had been relaxed, hanging down and pointing to the floor. The four vines that shot out struck the floor, bodily lifting me up and knocking me ass-over-tea-kettle. I heard Ylvas chuffing laughter and when I sheepishly looked up, I saw Sigmir had to hide a smile and suppress her own giggles. Well, I did look the fool just now, so being laughed at was to be expected. Still, I pouted, causing Sigmir''s giggles to break her suppression and come out in full.


    Now, seated on the ground, I tried to use my Ice-Magic to actually control the vines and it was quite intuitive, almost like using my own arms. They could extend about fifteen feet and my control increased with focus; if I just focused on a single vine, I could almost use it like a single, incredibly flexible finger. There was a deep, hidden part of my brain that had seen enough hentai to get ideas.


    However, momentum and inertia were a bit annoying. If I simply started a swing and let them rip, it became a question of the tail wagging with the dog but I was able to accelerate them with my Ice Magic and keep them controlled without inertia affecting me in any way.


    The whole thing was confusing, when used with Ice-Magic nothing was fed back to me, when I lost control, for example if I smacked something and wasn''t careful, I was liable to throw myself across the room. With a little experimenting, I realized that the rules it operated under were rather simple. If I didn''t use Ice Magic to cancel the forces working on the vines, those forces were transmitted into me.


    To fully use this new toy, training was required. Lots and lots of training.


    But now was not the time and here was not the place,


    Before we went further down, I wanted to do another thing: formalize a Freezing Spell so that I didn''t have to do it by the seat of my pants. I hadn''t formalized that many spells, it felt a bit like a waste of time, more often than not throwing them together worked just fine but a small, nagging voice told me that against serious enemies, that would not cut it. So I first formalized the Anti-Magic I had used on the first floor, a triangle version, a pentagon-version and a heptagon-version, then I did the same with the Ice Beam I had used on this floor.


    As I tested things out, the Ice Beam worked best with five runes, three Cold-, two Freezing-Runes, with the Cold-Runes creating a triangle of their own. When I tried the same with the Heptagon-version, it felt wrong, four cold-runes didn''t mesh well for some reason and using more freezing-runes than cold-runes gave me a wrong impression as well. With the Anti-Magic, it was different, three Devour-Runes, two Dark Radiance-Runes and two Curse-Runes gave a symmetry that worked well and strengthened the whole, at least it felt that way. There were some forces at play here that I didn''t quite understand.


    Still, the formalisation gave me one skill-point each with Darkness-Rune Mastery and Ice-Rune Mastery.


    My experiments had cost us a little more time than I thought but at least Sigmir and Ylva would be well rested. After a short meditation my Astral Power was restored and I was good to go.


    Now, it was time to go down the next set of stairs, to see what awaited us further down.


    I re-created our ten-foot pole and checked the stairs for magic which was fortunate. Halfway down the stairs, one step had a strange, glow to it so I used the magic I had used extensively on the first floor to disarm the spell. My first, non-channelled spell wasn''t enough, it only reduced the glowing by about half, so I used it again and one triangle-spell for good measure. With that the glow was so dim, it almost vanished and Sigmir carefully walked forward. As she stepped on the previously trapped step, the magic activated but instead of a powerful flash, it was a pathetic spark. Sigmir then told me that it had been similar to a light pinch, I guess the full spell would have been some kind of pain or kinetic spell, designed to take out a single person.


    Thanks to our trusty ten-foot pole, the next two arrow-traps were triggered safely and circumvented while they were resetting. They were rather cunning; there was just one step between the two traps so even if you managed to dodge the first bolt, chances were you got onto the step with the other bolt and that one would get you. But the mighty ten-foot pole solved the problem without trouble.


    When we got to the end of the stairs, I knew that this floor would be different. What greeted us, were two alcoves directly across the room from us, one held a Draugr wearing armour and holding a great-sword, the other a Skeleton, similar to those who''d accompanied Sally. Observe told me that the Draugr was just that, a Draugr, level 41 and that the Skeleton was a Skeleton Warrior, level 42.


    Support the creativity of authors by visiting Royal Road for this novel and more.


    Once more, Sigmir took the lead and engaged the Skeleton while I swiftly used my newly created Pentagon-Ice Beam against the Draugr. I channelled a bit of power into it and within a few, short moments, the Draugr was out of the fight for now. The Skeleton-Warrior was able to hold against Sigmir and they were exchanging blows, with Sigmir pressuring him into giving ground.


    I wanted to finish the fight fast, so I used my newest toy and wrapped a vine around his ankle, and when he wanted to step back, I pulled. I had to keep a great deal of focus on my Ice-Magic, and it took more power than I expected, but it worked like a charm - taking his leg forward just as he shifted his balance backwards left him flailing wildly, and Sigmir took advantage of it with glee. She was already striking but with the skeleton unbalanced, she put her full weight behind it, striking in the gap between helmet and shoulder and breaking enough bones to cause the helmet to roll away when the skeleton hit the ground. Well, not only the helmet rolled away, the skeleton''s head was still in it.


    Hacking apart the Draugr-popsicle was no challenge at all, it was almost unsporting to hack it apart without letting it thaw. It was just annoying to peel it out of it''s armour.


    Still, they gave nice EXP and gave me the small bump needed for level 43.


    As we moved on, we soon saw the next side-chamber entrance and down here, they were guarded. The moment we stepped into sight, a Draugr and a Skeleton-Warrior started to step out of their alcoves guarding the entrance and from the sounds within, they were not the only enemies.


    Now, with the enemies in the corridor and no door in sight, it was impossible to use our tried and true tactic of Sigmir blocking the door and me taking cover behind her. The corridor was too wide for that, our enemies would be able to get by her.


    I tried to freeze the Draugr before it really got free but the Skeleton-Warrior used its shield to block my beam, leaving a thin coating of frost on it''s shield but not impressing it in any way. I think if it could laugh, it would have. Seeing that there was little point in waiting, Sigmir got out her Axe and started to run at them. Feeling that being next to her was better than being away from her, I followed, straining to keep up with her longer legs.


    While running, I channelled a small stream of Astral Power into my new bracelet, having the vines extend slowly without breaking my stride. The vines were quite useful, bludgeoning attacks in opposition to my normal cutting or piercing strikes. Just before Sigmir reached the Skeleton Warrior, I struck with the vines against it, trying to unbalance it and partially succeeding; instead of smoothly letting Sigmir''s axe glide off it''s shield, the axe struck right into it, creating a deep dent in the material and maybe even causing damage to the bone below.


    At the same time, the Draugr started in on her so I let go of my vines, causing them to drop and took hold of Sigmir''s shield, helping her to brace against the strike. Ylva jumped at the Draugr, frustrated that she could gnaw at the undead flesh until she got sick of it and the Draugr would only be marginally worse for wear. Still, it was distracted for a moment, so I drew three runes and added two more with rune-projection to throw an Ice-Beam at it, giving us a little time.


    Out of the entrance, another Draugr was shuffling out and Sigmir was still dealing with the first Skeleton Warrior, so I reached for my vines again, this time using them to hold the Draugr in the doorway for a moment so I had time for another Ice-Beam against it, this time channelling it for a couple of seconds so it would be stuck there, blocking the doorway to give us time. Focusing on Sigmir and her opponent, I tried again to unbalance the Skeleton and this time it worked better, giving Sigmir time to take off it''s shield-arm. A dim, cracking sound forced my attention back to the first Draugr, it was slowly shaking off the effect of my Ice-Beam, forcing it''s flesh to move again, cracking the frozen parts, thereby creating the noise. It was still mostly stuck, so I grabbed it with my vines and used my shuttle as a guillotine, taking it''s head off which took quite a chunk of Astral Power, creating enough momentum with the shuttle and not letting the Draugr move with my vines.


    A quick look told me that I had roughly sixty percent of my power remaining. Controlling the vines as I did took an insane amount of Astral Power.


    Looking into the room showed me that there were three Skeleton Warriors and two Draugr, inside, one Draugr still frozen and currently falling forward as the Skeletons pushed it to get by.


    I turned back to Sigmir and saw she had finished her opponent, just in time to join me in handling the rest. The three Skeleton Warriors advanced on us in a slightly staggered formation, trying to maximise their numbers advantage. Suddenly, Ylva leapt to Sigmir, touching her arm and flowing into her Hallow and Sigmir''s Eyes turned yellow, looking just like Ylvas. In addition, the red aura she used from time to time appeared, stronger than I''d ever seen but tinged with silver light.


    Then she gave off a loud shout and slammed into the skeletons, striking with a strength and fervour that seemed insane, I managed to get close enough to anchor a regeneration-spell into her and stood back, focusing on channelling power into her and watching her go to town. Her aura wasn''t able to stop the strikes against her but it blunted them so what normally would be a crippling strike, was now a shallow wound that I was able to quickly heal. The first three enemies fell swiftly, but while she was duelling with the forth, she started flagging. Still, she managed to destroy it and now only the Draugr that had been frozen remained. Sadly it had gotten mobile again and Sigmir was staggering, no longer able to fight. The Draugr wanted to strike her but there was no way in hell I''d let that happen. In my anger, I reached with all four vines and with a flexing of my magical muscles, I ripped the Draugr apart. When I looked back to my Astral Power, it was at about 5%, I was running close to empty. But it had been enough.


    Without even looking at the EXP, I walked over to the staggering Sigmir and helped her to walk back, towards the stairs. This floor would take some time to clear.

 Chapter 42

    As we retreated back to the stairs, after our first serious battle on the third floor, I got curious and asked the still stumbling Sigmir what had just happened.


    ¡°It''s called ''Ferocity of the lone Wolf'', just now, when Ylva went into her Hallow, she shared it. She''s sworn to herself that she will not lose us, that she will protect Lenore and you. That ability is the embodiment of that commitment; it let''s her go berserk if she is outside, or she can use it within her Hallow and share it with me. It grants extreme strength for a short amount of time but it takes a lot out of me. Especially if I combine it with my Berserker-Aura, as you see. I can hardly walk.¡± she told me while leaning heavily on me.


    Together, we managed to make it back to the stairs and I pulled our sleeping furs out of the packs and helped Simgir to lay down, letting her head rest in my lap and idly stroking her hair. It took only moments until she fell asleep, breathing softly. Ylva had not re-emerged from her Hallow and was probably in a similar condition. I drew a regeneration spell, linking my mind to her body to check for damages but it looked like the channelled regeneration during the fight had taken care of it. It was just exhaustion which I wasn''t able to effectively heal. I could heal the wear and tear of muscles, even help them strengthen themselves but against her condition, I was powerless.


    With the opponents we faced down here, I''d have to get creative. There had to be something I could do, the simplest way would be to create an Ice block to seal the doorway, giving us time to deal with the opponents outside and a choke point against the enemies inside. But it would take a lot of power to create and move a block big enough to seal the entrances, I''d have to use normal Ice, no idea if it would be strong enough against the undead.


    Maybe some kind of mist, but to freeze the Draugr, I''d need incredibly cold mist, spread out over a large area. Probably not feasible as well.


    What about my Dark Magic? The skeletons seemed to be able to block my Anti-Magic attacks with their shields and the Draugr had their undead flesh to block them.


    Blood Magic? No way, no how, I''d be able to support Sigmir with it but not deal with them. I didn''t want Sigmir to be forced to abuse her new ability; it seemed to be an ace in the hole-skill, nothing to plan your battles for.


    No, I''d have to go with Ice-Magic and Ice-Runes. But how?


    I thought back about everything I''d done with either and remembered my old cave, the one protected by the Mist-Field. I''d been able to create mist with an engraving - why not try the same with Ice? I could create some kind of base-item out of Hard Ice and channel Astral Power into it to create the plug I wanted.


    With an idea in mind, I wanted to test it. First, I asked Lenore to keep watch and meditated to regenerate my Astral Power.


    With full Astral Power, I raised my hand and created a small cuboid out of Hard Ice. While creating it, I engraved small Heptagon Formations out of Ice-Runes into it, so four sides around had each one Formation on it. It took a surprising amount of power, for a one-off Item that didn''t even do anything.


    To test it out, I let it float up, a few steps and poured Astral Power into two of the Formations, the one on the top and bottom. Before the cuboid could start falling, Ice shot out of it spreading in a rough cone, smashing into the floor and the ceiling, anchoring it solidly in place within moments. I did the sides in the same way and within maybe four seconds, I had a solid barrier in place. I didn''t want to disturb Sigmir with movement, the noise just now had been enough so I asked Lenore to inspect my work. Looking through her eyes showed me that the Ice was seamlessly fused with the Hard Ice, making the idea of re-using the item impossible.


    Well, that meant that I had to create a few of them.


    I managed to create 5 more in the time Sigmir was asleep and when I showed her the barrier, she tested it with a couple of whacks with her axe and pronounced it ''Quite Solid''. According to her, it should buy as a minute or two, which had to be enough.


    Now rested, Simgir sat up and took out a bit of food to eat, so I snuggled up on her lap, closing my eyes and relaxing. I''d need my strength soon.


    I must have nodded off for Sigmir woke me with sweet kisses. I felt good and Ylva had rejoined us outside as well, looking rested, just like Sigmir. I ate some food as well and then it was time to move on.


    Stolen story; please report.


    When we saw the next room, we charged again and I let one of my cuboids float up. As Sigmir crashed into the Skeleton-Warrior, the cuboid floated into the entrance and I stopped running, triggering it with my Astral Power and it worked like a charm. There was a crashing, grinding sound as the Ice smashed into stone and then the entrance was sealed for now.


    With that done, I focused on the Skeleton-Warrior, using the vines to trip it like I''d done before. Again, Sigmir didn''t grant any quarter, using the opening with impunity, smashing the skeleton apart. By now, we heard the sounds of weapons smashing into the Ice-Barrier, trying to break it.


    Sigmir engaged the Draugr to give me the time needed to freeze it and once it was frozen, she dispatched it in moments.


    While waiting for the barrier to break, I let my mind rest, trying to regain as mush Astral Power as I could. It wasn''t a lot but to me, every drop of power was valuable.


    Once the barrier started breaking, it broke apart swiftly and Sigmir engaged the Undead in the opening, using the walls to guard her sides. Our first opponent was a Draugr so I froze it for Sigmir to dispatch, which she did.


    I waited for openings when she fought with a Skeleton-Warrior, not trying to trip it with my vines, another skeleton would just take it''s place and guard it''s fallen comrade. But the second, Sigmir managed to knock off the helmet of a Skeleton-Warrior, I struck with an Anti-Magic Heptagon, triggering it the second the Skeleton''s shield was out of position.


    With one more enemy out of the fight, there were only three left, one Skeleton-Warrior and two Draugr. The next opponent was a Draugr and my Ice-Beam struck once more, giving Sigmir the chance to relief it of its head.


    Now, with only two enemies, it became simple, I tripped the Skeleton-Warrior and blocked the Draugr with a floating shield to give Sigmir time to finish off the Skeleton. Then it was just a question of freezing the Draugr and cutting it apart, something that Sigmir did with glee.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Skeleton Warrior died.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You gain 2200 EXP.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>For killing an opponent without a Traveller in your party, you gain Bonus EXP</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>For killing an opponent with the Dungeon Traveller-Bonus in effect, you gain Bonus EXP</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>Draugr died.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You gain 2000 EXP.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>For killing an opponent without a Traveller in your party, you gain Bonus EXP</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>For killing an opponent with the Dungeon Traveller-Bonus in effect, you gain Bonus EXP</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    Satisfied that our tactic worked, we collected the spoils and regained our stamina and Astral Power before moving on. Just as we started our charge against the next group, something bizarre happened, causing us to stop in our tracks.


    It looked like the space was warping itself, twisting and shimmering like a mirage. Then, the two undead we were able to see turned into teacups of all things, falling from their chest-height to the stone-floor and shattering. Just as I thought it could not get any stranger, two beings walked out of the room, one was wearing a chequered dressing gown and holding a strange device that looked like an tablet-computer to me but had a bright, orange label that said ¡°Don''t Panic!¡±. The other guy wore a colourful sports-coat but for some reason a large, bathing towel was wrapped around his waist. I looked at Sigmir, silently asking her if she was seeing what I was seeing. Her wide-eyed appearance told me that either we were both going insane or something really, really weird was happening. Maybe I should take the advice written on that label. Don''t Panic!


    ¡°Amazing, Arthur, I don''t think we are within our own Universe any longer. The infinite Improbability Drive truly managed something improbable this time.¡± shouted the sports-coat and towel-clad figure.


    ¡°That''s great, Ford, but what do we do now? I wanted to visit Milliways, not some strange catacomb.¡± complained the gown-clad man. ¡°Can we use the drive to get back?¡±


    ¡°Well, it will take just a moment to calculate that improbability, then we are off again.¡± answered his companion.


    Just then, the space around the two began to distort again and the man in the dressing gown turned to us, bowed and said ¡°Farewell ladies, and thanks for all the fish¡±


    With that, both of them vanished.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Skeleton Warrior died.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You gain 2200 EXP.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>For killing an opponent without a Traveller in your party, you gain Bonus EXP</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>For killing an opponent with the Dungeon Traveller-Bonus in effect, you gain Bonus EXP</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>Draugr died.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You gain 2000 EXP.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>For killing an opponent without a Traveller in your party, you gain Bonus EXP</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>For killing an opponent with the Dungeon Traveller-Bonus in effect, you gain Bonus EXP</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    I looked at Sigmir, completely confused. ¡°What in the world just happened? Did you also see two strange guys?¡±


    She looked back at me, looking just as confused as I. ¡°Maybe we should head the other way. Yes, let''s just walk away.¡± I guess she was as freaked out as I was. Without getting even a step closer to the area those two had been in, we turned and walked the other way, freaked out beyond words and trying to pretend that no, nothing had just happened. Somehow, it felt safer for our sanity.

 Chapter 43

    After our close encounter of the third kind, Sigmir and I turned back walking back to the stairs and starting down the other direction. The first room on this side worked just like the last one we had cleared on the other side and with the next, we got lucky.


    The Draugr was closer to our side, letting me freeze him without the Skeleton-Warrior being able to block for him so we could destroy both before those in the room had shuffled out, so I was able to use two vines to stabilize myself against the wall behind me and use the other two vines to smash the Skeleton-Warrior coming out, back into the room. With that, Sigmir was able to take the door and we could destroy them with our previous tactics, only without expending one of the ice-cuboids.


    The fights continued, I gained another level against the next group, bringing me to 44. Astral Meditation gained another point, bringing it to 32 and Blood Rune-Mastery gained one as well, bringing it to 39. However, neither Ice-Magic nor Ice Rune-Mastery gained points, despite the workout they were getting. They easily gained points if I did something new with them but repetitive use was apparently no longer sufficient without a whole lot of it.


    With the cuboids and a lot of time, we cleared the rest of the floor and after a short rest, we turned to the third boss.


    Again, the room looked similar to those before, a few pillars holding up the ceiling but in the middle was not a coffin or throne, no, there was just a statue, about as tall as Sigmir and fully made out of metal. It looked like a plate-armour, standing guard holding shield and a golden sword before it. Once more, Sigmir had equipped her Lok''nar and was cautiously advancing before me.


    All of a sudden, the statue in the middle started moving, lifting it''s shield and sword, taking a guard-stance, looking at Sigmir.


    ¡°So, you come again? Do you want your sword back? Or do you want to seduce me again? No, Troll, I will still not marry you. I will not lie with a heathen whore like you. And you will pay for the curse you placed on me. I will slay you and it will be broken!¡±


    With that, he started to advance on us. I was flabbergasted, did he just call my cute, innocent Sigmir a whore? My mind went cold; nobody gets to talk about her like that, not without revenge.


    I observed the statue and got:


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>


    Knight Mannelig, level 45


    </td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    Looking through Lenore''s Sight for weak points didn''t show anything, only little flickers below the armour, this might just be a slugfest.


    Sigmir charged at the Statue with Ylva hanging a bit back, looking for openings. I did the same, only I also had my vines. Stretching them toward the knight, I wanted to attack his legs while Sigmir attacked the top. Just before Sigmir struck, I attacked, but the knight proved better than all the skeletons before - instead of retreating before Sigmir''s charge, he stepped into it, using his shield to strike her, creating an opening. But instead of trying to take the opening and getting entangled, he stomped onto one vine and used his sword to cut the rest.


    Sigmir reset her stance and tried to attack again, but even without moving off my vine, he was able to fend her off, forcing her away with quite a bit of skill. I tried to find an opening while their battle raged back and forth, but there was none to be found. Looking on, I saw that Sigmir was losing, it was a gradual process but it was there. He got shallow strikes with his sword in and a few times he managed to bash her with his shield whereas he had not taken more than glancing blows that got turned aside by his armour. In addition, I''d bet that the armour was either sentient itself - making it some kind of golem - or an undead was in there. Neither would tire like Sigmir.


    Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.


    Again, I tried to create an opening with my vines but this time, he managed to use his shield to shove Sigmir aside and managed to wrap one of the vines around his sword, overpowering my Ice-Magic and pulling me off my feet. I had to sever the vine, discarding all Astral Power it was made of, or he''d have pulled me into his range.


    Sigmir re-engaged him and I managed to reset my stance, again looking for openings. Another Shield-Bash unbalanced Sigmir and this time, there was no reason for the boss not to take advantage. His vicious sword strike would have caused a deep wound, maybe even death but I managed to place the floating shield in the way, though while the shield managed to stop the blow, it would be the only blow it would stop, breaking on impact.


    I guess Sigmir managed to read the flow of battle just as well as I did and called for Ylva to join her, using her new ability to reverse the flow. I cut into my hand to draw blood before I went close to Sigmir, matching her movements with Bullet Time to place runes, written in my blood, on her. I managed to keep Bullet Time going until I created a full Heptagon of Blood, Strengthening and Regeneration-Runes. The Strengthening and Regeneration-Runes formed triangles of their own, crowned with a single Blood-Rune. Forcefully holding Bullet Time gave me the mother of all headaches as backlash, almost blinding me. Then, I forced myself to start channelling Astral Power into Sigmir, watching her Aura flare and her movements start to overpower our enemy.


    Watching Sigmir batter him down, smashing deep rents and dents into the previously pristine plate-armour gave me hope that we''d manage to win the battle.


    Just as I was filled with optimism, the knight jumped back, dodging a sweeping strike from Sigmir and shouted ¡°I will not falter! Be cursed you heathen fiends!¡±


    While he was shouting, Sigmir didn''t even try to stop the strike but took a huge gamble, letting the strike continue, even accelerating it. The gamble was that she committed what some considered a cardinal sin in fighting, she followed the momentum of her weapon spinning full circle leaving her back open to her enemy for a moment. In addition to the full momentum of her body, she let the Lok''nar glide through her hand, holding it in one extended arm close to one of it''s axe-heads. With that, she had enough range to strike her foe and the combination of magic, leverage and momentum made the strike truly earth shattering.


    Next, two things happened at the same moment, Sigmir''s strike connected, cleaving the helm our foe was wearing apart and destroying it''s shield. The broken helmet revealed a skeletal skull underneath, glowing with dark magic and now sporting a deep furrow where Sigmir had managed to connect. On the other hand, his shout must have been some kind of skill, for a shock wave rippled through the room, tossing Sigmir through the air like a rag doll, breaking the magic on her, even tossing Ylva out of her Hallow to land next to her master. I was further away and was only pushed back multiple steps before I managed to regain my balance. Neither Ylva nor Sigmir were getting back up.


    The Boss turned to me and I saw only one last chance. A quick glance through Lenore''s sight showed me that yes, the magic looked similar to the skeletons we had fought before, just a lot more powerful.


    As the Boss walked leisurely towards me, as if he didn''t take me serious, I drew my Anti-Magic Rune-Heptagon and activated Overflow, forcing as much power into the spell as I could, trying to gauge the limits of the spell, breaking it now would certainly kill me. The beam lanced out, striking the skeleton''s face, burning away the magic keeping it alive and I kept going, letting all my power flow into the spell. To increase the power I had, I groped into my pack, pulling the bottle I kept all the blood I had siphoned off and drained it of power, throwing everything into the spell.


    After the power in the blood was gone, I felt my own power ebb and the skeleton was still standing strong, I could not allow me to falter. In a last ditch-effort, I used my own blood, still running down my hand, as a power-source, drawing out as much as I could, the pain driving me to my knees but I had to keep going. I felt something within me break, pain like I never felt before ripping through me, taking my consciousness away, only blackness remaining.

 Interlude - Meanwhile, on the Forums

    Official Road to Purgatory-Beta Forum


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>


    -Tobiuno, confirmed Beta-Account


    </td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    Greetings, fellow Gamers


    Many of you will know me, I''m Tobiuno, formerly battle-leader of team Razor, now guild-leader of the ¡°Blades of the Realm¡±-Guild, formed in the Human Empire, to be precise in the duchy of Highever. Personally, I started as a simple cavalier and got promoted to Captain recently, thanks to my experience in the real world. Out here, one of my hobbies is HEMA or Historical European Martial Arts.


    Now, as all know, tomorrow the next wave of Beta-Testers is allowed to join us and I wanted to present some of the things my guild-mates and I have learned about the world and the character-creation process. I also spoke with a multitude of gamers I know from my past in other games and they contributed information about different aspects of the world.


    Let''s start with the obvious. Real Life abilities matter. As I said before, I learned to use a sword in the real world giving me a tremendous bonus at the beginning; not only was I able to fight without having to rely on game-given skills, the skills I gained rose at an insane speed - where the rest might get a point per day of training, I gained multiple.


    So, moral of the story, if you have any applicable skills, you would be well served to choose a class that fits them.


    Now, on to character-creation. The first time you enter Road to Purgatory, you have to create your character. For this, you gain an assistant that can answer some questions for you. While I''m not sure if it''s true, some people claimed that being polite to your assistant makes them more helpful and being a dick to them will have them try to screw you over. Not sure if it''s true but I wouldn''t chance it.


    The first step of Character-creation is Attribute Selection. Some people are locked in here; they can only use one of the two methods which, in my opinion, sucks but it''s a Beta after all.


    Method one of Attribute Selection is called Point Shift. You start at 11 points in all attributes, making your character overall better than average. In addition, you have 5 free attribute points to spend. With that done, you can shift points around, increasing some and decreasing others. You can not go below 8 or above 15 with that method and I''d not go below 10 in any attribute - trust me, it''s better that way.


    The other method is called Body Baseline. Here, you are given a number of tests, allowing you to use a scan of your real body to use and your stats are measured by your success. I, and most of my guild, used Point Shift so I''m not sure what those tests are, I only spoke with two Body Baseliners, both were given tests of Agility, Strength and Cunning. They had to challenge an endless parkour, infiltrate a mansion and find a way to break open a door, either by doing a puzzle or using brute force. In both cases, their stats fell slightly short of those gained with Point Shift so I''m not sure if there is any advantage to using that method.


    With your attributes gained, you need to pick a race. Races are not only important for their bonuses, don''t get fooled there. Your race also influences where you start and how society as a whole will react to you. A buddy of mine thought it would be awesome to start as an Muspelar-Berserker, a type of Fire-Giantblood because the explanation said it was rare and the attribute bonuses were rather good. Well, joke is on him, he started in an impoverished village with little to no resources and no trainer for his class. So he spent the first weeks ingame doing scut-work for one of their hunters to get some training in turn. He didn''t even get his inventory, or Bag of Holding as it is called here, until then.


    On the other hand, those who started as normal humans, like I did, can select their starting point from a couple of cities in the human empire and are received by the local Adventurer''s Guild, given a small Bag of Holding and explained how to make the best out of our class. Hell, they even introduced me to the Dukal Guard, a local cavalry unit which recruited me.


    I immediately got armour, a weapon and a mount and was assigned to a veteran unit that helped me train and then level. My previous experience and quite a bit of luck helped me to rise through the ranks quite fast and my superior took a chance on me, letting me execute a campaign against the border incursions of Baretonia. So yes, you might have seen me in the second highlight-reel, back then I was only probationary lieutenant but my success has confirmed my rank. Of course, I was given multiple experienced sergeants and was told that they had the authority to take command from me if I fucked up. Well, as you saw on the highlight-reel, I won the battle and got my promotion.


    But no matter, back to character-creation and races. Choose one of the main races or at least one that has a strong sense of community; it will make your start in the game so much easier.


    The next step is to select your path. The paths are rather simple, you either specialise on Fighting, ''Mage''-Magic, ''Cleric''-Magic or Interpersonal Skills.


    Personally, I''m a Fighter, or ''of the Martial Path'' as they call it. I need less time to raise my fighting skills and I''m a better fighter. Obviously, one should take the path they want to specialise in. Maybe the most interesting path is the Civilised Path, as pretty much everything could be part of it. For example some of the skills I was taught to inspire and command my troops are part of both, the Martial and the Civilised Path, others are only Civilised.


    At the end of the day, it''s an important decision but also an easy one. You either take one of the classical archetypes, Fighter, Mage or Cleric or if you are unsure, you take the Civilised Path. Of course it''s not as easy, a lot of classes have some overlap so choose what feels best to you.


    Help support creative writers by finding and reading their stories on the original site.


    With the path chosen, you need to start walking. The starting point of your Path is your Class. Some classes, as said above, belong to multiple Paths, the best example might be the Paladin, straddling the Divine and the Martial Path. It would be too much to list all classes here, if it''s even possible, so I''m not even gonna try. Again, remember when choosing your class, try not to take something too exotic, without someone to show you the ropes, it will be a giant pain in the behind and you will fall behind if you ever manage to find your way.


    There are reasons for classes to be wide-spread, they work.


    Also, if a class sounds evil to you, consider not taking it, if the basic skill of your class is considered heretical, you will have an incredibly hard time finding groups or NPCs to work with and if you are caught, you are in deep trouble.. Examples for those would be Necromancers and Blood Mages.


    The last part of character-creation is choosing traits. Those can be pretty much everything you can imagine and more.


    Advantages and Disadvantages will be balanced by the System if you don''t do it yourself so take care. You also shouldn''t just look at the shiny numbers, some of the most innocent sounding things might be the biggest screw-over. I know someone who thought ¡°Oh, that trait doesn''t sound too bad¡± and took the Outsider-Trait. Well, as soon as something happens and he might be involved he''s the instant suspect. Even just looking at him gives you an uncanny valley feeling, as if there is something wrong. Not enjoyable.


    Even simple traits like a bad smell can muck up your game because people don''t want you around them, you get barred from shops or inns and even worse, sometimes your whole group gets thrown out. So beware the non-numerical traits, they might just be the worst of them. Something easily quantifiable like ''You have 50% less Astral Power'' - what they call mana in this world - might be bad, but being unable to use any shops or paying double prices because the shopkeeper wants to get rid of you is worse.


    Then you are allowed to choose a starting point, again I''d try to take something in the happy middleground: large enough to support you while getting started, but not so large that you are just shuffled off into the slums. For those who are able to, the duchy of Highever is awesome and the Blades of the Realm are recruiting.


    Well, that''s it from me, I hope to meet you on The Road to Purgatory.


    Best Wishes


    Tobiuno, Lieutenant in the Dukal Guard of his Grace, Sir Walter, Duke of Highever


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>


    Yuthos, confirmed Beta-Account


    </td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    Thanks Tobiuno, good summary. Personally, I''m playing a dwarven crafter and I have to say, it''s awesome.


    Honestly, I have to agree with what he wrote, don''t treat this as a normal game, this world feels truly alive. Don''t just think of it as a game, you will run into trouble.


    And believe me, the Death-Penalty sucks. Well, both being sentenced to death and the penalty you suffer if you die. If you die, you lose temporary attributes, levels and skill-points and even permanent attribute-points. Yes, each time you die, your character permanently becomes weaker.


    Seriously, don''t die. Even dying in the early game might screw over your late-game. We might respawn but don''t go charging in willy nilly, treat your life as if it''s the only one you have.


    On the subject of dying, remember to set your spawn-point. If you don''t there''s no way of knowing where you end up and you don''t want to be in the wilderness with high attribute-penalties for days. You will likely die again and have to gamble with your respawn, again. You see the problem - it can easily become a vicious cycle of death, lowering your attributes further and further.


    Look for a place you trust - an inn or a temple, for example - and ask the owner if you are allowed to bind yourself there. They understand what you mean and if they don''t actively dislike you, they will likely allow it.


    Yuthos, Smith of the Aurina-Clan


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>


    Tobiuno, confirmed Beta-Account


    </td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    About the Death-Penalty, it''s even worse than you think. Not only do you lose temporary levels, from level 50 onward, you lose permanent levels. A few days ago, when I was level 60, I died and when I had regained my lost temporary levels I was only level 59 but needed the same EXP I previously needed to reach 61 from 60.


    So yes, don''t go dying willy nilly, it''s most likely not worth it.


    Best Wishes


    Tobiuno, Lieutenant in the Dukal Guard of his Grace, Sir Walter, Duke of Highever


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>


    Slanesh


    </td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    Cut the crap, you just want to take all the benefits for yourself! Don''t listen to the troll!


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>


    Jeanyra, confirmed Beta-Account


    </td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    God, where were you when I needed you?!


    Just kidding...


    But in all seriousness kids, don''t do what I''ve done. I always played casters so my path was clear. I invested in all those tasty mental stats, disregarding the physical stats and made a Sorcerer. My guide told me it would be a bad idea but hey, high risk and high reward and all that.


    So I made an Sun-Elf Sorceress, thinking that I''ll be awesome.


    Joke is on me, when I arrived, I had no spells, just the ability to make my own spells. Yeah, funny that, how the hell do I do that? I then joined the Mages Guild and they taught me a few runes and after a long time of trying, I finally gained Fire Rune Mastery and the runes became easier. Then I saw one Traveller who rolled a guild-mage. Guess what? He is able to learn the runes directly from the guild, no need for stupid rune mastery to paint them into the air. In addition, he can even use a wand to skip the stupid air-painting I have to do. No, he just waves that stupid stick around, says some phrase and things go boom. That''s such BS, I''d love to reroll but nope, you have one beta-character.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>


    Tittania


    </td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    All will knell befor me! The Dark Quen will rise!


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>


    Cell


    </td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    Lol, Trolling is a art!


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>


    Heracles, Official Pantheon Moderator


    </td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    After the last two post, I''ll set this to only allow confirmed accounts to post here. No need for trolls, it''s a great summary in my opinion.


    However, people should keep in mind that it is only from a limited point of view.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>


    Tobiuno, confirmed Beta-Account


    </td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    Thanks for keeping the trolls out. Also, before things derail here once more with Pro/Anti-Titania Flames like they did a couple of times before, please note that the account is called ¡°Tittania¡±, so I''d bet that it''s a troll. I doubt that the real Titania would stoop so low, she''s too awesome for that.


    So if you read that Titania, there is a place for you amongst the Blades of the Realm, contact me if you are interested, I''m sure we can get you here.


    Best Wishes


    Tobiuno, Lieutenant in the Dukal Guard of his Grace, Sir Walter, Duke of Highever

 Chapter 44

    Slowly, I pushed my aching body up and blinked open my eyes. In front of them was the rough stone floor of the Dungeon, I must have passed out for a second after my last spell against the boss.


    Suddenly, I remembered the image of Sigmir flying through the air like a rag doll. I stood on shaky legs, looking over to her downed form before limping over. My head was killing me and trying to create runes to heal me, only produced a stabbing pain, as if someone was driving an ice-pick through my eyes into my brain. My blurry eyes wandered to my Astral Power Bar and seeing it totally depleted went to my debuff display. There was only one debuff and focusing on it told me that it was called Astral Severance.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Astral Severance</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You have been fully severed from the Astral River. No Astral Power can be regenerated until the severance is overcome. Duration: 71:58:30</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    So no magic for three days? Well, that sucks balls.


    I reached Sigmir, checking her for injuries as best as I could, before softly and carefully placing her head into my lap.


    Idly stroking her hair, I finally looked at the blue screens I had ignored.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Knight Mannelig died</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You gain 7 500 EXP.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>For killing an opponent 1 level above you you gain Bonus EXP</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>For killing an opponent without a Traveller in your party, you gain Bonus EXP</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>For killing an opponent with the Dungeon Traveller-Bonus in effect, you gain Bonus EXP</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>For killing a Dungeon-Boss without a full party, you gain Bonus EXP</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>You have cleared the Dungeon Barrow Den.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>For clearing a Dungeon under the effect of the Dungeon Traveller-Buff you gain Bonus EXP. The Dungeon Traveller-Buff expires.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>


    You reached level 45


    </td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Title gained</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You gained a Title:: Dungeon Explorer</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>For clearing a Dungeon while under the effect of the Dungeon Traveller-Buff, you gain the Title Dungeon Explorer. You gain increased Experience from the Dungeon Traveller-Buff</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Skill increased</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You increased your skill: Darkness Rune-Mastery [53/100]</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Skill increased</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You increased your skill: Blood Rune-Mastery [42/100]</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Skill increased</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You increased your skill: Blood Magic [25/100]</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    The EXP gave me a slight smile, even if the whole thing had been a trying experience. I checked the quest-log and saw it was truly completed. Yes, calling this quest ''Hard'' did it justice, it had been brutal.


    I was driven from my reverie by a soft, sound resonating in my mind. Focusing inward, I managed to identify Lenore as the source of the sounds, a mix of peeping and cawing but extremely weak.


    ¡°Lenore, are you alright?¡± I sent to her.


    ¡°By the ancestor, what did you do? I feel like a giant sat on me. You..., you ripped my own Astral Power out of me, enough to sever me from the Astral River itself?!¡± she sounded pained, exhausted and angry.


    ¡°I''m not sure. I needed every bit of power I could get. Maybe, after my own power was depleted, I took from you to finish the job. But I know what you mean, my own connection to the Astral is gone as well. It will be a few days before there is any magic from me.¡± I explained with a tired smile on my face. There was a slight exultation about winning that I would not vanish, even with my abused body and tired mind. Sigmir was breathing softly but easily, Ylva looked to be alright as well so we had won. Yes, it had been closer than I was willing to admit but it had worked, nothing would change that.


    ¡°I want to call you mad and rage at you. It had to be done, hadn''t it? If not, Sigmir would be dead and Ylva sent back to the source of Ice. But please, try to avoid it. I''m a creature of the Astral, if not for being in my Hallow when it happened, I''d be dead. I''ll have to stay in here until my connection returns. Please don''t try to use my active abilities until it''s back, it will not work and only hurt me.¡±


    Again, I got lost in my thoughts, stroking Sigmir until her eyes fluttered open some time later.


    ¡°What happened...? Morgana? You are alright!¡± she tried to push herself up and back on her feet but the only thing she managed was to get to her knees before she had to stop.


    ¡°Lay back down, love. We won. The dungeon is cleared.¡± she went back down and I was able to see a slight smile on her face.


    ¡°We did it, didn''t we? What happened? Why is your face so bloody? The last thing I remember is, that I used an incredibly risky attack. I think I struck him but afterwards, there was only darkness...¡± she asked while sinking back into my lap.


    I brought a hand to my face, trying to feel if something was wrong. ¡°He used some kind of area attack shout, forcing Ylva out of her Hallow and knocking both of you out. I got knocked back but your last strike managed to destroy the helmet and shield of the boss and I was able to destroy it with the Anti-Magic I used before. I guess the blood on my face comes from overdrawing my Blood Magic, the last time I did that, my nose bled as well.¡± I explained and resumed stroking her hair.


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    ¡°Love, it looks like you cried blood. You really gave it your all, didn''t you? Please, let''s not challenge dungeons again with just the two of us, this was far too close. I don''t want to lose you.¡± Sigmir told me, while softly stroking my face.


    ¡°Yes, I agree. Even if Lenore and Ylva are amazing, I''d rather have additional people with us. Say, what is the normal formation used? In other worlds, I''ve heard about battle-teams of four to ten people with pretty much every number in between. What do people in this world use?¡± I asked her.


    ¡°My father told me about that. Most dungeons don''t let more than five people in the same instance and there are limited instances per month. I told you that the rules governing dungeons only allow you to enter a new instance once per year, didn''t I?¡±


    ¡°Yes, you did. Now, we should both relax some more before checking our spoils.¡±


    By now, Ylva joined us as well, stumbling and just as battered as Sigmir and placed her snout on Sigmir''s belly, using it as a pillow.


    For a long while, no words were spoken and at least I was contemplating how close I just came to loosing Sigmir. We stayed like that until Sigmir decided it was time to get up. This time, she managed to get to her feet and offered me a hand. I grasped it but didn''t pull, afraid that even my little weight might be too much in her condition.


    Arm in arm, both for closeness and for stability, we shuffled over to the items that remained, after the boss itself had been seeped back into the dungeon. I wondered why Boss-Monster Corpses were drawn back into the dungeon and normal monsters remained and could be looted fully. I asked Sigmir but she had no explanation for it other than ¡°That''s just how it is.¡±.


    There were two items on the ground, one was a white shirt, almost shining, even in the dim light.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="10">Shimmering Silk-Shirt</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="5">Rarity</td>


    <td colspan="5">Rare</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="5">Type</td>


    <td colspan="5">Cloth Upper-Body Wear</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="5">Base Protection</td>


    <td colspan="5">0 against Piercing Damage</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="5">Base Protection</td>


    <td colspan="5">1 against Slashing Damage</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="5">Base Protection</td>


    <td colspan="5">1 against Blunt Damage</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="3">Special Effect</td>


    <td colspan="7">Attribute Increase ¨C While this piece of clothing is worn, Charisma +2 and Intuition +1</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="3">Special Effect</td>


    <td colspan="7">Size Adjustment ¨C This piece of clothing can adjust in size to a limited extent, if it''s supplied with Astral Power.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="10">This shirt was directly spun from the finest silk. It grants the wearer clearer sight to see manipulations and helps with manipulating others. It was part of the dowry that Knight Mannelig received, before denouncing his would-be bride.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    Shiny... Literally.


    The other item was a small, red pendant in the shape of a wheel.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="10">Copper Millstone</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="5">Rarity</td>


    <td colspan="5">Rare</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="5">Type</td>


    <td colspan="5">Pendant</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="3">Special Effect</td>


    <td colspan="7">Attribute Increase ¨C While this piece of clothing is worn, Endurance +2 and Strength +1</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="10">This pendant was fashioned after the millstones in the mills that the Knight Mannelig received as dowry before denouncing his would-be bride.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    I took the pendant and placed its chain around Sigmir''s neck, this would serve her well. Now, with this handy piece of jewellery, I was able to pull her down to my level and into a nice kiss of congratulations. Yes, this would serve well.


    The shirt on the other hand wasn''t bad, I''d wear it below my armour. I took off my armour and put on the shirt, asking Sigmir to take care of the size adjustment as I had no Astral Power in me. The adjustment itself looked as if the shirt was shrinking in the wash, just magnified by a hundred times. As I wanted to wear it below my armour, I was soon clad in a tight silk shirt, putting my body on display.


    When it was on, there was a feeling of expansion and a look on my status-screen showed me that my attributes were indeed increased. I donned my chest-armour and the feeling went away and my status-screen confirmed that the attributes were gone.


    So no armour stacking? Maybe the other way around?


    I stripped again, asked Sigmir to enlarge the shirt which worked without problem and pulled my armour back on. With my slight frame, wearing the maximum-sized shirt more like a summer dress was no problem but no attribute-increase happened.


    Well, rats. With that, I pulled off the shirt and placed it in my bag, the attributes it gave were not good enough for me to give up the protection offered by my armour.


    But while looking at my status-screen I was remembered that I still had the two points I gained for reaching level 45. In order to reach 30 Intelligence with level 50, something that might make the challenge of the first divide easier, I had to place both in it, which I did.


    In this room, just like the others, were a door that had opened on the boss kill but instead of a long, stretched path leading down, it was a stairway leading up. Sigmir used her Lok''nar to check for traps, hoping that there were no magic traps to kill an unsuspecting fool who deemed the dungeon safe, just because the boss had died.


    We made our way back up without incident and as we reached the top, we were greeted by another door and were able to open it.


    Looking down the corridor, we saw the exit of this place, we were at the first crossroad we had encountered after entering the dungeon.


    Hand in hand, we made our way outside, yearning for the fresh air after three days in this dark, musty place. Stepping outside felt a bit strange, as if we passed through a membrane but then we were out and surrounded by the clear, cold air of the forest.


    For the first time, I realized how loud and living even this snowy forest was. There was the sound of the wind, moving around us, the soft groans as the trees itself moved with the wind, the rustling of needles and the distant sounds of the oceans, all encompassing us. It felt as if for the first time in days, I was able to breathe freely.


    Looking into the sky, there were shooting stars, tracing flaming trails through the heavens.


    ¡°Look.¡± said Sigmir and in front of her materialised a blue screen. I guess it was hers and she let me read it.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Second Night of Falling Stars.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>A second group of Travellers was allowed to visit your home. Treat them as you would want to be treated yourself and teach them, for they will need it.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>

 Chapter 45

    Under the light of the stars and the incredible fireworks in the sky, we made our way back to the spot we had used three nights back to rest. As we reached it, we saw that it was still as we left it - no new snow or anything, and there was even some firewood left.


    As I was a little steadier on my feet than Sigmir, I went to gather more firewood, while she got a fire going. Our dinner was made out of dried meat and hard bread; neither of us had the strength left to cook something up, or the ingredients for that matter.


    The night, we spent once more snuggled together under a sky full of stars, watching the shooting stars go by. It looked impressive and remembering my own ride down, I had a fond smile on my face. How great it must be for Lenore, to soar through the sky as she pleases?


    I''m not sure if it was because we both were severed from the Astral, but for the first time, Lenore and I shared dreams that night. The dreams of flying, riding the wind made me yearn for wings of my own and the dreams of dreary school-buildings, built out of cold stone, filled with uncaring people, living their own lives filled me with a profound sense of loneliness, so deep that I woke with tears streaming down my face. I knew that I had never cared about being alone, so why was the dream hitting me so hard? Why was Sigmir''s presence so soothing to me? Not knowing how to answer either question, I buried myself deeper into her arms, taking in her smell and warmth, simply enjoying the knowledge that I was not alone. I almost felt Lenore''s wings settling around my shoulders in an clumsy embrace as she sent me feelings of companionship as well, trying to soothe my racing mind. The combination worked and I fell back asleep and this time, there were only happy dreams of flying, of Sigmir and of Ylva. Feeling content, I fell back into a deep sleep.


    Morning came and with it the moaning and groaning of Sigmir, Ylva and me as we stretched our abused muscles. I was best off, I only suffered slightly - my exhaustion had been mostly mental - but Sigmir paid for the strain the combination of Ylva''s skill, Sigmir''s aura and my magic had placed upon her body. Intellectually I knew that it had been necessary but I felt bad seeing her like that.


    I made her lay back down and tried as best as I could to massage the knots out of her muscles. I had never done it so I was not sure how well it worked but the stroking, caressing and fondling made Sigmir definitely feel good, going by the happy noises she was making.


    But if possible, I wanted to sleep in a bed tonight so we started making our way back to Neyto. On the way back, I felt just how badly I relied on my magic in this world; we were attacked, and using my blades felt clumsy, as if I had used Ice Magic every time before, giving me better control and strength. With Sigmir in her overdrawn condition, it must have been a sight to see us fighting. Even enemies ten or more levels below us became dangerous opponents that we had to take seriously in order to prevent injury. Luckily, there were only a few beings that attacked us, so we made adequate time, and fighting completely without Astral Power gave me an insight how much it did within my body. On a positive side, I gained five skill-points in my Dual-Blade Mastery; purely physical fighting had improved the skill a lot.


    We stumbled into the crystal forest surrounding the elemental nexus shortly after dark. Knocking on Kallista''s door was the next step and when she saw us in our exhausted condition, she instantly pulled us inside and gave both of us a hug.


    She greeted us with ¡°Welcome back. You managed your task, right? I''m glad, it would have been sad to see two stars so bright burn out so early.¡±


    I felt her gaze upon me and there was a slight tickling at the edge of my consciousness making me frown.


    ¡°Oh, you felt that? Remember the feeling, that''s what it feels if someone who''s proficient with Observe uses it on you. Looks like both of you profited tremendously from going into the Barrow Den but had quite the struggle. Now, my friends and guests don''t run around looking like bums that lost a brawl with a thornbush. Your clothes are ripped and torn every which way. Can you take care of that, or do you want me to?¡± She looked at me expectantly.


    ¡°You mean fix the clothes? I have no idea how, to be honest.¡± After my admission, she shook her head, muttering, ¡°What do they teach children these days? Oh, right, Traveller.¡±


    She stuck her hand in her waist-pouch and took a hand of small rocks out and started murmuring under her breath and making strange gestures with her free hand. Those didn''t look like the runes I did and didn''t leave any glowing lights behind. Just before I wanted to ask what she was doing, the hand with the rocks and my clothes started to glow with a grey light and all the small damages were flowing back together as if they''d never existed in the first place. Seeing my surprised expression, her hand flew up, stopping me from speaking. She repeated the procedure with Sigmir and her clothes were mended as well. In addition, every small stain was gone, as if the clothes had just been expertly laundered.


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    ¡°Now you look acceptable. Take a seat and tell me, which souls did you have to face?¡± She asked with a happy smile and started rummaging around in her kitchen.


    Sigmir and I took seats at her table, close to the fire, trying to get some warmth into our bones. I had never felt as cold in this world as today.


    ¡°Thank you, could you teach me how to do that? It seems like a very useful skill to have.¡± I asked her.


    ¡°I don''t think so. You use runes to use your magic, don''t you? My way would not work for you.¡± She answered.


    Slightly disappointed, I started my tale of the dungeon, curious what Kallista would tell us about it, now that we had seen it. The tale of the Schandmaul was still on my mind, someone who had done tasks for the Grandmother and ended up within a dungeon.


    While I told my tale, Kallista supplied us first with hot tea and just as I finished, with a scrumptious dinner, as if she had planned the timing. With me silenced due to a full mouth, Kallista sat down, prepared herself a cup of tea and started a tale on her own.


    ¡°Now, both of you know that the Grandmother is mostly doing as she pleases. What you need to understand is that she is old. And I don''t mean ''Old for a mortal'' I mean ''Old, even in comparison to the world''. She wandered the world for millennia and finally settled down here, creating Neyto and taking control of the Nexus. During the time she wandered the world, she encountered many things and some people made her angry to the point that she used her powers to entrap their souls.


    When she came here, the presence of those souls would have disturbed the Nexus and the workings around it causing great harm, so she created the Barrow Den to put those souls to use, imprisoning them within a created dungeon and supplying it with her own powers. From time to time, one of those who ask for her help, make an request so self-serving, so preposterous, that she sends them on a journey of self-discovery. Others attack her and try to kill her or those she granted sanctuary. In both cases, chances are that she takes their soul and buries them in the Barrow Den so they have a use in the afterlife.


    Due to that, she is able to control who goes into the Den and if someone tries to enter it without her permission, only their gods can save them. And even they would have problems.


    So yes, the Schandmaul took tasks to gain an enslavement-spell from the Grandmother. She wanted him to understand that, if you needed magic to make someone love you, it was not meant to be and that he should use his own wit and grit to win his girl''s heart. I mean, someone who is resolute enough to steal from the gods themselves should be able to charm a girl, shouldn''t he?


    Well, he was so narrow-minded that he never looked at himself and realised that there was no need for magic so when the Grandmother turned him away, he attacked her and got tossed into the den with his precious gains.


    The Snowqueen is a more tragic tale. You see, long ago, there was a beautiful princess, betrothed to the prince of a nearby kingdom. However, the prince was given a cursed dagger by his enemies and the curse drove him mad, killing his princess out of jealousy. Sadly, that was not all. After he saw what he did, he was freed of the curse but the madness remained. He used his own life and soul to fuel a great spellworking, trying to atone for his sins and resurrect the princess. However, he was no skilled mage and while there is power in madness, there is no skill in madness. His spell worked to a point; it took his own life, his soul and all the lives in the castle to fuel his insane working. The result was that the soul of the princess was ripped from the cycle, bound to this world together with all the souls in the castle. The city turned into a necropolis with undead roaming the streets and the undead princess, now sitting on the throne as queen looking for her prince and using magic to subdue any man unlucky enough to stumble into her realm. The concentration of undead energies caused the land to die and the harm spread out, slowly but surely like a disease.


    Without some similarly strong power-source, there was no breaking the spell, so the Grandmother did the next best thing and took all the souls there and bound them to the dungeon, containing them within. Sometime in the future, they will fade from this world and have peace at last.


    The last one you encountered, the Knight Mannelig, was an especially vile customer. You see, a young troll-maiden fell in love with the lout and wanted to marry him. As she was no great beauty, she used everything she could to provide a great dowry to entice the knight. Well, the Knight took the dowry and then claimed that he''d never marry her, for she was a barbaric heathen and not worthy of him. The troll-maiden killed herself in anguish and when the Grandmother heard it, she felt that the knight should pay for his callousness, so she ripped his soul out and he will stay in the barrow-den until his soul is lost. To mock him, the only weapon he is able to use is the blade given to him by the troll-maiden. There are more souls in the Barrow Den but the Grandmother decided that three would be the right number of floors to serve as a trial.


    When you continue your journey, you should remember that the trials are not only trials of combat, they are trials of character. Only the Barrow Den serves as a test of might, the other trials are different.¡±


    During Kallista''s tale, Sigmir and I had been busy listening and feasting at the same time so now we had to digest first, both the tale and the meal. It felt strange that the punishment was the same for those who actually did something as for those who had been the victims. But I guess it was a case of waste not, want not. Sure, simply destroying the souls might have been kinder but in my eyes, now they at least served a purpose and were not simply wasted. And thinking further, I was unsure if it was even possible to destroy them, considering that I was carrying around a soul that a God had sealed and left to perish. So who knew what was actually possible in that regard.


    With the dinner done, Sigmir and I excused ourselves and went to visit Kallista''s bath once more. While there was definitely lust in the air, my headache had resurfaced over the course of the day and Sigmir was still hurting from her overexertion during the fight, so we had to be satisfied with lovingly washing each other. Both of us were a lot more relaxed when we returned to our room and I tried again to massage Sigmir, this time with the benefit of a comfy bed for her and a warm room so I could take my time. I''m not sure who enjoyed it more, me caressing her muscles, feeling the strength within or her having it done. The combination of the warm bath and the massage soon managed to put her into a deep sleep and when I felt that there were no more tense spots, I cuddled up to her and went to sleep.

 Chapter 46

    After Sigmir had fallen asleep, I logged out to take care of real-world business. I had done so just before the fight with the last boss and now there was a pressing need once more. Getting up was interesting; the headache that I had in-game was still kind of there, more muted as if I was feeling less the pain itself and more the memory of pain, radiating through my mind. I heeded the call of nature before I popped some food into the oven, setting a timer to remind me when it was done. Then I grabbed my training blades and went through a full series of forms, comparing the experience in-game and outside of it.


    My body in the real world was rather close to my body in-game, if you discounted the reaction-speed, but there was something missing in the real world. Now that I had experienced it in-game, the difference became obvious, I had subconsciously used my Ice Magic to wield my blades.


    Interesting¡­


    The beeping of my oven-timer pulled me from my thoughts, reminding me that there was a primal need for fuel, even if my body was mostly lying around at the moment. I was quite careful not to overeat, I did little in the way of sports after all. About half an hour of training was not enough to eat heavy.


    While enjoying me meal, I logged onto the forum and saw a pinned thread by Tobiuno and started reading it. The information was interesting but limited, I guess those who earned traits from the tests had kept quiet about it, hoping to gain an advantage when the game itself launched. I heartily approved; no need to tell the masses your secrets for fifteen minutes of internet-fame.


    Further down, someone complained about the useless Sorcerer-Class and I had to laugh. Of course a class designed to walk its own path is worse at walking the road of another compared to someone who is designed to walk that road. What a fool.


    Still, it was interesting to compare my own experiences with those of others, even more so if it was possible without giving information away. I subscribed to the thread in order to look it up in the future.


    I also searched for anything that might give a clue just what had happened with the two strange guys at the third floor of the dungeon but there was nothing to be found. Unless I got information directly from Pantheon Entertainment, it would remain a mystery.


    Soon, it was time to rejoin the game.


    I logged back in and jarred my sleeping game-body awake by the shift.


    ¡°Thank the Ancestor, you are back.¡± cawed Lenore in my mind. ¡°It''s rather creepy to be severed from the Astral and being severed from your senses in addition to that is even worse. Say, what do you do when you turn into a soulless husk like that? Before, I was able to use my own connection with the Astral to make sense of things but just now? Not fun at all.¡±


    ¡°I''m sorry Lenore, I went back to my own world. What was it like for you?¡± I apologized.


    ¡°Normally, I''m still able to feel what''s around us, even if your body turns ethereal, I still know what is going on. I wouldn''t be able to leave without breaking our bond but it would be possible. Just now, it was as if I was in a locked box, without being able to perceive anything at all.¡± Lenore explained, then she pleaded. ¡°Please don''t do that again.¡±


    Now I felt bad for taking my time, I promised myself and her that I would not leave for longer than necessary before our connection was re-established.


    I pricked my ears trying to find out if anyone was awake already, there was no point in trying to go back to sleep, Lenore''s anxiousness radiated outward and made me anxious as well. I heard sounds downstairs, so I got up and got ready for the day.


    I joined Kallista in the kitchen, wishing her a good morning and joining her in her breakfast preparation. I remembered the post on the forum about random respawning and asked Kallista if it was possible to  bind myself at her place. Her sad smile told me all, according to her, it was impossible due to the influence of the nexus.


    With that out of the way, there was another thing I''d been curious about since meeting Kallista, I''d love to hear her story. She''d been a good friend to Sigmir and me, both, so I''d like to get to know her better.


    As we worked together, I decided to simply go ahead and ask. ¡°Say, Kallista, would you mind telling me your story? I have a feeling that there is one, and I''d love to hear it.¡±


    She looked askance at me for a moment, but replied ¡°Well, I believe we can trade. You tell me the story of Sigmir and you, and I will tell you my own. Fair is fair, after all.¡±


    We carried the prepared breakfast to the table and I started my tale.


    ¡°You know that the first group of Travellers came into this world two months ago. I was one of them, obviously. There were some circumstances that caused me to land not close to a city or dwelling, but in the middle of nowhere. During those first days, I managed to find shelter in a cave and fought with the local wildlife, getting stronger every day until one day, I stumbled upon Sigmir while hunting. She was hunted herself and surrounded by wolves, just getting ready to strike the killing blow. When I saw that, I felt my blood boiling, calling out for me to save her. I charged into the fray just as she fainted and my magic burst forth like never before. I managed to slay all her attackers and decided to take her back with me - I wanted to find out why I felt like I did. I had never felt like that before.¡±


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    I stopped talking to take a bite and have some tea. Just as I wanted to continue my tale, Kallista spoke up.


    ¡°Well, the old Changer made your people, did he not? I''m not surprised that he included an instinct to save his own blood. It''s just prudent to make sure that soldiers are loyal to those they are supposed to protect, right?¡±


    I must have looked quite surprised as she gestured for me to continue talking. I blinked several times, trying to make sense of the new information but then caught myself and continued.


    ¡°Where was I? Oh, right, I brought Sigmir back to my cave and fed her something warm, as she was shivering in the cold - that was before we met Ylva and she gained her own cold-resistance. When she woke up, she swore an oath to stay with me and protect me. After hearing her story, I felt like I had to protect her, to nurture her so she can be herself, and gave my word that I''d do so.


    When I made sure that she was alright that night, I discovered that she was under the effect of some strange magic or disease, I don''t quite know. The system told me that those living close to a nexus might be able to help so I wanted to take her here. Before that plan could go anywhere, my cave was discovered by her pursuers, and we had to flee together. For three days, we fled through the forests until we got caught with our backs against a canyon. Sigmir held them off, giving me time to create a bridge for us, but I got hit in the back and almost died. Sigmir managed to carry me to safety after I used my last strength to destroy the bridge we had just used. She cared for my wounds and made sure I would be still alive to heal myself.¡±


    Again, I stopped talking to take a bite. After a moment, Kallista spoke up again.


    ¡°So Sigmir is one of the old-fashioned Giantblood. The giants were nothing if not honourable. To them, having their life saved meant that the saviour had gone against the Norns for them and was worthy of their service. I doubt that most still know about that belief, but it matters not. To them, a life-debt is the greatest of all and satisfying it is imperative. She will spend the rest of her life with you, giants are hard-headed that way.¡±


    It was interesting to hear the differences between the myths Pantheon must have used as a basis and what they did with it. But it made sense, in the myths the giants were evil so they could not have honour. Here, they were just part of the world and tribal cultures often had a rigid belief in honour, holding them together.


    ¡°After that, we spent about a week in our new cave before we ran into Lenore and Ylva, who joined us. With them, we continued our journey here.¡± I smiled. ¡°Well, that''s the tale of the two of us. I''m still not sure why I feel like I do - my mind knows that as a Traveller, my time here is limited and after two years, I''ll be gone and unable to return. I know that there will be heartbreak at the end of the road. And despite that, I walk the road with great strides.¡± I looked down and picked at my breakfast, thinking about Kallista''s comment about making sure that soldiers stayed loyal. What better way to ensure loyalty, compared to making the soldier love their charge?


    ¡°No, don''t think like that. Don''t throw away what you have because of an uncertain future.


    I hold it true, whate¡¯er befall;


    I feel it when I sorrow most;


    ¡®tis better to have loved and lost


    than never to have loved at all.


    Treasure what you have, for any day could be the day you lose it. Now, I have promised you my story. And Sigmir, you can come in as well. Don''t worry about Morgana, she will not forsake you in her fear. Too much binds you together, believe me on that." Kallista spoke up, sounding in the middle as if she recited a poem. Just then, Sigmir came into the room with tears in her eyes. Those tears had been my doing, my doubts had caused her pain. As she sat next to me, I grasped her hand while feeling incredibly guilty and morose.


    Kallista got another plate for Sigmir and I held onto her hand, afraid to let go.


    ¡°See, what you feel is not just caused by some loyalty instinct. Your feelings are far too complex for that. But I promised you my own story and I shall deliver.¡±


    She looked at the two of us, poured herself another cup and held onto the cup as if trying to gain strength from it.


    ¡°You may know that dryads are a rather strange species. There are no male dryads, we bond with trees in order to leave offspring. A dryad joins with her tree in a symbiotic, eternal bond, creating the beginning of a grove. Each new dryad grows close to her mother, until one day, she has to decide if she wants to stay, plant her own tree and expand the grove or if she wants to wander the world and search for a tree and bond with it in the wild, forming a new grove. I was one of those gripped by wanderlust, and together with my best friend Iona, I set out to see the world. Iona went with me, but she had always been a more steady sort - I believe she might have been happy to just stay, grow her own tree and live happily ever after. Alas, it was not to be and she went with me.¡±


    I could see the shimmering of moisture in Kallista''s eyes and watched her take a sip of tea, to calm her quivering voice before continuing.


    ¡°We travelled far and wide but one day, we made a mistake. You see, we were both proficient in the shape-change spells of the druids so we spent most of our time as one animal or the other. That day however, we were in our true shapes, playing in the water when a couple of males happened upon us. Iona told me to change and flee, I did so and thought she was right behind me. When I got to the edge of the woods around the water, I turned to look for her. She had not fled with me, she had changed into a bear and attacked the men, using her own life to make sure I got away. I saw a spear pierce her heart before I could tear my eyes away and run. I don''t know how long I stayed a wolf, I lost myself in the instincts and the sorrow.


    The Grandmother saved me, you know? I was so lost in my shape, there was no more me, just a knotted ball of sorrow, buried under the instincts of an animal. She took her time, bringing me back out of my shell and after an eternity of patience on her part, I managed to find my way back into being me. I grieved for Iona and when the Grandmother asked me for my help, I agreed. That was back before she created Neyto. Together, we made our way to the Nexus and she asked me to link myself with the Nexus, to bond with it as if it was a tree. It worked, the Light Nexus of Ice attuned itself further with me, and its power helped the life all around us to flourish. The Crystal Trees around the Nexus are part of it, part of me. With my link to the Nexus, I have gained something incredibly valuable, I gained the time to wait for Iona. I believe that one day, her soul will return from the Cycle and, fates willing, we will be together again.¡±


    There was a brave smile on her face but it could not hide her sadness. Sigmir and I stood at the same moment, walking around the table and embracing our host and friend. When I looked up, into Sigmir''s eyes, I knew that I''d want to enjoy every second I could spend with her.

 Chapter 47

    Later that morning, Sigmir and I went out to turn in the quests for Thekk and Cisar. The tale Kallista had told us was still weighing on our minds, causing us to hold closely onto each other.


    Thekk was once more in his smithy, hammering away at some piece of metal. We waited until he paused in his rhythm, not wanting to disrupt his working.


    ¡°Greetings, Master Thekk, we return from the Barrow Den and have the Death Metal you wanted with us.¡± I greeted the smith. ¡°Where do you want us to put it?¡±


    He gestured to an empty bin at the side so I walked over and started tossing the metal we had gathered within the dungeon inside. Extracting it was quite hard as we had to jam the metal and the bones together to get all our loot out of the dungeon. In the end, I held the bag and Sigmir emptied it.


    When we were done, Thekk came over, inspecting our loot and then nodding.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Quest Completed</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>Thekk goes Death Metal</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You gained: 25.000 EXP</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    ¡°Good, that''s a decent amount. I''ll have to melt it to get rid of the annoying drain-effect that stuff has but it''s the best you can get out here. Thanks a lot.¡± For the first time, I saw him crack something akin a smile, not that it was readily visible behind his bushy beard.


    ¡°Now, I promised you an item made by my hand. Come, look at this.¡± he handed me an ornate silver dagger. It had a straight blade, double-edged and a slight fuller for some reason. The fuller didn''t end slightly above the quillon as customary, it extended down to it and was even extended into the quillon itself, tracing a channel to the two ends of the quillon. Both ends were fashioned to hold something, as if there were supposed to be gems inserted. The rest of the hilt was covered with a dark wood grip, ending in a pommel that had a round, silver-white gemstone inserted into it.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="10">Silver Athame</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="5">Rarity</td>


    <td colspan="5">Rare</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="5">Type</td>


    <td colspan="5">Ritual Dagger</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="5">Base Damage</td>


    <td colspan="5">10 Damage Piercing</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="5">Base Damage</td>


    <td colspan="5">3 Damage Slashing</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="5">Base Damage</td>


    <td colspan="5">0 Damage Blunt</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="5">Strength Modifier</td>


    <td colspan="5">Very Low</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="3">Special Effect</td>


    <td colspan="7">Blood Drinker ¨C This Ritual Dagger is made to allow for easier bloodletting, allowing the user to draw the blood into two prepared positions.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="3">Special Effect</td>


    <td colspan="7">Rune Weaver ¨C The pommel of this Ritual Dagger holds a spell-focus, allowing to draw runes with it. Ice-Runes drawn this way use less Astral Power.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="10">This Athame is not made for combat, it is made to facilitate better spellcasting, acting as a focus for Ice Runes and a guiding-tool for Blood Magic.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    Looking at the Athame, it''s shape, stats and special effects, everything told me, that was no martial weapon. This blade was designed to help with my spellcasting. The blade was so delicate, it would snap if I tried to use it for anything more strenuous than cutting vegetables and doing so would be a grave insult to the fine workmanship. No, this blade was supposed to be used to stab into a downed enemy to draw the blood through the fuller into the quillon and a prepared container. Or maybe, I could learn to create those Bloodspheres I had seen in the Snowbold-Den a month ago. They would fit into the quillon as if it was designed for it, which it probably was.


    But what interested me the most was the spell-focus, I''d love to learn how it works so I could create one for all my magic, not just Ice-Runes.


    While I was inspecting my new tool, Thekk watched me with interest, as if he was judging me, judging his work. I bowed slightly in thanks, ¡°Thank you, Master Thekk, it''s a beautiful piece, both in form and in function. I''m sure this will help me with my spellcraft. Say, can you tell me how that spell-focus works?¡±


    He cracked something akin to a smile at my compliments to his work, even if it was hard to see it below his beard. ¡°Honestly, no I can''t, girly. All I know is that there are some materials that can be used by enchanters to create those foci. I had a prepared frost quartz laying around and inlaid it into the pommel.¡±


    ¡°Ah, too bad. Another question, can you tell us why a magic item we found in the Barrow Den stopped working as soon as I wore my armour over it? When I just put on the shirt, it worked just fine, when I wore the armour over it, it stopped working.¡± I asked, as he seemed to be in a good mood.


    ¡°I guess it had some kind of passive effect? Some Attribute-strengthening or something like that? Those need to be worn in a specific fashion. They need to absorb astral power from the ether around you and if you cover them up in unintended ways, they can''t do that. Same if you disrupt the intended connection to your skin. For example, your Athame will only work as intended if the blade is not in a sheath and the hilt is in your hand.


    This narrative has been purloined without the author''s approval. Report any appearances on Amazon.


    In addition, if you wear too many enchanted items too close together they will interfere with each other, making them all worthless. Well, unless they are created to be worn together, then it works. But for example if you try to wear more than a single ring per hand, they will most likely stop each other from drawing power and just become pretty baubles.¡± He gave a thorough explanation.


    ¡°Say, while we are on the topic of magic items, would you, or anyone here in Neyto, trade for magic items from the Barrow Den? Two of the items we gained are pretty useless to us and one of those two is even cursed.¡± I explained, hoping to exchange them for something useful, or at least not as dangerous as that cursed dagger. Just the thought of using it gave me the creeps.


    ¡°No, I don''t think so. You need to remember, all the permanent inhabitants of Neyto are quite powerful. If they weren''t, they''d be dead by now - living next to a nexus is lethal if you aren''t strong enough. Kallisto filters most of it out, but not everything.¡±


    ¡°Drat. I''m almost at the point that I''d just throw this thing away.¡± I told him, while looking into my pack. While looking at the useless shirt and the cursed dagger, I saw the Obsidium Rock the Schandmaul had left behind.


    ¡°What about this, can you do something useful with it?¡± I took the rock out and showed it to him.


    ¡°Obsidium? So you met that old thief? He must have been ground to size by now, if the two of you can deal with him.¡± his smile changed a bit, making it ferocious. ¡°Yes, I can use it, with the size and seeing that your friend has added an axe to her gear, I''d make you a shield. Obsidium is best used for hard, non-bladed gear, you know, like shields or maces.¡± He looked first at me, then at Sigmir.


    ¡°Yes, a shield would be useful.¡± Sigmir told him after looking at me for a moment.


    ¡°Good, now, leave me to my work if there is nothing else. I''ll need a day or two, and the metal you brought me is enough to compensate me for both the Athame and the shield. In addition, I like working Obsidium.¡± With that, he shooed us out of his shop.


    There was still one more quest to turn in, so we walked over to Cisar''s farm, knocking at his door as he was not to be seen or heard outside.


    ¡°Ah, you are back. Good, do you have the bones for me?¡± he asked, right after opening the door.


    ¡°Greetings, Cisar. Yes, we have the bones you asked for. Where do you want them?¡±


    He guided us over to a large mill and pointed to an empty crate. ¡°Put them in there. I''ll take it from there.¡±


    I emptied the bag into his crate, taking care to get them all in.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Quest Completed</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>Bones for the fields.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You gained: 25.000 EXP</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>


    You reached level 46


    </td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    ¡°Oh, great, most of them are already cleansed. It''s the easiest way to destroy skeletons but not everyone can do it. Normally, I have to cleanse them before grinding them, you saved me some work.¡± Cisar said with a smile. ¡°Now, for your reward, I''ll show you outside.¡±


    We followed him out of the building and he stood in front of us, holding two slim crystals up. They were glowing with a strange but warm green-brown light.


    ¡°Now, I said I''d give you two Command Crystals. I know that you will probably have to travel quite a bit for the tasks of the Grandmother, so they will serve you well. I summoned two equine spirits and exchanged Astral Power for their service for half a year. To remain in this plane, they are bound to the crystals and the binding will break as soon as their time is up. I''ve engraved the two crystals with the pattern to create fitting shells for them so you only need to channel Astral Power into the crystals to materialize a Spiritgolem-Mount for you. While they can''t help you in combat - the shell is far too weak for that - they will serve you as transport easily. And the best thing is, they don''t need shelter or food, you can simply send them back into the crystal. Even if you never materialize them, I''ve given them enough Astral Power to keep them happy during their stay.¡±


    With that, he lifted one of the Crystals a bit over his head and it started glowing, then light shone out from it and the light coalesced into a equine form. It looked just like a sleek sorrel, maybe five feet at the withers so only a bit taller than me and for some reason it came out saddled and with reins, ready to be mounted. I blinked for a moment, not sure how to react.


    The horse looked at me and what I saw in it''s eye reminded me so much of Ylva and Lenore that I was sure it was truly sapient.


    ¡°Greetings, Spirit. I''m called Morgana, how would you like to be addressed?¡± I asked politely.


    The horse blew out it''s nostrils, walked over to me and pushed slightly against me. ¡°You can call me Elding. I think we will get along just fine.¡± the playful voice I heard was clearly female,


    I looked back and saw that Cisar had handed the second crystal to Sigmir and she was doing what he had done before.


    Another shape took form, this one a lot larger than Elding''s, maybe six feet at the withers. It looked a lot more muscular in comparison to the sleek Elding and was dun coloured. But the most striking feature were it''s eyes, they were an insanely blue colour, creating a distinct ring-shape in its pupil.


    It looked at Sigmir with a measuring gaze and I heard it''s voice as well.


    ¡°I am Hringur. Together, we will ride.¡± The voice was clearly masculine and sombre, not playful like Elding''s had been.


    Looking at the two animals, I just had to voice one problem. ¡°I don''t know how to ride.¡± I said with a small, embarrassed, voice.

 Chapter 48

    I turned out that my inexperience as a rider was something Sigmir shared, their tribe had a few beasts of burden but nothing for riding. Their main mode of transportation was simply walking.


    Still, it was no problem according to Elding, whom I trusted on the subject. She nuzzled my neck and told us that the easiest way to learn, was to do. With that gem of wisdom, Sigmir and I were shown how to mount without trouble, something that was a lot easier if you could talk with your mount, according to Cisar. Like that, the mount knew just what the hell you were doing and wouldn''t try to turn to see what was going on and in doing so stepping away from the would-be rider and making things difficult for him.


    With the use of the stirrups, it was easy getting on after Cisar explained how it works. We were told to simply hold the reins taut but not actually pull on them. The two spirits would chose our way and we could simply speak to them, after all they were able to speak with us.


    Like that, we left the farm and went riding through the snowy forest. Interestingly, the spirits were able to run on the snow, barely leaving a trace instead of sinking in and having to fight it.


    To view the world from higher up gave a different perspective, for the first time I was able to understand why some people in the real world were paying lots of money to be able to keep horses and ride. I knew the forest, it was almost equal to the forests we''d walked in for the last two months but the different perspective gave me a new outlook and the effortlessness of simply letting my mount decide what to do, made me feel relaxed and content.


    That change in outlook and perspective manifested in another way as well, I was able to see the forest with different eyes. I''d thought I had known the forest due to walking within this forest and those like it for days on end and had seen the beautiful sights it had to offer. But I had only seen the breathtaking, obvious sights for example it''s hard to miss a frozen waterfall glittering in the sunlight, it just smacks you into the face with it''s majesty.


    Now, I looked closer and was able to see small snow-crystals glittering on frozen pine-needles and small icicles growing in secluded spots. It was a more subtle beauty, the beauty of small things not the majestic, breathtaking view of some marvels of nature.


    The two spirits made sure that we didn''t run into anything that mistook them for prey and would have forced them to bolt, possibly causing trouble for their inexperienced riders. Over our ride, it felt more and more natural to move with Elding, letting me sit easy and making it a lot more comfortable. I even gained the Equine Riding-Skill but I doubted quite a bit that I''d be able to truly ride a horse that relied on me for guidance, Elding did that without any true input from me.


    We jaunted through the snowy forest for about two hours before we got back to Cisar''s farm. Dismounting was easy but the painful surprise came when muscles we''d never used in the way we had today, told us so. I stumbled a little and had to stabilize myself by holding onto Elding and saw that Sigmir had to do the same with Hringur.


    Both spirits wished us a nice day and retreated into their respective crystals, leaving Sigmir and me standing in the yard, grinning like fools.


    Together, we slowly made our way back through the grove, walking relaxed hand in hand and both of us thinking our own thoughts. For the first time since I met Sigmir, there was no need to do something, no crisis that needed attention, nothing really that needed to be done.


    With my Astral Severance we would not start our next journey for two days and hunting was pointless, if we found anything worth hunting, my handicap would stop us from doing anything about it. I didn¡¯t want to leave Lenore in the dark and log out for longer than necessary. I approached the Grandmother¡¯s house to turn in my quest but knocking did nothing. Kallista told me I¡¯d probably only see the Grandmother again once all three tasks were done.


    On the next day, apart from riding each day, we relaxed, talking, joking and simply doing nothing.


    I also talked with Kallista about the world of Mundus however her information was rather lacklustre. What she told me about magic was utterly useless to me, because she used an inborn connection to the natural world in addition to memetic chants, gestures and sometimes material components to use her magic. My use of runes was a totally different pony.


    The political and geographic information was interesting but it was dated before the cataclysm that changed both the geographic and political map in a literally earth-shattering manner. Even the continents had changed compared to her information.


    Thus, the only useful information I got was about the natural world. I learned that there was a metaphysical, natural balance between predators and prey. If too many predators were killed, predators further away ''felt'' the abundance of prey and were drawn there. In addition, killing large amounts of living beings without taking the appropriate measures had an effect on the surroundings, twisting them and creating the possibility that Nethersprites would manage to enter our world, spreading decay and corruption.


    In addition, she advised me about our way forward, according to her, our best bet would be going to Yari first; it was located at the end of a trade-route so we might be able to sell some things there as they actually used money. Pretty much everyone accepted the coins issued by the Adventurers Guild. There were the three ''low'' valued coins, starting with Copper then Silver and Gold. They all had a certain weight and due to their distinct pattern it was hard to shave off material so you could trust them without weighing. For higher values, the guild issued enchanted coins, similar to the paper-currency in the real world, because it would be rather annoying to lug around hundred pounds of gold just to buy something big. The comparison she gave was that a night in an inn was about a silver-coin, meal inclusive, a loaf of hard bread was about a single copper and so on.


    Stolen novel; please report.After Yari, we just had to follow the mountain-range south, staying on the east side of it, until we saw a large, lone mountain, this was Mount Yugid. It would take roughly six days march, or two days ride, south. When we completed our task there, we should simply head east until we reached a river and slightly south of us, we should find the grove of Tegi, it would be easy to spot it due to the taller than normal trees around it.


    The day after, it was another day of relaxation. During the afternoon, we checked in with Thekk and Praxi, getting the Dire Boar Armour from Praxi and the Shield from Thekk. Both were high-quality items, as one would expect from crafters with their skill.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="10">Obsidium Round Shield</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="5">Rarity</td>


    <td colspan="5">Rare</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="5">Type</td>


    <td colspan="5">Shield</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="5">Base Protection</td>


    <td colspan="5">18 against Piercing Damage</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="5">Base Protection</td>


    <td colspan="5">18 against Slashing Damage</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="5">Base Protection</td>


    <td colspan="5">14 against Blunt Damage</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="5">Special Effect</td>


    <td colspan="5">Master Crafted ¨C Base Stats increased.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="5">Special Effect</td>


    <td colspan="5">Attribute Increase ¨C While this shield is held, you gain +1 Endurance</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="10">This shield was made by a Master Smith to withstand attacks and help it¡¯s wielder endure attacks. It¡¯s infused with Obsidium making it durable but heavy.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    Walking over to Praxi, we were told that the Armour was an investment, he would detract it from our payment for the ashes.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="10">Dire Boar Brigandine</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="5">Rarity</td>


    <td colspan="5">Uncommon</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="5">Type</td>


    <td colspan="5">Leather Upper-Body Armour</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="5">Base Protection</td>


    <td colspan="5">5 against Piercing Damage</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="5">Base Protection</td>


    <td colspan="5">8 against Slashing Damage</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="5">Base Protection</td>


    <td colspan="5">7 against Blunt Damage</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="3">Special Effect</td>


    <td colspan="7">Attribute Increase ¨C While this piece of Armour is worn, Vitality +1</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="10">This Brigandine was made out of hardened Dire Boar Leather. It is enchanted to increase the Vitality of the wearer.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    In the evening, the Astral Severance wore off. The feeling of Astral Severance fading was a strange one. One moment it was as if I was wearing a blindfold and all of a sudden the blindfold was pulled away and the influx of Astral Power started flooding into me. I had to enter a meditative trance to keep myself from getting drowned in the Astral River.


    I let myself float and feel the stream gushing into me and was able to relax. There was a little pain as my mind had to re-acclimate itself to the Astral Power flowing within it but it was mostly harmless.


    While I was in my meditation, I remembered that I still had one rune to infer, a Blood Rune. Feeling the streams of power within me, I found one that felt akin to my Blood Runes and attuned my mind to it. For the first time, I didn''t use a runestone as basis of my meditation, instead searching the flow of power itself to attune myself to the right stream. Swiftly, a rune entered my mind, an extension of the spout-rune I already knew but attuned to blood. My mind read the meaning as Exsanguinate.


    Not quite what I''d been looking for but it was an interesting concept, useful for offensive magic and curses.


    The next flow I felt was a flow of Darkness, for the first time I truly felt the essence of darkness. Darkness was the unknown, the change and the chaos. Everything was clear cut in the light but things could hide in the darkness. The rune that entered my mind was the most basic darkness but maybe also the most profound. It was the rune meaning Shadow.


    For a little longer, I immersed myself in the Astral River, letting the power flow through me, before once more heading to bed with Sigmir.


    The next morning, we packed our belongings and mounted our spirit-horses before heading south.


    Journeying with the horses was an interesting experience, they weren''t physical creatures so as long as we supplied them Astral Power, they were able to keep going. Ylva had to retreat into her Hallow as she was unable to keep up for long. Instead of six or seven days wandering south to Yari, we managed the trip within two days.


    During the first night, we were the chosen prey of a wolf-pack but they swiftly learned that both Sigmir and I were no easy prey. They slunk back into the woods, leaving a few cadaver behind. Sigmir took care of the skinning and I made a nice stew with their meat.


    The next day, we reached Yari. It was nestled in a long valley with a wooden palisade. If I¡¯d have to guess, I¡¯d say the town had to have about thousand, maybe two-thousand inhabitants, mostly living in long log-houses. There were large tracts of land cleared around town, probably fields for the summer. The only gate in the palisade was facing west, so we had to circle the town once, before entering. We didn''t want to explain about our mounts so before getting into line of sight of the gate, we dismounted and sent the two of them back into their crystals.


    Then we marched on, toward the gates of Yari.

 Chapter 49

    Arriving at the gate of Yari, we got scrutinized by a bored looking guard. It was a tall fellow, maybe 6''6, broad as a barn-door and muscular-looking. His face was clearly ursine with a slim snout on a broad face, in addition to the cute-looking round ears on top of his head. He was clad in reinforced leather armour and holding a glaive while leaning on it. His bored look disappeared when he saw me, morphing into a sneer. As Sigmir and I walked up, he fully ignored me, just looking at Sigmir. After inquiring our purpose coming to Yari, Sigmir told him that we wanted to trade a little and spend the night before moving on. Hearing that, he looked happier and told Sigmir the way to the mercantile so she could take care of our trading. He didn''t quite come out and say it, but it was rather obvious that he''d want me gone sooner rather than later.


    Together we walked in and the first thing that truly hit me was the smell. Nothing could have prepared me for the acrid smell in the air, it was a mix of unwashed old sweat, urine, manure and other things mixed in that I did not want to think about. Smelling this town, after weeks in the crisp, clear air of the forests was akin to diving head first into a sewer. I almost physically recoiled and only the knowledge that it would not be for long kept me from running away. Thinking back, I realized that Neyto with it''s magical appliances was a huge exception and Yugan had the advantage of the ocean as a dumping ground and provider for fresh air. The valley and palisade kept the wind out, making the area a bit warmer but also kept the smell in. Trying to breathe through the mouth was only mildly better, now I had a disgusting taste in my mouth and had to fight in order not to gag.


    I followed Sigmir to the mercantile and watched as she haggled with the clerk about the price of our furs. We had a couple and hoped to get a little money here so we might be able to shop for some stuff. It took a while but finally, Sigmir seemed happy with the deal and got a handful of coins, mostly silver, for her trouble. She then exchanged some of her bounty for salt and a couple other traded incidentals. I guess that so close to the ocean, salt is rather easy to get, compared to further inland.


    We then left the mercantile and walked through the town, I got enough sneers that I pulled on my hood and tried to use a little Dark Magic to deepen the shadows just enough to hide my face. Trying around a bit, I found that the mental image of a black cloud helped. It was easier to imagine a photon-eating mist than it was to move darkness around. Soon, my face was concealed within a billowing cloud of Darkness. The cool thing was, I was able to easily see through it, probably because it was created out of my Astral Power and not a corporeal entity.


    With that, it got better, I still got looks but there was no disgust on their face, they just took notice of me, something I could understand, after all, I was a faceless, humanoid shaped cloud to them.


    It did annoy me a little but I guess I had only myself to blame, remembering my traits. Following behind Sigmir, I watched her buy bread, flour, onions and similar cheap, lasting foodstuff. For meat, we would simply hunt but gathering vegetables was rather difficult in the snow.


    As the day slowly turned to dusk, Sigmir asked the vendor she was talking to, to point us to an inn where we could spend the night. We got pointed to the mercantile, there was an inn taking up the other half of the building.


    The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.


    Walking in, it wasn''t packed by any means but there were some customers. Sigmir got us a room for the night, including dinner and breakfast. Before heading up, it was time for dinner. We chose a nook in the back of the room so I could stay slightly hidden in the shadows, Sigmir had picked up the hostility I''d drawn before concealing myself and wanted me to be able to eat in peace. In our corner, I was almost completely hidden behind her, something I was grateful for. The food wasn''t bad by any means, but we both had been spoiled by Kallista''s amazing magic kitchen and the possibilities within, So while the stew we got was better than the food I could produce over an open fire, it was behind the fare I could create in Kallista''s kitchen and comparing it to the food Kallista had prepared was just unfair.


    After we were finished, it was time to head to our room. I followed Sigmir to the front of the room and while she inquired about the earliest breakfast in the morning, neither of us wanted to stay longer in this unpleasant town, one of the drunk patrons decided to have fun with the small creature. Maybe I was hypersensitive due to all the hostility I had experienced during the day but I felt the flickering shadows around me and felt the intruder into them, a swift moving hand that aimed for my hood, trying to grab it and see what was hidden beneath it.


    There was no conscious thought, just reaction, honed by hours of training, often with scenarios in mind in which a taller, stronger aggressor attacked, possibly from behind. My hand went up, grasping his paw-like hand in my smaller one, digging into a spot that was a pressure-point for humans, and apparently for Bear-Beastmen as well, my aim was to cause pain to distract my attackers during my next action. I stepped back, into the beastman and pulled his arm, using my shoulder and side to leverage his own strength against him, causing a tumble toward the floor. Guiding him towards the floor, the consequences of my actions flashed into my mind, causing it to go into Bullet Time. Crippling a local would not fly, even in self-defence - I would be the one blamed - but I''d have to make an example. I pulled further, changing his course from impact with the shoulder to a flat impact on his back. It would stun him for a moment but most likely, there would be no permanent harm. At the same time, I used Overflow and channelled my Ice-Magic, hoping that I get the blue, glowing eyes. To make the effect visible, I pulled the Darkness before my face a bit back, making my eyes visible. As my Butterfly-Blades were in the grip of my Ice-Magic anyway, I had them float over his face, one in front of each eye, making clear that killing him would have been easy but I chose not to.


    Just as the sound of a heavy impact quietened the room, Sigmir whirled around and I saw her eyes flash red, her aura becoming visible and an invisible pressure spread out from her.


    ¡°We will remember your... hospitality.¡± she growled out before turning back to the innkeeper. ¡°Now, show me our room. We will leave in the morning.¡±


    Feeling the need to continue the theatre, I retracted my Blades, letting them vanish under my cloak and let Darkness billow out from under it, before stalking away, following behind Sigmir. With every step, small, dark clouds seeped from my cloak, before slowly vanishing into thin air.


    Together, we walked up the stairs, out of sight from the main room and entered one of the inn''s guest rooms. The room was quite small with little more in it than the bed and a small table.


    Out of habit, I checked my log for updates and saw that Darkness Magic was now on skill-level ten and stealth had levelled as well.


    Getting into the bed, I felt the prickly straw through the coarse cloth of the bedding. Comfortable, it was not. As I was now quite close to Sigmir, I asked her about the strange pressure that she had used before.


    ¡°In theory, I''m still someone who crossed the first divide, however due to the shaman, I''m weakened. But my strength is returning and I can use a little power to emit pressure as if I had still my original strength. It''s rather useless outside of intimidation. We should still leave early tomorrow morning - no need to give the locals time to get their hackles up.¡±

 Chapter 50

    The next morning, our day started at an accustomed, early hour. We quickly made our way downstairs, wolfing down the meagre breakfast served by an intimidated innkeeper. Afterwards, it was time to leave town before there was more trouble.


    Together we summoned our mounts and hurried away from the inn. Leaving through the gates was easy; they had a guard there but didn''t actually close them at night.


    In the fresh air away from town, I was unsure if we had even a reason to leave this swiftly, nothing had happened after all. Yes, I had smacked some local drunk into the floor but I had done so without causing permanent harm. At the end of the day, it mattered little - we were gone, and I highly doubted that I would voluntarily return.


    We continued our journey south, letting our mounts pick their path and direction. Mainly, Sigmir and Hringur lead with Elding happily plodding behind the bigger horse. Out of curiosity, I asked her about the Spirit-Realm and their normal existence. The two of them were Nature-Spirits, normally living in an world similar to Mundus, only it was fully inhabited by spirits. Interestingly, there was little difference between the spirits in their natural habitat and mortals, spirits could be killed there and eaten, just like mortal beasts could be eaten here. However a Spirit in our world was safe, it could not be truly harmed. They could be summoned with Astral Power because the given Astral Power was, as they called it, refined, in their world the Astral River was stronger, giving them more power but they could only refine a small amount of it. When I asked him if there were also realms of Elemental-Spirits compared to them being Nature-Spirits, I got quite interesting information. Nature-Spirits had small parts of every element with some elements being slightly stronger than the rest. For example the two equine spirits had more earth and wind than water and fire.


    When they were in the Spirit-Realm, it was truly survival of the fittest; every spirit was able to devour others taking their essence into themselves to strengthen their being.


    To me, it sounded as if there were multiple different ''echoes'' of Mundus, the first housing the Nature-Spirits and further down the road the elemental-spirits. Maybe there was even a ''lower'' realm that housed the cycle of souls I had heard about. It was an interesting concept overall.


    During our talks, I watched the endless pine forest go by. If not for the mountain-range to our right and the sun overhead, we may as well have moved in circles. Slowly but surely, I was getting fed up with the region.


    The first night, we spent under an overhang, sheltered from wind and snow. Ylva came out, disgruntled that she was unable to keep up with the two spirits and had to hang out within her Hallow. She made up for her annoyance by hunting for dinner, scaring up some smaller game and letting Sigmir and me prepare it. It was funny, Ylva now preferred her meals skinned, gutted and de-boned but uncooked. The rest of her catch, I turned into a stew for Sigmir and me. Lenore didn''t eat, according to her it was unnecessary as long as she was within her Hallow and she was not a huge fan of the cold. She could live with it but with the warm Hallow I provided, she chose not to.


    On the next day, we made it to the vicinity of Mount Yugid, shortly before nightfall. We decided to scout Mount Yugid during the night. If Firebirds were not named without any sense at all, they had to have a connection to the element of fire, so the dark of night should help us spot and avoid them.


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    Walking up the mountain was quite easy thanks to the stars giving enough light to let my low-light vision guide me. Sigmir had some more troubles but she was easily able to follow me and stay on my tracks. We closed in on the crest of a ridge and looking over it, we saw something unexpected. The cliffs formed a crater and multiple eyrie had been built into the cliffs, each inhabited by a large, red bird with a plumage reminding me of flickering flames. What was truly unexpected however was the bonfire in the middle, seemingly burning without fuel and the humanoid figure dancing around it.


    As I looked closer at the figure, I was spellbound by her beauty. It was as if everything within me called to join her dance, to lose myself in the moment and enjoy the fiery passions she invoked.


    I felt like a passenger in my own body as I hastily made my way down to the crater, barely aware that Sigmir was moving next to me and that the birds around me had started to make an unholy racket.


    When we got down, the dancing woman looked us over and gestured for us to join her dance.


    Together, we danced, Sigmir, I and this woman, round and round in the fire-light. I felt something tugging at me and became aware that the fire was moving with us, flickering, jumping as if it was dancing with us.


    No!


    Why would I want to dance with the fire? A primal part of me rebelled, fire was not for me. If I danced, I''d dance with Snow, with Ice, with the Storm.


    I was unable to stop dancing but I was able to let go. My Astral Power gushed out of me and the surroundings changed. First, mist gathered around me, swirling around me, pushing back the fire-light, caressing me and letting me caress Sigmir as the dance changed. No longer was it a dance around the fire, now the woman danced with the fire and Sigmir and I danced with the mist.


    We danced faster, the mist turning into snow and ice, floating around us and then I felt Lenore flap her wings in my mind and I knew how to turn the flurrying snow into a blizzard.


    The snow sped up with my urging, twisting, swirling faster and faster, moving with the flames, pushing them back. I felt myself becoming one with the blizzard and I felt Sigmir join me, not with her body or her mind, I was sure I was feeling her soul joining the blizzard together with me. I reached for her, as if taking her hand and she accepted. We joined together, not in body or mind, but our souls danced together.


    Our dance became faster, the woman let out a clear, joyful laughter, speeding up with us, challenging us and together, we accepted. The fire sprung up, leaving the spot it had burned before and flaring up, joining the woman in her dance, like the blizzard danced with Sigmir and me.


    When I saw the shadows whirl around us, I called for them, letting them join us in our dance, creating a counterpoint to the flickering fire-light. I felt my mind expand, felt the blizzard push back against the fire but at the same time, join the winds the woman had called into her dance.


    It became a truly magic dance, the fire and the light were only guided by the woman, the ice and the shadows were guided by me as Sigmir let me lead. And between both, the storm moved with both of us, bridging the differences and letting us feel each other. The howling of the storm changed, becoming music for our dance, singing a song of ice and fire.


    I lost myself in the dance, in the magic similar to the feeling I had in the beginning but I knew that embracing the blizzard would not harm me. I felt it''s embrace and knew that it was safe to let go.


    We must have danced through the night; our dance only wound down as the light of the false dawn slowly crept over the walls of the crater. I became aware again and the blizzard departed, leaving me tired but excited. The fire also died down, leaving warmth and silence behind.


    Now that the dance was over, I felt the exhaustion hit me, but it must have been a lot worse for Sigmir - she stumbled, and I had to steady her or she might have fallen. Together, we looked at the woman we had just danced the night away with.


    She looked regal, her hair red like the morning sun with orange highlights flickering within it like small, glowing embers. Calling her anything but beautiful would be a grave insult but it was no gentle beauty it was the beauty of a predator, like a lioness lounging in the sun or an eagle riding the wind. Her gown was made out of a flowing, white material, hugging her like a glove.


    ¡°Now, normally I would be quite upset that someone sneaked into my territory, like thieves in the night. But you joined me in my dance and I now know the two of you. You may call me Samodiva.¡±

 Chapter 51

    Samodiva. The way she said it, it was more than a name, it sounded like a title. Her posture, her bearing, it radiated royalty and grace, the grace of a deadly predator. I was captivated by her looks and voice, standing spellbound before her.


    Ripping myself from my trance, I spoke. ¡°I greet you, Samodiva. I''m called Morgana and this is my mate, Sigmir. I apologize for disturbing you during the night but the two of us were captivated by your dance. We just had to join in.¡±


    Samodiva smiled, looking me up and down, as if deciding what to do next. ¡°So polite, wonderful, it is so rare that my children and I have guests for breakfast. For your dance, I grant you a boon. What would you have of me?¡±


    There was a small tingling in the back of my head but I ignored it, for now, the only important thing was this woman before me and her offer. Visions of naked bodies, entwined in the flickering light of her fire graced my mind, visions of divine pleasures. As I got lost in my visions, I realised that there were only two bodies and it struck me like a hammer blow. Where was Sigmir in those visions? No way I''d find pleasure with anyone if she wasn''t there. With her, I had found something I had been searching for two decades in the real world and here my mind was throwing it away?


    All ideas of requesting carnal pleasures fled from my mind and clarity returned.


    I saw Sigmir slowly moving to one of the empty eyries and focused myself back to our host. Something was strange here. "A boon you say? Would you grant us a tailfeather of one of the firebirds? That would be a great boon."


    She looked at me and I saw fury in her eyes but she reigned it in and there was a saccharine smile on her face. ¡°Yes, of course. I will grant you that.¡± She looked at one of the birds a bit higher up on the cliffs and send a strange, whistling shriek, akin to a birds call. The Firebird winged down to us, landing on her outstretched arm. Softly talking to the bird, her eyes speared into me for a moment as she raised her other arm, gently pulling one of the tail-feathers out. The bird gave a mournful cry, lamenting the loss and the pain it was in. With an assist from Samodiva, it flew back into the cliffs around us.


    A swift look to Sigmir showed me that she was done with whatever she had done at the empty eyrie and was moving back towards me. My mind had finally thrown off the shackles of exhaustion and seduction it had been under and was clear once more, making the connections that had eluded me thus far.


    ''Guests for breakfast'' my ass, Samodiva was one of those spirits that seduced travellers to consume them. Mythology was full of them, Succubi, Yuki-Onna, N¨¹ Gui or whatever you want to call them. Samodiva was probably the local variant and I had wasted my get out of jail-free boon on the tail-feather. It would solve the quest but only if we could get away.


    As Sigmir approached, I gave her a hug and softly whispered in her ear ¡°Be ready.¡±


    I turned back to Samodiva, mentally reading myself to use my magic if necessary. The moment I took the feather from her hand, she spoke up.


    ¡°You joined the dance. And you lived. Both of you live, surviving thanks to your connection to each other. Without that, I would have had both of you. It is as they say. Together, you stand, divided you fall. According to the accords each of you gain a boon of me. And you gained the boon, taken from my own hand.¡±


    As she spoke, the rays of the sun reached her and her features blurred, the gown she was wearing turned into feathery wings, her hands turned into claws and her feet into talons. The formerly breathtaking face changed, getting leaner and turning into a cruel, beak-like visage. In addition, her soft, seductive voice turned sharp, cutting through the still air like the shriek of a raptor.


    ¡°And now, the protection of the old accords is gone. Thrown away by your own, foolish greed! Get them, children, get them!¡±


    Well, shit. The Firebirds all around us left their perches, rising into the sky and I saw that Samodiva herself took to the sky, not risking getting caught on the ground.


    With one hand, I stored the feather and the other drew my Athame swiftly drawing a cold-rune into the air as the birds around us sent ou sparks of fire with the beating of their wings. Those sparks turned into small, feather-like projectiles raining down on us. I discarded the idea of making a mist-cover for the moment and used my rune projection to create a sheet of ice to take the initial volley. I had to use my Ice Magic to prevent it from falling down on us. My next step was getting out my rune-stones, this encounter would require speed, not versatility or power. The first rune-stone I used in conjunction with rune-projection was another one of my ice-rune stones, creating another sheet of ice to reinforce the protections I had in place. Sigmir stood above me, holding her shield ready in case it was needed.


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    As fire rained down on my shields, I looked up, inspecting some of the birds and Samodiva. Samodiva came back as a level 50 Harpy, the birds were between 40 and 45 and Firebirds, no surprise there. But the simple fact that they were airborne and it didn''t look like they would come down soon, fighting seemed impossible. I launched a few Icicles and Ice-Beams but they simply dodged and continued to destroy my shields. To cover our retreat, I used a rune heptagon to fill the area with mist and placed concealment spells on both of us.


    Grabbing Sigmir''s hand, I started running through the mist around us, desperately trying to remember our surroundings, the mist was not all-concealing for me but it concealed enough. To better our chances, I floated one of my mist engraved icicles in another direction and pumped Astral Power into it as it neared the edge of my range, creating another mist explosion away from us.


    To prevent our noise from giving us away, I stopped running and tried to move as silently as possible and motioned for Sigmir to do the same. Up in the air above us, we could hear the cries of the Firebirds and the shrieks of Samodiva coordinating their hunt.


    We crept silently along the rocky cliffs, trying to get away and into the cover of the forest to escape our predators when I felt a shift in the air, not only a physical shift in the wind, it was as if the air itself had changed. The mist I had created to cover us quickly started to thin as the winds grew stronger, whipped up by the birds above us, trying to find us. It was similar to the dance last night, only this time a flock of birds helped Samodiva whereas Sigmir and I were exhausted mentally and physically. Fighting would doom us so we had to hide.


    Close by, within the cliffs, I found a small crevice, just large enough for Sigmir and me to squeeze into, hopefully out of sight from our hunters. I shoved her into the opening and instantly followed behind. There was little more I could do but hope that we would not be found. Now, I finally had time to check my notifications.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Title gained</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You gained the title: Tempestuous Dancer</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You danced with the storm and the Storm danced with you. Using dance to empower magical workings costs less stamina and strengthens the workings it fuels with the power of the blizzard.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Skill increased</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You increased your skill: Ice Magic [54/100]</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Skill increased</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You increased your skill: Darkness Magic [13/100]</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Skill increased</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You increased your skill: Stealth [18/100]</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    I felt the wind outside slowly subside and saw that the covering mist was completely gone. I used a bit of Darkness Magic to make the shadows within our small crevice deeper hoping that our dark clothes would blend with the darkness around us and conceal us. In addition, I tried to create a pure concealment spell over the opening but I had no idea if it worked. Once more, I wished for guidance when it came to magic. Direct physical or combat spells were easy enough but something like this, trying to conceal an opening without using physical means to do so? No idea. I was certain it was possible, probably even with Darkness Magic, but how? That, I did not know.


    Slowly, ever so slowly the day passed. I toyed with the idea of logging out but discarded it, I wasn''t even sure it would work while actively hunted and even if I would be safe, Sigmir would be on her own so no way. Sigmir and I pressed against each other, something that would normally make me ecstatic, but neither of us dared to move for fear of being found. The only voluntary sound we made all day was Sigmir whispering that she had collected the ash we needed.


    A few times, we saw the birds pass over us, high in the sky, and feared that the next moment would be the shriek of triumph, calling their allies and heralding another round of attacks against us. But that shriek never came and when finally darkness fell, both of our nerves were frayed. Our sleep deprivation did not help but under the cover of darkness and more concealment magic, we managed to creep away. A few minutes later, we started running in the darkness, putting distance between us and Mount Yugid. When we finally dared to make camp, neither of us felt like doing much, we only asked Ylva to guard us, then we fell into a deep sleep, those two days had been exhausting as hell.

 Interlude: Trailer

    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>


    Everyone has a road in life.


    </td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    A group of five armed people is seen, walking through a dense forest. One is wearing a dull grey plate-armour in addition to a sword and shield. Slightly in front of him is a dark form, clad in dark leather with a deep green cloak, melding into the forest, sometimes when he moves, a bow is visible in his hand, or the quiver on his hip.


    Behind the armoured fighter, walk two lightly armoured figures, one is carrying an ornate mace, or maybe it should be called a sceptre with a head shaped like a golden apple, while the other is using a long staff to keep the greenery away from him.


    The rearguard is a second fighter, this one with lighter armour; only a chain mail is visible while they walk by, and he carries a large, two-handed axe on his shoulder.


    The image shifts to a large, open theatre. On the stage is are two masked figures, one wearing a black cloak, the other a white gown. The audience room is empty, only few people are moving around, preparing things.


    Again, the image shifts. This time, it is a dark, snowy mountainside. Two black-cloaked figures creep through the snow until they reach a ridge and look into a crater illuminated by a bonfire. Various colourful birds nest in the cliffs around and a single woman dances in the fire-light.


    The image shifts again. A farmer stands tall, surrounded by fields of golden wheat and leaning on his scythe. In the distance, trees with colourful leaves are visible. The viewpoint shifts back, showing rolling hills, filled with various fields and farmers harvesting.


    Once more, the image shifts. A long line of riders assembles on a hill, looking down the slope and lining up. A single rider with a golden helmet rides out front, drawing a sabre and raising it high in the sky. The line bangs their fists on their armoured chests in response.


    Another shift. A solemn, high cathedral, filled with empty pews. A group of white-robed clerics walks down the aisle, slowly, solemnly moving to the high altar up front. The sun filters through the high windows, bathing the nave in colourful light. The windows are decorated with images of golden apples, lightning, warriors holding spears and flaming swords battling monsters and a tall tree, encompassing the world with its roots.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>


    For some, the road is smooth.


    </td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    The farmer is seen again, loading bundles of wheat onto a horse-drawn cart with the help of a farmhand. Both are smiling and carrying on and enjoying the glorious sunset in the distance. They mount their cart, wishing farewell to their neighbors as they head back to their homestead.


    The image shifts back to the cathedral, the clerics reached the altar and slowly the pews fill with worshippers as they enter the nave. Soft choral music fills the air. Candles fill the air with a different kind of glow. Up front, a cleric leads the choir in worship to praise the gods.


    The image shifts and the cavalry on the hill is seen again. The leader up front is slowly riding back and forth, shouting out words of encouragement to his troops. He then starts to ride down the row, clanging his sabre against each spear as he passes his men.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>


    For others, the road is winding and rocky.


    </td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    A huge, dark monster tries to bowl the ranger over. The fighter just manages to step in, blocking the attack with his shield but getting pushed back. The monster looks like a nightmarish cross between a large cat and a dinosaur: four legs, all sporting wicked claws, and a large maw filled with razor-sharp teeth.


    The monster tries to get around the fighter, feinting left only to get blocked by the axe of the second fighter. For a moment, stillness rules. A birds-cry echoes through the forest, shattering the silence and motion returns. The monster leaps back, with the two fighters sticking with it, trying to keep it contained so the ranger can land his strikes. Meanwhile, the two casters create glowing formations in the air, the one with the sceptre illuminating the forest with a warm, golden light and muttering chants and prayers under his breath. The golden glow falls upon the plate-armour wearing fighter, closing his wounds and reenergizing him.


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    The other figure draws brightly glowing, turquoise patterns into the air. As one of the patterns flashes, the turquoise glow centres around the ranger as he nocks an arrow. The glow gathers around the arrow and as it is launched, it draws a glowing trace into the air, striking the monster in the shoulder and penetrating deeply into it. The monster growls, and its claws shine for a moment, before it launches a rapid series of attacks against the two fighters. The shield-bearer manages to weather the attacks, his partner not so much; one of the later strikes hits his head and knocks him into the foliage.


    The image changes, back to the snowy mountainside. The two black cloaked figures are moving into the light, joining the dance with the white-robed woman. A thin mist springs up around them and turns into floating snowflakes. Clear laughter rings out and the fire burns brighter, jumping up and flickering around. The snowflakes start to rise and both, the fire and the snow start to twist around each other, never clashing but moving back in forth, keeping time with the almost obscured dancers within the crater. Now, figures of flame and shadow seem to join the dance, the shadows following the movement of the dark cloaked figures, the flames following the lead of the white robed one. The howling wind almost sounds like music as it echoes in the small crater.


    Faster and faster goes the dance, turning into an eddy of fire and ice.


    The image changes again, to the theatre. The seats are filled and the white-gowned lady is singing, lamenting the loss of her love. The black-cloaked man is in the back, seemingly chained. The opera continues, the female lead stands in front of a mirror, lamenting her lost love. On the other side of the mirror, the black cloaked man stands, now free of the chains. After the lady is finished with her lament, the man starts, raging against fate and the cruelty of the world. Their singing continues until they both turn, standing face to face, singing in harmony. They come together, dancing and continuing their song. At one point, the female stumbles for a moment but it is hardly noticeable for the audience.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>


    But in the end...


    </td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    The image changes back, showing the cathedral. The clerics and the choir loudly sing a hymn and the congregation is on their knees, praying. Above them, a thin, golden mist collects with the fervor of their prayer. The mist seeps into the objects of worship the clerics are holding.


    The image changes to the snowy mountainside. As the figures dance with each other, whirling around each other, the eddy grows and the howling wind turns into a transcendental song of fire and ice. The dancing grows more frantic as if both sides try to push the other back, causing slight clashes between fire and ice, adding to the mystery of the situation. Both sides hang in balance, preserving the harmony in this contradiction.


    The image changes to the farmer. He and the farmhand are now at a large barn, unloading their cart. A woman walks out of the farmhouse with a dog on her side and gives the farmer a hug and a soft kiss. Both embrace for a moment, smiling. After they break apart, the woman watches the two men for a moment before walking back in. The dog roams around the yard for a moment before following her back in.


    The image changes again, back to the theatre. The whole house gives the actors a standing ovation as the actors bow and leave the stage. Behind the stage, man starts berating the woman, not even waiting to take off their costumes. The criticism is harsh and biting and continues until the woman turns away, leaving the man behind. She walks back to her dressing room and takes of her mask and for a moment, a tear-stained face is visible under the mask.


    The image changes back to the hill-side. The leader is in the middle of the formation and raises his sabre. With a loud shouted command, the whole line starts charging down the hill, towards an infantry-formation. It only takes moments for them to reach them and the impact scatters the formation, driving them apart.


    The image changes back to the forest. The chanting grows louder and the ranger leaps forward, trying to take the fighter¡¯s place in containing the monster. Now unfettered from the second fighter, it easily manages to disengage and flee into the forest. All four rush into the foliage, looking for their wounded comrade. As they find him, his face is a mangled mess, causing the cleric to franticly chant his devotions, trying to stem the flow of blood and save his comrade.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>


    ¡­ it doesn¡¯t even matter.


    Because all roads lead to Purgatory!


    </td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    The world is shown, with ghostly, blue flames racing across the globe before surrounding the whole world with a glowing aura of blue fire.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>


    Find your own road and join us.


    On the Road to Purgatory.


    </td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>

 Chapter 52

    After our encounter with Samodiva, Sigmir and I slowly made our way west. We might be able to cross the distance in a single day but we took two days, asking our mounts to take their time so we could relax and recuperate from the exhausting excursion on Mount Yugid.


    The further west we travelled, the less game was detectable. No matter how we searched around, the previously abundant game was gone. At the end of the day, not even Ylva was able to sniff out anything bigger than insects when we made camp. Something strange was going on. I felt as if something was vibrating in the air - not loud and strong but a low, annoying sound, like a fly that was buzzing around my head and no matter how much I wanted to smack it, I was unable to.


    After making camp, Sigmir and I relaxed together, I used Sigmir''s lap as a seat once again, and we watched the gentle snow falling around us. Ylva had not given up, she was out and about, searching for smells of wildlife, I think the absence of animal life around us creepedher out.


    I was softly nuzzling Sigmir''s neck when she suddenly stopped me and went alert.


    ¡°Someone''s coming, Ylva warned me.¡± she hissed at me. The naughty thoughts I¡¯d had were instantly discarded and replaced by vigilance. I stood and used my concealment magic on both of us, activated the enchantment of my cloak and hid myself in the shadows around us. Had Samodiva found us, or was it something else? After Ylva came out of the shadows and hid in her Hallow, Sigmir hid in another shadow, staying vigilant. I used my Ice-Magic and a bit of the surrounding snow to prop up one of our blankets, making it look like a hooded figure, sitting close to the fire.


    We only had to wait for a few minutes, before a soft thunk sounded out and something struck the blanket. I made it fall over as if struck down. Shortly after, two slender figures moved into the fire light, both rather tall, holding spears and speaking softly.


    ¡°Nice shot. We got lucky that we got that one before the Nethersprites got here. Cursed things force us to hunt further out every time we go out. Let''s gag it, bag it and take it back. The Mother will reward us if we bring in good prey like that.¡± said one of them to the other.


    ¡°Can''t be too powerful if the spelled dart could bring it down instantly. But we can go back to Tegi and while the others have to search for more prey.¡± They closed in on the decoy and just before the first one reached it, Sigmir attacked the second one. The figure must have heard something as it turned just as the Lok''nar whistled through the air. Still, even the reflexive dodge-action was useless, Sigmir''s attack struck true, hitting the collar-bone and biting deep into the body. Now, I was able to see that it was a female, just like her companion who had was now fully aware that Sigmir had struck. Despite the brutal wound, the struck female retreated behind her companion with surprising speed and started to emit a soft, greenish brown glow.


    The uninjured being and Sigmir faced off while I used Observe to gain some extra information.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>


    Bound Nymph of Tegi, level 48


    </td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    The uninjured Nymph was level 48, the other level 46, giving me some confidence. To make my first strike count, I used a Heptagon out of Hard Ice, Hail and Cold, creating a wonderfully sharp Icicle, something I should rather call an Ice Spear and launched it into the wounded Nymph.


    The Nymph had no chance to dodge, as she was unaware of me even being there.


    My Ice Spear struck true, easily penetrating her cloak and any armour she may or may not have below it. Her companion heard her fall and oriented herself, trying to find me, but was only able to see her friend slumped over, with about a foot of sharp ice coming from her chest. I highly doubted that she would ever stand again.


    The remaining enemy was now snarling and tried to back away. The soft glow of Ylva leaving her Hallow pulled her eyes back to Sigmir and I took the moment to complete a Curse of Cold and Torpor, trying to hinder her. She started to sway a little and both, Sigmir and Ylva started to circle her, forcing her to focus on them . I used the time to cast a stronger spell, channelling curses of freezing, torpor and cold onto her. Her steps became less secure with every passing moment until she stumbled and fell into the snow, no longer moving.


    Sigmir checked her, took away her weapons and bound her. I stopped channelling the curse and after a few moments, she started to twitch a little. I used Lenore''s sight to make sure she didn''t try any magic.


    Our captive opened her eyes and immediately tried to cry for help. I stuffed a hand full off snow into her face, muffling the shout.


    ¡°Be quiet and you might live.¡± I glared at the captive. ¡°Now, why don''t you tell us why you tried to attack us?¡± I asked and let her turn her head to get rid of the snow in her mouth.


    The moment her mouth cleared, she tried to start shouting again, just to eat another load of snow. With her allies possibly in the vicinity, there was no way to interrogate her and I doubted that Sigmir had the skills to do so. I knew I had no practical knowledge in that field.


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    As there was little use in keeping her, I stripped off her chest-piece and then used my athame to cut the Blood-Runes into her skin to drain her strength. As I was carving, the Nymph''s eyes got big and panic was clearly visible in them as she tried to squirm away but Sigmir had tied her down quite well. It got a little annoying, trying to carve into a moving object, there had to be a better way than simply holding them down.


    I was fascinated with the slightly grainy texture of the Nymphs skin and the thick, amber fluid that oozed out of the lines I carved. The fluid looked almost like tree-sap and had a mellow taste and smell. I took my time to carve as I wanted to make sure the formation was perfect. When I was satisfied with my work, I carefully stabbed my athame into the middle of the formation, not too deep, just drawing blood.


    The formation was made up out of three small triangles, linking one of the three condense runes to a generic blood-rune and an exsanguinate-rune. The three condense-runes were also interlinked with another, larger triangle and all the runes were linked with a heptagon-shape that was only missing the line between the neighbouring exsanguinate and blood-runes. I started channelling Astral Power into those two runes, filling the formation in a symmetrical manner until the flow culminated at the condense-rune in the middle of my victims chest. An amber substance crept up the fuller of my athame and into the built-in settings as the Nymph first went stiff as a board and then gave off the most eerie and inhuman groan, as if her soul was ripped from her body. I felt power in the growing gems but it was definitely not blood, but it certainly looked interesting. The Nymph twisted, squirmed and tried to get away, but to no avail. As I watched the amber gems grow the Nymph''s struggles grew weaker.


    During the ritual, I felt the buzzing in the air around us intensify, but kept my focus on the struggling Nymph.


    After maybe a minute of struggle, the two gems had grown into small pebbles and the Nymph stilled, devoid of life.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Bound Nymph of Tegi died</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You gain 2500 EXP.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>For killing an opponent 2 levels above you you gain Bonus EXP</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>For killing an opponent without a Traveller in your party, you gain Bonus EXP</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>Bound Nymph of Tegi died</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You gain 2500 EXP.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>For killing an opponent without a Traveller in your party, you gain Bonus EXP</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Skill increased</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You increased your skill: Darkness Rune-Mastery [54/100]</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Skill increased</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You increased your skill: Ice Rune-Mastery [49/100]</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Skill increased</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You increased your skill: Blood Rune-Mastery [43/100]</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Skill increased</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You increased your skill: Stealth [19/100]</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Skill increased</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You increased your skill: Blood Magic [27/100]</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    I softly touched the two pebbles and they were quite solid, if I''d have to compare it to anything, I''d call it dried gum. Holding the athame, I was able to feel the two lumps and knew that it would be easy to channel the power trapped in the gems into a spell that I drew with the athame. It wouldn''t off-set the full expenditure, at least not without huge inefficiencies, but the gems would pay quite a bit of the power-cost.


    ¡°We should check their things and leave.¡± I told Sigmir. Somehow, she looked a little pale; we had wanted to spend a day resting and those two Nymphs had ruined it. Still, I had no desire to stay next to the two corpses and our camp-site was not good enough to make me clean up the corpses. First, I went over to the snow-filled blanket decoy and looked for the projectile they had used. It was a small dart and inspect told me it was an enchanted dart, but looking at it with Lenore''s sight showed me that there was no more magic remaining. The two Nymphs wore clothes made out of a rubbery, leaf-like substance and their weapons and armour looked like it was directly grown out of wood. Inspect told me that they¡¯d rapidly decay unless they were infused with appropriate astral power. In addition, we found a few extra enchanted darts and I could see the glow of magic on them, but was unsure if their creator could track them. I knew that I was able to feel things I had created when I was close enough - maybe something similar applied here. No matter, I didn''t want to find out, so the darts were tossed alongside the clothes.


    As we were working, something strange rushed out of the undergrowth, it looked like an indistinct blob of mottled grey slime, only it was not slow or creeping, but hovered slightly above the ground. Just looking at it made a shiver of revulsion run down my back. This thing felt wrong, as if the world itself had been sick and this was the result of it puking.


    I used observe and the system told me it was an Unformed Nethersprite and level 40. The moment I used observe, it attacked me, I reflexively used my Shuttle to attack it but the Shuttle simply moved through it, without slowing it down in any way. Luckily, Sigmir was next to me and struck with her Lok''nar, causing it to emit an piercing, otherworldly shriek and driving it back. She followed through, chaining more strikes, harming it and giving me time to create one of my Anti-Magic Spells. The spell struck and I kept it active, channelling more power into it and looking at the thing with Lenore''s sight. To my right eye, the thing grew less and less substantive, until it gave off one last shriek and vanished into thin air. To my left eye, it looked as if the inky darkness of my magic was consuming the mottled grey glow it emitted and the moment the glow was gone, so was the thing.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Unformed Nethersprite died.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You gain 225 EXP.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>For killing an opponent without a Traveller in your party, you gain Bonus EXP</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    There were more shrieks around us, some distant, some rather close. Neither Sigmir nor I wanted to face more Nethersprites so we fled into the night, trying to angle toward Tegi.

 Chapter 53

    There was a creepy tension in the air, as if there were monsters in the dark while we moved closer to Tegi. Normally, I felt at home in the dark, as if a comforting blanket covered me, hiding me from the world. The darkness here was different - it felt oppressive, choking me.


    As we moved, I used Ice-Magic to erase our tracks in the snow and I cast a concealment-cloak of shadows on all of us, trying to keep us undetected. In addition, I tried to stretch out my Darkness Magic, searching for enemies around us, in the dark.


    Running into hunting parties so far out of Tegi gave me a bad feeling; we''d have to stay stealthy for the entire duration.


    After moving about two hours, we stopped to make plans. Staying hidden was our priority, so we had to move during the night - during the day, my concealment was far less effective.


    We kept moving through the night and for some reason the trees around us got larger the further we went. In addition, the strange humming got more pronounced and I finally realized what it reminded me off.


    Close to the Barrow Den, there had been an aura of death, strong and solemn, like a large bass-drum, its sound almost inaudible, just recognizable due to the vibrations in the air shaking my very being.


    Here, it was different. The ''sound'' for lack of better word was akin to a hundred small insects buzzing. Not truly louder but more recognizable. If I had to link my feelings to my sense of smell, I''d say the Barrow Den smelled of the clear, crisp, slightly mouldy air of an ancient grave. The area here smelled like a carcass left in the heat of summer: fetid decay mixed with death, blood and rot.


    The realisation made me a little sick. What I was feeling was the result of reckless killing, using death and blood without pause for who knows how long. With that, I also twigged to the Nethersprite and the meaning of it''s appearance. The hunters of Tegi had killed so recklessly that the world was out of balance, with Nethersprites oozing through the cracks, despoiling the land further.


    Shortly before there was any light out, we found a dry hole beneath the roots of a large tree, a good hideout to spent the day. After we crawled into it, I used a combination of Ice and Dark magic to hide the opening, giving us shelter for the day. After a cold meal, we went to sleep.


    We slept the day away and as the sun was gone, we rose from our hideout, stiff from the hard ground and the uncomfortable quarters. I had to stifle a snigger when I imagined the scene for an outside observer. A dark, shadowy figure, breaking it''s way out from underground, groaning and moaning as it goes, followed by another dark figure. Luckily, there was nobody around us to call the zombie-police or we would have had a problem.


    Back on the ground, we continued our stealthy march toward Tegi, dodging both patrols and Nethersprites. Some time during the night, the feeling around us changed in a profound way. The buzzing feeling was still in the air but it was muted, for lack of a better word. I was still able to feel it but it was different, more removed. Walking a few steps back, the feeling changed back again, not gradually but at a perceivable place, with a clear demarcation. Using Lenore''s sight showed me a fuzzy grey nebula hanging before me. It easily parted around Sigmir, not sticking to her or reacting to her in any way. To make an semi-educated guess I''d call it a barrier against the Nethersprites and hope that it has no other function or we''ll have a problem. But I was certain that I''d have to keep up the concealment magic as long as we were within the barrier.


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    Sadly, I was unable to gain more information other than the fact that the mist was spread out in a huge circle, big enough that the curvature was almost invisible.


    We moved on and maybe two hours before first light, we reached a hill and were able to look down on Tegi. It was nestled into a river bend and had a huge, overgrown hedge instead of a wall. It didn''t look like a city or even a town, more like a garden or maybe an arboretum. Tall hedges created strong lines, separating different parts of the garden from each other. The whole thing was bathed in a golden glow from multiple small crystal lamps and a single, large crystal in the middle. The lamps were suspended from various trees and the large crystal in the middle was hanging from the largest. It towered over the grove, it¡¯s crown spreading out over the central plaza.


    In the glowing light, I was able to see that there was not a single speck of snow on the ground and the river was thawed close to the shore. Looking at it with Lenore''s vision showed me a mess of magical lines, fields and formations. Especially the crystals gave off a strong magical glow, surrounding the area. The strongest source however was slightly to the south side of Tegi, close to a large, open area. From our vantage, it looked like a ziggurat and if I''d have to guess, I''d call it the temple as it was one of the only points that had people standing in front of it at this time of the night. It looked like the barrier was centred around the highest point of the ziggurat.


    After looking at Tegi for a bit and trying to etch the map of it into my mind, we left the hill looking for a good hideout for the day so we could plan.


    A short time later, we had found another nice hole in the ground, hidden it with snow and magic and settled down to plan. The bare bones sounded simple enough: sneak in, find the apples, find the sacrifices, free the sacrifices, sneak out. Prepare one or two distractions if Murphy rears his head. Make sure to keep the brown matter well away from the rotary impeller. Our resources were sadly very limited so our plan was limited as well. It came down to me, Ylva and Lenore sneaking in, Sigmir staying well outside on her mount. Ylva would go in with us because of her better senses and ability to signal Sigmir with their companion bond, Lenore would go with me to lend me her sight and I''d go for my stealth, magic and opposable thumbs. Luckily, the next nights were moonless as it was new-moon.


    We''d make our way over through the river, using a small, prepared ice-plank to cross the thawed parts or we''d be in trouble; I doubted that even my cold-resistance would hold up against the chill-factor of dripping wet clothes. Once we were in, we''d make our way to the temple in hopes that the apples were close to it in the only non-overgrown part of Tegi.


    Once we had the apples, we''d search for the sacrifices for a limited amount of time, and if we had no luck then we''d abort and leave. If at any point we were discovered, Sigmir would throw a few burning torches into the hedge hoping that it would provide enough distraction to get away. In addition, the Hail-Mary option for distractions was Lenore flying up to the barrier focus and I''d throw as many Anti Magic Spells against the focus as Lenore could sustain. If the barrier that kept the Nethersprites out would break, the nymphs and dryads of Tegi would have bigger fish to fry than us.


    With that plan in place, I took quite a bit of time to create a plank out of hard ice and a few Mist-Crystals. I planned to seed those at the river bank, to create a large misted area if we had to cover our tracks on the way out.


    We slept away the rest of the day, making sure that we were ready for the night of action. I took my time to use the leftover Shadeleaf-Yarn to improve the concealment-enchantment on Sigmir''s cloak, hoping that it would be enough to hide her. Funny how I was much more worried about Sigmir and her part in the action than I was about my part, no matter that mine would objectively be more dangerous.


    After a refreshing slumber and the necessities in real life taken care of, it was time to head out. According to the plan, we''d move together until we found a good spot for Sigmir to hide out, I''d have to guide her as she had no special low-light vision and the starlight was not enough to navigate by. As soon as we found a good spot for her, hidden and close to the hedge, Ylva, Lenore and I would split, moving to the river and taking the open spot we had seen from the air. Sadly, the opening was on the north-side of the river, forcing us to move around town in order to get to the temple.

 Chapter 54

    Stealthily, we made our way towards the hedge surrounding Tegi, looking for a good hideout for Sigmir. We managed to find a dense copse of trees for her to stay in.


    After placing another concealment-spell on her, Ylva and I moved out, with Lenore staying within her Hallow. We made our way towards the frozen river, staying well away from the hedge. It took only a few minutes to get there and move across the ice to our entrance-point. After fusing the pre-made ice-plank with the river-ice, we moved over it, entering the grove itself. In here, the air felt quite warm, almost spring-like. The incongruity was unsettling.


    Creeping through the shadows within Tegi was easy, the bright light made for deep shadows, allowing Ylva and me to infiltrate the grove. Every so often, I used Lenore''s sight to check for magical traps, wards or similar things. There was something in the warm air that pearled off the concealing shadows I had summoned. Maybe it was a ward, maybe it was part of the unnatural warmth around here. Not knowing the possibilities for magical detection was quite annoying.


    I had planned a route through what I believed to be the residential district of Tegi, so we were able to avoid most of the crossroads, following a circular path close to the river. Doing so kept the trunk of the huge central tree between us and the large light-crystal. It took maybe an hour of skulking through the shadows, during which we neither saw nor heard anyone, to get to the temple-area. Here, we saw our first inhabitants.


    The two guards looked just like the hunters we had killed in the forest, tall, lithe forms, garbed in wooden looking armour and armed with spear and shield. To take them down without noise or really, anything that might give things away, I had to either one-shot or disable them. It also would be bad if there was a change of guards while we were here; last night I had seen a flurry of activity about two hours after dark. Staying in the shadows, I heard them talking about their dinner and the relief they''d be getting soon. That cinched it, I''d wait until after the change to make my move.


    It took maybe half an hour for the relief of the outer guards to arrive, they talked for a bit, making jokes about their ''oh-so-difficult posting'' before saluting and marching off. Two more went into the guarded space and a short while later two more guards came out.


    After waiting for about ten minutes, I struck with a combination of Shadow, Concealment, Disorientation and Torpor, extending an unnatural shadow for each guard through the natural shadows to hide their passage. Each tendril merged with the targeted guard''s shadow, softly wrapping around their legs, creeping up their bodies and covering their heads like an invisible, dark hood. I kept the connection active, focusing on the individual spells, channelling power into them and losing myself in the simple task of drawing Astral Power into my body and pushing it into the spell. Simply striking them would be easy, putting them down without either of them realising foul play was harder.


    Bits and pieces of their conversation entered my mind, talking about their duties and the fact that two of their huntresses had been killed by the Nethersprites, ridiculing them for their failure. Apparently the Arch-Druid of the Grove had been pissed because the loss of huntresses meant less sacrifices. They also griped about one particular huntress who caught a dryad from another grove, looking forward to the great sacrifice, bleeding animals was good and dandy to them but a true sacrifice was a lot more powerful, giving the grove more power for its pursuits.


    Through the shadow, I felt a bit of information flowing back, allowing me to keep both at the same level of mental acuity so neither became suspicious. After an indeterminate amount of time, both guards were unsteady on their feet before slowly sinking to the ground, down for the count. From the feedback I was getting, both had slipped into a deep sleep that would last until an outside disturbance woke them. Neither Ylva nor I heard any disturbance so we entered the temple-area, moving past the guards. If I left them as they were, they might muddy the waters, discovering their absence would probably raise at least as big an alarm as discovering them sleeping on the job.


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    Inside the temple-area, there were two distinctly different areas. The ziggurat, towering above the grove and a garden. Within the garden, I was able to see the glimmering shapes of a few golden apples, growing on half a dozen trees. Checking with Lenore''s Sight showed me that there was a thick net of magical flows, woven together into a spider net, covering that area.


    There was no way to get close to the trees without moving through the tendrils, and their spider-web like appearance gave me a strong feeling about their purpose. The tendrils gathered into thicker stands, leading to the ziggurat and to the large central crystal.


    Following those strands, I moved closer to the ziggurat, staying in the shadows as much as possible. The strands guided me to the ziggurat itself, but noises drew me to a small side-plaza filled with cages and the two guards I had seen before. The noise I had heard were one of the guards, dragging an animal back to an empty cage. In the filled cages, a menagerie of different animals was detained. Lenore''s sight showed me that the cages were enchanted, and judging by the subdued behaviour of the caged animals, it was a tranquility-enchantment.


    One of the guards was standing close to an altar upon which an animal had been placed. The guard was watching the animal slowly bleed onto magical formations which were draining the power out of the animals blood. Watching the flow of power reminded me of a river, a few tributaries joining together to feed a lake before going through a regulating dam, making sure that there was a constant flow of power up the ziggurat. Up there, I saw a large, mottled grey crystal, taking in the power and spreading it into multiple strands. One strand was leading to the trees, splitting further until it became the series of strands that I''d followed. Another strand was leading over in the direction of the large light-crystal and the rest of the power fuelled the barrier I had seen before.


    From the bits I had heard before, the barrier kept Nethersprites well away by turning the death-element gathered from the blood-sacrifice against them. What normally would draw Nethersprites here in droves was used in the dark crystal to keep them away. Looking up at the crystal, I was awed by the complexity I saw, it was a thing of terrible beauty, flawless edges, marrying form and function into a multi-faceted magical masterpiece. I had no idea how to create something like that but the delicate strands of power within gave me pause. No wonder they regulated the flow into that thing, it looked as if the crystal itself was separating and purifying the power drained from the animals to channel the raw vitality into the trees, the death into the barrier and the rest into the light-crystal. Sadly, I was unable to look at the light-crystal, I had a suspicion that it was just as complex, using the chaotic mixture in some ingenious way.


    Looking back at the altar, I felt a mixture of disgust, unease and outrage from Lenore, especially when the guard lifted the animal, carrying it back to it''s cage. They were keeping them alive to bleed them another day, wringing every little bit of power from them. Part of me applauded the efficiency of their methodical process but that little part was drowned out by the feelings coming from Lenore. While the altar was unoccupied and the buffer provided power, the two guards were standing around, having small talk, taking bets how long particular animals would survive before dying and being fed to the remaining animals.


    If I wanted to free the animals, I''d have to take out the guards and if I wanted to take those apples, I''d have to get rid of the magical formations around them. Studying the magical flows, I formed a plan. The regulating dam looked as if I''d be able to temporarily strengthen it after blocking the magical grounding that prevented overstressing the dam. Doing so would allow a huge pressure to build, and the moment my strengthening wore off, the flow would burst through the dam, racing into the dark crystal, shattering the bindings in there and hopefully inducing cascade failure in their magical system.


    I started by subduing the two guards out here. Just like before, it took some time - and towards the end, I had to push quite a bit of power into them - but they slumped down, out of the count. I moved up, inspecting the various animals, when the sight of the inhabitant of one of the cages stunned me. In it was a dryad, but that wasn''t the thing that gave me pause.


    The dryad''s features looked just like Kallista, only with a different skin-colour...

 Chapter 55

    "She looks just like Kallista..." remarked Lenore in my head. I was blinking in shock at the unexpected being in the cage before me. The locking mechanism was quite simple; without the enchantment on the cage, the dryad might have escaped on her own. Opening the door did stop the enchantment but the dryad was still out of it for a time. I pulled her out of the cage and asked Ylva to wait until she started moving. With that done, I moved to the other cages, opening them and taking various animals out, pretty much anything from winter hares to elk and even a tiger were caged here.


    There was still a sacrifice on the altar so I pulled the wolf off, healed it up a bit and placed it close to the others.


    With Ylva watching over them, I started my sabotage of the complex magic formation. I was pretty much flying on a wing and a prayer, using intuition, Lenore''s sight and sheer ignorance, believing that I would be able to do what I wanted with my Dark and Blood-Magic. There were no runes, so that part of me only helped with an intuitive grasp of the magic I was messing with, no true information.


    Breaking the grounding, two sturdy channels into the earth around the ziggurat that would only start taking in power when a certain strength was reached, was easy; simply break the connection and watch the channels unravel in a low hum of escaping power.


    When I was done, Ylva called me over, the first animals were stirring. Unsurprisingly, the first to snap out of the magical stupor were the tiger and a large elk.


    Using Lenore''s gift of understanding, I spoke ¡°Please, don''t be alarmed, I don''t mean you harm. If you wait for a bit, there will be a distraction to cover our escape.¡±


    Both looked at me with understanding but neither answered with anything I could understand, even with Lenore''s gift. I looked around and saw that the rest was lucid enough to have heard and understood me and the dryad looked at me confused.


    ¡°What...? Who are you?¡± she asked, blinking away her confusion.


    ¡°Name''s Morgana. I was asked to help those caught here by a friend of mine. Maybe you would want to meet her, you could accompany my group and me for a few days, I believe it would be a good idea.¡± I told her.


    Leaving her to fully wake up, I went and pulled the still sleeping guards from outside into the temple, using magic to make sure they stayed asleep. With my sacrifices collected, I had to shore up the dam, making sure that it would last about five minutes with the life force of six nymphs collected behind it as I planned to channel the two amber crystals I had in my athame into it as well. Looking at the decay, at the low level it would last for a while but the stronger pressure of more power should make it decay swiftly. I went back to the former sacrifices and told them my plan.


    The dryad was back on her feet, albeit a bit shaky. ¡°I thank you. My name is Adra, I would like to take your offer. Travelling alone has been rather unpleasant.¡± Her tone and look were far from the excitement I expected from someone who had been caged and waiting to be drained on an altar. Well, maybe she would warm up a bit after we got out of here.


    With my sacrifices prepared, I sneaked to the edge of the temple-area, scouting a good exit path. There was a small gap in the hedges close to the water, sadly the hedges were lined with more web-like spell formations, giving me pause. Still, I was able to carefully construct an ice-bridge over the water, giving me a swift path out of here.


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    Back at the altar, it was time to complete the sabotage. I had thought the next part over and over and hoped it would work like I wanted it to. The magical construction of the dam looked practical, easily up to containing the power of a normal sacrifice, stronger by far than the lake-like buffer they had. But I was able to strengthen the buffer by adding my own blood-runes into it. I wasn''t sure if the hodgepodge of magic would work the way I wanted but after adding the runes to the buffer and adding a slowly unravelling weave of darkness and blood to the dam, I hoped that my instinct was guiding me right.


    Now or never, it was time.


    Using Ice-Runes I fitted a tight gag over the first nymph while in the same moment piercing her spine, drawing blood and breaking the nerve-connection between her brain and her body, making sure that she was both unable to move and unable to scream. Even her nose was closed up, making sure there was no noise. With one hand on the altar and the other on her neck, I drew on my blood magic, not gently or even with focus on efficiency but with a brutal directness, simply ripping her vitality out of her and feeding it into the sacrificial magic formation. It took me about a minute to rip the last shreds of life from her and amongst involuntary muscle contractions the nymph perished. Moving to the next, I repeated the process, causing all four nymphs to expire in short order. Looking at the almost overflowing buffer, I placed the two pieces of ember-looking life-force on the altar and watched the weave that held the dam together slowly unravel.


    At the rate I had maybe a minute for the weave to unravel, then the power would rush into the crystal and hopefully wreck havoc. With a look to Ylva, I asked her to tell Sigmir to get ready to run, our fire-attack would not be necessary.


    ¡°Come on, let''s get out of here.¡± I told the animals and the dryad before moving over to the apple-trees. Shortly after I arrived, I felt the magic weave I had placed to hold the dam rip apart. The next moment, I was blown ass over tea kettle when a magical shockwave ripped through the air, destroying the flows of magic around me and blasting apart the complicated enchantments. My insane idea had apparently worked like a charm. I started taking apples with both hands when the other shoe dropped, making the shock wave seem like a mild breeze in comparison. A sudden pressure assaulted me, bringing with it nausea and vertigo and causing me to break out in cold sweat.


    I looked over my shoulder to the source of the pressure and almost lost my dinner. Between the dark crystal I had just blown up and the light crystal, a rainbow out of magical energy visible to the naked eye had formed, the different colours clashing with each other, scattering sparks of colourful light into the air.


    In the middle at the highest point, however, was a shimmering, similar to the light of a mirage and a strange mottled greyness spread out. It looked like a rip in reality itself, and out of that rip tentacles were oozing out, spreading the pressure and profound sense of wrongness I was feeling. It reminded me of the Nethersprite we had fought before, only amplified by a few orders of magnitude. A short moment of mental calculations told me that I had gathered eight apples and there was nothing holding me here.


    I took of running, all thoughts of stealth forgotten, now only speed counted. The former sacrifices and I were running across the green space and I was absent-mindedly wondering just what I had unleashed here. The temperature was already plummeting around me when I reached the opening. There was noise disturbing the nightly silence now, strange garbled cries of the invading entity contrasting the commanding shouts, pained cries and shouted incantations of the defenders.


    I took a moment to look back and saw brilliant flares of magic impacting the tentacles, trying to force the being back into the crack.


    Well, not my circus, not my monkeys.


    With that thought in mind, I made it over the ice-bridge, following Ylva into the dark, looking for Sigmir. As the various animals scattered into the dark, the rescued dryad, Adra, was following me, looking aghast but following me nonetheless. I guess any place was better than a city that was currently warring with a giant Nethersprite. In the darkness in front of me, I heard more of the strange cries the Nethersprites gave off, and could not wait to meet up with Sigmir. Just as I thought that, the large shape of Hringur became visible in the dark, guided by Sigmir to rendezvous with us.


    The moment Sigmir reached us, Adra materialized a small, dancing light, just bright enough to see a little. Sigmir took a single look at her while taking Ylva into her Hallow, before offering her a hand-up to ride behind her. In the meantime, I had taken out my own command crystal and summoned Elding beside me and mounted her.


    I took a last look at Tegi, seeing the rip in reality slightly larger than before and even more tentacles flailing around. With a strong sense of ¡°Nope, not my problem¡±, Sigmir and I asked our mounts to get us out of here.

 Chapter 56

    Now that we were on our mounts and they took over navigation, I was finally able to check the notifications I had ignored all evening.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Skill increased</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You increased your skill: Stealth [21/100]</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Bound Nymph of Tegi died</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You gain 2.500 EXP.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>For killing an opponent 2 levels above you, you gain Bonus EXP</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>For killing an opponent without a Traveller in your party, you gain Bonus EXP</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>Bound Nymph of Tegi died</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You gain 2.500 EXP.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>For killing an opponent 1 level above you, you gain Bonus EXP</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>For killing an opponent without a Traveller in your party, you gain Bonus EXP</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>


    You reached level 47


    </td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Skill increased</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You increased your skill: Darkness Rune-Mastery [55/100]</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Skill increased</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You increased your skill: Darkness Magic [17/100]</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Skill increased</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You increased your skill: Blood Magic [30/100]</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Trait gained</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You gained the trait: Defilement</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>Your use of Blood Magic has defiled a large Area. The power you gain when using Blood Magic is increased but the chance of letting Nethersprites into the world is increased as well.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    The trait sounded interesting, increasing the power of my blood magic but also the risk I took with it. I had yet to draw a Nethersprite so I had a feeling that it was more a long-time, area specific use of Blood Magic that caused trouble in that regard.


    I heard Sigmir and Adra talk softly in front of me but I was only able to make out bits an pieces. The parts I did hear were about me and Adra questioning my sanity. Oh, well, she had just seen me unleash some kind of unholy abomination so I could understand it. Still, I had done it, in part, to save her, so calling me a ''murderous lunatic'' was a little unfair.


    As we rode, we saw a few Nethersprites move past us, drawn to the power radiating from Tegi, they all ignored us, letting us pass until one of them was heading directly towards Sigmir. As she was unable to see in the dark, it fell to me to stop Elding for a moment and strike at it with a burst of consuming darkness. Luckily, it was a lot more drawn to the feast behind us to try again and we got past it. From that point on, I took the lead, preventing me from hearing even the smallest bit of conversation.


    We spurned our mounts onward, channelling Astral Power into them to give them more stamina, retreating north as fast as we could. Neither Sigmir nor I wanted to stay within the area overrun by Nethersprites longer than necessary. Sometime around noon, I was done. The night had been stressful and I needed rest. We continued on but kept looking out for a good hideout to rest for a bit. We get lucky and found a fallen tree that would easily shelter us. We could even light a fire and hope for the best. After dismounting, Hringur and Elding returned to their crystals at once and Ylva left her Hallow, rejoining us outside. Even Lenore made an appearance for once.


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    The camp-preparation was done in exhausted silence and while I was preparing some food, Adra approached me.


    ¡°I... I want to thank you. You saved my life.¡± she spoke up, exhaustion and apprehension colouring her voice.


    ¡°Don''t worry about it. A friend of ours asked us to save the sacrifices in Tegi, I''m not sure if she was aware you would be amongst them but I have a feeling there was purpose in our meeting.¡± I answered.


    ¡°Still, you did the deed. Sigmir told me a bit about your friend, I would like to travel with you so I can meet her.¡±


    ¡°Well, we will need to move north for a few days. I''d be happy to have you with us. As I said before, my name is Morgana and I''m a Traveller. You''ve met Sigmir and those two are Ylva and Lenore. I''m sure Kallista will be happy to meet you.¡± I introduced the rest of the group to her and we all gave a rough description of our abilities, learning that she was a level 50 Dryad and her preferred fighting style was a mix of supportive magic, suppressive magic and close-quarter-combat.


    We didn''t speak much more after that short talk, all of us were just too tired. Sigmir and I snuggled up once more, causing Adra to blush a little, at least that''s how I interpreted her look and mannerism. Experienced, she was not.


    Over the next three days we moved further north, Adra no longer joined Sigmir, she used a long spell to turn into a strange goat-like creature and kept up with Elding and Hringur for hours on end. We had to slow down from time to time, but she was able to keep up with magical mounts, something that astounded me to no end. When I asked her about it, she told me that she was able to turn into this shape she learned from an elder in her grove and into the shape of a large cat - based off a lynx if I''d had to guess; it was not too large or imposing. According to her, she had never to use that particular brand of magic, preferring a more direct approach, either using spells or using her spear. As we made camp one evening, she recreated her spear, taking a large, straight branch from a tree and, over the course of hours, shaping it into a beautiful implement of death. Again, I asked about it and learned that most nature-caster were able to create something like that, preferring the shaped living matter to cold, dead steel. The living matter grew with them, never became dull and they could mend it in the blink of an eye using their magic. It was quite similar to my use of my ice-weaponry.


    All in all, our way north was peaceful; wildlife felt that attacking us would be a bad idea and we only hunted what we wanted to eat, avoiding unnecessary bloodshed, remembering the empty forests around Tegi in which nothing but Nethersprites remained. There was no need to create more such areas,


    As we arrived in the area around Yari, Sigmir asked Adra to venture into the town, getting some supplies and information for us as we might be a little unwelcome in the small town. She had no trouble with it and took off with part of our hard earned coin. Sigmir and I enjoyed the time without an outsider in camp. Ylva and Lenore didn''t count, they were linked into our minds anyway but neither Sigmir nor I felt comfortable being fully relaxed and intimate with each other while Adra was in camp. Not that we did a lot that night but it was a welcome break for the two of us. We estimated that she''d stay in town for a full day, mainly to gather gossip and rumours, the supplies should be easy. We stayed a day in camp, relaxed and did maintenance on our gear, searched for a nice brook to have a bath, things like that.


    The next day, Adra came back to camp in the late morning and looked quite agitated.


    ¡°There are bounty hunters in town!¡± she blurted out immediately. ¡±I think they are looking for the two of you.¡±


    Her announcement made me sit up straight, there was practically no one who I had pissed off this early in the game. Well, no one but Sigmir''s former clan. I looked over to her and she met my eyes and cringed.


    ¡°Tell us what you''ve heard.¡± I told her.


    ¡°It was quite a strange group, one dwarf, I think an orc, a leopard beast-man and some kind of sylvan. I overheard them in the inn, talking about their target a tall giantblood female accompanied by a strange, small elfin creature. I kind of doubt that there are many like that running around here. They talked about killing the small one first to take the other one back to her clan for their justice.¡±


    ¡°Lenore, can you scout for us?¡± I asked in my mind and a second later, Lenore took off from my shoulder. At the same time, my mind went to the obvious reason for such a diverse group. They were all travellers, probably people who had played together in a previous game and were now here and had taken a quest for Sigmir from her clan. We''d have to take care of the quest in the future but for now, we had to decide either to take down their group or flee and hope that they were unable to track us further. Yari was an obvious place to start, it was one of the few towns in the area and we had been there and left an impression. The only question was, did they know we had left heading south - in which case we might give them the slip - or were they able to track us somehow?

 Chapter 57

    While we waited for Lenore to return from her scouting flight towards Yari, I wanted to hear more about this group that was hunting for Sigmir, so I asked Adra to describe them.


    "As I said, there were four of them. One was a dwarf, that I am sure of. He was wearing a chain-mail coat, a shield and a hammer. Oh, and he was wearing a golden tabard with a black hammer symbol on it. Another looked similar to an orc but not quite. I''m not sure what he was, his tusks were not quite as large as I''ve seen before. He had a huge axe and was wearing leather armour with bits and pieces of metal. The third was a leopard beastman in leather armour and for some reason he had a plethora of daggers on his waist. The last was a sylvan, I was unable to see what exactly and he had a staff with him. From his smell, I''d say he is a Lucare but I''m not sure. From the way he was moving I don''t think he had armour on, just a cloak.¡±


    My mind assigned classical roles to their party, the guy in chainmail sounded like a tank, the orc like some kind of fighter or barbarian, anyway, a melee attacker that could take a beating, similar to Sigmir. The leopard was some kind of scout or rogue-type and the last was either a healer or a caster. Not quite balanced to my mind but it sounded like a very functional party, they probably had planned it that way. Now, only one question remained: Could we take them?


    Impossible to know, really. It came down to levels and, more important, tactics. I believed that we could manage to take out one of them, either the sylvan or the leopard, if we struck him from ambush unless their level was ridiculously overpowered.


    Ideas of ambush-scenarios flitted through my mind when I realised something, we might not even have to fight them. The wilderness was vast and wide, if I wanted to track someone down, I had no idea how to even start. How would they find us to fight us?


    A while after I came out of my mental planning, Lenore returned. She landed on my shoulder and returned to her Hallow without saying a peep. In my minds-eye, it was as if I was seeing a film but more so, I didn''t just see, I was feeling what she was feeling.


    I, or rather she flew towards Yari, feeling the cold wind beneath my wings, giving me a shiver. It didn''t take long, maybe half an hour by air, to get to Yari and see the open gates. A group that looked like the one after us was walking towards the gates, apparently just leaving the town. Lenore circled a bit, looking down on them from above. After they left toward the forest-line, she landed in the forest on a high branch to observe them further. The cloaked sylvan took something out, it looked like a strange trinket, maybe an old compass or pocket watch but fashioned from bone or something similar. After a few moments, he oriented himself and talked to the others but Lenore was too far away to understand them. From their gestures, I''d say they just got a heading or something similar. Lenore watched them for a little longer as the sylvan and the dwarf used some magic before they all took off at a decent pace.


    We might be able to run, but I didn''t like the idea of a team of hunters that close behind us. I have had elaborate ideas of ambushes but at the end of the day, the KISS-acronym reigned supreme. Keep it simple, stupid.


    After I opened my eyes again, I realised that the memory had only taken about a minute, even if it felt a lot longer. I briefly explained the situation to the others and Adra recognized the tool they used as some kind of dowsing tool, used to periodically divine the direction to the linked target. Sadly, she didn''t know how the link was established but believed that my concealment magic would be able to block it.


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    I told them that I preferred to ambush them before they could attack us, using concealment and ranged-attacks to take out the sylvan before retreating under the cover of summoned mist. Depending on their reaction and levels, we could either use the time they had no tracker to get away or we could strike again. For that to work, they both needed ranged attacks.


    Sigmir asked me to make her an ice-axe, balanced for throwing, and Adra looked at me for a moment before telling me that she could use a bow. By Lenore''s and Adra''s estimation, it would take them about two hours from Yari to get here, so we had at least an hour to get ready.


    Adra took another branch and slowly shaped it into a longbow, using her hair as a bowstring. I sat and created a nice, simple throwing-axe out of Hard Ice and engraved a runic formation of Shatter-runes into the blade so Ylva or I could detonate it with Ice Magic for extra damage when Sigmir managed to score a good hit. I handed it to her so she could try it out before things got serious and made two more so she had extra if necessary.


    As soon as Adra had her bow completed - not entirely to her satisfaction, if the scowl on her face was any indication - we sent Lenore out to scout again. Minutes later, I heard back from her - the hunters were almost upon us. They used an animal trail to advance through the forest and there was a large clearing ahead of them. We had to make haste to get there before them so we could hide and strike them in the back. I placed concealment magic on all of us, Adra did something similar, she called the spell ¡°Forest Prowler¡± and it tied to the concept of natural predators hunting in the forest, increasing our speed and concealing us within the forest.


    When we got to the clearing, I hid two of my icicles with mist-engraving, just at the end of my range, hidden in the snow of the clearing. Lenore kept an eye in the sky on our prey to make sure that they were unaware of our preparations. My Ice Magic made sure that there was no trace of our passing in the snow around us and as soon as we had our position, Adra placed more spells around us, reinforcing our concealment even more.


    I had heard somewhere that battle was ninety percent waiting, ten percent sheer terror. For now, we had to wait and hope that the terror was not for us this day. Soon, the view of my left eye changed and I was looking with Lenore at our prey, watching them draw near the clearing, fooling around with each other, looking carefree and happy. They entered the clearing, looking none the wiser and as soon as they were past our position, I carefully started a seven-rune ice-spear, focused on simple penetration and explosive damage. At the same time, Sigmir drew back her arm and Adra drew back her bow. They watched my formation take form and the moment it flashed, they let their attacks fly.


    While our attacks were in the air, I used Observe to take stock of our enemies.


    The dwarf was level 45, the orc was actually a half-orc and level 43, the leopard was level 47 and the sylvan... was chunky salsa. No other way to explain it. I had observed them in order and before I got to the sylvan, our attacks had already struck. First, Adra''s arrow had struck his neck, with the arrow-head coming out of his throat. That alone would probably be a fatal wound. Next, my Ice-Spear had struck his chest, penetrating fully through it and shattering in an explosion of razor sharp shards a moment later, ripping his chest apart. Before the spear shattered, Sigmir''s axe had split his head and Ylva had detonated it, destroying the remains of his head in a shower of gore.


    His companions whirled around, only to get showered in red gore and realize that the largest remaining part of their friend was his lower body.


    Rest in pieces...


    Just as the dwarf was shouting something and they were clad in golden light, I used the mist crystals to flood the clearing with mist and we made our get-away. No point in fighting a battle that we might not win, if we can just retreat and set another ambush. As the mist enveloped the three glowing Travellers, Lenore kept an eye on the clearing from the sky, allowing us to gain information on their reaction without risking anything.

 Chapter 58

    A cold wind was blowing through the forest, as we repositioned, hidden by concealment-spells and waiting for Lenore to give more information on our enemies¡¯ reaction. As the mist was cleared away by the wind, I heard Lenore make a surprised noise, and was told that the clearing was empty. Nothing was left from the splattered remains of the sylvan, his corpse was just gone. Did Traveller-Corpses simply despawn?


    And the other three, either all three of them had very good concealment or they had escaped by simply logging out. It was a good tactic, if you are attacked by unknown forces, retreat and come back another day. Especially if not all of them logged out, the leopard had looked like some kind of stealth-class so I''d guess that he was somewhere hidden nearby making sure that the coast is clear. Anyway, they were gone and there was nothing we could do about it but to put distance between them and us. A short look to my log told me that I had gained some EXP for killing the sylvan, approximately as much as I''d gained for a nymph on the same level.


    ¡°Any ideas?¡± I asked the other two.


    ¡°They are... gone?¡± asked Adra ¡°How can they be just gone? Your partner was watching from the air, wasn¡¯t she? I refuse to belief that they were able to get away that easily.¡±


    ¡°I guess that they are Travellers. We are just guests to this world and we can leave as we please. They can simply stay outside this world as long as they want, they might even use other forms of communication to call for support. I don''t think that they have allies nearby but I honestly don''t know.¡± I explained.


    ¡°So they will continue to hunt us? Has either of you an idea how to get rid of their tracking?¡± asked Sigmir through gnashed teeth.


    I could only shake my head, slightly disappointed with myself.


    Adra spoke up ¡°It depends. If the tool is made by a normal spellcaster, simply get a better spellcaster to destroy the connection between you and things that could be used to link to you. Sadly, I don''t know the needed ritual, it''s not part of my abilities. However, if the tool is system-made for a quest fully defeating it is next to impossible. To end the tracking you would have to end the quest, probably by killing the one who put it up. For now, I don''t think we can do anything here.¡±


    ¡°I agree. We should get to Neyto, maybe we can get help there.¡±


    Once more, we mounted up, Adra turned into her strange goat-antelope thingy-form and we were off, heading towards Neyto. After we realised just how brutally an attack from ambush could devastate you, we turned cautious, not wanting to be on the receiving end. I recreated the Ice-Shields I had used in the dungeon, this time with ice-runes engraved into them so I could increase their size within moments, giving me the option to tank a couple of attacks as long as I wasn''t taken fully by surprise. In addition, Lenore consented to flying reconnaissance every so often giving the way in front of us the once-over. Adra used search-spells as well - but as she put it, those kinds of spells were the most varied spells, as there were thousands of ways to search for a multitude of things, from the most simple life-force search-spell to more complex spells with higher range, better detection that looked for specific souls. In addition, she told me that while there were thousands of ways to find someone, there were thousand and one way to avoid getting found. No spell would ever be perfect, so we had to remain vigilant at all times.


    With our heightened vigilance, I expected something to jump out any moment but the journey to Neyto was completely boring. Nothing wanted to mess with us out here, the predators looked for easier prey and we only hunted what we needed, mainly Adra did so as she was quite adept when it came to silent movement and stalking through the snowy forest.


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    During our night-rest, Adra was once more shaping her bow, slowly muttering under her breath in a way that reminded me of the few times my grandmother had dragged me into church, repetitive murmured prayer, over and over. I was curious about the greatly different style when it came to magic, mine was all concepts - expressed through runes - and mental imagery. However, both Kallista and now Adra used their magic in a totally different fashion, and what little I had found on the forums was all over the place as well. And her ability to change into animal forms, I hadn''t the foggiest idea how to even start something like that.


    There was so much I didn''t know about magic and I felt as if I was playing catch-up with the world.


    We also told Adra a bit about Neyto so she wouldn''t be too surprised by the strange town or the nexus. I had a feeling she would feel it just as strongly as I did.


    It was afternoon as we reached Neyto, two days after our run-in with the other Travellers. As we came closer to the white trees surrounding the village, once more a tree grew a face.


    ¡°It''s good to see you back. Morgana, why don''t you bring your guest to see me before going to the Grandmother in the morning.¡± said the tree-face and now, with a little creativity, I was able to see that it was Kallista''s face and voice that spoke to me through the tree.


    ¡°We will do so, thank you, Kallista.¡± I answered and looked over to Adra.


    She was still in her animal form, giving me no clue how she reacted to seeing her own face come out of a tree. We dismounted and watched Adra turning back into her own form. Part of me thought about the fact that her garments looked similar to the garb the nymphs in Tegi had worn, as if it was made out of leaves, bark and wood, changing shape with her without any trouble.


    I looked her over after she was back to her normal form, at least what I thought as her normal form, and she looked shaken, either from the palpable magic in the air or because she had just seen her face in a tree.


    ¡°Sigmir, Adra, would the two of you mind if we go to Praxi first? I''d like to deliver the ashes he wanted.¡± I asked, trying to give Adra a little more time to gather herself before meeting Kallista.


    Adra shrugged while Sigmir answered, ¡°No, that''s fine. It feels good to be back.¡±


    As a group we walked over to Praxi''s house before knocking on his door. I didn''t want to risk another dose of his charm-effect and neither did I want Sigmir to get hit by it. So we waited outside for him. It only took a short moment, then the door opened for us.


    ¡°Ah, you are back. It''s good to see you again, you have the ashes?¡± he greeted us with a smile.


    ¡°Yes, here they are.¡± acknowledged Sigmir, before handing over the gathered ashes. By now, they were in a small leather pouch.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Quest Completed</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>Ashes to Praxi...</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You gained: 25.000 EXP</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    ¡°Yes, very good. Thank you. Ashes to me and dust to dust. You already have the Brigandine I made for you, so I believe we are even.¡± He said with a smile. He looked at Adra for a second and almost opened his mouth but suddenly, he snapped it shut and almost fled back in his house. Strange behaviour for a strange guy but who knows. Sigmir and I exchanged a look and shrugged in confused unison.


    ¡°Let''s go to Kallista. She has hosted us before and invited us.¡± I told the other two and we walked around the nexus-lake.


    After knocking on Kallista''s door, we were quickly ushered in. It was almost funny, looking at Kallista and Adra, they looked so much alike, without their different auras and their skin colours, they could be mirror-images.


    ¡°I see you did as I asked. Thank you.¡±


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Quest Completed</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>Save the Sacrifices.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You gained: 25.000 EXP</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    ¡°Yes, and look what we found.¡± I smiled and gestured to Adra. ¡°Kallista, meet Adra. Adra, meet my dear friend Kallista.¡±


    Kallista was still visibly shaken, maybe even more so than Adra. ¡°Sigmir, why don''t you and Adra relax a bit. Morgana, would you please help me in the kitchen?¡±


    With that Kallista practically dragged me into her kitchen.

 Chapter 59

    As soon as Kallista had dragged me into her kitchen, she visibly relaxed. Still, there was a stark difference to her usual calm, almost stoic, self. I didn''t want to hurry her, so I simply started the familiar movements of cooking, giving her time to gather herself and talk on her own terms. We worked next to each other for a little bit before she stopped fidgeting and started talking.


    ¡°I know I asked you to save the sacrifices. What you don''t know is why I did it. I''m not really good with divination-magics, I am able to get impressions and feelings but no images or anything concrete. I knew that it would be necessary to deal with the dryads in Tegi but that you are too weak to face them head on. I also knew that saving the sacrifices would be vital but not why. Can you tell me what exactly happened?¡±


    A thought flashed through my head, ''Ugh, more magic I have no idea about...''


    I told Kallista what happened, starting with Yari, continuing with the meeting with Samodiva, the strange occurrences around Tegi and ended with the Travellers that may or may not hunt us. She listened intently but didn''t interrupt until I was done.


    ¡°I see it now. You did the right thing. The thing you destroyed, it was a focus. They used sacrifices to gain power and used that power to suppress the side-effects of their sacrifices. The more they sacrificed, the more power they needed to suppress the side-effects, the more power they needed, the more they sacrificed. I don''t know if they had a long-term plan or simply pushed their problems further and further back, thereby increasing the eventual backlash further and further. What you did probably defiled the area for a long time but honestly? It could have been so much worse. I''m just not sure if Adra''s predicament drew my intuition or if it was just the increasingly disturbing build-up of power they created. But it is done now, so that is that. I just don''t know what to do about Adra. She feels familiar, and I have a theory why, but I''m not certain.¡± explained Kallista.


    ¡°I will try to sort out my feelings later, but for now, it''s good that you are back. Say, did you get any extra apples?¡± she continued.


    She looked at me expectantly, so I showed her the eight apples and explained that we would need five of them for the Grandmother.


    ¡°Oh, that''s fine, three are plenty. Now, I know what I''ll do as my favour to you. Would you pass the apples to me please?¡± she asked. I handed the three apples over and we went back to preparing dinner.


    Dinner itself was interesting, the good food and general atmosphere of friendship between Kallista, Sigmir and myself lured Adra in and made her comfortable enough to tell us her story.


    ¡°Before, I introduced myself as Adra. The full form of my name is Adrastea but I usually go by Adra. The grove that spawned me is in Nolakan, when I decided to travel, my options were limited.¡± Upon seeing my look of incomprehension, she explained ¡°Nolakan is the region north of the inner sea. To the east and south-east is the Olympian Desert, to the west is the Luram- Mountainrange and obviously to the south is the inner sea. That limited my options quite a bit, I could go north to Nakadias, north-west into the fertile lands or Neurop or to the north-east heading into Beriasa. As you can tell, I wanted to see the endless expanse of the northern tundra and the boundless forests. Sadly, my mother was right, I was not ready to travel by myself. I was enjoying the truly wild lands out here, back west you could not travel for a week without running into a settlement or one of the old roads. Out here, it''s still wild, you can travel for days on end without meeting anyone, least of all bandits so I grew lax.. I believed I was safe with the preparations I made against wild animals. Sadly, my wards and my fire just drew those insane hunters.¡± she stopped and I saw tears in her eyes. The ordeal of her captivity finally caught up with her.


    As Adra was still not quite comfortable with me, I gave Sigmir a slight push and, when I realised that Sigmir was not sure how to handle it, I joined them, in a slightly awkward group-hug. That it came to this might be the biggest hint of just how unsettled and insecure Kallista was. When I went through insecurities she always had a kind word and a hug for me, now she sat there, fidgeting without joining in. I gave her a look and motioned with my head for her to come over and join in which she did but she stuck more to Sigmir and me than Adra.


    After a few minutes, the group-hug disbanded and everyone sat back down. A visible more collected Adra continued. ¡°I still can''t believe what they were doing. I can understand using Blood Magic, it''s not really different than eating meat. But what they did? They tried to keep their victims alive as long as possible to draw every bit of power out of them that they could. And when the sacrifice finally died, they fed the rest with their remains. All that death... All that suffering. And for what? To have all year spring? In Beriasa? What kind of insane being thinks of something like that?! And then you¡± she turned on me. ¡°By the trees, what you did was just insane. You caused a tear in the fabric, opening a passage to the Nether. Why would you do that?¡± Adra grew more agitated with every passing word.


    Finally, Kallista spoke up. ¡°Stop, child. I believe I know what happened and it was not Morgana¡±s fault. I think, in the beginning, they just used normal Blood Magic to fuel their growth-spells. Cisar uses growth-spells himself, just not with Blood Magic, he''s just that good at what he does. Blood Magic is a slippery slope. You can gain a lot of power with it and using it makes for quick success. But most use only part of what they gain and the rest escapes into nature as miasma. If you travel a lot and don''t use huge rituals, it''s negligible, the miasma fades back into the cycle without problem. They thought they could outsmart the cycle by using the power they gained to control the miasma, using it to ward against the consequences of it. It works. For a while. However, the need for more power grows with every passing day, the more power they needed, the more they had to sacrifice, the more they sacrificed, the more miasma they created, increasing the need for power. You can see the vicious cycle.


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    I refuse to believe that their powerful members were unaware of their folly, they must have sensed it. Morgana told me about their two crystals, quite ingenious. They split the power they gained, channelling the positive parts into their warmth spell, their light and their growth-spells, fuelling them with pure life magic. The other part of the coin, the negative parts, they channelled into the dark crystal. The problem is, some of the negative parts could not be used, it would destroy their workings, so they simply encased it into the crystal. The rest was used to strengthen the crystal and creating their strong wards. They needed a constant flow of magic to hold their crystal together and the pressure in the crystal grew higher and higher.


    What Morgana did, unknowingly mind you, was introduce a strong surge of magic, knocking their filter-system out and causing a wild surge to shatter the crystal and neutralize quite a bit of the power within. The rest lashed to the nearest source of strong life-magic, their other crystal. In the flux of power, reality got torn. That rend will devour life within a mile, maybe two, of Tegi but what you don''t realize, it''s the less destructive version. If the dryads of Tegi had ever lost control of their crystals, the flood of negative magic within their crystal would have killed much more, depending on when they lost control. They had no permanent solution for their problem, they just happily pushed it back further and further.¡±


    Kallista''s explanation made a bit of sense, I certainly had no idea what I had done to cause the events we had seen. I felt I had dodged a bullet there and felt a need to learn more about magic in general and the intricacies of my personal power.


    When we were done, Sigmir pulled Adra up and together they cleaned up the kitchen, claiming that it was only fair after Kallista and I had cooked. Part of me wanted to directly head for the bath-tub but a larger part wanted to wait for Sigmir. Unsurprisingly, the larger part won. There was still a voice in my head that yelled at me, telling me that I was insane, that I was tricking myself into believing in a relationship with a computer but for the first time in my life, the logical, methodical, part of me was shouted down and beaten into submission by the sheer power of my feelings. For the first time in my life I felt like I belonged somewhere. Just before I could start yelling at myself, Sigmir returned and pulled me into her arms, kissing me soundly. Her kiss silenced all the voices in my head, leaving my mind curiously blank. Almost on auto-pilot, I stood and pulled Sigmir into the bath with me. Sadly, she reminded me that Adra would go in after us, so we had to behave and be quick.


    We were quick, I hardly got my dose of Sigmir, but a small fix helped. Adra had strange look on her face as we passed her on the way back. I don''t know if it was because she had heard something or because I was happily being carried in Sigmir''s arms, only wrapped in a towel. Ah, well, no matter.


    We had some more fun in the bedroom but both of us were exhausted to we quickly went to sleep in each others arms.


    The next morning came and after a good breakfast, Sigmir and I went to visit the Grandmother. Adra stayed behind when Kallista asked her for help with something. After knocking on the walls of her strange cabin, a door appeared and let us into the structure. Once more, I realised that the inside structure must be much larger than the outside suggests.


    We were greeted once more by the smiling Grandmother, looking just as young before with only her eyes betraying her true agelessness.


    ¡°Welcome back, children. You were quite swift, it took you what? Not quite two months? Now, I believe you have something for me?¡±


    I took out the remaining apples and the tail-feather of the Fire-Bird and handed them over. There was nothing I could hand over from the Barrow Den but I had a feeling that it didn''t matter in this case.


    ¡°Yes, you have done well. I saw your testing in the Barrow Den, quite the Achievement to best that trial with only the two of you and your respective partners.¡±


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Quest Completed</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>Calm the Barrow Den.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You gained: 30.000 EXP</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>


    You reached level 48.


    </td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Quest Completed</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>Collect the Firebird''s Tail</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You gained: 30.000 EXP</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Quest Completed</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>Steal the Apples of Tegi.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You gained: 30.000 EXP</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    ¡°And with that you have completed my trial for you. Congratulations.¡±


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Quest Completed</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>Grandmother''s Tasks.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You gained: 40.000 EXP</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>


    You reached level 49.


    </td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    I perked up. Finally, Sigmir would be whole again.


    ¡°Will you heal Sigmir now?¡± I asked, full of expectation and hope.


    The Grandmother crooked her head and looked at me askance. ¡°Now, why would I do that? I never said I would, did I?¡±

 Chapter 60

    "... why would I do that?..." The Grandmother''s words echoed back and forth in my mind. My first impulse, born out of anger, was quickly squashed by the memory of the Schandmaul and the casual threat of a soul-trap the last time I had been here. I forced my gritted teeth to relax so I could ask in an almost normal tone, "You promised us your help. If you are not going to heal Sigmir, I assume you have planned something else?"


    She looked at me with a piercing stare, almost a glare but I held it. She had promised help and I wanted her to keep her promise. If she didn''t heal Sigmir, we had wasted two months on her stupid, senseless tasks. I felt a pressure building in my mind, at first simply pressure, then more like a migraine.


    Lenore squawked in my mind "Break her gaze. Break her gaze or she might break your soul!"


    I felt stubborn. Yes, she could kill me. What else was new? If she wanted to pressure me into declining her help or saying that the tasks had helped us grow and the growth was her help to us, she could take a long walk off a short pier.


    After what felt like hours, but it could not have been more than a minute, I felt a wetness trickle down my face. At first, only from my nose, then also down my cheeks. The pain was excruciating, but I felt a need to endure, to not let her break my resolve. If she wanted out of this, she would have to kill me. Slowly, the edges of my sight turned dark, and everything got blurry. I would not fail. Not in this. Not for Sigmir.


    Suddenly, the pressure was gone, I felt a light-headedness and almost fell but luckily, Sigmir was next to me and I managed to hold onto her arm, using her presence to steady me. She looked down to me and her face turned pale.


    ¡°By the Ancestors, what happened?!¡± she exclaimed and stroked softly over my face. When I saw her hand retread, it was bloody. She turned to the Grandmother and her aura flared in a deep red.


    ¡°Don''t¡±, I managed to gasp out and held onto her arm, both to hold her back and to hold myself up. Tense seconds passed until Sigmir''s aura faded away.


    Finally, the Grandmother smiled and said, ¡°Very well. You passed my tests. I know, at this moment, you probably hate me and are filled with anger. But let me explain.¡±


    With that she gestured to a sofa before seating herself. ¡°When the gods decided that Traveller''s would be allowed to venture to Mundus, I was intrigued. Why would the gods do that? What was in it for them? I''m a naturally curious being, so I searched for answers but none were forthcoming. I used my divination, trying to read the future, but I was unable to do so - I can observe Travellers in the present, I can scry their actions in the past, but their future? I can''t even divine general tidings.


    So I decided that if I meet Travellers, I would test them a little and depending on the results I would act. You are the first Traveller I met and I like what I see. I observed quite a few others but none are like you. You are like a diamond in the rough, brilliant magical affinities, an almost untainted but strong heart, loyalty to those you deem important, the self-control to keep yourself in check, even if you want nothing more than act, mental strength, cunning, ruthlessness and, maybe most important, a nice dose of luck. Or maybe it''s destiny, I don''t know.¡± she leaned back in her seat, before continuing.


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    ¡°I promised you my help and yes, what I did before was another test. But there''s a reason why I won''t heal your friend. First, I should explain a little about magic and spirits.


    Saying that ''Magic'' is a complex and unending topic, is an understatement. There are hundreds, maybe thousands of traditions out there, each with different beliefs and abilities. Of course, there are main-streams: Druidism, worshipping Nature and the natural Cycle of Existence, Shamanism, worshipping spirits, either those of their Ancestors or natural spirits, the various wizard-schools - all with their specific blend. The one who placed the malediction was a shaman, worshipping the spirits. But not just any spirits, he communed with the spirits of hunger - some call them Nethersprites but in reality, they are just spirits associated with hunger, death and consumption. In a way, they are the anti-thesis of life, they want to consume it without leaving anything behind for the natural cycle. They are attracted to the teeming life of Mundus, actively trying to gain entrance into our world, wherever they can. Other spirits only come if called or if you are at a place that teems with their blend of Astral Power, like an untamed nexus.


    Now, what he did to you is as vile as it is genius. He bound a Nethersprite to something you consumed, I''d guess something to eat and due to the fact that you took food from a trusted hand, part of your inherent resistance was circumvented and allowed the sprite to act within you. By the act of eating it, it came into contact with your soul and as it was a spirit of hunger and you, in part, used it to sate you, it had an easy opening. Due to that bond, it was able to draw in strength from you to sate itself and as it is partially part of you, it was not an external threat you would actively resist, it was just part of you. Something like that can''t kill you, it will just weaken you until you are weak as a child.¡± she stopped abruptly and I saw that Sigmir''s aura was once more glowing red and her eyes had a wild look in them. To snap her out of it, I straddled her lap and pulled her into a hug. She was shaking in rage but after a moment, she calmed, gave me a kiss and turned me on her lap so I sat sideways, allowing me to look at the Grandmother again and started speaking.


    ¡°Yes, I guess you are right. They never wanted to kill me, did they? They just wanted to use me as a broodmare, strengthening their own bloodline.¡±


    The Grandmother nodded and continued. ¡°That makes sense. Someone with the ability to bind a Nehtersprite like that has probably also the skills to kill. But I wanted to explain why it would not be a good idea if I do the healing. As I explained, the Nethersprite is bound to you. To attack it, you need to be in a position of openness; either you need to fully trust the one doing the casting, or you need to be unaware of it - in deep sleep or coma, for example - and in a vulnerable mind-set.


    You don''t trust me, and it would be foolish of you to do so. I could destroy the Nethersprite using brute force to gain entrance to the sanctum of you soul but doing so has a good chance of killing you in the process. It¡¯s no solution for your problem.


    But you trust Morgana here, don''t you? I was able to seal the Malediction within you because she had clumsily done something similar, trying to freeze it but not very successful. It would be best if she did the healing but sadly she lacks the knowledge to do so.


    And now we come back to the start of our conversation. You asked me, what form my help would take, didn''t you?


    You did three tasks for me and I will do three things for you. The first is simple, I will give you guidance about the ritual to heal your friend. The second is more interesting. I will gift you an old book of mine. Some would call it a Book of Shadows, other''s a grimoire. What you call it doesn''t matter, it contains quite a few interesting and useful magical rituals. I hope you can use it as inspiration but not as a guideline. As I said before, Magic is far too complex to use something so simple as a guideline.¡± She stood and looked down on me.


    ¡°And the third thing might be the most important. I will give you guidance, not guidance on your path but guidance about navigating the currents of the Astral River. Not a course for you to follow but tools and information to find your own path.¡± she spoke with an aura of grandeur around her.


    I was a little overwhelmed. What she said about the malediction made sense, in a way. It also explained a few things I had wondered about - but the offer to teach me? My mind was truly blown.


    I stood and looked into her eyes. ¡°I would be honoured to receive your guidance, Grandmother.¡±

 Chapter 61

    After my declaration, the Grandmother looked me over once more, nodding to herself as if lost in thought but obviously pleased.


    "Follow me, child.", the Grandmother said to me, before turning to Sigmir, "You can join Kallista and the child you brought with you. I don''t think you would find our talk very interesting."


    With that she rose, turning to one of the doors leading out of the room. Sigmir looked at me with insecurity in her eyes.


    ¡°We can trust her. Or rather, no amount of caution on our part could stop her if she wanted to harm us. There is simply no need for her to play games. I will see you later, dear.¡± With that said, I pulled her into a short kiss before sending her on her way, out the front-door. Then I followed the Grandmother just to stop dead in my tracks. After walking through the doorway, I was standing in a moon-lit forest glade, the doorway I had just stepped out of was built into a large tree. The air was feeling warm and a slight breeze played with the leaves in the trees around us. I looked around and the Grandmother was sitting on a log, next to the small pond in the middle of the glade. As I stepped closer, I saw that the pond was not quite reflecting the moon above us, it was more as if the silvery light of the moon had taken liquid form and was making up the pond.


    ¡°Sit, child. The night has always been the time for secret knowledge, the time for rituals, the time for magic.¡±, the Grandmother called out to me and pointed to a log a few steps away from the one she was sitting on. I slowly walked over, trying to comprehend my surroundings, trying to make sense of the input my eyes were giving me.


    I activated Lenore''s Sight almost by instinct and was blinded by the maddeningly complex colours around me, shining in every colour I could imagine and a few I couldn''t, varying in intensities and moving in impossible motions. I had never taken any mind-expanding drugs but damn, what a trip! Again, I stood still, trying to take the sight in, this time not the simple glade but the magic behind it. Just looking around created more questions than it answered and Lenore stopped the sight before I could drop down a rabbit-hole of intricate magic designs. Blinking like an owl, I resumed my steps, until I was seated in front of the Grandmother. The only thing I had truly taken in was that the pond looked just the same as the Nexus outside, but the vegetation was all wrong.


    ¡°Where are we? Or should it be when are we? This pond looks like the Nexus but it can''t be it, can it?¡± My mouth was trying to keep up with my racing mind, blurting questions out as fast as I could.


    The Grandmother smiled at the word-vomit I had just spewed out and my wide-eyed look of wonder. ¡°We are still in my house. What you see is a very high level Illusion, made out of my memories. So both questions are quite good. What you see is the Nexus when I first saw it, a few millennia ago. The world has changed a great deal since then. Not all change is positive, just like not all stagnation is negative. Both are necessary parts of life. But I wanted to give you tools so I should start at the beginning. Tell me, what is magic?¡±


    What is magic? It was a simple question but not really. I had read a great many fantasy novels in the real world and a lot of them had some form of magic in them. But what was true in this world?


    Maybe the best thing was to start at what I knew it was not? I knew that runes were not a necessity, I knew that gestures were not a necessity, I knew that chants were not a necessity. Not all magic was projected outwards so that was out as well. So what was left? Will? A mental Image? Astral Power?


    After my contemplation, I gave my answer. ¡°Magic is the ability to alter reality using one''s will and Astral Power.¡±


    ¡°A good answer. And an answer that shows you the necessity to specialise. You are a Sorceress, one of the Trailblazers. You don''t walk the path of another, you make your own path. To find your own path, you will need to look around you. Something that touches your soul, something that encompasses you and your magic as much as possible. That something will be your guide-post.


    For me, it was the cycle of birth and death. I was always good with healing magic, strengthening the healing ability of the body to the points that I was able to heal everything, even age to a degree. Sadly, only to a degree. I found my guide-post the day I lost my oldest daughter. She did not die from disease or injury, she died because she wanted to move on.¡± she stopped for a moment, wiping a small tear from her eyes before continuing, voice awash with emotions.


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    ¡°Age had taken a toll and not even I was able to turn back the clock for her as I was able to do for myself. I was standing at her bed, trying to find something to help her, looking over her children, my grandchildren, their children and so on. There was some sadness in their eyes but they were the celebration of her life. In that moment, I realised that Birth and Death are two sides of the same coin and both are necessary. Without Birth, there is no life, without Death, life has no meaning, it turns into an unending torment. Change, Mortality, those are the strengths of mortals. Immortals stagnate, even I slowed down, almost to a stop. The Gods could not change, even if their very essence depends on it. So the cycle of birth and death became my guide-post, I had learned a lot about magic to keep a being alive, to thwart death, but I also had to learn about death, the soul and the cycle of rebirth. The Barrow Den is part of my studies of the soul and it''s mysteries.


    But I was talking about the thing that guides you. Some call it a Totem, others say that your Domain is such and such. I don''t like either. It''s a guide-post, nothing more. You will have to find yours if you want to cross the divides, it is part of your journey.¡± she concluded.


    A distinct domain? Something that encompasses Darkness, Ice and Blood? Before my mind could start down the rabbit-hole, the Grandmother continued talking.


    ¡°Once you find your guide-post, you will need to understand it as much as possible. What your guide-post is depends on you, your experiences and your soul. It is one of those questions that have no wrong answer. Now, I said before that there are main-streams. One of the distinctions of the various main-streams is their guide-post, another is the question of natural or conceptual magic. Natural Magic is modelled after the natural world. As a simple guideline, everything that exists in nature can be mimicked with Natural Magic and strengthened or weakened to a point. It allows for highly varied spell-casting because it needs a balance. You can''t just focus on one aspect, let''s say the frozen winter and ice, you also need the gentle growth of spring, the fiery heat of summer and the furious winds of fall. All things in balance.


    Conceptual Magic on the other hand deals with concepts and those can be one-sided and extreme. They don''t need to follow the natural order, they can go to extremes that nature has no part in. They place greater limits on your spell-casting but allow for great power.


    Neither conceptual nor natural spell-casting is superior, both are simply paths you walk according to your soul. Some cannot single-mindedly follow a concept, forsaking all else. I am one of those. As I said before, only when I tempered my life-magic with the truth of death, was I able to find my direction. By the main-streams I gave you before, you could call me a Druid. But labels are meaningless, they will be placed upon you by those that come later. True importance is for you to find your own path.¡±


    I turned the two ideas she had just given me over in my mind. I believed that my magic was part of the conceptual side. Neither Fire nor Light gave me any warm fuzzy feelings, if not for the need to have a fire for cooking and warmth, I would never light one. Only blood didn''t quite fit in. But what would be the other side of the coin for blood? I asked the Grandmother about it as it didn''t quite fit as an element.


    ¡°Blood and Blood Runes you say? Blood Magic is part of Life-Magic. However it is internally balanced because blood is both life and death. Disease and Poison, those are the parts of death that come from blood. But obviously blood is also the carrier of life.


    It is a lot simpler when you focus on the simple elements. The best way to look at those it to imagine a hexagon, split into six parts. If you start with light and go clockwise, next you have air, then water, followed by darkness opposite of light. On the other side of darkness is earth and last but not least, fire. Each element has its place and its opposite. However, calling light and darkness elements is a bit misleading. They are more states of being. Darkness is change and chaos. Light is stagnation and order. Now for one of the magic paradoxes. The elements next to light, those that are most easily paired with light are the least ordered and stagnant. Fire and air are both highly mobile and fluid and it gets worse when you add light to either of it. The combination of light and air gives you the volatile element of lightning, fire and light gives you the solar element - some call it ¡®radiance¡¯, I prefer ¡®solar¡¯.


    On the other hand, water and earth are stable elements, especially earth. If you add Darkness and Water, you gain what some call the lunar element, the element of lunacy. It is opposite of the radiant sun and one of the least known elements, If you pair the solid earth with darkness, you get the highly structured crystal-element.


    Truly interesting are the elements that exist between the prime-elements of Fire and Earth or between pairing of Air and Water. If you add Darkness to Air and Water, you get the frozen existence of Ice. If you add Light to the same mix, you get the highly volatile element of the Storm. On the other hand, Fire and Earth give birth to Metal if paired with Darkness and Magma if paired with light. Interesting, isn''t it?¡±


    It was indeed interesting. I wasn''t quite sure what it meant in practise, maybe I would be able to learn air and water magic easier after I mastered my Ice- and Darkness-Magic? But if Blood Magic was an outlier, it sounded I should let myself be guided by Ice and Darkness on my search for a domain. I liked that term better than the guide-post term the Grandmother used.


    The new information was useful, but there were a great many questions I wanted answered, and I finally had someone I could ask.

 Interlude: Innsmouth?!

    -Tarrin''s gaming vlog -


    Today: [Road to Purgatory] - Did I take a wrong turn and end up in Innsmouth?


    A wolfman is shown, garbed in leather-armour and a fur-lined, hooded cloak. He sits on a log, next to him sits a grey wolf. He is armed with a long spear, on his back is a bow and on his hip sits a quiver filled with arrows. Around him, tall pines rustle in the wind and everything is covered in snow.


    ¡°Hey guys, Tarrin here. As you can see, I''m playing the [Road to Purgatory]-beta once more and I finally figured out how to use the vision-orbs allowing me to create recordings with a changed viewpoint within Road to Purgatory, rather than the normal first-person recordings I had to use before.


    So for the first time, lo and behold, the might of Tarrin, the Wolf-Ranger. As my usual viewers know, I play a Wolfman and picked the Ranger-Class. Since the last time, I completed my apprenticeship with Ifurn and was sent on my way as a journeyman, improving my craft on my travels. I chose to go west with my new partner, Arjuk, exploring the lonely forests and the windswept taiga of Beriasa. Arjuk was my given to me as a partner and as you can see he is a grey wolf. It''s incredible how smart he truly is, I could not ask for a better partner out here.¡± the wolfman reaches down, scratching the grey wolf''s ears, the wolf rubbing his head against the hand, clearly enjoying the attention.


    I uploaded a compilation of the sights in the frozen north but I found something that deserved an extra entry in my vlog. Why don''t I show you what I mean, before we explore further?¡±


    With that, the wolfman stands up reaching towards the camera and grabbing something behind the view-point. The view-point shifts and changes to the first-person of the wolfman.


    After a short blink, the view clears up and it is devastating. The ranger obviously stands on a slight elevation, and looking down, one can see that in an almost straight line, the trees change, the tall and proud pines giving way to twisted, gnarly shapes, devoid of leaves, devoid of life. The twisted trees stretch into the distance, as far as the eye can see from the limited view of the small hill he is standing on.


    Again, the voice is heard, ¡°Now, join me on my first exploration of this strange place.¡±


    With that, the video fades to black for a second, before restarting at a slightly different place.


    The forest passes by, as the ranger moves through the terrain, avoiding snowdrifts and branches. Suddenly, the trees change into twisted shapes. ¡°What in the world?!¡± he gasps. The trees look like nothing he has seen in Mundus before, reminding him of a horror-film.


    ¡°Arjuk, heel!¡± he calls to his partner, checking for a moment that the wolf has heeded the command and is next to him. However the normally fearless animal looks disturbed, fur standing up and the tail is firmly tucked between its legs. In addition, it''s growling softly, staring spellbound to the trees in front of them.


    ¡°Let''s check it out. Looks interesting.¡± with that, the ranger continues his way, spear at the ready, carefully picking his steps to avoid making any noise at all. The wolf next to him goes quiet, silently padding alongside its master.


    Together, they slowly and carefully make their way through the eerily silent forest. After some time, they see movement in the distance, not clearly more a dark shape moving between the trees. The ranger continues his way, now that he has a possible enemy, he can use the trees and the shadows as cover from that enemy. As he gets closer, he checks his partner again, and instead of next to him, the wolf is behind him, clearly unhappy with his path but also not willing to abandon his partner. His fur stands up all over, looking almost comical if not for the knowledge that something must be truly wrong for the proud wolf to act like that. In addition, a sickly sweet smell tickles the rangers nose, making him think of rotting fruits.


    Stolen novel; please report.


    They continue forward, toward the point they have seen movement and stumble upon a carcass. It looks like it was a deer once but the mangled form makes the determination hard. Only the head is still halfway intact and it looks sickly and emaciated, as if the deer was gravely ill and malnourished before it''s demise. In addition, the carcass is strewn around the trees as if whatever caught it was not that interested in eating and more interested in ripping its prey apart. The strange smell from the carcass adds to the abhorrent scene. The view turns black for a moment and retching is heard.


    ¡°By all that''s holy, what in the world was that?!¡± the view returns, showing the sick trees as the ranger circumvents the gory scene and continues his way deeper in this strange place. He realises that there is a slight rise to his left, leading somewhere up, maybe giving him a better view of this strange forest. He follows the rising ground up on a hill, soon arriving at the top and the view opens up to show him a river bend. His eyes see but his mind takes a moment to catch up to the sight.


    First, he notices the clear lines, as if there was once a planned structure down by the river. His instinct screams at him not to think about the rest of the sight but the conscious mind ignores the subconscious and parses the sight.


    And what a sight it is. In the middle of the formerly ordered and planned area sits a revolting entity, the first association his mind makes is a tumour. Purple-black, almost rotten-looking flesh, with pustules strewn about and covered in a tar-like goo. Tentacles squirm around it, making it clear that, whatever it is, it''s responsible for the empty area around it. Nothing but bare earth remains within maybe 30 feet of the entity, everything else was devoured.


    As the ranger watches, a bird makes the error to fly too close to the thing and instead of squirming around in confusion, the tentacles take instant action. Only a blur is seen as one of the tentacles snaps up, snacking the bird out of the air and pulling it back. The flesh parts, and a maw becomes visible, filled with huge, sickly looking teeth. The tentacle deposits its snack directly into the gaping maw, which snaps shut, devouring the bird.


    Nausea grips the ranger, but before he can be sick again, he turns and a terrible, pressing need makes itself known: Flee, flee from this cursed place, flee and save yourself.


    He turns, running away until he sees another dark blur further down the hill. His mind makes the association, whatever moves down there is similar to the being that ripped the deer he saw before to shreds. He tries to meld into the shadow while he readies his bow, knowing that the first strike might be the only advantage he has, if the being spots him. Arjuk crouches next to him, using his pelt and the snow as camouflage.


    It doesn''t take long for the strange blob-shape to become fully visible. It looks similar to the sludge that covered the Thing and the association makes the ranger almost toss his cookies once more. As he tries to keep his breathing steady, a sharp shriek of recognition sounds out and the blob moves toward the two partners. Not blurrily fast but with a clear and obvious purpose. The ranger nocks and arrow and draws his bow, when more shrieks answer the first one. His fight or flight-reflex instantly switches from fight to flight.


    ¡°Crippling shot!¡± he mutters the activation-phrase of one of his ranger-skills, coating the arrow in unique magic, taught to him by his master, magic to slow down any enemy it hits, no matter the physical reality. As long as the shot hits, his target will move slower for a time. After aiming at the centre of the blob, he lets his arrow fly, watching it as it not only strikes but simply goes through the blob. Another shriek sounds out, this one more angry and pained as the blob slows down but still moves toward the ranger.


    ¡°Swift Strides!¡± he mutters another activation-phrase, this one to increase the movement speed of himself and his partner. As he feels a large chunk of his power leave, fuelling the skill, he switches his bow with his spear, securing it on his back, making sure that he has his spear in hand if he needs to defend himself. After a second or two, the buff has taken full effect and the Ranger and his wolf start their flight.


    With long strides, they fly down the hill, past the crippled blob that tries to intercept them but is unable to. They run through the forest, dodging the crippled trees, making sure that they don''t fall. Behind them, shrieks ring out, calling for assistance akin to a wolf pack, hunting in concert, harrying their prey while calling for others to cut of the escape. Luckily for the Ranger and his partner, the blobs are slower than a buffed ranger and none is in position to stop them.


    After a flight that felt like it took hours to the ranger but in reality only took fifteen minutes, the ranger sees living trees before him. Hale and living trees, a line that hopefully demarcates safety from the insanity behind him. The shrieks had already stopped, not that the ranger had noticed, but after he crossed into the living forest, he slows, listening to his surroundings once more.


    No use to escape the horror behind him, just to run into a normal predator out here. Slowly, he moves parallel to the twisted treeline behind him, looking for an elevated place to see more.


    After a few minutes, the log seen in the beginning becomes visible and the ranger seats himself.

 Chapter 62

    Hours passed as I sat on the log opposite of the Grandmother, asking questions, often getting useful answers - but far too often for my taste getting the answer ''find out for yourself''. Nonetheless, I learned a lot about magic, not about my specific magic skills but general information giving me ideas and paths how to develop further on my own. She kept true to her word, never trying to tell me how to use my magic, or even telling me something was impossible. The worst outcome of a question was ''I don''t know'' or ''Find out for yourself''.


    ¡°Now, child. It is late so I want to impart you a few things before we end our day.¡± the Grandmother spoke, a lot more serious than our previous, spirited discussion.


    ¡°When you first came here, you carried a soul-prison. The soul-prison contains an ancient being, slowly fading from existence and destiny has made you the keeper of it''s future. The simple, safe way would be letting it fade, by simply doing nothing. The being will be gone for ever and the goddess who imprisoned it will be pleased but will not care about you or your part in it. After all, you meddled in her affairs, disrupting her seal and her guardian.


    Yes, I scryed your acquisition of the soul-prison. Quite well done I have to say, even if it was done with either luck or destiny on your side.


    The other option is to grab your destiny and run with it. To free the soul in the prison, you will need a fitting Nexus. No, not the one outside - that one is taken, and either Kallista or I would kill you if you tried to use it to free the soul.


    You would have to travel to the other side of this Nexus, high in the mountains of Arbotoma, between the frozen peaks you can find the counterpart of this Nexus. Kallista and I have used a lot of time and effort to coax this Nexus into providing us with positive power and energy, in turn shifting its counterpart to negative energy. The soul you are carrying is one of Darkness, to be precise it''s attuned to Death, Poison and Ice. The Nexus used to free it will become tainted by its power and if you did it here, it would kill Kallista and maybe kill me.


    However, saving the being in the soul-prison will be an opportunity few have; if you help an elder being on a task of vital importance like that, it will return the favour - and a favour of that magnitude can be earth-shaking.¡±


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="2">Quest Update!</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="2">The Soulprison</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="1">Quest Difficulty</td>


    <td colspan="1">Divine</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="2">You found an ancient Soulprison. Find out what soul is imprisoned within and decide it''s fate. There will be consequences, no matter what action is taken.


    The Grandmother has explained possible actions. To do nothing would consign the soul to oblivion and yield no rewards. To save the being, you have to use the suitable Nexus, located high in the mountains of Arbotoma. Doing so will earn you a favour of the imprisoned soul.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="1">Quest Reward</td>


    <td colspan="1">Gratitude of an Immortal</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    I blinked for a moment, trying to sort the information out in my head. Arbotoma was this world''s South America so the Nexus I would have to use was literally on the other side of the planet. Well, she said ''the other side'' I guess that was literally.


    It would be a challenge and Hell, did it sound cool. At the end of the day, the negative was that I would seriously piss of a Goddess, maybe even the complete Norse Pantheon but it was beta and if I managed the quest in the remaining 20 months, it might be close to the reset. But it would be an epic achievement that was certain. Shit, I guess that means Do or Die.


    ¡°I...¡± I started to talk, only to be interrupted by the Grandmother.


    ¡°Don''t tell me. I don''t want to get into open conflict with Sunna and her compatriots. Sometimes, ignorance is bliss. You will leave this place soon, I know that. What happens after, I don''t know, but I will watch with bated breath.¡±


    ¡°I''m glad I can provide entertainment. Maybe, I should teach you how to make popcorn.¡± I said in a voice dripping with sarcasm. The long discussion had made me a lot more comfortable with the ancient power in front of me.


    ¡°As you don''t want to continue talking about the soul-prison, why don''t we talk about Sigmir? How exactly can I heal her? And do you have any ways to evade or break a divination-compass?¡± I asked, changing the topic.


    Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.


    ¡°To fully and safely heal her, you will have to merge your soul with hers. That is one of the reasons there needs to be trust between the two who do the ritual. Your souls are very compatible, making it quite easy to merge them. Within the merged soul-space you can use your magic to purge the parasite within her. I can''t tell you exactly what will happen, it will be a fight within your soul-space and in there, the mind and the soul rule over reality and matter. Magic is part of both so it is a starting point for you.¡± she stopped, lost in thought. I waited for her to continue, at this point I was not sure what to expect. Sadly, when she continued it was on the other question I had asked.


    ¡°The divination-compass is a little harder. You might be able to cast a ward over the two of you - there are wards to reference in the grimoire I will give you - and it would be strong enough to break the tracking of a divination-compass made by a normal spellcaster. It might even be strong enough to evade a system-made compass for a few days but the system tries to enforce equality, so the tracking would be harder but not impossible. The precision of the compass could go down or the tracking interval could increase, something to make up for your inability to break the tracking. I will not get involved or there might be repercussions from the system and when great powers start to meddle, things get problematic in a hurry.¡± she explained.


    Somehow, hearing her say that things get problematic when great powers start to meddle made my spidey senses tingle. Hadn''t I just thrust myself in a situation between some ancient great beast, a Goddess and a meddling Grandmother? Yeah, no way that could become anything but problematic. But what would be the fun in a game without interesting situations?


    ¡°To get rid of a system-made compass, get rid of the quest that created it. Quests can be created due to strong emotions, for example a mother searching for her child or a child for her mother. Both could create a system-quest without really knowing it. Or they can be created by power, either personal power or political power. A powerful lord guarding his lands for example, or the Adventurers Guild with it''s missions, both are acknowledged under the system. You will have to determine who has that sort of power over your friend or has a belief that he has.¡± the Grandmother told me, giving me more than enough hints to find the quest-giver.


    ¡°Now, it is late and if we send you into your friends soul tomorrow, you should rest. Follow me.¡± The Grandmother stood, and gestured for me to do the same.


    I followed her as she walked through the tree-door into the reception room of her hut and off into another room. This room was larger than the hut should be but I was numb to the casual relationship the Grandmother seemed to have with space. I had a feeling that space gave the Grandmother as much room as the Grandmother wanted, no questions asked, reality be damned.


    The room I entered was a library, large bookshelves, filled with tomes, scrolls and even some stone-tablets. The Grandmother walked to one shelf in the back while I slowly followed, marvelling at the collection of knowledge surrounding me. Even with Lenore''s translation-trait I was unable to read some of the titles, making me wonder about the circumstances. Obviously, nothing could truly be universal, everything had to have limits.


    I caught up to the Grandmother, as she stood in front of a single shelf, slowly moving her hands in patterns and mumbling under her breath. After a moment, I felt a slight movement in the air around me, as if a breeze was blowing but we were indoors. The Grandmother took a book from the shelf in front of her and handed it to me.


    ¡°Keep it well. The stronger your mind is, the more you can read and understand. I''m certain it will serve you well. It contains a lot of universal basic spells and a some things I researched about Ice and Death.¡±


    The moment I took it, a glow sprung up from it, enveloping me for a second. I inspected it, curious what I had just gotten.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="10">Zevarra Agha</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="5">Rarity</td>


    <td colspan="5">Unique</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="5">Type</td>


    <td colspan="5">Grimoire</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="3">Special Effect</td>


    <td colspan="7">Ritual Guide ¨C Allows you to cast the spells written within without separately learning them.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="3">Special Effect</td>


    <td colspan="7">Soul Bound ¨C This Grimoire is bound to the Traveller Morgana. Only she can read it and she can store it within her soul.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="3">Special Effect</td>


    <td colspan="7">Growth¨C This Grimoire is bound to the Traveller Morgana. It will grow alongside her, yielding more secrets with growing power.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="10">This Grimoire was written by the Grandmother. It was gifted to the Traveller Morgana as a token of remembrance.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    I bowed deeply to the Grandmother, this was no small gift she had given me. Part of me was worried that it would come with strings attached later, but I remembered my own wisdom; the Grandmother was far too powerful to play games with weak mortals.


    ¡°Thank you, I will treasure this gift.¡± I said sincerely.


    ¡°I''m sure you will. You thirst for knowledge, just like I did when I was young. The world was different then, but I''m sure you will find your way. Just always remember, you walk your own path. Don''t let anyone manage your path or you will lose your way. Be true to yourself. Don''t lose yourself in your new book, remember, tomorrow will be an arduous day for you, so sleep tight.¡± with those words the Grandmother sent me off.


    I left the house with a lot on my mind, walking back to Kallista''s house almost in a trance.

 Chapter 63

    By the time I had left the Grandmother''s strange house, it was already dark, not that I''d really notice. My mind was going hundreds of miles an hour, thinking about the implications of all the new information I had gained. Some made a lot of sense, some were just plain and simply weird. I compared my own experiences with the information I had been given, looking for inconsistencies, but there were none. Did that mean I could trust everything I had learned? Probably not, but I needed some sort of plan to move forward, and without information, planning was impossible. So I''d use the information I had gained, assume that it was accurate but verify it with my own experiences. Trust but verify.


    I almost ran into the door - I was that deep in thought - but I managed the incredible task of knocking before opening the door.


    Entering into the house broke me of most of my introspection, and I looked around. Sigmir and Adra were sitting in front of the fire, close together and both happily laughing together. I felt a sharp sting upon seeing them like that, not even realising that I had entered. Kallista greeted me with a smile and waved me over.


    ¡°Welcome back. Sigmir told me that the Grandmother wanted to give you a little guidance. Be proud of yourself, the Grandmother is quite picky about the beings she guides. Here, look at the fruits of my day¡¯s labour.¡± With that, she handed over three small, translucent crystals. They had a golden-yellow tinge that glowed from deep within them. Looking at one of them from various angles didn''t quite help, the glow didn''t originate from anything I could see, it was just there. I used Identify and gained some information.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="10">Vitality Crystal ¨C Lesser Apple of Life</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="10">The crystallized essence of a Vitality-Fruit. Consumption increases Vitality by two, further consumption of this specific sort of Crystal will not yield any benefit.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    I looked at Kallista with slight confusion and she told me that she had used Alchemy to break down the three apples I had given her, strengthening their effect and making consumption easier. Normally, one of the apples would increase Vitality by a small amount, in the range of 0.5 and 0.8. That was the favour she had promised us. I was quite happy with the result, Vitality was something everyone could use.


    By now, Sigmir had realised that I was back and was almost bouncing as she came over. Her happy smile did quite a bit to assuage the sting I had felt before and the happy hug, she enveloped me in, soothed the rest.


    ¡°Welcome back.¡± she said with a bright smile, before laying a kiss onto me. ¡°I watched Kallista and Adra use alchemy and I sparred with Adra. She''s really good with that spear of hers.¡± Sigmir happily started to babble about her day. I enjoyed her exuberance and realised that in the almost three months we had known each other, we had never been apart for a full day until today. Still, every time she mentioned Adra there was a twinge in me. I simply smiled and watched Sigmir, holding her tight in my arms.


    Kallista brought out dinner and we all relocated to the dinner-table. During dinner, the conversation was dominated by Sigmir and Adra, I withdrew a little, thinking about the information I had gained and Kallista looked lost in thought as well.


    After dinner, part of me wanted to go straight to bed but Kallista had intercepted me and asked for a quiet talk.


    Before she even started talking, her gaze took me in, once again measuring me.


    ¡°You will leave Neyto soon, won''t you? You are almost done with the business with the Grandmother and there is little more for you to do here. You can''t settle down and, looking at you, you don''t want to, you are still gripped by wanderlust.¡± Kallista asked, rambling a bit, which was uncommon for her.


    If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.


    ¡°Yes, Sigmir and I will leave soon. We never really talked about long-term plans, at first it was simply due to necessity and afterwards? I don''t know neither of us brought the topic up. But before I ever met her, I found something. The Grandmother gave me some information on my find and I think I will act on them. It will be quite the journey.¡± I answered her, trying to make sense of her behaviour.


    ¡°The soul-prison, I know. I sensed it on you the first time you entered Neyto. It contains a powerful being, I don''t want that thing anywhere near the Nexus. Travelling to the counterpart of our Nexus will indeed be a huge journey. It''s funny, you can start off in almost any direction and go the right way. But you should head west, through Nolakan and Neurop, not east. If you go east, you will move through the Valkyrie-Territory and if Sunna catches even a whiff of your soul-prison, they will hunt you down like a rabid wolf.


    And heading west, you could take Adra with you. She can guide you, at least until Nolakan, but I believe the three of you could stay together, as a group.¡± Kallista got more animated by the word. What she said made sense, but her behaviour made me a tad suspicious, something else was going on. I simply raised an eyebrow, daring her to try to bullshit me.


    For a moment or two, she hesitated, her eyes pleading to take her reasoning and not question it further. When I didn''t budge, she hung her head.


    ¡°No need to look at me like that. I admit, I want you to take Adra with you. I can''t be sure, but her behaviour is so similar to Iona''s, that I think Adra is Iona''s reincarnation. But she can''t stay here. Not only is the Nexus slowly harming her, what if I stand in her way? To regain the memories of her old life, a dryad needs power and will. Strong dryads can meditate on their souls, slowly regaining the old memories and incorporate them into their new life. But I am to blame that her last life ended, just the memories of me could block the process.¡± By now, her animation had turned into agitation and she got up, pacing back and forth.


    ¡°I just don''t know. If I keep her around me, I might harm her inadvertently, keeping her from becoming who she''s meant to be, by trying to get my Iona back. That''s why I want you to take her with you.¡± Kallista was almost yelling by now and I knew why she had closed the door before. Suddenly, she sat back down, taking a deep breath and calming herself.


    ¡°The Grandmother chose to guide you. I trust her judgement. If Adra is with you, she will be alright. She can grow, in the wild, like she is supposed to, and if it is meant to be, she will regain her memories and forgive me. Maybe, we can be together again. But only if I can let her go once more and you can take care of her.¡± she stared at me and for the first time, I felt her power. It was rolling off her in waves, pinning me in place, almost palpable in the air around us.


    I thought about it and there was really no reason not to take her. Sigmir and I needed teammates and Travellers were not possible, for multiple reasons. One was the simple time question. I had pretty much taken the year off, playing the beta as much as possible, trying to ''reinvent'' myself after losing my identity as Titania and now simply to spend time with Sigmir. There were few Traveller who had the raw time to join us. Especially if we didn''t stay somewhere but literally travelled around the world. In addition, one of my traits penalized me if I played with other Travellers. So we would need to recruit natives and Adra fit quite well. That we would do Kallista, who I regarded as a friend, a favour was just icing on the cake.


    ¡°Calm yourself, friend. If Adra wants to join Sigmir and me, we will gladly take her.¡± I told Kallista. She relaxed and a huge smile blossomed on her face.


    ¡°Thank you. Another thing, could you give her one of the Vitality Crystals? I will compensate you for it but I can''t give aid to her myself. I don''t want her to know about Iona and my belief that she is her reincarnation. If she can remember, it is meant to be, I can''t interfere or I risk her very soul.¡± Kallista''s mouth snapped shut, as if she had said too much. I had a feeling that probing would be a bad idea so I simply ignored her statement at the end but kept it in mind.


    ¡°I can give one of the Crystals to her, at least if she joins us.¡± Part of me wanted to claim that compensation was not necessary but a greedy voice in my head wanted the goodies.


    ¡°You will not regret it. Adra is uncertain in herself, but I believe she will join you. Thank you, again.¡±


    After Kallista had hugged me once more, I was able to extract myself from her exuberance, it was obvious that her concern for Adra had weighed heavily on her. I joined Sigmir who was sitting by the fire, taking care of her Lok''nar and waiting for me. I simply snuggled up to her, trying to stay out of her way but simply being close to her.


    A while later, it was time for bed and Sigmir and I enjoyed it quite a bit, having a clean bed in a secure environment, it didn''t matter that we would have to take jokes about wild animals making noise the next morning. For some reason, I wanted the world to hear and know that Sigmir was mine, and only mine. It took quite some time, but when we finally slept, we slept the deep sleep of the truly sated.

 Chapter 64

    After a good night''s slumber, the day of Sigmir''s healing dawned. We had breakfast with Kallista and Adra, who, for some reason, would not meet my eyes, before heading over to the Grandmother''s house.


    We knocked and got shown in, once more heading into a new part of the house. The room we arrived in was made out of smooth stone - most of it inscribed with glowing runes - and in the middle of the room, a large ritual circle was drawn. There was no way for me to decipher the circle, but it was made out of a large outer circle, and within it, two connected circles almost formed an infinity-symbol.


    ¡°Sigmir, Morgana, your partners should leave their Hallows. Their presence would greatly complicate the ritual. If you wish, you can be skyclad for the ritual but it won''t matter in this case. Be in the state that you are most comfortable in.¡± the Grandmother greeted us. Ylva and Lenore materialized next to us before moving to the side, watching us intently. Neither Sigmir nor I wanted to shed our clothes with the Grandmother here and Lenore and Ylva watching us, so we stayed clothed.


    The Grandmother guided Sigmir into one of the smaller circles, making sure that none of the lines on the floor were damaged before she looked deep into my eyes. "This is it, child. I''m sorry I can''t prepare you for what is happening, but souls are simply too complex for that. I just don''t know what waits for you. Keep your wits about you, your will strong and your magic sharp. You can do it." she said with conviction and motioned for me to take my place in the second circle. I took great care not to damage the formation in any way. The Grandmother stood next to the outer circle, holding a carved staff.


    ¡°Both of you, let your Astral Power flow into the glowing rune in front of you. Don''t worry about the amount you pour in, just let it flow.¡±


    One of the runes in front of me started to glow, and I placed my hand over it, letting my power flow out as unformed as I could. It was a strange sensation, connecting to the complicated network around me, but it was effortless at the same time. There was a floating sensation, and I felt as if I was a leaf in the wind, gently moving on complicated streams of air. I closed my eyes to focus on the sensation, and felt a disconnect between my mind and my body. My mind was drawn somewhere else, and I did not try to fight it, letting the currents of magic take me.


    I floated on the current for some time before I felt the sensation change. I was no longer floating on the gentle current, now it was more as if I was rushing down a waterfall, falling with a rush of magic.


    My eyes flew open, or at least that was the sensation - I no longer had eyes in the strange place I found myself in. My perception was strange; the closest analogy I could come up with was that I was looking down onto a tall, windswept, mountain. There was nothing gentle about the mountain; it was rough and rocky but also solid and stable, as if nothing could ever move it. Around the mountain, a blizzard was raging, cold as ice but also ferocious and wild.


    The combination of the two extremes made me shudder but it also gave me a familiar feeling. That feeling of welcome drew me in, I let go of my fear and moved closer. The sensation of familiarity grew and the air smelled of welcome. Finally, my mind, or maybe my soul, made the connection, I was looking at the closest representation my senses could create of Sigmir''s soul.


    With the conviction that Sigmir would not harm me, here in the deepest part of her being, I let myself be drawn in. I stretched my senses and felt compatibility with the storm and let myself slowly merge with the storm, as I had before in the outside world. I felt Sigmir''s strong arms embrace me within the storm, knowing that she was close made me push on. I held onto my ego as I joined her wild side, moving with the storm and slowly becoming the storm.


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    Being one with the storm let me sense the entirety of her soul and I let them guide me. A strange smell in the air gave me direction and I followed the smell to find a strange spot on the mountain-side, it looked like a muddy bog hole, completely out of place on the rough mountain but it was still part of the mountain.


    I focused onto the bog and felt a feedback from the storm, the bog felt out of place because it was. It had to be a representation of the parasite within Sigmir, slowly eroding the foundation of her soul but camouflaged as part of her soul.


    The storm was howling around me, howls of rage mixed with roars of anger, whipping the atmosphere into a frenzy. Sadly, the storm was not cold enough to freeze the bog, they were part of the same entity after all. I felt the storm howling in impotence and my own howls joined the storms.


    I wanted to destroy that thing defiling my Sigmir''s soul, I wanted to annihilate it so thoroughly nothing was left of it for harming my beloved.


    Hate like I had never felt before coursed through my being and my howling rage became more focused, changing in pitch and tune. While there was nothing the storm could do, I remembered the Grandmother saying that conceptual elements could do the impossible and I studied the concept of ice. Extreme frost, frozen eternity, cold enough to freeze even hell itself, that was what I believed in.


    I let out a single, sky-shattering roar and a beam out of pure, furious cold burst from me, lancing through the sky and striking the bog in the middle. The ice spread, freezing the bog into a huge block of ice. But just freezing it was not enough, I dove down, gripping the block in my claws, spreading my ice-magic to hold it and I ripped it from the very bones of the mountain. The earth shook and a pained groan echoed across the land as I did so but it had to be done.


    I returned to the sky with my price, once more joining the storm and watching the storm batter the frozen bog, grinding it into dust and scattering it until there was nothing left of it.


    I stayed joined with the storm, flowing around the mountain, feeling the mountain''s hard shape under the soft caress of the wind and I let myself be enveloped in the feelings of safety around me, losing myself in the storm. The storm felt no longer like an icy gale, it felt like a lover''s caress. The mountain below me was no longer harsh and rocky, it felt like the hard muscles I had caressed so often.


    Sadly, the feeling was far too brief; I would have been happy to stay there forever, but I felt myself drawn away, and I knew that I had to leave, to return to my own body. I gathered my will, and slowly separated from the storm around me, drawing back and letting the current that had brought me here an eternal moment ago take me back. Feeling the current flow around me, I felt a profound sense of loss and of loneliness.


    I felt my mind settle back into my body, reacquaint itself with it''s mortal shell, literally returning to my senses. It took a moment for me to be able to open my eyes again and when I did so, the world around me was blurred with tears but I was able to recognize Sigmir. I felt a yearning for her, to be held by her and hold her in turn.


    Jumping to my feet, I no longer cared about the circle around us and we came together in the middle of the large circle, wrapping our arms around each other and trying to get as close to the other as possible, to eliminate even the smallest gap between us. I don''t know who started to kiss but it was good we hadn''t been skyclad for the ritual or the Grandmother, Ylva and Lenore would have gotten quite the show.


    After some time, we separated and I was able to draw back a little and look Sigmir in the eyes.


    ¡°Did it work? Is the parasite gone?¡± I asked.


    ¡°Yes, it worked. I feel my strength returning, probably not all of it but the parasite is gone. Thank you.¡± Sigmir said. The moment I heard that, happiness engulfed me and I pressed another kiss to her lips. After we separated once more, I realised that I had ignored both the system and the Grandmother. A short glance to the notifications showed me I had gained quite a bit.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Skill increased</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You increased your skill: Ice Magic [60/100]</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Skill increased</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You increased your skill: Astral Meditation [35/100]</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Quest Completed</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>Curing the Shieldmaid.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You gained: 20.000 EXP</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    I looked over to the Grandmother and saw that she was smiling.


    ¡°Ah, you rejoined the rest of the world? Take your time, soul-magic can take quite a bit out of you. But I see you have been successful. Congratulations, to both of you.¡±

 Chapter 65

    After the ritual was done, the Grandmother led us into a sitting room and served us tea. Ylva had returned to her Hallow, Lenore was for once the one more interested in the outside world, and stayed on my shoulder.


    "Well, that was interesting, wasn''t it. The two of you are truly compatible - such a connection is rare. Sadly, I need to tell you something." The Grandmother started.


    "Sigmir, you are targeted by a quest. I can''t scry who created it but you have to deal with the one who did. If you were stronger and willing, I could shelter you in Neyto but I doubt that you would want to separate from Morgana, would you?" She continued on, while looking at Sigmir.


    "No, I will not separate from her. When I felt my thread unravel, she stepped in and saved me. Only death will part me from her. Nothing else.¡± Sigmir said with conviction. At the same time I took her hand and simply held it in a show of support. I didn''t want to lose her. My rational side was screaming once more but was shouted down. We would bomb that bridge when we got to it.


    ¡°No, I didn''t think you would. Hold onto each other with both hands, when I see you, I want to believe in destiny.¡± She said with a smile.


    For the first time since coming here, I spoke up. ¡°We should leave soon. Sigmir, the only one who, in my eyes, could claim dominion over you would be your old clan chieftain. The Travellers we have seen have most likely taken the quest and we should take care of it before it becomes a large problem. Those four might have connections we can''t see. I would fight the world for you, but I''d rather fight on my terms.¡±


    ¡°Yes, sadly you will have to leave soon. Kallista tortures herself with seeing the young dryad and I am unable to scry anything about Adra''s soul, my vision is clouded. There is another thing you should think about.¡± The Grandmother looked at me.


    ¡°When you rescued Adra, you unwittingly destroyed Tegi by unleashing a Nether-Devourer, it''s a fully formed Nethersprite and quite powerful, but if you use your wit, you can destroy it. Destroying it would be quite the boon for you as it would bind Adra tighter to you and grant you a nice chunk of power. Think about it.¡± she continued without any reproach in her voice.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="2">Quest Alert!</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="2">Destroy the Devourer</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="1">Quest Difficulty</td>


    <td colspan="1">Impossible</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="2">Destroy the Nether-Devourer that was unleashed in Tegi.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="1">Quest Reward</td>


    <td colspan="1">no special Reward</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    I looked at the Grandmother and the Quest that had just popped up.


    ¡°You believe I could do it?¡± I asked her, there was no reason to go onto an impossible quest but I trusted her advice.


    She nodded so I also nodded my assent and took up the quest.


    ¡°If you don''t manage, don''t worry. The devourer is locally limited, it spreads but at a glacial pace. I will keep an eye on it and if you do it, the quest will complete without seeing me. It''s enough if I know about it and I will know.¡± With that remark, she stood.


    ¡°We will probably not meet again. But remember, Morgana, your way is your own. You might take detours on your path but it is still your path and in the end, it will serve you best. Never forget that.¡±


    Sigmir and I stood as well and I surprised myself when I pulled the Grandmother into a short but heartfelt hug. She had been a bit of a pain in the beginning with her taunts and tests but she had helped me a great deal, giving me guidance without pressuring me into following her lead. Just like a Grandmother should, I thought to myself with a smile.


    We said our goodbyes at the door and I knew that I had only spent a short time with her but it meant a great deal, at least to me. When we left the house, I realised that the ritual had been longer than I thought, it was late afternoon by now. We slowly made our way around Neyto, just walking hand in hand, in a way it had been home for almost two months. Lenore was not happy with the cold, so she returned to her Hallow. We hadn''t spent most of our time here in Neyto, but we always knew that Kallista would have a warm meal, a bath and a soft bed for us.


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    Tomorrow, we would leave and probably never return. At least not during this life, as I started to think about the beta.


    As we walked, I slowly guided Sigmir over to a tree with a little less snow below it. I made her sit down and took a seat on her lap, snuggling up to her and just letting the world around us be. Sitting there, peacefully, in the snow, I told her about the favour Kallista had asked of me and explained my reasoning for accepting. She readily agreed that we should ask Adra to join us and didn''t mind giving her one of the Vitality-Crystals.


    With that out of the way, I took one of the crystals out and told Sigmir to open her mouth. I had asked this morning and according to Kallista, to use one, you had to place it within your body and let it be absorbed. She had recommended the mouth but had gotten the giggles when she winked at me and told me that there may be other ways.


    After feeding Sigmir one of the crystals, I placed one on my tongue as well and within moments flavour exploded in my mouth. The crystal tasted of apple, a few spices and something I could not identify. I had never tasted something this intense but also this mellow. Normally, intense flavours had a bite to them, getting slightly too intense with ease but not this one. No matter how strong it was, I wanted more, wanted it stronger. In addition, something was flowing into my body, heating me up all over. Sigmir and I held each other as we gave out soft moans, overwhelmed by the intensity We shook in each others arms for some time before settling down, simply enjoying the afterglow. If I could bottle that feeling and sell it, I would be the queen of two worlds. Once more, a slight shudder went down my spine, this time for a wholly different reason.


    A bit later, Sigmir jokingly complained that we were sitting here in the snow, when there was a nice hearth close by, somewhere she would not freeze her butt off. She laughed as she said it but I felt a bit bad using her as a pillow in the snow. I stood and gave her a hand up, secretly feeling surprised as she felt a little heavier than before. No way I''d say that to her, no way, no how, I knew at least that much about relationships.


    Hand in hand, we walked over to Kallista''s house, looking for Adra as we walked. As we came closer, we heard crunching snow and soft grunts close to the house. Curious as we both were, we walked over and saw Adra training with her spear. She was good, seriously good. Fast as a striking snake and, if the sounds were any indication, there was a lot of power within her strikes. A glance with Lenore''s sight showed that there was more to her fighting than simple physical prowess, she was surrounded by multiple, distinct glows, forming a complicated formations around her. It covered most of her body, mainly wrapping around her arms and legs but also connected along her spine and hugging her torso and hips.


    Sadly, I was unable to make out anything useful for my own magic, I was just able to see the formation purposefully move with each of her strikes and moves.


    As we stood there, Adra realised that she had spectators and stopped her training. She came over to us and after greetings, I gave her our proposition.


    ¡°Adra, I believe you have been told that you can''t stay here long. Sigmir and I have completed the task we had come here for and now we need to move on. While you travelled with us from Tegi, we felt that you would be a good companion on our travels. Our journey will take us quite far, you would probably see quite a lot of the world, which was the reason for your own travels, wasn''t it?¡± I asked her with a smile.


    Adra looked me over with a penetrating gaze before shifting it to Sigmir and giving her the same scrutiny. ¡°You know, when I first met you, I thought I was jumping from the forge into the forest-fire. I talked to Kallista a bit and she thinks you are a good one. There is something in Kallista that I want to trust; she is an ancient of my race, but there is more. I will join you for now, travelling on my own has not been as exciting as I hoped it would be.¡± She said before pulling me and Sigmir into a short hug.


    ¡°Now, Sigmir, do you want to spar again? Yesterday, we had a draw but I feel like I can take you today.¡± Adra said with a smile on her face.


    ¡°No, I will pass. The two of us have been in a ritual for hours and I am not sure if my strength works like I want it to.¡± Sigmir declined.


    ¡°I will probably lose but I would like to try. Your style looks quite interesting, the mix of magic and martial fighting.¡± I told a surprised looking Adra, she obviously did not think of me as a fighter, just a spell-caster.

 Chapter 66

    Taking off my cloak, I stepped forward, into the open space Adra had used to train. There were multiple ways to play this. I could try to simply use my physical abilities and martial skills but I''d lose. Badly. I''d have to add magic to the mix and I had two options for that, going a similar route as Adra did - using my Blood Runes to strengthen myself - or using Ice Magic in conjunction with my shuttles.


    Adra softly moved her hand across the blade of her spear, blunting the edges, allowing her to strike without causing serious damage. I picked a fighting-style and used Ice Runes to create two blades similar to my Butterfly Wings, but blunt, and four simple shuttles, each about a foot long and thin. Testing a little, I realised that I was able to lift three at once with my ice-magic but it was a major strain. Satisfied with my testing, I let the shuttles vanish behind my back, sticking them into my belt so my mind was free and they were easily available.


    I took on a defensive stance, planning to keep my distance and use the flying shuttles as means of attack. Trying to attack with my butterfly shuttles would be extraordinarily troublesome against a spear. Not impossible, just troublesome.


    I gave a slight bow to Adra, ingrained into me as proper behaviour, and with a ''Begin!'' from Sigmir, we were off to the races. Well, Adra was, immediately striking at my mid-section, using the reach advantage of her spear to put me on the defensive, only for me to dodge and test her reaction with a single flying blade. She easily dodged it with her magically enhanced speed, and I let the flying blade simply sail away, landing behind her. No need to clue her in on all my tricks just yet, and the blade was in a good position for later shenanigans.


    The first strike set the tone, Adra furiously attacking, me dodging and harassing her with flying shuttles. By now I had tipped my hands about the fact that I could freely control them and attack from blind-spots, making Adra''s attacks a risky proposition. All of a sudden, Adra sped up, easily smacking my flying shuttles away and pouncing on me. I tried jumping back but I was too slow. Bullet Time triggered and I went for the mutual defeat, letting go of my butterfly blades and using Ice Magic to send them at her. Just as the blunt tip of her spear softly touched my throat, the blunt edge of my blades touched hers.


    There was a definite look of surprise on her face, quickly replaced by a smile.


    ¡°Interesting choice of style I have to say. Those flying shuttles add a lot of options.¡± Adra said with genuine interest in her voice. ¡°Again?¡± she asked.


    I nodded, this time going with the other plan I had. It took a lot of focus to create a seven-rune formation that was not a heptagon, but during my talks with the Grandmother, I had an idea for my Blood Runes, using them on specific points of my body. One strengthen-rune on each arm and leg linked to simple blood-runes on my forehead, chest and abdomen. The simple blood-runes would give the spell duration and the strengthen-runes would give it effect. Sadly, I had to channel the spell or I''d run into problems, as I was lacking in endurance. I tested a little experimenting with shifting my magic into one of the four strengthen-runes and realised that I might be able to match Sigmir in raw strength this way.


    I called my blades back into my hand and readied myself for another bout.


    ¡°Begin!¡± Sigmir''s command sent us both into action, without my shuttles, I''d have to get close or I''d just die at the end of Adra''s spear. My sudden aggression surprised Adra, she had to dodge back, trying to gain distance in order to fully use her spear. I chased and the duel became the opposite of the one before. I was chasing, Adra was defending and counter-attacking. I was slightly faster than her but only in linear movement, which allowed her to dance circles around me. I needed to end this, the seven runes on me were drawing a lot of magic and my body was sending me messages that I was overstraining it. I had one more trick, literally, up my sleeve and I''d have to use it now.


    After dashing forward, I pushed one last flow of magic into the runes on me, groaning with the power rushing into me and dropped the channel, knowing that a few moments later, I''d be hit with the strain I had subjected myself to. Instead of channelling into the spell, I channelled power into my accessory. In an instant, a single vine shot out, attempting to bind a surprised Adra. The vine entangled her arm, binding it and the spear giving me an opening to get to her. I moved in and just as I touched her chest with the tip of my knife, indicating a good hit, a paw touched my face.


    I was not the only one with tricks up their sleeve, Adra had shifted her hand into a paw, armed with wicked claws. We had another mutual defeat on our hands; both of us would probably be dead, were this a real fight.


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    I let out a groan as the backlash of my magic hit me, loud enough that Sigmir heard it and simply picked me up like a child, carrying me over to Kallista''s house. Adra grinned and followed us inside. Kallista saw me and let out a chuckle, shaking her head. Yes, I had overdrawn my physical body and now I was paying for it. Nothing a careful application of magic, a hot bath and some tender, loving care from Sigmir could not fix. Well, the tender, loving care was optional, but nobody needed to know that.


    I wanted to stand up to help Kallista with dinner-preparations but I found myself restrained by Sigmir. She simply held me in her lap, softly caressing and petting me, giving me the occasional kiss. Apparently healing her had restored quite a bit of her confidence and made her more demonstrative with her feelings. Or maybe it was an effect of the ritual, either way, I would not complain. Accepting my captivity, I simply snuggled into Sigmir, enjoying her attentions.


    Dinner was served and during the lively dinner-conversation Adra mentioned to Kallista that she would leave with us. There was a brief smile on Kallista''s face and she agreed with Adra that it was a good course of action. We made plans to rest up tomorrow and leave the day after.


    After dinner, Sigmir picked me up again and I giggled as she carried me to the bath. We had a lot of fun washing each other and relaxing, enjoying the large tub before we moved our fun to the bedroom and carried on there. I had originally planned to start reading the Grandmother''s grimoire but my plans were shattered by Sigmir and her new-found insistence. The day before, I had made sure that the world knew she was mine. Today, she repaid the favour.


    As my character slept, I logged out and took care of business in the real world. It worked quite well; I only needed a little sleep in-game, and could function outside without problems, giving me a lot of time. I wanted to know if there were any information on Tegi and with a little searching I found a vlog, venturing into a corrupted area in Beriasa. After watching it and comparing the landscape to Tegi, I knew that I had been lucky. The Nethersprites in the video looked a little more corporeal than those I had fought and looking at the Devourer gave me the creeps, even through the video. But I had an idea how to defeat it.


    Back in game, my character woke for a moment before I settled back into Sigmir''s embrace and fell asleep.


    The next morning came not with a bang, but with a moan. Sigmir had awakened before me and restarted the festivities. Again, I did not complain but enjoyed it. It took a while until we made it to breakfast, causing giggles from Adra who was sitting close to the hearth, relaxing. During breakfast, we made plans for the next day, Sadly Adra had no mount, but her strange goat-form was able to keep up for quite some time. When Adra heard about Tegi and the Devourer, she got pale but was on board with attacking it.


    After breakfast, we went out, Adra and Sigmir wanted to train a bit and I wanted to be with them and read my book. They did not spar, but from the exercises Sigmir did, something was different. Her movements seemed noticeably faster and more fluid than before and it took me a few minutes of watching her graceful movements until I understood. The ritual yesterday had rid her of the parasite in her and she had regained her strength, letting her use her class again and the strength of one who crossed the first divide.


    I watched a little longer before my curiosity got the better of me and I started reading, though for now I was only able to understand a few pages.


    The first one was a spell called Mending; it came with a description and a chant. Focusing on the book, I understood that the chant was not meant to be meaningful; it was meant to move Astral Power in a specific way to manifest the spell. I could cast it - and did - but understanding the principles involved was beyond me. It did, however, clean my clothes and fix a few small tears.


    When I was done with the first spell, Sigmir and Adra were done for the day and we all went back to Kallista''s house. I harshly abused Sigmir by placing her on one of the sofas and using her as a pillow, snuggling into her and reading. Her smile told me that she did not mind at all.


    The next spell within my book was a ward, it was quite simple in design; it used three rocks as anchors, and everything larger than a squirrel crossing the lines between the rocks less than three meters off the ground would trip the ward, creating an audible alarm. This one took me a little longer to cast, but I had a feeling that I might be able to create something similar using my personal magic, only that my wards would involve mist and misdirection. The wards would have to be more complex, linking more anchors together, but it was similar to the mist-field I had used around my original cave.


    The third and last spell was something truly interesting. It was a ritual spell encouraging plant-growth making it utterly useless to me. But it used a ritual circle partially made with runes to create a consistent effect over a longer time. With a little experimenting, I might be able to create something using my Ice-Runes to create impressive effects.


    Reading through the spells and assorted information took me quite some time, especially as I tried to figure out their applications with my personal brand of magic, so the rest of the day was spent taking a walk to say goodbye to the rest of Neyto, and get some plain and simple relaxation.

 Chapter 67

    As the moon was rising during our last night in Neyto, I felt a need to go outside, to compare the current state to the illusion the Grandmother had created. Outside, I felt a strange sense of d¨¦j¨¤-vu, the scene so similar but so different from the illusion. There was no full moon yet - that was a few days away - so there only was an almost full disc in the sky and its reflection in the Nexus.


    Almost in a trance, I walked forward, close to the ''water'' and sat down before allowing my mind to wander, entering fully into a meditative trance. Unlike the gentle floating sensation I had during the Grandmother''s ritual, now I felt like a leaf in the rapids, trying to keep afloat and not get smashed against the rocks. I felt that the consequences of getting swept away would be dire but I also felt an exhilarating sensation washing over me, like a bath in a cold mountain stream. Cleansing, refreshing and cold but not bad as long as you kept your wits about you. I had to keep a grip on my mind, getting accustomed to the feeling without simply joining the river. The sense of danger sent a shiver down my spine, but somehow, I just did not care, I wanted to stay in the river and feel the sensation some more.


    As my situation stabilized, I was no longer in acute danger of getting swept away and my mind started to wander. The first thing it latched on were the spells I had read about. Especially the ritual circles gave me inspiration; I had used my magic to influence the weather before, both with runes and with subconscious use of my Ice Magic. A part of me wondered if those joinings to the storm gave me direction in my search for my domain. It certainly stirred my soul, but it was focused on Ice and Storm, completely discarding my aspects of Darkness and Blood. I had ideas of crafting a large spell-circle in the ground using it to focus my previously unconscious efforts into something bigger. My runes were useable in combat but I had a feeling they would truly shine in ritual-magic.


    I thought a while about the possibilities of slow-working, large-scale spells and the possibility to use something like that in Tegi. Thinking about Tegi brought Adra and our sparring into focus. She was, according to my understanding, a mix between spellcaster and martial fighter and I had been seriously outclassed. Without the flying shuttles in our first bout, she would have easily destroyed me. The Eisblumen were truly useful but I wanted something more. In my mind, I saw images of multiple, thin shuttles used in formation. Far thinner than those I used before, more suited to stab into an enemy than slash at them. A short idea of simply using a round shape and purely stabbing was quickly discarded.


    I was so entranced into my meditation and imagination that I did not feel my hands moving, but I felt the familiar sensation of Astral Power leaving me. I kept my focus on slowly pulling myself free but the submersion kept dragging at me, making the process slow and almost agonizing. I scolded myself for getting in too deep but after a short moment, I discarded those thoughts as useless, what was done, was done.


    Regaining my senses I felt a connection form, tethering me to a glowing runic formation, consisting of Ice-Runes. In front of the formation, slightly connected to me were six shuttles, each slim and deadly just like I had imagined before. As the formation faded from existence, I reached for them with my mind and fully focusing on the six blades, using both processes, I was able to barely keep them afloat. Using them in any serious manner would be impossible but maybe in the future.


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    Letting them float in front of me, I inspected them.


    <table><tbody><tr><td colspan="10">Weaver''s Fury</td></tr><tr><td colspan="5"> Rarity</td><td colspan="5">Unique</td></tr><tr><td colspan="5">Base Damage</td><td colspan="5">18 Damage Piercing</td></tr><tr><td colspan="5">Base Damage</td><td colspan="5">14 Damage Slashing</td></tr><tr><td colspan="7">Strength Modifier</td><td colspan="3"> none </td></tr><tr><td colspan="3">Special Effect</td><td colspan="7">Imbued. Due to the process used for the creation of this weapon, it is strongly in tune with the Ice-Magic of the Traveller Morgana. 25% lower cost when wielded by her Ice-Magic.</td></tr><tr><td colspan="3">Special Effect</td><td colspan="7">Formation ¨C When multiple parts of this weapon are used together, they deal bonus-damage depending on the number of shuttles used.</td></tr></tbody></table>


    Impressed by my new toys, I let two of the shuttles drop in front of me and used the other four in formation, feeling them out and realising that using them in a single formation with both thought-processes was incredibly easy, letting me accelerate and move them with a deadly grace.


    Just as I finished my trials, a voice floated to me out of the darkness.


    ¡°Not bad, child. You connected with the Nexus and survived. You even managed to create something with it''s help.¡± I recognized the Grandmother''s voice but even looking around, I was unable to locate her. More of her shenanigans...


    I got up, gathered my new weapons and realized that I had gained two ranks in my Astral Meditation and a single rank in Ice Magic, adding a little spring to my step. I already had an idea how to carry my new weapons; angled sheaths sewn into my cloak to allow for concealment and rapid use - I just had to sew them in.


    Back in Kallista''s house, I showed my new weapon to Sigmir and Adra, both remembered my use of multiple blades against Adra and knew that it would give me a great boost. Kallista came over as well and approved of them before giving me a bottle with a light blue liquid, slightly glowing from within.


    ¡°I want you to have this, as we talked about before. I believe it will help you a great deal, if used at the right time.¡± she said with a wink, indirectly telling me it was compensation for giving Adra a Vitality-Crystal. I inspected the bottle and the system told me what it was.


    <table><tbody><tr><td colspan="10">Lauded Spirit Draught</td></tr><tr><td colspan="5"> Rarity</td><td colspan="5">Rare</td></tr><tr><td colspan="10">A potion designed to strengthen one sense while dampening all others. This one was brewed to strengthen the mystical perception.</td></tr></tbody></table>


    I read it and looked at Kallista with a questioning, raised eyebrow.


    ¡°When you feel something but are unable to make sense of it, this potion will help you. The Grandmother told me about your search and there will be situations that will baffle you. This potion allows you to shut everything else out and focus on those indescribable sensations and baffling feelings. It will help you in discovering yourself..¡± she explained. It wasn''t a really helpful explanation but I had a feeling that I would know when to use it. I had experienced those strange tugs on my mind, and maybe her potion would help me find my domain. And if not, I had not really lost out by giving a prospective team-mate something useful.


    That night, Sigmir and I used Kallista''s bathroom for a last time, before enjoying her comfortable beds. We both slept deeply and were satisfied after we were done, knowing that the road was less than suited for our fun. Maybe we would find a hot spring somewhere but I knew that it was not really realistic to hope for one. But as they say, hope dies second-last, just before the patient.


    Soon, morning came and we all had breakfast together before heading out. Adra shifted into her goat-form, Sigmir and I mounted our Spirit-Mounts and with a wave to Kallista, we set off into a long and arduous journey. It would be a blast.

 Chapter 68

    On the day we left Neyto, we made good speed south. Our plan was to visit Tegi first, trying to take care of the Devourer, then move on to Sigmir''s former tribe. Sadly, while Sigmir knew the area around her tribe and had a rough idea of a direction, her flight had been rather chaotic so we would have to search for them. And make a plan; taking out the leader of a tribe consisting of hundreds of people and a cadre of warriors would be impossible without a good plan. Luckily, we had some time to make one.


    As we travelled through the snowy forest, I once more realised that there were always multiple levels to my perception. On the first glance, the forests around us were repetitive and boring, pines, snow, a few rocks and nothing more. Looking closer, every tree was unique, every snowflake, every rock different. It made me wonder about one''s place in the world, both this one and the real world outside. Was everyone only a tree like all the others around them, unique in the details but at the end of the day just one tree in a forest? Or was there something else out there, making one into a special snowflake, as the expression went?


    I spent quite a while deep in thoughts, observing nature around us and trying to figure out the big questions of individuality and life. Unsurprisingly, I was not successful and had to push the questions from my mind.


    We made quite some distance before making camp that day. I wanted to place my wards and Adra was able to use some as well. I watched her use a few trees to anchor her magic and, when she was done, I asked her to explain her doing to me. She had no problem to do so and I learned that her affinity to nature made it easy for her to use trees. Rocks were rather universally usable for simple and weak wards. If I wanted to anchor something more powerful, I''d have to use something different, attuned to the wards or to magic in general.


    There were crystals one could use, mostly called wardstones and those, while not truly rare, were not something you could just pick up from the ground. Curious, I tried to use a normal stone to anchor an idea I had for a mist-ward and at first, I was unable to make the magic stick to but as I persisted, the stone started to crumble and break. After picking up a new set of stones, I realised that I did not want to place the alarm-ward just yet, we were still going in and out of camp. The stones were set aside for later and I helped Sigmir gathering wood and prepare a fireplace.


    Some time later, I watched Adra use a spell on the fire, making it burn hotter while consuming less fuel and felt a little slighted. My magic was great for combat, but utility? Not really.


    During the evening, I read through the Grimoire once more, hoping to gain inspiration and learn more about magic. After a little reading, I was sure that my idea could work. I moved some distance away from our camp and started to form runes out of ice. I had to greatly focus in order to make them just as I wanted to and I knew that it would only work with Ice-Runes. As I made them, I placed them into a spell-formation, linked by lines made from more ice. After I was done, I took my place in the middle of the formation and tried to stretch my mind out to feel it. There was a contact and I managed to work my Astral Power into it, slowly feeling an effect form above me. My Astral Power was draining quickly, but what I had done worked as proof of concept. I had no doubt that if I managed to power a formation like this, I could create some seriously large magic, even consciously use the weather to strike at my foes.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Skill increased</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You increased your skill: Ice Rune-Mastery [50/100]</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    As I came back to camp, Adra and Sigmir were still doing their own form-work, stretching a little after a day of travelling. Before bed, I settled down, letting myself float into the Astral River, looking for a stream of Ice to dive into. It did not take too long to find one, There was a lot of Ice in the Astral River; maybe it was part of the location I was in, maybe not. Who knew?


    My mind still had visions of me unleashing frozen hell upon my enemies, and the Rune I comprehended was a stronger version of the Hail-Rune: it read ¡°Blizzard¡±, and contained the link between the Elements of Ice and Storm. I had a feeling that I would come to like this rune. After luxuriating in the feeling of Astral Power flowing around me for a while, I drew myself back into my body, feeling both exhausted and refreshed at the same time.


    After my meditation, it was time for bed, so I snuggled up to Sigmir and enjoyed a completely different feeling of comfort.


    Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.


    The next morning was a little muggy, there was a cold fog in the air, making it miserable. After breakfast we broke camp and started our day. The weather made all of us a little withdrawn and grumpy so there was little talk or happiness. The feeling of isolation within the white fog did not help our mood in any way.


    The combination of bad mood, bad vision and carelessness is probably to blame for what happened next. We were moving on a clear stretch that normally would be a meadow but was now snowed in. As we came close to the treeline, a tingling sensation caught my attention. Sadly, it was too late and plant-roots shot out of the ground, entangling the legs of our mounts. The Spiritgolems were not made to withstand any punishment and disintegrated instantly. As I was falling, I saw a few figures hidden in the treeline come forward. Out of instinct and panic, I reached out with my Ice Magic. I did not reach for the shuttles on my back or the blades on my side, I reached for the snow at our feet. Not trying for individual snowflakes I tried to simply throw up as much snow as I could to obscure us and it worked like a charm. For a moment, we were all swimming in a sea of white.


    I landed on my side and sprung up as quickly as I could, while seeing Sigmir land with a lot more grace. The red aura I had seen a few times sprung up but instead of simply radiating outward, it wrapped around her, forming into a shimmering armour, making her look like an angry deity. The moment she landed, she exploded forward, showing an incredible speed. Her aura was glowing strong enough to let me see her even through the obscured vision as she charged into the figures, her Lok''nar pulled back for a devastating strike. Most of the snow quickly settled back down, leaving my vision impeded but not totally obscured.


    Just as Sigmir arrived in front of our attackers, I saw Adra get to them as well. She had managed to dodge out of the attack and moved forward in her goat-form and just as Sigmir barrelled into our attackers, Adra took a mighty leap, still in her goat-form, just to shift in mid-air, turning into her dryad-form, with her spear already poised to strike. She did not waste any time, stabbing forward, adding her momentum to a vicious thrust. Her chosen target was obviously not prepared for her, trying for a hasty dodge and failing. He got impaled right through the chest, before Adra pulled back for a follow-up attack.


    As I watched my two companions wreak havoc, I saw a strange disturbance in the fluttering snow around me. It almost looked like a figure moving but other than the disturbed snow there was no indication. ''Stealth!'' That thought enraged me, there was another attacker out there and he was after me. ''Fucking rogues!''


    Recognizing the danger, my mind went into overdrive, activating Bullet Time and Overflow at the same time to give me the best chance. My shuttles were not good for area-attacks, my runes took too much time, so I triggered my Eisblumen, letting the vines flail out and strike into the direction of the disturbance. One of the vines connected with something and I used all my control to wrap the vine around that ''something'' it had connected with. When I felt a good grip, I yanked the vine upward. My would-be attacker''s stealth broke and I saw him for the first time. It was some kind of cat-beastman, clad in dark leather, two daggers in hand and more on his hips.


    My vine had wrapped around his leg and taken it out from under him and I knew that I did not want to get up close and personal with any of his knives. I fully focused on the Eisblumen and on using them to control my Attacker. I wrapped my vines around his other leg and both arms so I had him immobilised facing the other way and upside-down. Now, I just had to take care of him and I would be good. With supreme effort, I managed to create one extra vine and used it like a spear, impaling my attacker through the back. In my anger, I pulled at the other vines the moment I felt penetration and I failed to control my strength. Fear and anger made my magic stronger than I ever thought and I saw limbs rip away. The rage within me was still not satisfied, even with the dismemberment of my foe, so I used the vines to flick the collected limbs at the guys in the treeline.


    In the short moment, I had used to deal with my attacker, Sigmir and Adra had cut our attackers down to size. There was just one dwarf remaining and by now I knew we were fighting the four Travellers chasing after Sigmir. It turned out that I was either a genius when it came to throwing dismembered limbs with ice-vines or I got lucky but the casually thrown arm hit the dwarf right in the face. Not only that, the tumbling motion made it a slap, right out of a comedy. Well, if a comedy featured dismembered body-parts. There was no damage but getting slapped in the face by a teammates arm, without the teammate, was one hell of a distraction and both Sigmir and Adra made sure to use it, ending his shock by simply ending his life and the fight at the same time.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Half-Orc Traveller died.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You gain 2500 EXP.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>For killing an opponent without a Traveller in your party, you gain Bonus EXP</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>Dwarf Traveller died.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You gain 2550 EXP.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>For killing an opponent without a Traveller in your party, you gain Bonus EXP</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>


    You reached level 50.


    </td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Skill increased</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You increased your skill: Ice Magic [63/100]</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>

 Chapter 69

    -We gathered together after the sudden ambush and took stock of our condition. Adra looked at Sigmir with undisguised awe.


    ¡°You sure held back when sparring against me, didn''t you?¡± She asked with a small hitch in her voice.


    ¡°No, I did not. I regained a lot of my strength after the ritual Morgana did for me. And after I regained my strength, I did not want to use it in a sparring fight, I wanted a fight I did not have to hold back in, to gauge how much I truly regained.¡± Sigmir answered with a smile. The combination of her sweet smile and the blood that was still splattered across her armour and face created some heat in interesting places.


    ¡°We have been careless. I will make a habit of placing concealment-spells around all of us, I hope we can avoid another ambush.¡± I told the other two, and did just that.


    I wanted a long-running concealment, so the runic formation I created focused on the mystical medium I wanted to use. Shadows and mist were in my opinion the best choice to conceal someone, so the formation was composed out of two rune-triangles made out of shadow and mist, both set around a single concealment-rune. It took quite a lot of focus to create the spell like I wanted to, but I felt it take effect. I realised that I was successful when a thin, dark mist formed around the one concealed, not enough to conceal to physical sight but hopefully enough to prevent magical scrying. Sadly, I only had enough power left to conceal Sigmir; the stunt with the Eisblumen had taken a lot of power out of me. On the upside, I gained a point in my Darkness-Runes. Ever since I had reached skill-level 50, the progress had massively slowed down.


    When I wanted to re-summon my mount, I realised that the spell-formation on the crystal was disrupted, slowly regaining its original appearance. We would have to wait some time to ride again, so Sigmir and I had to walk. Adra walked with us, not shifting into her animal-form considering that she would have to slow down anyway. Ylva joined us as well, now that she was able to keep up. After walking for some time, I placed concealment spells on Adra and myself. I doubted they had the ability to track Ylva so I did not bother with her. I knew it was most likely not necessary as they would not respawn for a day but I felt I should get into the habit.


    I placed the two points I had gained into intelligence, bringing it up to thirty. A short look into my special-skills showed me that I was now able to use three-rune spells instantly and tried it out, shooting an icicle, using my new blizzard-rune for movement and hard-ice as a medium. The result was not bad, it would cause some damage but when I saw the power-cost, I was sure that instant-casting was reserved for emergency situations. The cost-modifier was applied exponentially, increasing the cost by a factor of eight.


    Once again, I looked over my stat-page and liked what I saw.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="12">Basic Overview</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="6">Name</td>


    <td colspan="6">Morgana</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="6">Race</td>


    <td colspan="6">Firn-Elf</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="6">Level</td>


    <td colspan="6">50</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="3">Health</td>


    <td colspan="3">480/480</td>


    <td colspan="3">Stamina</td>


    <td colspan="3">470/470</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="3">Astral Power</td>


    <td colspan="3">1468/1680</td>


    <td colspan="3">Divine Power</td>


    <td colspan="3">-</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="2">Strength</td>


    <td colspan="2">9</td>


    <td colspan="2">Agility</td>


    <td colspan="2">13</td>


    <td colspan="2">Dexterity</td>


    <td colspan="2">12</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="2">Intelligence</td>


    <td colspan="2">30</td>


    <td colspan="2">Intuition</td>


    <td colspan="2">22</td>


    <td colspan="2">Charisma</td>


    <td colspan="2">9</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="2">Courage</td>


    <td colspan="2">13</td>


    <td colspan="2">Endurance</td>


    <td colspan="2">11</td>


    <td colspan="2">Vitality</td>


    <td colspan="2">14</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    Getting my intelligence to 30 even gave me a new ability, called Improved Recall, passively increasing my memory. Once more, I was intrigued by the effects the game was claiming to have on a body. If they could simulate better memory, what else could they do? How would it carry over into the real world? I had seen a couple of articles about it and people screaming about it but they had been screaming about video-games and their effect, ever since a white ball was bouncing between two moving slides, so I was not overly worried. In addition, I had far too much fun in this world to consider leaving it.


    We walked for another hour before we could re-summon our Spirit-Golems and when we did, neither Elding nor Hringur were overly happy about getting their shell destroyed. Apparently there was some feedback, nothing truly harmful but very uncomfortable. After talking a little to the two of them and Adra, we learned that they were able to find their way to places they had been before, so we did not need to use the exact same path on our return to Tegi. We could stay further west and keep away from Yari. None of us wanted to be too close to it, if the four bounty-hunters respawned. We feared they could get local support to go after us, if they paid the right price. Probably not even that high a price, if the guy I had knocked down when we were there had anything to say about it. I doubted that someone would go out of his way to hunt another down for a bar-brawl but getting paid to get revenge? I knew I would happily go for an offer like that.


    We managed to travel a couple more hours before setting down for camp. We went through our routine of gathering firewood, setting up wards and preparing a place to sleep before settling down.


    After dinner, it was time for a little training, first it was me against Sigmir, then Sigmir against Adra and finally, Adra and I together against Sigmir and Ylva. Individually, neither Adra nor I could get to Sigmir and together we had to work for it. The weak link quickly showed in Ylva.


    It became obvious that the strength of a class helped quite a bit as Ylva lacked the specialised skills each of us had. Sigmir was now freely able to use her red aura as an armour, something that greatly increased her strength and endurance in addition to multiple simple skills like the charge-skill, which allowed her to use her Astral Power to increase her linear speed for a short moment and some direct attacks that enhanced singular strikes. She never used them directly against us, showing that they were simply too powerful by shattering a specially prepared Ice-Shield with a single blow. Adra told me that it was that skill that killed the Half-Orc with a single strike, armour and protective buff from the paladin be damned.


    You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.


    Adra in turn focused on her self-buffs for both melee-combat with her spear, and ranged-combat with her bow. Now, I saw one of the problems of my sorcerer-class: I was missing those specialised skills. I could manage with my self-created spells, but I had a feeling that they were lacking in comparison to abilities that had been passed down and perfected by generations of fighters.


    Looking for a solution, I started to use forms I had learned in the real world, and tried to add my flying shuttles as close-in support. I had always used them together but never tried to make them into one. I lost myself in the motion, both the magical motion of the flying shuttles and the physical motion of my practised forms.


    Some time later, Sigmir startled me out of my trance by asking about my plans for Tegi and the Jonari-Tribe. I had some ideas for Tegi, the key was quite simple. The video showed that the devourer was static but huge. I doubted that something like normal Icicles or arrows would even penetrate it''s skin, it wouldn''t even be a pin-prick for a beast that size. With the quest saying that it was impossible, I knew that only thinking outside the box had any chance at all. Parts of me wanted to flood the river or bury it in an avalanche but neither was possible. What I believed to be possible was a blizzard, even a thing that size could be frozen, with enough time and Astral Power. I had tried a runic formation that might be a working foundation for ritual magic the night before.


    Setting up somewhere on the hills with line of sight to the beast and controlling the access to the ritual-side was probably our best and only shot. Sigmir had her Lok''nar to hurt Nethersprites and I hoped Adra was able to do something with her magic. I explained my reasoning to the two of them and learned that Adra could attack Nethersprites but it took a toll on her, so it came down to Sigmir and her ability to handle the them and my ability to use a brand new ritual magic. We made plans to try out the ritual magic when we were closer to Tegi and further away from our pursuers.


    The Jonari were a whole different ball-game. Each of us had enough strength to handle the normal tribe-member and the hunter without trouble. Sadly, the core-forces were at least as strong as Sigmir, most of them stronger. Against a single one of them, we would be hard pressed to win as a group. At least if we didn''t cheat. Well, good thing that I had no compulsion against cheating in battle. Relationships were another matter.


    As we talked about possible ways to separate the elite-warriors and ambush them, Ylva turned up in camp. She had taken off before, stretching her legs after the time within her Hallow.


    Spoiler: Spoiler<input class="spoilerButton" type="button" value="Show">


    ¡°There is a warm spring close by.¡± she told us. ¡°You might want to wash off the blood, before it smells.¡±


    I looked over to Sigmir and there was a definite glimmer in her eyes.


    ¡°Why don¡¯t we let Adra take the first bath? Just in case we want to stay longer?¡± I asked, probably looking very similar to Sigmir. I could almost hear Ylva roll her eyes as she bounded over to Adra and gave her the information. At the same time, Sigmir stood and the look on her face reminded me of earlier, when she wore the blood of our enemies as make-up. She looked at me like a predator, part of me truly liked it but another part wanted to be the predator, not the prey. Preventing her from simply using her physical strength to take control, I pushed her to sit back down and straddled her lap before starting to kiss her. We lost us in the dance of tongues until Adra came back to camp and told us to get our bath in so we could get to sleep.


    Sigmir simply stood, holding onto me before walking over to the hot-spring. As she walked, I started to open the various bands that held her armour and clothes together so I could quickly strip her. As soon as we got there, she started to do the same to me. She didn¡¯t even have to set me down, she was strong enough to use one arm as a seat for me while using the other to strip me. I managed to get her upper-body armour and cloak off but getting at her pants was quite and simple impossible.


    Just before she managed to start in on me, I handed her her bloodied clothes with a smile and told her that she should wash them before we got too much into it. Her growl would have made Ylva proud, it was a nice mix of ferocious and lusty, sending shivers and heat in all the right places. I was lucky that I had not splattered myself when I dismembered the rogue so I could watch a naked Sigmir cleaning her clothes while sitting in a hot spring. I scooted around a bit, searching for the coldest place in the spring, it was a little warm for me. I washed myself while I waited for Sigmir. Soon, she had washed the blood splatter off her clothes and joined me.


    Just as she was about to pounce on me, I struck. I had been naughty and taken the Eisblumen into the spring with me. With a lot of care and focus, I let one vine wrap around each of Sigmir¡¯s arms, bringing carefully bringing them together behind her back, effectively binding her before making her sit. She looked at me in surprise but when she saw the look on my face, it seemed as if she decided to stay put. I had no doubt that she was strong enough to break the vines but chose not to. I was able to use two more vines, as long as I didn¡¯t move them around wildly or too independent from each other. I used them to simply spread her legs a little, giving me room to wash her thoroughly.


    It didn¡¯t take long for her to start squirming and putting pressure on my vines but as long as she wasn¡¯t making a concentrated effort, I was able to hold her. There was no way to go down on her as long as she was in the water so I wrapped the vines around her knees, using them to bind her knees together and lift her out of the water. Pushing her knees up to her chest, I had wonderful access to the promised land, one might even call it the netherlands. My tongue instantly made plans to invade, aided by probing fingers. I even tried teasing another hole, I had just cleaned it, so there was no point not to check her reactions. From the cries she let out, into the night, she enjoyed it just as much as I enjoyed it. I built her up, close to a peak before letting it recede a little, just to start the build-up again. After four cycles of teasing she started to beg so I let her trip over, bringing her to an earth shattering climax.


    Well, maybe vine-shattering, her convulsions were so strong, she almost broke her bindings, so I quickly let her down into the warm water. As I retreated the vines, I realised that they were indeed made out of ice and thus rather cold. Naughty parts of my mind conjured up images of cold vines, teasing stiff nipples or maybe even inserted into hot places.


    As my mind was swimming with ideas, Sigmir took her ¡®revenge¡¯, snatching me up and taking control of my body. Once more, I was reminded that she was strong enough to simply lift me and use me as she pleased and that she liked to get even. I mirrored her cries into the night before we both settled down in the hot spring, simply enjoying the warm water.


    When we finally made it back to our camp, Adra was sitting with Ylva, shaking her head in amusement.


    Soon, we all retreated into our sleeping furs, catching some shut-eye before the next day dawned.

 Chapter 70

    The morning after the ambush, we once more broke camp and continued our journey, now with added concealment-spells. During breakfast, Adra proved that she was coming out of her shell, by making jokes about the strange noises she had heard the night before, wondering what kind of animal had wandered close to our camp. Her ideas were quite funny, especially when she started to mimic what she had heard. Sigmir started blushing but I felt that the better way to deal with it was to own up to it. If I was able to coax such pleasure from my partner, why not bask in the fact?


    The days journey was uneventful, we moved through more snowed in pine forests, followed by snowed in fields. Did I mention that it snowed? My mind was occupied by ideas on how to create the runic formation I needed for the ritual I had planned, I knew my ideas got close but I believed that something was still evading me. I would need any bit of power and efficiency I could get my hands on or I would likely fail.


    Sigmir was not quite happy that I spent the day in a daze but she made do, talking to Hringur and Ylva, who wanted to keep up with us and spent the day outside her Hallow.


    The day went on, until in the late afternoon, we came upon a good spot to camp, protected from wind and snow, allowing us to make camp without trouble. I snapped out of the daze I had been in and did my part before continuing to read in my grimoire.


    After dinner, I sat on a rock, a little outside the camp, looking up into the sky. By now, the moon was showing her full glory and the clouds had parted, allowing the poor creatures on earth to witness her splendour. As I sat and watched, memories started to surface. Memories of the moon, of the time I had been fleeing together with Sigmir, running from her tribe.


    The green, burning skies, framing the gentle silver light of the moon.


    I smiled at the feeling, I had just started to get to know Sigmir but there had been an undeniable attraction, pulling on me like a magnet, not letting me take my eyes of her. I remembered standing next to her, holding her hand and looking at the burning skies.


    The next day, the moon had changed. Instead of the gentle, silver light, the moon had shown her other side. The angry, red disk in the sky, calling for murder, calling for blood, letting the world know that she was not only the gentle mistress, guarding our sleep but also the herald of the night, letting the shadows reign as blood was spilled in clandestine murder, with only her as the witness.


    I remembered looking at the moon with Sigmir, Lenore and Ylva, outside the Barrow Den, holding Ylva while she missed her pack, taking solitude in the caress of the mother and the knowledge that, no matter where they were now, we were all under the same sky, the same moon.


    I felt something stir in me, calling to me. I tried to listen but it was too faint to make out. I relaxed my mind, not straining but relaxing, letting my awareness sink into the recesses of my mind. The sound grew stronger but a sudden thought broke into my awareness. I had the potion Kallista had given me, just a few days back. She claimed I would know when to use it, and I felt that the time was now.


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    Slipping it out of my pack, I looked once at the slightly glowing liquid, watching in fascination as the silver moonlight broke in the liquid, creating an impressive display of colours as the silver moonlight was partially reflected and mingled with the blue glow of the liquid. Putting the bottle at my lips, I emptied it in a single, long swallow.


    After I drank it, I closed my eyes again, trying to make out the stirring in me, trying to comprehend it.


    A beat shook me, vibrating me as if I was a drum and someone started a rhythm. Shocked, I took a deep breath, inhaling deeply. Something strange was going on. My mind was racing, going miles per second, as the cold night air flooded my lungs, bringing with it tastes, sensations and smells I could not categorize. It was as if my senses were in a strange state, both mixed up and hyper-aware. The air around me tasted of the green pine needles, the white snow in the air and the red fire we had burning. It wasn''t that I had never smelled pine - I¡¯d probably smelled it at least once each day we had been outside in Mundus - but I had never tasted the green as vibrant as I did today. Similarly, the white of the snow gave the air a taste of frost, of ending, bringing with it the certainty that everything in this world comes to an end. For the first time, I understood why Ice was so close to Death, why there was no renewal in the frozen eternity, it was the element of eternal peace, the peace of a frozen grave.


    As my eyes shot open, my body tilted back and I fell into the snow. I did not feel any cold, it was as if I was lying in a bed of clouds, looking up, seeing the frozen moon, floating upon the darkness of the universe. I felt the Astral River raging around me, trying to sweep me away with it, taking me up to the moon, showing me eternity. Part of me wanted to lose myself within the raging current, letting all my worries, my dreams, my whole being go and just be a drop in the river, flowing with it, without a care, without pain, without consciousness. To just let go, leaving nothing behind but an empty shell, while I would visit the frozen moon, swimming within the ocean of stellar darkness, floating on a river of starlight.


    My mind stretched, I was not willing to let go of my body, I kept my mind tethered to it but I was willing to see how far I could go. I felt as if I was touching upon eternity, the eternal moon, always waning and waxing in the sky, but in truth, she never changed, always the same frozen in the darkness around her. I felt myself expand, trying to take in her splendour as I looked down upon Mundus, seeing the changing world below me.


    For a second, it was as if I was looking into the eyes of my body, frozen in time below me while I was swimming in the Astral River, touching upon the moon and taking part of her frozen light into my soul. The frozen light in the darkness. There was no warmth, it wasn''t the hot embrace of the sun, just the gentle frozen caress of the moon, chilled by the travel through the darkness around her.


    It was as if I felt a presence in the moon, a consciousness answering me, forever solemn, forever frozen, eternally circling the world, watching the seasons change below. I felt her loneliness and there was a part of me that could relate. I remembered my days of solitude, wandering through my life, moving through society but never able to join it, a watcher, eternally outside. There was a kin-ship, a bond between the moon and myself.


    I reached back to my body, feeling the connection strengthen, tethering me to the eternal moon and the moon to me. I would forever feel her pull, soothing her solitude by letting her experience vicariouslythrough me.


    Suddenly, I felt the sensations wane, my mind no longer able to stretch like I wanted it to, like a rubber-band, I was pulled back into my body. I moved with the pull, against the flow of the Astral River, swimming back into my body. It wasn''t just my mind that was taken with me, it brought something with it. The moment my mind rejoined my body, something else slammed into me, inundating my body with power, changing me on a fundamental level. I felt my body grow stronger, my senses sharpened and my mind expanded to accept those new sensations. No longer was I feeling the ghost-sensations I had felt before, but my senses had sharpened compared to before.


    The power thrummed within me and I tried to take control of it, before it grew out of control and broke through the surface of my mortal vessel. I circulated it within me, mimicking the meditation I always used to connect to the Astral River, just that now I was only circulating the power within me. As the power circulated, I felt it calm, not draining but accepting the channels I had placed it in. After a few circulations, I no longer needed to guide it and I let go of my control and watched it merge into my body.


    My mind inspected the changes my body went through and I felt stronger than before but what gave me the biggest surprise was the gift I had received. In my chest, next to my heart, was a small, silvery jewel. It looked like a tear, spun out of moonlight and darkness. It was a gift from my new sister, a reminder that no matter where I''d go, she would always watch over me.

 Chapter 71

    After my mind had settled a little after the strange journey Kallista¡¯s potion had just sent me on, I realised that the system had given me quite a few messages.


    <table><tbody><tr><td>You have crossed the first Divide.</td></tr><tr><td>After crossing the first Divide, your body was strengthened by the Astral River. You gain +5 to all Attributes. </td></tr></tbody></table>


    <table><tbody><tr><td>Class change!</td></tr><tr><td>After crossing the first Divide, your class has changed. You are now a Lunar Sorceress. </td></tr><tr><td>By communing with the moon, without losing yourself, you have taken part of her, into yourself. You are now attuned to the lunar cycle and her magic.</td></tr><tr><td>Your new class grants you an Attribute-Bonus of one Intelligence every five levels and one Inspiration every ten levels.


    Your new class grants you the trait: Lunar Cycle </td></tr></tbody></table>


    <table><tbody><tr><td>Trait gained </td></tr><tr><td>You gained the trait: Lunar Cycle.</td></tr><tr><td> The moon conveys both, the frozen light in the sky and the surrounding Darkness she swims in. Depending on the phase of the moon, you gain a bonus on your Ice- or Darkness-Magics..</td></tr></tbody></table>


    <table><tbody><tr><td> Title gained </td></tr><tr><td>You gained the title: Trailblazer.</td></tr><tr><td> You are the first Traveller to gain a previously unknown class. The Trailblazer-Title increases Courage, when dealing with the unknown, by 100%.</td></tr></tbody></table>


    Looking around, I saw Sigmir, Adra, Lenore and Ylva look at me with concern in their eyes.


    ¡°Don¡¯t do that again. I was kicked right out of my Hallow!¡± cawed Lenore. Her words seemed a little callous, but I felt the underlying relief that I was apparently fine.


    ¡°That was¡­ I can¡¯t describe it, I don¡¯t have the words for it.¡± I said, still reeling from the after-effects. ¡°But I did manage to cross the first Divide.¡± I announced with a grin.


    I saw the eyes of all four of them grow a size, when they took in what I just said and what it truly meant. From what Sigmir had told me, gaining levels was great but a Divide represented a leap in power. I was not quite sure what my new class would give me, beside the extra stats and the trait which were nice, but I had a feeling that there was more to the class. My old class never provided any informations that I did not find myself, so I doubted that the new class would be different in that regard.


    It also meant that we should hurry toward Tegi as fast as possible. I felt the moonlight empower me, strengthening my ice-magics greatly; both the use of Ice Runes and direct Ice-Magic were empowered by the silvery light. The power would wane over the next two weeks and I would gain a bonus to Darkness-Magic instead which would reach its peak during the new moon. I wanted as much power as I could get to attack the Devourer, without waiting for the next full moon.


    The others were in various state of surprise and Sigmir looked at me in a proud and proprietary fashion that I did not mind at all. Ylva looked a little pensive and Lenore retreated into her Hallow before gratulating me. She also realized Ylva¡¯s pensiveness and explained.


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    ¡°I think she is a little jealous. We spirit-beasts don¡¯t have classes and need to cross the first Divide to draw even. We have stronger bodies, just like animals, but classes even the playing field and then some. And crossing the Divides is hard for us, we need to take in the essence of another spirit-beast or a true spirit. Both is a challenge.¡±


    I felt intrigued by that different way, sure, it sounded more difficult than the way I had gone. But was it really? I had needed the potion given to me by a millennia old dryad and probably a good amount of luck to have the chance to advance and then I needed to keep my mind together against the pull of my domain. Sigmir had been trained since she was able to walk, trained by someone who knew the way to gain her specific class. Without that training, she admitted freely that she would not have crossed the Divide. For Lenore and Ylva, we just had to hunt down an appropriate spirit and let them ¡®take it in¡¯ whatever that meant.


    ¡°Congratulations. I wish I knew when I can challenge the Divide.¡± Adra ripped me from my thoughts.


    ¡°Thank you, I¡¯m sure your time will come.¡± I told her with a smile. I was not even sure what class she was, so there was nothing I could say that was not a platitude.


    ¡°We should sleep, there is a small change in plans. The faster we get to Tegi, the more power I have to deal with the Devourer. So we will make haste.¡± I told the other two before using Sigmir as my personal mattress.


    During the rest of the night, I slept on and off, trying to make sense of the experience and the feeling of kinship I had felt with the strange consciousness I had felt connected to the moon. Something, or maybe someone, had felt my attempt to reach out to the moon and responded. The tear in my chest was either a result of passing the Divide or it was something unique to me. It felt so similar to the Astral Power within me but at the same time, it felt different. More¡­ robust was the only word I could think of.


    It was an intriguing riddle but to solve a riddle, you needed clues. I did not have any, but I would keep my eyes open, looking for them. Maybe I would find some, I had a feeling that it would have a deep impact on me and the world.


    The next morning greeted us with a splendid sunrise, illuminating the world around us. My senses felt clearer, crisper, I had never felt as alive as now. Nothing I had done to this point gave me such a feeling of power, of expansion. I was more than I had ever been and I truly liked the feeling. No wonder Sigmir had been subdued and without confidence when she had been under the influence of the cursed parasite. I felt a cold, calculating anger within me, a thirst for retribution, for vengeance. I wanted them to feel pain, the pain of knowing that everything they had ever wanted, their dreams, their desires, everything they held dear, that it all was turned to nothingness because of them.


    It was not the hot fury that screamed for instant action, it was the ice-cold anger that urged me to bide my time, to plan my move so when I was done, nothing would be left but frozen desolation.


    I placed the concealment-spells, Adra took down her wards and Sigmir broke camp and soon we were on our way south, heading towards Tegi.


    That was our schedule for the next four days. Get up early, travel as long as Adra could, make camp, sleep, get up and repeat. There was little time for training and even less time for fun times, but each day reduced the power I had for the attack on the Devourer, for my plan was based on Ice Magic.


    The strict travel-schedule gave me ample time to let Elding do the thinking and just let my mind roam. My body had adapted to riding to the point that there was no thinking involved when it came to just staying in the saddle. Part of the time, I quizzed Elding about Devourer, learning that she was rather knowledgeable about all matters spirit and Nethersprites were among her vast knowledge. But most of the time, I focused on my magic and the task I had given myself.


    The ample time I had for that turned into magic theorizing, the grimoire I had been given by the Grandmother gave me the foundation and time, logic and instinct built upon that foundation. By the time we neared Tegi, I had a ritual in mind. It would take a long time, hours upon hours, but it should introduce enough power into the area to cause some serious havoc.


    Guiding that havoc was the biggest problem, I would have to use a combination of runic formations, which I took from the Grimoire, and pure Ice Magic to let my attacks land where I wanted them. Against a moving target, it would be nigh impossible but the video I had seen and the description of the Grandmother talked about a stationary enemy.


    It was basically the optimal situation for large scale, ritual magic. Little in the way of mobility, little mystic ability - just a huge chunk of vitality, endurance and armour. The Devourer could stand up to an army as it would ignore mundane weapons and small-scale magic while regenerating by devouring prey.

 Chapter 72

    The dead forest around Tegi was even more eerie than I had thought when looking at the video. Not only were the trees dead or twisted, there was no life in sight. Nothing at all. The strange feeling I had when Tegi was still in existence was gone, it was possible that the miasma had been fully absorbed by the Nethersprites, leaving nothing behind.


    Looking at the snow-covered forest, I saw nothing but death.


    ¡°Let¡¯s move in. Take care of Nethersprites.¡± I told the other two and watched Sigmir take point. Adra took the last spot in line, guarding our back which left me in the middle position, allowing me to support either of them with my magic.


    In a move I had practised a little, I flared my cape and let four out of the six shuttles of the Weaver¡¯s Fury float up. Since I crossed the Divide, I was able to do simple tasks, like walking forward, while using two processes for my Ice Magic. My ability to use all six shuttles was slowly improving but I was not yet able to use them in actual combat. But I would be, soon.


    As we walked without incident, I realised that I was stupid, I could always let my blades fly after we found enemies, what I was doing now was just a waste of Astral Power and focus. With a self-deprecating smile, I let all four blades return to their sheaths, slightly embarrassed that I had made such a basic mistake. Even if it looked cool.


    Our movement was cautious but we didn¡¯t focus on stealth so it was only a question of time until we were spotted. A shriek tore through the air, and the first Nethersprite charged toward us, intent of ripping us apart and devouring our life-energy. Sigmir met its charge and dispatched it with prejudice. Now the jig was up, they were coming, But it did not really matter much to any of us, we knew that we would face them all anyway if we wanted to destroy the Devourer.


    We moved into a nearby clearing and stood ready to fight. I let my shuttles soar once more, scanning the forest around us. The Nethersprites did not disappoint and with loud shrieks we were engaged. My attacks failed to do lasting damage to the sprites but I managed to poke them back, letting Sigmir and Adra deal with them in a controlled fashion. At first, I just used two blades, retaining as much Astral Power as I could but soon I was forced to use four, later even six for short moments and those moments took a lot out of me, both mentally and magically.


    They kept coming, trying to take us down and we kept fighting, back to back. Just as I wondered if there was any end to them, their attacks lessened and I retrieved the shuttles and tried to get as much power back as possible, just in case it was just the calm before the storm.


    But it wasn¡¯t. Sigmir and Adra finished off the last few attackers and we were able to move on, up onto the hill overlooking the ruins of Tegi. As we walked, I saw once more that the Nethersprites truly gave pitiful experience, it had to have something to do with their existential makeup.


    And ruins they were. Again, the video I had seen had not prepared me for the visual impact of the Devourer. Its misshapen shape, like an excised tumor, brought to life by an insane scientist, was truly the stuff of nightmares. In addition, there was a low mental pressure, not like the piercing pressure I had felt from the Grandmother and Kallista but almost as if the movement of the planet below us was giving us motion sickness. Calling it pressure might be misleading, it was a mental radiation, spreading nausea and discomfort.


    I looked around and found a good spot for my ritual. I had easy sight to the Devourer, enough space and limited ways up, giving Adra and Sigmir better odds at defending me during the ritual.


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    After a kiss for luck from Sigmir, I started laying down the ritual. The outer heptagram was made up out of runes of Ice, Hail and Blizzard, the next formation was an offset pentagram, some lines merging with each other, others supporting the runes, enhancing their effect.


    The innermost formation were a rune triangle, merging the five Blizzard runes in the outer layer and the three in the middle layer into a single spell-formation. On the lines of the inner spell formation I had written the directing runes out of the grimoire. I had needed to hold it in my hand. comparing the written runes to the runes in the book, to make sure they were correct but I managed to inscribe them. When I was done, I felt a little light-headed as I had used my own blood to create the formation, linking myself to it so I could channel my powers with less loss.


    When the moon stood high in the sky, I started feeding my magic into the formation feeling out the blood around me and it was responding to me. Recalling the movement I had learned from nature itself, I started moving, twisting, jumping, dancing. My emotions merged into the formation as a wild joy bubbled up within me.


    My will, my emotions and my magic merged with the help of the formation, giving birth to something different. As I danced, the blood-written runes around me started to shine in silver light and in the air around me, small ice-crystals started to form, joining my dance and slowly rising into the air.


    High up in the sky, my magic started to take effect. The small ice-crystals started to disperse, spreading over a ever growing part of the sky and slowly the surrounding air started to react to my magic. First, small ice crystals started falling back down, harmless to anything but the weakest creatures.


    But as the night progressed and I persisted in my dance, the icicles grew ever larger, ever stronger. And not only did the icicles grow larger, the directing runes also got stronger, guiding them more and more against the Devourer.


    For the first time, it must have felt something. Deep, growling noises ripped through the night, not the high-pitched shrieks but a deep, piercing grown, as if a fingernail was dragged over a giant chalkboard. The trance I had placed myself in was almost broken, my dance interrupted but my mind managed to resist the effect and carry on.


    Arm-long icicles struck into the hide of the beast, some drawing blood, others still glancing off but there was progress. If it could feel my attack, I had a chance. Sadly, the wounds it sustained healed quickly, leaving unmarred flesh behind. But my magic was still growing and it would grow further as long as I managed to keep up my trance. There was a hard limit how much power the formation could sustain but it was not reached yet, not by far. I just had to hang in there.


    As the darkest hour of the night approached, I felt comfortable. The power I had summoned was raging around me but it was my power. It cocooned me, tuning out the radiation of the Devourer, allowing me to fully focus on my magic. Without the influence, it was as if a weight was lifted from me and my spirit surged. I fully joined with my magic and I merged with the storm above. I felt the icicles form and rain down and I joined my will to every single one of them, giving them a loving push as they struck into the monster below. It was corruption incarnate and nature wanted it cleansed. I would be nature¡¯s tool, freezing it into eternal ice before shattering it.


    Down, down, the ice poured. Now the icicles were truly ice-spears; sharp shards of ice, bent on piercing the Devourer and sending it back into the realm it had crawled from. The larger icicles started to pierce deep into its immobile form, preventing the swift healing of its wounds causing pain with every moment. And more and more kept coming.


    I felt my limit approaching, a limit of magic, a limit of my spirit, a limit of my body. Not even blood magic could help me cheat that limit so I had to end it now. Reaching through the formation, I coalesced every bit of power I had scattered, gathering it all high above the Devourer into a gleaming pillar of frozen desolation.


    As my dear sister in the sky retreated below the horizon, I used all my remaining will and smashed the pillar down, sending the culminating attack of my ritual into the Devourer.


    I felt the earth shake below me, as I sank to my knees, exhausted and drained. I had given everything but my life. Just before I hit the ground, I felt myself cradled in strong arms and when I saw Sigmir¡¯s worried face, I managed a smile as sleep took me.

 Chapter 73

    I felt soft, velvety lips call me back to wakefulness. Blinking my eyes open, I saw Sigmir¡¯s face looming over me, pulling slightly back after the kiss she had just laid onto me. If she wanted to kiss, I would gladly oblige her so I grabbed her head and pulled her back, kissing her with fervour.


    When I felt, I had shown her enough that I liked kissing her, I ceased my attack and took stock of my surroundings. I was placed on Sigmir¡¯s lap once again and held in her arms. All was good in the world. But beyond her protective arms, I saw the twisted forest around Tegi, surprised that we were still here. The position of the sun told me that I had been out for a few hours and I would have thought that neither Adra nor Sigmir wanted to stay in the creepy forest longer than necessary.


    ¡°Adra is doing something. She said it was a necessity.¡± Sigmir told me when she saw me looking around in confusion. There was nothing more to see in my field of vision that required my attention and I did not want to leave Sigmir¡¯s lap so I focused on my interface.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Unformed Nethersprite died</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You gain 113 EXP (50% diminishing returns).</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>For killing an opponent without a Traveller in your party, you gain Bonus EXP</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>..</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>Nether Devourer died</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You gain 2200 EXP.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>For killing an opponent 87 levels above you, you gain Bonus EXP</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>For killing an opponent without a Traveller in your party, you gain Bonus EXP</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    My mind went blank for a second. ¡®87 levels above me?!¡¯ The devourer had been level 137? No wonder the quest had said that it was impossible. But the experience-points Nethersprites gave were pathetic. The base-amount for the devourer was less than what a humanoid on our level gave and the unformed Nethersprites were just as bad. But considering that Nethersprites seemed to be the punishment by the game-world for over-farming, it was reasonable. There was probably some kind of in-universe explanation along the lines that Nethersprites were diminished beings and gave little EXP because of that, but it did not matter. They were unpleasant enemies and I hoped to fight them as little as possible.


    And we had encountered the annoying diminishing-returns penalty. I had read up on it, using the forum and it was rather simple. If you killed the same type of creature in subsequent combats, for every creature you killed, you gained less experience, up to a maximum penalty of 50%, halving the gain. So when we had killed more than ten Unformed Nethersprites in the clearing, we had stacked the penalty up and no Nethersprite had given more than half the normal experience. The system was suspended for quest-enemies and was reset by killing something else so it was rare to run into it, but when you did, it sucked big time. It didn¡¯t feel fully thought out - if you wanted to circumvent it, it was easy, but if you didn¡¯t pay attention, it could bite you in the ass. I¡¯d have to put something in the report I planned to submit to Pantheon.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Skill increased</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You increased your skill: Ice Rune-Mastery [53/100]</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Skill increased</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You increased your skill: Ice Magic [65/100]</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Skill increased</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You increased your skill: Astral Meditation [40/100]</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    The skill-gains made me smile. Ice-Runes gained three full points and Ice Magic gained two. Using a serious large-scale ritual obviously gave a lot of skill-experience. But most likely it only gave that much when I used it for the first time. Consecutive rituals would help, but not as much. What made me sad was that there was no trait or title, nothing along the lines of ¡°purifier¡± for killing a huge Nethersprite, or ¡°giant slayer¡± for killing something so many levels above me.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Quest Completed</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>Destroy the Devourer.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You gained: 30.000 EXP</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    With the messages taken care off, I wanted to get going. No matter how great it was to sit on Sigmir¡¯s lap, I wanted to leave the creepy forest. For that, Adra had to do whatever she had deemed necessary.


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    ¡°Let¡¯s find out how long we need to stay around here. I¡¯d love to leave.¡± I said and realised that the concealment-spell on Sigmir had lapsed at some point during the night. I refreshed it on her and on me before we went looking for Adra and spotted her closer to Tegi.


    When I looked down towards the ruins of Tegi, I saw the after-effects of my ritual. The devourer was still there but it was impaled with a huge spike, like a butterfly pinned by a collector. The Astral Power I had used in my last strike had coalesced into a silvery-white spike, shaped like an icicle and was still persisting in frozen perfection. On closer observation, I discovered that the devourer was not only impaled, it was frozen solid. It would be hard to imagine ways that something could be as thoroughly dead as that.


    ¡°Ah, good, you are awake.¡± Adra said as we came closer. She was inscribing stones and placing them around the devourer. ¡°That thing contains a lot of essence, both the essence of life and the essence of death. I¡¯d love to siphon some of that essence off when it returns to the land.¡±


    ¡°How?¡± I asked. To me, ¡®returning to the land¡¯ meant that it slowly rotted and decomposed, feeding the land with its essence, just like we all did after our death. I doubted that anything other than microbes, would feed on that carcass so it would simply rot.


    ¡°Can you thaw it? Or shatter it? Currently, the essence is trapped by your spell, it¡¯s frozen within the devourer. If you can set it free, I can gather some of it and progress on my own path.¡± Adra asked with a smile and I realised just why the Grandmother had sent us here.


    Helping Adra sounded like a good idea to me, so I walked a little closer to the corpse and stretched my mythical senses towards it. I felt the Ice-Spike and it was still infused with my essence, allowing me to manipulate it easier than normal. The frozen flesh of the devourer resisted a little but it was frozen and thus under the domain of my ice-magic. I had a feeling that I could shatter it, but it would take some effort.


    I told Adra as much and she smiled happily while she told me she needed to prepare some more anyway. I asked Sigmir what she thought and she felt it was a good idea. According to her, if I shattered it, the remnants would spread further, helping the surrounding area to recover and while Adra would siphon off some of the power, it would still be enough to revitalise the forest. The dryads had gathered so much life-energy before and it had been devoured so she felt we should get a nice reward. Or in this case, Adra should get a nice reward.


    While we waited, she told me about their night. For them, it had been a night of almost non-stop combat. We had killed most of the Nethersprites in our first battle in the forest, but the devourer had either called in more from their realm, or they simply appeared, creating an ceaseless stream of attackers. They had managed to prevail, though, mainly thanks to teamwork and Sigmir¡¯s silver-plated Lok¡¯nar, which gave her a huge advantage against Nethersprites.


    ¡°I am ready.¡± I heard Adra call over. As I wanted to leave the forest as soon as possible, I stood and walked over. I had thought about the easiest way to shatter the corpse and I believed it was rather simple.


    I placed my hand onto the frozen corpse and willed my magic into being, using Ice-Magic to pull down some of the Ice-Spike and formed it into a shatter-rune before walking further around the devourer and repeating the process six more times. Like that, I had created a rune-heptagon out of shatter-runes, all linked to each other and the central spike.


    ¡°Everything returns to the land. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.¡± I intoned. It felt strangely false to say that, my path was deliberately chosen to go against that logic. If I had my way, I could freeze something for eternity, ripping it from the circle of life and enclosing it in eternal ice.


    But for now, I had not enough power, so ashes to ashes, dust to dust.


    With that thought, I let Astral Power flow into the runes, causing them to glow and with a dull noise, the frozen corpse broke apart, shattering into small fragments. Some were picked up by the wind and moved over the twisted trees, others got picked up by the river and the rest simply sank to the ground. At the same time, I felt the mixture of essence flow outwards, returning to the land. Neither life nor death was good on its own, both needed their counterpart to exist. The wards Adra had prepared flared to life, gathering some of the essence and carrying it to her but the amount she took was miniscule compared to the amount that returned to the land.


    When I looked at her, I noticed a glow around her; she had definitely profited from the essence, looking vitalised and strong.

 Chapter 74

    Monotony...


    It had been three days since we left Tegi, and we had travelled south-west ever since. According to Sigmir, we had crossed roughly half the distance to her tribe and I was seriously wondering if the game-developers had truly thought their game through. If not for the company, I would be mad with boredom. Day after day, mile after mile, we travelled through the same sort of forest, with a few different types of trees around us. From time to time, the forest was broken up by snowed-in meadows and frozen-over rivers but that was rare and it did not change much.


    Adding to the boredom was the fact that I had yet to fully learn to suppress my aura as a being of the first Divide, scaring animals away from us, preventing attack and taking away even that slight break in monotony.


    With that monotony, it was not a big surprise that we jumped at the prospect of excitement we felt when Ylva told us that she smelled something strange. She tracked the strange scent through the forest until we happened upon a large clearing. There, we found the source of the scent and the reason for its strangeness. Strewn across the clearing were multiple corpses, giving off a penetrating smell, a mixture of blood, decay and the resin-like smell of nymph-blood. No wonder that Ylva had called the scent ¡®strange¡¯.


    We inspected the bodies, trying to puzzle out what had happened here. The corpses were a mixture of sylvans, looking like dryads or maybe nymphs, and wolf-beastmen. The sylvans were using their normal garments out of living fiber, but obviously it was now dead and decaying, contributing to the smell. The beastman were clad in leathers and looked less like warriors and more like hunters, armed with bows, daggers and the odd spear.


    Judging be the fact that there were corpses from two distinct factions and some of the sylvans had weapons still buried in their bodies, I could make an educated guess to the happenings here. They had fought each other, one side winning but probably not by much. After their win, they had left the scene in order to avoid possible reinforcements, not even taking the time to bury their dead.


    ¡°They look like the nymphs in Tegi.¡± Adra remarked.


    I inspected the nymphs again, this time more closely and had to agree, they did look just like the ones we had killed before.


    ¡°Well, it¡¯s not a big surprise that some of them survived the destruction of Tegi. I guess they are now homeless.¡± I said with a little smile. There was no love lost for them, not so much because of their ruthlessness, sacrificing everything they got their hands on in an almost industrial fashion, but because of their stupidity.


    For one thing, they never thought their actions through to the end, I had thought about their methodology quite a bit and was never able to deduce their end-game plan. They had literally built their city on an ticking time-bomb and even without my intervention it would have ended in catastrophe. Something like that would make sense if it was one being¡¯s doing, using a city as henchmen to do their bidding and dropping them once they were no longer useful, leaving them to clean up the consequences, but it didn¡¯t look like that was what happened there.


    And that was part of the other thing that I disliked about them. If it had been one being¡¯s action, used to create a power-reservoir for personal use, for example something used for a great working of magic, I would be able to respect that. Ruthless but focused on a goal. But no, they had squandered the power they had raised, wasted it on ridiculous acts of arrogance. Heating their city-area to spring-temperature in the siberian winter? Lighting it up like modern-day New York? I was just unable to fathom it, there was no use, other than the stroking of one¡¯s ego by doing something just because they had the ability. And that funnelled back to my first point of annoyance, they did not have the ability. In a way, they were a perfect example for the inclusion of pride as a cardinal sin.


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    Now, it looked like they had simply migrated a bit south and were trying to carve out a new area for themselves.


    As I was lost in thought, Ylva and Sigmir were looking around a little further in the woods and a surprised shout ripped me from my contemplation.


    ¡°We found something. Come over and look.¡± Sigmir called out.


    Adra and I moved over, curious about their discovery. Sigmir and Ylva were standing together, looking at footprints in the snow and combined with the splattered blood, it was enough to make me want to know more. The blood was red so one of the beastman had managed to get away.


    I looked over to the other two and asked with a slight smile, ¡°Want to find out more? I¡¯m curious.¡±


    Sigmir just shrugged, but Adra looked eager. I think there was a part of her that was feeling some responsibility for the events in Tegi. Just why she did was beyond me - it was not as if she had assisted in the creation of the problem, or caused it to blow up in the stupid dryads¡¯ faces. I was a lot more responsible than she was but I knew that I had not actually done anything, just stopped it before it became worse. Maybe she had some sort of survivor¡¯s guilt, I had read about that in books before and it did not sound entirely rational, why would one feel guilty about not dying?


    Again, my train of thought was stopped short, this time by the need to follow the others. Following the tracks was easy enough, even I could have managed to do so, they simply led through the forest in a relatively straight line, away from the fight.


    It did not take long for us to find the end of the tracks, a dense thicket of evergreen shrubs. Ylva growled a little, letting us know that something, or more likely someone, was hiding in the shrubs and that it was the source of the tracks we had been following.


    Adra moved forward but was held back by Sigmir. ¡°Let Morgana or me lead. If they fought with dryads, you might scare them. And a scared, cornered animal will attack, even if it kills itself doing so.¡±


    I realised that there was wisdom in Sigmir¡¯s words, if I had just escaped a fight and someone who looked even remotely similar to my attackers was following after me, I would be liable to do something reckless.


    Looking closer at the shrubbery, I did not want Sigmir with her large frame to be forced to struggle through it so I moved forwards before she could. My smaller frame was handy sometimes, for example when it came to getting into tight spots.


    I made my way into the thicket and found a rather small wolf-beastman curled up inside. Well, he was larger than me, but not by much and he did not look good. As I was reaching toward him, he twitched and snapped at my hand. The simple act of moving seemed to take a lot out of him and he shrunk back. I had seen documentaries of animal handling and felt I should try something similar. Talking in a calm voice, I tried again, this time not reaching for his face but his body, not causing a reaction this time. When I sent out my magic, I knew the reason why. He was burning up and had lost a lot of blood, there was just no strength left in him. I also found the reason for his blood-loss, a deep gash in his back, no longer bleeding freely but the blood-soaked clothing attested to the fact that it was a bad wound.


    If I wanted to sate my curiosity about the happenings in the clearing, I would have to save his life. After a short deliberation, I told the others what I had found and created a rune-formation, mainly composed of blood-runes, funnelling a lot of my own power into the healing in order to make it as easy as possible on his system. Simply throwing a regeneration-spell at him, might heal the wound but take all his remaining strength to do so, leaving me with a perfectly healed corpse.


    It did take a little while, but as the pain left him, he calmed and  soon settled into a deep, sleep. I checked my Astral Power and realised that I had quite a lot left and I doubted that we would move further today so I simply stretched my Eisblumen-vines and ripped out enough of the shrubbery to allow Sigmir and Adra comfortable entrance.


    It was a dry, protected space to spend the night in, after all - no need to waste it.

 Chapter 75

    We made our camp within the protected enclosure provided by the evergreens and waited for the beastman to wake up. Sigmir had looked him over and guessed that he was a youth, maybe fifteen winters old, as she put it.


    During the night, we put up a watch, feeling a need to have someone awake, just in case he woke up and did something stupid. In addition, I did not trust Adra¡¯s wards against an enemy that had captured her before, I had no aspirations to study dryadic blood magic from a sacrificial point of view.


    Sadly, the night did not pass without incident. As coincidence would have it, the youth woke during Adra¡¯s watch and the sight of a dryad, illuminated by the flickering fire caused his awakening to be noisy, waking the Sigmir and me as well. Maybe it was the rude awakening after far too little sleep but I was rather grumpy.


    ¡°Settle down, if you undo my hard work healing you with your hysteria, I will just let you bleed out.¡± I growled at him. focusing on Lenore¡¯s ability to make myself undoubtedly understood.


    It did not help much, before I had spoken he had fearfully fixated on Adra, now his eyes were darting between Adra and me, as if trying to find out who would kill him first.


    Sigmir rose out of the furs beside me and the relief on his face was almost comical to witness.


    ¡°Nobody will harm you, child. We found you in this shrub, dying. Morgana here saved your life, so be a little grateful.¡± Sigmir said, a lot less grumpy than my growl but then, I had held the first watch, giving me only about an hour of sleep in her arms, judging by the interface-clock whereas Sigmir had last watch giving her about four hours of sleep more.


    ¡°Try to catch some more sleep, we will talk in the morning.¡± she continued.


    He opened his mouth, as if to answer, but a sharp glare from me caused it to snap shut, with only the sound of teeth clicking together coming out.


    Seeing that he was suitably silent, I rolled back over and pulled Sigmir back down. No way was I giving up my hug-pillow.


    The rest of the night passed quietly. At one point, I woke briefly when Adra roused Sigmir for her watch, and I used that to go into the real world for a short time, taking care of necessary business out there.


    Back in game, I was able to catch a little more shut-eye but I had a feeling that I would be rather grumpy during the day. Some time later, though, I got one of my favorite wake-up calls. Soft lips, gently caressing my own, strong hands petting my hair and a warm arm around me. There was no way I could be grumpy when waking up like that, I just had to smile and return Sigmir¡¯s affection. We enjoyed each other until Ylva interrupted us. I had not known that she was outside her Hallow, so I was a little surprised, but apparently she had gone hunting during Sigmir¡¯s guard and caught us some meat for breakfast.


    I went out, gathering some wood while Sigmir prepared the meat and then it was time to cook. I did the cooking while Sigmir woke the other two before taking care of her gear. It was a strange sort of domesticity but it felt quite good. Despite being in the middle of nowhere, I felt at home in a way I had never felt before. Maybe there was truth in the saying ¡°Home is where the heart is¡±, and my home was now with Sigmir. Before dark thoughts could intrude, I focused on the mechanical task of cooking. As I busied myself, I heard Adra talk to our guest.


    ¡°Maybe we can start anew, in the light of day. My name is Adra, the one next to the fire is Morgana and the one with the axe is Sigmir.¡± she spoke in a friendly, unthreatening voice, trying to put the child at ease.


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    It did not quite work that way, he glared at her for a moment before focusing on Sigmir. ¡°My name is Rai. Why is a Jonari out here with such strange company?¡±


    A part of me was surprised that he knew about Sigmir¡¯s tribe but it made sense. There was probably no other giant-blood-tribe in the area, so to the child, any giant-blood was automatically of that tribe.


    ¡°I am travelling with my friends, child. But you are impolite, you know that?¡± Sigmir answered in a slightly scolding tone.


    ¡°Don¡¯t call me child. I¡¯m a junior hunter, I am not a child.¡± the child barked with embarrassment tinting his voice.


    ¡°Well, then, Junior Hunter,¡± I said, mockingly emphasising his title, ¡°Why don¡¯t you tell us what happened back on the clearing? We found dryad and beastman-corpses, looking as if they have killed each other, but I¡¯d like to know more.¡±


    He looked at me for a second before looking back at Sigmir. She had fixed him with a bit of an angry glare, strong enough to prod him into talking.


    ¡°We were out hunting. It was my first hunt but we had bad luck. There was little to no prey to be found. We had just taken our midday-break when they came. Like the wind, they struck, blowing through the trees. We fought, but they were just too strong. I was separated from the others and retreated into the trees. I had been wounded in the fighting and needed to find a space to gather strength before going back to the village.¡±


    Somehow, his tale sounded strange to me. Had his elders not taken care of the youth in their midst, making sure that his back was covered in the meele? Didn¡¯t they know anything about formations? Out of curiosity, I tried an idea I had a few days earlier. Kallista had some way to keep others from noticing her observe-skill so there was at least one way to do so. I had concealment-runes, maybe I could find a way to emulate what she did. I did not want to practise on Sigmir or Adra but I had no such reticence when it came to the child, Rai.


    I closed my left eye, fearing that Lenore¡¯s presence would change things and imagined a small runic formation out of concealment runes around the eye, imagining that the skill passed through the midpoint and ¡®picked up¡¯ the concealment on its way.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Skill increased</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You increased your skill: Darkness Rune-Mastery [57/100]</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    It probably worked as the youth did not twitch or pause in his retelling as I Learned that he was a level 25 beastman. I was a little confused about his low level, Sigmir had told me that she had managed to breach level fifty before we ever met and was weakened afterwards. Maybe a difference in culture or Sigmir was just that good. Probably Sigmir¡¯s raw talent was the cause, she was pretty awesome after all.


    ¡°The village? Are you from Adernas-village? Father told me it was the closest beastman-village from the Jonari village.¡± Sigmir asked.


    ¡°Yes! Yes, I am.¡± he enthused. By now, breakfast was done and I prepared four servings. Adra took her own and the one for the child and brought it over to him, while I served Sigmir. I saw her scowl a little when she saw that the child had just taken the food without a word of thanks to either me or Adra, he was just digging in and looking at Sigmir from time to time. Her smile returned when I handed her the food and she thanked me in a carrying voice, making sure that the child heard her. Sadly, he just ignored it in favor of shovelling more food into his mouth.


    Sitting next to Sigmir, it was easy to feign loving whispers to her. We must have looked just like two girls in love but sadly, I was not whispering sweet nothings into her ears, or describing just what I would do to her the next time we had either a bed or a warm bath, no, my whispers were a little darker.


    ¡°Do you think that Jongarn has told them to keep watch for you? Should we avoid the village and make sure that no report of us reaches it?¡± I asked, glancing over to Rai for a moment.


    She pulled me onto her lap, ignoring the hindrance it was to eating and whispered back.


    ¡°No, I don¡¯t think so. He would not sully the tribe¡¯s reputation with the locals. I think that he is aware that sending Travellers after us is his best bet. The Travellers will probably leave the area soon after and the tribe¡¯s reputation is safe. Or maybe he plans to kill them after they returned me, I¡¯m not sure he is aware of the implications of them being Travellers.¡±


    Hearing that, I was a little relieved, I would have hated to waste time and Astral Power on a fool we just had to kill afterwards.


    After breakfast, we started moving in the direction Rai suggested was leading to Adernas, all four of us moving on two feet, I did not want to show all our cards, just in case Sigmir was wrong about Jongarn, the son of the Jonari tribal-chief.

 Holiday Special pt 1

    Come on, Children, gather around the hearth and sit down. Sit down and listen.


    You know, we celebrate the Festival of Lights, or Yule as some call it. But do you know why we celebrate it? Let me tell you the story, of how the Festival of Lights came to be.


    Once upon a time, in a far and distant land, there was a race of great beings, living in union with the world and each other. They were proud people, proud and mighty, thanks to their union with the world and the forest that sheltered them within.


    But one day, there was one amongst them who was different. Nobody knew why, but she was not like all the others. Where her brethren searched for their place in society and accepted it, she did not. Guided by demons, she did not care for society or for the world around her and driven by her desires she searched and hunted for something.


    What she was hunting for? Nobody really knows, some say it was power, some say it was knowledge, others claim it was revenge for a loved one. Whatever it was mattered not for she could never find it. She was searching, as if she had a thirst that could never be quenched, a hunger that could never be sated, spurring her on and slowly driving her to change. And changing she did, at first slowly, but once the change started, it became faster and faster, like an avalanche going down a hill.


    To sate her craving, she searched far and wide, thirsting for more power, more knowledge, trying to take everything she could. But it was never enough and her hunger drove her to slowly consume herself, and the proud and graceful being was slowly diminished, making her smaller and twisting her. First, she lost her heart. The heart, formerly proud and strong was consumed by her greed, her lust for power and turned cold and uncaring, leaving her with an icy lump in her chest, never to feel again. Once her heart was lost, the rest quickly followed. Her hair turned black as the darkness she was calling on, her skin pale as the ice she was wielding and her eyes green in envy.


    The people around her took notice and saw her for what she truly was, a sad and twisted existence. They tried to help her, calling on the gods and their angels but it was in vain. In order to help her, she would have to want help which she did not. She was lost in her desires, no longer seeing the world around her as something to commune with, something to cherish, only searching for her own advantage.


    When the people around her tried to help her and when that failed tried to limit her, she started lashing out and, for the first time, those around her could truly see what she had become. Her twisted magic was powerful, wielded by an uncaring heart and struck those around her, even former friends were not safe from her insanity. They were struck down, consumed by her greed in order to fuel her continued search for more power.


    Unshackled from even the smallest consideration and unbound from her former life, she discarded every sentiment of mercy, every bit of joy that may or may not have remained within her and the only thing that mattered to her was amassing more power, causing her to rampage, slaughtering and consuming everything in her path.


    Finally, her search led her away from the lands of her people, away from the forest they lived in and the people rejoiced and started to rebuild, for her rampage had caused great harm and suffering.


    But the dark being was only gone, not defeated. Time passed as she was gone, vanished in the dark, some hoping that the darkness had swallowed her, as it had so many others that stood against her. They prayed for justice, hoping that her greed for power had destroyed her. But alas, it was not to be. After she had left the lands of her people, her search had led her into the wilderness, deep into the mountains and nobody truly knows what she found there. But whatever it was, it changed her even further and it made her into a true monster. No longer was she one of her people, not even a twisted version of them. No, she became a true demon, the demon we know now as the Dark Queen.


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    And a Dark Queen she was, dark as the night and cold like the moon, sitting on the frozen throne of her citadel, sometimes sending her minions out to do her bidding. Those minions were just as broken as she herself was, twisted, icy abominations, distorted and controlled by her magic, they raided the land closest to her citadel. The people living closest fled, driven off by the monsters and they carried word of the abominations to the rest of the land. When they learned of the abominations, they prayed, prayed to the Goddess of the Sun to grant them aid, to lend them her power to banish the abominations that invaded their land.


    And the Goddess looked down, seeing the suffering of the people and the destruction wrought by the abominations and it made her curious, just what had brought those horrors to the world. The Goddess looked through the sun and everything in the light of the sun was laid bare before her. Learning what had created the abominations, she grieved. Why, oh why was a mortal so horrible, so cruel, to create such monsters and bring so much suffering?


    The Goddess turned to the mortals, for her power was limited on the mortal coil, and told them of her discovery. Told them of the hordes of horrors hidden in the mountains, told them of the abominations in the frozen valleys, told them of the terrible Frozen Fortress, raised out of the land itself, crafted out of a glacier. And atop this Frozen Fortress, there was a throne, a throne of Ice and atop this throne, a Dark Queen was sitting, surveying the shadows cast over the land. Everything in those shadows was hers, or so she thought.


    The Goddess called upon the mortals to stop the Dark Queen, to rally to each other and break the Frozen Fortress, to overthrow the Dark Queen and bring on a new dawn. And they would not stand alone, the Goddess called upon the angels to stand with the mortals, to shield them and fight alongside them. Called by the Goddess, they angels obeyed, joining the mortals in their crusade.


    But the Dark Queen was not idle. She called upon the horrors of the frozen wastes, upon the wolves and upon the ravens. She called upon them and granted them power, but her power was not without drawbacks, it twisted the wolves into wargs, making them larger and stronger and the ravens into nevermores, separating their spirits from their bodies and making them into bringers of death and ruin.


    As the crusade marched towards her fortress, her own armies waited on them in ambush at the pass that is now known as the Gate of Tears. At the Gate of Tears, a terrible battle ensued, the Queen herself was bringing her might to bear against the gathered crusade, tormenting and weakening them while her armies tore into them. The Nevermores were ripping their souls from their bodies, leaving the bodies in a state between life and death, not dead but also no longer the beings they were before. In that state, they were easy prey for the cruel wargs, tearing into their flesh and ripping the bodies to pieces.


    The only reason that the crusade did not die at the Gate of Tears was the intervention of the angels. They saw that the battle was lost, that the armies were being destroyed and the only chance to avoid a total loss was a retreat. They sacrificed themselves in a great magic, striking at the land and the Dark Queen itself, causing a huge avalanche to cover the retreat of the crusaders, to drive the forces of the Queen back to their land.


    But not all was lost, after the disaster at the Gate of Tears. The strongest, the most wily of the crusade had taken another route, bypassing the ambush and sneaking into the lands of the Dark Queen herself. Behind enemy lines, cut off from all support, their conviction was simple: succeed or die. They were willing to give everything to stop the Dark Queen, everything they had and more. With that conviction, they marched, marched upon the Frozen Fortress, marched to their destiny. They were calling themselves the Korbal and on their lips was a prayer to the Gods, calling upon them to grant them victory, victory or death. That was their battle-cry.


    Victoria aut mors.


    Onwards, they marched knowing that they would only return victorious.


    Victorious, or not at all.

 Holiday Special pt 2

    Aaaah, that hits the spot. Now, where was I? Oh, right, the journey of the Korbal and their fight against the Dark Queen.


    As I told you, the Korbal did not join the assault on the Gate of Tears, they moved on a hard and arduous route, circumventing it. They did so, knowing that they would be cut off in the lands ruled by the Dark Queen. But they marched, driven on by the knowledge that, if the main army of the crusade was stopped, they would be the only force capable of stopping the Dark Queen.


    The battle at the Gate of Tears was a disaster for both sides. The forces of the crusade had taken heavy losses due to the ambush sprung on them and the simple fact that the forces of the Dark Queen were far more adapted to the frozen battlefield in the mountains. However, in their desperation, the gahtered angels had launched a final attack that cost the Dark Queen dearly. A radiant beam of light, burning through the sky, striking the Dark Queen and triggering an avalanche, burying most of her advancing army.


    Due to the losses she had suffered, an all-out assault was impossible so she had to take her revenge in a different manner. And that she did, using what had worked best for her, ever since she had started her journey. No longer relying on troops and forces, she went all in, calling upon the demons that had guided her and demonstrated what the Frozen Fortress truly was.


    Using her Fortress as an amplifier, she worked a great and terrible spell, trying to visit her revenge on those who had opposed her. Not just the mortals, no, in her hubris, she wanted to punish the gods themselves for sending their angels against them. And they were her first target. But even the Dark Queen was not arrogant enough to attack the Gods directly.


    No, she unearthed an ancient and terrible being, long since sealed by the Gods below ground, bound in darkness to never harm the world again. In her hubris, she started to unseal it and wanted to make it her agent of destruction. When the Gods felt their ancient foe again, they knew that they, themselves, needed to act, to go to war once more, if there was to be any chance of restoring the seal.


    A huge battle was fought, high in the air above the jagged mountains around the Frozen Fortress, fought between Angels and Monsters, fought between the Agents of the Gods and the Demons called by the Dark Queen. Thanks to the Frozen Fortress, the Dark Queen was able to make her stand, to resist the might of the gods and managed to reach a stalemate.


    The Angels fell in droves, some devoured by darkness, others shattered by ice, it was a battle they would not easily recover from. But for the glory of the gods, they made their sacrifice, using their own life to prevent the Dark Queen from succeeding in her insanity. Some say that their sacrifice was in vain, but no, their sacrifice was needed. They paid the ultimate price, preventing the Dark Queen from reviving the monster she had unearthed and slaying the demons called by her, but at the same time, without their agents, the gods were powerless to stop the Dark Queen''s working at the source.


    Now, with the gods powerless in her realm, she turned towards the mortals, the people that had once been her own people. If she managed to drive them from their land, she would be able to fortify her lands, to make them unassailable by either the gods or their agents.


    So she called upon nature itself, not communing with it, like her people did, no, she summoned and dominated nature itself, calling upon the wind and snow in an attempt to darken the lands and destroy the union with nature the people relied upon for their lives.


    Great and powerful was her magic, calling upon ancient, forbidden lore, calling upon it to lay waste to the forest, to bring a winter that lasted for years, a deep and dark winter to choke off the light the forests relied on.


    But it was not to be. For millennia, the people of the forest and the forest had existed in union. Now, they were threatened in union and the forest itself rose, lending its power to Yulius, the leader of the people, giving him the strength to oppose the Dark Queen. But it was not quite enough, Yulius was slowly losing. He was in the heart of the forest and the Dark Queen atop her Frozen Fortress and slowly but surely the winter winds were blanketing the forest, sending it into hibernation, into a deep slumber to never wake again.


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    But in her focus on the far enemy, on the bright light that was Yulius and the forest, the Dark Queen never looked close to home, never saw the Korbal as they marched through the dark and the cold, marched upon her fortress.


    The Korbal made their way to the fortress, sneaking when they could, fighting if they had to until they finally reached the entrance itself. Dark Magic was thick in the air, thanks to the amplifying effect of the fortress. It saturated the surroundings, so thick that it almost choked the Korbal on their approach. The magic made reality thin and let the demons that normally roamned nightmares seep into our world. Nightmares of endless hunger, nightmares of frozen solitude, trying to find the fulfillment that they lacked in their own realms.


    And the Dark Queen was smart, she used those nightmares, bound them to the doors and the walls of her fortress. Only if one overcame the nightmares would it be possible to advance. Trying to break the fortress itself brought all nightmares against them at the same time.


    It was a brutal battle, brutal, callous and deadly. Over time, slowly but surely, they made their way upwards, coming closer to the throne atop the fortress, closer to the Dark Queen herself.


    After a seemingly endless battle, they managed to make their way to the top, to face the Dark Queen herself. Their arrival saved the forest, as it stopped her from focusing on her magic and forced her to deal with them. At the same time, the fight with Yulius and the forest prevented her from simply annihilating the Korbal as soon as she became aware of them.


    We only know little about their true battle, only what the sole survivor of the Korbal could tell us, the sole survivor who was unable to make it to the last battle. Against the final nightmare, a twisted thing of claws and ice, he had been wounded, crippling him and preventing him from making it to the top of the fortress. His wounds would have been a hindrance for his comrades, forcing him to stay behind. The battle raged for hours, howling wind and raging flames, shattering ice and crumbling metal, magic powerful enough to rend space and shatter reality around the fortress, until finally, there was silence.


    No wind was howling, no snow falling, just silence. The wounded soldier forced himself to make his way to the top, not knowing if he simply wandered to his doom or if he may be able to help his comrades.


    As he climbed, a cracking shattered the silence and he realised that the fortress around him was crumbling, cracks forming in the ice around him and chunks began breaking off.


    Finally, he made his way to the top and saw a shattered, broken expanse. And on that expanse, he saw his comrades. All of them, meticulously impaled with icicles and frozen in place afterward. But there was no sign of the Dark Queen, just his dead comrades atop a crumbling fortress. In his pain, he prayed, prayed that the gods listened, prayed for his comrades to be spared from a grave in the crumbled ruins of the fortress.


    A golden light engulfed him, him and all his comrades, a light bright as the sun at noon, forcing him to close his eyes. And when he opened them back up, he was no longer on the fortress, he was in the temple of Sunna, the Goddess of the Sun. His comrades lay alongside him, their bodies whole again, but without life and he heard the voice of the Goddess.


    ¡°Rejoice, last of the Korbal. Your comrades are by my side, where they will know no evil, no suffering. You will remain, to tell those around you of their victory, to warn them of the Dark Queen, for she is not defeated, only banished.¡±


    The sole survivor discarded his name, calling himself only Korbal from that day on and he heeded the Goddess call, warning Yulius and those around him of the danger and they heard him.


    To pass on the warning, they created a reminder, an observance during the longest night of the year, a reminder that somewhere out there was a monster, hidden in the darkness, that wanted to destroy them, destroy the forests that sheltered them.


    So now, before the longest night, we prepare a tree, gild it with light, with silver and gold, to remind us of the grace of the gods that delivered us, decorate it with angels to remind us of those who sacrificed everything to keep us safe. During the night, we pray to the gods to keep us safe for another year, pray that the Dark Queen never returns to haunt our land.


    On the next day, we celebrate, giving presents to those around us to rejoice, to remind us of the gifts given by the forest, the Korbal and Yulius. To honour him, we call the festival Yule, or the Festival of Lights, to honour those who walked through the darkness to protect the light that shines upon us.


    Now, children, let us pray to the gods for another year of peace, another year of light.

 Chapter 76

    On our way to Adernas, we had to camp out another night. By now, I was more than just a little annoyed. Rai, the young beastman, was displaying an infuriating mix of arrogance, child-like innocence and cowardice. He had yet to speak to either Adra or me, let alone thank either of us for something we did. No ¡®Thank you for saving my life.¡¯, no ¡®Thank you for cooking.¡¯ nothing. He stuck to Sigmir like a leech, thinking her presence would shield him or maybe seeing her as the leader of our group.


    That part, I mostly did not mind. I was not a leader, I knew that much. But at the same time a small part of me, minded it very much. I had been burned before, trusting a friend to take over leadership, only to lose all that I had built. Of course, Sigmir had sworn an oath of submission to me but without knowing the fine print, it was not that secure. With that it came down to one question. Did I trust Sigmir, oath or no oath. By now, that question was easily answered. And thus, I did not mind her taking over leadership of the group. Much.


    But it wasn¡¯t Sigmir¡¯s behaviour that annoyed me, she was just as annoyed by Rai as I was. She tolerated him acting like a child, but when he hid behind her because he had once again done something rude I was glaring at him for, that annoyed her. During the night, she told me that she believed in personal responsibility - if one acts arrogant, one should have the courage to withstand the displeasure, not hiding behind another like an spoiled child.


    Roughly at noon, I got my first look at Adernas. Lenore was scouting once more and I managed to tap into her sight, despite the distance. It felt easier to do so, since I crossed the first divide, but I had a feeling that channelling spells through her would cause negative effects far easier as well.


    From the air, Adernas looked like an unorganized collection of houses, built close together for protection. At first glance, I estimated the population at roughly two, maybe three hundred people, living off the land around them, and judging by the few visible fields, they were mainly hunters and gatherers. I tried to see if there were any giantblood around and was unable to spot anything but wolf-beastmen, so we would risk entering the settlement.


    Thinking about entering, I almost laughed. It was a bad idea for Sigmir to enter, just in case her tribe had contacts here, passing on the fact that she was here. It was problematic for me to enter, due to my Outsider-Trait. Normally, Adra would be our best bet, but here, she might be the worst to enter, depending if the news of dryads and nymphs killing their hunters had filtered back already. But if we wanted more information and possibly a reward for saving the annoyance, we would have to enter.


    As Lenore circled over the village, I asked her to stay outside for some time, watching for suspicious behaviour from the air, just in case. I also made the decision that I would not use magic to conceal my features, fearing that concealment next to a dryad might make them even more hostile than my normal features would.


    There was no wall and no guards around but we didn¡¯t make it far into the village when someone screamed, ¡°Dryad!¡± and a spear was flying Adra¡¯s way. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Rai hiding behind Sigmir, not moving forward to clear up the misunderstanding. But the spear had to be dealt with. No time to draw out runes, so I instantly projected three ice-runes around my hand, willing them into existence and channelling Astral Power through them to manifest a solid ice-shield in front of the spear. It stopped the spear and hung there for a moment before fading away in glittering of silvery shards.


    To prevent more attacks, I flared my cloak, letting all six shuttles soar, stretching my Ice Magic as far as possible, even getting some of the snow around us. Under the guidance of my Ice Magic, the six shuttles and a glittering dusting of snow was swirling around us, inspiring awe with both beauty and power.


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    ¡°Enough!¡± I did not raise my voice but I tried to draw on the core in my chest a little, amplifying my voice with the strength I had gained after crossing the first divide. It even seemed to work, as there was stunned silence while I let the shuttles hover behind me,


    Suddenly, a woman screamed, ¡°Rai!¡± and run forward. Rai left his hiding place behind Sigmir¡¯s back and moved forward, jumping into the woman¡¯s embrace with a strangled sob of ¡°Mother!¡±


    Out of the corner of my eyes, I saw Sigmir¡¯s face display a grimace of scorn and disgust for a moment, before settling into a grim scowl. Adra on the other hand had a soft, benevolent smile on her face. To me, the whole scene felt light an annoyance.


    While Rai had his reunion with his mother, two tall and powerful-seeming wolfman joined the gathering around us. I felt attempted intimidation would be the wrong gesture and they had no overt weapons, so I swiftly moved my shuttles back into my cloak and displayed my open hands in a gesture of peace. It was rather interesting that their scowl was not directed at us, but at Rai, still sobbing in his mother¡¯s arms.


    After a moment, one of them looked at the spear, still lying on the ground where it fell and schooled his features in a neutral mask before he turned to us.


    ¡°Greetings. I am Giro, chief of Adernas. I want to thank you for bringing my son back. Would you be so kind to tell us what happened?¡± he asked.


    ¡°Of course. My name is Morgana, a Traveller, these are my companions Sigmir and Adra. Why don¡¯t we go somewhere private so we can tell you what we know?¡± I introduced us and hoped that he would approve the change in venue, I had no need for a lynch-mob against dryads to form out in the open.


    Giro nodded and led us into the largest house I could see. The other wolfman followed along, leaving Rai with his mother. The house itself was built out of rather simple materials, mainly wood combined with plaster and furs but it was rather well made for the conditions.


    Inside, we were shown to a large table in front of a hearth and seated on one of the benches. Giro sat at the head of the table, with the other wolfman at his right side.


    I told the story, telling them that we were travelling from further north and heading into distant lands, far beyond our own. When I came to the combat-site we had spotted, both of them grew very still and attentive, so I went into detail on my observations and the conclusions I had drawn from them. They developed interesting scowls when I told them about the trail we had followed and the state we had found Rai in, their scowls not lessening when they heard about his injury, the healing and the story he had told us. Finally, the second wolfman spoke.


    ¡°Thank you. My name is Guto, I was among the hunting party you found. Sadly, your conclusions were rather accurate. We were ambushed and our leader was one of the first to fall. We managed to beat them but we were all wounded to some degree and had no strength left to take care of our dead.¡± he paused for a moment.


    ¡°Are you already healed?¡± I asked, breaking in a little.


    ¡°No, not yet, but my wounds are not dire.¡± he answered, with a small sigh.


    ¡°May I heal you, using magic?¡±


    He looked at his leader for a moment and both nodded, so I stood and walked over. To me, this was a great chance. Healing him did not cost me anything major, a little Astral Power, but it might endear me to the chief and possibly to the hunters if they heard about it.


    Not quite knowing where his wound was, I simply used a large rune-heptagon, mixing blood, vitality and regeneration, and carefully channelled power into it. That gave me the now familiar sense of his body and I found a cut on his arm and a puncture-wound in his thigh, both annoying but not dangerous, just as he said. Both had been cleaned and bandaged, but my magic was able to do more. Making sure that everything healed right and well, I let his body provide most of the needed power, exhausting him in the process but a large meal and good night¡¯s sleep would cure that.


    I told him just that and the chief invited us to stay the night. Feeling it would be rude, I agreed, just as the door opened and Rai came in with his mother.


    Now, Giro was scowling again.

 Interlude: Trailer - Crafting

    To walk your road in life, you need the right tools...


    In a dimly lit room, a small figure is seen, standing over an anvil, hammer in hand. The only illumination stems from the glow of a burning furnace, made out of black stone. But it¡¯s not the normal, flickering glow of a fire, it¡¯s a steady, orange glow, Within the furnace, a steady stream of lava provides the heat to smelt the metal on a small, black crucible, allowing for easy smelting of different metals, even those that need special magic to work with. The crucible itself and the drain have both been meticulously inscribed with various runes, helping with the transfer of heat, the protection of the smith and invoking the grace of the gods on the work done.


    In front of the furnace, the figure is muttering under his breath, softly cursing incompetent apprentices, mediocre metals and ignorant clients, wishing for the impossible. But for a dwarf like him, the pursuit of smithing perfection is the highest pursuit there is. Picking up the finely crafted moon-silver bracelet in front of him, he places it on a small pedestal in front of the drain and works a small lever, letting molten gold flow through the drain and pour into fine inscriptions, filling them with gold and binding the gold to the moon-silver. That simple pour represents the culmination of hours upon hours of work, the apex of concentration. A single mistake now would waste all those hours, all those materials. But the dwarfs hands are steady, his eye sharp. The inscriptions fill up perfectly, decorating the moon-silver with a band of golden runes. Not wanting to disturb the cooling of the gold, the dwarf leaves the finished bracelet on the pedestal and leaves the room.


    For the first time, the dwarf is fully visible and he is an impressive specimen. Clad in a sturdy leatherwest, worn over a simple tunic and pants, his dress is simple, but on his chest sits a necklace, displaying a symbol made out of three interwoven hammers, all connected at the shaft and each made out of a different material. A golden hammer for Sindri, a black hammer for Brokkr and a bronze hammer for Eitri. Each hammerhead is adorned with a differently coloured gem. In defiance of dwarven convention, his beard is short and cleanly groomed, possibly to make sure it can¡¯t interfere in the smithing, but his hair is a wild, bronze mane, tamed by a leather thong.


    ¡°Yuthos!¡± the dwarf yells out, calling his apprentice. ¡°Where is this useless git?¡±


    The swift approach of feet is heard and within moments, another dwarf enters the room.


    ¡°Yes, master?¡± asks the new entrant.


    ¡°I am done with my work. We can proceed with your lesson for the day.¡± Together they move into another room, this one dominated by a classic charcoal furnace. At first, the apprentice works the bellows as the master expounds over the need for a steady stream of air, keeping the fire at a steady temperature to make the metal strong and malleable. Soon, the first step is done and the bar is taken from the furnace and forged for the first time. Again, the apprentice does the work, while the master speaks of proper technique and points out possible mistakes.


    The process is shown in few short segments, but the sweat on both dwarves shows the passing time.


    Finally, the apprentice finished his work, creating an bracer, ready to be fitted with leather straps to hold it in place. The master looks it over and nods, giving his approval to the work of his apprentice.


    Another scene


    In a copse of yew-trees, two woman are walking. Both are slender and fair, looking almost ethereal. ¡°Now, pupil, you want to learn my art. To craft a good bow, you need to start with a good stave. A good stave comes from good wood. The trees around us were raised by my predecessors and me to give us those staves. We take care of the trees and they provide the materials we need. It¡¯s a symbiotic process, neither side would prosper without the other. The trees trust our stewardship of them, and we need to prove ourselves worthy.¡±


    Together, they work fertilizer into the ground around the trees, making sure that the trees have what they need. They make sure that the trees are free from parasites and disease. From time to time, the teacher demonstrates a spell to help with their mundane practises, showing the pupil that magic is a useful tool, but also that it is no more than a tool. The worth of the tool is measured by its use. After a while, the two retreat into a grass-roofed hut, built into a hill itself. Inside, in a dry room, various shelves with drying wood wait for the two.


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    ¡°Now, a good stave needs to be dried before it is worked. The wood you see in here was taken years ago and is being prepared ever since. Patience might be the most important trait for a bowyer, not dexterity or insight into the wood. Both are useful, but if you lack patience, you will spoil your work, no matter how great your skills otherwise.¡±


    The teacher reaches for a length of wood and hands it to the pupil.


    ¡°This will be your first project. You will have to cut it, carve it and shave it. It will be yours, once you are done. A reminder of your beginning.¡±


    The teacher takes the pupil into another room, this one a bedroom. Atop a bureau sits a bow. It looks rather simple in design and badly made. The wood is slightly twisted and uneven, a few dark marks showing the maker¡¯s impatience during the burning-process.


    ¡°This one is mine. It sits in a prominent place to remind me that, while talent is useful, effort and dedication to the craft, those are what makes the master. As you can see, my work was shoddy at best, I doubt anyone would willingly use that bow. But by never giving up on my craft, I got to the point where I am now. Being hailed master-crafter of bows, supplying bows to the Wyld Hunt itself.¡±


    Another scene


    In the steady shine of a crystal-lamp a dark-skinned being sits, looking through a magnifying glass at his work. He is one of the Daimon, a follower of Chronos to be precise. And everything in his world is about precision, from the grooming of his small pair of horns, to the making of delicate time-pieces, trying to worship his god in his work.


    And such is the piece he is working on that day. A small time-piece, small enough to be carried around and wound by a spring, moving the gears at a steady rate in accordance with the flow of time. Trying to manipulate the tiny gear-pieces with a small pair of tongs, setting them onto their prepared axles to let them grip into their pairs is no easy feat. Only with a delicate, steady hand and a clear eye is it possible to make the valuable time-pieces for the higher ups.


    There are other ways to tell time, but he prides himself on his work, in his opinion the purest of them all. His time-pieces do not rely on external factors, no need for sand to fall through an opening, no need for a candle to burn down, no need for the shadow of the sun to wander on a scale. No, his time-pieces are pure, they work by their design. They give the pure time, unchanged by the size of the opening in a sandglass, unchanged by the burn-rate of a wick and unmolested by clouds. It takes some time, but soon his work is done and he stands, taking the finished time-piece to the customer, a proud priest, collecting tribute to the gods. His work was chosen to be given to Chronos himself, making it the proudest day of his life.


    Another scene


    A raven haired woman, stands in front of a complicated glass-apparatus. Under one of the flasks a fire burns, boiling the liquid within. She focuses on the liquid, comparing the heat to her notes and brushes her hair back behind her pointed ears.


    ¡°Interesting. After infusing the water with Astral Power, the boiling point changes. But for some reason I can¡¯t find a mechanism for the change. Master, why is it like that?¡± she speaks up, hoping for a good answer from her master.


    ¡°You reach for knowledge over your current level, child.¡± a pale, white-haired elder answers. ¡°You simply infuse the material with raw Astral Power, unwise of the composition inside you. Unless you are highly skilled in the use of Astral Power, you will always have a mixture within you, depending on the Astral River around you. Simply pushing your Astral Power into a substance can unbalance it. Only a highly skilled Alchemist can use specific types of Astral Power to change materials in a consistent and useful manner, you are far from ready. Learn to use the materials and their properties first, then try to change them.


    Why are you so obsessed with the influence of Astral Power on matter anyway? Matter is in internal balance, it has always been like that.¡± the elder explains with a slight annoyance in his voice. His apprentice is skilled, yes, but oh, so headstrong.


    ¡°It is interesting. The most basic, physical properties change due to Astral Power infusion. What happens if the infusion occurs naturally? Wouldn¡¯t that change the materials around us? And couldn¡¯t we guide that?¡± she asks.


    ¡°Now you are talking true transmutation? When the world was young and unsettled yes, you are right, legends tell that back then the gods were able to shape the world to their will. But as the Astral River settled, the world settled with it and now we have a balance. And true transmutation is theoretically possible but the Astral Power-Cost is prohibitively high. Now, get back to your work on the Aqua Regis, you have an order to fulfill. Once you are done, you might be able to go back to your waste of time.¡± The elder rebukes his apprentice. The thirst for knowledge the young traveller expresses is immense but thirst for knowledge does not quench hunger for food or keep the rain off their head.


    ...and sometimes, making those tools is your road in life.

 Chapter 77

    After the chief¡¯s wife and son entered the building, the chief asked his wife to provide us with a warm drink and offered us his fire to rest. It felt like a dismissal, but a very polite one. We moved over to the fire, seating ourselves on the furs in front of it. Well, Adra and Sigmir did, why would I want to sit on a fur if there is a perfectly good Sigmir available, with a lap to sit on? Obviously, I sat on Sigmir¡¯s lap, sideways and lying my head on her shoulder, allowing me to peek at the group we had just left if I wanted to. I was rather curious about the chief¡¯s behaviour, it had looked to me as if he was extremely displeased with his son, despite Rai surviving a dangerous ordeal. Or maybe because of that.


    The chief¡¯s wife brought us a strange tea, made out of herbs or something, basically warm, flavoured water but it was welcome to us. I regretted the fact that I was missing ways of magically checking for poison. But I believed it improbable. In addition, I was not sure about the physiology of dryads, giant-bloods and firn-elves, wondering if there were poisons that worked on all three of us. Sigmir and me, yes, easily, I suspected that our races were close enough to theoretically produce cross-bred offspring, due to the infusion of giant-bloodlines into the elven-ancestors to create the firn-elves. But while Adra had an almost identical eidonomy, I wasn¡¯t sure she was even in the same phylum as we were or whether she would be classed as a plant or something else entirely.


    I was dragged from my musings to watch Rai taking a seat on the bank we had just vacated, looking rather tense and surreptitiously looking at Guto with fear in his eyes.


    ¡°Now, Rai, why don¡¯t you tell me what has happened from your point of view?¡± The chief asked his son, ignoring the tension. I listened to Rai stumbling through his story, more or less keeping with the tale he had told us. During the tale, he kept his eyes fixated on the table in front of him, never looking at either his father or Guto.


    ¡°Rai, do you know why Guto was here this afternoon? When he should be at his home, resting? He gave me his full report. Do you know what happens if two tribesman disagree in an report to me?¡± Giro asked, causing Rai to blanch.


    ¡°I¡­ I know, father.¡± Rai stammered.


    ¡°Now, Guto, why don¡¯t you give me your report again?¡± Giro prompted.


    ¡°Yes, chief. Our group went out hunting five days ago. It was young Rai¡¯s first adult hunt and he was assigned to partner with Dero, protecting his flank and learning from him. He was our leader after all. On the first three days, we had little luck but two days ago, during our noon-break, we were attacked by a group of sylvans, a mix of dryads and nymphs. It was a swift attack but we managed to rally around Dero, protecting each other and fighting back. Well, we managed, until Dero was struck in his open flank where his partner had abandoned him to flee in terror.¡± Guto spoke in a quiet voice and towards the end, I could hear his emotions creep in and saw tears stream down his face.


    ¡°With the loss of Dero, we were forced back at first but our attackers couldn''t press on, their wounds mounting, forcing them to finally retreat. I don¡¯t think anyone of us was uninjured, so we left our comrades out there, retreating to the town. Nobody knew where Rai went in his flight and now he is in front of us.


    Rai, son of Giro. I name you coward.¡± Guto spoke the last sentence with conviction, as if he was pronouncing a verdict.


    I saw Giro flinch a little and close his eyes for a second, before schooling his features into a neutral mask. But that little flinch was nothing compared to Rai¡¯s reaction. He shrank back, looking like a beaten and abused dog.


    Carefully whispering so only she could hear it, I asked Sigmir what had just happened.


    ¡°Cowards are discarded. If you want to be a hunter, if you want to be a leader, you need to have courage. While out hunting, your partners, your group needs to be able to rely on you. In my tribe, for the son of the chief to be named coward would be the same as banishment. I think this tribe is similar in that regard. The moment Rai turned his back on his comrades to flee, he lost their trust. To regain it will be hard.¡± she whispered back.


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    ¡°But why tell him off in front of us? Why not wait until we are gone, or ask us to look at the village. Why deliberately talk in front of us?¡± I asked her. I had always thought that tribal societies wanted to display an image of unity towards outsiders, no matter the internal conditions. Inter-tribe strife would be a sign of weakness, inviting attack. It was one of the reasons Sigmir had given me when predicting that the hunt for her was not spread outside her tribe as it hinted at internal discord.


    ¡°Because Giro is a clever old dog, love. The only way his son can regain his status, maybe even the tribe¡¯s trust, is a display of courage. And that display has to be a fight against those he has fled before. So if Giro wants to keep his son, Rai needs to win in a battle against the dryads, but not a single tribesman would join a coward, unless they have a great debt to him. But the three of us are different. Giro can easily sense that you crossed the first divide and probably sense it on me as well. He hopes that we will feel compassion for his son and help him to regain his status. I believe he will offer us something to take the fight to the dryads in the name of revenge, offering his son as a guide. Like that, he could make a case for his son¡¯s redemption after he paid us off. Or he just hopes that we take Rai with us if he has to banish him, I doubt Rai could survive without help.¡± Sigmir explained in a whisper.


    At the table, Rai had balked at first, trying to explain away what he did but after his father had offered that he would talk to the injured, he folded.


    ¡°Rai, you have admitted to cowardice, to deserting your partner in combat, causing him to die. I cast you from the tribe, not to return until you redeemed yourself. You have until the next new-moon to leave, afterwards you will be slain if you return without proof that you have overcome your cowardice by killing those you have fled from before.¡± Giro spoke with a deep, carrying and heavy voice. His verdict was slightly disrupted by the wailing of his wife, but he ignored it and carried on.


    Interestingly, I saw Adra flinch as he spoke, almost as if the verdict was against her.


    As Rai stood up and left the room, he made a good impression of a convict, on his way to execution. Giro looked over to us, as if he expected movement from our part, after all we had meddled once already and Adra looked ready to jump up as it were, but she managed to control herself.


    Giro invited us once again for dinner and spoke highly of the crafters in his tribe, hinting that we might want to trade with them. Sadly, none of us had anything truly trade-worthy, just the bit of money Sigmir kept and the old shirt we got from the dungeon, a while back. I remembered that I wanted to offer it to Adra, but hadn¡¯t done so, yet.


    As we walked outside, Adra glanced at me sadly before softly speaking. ¡°We need to help him.¡±


    I almost stumbled when I realised that Adra had taken the chief¡¯s bait, hook, line and sinker. Before I could even start to answer her, Sigmir did. ¡°No, we don¡¯t need to help him.¡± she said. ¡°His behaviour does not warrant help. Even on our way here, his behaviour was shameful. Why should we help him?¡±


    I heard quite a bit of emotion in her voice. I guess for someone who believes in a personal code of honour, the spoiled behaviour of Rai was distasteful to the extreme.


    ¡°But it¡¯s our fault that the dryads left Tegi and came here.¡± Adra said, now speaking in an almost whisper, not wanting to be overheard.


    ¡°And that means nothing. Not a thing.¡± I said with conviction in my voice, trying to speak english and let only Sigmir and Adra understand me via Lenore¡¯s companion skill. I had no idea if it worked like I wanted, but it might.


    ¡°But¡­¡± Adra started.


    ¡°No!¡± Sigmir spoke in a voice broking no argument. ¡°It¡¯s not our fault that he broke in his first real combat. To abandon your comrades in battle is despicable. Ones first battle is an important step in the crucible of life. Either you harden, or you break. He broke. My father sent me into my first battle, and it was victory or death.¡± I could hear that she meant what she said, from the depth of her heart. Adra, on the other hand, was not happy with either of us, but I had an idea she might like and Sigmir probably could accept.


    ¡°What about a compromise. Sigmir, you said that the chief will probably offer us a reward to deal with the dryads. If the reward is good enough, we could take Rai with us to accomplish his task. If Rai can harden himself, he might be redeemable. In the end, he is not our problem, he is his father¡¯s problem.¡± I proposed. I had no problem to help with something I found distasteful, if I was rewarded well enough.

 Chapter 78

    After my suggestion, Sigmir and Adra were mollified, even if Adra was slightly taken back at my mercenary attitude whereas Sigmir was obviously fine with it. We continued on, idly looking at the village and gathering a small following of children and youths. Adra was quite happy that our meeting with their chief had dispelled the animosity she had been under, causing them to flock to her. They still kept their distance from me, but I was quite alright with that.


    As we walked there was something on my mind, a thought that had not left me for days. My original plan to deal with Sigmir¡¯s tribe was flawed, fatally so. I had planned to use long-range, wide-area ice-magic, basically the ritual I had devised for the Devourer, to strike at them without giving them a chance to fight back. But after actually using it, I realised that it was just a wishful thought, shattered by the cruel reality. My ritual was far too slow, even a blind man would realise that something was wrong with the buildup of Astral Power above them and the slow increase in the falling icicles, giving them ample time to either take cover or sally out to interrupt us. Or do something else entirely, I was under no illusion that I had more than rudimentary knowledge about the options available to an old shaman and his chieftain, in the centre of their own domain.


    Maybe Sigmir had a good idea how to deal with them - at least, one better than ¡®Tell them we are here with a huge magic ritual and hope to hold them back long enough.¡¯


    Laughter pulled me from my ruminations and I watched Adra happily playing tag with a few children, chasing them around until their game devolved into a snowball fight. It was rather funny to see such a playful side of Adra, it was something new. But even more interesting was Sigmir¡¯s reaction to it, she wasn¡¯t amused as I was, she looked sad and maybe a little angry. Uncomfortable with her discomfort, I moved a little closer to her, taking her hand and gently squeezing it in support. I wasn¡¯t sure why it hurt her to see the children play, but I wanted to help her.


    ¡°Are you alright?¡± I asked her softly.


    ¡°Yes, sure.¡± she answered, softly and sounding like she was lost in thought.


    One of their snowballs flew our way and I, not wanting to jolt Sigmir, used my Ice-Magic to divert it. The look on Adra¡¯s face clearly accused me of cheating and promised more attacks in the near future.


    ¡°Why don¡¯t you ask Ylva if she wants to play and the two of us take a little walk in the forest?¡± I suggested, hoping to distract her from her thoughts.


    A moment later, she raised her hand and Ylva materialised in front of us, quickly bounding towards the children and running Adra over, causing great laughter. Without a word, Sigmir pulled me onward, towards the edge of the village. Multiple snowballs were sent after us, but I was having none of that, again, using my magic to throw them back, causing even more laughter behind us, as I had apparently struck true.


    After walking for a few minutes on the cleared area between village and forest, I pulled Sigmir to a stop and gave her a soft, loving kiss.


    ¡°You know, you can tell me what¡¯s eating at you. I promised you that I would be there for you.¡± I said in a gentle voice.


    At first, it seemed like she didn¡¯t want to talk as she used a cruel, one might even say inhumane, tactic to distract me, kissing me back but increasing the strength and depth of our kiss until the world retreated shrinking to only encompass our bodies and the points of contact between them. There was no way I could focus on my topic of inquiry when she did that. I heard a soft moan, it could have been either Sigmir¡¯s or my own, but I felt that if I didn¡¯t managed to get a handle on myself, we would soon be lying in the snow, going at if for all the world to see. Not that I had a problem with the world seeing us, but I had little desire to do so right next to the village.


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    With great difficulty, I pulled back and looked into her eyes, seeing them gleam with unshed tears. That was so unlike Sigmir, it shocked me. I had only seen her cry once before, shortly after we met, when stress and exhaustion had pushed her beyond her considerable limits.


    I pulled her over to the forest, close to one of the trees and pushed her down, seating her against it. With her seated, I straddled her lap while, at the same time and almost absentmindedly, constructing barrier of mist, whirling snow and shadows around us, creating a swirling cocoon of safety, keeping the world, with all its prying eyes, safely locked out.


    ¡°Now, dear, what weights on you? And don¡¯t tell me it¡¯s nothing, I can see your pain. Let me share it and maybe I can ease it.¡± I implored her, gently stroking her cheek while looking deep into those teary, pained eyes.


    ¡°I¡­ We¡­ I¡­¡± she tried to start talking but emotions choked her, strangling her voice as tears spilled over. I simply embraced her head, pulling it close and holding her, trying to project a feeling of safety. Heart wrenching sobs tore out of her throat, while hot tears spilled onto my chest. I felt my own eyes water, tears running down my cheeks. I hated the feeling of impotence, that I had no idea how to help her. My Sigmir was hurting and I could not do anything to change that. So I did the only thing I could do, hold her close and not let go.


    After a while, the sobs died down and silence reigned. I wasn¡¯t sure if Sigmir had simply fallen asleep but I was not willing to let the world get to her if that was the case. I would hold her, keeping her safe as long as needed.


    But I did not have to wait long, soon her voice came from my chest, quiet and soft, lacking her normal strength.


    ¡°I¡¯m sorry, I don¡¯t want to be a burden. It¡¯s just that over the last two days, it became real. We are now so close to my tribe, I can almost taste home in the wind. And every time I think I can taste it, I remember, there is no more home for me.¡± she said with a shudder.


    I squeezed her a little, trying to convey the idea that I would be with her for as long as I could. It tore my heart that I could not promise her to be with her, knowing that our time together was limited.


    ¡°Whenever I taste that smell of home, I just want to walk back into my tribe¡¯s village, head held high, showing them that my father''s blood is strong and will not falter. But the reality is, my father was slain and his remains desecrated. The only strength that I have, is my bodily strength...¡± her voice trailed off.


    ¡°No, you are wrong. As long as I draw breath in this world, I will stand with you. I told you once, I would be your family. Your foes would be my foes, your pain, my pain. Even if the world ends, I will come for you in the next world.¡± I spoke, conviction burning in my voice. I had no idea how to do so, but I knew that I would do anything I could, anything I had to, to keep my promise.


    ¡°Thank you¡­¡± she whispered. ¡°Do you think we will have to wipe my tribe out? Many of them were my friends, were my father¡¯s friends. But they hunted me, like an escaped animal, to be drug back for breeding. How could they?!¡± anger was seeping into her voice, bringing with it the strength I had so sorely missed from it.


    ¡°It depends what they were told. If Jongarn told them a good lie, they might have chased after you, thinking that you had been forced away, hoping to rescue you from the vile monster that stole you. And I honestly don¡¯t know how to deal with your tribe. I can understand that you don¡¯t want a massacre.¡± I fibbed a little, I had no experience or understanding in that regard, I just knew that Sigmir needed to hear it, at this point.


    Before coming to this world, I had never felt emotional attachment to anyone, not even my family. I understood who my family was, I understood that I loved my mother. Or at least I was convinced that it was the right thing to do and that I logically did so. But what I felt here in this world was different. It was less¡­ contrived. I knew that I would move heaven and earth for Sigmir. There was no need to think about it, no need to understand it. I knew it. But that was only for one person, not for a village.


    ¡°Maybe we can think of a way to get the quest taken care off, without too much bloodshed.¡± I said, more in the way of voicing a hope than any true conviction. I doubted that Jongarn, his father or their shaman would let Sigmir go without a fight.

 Chapter 79

    Sigmir and I stayed a little longer in the swirly cocoon I had created, and Sigmir used the time to lighten her burdens. After she had started talking, she was happy to continue and I learned what had actually triggered the little episode. Seeing the kids play and watching Giro scheme for Rai, both reminded her of her childhood.


    Once again, I was reminded that I was a few years older than Sigmir and that a combination of her species, her society and her family had forced her to mature faster than I considered proper. To her, the playing children symbolised something she had never been able to experience - an unburdened childhood - and the scheming of Giro told of affection in spite of failure. My modern sensibilities were incredibly offended by a father practically forcing his daughter to mature, calling it child abuse, but to her, it was good child rearing. Well, to me, even Giro¡¯s actions were abusive but it was, quite literally, a different world. The world I was used to was governed by evolution over long periods of time, this one was governed by the system-assisted personal evolution.


    With that cheery thought in mind, I refocused on the girl in my arms and the swirling cocoon around us. By now, Sigmir was simply enjoying the closeness, allowing me to take a closer look at what I¡¯d done. It had been mostly instinctual, the attempt to use both Ice and Darkness-Magic to conceal us here. In my mind, the runes of concealment, mist, blizzard and shadow were all interwoven and Astral Power was channeled into them. But they did not form an actual runic formation as I knew it, it was something different.


    What had I said to the Grandmother when she asked what magic was? ¡®The ability to alter reality using one¡¯s will and Astral Power¡¯? That would mean I had literally willed this cocoon, this barrier into existence. And the runes allowed me to keep it together? I mentally prodded a little at the construct and it felt similar to the sensation given by my Ice and Darkness-Magic. So the magic-types had interacted with my runic knowledge to follow my will? I was not certain I liked that, it felt a little alien. Or had my subconscious drawn on my different skills to follow my will? How exactly did a game manage to interpret the subconscious of an normal human to work magic with skills the actual human did not have?


    As I pondered the implications, the barrier around me weakened as if my own doubts influenced the strength of the barrier. Sadly, I could not ask anyone in game about it, they would simply say that it was part of the way magic worked, it certainly fit with the Grandmother¡¯s lessons. And talk to someone outside the game? They would either say I was even more mentally unstable than I knew myself to be and tell me to quit the game, or they would accept it and tell me to quit the game because it messed with my head. Neither was acceptable to me, so I would just have to accept it as part of this world. But it made me curious.


    I didn¡¯t want Sigmir to know about my insecurities, so I let the barrier disperse with a flourish, creating a glittering dusting of snow around us.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Skill increased</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You increased your skill: Ice Magic [66/100]</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Skill increased</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You increased your skill: Darkness Magic [20/100]</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    I was a little surprised that I gained multiple points in Darkness Magic; there had to be something to my action, something new and more complex. But for now, Sigmir had priority.


    ¡°Come, why don¡¯t we retire in front of Giro¡¯s hearth? I would love to cuddle up to you in a slightly warmer place.¡± I said to Sigmir as I stood and offered her my hand to pull her up. Ever since I had crossed the first divide, something like that was a lot easier. I wondered just how the increased stats would influence other activit¨ªes, I expected the higher overall stamina to come in handy when wrestling on a mattress.


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    Sigmir must have read my mind, or maybe my eyes showed my thoughts, because she blushed a little when I pulled her up and straight into another hug.


    We walked back to the village and as we got closer, Lenore told me to watch through her eyes for a moment. I did so, dreading some sort of betrayal against Sigmir, to drag her back to her tribe, but the reality was quite different. It was an ambush, but of a different variety. Adra had pulled the children together and prepared multiple snowballs. I had to smile a little, it was interesting to watch Adra come out of her shell, even if it might be a little annoying at times.


    Softly speaking, I mentioned it to Sigmir, but Ylva had already warned her.


    I kept the connection through Lenore up, using the shifted view-point to target my magic. I had never tried to use my Ice Magic in such a way, targeting something outside my personal perception and it felt a little strange, but not overly difficult. Taking control of the snow behind Adra, I kept myself ready to show Adra that cleverness was great, but cheating could win the day, any day.


    The moment Adra and her new minions threw their snowballs, I let go of the snow I controlled, letting it drop onto them, causing great screaming. At the same time, I managed to swat away the thrown snow, Sigmir and I chuckled a little and walked on, watching Adra dance around, trying to get rid of the snow that had managed to get into her clothes.


    ¡°You cheated!¡± Adra accused in a pouting tone.


    ¡°Well, you tried to trick Sigmir and me in an ambush. I just got to you first.¡± I said, grinning all the while.


    ¡°We were planning an ambush, fair and square. You had outside help, how can you dare?.¡± she retorted, but could not keep from laughing.


    Just as she was done with her de-snowing, Ylva leaped at her, tackling her down, into the snow. By now, the children were laughing merrily at the demise of their former leader. Sigmir offered Adra a hand to help her up, by now also laughing.


    ¡°You know, you should not plot against someone when their partner is right next to you. It might backfire.¡± Sigmir told her. Ylva chimed in with a chuffing sound that I interpreted as laughter.


    ¡°Bullies¡­¡± Adra said in a complaining voice, causing even more laughter. To make our evil bullying up to her, I used my Ice-Magic to remove the snow from her clothes, without the need to squirm around.


    Adra joined us and the three of us walked on. It felt¡­ nice. Strange, unusual, yes, but nice. Having people to goof around with, to laugh with. And feeling like laughing with them, not standing at a side, looking at their actions and wondering just what drove them to act like that. I had noticed it before, but only with Sigmir, this¡­ feeling of belonging. Of friendship? I was unsure what I would call it mentally, it was similar but different from the feelings evoked when I was with Sigmir. The playfulness, the happiness was there with both of them, but with Sigmir, I wanted more. With her, I wanted to be close, to be with her at all times and most important, I wanted her to return those feelings. I was happy that Adra returned the playful banter, taking the teasing and returning it in turn. But I believed that rejection from Adra would be a lot easier to take compared to rejection from Sigmir.


    Intellectually, I knew about emotions. I had read a few books, thematizing romance. I had even been forced to read Romeo and Juliet during my education. The play had not evoked any thoughts of romance on my part, I remember wondering just how stupid those people had to be.


    But now, there was something different. Just the idea of separation from Sigmir was hard to take and the knowledge that we probably would have to seperate was hard to take. Part of me wanted to run, to log out of the game and never log back in. But I knew that I was already unable to do so. I was drawn back into this world; like an asteroid, captured in a gravity well. I knew that at the end of my journey, I would burn up in the atmosphere, turning into a shooting star - but despite that knowledge, there was no will to escape. The knowledge of increasing future pain did not stop me from from pursuing those happy, present feelings.


    We made our way to Giro¡¯s house, knocking before entering and were greeted by a smiling Giro.


    ¡°Rai told me that you are great warriors. My village just lost some of our best hunters, would it be possible for me to ask you for help? The village would be most grateful, if you could assist us in these trying times.¡± Giro asked, with a friendly smile on his face. I had seen such a smile before, mostly on used-car salesmen. Sigmir and I shared a look that only said, ¡®I told you so.¡¯

 Chapter 80

    With the look Sigmir and I shared upon hearing Giro¡¯s request, we settled who would take point in the negotiation. Neither of us believed that the village truly needed us, but that Giro felt that he could conserve his people¡¯s strength by using our strength. He may even hope to push any possible blame onto us, in case something went wrong or he got a chance to negotiate with the dryads.


    ¡°Yes, these are trying times for all, aren¡¯t they. But I am sure that a prudent leader like you has already planned ahead for troubles like these and is not dependent on the good will of a small group of travellers, such as ours.¡± I threw out a bit of bait for Giro.


    ¡°There are some preparations, yes, but those require sacrifice, whereas a group as powerful as the three of you would not need to sacrifice anything. Helping us would be as easy as flipping your palms, no trouble at all, wouldn¡¯t it? You are such great and powerful beings after all.¡± Giro baited back. Both of us trying to play on the other¡¯s arrogance into making concessions.


    We battled back and forth for quite some time, trying to gain a decisive advantage but neither of us could nail the other down, but we got closer to a compromise by the minute. Finally, after a far too long negotiation, we were done.


    ¡°So, we give you two small bags of holding, filled with provisions and two sets of leather armour - one studded, the other supple - and in return you will take care of the dryads for us. My son Rai will serve as your local guide for the task. Right?¡± By now, Giro¡¯s luster and smile had worn off and he looked just as exhausted as I felt, not that you would see it on my face.


    I agreed to his summary and a quest popped up.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="2">Quest Alert!</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="2">Protect Adernas</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="1">Quest Difficulty</td>


    <td colspan="1">Hard</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="2">The village of Adernas is troubled by dryads and nymphs, hunting for them. Make sure that the people of Adernas can rest easy, as the dryads and nymphs won¡¯t bother them any longer.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="1">Quest Reward</td>


    <td colspan="1">Provisions and armour</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    We shook and the quest was accepted. Now, I could return to Sigmir¡¯s embrace and simply relax a little. The negotiation had gone well for me and reading the quest at the end, everything fit right with my plans.


    After a nice dinner with Grio and his family, Sigmir, Adra and I made camp in front of the hearth, there simply was no guest-room, and, in a soft voice, I told them about my idea.


    ¡°Sigmir, you asked me to think of a way to settle the problem with your tribe as peacefully as possible. I have an idea to that effect. At the end of the day, our objective is taking out the shaman who cursed you, the chieftain and his son. The rest, we don¡¯t care about and you would rather not kill them, right?¡± I summed up our objectives.


    ¡°Right. I know that we probably will have to kill people I knew but that¡¯s just how it is. Sadly.¡± Sigmir answered.


    ¡°Compared to Adernas here, how good is the defense of your tribe? Is there a wall, are there permanent guards?¡± I asked, gathering more information.


    ¡°There is no wall, for what would we need it? Hunters patrol the area and make sure that no animals get too close to the village but other than animals, nothing would attack the Jonari. There are many Jonari and they are well-known for avenging themselves.¡±


    ¡°So, if someone would kill their chief, Shaman and the chief¡¯s heir, they would not take that kindly, would they? They would hunt down whoever killed them, taking their revenge, even if they would have to hunt the killers to the end of the earth, right?¡± I asked, hoping that I had interpreted the stories told by Sigmir correct.


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    ¡°Yes, no Jonari hunter would rest until vengeance is carried out. The only way they would not take revenge is if the chief died in an honourable duel. But there are rules concerning who can challenge the chief, what conditions need to be fulfilled and what the winner needs to do afterwards. It¡¯s rather complicated. I think my father might have had the right to challenge, but one of the conditions is that the challenger needs to have an heir, ready to take their former place. I didn¡¯t count.¡± Sigmir explained, sounding a little annoyed.


    ¡°Well, then I do have a plan. First, we search for a group of nymphs, capturing or killing them. I would love to capture one of them, but I doubt that it will be possible. But anyway, we just need their blood and a weapon or two.


    Then, on the new moon, we sneak into the Jonari Village. If the defenses are no better than here, we can do it. The darkness will hide us and my darkness-magic is the most potent that night. At the same time, I can use my ice-magic to make our tracks look just like Adra¡¯s track and add a few extra tracks on the way in.


    During the night, I am sure that we can disable and kill the shaman and Jongarn, maybe even the chieftain himself. If I use blood-magic and Adra uses her magic, I think we can make it look like the dryads of Tegi did it. In addition, we make the scene look like the dryads did it, using the blood and weapons we procured before. That should stir the Jonari into action, right?¡± I laid out the beging of my plan.


    Sigmir laughed a little at the understatement at the end. ¡°You could say so. Killing the chief¡¯s son in the middle of the village? That would be like a slap right in the face of everything they believe in. Most Jonari believe in honour, though sadly not all of them. Assassinating someone in their bed? That¡¯s about as dishonourable as it gets.¡± Her expression showed that she was not happy with the idea of assassination but the fact that those we wanted to kill had discarded honour with their acts against her - and the fact that it would likely save a lot of lives - lessened her disapproval.


    ¡°So we have all the Jonari hunters after us, thinking that we are a group of nymphs from Tegi? And then? Lead them to the rest of the nymphs?¡± Adra asked, understanding the plan quite well.


    ¡°Yes. We need to be swift, but I believe we can make it work. I hope that Lenore can scout the area, letting us draw the Jonari hunters into a spot where they run into a group of nymphs. If we make it look like a Jonari uses Ice-Magic to get the drop on them, there should be enough confusion to spark a fight. And we can sneak away, using concealment magic. The only problem is Rai. His father was adamant in having him ¡®guide¡¯ us. We should leave him here, under a pretense and pick him up at a preplanned spot after we stirred up the Jonari. I don¡¯t want him with us for the night-attack. Well, I don¡¯t want him with us, period, but as I said, his father was insistent.¡± I concluded my plan.


    I was not really happy with it, it relied on far too many things going right, with not enough room for errors, but I had no better idea. Sure, we could stay in the area, conducting a guerrilla-campaign against both, Jonari and dryads - but it would take ages, and be dangerous as all hell. A single mistake could lead to both Sigmir and Adra dying. My plan concentrated the risk into a brief period, and let us leave the area afterwards. I could see that Sigmir was not quite happy with my plan, but she went along with it, having no better idea as well. Adra looked a little happy with the plan and it took me a moment to understand. What I planned to visit upon the first group of nymphs was quite similar to what had happened to her at their hands and she was just evil enough to appreciate the reciprocity.


    While trying to fall asleep in Sigmir¡¯s arms, I was pondering possible ways to increase our chances when I did have an idea. I had become a lot better with my magic since I last tried it. Maybe, I could use some of my Shadeleaf-paste in combination with my Hard Ice to create a persistently cursed equipment.


    Something similar to the normal, enchanted equipment, but with negative attributes. A collar, inscribed with runes of confusion, disorientation and torpor, suppressing almost all mental functions of the wearer, allowing us to make a nymph docile and using it as a scapegoat during the attack on the Jonari. If they found a recently dead nymph next to the chieftain¡¯s corpse, they should not doubt the scene. Yes, there was potential in my idea.


    With an evil smile, I fell asleep, dreaming of the havoc I could wreak with my new idea.

 Chapter 81

    During the morning, I was planning possible rune-combinations and formations for my new toys. At the same time, Lenore and Ylva were scouting in the forests around us, looking for any clue of where the dryads were. Ylva was quite happy with the fact that Rai¡¯s presence forced us to walk, as we still did not want to show him our mounts due to my paranoia, whereas Lenore was quite annoyed with my paranoia, because I had asked her to stay outside her Hallow and more or less out of sight as another possible hidden card.


    As I lacked the abilities necessary to seriously look for tracks, I was able to let most of my attention zone out, focusing on my work. And what an interesting project it was. I was quite sure that I had a working rune-combination but sadly, I was lacking the means to test it. For a short moment, I eyed Rai¡¯s neck but Adra would be upset if I used our guide as a guinea pig. And I was not quite sure it worked as I wanted it to, it would be hard to explain Giro that I had accidentally turned his son into a mental vegetable. Not that the son had all than much mental capacity to lose, but it would be a hassle.


    No, I would have to wait until we caught us some dryads, I wanted at least two test-subjects as I had two different fuel-mechanisms in mind. One mechanism was to be simply fueled by a controller, meaning me, the other was a little more ingenious. My idea was to add small, thin thorns to the inside of the collar, not large enough to cause wounds, just large enough to draw blood, and inscribe the runes to slowly draw magic out of the wearers blood, using their own power to fuel the magic keeping them under control.


    Well, more or less, under control. I had a layered formation in mind, three seven-rune main-formations, linked together into a triangle, each similar to each other and each reinforcing the others. Each seven-rune formation would consist of two triangles, forming a star of david and a single centre-rune. The centre-rune would be a blood-rune, inscribed in the blood of the target, setting the target. One of the triangles around it would be made out of curse-runes, describing the medium which is used to affect the target. And the other triangle would be different for each of the three main-formations, one using torpor to weaken, slow and dull the mind and body of the target, one using disorientation to further befuddle their mind and the final formation made out of madness, to take the last coherence from their mind.


    If I could tweak the magic just right, I thought, I could make them drooling, zombie-like idiots that could be guided with a simple leash. Like that, we should be able to smuggle them into the Jonari-camp and have them die in glorious combat with the Jonari-Chieftain. Well, kind of¡­


    But tweaking the magic would require a bit of experimentation, thus my short-lived idea to use Rai as a guinea-pig.


    Our day passed without incident, neither finding any tracks of the dryads, nor them finding us. We made camp in an out-of-the-way cave, well hidden and protected in a small gorge. Without Ylva stumbling across it, we would never have found it. Inspecting it, we decided that Rai would have to stay here, so we didn¡¯t have to trust him. When he heard that, he was almost pitching a fit but the simple fact that both Sigmir and I were willing to make him stay by force ended any discussion on the matter. It also showed how problematic he truly was, his father had ordered him to obey our orders while he was out, guiding us.


    After his fit was done, Sigmir and I both sat him down, explaining to him the facts of life. At this point, we hardly knew him and certainly did not trust him. What we were doing out here was not a game, I had to suppress a smirk at that, it was bloody serious. And it would be bloody. Unless some kind of miracle occured, we would have to wage a hidden war, kill some of their patrols, or maybe guards once we found their main-camp, and fade back into the woodworks. There was no way we could take an unknown into a situation like that, not until we had a better idea of their strength and composition. While that was a bit of a snub to him, it was not about him. Not in this case. It was quite plain and simply about survival. If we had someone with us that we could not trust, we would be hampered. So for the first few days, maybe the first week, we would leave him behind.


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    That was, of course, the story we had concocted before. Our plan was that we would incite the fighting between Jonari and dryads, presenting it as an coincidence to Rai and claiming that it was to be expected, that the dryads were not only pressing in on the area around Adernas, but also into the territory of the Jonari. As soon as the fighting was serious, we could move back to Adernas, report to Giro and claim that our job was done. I was not sure if it would be enough to erase the mark of cowardice from Rai, but frankly, I did not care.


    At first, Sigmir and I debated for a short time, if she should wait here with Rai, because she had little training and knowledge of skulking and sneaking into a village. Give her some animal to stalk and she was quite adept at stealth, but sneaking up on sapient beings was different from sneaking up on a deer. I countered that I had only done so once, in Tegi, and that there was another thing to remember, neither Adra nor I knew the lay of the land in the Jonari-village. We would have to rely on a description or even blind luck, neither the best bet for a stealth-mission. No, she would have to go with us and our little annoyance would just have to babysit himself.


    He also learned that life¡¯s not easy at the bottom. On our original journey from the ambush-site to Adernas, we had taken it easy on him, not quite knowing what was going on. Now, we knew what was going on and gave Rai the tasks befitting of journeyman-hunter, sending him around for firewood, letting him go with Sigmir and Ylva as a gofer, making him gut and butcher their prey under Sigmir¡¯s watchful eye, all those nuisance-tasks. I kept cooking, mainly because I did not want to eat his attempts but also because I enjoyed it and gained skill-points doing it. It was far from my other, main-, skills but it came along nicely, if slowly.


    We spent some time on fixing up the cave, so that Rai was comfortable during his stay and to give us a place to return every night. There was simply no way to gauge how long it would take us to find a group of dryads and subdue them, without killing them all. By now, I was convinced that I wanted some serious evidence for the Jonari to find. Sure, some circumstantial evidence was not bad, footprints for example, but a nice, still-warm corpse was a lot better to stir up sentiment.


    The next day was largely a bust. We searched the area but did not turn up a single dryad, just a few dead wolves, looking like they had been killed in a manner similar to what I would expect from a group using spears and bows. What clued us all in to the fact that it was most likely a group consisting of dryads was the fact that the pelts were still there. Dryads and nymphs used their strange, self-grown fabric as clothes and armour, so they had little to no use for pelts, everyone else would take the pelts as the most valuable part of the wolf. So, we had a starting point. Sadly, night was falling, so we returned to our camp and started tracking the next day.


    Tracking them through the snow was not too hard, they left a rather obvious trail, if you knew what you were looking at. They simply used something similar to my Ice-Magic to smooth out the snow behind them, leaving it in a perfectly plain state. Even a little freshly fallen snow would erase the track, but as soon as we were on the start of it, we could easily follow. Guessing how far ahead they were, was sadly a thing of impossibility.


    When it was almost completely dark, we finally saw a hint of them. Someone had killed a deer and gutted it on the spot, not unusual, as you did not want the blood and guts stinking up your campsite. But what clued us in that it had not been long, was the fact that the entrails were still warm and in the cold climate around us, that meant that it had not been long, not at all. We pressed on and were rewarded with a nice view of their camp-site.

 Chapter 82

    The camp we had found was surprisingly normal. In my mind, there was this image of dryads and nymphs, dwelling in the forest, one with nature and its creatures, frolicking around naked, all that jazz. The idea was slightly influenced by the images presented under the banner of a certain mouse, but the reality on Mundus was more Darwin, than Disney. Nature was survival of the fittest and here on Mundus, a single powerful being had the ability to change the fate of a tribe, maybe even a race. Of course, intellectually, I was aware that the Disney-inspired image was a false one - Tegi had shown that - but the image was still there.


    What we found could easily be a group of humans, elves or beastmen, just judging from the organisation and action we were seeing. There were all in all six beings, I believed five were nymphs, one a dryad. The difference, according to Adra, was that dryads were longer-lived and could instinctively bond with a tree to form a grove, prolonging the life of both of them to an insane degree. A bonded dryad would live as long as her tree was alive and the tree could live forever, thanks to the symbiosis-effect. Nymphs could not bond with a tree, however they could get bound by a dryad, sharing some of her tree¡¯s life-force, giving them more power and longevity. Most dryads were quite adept at nature-magic, especially once they were bound to a tree, whereas nymphs were more of a martial mind-set, using their limited power to create armaments out of the strongest wood they could find. The best they could get was a freely given piece of their bonded dryad¡¯s tree, allowing for a synergy-effect.


    The one I believed to be a dryad was sitting in a meditative pose, letting the world flow around her, while two nymphs were taking care of the deer-carcass, butchering it and cutting it into portions. Another nymph was stoking a small fire and preparing some things in a small pot, probably for some sort of stew. The last nymphs were already down, maybe sleeping, maybe relaxing, getting as much rest as possible for a night-watch. At least, that¡¯s what I would do in a group like that.


    The group before us looked like a great target for us, there was just one problem. We had not the slightest idea how strong they actually were. Once again, I tried the concealed observation I had used with Rai, trying to find out their level without them knowing about it. Feeling the gloomy dusk around us, I decided to use the shadows as a medium, combining concealment and shadows into a small formation, set directly in front of my right eye and tried to add the observe-skill into the formation. I kept the formation supplied with Astral Power, feeling the flow, hoping that I would get an inclination if I was successful by the expenditure.


    First, I observed the two nymphs that were laying down, hoping that their state would allow me some free information. They didn¡¯t even twitch and I learned that they were indeed nymphs, Bound Nymphs of Tegi, to be precise, and level 44 and 46. Next, I observed the cooking one and she was level 48. The two butchering ones were 43 and 49, allowing me to breathe easy. Unless the dryad was insanely more powerful, we could take them. None of them gave me the impression of having passed the first divide, I had experimented a little with Sigmir, learning to conceal my power and feeling if someone else was concealing their power.


    At that point, I was torn inside. I wanted to know the power-level of the dryad but I was a little apprehensive, fearing that she might detect the observation. She was meditating, which could mean that she was focusing on some complex concept and ignorant to the world - or it could mean that she was focusing on her body, feeling the smallest change and pushing her senses to the max. I could do, and had done, both during meditation. Sure, I was convinced that we could take them, but I wanted to wait with our attack until later, until they were deep asleep and I could take their guards down with my magic, letting them fall into a cold-induced slumber, like I did with the guards in Tegi. My personal goal today was not simple killing, I wanted as many of them alive as I could get, either to increase my supply of their blood-like resin, brimming with power, or as guinea-pigs for my new idea.


    Oh, well, somewhere out there was certainly an inspiring poster, proclaiming something that the bold will go forth and conquer or something in that vein. So, I would be bold in my caution, or something stupid like that, and focused my senses on the dryad. It was a dryad, an unbound dryad at that, and level 59.


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    Sadly, my bold courage was not rewarded that night and the dryad suddenly stood, proclaiming in a loud voice, ¡°We¡¯ve got company!¡±


    ¡°Let¡¯s get them. Remember, I want as many of them alive, as I can get.¡± I told my two companions. Two on one-odds, not really good, but it could be worse. Sigmir and I had crossed the first divide, evening the odds. In addition, Ylva was with us as well, even if she was a little weaker than someone with a class. I was not sure if the nymphs had them, but I assumed that they had, erring on the side of caution.


    Sigmir, Adra and Ylva quickly moved forward, Sigmir with her shield and axe in the lead, flanked by Adra and Ylva. The Nymphs moved to meet them and I sent three of my shuttles to answer. Over the last few days, I had gotten used to the strengthening my body had experienced after crossing the first divide, letting me use my power to its full extent.


    I sent out three of my shuttles, starting to harass the nymphs and forcing them to be cautious and keep an eye on the flying threats. But the true threat were not my shuttles, it was my magic. I stood back and wove curses together, sapping their strength and their will, confusing them and hampering them. The moon helped me, she was almost fully hidden, only a sliver of silver in the sky, giving me almost the full bonus of my Lunar Cycle-trait.


    Sigmir and the others fought mostly defensive, giving me time to work my magic and watching our enemies start to stumble.


    But the curses were not as effective as I hoped they would be, and I quickly realised why. Just like I stood back and worked my magic, the dryad was doing the same, trying to undo my work and keep her fighters strong. Now, we could not have that, could we?


    When the curse I was weaving was done, I triggered my Overflow and fully focused on my Ice-Magic. No more half-assed usage of it to harass, no, now I went for the kill. I would lose some of the power I could gain, but I wanted to take out the uncertainty. They might have reinforcements on the way, we certainly had none. The three shuttles already out and about shifted and went after the dryad, forcing her to dodge in a hurry and still giving her a bleeding cut on her shoulder. But those three were only the distraction, a way to force her to dodge. The three shuttles I had held back to focus on curses were out now, and they had quite a lot of space to accelerate, each aiming at one of the areas the dryad could dodge into.


    The dryad had dodged to the right, and one of the shuttles went right into her gut, not fully penetrating but causing a deep wound. The shuttle I had sent in case she dropped to the floor struck her leg, adding another cut and disrupting her balance, sending her sprawling on the ground. I called back all my shuttles and sheathed three of them. The other three shuttles that had cut her and were stained by her blood, I left out, floating in front of me. I was re-thinking my decision to just kill her. With her blood, I could strengthen my magic against her and take her out without too much trouble.


    With the three shuttles before me, I created a larger magic formation in front of me, similar to the formation I had in mind for my collars, three curse-runes, three disorientation-runes and a blood-rune in the centre. Using my finger, I was wiping the blood off the shuttle and touched the centre-rune, letting the blood flow into the rune to complete the magic.


    Astral Power was flowing out and the dryad on the floor was enveloped in an inky blackness. It clung to her like a film and she sunk to her knees, trying to make the world stop spinning, no doubt. I had an evil grin on my face, as I created another formation, this one with curse and torpor-runes, using another shuttle to supply the blood.


    Again, magic flashed and the weakened dryad was down for the count. I was not sure how long it would last, but I had quite a bit of hope.


    Checking my Astral Power, the stunt had taken quite a bit, bringing me lower than I hoped, but the only thing left was clean-up. I flung more curses, focusing on one nymph at a time and when two had fallen to my curses, the other three could see the writing on the wall and started to run. I used my rune-projection to overwhelm one of those three and called to my companions to take care of the other two, something they easily did, just with lethal wounds.


    I quickly moved to the dying nymphs - not to help, but to make sure that their life would not go to waste. Adding my athame to the wounds they already had, I used my blood-magic to take as much of their power as I could before death took it. Sadly, both together only condensed two small amber pebbles, less than what I had gotten before from a single nymph.


    Oh, well, it was better than nothing. Wiping the smile off my face, so I would not seem like a complete lunatic, I stood back up and looked at the spoils. Three nymphs, one dryad, all down and ready to collar.


    It was experimentation-time. For Science!

 Chapter 83

    When the fighting was done, I asked Sigmir and Adra to take care of the corpses, it would be sad if we wasted the preparation they had already done in the camp, so we would take it over. In addition, I wanted to get my four volunteer-subjects dealt with. I ignored the messages of experience-gain and went to work.


    Looking over my four test-subjects I thought about the best methodology. I could either start with the weakest and work my way to the strongest or vice-versa. Both ways had advantages, but for now, I wanted to start with the strongest, mainly to get possible mistakes out of the way. The best result would be to get two of them under control, the weakest two at that, the other two were expendable. Two, I could control without the collar, if need be, but more were not possible.


    With that in mind, I went over to the downed dryad, who had yet to twitch. She would be my first target, easily the strongest of the bunch and the one with magic training of her own. If any of them died in the process, I wanted it to be this one.


    First, I created a collar around her neck, without any flourishes; a simple band out of hard ice - no need for clasps or hinges or anything, it would never come off anyway. Into the collar, I inscribed the runes I had envisioned, making sure that I did not channel any Astral Power into them, without preparing the darkness and blood runes with their appropriate medium.


    This first part was rather easy, it only used actions I had done multiple times before in a slightly different fashion. Filling the runes with their medium - Shadeleaf-paste for the Darkness-runes, and the dryad¡¯s blood for the central blood-runes - was easy as well. The connecting lines, between the various runes, I filled with a mix of the dryad¡¯s blood, my own blood and Shadeleaf-paste. I was not certain that it was the best way, but magic was mainly guided by intent and will. Runes, inscriptions and materials were just guiding and focusing tools, the true work was done by the caster¡¯s will and mind.


    The next part, however, was new. I had to create a permanent effect at an appropriate strength that I could either completely leave alone or use in a ¡®background noise¡¯ manner, without focusing on it.


    Remembering the way I had used my darkness-curses before and the fact that Darkness-magic was, as the magic of madness and insanity, at least partially the governing magic of the mind and mental-magic, I attempted something new. I reached out with my Darkness-Magic and tried to gain an impression of the dryad¡¯s mind. With some focus, I managed to gain the impression that there was something there. I could not read any thoughts, if there were any with the dryad in an almost comatose slumber, but I could feel a subdued ¡®glow¡¯, like a darkened lamp or a glimmering ember. Lenore joined her sight to mine, and I gained a better impression of my magic reaching for the mind of the dryad, her mind and magic represented by a multi-hued greenish-brown in Lenore¡¯s sight, intermingled with the silver and black traces of the curses I had wrapped around her before.


    With the slight hook into the dryad¡¯s mind in place, I started channeling Astral Power into the collar, careful to keep the flow steady and low, I did not want to destroy the collar due to stupidity on my part. There was only so much Shadeleaf-paste left, no need to waste any.


    Soon, I felt the different runes connect within their formations and I focused to guide them in the right manner, connecting the curse-runes to each other, connecting the effect-runes - meaning the runes that told the curse what it was supposed to do - together, creating two separate but connected triangles around the blood-rune in the middle. Once they were ready, the triangles connected to each other and formed the seven-rune formation by joining with the blood-rune in the middle.


    With the main-formations prepared, I tried to tie them together, using their geometric positions and the central blood-runes as mediums to connect them into a larger formation. In a way, it was not a three runes-formation, but a twenty-seven runes formation, something I was not sure I could use. I had done something similar with the ritual magic I had used against the Devourer, but that had been a rework of an existing ritual, not done from scratch, as I did now.


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    But with a lot of focus, and a slight headache, I managed to connect them and felt the strands of magic reach out to the dryad. The silvery light representing Ice, the black, light-swallowing radiance of Darkness and the vibrant, pulsating red of Blood, each playing their part in the magical web that tried to envelop the dryad¡¯s body, mind and maybe even her soul. But there was a resistance, the strands slid off, or maybe they were pushed off, not managing to connect and do their part.


    I joined my own will to the web, guiding and strengthening it, while letting more magic flow into the formation, forcing the connection and the envelopment. Now, I felt the pushback myself and got an impression of desperation as the combination of my will and the web slowly encroached closer and deeper into the sanctity of the dryad¡¯s mind. With a slight smile on my lips, I pushed harder, waiting for the resistance to give way so my magic could do its job.


    Suddenly, the resistance was gone and I felt the magic gush in, filling the dryad and doing its job. With a feeling of triumph, I withdrew my mind but realised something. I had not won. Or rather, it had been a hollow victory. The light glow I had felt before was now gone, snuffed out by the pressure I had applied. Looking closer, only those strands of my magic that dealt with the body had taken hold, the purely mental strands were flapping in the breeze, so to speak. Like a cornered animal would fight to the death, the unconscious mind, or maybe the subconscious mind, of the dryad had resisted to the end, trying to push the encroachment out and had perished, instead of submitting.


    I looked at the dryad with my normal eyes and saw that she looked vacant - not just unconscious, but truly comatose. She was still awake, but no more sapient than the next tree. Or to use a common analogy, the light was still on, but nobody was home.


    Testing possible ways to undo the damage, I first withdrew my magic from the collar and even broke the collar in an attempt to regain as much unstained Shadeleaf-paste as I could, but there was no change in the dryad. There was a certain irony in the fact that I had turned a tree-spirit into a vegetable, but I was careful not to voice that thought out loud, Adra believed me to be a bit insane already, no need to confirm her opinion.


    With a thought of ¡®Waste not, want not¡¯, I plunged my athame into the dryad and siphoned her blood and power off, creating two nicely-sized pieces of blood-amber to use later. The dryad perished, I gained some experience and skill-increases for Blood Magic, Blood Rune Mastery, Darkness Magic and Darkness Rune-Mastery, demonstrating that new, creative ways to use a skill increased it beyond what repetition could do.


    But how to circumvent the problem I had just encountered... Suddenly, it was as if a light-bulb was switched on in my mind: if the unconscious mind is the problem, don¡¯t deal with it. Deal with the active, conscious mind first, break it and use the broken mind to enter. Don¡¯t try to break down the wall - smash in a window, and let the cold in.


    After resting and planning a bit, I moved to my next test-subject, one of the nymphs. A quick observe told me that it was one of the weaker nymphs, only level 44. I believed that the easiest way to break her mind, to make her welcome any contact with me, no matter what kind of contact, was probably sensory deprivation. It was supposed to be one of the worst tortures, stripping the subject of everything that made them, well, themselves. In a way, my collars were supposed to do something similar, only faster and with magic.


    When I thought a bit about it, Darkness Magic was quite versatile when it came to the mind. My Ice-Magic was rather straightforward, manipulate ice, period. Sure, Darkness-Magic allowed me to deepen shadows and things like that, but what I did now felt more encompassing, as if I had only scratched the surface before, the things dealing with the physical realm and now a whole, new realm was before me, the mental realm, the realm of minds and I was very well aware what darkness could lurk in a sapient mind.


    After cutting off all the nymph¡¯s clothing, I went to work. Using runes of shadow, concealment and a bit of disorientation, combined with a lot of Astral Power, I enveloped the nymph in a cocoon of corporeal shadow, lifting her off the snowy ground. With her floating in front of me, I used a bit of blood and darkness-magic to get rid of the effect on her, I had placed them and with a small effort, I could get rid of them again. It did not take long for the nymph to come back to consciousness, not that she would easily be able to tell. My intent in the magic was that the shadows concealed everything, vision, touch, temperature, even the sound of her own voice, everything was swallowed by the dark shadows. It seemed to work, she started to twitch a little, moving her hand but even the touch of her own hand on her own skin was concealed from her. If I did everything right, she was a discorporeal shadow, floating in a sea of endless darkness, unable to even feel herself.


    As the controller of the spell around her, I could hear her scream, a primal, desperate cry for help. But of course, other than me, nobody could hear her scream. She could not even hear her own screams.

 Chapter 84

    After I had enveloped the nymph in her shadow-cocoon, it took a few moments for her to realise her situation, that something strange was going on. At first, she didn¡¯t quite parse what was going on and was talking into the void, but there was no sound, no echo; if I didn¡¯t make a mistake, she didn¡¯t even hear the sound of her own voice. She moved around, but to no avail, the darkness simply shifted with her and kept her from feeling anything. Soon, the screaming started, desolate cries, lost in the nothingness surrounding her. As I controlled the darkness, I heard her and decided that it was time for a first contact. With her, I didn¡¯t plan to completely break her, just damage her to the point that she would welcome contact with me. The idea was that her willingness to come into contact with me and my magic would shut down, or at the very least weaken, her subconscious defense.


    Wrapped in darkness, my hand carefully approached the struggling form of the nymph, gently touching her shoulder. The first reaction was shock and she shied away from the contact, causing me to retract my hand. Shying away would just not do, I would have to let her stew for some time. Thinking of stew, I checked the dinner-preparations, and after making sure that the other two nymphs were still out, joined Sigmir and Adra to eat. Both looked a little concerned with the fact that I had killed one of our captives and had another wrapped in a sphere of darkness, but neither felt a need to comment. We enjoyed our meal together and after maybe an hour of eating and chatting, I went back to my little project.


    Again, I reached for the nymph¡¯s shoulder and this time, after tensing for a moment, the nymph welcomed the contact, craving anything to occupy her mind in the void. I reached for her with strands of darkness, gently nudging her mind and was incredibly surprised when her mind actively welcomed the invading magic, apparently she craved stimulation. I felt there was tremendous potential to work with, rewriting and conditioning her personality, but it would take serious work and for me, to go to such length, I wanted a better base-specimen.


    ¡°Relax, and I can get you out of the void.¡± I spoke, using Darkness Magic to let my voice penetrate the cocoon around her. There was no hesitation, no struggle in her, just a plea to help her, to get her out of the darkness and back into the light. Part of me wondered if the fact that nymphs were nature-, or maybe flora-, spirits made them especially vulnerable to such an approach. In my mind, it made some sense that a spirit based, or evolved, from something using photosynthesis had a strong attachment to light. Experimentation with other subjects could answer that question, but at the end of the day, a lot of beings were diurnal or in some other way reliant on light. Unless I found some kind of mole-man or maybe some kind of angler-fish, I doubted I would find a creature that enjoyed the isolation in the dark void. Probably not even then, those creatures were just anchored in senses other than sight.


    I pulled my mind out of the train of thought it had followed and focused on the present. The nymph was still pleading and now it was time to act.


    At first, I created the collar out of ice, letting it settle around her neck, softly speaking to her, telling her that I needed an anchor to get her out of the dark, that it would help me reach her. Without the knowledge just where she was, it was easy to convince her that she was trapped in some sort of otherworldly void and, for a moment, my mind flickered to stories I had read about a person dying and finding themself in some sort of white-space, just to be greeted by a deity and whisked away to another life, a life of adventure, greatness and pleasure. I had always wondered how easy it would be to convince someone of your intentions and now, I discovered that it was incredibly easy, the nymph was either desperate for help, or incredibly gullible.


    ¡°You will feel a small prick.¡± I told her at one point, convincing her that everything was fine in order to get some of her blood. Part of me was annoyed that I had forgotten to get it before putting her under, but it would have to do. She didn¡¯t even question me, she was so desperate to leave the void that even the small cut I used was a welcome stimulus.


    I added the blood to the already carved runes and filled the collar with the shadeleaf-paste I had left. Considering the amount I had left, I would probably have to get rid of one of the two remaining nymphs, I doubted that it would be enough for two more collars and I did not want to use it all up. I would have to carefully keep an eye out and ask Sigmir, Adra and Ylva to do the same.


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    When the runes were finished, I channelled power into them, feeling the tendrils reach for the nymph and my voice was keeping up a reassuring, almost hypnotic patter, drawing her in and letting the tendrils seep into her being. It was interesting to watch; she easily welcomed the threads of ice, they matched part of her natural processes to a T. It was almost as if the magic of ice, of torpor, was supposed to fit into a part of her. Thinking about it, it did make some sense, most trees went into a sort of hibernation, shedding their leaves, storing energy and so on. The rune I read as torpor was at least part of the concept that caused it.


    The darkness-threads had a harder time, they were lacking the natural pattern that the ice-threads settled in but it was only a slowing down, not true resistance. The nymph truly wanted the magic to settle in, convinced that it would guide her out of the dark. And it would, just not quite in the way she wanted it to happen.


    I watched as the magic enveloped her being, the disorientation settling in and the madness scrambling her mind. Once it was done, I let the shadows around her vanish, feeling that there was no more need for an external prison, she was now imprisoned in her own mind. Just as I had planned, the torpor-runes were weakening her mind, bringing it down into a simple, almost infantile state. When added to the disorientation and madness-runes, the result was a zombie-like state, the nymph had no capacity to question, no capacity to resist. But on the other hand, anything more advanced than walking would be out of question, and even when walking, she would have to be guided. Soon, the threads were fully embedded, keeping her mind in the state of dimness that I wanted it to be and I got a blue window, telling me about something new.


    <table><tbody><tr><td>Skill increased</td></tr><tr><td>You increased your skill: Darkness Magic [26/100]</td></tr></tbody></table>


    <table><tbody><tr><td>Trait gained </td></tr><tr><td>You gained the trait: Mind Bender</td></tr><tr><td>You are able to use a combination of torture, darkness-magic and hypnosis to bend others to your will. Overall effect of mental subjugation increased.</td></tr></tbody></table>


    Now, that did sound useful and worrying at the same time. I doubted that civilised beings would welcome a trait like that, at least if they knew about it. It would be interesting to watch if there was some sort of interplay between this trait and the Ruthless-trait I had picked up so long ago.


    Testing the streams of power I still held, I channelled a bit more power into the torpor-runes and watched as the nymph slumped over, falling into a state between sleep and coma. She would remain in that state, as long as power was provided to the collar, so either I would have to do so, meaning I could not log out, or I would have to use another source, like blood-magic. I had planned ahead and the collar had multiple small receptacles to receive the resin-like blood-ambers I had gathered. I did not have enough to fully fuel the collar with those, but it should be enough for a few nights. And for the other nymph, I had planned something else. Before I could take care of the other nymphs, I redressed the collared nymph, I did not want to damage her, before it was time to use her.


    With one nymph done, I went over to the other two, observing them and picking the stronger one, this one would sadly have to be discarded. I never let her regain her consciousness, feeling it would be needless cruel. I just stabbed my athame into her, draining her life and the astral power contained within, watching her essence flow into the small pebbles of amber. She did not produce the same amount of power as the dryad had done, but more than the two I had euthanized directly after the battle.


    After the second nymph died, I got a nice surprise, the EXP she had given were just enough to push me into the next level, even if they were slightly reduced.


    Wanting to get my work done, before going to sleep, I moved to the third nymph. Again, I undressed her and drew a little blood before enveloping her in darkness. I let the her stew for a while, before repeating the process I had used before, offering her help and talking in a kind voice, while I let my magic seep into her mind. It was a lot easier, thanks to the trait, and I wondered if it worked that well because they were nymphs. Part of their being, their raison d¡¯¨ºtre, so to speak, was to be bound to a dryad, making the process of being bound something natural for them. Again, more experimentation would be required, on different subjects. The whole idea was fascinating to me.


    Soon after I had started, the nymph was collared and her mind was subdued - only this collar had small thorns on the inside, drawing blood from the nymph and using the blood and the power within to fuel the collar. I was quite proud of the design, it was quite elegant. The nymph¡¯s own power was fueling the collar keeping her subdued.

 Chapter 85

    Once more, I was forced to suppress socially inappropriate laughter the morning after we fought the dryad and her nymphs. During breakfast, Sigmir had asked me if I had slept well and I had happily told her that I had slept great. The expression on Adra¡¯s face, who was looking at the two surviving, now collared, nymphs had turned into a grimace of disbelief and dread when she heard me professing that the torture and the violation I had committed the night before had not affected my sleep in any way.


    We also took stock of the things secured from the nymphs and I was happy to find multiple of the enchanted darts we had seen before, the ones used to capture living beings for their sacrificial rituals. With them, I would be able to use magic to put Jonari-guards to sleep, adding more credence to the idea that nymphs and dryads of Tegi had attacked them. Our plan was slightly ruthless, but I wanted the quest to hunt us dealt with, else it would most likely come back to bite us in the butt. If I understood what the Grandmother had told us correct, quests like that, with an easy way to track the prey, were rare and almost always given by a leader to rescue someone taken from their community. So, in a way, the system was fallible; it could be abused to gain advantages, if one was able to delude oneself. Or maybe, the quest-giver was truly convinced that the quest was given to rescue Sigmir. If that was the case, it could be a problem, if it was not given by one of our three targets.


    It annoyed me that I was so lacking in information; there were variables that I did not know - essential variables - but I had not the slightest idea how to get the information. The name ¡°Divination¡± came to mind, but I had no idea how to even start an attempt to scry for the information I wanted, nor of what elements governed divination and scrying. Both Light and Darkness were possible, but it was also possible that there were higher elements that I did not know about. Thinking logically, space and time were needed for divination, one wanted to gather information from a different point in either space or time. or both, and interpret that information. So, clairvoyance, or farsight, would be Space, pre- and postcognition would be Time and true divination would be both. I wondered if the skill I used to see through Lenore¡¯s eyes was considered divination and if I could use it to gain a mechanism to start research into that branch of magic.


    My ruminations on magic were interrupted when I had to check up on the two nymphs and suddenly realised something I had not considered. Thus far, my idea had worked, the mind of both nymphs was suppressed to the point that I would not call them sentient any longer, they were alive and could be guided through simple, muscle-memory tasks, like walking, chewing and swallowing, but anything higher than that was not possible. So, we would have to take care of them, as if they were two overgrown toddlers, practically baby-sitting them the next few days. That would be so much fun, I could hardly wait. I was mentally cursing the Pantheon development-team, why on earth did they have to make everything at such a high level of realism? What a shitty job...


    After we had our breakfast, I told the other two what we would have to do, causing Sigmir to groan a little and Adra to scowl. Neither looked happy but Adra agreed to help me feed them for now. However, taking them into the bushes to relieve themselves was a chore neither wanted to help with.


    A while later, we were on our way, with me both intrigued and disgusted. The chore had killed even the most remote idea of ever having children and given me an interesting insight in the human, or rather sapient, condition. For some reason, the hygiene conditioning was stronger rooted in the mind than anything else, it apparently held true even when the mind was suppressed to a state little higher than ¡®vegetable¡¯, They were walking like zombies, and even the idea of speech or rational thought was laughable, but that single, simple part held true. Maybe because it was part of the earliest, learned behaviour.


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    Luckily, we did not have to let their slow, shuffling walk slow us down, Sigmir and I simply summoned our mounts and fixated the two nymphs on their back, walking next to the mounts. Both of them were rather displeased by my actions, equating my actions to the practise of forcefully binding spirits into shells and using them as tools but they merely voiced their opinion without trying to change the agreement they were under. They had given their word to serve as mounts for a time and would do so. Almost no matter what I did with them.


    With the two nymphs on the mounts, Sigmir and I were able to demonstrate the strength one gains when crossing the first divide by only slightly reducing our pace, despite having to keep up with spirit-mounts and Adra¡¯s strange goat-like form. Over the day, we crossed quite the distance, passing the area we had hidden Rai in, but not actually meeting him. He had orders to wait for our return and hopefully he would obey them. Well, if he did not, he would come to regret it. Collateral damage was a sad reality of life after all.


    In the evening, we made camp and I did my babysitting-chores, once more contemplating the need for both nymphs, maybe one would do. But no, I had both and would not waste them simply to spare myself work. Another annoyance was the need to use external blood magic to keep one of the collars going through the night, the other used the nymph it held to fuel itself, but the first one I had created needed an external powersource. While I was awake, I was easily able to channel power into it, it was little more than a trickle, but when I was asleep or, even worse, logged out, I could not do so, forcing me to use other ways to keep it powered. Originally, I had planned to use the blood-amber I had gathered but it was a bad idea, wasting what little I had. No, I would have to use my own blood.


    Shortly before I went to sleep, I went to the two nymphs. The one with the self-fueling collar looked a little pale but not seriously injured. Cutting into my finger, I tried something new, actively forcing Astral Power into the drawn blood to supercharge it. My mind recoiled in pain, but I got the feeling that it worked, making the blood, for lack of better term, thicker and more potent. A single drop contained an incredible amount of Astral Power, I had managed to squeeze about a third of my total Astral Power into it before the pain spiked to another level of agony, breaking my concentration and leaving me reeling.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Skill increased</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You increased your skill: Blood Magic [33/100]</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    It was quite the surprise when I realised that my hair had lost its supernatural colouration, normally, it was sprinkled with small silvery lights but now that light was gone. I suspected there were also black lights and maybe even a few dark red ones, but those were simply invisible in my dark hair. The Grandmother had warned me that my hair stored my power and that the external storage of power, outside of my vital body, came with both advantages and disadvantages. Had I just discovered one of the advantages - the ability to shift the power from my hair, into shed blood without mind-rending pain? Maybe. Or maybe there was another mechanism at play, something I did not know. It was highly possible, after all.


    I spent the night snuggled up to Sigmir, enjoying her warmth. But sadly, it was not for the full night. Thanks to the night-attack the nymphs had used to capture Adra before we met, both Sigmir and Adra insisted on a night-watch, split between three shift. Thanks to Lenore and Ylva taking a watch each as well, each night two of us could sleep through the night and three people had to switch off. That night, Sigmir had the dog watch, the middle watch, leaving her with the shortest amount of uninterrupted sleep. The fact that I slept in her embrace meant that I would wake as well, but there was no way that I would give that up.


    In the morning, I was rather grumpy while taking care of the two nymphs, but that faded when something truly interesting happened. Something I had not expected or intended, but it was an interesting development nonetheless. The nymph with the self-fueled collar stumbled, slumped over and gave off an heart-wrenching, piercing wail, telling of unimaginable agony, a wail that seemed to go on forever and that conveyed only one thing.


    Despair. It was the sound of a soul that only wished to escape the mortal coil, to flee into the Cycle of Rebirth, what some called the river of souls.


    But either chance or destiny had other plans.

 Chapter 86

    I had just watered the nymph with the directly powered collar and was now moving on to the other nymph, this one with the collar she fueled herself. My first task was to bring her into the nearby bushes, so she could relieve herself, so I pulled her up and pushed her forward, following behind.


    All of a sudden, the nymph keeled over, dropping to her knees and a shrill, piercing scream ripped out of her throat, surprising me. I would not have believed that any being could sound so utterly desperate, let alone one that should not have more cognitive functions than the average potted plant. But somehow she did and her voice was conveying a brutal mixture of pain, despair and dread. If I could bottle that sound and add it to a spell, I would have the ultimate ¡®fear¡¯-spell. It reminded me of the tales about banshees, mystical spirits, or maybe ghosts, that were able to bring death with their wail. The nymph was no banshee, but she was doing her very best to imitate one.


    I moved around the nymph, trying to find out what was going on, kneeling down to be level with her when the world stumbled. There was no better way to describe it, it was not a physical sensation, but a psychological sensation, a shudder passing through the air, causing all the small hairs on my body to stand up.


    Suddenly, the scream was cut off, not tapering off or choked off, no, it was more as if a faucet was closed, switching from bone-chilling screams to an eerie silence. But that was not all, the nymph was standing back up, moving in a wooden, unnatural manner, almost as if something had attached strings to her limp and moved her like a puppet.


    I stood, wondering if someone was interfering with my collared nymph and in a bit for more information, I used Lenore¡¯s magic sight, looking for more information, maybe some sort of hint what was going on. And a hint I did get. In hindsight, I wished I had never pulled back the veil to peek behind it. What I saw, could not be unseen and I knew that it would haunt me to the end of my days.


    Throughout the ages, writers had written about fear of the unknown, about the instinctual fear people had from the dark, from beings hidden in the dark. I had never feared the dark, least of all since I came here, to Mundus, and learned to control it, to harness it. What I saw at that moment, was one of the reasons people feared the dark.


    My mind was screaming, recoiling in horror from the thing that should not be, screaming to flee, to hide or madness would claim me, if I persisted to look at it. In a way, calling it the granddaddy of the Devourer of Tegi would not be inaccurate, but only insofar that calling a tiger and a kitten related would be accurate. It was so much more, so different that my mind did not want to classify it. There were tentacles, some with gaping maws and jagged teeth, others with strange suckers, as if it was an octopus or something similar. And it was huge, almost incomprehensibly so but it did not quite follow the rules of geometry as I knew them. There was a strange twisting of space, of reality around it, making even the most remote comparison moot, my mind was simply not equipped to handle a being like that. In the moment I peeked behind the veil, a single tentacle was holding the nymph¡¯s head and it looked as if the rest of the being wanted to squeeze inside the nymph. I doubted that it would work, I prayed to all the gods that may or may not be out there that it would not work.


    My peek only lasted a single instant, but that single instant caused Lenore to recoil in pain and her mental anguish echoed in my mind. Not that my own mind was doing much better, it was as if there were multiple tons pressing against my skull, trying to crack it open to make my brain squish out, like the filling in a pi?ata.


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    As one part of my mind was trying to reconcile the things I had just seen with the reality around me, another part was taking in the nymph with my mundane senses. The first thing I noted was that the collar around her neck, formerly a clean, silver-blue colour with reddish-dark inscriptions was now being tainted with a mottled grey-purple sludge, causing even the remote, insane idea to use the collar to suppress whatever it was to die the moment I had it. There was no way in this world, the next world or any world that I would link my mind to that collar.


    My eyes were roaming further up, the nymphs mouth, her nose and then, her eyes. I had read once that the eyes were a window to the soul. If that was the case, I truly did not want to think about the things I saw there. The disorienting nausea I had felt around Nethersprites before was assaulting me, stronger than ever before, driving me to my knees and causing me to retch. In a way, it was lucky that I had not eaten breakfast, or I would have lost it.


    But while my mind recoiled from the eyes that would haunt my nightmares, my eyes were unable to sever the connection, even as I was brought to my knees. I could not look away, could not break the gaze of the unreal entity before me.


    The mouth of the being, formerly known as nymph, opened and sound came out. It was definitely not the the voice of the nymph, the voice sounding more like a mix between crushed gravel and breaking bones, deep and sombre.


    ¡°Y'' ymg'' mgr''luh.  Y'' ymg'' kadishtu hai¡­¡± My ears heard the words but at the same time, my mind heard them, too. Maybe it was because of Lenore¡¯s ability, maybe it was because the entity had a similar ability. But I knew the meaning of the words. ¡®I see you. I know you now¡­¡¯ With the sound, a feeling of hunger, the impulse to devour was creeping into my mind, a hunger that could never be sated, no matter what was devoured.


    In my chest, the crystal that had formed when I crossed the first divide started to tremble, sending streams of chilling, calming energy into my flesh and into my mind, trying to reduce the strain I was under, thanks to the unbroken gaze of the being. Sadly, it was not enough, I could not even rise from my knees, let alone use magic or do anything at all to defend myself against it.


    Just as the being started to raise it¡¯s arm, maybe to touch me, maybe to do something else - I did not know and, in all honesty, I did not want to know what it had planned - when a line of cold silver flashed through my vision.


    The connection between our eyes broke, allowing me to look away and what I saw made my heart soar. Sigmir stood behind the nymph, clad in her red aura, eyes flashing with the yellow of Ylva¡¯s strengthening ability and her Lok¡¯nar still moving fast, using the momentum of her first strike to strike again and again, reducing the possessed nymph to ground meat. Never before was I so glad to see someone being hacked to pieces, never before had violence looked that good. As Sigmir was hacking away, the pressure on my mind was slowly decreasing, giving me more mental breathing room, The crystal was still helping, healing my tortured mind from the strain it had been under.


    Finally, I had regained enough strength to stand and take stock of my surroundings. Both nymphs were dead, one hacked to pieces by Sigmir, the other killed by Adra with a single stroke of her spear. It took me a moment to realise that I had stopped supplying the collar the moment I had peeked behind the veil, my mind too scrambled to keep the supply up and when the nymph had started to snap out of it, Adra had taken measures. I truly could not fault her, not when the second nymph was in the process of bringing some sort of eldritch abomination into the world. Sure, the thing had focused on me for some reason, but I had no doubt that both, Adra and Sigmir, had felt that something was seriously wrong.


    A small, tiny, part of my mind was looking at the log, taking note that we had only gained exp for one of the nymphs and nothing for the other thing, no doubt because it did not die in any way. There was also another screen, telling me that my Defilement-trait had been strengthened causing me to shudder. If things like that could be brought forth with Blood Magic, I was not so sure if I wanted to continue the practise.

 Chapter 87

    I felt shaken, my mind still reeling from the glimpse behind the veil. The knowledge that something so strange was lurking just beyond some barrier was unsettling. Add in the fact that a mere glimpse had been enough to drive my mind close to a breaking point and I was humbled. Experimenting with magic, especially Blood Magic, suddenly seemed a dangerous idea. Maybe, just maybe, I should focus on my Ice Magic for now and some Darkness Magic to mix it up.


    ¡°What happened? Are you alright?¡± Sigmir asked, her voice thick with concern.


    ¡°Yes I¡¯m alright. Can you tell me what you saw?¡±


    ¡°I heard the nymph scream and suddenly, I was hit by an aura, a powerful and alien aura and I saw you driven to your knees. It was rather obvious that the aura was emanating from the nymph, so I made it go away.¡± Sigmir explained.


    ¡°I felt the aura as well and thought it would be a good idea to make sure that the other nymph did not join her comrade.¡± Adra added.


    Lenore took that moment to leave her Hallow and perch on my shoulder. Through our link, I was able to feel her inner turmoil, at least as strong as my own.


    ¡°By the Ancestor, just what was that?¡± she asked.


    ¡°I think it was some sort of Nethersprite. Or something similar. It reminded me of the Devourer in Tegi, just taken up to eleven, or maybe twelve. I wish I had an idea what caused its appearance, so I can avoid it.¡± I explained, focusing on Lenore.


    ¡°It could be a coincidence. How exactly did that collar work? I know you channelled power into the other, but not this one. So where did the power come from?¡± inquired Lenore.


    ¡°Blood Magic. There were barbs inside the collar, drawing blood and power from the nymph wearing it. Once it was powered up by me, it was self sufficient, empowered by the wearer. The stronger the wearer, the stronger the power for the collar. I thought it was an elegant solution.¡±


    Lenore tilted her head, something I had seen her do when deep in thought. After a few moments, she blinked and came up with a theory. ¡°Didn¡¯t the Grandmother tell us that all Blood Magic leaves a miasma and higher concentrations draw Nethersprites? So what you did was create a continued stream of misama, flowing into the world and maybe other realms? A continued flow that something could follow back, leading it to a weakened, subdued mind, ready for the takeover?¡±


    The mental image Lenore¡¯s words invoked was rather pointed, a nymph with a line hanging down into different realms, similar to a fishing float with a lure hanging below it, leading to the surface. If that was what I had done, I was relieved. Not that I would test it out, far too dangerous, but it did not mean I would have to completely give up on Blood Magic, even in dire emergencies. But I would take care not to do something similar, or similarly stupid. In addition, I should run my ideas past Lenore and maybe Elding and Hringur, they had more knowledge about other realms, hailing from there.


    Blood Magic reminded me a little of nuclear power generation in the real world, relatively easy to use but with incredibly dangerous side-effects, allowing for unexperienced or careless users to kill themselves in a myriad of ways, possibly taking huge swaths of land with them. Only that Blood Magic was possible for an individual, making it even more dangerous. Somehow, the alleged persecution made some sense now.


    Forcibly shaking off the remnants of terror that still clung to me, we quickly broke camp and mounted, now able to move faster, without the two nymphs. During our ride, I explained Elding the events and got her opinion and it turned out that she concurred with Lenore. A continued stream of power into a different realm was a subtle, but obvious lure for more powerful denizens of that realm, allowing them to use their own power to follow the stream, letting even the most powerful beings cross over the boundaries between realms. And what I had seen had probably been one of the most powerful Nethersprites in their realm, powerful and ancient. According to Elding, beings on that level could only cross over by their own accord or if they were summoned with their true name and insane amounts of power or sacrifice. So to put it into perspective, I had goofed and dropped a lure into the water and managed to fish up the Leviathan.


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    We rested for lunch and I told the other two about the adjustments to our plan. Sadly, we were missing the central part - the unquestionable evidence that the dryads had done the deed - so it would have to go down to circumstantial evidence, for example the enchanted sleep-darts we had found on them. Those were pretty damning and in addition to the trails we would lay into their lands, hopefully into one of their camps, it should be enough. Personally, I would prefer more evidence to remove even the most unreasonable doubt, but sometimes one had to play the cards one was dealt. Now, we had a decent but not good hand and had to bluff the rest.


    After lunch, Sigmir started to recognise the first landmarks and it told her that we were roughly two days march away from her tribe¡¯s permanent village. That told me that I wanted an overwatch, so I talked Lenore into flying scout for us, making sure that we did not run into a hunting party or something similar. In addition, I started to focus on hiding our tracks. There were two ways to do so, either simply let our tracks form and use ice magic to alter or erase them or stop them from forming in the first place, using ice magic to send the weight placed on the snow into the deeper layers.


    My plan was to use the first method for now, mainly because it was similar to the method used by the dryad group we had fought before. Once we had guided the Jonari to the dryads, we could use the second method, which I thought better and more secretive, to disappear. But for now, I wanted our tracks to look as similar to the tracks of the dryads as possible.


    For the night, we found a camp not to close to the Jonari village, meaning we would easily be able to make our way into their camp the next evening so it was time for us to rest and recuperate before our night raid the next night. One of the easiest ways to make sure we were awake during the next night, was to stay up as long as possible and try to sleep during the next day.


    During the evening, Sigmir drew into the snow, making a rough map of the village, as she knew it, making sure that we knew what was in store for us. To me, the collection of houses looked nothing like a village. The houses mostly formed small clusters, up to five houses if I saw it right, but there was no obvious connection, like roads or straight paths between the clusters. My mind wanted to call it a chaotic mess but to the Jonari, it was what they called home. I asked about the clusters and was told that each cluster was home to an extended family, sometimes the adult children stayed close to their parents and extended the cluster, sometimes they started a new cluster. People like her father, who left for an extended period of time, always started their own cluster - in a way forming their own, new family. I could see that there were further social norms, maybe unique to the Jonari, maybe part of tribal culture but for an outsider like me, there was no unravelling them.


    The cluster housing the chieftain and his family, including Jongarn, was central to the village, the shaman was housed at the edge of the village, secluded and hidden from view. Our plan was to hit the chieftain¡¯s family first, as the main target. Killing the shaman was important - and a voice within me called for his blood, wanted to kill him in the most grievous of ways for the pollution of Sigmir¡¯s soul - but the quest that guided that traveller-group to us was more important. Yes, revenge was best served cold, icy cold, but it was not my priority.


    On her crude map, Sigmir showed us the best paths of approach, just in case we needed them. She even suggested splitting up, Adra and I going after the chieftain and she going after the shaman, something I thought about for a moment. The only thing keeping me from dismissing it out of hand was that Sigmir made the suggestion, someone who I believed to be an extraordinary fighter, with a firm grasp of tactics. But I felt that the disadvantages far outweighed the advantages, so I explained my reasoning to her and then dismissed the idea.


    Deep in the night, with only the faintest glimmer of moonlight in the sky, we started our guard-rotation. Tomorrow night would be a dark and windy killing night.

 Chapter 88

    We spent the day relaxing in the hideout close to the Jonari Village. But the relaxation ended the moment dusk settled over the land, covering it in a dim twilight. Our timing had been good, there was no moon in the sky and thin clouds made sure that even starlight was limited. I had seen darker areas, but seldom under the open sky. But to us, the darkness was useful, cloaking and hiding us from anyone who may or may not search for us.


    Before setting out, I renewed the concealment spells on all of us and strengthened them for good measure. The most important thing tonight was to not get caught. If we did, everything else was mostly a waste of time. If we did not, the worst that could happen would be an annoyance with little true consequence. Maybe that was the most important thing to keep in mind. The only way to truly fail tonight, was getting caught. Feeling that there might be some emotional component for Sigmir, I made sure to stress that fact to her, I had some concern that she would do something stupid, evidenced by the fact that she wanted to go off by herself to take care of the shaman - maybe the most powerful foe we would have tonight. And while I was willing to punish the Jonari-leadership for their actions against Sigmir, I was not willing to lose Sigmir over that punishment. Not in a thousand years.


    On foot, we approached the village, using quite a bit of magic to keep us hidden from view and to hide our tracks. Hiding us felt easier than ever, the dark night helped a lot and the trait I got from my new class strengthened my magic to an extreme degree. I had a feeling that the trait was not linear but some sort of exponential strengthening, making the strengthening at the extreme-points, full and new-moon, a lot more potent than the rest of the time.


    I would love to claim that we proudly stood atop a hill, looking down on the dimly lit village we would raid that night. But it would be a lie. We crept into the area around the village through the forest surrounding, sticking to shadows and hiding behind any cover that we could find. No, there was no arrogance in our approach, all three of us were aware that we lacked the strength to do open and ¡®honourable¡¯ combat, we had to sneak in and use a knife in the darkness.


    I think that need to sneak in was especially hard on Sigmir. To her, honour was a cornerstone of her personality; honourable behaviour - especially in combat - was deeply ingrained in her, deep enough to pledge her life to me for saving hers. That pledge was also the core of her rationalisation right now. To her, our actions were dishonourable but she was not responsible because she only did as ordered. It was rather interesting that she was using self-delusion to that point, but maybe she did not see it as such. Another interesting part was that she had no problem with stealth during a hunt, something that was an entirely different ballgame compared to combat. That was interesting in itself and part of me wondered how close the ¡®hunted¡¯ party had to be to her people to count as a combat opponent compared to a prey to be hunted.


    Adra was more practical about it. To her stealthy tactics were just natural - she simply considered herself analogous to a great cat waiting for prey in a tree or using tall grass or foilage to sneak up on its prey. There was no differentiation between hunting and combat in her mindset - at least I was unable to detect one.


    A part of me would love to study the different races¡¯ mental makeups and find a common thread. I was aware of studies about human morality and human behaviour when confronted with immoral choices, something the programmers had to have used as a baseline, unless they tried to create the psychological makeup of all the species without any baseline, which I doubted as it was a far too complex concept to just eyeball it. So it had to be somehow based on human concepts, or maybe on the concepts of other social species on earth. Looking for those common threads and the basic concepts would be fascinating - the attempt to follow a designer to their template, a designer that did not want things to look designed, but evolved. At least for the natural species, my own species was supposed to be designed from two natural templates, making the evolutionary makeup even more interesting. But that study would have to wait until I got a better handle on my magic-studies, those were more important for now.


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    I tamped down on my random musings once we left the forest and the possibility of detection from the village turned from ¡®extremely unlikely¡¯ to ¡®quite possible¡¯. With that change, I focused on my darkness magic, making sure that we were nothing more than a shadow in the dark, invisible to casual observers. Even an awake and watchful observer would be hard pressed to find us in the deep and encompassing darkness.


    Sigmir was guiding us through the darkness, keeping us well away from the houses, just in case someone was looking out. It was unlikely, to do so, they would have to open a window, letting a lot of warmth out. According to Sigmir, windows were covered with shutters from the outside and multiple layers of fur and leather from the inside during winter, making the act of opening one a large ordeal. The Jonari had little to no clear glass, meaning that most windows were very small and easily covered anyway. So, as long as we didn¡¯t make too much noise, we should be in the clear.


    It was interesting, to see the different stages of civilisation at the same time. The Jonari were slightly less advanced than the wolfman of Adernas who, in turn were less advanced than the bear-beastman in Yari. The Naga-settlement we had visited once had a vastly different stage of development, using different building-materials and techniques. A serious outlier was Neyto, with an almost modern technology-level, but that was easily explained by the power of the inhabitants and the access to serious levels of magic. Part of me was looking forward to the bigger cities and their standards of living.


    But right now, I was seeing the buildings of the Jonari around me, built out of hewn wood and insulated with some sort of clay before being whitewashed with chalk or lime or something similar. The fact that Sigmir had lime with her, back when we met, led me to believe that it was a lime-based plaster.


    As we sneaked into the village proper, not even the dogs wanted to react, driven back into their shelter by the cold. Or maybe the concealment-magic I had layered on top of us prevented our smell from alerting them. It didn¡¯t really matter what kept them down, but it worked.


    Soon, we got to the house of the chieftain, Sigmir still guiding us. As we advanced, I checked for detection wards around the area but there was nothing to be seen. When we got to the door, Sigmir tried to open it. Soft pressure against the door proved fruitless, it didn¡¯t budge in the slightest. A short look to the middle showed that there was no key-hole, so it was most likely barred from the inside. Breaking it open with force would definitely cause enough noise to alert anything in the area, who, in turn, would alert everyone in the village. So, brute force was out.


    Pressing against the door caused it to slightly shift back, only a few millimeters but enough for a shadow to creep in. I was quite unsure of what I was doing, but I was able to feel the darkness on the other side, maybe I would be able to do so without the connection and my mind just used the connection as a crutch, but I was feeling the structure of the door, through the door. Thinking of the first manifestation I had used with my darkness-magic, the tendrils, I mentally focused on the rune, trying to manifest them from the darkness on the other side of the door, in order to use them to lift the bar that held the door closed.


    Astral Power was slowly flowing out of me, until I felt the tendrils connect with the edges of my mind. Thinking of the way I was using the vines manifested with my Eisblumen-Accessory,  I managed to get them to move as I wanted and to lift the bar up, but the moment I did so, the drain on my magic increased by an order of magnitude. Using darkness in such a way was a lot harder than expected, causing me to almost let the heavy bar drop, but it was slowly slipping from the tendrils. Luckily, the pressure I had placed on the door to get the connection caused the door to swing open and allowed Sigmir to make the catch, before the whole house was alerted to our presence.


    Now, we just had to find our targets.

 Chapter 89

    With the door open, Sigmir, Adra and I sneaked in, looking around the room after quickly closing the door - a cold draft would be a telling signal for anyone feeling it that something was wrong. We were in a large front-room, something I would call a saloon, sitting-room or main-room, depending on the area I was in. There was a large table, with benches and a large, almost throne-like chair in one part of the room and a stone-hearth against the opposite wall. A few doors were leading further into the house.


    A quick assessment told me that we were not alone in the room, in front of the hearth, two sleeping forms were visible. Freezing upon their discovery, I used my magic to make sure they were deep asleep, before sneaking closer and drawing my dagger. Observe told me their levels were in the high forties, so I should easily be able to take care of them. Just before I was close enough to start slitting throats, Sigmir put a hand on my arm, stopping me.


    ¡°Don¡¯t. The smell would give us away.¡± she whispered in my ear.


    It was something I had not accounted for, but she was right. At the same time, I did not want to leave them here, only held by a spell that may or may not hold if there was a commotion. No, those two had to die, silently and without spilled blood. Suffocating would work, but it was very likely that they would wake during the process, trying to fight back and making a ruckus. Thinking further, I had an idea.


    The dryad I had first tested my collars on, I had managed to snuff her consciousness out, without her making any fuss. In a vegetative state such as that, I had no problem leaving the two out here, maybe ending their suffering on the way out, when it no longer mattered.


    Placing my hands on the temples of the first one, I tried reaching out with my darkness magic, feeling for the mind of the Jonari, similar to the way I had done with the dryad. Back then, I had the collar to help me, but right now, the new moon strengthened my darkness magic to a great degree, allowing me to work the same magic, without any strain or external tools.


    Using Lenore¡¯s sight as a guiding tool, I let the dark tendrils of my magic invade the core of the Jonari¡¯s being. I felt Lenore¡¯s mind join mine in the attack and felt her alien thought processes merge with mine. It was an interesting, if alien, feeling. Her mind worked nothing like mine, if the parts I felt during the merge were any indication. She had lent me her senses before, but that was always preprocessed by her mind and made suitable for my own mind by the magic that bound us together. Now, it was an unfiltered merge, letting us feel the other¡¯s mind in its primal form.


    Her mind was a thing of immense complexity, able to use complex information in ways I would never be able to, as long as it was information her instincts could handle. Flight was one of the things covered, giving me a feeling that she was easily able to fly but completely unable to teach flying, even if someone got wings. The magic we were using at that moment was used in a similar manner.


    She did not go after the mind of our victim as I did, her magic attacked something else. When I attacked the mind, the mental image I had was that of a cloud or gaseous ball, connected to the physical form at the skull, the spine and the heart. I was not quite sure why those three points, but if I had to explain my instinct, I would say that the skull, and the brain to be precise, governed conscious thought, the heart governed emotions and the spine governed instincts. Of course there was some overlap and it was probably simply a mental model used by me to help me guide my magic and not rooted in reality. But it worked for me and that was all I needed.


    The ball itself was a representation of the mind and the power that mind wielded, in the form of it¡¯s Astral Power. The mind of the dryad I had probed before had been steeped in nature and natural magic, the mind I was probing now had less astral power, a lot less, and it was mostly ¡®flavoured¡¯ ice and something I would call ¡®physical¡¯ or ¡®body¡¯ magic; it felt similar to blood magic, but more encompassing, thus the connection to the physical aspect of one''s being.


    This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.


    But anyway, my mode of attack was trying to sever the connections between the mind and body, leaving the mind to slowly dissolve in the background stream of the Astral River. Lenore worked in another way, striking at something I was unable to perceive, trying to knock that something loose so it would be swept away. At least, that was what I got from the way her mind went about the task.


    As we worked, I felt a few impulses flash from the mind I was attacking into the connections to the body but I was able to squash those impulses. The body below us didn¡¯t even twitch, giving me the impression that the impulses that I stopped were commands from the mind to the body and vice versa. Without those impulses, there was no fighting back for the body. And in the mental realm, Lenore and I were making quick headway, the connections I was attacking started to fray and Lenore had success with her own attack.


    Suddenly I felt the three connections snap at almost the same time, each sending a shockwave through the glowing ball, dimming it with the last reducing the glow completely. At the same time I felt Lenore¡¯s triumph echo in my mind and felt something else fade from the being in front of me.


    When I blinked open my eyes, I realised that I had gotten a message that the Jonari in front of me had died and I had gained EXP. A mental question to Lenore told me that what she had done was attack the soul of the being in front of us, knocking it loose and sending it into the cycle of reincarnation. There was just no coming back from that.


    With a good way to permanently take the guards out, without attracting attention, we quickly dealt with the second guard before moving on. Sigmir pointed to one of the doors and we carefully sneaked over. Opening it revealed a hallway, leading deeper into the house. Sigmir led us on, before stopping at one door.


    ¡°This is the chief¡¯s chamber. I¡¯ve never been in it.¡± she whispered to us.


    Again I carefully tested the door and, feeling no resistance, slowly opened it, revealing a dark room with a large bed against one wall. The room was dominated by that bed, overshadowing what little else there was in the way of furniture. Two chests, a large closet, a small table looking like a nightstand and a footstool, all simply made but sturdy looking, not quite the filled and cluttered rooms I was used to. In the middle of the bed, a singular, large-framed humanoid was snoring in deep sleep. Before any of us approached, I carefully used magic to deepen his sleep, hoping that he was lacking any instincts against a magical attack during his sleep. But if he would wake from a sleep-spell while sleeping, we were screwed anyway, in that case, there was no way we could get close enough to attack without him waking.


    After a moment of resistance, the spell took hold and the feedback told me that the chieftain was powerful, stronger than both Sigmir and I combined in terms of level. Attacking him outright would be a quick way to my first ingame death and the loss of Sigmir and Adra. So again, subterfuge would be needed.


    Keeping a mental eye on the sleep-curse I had placed on him, I moved closer, making sure that I was not missing anything, for example a bed-companion, when approaching. But no, the chieftain was sleeping alone. Maybe it was part of their custom, maybe something else. Now was certainly not the time to think about giantblood tribal marital sleeping-arrangements.


    Thinking of the way I had dealt with the guards outside, I wanted to do the same again. Kneeling on the bed, I placed my hands at his temples and channelled my magic. Just like before, Lenore joined me and then things started to go bad. The mind I was attacking was not that much stronger, at least that was what it seemed like. But it resisted my attacks and the pulsing flashes from mind to body and back were stronger, taking all my mental strength to keep him from simply shaking my attack off and starting the fight in the physical realm. I needed to give Lenore time to do her thing, hopefully, with enough time she would manage to strike at his soul - or so I thought. That thought was shattered after the first attack she dealt, it was repulsed by a raw, undirected but powerful outburst of power, throwing her back and injuring her. She was out of the fight.


    The repulsion of Lenore brought a stalemate, I was unable to cause any telling damage, the chieftains mind was powerful enough to resist me but I was strong enough to hold the fight in the mental realm, where I was able to bind him. But of course, that would not last, I was expending mental strength and Astral Power with my binding, just keeping his mind from its normal function.


    I had to draw a tiny bit of my mental strength back, just enough to blurt out a single, simple word. ¡°Help!¡±

 Chapter 90

    Even the short moment it had taken me to blurt out my plea for help had set the struggle within the chieftains mind back and it took a lot of focus and struggle to get back into an equilibrium. Time lost all meaning as I wrestled with his mind, trying to prevent it from regaining control of his body. Right now, it was almost as if I was a nightmare and he tried to wake up. If he managed to do so, I would most likely lose.


    Suddenly, the impulses from his body grew more frantic and strange. There was a draining, something was happening that made both his body and mind fight so much harder but it took a lot of strength out of him and me as well. It was as if I was dragged down into a muddy bog with his mind as his mind fought like an enraged bear to free itself. Before, there was a sense of self-preservation to his mind, it was more interested in defending and surviving, now it was just interested in crushing me, no matter the cost.


    When I felt my own mind grow dim, I forcibly broke the connection, feeling the tendrils that connected us snap and whip back into my mind, causing fiery lashes of pain to carve in my mind. I managed to suppress a pained scream, keeping it down to a moan as I almost keeled over. Whatever had happened, it had been bad and something I seriously did not want to repeat.


    When the tears faded from my eyes, I surveyed the scene in front of me. Adra had stabbed her spear into the chieftain¡¯s brain, by setting it into the hollow of his jaw-bone and pushing, so there was no way for it to slide off, no matter how strong his hide. I was still connected to his dying mind and the struggle had been what had wounded me. On the plus side, he was dead and we were not. On the negative side, I felt as if someone had taken a whip to my brain. But hey, if I was ever curious what it felt like to have a hot poker stabbed into one''s skull, there was no need to ask. I had a good approximation now. Using more magic was not an attractive proposition that moment, but I would have to grit my teeth and hope that I was not making some mental wound worse.


    In addition, there were a few interesting messages on my interface.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Jonari Hunter died</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You gain 1500 EXP.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>For killing an opponent without a Traveller in your party, you gain Bonus EXP</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>Jonari Hunter died</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You gain 1500 EXP.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>For killing an opponent without a Traveller in your party, you gain Bonus EXP</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Jonari Great-Hunter died</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You gain 7300 EXP.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>For killing an opponent 61 levels above you you gain Bonus EXP</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>For killing an opponent without a Traveller in your party, you gain Bonus EXP</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Skill increased</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You increased your skill: Darkness Magic [32/100]</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Skill increased</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You increased your skill: Stealth [24/100]</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Composite Skill gained</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You gained the skill: Mind Magic [1/50]</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>Skills aggregated under the Mind Magic-Skill: [Darkness Magic]</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>There are almost unlimited ways to influence the mind of others, using magic. You learned to do so using the element of Darkness as a base.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Skill increased</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You increased your skill: Mind Magic [3/50]</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    While I was trying to get my breath under control, I read the messages and was intrigued. A ¡®composite skill¡¯... To me, that sounded like a skill based on multiple different skills, with multiple ways the skill worked and probably different, but similar, end-results. So, similar to programming with different programming languages, each slightly different in the approach to problems, the scope of problems solvable with them and the effort involved. The limit on maximum-skill level could either mean that Mind Magic was so simple that there was no need to grade on a scale of one-hundred or that the current incorporated skills only allowed a limited scope of application. Somehow, the first idea was just a tad suspect, considering that the description literally said that there were almost unlimited ways.


    Find this and other great novels on the author''s preferred platform. Support original creators!


    So, incorporating more skills into mind magic? Sounded interesting. At this point, the only thing I was able to do was crush enemies with brute, overwhelming force. Sure, a sledgehammer could be useful but it was a limited tool and every new tool in my toolbox was something good. Even if the combination of Blood Magic and mental manipulation using Darkness slightly screamed ¡®evil overlord¡¯. I was already dressing the part, black furred cloak and armour and everything, but still, there was no need to overdo the chlich¨¦, was there? Oh, who was I kidding, there was totally a need and it was definitely worth it.


    My breathing back under control, I nodded to Adra who had pulled her spear back out and used straw from the mattress to plug the hole to some extent. It would slow down the smell but only so much. I listened closely if there was any extra noise in the house, indicating that we were busted, but nothing. I had to suppress a giggle, when a small part of me remembered a phrase from my language-classes at school. ¡®Die Ohren spitzen¡¯, the german colloquial phrase to ¡®listen closely¡¯ and here I was, doing just that with pointy, elf-ears. The backlash must have hit my mind harder than I thought, I had to focus on the situation around us, not let my mind wander away from the pain.


    After shaking my head to clear my mind, at least a little, I was moving off the bed and joining Sigmir and Adra closer to the door.


    Through gritted teeth, I told Sigmir to move on and thanked Adra for the assist. Both nodded and, despite looking slightly worried at me, continued their way.


    Again, Sigmir took the lead and Adra covered our back. Back in the hallway, we carefully closed the door and Sigmir led us to another door, close-by.


    ¡°This is Jongarn¡¯s chamber. Finally, the bastard gets what is coming to him.¡± Sigmir growled out, between clenched teeth. Her voice was dripping with hate and the desire to do violence, I almost expected it to condense into a physical substance, it was that intense. But nothing happened, no small crystals of hate and malice formed.


    After a nod from both Adra and me, Sigmir carefully opened the door with a look of fierce glee and determination on her face and peered inside, just for her face to fall, as if someone had just kicked her favorite puppy.


    ¡°He¡¯s not here.¡± she said, her voice still hateful, but also defeated. To her, she had looked forward to kill Jongarn, maybe more so than she had ever looked forward to anything in her life. In her eyes, he was largely responsible for her father¡¯s death and her banishment. Of course, without that banishment, we would never have met, but it was ¡®human¡¯ nature to overlook the good things that could come from something bad.


    ¡°Enter, look for something of him.¡± I was told by Lenore, in my mind. She had apparently recovered from the events in the chieftain¡¯s mind and had some sort of idea. Frowning a little, I entered the chamber and looked for ¡®something of him¡¯, just for Lenore to feel my confusion and clarify that she meant a hair or something similar, something that had once been part of him, or something with a strong, emotional connection. The underlying thoughts that were sent in addition, made her idea obvious. There was a connection between objects and their owner, the Grandmother and Kallista had told us about that. Beloved, important objects - for example the favorite toy of a child or a weapon that a fighter kept by his side and used for years - could be used to trace the owner. But a stronger connection could be made with body-parts, like blood or hair. With an experienced user, even the remains of a relative could be used, something the local shaman had done to attack Sigmir, a long time ago, shortly after we met.


    Thinking back, I had done something similar, just a few days ago, I had used blood to strengthen the connection between my magic and the dryad we had attacked. I had used her blood to bypass a large part of her magic resistance. So, Lenore believed we could do something similar here, either find Jongarn or attack him via magic from a distance.

 Interlude: Fudgecakes on the Forum...

    Official Road to Purgatory-Beta Forum


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>


    -Gloinar, confirmed Beta-Account


    </td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    Title: What the Fudgecakes, Pantheon?!


    Hey Guys


    I just want to know, what are your experiences with PvP-Combat in the Beta? Is the balance as shot as I believe it to be? Can it be fixed?


    Let me explain where I¡¯m coming from. I play with three others, we all know each other from previous games so when we all got an invite, we decided to get together asap and play together. All of us are students and took a one-semester break for Road to Purgatory, so we all have a lot of time to play together.


    We all created our characters and went through our starting-towns, after making sure that we started close together. So, when we were in the level 25 to 30 range, we met up and grouped up. Everything cool, Half-Orc Fighter, Dwarf Paladin, Snow-Leopard Stalker and a Lucare Druid. The races should be self-explanatory, except Lucare, those are more or less the male variant of a dryad. Sounds like a rather balanced party, right? Well, we did. Sure, a little light on the magic, a second dedicated caster would be cool, but we just don¡¯t have one.


    So, after we met up, we started to travel and quest together. Everything cool, we are in the wilderness, almost no other players and the fights work great. Well, until we met another group. At least I think it was another group. And that¡¯s where my question about PvP-Balance comes from.


    To illustrate my point, watch this video:


    mist-fight.avi


    A snow-covered forest. The view seems to be first-person, out of the eyes of someone rather small, who is walking in the forest. Suddenly, the person stops and turns, looking at those walking behind him. A sylvan in a robe, carrying a staff, a half-orc with an axe and leather-armour and a snow-leopard in leather come into view.


    ¡°Still the right direction, Len?¡± comes from the person making the video.


    ¡°Should be, Gloin. I can¡¯t check, the thingy we got has cooldown, you know? But when I checked after we left town, it pointed in this direction.¡± answers the Sylvan, Len.


    ¡°Let¡¯s get going. The direction changed the last few days, so our target is on the move. We can¡¯t waste time, I want to get that quest done so we get the extra rep.¡± comes from the Half-Orc.


    ¡°Yes, yes Drogio, I know. You are certain that we can get a ton of quests, if we just grind the rep. Where have I heard that before, I wonder?¡± mocks the leopard.


    ¡°Why, Tamir, I think I heard something along those lines, way back when we were killing friggin teddy-bears in that stupid demon-forest, collecting friggin feathers or something and what did we get when we were done? Oh, right, a whole lotta nothing.¡± chimes in the person making the video, obviously the dwarf Gloinar.


    The group makes a little more fun of the one who views every reputation-bar as the way to ultimate power, no matter how small or how remote the community is. Well, he got a title calling him insane once, but everyone knows that titles are just a joke.


    The video speeds up while nothing happens, until the group comes on a clearing. Nothing is visible and, if not for the reduction to normal speed, the viewer would not see anything special with the scene. Nobody is talking or making jokes, just more snow-covered trees, as far as the eye can see.


    ¡°Wha¡­¡± Len¡¯s voice sounds out behind the group, causing the three others to whirl around. The next moment a ¡®chuk¡¯-, a ¡®tchunck¡¯- and a ¡®squack¡¯-sound are clearly audible in the forest, and the viewers see the cause in clear detail. ¡®Chuk¡¯ was an arrow piercing Len¡¯s throat, ¡®tchunk¡¯ was a silvery icicle, almost as thick as a wrist piercing his chest and ¡®squack¡¯ was an axe out of the same material lodging itself into his skull.


    Just when the three of them want to spring into action, the two ice-made weapons explode, showering all of them with gore, causing a wave of revulsion. Killing in-game is one thing, having a team-mate literally blown to pieces and getting showered with them? Whole different ball game.


    ¡°Protection of the Forgefather!¡± Gloinar instantly uses one of his strongest group protection-buffs, ignoring its cost and long cooldown.


    Now buffed and a little better protected, it¡¯s time to counterattack. But before any of them can even think of an appropriate reaction, white mist envelopes them all.


    ¡°The hell?!¡± asks Gloinar.


    ¡°I think I saw three people vanish into the woods. But don¡¯t ask me to trace them, we would just get boned again.¡± says Tamir.


    ¡°Team-Logout. Asap!¡± orders Drogio.


    After a few moments of undisturbed time for the characters, they log out. During that time an active attack on any of them would stop the log-out for all of them, due to the team-log-out option, so it¡¯s useful for teams in contested territory, just in case someone waits for one or two to leave the game, before attacking. But with the log-out, the video turned black and ends.


    back in text


    See what I mean? Just what the hell are you supposed to do in an ambush like that? There was literally half-a-second between the strange feeling you get when observed and the first attack hitting. How the hell do you react to that if you are not a friggin ninja? So, back to my original question, What the Fudgecakes?


    Gloinar out.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>


    -Harms, confirmed Beta-Account


    </td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    How about git gud?


    Or in all seriousness, you stumbled into a planned and well executed ambush. Just what do you expect if multiple people prepare and focus their attacks, most likely buffed up to the nines, onto your clothy? Hell, they even went to some serious overkill-level. I¡¯d guess that every single one of those attacks would have been lethal, maybe not the arrow if serious healing was close-by but the other two? No way, Jos¨¦.


    So, Gloinar, what exactly do you expect? If you blunder into an ambush, you get rekt. That¡¯s about as surprising as the fact that you get wet if you fall into a river.


    But those are just my two cents


    Harms


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>


    -Malaf, confirmed Beta-Account


    </td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    Can only agree with the guy above me. You got rekt, so don¡¯t whine on the forum.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>


    -Do¡¯brown, confirmed Beta-Account


    </td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    Would you like to have some cheese to your whine, Sir?


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>


    Heracles, Official Pantheon Moderator


    </td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    Please, guys, keep it civil.


    And before you jump on me for an official answer, I¡¯m just keeping the forum clean and civil, I have literally no impact on game-design or balance.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>


    -Gloinar, confirmed Beta-Account


    </td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    Me again. Yes, I¡¯m re-using this thread, because, reasons.


    I will give you some background on the situation. My buddies and I met a tribe of hunter-gatherers and got along with them, you know, good first contact, nice talks, did a few quests for them. Then, the big cheese of the place, their chieftain and his son want to talk to us. Cool, we thought.


    This tale has been unlawfully lifted without the author''s consent. Report any appearances on Amazon.


    Talking to them, they told us that the daughter of one of their greatest heroes who was supposed to marry the chieftain¡¯s son was abducted by some sort of monster taking the form of a child. Sounds creepy as hell, but almost standard fantasy-quest fare, right?


    Well, we got a quest, called Find the Shieldmaiden, objective was to bring the shieldmaiden back to the village, bonus if we killed the one she was with. As the area up here is friggin huge, friggin empty and friggin boring we got a compass-thingamajig that would guide us. Problem, two hours cooldown and only a direction, no distance or anything. But hey, quest said it was hard and we had no other quests so off we went, hoping for awesome rewards and more quests. Those are friggin rare here, no idea how it¡¯s somewhere else.


    So, following compass-thingamajig we went north and east. On our travels we got another quest, escort a hunter to some town called Yari, right direction so we took it and moved on. Well, joke was on us, the next day, the signal shifted, no longer north-east of us, but suddenly south-east, but throwing the other quest away and possibly losing a whole quest-hub? No, thanks. So we went on to Yari. The signal staid south-east of us, then shifting south-west.


    Once we got to Yari, it was almost directly west of us, so we knew that they were moving, so we went searching. The result, you have seen in the video.


    But that¡¯s not all. Luckily, we had all placed our respawn in Yari so it didn¡¯t take that long for Len to join us again and he was safe with the debuffs. Once Len was back with us we looked again. We would have done so sooner, but sadly he had the compass-thingamajig when he died and it vanished with his corpse. Now, the signal was pointing almost straight north but for some reason, the needle was no longer steady, it wobbled a few degrees back and forth. Sure, a wobble like that is no problem if you are close, but on a distance of who knows how many miles? For some reason the thingamajig broke.


    By now, we were all pretty pissed and wanted the quest done. So we just went north, checking the compass as often as possible and so on. One morning, the wobble went away for a moment, before going wild. Guessing that something was up, we hid in the shrubbery and waited. A few hours later, the wobble was still there and still pointing north. From the maps we had seen, we knew that we were on a friggin peninsula, so unless they wanted to stay in the area, they would have to go past us.


    We thought we were lucky when we saw two riders below on the clearing in front of us. One looked similar to the guys who gave us the quest, just a little bigger, the other looked smaller, not quite child-like but who knows what their children look like. Skin-tone was right, hair-colour was a bit strange but the compass suddenly started to point directly to them, once they were close enough.


    So, this time we were in an ambush, according to you, we should easily win, right? Why don¡¯t you look at what happened to us?


    ambush.avi


    The view-point is set a little above the heads of the taller characters, looking down on Gloinar, Len and Drogio who are hidden in the shrubbery. In front of them, a large meadow is visible and on a bit of the side, Tamir is semi-visible, almost like a silhouette, indicating that he is using a skill to remain unseen unless you are able to break the skill or in his party.


    On the meadow, two riders are visible, one big, one small. Next to them, an animal is running. For some reason, the smaller animal seems incredibly out of place.


    ¡°I¡¯ll snare them, then you move out to distract them. Tamir will take the monster out and hopefully the control on the other will break.¡± Len suggests.


    ¡°Sounds good.¡± Drogio, the combat-leader of the group, agrees.


    All three get ready and, once their target is in range, Len starts chanting. A few moments later, vines break the ground under the horses and ensnare them. But instead of falling like expected, taking their riders with them and possible even landing on the riders and taking them out of the fight, the horses just disappear.


    Both figures start falling, the taller one going into a controlled fall, like a martial artist, the other just falling. But the vision gets blocked the next moment, as snow springs up, obscuring the events on the field. Still, Gloinar and Drogio move a forward a little, just to see two figures flying out of the swirling snow.


    One is the tall figure, white-hair flying but now a glowing armour out of red light envelops her. In addition, the eyes that look at the paladin and the fighter shine with yellow light. If that was not enough to indicate the fact that she was unhappy with them, the drawn back, huge axe would be a second, definite indicator for that fact.


    The other figure is smaller, it¡¯s the strange animal. But just as the animal gets closer, it takes a huge leap and in the air, it rapidly changes, from leaping animal to attacking sylvan. Before, Len had been ready to dodge the charge of the antelope-like animal but instead a large spear is expertly thrust at his chest. The surprise, combined with the momentum of the charge, are too much and the spear easily stabs into his chest before withdrawing for more attacks.


    While the sylvan prepares for more attacks, the first figure is on Drogio and Gloinar. Gloinar tries to make her focus on him, but no dice, she simply dodges past and strikes a furious blow, easily breaking the parry-attempt, the buffs and the armour of Drogio, lodging the axe deep into his chest, before kicking Drogio in the chest to dislodge it.


    In the clearing, the snow has mostly fallen back to the ground and the smaller rider is visible, just like Tamir. But Tamir is no longer in his stealth-mode, he is hanging up in the air, help up by strange tentacles coming from the small rider.


    Just as Gloinar thinks about ways to help, the eyes of the small rider glow silver, she gives a shout and heave of effort and Tamir gets ripped apart. Literally ripped apart.


    Forced to defend himself, Gloinar is no longer able to think about his buddy, at least for a moment. That moment ends when the world forces him to think about his friend, because the severed arm of said friend is thrown in his face. The shock made his defense crumble, allowing multiple attacks to hit him and with the last group-member taken down, the recording turns black as well.


    back in text


    Who was it that asked ¡®What do you expect when you blunder into an ambush¡¯? Would you please come forward and tell me why the friggin hell I was slapped in the face? And not just any slap? Why I was slapped in the face by a teammates ripped-off bloody arm?!


    So I ask, once more: What the fudgecakes?!


    Gloinar out.


    <table>


    <tbody>


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    <td>


    -Harms, confirmed Beta-Account


    </td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    Ok, sorry to sound harsh but: Again, git gud!


    Damn, those three owned you, owned you hard. No idea about the two smaller ones, but the tall one used something similar to the Rage-Aura of the berserker-class. At least the red glow looks just like that. But the aura just glows around the berserker, it¡¯s not some sort of armour-style thing, it just strengthens the berserker but drains stamina like crazy and can¡¯t be turned off easily, so it¡¯s a fight until the berserker keels over. The glowing eyes, again, no idea, some sort of strength buff?


    And an ambush only works if you have enough power, the easiest way to escape an ambush is to break the kill-box. What that looks like, you ask? Well, the video is an excellent example.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>


    Shuigun, confirmed Beta-Account


    </td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    The Art of the Bitch-Slap: Next level¡­


    ¡°I won¡¯t even dirty my hand by slapping you.¡±


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>


    -Morgana, confirmed Beta-Account


    </td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    Something¡¯s rotten in the state of Denmark¡­


    You do realise that the one you wanted to ¡®save¡¯ was the one who killed you? I would think about the meaning of that fact.


    It can either mean that the one you are hunting is powerful enough to completely mind-control someone more powerful than you are, so if you have bad luck, it is very possible that you end up mind-controlled yourself. (On second thought, continue hunting them and tell us what happens if a player gets mind-raped. I would be quite grateful if you give us a thorough accounting of the effects of mind-control on player-characters, so the rest of us can avoid getting their mind scrambled.)


    Or it can mean that the NPCs who gave you the quest lied to you. That would mean that you stumble around in the dark, unknowing just where the pitfalls and trip-wires are. Or in other words, if they lie to you, in order to use you, do you really want to let yourself be used and hope that they are benevolent afterwards? I mean, to me, Road to Purgatory feels a lot less railroaded than previous mmo-rpgs, more in line with classic pen&paper RPGs, so if NPCs want to screw you over, they can definitely do so, but unlike in other mmo-rpgs, you can actually avoid getting screwed and change the outcome. Not like in some games when your gamer-senses scream at you ¡®That cave is a trap¡¯ but the only way to advance the story is to go in and stumble into the trap.


    Oh, well, I hope you continue your hunt, there is far too little information on magic, especially mind magic. Maybe, you can gain fame by writing the definite treatise on getting mind-raped, from the victim¡¯s point-of-view.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>


    -Antiby, confirmed Beta-Account


    </td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    Just watched the second video and I gotta say, Dayum, they got style.


    I don¡¯t think that the caster gave you the hand on purpose, but sometimes, hilarity strikes in the oddest of ways.


    But I have to agree with the poster above me, I would think twice if I want to continue that quest.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>


    -Gloinar, confirmed Beta-Account


    </td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    Ok, things ain¡¯t funny any longer.


    Why the hell does a quest vanish? Not complete, nothing about failing, just gone from the log? And the compass-thingamajig is gone as well, not broken and pieces remaining, just gone.


    Is the game screwing with us or is it a bug? Or both?


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>


    -Vulcanar, Official Pantheon Development Team


    </td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    I was told about this interesting thread and just had to take a look.


    Let¡¯s start at the bottom and work my way up.


    @ Gloinar: It¡¯s neither a bug, nor is the game screwing with you. Everything is working as intended. And that¡¯s all I¡¯ll say about it.


    @ Morgana: Interesting Meta-Gaming there. But you are right, with the statement that there is little information about magic and even less about mind magic. For good reason. In addition, yes, with careful analysis of circumstances around you, it is easily possible to avoid situations that would turn out bad for you. So, keep your eyes open and be careful.


    @ Harms: Why, yes, it indeed looks very much like the berserker aura.


    @ Gloinar, again: About both videos. Everything you saw there was legit. Nothing more to say, from a developers point of view. We will continue to look at the metrics of magic usage and the appropriate power-result and there will probably be adjustments, we will see.


    Vulcanar


    *throws down smoke-bomb and vanishes in a puff of smoke*


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>


    -Werot, confirmed Beta-Account


    </td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    First after dev!


    Also, Gloinar, learn to play


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>


    -Antiby, confirmed Beta-Account


    </td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    So, dev says everything¡¯s legit.


    About the vanishing quest, I¡¯d guess that it can¡¯t be completed any longer. For example, if the target is dead, the quest is no longer possible. Dunno if it would count as failed or not, but it would no longer be relevant. Or if someone completed it before you. If Quest-Failure has negative consequences, I don¡¯t think you should be penalised for not being fast enough. Or, maybe, the quest-giver got killed and the game doesn¡¯t want you to waste days or weeks on a quest that can¡¯t be completed any longer.


    I wish you good luck on your hunt, we still need that treatise about mind-control against player-characters.

 Chapter 91

    Jongarn¡¯s chamber was similarly laid out as his father¡¯s. A long bed dominated the room, with a closet and a chest placed against the walls. Whispering, I explained to Sigmir what Lenore suggested, and we entered the room. I was looking for hair and Sigmir was looking for something he used a lot. She knew him, so she was a lot better suited to find something that he had an emotional connection to. If that failed, we would have to take something from his father and hope that it worked, somehow. Not that that idea filled me with confidence, I was unsure whether I could find someone using a sympathetic connection at all, not to speak of isolating one out of multiple connections when using a relative¡¯s possession.


    The first thing I searched was obviously the bed. Sadly, neither the pillow nor the blanket proved useful, both were clear, apparently freshly cleaned. I heard Sigmir grumble over by the closet, she wasn¡¯t having any luck either. Together, we moved on to the chest and searched it as well. There were some clothes, but Sigmir discarded them as new and Lenore agreed that they didn¡¯t matter enough for a person. After all, how much emotional connection does one have to ordinary, everyday clothing. Almost none at all, it¡¯s just something that is needed, nothing to invest any great emotional energy into. If an ordinary shirt rips, it is either fixed or discarded, but not mourned in any way, shape or form.


    I was getting frustrated by the lack of progress, when Sigmir spoke up. ¡°Have you checked the mattress?¡± she asked. That simple question stumped me for a moment, why check the mattress? Then, the lightbulb in my head turned on. I was used to foam-mattresses, made in a factory and more or less sealed before ever seeing their customer. Here, a mattress was mostly a pile of fur over a bag of straw.


    Next, I was almost ripping the bedding and mattress apart and it took only moments for me to find quite a few short, grey hairs at the top. Showing them to Sigmir confirmed that the length and colour was right, they could very well be Jongarn¡¯s. That was good enough for me, we couldn¡¯t really know if the hair truly was his, but the circumstances pointed to it. Add in the fact that we were in enemy territory and a protracted search a bad idea and we took the hairs and ended our search.


    The next thing was to attempt the sensing. Holding the hairs in my hands, I focused on them.


    In my mind, Lenore started speaking. ¡°Feel the hair. Envelop it with your magic. Know, that a piece of the whole is connected to the whole. Know, that the whole is in the same darkness as you are.¡± I had a suspicion that she was making that up as we went along, but it helped.


    Despite the pain in my head, I drew on my Darkness Magic. The knowledge that we were under the same sky, in the same night and in the same darkness helped. Before, I had used a physical connection within a patch of darkness, but was that really necessary? Why would a physical connection matter with a non-physical medium? It wasn¡¯t as if darkness was like air, a physical medium around me. Darkness was everywhere, one just had to know where to look. During the night, it was easy, especially during a moonless night, darkness was all around us, enveloping us, hiding us and comforting me.


    I was feeling something. As if I was slightly pulling at something bigger, something further in the distance. The sensation originated from the hairs in my hand and stretched into the distance. I wasn¡¯t able to get a clear reading, just a rough direction and a feeling of distance. If I had to categorise it, the direction was west, pointing somewhere between Adernas and the region we knew was occupied by the dryads of Tegi. The distance was harder to feel, just that it was not close, if I had to put a number on it, I would guess that it would be at least one day¡¯s march to get there. So, the one we wanted to kill the most was not even in the village.


    A quiet but vicious curse sprung from my lips, causing Sigmir to look at me in question. With the termination of the magic, the pain I had experienced before returned with a vengeance. Groaning in pain, I explained my discovery and she looked just as unhappy as I felt. The icing on the cake would be to get discovered in the village.


    I was a little unsteady on my feet but managed to get to the front room again. But now, we had a problem. In my wobbly state, I doubted I was able to hide our tracks like I did before.


    In front of the door, Adra stopped us and, with a hand of both our shoulder, started chanting softly. I was unable to make out words or anything like that, until at the end, I heard her say ¡°...and pass without trace.¡±


    A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.


    I felt a wave of magic wash over us, and she explained, ¡°It¡¯s a useful spell to prevent traces. I think it¡¯s similar to the one used by the dryads. I didn¡¯t mention it because it takes a ton of concentration and I can only use it twice, maybe three times a night and once those are up, I¡¯m almost comatose due to exhaustion.¡±


    I groaned in annoyance; so now, we had two people who were largely useless. Adra needed to concentrate on her spell or we would quickly be in trouble and I was limited in my magic. Even thinking about Ice or Blood-Magic made me nauseous, the only thing that made Darkness-Magic different was the strengthening effect of my class, helping me during the moonless night. But even that would not help me much longer. I had two, maybe three magic uses in me and after them, Sigmir would have to carry me.


    By that point, my mind felt as if it had been through the wringer and I was confused enough that Sigmir simply took the lead. Comprehensive thought eluded me, or I would have proposed a different plan of action.


    Covered by Adra¡¯s magic, we made our way towards the edge of the village. Not to escape, we had one more target during that raid. Taking down the shaman. The mere thought of killing the bastard that tainted my Sigmir¡¯s soul was a balm on my mind and it drove me on, happily marching forward, despite the pain.


    The building-clusters were far enough apart that we did not have to worry about being easily seen and soon, we were close to the shaman¡¯s hut. Or rather, his building-cluster. It was not only for the shaman, his apprentices lived in the area as well, alongside a few care-takers.


    Knowing that spell-casters were living here, I forced myself to check with Lenore¡¯s vision, searching for magic traps and wards and it was good that I did so, the area around the buildings and the entryways was littered with magic. I was unable to easily detect what the various formations did but I was willing to bet that at least some of them would be bad. Probably not all, but enough of them.


    ¡°Wait for me.¡± I groaned to the other two and drew on my magic. My mind was focused on darkness, on concealment, as I drew the deep shadows of the night around me, pulling them closer, like a cloak. Wrapping around me, enshrouding me, keeping the world away from me and me away from the world. Around me, was a dark nothingness, the nothingness of the void, the emptiness between stars. My proprioception was going wonky, I knew the feeling from the migraines I got sometimes and the pain medication I took for them. It felt as if I was a floating head with a body attached, as if my head would fall off if I tilted it too much.


    My walking turned into a shuffling or maybe floating - at that point, I was no longer lucid enough to make out the difference - only propelled forward by my will, or maybe my stubbornness.


    The magic formations flowed around me, not reacting to the slightly different patch of darkness within an ocean of darkness, the one shadow amongst hundreds of shadows. Even my sense of self was starting to get a little strange in the shadows I had called.


    Who was I? Morgana? Titania? Samantha? Jade? All those names, but did they really matter?


    A door was before me. To keep me out? But why would it stop me? There was a crack under the door, a small crack, but filled with shadow. I was shadow, wasn¡¯t I?


    I was here¡­ Why was I here again? Sigmir. I remembered that name. My Sigmir. Someone had sullied her soul. I was here because of that. Where was the defiler? There was a cawing in my head, why was someone cawing in my head? No, find the defiler. I felt a trace of miasma, coming from one of the doorways. It tasted similar to the parasite that had latched onto my Sigmir¡¯s soul.


    That had to be the right way. Within the room, a figure was standing, back to the entrance and in deep concentration, concentration on something in front of him. Magic Circle? I had seen something similar, hadn¡¯t I used something similar? Within the circle, a strange thing was standing, bound by shackles of magic, of blood and stone, of ritual and tradition.


    The shaman was making noises, speaking to it. He was the defiler. He would die. In my hands, there were two blades. Sharp, cold blades. But what were hands? No matter, I had the tools to do what I was here to do.


    One blade pierced into his kidney, the other was placed further up, stabbing into his chest, hunting for the heart. A piercing scream. The thing in the circle was making strange noises, undefinable. It felt hungry. Maybe I should feed it. Pulling the blades out, I gave the defiler a shoving kick, not hard, just to make him move forward. Into the circle. The thing within made happy noises, maybe it would be sated soon.


    I had done what I was here to do. Now what, who was I and what did I have to do now? Did it matter? Why had I been here in the first place? My Sigmir. Her soul had been sullied. Revenge had been meted out.


    My Sigmir, where was she? I felt her, nearby. The scent of her body, the taste of her lips. There she was. In the shadow. So close to me.


    I was a shadow, so I was next to her. But a shadow could not hug her? To hug her, the shadows need to be gone. Pushing them away. Hard.


    Suddenly, I was falling...

 Chapter 92

    When my mind started cooperating again, there was still darkness around me. But the darkness had changed, it was no longer empty and cold, no, I was surrounded by warmth. With my mind back in action, the rest of my senses returned as well. After my perception of temperature, my senses of proprioception and touch were next, allowing me to identify just what was that warmth I was feeling. Quickly, I was able to identify it was an embrace. With the return of my sense of smell, I was even able to identify just what was embracing me. There were not many beings I could easily identify just by a small sniff of them, but Sigmir was definitely at the top of that list. That combination of leather, sweat and a little something that was just her, a smell that reminded me of pine-trees and fresh snow. With that knowledge, I was instantly calmed. My hearing came back next and I heard the low shuffling of feet on snow.


    Now, with my mind getting back to full speed, I must have stiffened in some way, something that made Sigmir realise that I had awoken. There was a low order to Adra, stopping their run for a moment, and after a bit of movement, the darkness around me vanished and I realised that my sense of sight had returned some time ago, I had just been covered by Sigmir¡¯s dark cloak and softly pressed against her chest.


    ¡°Thank the Ancestors, you are awake. Are you alright?!¡± Sigmir exclaimed the moment our eyes met. She looked worried and I could understand it. Just trying to figure out what I had done was giving me a bit of a headache. There was a surreal quality to my memories, reminiscent of a brutal migraine attack, or what I believed some drugs to cause. A floating, sensation, akin to swimming but different.


    ¡°Yes, I¡¯m fine. I¡¯m not exactly sure what I did or how I did it, but the shaman is dead.¡± As I said that, I placed my arms around Sigmir, giving her a soft squeeze to reassure her of my good health.


    ¡°I guessed as much. Just before you reappeared, there was some sort of a scream, it reminded me of the noises the Nethersprites around Tegi made.¡±


    That¡­ made sense. I dimly remembered stabbing the shaman in the back - one blade going for the kidneys, the other for his rotten, black heart - and afterwards I kicked him into what seemed to me like some sort of summoning or sealing formation with a Nethersprite in it. So, interpreting the clues, I had fed him to his very own, summoned Nethersprite? For an act that I had committed while my judgement was seriously impaired, I sure liked the style.


    ¡°Can you let me down? Not that I don¡¯t like being in your arms, but we should hurry onwards, right?¡± I asked, hoping that my actions had not screwed up our overall plans. The look on Sigmir¡¯s face was unhappy and I heard soft mutterings from Adra, cursing my recklessness and stubbornness.


    Placing my feet down, I wanted to start walking but just as I tried to make the first step, the pesky planet dodged away, trying to make me stumble. Luckily, I was still close to Sigmir, and she simply picked me back up. There had to be a sheepish look on my face, for neither Sigmir nor Adra made fun of me. Well, there were worse ways to travel than in her strong arms and it gave me time to check my notifications.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Jonari High Shaman died</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You gain 1500 EXP.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>For assisting with the kill of an opponent, your EXP was reduced.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Skill increased</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You increased your skill: Dual Blade-Mastery [17/100]</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    Unauthorized usage: this narrative is on Amazon without the author''s consent. Report any sightings.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Skill increased</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You increased your skill: Darkness Magic [38/100]</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Skill increased</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You increased your skill: Stealth [28/100]</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    So, I hadn¡¯t truly killed the shaman, but the Nethersprite killed it and I only got partial EXP for it? Well, good enough, I guess. My Darkness Magic however had taken a huge leap, gaining multiple points, thanks to the stunt I had pulled. I had either done something seriously cool, like shadow stepping or used some sort of ephemeral shadow form or I had turned myself invisible to the point that neither Sigmir nor Adra were able to perceive me. And I had done so, without alerting the wards around the house. But I was pretty sure that I had squeezed myself through the cracks under the door, that spoke for some form of ephemeral shadow form, allowing for movement through any shaded spot, or maybe any deep enough shadow. At night, that would be insanely powerful. And thinking of the trick I had pulled to get out, that seemed to be a true shadow-step, moving from one shadow to another, possibly targeted by my knowledge of Sigmir.


    Getting carried gave me the chance to ponder what had happened just now. And what I had done. Maybe even more important, how I had done what I did. Just by going by the things I could remember, I would guess it was some sort of shadow form. The how? Well, I had realised that it was easier to use Darkness Magic in the night, or rather, in the dark.


    No real surprise there. My current hypothesis was that it was easier to use Ice Magic in the cold environment around here and that it would be harder, say, in the desert. In addition, I believed that there was a sort of balancing factor, after all, it seemed logical that denizens of the frozen north were resistant to cold and ice, considering the fact that they were surrounded by it. In contrast, some sort of desert- or jungle-dweller that had never even heard of the concept of snow and that regarded temperatures below 30¡ã celsius as an arctic blast would most likely take more damage from my Ice Magic while his prefered environment would give me a harder time using it. To me, it sounded like a simple and very logically stringent balance-concept.


    So, I had used my Darkness Magic in an incredibly dark, slightly cloudy night outside of any artificial light sources, giving me just about the darkest environment one could find without going underground. Add to that the fact that my class further boosted Darkness Magic during a new moon, giving me even more power to play with and it seemed that my power had far outstripped my control of said power.


    Given what I had tried to do, hide myself, it had taken that idea and taken it to eleven, but I had quite literally gotten lost in the darkness I had summoned. I truly did not want to think about the folk wisdom that had validated, getting lost in the dark, getting swallowed by the darkness I had summoned, maybe even something about staring into the abyss. Well, no, the last would most likely apply to the shaman but it could be a hint that there was interplay between used magic and the character of NPCs. Maybe even effects on the players themselves. I had realised that my actions, my behaviour and even my thinking in-game were different from the norm, my personal norm outside the game that is. That my behaviour was abnormal compared to the mystical ¡®normal¡¯ humans was no surprise, I was crazy after all. So, was the game making me more crazy or less? Somehow, I doubted that I was the best to contemplate that. But it did not really matter, I was highly functioning and that was all that mattered at the end of the day. Not normal, but able to fit into the mold made by society.


    Ok, so the environment had caused stacking strengthening effects, causing me to have the power to make something happen and my lack of control had taken it to levels I was, well, almost unable to control. There was just a bit of my will giving directions to do what I had planned. It was strange and a little creepy but that was what had happened and part of the how.


    The how. That was a truly interesting question. When using runes, I was generally easily able to make sense of the magic and what I did with it. It was almost like¡­ math. A scientific notation of complex concepts, allowing for the quick communication of those concepts.


    And if runes and rune-mastery represented the science of magic, it made sense to consider the straight ¡®magic¡¯ skill the art of it. Less structured, more of a freeform but still mostly following rules. Except when it didn¡¯t.


    The more I thought about that idea, the more sense it made. There was an interplay between the straight magic-skills and their runic-mastery equivalent. Thinking back, I had used a combination of runes and straight magic-skill to create that barrier a few days ago. That would mean that there was a possibility to combine runes and the freeform magic to form something greater. I would have to think more about that and the things I could do with it.

 Chapter 93

    The slight shaking of Sigmir¡¯s gait combined with the warmth and the feeling of security in her embrace must have lulled me to sleep, for I was woken after the sun had started to peek through the clouds in the next morning. Both, Sigmir and Adra told me that they had kept a good pace through the night but needed a rest for now. When I asked Adra why they did not use mounts or her travel-form, I was told that her spell was only able to erase the tracks of humanoids. I tried to get her to explain why that was but the only thing I got from her was the statement ¡°That¡¯s just how it is¡± - and on pressing further, a grumpy ¡°I don¡¯t know.¡±. Sensing that I would just have to accept that her expertise was in practical application, not theoretical knowledge, I let the matter rest and sent both of them to bed. There was a smile on my face, when Sigmir settled down, right next to me and, after a moment of contemplation, simply pulled me into a sitting position and used my legs as a pillow.


    Sadly, I had to make her wait, there were a few things I wanted to deal with in the real world, now that I had time. After sending Lenore out her Hallow, to keep watch and play beacon in case they had to flee, I logged out. Outside the game, I felt strange, there was a curious absence, something was missing in my mind, something I was getting accustomed to but could not place a finger on.


    After a few housekeeping-tasks, I went onto the official forums, a few days back, I had found a thread from the group hunting Sigmir and me ingame and had applied a little metagaming. If they did not know that the warning against pursuing us came from me, it could work. I had placed a little more thought into it, bringing concepts from different games into my case, making it an objectively good post, even if my agenda was a little different than the face-value. At the end of the day, I knew more about the situation, or rather, I had a different perspective. There was even a developer-post, congratulating me on my metagaming. Somehow, I wondered if the developer was aware that I was playing a misdirection-game, using the forum. It was good to know that their quest was gone and if we managed to take out Jongarn, it was unlikely that the rest of the tribe would issue a new quest to hunt for Sigmir. After all, he was the one obsessed with her.


    Of course, that idea only remained true as long as they were not aware that she was in the area. As soon as they learned about her presence, they might get suspicious, but at that point, I was planning to be far, far away, so far that there was nothing they could do about her. I suspected that even quests to search for someone were limited in scope or in detection-capability, it felt wrong and unbalanced if there was no way to escape a quest to hunt you, a way other than dying or killing the quest-giver. If killing the quest-giver truly ended quests, it could also be that me bringing Sigmir back into the tribal village ended their quest because she had already returned. Killing the target of a kill-quest should end the kill-quest for everyone, even if you were not on the quest, as the target could no longer be killed, obviously. It was entirely possible that something similar applied here.


    My real-world tasks took me about an hour, so two hours had passed ingame. When I got back in, the camp was still around me, with Ylva and Lenore waiting around, keeping watch on the surroundings


    ¡°Lenore, can you scout around a bit, before returning to your Hallow?¡± I asked, using our mental connection so that the two sleepers were not disturbed.


    Lenore took off, and I carefully sat next to the sleeping form of Sigmir, close but not touching her, when she suddenly moved in her sleep, putting her head in my lap and an arm around me, all without signs of waking up. I had to suppress a giggle, seeing her peaceful and relaxed like that was wonderful, normally, there was always a slight tension in her, a vigilance, ready for whatever the world would throw at her next. But right here, right now, she was calm and relaxed, despite her vulnerability. Carefully and softly, I started stroking her hair and face, gently tracing the lines of her lips before placing an arm around her and I felt myself relax, enter a strange state of calm awareness, taking in the world around me in a way I had never before.


    Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.


    The frozen forest around us, frozen in stillness and silence, no wind to intrude, not even sun-rays from the sky, just enjoying the sombre silence around us. The sound of silence, maybe it was a feeling like this. A feeling that all I ever wanted, all I ever needed was here, in my arms, knowing that even if Sigmir was awake, neither of us would speak. Words would only shatter the calm silence around us, intrude into it with thoughts of reality. Maybe even thoughts of violence, or words of violence, crashing in, into our little world. No, the silence was better.


    It was an intriguing feeling, sitting here, surrounded by an absence of sound, an absence of motion and simply stretching my senses out. In the perfect quiet, every pin-drop would be magnified, every slight disturbance would shatter it. In a way, it was a frozen moment, eternal but fleeting. In that moment, I understood something about reality, at least this reality. This silence, it was my moment. Frozen in time, frozen for eternity, the perfect stillness, the perfect representation of stillness. Stillness, one of the concepts in my Ice-Magic, the absence of motion, of sound, taken to the extreme, even the absence of time. It was all based on the sensation around me.


    The moment, and the silence around me, was disturbed when movement intruded in the form of Lenore. Her wings beat the air, stirring it up, shattering the stillness all around us, carrying her down to us before landing on my shoulder.


    ¡°Nothing to see, I doubt that the Jonari started their pursuit before dawn.¡± she told me, before returning to her Hallow.


    ¡°You were back pretty fast. Is it that cold up there?¡± I teased her, now that she was back in the warmth.


    ¡°What do you mean? I scouted for about an hour.¡± she answered and I felt her confusion shimmer through our bond. Now, it was my turn to be both, confused and surprised. Had I really sat here, idly caressing Sigmir for an hour without realising it? My Mundus-body had no problem with limbs falling asleep so there was no indication, but I would have to believe Lenore when she said that she had been gone for an hour. So, that moment I would have bet did not last for longer than the blink of an eye had actually lasted for an hour? Interesting. Very, very interesting and just as scary.


    But there was a message in my log, that gave me a small hint to the time I had spent there, ruminating on the concept of stillness and its relation to freezing and thus Ice-Magic.


    <table><tbody><tr><td>Skill increased </td></tr>


    <tr><td>You increased your skill: Ice Rune-Mastery [56/100]</td></tr></tbody></table>


    The extra skill points were even fitting with my idea on the two types of magic, I had pondered a singular concept, represented by a single rune, Stillness. I even had an idea how that rune would look like, considering the patterns in the runes I already knew.


    ¡°I give you a few days to stop that.¡± Sigmir¡¯s voice pulled me out of my thoughts and I saw that I was still caressing her, as I had the whole time, only now, she was awake to enjoy it. Part of me wanted to pull back and apologize for waking her up, but it seemed that she truly didn¡¯t mind. She looked more like a happy cat, or maybe a lioness, lazily lounging in the sun and accepting the adoration of the world around her. Contend would be a good word to describe her, at that moment. Sadly, it did not last.


    ¡°We should move on. If we start now, and hurry, we can get to the cave where we left Rai shortly after dark.¡± she said, as she was starting to get up. ¡°Why don¡¯t you try to get another direction from the things we have taken from Jongarn¡¯s room? I¡¯d rather have him taken care of, permanently.¡±


    I did just that, trying to remember what I had done during the night and reproducing it and there was a sensation of direction, sadly, it was utterly useless. I felt that he was somewhere in front of me, the feeling spanning an arc of almost ninety degrees, without any idea of distance. The only thing it told me was, that we were heading in roughly the right direction. Maybe, I¡¯d have more luck during the night, when the darkness blanketed the land.

 Chapter 94

    After waking up Adra, it was time to break camp. We discussed switching the spell we used to evade tracking, as I was now awake again, but decided that it might attract suspicion if we did so. Even if the spell Adra used, a spell she called ¡°Pass without trace¡± just made it harder to track, not impossible, in a way, that might even be better, letting them think that they were able to track us, just to lead them onto the track of a group of dryads.


    ¡°There are horns behind us.¡± Ylva stated, just as we started to leave. I felt myself blanch a little, remembering the sounds of horns, hounding Sigmir and me through the forest, shortly after we met. But both of us had more power now. Hopefully, enough power.


    ¡°Can you estimate the distance?¡± I asked Ylva, just as Sigmir asked for the exact rhythm.


    ¡°I don¡¯t quite know. Just that they are far away, at the edge of my hearing, making it hard to make out anything specific. I can¡¯t even tell if there are multiple sources overlapping or just a single source calling them together.¡±


    Ylva¡¯s answer calmed me quite a bit, her hearing was exceptional, informing us that we had a good lead. Now, it came down to keeping it. With that in mind, we started our travel.


    During the day, there were more horns, some only audible for Ylva with her exceptional hearing, others were closer, close enough that even those of us without canine hearing heard. Sigmir explained that the signals  called for individual hunters and hunting groups out here to take action, to search for intruders. Nothing was signaled about the nature of the intruders or the fact that their chieftain and shaman had been slain, only that intruders were on the land of the Jonari and they had to be caught.


    We were pressing on, not stopping or slowing, when suddenly Adra cursed, twisting around and in the same movement readying her bow. Reacting to her movement, Sigmir and I turned as well, searching for the thing  that had spooked her. It took me a moment to make out a shadow that did not move in the same way as the trees and the brush around it, but it was far enough away to make the judgement hard, thanks to the amount of foliage between us. By the time I had made it out, Adra had already let an arrow fly. It looked magical, literally so, trailing an arc of azure light, for a split-second connecting her bow with the target, before fading. The target fell over and moments later, we got the message that we had gained EXP. I wanted to run over, checking if there were more enemies, if we had to fight, but Adra stopped me.


    ¡°Wait. The concealment is gone and I can¡¯t recast it. At least not for an hour or so. That shot took too much out of me.¡±


    ¡°Well, darn. You say Astral Power is the problem?¡± I asked, with a sudden, bloody idea. Maybe it could work, but it was an idea worth trying.


    ¡°Yes, I¡¯m not that good with that type of magic, so it takes a lot of power to make up for my lack of skill.¡± she answered.


    ¡°Let¡¯s try this. Maybe it works. Can you use the spell and let me power it? Or rather, can you use the power I provide?¡± As I asked, I was searching for the Blood Amber I had created from the nymphs and the dryad a few days before.


    ¡°I don¡¯t know, I never tried anything like that.¡± She looked a little uncertain.


    ¡°What¡¯s the worst that could happen? Let¡¯s do it.¡± Part of me wanted to bite my tongue as I said the first part. My last two experiments with magic had come far, far too close to killing me. Well, as the adage went, ¡°Third times is the charm.¡±


    Her uncertain look did not lessen, but she started chanting and I used Lernore¡¯s sight to look at the magic behind things. It looked almost as if she was drawing a picture with her words, no gestures or direct control needed, the words worked as a mantra, guiding her power into the formation needed to activate the magic. Looking at her, I saw the power slowly gather from all over her body and drew on the power of the Blood Amber in my hand, using my Blood Magic-Skill to control it and guided it to that gathering point. There was a slight resistance, forcing me to concentrate to keep the flow steady and focused, as if the magic did not quite want to accept the outside influence. In my normal vision, I saw Adra flinch for a moment and scowl afterwards, as if it was uncomfortable, but she never stopped chanting.


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    The first Blood Amber crumbled after maybe a minute, forcing me to take out another, letting its power flow to her. This one crumbled too, but before I could even try to figure out how to make up the difference with my own power, the spell was completed, the picture flashing with light and settling over us.


    ¡°That was not fun. Can we not do that again?¡± Adra sighed.


    ¡°I¡¯m sorry. Why was it not fun? I never had a problem with using Blood Magic to power my spells, as long as it wasn¡¯t my own blood.¡±


    ¡°I can¡¯t really explain it. The feeling of someone else intruding into the spell, into such an intimate place, it feels uncomfortable, violating even. Letting you in was hard enough, not that you gave me much choice, your magic is rather formidable.¡± she explained, with a wry grin on her face, letting me know that she wasn¡¯t taking offence. We had come quite a way from our initial meeting, when she had looked at me, as if the choice between going with me and getting sacrificed in a blood magic-ritual was a hard one. But travelling for weeks, in a small group, forced you to get to know each other, to see the other¡¯s quirks. That had apparently softened the effect of my antisocial traits, both of the ingame-avatar and of my personality.


    ¡°Well, I¡¯m sorry. Maybe we can find some way for you to learn how to harness my magic, or blood magic, to fuel your spells. It would give us another arrow in our quiver, but that¡¯s something for another day.¡± I told her. It was an interesting concept to ponder,


    Now that the spell to cover our tracks was reapplied, we moved over to the corpse and I was truly impressed, her shot had been awesome. Shooting at an concealed target, while moving and without any real time to aim and still felling him with a single shot, a shot that hit him square in the chest, taking out the heart? That was an incredible show of skill. Or maybe luck, a single shot might be attributed to luck.


    Before his demise, the shadow had been another Jonari-Hunter, having a horn in his hand and armed with a hand-axe. Sigmir identified him as one of the trappers in her tribe. We decided to leave him as he was, arrow and all, letting him look just look like he was killed by an nymph or dryad-archer. Which was exactly what had happened after all.


    Happening upon the hunter raised our vigilance almost to paranoia-levels, but we were lucky and we saw nothing more of he Jonari for the rest of our run, only from time to time hearing their horns in the distance.


    That is, we saw nothing more of them, until we got to the gorge we had left Rai in. Now, that was the moment when I got a truly bad feeling in my gut. By the time we got into the vicinity of the gorge, twilight had fallen, giving us enough cover, but the fact that it was now guarded by Jonari-Hunters, two bulky males that Sigmir identified as two of Jongarn¡¯s henchmen did nothing to assuage the feeling in my gut, but changed into an interesting feeling of anticipation, the knowledge that it was likely that we had just found the last prey we had wanted to kill, the one that was the main reason for our attack on their village, almost made me shiver in what I could only call bloodlust. I knew that I wanted to bleed him, that I would love to stab my athame into him and slowly draw out his blood, letting it coalesce into a gem to make a pendant for Sigmir out of. Maybe I would even try to recreate the collar I had placed onto the nymph, the one that had allowed some sort of eldritch horror to swallow her soul and annihilate her mind.


    As fast as the last thought came, it was banished just as fast. While it was most likely the most painful way to go, remembering the scream of the nymph, I was not willing to risk my sanity, my soul and the world at large to make him die a maximally painful death. Just the feeling of me ripping out his life with my Blood Magic would have to suffice.


    ¡°I will scout them out, I¡¯d rather not attack them head on, that gorge is an excellent defensive position.¡± I told the others, before drawing on my Darkness Magic to conceal myself.


    Remembering what I had done the night before, I tried to duplicate it, but in a slower, controlled fashion, in order to keep my wits about me. With one part of my mind, I focused on the runes for Shadow and Concealment, trying to add their meaning into the magic to help myself along. Soon, I got to a point where I was unable to do more, it felt more like a reflexive resistance of my mind, preventing me from going too far with my magic than a limitation of the magic itself. Last night, my loopy state of mind had probably prevented me from sensing it.


    There was a soft hiss when I started moving, and looking at my arms, it was more akin to a strange cloud of darkness, a shadow in the night than it was an arm. It would not let me walk right by the guards and I doubted that I would be able to do the strange shadow step I had used the night before, but with a little magic, I had no doubt that I could sneak my way into the gorge.

 Chapter 95

    There was a strange lightness to my steps, as I moved through the forest, sneaking up on the two guards at the entrance of the gorge we had left Rai in. It was as if my legs did not have to carry as much weight as they were used to, but at the same time they were weaker, less substantial. The feeling was slightly discombobulating, forcing me to step carefully to keep my balance. That forced me to slow down and control my every move, which in turn gave me time to check each step for loose twigs or anything that might give away my approach. I realised something else as I came closer, my sight was a bit different than normal, there were no colours, only a grayscale but in turn, my night-vision was truly exceptional, letting me see as if it was daylight.


    When I got closer, I realised that my standard approach would not work, I had planned to put the guards to sleep before moving into the gorge but the two guards were talking to each other and apparently at least one more person further in the gorge, someone I could not see and thus could not target. So, if the two guards outside suddenly dropped out of the conversation it would raise the alarm. Trying to listen to them was completely impossible, for some reason the sounds reaching my ears were muffled, as if they had to travel through thick wool or something similar. Maybe it was another effect of my shadow-cloak.


    Looking the guards over again, I realised that they were not stupid. They had bound a torch to the rocks behind them, illuminating the area around them without messing up their night-vision. Why couldn¡¯t they hold their torches head-high, next to their faces, destroying their night-vision and giving me nice, deep shadows around them? Oh, well, there had to be another way in.


    Looking at the area, I thought about a different approach, something to let me close in without being seen and after a moment of video-game-think, the scales fell from my eyes, making the solution obvious. I wasn¡¯t in a normal video-game, forcing me on predictable paths right into my enemies. The gorge I wanted to infiltrate was roughly perpendicular to the cliff it was carved in and the obvious solution was to climb up the cliff and scout them out from above. I could even climb down at the cave-entrance if I wanted to, circumventing the guards in the gorge itself. The climb up should be rather easy with the strengthened avatar I was using; in real life it would be daunting, but in Mundus? Not so much.


    As I was planning my approach, I realised something else, the cliff was strange, it was too straight, as if someone had taken a straight-edge to the land and pushed down. Or maybe as if some being had raised the other side in order to create an embankment in some long forgotten battle. The idea made me shiver - if I was right, it was an insane feat of sheer power. Sadly, I could not quite see the length of the cliff due to the forest, but no matter what it was a huge feat, a truly earthshaking display of power I peeked through Lenore¡¯s sight, hoping for some trace of the incredible magic that had shaped the land, hoping for a small gem of insight into that level of power but there was nothing. Either there had never been anything or the relentless march of time had swallowed it, leaving only the broken land behind.


    I was proud of my magic, of the power I had used in Tegi to smash the Devourer - but compared to this? Compared to this, I was a drop in the ocean, insignificant. But the idea could be something to strive for, something to achieve. Maybe not during the beta - it was on a time-limit - but in the official game? Yes, power to shake the bones of the world itself, to alter the landscape. I wanted that, craved it even. I felt the small gem, reminiscent of my crossing of the first divide vibrate a little, joining my body in the excitement I felt, the taste of power an almost physical thing on my lips. Sweet like the purest manna from heaven, bitter like the black nectar of the gods, I craved it.


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    Yesterday, I had tasted a tiny sip of it, the feeling of being one with the darkness, unseen, unhindered, a true harbinger of death. Free and unbound.


    With newfound conviction in my heart, I reached the cliffside and started climbing. It was ridiculously easy, the cloaking darkness around me lessened my weight but if I focused it around my arms, they did not lose strength as my legs had, so I was using my normal strength to lift a fraction of my normal weight. In addition, there was quite a bit of ice and snow on the cliff, enough for me to use my Ice Magic, shaping it into secure hand- and foot-holds, allowing me to scramble up the cliffside as if it was a ladder. Climbing up an unknown, sheer, icy cliff in the dark should be an incredibly hard, almost impossible undertaking but the combination of magic and an attribute-enhanced body made it so easy, a part of me wanted to laugh in childish glee. But that had to wait, until I knew what was going on and no longer trying to pull a Mission: Impossible.


    Sadly, the two meters were a lot harder, the nice, rock-hard cliffside gave way to an earthen slope, still hard thanks to the frost but not giving me the confidence the rock had given me. Still, I made it up without any incident.


    On the cliff, there was a band of almost empty snow running along the cliff, without trees growing there, only small shrubbery and even that looked rather pitiful. But it added a rough outline to the cliff, allowing me to blend in as I walked to the gorge, splitting up the cliff. It should have been almost impossible to see the drop in the dark and I had no doubt that many an animal had failed to sense it, especially if fleeing and fell to its death. But right now, there was no danger of that, a bright light was shining up from the gorge, tinting the shrubbery in flickering, orange light.


    Looking down, I saw a brightly burning fire, sized somewhere between a normal campfire and a true bonfire, giving light and warmth to the four Jonari around it. None of them looked like Jongarn had been described by Sigmir, so I guessed that he was inside the cave. There was a smaller, flickering light coming from the cavem  almost impossible to see due to the fire outside, but the moving shadows gave it away.


    Surveying the scene, I saw that there were deep shadows towards the end of the gorge, close to the cave-mouth. There was a feeling of confidence in me, making me sure that I could make it down there, just as easy as I had made it up here. That would allow us to attack them from two sides, Sigmir and Adra going for the guards just as I attacked those down there. Like that, it would do both, stop them from using the narrow gorge as a defensive position and stop them from escaping. I took the time to make sure that there were no wards prepared, carefully looking the gorge over with Lenore¡¯s sight, paying close attention to the cave-mouth. After all, Lenore would not be with me down there, so knowing if there were wards was paramount. But there were none.


    With a smile on my face, I asked Lenore to leave her Hallow and play communication-link, so we could attack at the same time. She was not happy about the cold but understood my plan and obliged.


    Now, I just had to get myself into position and scout out the cave before starting the attack. All in a night¡¯s work.


    With a voice in my head humming the Mission: Impossible-theme, I started to climb down, a shadow in the dark, silent and invisible. The climb was almost easier than before, now that I had done it once. There was even more ice in gorge, maybe due to some sort of wind-shielding allowing it to accumulate. It mattered not to me why it was there, just that it made the climb down trivial.


    Down in the gorge, the shadows clung to me, embracing me amongst their own, shielding me from stray gaze as I slipped into the cave. There was a torch here, small and flickering but even with a torch, without someone to see me, I could easily skirt  it¡¯s light and move further into the cave.


    At that moment, a familiar smell joined the clean, earthen smell of the cave. A penetrating scent, metallic and slightly cloying. A smell I had smelled quite often since coming to Mundus. Now, I just had to find out whose blood had been spilled here and how much of it.


    I made my way further into the dark cave and quickly found my mark. Bound, on the floor, was Rai, bleeding from numerous, small cuts. Not cuts to kill, no, those were cuts to just cause pain. To torture. And in close to him, still holding a bloody knife and smiling in a maddingly familiar way, was Jongarn.

 Chapter 96

    Seeing Jongarn in the dim torchlight, I tried to meld deeper into the shadows, hiding myself from him. Luckily, his gaze had been fixed on Rai, ignoring the entrance so I had not been discovered. In the shadows, I froze, asking Lenore to tell Adra and Sigmir to wait with their attack. I was not certain about Jongarn¡¯s combat prowess, so a frontal assault was not appealing. The only estimation I could use was Sigmir, and that was a sobering thought. Sure, she had told me that she was a better fighter, that he never crossed the first divide, but time had passed, so it could have changed. Or she could have been deceived. So I would treat him as a dangerous opponent.


    Waiting on him to turn his back, I focused on listening. Even as close as I was to them, it took effort to make out words, the muffling of my shadow cloak affecting me just as much as it affected the noises I might make. At least, that was what I hoped.


    ¡°Why, why don¡¯t you just tell me what I want to know, stupid pup? Do you enjoy what I do to you?¡± Jongarn talked, almost in monologue, as if he did not care what Rai said. Or maybe it was a question he had asked a few times already.


    ¡°I saw you react earlier. You know something, but why won¡¯t you just tell me? Why don¡¯t you make it easier on yourself?¡± Jongarn bent down, looking Rai in the eyes.


    ¡°You know, you will tell me what I want to know. It¡¯s just a question how much pain you have to suffer beforehand.¡± As he said that, he straightened and just as he talked about the pain Rai had to suffer, he placed a vicious soccer-kick in his side, causing Rai to let out a grunt. The look on Jongarn¡¯s face was not one of someone who did not like what he did, it was one of pleasure, as if he had a new toy and was playing with it. For some reason, it felt familiar, as if I had seen it before but I was unable to place it. Where had I seen such a smile?


    ¡°When I talked to Horgar, I saw you react to the name Sigmir. I know that her father never let her venture in the direction of Adernas. I know that she fled north, not east. So, I know she is back. You will tell me what you know about her. Oh, you will tell me. And I will find her.¡± Hearing Sigmir¡¯s name on Jongarn¡¯s lips, my blood started to run cold, but hearing that Rai had not told on us, without knowing the circumstances, despite being tortured, raised my opinion on him by quite a bit.


    ¡°I¡­ spit on you!¡± It came out as a whisper, almost inaudible for me, but the defiance in Rai¡¯s voice was palpable. He even tried to make good on his words, spitting in Jongarn¡¯s general direction, showing more backbone than I had seen before. Or maybe, he just wanted Jongarn to kill him, simply to end the pain. If that was his plan, he was in the right direction.


    Faced with Rai¡¯s defiance, Jongarn actually retreated a bit, muttering under his breath as he walked towards the back of the cave. Feeling that it was a possibly unique chance, I moved forward, skirting the edges of light and hiding in another shadow. If Jongarn moved back to Rai, I would have an open way to strike.


    ¡°Do you think I don¡¯t know what your defiance is? Seeking to die, don¡¯t you? Don¡¯t worry, you will. After you told me everything you know. And after I made you pay for the time you make me waste. Oh, we will have so much fun¡­¡± Jongarn¡¯s ranting was getting even more deranged and his tone of voice promised more pain for Rai, as he stalked back towards him. But that would never happen. Seeing my moment approaching, I asked Lenore to let Sigmir and Adra start their assault outside. And then my moment was there, Jongarn turned back to Rai and in the process had his wide-open back turned in my direction. Seeing an obvious opening, I surged forward, drawing my blades and dropping the shadow-cloak that held me concealed at the last step. I was not sure how the strange non-corporeality would interact with an attack and right now was not the time to test the interaction. No, now was the time to bury my blades into Jongarn¡¯s kidneys.


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    Sadly, all ideas to make him suffer had to be discarded for a swift and terminal solution, something that made sure I could focus on other things, like slaughtering the rest of his henchman, in case they focused on the cave.


    So, with Bullet Time activating, I carefully aimed my two Ice Blades at the seams of his armour, using my Ice Magic to steady them and move them as they punched through and dug deep into his back and kidneys. His ranting was replaced by a piercing scream, as the pain hit him. Two blades in the back was what I considered a good start, when it came to him but far from enough. So, my next move was to give him a swift kick into the back of his knees, causing him to stumble forward and fall to his knees, his own momentum helping me to twist the blades and rip them back out. Sadly, twisting the blades was almost impossible, his armour held them more or less in the same direction, but the thought was there.


    But to build on the idea of pierced kidneys, I went to other targets. One blade went higher in his back, roughly the area his heart would be but his armour was quite sturdy there, no seams to abuse, so the blow glanced off. Normally, it would have caused a bruise, but I doubted that bruising would be a problem in that situation. No, bruising would never be a problem for him again, I realised that when my second blade cut into the soft tissue between his ear and his jaw-bone before easily sliding to the front, cutting through cartilage, muscle and blood-vessels on the way. The way his scream was literally cut off and replaced with more of a whistling sound told me that I had at least nicked his windpipe, maybe even severed most of it. But what I definitely had severed were the blood vessels supplying his brain. At least if the anatomy of giantblood was the same as humans, or similar enough in that regard.


    Pulling the blade back out, I saw something. Something disturbing. In the flickering light of the single torch, I saw my mirror-image reflected on my blade, just for a split second, without Bullet Time I would never have realised what I was seeing. But that moment showed me why Jongarn¡¯s smile had been so familiar. In that moment, I was wearing just the same smile. I felt shock race through my system in a way I had never felt before. I felt revulsion, revulsion that I was displaying a mannerism so similar to someone like him. Forcibly and with great mental effort, I banished any thought on that matter. It would have to wait until the situation was resolved.


    I could hear combat noises from outside so I got ready to move. I heard a soft gasp from Rai and a swift glance to Rai showed me that he was looking good for now and the bindings would make sure that he didn¡¯t do anything stupid, like rushing into combat while wounded, and an even shorter glance to my notifications told me that Jongarn had given me some EXP. The EXP weren¡¯t even half-bad, he had a couple of levels on me, not that it had helped him any.


    Just as I thought about my next step, move out to attack or stay and defend Rai, I heard rapidly approaching footsteps and someone shouting for Jongarn, telling him that the camp was under attack. Maybe, they had not heard his scream or they had taken it for Rai¡¯s scream. Not that it mattered to me. Feeling Bullet Time run out, I activated Overflow to allow for a maximised alpha strike, something to make sure that no matter who came into the cave, he would fall. All six shuttles of the Weaver¡¯s Fury rose from my cloak, forming a beautiful, deadly snowflake in the air and the second the figure of a Jonari Hunter stepped into my view, the six shuttles flew off with deadly grace. Somewhere, deep in the back of my mind, an idea was formed for later consideration, the idea to join the shuttles with the runes for Hail or Blizzard, similar to the way I had used the runes for Shadow and Concealment to strengthen my Cloak of Shadows before. But it was not something that I wanted to test in the midst of combat.


    I saw the look on the Jonari change from concern to surprise as he saw me with my, no doubt, silvery blue glowing eyes and then to pain, as all six shuttles pierced his torso. I think he wanted to say something but at least one of the shuttles had pierced his lung, maybe two, it was hard to tell by the angle. Another two were lodged into the area his heart was in, undoubtedly doing even more damage and the final two were sunk into his stomach.


    With but a thought, I ripped all six back out, watching the Jonari crumble. before I thought about making my way outside and into the rest of the fight.

 Chapter 97

    With the defeat of the hunter that was rushing in, I had a little extra time to make sure that Rai would not die in the next minutes. It would be a shame to lose out on the quest he was involved with. And there was a small, nagging voice in my head, reminding me that at least some of his wounds were because of his association with Sigmir and me.


    ¡°Are you severely wounded anywhere, or just the superficial cuts and probably bruises?¡± I asked, bending down to pull him into a halfway comfortable position and cutting his bindings.


    ¡°No... I¡¯m alright.¡± He answered, while avoiding my gaze.


    ¡°Good. Stay here.¡± With those words, I left the cave, the Weaver¡¯s Fury floating behind my shoulders.


    Outside, I saw that Sigmir and Adra had been busy. I only saw the three guys that had been at the campfire, engaged with the two of them, as they used the gorge to prevent encirclement. Sigmir had her axe and shield in hand, taking the brunt of their attack and allowing Adra to strike from behind her, using the longer reach of her spear. Classic formation-tactics but the reason that it had become a classic, prevalent tactic in both worlds was simple. It worked. The three Jonari were showing multiple wounds each, while Sigmir and Adra looked completely fine. Simple passage of time would assure their victory. Not that it would be needed.


    Trying something new, I tried to split up my six shuttles in three groups of two to attack independently from each other and found it extremely hard. Moving them in three formations instead of two would give me a headache, trying to balance a formation that was comprised of shuttles from two different mental processes. With a quick thought, I split the mixed formation, assigning the two shuttles to the other two formations and felt my burden lift. Using the shuttles in two formations was almost no burden at all, just an expenditure of Astral Power.


    My first strike was also my last. The two Jonari I had targeted were unaware of the incoming shuttles, until they were hit, straight into their backs, causing massive damage. Both Sigmir and Adra used the disturbance to make their demise a certainty. The last Jonari saw the writing on the wall and tried a risky move of dodging around Sigmir to escape. Of course, opening his back to Sigmir and his side to Adra was a bad idea, allowing them to attack with impunity.


    Seeing that the fight was over, I moved my shuttles back to me, rotating them for a moment to get the blood off, before sheathing them once more. The image of a shuttle rotating around its shortest axis was giving me ideas, if I could get it fast enough, it would almost be a saw blade. Visions of flying razor sharp saw blades promised a quick demise to any enemy I would be facing.


    But for now, Rai needed checking up. Sigmir and Adra had made their way over and joined me, so I gave them an update. ¡°Jongarn was in there. He won¡¯t act against us, ever again. Rai is in there as well. If I interpret the words I heard right, Rai had heard Jongarn use your name, Sigmir, and reacted to the name. Jongarn wanted to know what he knew about you and, when Rai did not tell him, Jongarn tortured him for information. Unless there is some sort of conspiracy active, Rai kept quiet and did not tell him anything.¡±


    ¡°But Jongarn is dead?¡± Sigmir asked, just as Adra asked about Rai¡¯s condition.


    ¡°Rai is a little beaten up but seemed to be fine. Jongarn is dead, sadly I was lacking the time to make it as painful as he deserved. But he is gone for good.¡± I answered them in turn.


    Sigmir seemed pleased with the fact that Jongarn was gone, Adra looked more pensive.


    ¡°Maybe that¡¯s for the best. He is gone and the two of you can put your hatred to rest. I think that torturing him simply for the sake of causing him pain, to make him suffer would be harmful to you.¡± Adra said.


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    When she voiced that thought, I felt that there might be some truth to that. Just thinking about the look, that slightly manic grin on my face as I cut his throat sent a shiver down my spine. Not because I had never seen in before, I was aware that I had a similar smile on my face, back when I had used the full extent of my magic and used it to exterminate the Snowbolds. I could easily imagine myself having just that expression as I slowly and carefully tortured him to death, making his demise last days just to satisfy an inner voice to make him suffer for what he did to Sigmir.


    It was a startling realisation that, if judged by my actions, I was only slightly better than Jongarn. He had used underhanded means and magic, trying to bend Sigmir to his will, so she could be a broodmare. I had used torture and magic trying to bend the nymphs to my will, in order to use them as sacrificial objects. The only saving grace was that the nymphs were enemies to me and Sigmir was an ally to him. But that did not make my actions less reprehensible. And the worst part about it was that I didn¡¯t really feel bad about it.


    Part of me wanted to feel bad, wanted to feel assured that after this revelation, I would never act like that again. But the realistic part of me looked at the strange, new sensations within me, those feelings that I only had when I was in Mundus, within my avatar, and that realistic side told me that, unless I made a conscious effort to avoid such behaviour, it was likely to happen again. There was something within me that did not want to be a being similar to Jongarn. The simple thought to be like him in that way was repulsive to me. For now, that meant that I should try to be conscious of my actions and examine them closely.


    Sadly, there was no objective truth to what was good and what was bad, something I had always known but right now, I was realising that my subjective view was skewed. Now, that I was examining my actions, I realised that my normal guidelines were the laws of the state I was living in. While I was aware that laws were not automatically moral, it was the best I could do. But once I had arrived in Mundus, obviously I had discarded them; it was a game-world after all, a world largely without rules, something the developers had made quite clear: there was only the local law that protected you, and a few safeguards to keep the human from essential harm, in mind and in body. With me starting in the wilderness, I had subconsciously chucked all rules and morality out of the window, never even thinking about them, making me in essence just as much of a monster as I considered Jongarn to be.


    Some said that the first step of alleviating a problem was to accept that there was one. Intellectually, I did know that I did not want to be like Jongarn. The problem was that I was lacking the moral compass to fix that. For now, I would use Sigmir and Adra as moral guidelines, two natives of this world, to shape my decisions and actions - like that, I should be able to steer clear of such behaviour.


    For now, I wanted to help Rai, he had protected Sigmir in his own way, by keeping silent despite the torture. Even if an inner voice told me that it would be best if he tragically died, making sure that he could not tell anyone who killed Jongarn, allowing others to make the intuitive leap that we might be responsible for the death of his father and the Jonari shaman, I would not give in. I would not be the monster that killed someone who protected my Sigmir, just because of something he might do in the future. It would be the first test for my newfound conviction to act morally, not just going the path of efficiency.


    In the cave, Rai was still where I had left him, not that he could have gone far with his hands and feet bound. When I moved closer to cut his bindings, his eyes suddenly got huge and I realised that, while I had made sure to get rid of the blood on my shuttles, the blade in my hand was still stained with Jongarn¡¯s blood, giving it a menacing quality. I had a feeling that if I started to smile, he might just faint dead away, after all he had seen me cut Jongarn¡¯s throat with a smile on my face.


    ¡°Just cutting the ropes, don¡¯t worry.¡± I told him, as I moved behind him so I could cut his arms free. When his arms were free, I moved to his legs, cutting them free as well, but stopping him from getting up before I could take care of his wounds.


    ¡°Wh¡­ Thank you.¡± He started to say something else, but suddenly caught himself and looked me straight in the eyes, while thanking me. While it had not been the first time he had talked directly to me, it was the first time that he thanked me.


    You could have knocked me over with a feather. Maybe, just maybe, something truly good would come from having saved him.

 Chapter 98

    I almost wanted to ask who he was and what he had done to Rai, I was that surprised. After we had saved him for the first time, he had acted as if he was entitled to it and the world revolved around him. Now, in a situation that he easily could have blamed on us, he turned courteous and grateful? Something had prompted a massive change in him, but I was unsure what. If it was the torture, maybe I should keep it in mind, a way to unspoil brats would be useful to be aware of.


    For now, I would take care of his wounds and watch the situation develop. Sadly, with the fact that Rai knew about the conflict between us and the Jonari, there would be no time to do possible follow-up quests after the fight against the nymphs.


    The healing was easy; a simple, channeled Rune-triangle allowed me to scan his body and fix the cuts and bruises he had. There were a lot of them, but none of them were infected so there was no problem. As I took care of them, Sigmir and Rai started to talk.


    ¡°It¡¯s good that you are alright, Rai. Can you tell me what happened?¡± she asked.


    ¡°Yes, sure. I was staying close to the cave and was waiting for you to come back when a member of their hunting party saw me and their group joined me. They introduced themselves as a hunting party of Jonari, led by Jongarn, their chieftain¡¯s son, someone I had met before, when my father brought me on meetings with the leaders of other groups around us. When I knew who he was, I recognized him and, when asked, explained where I had seen him before. He was quite happy and offered to help me back to Adernas, if I wanted to.


    I told them no, that I was holding down the fort for a hunting party, something to do with my training. By then, it was evening and they asked if they could share the camp, something I did not mind, at that point, I was pretty sick of being by myself.


    During the evening, they were rather nice, if a little boisterous, talking about their great skills and their kills. Part of me wanted to join in, but what would I say? That I had failed on my first hunt, that I was utterly unskilled with a spear and that I would most likely be banished from my tribe? I considered lying, but I had spent the time alone thinking about the lies I had told, mostly to myself, and felt that it would be foolish to add to them.


    The next morning, during breakfast, Jongarn and one of the others, Horgar, talked about a hunt they had been on and how they failed, due to, as they called it, the tiny witch and what they would do to her, if they ever caught her and Sigmir. I must have reacted to the name Sigmir, causing the whole group to pounce on me, they knew that it was unlikely that I had ever met Sigmir before she left the tribe and wanted to know why I had reacted.


    After I had heard their ideas what to do with the two of you, I knew that I should keep quiet. The two of you, especially you, Morgana, have helped me a great deal and I have been a spoiled child, I realise that now.¡±


    By now, I was done with the healing and looked up, to saw a sad, self-deprecating smile, on his face. When we left him in the cave, I would never have believed him to be capable of such a smile but apparently he had done some soul-searching out here. Well, sitting in a solitary cave in a quiet, frozen forest might just be the best spot for soul-searching, no distractions, just time to think and reflect.


    I was too startled to actually react to his revelation and the change in behaviour, and he continued. ¡°When I did not tell them what they wanted to know, they got nasty. At first, it was more intimidation and coercion, they told me that you had been banished from your tribe, even after their previous story, the story how they had hunted you, it just didn¡¯t add up. I kept quiet and their attempts got physical. At first all of them were in the cave, but soon, Jongarn sent the rest out and his behaviour changed. He still asked about you, but it seemed that getting information was secondary to him, his main goal was to cause as much pain as he could.


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    At one point he¡­ he slowly and carefully showed me where not to cut, because cutting at those points would easily cause great damage without causing any extra pain.¡± there was an obvious shiver running down his body, as he quieted, clearly remembering the torture and pain. Adra had listened from a small distance away and was now offering him a waterskin, letting me realise that Rai had been tortured the entire day. Somehow, I doubted that Jongarn had cared about getting him something to drink or to eat.


    ¡°Don¡¯t worry, he can¡¯t hurt you any longer. Why don¡¯t we leave the cave and have some supper?¡± I suggested, thinking that if I had been tortured in a cave for hours on end, I would rather leave the cave. I doubted we would sleep in the cave, not with the smell in here, a smell that got more penetrative and odious by the second. Rai looked grateful when I suggested it, so I turned to Sigmir and Adra, asking them for help with the two corpses. I doubted that the air would clear enough to sleep in the cave, but maybe it would.


    As we left the cave, I finally looked at the skill-levels I had gained during the encounter.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Skill increased</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You increased your skill: Darkness Rune-Mastery [59/100]</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Skill increased</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You increased your skill: Blood Rune-Mastery [46/100]</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Skill increased</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You increased your skill: Dual Blade-Mastery [20/100]</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Skill increased</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You increased your skill: Darkness Magic [40/100]</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Skill increased</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You increased your skill: Stealth [30/100]</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    Outside, I started to prepare a meal for the four of us, no need to let the fire go to waste, while Sigmir and Adra moved the corpses we had created out of the gorge. For once, I did not mind that Rai simply sat close to the fire, without doing anything to help.


    ¡°You saved me¡­ Again. It¡¯s strange, when I first saw you, I was scared of you. As if you were something from another realm, here to devour me. But when you acted like all the others, helping me, I felt as if it was my due, as son of Giro- Silly of me, I know. I had a few days to think about it, about my behaviour. Father and mother have always done their best to accommodate me. When I had trouble learning the spear due to my size, father simply let it go, he let me try out various weapons and when I liked to fight with two knives, he just let me train on my own, as there was nobody in the tribe to train me. I fought against other children and won, my smaller size and high speed letting me dominate them. So, when I was fighting against the other children, I was so sure of myself, so sure that I could take on the world. I could never fight against adults, not as long as I was considered a child. Once I had been on my first hunt, I would join an experienced hunter as his apprentice, getting training and guidance from him. But the one who was supposed to become my master died, he died on my first hunt and I was named a coward.¡± I listened to him, but it was as if he did not really talk to me as a person and more as if he was confessing, simply talking about his problems to get them off his soul. Whatever the reason, I felt that I had to listen. It was the least I could do, after he had kept our secrets, kept quiet for us.


    ¡°When we fought against the nymphs, I quickly learned that fighting against a single opponent is entirely different from fighting alongside another and that I could not even get close without leaving my position. I was so useless and they easily separated me from the others and when I realised that I was all alone, I ran, what else could I do? Try to fight against multiple nymphs on my own? I¡¯m not that strong. So, I ran. Not that I¡¯m proud of it.¡±


    He sounded contrite and I could understand it. In a way, he and Sigmir were on opposite sides of an extreme, Sigmir¡¯s father had relentlessly drilled her, forcing her to become a strong warrior, but she had lacked in love and care, while on the other side, Rai had been spoiled with affection but had lacked in appropriate preparation for his adulthood. And when the adult world had forced itself onto him, he had not measured up and the consequences were those of the adult world.

 Chapter 99

    During dinner, Rai was rather quiet but both Adra and SIgmir told their own stories, trying to help his mood. Especially Adra¡¯s story was similar in some ways, she had made mistakes when she was on her own and ended up in rather big trouble. I was grateful that she never truly explained just where and from whom we had saved her, just explaining the overall circumstances. There was no need to give him the information that, in a roundabout way, we had caused their problems with the nymphs.


    We also discussed our next steps, deciding that we would rest in the gorge for the night and move on the next day. Part of me wanted to run through the night, fearing that our hunters would do so, but Sigmir and Adra talked sense into me, making me understand that it was more likely that we would end up making mistakes if we forced ourself to carry on, despite the exhaustion.


    The cave was, sadly, still saturated with the smell of blood, making it unpleasant to stay inside, so we all slept outside, in the cold but clear air. At the entrance to the gorge, I tried something new, creating a wall of ice and using the concealment-rune to make it blend with the environment but sadly, it was not working as I wanted it to. Maybe, there was something more to it, or I needed more power to make it work as I wanted. In a way, what I wanted was not quite darkness-magic, more illusion-magic, not that I knew if there was a difference, after all, I would have classified mind magic as something different, but had learned that it was a composite of different elements and mastery over the different elements helped with the mind magic skill. Using that idea, it might work if I had a way to bend, or rather break, light, maybe I could get my ice magic to the point that I could create ice-lenses and prisms, allowing me to manipulate light like that. I doubted that learning light magic itself would be a possibility, not without either a good teacher or a miracle. My current magic abilities were wholly dependent on the fact that I had the affinities for them.


    The night passed uneventful, we rotated guards between Sigmir, Ylva and myself, letting Adra and Rai catch extra shut-eye. Rai had trouble settling down, to the point that I offered to use my magic to put him to sleep, something he accepted. I used a combination of ice and blood-runes, trying to shift the focus of the spell from the normal comatose state into a restive trance, letting him recover without disruption from nightmares. The spell worked like, well, a charm and he slept until we woke him the next morning for breakfast.


    After breakfast, it was time to move once again, so we broke camp, making sure that nothing was left behind that told of the specifics of our group. Our overall plan was still to lure our pursuers into a group of nymphs, maybe with added incentive for both parties, and fade away while both groups were under the impression that the other had attacked them first. I had little doubt that both groups would do little to question that assumption, neither side had shown great prudence in their actions, leading me to the belief that hot-headedness and aggression were the prevalent characteristics in either group.


    Travelling during the day was a little more exciting, mainly because the horns we had used before to get an idea of the distance between our hunters and us were absent. Sigmir explained that absence by explaining that the hunting party had converged on the magical remnant of the spell we had used to remove out traces. They had realised that their normal approach of casting a wide net to find our tracks in case we doubled back, was useless thanks to that spell, preventing all but their best trackers to follow us. So, they simply had to follow those tracks, but that was exactly what we wanted. It didn¡¯t really matter if they were faster than us, because, depending on our luck, we only needed to stay in front of them for the day, maybe one or two extra days, before we could slip away, bring out the popcorn and watch the show, as they clashed with a party composed of nymphs and dryads.


    Shortly before nightfall, I sent out Lenore, causing Rai to be quite surprised, when, suddenly, a raven was sitting on my shoulder, without him being able to detect it¡¯s approach. I made short introductions, not quite telling him why he had never seen her before, just telling him that she was my spirit-companion and would scout for us. He looked as if he had questions about it, but he held back, not asking them. The previous Rai would have demanded answers, annoyed that he even had to ask, that information had been withheld from him. His newfound prudence would serve him well.


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    While Lenore was underway, the rest of us looked for a good spot to make camp, somewhere we could see possible attackers before they got to us, without making it obvious that we were hiding from the dryads as well. Misdirection was the buzzword of the day. Adra found a good spot, hidden between shrubbery and protected by the wind. I was against taking the risk of lighting a fire, so our camp would have to be a cold one, so every little thing counted. Sigmir and I would be alright anyway, thanks to a combination of snuggling and cold-resistance but Adra and Rai were lacking those particular advantages, or so I thought.


    As we made our cold camp, Lenore came back, reporting that she had spotted a group of dryads and nymphs making camp maybe fifteen minutes of walking away from us. She did not investigate too closely, for fear of adding a wild fowl dish to their dinner-table, so she could only roughly estimate their numbers, but that rough estimation was good enough for me. She estimated that there were at least fifteen beings in that camp, but had no way to tell nymphs from dryads. In the other direction, she had seen no hint of our pursuers, so we should be in the clear, for now.


    Part of me wanted to use the night to scout out the dryad camp, but I restrained myself, there was no actual point to it, beyond sating my curiosity and the risk was simply not worth the reward, so I stayed put. But in our camp, something else was going on that fed my sense of curiosity and drama, Shortly after they had laid down, Adra had grabbed Rai in an embrace, mumbling about feeling cold and apparently seeking warmth. His face lit up like a christmas tree, broadcasting a wide variety of emotions, chief among them embarrassment but also lust mixed in. Adra looked simply comfortable, she had found what she was looking for, warmth and a second blanket, making her a happy dryad.


    That spectacle gave me something new to think about in my ongoing investigation of the intricacies of the basic culture on Mundus. Not so much about culture-specific traits but in a broader, possible multi-racial, sense, what made the sapients of Mundus tick. Just how did society work with truly alien beings? How did cross-species romance work, was it common, rare, maybe even forbidden? Sigmir and I were a rather bad example, our races were far too closely related to matter, in the grand scheme of things. But Rai and Adra? Far more interesting. But I should not put the cart before the horse.


    But just thinking about it, on Earth, there were problems just because people had a different skin-colour or even sillier things, like religious or political beliefs. On Mundus, I had seen Nagas, had heard about Centaurs and was relatively sure that there would be even more interesting beings, like Arachne. So, how could a society work with such different beings, when Earth was split over trivialities?


    My guess was, that it worked just like Earth. Beings clustered together in tribes for protection and power-projection, those tribes being as inclusive as they had to be, based on location, and those who did not fit in were ostracised. So, in a dangerous area, ¡®tribes¡¯ would be overall more inclusive, due to the simple need to include enough power to protect the tribe.


    I watched the squirming of Rai and the happy smile of Adra a little longer, and realised that apparently, the close proximity to Adra had changed all negative thoughts Rai might have had, allowing him to sleep without magical aid. I counted that as a win and snuggled into Sigmir¡¯s embrace, not caring that she had the first watch and would wake me later. Her lap was almost as physically comfortable as my bedding but far warmer. When adding in the warm and fuzzy feelings I was having in her arms, I would take a little physical discomfort any day of the week.


    I had the last watch and asked Lenore to scout once more, in the dim pre-dawn twilight. She was gone for some time but when she returned, what she told me made sure that my mind was fully awake, faster than any coffee could. The Jonari had not stopped for the night and were about an hour away from us and the dryads looked as if they wanted to start their day bright and early.


    To me, that meant that I started shaking people awake. It was showtime.

 Chapter 100

    Adra and Sigmir quickly woke up, once I started shaking them, Rai needed a moment to realise just where he was. As soon as he realised that during the night, Adra had imitated an octopus and wrapped herself around him, as if he was a hug-pillow, he could not get out of bed quick enough, blushing all the way. I shared an amused look with Sigmir, but both of us were aware that teasing the two of them would have to wait until our situation had been resolved.


    We quickly broke camp - wolfing down a meagre, cold breakfast as we did so - and started our day. One thing we made sure of, was that we left nothing behind that hinted at the fact that anyone had camped at that particular spot. As we did, Lenore retreated into her Hallow for a bit, knowing that she would have to play an important role and needed strength.


    Once more, Adra used her magic to conceal our traces and, using Lenore¡¯s sight, I guided us onto the traces left by the dryads, merging our traces with theirs, as we came closer to their camp. I added my own concealment magic to Adra¡¯s, hoping that the Jonari were not checking every meter of the track too closely, but we needed the added concealment to get so close to the dryads without getting detected.


    We took up position close to the dryads camp and Lenore took flight once more, searching for the Jonari, as we watched the dryads. Now, we had a much better visual of their camp, allowing us to identify the group as two dryads and fourteen nymphs, currently finishing up their breakfast and packing everything they had scattered around their campsite, even if their actions were less careful as ours had been. In addition, the larger group left clear traces behind. It was interesting to watch the two dryads to use a spell that was so very similar, maybe even identical to the spell used by Adra, to conceal their party. It seemed less because they were worried about pursuit and more a simple habit. Seeing the spell for the first time from the outside was a little weird, their figures blurred a little, becoming indistinct and hard to notice as they seemed to blend into their surroundings. It didn¡¯t let them vanish from our sight, we could still track them as we knew where they were, but finding them without that knowledge would require special senses.


    Soon, they were on their merry way, we carefully stayed behind them, just out of the sight of their rearguard, relying on our concealment spells and the forest to keep hidden. Lenore reported on the position of the Jonari, letting me gauge their speed and distance, so I had a chance to get the timing right.


    The minutes crept on, until I felt that the timing was right. The Jonari were almost in sight and we were in an overgrown part of the forest, so now was the time to act.


    ¡°Let¡¯s go, it¡¯s time.¡± I told the others and Sigmir, Rai and I sped up a little, while Adra fell back and Lenore landed on her shoulder.


    The three of us caught quickly up to the rearguard of the dryads and my plan was to attack them with ice-magic, before fading into the forest. I was about to start casting, when Sigmir stopped me. ¡°Let me.¡± she said, as she pulled a throwing axe out of her bag and moved into the open. Trusting her, I dispelled my concealment, leaving her visible, Adra was too far away for her concealment to still cover us.


    ¡°Giantblood!¡± A shout echoed through the forest, followed by the meaty thunk of a throwing axe striking flesh. The last nymph had spotted Sigmir, before falling to her attack. Sigmir had proven once more that she was an elite-fighter by striking a concealed target with an unfamiliar weapon and still splitting the targets head.


    Immediately, I refreshed the concealment-spells on her and used Ice-Magic to prevent any tracks from forming. It was a totally different approach to the magic used by dryads and Adra, leaving little to no magic residue behind. I had experimented a bit and the residue faded within minutes.


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    At the same time, Lenore let me know that Adra had taken her shot as well. Her part was to attack the Jonari-scouts, maybe even killing one of them. I linked my senses to her, using her eyes to renew the concealment-spells on Adra. Luckily, those were Darkness based, so the strain on Lenore was small. The Ice--Magic I used to conceal her steps was sadly not, but it was only for a short time, until we met up again. Lenore and I were able to angle towards each other and away from the two groups we had just attacked.


    As soon as we met up, Lenore moved over to me and gave me a long-suffering look. ¡°Once more into the breach.¡± she said, just before flying away again. This time, to make sure that everything had worked out.


    The rest of us continued moving and I made sure that there were no traces of our passing. Behind us, the sounds of battle started, shouts, the clanging of weapons, screams, the whole, horrible litany of death and destruction.


    My new conviction to try to act better was reminding me that I had just started a conflict, maybe even a small war, for the sake of convenience and revenge. Was that what I thought ¡®good¡¯? I would have to do better next time, think of a better way. But for now, it was done. It felt so easy to shake of the idea of feeling guilty, far too easy.


    Using the information Lenore had gathered and the locations we had seen the dryads, I could roughly guess the direction in which their main-camp was located. That would be our next target, so I guided the group in that direction. It was rather likely that the conflict with the Jonari would draw their attention away from their camp.


    We had moved for about an hour, when I felt Lenore close in and land on my shoulder before returning to her Hallow. There was a stream of emotion from her, a non-verbal communication complaining about the time she had spent flying in the cold. I sent back a bit of mockery, reminding her that she had spent most of her life in this area, cold and all, and that the availability of her Hallow had made her soft. Her response almost caused me to fall down, as the image she sent back was simply one of herself, turned away from the viewer, with both wings spread, and raised tail-feathers. The message was clear, even if the concept was more of a humanoid one. I wondered just how much subconscious transfer went on between us. Maybe, I would start trying to groom my feathers, or search for worms, who knew?


    But apparently, she felt that our little teasing contest had ended in her victory, as I was quite literally speechless and it was time for serious business. I let Sigmir take the lead, and my main-attention retreated into Lenore¡¯s memories, only leaving enough attention behind that I was able to follow Sigmir.


    For a moment, I felt discombobulated, the mental switch between my normal, humanoid body and Lenore¡¯s avian body was jarring, but after that moment, it felt amazing. The wind beneath her wings, the air around her. Once more, I felt the ultimate feeling of freedom, before focusing on her sight, taking in what happened below her.


    I saw that the Jonari had heard the shout and found their scout, seated against a tree with an arrow in his chest. Without serious healing, he would not live long. One of the others bent down to the wounded, as if trying to hear something, before straightening. With a few hand-signals, the other Jonari moved into a formation and surged forward, weapons at the ready.


    The view shifted, as Lenore had searched for the dryads at that point and used her special sight for that and soon, I saw the signs of nymphs hiding in the forest. One of the Jonari-hunters was apparently able to see through their camouflage and warned his comrades before launching an attack on what he believed to be ambushers. The chosen weapon was a throwing axe, just like the one used by Sigmir earlier, only this hunter was less capable than her, or maybe the nymph was lucky, the axe ¡®only¡¯ sunk into her chest.


    But both sides were off to the races, at first striking from range, then starting a ferocious melee. I almost had to laugh, when I realised that one of the dryads was using a mix of water and ice-magic, creating icicles to attack her foes. It was so very similar to my own method of attacking, almost indistinguishable.


    Lenore had stuck around for some time and I watched people fall on both sides, before the nymphs started their retreat. The Jonari had taken enough casualties that they did not try to give chase, most likely knowing that there could be more nymphs waiting in ambush. They collected their fallen, before retreating as well. Once the fight was over, Lenore left and started to fly after us.

 Chapter 101

    Once I had seen the fight, I was quite sure that we had managed to achieve our goal. Both sides were poised for a larger conflict, the Jonari had very good reason to believe that it had been a dryad-party that had attacked and killed their chieftain and the dryads had been attacked by the Jonari on their turf. Adding to that the fact that they had to know that one of their parties had vanished, it would increase their ire. Maybe they had even found the corpses of the party we had taken out, most of them dying to wounds pointing at a Jonari signature-weapon, the Lok¡¯nar.


    For the Jonari, the fact that both, Adra and I had mostly used attacks that made wounds similar to the weapons used by dryads should help in their conviction, especially as we had left depleted, enchanted darts in the few targets I had killed via the dark mind-magic. On the other hand, the nymph killed to incite the dryads had spotted Sigmir and identified her as a giantblood, before getting killed by a genuine Jonari-throwing axe that Sigmir had taken from Jongarn¡¯s henchman.


    Obviously, if both sides stopped and carefully investigated the timing would fall apart, hinting at third-party involvement, but I highly doubted that either side would do so; once blood was spilled, neither side would simply say, ¡®Oh, sure, let¡¯s talk about things.¡¯ It was against human nature, and that was what I was projecting onto the sapients of this world. I hoped it was an universal trait, or rather, I hoped that the developers had not tried to plaster some strange traits onto their races, causing them to act in a totally unpredictable fashion. Neither Sigmir nor Adra had objected to my plan and the underlying assumptions, so I had hope that it would work.


    The days after we had managed to incite conflict between the Jonari and the dryads had turned into a strange game of hide and seek. We were searching for the base-camp of the dryads, hoping to find something that we could use to completely negate the threat they posed to Adernas, while at the same time dodging groups of nymphs and dryads heading towards the direction we came from. It was rather obvious that the dryads had some way to communicate at a distance, something Adra claimed to be trivial; she was able to send messages at a distance, but neither Sigmir nor I had any skill in receiving them, rendering it moot.


    Our most valuable asset during that game of hide and seek was undeniably Lenore. Her ability to scout in the air combined with her ability to see through the dryad¡¯s habitually used concealment was priceless, plain and simple. She was griping a bit about the cold, but at the end of the day, she was smart enough to understand just how useful her scouting was. In addition, she felt my gratitude and the conviction that I wanted to repay her, as befitting a partner. She had hinted at something she wanted to do, something she wanted my help with, but had yet to tell me just what she wanted. My guess was that it had to do with her own advancement, that she wanted help to cross the first divide, but that was only a guess.


    We had to dodge multiple dryad parties, all roughly heading towards the location of the fight and all in a hurry. It was interesting that the fight with the Jonari triggered such an reaction while there was no hint that the fight with the hunting party Rai had been a part of had triggered anything comparable. It was as if the dryads knew that the Jonari had a lot more people, and thus fighters, compared to Adernas.


    While we probably could have fought against the parties, and it was likely that we could have won, it would have tipped them off that someone was sneaking up on them, something I was trying to avoid. A good part of the setup I had cooked up was to reduce the number of enemies around their main-camp, not increase their vigilance against a sneak-attack. There would be an overall increase in vigilance, but I doubted that it would be directed against a small party, not if they knew the Jonari. Night-raids were just not their style.


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    After three days, Lenore spotted what I believed to be our target. Smoke was rising from an overgrown valley and not just from a single source, but from multiple sources, hinting at a large group camping down there. Due to the foliage, Lenore was unable to gather more information, but the simple fact that the foliage was so much more dense than in the surroundings was a hint in itself.


    We would have to decide on our approach, either trying to move into the mouth of the valley during the night, hoping that we manage to dodge any guards and spells they may have there or to climb up one of the hills on the side, hoping that we were able to make a stealthy descent into the village itself. The difficulty of such an descent was totally dependant on the local geography, moving down a steep slope could be problematic, not to mention the fact that ice and snow made it extra problematic.


    To make an informed decision, we needed more information, so we scouted out the area on the other side of one of the hills making up their valley and made camp in a cave there. As we scouted, I realised something I had not expected. When it came to pure stealth, without magic-usage, Rai was the best out of all of us. If we used magic, I had them all beat, but without it, Rai was able to beat out Sigmir, who was adept at stalking. Adra had the same problem as me, she was relying on her magic to bolster her ability. When we tried to find out just why Rai was so adept at stealth, something interesting happened. He blushed even worse than when Adra used him as a warming pillow, a habit she had fallen into when we had to forgo the campfire, causing all of us to become terribly curious. Sadly, he was adamant about keeping this secret, avowing that he would not tell, not even under torture. It was good to see that he was able to joke in that manner, it showed that he was getting over the ordeal with Jongarn.


    But his surprising stealth-skill changed our plans a bit. I had originally planned to keep watch with Sigmir at my side, but now, I decided that Rai would be more useful, as I wanted to use a combination of mundane stealth and my magical concealment. When I asked him, I had to suppress my laughter, he looked like a happy puppy, eager to help, I almost saw a ghostly tail wagging behind him.


    Before we tried to sneak up on the nymphs, we made a few trials in the valley we were camping in, measuring the limits of the combination against Adra, Sigmir and Ylva. At first, I had some problems, but Rai gave me a few useful hints and instruction, to the point that my stealth-skill gained points, despite my trait that reduced the usage I got out of instruction.


    Once we had gotten used to working together, things changed. Even when the others knew we were coming and from which direction, we were able to sneak up on them, at least in the dark. When it was light, the utility of my magic took a nosedive, greatly limiting what I contributed.


    So, a day after we had spotted the valley, Rai and I were heading out, looking for the security measures used by the dryads, trying to find a way into the valley.


    There was one snag, the nymphs were rather careful and sent out patrols, checking the surrounding area, but luckily, we spotted them before they managed to spot us and got under cover. But it was a problem, especially if they managed to find our camp, so once more Lenore had to brave the cold air and warn the others.


    We moved on, looking for a good position to keep watch on the valley and maybe see the patrol returning, allowing us to make out parts of the security.


    Our search concentrated on the hillside, somewhere that would allow us to look down onto them, while, at the same time, staying away from any sharp contrast that would make us stick out. The sky, for example, was a sharp contrast if it was behind you, so the top of a hill was completely out, at least according to Rai.


    I let him take the lead and he did not disappoint. At one point, he suddenly stopped and made sure that I knew that before us was something bad. He could not name it closer, but his instincts told him that something was there. We found a nice thicket to wait in, with a relatively good view onto the mouth of the valley. I was curious and kept the location he had warned me of in mind and took a closer look once Lenore was back with us. He truly did not disappoint, with Lenore¡¯s sight, I was able to make out threads of magic, woven into the foliage close to the ground, creating some sort of warding magic.


    Clearly, the dryads had learned from the destruction of Tegi.

 Chapter 102

    Rai and I spent the night and most of the next morning watching the mouth of the valley harbouring the dryads, taking note of their movements and trying to figure out how their magic-defenses worked. The mundane defenses at the easily traversed regions were tight to the point that I did not see even the slightest chance to circumvent them without a lot of luck, something I was not willing to risk.


    On the other hand, the magic-defenses were a lot less sophisticated, at least the outer layer. I had no way of knowing if there was more behind them, out of my sight. The only thing I was able to find with Lenore¡¯s sight was a layer of magic, woven into the foliage roughly a meter above ground, allowing for small game pass below it. I was rather curious how it was maintained, their old wards had been woven into their huge crystal-focus and were supplied by their constant use of blood-magic but I hoped they did not try the same thing again, not after I had seen what could crawl out of the Nether. But even if they were, there was no way that they could have accumulated the same amount of misama as they had previously. At any rate, if I could figure out a way to follow the warding-network, I would probably get to their leader and maybe we could cut off the head of this particular snake.


    During the night, Rai softly spoke up. ¡°Morgana, what are your plans? You know, after this?¡± His voice sounded pensive, as if he was lost in thought.


    ¡°That depends, Rai.¡± I whispered back, ¡°We might stay for a bit in Adernas, do a few quests, things like that, before we move on. I want to see what this world has to offer and I cannot do that in the frozen forests of the north. Don¡¯t get me wrong, your homeland is beautiful, in it¡¯s own way, but I want to see what is hiding behind the horizon, what is hidden behind the next hill and the next bend in the road.¡± There was a smile on my face, as I realised that it was true. I had intended to use a half-truth, to conceal the fact that I wanted to free an ancient entity imprisoned by the gods, but the half-truth I was telling was a lot more than half true. Even without the quest, I would not be contend to stay in this area, I truly wanted to see this world, wanted to understand it.


    There was a lot in this world that I had come to appreciate, even when comparing it with the modern world I was used to. On more than one occasion had I wished that this world was truly real, even while wondering if it really mattered. What was real anyway? Some people proposed the idea that the ¡®real¡¯ world was just a simulation, run by a higher consciousness. So, why not enjoy this world, which was just that?


    Obviously, the biggest thing in this world was Sigmir. But not the only thing. Magic had intrigued me, had captivated my interest in a way no subject ever had. Those were the biggest, but not the only things that I loved in Mundus.


    In my mind, I planned different ways to approach, different avenues of attack but, due to limited information, it came down to the simple concept of circumventing the wards, probably by simply crawling under them, and going down the slope. Part of me wanted to try scouting it beforehand, but I was a little unsure of my own skill, so bringing the complete group, under the cover of my concealment-spells, had the best chance of success. In addition, it was a necessity anyway, there was almost no chance that I would be able to deal with the nymphs here on my own. Not unless I got seriously lucky, like I had in their original base in Tegi, it was not something I could count on. So, bringing as much power as possible would be the best way.


    On our way back to Sigmir and Adra I realised a small problem. Lenore had asked them to leave our previous camp, looking for a spot that the patrols would not find. But now I had no idea where they went.


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    After a moment, I realised that there was something I could do. I had used magic to locate Jongarn, using old hairs of him as a link. There was no doubt in my mind that I could do the same with Sigmir, even without a link to focus on. I had felt her soul, merged my own into hers and experienced the entirety that was Her. Closing my eyes, I focused onto her, the feeling that was her and my own feelings for her, while drawing on my magic. For a split-second, I felt a resonance, felt her react to me, felt her surprise. I was unable to transmit anything but a feeling of longing calm but I knew what direction to take.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Skill increased</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You increased your skill: Darkness Magic [41/100]</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    With that direction, Rai and I made our way up the hillside, looking for them. They were quite surprised when we managed walk straight up to their hideout, it was a good one. The two of them had found a huge evergreen tree and made themself a hiding spot below the lowest branches, perfectly hidden from side, without any overt magic usage.


    Adra was a little miffed that we had spotted her so easily, while Sigmir closed her eyes for a moment, before speaking. ¡°I asked Ylva to come back. She has waited close to the cave we had made our camp in. A wolf in the forest is a lot less suspicious, compared to multiple humanoids.¡±


    ¡°How did you find us? You can¡¯t have followed our tracks, if you did, Ylva would be with you. And I made sure that they were concealed.¡± Adra blurted out. Clearly, she had a tough time with the fact that her concealment had no effect.


    ¡°Don¡¯t worry, I doubt that just anyone could have found you here. But, in a way, you have a part of me here, why wouldn¡¯t I find my other half?¡± I asked, smiling at Sigmir.


    It took a moment but both of them understood, Adra looked flabbergasted and Sigmir looked pleased.


    ¡°So it was you. I thought I felt something, but I wasn¡¯t sure if I was imagining things, because I wanted to have you with me so bad.¡± Sigmir¡¯s smile turned truly dazzling, showing that she was seeing this connection as something truly special.


    ¡°But¡­ Wha¡­ How?!¡± Adra was looking for words and after a few moments, she found them. ¡°You found her without a focus? I thought connections like that were only a myth.¡±


    Now, I was intrigued, ¡°What do you mean?¡± Was my connection with Sigmir that unusual?


    ¡°There are legends of lovers, united by destiny, who are able to feel each other''s soul. I always thought those were romantic myths, without any basis in reality. If you truly used nothing but yourself as a focus¡­ I don¡¯t know what it means. Do you think you could find me like that?¡± Adra seemed unsure. I didn¡¯t even need to think about it. There was no way I could do that, no way, no how, so I simply shook my head. Adra seemed unsurprised, she had to have expected just that reaction.


    In a way, the knowledge that I could find Sigmir was soothing a particular worry within me. If I was able to do so now, I might be able to do so after the beta ended and the world changed. I would have to hold onto that feeling, the feeling of hope, and simply gain enough power to make the world submit to my will. But that was for later, much later. For now, we had an assault to plan.


    I told the other two about our observations and my personal ideas how to circumvent them. They agreed with me that a direct attack was impossible, even if most of their combatants were outside, even their civilians would likely overwhelm us with sheer numbers. And that was with the ludicrous assumption that we would be able to take out the combatants they had undoubtedly left behind.


    No, if we wanted to win this, there were only two ways. Either sneak in and keep things quiet or go with the biggest bang I could think of, trying to kill off as many enemies as I could, before they could react. The magic I had used against the devourer was incredibly powerful and I had no doubt that I could spread it out more, let frozen death rain over a larger area. But I was also aware that I needed a lot of time to get it to that point and everyone with even the slightest bit of perception would feel me doing it. No, for this, we needed subtlety, a shiv, not a sledgehammer.


    My mind went back to the attack I had used against the Snowbolds so long ago. It would not work, not in the same way, but maybe there was something useable in the idea.


    An idea was starting to germinate in my mind. It would be a challenge, but an interesting one.


    I explained my plan to the others, before heading to sleep. It would be an exciting night.

 Chapter 103

    We had spent the day after Rai and I had scouted the dryad¡¯s defenses resting and experimenting, I wanted to make sure my idea would work; I believed it would, but finding out that it didn¡¯t, right when enemies were trying to kill us, would be a bad thing. So, experimenting was necessary.


    During the night, it was time to move. Part of me wanted to wait longer, wait until the moon was full and I got the maximum strength from it, but each day we waited gave Mr. Murphy a chance to screw us over, and if there was one thing I knew, it was that Murphy would get you, if you gave him a chance.


    As we started moving, I realised that I was getting used to night-raids; it felt right to sneak up on our enemies, trying to catch them asleep. Part of me wanted to decry it as cowardice and evil, reminding me that I wanted to be less of a monster. But the rational part of me still reigned supreme, there was a large gap between a monster and a pragmatist. I would try to avoid needless cruelty and maybe limit the glee I was expressing when killing my foes, but I would never, ever, willfully risk my own life, the life of my companions, or even worse, the life of Sigmir, simply to satisfy some ridiculous notion of fairness or honour. Fairness was fine for the training-mat, but in a real fight, it was something to be discarded post-haste. So, if they did not realise we were coming, it was their fault, as they were not vigilant enough and their preparations were simply lacking.


    Up on the crest of the hill, we stuck to the shadows and I moved to the front. I searched for a good place to move downwards, somewhere we had a chance to climb down without triggering an avalanche or a landslide or something similar. Finally, roughly at the halfway point between the mouth and the end of the valley, there was a relatively traversable area down the slope. Looking further, I saw that the slope got steeper and steeper afterwards, making it almost impossible to move downwards on.


    Looking down the area I wanted to use, I was searching for their ward before starting my descent. There would be a ward somewhere around, I was certain of it. The slope down into the valley was snowed in and our descent was slow and perilous. After a few minutes of careful sneaking, interspersed with repeated glances through Lenroe¡¯s sight, I saw the ward shimmer before me. It was quite sneaky, placed about a meter above the ground, to let small game move below it, but bigger animals, and obviously people, would trigger it, unless they crawled down a steep slope on their bellow or had some sort of magic detection. And even with magic detection, it was the question if one looked at the right time and was able to stop in time.


    The simplicity of the ward made circumventing it rather easy, it was a simple ribbon of magic and breaking it would alert the caster and probably mark us. The simplest way would be to move below it, possibly combined with a diversion, breaking it at another place to divert attention. But we were lacking a diversion, so simply moving below it would have to work.


    For me, it was incredibly easy, I was almost able to simply walk under it, thanks to my rather lacking body-height, but Sigmir crawling under it looked quite hilarious. It gave me funny ideas of limbo, if we ever reached a warm, sandy beach. The image of Sigmir in a bikini made that idea a glorious one, all on its own.


    Involuntary comedy aside, we managed to circumvent the ward and my vigilance - one might call it paranoia - went up to eleven. What better place to place additional warding than closely behind the first, easily circumvented ward, catching those who think they are able to fool the creator of the warding-scheme?


    And indeed, a bit further down the slope, there was a small, magic glimmer, suspended in a tree. At first, I only saw a single one, but there were multiple, hidden in a few trees making a rough line, like sentries. I wasn¡¯t seeing any connection to other magic formation, so there should be no transfer of information unless the magic was triggered; no fail-safe system alerting the creator if the magic was dispelled.


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    Feeling the darkness around me, I created a rune formation, using the shadows as a medium to devour the magic before me. It would waste quite a bit of Astral Power on my part, as I had to use the Curse-Rune as a stand-in for a general Magic-Rune, but I only had a vague idea what the magic-rune looked like. But the magic went off without a hitch, engulfing and smothering the glimmer in shadows, before the original magic was devoured in a short deepening of the shadows around it. I got a notification that I gained something.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Skill increased</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You increased your skill: Darkness Rune-Mastery [60/100]</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    That single point made me quite happy, ever since I had gotten to skill-level fifty, the increases had been gradual, to the point of being glacial. I even had an idea which rune I would want to finalise, the rune I had just needed, the rune for Magic.


    There was no visible commotion, neither to my ordinary vision nor to Lenore¡¯s magic vision, so we headed further down, into the valley.


    The trees around us were useful in concealing us, but at the same time, they concealed what was before us - at least they did, until the steepness of the slope gradually decreased and the danger of slipping and becoming an avalanche going down the slope was gone. Once we were down there, the trees were a lot bigger and had bigger distances between them, allowing for better visibility.


    Now, we were seeing small, hut-like structures, molded directly out of the trees. Each single dwelling was small - probably not more than one or two people per dwelling - and from a few of them, smoke was rising and through small gaps flickering flames were visible. The vast majority had no smoke or light coming from them, hinting that they were empty, Hopefully, they were and not just filled with especially cold-resistant nymphs, or we would have a bad time.


    We stayed in the trees, hiding in the shadows and skirting around the habitated areas of the valley in our search for the centre of power in the valley. The lines of power hinted at that centre being at the end of the valley, in the deepest and most protected part, which made sense.


    There was no more warding magic this close to the huts; most likely their current warding-scheme was unable to exclude allies, making it problematic to filter possible responses. It was an old problem of intelligence work, something I had read about in a few books. Gathering information was often a lot easier than analysing and interpreting that information, as it was akin to searching for a few needles in a haystack, without knowing if there were any needles in the stack at all, not knowing what the needles looked like - and someone was throwing more and more hay onto the stack, as you tried to work.


    The huts soon disappeared, replaced by a stretch of empty forest, at least to the mundane eye. To Lenore¡¯s magical vision, the forest was anything but empty; it was littered with a multitude of magical traps, enough to make me check carefully for mundane traps as well. Even something as simple as a tripwire with some sort of noise-maker would be effective in the quietness of the night.


    With the help of Lenore¡¯s sight, I managed to map out a rather complex path through the forest, keeping well away from all possible spells, and had shown it to Sigmir. Once I had done what I planned, I would not have the focus left to beware of traps, so she had to lead.


    The stretch worked out quite well for my plan, I had thought up something to hopefully keep the majority of nymphs away from us. When I had attacked the snowbolds, I had used mist to keep them within their burrow. Here, I might be able to slow weaker members of the village down, keeping the enemies we had to face low and hopefully keeping us from getting overwhelmed.


    I had made up a few Hard-Ice Crystals, engraved with runes of mist and disorientation, before testing out if I was able to link with them to create a disorientating mist. The crystals shattered relatively quickly, but I was able to create the mist and strengthen it once it was created.


    Creating a barrier would hopefully give us enough time to deal with the enemies at the centre, maybe even cover to get away. I had made up my mind that we would kill whoever tried to stop us, but part of my new compassion required me to keep the civilian casualties as low as possible. And massacring them would give little to no EXP anyway, so my gamer-sense was not revolting.


    With the crystals placed and my mind linked to them, Sigmir took the lead and carefully followed the path I had shown her.

 Chapter 104

    Following Sigmir through the short stretch of trapped forest was rather easy, even with most of my mind focused on the crystals I had placed within. There were five crystals, roughly equally interspersed across the stretch, each floated into place with my Ice Magic.


    I had done my job right and Sigmir had followed my instructions, allowing us to circumvent the traps, without triggering anything problematic. The others had to make sure I didn¡¯t trip a wire, but I had warned them that I could do little more than walk forward.


    Before us, another clearing opened up, this one looking greatly different from anything I had ever seen. Dominating the clearing, right in its middle, was a rather small tree, some sort of birch - at least it looked like that to me - but the type of tree or its size was not the thing that made it dominating. No, it was dominating because the large, clear crystal I had seen in Tegi was partially merged into the tree, illuminating the clearing. In front of the tree and the crystal, a dryad was standing - one hand holding onto the crystal, the other holding onto the tree - and her legs were entwined with roots coming from the ground, as if she was merging the two. In addition, there were two nymphs on the clearing, possibly as guards or helpers. The dryad did not look as if she was taking anything in but her work.


    ¡°She¡¯s trying to rebuild her tree. She must have lost it when Tegi was destroyed, maybe due to backlash, but she is weakened.¡± Adra softly explained and there was a strange sort of hunger in her voice.


    ¡°So, we kill her and this community falls apart?¡± I asked.


    ¡°Probably. But I¡¯d like to absorb her power. I got a lot of power when you shattered the Devourer and if I get more than a fraction of the power she is channelling into the crystal and the tree, I will surpass the first divide.¡± The hunger I had heard in Adra¡¯s voice before was even stronger now. She truly wanted to devour the power of that dryad. She didn¡¯t see the other dryad as anything but nourishment for herself, a meal to be devoured, if at all possible.


    ¡°I will try to keep others away. You three should take out the guards first, then you can do whatever you need with her. Sigmir can cover you and Rai can cover me.¡± I laid out a basic tactic and started channelling power into the crystals, only a trickle at first, to remain inconspicuous. The others nodded and I saw Rai move further through the shadows, aiming at the position closest to one of the guards, as Adra readied her bow.


    After a few moments, Adra spoke a chant under her breath and let an arrow fly, aiming at the guard further away from us. I took that as my signal to increase the power I put into the crystals, creating a huge amount of mist and shattering the crystals in the process. The mist was still connected to me, via my magic, letting me control and strengthen it.


    On the clearing, events escalated quickly: the nymph Adra shot sank to the ground with an arrow sticking out of her skull, and the other gave off a strangled cry as Rai copied the maneuver I had used on Jongarn; two quick stabs into the kidneys, followed by a single stab to the throat.


    My focus was almost broken as a terrifying pressure assaulted us, the dryad had realised that something was going on and spread out her presence. Just judging by the power of the pressure, I would assume that she was either high on the first or maybe even past that, but at the same time, the presence felt hollow, as if it was only an image of past glory.


    ¡°Intruders?!¡± She shouted, her voice spreading through the clearing but getting smothered in the mist. ¡°If you run now, rats, I might not send my huntresses after you!¡± she threatened in an angry voice. My own attention was too taken with the control of the mist and attempting to use my new mind-magic skills against anyone entering the mist to make sure that they got lost in the short stretch of forest, but that was not true for Adra.


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    ¡°Your huntresses? Mhehehehe, they can¡¯t help you, they are far away. No, you will be but a dried, shriveled husk when I¡¯m done with you. Fertilizer for the forest.¡± Adra¡¯s voice had a disturbing quality to it and her laughter was not helping me to see her as sane. There was a small voice, claiming that it were just my own mannerisms I was seeing in action, her entire being focused on her own advancement and the destruction of her enemies. Maybe, such personality-traits were a necessity to become truly powerful in this world, I would have to watch and consider further. Sociopathic tendencies were a hindrance in a world based on societal cooperation, in a world based on personal power, they could be an asset.


    The dryad-leader only gave off an inhuman shriek and the pressure on us intensified but I took it more like a puffer-fish, puffing up to appear bigger and more threatening. No, if she could fulfill the promise of violence her aura was projecting, she would simply kill us, not try to scare us.


    ¡°Don¡¯t think your aura will fool us! I can feel its hollowness, you are far from your full strength. A dryad that was bound and lost her tree? Come, Sigmir, let¡¯s make timber!¡±


    A disturbance in the mist drew my focus, someone had wandered into it and, thanks to my skill in Mind Magic, I was able to feel the mind and it felt weak. Weak enough that I was able to push the disorientation even stronger, causing the nymph to lose her way, wandering in circles around a single tree. I felt Lenore¡¯s magic join with mine, introducing something else into the mix, a gentle wind, softly blowing between the trees, causing the density of the mist to wax and wane while creating phantom images due to the movement. It would add to the disorientation someone in the mist would feel, decreasing their ability to navigate it even further. I kept vigilant, letting minds wander halfway into the mist before sending them into spirals of confusion and misdirection.


    There was a momentary lull in the minds trying to get through my barrier, allowing me to take a glimpse at the fight between Sigmir, Adra and the dryad-leader. I was not quite sure what Adra was doing - she had her spear in hand, but the main event seemed to be a tangle of ghostly vines or roots, spreading out from the phantom image of a tree behind her. The vines were creeping toward the crystal and the tree the dryad was working on and it had to be frightening to the dryad, she was frantically trying to get at Adra, using strange wooden projectiles to shoot at her and tree-limbs were waving around like clubs. But Sigmir had taken out her shield and was standing strong, shielding Adra behind her and taking any attack that might hit her. Her offensive actions were limited to the occasional blow into one of the tree-limbs, if they got too complacent. Ylva was next to her, coordinating with her and adding a second layer of defense to their struggle.


    Sadly, I could not truly watch their fight, only take a few glimpses, as the nymphs outside knew that something was going on back here and they probably knew that they needed to support their leader, so they tried to overcome the mist-barrier. But with Lenore¡¯s help, I was able to let them wander around, without getting anywhere.


    My attention was pulled back to the middle of the clearing by an especially loud and shrill shriek and the image I saw was promising. The ghostly vines used by Adra had penetrated into the crystal and it looked as if they were absorbing the energy from the crystal into her. What was a little disturbing was the fact that it reminded me of the tentacles and the devouring mechanisms I had seen from the nethersprites, as if they were two sides of the same coin, or maybe a similar coin, feasting upon the life to fuel their own existence. Anyway, with the vines sucking the life out of the crystal, the dryad was visibly weakened and Sigmir seemed to have an easy time blocking her attacks, letting me assume that the fight would be over soon.


    Just as my mind reminded me what ¡®assume¡¯ also meant, I heard the crunching of snow close to me, forcing my attention to my immediate surroundings, and showing me that I had mucked up at some point in the fight. Next to me, in the process of swinging some sort of bladed weapon - one might call it a saber - was a nymph that I had failed to trap in my mist-maze. The focus of my world suddenly was very narrow, consisting only of the sharp blade that was rapidly approaching me.

 Chapter 105

    My mind went into overdrive as the blade was whistling towards me, activating bullet time, but there was little I could do to stop it. Even the vines of the Eisblumen-accessory wouldn¡¯t be in time to help, let alone anything else. My magic was currently focused onto something else, even with bullet time, it would be no help. My blades were uselessly held in my dangling hands, my focus had been fully on my magic, ignoring my physical body. Maybe, I would learn what the respawn-mechanic was like.


    Still, there was no way I would go down without a fight, so I focused my power into the Eisblumen, feeling the vines slowly sprout out. At the same time, I felt my control over the mist slip away - but if I died, the mental aspects would dissipate anyway.


    Suddenly, a shadow blurred into my line of sight, before resolving into Rai¡¯s back, as he stood in front of me, taking the blade into a crossed block of his own blades. It was a horrible idea, completely blocking a saber with his short swords, but I was not in a situation to be picky about the way I was saved. He blocked the next attack by the nymph as well, but this time, her strength simply slapped him aside, opening the way to me. Still, the time he had bought was enough for me - enough to extend the vines if I wanted to use them and to move into a stance with my blades. It also gave me a moment to take my enemy in; her gear looked a little strange, compared to the standard nymph-garb. Her entire gear was dark brown or black and looked a lot more like bark than anything I had seen them wear. In addition, her sabre looked almost metallic; a dark, foreboding blade, reminding me of the weapons used in the Barrow Den, steeped in death and decay.


    The clash between the nymph and me was fast and furious, she was in a total, suicidal offense mode, leaving huge openings, but taking them would let her score a decisive hit in return, something I could not accept. She was as strong as me and almost as fast, but the combination of desperation and more-than-adequate skill gave her enough of an edge to push me back. For me, the objective was to get rid of her so I could get back to maintaining the mist, to keep our enemies at bay. She just wanted to get a good hit in, forcing me to stop my maintenance of the mist so her comrades could overwhelm us.


    I was about to do something stupid - accepting a wound to gain an advantage - when Rai rejoined the fight, striking into her unprotected back. The sudden attack gave me the opening needed to end the fight with a seemingly glancing blow, but what seemed like a superficial wound for a moment was in fact a cut into the arteries supplying her brain causing a spray of amber liquid. That new wound, in combination with the wound struck by Rai forced her to her knees and allowed me to re-focus on the mist.


    It took me a few moments of desperate scramble to reaffirm my control, but the damage was done. Two more fighters had managed to overcome the mist and appear in the clearing.


    ¡°I will take care of them.¡± Rai said with conviction, even when I knew that he would not be able to manage. Part of me wanted to help, but I knew that the mist had to be the priority or there would be more. In essence, it was a lose-lose proposition, either I dropped the mist and we would get overwhelmed, or I kept the mist going and Rai would get overwhelmed, forcing me to fight alone and drop the mist.


    Luckily, we were part of a team and Ylva was no longer needed against the dryad, allowing her to join us. It took her precious seconds to cross the distance between the two fights, enough for Rai to take a small wound, as he was completely pushed back by his two enemies. But when Ylva joined him, the fight instantly turned, showing that neither of the nymphs was terribly strong. With her in the fight, I was confident that they could manage, and fully focused on the mist, forcing the nymphs to wander in circles some more.


    It took some effort, but soon, the situation was back under control and I had more of a breather. Ylva and Rai had taken down their two enemies and were guarding in front of me and the fight between Adra, Sigmir and the dryad seemed to wind down as well. The crystal, previously a shining beacon of splendor, had lost its glow and luster, turning dim and flickering, while the tree it was linked to looked as if it was about to fall over, withered and dead. As I was watching, the dryad gave a last, desperate struggle against Sigmir but was rebuffed, when Adra suddenly changed her behaviour. She had been focused on drawing in the energy of the tree and the crystal, using the strange tree-phantom to devour it, but then she stepped up next to Sigmir, and countered the attack of the dryad with a single, precise stab, striking right into her heart. The dryads mouth opened in a silent scream as Adra held her pose, propping up the dryad with her spear and the phantom-tree enveloped the dryad. It seemed that Adra had said something to Sigmir, as she was turning her back to the dryad and moved towards us.


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    When I looked back to Rai and Ylva, I spotted a slight disturbance, thanks to the contrast between the swirling mist I was controlling and the still air on the clearing. There was a slight blur in the air, slow-moving but definitely there. My reaction was simple, a straight attack with my vines. They gave me a good coverage, allowing to aim at the rough location and hit if I got close enough.


    Just as I struck, I realised my mistake. The disturbance was so faint, I had mistaken the distance - I had believed it was just leaving the mist, when, in fact, it was already halfway across the distance to me, and right next to Rai. The disturbance vanished, as if a cloak was pulled back, and resolved into another nymph, equipped just like the one that had almost killed me before, the same dark garb and the same black blade. Only she was attacking Rai the moment she appeared, not me.


    He tried to block, but the surprise combined with her greater strength made that impossible, the only thing he managed was to redirect the weapon, causing it to cut deeply into his shoulder instead of his neck, but it saved his live. The next moment, my vines arrived, smashing into the nymph, causing her to get tossed away, tearing the blade out of Rai¡¯s shoulder, ripping the wound open. Sigmir saw what was happening and used some sort of skill to instantly close the gap and take care of the nymph.


    Behind me, a new presence was filling the clearing, gushing out of Adra with abandon. The dryad had perished and to the victor went the spoils. But that would have to wait until later, it would greatly suck if Rai died just as we had completed our quest. With that in mind, I hurried over to him, letting the barrier-part of the mist drop. It would no longer confuse and misdirect our enemies but it would linger for awhile, acting as concealment. I had a feeling that the nymphs were not incredibly convinced that another attack was in their best interest, they had to feel the aura Adra was pulsing out. That, in combination with the lack of battle-noise should tell them that their leader was slain and the only thing waiting for them here was death. Maybe they were fanatical enough to throw their lives away, maybe not. For now, healing Rai had priority. Luckily, I had used relatively little Astral Power; creating the mist had taken some, but maintaining it and using it as a medium for my mind-magic had been cheap.


    Placing one hand onto him, I drew runes with the other hand. allowing me to take in the condition of his body. There were a few small cuts and bruises, the only serious wound was in his shoulder. But that one was serious enough, not only was it a deep and ragged cut, there was something else in it, a dark energy, as if the wound was actively worsening.


    It felt magical, so calling it a curse would be fitting, probably bound in the sabre - it had given me the creeps before, and now I knew why. I felt Lenore¡¯s mind join with mine, adding her perception to my own, giving me the impression that the curse was based in an energy similar to the energy that lured Netherspites; the malevolent by-product of Blood Magic, a misma of decay. It was spreading in his blood, forcing me to do something rather brutal to save him.


    Changing the runes I had used, it was less of a healing spell and more of an attack-spell. It had to hurt like hell, as I used my magic, focused by the runes, to rip the contaminated blood from his body, I had to dig deep to get it all, pulling blood from large parts of his body, back to the wound, causing a fountain of blood to sprout from his wound. He gave of a pained, scream and went limp, probably a combination of pain and blood-loss. But the contamination was gone, allowing me to change the runes back to a healing spell and gently channel power into it to ease the burden on his body. I had no real idea how long the healing had taken, I had been in a state of absolute focus, communicating with Lenore over our bond, a state where time lost all meaning. It may have been minutes, it may have been days. Well, considering the situation around us, not days.


    When I looked up, Adra, Sigmir and Ylva stood between us and the slowly dissolving mist. There were no extra corpses around us, so I assumed that the other enemies had seen retreat as the superior option.


    We had won.

 Chapter 106

    With the fight over and the remaining nymphs scattered in the winds, I took a moment to look at the notifications I had ignored since entering the valley - and there were a lot of them.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Bound Nymph of Tegi died</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You gain 2500 EXP.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>For killing an opponent without a Traveller in your party, you gain Bonus EXP</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>Tegi - Dryad of the Grove died</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You gain 15000 EXP.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>For killing an opponent 54 levels above you you gain Bonus EXP</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>For killing an opponent without a Traveller in your party, you gain Bonus EXP</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>Bound Nymph of Tegi - Stalker died</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You gain 3000 EXP.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>For killing an opponent 5 levels above you you gain Bonus EXP</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>For killing an opponent without a Traveller in your party, you gain Bonus EXP</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>


    You reached level 52


    </td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Skill increased</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You increased your skill: Darkness Rune-Mastery [61/100]</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Skill increased</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You increased your skill: Blood Rune-Mastery [48/100]</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Skill increased</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You increased your skill: Ice Rune-Mastery [57/100]</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Skill increased</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You increased your skill: Ice Magic [67/100]</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Skill increased</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You increased your skill: Blood Magic [35/100]</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Skill increased</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You increased your skill: Darkness Magic [42/100]</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Skill increased</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You increased your skill: Dual Blade-Mastery [21/100]</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Composite Skill expanded</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>Skills aggregated under the Mind Magic-Skill: [Darkness Magic][Ice Magic]</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>New maximum skill level [60]</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Skill increased</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You increased your skill: Mind Magic [5/60]</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    I blinked for a second, surprised by the amount of EXP gained for the dryad - enough to easily push me over to the next level, and then some - and the change to my Mind Magic skill. Once again, I wished for some sort of ¡®Magic for dummies¡¯-book, shedding light to the sometimes confusing aspects governing the magic of Mundus. Obviously, something of that sort would most likely be called ¡®Clavicula Salomonis¡¯, ¡®Necronomicon¡¯ or ¡®Enchiridion¡¯. The closest I had was the Zevarra Agha the Grandmother had given me, and while it was incredibly useful, I was unable to read much of it. But maybe that was by design; there were legends about grimoires destroying the mind of the unprepared reader, and given the number of times I had almost killed myself with reckless magic experimentation, I was inclined to take that risk seriously.


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    Before heading out, I remembered something that was an integral part of most online role-playing games - the looting. Adra seemed quite eager, and together we checked the remains of the dryad and the surroundings. There was one of the huts grown out of a nearby tree, something I took as the dwelling of the dryad. The corpse itself had nothing that was of value; whatever Adra had done to her had ravaged the plant-like items she had been wearing even worse than I had seen previously.


    The small hut looked better; there were mostly materials inside, a few living plants that Adra took, and an assortment of dried plants, primarily herbs and a few mushrooms. I recognised Shadeleaf, the rest I had no idea about. For now, I would take them with me - maybe they had value. In addition, there was an assortment of red crystals identified as Blood Crystals, the equivalent to the resin-like stuff I got when condensing the blood of nymphs with my dagger. Probably better concentrated and crystallized from different life-forms thanks to a better grasp of Blood Magic, but it served the same purpose, allowing you to store the results of Blood Magic without a need to bring the living beings with you. Those, I would take with me and use in emergencies, they made for excellent power-supplies when my own power was not enough.


    ¡°Finished?¡± Sigmir asked as Adra and I emerged from the hut. She had stayed outside, looking after Rai. He was still lying in the snow, unconscious and surrounded by his own blood.


    ¡°Can you carry him? I¡¯m not sure how long he will be out, what I did had to hurt like hell.¡± I asked Sigmir. She just looked at the blood splattered in the snow and nodded before carefully picking him up.


    ¡°Adra, can you lead? Roughly the way we came from, no need to run into a possible ambush.¡±


    ¡°Sure. I doubt that they will try anything before rejoining with the rest of their forces, if then. Losing their leader will most likely cause them to scatter, unless they have another dryad with the strength to hold them together. Which I doubt, another powerful dryad would have used her weakness against her, just as I did.¡± There was a slightly disturbing smile on Adra¡¯s face as she talked, indicating that struggle for dominance amongst dryads were not rare, It sent shivers down my spine, wondering if non-dryads were targets for their struggles as well. I would have to be careful of that, very careful, even if the main cause for targeting other dryads was the absorption of power, something that would not work with pretty much anything but other dryads.


    We headed out, with the remnants of mist swirling around us. By now, the mist had spread through most of the valley but greatly lost its density, allowing us to navigate easily. The village seemed fully abandoned, without taking anything of value. I had no particular desire to carefully loot the entire village - not if there might be another force of nymphs on their way back. I had no illusions that the gathered strength of a hundred nymphs would easily be enough to overwhelm us, unless we had incredible luck and the terrain on our side. And even then, it would not be a certain thing, so discretion and avoidance were the better part of valor here. We had cut off the head, but the rest of the snake could still crush us to death. But with a little time, the Jonari and the probable interfighting would end them, so the threat to Adernas was dealt with and we could claim our reward.


    Sadly, given how everything played out, we should not dawdle around and take every quest in the area; there was a chance that someone would realise what we had done. Not a high chance, but it was a chance nonetheless. I highly doubted that Rai would actively tell anyone about it - he had demonstrated his ability to keep silent when Jongarn had tortured him - but when someone asked him a direct question, especially his father, it would be problematic, forcing him to choose between keeping silent for our sake and his duty to his father.


    And, if I was honest, if there would be a struggle in that case, I would be disappointed in Rai. He had shown a great deal of maturity the last few days, had demonstrated that he was willing to take care of his own life, not relying on his father. But with such a sense of responsibility came also a duty to his village and its people, a duty superseding any loyalty to us. The days alone in the forest had been very good for him, allowing him to examine his life without external influence - at least until the external world had come crashing in and shown him that the world did not owe him anything.


    From time to time, I used Lenore¡¯s sight to check the magic around us, but most of it had unravelled, only the small, unconnected flickers were still in their trees. Out of curiosity, I created a small Ice Shield and walked up to one, interested in their function. Once I got within a few steps of the tree, the flicker exploded in a bright flash, while sending out a loud noise. Even with the opaque Ice Shield, I was blinded in the flash, demonstrating that it was an excellent warning and defensive system. While I was blinded, Lenore left her Hallow and lent me her eyes once more, allowing me to continue my way. Both Adra and Sigmir looked a little exasperated that I was testing strange magic traps by simply walking into them, but at the same time, both looked as if it was exactly what they expected of me. Somehow, I was not sure I liked that.


    The way back up the hill was annoying for Sigmir; the additional weight of Rai caused her to repeatedly lose traction as the snow beneath her was sliding away, to the point that I used my Ice Runes to create a board to carry him on with my Ice Magic. The magic was not increasing my own weight, allowing me to let him float up the hill with us. I heard Rai groan before we got to the top, so I told him to lie still and get his strength back. Unsurprisingly, he tried to stand and walk on his own, but his legs were not up to the task and the threat that he could either use the stretcher or be carried like a baby made sure that he stayed on the stretcher as we made our way back to the tree we had used before.


    It made sense to spend the rest of the night, before carefully making our way back to Adernas.

 Chapter 107

    We spent the rest of the night below the same tree we had used before, relying on its position and the previous measures to keep us safe. Adra asked to be exempt from keeping watch, as she needed some time to digest the energy she had taken in during the fight, directing it to do what she wanted it to do. I offered Sigmir and Ylva a chance to sleep first and sat down to a silent vigil.


    A few steps away, Adra sat in a meditative pose with a strange, white branch in her lap. It was a long branch maybe two meters in length and almost as thick as my thigh, unworked as if she had just broken it off a tree. But the branch looked quite familiar, just like the crystalline trees surrounding Neyto, so I knew that it was most likely a gift given By Kallista. The fact that she only used it now hinted that she either needed to cross the divide before using it, or that she was using the power she had gained to work the material, as I doubted that it was ordinary. In fact, the pose and the process she was using looked similar to the way she had created her current armaments from ordinary wood. Her mouth moved slowly, as she chanted under her breath, keeping very quiet to not disturb those who wanted to sleep.


    Rai had fallen asleep on the stretcher, exhausted from the deep wound and the subsequent, rather brutal, healing. He had come through in an unexpected way, he had come with us to prove his courage, to demonstrate that he was no coward - and to me, he had done just that. When I had assigned him to guard my back, as I kept the mist going, I had not expected that he was actually required, relying on my own perception and the mist-barrier to keep enemies at bay, but the nymph-stalker would have managed to get to me, if he hadn¡¯t had the courage to engage a vastly stronger foe. Even before, he had demonstrated good qualities, at least after his time of reflection followed by Jongarn¡¯s torture. Maybe torture did work after all, even if not for procurement of information, but to get rid of an ingrained sense of entitlement. Something to keep in mind.


    My watch passed without incident and once it was time, I woke Ylva and let myself slip into a trance, searching for the new rune I could understand. The crystal in my chest gave off a feeling of comfortable cold as I dove into the flow of the Astral River, surging around me. It felt easier, clearer, compared to before, easier to make out the different streams and to find the parts connected to Darkness. The rune condensed almost instantly, based on the Curse-Rune I knew, or rather, the curse rune made up part of the Magic-Rune. This rune encompassed more than only curses, allowing me to use it for beneficial magic, but at the same time, it was weaker than the curse-rune when it came to negative magic. I had a feeling that this rune might be one of the most flexible, allowing one to use magic to affect magic or to generally bolster almost any spell by strengthening magic as its medium. At the same time, it might just be the most ineffective rune, as only a small part was truly ¡®fitting¡¯ at any one time.


    I spent some time in communion with the River, letting it flow around me and just relax my being into it while keeping myself from flowing away. But I knew that I should get some sleep, so I eased out of the river and regained my senses. Adra was still in her own trance, softly chanting at the branch in her lap, the stick had changed a little, getting slimmer, it had lost half of its diameter and I doubted that she would be done soon. No, the branch would turn into a spear at some point. Ylva was a comforting presence close to the edge of the camp, keeping vigil, so I slipped into Sigmir¡¯s embrace, an even better place to relax, compared to the Astral River, and let myself go, instantly falling asleep. I woke for a moment when Sigmir was woken for her watch, but, once again, that was a sacrifice I was willing to make; a short disturbance in my sleep was easily endured for the comfort of sleeping in her embrace beforehand.


    In the morning, a short glimpse showed me that Adra was still not done with her spear. The shaft looked about ready, but the blade and tip were only in a very rudimentary shape, making it look like a quarterstaff with a quashed end. During breakfast we considered our next steps. We had finished our quest and only needed to return Rai to Adernas and his father to get our reward. At the same time, I had a small desire to hunt down as many nymphs and dryads as possible, they were simply good EXP allowing to strengthen us all, especially Rai. He was a lot lower-leveled than us, and I wanted to help him, to reward the remarkable turnaround he had undergone. At the same time, Adra reminded us that we had avoided giving the nymphs any idea just who had killed their leader, I had feared that the dryad may have used magic to pass on an image of us, but Adra assured me that magic to pass messages took some time to cast, something the dryad didn¡¯t have, so if we managed to keep them in the dark, there should be no further retribution against Adernas, at least as long the people of Adernas kept quiet about our attack.


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    The others agreed to my suggestion - to stealthily make our way back to Adernas but, at the same time, take out any small group of nymphs and dryads we came upon.


    Once we were done eating, we broke camp and started our journey.


    As we started walking, Sigmir covertly showed me the command crystal, asking if I wanted to show Rai our mounts, but I gave a slight shake of my head, rejecting the idea. I trusted Rai, but for one thing, we only had two mounts, and for another, I wanted to keep something up my sleeve, just in case something went wrong in Adernas, in case I had missed something.


    ¡°Lenore, would you mind to fly overwatch for a time?¡± I mentally asked my partner.


    There was no verbal reply, just a short feeling of cold air, penetrating my feather-coat, when she let me know what she felt about my idea, literally. But there was an undercurrent of acceptance, and she left her Hallow to reappear on my shoulder. After blustering her feathers for a moment and giving me a soft slap on the back of my head using her wing, she flew off, doing as I had asked. I had to smile at her antics and as she flew off, she sent me an impression of wind lifting up her wings, a feeling that I had felt a few times before and always enjoyed it, because I associated it with freedom and lightness.


    Those of us who were unable to fly had to trudge through the valley we had made camp, keeping an eye out for possible tracks or ambushes that Lenore had missed, while once more being under the cover of Adra¡¯s concealment-spell. It felt stronger; passing the divide had given her a boost to every part of her being, just as it had done so with me.


    When we came closer to the exit, Lenore told me that there was a multitude of tracks leading out of the other valley, the one hosting the nymphs and dryads, but no living being were in sight. Once we got to the mouth of the valley we were in, I saw what Lenore meant. The snow was trampled and disturbed on a large scale, in great opposition to the previous state, undisturbed and traceless as they had habitually used magic to cover their tracks. Obviously, that had changed in their flight after our fight, giving me an assurance that they were not waiting in ambush somewhere close. At the same time, my paranoia did not allow me to relax my vigilance, just in case an elite-group had prepared an ambush using the chaotic tracks to lull us into a false sense of security. But, once again, my paranoia proved pointless and we passed the area without incident, continuing our way towards Adernas.


    Some time after our midday break, which Lenore had spent in her Hallow, sending me annoyed thoughts, Lenore spotted a small group of nymphs, roughly coming our way. After a small discussion, we searched for a good spot to ambush them, they were our enemies after all. Once we found a good spot, close to the slight depression the other group was following, we prepared ourselves, once again using magic to conceal us and to boost our first strike. There was a brief discussion whether we wanted Rai, and maybe me, to take a secondary position to attack them from the rear using stealth after Adra and Sigmir engaged, but it was rejected, deciding on a simple formation of Sigmir as vanguard, providing melee-cover for Rai and Ylva and Adra and I covering their backs using bow and magic, respectively.


    After a short wait, our prey was in sight.

 Chapter 108

    The group we had decided to ambush was consisting of five nymphs and a dryad, the nymphs were all equipped with their standard garb of soft, bark-like armour and a long spear, the dryad had a staff in hand, a staff that was glowing in an eartheren, brown light when I took a look with Lenore¡¯s vision. With a short word to Adra, I designated the dryad as our first target, I was unsure what the deal with the staff was, but I would rather not find out the hard way, so even if it was harder to take out the one at the center of a formation first, we would try. They were in a rather simple formation, two nymphs up front, followed a few steps behind by another nymph and the dryad and, again a few steps behind, the last two nymphs. The two paired nymphs kept about five steps apart, the dryad and the last nymph were far closer together, maybe two steps apart. The depression they were walking in was clear of trees or shrubbery, allowing them to keep their formation without having to take obstructions into accounts.


    Once they were close enough Adra started, once again, chanting some sort of spell under her breath, some sort of damage-boost if I had to guess. At the same time, I was considering how exactly I wanted to make my first strike and went with the tried and true method of throwing an icicle inscribed with shatter-runes. To do so, I had to keep control of the spell as the icicle manifested, channelling the power instead of simply dumping it at once, so I had time to use my Ice Magic to inscribe the shatter-runes into the projectile. Once the projectile was ready, I could let the spell go, while keeping the shatter-runes linked to my mind. It took at least thirty seconds to use the spell like that, and a lot of power, so using it in most circumstances was out, but to use it in an ambush was valid.


    Sigmir gave us a countdown, so we both attacked at just the same moment, Adra with her bow, shooting an arrow glowing with azure light, I with the prepared Icicle, shedding glittering, silver-blue particles. Both projectiles aimed for a gap between the two nymphs up front and just bypassed them, when things happened. The dryad managed to react, and suddenly an earthen barrier shot out of the ground, taking the impact from both projectiles. The thinner arrow managed to penetrate but it had lost its glow and was visibly slower and the ensuing hit was no more than a tap, easily taken by her armour. The thicker icicle did even worse, not even managing to pass through the wall but sticking in it. Using the shatter-runes, I caused it to explode into a shower of razor sharp shards but even those were mostly absorbed by the wall. The rest managed to wound the two nymphs up front and a few struck the dryad but without any telling effect. At least, now I had an idea what the staff did, it allowed the dryad to rapidly cast spells.


    While Sigmir; Ylva and Rai went out to confront them, Adra simply continued shooting arrows at them. After a moment, I decided that I would keep back, ready to answer their actions as needed. They demonstrated good coordination, the two wounded nymphs falling back a little, bracketing the dryad, and the other three getting into a formation with the nymph that had been next to the dryad in the center. That one also turned a bracelet into a shield, giving them better coverage against attacks.


    Once their formation was established, they started to charge us, not even trying to flee. But it made sense, when in an ambush, do the unexpected. It gave you better chances to get away and it avoided possible traps laid by the ambusher. Or maybe they just thought they were stronger and would simply kill us. As they charged, three earthen spears shot from around the dryad in an attempt to soften us up. Within a split-second I decided to take a page out of the dryad¡¯s playbook and use our surroundings to my advantage, not trying to conjure the ice needed but simply use what ice and snow was around us. The result were three thick and hard-packed snowballs, hurtling against the spears and throwing them off-course. I had no need to fully block them, simply making sure that they got nowhere near us was enough and easily accomplished.


    Adra¡¯s arrows on the other hand were almost as ineffective. The first was blocked by the shield-bearing nymph, one was dodged but a third managed to sink into the shoulder of one of the nymphs up front.


    When the three nymphs up front started clashing with Sigmir, they managed to match her, forcing her into all-out defense, even with one of them wounded. Rai demonstrated that he had some talent in being unseen, and hid behind Sigmir at first, then suddenly darting out and jamming a blade into the wounded nymph¡¯s side, forcing her back.


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    However, the chaotic melee between all of them made it impossible for Adra to continue shooting for fear of hitting our allies. She would either have to move far enough to shoot past their fight at their backline or join the melee. She decided to move, while I, not seeing any more attacks from the dryad, flared my cloak to let three of my shuttles fly. They were directly controlled, giving me much better targeting so I could harass the nymphs, but first, I tried to surprise the already wounded nymph and finish her off. Three shuttles, attacking from three directions, made dodging hard and her wounds took their toll, slowing her down and causing my shuttles to strike true. The dryad might have been able to help, but she was busy chanting something under her breath. The nymph I had targeted fell and would not live much longer, of that I was sure. The two nymphs fighting with Rai and Sigmir looked worse for wear as well, but had managed to escape serious wounds.


    I figured that whatever the dryad was chanting, it would be much better if she never finished her chant, so I focused my attacks on her - even using all six shuttles - but the two wounded nymphs did their best to stop me and managed to do so, even as they suffered wound after wound, worsening their condition. Just as I decided to kill them first, the dryad finished her chant and all of them were enveloped by a green glow and their wounds started to visibly heal - but not only that; they also moved faster and their attacks seemed to hit harder. By now, Sigmir and Rai had managed to kill off the weaker of their foes, so there were still three nymphs and a dryad left.


    With a thought, I took my shuttles back, as the two formerly wounded nymphs joined their compatriots, leaving the dryad at the back. A quick look revealed that my hope worked out, there was blood on them, so, while Ylva retreated into her Hallow and Sigmir went into her frenzy-mode, I combined two things I had already managed to try something new. With the blood of the two nymphs as a focus, I attacked their minds. I felt Lenore¡¯s mind join mine and activated Overflow, pouring Astral Power into a crude attack, simply using my power as a hammer to smash them. The effect was quite pronounced, both nymphs stumbled and almost fell, allowing Sigmir to get two lethal strikes in. Luckily I was only attacking their minds, never gaining entrance, or the backlash would have been bad.


    As I had done so, Adra had pinned down the dryad, forcing her to rely on her earth magic to block her arrows or be turned into a pin-cushion, so our situation looked a lot better. Sigmir, in her red-armoured, golden-eyed frenzy mode, was overpowering the buffed-up nymph, allowing Rai to slip in and cause nasty wounds. I decided to help with the dryad, and added my own attacks, using my shuttles, to Adra¡¯s barrage. The dryad thought to flee, trying for the close-by woods under the cover of a hastily thrown up cloud of dust, but thanks to Lenore¡¯s vision, I was able to strike her fleeing form. Either Rai or Sigmir had managed to finish their opponent, so the fight was over.


    A quick look at the EXP showed some nice advancement, and I had gained some skill-levels as well.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Severed Nymph died</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You gain 2300 EXP.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>For killing an opponent without a Traveller in your party, you gain Bonus EXP</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>Unbound Dryad died</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You gain 10000 EXP.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>For killing an opponent 9 levels above you, you gain Bonus EXP</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>For killing an opponent without a Traveller in your party, you gain Bonus EXP</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>Severed Nymph Guardian died</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You gain 2700 EXP.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>For killing an opponent 18 levels above you, you gain Bonus EXP</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>For killing an opponent without a Traveller in your party, you gain Bonus EXP</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Skill increased</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You increased your skill: Blood Magic [37/100]</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Skill increased</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You increased your skill: Mind Magic [7/60]</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    I quickly checked Sigmir out, healing her wounds and alleviating the backlash she suffered from the usage of Ylva¡¯s special skill before we all left the scene, just in case someone had heard our fight. I did pick up the staff used by the dryad, just in case I could learn something from it. Unlike the normal gear used by nymphs or dryads, it was not made out of wood and linked to its owner¡¯s life, a link that made it useless after the owner died. Its material was more akin to rock or maybe crystal and seemed to have survived the death of the dryad just fine. I would have to study it, it had been a useful tool for the dryad, something I would not mind to use for myself.

 Chapter 109

    As we moved on after the fight, I considered the relative trouble we had with the fight against a clearly weaker group. Only one of them had crossed the first divide, compared to three of us, and while another was quite a bit higher leveled, I felt that we should have won a lot easier. The obvious reason we had problems was that our usual tactic heavily relied on our first strike, and without that, Adra had been rather useless, due to the fact that firing arrows into a chaotic melee was a gamble, each arrow potentiall hitting an ally. That had forced her to change her position and the time needed to run that distance was long in a fight that made seconds feel like hours. Even my own contribution had been limited, at least up to the point that I had gambled on my idea to use Mind Magic to cause an opening for Sigmir. At the same time, I needed to remember that we had won without loss or even serious injury, so it wasn¡¯t too bad. Better positioning and tactics would have to be thought up for the future.


    At night, in camp, I tried to make sense of the staff we had taken from the dryad. Adra was with me and just as interested as I was - as was Lenore, whose interest I could feel in my mind. A quick inspect gave us some useful information.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="10">Earthen Staff</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="5">Rarity</td>


    <td colspan="5">Rare</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="5">Base Damage</td>


    <td colspan="5">12 Damage Bludgeoning</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="7">Strength Modifier</td>


    <td colspan="3">High</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="3">Special Effect</td>


    <td colspan="7">Focus: Earth - Allows storage of Earth-Element Astral Power.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="3">Special Effect</td>


    <td colspan="7">Magic Channel: Earth ¨C Allows usage of stored Astral Power to strengthen Earth Magic. .</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    Visual inspection with our eyes yielded little, the staff itself seemed to be made from grey rock, it had a marble-like, smooth surface but was far too light to be solid rock. Part of me wanted to test if the staff could be broken - rock was brittle after all, and I had seen martial artists break rocks. But simply breaking it for the sake of breaking it seemed to be an incredibly waste, even if it was possible. Looking through Lenore¡¯s vision showed that the glow was almost gone, only barely penetrating the rock from the core that was emitting it.


    I explained to Adra what I saw and she posed that the staff itself had a core from a different material, most likely inscribed with runes, and the shell was used to channel power from the inside to the user and vice-versa. Curious, I tried to push some of my own power into it and there was a feedback. It felt as if I tried to lift a huge boulder and in Lenore¡¯s vision, I saw that most of my power simply radiated off, unable to be stored. Even pushing a third of my power into the staff only changed the glow marginally, something Adra explained with my lack of affinity for earth magic. I had Astral Power and, in theory, could use Earth Magic and thus convert it into Earth-Element Astral Power, just that it was a lot harder for me, using more power, focus and effort, to the point that it became infeasible.


    Handing the staff to Adra, I watched how she did, there was less waste when she tried it, but still a lot of waste. To compare, I held my hand up, creating a set of Ice Runes to channel power into, watching as I did and the difference was obvious. I had taken it for granted before, but now I consciously watched as the power streamed from my hand, siverly-blue with almost no waste radiating into the air. Mixing Darkness and Blood-Runes into the formation changed the perceived colour and slightly increased the waste, but I was still using almost all of it, maybe wasting five percent. Trying to use Earth Magic, I had wasted about ninety percent. Adra, in comparison, wasted maybe seventy percent with the staff.


    Once Adra had charged the staff for a bit, I asked her to try it out, which she did. She managed to raise a molehill before the staff was empty and she was gasping for breath, spent. I had watched and once again, most of the earthen power was simply wasted, most likely due to lack of affinity and skill on Adra¡¯s part. I wanted to test it for myself, but I could easily imagine how little I would be able to achieve, even if I used all my power and the fully charged staff.


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    ¡°I doubt you could do much with it. But I have a different idea.¡± Lenore said in my head. The next moment, I felt her mind brush against mine, closing the small distance between our minds, allowing our minds to merge. We had done so before, but always in the heat of the moment, without me thinking about it, but now, I had time to observe and feel what happened. The feeling was strange; it became hard to tell where my identity ended and where Lenore began, and only the mental reference to our bodies allowed me to identify what subconscious streams belonged to whom - for example a reference to my feathers was clearly not mine, same with a thought about my wings.


    But with our minds joined together, I knew what her idea was, she felt that our connection had strengthened to the point that we could consciously cast magic together, even closer than we had before. Before, we had mostly used our magic simultaneously, even through each other, but never in the way she felt we could do now.


    I felt her reach out, feeling the wind around us and my mind was there with hers, tasting the air, feeling the changes and joining with them. At first, it felt alien to me, but thanks to Lenore¡¯s mind, I was able to make sense of what i was feeling and we started to manipulate the air, using what I knew had to be Air Magic. It felt less rigid than Ice Magic and more whimsical and lighter compared to Darkness Magic. It was as if our minds were dancing together; in the beginning Lenore was leading, guiding me through the air around us, but soon, she let me try my figurative first steps, feeling the air and what it was touching on. I learned that there was so much in the air: vibrations that represented sound, small impurities that represented smells, changes in temperature, changes in density - all at the tip of my mental fingers. But also far too complex to interpret, at least for me. For someone with a higher skill, the air had to be the ultimate record, allowing them to track and trace, to gain incredible amounts of information, just by taking in what was around them.


    After what felt like only moments, I felt the beginnings of a headache and pulled my mind back, slowly disentangling myself from Lenore, regaining my own ego. A quick check showed me that it had been maybe twenty minutes of merged minds, far longer than I had thought. In addition, the merge and the unfamiliar magic had used up an astonishing amount of Astral Power. During the merge, I had learned that the merge was possible, thanks to the advances in Mind Magic we had made together. When merged, we could use the other¡¯s magic abilities with our own Astral Power, allowing us to cast magic in ways we could not do on our own. The obvious combinations would be Air combined with Ice magic on one hand and Death and Darkness magic on the other. It was similar to the things we had done before, using those skills alongside each other, but now we could merge them to achieve greater things.


    With my focus back to my body, I was blinking the aftereffects of the merge away and looking at Adra who was still messing with the staff. Just when I thought that she had not realised what I had done, she spoke. ¡°What did you try? I felt the air stir around us.¡±


    ¡°Just a little something with Lenore. What do you think about the staff?¡± I asked, trying to deflect her curiosity. I could hardly give her answers that I didn¡¯t have myself.


    ¡°It¡¯s useful for some, but useless to us. We should keep it and sell it somewhere with more people around.¡±


    ¡°Do you think we could take it apart and learn how it works? I would love to have something similar for my magic, it seems quite useful.¡±


    ¡°Even if we knew how it worked, I doubt that we could make one for you. There has to be some sort of special material within, something that can store the Astral Power. Stuff like that is rare,¡± Adra explained. But lack of material did not faze me, I was sure that we would find something fitting at some point. Or maybe I could create something - I had already used conjured Ice as spell-focus, so maybe I would be able to get somewhere with that as a base.


    Just when I wanted to say so, she continued. ¡°Another problem, just how would you like to take it apart? Simply breaking it would destroy the core material and most likely shatter the runes needed to make it work beyond recognition. You would need a competent Earth Mage to seperate the layers, it¡¯s even harder to take apart than it was to create.¡±


    Her argument brought me up short - I had not considered that. But when thinking about it, it became obvious: unless the core was a lot harder than the outer shell, it would be almost impossible to shatter the outer shell without destroying the core. I would have to try to get a bit of understanding by studying it with Lenore¡¯s vision, both the charging and the discharging process - maybe then I could glean a bit of understanding, enough to give me an idea where to start making my own. And an idea what to look for in materials, something even harder.


    But I had seen an awesome toy and I wanted one for myself.

 Chapter 110

    Over the next couple of days, we made our way back towards Adernas, actively looking for groups of nymphs and dryads on the way and happening upon two more groups. Both were small and easily dealt with, when we changed our approach a little, sending Adra off to the side before the encounter and letting her strike into the other group¡¯s flank, once they engaged with the rest of us. My own first strikes worked out well, to the point that I started using two icicles at once, with individual targets. The individual attacks were weaker, but still easily able to penetrate our current opponents and rip them apart with the detonation.


    Thanks to the fights, I gained another level, bringing me to 53, and skill-points in Ice Magic and Ice-Rune Mastery.


    During the nights, I tried to make sense of the Earthen Staff, linking myself to it and carefully inspecting any occurring changes with Lenore¡¯s vision. I even let myself sink into a meditative trance, trying to examine changes in that state, but had little success, even though I gained two points in Astral Meditation.


    Once I got to the point that I wanted to smash the staff against something hard, I read in the grimoire from the Grandmother, trying to further my understanding of the spells I had already tried. There was more to learn, even if I was able to use them with the book. I wanted to understand them on a fundamental level, understand how the chants guided my power into the runes that made up the spell. That would allow me to truly make them my own and make variants of them for myself, maybe even teach me new runes.


    Just as I got to the point that I wanted to throw the staff away, Rai approached me. He had been rather contemplative over the last few days, often staring into the distance with unseeing eyes. I had heard the term ¡°thousand-yard stare¡± and felt that it was appropriate, wondering just what was going on in his mind. Now, it seemed I might find out.


    ¡°Morgana, can I ask you a question?¡± he asked. I had to suppress a snicker and the rather gilb answer that he just had.


    ¡°Yes, sure.¡±


    ¡°Do you think that father¡¯s plan will work? That my actions will be forgiven and I can move on with my life?¡± His voice cracked a little as he asked, giving me the impression that he already knew the answer and just needed me to confirm his thoughts.


    ¡°Forgiven? Maybe, given time and effort on your part. But I doubt that they will ever be forgotten.¡± I decided to give him my brutally honest assessment.


    He looked at me for a moment with a pained expression, before he spoke. ¡°I see. So, if I stay, I will be forever remembered as the coward, the one who needed outsiders to bail him out, too weak to take care of my own life.¡±


    There was nothing I could say; it was too easy to imagine the attitude of the rest of the village - there might even be someone trying to use Rai¡¯s failure against his father, it wasn¡¯t impossible. But I knew that there was nothing an outsider could do to change the village¡¯s attitude and I told him that, while extending an offer to help him, if needed. I wanted to encourage the increase in maturity he had displayed over the last few days, Compared to the surly, entitled brat he had been when we first met him, it was worlds apart; he had valiantly done his part, not only when it came to fighting but also when it came to the mundane chores - those annoying things that nobody wanted to do, but someone had to. He had done his part and more, not once offering a serious complaint.


    We sat for a little longer in silence, I thought that he might say something more, but after some time, he simply wished me a good night and moved off a little. For me, that meant going back to the grimoire and trying to understand more magic.


    That night, something was different about the book, however: there was another spell on a page that had been blank before. I was a little unsure just what had caused the spell to appear, it wasn¡¯t as if I had achieved some sort of milestone or something similar. But, no matter why, there was a new spell, a spell called Water Mirror. From the description, it used a small body of water to form a window to look at a different place by connecting to a different body of water. The idea was that all water was magically connected. It was understandable, as a mystical concept, by imagining the water-cycle, rain falling, flowing into a river and then the sea, before turning into vapor and clouds before turning back into rain. With that in mind, it was quite easy to see a connection between individual bodies of water and use magic to connect them with each other.


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    I tried it out, making a puddle and casting directly from the book. At first, it didn¡¯t work - only once I made a second puddle, a little away from us, did I manage to get a working connection. But the Astral Power drain was quite insane, for a spell that just let me look out of a puddle a few meters away. But it got me thinking: maybe I didn¡¯t have to use water as a medium.


    Sinking into a meditative trance, I tried to taste what the chant meant, which runes meant what. A few of them gave me the impression of water and it was hard to hold onto them, never mind understand them. But most of the runes gave me a different impression, not water but something else, something I could not grasp at all. By thinking how the spell worked, I would assume that they had to do with the shifting of the viewpoint, so some sort of divination or space, depending on the interpretation. I tried to substitute the water-runes with darkness-runes, letting me use a shadow as medium for the viewpoint-shifting.


    Turning the runes into chants was a strange feeling, the chants themselves held no real meaning themselves, they only guided the mind in the pattern laid out in the runes. In a way, it was similar to the spell creation I was able to use as a Sorcerer, formalizing individual magic expression to create spells that were universally teachable. I could have tried to keep the runes as runes and add the chant for those I could not understand as runes, but I had no idea how to merge them in a satisfactory manner. After a while I had an impression how the chant should sound, how it should work and opened my eyes again.


    The first thing I realised was that I had gained some skill-levels.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Skill increased</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You increased your skill: Astral Meditation [43/100]</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Skill increased</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You increased your skill: Darkness Rune-Mastery [62/100]</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    Turning my back to the fire, to have a nice, deep shadow, I started chanting, carefully keeping an eye on my mental condition and ready to interrupt my magic if something strange happened. There had been far too many strange incidents when I experimented with magic, especially with Darkness -Magic. Well, and Blood-Magic.


    There was a bit of dissonance - the magic was not quite meshing as it should, as if the gears that made the magic were not quite the right size - but I felt them grip nonetheless, even if I needed to jiggle them a little with my Darkness Magic. I felt Lenore¡¯s mind join with mine, not merging but lending her skill to mine, helping with the unfamiliar magic. Her joining me helped, as we shared an ability that worked similarly - linking my own sense of sight with hers - allowing us to use it as a reference.


    I had targeted a shadow a few trees away and I felt my senses shift from one shadow to the other. It was no longer the reflective surface of water that worked as a mirror, now I was looking into one shadow and out of the other, in a strange twist of perspective. Luckily, I was already sitting, or the escheresque view would have knocked me flat.


    A little experimentation allowed me to use Darkness Magic to shift the viewpoint and even to look back at the clearing with our camp, only to discover that it was not visible. Curious, I tried to stretch the sensing towards the camp, using the shadows of the forest, when I felt resistance. With strengthened curiosity, I pushed against the resistance, feeling it give and, with another, even stronger, push, break. Just as it did, an audible alarm, almost like ringing bells filled our clearing and Adra jumped up from the relaxed, almost napping, position she had taken after dinner, almost as if something had stung her.


    ¡°Something triggered our wards, I think someone tried to scry our position, get ready to run!¡± she exclaimed with a panicked voice, as she started to grab her things. Rai and Sigmir heard her voice and were just as alarmed.


    I heard Lenore snicker in my mind and felt my cheeks blush.


    ¡°Wait, can you trace the magic? I experimented with a farsight-spell and wondered why I couldn¡¯t see our camp, so I tried to push it a little¡­¡±


    If looks could kill, I would have found out how it feels to respawn in game. Adra stood and muttered under her breath before looking at me,


    ¡°Did you use Darkness-Magic to scry?¡±


    ¡°Yes, why?¡±


    ¡°Well, it was most likely you who triggered my wards. The magic was rather clumsy and Darkness-based, so I guess we can stay here tonight. Please warn me if you try something like that in the future.¡±


    I simply nodded, feeling a little bad. But at the same time, I was glad that our wards seemed to work quite well against magical intrusion, I had wondered a little, they had seemed a bit useless, as they glowed in Lenore¡¯s magic sight, giving away that someone was there. While Adra reestablished her ward, I looked at my log, while settling down in Sigmir¡¯s lap.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Skill increased</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You increased your skill: Darkness Rune-Mastery [63/100]</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Skill increased</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You increased your skill: Darkness Magic [41/100]</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    Satisfied with the gains, I happily snuggled in, enjoying the feeling of Sigmir¡¯s arms around me and looking forward to the next time we had some privacy.

 Chapter 111

    We reached Adernas around midday, but did not enter until late afternoon. My paranoia was acting up, so only Adra and I entered the town proper, while the others stayed back, due to a bit of uncertainty with Rai¡¯s banishment. The only thing Giro had said was that Rai was no longer welcome after the New Moon, an event that happened almost two weeks ago, so I had proposed that two of us went ahead to ascertain things. I doubted it was some sort of trap - using the banishment as an excuse to attack or something similar - mainly because it would be pointless to create a trap in such a way, but I was lacking the information to make useful predictions, making me stay on the side of caution.


    Lenore had overflown the village while we waited, making sure that no Jonari were using it to resupply, who¡¯d ask uncomfortable questions, if they saw Sigmir. Of course, we could not rule out the possibility that they had been in the village and left, after asking the villagers to capture us, if they had an idea what we had done.


    Overall, the whole thing could become a problem, or it could just be my paranoia, making up problems that were just that, imagination.


    When Adra and I entered the village, the welcome was warmer than last time. No spear was thrown, no screaming people, but someone had to have notified Giro, as we were quickly met by him and another hunter. I stepped forward to receive them, while Adra stood back a little, staying vigilant.


    ¡°Greetings, Morgana. I see you have returned. Was your hunt successful?¡± He asked, seemingly unconcerned with his son.


    ¡°Greetings, Giro. Yes, we have brought low our prey. I think you will be proud to hear that Rai has shown bravery in combat and that I personally trust him to fight beside me, to watch my back.¡±


    When I said that, Giro smiled for a moment before regaining his calm mien, but much more interesting was the fact that the other guy scowled for a moment before regaining his calm.


    ¡°That¡¯s promising. Let me introduce you to Kallik, brother of Dero. He¡¯s one of our best hunters. I¡¯m sure he will be glad to hear that his brother was avenged.¡±


    It took me a second to place the name Dero, before remembering that it was the name of the hunter that had been Rai¡¯s partner and slain due to Rai¡¯s inexperience and, as they called it, cowardice. After the time I had spent with Rai, I was more charitable, placing most of the blame on inadequate training and upbringing and not an ephemeral quality like cowardice, even if there was an attribute called Courage.


    ¡°Greetings, Kallik¡± I gave a slight nod to him, which was returned, before focusing back on Giro. ¡°Can Rai enter the village again? You said he needed to prove his courage by fighting the nymphs, which he did, but I don¡¯t know your customs. Does he need to provide evidence or is his word enough?¡± I asked, hoping that the word would be enough. While we had collected more than just a few heads, I had no great desire to show them off in some morbid display of massacre-


    ¡°Yes, he can enter the village and tell of your exploits. But what do you mean by evidence?¡± Giro asked.


    Instead of answering, I pulled out one of the severed heads I had stored in my bag, drained of blood so it wouldn¡¯t make a mess. The process of draining the blood had caused the head to shrink, reminding me of the voodoo-legends I had heard about. The combination of the shrunken state and the fact that the nymph that the head had belonged to died in a great deal of pain due to my mind magic, made this one the most gruesome sight of them all.


    The look on Giro¡¯s face made the discomfort of handling the head worth it, first a second of confusion, then realisation followed by a mix of disgust and fear. Kallik looked shaken as well, convincing me of the next course of action. My instinct told me that Kallik was trouble - or maybe it wasn¡¯t instinct but rational thought. If he blamed the death of his brother on Rai, redeeming Rai would not go over well with him.


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    Thus, I would move forward with the classic tactic of shock and awe. With that in mind, I summoned the shadows, channelled through runes of devouring, flowing from my hand to encompass the shrunken head and devour it. My eyes turned black for a moment, when I had to activate Overflow to channel enough power but I doubted that it took away from the display, as I had also let my full presence of a being of the first divide leak out. When the shadows faded, there was nothing left of the head, not even a drop of blood. I had experimented a little with it, and the amount of power was large - and even larger when there was power left in the matter I wanted to devour - but for bodies, most of the power was in the blood, and I had drained it before.


    The shock-part of my display was done and I had something special in mind for the awe. Flipping my hand, so my palm pointed skyward, I used simple runes of Ice to create something new, using my Ice-Magic to shape it. It was a rather complex shape but I had no need for great durability or substance, only looks. After a short time, a small bird was sitting in my palm, it was only a sculpture but I was not done yet.


    Bringing the sculpture to my mouth, I blew my breath onto it, using magic to make my breath mist and linger around the sculpture before fading away.


    In a soft voice, I spoke to the bird in my hand, ¡°Go, tell the others that they may enter the village.¡±


    The bird started to move and after a second, took off flying towards the forest, leaving a glittering trail of sparkling ice drifting in the air.


    Looking back at Giro and Kallik, I saw that my little parlour-trick had been successful. The only reason the bird had ¡®flown¡¯ was that I had used Ice-Magic to move it around and keep it aloft. The movement in my palm, the flapping of it¡¯s wings, all just show. But, judging by the wide-eyed look on their faces and the look of surprise on Adra¡¯s face, it had been convincing. What they didn¡¯t know was that the bird had turned into a simple, ballistic projectile once it had passed out of sight, plummeting to the ground, and that the real signal to the others had been sent using my connection to Lenore.


    I would have to look into summoning magic; creating real Ice-Golems seemed worth pursuing, our mounts were something like that, magical shells animated by a summoned being. Depending on the exact mechanics, magic like that might be the most powerful of all, if one had enough time to grow one¡¯s forces. But that was an idea for another time.


    With the bird flown off, I focused back on Giro. ¡°They will be here soon. How exactly will this work? You banished Rai without any ceremony, will there be one for his redemption?¡±


    Giro seemed insecure for a moment and Kallik looked angry, before giving a short goodbye and leaving.


    ¡°I¡­ don¡¯t really know. It is tradition to banish cowards until they have shown their courage but I don¡¯t think anyone ever managed to do so. I will discuss with the other old folks how my son can return to the tribe.¡±


    While he talked, the others had left the forest and were walking across the cleared expanse towards the village.


    ¡°Why don¡¯t you go into my house to warm up, I¡¯m sure my wife will be happy to see Rai again. She was morose the whole time he was gone.¡± he offered.


    ¡°Sure, we can do that. I¡¯m sure Rai is happy to be back.¡±


    Adra and I linked up with the others and together, we walked towards Giro¡¯s house. Once we got to it, I let Rai lead the way, feeling it was appropriate that he entered first.


    ¡°Oh, my baby!¡± A wail echoed through the village the moment Rai opened the door and became visible. We hadn¡¯t really a chance to enter, as his mother had rushed him, engulfing him in a hug and sobbing as she clung to him.


    There was quite a bit of embarrassment on his face, but he dutifully hugged his mother back, even as she started to fuss. He even managed to corral her out of the way, so the rest of us could enter and get out of the cold.


    When the fussing about her baby started to turn into nagging and moaning about the fact that her poor baby had been forced out to prove himself, I had a strong suspicion about why Rai had been so entitled when we first met.


    At the same time, I was looking forward to the drama that would ensue when Kallik and his anger clashed with Giro¡¯s cunning and the protectiveness of Rai¡¯s mother. Luckily, we had front row seats for that particular performance.

 Chapter 112

    Rai let his mother continue her fussing for a few minutes, before he realised that she was not winding down and broke in.


    ¡°Mother, you are being rude. Let me introduce the people who kept me alive the last few days. I doubt that I could have managed without them. Meet Sigmir, Adra and Morgana, each of them a formidable being in their own right.¡± We all gave a polite nod to our hostess. We had spent a night here, but nobody had ever bothered to introduce us.


    Rai hesitated for a moment before continuing, ¡°Friends, meet my mother, Anjij.¡± The blush on his face gave a hint at his thoughts, indicating that his hesitation was because of the identifier, ¡®Friends¡¯. I had to smile, what I would previously seen as a snub against us, seemed to be genuine shyness that had been hidden under a cloak of bluster.


    ¡°Greetings. Why don¡¯t you all sit down and I get you something warm to drink? Rai, why don¡¯t you go into your room and change into something more comfortable - you are home now, no need for the sturdy clothes.¡± Anjij gestured for us to sit and started bustling around in the kitchen. Rai seemed to think for a moment, before sitting with us, still in his armour.


    It only took a few minutes for his mother to return, carrying a steaming kettle and mugs, which caused Rai to stand and help her. The look of surprise on her face was quite interesting to see.


    ¡°Sit, Rai, sit, you have been out for days, relax. Why haven¡¯t you changed? Are you too cold, do you need me to put more wood onto the fire? Is that why you are still in your warm clothes?¡± She did manage to hand out the mugs and Rai poured each of us a warm herbal tea even while her fussing continued.


    Sigmir looked a bit taken back by the excessive mothering Rai was smothered in, I could guess her thoughts, linking the excessive mothering to his spoiled behaviour when we met. There had been some of it when we were here last time, but back then, he stayed away, keeping it out of our sight.


    The three of us watched as she tried to pull Rai into her pace, no doubt believing him to be the same person who had left two weeks before, not knowing that the events of those two weeks had changed him, hopefully on a fundamental level. It was almost funny watching them, Rai tried to take his cues from us, to be calm and collected, even while his mother almost literally tried to spoon-feed him his tea when he let it sit in front of him. At least his reluctance to drink the tea was relatable, the only good thing I could say about the tea was that it was warm - taste-wise, it was a mix of bitter with an aftertaste of grass.


    I felt a mental tug from Lenore and rested my head in my hands, hiding my now closed eyes from view so nobody could tell that I was looking through her eyes. I was also getting sent her thoughts, allowing me to parse what she heard. Luckily, I was already sitting, or the disconnect between my mind and my body would have knocked me down. The conversation around me continued, but I only listened with half an ear, mainly focusing on the images Lenore was sending me.


    Lenore was sitting on a roof and watching as Kallik walked into an open workshop, probably a carpenter¡¯s workshop, judging from the tools and materials. She flew over, landing on the roof and I heard loud voices from below.


    ¡°... you heard? Giro managed to get some outsiders to help his pup. It¡¯s a disgrace, he acts like a merchant instead of a leader, bartering and bending the rules - his father would have been ashamed.¡± Kallik¡¯s voice was quite agitated as he spoke.


    ¡°So, he really did it? The pup didn¡¯t even have the gumption to die on his feet, redeeming himself to the ancestors?¡±


    ¡°I didn¡¯t see him, but while I was talking to Giro, two outsiders asked to speak with him and he happily went, like the dog he is. He obviously knew them, they were talking about some hunt they had been on and that Rai had redeemed himself by killing nymphs.¡± Kallik paused, before continuing, ¡°But, the outsiders, we shouldn¡¯t go against them. The one who was talking, she send a chill down my spine, just looking at her.¡± The undercurrent of fear in his voice made me want to smile.


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    ¡°Pathetic!¡± spat the unknown voice. ¡°Giro goes and finds some powerful helpers for his son, so he can claim that he redeemed himself? It stinks - cowards were always send out so they could die and regain their honour in death. What is the point if you send them with someone to hold their hand?¡±


    ¡°Cursed coward! First he kills my brother, then he can¡¯t even die a proper death! Without the helpers Giro got, the little coward would have gone out and died, just like cowards are supposed to.¡±


    ¡°That gives me an idea. I doubt the outsiders will stay for long - once they are gone, you can call in the blood debt owed to you, and kill the pup yourself. I don¡¯t know where Giro could find truly powerful allies, but I doubt that they are willing to stay in our village for long. There is simply nothing here that would interest someone like that. ¡±


    ¡°That¡­ That would work. At least, my brother could rest in peace, knowing that the coward who killed him died for it.¡± Kallik¡¯s voice sounded eager. ¡°Thank you, Elder Tulok, for showing me the way.¡±


    ¡°I¡¯m always willing to listen to the worries of our tribesmen. You know that. Farewell¡±, The voice that had to belong to that Elder Tulok said responded.


    Kallik left the workshop and, just before Lenore flew off to follow him, I heard soft laughter from below. Soft, but somehow sinister laughter.


    ¡°Keep an eye on Kallik.¡± I asked Lenore over our connection, cutting the visual connection to return to my own body.


    In Giro¡¯s house, Anjij had excused herself into the kitchen and the four of us were simply sitting around the table, enjoying the fact that we were out of the cold and the wind. Even if you were resistant, it felt better to be warm, than to be cold.


    But it was interesting that there was a faction that wanted Rai dead, or rather that wanted to harm Giro. That Elder Tulok didn¡¯t sound as if he really cared about Rai in particular, his venom had been directed at Grio himself.


    ¡°Why are you smiling like that? Nothing good ever comes from that smile!¡± Adra accused and I realised that there was indeed a small smile on my face.


    ¡°What do you mean? When do I smile like that?¡± I asked, genuinely confused.


    ¡°Every time when you try something insane with your magic, you have that smile on your face. What do you have in mind that you smile like this?!¡±


    Just before I could answer, the door opened and Giro and a second, older beastman entered.


    ¡°There you are. Morgana, meet Elder Yuka, he is our blacksmith.¡± Giro announced, the moment he entered.


    Biting back the conversation with Adra, I greeted the unknown Elder.


    ¡°I have thought about the best way to announce Rai¡¯s redemption and once a youngster has succeeded on their first hunt, they are given a weapon, made for them.¡± Giro explained. ¡°That way, it is official that Rai is part of the tribe and not a coward. Rai, explain Elder Yuka what type of weapon you want.¡±


    I had a feeling that the ceremony wouldn¡¯t go over well, especially with Kallik.


    ¡°Say, Giro, what are your tribe¡¯s traditions concerning blood debts?¡± I asked, seemingly as a non-sequitur.


    ¡°When one¡¯s relative is killed, the relatives have the right to challenge the killer to collect the debt. Why do you ask?¡± Yuka answered, before Giro could.


    ¡°So, if someone, say Kallik, claimed that Rai had killed Dero by abandoning him in battle and wanted to collect the debt, he would have a case? Despite the fact that he had been punished for his deeds and afterwards redeemed himself?¡± I asked.


    Both Giro and Rai blanched, and again, Yuka answered my question, this time with a frown. ¡°The Elders would have to decide. I don¡¯t think there was ever something like this. Nobody who had been named coward was able to redeem himself.¡±


    ¡°Why do you ask? Where did you get such an idea?¡± Giro asked, agitated.


    ¡°The winds whispered to me, that Elder Tulok has proposed just that to Kallik. Tulok seemed to carry a grudge against you, Giro. Care to explain?¡± I asked, while quickly hiding the smile that threatened to break out again.


    The plot of the drama was thickening. I was looking forward to the next act.

 Chapter 113

    At my statement, Giro looked as if someone had punched him into the gut and heavily sat down. Yuka was scowling in distaste, but joined us nonetheless.


    ¡°It¡¯s old business. I thought it was long over, over and forgotten.¡± Giro started. ¡°The chief of Adernas is simply the first amongst the elders, the one who voices their consensus and can act as a tie-breaker. My father was highly respected and a great warrior and hunter. It is because of him that I am the chief, but I¡¯m lacking the strength to command respect by force. Tulak is older than me, and more powerful, and he believed that he would become Chief after my father died, but it was not to be. I became Chief, and he¡¯s resented me ever since - but once one is chief, there needs to be a reason for change.¡± he explained.


    ¡°You see,¡± he continued, ¡°I am a competent administrator and negotiator, which helped Adernas in trades and day-to-day business, but not so much when push comes to shove - so when our village was attacked about twenty years back, shortly after my father¡¯s death, the fighting was brutal. and both his younger brother and his wife died.¡±


    He shook his head, appalled that a tribesman had held a grudge for so long, letting it fester for decades and was now trying to take revenge against his son.


    ¡°You said that the decision was made by the elders, if the challenge was valid. What would happen if he offered you his vote in exchange for stepping down as chieftain? I doubt that Rai could win against Kallik - nothing against you, Rai, but he is far more experienced.¡± I suggested a possible plan laid by Tulak.


    ¡°I¡­ I would accept and step down. Being chief is not worth my son¡¯s life.¡±


    ¡°Which would mean that once you stepped down, Rai¡¯s life is in Tulak¡¯s hands. And if he suggested the course of action to Kallik, only to hoodwink him, who¡¯s to say that he won¡¯t do the same to you?¡± Yuka tossed in, completing my train of thought admirably. ¡°This is bad business - bad business, I tell you.¡±


    ¡°In addition, once you stepped down, who¡¯s to stop him from using Rai¡¯s original cowardice against both of you? The winds told me that nobody has ever managed to redeem himself. Could he bring that up again?¡± I asked.


    By now, Giro was looking truly troubled and Rai looked just defeated. He had suspected that it would not be as easy as his father had hoped and it was getting obvious just how difficult it might be. For me, my gamer-sense was tingling, it sounded like a chain-quest to help Giro strengthen his position and cement Rai as the next chief. I had to fight the smile Adra had accused me of having.


    ¡°So, Giro, what are your plans? I promised Rai some help, if need be. But that would happen as long as we are in the area, before we move on.¡± I offered, presenting a possible solution, without truly saying what we could do. It would be bad to overplay my hand by offering to simply assassinate Tulak and Kallik, even if I had little doubt that we could manage. Neither seemed to be as strong as the Jonari-Chieftain, not by far. It might leave them strapped for combat-strength, but that was a problem for another day.


    There was a twigging of discomfort, not internally within me, but almost as if it was projected from the outside. It did not feel like Lenore¡¯s feeling, but more like¡­ the one time I had somehow linked to Sigmir, connecting to her mind? Or maybe her soul. Looking at her, she had her hard and stoic face in place, but looking at her eyes, her eyes told a different story. It only took me a moment to realize why.


    She was thinking of her father, asking herself if at the main-table of the Jonari-Chieftain¡¯s house a similar gathering had taken place, calmly planning how to make sure that their plans were successful, no matter who had to die for them. The idea that we might carry out an act so similar to the one sealing her father¡¯s fate was causing her enough mental pain to transfer to me, even if she would not speak against me, thanks to her convictions concerning oaths and her life-debt. She would follow me into her grave. And if I ever did something so vile that she could not follow me? I had a strong feeling that she would rather kill herself than betray her oath to me.


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    ¡°Could¡­ Could you¡­¡± Giro tapered off.


    ¡°Grow a spine, boy. You want to ask them if they could simply kill those two and all that oppose you, ain¡¯t you?¡± Yuka broke in. He seemed to dislike the idea but was aware that sometimes conflict could only be ended by ending one of the conflicting parties. Giro looked a bit stricken when Yuka was so blunt, clearly stating the fact of the matter.


    ¡°Yes, that.¡± Giro admitted, still not able to say the words. Yuka gave a snort of derision. I was just about to start negotiating for a good price to take care of his little problem when Rai broke in.


    ¡°No! I cost the tribe the best hunter already. Do you really think that their families would sit by if the two of them were slain? They would want to find the culprit, they would demand justice.¡± His voice was strong and determined.


    ¡°What would you do?¡± I asked, curious if it was simply a childish outburst or if he had thought about it.


    ¡°I¡­ I will leave. I thought about it a bit, especially after what happened in the cave. That I want to become stronger and to do that, I need to train and to travel.¡± He exclaimed, making me think that it had been a childish outburst after all, but his next words changed that idea.


    ¡°You said you would help me. So, help me, take me with you and train me. I have seen you wield your two blades, I have seen you move. You are mainly a spell-caster, but still able to hold your ground in melee range. If we announce that I have redeemed myself of cowardice but taken on a master to grow stronger, would they dare to attack father, knowing that I might become stronger than all of them? Could they attack father without my weakness in the picture?¡±


    My gamer-senses were confused; either gaining a side-kick / trainee / group-member or possibly gaining a couple of the precious few quests? From a long-term cost/benefit analysis, taking Rai was probably better - at least if I managed to bring him up to speed skill- and level-wise - while the quests would add some strength to the group immediately, in the form of precious EXP.


    Looking at Giro, he managed to look relieved and apprehensive at the same time, while Yuka slowly stroked his beard, obviously thinking about the idea.


    ¡°You are aware that we will be gone for a long time? That the journey we are on can easily kill you, without you ever seeing this village again? Even that it is quite likely that it will kill you?¡± I asked.


    ¡°And that taking on a master is not a step easily taken? Taking her as your master, will bind you to her, until she releases you. And even afterwards, she will always have been your master, a figure as respected as your father.¡± Yuka threw in.


    I looked at Sigmir and Adra, trying to gauge their reactions. Adra looked quite happy, probably because she would get to keep her warm hug-pillow while Sigmir looked relieved. She would have preferred to take Rai with us, even if he was still his bratty self, if it meant that there were no killings carried out within the clan.


    ¡°Yes, I know that it is not an easy step. I have thought about it for days, ever since I saw her in a serious fight. Here in Adernas, nobody even uses two blades, but she wields them with lethal grace and deadly skill, a shadow in the night - but a shadow that reaps lives.¡± His voice had an admiring, almost worshipping quality to it. I was reminded of an article I had once read, talking about the ¡®damsel in distress¡¯-trope in storytelling as an extension of the suspension-bridge effect known in psychology. It could lead to a sort of co-dependence, something I would have to watch out for, if I wanted Rai to stay his own being. If not, I might be able to nurture that co-dependence and gain a loyal¡­ follower.


    Looking back, I could see that he had always done whatever I had asked of him, that he had seemed happy when I asked something of him, sometimes to the point that I imagined a tail wagging behind him.


    ¡°If you are certain that it is the road you want to travel, you can join us. I¡¯m certain you will grow strong on our travels. For it is either strength or death that awaits you on our road.¡± I said, a grim smile on my face.


    Now, it was up to Giro to decide.

 Interlude Patch 1.4.

    It was a strange place, a place that defied the mundane idea what could be real. It was the place, the laws of reality went, if they wanted to get falling down drunk. It was a place where the question of when was meaningless, where tomorrow¡¯s future was yesterday¡¯s past. It was a place outside of space and time, a place located in the fleeting moments between dreams and reality, it was a place where reality was as malleable as ideas and change as natural as shapes in the clouds. It was unbound by whatever rules bound the countless, infinite universes that sprang into existence and vanished into nothingness around it. And it was the only place where you could get a good cup of coffee.


    It was the Everwhere Cafe and Diner.


    It was a normal tuesday at the Everwhere Cafe, as it was always tuesday, the usual suspects had received the drinks they would order later, when a long anticipated surprise occured. Reality seemed to choke on something, so Space-Time gave her a few slaps on the back, to help her clear the airways, when in the arrival area, two newcomers appeared. They seemed to be unused to the intricacies of extra-multiversal travel and landed in an awkward heap, before sorting their limbs out, making sure that the limbs they had, were similar to those they were supposed to have and wondering why they had a taste of eucalyptus in their mouth.


    One of the newcomers was a petite female, her skin shifting between a pale white and a bluish hue, as her ears were switching between being pointed and not, all interspersed with short moments in which she was something entirely different. Something far larger but still taking up the same space, something equipped with vicious claws.


    The other was a gallant old man with an impressive beard that was almost two meters tall, shifting between that and a beautiful young girl with modest breast wearing a beautiful white robe. Their eyes held a certain majesty and pride in them, prompting all who see them to feel fear and awe. Behind this second figure the space continued to distort as if trying to eject this invader but lacking the power to do it. Also, of note was that for some reason the drink of the nearest customer had soured and the salad al fresco that he was eating had rotted into goop.


    When both had managed to collect their thoughts and limbs, the maitre d¡¯ approached them, a silhouette covered by a strange, shimmering veil, looking as if it had been woven from starlight and the twinkle in a mischievous child¡¯s eye.


    ¡°Greetings, Newcomers. I welcome you to Neverwhere Cafe and I hope you will enjoy your stay.¡± the silhouette said, a voice that echoed in ways that should not be.


    ¡°Greetings. Where am I?¡± the first newcomer, whose form had stabilized into the appearance of a pale humanoid with long, raven-black hair and purple eyes, asked.


    ¡°Why, you are visiting the Everwhere Cafe, the best place to get a cup of coffee if you stumbled out of your universe.¡±


    Both newcomers were now looking around, trying to make sense of their surroundings. It was not easy, as the surroundings had the annoying habit to shift upon observance, shift into something that might make sense to the observer.


    At one table, close to them, two human-looking beings argued animatedly. One of them looked female, maybe a meter and seventy tall, with short, black hair clad in a black lab-coat and wearing a pair of stylish glasses, the other a dour looking man, wearing a black suit with a white shirt and a maroon tie and it looked as if the woman wanted to strangle the man.


    ¡°Now, why don¡¯t you explain to me why there are so many damage-claims that we need to pay out? I know you had full coverage with our ¡®Mad Science¡¯ insurance package, but we need to make sure that everything is in order.¡± the man tried to reason.


    ¡°I was studying zero-time and its effect on hyperspace. I managed to fabricate a moment that was unlinked from space-time and directly into hyperspace, creating effectively an area that was not part of space-time. That resulted in a huge influx of hyperspace-energy into normal-space, which in turn resulted in the rapid expansion of the newly formed space-time¡­¡± the woman tried to explain in an exasperated voice.


    The mysterious old man had now fully turned into a blonde haired girl and was rubbing her chin as she regarded the place with mild curiosity. Her manly mannerisms as she wandered around as if she owned the place drew some attention from the both the female and male patrons.


    She half-heartedly listened to the conversation of the two creatures with mild interest. What drew her attention the most was the building itself.


    ¡°Hmm, curious. This style of building is not one I am used to. And that...drink,¡± she lapped the air with her tongue. ¡°So fragrant, what is that?¡±


    ¡°That is a Micro-Lot blend of an extinct Costa Rican La Roja beans and the finest batch of Kilimanjaro beans in existence. Very precious,¡± the maitre¡¯d said with pride.


    ¡°Interesting names. I don¡¯t understand all of it but I¡¯d like one please. Oh, and her share too.What do you expect as payment?¡± she asked, knowing that one had to be careful when dealing with Elder Beings, their bargains often came with unseen strings attached.


    ¡°Do you accept gold?¡± she asked, pulling out a pouch from her sleeves.


    ¡°No gold. As you can see, this is not a place where gold has any merit. However, you will already have paid, when you come here.¡±.¡±


    ¡°And what price would that be? The chains of Bhavacakra still has its hold on me. And my guts tell me that owing you is like a binding of fate. How about a Longevity Pill then? One pill could prolong a mortal¡¯s life by a hundred years.¡±


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    The Maitre¡¯d took the violet colored pill the girl offered and regarded it with a critical eye.


    ¡°Very well, one can never have enough baubles. Please have a seat.¡±


    As the strange creature left, the blonde girl pulled up a chair on a table and said. ¡°Please.¡±


    ¡°Why, thank you kindly.¡± The first being said with a smile, gave a slight bow and sat, observing the surroundings.


    ¡°I like to show women some appreciation. Especially one with such rare beauty. Whether they accept or not, it is another thing entirely.¡±


    The girl sat on the other chair and rolled her sleeves up to her elbows before taking a piece of bread on the table.


    ¡°My name is Wang Tian Gu/Cornelia. Hmm, let me try that again. Wang Tian Gu/ Cornelia. Hoh, that¡¯s weird. When I say my name, I hear two things. What about you?¡±


    ¡°You can call me Morgana/Titania/Samantha.¡± As she introduced herself, not just one, but four sounds came out at once, three voices and a deep, dangerous growl, clearly not made for a human throat, causing her to cough.


    ¡°This will take some getting used to.¡± With a frown, she looked up, towards the bar and a small squeak escaped her lips. The bartender reminded her of something she had not yet seen, something that was trying to squeeze into a dimension too small for it, a nightmare of tentacles, power and madness.


    ¡°An odd thing, isn¡¯t he? I see no bounds of karma on him. That means he has never given or taken from anything in the universe. Or the universe does not know he exists. Yet he is no god or demon, for he has none of the Four Noble Truths. For such a being, of course that pill is a bauble. Just like a sword skill is worthless in the face of one who has reach One with the Sword state.¡±


    ¡°But you...the chain of Bhavacakra wraps itself around you like a vice. So much pain, hatred, and anger. And yet there is also love and happiness,¡± the girl scoffed. ¡°Heaven is truly cruel.¡±


    ¡°I see you¡¯re a smart girl. And as one smart girl/man to another, I¡¯m sure worthless topics like the weather is uninteresting. Especially not when we are sitting here with the world in chaos outside,¡± she leaned forward conspiratorially. ¡°So let¡¯s have a conversation. I promise I won¡¯t take you home and practice dual cultivation with you.¡±


    ¡°Ah, and here comes our order. Have you ever drunk this...koffie?¡±


    ¡°Coffee, and yes, I have, but it¡¯s been a while. And I doubt you could take me home, even if I were to let you. Which I would not, for I am very much taken by another and I would fight gods and destroy worlds for her.¡±


    The conversation was stalled by the arrival of the drinks. The being with four names raised the cup to her lips, sniffed for a moment and smiled.


    ¡°I truly don¡¯t know how long it has been. Or how long it will be, however that works in this place.¡± With those words, she took a sip and her smile was quickly replaced with a pained frown. ¡°Damnation, I am no longer used to hot drinks.¡±


    For a second, she just glared at the cup, before holding the spoon upright in the cup and her glare changed for a moment, as power welled up and the liquid turned into a popsicle. Pulling the coffee-popsicle out of the cup, she daintily lapped at it with a slightly burned tongue, enjoying the soothing cold.


    Cornelia sipped the drink and enjoyed the unfamiliar aroma, finding that analyzing the complex taste as enjoyable as dissecting a powerful poison. She then poured a handful of pills from inside her sleeves.


    ¡°These are some snacks I have. Rejuvenating Pills, Beautifying Pills, Soul Destroying Pills, and Dragonslaying Poison Pill. Pick your poison.¡±


    ¡°Dragonslaying Poison? Oh, the hubris.¡± she glanced at the pills and a blood red, pulsating radiance enveloped them. ¡°But maybe not just hubris. You do have the skills to back it up. I think I will take this one, even if I was taught to never accept candy from strangers.¡±


    With these words, she takes one of the Rejuvenating Pills and pops it in her mouth. ¡°Sadly, I don¡¯t think we can take anything back with us. The feeling of power inside you and your pills is just a tad different from the power that governs the place where I come from. There would be a rejection and I don¡¯t think either of us would survive the rejection of a universe. Or if we did, that the universe would survive the backlash.¡±


    The Rejuvenating Pill had a gentle herb taste. It was the sensation that was prevalent. Like chewing a gentle Summer Breeze. The moment the pill dissolved in her mouth, a feeling like having bathed in a refreshing cold water and enjoying a nice warm sauna enveloped her. She almost uttered a moan, but managed to hide it well.


    ¡°But your candy does taste interesting. I would be remiss not to offer something in return.¡± With that, she pulls a small, perfectly round, ruby out of a small pouch at her waist.


    ¡°Here, enjoy.¡± with these words, she handed the gem over.


    The blonde girl regarded the gem and played with it using her long, prehensile tongue. Juggling it with an audible noise before gulping it down.


    The moment the ruby entered her mouth a sensation unlike everything she had felt before entered her mouth. A cool, almost freezing feeling spread from her tongue, as if she was tasting the very essence of ice itself, but mixed into the ice was a faint taste of iron, with a rich, earthy underlying taste, reminiscent of endless pine-forests. But it was not a physical taste per-se, it just presented to her senses as such, in reality it was something deeper, something more primal, the gem contained the essence of life itself, slowly spreading into her body.


    ¡°Interesting. Very interesting,¡± Connie savored the taste with a smile. ¡°But this is not a man made thing, is it? This kind of purity cannot come from human hand. Unless they have reached my level.¡±


    ¡°Well, we all have our own specialities. You are no doubt very good at alchemy and while I have dabbled, it is just not my thing. However, I am excellent when it comes to enchanting, especially blood-enchanting. What you just tasted was more a plaything of mine, the condensed essence of a woodland-beast sealed in ice. I greatly enjoy the sensation and it is very easy on the figure, you know?¡±


    Connie did not reply the query as she was savoring the taste. The old man who was her slept with his eyes closed, remembering the taste that awakened a happy feeling inside him. It was the taste that reminded him of Fei. Sadly, the memory ebbed to and fro, shaken by the uncertainty governing the place.


    Suddenly, at the other end of the bar, Continuity was waking up from a nap, looking around and realising that something was not quite right, that some beings had slipped the grasp of linearity and had arrived somewhere they should not be. Obviously, that could not be tolerated, the timelines could get tangled and poor Causality would feel violated once more. If that happened again, there would be an army of blue birds, chirping metoo, metoo and undoubtedly, a lawsuit would sure follow. No, best to make sure nothing of that sort happened.


    A quick look to the barkeeper and the maitre d¡¯ summoned the powers that were, are and will be, asking them to use their unique abilities to banish the escaped beings back to their own place in space and time, taking away the memories of the strange events that had taken place.


    Hopefully without causing madness. But mortal minds had often problems when faced with beings such as them. Oh, well, neither of the mortals could claim to be totally sane anyway, so maybe nobody would spot the difference.

 Chapter 114

    After Rai had his outburst, Giro was looking pensive. I hoped that he would accept his son¡¯s decision, so everything remained in harmony - because if he rejected it, I would still let Rai accompany us, as I had given my word. And if I denied Giro¡¯s outlook, things in Adneras would get tense, even if I doubted that there would be bloodshed, which would make the whole idea of Rai going with us to avoid conflict meaningless.


    He took a few moments, staring into empty air, before speaking. ¡°You have my support, but I would ask to see a demonstration of your skill, Morgana. If you are to be the master of my son, I want to see your skill with my own eyes.¡±


    ¡°Why would I jump, like a trained dog? At the end of the day, you are asking something of me, not offering something to me. But I will acquiesce, if you accept my conditions.¡± I countered angrily. Rai looked a little surprised at my harsh voice.


    ¡°Name them, then.¡± Giro said.


    ¡°First, I will fight in a sparring-match with either one of your fighters or against one of my companions.


    Secondly, as my disciple, Rai needs the right sort of weapons.¡± I focused for a moment, letting my Frozen Butterfly-Wings soar out and hover in front of Yuka.


    ¡°You are the village¡¯s smith, right? Copy the weapons as close as possible, Rai can¡¯t use the Ice-versions I use - they would harm him. But to use the style I use, he will need them.¡± I told Yuka.


    ¡°And thirdly, we need information. Maps, tales, whatever you can give us, that can guide us on our way west.¡±


    After I made my demands, Giro was looking relieved. My demands were reasonable and would allow both of us to save face. Not that I really cared about the respect I got from the natives, but it had its uses.


    ¡°Oh, and before we forget about it, The quest you gave us. It is done.¡± I added.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Quest Completed!</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You completed the Quest: Protect Adernas</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You gained: 35 000 EXP</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    ¡°Good. The armour, it is for you two?¡± He asked, pointing at Sigmir and me.


    ¡°Yes, it is. I need the supple variant, optimised for agility, Sigmir needs the studded variant, for added protection.¡± I explained, even if it was rather obvious.


    ¡°I thought as much. Making the armour will take a few days and for the future master of my son, I will do my best work.¡± I blinked in surprise for a moment.


    ¡°What, do you think I¡¯m useless? While Yuka is our best smith, I¡¯m the best leatherworker. I don¡¯t want the tanning-smell in the house, so the workshop is a little outside the village, next to Yuka¡¯s forge. I will ask my wife to take your measurements.¡± Giro announced, pride for his work evident in his voice.


    ¡°Anjij, come, and measure our guests. There is work to do.¡± He called out.


    ¡°Rai, go and make sure that your mother¡¯s cooking will not spoil while she measures us. You watched me cook often enough, so you should be able to, right?¡± I added, demonstrating that I considered myself as his master from now on, commanding my disciple as I wanted. I had watched the masters at the school where I trained in the real world, and it almost seemed as if the only thing needed to be a master was the ability to spout mysterious lines, talk in an asian accent and whack students with a thin cane. Not hard, to cause pain, but softly, to correct. At least, that¡¯s what the masters there claimed.


    Rai went into the kitchen, passing a confused looking Anjij on the way, before Anjij pulled Sigmir and me into a different room and measured us, using knotted cords, marking out various measurements, hips, waits, upper thighs, everything. She was thorough enough to make both Sigmir and me blush in embarrassment, by prodding and poking us in various places to move us as she wanted. The fussing mother had been replaced by a strict worker, making sure that Giro had all the measurements he needed to make us the best armour she could. The few words she spoke all made it clear that she very much enjoyed the knowledge that his work was the best.


    The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.


    Once the measurements were done, we returned to the main-room and Giro asked if it was possible to get the demonstration done before dinner. I had no problem with that, and we moved outside, where Guto, the warrior I had healed before, was waiting.


    In a group, we moved to a clear space outside the village, with a few children trailing behind us. A concealed observe told me that Guto was level 67 but he gave of no feeling of having crossed the first divide and his weapon was easily visible, a long spear with a lug behind the blade to prevent over-penetration. It was clearly a hunting-tool and not a true martial weapon.


    We moved roughly twenty steps away from each other and stood clear. Rai was to toss a stone in the air, and once it landed, we would start. Nobody had announced any rules, so I blunted my weapons and used blood magic to channel Astral Power into my body, increasing my strength a great deal.


    The rock was tossed into the air, landed and I moved. My charge and the insane speed surprised Guto but he managed to bring his spear to bear, trying to let me run into it. I reacted by simply using my superior strength to slap it aside and place my second knife against his neck. The fight had lasted less than three seconds.


    It was obvious that Guto was lacking in serious martial training - he had learned to fight as part of his training to hunt, but there was a world of difference between defending yourself from a wild animal and doing battle against a trained enemy. I had noticed that most local fighters were lacking in training and martial skill, though maybe that would change once we got to the more civilised areas, where more people lived and thus more violence was wrought.


    ¡°Furious Flame.¡± I announced in a clear voice. It was the first path of the style I was taught. Swift and relentless attacks, aimed at striking first and making the first strike the last. I was not a big fan of it, due to my lack of reach and strength.


    Moving back into position, I signaled for another bout. The rock was tossed and landed, but this time, there was no instant movement from me. Instead I slowly and steadily moved towards him and he met me in the middle. Trying to block a spear with two blades was not a fun or easy thing to do, but thanks to the lug, I managed to do so. My steady advance never slowed and even with the blunted blades, my heavy strikes must have hurt.


    ¡°Rumbling Earth.¡± I announced. This was my least favorite path, it relied on a steady approach, centered on strength and immovability. My choice of weapon was wrong, my body-type was wrong, everything about it was wrong for me. But I had tried it, before discarding it.


    Again, we moved back into position and the rock was thrown. My stance had greatly shifted and I was letting my enemy approach, while I gently moved towards him. The approach was similar to the steady approach of the earthen path, but it was a lot lighter. Once he struck, instead of blocking it in a block-headed maneuver, I let myself flow around the spear, pushing it just far enough aside to get to him. Once more, my blade would have gutted him.


    ¡°Flowing Water.¡± Not my favorite path, especially against weapons with so much more reach. It relied on counter-attacks and flowing parries.


    ¡°For the last path, I would like to ask Adra to join me.¡± I said. Now, I wanted to impress.


    Adra grinned and pulled a crystal-white needle from her hair, which enlarged to become a long spear. There was nothing tool-like about this spear, it was all weapon, designed and tuned to kill. And it was obvious that the spear was special; there was an aura of sharpness, of danger surrounding it.


    Part of me wondered if I had mucked up, as Adra took Guto¡¯s place and, after blunting her weapon, gave the ready sign.


    The rock was thrown and I started to move. My favorite path, the path known as Twisting Wind. Adra and I approached each other, she moving in a steady, controlled manner, while I was moving erratically, shifting from a slow approach to a sudden burst of speed, until I was almost in her range. From then on, my movement turned into a circling one, keeping her exactly as far away as I wanted her to be, as I feinted and lured, trying to get her to commit so I could move in. The essence of the Twisting Wind was elusiveness, never being where the enemy thought you were, until striking a seemingly harmless blow, while trying to cause maximum damage. Even a glancing blow to the elbow could sever sinews, even a glancing blow to the throat could cut arteries. Speed and trickery were the name of the game, and I loved it, as it needed very little strength.


    Finally, she bit, trying to stab me, only to see me move with her stab, dodging it and following it in. Once I was within her guard, it was over and she asked for another bout. I agreed, after stating the name of the path.


    The second bout was incredible. Adra had changed her grip, taking the spear in the middle and wielding it more like a staff, trading range for flexibility. I no longer kept to a single path but switched it up, flowing from element to element, trying to score telling hits.


    The ¡®thock-thock-thock¡¯ of our colliding weapons was a staccato beat, a music of battle. In the end, stamina decided the fight, Adra simply had a lot more of it and she managed to get me in the end. But it had been a hard fight and both of us had our personal clouds, steam rising from our heated bodies.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Skill increased</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You increased your skill: Dual Blade-Mastery [24/100]</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Skill increased</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You increased your skill: Blood Rune-Mastery [49/100]</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    I looked Giro into the eyes and asked, ¡°Now, are you entertained?¡±

 Chapter 115

    The next few days, we stayed in Adernas and made plans to go forward. But not all plans were well-received, the evening after the demonstration for Giro, he had formally asked me to take on Rai as my disciple. It was mostly for show, as I had already accepted him, but he did it in full view of his wife. For a moment, I wondered if we were all going to die when the mother wolf started to defend her cub. But Rai proved his mettle, by standing up and calmly explaining to his mother that it was his wish, that it was his journey. His mother was speechless for a moment, before starting in on him. He did not get angry, he kept calm, collected and explained his reasoning. No emotional displays, throwing a tantrum that he wanted to prove himself, no whining, nothing, just adult calm and cool reasoning.


    Maybe torture did not work to get answers, but it certainly had worked to get the brattiness out of him.


    I think Rai regretted his decision the very next day, and every day after, while we were in Adernas, as I happily started training him. As there was little else to do and I was able to heal bruises, that meant I could abuse, or train, my disciple as much as I wanted to. My training method involved showing him a movement or stance and smacking him until he got it right, before moving on the next. I¡¯m not sure if it was the teaching or the smacking, but during our stay, I got a few skill-points in my dual blade mastery, bringing me up to 28.


    But the biggest thing during those days was that Giro had a comparatively large map, showing more of this corner of the world than I had been aware of. It was mostly a thematic map, marking out other organized groups, danger-zones and similar things, not necessarily terrain-features, unless they were noticeable enough, like large mountains or rivers. That meant, that a small but deep canyon would have no mark, making the map less useful when creating a precise route - but incredibly useful to know what one was getting into, in a specific region. Or where one could find a village that might be bartered with for supplies or shelter. Money was largely useless out here; one could not eat gold, no matter how hard one tried. Well, unless one was of one of the stranger species.


    I was glad about that, it had been something that had always annoyed me when gaming. You got to a new area, somewhere deep in the wilderness and met a group of hardy men, trying to fight off a horde of monsters, undead, barbarians or whatever the setting demanded. They are grim and gruff, telling you that you need to prove yourself worthy, that they will not support you, as they need their supplies or something along those lines - but as soon as you show some clinking coins, they are happy to sell you pretty much whatever you need. The gameplay demanded it, but it felt just wrong.


    On the map, the north of us, the direction we had been coming from, was blank, only a skull with a question-mark in it, signifying a deadly area for unknown reasons. According to Giro, it was used to mark the most dangerous areas, because nobody knew just what killed people there. Some people travelled and were fine, others simply vanished. Without knowing what killed them, nobody could prepare or gauge the risk. If you went into an area teeming with dragons, you knew to expect dragons and could prepare. Not against the unknown. The area to the north-east was marked as relatively safe, as there were only normal animals around and no civilisation but a few travelling tribes that roamed in that area. To the east, was the Jonari-village, a few notes on it but nothing major. Just that their hunting-area was mostly to their east and south.


    To the north-west, the map marked out a mountain-range that had to be the one containing Mount Yugid, and it noted that the mountains were comparatively safe, only warning of airborne threats, as firebirds used them as a hunting range. On the other side of the mountains, further to the west, was a road marked out - not in detail but as a guideline, that it had to be there somewhere. At the northern end of the road was Yari, the bearman town we had visited before, roughly halfway along the mountain-range was another settlement named Kyrta, and to the south, slightly south-west of Adernas, was a small city called Yaksha.


    There was a gap in the mountain range, right in the area where Yaksha was, giving them excellent access to the eastern part of the continent. It was a testament to how wild and untamed the area east of us was, that Adernas was not a teeming trade-post and Yaksha not a flourishing city, with its position between two natural barriers. If one wanted to go further east from Yaksha, one had to either go two weeks north, to Yari, or at least one week south, maybe more, as the map cut off there.


    Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.


    I asked about the part of the mountain-range south of the gap, as it had a slightly different symbol compared to the one north of it, and was told that there were flying monsters as well, but many more and a different sort, compared to those further north. A smaller type, not of firebirds, but more vicious and brutal, a type of bird the hunters of Adernas only called wind raptors. When Lenore heard the name, I felt her mentally perk up, even though she was still outside. It seemed as if she was looking through my eyes, similar to what I sometimes did with hers. I only hoped that she did not fall off a roof or tree while doing so, I was always glad to sit down while I did it.


    South of Adernas were more forests, apparently similar to those we had wandered through all these days, but lately, the wolves had acted up, as more and more of them came into the area. Giro was unsure what it meant, it might mean that further south some sort of trouble was brewing, trouble that the wolves were avoiding. Or it might mean something entirely different. It was not as if wolves, even spirit-wolves were eager to converse with wolfman.


    What was most interesting on the map was that the road that ended (or started, depending on your view) in Yari was an old road, built an eternity ago by an old, now lost, civilisation that had made their roads to last forever. Those roads spanned the vast majority of western Aretia, connecting towns and kingdoms, tribes and cities. These days, they were mostly maintained by the merchants guild, which was part of their power. If some group did not want to play ball with them, the road was no longer maintained. And that meant that everyone else who lived at that road was directed to them, for complaints.


    With this information, Sigmir, Rai, Adra and I huddled together and started to plan our route, moving forward.


    ¡°When I travelled north, I kept east of the mountains, not using the road. I wanted to immerse myself in solitude, feel the wilderness.¡± Adra explained. ¡°But if we travel south-west, we probably should use the road. It will cut travel-time, and if I understood right, your journey will be a long one, right?¡± she continued.


    ¡°You can say that again.¡± I said with a smile, ignoring the confused look on her face - maybe she didn¡¯t know the phrase - and continued, ¡°Sigmir and I want to travel to the other side of the earth. The place we want to reach is in the southern part of Arbotoma. I¡¯m not even sure how we get from either Aretia or Daiea to Arbotoma, nevermind the rest of the way.¡±


    By now, there was a smile on my face. The sheer scope of the journey was breathtaking and I could see that Rai¡¯s jaw was just about to hit the floor. He might have heard of the other continents in stories, but only as mythical, far away places.


    I felt Lenore reach towards me and we mentally met, ¡°I want to go into the southern part of the Mount Yugid mountain range. If I¡¯m not wrong, I can gain a lot there. And my gain, will be your gain.¡± she explained. The feelings that got transmitted along with her thoughts told me that it was truly important to her and that, while she didn¡¯t want to say it, she was calling in the markers she was due. I didn¡¯t mind, she had helped us a lot and if there was something to gain, I would happily go there. If it didn¡¯t kill us.


    ¡°How about we go into Yaksha, find out if there are quests to do in the southern mountain-range and deal with them before moving further south. Quests mean strength and I think once I¡¯ve got Rai up to speed, our group will be quite formidable.¡± I suggested.


    ¡°Don¡¯t overestimate our strength. Out here, there are a lot of beings that manage to gain a high level, but beings that overcome divides are rare. The further we get towards civilisation, the more common beings that overcame the first divide are going to be. Levels only mean that you have killed a lot of beings, or been involved in a lot of quests. Divides mean more, that you have overcome a fundamental watershed.¡± Adra cautioned me.


    Maybe she was right, one of the reasons the dryad Tegi had been able to do what she did, was that she had probably overcome the second divide and bound a lot of subordinates to her and her tree. And another thing I had to keep in mind, levels and divides meant very little, if one was not vigilant. The way the Jonari Chief and their shaman had died proved that in visceral detail.


    The others accepted my suggestion of heading towards Yaksha, mainly because there were few alternatives.

 Chapter 116

    A few days after we had returned to Adrenas, the moon was once again full, shining high up in the sky. To me, that meant my Ice-Magic was greatly strengthened, and I planned to remake my Frozen Butterfly Wings; I had learned a lot about the magic, and my abilities had grown since I¡¯d originally made them. Hopefully, I would be able to create a better item than before.


    I told Sigmir about it and she agreed to watch over me; if I wanted to do the creation right, I would be completely defenseless - easy pickings for anyone wanting to do me harm, like Kallik, who had looked as if he had bitten into a lemon, when he heard that Rai would join us as my disciple. Lenore had kept an eye on him, but I wanted her help with the crafting, the additional Astral Power she supplied should be useful.


    So, once the moon had fully risen, I sat outside Adernas in the field, centering myself to do some heavy duty spellcasting. I had cleaned the area around me, laying down a sheet of ice, inscribed with runic circles and a frozen platform in the middle. That was my seat for the night. Unsure if it would help, I had shed my clothes, deciding to follow old, mythological practices and perform my magic skyclad, as they called it. I certainly felt in touch with the cold, as it was biting my flesh and seeping into me. Hopefully, it would help.


    Closing my eyes, I felt the moonlight on my skin, almost a physical caress - not scorching like the sun, but gentle, like a cooling breeze on a hot day. For some reason, the cold sensation it gave me chased away the chill of the night. The crystal core in my chest started to stir, almost humming, in tune with the moonlight touching my skin, forming a connection between my body, the innermost part of my magic, concentrated in the core, and the moon in the sky. The Astral Power within me was roiling, surging, pressing at the confines I had imposed upon it with my will, like a river trying to overwhelm the dikes to flood the land.


    But no, I had purpose during the night, so I forced the power into the paths I had prepared and planned, letting it flood into the runic circles surrounding me, before coming back to me purified and attuned to the runes I had prepared. There was only one rune that could be fueled with the power in that state, the Hard Ice-Rune. But that was all that I needed.


    In front of me, seven Hard Ice-Runes formed, spun together by my will and fueled by the power I had gathered and was still gathering. Part of me was floating on the Astral currents, drawing in more power, while another part was keeping them in check.


    The formation in front of me was emitting almost no light at all, every bit of power that got into it was used to fuel the magic I was weaving. I felt the Hard Ice crystals form, and stretched my Ice-Magic, trying to weave them together to create something stronger than the sum of its parts. Each crystal was slightly different in form, slightly different in size, making it hard to perfectly conjone them but as I focused, I felt something join to the crystals, a liquid version of them. The strange, silvery liquid felt surprisingly heavy; normally one expects liquids to have roughly the same density as water, but the feeling this liquid gave me was more akin to mercury.


    But I was able to control it and it worked almost like a solder, bridging the small distances and differences between the microscopic crystals, binding them into a whole, far stronger than the sum of its parts.


    The process stretched for hours, as I was channelling power through my body, the runic circle around me and into the formation that let the blades slowly coalesce within it. Finally, I had a feeling that I had done all I could, and finished the blades up, adding a few decorations, making sure that the balance was exactly as I wanted it to be, and so on.


    Once I was done, my curiosity reared its head and I let the blades rest beside me on my seat, there was magic exploration to be done. I wanted to know just what the strange silvery liquid had been and, maybe more importantly, what I could do with it. Just from the heavy feeling it had given me and the amount of effort needed to create and handle it, I suspected that it had to be a higher-tiered material compared to the Hard Ice I was using, just like the Hard Ice was a step above normal Ice.


    You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.


    Drawing upon the base-formation, I was moving power again. Lots of it. But I did not try to channel the power into a runic formation to cast another spell, I used Ice-Magic to draw it out and control it. And it worked. Sort of.


    My mind struggled with holding a small amount of the silvery liquid in the air in front of me and I could feel the cold radiating away from it, strong enough to pierce the comfortable sensation given to me by the moonlight and bite my skin. And that was with the liquid at arm''s length. I even saw small amounts of gas freeze in the air around it, creating a small amount of fog around it. Those two things made me shiver and wonder just how cold the liquid was.


    Lacking any form of thermometer and certainly not about to check it with my hands, I pushed against it with my mind, heaving it towards the nearest tree.


    It arced through the air, leaving a glittering trail behind, like a glittering trail of stars, following the moon through the sky, but the peaceful scene only lasted until the liquid impacted the tree. There was a loud crack and the tree started to topple over, broken.


    That had¡­ potential. But only if I learned to use it in a more efficient fashion. On a flight of fancy, I decided to call the liquid ¡°Liquid Moonlight¡±, for the colour and simply because is sounded pretty.


    Slowly easing back into full focused state, I started to perceive more than the small focus I had tunneled on before. Sigmir was still there, looking at me with a bit of confusion in her eyes, as if she wanted to ask why I had destroyed the tree, and I would explain, later. For now, I wanted to get dressed first and maybe into her warm embrace.


    As soon as I was dressed and had my cloak wrapped around me, I inspected the new blades I had made for myself.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="10">Lunar Butterfly-Wings</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="5">Rarity</td>


    <td colspan="5">Rare</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="5">Base Damage</td>


    <td colspan="5">8 Damage Piercing</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="5">Base Damage</td>


    <td colspan="5">15 Damage Slashing</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="5">Strength Modifier</td>


    <td colspan="5">Low</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="3">Special Effect</td>


    <td colspan="7">Imbued- Due to the process used for the creation of this weapon, it is strongly in tune with the Ice-Magic of the Traveller Morgana. 33% lower cost when wielded by her Ice-Magic.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="3">Special Effect</td>


    <td colspan="7">Coordination- These Blades are a pair. If both are used at the same time, their damage increases.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="10">These Butterfly Blades, made out of Hardened Ice-Crystals, form a breathtaking Set of Crystal Blades, created to be used in concert. The crystals were bonded, strengthening the weapons, thus reducing their chance to break. The material used makes them hard, but they are still vulnerable to heat.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    Looking the stats over, I was quite pleased with my work. They were basically the same as before, only better.


    In addition, I saw that the intense magical crafting had yielded results.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Skill increased</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You increased your skill: Ice Rune-Mastery [61/100]</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Skill increased</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You increased your skill: Ice Magic [69/100]</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Skill increased</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You increased your skill: Astral Meditation [45/100]</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    Smiling, as I saw that I should be able to infer a new Ice-Rune, I seated myself again. I doubted that there would be a better chance to do so in the near future, so I lowered myself back into a trance.


    There was almost no surprise when my mind latched onto the idea of the silvery liquid, trying to grasp its meaning while I swam in the parts of the Astral River that were Ice. I felt the rune, saw the rune but was unable to grasp the true meaning. I doubted that I had understood it fully, but would be able to partially use it. But the only name I knew it by, was Liquid Moonlight, the name I had come up with.


    ¡°Come, Sigmir, let¡¯s go to bed. I¡¯ll tell you what I learned in the morning.¡± I called to Sigmir, as exhaustion hit me. When I stumbled a little, she carried me off, to bed. I was asleep before we got to the house.

 Chapter 117

    Our time in Adernas was heading towards its end. Yuka had finished the blades for Rai and Giro was done with the leather armour for Sigmir and me. I had watched Kallik and Tulak, to make sure that they did not try anything while we were in town, or worse, gave information to the Jonari, but neither of them seemed to be interested in open conflict with Adra, Sigmir and me. Tulak gave me the impression of a coward, the few times I talked with him, but Kallik might become a problem. He had pride and it might lead him down a problematic path.


    The feast that marked our last night in Adernas was an interesting affair, I had visions of a huge bonfire with the village gathered around it, but in reality, it was Giro, Yuka and another Elder, their wives and a few chosen hunters, in addition to my group, and all were invited into Giro¡¯s house.


    ¡°Good evening, friends. As you have heard, my son, Rai, has redeemed himself and faced his shortcomings. To rid himself of his weakness, he has chosen to follow his new master, the Traveller Morgana, on a long journey, gaining experience and power on the way.¡± Giro greeted the attending group.


    ¡°As it is tradition, I present a gift to the master, in exchange for the teaching she will impart on her disciple.¡± Giro moved over to me, handing me a set of leather-armour. It was a little duplicitous, the armour had been a reward for the quest to get rid of the dryads but it seemed he had put in quite a bit of extra effort, so I¡¯d let it stand.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="10">Supple Leather Jacket</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="5">Rarity</td>


    <td colspan="5">Uncommon</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="5">Base Protection</td>


    <td colspan="5">5 against Piercing Damage</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="5">Base Protection</td>


    <td colspan="5">9 against Slashing Damage</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="5">Base Protection</td>


    <td colspan="5">5 against Blunt Damage</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="5">Special Effect</td>


    <td colspan="5">High Quality ¨C Base Stats increased.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="5">Special Effect</td>


    <td colspan="5">Unencumbered - No movement-penalty.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="10">A Leather Jacket, custom made by a skilled artisan, provides excellent protection without compromising mobility.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="10">Supple Leather Pants</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="5">Rarity</td>


    <td colspan="5">Uncommon</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="5">Base Protection</td>


    <td colspan="5">5 against Piercing Damage</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="5">Base Protection</td>


    <td colspan="5">9 against Slashing Damage</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="5">Base Protection</td>


    <td colspan="5">5 against Blunt Damage</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="5">Special Effect</td>


    <td colspan="5">High Quality ¨C Base Stats increased.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="5">Special Effect</td>


    <td colspan="5">Unencumbered - No movement-penalty.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="10">A pair of Leather Pants, custom made by a skilled artisan, provides excellent protection without compromising mobility.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="10">Supple Leather Moccasins</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="5">Rarity</td>


    <td colspan="5">Uncommon</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="5">Base Protection</td>


    <td colspan="5">5 against Piercing Damage</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="5">Base Protection</td>


    <td colspan="5">9 against Slashing Damage</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="5">Base Protection</td>


    <td colspan="5">4 against Blunt Damage</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="5">Special Effect</td>


    <td colspan="5">High Quality ¨C Base Stats increased.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="5">Special Effect</td>


    <td colspan="5">Unencumbered - No movement-penalty.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="10">A pair of Leather Moccasins, custom made by a skilled artisan, provides excellent protection without compromising mobility.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    After looking over the gift for a moment, I bowed for a moment and thanked him for his excellent work. While the armour lacked enchantments, something I might remedy myself at some point, it was what I needed, protection, without losing out on my true protection, my mobility.


    The next part of the proceedings was Rai, giving his word to obey me as my disciple and I gave my word to teach and nurture him.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>You gained a Disciple</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You entered into a Master-Disciple Relationship. In such a relationship, the Disciple is bound to obey the Master. The Disciple gains increased skill-gains in the skills taught by the Master while the Master gains slightly increased skill-gains when teaching the Disciple.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    That sounded useful and it made sense. When teaching a skill, you had to re-acquaint yourself with every facet of that skill, so improving your own skill was a given. And the subordination was made up by the higher gains for the Disciple. All in all, both sides gained, making it a win-win relationship. It was not sealed in blood, only in word, so it was a lesser oath binding us, but it would have to be enough.


    The procedure went on and Rai was presented with his blades, a fine pair of Butterfly Swords, well balanced and quite sharp. But they were not mere weapons, they also signified that he was no longer a child. That he had survived his first hunt and would start to move into an adults world. In his case, it did not really matter, his world would consist of the group he was travelling with, at least for the next year and a half.


    Once the talking was done, the solemn atmosphere devolved into a more boisterous and happy one, a few of the comparatively younger hunters teasing Rai about the fact that he would be travelling with a bevy of women, at least until I changed my seat to Simgir¡¯s lap and made myself comfortable. My behaviour might have been influenced by the served alcohol, making me slightly tipsy and definitely amorous, but it was enough to make it obvious that, neither Sigmir nor I would be interested in Rai. Adra on the other hand had either drunk a lot more, or it was affecting her more, at any rate, she was swaying and not making sense, talking about her great new pillow. Sigmir and I might have laughed a little about that, but not too much.


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    The rest of the evening and night were a bit of a blur and the next morning we all were a little hung-over, an effect I seriously did not enjoy. The hangover, due to the strange stuff we had been drinking, was worse than anything I had ever experienced, or maybe it was due to the simulated nature of this world. At any rate, it felt as if some small animal had crawled into my mouth and died in there, before decomposing at an accelerated pace. Adra looked similarly afflicted, wondering if suicide was a viable option or if there was some sort of magic to help us. Sigmir was lucky, or maybe she hadn¡¯t drunk as much and was unafflicted.


    Anyway, we managed to get on the way, after a more or less pleasant breakfast mostly filled with groans and soft spoken words.


    We all walked, with Lenore scouting the way, as I had still a bad feeling that Kallik would try something. In addition, we would have to come up with a way to use our mounts, despite having Rai with us. We had not used them around Adernas, just in case we needed them as a surprise in a quick get-away, but now that we had left, it no longer mattered.


    My headache got a lot worse, when Lenore mentioned that she had seen something suspicious, at least two hunters hiding along the path that Giro had recommended. Sometimes, I hated being correct, but maybe it could turn into a good teaching opportunity on the topic of dealing with enemies. I was a firm believer that enemies should be pulled out by the roots; once they dared to attack, they should never be given a second chance, if possible.


    I told the others about the possible ambush, so they were prepared but I decided that we would not strike first, mostly so Rai could see the truth, that some people could not leave well enough alone. It would mean the loss of life for Adernas, but there wasn¡¯t anything I was willing to do about that.


    About half an hour later, I was surprised in an unexpected fashion. I had expected to be surprised by a sudden attack, an arrow shot from cover, a spear thrown from behind, something like that, which would make the surprise-attack into a non-surprise. But I certainly had not expected to see Kallik stand in the middle of the path, alone, waiting for us to walk up.


    ¡°Greetings, Kallik. How¡­ interesting... to see you.¡± I said with something resembling a smile on my face.


    ¡°Greetings, Morgana. I have no conflict with you, but I need to avenge my brother.¡± He said to me, before focusing on Rai. ¡°Rai, son of Giro, I challenge you.¡±


    Now, wasn¡¯t that interesting. I openly used observe and saw that Kallik had quite a few levels on Rai, but that he had yet to cross the first divide. He might be a good opponent for Rai, to see that levels were not important and that his training had already strengthened him. And if Rai failed, I could always intervene.


    I looked at Rai for a moment, telling him, ¡°You can do that. It¡¯s your first fight as my disciple. Do your Master proud.¡± and stood aside.


    Rai swallowed hard for a second, before drawing his blades and readying his stance. Kallik seemed pleased and got out his spear. Poor fool. In a duel, spear against blades, it came down to skill, skill to overcome the reach-advantage of the spear against the skill to keep the blade-wielder at a distance. I had shown Rai multiple ways to avoid the tip and once that happened, the spear turned next to useless. Sparring with Adra had been a great way to show the differences between the two styles.


    The two of them began and I kept an eye on the fight, literally, as my other eye was hidden behind a fringe of hair and using Lenore¡¯s sight to make sure that the duel was no simple misdirection to ambush us. If it was, it was a good plan; an honourable fight right in front of us would undoubtedly keep our attention focused on it.


    Rai had learned his lessons well, he kept out of range, using feints and tricks to draw Kallik in an disadvantaged position before moving in, inflicting a wound and retreating again. He had yet to learn enough about anatomy to inflict serious wounds with a single cut, but even a thousand paper-cuts would kill an opponent - it just took longer, and opened up the field for mistakes. I would have to teach him more, so he could directly target either vital areas or sinews, a cut hamstring for example limited the opponents movement greatly. Even something as simple as cutting the bands and closures of the opponents armour could limit his mobility.


    Just looking from the outside, Kallik was losing, and losing badly. He had yet to touch Rai while Rai had scored multiple cuts into his extremities. But in reality, Rai was moving a lot more and faster, so Rai was using up stamina at a faster rate. Soon, he would slow down and Kallik would be able to reverse the fight.


    But the fools waiting in the wood did not know that. It seemed like they had planned to watch the fight; if Rai lost, good, but if Kallik was losing, they would attack us from ambush. It was a good plan, with good chances of success if executed properly. I watched the hidden guys ready their bows, and just as they drew back their arrows, I struck. I had told Lenore what I was planning and slammed a curse of disorientation home, causing all four of them to sway and stumble. Their arrows were shot, even if only roughly in our direction so I had all the excuse I needed to end the duel.


    Which I did, the moment the arrows landed in the vicinity. My Eisblumen surged out, wrapping around Kallik and knocking him down.


    ¡°Now, Kallik. Tell me, how do you punish betrayers? Yes, your friends tried to help you. They failed.¡± He looked resigned to his fate, Rai looked surprised.


    ¡°Yes, Rai. There was no honour in this one. I doubt there ever was. The duel was a farce, a misdirection, so his friends could strike from the shadows. Keep it in mind, always suspect that an enemy will use dirty tricks. And always be ready to use dirty tricks. They work.¡±


    I looked at Rai, who nodded.


    ¡°Now, finish him. Finish him, like the conniving bastard deserves.¡±


    Part of me wanted to use him as an anatomy-dummy, to teach Rai where to cut to cause massive damage, but that might be too much. Rai looked sick for a moment, but walked up and cut the lying man¡¯s throat in a clean cut.


    Nodding, I pointed towards the other four, who were still hidden. ¡°There are four more. Take care of them.¡±


    Rai jogged off, with me watching first directly, then via Lenore. I was curious, would he try to show mercy and send them away, or would he kill them all?

 Interlude, End of an Era?

    ¡°Good Afternoon. This is Jill Ankerton and today, we have a special treat for you gaming fans out there. I am honoured to moderate a panel-discussion about the future of gaming and e-sports. Now, two months after the beta of ¡°Road to Purgatory¡± launched the gaming-world is feeling the effects. But what will those effects look like in the future? What will change for the e-sports world? Is it the End of an Era?¡± Jill, a petite brunette is shown, sitting in the middle of an oval desk.


    ¡°To discuss this, I¡¯m joined by,


    Tobiuno, former captain of Team Razor and current Guild-Leader of the ¡°Blades of the Realm¡± one of the leading guilds in the Road to Purgatory-Beta.¡± The camera pans to the first guest to her right, a maybe thirty years old man, looking rather fit but otherwise unremarkable.


    ¡°Acrasia, current healer of Team Amarantine and star of the ad-campaign ¡®Hone your Craft¡¯¡± On the first seat to the left sits a beautiful woman, long, blonde hair reminiscent of a lion¡¯s mane and dressed in a business-costume tailored to show off her considerable attributes.


    ¡°Katerina Aneissa, a video-game critic and blogger,¡± seated next to Acrasia, a slender, dark-haired woman smiles into the camera.


    ¡°Eve Langley, press-coordinator of the International eSports Assembly¡±


    Next to Tobiuno a tall, slightly overweight woman smiles into the camera.


    ¡°Rowan Mason, community coordinator for Hailstorm Entertainment''s CoW-division.


    On the last, open seat on the left side, a good-looking, blonde man smiles and gives a small wave to the camera.


    ¡°And, last, but certainly not least, Vulcanar a member of Pantheon¡¯s ¡®Road to Purgatory¡¯ development-team.¡±


    The camera pans to a small-ish man, sitting on the right side, looking slightly uncomfortable.


    ¡°Now, our topic today is the future of gaming and esports and I want to thank you all for being here. Let¡¯s start with Mr. Mason. Where do you see CoW in the future and what do you think will the official launch of Road to Purgatory bring?¡± Jill asks.


    ¡°Thank you for having me, Jill. To answer your question, Road to Purgatory is only the last in a long line of challengers, all charging at us, trying to wrest the throne from CoW. They all have failed and I don¡¯t doubt that CoW will prevail once more.¡± Mason answers with a slightly arrogant smile on his face.


    ¡°Those are strong words. What do you think about them, Vulcanar?¡±


    ¡°Strong, certainly. But also uninformed. Trying to predict the future, without adequate information is a fool¡¯s errand. I have no doubt, that by this time next year, everyone will be on the Road to Purgatory.¡± Vulcanar states with a small smile.


    ¡°Eve, what are your thoughts?¡± Jill tries to de-escalate, her ploy of creating tension using the two company-representatives had worked a little too well.


    ¡°From an eSports-perspective it is incredibly interesting. In a way, Road to Purgatory does not quite fit the normal eSports categories. It might even be more in your ballpark, Jill, to create coverage about a digital world.¡±


    ¡°You mean, for GNN? If there are plans for something like that, I can¡¯t announce them. We will have to wait and see.¡± A smiling Jill not-announces.


    ¡°It would be worthwhile, I¡¯m sure of that. The Mundus, the world of Road to Purgatory is incredibly vast and wide, I could imagine that there will be huge demand of coverage, to bring interesting parts into focus. Not just for gamers, but for everyone, everyone who wants to see incredible wonders.¡± Tobiuno breaks in.


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    ¡°You certainly are taken with the game. According to sources in Team Razor, you have all but quit playing CoW, only playing the absolute minimum required by your contract, focusing on Road to Purgatory. Do you plan to leave Team Razor entirely?¡± Jill asks.


    ¡°I really don¡¯t know. Currently, Road to Purgatory has me in its grip, and I¡¯m not sure if I can go back to normal gaming afterwards. It is just so much¡­ more.¡± Tobiuno states, with a slight glow in his eyes.


    ¡°Which brings up an interesting point. Can Road to Purgatory be safe for public consumption? It is a new technology and while there are studies about its safety, I for one wonder about the long-term impact on one¡¯s mentality, being thrust into what amounts to a warzone day after day. Is it too realistic?¡± Mason throws in.


    ¡°We have completed all necessary tests and a lot more besides. There are no safety concerns and if we have missed anything, which I highly doubt, the beta-tests will uncover it.¡±


    ¡°I have a question for Vulcanar.¡± Katerina pipes up and a small groan is heard. ¡°Is it true that everyone is locked to their own sex and female bodies are weaker in-game? Isn¡¯t that incredibly sexist?¡±


    ¡°I don¡¯t know about sexist. It is realistic, which is what we strive for. Male and female bodies are different. The exact extent of the differences is dependant on your species. For example, a male mandrill is three times the size of a female. Is that sexist? No, it is just biology. We strive to make Road to Purgatory a game that is both fair and realistic. In addition, there are species that are universally male or universally female.¡± Vulcanar explains in a slightly exasperated voice.


    ¡°And can you tell me if there is a special protection for females, so they don¡¯t get raped ingame?¡± Katerina continues.


    ¡°No, why would there be? Again, we tried to make the world realistic. That includes any kind of violence, even if it might be disturbing for some. You can always use a force-logout, which will leave the ingame-avatar behind.¡± Vulcanar explains and Katerina looks shocked.


    ¡°Now, let¡¯s not go down that rabbit-hole, shall we?¡± Jill intervenes. ¡°Acrasia, why don¡¯t you give us your perspective?¡±


    ¡°Yes, give us the perspective of someone who caused their team to go 1 / 6 since she joined it.¡± Tobiuno breaks in, causing Acrasia to bristle but ignore it.


    ¡°Sure, Jill. I don¡¯t think that Road to Purgatory will manage to take off. There are far too many problems, mainly the time-commitment needed to play at the highest level. Sure, only a fraction of players manage to play high-level eSports but that does not stop them from enjoying the game in general. If you want to see even half of Mundus, you need to commit hours upon hours to the game. In addition, I doubt that there will be much of a market for content, it is simply too bloody. One of the biggest consumer-groups is excluded from the get-go, as the game will certainly be rated mature. It would not surprise me if a lot of countries will take a very close look at it, as it is such a new form of media.¡± Acrasia says with a vindictive smile on her face as she continues.


    ¡°Meanwhile, Amarantine will take the off-season to gel together, we had a few growing pains but from next season on, I¡¯m sure our fans will get to see the quality of gameplay that they are used to.¡±


    A soft snickering is heard from Tobiuno. To prevent open murder, Jill tosses a question to Katerina.


    ¡°As a video-game critic, were you invited to play the beta, Katerina?¡±


    ¡°I have yet to receive a capsule, the company seems to have prefered male critics on their draw. Maybe, they want to hide the open misogyny in their game.¡±


    ¡°Oh, will you cut it out? What would you have to offer, other than stating that spears are phallic objects and using them to stab someone is akin to rape, so every spear-user is a violent, misogynistic rapist.¡± Tobiuno cuts in.


    ¡°Could you tell me a little about the process you have used to determine beta-participation, Vulcanar?¡± Jill tries to cool the rising tensions.


    ¡°Honestly, I can¡¯t. As far as I have heard, there were three pools. One for especially accomplished gamers and I would guess that Tobiuno landed in there. Those got a preferred draft, because we wanted and needed their opinion. The second was a general pool, for everyone with random chanced drawings. And the last pool was for the press, giving them a limited option to come to us, letting them play for a bit on prepared characters. Simply because, it is true, Road to Purgatory is an incredibly time-intensive game and the current beta-testers are trying to test as much as possible. I don¡¯t think they will manage everything unless we give them a small push here and there.¡± Vulcanar states.


    ¡°Oh, and I can tell that it was not impossible to get beta-keys as a female. I happen to have one, even if I¡¯m sadly limited in my time. But I greatly enjoy the time I get to spend in Mundus.¡± Eve jumps in.


    ¡°And we have all seen that Titania claims that she has one as well. She has written a slightly cryptic post to that effect, but I have yet to hear more. But the world of Mundus is incredibly vast, so even without news, I have no doubt that she is out there, kicking ass and taking names.¡±


    ¡°With that statement, we go to commercial.¡± Jill manages to get out, before Tobiuno gets murdered on camera. Both ladies on the left are already sharpening their nail-files.

 Chapter 118

    As I watched Rai take off towards the cursed hunters, I wondered if he would pass my impromptu test.


    ¡°You want him to kill those four, don¡¯t you? Even if they are people he¡¯s known all his life?¡± Adra asked with a slight frown.


    ¡°Yes. Once they attack with intent to harm us, they are no longer friends, neighbors or even people. They are enemies to be killed.¡± I answered while watching Rai disappear from my sight.


    ¡°She¡¯s right. I should have been a lot more careful after my father¡¯s death. But I believed that the tribe had my interests in mind, Thanks to my trust, I was poisoned and had to flee, almost dying. It¡¯s good if Rai can learn his lesson early.¡± Sigmir said in a grim voice.


    ¡°Ah, he found them.¡± I told the other two, as I watched through Lenore¡¯s eyes. The four hunter had tried to flee but the curse was strong enough to make the attempt a joke. They had managed to move maybe twenty steps, and not all in the right direction. I watched as Rai stalked towards the first, who apparently had not realised what was happening. Rai came up from behind, stabbing him into the kidney before trying to slit his throat, making the mistake to pull his head back, exposing his neck but forcing Rai to saw through the larynx before he was able to sever the important blood-vessels. It was good that he had stabbed him into the kidney before, or his target might have successfully struggled and thrown him off, if it had not been for the disabling pain he had been in.


    The noise alerted his other targets, one tried to fight but he chose the wrong Rai of the multiple he must have been seeing, attacking a tree next to him instead. Or maybe the tree had insulted him, who knew in Mundus. At any rate, the attack gave Rai a bit of motivation and he managed to stab him in the chest, judging by the angle of the knife and the bloody bubbles that quickly appeared on his lips, penetrating one or both lungs. Rai needed a crucial moment to get the blade back out, it had not gone cleanly between the ribs. It was one of the reasons I preferred the air-path to the fire-path, superficial wounds seldomly caused the blade to become stuck.


    The third target had tried to run, but again, the disorientation-curse meant that his effort was in vain. Oh, he managed to run. Into the next tree, managing to knock himself silly in the process. Rai closed in and stabbed downwards, again into the chest but this time managing to hit the heart.


    The last target must have realised what was happening and tried to plead with Rai. Lenore was too far away to hear, but I was able to see tears running down his face, as he cried, kneeling in supplication and hoping for mercy. It disgusted me; the coward had tried to attack from the shadows and now that he was caught, he was lacking the dignity to die on his feet, preferring to cry and snivel, hoping for quarter


    I saw Rai hesitating, getting drawn in by the coward and lowering his guard, when the coward suddenly surged forward, knife in hand. Rai tried to dodge, but he had let his guard slip too far and gone too close. My anger joined with my magic, using mind magic to strike through my link to Lenore, not just stunning the coward but causing his mind to collapse fully. Rai was still knocked down and nicked by the knife, due to the momentum of his attacker, but he escaped a worse wound. I had not even thought about intervening, Rai was my disciple and he would not fall to such a coward. If I couldn¡¯t teach him, he would die. But not because of some snivelling coward, if necessary, I would slay him myself.


    With a small nudge by me, Lenore flew over, landing on the branch closest to Rai, who was struggling a little to get out from under the corpse.


    ¡°Have you learned your lesson, disciple?¡± Lenore asked for me, mimicking my voice.


    Rai looked embarrassed and when he finally managed to get to his feet, he bowed in shame.


    ¡°Yes, Master. I¡¯m sorry i disappointed you.¡± he apologized.


    ¡°And what lesson was that?¡±


    ¡°That¡­ That mercy is wrong?¡± He asked.


    ¡°No. Mercy has its place. But that you should never trust, without verification. I¡¯m sure the coward down there tried to negotiate with you promising that he would help you in turn or something along those lines. You fell for it. He had already shown that he was not to be trusted by attacking during a duel, attacking from ambush at that. What you need to learn is that honour, mercy and justice are all wonderful concepts. But at the end of the day, power is what counts. With enough strength or power, you can be lenient to grant mercy. You can act honourably without getting taken advantage of. You can enforce your justice. But without enough power, all those things are stones around your neck, dragging you down.¡± Lenore said for me.


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    Rai seemed to be thinking about my words, when I ordered him to take care of his gear, loot the corpses and return.


    Lenore asked if I believed that there would be more ambushes, which I answered in the negative, causing her to return, landing on my shoulder. After the conflict, I wanted to get as far away as possible, just in case something unexpected happened, so I decided that we should use our mounts. The problem that Rai had none, could be solved if either Sigmir or me ran, letting him use our mount. I was curious how fast either of us was able to run, now that we had crossed the first divide. Sigmir was much more focused on the physical side, giving her the edge in sheer attributes, while I had my Blood Runes and Blood Magic to bolster my physical prowess.


    Lenore returned to her Hallow, just as Rai came trotting from the forest, clearly still down and embarrassed from his mistake.


    ¡°We will talk later, Disciple. For now, we should quickly move.¡± I said, pulling my Command Crystal out. Sigmir saw my action and raised an eyebrow in question.


    ¡°Speed is currently more important than secrecy.¡± I added, to answer her unspoken question.


    Elding appeared and I told Rai to mount and asked Elding to follow Hringur, who joined us moments later. Sigmir mounted and while Adra transformed, I used Blood Runes to create a relatively weak, channelled spell that would allow me to constantly funnel part of my Astral Power into regeneration-runes which I created with the intent to regenerate fatigue and strengthen-runes focused on my leg-muscles. I was unsure how effective that would be, but I hoped that it would allow me to keep a high pace for a long time.


    Adra finished her transformation and for a moment I had the insane idea that either Rai or I could ride on Adra. She must have employed some sort of mind-reading technique that moment or maybe my face was just that expressive, but the gesture she made was rather clear displeasure. She simply turned her hind-end towards me and flicked her tail to the side. It was non-verbal communication, but the intent was communicated loud and clear.


    Before she had crossed the divide, the form she used for travel was similar to an antelope or maybe a goat. Before, she was about a meter twenty from head to hind and a bit below a meter high, with strangely coloured, white-tan fur and a slender snout or muzzle or whatever it was called in an animal like that. Now, she was easily the size of a horse - only a lot less bulky, more slender, and clearly built for speed. So, my thought of riding her was not too far out there. And again, she must have read my mind, as she flicked her tail again, before taking off.


    Laughing a little, I checked if Rai and Sigmir had mounted alright, before going after her, keeping careful track of the amount of power I was funnelling into my magic, balancing speed, stamina-expenditure and Astral Power expenditure. I was clearly slower than the mounts and much slower than Adra, but our speed was a lot higher than before.


    That evening, after training Rai for about an hour, I made him sit, to talk.


    ¡°Tell me your impressions of your fight today. First, the one with Kallik.¡± I started the verbal lesson.


    ¡°At first, I thought I had him. I was able to wound him and while he managed to keep me from doing more than shallow wounds, he had been unable to do anything to me.¡± he started.


    ¡°But just before his friends attacked, I realised something. I was getting tired, I had only a few more minutes at that intensity in me - and once those were over, I would be a lame bird. I think I would have lost, in the end.¡±


    ¡°Good. You realised that. It is one of the biggest problems of the Air Path. You can reduce it by making the hits you do manage count for more. We will go into anatomy lessons more, most likely with a live subject. I don¡¯t know enough about all living beings on Mundus, so some we will learn together. I know quite a bit about mammals, so I will teach that to you. It will also help with the mistakes you made against the four in the woods.¡±


    Rai nodded and I continued.


    ¡°So, what other mistakes did you make? Simple. You fought honourably. That is not inherently bad, but you need to learn to differentiate. Is it a fight I am able to lose? Some fights are. You might walk away beaten, you might walk away with less money, you might be forced to flee. But you walk away. On the other hand, some fights can¡¯t be lost, they need to be won.


    In those fights, you cheat. But cheating or using dirty tricks is something that needs to be deliberated. If you always cheat, your opponents will know it and guard against it well. If you have a reputation to never cheat, their vigilance will be lower and you might be able to triumph against all odds. Your reputation might take a hit but that is survivable, especially if you spin it afterwards.


    So, you need to ask yourself. Could you have cheated? Were you vigilant about your opponent cheating?


    I told you in the woods, didn¡¯t I? Honour, Compassion, Mercy, Justice, those things are for the powerful to display when facing someone weaker. When the cards are down and survival is at stake, those noble values cease to be important.


    At the end of the day, the one who survives writes the story.¡±

 Chapter 119

    My lesson with Rai continued for a while longer, touching upon a few ideas I wanted to impart into him. A big one was that anything could be used in combat. If I threw a pretty flower at my opponent, distracting him for a moment and I used that moment to attack and kill him, then the pretty flower had been a lethal weapon. He needed to learn to not only focus on his opponent but also everything around him. It was that lack of awareness that had led to both of his injuries against the nymphs.


    Another habit I had to break him off, was to meet force with force, it worked against people of similar strength but if I tried to block an attack made by Sigmir, I would have a bad time. And that was not even taking into account the fact that her both, her Lok¡¯nar and her axe were a lot heavier and carried more momentum. I had made some progress on that front with him, as he quite naturally took to the air-path, which relied on either not being in the way of the opponent''s attack in the first place, by using feints to make him attack empty air or simply dodging out of the way. If neither worked, it was possible to use a parry, similarly to the moves of the water-path and if that was impossible, you were in a bad spot. Blocking, what he still sometimes tried, was simply a bad idea for us agile, speed-types. My current plan involved letting Sigmir smash through his blocks again and again, beating into him the need to dodge. Luckily, he was able to fight for a short time using practise blades made out of ice, or Sigmir would likely break the beautiful blades given to him by Giro.


    Another thing he needed to learn was to use the force of your opponent against him, it was another, easy trick for weaker beings to overcome a stronger foe. It didn¡¯t always work, especially against someone experienced, but against untrained or non-sapient beings, using their own strength against them was the easiest and best way to deal with them. One of the easiest ways was by luring them into a situation that their own momentum hurt them if they charged, for example by letting them run into a tree, or by using snares to attack a leg at the right time. Spears were another good way, but neither of us used one. Adra was already aware of those tricks, so I didn¡¯t need to train her.


    After the lessons, I continued my own studies, mostly trying to learn more about magic. My current fascination was the strange liquid, the ¡®Liquid Moonlight¡¯, it was insanely cold but creating it took an equally insane amount of Astral Power and if I wasn¡¯t careful, it quickly evaporated or something similar. I had no idea what happened to it after it disappeared from my grasp. What was interesting was that once it had bound Hard Ice crystals together, it no longer disappeared, it remained behind, minimally weaker than the Hard Ice-crystals themselves but still easily as strong as steel.


    And it had the interesting ability to take in Astral Power before slowly shedding it, similarly to my own blood when used with Blood Magic, but I had yet to find a way to control the flow-rate with either material or simply store Astral Power for a longer time in a rechargeable substance. I was experimenting with a mixture of Blood and Liquid Moonlight, sadly the extreme cold of the Liquid Moonlight made it next to impossible to mix them in a meaningful way. While I kept them in strict control using their respective magic-skills they could mingle together, but they were still their own substance and my control could easily pull them apart again. Mixing, creating a substance that was both and neither, was sadly impossible for me.


    But I had a feeling that there was more to the Liquid Moonlight, something I had yet to learn and understand. Comparing it to the Earthen Staff, I had a feeling that it might be part of the substance needed to create the core, possibly used with some other material to regulate the flow, or maybe with the correct runic-inscriptions around it. Or maybe there was some sort of material that could hold it in, without letting it evaporate or warm. Normal physics told me that encasing an extremely cold liquid would cause incredible pressure onto the casing once the material warmed up and tried to evaporate. But I somehow doubted that normal physics were all that was at play when it came to magic materials or the amount of energy needed to create anything would be insane, just as the amount of energy set free if something was annihilated.


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    Just thinking about that, I wanted to find out if it was possible to create true annihilation-reactions with proportional energy release. It was an idea I was willing to respawn for, if only for the knowledge that it was possible. And who knew when you needed a seriously big bang?


    Later that night, when everyone, but our guard, Rai at that time, was asleep I logged out and spent a bit of time in the real world.


    Just looking at me was rather funny, due to the amount of time spent ingame and indoors, my previously pale skin was now heading towards snow white. My regular work-outs and very controlled diet kept me slim and moderately fit, but without either going out or into a tanning-salon, I would quickly be as pale as Morgana ingame, only without the bluish skin-tone. Well, and the long ears.


    As I did my work-out, I let the video-site I used run in auto-mode, selecting content according to my normal tastes and happened upon a GNN-panel show. It featured some of my least favourite people, Acrasia, whom I disliked for the fact that she had been the one pushing me out of Amarantine, Mason, because he was a creepy jerk and had once ridiculed me at Hailcon, asking if I was lost and where my parents were and that self-important Katerina, who I disliked for her inability to simply play a good game and not make a scene about some perceived sexism in that game. I think she mostly did it to stay relevant, but sadly that need to self-promote was harming good and great games.


    On the other hand, watching them getting ridiculed by Tobiuno, whom I saw as a competent and dangerous opponent, was somehow satisfying and listening to a Pantheon-employee was always a rare treat, even if they tried to pack as little meaning as possible in as many words as they could get away with. It reminded me of the clich¨¦s about elves, a people trying to say nothing and everything, without saying anything. I wondered if that trait was included in Road to Purgatory or if they had kept that behaviour for their employees.


    Sadly, there was little of real substance, mostly partisan behaviour, one side disliking Road to Purgatory and trying to undermine it, on the other side people hyping it to the stars. I personally enjoyed it a great deal, so I was on the side for it, but I felt that the format was a bad one, and inviting employees of both, Pantheon and hailstorm was just trying to stir the pot. But it made for entertaining videos, even if their antics were overshadowed by Tobiuno making fun of Acrasia and Amarantine¡¯s loss-streak, even if there was a slight sting, hearing how the mighty had fallen.


    Out of some sort of masochistic curiosity, I pulled up highlights from their recent matches and quickly saw the problems. The biggest was undoubtedly that they lacked teamplay, which only came with experience. Switching out a central position disrupted the team, no matter what. And using a relatively inexperienced person on that position, well, inexperienced compared to someone who had played for over a decade, it was a recipe for disaster.


    Another problem was that the current team-composition simple and direct tactics necessitated, which could be exploited. My old class had been able to lure the opponent into miss-judgements and mistakes, making them waste strength in a way that did not show up in any statistic, making it seem as if I did less than anyone else. That part of the class was almost entirely unknown, the quest to gain that skill had been removed years ago. It was a legacy-skill and one that I had used and abused to great effect. Legacy-skills had been a big controversy back then, the question if it was fair to let people use them in organised play, but the crowd that felt that they were part of a unique character and experience won out. Hailstorm countered that by making them either incredibly hard to use and next to useless if not used perfectly, allowing the new classes to take over the reins.


    Oh, well, I had a new game, a new love and there was no way I would go back to CoW.


    With a smile on my lips, I finished my business in the real world and returned to Mundus, finding myself in Sigmir¡¯s arms and, for a short moment, wondering what the future would bring. After that moment, I slipped into a comfortable sleep, dreaming of future adventures.

 Chapter 120

    Over the next few days we continued our travels east, using the mounts with Sigmir and me running alternately. I still wanted to make Adra give me a ride, but the glare she had given me when I suggested it the first evening had made it clear that it would not happen, unless there was a life-threatening situation. And maybe not even then.


    During our travels, we tried to keep our dried supplies as high as possible, mostly by asking Adra or Sigmir to go hunting during the evening, while I trained Rai, but after the first day of travel, the game they could scare up simply vanished. I tried to feel if there was a miasma in the air, similar to the area around Tegi, or any aura of death that might hint at a magical problem, but I was unable to find anything. That could have been because I was not skilled enough or because there was nothing to find, so our vigilance ramped up each day.


    The fact that during the night, we heard howling wolves did not make us relax at all. Most animals had given up on attacking us, unless we actively hid our aura, not just reigning it in as we normally did for Rai but I was worried that a large wolf-pack might get ideas to try taking us down. The howling was rather far away and they were calling to hunt, perfectly normal pack-behaviour, according to Ylva.


    One afternoon, three days after we had left Adernas, we were moving rather slowly, in order to relax a little when something happened. Without warning, four wolves jumped out of the woodwork, three of them charging towards the mounts and Adra, making a huge ruckus in the process, snarling and growling like mad while the forth tried to move between me and the other three. There was a short flash of annoyance, that they had managed to sneak up on us, but they knew the terrain and were born hunters, so it was only a small one.


    After that flash, I observed the wolves, both with the skill and without. They all looked slightly shaggy, with dark-grey fur and I thought they looked thin, compared to Ylva. The magical side made me realise that their levels were only between twenty-five and thirty, which made me paranoid. Even the dumbest animal had to know that an attack on that level would never bring us down, even individually. Taking on the wolf that had gone between me and the others, I quickly started to draw runes, managing two before instantly creating the third as he had gotten close. My favourite weapon, a simple icicle lanced out, forcing the wolf to dodge. It got still hit in the shoulder, but not speared through the chest, my original target.


    Just as the spell was flying, another wolf jumped from the side, trying to get to me before I could react but I had suspected something like that, so I was ready. Using my Ice-Magic to draw my Lunar Butterfly-Wings into my hands and tried leaping aside, while punching out, to increase distance between us. The idea was to hit the wolf at the shoulder and push myself away from it.


    It worked quite well, only that I was airborne and the wolves ambush was not finished, a third wolf, this one completely black and larger than the other five, leapt at me, trying to get me while I was in the air, unable to dodge. Time slowed to a crawl as my mind slipped into Bullet Time and I had an idea that could save me. Remembering my first experiment with my Eisblumen, I let the a single vine strike out, not trying to push the wolf aside, but striking the ground below me, to gain a bit of separation. With more time, I would have used more vines and went for the wolf, but the ground was closer, giving me more time to move after accelerating myself.


    The result was that the leaping wolf slammed into my legs, sending me into an airborne tumble, instead of getting hold of my chest and carrying me down beneath him, undoubtedly to get my throat ripped out.


    My tumble reminded me why I disliked amusement-park rides and Bullet Time was still active, giving me ample time to ponder the old joke that the fall did not hurt, only the sudden stop at the end. Luckily, my sudden stop was not quite so sudden, as I landed in the soft snow, acting as a pillow. I was struggling with disorientation for a moment, trying to get back to my feet, fearing that any moment one of the wolves would be on me, when multiple yelps and smacking sounds reached my brain.


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    After I got back to my feet, I saw that the other three had already dispatched the wolves that had attacked them and one of Adra¡¯s arrows had struck down a wolf next to me, as Sigmir charged over.


    Seeing the greatly changed odds, the remaining two wolves tried to run, giving off barks but I was having none of that. Anger gripped me, Overflow activated and I was creating runes as fast as my mind could handle, heedless of the extra Astral Power cost for instantly creating them. Before the first Iciele hit the fleeing black wolf, two more were in the air, followed by a curse of disorientation.


    The curse took hold but the effect was not as strong as against sapient beings, most likely due to the stronger instincts. In my anger, I tried to strike out with Mind Magic, but that was even less effective. Adra however, managed to nail the black wolf to a tree with one of her glowing arrows.


    Breathing hard, due to Astral Power expenditure and anger, I closed in on the still living wolf and observed it.


    It was a level 54 Black Wolf and tried to be menacing by growling and snarling as I closed in. I almost laughed, it was obvious that there was no way it could hurt me, not in its current state. Drawing my athame, I gave it a small cut and channelled my Blood Magic, causing it to go insane with pain, breaking off the arrow and trying to get away, but I already had the link and simply ripped with my magic, probably wasting some of the power I could have siphoned off, but there was still some of the thick, red substance and a big, bad wolf that had died in the most painful way possible.


    The EXP we gained for the encounter was pretty bad, the four shaggy wolves had only given a few hundred a piece and the Black Wolf only a thousand, there was a reason we didn¡¯t bother to actively hunt down normal animals at our current level.


    ¡°Are you alright?¡± Adra asked, as I returned to them.


    ¡°Yes. One of them got away.¡± I replied in a grumble.


    ¡°Well, better one of them getting away, than they getting one of us. That could have been far different, you know?¡± Sigmir asked as she gave me a short hug.


    ¡°Yes, I know. Just imagine you had been on normal horses and Adra some normal beast. The mounts would have panicked and carried you away until you got them under control and it would have been six wolves against little ol¡¯ me.¡± I answered, shivering a little as I imagined trying to get up, with six wolves trying to keep me down and kill me.


    ¡°And we have another problem.¡± Sigmir added, ¡°Ylva tells me that the wolf we killed probably was one of the group that attacked her own pack. They are organised, dividing themselves up into smaller hunting groups and larger packs, in order to cover ground and keep it.¡±


    I shook the snow that was still clinging to me off and eyed my Astral Power deciding that I would need to join one of my companions on their mount to regenerate it, especially if something similar happened again. When we re-summoned the mounts, I asked Hringur, if he was able to carry Sigmir and me together. It was not the best weight-distribution, but if I had to cling to someone all day, or have someone cling to me, I would greatly prefer Sigmir.


    He eyed me for a moment and agreed, with the stipulation that it would cost extra Power and slow him down to do so. Internally weighing the options, I decided that I was fine with the problems.


    After mounting, we heard a wolf¡¯s howl in the distance but much closer than those we had heard the last few days.


    ¡°It is the wolf that got away.¡± we were told by Sigmir, who passed on knowledge from Ylva ¡°Ylva thinks the wolf is calling the higher-ups of its pack because we killed that hunting-group. She thinks more will come.¡±


    That did not sound good. I was not entirely happy with the idea to be harried and repeatedly ambushed. I much preferred to fight in a space where they could not use their numbers and pack-tactics against us.


    ¡°Lenore, can you find us a good space to fight them? Some sort of valley or something similar? And keep an eye out for them?¡± I mentally asked.


    I felt that Lenore was not happy about it, but she obliged, leaving her Hallow and taking off while we continued our way.

 Chapter 121

    We continued on our way for a few hours, when Lenore returned and went straight into her Hallow. She reported that she had been unable to get a good idea how many wolves there were, but was guessing that the answer was, a lot of them. According to her, the best chance to get to terrain that we could use to our advantage was to head towards the northern end of the mountain-range and looking there.


    If we hurried, we would be able to get there tomorrow, so we would have to drive our mounts quite hard. We only stopped once the sky was slowly turning red, quickly making camp and using parts of our supplies. There was no training for Rai that night or attempts to hunt. We even doubled up on guards, leaving two people awake, just in case they managed to avoid our wards. We heard howling in the distance, but I doubted that the wolves would be so kind to give us a warning howl just when they were closing in. No, they were coordinating, trying to cut off our escape-paths before striking.


    Ultimately, our vigilance was not tested and the night passed uneventful. But there was a palpable tension in the air, it felt as if the forest was ready to snap. Maybe it was just me, but I doubted it, something was out there.


    We quickly broke camp and once more Lenore was scouting, mainly towards the mountains before us, hoping that she would find a good sheltered location we could use to weather the coming attack. At the end of the day, what we were doing was a gamble. We gambled that we managed to take the wolves that were hunting us, using a terrain-advantage, stopping them from using their numbers-advantage.


    But when it came to battle the enemy also got a vote. If they simply hung back, in essence using siege-tactics, it would be problematic. None of us had any real talent with fire, which would allow us to use magic to melt snow for water without using wood. Adra was able to light a fire, but melting enough snow would be nigh impossible. Me, on the other hand, if I steeled my will against the nausea, used Overflow and almost all my Astral Power, I was able to just about produce a glimmer that, with enough good will, might be called a flame. Or maybe a spark. Afterwards, I had a huge headache, telling me that fire was clearly not my element. In addition, it felt so horribly wrong that I doubted I could make myself try again.


    So, holing up in a valley might save us, or it might not, but I had a feeling that getting hunted down in the forest, the natural habitat of the wolves, was an even worse idea.


    During midday, Lenore returned, telling me that she had found a promising area, a small canyon, cut into the rocks by a modest stream and leading into a cave that we might be able to use as shelter. It sounded good, the canyon would give us quite a bit of killing ground, so we should be able to hole up for a few days, hoping that the wolves either lost interest and left or we managed to kill enough of them to dissuade further pursuit. Lenore was unable to determine if the stream was still there, as it was hidden under ice and snow, or how deep the cave actually was, but according to her, it was our best bet. I believed her.


    She took off again, and about an hour later Adra warned us about incoming enemies, allowing all of us to ready ourselves. Her warning was just in time, a few moments later, four shaggy grey wolves burst from the undergrowth, trying to spook our mounts and herd us. I was having none of that, quickly unleashing my Weaver¡¯s Fury and sending two formations of three against two wolves. They tried to dodge, but neither were able to dodge all three. One of them managed to dodge two but took the third deep into its chest, the other tried to avert getting hit into a vital spot, but the attack crippled both of its legs on the left side, making it fall.


    Adra leapt and changed her shape in mid-air, striking as soon as she had an arm to do so. Her attack was a cleaving swipe, using the spear not to stab but more like a halberd or something similar, covering a large arc with her attack. The wolves had not expected that, one lost a leg, while the other dodged. The last wolf saw that we didn¡¯t react like prey should and tried to run. Leaving the two crippled wolves to Adra, I focused on the fleeing wolf, striking with my weaver¡¯s fury and killing it as well.


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    Adra had been smart enough to leave the two wolves alive, allowing me to harvest their blood for later use, even if the amount of power was quite pathetic. They were so much weaker than us that experience penalties applied to us, with only Rai getting the full amount.


    ¡°We should harvest them, just to stretch our supplies. There is no telling if we need to, but I¡¯d rather eat wolf than eat nothing at all.¡± Adra said, looking less than pleased.


    I could understand her displeasure at the prospect of eating them, wolf-meat was not great at the best of times but these four specimen seemed to be almost starved, making their meat even less appealing. But still, waste not, want not. I moved to the wolves I had not yet drained of blood, drawing a rune triangle onto them, using my exsanguinate-rune to rip the blood from their carcasses. Both had deep wounds, making it an easy job and once it was done, Hringur allowed us to use him as a pack-animal, even if it irked him a little.


    So, Sigmir and I had to run for the last stretch of our journey, but nothing happened during that stretch. We reached the mountain-slopes and Lenore guided us towards the valley she had scouted out. Here, even Rai dismounted and Adra once again used her Pass Without Trace-Magic, hoping that the wolves would lose us. I doubted it, they were consummate hunters and I was pretty sure that some of them had their own magic, but maybe it would help.


    The valley itself was quite short and narrow, only a few hundred meters between the mouth and the cave that marked its end, with the cliffs being quite steep and daunting, at some points only a few meters between them. I almost wondered if the valley was not natural, but I reconsidered, it might just be a different type of rock that had been softer than the surrounding rocks, causing it to give way to the water first. There had to be quite some snow-runoff from higher in the mountains, causing great seasonal changes in water level. Luckily, we had months until spring might even think about thawing the snow here, so we were safe from that.


    My first act, once we reached the mouth and the others entered was to try and enspell the shadows cast by the cliffs to conceal the valley, making it harder to detect. I tried to weave it into a ward, similar to the one I had found in my grimoire, but it was not easy. making me unsure of the ultimate effect, as it was almost useless against me. But that might be because I was the caster, because I knew about it, or because of my level or because of my darkness-affinity. Hopefully, it would work better against the wolves. Behind my ward, Adra was creating another ward, layering our protections.


    But I wanted more than just meta-physical protections, so I sat and started a lengthy casting process, to make a wall of Hard Ice, to narrow the valley even further. It would allow a single fighter to block the path and two others to look over the wall and throw magic or arrows their way. I could have blocked the path completely, but that would reduce us to complete passivity, hoping that they went away due to boredom. The narrow opening would entice them to fight us on our chosen ground, allowing us to bleed them while also delivering food to our doorstep.


    As I sat there, Sigmir and Rai wandered by, telling us that they would get as much firewood as they possibly could, just in case the wolves wanted to siege us. It seemed such a human idea, so unlike normal predator-behaviour, but I could not be certain that they would act as I expected them to. Even Ylva was unsure about that pack''s tactics, as they acted rather strange altogether. Slowly, the wall in front of me started to grow, when I felt a tugging somewhere in the depths of my mind. It took me a second to recognise the source and a few more seconds to do more than instinctually answer. The tugging was Sigmir, trying the trick I had used to locate her when Rai and I had scouted the dryads, so I tried to send back a feeling of invitation and welcome.


    A few minutes later, the two of them returned, Sigmir smiling. When I asked her why, she told me that they had trouble finding the valley, so she had tried to feel for me and suddenly, a few hundred meters away from them, the shadows had fallen away, allowing her to find the valley. Rai had been unable to see it, until she had guided him almost all the way. It seemed that the ward was working quite well.


    After a short kiss, I went back to growing my wall.

 Chapter 122

    I spent the rest of the evening working on defenses for the small valley we had chosen as our killing ground. The first defense that went up was a simple wall, about two and a half meters high, with a parapet slightly under two meters up. The wall had an unsecured opening in the middle, allowing for a single fighter to defend it with ease, hopefully it would be enough to draw the wolves in.


    Further down the valley, I had used my Ice-runes to compress the loose snow, giving me a smooth, hard-packed surface that was sealed with a smooth layer of ice, making it quite challenging to climb the valley. Getting down took some getting used to, mostly forcing us to use our hands to grab hold of the valley¡¯s walls and slowly, slide downwards, one arm-length at the time. But wolves won¡¯t be able to emulate that, given that they don¡¯t have the significant advantage of opposable thumbs. One could say, it is a handy thing.


    I thought about adding spikes to the ice, but decided against it, fearing that it might add traction instead of being an obstacle. So, no spikes. But caltrops, those were quite easy to make out of hard ice and will not add traction where we didn¡¯t want any.


    Until events put a stop to it, the others had been carrying as many supplies into the valley as they could, mostly firewood but also any game they could scare up and bring down. Not that it was a lot, the area seemed to be over hunted as it were. Maybe due to the combination of predatory birds from the mountains and wolves from the forest, who knew.


    That collection went on, until a few howls came from the forest to echo around in the mountains.


    ¡°They found the area where we killed those wolves today. There is a lot of anger in their howls.¡± Sigmir told me, as she was quite close to me at that time.


    ¡°Finish up, cover the tracks you made and get behind the wards. They might lose our track outside and give up.¡± I said, with little conviction in my voice. I was pretty sure we would have to give the wolves a seriously bloody nose to make them back up. Hopefully, that would give us the time to leave their territory.


    After they could no longer venture outside, they explored the cave from which the stream that had dug the valley sprung from. It was a disappointment for multiple reasons.  After a few, maybe ten, meters into the mountain, the cave narrowed to the point that one had to crawl on the ice that covered the stream, making it a risky proposition. In addition, it was completely dark, to the point that even my low-light vision did not help. Those two factors made us decide to simply close the narrow opening with some ice, relying on the idea that anything strong enough to break the ice would be heavy enough to be unable to crawl over the ice on the stream.


    But once those steps were taken, the main-part of every combat-operation set in. The waiting. I experimented a little, using the scrying-spell I had happened upon, trying to use it to scout out predetermined locations. Shifting my own viewpoint worked quite well after a couple of tries and after about an hour of experimentation I was able to comfortably use the spell to skip from shadow to shadow, in essence allowing me to scout without leaving the valley. There might be ways to trace the spell back to its origin, meaning me, I was even certain that there were, but I doubted that a pack of wolves had the magical sophistication to use magic in that way. I could be wrong, but I doubted it.


    Part of me wanted to ask Lenore to fly out but tracking a bird was something easily within the expected skill-set of a wolf-pack, so she stayed back, letting me borrow her Astral Power regeneration.


    I tried to let my scrying move into the mountain, using the narrow opening in the cave but sadly, the fact that I was looking out from a shadow did not mean that I was able to see in the darkness. Lenore¡¯s magic sight worked from her point-of-view, meaning that even when she was in my Hallow and, in theory, looking through my left eye, it was impossible to use it at through the scrying-shadow.


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    While I was busy, using my magic to scout, Adra was making dinner and Sigmir and Rai trained together. Normally, I would monitor them and correct Rai, but right now, his training sadly had to take a backseat. Once it resumed, we would also have to look at ways to give him a ranged-option in combat, being purely focused on melee-attacks was a good way to find an early grave. There were enemies that nobody, especially not fragile speed-focused types like us, wanted to get close to, due to the fact that they had the ability to annihilate anyone foolish enough to try. The devourer we had faced in Tegi was an excellent example for an enemy like that. Or enemies that simply used their innate ability to fly and cast spells while flying to stay out of range, never giving you a chance to strike back. No, he needed a ranged-option. Even Sigmir had a few throwing axes, mostly made by me, out of hard ice, but also a few out of normal material that she had liberated when we had visited her tribe.


    Late in the day, when the fading light of dusk had almost given way to the pure darkness of night, a few howls caught my attention. There had been the odd howl all day, but those sounded slightly different and closer.


    ¡°They are in the area but have no idea where we are, so now they spread out, searching for scents and noises.¡± Sigmir announced in a soft voice.


    ¡°So, training ends for now. No need to help them find us.¡± Adra said, as she used her magic to snuff out the fire we had used. Using water would have been easier but wasted the remaining fire-wood.


    In the spirit of not giving our position away, even by accident, I stopped my scrying and moved into the cave, pulling Rai along. I was rather curious about his ideas when it came to ranged weapons.


    ¡°Now, disciple, what are you going to do against an enemy that you can¡¯t reach?¡± I asked, using my Inscrutable Master-voice. It was a work in progress.


    He thought for a moment, before answering, ¡°Hide. Wait for a chance to get to my enemy and strike only when I have a good opening. If no opening presents, make a distraction. If that does not work either, retreat and fight another day.¡±


    I nodded, his answer was a good one for his skill-set. ¡°What if that does not work? For example, assume that the wolves attack and you need to man the wall I put up. Your blades will be utterly useless. ¡±


    ¡°So, if I can¡¯t reach my enemy, I have a problem?¡± He answered, slightly cheeky, as it was a quite obvious observation.


    ¡°In a way. Most likely, you will never have problems again, as you will be dead. The solution is, you need more tools for your toolkit. Currently, you are quite good when it comes to causing damage at close range and sneaking up on enemies. Sigmir told me that she plans to help you with your tracking, a lesson I plan to take as well. But for the original question, the answer is to increase your own reach. That can be done with magic, as I do. Or rather, I mainly use magic and have my blades for times when the enemy forces me into melee in order to prevent me from using my magic. Adra has her Longbow and a few spells to increase its power and Sigmir has a couple of throwing axes.¡± I explained.


    ¡°So, dear disciple, you see that none of us thinks it would be wise to rely on a single type of weapon. I want you to think about a good second option for you, something you can use to reach out and get to your foe. It can be a ranged weapon or a type of magic, depending on your choice, either one of us will train you, or we will help you train yourself.¡±


    Rai nodded, understanding my point. It was not as if it was a complicated one.


    ¡°In Adernas, I have tried learning the Bow and the throwing spear. It did not work well. That reminds me, you never use your stealth-skill to conceal yourself, do you? You always use magic, right?¡± He asked, in a bit of a non-sequitur.


    ¡°Yes, I use the Shadows to conceal me.¡± I answered in a confused tone. ¡°But what does that have to do with the price of butter?¡±


    ¡°I was just thinking. If I learned a sort of magic, it would be good to have one that allows me to improve my main mode of combat, right? My best feature is my stealth, I doubt that will change. So, learning magic that improves that feature and gives me options to attack at range would be the best of both worlds, right?¡±


    ¡°Sound logic. Some diversity is a good idea, so a single resistance can¡¯t fully shut you down, but that is what you are doing. So, yes, Darkness Magic would be a good idea. We will just have to find out if you have talent.¡±


    It was quite fitting, I would have to throw together a few spells for Rai, it should help him start out.

 Chapter 123

    The next day mostly passed uneventful, the wolves were looking around the area, searching for our hideout, but they failed to find it for most of the day. Inside our valley, we relaxed and trained our magic, as there was no way to spar. I had managed to create a spell-chant for my Shadowcloak and taught it to Rai, letting him practise some magic. He needed more Astral Power to cast, but it worked quite well, even without strong mental attributes. He would never be a powerful caster, but I had a couple of ideas that would allow him to make things work. Not enough to use it as a serious mode of attack, but strong enough to support from range, using curses and deception. I would have to look into getting him a crossbow, to add a ranged-option. Or maybe look into different spell-schools. There was a possibility that he was gifted in one of the other schools, but I had no idea how to verify that.


    I was pondering the possibilities when I felt my concealment ward warp, disturbed by some outside force. Using the shadows around me, I used a scrying-spell to look out of the ward and the scene made me grateful that I was already sitting, or it would have knocked me down with laughter.


    The ward was warping and slightly shimmering, as something passed through it. One of the stupid wolves had apparently decided to mark the territory right at that spot and his marking was disturbing the ward. A nearby wolf was looking at it with suspicion and gave of growls and barks, calling attention to it. If I would had to place a quess what caused our wards to break and the valley to be found, a wolf following the call of nature was not on the list. Stupid mutt.


    ¡°They found us.¡± I told the others. ¡°Lenore, how about you fly out and take a look?¡±


    Lenore was not terribly happy to be asked out of her Hallow but she obliged, as she always did. I think her growling was mostly for show and to tease me. I could have looked outside using scrying magic, but that took a lot more Astral Power, something I wanted to conserve if the wolves attacked.


    As Lenore started to fly, we moved to the wall, Sigmir standing in the gap with Rai right behind her and Adra and I on the wall beside her. If the wolves needed a push to engage, I could channel spells through Lenore, giving them something else to think about. Outside, the howling called the wolves together, calling them to their cornered prey. Well, we would see who was the prey and who the hunter.


    Watching through Lenore¡¯s eyes, I saw that the wolf-pack was quite large, maybe thirty of the grey wolves and five of the larger black wolves. But most imposing was their leader, a huge black wolf, easily the size of a small pony and shrouded by an aura of menace. Not something I wanted to face on the open field but manageable in the confines of the valley. It would depend on the strength of the big wolf, and it¡¯s ability to bring that strength to bear.


    But seeing them gave me another idea, the last time we were hunted was because one of them got away. If I could make sure that none of them got out of the valley, it should buy us more than enough time to fully get away.


    ¡°Lenore, can you inspect the snowdrifts on the cliffs above the valley?¡± I asked her, thinking that an avalanche would allow me to easily seal the valley with a mountain of loose snow. She flew over, and I saw that the snow on the cliffs was piled high, giving me an insane idea. Once, in an old movie, I had seen the action-hero throw two grenades onto a glacier, triggering an avalanche and riding it down into the valley. If necessary, I might do something along those lines. It was just insane enough that it might work.


    The wolves outside gave a loud howl, all howling together in a display of unity and intimidation before the shaggy, grey wolves started to run into the valley. The smooth ice made their charge falter in an almost embarrassing manner, their claws failed to gain full purchase on the ice and they tumbled down, causing a puppy pile at the mouth of the valley. If those puppies were not hellbent on killing and devouring us, it would have been incredibly cute. But the snarling furball was sadly not cute at all.


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    The wolves sorted themselves out and started to slowly and with great effort crawl up the valley, far from their earlier charge. Looking over to Adra, we decided with a shared nod that it was time to light a small fire under them. Adra started to draw back her bow, creating arrows from her Astral Power and taking aim, while I calmly drew the runes for my trusty icicle in front of me. It was almost the same spell I had first used, especially against the grey, low-level wolves there was no need to waste Astral Power on creating fancy magic.


    Adra¡¯s bow twanged and my magic formation flashed as they sent their deadly projectiles towards the crawling wolves. They tried to dodge but only succeeded in scrabbling a little before two of them were impaled. Twice more, Adra and I struck, before the wolves abandoned their attack, retreating back outside the valley.


    What happened next would be crucial, either they had something more in their paws or they had no chance to get us out of the valley. At that point, we might be forced to either sally out and attack them, or leave the valley in the night, climbing the cliffs. Neither felt like a good idea, so I was curious about their next step.


    And they did not disappoint. The huge, black wolf moved to the mouth of the valley and it seemed to grow and glow for a moment. A powerful aura swept over us and the wolf let out a deep, powerful howl, echoing through the valley. But it was not only sound that echoed, the howl was accompanied by a magical shockwave, travelling up the valley and shattering the ice. Even the wall Adra and I were standing on had a few small cracks in it, but nothing too damaging.


    I felt stunned for a second or two, my senses scrambled by the immense power that beast had just used and it seemed as if the others were not faring much better. Lenore was luckily on the cliffs above, or she might have fallen from the sky. Rai, on the other hand, had been knocked down, sitting on his behind and blinking in confusion.


    After Sigmir had shaken off the effect of the howl, she relayed a message from Ylva, who had remained in her Hallow. ¡°That wolf, it¡¯s strong. It has crossed the first divide and is quite closely related to Freki.¡±


    ¡°Dearheart, she thinks that that wolf might help her to cross the first divide, if we manage to capture it alive.¡± Sigmir told me. That sounded quite interesting, getting Ylva over the first divide would be incredibly useful, not to mention that it might allow her to add even more strength to Sigmir, when she was in her Hallow.


    A plan formed in my mind, contingent on getting all wolves into the valley. As the grey wolves charged again, the uneven ground allowed them to gain traction, I asked Lenore to take to the air so she was able to see the remaining wolves.


    Using her sight I started channelling Darkness-magic through her, shaping it to attack their minds with a curse of Madness. It was quite similar to things I had done before, but strengthened by the new abilities I had acquired. The five black wolves outside succumbed first, their eyes glowing red and their growls turning savage, before they joined their grey brethren in their charge. The huge wolf held out longer, but I managed to get close to its mind, feeding it whispers of greatness, that devouring us would allow it to claim the bloodline of Fenris, making it stronger than ever before.


    The maddening whispers seemed to work, the wispy aura around it increased and it started to make its way into the valley. Not charging all-out as its lesser brethren did, but a regal, stalking motion.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Skill increased</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You increased your skill: Darkness Rune-Mastery [64/100]</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Skill increased</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You increased your skill: Darkness Magic [43/100]</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Skill increased</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You increased your skill: Mind Magic [10/60]</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    After a short glimpse to my skill-gains, I gathered myself for the next step. Our enemies were gripped with madness and hell-bent on devouring us. So far, everything was going as planned.

 Chapter 124

    After I had managed to convince the big, bad wolf to start moving up the valley, I focused on the incoming pack. Sadly, I was quite sure that I would need as much power as possible for my plan to work, so I was limited in my actions against them. But there were somethings I could do.


    My runic magic easily worked with previously acquired resources, meaning I could easily use the viscous substance I got when using Blood Magic to fuel it. Looking at the attacking pack, that snarling, barking mass charging up the valley, I opted to maximise the affected area and prioritise weakening them. Combining the runes of Mist, Cold and Liquid Moonlight should create a cloud of extremely cold mist, far colder than normally possible, as water was replaced with the intrinsically cold Liquid Moonlight. Adding to that, I used the darkness-rune for devour and the blood-rune for strength, so the icy mist should greatly sap the strength of the attacking pack.


    Channelling the power out of the collected blood-goo, the formation flashed and the temperature perceivable dropped as the mist followed the laws of thermodynamics and started its journey downwards. The goo turned black and all signs of life left it, showing that it was now useless. But it had done its job, my Astral Power was still close to full and the pack would be weakened when it reached us.


    When the pack charged into the mist, quite a few whimpers were mixed in with the snarling and barking and my combat log showed that I was dealing damage, not a lot per wolf but massive damage due to their number. But obviously, it was not enough to stop them, nor did the caltrops we had spread manage more than cause more whimpers and some blood splatter on the ice.


    The frontrunners crashed into Sigmir, who had braced herself as good as she could but still slid back from the impact. The rest piled up behind them, some crashing into the ice walls, others scraping against the cliffs but our position held. Adra started to stab downwards with her spear, reducing the pressure on Sigmir while Rai made sure that no wolf managed to get by her.


    A short glimpse to the big, bad wolf showed me that it had crossed enough of the valley for my plan to work, so I pulled the trigger. The plan itself was rather simple, the wolf¡¯s roaring howl had not only shattered the ice I had spread, it had also shaken up the snow below the ice and, much more importantly, the snow on the slope above us, almost causing an avalanche.


    Triggering Overflow, I reached out as far as possible with my Ice Magic, spreading my arms to add emphasis to the magic I was casting. I doubted that the act of gesturing itself had a bigger, metaphysical meaning, but I could get behind the idea that my mind assigned the gestures a value and as my mind made the magic work, the gestures had meaning.


    So, with my arms spread in tune with my Ice Magic, I took hold of as much of the snow above us as I could, before moving my arms together, almost in a clap but not quite. And there was no need to clap, my Ice Magic followed my mental command and the gesture, causing the snow to move. And move it did, two solid streams of white thundering down from each cliff, crashing together in the small valley.


    Most of the grey, shaggy wolves got crushed outright by the impact, the rest was lucky enough to be too close to our fortifications and in the safe-zone I had created. But the impact of having the majority of their pack crushed behind them had them shaken.


    And the initial impact was not all that happened, the snow did not simply settle, it followed gravity down the slope, creating an avalanche rolling down the valley. The five black wolves quickly got rolled under and the big, bad wolf saw the wall of whiteness coming and tried to run. But it was too late and it got buried as well. I doubted that any of the black wolves got killed, but they certainly were stunned. My Astral Power had taken quite the hit, the huge amount of mass I had influenced had cancelled out the fact that the influence I had exerted was rather small overall. I just had to get it to start moving, the rest had been gravity.


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    Breathing heavy, I watched as the other three dispatched the few remaining wolves as Lenore landed on my shoulder, looking down the valley.


    ¡°I do like your handiwork. What¡¯s next? I doubt you used that much snow just to wipe out the weaker wolves.¡± she asked.


    ¡°No, not really. The main idea was that we now have more than enough time to capture the black wolves. If Ylva can use them to gain strength, I¡¯m all for it. And I¡¯m interested in the bloodline of the big, bad wolf. Freki is a god, or at least a demigod, right? So, a close relative should have a special characteristic in its blood.¡± I was curious just what I would find, if I got my hands on the blood of that specimen. What was a god? What were their special characteristics? Were any of those still present in the diluted divine blood of the buried wolf? And, if yes, would i be able to extract any of it? I was a blood mage, so the blood of a god was the ultimate resource, the philosopher¡¯s stone for blood mages, so to speak.


    Lenore returned to her Hallow and I felt her Astral Power regeneration join with my own, replenishing my stores. Looking down, I saw that the others had taken care of the wolves in front of us and were looking down the slope, searching for more enemies.


    As I did not know how long the wolves would remain buried, I used ice magic to create snowshoes for all of us and carefully made my way down the slope. The others put on their shoes and followed me. Finding the wolves was relatively easy, thanks to Lenore¡¯s magic vision, allowing me to see their life-force through the snow, but I had no interest in simply digging them up. Using Lenroe¡¯s vision as a guide, I stretched my mind magic through the snow, pushing torpor at them, slowly pulling their minds into sleep. That their brains were shaken and the combination of freezing cold and oxygen deprivation drew them into oblivion helped greatly, allowing me to put them out without struggle. I doubt they even realised that there was something messing with their brains. I tied the torpor into a lasting curse, keeping them out as long as there was no brutal pain to wake them.


    We had to be rather careful as we dug them out, as there were broken bones that would have woken them if handled roughly, but we managed it before any of them expired. I was curious if I could use the weaker black wolves as a guide, maybe they had the same bloodline but weaker, allowing me to detect it in the differences.


    We secured the wolves in ice-casts, holding them on their back and giving them nothing to extend force against with anything but their back-muscles. Those were obviously weaker than their legs. The normal black wolves were bound in normal ice, the bigger one in Hard Ice and then it was time to find out what Ylva needed to advance herself.


    She left her Hallow and the big, black wolf turned insane, trying to twist out of the binding, snarling and snapping like a rabid animal.


    ¡°I have to devour him, to absorb his strength, but I doubt that it will be enough to allow me to overcome the divide. Not from a single wolf.¡± Ylva told us, after looking at the snarling wolf.


    Now, I was getting curious. ¡°You absorb the strength during the digestion-process? And what about the strength that dissipates after its death?¡±


    ¡°I¡¯m not sure. I just feel that his strength would strengthen me.¡±


    ¡°Would you mind if I try something? If it fails, we can always hunt for more wolves.¡± I offered. My mind had changed from, ¡®I want to escape and get away from them.¡¯ to ¡®I want Ylva to advance if these wolves offer the possibility to do so.¡¯ Strengthening Ylva was almost as good as strengthening Sigmir, so I was happy to put forth the effort.


    We moved the wolves out of the valley as I needed more space for the next step and Adra put a ward around the space I wanted to use, to prevent sound from escaping. Her wards were used to keep us from being detected so they had a sound-dampening aspect to them, hopefully it would be enough.


    To hopefully corroborate my theory, I summoned Elding and asked a few pointed questions about spirit-advancement, learning that indeed the relevant power for a spirit, and most likely a spirit-beast as well, was the Vital Astral Power of the devoured spirit. It was the power that I was using if I used my Blood Magic on myself when I had no more Astral Power remaining and was overdrawing my magic, possibly causing harm to myself. Spirits could use their own power to slowly, very slowly, nurture their young but it took a great amount of time to do so without harming themselves.


    So, I had an idea that could work, I just had to make my idea a reality. I think Adra had a slightly worried look on her face, as I started sketching out my ritual. I must have had that special smile on my face as I did so. Oh, well...


    For science!

 Chapter 125

    Knowing what I wanted to achieve, I just had to create the ritual to do so. Creating a ritual from complete scratch was not something I had done before, but I had successfully changed a few, so I believed to have a chance. And if not, what was the worst that could happen? Other than apocalypse by giant tentacle-monster.


    Just looking at the requirements of the ritual, I had a feeling that the ice-shackles I had placed around the wolves would not last, not if they struggled with all their strength, ignoring possible injury to themselves. But there was a simple way around that. I just needed the wolves alive, not whole, so crippling them was a valid option. Their backs were already bound in ice, so letting a needle protrude from the ice, penetrating their spine and severing the spinal cord was quite easy, I even used the Blood-Clot rune to stem the bleeding without regenerating the underlying damage, I didn¡¯t want them to lose valuable blood after all.


    Now, I had six quadraplegic wolves as ingredients for my ritual. I wanted to extract as much power from the big, black wolf as I could and hopefully, I could add to that by taking the blood of the normal wolves and purifying it using magic. At the end of the day, the normal wolves had to have at least part of the foundation to reach the first divide. If I could take that from them, it might be enough for Ylva to reach it, even if the ritual lost part of the power extracted from the big, black wolf.


    ¡°Ylva, can you spare a bit of blood, filled with your personal magic?¡± I asked, thinking about the best way to make sure the siphoned off power was right for her. I had realised that a big part of my personal sense of magic was rooted in my senses of smell and taste. I had never quite put the pieces together, but it was my sense of smell that had warned me when we approached the miasma of Tegi, that sweet smell of decay had been more magical than mundane. And the clear, crisp smell of my ice-magic was easily recognizable.


    So, using those senses to assess the magic in the blood made sense. Hopefully.


    Ylva looked at me a little suspicious, but she trusted Sigmir and Sigmir trusted me. So, my request was granted and I was allowed to make a small cut into her paw and, after warning her that it might hurt a bit, I used my Blood Magic to take a bit of empowered Blood. I knew how much it hurt, so the pained yelp was no surprise to me. But I had what I needed.


    Bringing the siphoned off blood to my nose, I took a deep breath, trying to differentiate the different smells into magical and mundane, After closing my eyes to help me focus, I started to get a mental impression, similar to the one I got when diving into the Astral River, allowing me to divide the impressions up into distinct entities.


    My tongue snaked out of my mouth, taking in a bit of the blood, letting it sit on my tongue and allowing me to parse the different tastes and give me a better mental image of the magical makeup of the blood and thus Ylva. It was enlightening to say the least, mainly to have the experience for the future. At the end of the day, Ylva¡¯s power was quite simple in structure, a broad aroma of raw, physical strength with a crisp sub-taste of coldness and ice.


    The aroma of physicality was easy to spot, thanks to its strength but the taste of ice was less perceivable and it was quite possible that I only noticed it thanks to either my own affinity for the element or a possible bias, as I knew that Ylva had her own affinity for Ice. I would have to experiment with that sort of recognition in the future.


    But now, I knew what I wanted to achieve, so I could map out a path to get there.


    The first step would be to siphon off all the blood from the weaker wolves, gathering it in a single location before extracting the blood from the big, black wolf, comparing the two blood types and trying to use magic to smooth out possible differences between the blood-types and Ylva¡¯s blood, before letting Ylva drink the mixture and try to help her with the absorption.


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    To construct the ritual, I went with a shape as classic as simple, a pentagram, with each of the black wolves on the points of the star and the big, black wolf in the center, together with me Each wolf, both the smaller wolves and the big one, got their own altar made out of ice, inscribed with Blood runes, to help with draining them. The runes were similar to those I had seen in Tegi, just without those that cut off the flow before the sacrifice on the altar died. The runes were quite well made and I had a feeling that they would maximise the amount of power drained from the sacrifice.


    In the middle of the pentagram were three bowls out of hard ice to take in the blood I drained from the wolves outside and allow me to work with it, hopefully using the second bowl after a magical purification of the blood.


    Finally, I made two wards around the area, one a simple ward to avoid detection, the other a bit of an expremiement, it was based on the wards I knew, but I had placed the darkness-rune for magic as the focus, trying to keep magic in, hopefully allowing me to keep the Astral Power I was siphoning off within the volume and not wasting it. Hopefully, that would help against detection.


    Finally, after a good dinner and a meditation to make sure that my Astral Power was at its top level, I moved into the pentagram, making small cuts into each of the wolves with my athame, making sure that their blood mingled on the blade. I was planning to use the blade as a ritual focus, so it was appropriate.


    With the blade in hand, I stood in the middle, focusing on the blood on the blade and the pentagram around me. I felt a need to chant under my breath, a soft chant, calling for blood, calling to the blood on my blade and calling the blood that still remained in the wolves to follow suit. My chanting started to follow a simple, drumming rhythm, a rhythm that I quickly recognised as the ebb and flow of the Astral River around me. Even my own heart was beating in tune with that ethereal beat, as if the world itself was a living being and the Astral River its blood stream, carrying with it the beat of its heart.


    The runes, drawn into the altars on the points of the pentagram started to light up, flashing in tune with my heartbeat and my chanting, followed by the lines making up the pentagram and thin flows of blood started to stream through the air, drained from the wolves and following the lines towards my blade, flowing down the fullers, into the guard before dripping down into the prepared bowl.


    With the blood flowing all around me, I take a deep breath, judging the smell of blood and mapping out its makeup, feeling the similarity to Ylva¡¯s blood and feeling the differences, trying to fully understand them before moving on.


    When the wolves around me are drained from the last drop of blood and expired on the altars, I turn towards the big, black wolf. It had been silent the whole time, but the whimpers and final sighing breaths of its brethren have pushed it to growl and snarl at me as best as it can. Thanks to Lenore¡¯s special ability, I can understand the snarls as vows of vengeance, calls for bloody retribution and prayers to its ancestor, hoping for salvation. Sadly, there is no salvation for the wolf, its fate is sealed.


    After cleaning my blade with magic, making sure that all the drained blood is in the bowl before me, I started with the next part of my ritual. A small cut allowed me to drain some of the big, black wolf¡¯s blood doing with it the same as with Ylva¡¯s blood earlier.


    First, a deep smell, for a preliminary mapping of the included elements, there is the physicality that I had seen with Ylva, but there is also another influence, small in volume and one that I could not quite understand. But it was concentrated power, far stronger than anything I had ever seen or tasted before, so the assumption that it was the divine bloodline, still concentrated within the blood of the wolf before me.


    Trying to understand the potential of that divine blood, I was focusing on, I felt a strange sensation, normally, the power I was feeling had its own rhythm, thrumming in tune with the ebb and flow of the Astral River but not the power within this blood. It was as if it was beating in rhythm with another beat, slightly off from the power of the world around it. It was intriguing, as if the divine blood was unlinked from the Astral River around us, independent of the world of Mundus as a whole. Sadly, I had no idea what it meant, it was just an observation, but it was a good one, as it allowed me to seperate the divine blood from the rest of the blood.


    Draining the blood took long, far longer than it had with the smaller wolves, as I was very careful, making sure that I got all the power into the blood. If I lost any of it, it would be a tremendous waste.


    Once I was done, I had two bowls of wolfblood, both brimming with power. Now, for the next step of my ritual.

 Chapter 126

    With the two bowls of blood in front of me, I focused on the one from the five smaller wolves, trying to concentrate the power in less volume, to make it similar to the blood of the big, black wolf. Feeling the blood was easy, but I wanted a fundamental transformation, a change of its base properties. I felt my own Astral Power flow out, and realised something, not only should I concentrate the blood to match the power in the big, black wolfs blood, I also should add the properties currently found in Ylva¡¯s blood, or she might lose her Ice Magic, or it might change her on a fundamental level.


    Without a great deal of thought, I went to the closest source of Ice-type Astral Power, namely myself, cutting into my hand to gain access to my own blood and focused to push Ice-type Astral Power into the blood that was welling up in my hand. It was painful, but not as painful as some of the other experiences, I knew that I would only harm myself if I overdid it and within moments, I saw my blood undergo a qualitative change, it was brimming with the coldness inherent to Ice-type Astral Power, reminding me of the Liquid Moonlight I had created previously.


    Mixing my own blood with the wolf¡¯s blood went smoothly, the Astral Power I had donated allowed me to smooth out the difference in base-power, concentrating the power in a lesser volume and dropping the now drained and useless blood back into the bowl, discarding it.


    The next step was to take out the divine blood from the big, black wolf¡¯s blood, so it was not in the mix when Ylva absorbed the blood, just in case it made trouble. Focusing on the bowl holding its blood, I again used my blood magic, feeling the blood and searching for the parts that did not beat in tune with the heartbeat I was feeling. After a moment, I turned the idea around, slowly drawing the parts that were in tune into one orb, leaving the rest behind, which was far easier.


    Soon, I had an orb of empowered blood, easily the same amount as the blood I had drained and enriched from the other wolves and just as powerful and a second, incredibly small orb, not much more than a large drop, of divine blood, vibrating with concentrated power. Part of me wanted to understand the divine blood more, to experiment with it, but that would not quite work, I was feeling it slowly slip my grasp, evaporating into the Astral River or wherever it went.


    Ylva had watched me the whole time, standing next to the pentagram, and now she was walking forward, totally focused on the divine blood, as if entranced by it. Luckily, the draining ritual was completed and she could not disturb it, even if she broke up the lines I had drawn.


    Once she was next to me, she threw her head back, letting out a deep, carrying howl and around her, a huge, ghostly silhouette manifested, a gigantic, silver wolf, radiating incredible pressure, freezing me in my tracks. The howl ended and both Ylva and the ghostly phantom opened their eyes and I felt a strange suction-force and the divine blood was drawn into their combined maw I saw Ylva swallow, the huge phantom-wolf vanished and an invisible pressure-wave projected out from her, rattling my mind and shattering the wards around us. I barely kept my mental hold on the blood I had siphoned off, not dropping it.


    The ice I had used to create the ritual implements fared worse, the altars shattered and there were deep cracks in the bowls, causing me to scramble to get a mental hold on the enriched blood, so it would not spill.


    Ylva stood next to me, slightly vibrating with energy, while I combined the two blood orbs into one, carefully mixing it into a single, powerful whole. When I saw that Ylva focused back onto me, I got ready to divide the blood into easily digested swallows, so she could take it bit by bit into herself, while I used my magic to make sure that no Astral Power was lost. I believed it was that loss that made it hard for spirits to cross the divides, they needed to take in the blood while the power was lost due to the death of its owner. Blood Magic allowed to reduce that loss, at least that was my theory. In addition, there might be a problem with the absorption of miasma, something I could prevent as it was expunged before Ylva took in the blood, polluting the surrounding area.


    After a short time, Ylva stopped vibrating and asked me for the first mouth of blood. I moved it over to her and she took it in with a single gulp, reminding me of the fairytale question, ¡°Oh grandmother, what a terrible, big mouth you¡¯ve got.¡± I managed to keep my grip on the Blood as it went into Ylva and once it was in her stomach, I slowly let the power seep out, allowing her to absorb it at her own pace, making sure that nothing was lost. The process of holding the power within the blood and releasing it at a constant, easy to absorb pace was quite difficult and required my complete attention and I slipped into a semi-trance state, focused on the process of feeding Ylva power.


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    Most of the night had passed when Ylva had digested the siphoned off-power and once she had the last shred taken in, she let herself go, using the power she had taken in to attack the first divide, breaking through the barrier holding her down and reaching for the sky. I felt an immense power radiate outwards for a second before it cut off and her body started changing, growing in size and power. It was as if the world itself had small tears all around her, not the tears that led to the realm of Nethersprites, but to other places, the different spirit-realms themselves, as Ylva broke through and power rushed into her, allowing her to complete her transformation.


    It was breathtaking to watch, truly awe-inspiring and I felt Lenroe filled with a sense of envy and longing. I sent her a feeling of reassurance, promising that we would find something to drain for her as well, now that I had an idea of the workings and was no longer flying by the seat of my pants, I had confidence to help her as well.


    Gathering my wits, I looked at the notifications I had gotten,there was the EXP gain for the wolves, and a few skill-gains.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Black Wolf died</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You gain 1500 EXP.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>For killing an opponent without a Traveller in your party, you gain Bonus EXP</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>Black Alpha Wolf died</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You gain 4500 EXP.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>For killing an opponent 6 levels above you you gain Bonus EXP</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>For killing an opponent without a Traveller in your party, you gain Bonus EXP</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Skill increased</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You increased your skill: Blood Rune-Mastery [51/100]</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Skill increased</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You increased your skill: Blood Magic [42/100]</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Skill increased</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You increased your skill: Astral Meditation [46/100]</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    Sadly, there was no new trait for ritual magic, or for messing with divine blood, but maybe the second was for the better. I already had a few traits that would make me a suspicious being if anyone ever knew I had them, no need to add every single priest or cleric to the list of my enemies, I had no doubt that no deity would see a mortal mucking around with their power favourably, even if they opposed the deity I was experimenting with, I strongly suspected that they would reject anyone that experimented with their power. It was only rational, Knowledge on the fundamental truth and power about deities was something they would not want in mortal hands.


    It was intriguing and something I wanted to research further, either during the beta or later, once the game went live. It was undoubtedly the deepest, hopefully most interesting truth of this world, the deepest and final secret to be uncovered. I would have to search for it.


    I fully returned to reality, no longer focused on my musings and took in the change Ylva had undergone. Previously, she had stood maybe three-quarters of a meters at the shoulder, now it was just about double that, allowing her to look me squarely in the eyes. Seeing her like that, I, once again, had the idea that she might be a suitable mount, but the look in her eyes made me reconsider that quickly. Spoilsport.


    Her fur had changed a bit in hue, it was a little darker, but had acquired an almost metallic gleam, reminding me of the colour known as gunmetal.


    ¡°Are you done?!¡± Sigmir asked in a tired voice, making me look around.


    ¡°Yes, why?¡± I responded.


    ¡°A few Nethersprites wanted to take a bite out of you, after your wards broke. We had to guard the whole time.¡± Adra responded, sounding slightly annoyed. ¡°And in addition, the advancement made quite the commotion, we might want to leave as fast as possible.¡± she continued.


    What she said made sense, I had no doubt that the aura Ylva had given off during her breakthrough and when she had taken in the divine blood had been widely senseable, alerting powerful beings that something had happened here. It would be better to leave before they got here, to find out what had happened.

 Chapter 127

    We quickly left the ritual site, putting as much distance between it and us as possible. I had a feeling that the bigger black wolves would not be happy if they knew that someone had used one of theirs as a resource to strengthen themselves, once that happened, we would be hunted again. So, it was vital to create distance while keeping up Adra¡¯s anti-tracking spell and my own concealment spells. Neither were perfect, there were undoubtedly countless ways to beat either, just as there were different ways to hide tracks, But we were using what we had, hoping that the combination of different spells and distance kept us safe.


    Or we would have to fight again. But staying was not an option, there were far too many no-win situations that could occur if we did.


    So, we hurried, first on foot and later on horseback, with Sigmir running next to the mounts, demonstrating that she had gained power as well, gaining more strength from her connection with Ylva. It would be strange if the spirit-partner crossing the first divide did not give benefits to the contractor of that spirit. I would have to ask Sigmir in a quiet moment, or I would have to wait until Lenore crossed over as well. It was something that would happen, I had no doubt about it, now that I knew how to help, I would do so.


    Despite our exhaustion after a busy night, we continued to move at a high pace, driven onward by fear or rather caution. None of us wanted to get cornered by a large pack of wolves in the open, that would be a good way to get ourselves killed.


    Finally, we stopped for the evening, almost all of us exhausted and in dire need of rest. The only two who had been able to rest during the day were Lenore and Ylva, in their respective Hallows. They shared their strength with their partner, but it was not as exhausting as a day of riding or running.


    We made camp for the night on a small clearing, hoping that the indefensible position would not come back to bite us during the night, None of us felt like hunting, so the dinner were warmed up-rations from Adernas, cooked into a stew with some wolf-meat and served with bread. It was a simple but quite delicious meal, with all of us enjoying the warmth after a day of riding in the cold.


    I was curious about Ylva¡¯s new strength but I remembered that Sigmir had told me once that it was rather impolite to ask something like that, so I stopped myself. But just judging by the fact that Sigmir had kept up with the horses for the entire day and her new size, I would assume that she had become a lot stronger.


    Lenore must have felt my thoughts and added some perspective, telling me that normally spiritbeasts had trouble crossing divides, as it required them to devour the essence of other beasts, similar to me, using their blood for magic. I needed a blood-rune to draw the Astral Power out and bind it into their blood or the power was lost when they died. So, when devouring other spiritbeasts, most of the power was lost in death, even if they managed to start feasting while their opponent was still alive. Bringing an opponent down as a group and having one designated eater afterwards would make it impossible to absorb power.


    And bringing down a being strong enough to be worthwhile was difficult in the first place, sure it could be done with either luck, good tactics or more powerful allies but at the end of the day, it was not something that happened on a regular basis, I was sure that there were some nobles or other important beings that had the inherited power to have someone assist them in strengthening either themselves or a partner, just like in the real world wealth had its own, inheritable privileges. It seemed that even a medieval, multi-species world like Mundus could not escape some social problems.


    Shaking those philosophical questions, I let myself slip into a trance, thinking about the ritual I had conducted and possible ways I could further my blood magic, it had passed skill-level fifty after all, allowing me to learn about a new rune. There were two distinct paths I could divide the blood runes I currently had, either giving or binding. Giving allowed me to heal and strengthen or, if I invested it using Darkness-curse-runes do the opposite. Binding allowed me to bind power into blood, using it at a later point, mostly in concert with my non-rune-based Blood Magic. Both paths would allow for interesting possibilities but I had just demonstrated that I was able to use the binding ways to a degree that was sufficient for my current power, so I wanted to focus on the strengthening ways.


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    Binding would either allow me to bind more power in less volume, meaning that it might allow me to create a solid substance instead of the viscous liquid I was currently creating or it might allow me to bind more than just Astral Power into Blood, allowing for interesting applications but those were less of a current focus and more something that might be interesting in the future.


    But Strengthening might allow for stronger buffs or better healing, both things that had an immediate benefit for the group and me.


    With my mind fixed on a path forward, I dove into the Astral River, looking for the part that represented Blood Magic, soon finding what I searched and feeling the sticky sensation of the power envelop me. Each flavour of Astral Power had a different, distinct feeling to them, Ice was crisp and cold, Darkness was ephemeral and haunting and Blood was a sticky, pulsating warmth.


    Feeling around in the sensations, I gained a familiar impression, it was an impression of me, using Blood Runes to strengthen myself, allowing for greater acceleration and more force but without allowing for better reactions or increased agility. Sure, higher strength was useful for most fighters, but agility was just as important and for me even more so.


    Keeping that idea in mind, I tried feeling for a rune that would allow me to increase the agility and maybe the reactions of the spelled person.


    Threads of power coalesced into an image, forming a rune that I knew to mean ¡®Hasten¡¯, exactly what I had been looking for, making me smile. I stayed in the soothing flow of the Astral River, letting my mind, or maybe my spirit, float as it pleased, only holding onto a connection back into my body.


    Spreading my senses, I felt the different elements in a way I had not before, some welcoming the connection with me, others rejecting it. The first rejection, I got from what I believed to be fire, the scorching heat burning me before I got more than the faintest impression to its nature. I was reminded of the Grandmother¡¯s explanation that I was moving on a path of extremes, following and searching for the purest of my chosen element. I wondered if the rejection of Fire would become stronger as time passed and my power grew or if it was based on my personal affinity which I believed to be an intrinsic quality and not subject to change.


    After the short but painful experience with fire, I continued drifting, enjoying the gentle contact with air and the soothing sensation of water but not managing to understand anything about either of the elements, other than they existed. I had touched the element of Air before, but only when working with and through Lenore, not on my own.


    It was fascinating, the different elements gave me completely different sensations, Water and Air welcomed me but felt slightly indifferent, Fire and Light reacted with strong rejections while Earth did not even seem to notice my existence, ignoring me completely.


    It made me wonder, if I could learn to use more than just the elements I was currently wielding, remembering an ancient cartoon. But I knew that I would never command all elements, not even the prime elements of Air, Water, Earth, Fire, Light and Darkness. But maybe once I hit a limit to what I could do with the elements I knew, I might delve into the Air and Water, they were connected to Ice after all. Maybe, I could use that connection to learn more. It was strange, feeling a desire to acquire knowledge and magic ability, even knowing that it was not real, I wanted to understand it, wanted to learn all there was to know about it.


    I was reminded of the beginning of a classic play, a doctor cursing the world about his inability to learn the fundamental truths of the world, finally summoning a spirit, or maybe the devil, to acquire more knowledge. Somehow, I understood the sentiment and made a mental note to avoid all poodles.


    Finally, I pulled myself from the Astral River, emerging refreshed but tired, snuggling into Sigmir¡¯s comfortable embrace and going to sleep. Unless something bad happened, we should get to Yaksha the day after the next. I was slightly apprehensive about visiting another city. Yari had not turned out that well.

 Chapter 128

    We saw the first signs of Yaksha around noon, two days after I had performed the ritual and helped Ylva to cross the first divide. During those days, we had heard howling wolves but never clear enough for Ylva to make out the exact meaning, so we were uncertain if we were actively hunted.


    I also wondered about the exact mechanisms of crossing divides, Sigmir and I had crossed the first divide without outside resources, well, outside of the perception-potion I had used, whereas Adra and Ylva had taken in power from an outside source to cross over. Sigmir had described her crossing as a harrowing trial posed by the system, in which she had to overcome a core weakness of her class and control her rage, while I had needed to create a connection with something outside myself, which would remain linked to me.


    On the other hand, Adra had quite literally stolen the power from another dryad, and maybe also from the Devourer we had killed before, crossing the divide in a different manner. I had a theory that Adra had created her domain internally, similar to the way she would have linked to a tree as a dryad, but with some sort of incorporeal spirit-tree. The idea had emerged when I had seen her manifest a ghostly tree to suck up the power from the dryad¡¯s crystal-tree-hybrid. I had yet to ask her about the specifics, remembering Sigmir¡¯s warning about politeness.


    As I was thinking about it, maybe that was the link, when Ylva had crossed over, she had also summoned a ghostly phantom, for her it had been a wolf, and absorbed an outside resource before she had been able to cross over. I would try to find out more, without offending my friends.


    We were on a small rise in the foothills of the northern mountain-range, looking down towards Yaksha, still a few hours away from the town. My first impression of Yaksha was confused, the location seemed a little strange. Relatively close by, were two mountain-ranges and the city was almost exactly in the middle, not using the natural barriers provided by the mountains to increase the city¡¯s defense, something I had assumed logical.


    The city was protected by a small, wooden wall, no higher than three meters, something I could not really take as serious protection, each of us would easily be able to jump over it or outright destroy it and I highly doubted that we were the top of the food chain in these parts. Around the wall, the forest had been cut back creating a kilometer or two of cleared land, probably used as fields during the short summer, making it impossible to sneak up on the city.


    From our higher position, we were able to make out a small road or maybe a wagon-path towards the town from the west and the larger road towards Yari passed the town on the east-side but did not seem to enter its walls, making it a curious construction. It might have something to do with tolls or something similar but I had no way of knowing that.


    Soon, we returned to the forest, cutting my vision off as we headed towards the path we had seen, intend on continuing our journey on an easier route, even if the difference was minute at that point. While there was always the danger of bandits preying on travellers on an established route, I highly doubted that we would have problems like that so far from civilisation, there was simply not enough trade to made banditry even remotely viable.


    A few hours later, we exited the forest and moved onto the cleared area around Yaksha and with a small nudge, Lenore obliged my curiosity, left her Hallow and took flight, allowing me to gain a better perspective of the town. From above, it seemed like a jumbled mess of buildings, hazhaphardly strewn within the walls and around a central square, most likely a market place. There were a few more small squares centered around what appeared to be wells, a necessity in a city without an obvious water source.


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    Another thing I noticed was that there were platforms on multiple of the bigger houses, with small ladders allowing access. I highly doubted that anyone had a roof-deck for recreational use, not in the local climate that ranged from ¡®mildly warm¡¯ to ¡®lose body parts to frostbite¡¯, even if there was a bit of humour in the image of one of the local women, in a bikini, lying on the roof, trying to get a tan. Mostly due to absurdity.


    So, the platforms had to have other usages and it took me a moment to figure out what I was seeing on one of the bigger ones. There was a permanently installed stand and it strongly reminded me on pictures of old anti-aircraft guns I had seen in history class, only without the gun. But a very large crossbow or a small ballistae could very well be placed into the stand, allowing for a good field of fire, both into the sky and over the wall into the field. The placement of the platforms, all within the enclosed space of the wall and obviously made to spread the fields of fire in every direction, gave me a good idea just who made the most trouble for the town, flying enemies. And pretty large ones at that, if there was a need for permanently installed stands, instead of fully mobile crossbows or normal bows.


    Thinking back, I had a good idea what one species that gave the town trouble was, Yugid, the mountain where we had faced the Firebirds and Samodiva, was not that far away, so if there were more than the few we had seen, it was very much possible that they came here to look for prey.


    Lenore gave me a good impression on another airborne predator we had yet to see, the wind raptors we had heard about. That idea also provided a reason for the town¡¯s location, they wanted to have some warning from airborne threats, closer to the mountains, those threats might use those very mountains to hide from discovery, out on the plains that was harder, especially for large birds.


    Luckily, Lenore was small enough to fly under the radar, so to speak, and soon she returned to me, retreating into her Hallow while telling me that she could not see why us land-bound two-legs felt a need to cluster in such a chaotic way. I agreed with her on that part, the town looked as if someone had upended a bucket of bricks, letting them fall where ever. But at the same time, what would they need serious roads for, I doubted that there was a single wagon in town, it would be next to useless. For wagons to make sense, you needed a certain volume of material flow, something I just could not see in such a town. In addition, there were magic bags quite readily available allowing for comparatively easy transport, even of bulk material, lessening the need for wagons even further. It made me wonder if there was a tradition of wagon-trains to move bulk-goods or if there were simply groups of riders with magic bags.


    In my opinion, the only reason the town had ever been established, instead of remaining a nomadic tribe, as cultures in similar climates had on Earth, was the existence of growth-magic, allowing for efficient farming even in the short summer they had to have up here in the north. Even now, the days were a lot shorter than the nights, but I think they were getting longer again. No, without magic farming, the locals would have to remain nomadic moving with their herds and scrabbling for additional food, but thanks to magic, they were able to farm, but not to the point that they were able to feed livestock over the winter, making them an interesting mix of hunters and farmers.


    ¡°We should continue on foot.¡± I suggested a few minutes after we had left the forest and dismounted, swiftly followed by Rai and Adra¡¯s transformation. Sigmir simply slowed down in order to stay with us.


    ¡°We are trying to conceal our strength again?¡± Rai asked. I had explained to him why we had not shown our mounts when we had been with his tribe, giving him a lesson on vigilance for trouble.


    ¡°Yes. And I don¡¯t want anyone to think Sigmir is any less compared to either of us. Or Adra for that matter. If two ride, she might be taken for some sort of servant or slave. I don¡¯t want that.¡± I explained my reasoning, earning a smile from Sigmir.


    It took us a little longer to cross the cleared area on foot, but soon we were at the gate, allowing entry into Yaksha. We were not the only ones moving on the cleared area, there were a few groups I believed to be hunters, all between three and ten people, most carrying game. It reminded me that even magic bags had limits, mostly the size that could be placed inside at once.


    Remembering Yari, I moved behind Sigmir, drawing my hood deep into my face and conjuring up some shadow to conceal myself with. I had no desire to repeat the experience. The guard at the gate seemed incredibly uninterested, not even really looking at us, probably because trouble would not come on two legs around here.


    But we were in Yaksha. Part of me, mostly my nose, wanted nothing more than to leave.

 Chapter 129

    After entering into Yaksha, we moved further into the town and I wondered if there was any sense or order to the layout. The buildings around us seemed to be warehouses and the buildings behind them might be residential houses, not that I could really tell. The buildings had solid wooden walls, with only a few, small windows and a single, large door each. The buildings on the outskirt had even larger doors, reminiscent of barn-doors, almost as if they were used to let wagons inside but I was unsure. Maybe it was to let hunters carrying game inside to be processed, making it the butcher¡¯s buildings.


    The way further into the town was not so much marked as a road or footpath, I think Sigmir simply followed the trampled snow to find her way. It seemed to work, as we soon were on the central square, which I believed to be the market square.


    The market square gave me something I had lacked before, perspective for Mundus. I had believed that Sigmir, standing about two meters and twenty tall, was in the upper reaches of sapient beings in this world, when measuring height. Most sapients I had seen had been between my own diminutive height and her towering size, with a few bear-beastman in Yari standing slightly taller than her, making the height distribution relatively similar to the real world.


    On the market square, I gained that perspective, showing me just how wrong I had been. There were a few groups of different beings, giving me a wider picture of the races of Mundus and reading about them had not prepared me for seeing them directly. The few dwarves were unsurprising, I had seen Thekk in Neyto and while there were differences, they were not striking. On the other hand, I doubt that anything could have prepared me adequately to see my first centaur, there was a difference between knowing that a centaur was a human torso, growing out of a horse-body and a whole different pony to see just that.


    There were six of them and even the smallest, a woman, was comfortably able to look Sigmir into the eyes, with her horse-body¡¯s back being roughly eye-level with me. The biggest, on the other hand, towered over Sigmir, just like Sigmir towered over me, I might have bowed down a little to pass below his belly but not a lot. Not that I would voluntarily try that, I was not that reckless. But his horse-back was easily at Sigmir¡¯s shoulders and the human torso went up from there.


    It was quite sobering, seeing the immense physical differences. I wondered just how the game was able to keep things in balance, after all a body that size had to have a corresponding strength, allowing for huge advantages for a centaur. A second thought made me realise that the strength was mostly useless, bound in the lower-horse body, which would allow them to carry or pull large loads, but the deliverable strength, using weapons, should be similar to a human of the same size on a mount. So, a permanently mounted, perfected synchronized with their mounts, cavalry, probably the best cavalry on Mundus. But that was not purely an advantage, I truly wanted to witness a centaur trying to climb a cliff or use a ladder, the mental image alone cured me of any idea that their bodies were a true advantage for them.


    Seeing the huge bodies gave the architecture I had wondered about before some perspective, with beings that might want into a house easily standing three meters tall, they needed the higher doors and high ceilings.


    And between those extremes, there were others, some that I believed to be beastman of different flavours, others that seemed to be furred humans with tusks, reminding me of artist renditions of caveman but I was guessing that they were some sort of cold-resistant orcs, they looked very similar to the orcs I had seen in videos, just covered in fur.


    ¡°That should be the adventurer¡¯s guild. We should register there.¡± Adra said, gesturing to a rather small building at the edge of the square. The door was sized similar to the barn-doors I had seen on the houses on the edge of town, what I had believed to be warehouses, and above the door was a sign with a boot burned in. I wondered why the so called Adventurer¡¯s Guild was using a boot as their sign, it seemed slightly strange. But at the same time, what but their mobility was connecting adventurers, if they used a specific weapon, it would exclude far too many, similarly with some sort of symbol for magic or the various gods.


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    ¡°Yes, they should be able to point us to a tanner to sell the furs we have and maybe to an inn. We need some coin.¡± Sigmir stated, reminding us that we might leave the exclusively barter-driven economy of the wilds. We had skinned the various wolves when we had time, but those furs would only give little coin. I was slightly leery of selling the big, black wolves fur, just in case my ritual had left some sort of magical residue on it, but if we needed the money, so be it.


    We walked over to the guild, a few beings on the square looking over curiously, but nobody approached us. I stayed in Sigmir¡¯s shadow as much as possible, using it to help my magic conceal myself. In addition, I tried to use what Rai had told me about using the Stealth-skill itself to hide in plain sight. It was far less powerful, possibly because I was not yet used to it, but it helped. I had used it mostly passively before, but now I tried to actively use my stamina to fuel it. It was a strange sensation, not completely like my magic-usage but still similar.


    Adra pushed open the door to the Adventurer¡¯s Guild and we entered the dim building, only kept alight by the limited light shed by a couple of candles and a burning fire-place. The building was divided by a sturdy counter, behind which a strangely shaped female beastman sat. She had some tan fur and an almost pinched face, making me think of a snout, with two small horns protruding from her forehead, curling backwards. She looked up, looking us over as we stood for a moment, taking the ambience in.


    The mental image I had of an Adventurer¡¯s Guild before, it was now shattered. I had imagined a raucous bar, filled with rough man, ready to do violence, prone to fight and assert dominance. Next to the bar, a small counter, allowing for a beautiful attendant, who was chased by all single males and regularly fought over, to hand out advice and quests for the would-be adventurers.


    The reality was different. There was no bar. There were no permanent patrons. The atmosphere reminded me of some government-office building crossed with a graveyard, it was that fun. The female beastman behind the counter looked plainly bored, not all that excited of having new people in her domain. Her demeanor reminded me of the woman working the admissions-office at school, only without the perm. But her horns made up for that.


    Adra walked to the counter, speaking up. ¡°Greetings. We would like to register as Adventurers.¡±


    ¡°Oh, great, more Travellers. Let me guess, you have no idea how the guild works?¡± She asked, projecting an aura of supreme annoyance. It made me wonder how many Travellers she had inducted, there couldn¡¯t be that many, could there? The third wave had started some time ago, but still, that meant there were only some hundred-thousand Travellers, spread all over the globe. She continued before any of us was able to answer. Not that it would have changed anything, we needed an explanation.


    ¡°The guild gives two types of quests. Normal Quests and Bonded Quests. Anyone can take any normal quest, if you overestimate your ability and die, it¡¯s no skin off our back. Bonded Quests can only be taken by proven guild members of good standing, people we know are powerful enough to fulfill them.¡± She said, in the monotone voice of someone who had given the same information hundreds of times.


    ¡°When you first register, you are given a Guild-Card, it lists shows your name and Guild Officials can inscribe informations into it, using magic.¡± Hearing that, my mind instantly went to possibly studying the card, finding out how it worked and using it to my advantage.


    ¡°The card is tamper-proof and we will know if it has been screwed around with. So, don¡¯t try. I know the look on your face, elf, you are one of those magical types that needs to sniff out every little secret, aren¡¯t you?¡± She looked straight at, and through, me, obviously unimpressed by my concealment. I felt my cheeks flush with a blush, at her very accurate assessment and the chuckles from Sigmir and Adra. At least Rai had been able to keep his amusement to himself, not shaming his master.


    ¡°Now, little elf, why don¡¯t we start with registering you?¡±

 Chapter 130

    The guild-clerk¡¯s gaze was intense, I felt like as if I was under a microscope, or maybe a butterfly ready to be pinned to a piece of cardboard, to be archived for later. It was not so much power that kept me pinned but intensity and experience, the woman I was facing had seen so much more than I.


    ¡°Very well. What information do you need from me? And how much does the registration cost?¡± I asked, pulling a little on the crystal in my chest to strengthen my presence.


    ¡°Your name. And registration is five silver each.¡± She said with an amused smile. I looked over to Sigmir and she frowned, signaling me that we were lacking a little in the money departement. Rai, however, spoke up, telling us that he would cover the cost for us.


    ¡°I¡¯m called Morgana, a traveller.¡± I introduced myself. As I spoke, the woman stood and moved a bit back, to one of the cabinets. Due to that, I saw more of her, realising that she was missing her left leg, from the thigh down. I could not help but stare for a moment, seeing the primitive prosthetic. She turned back and noticed my gaze.


    ¡°What girl, never seen an retired adventurer? Most of us take a job with the guild if they are too wounded to continue and have the standing. One even tried to retire after just taking an arrow to the knee, damned slacker, they sorted him out post haste.¡± she told us in an annoyed voice, before mockingly adding, ¡°I hear he became a guard somewhere.¡±


    After looking us over once again, she continued in a slightly nicer voice. ¡°In a way, the guild-standing is your retirement as an adventurer. So, don¡¯t screw with the guild, it might be all that keeps you off the street in the end.¡±


    Finally, she pulled out a box, carrying it to the counter and pulling a few thin metal plates out of it. Rai placed twenty, round silver-pieces on the table, each with a square hole in the middle, for a stick or a string to be put through, allowing for ease of carrying.


    ¡°So, Morgana. I see.¡± the woman looked me over once again and I felt a strange sensation, one I had felt before when Kallista had demonstrated what it felt like to be subtly observed. Out of reflex, I pulled at the shadows and the darkness around me, trying to shroud me from the invasive gaze.


    ¡°Stop that, I need to observe you.¡± the woman growled.


    ¡°Next time, tell a gal that you invade her privacy.¡± I growled back, but let the shrowing fade away, even as if it felt uncomfortable.


    ¡°Didn¡¯t think that you¡¯d notice or be able to do something about it. The last few fools got here without even learning from their tribes, a few hadn¡¯t even managed to get to level ten. Plumb fools the lot, running out into the world before they are ready. But if the rumours are true and Travellers truly can¡¯t die, maybe that makes them reckless.¡± the woman explained with a slightly grudging respect.


    Feeling peevish, I used my darkness magic to conceal my own use of observe on her, learning a little about her.


    <table><tbody><tr><td>Female Caprakin, Level 104 </td></tr></tbody></table>


    So, she was a goat-beastman. Or beastwoman.


    She twitched for a moment and glared at me, before breaking into laughter.


    ¡°Well played, little elf. You can call me Saya.¡±


    ¡°Thank you, Saya. Before, you said something about bonded and non-bonded quests, can you explain a little more?¡± I asked, trying to get more information during a moment of levity.


    ¡°Mhm. Sure.¡± She said, slightly distracted as she moved her hands in distinct patterns and I got a slight whiff of magic in the air. Peeking through Lenore¡¯s eyes showed me a maddingly complex magic formation, completely different from everything I had seen to that day.


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    ¡°Don¡¯t peek!¡± Saya admonished me. I curbed my curiosity, unwilling to make the clerk even more annoyed with me. She continued her hand-movement and started talking.


    ¡°Bonded missions are those the guild takes serious. They are more expensive and most of the time they are protective in nature. For example, guarding someone important would most likely be a bonded mission, even if a caravan might allow others to join, for a fee. The guild selects those who take such missions quite carefully, as the guild¡¯s reputation hinges on each and every one of them. People trust us because the guild¡¯s word is binding. If a bonded mission fails, the adventurers undertaking it better have a damn good reason and don¡¯t try to run, or the guild will hunt them down.¡± Saya explained, before finishing the spell she was using and handed me my card. It was a slim, metal rectangle, no larger than a credit card with a simple engraved name, Morgana, on it.


    Saya looked me over once again. ¡°Now, I need a drop of blood from you.¡±


    Frowning, I looked at her, before asking ¡°What for?¡±


    ¡°To imprint the card on you.¡±


    The idea was quite uncomfortable, even I could to quite a bit of damage with a drop of blood and there were uncountable ways that it could be used to target me and I had only very rudimentary ideas how to defend against such attacks.


    But I wanted the guild-card, so I had to bite my tongue and deal with my apprehension.


    Creating a tiny sliver of ice on my fingernail, making it razor-sharp, I used it to slash open a small gash in my other hand, letting a bit of blood well up. Seeing the blood, I tried to pull my essence back from it, basically using blood magic in reverse, leaving only the smallest amount of it in the blood, an amount that should rapidly dissipate, before letting the blood drop onto the receptacle Saya had prepared for me.


    ¡°How paranoid.¡± Saya remarked as I did so, causing a slight blush, but I would not apologize for my caution. The receptacle flashed a little and I saw the blood vanish and felt a small change in my card.


    I peeked at it, using Lenore¡¯s vision, curious what it would look like, but I only got the barest glimpse of a dense and highly complex magic formation that was concealed within the card. What little I could see, was far too complex and confusing to understand.


    ¡°You can look at the card, but I would not try to alter the information encoded within. You will fail and we will know. In addition, your information is now in the system, so don¡¯t try to fool anyone, claiming to be a new adventurer. We will know.¡± Saya explained.


    ¡°Now, for you, Miss Giantblood.¡± she looked over to Sigmir, who took my place.


    They went through the name and observe-spiel and as Saya was preparing Sigmir¡¯s card, she continued explaining about quests.


    ¡°So, bonded quests are serious. Unbonded quests are a lot more relaxed, with them it doesn¡¯t really matter if the adventurers fail, they just die and it¡¯s no longer our problem. Unbonded quests are mostly tasks to go somewhere and kill things or gather things, if you succeed and bring back proof, you get paid, if not, tough luck and someone else can cash in. By doing such quests and demonstrating reliability, you can gain guild-standing. But the standing is mostly left to the experienced clerks, most of us can smell a problem from a mile away. For example, the little wolf back there,¡± she said, looking at Rai, ¡°that one is green as spring grass and you, miss elf, are a ruthless little monster, aren¡¯t you?¡± she said, with a smirk on her face as she looked at me.


    ¡°Such compliments.¡± I answered in a mocking voice. ¡°Let¡¯s just say, I do whatever is necessary to get the job done.¡±


    ¡°I¡¯ve seen others like you before. If they care for someone, they will happily burn down the world for them, smiling as they go. And if they don¡¯t they will happily stab them in the back, for their own gain.¡± she said, speaking without heat in her voice.


    I took Sigmir¡¯s blood as well, draining it of most of her essence, so she was safe, before placing a gentle kiss on the cut and closing it with my magic. Sigmir blushed a little at my affection, but I did not care.


    ¡°Next, miss dryad.¡± Saya called for Adra.


    They went through the same song and dance, but this time, Saya explained about a few quests in the area. We could get paid for hunting wolves, mostly in the east, where we came from, we could get paid for hunting wind raptors in the southern mountains or we could get paid for hunting fire-birds in the northern mountains. In addition, there was a premium for meat-delivery to the town, during the winter-months. During spring time there were more ways to make some cash, but that did not really help us.


    After making sure that Adra¡¯s blood would not be abused, Sigmir took out the wolf-pelts we had gathered on our way here, learning that we could get paid for them at the guild or sell them in town. Hoping to get a better price in town, Sigmir decided to keep them for now, only showing the amount of pelts we had and the quality, so Saya could get an estimation of our fighting prowess, even if only a very rudimentary one. There was a huge difference between killing forty wolves during forty days, a wolf each day, or killing them all at once, in a single, huge fight.


    Finally, she registered Rai, before giving us a couple of hints where to go next.

 Chapter 131

    Saya gave us the system-version of the quests to hunt wolves, alpha-wolves and wind raptors in addition to the one that required us to bring in game-animals, mostly elk, deer or mountain goat, but it was quite wide-ranging, as it was given out to supply the town with meat. The quests for wolves and meat were marked as easy, the one for wind raptors as medium and the one for alpha-wolves as hard.


    Afterwards, she suggested to take the pelts we already had to the fur-trader, as they would most likely give us the best price, not that we could count on a lot of money from the pelts we had. Pelts were simply the main-product of the town and, in a way, the region, in addition to some other speciality products. But those specialities were only available to few traders, for example there was a dwarven settlement further to the north, close to the trade-route and they traded in some metals, but getting in on that particular trade was next to impossible. Others, like the trade in certain timber-types required special skills, as I had not the slightest idea how to find the required resources.


    We thanked her for the help she had given us and left the guild, me once again hiding in Sigmir¡¯s shadow. The market-place was still quite lively but it was obvious that soon people would head to their respective lodgings. It was something that should be quite easy to find, Yaksha was a trade town after all, people came here to sell their wares and buy things they could not get in the wild, things that needed to be imported and thus would carry a steep price.


    The fur-trader was easy to find, once we knew where to look, it might just be the biggest building in town, a small store-front set in a huge warehouse, allowing them to collect furs and pelts all winter and shipping them into civilisation during the spring and summer-months. Feeling that my presence would not help the trading, I stuck to the shadows, watching Sigmir and Adra haggle with the buyer, trying to get a better price but the buyer was obviously quite skilled and had an almost unbeatable advantage, he knew that he had no competition. In addition, at least according to him, the furs we had were of a bad quality and inadequately skinned and treated. The result was that nobody would give us a better price, so even if his price was quite bad, barely more than the base-price offered by the guild, it was the best we could get. Finally, Sigmir shook his hand and took the silver he offered, placing it into her satchel.


    With that out of the way, we went back to the market square, looking for an inn for the night. Yaksha had multiple and all but one quite obviously targeted the countless hunters and other less reputable guests, those folks that came to town to dispose of their goods, getting a small taste of creature-comforts before heading back out into the wilds. They seemed rough, probably overpriced and selling an enormous amount of beer and spirits but the alternative was the inn that targeted the trader-trade but I had a feeling that we were lacking in money for that particular establishment. So, after a little looking and asking, we decided on an inn at the edge of town, towards the trade-road, hoping that it would be fine. I had mostly gawked at the various beings Sigmir and Adra had talked to, so I had not paid that much attention to the conversations.


    The inn was, once more, built out of the never-ending supply of timber and the inside walls insulated with furs, trying to hold in the heat from the huge hearth. Over that hearth, a large cauldron was hung, letting out steam and the delicious smell of soup or stew filled the common-room. From the size of the building, I assumed that there was a second floor and rooms further in the back. The proprietor was one of the bear-beastman and judging by the fact that he was hardly bigger than Rai, he seemed to be a small one. But he easily made that small size up with his girth, he looked almost comically round. While it was hard to judge on his, to me, alien face, he looked like he was happily smiling.


    ¡°Greetings, greetings, travellers, welcome to the Dancing Bear. Are you looking for a room or do you only want dinner?¡± he asked Sigmir in a happy voice.


    ¡°Greetings, innkeeper. We are looking for a place to sleep, what rooms do you have available?¡± she asked back.


    ¡°I think three of the private rooms in the back are still open and obviously there are spots left in the open room upstairs. A private rooms is three silver the night, with a single bed, the spot upstairs is a half-silver per person. Dinner tonight is a silver per person, unless you want something special.¡± I almost choked at the prices, selling all our furs had only netted us thirty silver, so if we wanted to have beds for everyone with dinner, it would be more than half of our money. Sigmir grimaced but agreed after haggling a little and getting breakfast for our party for another silver. It was gratifying to watch the innkeeper blink in surprise when Sigmir handed over seven silver and I stepped out of her shadow when he checked us in, only then realising that our party was composed out of four people, not three as he had apparently assumed.


    While we all had quite the desire to take a bath, getting clean once again, none of us felt the need to fork over ten silver for the service of getting water brought in and heated. Out of curiosity, and to mark out our sleeping spaces, Sigmir and I went upstairs into the open room and it was just that. It was simply the attic of the building, filled with furs spread over some sort of padding material, dried grass or maybe leaves or something similar. We decided on one of the corners, marking our territory by dropping small items onto the furs, in this particular instance, I created small items out of hard ice, the room was cold enough that there would be no melting that might make our bedding wet. In addition, the icicles were still mine, so if someone had the great idea to steal them for some reason, I should be able to find them again, at least for some time.


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    Afterwards, I followed Sigmir back downstairs, with me hiding in her shadow once more. It was becoming something of a habit. But, I did not mind being her Shadow at all, as it meant that I was able to be so very close to her. And nobody got hostile due to my outsider-trait. So, it was a win-win situation.


    Downstairs, it was not my outsider-trait that made things annoying. It was the fact that there were very little human-looking beings in the region. Giantbloods, if you wanted to feel small and were into blue girls, a few dryads or nymphs, maybe the odd firn-elf, if you could deal with the skin-colour or maybe similar races but that was it, most locals had some sort of furry adaptation to the local climate. So, a couple of Travellers had seen their first non-furry female when they spotted Adra and the sight must have caused them some sort of testosterone overload.


    That was the only explanation I could come up with, when I saw three males of different species stand next to the table Adra and Rai had secured for us, trying to pick Adra up with lines that should only be used at a bar, moments before last call, when desperation set in. Those lines, and their varied races, were also the reason that I figured they were travellers, as I highly doubted that any native of Mundus would suggest that someone was tired because they had been running through their mind all night long.


    Rai was still sitting, even if he looked slightly annoyed at the interruption and maybe a little jealous, he had become quite close to Adra, over the last couple of days. At least, that was my assumption, he rarely blushed anymore when she used him as a hug pillow. Maybe, he was just getting used to it, who knew. But anyway, he was trying not to make trouble for the innkeeper, something quite admirable.


    Sigmir and I moved over, just as one of the would-be Romeos finished asking what was on the menu and answering his own, stupid, question by separating the word into three, making me groan. And it was not even funny, not in an establishment without a menu. One of his compatriots spotted Sigmir and realised that, while she was vastly taller, broader in built and had oddly coloured skin, she looked quite human, especially her chest area. In addition, he might have had a little something to drink before, as he elbowed his friend and pointed at Sigmir, specifically at her chest.


    His words, ¡°Woah, look at the hoo¡­¡± were not quite literally cut off when he felt an icy feeling at his throat, a feeling that may or may not have originated from the blade I was pressing against it.


    The response of his friends was cut off when I activated Overflow and plunged the area right around me into darkness and struck against their minds at the same time, trying to rattle them, inducing fear in their heart. I felt Lenore¡¯s mind join mine in the attack and when I let the shadows fade a moment later, all of them looked quite shaken.


    ¡°Now, my friends and I want to have dinner in peace. And if you talk about my mate like that again, you will learn two things. The meaning of pain and the meaning of fear.¡± I announced, still pushing against their minds.


    The three stooges left, their tails firmly tucked behind their legs, only leaving behind a faint smell of urine, as one of them had a small accident when I cut off his sentence.


    As Sigmir and I were settling down at the table with Rai and Adra, the innkeeper came over, delivering our dinner and asking me to not spill blood in his establishment, at first I wanted to be annoyed but when he explained that it was so incredibly hard to get the blood stains out of the wooden floor, I had to relent, it was a good concern and it would be impolite to make more work for him. I agreed and promised not to make a mess. It was not as if I was really limited by the promise, if necessary, I could always use my Blood Magic to keep blood from making a mess.


    The food was quite good, rustic and gamey but good. None of us was interested in alcoholic beverages, which were almost prohibitively expensive anyway, so we stuck to water from a nearby well.


    ¡°Now that we have some time, Rai, where did you get that much money?¡± I asked.


    ¡°My father gave me some coin for the travels. We don¡¯t use coin a lot in Adernas but sometimes there is trade with outsiders and coin can be useful.¡± he explained. Sigmir and I shared a look and wordlessly agreed that we should reimburse him.


    ¡°Well, thank you. Can you give me an idea how much each coin is worth?¡± I asked, looking at all three of them.


    ¡°Hard to say, really. It depends where you are, closer to home a guild-silver penny is enough to feed someone for two days, but here, where food is more scarce, the price shifts. So, really it depends. Mostly, ten copper-jacks, the smallest guild-coin can be exchanged for two halfpennies or a full penny but especially half-pennies are less desired so you will sometimes only get nine copper-jacks when exchanging for two halfpennies. Simply because a halfpenny is less convenient to carry.¡± Adra explained, while Sigmir showed me the coins, the silver coins I had seen before, each with a small indent that showed its middle-line and one of them had been split at that indent, making a half coin, or a halfpenny. In addition, there were copper coins that were similarly sized, maybe a little smaller.


    ¡°There are also gold coins but they are less common and a lot more valuable. I think there are different sorts of gold coin, but I¡¯m not sure about that.¡± Adra finished her explanation, with Sigmir and Rai listening just as I was.


    After dinner, we headed upstairs, looking forward to sleeping indoors for once. Not that the furs were much more comfortable than our normal bedding, or the location much more secure, it was just a psychological thing, at least for me. Sleeping indoors was what I was used to see as normal, so it was the best. Or something like that.

 Chapter 132

    My mind was jolted awake during the middle of the night and for a second, I was unsure where I was, or even who I was. It took me a second to get my bearings and to realise that the jolt I had felt, had been caused by the ward I had placed around the four of us. Stretching my mind into the shadows around us, I felt three intruders sneaking towards us, the three stooges I had sent off earlier. Well, if they were sneaking up on us, in the middle of the night, I had no need to ascertain their intentions, I would treat them as they begged to be treated and make good on my promise.


    The open dorm that had once been an attic was almost completely dark, only a small candle at the stairs shed some light and the amount that made it to our corner was miniscule at best, so I had plenty shadow and darkness to work with. I was quite interested what would happen if I used mind magic on other travellers and I was hoping that they would post about their experiences on the forum. I would have to keep an eye open.


    A stealthy observe told me that the three stooges were all under level twenty, making a nightly sneak-attack the only way they had a chance to take us out. Well, the only way with a success-rate higher than the survival-rate of a snowball in hell. I carefully fed magic into the darkness around us, making it deeper and more corporeal, letting me manipulate it with ease and impunity.


    My attack against the stooges was, to me, the epitome of mind magic, not flashy, without making huge waves, just a soft, insidious creeping in. To the stooges, it must have been as if the candle simply went out, making the darkness around them all encompassing. And in that darkness, they could feel something, a presence, all around them. I felt their fear-response and it allowed me to get into their core, without even touching them, and I was able to witness the strange interplay between mind, body and soul that I had seen before, when I had used mind magic to keep the guards under, during our attack on the Jonari village. Well, I saw mind and body, and Lenore allowed me to gain an impression of the soul-part, which I could not directly sense.


    Together, Lenore and I, managed to bring all three under our influence and while I kept their body from responding to anything their mind commanded, Lenore gleefully went to work, picking at the interplay between mind and soul she was observing. We had theorised that feelings stemmed from a mind-soul interplay that acted on the body, so the fear that the three of them were feeling should emerge in her observation and I was blocking the effects fear had on the body. Normally, when one was afraid, the body would go into overdrive, trying to give the best results in the fight-or-flight response, something I was not interested in. It might be useful as a short-time buff for my allies, the physical response without the mental drawbacks, but that would have to be researched another time.


    But as the three stooges were definitely afraid, Lenore had a prime seat to witness the interplay in action and after a few minutes of watching, she started to introduce her own responses into the mix, observing how it changed things.


    At that point, it was hard to distinguish where Lenore¡¯s mind ended and mine begun, we had linked up so tight that thoughts were flowing from one to the other without effort, giving both of us a better perspective. Lenore now knew what her interference triggered as physical sensation and I saw the gossamer thin web wrapped around the connections between mind and body, tiny strands that kept the mind tethered to the body, but were also interwoven with both, mind and body, in strange ways, allowing the sapient to function.


    We were happily poking and prodding at one of the three, trying to establish a stimulus-response pattern, when the connection-points between all three aspects suddenly started to break and the whole complex construct unravelled due to those broken connections. Trying to stop it was impossible, the best we could do was leave the realm we had intruded into, so we would not be harmed by the collapse.


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    It freed up enough of our faculties to let us see that we had just killed the first of our volunteer-subjects but luckily, we still had two more. For the second, Lenore focused on giving a stimulus and I watched just what it did to his body, while blunting the effect it had. It was giving us some ideas what the stimuli we were using were based on. After a few tries, it turned out they were mostly based on sight, which was not a big surprise, Lenore was stimulating parts she had watched being stimulated as we had captured them and the idea that their sight was still telling them something, as they were trapped in the dark, was no surprise. In addition, the blunted responses I allowed were giving me information how their bodies responded, even the blunted responses caused tremendous effects on the body.


    With some effort, I managed to stretch the sense I normally used for healing towards our current test-subject and felt his body that way, comparing the responses between the governing part, which I suspected was based in his brain and spine, and the responses in the individual body-parts. I was not experienced enough to understand the changes in most organs, but the rapid beating of his heart, I was able to perceive. Lenore and I kept prodding, interested in the changes the heart was experiencing as we did, until the rapid, but steady beat started to turn into wild arrhythmic flailing. We mentally stepped back, but the damage was already done and I was not willing to heal him, to prolong our experiments.


    It was a bridge too far, I was willing to experiment on them, even torture them, they had tried sneaking up on us with obvious ill intent after all, but I was not willing to keep them alive to experience more pain and torture.


    Shortly after we had stepped back, the body shut down and expired.


    After a short, mental conversation with Lenore, we turned the experiment around with number three, I induced bodily stimuli while Lenore watched the effects of them, trying to understand just how they worked. Sadly, I was a little limited in the stimuli I could supply. cold and touch were easy to come up with and by increasing the intensity, pain would follow. I picked one sensation, cold, and started to make our test-subject feel it. The easiest way to supply the feeling of cold was by direct magic exposure, so I used ice-runes to induce cold directly without a physical medium. Part of me wanted to use Liquid Moonlight but that was the ultimate cold I could muster, so it would be the last thing used, not the first.


    The responses were quite interesting and varied depending on the area the cold was applied, the limbs reacting vastly different from the core. But there was only so much we could do with cold, so Lenore asked me to try touch.


    While I was not too keen on it, I started with simple things, soft touches and air-flow, followed by stronger touches and even strikes, so I started to get into the pain-response. To increase the breadth of that response, we needed other stimuli and I was not about to pinch the guy, so I pulled my athame and pricked him, giving Lenore more information to work with. Again, there were physical responses that bypassed the mind entirely, other went into the mind and were filtered within, with only a tiny amount passing on to the soul.


    Questioning how the amount of pain would change the response, I tried to induce a different sort of pain by direct exposure to Liquid Moonlight, causing a small part of the skin to freeze. The result was interestingly similar, just higher by orders of magnitude. But I had one more arrow in my quiver, so to speak, one pain-sensation I wanted to try.


    The pricks I had given him had let enough blood flow out for me to work with, so I placed my athame back into one of the pricked spots and channelled my Blood Magic through the blade, drawing his Astral Power out. Blood Magic had been the worst pain I had experienced in Mundus, by far worse than anything else I had felt and I was quite interested what Lenore would find out.


    Even a slight draw made it almost impossible to hold onto his core, it jolted that violently, the body-part of the core eroding and draining away visibly, with the strands that represented the soul stretching before getting ripped apart. I tried to increase the pace at which I drew power and we got ejected from the core, as the test-subjects body jerked wildly, convulsing and falling over, dead.


    At some point during my experimentation, the others had woken up, but seeing the three stooges standing there, they had simply watched. Now, they were looking at me for an explanation, why we had three bodies next to our sleeping space.


    ¡°I promised them downstairs, I would teach them the meaning of pain and fear. They desperately wanted that lesson, it seems.¡±

 Chapter 133

    When the next morning dawned, the three stooges, who had tried to attack us during the night, had demonstrated that they were travellers, by virtue of their bodies despawning at some point in the night. To us, it was an incredibly useful thing, or there would have been three dead bodies that raised questions and could cause trouble. Now, we just had to leave before the stooges respawned and the situation would have time to blow over.


    Lenore and I happily discussed what had happened, what we had discovered, partially merging our minds to do so. We now had ideas how to create direct sensations in the mind of a target, not just slamming into the mind with brute force, but inducing the sensations we had experimented with, adding to my repertoire in Mind-Magic.


    And I had gained two skill-points in it, bringing it to twelve, not tremendously high, but I had not done a lot with the skill. It was a type of magic we both enjoyed, seeing it as something very, very interesting. We often discussed magic and the application, it was one of the things that united us, our interest and our fascination with magic experimentation. Lenore was a little more conservative, less prone to simply saying, ¡°Let¡¯s find out what happens if I do, insert borderline insane idea.¡± but that did not stop her from evaluating the results and enjoying the new knowledge.


    Another thing we were both curious about was if I would be able to use the blood I had drawn from the last traveller would allow me to locate and track him, or even attack him from a distance. I had mostly worked out the process to use blood as a link to target someone with runic magic, but I was not sure if it would work with a traveller. Not because of the way the local magical lore worked, but more because of the insane imbalance that would create in a game-world. Just capturing someone once, would enable a sufficiently ruthless Blood Mage to kill the traveller at any point. Or torture him. It would, in essence, erase the character, something I doubted Pantheon would want in a game, even if they tried to make it as realistic as possible. However, I felt that, as a Beta-tester, it was my solemn duty to test that particular theory.


    The innkeeper looked at us with suspicion in his eyes, he had seen the confrontation the night before and when three fewer people came downstairs, it was not too big of a stretch to suspect that something had happened. It was not as if the attic-dorm was so inviting and comfortable that people would stay in it, just for the comforts of home. But, at the end of the day, he was just an innkeeper and not interested in confronting four adventurers. So, he just served us breakfast. The breakfast would not win any awards, nor was it so plentiful that one could eat with abandon, but it was adequate in quality and quantity. Not great, not even good, but adequate.


    A quick discussion during breakfast revealed that none of us was too keen on staying in town, there was little to see or do, unless one wanted to stay for longer than we could afford. There were a couple of craftsman who would be able to train us, but convincing them to do so was outside of our financial ability and staying long enough was not really possible as well. Just trying to estimate the time needed to complete the journey we were on was close to impossible, so there was no way I was willing to stay here, in a small town in the middle of nowhere.


    Lenore wanted to go into the southern mountains, apparently hoping that the wind raptors had the right kind of energy she needed to break through the first divide and I was very willing to help her find out. I had offered her to add my own Astral Power into the mix, but what she needed was neither Darkness nor Ice, it was Death as a basis and Air as a supporting element. I had been able to help Ylva, as she had needed physical strength as a basis, which I had taken from the wolves, and Ice as a supporting element, which I had added into the mix, allowing her to cleanly break through.


    On the way towards the gates, I saw a small store that seemed to be a herb-store and remembered the incredibly useful Shadeleaf I had found long ago and the variety of herbs we had taken from the dryad Tegi, all still in my bag, as I had no way to deal with them.


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    Pulling the others along, I entered the store, interested in what they were selling and was greeted by a dim room, the air heavy with smells ranging from stingingly sharp to soothingly mild. There was a light undercurrent of magic in the air, hard to detect and mixed with the other smells, making it hard to accurately asses. Smelling the magic in the air, I unconsciously let my tongue dart out, tasting the air and the magic carried on it, trying to understand it. But even with the additional informations, I was unable to separate the myriad traces in the air, they were just too intermingled.


    The sight in front of me was not much better, the store itself had a tiny space in front of the counter and a large space behind it, making it almost look like a pharmacy in the real world, you did not browse here, you asked for what you needed and were given it, if it was in stock.


    I approached the counter, looking the proprietress over, trying to understand what she was. She looked like a human, only rather small, with rougher features and mostly covered in grey fur, only in her face there was visible, pale skin. Well, small compared to most humans, compared to me, she was maybe half a head taller. I could only guess at her race, it might be some sort of dwarf, some sort of orc or something else entirely. Even elf was remotely possible, even if I doubted it, she was too sturdy to make me believe that she was one.


    ¡°What do you need?¡± she asked, in a gravelly voice, sounding a little like a rock slide going down a mountain.


    ¡°I am looking for a guide to local fauna. I have some interest in the magical properties of herbs and their usage as magic foci.¡± I explained.


    ¡°You want to learn herb-lore? Mhrm, I might have something for you, but it¡¯ll cost you.¡± she smirked. I somehow had a feeling that it would be more coin than I could afford. She turned around, looking through one of the cupboards behind her and turning back with an old and worn book, the jacket made out of wood to protect the bound pages within.


    ¡°There it is, my old tome. Got every herb of the region I know and what I know about their effect. But if you want it, you¡¯ll have to pay for it.¡±


    ¡°How much?¡± I asked, thinking about possible ways to get coin and a lot of it.


    ¡°If you pay in coin, fifty official guild gold coins.¡± the woman announced. I had been prepared for a high, even a brutal price, and she did not disappoint. The official exchange of silver into gold were hundred-ten silver-coins for a single gold-coin, if you used the guild, which took ten percent, so she essentially wanted at least five-thousand silver coins, depending on the exchange, it would be up to five-thousand five-hundred.


    My face must have given away the impossibility of that number, as she cackled.


    ¡°I can also lend the book to you. But I will need collateral in exchange for it.¡±


    ¡°What type of collateral do you have in mind? I can leave these herbs here, this staff, or this book.¡± I suggested, getting out the vast herb-collection I had taken from the dryad Tegi, the Earthen Magic-Staff and the book I had been given by the Grandmother. It would not be useful to the hag in front of me, but it was good collateral.


    ¡°That book? Where did you get it?¡± she asked, her eyes wild, the moment she saw the Zevarra Agha.


    ¡°It was given to me, by a dear teacher who helped me to find my own path.¡± I explained, not naming the Grandmother directly.


    ¡°She taught you? In that case, you will give me your word that you will return my book to me. I will keep those herbs you offered and you will give me your word.¡± the hag seemed rather subservient now, almost afraid.


    ¡°Very well. I, Morgana the traveller, give my solemn word to¡­¡± I trailed off, waiting for her name.


    ¡°I am Suja, of the Greyfur tribe.¡±


    ¡°...Suja, of the Greyfur tribe, that I will return the book of herb lore she lent me, within two weeks.¡± I finished my promise. There was no fanfare, no system announcement, but Suja seemed happy with the deal. I carefully took my new book, softly stroking over it¡¯s weathered cover, placing it into my bag, together with the Zevarra Agha.


    ¡°Thank you, I will take good care of it.¡± I told her before leaving the store behind.


    As I left, Suja bowed to me, it was a slightly strange experience.

 Chapter 134

    There seemed to be nothing more to do in Yaksha, so, after replenishing some of our supplies, we headed back out into the wild, away from the bad smells and the bustle of the town. Not that Yaksha was an especially bustling town, but compared to the wilds we had been travelling in for the past months, it was teeming with people. We were not the only group heading out, over the cleared fields around the town, some other hunters were even close enough to talk.


    It was a three man team that was walking close to us and Sigmir started a conversation with one of them, an old looking male and from his figure, I would have guessed him to be a giantblood, even if likely of another tribe as Sigmir, because his skin-colour was more grey-blue compared to her. One of his companions was a rather young looking wolf-beastman, apparently even younger than Rai, and the other was what appeared to be a snowbold.


    ¡°Greetings, Elder. Could you tell us a little about the surrounding area?¡± she asked.


    ¡°Sure, young one. I¡¯m teaching these younglings how to trap, so I don¡¯t mind the company, maybe they learn something as well.¡± he answered with a chuckle. ¡°What do you want to know?¡±


    ¡°My companions and I are from further east and don¡¯t know the area very well. We have heard about trouble with wolves in the forests and wind raptors in the southern mountains, but we are lacking in information.¡±


    ¡°Hrm, those are the big threats, but there are other things that can make trouble. I shouldn¡¯t have to point out the danger posed by bears or large cats, right? There are some of them, not enough to make trouble for Yaksha, mind you, but enough. And if you bumble into them, they will happily take down one of you, or even all of you, for supper. The bears are rather passive during the winter, but sometimes they wake up and if they do, they are hungry.¡± the old man explained.


    ¡°But those threats are obvious ones, if you miss a bear you deserve to be eaten. Less obvious are the sables and the wolverines. The sables are smaller and might look cute, but underestimate them and you will suffer. Once they reach a certain level, they become blindingly fast and you will not notice their attack before they have ripped you open. On the other hand, wolverines are much like bears, once they decide that you are food, you are in trouble. They are smaller than other predators out here but there have been stories of a wolverine taking apart a wolfpack to defend its kill. Fearless, vicious little buggers, those things.¡±


    I stepped out of Sigmir¡¯s shadow, I had not seen a need to leave the comforting closeness since we had left town, and spoke up. ¡°The wolves, why are they such a problem?¡± I asked, curious about them. I remembered the meeting with Ylva, her pack had been attacked by another pack, a pack very similar to the ones in this area but quite a bit further to the east.


    The old man just raised an eyebrow at my sudden appearance, the young wolf-beastman jumped a little but the snowbold reacted as if he was staring at a vicious beast. At first, he just froze, then he gave a strangled shriek and hid behind the old man.


    ¡°What is wrong with the small creature?¡± Rai asked, confused.


    The snowbold was still shaking uncontrollably and hiding behind the old man, who looked slightly confused now.


    ¡°I¡¯m not sure, he¡¯s a snowbold, strange little buggers that live further east. Haven¡¯t seen one before this one came here a few months back, half frozen and starved. A couple of the older guys wanted to help him, so we gave him some food and I started to teach him trapping. Tried teaching him to fight, but I doubt that he will ever be strong enough for that.¡± the old man explained, as his charge was completely unable to speak for himself.


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    ¡°Interesting, my tribe lives further east but I¡¯ve never seen a creature such as this and the land is quite dangerous, so I¡¯m not sure things such as he could have survived there.¡± Sigmir chimed in. I for my part, was keeping quiet, not willing to reveal what I knew about snowbolds.


    ¡°The little bugger said something about their home being a place of warmth, given to them by the great flame, in exchange for their devotion. His language is a little strange but one of the others managed to teach him common by using some sort of teaching-skill. Well, anyway, the small one said that one day, their tribe was killed and the great flame extinguished while he and a few others were away. They tried to survive, but without the great flame, stronger monsters came to their cave, driving them out.¡±


    ¡°So, why is he reacting to me like that?¡± I asked, trying very hard not to think about the implications. I had, after all, a very good idea what the great flame had been and how it had been extinguished, but there was no reason to reveal that.


    ¡°Good question, but how would I know?¡± the old man reasonably said. His charge had still not stopped shaking, so getting any knowledge out of the snowbold would have to wait.


    ¡°But anyway, you wanted to know about the wolves, right? Well, the grey wolves mostly live further south, on the other side of the mountain range. But they come further north each year, only driven back by the winter. This year, the winter is rather mild, so they try to stay, even if they have to drive away the animals that normally hunt here. Or the people that try to do so. There is just a limit on how much game there is, especially game that can be taken down easily. For larger prey, they need their black furred alphas, and even those will risk injury or death if the prey puts up a fight.¡± the old man sighed, before continuing.


    ¡°We people on the other hand mostly rely on traps and a few, insane hunters like you, those that laugh death in the face on a daily basis to bring down serious threats. I can feel that you have some power. But for every one like you, there are two, or maybe three, that get eaten before gaining power. And once they gained a modicum of power, they stop trying, taking what game they can without risk. Very few are insane enough to keep struggling, risking their life over and over again, once they reach around level fifty and normal animals will hardly add to their strength.¡±


    ¡°Wait, the black wolves are always stronger and the alphas?¡± I asked, slightly confused. Normally, some greys should gain strength by levelling up and becoming alphas in their own right, right?


    ¡°Well, the black wolves are stronger at birth and other blacks help them to gain strength. So, they are the strongest in their generation, allowing them to pass their strength on. A shaman, one of the wolf-beastman who can talk to them, told me that it is because the blacks are descendants of the Odin¡¯s hounds, of Freki and Geri. But that might just be ancient myth, who really knows.¡±


    As the old man spoke, I felt Sigmir tense next to me and realised that her eyes had taken on a yellow tint, while her fingernails had turned into claws and thin, silvery fur was visible on the back of her hands and in her face. Trying something new, I reached out with my mind magic, not striking as I normally would, but a gentle touch, trying to reach through the connection I had with Sigmir. For a moment, we connected and I felt Ylva seethe with anger in her Hallow and, before the connection snapped, both Lenore and I sent soothing, calming thoughts to both of them. It must have worked, as the fur receded and her hands turned normal again, as she took my hand and gave it a gentle squeeze.


    We continued our conversation with the old man as we walked, learning more about the animals of the area and their ranges, even if he only knew about those close to Yaksha. In addition, his information was mostly on areas he knew to stay away from, claiming that he was only a trapper and didn¡¯t go after anything that could simply snap through his traps. When we reached the forest, the old man and his two pupils split of, looking for good areas to set their traps, while we continued on, towards the mountains.


    Our plan was quite simple, we spent a few days in the mountains, hunting wind raptors and hopefully help Lenore achieve what she plans there before going back into the forest and either hunt some more. Once we had filled our packs with game and hopefully killed some wolves for the guild¡¯s quests, we would go back to Yaksha. But overall, we weren¡¯t planning to spent more than ten days in the area, we had places to be and our way onwards was a long one.

 Chapter 135

    After we split with the three trappers, we continued further into the forest, with Adra leading the way together with Rai. Adra was better at looking for tracks and threats, so today she was teaching him how to get better at it. It had been one of our plans for the future, that those better at those general skills would teach them to the rest. So, I would teach them how to cook, Sigmir would teach us how to skin and process game, Rai would teach all of us how to sneak and Adra would teach tracking. In combat, each of us would keep their own specialisation, but the other skills could be quite useful, if each of us had some skill in it.


    As the two of them got ahead of us, I gently held Sigmir back a little, increasing the distance between us.


    ¡°What happened back there? You looked ready to get violent.¡± I asked, looking her over in concern.


    ¡°I¡­¡± she started to answer, when suddenly, Ylva left the Hallow she had been in and materialised next to us.


    ¡°It was me. When the old man talked about the black wolves and their foul ancestors, I got so angry. Those were the ones that drove away my pack.¡± Ylva explained.


    ¡°And neither of us is used to her increased power. With both of us having crossed the first divide, the connection is deeper and I was not prepared for her feelings influencing me.¡± Sigmir added.


    Lenore left her Hallow as well, materialising on my shoulder and adding her own opinion, ¡°Could it be that you can¡¯t quite control your powers due to the method of acquiring them? Normally, you would devour them one after the other, not get an infusion of concentrated power as you got, maybe you will have to digest the power you feasted on before you can fully control it.¡±


    Lenore had a unique viewpoint, as she was both a spirit-beast but she also had been in my mind during the ritual, allowing her to understand my actions and what exactly had happened far better than someone who had just watched from the outside. I certainly placed great weight on her opinion on this matter and it seemed like Ylva did so, too.


    ¡°So, how do I digest the power?¡±  she asked.


    ¡°Meditation? Maybe it¡¯s just a matter of time?¡± I suggested, not really sure how spirit-beasts worked in that regard.


    ¡°Could work. Stay outside the Hallow for now, so there are no further complications regarding your bond.¡± Lenore added to my idea.


    ¡°You want to stay outside as well, Lenore? It is quite the nice day after all.¡± I asked, suppressing a smile. Ever since we had met, Lenore was enjoying the warmth and comfort in her Hallow, compared to the windy and cold outside world.


    ¡°I will go back into my Hallow, I want to go over the things we did last night, maybe I understand more, compared to before.¡± she answered, her voice dripping with self-sacrificing sincerity, as if she wanted nothing more than stay outside but was making the great sacrifice of staying in her Hallow to work. I may have snorted a little in amusement, causing her to cackle in laughter as she disappeared from my shoulder.


    Sigmir and I slowly continued on our way, while Ylva loped ahead, joining the other two, adding her nose to the scouting. As we walked, I realised that Sigmir still looked rather out of sorts and was radiating an insecurity I had not seen on her for weeks. I was getting quite good at reading her mood, but that did not surprise me, considering the amount of time we spent together.


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    ¡°Dear heart, what is wrong?¡± I asked in a soft, gentle voice.


    ¡°I was about to lose control. I don¡¯t lose control, that was the whole point of my father¡¯s training, to control myself, even when the battle-lust burns in me and I want to channel it, fighting till I drop.¡± she answered, her voice sad and defeated.


    ¡°But you did not lose control. You not only controlled yourself, you also controlled another that was pushing you, holding her back. So, an outside force was pushing at your control but you managed to keep control.¡±


    ¡°I almost lost it. What if I lose it and hurt you?¡± her voice a strained whisper.


    I stopped her, turning her to look at me. Sadly there was still the huge height-difference, but I stretched the vines of my Eisblumen downwards, using them to lift me up, so I could look directly into her eyes. ¡°There is no way you would hurt me, in control or out of control. No way I would ever believe that, you could never hurt me.¡± I said, my voice absolutely calm. I had seen her soul, I had touched her soul and accepted her for what she was. There was nothing more intimate, no higher trust I could imagine, so the idea that she would harm me, felt utterly ridiculous. I knew, in the bottom of my heart, in the depth of my soul, that I was safe in her hands. She was, quite literally, my rock, my mountain.


    On a whim, I reached with my mind towards her, not to strike but in an attempt of the reverse. It was not as intimate as joining our souls together, but I wanted her to feel what I was feeling, the absolute confidence I had in her. There was a feeling of contact, almost as if we were rubbing against each other, and her eyes went wide. I felt her, not just next to me, but similarly to the feeling when I was conversing with Lenore in her Hallow. Remembering how I was able to communicate with her, I tried sending feelings over the connection, remembering the many times I had been lying in her arms, the times we had kissed, trying to send her the feelings of contentment, trust and love I felt for her.


    There was an answer, a little hesitant at first, maybe she was not quite used to the strange way of communicating, but I felt her trust in me, the trust that I would be with her, that she wouldn¡¯t be alone.


    ¡°Hey, will you come along?¡± Adra¡¯s voice pulled us from our reverie and the connection between us broke, leaving both of us a little reeling. But from the look on Sigmir¡¯s face, she had felt what I wanted her to feel and it had had the effect I wanted it to have.


    There was a smile on her face, as we continued after Adra and Rai, holding hands despite the terrain we were moving on.


    The rest of the day passed without any great incident, the others found a few wolf-tracks but no wolves or we would have started on our work early. Shortly before dusk, we made camp in the foothills of the southern mountains, preparing to move upwards. The camp we made was in a small depression, hiding our fire from prying eyes. I excused myself from the work that day and took out the book I had been lent in the morning, hoping to get at least an idea of useful plants I could find in the area.


    As I was reading, it became clear that while there were quite a few useful herbs and plants, most of them were either very well hidden, like the Shadeleaves I had found before, or would only be useful during spring and summer, when they had leaves or sometimes blossoms or fruits. The book was not very thick, so I was able to get through it within an hour or so and afterwards I started to help the others with cooking and such. While I had read, Adra had gone out and taken down a small deer, so we had meat for the next couple of days and it was Sigmir¡¯s job to help with cooking.


    After a tasty dinner of deer-stew, we settled down for the night and I logged out as soon as Sigmir and I were in our furs, there were a few things I wanted to do.


    The first was to take the recording of the time I had spent reading, and thus looking at, the herb-lore book, saving it in an extra file so I could access it at any time. That way, I had essentially a copy of the book and could look things up, even after giving it back.


    The next steps were more mundane, taking care of biological necessity and such, but afterwards, I spent some time looking through the forums and streams if there were any about the three stooges and their night visit.


    Lo and behold, there was a thread of the main stooge, wondering just what happened and making veiled accusations of cheating against me, colour me surprised. But there was even footage and not for the first time, I wished for Lenore to be with me, as she was able to give me a useful perspective on things.

 Interlude: Stooges on the Forum

    Official Road to Purgatory-Beta Forum


    <table><tbody><tr><td>-Ghostblade, confirmed Beta-Account</td></tr></tbody></table>


    Hey guys


    Maybe one of you can help me, is this a bug or what just happened?


    darkness.avi


    Two figures stealthily get up next to the one recording, in an almost entirely dark room, the only light-source a small candle burning in a corner, next to the door. The floor is almost completely covered in furs, a few of which have someone sleeping on them, wrapped in blankets against the cold. One of the three, a wolf-beastman with slightly glowing, ember eyes, gestures towards one of the corners and all three start making their way towards that corner, taking care not to make any noise or wake anyone.


    The one recording must have some sort of low-light vision, as the image is far clearer than it should be, considering the light-source and the colours seem slightly false, but even with the low-light vision, it is far from clear what is going on. In the corner that the three are sneaking towards, four people are huddled together in two pairs, sharing their blankets and body-heat against the cold that is made obvious by the misting breath of the one recording.


    When they are almost in the corner, just a few steps away from the four sleeping figures, the image is plunged into darkness, the type of darkness one normally only finds deep underground, or in the heart of a banker.


    Seconds pass, the image a solid, black nothingness, the only indication that it is not simply a broken monitor is that the heads-up display is still there. One might think the video froze, but there are some slight, strange noises that could mean that the one recording tries to move until, after maybe a minute, a blue box informs the one recording that he died and will respawn in twenty-four hours.


    The image shifts, back to the beginning, and this time, all three viewpoints are displayed. The original one does not change in the slightest, the one that has to be from the wolf-beastman shows that the wolf has superior night vision, no false colours and the room if fully visible and the last one has no low-light vision but is guided by his two companions. The other two videos don¡¯t differ much from the original, the three get up and sneak towards the corner and things go dark.


    But there are differences, the one from the wolf-beastman shows the lying figures a lot better and that one of them figures opened her eyes just before the darkness enveloped them.


    Once things went dark, the original video is unchanged again, but when the blue box tells the player that he is dead, strange noises and swirls and flashes of colour disturb the darkness in the second point of view, creating what appears to be some sort of strange drug-trip. But the trip does not last long and soon, the swirling colours are replaced by another blue box, again telling the player that he too, died.


    Seconds afterwards, slight noises, like a soft scratching sound is heard from the third view-point. The noises continue, until suddenly the darkness is gone, for a second replaced with a view of the room the recording had started in. But right in front of the recording one¡¯s eyes, a small figure stands, wrapped in a dark cloak and holding a glinting silver knife, dripping with blood.


    And then, that image too, is replaced with the blue screen, telling the player that death has come for him.


    --


    So, you¡¯ve seen what we have seen. What you can¡¯t see on the video are the strange sensations. When I was in that darkness, I was sure there was something or someone else there with me.


    Ghostslash, the second viewpoint, said the same, only that he was experiencing strange sensations he can¡¯t explain in addition to the swirling lights, some smells a taste in his mouth, stuff like that. In addition, shortly before he died, he felt some sort of burning pain in his chest.


    And, last but not least, Ghostfire, the third viewpoint, says that at first, he was feeling cold, as if he was walking outside in the snow, just worse. As if he was lying in frigid water or something. After the cold, he felt as if someone was touching him, just soft touches, maybe some wind, hard to say.


    But once the touching ended, the pain began, small pin-pricks, followed by something cold ripping into him, he says it felt as if the cold froze him alive. And then, what he described as the worst pain he had ever felt, inside the game and outside. As in, not even funny, why the hell would anyone subject themselves to so much pain. Normally, the pain-response in Road to Purgatory is unpleasant, short bursts of pain that tell you when you screwed up, but never seriously bad.


    Well, that is, until yesterday, when we recorded the video. He described it, as the sensation of having your brain ripped out through your nether-passage.


    So, guys, can anyone tell me what happend? I mean, obviously, we got killed. But how? What the hell happened there? Some kind of bug? Some kind of cheat? I mean, it just got dark and we died, seems slightly imbalanced, even if it is legit. And what¡¯s with the pain-response Ghostfire talked about? Should a game seriously hurt?


    This book''s true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.


    Cheers


    Ghostblade


    <table><tbody><tr><td>-Harms, confirmed Beta-Account</td></tr></tbody></table>


    How about git gud?


    Seriously though, not a lot to work with here. I mean, you died one by one, so that might mean something. But what? No idea. Guess you got hit with some sort of crowd control and finished off once you were helpless but that¡¯s just my assumption, no idea how valid it is.


    About the pain, good question, there might be types of magic that amplify the pain itself, not sure. Let¡¯s see what Pantheon says about it, before going apeshit, might just be a bug.


    I could swear I¡¯ve seen the chick before.


    <table><tbody><tr><td>-Tarrin, confirmed Beta-Account</td></tr></tbody></table>


    Wait, I¡¯ve seen you around, right, Ghostblade? The three of you were the guys who made that stream in which they just made the first couple of quests in their starting-towns before meeting up and heading out together, on their own. You made a couple more, mainly showing how you got to some other town and started trap-hunting in the area, claiming that the EXP were awesome. But you only started wave three, so if you managed to get anywhere near level twenty, I would be quite surprised. If so, I think I know what happened with you.


    <table><tbody><tr><td>-Ghostfire, confirmed Beta-Account</td></tr></tbody></table>


    Yes, we peaced out of the starting-town post haste. We play online cause we want to play together, if we wanted to play with scripts, we would do theater.


    <table><tbody><tr><td>-Tarrin, confirmed Beta-Account</td></tr></tbody></table>


    Well, okay then, here is what I think. Unless I¡¯m grossly mistaken, I¡¯ve seen two of those you attacked before, in one of the highlights from Pantheon, the first or the second, I don¡¯t remember. There, they stood on some sort of plateau and the smaller one was showing that magic was serious business, as she skewered a couple dozen wolves on falling icicles.


    Made quite a few people take note that someone had serious AoE-magic that early, like, a week or two after the game launched. People placed bets that they are among the most powerful player characters at the time.


    So, unless you observed them and got some info you are not sharing, I¡¯ll assume that the two of them continued to kick ass and take names. That means, you took three low-level newbie scrubs and tried to mess with someone who is probably placed somewhere near to top when it comes to power level.


    Anyone surprised that the three got their asses kicked into orbit?


    <table><tbody><tr><td>-Do¡¯rodra, confirmed Beta-Account</td></tr></tbody></table>


    Wait, I remember that video, Highlight Reel, Week two.


    Shit, that looked awesome.


    <table><tbody><tr><td>-Morgana, confirmed Beta-Account</td></tr></tbody></table>


    To shed some light into the darkness here, even if it is against my inclination, let¡¯s start with some facts. First of all, sneaking up on peacefully sleeping people is a no-no, someone might just take that as a hostile action and take measures to protect themselves.


    You know, like we did.


    Thus, the next thing: anyone sleeping without some sort of alarm-system is simply a fool, whether in the wild or in an open tavern-room. That alarm-system can be formed by setting guards and sleep in shifts, or you can use other measures.


    You know, like we did.


    And finally, if someone gives you a warning, after demonstrating their ability to make good on that warning, maybe, just maybe, consider following the warning the next time.


    I told you, I would teach you the meaning of pain and the meaning of fear.


    Consider that lesson one. And, unless Pantheon blunted a couple of my toys when used against players, lesson two will come after you respawn.


    And No, I¡¯m not sharing just what I did to you or what I¡¯m planning to do.


    Finally, just as a public service announcement, trying to take on an elemental spellcaster who is surrounded by his or her chosen element(s) increases their power multi-fold. In other words, if you attack a watermage on the ocean, don¡¯t be surprised if you drown. Or, if you attack a fire mage in a burning building, expect to get burned. Which you should anyways, if you are in a burning building, but a fire mage will do a better job of it.


    Oh, and just for the fun of it:


    The unknown troubles on your mind


    Maybe your mind is playing tricks


    You sense and suddenly eyes fix


    On dancing shadows from behind


    And have you felt your neck skin crawl


    When you''re searching for the light?


    Sometimes when you''re scared to take a look


    At the corner of the room


    You''ve sensed that something''s watching you


    You find it hard to look again


    Because you''re sure there''s someone there


    Yes, someone is there. And it is I.


    So stay within the light


    There''s something alive in the darkness


    I can feel the power and my might


    I am the one you should not blame


    Hallowed be my name!


    <table><tbody><tr><td>-Harms, confirmed Beta-Account</td></tr></tbody></table>


    Ass-kicking confirmed, I guess. And, quoting Iron Maiden while doing it, so bonus points.


    But even when you said you won¡¯t share, just a hint how to get that sort of multiple minutes-long crowd control? I mean, shit, once you get hit by that, you are just boned.


    So, you were highlighted in reel two? Don¡¯t think I¡¯ve seen that, but I¡¯ve seen you before.


    Right, in [that] thread, that¡¯s you right? Where did you get the awesome NPC-companion?


    <table><tbody><tr><td>- Danilli of the Raging Storm, confirmed Beta-Account </td></tr></tbody></table>


    I think I tried calling your boss once. But he screened my calls and tried to reach me afterwards by contacting some strange alien-guy. Could you pass on a message?

 Chapter 136

    I watched the videos posted in the thread a couple of times, even going so far to pull the video from my point of view, to get an idea which of my actions had caused what reaction. It was quite interesting, the colours they were seeing, the best comparison I could come up with were random hits on a typewriter. Getting a meaningful picture that way would be akin to randomly hitting keys and hoping to get a novel, if you wanted a specific picture, it would be akin to getting a specific novel. With a single try. So, it would be nigh impossible to use that method to create mental illusions.


    But the impressions of the last guy were interesting, I would need Lenore to help me with a few tests. Hopefully, I could use the blood of that guy as a medium to target him, they were now primed to cry on the forum, if strange things happened to them, especially after my threat. And, what better test-subjects could one want, three idiots that kindly supplied me with a reason to use them.


    I logged back into the game, orienting myself for a second, before getting comfortable and starting to confer with Lenore over our mental connection.


    ¡°I have acquired the last moments of the fools who tried to attack us tonight.¡± I told her, excitement tinging my thought.


    ¡°Oh, so they shared them? You told me, it might happen, but why would anyone supply their enemies with such knowledge? Are they stupid?¡± She asked, her mental voice incredulous.


    ¡°Possibly. But, they did not know I would see the information and hoped someone else could tell them what we did and help them formulate a strategy against it. I placed a small germling, a seed if you will, reminding them about the threat I made. If we manage to attack them using the blood I took, we might get even more information.¡± I answered.


    ¡°If we want to do that, and conduct a meaningful test, we will need to try it on other beings first, so we know that you can actually use the blood to attack someone you don¡¯t see. We managed to attack the dryad a while back, but we could easily see her. And, while you were able to get a direction towards Jongarn, that was far from sufficient to attack him.¡±


    ¡°So, we should try to catch some game, instead of killing it?¡± I asked, not quite happy. After the ill-fated events with the collars and later seeing myself in Jongarn, I had told myself that I would kill my enemies, not experiment on them.


    ¡°Yes. We need to know our capabilities if we want to learn more about magic, you know that.¡± she gently chastised me. It was humorous, now, she was pushing me forward, normally, I was the one who pushed the her into trying things she was not quite comfortable with. I mentally gave her my acceptance and she sent back supportive thoughts about my own attempt to develop a conscience. But even with a conscience, sometimes animal experiments were necessary. I would gladly use the stooges for all my experiments but I had a feeling that Pantheon would not view a continued imprisonment of other travellers kindly.


    I focused on the images I had seen on the forum, sending them to Lenore in as pure form as I could. She agreed with me that manipulating what other beings saw was limited to blocking everything, as the paths were slightly different for everyone, so we would need to either understand how body, mind and soul were exactly connected so we understood the underlying principles or we would have to painstakingly map the responses out for every new enemy. And, if we could do that, we could just use classical conditioning to bend them to our will.


    Something else she noticed was that we dropped the blindness we had used originally after getting into their heads. We would have to get better with keeping that up if we wanted our enemies in the dark, literally, just for those moments we were suddenly kicked out of someone¡¯s mind. Lastly, she lamented that we had no subject to test if the impressions she had studied were the same for everyone or how much they varied. If we could send an impression that gave one being the sensation of a small prick and another being the sensation of being stabbed with a spear, it was less useful than knowing what they would feel. It was something we would have to find out and it would be with beings that told us what they felt. Maybe some sort of covert testing, the results should be quite obvious.


    Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author.


    As I was thinking about those sensations, I had an idea that I wanted to try out later, alone. It involved Sigmir and a different sense of sensations and their testing. But that was only for the two of us, without Lenore, and only with her consent.


    ¡°Don¡¯t worry, I have little interest in watching you two entertain each other. But, if you manage that, would you share the process with me? I would be grateful.¡± Lenore sent, and there was a distinctly naughty undertone to her thoughts and it was directed at Ylva. The two of them had been close before they had joined us and the few times Lenore had left her Hallow unprompted, they had spent the time close together. I firmly suppressed further imagination in that direction, it was one of those things that would result in strange nightmares. Hopefully, it was not too late.


    We discussed further ideas what we could do in our tests, until I got too sleepy. Lenore had a watch later, so she left her Hallow and waited in the outside world. I felt Sigmir next to me, so I grabbed her arm and draped her around me, snuggling into her and taking comfort in her closeness, before quickly drifting off to sleep.


    The next morning, I was awakened shortly before dawn, when Lenore spotted something sneaking into the direction of our camp and alerted me using our connection. Even before opening my eyes, she shared what she was seeing. She had taken post on a high branch, that allowed her to keep watch in all directions and there was a large cat moving towards us. Her own power was not suited to attack an animal like that, so I had to help. After a quick, mental discussion, I channelled darkness magic through her, constructing a simple, weakening curse first. It would give me some feedback on the cat¡¯s strength and weaken it.


    Sadly, darkness was not well suited for direct attacks, so I slipped out of Sigmir¡¯s embrace and our shared furs, pulling my cloak around me, with the Weaver¡¯s Fury inside. My curse had drastically reduced the cat¡¯s vigour, so I tried something new, using a concealed Observe through Lenore. There was no feedback that it had done anything, so it might be something that I couldn¡¯t channel through her. Maybe because it was a skill, not a spell.


    I contemplated drawing the pre-dawn shadows around me and play a game of hide and seek with the cat and realised that it was a good opportunity. The cat was already weakened and it seemed to be a loner, making it good prey. I did just that, conceal myself with both my stealth-skill and my magic, carefully moving towards it.


    Sneaking up on the weakened cat was childsplay, thanks to Lenore, and I started to slip a Torpor curse into it, watching as it started to stagger and fell down. Observe told me that it was a level forty lynx, nothing to be excited about. When I was next to it, Hard Ice quickly formed into shackles, immobilising and silencing it, before it even realised what had happened.


    Lenore came down from her lofty perch, landing on my shoulder.


    ¡°First with hair and line of sight?¡± she asked, reminding me of the magic I had used to find Jongarn, trying out if it would work to strengthen magic.


    After ripping out some hair, hopefully getting the roots as well, I walked off a little and used two more curses on the cat, neither terribly powerful but there was a magical feedback that I was able to judge. The first, without the hair, was slightly harder to cast and took a little more Astral Power, compared to the one used with hair.


    ¡°So, let¡¯s move on to blood.¡± Lenore eagerly supplied. There was a strange animosity for our test-subject, maybe it was some sort of racial dislike for cats.


    ¡°Soon. I want to wake at least Sigmir, just in case we get visitors. I don¡¯t really like the idea of getting attacked by Nethersprites while I try to collect data.¡±


    Lenore stayed behind, while I gave Sigmir a gentle kiss to wake her, despite realising that she had been awake all along.


    ¡°Dear, could you watch over me while I try to confirm a few things with magic?¡± I asked, when she opened her eyes and smiled at me.


    ¡°Sure, but I want another of those.¡± her smile grew a size and I paid her, even doubling her asked-for price.


    After helping her up, I walked back to Lenore and we started on our experiments.

 Chapter 137

    ¡°Let¡¯s see what happens with normal blood.¡± Lenore said, when I returned with Sigmir.


    Sigmir looked slightly worried when she saw the bound lynx, but did not protest my actions.


    ¡°Once with line of sight and once without. I just wish we had the time to try how distance plays into the equation. Oh, well, not this morning.¡± I answered, while making a small cut into one of the lynxes¡¯ paws, not damaging the fur, so we could skin it later. Blood welled up and I seperated it onto four ice-shards, serving as petri-dishes.


    I walked a few steps away, turned and cast another curse, this one without blood to help with targetting or anything like that. Again, there was some resistance, very much like before when I did the control-test for the influence of hairs. I had been worried that the weakening of my test-subject might make it easier, or possibly repeated attacks wearing down the resistance. But, no, the resistance was as strong as before.


    The blood helped, allowing me to get a stronger impression of the cat¡¯s existence, to cast my spells at and it was easier to curse it.


    The next experiment was walking away, getting some distance and breaking line of sight. Normally, I would be hard-pressed to affect the cat, only by using my knowledge of its position, I would be able to attack it. I focused on the blood and managed to get a connection to strike through. The next step was to wait, I knew that blood lost its potency quickly after leaving the body, unless I used Blood Magic to seal the power inside the blood. Would it be the same for its usage as a ritual component?


    Ten minutes later, I knew the answer. Using it after five minutes was almost impossible and by ten minutes, I was unable to get a better read than with the hairs I had tried before, only getting a direction. So, the essence was the key for real targeting but getting a rough read was even possible with normal blood?


    Now, what would happen if I used blood with the power, or essence, sealed in it?


    I walked over to my lab-cat - for once the lab-mice won - and pressed my knife against the wound I had made before, letting some fresh blood well up, before using Blood Magic to draw more. When I did, the cat went insane, trying to break the shackles even as its own bones were breaking. Scowling, I quickly moved away, not wanting to watch the animal suffer. Somehow, it felt just wrong, but it was a necessity. I needed to know if the sealing with Blood Magic made a difference.


    My first spell was easily cast, a lot easier compared to the one with normal blood, and I used it to subdue the cats mind, leaving it alive but unconscious. The cat would die but now it would not suffer. About fifteen minutes later, I tried again with empowered blood and it still worked just like before. I experimented with a new spell to cause damage, purely based on blood-runes, fitting as I was experimenting with blood magic. The spell was based on the exsanguinate rune, which I normally used to draw all blood out using a large wound. Now, I was curious what would happen if there was no large wound, but the blood was thoroughly affected by the rune.


    The spell worked, I gained a pittance of EXP and knew the cat was dead. When I walked back, there was some blood below the paw I had cut before, a little from seeping from the ears, eyes and nose, but not a lot. Looking closer and using my blood magic to probe the rapidly cooling cadavre, I noticed that most blood vessels simply had burst, in essence causing massive internal bleeding, as if multiple aneurysms had burst at the same time, all over the body. Death was about as close to instant as death can be. I filed the spell away as a highly effective way to kill, if I managed to get it delivered. It might work with a curse, but I doubted that it would be as effective as when used as a pure blood-magic spell, using Blood as a delivery-medium and as a target.


    If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. Please report it.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Skill increased</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You increased your skill: Blood Magic [44/100]</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Skill increased</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You increased your skill: Blood Rune-Mastery [52/100]</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    By now, Adra and Rai were awake as well and started breakfast, while I was taught how to skin a cat. I knew there were a lot of ways and now I would learn how to do it right.


    It was quite bloody as most of the meat had been soiled when the blood vessels had burst, so Sigmir decided to leave the meat behind. She scolded me for wasting it, but could understand that I had tested something and wanted to end the animals suffering as fast as possible. But we carefully skinned off the fur, making sure that no scraps of meat stuck to it and would rot later, making the fur stink.


    Sigmir even kept the teeth and claws, stating that there were quite a few useful ways to use them, even if she only made decorations or buckles out of them.


    After we were finished, we returned to the other two, who had waited with breakfast for us, and we ate together, before continuing our way towards the mountains.


    Today, it was my turn to learn how to scout and Adra scolded me that I was paying the same amount of attention to the various plants we saw, sometimes even checking if there was something in particularly protected spots I had read about in the herb-lore book, hoping to get lucky. It was not likely, as it was deep winter, but I had to try.


    Looking for tracks and scouting was incredibly dull, normally when travelling, I could distract myself by either ruminating about magic or talking to Lenore. Sometimes, I would even daydream about Sigmir. But while I was scouting, I had to be careful at all times, or I would miss something. Lenore was no help, she had decided to take a nap in her Hallow, catching up on the sleep she had missed during the night. I could forcefully use her sight if I needed to see if there was something hidden, but I would wake her and she would be one grumpy bird.


    Over the day, we saw a couple tracks, some older wolf-tracks, a few of deer-tracks and a relatively new boar-track which was something to watch out for. In the middle of the afternoon, we left the forested foothills behind us, and started our climb into the mountains. The previously dense forest got sparse, tall fir-trees giving way to smaller, often gnarly, pines. The snow made our footing precarious, forcing us to slow down and move extremely careful. I even went so far, to reach out with my Ice Magic, always prepared to assert my power, just in case it became necessary. We decided that scouting was a great thing, but the biggest danger locally was not posed by attacks, at least not by attacks from other living things. An avalanche could be seen as an attack, you only had to ask the wolves we had fought in the small gorge, a couple of days ago.


    A natural avalanche would be much worse than what I had done there and I was the only one who had a chance if we got caught in one. So, our formation tightened up and we stuck close together.


    In the late afternoon, Lenore awoke and I asked her to take a look around, what the terrain above us looked like. I knew that there would be a treeline and above it, our journey would be much harder. My plan was to either make a semi-permanent camp below the treeline or move below it each day and make a new camp. I had no desire to make camp above it, unless there was a pressing need or a great spot to do so.


    About five minutes after Lenore had taken flight, I felt her approach us at high speed, the fear in her mind standing out like a beacon. I frowned and reached out to her, quickly understanding the situation. Two wind raptors had decided that Lenore was just right as an afternoon snack.


    I called everyone to a stop and asked Adra to get ready to shoot. While she readied her bow, I closed my eyes, not to channel magic through Lenore but simply to avoid mentally locking onto anything until the wind raptors were in sight. I knew where they would be, thanks to my contact with Lenore, so I crafted my spell and let it fly a moment after Lenore was in sight.


    My estimation for their speed was spot on and just after they were in sight, an icicle speared through the lead bird. Moments later, Adra¡¯s arrow pierced the other, her arrows quite a bit faster than my own icicles.


    Both birds gave some EXP and I realised our error. There were a couple of useful materials in the birds and we really should get them. I muttered an oath and we started towards the area they had to have fallen into.

 Chapter 138

    Making our way over to the area the stupid wind raptors had fallen in was a lot harder than expected. The snow was shifty and treacherous, lying on the broken and rocky mountainside. Even if I was able to keep the snow from shifting under us, if I focused and used a lot of magic, the rocks below were not subject to my power and if the foundation shifted, it was seriously hard to hold the upper layers in place. After we almost fell, due to a rock shifting and rumbling down the mountain, producing a small avalanche, I resorted to brute force. It took large amounts of magic, forcing me to rest and meditate once, but I was able to simply produce a solid path of ice, complete with footholds on top and spikes underneath, placing it on top of the snow. Walking on the path distributed our weight over a huge area, reducing the weight transferred on individual areas. It was the same idea behind snow shoes, only taken to ridiculous levels.


    But, it allowed us to make the journey within thirty minutes, with little to no danger. It would have been faster, but we had to walk down into a valley and up on the other side. When we got into the area, I had reached the point of regretting the idea to look for the raptors, but sometimes, you have to check out the last nook and cranny of a blind alley.


    We looked around the rocky slope, searching for the downed birds, when another being announced that it was hungry. Or maybe it announced something else. The noise was a mix between a roar a bark and a groan, sounding almost like a rockslide going downhill. Everyone spun around, looking for the source of the noise, and it was quite easy to spot, making me wonder why we had not seen it before.


    It was a brown bear, slightly larger than even the strengthened Ylva, its back about as high as Adra or Rai. But where Ylva was slender and long legged, the bear had roughly three times her mass, maybe more. But just the size and mass was not what drew my attention, the blood around its snout did. It was quite clear that we had disturbed its meal. So, being a polite bear, it wanted to invite us for dinner. Or was that, as dinner?


    Running would be pointless and I doubted that we could annoy it more, if we tried, so I observed it and was informed that it was a Brown Mountain Bear and level sixty-two. Sometimes, the species names seemed so incredible informative, I could not help myself but groan. My use of observe was answered with another roar.


    I had a feeling that killing it would be child¡¯s play, at least for me. Just cause an avalanche and it will bury the bear. What made it a bad idea was that it would also bury us and the surrounding mountainside. But mostly that it would also bury us.


    The bear roared another challenge and started its lumbering charge towards us. Seeing it barrel towards us, I considered the avalanche again. That was, when Sigmir started to glow red and started sprouting the thin, silvery fur again and answered the challenge with a howling roar of her own. When I had considered what to do, she had taken Ylva back into her Hallow and was now preparing to meet the charge, axe and shield in hand.


    Knowing that I could help with that, I raised my hand and drew runes to produce a halo of darkness that would increase her strength and speed, seven runes, three Dark Radiance as a medium and two each of Strengthen and Hasten. I kept the formation open, channelling power into it to give Sigmir a prolonged buff, taking the burden to maintain it on myself.


    Next to me, Adra had her spear in hand while Rai had drawn his blades, not that I thought he would do much. Concentrating to my utmost, I kept the formation for Sigmir going and started drawing a second one, this one targeting Adra, buffing her up just the same.


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    While we prepared, the bear had gathered speed and Sigmir had braced herself to stop it, so it could not simply run us over. Part of me wanted to simply jump aside, hoping that it would barrel down the mountain but I knew that my hope was unrealistic. The bear knew the mountains and their treacherous nature much, much better than us, so hoping that it would overshoot that badly was just wishful thinking.


    The bear tried to use its bigger mass to run her over, while Sigmir used her shield to take the impact, getting pushed back a couple of steps, before rallying and striking back, using her axe. At the same time, Adra and Rai attacked as well, from the sides.


    Adra managed to poke a hole into its shoulder, while Rai¡¯s attacks might have tickled the bear, but maybe not. There was no visible indication that it had even noticed him. Adra on the other hand had to quickly jump back, to avoid its paw. That opening allowed Sigmir to bury her axe into its front leg, drawing more blood.


    The bear reared back onto its hind-legs and let out another roar. It washed over me and I felt like I had stuck my head into a ringing bell. For a moment, I lost concentration on the buff-spells I was channelling and both fizzled out before I could restore them. When I looked over to my companions, I saw that Rai had stumbled back, blood trickling from his ears, while the other two seemed shaken, like me, but still fine.


    After the stunning roar of the bear, Adra and Sigmir kept trying to grind it down, but it was slow going. Their attacks managed to breach its defenses but not deep enough. Even Adra¡¯s spear, which gave me shivers, just from looking at it, managed to get maybe a hand-width deep before getting stuck in the rock-solid muscles the bear was packing. Sigmir and her one-handed axe were even worse off, her axe only got a finger-width or two into the muscles before losing momentum.


    My options to help them were rather limited, I had a strong feeling it would shrug my icicles off without even blinking and ensnaring it with darkness magic was a joke.


    Thinking that a curse might work, I threw one together to weaken its speed. Sigmir already was able to hold her own against its strength but every hit she could simply avoid was one she did not have to endure. So, I focused to increase its weakness, instead of decreasing its strength.


    The curse worked, sort of. The bear was slower but I felt it pushing against my curse, quickly weakening the curse. But the other two were able to use the curse¡¯s effect, getting a few better hits, striking where the muscles were not as thick and protective.


    When the bear reared back, I saw an opportunity, guessing that it would roar again, and instantly projected three runes, shooting a small drop of liquid moonlight - right into its opening snout. Once it was inside, my control was cut off and the liquid moonlight did its thing. The effect looked almost comical, instead of a roar, there was only a choked whimper coming from its mouth, alongside a cloud of icy mist. Within seconds, the bear started to twitch and keel over and I had a good idea what had happened. The intense cold inside its snout had probably caused the blood in its brain to rapidly cool down. There were few more delicate organs than the brain but the moist environment of the snout and the soft tissue nearby were excellent conductors for heat, or in this case cold.


    Shortly after the bear had fallen, we got EXP and relaxed.


    Sigmir and Rai took care of skinning the bear, it had a good coat of fur, maybe good enough to make a new armour and if not, we could sell it for profit. Probably not in Yaksha but further west. While they did that, Adra and I looked around, quickly finding what the bear had been snacking on. The rest of a wind raptor alongside shattered remains of an icicle, were still lying in front of a cave. We had literally dropped food in front it the bears cave, almost right into its mouth. And then, we had disturbed the sudden windfall. No wonder that the bear had been slightly annoyed, first it was woken up by the delicious smell of blood, then it got disturbed while it was eating.


    But, judging by the cave, we had a good hideout to camp in, I doubted that anything would annoy us for a couple of days, out of respect towards the previous owner. It was not a tremendously large cave and the smell was strong and musky, but it would protect us from the weather and give us a good base-camp, slightly above the treeline.

 Chapter 139

    After deciding that we would stay here for the next couple of days, Adra and I started to clean the cave up. Or rather, I did. At first, Adra wanted to simply use her hands to toss out the debris left behind by the bear, but I balked. Most of it was just too disgusting to touch. So, I cheated. There was more than enough snow outside and I used my magic to drag some of it inside, piling it up in the deepest part before pressing it against the ground and wall while slowly moving it back out. It worked very much like a fine-bristled broom, cleaning to debris out in one fell swoop. Lenore snickered in my head and left her Hallow, to do her part. Again, we moved into the deepest part and she perched on my shoulder, explaining what she was planning. While her main element was Death, she had a passing familiarity with Wind magic, something I had tapped in once before. Now, she wanted to do something similar, with her forming the magic and me powering it through her.


    It seemed like an interesting idea, so I agreed and watched as she built her magic, a process that was both familiar and alien at the same time. The basics were the same compared to my own magic, but the way she constructed those basics and the end-result was different, especially the construction. But allowing my own power to flow into her was easy and after a bit of time, there was a nice airflow going on, pushing air out the bottom of the cave and drawing more in from the outside, quickly chasing the musky smell away.


    When I was done, I went back out and saw Adra shake her head at my frivolous use of magic, but I just laughed about it. Magic was a tool - an impressive and incredibly useful tool, but a tool nonetheless.


    The other two were still wrestling with the bear, having a load of fun trying to skin it, its fur had lost some of its durability with its death, making me think that it had had some sort of magical boost, but not all of it. As we passed them, I told Sigmir that Adra and I would be looking for a supply of firewood further down the mountain and that we would stay in the nearby cave while we hunted on the mountain. She just nodded and asked if we could get her a couple of sturdy branches so she could construct frames to stretch the pelts we already had.


    Searching for dry wood in a snowed-in forest was a barrel of laughs, it was less looking for wood itself but more, search for a protected spot that kept the wood free from snow. Lenore helped once again by flying reconnaissance and with her better vantage she was the one that found a tree that had fallen against a cliff, protecting it from most of the snow, especially the lower branches. After the first load of wood we carried to the cave, Adra asked Sigmir for her small axe, it worked quite well outside of battle, to cut wood. Adra and I worked even longer than Sigmir and Rai, getting enough wood for the next few days into the cave, cutting up quite a bit of tree in the process. It must have fallen some time in the spring or summer, the wood was pretty well dried, making for good firewood.


    When we got to the cave with the last load, I almost dropped it, laughing. Sigmir had placed the frame with the bear¡¯s pelt in front of the cave, like a door. It sealed most of the entrance, protecting us from wind and I had no doubt that there was a bit of a message there, for everything smart enough to understand. The message being, ¡°Those who sleep here, killed the previous owner. Are you sure you want to challenge us?¡±


    Inside, it was time to cook, today it was cooking with Adra and we made bear-stew. Not the best meat - too gamey and stringy - but we had far too much of it to just let it go to waste. In addition, I had found a couple of edible roots in the forest, adding some fresh veggies to our diet.


    The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there.


    For the evening, Sigmir and I split a little from the other two, just relaxing together, not doing anything but just being together, basking in the presence of the other. I was tempted to try my mind-magic ideas but we were on a dangerous mountain and I had no idea how well they would work, no need to invite trouble. But looking at the stars together was very enjoyable, even without being naughty. Or maybe, because neither of us was feeling naughty.


    It was interesting, the stars looked quite similar to those seen from Earth, if there was no light-pollution at least. I wondered if Pantheon had simply copied them, if they had taken the night sky we knew and slightly altered it, or if there was more to it. I did not know enough about astronomy to pass judgement but it was something that made me curious. The world of Mundus was so similar in some aspects, geography for example, but also so very foreign.


    The next morning, while the others prepared breakfast, I experimented a little. If the three stooges logged in right after their twenty-four hours death-timer, based on the real world, was up, then they had been able to revive about two hours ago. So, I was curious if I was able to get at them using Blood Magic and if not, why.


    ¡°Pica, can you show me the Road to Purgatory stream from Ghostfire?¡± I asked my personal capsule attendant.


    ¡°Checking. Yes, the stream is completely public, so I can do that. However, to ensure fairness, the stream will be delayed by ten minutes and while you are watching, you cannot move or communicate.¡± the attendant answered and a parchment materialised in my hand. On it, I was looking at the web-interface for the streaming-service and I watched the three stooges wander around a town, apparently Yaksha.


    Hoping that they did not log out in recently, I rolled up the parchment and got out the blood I had drawn from Stooge number three. Using the same methods I had used previously, I tried to channel magic, first to follow the link the blood provides back to the source. What I gained was not really an image, just a mental impression of his body and existence. But with the link, I formed runes of Blood, letting them seep into the Blood in his body. There was a moment of resistance, but I focused, gently pushing forward, deeper into his being, until the resistance parted and the runes were linked with his entire being. Then, I channelled power into the runes and the blood I was linked to was forced out of the confines it had previously been in.


    The power I had used to link myself quickly evaporated while forming a humanoid shape, just a little seeping out from the head and the groin. I felt Lenore chortle in delight about the successful test, to her, it is the best kind of magic. Incredible range and with improved skill, it might be possible to use a single hair for such an effect. Maybe.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Skill increased</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You increased your skill: Astral Meditation [47/100]</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Skill increased</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You increased your skill: Blood Rune-Mastery [53/100]</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Skill increased</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You increased your skill: Blood Magic [46/100]</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    Sitting back, I felt baffled. Killing someone at such a huge distance would be incredibly bad for the game. I could easily imagine the amount of damage I could do at my relatively early power-level, without having even a single mastered skill, so I didn¡¯t even want to try to imagine what could be possible with more skills and power.


    Feeling it was my duty as a tester, I wrote a ticket using the ingame-interface and sent it to Pantheon, explaining what I had done and my opinions on the results such a mechanic would have for their game. Just getting caught, once, would be enough for a fate that rivaled perma-death in its severity. Blood Magic would be even more abhorred than it already was, especially amongst players.


    Out of curiosity, I opened the streams of him and his two buddies, watching until the time-delay got to the moment in which I had used my magic. The three of them had walked down the street, without a care in the world, when suddenly his stream just turned black with the message, You died, respawn in twenty-four hours. But the streams of his buddies were more interesting, their friend just gasped once before falling to the ground, like a puppet with cut strings. On closer examination, blood was seeping from his ears, eyes, nose and mouth and there was no indication of breathing or any other sign of life. Just, sudden death.


    I would have to wait and see what Pantheon would do about my ticket. And look into the forum in the evening, just to see what the stooges had said. But for now, we had wind raptors to hunt.

 Chapter 140

    Hunting wind raptors was fun. So much fun that I wanted them all to spontaneously freeze and die. Even combustion would be fine with me.


    To hunt them you first had to find them. Sadly, from what we had seen to this point, they lived in nesting partnerships, possibly permanent ones, in their eyries in some high and impossible to get to places, unless one had the ability to fly. So, getting them where they lived was close to impossible.


    Hunting them while they were out hunting was complicated. They hunted by circling high in the air, forming a figure-eight with their partner, each of them flying the figure in one direction, giving them excellent view of the ground below, allowing them to spot prey or warn them off attacks, long before the attack got to them. And, once they were warned, they could either dodge the attack or use what gave them their name. Wind raptor. Wind!


    Each of the stupid birds was quite adept when it came to wind-magic, far better than Lenore. Lenore was only able to use wind-magic to aid in her flying - making her faster and more agile - unless we cast magic together, when she was able to do more. The raptors on the other hand, the first pair we attacked used their magic to swat aside both attacks we used, my icicle and Adra¡¯s arrow, causing them to go wild. And afterwards, they dove down like a, well, hawk on a mouse, only to stop a few meters above the ground and use their magic to transfer their momentum into the air around them, causing massive downbursts to hammer us. It was not lethal but decidedly painful. I managed to snag one of them using an instant-cast icicle but its partner quickly fled back up, into the sky, screeching all the while.


    Not that we heard a lot of the screeching, the overpressure from the wind magic had caused  our eardrums to burst, at least those of Rai, Adra and me. Sigmir withstood it thanks to her increased durability whereas Rai was struck the worst, staggering unbalanced until I healed him up. While we were dealing with our own problems, the raptor quickly left the area.


    So, we had to search for more. But, without a plan, that was annoying as hell. There was the possibility of using Lenore as bait but I already knew how she would react to that, so I didn¡¯t bring it up. Getting mentally mooned by a bird once was more than enough.


    We continued looking for them while trying to come up with a plan, feeling that our best bet would be to take a shot at a pair, hide under a shield from Sigmir and me before attacking with arrows, thrown axes and maybe a throwing star from Rai.


    He had experimented a little with throwing his blades until I put a stop to that. Not only was he using blades not balanced for throwing, he was also dulling the edges of his weapons, making it a no-go. Instead. I made him a couple throwing stars out of Hard Ice, letting him play with those. They were decently balanced, but it was obvious that they needed to be made from a heavier substance to be effective. Sigmir had the same problem with her throwing axes but their bigger volume made even the lighter ice-axes quite effective against soft targets. He would need quite a bit of training until he could hit what he was aiming at, but at least with the throwing stars he didn¡¯t have to worry about hitting handle-first, like he had with his blades. Additionally, Sigmir had given him a couple of lessons with her axes, hopefully that helped as well.


    But back to our wind raptor-hunt. Finding the next pair took almost an hour, but at least we managed to scare up dinner during that time, a level forty mountain-goat that tried to run faster than a flying arrow. It did not succeed, and a careful application of my Ice Magic allowed me to get it down the cliff it had run up without triggering an avalanche.


    A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.


    We went higher and higher, searching for the raptors both in the air over the lower mountain and above us, but they seemed to be incredibly rare for their hunting-priority. But finally, we got to the top of the ridge we were climbing and found another pair, circling in the air below the other side. To get their attention, I shot an icicle at them, not even trying to hit or we would have to climb back down to get their carcass, or rather their claws, feathers and beak, those were the parts listed as valuable. We would take the whole bird and dump the useless parts once our bags were full.


    The icicle flew and the stupid birds did not realise the attack from above, focused on the ground below them, so I channelled my power for a second, causing the flying icicle to explode into a rain of razor-sharp shards, lacerating one of the birds but not killing it. But it was angered by the attack, that much was easy to understand from its screeching cries.


    Both raptors shot up high before going into a dive, just as we had hoped. I had prepared a solid sheet of ice that I could quickly raise above our heads and once their attack hit and they had lost their momentum, the other three would step out and attack. Sigmir and Rai only needed to get close to their targets because they were throwing weapons made out of my Hard Ice, so I was able to influence them without trouble, either shattering them into shards to changing their trajectory.


    The raptors dove and shortly before they were upon us, I raised the shield causing them to abort their attack and instead of transferring their momentum to the air around us, they kept it, levelling out at high pace. Adra got off her shot, piercing the wing of one raptor but neither Sigmir nor Rai had the projectile speed to get the other, not to mention the ability to hit it.


    Both raptors were screeching up a storm and heading up the mountain, following the ridge we were on. Hoping to get another shot at the wounded raptor, we started to go after them, deeper into the mountains.


    As we continued, the ridge started to level out, into a small plateau. There were still mountains rising up around us and between them was a wide valley, looking to my untrained eye as if a river had carved it in the summertime or maybe a glacier. The walls around us were steep and sheer, almost vertical, making the idea to climb them a difficult, possibly impossible proposition.


    In the sky above that valley, the two raptors were still trying to get away from us and it looked very much as if the wounded one had slowed down. We could almost smell the blood of our prey, as it tried to get away and none of us was inclined to let it, so we went after them, into the valley.


    I felt around a little, making sure that we were not walking on unsafe snow and die due to an avalanche or something equally stupid but no, the snow was packed and hard below us, allowing us to keep a fast pace on our chase. Around us, the mountains were coming closer, as the valley narrowed more and more until we reached an area where the seasonal snow seemed to turn into eternal, glacial ice. The valley was widened here, probably due to lake below the snow and the only way into the basin was through the valley we had walked through.


    The two raptors were circling in the valley, screeching their angry cries but now, they were answered. From the walls above us, more raptors leapt into the air, calling out their anger.


    ¡°By the ancestors!¡±  Sigmir cursed next to me and I mentally agreed.


    Above us, the two raptors we had chased were now obscured by an angry flock that darkened the sky.


    Adra cursed and added, ¡°We need cover!¡±, before looking around us, trying to find something, anything to hide under. But there was nothing in the valley, it was scrubbed clean by the movement of ice and snow each year.


    I observed a few of the raptors above, taking note of their level and trying to understand what they were planning. Most of them were roughly my own level, some lower, others higher but their sheer numbers could bury us. If they chose to do so, I somehow doubted that they would try to bury us, more like constant attacks with their magic, until we were battered and broken.


    Unbidden, Lenore added her vision to mine and I got a rough idea. The flock had organised in a single circle, a wheel that turned in a single direction. And they all had added their magic to the wheel, slowly speeding their flight, and the air around them. up. Now, I knew what they were planning. And I didn¡¯t like it one single bit.

 Chapter 141

    The moment I recognised the formation of birds for what it was, a gigantic group-casting, survival became my first priority. The simplest way, running away, was sadly not feasible; the narrow valley we had traversed to come into the basin we were now in was acting as a funnel, the wind-speed already reaching levels strong enough to rip the flesh from our bones. No, getting away would not be easy.


    The others were searching our surroundings, while I tried to come up with a way to at least delay the inevitable attack. There was just one way that either Lenore or I could think of, from the top of our heads. Weaken the birds¡¯ magic by diluting it. They moved the air with their wind-magic, so add something into the air that they have to move in addition but cannot influence with wind-magic and their magic should weaken.


    Raising my hands, I drew a magic formation focusing on mist and blizzard, not trying to meet their power head on but simply weakening it to buy the others time to find some sort of refuge. At first, I let a huge amount of magic flood into the formation, my eyes shining icy-blue in tune with the magic and the surroundings were bathed in dense white mist while the winds started to chill and small snowflakes and shards of ice were added. Not necessarily positive, at least not for Adra and Rai, both of whom were susceptible to cold-damage, but the pressure exerted by the wind-magic battering us down was lessened.


    But what I was planning was not a footrace, it was a marathon, I needed to hold the storm at bay until the others had some place for us to hide out until the birds hopefully tired themselves out and we could get away. Or¡­ something.


    With the storm howling around me, I looked for a calm centre within myself but in the storm I needed to move to be still. So, I started to move. Hesitatingly at first but quickly I remembered the times I had stood in a storm before, following the rhythm of the storm, dancing with the winds. No longer was my mind focused on pushing back the raptors¡¯ magic, my mind relaxed into the magic, letting my own flow freely, mixing with theirs.


    I was dancing in the storm and the storm was dancing with me. No longer was it an uncontrolled battering, hammering down upon the world, it had changed, turned into a true tempest. It was still lethal and I had no doubt that we would all die without shelter but somehow, it mattered a lot less than before. There was a sense of lightness, a sense of freedom that surrounded me. It was intoxicating.


    Lenore joined me in my dance, adding her own touch to our movements and I felt something strange, feathers were sprouting where normally hair was growing. I felt closer to Lenore than ever before, our minds mingling and merging, united in our tempestuous dance. In one moment, I was myself, earthbound and wingless, the next moment, I was soaring on raven wings, flapping them in tune to the winds around me, letting them take me where they wanted. The next moment, I was earthbound again, my movements full of sorrow about the lost freedom, the lost excitement.


    But not even my powerful resistance to ice and cold was able to ward of the brutal cold or the tiny ice-shards that lacerated my exposed skin. It was an exquisite pain, sharp and cold but mingling with it was the sheer ecstasy that was the magic around us. I felt my mind, my soul pull at their bodily shackles, trying to soar into the sky, unbound and untamed, joining the storm to ravage the lands.


    Suddenly, I was ripped from my dance, my mind pulled firmly back into my body that was carried through the storm. The howling around us increased, as if the storm was raging against the one who had taken me away from it, angry like a scorned lover. My mind was still reeling, swaying like a reed in the wind, tumbling like a leaf, whirled around by the storm.


    But my body knew the touch of the one who had taken me and instinctively pushed back against the battering storm that tried to pull me back. If Sigmir was taking me somewhere, I would trust her to do the right thing.


    This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.The wind around us was suddenly cut of and we were in the darkness and a deluge of blue screens forced my mind back into focus.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Experience gained</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>For interfering in a great magic working and causing it to backlash against its casters, you gained Experience: 24540 EXP gained.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>


    You reached level 54


    </td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Skill increased</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You increased your skill: Ice Rune-Mastery [62/100]</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Skill increased</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You increased your skill: Ice Magic [70/100]</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Skill increased</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You increased your skill: Astral Meditation [48/100]</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Companion Ability gained</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You gained the Companion Ability: Avatar: Raven¡¯s Shadow (incomplete)</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>By fully merging with your spirit-companion, your body temporarily takes on some of their characteristics and abilities. The ability is currently incomplete due to the lacking strength of you and your companion.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Title strengthened</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>Your title Tempestuous Dancer has been strengthened.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You danced with the storm and the Storm danced with you. Using dance to empower magical workings costs less stamina and strengthens the workings it fuels with the power of the blizzard. In addition, when you dance, the winds join in, protecting you and your dance.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Dungeon entered!</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You have entered an instanced Dungeon, the Morainian Cave. Only those of your party can enter this dimension from the outside.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You are the first Traveller entering the Morainian Cave. For the first three days, you gain the Dungeon Traveller-Buff, granting Bonus EXP.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Dungeon Explorer in effect.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    ¡°Are you alright?¡± Sigmir asked, while I blinked, looking around, trying to make sense of the situation.


    ¡°Yes, I think so. Where are we?¡± It looked like we were in some sort of narrow gap between frozen rubble. But there was a bit of a structure, similar to a tunnel going further down, into the mountain or, more likely, into the moraine. I wondered what kind of enemies we would face, if there was even a theme. I just hoped it was not undead-spiders.


    ¡°Rai found it. We didn¡¯t know that it was a dungeon before we went in. Now, we can either go forward, gaining strength or hope that the storm does not rip us apart.¡± Adra explained.


    ¡°What happened to you, out there?¡± Sigmir asked, still looking worried.


    ¡°I magically dueled with the complete flock. There was no way I would be able to meet them head on, magically, there were far too many birds. But, I was able to tilt the playing field a little, making them work harder and pay a lot more for their magic. Not sure how long the storm will rage, They fed a lot of magic into it and I added quite a bit of my own.¡± There was a vicious smile on my face. I had succeeded to a higher degree than I had anticipated, I had originally only wanted to slow them down, but judging by the message, I had to have caused their magic to recoil to the point that a couple of them got ripped apart. Now, if we only had been able to collect their corpses, it would likely allow us to turn in the quest from the guild as soon as we got back into town. We would have to keep our eyes open on the way back, maybe even dig a little in the fresh snow.


    I tried to feel Lenore but she seemed to have been affected even worse than I had been and was now completely exhausted, sleeping in her Hallow. Most likely due to the difference in divides between us, I assumed the Raven¡¯s Shadow was similar to the berserk-state Sigmir was able to use with Ylva, where she now grew silvery hair that looked very similar to Ylva¡¯s pelt. It made me curious what a full avatar-state would be like, would I get wings? Would Sigmir go full-on werewolf? Hopefully, I would be able to find out during the beta.


    But for now, we had a fully unexplored dungeon to explore.


    ¡°Let¡¯s rest before we head further in. I spent all my Astral Power outside and I would rather be at my best, we have no idea what awaits us in here.¡± With that, I seated myself, merging with the Astral River and letting its flow wash away my exhaustion. Hopefully, Lenore would awaken soon, I wanted her magical vision to guide us in this unfamiliar darkness.

 Interlude: Highlightreel III

    Under a relentlessly burning sun, a woman stands alone. Her only companion is her shadow, her only solace is the fact that she¡¯s found her prey. And what a magnificent prey it is, beyond the next dune, it is sunning itself, absorbing the burning rays that any reasonable being would avoid at all cost. But not that particular prey. Some might call it a dragon. They would be wrong.


    But it is a reasonable name for the prey. It is, after all, a huge lizard, almost four meters in length from head to tail and with a known penchant for expelling the sunrays it had soaked up beforehand in a concentrated burst of molten sand, scorching anything it touches. Its short legs are topped by razor sharp claws and the scaly ridges on its back glint with a metallic, golden glow in the burning sunlight. So, calling it a dragon is reasonable, as long as you are not in the vicinity of a real dragon. They might take offense. And a dragon, taking offense, goes on the offensive against those that offended it.


    Not for the first time, the huntress wonders if it had been the smart thing to do, mouthing off to her teacher, telling him she was ready to take on any trial to gain his teachings. But the method to reach the first divide had been a too juicy target. So, the huntress was sent out into the desert to kill this particular nuisance to the village and bring back its claws.


    A look into the sky tells the huntress that it is time, that the lizard should be entering its afternoon-lethargy before hunting once again and burrowing into the sand for the night. The time to strike has come.


    Silent as a ghost, the huntress moves upwards, almost to the crest of the dune but not over it. If she goes over, the lizard will see her and the fight will start. As her teacher taught her, the huntress pulls an arrow from her quiver, tipped with a sharp shard of black rock and starts the process of buffing. Her lips move in an almost silent chant, beseeching the ancestors and the gods to allow her arrow to strike true, to increase its damage and all the other effects that she can layer onto the arrow. It is not a true prayer to the divine, just the method she had been taught to channel her magic.


    One glow after the other appears, some settling into the arrow, others settling into the bow, the bow-string and the huntress herself. All for a single moment. Finally, the huntress¡¯ Astral Power is almost depleted but her first attack is guaranteed to inflict massive damage. Maybe even enough to slay the beast, despite its defenses and strength.


    With one last, deep breath, the huntress stepped up, onto the crest of the dune, looking down, instantly raising her bow and drawing the string back. The lizard looks up, irritated that his afternoon-nap has been disturbed and for a moment, a split-second, the world stands still.


    That moment of silence ends with the twang of the bow-string and an arrow, clad in various lights lances through the air, leaving behind a mirage of colours. The arrow strikes the lizard, penetrating deeply into its chest and the arrow dissolves into a blaze of light, evaporating the flesh around it. Blood spurts out, propelled by the spells that had been layered onto the arrow, increasing the damage, the pain stunning the lizard for a moment.


    But it had not been enough, the lizard inhales deeply, despite the huge wound that causes it to bleed out. It is driven by a single thought, revenge. To take the huntress with it, on its journey to the afterlife.


    The light around it seems to dim for a second and the lizard breathes out, a spray of white-hot, glowing sand is propelled through the air, towards the lone huntress. Instantly, she jumps back, rolling down the sand-dune. Above her, the intense heat causes the air to distort and shimmer, until a few seconds later, the spray peters out. Climbing back up, the lizard is currently in the process of running towards the dune, but with every step it takes, the next step is less secure until it stumbles across something and falls. The huge wound had taken its toll and the blood loss was quickly proving fatal.


    The huntress starts walking down the dune, when a cracking sound below her grabs her attention, causing her to look down. Surprise colours her features, when she realises that the breath-attack has been powerful enough to melt the sand below her, turning it into a rudimentary form of glass.


    But, with a smile on her lips, she walks towards the fallen lizard.


    The scene changes¡­


    From the mist, a shape, a ship is taking form and the silence of the seas is about to drift into a storm. The shape is the pride of the elven Kingdom Sabatorum, the newest symbol of their power, an attempt to show all of Mundus that the Naga are not the undisputed rulers of the Ocean.


    The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.


    On the ship, numerous elves are moving around, tacking the sails, preparing the mighty spell-cannons, making sure that everything is working just fine. It is their maiden-voyage and the sailors of the Tirpitz are proud to have been chosen.


    But below the waves, a shadow is moving, unseen, unknown, awoken from its slumber by the passage of the gigantic ship above. Only, to the shadow, the ship is not gigantic, just a large target. After a moment of deliberation, the shadow dives deeper into the dark ocean, before turning and speeding up, towards the intruder into its territory.


    Now, the shape of the shadow takes form, first, a huge, blade-like spear leads the way before being replaced by a sleek and deadly form, a form ready to hunt and kill.


    One of the sailors above notices the shadow, yelling out a warning but it takes a moment for the warning to be heard. A moment the ship might not have.


    The yelled warning is quickly replaced by the alarm-bell, calling all sailors to their stations and the magicians start to deploy the mighty magical shields but just as the shields start forming, they are broken through, the sword spearing into the lightly armoured belly of the ship, ripping apart wood and armour alike, causing a deep wound in the proud ship. A few unlucky, or maybe lucky, souls are instantly killed by the brutal attack.


    The swordfish is carried upwards by the remaining momentum and for a moment, the magicians that man the cannons see a chance to fight back against the true kings of the ocean, the mighty beasts that lurk beneath the waves. Simple arcane-magic is activated by sailors pouring their powers into the cannons, sending glowing spears of pure magic towards the creature that ripped into their ship, causing large chunks of flesh to be blasted away, leaving gaping wounds behind.


    One of the spears, whether by luck or by providence, hits a weak spot close to the head, causing a lethal wound. The swordfish sinks back beneath the waves, hiding in its natural habitat while the water around it turn red with blood. Above the waves, the sailors cheer, damage-control crews start to get the damage back under control.


    What they don¡¯t know, is that when there is blood in the water, the sharks start circling¡­


    Soon, the beasts will come and drag the proud ship into the depths, showing the world once again, that they are the true kings of the ocean.


    The scene changes¡­


    A frozen mountainside, wolves howl in the distance.


    One of the small gorges in the mountainside is covered in a smooth and slick ice-surface and the wolves in the area converge at the entrance into that gorge.


    Higher up in the gorge, four people stand ready to defend, two perched on fortifications out of silvery-white ice, the other two standing in the gap between the fortifications. Their situation looks grim, easily thirty wolves are snarling at the entrance of the gorge, ready to charge in and rip the four defenders to shreds for daring to stand against them.


    Almost as one, the wolves start running up the gorge, a snarling furball promising death to anyone foolish enough to stand in their way, that is, until the horrific picture they present changes into an image more suited to slapstick-comedy. The moment they try to keep their balance on the slick surface that coats the gorge, their previously purposeful charge turns into a yelping ball of sliding paws and falling wolves, taking away all their intimidation-factor. Some wolves start bleeding from punctures and cuts, caused by small but sharp icicles that are spread around in the gorge, forcing them to abandon the idea to crawl up.


    At the entrance, a huge, black wolf howls and it seems like the world is vibrating with its power. The ice protecting the gorge shatters, turning a useful barrier against the charge into an easily passed area that no longer protects anyone.


    On the walls, above their heads, a raven watches the wolves charge again and for a second, the left eye of the raven glows with dark light and the remaining six wolves start moving. The five smaller black wolves start running after their grey brethren while the huge wolf starts moving in a sedate pace, as if it is beneath it to run. Why should it, the prey is cornered and cannot escape.


    In the gorge, at the fortification, a small figure, clad in a black cloak smiles as she sees the wolves charging up. Raising one hand, she draws a magic circle, quickly but with a steady hand, the five symbols glow in three different colours, three silver, one pulsating red and the last one seems to draw all the light around it in, making it hard to look at. With the other hand, the smiling one draws a small flask filled with a deep crimson coloured liquid, a colour that seems incredibly similar to the pulsating red symbol.


    For a moment, the flask glows before its contents turn black and a strange, silvery mist floods out from the magic-circle, drifting towards the snarling wolves. The wolves get closer and, while the one who had just used a spell raises her arms above her head, the one in the middle braces for impact.


    A few wolves slam into the braced one, pushing her back while more wolves are stopped by the frozen fortifications, when the small one¡¯s eyes glow with silvery light and she starts moving her arms, almost like a conductor. And, like a conductor, her gestures seem to cause a noise to fill the area. A rumbling echo.


    For a second, nothing changes.


    And then the world turns white, as tons of snow crash down from above, burying most of the grey wolves before rumbling down the mountain, annihilating everything in its path.


    While the small being smiles down at the destruction she wrought, the black raven flies and lands on her shoulder before the images fade to black.

 Chapter 142

    After a while, Lenore woke back up again. She was moaning and groaning a little but I felt her elation of the joining we had experienced. It had been intense, standing in the storm, feeling the magic surging around us, ebbing and flowing, changing the very fabric of reality around us. I wondered how long it would take until the magic would dissipate, if it would at all. Hopefully it would, or things would get rather spicy. But for now, we had a dungeon to explore and I was quite curious what we would find.


    After explaining to Lenore what had happened, I opened my eyes back up and alerted the others that I was ready to continue.


    Once again, Sigmir took the lead with Rai right behind her while Adra and I kept a bit of distance between the two groups Finally, Ylva played rearguard, allowing Sigmir to perceive everything in our group, thanks to their link. It took away their berserk-ability but in return gave us more options.


    The tunnel we were moving in looked quite strange; everything I knew about the laws of nature told me that the loose-looking structure composed out of rocks, ice, earth and sand could not possibly be stable. But, apparently it was. Sigmir and Adra had done a couple of tests while I had meditated and declared the structure sound. Hopefully they were right, a cave-in could quickly do us in, even if I might manage to get some control of the ice, once it was broken from the walls. While merged into the walls, I had no way of influencing it using my Ice Magic, I couldn¡¯t even feel it. In addition to that, the ice-parts of the walls were glowing in a soft, blue light, reminding me so very much of my magic. There had to be a connection but I was unable to find it. I filed it away for now, trying to come up with ideas to get a connection.


    We got the first hint that we were not alone in the dungeon, when a strange, worm-like creature burst out of the floor beneath us, coming up right below Rai, so in front of Adra and me. He must have felt something, maybe some sort of vibration, or he might have been incredibly lucky. Instead of having his foot and leg drawn into the thing, he had managed to side-step its first attack and its momentum carried it further into the tunnel. Judging by his cursing, I would assume that he¡¯d felt something.


    My brain needed a second to comprehend what it was seeing and even after that moment, the first impulse was to deny reality. The thing in front of us looked like some unholy abomination birthed from the nightmares of a deeply disturbed person. My eyes zoomed in onto the thing¡¯s maw, and there were only teeth. Row after row of sharp and pointy teeth, lining the way down into the things body. The rest of its body, seemed to be made up out of solid-looking segments, connected with narrow, fleshy bands between them. It looked like some unholy mix between a boa-constrictor, a lamprey and an earthworm. The phrase, ¡°Kill it with fire!¡± sprung to mind, I was that disturbed.


    But, I had no fire at hand, so I pumped as much Astral Power as possible into my normal icicle-spell, using Overflow and instant-casting it. At the same time, I used Observe, trying to learn more about the abomination we were facing.


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    Glacial Querder, level 37


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    My icicle pierced between the solid-looking segments of the worm, drawing a piercing shriek from the querder¡¯s maw and it was staggered for a second, thanks to the impact. At the same time, Rai had struck with his daggers, one blade just creating a scratch in a solid segment, the other cutting into the flesh between two segments. Adra, seeing our attacks land, used her spear to pierce through one of the lower fleshy connections, pinning the querder to the ground below us.


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    Sigmir must have realised that the pinned worm was no danger, focusing on the front, just in case the shrieks drew more attention, while the three of us finished off the worm. The querder had rather low vitality; after the initial three attacks, it only took one stab from Rai and a single combined attack from my Weaver¡¯s Fury to send the monster into an early grave. Likely, it was lacking in vitality, relying on the armoured segments and attacking from ambush to take down prey.


    The EXP we gained was miniscule, considering that the querder was 17 levels below me. Even the various bonuses could only do so much with a low base-amount making the dungeon not really worthwhile for Adra, Sigmir and me - but Rai should catch up a little. And getting the Dungeon Explorer Title for Adra and Rai would definitely be worth it, so we carefully continued, instead of sitting at the entrance, twiddling our thumbs until the magical storm outside died off.


    For a moment, my curiosity overcame me and I inspected the dead querder, only to realise it was a bad idea. Too many teeth and not enough that I identified with anything other than disgust. It seemed to be a long sleeve, filled with razor-sharp teeth that tried to engulf something whole before shredding it. Shivering, I followed behind the others, suddenly very glad that the EXP for the dungeon would be largely irrelevant.


    Now that we knew to be very quiet and focus on even the slightest vibrations and noises around us, the chances of a successful ambush greatly diminished, so the next two querders suffered similar fates to the first. The first one tried to go for Sigmir, only to be smashed against the wall with her shield before being instantly dispatched with her axe and the second one got instantly skewered by Adra¡¯s spear. She even managed to pin it against the wall before more than the first foot was visible, turning it into a great test-subject for me.


    The results were dismal.


    First, I tried to use Darkness-magic against it, without much hope, and the results were about as bad as expected. The thing made a living below ground, in total darkness. The only thing that had a tiny amount of effect was using devouring-effects, targeting its vitality, but even to that, it was next to immune.


    My next idea was feeding it Liquid Moonlight, to see what it would do with extreme cold applied to the insides of its body. I had quite a bit of hope, just to see it squashed. The stupid thing was able to consume the Liquid Moonlight and the noises it made could be only interpreted as gleeful.


    Shooting an icicle into the maw and shattering it, hoping for damage from razor-sharp icicles was just as effective as the Liquid Moonlight, meaning not at all. Only that Adra now joked the wiggles of the thing seemed happy, suggesting I could tame it to be a pet.


    Somehow, my glare did not reduce her giggles in any way so I used the magic I had the biggest hope for, Blood Magic. No matter what, the thing must have something that fell into the domain of Blood Magic, carrying its vitality and allowing me to violently murder it. Shuddering in disgust, I placed a hand on the wound Adra¡¯s spear had made, ignoring the nearby teeth and trying to rip its vitality from its body.


    Failure¡­ There was just nothing to grab onto, even as I felt the sticky ichor sullying my hand, I was unable to grasp the vitality inside the thing¡¯s blood to rip it out.


    ¡°Sigmir, love?¡± I asked, after stepping a bit back, my voice sugary sweet. ¡°Could you lend me your Lok¡¯nar?¡±


    At the same time, my Weaver¡¯s Fury started hovering behind me before encircling the things front-end like a collar. When Sigmir passed me her weapon, the blades stabbed into the thing, dragging it out of the wall like the cursed worm it was. Somehow, I felt my mouth curve into a smile.


    I was far less skillful with the Lok¡¯Nar than Sigmir, but with a copious application of strength-buffs, sheer and utter hatred and disgust, I managed to take out my dislike for the species on the things body. For ten minutes or so. First, hacking it apart at the seams. Next, hacking the segments to pieces, followed by hacking the pieces to smaller pieces.


    Finally, I felt better, slowly coming to terms that my magic was utterly useless in any but its crudest form, using icicles to stab between the segments.


    ¡°Thank you, love.¡± I handed Sigmir her weapon back, after thoroughly cleaning it and myself from the traces left behind by the dismantling of the stupid thing.


    ¡°Oh, and Adra, my dear friend.¡± I turned to her, still smiling as I had been unable to wipe the smile off my face, since I had been given the Lok¡¯nar and my voice sweet as sugar, ¡°If you ever suggest that I want to have anything to do with such a disgusting creature¡­ Just, don¡¯t.¡±

 Chapter 143

    As we crawled deeper into the dungeon, there were a couple more attacks of the stupid worms, sometimes even multiple at the same time, turning the small tunnel into a rather odd dodgeball-court, with us desperately avoiding the sudden lunges. It helped that Sigmir realised that the worms only came out of frozen parts of the wall, not out of rock or earth and were only able to rapidly burrow into those parts afterwards. Less possible attack-angles made it easier to anticipate their attacks and I had a feeling that their ability to literally eat my attacks was very much connected to their ability to burrow through the strange, glacial ice that made up the dungeon. In addition, their tunnels almost instantly froze over after they vanished through them.


    Part of me wanted to investigate further, finding out how the did their thing, but the revulsion was stronger, keeping me from taken a closer look.


    Finally, we left the narrow, almost claustrophobic tunnel and entered a larger area, apparently created when a couple of large rocks crashed against each other and were pushed up by the relentless glacial movement. The ground seemed to be a single, huge rock or boulder, polished smooth by countless eons of slow moving ice and snow.


    From the chamber we were in, three additional tunnels branched off, each heading deeper into the moraine.


    ¡°Careful. I have a bad feeling about this.¡± I told the others. My gamer-instincts were screaming that this would be either a boss or a mini-boss room, not that there was anything that really hinted at it, other than my instinct. The others fanned out a little, so we all had space to dodge, just in case I was right. Taking a glance through Lenore¡¯s sight, I noticed that a particular part of the ceiling was glowing with Astral Power.


    ¡°Above us!¡± I yelled, just as the rocks that had looked like part of the ceiling came crashing down, forcing Sigmir and Rai to dodge aside. Luckily they had been warned, or things might have turned out bad. Not that they couldn¡¯t turn out bad anyway.


    The rocks were not as random as I had believed them to be, a couple of larger rocks were linked by smaller rocks, gravel ice and even a few, frozen branches. Sigmir and Rai stayed back while the thing collected itself and got up, not for reasons of chivalry or fair-play but because they had no idea what we were facing and how it would move. Attacking a prone foe was only a good idea if you knew that the prone status was a hindrance to them, not an advantage. Charging in and getting rewarded with a boulder to the face was a bad idea.


    It took a few second, but then, the thing was standing on two larger rocks, looking almost humanoid, with the two rocks it was standing on as legs, two smaller, asymmetrical rock-formations as arms and finally, a huge, ellipsoid boulder as torso and head. The whole thing was about a head taller than Sigmir. Unsure just what we were facing, I tried to observe it and learned that we were facing a so-called ¡°Clast Elemental¡±, and it was an admirable level 57. The level shocked me deeply; so far, we had faced no foe above level 40 in this dungeon, and now, a jump to level 57? That seemed deeply problematic.


    Adra got out her bow and started shooting, even if it seemed like a pointless gesture. I hesitated to even try - it was, after all, a rock, held together by magical ice. So, throwing more ice at it seemed like a rather pointless waste of Astral Power. Better to save my power, healing and buffing my allies. I did, however, try to reach out with my Ice Magic, checking if I was able to influence the icy parts of the elemental. To my surprise, I was able to feel them but, as expected, completely unable to assert any influence on them.


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    Adra managed to chip off some ice but her arrows clearly had little effect. Sigmir stepped up, shield raised and glowing with her red aura, dodging the first strike made by the larger and thicker arm before hacking into it with her axe. Her strike chipped off some more ice, if we continued like that, we could make shaved ice, soon. After her attack, the thing¡¯s counter strike was blocked by her shield and she was forced to take multiple steps back, to keep her balance. Rai jumped also in, chipping off more ice and even a few small rocks.


    The only positive thing was that the thing was slow and cumbersome. It ignored Rai and Ylva, maybe their efforts were simply not worth its attention, and focused on Sigmir. She was unable to evade all attacks the thing made, but managed to block the few that she could not dodge with her shield, taking some bruises - but nothing my Blood Runes could not deal with.


    After the first few exchanges, it turned out that the fight was more tedious than anything else. Our enemy was incredibly hard and strong, but its slow speed allowed us to fight at our leisure. There was no need to risk anything by experimenting, so I stayed back and kept my power in reserve, to heal when needed. Whenever my Astral Power was topped up, I channelled some of it into strength-buffs for Sigmir - her axe was the most useful tool we had to deal damage to the stupid elemental. Even Adra decided that making more arrows out of her Astral Power was a pointless waste and started to poke the thing with her pointy stick. Not that it showed a lot more effect, but a bit more.


    It took us almost twenty minutes of constant fighting to slowly whittle away at the stupid elemental, Adra, Ylva and Rai focusing on a single leg, or rather the hip-junction, chipping away the connection to the leg while Sigmir chopped whatever she could conveniently reach without overextending herself.


    Finally, the leg they had been attacking broke away and the thing toppled over, the various parts shattering on impact with the floor. It seemed more a rule-of-cool animation than an actual physical effect but I was happy nonetheless.


    <table><tbody><tr><td> Clast Elemental died</td></tr><tr><td>You gain 5 000 EXP.</td></tr><tr><td> For killing an opponent 3 level above you you gain Bonus EXP</td></tr><tr><td> For killing an opponent without a Traveller in your party, you gain Bonus EXP</td></tr><tr><td> For killing an opponent with the Dungeon Traveller-Bonus in effect, you gain Bonus EXP</td></tr></tbody></table>


    Something drew me to the fallen Elemental, the smell of something delicious, emanating from the crack in the largest boulder. I had never smelled anything like it it smelled like the magic I was commanding, only more so.


    Stronger, clearer, crisper. I was lacking words to describe the smell, only that I was salivating to get my hands on whatever was smelling like this.


    While the others had sank down, regaining their strength after the fight, I straddled the boulder, slowly letting Ice seep into the crack, before pushing it apart, widening the crack, until, with a loud, shattering sound, the boulder came apart and I saw what I had been smelling.


    In the middle of the boulder, encased in rock, had been a single, silvery-white gem, about the size of a fist and radiating icy cold. I inspected it and learned that it was called ¡°Eternal Ice¡±, so maybe not a gem. Or maybe a gem with a special name.


    Reaching out with my Ice Magic, I got a serious surprise. When I grabbed it, I felt a freezingly cold sensation transmitted back into me, painfully cold. I could not hold onto the gem for long, just long enough to pull it from its place and grab hold of it with my hands. The cold instantly transmitted into my hands, causing me to start shivering for the first time.


    ¡°Fascinating. I think we will learn quite a lot from this thing.¡± Lenore stated. She was not interested in Ice Magic, but when I learned, she learned as well, often drawing inferences from my furthered understanding to use with her own magic.


    ¡°We will have to study this thing a lot. I think it might lead me to the pinnacle of Ice Magic, maybe even allow me to understand a rune or two.¡± I felt giddy with the possibilities. Judging by the temperature, the Eternal Ice might be a higher form of ice compared to my Hard Ice. So, understanding how it worked, what it was, might propel me to unknown heights.


    But first, I wanted to take care of the others, they were in need of dinner and rest. Trusting that the rock beneath us would keep us safe from the annoying querders, we set up camp, it had been a long day of hiking, fighting and discovery.

 Chapter 144

    After we set up camp, I spent quite a while trying to interact and understand the Eternal Ice, repeatedly grasping it with Ice Magic, comparing it and its effects with Hard Ice and Liquid Moonlight and trying to come up with theories what it might be.


    What I noticed was that, similarly to the Liquid Moonlight, it was able to absorb Astral Power and I thought that there might be a bit of a reflux when I connected with the Ice, using Ice Magic, but I was not certain. The contact with Ice Magic was just too painful to endure it for longer than a few seconds. Even touching it was rather problematic, the cold it radiated was that powerful, but only when directly touching it, coming close was not a problem, for some reason. What made me even more curious was that it seemed to have an automatic interaction with Ice Magic. When I tried touching it, I could, at least for a short time. Adra, on the other hand, lost a small part of her finger when she tried it, forcefully ripping it away the moment she made contact. If touched with a rock, the rock cooled rapidly down but only in a short distance from the Eternal Ice, even to the point that gases solidified on the rock. But not on the Eternal Ice and the rock did not stick to the ice, even when we made it wet beforehand. It was maddening and completely contrary to how matter normally should behave.


    Lenore and I discussed for quite a while until we had a half-baked hypothesis what it might be. Our first, rather obvious, assumption was that it was a solid form of Liquid Moonlight. It did not seem like normal ice, meaning like frozen water, it was something more. What took longer was the idea that it might be due to an interaction with other concepts, I even had an idea which. The first I had in mind was the concept of Stillness, the ultimate absence of motion, down to a molecular level. But if it was only that, the atmosphere around it should liquify and even solidify on its surface, quickly building up an insulating layer, shielding the surroundings from the cold. So, there had to be another concepts involved or my inspect did not work like I believed it to work. That concept might be a type of temporal concept, freezing the matter even in time.


    It made no real, physical sense but it was the best hypothesis we could come up with.


    All that thinking made me develop a headache, so I told the others after dinner that I would be gone for a short time and logged out. The first thing that greeted me in my capsule-space was a deluge of messages. At first glance, I saw hundreds of requests to watch my stream, a couple of notifications about forum-posts and various messages requesting contact, all addressed at Morgana. All addresses I had maintained under my Titania-handle had quite good spam-filters so I was not bothered by the messages sent there but I had been lazy with the Morgana-handle, only setting up the basics.


    ¡°Pica, can you sort out the messages I got and display them on the computer-screen by priority?¡± I asked the capsule attendant, hoping that the AI was advanced enough to deal with that particular headache.


    ¡°Yes, Jade, I can do that.¡± my attendant answered me, right before I left the capsule to head into the shower and grab some food.


    After my shower, I used the computer to display the now filtered messages, starting with the non-automatic ones.


    The first was from Pantheon, apparently from a real employee telling me that they had received my ticket and were discussing possible actions.


    Then came that, what could only be described with the simple expression of shitstorm. Somehow, the theory was out there that Morgana and Titania were one and the same. And, in good internet-fashion, it had jumped from an idea to an assumed fact within a couple of forums-posts. So, now my stream was getting requests by the hundreds when before, there might have been one or two a day, which I had all denied.


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    I sifted through a couple of gaming-journalists, all trying to get either an interview or my take on something. After those, I had to go through a couple of messages, trying to get me to join this guild or that party, all promising me the world and more. For a beta-test.


    I didn¡¯t want to deal with mass-guilds at the best of times, especially with my traveller-rejecting build, there was no way for me to ditch my current party. And no reason to. Sure, in the past having NPC-party members was often a bad idea, due to lacking AI, but now? Sigmir felt more real, more like a person, to me than all the humans I had met outside the game. It was a strange feeling, that I felt so at home with them, but I would not give it away for anything in either world. The only downside was that they would not come back from the dead - but in turn, they had information about the world and common-sense. So, I just had to keep them alive or learn how to resurrect people and I would be golden.


    Next, I got to the messages that told me about forums-posts. Following the link, I found out what had happened and I instantly wanted to hit my head against a wall. They had taken a few innocuous things I had said and linked them together, added a couple more or less obvious screen-capture and hit the bulls-eye. All the signs of an internet-conspiracy but for once, the blind squirrel had hit the nail on its head. Or something like that.


    The mods had split off the thread from the main-thread, the one about the three stooges and made it into a new one and it was growing, rapidly. On the other hand, in the one with the three stooges, things had been added after I had made the third stooge¡¯s head explode, adding to the madness flooding my inbox.


    I wrote a reply in the stooges-thread, just for the fun of it. It was a little annoying that they accused me of cheating, again, but that a Gamemaster chimed in, on my side, made the whole thing rather funny.


    The other thread, about Titania and Morgana being the same person was simply ignored. There was no way I would give a definitive answer if I was Titania or not - maybe, just maybe, the internet-mob would calm down if the trolls were not fed. It was common knowledge to never feed the trolls, especially not after midnight, no matter how much they cried. Or they would turn from fluffy, cuddly little fluff-balls into monstrous, salviating creatures that one should instantly throw into a mixer. I would not feed them information about Titania but there was no reason not to use the sudden internet-fame Morgana had. But that was a slightly different idea.


    And finally, there were the messages asking me for admission to watch my stream. Those were categorically denied, all of them. But, I did take a couple of highlights, mostly what had been shown in the highlight-reel and show it from my perspective. Not the first one, though, that seemed to be a little too brutal, going by public reaction. I added a few interesting scenes, mostly a few scenes from the fights against Tegi and against the Devourer to round it out and posted the whole thing with my Morgana-handle. If I wanted to continue playing full-time after the beta, I would need to build a brand to ensure an adequate income by creating interesting content. I was quite sure that I would not allow anyone complete access to my stream, so I would need snapshots that were captivating enough to get viewers. And the easiest way to do so, would be to establish my brand now, while Morgana was in the public¡¯s eye anyway.


    Finally, I took some time to watch the highlight-reel and it looked quite impressive. Interestingly, the part with the gigantic ship looked rather different, it did not focus on any one character, making me wonder if there was a player in the video at all or if the marketing-department had taken an NPC-only event and used it as promotional material. It wouldn¡¯t be surprising, the footage looked quite epic, the sort of thing Hollywood might produce as an action-flick. Titanic meets Bismarck meets Jaws or something along those lines. They just needed a heroic main-cast and it could become a blockbuster. On the other hand, the huntress looked quite interesting, her playstyle seemed to be almost like a sniper, putting everything into a single, devastating shot. It might be a good idea to come up with some sort of magic that allowed me something similar, maybe dust up the frost-ray spell I had used before and use the newer runes in it to empower it. A continuous beam of Liquid Moonlight should serve as a devastating attack against everything that is not highly resistant or immune to the cold.


    Shaking my head, I did my exercises and logged back into the game, wondering just what the future would bring.

 Interlude: Stooges on the Forum - Round 2

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    -Harms, confirmed Beta-Account


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    So, guys, have you seen the newest Highlight-reel? And noticed someone looking so very familiar? For example, a female spellcaster, standing on a frozen rampart and throwing a friggin¡¯ avalanche at her enemies? Next to a Giantblood that we have seen before?


    I looked through a couple of older, official videos and she appears a couple of times, mostly magically kicking ass and taking names. Even in another player-thread in which the players complained about getting their asses kicked six ways to Sunday when they tried to ¡°rescue¡± the Giantblood.


    And now, imagine my surprise when I looked at the older videos and noticed that even in the first one, there was someone that looked remarkably like our dear Morgana. Unless Morgana in this thread is trolling once again, like she did in the other player-thread, planting some false information but I kind-of doubt it. So, for now, I will assume that Morgana who posts here, claiming that she is the one in the video, truly is who she claims to be.


    Now, back to the older video in which I have noticed her. Remember highlight-reel one? The one after two weeks? In which a spellcaster, hidden in shadow, used some sort of mist-magic to murder a huge group of some sort of mob?


    Looky, looky here:


    Two pictures, one from the original highlight-reel, showing a figure in a dark cloak, her face hidden in shadow, as she sits on the ground and channels power into a magical formation, her eyes flashing with an evil glint and her lips curled up in a happy smile.


    The other, a screen-capture from the videos in the thread, from the third person to die, the moment of his demise when, for just a short moment, the darkness recedes and he sees his killer. A petite figure with a dark cloak wrapped around her like a blanket, her eyes flashing with a dark light within them and the lips curled up in a happy smile.


    You can¡¯t see the face in either image, but the two images look so very, very similar that it is remarkable.


    Or, look here:


    Two more pictures, one from the newest highlight-reel, showing a figure in a dark cloak, lined with black feathers, standing on a rampart made from ice, creating a magical formation, consisting of three silvery-white symbols, one dark symbol and one pulsating red symbol, floating in front of her.


    Again, the other image is taken from the first highlight-reel, now showing the dark figure and her magic. The formations looks so very similar, three runes are identical, just that two silver runes have been replaced with two dark runes.


    Oh, and look here, there is more:


    Again, two images next to each other, one from the second highlight-reel, the other from the current one. The image from the current one shows the black cloaked figure, standing with her arms spread and her eyes shining with silvery-white light.


    The other image, from the second highlight-reel, shows a very similar figure, standing behind a Giantblood, her eyes shining with the same silvery-white light, while she uses some sort of magical formation to cast hail onto her enemies.


    Looks rather interesting, don¡¯t you think, guys? But, now for the real fun.


    After the first highlight-reel, a certain, rather famous, someone claimed responsibility after people got their unmentionables in a twist over the slaughter in the video. Remember who that was? Titania of Craft of War-fame, one of the few, long-running female pro-gamers, posting some semi-cryptic stuff about a fairy fallen from the light, slightly changing an old songtext from a Hard Rock/Alternative Metal-Band to make her point.


    So, Titania, a name taken from a fairy-queen, says that she is no longer using light, but that the darkness will sweep the land, making it rather obvious that she was the one in the video, at least that¡¯s what everyone thinks.


    And now, as you can see above, Morgana, a name going back to Morgan le Fay or Morgan the Fairy, a character with both good and rather evil legends associated to her, does something very similar. Using song-lyrics to make her point.


    To conclude my line of argument: Morgana, who posted here, is the same person as Titania. So, I would say: You have been destroyed by a legend!


    Cheers, Harms


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    Love this story? Find the genuine version on the author''s preferred platform and support their work!


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    Gloinar - confirmed Beta account


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    Wait, so, the one who killed my party was Titania? And she managed to make us question ourselves by posting here, sowing doubt? Well played, Lady, well played. But we will get you¡­


    But I¡¯m still curious just what was used against the three of them. I don¡¯t suppose a certain someone is willing to tell us, right?


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    -Heracles, Official Pantheon Moderator


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    Just because my name is Heracles does not mean I enjoy mucking stables, so I redirected a river and washed all the unrelated posts about whether the player Morgana is also known as Titania into a new thread. Please, keep on topic people. I left the posts that still relate to this topic, at least partially.


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    -Ghostblade, confirmed Beta-Account


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    Ok, I completely don¡¯t care who Morgana is, was or will be. But if that isn¡¯t cheating, I don¡¯t know what is.


    splat.avi


    The two we already know from the last video are next to the recording player, walking down some sort of dirt-road, frozen mud mixed with a little snow, ice and fresh mud. They talk about going out once again, to trap game when suddenly, the figure on the left just collapses, like a puppet with cut strings. The other two freeze for a second, before hurrying to the aid of their friend, only to find some blood seeping from his mouth, nose, eyes and ears. No other injuries are visible but he is quite obviously dead.


    splat1stperson.avi


    This time, the video is shown from the viewpoint of the dying player. The images are synced and it becomes obvious that the player is dead before he hit the ground. There was no indication, no nothing to show that he was under attack.


    Ghostblade only felt a sharp pain for a split-second before he was booted from the game. I mean, what the hell? We asked around a bit and the group around Morgana left yesterday, apparently heading into the mountains. But the videos above explain why the Snowbold behind the hunter we talked to almost pissed himself when we asked about her, maybe she wiped out his people.


    So, we wrote a bug-report, I mean, it can¡¯t be that some murder-witch can simply kill people from miles away, right? Where is the balance in that?


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    Jeanyra, confirmed Beta-Account


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    Ok, ouch.


    I watched the videos about her and unless there is something I¡¯m missing, she is throwing three fundamentally different types of magic around as if it is nothing, even combining them with ease.


    But no idea how to use magic without a line-of-sight or at least an excellent idea where to target your spells. I mean, I can let a fireball follow a ballistic track or move it around a corner to some degree but completely blind and, if you are right, from miles away? That¡¯s some high-level stuff.


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    Funny how that goes.


    We got two reports about this incident, one reasonable, well argued and maybe a minute after the incident.


    The other, maybe fifteen minutes later, riddled withinsults and basically just a toddler, throwing a tantrum, calling the company, us devs, the game, the world a pile of garbage and the one who killed them a cheating -insert a long string ofexpletivesthat I won¡¯t repeat here-.


    You might ask, what was funny about that? Well, the first report, the well-written one, was written by Morgana, explaining what she had done, how it was done and what her ideas were how to limit the impact of that ability without breaking the game, at least from her limited viewpoint.


    Now, here is an official statement: What Morgana did was not a cheat or bug. It might be called an exploit, depending on your point of view but even that is stretching it. She used a mechanic mostly as it was intended, apparently not believing that we had left such an easy-to-exploit mechanic open. Given that she reported it herself, there obviously will be no measures taken directly against her, we will however, look into her suggestions to prevent what she did from being done again. Her arguments against leaving the mechanic in the current form were quite well reasoned.


    For the insult-laden report, Ghostfire, the report-writer, will enjoy a one-week forums-ban.


    So long, Vulcanar.


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    -Morgana, confirmed Beta-account


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    Thanks, Vulcanar.


    To the Ghost-noun squadron. I do not cheat. I test the game, as we beta-testers are supposed to do.


    I admit, I used one of my class¡¯ abilities, testing if it would work even after you respawned, not thinking that it would, mostly because it would almost be equivalent to perma-death. But it worked. So, I did what a good beta-tester does, reported it and let the devs sort things out.


    Now, you¡¯ve insulted me once too often. If I see you again, I will demonstrate you that I don¡¯t need to cheat to utterly destroy you. Again. I don¡¯t even need to sneak up on you while you sleep - but I might do so, just to demonstrate that turnabout is fair play.


    And to Gloinar, No, I don''t think I''ll tell you, a Lady got to keep her secrets and all that.

 Chapter 145

    After reading through the threads, I set a filter-system for my messages and returned to the game and Sigmir¡¯s embrace. Part of me was annoyed that my identity had been given away due to Pantheon-promotion but at the end of the day, that might just be the price for playing the game. But, I would have to think of something to drive home the point that I was not a cheater with the three stooges. I took pride in the fact that I beat people in the game with my skills and - especially in Road to Purgatory - my insight into the system, not by cheating. I posed the problem to Lenore and we both slumbered off with thoughts of cruel and unusual punishments.


    The next morning might have dawned but deep under the moraine, there was just the steady glow of the ice around us when we awoke. But, we were awake, the UI told me it was morning and we had a dungeon to clear. And, thanks to the elemental, I was quite motivated to do so, if I could acquire more Eternal Ice, it might help me on my road forward.


    After breakfast, we picked a tunnel and continued our way, vigilant against our surroundings as the dungeon had shown that danger could lurk everywhere. We killed a few more Querders and their level was growing, giving us some tasty EXP and getting me closer to the next level. It was still far away but the dungeon might be enough, depending on its size. Finally, after maybe an hour of following the winding tunnels through the moraine, we entered another large room, the floor mostly made out of ice.


    We carefully entered, all of us wary what might await us here. When we reached the middle of the room, it became clear. The ice below us started shaking and a larger version of the Querders we had fought before burst from the ice below us, between us and the entrance. The increased size did not help with their looks, it only magnified the horror that they were. Instead of the easy-to-handle diameter of ten to twenty centimeters, the only important part of the monster we were facing, its maw, had a diameter of about a meter - almost enough to swallow me upright. And if I, or anyone for that matter, was swallowed, it would be a swift and rather messy death, of that I was certain. Sigmir must have realised that trying to block the twenty meter long behemoth we were facing was utterly impossible, this would be a fight of dodging, hitting and running, so she put her shield and axe away, taking her Lok¡¯nar in hand.


    I observed the monster and the system told me that it was a Mature Glacial Lamprey and level forty-five. The level-disparity gave me some hope, but even with it, I doubted we could fight head on, simply due to the massive bulk of our opponent. Looking closer, I noticed that there was a ring of nine eye-like protrusions around the maw and that the fangs were glinting with a strange liquid. In addition, I saw that during the emergence of the Lamprey, it had sealed off the entrance to the room with a solid wall of ice, similar to the ice that made up the dungeon. Not that it mattered, escaping the room we were in would be suicide, in the narrow passages, dodging he lamprey and its teeth would be impossible.


    Sigmir gave a battle-cry and somehow, I knew that she would charge in the next moment, to draw the attention of the lamprey, so, to give her the best chance, I instantly projected the runes for magic, strength and haste. A dark glow mingled with her red aura, just as she smashed into the lamprey while it was rearing up, making me think of a snake getting ready to strike. Despite the buffs on her, she only managed to strike a flesh wound into the lamprey¡¯s side, causing ichor to well up between two armoured segments before she had to jump away in an effort to dodge the bony tail-end of the creature.


    But that attack set the tone, Adra and Sigmir struck singular, powerful blows, using the length of their weapons while I did my best to augment their attacks with my magic. Ylva, on the other hand quickly joined Sigmir, increasing their strength and Rai was doing his best to weaken the monster with his rudimentary darkness magic. Not because it really did something, just in an effort to do anything. His daggers were just unable to even cut the hide between the armoured segments, it was just not his fight. At the same time, the lamprey must have had some capability when it came to sensing magic, whenever I tried to draw out a full magic formation, it would attack me, forcing me to abandon my cast. I was limited to small spells that I could mostly create in an instant, limiting the impact I had.


    This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.


    At first, the lamprey just tried to either swallow its target or smash it with its tail, pretty much ignoring Rai and me unless I tried to cast. That changed after about two minutes of fighting, it had just forced Sigmir and Adra to dodge, when it reared back up, like at the start and suddenly, a deluge of liquid shot from its maw, towards me. I felt time slow around me as Bullet Time went into effect and for a moment I despaired, knowing that I would not be physically fast enough to dodge, I had started moving too late. But that moment lasted less than the blink of an eye and in desperation, I let the vines of my Eisblumen grow out, smashing into the ice below me and, in turn, augmenting the movement I had started.


    It was just enough, but barely. The vines were just gone, along with a chunk of my Astral Power, even my cloak and boots had suffered a little due to tiny droplets of the liquid splashing away from the impact-area. My mind was still racing with the near miss when I noticed the gigantic body of the lamprey moving towards me.


    Closing my eyes, I wondered where I would respawn - and then I impacted the ground, jolting me out of my despair. The lamprey had missed me, or rather, it had never targeted me in the first place. I just saw the end of its body vanish into the ice below us, the opening vanishing in the wake of its passing.


    Relieved to have escaped death, I jumped back on my feet. Sigmir called out to me, to make sure I was alright. I assured her that I was, while trying to find out where the monster would come back from, that moment might give us a valuable chance to strike. In a semi-desperate measure, I used my magic to create a few seconds of snowfall within the cave, letting the loose snow cover the ground and giving us an easy, visual indicator where the lamprey would reemerge. When the loose snow was disturbed by the vibrations given off by the lamprey, it was far easier to see, compared to the solid ice.


    Once the snow was settled, I could even feel it with my magic and I had an idea that might allow me to strike a devastating blow against it. My eyes closed and I tuned myself to my magic, feeling the snow on the ground lightly vibrating. The vibration told me where the lamprey was and I started drawing glyphs into the air, creating a massive icicle, not a small, knife-like shard like normal or even one of the larger spears I used from time to time. No, it was a massive lance of hard ice, containing a huge amount of my Astral Power. If it worked, it might end the fight with a single strike, Even as the lance manifested while I was pouring power into the magic formation, I used my Ice Magic to draw small symbols into it, adding the runes for shattering in small magic formations to the lance.


    I felt the lamprey take aim to reemerge, targeting Sigmir. While holding onto my magic with all my will, I called out a warning, seeing her jump to the side and a second later, the lamprey burst out of the ice. But, now it was limited in its moves, it had to fully leave the hole before it could get its body anywhere else and I had more than enough time to prepare some serious magic.


    With a smile, and my eyes undoubtedly glowing with silver light, the Ice Lance shot out, my Ice Magic adding to the force it had thanks to my Rune Magic. I had been unable to target the weak points between the armoured plates but I was trusting my magic to have enough power. And it had, with a great cracking noise, the lance broke through the armoured plates, penetrating deeply into the body of the lamprey. Just as the lamprey started screeching in pain, I triggered the runes I had inscribed all over the lance, reducing the lance to razors harp shards, shredding the things innards.


    The screeching continued and I noticed that its eyes flashed with a dark glow that I knew quite well. Darkness Magic. Purple-ish beams of darkness, what I recognised as Dark Radiance came from its eyes, striking almost randomly around it. If it wanted to play with Darkness, two could play that game. I was still in a strange state, hyper-aware of my magic and the area around me, allowing me to feel the beams before they actually struck. And once I knew where they would strike it was quite possible to make sure that they did not hit anyone. The short bursts of magical contact even allowed me to understand what they were, it was a relatively simple curse made to weaken magic.


    As fast as the attack had begun it ended, when Sigmir, Rai and Adra all did their very best to dismantle the lamprey, using the plate I had shattered as starting point. With its armour broken, their attacks dealt massive damage, it tried to spit its strange ice-dissolving acid once again but even as it tried to rear up, Sigmir used her berserk-ability and finished the job my Ice Lance had started, separating the front-part of the lamprey from the back, causing its maw to smash heavily back to the ground and its acid-attack was interrupted.


    We all stood back, as it wiggled back and forth, unable to get any traction. The lamprey was dead, it had just not stopped moving yet.

 Chapter 146

    Even while the huge lamprey was writhing in its death-throes, it started to dissolve into black mist, absorbed back into the dungeon. I saw that a few items remained behind, in addition to the windows that told me about the gains I had in the fight.


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    <td>Mature Glacial Lamprey died</td>


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    <td>You gain 5.500 EXP.</td>


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    <td>For killing an opponent without a Traveller in your party, you gain Bonus EXP</td>


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    <td>For killing an opponent with the Dungeon Traveller-Bonus in effect, you gain Bonus EXP</td>


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    <td>For killing a Floor-Boss without a full party, you gain Bonus EXP</td>


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    <td>Skill increased</td>


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    <td>You increased your skill: Ice Rune-Mastery [63/100]</td>


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    <td>Skill increased</td>


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    <td>You increased your skill: Blood Rune-Mastery [54/100]</td>


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    So, the lamprey had counted as a floor-boss? That was interesting, it had been a lower level compared to the Elemental we had fought before and that had not counted as a floor-boss, for some reason.


    Pondering why that might be the case, I walked up to the items, looking over the rewards we had gained. There was one necklace that looked just eerie, a black, equilateral triangle, set with nine dark gems, all looking very much like eyes. Two gems were set close to each side, with a third between them, forming equilateral triangles between the eyes close each other and a third triangle between the three eyes in the centre.


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    <td colspan="10">Three times Three Eyes</td>


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    <td colspan="5">Rarity</td>


    <td colspan="5">Rare</td>


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    <td colspan="5">Type</td>


    <td colspan="5">Pendant</td>


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    <td colspan="3">Special Effect</td>


    <td colspan="7">Attribute Increase ¨C While this piece of equipment is worn, Endurance +2</td>


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    <td colspan="3">Special Effect</td>


    <td colspan="7">Elemental Resistance: Ice - While this piece of equipment is worn, the effect that the cold has on the wearer is lessened. .</td>


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    <td colspan="10">This pendant carries within it the lifeforce of a being that thrived in one of the most hostile environments, the eternal ice of a glacier.</td>


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    We looked it all over together and quickly decided that it would either go to Adra or Rai. Sigmir already had the pendant we had unearthed in the Barrow Den and I had no desire for a pendant that helped with Frost-resistance. Adra and Rai discussed for a moment, before Adra put it on, looking quite pleased.


    ¡°I would like to borrow the pendant later, is that alright with you? Just to experiment a little with the Eternal Ice we have found before, maybe the pendant will allow me to work with it.¡± I asked Adra after she had put it on. She just nodded, seeing no problem with lending it to me for some experiments.


    The other items we found were nothing immediately useful. One was a segment of the carapace that had protected the lamprey that could be fashioned into a shield or armour, according to Inspect, and the others were three fangs that still dripped with the acid it used to dissolve ice. For some reason, the acid that dropped down did not attack the ice below us, or even the snow I had spread out, but looking up, I had a hunch what they were supposed to be used for.


    The entrance was still sealed with ice so I carefully picked one of the fangs up, walking over to the barrier and first tried to manipulate it with my Ice Magic. Sadly, once again, there was no feedback, no sense of existence, it was as if the Ice was simply not there or as if it was not ice at all. With a frown, I pushed the fang into the top-part of the barrier and it sunk in easily, actually too easy. The next thing that happened made me smile, even with the great effort Pantheon had invested into making Mundus realistic, some things were just game-logic. The barrier dissolved into nothing, together with the fang I had used. Nothing else was affected, just the barrier that had sealed off the room.


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


    ¡°Let''s return to the room we have spent the night in, so we can rest in peace. I have no idea if any of those Querders lurk below the ice here.¡± Sigmir suggested when she saw what I had done. I just nodded, feeling the magical exhaustion catch up with me.


    The way back was quiet, it seemed as if the querders were gone for now.


    We rested in the main-chamber, having lunch and I meditated for a while, enjoying the crisp coolness that the Astral Power in the dungeon carried with it. In the dungeon, the Astral River was almost entirely composed out of Ice-flavoured Astral Power. Instead of the normal mix of flows, I was able to luxuriate within it, drinking it in deeply and marvelling in the feeling.


    But I did not want to lose myself in the feeling, so I only stayed to soothe my exhaustion and fill my Astral Power completely up before forcing myself back awake.


    Using a highly scientific method to choose our next path, we flipped a coin and went into the path almost opposite of the one we had explored before. As we walked, the querders started attacking again and we dispatched them quickly, thanks to the fact that their attack-patterns were incredibly simple. They just lunged from the ice, trying to get someone and if it failed, they were defenseless for a moment, allowing us to strike back without trouble.


    But it was not only querders that attacked us, we were also attacked by something that might be troublesome for some groups but for us, it was easy. From time to time, small Ice-Elementals, called Ice Sprites, tried to attack us with sharp icicles. They were basically a tiny core of Eternal Ice, surrounded by normal Ice, shaped more or less random. Some had three legs, others four, some only two and so on, it seemed random. There was no rhyme or reason to their shapes but they all had one thing in common. Their power-level was lower than my own and if I managed to touch them and manifest a Shatter-Rune onto them, the ice that made up their body broke apart, assuming I pumped enough Astral Power into the rune. That interaction made fighting them a breeze and easy EXP for us, especially given that their levels were between fifty and fifty-five. I was quite happy about the slivers of Eternal Ice I was getting, certain that there was an applicable use for them.


    After some time, we got to another chamber and here, the opponent was instantly obvious. It was an Ice-Elemental, similar to the sprites we had fought on the way in, only bigger. Much, much bigger. The sprites were about the size of a dog and this one was more like an elephant. A central body was held aloft by four massive legs and two club-like arms were sprouting from it. It looked crude and blocky, as if it was purposefully built for combat, without any features that I would expect in a natural creature.


    Observing it informed me that it was a Glacial Elemental, level fifty-eight. For a short moment, I wondered if there was any way to make it shatter, like its lesser cousins but I doubted it. I might be able to interfere with it but outright destroying it would likely be impossible.


    Once again, Sigmir charged our opponent, using her shield as a battering ram and drawing the elemental¡¯s attention to herself. Her attack cleaved off some ice from one of the legs, showing that the elemental was not as durable as the Clast Elemental we had fought outside. But the its lower durability brought a major advantage with it, the elemental was faster, forcing Sigmir to block an attack from one of its arms and the force contained in the attack sent her staggering a few steps back. Rai, Adra and Ylva would certainly suffer broken bones from such a strike.


    The fight turned into a strange game of keep-away, while the elemental had fast attacks and linear movement, its turning was slow and cumbersome and the arms were limited in their attack-range. That resulted in one of us being targeted by it, often with a charge that tried to run the target over and use its incredible weight to crush us underneath while the others went for the backside and hind-legs. The hind-legs were able to kick back, but it was obviously not what they were made for, making the attacks powerful but easy to dodge.


    We played the game of keep-away, slowly whittling away at the elemental when I noticed that our progress was strangely slow, far slower than it should be. I looked through Lenore¡¯s eyes and noticed the problem: The elemental was using the Astral Power in the area to slowly replenish itself, making me realise that the fight was one of endurance. Would we run out of steam before we managed to wear it down despite its regeneration?


    I had a seriously bad feeling about that.

 Chapter 147

    ¡°Retreat!¡± I called out to the others, watching them disengage as best as they could from the elemental. After the boss charged once more and Adra leapt away, dodging, I used Overflow and put my Astral Power into instantly manifested Ice Walls, boxing the elemental in and forcing it to break through the walls before it could go after us. Luckily, the entrance was not blocked and we got into the tunnel before it was upon us again, the narrow walls around us preventing it from following us.


    We re-grouped a little further down the tunnel, looking for a spot that had no ice, just rocks.


    ¡°Why did you call for a retreat? We were winning.¡± Adra asked, looking curious and slightly annoyed.


    ¡°No, we weren¡¯t. The elemental was drawing upon the glacier around us, the endless Astral Power, to restore itself.¡± I explained.


    Rai frowned, ¡°Well, we certainly can¡¯t fight that thing until the glacier is gone. If we tried, we would be here for an eternity.


    ¡°There might be a way. Remember how the other elementals were, well, designed for lack of a better word? There was a small core of Eternal Ice in the centre. What do you think, is that core the weak point and if we manage to attack it, the elemental will be destroyed?¡± I asked, trying to come up with a way to destroy our foe.


    ¡°Could be. And if it is, we will have to focus our attacks on a single point, better, focus all our power into a single attack.¡± Adra picked up my idea.


    ¡°Or into a single person. The spells you use on yourself, are you able to put them on Sigmir?¡± I spun the thread further, passing the idea back to Adra.


    ¡°Yes, but they are not supposed to be used that way. There might be some backlash.¡±


    ¡°What kind of backlash?¡± I asked, frowning.


    ¡°I think the spells would increase the power and speed but I¡¯m not sure if they would prevent the person from harming themselves with the additional power.¡±


    ¡°Let¡¯s keep that in mind. First, I want to heal you up and maybe we should look into the other tunnel before we decide?¡± I asked, and the others nodded. Healing them took only a few moments, none of them had taken serious hits in the fight. Luckily.


    Afterwards, we walked back to the central area and from there, into the third tunnel. It looked very familiar, just like the two tunnels we had traversed before, querders and Ice Sprites annoying us every other step. But, the tunnel did not end in a boss-room with the big bad of the dungeon waiting for us, it ended with an ice-wall. A familiar looking ice wall, it looked just like the one that had closed the room of the first boss.


    ¡°I guess if we want to continue, we need to use one of the fangs from the first boss or we are stuck.¡± I said, using game-logic in a game world. The others nodded, but none of us made the first move.


    ¡°It might be better to take care of the elemental first. Just in case.¡± Sigmir suggested, mirroring my thinking and unease. By my gamer-logic, the elemental was either the second, necessary boss of the dungeon and after the wall would be another obstacle or the elemental was a bonus-boss that we may ignore. Its level hinted at bonus-boss but I was unsure.


    ¡°Sigmir, if we want to destroy the elemental, we depend on you. If we put my Blood Magic buffs and Adra¡¯s buffs on you and maybe a weakening curse from Rai onto the elemental, it would depend on you. Unless I¡¯m mistaken, you would face quite heavy backlash afterwards,¡± I explained, worry for Sigmir in my voice.


    She gave me a soft, reassuring kiss, ¡°Don¡¯t worry, dear. I can handle it.¡±


    The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.


    ¡°Well, then, let¡¯s try it.¡± I agreed to her confidence with a soft sigh, worrying for her.


    We turned back from the wall, moving back into the main room and settled down for a bit. I had to come up with a curse, using only Darkness Magic so Rai could use it. Lenore and I tinkered a bit, turning the runes for Curse, Devour and Magic into a chant that should allow Rai to place it onto our enemy by continuously chanting, draining its magic in the process. At least in theory. Teaching it to him took another hour or so, but then, we were ready.


    Again, we went into the tunnel leading to the elemental, quickly crossing the distance thanks to the absence of enemies. At the entrance, Adra started chanting and I drew runes directly onto Sigmir, creating two formations, one centered on the Strength-rune, the other centered on the Haste-Rune. Keeping both active was mentally straining but I didn¡¯t have to hold them for long.


    Next to me, Adra was softly chanting and through Lenore¡¯s sight, I was able to see the magic that normally enveloped her when fighting settle around Sigmir.


    ¡°I¡¯m ready.¡± Adra announced and Sigmir stepped forward while Rai started chanting. The elemental seemed to only notice us when he did, hinting at the fact that it sensed the magic that targeted it. The next moment, he had to dodge to the side, when an icicle shot towards him but he managed, without even stopping his chant.


    But then, it was a moot point whether the elemental had noticed us.


    Sigmir, glowing with magic and her own abilities, charged forward. Her armour of red energy, the soft fur and golden eyes that came as part of her connection with Ylva, the pulsing glow of my blood magic and the shimmering of Adra¡¯s buffs. all those effects surrounded her. In a way, Sigmir was using the strength of four people, all of whom had crossed the first divide. And I knew that I was not holding back, using Overflow to let my Astral Power freely flow into the buffs on Sigmir, supporting her with all my power. There was no way, that her attacks went unnoticed and the elemental quickly had bigger worries than Rai and his anti-magic curse.


    Sigmir¡¯s strikes, dealt with her Lok¡¯nar, made good on the name of her class, Mountain Cleaver. Even the elemental felt those heavy and powerful swings, one after the other forcing it back and cleaving deep gouges into its frozen body and forcing it back. In my vision, I noticed a dark glow slowly taking away the icy mist that surrounded the elemental, preventing it from getting all the power it needed to regenerate. Not that its regeneration would be fast enough to keep up with Sigmir¡¯s furious assault.


    A part of me noticed that my Astral Power was swiftly depleting and I started to worry if our plan could work. But then, for a split-second, the elemental glowed brightly with silvery light, or rather, the silvery light that made up the elemental was freed from the dense carapace for a moment when Sigmir exposed its core. But only for a moment, and then that magical moment was gone. Her next strike, following the previous on its heel, had shattered the magic that held the spirit in the world of Mundus and I witnessed how it evaporated, either into the glacier or into the spirit-world of ice, where it undoubtedly came from.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Glacial Elemental died</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You gain 9 500 EXP.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>For killing an opponent 3 level above you you gain Bonus EXP</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>For killing an opponent without a Traveller in your party, you gain Bonus EXP</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>For killing an opponent with the Dungeon Traveller-Bonus in effect, you gain Bonus EXP</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>For killing a Floor-Boss without a full party, you gain Bonus EXP</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>


    You reached level 55


    </td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>


    You gain one point Intelligence from your class, Lunar Sorceress.


    </td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    I noticed the messages while I gently eased off the Astral Power I was pouring into Sigmir. If I was hasty, I might cause additional backlash to her and that was something I wanted to avoid. As I watched the ice that had made up the elemental evaporating only leaving behind the core of Eternal Ice, I noticed that Sigmir was staggering and rushed forward, in case she fell.


    ¡°Now¡­ that was fun.¡± Sigmir mumbled when I reached her, only now really taking in the size of the chunk Eternal Ice that had kept the elemental alive. But, even the huge core paled in comparison to the worry I felt for Sigmir. Gently placing my hands on her face, I started channelling my Blood Magic, trying to ease the pain that the backlash undoubtedly caused her. Ylva left her Hallow next to Sigmir, visibly staggering as she did.


    ¡°And you tell me that I¡¯m reckless with my magic, love.¡± I softly scolded, not really meaning it while I eased her to the ground, letting her use my lap as a pillow.


    There was no way we could take on the rest of the dungeon today.

 Chapter 148

    Once I got Sigmir down onto my lap, I noticed that she was sweating and shivering, obviously in pain.


    ¡°Adra, Rai prepare a camp. We won¡¯t move from this chamber until Sigmir is better, so probably not before tomorrow morning.¡± I told the other two, while gently drawing my healing-rune formation onto Sigmir, getting an impression what was going on in her body. At least that was my plan, but once I connected I noticed that the normally gentle energies I used to heal exacerbated the problem, it was not just an overexertion of her physical muscles, the powerful magic we had stacked on top of the powers she used herself had placed a tremendous magical burden onto her body. And now, she was paying the price.


    I swiftly disengaged the heal, not wanting to cause further damage and simply held her, softly caressing her face. There was nothing I could do to help with her suffering beyond trying to keep her as comfortable as possible in the circumstances.


    ¡°Are you certain it is smart to stay here? If we get attacked by querders during the night, it would be bad.¡± Adra opined, reminding me that the ground below us was ice, not solid rock. I frowned but she was right, if we got attacked from below, it could easily prove fatal.


    I created a stretcher out of ice and helped Sigmir onto it, not wanting her to walk at all. She protested a little but I was having none of that, she was hurt and in pain, so she would be a obedient patient and let me take care of her.


    We went back into the central room, Sigmir floating along on the stretcher held aloft by my Ice Magic, Again, we were not attacked on the way back, so, once Sigmir was situated, I went back to get the chunk of Eternal Ice.


    Transporting it was slightly tricky, I ended up encasing it in a block of Hard Ice, but even Ice was damaged by the ridiculous low temperature, the cold causing it to crack and air to condense in the gaps making it hard to deal with. As I was handling it, I noticed that I was more affected by the large chunk, compared to the smaller chunks, the slivers I had gathered from the Sprites, I could handle with my Ice Magic, only, feeling a cold, numbing sensation slowly invade my mind. The big chunk made me mentally retreat in shivers when I made magical contact. But with some effort, I got the chunk back into my magic bag, hoping that it would not be damaged. The magic bag, that is


    When I got back to the others, they had made a camp as best as they could, even using some of the limited firewood we had with us, so we could have a warm dinner. I was looking forward to warm food, even as I was a little annoyed with the fire, for some reason. The dungeon was strangely comforting, even with the vermin in here, the soft glow from the ice and the overall chilling atmosphere was something that set me at ease.


    ¡°Who is cooking with me today?¡± I asked, once I reached them.


    ¡°I will, why do you ask?¡± Adra replied.


    ¡°Good. Rai, do you think you can sneak to the entrance and take a peek outside? I¡¯d love to know the condition of the storm.¡± I explained and Rai cloaked himself in magical shadow before moving away, his footfalls almost inaudible even in the complete silence that surrounded us.


    After he was gone, before Adra and I started to work, I remembered that I had gained a level in the fight against the elemental, bringing me to level fifty-five and giving me two attribute points. After a moment of mental debate, I placed one into Charisma and one into Vitality, bringing them to fifteen and twenty respectively. I had considered other possible distributions, but finally decided on those two, as they might give me special abilities. And my assumption was proven correct.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Special Ability gained</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You gained a Special Ability: Cloaked Aura</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>For having 15 Charisma or higher, you gained an ability based on your play-style. The ability Cloaked Aura conceals your aura, making it harder to assess information based on it.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Special Ability gained</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You gained a Special Ability: Bloody Vitality</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>For having 20 Vitality or higher, you gained an ability based on your play-style. The ability Bloody Vitality decreases the amount of health lost when using Blood Magic on yourself. Other negative effects remain.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    Both abilities sounded rather interesting, even if they were not earth shattering. The Cloaked Aura skill sounded useful for sneaking around and in addition to passively preventing scrying or using abilities similar to Lenore¡¯s sight to gain information on me. Maybe it would even work against abilities such as Observe but I rather doubted it.


    On the other hand, Bloody Vitality sounded rather dangerous, I had already seen what could happen if you used Blood Magic for an extended amount of time on the same subject, when I had experimented with collaring the nymphs. If I lost less health to Blood Magic, wouldn¡¯t that allow me to drain over a longer amount of time and possibly cause the same thing to happen to me? Somehow, I was not a fan. I would have to be careful not to fall into a trap when it came to using my own blood to fuel magic.


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    ¡°Now, why don¡¯t we look at what we have to work with?¡± I looked over to Adra and together we started to prepare a meal. Not that we had a lot to work with, some edible roots, some meat, some water, all cooked together into a stew that tasted relatively well.


    Before long, while we were still cooking, Rai returned.


    ¡°The storm is still going on but it¡¯s strange, the storm is far slower than before but a lot colder, I think.¡± he explained.


    Lenore and I conversed mentally for just a moment, exchanging ideas at the speed of thought, allowing for a short discussion to take place in just a few seconds and we came up with an idea why that might be.


    ¡°Good, that means it is settling down. When the birds started whipping up the air, it was pure wind-magic but when I intervened, I added Ice in the form of a Blizzard, shifting the balance. I think, when I did that, the storm started to draw on the magic of the surrounding area, especially the glacier. Or rather, because the area around it was so saturated with Ice Astral Power, the storm started absorbing the matching Astral Power and kept going, long after it should have blown out. Now, the balance of Astral Power within slowly shifts until there is not enough wind Astral Power to keep the storm going and once that happens, it will probably get incredibly cold out there, at least for a moment, before settling.¡± I explained Lenore¡¯s and my thoughts on the matter, even if we were both just guessing.


    ¡°That sounds dangerous. I have heard of places where the Astral River flows freely into our reality, changing and warping reality. Hopefully, it is as you say and the Astral calms down once the storm calms or it might turn into one such place, a place of eternal frost, even colder than it is anyway.¡± Adra threw in, lightly glaring at me.


    ¡°Places where the Astral River flows freely? You mean, like a Nexus?¡± I asked, curious.


    ¡°No, a Nexus is something natural, at least I think it is. When I was younger, I heard tales of places where some long forgotten sorcerer used their magic in a reckless manner, causing effects they could not predict and escape their control. Such places of wild magic are hostile to all life, only those with incredible resistance can survive there. Tales about them serve as a warning to young magicians not to experiment recklessly with their power or they might not only kill themselves but poison their surroundings for generations to come.¡± Adra explained, her glare getting more pronounced with every word.


    ¡°She¡¯s talking about you, you know?¡± Lenore asked, her mental voice accompanied by the chortling cawing that was her laughter.


    ¡°Don¡¯t worry, I¡¯ll be more careful from now on.¡± I told Adra, not wanting her to worry too much. ¡°But, restrictions on magical experimentation might just be a way of those with power to hold onto it, you know? Telling everyone that experimenting with magic will kill you, so nobody experiments and those who control the magical knowledge keep their control. And, knowledge is power, especially magical knowledge.¡± I added, speaking my mind.


    ¡°Oh, it in our grove it was not forbidden to experiment. Those who wanted to do so got their homes moved, beyond the edge of the grove so if they made mistakes, nobody but them would suffer. I heard that most people do something similar, those who want to experiment are sent to live in comfortable towers on mountain tops or in similar places, far away from other people who they might accidentally kill once their magic gets out of their control.¡± Adra retorted, making her stance on magical experimentation clear.


    ¡°You mean, like a cave deep underground, filled with their element? Why didn¡¯t you tell me that I should use this chance and get some experimentation done? Would you lend me your necklace? I want to get some deeper understanding of the Eternal Ice and some additional frost resistance might be helpful.¡± I cheerfully told Adra, drawing a chuckle from Sigmir and some laughter from Rai. Adra just glared at me but she handed over the necklace.


    But, before I went off to experiment, I helped Sigmir with eating, literally feeding her. She grumbled a little, claiming that she was not an invalid but I just shushed her and she let me have my way.


    After dinner, I went off to the side, still in the room but facing towards the tunnel towards the Ice Elemental, just in case something interesting happened with my magic. The necklace was around my neck but the effect seemed to be rather miniscule, to put it in perspective the temperature I would feel comfortable in was just a few degrees lower than before. Maybe it would work better with magical effects or maybe there was some diminishing returns effect, making it less useful for me, who already was highly resistant to the cold.


    It didn¡¯t really matter; it was enough to allow me to keep extended magical contact with the small slivers of Eternal Ice, letting me study them. Interestingly, Lenore was affected as long as she stayed in her Hallow, forcing her to leave it and perch on my shoulder, her mind still connected to mine but less direct. It was a curious effect that neither of us fully understood but she was just as fascinated by the Eternal Ice as I was. Not because she was interested in Ice Magic but because there might be something similar for the other elements.


    After a while of trying to understand what it was, I had an idea, trying to pull it apart, to shape it in a way I would shape my Hard Ice or the Liquid Moonlight. It took an insane amount of Astral Power and I felt a force push back but with Overflow, I managed to put out enough power to deal with the resistance. Finally, the Eternal Ice turned into a liquid form, looking similar to the Liquid Moonlight, but I knew better. What I had before me, was pure Ice Astral Power, concentrated enough to take on a physical form and not bound by whatever process had been used to form the Eternal Ice. For the moment, it was held together by my magic and my will but my Astral Power was quickly running out. I did not want to know what would happen if I lost control of the power in front of me.


    Thinking fast, I shaped it into runes and with a flash, a beam of pure cold shot from the runes I had created, allowing me to channel the insane amount of power I had unleashed into the tunnel in front of me.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Skill increased</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You increased your skill: Ice Magic [72/100]</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>

 Chapter 149

    The others had not missed the insane amount of power I had unleashed, especially Adra. But neither Lenore nor I were really interested in dealing with them, both of us were awestruck by the result of our experiment, Lenore instantly went back into her Hallow and we used the close connection to discuss the deeper ramifications of what we had seen.


    ¡°That was amazing! It was... as if the Eternal Ice is a solid form of Astral Power. Not just Astral Power used to bring ordinary matter into this world or to manipulate what was already here.¡± Lenore mentally crowed as soon as she was back in my mind.


    ¡°Crystallised. Or maybe frozen? But why was it stable until I mucked around with it, even pulling power in?¡± I started to voice my tumultuous thoughts. In a way, some things made more sense now. If we were right and Eternal Ice was a stable, physical expression of energy, the amount of power became unsurprising, assuming my understanding of physics was still true in Mundus. Part of me thought of the almost head-sized chunk of Eternal Ice we had wrestled from the second Elemental, trying to understand the scale of power there. Just now, I had used a pea-sized sliver, and it had taken a huge chunk of my own power to keep the resulting energy under control and directed. In essence, I was now holding the magical equivalent to a nuke, only without a method of remote detonating it.


    Lenore¡¯s mind went into a different direction, pondering if it might be possible to create something similar with other elements. A crystallised form of Darkness or, for her, a crystallized form of Death or Wind? I was not sure how that would even work but I doubted it would be fully analogous, after all, Ice was in its nature something that only existed as the crystallization of a liquid.


    My musings were interrupted when Adra shook my shoulder.


    ¡°Are you alright?¡± She asked, looking very annoyed but also rather concerned.


    ¡°Hm? Oh, yes, thanks. Searching for understanding is not always an easy path, as you know.¡± I answered, a grin forming on my face as Lenore started to think of possible applications of the Eternal Ice and what it might mean if we managed to create some for ourselves. Even manipulating what we had into a new shape would be alright with me but I doubted I would try that for a while.


    I picked myself up from the floor, exhaustion, both magical, mental and physical washing over me. I had not realised just how difficult it had been to channel so much power and use it to keep something under control. Normally, when I used Overflow it was for some brute force application or to flood an existing spell with power. But what I had just done was something entirely different. Walking back over to the remains of our fire, I made an effort to keep myself steady, hiding the exhaustion I was feeling. No need to clue Adra in on just how close I had come to making a probably lethal mistake. I noticed that Sigmir was already asleep and joined her, quickly falling asleep next to her.


    When the next morning came, Rai carefully shook both Sigmir and me awake. Neither of us reacted well to being roused, both grumbling and groaning. Sigmir looked a little confused why I was in a state similar to her and I softly explained what I had done, making sure that only she was able to hear my explanation. The Eternal Ice was a valuable trump-card after all.


    It took us some time to get ourselves ready, but before long we started our way towards the rest of the dungeon. There were no new enemies to fight, making me slightly sad, I would have loved to get my fingers on more of the small slivers of Eternal Ice contained within the Ice Sprites. But, alas, it was not to be. Once we reached the frozen barrier, I got one of the fangs out, pushing it into the barrier and causing it to dissolve.


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    Keeping our formation tight, we stepped forward onto a rocky platform overlooking a huge cavern. To the left and right, a ramp led downwards so we had a good look onto the creature that was dwelling here. Once more, my mind needed a second to make sense of what I was seeing. The thing down there was huge, even larger than the mature lamprey we had fought before. So huge that I strongly doubted it would even be able to move. It looked almost like some sort of clam, the armoured segments that protected the querders and the lamprey overgrown and overlapping, locking it in place. They even formed a crude mouth around the things thooty maw.


    The floor around it looked strangely segmented and it took me a second to realise that I was looking at querders, some partially in their eggs, others larger as they slowly drifted from the grotesque thing in the back.


    Finally, I shook off the disgust I was feeling and used Observe.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>


    Agnatha - Level 51


    </td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    My use of Observe caused it to notice us and with strange shriek the battle started. Below us, the Querder started squirming even more and I felt something in the air around us and suddenly, the barrier behind us reformed. During the formation, I was able to feel it for a moment, feel the link to the Agnatha below us. It had used Ice Magic to control part of the ice around us and I suddenly understood why I had been unable to manipulate it. It was stained with the things Astral Power, seeping into the Ice over a long time, changing it ever so slightly.


    ¡°Adra, Rai, take the right side, Ylva and I will defend the left side. Love, do you think you can make sure that big ugly down there does not attack us?¡± Sigmir decided on a tactic, we would have to take down the querders before we even thought about going down there. And the best spot to do so was right where we were, using the rocky high ground to our advantage.


    Lenore lent me her sight once again and I realised that my job might be harder than expected. Big Ugly, as Sigmir had appropriately christened the boss, was using quite a lot of Astral Power, Lenore¡¯s sight showing me a cloud of mist hanging around the boss. The mist seemed to be tainted somehow, not the pure elemental Astral Power that I used in my magic, there was something different mixed in, something that I didn¡¯t quite understand.


    As the querders squirmed up the ramps, forced into a choke-point by the natural environment - or rather, the dungeon design - the Big Ugly made its move. Tendrils formed in the cloud, lashing towards us, composed out of pure cold. I had a feeling that it was just a probing attack, not a serious strike, made to test our defenses and weaken us for the querders to feed on. Thanks to Lenore¡¯s sight, I noticed a weakness in the attack: the tendrils themselves carried most of the power, with only a thin connection to the billowing mist around Big Ugly.


    There was no time to compose my counter-magic with runes, so I struck back using a combination of Ice and Darkness magic, acting purely out of instinct. Lenore helped me guide the magic, her mind had closely joined with mine, thought flying back and forth in our communion, almost as if she was a third process in my mind.


    The slender spears into which we had formed our counterstrike penetrated into the vulnerable segments of the tendrils and for just a split second, I was able to influence the thin tendril, my own magic more concentrated in the area than Big Ugly¡¯s. There was a smile on my face when I severed the tendrils, letting the Astral Power the thing had used lose focus and purpose, causing it to dissipate into the area around us. The temperature in the cave dropped slightly but not in a dangerous way.


    Round one of my magical duel with Big Ugly went to me.


    While I had parried the magical attack, the others were busy keeping the querders back, Sigmir and Ylva having a much easier time with them. Ylva had quickly realised that the things were still developing and the armoured segments of their carapace were not really hard yet, letting her crunch through them with relative ease. I didn¡¯t even want to know how those things tasted but she was going to town on them. Sigmir simply played steadying rock, letting them break against her shield.


    On the other side, Rai was at the front, slicing and dicing the weaker querders while Adra struck with her spear from behind him, taking those out that were slightly more developed.


    For now, neither side was in trouble, even if Rai and Adra were feeling some pressure.

 Chapter 150

    After the first round of magical combat, Big Ugly seemed to mentally sit back for a moment, giving me a moment to think. If we wanted to get down there, we first would have to take down all the Querder. I wondered if that was even possible, there seemed to be hundreds, maybe thousands of the things. So, was the right tactic to directly attack Big Ugly? After a moment of consideration, I decided to test a little, combining three Devour runes, three Magic runes in triangles, forming a six-pointed star with a Curse rune in the middle and started channelling power into the formation.


    I felt the curse trying to attach to Big Ugly but I felt a powerful resistance, likely the thing was either resistant to Darkness magic or to magic in general. Both were very possible scenarios and I rather doubted that I could simply try to brute force my approach to taking the thing down, it was a boss-monster after all. I tried a few more spells but they were all smothered out by the freezing mist around Big Ugly.


    For a second, I took stock of the situation the others were in and realised that they might actually be able to take down the Querders that were squirming up the ramps, as surprising as that seemed to me.


    Sadly, the next moment, Big Ugly was demanding my attention again, this time the attack had even more power, as if that helped anything. All power on Mundus was useless unless it got to us. And again, there was a weakness in the magic that I could exploit.


    Big Ugly and I exchanged magical attacks a few more times, or rather, I parried away its attacks. In one of my moments of down-time, I noticed that the mist around it did not seem to fade and that the amount of Querders had not decreased at all, it seemed as if there were more coming up from underground. And those were not the barely formed Queders with soft shells, those were slightly more grown up, their armour fully formed and solid.


    My ruminations were interrupted by a scream and I noticed that one of the Querders had managed to get by Adra¡¯s spear and tried to latch onto Rai¡¯s leg, using its sharp teeth to shred the flesh in the process. With barely a thought, I used my Eisblumen to help, battering against the Querder, wrapping around them and tossing them away, taking the pressure of Adra and Rai so they could reorient.


    But my distraction had a cascading effect, Big Ugly tried again to strike and this time I didn¡¯t manage to parry away all of its attack, parts of it striking Sigmir, causing her to stumble, something the Querders used to their advantage. Ylva surged forward in a brave attempt to keep them from burying her but she paid for it in flesh and blood. Again, I struck with my Eisblumen, pushing the Querders back for a second but it became clear that the fight was not going as well as I had hoped. Instead of slowly winning, we were losing and the death-spiral became faster and faster. Rai¡¯s wounded leg was no longer fully supporting him, causing him to be slower and less secure, the wounds Ylva had suffered hindering her just as much, maybe more.


    ¡°The Eternal Ice!¡± Lenore cawed in my head, transmitting her insane idea together with the words. It was an idea that could have been my own in its insanity. But, as I heard somewhere, sometimes crazy works.


    Grabbing into my bag, I thought for a moment before deciding to go for mostly broke, pulling the Eternal Ice core from the Clast Elemental out, the freezing cold instantly seeping into my body, numbing my hand. But I welcomed the cold, I would need it to do what I was planning. I felt a huge amount of Astral Power transfer into me, Lenore giving me what she had before leaving her Hallow and taking cover behind me. Not that I really minded, her pain would only distract me from what I had to do. As an insurance, I also pulled the last fang from the lamprey-boss from my bag, handing it to her. If I failed, she would try using it to open the barrier behind us. I doubted it would work, not with Big Ugly alive, but who knew, maybe it would. But I would not fail, at least that was what I told myself.


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    Taking a deep breath, I stepped forward, to the foremost edge of the balcony we were on. Holding the Eternal Ice in front of me, I looked down at Big Ugly, mentally throwing down the gauntlet. What I was planning had a good chance to kill both of us but I just wanted it to die. That was okay with me, I was a Gamer. I would respawn.


    After that second of preparation, I activated Overflow and Bullet Time, letting my magic flood freely out of me and into the Eternal Ice. And I let the the power from the Eternal Ice flow back into me, not even trying to keep it from harming me, only focusing on unbinding the power and throwing as much as I could at Big Ugly. The numbing chill that had invaded my hand spread all over my body, into my mind and even my soul, trying to numb me to everything, making me as cold and uncaring as ice, eternally unchanging. But I held onto a single idea, the knowledge that I needed to control the power I had unleashed from harming Sigmir. And to do that, it needed direction. Somehow, the giving it direction was easier now, and I idly noted that there was some blood flowing from my hand, apparently I had cut myself on the sharp edges of the Eternal Ice without even noticing.


    But that mattered not to my numbed mind, only what I had to do mattered. A smile crept on my lips and from somewhere deep within my mind, words bubbled up, almost making me giggle as I said them out loud.


    ¡°Cone of Cold!¡±


    With those words and the rune for Liquid Moonlight in my mind, I managed to force the power in front of me into a semblance of what I wanted. The dense, glowing mass of power in front of me boiled outwards, not a stream of Liquid Moonlight but a blast of cold, not just the coldness of a glacier, no, what I had imagined was the absolute coldness, the absolute expression of stillness, a coldness so extreme that even time itself froze.


    The blast of silvery white power streamed forward, blowing the mist away and crashing against Big Ugly and breaking against the wall behind it, like a wave. And like a wave, it washed outwards, some of it blasting back towards us, annihilating the querders and continuing on.


    My mind was turning fuzzily numb, dropping like an arrow at the end of its flight. I pushed against the wave of power I had unleashed, trying to keep it away from me and my companions. But I was at my limit, my mind simply folding under the burden I had placed upon it, falling into darkness.


    When I opened my eyes again, I was in the capsule, the game having booted me out. I must have missed the announcement that I had died or fallen unconscious. Trying to log back in told me that my character was currently unable to act, making me wonder just what had happened. Back when I had overdone it with my magic, creating and subsequently destroying a bridge to escape from Jongarn, there had been a timer telling me how long my unconsciousness would last. But now, I only was told that my character was unable to act, strange.


    After taking care of a few real-life errands, I went back into the capsule. I was unable to log into Road to Purgatory but I could access my home-space, so I did just that. My mountain top temple, that I had created what seemed like ages ago was still like I had left it Not that I spent a lot of time here. I had greatly enjoyed making it but I preferred the world of Mundus.


    But for now, there was a desk with that served as an interface to allow me looking into the huge amount of gossip about Titania on the forum. For a while, I kept reading in a rather disinterested fashion, wondering if anything useful would come of it.


    Finally, I had enough and because of the affinity I had with the esthetics of the dungeon in Mundus, I started to recreate a similar cave, below my temple, making it a basement of sorts. There might have been some inspiration coming from a strange guy, dressing up as a bat and fighting crime by punching one mugger at a time. I let myself be inspired by the dungeon on mundus, but my basement-cave was not a copy, it was my own design. One of t the big differences was that I did not use the dark, tainted ice but the pristine, silvery white ice Morgana commanded, making the cave shine in sparkling light.


    It was fun, making spires and spirals but my heart and mind yearned to go back into Mundus. And finally, after what felt like ages, the game gave me the message that I was able to log back in.


    Curious what I would find, I did just that.

 Chapter 151

    It took me a few moments to gather myself back together after logging in but once I managed to do so, I was rather surprised just where I was. I was comfortably resting on a pile of furs, my head cradled in Sigmir¡¯s lap. It seemed I had survived my insane gambit. But what drew my eyes away from Sigmir was the cave-ceiling above me. Instead of the dark, weakly glowing ice that it had been before, it was not silvery white, shining with clear, icy light. It had been the reason for my initial disorientation, the semblance to the cave I had just made under my temple. I had been trying to get the ice I constructed it out of as close as possible to the ice I was using in my magic.


    But Sigmir¡¯s presence made it obvious that I was in Mundus, not in my home-space.


    ¡°Thank the Ancestors you are awake!¡± Sigmir called out the moment she realised that I was back with them.


    ¡°Yes. What happened after I passed out?¡± I asked, curious about the events.


    ¡°You were falling forward, whyever did you step so close to the edge? Anyway, you were falling forward and I would rather not have my partner devoured by vermin. Well, or killed by the fall more likely. So, I grabbed onto your cloak and managed to tip you the other way so you landed on your back.¡± Lenore started to explain, making me realise that she was sitting nearby.


    ¡°Whatever you did with your magic, it worked. The blast you summoned killed not only the Agnatha, it also destroyed most of the Querder but luckily it didn¡¯t reach us, before it could, it spread into the walls around us, changing them.¡± Lenore continued, making me glimpse at the log, curious what it was saying.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Skill increased</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You increased your skill: Darkness Magic [44/100]</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Skill increased</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You increased your skill: Ice Magic [75/100]</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Querder-Larva died</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You gain 83 EXP.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>For killing an opponent without a Traveller in your party, you gain Bonus EXP</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>For killing an opponent with the Dungeon Traveller-Bonus in effect, you gain Bonus EXP</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>Agnatha died</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You gain 10.000 EXP.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>For killing an opponent without a Traveller in your party, you gain Bonus EXP</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>For killing an opponent with the Dungeon Traveller-Bonus in effect, you gain Bonus EXP</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>For killing a Dungeon-Boss without a full party, you gain Bonus EXP</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>You have cleared the Dungeon Morainian Cave.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>For clearing a Dungeon under the effect of the Dungeon Traveller-Buff you gain Bonus EXP. The Dungeon Traveller-Buff expires.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>


    You reached level 56


    </td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Title strengthened</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>Your title Dungeon Explorer has been strengthened.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>For clearing a Dungeon while under the effect of the Dungeon Traveller-Buff, you gain the Title Dungeon Explorer. You gain increased Experience from the Dungeon Traveller-Buff and while under its effect, skills level faster.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Title gained</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You gained a Title: Ice-touched.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>Most often, those touched by Wild Magic perish. You were touched and withstood the touch but your body, mind and soul will eternally bear the mark of the event.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    The EXP-window was the most extreme. There were hundreds of entries, all but the last just for a pittance of EXP but it was one of those moments where quantity had a quality of its own.


    What I noticed when while looking at the log was that my temperature-perception was off. I somehow knew that the surrounding cave was colder but I did not feel the cold as unpleasant. I tried to look around me, pushing me up and almost headbutting Sigmir. She smiled a little at my sudden proximity and I thought a kiss would be next, when she suddenly gasped.


    ¡°What¡¯s wrong?¡± I asked, a little worried. That was not what I had expected.


    ¡°Your eyes. They look different than before.¡± Sigmir explained, looking slightly worried. Lenore, on the other hand, looked closely at me and shared the view from her point of view, showing me my face almost like a mirror. And indeed, my eyes had changed small but luminous specks of silvery-blue had intruded, adding something rather uncommon to my appearance. The specks were not limited to my formerly jade green iris, there were even specks in the sclera, making my eyes rather alien and a little eery. The overall effect was similar to the effect my Overflow had when I was use Ice-magic, only toned down a lot.


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    ¡°Well, this is new.¡± I chuckled, guessing that it was part of my new title. I wondered what else had changed. It sounded rather ominous making me wonder what else had changed.


    ¡°Now that you are awake, can you heal Rai and Ylva?¡± Adra asked from a few meters away. Nodding, I finished raising myself, feeling slightly off-balance but Sigmir steadied me and after a moment I was fine and started walking over to Rai. They had bandaged his wounds, most of them not really serious, but his leg-wound had already dyed the bandage red.


    ¡°You did well. Now, let¡¯s take care of you, Disciple.¡± I said with a slight smile, as I knelt next to Rai, getting a closer look at his leg. Using my Blood Magic and appropriate Blood Runes, I stretched my senses into his leg to start repairing the damage. Just as I did, he flinched and started shivering.


    ¡°It¡¯s cold, Master.¡± he gasped and I realised that the Astral Power I was using was no longer normal, there was a contamination in it, a trace of pure Ice Astral Power. Feeling the damage that trace was doing, I quickly withdrew my senses and power from Rai¡¯s leg.


    ¡°That was unexpected.¡± I mumbled as Lenore came flying, feeling my agitation.


    I mentally explained what had happened and she seemed fascinated, though we quickly agreed that I should fix Rai¡¯s leg first, especially after the additional damage I had caused to it. Lenore entered her Hallow to help and the first thing she did was complain about the cold. It didn¡¯t damage her, just made her warm and comfy Hallow less relaxing for her.


    Her mind joined with mine and together, we managed to extract the Ice Astral Power, draining it away before we used the rest to probe and afterwards heal Rai¡¯s leg. What I noticed was that the process was a lot more complicated and took more power compared to before.


    Still, after about ten minutes, Rai¡¯s leg was on the mend, even though I was unable to replace the lost flesh. There was no more danger of infection and it would heal in a matter of hours. Ylva needed healing as well, but before we went there, Lenore and I started a closer look at the changes within me.


    I settled into a meditative trance and looked inward. The first thing I noticed was the crystal core in my chest, which I had gained when crossing the first Divide was giving off a tiny bit of silvery-white light to my mental eyes. I wondered if it did that in the physical reality as well but I was not ready to cut open my chest to find out. I looked further, mentally following the flow of Astral Power through my system and noticed that everywhere I looked, there was that slight trace of Ice-type Astral Power. I was unable to find out where it was coming from, it seemed to just be part of myself now.


    ¡°I guess, now you know why experimenting with things you don¡¯t fully understand is dangerous.¡± Lenore chuckled a little. ¡°On the other hand, I¡¯m rather interested how your Ice-Magic has changed.¡±


    Feeling that trying to change my current situation would be rather dangerous so I returned to reality, practising the old wisdom of accepting what you cannot change. Now, that I had a better idea what had been the problem, I went over to Ylva and tried healing her without direct help from Lenore. Ylva was at least partially a Ice-type Spiritbeast so if I made a mistake, the damage would be minor. Lenore still looked closely at my actions, ready to help at any moment. Again, it was mentally taxing and difficult but I managed without needing her to directly interfere.


    When I was done, I walked a little off, planning to test my other spells, to see what had changed there. Sigmir followed behind me, apparently she had been feeling my agitation somehow. I explained the changes, especially my worry that I would be unable to heal her because of the change in me. She instantly pulled me into her arms, gently holding me while she told me that I would figure it out, that she had confidence in me. And if not, she didn¡¯t care, even if I lost all my powers right this moment, she would still stand with me and protect me.


    I had to smile a little at her words and a tension I had not noticed was lifted from me. I gave her a soft kiss and, together with Lenore started to further evaluate what the changes with me had done to my magic.


    My first experiment was with pure Ice-magic and I noticed that whenever I used it, the trace that was in me made it far easier compared to before. The trace helped to form my magic according to my desire, even when I used runes it felt more responsive and comparatively more powerful. What effect that feeling of greater strength would produce when applied against someone was something we would have to find out later.


    Blood Magic was a tad difficult, I noticed that when I used it on myself, there was no change, it worked just fine. On the other hand, healing Rai had shown that it was not the same as it had been and Lenore and I decided we would have to experiment on a live-subject. Later.


    When I started to use Darkness-magic, I got a surprise. The Ice Astral Power merged quite well into the darkness, adding a cold impression to it, the darkness not only an absence of light but also warmth. What made me a little miffed was the effect it produced when I used shadows to cloak myself. I, myself, did not feel anything different but when Sigmir looked on from the outside, she had to suppress a giggle.


    I was sparkling. Or rather, the magic I had used as stealth-tool was now sprinkled with a dusting of silvery-blue sparkles, making it looking similar to the night sky. Looking at it through Lenore¡¯s eyes made me groan, I did not want to sparkle. In addition, the ease with which the Ice Astral Power merged with the Darkness-Magic made it hard to seperate the two, it was not impossible but it required me to focus for minutes, increasing the cast-time and the Astral Power cost by a huge amount.


    Done with my preliminary experiments, I asked Sigmir if they had checked the corpse for loot why I had been out. She nodded and explained that there had been a segment that could be used by a crafter for armour and a couple of teeth that Adra had asked for. Apparently, she was able to use them to add to her own magic, allowing her to increase the penetrative power of her spear and the arrows she created with her magic.


    I had no problem with that, given we didn¡¯t need them to leave the dungeon. We moved back to the others, deciding that we would spend another night in the dungeon, leaving the next morning.

 Chapter 152

    We completed setting up camp in the dungeon and it was Sigmir¡¯s turn to help with cooking. But I hit a bit of a snag in that chore, when I moved closer to the fire, I felt abnormally hot, as if I was standing outside during summer wearing winter clothes. I instantly started to sweat, feeling uncomfortable in my warm clothes, so I started to strip of most layers, just keeping a bare minimum so I was not bare.


    ¡°Love, what are you doing?¡± Sigmir asked when I stood there in little more than my unmentionables, causing Rai to turn slightly red.


    ¡°I¡¯m feeling too warm. Not sure why, but it feels like the fire roasts me.¡± I grumbled in response, wondering just why I was feeling that uncomfortable. But undressing helped, the feeling went from unbearably hot to slightly uncomfortable. I was just wondering if it was a permanent change or if it was just temporary, because if I was feeling too hot in an ice-cave, just because I was close to a fire, then I did not want to find out what I would feel like in a more temperate climate or worse, in the desert. With a little thought, it became obvious that my brush with Ice Magic had shifted my thermal comfort range further, previously it had been roughly ten degrees celsius lower compared to what I would think normal for a human but now I was guessing it was about  twenty degrees lower. I would have to experiment a little more but if I was right, there was one huge advantage. If I was right, I would be able to wash in any liquid water without it being painfully cold. It certainly was worth checking out.


    Once Sigmir and I had finished cooking, we ate all together and decided on a night-watch, even if we all doubted that anything would happen during the night. I snuggled up together with Sigmir, enjoying the feeling of her arms around me. Curious, I asked her if I was feeling any colder than before but she claimed that there was no difference in my body temperature.


    When it was my turn to keep watch, Lenore joined me and together, we tried to understand more about both, my changed condition and the changed condition of the dungeon. The change that had in occurred in the dungeon, either due to the defeat of the boss or due to the way I had used to defeat it, was fascinating. It had not only changed the physical appearance of the dungeon but also the flow of the Astral River inside. Previously, the river had been, for lack of better word, murky or maybe calling the sensation muddy would be more accurate. I had not quite understood what I had been feeling  but there had been something that I failed to understand or really notice until I felt the difference. It was minute but now that it was gone, I wondered how I had failed to notice it before.


    Or maybe I was now able to feel the parts of the Astral River filled with Ice better than before, that might account for my slightly changed perception. I discussed it with Lenore, who was sitting on my shoulder, lightly complaining about the fact that her Hallow was now slightly colder compared to before. Her mental voice made it clear that it was just good-natured ribbing, nothing more. But, when it came to my perception of the Astral River, she agreed with me that there had been a minute change, her perception of the change was lesser than mine but again, that might be because of her lesser affinity to the Ice-Element that dominated the Astral River in the dungeon.


    Together, we pondered the changes for a long time and in the morning, we had a rough idea what the changes meant. From now on, my magic would contain a trace of Ice by default, essentially adding to every spell a bit of cold-damage. For offensive magic, that was great, especially Ice-Magic which was strengthened even further, but for supportive or even utility magic, it was rather problematic. In addition to that, my cold-resistance had been increased by quite a bit and I was able to handle the large chunk of Eternal Ice physically or with my magic. It did not mean that I dared to unleash the power within, that would almost certainly destroy me but my new resistance allowed me to study it closer.


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    One part that was interesting was that I managed to add to one of the Eternal Ice slivers by packing Liquid Moonlight around it and applying pressure via Ice Magic. It took quite a bit of power for very little gain and the thin layer was slightly different, less dense and less still but it was a start. With time, I might be able to create actual weapons out of Eternal Ice, something I believed to be the pinnacle of my current understanding of Ice Magic. My pondering on the concepts that were contained in the creation of Eternal Ice paid off, as I gained two levels of Ice Rune Magic, bringing it to sixty-five and one in Astral Meditation, bringing it to forty-nine.


    We all had breakfast and, after I took another look at Rai¡¯s and Ylva¡¯s wounds, we all started on the trek out of the dungeon. The change to the ice had spread throughout the dungeon, making it far lighter and less gloomy than before and a part of me wanted to stay, to study further. But sadly, there were problems with that idea, one was that I was lacking an idea where to start, I might stay and bang my head against that uncertainty for ages without making progress. Another was that we had no time. In just a little over a week, I would have to give back the herb-lore book or the stash of herbs we had liberated from Tegi would be lost and I would have broken my word, something I wanted to avoid.


    And, the bigger one, was that the journey we were on would be rather close considering the whole two years I was spending ingame. Travelling from Siberia to South America, mostly on foot or horseback, was a long journey and I was very curious what a divine-quest would give me in bonuses for the real game. Even if it was just a title, it would be something unique that only I had. And for most gamers, the lure of having someone only they had was strong and people were willing to invest large amounts of time and effort into such perks. There had been a few grinds in Craft of War that awarded nothing but a title, took days, sometimes weeks, of ingame-time effort and had despite the pointlessness of such an endeavour, I had prevailed in them. So, there was no way that I would let the Divine-difficulty-quest I had run out of time.


    When we got to the entrance, I poked my head out, just in case that the magic had unleashed more Ice-type Astral Power than I had anticipated and permanently sealed the valley. If that was the case, we would have to prepare. But my fears were unwarranted, it was a little chilly outside but not problematically cold.


    I led the others out and started looking around. The snow around had been frozen into a solid mass but I noticed that something was sticking out of that mass a short distance away, closer to the walls. Walking over, I found a dead wind-raptor, frozen solid. Thinking about the quest we still had, I stretched my Ice Magic, both to sense if there were more hidden in the snow and to get it out of the snow to take the materials we needed.


    ¡°Wh¡­a..a...a...t a...a...a...r...r...e...e y...o...u...u...u d...o¡­.o...ing?¡± Adra stammered out between clackering teeth. hugging herself against the cold.


    ¡°Mh? Oh, there are dead birds buried in the snow. I¡¯ll dig them up so we can sell the materials. Do you need more feathers to study for your magic?¡± I asked, remembering how Adra had asked for some of the feathers in an attempt to imbue the arrows she was using with her bow, adding Wind Magic to their default state. I was not quite certain how exactly it worked for her, she made the arrow with her Astral Power, similar to the way I made my icicles but somehow, she was able to study some materials and add their characteristics to her repertoire. I think she was also able to directly use the materials but then they would obviously be gone, so it was just a limited resource, compared to the arrows she made from her Power.


    She looked at me as if I had just suggested to jump from a bridge and then, she simply turned and walked away, muttering that she would wait outside the valley. Rai instantly followed her, while Lenore had decided that her Hallow was not as cold as the outside. Sigmir stayed with me but I noticed that she seemed to be cold as well. But with her help, I was able to focus on using magic to dig up the birds, she collected them and after maybe an hour of work, we had another twenty birds, making me quite happy.


    We followed behind Rai and Adra, finding them quickly once we left the direct vicinity of the bowl-valley, waiting in a protected spot. With the dead birds, we could easily turn in the quest for hunting them, even with a bonus for overachievement. If we managed to get some extra game on the way back, especially wolves, we would have a nice chunk of change for the next part of our journey.

 Chapter 153

    We spent the rest of the day hiking down the mountains, looking for more Wind Raptors but finding none. During the complete hike, I noticed that only the Wind Raptors were absent, there were still other beasties around. We managed to hunt down two mountain goats and a large Mountain Tiger that was trying to either turn us into lunch or take our kills from us. Luckily, Lenore was still a little unused to the new coldness in her Hallow and had taken to flying around a lot more, keeping herself warmer. The result was that she saw the tiger early and warned us, allowing us to be ready as it sneaked up on us while Sigmir was teaching me to skin a cat, using a goat.


    The warning made the fight almost trivial, we all made as if we had no idea that the tiger was there and as it leapt, Adra had been ready to strike, letting the tiger impale itself on her spear. The fact that she only made a single, clean hole into the pelt meant that Sigmir let Rai and me work on the goat, making us show what we had learned while she worked with Adra on the tiger. It was quite the specimen, not that I had a lot to compare it to, but it was imposing to say the least. Longer than I was tall and easily twice my weight, with teeth and claws that reminded me that here on Mundus, the civilised races were not at the top of the food chain. When I mentioned it to Rai, he told me of stories about even larger cats, some of them twice or even three times that things size. Part of me wondered if he was pranking me but he believed his tale, of that the rational part of me was certain.


    In the afternoon, we got back to the cave we had originally planned to spent time in, before taking shelter in the dungeon. Sigmir and Adra made sure that the various pelts we had skinned off were in good condition while Rai went to gather more firewood, taking Ylva along for protection. Normally, it would be my job to go with him, but Lenore had decided that we would have to do something about the coldness in her Hallow.


    So, I sat with my back to the rocks, feeling the shadows around me. We had discussed what we could try during our hike and the only idea we both felt had a chance to succeed was to shroud her Hallow in Shadows. She was partially a Spirit of Darkness, even if the elements of Death and Wind were far stronger in her, but Darkness was part of her. So, Darkness was what we wanted to use. My mind was long able to accomplish two tasks at the same time and to join with Lenore allowed us to go even further. She brought her own mental processes and we joined them two by two, allowing us to share thoughts on a deep level. If either of us wanted to root through the others mind, there would be no stopping, in a way it was a huge show of trust. But it felt right, we had been together for months now, our minds joined closely whenever she was in her Hallow and our shared fascination with magic had brought us into harmony.


    To Lenore, Magic was part of her, an essential aspect of her existence and she was not content with her instinctive ability with it, even joining my forays into the Astral River, trying to learn Rune Magic. She had not managed yet and over the last days, she had decided that she wanted to try something else, to first learn Darkness Rune-Magic and maybe manage to apply that knowledge to Air Runes and Death Runes. We had been unable to make great strides in that regard, her mind worked in different ways compared to mine and Rai¡¯s so it was slow going, the one-eyed leading the blind.


    To me, Magic was the greatest and most fascinating part of Road to Purgatory. Only my feelings for Sigmir eclipsed the joy I felt when using Magic and those were an entirely different thing. Both made me feel complete, but my feelings for Sigmir were a different flavour, we both enjoyed learning about the other and walking our path together, a path that was meant for both of us. My path of Magic was a path only for me, Lenore walked on her own path, parallel to mine, but that path of Magic made me feel purpose for the first time in my life. It was a fascinating feeling.


    Our plan was to form our split minds into two distinct wholes, both made out of half of each of us, one looking from the outside at the connection between my body and the Hallow, the other from the inside, trying to understand how the Hallow was anchored to it. And that was where we ran into the first snag, my mind was unable to enter the Hallow, even joined with Lenore. We both knew that it had to be possible, I had done so once before, but that had been an unconscious action during a dream, possibly helped along by parts of Hugin that were still contained in her Bloodline. It was one of those things that I simply accepted as ¡®Magic¡¯ and moved on, not even trying to understand it at this point. So, I needed to mentally enter the Hallow, which proved difficult. At first, we were unable to even find the Hallow, there was a physical mark on my body, but getting from my marked eye to the magical dimension, or whatever one wanted to call it, that sheltered Lenore¡¯s body. That was the first hurdle. I tried to watch Lenore enter the Hallow but it proved pointless and even she was unable to explain how she entered the Hallow, she just did.


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    So, we came up with another plan, using the fact that as part of our bond, Lenore was letting most of her own Astral Power regeneration flow into me and she was able to push more Astral Power into me, like she had done during the fight with the dungeon boss. Once, I had managed to take her Astral Power unwittingly ripping it away from her and using it but it was something I had apologised for, when I had experienced the bleedthrough of her feelings. She had felt utterly violated by that action, Magic being an intricate part of her, taking it was one of the biggest violations to her.


    Now, we used that mechanism of Power-sharing to create distinct flows of Power that we witnessed from both sides, and with some effort, we managed to follow the flows of Astral Power to the joining point, the point where the Hallow was magically connected to my own magic system. Once we had found it, we both wondered how we had ever missed it, it was akin to a glowing whirlpool and when Lenore entered, she entered the whirlpool, dissolving into pure power while travelling into the Hallow.


    Consciously entering myself was rather strange, the best metaphor I am able to come up with, was that I was riding on Lenore¡¯s back, letting her carry me inside. During the process, I noticed that I would only ever be able to send half my mind inside here, if we wanted more, I would have to establish my own Hallow inside Lenore¡¯s body and she would have to carry both of us. If that was even possible. But the idea was fascinating to both of us, as it flashed into my mind.


    Now, partially inside the Hallow, we watched the interplay between my own magic, the Astral River that was somehow connected to the Hallow and Lenore herself. Again, my mind used metaphors to make sense of what I was seeing and interpret it. Obviously, the problem had to stem from the fact that my magic was permanently containing traces of Ice-Magic, so, we looked at the flow that came from me, studying it in detail. Finding the Ice-Magic proved rather easy, it stood out like a beacon, glowing with power. Dealing with it, was a little harder, after an indefinite amount of time that we pulled, prodded and pushed at the magic, we came up with the idea to inscribe runes of Shadow into the whirlpool that connected the Hallow to my body. Neither of us really knew what we were doing, but I argued that it was part of my mind, so if I believed that it would work, it should work in the confines of it.


    Maybe that belief was the key to success, somehow, I was able to hover above the whirlpool and inscribe runes of Magic and Shadow into the swirling power, filtering out everything else. When I did so, the Hallow turned even darker, an inky blackness swirling around but Lenore was quite happy with it, feeling right at home. At the same time, the temperature went back to normal, at least in her perception and I only had to keep one of my mental processes floating above the whirlpool, holding the runes in place. I obliged, having a feeling that it would probably be only a matter of time until the runes became natural part of my mental landscape and thus my second mental process would be free to move along. And even while holding the runes in place, I was able to ponder other questions, not needing my full focus on the runes.


    A downside we noticed was that the filter reduced the amount of Astral Power Lenore was able to pass over to me, reducing the Astral Power regeneration quite a bit, so we agreed that the filter would only be in place outside of combat, something easily agreed by both of us. In combat, I would need my mind fully on fighting, not holding something in place.


    Finally, I emerged from my meditation, feeling the shadows gently swirl around me. I idly noticed that I had gained another level in Astral Meditation, bringing it to fifty. Night had fully come and I made my way over to the cave, stepping softly to avoid waking anyone up. Sigmir was the one on watch-duty, so I simply sat on her lap, not talking, just enjoying her closeness and the scent that was just her. I might have dozed off, sitting there, the work I had done with Lenore had been mentally exhausting.


    The next morning, I awoke in our sleeping furs, still cuddling with Sigmir.

 Chapter 154

    At breakfast, we discussed our next steps. We had quests to hunt general game for meat and reducing the number of wolves and their Alphas. While hunting above the treeline was overall easier, thanks to Lenore¡¯s ability to fly and find game that way, we decided to head further down the mountain, as wolves generally stayed below, leaving the higher areas for other predators.


    Soon, we broke camp and headed downwards, looking for trails that might lead us towards worthwhile game. What we found, surprised all of us, especially me. There was almost no game to be found and the few tracks we spotted were wolf-tracks. And there were a lot of those, more than I believed to be sustainable. With a bit of grumbling, Lenore took to the skies, giving us another view from above and scouting towards Yaksha. What she found made me curious, the woods were teeming with wolves and in the direction of Yaksha, the air was thick with large, flying creatures. She had no interest in getting closer to those, so she returned.


    Again, we discussed the best ways to continue as the amount of wolves made all of us rather skittish, a pack of such size could easily do us in if we fought without serious terrain-advantage. I went with Lenore over the memories of her flight, not that there was a lot, using the fact that I was seeing her viewpoint in a different light and was able to detect things that she hadn¡¯t seen in her field of view. In this case, what I noticed that she didn¡¯t was a pattern that just seemed unnatural to me, signs of human, or rather, sapient, activity outside of Yaksha.


    ¡°What do you think, can we scry the area?¡± I asked Lenore, knowing that her help and assistance would be crucial.


    ¡°Should work, unless it¡¯s warded.¡± came her slightly lackadaisical reply. Scrying was not interesting to her, it was something we had done before and she thought it boring, maybe because she was used to shifting her view-point when she entered my Hallow.


    I told the others what I was planning, asking them to guard me while my mind was occupied with other things.


    Before, I had only used my own line-of-sight to start scrying, now I was using the memory of Lenore¡¯s sight as a guidance, making me wonder how much harder it would be. But, with ideas taken from the grimoire, I had thought up a technique that should work. Forming a triangle by putting the tips of my thumbs against each other to form the base and putting the tips of my index-fingers against each other to complete it, I used the runes of shadow and darkness on the back of my hands to create an area of absolute darkness in the triangle, using that ¡®pool¡¯ of darkness as a base to shift my vision. What I was using was a modified version of a water-mirror, so the mental imagery of a pool of darkness helped. The reason why I placed the darkness in a triangle was that I could easily raise my hands in front of my face, letting me gaze into the darkness without disturbance.


    It worked like a charm, the memory of Lenore helped me guide the scrying and moments later, I was looking from the shade thrown by an old tree, looking at a slightly familiar sight. It was one of the stooges, hidden in obvious ambush on a game-trail that led towards the mountains. I was no gambling woman but somehow, I had a feeling that his two friends were not far away, waiting for someone, quite possibly me, coming down from the mountains to attack.


    Lenore mentally agreed with me, that it was very likely that they wanted revenge and had heard that we were out, hunting wind raptors, and decided to give us a greeting on the way back. We put our minds together, trying to decide what to do with them, if we wanted to get creative in our attack or simply kill them.


    Part of me wanted to put them to sleep, take their blood with Blood Magic and make a necklace that glowed whenever one of them came close, at least until they managed to get themselves killed. Sort of like a rather famous sword that glowed when orcs were nearby, but with stooges. I was not entirely certain how something like that would be done, so I shelved the idea. No, there would be no excessive creativity in this one, just Lenore sitting on a tree, allowing me to channel Mind Magic from a distance.


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    Before breaking the scrying, I shifted it from shadow to shadow, looking and finding the other two stooges nearby, making me wonder how they knew where to wait. Maybe, I would keep one alive and ask him. But maybe not.


    I told the others about the ambush and my decision to blow it up, and we started our way towards the three of them, looking for anything worthwhile to take down. We did run into a small pack of five wolves, hitting them with everything we¡¯d got to keep them from calling in reinforcements, not even skinning them on the spot, but putting them into our packs after I ripped the blood from their carcasses so it wouldn¡¯t spoil the meat or our packs.


    In the small fight, I noticed that it was harder to fight with the filter that kept Lenore¡¯s Hallow warm in place but not impossibly hard. Still, it was just a stop-gap measure and I was not too happy with it. But until we found an alternative, it was the best we had.


    After about an hour, we were near the ambush the three stooges had set and Lenore left her Hallow again, taking part of my mind with her.


    She quickly found the stooges, right were they had been, having barely moved while they waited for their prey to come to them. Lazy cowards.


    Lenore sat in a tree, overlooking all three of them, and I channelled Mind Magic through her, our wills uniting to strike the first of them. Not with the crude hammer-blow we usually used, I wanted to know if I was able to slowly infiltrate his mind without him noticing.


    I was not quite sure if it worked, maybe it was the distance but the sensation of his mind was hard to grasp so after a few minutes of trying, I switched tactics and formed runes of disorientation and madness, using them to shift the texture of my magic into something interesting.


    At the same time, I added runes of devouring and vitality, letting his life-energy drain from his shivering body. After a minute or so, he sunk into the snow, dead.


    I had already selected my next target, so I stretched my mental tendril towards him, quickly finding his mind and, this time, I started with the madness and disorientation. But I added something else, I tried to add whispers, soft words telling him of the cold, of freezing to death, describing how his body would slowly chill, his mind sinking into darkness.


    The result looked rather promising, after just a few moments, he started screaming, drawing the attention of his remaining friend. When said friend tried to help him, he drew his sword and started to madly hack at his buddy in an insane fury, heedless of anything he did to his friend. After a few moments of that sudden, insane attack, I felt bored and brought the full power of my mind to bear, shattering his in the process.


    But those few moments had been enough to cause brutal wounds in his friend who had been too overwhelmed and surprised by the sudden assault. Just from the wounds and the fact that the assault had broken his legs, I had no doubt that the third stooge was dying. But that would be just boring, so I nudged Lenore who flapped her wings, landing on the fallen body of the friend I had just killed.


    When the last living stooge focused on her, she started to madly cackle, cawing in laughter, making her caws deliberately sounding like the word ¡®Nevermore¡¯.


    ¡°The mistress has a long arm, a long arm indeed.¡± she cawed and the stooge seemed to recoil in horror.


    ¡°Insulting her, that was a stupid thin, a stupid thing indeed. But what do I expect, indeed, stupid meatsacks that you are, indeed.¡±


    With those words, she used her own magic, taking some of my power to add punch to it, forming her native ability to rip the soul from his body. It was not something I could copy or even really detect. It needed time and quite a lot of power, which limited her, but when she was able to fully use it, it was devastating. Her eyes flashed with power and an eerie, green light washed over the stooge, causing him to slump down, dead.


    I focused back on my body and saw a nice notification, telling me that my Mind Magic had leveled, bringing it to thirteen. With the three of them done in, we continued our hunt, looking for prey.

 Chapter 155

    ¡°Something is wrong.¡± Sigmir stated about an hour after Lenore and I had severely chastised the three stooges, teaching them that trying to ambush me and mine was a foolish endeavour that would only end in pain. Their pain. During that hour, we had continued our way through the snowed-in forest, looking for game to hunt, something that could feed the people of Yaksha, netting us coin and goodwill in the process. But Sigmir¡¯s statement stopped our prowling search, causing all of us to look at her.


    ¡°What do you mean, love?¡± I asked, curious what she was referring to. I had had a strange feeling tugging at me, causing me to carefully look around but I had been unable to trace that feeling back to its origin. Now, Sigmir was apparently feeling something similar.


    ¡°It¡¯s too quiet, do you remember the forest around Tegi, when we visited the second time?¡± Sigmir asked, making me shudder in memory. Back then, the forest had also been eerily quiet, quiet as a grave, thanks to the Devourer that had sucked all the live from the land.


    ¡°You mean¡­?¡± I asked, while stretching my magical senses to their limits, fearing that the next moment some creepy monster would jump out from behind a tree. Maybe that was why I had been so disgusted by the Querders and Lamprey, their elongated, slithering bodies reminded me of the tentacles I had seen on some Nethersprites.


    ¡°No, I don¡¯t think so.¡± Sigmir answered, while Adra nodded along. ¡°But something is going on in this forest. Something strange.¡± she added.


    ¡°Let¡¯s be careful.¡± Adra suggested and we shifted from a slightly casual formation, into a formation dedicated to respond to attacks. Adra went into the front, as our best tracker, followed by Rai, me and finally Sigmir, bringing up the rear.


    Keeping quiet and stepping carefully, we continued on our hunt. Sadly, we had no luck, there were the large birds Lenore had seen before, flying in the distance, and we happened upon another small wolf-pack, taking them down once more but wolves were not really tasty. Finally, after some time, Adra called for a halt.


    ¡°I don¡¯t think there is any point to continue. There is just no game to be had, something must have driven it away, either the wolves or those birds we have seen in the distance.¡± she told us.


    ¡°So, go into the mountains, above the treeline?¡± I asked, remembering that we had been able to hunt quite well up there. Just no wolves.


    ¡°No, let¡¯s head to Yaksha and find out if they know what¡¯s going on. It might be useful.¡± Sigmir suggested, causing Adra to nod in agreement.


    I was not really happy with that, the gamer in me wanting to complete all quests before heading back but it seemed that the world of Mundus had other customs so I just nodded and Adra re-oriented herself, setting of towards the town. We were not too far away and if we hurried, we should be able to get there around dusk.


    What we found was rather surprising. From the forest around the cut area, we were able to see that the birds we had seen before were Wind Raptors, hovering in the area, not trying to attack the city but keeping an eye on things.


    Not wanting to cross the distance with birds attacking us, we kept hidden, waiting for night to fully fall, hiding us from their sight.


    So, we sat there, discussing why the birds were behaving the way they did. It didn¡¯t take long for us to come to the conclusion that the bowl valley with the dungeon, which I had permanently warped, had been their main nesting space. It was an excellent retreat for them, the bowl-spahe strengthening their wind-magic to a ridiculous degree making an attack difficult to say the least. We would have been torn to shreds had I not acted the way I did, disturbing their magic and, with more luck than good sense, changing their magic in such a way that it was no longer in their control but was turned into wild magic, fueled by the surrounding area and its Astral Power. Lenore and I had tried to comprehend the result of my actions quite a few times but neither of us was certain that we understood what had happened. Not understanding what we had done was irritating but there was nothing either of us could do about it, neither of us had any real formal magic-education. We could only learn by experimentation and discovery.


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    And in this particular case, maybe our reckless use of magic had worked a little too well, permanently changing the area by bringing the glacial flows of Astral Power to the surface, cooling the area to a point that made it impossible for the raptors to continue living there. Now, with their nesting place destroyed by two-legs, it seemed that the raptors wanted to take revenge on the two-legs and targeted the town to do so.


    The next surprise came when dusk forced the Wind Raptors to abandon their blockade. As we were about to start our journey across the clearcut, we noticed that we were not the only beings hiding in the forest-line. Stopping for a moment, we used our varied magical means to investigate and realised that there were dozens of wolves hidden around us, not really doing anything active, just slinking around. I might be anthropomorphising, or would that be sapient-pomorphising, but they gave me the distinct impression of being up to no good, acting like some thugs, skulking in dark alleys.


    ¡°Maybe, we should make sure that we are not seen.¡± I suggested, once we had an overview about the amount of wolves in the area. Again, neither of us had a need to tussle with all of them at once, so the idea to sneak past them was a good one. The others crowded around me and Adra used her magic to erase our tracks, while Rai and I used our Darkness-magic to hide us in the open field, making us an indistinct, dark shadow hidden by the darkness around us. I had to conceal Sigmir and Adra, in addition to myself, making it a rather complex piece of magic, creating a cloak of shadows using runes and stretching it over the other two with Darkness-Magic. Luckily, Rai had his own cloak while Ylva and Lenore were in their Hallows, using that innate piece of magic to hide themselves from the world.


    Preparations in place, we started moving, stealthily making our way forward. I kept scanning the field, using Lenore¡¯s vision and noticed that there were other sources of magic creeping around, I was unable to clearly make out what they were doing, but I could hazard a guess that those concealed by the magic were doing just the same as we did, avoiding the massive amount of beasties that surrounded the town.


    I quietly whispered to Adra what I was seeing and she focused on the area I pointed out to her, trying to find what I was seeing. It took her a few moments, but once she knew where to look, she managed to pierce through their concealment, telling us what was out there. My assumption had been right, it was another group of hunters, moving towards the town. Unsure if the gates would open for us, we followed the four hunters, careful not to draw attention and when we got close to the walls, they gave a signal and a ladder was lowered, allowing them to enter the town.


    We moved close and once we were close enough, Sigmir made contact, quietly asking for the ladder to stay lowered. There were some quiet swears due to the surprise, but just from the fact that we could talk, it was obvious that we were not animals, so the ladder stayed down and we were able to climb over the wall. Nobody really checked, after all, what was gnawing at their walls were wolves and those were not known for their ability  to use ladders.


    Once inside, I dropped the concealment from Sigmir and Adra, keeping myself hidden in Sigmir¡¯s shadow, unsure if my Outsider-Trait would cause trouble. When asked, the others simply answered truthfully, that we were hunters and had been unable to track down game, so we came to the town, looking for more information. Sadly, neither the hunters nor the watchmen had any real information, just that the woods were teeming with wolves, killing everything and the Wind Raptors had turned up a few days ago, circling the town and attacking everything moving on the open ground around town.


    The town itself could easily defend itself against both threats, the Wind Raptors had felt the bite of Yaksha¡¯s bows and ballistae when they came too close on the first day and the wolves hadn¡¯t even tried to attack the walls, so it was a bit of a stand-off. A few hunters, especially the few Travellers in Yaksha, tried to sneak across the clearcut in the night, coming back the next night with their prey, if they had any.


    With those things in mind, we headed towards the inn where we had stayed the last time. It had been quite good, so we wanted to stay there again.

 Chapter 156

    We made our way towards the inn, well, Sigmir and Adra made their way, with Rai and me staying in the shadows, slinking after them. There was something in the air of Yaksha, almost like an electrical charge, setting me on edge.


    On the way towards the inn, Saya, the Caprakin we met at the guild when we were in town the last time intercepted us.


    ¡°You have some nerves, coming here again.¡± she said, looking at Sigmir for a moment before focusing on me but not pushing away the shadows that concealed me.


    ¡°Why do you say that?¡± Adra asked, frowning at the accusatory words, even as her tone was conversationally.


    ¡°Three guys, Travellers, they claimed that you broke the peace of the hearth, killing them during the night. And when the wolves came from the woodworks, they said that you had slaughtered some of them, making it sound like you are responsible for them blockading the town.¡± Saya explained and I was getting a little annoyed at my inability to directly talk with her. But if I understood her right, the three stooges had poisoned this town for me. Wanting to speak directly with her, I asked in a whisper if we could go into the guild to talk. She just nodded and led us towards the guild, opening the door with a small key, hinting at quite sophisticated locksmithing-techniques.


    We trooped in and once inside the dark building, Saya quickly lit a small lamp, bathing us all in soft light.


    ¡°Now, care to tell me what happened?¡± she asked, curious. ¡°When you were here last, I thought you were a monster, but a sensible one. So, breaking the peace of the hearth in an inn seems out of character for you.¡±


    ¡°Depends on your definition.¡± I started, stepping from the shadows, ¡°Yes, I attacked and killed them. But only after they tried sneaking up on us in the middle of the night, I had placed a ward to prevent just that, as we had a small confrontation with them before and I¡¯m a little paranoid.¡±


    ¡°So, they stepped where they shouldn¡¯t? Not a huge surprise, I¡¯ve got to tell you. They felt, I don¡¯t know, shifty. The kind of people that try to gain any advantage possible, no matter how.¡± Saya paused for a moment.


    ¡°Still, you should have told the innkeeper, not just walk away as if nothing happened. People have the bad habit to believe those who accuse first.¡± she continued.


    ¡°Well, true, but I wasn¡¯t aware that there was such a thing. To me, an inn is just a place where I rest my head. And in the last inn we have been in, we got into a little trouble without getting any help to uphold such a thing.¡± I explained and Sigmir nodded along.


    ¡°Ah. Well, in most communities that host a lot of travellers inns are safe-spaces were nobody fights. Simply, to make sure that people can rest there, in peace.¡± Saya answered.


    It was a sensible rule, if people started picking fights in towns and especially inns, damage would quickly accumulate, especially with the amount of power a single person could hold.


    ¡°That could cause problems..¡± I said, thinking of all the things that might go wrong. In addition, I wondered if the three stooges had lain in ambush, waiting for us, or if they simply used their status as Travellers to go out and hunt, bringing back food for the town.


    ¡°Most likely, yes. If I were you, and there is no reason to stay in town, I would hike it. The townsfolk will simply hunker down for a while, the food stores are easily able to last the winter and I doubt that the wolves or the wind raptors will try to actually destroy the town.¡± Saya gave valuable advice, if we stayed, the stooges would undoubtedly try to make things difficult for us, or rather, for me.


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    ¡°Why do you think the town won¡¯t fall? And why are those beasts acting that way at all¡± I asked, curious while weighing the possible ways forward in my mind. It rackled that they had been able to make me unwelcome in yet another town, but maybe that was just what I had to expect, I had chosen a built that focused on personal, magical power at the expense of social graces, talents and traits. If they were even just average in that regard, they would likely be able to spin a tale that made me look like a total monster, not that my actions had been far from one.


    ¡°Oh, the wolves could definitely destroy the town. But they would need some serious motivation to do so, as they would have to sacrifice a lot of pack-members to do so. They move around, year-round, coming into the vicinity from time to time but never causing too much damage.¡± Saya¡¯s answer made me swallow hard, I had a feeling that my, or rather, Ylva¡¯s presence would count as motivation, after all, I had used Blood Magic to suck one of their Alpha¡¯s dry, even usurping the divine bloodline they carried, feeding it to one of their adversaries. Yeah, if they got wind of that, I had no doubt that they would want to voice their displeasure. And the Wind Raptors, they had to know that I was responsible for the wild magic that had not only ravaged their numbers but stained the valley they used.


    ¡°The Wind Raptors, I¡¯m not sure what has their feathers in a bunch. They live in the nearby mountains and hunters regularly cull their numbers. There has never been a case of such a massive flock coming into the lowlands.¡± Saya continued with a shrug. As she talked, she kept an eye on me and must have seen something. ¡°But you look like you know what is going on with them, care to share?¡±


    ¡°Well, I might. You gave us a quest to hunt them, remember? Well, we might have been more successful than planned and hunted them into what I now believe is their roosting-area. There were dozens, maybe hundreds of Wind Raptors nesting in a bowl-valley and they used their combined magic against us.¡± I explained and noticed that Saya looked slightly sick.


    ¡°You followed monsters into their breeding-space and lived?!¡± She blurted, her eyes wide. It sounded like it was a well-known fact that monsters would defend their breeding-areas with impressive ferocity.


    ¡°That is getting tiresome, the lack of information.¡± I growled softly, wondering why Sigmir and Adra did not know such a thing. I would have to ask them later.


    ¡°Anyway, the birds tried to use their magic against us and I took their challenge, winning it. Their magic got out of control, killing some of them in the process and creating an area of wild magic in the process.¡± I continued.


    ¡°That would do it, yes. But, wild magic? You are either lucky, skilled or insane. Probably all three. It changed you, didn¡¯t it? There is something different about you, something that I can¡¯t quite put my finger on.¡±


    ¡°Maybe. As we have established that staying in this fine town would be a bad idea, why don¡¯t we settle the quests you gave us and we will be on our way?¡± I asked, thinking about the herb-lore book I was carrying. After reading it, I knew that the herbs we had taken from Tegi were useless to me, but still, I had given my word that I would bring it back. Maybe the herbalist wouldn¡¯t mind a nightly visit.


    ¡°Sure, we can do that. Show me what you got.¡± she agreed with a grin, so we started to pull out the wolves and wind raptors, stacking them on the floor, making a neat pile of either trophies or simply dead bodies. We would get paid for either, so it wasn¡¯t that much of a difference.


    ¡°You have been busy, haven''t you.¡± Saya noted as she started counting the amount of kills we had brought.


    Just as she sat on a small stool, to allow her ease of counting despite her wooden leg, the door opened and another hunter peeked in.


    ¡°Saya, good that you are still here¡­¡± he started before taking in the scene, focusing on me and a frown marred his face.


    ¡°You! You are the one the other travellers talked about, the one who brought the wolves to our door.¡± he started yelling, his voice accusatory, causing the people on the square outside to gather. Apparently, one of them was a friend of the innkeeper and he added fuel to the fire, yelling about, me, breaking the peace of the inn. Next, I heard a squeaky voice, calling me a monster, a nestling-slayer and noticed that the snowbold had found his voice, undoubtedly thanks to the forming mob-mentality. It felt unnatural the quickness with which the group changed from people simply milling around, going about their business now that the wind raptors were no longer in the sky, into an angry mob. I had a sneaking suspicion that my Outsider-trait was making up for the time I had spent away from people, doing its best to get me into trouble.


    The shouts continued and I had no doubt that we were moments away from a rather nasty fight, unless someone could frighten the mob back to their senses.

 Interlude: Advertisment - Tobiuno

    Built on the top of a hill, Castle Everwatch oversees the plains of Evergreen, protecting the people of the Duchy Highever from harm. During the last weeks, a band of knights got stationed here, sallying out to hunt the numerous bandits that plague the abundant plains.


    The leader of that band of knights is as unusual as his tactics, for he is one of those not born from this world, one of the undying Travellers, sent by the gods to learn about life. This particular Traveller, known as Tobiuno, Captain in the Dukal Guard of Highever and leader of a group of Travellers, calling themselves the Blades of the Realm, is standing on the battlements, looking down at the endless, green plains he is tasked to guard.


    ¡°Greetings, fellow Travellers and those of you who have yet to travel to Mundus.


    Allow me, to show you what awaits those who walk the Road to Purgatory.¡± the tall human announces, with a friendly smile before starting to walk along the wall, from time to time gesturing to the plains below the castle. In the distance, worked fields are visible, hinting at the farmers doing their work to supply the Castle, the Duchy and the surrounding lands with grain.


    ¡°Welcome to Castle Everwatch, one of the countless castles and fortresses on the world of Mundus, there are many like it, but this one is mine. Well, in a way. I, along with a unit of the Dukal Guard and the Blades of the Realm, was tasked with the protection of the Evergreen-plains by the Duke of Highever. Castle Everwatch is his, but we are doing his Grace¡¯s work so, for now, it is ours. You may ask yourself, what is so special about Road to Purgatory, let me show you.¡±


    The scene cuts to the courtyard. Tobiuno is no longer dressed in normal clothes but is now wearing a chainmail-vest over thick cloth-armour, has a sabre belted to his side and a shield strapped to his arm.


    Horses are already readied and Tobiuno mounts, joining up with nine other riders, three like him wearing chain-mail, shields and weapons, one a sabre and the other two have swords at their side. Two riders are scouts and have a spear in a holster affixed to their saddle, with a quiver and a shortbow on the other side. Those two are clad in leather armour with some metal-reinforcement. The last four wear soft leather armour but without metal, more normal cloth-like than armour, really. One has no visible weapon at all, one a small but very ornate dagger and the last two have ornate maces.


    ¡°Today, we will patrol with two groups, showing you what Mundus looks like. At least here, were we live. Oh, and just remember, it is winter, so take that into account.¡± Tobiuno tells the camera, laughing a little as the green plains could easily be seen during spring and their looks would likely be the same.


    The ten riders leave the castle, taking up two formations next to each other, each with a scout at the front, followed by a shield-wielder, the two in soft armour and finally the other shield-wielder. Tobiuno is one of the two riding at the end of the group, keeping an eye on things. The formations follow a paved road, obviously built for carriages.


    ¡°As you might see, Mundus is, in a way, far larger than Earth. Not because it is physically bigger but because the life moves slower. When you want to go somewhere, you do so either by shank¡¯s mare, a real mare or a mare-drawn carriage. You might say, travelling is mare¡¯s business here.¡± Tobiuno explains to the camera and a low groan is heard from the rider next to him.


    ¡°Anyway, why don¡¯t we look how others live?¡± he says with a chuckle as their ride continues.


    The group continues on their way and on the nearby fields, peasants are visible, some working the fields, others talking amongst themselves. The scene seems straight out of a period-piece, extolling the values of traditional values, hard labour and a simple life, eschewing technology. Not that that would be the reality, as one can see on a nearby field where a figure clad in a green robe decorated with a bright-red flower is blessing the fields.


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    ¡°You might know that Pantheon-Entertainment did their best to make Mundus into a living world, a world that we share with those already living here. And over there, you see one of the major differences between the worlds. That, over there,¡± he gestures to the green-robed figure, ¡°is a cleric, a priest of Demeter, the Harvest-Goddess.¡±


    For a moment, the priest is clad in gentle, golden light before it swiftly spreads around him, seeping into the soil. Once the light is gone, the priest seems to sag a little, as if he had just done something extremely exhausting. After a moment, he turns to the road and greets the riders with a light nod that is returned by them.


    The riders continue on their way and the scene cuts, to them, entering a small town. There is a hustle and bustle going on, everyone seems to move in a chaotic fashion but at the same time, there seems to be order in that chaos. While everyone moves at their own pace, they all seem to know their surroundings.


    ¡°Here we are in one of the towns we protect, so that those who don¡¯t want to fight can go about their business in safety. The blacksmith forges iron into all manner of things, from simple nails to plows and even swords if they are skilled at their craft. Outside town, there is the tannery, working in skin and leather, where the townspeople don¡¯t need to smell them.¡± Tobiuno explains with a laugh and the camera shows the market-square once more, showing how a farmer is haggling with another, in the distance, the blacksmith is seen working in an open forge, the clanging of his hammer-strikes clearly audible over the crowd¡¯s noise.


    Nearby, one of the other riders is talking to a guard, apparently getting a report and signaling something to Tobiuno, using hand-signs.


    ¡°Well, we could spend hours here, watching the villagers going about their day, but we have a duty to perform, so we need to move on.¡± Tobiuno smiles to the camera and the scene fades to black.


    With the next cut, the ten riders move through a forest, or rather, nine riders and one scout on foot, focusing on the earth before him, following a set of tracks. All of them seem far more alert compared to the previous scenes and the weapons are held ready, not comfortably holstered.


    ¡°Sadly, Mundus is in many ways a world where the strong prey on the weak and not all predators have four legs. But some do.¡± Tobiuno explains, just as the mounted scout shouts a warning and uses his spear to ward of a four-legged attacker, skewering it with a stab that was either excellently placed or lucky. Crimson blood splatters into the dark fur of the attacker, dying it red. At first, it seems to be a wolf but the scout calls out that it was a hound.


    Cursing, the scout of foot mounts and the formation shifts starts moving again, watchful for any trouble around them. Those with shields have taken point and the scouts are now in the back, keeping watch of the surroundings, one holding his spear, still stained with some blood, ready, the other having is bow in hand and an arrow in the other, trusting his horse to follow the other animals.


    ¡°To the left! CHARGE!¡± Tobiuno calls out at the front and the camera shows a group of bedraggled figures getting ready to fight, their hound having warned them from the coming attackers. As the four leading figures move together to charge the camp, the four clad in soft start their own work. One starts to glow in golden light, another has raised his hand and in front of it, glowing symbols start forming in the air as he mutters under his breath. The other two have drawn their implements and seem to do their thing.


    Just as the archer in the back lets loose with an arrow, the image fades to black.


    The next scene shows Tobiuno again, dressed in normal clothes, a linen tunic and pants, again standing on the battlements, with a glorious sunset behind him.


    ¡°Mundus. A living world, for everyone to explore. Not only to explore the world but also to explore themselves. To explore what it means to walk a different path. What it would mean to be a farmer or a priest, an adventurer or a craftsman. You can be whatever you want to be. You can make your own adventure.


    ¡°Join us and find your own road. On the Road to Purgatory.¡±


    The scene fades to black again and the logo is shown, an image of the globe, with ghostly blue flames racing across it, until it is completely shrouded in an aura of blue fire.

 Chapter 157

    It had only taken moments to turn the people milling around on the market-square, going about their business, into an angry mob, some even equipped with torches. Looking over to them, I handed Sigmir my bag and mentally asked Lenore to leave her Hallow, which she instantly did.


    ¡°You take care of things in here, I take care of things out there.¡± I told them, as Lenore hopped off from my shoulder.


    Then I stepped outside, confronting the angry mob. Thanks to my connection with Lenore, I was able to explain my plans to them, even while I was outside. Their part in things was to turn in the quests, get the money and ask Saya to give the herb-lore book I had borrowed to the herbalist. It seemed I wouldn¡¯t get my deposit back, but that was fine with me.


    Looking at the people outside, I wondered just why they were so angry and why their anger was directed at me. It didn¡¯t make any sense, at least from where I stood. But if they wanted to a confrontation, they would get one.


    ¡°Silence!¡± I spoke, trying to project my voice without shouting. At the same time, I pulled the large Eternal-Ice core out of my bag, shattering away the ice that I had surrounded it with, holding it in my hand, even as the cold painfully invaded my hand. To help my hand, I shrouded my hand in a combination of Liquid Moonlight and Mist. The idea was to use the inherent power of the Liquid Moonlight and the diffuse nature of mist to create a layer of insulation. I needed to use Overflow to control it and to keep myself from harm as I handled the Ice but I would have used Overflow anyway, just for the visual intimidation-factor.


    The square was bathed in silvery-white light from the orb floating above my hand and the mist billowed around me, causing the temperature of our surroundings to noticeably drop. A gasp went through the gathered people and they seemed to collectively take a step back. But my command was obeyed, silence fell over the square, the power radiating from the orb in my hand quashing any notion of resistance. At least for now. But the power of the Eternal Ice was also radiating back into my hand, even with the insulation I used, making it painfully cold. It was a strange sensation, a part of me welcomed the icy cold, even as I had no doubt that it was damaging me, maybe even destroying my arm.


    ¡°Hear me, people of Yaksha!¡± I spoke into the silence, making sure that every eye was either on me or the glowing orb, promising death, in my hand. Either focus worked very well for me.


    ¡°My party and I came into your town in peace. Apparently, you do not want us here, so we will leave and will leave in peace.¡± I announced, causing the mob to start muttering again. With the mutterings, I also felt a few attempts to Observe me but I tried to do the same thing I had used against Saya when we were here the first time, using shadows to hide my stats. Now, I used the mist to do so, at least that was the mental idea I was using with my magic. I had no idea if I was successful but the least I wanted to do, was try. The creepy, uncomfortable feeling that came with being Observed never fully manifested, only the foreboding feeling that I got a split-second before it happened.


    ¡°But if you try to harm us, if you try to attack me or mine, there will be no more Yaksha. I will make it my mission, the mission of an undying Traveller, to wipe this town off the map, to make sure that each and every one of you dies, that your families die and that ¡®Yaksha¡¯ becomes synonymous with ¡®death¡¯. And you can see that I have the power to do so.¡±


    While I was outside, explaining the facts of life to the angry mob, Lenore was inside and I listened in, as she, once again, used my own voice to speak to the others.


    ¡°It seems as if we should leave this town post-haste. Sigmir, can you hand Saya the herb-book? And Saya, can you return said book to Suja, of the Greyfur-tribe? If you could do that, we just need you to formally complete the quests and we will be out of your hair.¡± she explained the others.


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    ¡°You mean the hag? Sure, I can do that. But first let me count the mess on my floor.¡± Saya agreed, quickly tallying up the birds and wolves we had brought in.


    ¡°Well, you brought me twelve normal wolves and the remains of twenty-three Wind Raptors. Give me a moment to get your coin.¡± after saying that she rose, taking the book from Sigmir and moving behind her counter. She rooted around under it for a moment, before gesturing to Sigmir and handing her a handful of coin.


    ¡°There you go. I doubt you will come here again, at least judging by the mob outside, so I wish you luck on your travels. And ask the little monster not to raze the town; judging by the amount of Power I feel outside, she¡¯s gearing up to something big.¡± Saya said, apparently unconcerned with what I was doing.


    ¡°We are done, can we come out?¡± Lenore asked from inside, just as I had asked her. A short glimpse to my event-log told me that I had quests completed and EXP gained, enough to bring me a level-up. But it was time to leave, before the mob could go look for their courage and force me to make good on my threat. I had no doubt that the power contained in the crystal would be enough to wipe Yaksha off the map, killing everyone in the area, including me.


    ¡°We came in peace and hope that we can leave in peace again.¡± I finished my announcement, my voice as cold as the orb in my hand, and I increased the amount of Mist I was creating, causing the mist to shroud half the square within seconds. There were others in the mist and I drew the disorientation-rune, using the concept it represented to add to the mist around us, even going so far to gently push against the minds of the closest townspeople that were still out there.


    ¡°You can come out.¡± I told Lenore and heard the door behind me open. Feeling the others behind me, I combined runes for concealment and mist, trying to hide us in the cold mist that shrouded the area. It felt easier to shroud them like that, maybe because I was just hiding us within a larger formation compared to hiding us in an open field. I also noted how the silvery light from the Eternal Ice refracted in the mist, making it even harder to see through due to the diffuse light. I was still able to get a rough perception about our surroundings, thanks to my connection to the mist, but without that connection, seeing further than the length of my arm was impossible.


    ¡°Let¡¯s go.¡± I told the others, letting Lenore hide in her Hallow again and changing the density of the mist around us, so the others could at least see me while I guided them back to the wall. As we walked, I continuously increased the amount of mist in the air, blanketing the whole town in a dense cloud. In addition, Lenore added her own mind to mine, using the mist as a medium to confuse the few people we had to pass.


    Once the mist was dense and widespread enough, I placed the Eternal Ice back into a shell of Ice and into my bag. That action made me notice how badly my arm was damaged, even from just being close to the Eternal Ice for a few minutes. My arm had stopped feeling cold while I had been talking to the townspeople and now I was unable to move my fingers and wrist, making me curious how much damage I had caused to myself. My HP-bar was down to forty percent, but the HP-bars in Road to Purgatory were a rather bad indicator for normal living things, as even something with a huge HP-pool would die very quickly with the right wound. Open a major blood vessel and there would be an added debuff, reducing the HP by a percentage of their maximum, depending on the vessel. For example, I had noticed that cutting the throat added a fifteen percent maximum HP per second bleed-effect. Other attacks simply counted as fatal, causing instant death, those mostly involved massive brain-trauma or things like decapitation.


    The mist made our way to the wall quite easy, nobody was able to see us, but the wall was guarded, especially the ladder. But I had enough Astral Power left to simply make my own ladder, out of Hard Ice, allowing us to climb up and jump down the other side. Climbing the ladder one-handed was hard enough that Sigmir noticed the damage I had done to my arm, causing her to frown in displeasure and pick me up like a child as she jumped down the wall and on our run away from the town. When we got to the treeline, she activated all her self-buffs, changed her grip on me so that she had one hand free and hacked the few wolves that waited there apart without either slowing down or putting me down.


    When I looked up, I had never seen her looking better, her mouth set, a few splatters of blood on her face, it was¡­ fitting. My fierce protector.

 Chapter 158

    I was contemplating death. Wouldn¡¯t it be the height of irony, if the first time I died in Road to Purgatory was by my own hand? And not in a magical experiment gone wrong, but in a calculated, deliberate decision that death and respawn was an easier way to go about things compared to continuing? The arm I had used to hold up the chunk of Eternal Ice looked like something a scientist had found buried in some glacier.


    After we had fled Yaksha - putting another town on the list of places I was no longer welcome - Sigmir had continued to carry me, despite my objection that it was my arm that was damaged and I didn¡¯t need it to run. The look she gave me made me rethink my stance, there was no loss to be carried and I had a feeling that arguing with her would only hurt her. So, I simply watched her face, the mix of fierceness, determination and gentleness making me marvel at the partner that stood beside me.


    Adra and Rai quickly caught up and after a few minutes of running, Sigmir slowed down and asked Adra for a concealment-spell. As soon as that was cast, she changed directions a few times, changing our direction so we ended up roughly parallel to the road south. I managed to reestablish my mental filter to keep Lenore from being cold in her Hallow but trying to heal my hand proved to be too difficult in my shaken state. The pain must have taken a bigger toll on me than I had thought; my mind felt sluggish, almost as if I was trying to think through thick molasses. I felt Lenore¡¯s mind close by and started to take shelter with her, letting her presence soothe me, even when my mind only wanted to drift away.


    Finally, one of the others spotted a secluded spot to rest for a time; obviously their bodies were feeling the effect of a rather long and exhausting day, just as mine was nearing its limit. I was only dimly aware that Sigmir placed me on the bedding we shared and after some time, she brought some stew, feeding it to me.


    In that time of waiting, I was contemplating if making an official shelter, setting it as my spawn-point and killing myself would be easier compared to trying to restore my hand. I had started to try, once Sigmir had placed me in bed, but the effect I was having was massively limited, my Blood Magic apparently had problems with restoring that type of damage, even compared to closing deep wounds. But Lenore kept harping on me, pushing and prodding that I wouldn¡¯t try such a thing, arguing that the gods that were responsible for bringing my consciousness here would likely take a dim view on such an attempt to use their system to my advantage. I idly wondered, deep in the recesses of my mind, if that was part of some sort of anti-cheating thing or if Lenore was speaking her own thoughts.


    Both were possible and so, I kept trying.


    When Sigmir came and fed me, literally spoon-fed me, brooking no resistance from me, reminding me of the time she had been injured and I had taken care of her, I had been at the point that I slowly managed to get circulation into the damaged limb without poisoning myself, using my magic to filter the toxins out. The blood supply had, possibly due to an subconscious use of magic on my part, shut off at some point - and from what I felt with my magic, that was a good thing, or I would be in an even worse state. Keeping the filtration and circulation going took quite a bit of my attention, so it might have been a good thing that Sigmir had decided to feed me, or I would have made a mess.


    After eating, I tried to assert myself that I would be able to take a watch but Sigmir simply put a hand on my chest and said no. Once more, I looked into her eyes and saw steely determination there, making sure that I knew she would not budge on that point, that I would not get out of bed before morning and that I was lucky Pantheon had not insisted on including all biological processes into their game.


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    Even if I had wanted to protest some more, I had nothing left to protest with so I simply let her have her way, sinking back into the bedding, noticing how Ylva left Sigmir¡¯s Hallow, pacing the camping-spot as if to make sure she knew where what was.


    ¡°Sleep, dear. Ylva promised to guard us and you need your rest.¡± Sigmir whispered to me, as she draped herself around me, encircling me in her arms.


    I gave her a soft kiss, assuring her that I would rest. What better way to rest than in her arms?


    But resting did not mean sleeping - if I let my arm deteriorate more, I would really have to think about cutting it off - so while my body rested, my mind and magic were busy, using blood to slowly change the flesh bit by bit, maybe cell by cell. It was hard to frame the information I received from my magic in terms I could align with the biology I knew, the sensations were much more rooted in feelings and my self-perception, making that particular task rather difficult. But bit by bit, I was able to get my hand back into working condition, even if I had to pry loose cell after cell, extract it with Blood Magic, replace it with my magic and move on to the next cell. That was roughly the process I had to use; maybe I was working on a slightly larger scale, replacing more than just single cells, but I was not sure.


    Once I had the process figured out, it quickly became a task of repetition and my mind started to mingle with Lenore, our combined minds using a small part of the whole that made us to keep an eye on things while we held a conversation about more interesting topics. Normally, we would talk about magic, which was our biggest, shared interest, but there was something I was curious about, especially if we continued on our current path.


    If we did so, our path would lead us further south, staying on the western side of the mountain-range in which we had hunted Wind Raptors and the mountain range would cut us off from the area we had previously been in.


    So, what I wanted to know, was if Ylva was planning to go after the black wolves that had hunted her pack, back when we met. It had been at the back of my mind all that time, especially when I had taken the blood from the black Alpha-wolf and fed it to Ylva.


    My connection with Lenore gave me her perspective on things, and I noticed that that perspective was much more rooted in the present; while she remembered things, Lenore was much less emotionally attached to the past. To her, the past was to be remembered but she would not dwell in feelings about it. No remorse, but also no joyous remembrance. No regrets, but that also meant less motivation.


    I noticed that that particular trait was the reason why she never went after me about my magic experimentation, once she could tell me off for it, the experiment was already over and in the past.


    It was a strange dichotomy, her reverence for her Ancestor and her almost negligent view on lessons learned from past behaviour. Her mind quickly provided the answer: her Ancestor was part of what made her into her current form, so it was only right to revere him. In that regard, her mental processes simply made no sense to me when I looked at them without the benefit that the combination of our minds gave me. When I looked at her thoughts without her mind there with me, they made a lot less sense than when our minds were joined; we both needed the other¡¯s mind to interpret memories and thoughts of the other, our own minds lacking the reference-frame to do so.


    In our shared, mental gestalt, the night passed relatively quick and once the sun rose, I took stock of the progress we had made with my hand. It no longer looked like it belonged to ?tzi; it looked almost like a living limb again. Moving it was still impossible, but at least I was relatively sure that I would be able to heal the rest of it and no longer contemplating to test whether respawning fixed previously-damaged body-parts. A look at my log showed that I had gained two points in my Blood Magic, something I had expected. I had used that particular magic intensively in a complex and new manner, so skill-gains were expected.


    I was fed breakfast again, despite my improved arm, and during breakfast, we discussed our further plans.

 Chapter 159

    ¡°Well, that¡¯s another place we can¡¯t visit again. Didn¡¯t you also get kicked out of Yari?¡± Adra asked with a slight smirk once we got to serious conversation over breakfast.


    ¡°Yes, we did. Not that it matters; I have no desire to go back there, ever again. And speaking of going back, is there anything we need to do before we head further south?¡± I asked, mainly Ylva and Lenore. Ylva had that feud with the black wolves, ever since they had attacked her pack and Lenore had expressed interest in the mountain and the wind raptors, we had fought some of them but I was not sure if she had achieved whatever she had wanted to achieve.


    ¡°I have what I needed from the Wind Raptors. Not that I gained much; I will need something else to cross the first divide.¡± Lenore explained, and I felt her apprehension about that ¡®something¡¯ she spoke off. I made a mental note to ask her about it, once she was back in her Hallow and we could communicate directly.


    ¡°I will follow you, Master.¡± Rai stated, conviction clear in his voice.


    ¡°We can head further south. There is nothing we can do in this area.¡± Ylva growled before retreating into her Hallow. I had a feeling that she¡¯d love to go against the black wolves but that she was realistic enough that we would just die if we tried. We had managed to fight off one pack of them but everything we had heard told us that there were more, far more of them out there. And we had heard one of them invoking the names of Odin¡¯s hounds, Freki and Geri. If that was truly who lead the black wolves, then I was very much on board with Ylva¡¯s decision to let sleeping dogs lie, so to say.


    Another thing that made me want to leave the area as fast as possible was that both the wolves and the wind raptors had good reason to go after us in general and me in particular. Fighting them all would be suicide, pure and simple. It rakled a little, to run away, but there simply was no reason to stay and fight them, sacrificing not only myself but more important Sigmir in the process. No, in this case discretion was the better part of valour.


    In the end, we agreed that travelling south would be the best choice in general and that staying in the forest for a day or two before travelling openly on the old imperial road was a sound plan.


    So, for the next two days we kept going south-ward, staying close to the road but far enough away from it so that anything preying on travellers would not come across us. Humorously, it wasn¡¯t bandits we were worried about, our collective wisdom told us that even the old imperial road was not having enough traffic in winter for any bandit to make a living, our worries were more addressed towards the rather smart and cunning beasts that roamed these forests. I had no doubt that a being as smart as Ylva or Lenore would be able to formulate a plan to lay ambushes on the roads, just like bandits would.


    Nothing really happened during those two days, I mostly focused on restoring my hand which took a lot of focus. The rest of my time was taken up by mothering from Sigmir who had taken the rather significant and obviously problematic injury I had incurred almost as a personal insult. So, as if to make up for her perceived failure, she went into an overprotective, mothering mode, that threatened to drive me insane. Or, more insane, depending on whom you ask.


    But when I wanted to set her straight, to make her understand that I was not a fragile doll, we clashed a little. My independence and stubbornness clashed against her protective instincts and pride. It was a tense moment, but at the end of the day, I lost the clash. Or, maybe I won, depending on your perspective. I lost because I accepted her taking care of me and promised that if something like that ever happened again, I would let her take care of me, again. But, I also won because her argument was less an argument and more a heartfelt plea that she hated to see me hurt and that it pained her to see me hurt and she needed to know that I was taken care of. The sheer emotion in her eyes made me concede my struggle and I let myself be spoon fed another day. If mothering me, made her feel better and lessened her undeserved guilt, I felt it the least I could do to let her.


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    After all, I was at fault for causing her grief, even if I was unsure if there had been a better way out of Yaksha.


    I did manage to quiz Lenore on her needs to cross the first Divide, learning that she would need to harvest the energies left after the departure of souls, not what we absorbed as EXP but something else, something lingering. One such place would be the Barrow Den but Lenore joked that the Grandmother would smite us if we tried to destabilize her dungeon, another might be the ancient Kingdom formerly ruled by the Ice Queen, Sally. Sadly, we had no idea where that Kingdom actually had been or if it was even still there. We would have to look somewhere else for the haunting, lingering energies set free by massive loss of life.


    And the events in Yaksha made a couple more waves, as there had been another Traveller in the crowd who had published the recording of me, cowing the whole crowd, complete with a evocative description of the emotions felt during the time I had been visible. Adding to that was the video and a bit of description from the Ghost-nouns of Lenore coming down from the skies to lay a smackdown onto them, which they easily attributed to me and things got a little spicy online.


    As if the previous nonsense hadn¡¯t been bad enough, the new videos and descriptions just as the old ones were slowly leaving the front page was akin to pouring gasoline into a fire, it was as if someone had thrown fresh meat into the troll-cage.


    The replies ranged from the normal-concerned to the simply ridiculous, spanning every facet of intelligence between those extremes.


    The most normal ones were those who thought the threats I had made against Yaksha, realistic threats even without the strange magic artifact I was holding, were ill-boding for a living world if any relatively new character had the ability to threaten a town with the implacable wrath of an undying threat, a threat that could not be killed and would come back to haunt them again and again, it would pose a significant problem for the NPC-population.


    Those concerns were mostly assuaged once someone explained that a character trying to do something like that was taking a slow route to perma-death, thanks to the way death-penalties worked. The penalties were harsh and, more important, they were partially permanent. It was one of the rare cases of a developer appearing and actually explaining how the death-penalties worked, that a part of them was recoverable, unless one died again before doing so, and only a portion was permanently lost on the first death. That meant that while it was possible for a Traveller to commit to revenge on a large scale, it also meant throwing away one''s character. The developer in question even alluded that there was a mechanic for natives to do something similar by dedicating themselves to a particular deity, being unable to die before their vengeance was fulfilled, but dying once it was.


    But those concerns were the ones I could understand and emphasize with.


    And then there were those who, once again, called me a cheater, a hacker, a developer-plant and what-not. They claimed that Lenore was some sort of exploit, or rather my ability to speak and cast magic through her, others claimed that the artifact I was using was the result of me hacking the game. That last one caused me to chuckle, I could code a little, there had been a few classes in university but that just meant I was able to write myself a simple calculator-program, if I so wanted. Hacking into something like Road to Purgatory was so far out of that ball-park, it wasn¡¯t even in the same solar-system anymore.


    Anyway, I read the strange theories as long as they amused me before trying to find a map of the area we were heading towards. Sadly, the amount of maps for the world of Mundus was very much limited so other than a rough map with all of two cities within a few hundred kilometers of my estimation of our position, they helped very little.There were a few marks that I could not identify on the map, one of them about three days ride south of our position but other than that, I was unable to find anything useful.


    We would just have to see what waited for us beyond the horizon, what was beyond the next bend in the road and hidden behind the next hill. Somehow, that not-knowing gave me a huge thrill and made me look forward to the journey so much more.

 Chapter 160

    After two days that we spent using the forest to hide ourselves, we finally decided that we had put enough distance between us and those we had angered, meaning that we felt secure in using the old imperial road.


    Leaving the forest and moving onto the road, I got my first good look at it - when we were in Yaksha, I had not really looked at it, just seeing it as an old brick road, even if it was in relatively good condition.


    Now, I was really looking at it and noticed things I had not noticed before. The first thing I noticed was that there was a subtle magic permeating the road and seeping into those travelling on it. Curious, I switched on the magical vision Lenore granted me and together, we looked at the road.


    And what we saw was stunning, I had sometimes thought of myself as a good spellcaster, due to my ability to create new magic out of three different elements and making it my own. There had been a few forums posts strengthening that belief, that it was something special and rare. What I was seeing below me, taught me that it was hubris.


    ¡°It¡¯s¡­ beautiful.¡± Lenore whispered in my mind, her voice an almost breathless sigh.


    ¡°Makes one humble, doesn¡¯t it. To see what is possible.¡± I answered, my mind held in thrall by the image in front of me.


    The magic that permeated the road was dizzyingly complex, to me, it appeared as a colourful weave of different elements, some interwoven in such a way to change their fundamental nature to create something new. It reminded me a little of the lesson the Grandmother had given me, that Ice-element I was using was an amalgamation of Water, Air and Darkness, making me wonder if the elements I did not know in the weave before me were of a similar fashion, combinations of different base-elements to form something new. Maybe there were even ways to achieve different outcomes using the same base-elements by interweaving them in different ways.


    In comparison to the complexity I was seeing, my own magic and its usage was crude, barbaric even. I was like a monkey, painting a cave with its own feces, in comparison to the sheer artistry the road-builders had used in their working. I felt Lenore¡¯s mind next to mine, and there was a hunger in both of us. We both were fascinated by magic but now we saw a masterpiece in front of us. A masterpiece of magical engineering, built to last for eons, subtle and efficient in its working. It was inspiring.


    Taking a deep breath, even sticking my tongue out for a moment, tasting the air to use my own senses, not just the sense Lenore lent me. My own perception of magic was less precise but in turn, they gave me a more intimate picture and even allowed me to pick at sensations and get a deeper understanding. Now, I was tasting the magic in the air and it blew me away. It was just too complex, too intricate, for me to even begin making sense of what I was tasting. After a moment, I pushed the overwhelming sensation away, gathering my senses.


    ¡°Do you think we will ever be able to work on that level?¡± Lenore asked, her voice filled with awe at the working that had managed to last eons.


    ¡°Yes. Yes, we will.¡± I answered, filled with determination. Seeing what was possible, the sheer beauty of it making my ache, I wanted to learn more, so much more. I wanted to be able to paint the world with my own brush, to change it according to my will.


    ¡°Are you alright?¡± Sigmir asked, pulling me out of my thoughts and back into reality as my mundane senses perceived it.


    ¡°Yes, it¡¯s just¡­ The magic of the road is incredible.¡± I sighed, thinking about the underlying meaning of what I had seen. The Empire that had built these roads must have been incredible. And the sheer scale of it, unless I was very much mistaken, the whole road was like this, a road-network spanning the whole continent. I was certain that the road was not the work of a single spellcaster but the product of the combined working of numerous mages, all united in a single purpose.


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    While my mind was still awash with the experience, Elding carried me further and I felt the magic envelop me, seeping into me.


    A blue window appeared and told me its effects, at least some of them.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>You are under the influence of a magical effect.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You are on a magical road. While travelling on it, you gain its effects. Stamina regeneration and movement-speed are increased while Stamina consumption for movement is reduced.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    I was not the only one under the effect, our mounts suddenly seemed to gain a spring in their steps, each movement carrying them further and Sigmir sped up and even her bearing changed. Before, she looked like she was jogging, now it was more like a glide, a ground-eating stride that made her movement seem completely effortless.


    The road also answered something I had considered in the back of my mind, from a gamer¡¯s perspective. While travelling was relatively interesting, it got boring just as fast. If you saw the same sort of landscape day after day, it got boring. I had noticed that during the travels in the forest, it was not that the frozen landscape of the north was inherently boring but even the most awesome and magical of environments turned ordinary if you were exposed to it on a regular basis.


    So, how could a world mostly on a medieval level of technology cope without resorting to lazy solutions? Sure, it would be possible to set up a service that functioned similar to aircrafts using some sort of flying monster but that would bring with it a huge set of problems. For example, why other monsters didn¡¯t simply snack on them, the latest Highlight-reel had shown that even the major kingdoms were subject to nature and monsters if they moved into their territory. And I had no doubt that the upper reaches of the sky were the domain of flying monsters, hunting those that dared to disturb their windswept heights.


    However, a magical set of roadways, built eons ago by an empire now lost in time? That allowed not just Travellers but also goods and to a lesser degree people move across large distances relatively fast, giving the players a way to experience more of the game without breaking the world.


    Travelling on the road proved to be almost effortless, our mounts needed a lot less power to maintain a high pace and Sigmir was able to sprint alongside them, moving at speeds that I associated with a very fast moving bike or a slow moving car, only that she was able to keep up that pace without tiring.


    We had started our day¡¯s travel about an hour before noon and went until about an hour before dark, stopping only once to rest. The one who truly needed that rest was ironically Rai who was riding alongside me, Sigmir and Adra who used their own bodies to pace the spirit-golems we were using were just fine. By my estimation, we had crossed about hundred-fifty kilometers, an insane distance for anyone not using modern transportation. It meant that there was a lot less pressure to keep moving, at least if the road-network was as vast as I believed it to be. On our way, we had bypassed two settlements, both set a bit away from the road, undoubtedly to take advantage of some geographical feature. None of us had a need to stop and explore the small settlements, they seemed just too insignificant and boring, no even on a level with Yaksha, just collections of houses reminiscent of the Jonari-village or Adernas.


    But those villages were not what drew my interest, as we moved I noticed something about the road. It was perfectly adapted to the terrain, or so I thought. However, as we travelled, I noticed that it was the other way around, not the road was built to fit the terrain. I noticed that some of the terrain-lines seemed to be a little too coincidentally perfect for the road to just be geological chance. Not to keep the road straight but to avoid large changes in elevation or direction. It seemed more like a modern highway than a medieval brick road.


    Lenore and I kept our senses open as we travelled and noticed that the underlying flow of the Astral River was completely steady, without deviations. Normally, there was a slight ebb and flow of power in the surroundings, sometimes a little more, sometimes a slightly different composition but on the road, it was uniform, making me certain that either the road was following a natural feature of the Astral - the fantasy concept of Ley Lines came to mind - or that the builders of the road had not just changed the local geography to suit their needs but also the underlying, magical nature of the land.


    Either way, our shared respect for the ancient builders of that road grew with each step we took.

 Chapter 161

    Thanks to the old, imperial road, we managed to travel hundreds of kilometers over the next few days. After the first day of travel, we tried to make stops at the small villages close to the road, seeking information and work. We spent the second night in a village-inn and learned something. Just because there is an inn, it does not mean that staying there would be a comfortable or smart idea. I almost left the inn, running screaming into the night, when I got a good look at the straw-filled bag that counted as a mattress. Not so much because it would be prickly and uncomfortable but because there were small, black crawlies living in the straw they wanted me to sleep on. And they even wanted to be paid for allowing me the privilege of sleeping on their bug-filled straw. Part of me wanted to ask them for payment, after I used my Ice-magic to chill the straw far enough down to kill even the hardiest of bugs - hell, the temperature I used would have killed me if I hadn¡¯t actively used magic to protect myself. With that treatment done and our own bedrolls spread over the debugged straw, I was willing to sleep in Sigmir¡¯s arms. Somehow, during the night, my subconscious must have decided that even that was not enough and when I woke up, I had curled up on Sigmir¡¯s chest, putting her between me and the formerly bugged straw.


    To top the experience off, the breakfast the innkeeper served made me wonder whether the bread served had been from this year or the last, and the less said about the rest of the food, the better. I thought about asking him for the recipe, it would have been an instant hit on the dieting market: once you tasted his cooking, you were cured of the need to eat - even just the thought of food would make you nauseous.


    Needless to say, after that wonderful experience, the idea to stay in small inns along the way lost its luster.


    But journeying on the old road was not just an experience in terms of exotic lodgings, studies in the behaviour of bedbugs and culinary extravagance. It was also a demonstration of just how vast the world was. How vast and how empty the corner we were in truly was. In a week of travel, we saw maybe ten villages, each with a hundred, maybe two-hundred people living there. And between each village, we had to travel hours, hours using the buff provided by the road and the endurance and strength of our first-divide strengthened bodies.


    Out of curiosity, we had Rai run one leg of the journey and the difference was stark. The buff seemed to strengthen us according to our own capabilities, so Rai, with his greatly lower base-endurance, was not strengthened as much as Sigmir was. It let him keep up a lot better than without it, but still, we had to slow down almost by half. So, between each village was at least a day of travel for a weaker being, and that was considering day-length during spring or autumn. The seasonal change in day-length was not as pronounced as it was in reality but I had noticed that the days had, at first, become shorter and then, about two months ingame, had started to become longer. I figured that Mundus had its winter solstice sometime around that time but it was hard to figure without a calendar or careful observation. I had yet to see a calendar on Mundus and even for Sigmir and the others, there was no concept of weeks, just months, counted from full moon to full moon and seasons, which consisted of three full moons.


    Lenore and I passed most of our time, trying to understand more about the magic contained in the Eternal Ice, even if our work was purely theoretical. The pain and the other problems involved with almost losing my hand had made me a little apprehensive when it came to the large chunk, so we stuck to the small slivers. It didn¡¯t make a lot sense to me, why the temperature-effect was larger due to a larger chunk; everything I knew about physics told me that the temperature-transfer should be dependant on temperature-difference and contact-area. If you touched a hot stove, it didn¡¯t matter if that stove was large or not, just the touching area and the oven¡¯s temperature mattered. But with the Eternal Ice, I was able to hold the small slivers without real discomfort, it merely felt like holding a bit of ice in the real world, on the other hand, the big chunk had almost made me lose my hand, merely by being near it.


    Anyway, after our days of travel on the road, we got to the first settlement that I was comfortable calling a city. It was located on the shores of a river that was currently frozen over and we were easily able to see it from the distance. The first hint for me that I should consider it a city was that it had a wall. A real wall, not just a fence with delusions of grandeur, it was a real wall, sheer, grey granite cliffs, seemingly directly grown from the ground, without any mason¡¯s involvement.


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    That wall, plus the watchtowers and the keep that towered over the rest of the settlement made me a little apprehensive, I knew that I had not the best track record with towns. With that record in mind, if something similar to the events in Yaksha happened here, I had little doubt that some powerful magician would quickly appear and deprive me of my Eternal Ice.


    In addition to that, I noticed that the gate-security seemed to be quite a bit better than in Yaksha, where the check was basically just a half-asleep guard, grunting in your general direction. Here, the gate was not just a single gate but a short tunnel with gates at each end and as we got closer, a short glimpse through Lenore¡¯s sight showed that there was some sort of magic barrier or a magic field or something like that covering the opening. Sneaking in, like I did in Yaksha, would be rather risky and it was a risk I was not willing to take. To make up for that, I had fashioned myself a bandana-like leather-scarf that allowed me to cover my face under my hood without using magic. I was not sure if that would be enough to suppress the effects of the Outsider-trait or even if I would be allowed to enter the city while masked but I was willing to try. A mask could be explained away as protection from the cold, a personal fashion-choice or even some sort of tribal custom, not like using magical concealment and trying to sneak in like a spy or criminal.


    As we approached the last stretch, the road traffic increased exponentially, as smaller roads led to the large, imperial road we were on. It was bad enough that we decided to dismount and dismiss our mounts, simply walking along without trying to overtake the few elk-driven carts that were used to bring some sort of goods into the city, even now in winter. Or, maybe right now in winter, I noticed that there was quite a bit of timber on the carts, maybe it would be stored as firewood or used in case someone was running out. I could imagine that storing enough firewood for a city was problematic, so storing it outside and bringing it in bit by bit could be a good solution.


    Adra struck up a conversation with one of our fellow travellers and learned a bit about the city: it was called Kolyug and had been built by Wintertrolls, who made up the majority of inhabitants. I had yet to consciously see a Wintertroll, I had read on the internet that trolls in Road to Purgatory were unlike most fantasy-trolls; not simple-minded monsters but relatively ordinary beings, for Mundus that is. They were considered a sturdy folk, similar to dwarves in many ways, but without the dwarven predilection for either mountainous or subterranean dwellings and crafting. Their society was rather orderly, generally organised in profession-centered castes where the child took over the profession of his father and was apprenticed to him. Sadly, I didn¡¯t remember a lot and what I remembered was written about another sub-race, living further south. Who knew if the information was even applicable.


    Finally, we got to the city-gate and waited in line for entry, and I saw my first troll. The first thing I noticed was that the similarity to dwarves was quite obvious, their body-structure made the comparison obvious. The trolls manning - or was that ¡®trolling¡¯? - the gate were built like brick-walls, almost as wide as they were tall and from the looks of it, little of that girth was fat. Calling them stout would be fitting if they were smaller but they stood almost as tall as Sigmir, maybe half a head shorter. Massive was a good adjective to describe them or maybe solid.


    The line moved on and on, until it was our turn. We let Adra do the talking and she introduced us as travelling Adventurers, getting a grunt in reply. Next, I felt the uncomfortable sensation of an Observe wash over me and for once, I suppressed the almost conditioned reflex to squash it, letting them see what I was. There was another grunt and Adra got directions to the Adventurers¡¯ Guild where we could look for work and the guard hinted that inns around that area of town were very much geared towards adventurers, providing rough but cheap lodging. Adra thanked him and we entered the gate.


    As we did, I felt a film wash over me and a glimpse through Lenore¡¯s eyes showed me that the film was connected to another guard stationed at the inner gate. Looking at the magic, I thought I understood the purpose. It noted any living being walking through the gate, using a variety of means, allowing them an accurate count who was inside. Sigmir and I got stopped and told that we registered as two living being each and that we would have to explain that, or be denied entry. It took me a second to realise that they had detected Ylva and Lenore, so both of us asked our spirit-beasts to join us, Ylva getting quite a bit of attention compared to Lenore. It was apparently not every day that a wolf the size of a pony entered the city.


    But spirit-beasts were common enough that there was no further problem, we were just told that we were jointly responsible and to not make trouble. After that small wrinkle, we were in the city itself, following Adra towards the Guild.

 Chapter 162

    Walking the streets of Kolyug made me realise how little I had seen in the months I had played Road to Purgatory. Kolyug was the first city I was in, and I felt like a rube from the boondocks, seeing the bright lights for the first time. Not that the lights were bright, but the city was solely constructed out of grey stone - almost certainly with magic - and its uniform nature made it clear that it was not coincidence that it looked like it did. This city had not grown organically, with new people constructing their living space and roads forming so that people could get from one end to the other. No, this city had been planned, meticulously so, and a strong authority had made sure that nobody stepped away from the plan.


    Another thing that was different took me a few moments to notice, mainly because the thing that stood out was the absence of the stinging, bad smell I had been subjected to in Yaksha and Yari. Kolyug did not smell like roses, there was a certain smell in the air, a smell I would later learn was the smell of unwashed troll. The best description I could think of was that it smelled of wet rock dust, slightly stinging and maybe a little metallic. All in all, there were worse thing to smell, like unwashed human or, even worse, the noxious miasma of sewage. Part of me was curious how they had managed a sewage system in an arctic climate but a bigger part simply went with the knowledge that it worked and treated it like sausage and laws. Great things to have, but detailed knowledge of the processes involved was better avoided.


    With those thoughts tumbling in my head, I decided that now that we were inside the city, I could return to the place where I felt best when around other people, hiding in Sigmir¡¯s shadow. There, I could let her deal with those around us and I was close to her. It was almost as good as being alone with her, out in the wild.


    After following Adra through the grid-system that were the roads of Kolyug, we got to a small square, with quite a few people milling around. What made me take notice was the set of stocks built in the middle of the square, a massive contraption made from dark wood and a short glimpse through Lenore¡¯s eyes showed me that it was brimming with magic. Adra ignored them and headed towards a building with all the aesthetics of a government office. Drab, grey and boring. The only thing that made it slightly more palatable was the sword-and-bow-symbol of the Adventurer¡¯s Guild on a sign out front.


    The inside was not a whole lot better, a counter similar to the one in Yaksha was the only real furniture, there was nothing inviting one to stay. A board took up one of the walls, orderly hanging papers decorating it. What made it slightly more interesting than your average government office was the being behind the counter. I had thought I had seen large trolls, but that one, he put them to shame. When I saw him, I wondered just how in the hell he got through the door of the building; he was that big, both in height and in width. I felt like a dwarf, just looking at him, standing about eight feet tall, towering even above Sigmir, but even more impressive was his width. Part of me wanted to test if his shoulders were wider than I was tall but I felt that annoying him would be a bad move. His muscles¡¯ muscles had muscles on their muscles and next to the table was what I could only describe as a small tree, only that it was made out of metal, undoubtedly his weapon of choice, a club that could easily double as a siege-ram if there was need.


    ¡°Yes, what can I do for you?¡± the troll asked, scanning over us, without outwardly noticing me. I had trouble keeping myself from laughing at his voice, with his stature, I had expected a voice only slightly above infrasound, deep and rumbling. His voice, was not that. He sounded relatively normal and pleasant, maybe a baritone and without an especially resounding quality.


    ¡°Good afternoon, my companions and I are a travelling group of adventurers and wanted to check for the usual jobs.¡± Adra took the lead in speaking.


    ¡°Hrm, yes, sure. There is the bounty board - just remember, the Guild will take no responsibility if you get hurt because you overestimated yourself. Most jobs have some sort of estimation of the enemies you will face but those are just guesses.¡± the troll explained while Adra walked over. Sigmir stood back and I noticed that the troll was muttering under his breath and was able to catch that he was adding information because some Travellers had gotten themselves into trouble.


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    ¡°Morgana, how long do we plan to stay here?¡± Adra asked from over by the bounty board, so I stepped forward, leaving Sigmir¡¯s shadow to take a look and as I walked over, there was a soft, possibly surprised, grunt from the troll. The bounty board had quite a lot of different papers, most were straight forward, like killing a number of animals in the area, others were earmarked as only for certain ranks and dealt with escorting or delivering someone or something. I remembered Saya explaining that the rank was a measurement of trust from the guild, to make sure that the Adventurers escorting were not in reality bandits, ¡®escorting¡¯ their prey directly into the underworld.


    ¡°Is there a rule how many jobs we can take on at any given time?¡± I asked, thinking about taking a week or two to do a few hunting quests in the area, maybe go, look for another dungeon, it would give good EXP.


    ¡°No, there is not, why would there be?¡± the troll answered, clearly over his surprise of me appearing.


    I continued studying the jobs, when Rai spoke up behind me.


    ¡°Those stocks out there, what are they for?¡± he asked the troll.


    ¡°The Kol installed them as a warning, some foolish Adventurer mouthed off to one of the keep-guards so now, those who disturb the order are put into the stocks for a day the first time, branded the second time. If they don¡¯t learn their lesson, they are killed - and banished, too, if they are Travellers.¡± the troll explained, making me shudder a little. ¡®Disturbing the order¡¯ was such a nice, incredibly specific law, so nice in fact that I made a note not to interact with officials if at all possible.


    ¡°What is a Kol? And is there a list of rules that constitute your order?¡± I asked, hoping for some easy to follow rules.


    ¡°The Kol is the family head of the ruling family, they ruled over Kolyug ever since they built it. And for rules, just follow common sense and you will be fine, probably.¡±


    ¡°Wonderful¡­¡± I muttered under my breath, thinking of all the ways that could go wrong. But the mention that the ruling family had built Kolyug made me curious; unless I was grossly mistaken, the city was made with Earth Magic and I had a nice staff to boost just that. Maybe, I could either sell the staff or trade it for information.


    ¡°Any restrictions on selling items? I don¡¯t want to try selling something that you regard as contraband, I have heard of communities placing restrictions on all sorts of things, from types of meat to specific herbs or drinks.¡±


    ¡°No, none of that. Just that five percent of everything traded in the city is taxed by the Kol, but it is the store¡¯s responsibility to take care of that. There are quite a few stores here in Kolyug, mostly buying and selling what others hunt and gather in the north before selling it south.¡± the troll volunteered, making me realise that he might have been bored before we turned up.


    ¡°Thank you. Could you give us a recommendation which inn is good? The last one rented their beds to far too many bugs for my taste.¡±


    He laughed a little and sent us to an inn, just on the other side of the road, specialising in the Adventurer-trade. Their prices were a little higher but they knew that those living rough outdoors enjoyed having a undisturbed night for once.


    I thanked him again and registered a couple of hunting quests, all targeting an area on the other side of the lake, estimated levels between fifty and seventy. In addition, there were bandits in the area, making me almost giddy with excitement, after all, hunting bandits was one of the staples of any good role-playing game and I was looking forward to do it here in Mundus. The quest spoke of a hideout that had to be located and either reported without being spotted or wiped out. Wiping them out was better rewarded but only if certain identifying effects of the bandits could be produced. It was a quest that required us to register it with our Guild Cards and if we were found to have thwarted the guard by warning the bandits, we might be penalised.


    With a nice amount of quests registered, we thanked the troll, who had introduced himself as Lagor when we had given him our guild-cards, and left to check out - and possibly in at - the inn.

 Chapter 163

    We left the drab Guild-building and crossed the road to get to the inn, an inn that seemed just as cheerful and happy as the rest of the city, grey stone without even a dash of colour in sight. The inside was a lot better -, it was pretty much what I had expected from the common room of an inn. Long wooden tables with benches, a wide stone hearth with a happily dancing fire and a bar behind which the innkeeper, or in this case, innkeepress, stood, waiting for customers. It was afternoon, so the common room was pretty empty, with only two people sitting around, nursing their drinks.


    Adra walked up the her, as I had moved back into Sigmir¡¯s shadow when we were leaving the Guild and spoke up.


    ¡°Good Afternoon, we are looking for a place for the night. The Guild-clerk recommended for us to come here, so we thought to check it out.¡±


    ¡°Ah, my husband sent you? Sure, there is room, either you can bed down in the bunk-room or you can take one of the private rooms. Three people?¡± the innkeepress answered, forcing me to suppress a giggle. She was on the small side, not just for a troll but in general, about level with Adra and only slightly wider. Imagining her with her husband was a mental image that was either scary or hilarious, depending on your point of view. But I should not judge, my own situation was far too similar for that.


    ¡°No, there are four of us.¡± I spoke up, stepping out of Sigmir¡¯s shadow. She blinked a little in surprise but that short look of surprise was all there was before she regarded me with a friendly smile, as if it was an everyday occurrence that people literally stepped out of another person¡¯s shadow.


    ¡°Of course. As I said, you can either get a room for two silver each night or the four of you can go into the bunk-room and pay one silver all together.¡± she explained and now, it was my turn to be surprised. The inn here was vastly better than the one in Yaksha but the prices were lower. My surprise must have shown on my face, as she laughed and explained.


    ¡°I don¡¯t keep this inn to make a profit, Lagor and I made more gold than we could spent before we settled down but going from roaming adventurer to a life of idle pleasure almost drove us insane, so we both wanted to keep our toe in the game. He became Guildmaster and I got myself an inn, specialised in the adventurer trade. Part of the payment is that I get to listen to all the stories that adventurers spin in my common room.¡±


    ¡°Dear, I never asked, how much did Saya pay us in the end?¡± I asked Sigmir. It had just slipped my mind, with the pitchfork-wielding mob and its aftermath.


    ¡°We are good, if you want to splurge on individual rooms.¡± she answered, smiling a little.


    ¡°Saya? How is the old goat?¡± the innkeepress cut in.


    ¡°Last we saw her, she was good. You know her?¡± I asked, curious about the connection.


    ¡°Sure, Saya was travelling with Lagor and me. She¡¯s a good friend.¡± she explained. That made me just more curious.


    ¡°Do you mind if I Observe you? Or is it impolite to ask that?¡± I asked, not sure about the etiquette in that particular situation.


    ¡°It is a little but I don¡¯t mind to just tell you. I¡¯m Drega, a level 112 Wintertroll-Hag, a priestess of Frigg, if you are really curious.¡± she answered, an answer that just changed my curiosity from being curious about her in particular to being curious about Divine Magic in general. I knew how I used magic but I was unsure how Clerics and Priests did it.


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    ¡°Greetings, Drega, my name is Morgana, I¡¯m a level 57 Firnelf, a Traveller and a Sorceress.¡± I introduced myself, causing the others to follow suit.


    ¡°That you are a Traveller was rather obvious, but a Sorceress? Those are rare, and for good reason.¡±


    ¡°There is a reason?¡± I asked, interested in the reason.


    ¡°You can¡¯t train to be a Sorcerer, most children are trained before they ever get their class and the training influences what they are. Not with Sorcerers, at least not that I know of. Not that there''s anything wrong with being one, it is just rare. But back to your rooms, I have a feeling that you are prone to go off tangents if we don¡¯t get our business done first.¡± Drega said with a smile. Not that she had a lot of room to talk, her question had send us on the original tangent.


    ¡°Two rooms, one with two beds, the other with one larger bed, if you have it. If not, then a smaller bed in the second one will be just fine.¡± I told her, feeling Sigmir¡¯s arm wrap around me in a possessive gesture. Not that I minded, I just snuggled in a little, enjoying her closeness.


    ¡°Oh, and how much are baths? Do you have a tub?¡± I asked, hoping almost against hope that it wouldn¡¯t be too expensive.


    ¡°If you promise to sit with me in the evening and indulge my curiosity, telling me of your travels, then you can use the bathing chamber, right now before it gets hectic. We have running water and there is a magic circle on the tub to heat it, you just have to power it.¡± she gave an answer that almost made me give her a hug. Bathing was not as necessary for cleanliness and hygiene, thanks to the spell from the Grandmother¡¯s spellbook that allowed me to clean people and clothes but still, there was something about bathing that added another, psychological feeling of cleanliness to it that I craved.


    ¡°Deal, I¡¯ll be happy to talk. Sigmir, dear, do you want to wash my back?¡± I agreed happily and my question caused laughter all around, even as Rai blushed cherry-red.


    Sigmir, in turn had a wide smile, squeezing me a little while nodding. That, in turn, caused Drega to laugh even more and first guide us to two rooms, one small but with a huge bed, quite obviously made for a troll, the other with two smaller beds but more floor-space. Lenore and Ylva decided that they had no need to witness what happened between Sigmir and me in the bath so they decided to wait in the smaller room after we checked back with Drega.


    Rai and Adra decided that while Sigmir and I were in the bath, they would head out and explore the city, looking at the various stores.


    Finally, Sigmir and I were shown into the bath. It was not as sophisticated as the one in Kallista¡¯s house, back in Neyto, but it was nice nonetheless, a wide, stone-tub with a tube for water at one side and a closed drain on the other. Drega demonstrated how to use the tube to let water flow in and where the magic formation was to heat it.


    Powering the formation was quite simple, it just took some power. At that point, we ran into a small problem, I had let Sigmir check the water temperature in the tub while powering the magic and the temperature that was comfortable for her, was scalding hot for me. But a little discomfort was not enough to stop me from enjoying a bath with her, even if I had to grit my teeth at first. After a few minutes, I got used to it but still, it was far from comfortable.


    Despite me, having to hide my discomfort, Sigmir and I managed to have fun in the bath, sharing the simple joys of washing each other and being clean. We also managed to have other types of fun, emboldened by a mix of trust into the thickness of the walls and a disregard for people possibly hearing us, allowing us to enjoy each others cleaned body in a myriad of ways.


    But all fun had to come to an end, so after we were managed to get clean, get dirty and get clean again, we went to dry off and left the bathing chamber behind.


    After getting Lenore and Ylva, we went back in the common room, where things had changed quite a bit. Before, there had been two people, listlessly staring into their mugs, now, the room was filled with talk and laughter, a large cauldron was hanging over the fire, even a bard had set up in a corner.


    What I found interesting, was that everyone in the room gave me a feeling of strength, making me realise that everyone was an adventurer. My previous exposure made me a little leery, wondering if a huge brawl would break out, but Adra and Rai, who had arrived earlier than Sigmir and I were happily sitting at a table, chatting with a rough looking fellow, so we went to join them.

 Chapter 164

    ¡°How nice of you to join us.¡± Adra said as we stepped up. ¡°I think I need to use the tub as well, the two of you have such a glow, the bath must be a real pleasure.¡± she continued, causing my cheeks to heat up.


    ¡°You certainly can do that, but I doubt that you alone would find it as pleasurable as we did.¡± I answered, refusing the let my embarrassment defeat me.


    ¡°Yes, you are probably right.¡± she admitted with exaggerated sadness before continuing. ¡°But for now, meet Kelgorn, he¡¯s a hunter roaming the local area and he has been a font of useful knowledge.¡± she introduced the unknown male who had witnessed our banter with an amused expression.


    ¡°Greetings, Kelgorn. You can call me Sigmir and this is Morgana.¡± Sigmir greeted him, while seating herself and pulling me onto her lap. Not the most dignified position but certainly the most comfortable.


    Kelgorn was another one of those vaguely grey skinned humanoids without any easily attributed features giving away his race. There were just too many races that looked roughly human, with minor physical differences, in some cases, the extremes of one race were the norm in another or vice versa. For example, a slender troll could easily pass as a pale giantblood. And that was without even going into mixed-bloods; in those cases it got even more confusing, without personal perceptual bias playing into it. Some races were easily identified, for example fur and tusks were a good indication of some sort of Orc or animal features for beast people. In Kelgorn¡¯s case, neither was in evidence, but the local populace caused me to assume that he was a troll, a slender one, sure, but a troll nonetheless.


    ¡°Greetings, Sigmir, Morgana. It¡¯s a pleasure to meet you.¡± he answered, his voice deep and resonating. He didn¡¯t raise an eyebrow at our slightly strange seating arrangement, which was good because I could not be bothered to change it. Sitting on Sigmir¡¯s lap, with her arms around me, was amongst the best places to be. Generally, all those ¡®best places¡¯ had the qualifier, ¡°with her arms around me¡± attached.


    ¡°Ah, great, I thought I heard the two of you come from the bath. Why don¡¯t you have dinner and afterwards you can tell me stories of your travels.¡± Drega came bustling from the kitchen, already with mugs in her hand. She chuckled a little when she saw our seating arrangement but simply placed mugs in front of us, without further comment.


    ¡°Yes, we can do that, thank you.¡± I answered, thinking of the many questions I had about the clerical spellcasting. I had only seen a few detailed mentions of itin the forums and none of those went into mechanics, only describing effects, some of which were rather impressive. I couldn¡¯t even think of a starting point to replicate them. For example, healing spells that targeted any disease, it seemed almost impossible but for clerics, it was apparently one of the easiest and most basic spells. Adra and I had talked about her spells and with most of them, I was able to come up with a rough theory about their actual workings, even if was just conjecture, but for clerical spells, the only ideas I had were maddingly complex processes that I couldn¡¯t even begin to describe in concepts, which I could possibly express in runes.


    But for clerics, it was as simple as calling upon their deity in a specific manner and it worked.


    ¡°We were just talking about the local terrain and what to look out for.¡± Adra told us, and Kelgorn nodded before continuing his explanation. Sadly, I had missed the beginning so I could only understand parts of it, without the previous explanations, it was just too confusing to follow along. I simply listened, sipping the strange, spicy-sweet liquid and cuddled into Sigmir¡¯s arms and letting my mind wander.


    Sadly, my comfortable contemplation was interrupted when voices were raised on the other side of the room, angry voices. My mind sluggishly roused itself from the comfortable haze I had drifted in, trying to decide if I wanted to interfere when the angry voices turned into the sounds of fighting, as fists were thrown, mugs started to break and drinks were spilled. But the decision whether i wanted to interfere or not was quickly taken away from me.


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    An angry command echoed through the room, barked in an unfamiliar language by a familiar, female voice. The entire room fell silent, one could have heard a pin drop, indeed I was able to hear drops of liquid dripping onto the floor and splashing apart, it was that silent. Looking into myself, my mind was refusing to even contemplate moving or talking, it felt almost like an outsider looking at my own mind, a mind luxuriating in the feeling of comfort and homeliness, the idea to disturb the peace abhorrent.


    ¡°Impressive.¡± I heard Lenore¡¯s mental voice and I latched onto it, instinctively linking with her, allowing her mind to almost puppet my body. It seemed as if she was not affected as I was, allowing her to move my body, taking a look around in the common room. The whole process of breaking free had only taken a second or two, but it felt far longer in my mind.


    Looking around, it was as if everyone was frozen, not frozen like I would freeze people but frozen in that fudged state of comfort, of knowing that they were in a safe, homely place. At the front of the room, Drega was making her way through the happily pacified crowd, pushing towards the area where the fight had broken out.


    ¡°Explain yourself!¡± she angrily growled at one of the former combatants, still standing with the handle of a mug in his hand. The growl seemed to rouse him but the look of anger on Drega¡¯s face had an effect similar to the previous pacification, he seemed to have completely forgotten that he had been willing to fight, looking sheepish and very, very sorry. Not that his look of contrition saved him, Drega lit into him in an impressive tirade, berating him for drinking too much and breaking the peace of her hearth.


    Around the common room others slowly came out of the fudge-state, some apparently not even realising that something had happened, as if they had just drifted off in the comfortable atmosphere. The connection to Lenore had allowed me to keep more of my wit about me and now that my mind was cleared, she let me take complete control again, fully retreating into her Hallow. I kept watching Drega verbally berating those who had started the fight before giving them the option to be banned for life or to pay the damages and leave for the day.


    While Drega was at that, a serving girl came around and placed bowls of warm stew and tasty looking bread on our table, causing my nose to distract me from the performance on the other side of the room. The simple but pleasant smell made my mouth water, it smelled like nothing I had ever smelled before. As I was salivating over the stew, I vaguely noticed that those berated by Drega were leaving in a sheepishly looking group but I was far too occupied with the food to pay them any mind.


    The moment the first spoonful of stew passed my lips, taste exploded in my mouth, not invasive or unpleasant just an intense taste, as if the stew I was eating was the apex, a complex blend of hearty meat, crisp vegetables and spicy broth, it was unlike anything I had tasted before. Looking up, I noticed that the others had similar looks of vague rapture on their faces and they slowly spooned the stew into their mouth, savouring each spoon like a religious experience. When I tried the bread, it was just as good, still warm from the oven and exactly the right amount of spongy softness surrounded by a chewy crust. It complemented the taste of the stew perfectly, adding a slightly nutty flavour to the blend.


    ¡°I see you enjoy my cooking.¡± Drega said with a smile in her voice, having appeared at some point while I had been too focused on my food to notice anything new that was less invasive than an earthquake.


    ¡°Yes, yes, we do indeed. It¡¯s¡­ I don¡¯t have the words.¡± I answered her, after swallowing what I had in my mouth.


    ¡°That¡¯s good, I always like it when new people get their first taste. Eat with the Blessing of Frigg. We will talk later.¡± Drega told us, making a small gesture before retreating into the kitchen. As she left, I noticed a notification, before my focus was captured by the meal again.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>You are under the influence of a magical effect.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You were blessed by Frigg while eating in a house under her protection. Your health, stamina and Astral Power regenerate at an increased rate for the next two days.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>

 Chapter 165

    Far too soon, the bowl of stew was emptied and cleaned, using a piece of bread, and I sat back, content with the world.


    ¡°Finally finished with stuffing your face and able to listen?¡± Lenore asked, her voice snarky.


    ¡°What do you mean?¡± I questioned, unsure what was going on.


    ¡°Do you even remember how our host has thrown everyone in a mental loop and thrown a few guys out?¡± she asked and I realised that I had indeed ignored my own thoughts in favour of the food placed in front of me. It was an incredibly scary experience when Lenore added her own, mental perspective, giving me a bit of perspective on my own thoughts. We both had been fascinated with her apparent magic, calming and, indeed mesmerizing, the entire room without most of them even realising it and in the next moment, I had started ignoring Lenore and started stuffing my face.


    ¡°Should we leave? Do you think we are in danger?¡± I asked, my mind whirling with very scary ideas. If the inn had been far out there, deep in the wilds, I would have wondered if the meat we had been served was what was left of the previous patrons but in the city, such activities would have quickly aroused attentions.


    ¡°No, I don¡¯t think so. Remember, she introduced herself as a Priestess of Frigg, so hospitality and the hearthfire are holy to her. She would never harm patrons in her inn.¡± Lenore calmed me and I felt that her anger had been more with me, ignoring her instead of the events. ¡°But you should ask her, after all, she wanted to talk to you.¡± Lenore continued and just as she did, Drega came from the kitchen and plopped herself down next to Sigmir, a look of expectant glee on her face.


    ¡°Now, tell me your story. I would love to know how a Traveller managed to touch onto the elements and not perish.¡± she said, only her cheerfulness making it a friendly question instead of a barked order.


    ¡°Would you answer me a question before I do?¡± I asked in turn, causing a short frown but she nodded.


    ¡°Before, when those idiots started to fight, what did you do? It was honestly rather scary to feel my mind sink into an altered state.¡± I posed my question and observed her very closely, trying to gauge her emotions at the question.


    What I saw, was mostly embarrassment, something that became even more obvious when she answered.


    ¡°You noticed that? Impressive. I apologize, what I did was invoke a word of power, laced with the power of Frigg, making them remember the rules of hospitality. It only quells struggles and fights, similar to a mother, stopping her children from fighting. I did not mean to scare you, most beings wouldn¡¯t even notice.¡± she explained, her cheeks changing colour in what I assumed was a blush.


    ¡°Interesting. I was honestly scared for a second, not only because of your actions but afterwards, when the food was served, I forgot about everything and focused only on the food.¡±


    ¡°The food is just that, food prepared by a very good cook and blessed by the Mother of the Hearth. It seems you are a bit a glutton, aren¡¯t you?¡± she asked, now brightly smiling again and it was my turn to blush.


    ¡°Maybe. But you wanted our story, right? I guess I will start with my part of the story, ever since I came to Mundus and the others can later add their own stories. I guess that will take most of the night.¡± I changed the topic and, after setting up a floating viewpoint and taking another gulp from my mug, started my tale.


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    As I narrated, a few people gathered around to listen and conversation mostly ceased around us. I told my story without embellishment, not that there was much of a need, telling about my arrival on the trail of a shooting star, about my troubles with the Snowbolds, leaving out my genocide of them and the soul prison I had found, before I got to the meeting with Sigmir. At that point, I felt her arms pull me closer in a possessive manner, something I welcomed. I told of being chased by the Jonari and our escape, about meeting Lenore and Ylva, who both came out at that point, and about our journey to Neyto.


    When I mentioned the Grandmother, everyone looked quite impressed, especially when I spoke of the tasks we had done for her. One slightly drunken listener challenged me, saying that I was just spinning a tale, a challenge I answered in the only possible manner. By pulling out the Zevarra Agha and telling him to identify it, apologise and shut up. He did just that and it was as if I had cast a spell of instant sobriety on him, his previously heated cheeks instantly turning pale. In addition to profusely apologising to me, he pressed some coin into Drega¡¯s hand and left the room as if a pack of hungry wolves was nipping at his heels.


    I just smiled at the interplay, drank some more from my mug, which somehow had refilled itself as I was talking, and continued to speak. What came next were great parts, telling of the Barrow Den and Samodiva, before speaking about the dryads of Tegi and the elder dryad, Tegi herself. About their vile actions and explaining how I had found Adra, shackled in a cage, ready to be sacrificed to their ambition of endless spring. And about their righteous comeuppance, how their vile deeds were turned back against them and it ended up destroying their home due to their foul magic. At that point, Rai visibly straightened but I was too deep into my story to think about that.


    I continued my recollection, speaking about the journey back to Neyto with Adra, about healing Sigmir with the Grandmother¡¯s help and about learning some fundamental truths from her, not that I even tried to explain what she had taught me, that was something I kept close to my heart.


    The continued journey, after leaving Neyto, I explained as a desire to see what was hiding behind the horizon, to see was was hidden behind the next bend in the road, again, leaving out that I wanted to head to the Nexus opposite of the one in Neyto, to use it to break the seal on the soul-prison. At least that was what I currently thought about, I might change my plans with more knowledge about the soul-prison and the world itself. But it was a journey worth undertaking anyway.


    I skipped most of the explanation for the conflict around Adernas, especially the way we instigated the Jonari to attack the dryads of Tegi, just in case word travelled back north, I did not want the people of Adernas to experience retribution from enraged Jonari, if they decided to use them as a convenient target to vent a possible rage. The travel further west and our conflict with the wolves was mentioned but, once again, I skipped the part where I ripped the part that was a remnant of the wolves divine heritage out of it, vaguely remembering that Frigg, the Goddess that gave Drega her powers had some relationship with Odin, who was the keeper of Freki and Geri. I didn¡¯t quite remember how they related, if they were married, siblings or both, but it seemed to be an unnecessary risk.


    Finally, as my mug was somehow full again, I got to the recent events, telling of Yaksha and our hunt in the mountains south of it, speaking about the wind raptors and their attempt to destroy us with their wind magic and how I made it so nobody could control the ensuing storm, just surviving thanks to Sigmir, pulling me to safety. That the area where we had battled was now a field of wild magic, where the flow of Ice Astral Power native to the nearby glacier was bubbling forth caused Drega to look me over measuringly once again. The tale of the dungeon and my almost suicidal attack that allowed me to touch the reality of Astral Ice and strike down the Agnatha rounded the story out, just as my mug was once again, miraculously full. Speaking about Eternal Ice and me, using it as I had, caused Drega to simply shake her head in smiling disbelief.


    It was a good point to end the telling of my tale, so I did just that, glossing over our way back to Yaksha and following that, the way to Kolyug, not wanting to reveal that I was carrying even more Eternal Ice with me, more than I had used in my attack on the Agnatha.


    Sadly, the world around me had turned a little blurry during my story, causing me to wonder if I would be able to discuss magic with Drega, especially the difference between my magic and the divine spellcasting clerics used. But I was happy and warm, with Sigmir¡¯s arms holding me close to her, causing me to cuddle in some more and drift away, into a content and deep sleep.

 Chapter 166

    I awoke the next morning, sleeping sprawled over Sigmir in our room, wondering how I had gotten there. My mind was rather fuzzy and indistinct but I remembered talking with the others and telling my story to Drega but I didn¡¯t remember much of the telling, nevermind what happened afterwards. When I started moving my head, I felt as if a band of dwarves was trying to mine my brain for ore, using pickaxes, hammers and all sorts of tools to crack open my head, without regard for the mind currently inside. That focus on my head made me notice the taste in my mouth, it was about what I expected to taste if something crawled into my mouth, died and decomposed without me noticing.


    My groan must have awoken Sigmir, but I could only guess that she knew my condition, as she didn¡¯t say anything, just put an arm around me and stroked my head with the other hand.


    ¡°What happened?¡± I asked, my voice slightly hoarse but far too loud for my tortured brain, causing me to shudder.


    ¡°If I didn¡¯t know better, I would say that you tried to out-drink a troll. Drega told me that you might have a terrible headache and that I should make you drink a lot of water before letting you try to heal it with magic.¡± Sigmir answered in a whisper, but even that whisper was too loud and made me groan again.


    ¡°Just close your eyes for a bit.¡± Sigmir told me, her voice even softer than before and I felt myself picked up and placed back into the bed. Breathing in, Sigmir¡¯s smell filled my nose and I did as she had told me, closing my eyes and wondering if death would be the preferable option.


    I heard Sigmir leave the room and return a short time later. Again, she carefully picked me up and placed me on her lap, my only responsibility was to keep my head from rolling of my neck, something I managed, albeit barely.


    ¡°Open your mouth, I have some water for you.¡± Sigmir told me, her voice barely a whisper. With some effort, my mind remembered where my mouth was and I even managed to open it and felt a cold, smooth material placed against my bottom lip and some water flow into my mouth, washing away the sticky, sickly-sweet taste that was prevalent inside. After I swallowed the first mouth full, my body seemed to scream for more but Sigmir only gave me so much, probably keeping me from spilling it all over the two of us.


    Some time later, my body¡¯s need for water was sated and the banging headache had abated somewhat, so I carefully drew runes into the air in front of me, the mental effort bringing back the headache with a vengeance. I gritted my teeth and pushed through. The information flowing back into my mind from the blood-runes I used for healing was a little garbled, but I managed to parse from them that my body was in need of water - or rather, needed to absorb the water I had drunk, and needed to break down some remaining toxins. By now, I had understood that I was having a hangover, so it wasn¡¯t unexpected, and I managed to channel some Astral Power into both processes, in an attempt to bolster my natural healing with magic. It seemed to work; after quite a bit of Astral Power had drained away, I felt remarkably better, allowing me to open my eyes again and look into Sigmir¡¯s slightly worried face.


    ¡°Thank you, love. Please, next time remind me to ask what I¡¯m drinking. I had no idea I was getting drunk. Well, at least I think so, my memories of the evening are a little fuzzy.¡± I spoke, my voice back to normal, without flinching from the volume.


    Now, it was Sigmir¡¯s turn to grin widely. ¡°Aw, really? You are such a cute, giggling drunk, it would be a shame if I never see you like that again. But, yes, I will. Maybe you can keep it to ¡®affectionate, cuddly drunk¡¯.¡± she said, her voice thick with amusement.


    Part of me was glad that I had not caused property damage - the idea of the magic I was commanding running wild with a drunken fool at the helm was rather scary - but now I was wondering just what I had done to cause her such amusement. But I decided that I did not want to know, I vaguely remembered that I had set up a floating camera to record the telling of my story, thinking about using it for a video, maybe as a narration while images from the encounters were playing on screen. That meant there was a second viewpoint and I could check, later. If I truly wanted to know.


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    Looking around, I noticed that Lenore was not in her Hallow and nowhere to be seen outside. I asked Sigmir about it and was told that Ylva and Lenore had opted to sleep in the other room, together with Adra and Rai. My incomprehension must have shown on my face, as Sigmir explained that I had made rather explicit statements about my plans with Sigmir during the night, something neither of the two felt a need to witness. That revelation caused me to blush even more, wondering if I had made even more a fool of myself as I had expected.


    ¡°Did I do anything to you?¡± I asked, remembering an idea I had about two weeks ago, the idea to try using my Mind Magic to learn some stimulus-response patterns in Sigmir¡¯s brain and use them for fun and pleasure. Such experiments, as pleasurable as they hopefully would be, were not something I wanted to try out without being in full control of my faculties and with quite a bit of research and preparation beforehand to make sure that Sigmir would be safe. But who knew what drunken-me had cooked up.


    ¡°Nothing more than snuggling, don¡¯t worry. And it¡¯s not as if I¡¯m some delicate flower that you could physically overpower and ravage, am I?¡± Sigmir asked, making me just shake my head, not wanting to get into my ideas to use Mind Magic - a highly dangerous and powerful type of magic - as, basically, a sextoy.


    At that point, my stomach decided that it had a need for further sustenance, that the water I had consumed was well and good but it needed something more solid to settle it, and made its desires known with a loud rumbling sound, causing Sigmir to grin even more. We left our room together and when we entered the common room, Drega was already standing behind her counter, talking to Rai and Adra who sat at one of the tables. All three of them started to laugh when Sigmir and I entered, their laughter clearly directed at me, as Sigmir had been in before to get the water for me.


    ¡°Impressive, I wouldn¡¯t have thought to see you today, nevermind on two legs. You put away enough mead to make a full-grown troll tipsy but it seems you have recovered quite well after Sigmir got you some water.¡± she greeted me, after her laughter subsided.


    ¡°To be honest, I didn¡¯t realise what I was drinking, only that it tasted good. Luckily, I managed to heal my hangover or you would be right that I wouldn¡¯t be upright by now. Could we impose upon you for some breakfast?¡± I answered, eliciting more laughter.


    ¡°Sure, wait a moment. You healed yourself, you say? Not bad, hangover is one of the few things I can¡¯t heal, some claim it¡¯s the Gods¡¯ punishment for over-indulging.¡± Drega told us, as she walked back into her kitchen while Sigmir and I sat down with the others.


    ¡°So, did you have even more fun after dinner?¡± Adra asked, widely grinning.


    ¡°More than you would believe.¡± Sigmir answered, smiling, while I was busy blushing bright red. Apparently, I had made my remarks not in the privacy of our rooms, with only Ylva and Lenore as witnesses but in the common room, with however many people listening in. Just as I wondered if I would be able to come up with some sort of mind-wipe spell, Drega brought food for Sigmir and me, some meat-cuts, some cheese, butter and even a bowl of honey, alongside more of her awesome bread and mugs filled with milk.


    ¡°There you go, I hope you¡¯ll enjoy it as much as I enjoyed your story yesterday. Not many, even amongst adventurers, manage to meet such legendary characters as the Grandmother.¡± Drega told us, before turning to go back to her counter.


    ¡°Thanks. Would you mind talking to me about magic, after we are finished with breakfast? I¡¯d love to know more about the difference between what you and other clerics can do, compared to my own powers.¡± I asked, causing her to turn back to answer.


    ¡°We can talk, sure. But I will not tell you more than the educated people consider common knowledge. I won¡¯t, or rather, I can¡¯t, tell you the secrets of my Mistress.¡± she explained. I nodded in thanks and started to tug into my food, driven to sate my hunger for food before quenching my thirst for knowledge.

 Chapter 167

    ¡°So, what do you want to know? Or rather, what do you know about clerical powers?¡± Drega asked, after I had finished my food and was contently sitting with the others.


    ¡°Nothing really. I have seen some of the things possible with them but that¡¯s about it.¡± I answered, hoping to learn more.


    ¡°Oh, dear. I guess I should start at the beginning then. Priests, or clerics in general, pray to their gods and we imbue our prayers with the Astral Power our bodies generate. Most do that in a ritual fashion during times that are significant to their patron, for example, I do so during cooking. In return, the gods lend us their own power, but as we mortals are unable to fully grasp that power, it slowly slips from us, flowing back to the gods. But as long as we hold it, we can use it to exert the power of our god unto the world. For example, my patron is Frigg, as I told you and her power centers around keeping the home and hearth safe, but also to divine the future in some ways. In addition, she allows me to heal those who have been wounded, something that most gods allow their vassals, to ease the suffering of us mortals.¡± Drega explained, giving me some information that seemed rather interesting but left me with even more questions.


    ¡°So, how do you actually cast spells? I mean, when I cast spells, I need to first formulate the spell I want to use in runes, draw those runes with the mental image and intent to cast the spell I thought up, and supply it with Astral Power. How do you do it?¡± I asked, hoping for clarity.


    ¡°Not like that. The Goddess has passed down the prayers and benedictions and their purposes, that¡¯s all we need to know. When I heal someone, I pray to Frigg and ask her to soothe his ailings. if I want to protect someone, I pray to Frigg and ask her to warn the other from incoming danger, so they can see what would hurt them and avoid it. I am merely a vessel for the power of Frigg.¡± Drega explained, her voice filled with emotion.


    I simply nodded, thinking about the way I taught spells to Rai; he didn¡¯t need as much knowledge of the concepts involved, but he still needed some of it. Part of me wondered if the Gods were simply teaching such advanced spells that people couldn¡¯t understand them. It would make sense, but I doubted that I would be able to ascertain something like that. But it explained why the spellcasting of clerics seemed so different, allowing for things that were just completely out of reach for my elemental spellcasting. There were videos of wounds melting away in seconds, whereas I would need minutes to close such a wound and it would either take a ton of power from the healer or it would greatly sap the healed one¡¯s strength. But the priests making the videos could simply throw one healing spell after the other.


    In addition, I wondered just how versatile priests could be, it sounded as if each priest was very limited depending on their patron, not just compared to me and my freewheeling spell slinging, but even compared to normal mages who had their spells memorized.


    ¡°There are also ways to directly plead to our Patron, asking them for direct intervention, that¡¯s how miracles happen. But such occurrences are rare and require someone in great favour with their Patron, you ask them to directly work through you, afterall.¡± Drega added, contrasting what I had in mind.


    ¡°So, what stops someone else, someone like me, from using that sort of magic? Or what stops you from using other types of magic?¡± I asked.


    ¡°In essence, nothing. If you find a deity that wants to help you and accepts your arcane magic, they could lend you their power. If I would do so, the Goddess would likely no longer allow me to borrow her power.¡±


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    Well, they did need a reason why not everyone would be able to use clerical magic, as it sounded less like magic -, needing skills, knowledge and imagination - and more like going to a higher power and begging them for help, making me secretly snigger about the fact that those who wanted to play priests and clerics would mostly need skills in sucking up.


    I tried to get some more concrete informations about the gods and their follower but sadly, Drega dodged most questions with vague answers or simply smiled and kept silent, leaving me without a real clue on their capabilities.


    But she did tell us some more about Kolyug, even suggesting a store where we could hope to get a good price for the Earthen Staff we had carried around for weeks. Sadly, my biggest hope, finding a public library of some sort, was dashed - there was no such thing. Information was kept by the ruling clan and an established cabal of mages of some sort and getting into their libraries would require a lot of political clout or money and even then, it would not get me access to everything they had.


    Otherwise, the city was mainly a place where the various craftsman and traders had set up and banded together for security, similar to Yaksha, only on a much bigger scale.


    We made our plans to explore the city until evening and then spend another night in Drega¡¯s inn, before heading out into the wilderness once more. Ylva and Lenore retreated into their respective Hallows, Ylva because her size would be a little problematic and Lenore because she preferred her Hallow anyway.


    Sigmir paid our bill, just in case we, for some reason, couldn¡¯t come back as planned, and we left the inn, stepping into the grey, dull streets of Kolyug. The ambience of the city was not helped by the fact that a cold wind was blowing and snow was falling from a dark sky. I felt fine, my cloak keeping the wind away from me and the temperature being not too cold, but Adra and Rai looked quite miserable, looking as if they wanted to turn around and head back into the warm inn. It was funny, the last weeks hadn¡¯t been warmer or more comfortable and we spent all of that time in the wild outdoors, sleeping under the sky, or a nearby tree at most, but after a night in a warm, comfortable inn, the two of them seemed to feel the harsh contrast especially painful. But no, they stuck it out, knowing that we would head out back into the wild the next day so postponing it would only add to their discomfort.


    I simply put my hood down and added a little mist to conceal my features, just in case the Outsider-trait decided to act up again; what had happened in Yaksha had been rather strange, even knowing that I had the trait.


    As we walked through the streets to the magic shop, some sort of general store for everything magic, from materials to enchantments, potions and scrolls, I noticed again how uniform the city looked. It was as if someone had taken a straight-edge to paper and afterwards used that paper-plan as a blueprint for the magic that had been used in the construction. It was something Drega had confirmed, that the whole city had been constructed using magic, magic on a huge scale. On our way, I used Lenore¡¯s sight to look at the city through that lense and there were trails of ordered magic - not the natural, freely flowing untamed magic I was used to - woven through each part of our surroundings. Seeing that, Lenore and I discussed just how such a feat could be done, such an precise and orderly integration of magic into the whole city, where each part was linked to the next. The only thing we could come up with was that it had been done in a single casting, which, obviously, made us speculate just how such a casting, the construction of a complete city with a single spell, was possible.


    Our best guess was that it had been done using ritual magic, something similar to the magic I had used to defeat the Devourer, back in Tegi. First saturating the area with channelled Astral Power, slowly increasing the amount the ritual had to work with - probably done by dozens of Spellcasters over days, maybe weeks - and then, in a concentrated and massive effort, using all that Astral Power at the same time, to shape reality to the casters will.


    It was breathtaking, just imagining the amount of power needed to bend reality to their will on such a scale. It made me want to gather more power, as fast as possible; even if I doubted that I could do something similar, I wanted to see just where my limits were, what I could do if I mastered my power and reached for the top.


    With such dreams of grandeur, we reached the magic shop and I put my ideas away, curious what we would learn inside.

 Chapter 168

    The magic store was, surprising absolutely no one, another drab grey building, built out of the ubiquitous grey stone. I wondered if the city was deliberately built that way, to promote depression, or if the trolls simply had the aesthetic sense of a blind mole. Personally, I had a feeling that if I tried to stay for more than a few days, I would start to paint the walls and the streets - with blood, if no other colours were available. Better not risk staying too long, I had no desire to get banned from another town.


    Inside, it again looked rather different, but much more in line with my expectations: a counter and rows of shelves, reminiscent of a pharmacy back at home, something that made a lot of sense when I peeked through Lenore¡¯s sight, the shelves were alight with complex magic, some of it focusing on the items on that shelf and in other cases it looked like wards to keep outsiders away or maybe keep the items controlled. Behind the counter, was another female troll, looking very similar to Surja, the owner of the herb-store back in Yaksha.


    ¡°Greetings, do you only sell or do you buy as well?¡± Adra asked while I was still looking around in wonder.


    ¡°Greetings, it depends what you have to sell. I have no need for some overpriced trinkets, sell those to the fool Adventurers.¡± the troll behind the counter answered, her voice sounding hoarse and rough.


    Adra shook my shoulder, pulling me from my examination of the highly interesting wards the troll had set up, telling me it was my turn.


    First, I handed over the Earthen Staff, curious what she¡¯d make of it. I kept looking at her through Lenore¡¯s sight, hoping to maybe glean some more tricks, as she looked rather experienced in her craft. I felt Lenore¡¯s mind join with mine and together, we watched in breathless amazement as a highly complex formation of magic shot from the shopkeepers forehead, scanning over the staff in a systematic and careful manner. Together we were able to make sense of parts of it, the parts that were similar to the divination-based skill Inspect we used, but it was just a tiny part of a larger whole. But her scan allowed me to get an impression of a few of the runes used in the staff; not a complete picture but it was a start. They looked different from anything I had ever seen, but there was a slight resemblance to the runes of Darkness, especially the one meaning Magic. Both Lenore and I tried our very best to burn those images into our minds, knowing that it might be a starting point to replicate the staff in an elemental flavour more to our liking.


    ¡°Not a bad work, Motherstone as a core, supporting a solid rock shell with structural enhancement and power storage. Yes, I¡¯d buy that thing. Do you have more for me?¡± she asked, looking first at me, then at Adra.


    ¡°Yes, but I¡¯m not sure I want to sell it, maybe you could tell me your thoughts on this.¡± I told her, pulling a small shard of Eternal Ice from my bag.


    ¡°Ah, Eternal Ice. Another low-grade Elemental Crystal, yes, I¡¯d buy that as well. But you wanted my thoughts, well, it is, as I said, a low-grade Elemental Crystal, similar to the core of that staff. Useful to power enchantments and such, or, if you are seriously suicidal, use it to directly fuel spells, but that¡¯ll most likely kill you, trying to keep such power in check without the necessary enchantments and formations is nigh impossible and if you don¡¯t, it¡¯ll lash back, striking directly at your soul¡­¡± as she talked, she started to frown and when she petered off, she used a similar spell to the one used previously, only this time on me, undoubtedly trying to get a better look at me. I had expected something like that and was ready for it, shadows blooming from below my hood, obscuring my face and smothering the magic, not allowing her to learn anything about me. I had even been careful to keep the traces of Elemental Ice that accompanied my magic normally in check, using pure Darkness.


    ¡°Now, let¡¯s not be impolite, please.¡± I asked, in a gentle voice after letting most of the shadows fade away, letting an outline of my face be seen through, almost as if I was wearing a veil.


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    ¡°I apologize, just natural curiosity, something you can undoubtedly understand.¡± the shopkeeper apologized with a slight bow and smile, taking the tension out of the situation.


    ¡°It¡¯s fine. So, the staff¡¯s core is made out of a material equivalent to the Eternal Ice?¡± I asked, seeking confirmation.


    ¡°Yes, enchanted to allow a slow drain of power from the crystals, instead of destabilising the crystals, unleashing the whole power at once.¡± With the shopkeeper¡¯s confirmation, I felt a bit like a fool and Lenore was hysterically laughing in her Hallow. It seemed that we had been even more lucky than I had believed previously and that my analogy with nuclear fission had been rather apt. With information, we could have used the crystals in a controlled manner, just as in a power plant, nuclear fission was used to create safe energy instead of the explosive, uncontrolled manner I had unleashed the power.


    ¡°Do you know how to enchant such a staff?¡± I asked, hatching a plan.


    ¡°With Eternal Ice? No, I don¡¯t have that ability, I work in other elements.¡±


    ¡°But you have the information? Could I look at your books and such, as compensation for your previous rudeness? Just looking through them once, you can look over my shoulder as I do. I will even give you the answers you previously sought.¡± I suggested, hoping to get a good look, allowing me to look at the recording later. It wouldn¡¯t be as good as having a reference book permanently with me, but again, I doubted that anyone would give away their knowledge without serious struggle.


    The shopkeeper took a measuring look at me and I let the shadows concealing my face face, letting her see me without obstruction.


    ¡°In turn, I can show you the grimoire I received from an elder who taught me some truths about magic before sending me on my way.¡± I added, hoping to use the Grandmother¡¯s reputation to my advantage. I could see the interest and surprise on her face and pulled the grimoire from my bag, letting her see and Inspect it.


    The Grandmother¡¯s reputation came through once more, the shopkeeper¡¯s eyes went almost comically wide when inspecting the book and she nodded, gesturing for me to come behind the counter while almost reverently touching the grimoire.


    ¡°Why don¡¯t I show you what I can access in the grimoire at this point - I¡¯m afraid that it is not as much as I would like to; the Grandmother restricted how much it shows, depending on my mental and magical power.¡± I explained, while opening the grimoire, allowing the Shopkeeper to look over my shoulder, into the book. The soulbinding on the book made sure that only I could open the book but, at least with Lenore and Adra, others were able to read along with me, if I let them.


    Over the last few weeks, there had been more pages unveiled, I had read them before, mostly rituals to gather and shape power but nothing that I had been able to use in a useful manner. The shopkeeper looked over the spells carefully, muttering under her breath as she went along. Sadly, there were only ten pages, filled with complex symbols and instructions, so it didn¡¯t take too long, maybe half an hour - the information was that complicated.


    ¡°Interesting. It is obvious that the writer was greatly experienced. Let me show you my collection.¡± she told me, after I got to the last page.


    Her collection was recorded on thin leather, not paper and I quickly noticed that it was far less complex and comprehensive compared to the grimoire, but Lenore and I were able to pierce some things together. It was a little difficult, because the enchantments were designed to work with another type of Astral Power. From the feeling I was getting, the Shopkeeper, or maybe someone else, was working in Earth and something vaguely reminiscent of my Blood-element, something that Lenore claimed was the element of Wood or vegetation, whatever you wanted to call it.


    After the first page, I no longer tried to even understand what I was looking at, I merely made sure that I scanned every page carefully, so that I would have a recording of it later. Lenore tried to read along, but she was limited to what I was seeing, if she wanted to read. But the shopkeeper had a few books and I was scanning them all, over the course of the next hour. As I was doing that, I heard Adra and the shopkeeper haggle over the amount of money we would get for the staff but I was too focused on the pages to pay the end result any heed.

 Chapter 169

    After my information acquisition in the magic store, we continued walking around Kolyug, partially to sight-see, not that there were any, and partially to restock the few items and products we could not acquire while travelling, salt for one, and quicklime. On advice from Drega, we kept to the merchant and craftsman parts of town, something easily done thanks to the rigid grid-pattern. We were staying well away from the are around the castle, where the the truly wealthy and the rulers of Kolyug were living. It was a little sad, I had asked Lenore to take to the skies, letting me look down from above and at the center of Kolyug. The construction was quite different, still made from grey rocks but far more sophisticated and truly beautiful, thanks to the intricate designs. I¡¯d have loved to take a closer look - maybe even study if the design was influencing the flow of magic through their construction. But no, we¡¯d get away with Lenore flying over it but traipsing through the area would likely make us brush against one of those living there, someone with enough clout to make us serious trouble.


    The other extreme, compared to the beautiful area in the center, was the area I¡¯d call the docks, where the walls went out, into the water for a ways, forming a harbour. There, the rigidity of Kolyugian design was somewhat broken up and between the orderly warehouses was what I could only call a shanty-town. Lenore had given me an overhead view after Drega had warned us away from it and after seeing it, my desire to take a closer look was quickly extinguished.


    What Lenore was seeing from the air was bad enough, the shanty-town was housing the poor and destitute, the day-labourers and beggars, those unwanted people living out a squalid existence. It reminded me of the famous poem, talking about the tired, the poor, the huddled masses, only I wasn¡¯t sure if they were yearning to breathe free. In a world of magic, where anyone might become powerful by risking their life, how would a class of truly destitute form? It was a thought for another day, once I had seen more of the civilizations on Mundus.


    We finished our shopping, even looking at a few pieces of armour and weapons, but none of what they had in stock was of suitable quality for us; only if we took quite a bit of time and had something especially made for us - undoubtedly paying through the nose for it - would we get something superior to our current gear. Adra took the time and sold some of the Querder-parts we had gotten in the dungeon and the few pelts we were carrying with us, getting some extra coin in the process but Kolyug, as much as it was a city, turned out to be a dud, shopping wise. But that was fine, I had no doubt that as we ventured west, we would find other places to shop.


    In the evening, we returned to Drega¡¯s tavern and for this evening, I promised myself to stay away from the mead, I wanted to log out and take care of a few things in real life and, while I was curious if there was a psychosomatic response, my body believing itself to be drunk despite only drinking ingame, I decided not to experiment. And I doubted that there would be one anyway, or I would also expect one when dealing with other, serious, poisons and injuries, something that would likely have caused the project to crash and burn long before shipping it to the first beta-tester.


    Sadly, Drega was too busy to sit and chat with us during the evening but Kelgorn, the hunter that had shared the table with us, was there and, again, Adra tried to learn as much about the area as possible.


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    Later, once we were back in our rooms and Sigmir and I had enjoyed ourselves, I logged out, lying in her arms. Outside the game, I, once again, cleared my spam-filter first, mostly just casually glancing at the header before sending it to the digital abyss, but in the unconfirmed-folder was something I thought interesting. It was an offer, an official offer that could be quite beneficial. I had seen the advertisement they had made with Tobiuno as a main-character and they had made an offer that they wanted something similar, with me in the lead, in the near future.


    It was quite a good offer, especially if I wanted to increase the name-recognition of Morgana as a brand but I wondered if it might backfire. Looking at the forums and a few streams, a lot of buzz about Morgana was created because nobody had more than a very slight clue about what actually happened when watching the videos, trailers and highlight-reels. Sure, some spellcasters posed ideas based on their own magic but as I came up with my own spells, it was rather difficult to understand them, without the additional senses supplied by the game. And trying to encode the specific sensation of magic into a video seemed completely impossible, it seemed to vary from person to person. I, as Morgana, perceived magic as smell and taste while Lenore perceived it as colours, a skill she was able to lend me. Sigmir, on the other hand, was only able to vaguely perceive magic, as something similar to a sixth sense that gave her goosebumps and raised the hairs at the back of her neck, depending on the severity.


    What I wondered was, would I have to reveal more about my magic and if yes, would it cause that buzz-effect of wonder to fade? Like a stage-magician, if I revealed my tricks, would I lose what name-recognition Morgana already had?


    Unsure about the details, I responded vaguely positive but with a request of a lot more information about the details, before I would make a final determination.


    But thinking about the ways magic was perceived, I looked at the video of us walking through Kolyug, the part where Lenore and I had looked through her sight to study their magic. Interestingly, it was lacking the part that was perceived by Lenore, strangely shifting my sight as I only saw normally through my right eye during that portion, the left holding Lenore¡¯s Hallow and being overwritten by her perception that wasn¡¯t recorded.


    Afterwards, I saved the part of me, reading the books and placed it into a private video, something I could look at while ingame. It was almost a joke to allow such usage, I would most likely be unable to use the senses that helped translate what I was seeing in a magic book into the thought-forms and concepts my mind used but it would allow me to take inspiration for my own experiments, something that would help me a great deal. It wasn¡¯t like I needed to take what was written and use it - I made my own magic anyway.


    After those tasks, I got myself some food and exercise, noticing that I would have to increase my outside-periods. My customary forms felt more difficult and the bit of muscle tone I had, it was mostly gone. I needed to improve my shape again, not just because of my general health but also because I needed to be in shape to get the same, or maybe even better, results in the attribute-challenge of the character creation. Having those extra points was just too valuable to pass them up, especially if they were linked to something that has a real, substantial benefit, like being fit and healthy.


    Otherwise, the stooges had finally stopped posting their accusations - or maybe they had managed to get all three of their accounts banned in the forum, either was fine with me - and I doubted that I would run into them again. And if I happened to do so, well, they had not convinced me of their competence to be a threat. Annoyed me into killing them - maybe even without reason the last time; they claimed they had just been hunting - but still. If they annoyed me again I might just decide that there was value in testing just how good the cut-off from pain and mental attacks was. Lenore and I had done some brainstorming after the inclusion of Ice-Astral Power into all my spells and we had some ideas that were a little dangerous, especially after the snag with my mind-control collars. But Pantheon had undoubtedly very good cut-offs to prevent the stooges from being permanently hurt and if not, better it came out now, instead of once the capsules were in general circulation. First, however, they would have to take another run at me again.

 Interlude: Highlightreel IV

    Deep in a forest, where only little light reaches, ten people and their horses, nine on them, one walking next to his horse, follow a path. The one on foot, clad in leather, holding a bow and having a quiver on his hip leads, keeping his eyes on the path, going down to check the path with his hands. The one slightly behind and next to him is clad in similar armour and holds a long spear with a cross-piece a hand below the tip to prevent over-penetration, one that looks exactly like the spear in the saddle skirt of the un-mounted horse.


    The riders behind them are clad in mail-shirts over leather, both of them have a shield, formed like a teardrop, strapped to their left arms, one with a sabre the other with a straight long-sword in a sheath below their shield, ready to be drawn with their right arm. They keep close watch of the flanks, ready to respond to any attack.


    The next four stand out a little, clad in soft leather clothes and without the obvious martial weapons the other carry but on closer look their daggers and ornate maces giving them away as spell-casters of some kind.


    The last two are clad just like those in the second row and they keep quite a bit of distance, watching out for attackers from behind, one of them turning around every few seconds to check.


    The sabre-wearing warrior in the back speaks towards a small, silver object that keeps pace with them, when suddenly, a large canine, maybe a small wolf, maybe a large dog or maybe a mix of the two, breaks through the brush, snarling and barking, only to end up being skewered on the spear, stopped by the cross-piece. Getting a good look at the animal dying at the end of his spear, seeing the collar around its neck and realising that it¡¯s a guard-animal of some kind.


    ¡°Hound!¡± he calls out to his companions, making sure that they know that it wasn¡¯t a random animal attack, maybe due to rabies or extreme hunger, but that they have stumbled upon someone who uses animals as their guards.


    While muttering soft curses, the dismounted rider jumps back onto his mount and they keep their eyes open, looking for the owners of the guard dog, most likely the bandits they had been hunting all along.


    They enter a large clearing and the one riding in the back calls out, ¡°To the left, charge!¡±, their formation shifting and picking up the pace as they see a small camp, five tents around a small fire, with logs and scruffy-looking figures sitting around it.


    Their formation shifts into a wedge, the two who had been in the back picking up the pace and take position next to the other two shield-bearers, the two scouts falling back to let the four armoured shield-bearers take the lead, with them on the sides of the wedge. Before putting his bow away, the archer quickly nocks and shoots two arrows, not fully bothering with aiming, just trying to sow confusion and maybe wound a bandit before their charge hit. His mount is well trained, keeping their position in the wedge without effort, allowing him to put the bow away and ready his spear.


    Behind them, the four spell-casters are clad in colourful light and a golden light shines from one of them, enveloping the six charging riders for a moment before fading. But some of the light remains, adding a soft glow to their armour.


    One of the other spellcasters has finished his working and with a shout, a fireball arcs from his hand, overtaking the charging riders and exploding in the middle of the bandit-camp.


    And then the charge hits, the heavy, well-trained horses smashing through the camp, simply using their mass to break through the disorganised and confused bandits that still reel from the sudden attack. Their riders simply use their weapons to hack down at their prey in the few moments they are amongst them, before their speed carries them through the camp and out the other side where they turn, still in formation, to make another pass.


    But there is no need, one bandit lies still with an arrow in the chest, two try rolling on the ground to put out fire, two have been simply trampled by the charging horses and the last four have all taken a heavy hit from the riders and look rather worse for wear. Just as the apparent leader, clad in slightly better armour and with a weapon that¡¯s not more rust than intact metal gives out orders to defend against another attack, the two remaining spellcasters have finished their magic and roots burst from the ground, wrapping around all bandits, dead or alive, tying them down.


    The six armed riders slowly approach, careful to make sure that nothing jumps from the tents, even as one of the tents is burning. They dismount a few meters away, the shield-wielders leading the way, with the two scouts supporting them with their spears. A few stabs into the tents make sure that nobody is hiding, before the group binds the bandits, before the magic binding them fades. Once that is done, they quickly search the tents, easily finding the evidence to ascertain that they indeed are the bandits they have been looking for.


    The leader of the riders addresses the bound bandits, after giving a small sign to his men.


    ¡°Greetings. I am Tobiuno, Steward of Everwatch, and in the name of Sir Walter, Duke of Highever, I hereby judge you, according to the laws of the realm. You have been found guilty of robbery, banditry and poaching. The sentence is to hang by the neck at the nearest road, remaining there for the carrion-feeders, serving as a warning.¡± he declares with a small frown.


    The bound bandits groan and those who are too wounded to walk are quickly put out of their misery. After that is done, one of the men speaks up.


    ¡°Sir, why don¡¯t we say that none of them is fit to walk?¡± he asks, the leader frowning for a moment but quickly getting his point.


    ¡°Yes, you are right, I don¡¯t think any of them can be made to walk.¡± with those words, he pulls his sabre again, ending the lives of the bound bandits with swift strikes.


    ¡°Let¡¯s burn the camp and the corpses, no need to give the carrion-feeders indigestion.¡± he calls out after the gruesome business is done, all ten looking relieved not to have to drag the prisoners to the nearest road and hang them.


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    [fade-to-black]


    The view flies, over snow-covered mountains, mixes of white snow and grey rocks dominating everything. Suddenly, on the horizon, what looks like a cloud becomes visible, strangely grey-brown and moving in an odd manner. The vision flies closer and a huge glacier becomes visible and it becomes clear that the cloud is centered at the end of that glacier.


    Closer still, and it becomes obvious that the cloud is composed out of dozens of birds, some smaller, flying lower, others bigger and the strange optic stemmed from the fact that the winds and air move with their swarm, twisting in a circle.


    When the vision gets close enough, a round valley becomes visible, right below the wheel formed out of birds and wind, a valley buffeted and ravaged by the brutal wind the birds have conjured up, orcane-like wind funnelling through the sole entrance to the valley, ripping even small rocks from the mountainside and carrying them away.


    Suddenly, at the bottom of the valley, figures are visible for a moment, trying to move through the wind, only to be obscured by a white cloud of thrown up snow and, strangely, mist that starts moving with the wind, joining it in its mad, twisting chase. The vision moves into the cloud and in the middle of the valley, a black-clad figure moves with the wind, her cloak flapping behind her, like black wings. Her hood is blown back and one can see a pristine, pale-blue face, a gentle smile playing on her lips, despite the storm raging around her.


    Her arms move in a strange manner, partially blown around by the brutal winds, partially moving with the wind, directing it to blow, sometimes leading, sometimes following, as her feet step in an almost floating, dreamlike manner. As she moves, the interferences she takes from the storm seems to cease more and more, or maybe her movements just move with the storm, not trying to control it but letting it blow her where it will, a leaf on the wind, stillness in motion.


    But the image of doesn¡¯t last, the storm turns even more furious and the dancing figure is about to lose her step, to be blown into the air and ripped apart by the harrowing winds when another figure steps into her space, gathering the far smaller figure into her arms, ripping her from the possessive grip of the storm and carrying her away, into a small crevice below the glacier.


    Now, with the loss of the dance-partner, the storm turns even faster, even more furious and the vision moves out, now again, showing the valley from above, the birds frantically flying to move with the storm, that has now turned into a blinding blizzard, sharp shards of ice, carried by relentless wind turning into razor bladed. Some of the smaller birds manage to get to safety, protected by their bigger brethren but a lot of them are swallowed by the wind, some pulled down into the valley and broken against the walls, others struck down by flying ice.


    And the storm rages on, as the birds flee from the havoc they wrought.


    [fade-to-black]


    In the middle of a city, surrounded by a massive wall of white stone, near a huge, white tower with a golden top, stands a huge, round building. The building is built from grey stone and decorated by colourful awnings, giving shade from the sun above and masses of people mill around, creating a teeming, buzzing atmosphere.


    In the middle of the round building, surrounded by stands made from grey marmor, is an empty expanse, filled with sand and on one side of that round expanse stands a tall figure, clad in shining armour, waiting for his opponent, the next test of his mettle and martial might.


    His hands hold a massive weapon, crafted to be one-and-a-half times his impressive height, a polearm that many wield but few, if any master. On the top of the three meter long shaft, made from some of the hardest wood and banded with metal sits the head that makes the weapon so unique and versatile. On one side, sits a crescent-axe blade, opposite of it, a sturdy and sharp spike and between the two a gleaming spear-tip. The fighter had previously used his halberd with great ability and versatility, chopping limbs of with the blade, striking through even the hardest armour with the sharp spike, parrying attacks with the shaft and using the spear to impale those recklessly charging at him, be it another warrior or one of the many monsters, captured for the arena. He even, from time to time, used the butt of his weapon like a staff or club, hitting his opponents over the head with it.


    An announcer, his voice carried far and wide by magic, starts speaking.


    ¡°And finally, the last challenger for the great Gramus, is a special treat. He is one of those the Gods told us about, a chosen one, send here to learn and receive guidance. Today, he will receive guidance from the one of the greatest warriors that have ever graced the sandy floor of our arena.


    Give a rousing cheer for Clavran!¡±


    From one of the stairs, leading down into the staging area below the arena, another warrior emerges, his armour far less splendid, made from reinforced leather and in his hands wait two blades, one longer, the other shorter but both slightly curved, crafted in a style unfamiliar to most in the audience, but a few, those experienced with foreign countries and cultures eye them with interest. The weapons almost look like a cavalry saber, only the larger one is far larger than a saber, the shorter one quite a bit shorter and both are so slim that one has to wonder if they would survive the brutal impact a cavalry charge subjects them to.


    The fighter calmly walks into the arena, for a moment looking around the stands until his gaze falls on his opponent and it seems as if the rest of the world ceases to exist for him.


    Now, only his foe matters, until he is vanquished.


    After a short prayer to the gods and salute to the Emperor, combat starts, not with a bang but with a careful approach by Clavran who starts to circle his opponent. The experienced fighter Gramus has to smile at that, holding his ground and easily keeping his foe in his vision, noting that those in charge of the arena have used the powerful magic of the ancient building to bring his attributes down to his foes level. For a moment, he tenses his muscles, one after the other, mentally taking note of what he has to work with, before his foe starts the first, probing attack, slashing with one blade in a feint to get an opening, if Gramus underestimates the newcomer.


    He does not, and so, the dance begins. Blade strikes axe, shaft parries blade, in a frantic symphony of clanging metal. From time to time, one of the combatants manages to get a grazing hit, causing small marks on the armour of the other, but neither of them manages to do more than cause cosmetic damage. After the first few exchanges, Gramus had taken his halberd in a centered grip, using not only the axe-head but also the butt to great effect. Some might say that his longer reach would help more, but there are more than enough tricks, feints and abilities to get into the radius of the weapon, taking away the biggest advantage of its heft and reach. The center grip takes that into account, meeting the enemy on almost even ground, forcing them to commit at short range.


    And that short range is what decides the match at the end, Gramus letting a stab from the shorter blade pierce through a gap in his armour, causing a superficial wound, while he manages to capture the longer blade between the axe-head and the spear-tip, twisting his weapon almost like a sword-breaker and ripping the weapon from his foes hand, bend in a manner that makes any warrior and blade-smith in the audience cringe.


    Reduced to only the lesser of his two blades, Clavius is at the mercy of his more experienced foe and is forced away. At that point, Gramus gives his opponent a moment to concede, hoping that he is not forced to end the match by maiming or even killing his opponent, he had fun fighting him. The Traveller, seeing that there is no way to get into range to use his short blade against his powerful foe, not with the halberd keeping him at a distance, bows, conceding the match. But it had been a good match and the crowd cheers for both fighters, as Clavius calls out, asking them if they are entertained.

 Chapter 170

    The next morning, after a hearty breakfast, we headed out again, into the drab, grey town, covered by a dreary grey sky. Again, I was wondering how anyone could stay in this grey hell - even after just two days, I was starting to feel depressed. At the gate, I experienced a bit of a surprise when Kelgorn, the hunter who had taken quite a bit of time to explain the terrain around Kolyug to Adra, was already waiting. He greeted Adra in a happy and friendly manner and I learned that he had offered to join us as native guide and Adra had accepted. Apparently, Adra had even asked me, but I had been too lost in thought - or rather, conversation with Lenore - to notice and she had taken a half-conscious grunt as assent.


    I made a mental note to keep an eye on Kelgorn; we were on a bandit subjugation-quest after all, and slipping a spy into adventurer-teams as they left town would be a good way to make sure that nobody got the drop on you. But I didn¡¯t know whether he was a spy and even if I knew, in Mundus the old adage, better the devil you know, held true, so I kept quiet.


    After stepping outside, I noticed that a strange feeling of oppression faded away, I hadn¡¯t even noticed it before but at some point, the walls and buildings of Kolyug had started to take a true psychological toll on me, dampening my mood and spirit. But now that I was outside again, seeing the endless, snowy forests in the distance, I felt myself able to breathe freely, without artificial boundaries imposed upon me by outside forces.


    Seeing that Adra had taken over the guidance of the group, together with Kelgorn, I kept back with Sigmir, playing rearguard. Moving back into her shadow, I informed her of my suspicions regarding Kelgorn, asking her to be vigilant without giving anything away. She was clearly not happy but agreed that until we knew if he was a spy, we couldn¡¯t take any truly offensive action.


    Our way led us around the city, towards the frozen river, which allowed us an easy passing to its other side, the region where the various hunting quests led us. As we walked onto the ice, I stretched my senses downward, noticing that while the ice was thick, there was flowing water below. It was quite brave of those without the abilities to gauge the thickness of the ice below them - and thus their safety - to walk onto it. But to me, it was even better than any road; it gave me an endless amount of material to work my powers on, and even another measure to attack enemies by breaking the ice below them. If only there were any enemies on the ice, it would be glorious.


    Maybe we could find the equivalent to a Hunn-army, using a frozen river as a an invasion route, allowing me to destroy them with ease. But it was just a flight of fancy, about which Lenore had a good chuckle, an army would undoubtedly have some way to avoid such a fate. Even if it would have made for an awesome video, I had, at some point, read about an old soviet propaganda-piece with a great cavalry battle on a frozen lake as their finale with the opposing forces breaking through the ice and drowning in the icy depths.


    I was almost sad when nothing had tried to attack us as we left the ice on the other side, but I was certain that I would get the chance to commit some murderous magical mayhem soon enough. The shore we were climbing up was snow-covered, like everything else, but below it, I could feel gravel and rocks, making me wonder how the area would look without the white blanket that had covered the world ever since I got here.


    Following Kelgorn and Adra, we walked into the woods, Ylva coming out to look for senses and prey. Both of them had their weapons out, Kelgorn a spear and Adra her bow. In addition and with a little prodding, Lenore left her Hallow as well, with me concealing her from Kelgorn, just in case he was keeping track of us. Her job was to scout from the air and keep an eye out for the ambush I was expecting. Not that I expected it this early, I doubted that the bandits had their camp anywhere in a one-days walk from the city, if it was me, I would want to be at least four days march away from the city, with scouts between it and my camp. Or I¡¯d eschew the idea of a fixed camp and move from place to place, raiding and plundering as I went. Either would work quite well, if I ever wanted to go that route.


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    And it was not only bandits that kept away from the city; for the first hour or so, we didn¡¯t spot anything bigger than a hare that Ylva ran down out of boredom, making it into a two-bite snack for her. I would have to remember to feed her a fresh kill, if we ever needed to intimidate someone, the sight of a huge wolf, blood and saliva dripping from her smiling maw made one hell of an image if you didn¡¯t know her. Even if you did know her, it looked like she wanted to be called Grandmother and asked why she had so big eyes.


    Later in the day, we found a few game-trails, but nothing that hinted at the game we were interested in, so we continued our way, until one deer-like animal was unlucky enough to run into us. The fight, if one wanted to call it that, was over before it had really begun, Adra made an arrow with her innate magic and shot it before I was able to consider whether I wanted to use instant magic. For once, I didn¡¯t use Blood Magic to drain the carcass, not wanting to give away even more of my capabilities than I already had when I had told my story. In the story, I had never quite explained that I was able to use Blood Magic, nevermind my capabilities with it. If my hunch was right and Kelgorn was a spy, I wanted to have more than one ace up my sleeve.


    At camp, I, once again, took care of cooking the food, using the fresh meat and some of the supplies we had bought in Kolyug before we decided on night watches. There was no way I would trust Kelgorn with one, but I was hesitant to come straight out and say so, so he was assigned the first watch and I took the second, knowing that I would have less sleep by staying up but unless I made a habit of that, I wouldn¡¯t run into trouble. After dinner, I made an excuse and collected Lenore who was slightly annoyed about the futility of scouting the whole day and agreeing with me that it was a good idea.


    When it way my turn to stand watch, Kelgorn gently shook me awake, at least I pretended to wake up and it was time to take another precaution. After he laid down across the fire, Lenore and I watched the woods for about an hour, before we started my plan. Gently and softly, I stretched my magic senses out, using mind magic, to start probing Kelgorn and looking for a back door into his head. He was asleep and Lenore and I were very cautious to let him sleep, trying to make like a leaf on the breeze, gently floating into his dreaming mind. It was not something we had done before but I doubted that even if he was awake he would fully understand what was happening.


    It took almost the entire time we had at watch but the soft and flowing approach, instead of the brute force approach we normally used allowed us to find a path into the inner domain of his mind, not that either of us was able to get more than the vaguest understanding of what and where we were. What we were seeing was not the normal interplay between body, mind and (the for me invisible) soul, but we were in the area that I perceived as mind, colours streaming and flowing around us, reminding me of what I thought an LSD-trip would look like.


    But it didn¡¯t matter, unless the theory I had posed and Lenore agreed with was wrong, we would be able to leave a trail out to follow the next time, allowing us to instantly bypass his mental defenses and strike with impunity. It was almost funny: what I was doing with Mind Magic was so much like hacking in movies that I wondered if there was a correlation, that one of the devs had watched too many hacker movies and went wild.


    When we woke Adra for her watch, I noticed that Mind Magic had risen, making me smile happily. The night had been more successful that I had anticipated.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Skill increased</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You increased your skill: Mind Magic [15/60]</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>

 Chapter 171

    Hunting in the woods around Kolyug was not as interesting as I would have hoped. The game was basically the same we had hunted further north, with levels mostly between thirty and fifty making it almost no challenge at all. We spent the most of the second day after leaving Kolyug hunting what I could only consider as critters, spending far more time following their tracks than actually fighting them.


    There was one quest that would hopefully be interesting, the hunt for a bear that had been problematic enough to gain a direct bounty, as it had apparently decided not to hibernate in the winter but taken to going after farmsteads. That bear was our first big target, apart from the constant lookout for the gang of bandits.


    While we were looking for the bear, we also kept our eyes open for traces of the bandits and their hideout, but on the second day, I realised that it might be a pointless task. I had underestimated a simple thing, scale. On the map we had seen in the Adventurer¡¯s guild, the area had looked so small and our task so straightforward, go out there, kill the bandits, return, profit. The reality of it was, the closest attack had been about two kilometers away from Kolyug, the furthest about twenty. Without extreme burdens, those distances were a joke to beings with some levels to their name, crossed within an hour, maybe two.


    In addition to that huge area that we would have to cover, there was no link between the sites that had been attacked, no common thread that we might be able to follow, they were all over the region, loosely centered around Kolyug. In addition, the attacks had varied in scope and scale; in some cases, a single farmstead had been raided and burned, but on the other hand, the last caravan in autumn had been raided and burned - a caravan with guards and escorting adventurers. That last piece of information was suspect, as it came from Kelgorn, but still, it gave me pause.


    But before I worried too much about tracking down the bandits, we had a bear to hunt. That one was far easier, it had raided farms on our side of the river, one just days ago, and as we had been searching in the woods, I had been mentally going over the information, finally noticing that there might be a connection. The times during which the bear had struck had been all over the place, making me curious. Normally, predators had a preferred time of activity, all animals had, some were active during the day, others during the night and again others during the twilight hours, to put it simply.


    But what if the bear was starting its activity at the same time, every day and went until it found food? That would allow me to make a rough estimation using the attack-times and the travel-speed, getting an idea where to look.


    I had explained my idea to Adra who thought it had merit and ran with it, she was far more experienced in woodcraft after all. Using the normal activity pattern of bears, some estimation and a lot of guesses she decided where to look for our furry friend.


    During dinner on the third day after leaving Kolyug, I tried to carefully sound out Kelgorn,  and it was during that session that he told me about the merchant caravan. Sadly, I was not a skilled enough conversationalist to get the information I wanted from him, so ultimately, I gave up. I considered letting Adra handle it, explaining my suspicions to her but the lack of certainty, and a bit of pettiness, prevented me from doing so. Rai, on the other hand, was kept in the dark because I was not sure if he would be able to keep his emotions hidden; he seemed to dislike Kelgorn anyway, so fueling that dislike might give things away.


    I considered telling Rai about my suspicions that evening but ultimately, I decided against it, instead, I focused on his training, mainly with his blades instead of his magic. Knowing that it might be a bad idea to let Kelgorn see too much of our fighting-style, we mainly focused on forms, beating them into Rai¡¯s head until they became second nature, allowing him to use a particular set of movements in combat without the conscious need to think about where to place a foot or how to shift his weight. It was one of those disciplines that were moderately easy to learn - but mastering them, that took time and repetition.


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    A lifetime of dedication, as my teacher had put it.


    We had been moving slowly and carefully, not wanting to literally run into something, so it took us almost four days to cross the distance we would cross within half a day on the old highway or a day if didn¡¯t worry about enemies but finally, during the afternoon on the fourth day, we got into the area, a couple of rocky hills and valleys. I had Lenore fly scout every day, hiding my activity from everyone but Sigmir and she had told me where the bear was, it was apparently relatively easy to spot, even from the air. When I asked why, I was shown a mental image and had to fight to keep my composure.


    There was an area devoid of trees and brush, but also of snow, everything was covered in a mixture of ice, mud and ash. In the middle of that area, black with soot, was a cave mouth and in the shared image, a bear the size of large car was trotting into the cave. It was about the same proportion compared to Yvla, so I could assume that it had crossed the first divide, and judging by the fact that the bear was on fire, I had a good enough idea about its elemental affinity. Either that, or someone had lit the bear on fire and it was simply ignoring it, I was not sure which option I thought worse.


    Now that I had an idea where to look and what to look for, I was able to sense a faint echo of power - of heat - and somewhere inside me, hatred welled up. That thing should not be and I wanted it to be gone from this world, to prevent it from tainting the pristine white snow.


    ¡°I feel something.¡± I called out to Kelgorn and Adra, stopping them in their tracks and moving back to me. I no longer tried to keep the discomfort and revulsion I felt from showing on my face, just telling them the direction and approximate distance to the entity I was feeling and warning them that I had no idea just how powerful the being we were hunting truly was.


    Adra frowned a little, having seen me take insane risks with a smile, so for me to be discomforted by the prospect of a fight would be a fight that worried her, but nonetheless, she moved into the direction I had pointed out to them, leading once more.


    That gave me time to ask Lenore to come back, having her and the additional power she allowed me to wield might be crucial if the bear turned out to be more powerful than anticipated. I even went so far to disable the filter that kept the Ice-aspect of my power from invading her Hallow, allowing me to use my full magic power. It was only about a ten percent decrease in Astral Power regeneration but seeing the monster we were hunting, I wanted to have all the power I could get.


    As we closed in on the cave, I started to think about ways to deal with our foe, considering how to defeat a being that only a magically supported Sigmir could stand up to. But even with magical support, it would be a seriously hard fight, just from the physical size and power of our enemy.


    The first decision I came to, was that fighting the bear either in its cave or in the bare area in front of it would be a dumb idea. One of my biggest advantages had always been that I was a spellcaster controlling Ice and almost all my fights had been in an environment where I had next to unlimited access to a natural source of ice and snow that I could use to my advantage. Discarding that advantage seemed just dumb.


    The next was that I did not want to have Sigmir engage it, if we could help it. We simply didn¡¯t know enough about it, about its powers, making it a risky proposal. Hit-and-run tactics, in games commonly known as kiting, seemed a far healthier, if less honourable, idea.


    And finally, I concluded that the battle might allow me to gauge Kelgorn¡¯s intentions a little better, if he battled with us, risking his own life against a powerful foe, I might be inclined to trust him a little more. Probably not, but I might be.


    With all that in mind, I crossed the rest of the distance to the burned out area, suppressing my smirk when both Kelgorn and Adra made noises of shock and disbelief seeing it.


    Convincing them to not enter the area but wait and observe was almost comically easy, they were not eager to meet the entity that had created the devastation in front of us, especially not walking into its cave.

 Chapter 172

    Adra and Kelgorn looked around the burned-out area, soon finding bear-tracks leading towards and into it, making them agree that the power Adra and I were feeling from the cave was our target. And that attacking the bear in its cave was suicide, they had seen the size of its tracks, giving them an idea just how big our foe was. Fighting such a monster in a confined space was just a suicidally bad idea so we settled in to wait until it came out, quietly discussing how to fight it best.


    We quickly came to the agreement that fighting it in close combat had the potential to backfire horribly and that the best idea would be to attack it from all sides on the open area, fading into the forest if went after one of us while the others would intensify their attacks, hopefully getting its attention. To do that, we would need as many ranged attacks as possible, so I started to create axes for Sigmir to throw while Kelgorn started to pull out javelins from his belt-pouch. I had to smile at that, especially when I was reminded of an old and very british maid that helped with unruly kids. Only that our maid was a tall, grey-skinned guy that looked a lot more like a certain Austrian that would be back.


    With Rai, on the other hand, I discussed what his role would be. My hope was to use his magic to rob our foe of its sight, hopefully helping with our tactic. Rai would need to use a new spell, to project a dark cloud around the bear¡¯s head but that was not a big problem, coming up with such a spell only took me moments. Making it into a spell that Rai could use and teaching it to him took a little longer, but as the actual magic was quite simple, Rai was able to use the new spell on his second try. It showed me that he was coming along quite nicely when it came to his magic, or maybe that he was getting used to the way I structured my spells.


    About half an hour before we assumed the bear would leave, we scattered in the forest around the burned out area, with me taking the middle position right opposite of the cave, roughly where we expected the bear to head. To my right, Rai was waiting, to my left Sigmir and next to Rai was Adra¡¯s position with Kelgorn positioned to Sigmir¡¯s left.


    The bear was very much on schedule, as soon as the sun vanished behind the horizon and Twilight was upon us, I noticed that the power emanating from the cave was changing and moving.


    Gulping down what little moisture was in my mouth, I started to carefully construct my first-strike spell, hopefully striking a hindering wound into our furry foe. Afterwards, I would try to use my magic to fade into the shadows and let the others get the bears attention before striking again.


    Right on time, the bear emerged from its cave in all its glory. Only that it was no longer on fire. Looking with Lenore¡¯s eyes showed me truth once again. The bear was still emanating Fire Astral Power but it was also absorbing it. For a few moments, Lenore and I discussed what we were seeing and when minds are directly connected, a few moments can allow for a long discussion.


    ¡°Why do you think it¡¯s mostly active at night? Wouldn¡¯t it be better to move during the day, that would let it absorb more power.¡± Lenore questioned but I had no real answer.


    ¡°And why is it leaking its power like that?¡± I mentally frowned and the two of us bounced ideas off the other, none of them really plausible. Finally, it dawned on me.


    ¡°Wait, when we saw it for a moment during the day, it was on fire. What if that fire was just a physical representation of the leaking Astral Power? And what if it is unable to control the power it has, the fire simply flowing through it, uncontrolled? That would be excruciatingly painful, it would burn like physical fire!¡± thoughts tumbled in my mind, connecting the dots.


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    Flavoured Astral Power needed to be controlled, that was why I was able to handle the Eternal Ice - well, mostly - while it would simply destroy the others; my Ice Magic was protecting me. The big chunk was too much for me, or maybe it was a higher grade, so there was some damage, but I believed that I would be able to handle it, maybe even create some of it, if I got better with my magic.


    But the bear, if it was unable to stop itself from absorbing Fire Astral power, unable to then control the power it was absorbing and unable to store it, the power would just flow through until it escaped back into the environment. And that uncontrolled flow would feel like liquid fire through it, because, in a way, it was. I didn¡¯t even want to imagine what it would feel like, it had to hurt like hell. No wonder that it was unable to hibernate, no wonder that it was incredibly aggressive. And no wonder that it preferred to keep out of the sun, there was some Fire Astral Power in the rays of the sun. Not a lot but when one was quite literally burning from the inside, every bit less pain would count.


    It made me realise, we were not here to hunt down a dangerous monster, we were here to put a tortured creature out of its misery.


    After the bear had moved roughly in the middle of the clearing it had made, my spell was ready to strike, once again, I was using a lance of hard ice. Not as massive as I might be able to make it, but sharp and as dense as I could compress it. I was hoping to penetrate into the bear¡¯s shoulder before shattering, damaging the muscles and slowing it down.


    That was the theory.


    The Praxis? Well, as they say, in theory, there is no difference between theory and praxis.


    Reality had other ideas.


    The lance, my compressed lance, arcing through the air, trailing a tiny bit of vanishing Ice Astral Power, headed straight for our furry foe, as fast as I could make it. It struck, right where I had aimed, right into what would be the biceps on a human, causing the bear to stumble a little from the impact.


    But against my expectation, it only penetrated about a hand deep into the muscle and such a depth was far less than I had hoped. Even shattering it worked not quite as well as hoped, the Fire Astral Power already working against my Ice Magic so the force was far less than normally. It still ripped a hole into the muscle, wide enough to put both my fists in without getting them bloody but compared to the size of the bear?


    The rest of my lance shattered into razor sharp shards, which I had expected to add a couple of lacerations to the bears hide but they hardly marred its fur, there might have been a few small scratches but I had worse wounds from the hazards of office paper.


    The other part of our plan had worked quite well, the bear knew it had been attacked. I had once read that when animals are in pain, they strike out against the nearest target, even if they normally wouldn¡¯t. The bear had been in pain before I attacked and now it was as if I had invited it to unleash all the pent up rage and pain on me. And there was a lot of it.


    I had once heard a description about a roar that shook the earth, but I had never quite expected to experience one. Or maybe it was me shaking, but I certainly felt it, deep in my bones. And the trees around me felt it as well, losing a few needles when what I can only compare to a blastwave passed us.


    Remembering the plan, I grabbed the shadows around me and added to them, trying to convince the world that I was just another shadow.


    As I ran, I felt Rai to my right, casting his magic, hopefully helping with my escape.


    The bear had other ideas and the outburst of magic I felt behind me was quite scary but not as scary as the heat that caught up to me, heat and light that burned away my cloaking shadow.


    Looking over my shoulder, I noticed that the area where I had stood just moments before was now a burning wreck, luckily I had not stuck around. That would have seriously hurt. Or maybe it would not have. After all, the dead don¡¯t feel pain.

 Chapter 173

    After the fiery explosion caused by the bear had lit up the area behind me, I turned just in time to see Adra step out of the forest behind the bear and, while the bear was starting to trundle towards me, she let an arrow fly. Her shot was obviously magical, with streamers of colour radiating from the arrow and trailing behind it and her strike was better than mine had been. Her arrow punched deeply into the bear¡¯s left hind-leg, before the magic that was focused on it burst out, cutting the flesh around it into ribbons and causing blood to fly far and wide.


    Again, the bear roared but this time, there was pain mixed into its roar. I hurried onwards, towards Rai and taking up a new, hidden position, while the bear had turned and was now gathering steam to go after Adra. I could see blood flowing from the wounds we had caused but I also noticed a flickering in them and, thanks to Lenore, was able to see Astral Power gather at those spots, like a band-aid or bandage.


    With the bear turned around, Sigmir took the opportunity and launched an axe into it, trying to strike the same area Adra had hit but her attack failed to cause any real impression, leaving barely a flesh wound. I couldn¡¯t even cause the axe to explode, the Fire-Astral-Power was just too thick to connect to it. When the bear didn¡¯t care about Sigmir¡¯s attack, Kelgorn added his own, a javelin arcing from his position and hitting the shoulder I had attacked but from another angle. But, where the attacks from Adra and me were only partially physical, mostly acting as a delivery mechanism for magic, his was purely physical. The javelin must have had barbs or something similar on it, for it stuck, even as the shaft started to smoke and burn.


    Again, the bear spun and Kelgorn¡¯s attack must have hurt quite a bit, the bear used its magic ability to attack again. This time, I was able to see what was happening and I wondered if the stupid bear¡¯s mother, or maybe its father, had shacked up with a dragon. It reared back, on two paws, and shot a fireball from its mouth. Why on earth did a bear use a breath-attack?! The attack arched through the air, despite my incredulity, striking a tree near the position Kelgorn had attacked from, exploding into a short flare of fiery rage, erasing that tree and a few more beside.


    Shaking my head in disbelief and hoping that Kelgorn had been able to vacate the area before it was torched. When the bear landed back on all its four paws, I noticed that the Astral Power around it was weaker and decided to strike at it, even if it was not the best moment. I was unable to gather all that much power or use a sophisticated spell but even a swift icicle, without a lot of power seemed like a good idea.


    And it was, my previous attacks had been weakened by the Astral Power that was pouring from the bear, but at that moment, my attack struck true, adding another wound to the already wounded hind-leg.


    We continued that dance of attacking, repositioning, attacking, dodging and so on for a little while longer, all of us slowly adding wounds and hoping that blood loss would slow it down. It did not, at least not in a way I could see. I knew that I had taken a few close hits and my hands and face felt as if I had a brutal sunburn. There were a few more spots where burning splinters from the trees that the bear¡¯s firebreath had blown up had struck me. Even a miss was creating shrapnel that would make a grenade proud and I could feel blood from those wounds.


    Adra had been the last to attack and while she no longer had the time to add serious magic to her attacks, her arrow was sticking from the bears flank and this time, when the bear spun around and roared, once again. Only this time, things changed.


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    With the roar, the blood that had been flowing from its body, matting its fur and dripping to the ground beneath, all of it, burst into flame, burning with an angry, red flame.


    For a split-second, I regretted not using the Eternal Ice for my first attack, wanting to keep it in reserve until I became able to use it but it didn¡¯t really matter anymore. I would need at least a few seconds to bring it under control and right now, I didn¡¯t have those.


    The now burning bear was charging towards Adra and when I tried to get its attention, I was ignored. My attack struck but the only result was that a flame burst from the impact-spot, destroying the icicle before it could fully penetrate, let alone shatter.


    Sigmir tossed an axe after it while stepping into the open and shouting something, but her attack didn¡¯t even manage to get to it, the axe melting beforehand.


    Thanks to Lenore¡¯s sight, I was able to barely see where Adra was in the forest, she was angling away from the madly charging bear, trying to get as much distance as possible.


    I used both Overflow and Bullet Time. starting to cast spells as fast as possible, looking for something, anything, that might work. The first idea was to use Mind Magic, but before I could even try to attack with that, Lenore stopped me, reminding me of the Alpha Wolf and my inability to harm its mind, we assumed due to its ferality. Compared to the raging bear before us, the wolf had been a picture of collected thought, so I agreed, while the instant effect and bypassing of its powerful physical defenses seemed like a great idea, it was not worth the power and backlash.


    With Lenore¡¯s suggestion, I added Blood Runes to an icicle, using one mental process to engrave them as the icicle formed, while linking my magic to it, hoping to interfere with the power the bear seemed to get from the burning blood.


    The runed icicle managed to last until it struck the bear and there seemed to be a split-second of success, causing some blood to splatter out, before the brutally burning fire ended my effort. But it had worked, at least a bit, so I tried again, while trying to come up with another idea that might work better.


    Kelgorn had also stepped forward and launched another javelin, but, just like the attacks from Sigmir and me, it had not caused the bear to abandon its mad attack. He, just like Sigmir, started to follow the bear but he was almost as far away as Sigmir had been.


    By now, the bear had reached the area of forest where Adra had hidden before and its fiery aura caused the snow to instantly evaporate and steam billowed forth, clouding my normal vision. Suddenly, I felt a pain sting into my head, as if someone had driven an icepick into my skull, only that it was not coming from one point but from the complete top and back of my head. The pain was so intense that I lost the connection to Lenore for a moment, switching off my magic vision, causing me to lose track of it.


    I stumbled for a moment, feeling my magic leaking away and fell to the ground. Knowing that the bear was after Adra, I forced myself to my feet and forward. Even if I was unable to see the bear, even if my magic was leaking out, I would not let Adra face the monster alone. When I got to the cloud, I forced myself to use Lenore¡¯s sight again, even if it felt as if my head would split. But even in Lenore¡¯s sight, I was unable to see the towering monstrosity when a blue screen caught my attention.


    [table]


    <table><tbody><tr><td>Infernal Bear died</td></tr><tr><td>You gain 13500 EXP.</td></tr><tr><td> For killing an opponent 43 levels above you you gain Bonus EXP</td></tr><tr><td> For killing an opponent without a Traveller in your party, you gain Bonus EXP</td></tr>


    <tr><td>Skill increased </td></tr><tr><td>You increased your skill: Ice Rune-Mastery [66/100]</td></tr></tbody></table>


    <table><tbody><tr><td>Skill increased </td></tr><tr><td>You increased your skill: Stealth [34/100]</td></tr></tbody></table>


    ¡°It¡¯s dead?¡± I asked no one in particular, not quite certain what was going on. We had the EXP but I had no idea what had happened. Letting go of Lenore¡¯s sight again, I stumbled a little and Sigmir reached the cloud and me, catching me in an embrace and preventing me from hitting the ground again.

 Chapter 174

    When Sigmir grabbed me, she frantically started to pat and lightly slap my head, before carrying me over to a patch of snow that had yet to be molten, and throwing me into the snow head-first.


    It had taken a second to understand her actions, but by the second or third pat to my head, I realised what had happened. Apparently, my hood had slipped during the fighting and one of the hot, burning splinters had landed in my hair, sticking there and finally managing to set it on fire. When my head was stuck in the snow, I felt the soothing coldness numbing my head and started to think clearly again. My hair had been a tremendous asset to me, ever since I had taken the trait that allowed me to store Astral Power in it, increasing the amount of power I had to use by a third. And now, that power was lost, my head was burned and raw and I was seriously weakened.


    I pulled my head from the snow and thanked Sigmir, taking her hand to pull myself to my feet before standing next to her, looking at the cloud. Before Kelgorn reached us, I pulled up my hood again, hiding my burned head and carefully feeling my insides, looking for further damage. I found more spots where splinters had taken a burning toll on me, undoubtedly my weakness to fire not doing me any favours when I noticed Adra and Rai stepping out of the forest, moving next to us.


    ¡°The bear is dead, right?¡± Adra asked, looking as confused as I felt.


    ¡°We got EXP, so I think so. But how it died? I have no idea.¡± I answered, looking the others over. They seemed to be less wounded and weakened, at least at a casual inspection. I was just about to suggest a closer look when a gust of wind blew away the steamy cloud that obscured our vision and we saw the bear.


    Carefully walking up, the smell of charred flesh was thick in the air and when we got to it, I started to stretch my magical senses into it, similar to how my healing would work. It was harder and easier with a dead body, but in this particular case, finding out what had killed it was child¡¯s play. The flesh was charred, burned from the inside, its magic had not just cooked its flesh, it had roasted the poor animal. I didn¡¯t even want to imagine the pain it had been under in its last moments.


    ¡°I don¡¯t think there is any point in skinning it.¡± Kelgorn said, after he and Sigmir inspected the pelt. I had to agree, the literally boiling and burning blood had damaged the bear¡¯s fur and skin to the point that simply brushing over it caused the hairs to crumble and the skin made me think of roast-chicken, only without the crunchy consistency.


    ¡°True. And even the flesh below seems to be spoiled and wasted. Let¡¯s cut off the head to prove its death and get away from here.¡± I suggested. I was feeling weak and the Astral Power around us was in turmoil, the bear¡¯s carcass shedding a lot of Fire-Type Astral Power.


    ¡°You can move away.¡± Adra told me, before continuing, ¡°I think the bear might have condensed some Astral Power, I¡¯d like to find out.¡±


    ¡°Show me later?¡± I asked, not wanting to stay in the area. I assumed what she was looking for was similar to the core I was feeling in my chest, ever since I passed the first divide, or maybe more like the cores of Eternal Ice in the elementals we fought in the glacier-dungeon. But I was getting nauseous from the Astral Power in the air, I wanted to take care of my wounds and I wanted to find out if I could do anything about the loss of my hair. Not just because of vanity, even if that was a factor, but also because I wanted the Astral Power storage back.


    ¡°Sure. Why don¡¯t Sigmir and you check the bears cave?¡± Adra asked, while starting to cut into the carcass.


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    ¡°We can do that.¡± Sigmir agreed and we walked over towards the cave.


    ¡°Give me a moment, please.¡± I asked after we had some distance and were far enough away from them to be out of sight. By now, my Astral Power had drained to about twenty percent and it was not filling up, making me worry a great deal.


    ¡°Lenore, what¡¯s going on?¡± I asked mentally, seeking her input.


    ¡°I¡¯m not sure. The power is seeping out from your skull, at least most of it. I can keep my own power, but I think whatever is in your system, will flow there, unless you actively keep it from happening.¡± she answered and showed me what she was seeing, thanks to her perspective of the flow of power in my body. There seemed to be no threshold, so soon, I would be unable to cast magic, simply because there would be no Astral Power in my system. Lenore could give me some, allowing me to cast a few spells every now and then, but it was difficult for her to do so and she didn¡¯t really like it.


    Together, we could see what was happening, but understanding would need more investigation and more urgently, it meant that I would have to take care of my wounds, before I became unable to do so. Lenore helped with controlling my power and focusing it, allowing me to focus on healing myself, otherwise I might have screwed up, as all parts of my Astral Power were slowly draining, even what I was actively using. It was a rather unpleasant sensation, but with a little time, it worked. Healing the skin on my head was almost impossible, for some reason, the closer the power came to the back of my head, the easier it was to lose it to the draining effect, so, with great effort, Lenore and I managed to get some healing done, but not a lot.


    Finally, with the bleeding healed and my vitality mostly restored, I quickly checked Sigmir, but her stronger armour had kept her safe. I would check Adra and Kelgorn later, for now I was relying on the fact that neither of them had looked greatly damaged or asked for help. Rai had been easily safe the entire fight, only using his magic to blind the bear, never actively attacking, due to his persistent lack of ranged-options.


    To understand what was happening with my hair and Astral Power, Lenore left her Hallow hopping over to Sigmir¡¯s shoulder, so she could look down on me and assess the problem from the outside.


    At first, she just shared what I was looking like and I was shocked. I had tried to mentally prepare myself for the reality but nothing could have prepared me for the reality I was seeing. My beautiful, luxurious hair, glowing with power and magic, it was all gone. A sob escaped my throat and I wanted nothing more than curl up and cry, seeing my head through Lenore¡¯s eyes. The skin on my head was red and irritated, even after the healing I had poured into it but at least there was no scarring.


    Lenore switched on her magic sight allowing me to see what the magic was doing, and it seemed as if the Astral Power was mostly just flowing out, as if there were still hairs there, like a bleeding wound, just with Astral Power instead of blood. Looking closer, we were able to detect some Astral Power that seemed to fuel a natural process, being slowly converted into something that neither of us could fully understand but together, we pierced together enough to make a slightly educated guess, instead of just a wild-assed one. My hair was regenerating, slowly, but surely. It was far more complex than any healing I could attempt, but also a lot more wasteful.


    That had to be the big drawback for the extremely powerful trait Magical Hair I had picked when creating my avatar, a weakness that could be exploited to weaken me a great deal, in addition to the problems I would face if anyone, ever, got his hands on my hair, without me making sure that it was harmless. It would be even worse than normal blood, second only to blood drawn with blood magic.


    Lenore and I hemmed and hawed for a bit until we finally decided that there was nothing we actually could do, so Sigmir and I continued on our way to the cave. When we got there, the smell of animal, of feces and of decaying meat was pugent in the air, but we wanted to know if the reason for its state were in there, so we braved the smell and carefully entered, just in case the bear had a partner or, even worse, cubs in its cave.


    But no, there was nothing in the cave but gnawed off bones, mostly from animals but I thought a few looked like a troll-skeleton. One corner seemed to be its toilet - for the times when going out was impossible - something we only gave a cursory glance, until the smell drove us back out, into the evening air.

 Chapter 175

    ¡°Morgana?... Morgana?!¡± I heard Adra call from outside, so Sigmir and I quickly left the bear¡¯s cave and joined her.


    ¡°What¡¯s wrong?¡± I asked, curious. She had wanted to dig around in the bear and while I had taken some time before going into the cave, it hadn¡¯t been that long.


    ¡°We found something. You will want to look at that - I¡¯m sure of it.¡± Adra told me, before turning and walking back towards the carcass.


    Doing my best to ignore the unpleasant sensation of Fire Astral Power in the air, I followed after, interested in what they had found that fast. When we got to the bear, they had shifted him and started cutting into its pelt, starting at the middle of its chest but not progressed from there.


    ¡°Look at that and tell me what you think.¡± Adra told me, gesturing to their cut.


    So, she wanted to avoid telling me their conclusions, to see if I arrive at them on my own?


    Taking out one of my ice-blades, I shifted the bloody fur a little to let me see, while stretching my magical senses out again, focusing on the wound and the area around it. I noticed some scar-tissue but mostly the smell of burned flesh and the unpleasant smoky, burned smell and taste of Fire-Magic.


    Lenore had retreated to her Hallow while we were in the bear¡¯s cave and she was the one noticing what was going on.


    ¡°Those scars, they have a pattern.¡± she told me, and I looked closer again. And she was right, the scars seemed to be a cut that had been sutured close afterwards. But who on earth would operate on a bear the size of a van?! Calling such an undertaking madness was an understatement of the first order, even with some sort of sleep-spell or drugs, I thought it was more than a little insane.


    But, with the scar-tissue as a guide, I looked deeper, at the ribs below and noticed that there was something there, still softly emanating magic. I had missed it before, my scan too superficial and the escaping energies too powerful, blinding me to the subtle fluctuations.


    ¡°Someone operated on the bear.¡± I said out loud, so that Adra and Kelgorn could hear me. ¡°Some sort of mage, by the looks of it, but I can¡¯t tell more. Could you cut the ribcage free?¡± I continued, not wanting to use my Ice-blade more than necessary, knowing that the lingering Fire Astral Power would slowly damage it. Even I was feeling a little stung by it, so I moved back, to let Kelgorn and Adra work.


    They carefully peeled the charred flesh away, sometimes hissing when the lingering heat burned them, until after some time, maybe half an hour, the ribcage was visible, startling white in a gory, bloody wound.


    With some support from Lenore, I was able to use her vision and what we saw was a mess. From deeper in the body came a pulsing, glimmering light, like a flickering light bulb set behind a thick curtain or deep under water. Filtering out the light as best as we could, guessing that it was the magic crystal Adra was looking for, we focused on the ribs. There, we saw that the magic I had noticed before, someone had carved strange sigils, greatly different from the runes I knew and used, into the bones before closing the bear back up.


    The most startling thing, at least to me, was that the sigils pulsed in tune with the light from deeper within the body.


    ¡°Do you think the crystal is linked to the runes? I mean, the runes are quite likely an experiment but to what purpose?¡± I asked Lenore who was studying the magic before us just as intently.


    ¡°Most likely, yes. But why would its own magic kill it? Unless the crystal deeper within it was placed there by a magician and then linked to the runes?¡± Lenore started to ponder and I felt a shiver run down my spine, despite, or maybe because, the stifling Fire Astral Power still swirling around us.


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    ¡°Do you think that¡¯s possible?!¡± I asked, trying to conceptualise such an experiment. Using an outside power-source, drawing power in and strengthening the wielder? It sounded interesting but it had to be an early attempt, the way it had failed.


    ¡°Cut the crystal out as fast as you can, it¡¯s deeper in the chest.¡± I told the others before calling for Sigmir, to help them chop through the ribcage before retreating to a safe distance. Sigmir heard the urgency in my voice and instantly pulled out her axe and started on the ribs. Every strike caused sparks to fly and I wondered if we should even stay. If it was an experiment, wasn¡¯t the evaluation and maybe recovery of the experiment part of things?


    If so, a mage with most likely much more power than me and an rather insane mind might be on his way here. I had no desire to meet that mage, not unless I had an army or two at my side, with their own magicians.


    The only reason I didn¡¯t press to immediately flee was that I had not seen any magical links connecting to the bear or felt any kind of signal, so I deemed the risk acceptable.


    As I was trying to think of possible risks the rib cage gave a last spark and the magic linked to it started to fade, allowing Sigmir to quickly chop through the physical material, laying open the flesh below. All three of them started to carve, a red light now even visible to normal sight, without Lenore¡¯s vision and moments later, I was driven back by a burst of Fire Astral Power.


    I retreated even further, until I no longer took damage from the sheer presence and Lenore left her Hallow after a short consultation, accepting that Kelgorn would see her in return for getting a good look at the crystal they had found.


    Lenore shared her sight with me, now looking through her own eyes, and there were sigils carved into the red, ruby-like gem, just like those in the ribs. The magic was complex, not as blindingly complex as the single glance I had gotten of the Grandmother¡¯s magic grove or the magic roadway but far, far beyond anything I could hope to understand.


    Trying to understand what it was supposed to do or how it was supposed to work was impossible, neither Lenore or I had even the slightest idea where to start. Even identifying the different types of magic involved was complicated, Fire was obvious, it served as base, quite possibly linked to the sun. But there was also a different undertone, vaguely reminding me of Blood but not as fluid, more rigid. Lenore thought it might be some sort of Bone-magic. Another thing mixed in was, according to Lenore, similar to the Death-Magic she innately used, with me guessing that it might be a derivative of Necromancy.


    All in all, it scared the hell out of me.


    ¡°Do you think some insane mage crafted that crystal to forcibly elevate the bear above the first Divide?¡± I asked Lenore, trying to keep the terror at bay as my mind followed a logical path that I really disliked.


    ¡°I¡­ don¡¯t know. It could be and fits what we have seen.¡± Lenore answered, hesitatingly.


    ¡°Most animals here have a frost-affinity, right? Do you think it was some sort of experiment to bestow fire-affinity on something with frost-affinity?¡± I continued and Lenore followed my train of thought.


    She agreed with me about getting the hell out of the area - maybe even discarding the quests all together, not going back to Kolyug. After all, if it was some sort of experiment to combine fire and frost, frost-magic was carved into my very soul, I already had a magic core within me, right where the bear had its core installed, only that mine was natural. Wouldn¡¯t that make me an even better test-subject? Maybe, but no matter how you sliced it, having a guinea-pig that came back after dying was useful. I had no desire to be that guinea-pig.


    ¡°Do you think Kelgorn is in on it?¡± I asked Lenore, panic slowly rising within me. It was paranoid, but what if Kelgorn was a spy, sent to get an assessment of the experiment?


    ¡°No, I don¡¯t think so.¡± Lenore kept calm, even as I wondered if she would lend me her power to make sure he wouldn¡¯t betray us. It wouldn¡¯t be too hard, we had access to his mind, a single blast of Lenore¡¯s Death Magic and the problem would be solved.


    Lenore spoke, her voice eerily similar to mine but not quite.


    ¡°Sigmir, gather your sweetheart. She¡¯s having a minor meltdown. Adra, grab that thing if you can and then we should get away from here, the magically charged atmosphere is getting to her.¡±


    Moments later, as I was considering if I could gather enough magic on my own, by holding onto what I was regenerating, Sigmir gathered me in her arms and gave me a strong kiss, breaking off my subconscious mutterings and bringing me back to the present.


    ¡°Thanks, love. Let¡¯s get away from here, fast. Back to Kolyug, but carefully.¡±

 Chapter 176

    We were fleeing. Not that the others would have called it that, but to me, it was flight, plain and simple. After telling Sigmir that we needed to get away, she had, once again, simply picked me up, called out to the others and started running. I felt her use her own abilities to boost herself, moving fast enough to outrun most horses. In my weakened and drained state, I wouldn¡¯t have been able to keep up, not even the five minutes she kept that pace before slowing down for the others. They could reach such a speed but only hold it for a short time, unlike Sigmir, who was able to run like the wind for hours on end. Or, maybe saying she was running like an avalanche was more fitting.


    But even after slowing down for the others, the pace she set was murderous, long strides beating the ground into submission as she followed after Ylva, who was scouting ahead. Knowing that I would slow down the group, I was stewing in my powerlessness, angry at the world in general, lacking a specific target for my displeasure. The bear - who had caused the fire that burned my hair - was gone, dying in horrible pain due to the experiment of a magician I could only call insanely brilliant and brilliantly insane. I had no doubt that he, or she, was crossing the fine line between genius and madness on a regular basis, most likely multiple times a day.


    I wanted to hate that magician for his experiment and the assumption that he was more powerful than me, by a long shot, which was the reason for our flight. If only I were stronger; strong enough to deal with the brilliant mind behind the enchantment on the fiery gem Adra had harvested from the bear¡¯s corpse. Recalling the magic she had seen, I tried to find out more, to gleam some understanding. It was beyond me, but not as far beyond me as the ancient roadways or the enchantments the Grandmother had in her house. With those, I had felt like a child that knew how to do basic maths, trying to understand some strange, esoteric quantum theory.


    With the enchantment on the gem, the notation was different from what I was used to and the resulting streams of magic were complex but not totally incomprehensible. It was a shame, really, that I was unable to get close to the gem, the Everburning Ember, as Lenore¡¯s Identify had called it, without being in pain and taking damage, just from the disgusting Fire Astral Power that it radiated. Maybe, once I had my magic back and was able to use it to shield myself, but for now, that gem was poison to me.


    ¡°We should take Kelgorn out, if he works for the bandits or that spellcaster and attacks us, or even gives away information about my status, we would be destroyed.¡± I mentally pestered Lenore, not for the first time, to help me use the backdoor into Kelgorn¡¯s mind and eliminate the threat. It irked me, being forced to beg for power from my magical companion, but my own Astral Power Storage was fully depleted, everything had flown into fueling the growth of my hair, and even what I regenerated was directly funneled there. I was able, with great mental difficulty, to grasp drops of Astral Power and hold onto them but so far, every time before I had enough to do anything with it, my concentration had wavered for a moment and the power had been siphoned off.


    ¡°You shouldn¡¯t directly resort to violence, just because you are scared. He hasn¡¯t done anything suspicious, and both of us have watched him, what would the others think if you suddenly start murdering party-members?¡± Lenore softly rebuked me, trying to be the voice of reason. But there was an unpleasant feeling between my shoulderblades, making me wary of him.


    After two hours of running, Sigmir slowed down and the others caught up, breathing hard and winded.


    ¡°What¡¯s going on?¡± Adra asked, a sentiment mirrored on Rai and Kelgorn¡¯s face.


    ¡°That gem you put in your back, think for a moment, what does it mean?¡± I asked, freeing myself from Sigmir¡¯s embrace.


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    Adra frowned for a moment, in incomprehension.


    ¡°It was placed there, obviously.¡± she stated, seeing the obvious but not thinking it through to the end.


    ¡°Yes, almost certainly by another spellcaster. A spellcaster with enough power and knowledge to create the thing, subdue the bear without killing it and implanting the crystal in such a way that it strengthened the bear, maybe even made it cross the first divide. Take all that together and you have a spellcaster with a lot more power and curiosity than ethics, and yes, I know that it¡¯s a little bit ironic coming from me, but I have no desire to meet such a spellcaster without either a dire need or a safety net in place. We have neither, so I wanted to get away from the experiment as soon as possible.¡± I explained, keeping an eye on Kelgorn if he reacted in any way to my description. I was reaching a little but I could easily imagine that the bandits in the area worked for a spellcaster, possibly providing muscle in exchange for the odd spell or two. It would explain a few things, like how a group of bandits had managed to take down a complete caravan and why their raids had little pattern, what if they were just out to acquire human, or rather sapient, resources for the experiments. I was not sure what was less likely, two factions that I would call evil in the same area or one faction, led by a spellcaster. I was planning to explain my reasoning to Lagor, the Guild-master/clerk in Kolyug, right after giving him the gem, collect the reward and get the hell out of the area.


    In any way, it might just be a bit of paranoia that made me suspect Kelgorn, but, as the saying went, just because you''re paranoid doesn¡¯t meant that they aren''t out to get you.


    ¡°Now, that¡¯s a pleasant idea, some mage with even less morals than you and more power. Tegi, all over again, only this time without being seriously weakened.¡± Adra groaned, undoubtedly remembering her rather precarious situation when we had first met. ¡°You should really take those examples to heart, reckless magic experimentation will come back to bite you.¡± she continued.


    I kept quiet with my take on that, thinking it was the opposite. If you wanted power as a spellcaster, you needed to experiment. Of the truly powerful spellcasters I had met, all were either monsters, like Tegi and the unnamed mage that had conducted the experiment on the bear, or were forced to live under the protection of the Grandmother, basically staying in exile for one reason or the other.


    What I was taking from that was, grab as much power as possible, while moving around and avoiding to draw too much attention to you, too soon. It wasn¡¯t as if there was a truly free flow of information; the Naga had some kind of information exchange through their ocean-magic, of that I was aware, but I doubted that they used it for anything trivial, like the odd village vanishing or some strange monster appearing. That meant, as long as one didn¡¯t make extremely stupid mistakes, or worse, talk about the research one was undertaking, there shouldn¡¯t be anyone able to realise what was happening, even if the odd atrocity occurred.


    ¡°Possible.¡± I allowed Adra¡¯s warning, in order to hide my own thoughts on the matter. ¡°We should return to Kolyug as soon as possible, to report the demise of the bear and our discovery. It should net us some kind of bonus, don¡¯t you think?¡± I asked, trying not to sound too mercenary.


    ¡°Yes, that would probably be for the best. I can¡¯t believe that anyone would do something that insane.¡± Kelgorn agreed with me, making me question if I my idea was a good one. Was there an ambush prepared between us and Kolyug? But in our state, an ambush was hardly necessary, even if he didn¡¯t know about my current magical impotence, it should be relatively easy to get enough forces into position to assure success.


    I also noticed that he was eyeing me a little suspiciously, as if he was suspecting that I was wary of him, it made me itch to take him down, but before I could even ask Lenore, she refused.


    ¡°We should make camp, I don¡¯t know about you, but I¡¯m tired. Fighting the bear has been exhausting, especially whenever it shot those flames at us.¡± Adra suggested, after stifling a yawn.


    I looked at the others and saw that all of them seemed more or less sleeping on their feet, so I just nodded, while Sigmir agreed verbally. The only wrinkle was that I rejected making a fire, fearing that it might lead enemies to us and that the presence of the enchanted gem in Adra¡¯s bag was slowly leaking out, making me uncomfortable the longer we stayed in an area. That led to splitting up, with Sigmir and me sleeping a distance away from the others. I preferred it that way, not just because of the gem but because I was feeling uneasy in the presence of the others. I was not sure why but once I was back, safely encircled in Sigmir¡¯s arms, I started to feel better and more relaxed, until sleep took me.

 Chapter 177

    When I woke up the next morning and let my hand roam over my head, I noticed that I had started to regrow my hair, maybe a centimeter or two, over the night. My first reaction was gleeful surprise, knowing that in the real world, the same length would have taken a few weeks, maybe even a month. But then I considered what it meant for my magic, if I assumed that I would be unable to keep magic in my system until my hair was back at full length, that glee vanished as fast as it had appeared. I would be down for two weeks or thereabout, limited to using my blades and instinct. Just at a guess, I would be weaker than Rai, simply due to being unused to not having magic in my fighting.


    Wanting to be positive, I decided to wake Sigmir up by kissing her. Doing so banished all negative thoughts about my magical impotence and made the day look brighter by the second. Sadly, we could not stay on our furs and make out, I heard Adra call us over for breakfast. A few, maybe a few more, kisses later, we both stood and I pulled my hood back down, hiding my lack of hair. Lenore made a couple joking comments about my vanity but it wasn¡¯t vanity that drove me, it was vigilance. If anyone had noticed the fact that my hair was magical, which wouldn¡¯t be too hard, after all few people had softly glowing hair, it would be easy to draw the conclusion that I was weakened without hair. And that was without taking into account the stories about witches losing their magic when their hair was cut off, which would make that conclusion even more obvious. No, for now, I needed to hide my short hair.


    Sigmir and I both ambled over to the others, with me grimacing a little when I noticed the influence the gem was still spreading. I wondered why the chunks of Eternal Ice were not acting in such a manner. My guesses were that either, they were and everyone was just too accustomed to the influence of Ice due to our surroundings, or that I was just too sensitive to Fire Astral Power, due to my racial weakness and probably the weakness due to the infusion of Ice Astral Power into my soul. The other possibility was that the enchantment on the gem was causing it to spread its power into its surroundings, trying to keep the bear¡¯s magic fueled, only that the bear was gone. Or it could be something else entirely, if there was one thing I had learned about magic, it was that magic could always surprise you.


    We had breakfast, not really talking much, before packing our things and moving on. Once again, Adra and Kelgorn went ahead, scouting, while Rai stayed back a bit.


    I noticed him scowling when we split, and asked him about it, curious about his displeasure. The fact that he blushed a little and denied that he was any such thing only stoked my curiosity, while Lenore was equally curious. He decided that he would be the rearguard, together with Ylva, so that Sigmir and I were in the middle. I didn¡¯t mind, I knew that I was greatly weakened so a secure position was appreciated.


    Lenore and I discussed whether it was smart to have her fly patrol, after all, if she was in her Hallow, she was able to pass her Astral Power into me, allowing me to cast a spell or two, despite the draining effect my regrowing hair was exhibiting. On the other hand, if she was up there, it would be far harder for anyone to sneak up on us or surprise us in an ambush, so it was a wash. In the end, we decided to have her fly, if she spotted anything, she could return and still add her power.


    ¡°I think I know what¡¯s wrong with Rai.¡± Sigmir told me, a few minutes after we had started out.


    ¡°Really? Please, tell me, love. He¡¯s my disciple after all, if he has trouble, I should know about it and offer help.¡± I answered.


    Sigmir laughed a little about my eager tone, before continuing.


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    ¡°Adra paid a lot of attention to Kelgorn, even now he¡¯s the one in front with her. I think Rai is jealous but doesn¡¯t want to admit it.¡± she grinned. I thought about it for a moment, and frowned.


    ¡°But, whenever she pulled him into a hug, to keep warm, he squirmed and struggled. And now you say he loves her?¡± I asked, confused.


    ¡°Love? That I don¡¯t know. But attraction, lust, possessiveness? Those are much easier to see.¡±


    ¡°So, you mean he¡¯s attracted to her but his attraction embarrasses him?¡± I asked, trying to understand. When I had felt attracted to Sigmir, I had acted upon it. She had reciprocated and that was it, why was there a need for embarrassment?


    ¡°Mhm. When we first met, your forwardness was a little embarrassing to me. But we were all alone, in your cave and I felt alone in the world. So, I simply enjoyed the closeness, the feeling of peace when you are with me.¡±


    ¡°I¡¯m glad you did. I¡¯m not sure how I would have acted if you¡¯d rejected me. When I saw you, I never wanted anyone or anything like that, never in my life.¡± I confessed, remembering our first meeting. The strange sensation of needing to protect her. The feeling of deja-vu, of knowing her. And the feeling of belonging, that I desperately wanted to hold onto.


    Grabbing her hand and squeezing a little, I asked. ¡°So, what do we do about Rai?¡±


    ¡°Nothing. You won¡¯t allow Kelgorn to travel with us, will you? That means the problem will solve itself. As soon as we are in Kolyug, we¡¯ll tell the Guildmaster about the bear, give him the gem, get our rewards and get back onto the road. The agitation radiating from you makes me twitchy, so I can guess how uncomfortable you are. Once we are on the road, Kelgorn will be out of the picture and what happens, happens. I¡¯d avoid trying to meddle with their relationship, I doubt that either of us have the experience to get the results we want.¡±


    I thought about Sigmir¡¯s explanation for a moment and had to agree. If I tried to meddle in their relationship, it would very likely backfire. I might ask Adra for some help, when it came to demonstrating holds and grapples, so that I would be able to demonstrate on Sigmir and Rai copy my actions on Adra, but that would have to wait a little longer. I had no desire to show Kelgorn more than I needed to.


    For the next two days, we continued on our path, travelling towards Kolyug as fast as we could. Well, almost. Adra and Sigmir convinced me to take the time and hunt down what was missing for the normal hunting-quests, gaining a few more EXP in the process. I hadn¡¯t checked mine since killing the bear, so I was happily surprised when I got the message that I had levelled to fifty-eight. I had gained a few skill-points during our hunt, but the level-up was what really made me happy.


    What made me less happy was that, on the second evening after we had killed the bear, I had taken the plunge and maneuvered Adra away from camp, allowing me to talk to her about Kelgorn. Not about her closeness to him, but about my suspicions. That I didn¡¯t trust him and needed her to be vigilant, so he couldn¡¯t guide us into a trap. I didn¡¯t tell her about the backdoor I had placed into his mind, that would likely be a step too far, in her opinion.


    Sadly, the talk went downhill from there, she accused me of being paranoid and that he had only been friendly and helpful towards us, while I had treated him with suspicion. She even mentioned that he had talked to her about my hostile attitude, asking if it was something he had done or if I just hated males in general. When I frowned at that, she explained that he had asked the question because of the relationship between Sigmir and me, that such an unnatural relationship would only happen if both females hate males.


    Once again, he only survived because of my magical impotence, or else I would have ripped his mind apart for that. Who was he to question our relationship? I was about to go after him with knives drawn, but Adra held me back and called Sigmir in, to distract me.


    Her distraction worked, I calmed down when she held me in her arms. And my mind perked up when she explained to me that it didn¡¯t matter what some idiot thought; there were only two people who had to enjoy and accept our relationship and that were the two of us. Her words and kisses helped but afterwards, I kept an even closer eye on him, almost hoping that he would betray us, just so I would be able to rip his mind apart.


    Just thinking about it made me smile with wicked glee.

 Chapter 178

    It was late morning, we had been travelling for maybe two hours after breakfast and according to our plans, we should reach Kolyug some time in the late afternoon, unless something unexpected happened. Over the few days it had been since we fought the infernal bear, my hair had grown quite a bit, about eight centimeters. I had noticed that it was growing faster during the night, when Lenore was staying in her Hallow, but that was to be expected- After all, one part of our bond increased the amount of Astral Power I regenerated while she was there, in effect funnelling roughly half her regeneration to me, when she was at full power.


    Sigmir and I were in the middle of our formation, with Ylva and Rai in the rear and, once again, Adra and Kelgorn out front, scouting ahead. Thanks to our position and the fact that Lenore was circling high above, keeping an eye on things, Sigmir and I were relaxed, mostly treating it like a hike through snowy forest, without being overly vigilant. It was enjoyable, walking hand in hand, simply being with the other. Sigmir¡¯s presence always calmed me, she was my rock, the solid influence that I knew would keep me grounded.


    Suddenly, I felt Lenore getting agitated and, when I looked up, saw her rapidly descending, coming in from the front, far faster than normal. Holding my arm out, I helped her land and absorb some of the momentum she still had, while her mind was flooding mine with images of what she had seen.


    In front of us, about half a kilometer away, was a camp, not particularly large, but right in our way. The images Lenore was showing me, were showing a mixed back of trolls and orcs, all armed and armoured. Two were carrying spears, like Kelgorn, another had a bow, there was an axe and I thought one had a sword or saber, some bladed instrument, anyway. With my magic, I would have welcomed the challenge, but without it, I didn¡¯t like the odds, not at all.


    Internally, alarm bells were ringing up a storm, I had been waiting for an ambush ever since we started out and now, it seemed that the ambush was in front of us. A small group, to take our attention while other groups encircled us? That was plausible. Another possibility flashed into my mind, as I thought about it. What if the bandits out here had no long-distance communication? If Kelgorn was a plant for them, I thought I would have noticed him using some sort of magical radio. The easiest way around that would be to have him guide us into a semi-permanent encampment where we could be dealt with.


    I quickly relayed what Lenore had seen to Sigmir, who looked rather grim. We had talked about such a scenario, so it wasn¡¯t too big of a surprise to her.


    ¡°I¡¯ll call Rai.¡± she said, likely using her connection with Ylva to bring him to us.


    As we watied, Lenore hopped over to my shoulder and went into her Hallow, just in case she needed to give me access to her magic.


    Moments later, Rai and Ylva walked up, Rai looking confused, Ylva grim.


    ¡°There¡¯s a camp directly in front of us. I suspected that Kelgorn might work for the bandits we are hunting out here, making sure that we wouldn¡¯t find them, unless they wanted us to find them.¡± I curtly explained, drawing a sharp gasp from Rai. It seemed as if he instantly understood the problem.


    ¡°I will strike at him with magic but I can¡¯t be sure that it will kill him. It will stun him, of that I¡¯m sure. I need you to make sure that he¡¯s dead afterwards. He can¡¯t see you approach or he might guess that something is up and call his allies.¡± I told Rai, who nodded. He looked a little conflicted but I was quite sure that he wouldn¡¯t disappoint me.


    We sped up, closing the distance between us and our scouts, until I thought that I would be able to strike at Kolyug. Nodding to Rai, I sent him on his way, watching him use his own, physical stealth-skill with the cloak of shadows I had taught him. He wasn¡¯t quite invisible but as good as, unless one saw him vanish or he was in direct sunlight, I wouldn¡¯t be able to see him. But his cloaking, at least what he was using right now, was unable to help him against Lenore¡¯s sight, so I was easily able to follow his progress.


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    Kelgorn was up front, leading us into the trap, with Adra covering him, unaware of his duplicity. There was a cold hatred within me, the bastard was betraying us and he would pay for it. Just as Rai had almost caught up to Adra, my mind joined with Lenore, using my skill as a guiding force but her Astral Power as fuel. It felt incredibly intimate, our minds mingling but without my own power, it was the only way to use my mind magic.


    The backdoor into his mind was still there and I used it to surge into his mind, delivering a punishing blow. I wasn¡¯t quite sure how the magic worked, due to the fact that it was a combined casting but I think that we froze his mind for some time. Maybe forever. Not that it mattered, once he stumbled from the mental blow, Rai was attacking, using his momentum to drive one blade into his kidney, the other hand free only to shove a load of snow into his mouth. That way, there was no sound, just in case he tried to scream as most beings do when in sudden pain.


    Sigmir and I started to run, while Adra was stunned in surprise, caught flat-footed by the sudden, vicious attack by a party-member on another party-member. Before we managed to cross the distance, Rai had stabbed Kelgorn again, this time in the heart-area and, for good measure, cut his throat, using the movements I had shown him. Despite the situation, I was proud of my disciple, he had acted exactly as ordered, not asked pointless questions in a crisis and solved the problem in a terminal fashion.


    <table><tbody><tr><td>Winter Troll died</td></tr><tr><td>You gain 7000 EXP.</td></tr><tr><td> For killing an opponent without a Traveller in your party, you gain Bonus EXP</td></tr></tbody></table>


    <table><tbody><tr><td>Skill increased</td></tr><tr><td>You increased your skill: Mind Magic [16/60]</td></tr></tbody></table>


    Adra was just about to pierce the situation together, overcoming her surprise, when Sigmir and I reached her.


    ¡°Quiet!¡± I hissed, the moment I was close enough. She must have heard our approach and frowned.


    ¡°There¡¯s an ambush, right ahead. And he,¡± I pointed to the cooling corpse of Kelgorn, ¡°was leading us right towards it.¡± I explained, keeping my voice silent.


    ¡°Lenore, can you take flight again? We need to get away from here, without being seen.¡± I mentally told her and she instantly left her Hallow, feeling my agitation.


    Adra frowned, apparently not sure what to say, but a moment later, she nodded.


    ¡°Where to? Lenore warned you, right?¡± she asked, her voice slightly shaky but composed.


    I waited for a moment, while Lenore was flying higher. Once she was high enough to give her a good overview, she warned me that the camp was starting to move and that there was more movement, hidden by the bushes, roughly to our right. Gritting my teeth, I told Adra that and she quickly chanted a spell to hide our tracks before we started to move, to the left of our original route. We hadn¡¯t even the time to search Kelgorn¡¯s body, maybe get more hints to the bandits operation but I doubted that a competent spy would have any incriminating information on him.


    We didn¡¯t bother with stretching out the group into scout, middle-group and rearguard, we simply relied on Lenore¡¯s airborne scouting and moved as fast as we could, away from the ambush and Kelgorn¡¯s cooling corpse. Adra¡¯s spell prevented easily followed footsteps, but it was no perfect solution, a competent tracker could follow the traces left behind but it might slow down pursuit. I internally cursed the fact that my magic was currently unavailable, but cursing reality wouldn¡¯t solve our problem. Running might, so I did just that.


    We headed into the direction Lenore told me, running for maybe twenty minutes, until she was sure that there was no pursuit. I told the others to slow down and asked Adra to lead us back towards Kolyug. She nodded but demanded an explanation, which I was happy to give.


    ¡°I told you that I suspected Kelgorn. What better way to prevent trouble than to have a few people in the city, sounding out those who might go after them, inserting himself into such groups and making sure that they vanished. As long as there was no record of him going with us, he could do that again and again, with no one the wiser.¡± I started and Rai gave off a disgusted sound.


    ¡°Just now, he was leading us right towards a group, waiting for us with weapons ready. The group Lenore saw could have killed us. We might have been able to take down a few of them, but not all. Not in my current condition.¡± I continued, grumbling the last bit.


    That caused Adra and Rai to frown, I had not told them about my little problem and was not too hot to do so, it had just slipped out.


    But it had, so I pulled back my hood, showing them my short, untidy hair.


    ¡°When we fought the stupid bear, I had an accident. You noticed that my hair is not quite normal, right? I store part of my Astral Power in it, so right now, I¡¯m weakened.¡± I explained, when they were both looking confused why short hair was such a disadvantage.


    They both nodded and it seemed that for now, Adra was accepting my actions. Maybe that would change once she had time to think but hopefully not.


    But no matter what, we continued on our way to Kolyug.

 Chapter 179

    We managed to get back to Kolyug in the early evening, just as dusk was settling in. During the day, I had given a rough explanation of my weakness but I didn¡¯t go into detail. Adra was still sceptical about my actions, but seemed to have decided that I was simply cautious, which was a good trait, if you wanted to survive. Rai on the other hand seemed a lot less conflicted, to him, he had obeyed his teacher and that was simply what a disciple had to do. Personally, I think that his dislike of Kelgorn helped a great deal but it didn¡¯t matter. We had escaped the ambush and were now approaching the gates of Kolyug, so bandits were no longer a problem.


    We entered the city together, even as I had to endure the discomfort I got from being too close to the Eternal Ember in Adra¡¯s pack when I felt another problem. Previously, I had noticed the strongly Earth-aligned forces in Kolyug, remnants of its creation, but now, it felt oppressive, as if there was a mountain, pressing down on me. Not painful, like the fiery aura of the Eternal Ember, but unpleasant nonetheless.


    Lenore and I discussed it while walking towards the guild and came to the conclusion that the problem was with my own power or lack there off. Generally, There was power within me, allowing me to resist external pressure, even if it was just an unconcious effect. But now, I was empty, literally draining myself as fast as I regenerated power, robbing me of that resistance. With a little experimentation, I noticed that my senses seemed to be a little sharper when it came to the detection of magical anomalies but I doubted that it was a discovery I would ever willingly use. Fully draining myself of magic, to get a barely perceivable boost to my sensory capabilities seemed to be a bad idea. But it would be worthwhile to research if I might be able to simulate my current state, compressing my power into my core to allow better sensing outwards, or something along those lines.


    At the guild, we quickly got to talk to Lagor and I let Adra do the talking, once again. I had to suppress a smirk when she started with the smaller tasks, hunting game and such, turning in wolf-fangs, the tusks of a few wild boars and even the long, sharp claws of a wolverine, completing the quests we had been given. When the EXP from the quests were enough to bring me another level-up, I truly started smiling.


    But when she pulled out the bear¡¯s head and the Eternal Ember, roughly explaining what had happened, I was serious again. Laughing while Lagor¡¯s complexion went from slate-grey to chalk-white would be a little inappropriate.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Quest Completed!</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You completed the Quest: Ursine Troubles</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You gained: 50 000 EXP


    You gained: 10 Gold Coins</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    Seeing the reward, I really had to fight to keep my expression under control, the other quests hadn¡¯t given more than fifty silver, all together. But then, finding and fighting the bear had been a lot more trouble.


    ¡°You carry omnious news. Would you be willing to join me, telling the captain of the guard about your experience?¡± he asked, looking rather spooked. Part of me wanted to refuse, fearing that we would be roped into the events and I had absolutely no desire to go against the magician who had created the enchantment on the Eternal Ember. Adra gave me a short look, to which I nodded, pushing down my objections. We would leave the next day, no matter if they tried to force us into going after the magician, It might damage our standing with the guild, but I doubted it, the guild wouldn¡¯t work if every local power could use it to force adventurers into suicide missions. No, the worst that could happen on rejection would be trouble with the local forces, so we would have to play it by ear.


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    She agreed to talk with the guards the next morning, which gave us a follow-up quest.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="2">Quest Alert!</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="2">Bringer of Grim News - Kolyug</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="1">Quest Difficulty</td>


    <td colspan="1">Chain-Hard</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="2">Landor wants you to relate your experiences to the Captain of the Guard</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="1">Quest Reward</td>


    <td colspan="1">Increased Reputation with Kolyug</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    ¡°We will take residence in your wife¡¯s inn again. Do you want to meet us here or there?¡± Adra asked.


    ¡°I will ask her to wake you early, so we can visit the captain first thing in the morning. I will send him a message today but I doubt that he feels we have to have our talk tonight. Go, rest up.¡± Landor told us.


    ¡°Are there any quests that would send us further south?¡± I asked, making my intention to leave as early as possible clear. Sadly, he just shook his head, explaining that the only quests he had were important courier-quests, which we weren¡¯t eligible for, as they were guild-bonded. We had gained some trust, but not enough to trust us with important quests, it seemed.


    I just shrugged and left, stepping into the depressing greyness. Maybe that was why the other magician was working in the area, trying to colour Kolyug. A worthwhile goal, if there ever was one.


    The way over to the inn was short as ever and I used it to softly tell the others not to mention Kelgorn, just in case there were others working for the bandits in town. Or, something I didn¡¯t say, just in case I had been wrong and ordered an innocent man killed. But, when it came to our survival, I was willing to slay ten innocent men, in order to catch one traitor. I didn¡¯t presume innocence or require evidence. I knew internally that it might make me a bad person, but if it did, it also made me something else. A surviving person.


    As we entered into Drega¡¯s inn, I shook off those thoughts, letting the soothing atmosphere envelop me. Drega looked happy to have us back but frowned a little when looking at me. I had no doubt that a former Adventurer of her power and prowess was feeling that something was wrong with me, maybe even be able to pinpoint what the problem was.


    ¡°Greetings, do you have rooms for us?¡± Adra asked, acting as the face of our party, as usual. She would have to do so the next day as well, not just because of the fact that I could hardly touch the Eternal Ember but also because I dreaded what would happen if my Outsider-Trait chose to act up. I had no idea if there was a trigger to it or if some cultures were especially susceptible to it but getting blamed for the bandit-problem would be bad.


    ¡°Yes, of course. Two rooms again?¡± Drega asked, giving Adra a smile.


    ¡°Yes, please. Morgana, Sigmir, you enjoyed the bath last time, want to go again?¡± Adra asked with a smirk. Luckily, most of my face was hidden by my hood, so my blush was mostly invisible, while Sigmir gave a happy nod.


    Soon after, Sigmir and I were in the bath, and, due to my condition, Sigmir was using her power to warm the water. When it started to steam, I had a moment of dilemma, either I spoke up and spoil Sigmir¡¯s hot bath, or I would boil. Gritting my teeth, I gave a careful test with a single finger and the problem solved itself when I was unable to suppress the pained squeak which Sigmir noticed.


    Her reaction surprised me quite a bit, she instantly saw the problem and my reddening finger and the water-flow instantly changed, with her power actually working on cooling the water down. But when she grabbed my finger and started to gently sucking on it, all thoughts of hot water fled and I could only think of the warm wetness around my finger.


    It turned out, the water-temperature was not crucial for a hot bath, we managed to have that, all in water most people would call frigid. Luckily, Sigmir had gotten quite the bonus to Frost-Resistance when Ylva crossed the first divide, making her only slightly less hardy than myself. Maybe, we would find a nice stream on our continued travels, it seemed that, as long as the water was actually flowing, we could have a comfortable bath.


    In an almost perfect reenactment of our last visit, we came out of the bath and were promptly teased by Adra, only that there was no new guy sitting at her table. Hopefully, nobody outside the party noticed so we wouldn¡¯t have to lie about Kelgorn. I didn¡¯t want to draw attention to us, or our findings, at least not before we had left Kolyug behind us. Once that had happened, I hardly cared what they knew.

 Chapter 180

    During the evening all of us kept relatively quiet, occupied with our own thoughts. What I did, however, was asking Drega for the blessing she had used the last time, which she spoke over me, increasing my Astral Power regeneration by quite a bit. In exchange, I answered her question about my condition, explaining that my hair stored power, that it had been burned in a fight and was now draining a massive amount of power while regrowing.


    After our talk, I wondered why I had volunteered that much, considering my usually more secretive ways, but somehow, I was feeling comfortable with trusting her. And she had helped me decreasing the time to regrow my hair by quite a bit.


    When it came to drinks, I held back, getting only slightly tipsy from the delicious mead Drega served. Soon, I was cuddled into Sigmir¡¯s embrace, floating on a fluffy cloud of happiness, until we retired to our room, where we did unspeakable things to another. Luckily, I was not too drunk to enjoy them before we fell asleep.


    Morning came far too soon, bringing with it a knock on our door and a light hangover. We dressed and went to have breakfast, well, Sigmir walked, I staggered a little, but once I had drained a large pitcher of water, my headache subsided without needing any magical healing.


    Drega told us that Lagor had already gone over to the Guild, as he needed to do some work before heading over to the Castle, so we should go there, to get him.


    We left the inn and I gestured for Adra to go over into the guild, Rai following her, while Sigmir and I waited outside.


    The peaceful atmosphere of Kolyug was suddenly shattered when I heard rapid footsteps approach, causing both Sigmir and me to jump aside, only for me to notice an arrow coming towards me. Time slowed as my body tried to limit the damage, but even with everything I tried, I got hit in the shoulder, near the collarbone.


    My mind, on the other hand, took the time to take in the situation, especially the grey-skinned form charging towards me, axe raised high. Further back, was a beastman moving towards us and, even further back, another form, with a raised bow.


    I landed, a bit off-balance due to the hit I had taken, but two quick steps allowed me to catch my balance, while my mind was racing. I knew the three attackers, I had killed them before, multiple times. I instinctively wanted to use Mind Magic once again to strike down the three stooges, but there was no Astral Power in my body, but even as I failed to strike back, I noticed magic coageling around us, and not just any magic, the magic woven into Kolyug itself was reacting to something. Certainly not to me.


    ¡°Don¡¯t!¡± I called out to Sigmir, who had been about to attack, trying to defend me, but the feeling the magic around us gave me told me that it would be a bad idea. The first stooge, on the other hand, didn¡¯t hesitate, using his axe to strike at me, managing a glancing blow, to my arm. It would leave a bruise.


    His canine partner behind him changed targets, going after Sigmir, throwing a knife at her, but before I was able to see if the attack had worked, the world around us changed.


    I felt the magic reach some sort of threshold and grey chains, made from the very same rock that the city was made off, shot from the roads and buildings around us, wrapping all three stooges up, binding them nice and tight, with manacles around their hands, feelts, shoulders, hips and even neck. The worst they could do in their state was cuss at us. Which they did, but I was more worried about the bleeding wound I had gotten from the arrow and just what had happened.


    I noticed Sigmir knocking on the inn-door, likely getting Drega and heard the rhythmic clapping of footsteps approaching in cadence. A group of four guards, all large, grey trolls, clad in chain-mail and armed with halberds, came jogging towards us. I noticed the symbol I had seen on the gate-guards on those trolls as well. That, and the uniformity of their gear, told me that they were the local guard.


    I thought about what to say, if volunteering anything would be prudent, when Drega left her inn, tutting in annoyance when she noticed my injured form. The three stooges were still spewing abuse, when the guard stopped between us. Drega ignored all of them, simply walking to me, placing one hand on the arrow-shaft, still sticking out of me, the other on my chest. She started speaking, her voice loud and clear, but, even with Lenore¡¯s ability, I was unable to make sense of the words she was using. I heard the name Frigg, spoken with love and adulation, as a golden glow enveloped first Drega¡¯s head, then flowing down her arm and covering my chest.


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    Before I could make head or tails of what I was seeing, Drega simply pulled the arrow from me, without any obvious problems or pain for me, not even leaving a wound behind. Even the bruise on my arm, from the glancing attack, was gone. When my eyes focused on the arrow, anger pooled within me, it was an barbed arrowhead, designed to cause grievous wounds when removed without proper care.


    I felt myself start to shake, a quick glance into the hud telling me that my stamina had greatly been depleted, likely by the activation of Bullet Time without any Astral Power. Or maybe, it was simply a normal adrenaline reaction, made worse by the fact that my body was depleted of Astral Power. I simply didn¡¯t know. Drega helped me sit down, right there in the streets, while Ylva left her Hallow, lying behind me and around me, like a large, fuzzy cushion.


    I simply sat there, letting my mind and body catch up with each other and calm down, while I watched the events unfold. After I had been treated, Sigmir and Drega went to the guard who stood back, while the other three were doing something with the three stooges. I couldn¡¯t quite hear what they were saying but Sigmir looked rather angry and Drega didn¡¯t look happy at all. Maybe it had something to do with the fact that we had been attacked right in front of her doorstep, after she had given us shelter for the night.


    The situation was not improved when Lagor, Adra and Rai came from the Guild, taking in the sight before them before joining Sigmir and Drega. I heard snippets from them, especially Lagor, who wanted the mess cleaned up as fast as possible, because we had an appointment with the Captain of the Guard. The look on the guard¡¯s face was surprisingly calm for being beset by five more or less angry adventurers, even if two of them only were former.


    By now, the other three guards had somehow changed the bindings around the three stooges so that their arms were shackled behind their backs and they couldn¡¯t have run, even if they wanted to. I glimpsed through Lenore¡¯s sight but the magic was too complex for a casual glance, the only thing I could understand was that the bindings were now controlled by the guards, or rather, linked to something they were carrying.


    Deciding that I should add my two cents, I pushed myself up and walked over to the others, with Ylva at my side. The guard looked me over for a moment, while the three stooges started to spew abuse again, calling me a coward and all sorts of things. I ignored them as best as I could, focusing on the guard.


    ¡°Greetings, could you tell me what happened here?¡± he asked, giving a short glare at the others in my party, when they wanted to speak up. I gently placed a hand on Sigmir¡¯s arm, to quiet her agitation.


    ¡°Greetings. Of course. We have spent the night in Drega¡¯s tavern, on recommendation from Lagor. He needed us to report to the Captain of the Guard this morning, something we have encountered in the wild. While two of us went to get him, we waited in front of the door, minding our own business, when we were attacked by those three.¡± I gestured to the stooges.


    ¡°We didn¡¯t fight back, only taking evasive action, dealing with such miscreants would infringe on your duties, after all. Before we suffered more than superficial damage, the enchantment, I assume it is part of the city-wide magic?¡± I shook my head for a moment, as if to wipe away my thoughts about the powerful enchantments woven into the stones of Kolyug. ¡°Anyway, they were bound by the magic and I was healed by Drega.¡±  I finished my statement, causing the guard to nod.


    There was some more abuse from the stooges, accusing me of attacking them first, claiming that they only wanted to pay me back.


    The guard looked at me and I explained that they had tried to attack us before, in another town. He simply told the stooges that he didn¡¯t care, well, he used more colourful language, what happened outside of Kolyug. If we wanted to fight, we could do so outside of the walls. Within, there wouldn¡¯t be any fighting. Not that it would matter for them, they would be bound in the stocks for two days, before getting banished from Kolyug.


    When the stooges tried to argue, he gave a short gesture to the other guards and suddenly, the rings around the stooges necks flashed and their voices simply stopped working. They still made the mouth-movements, but no sound escaped.


    ¡°Thank you, for not fighting back. You wouldn¡¯t get in trouble for it but the processes involved in releasing the enchant is a pain.¡± the guard gave a bow, before he and his trolls escorted the stooges away.


    When a small message informed me that I had gained EXP and that my reputation with Kolyug had slightly increased, I had to stifle a giggle. It seemed as if not killing the stooges but letting the guard deal with them had actually increased the EXP we had gotten.


    And then, it was time to go with Lagor, to see the Captain of the Guard.

 Chapter 181

    Landor guided us through parts of Kolyug we had not entered before, towards the center. I had seen them from the sky before, but only in a very superficial way, due to the height Lenore had flown at. What I had seen had made it obvious that the houses were larger and more elaborate, which combined with what I had heard had led me to believe that it was where the elite of Kolyug was living.


    On the ground, my view was confirmed, the magic around us felt stronger and the houses, while still built from plain grey stone, had a more sophisticated feel to them, even if I couldn¡¯t fully grasp the aesthetics.


    As we walked, I got a little curious. ¡°Say, Landor, why was the guard able to simply decide on their punishment on the spot? How does Justice work here in Kolyug?¡± I asked, curious if there was some sort of legal system or if it was purely the whim of individuals.


    He laughed for a moment, before answering. ¡°It depends; for residents there is the magistrate who would hear cases, but not for outsiders. The locals have a dim view when it comes to outsiders coming into their town and making trouble, so the punishments for them are harsh, swift and often final.¡± Landor¡¯s voice halted for a moment, before continuing.


    ¡°You have seen the city¡¯s magic in action, it makes Kolyug a very peaceful and orderly city, just how the locals like things. In my youth, I felt stifled by it, that¡¯s probably why I became an adventurer but I doubt you are interested in ancient history.


    ¡°Anyway, the Sergeant - that was the rank of the guard we talked to - has the authority to judge simple cases. In your case, it was simple: you had two well known citizens of good repute on your side, and someone,¡± he looked at Sigmir for a moment, ¡°dropped the fact that you were scheduled to meet the Captain of the Guard. In addition to that, the enchantments hadn¡¯t triggered on you, making it clear that you never took action, or they would have secured you as well.


    ¡°With all those, the Sergeant was happy to side with you, maybe hoping that we would mention the incident and his role in it in a positive light, when talking to the Captain. We should actually do that, his actions were quite efficient and professional, or we would be even later than we already are.¡± Landor finished his explanation with a rumbling sound, shepherding us towards the castle in the middle of the city.


    Hearing it, I was shaking my head, with a smirk on my face. Even in a fantasy world, what seemed to count was who you knew.


    When we got to the castle itself, I was almost afraid to go in. Or maybe ¡®afraid¡¯ is the wrong word; ¡®repulsed¡¯ might work better. Because that was what I felt, pushed back by the concentration of Earth Type Astral Power. It was less concentrated, far less concentrated, than the Nexus in Neyto but at the same time, it wasn¡¯t contained, flooding the structure before me. Lenore and I glimpsed through her vision, taking it in, and I finally understood what Kolyug actually was. I had thought it had been a gigantic engineering project, used to create a great, orderly city, using magic but I had been wrong, so wrong. I had to suppress laughter that tried to bubble up when I realised that what I had thought was simply a city was so much more.


    Unless what I was feeling and seeing was wrong, then the whole city was basically an advanced magical item, made to channel vast amounts of Astral Power from the lines of power below, lines connecting the various nexus all over the world, into a useable form, for the Kol to use at his leisure. I had to bow to their genius, the Grandmother had told me that she was controlling the Nexus in Neyto, using Kallista¡¯s grove and the Barrow Den to filter the powers within, but even then, they were harmful to weaker beings, over prolonged exposure. The original Kol had apparently solved that problem. While I thought that the absolute power provided was orders of magnitude weaker than what a Nexus gave, it was still awe-inspiring.


    I took a deep breath to gather myself and it seemed my strange reaction had drawn the attention of the guards Landor had been speaking with. Giving a light bow, I started to explain. ¡°Please excuse my strange behaviour, I am a little sensitive to the ebb and flow of Astral Power. That¡¯s why I reacted the way I did.¡± I told them, after pulling my hood back. It might cause problems due to the Outsider-trait but if I tried to stay concealed, it would likely cause even more problems.


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    The two guards were frowning but Landor told them that he would vouch for me, which caused me to raise my eyes in surprise.


    ¡°My wife is a good judge of character, far better than I am. And she told me that you are decent people.¡± he explained and both guards relaxed, stepping aside to let us in. I was a little tense, the surrounding Astral Power pressing down on me and my discomfort caused Sigmir to grab my hand, squeezing it to comfort me. The gesture helped me quite a bit, even if there were butterflies in my stomach. I was not comfortable in official, social situations and never had been.


    We were guided over a small exercise yard, that would, if the keep itself ever got assaulted, work as a further line of defense and into the keep building itself, Landor leading the way, clearly knowing where to go.


    After a short time of walking through nondescript corridors, built out of, you guessed it, grey rock, he opened the door to an office, greeting another troll, before shepherding us into an inner office.


    The troll we saw there was quite the impressive specimen, even bigger than Landor and just as muscular. Part of me thought that Trolls really needed to put some extra points in agility but who was I to tell anyone how to train.


    ¡°Greetings, Landor. Now, tell me why we needed to urgently meet and who those small people are.¡± the mountain of a troll, maybe it was a mountain troll, asked. His voice finally had the deep, rumbling and resonating quality I had been expecting from trolls all this time, sounding like an avalanche rolling downhill.


    ¡°Greetings, Captain Nurlad. These Adventurers have been doing a couple of jobs for the Guild and on one of them, they found something I wanted to bring to your attention. Adra, if you would?¡± Landor gestured for us to step forward.


    Adra bowed in greeting and started talking. At first, she explained our task and method to solve it, before getting to the meat of the matter. Bear-meat, in this case. When she described the Infernal Bear we had fought, the Captain¡¯s eyebrows went searching for his hair, a fruitless task if there ever was one. Either, he was shaving or simply not growing hair on his head.


    When Adra explained how we had realised that the bear likely had died due to its condition and started to investigate, finding the strange wounds, she gestured for me to explain what I had found.


    Swallowing my nervousness, I bowed and explained what I had found, glossing over the exact magical abilities I had, not wanting to risk getting penalised for being a Blood Mage. Hearing about the healed scars and the magical sigils within the bear, his frown deepened, until he heard about the Eternal Ember. At that point, he muttered a soft curse, in what I assumed to be troll, that I understood thanks to Lenore¡¯s ability. I wondered just how a goat would accomplish the task he alluded to, but maybe I was just uneducated about interesting mating practises and local anatomy.


    My part of the explanation done, I stepped back and Adra showed him the Eternal Ember, causing another curse. It seemed I had to learn a couple of things about mountain goats, they seemed to be capable of the most curious things, who knew?


    ¡°I see, it is good that you brought this to my attention. Will you please gather suitable adventurers?¡± the Captain asked, looking at Landor.


    ¡°As for you, don¡¯t tell anyone about your discovery. I would ask you to join the investigation, but I doubt you have the power. But, you brought this to us, so I will offer you a spot, if you believe to have the strength.¡± he continued, now looking at Adra.


    Adra gave a bow, explaining that we were lacking in strength for such a task but that we would keep the events secret. Additionally, she askedLandor to relay the events that had happened earlier, to commend to Sergeant, as promised.


    There was a blue window, giving some EXP and the message that we had declined to continue a chain-quest. I breathed a sigh of relief when I saw the difficulty. It was labeled as impossible and remembering the Devourer, I knew it would be brutal, unless there was some sort of excellent ability-matchup on our side. But, against some sort of Fire-Mage/Necromancer/whatever-else they were, I doubted such luck.


    The Captain nodded gravely and handed a couple gold-coins to Adra, for the Eternal Ember. There was also a window telling me that our reputation with Kolyug had improved even more, but I was not sure what good it would do.


    Next, he stood and got the troll in his front-office, to escort us out, while he started planning with Landor.

 Interlude: Advertisment II

    From high above, a city becomes visible, below the clouds. Around it, endless plains, dotted with villages, fields, forests and meandering rivers stretch. Far away, snow-covered peaks are barely visible in the horizon. The city is surrounded by strong walls and the inner parts are built from white stone, giving it a pristine appearance. However, outside the inner city, that pristine image falls apart, the further away from the center one is, the less impressive the buildings, as white stone gives way first to normal, grey slate, then to wood until it finally reaches the shanty-town outside the walls, where the improvised used whatever they could to make their shelters.


    In the center of the city is a large tower, towering above the other buildings and nearby, standing on the border between the white buildings and the grey buildings is a perfectly round building, the sandy center open to the elements. The camera shows the outside, the colourful awnings, before entering a tunnel, leading downwards, below the earth. Here, oil-lamps shed light to their surroundings and sturdy doors lead away from the main tunnel- The camera continues, until it reaches one of the doors, passing through it into the room behind it. There, a figure stands beside a simple cot, clad in nothing but a loin-cloth. His tall frame is tight with muscles, but not overly muscular, the maintained physique of a gymnast or a fighter. Scars decorate his naked chest and his eyes, set below a fringe of short-cropped black hair, hold an almost manic intensity.


    ¡°Greetings and welcome, to the Great Arena, in Retania, the capital of the Kingdom Lanretia. Today, I invite you to join me for the day. My name is Clavran and I aspire to be the greatest Swordsman to walk the realm of Mundus.¡± With that declaration, the dark figure bangs his right hand to his left chest, fist facing outwards.


    ¡°My day starts early, doing something many will be familiar with. Lifting weights and running laps in the great Arena above. It¡¯s best to do so early in the day, before the sun starts heating the sand.¡± Clavran stands and walks out into the corridor, following it deeper into the complex.


    ¡°You might wonder, why I already fight in the arena. The answer is simple, to become the greatest Swordsman on Mundus, I chose to begin my path at the lowest level, so that I could climb the highest mountains. I became a gladiator. Not due to skill, not due to overwhelming power. I became a gladiator, using the one thing I had even before arriving in Mundus, my freedom. I became a slave gladiator.¡±


    The tunnel opens into a large, open area, lid by more oil-lamps and with a sand-covered floor. Near one wall are strange contrivances, almost looking like barbells, but seemingly made out of a single piece of metal, not allowing to adjust the weights. Near them, a man clad in green robes stands, waiting. He is quite a bit shorter than the arriving Clavran, but holds himself with authority, making him look larger than life.


    ¡°Clavran, let¡¯s see how you progress. The boss wants to know if his investment is worth it, or you might become beast-bait.¡± the green-clothed man states before he starts to wave his hands, lights dancing around them, forming strange symbols in the air.


    The symbols flash and light dances around Clavran, who frowns a little.


    ¡°Good, good, your progress is¡­ passable. I will adjust the weights for you. Don¡¯t falter, or you will bait for the night.¡± the green clad man states before turning and wiggling his fingers some more, this time next to one of the strange barbell-contrivances. Again, light flashes, this time around the barbell that can¡¯t frown, but flashes in a different light in return. Next, he pulls a candle, places it on a nearby alcove and lights it with a single, disdainful word.


    Meanwhile, Clavran gets a cloth, places it on the floor and starts moving the barbell, straining to lift it, despite the light appearance.


    Through gritted teeth, he explains. ¡°Looks like nothing, right? The man you just saw, he is one of the mages working for my boss. His job is to view my stats and adjust the weight of the barbell, so that it will always feel heavy. And if I don¡¯t work hard enough, I¡¯ll be sent into the Arena to die against some beast, for the amusement of the masses. That¡¯s the advantage of being a Traveller, I come back from the dead. But it will cost me strength, so it is an excellent motivation to do my best.¡±


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    The camera fades for a moment, before returning to a burned down candle and the image of Clavran, now soaked in sweat.


    ¡°Looks fun, right. And now, for cardio.¡±


    Without bothering to wipe his sweat, Clavran walks towards another tunnel, this one leading upwards. A short set of stars leads to a door and behind that door, is what seems to be an open field. But it is not, it is the center of the Arena, a sandy pit, currently filled with maybe fifteen other loincloth clad figures, running in a circle next to the outer wall. Clavran joins the circle, running at his own pace. Some overtake him, others are overtaken by him. The figures are varied but all cut from a similar cloth, muscular and scarred. Some seem to be focused on speed, their muscles clearly defined but relatively small, others look like human-shaped mountains, massive muscles glistening with sweat. But most are between those two extremes, trying to stay balanced with their strengths and weaknesses.


    The camera fades again, returning to the sandy pit looking similarly, but the sun crept higher into the sky, almost reaching the running figures. Where before, Clavran was soaked in sweat, he is now dripping with it and his breathing is laboured.


    ¡°And now¡­ for the next part¡­ of my day. But first, I get a shower. No, you can¡¯t join.¡± he pants out, as he walks back towards the door and the camera fades to black again.


    It returns to the original chamber, only now, Clavran is clad in dark clothes, his hair still slightly wet.


    ¡°Time for breakfast.¡± he says, with a smirk on his face, before leaving again, going into the other direction, compared to before. He walks through a couple of tunnels and doors, until he gets to another large room with a couple of tables. Some are occupied and there is a large cauldron next to what looks like a buffet table.


    Clavran gets food, including a bowl of oatmeal, and a pitcher of water, before digging in. The scene jumps again, his food is gone and he stands again.


    ¡°Now, it¡¯s time for class. Don¡¯t worry, you won¡¯t have to sit through it with me.¡± he smirks, leaving the room and walking through more tunnels, until he reaches a small auditorium, reminiscent of a university classroom that someone filled with people that look like a strange mix of convict and professional athlete. They all sit, and after what seems like a moment later, another figure enters at the bottom.


    The lecturer is clad in a green robe, similar to the one from earlier, and again, there is some finger wiggling and images appear, instead of a blackboard. The lecturer starts to talk, explaining the creature seen in the images, describing the attacks of a young manticore, before the image fades to black.


    When it returns, Clavran walks through some more tunnels, speaking again.


    ¡°The next part of my day is training with Old One-Eye. But don¡¯t call him that, unless you want to be beast bait.¡± Clavran explains, winking into the camera.


    After a couple more doors, he is back in the large room where he worked out before. Only now, he steps over to a grizzled old man, bald and with an eyepatch, holding what looks like a riding crop. His remaining eye glares at Clavran and he scolds him for being late.


    ¡°Take your ridiculous swords. No idea why you want to use such strange weapons, but the boss thinks that the crowd will enjoy it.¡± he orders Clavran, who picks up a pair of single-edged swords, lightly curved with small, round guards.


    The old man starts to bark out commands, stances for Clavran to take, moves for him to execute. After every move, there is a bark that tells Clavran just what he did wrong, sometimes accompanied with a smack of his crop.


    The scene is framed in jump-cuts, showing the moves only once, or even only part of a move, the only hint about the actually passing time is, once more, the sweat that is soaking Clavran¡¯s clothes.


    In the final frame, Clavran is seen, walking up the tunnel to the Arena and a voice is heard, calling out, ¡°¡°And finally, the last challenger for the great Gramus, is a special treat. He is one of those the Gods told us about, a chosen one, send here to learn and receive guidance. Today, he will receive guidance from the one of the greatest warriors that have ever graced the sandy floor of our arena.


    Give a rousing cheer for Clavran!¡±¡±


    As Clavran opens the door, the scene dissolves into bright light, and a banner appears.


    ¡°Find your own path on the Road to Purgatory!¡±

 Chapter 182

    We were quickly shepherded out of the castle, and, without a good reason to linger, started to leave the surrounding area, not wanting to get into trouble with the residents. As we walked, Adra spoke up.


    ¡°What are we going to do now? You mentioned that you are weakened, do you want to stay in town until you are back at full strength? Or do you want to watch the three idiots in the stocks, maybe throw something at them?¡± she asked, looking over to me.


    ¡°No, certainly not. Remember when I asked Lagor for tasks sending us further west? I plan to leave soon - maybe tomorrow, maybe the day after.¡± I answered, weighing potential problems. The food and blessing from Drega had done quite a bit to lengthen my hair, and with those days, it would be well on its way to be grown to the same length it had been. I had noticed that the previous colouration that the small sparkles of Astral Power had given it was coming back, maybe with a little more silver, but I took it to mean that the burning had not caused any permanent damage.


    ¡°As for the stooges, they can rot for all I care. If they cross my path outside, I will kill them but I will not go out of my way to hunt them.¡± I continued, even if throwing a few snowballs, maybe with icy cores, was quite appealing. Or, maybe even better, to make a video, showing them in chains, being humiliated by the common folk.


    ¡°You have that smirk on your face, do I want to know what you plan?¡± Adra asked, making me giggle a little and shake my head.


    ¡°No, just thinking about those three.¡± I answered, carefully returning my face to a neutral mien.


    Suddenly, I felt as if Lenore had slapped her wing to the back of my head, pushing me to focus on a few people walking the streets. I blinked, slightly annoyed, not seeing anything interesting in them, they were just more Adventurers. They were not too uncommon a sight, walking around in leather armour and with visible, albeit sheathed, arms. There was an undertone of annoyance in her thought when she pushed a memory onto me, from her perspective. It showed the ambush that had caused me to order Kelgorn¡¯s death and focused on the faces of those preparing it. I profusely thanked Lenore when I realised that indeed, those few adventurers, walking nearby, as if nothing was going on, were the same that had prepared the ambush. I wanted to duck into the shadows and hide, maybe attack them, but I forced myself to remain calm. I might have done worse than I thought, Sigmir squeezed my hand in reassurance, telling me that she was there.


    ¡°Is there anything one of you needs to do here in Kolyug?¡± I asked, looking over the others. I was not quite sure how our supply of those things we couldn¡¯t hunt for ourself was, I knew about the cooking-supplies but other things, I just didn¡¯t know.


    ¡°No, I think we need a few things, but there¡¯s nothing big. I haven¡¯t seen any impressive artisans, so I doubt we could get better gear. If we had more money, a lot more money, to be honest, we could get something magically enhanced, but I doubt that we can pay for that, even with the quite generous payment for our latest hunt.¡± Adra answered my slight non-sequitur.


    After a quick brainstorm, we split up, Adra and Rai going together to get more salt, quicklime and soap, while Sigmir and I went to grab some vegetables that wouldn¡¯t spoil easily and maybe some grains, simple things to add to our diet. It didn¡¯t take long and neither Sigmir nor I felt a need to haggle a great deal, simply paying the slightly high but not outlandish prices, grabbing our purchases.


    I had filled Sigmir in about the people I had seen and my fears - that they might be after us or that they might scout Kolyug for a larger attack. Either would be bad news for us and I wanted to leave the town behind, hopefully escaping before a real net could be cast. She warned that we would need to be careful that there could be an ambush waiting on the road. Overall. she agreed that our options were to either wait until the danger had passed, which might take weeks, or months, maybe even years, or to move as fast as possible, hopefully getting away before any serious effort can be organised. It was, after all, just a day ago that their ambush had failed, so it might not be a problem yet.


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    As soon as we had procured the supplies, we caught up with the others, finding them haggling with a merchant for a better salt-price. I interjected, suggesting to Adra that we could just get our salt in Yugan, remembering the naga-village at the coast, where Sigmir and I had spent a night what felt like ages ago. There seemed to be a glimmer of recognition in his eyes and suddenly, the price dropped a great deal, he must have known that the naga had the ocean at their doorstep and could use their magic to harvest any amount of salt they needed, making it virtually worthless.


    Adra used the opening, slashing the price even further and soon, we were out of the store with a small sack of salt.


    Outside, Adra looked at me questioning. ¡°Yugan? Where¡¯s that?¡± she asked, curious about what she had to think was our next destination.


    ¡°Yugan is a small naga village, if you can even call it that, quite far north-east of here. We won¡¯t head there but I hoped that the merchant might have heard the name, or maybe recognise it as a naga-name and lower the price. It worked, didn¡¯t it?¡± I explained, laughing a little. Adra joined me, happy about saving money and maybe even more happy about deceiving people. To her, haggling and trading was an extension of her personal, maybe natural, inclination to ambush and strike from concealment. Sigmir was frowning a little, she felt that deception was dishonourable but she accepted that we thought of it as just another contest of ability, so if they failed to see our deception, it was their fault for lacking perception.


    ¡°Anyway, do you have what you need?¡± I asked, bringing my mind back on track.


    ¡°Yes, I think so. Why the sudden hurry?¡± Adra asked.


    ¡°I will tell you later. For now, we will leave Kolyug and move west.¡± I answered, starting to walk towards the inn where we had left some of our things.


    There, I got the biggest laugh of the day, in the stocks we had seen the first day my three dear, stoogy friends were bound, with a few children standing around them, laughing. As we watched, a few more came running, carrying some snow with them, starting to pelt the stooges with snowballs, laughing if their throws managed to get a particular funny reaction, like the moment one of them started to cough because he had inhaled some snow.


    I wondered why they were still logged in and asked a watching guard how long they had been there.


    ¡°Oh, not long, maybe five, ten minutes. The children will soon grow tired of their game, but for now, they enjoy it.¡± he answered, making me think that maybe the children held them in a state similar to combat, preventing log-out. Or maybe the first few minutes they couldn¡¯t log out.


    Curiosity got the better of me and I walked over, deciding to simply ask them. The children retreated a bit, as if we adults were disturbing their games and I stepped up to one of them, the others staying back a little. They seemed tremendously happy to see me, mumbling all sorts of insults, making me wish for a snowball to shove down his throat.


    I asked why they were still logged in, two of them told me it was so that they could do all things of normally unspeakable things to me, my party and my dead body, not necessarily in that order but the third muttered something about a longer log-out timer, keeping them in the game for fifteen minutes. I thanked the one who had answered, telling the other two I would show them what I thought about them. A short thought to Lenore caused cackling laughter and she left her Hallow, materialising on my shoulder. The stooges looked wide-eyed, and she hopped from my shoulder onto the stocks, above their heads.


    Moments later, something warm and slimy dripped onto the head of the first stooge and the children nearby started to howl in laughter. while Lenore hopped over to the other intransigent stooge.


    Once again, she used my voice to speak. ¡°That will take a moment, why don¡¯t you go inside and get your things?¡± she asked, to which I nodded. I didn¡¯t even have to, Rai had gone inside while I had approached them and was just coming out with our things, so I just watched the white slime seeping into the stooges hair.


    It didn¡¯t take Lenore long to ready another bomb to drop on the second stooge¡¯s head, causing the children to almost fall over laughing. Afterwards, Lenore hopped back onto my shoulder before vanishing in her Hallow.


    ¡°I could make some awful pun here. But I think that would be just shitty.¡± I told them, before turning and walking back to the others, laughing to myself.

 Chapter 183

    After aptly demonstrating just what I thought about the stooges and making plans to upload the video onto the forum later, after some creative editing, we made our way to the gates. I noticed that the guards seemed a little more friendly towards us, not that it was easy to notice, trolls didn¡¯t seem to show a whole lot of emotion, but their frowns were not quite as deep as they had been. I kept my eyes open, just in case the bandits were having us followed but it seemed that we had dodged that particular bullet, there was nobody that stood out to me, nobody that seemed to be taking a special interest in us.


    That lack of interest caused me to have two contradicting sensations at the same time, one was a sense of foreboding, as I wondered what I was missing, if I simply didn¡¯t see them, whoever they were, and the other was a sense of relief that I wasn¡¯t seeing the bandits I had seen before, waiting for us to leave town, so we could be caught.


    Once we had left town, Sigmir summoned our horses - I was still lacking the Astral Power to do so - and Adra turned herself into her goat-deer-whatever-it-was form, running along. I asked Lenore to fly scout once again and she kept an eye on us from the air, making sure that we wouldn¡¯t run into any ambushes along the road. I had considered using the frozen river as a non-obvious route away from town, but in the end, decided against it. The biggest advantage, beside the fact that it was wider than the road, without foilage nearby, was that it would give me a massive boost to my magical attacks; snow was nice and all - compressing it gave me useful projectiles and allowed me to conceal things - but compared to the ice of a river, with bone-chillingly cold water underneath? That would give me options I could normally only dream about; on such a battlefield, I would be able to vanquish armies, if they had no strong magical support, and even if they did, I had some confidence to get away.


    Alas, those dreams of magical mayhem were dashed by the cruel reality that my hair was still not grown back, sapping me of all my power. Shaking my head, I mounted Elding, letting Rai have Hringur, while Sigmir was running. Something about that tickled me a litte, that the one who supplied the power to summon our mounts was the one not using them. At the same time, I realised that, thanks to my inability to generate power, we would be slowed down, my mount limited in speed as the consumed power was directly related to the speed, at least up to a certain point. Still, I wanted to leave the town behind me as fast as possible.


    We made good speed over the morning, leaving Kolyug behind and it was near midday when we had to slow down, even with the magical boost the road was giving us. Incidentally, we simply decided to have some lunch, dismounting and making camp near the road. Lenore returned to me, after scouting the whole morning, retreating into her Hallow, squawking about the cold.


    During the afternoon, now with us moving a lot slower, Sigmir suddenly raised her arm, getting all of us into a state of alert. Not sure what was going on, we closed ranks and, just to be on the safe side, dismounted. Having our mounts attacked and dematerialised was a good way to end up in trouble, so avoiding that was key. With my reduced combat capabilities, I was resigned to remain in the middle of the formation when Sigmir explained that there was something, a bad feeling in her stomach. We all knew that she was not prone to flights of fancy and carefully continued onwards, Lenore and Ylva coming from their respective Hallows to scout.


    Just as Lenore emerged, I heard something almost like a musical note, like the twang of a badly tuned guitar, and Lenore vanished from my shoulder in a flurry of feathers and the only thing I felt over our link was pain.


    The world slowed down; the pain told me that something was very wrong, even if it was not my pain. Around me, the others started moving, even faster than I did. That first twang I heard was quickly followed by a three more twangs, but forewarned was forearmed and neither Sigmir nor Adra or even I were confined to normal, mortal standards. Three more arrows shot from the bushes, two were blocked by Sigmir, one was simply caught by Adra, right before she turned and the arrow shot back, leaving an azure trail. There was a satisfying scream, moments later. I, on the other hand, was almost brought to my knees when Lenore turned back into light, vanishing into her Hallow once again. It was¡­ unpleasant, but there was nothing I could actually do at that moment. We had bandits to kill.


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    Staying together, we did the only thing we could do when confronted with an ambush, we charged to enemy line, hoping to break through their line and either escape or fully engage, depending on their numbers. There was wave of hasty shots, those so sloppy that we didn¡¯t even need to dodge, they simply missed.


    Sigmir led the way, breaking through the shrubs, causing snow to fly around and we had four archers in front of us, all of them clad in simple leather clothes - I wouldn¡¯t even call them armour, they were that shoddy. At their feet were four bows, similarly simple looking, while they were just pulling their murder-implement of choice. I think one simply picked up a log, not even bothering with a real weapon, it was just a club, one had a hatchet, another a large axe, made to split stubborn logs, possibly by hitting the axe with a hammer, and the last had a rusted butcher¡¯s knife.


    Their competence with those weapons was about as highly rated as the quality of the weapons, and if I hadn¡¯t been in considerable pain, I would have left them for Rai, as training dummies. I heard some movement, behind us, though, coming from the other side of the road, so I knew that it was sadly not to be - we had to finish them before their buddies arrived.


    Calling it a fight would be generous, we fell onto them like wolves upon a flock of sheep, simply striking with speed and force they couldn¡¯t muster.


    Sigmir was the first amongst them, the axe she had looted from the Grandmother¡¯s dungeon so long ago easily batting aside the butcher¡¯s knife before hacking into her target¡¯s torso from above, causing a brutal wound and shattering his collarbone. Adra was right behind her, simply stabbing her target into the stomach as he had raised his axe, as if he was splitting logs. Such an attack was great, if your target was not moving faster than the average log, and even then, it might miss. Against someone like Adra? I would have laughed, if not for the pain. Rai demonstrated that there was a reason for the extra large and sturdy guard on the butterfly blades I was training him with when he used a simple punch on his foe, breaking his arm, before following up with another punch, breaking his face. And lastly, my own foe. Even in my weakened state, I doubted that I would have had problems with him, but thanks to the arrow Adra had thrown back, he was pinned to a tree, making my part even easier. A swift stab to the side, and he would bleed out soon. As soon as those four were on the ground, or rather three on the ground, one still pinned to the tree, we had to focus on the other group, behind us.


    Just as I did, a renewed surge of pain came from Lenore¡¯s Hallow, this time succeeding in driving me to my knees, but it allowed me to get a better look on our opponents. They didn¡¯t look like much more than the four fools we had just taken down, maybe slightly better weapons and not as shoddy armour, but still, none of them was a challenge. I wondered what drove people to such stupidity, but my mind quickly focused inward, on Lenore. I felt that, what little Astral Power was in my system, siphoned away by Lenore¡¯s Hallow, undoubtedly trying to keep her alive, maybe even heal her. But it wouldn¡¯t be enough.


    ¡°Don¡¯t kill them!¡± I shouted, as an insane plan formed in my mind. I needed more power. And where better to take that power from, than from those who attacked us?


    The other¡¯s obliged me, while I forced myself to my feet, stumbling through the snow, towards the one with the worst wounds. He was dying, quickly, and I needed to get the power, that juicy vitality seeping into the frozen earth.


    Blinded by pain, and more by memory than anything else, I pulled my athame, wetting the blade in the bleeding wound, hoping that the supplemental effect might help me to draw the power in, despite my absolute Astral Power depletion. No such luck.


    When another idea started to form in my brain, I started to giggle, maybe I was getting a little deranged from the pain.


    But, if I wanted to help Lenore, I had to try.

 Chapter 184

    The giggle broke something in me, I was no longer in full fight-or-flight more, but it was as if I had taken a step back, looking over my own shoulder. It didn¡¯t change what I planned to do, but it added¡­ perspective.


    As I pulled the dagger from the wound Sigmir had struck into her target, that idle part of my mind took in more information than ¡®target, need to kill¡¯. Before, it had just been that - ¡®the enemy¡¯ - but now, I took in more; the coarse, mottled grey fur, the solid muscles, the slightly larger jaw with enlarged teeth, almost looking like tusks. And I heard the mortally wounded creature wimper, not consciously, but there was still life in him. Orcs seemed to be sturdy creatures, a feature I would gladly use to heal Lenore.


    I brought the bloodied dagger to my face, first sniffing the blood, hoping against hope that I might be able to use that sense to get to the magic insight. No such luck, the only thing I was smelling was the coppery tang of fresh blood, mixing together with the calming scent of pines and snow.


    My tongue darted out, licking the blood off, hoping that I could get to the magic like that. I perceived magic using smell and taste - smell for the broader picture, taste for better resolution and control - thus the idea to use those senses and the perception to build a bridge that might allow me to siphon off their power, using it to restore Lenore. But even with the blood in my mouth, the sweet, slightly sharp taste on my tongue, I was unable to make the connection. I knew there was power in the blood, I could literally taste it. But I couldn¡¯t get at it.


    Desperate, I brought my mouth directly to the bleeding wound, licking it, sucking on the wound, tasting the blood directly at the source. The wound was deep, gouged into his chest and the moment my tongue made contact, I could feel his power, flowing through him. It wasn¡¯t much, most of it was gone, but what was there, I could feel. Stretching my Blood Magic, I reached for it, grabbed it, and pulled it towards me. I was rewarded with a sweet-tasting load of blood, gushing right into my mouth, bringing with it what little vitality was still in the orc. It was an intriguing taste, not just the normal taste of blood, but there was more in it, the power itself was like the sweetest spice. And I drank it down, taking in the Astral Power and the Vitality, even as a voice in the back of my head screamed that it would become miasma, as soon as the link between Vitality and Astral Power was broken. Normally, I would let the miasma simply seep into the environment, but if it formed within me, I doubted I could do so.


    The orc beneath me shuddered, as his body tried to escape but he was far too weak when I had started, so, with that shudder, he expired, what little vitality had been left inside him was now filling my stomach.


    I felt the Astral Power surge within me and forced it towards Lenore¡¯s Hallow, letting her drink the life-giving power straight down. But it wouldn¡¯t be enough, it was only a good, first step.


    I went to my next target, the one Adra had stabbed who was holding his stomach, trying to prevent his guts from escaping. Apparently, they had snagged on Adra¡¯s spear, when she had pulled it out. It was also an orc, slightly taller and more muscular than the one before, at least his upper body was. His legs looked almost flimsy in comparison, as if he was mostly using his upper body.


    Pushing that thought from my mind, I decided that I didn¡¯t want to suck on some orcs furry stomach, so I used my athame to make a small cut at his neck, where the fur was sparse, only to draw a little blood, before bringing my mouth to that wound, licking it and sucking a little before using my magic to siphon the Astral Power out of him, alongside his life. He tried to resist more, but I stubbornly held on and again, he quickly died. My mind idly noted the slight difference in flavour but there were no words that could really describe it. Fiery but not spicy, with an earthy undertone, those were the words that came to my mind, sending that idle part of her mind into another giggling fit, as it started to describe the taste like one of the wine-snobs she had seen in a TV-show once. ¡°The orc has a sharp bouquet and an astringent, maybe even biting, taste. It would go well paired with a sweet dish.¡±


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    Raising myself, I let the giggles out, my mind slightly clearer than before, but the pain coming from Lenore was still there, even if my mind was slowly numbing to it. But that was fine, I still had more bandits to drain.


    As I knelt down over the one taken down by Rai, I noticed that the sounds of Battle had ceased. Again, I made a small cut with my knife before tasting the blood and using my magic to suck it from his body, rapidly swallowing the tasty power that splashed into my mouth. He had a little more than the others, pushing the pain even further back. When I stood and walked over to the one pinned to the tree, he had forced himself off the tree and was trying to get away, even as his blood spilled from both wounds, making it obvious that he wouldn¡¯t get far.


    I quickly caught up to him, it wasn¡¯t as if he could run, not with the wounds in him, and clubbed him over the head with the heavy branch he had wielded before. He sacked to the ground, stilling, and I repeated my action. As I did, I noticed that there was more noise behind me now, shouting, screaming and struggle. Turning, I looked to the second wave of bandits, there were five of them, one was held down by Ylva, but the bandit struggled against her. Another looked like he had tried to run and managed a few steps but Rai was right next to him, his blades bleeding, just like the back of the bandit¡¯s knees. I smiled, taking note of the good method to keep someone down. Without their knees, nobody would get anywhere.


    Two more were simply down, their blood seeping into the snow, they seemed to have fought to the end, while Sigmir was holding one up by the neck, as he weakly struggled against her grip. I walked over, thinking about the tasty power lurking within them, when I registered the moaned words coming from the orc Sigmir was holding up.


    He seemed to be deeply afraid, his eyes getting wider with every step I was taking towards them, as pleading moans came from him, imploring Sigmir to let him go before the monster got him. I ignored him and his pathetic state, kneeling next to one of the downed forms, only now noticing that it seemed to be a female. Not that there was a huge difference, slightly softer features but even then, I wasn¡¯t sure. And I hardly cared as I cut into the neck. But I was disappointed, no tasty blood sept from the wound and when I checked her pulse, there was none. Not sure what made me unable to draw power from someone, what constituted death in this world, I licked at the wound but the sweet taste of power was gone, leaving only the coppery tang of blood. I rose, a frustrated growl escaping from my lips, quickly making my way to the other downed figure. Again, no luck and the growl grew louder, I needed to save Lenore, I didn¡¯t want to consider what would happen if I failed.


    The one Rai had taken down was still alive, even if Rai had been forced to add matching cuts to his elbows, but even with them, he was struggling. He had to be in tremendous pain, if only I had known that the others were already dead, I would have released him from his pain sooner.


    Another cut, this one to the back of his neck, forcing me to push away some of the unwashed hairs from, his head and I had another surge of power flooding me.


    I continued on my way, the pleading from the one held up by Sigmir had ceased by now, but I went to the one held down by Ylva. I think it was another female and she had a nasty wound near her temple, likely from Ylva, hitting her to stop her from struggling. It made me smile a little, I didn''t need to cut this one. Small mercies and all that. Placing my lips against the wound, I went looking for power, finding it quickly.


    The pain must have ripped her from blissful unconsciousness, causing her to buck, trying to throw me off. More my reflex than by conscious thought I used the power I had just syphoned from her to strike at her mind, letting her panicked mind escape into cool, endless darkness. Her mind had been so eager to get away, to flee, that it was easy, far easier than normal. And with her mind trapped, I could resume the draining, without wasting more power.


    Walking over to Sigmir, she tossed the last orc into the snow before me, giving me a slightly worried look.


    ¡°I will explain in a moment.¡± I told her, before draining that one as well. More blood, more power flooded my system, hopefully enough to help Lenore.


    With no more victims to drain, I sat and sent my mind inwards, to the boundary between my mind and Lenore¡¯s Hallow. Maybe I could help her even more.

 Chapter 185

    Sitting in the snow, after draining the bandits of their Astral Power, Vitality and ultimately life, I was getting a little queasy. While I had acted, I had been in a strange fudge-state, almost like a bystander, driven solely by my desire to save Lenore but now, in hindsight, I was a little appalled by my actions. Not necessarily the killing, that would be hypocritical, but the intimate way in which I had drained them.


    Shaking off those thoughts, I focused inwards, taking note of the roiling mass of blood that I had ingested and of the power still in my system, that I forced towards Lenore and her Hallow, to prevent it getting used to fuel my growing hair. I started poking my senses to Lenore¡¯s Hallow, still unable to truly get inside without her help, which was not forthcoming at that moment.


    Finally, the pain coming from her abated somewhat, it was still there, but more muted. At first, I was scared that it meant she was losing grip on her existence, but then thoughts started flooding over our bond, not in the usual, formed and formulated manner but chaotic and jumbled, making them hard to understand and even harder to follow. What I managed to understand was that she was hanging on, wounded but still there. And that she needed some more power, not necessarily Astral Power, but something.


    Right at that moment, my stomach clenched again, reminding me that I had ingested what would become miasma, the favourite food of Nethersprites and not something one should eat. To my understanding, it was some sort of the opposite of Vitality, the essence of rot and decay, but I wasn¡¯t firm on that, it was just my current idea of it.


    Reaching inside me, I started to grab hold of the roiling energies within me, trying to control and corrall them, with the insane idea that maybe Lenore might be able to use them. As I did, my stomach started to revolt, telling me that I was an idiot. Pressing on, I dragged the revolting mass of death and rot through the magical channels holding my body together, ignoring the feelings of disgust that caused, as if I was drinking raw sewage. It was not fun.


    When the mass got to Lenore¡¯s Hallow, I let it seep inside. I was remembering the way we had started to filter out the Ice-tinged Astral Power and was using it now in reverse, forcing something that wasn¡¯t pure Astral Power inside, hoping that it would work as I hoped.


    It was a tough, sloughing process, dragging the breaking down vitality through my body throwing it bit by bit into Lenore¡¯s Hallow and after some time, I was no longer able to go on, my mind was just too raw, too exhausted.


    Returning to the outside world of Mundus, my stomach gave another clench and there was nothing I could do to stop the revolt, nothing but bend over on my knees and emptying everything I had taken in back into the snow. Black, dead blood, mixed with rotting miasma splattered into the snow, revolting to look at and even worse to smell. If I hadn¡¯t been in the process of throwing up everything in my stomach, seeing the disgusting mass would have made me sick anyway. By the sounds nearby, I was not the only one, but there was no way I could look up to see what was happening.


    I felt a weight on my shoulder and Lenore landed in the snow next to me, looking very much worse for wear, her body expelling things I didn¡¯t want to think about on both ends. I noticed that she looked a little different, not quite as she had looked before. But before I could think of it further, biological functions took over again and more pressing matters came to my mouth, pressing up from my stomach.


    It took far longer than I had ever expected, even if I was only throwing up bile towards the end, my body revolting against the abuse I had subjected it to, reminding me that some things just should not be done. I was quite sure that it had worked in this particular instance, but I was also sure that it had been an incredibly bad idea. Not a stupid idea, it had worked after all, but a bad idea nonetheless.


    After I had started throwing up, there had been some strange sounds, moaning, wailing and the sounds of Sigmir¡¯s weapon striking something, Finally, I was able to crawl away from the mess I had just expelled, grabbing some clean snow to wipe my face and regain a semblance of composure. With that done, I looked around, noticing that Adra and Sigmir had dispatched a Nethersprite that had been attracted by my actions while Rai had lost the contents of his stomach, thanks to the vile substance I had expelled.


    ¡°Are you alright?¡± Sigmir asked, looking very worried.


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    ¡°I¡¯m still standing.¡± I told her with a wry grin, even if it wasn¡¯t really true, I was resting on my haunches, after cleaning my face. She just shook her head, not looking convinced, but when another Nethersprite appeared, she was able to vent her worries on it.


    I, on the other hand, focused on Lenore, finally taking in what had changed about her. Her head was completely white now, her beak, her feathers, everything. Her eyes were the exception but even they were changed, previously, they had looked, well, normal, plainly black eyes but now, they looked fathomless, drawing you into a black void.


    Walking over to where she was sitting after her own sickness, I gently picked her up, feeling her trembling body.


    ¡°That was not fun.¡± I said, gently, so only she could hear me. ¡°Are you alright?¡±


    ¡°I¡¯m not sure. But thank you, getting shot is not fun.¡± she answered and a remnant of the feelings she had after being shot flowed through our connection, the pain, the despair, the knowledge that she would die. It had been a mortal wound; even a spirit beast could be slain, and she was not a particularly physically inclined one. But the forms of spirit beasts were less dependent on physical characteristics, or rather, there was a direct link between their physical form and their essence, at least to my understanding. It was how they were able to form Hallows and retreat into them. How else would a wolf the size of a pony be able to merge into someones arm without adding more than a coating of soft hair or how would a raven much larger than my head be able to live within one of my eyes? But with her physical form impaled on an arrow, even after retreating into her Hallow, Lenore had been dying, the fact that my body was depleted of Astral Power not helping her regeneration.


    I placed her on my shoulder and we shared more information, amongst them a surprising fact that I had not expected. Lenore had, on the boundary of life and death, managed to cross the first divide, maybe because of the strange quality of the decaying vitality I had fed into her Hallow, maybe because of the experience, neither of us could say for sure. But she had managed it. That information prompted me to look into my own log, and I was pleasantly surprised by what was written there.


    <table><tbody><tr><td>Grey Orc died</td></tr>


    <tr><td>You gain 1300 EXP.</td></tr>


    <tr><td> For killing an opponent without a Traveller in your party, you gain Bonus EXP</td></tr>


    <tr><td>.</td></tr>


    <tr><td>.</td></tr>


    <tr><td>.</td></tr>


    <tr><td>Nethersprite died</td></tr>


    <tr><td>You gain 200 EXP.</td></tr>


    <tr><td> For killing an opponent without a Traveller in your party, you gain Bonus EXP</td></tr>


    </tbody></table>


    <table><tbody><tr><td>You reached Level 60.</td></tr></tbody></table>


    <table><tbody><tr><td>You gain one point Intelligence and one point Intuition from your class, Lunar Sorceress.</td></tr></tbody></table>


    <table><tbody><tr><td>Skill increased </td></tr>


    <tr><td>You increased your skill: Dual Blade-Mastery [31/100]</td></tr></tbody></table>


    <table><tbody><tr><td>Skill increased </td></tr>


    <tr><td>You increased your skill: Blood Magic [50/100]</td></tr></tbody></table>


    I had levelled to sixty and once I spent the points I got from that, I would have thirty Intuition, likely giving me some nifty special ability. But what caught my eyes was the ability I gained thanks to  Lenore.


    <table><tbody><tr><td>Companion Ability gained </td></tr>


    <tr><td> You gained the Companion Ability: Raven¡¯s Calling</td></tr>


    <tr><td>The Raven¡¯s cry spreads the shadow of death. Magic cast in unison with your partner carries the power of death, unbinding the souls of those affected.</td></tr></tbody></table>


    It sounded incredibly powerful, even if I wasn¡¯t too sure what it exactly meant. It could mean something simple, for example a small damage bonus using some sort of Death-Damage-type, similar to the simple Cold-Damage I could cause with some of my spells, only that I doubted that many things had death-resistance, contrary to the almost universal prevalence of Cold-Resistance I had encountered, undoubtedly a feature of the environment. It was so bad that I hardly remembered that I had those spells, defaulting to the simple measure of impaling enemies on shards of ice.


    But, Lenore¡¯s ability could also be something less predictable, like a chance that one of our spells would cause instant-death, maybe depending on the enemy. That would be a little annoying, most of the spells we used in true unison were mind-magic spells and with those, I didn¡¯t always aimed for death.


    But experimentation would hopefully clear that up. For now, I had a feeling that moving on would be prudent.

 Chapter 186

    ¡°I found something!¡± Rai called out, pulling my attention away from the log I had just checked and towards him. He was walking back towards us, from somewhere across the road, making me curious.


    ¡°What did you find?¡± Adra asked, obviously knowing more than me.


    ¡°I checked the spot where those guys waited and found their tracks. Want to check out their hideout?¡± He asked, grinning a little.


    It was a good idea - I had to admit that. The bandits we had taken down had been rather incompetent, ill-equipped and low-leveled so I was not too afraid of finding their hideout, I doubted that they would be part of some competent force, which I suspected the spellcaster who had created the bear would lead. Or, maybe, it was an unrelated force - that was entirely possible.


    However, the most likely possibility was that they were simply a small-time gang and we could find some loot in their hideout.


    ¡°We should definitely go check that out.¡± I agreed, hoping to find something useful. ¡°Lead the way, Rai, Adra.¡± I told them, while focusing on my own stats for a moment. I wanted to distribute my two points into Intuition, which I did with but a thought. Bringing Intuition to thirty, I gained a new ability, according to my previous actions.


    <table><tbody><tr><td>Special Ability gained </td></tr>


    <tr><td> You gained the Special Ability: Improved Magic Perception</td></tr>


    <tr><td>For having Intuition of 30 or higher, you gained the skill Improved Magic Perception. Improved Magic Perception increases your sensitivity to magic, allowing you to get a better understanding of the magic you encounter.</td></tr></tbody></table>


    On first glance, it sounded rather simple and I was quite happy to try it out on the first target I got, simply to see the difference. And there was a great target, right in front of me, a magic roadway which I had studied quite intently, trying to wrest some of its secrets away from it.


    Lenore had gathered herself to the point that she hopped onto my shoulder while I mentally shared my new ability with her, which she welcomed. As I walked closer to the road, I was able to perceive the smell of magic earlier than before and was even able to sniff out the complex mix of powers interwoven into the road. I was still far from being able to unravel what each flow did, but my resolution, for lack of a better word, was much better. It got even better when Lenore went into her Hallow and shared her vision with me. It seemed my new ability worked on the shared perception as well and when I focused on a part of the magic weave, I was able to make out more details. Sadly, in this case it only meant that I was shown how broad the sky was, but even then, I was looking at a masterpiece of magical engineering. Understanding the whole while looking at a small part was impossible, but I could get a vague idea that there was a keystone somewhere, or multiple keystones, possibly linked together to form the network.


    Before either Lenore or I could delve deeper into the magic, possibly losing ourselves in the study of it, Sigmir gently pushed me towards Rai and Adra, who had checked the tracks Rai had found and were ready to follow them.


    That part was rather easy, even I would have been able to follow these tracks, it hadn¡¯t snowed since the group had been through, so the snow was trampled on a clear path. We walked for maybe ten minutes, Rai and Adra moving up front, training their stealth, with Sigmir and me following behind. Even I tried to train my non-magical stealth, with some success, I gained another point in the skill, but I was greatly looking forward to regaining my magic. And it wouldn¡¯t take much longer, especially with Lenore crossing the first divide and adding even more regeneration to the pool I was drawing from.


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    Rai and Adra waited for us, crouching behind a small brush, gesturing for us to keep quiet, which we did. Then, they gestured to take a look and I saw a single orc, standing next to two relatively small, harnessed elk. The tracks led right up to the spot and in the snow around them were a few contraptions that I identified as snow-shoes. Some more gestures and Sigmir stayed where she was, while the rest of us circled around, making sure that even if the orc tried to run, it would be pointless.


    Roughly at the same time, we stepped forward, making the orc jump in surprise. When the orc tried to ready a weapon, Sigmir suddenly leapt forward, slapping it from their hand, into the snow.


    ¡°Stop that!¡± she growled, looking rather menacing, with her axe still stained with the blood of the other orcs.


    ¡°Now, we can do this the easy way, or the hard way¡­ Or, if you try to be smart, there¡¯s the even harder way...¡± I started, pulling the orcs attention to me. Now that I was closer, I could make a guess about their sex and realised that it was another orc female, not that I really cared. Around that moment, she noticed Rai and Adra approaching and must have assumed that I was the weakest link in our formation, as she tried to bowl me over. I tripped her while stepping out of the way, causing her to land in a tangle of limbs.


    ¡°It seems you are looking for the hard way. Don¡¯t claim I didn¡¯t warn you.¡± With those words, I gave her a kick into the side, causing her to hunch, before kicking her again, this time causing her to flop onto her back.


    ¡°You will tell us what you bandits were up to, preying on people travelling the road.¡± I announced, after drawing my athame and letting the sun glint off the edge. ¡°Or, you could try to stay silent and I would have to hurt you. Honestly, I don¡¯t really care which way you want this to go, you telling us about your hideout would be useful but there are quite a few magical hypotheses I want to test. It is entirely up to you.¡± I explained, feeling my mouth curl into a smile.


    Instantly, the orc decided that confession was good for the soul and her mouth turned into a bubbling brook of information, as she spilled everything she knew, no matter how inconsequential. Not only about the bandits, if we could even call them that in hindsight but also about every naughty thought, every unkind word and every even slightly questionable action. I would have cut her off, maybe literally, but it was just too entertaining listening to her ramble on about the tusks of some guy or how she used to steal honey from the village beekeeper.


    It turned out, what we had taken down as bandits were, infact, just a group of stupid youths from a nearby orc-village. At first, the group had been going out for fun, after their chores were done. That had turned into trying to hunt, the guys trying to impress the girls, until one of them had the great idea to scare travellers on the imperial road, maybe rob small groups.


    I had to facepalm at that, I doubted that any travelling group was stupid enough to be vulnerable to an attack as they had tried on us; they would have to had insane amounts of luck to take enough people down with their shoddy archery to win any serious encounter. The only reason they had managed to hurt Lenore as badly as they had done was that she was hit right as she left her Hallow; a moment of vulnerability, combined with the fact that she was generally not physically strong, had conspired with an incredibly lucky shot on their part to hurt her. And the shot was truly incredibly lucky, as it had been fired before she left her Hallow and would have missed altogether if not for her coming out. ¡®Luck¡¯ could hardly describe it.


    It took quite a while for her to wind down and once she did, I was almost feeling bad for the way her friends had died. They had been stupid kids, the equivalent of idiotic punks hanging around at a street-corner shouting obscenities at passing cars. Well, almost. As I was about to turn around, simply leaving her to her own devices, Lenore left her Hallow, hopping onto my shoulder.


    ¡°It might be problematic if she told lies about us, claiming that we attacked her friends.¡± Lenore explained, using her version of my voice to speak to all of us.


    Just as I was about to as what she had in mind, she hopped into the air, beating her wings harder than I had seen her do and a strange, dark gas-like effect, almost like a dark mist or dark wind was streaming from her beating winds as she hovered in the air, quickly enveloping the sobbing orc. The orc twitched for a moment, before stilling and I noticed a message telling me that I gained a small amount of EXP. But, as I watched, the orc started twitching again, just a tiny bit, almost impossible to see. Lenore landed on my shoulder again and I felt satisfaction over our bond and when I looked closer at the orc¡¯s corpse, I felt magic emanating from it. I would have to talk with Lenore about her actions and new abilities.

 Chapter 187

    ¡°Now, that was not nice. But, I guess you¡¯re right, it could bring troubles if someone spreads lies about us, especially if the lie is that we ruthlessly murdered a bunch of idiot kids.¡± I said to Lenore, once the orc fully stopped twitching.


    ¡°And they tried to kill me. Just for that, I wanted to kill her.¡± Lenore added, landing on my shoulder and vanishing into her Hallow.


    ¡°But that wasn¡¯t the main reason, was it?¡± I asked her, now conversing mentally.


    ¡°No, not really. I was just as curious about the new ability I gained when crossing the first Divide.¡± she answered, and I could almost hear the smugness in her voice, an unspoken challenge to my understanding of magic and my power of observation.


    ¡°You mean the mix of wind and death-magic? Or the fact that you imbued her with your energy, almost like a puppet?¡± I asked, forming my preliminary observations into words. Guessing that Lenore was using Wind-Magic was easy, she was a bird after all, and it seemed obvious that her crossing of the divide in the way she had, had strengthened the Death-Magic she had. Adding to that the fact that the orc had twitched some time after I had gained the EXP and that smell of magic on the corpse made guessing at some sort of zombification the most plausible answer.


    ¡°So you noticed.¡± She cawed quite happily, ¡°Yes, I can make those I kill obey me, at least for some time.¡±


    ¡°We will have to explore what we can do together, as soon as I have my hair back. And once my magic is back, I¡¯d love to experiment with the information we have gotten in the Magic Store.¡± I told her, grinning.


    ¡°You are being creepy again.¡± Adra said, pulling my attention back to the outside world. ¡°So, some village that supports banditery. Want to deal with that?¡±


    ¡°Why would we? I mean, we killed those idiots because they attacked us, I have no desire to tell their parents about their death.¡± I answered, unsure what Adra was suggesting.


    ¡°Unless you believe that we were the first travellers that they attacked, they got loot. And that loot is in their village. I¡¯d suggest to make sure no more bandits emerge from that place. How long do you need to get your magic back?¡± she clarified, making me chuckle a little, at her ruthlessness. There were times when she was slow to start with violence, but once she got going, she was worse than me. Just as I thought that, she walked over to the pack-elks, killing both of them with precise stabs of her spear.


    ¡°Don¡¯t you think we could have used those?¡± I asked, thinking of Sigmir running next to our mounts all the time.


    ¡°Not really, dumb animals would hardly be able to keep up with us. More trouble than they are worth.¡± she responded with a shrug.


    I was curious what Sigmir and Rai thought about essentially raiding a village, as punishment for their banditery Rai looked a little uncomfortable, while Sigmir spoke up.


    ¡°They chose their path, and bandits are a scourge - their village deserves to be eradicated.¡± she stated with the utmost conviction. When I looked back to Rai, he just shrugged.


    ¡°Sure, but if we want to take on a whole village, we need to be smart about it.¡± was my only caveat. A village with ten teenagers would have at least a hundred people, or so I¡¯d guess, but I wasn¡¯t sure what qualified as teenagers amongst orcs, or if those ten were all there had been. Thus, my caveat about being smart - or, maybe more importantly, careful about any attack. In addition, I was not sure if looking for a fight here, this close to Kolyug, was a smart idea - we had essentially fled the city because I was afraid of the spellcaster who had created the infernal bear, and now we were stopping only a few days of forced marching away from the city, to pick a needless fight with a village - or ¡®group of bandits¡¯, depending on your definition. And still, I wanted to do it, wanted to punish them for their banditery.


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    Rai and Adra started tracking the trail left by the idiot teenagers, and again, a blind man could have followed it using a stick. But it got me to thinking, there had been the offer from Pantheon, regarding an advertisement, featuring just me. If I could spin it right, I might be able to make a red herring of things, while adding some rather cool footage. I would have to look at the exact guidelines they had for making such their advertisement; the previous two had depicted the player-characters as heroic or at least neutral beings - would they mind if I bucked the trend?


    Smirking and in a mental discussion with Lenore, I followed behind the others, until they stopped me with a raised hand. In front of us, nestled between two hills, was the village. It looked small, I¡¯d be surprised if there were more than seventy people living in it, so they had already lost a good chunk of their people and combatants. Counting the houses, there were twelve buildings that looked like, well, they were built for people. I wasn¡¯t quite firm on my northern barbaric orc architecture but was quite certain that the buildings without chimney would not make for comfortable living. We would have to watch for some time, to get a better idea about the amount of people living in town, how many of those were combatants that might be dangerous and so on, at least if we wanted to bring the fight to them.


    Looking down, there were a few people milling about, some of them in good clothing that seemed rather out of place. It pushed away the last doubts I had, about it being a normal village, making me agree with Adra that it was little more than a group of bandits that had settled down, maybe put down roots.


    ¡°We will wait for the night, maybe even the night after.¡± I told the others and we carefully retreated, while making our way up one of the hills.


    ¡°Rai, you keep an eye on them, for now.¡± I told my disciple, who nodded and went back towards the tree line.


    We found a protected hole in which we could make our camp, hidden from view and protected from the weather. We made camp there, even if it was only a cold camp, smoke might give us away, but a couple of fir-branches allowed us to create a roof, trapping warmth in with us. The cold was far more problematic for Adra and Rai, compared to Sigmir and me, so we made a plan that Sigmir would sleep now, while I logged out, to deal with a things in the real world.


    I had a few things I wanted to do before leaving the capsule, all of them having to do with video editing. The first, and most whimsical, was to take the clip of Lenore bombing the stooges while they were locked up, setting it to slow motion and adding some needlessly dramatic music to the clip, making it more a funny gag than anything else. Of course, the butt of the joke were the three stooges, so I was happy with the result. The next, obvious, step was to post it on the forum, with a remark about justice being served.


    When I got there, the stooges had already made a thread, complaining about ingame systems of punishment, making me chuckle quite a bit. But their thread was the perfect backdrop, as they didn¡¯t specify what had actually happened, only that it sucked to have a game and being unable to play it because of some stupid punishment. It seemed to me, that they desperately wanted to be laughed at and I was happy to oblige them with their desire.


    Afterwards, I looked at the rules for advertisement and noticed that there was a request to tell a bit of a story. Interestingly, there was no actual rule against gore and violence, I had assumed something like that when Tobiuno had cut his advertisement right when the action started, only to have it featured in a highlight-reel. After the last, I had asked that I would be consulted in the future, if my material was used. Of course, I had no leverage on that, it would be purely a courtesy, but I had some hope that they might oblige, if I got them useful promotion-material in my own videos.


    The last part I wanted to do, before climbing out of my capsule, was to look over the footage from the bandit fight, I had a bit of a plan for my own video and I hoped to use some of that footage in it. I was quite happy with what I found, there were a few short clips I could use, to set the stage. My idea for a video was more along the lines of grim, dark avenger instead of straight-up villain, so I needed some sort of original motivation for the actions shown later.


    Afterwards, I left my capsule to take care of things in the real world, I had made a commitment to myself to get more training and I needed to stick to it. Once the beta ended, I wanted to get some good stats on character-creation - and for that, I needed to keep in shape.

 Interlude: Once more into the Forum

    Official Road to Purgatory-Beta Forum


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>


    -Ghostblade, confirmed Beta-Account


    </td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    Hey guys


    Yes, it¡¯s me again.


    I¡¯m curious, why do people buy games? It¡¯s to play, to escape the normal life we live as accountant, baker, teacher or whatever else you are. Ultimately, it is to have fun, right? Do you know what¡¯s not fun?


    Standing in some medieval shaming device for a good ten minutes, because the Log-Out timer is increased in the pillory, knowing that for the next day, in real life, you can¡¯t play - that is not fun. At least in my opinion, maybe there are people who disagree but I think, or rather, I hope, that the majority is with me on this one.


    And the system seems to be biased, I mean, yes, we attacked someone in town, but only because that someone killed my buddies and me multiple times, twice in towns, once outside. So, for once, we got the drop on them, only to have the game-system itself step in, truss us up and punish us. On the other hand, when we were attacked, did the system intervene? No! Not even when we were attacked in an Inn, which I had considered truly safe-zones.


    So, what is your opinion on all that, in-game punishments and even jailing your character and some strange bullshit system that protects some, while punishing others. Yes, I know, some people are valuable to the company, due to the content they generate, the clicks, the advertisements, all that jazz, but still, there shouldn¡¯t be blatant system-bias in their favour. That will kill the game faster than anything else, other than health-risks while playing.


    And with that, I¡¯m out.


    Ghostblade


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    Sounds like bullshit. Bullshit, all around.


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    Not quite sure what you mean by blatant bias in favour of content-creators. Granted, I¡¯m no big celebrity streamer but I do generate content, pulling in a solid number of viewers every week.


    But I doubt that my character is marked in the system, I¡¯m just playing like everyone else, only that I post my recordings from time to time, after editing them.


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    No offense, man, but you get what, five k viewers? If that? I looked and the most you got was with that crippled, creepy forest and that video got sixteen-thousand, nine-hundred views and change.


    Let¡¯s be real, you are a small fish, if you are even a fish at all. Pond-Scum, would fit better, you just don¡¯t matter.


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    Jeanyra, confirmed Beta-Account


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    Dude, no need to be an ass. Growing a subscriber-base takes time, effort and luck. You know the old joke, that monday morning, everybody is a star-quarterback? Believe it or not, until you have more viewers and better content, you should sit tight and shut up. And yes, I know that the three of you uploaded a few videos with more views, but let¡¯s be honest, those got the views they got because of the one kicking your ass six ways to sunday.


    That doesn¡¯t make you famous streamers or content-creators or something like that. That makes you parasites and people take joy in watching someone squash you.


    Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.


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    First of all, I doubt that Pantheon overtly puts their finger on the scale, so to speak. They might give out hints, so that famous streamers are in the right spot, at the right time, to generate awesome content, or they just take who is in the right spot at the right time and publish the stream from them, like they do in the highlight-reels.


    And yes, I know that some players are in them too often for random chance, but consider this: Those players are the trailblazers, those who invest insane amounts of time into the game and have since the beginning.


    Is it surprising that they are ahead of the curve when it comes to awesome things happening to them? Not really, at least in my opinion.


    And now, getting back to the other topic.


    I¡¯d need some more information before I can even start to pass judgement, I¡¯m guessing that you tried something with Morgana/Titania again? Let me further guess that it went bad and, once again, you have no idea why, thus your assumption that the game-system was involved?


    How close am I?


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    Semi-Right, Harms.


    Yes, we went after Morgana, or rather, we lucked out and ran into her and her party when they weren¡¯t paying attention.


    So, what do you do when someone you want to kill isn¡¯t paying attention?


    Exactly, kill the caster first, mop up the rest, so we went after Morgana, managed to get a solid hit in and suddenly, before the rest of her party managed to do more than get their weapons out, we are trussed up by some magic effect that, according to tooltip, lasts indefinitely, preventing us from attacking, moving, using magi, everything.


    And it wasn¡¯t Morgana herself, she went down quite hard after the first hit, so I doubt that she had a hand in it, especially because the chains we were caught in were made from rock or something.


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    Not cool, guys. Spreading misinformation is not okay and insulting someone for the size of their channel is just pathetic.


    There is no ingame-reward for streaming, making videos or any sort of content-creation. The fact that I¡¯m a content-creator, streamer and general promoter of the game has no effect of my performance ingame and devs don¡¯t give me any heads up, I only get those via ingame-channels I cultivated, something anyone could do.


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    Ah, so close to self-enlightenment, and yet so far away.


    But, fret not, I will grant you enlightenment, as the zen-master I am.


    First, however, I want to share with all of you, the newest martial-art style I managed to master, it is called ¡°Way of the Pigeon¡±. most would class it as an Art of the Open Hand, which, in this case, is used to deliver a resounding slap to the metaphorical face of another person.


    pigeonslap.avi


    Darkness reigns and in the background, slow, almost mournful, music plays. Then, the camera slowly zooms out and light shows that the darkness had been a dark slab of wood, the upper half of a pillory.


    On the pillory, a large, black raven sits, looking away from the camera.


    To the music, words are added, a tirade of insults, curses and expletives, stemming from the person in the pillory. The movement of that person¡¯s mouth and the words are not in syinc;, the mouth moves slowly, making it obvious that the video is in slow-motion.


    Suddenly, the camera zooms back in, not completely, but the focus is clearly on a glob of whitish goop, dropping from the raven.


    As the goop drops, the music slowly swells, towards a crescendo and right as the glop splatters into the bound person¡¯s hair, the music reaches its triumphant crescendo.


    Ah, yes, now, where were we?


    Right, you wanted to know what happened, considering that I was apparently out of the action. In that regard, you were right, by the way, though not for the reason you think you are, but on that, I¡¯m not elaborating.


    But consider this. You attacked me, right in the town of Kolyug, out in the open. Now, I¡¯m not sure if it is a racial trait of the Trolls on Mundus or a local trait but those guys give Control-Freaks a bad name. I could add some video of the town and the whole town is an obsessive-compulsive nightmare. Clean, each brick measured, every corner exactly ninety degrees, even the magical field or whatever you want to call it, is bound into the architecture.


    And in the town of such control-freaks, you started trouble.


    Now, take this with a grain of salt, I¡¯m not certain how correct I am on it, keep that in mind.


    The whole town seems to be a magical artifact, created some time ago and kept in the hands of the Kol, which is the mayor, noble, whatever you want to call the big cheese. There might even be some sort of elemental intelligence bound in the thing, I¡¯m not sure, but it is basically a huge surveillance and control-system.


    Mind you, we are not talking game-system but in-world system, similar to CCTV in the real world. Just magical with automatic enforcement.


    You might say that we fought in towns before, and we did. What you ignore are two things. Our previous fights, if you want to call it that, took place in Yaksha, a small hamlet without a town-guard. And I managed to kill you without witnesses or even anything truly pointing at me. If not for your ability as Travellers to come back from the death, nobody would truly know that I killed you. Suspect, maybe, but not know.


    Despite that, the rumours you spread caused a mob to form, running me out of town and I don¡¯t want to consider what would have happened without the threat of overwhelming power holding them back.


    Yet, despite those facts, you dare to play the victim?

 Chapter 188

    After I returned from the real world, I sat down with Lenore to plan. Both of us were a little giddy to be able to play with new magic, merging the new-ness into what we had done before. Deep down, I think Lenore was so adamant when it came to punishing, or really, attacking, the village because her near-death experience had scared her. From what I could tell, she had always been the watcher, looking onto the world from safety, at first the safety of the skies, there were few predators going after flying ravens after all, and later the safety of her Hallow.


    Almost dying had rattled her.


    Examining my own motives, I was not much better; part of me wanted to show that I was still strong, still in control, even after the - maybe excessive - vigilance I had towards the magician who had created the infernal bear, and especially after feasting on the blood of a few stupid bandits. Granted, massacring a village in what amounted to a magical experiment might be over the top - but maybe not. Mundus was a world where the strong could act as they wanted and what I did would make me stronger. But still, there was a part of me that was a little hesitant to wipe out a village, for the actions of a few inhabitants.


    The sit-down with Lenore was a little strange, as I once again let myself be drawn into her Hallow, being only peripherally aware of my body, as if I was looking through a long straw, with just a very limited perspective and perception.


    Lenore¡¯s Hallow had changed quite a bit since my last visit, where before, there had been a dark, sort-of nothingness, now, there was¡­ something. It was eerie and very hard to describe, with me not being in my actual body, instead as something else, experiencing things that I couldn¡¯t quite relate to physical sensations but such comparisons and metaphors are the only way to describe it.


    It felt as if there was a wind blowing but I couldn¡¯t feel movement or hear the wind, it was just the feeling. But, while I had that feeling of movement, there was also a vague feeling of stillness, as if the air itself was muffling the world. When I took a breath, there was a strange taste in the air, not quite the fetid decay I knew from miasma but something similar, it reminded me of the Barrow Den, of ancient graves and death. What struck me as odd was that, all in all, the previous, almost oppressive darkness had receded a little, into a more murky, swirling dark-greyness.


    When I oriented myself, Lenore was sitting in front of me, on a white stand that looked almost as if it was carved from bone.


    ¡°I like what you did with the place.¡± I told her, slightly in jest.


    ¡°Why, thank you. You had a part in that, you know?¡± she answered and I could hear her amusement.


    ¡°Oh? What did I do?¡± I asked, curious.


    ¡°Isn¡¯t it obvious? When I was struck and, to be honest, dying, you literally drank the life-blood of several sapients in an effort to gather enough power and vitality to heal me. That power was¡­ flavoured, you might say - maybe call it ¡®tainted¡¯, I¡¯m not sure. Anyway, when it passed through you, it took on a small part of what makes you into who you are. That¡¯s why it¡¯s a little cold in here, but I doubt that you would feel that - it¡¯s part of who you are, after all. And now part of who I am.¡± Lenore started to explain, hopping off her stand, over to my shoulder.


    ¡°And not only that, you forcibly used the vitality of another, as it was decaying into miasma, feeding it to me. Miasma is not quite death but also not life, it¡¯s decay, something that¡¯s anathema to life and death.¡±


    ¡°You mean, like undeath? Honestly, I¡¯m not quite sure what I did nevermind how I did it. I just felt your pain and wanted to help you. Normally, I would have used my own Astral Power, I might even have remembered to filter out the ice-element, but without Astral Power, without any power, really, I just used what I had at hand. I tried to take their Astral Power normally, with my blood magic, but even for that, I need some Power on my own to start the process - unless, it seems, I have their blood in my mouth. It¡¯s curious, but it might just be one of those things about magic that just are.¡± I explained, looking around for some sort of chair, something to get a little more comfortable.


    This story has been taken without authorization. Report any sightings.


    ¡°Oh, I know that. And I¡¯m grateful, believe me. Feeling myself fading was the most disturbing experience I ever had, I¡¯d rather avoid a repeat of that. And, if you are looking for a chair, look behind you. I got a little better at controlling my Hallow, after crossing the Divide.¡±


    I turned and there was a comfortable looking chair, made entirely out of the same material the stand Lenore had sat on previously, just waiting for me. Not questioning what had happened, given that I was standing on grey, slightly swirling, clouds, a chair appearing from nowhere was not too outlandish.


    ¡°But it changed me, not for the better or worse, just different.¡± Lenore continued as I sat.


    ¡°So, different. And you want to try out your powers on some villagers, did I get that right?¡±


    ¡°You sound disapproving?¡±


    ¡°Honestly, I¡¯m ambivalent on that one. When I try to examine my feelings, I just get confused. Let me lay it out to you, maybe you have an idea.¡± I started to explain, rubbing my head a little.


    ¡°Part of me thinks that the villagers themselves haven''t done anything to us, that we are punishing a group for the deeds of a few individuals. On the other hand, that never stopped me before, one of the first things I did after coming here was wipe out a group of snowbolds, thinking them mere vermin, until we met that one snowbold that tried to integrate into Yaksha. Hell, I¡¯m not even sure what snowbolds are, if they are some strange, local occurrence, spurred into existence by the artifact in that cave or if there are other burrows out there. Doesn¡¯t matter. Thing is, I devised a plan to killed them and did it. And I was laughing happily when my plan came together, proud of my creative use of magic to overcome a group that was not only more powerful than me as a group but even had individual members that would easily have killed me. The only thing those snowbolds did to me was annoy me, something that likely stemmed from the fact that I intruded into their territory.¡± I explained before pausing for a second.


    ¡°I never felt guilty about it. But now, we are about to do essentially the same, just with more of a reason; the bandits came from here after all. And if the people down in the village knew what happened to their youths, I have no doubt that they wouldn¡¯t just wave it away, saying that we were right, that they had been bandits. Not if it involves their family, something almost inevitable in such a small village.¡±


    ¡°So, what is the problem? I don¡¯t quite understand?¡± Lenore asked, before continuing, ¡°Is it that they look relatively similar to you? That they are humanoid, live in houses and form social groups within their own species? Do you consider them more, I don¡¯t know, worthy or respectable because of they walk on two legs and have opposable thumbs?¡± her questions were getting a little scathing and I had to examine my feelings once more.


    When I did, I realised that before, I had simply looked at those I fought as ¡°others¡±, strange as it was. On one level, I knew that all beings on Mundus were part of Road to Purgatory - existences generated by highly sophisticated AIs - but I had pushed that knowledge into the background, because of Sigmir. Unless I deliberately thought about it, I simply ignored the fact, a cognitive dissonance that I recognised but simply accepted. With my feelings as they were, I simply saw Sigmir as Sigmir, without considering any bigger implications.


    But on another level, I had simply taken those we fought as enemies, at first as simple animals and mindless creatures, when it came to the snowbolds, but when I looked at the facts, it was another delusion. I was talking to a raven after all, who had become one of my closest friends. That made it obvious that not all animals were the simple creatures I had put them down as and the meeting with the Snowbold in Yaksha had shown me that it was true for them as well.


    So, why was I just now feeling conflicted when it came to the village - was it really that different from Tegi, a town I had accidentally wiped out? Or the actions taken against the dryads, after they had fled, hunting them down to kill Tegi herself?


    Finally, I decided to simply go along with Lenore - she had done so with me, even when unsure of my actions, so following her lead wouldn¡¯t be a problem. Or, it shouldn''t be.


    ¡°Let¡¯s talk magic.¡± I told her, with a grin. That would distract me from my whirling thoughts.

 Chapter 189

    ¡°Yes, let¡¯s talk magic. You said that you wiped out a burrow of Snowbolds and I noticed a few slivers of memory, can you elaborate?¡± Lenore asked with a chuckle.


    ¡°It was just after coming to Mundus, so I was weak in level but had a couple of interesting ideas. I caught two snowbolds and used their life-force to fuel my spells. It was one of my first, real workings with Blood Magic, I tried a few things before, but nothing on that scale.¡± I started to explain, remembering what I had done back then.


    ¡°The snowbolds had a burrow and hid inside whenever there was conflict, so I sealed the exit and used a cold mist to disorient and harm them, I sat there for hours, lost in my meditation to maintain the spell. My hope was to turn their own burrow against them, causing them to be lost in their tunnels, slowly dying from my magic. If they had been less cowardly or more intelligent, I would have died that day, but I guess I took a risk and it paid off.¡±


    ¡°That sounds promising, how about we do this?¡± Lenore asked and started to explain her idea.


    A few hours later, I returned from the discussion within Lenore¡¯s Hallow, taking in the real world again. My legs felt a little wobbly, while my mind had been in the Hallow, my body had sat cross-legged in the snow, not that the cold bothered me, but sitting still had caused my legs to fall asleep. Lenore¡¯s ideas had been good, now, I only needed to regain my Astral Power. I reached back and noticed that the growth had been quite good, there was maybe a hand-width missing to my old length, maybe a little more, so it should be finished soon. Drega¡¯s food and the blessing she had added to it had been most helpful.


    I looked around and noticed that Adra was no longer in camp, instead Rai was nearby.


    ¡°You are back? What can you tell me about the village?¡± I asked him, speaking softly.


    ¡°Yes, Adra switched off with me about an hour ago. I haven¡¯t seen anything remarkable about the village or the people¡¯s behaviour. They just go about their business, mostly staying inside. Most of what I¡¯ve seen were people going to the outhouses. There were a few who looked like they might have been adventurers at some point, but I¡¯m not sure, not from the distance.¡± he explained, painting the picture of a perfectly normal village, going about their day in late winter.


    ¡°Interesting. I wonder just why those fools decided to make of play of being bandits. They had to have known it would be hellishly dangerous.¡± I shook my head, deciding, once again, to now worry about it. For once, Lenore would take the lead.


    ¡°We will watch them for another day or two, before attacking. I want to avoid getting a nasty surprise when we do.¡± I told Rai, before walking over to Sigmir, cuddling in. Those two days of delay served a few purposes, one was the avoidance of problems during our attack, one was the idea that, if anyone tried to catch up to us, after our departure from Kolyug, they would follow the road, not traipse off into the wilderness to some random hamlet. It added a small layer of safety to us, making me less twitchy. The bad feeling I had ever since fighting against the Infernal Bear had receded quite a bit over the last day, letting me think more rationally.


    In the privacy of my mind, where only Lenore could perceive me, I had even admitted that I might have overreacted with Kelgorn, that there really had been no evidence to his treachery. While I was reasonably confident that I had been right, I was not certain. And after considering things calmly, I had to admit that there were perfectly ordinary reasons for the events that I had strung together; what I had seen as a prepared ambush might have been just a normal adventurer group that happened to camp in our path. It was unlikely, and maybe I had overreacted in a state of hypervigilance, brought about by the insecurity of not having my powers, but, deep down, I knew I would do it again. It was something Lenore had reminded me of, that I had to keep my wits, vigilance and yes, my ruthlessness, if I wanted to keep the whole party safe.


    This book is hosted on another platform. Read the official version and support the author''s work.


    But the past was just that - the past. I would have to make sure not to get in such a situation again, especially not without my magic.


    For the next day, we kept stayed in the camp we had made, rotating the observation of the small hamlet between us, and really, when it was my turn, I couldn¡¯t spot anything that wasn¡¯t perfectly ordinary. But then, even bandits had to eat and be ordinary, it wasn¡¯t as if they could be out, raiding, fighting, ambushing all the time. My current guess, based on the overall fitness of the villagers and the fact that their youths had attacked us, was that during the winter months, when hardly anyone was travelling anyway, they were just normal villagers and the rest of the year, they had a lookout near the road, to take care of caravans and collect resources for the winter. It was the only thing that made sense to me.


    Finally, during the second night in camp, I felt a change within me. As momentous as the change was, it was lacking in fanfare, but, from one moment to the other, my Astral Power stopped seeping away, drained to fuel the growth of my hair, it simply started to flow as always. I luxuriated in the feeling, it was as if a thirst I had not known to have was quenched, a burden lifted.


    I let out a sigh of relief and Sigmir looked at me questioning.


    ¡°It¡¯s back. My power is coming back.¡± I told her, with a wide smile.


    ¡°Thank the ancestors. You¡¯ve hardly been yourself the last couple of days.¡± Sigmir answered, giving me a kiss filled with relief.


    ¡°Yes, I noticed. I just felt as if part of me was missing, my magic is what allows me to stand next to you, to guard your back, to be worthy of you.¡± I tried to explain, but she cut me off.


    ¡°Nonsense. Your magic is part of you, sure. But what¡¯s that about being worthy? Even if you would lose your magic, never being able to cast a spell again, we would be together. Don¡¯t you remember my words? From now, forevermore? Nothing in this world could change that.¡± Sigmir impressed upon me, her arms hugging me tight against her. Her words felt good, but despite them, I knew that I wouldn¡¯t want to be a burden on her. My pride wouldn¡¯t allow that.


    ¡°Thank you.¡± I simply said instead, giving her a soft kiss, ¡°But now, I have something to do in the village.¡± I continued, slipping out of her embrace.


    Now that my magic was back, I had things to prepare, so my first step was talking to Adra.


    ¡°Your spell to conceal tracks, it also hides smell and muffles sounds, right?¡± I asked her, even if I was almost certain about the answer.


    ¡°Yes, it does. Why?¡±


    ¡°I have a few things to do in the village. Can you cast it for me?¡±


    Adra frowned for a moment but nodded.


    ¡°Sure, wait a second.¡± she stood and started mumbling the chant I knew. After a minute or two, I felt the sensation settle around me and added my own spells, now that my magic was back at full power.


    ¡°I will be back.¡± I told the others, hiding a giggle when I affected an Austrian accent for it, and was off.


    Cloaked in shadows, in the darkness of the night, hidden by my magic, Adra¡¯s magic and my, by now quite decent, stealth-skill, I entered the village. Sneaking in was a joke, the only reason I needed to be careful was that I didn¡¯t want them to know I had been here.


    It was obvious that it was not built to withstand attack, the only defenses in place were sturdy doors, to keep wildlife out until people could arm themselves. But doors that would protect from wolves or, maybe, with a lot of luck, from a bear, wouldn¡¯t protect them from magic. Not that anything would happen that night, no,  I was just placing markers, as strange as it was. And not even markers for attacks or anything like that, no, what I was placing were essentially cameras. I had plans for the villages demise, or rather, the footage of it, but to have that footage, I needed some assistance. I had sent a message to Pantheon and they had come through, giving me a few invisible orbs of observation, as they were officially called, that would record during a specified time-frame. There were a few limitations, mostly that I couldn¡¯t look at the material until twenty-four hours had passed in real-life and that I had to do the advertisement, but that was all fine for me.


    I had a plan, after all.

 Chapter 190

    A cold wind was blowing and I was standing atop a hill, overlooking the village we were targeting. The others had taken up positions nearby just in case something went wrong, but I doubted it. The night was as dark as a night ever got, clouds kept the little light from the stars away and, luckily for us, it was even a new moon night. Thus, not only was the night dark and very unpleasant, my classes¡¯ bonus even kicked in, boosting the darkness-magic that would be involved in the ritual. Even if someone stumbled outside, it would be nigh impossible to find the source of the ritual, unless they had a powerful spellcaster who happened to move outside. But, in that case, we would either run or the others would intercept them and fight.


    The last few hours had been interesting, Lenore and I had closely worked together, to create the ritual circle we were planning to use, with me, from time to time, allowing Lenore to guide my body, incorporating runes that I couldn¡¯t make heads or tails of. Those runes were runes she had started to understand thanks to crossing the first Divide, runes that signified her existence, runes of Death and Air. It had taken us hours of effort to incorporate them into the ritual and even that was an experiment.


    Finally, the circle was done and I shed most of my clothes, keeping only a minimum covered. Normally, I wouldn¡¯t have even used that minimum, doing the ritual skyclad, according to Lenore¡¯s suggestion, but I was planning to use footage of the ritual in the advertisement and had no desire to be bared for the whole internet to see. And Pantheon would likely have pitched a second fit, besides the one I was already expecting. So, with only my chest wrapped and a thin skirt, I was standing in the snow, feeling the wind flow around me.


    I pulled up the control-menu for the various recording-orbs I had placed, activating them all at once. It was show-time.


    Within me, reached out to Lenore, letting my mind join with hers, so that our thoughts flowed directly between the two of us, allowing us to cast magic as one. With a deep breath, I started to move, slowly at first, my steps gentle, almost hesitant, as Astral Power was flowing out, into the world.


    It was the first part of Lenore¡¯s and my dance, a slow start that would only expend as much Astral Power as we were regenerating together. We reached for the Astral River, letting our minds drop into a meditative state while my feet continued their slow dance and dark, cloudy mist started to billow around us. But the mist didn¡¯t stay near, the other part of the ritual, Lenore¡¯s contribution, slowly blew it towards the village, where it sunk from the windstream, filling the valley the village was in.


    The magic wasn¡¯t terribly complicated, it was something I had used a few times already, thick, icy-cold mist that would confuse the senses of anyone unlucky enough to be caught inside. But the main-purpose was to fill the area with our Astral Power, still vaguely connected to us, using a variation of the ritual I had devised against the Devourer, where I had filled the sky with my Astral Power and finally, pulled it all together for the final blow against the Devourer. That way, I was able to use massively more Astral Power than I normally had.


    As one, Lenore and I decided that it was time for the second part of our ritual and our connection grew even tighter. An ability we had gained weeks ago, finally got to shine. The Avatar-form, Raven¡¯s Shadow, a merge between Lenore and me, not only our minds working together but even our bodies merging.


    The thin hairs on my arms and all over my body turned into black feathers, giving me additional protection from the cold. The rest of the changes was a little different, signifying that the ability was still in its beginning stages and it would take more time and development for it to be perfected. Over my hands, slightly translucent, ethereal black claws formed, while my nose and mouth were covered by a similarly translucent beak, only that this one was bone-white. On my back, a pair of wings formed, not quite the rounded shapes one imagined in angel-wings, the wings were clearly formed in the image of raven-wings. And, unsurprisingly, they were black as the night around us. Something inside me told me that, once Lenore and I developed further, the translucent changes would become real, allowing for a complete merge, even giving me the ability to fly.


    Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.


    But the mental change might have been even more interesting, before, there had been a slight separation between our minds, now, that was gone. There was no longer communication between Lenore and me, because there were no longer to separate beings. It was a heady experience, inspiring, intimate and a little scary. My resolve to treat the inhabitants of Mundus as real was tested but just moments later, the experience of the joined mind blew me away. I simply didn¡¯t care any longer what Lenore was, it didn¡¯t matter.


    There was no longer a me, or a Lenore, there was only an us.


    We felt the wind billow around our changed form, and it was almost as good as flying. The cold was a little annoying, but it was part of us, just as the connection with the Astral was part of us. Our dance grew faster, more fierce.


    And with the change, the ritual finally made complete sense, the runes we had inscribed earlier coming together in a complete whole, a whole we controlled. The runes we had used before were joined by more runes, runes of death and of devouring, of control and confusion. The amount of Astral Power we poured into the ritual increased and so did the amount of power in the valley. Together, we could feel the dense, dark cloud, feel and even control it, to an extent.


    The original plan had been to wait until the dark mist had seeped into the houses, slowly killing the inhabitants before raising them as undead, to fight those who could resist our measures but we caught a lucky break.


    A sleepy villager, apparently unwilling to use a chamber-pot, opened the door and we controlled the mist to envelop her, the mist swiftly draining the life from her. We felt her soul leave her body and before the body could hit the floor, our power took hold of it. We couldn¡¯t give intricate commands, but there was no need to do so, the only command we needed to give was to hunt. Through the mist, we could perceive her actions, her shambling walk back into the building, which was now flooding with icy mist. We noticed that she was far less coordinated and understood that the strength of our undead was directly dependant of the strength of the bodies, but massively reduced from that base. It meant that, for now, raising our foes as undead was quite useless, the shambling husks were no real threat for someone of their previous strength, but it could be a massive blow to morale, or, as we were doing now, to augment area-of-effect magic.


    The shambler fell against a door inside, uselessly scratching at it for a moment, before managing to open it. Inside, on a wide bed, was another orc just starting to stir. When the cold mist flowed past the female, it quickly woke him up. But it also caused him to become confused, too disoriented to realise what was wrong when the dead form of his partner lunged for him, not to embrace but to attack. She tried to grapple him, her arms scrabbling around uncoordinated while, at the same time, trying to bite him. If not for the tragedy of the scene we observed through the mist, it would have been humourous, the coordination of both combatants destroyed due to magic. But the revenant didn¡¯t need to kill its prey, it only needed to allow the mist to reach it and that had been accomplished. A few minutes later, a second revenant had been raised, this one with a couple oozing wounds.


    With the same order as the first, the pair, now united in undeath, shambled from their house, towards the next house. A small part of my mind was revulsed, but the rest of me was proud how well the magic worked. We would have to refine it quite a bit, but for a first try, it was very effective.


    We watched as our two revenants shambled to another house, again, taking a few tries to open the door and the mists flowed with them. We changed our focus a little, diffusing it into the mist and adding guidance to the magic as a whole. Some of the mist had seeped into other buildings and started to weaken victims there and we wanted them to rise, just as the first two, thus, we used quite a bit of power to make sure that, everything dying in the mist, would be raised with the order to hunt. The spell would last until the power we had supplied to it was gone.


    With that done, we focused on regenerating Astral Power, supplying the spell with it. It also meant that we didn¡¯t have to listen too closely when the screaming started.

 Chapter 191

    We, that is the combined form of Lenore and I, kept our ritual and dance going throughout the night, only stopping once the first rays of the sun drove the surrounding darkness away. Not that the sun truly weakened us, but there was power in symbols and we needed to stop anyway, so why not use that moment of dawn to do so.


    With our dance, the avatar-state we had been united in also came to an end and I stumbled a little, suddenly feeling lonely after hours of constant, intimate contact with a good friend. I barely remembered to finish the recording from the recording-orbs before stumbling off, grabbing Sigmir in the process. Lenore was similarly afflicted, she hadn¡¯t even returned to her Hallow, she had placed herself on my shoulder, something unusual for her, but I think both of us had a need to reaffirm our own individuality and the close contact in the Hallow was not suited for that.


    Part of me wanted to leave the game entirely at least for a few hours or maybe even days, but that would have meant rejecting the character I had created over the last few months, something I was not prepared to do. In a weird way, parts of what had begun as a role, a character, I played ingame, were now near and dear to my real personality. I was reminded of the old adage about the masks one was wearing becoming part of them. In a way, Morgana had become part of me, or rather, Morgana was what I would be in a world like Mundus. There was a mental separation between my real life-behaviour and the character, yes, but I was not sure how much of that separation was because of the different worlds both were ¡®living¡¯ in. Part of me was curious, if I would become Morgana, if the real world were like the game. Not that such an idea was realistic in any way, but it was a curious idea, how much someone''s personality was shaped by their surroundings. It wasn¡¯t something that could be measured, but it was an interesting question.


    But, before I was willing to entertain such ideas further, even before looking at the spoils of the night or checking what Lenore and I had achieved, I needed to get my bearings and the best place for that, was in Sigmir¡¯s arms. As I pulled her back to camp, Lenore asked Ylva, through Sigmir, if she would leave her Hallow, to spent some time with her. Apparently, Lenore had the exactly same idea, to affirm her personal identity by the connection to her dear friend, Ylva.


    Ylva immediately joined us outside and when we reached camp, I pushed a bemused Sigmir onto her bedroll, cuddling up on her chest, enjoying the fact that I was small and light enough that I could do so easily. I vaguely noticed Ylva rolling around Lenore, creating a warm and fuzzy cocoon for her feathery friend before I fell asleep.


    My dreams, were rather interesting and varied. For once, I vividly remembered them, my favourite parts were those in which parts of my previous connection to Lenore asserted themselves, giving me images and visions of flying, not just of being above the land and looking down, but feeling the wind beneath my wings, as I soared through the sky, riding the wind. It felt glorious and I knew that it was only a question of time before I would be able to do so myself.


    Other parts were less pleasant, likely hailing from a guilty consciousness, thanks to the massacre we had caused. Or maybe, it was part of dealing with things the part that was I had purposefully ignored while merged with Lenore, the parts of the magic that had caused the dying villagers to rise again, hungering for the vitality of the living. Now, I was dreaming of shambling figures, roaming through a dark, cloudy emptiness, searching for something to sate their hunger. What made the dreams truly disturbing was that it wasn¡¯t villagers I was dreaming of, the figures had familiar faces, not only were my party-members haunting my dreams, as disfigured revenants, even people I had known in the real world joined in. Seeing Rai and Adra shamble around, their eyes dead and empty, their bodies broken, that was disturbing. Seeing former teammates from my clan, people I had met at the martial arts-school, half-remembered faces I knew from school, all reduced to shambling husks, was unpleasant. But neither of those experiences came close to the sheer terror I felt when I saw my parents, their bodies mauled, with black blood slowly seeping from their wounds.


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    It was in those dreams that I felt myself reach out, for something, for someone to drive those shapes away and my plea for help was answered. In the misty emptiness of my dreams, a familiar form took shape. A broad, sturdy back, wide, muscular shoulders, covered in familiar armour with a savage weapon in hand. Somehow, I knew that now that she was with me, I would be fine.


    Maybe, it was that knowledge that altered the dream, for the cloudy emptiness, previously so bleak and dark changed. What before felt depressing suddenly reminded me of the comfort I had felt at night, the figure that, before, was clad in armour and armed with her Lok¡¯nar was now dressed in a much less as she turned to face me.


    I woke up, what felt like much, much later, strangely pensive. I was not one to believe in some sort of prophetic dreams and the reason for my nightmares was rather obvious, but still. Dreams had a meaning behind them, if only, in this case, the meaning that a subconscious part of me was strongly against using necromancy, for that was what Lenore¡¯s newest skills were. I would have to think about that particular subject.


    ¡°Ah, you are awake?¡± Sigmir asked, sounding bemused.


    My only response was a mumbled sound of contentment as I tried to bury a little deeper into her embrace,


    ¡°You know, at first, I thought you had a nightmare and tried to wake you, but you didn¡¯t wake.¡± Sigmir stopped herself and I could hear the grin in her voice when she continued. ¡°That was when your moans changed from discomfort to something else, something I¡¯ve heard a few times already. Tell me, what did you dream of?¡±


    I blushed a little, knowing that my body had reacted to my dreams and making a semi-educated guess that her nearness had been the reason she had appeared in my dream. Or, it might be that my mind saw her, rightfully, as my protector, the one I could rely on, when the going got tough. I had no doubt that she would stand with me and protect me, no matter how ¡®evil¡¯ I ever got. It was comforting.


    Still not leaving the warm cocoon of Sigmir¡¯s embrace, I looked at the log from the previous night. It was almost disappointing, the experience gained from wiping out a village was merely a pittance, not even enough to boost me up a single level. I had gained points in my three rune-magic skills, undoubtedly for the new ritual that had combined all my magic into something rather fearsome and I had improved one of my traits and one of my titles. Or rather, increased, if it was an improvement would have to be seen.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Title strengthened</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>Your title, Magician of Annihilation, gained significance</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>For coming up with a new magical way of committing massacre, you gained the title Magician of Annihilation. Increases the EXP gained when using magic to annihilate large groups of opponents.


    Friend or foe, if they learn of your deeds and skills, will seek ways to handle your ability to commit magical mayhem.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Trait strengthened</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>Your trait, Magician of Massacre, was strengthened.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>Those who can use magic to kill large amounts of enemies are both revered and feared, depending which side they are on. When using magic to strike at large groups your skill-gains and the damage dealt are increased.


    When combining your magic with others, for the purpose of massacring your enemies, you confer the advantages of the trait, Magician of Massacre, to all those involved in casting the magic. </td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    The first one, that didn¡¯t sound ominous at all. At the same time, it was merely common sense, if someone knew that an enemy of theirs had the ability to wipe out armies, they wouldn¡¯t send an army against them. I was not at the level to destroy armies, not yet at least, but I had a feeling that Lenore and I would get there. So, anyone knowing about that would seek a way to deal with me, us, before we became an issue for them. Suddenly, I was not so sure about making the advertisement I had planned to make, had even taken footage for.


    It was the old question, showing what I was capable of doing would make others fear me. Would that fear mean they wouldn¡¯t go against me, maybe even giving me consideration out of respect for the powers I commanded or would they shun me, afraid of my powers.

 Interlude: Advertisment III

    In a snowy forest, figure stands, all features concealed by a dark cloak. All, but one feature, a large raven on the figures shoulder, its feathers midnight black, other than those on its head, which are bone-white. The raven gives some scale to the figure, showing that it is a small, slender being.


    The winds swirls around the two, carrying with it a dusting of snowflakes and causing the cloak to flutter a little. As the camera pans around them, the Raven gives off a loud caw, carrying with it the word ¡®Nevermore¡¯. When the camera stops in front of them, the figure¡¯s features become visible, finely chiseled bones under light-blue, almost white, skin and piercing, green eyes. The cloak¡¯s hood is pushed slightly pushed back by the wind, showing the figure¡¯s hair, its colour almost the same deep black as the raven¡¯s feathers. The only difference is that the hair has silvery sparkles and some glistening, red and dark-purple highlights. With her hood back, her ears become visible, pointy tips telling a little of the figures race.


    ¡°The Pantheon¡¯s gods told us that everyone has their path in life.¡± The figure begins to speak, her voice soft, almost melodic.


    ¡°They tell us that our path is just for us, that some will walk with us for a time, maybe even till the end of our path. But, what if someone crosses you on your path, maybe even tries to bar you from continuing on your path?¡± The figure asks and the raven caws again and the image fades into darkness.


    When light is back, the view is changed. The black cloak bordering the view above telling that one is now seeing through the figue¡¯s eyes and the rhythmic movement tells of walking. On the cobblestone-road in front of her walks a tall, muscular amazon with skin of a tone similar to the first figure, clad in dark armour wielding a hatchet and a shield, next to a second trained figure, this one clad in nut-brown armour that almost looks wooden, decorated with leaves. The glinting spear in her hand shows that she too, is a warrior.


    The final figure is smaller than the two women and the only visible male, clad in dark leather armour similar to the smallest and largest figure and armed with two short-swords, similar in length to his forearms. There is another feature that sets him off from the others, where the others look very similar to humans, he does not. His features are clearly canine, a grey-furred muzzle sticking out from his face and a set of ears sitting on the top of his head.


    What stands out is, that while the surrounding forest and the bushes at the side of the road are white with snow, the road they are walking on is clear, making one wonder why the public service on a road in the middle of nowhere is that good.


    The tall figure raises her hand, signaling for the others to stop and, while keeping an eye on the bushes ahead of them, speaks. ¡°There¡¯s something. I¡¯m not sure what. I think we need Lenore and Ylva.¡±


    After speaking, she lowers her right arm and a silvery white light emits from her open hand and a similar light is barely shining into the image from the left.


    Suddenly, a soft, almost musical, twang can be heard, thanks to the almost totally silent forest. While the light from the tall figure in front coalesce into a huge wolf, an arrow becomes visible, flying towards the image. For a second, the view turns dark, as if the one capturing the images was hit, but then it is back, just to see the tall warrior lower her shield, now with two arrows sticking out of it, while the brown-armoured figure is in the process of throwing an arrow back towards the bushes, the arrow shining with azure light. A loud scream told of the effectiveness of that maneuver.


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    The others, including the newly appeared wolf, charge forward, weapons at the ready, to engage the attackers. The one sharing their vision follows after them and, as she runs, draws blades of almost translucent ice, shimmering in the light from above. After breaking through the shrubs lining the road, they engage the archers, who tried to land another salvo but all shots went wide.


    Their attackers are furry humanoids, clad in simple armour and armed with little more than tools, but the party quickly strikes them down. Behind them, the sound of approaching reinforcement is audible, so, the three others turn, while the one filming stays back as the image fades to black.


    When the light returns, the one from the beginning is back in front of the camera, as she had been earlier.


    ¡°Bandits, they wait on many paths, the scourge of civilisation, preying on those venturing from their comfortable homes. Those who travel the world universally abhor them, hunting them down whenever they can.¡± she explains and her voice is hard, making it clear that her hatred for bandits is a deep one.


    ¡°They are parasites, plain and simple, lacking even the excuse of instinct and hunger that monsters have. No, they need to be hunted, to prevent that plague to spread. Hunted and exterminated. And, when you solve your problems like that, you need to, as the chinese say, not just cut the grass, you need to remove the roots.¡± she continues.


    ¡°Join me, to see what happens to the roots of those who barred my path.¡± she finishes with an evidently evil grin before swiftly turning, causing her cape to whirl up some snow as the vision is obscured by a sudden cloud of white fog.


    When the fog is gone, the view is completely changed. Gone is the forest, replaced by a snowed-inn hillside. The surroundings are hidden by darkness, only the figure of the one who previously talked is barely visible in the dim light shed by strange symbols etched into a sheet of ice, some of them silvery white, others darker, almost black. But even she has changed, gone is her cloak, gone is her armour, despite the cold evident by the snow, she is only clad in a short skirt-like wrap and her chest is hidden by bandages, but she does not look cold.


    She slowly starts to move, one step and mist starts to slowly billow around her, a turn and the mist starts to move. A few steps later, and it is hard to see her through the mist, but wind starts to slowly blow the mist away, driving it into a direction.


    The image fades and one sees a village, small buildings made from roughly hewn logs, with smoke coming from a few chimneys. Despite the darkness, the slowly creeping in fog is visible.


    The camera shifts back to the hilltop and, for a moment, the figure is obscured by mist. When the mist fades a little, she has changed. Her pale-blue skin is gone, replaced with midnight black feathers, her hair still there, but set within are bone-white feathers. Her hands are encased in vicious looking, translucent claws, almost fully hiding the hands inside, her face is similarly hidden by a white beak and on she has a set of black wings on her back.


    Some might call her a fallen angel, others a harpy or a monster. What the truth is? Who knows.


    Her movements change, they grow faster as her whole body glows with a strange light and again, the fog billows up, hiding her from view.


    When the fog fades, the view is back in the village, only the peacefulness from earlier is gone. The fog is thick and something is moving throughout the fog. Eerily jerky shapes are barely visible until light from somewhere illuminates one of them, a figure that might have starred in a horror-movie. The strangely moving figure looks similar to the bandits earlier, only that he is larger and black blood oozes from gashes on his body. But far too little blood, one would think, and his eyes are devoid of life.


    A scream of terror rends the night and another figure is visible, if only for a moment. The new figure looks alive, alive and terrified, as the first figure starts to shamble after her with surprising speed. They vanish from the camera and moments later, another scream is heard, this one a scream of pain.


    As the vision fades, the voice from the figure earlier is heard.


    ¡°Not every path is peaceful. And those who bar your path need to be vanquished.¡±


    The world, clad in blue flames, is visible again and the banner


    ¡°Join us. On the Road to Purgatory!¡±


    displayed over it.

 Chapter 192

    I had to chuckle to myself, the final edit of the advertisement I had filmed looked quite good. I was having some second thoughts about my actions, but from a purely artistic point-of-view, I was quite happy with my creation. And not just artistically - it was also what I had intended from a meta-gaming perspective and even, to use an overused label, from a propaganda point-of-view. What I had created pointed clearly to the darker aspects  of Road to Purgatory, something I wanted to, well, advertise, even with the advertisement featuring a slave-gladiator, but it would also serve as a great red herring.


    The previous clips of me mostly featured the times I had used my ice-magic to create mist and a few clips of me using my weapons, only the one of Sigmir and me saving Lenore all that time back and one or two of those I had uploaded had any actual Ice-Magic, meaning icicles and similar attacks or more than a slight hint of Darkness-Magic. Especially Darkness-Magic was nigh impossible to spot from recordings, even I had difficulties seeing the hints of its use, and that was with me knowing what to look for and knowing that it was there to look at. No, an outsider looking at the clips and would likely assume that I was a necromancer, using some sort of mist or gas to carry the necrotic effects of my magic. It seemed that some sort of delivery mechanism was quite important for necromantic magics, similar to my blood magic, needing either direct application or some carrier. Additionally, I hoped that most would look at the advertisement and assume that it was made to show off, featuring my biggest and baddest magic, instead of a failed experiment.


    Because, sadly, that was what it was; the magic Lenore and I had used had a limited purpose, a very limited one at that. It was great to kill far weaker beings and spread terror, especially the second part - in that, it might be the supreme magic. The only thing worse I could imagine was some sort of wide-range, mind-altering effect that added cannibalistic and berserker-effects to those afflicted while leaving their memories intact. But even that might not bring the same amount of terror as to see your loved ones, especially the weakest ones, meaning the children, be snuffed out by a cold mist only to rise again, hungering for your flesh.


    Other than as a terror-weapon it was useless, as two survivors in the village proved. Luckily Adra and Rai had been vigilant and killed them before they could flee, but even those two hadn¡¯t been stronger than Lenore and I, they had been mid-level fifty, failing to wipe them out in the area-of-effect attack was just that, failure. So, Lenore and I would have to look at the magic again, either discard it or change it further to make it useful.


    But I wondered if we should even try to make the magic stronger, more useful.


    After Lenore and I had recorded the speaking-clips for the advertisement, we had waited for night to fall and snuck into the village under the cover of darkness. While Lenore had been unaffected by what we had found there, I was not. Even now, in the real world, without the much more intimate feelings for the world of Mundus I had in the game world, I was asking myself if, maybe, just maybe, there was something like ¡°evil¡± magic. Sure, I could argue that magic was just a tool and all that, but the images of young orcs, not more than children, killed and raised by the magic, it made me wonder. Was there a good application for that tool? Or was that particular tool a purely evil one? I had shied away from going into the buildings, knowing that, if there had been younger children or toddlers, they would be there, dead in their cribs and beds, maybe gnawed on by their zombified relatives.


    Outside the game, I could argue with myself, that if we strengthened it, we would be able to use it as an actual attack, against enemies that were of similar strength to us - that it was an attack that would work great against enemies that believed that quantity was the only quality they needed, but just remembering what I had felt in that village, made a mockery of that.


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    With some mental effort, I forced my mind away from the memories of that place and of the nightmares I had suffered, not only directly after the ritual but in the night after, the nightmares that had made me log out, just an hour ago. I had edited the advertisement, arguing with myself that I already had the footage and it would be foolish not to use it.


    Maybe there were better ways to use my magic, maybe I could find something better.


    With those thoughts, I immersed myself in the hundreds, maybe thousands, of hours recorded by beta-testers. I could only access what was open to the public which was a lot less now that it was generally known to be possible to block access, but still quite a few had uploaded things.


    As my only search-filter was that I wanted to see magic, the amount was reduced but not by much. There were still thousands of clips, but I was looking for inspiration, so I picked one, more or less at random, and started watching.


    The first clip I saw was rather simple, the viewpoint was of a guildmage, according to the title, and he simply moved after some sort of knight or paladin and fired small, flaming spheres that clung to the target, like some sort of magical napalm. They didn¡¯t splash around, making them good single-target attacks but sadly, the whole casting was done with a simple command of ¡°Flaming Orb¡± and a glowing wand, making it rather pointless for me. I watched a little longer, but other than a flaming sphere, which was the bigger, area of effect version the mage used when multiple enemies went for them, there was nothing more to find.


    The next clip was of another guild-mage and I only watched about thirty seconds of him repeating Water Orb, firing a - who would have thought - water orb at his enemies, that looked just like the Flaming Orb, though the additional damage-effect looked slightly corrosive, like some sort of acid.


    I had a feeling that I would be at it for quite a while.


    About five hours later, I waved away the screen and wanted to hit my head against a table, wall or any hard surface, really.


    The vast majority of clips I had seen used similar methods, they had some sort of tool, like the wand of the guild-mages and used an activation-command to cast their magic. Others used only a chant, which was similarly just an activation-command, just in another language, wasn¡¯t it? Maybe with some sort of gesture, but not always, and much longer than the simple one-word commands used with wands and the like. Which explained why the longer chants were used for non-combat magic, things like warming food, lighting a campfire or mending small tears in clothes, for those it hardly mattered if the cast took a second or two or if it took a full minute. But in combat, that made a difference.


    However, that vast majority was not what made me feel like an utter moron. No, that was reserved for one of the few Sorcerer-clips I had found, a clip featuring some demon in the desert, hunting with fire-magic. The magic was not vastly different from the magic used by guild-mages, just that he wasn¡¯t using a wand, or activation-words. It had taken me a minute to realise what he was doing and only because I had seen something similar before.


    He had a bracelet, made from leather and stones around his hand and used his magic simply by pointing his right hand at the enemy and a fiery projectile shot out. After a few of those, I finally realised that the stones in his bracelet were Rune Stones, like those I had gotten right at the beginning, when I had landed in Mundus. Just that mine had strict limits on how fast they could absorb Astral Power, making me unable to use them for more than completing a single spell before they needed to be recharged.


    The sorcerer in the clip was obviously not hampered by that, maybe due to better rune-stones, maybe due to better skills, I wasn''t sure. But he was able to complete his magic with only a tiny delay, something that would improve my combat-capabilities by a lot, if I could copy his style. I had been too tunnel-visioned on using some great, eternal-ice made spell-focus that allowed me to use all my spells without effort. And I would love to have some sort of universal-focus, that allowed me to safely use attacks like the one I had used against the end-boss of the glacier-dungeon, but it was just not realistic with my current skill.


    I made a mental note to acquire some rune-stones in the next city, enough to inscribe my favourite Icicle-Spell and maybe some darkness, anti-magic effect for the other arm.

 Chapter 193

    Back in Mundus we were back on the road, heading west. I was feeling a little under the weather, so to speak. Not the physical weather but the emotional turmoil within me was taking a toll. I had, since coming to Mundus, employed a strange mental separation between the mobs that were to be slaughtered for fun, EXP and profit and the beings that I considered just as alive as I was, even if they were born from electronic impulses.


    Cogito ergo sum, as the philosophers said, and after talking with Sigmir and sharing a mind with Lenore, denying that they were cognisant would be a joke. And that was without thinking about the deeper implications about my feelings for Sigmir. I had considered that mental separation before, but never quite managed to get my feelings and my logos, my thinking mind, to align. To do that, I would have to acknowledge that I was someone willing to sacrifice other, thinking beings, beings just like me and those I loved, to gain power. Because that was what we were doing, hunting others to strengthen ourselves.


    As I was considering that, Lenore suggested something for my consideration, she found my turmoil illogical but I had been aware of that. But her suggestion was to think about the thinking beings, the animals and such, that died every day in the real world to feed the vast society that she had glimpsed in my memories. I tried to reason internally that those were just, well, animals, raised for the explicit purpose of being slaughtered later, which helped.


    I had asked Lenore for her take on the whole affair, but to her, it was simply part and parcel of living, you had to eat and you either got more powerful or you would be food one day. While she felt it would be wasteful to slaughter beings that were too weak to add to our strength without provocation, she had absolutely no compunction against revenge, even preventive revenge, striking to make sure that enemies could not ready themselves.


    Curious, I asked the others about their opinions over the next few days.


    Rai¡¯s might be the easiest to understand. He simply considered the rest of the group and me in particular as the leaders, so if we said ¡°Kill¡±, he killed, if we said ¡°spare¡±, he spared. I considered it a bit of an emotional cop-out, simply saying ¡®I was just following orders.¡¯ but it was what it was.


    Sigmir was similar to Lenore in a few ways, to her it was about keeping her people, which primarily meant Ylva, Lenore and me, with Adra and Rai being of lesser importance to her. To do so, she needed power and to get power, she needed to kill. She felt no need to go after weaker beings but, like Lenore, she was happy to prevent potential problems from becoming actual problems.


    Finally, Adra considered for the longest time. She was seeking for something, her destined tree, as she called it. That tree would, one day, become part of her, allowing her to reproduce while sharing her powers and immortality. That meant she was looking for challenges, like the attack on the elder dryad Tegi, that had been a challenge, or the dungeon under the glacier, another challenge. Fights that didn¡¯t challenge her were boring, so she simply ignored them, until she needed to fight or it became challenging.


    Sadly, those ideas didn¡¯t help me to solve my own problem, so I spent a few days worrying until Lenore hit me with a thought I had not considered in such a direct manner. Her question had been how many lives would have to be at stake for me to consider sacrificing Sigmir. My instant answer, without thinking or considering had been that I would happily freeze over the world if it kept Sigmir safe. Lenore had simply laughed and told me that, if I wanted to have that choice, I would need to keep increasing my power, no matter what. When I considered that, I had to grant her point, unless I had the power to keep mine safe, I might lose Sigmir. And that was something I wouldn¡¯t let happen, even if I had to sacrifice children, cutting out their hearts. At least that was my initial reaction; whether I had the strength to stomach my convictions, the future would show.


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    That is not to say that I only debated the topic of morality during the week we travelled west, no I also studied the images from Kolyug¡¯s magic-store, discussing with Lenore what could be done with the information we found.


    What intrigued me the most was the mention of an item called Warding Orb. The description was a little vague but, unless I was grossly mistaken, it was essentially a spell formation carved into elemental crystals, for example Eternal Ice, that allowed to channel bursts of pure elemental energy from the orb. My idea was to circumvent the extreme volatility of Eternal Ice by substituting it for directly controlled Liquid Moonlight, it would reduce the punch of the item-turned-spell by a great deal, but it would allow me to attack without using runes for each spell.


    When I tried my idea, it sort-of worked, using a seven-rune circle of pure Liquid Moonlight, creating the substance and taking hold of it with my Ice Magic straight away. It took a lot of Astral Power to create a fist-sized orb but afterwards, I could send out thin streams, almost like beams, of Liquid Moonlight to attack, allowing for rapid attacks, spread almost as far as I wanted. My second attempt was an attempt to unleash the Liquid Moonlight all at once, creating an effect similar to the cone of cold I had used against the glacier-dungeon end boss and the result was promising. The range was a little short and there was no way I could use it with my allies in the line of fire but I could unleash the orb of Liquid Moonlight in a single burst, freezing everything in a one-hundred-twenty degree cone for a few meters.


    ¡°Do you think we can get to results between ¡®almost uncontrolled burst¡¯ and ¡®single-target shooting¡¯?¡± Lenore asked after that  experiment.


    It was a simple question but it gave me ideas, which made me happy.


    My first idea was to hold the orb over my head and just protect myself, creating a small explosion centered around me. The radius was roughly the same as with the cone-burst, maybe five meters and the power was reduced quite a bit, but nonetheless, I had something useful if I found myself surrounded. In memoriam of one of the most iconic spells in many-a-game, I named my new creation Frost Nova.


    The next was to try to combine the idea of the original beam-like shot and the cone, creating a lense-effect, basically allowing for limited cones that I could focus as I liked. For now, that part was a work-in-progress, with which I failed, even with Lenore¡¯s mental encouragement and her help. All in all, the experimentation netted some benefits, raising my Ice Magic to seventy-six and my Ice-Rune Mastery to sixty-nine.


    Otherwise, nothing exciting happened, no bandits, no dangerous animals, nothing. That made me write a report to Pantheon, stressing the importance of adding some content between the various strong-points. The world of Road to Purgatory was wonderful but, at least with the current number of players, it was simply too empty. We had covered hundreds of kilometers on the old, imperial road and I think we fought twice, if you can call it that. There had been a few villages near the road but even those hardly broke up the monotony of travel; maybe if you wanted to immerse yourself in their culture they would thaw to you, but to me - maybe because of my outsider-trait - the villagers were unwelcoming, answering with few words and little warmth. That left the landscape as selling point for travel, but while the landscape was beautifully crafted, it was slightly repetitive. After seeing a few thousand snow-covered trees, they become boring, no matter how magically the snow glitters in the night, no matter how romantic it would be to curl up with a significant other next to a nicely burning fire, watching the snow fall.


    There needed to be some excitement during travels or some way to cut the travel-times further, or people would simply leave. Sure, there was the social part of travelling with people you liked and I enjoyed travelling with my group, especially Sigmir. But still, sitting on horseback for hours on end, looking at the unchanging landscape took its toll. Hopefully, it was just in the far north like that, even in the real world, the area we had been travelling in was one of the places least touched by human hand.


    But after the week of travel, things suddenly changed, the snow-covered forests made way for windswept plains. They were covered in snow, just like the area we had been in, but the sheer emptiness made me slightly uncomfortable. At least, nobody would sneak up on us.

 Chapter 194

    Arriving at the border of the windswept steppe was a little strange. While I could see no reason for the sudden demarcation, it was certainly there. Within maybe a hundred meters, almost in a straight line, the pine-trees got smaller and misshapen, as if trying to stand against the wind was pushing them down. They gave way to brush, and then even that brush vanished, leaving us on an endless-seeming, white expanse. What gave me the willies was that the sky was cloudy and roughly the same colour as the snow, at least when it faded into the distance, taking away the normally clear demarcation between earth and horizon, making it look like the expanse was truly endless.


    ¡°Now, this is not creepy at all.¡± Sigmir noted, looking as disturbed as I felt.


    ¡°You can say that again. Adra, did you cross the plains on your way north?¡± I asked, curious.


    ¡°No, I passed further to the south - and right now, I¡¯m glad about that.¡± she answered and I could see Rai nod in agreement. All of us were used to having the forest give at least some cover, allowing to hide if it ever became necessary. But here, the only cover was the snow beneath us and that was of no help when it came to escaping from enemies.


    When I thought about that, I realised something else. Just because the land looked flat didn¡¯t mean it was; there was always the possibility that there were valley and depressions all around us, only covered by snow. Luckily, the magic of the old, imperial road somehow managed to keep snow from accumulating on it, which helped a great deal with navigation and prevented missteps. But if we left the road, I would lead, using my magic to make sure we didn¡¯t get swallowed by a snow-drift.


    ¡°We need to gather wood.¡± Sigmir announced, bringing up the task that was normally part of setting camp. It took me a second to realise that she was right, unless we started to dig into the snow, we would find no fuel for a fire, and a few days - or however long it took us to cross the frozen expanse - without any way to cook food or warm up would be uncomfortable for me and lethal for the others. And so, we spent the rest of the day on the outskirts of the plains, gathering wood and making sure we would be ready to enter the frozen desert before us. For a desert it was; one without sand or heat, but an area hostile to life nonetheless. Well, unless the life had adapted to it, and I had no doubt that there were some critters that loved it here - maybe something similar to the Querder we had fought before, digging through earth and snow as they hunted. That was a truly cheery thought that would certainly not give me nightmares later.


    Luckily, the night passed without incident and the next morning, we set out. Our magic bags filled with as much wood as we could cram into them, if we had too much, we could alway ditch it at a later date.


    After entering the steppe, the first couple of hours were spent in an even worse boredom than in the forest. There, we had to keep watch, making sure nothing was hiding behind the next tree, but here, where there were no trees nor any actual cover? That vigilance fell away, to be replaced by a feature that my gut told me I would come to hate. That feature was the wind, which was a constant feature blowing down from the north. It cut through my clothes, making me feel itchy, exposed and a little cold. For the others, it was worse; where I felt just a little cold and clammy, Rai looked like he would soon suffer from hypothermia. He was lacking the powerful cold-resistance bestowed upon Sigmir by her bond with Ylva, strengthened ever since Ylva had crossed the first divide or the fur that kept Adra warm in her changed shape.


    ¡°We should rest for some time!¡± I called out when I noticed that Rai seemed to be getting blue. The others seemed to be quite happy to get off their feet for some time and I certainly was happy to get off my mount, not that it was unpleasant, but even now, after a few hours, my backside was simply complaining about the exertion. And it was made worse by the wind, I felt like it was rubbing my body raw, just its mere existence.


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    That was when I realised that even without sitting on a mount, there was nothing to stop the wind. We could ask Elding and Hringur, our mounts, to block but even they didn¡¯t enjoy the harsh wind so I came up with a simpler solution.


    I was an Ice-Mage after all, so creating a rampart of Ice was easy for me, a semi-circle of ice that would protect us from the wind. As I raised it after anchoring it to the snow below, I instantly felt the wind tear and rip at it, trying to grind it away. And I had the feeling that the wind would manage. It wouldn¡¯t matter, I hadn¡¯t created the Ice in such a way that it would be permanent, as I did with my weapons, but simply created it casually, like I did with the Icicles I used to attack. Those lasted for a few hours before evaporating back into the Astral River.


    ¡°Rai, Adra, you two sit and warm each other.¡± I ordered, gently but firmly, causing both of them to blush while they huddled together with their back to the frozen dome, cuddling under a blanket.


    I had to hide a smile; the two of them, especially Rai, looked adorable. Not that Rai would have thanked me for that characterisation, but he looked so much like a puppy that was miserable after being left out in the cold for too long, that I had to strictly control myself. Adra looked less frozen but even she looked much happier watching Sigmir and me set up a fire from the warm cocoon she shared with Rai. Even I was somewhat happy about having a fire burning, adding some warmth and driving away the chill the wind had driven into even my body.


    Once the fire was nicely burning, I placed a pot filled with snow above it, letting the snow quickly melt into water before adding some crushed herbs I had bought in Kolyug, creating something that might be called tea. I drank it more for the taste, which was surprisingly good, but I could see that the others were incredibly happy to have something hot to warm their insides.


    If there had been anyone looking on from the outside, I had no doubt that we looked quite cozy, I had expanded the ice, keeping the wind out and some of the warmth in, making it almost an igloo, just created from slightly opaque ice instead of snow, and on one side, Rai and Adra were sharing warmth under a blanket, on the other side, Sigmir and I were cuddling for warmth and enjoyment, with Ylva wrapped around us, substituting the blanket. Lenore had declined to leave her Hallow, even though she had some interest in the seemingly endless wind around us. I was not quite sure, but I had a feeling that there was something magical in the air, similar to the taste of the air in after we had left the glacier dungeon. It was a different flavour, but the texture was reminiscent of that.


    ¡°Do you think the wind is natural?¡± I asked the others, specifically looking at Adra.


    ¡°Could be.¡± she answered with a small shiver. ¡°But if it isn¡¯t, would you want to meet what¡¯s causing it? I¡¯ll be honest with you, I don¡¯t want to challenge a dragon - the stupid Infernal Bear was bad enough.¡±


    I chuckled at that, amused that she was considering me that reckless. ¡°Don¡¯t worry, I don¡¯t plan to challenge such a being just yet. Maybe once we all are much more powerful.¡± I answered with a smirk, before continuing. ¡°No, I don¡¯t think that whatever is causing the winds is still present.¡±


    Adra interrupted me, eyes wide. ¡°You think it might be an artifact?¡±


    ¡°I was thinking more of a place of wild magic, some leftover from a long forgotten battle. You think an artifact might be responsible?¡± I would love to study something that powerful, even if only from afar, the few true artifacts I had seen were rather unwieldy after all. Kolyug and the old, imperial road were marvels of magic but I could only ever look at a small part of the whole, making more than very superficial observations impossible.


    ¡°Dear, I doubt that such an artifact would be unguarded. If it were easy to acquire it, it would have been taken long ago.¡± Sigmir stopped me before I was too enamoured with the idea to go artifact hunting.


    ¡°I wasn¡¯t thinking about that.¡± I lied, embarrassed at my reckless reaction.


    ¡°Sure you were not. That sparkle in your eyes, that must have been for some other reason.¡± Adra laughed.


    ¡°It so was. I was just thinking about giving Sigmir a kiss.¡± I retorted before doing just that, causing the other two to giggle. No artifact was worth enough to consider risking my dear for it, that I knew.

 Chapter 195

    We finished our rest, refreshed and warmed up, not quite looking forward to the next leg of our journey but it was also not looking as bleak as before. We had just left the igloo I had conjured up when I noticed the snow beneath us shift and shake a little, as if there was a small, localised earthquake below us.


    ¡°Watch out, I think we¡¯ve got incoming!¡± I called out, causing the others to look around in alarm. Preparing for the confrontation, I quickly drew the runes for Liquid Moonlight, letting an orb of it coalesce above my hand, while trying to get a better feeling for the shaking, where it came from and maybe what it was caused by. Sadly, It felt as if the shaking was coming from all around us, not either from one gigantic source, which I doubted, or from a lot of sources. I was about to suggest evasion when the first of our foes showed its ugly head. And an ugly head it was. Rai must have felt it just in time, he suddenly leapt aside, right before a pair of mandibles burst from the snow beneath him, followed by an unholy cross between an ant, a spider and a crab. My first reaction, despite my dislike for flames, was to kill it with fire. The next few ideas popping in my head all had to do with ending the creature, as quickly as possible and as violently as necessary.


    I had the presence of mind to observe it and was not too happy with the result.


    <table><tbody><tr><td>Ankheg, level 56 </td></tr></tbody></table>


    I had no idea what an Ankheg was supposed to be, but it looked vicious. Not because of its size - the Ankheg was only the size of a medium-sized dog - but because everything about its brown-grey body spoke of violent predation.


    There was the pair of mandibles that had tried to grab Rai, serrated to ensure that prey couldn¡¯t escape and leading towards a maw filled with more sharp teeth. It had six legs, all seemingly ending in sharp points - maybe to allow it to keep its grip on frozen ground, or maybe to impale weary travellers - and two arms, ending in crab-like claws, that looked made to grab onto prey and tear it apart. Or maybe to quickly burrow through earth and snow, but their first purpose seemed to be as weapons.


    I felt the snow still trembling, so I called out an additional warning, just so that nobody would become complacent, now that we saw the enemy. Just seconds after that first Ankheg had tried to strike Rai, another tried for Adra and a last one forced me into a hurried dodge, almost making me lose the orb of Liquid Moonlight, which would have had unpredictable consequences. I would have to find those out at some point, but for now, we had enemies to fight.


    I felt more than saw Sigmir use her red aura before she interposed herself between the monster and me, roaring out a challenge to get the attention of as many of them as possible. Ylva was next to her, guarding her back and making sure that nothing would get to her from behind. Our usual formation would be centered around her, as a bulwark to keep our enemies at bay, with the rest of us essentially hiding behind her. Here, that wouldn¡¯t quite work; not only were our enemies all around us, the snow was still shaking, hinting at more enemies beneath us. In this case, Adra and Rai were trying to herd the Ankhegs towards Sigmir, using her steady presence as an anvil to smash the monsters to pieces.


    I was still kneeling in the snow after my hasty dodge and decided to be careful in my counterattack - there was still room for massive blasts of magic later, if such became necessary. My first move was a defensive one, using the abundant snow to raise a thin column, only about a meter high but it would make it impossible for one of those things to sneak up on me.


    With my own position secured, I started to attack. As I had practised, I unleashed thin bolts of Liquid Moonlight, trying to hit their leg-joints in an attempt to limit their mobility. I had considered trying for something more damaging, but their exoskeletons looked like they would shrug off most of my attacks and I had a feeling that simply using cold would be foolish; anything surviving in the frozen north would have at least some cold-resistance.


    The blasts worked like a charm, their lack of mass allowed me to shoot them with an incredible velocity, making dodging next to impossible, but of course, it also limited the damage I could cause. But I was not after damage, what I was after was control. The Liquid Moonlight hit their joints and instantly hardened into something similar to my magical ice. I had no doubt that, given time and appropriate leverage, the Ankhags could break the ice freezing their joints, but until they managed that, the others had a far easier time.


    After I had frozen up two legs of one Ankhag, Sigmir managed to knock that one onto its back with a well-timed shield bash, and once it was prone, she hacked into it without mercy, the chitinous armour obviously far weaker on their belly. Seeing her success, I focused on the one that was herded by Adra, freezing joints, allowing her to use her spear as a lever to flip it over. Once I was sure that she had it under control, I set out to help Rai.


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    Sadly, while I had hindered two or three legs of the three Ankhags that had attacked at first, three more had tried to get at the others from beneath, forcing them to dodge.


    I took stock for a moment, when I noticed that one of the Ankhags looked slightly larger than the others and was acting, for lack of better word, strange. Now, every one of those monsters seemed strange to me, but there was something that bugged me about that particular bug, so I kept an eye on it, maybe because it carefully stayed back, looking at the fight from the distance. I used Observe on it, but I got no more information than that it was an Ankhag and level sixty-one.


    Despite its existence, I shot a few more bolts into the melee that had developed between the Ankhags and the rest of my party, trying to limit their mobility. But, knowing that I only had limited power left in my orb, I held back, watching my companions fight. Sigmir, Ylva and Adra showed in stark clarity why the first divide was, well, a dividing line.


    Sigmir was strong and durable enough to simply shrug off most of the attacks directed at her, either by relying on her shield or by deflecting most of the force, letting her armour and body endure the rest. There were a few bloody scratches that told of that tactic but the deep gashes she had smashed into the chitinous armour of the Ankhegs showed the difference in effect.


    Ylva had a worse match-up, lacking the armour and shield, figthing mostly behind Sigmir, but as I watched, she darted out, her jaws clamping down on the leg of an Ankheg before she ripped it off with a sudden shake of her head, leaving a wound leaking ichor.


    Lasty, Adra, was using her mobility and reach to stay out of their reach, trying to stab at openings while moving backwards.


    Rai was trying something similar to Adra but he was worse off, not only was he far weaker but his weapons lacked the reach to attack without risking counter-attacks. But he did me and my teachings proud, swiftly darting in, using one blade to deflect the monster¡¯s attack before trying to get a precise strike into the gaps of their armoured bodies. Despite the fact that the monster he was fighting was higher-level than him, I had no doubt that he would win, unless someone interrupted their fight.


    ¡°Watch out!¡± Lenore warned me, drawing my attention back to the solitary Ankhag that had reared back its ugly head. I wasn¡¯t sure why, but it reminded me of the few monsters that had some sort of breath-attack, about to be unleashed. My reaction was a simple one, I let the rest of Liquid Moonlight fly as a beam towards its maw, hoping to stop the attack. I was just a little late, but only just.


    The silvery-white stream of Liquid Moonlight met with the neon-green stream the monster had spit out, causing a strange effect. I would have expected some sort of violent clash but that was not what happened. It looked almost as if the neon-greep goop the monster had spit was boiling, causing snowflakes to be expelled. Saying that I was confused would be putting it mildly but I had little time to consider the strangeness of the phenomena I was witnessing.


    Before I had struck against the spit-attack, I had already used quite a lot of my Liquid Moonlight, mostly depleting the orb I had conjured at the beginning, so I was not too surprised when the goop-attack was still ongoing when my stream of Liquid Moonlight was depleted. But I had managed to get enough time for the others to get out of the way, hiding behind Sigmir who had taken a knee to increase the area her shield covered. No matter how the Ankhag tried, it was unable to get more than a few splatters past her shield, which I saw as a win.


    Seeing its trump-card be so solidly defeated, the Ankhag let out a screeching scream and, with surprising speed, started to dig back into the ground, either retreating or fleeing. I felt anger boil up in me, that thing had tried to attack us and now it wanted to flee?! Not on my watch!


    I activated Overflow and used the entirety of my remaining Astral Power in a single burst, forcing as much of the snow and ice around us under my control and smashing it together in a single point, right where the Ankhag was trying to get away. In the second I had taken, about half its body had vanished when an avalanche of snow smashed against it, crushing it with unrelenting power. I was quite lucky that I was already on my knees or I would have fallen over - moving such amounts of Astral Power was physically draining - but feeling the annoying bug being squashed was well worth it. The other bugs had similarly tried to get away but the combination of frozen limbs and the attacks of Sigmir, Rai and Adra had prevented that.


    <table><tbody><tr><td>Ankhag died</td></tr><tr><td>You gain 2250 EXP.</td></tr><tr><td> For killing an opponent without a Traveller in your party, you gain Bonus EXP</td></tr><tr><td>.</td></tr><tr><td>.</td></tr><tr><td>.</td></tr><tr><td>Ankhag died</td></tr><tr><td>You gain 2250 EXP.</td></tr><tr><td> For killing an opponent without a Traveller in your party, you gain Bonus EXP</td></tr></tbody></table>


    <table><tbody><tr><td> You reached Level 61. </td></tr></tbody></table>


    <table><tbody><tr><td>Skill increased </td></tr><tr><td>You increased your skill: Ice Magic [77/100]</td></tr></tbody></table>


    After a quick look into the log, I joined the others and while I looked at the few scratches they had suffered we discussed if we wanted to take those things apart, for food or material. We decided against it, even if the idea to extract the goop that turned out to be a strange acid that, for some reason, didn¡¯t dissolve snow but there was some damage on the wooden parts of Sigmir¡¯s shield.


    What clinched it was that I still felt a slight vibration in the snow, so we quickly made our get-away, not wanting to fight more of these monsters.

 Chapter 196

    After fighting with the Ankhegs, we quickly left the scene, not wanting to face more of the creatures. While they were not a big problem in a small group, as we had just faced, I had that creepy feeling that they were more like ants and images of being swarmed by hundreds, maybe thousands, of dog-sized insectoid monsters, looking to devour our flesh were quite effective in spurring us on.


    It was only when dusk forced us to slow down that we did and, for a moment, I was considering the best way to make sure we wouldn¡¯t be attacked during the night. Ultimately, my solution was probably overkill but I was having an itching sensation between my shoulders, driving me to extremes. The cold, cutting wind didn¡¯t help my mood any, making me irritated and slightly paranoid.


    The space we chose to rest was nothing special, the flat land around us wasn¡¯t showing any good spots to rest anyway, so we simply choose one at random, where I worked my magic. Copious amounts of magic allowed me to conjure small pillars of ice, set in two circles around one slightly larger central pillar. The whole construction wasn¡¯t too large, the diameter of the outer circle was maybe four meters and had twelve pillars, the middle circle was maybe two meters in diameter with six pillars and the center pillar was about a meter in diameter. The other pillars were only half that, and about as high as wide. Once the pillars were constructed, I needed to regenerate Astral Power before continuing my construction. The others looked at me with a mix of disbelief and awe, especially once I started again.


    The next part of my work was a solid sheet of ice to lay on the pillars, and into that sheet, I placed a warding rune that I had learned some time ago from the book the Grandmother had given me. I had to inlay the rune in my own blood, something I gladly gave for a night of secure sleep, as it would alert me if the sheet was disturbed. The final step was to add a round ceiling to the construction, keeping the wind out and the warmth in. I even remembered to add a hole above the middle, allowing the smoke to leave.. In essence, I had set an icy igloo on a set of pillars, making sure that no monster was digging through the floor the get at us.


    The construction had taken me about half an hour, time the others had spent huddled together after I had told them not to start a fire yet, knowing I wanted it inside my construction. When I put the finishing touches, namely a small ladder that allowed us easy entry to the opening in the dome, their expressions had mostly recovered but there was still some awe left. I had, after all, just pulled a small building from the air - granted, it was only a single room but still, it would allow us to rest in peace. And just as I thought that, I forcibly erased the thoughts that came unbidden with that idea.


    Once we were inside, I quickly closed up the opening with a small plug made from ice, easily removable from the inside but less easy from the outside. When I thought about the fire we wanted, I added a bowl, or maybe calling it a brazier would be better, slightly higher than the floor and made fully from Hard Ice. I was curious how the ostensibly stronger material would fare against a normal fire and how it would melt. Would it be water or something different?


    I even added small chains hanging from the opening above, allowing us to hang up our pot so we could cook a nice stew. Soon, we were quite comfortable, the temperature high enough that I had shed most of my clothes, instead snuggling with Sigmir for warmth. Yes, lying in her arms, watching the stars through the small air-hole was definitely for warmth and no other purpose. Rai and Adra were also quite cozy, I was curious if they were merely together for warmth and companionship or if there was more. But I could hardly just ask, such a thing would be supremely uncomfortable and awkward in the real world, never mind here with the different social norms. What if even insinuating that they were in a relationship was something akin to asking someone back home if they were having a sexual relationship with their dog? I doubted that such extreme prejudice existed but I simply didn¡¯t know. They were two distinctly different species after all, so there might be some idea about continuing lineages and such. I doubted that a dryad who, according to my current understanding of magical biology, reproduced by essentially merging with a tree and, well, playing the pollen and bee-game afterwards, could mate with a beastman who I was quite sure was, biologically speaking, quite boringly, reproducing like any other mammal.


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    ¡°What has you so deep it thought, dear?¡± Sigmir asked, startling me from my ruminations and causing me to brightly blush. There was no way I could explain how I was thinking about the mating habits for our companions, I would risk melting the igloo with the heat of my blush.


    ¡°Nothing important. I was just wondering if I should have made two igloos.¡± I answered, quickly coming up with a good excuse that covered my sudden blush. It was quite successful, as Sigmir blushed almost as red as I did, showing that she understood my intent perfectly well. And it was true, while Sigmir and I happily cuddled together even when Rai and Adra were mere meters away, neither of us was interested in putting on a show for them.


    Shaking off those thoughts and desires, I got up. Sigmir looked at me questioning and I told her what I was planning.


    ¡°The whole day, I felt that there was something in the wind, something magical. I hoped to maybe find out a little more, now that we are resting here.¡±


    Rai and Adra shuddered, either labelling me an idiot for going out into the cold wind or feeling jealous that I could do so without suffering overmuch for it.


    I crawled out the hole after knocking the icy plug down, carefully closing it after me. For me, the plug was no obstacle, it was made with the power of my magic after all, so I had control over it. Outside, I instantly felt the cold and icy wind dance around me, blowing in from the north.


    Walking a quarter of the way around the igloo, I stood, facing directly into the wind and closed my eyes. I remembered the times I had danced with the storm, letting the wind play around me and even merge with it, to influence it but at the same time get influenced by it. I was not certain I wanted to try that here, not with the unknown power riding the wind. I remembered far too well how Lenore had used the wind of her wings to carry death to the single surviving bandit. While the wind alone was not enough to harm, if I merged with it, that might change. Instead, I simply let myself breathe, tasting the air in my mouth, smelling it with my nose.


    I stood there, for a minute or an hour, I don¡¯t know, slowly breathing the air and trying to make sense of the sensation I was having. I was quite certain that I was feeling something, was smelling something, but what? That I simply didn¡¯t know.


    Lenore had watched my actions from the back of my mind, letting me use my own senses which were better at subtle detection but not as good as her sight when it came to the bigger picture.


    I felt her focus her sight, staring out of her Hallow into the world but, other than the igloo behind us, there was no magic to be seen.


    ¡°You have that feeling as well, don¡¯t you?¡± I asked, knowing the answer before I had finished the question.


    ¡°Yes, something¡¯s out there.¡± she agreed, the two of us still staring into the darkness.


    I felt the curiosity bubble around in me, I wanted to know what was out there. Maybe it wouldn¡¯t be such a bad idea to try merging my mind into the wind - I had managed to survive when the wind raptors had thrown their magical murder ritual against me, hadn¡¯t I? That had even boosted my powers to use rituals directing my magic.


    I closed my eyes back up, slowly moving with the wind, ignoring Lenore¡¯s surprised squak but she was just as curious as I was. Slowly at first, tentative and maybe a little skittish, I started to dance with the wind¡¯s caress. What had felt biting and irritating before was now feeling softer, less harsh, almost gentle, emboldening me to continue.


    I felt myself start to rise above my body, ready to ride the wind, dance on the updrafts and race with it over the frozen earth.


    And suddenly, I felt something else, something powerful.


    I think I heard a scream, carried away by the wind.


    I think I felt pain.


    And then, I felt nothing more, as darkness claimed me.

 Chapter 197

    I woke up slowly, clawing my way back to consciousness. The first sensation assaulting me was pain. I felt as if someone had opened a construction-side, complete with jackhammers and heavy machinery in my head and now they were working away, trying to dig a tunnel from my forehead to my spine. For some time, that was the only thing that I felt, my whole being dominated by pain. Finally, I managed to get a bit of a grip on the pain, managing to subdue it a little, allowing me to notice the sounds that were tickling my ears. I internally smiled, it was progress, even if I had no strength to open my eyes, I was able to hear.


    ¡°Will she be alright?¡± it was Sigmir¡¯s voice, nearby and she sounded stressed, maybe even a little defeated.


    ¡°I think so. I¡¯m no great shakes as a healer, I mainly managed to channel some Astral Power into her, hopefully where it would help. But without any idea what she¡¯s done now, I have no idea where even to begin to treat her.¡± a second voice, Adra¡¯s, responded, sounding tired.


    ¡°It has been hours!¡± Sigmir¡¯s voice snarled, almost scolding. ¡°Why isn¡¯t she waking up?!¡±


    ¡°I just don¡¯t know.¡± Adra answered.


    ¡°Peace, Sigmir. Snapping at your friends won¡¯t help. I can feel Lenore in there, but she too, seems to be unconscious.¡± a barking sound answered but I could understand it. It had to be Ylva, talking to Sigmir, who would be the only one able to understand, other than me, thanks to Lenore¡¯s ability. The sound woke up a second sense, my sense of touch, thanks to the rumbling vibrations from the cushion I had been lying on. Only that it wasn¡¯t a cushion, it was Ylva in all her furry glory.


    Things got silent after that and I hung there on the edge of consciousness, resting for a bit before I resumed my struggle to get awake. After some time, I felt a ticking somewhere in the back of my mind, where there was no pain and I reached out to it, soon feeling the familiar sensation of my mental connection with Lenore establish itself. The first thing coming over the connection was a pained caw, but just knowing that she was there filled me with new strength and I started to fight again, drawing strength from her while sending strength back.


    ¡°Something¡¯s happening.¡± I heard Ylva bark, giving me even more motivation.


    ¡°What are you doing?!¡± Adra¡¯s voice sounded panicked and suddenly, I felt something flow into me from the outside, a raw and unbridled energy. As it was flowing into me, I felt as if someone had mistaken my body with a plug and stuck me into an electric outlet, an itching, burning sensation spreading out all over me, making me move. I felt my eyes open, almost bugging out of my skull and, for a moment, I took in my surroundings. I was in the igloo, with Ylva laying against the circular wall while Adra and Rai hovered nearby. Then, my vision was cut off when a heavy body slumped onto me, almost burying me.


    I panicked for a split-second until I realised it was Sigmir. I tried moving, my limbs still burning with the energy that had been poured into me, until I noticed that Sigmir was completely limp, her breathing shallow. Now, the panic was back in force. My mind was still too raw to use my magic, but Adra and Rai must have noticed that something was wrong turning Sigmir to her side, allowing me some room to move. As I did, I realised that my arms were encased in the same crimson energy that flowed around Sigmir when she was seriously fighting. I tried to keep still, but felt myself shake with energy, urging me to move, to battle. Battle what? That I didn¡¯t know, something, anything.


    ¡°What happened?!¡± I asked, my voice coming far faster than normal.


    ¡°Sigmir - she did something.¡± Rai answered and I felt a sudden surge of anger at the useless answer. Even I could see that she had done ¡®something¡¯ but that didn¡¯t help me. I just managed to tamp down on my anger before I could do something I would regret later, like gutting Rai for his useless answer and heard a noise in the back of my mind.


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    ¡°Control yourself!¡± It was Lenore, calling from her Hallow and she managed to get through the red fog in my head. ¡°Don¡¯t you see that Sigmir needs you?¡±


    Her question cleared the remaining for out in a hurry and I focused on my Sigmir, pushing all distractions away. My magic seemed far away, almost out of reach, so I simply reached out with my hand, feeling her pulse. What I felt caused my blood to run cold, fear suddenly heavy in my stomach. Her pulse was rapid but I couldn¡¯t make out a rhythm, it was pure chaos. Her colour was pale, making her look like a ghost.


    I had no real idea what was wrong with her, but just from the symptoms I was afraid. Afraid that she was dying because she had tried to help me, after I had done something stupid.


    I needed more access to her, so I pushed her onto her back, reaching out with my hand again, trying to remember what to do when someone had a heart attack. Not that I truly knew what I was doing, but unless I managed to reach my magic, I was helpless. Again, I reached for my magic, trying to get at it despite the fog that had settled back in my mind, heightening my emotions and making me almost hysteric.


    I needed something to focus on, something physical that allowed me to work, despite the distractions. Before I had finished that thought, I had my athame in hand and rammed it into my other hand, the suppen spike of pain causing me to curse, but allowing me to focus. Before that feeling of clarity faded, I pulled the blade from my wound, knowing that blood was an effective medium to transfer magic and placed my hand on Sigmir¡¯s skin, in this case simply grabbing her throat, as it gave me the maximum skin-contact.


    From there, i sent my magic into her body, feeling her heart beat, feeling her blood race but it was not right. The heart was beating too fast and the chaotic rhythm made it all wrong. It was like someone was playing a song, only that half the band had started too late and was now trying to play it as normal, shattering the harmonies, turning music into pure noise. Just that the music in this case was Sigmir¡¯s life and the noise would soon cause complete failure.


    And that was not acceptable! If Death wanted to have her, he could damn well get in line, she was mine and I would not give her up, neither to Death nor to Gods or her Ancestors.


    I felt Lenore push through the haze that I barely managed to keep from my mind, push on despite the pain, and I welcomed her help with open arms. Our thoughts merged and once again, the line between us blurred.


    We had the idea to use our own pulse, the pulse of our physical body, as a metronome to bring order to the chaos. Part of our attention was split off, to ensure that the problematic elements in our joined magic, the Ice-Element from Morgana and the Death-Element from Lenore, would not harm her, while we were trying to help her.


    Our magic surged into Sigmir, flowing from my bloody hand into her skin, from her skin into her blood and with the blood to her heart. Lenore and I felt our pulse and focused on the idea to synchronize Sigmir¡¯s beat with ours. There was a bit of resistance, as if her heart was trying to resist the beat but then, as if something between us broke, our hearts synchronised. Literally.


    It was a strange sensation, reminding me of the soul-merge we had performed with the Grandmother¡¯s assistance to heal Sigmir. And it was not just magic that surged, the magic carried something else with it. For a split-second, barely enough to understand what I was seeing, I was back in Sigmir¡¯s soul, only that there was not just the mountain, there was more. In that moment, I saw the moon in the sky, felt a cold wind blowing around us.


    Then the world lurched and I was back in the normal world, my Avatar-state forcibly ended. I felt Lenore leave her Hallow, looking ruffled but far more important was that Sigmir¡¯s eyes fluttered open, causing not just a stone but a whole avalanche to drop from my heart.


    ¡°Thank the stars¡­¡± I muttered, feeling exhaustion settle around me.


    But there was something far more important than sleep could ever be.


    ¡°Don¡¯t ever try to leave me again!¡± I softly told Sigmir before pressing a kiss to her lips.

 Chapter 198

    When I woke up in the morning, my body felt as if I had tried to block an avalanche, only to be buried by it. While there were no outward markings anywhere, I felt as if I had bruises on my bruises, or maybe as if I had run a few marathons, back to back. Everything hurt.


    The night before, after I had managed to get Sigmir¡¯s heart beating in a steady rhythm, we had exchanged just a few words before falling into a deep sleep, still clinging to each other, as if the other was the only thing keeping us from drowning.


    Now, in the morning, I was quite happy to look into her face, trying to keep myself from thinking how close it had been. It was no great intellectual challenge to understand what had happened, I was quite sure that, once Ylva had noticed me coming back from the depths of unconsciousness, Sigmir had somehow channelled her own aura into my body, giving me the physical jolt that pushed me back to consciousness. But her aura was not supposed to be used that way - it was merely a way to strengthen her own body. When we had overcharged it, during the fight against the elemental-boss in the glacier-dungeon, she had paid the price for it in physical exhaustion and pain, just like I was doing now. But forcing the power out of her own body had cost her, thus the collapse afterwards.


    The question of why she had done it was even easier to answer, I had messed up, badly. I knew that she was taking her word seriously, never mind her sworn oath. I had to face it, the dangers when I recklessly experimented with magic were not limited to myself, Sigmir was just as much as risk as I was. Part of me wanted to scold her, to make sure she wouldn¡¯t try something that reckless again, but I knew it would be pointless. She was stubborn enough to give a rock lessons and she had given her oath to protect me, even if I did something stupid. Or if I hurt myself. And she would try to help me, even if it meant killing herself. As her actions the night before had shown.


    I would have to do better, be better, or I would lose her. Not to outside influence or actions, but because my own recklessness or stupidity killed her.


    And that was not acceptable.


    I kept watching the light play over Sigmir¡¯s features, enjoying the way the morning sun refracted in the thick ice that made up the igloo we were in. It was fascinating, in these last months that I had spent in Mundus, I had had more contact with Ice and Snow than in the entirety of my life before, and still there were things that surprised and awed me. At its base, it was merely frozen water, but with the help of the sun, it turned into a spectacle of glittering light, worthy to decorate even the mightiest cathedrals.


    There was a lesson there, a lesson about seeing your surroundings for what they were, about not letting familiarity breed contempt. Even in something as simple as the Ice I had conjured for our nightly shelter, for a simple place to hide us from the wind, there was beauty.


    I gently caressed Sigmir¡¯s face, trying to memorise every contour, every edge of her sharp features, even the small, tiny, imperfections that marred her complexion, reminders of a past spent in the great, cold, outdoors.


    Not wanting to wake her, not after my foolishness last night, I looked up, checking up on the rest of my group, my friends.


    Adra and Rai had cuddled up, not quite as close as Sigmir and I, but sharing a blanket and a closeness that I thought was more than just for warmth. I had to smile at that, they were a slightly unlikely pair, but I was happy for them to have found some warmth. I was less worried about Adra; she was strong, both mentally and physically, having managed to shrug off nearly getting sacrificed by her own species and soon after turning around and hunting those people down with little remorse. But maybe she simply didn¡¯t care about species, simply dividing the world into friends and others, or some other groups. But even before that, she had set out alone, to find her place in the world.


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    Rai on the other hand, I worried about him. If I wanted to keep my word, I needed to train him, to make him truly strong. The funny thing was, to me, keeping my word mattered little. I hardly cared what some village somewhere in Mundus thought about me, I wouldn¡¯t care even if I were to live permanently here, not just as a travelling visitor. But Sigmir, she cared, she thought in such concepts as honour and keeping one¡¯s word. For her, it was important and I had a feeling that she would be greatly disappointed it I didn¡¯t live up to my word. So, I had to train Rai. I would have to step up that part, we had practised practically every day after dinner but only for a short time, I would step that up and come up with some exercises to train up his magic.


    Next, my gaze settled upon Ylva and Lenore, the two of them an almost comical picture. Lenore was sitting her head tucking into her feathers, the bone-white feathers starkly standing out in the contrast, and Ylva had almost wrapped herself around her smaller friend. The two of them were an even less likely pair now than when we had started out together, Ylva¡¯s form, after crossing the first divide, was all about physical strength, especially thanks to the divine bloodline I had extracted for her. She had absorbed it, but as of yet, I had no idea what effect it truly had.


    Lenore on the other hand had evolved in the opposite direction, her physical attributes only slightly enhanced by crossing the divide but her magical aptitude had soared. After the fight in the village, if you could call our massacring of it that, we had discussed what she could do. It seemed that now, she had something similar to my runic mastery, only for death and wind. As she was unable to simply draw them, her way of using runes was more akin to the way I used them in my normal magic, holding them in mind to anchor a concept.


    She must have felt my attention, or maybe she simply woke up, ruffling her feather for a moment before stretching her wings and looking over to me. I felt her mind reach out and we made the connection, allowing us to talk without disturbing the others.


    ¡°Good morning. We were foolish, yesterday.¡± I stated, contrition flooding over our bond.


    ¡°Good morning to you, too. And I agree. How is Sigmir?¡± came the answer and I could tell that Lenore felt similarly guilty to me. We both had been too curious and almost suffered the same fate as the cat.


    ¡°Not yet awake. But I¡¯m relatively sure she suffered no lasting ill effects, this time. There can¡¯t be another!¡± I strongly stated, making sure that Lenore knew of my conviction. No more reckless ¡®let¡¯s see what happens¡¯ experiments with magic. Every experiment, from now on, would have to be carefully planned and if we were unable to plan some sort of protection, I would refrain from experimenting, especially when it came to things I didn¡¯t understand in the slightest, like powerful, ancient magic that seemed to influence a whole region.


    Lenore cooked her head, as she often did, and just looked at me questioning.


    ¡°I want you to help me; remind me that this can be the result if I¡¯m reckless again. I will try to be better but I¡¯m not sure I can rein in my curiosity at all times. So, I ask you, my dear friend and partner in crime, to hold me back.¡± I continued, causing her to laugh over our connection, but I felt her agreement within the laughter.


    I looked back down, into Sigmir¡¯s face, once again engraving her features in my mind and wondering what I had done to deserve her company. Somewhere, deep inside, I wondered if I truly did, she had shown just the night before how much importance she placed on my wellbeing. More than on her own, that was certain.


    It was a sobering realisation, knowing that my own wellbeing was no longer just my concern, if I hurt, or got hurt, Sigmir would blame herself, causing herself more pain than I could likely imagine. I would have to make sure that I took just as much care of myself, as I would take care of her. I had to giggle at that thought, that we both were willing to go further for the others wellbeing, take more care to keep the other from harm, than we were when it came to ourself. For me, it was likely because, no matter how much time I spent in Mundus, it was just an avatar I was controlling, not truly me. But for Sigmir? It boggled my mind.


    I pressed another soft kiss to her forehead and stood, training my sneak-skill in a new way: Preparing breakfast without waking anyone.

 Chapter 199

    ¡°Wake up, sleepyhead.¡± I softly pressed a kiss to Sigmir¡¯s forehead, causing her to mumble in her sleep. While she was incredibly adorable, I worried that the events of the night before had caused lingering damage, as she was normally not one for staying in bed alone. I added a second kiss to the first, while stretching my magical senses into her body, looking for damages. The only thing I found was that her muscles seemed to be in a state similar to mine, sore and tired, but that was something I didn¡¯t want to cure with magic, for fear of making the problem worse.


    My second kiss had done the trick and Sigmir¡¯s eyes fluttered open, a gentle smile appearing on her face the instant she focused on me.


    ¡°Breakfast is ready. We¡¯ll talk later.¡± I whispered into her ear. While I was planning to apologize to her, once again, I wanted, needed, to impress upon her that I valued her well-being higher than my own. I doubted that it would change anything - I had tried before - but that didn¡¯t change my need to try. She nodded, wished me a good morning, and let herself be pulled into a seating position, groaning when her muscles were forced to move.


    While I handed out food, I asked her if she was able to handle the day¡¯s travel and, to absolutely nobody¡¯s surprise, she instantly told me that she was able to handle it. I had no doubt that she was planning to force herself, not admitting to such mortal things as ¡®weakness¡¯ unless it was a mortal wound and she was in the process of dying, her stubbornness spurring her onwards.


    I considered making it a day of walking, but decided against it, simply stating that we would stay in our igloo for the day. My poker-face almost slipped when not only I purposefully missed the expression of relief that flashed over Sigmir¡¯s face, but Adra and Rai did as well. Pride, such an interesting idea. I personally didn¡¯t feel a need to play such games, but it seemed to make Sigmir feel better.


    ¡°Rai, why don¡¯t you show Sigmir the second form I taught you. I think it would be good for her to stretch her body after breakfast.¡± I gently suggested, making plans for the day. Resting would do us all good, even if it prolonged the time we spent on the harsh, windswept plains.


    ¡°What are you planning?¡± Adra asked, curious. Everyone in the group knew that I would normally jump at any chance to spend time with Sigmir but now, I was making my disciple do so.


    ¡°I plan to add to our igloo. If we spent the day and a second night, I want more than a single room. Luckily, using Ice-Magic is easy in the cold environment we are in.¡± I vaguely explained, not certain what I would actually do. The easiest way would be to mirror the igloo, making two round chambers connected together by a small hallway, which would also contain the exit, but that was boring. It would take about half an hour and then I¡¯d be done. I was planning to spent quite some time in the real world, but still, I wanted to craft something more, something grand.


    During breakfast, I considered different structures, from raising a tower, possibly the most stereotypical mage-building out there, or maybe creating some sort of rounded, multi-chambered and storied, avant-garde igloo-artwork, marrying ice-sculpting with some bubble-design straight out of science-fiction. While it would be fun and a serious challenge to get stable, it seemed pointless for a time-limited shelter. And more rooms meant more wood to be burned, at least if Rai and Adra wanted to be comfortable. Sigmir and I could simply share warmth, maybe have Ylva join us, she was a great cushion and heat-source.


    In the end, when we finished breakfast, I made my decision, heading outside to make it into reality. Sigmir and Rai were hot on my heels, planning to do the forms I had instructed Rai to show her.


    ¡°Give me a moment.¡± I asked the two of them, before starting my magic. Lenore had joined me and was curious whether what I was planning would actually work. It was both easy and difficult. Easy, because it was something I had done before, a few times at that. Difficult because it was on a far larger scale.


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    I walked around the igloo, making an ellipse that would allow me to go with my first idea, mirroring the igloo, but I wanted to do one more thing. As I walked, I created tracks of Ice, making a runic formation, not in a circle, as normal, but in an ellipse. That was the first challenge: would the distorted formation work like a normal one?


    Once six runes were placed, I stepped into the center and sat down to regenerate Astral Power, closing my eyes and feeling all six runes around me, imprinting the formation into my mind. It was not yet complete, but it would be, soon.


    Letting out a long breath that misted in the cold air, I raised my athame, channelling power through the crystal in the handle and creating another Ice-rune above me, completing the formation with the six others around me. The one in the middle was the center, the control, and the last to be placed.


    With the formation complete, I started to slowly channel power into it, becoming little more than a conduit for the Astral River, letting it flow through me and into the formation. As I stood there, seconds felt like minutes, minutes like hours. It was exhausting, both mentally and physically, the wind not helping my endeavour. But soon, the wind was blocked, making me smile.


    Finally, after almost an hour of constant channelling, I felt something click in my mind and knew that I had been successful, allowing me to return to the world around me. My plan had worked: around the igloo, a slightly opaque wall stood, two and a half meters in height, blocking the annoying wind from coming inside.


    There was more to do, but I wanted to relax first, so I climbed into Sigmir¡¯s lap, cuddling into her. She looked a lot better, now that she had worked the kinks from her body, which was why I had ordered Rai in the first place. He had already gone back in, so it was only the two of us, which was just fine with me.


    ¡°I need to apologize.¡± I started, giving Sigmir another, soft kiss. ¡°I was reckless, once again. And this time, you almost paid the ultimate price.¡± I felt a tear trickling down my face, just speaking of it made me sad.


    ¡°It won¡¯t happen again. Not just because I will do my best to be more careful, but because I ask you to never do something that foolish again. It was a stunt worthy of my own recklessness. You need to remember, I am a traveller, a visitor to this world. Even if this guise is wiped from the mortal coil forever, destroyed by forces beyond our imagination, I, my essence, will return. Maybe I will look different, maybe you won¡¯t recognise me at first, but I will always come back to you.¡± As I made my speech, my plea, I looked deep into Sigmir¡¯s eyes, hoping to impress upon her my seriousness.


    She simply smiled, a smile that seemed to say, ¡®let her talk, I will do what I deem best¡¯ but I could only hope that she took my words to heart. I would certainly do and be more careful in the future.


    We stayed in our cuddling position for a while, no longer talking about the events of the last night, simply looking out into the world, watching the clouds drift by, sometimes sharing our impressions, or just sharing kisses and few words. From time to time, I moved around a little, creating more parts for the igloo, adding a gate to the wall I had made before, things that took little time and didn¡¯t take me away from Sigmir.


    Finally, in the afternoon, I was finished and suggested that we go inside our new igloo for an afternoon-nap. Sigmir happily agreed, still not fully recovered from the excitement during the night.


    Once we were settled down, I logged out, letting my avatar sleep comfortably.


    Outside, I went through the usual steps, food, potty-break, training and looking into the forums.


    My first stop was the thread of the stooges, I had mostly ignored it the last couple of days, but now I was curious. The result was not quite what I had expected, the first couple of comments were just about what I expected, but it seemed that afterwards, the thread had devolved into flaming, name-calling and similarly toxic behaviour, causing the mods to close it down.


    What truly surprised me was that Lenore had apparently become an internet-sensation, people had taken the video of her¡­ bombing the stooges and cropped out the stockade-frame in the background, adding it to everything, from Rick Astley, to various politicians, streamers, whatever they could think of. One of the images, I even saved for myself, just because it gave me a chuckle, and that was the image of Lenore, ...bombing Acrasia in a Team Amarantine group-shot.


    On the other hand, the advertisement featuring me had launched and the created quite a bit of buzz. The reception was just as mixed as I had hoped, creating discussion and thus, interest. As they said, all publicity is good, unless it¡¯s your own obituary.

 Chapter 200

    Part of me wondered what future travellers, either with a capital T or without, using the ancient road would think. After spending some much needed time in the real world, I had returned to Mundus and spend some more time improving our igloo and the surrounding wall, adding spikes, walkways and similar features to the wall, creating a small but quite defensible fortress, complete made out of ice, right next to the road.


    Sadly, my efforts would most likely go unobserved, I had refrained from conjuring the Ice ¡®dense¡¯ enough, not in a physical but in a magical sense, so it would evaporate back into Astral Power soon enough. Not that either of those words really meant what I wanted them to mean in the context but I was simply lacking the language to describe the effects of my magic in a physical sense. It was a transformation of physically solid magic into magic flowing within the Astral River, calling it another phase was the closest equivalent I could come up with but not quite right.


    During my time outside, I had decided to change my approach to magic experimentation, less ¡®let¡¯s see what happens if I push the big, red button¡¯ and more a systematic, scientific approach. I was quite certain that there were others out there, using such an approach - the Mage¡¯s Guild was a very likely suspect - and I was quite curious about what they had accomplished. The biggest advantage of such an approach was that without the reckless experimentation, I was a lot less likely to cause myself and thus Sigmir, by proxy, grievous harm.


    The next morning, we used the walled-in area for our daily training, so we wouldn¡¯t have to do so later, in the open. Sigmir and I were still rather sore, but neither of us moved as if we should get a walker, which was a plus. Sigmir insisted that she was able to run, but I made my plans to share her burden for the day, running for some time myself. Rai was simply still not past the first Divide and as such, he would slow us down a great deal.


    After leaving my impromptu-fortress, I decided that a little mischief was appropriate and added a rune formation to the inside of the gate, creating it out of Hard Ice, so that it would be the last thing to fade back into the Astral River. The rune would, if triggered, activate Shatter-Runes that I inlaid in every bit of the fortress, hopefully causing it to either explode or simply break apart if a careless soul tried to take advantage.


    While it was slightly evil, I felt that anyone trying to enter such an obviously magical structure without the care or ability to check for obvious magical traps, deserved to have their ¡®prize¡¯ explode in their face. And the trap was rather obvious, for anyone with some magical ability.


    Once we were back on our mounts and travelling, I quickly got annoyed by the ceaseless wind. When I mentally moaned to Lenore about it, she cawed in her chuckle-equivalent and appeared on my shoulder, holding onto me with her claws.


    ¡°Let¡¯s try it the other way around: I cast magic and you slowly channel Astral Power into me.¡± Lenore told me before spreading her wings. I felt the wind drag at her, at least for a moment, before it ceased. Not the wind, but the drag and the feeling of wind against me. It was a strange sensation, my sense of balance telling me that we were moving, quite fast at that, but the sensations normally accompanied with that movement were missing.


    Taking a deep breath, I noticed a strangely faint but at the same time powerful scent in the still air around me. It was one I had tasted before, when fighting the Wind Raptors, it was the taste of wind-magic - only now it was not directed against me, but used by Lenore to keep the wind away.


    Feeling grateful and wanting her to continue, not just to keep the wind out of my face, but so that she could train her new style of wind-magic, I looked at our connection, feeling it out before carefully channelling Astral Power into it. Filtered, of course, I had no desire to get cawed at - or worse, bombed - because I had fed Lenore with the Ice-flavour normally present in my Astral Power.


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    Sadly, after just a few minutes of blessed magical windshield, Lenore complained about our connection that standing on my shoulder wasn¡¯t comfortable, at least not for a long time while I was sitting on a horse. My shoulder, despite being rather slim for a humanoid¡¯s shoulder, was simply too wide for her claws to comfortably wrap around.


    ¡°Mhm, I do have an idea. Please, continue, while I¡¯ll craft your new perch.¡± I suggested, laughing a little. I was filtering the Ice-flavour out anyway, so I gathered it instead simply letting it flow away, into the wild, using it to slowly craft a perch for Lenore. And not any perch, I had little desire to permanently hold her up, that would get heavy, no I decided to make the perch long enough to place it into the stirrups, alongside my foot. That way, Lenore¡¯s weight would be transmitted directly to my mount, without tiring out my arm.


    Supplying Lenore and crafting the perch was slightly challenging because of the multi-tasking involved but after maybe ten minutes, I had a nice perch, made from glittering ice. It was a simple affair, basically a long staff, down to the stirrup, with a crossbar at the top, looking like a capital T. Part of me had considered to add a small mirror or something like that, something shiny, glittering, for Lenore to preen over, but I decided to abstain from poking fun at her while she was doing me a favour.


    I held the perch to my shoulder and Lenore happily switched over, all while continuously keeping the wind away from us.


    Sigmir, who had been running alongside us, finally looked over what I was doing.


    ¡°That¡¯s a strange weapon for mounted combat.¡± she noted, looking at my new bird¡¯s perch, causing me to blink in surprise.


    Weapon?


    But then I reconsidered, looking at it from an objective standpoint and realised that yes, if I wanted to fight from a mount, either a summoned spirit-golem like Elding, or from a physical mount, my short blades were completely unsuited. On the other hand, if I sharpened the ends of the crossbar into sharp points, I could essentially play polo, with my opponents being the ball. Grinning at the idea, I simply continued to channel the filtered out Ice-Astral-Power into the perch-cum-whacking-stick.


    ¡°It isn¡¯t meant to be one, but I might improve upon the idea to make it one. Right now, it is just a perch for Lenore to sit on.¡± I answered, looking over to Sigmir who shook her head. laughing all the while, and I noticed her mutter something to herself. While I was no lip-reader, it looked suspiciously like two short words and my guess was that she laughing about Lenore being a lazy bird.


    After a while, I felt something shift in the magic I was channelling, the pointed ends for the crossbar had formed a while ago, so the sudden shift made me curious. When I casually inspected my newest creation, I almost fell from my mount.


    <table>


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    <td colspan="10">Icy Whacking Stick</td>


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    <td colspan="5">Rarity</td>


    <td colspan="5">Uncommon</td>


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    <td colspan="5">Type</td>


    <td colspan="5">One-Handed Polearm</td>


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    <td colspan="5">Base Damage</td>


    <td colspan="5">5 Damage Piercing</td>


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    <td colspan="5">Base Damage</td>


    <td colspan="5">0 Damage Slashing</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="5">Base Damage</td>


    <td colspan="5">2 Damage Blunt</td>


    </tr>


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    <td colspan="5">Strength Modifier</td>


    <td colspan="5">Low</td>


    </tr>


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    <td colspan="3">Special Effect</td>


    <td colspan="7">Imbued - Due to the process used for the creation of this weapon, it is strongly in tune with the Ice-Magic of the Traveller Morgana. 25% lower cost when wielded by her Ice-Magic.</td>


    </tr>


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    <td colspan="3">Special Effect</td>


    <td colspan="7">Mounted Weapon - When this weapon is used from the back of a mount, the mount¡¯s speed increased the damage instead of the user¡¯s strength..</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="10">This Whacking Stick was created out of Hard Ice by the Traveller Morgana. The material used, makes it lighter than normal but brittle and vulnerable to heat.</td>


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    </tbody>


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    Not only had the system apparently decided to take the name I had given to it and made it into a real item, albeit with mediocre stats, but somehow, the process of slowly channelling pure Ice-Astral Power into the item had changed it from the original, normally conjured Ice into Hard Ice. That might mean that, if I just channelled power long enough, an item of mine might make the transformation from Hard Ice into the next, higher tier of Ice, either Eternal Ice or some intermediate level. That was experimentation I could happily pursue, using small samples and a slow increase in power to make sure I wouldn¡¯t blow myself up by accident.

 Chapter 201

    Four shrubs. That was the entirety of vegetation that we had seen peeking out from the snow over the course of the last two days of travel. And calling them ¡®shrubs¡¯ might be overrating them, they were more like brambles with pretensions of grandeur. At this point, I would have welcomed monster attacks - anything to break the monotony of travelling across a seemingly endless, white expanse, permanently exposed to the harsh winds blowing down from the north. But even the Ankhegs were disappointing me; other than the attack on the first day, we had seen neither eye nor claw from them.


    There had been an epic battle, well, a battle of stubbornness, during lunch on the day after we had left the first building I had conjured. After Sigmir had run the first leg of the day, I had insisted that she¡¯d ride, with me running. She had declined, I had insisted, she had protested, I had stated I wouldn¡¯t ride, she had called me stubborn, I had silenced her with a kiss. From then on, it had turned a little more enjoyable, with either of us trying to keep the other from protesting by using ...oral arguments, until Adra had tossed a load of snow on the two of us.


    But I had won the argument and started to run, with Lenore back in her Hallow. It meant that I was subjected to the endless wind, but if I could get Sigmir off her feet, that was a price I was willing to pay, she was still not completely healed after the incident the night before.


    Running at the speed of our horses meant that I needed to constantly use Blood Runes to strengthen my body, carefully channelling power into them, making sure that I was neither overdoing it - which would exhaust me quickly - nor underpowering them, which would have the same effect, just on a physical level. It was an interesting challenge, at least for the first hour or so, afterwards, I had fixed the level needed in my mind and could simply keep going. During the night, I was a little sore, but nothing I couldn¡¯t deal with.


    Now, two days later, all of us were a little irritated and I had made the unilateral decision that I would conjure two igloos for our night¡¯s rest, giving me and Sigmir a separate space to relieve tensions. Just the thought made me smile. Sadly, it wouldn¡¯t help Adra and Rai, unless they tried the method in the privacy of their own igloo. It was the best way to get rid of tensions, and certainly the most pleasurable. In a pinch, a good fight, slaughtering some monster, or anything, really, could do, but even that was impossible, unless we started fighting amongst ourselves.


    While we were travelling and it was my turn to ride, I had started my careful experimentation with the idea that stronger ice might be created by saturating it with Astral Power. Sadly, I either was missing something, which I felt was more likely, or the amount of power needed to saturate Hard Ice was seriously insane. I was not sure which, both were distinct possibilities, possibly at the same time.


    The experiment I was conducting when I was riding was quite simple, ever since Lenore had started using her magic to keep the wind away from us, I had channelled a Astral Power over to her, in a reversal of the normal state of affairs. Normally, I was getting what Astral Power she would generate normally and thanks to one of our companion abilities it was an automatic process. Now, I had to focus on steadily sending what Astral Power I was regenerating over to her, while filtering out the parts that were Ice Astral Power, which left me with them as left-over, normally discarded back into the environment. Instead, I had created a small ice-shard, something I could comfortably hold, and channelled the pure Ice-type Astral Power into it, curious what would happen.


    The result was ¡®nothing much¡¯ - after maybe half an hour, the shard had fully transformed into what I would have conjured when using ¡®Hard Ice¡¯-Runes. I was curious that the amount of Power needed to transform normal ice into hard ice was far, far larger than what would be needed to conjure up hard ice in the first place, but it was merely a curiosity, not something I could use in my research. Since the shard had changed, I had continued to pour in hours worth of Astral Power-regeneration which the shard had absorbed without changing further. Physically, it felt just as heavy as before and I was unable to perceive any additional cold from it, either of which I¡¯d have expected if it was on the way to transform into Eternal Ice. Magically, I thought it felt a little ¡®heavier¡¯, more difficult to move with my Ice Magic but the change was so minute that it might just be my imagination. It was not as if I could use precision-scales to measure the sensation, I had to make do with my senses and those were not perfectly calibrated. So, I continued letting power pour into the shard. If nothing else, it served as an exercise in continued, magical channelling, something that might prove useful in future rituals.


    Find this and other great novels on the author''s preferred platform. Support original creators!


    ¡°We should stop for the night.¡± Sigmir called, making me stumble to a halt. I had been lost in thought, discussing possible ways to use my Blood Magic with Lenore, and ignored the bleak world around me. Now, looking around, I agreed with Sigmir, the Sun was already mostly behind the horizon, meaning it would be dark in an hour or so. If I wanted to conjure up shelter, I would need at least half an hour - and if I wanted to make two igloos, it would be more.


    ¡°Indeed.¡± I agreed, for a moment watching the others dismount and Adra starting the process of changing her shape. After that moment, I went to work, using the now familiar magic to create shelter. I had kept the basic shape of the igloo I had made on the first day, merely playing with the efficiency and speed of casting. Within half an hour, I had the first igloo ready, which would be the one we used for eating. It would also serve as shelter for Rai and Adra, while Sigmir and I would take a second igloo, not that I had told them that.


    ¡°You can go in and start preparing dinner. I want to add a little extra.¡± I told the others, making Sigmir look at me with a raised eyebrow. The last two days, I had merely conjured up a single igloo, not the fortress-like construction I had created during our rest-day.


    I walked over, gently pulling her head down to whisper in her ear. ¡°I will make a second igloo, just for the two of us.¡± my smile must have told her more about my plans than the words spoken and she blushed a pretty shade of purple, making me smile even wider and kiss her cheek.


    During dinner, Sigmir seemed to shift around quite a bit and, judging by the smirk on Adra¡¯s face and the blush visible on Rai¡¯s, the other two had either heard what I had said or simply guessed it from the facts in evidence. I didn¡¯t care that they knew, especially Adra had heard us before, I just refrained from giving a direct floor-show.


    Afterwards, I grabbed Sigmir by the hand, dragging her with me to the other igloo, causing Adra to get the giggles. Still, I didn¡¯t care, solely wanting to try to have the wonderful sounds Sigmir made drown out the incessant howling of the wind.


    In the igloo, I quickly pulled out our sleeping-blankets and furs, before pushing Sigmir down, starting on the task of unwrapping my present, while trying to drive her insane. I hadn¡¯t managed to get her out of more than her armour and just started to work on the tunic she wore under it when I heard a howl in the distance. Not the howling of the wind, but the howling of a wolf. I considered for a second but decided that unless the wolves were already scrabbling at the igloo, trying to get in, I didn¡¯t care.


    Sadly, Ylva didn¡¯t agree with me. I had assumed she did the same as Lenore, essentially putting her non-existent hands over her ears, closing her eyes and loudly cawing to make sure she didn¡¯t catch any of the action, maybe peeking on the emotions I was experiencing but apparently, she stayed aware enough to hear the howling. So, when she suddenly appeared from Sigmir¡¯s hand, I was rather surprised and couldn¡¯t quite continue with the task at hand, due to the pony-sized canine in the igloo. It was easier to ignore an elephant in the room, compared to Ylva.


    ¡°The wolves, they are calling for help.¡± Ylva told us, her voice pleading to check what was going on.

 Interlude: Advertisment Discussion

    Official Road to Purgatory-Beta Forum


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    Heracles, Official Pantheon Moderator


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    Greetings, dear Traveller


    This thread is for the discussion of the latest vision-shard that managed to cross the world from Mundus into our world, showing parts of the Adventures for a young Firn-Elf named Morgana.


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    Cell


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    FRIST!!!11111


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    Jeanyra, confirmed Beta-Account


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    Ho, boy. That was intense and it makes me seriously curious.


    Do we know what Class Morgana is playing? I¡¯m a Sorcerer and supposedly those are the most varied and versatile spellcasters, at least that¡¯s my understanding. But I haven''t the slightest idea how half of what she used would even begin to work and the rest is a little over my head, but I use fire, not wind, ice/mist and whatever else she had mixed into that spell.


    In addition, I guess I have to rethink my opinion of ritual casting, when I heard that it takes from ten minutes to multiple hours, setting up an using a ritual, I just thought, ok, those are useless in combat, moving on. But I guess not every combat is head-on and hidden in the darkness, she had more than enough time to prepare.


    But most of all, I want to know what that transformation was. Magical Girl goes Gothic? Now, I want to get wings, I should have rolled a Valkyrie.


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    Yuthos, confirmed Beta-Account


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    Excuse me, but before we go into enthused screeching about the awesomeness of the magic used, could we look at what she did? I mean, she just murdered a village and turned them into some sort of friggin zombies who then proceeded to make sure her murdering was complete.


    That part before, sure, she shows some bandits attacking her and they were the same species as the villagers, but still, that¡¯s some messed up shit.


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    -Harms, confirmed Beta-Account


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    Yuthos, we have no idea what happened between the clips shown, so calm down. It¡¯s a short advertisement-clip, not the full picture.


    That said, I wouldn¡¯t want to mess with her, not with what we have seen already.


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    -Tarrin, confirmed Beta-Account


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    @Harms,


    Yeah, no joke, just from looking at the old scenes, you can see an obvious progression. At first, she used mist and it killed her enemies. Then, she apparently tried something new but I¡¯d guess she was not happy with it, maybe letting ice rain upon her foes was too boring for her, or something like that.


    The next time we saw her, she and her party were insta-gibbing someone before running under the cover of mist, she used a cloud of snow and mist to hide from an ambush and she used mist to attack a few wolves.


    Now, she uses mist that turns her foes into zombies?


    Ghost-noun squad, if I were you guys, I¡¯d stay inside on misty days. Or you might get shat on, again. Just maybe not literally.


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    -Goliry, confirmed Beta-Account


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    Oh, burn. You may want to apply cold water, Ghost-squad. Or, you know, maybe use the water to wash the bird-droppings out of your hair.


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    Whelp, if there was ever any question to the rating this game would get, it¡¯s now answered. The only question remaining is how restricted the sales will be, neither Pantheon nor anyone else has said anything official in that regard.


    Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.


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    -Howardlight, confirmed Beta-Account


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    I am calling for a holy crusade to slay this foul creature before it can spread its influence any further! This abomination is a blight before all that is holy and we need to hunt it down!


    DEUS VULT!


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    -Harms, confirmed Beta-Account


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    I¡¯m seeing Zombies in Howardlight¡¯s future, but it is somehow obscured by a dense mist¡­


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    -Snydervine, confirmed Beta-Account


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    Harms, that¡¯s awfully brave for someone in Crusading Distance.


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    Oh, you know, I¡¯ll just need to find Morgana before you. Then, I can get some popcorn and watch the show, I¡¯m a fan of Zombie-Apocalypse movies, and guess what? I¡¯d bet that you¡¯ll be the star in one, if you try to go for her.


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    -Palda Hengar, confirmed Beta-Account


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    Howardlight is the new Smoky - Only you can prevent Zombie-Plagues!


    Or maybe, in case of Zombies, break glass?


    Oh, no, Uncle Howard wants YOU!


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    Tarrin, I won¡¯t dignify that with a response.


    But I¡¯d like to raise the question of balance again. The sheer scope of havoc shown here is two or three levels above anything a martial class can hope to achieve on a good day, just imagine that stuff against an army or something similar? There¡¯s a reason Necromancer¡¯s make such great villains, they need to be defeated or bad things will happen.


    And as such, for Howardlight: Not sure when the clips were made, but she seems to be heading south, or maybe south-west, not sure. We first encountered her in Yaksha, in northern Aretia, and since then, she moved in that direction, visiting the city of Kolyug, just in case you want to meet her.


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    I call upon the forces of Light in Aretia, cleanse the world of the abomination!


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    What I¡¯d like to know is, how did she get the footage? I mean, unless she had someone in the village while she zombiefied it, she would still be on that hill, using her ritual, right?


    So, why does she have the footage from inside the village?


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    Snydervine, I guess not quite in crusading distance, eh?


    But, if she¡¯s moving south-east, I think she¡¯s coming towards the area I¡¯m playing in.


    Morgana, if you find yourself in the area of the Sunderfist-Orcs, visit the encampment, I¡¯d love to invite you to a mead, just for your style.


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    -Morgana, confirmed Beta-Account


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    Seems like the Advertisement did what it was supposed to do, make people talk about it.


    To answer a few, but not all, questions:


    Harms, I might look you up, depends on my plans at the time.


    Bycackle, I had a little support for making the Advertisement; those viewpoints were recorded by Panthon, after I placed markers where I wanted the cameras.


    Ghostblade, getting smart(er), eh? Having others do the dirty work. I doubt it will matter, the world is far too big for something as simple as a cardinal direction being enough to intercept someone. And that¡¯s before going into such nifty things like disguises, magical or mundane.


    Howardlight, seriously? The Light? In a world where the major religions are under the leadership of a Death-God (Odin) and a God of Thunder (Zeus), you call upon ¡®The Light¡¯? Can anyone even name the God of Light in either Pantheon? Anyway, if you want to come after me, feel free, there are a few more things I want to try against Travellers, ask the Ghostnouns how fun it is when someone explodes you from miles away.


    And yes, while that particular trick was reported and hopefully fixed, I have a few more hidden in my sleeves.


    Do¡¯rodra, I doubt that my little advertisement would influence that. Just consider what happened in Tobiuno¡¯s clip, or rather, in the cut scene that was made into a Highlight-reel. It was pretty much the same, an action against bandits. Just that I don¡¯t have the mounted combatants to ride them down, I need to apply a magical solution to a mundane problem.


    Yuthos, there are over two ingame-days between the clips used in the Advertisement, so you simply didn¡¯t see that we followed the bandits to their camp and further to their village. In addition, you were unable to see that the villagers were dressed in far too well-made clothes for a normal village and that a caravan recently vanished in the area.


    What I¡¯m trying to say is, Bandits are a scourge and need to be eradicated. That includes those that stay behind to hold down the base and those that support them in their ways. At least in my opinion and in the opinion of all locals I¡¯ve asked.


    Jeanyra, I¡¯m feeling generous, so I¡¯ll give you a hint: I¡¯m a Sorceress as well. And, to paraphrase the Sorceress that taught me quite a bit: Your magic needs to suit yourself, not what anyone else thinks it the right way to use magic.


    I think you mentioned that you went to the Guild, to get taught some. That magic is not yours, so it won¡¯t work as well as what you could do by experimenting and researching on your own.


    For the magic used in the Advertisement, I won¡¯t go into details, just that the main-part was Death-Magic, carried by Wind and Ice-Magic and that the ritual took multiple hours all in all.


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    Cool, questions are answered.


    Mhm, a few hours for the ritual? Now I¡¯m curious, unless the villagers were on a much higher level than the caster, that¡¯s some horrible mileage, thinking purely in damage-over-time aspects. Maybe the secrecy makes up for that, or the zombification afterwards, but I don¡¯t know, it feels more like a cool gimmick, not something really useful.


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    Jeanyra, confirmed Beta-Account


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    What, seriously?!


    Ok, now I¡¯m jealous, I have a couple of spells but hell, what you can do with the class seems so much more awesome. Can you at least tell me how you got that Raven we saw in a few scenes and how that feathered form works?


    And you said a Sorceress trained you, HOW?! I tried to find a sorcerer-trainer but no luck, I still only have the one active class-skill I had from the start.


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    No, I¡¯m afraid I¡¯ll keep that to myself, but I¡¯ll tell you that it¡¯s not a class feature, I don¡¯t have any more active class-skills. It is a case of the number of skills being less important than what you do with them.

 Chapter 202

    For just a moment, I was tempted to ignore Ylva and continue my previous plans. Sadly, the mood was just gone, and the lust that had previously coloured Sigmir¡¯s face was replaced with concern.


    Pushing myself up, I looked over to her, asking ¡°Can you hear which wolves they are?¡±


    I was reasonably certain that she was able to, I highly doubted she would ask to go, help the black wolves we had fought before, but I wanted to be certain.


    ¡°I¡¯m not sure. I know that they are not the Black Hounds of Odin, but they also don¡¯t exactly sound like my old pack.¡± Ylva hesitatingly admitted.


    ¡°But you want to help them anyway?¡± Sigmir asked, her voice filled with concern. The look she shot me made it clear that she wanted to help those wolves, if only for Ylva¡¯s sake. Knowing that Sigmir knew Ylva much better than I did, I could only assume that there was a reason for it, so I nodded, pushing the annoyance at being interrupted away from me. Not completely, if I couldn¡¯t take my frustrations out in the way I wanted, I would take them out on whatever the wolves needed help against, using the blood of my enemies to wash away the annoyance. The thought brought a smile to my face.


    Leaving Sigmir to put on her armour, I walked over to the igloo containing Adra and Rai, a thought ripping away the thin sheet of ice that blocked the entrance and shouting inside.


    ¡°There¡¯s something afoot, wolves calling for help.¡±


    Moments later, Adra answered from the inside, her voice almost carried away from the endless wind.


    ¡°What? You are already finished?¡± she asked, while peeking out of the opening. ¡°Normally you take long¡­¡± she continued, a smile on her face, until she fully saw me, at which point the humorous taunt died on her lips.


    ¡°Ylva heard wolves calling for help and wants to go, see what is going on.¡± I told her. Her head instantly vanished and I heard frantic movement inside, seeing their silhouettes painted against the opaque Ice by the light of the fire inside.


    A minute or two later, Sigmir had joined me, as had Rai and Adra.


    ¡°Now, what exactly is going on?¡± Adra asked, placing herself in the wind shadow of the igloo.


    ¡°Not sure. Ylva, what exactly did you hear?¡± I asked.


    ¡°Just the call for help. I told you before, each wolfpack has their own dialect, so to speak. The dialect I heard is similar to the one of my old pack. Not the same but very similar. The language used when howling is quite simple so I cannot say more than that it was a desperate call for help.¡± Ylva explained and I translated for the others.


    Just at that moment, another howl broke the silence around us, coming from a similar direction but this time, we all heard it. I saw Ylva flinch and turn, looking as if she was about to dash into the nightly darkness. A look to Sigmir showed me that she, too, wanted to go and help them.


    ¡°Alright. Let¡¯s head out. Ylva, you take point, Rai, I¡¯m afraid we all have to run, so tell us if you can¡¯t keep up. Don¡¯t exhaust your resources, we¡¯ll likely have to fight once we get to the wolves.¡± I ordered and Ylva instantly dashed off, with us in tow. It was obvious that Ylva used her connection with Sigmir, who was in the rear, to make sure we were all in a tight formation.


    Against my expectations, it was not Rai who seemed to have the biggest problems keeping up, that questionable honour went to me. Mainly because I took the order to preserve resources seriously, not tapping into my Astral Power to strengthen my body.


    This content has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.


    It was just as well that we didn¡¯t have to run too far, after only twenty minutes, Ylva stopped, giving out a haunting howl of her own, causing more howls in response. After a second of listening, she was off again, no longer caring to keep formation, simply running all out. We hurried after her and within a short minute, Ylva reached the battlefield.


    Because that was the only way to describe what emerged from the darkness as we approached, a battlefield filled with wounded wolves, some already down, bleeding into the snow and their foes, Ankhags similar to those we fought on the first day on these windswept plains. There were maybe fifteen wolves still standing, half of them bleeding from more or less severe wounds, and another five were down. On the other side, the Ankhags were almost twice that but from what I could tell, they were slightly weaker than those we had fought before.


    I was a little surprised when Ylva started to glow in the red light that normally enveloped Sigmir in serious fights but focused on my own battle instead of watching her fight. It was good that the run over had soothed my anger somewhat, giving me the calm to assess the battlefield without the urgent need to release my anger upon those who had interrupted me. While the thought to unleash frozen hell upon the Ankhags, I quickly realised that doing so wouldn¡¯t be the best way to go ahead. With that in mind, I focused my efforts into defense, using the snow around us to block attacks, mostly their acid-spray, or to bind and hinter them.


    But while I was conserving Astral Power to heal after the fight, the others had no such need. Sigmir, clad in her red aura, was fighting alongside Ylva, for once, Ylva was taking point and Sigmir was not just watching her back but was using her Lok¡¯nar to cleave into the openings Ylva¡¯s attacked caused. Their presence also acted as a rallying point for the wolves, while they couldn¡¯t quite know what was going on, they could easily see that we were, at the very least, their enemies enemy and they happily used us to defeat that enemy.


    Adra, on the other hand, used the fact that the battlefield was rather wide and crowded with wolves and Ankhags to use her bow to great effect. She stood next to me and shot arrow after arrow. While each shot took a few seconds, each arrow was accompanied by the azure glow she used to increase their speed and penetration. I think the higher speed also allowed her to hit the moving targets with increased precision, or maybe it was another part of the spell, I was not quite sure. But the effect was quite startling, in our previous encounter, we had floundered a little, not knowing how to hurt the Ankhags, but now, Adra¡¯s arrows were hitting the weak-points of their carapaces, striking deep wounds.


    But the most damage was likely caused by Rai, who used the cloaking spell I had taught him to blend into the night, not even fully appearing when he struck. Even I - with my advantageous vantage point, low-light vision, Darkness-magic and general high affinity for all things happening under the cover of darkness - had trouble keeping track of him as he ghosted across the field, attacking whenever there was an opening presented by the Ankhags, causing them grievous wounds and disrupting their attacks. They couldn¡¯t even begin to detect him, not on the chaotic battlefield, and he abused that weakness with impunity. His vicious attacks brought a smile to my face, there was no inclination of mercy or that foolish idea of a fair fight in his movements, he simply struck with brutal efficiency.


    Our intrusion on the battlefield marked an instant shift in momentum; before, the wolves had desperately tried to get away and the Ankhags had forced them to commit by attacking the wounded - but with us, the Ankhags were on the back foot, especially with Rai savaging them whenever they tried to burrow into the snow the escape. But what ultimately broke the Ankhags chitinous shells was the arrival of a few fresh wolves, not because of their pure combat prowess, no, simply by virtue of showing that the wolves had reinforcements on the way. The new wolves joined the group gathered around Ylva, bringing new strength and additional numbers into the chaotic melee.


    What had been a desperate attack to drive the bugs away from the wounded shifted into a slaughter as the Ankhag¡¯s tried to get below the snow. But that was my domain and while I was still not willing to invest massive amounts of Astral Power to crush them as the bugs they were, I was perfectly content to use moderate amounts of power to harden the snow, making them slow to dig into it. The additional time they were above ground and unable to dodge was exploited by all the other fighters and their numbers dwindled.


    At that point, I decided that while finishing off as many Ankhags as possible was a fun challenge, the wounded and dying wolves might be more important. With that in mind, I took a cursory look at their wounds and began treating the worst of them, realising that even a minute more might have caused the wolf to expire.

 Chapter 203

    Kneeling, I took stock of the worst-looking wolf. Luckily, it seemed that it hadn¡¯t been downed by the severity of its wounds, albeit they were rather ghastly, but due to the fact that its legs were wounded and unable to carry it further. But flesh wounds were relatively easy to handle with my blood runes - damage to internal organs or bones would be harder. Ignoring the growling coming from the wolf, I drew upon my own power, quickly writing the necessary runes around the wound and channelling magic to fix it to the point that the wolf was out of danger. As the magic worked, the wolf gave of a surprised sounding whimper, which I also ignored, focusing to keep the magic expenditure as small as possible and the Ice that tainted my Astral Power out of its wounds.


    The first wolf handled, I quickly made my way to the other downed wolves, stabilising them as well, before orienting myself and taking in the surroundings. The wolves around us looked all quite similar to Ylva before she had crossed the first Divide, their grey pelts almost shining in the silvery moonlight. One of the wolves, currently standing next to Ylva, was just as tall as she was and had a similar aura of primal power, making me realise that it, too, had crossed the first Divide. But I also noticed that it was bleeding, badly, and looked about ready to keel over, only stubbornness keeping it on its paws.


    We were here to help them, even if they seemed to be at a loss how to deal with us. When I approached the big wolf, it growled at me, but so weak that it only strengthened my resolve.


    ¡°Patients should be quiet.¡± I growled back, not in the mood to argue.


    Its muzzle came up, as if it was about to bite and without thinking, I simply slapped it straight on the nose, not hard enough to truly harm but hard enough to get my point across. There was a strangled chuffing noise coming from Ylva, which I had learned was her version of laughter.


    Something about my actions had caused the wolf to still and I was able to stretch my senses into its, or rather, as I quickly noticed, his, body. What I found made me elicit an angry growl, this wolf should have been the first to treat but I had missed it because the stupid wolf had been on his paws, not lying in the snow, writhing in pain, as he should have. He had a ragged gash in his abdomen, deep enough to soak his gorgeous silver-fur in blood and - the real problem - perforate his intestines, causing all kinds of nasty fluids to poison his flesh.


    Muttering under my breath, I pushed the surprised wolf over, so that I could get to the wound, drawing runes around it. After a second of contemplation, I used seven runes, not just to stop the wolf from bleeding out, but I needed to restore some of his vitality directly.


    ¡°That won¡¯t be enough.¡± Lenore reminded me in the back of my mind, and after taking another look, I had to agree. The gastric fluids were spread out too far, it would take more power than I had to simply regenerate the whole area, especially combined with the expenditure of preventing the strain on the wolf¡¯s system from killing him in the process.


    ¡°Can you hold the healing-spell?¡± I asked Lenore, considering my options. She agreed and I felt her power take over some of the burden, even if she had to take care that the Death-Magic inherent to our joint casting wouldn¡¯t harm the wolf. With the burden lightened, I was able to use the direct contact to gain control over some of the wolf¡¯s blood in the area, carefully gathering the poison and the afflicted blood in one area, gently siphoning off the vitality within the blood to use in the casting before causing the disgusting filth to exit from his wound, splashing into the nearby snow.


    I felt Lenore channel a little more power into the healing-spell, letting it do its job, but after a moment, there was still more poisoning inside, so I repeated my actions, until after the third round of cleansing and healing, there was nothing left to cleanse and the wound regenerated to the point that the wolf would heal on his own, if given some time to heal.


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    Seeing that I had done what was necessary, I stood, looking for the next wounded wolf to heal, only to realise that the situation was a little tense. The others had gathered around me in a defensive position and the wolves looked torn between trying to attack us and retreat with their wounded.


    ¡°Ylva, talk to them, they called for help. I will heal their wounded, if any are as bad as this one, we can¡¯t lose any more time.¡± I ordered, without taking my eyes from the wolves, trying to assess which needed healing the most. My previous patient gave a soft, wordless growl, trying to stand. Knowing that, while I had healed the worst of his wounds, he was far from hale, I growled again.


    ¡°Stay down, fool. If you make even more work for me, I¡¯ll have your pelt.¡± I grumbled, before moving to the next wolf. Miraculously, the wolf ceased his attempts to get up, instead resting in the snow. For some reason, the interaction defused the situation and the wolves no longer looked about to attack, even though they still stood around us.


    Having finished my assessment, I walked to the next wolf ordering it to lie down so I could get to its wound. To my surprise, it did just that, no growling, no posturing, nothing, it simply went down and allowed me access to the gash in its flank. Compared to the wound of the other wolf, it was harmless, it might even heal on its own, given enough time. The wolf would likely never be able to run at full speed again if it did, but the wound would not kill the wolf. Again, I merely did what was necessary to keep the wound from making long-term problems, and moved on to the next wolf.


    Soon, I stood from the last wounded wolf, almost falling over as the exhaustion finally caught up to me. At first, the others had walked with me as I treated the wolves, but after the second or third, Ylva had returned to the one I had treated first and I had heard them exchange a few words, or growls, in their language. If I focused, I was able to understand it, but I was too focused on the healing to process anyone talking, no matter the language.


    ¡°Easy, love.¡± Sigmir caught me, as I staggered. ¡°You did a lot of good. Ylva said the leader of this pack wants to talk to us.¡±


    My mind was a little fuzzy, first the long day of travel, then running towards the pack, the fight and finally the exhaustive, magical healing, it made for an exhausted Morgana. On a whim, I decided that I was not willing to walk another step, so I placed my arms around Sigmir¡¯s neck, softly telling her to carry me. She giggled a little at that, but happily picked me up one armed, making me realise that she was able to place her hand under my thighs, allowing my back to rest against her arm, almost in a one-armed princess carry. It was surprisingly comfortable, I just had to hold onto her and got where we wanted to go while cuddling with Sigmir. Maybe I should have her carry me more often.


    ¡°Morgana, Sigmir, meet¡­¡± Ylva made a rumbling growl that was impossible to translate into a language I spoke. Thanks to Lenore I knew what was meant, but it was another name that contained allusions to smells, specific sounds, parentage and a few other concepts.


    ¡°They can call me Swiftstride.¡± the wolf added, apparently aware that their naming just didn¡¯t work in other languages.


    Sigmir nodded, ¡°Greetings, Swiftstride. As you likely know, I¡¯m Sigmir and this is my mate, Morgana, a Traveller. The other two are Adra, hailing from a distant grove and Rai, Morgana¡¯s disciple.¡±


    Somehow, hearing Sigmir describe me as her mate made me all giddy inside and I wanted nothing more than to be back in our igloo, continuing what we had began before the howling had interrupted us.


    ¡°I thank you for aiding us, the Pack of the North Wind is in your debt.¡± the wolf solemnly said, this time using a name we could use at the start, not just the amalgamation of concepts used in the wolf¡¯s native language.


    ¡°I would like to invite you into our main-den, you can rest there.¡± he continued and I felt my gamer-senses tingling that had the makings of an introduction to a secret faction.


    ¡°We would be honoured to see your den.¡± Sigmir told the wolf, after I nodded my assent. It would also allow me to finish healing the other wolves, so that there would be no complications in the future.


    A blue window opened, reminding me that I had to look through the notifications and telling me that we had accepted a quest to escort the wolves to their den. Somehow, the term ¡®escort¡¯ did not fill me with confidence.

 Chapter 204

    After we agreed to escort them to their den, I took a moment to look into my log, just in case there was something urgent.


    <table><tbody><tr><td>You have been part of a Battle. As you were not part of either of the groups struggling, your EXP-Cut is greatly reduced. You gain 18.723 EXP </td></tr></tbody></table>


    <table><tbody><tr><td>Skill increased </td></tr><tr><td>You increased your skill: Blood Rune-Mastery [57/100]</td></tr></tbody></table>


    When nothing jumped out to me, I focused back to my surroundings, deciding that letting myself be carried while the wolves had to run despite their injuries would send the wrong message. I had healed the worst of their wounds, but they were still far from hale.


    While the wolves milled around, getting ready to leave, we just stood around, not having anything do. A couple of the wolves were giving out howls that, according to Ylva, told everyone that the situation they had called in help to resolve was no longer existent and everyone could go back to what they had been doing. I had to hide a grin at that, my subconscious wasn¡¯t quite up regarding wolves as sapient beings, despite my exposure to Ylva and Lenore, so the thought of them essentially making a phone-tree to carry their messages was just strange.


    ¡°You smell strange.¡± one of the wolves, relatively large but without the aura of Power enveloping the lead-wolf, approached, sniffing at me. I was a little taken aback, especially when it pressed its nose into my crotch in an inquisitive journey to find out what it was smelling, but before I decided what to do about it, it pulled back, looking at me with questioning eyes.


    ¡°I have no idea what you consider strange.¡± I answered, a little unsure. We had gone a few days without bathing but I hoped it wasn¡¯t too noticeable, thanks to my Traveller-Body. And even if it was, the others should smell just as distinctive, yet I had been picked out.


    The wolf cocked its head, looking at me with disbelief, before looking at my companions.


    ¡°The big one, she smells similar but it¡¯s not the same smell.¡± it told me, after sniffing into the air a little. At that, I blushed bright red, getting an idea what it might be smelling. And there was not way, neither on Mundus nor on Earth, that I would give some sniffing wolf the talk about birds and bees. I¡¯d just be called a bitch in the end and I had no desire for that.


    Luckily, any need for a response was terminated when a distinctly unfriendly growl rippled through the night. I looked towards the source and Ylva stood in front of another wolf, the second largest of their pack, her hackles raised, teeth showing and fire in her eyes. Before I could even consider what to do, Lenore left her Hallow, flapping her wings twice and landing on Ylva¡¯s back, joining her in glaring at the other wolf.


    ¡°Leave her alone!¡± she cawed and thanks to our bond, I felt her outrage.


    ¡°What is it to you, bird? I just said that a fine bitch as she is should not run with the two-legs, she should lead her own pack with a good wolf at her side.¡± the wolf answered with a growl that was not just him talking. There was a slightly menacing tone to it and I just wanted to groan. Why were there always idiots about and why did we run into them without fail?


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    For a moment, I considered letting them handle it amongst themselves but I decided against it. Where would the fun be in that?


    ¡°Know your place, mutt.¡± I growled as I walked over, having taken out my whacking stick. If I had to whack the dog, I would rather use something made for the purpose. I noticed that the others were following me, Sigmir looking a little angry as well, possibly influenced by her connection to Ylva.


    ¡°She carries divine Blood, I would know, I put it there myself.¡± I continued, fixing the wolf with an angry stare, even activating my Overflow-ability and channelling a bit of Ice-Magic, just a hint to shroud myself in cold mist and make my eyes glow with an icy light.


    My words had the intended impact, causing silence around us. Lenore hopped off Ylva¡¯s back, taking her position on my whacking stick, freeing up Ylva to act, just in case there was violence.


    The wolf stilled, focusing on me and I felt myself measured. I stopped next to Ylva, placing a hand on her flank, simply to show support.


    ¡°And you should know, we are family. Distant family, maybe, but we,¡± I gestured to Sigmir and myself, ¡°we both hail from the same lineage as she does, going back to the Divine Trickster himself, Loki.¡±


    I noticed that the wolf wanted to scoff but I felt something next to me, something powerful, and was barely able to control myself from jumping away from it. For just a moment, Ylva¡¯s eyes shone with silvery light and the silhouette that had absorbed the Divine Blood back when she had crossed the first Divide manifested around her, letting out a short howl.


    Looking around, all but the biggest wolf, Sigmir, Ylva and me were on their knees, prostrating before the phantom. I pushed down the many, many questions I wanted to ask, mainly what the hell was going on, but kept them to myself. A glimpse to my log showed that I had gained a buff called Call to Hunt, increasing my movement speed and the strength of my next attack. Another question for the growing pile.


    ¡°Now, are there any more questions, or can we leave?¡± I asked, still keeping my poker face.


    ¡°There will be no more questions. Let us run.¡± the biggest wolf agreed and within moments, we were off.


    I was quite happy about Ylva¡¯s buff, allowing me to keep up with the wolves without needing magic to increase my prowess. That way, I would be able to heal the injured wolves whenever we stopped, adding to our combined strength.


    Luckily, we didn¡¯t run for too long, only about an hour after we set out, the wolves started flagging, which didn¡¯t surprise me at all. My way of healing took quite a bit out of the one healed, a cost I had only partially paid myself.


    ¡°We need to rest.¡± Swiftstride, the leader, barked out.


    ¡°I agree. You and the others that were injured, you still need healing.¡± I told him, walking up next to him and stretching my senses into his body. Luckily, the repairs I had made were holding up to the exertion and I started the slow process of repairing the flesh around it. I was limited in what I could do at once, there was a sense of resistance that grew stronger the longer I worked and the more power I poured into him. It was a curious effect, making me wonder just where the limits of my ability to heal myself and others were - would the resistance reduce with time, or would a scar remain, with the size depending on my efforts beforehand? Our group had avoided serious damage so far, so I simply didn¡¯t know. Part of me was looking forward to find out without having one of my companions and friends permanently harmed - that way, I might be able to find out how to deal with it if it ever came up.


    After doing what I could with Swiftstride, I went around again, healing one wolf after the other, as I had before. While I did that, the others pulled out some food, sharing some of it with the wolves, but there was only so much we had with us. There was a world of difference between planning to feed four people and two spirit-companions - who had their own strange rules for how much food they needed - and feeding four people, two spirit-companions and a pack of twenty wolves. Additionally, we normally counted on being able to hunt game to subsist on, which hadn¡¯t quite worked out on the windy plains, so we would need to get fresh food in a few days. Upon questioning, we were assured that we would reach the den the next day and could get something there, we were guests after all.


    I was curious what the canine equivalent of a city would look like.

 Chapter 205

    I hadn¡¯t been quite sure what to expect when the wolves told us they would take us to the Great Den. There had been visions of an ordinary wolf¡¯s den only scaled up to eleven in my head but also more fantastical variants, something out of other games, where non-humanoid races had their own cities, built very much like those of humanoid races, only a lot bigger and more grandiose. But mostly, those cities had been attributed to dragons, without going into reasons why a dragon would even want something like that.


    At first, seeing the Great Den made me think the first idea, of a normal wolf¡¯s den, was correct. The entrance was nothing more than a hole in the snowy fields we had been travelling across, just big enough to allow wolves the size of Ylva and Swiftstride to enter comfortably. Sigmir, on the other hand, looked a little uncomfortable, having to hunch but there was nothing to be done about it, we could hardly start digging up the tunnel just for her.


    As we were entering, I felt myself scrutinised - not that I could see the watchers, but I was quite sure that they were there. Part of me wanted to peek through Lenore¡¯s sight, looking for them or the magical defenses but I wasn¡¯t sure if something like that could be detected and if it was, how the wolves would react. What I did notice was that the snow above the entrance was looking a little strange and there was a feeling of permanence and solidity about it, making me guess that it had been treated with magic. That feeling reminded me to be on my guard, that just because the wolves lacked opposable thumbs they were not simple beasts. It was a lesson I needed to internalise, if I wanted to thrive on Mundus.


    After the narrow entrance and a short tunnel, just a few meters at a steep decline, we reached a larger room, the ceiling high enough that Sigmir could stand, albeit just, and wide enough that we all would be able to walk next to each other. Once we had entered, I was almost run over by Adra who was walking behind me as I just stopped, staring at the sight. I had expected dirt floors, maybe magically worked stone, but I would have been wrong. Not just the floor but everything around us was looking as if it was made from snow, white and clean but still glowing, literally, from the power imbued into it.


    Stepping over, I placed a hand against a wall and felt the power bound within, not just cold but more. It gave me a good idea why the Ankhags and similar burrowing foes would be unable to breach the den; unless I was wrong, the strange, crystalised snow would unleash its power if the structure was damaged, annihilating any attacker. And the room we were in was quite obviously made to allow easy defense of the choke-point that was the entrance, trying to get down the steep, narrow tunnel would force attackers to go single file, only to be ripped to shreds by waiting wolves with more than enough room to maneuver. With just a couple fighters - or even less fighters but with some magic support - you could hold such a room until you ran out of supplies, unless the attackers had massively stronger individual fighters.


    A soft growl behind me reminded me that we were guests and maybe studying what had to be a significant part of their defense was rather impolite. Turning around, I noticed that the rest of my party looked at me with amusement in their eyes while some of the wolves glared.


    ¡°Don¡¯t mind her, she has yet to see a magical curiosity and resist the urge to study it.¡± Adra explained, grinning widely.


    ¡°I¡¯m not that bad.¡± I half-heartedly objected, more for the sake of formality. I knew I actually was that bad.


    ¡°Really? Let me think, right after we met, you caused a dimensional tear, that allowed a large Nethersprite passage. Granted, you later destroyed the sprite but still. A little later, you were involved in a highly complex ritual, thought up by an elder being, strong enough to tear mountains and redirect rivers, at least that¡¯s what Kallista told me.¡± she began, holding up her hand when I wanted to interject.


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    ¡°And I saw you experiment on your own, almost causing another dimensional tear once and then there was the experiment in which you destabilised crystallised elemental essence, almost blowing yourself, and us, up in the process. Why, just a few days ago, you almost managed to kill yourself, once again, trying to understand the nature of the endless wind above. Do I need to go on?¡± she continued, finally ending with a question and a raised eyebrow. There was wolfish chuckling all around, even if they looked at me a little cautious now.


    ¡°I was only looking, nothing more. It¡¯s a fascinating use of magic and I¡¯ll admit to my curiosity, but I wouldn¡¯t have tried anything.¡± I assured everyone, mainly trying to convey to the wolves that i was not a danger, neither to their den nor to myself.


    Now, even Swiftstride was chuckling, ¡°Let¡¯s continue, there are wolves I want you to meet.¡± he told us, urging us on.


    I filed back into the group and we continued our way, into another tunnel, also lined with the curious snow. I was quite certain that we either should be below the ground, even without stretching my magical sense for Ice and Snow out and that even if we were not, the snow should have been compressed into ice, simply due to time and pressure. Despite that, it looked like the first dusting of powder-snow, soft and light, right after falling. But I had already caused a commotion, so I kept my curiosity firmly in check.


    We followed the tunnel into another similarly built room, maybe a second defensive-point, and from there, a number of tunnels branched off into different directions. The one we followed looked just as all the others and, like them, was wide enough for two wolves to pass side by side.


    We passed a couple more side-tunnels and the wounded wolves left the group, heading somewhere else. ¡°They will be taken care of.¡± Swiftstride assured me when I hesitated for a moment. But I had cared for them over the last day and I wanted to make sure that they would be taken care off, it felt wrong to let them leave my care without explaining what had been done and what needed to be done for them. When I said as much, he nodded and assured me again, repeating that their healers would take care of them but that I could visit after we had met the Alpha of the Den.


    The few wolves we saw took a double take, obviously not used to seeing humanoids visit their den, but I noticed that Ylva, who had opted to stay outside her Hallow, drew almost as many looks as the rest of us. Most wolves had obviously yet to cross the first divide but I noticed a few, maybe two or three, that had. I also noticed that their fur-colour was similar, all of them a silver-grey, just a tad darker, less silver, than Ylva and her original pack.


    Soon, we entered another, slightly larger chamber, this one round and Swiftstride told us that we would wait, while giving out a bark, telling someone else that we needed to talk. We didn¡¯t have to wait for long, only minutes after his bark, a couple wolves entered the room from tunnels leading deeper into the den and their appearance took my breath away. There were seven of them, all of them the size of Ylva and Swiftstride and all but one of them clad in the aura of a being that had crossed the first Divide, only that theirs was even stronger than what I had felt before. Not that they blasted it out, like I had seen Sigmir do it once or twice, but it was draped around and over them, like a cloak, impossible to miss.


    But what truly took my breath away was the last wolf, while not physically larger, its aura was stronger by an order of magnitudes. I would have placed quite a few bets that the wolf had crossed the second divide and was on its way to the third.


    It was that wolf that spoke. ¡°Greetings, Son.¡± it addressed Swiftstride before looking over to the rest of us.


    ¡°I see you brought back guests, how unusual. Tell me, why did you bring them to the den?¡± it asked, looking us over - and, once again, I felt myself measured and hoped that I wouldn¡¯t come up short.

 Chapter 206

    Why did I have a light feeling of dej¨¢-vu?


    Ignoring that feeling, I focused on the two wolves, especially the older, more powerful wolf.


    ¡°You told me to do right by my allies. These two-legs came to our aid when we needed it. They fought on our side; to do anything but invite them would be a disservice.¡± Swiftstride answered and I could hear the pride in his voice.


    The alpha looked over us again and I felt the feeling of Observation again and despite it being rather unpleasant, I stopped myself from pushing back. But I was not willing to just sit there and take it, so I used Observation back, curious what I would find.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>


    Wolf of the Winterstorm, level 207


    </td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    The wolf obviously had felt what I had done and focused on me, his aura billowing out, almost pushing me to my knees. I held on, drawing upon every ounce of willpower and magic I had, simply to remain standing. It made me wonder if my impulsiveness had been a good idea, until, after a second or three, the wolf gave out a barking laugh.


    ¡°Curious, they certainly look like beings who run into danger, instead of away from it. And two of them even carry the blood of Loki. Introduce us, son, before telling me what trouble you found yourself in. I can see that you were wounded.¡± he ordered while pulling back his aura.


    ¡°These are Morgana, a Traveller, her mate Sigmir, Ylva - formerly of the Frost Wolves and Sigmir¡¯s bounded Spirit-companion - Adra, a dryad from a distant grove on her wanderings and Rai, the disciple of Morgana.¡± Swiftstride introduced us, one after the other. ¡°There is one more, Lenore, a Spirit Raven who is bound to Morgana but she dislikes the cold and remains in her Hallow.¡± The big wolf gave a nod of greeting while Swiftstride stepped forward and turned to us.


    ¡°This is the Leader of my pack and my father, Sirius.¡± he introduced him, once again using the strange, indecipherable name in their own language first before giving a name that we could use. Knowing that Rai and Adra were unable to understand what was said, Sigmir had started to translate for them in a low voice and we all gave slight bows to acknowledge the introduction, saying our own greetings in return. I had to hide a smile at the given name, it might have been considered rude.


    ¡°About my troubles, the damned ponies were at it again.¡± Swiftstride had turned back to his father and when he mentioned ponies, all present wolves, but Ylva, gave off angry growls, strong enough to make my bones vibrate.


    ¡°I feared as much. Tell me in detail.¡± Sirius ordered and Swiftstride obeyed.


    ¡°We were near the edges of the windy plains, patrouling, when a centaur hunting- and raiding-party attacked us. As you ordered, we instantly turned, using the deep snows and the wind to cover our retreat, not getting into a fight with them. A few of my wolves took arrows and they gave chase, but I was certain we would get away during the night. I don¡¯t know if it was bad luck or if the ponies managed to work with the bugs, but in the night, we ran into a group of the bugs.¡± He stopped for a moment and I got a feeling that news of such an alliance would be ill-received by the wolves.


    ¡°They attacked from below, managing to wound more wolves, mostly crippling their legs so they couldn¡¯t flee or fight. We called for help and one of the first groups that arrived were these two-legs.¡± again, he paused, this time nodding to us.


    ¡°They managed to create a solid center that we could rally around, while keeping the bugs at bay. Afterwards, this one,¡± he gestured to me, ¡°healed our wolves, including me. I don¡¯t know how many would have died without them in general and her in particular.¡± he concluded.


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    ¡°So, are you invoking the ancient rites of blood debt? Are you looking to dedicate your life to service to her?¡± the Alpha asked and I could hear that he was rather displeased with the idea. I got a feeling that trying to claim such a debt would be rather unwise, but maybe we could get something else out of it.


    ¡°Forgive my impertinence, but you said it yourself, we are of one blood. How could I call in a life-debt to a fellow child of Loki?¡± I spoke up, after thinking quickly. I was well aware that I would have to speak with Sigmir later, but for now, I wanted nothing to do with having another wolf tag along with us, not if it meant pissing off the powerful Alpha.


    I could see that Swiftstride looked a little relieved at my interruption, making me think that he would have honoured the debt but would prefer to remain with his pack. At the same time, Sirius grumbled in agreement, before speaking.


    ¡°Indeed, it would be wrong to claim a debt for saving one you share blood ties with. But, as it has been a long time for our ancient relatives, the Firn-elves and the Giantblood, to visit our den, it would be wrong not to give you presents for the occasion. We will see to that later. For now, I extend my thanks and give you leave to explore the den at your convenience.¡± he announced and now, I had a hard time hiding my grin.


    ¡°What are we going to do about the ponies?¡± another of the wolves, this one sounding female, asked. ¡°It has been six months and their raids have grown more and more daring.¡± she continued.


    ¡°Do you want to bring that up before the outsiders?¡± a fourth wolf asked, making me wonder why the previous report had been fine to talk about in front of us.


    ¡°He called them Blood-kin, so they are no outsiders. But it hardly matters, I doubt they are in league with the ponies, not unless they are hiding another set of legs somewhere.¡± the female answered, just before Sirius broke in.


    ¡°Enough. They are kin and maybe they have insight of the world outside of our plains. We hardly hear news, few of the so-called civilised people even speak our language. Tell us, travellers, what are the news in the world?¡± he asked, and I noticed that he called all of us travellers, as if not knowing the special meaning of the term. And with the time-frame, I had a rather obvious idea.


    ¡°There is one thing of note but first, would you tell me if the word Traveller has a special meaning to you?¡± I asked, first wanting to affirm my suspicion.


    He cocked his head, which looked rather funny on the huge wolf, before asking, ¡°It is one who travels, is it not?¡±


    ¡°So it is like that. You see, seven months back, the gods themselves decided to allow others, Travellers from another world, to visit this world. I am one of them and we take on a guise, an Avatar, if you will, to travel here - an Avatar made, I think, by the Gods themselves. That Avatar can be of most species, what you see is not the form I was born into, it is one I only use here, on Mundus.¡± I explained, causing the wolves to stare a little. But that was somewhat to be expected, I was declaring that I was a literal alien after all.


    ¡°I could imagine that some Travellers came here, using the form of Centaurs and started to hunt, trying to quickly raise their strength. It would make sense that they hunt on the plains, given what I know about Centaurs, I would expect them to act similar to cavalry, using hit and run-tactics and their superior speed in battle.¡± I continued and at the last part, the wolves laughed a little.


    ¡°Superior speed? They might be able to outrun us over a short distance, but once the sprint is over? Then they don¡¯t have a chance to outrun a wolf, we run like the northern wind.¡± one of them spoke up, making me blush a little.


    ¡°But what you say sounds grim, indeed. Tell me, what happens if your form here gets broken? Your Avatar, you called it?¡± Sirius asked, sounding a little worried.


    ¡°My essence, maybe my soul, I don¡¯t know, is sent back to my world, where I wake without harm. I have yet to experience it myself, but when other Traveller attacked us, and we killed them, it looked like their bodies vanished into the air itself, leaving nothing behind. Afterwards, their bodies are reformed two days later, at a safe location they chose beforehand or somewhere around the area of their demise - weakened, for a time, but otherwise hale and healthy.¡± I told him, causing him to growl in annoyance.


    ¡°Just what did the Gods think?! That makes them immortal, doesn¡¯t it? So, the centaurs might have immortals bolstering their ranks, no wonder they got bold.¡± Sirius exclaimed, before focusing back on us.


    ¡°Swiftstride, go, show our guests the Den. We need to discuss things.¡± he ordered, sending us away.

 Chapter 207

    ¡°Come, friends, the elders need their quiet.¡± Swiftstride told us, before turning and leaving the room. As we did, I saw a notice in the corner of my eye, telling me that I had gained a massive increase in reputation with the Pack of the North Wind, bringing my social status, something I had yet to raise to anything but neutral, up to a level called Honored Friend. Part of me wanted to laugh, that the first group I had befriended in a way the system recognised was a wolf-pack. Maybe I should found a city on a hill, it might flourish, at least if I could keep drunken fiddle-players out.


    ¡°You mentioned I would be able to assure myself that my patients are taken care of.¡± I reminded him, keeping the added advantage of bringing him into their infirmary to myself. While he had been a patient and I was relatively sure there wouldn¡¯t be any problems remaining, I wanted to have it checked out by their healer, someone who would be used to working on wolves for their entire life. In addition to that, I was curious what sort of healer they had available, what sort of society they had.


    ¡°Of course. Follow me.¡± he agreed, padding ahead with us walking after him.


    The tunnels we were now walking in seemed slightly wider and more populated, and I realised what the den reminded me of. We might be in the equivalent of a non-instanced dungeon, having just met the end-boss. It was an interesting idea, even if it made me wonder about the balancing. Having a dungeon mostly populated by wolves between level forty and seventy, only to have the end-boss in the two-hundred was¡­ problematic, to say the least. At the same time, it raised questions about befriending other monsters, dungeon or otherwise.


    In any case, we received friendly barks and growls in greeting as we walked through the den, making me rather happy. It felt good to be seen with favour - and some of the wolves, especially the younger cubs, were just adorable. I never had been able to have a pet and when a young, silver-grey pup decided to toddle after me, looking adorably clumsy while doing so, I just about melted. Without thinking, I stopped, kneeling down and started to gently scratch it behind its ears, while it tried to lick everything that came too close to its face. Its fur was so fluffy soft, it was marvelous.


    Soft giggles pulled me from my mesmerised state, causing me to realise that the others had stopped with me and Adra was having trouble not to burst out laughing and even Sigmir and Rai had wide grins on their face.


    ¡°Oh¡­ my... ¡° Adra managed to get out between giggles. ¡°I never thought that you, little missy murder-blood mage, could look that cute.¡± I froze for a second, feeling a blush creep up on my cheeks, when a warm tongue tickled my face and I saw that the little wolf had managed to jump onto my knee and use that to boost itself far enough up to lick my face.


    ¡°Look, Sigmir, you have competition for kissing Morgana.¡± Adra continued, now Sigmir was giggling as well.


    ¡°Woe is me, my beloved mate set me aside for a wolf.¡± she said in a dramatically over the top voice, making me wonder where that came from. She certainly hadn¡¯t seen any bad drama on television but maybe it was just part of who she was.


    ¡°Don¡¯t worry, love. Nobody could ever replace you, but the little guy is awfully cute, don¡¯t you think?¡± I assured her, while wrapping my arms around the wolf for a moment, causing laughter even amongst the wolves. Afterwards, I noticed a bitch-wolf standing nearby keeping very careful watch on the pup, making me assume that it was its mother, so I carefully set it back down, giving it a last scratch before gently pushing it back towards her.


    ¡°I¡¯m sorry for delaying you, Swiftstride.¡± I apologised, even if it was a lie. I was not sorry for petting the little wolf.


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    ¡°Don¡¯t worry about it.¡± he answered, amusement strong in his voice. ¡°Let¡¯s continue. And if you want, we can head into the nursery later, most cubs are in there.¡± he laughed, making me grin despite myself. At the same time, I wondered about their mating season and how many pups would be there. But considering that it should be early to mid-spring, maybe it wasn¡¯t unreasonable, it was just that the endless ice and snow had concealed the changing seasons from me.


    There were no further delays by cuteness on our way and in the infirmary, we were greeted by another larger wolf, only this one felt vastly different from those we had met before. Part of that was that it was smaller than the others who had crossed the first Divide - still larger than normal, and the aura of Power was unmistakable, but there was a difference. Part of it might be what I perceived as smell, she smelled less crisp but there was a powerful undertone of an earthy, primal scent of beast. I was not quite sure what to make of it, having not smelled anything like that before.


    Around the main-chamber, there were smaller chambers, not much more than alcoves and I could see that the floor was covered in fur in there. About half of them were being occupied by wolves, most of them, I recognised as my patients from the days before.


    ¡°Greetings, cousin. Let me introduce you to the Traveller Morgana, who healed these before we got here, her mate Sigmir and their companions, Ylva, Adra and Rai.¡± he turned back to us.


    ¡°Friends, this is my cousin. I think the best name for her you can use would be Still.¡± he finished introductions, with all of us nodding in greeting.


    ¡°Ah, you are the one who healed them? Good work, even if there is still a lot to do.¡± Still complimented me.


    ¡°It was my honour. But could you please take a look at Swiftstride, he suffered the worst wounds and while I used a lot of power and did my best, I would rather have someone used to working on wolves look at it, just to make sure there won¡¯t be more problems.¡± I asked.


    My question caused Still¡¯s head to snap to Swiftstride, with a glare in her eyes.


    ¡°You were wounded and didn¡¯t come here first?!¡± she asked, her growling deep enough to make my bones vibrate. I almost laughed at Swiftstride body language, he looked so much like one of the dog-pictures on the internet, showing a dog that had done something bad and was being scolded by their owner, it was uncanny. The proud, oversized wolf, looked like a kicked puppy.


    ¡°I¡­¡± he tried to explain, before looking at me, ¡°She healed me¡­¡± he got out before a wordless growl from Still silenced him. Next, I felt her exude magic, not in the same way I used it, not even in the same way Lenore used it, it felt more like Adra¡¯s but still not the same. I blinked on Lenore¡¯s sight, watching as the magic, glowing with multi-coloured light, emerged from Still before enveloping and seeping into Swiftstride.


    ¡°His belly was hurt? And even his intestines?¡± Still growled under her breath and I saw the light gather around the area I had healed, likely tracing the wound and my healing.


    ¡°No traces of infection, that¡¯s good. But he will need to rest and heal for a while, the fix was done well, but it might open again, if he overdoes it.¡± Still continued, making me quite proud that my battlefield-fix was considered ¡®well done¡¯.


    The magic faded and Swiftstride growled at me, ¡°You said you wanted to make sure that the others were cared for, you never said something about me.¡± he grumbled, only to realise a moment too late who was still next to him.


    ¡°And you say that as if it is bad. I¡¯m glad to have seen that, you will need to relax at least for a week, better two. You are healed but the healed areas are still weakened, compared to normal. She made sure that nothing remained that could cause infection, but if you are stupid enough to re-open those wounds, you will die slowly and painfully. And it will be entirely your fault.¡± Still growled at him and I was quite sure that it was the last I heard of that.


    ¡°But it speaks well of you that you want to make sure your patients are taken care off. Come, I will show you what I have done for them and maybe we can work together to alleviate some of the lingering damage. From what I have seen of your work, your healing is powerful and well done.¡± she invited me, using her muzzle to gesture to one of the alcoves.


    Happy to work with another healer, maybe allowing me to learn more about the craft and my powers, I followed behind, leaving the others to relax or do what they wanted.

 Chapter 208

    Working with Still was quite educational. One thing that I noticed instantly was that she was using magic in a far more encompassing fashion than I was, doing things with it that I would have used my hands for with her magic. I learned that she had specifically learned an application of Wind Magic, even without having talent for the rest of it, allowing her to essentially use telekinesis, easily making up for her lack of hands. Her other magic was essentially the opposite of Lenore¡¯s innate abilities, Still was wielding Life Magic. Working with her taught me a lot about the advantages of specialised magic, when I noticed how hard a time she had when it came to directly working on the patients blood and flesh. She was able to throw magic at a problem, greatly boosting the natural recovery ability, even guiding it in ways that were unnatural, but when the problem was one that the body wouldn¡¯t be able to handle, she needed huge amounts of power to compensate for it.


    When we talked about the power-requirements of her magic, she proudly showed me to a back-room but only to the door, not allowing me entry. When I looked inside, I saw an altar-like table and on it rested a clearly canine skull and the attached spine. The bones shimmered in the dim light, giving of an almost metallic sheen and inserted into the forehead, between the eyes, was a large, turquoise gem. Not knowing what to say, I looked at Still, wondering what it was. As I saw it, it was the equivalent of me, using a fetish crafted from human, or maybe firn-elf, bones, gruesome and rather worrying.


    Still gave a bow to the altar before speaking.


    ¡°This, Morgana, is one of the greatest artifacts in the den.¡± she said and I could hear the reverence in her voice.


    ¡°One of our ancestors wanted to help the den even after she passed on, not satisfied with doing her best in life, she wanted more. And more, she did, according to our stories, she created this staff in her death, using her own body and the last flare of her great power to make the Denmother¡¯s Staff.¡± she explained.


    ¡°You mean, that¡¯s her skull and spine? And she did that to herself?!¡± I asked, trying to keep the disbelief out of my voice. It seemed just too fantastical to be true.


    ¡°Yes, according to legend, she had great magical power and had learned some of her magic from the Old Witch of the North, magic that she passed on to her descendents and ultimately me. But you wanted to know how I could power some of my magic, this is how; the staff allows me to cast magic through it and store a great deal of Astral Power inside, for later use. I only use it if the need is dire; doing otherwise would be disrespectful.¡± Still explained and I barely managed to smother the question if I was allowed to study it. Even showing it to me was probably a borderline-case and she had only done it as a favour.


    ¡°Thank you for showing me. It is an impressive item.¡± I told her, forcibly burying my curiosity.


    ¡°I thought you would appreciate it. We wolves have only a few items like that, crafting items is not easy for us, so most of us prefer to rely on our natural bodies and powers. But sometimes, I am just not enough, so using the staff helps to save lives. I wouldn¡¯t be allowed near it at all, if not for the fact that I¡¯m the keeper of the infirmary and one of the few wolves gifted in the healing magics.¡± Still explained and I realised something important.


    I had never quite thought about what it meant to have a relatively advanced culture without the basic ability to craft things and how such a culture might develop. As such, learning that crafted items were the epitome of status-symbols among the wolves was enlightening. It also reinforced the idea that asking to study it would be terribly impolite.


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    After seeing the staff, she guided me back out but the rest of my group was nowhere to be seen. It shouldn¡¯t have come as a surprise, we had spent hours working on the various injuries and there simply was nothing to do here.


    Still gave a soft bark and a different, relatively small wolf appeared.


    ¡°I apologize, Morgana, but I prefer to stay in the infirmary, just in case something bad happens.¡± Still explained, ¡°But Fresh Snow here will guide you to your group.¡± she nodded to the newly summoned wolf, who looked as if she was bursting with pride.


    ¡°Greetings, Fresh Snow, and thank you for guiding me.¡± I greeted her and had to hide a grin when her tail started to wag back and forth at high speed. ¡°It was a pleasure to work with you, Still. Don¡¯t hesitate to call upon me if you need help while I¡¯m here.¡± I gave my farewell to Still, who returned the gesture.


    ¡°I will guide her, Elder.¡± Fresh Snow told Still and I thought there was some awe in her voice. ¡°Please, follow me, honoured guest.¡± she told me and started to walk off, looking around to make sure I was following. I caught up and walked next to her, curious about the social interaction.


    ¡°It is so exciting to meet you, honoured guest. Is it true that one of your group has Divine Blood?¡± Fresh Snow gushed, before I ever had a chance to ask about Still. I had to smile at her enthusiasm and it was interesting to feel so appreciated.


    ¡°You likely mean Ylva, and yes, she has. But not only the blood of one Divine Being, she was born with the blood of Fenris strong in her veins and a while back, when we fought against the Black Hounds of Odin, descendants of Freki, we managed to capture one of their Alpha¡¯s alive.¡± I started to tell the tale, using names I had heard from Ylva. Just the names caused Fresh Snow¡¯s hackles to rise and a soft growl escaped her throat.


    ¡°After we captured him, it would have been such a waste to simply spill his blood, all that juicy power would just have returned to the Earth. No, I had a better idea, using the Alpha and a few of its powerful helpers, I managed to trap what little Divine Essence they had, condensing it into a small drop of Divine Blood and Ylva ate that blood, devouring the power of her enemies.¡± I explained and again, Fresh Snow¡¯s tail was wagging in enthusiasm.


    ¡°Amazing. I knew you must be awesome when Elder Still allowed you to work with her, even thanked you for helping her, but to capture Divine Essence¡­¡± she spoke, the mental transmission almost a squeal of excitement.


    ¡°Would you tell me about Elder Still? I don¡¯t know a lot about your Den and pack, just that the Alpha is at the top.¡± I asked, trying to carefully get some more information from the enthusiastic wolf.


    ¡°Of course. The Alpha is the most powerful of the Elders and our leader, but you knew that already. Below him are the Elders, the wolves who managed to cross the first Divide in the older generation. Well, mostly, there are exceptions, for example Still is not as old as the other Elders but due to her special status, we call her Elder, out of respect.¡± she explained.


    ¡°Below the Elder are the Pack Leaders, those who lead the small packs that go out to gather food and fight enemies. Most wolves are part of those packs, others, such as I, are trained directly by an Elder in the hopes that at least one of us will manage to get the needed skills to take over for that Elder in the future. For example, the Elder who is teaching me is responsible to keep new tunnels from caving in.¡± she continued and we reached a couple of small rooms in which the rest of my party was sitting on piles of fur-scraps, Ylva softly talking to Swiftstride, the others looking a little bored.


    I could understand the boredom, especially regarding Rai and Adra; neither of them spoke the local language and, while the caves were marvels of magical architecture, I doubted that Adra was reckless enough to experiment without permission while we were guests. And permission was hard to ask for, if you didn¡¯t speak the language.


    ¡°Ah, Fresh Snow, you kept our guest entertained, I see.¡± Swiftstride said, hearing the tail-end of her explanation. He sounded just a little reproachful.


    ¡°Yes, Pack Leader. Elder Still asked me to guide her, so that is what I did. She needed guidance in the social customs of the Den, don¡¯t you think?¡± she asked, her voice almost teasing. ¡°And they saved you, so I thought it would be good to tell her just where you stand in the pack, that you are important even if you weren¡¯t the son of the Alpha.¡±


    At that, Swiftstride growled softly and without understandable meaning.

 Chapter 209

    The day was coming to an end in the Wolves¡¯ Den, and they had replenished some of our rations from their stores, even if it was only meat that we got, we were rather happy with it. In addition to that, I had spent over an hour in their nursery, having the wolf-pubs crawl all over me, sniffing around and generally enjoying the simple attention they were getting.


    I had even taken a video of it, although I was not sure if I wanted to actually post it and hoped that the algorithm for Highlight-reels wouldn¡¯t flag it, taking the decision from my hands. The reason for making it was simple, if I wanted to make a go at it as a full-time streamer, once the game officially launched, I needed to present as someone you wanted to watch. The normal, magical mayhem wasn¡¯t bad, but having more diverse content might be a good idea and playing with puppies, even wolf-puppies, would likely get a lot of views - after all, only absolute monsters didn¡¯t like puppies.


    After dinner, Swiftstrider joined us again, asking all of us if we would join him. When we followed, he used small tunnels and soon, we stood in front of Sirius, who looked rather grim.


    ¡°I need to ask a favour.¡± he opened, his voice serious and filled with concern. I had a feeling that it was quite hard for the proud wolf to ask us for help, even if we had demonstrated to be friends of the pack. I simply waited for him to continue, letting him say his piece.


    ¡°We told you that the Centaur-attacks got worse and you posed a potential reason for it. While we can¡¯t know if you are right, I fear that you are. And if you are right, I¡¯m not sure if we can hold the Den, not in the long term.¡± he explained, causing me to frown. While I felt a certain amount of compassion for them, I didn¡¯t want to stay in the long-term, I wanted to try fulfilling the quest regarding the Soul-Prison, hoping that it would give me a reward that carried over into the actual game. Helping the wolves might be a major undertaking but I doubted it was on the same level. Still, I simply waited for him to ask his favour.


    ¡°What I want you to do is join one of our hunting-packs, helping them to push the centaurs back for a couple of days, keeping them busy while we prepare the surroundings to our advantage. There are a few things we can do, but we need to make sure that we aren¡¯t disturbed during that time.¡± he explained and a blue quest-window opened for us to accept or decline.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="2">Quest Alert!</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="2">Buying Time - Pack of the North Wind</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="1">Quest Difficulty</td>


    <td colspan="1">Hard</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="2">Push back the Centaurs, buying the Den ten days to work on their defense.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="1">Quest Reward</td>


    <td colspan="1">Increased Reputation with the Pack of the North Wind


    A Magic Item for each party-member, the quality depending on your success.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    I looked at the quest and felt my eyes widen a little, magic items had been rather rare and here we had a chance to get a few of them, four or six, depending how they counted Lenora and Ylva. Sure, we would have to fight a small guerilla campaign for them, but, looking at Sigmir, she would have agreed to it anyway.


    Not wanting to show hesitation, I gave Sirius a solemn nod, telling him that we would work with his hunters, driving back the centaurs. Sirius told us that he would gather the pack over the next two days and until then, we were invited to stay in the den, enjoying their hospitality. Swiftstride instantly volunteered to lead the attacking pack, only to get growled at by his father and told that Sirius knew about Swiftstride being grounded by Still and that he shouldn¡¯t try to get them both in trouble.


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    I had to hide a laugh at that, both big, bad wolves were under the paw of the healer, at least when it came to medical decisions.


    ¡°And now, there is another matter.¡± Sirius said, his voice sounding a lot less, well, serious. ¡°I deliberated and decided what present our dear cousins, whom we have greatly missed, should get for venturing into the Den of the North Wind.¡± he explained, his voice dripping with sincerity. I had a feeling that the old wolf was rather sly, that the presents we essentially got for saving Swiftstride¡¯s life and absolving him of paying back the life-debt were also meant as a bribe to motivate us on our quest. If we hadn¡¯t agreed, I was quite sure we would still get a present but now, it was much more likely that he would give us something good.


    ¡°That is most gracious of you, Alpha Sirius.¡± I nodded, playing diplomatic and inscrutable elf.


    Sirius let out a loud bark, calling another wolf whose name I had never heard before and couldn¡¯t translate. It took a minute or two and then another wolf came trotting in, carrying a few items on its back. It looked like they would topple down any moment, but a glimpse through Lenore¡¯s sight told me that they were held in place using magic.


    ¡°Rai, Disciple of Morgana, step forward to receive your gift.¡± Sirius solemnly growled and a moment later, after I had translated for him, Rai did just that. One of two bottles, looking like they were made from crystal, floated forward, towards Rai who accepted it with a bow and a word of thanks. He was unable to understand what was said, but I thought he acted well.


    Next, Adra was called forward and got another bottle filled with a liquid that changed colour from teal to light-blue, depending on the light. She, too, gave a bow and words of thanks before returning to us.


    ¡°Sigmir of the Giantblood, step forward to receive your gift.¡± Sirius intoned and now it was Sigmir¡¯s turn. He handed her a small, crystalline looking ring, making me tremendously curious what it might be. I would have to ask her to show it to me, later. She thanked him and returned to stand behind me, but as she did, I could see that she looked quite impressed.


    ¡°Morgana, Traveller from a distant place, step forward to receive your gift.¡± he called and now it was my turn. Stepping forward, the last item from the wolf¡¯s back floated over, for me to take. Taking it and looking closely, it was a small, almost simple-looking gem but I had a feeling that it was everything but. Using inspect showed me a blue window.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="10">Crystal of the Northern Wind</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="10">A rare gem with an affinity to both Wind and Ice, making it a great material to empower equipment of those types.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    So, I had been given a material, something that might make for great equipment, but for now, it was useless. Nonetheless, it was a rare item, so I gave a bow in thanks, before returning to the group.


    ¡°With your leave, we would return to our quarters.¡± I told Sirius, having nothing more to discuss. He had given us the quest and, more importantly our rewards. He gave a nod, sending Swiftstride with us who got us safely back to the chambers we had been assigned.


    Once again, I had to hide a smile, watching Rai and Adra head into one of them, while Sigmir and I had the other chamber. When the wolves had asked earlier how many we wanted, the two of them had decided to stay together.


    ¡°Swiftstride, do you think it would be possible to have a talk with the Fresh Snow¡¯s master? She mentioned that she studied under the wolf who is responsible for your architecture and I would love to learn more about the snow-like covering you use.¡± I asked, pausing for a second before explaining further, ¡°You see, I¡¯m primarily an Ice-Mage, so it would be quite the boon for me to speak with an experienced user of the Element.¡±


    ¡°I can ask him, but I will make no promises, he is an old, cranky wolf.¡± Swiftstride answered, not sounding too happy.


    ¡°Maybe ask Fresh Snow to act as an intermediary, she seemed quite friendly to me.¡± I suggested.


    ¡°That might help. And yes, she seemed to be fond of you.¡± he allowed, sounding even more unhappy. There might be some sort of rivalry between the two of them. Still, if I got to talk with the local magic-guru, I was quite happy about it.


    ¡°Again, thank you.¡± I told him, before we wished each other a good night and Sigmir and I headed into our room.

 Chapter 210

    Once Sigmir and I were in our room, the door closed by a conjured sheet of Ice, I stopped, considering. Part of me wanted to resume what I had started a few days ago, before we met the wolves, but there was something I wanted to clear up before it festered within her. While I wasn¡¯t sure if she perceived it as a problem, she might and it might cause her pain, something I was not willing to risk.


    Some more hand-waving by me and I was pouring power into a magical formation that grew a larger boulder of ice, shaped like a very wide loveseat or maybe calling it a throne might be more accurate. After heaping furs onto it, creating a thick cushion over the cold ice, I gently pushed Sigmir over to it.


    ¡°Sit, Love. I want to talk to you and I want to snuggle up to you. But if we lie down together, I¡¯m afraid I¡¯ll be a lot more interested to do other things than talking.¡± I grinned, thinking of the things I wanted to do later. Sigmir nodded, mirroring my grin, but adding a charming blush to it.


    Once she was on the throne, I climbed into her lap, making myself comfortable and pulling her arms around me.


    ¡°So, what do you want to talk about?¡± Sigmir asked and I thought there was a trace amount of tension contained in her voice.


    ¡°Nothing bad, I promise.¡± I assured her, adding a kiss to her cheek to press the point home.


    ¡°I just wanted to make sure you understand why I discarded the potential of a life-debt from Swiftstride, that it was not to make light of you and your traditions, or even the oath you gave me after we met.¡± I started, trying to get a read on her face. There was a small reaction, but too small and gone too quickly for me to fully comprehend. But it was quite obvious that she had noticed and I was relatively sure it had bothered her.


    ¡°For one thing, I hardly care about Swiftstride. When I saw you, it was as if someone or something drove me to save you.¡± I began, remembering seeing her between the wolves that had been hunting her for the Jonari and how extreme I had reacted. In hindsight, I was glad that I had, even if I didn¡¯t why and it still eluded me.


    Sigmir looked pensive at that, as if trying to figure something out and I continued, wanting her to come to the right conclusion.


    ¡°What I¡¯m trying to say is that, debt or no debt, you are part of my life and I want to keep it that way. And I think, or maybe hope, that you feel the same about me, that even without swearing your oath back then, you would be with me and continue to me at my side, as my mate. For that is what you are, love, I wouldn¡¯t want to be in this world without you.¡± I admitted, just as much to her as to myself. Being on Mundus was exhilarating, I was feeling emotions that I had never felt before, a lot of them focused on Sigmir. If she were to leave me, I was not sure what I¡¯d do. I might just never return to this world, going back to my old existence with bittersweet memories to remind me of this world I had started to love. Maybe that sentiment was not the most healthy one, but the difference between worlds was like seeing an old movie in black and white compared to a new one, in high definition, digital colour.


    As I had talked, my eyes had strayed from her face and I had simply placed my head on her chest, my eyes staring past her, unfocused as memories played in my mind¡¯s eye. I felt a hand on my chin, gently turning it to Sigmir and tilting it upwards and then, my lips were covered in a fiery kiss. As the passion flowed from her, into me, I knew her answer, she had understood what I had wanted to convey. There was no mistaken her passion. And for the next few hours, we both were gripped by it.


    In the next morning, we met Aida and Rai for breakfast, both of them looking rather amused, maybe because both Sigmir and I were walking a little gingerly, after getting carried away in our passion the night before. I would have been able to heal the soreness and slight bruising, but that would also have gotten rid of that deliciously naughty feeling I was still having which was well worth the slight discomfort.


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    ¡°Rai, did you hear the wolves howling last night?¡± Aida asked, smirking widely.


    ¡°I¡¯m not sure what kind of animal was howling, but I¡¯m not sure what they wanted to convey, it didn¡¯t sound like they were howls of communication or pain.¡± he answered, keeping a straight face, but there was a bit of an amused sparkle in his eyes.


    ¡°Yes, yes, you comedians. But, if we are on the topic of nightly activities, what is going on with the two of you? I noticed that you roomed together, even in a place where there are plenty chambers for us to use.¡± I asked, delighted in their shared blushes. ¡°Adra, remember, his mother gave him into my care, if you corrupt him, I might have to say something, as his Master. Or is that Mistress?¡± I continued, causing their blushes to deepen.


    ¡°Love, don¡¯t tease.¡± Sigmir gently rebuked me, before continuing, ¡°At least not too much.¡±


    When I looked over to her, she had a happy smile on her face, watching the two of them squirm.


    ¡°So?¡± I prodded and Adra finally started talking.


    ¡°It¡¯s not like that.¡± she promised, her voice soft. ¡°At first, I grabbed him for shared warmth, the two of you were always so cozy but there was no way I could get into your bed, even if just for warmth.¡± she began, her eyes looking a little distant but also haunted.


    ¡°You remember that experiment you tried with the first nymphs from Tegi we captured?¡± she asked, seemingly in a nonsequiteur, to which I just nodded. It had been an experiment I wasn¡¯t proud of. If I understood the result right, I had slowly drained their essence, their very life itself, letting the energy seep into the realm of Nethersprites, like a fishing lure. Finally, that lure had attracted something and just remembering it was making me shudder, I had been incredibly lucky that Sigmir had reacted fast enough and that destroying the anchor had caused that thing to lose grip on its connection.


    Adra must have seen my shudder and interpreted it correctly, because she continued in her tale. ¡°It reminded me how close I had gotten to a similar fate. Only a short time earlier, just ten days or something like that, I had been in a cage, waiting for another dryad to drain my blood¡­¡± she stopped and Rai put his arm around her, giving her a comforting hug.


    ¡°After seeing that thing, after feeling its aura, I was having nightmares, dreams of tentacle monsters trying to invade my mind, to make me their puppet.¡± she admitted, her voice now even softer. It was a far cry from the normally confident and often teasing Adra I had gotten to know.


    ¡°But when I grabbed Rai for warmth, the nightmares went away¡± she continued and I felt bad for her. I hadn¡¯t noticed her distress at all, even if she had been a close companion and friend during that time. Sure, she had been a little disturbed by my actions in the beginning, maybe she still was, but was I so bad that she wouldn¡¯t tell me something like that?


    Thinking back, I realised that she might have been afraid, I had used the dryad and the nymphs, beings rather similar to her, in deadly experiments, not even hesitating. So, she might have thought that I would do the same to her, use her and discard her, if she showed any weakness. It was a horrible feeling; the idea that I would sacrifice my friends like that was unthinkable.


    ¡°I¡¯m sorry for that, Adra. Just know, I see you as a friend and if you have problems or concerns, I¡¯ll have an open ear for you.¡± I told her, trying to convey sincerity, before focusing on Rai.


    ¡°Rai, please, be good to her.¡± I told him, hopefully in a voice that made it clear I was asking as a friend, not ordering as his Master.


    Both of them looked a little taken aback, maybe because of the emotion in my voice, and it seemed as if they were lost for words. But that was just fine with me, I wouldn¡¯t want to explain what was going on in my mind anyway. Luckily, I didn¡¯t have to, as Fresh Snow padded into our room, a wolfish grin on her face.


    ¡°Good morning, everyone.¡± she greeted us, before focusing on me, ¡°Morgana, Swiftstride asked me to introduce you to Master ¡­¡± she said, using the same description Swiftstride had used the night before. I felt myself perk up at the thought of new magical knowledge, for once, acquired without risking life and limb, at least I hoped so.

 Chapter 211

    Still in a bit of a funk, but enthused to learn more about Ice-Magic, I gave Sigmir a soft kiss and told Fresh Snow to lead on, wishing the others a nice day. Their options for entertainment were rather lacking, but I was quite sure they would be able to spend the time in some way.


    Trying to make small-talk as we walked, I asked Fresh Snow what had her so happy this morning. Her tail gave away her glee on being asked, making me grin when I realised that with the wolves, the face wasn¡¯t the thing to read, it was the butt and they all had a terrible pokerbutt.


    ¡°Swiftstride came to me for help.¡± she said, without further comment, making me wonder why that made her that happy. She had been standoffish with him, as if nothing would make her more happy than to have him disappear.


    ¡°And¡­?¡± I asked, slightly unsure if she was just gloating that he had needed to ask her for help, as it might demonstrate his inability to perform a task was making him lesser or something like that. But, no, I was rather surprised when she started to almost swoon over him and that he had needed her, making me decide that there were things between heaven and earth that I just couldn¡¯t understand. But I was regaled with a tale of his positive aspects, a lot of them just didn¡¯t compute for me, due to the difference in our thought-structure. Even Lenore had trouble understanding what she described when she talked about his smell, it was simply outside of either our experience, making it impossible to relate, but hearing about her trying to sniff his behind just made me chuckle.


    Finally, I was saved by the bell - or rather, our arrival at the chamber of Fresh Snow¡¯s master, an obviously old wolf, his pelt almost glowingly silver, compared to the more grey pelts of the rest. Just like some of the other wolves who had crossed the first divide, there was an aura of power around him, but in his case, the power felt slightly different, almost pleasantly cool instead of sharp and penetrating.


    ¡°Greetings, Master. I was asked to introduce this Honoured Friend of the Den, the Traveller Morgana, to you.¡± Fresh Snow said, her voice humble and submissive. I thought she was about to lay down and show her belly, just from the way she was acting. The wolf¡¯s eyes fixated on me, almost as silver as his pelt, compared to the gold or amber eyes the rest of them had. The stare reminded me of the Grandmother, only far weaker in intensity. With her, I had the feeling that she was able to see into me, down into my soul, knowing every thought, desire and feeling I had ever had. With him, I felt weighted and measured but just superficially.


    Not wanting to back down, just as I had with Sirius, I waited, trying to get his measure, even looking at him through Lenore¡¯s sight. The aura of Power around him felt, for lack of better words, charged, as if some of his power was constantly leaking out,


    ¡°Greetings, Elder.¡± I took the initiative after a few moments of silent measuring between us. ¡°Is there a simple word or name I can use to address you? While I understand the language of wolves, my brain is not used to thinking in it, it would be a kindness to allow me such a convenience.¡± I continued, politely.


    ¡°Greetings, Traveller.¡± he answered, his voice sounding stronger in my head than expected, and slightly rough.


    ¡°And yes, you can call me Old Ice, that fits quite well, don¡¯t you think?¡± he asked, surprisingly friendly. I had expected a grumpy old wolf, from Swiftstride¡¯s reluctance and the submission Fresh Snow had just shown.


    ¡°Then, greetings, Old Ice. It¡¯s a pleasure to meet you.¡± I repeated my greetings, this time using his name.


    ¡°Now, why did you want to meet me? I can guess some of it, but I¡¯m curious what you think.¡± he asked, a light challenge in his voice.


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    ¡°As you undoubtedly felt, I¡¯m walking on the path of Ice and Snow myself, trying to understand the mysteries it hides. So, when I noticed the curious substance used to line your den, I wanted to learn more about it and the person behind it. Still introduced me to Fresh Snow, who, now, introduced me to you. To make it simple, I¡¯m interested in your knowledge but also in your wisdom.¡± I explained, keeping my voice strong and confident.


    ¡°Ah, so that is what you are after. Yes, I can feel your powers, I can even feel the touch of Death on you and the Raven in her Hallow. She¡¯s one of Hugin¡¯s brood, isn¡¯t she?¡± his voice got a little cold when he spoke Hugin¡¯s name, maybe more of the feud between Odin and Loki, I wasn¡¯t quite sure.


    ¡°She is, my dear friend Lenore.¡± I replied, wanting to provoke him, but I wanted to stand up for my friend. To that effect, I asked Lenore to leave her Hallow, taking my whacking stick from my magic bag, letting her hop over to it.


    ¡°She gave her freedom, offering to serve me for a year, in a bid to save her friend, Ylva of the Frostwolves from the line of Fenris. She never hesitated, and I would thank you if you don¡¯t disrespect that friendship.¡± I explained, just daring him to reject it. Yesterday, I had learned that they honoured life-debts and were proud of their lineage, so it should get Lenore some respect.


    I just got a chuffed laugh from him, ¡°Good, standing up for your friends, that is a good quality. I will try to ignore the old feuds, but it is hard. The black wolves of Odin have been trying to press us for all my life.¡± he explained, sounding a little tired.


    ¡°Now, you wanted to talk with me about magic? What do you know about Ice and Snow? What do you know about the wind that drives the Blizzard, what do you know about the glaciers that break mountains?¡± he asked and I conjured up a chair for me, settling in for a long discussion.


    ----


    Suddenly, a loud growl jolted me from the deep discussion Lenore, Old Ice and I were having. For a second, all three of us scanned the room, looking for the attacker, when a second growl showed just who was growling at us. It was my stomach, telling me that I had neglected to feed it most of the day, just a few bites of breakfast and nothing since. When I checked the time, I realised that we had talked for almost ten hours, non-stop. Now that I was thinking about it, my mouth was rather dry and I felt a little hoarse.


    Looking around, I noticed Fresh Snow lying nearby, intently looking at us, her eyes sparkling a little.


    ¡°I think we should take a break for some food, do you agree?¡± I asked Old Ice, who readily agreed. I simply took out some of the food I carried around with me, sharing it between the four of us.


    As we ate, we mainly kept the topics to small talk, our minds filled with new ideas regarding magic. It was interesting, I had a lot more understanding regarding the hardness of ice, how to form and use it, even slight understanding towards Eternal Ice, whereas Old Ice, despite his name, was far more knowledgeable about snow, how to form snow into a complex crystal structure that had interesting properties not found in normal ice and how to preserve them.


    It had been an enlightening discussion and I think Old Ice had profited quite a bit himself, making me feel better about it.


    ¡°Morgana, might I ask who taught you? Rumor has it that you, the Travellers, are not from this world and only arrived recently, were you taught in your world? What is it like there?¡± Fresh Snow finally asked, her voice almost as respectful towards me as it was towards her master.


    ¡°What is it like? That¡¯s a question I can¡¯t answer, we would be here forever. Different, that, I can tell you. But no, I only learned magic after coming here. We¡± I gestured to Lenore, ¡°we met a kindly old lady who, after sending Sigmir and me around on some errands, taught me quite a bit, not direct knowledge but methods and understanding how to acquire knowledge on my own. Ever since then, I¡¯ve experimented and learned from it, even if it almost killed me a few times.¡± I continued, smiling at the memories of the Grandmother.


    ¡°A kindly old lady who gives out errands?¡± Fresh Snow asked, sounding a little choked.


    ¡°Yes, here, she gave me this.¡± I grinned, realising that, once again, my teacher¡¯s fame was known here. When I pulled out the Grimoire she had given me, both wolves looked at it almost reverently and made puppy-dog eyes for me to tell them the story.


    It was late in the night when I managed to get back to Sigmir and crawl into our sleeping furs with her. But it had been a good day.

 Interlude: Advertisment - Whisper

    Wind blows across the sand, catching a few grains and carrying them until they drop back down. The air is hazy with a blistering heat, thanks to the burning sun above. The camera follows the wind, quickly closing in to a sprawling city, the buildings made from sandstone almost identical in colour to the desert sands around. White cloth is used to create shade all around, between buildings and even over some roads.


    People are visible, their reddish-blue - almost purple - skin-colour marking them as non-human long before the camera is close enough to show details. But it only takes seconds for the camera to be close enough to show that the people have thin tails ending in sharp and bony points, as well as short horns starting at their temples and going in different ways, some curled, like a ram¡¯s horns, others straight and a few even splitting up into something looking like antlers.


    The camera proceeds into the city, slowing down, showing the surroundings, the airy buildings, mostly providing shade and shelter from the sand carried by the wind, the stalls out on the streets and a hustle and bustle all around. Large lizards walk around, some with a rider in a strange saddle, others used as beasts of burden, weighed down by goods and freight.


    After a sweep through the street, the camera enters a building, showing the white-washed inside walls, before ascending a stairway to the roof-terrace where one of the horned figures stands, clad in a long, white garb and a veil to keep the sand from her face. A moment passes - the wind playing with the soft-looking cloth - and the figure turns, lowering her veil to show a dark purple face, the features too sharp to be truly called pretty but with a beauty akin to a sword made by a master of their craft. Topping the head and anchoring part of her head-garb are two horns, short, straight and sharp, drawing some attention from her eyes, smoldering with a golden glow.


    ¡°Greetings and welcome to Khartul, the city of crossroads, a place where many a path crosses with that of another. It can be your path on the road, it can be your path in life, either way, Khartul might change yours, leaving you on a new road.¡± the figure speaks, her voice a mix of smoke and honey, caressing yet slightly rough. After she stops speaking, she smiles, her lips parting a little and revealing sharp canines, adding a dangerous feel to her beauty.


    ¡°Most call me Veiled Whisper and I am known as the one who knows everything. Because, you see, while some seek their path amidst carnage, slaughtering those who cross them, hunting those who might threaten them, my path is a different one. I don¡¯t seek to be the most powerful magician or the strongest swordsman or even the most devout believer, favoured child of whatever deity they serve. No, what I seek is to know things. From the most benign gossip to the knowledge the deities themselves deemed too dangerous, every piece of the puzzle, every whisper in a careless ear, they are all my currency and my desire.¡± the pointy tip of her tail, shaped almost like a heart or maybe a spade, comes into view, dancing above one of her shoulders before switching to the other, almost like a snake waiting to strike.


    ¡°And today, I invite you to join me, as I walk the roads of Khartul. But remember, a secret shared is a secret lost.¡± with those words, she smiles again, raising her finger to her lips in a shushing motion. After that, she  draws up her veil again before walking into the house and down the stairs.


    The camera cuts to the outside, where the now veiled Whisper steps out, two impressively large figures, both clad in similarly white garb but topped with chainmail and a large, curved sword at their side, following along either side. Their faces are veiled, too, but their barely visible eyes scan back and forth, looking for a threat to present itself, so it can be dealt with.


    ¡°Meet Sayf and Harba, sadly, there are too many who think that just because I know something, I should share. Or that I know too much and the best way to make sure that my knowledge vanishes would be to assure my demise. To prevent that, I have Sayf and Harba, my sword and my spear, both travelling with me, wherever I go.¡± the voice from earlier continues, but not coming from the walking figure, but spoken by an invisible narrator.


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    The trio continues across the busy roads, the two bodyguards assuring that nobody comes too close, using sturdy metal rods to make a path, until a figure, clad just like the Veiled Whisper, approaches. For a second, the figures stop, small, almost invisible gestures are exchanged and the guards allow the new figure to approach, the two white-garbed females moving their hands at their waists, maybe exchanging something, maybe not.


    ¡°Some might ask, how can I know everything, how could I keep up. This was one of my Veiled Words, one of those who collect information for me, acting as my agents. They don¡¯t know everything but they are the important channels that allow me to gather the information I¡¯m interested in. And sometimes, they allow me to move about the roads without my guards, acting just like one of my words, my face hidden by the Veil of Secrecy.¡± the voice explains again, while the two figures on the screen part again, their interaction mostly hidden by the massive bodyguards. With a little practise, it would be easy to have both of them switch places with no one the wiser.


    After that interaction, they continue until they reach a large structure, not quite a building, more like a permanent pavilion providing shade for the market within, almost a street-market but not quite. Guards, clad in similar garb as the two bodyguards, make sure that not everyone is able to enter but the white-clad figures pass without any direct observation.


    Inside, the air is filled with soft noise, hundreds of conversations adding together to produce a indecipherable background noise but, despite all that, no hawkers are shouting prices, the haggling is carried out in subdued, polite tones, all is very orderly. No cutpurses try to ply their trade, no thiefs running after a successful grab, merely the wealthy and the influential are allowed inside.


    The white-robed trio walks along the stalls, the narrator adding a little information what is seen on the various stalls, talking about mead from the Valkyries, silk from the wild lands, valuable elven timber, crystals coming from the deep desert, further south on the demon-continent, almost everything can be bought on the market of Khartul.


    Veiled Whisper inspects some of the wares, softly speaking to the vendors, sometimes, a soft handshake is exchanged but never wares or money. The narrating voice continues to explain, speaking of a system of trust and obligation, those who sponsor the market make sure that the deals made within their halls are kept. It is their honour that allows all to trade freely, at least as long as their rules are kept.


    The market-scene shifts a little and the threesome in white leaves, the two bodyguards looking much more alert after leaving, as if someone might attack them. The female in the middle now walks with a purpose and both hurry to make sure that she is protected, no matter what.


    The scene shifts and the white-clad female figure walks into a tee-house, climbing up a staircase to their roof where she takes a seat, the camera showing the city behind her.


    A cup of tea is set in front of her and finally, the camera shifts, no longer showing her veiled face but shifting to her back, looking out over her shoulder.


    Before her, the cerulean blue ocean spreads as far as the eye can see, white-sailed ships using the wind to enter and exit the harbour. Below, the serpentine figures of the Naga are visible, almost in the same number as the horned and tailed demons.


    ¡°The harbour of Khartul, one of the most important harbours in this part of the world and another reason why Khartul is the city of crossroads. This is one of my favourite places, looking out over the sea, wondering what is behind the horizon, what sail will be the next to show, what information will it carry. And I will be able to find out, one day.¡± the figure stops again, lifting her veil a little to drink a sip of tea.


    ¡°Because that is what I do. I drink tea and I know things.¡± With that, the figure laughs again and the camera zooms out, over the ocean before rising and showing the sprawling city for a moment before rapidly rising, showing the whole world for a moment before the blue flames engulf it, creating the ¡°Road to Purgatory¡±-emblem.

 Chapter 212

    During the rest of our time in the Main Den, Fresh Snow almost turned into my shadow, asking questions about the way I used my magic and what the Grandmother had taught me. Most of the time, it was rather endearing, her ernest interest flattering and she reciprocated with complete openness, even if the breadth of her knowledge was limited compared to that of her master. But it helped me to better understand the differences between the constructs they created from snowflakes and what I did with my ice. It was not just a question of the amount of Astral Power I dumped in, that merely increased the magical density of the Ice I was creating, it was also a question of pressure and a variety of other conditions that led to the different forms. It made me think that maybe, those conditions and the state in which the Astral Power ultimately settled was what seperated Hard Ice from Eternal Ice, that I needed to find the right way to add the power, instead of merely dumping in more. At some point, the power I poured in would simply evaporate back into the Astral River, without changing anything. But to find that condition, I had to learn how to manipulate them on a magical level, which was rather difficult, given that I had only my instinct and vague ideas to guide me. So, in a bid to learn more, I started at the simplest level, using Ice Astral Power and trying to condense it into snowflakes, similar to those used by the wolves.


    More time was taken up by visits from Swiftstride, during which he explained what they knew about the upcoming conflict. The biggest problem was that the wolves were used to the open plains and the forests, places that allowed them to use their mobility and pack-tactics to the fullest. That had worked well in the past, but now, the centaurs had started to set up semi-fortified camps, guarding themselves during the twilight-hours which had been the main hunting time for the wolves. But now, the wolves had to try to content with them on their terms as the centaurs happily competed with them for the game in the area. It was a smart tactic, one that strengthened my hypothesis that Travellers were involved. I could think of no other explanation for the sudden, extreme shift in tactics, from marauding, moving herds of centaurs to stationary camps with guards and even trained guard dogs; that seemed a little too coincidental, especially considering the timing.


    Our task was to make sure that no patrols or groups were able to venture into the plains, or things might get seriously hairy. I wasn¡¯t quite sure what the wolves were planning to make themselves more secure or why it hadn¡¯t been done in the past, but apparently, if the centaurs stumbled upon their measures before they were completed, it would be a disaster. And that was where we came in, pushing them back to their bases, attacking when they didn''t expect it, miss-directing them. Buying time, that was our task.


    In preparation, I had thought of a few ways to do that, ranging from trying to use the permanent wind to form a blizzard, keeping them out, to attacking them head on. At the same time, I knew that I might die doing so, which brought me to Still and her infirmary. While it was no inn or home, it was enough for the system to allow me to set my spawn-point there, just in case i would die. And with that done, I had impressed that upon Sigmir, making sure she understood that, even if I died, it wouldn¡¯t be permanent, that she had to live and return to the wolves¡¯ den, where I would step back into the world. I didn¡¯t want her to attempt saving me by risking her own life, she wouldn¡¯t come back. It had been a rather spirited discussion, but at the end, she had either accepted my plea or given up on the discussion.


    Another thing I had learned was what the presents for Adra, Rai and Sigmir actually were. Rai and Adra had been the worst off, for a given value of worst, the potions they were given would boost their resistance to frost and cold by quite a bit, lasting for about a month. They wouldn¡¯t be as resistant as Sigmir or I were, but it would likely bring them to about the same resistance Sigmir enjoyed before Ylva had crossed the first Divide. When I had heard that, I had quizzed Fresh Snow a little, trying to find out if those potions could be used to bring my already powerful resistance to an even higher level, maybe allowing me to actively work with Eternal Ice, feeling it with my hands and linking it to my magic, without harming myself. Sadly, the potion¡¯s effect on me would be negligible, if there was any at all, the boost mostly working for those with weaker resistances.


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    Sigmir¡¯s present might be the most interesting, the ring she had been given was apparently carved from the bones of an ancestor of the den, similar to the staff I had seen, and would strengthen Sigmir¡¯s connection to the wolves. One benefit was that wolves could feel that she was considered a friend by some wolves, which might make them more willing to communicate. But the true benefit was that it strengthened the connection between Sigmir and Ylva, especially when they used their Avatar-form. It was hard to guess how big a change it was, especially as we had only tried it out in the safety of the den, but Sigmir and I thought that the strengthening effect was about twenty-five percent.


    But finally, after three days of mostly resting, discussing magic and playing with wolf-cubs, the hunting-pack we would travel with had assembled and Swiftstride came to get us. Normally, I would have expected some sort of ceremony but Fresh Snow had told me that everyone was busy preparing for the rituals that would strengthen the den, while we bought them time. While I was rather curious what they actually had planned, I had thought they would simply retreat deeper into the plains, letting the endless winds weaken their foes, but it seemed that I had been wrong.


    While I wondered about the wolves¡¯ plans, we walked through the tunnels that seemed busier than ever, guided by Swiftstride to the entrance and exit of the den.


    There, in the second large room, the pack was waiting, almost ready to head out.


    ¡°Windpaw, Snowdust, these are the honoured friends of the den who will join you.¡± Swiftstride approached two large wolves, both easily recognisable as having passed the first divide, both by their aura of strength and their size. ¡°Friends, these are Windpaw and Snowdust, two experienced hunters. Their hunting packs were combined for the mission against the Centaurs.¡±


    ¡°Greetings, Friends of the Den.¡± the two of them said, one after the other introducing them, and even taking in the smell of each of us.


    ¡°I hope we can work together well, we wolves are hunters, what we are doing now, attacking a prepared group, that is not how we normally work. But it is necessary, for the good of the den.¡± One of them, Windpaw, added after the pleasantries were out of the way.


    I nodded in approval, his surprisingly honest attitude likely the reason he had been chosen.


    ¡°I have quite a few ideas how to change the situation into something more to your liking, something that can use your talents much better than simply throwing yourself against a prepared position.¡± I told them, considering what to tell them. Sure, I had a few ideas but I had no doubt that the Travellers that I suspected to command the host, or at least influence the commander, had ideas of their own. I would need to come up with something that was not easily countered or seen through, otherwise we might find ourselves on the receiving end of a nasty shock.


    ¡°Fresh Snow, Swiftstride, it was an honour to meet you and visit the Den.¡± I told the two of them, before giving Fresh Snow a gentle hug. She had become a good friend during our stay, her mix of exuberance and humour a refreshing experience.


    Both of them gave a soft, howl of goodbye, one that was picked up deeper in the caves, causing an eerily haunting sound, yet, knowing that it was caused by our friends, wishing us well for our mission, made it strangely calming.


    Without any more words, without ceremony, we set out, the thirty wolves of the hunting pack filing out, followed by us. I had a feeling that they knew that some of them wouldn¡¯t come back.


    And, once the wolves had left the den, we followed behind them. Personally, I was curious what this adventure had in store for us.

 Chapter 213

    After leaving the Den, we travelled with the wolves, heading back towards the old, imperial road. It would take us about a day to reach it, now that the wolves we were travelling with were healthy, and from there, we would need about two more days to reach the area where the Centaurs were operating. It was beyond the eternally blowing wind, in an area between a lake, currently frozen, and a forest, a strip of land that was similar to the windswept plains but lacking the punishing wind.


    That wind was something I had asked the wolves about and their reaction had told me that they knew about it, while their evasive answers told me that they wouldn¡¯t speak about it, at least no without good reasons.


    Over the days we travelled with the wolves, I got to know a couple of them and I was rather intrigued. They were all looking forward to going after the ponies, as they derogatively called the centaurs, and almost giddy at the idea to pay them back for hunting wolves. But, while those traits were shared by all of them, the underlying personality was different for each of them.


    For example, one female, Bright Cloud, was an avid astronomer, without telescope, without any way to write down what she saw, she simply enjoyed watching the night¡¯s sky, trying to see patterns and figure out the meaning of them. And she had a prodigious amount of knowledge stored in her head, more than I would have expected, really, allowing her to give me quite detailed information about the current season and, based on past observation, what the future would bring. I was curious if her prognosis - that within the next few days, a major shift in weather-pattern would occur - would hold true. She claimed spring was coming fast and would melt some of the local snow, despite the cold, northern wind.


    If she was right, I had a few ideas how to abuse such a shift to harass the Centaurs, using mud and thin coatings of ice to hinder them, using their higher weight against them. Essentially, I was planning to use tactics used against cavalry on Earth against them, just to see how they handled something like that.


    Another wolf, Crisp Ice, told me quite a bit about the local monsters, the dangers inherent to them. He taught me how to get a feel for the snow beneath us - not necessarily using magic, he managed without, merely with his paws - to feel the vibrations and use them to detect dangers lurking below. Or prey, that was possible as well.


    When we had first arrived on the windswept plain, I had been taken aback by the emptiness, that there seemed to be no life at all in the area. After the lessons Crisp Ice taught me, I learned just how wrong I had been, I had just failed to look in the right place. Where I had looked at the surface, now, I was able to look beneath the surface and that, hidden in tunnels of snow and earth, was where the life was.


    Plants, sleeping in the frozen earth, waiting for the spring-thaw, martens, rabbits and all kinds of small animals, sleeping in their burrows, waiting for the plants to grow, it wasn¡¯t the lifeless desert I had thought it was, not at all. It was just hidden.


    Those lessons and the swift pace they set towards the centaurs, made the days go by quite fast, but during the night, I was able to leave the game and get a few things done in reality.


    As I was preparing dinner, I saw a new advertisement, after my own had been out for a while, they had a new one. This one featured a daimon, at least I was quite sure that that was her race, playing up the mystery and intrigue angle. There were a few things that stood out to me, the biggest that she had ostensibly shown her face during the clip. Somehow, that seemed slightly strange, if she wanted to keep herself hidden, but, given that I had used my own advertisement-clip to add a few false trails, what were the chances that she had done the same? At the same time, an information-broker might have some juicy details, knowledge about old ruins, with interesting, lost magic, so I made a note to contact her ingame, or maybe even using the forum. I doubted that I would get anything using the forum, at least not without something to trade, but I might visit the town she was based in. My path was leading me into that direction, even if only very generally.


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    What I did next, was trying to find out if there was anything about centaurs, maybe allowing me to get a read on them, before we ever encountered them. Just using the keyword ¡°Centaur¡± in the video-database of Road to Purgatory produced quite a few hits, a few thousand, that is. Looking through them one by one would take not just hours, but days, so I filtered, first using keywords related to hunting, curious what their normal tactics would be, and starting there.


    After watching a few of them, I realised that their tactics were rather similar to what I had seen in documentaries of mounted archers of earlier times, the centaurs were using their fast-speed over short distances to sprint, turn, shoot an incredibly large bow, sprint some more, either to catch up or to keep distance between them and their prey. Otherwise, they also seemed to favour tactics to encircle larger prey, almost like native americans in western, riding around a circled wagon-train and slowly whittling down their defenders.


    Obviously, the clips I saw were not from the centaurs we would fight, but it gave me a baseline to gauge their abilities. Unless I missed my guess, the centaurs we were up against used similar tactics but only during times that favoured them, so mostly during the day, when the light allowed them to use ranged-attacks to their best effect.


    Afterwards, I deleted the filter and applied one that looked for snow and ice-themed videos, sadly, the few that were there, were rather useless. They showed centaurs in small tents, sleeping, acting generally domestic and all that. Nothing about tactics for hunting during the winter, nothing, really. That lack told me that they likely had trouble on shifting ground, like ice and snow, so they mostly stayed inside. It might be another weakness I might be able to exploit.


    With that information, I started looking at historical records how had people fought - and more importantly, won - against swift, mounted archers before? My search quickly brought me to documentaries about the Mongols and their mounted cavalry, talking about their campaigns into Europe, their victories and their defeats. Some of the information, I would be able to use, other parts were virtually useless. At the end of the day, I would be fighting against Centaurs, not Mongols and, given my hypothesis about Travellers helping the Centaurs, I had no doubt that those Travellers would look at similar sources as I had looked at, at least if they had any sense.


    So, it was a case of knowing your enemy and knowing yourself. Part of me was looking forward to seeing how they stacked up and what I, personally, could do to throw a wrench into their plans.


    Finally, after doing some exercises, I logged back in, timing it so I had spent the night outside the game, which would make me a little tired during the day, but nothing problematic. The wolves had kept watch during the night, so when dawn broke, we headed out, towards the centaur-camps. Not that we would get there, or even want to get there on that day, but we wanted to get near, hopefully without being spotted from afar.


    ¡°Lenore, can you scout ahead?¡± I asked mentally when I felt the wind weaken around me. It was quite sudden and without any discernible reason, making me even more curious what caused the wind, I couldn¡¯t think of any natural reason for the wind to blow all the time in a highly defined area. It just didn¡¯t seem right, sure, there could be mountains, funnelling the wind in a certain direction, but that only went so far, I thought that I would see such a mountain-range, if there was one.


    ¡°At least we are out of the wind.¡± Lenore grumbled a little, she was still not a fan of the cold, something I still thought funny for a being that grew up in the frigid north. While I wasn¡¯t looking forward to getting further south, mainly because of my own sensitivity to heat, I was curious how Lenore would deal with it. Maybe there, she would complain about the heat and the stinging sun.


    As I suppressed those thoughts, to make sure she didn¡¯t catch them, she left her Hallow, taking up position on my shoulder before hopping off, strongly beating her wings to gain height and speed.


    ¡°Good luck, dear friend.¡± I mentally sent after her, before she left the range we could communicate in.

 Chapter 214

    While Lenore was on her scouting-trip, the rest of us waited around, some of the wolves spreading out towards the forest, looking for a good spot for us to set up our own camp. We would be here for some time, so having a good position to spend time while not going after the Centaurs was important, as was securing a supply of food and water.


    Lenore soon returned from her preliminary flight, landing on my shoulder and merging into her hallow as soon as possible. Sitting down, I asked her to show me what she had seen and she did, letting me experience her memories.


    The next moment, I was feeling my wings beat the air, riding the wind to rise into the sky, away from Morgana. The air was cold, the wind still biting, even if the weather was supposed to change soon, for now it was still winter. With a few more beats of my wings, I managed to find a current that carried my higher without additional effort and soon, I was able to look down upon the land from high up, high enough that I was unable to make out small animals on the ground. But that was just fine, I didn¡¯t care about them at all, Morgana wanted to know about the centaurs. I had heard about those, we had even seen a few in Yaksha, but it seemed that they were doing something big in the area.


    A few minutes later, I started to see the smoke of their fires and the outline of their camp, causing my to change my direction to get a better look. From above, the camp seemed to be created with a clear plan in mind, not as haphazardly as most other organised dwellings I had seen before. The only town that came close had been Kolyug, the organised troll-town following rigid lines, even seen from above, as if drawn with a straight-edge. The camp below me was similar, the tents organised in squares with wide path between them, even if the tents themselves were round, making it a little strange to look at.


    As I got closer, I could see that further in the distance, more smoke was visible, hinting that there were more camps out there, far enough apart to not interfere with the others operations but close enough to respond to large battles. At a guess, it would take just a few minutes to get from one camp to the other, if someone like Morgana was in a hurry.


    I let my eyes follow the paths between tents, noticing more and more details as I got closer, for example that the tents seemed to be organised in groups, seven tents surrounding one tent in the middle and that the whole camp was organised in a similar manner, seven groups of tents surrounding a group of larger tents with the biggest in the center. Unless the centaurs acted in a very different manner to most sapients, that biggest tent would house their leader, something that was always good to know.


    After getting close enough, but not too close, just in case they knew of aerial scouts and took measures to send such scouts to the cook-pots, I started circling, looking closer. There were centaurs out and about, quite a few of them actually. Most seemed to just mill around, but I noticed that at the edges of the camp were guards posted and on the other pathway were patrouls, consisting of one centaur accompanied by what looked like a large, dark-furred wolf.


    As I watched those patrols, I noticed that the whole camp was even more secure than I had first thought, the outer perimeter was ringed by low, pointed stakes, sticking out a small earthen berm that would make a direct and swift ground-attack suicidal.


    After another circle, trying to figure out which tents were what, sleeping spaces, storage and all that, I decided that I had seen enough for now and wanted out of the cold, back into my nice comfortable Hallow.


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    Flying back took some more effort, the wind blowing against me, but I tried the trick I had used to keep the wind from annoying Morgana and me too much, using my magic to guide it around me. That made flying far more comfortable and easier. Long before my Astral Power dipped below half, I got back to Morgana, landing on her shoulder and shifting into my Hallow.


    The memory ended and I felt myself blink a few times, the memory so much more vibrant and intense that it had been when we had shared before. Before, I had watched her memories, like an encompassing movie, now, I had been Lenore, not just watching her.


    For a moment, I just sat, trying to digest the memory-stream I had just experienced from my lense and it was even more intense; having my own senses filter what Lenore had experienced changed things a great deal. What to her was just the normal experience of flying, was strange and exciting for me, what to her was just the smell of the wind, held mysteries of magic hidden inside.


    But that wasn¡¯t quite as important as making sense of the camp, and I had to agree with Lenore - it seemed strange. The Centaur-camp looked like someone had used simple, almost primitive, materials and equipment to construct a highly organised camp, it didn''t quite make sense. A civilisation with the level of discipline and organisation needed to develop and construct such a camp wouldn¡¯t employ the individualised and chaotic crafting that resulted in the equipment she had seen.


    But what she had seen changed my ideas a bit, even trying to attack those camps would be idiotic, unless I managed to do it completely from a distance, in a manner similar to what I had done to the nameless village. But I highly doubted that the Centaurs were weak enough to die from just that and unless they were completely stupid, they would have some sort of magical defense, to prevent enemy spellcasters from wreaking havoc. It was something I wanted to test, maybe by trying to scry into their camp, it was something I hadn¡¯t tried in a while and it might be useful. I would have to try if I was able to use Lenore¡¯s memory to guide my scrying, allowing me to gather intelligence from a distance.


    ¡°They found a good spot to make camp.¡± Windpaw, who had stayed with the rest of my group, told me. I hadn¡¯t been able to hear their howls, but maybe they held back or used some sort of trick, something like a dog whistle, to keep the centaurs from hearing them.


    ¡°Lead the way, I¡¯m done for now.¡± I told him, standing up. He quickly turned towards the forest and started running, not fast enough to leave us behind but pushing us. I cheated a little, using my blood magic to increase the strength of my legs, allowing me to keep up, but it used a bit of Astral Power. I had no problem with that, I didn¡¯t plan to fight once we reached our destination, not this time.


    The forest we reached felt strangely quiet, after the endless wind that had howled around us whenever we were outside and the soft bustle of the wolf¡¯s den, the silent forest felt almost eerily in comparison. At first, the silence set me on edge, worrying that we were walking into an ambush, despite the fact that the other wolves had called us, but within a minute or two, I settled back into the mental feeling I had before reaching the plains, allowing me to take in the soft noises around me, the creaking of wood, the soft noises the needles made when moving in the wind and the myriad sounds of animals, scurrying away from the predators that invaded their little kingdom.


    Realising that those sounds were there and I just hadn¡¯t heard them, my ears to used to hearing the wind and trying to filter it out, that the absence of that sound and trying to find it had made me miss the other sounds around me.


    With me sufficiently calmed, we continued, and the spot the wolves had found was quite good, they had spotted a small cave in a hillside and apparently some of them had the magic to make it sufficiently large to house all of us. Not only housing, but giving us a very defensible position as well, at least if we added a hidden exit, if we ever got boxed in. Remembering the thoughts I had on magical defense just before, I called over Adra and pulled out my grimoire, looking at the alarm-spell it had included, trying to find ways to secure our own camp, before testing if the centaurs had done the same.

 Chapter 215

    While the wolves enlarged the small cave they had found, Lenore, Adra and I placed the few wards and defenses against magical detection that we knew around the area. Sadly, neither of us was particularly experienced in that kind of magic; I was quite sure my darkness-magic was suitable for it, but without a lot of experimentation, I didn¡¯t even know what I needed to know. And to experiment on that, I would need an allied mage using some sort of scrying or tracking magic in an attempt to push through my defenses, with me studying the successes and failures. While it was something that sounded quite interesting and like a valuable pursuit, there was, sadly, no way I could do such a thing during our travels.


    Dusk was setting in by the time we felt that we had done what we were able to and we headed into the newly enlarged den to have dinner. The wolves had their own food, a fresh kill some of them had made and brought back to the den, careful not to leave traces, while Sigmir and I prepared food for those who preferred their food cooked.


    While eating, Snowdust came padding over, together with Windpaw, to discuss strategy. Our task was to keep the centaurs from heading deeper into the windswept plains, even when it got warmer, to make sure the main den had enough time to finish their current preparations.


    The question was, how could we accomplish that and there were a few answers to that question. The easiest, at least conceptually, was to simply kill them all, slaughtering the centaurs in their camps. Sadly, while it was conceptually easy, it was next to impossible in practice, not only were there a lot of the silly ponies but, if we started to seriously reduce their numbers, they would likely call in reinforcements from the other camps Lenore had seen in the distance. And I didn¡¯t believe for one second that the three camps Lenore had noticed were the only camps out there, it would be too much of a coincidence.


    No, we needed to keep the centaurs occupied without triggering a massive counter-attack and without giving away what we were doing. To that effect, we decided that one of the important parts of our strategy was to keep the fact that we, the two-legged members of the group, were working with the wolves under wraps. We would help them, but mostly in a supportive role, something that suited me quite well, having Lenore scout from the air, while I would try my hand at scrying and manipulating the weather. I doubted that I would be able to achieve a large-scale effect, not against the changing seasons, but I thought that I would be able to give the wolves some cover by conjuring up some mist or maybe a small Blizzard.


    At the end of our dinner, we decided that the wolves would start their original hit-and-run tactics back up, but only using half the pack they had here. The rest would wait in the cover of the forest to help with the hitting, if the running failed to shake off any equine pursuers. I had to hide a chuckle at the idea that here, the wolves were running from the horses, in a reversal of their normal prey-and-predator relationship.


    My group, on the other hand, would focus on gathering information, evaluating the success of the strategy and trying to influence the weather, all without getting caught by the centaurs. Not an easy task but I thought that we would be able to fulfill it.


    ¡°Love, I want to try scrying the centaur-camp tonight, would you come with me and guard my body?¡± I asked Sigmir after the wolves had returned to their packs. It was a first foray and I wasn¡¯t sure whether the centaurs had some sort of defensive mechanism that maybe even told them from where the magical intrusion came. To make sure that I wouldn¡¯t accidentally give away the location of the den, I was planning to head out into the forest, quite some distance from camp. But out there, I would be completely vulnerable if something went wrong or even when everything went right, I would be non-responsive while my consciousness was shifted into the shadows, looking at the centaur-camp.


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    Sigmir just nodded, hugging me a little closer. ¡°You will be careful, will you?¡± she asked, speaking softly.


    ¡°I will. I don¡¯t think that there is any danger unless they have a seriously powerful and skilled spellcaster in their camp. But even if they have one, they would have to backtrace my spellcasting to attack my body, which I believe possible - but again, I doubt that some Arch-Mage is bored enough to provide magical security for a centaur-hunting party.¡± I assured her, careful not to understate the danger. I didn¡¯t want to get into the habit to lie to Sigmir, just to keep her from worrying. No, being truthful was the better option.


    ¡°Rai, Adra, do you want to join us?¡± I spoke up, while getting up from Sigmir¡¯s lap.


    The two of them looked quite comfortable but when I asked, they instantly started moving and got ready. Within a minute, the four of us, with Lenore and Ylva in their respective Hallows, left the cave, giving the wolves that guarded the exit a polite nod.


    Walking in the smaller group somehow felt a lot better than the pack we had moved in the last couple of days, I had grown accustomed to having the three of them around me and the wolves had changed that dynamic.


    ¡°What are we doing out here?¡± Adra asked, after we had walked a minute or so.


    ¡°I plan to take a magical look at the centaur-camp.¡± I started to explain when I had an additional idea.


    ¡°Lenore, you can fly in the dark without problems, right?¡± I asked her mentally, hoping that she would be able to get another look, this one from lower altitude and with her magical vision active. That way, she would be able to tell if there were any major magical defenses, further reducing the risk I took when scrying. For her, the risk would be low, due to the simple fact that shooting a flying raven in the black of night was something I deemed difficult to do and unlikely that it would even be tried.


    ¡°Yes, I can and yes, I will do as you are currently planning.¡± she agreed with a mental laugh before leaving her Hallow again and taking wing. The others looked at me questioningly, and I explained what I was planning and what Lenore was doing.


    ¡°I think I can help you, at least a bit.¡± Adra nodded as I spoke. ¡°You worry that they manage to find you while you are looking into their camp, right? I will place a warding around you, that prevents others from finding you, that way, it should be harder to, well, find you, even if they have someone who could do something that complicated.¡± she continued.


    We continued on, mostly just walking away from the den in a random direction and erasing our tracks, it hardly mattered where I started, just that the place had no connection to the den.


    After maybe half an hour of walking, Lenore returned and quickly got into her Hallow. This time, she didn¡¯t simply share her memory but explained what she had seen, that there were magical defenses around the camp but, from what she could see, they were relatively simple, almost crude. I should be able to get a good look, without setting off any alarm bells, if I was careful.


    Knowing that, I simply stopped, deciding that the random spot of forest we were standing on was just as good as any other spot.


    ¡°Let¡¯s prepare.¡± I said to Adra, who nodded and started to draw a circle around me, maybe four meters in radius.


    I, on the other hand, considered the best way to go about things for a moment before starting my own magical circle in the snow, laid out in Hard Ice, that way, I would have a robust, physical medium to anchor the Astral Power to. My idea was to have a runic formation create a spot of pure, unfathomable darkness for me, to use as a medium to scry through. Previously, I had used a normal shadow and it had worked, mostly, but now, I wanted to cross a larger distance and use Lenore¡¯s memory to target the spell, which undoubtedly added some difficulty  to the casting.


    In my mind, Lenore agreed with what i was doing, giving small suggestions from her own experience, slowly merging her mind with mine, not fully slipping into the Avatar-mode but we were getting there.


    ¡°Okay, I¡¯m done.¡± Adra said from a few meters away and I felt a slight change in the surrounding atmosphere, subtle and almost imperceivable. The only reason I noticed the change was that I was looking for a change, now that Adra had her ward up.


    ¡°Let¡¯s do this.¡± I mentally told Lenore, completing the Avatar-State and sending my mind into the darkness, to see what was hidden under the cover of night.

 Chapter 216

    Peering into the darkness, I tried to use the same magic I had used before, to create an outlook from another shadow, my variant of the water-mirror spell. I had done so before, so I thought I would be able to do so again. The difference was that back then, I had simply shifted my viewpoint from one shadow I was able to see, into another. Now, I wanted to move from one shadow I could see - or rather, a dense pool of Darkness - into a shadow I couldn¡¯t see, was not certain was actually there, and which was in a position I had never personally seen. That added to the difficulty, but to make up for that increase, I had Lenore aiding me and she had seen the position recently, including the magical formations around the camp.


    As Lenore projected the area I wanted to link the darkness before me into my mind, I focused on the concepts and runes described in the water-mirror spell, just replacing those concerning water with runes concerning darkness. Both were merely used as a medium; a link between the point of origin and the target. Water worked well, as it was a transient medium, perpetually flowing and cycling. Darkness on the other hand wasn¡¯t flowing but it was forever changing, as it wasn¡¯t something that existed, it was a state of non-existence, the absence of light.


    I felt a reaction to my attempt to connect the darkness in front of me to the distant darkness, to link the two of them so I could see out of the distant one, as if I was looking through a window. At first, I thought it was due to the factors that I had considered but as I poked and prodded, slightly changed the mental framing I was using, I realised that the problem wasn¡¯t in the spell as such, it was in the destination. In a bit of an experiment, I used a different patch, not inside the camp, merely somewhere between my position and the camp, a spot that Lenore had coincidentally noticed because it was a relatively large clearing, and tried to look at it from a ground level.


    Just from knowing that there were shadows beneath the trees where the soft starlight was blocked out and kept away, I was able to form a bridge, a window into that clearing. To make sure it worked as I wanted it to work, I moved the focus around, slowly looking at different parts, even trying to focus on specific things to bring them closer, it was certainly possible, if a little challenging.


    After a few moments of looking around and testing whether I was able to use magic through the window - an attempt that ended in absolute failure, I wasn¡¯t even able to perceive the ice and snow with my magical senses - I let the magic evaporate.


    ¡°Well, that didn¡¯t work.¡± I mentally grumbled to Lenore. ¡°Their warding seems to prevent that way of scrying, do you know any other?¡± I asked, slightly annoyed that I had been thwarted that easily.


    ¡°No, I¡¯m afraid not. It seems that the water mirror, or maybe that particular form of scrying is common enough that wards against it are prevalent.¡± Lenore joined in, sounding peeved as well. Maybe because she would be tapped for regular scouting, if the scrying fell flat.  ¡°But I do have an idea what we can try, if you want to.¡± she continued, making me grin with enthusiasm.


    ¡°Is it safe?¡± I asked, before I got carried away and did something risky again.


    ¡°It should be. What I have in mind is essentially a practical application of two skills we already have, only that I want to try it in our Avatar-state so we can combine our skills to make it a reality.¡± she explained, her mind sending a stream of thoughts to elaborate.


    It only took moments for me to understand what she had in mind and I thought it was worth a try. So, without great gestures or ceremony, we fully merged, joining together in our powerful Avatar-state, the Raven¡¯s Shadow.


    But that was only the first step, together, we slightly changed the runes we had used to create the darkness in front of us, shifting it to create darkness around us, almost what we had done to isolate the nymph, so long ago, in order to break into her mind.


    For a second we were completely enveloped by darkness, a darkness so all encompassing and absolute, we wouldn¡¯t have known if our eyes were open or closed. But then, we started reaching out with our magic, feeling the darkness around us, and while we couldn¡¯t see, we knew where there was light and where there was darkness in our surroundings. We knew that it wasn¡¯t the surroundings that had changed, but our perception.


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    The next step was slightly different, instead of shifting my awareness into Lenore, as I did when I looked out through her eyes, I shifted my awareness into the absolute darkness around us. It was a strange feeling, not quite like touching, not quite like seeing, neither really mapped to the experience of feeling the darkness.


    It reminded me a little of the strange state I had reached, back when we had avenged Sigmir, visiting bloody vengeance on her tribe, I had pondered that state and my apparent ability to move through shadows and even teleport through one at the end, but I had never quite managed to recreate it, not wanting to nearly kill myself to even start experimenting.


    But now, it seemed as if Lenore and I had managed to get us into a state that was quite similar to that I had been in back then.


    Focusing on the direction we knew the camp was in, we started to shift the darkness, using the mental construct of a raven, made purely from darkness, without depth, without texture, merely a shadow in the night. Now, we truly were the Raven¡¯s Shadow.


    In that state, moving relied more on our will to shift than on any physical features, making the journey quite interesting; it was as if we were dreaming while being awake, disassociated from our body, but still inseparably linked to it. It was almost as if we had formed a companion-bond with the Darkness around us, a formless, featureless mass, and had half of our combined existence, taking parts from both of us, shifted into it to create the shadow construct.


    Our journey to the centaur camp felt like it had taken hours, but the part of me that was still linked to my body knew that it hadn¡¯t been more than five minutes, merely from having a rough idea of how often we had breathed during that time. But, in the state Lenore and I were in, having temporal dissociation might be just par-for-the-course. We just didn¡¯t know, having no experience to exist as darkness. It would make sense, that Darkness had no sense of time, being defined as something being absent.


    ¡°We are almost there.¡± Lenore caught my attention, helping me focus on our joined thoughts instead of letting my mind fall down the rabbit-holes of our strange state.


    ¡°I see it.¡± I answered, focusing on the flickering, shifting light, coming from campfires, in front of us and the similarly moving shadows that light created. We were even able to get a sense of the magical warding around the camp, not that either of us was able to identify its components, just that it was there and used to keep things out. But apparently, constructs created from pure darkness were not on the list of things to be kept out, allowing us to simply move across the barrier and into the camp itself.


    Inside, we continued to shift from shadow to shadow, sometimes creeping behind tents, other times hitching a ride on one of the ponies, merging our shadowy construct with the inevitable shadow such a being cast.


    It was rather fun, to move about in their camp, knowing that only there seemed to be no way for them to stop us, no way for them to even detect us. We ghosted through the outer perimeter, getting looks into some of the tents, making mental notes where they kept their food and that their weapons and armour seemed to be left to the individuals, instead of having some sort of armoury. But, just knowing which thents had their food and where their support-personnel slept was valuable, if we wanted to push them back, destroying their food was an excellent way to weaken them.


    Once we were done with the outer perimeter, we moved to the inner tents, those eight tents that were obviously more important. There, we ran into a snag: the tents were illuminated brightly, looking from the outside as if they had light-bulbs in there. It made it impossible for me to simply shift inside; I could change my shape to conform to the shadows I had hidden in before, but I needed a deep enough shadow to do that. In there, I had no chance to even try - it was too bright.


    We tried for a few more minutes, until the part of me that was still in my body started to experience headache and a bit of lethargy, making me realise that we had continually used a little more Astral Power than we were regenerating, despite our increased attributes as an Avatar.


    Together, Lenore and I let go of the shadow we had controlled, letting our awareness snap back into our bodies, which was a bad idea. While our awareness and the pieces of ourselves we had linked into the shadow were still connected to the rest, and would always be, the connection apparently acted like a rubber band, and letting us snap back to reality caused a major headache.


    But we had achieved what we had set out to, without getting caught.


    I certainly counted that as a win, headache or not.

 Chapter 217

    After my magical scouting, we quickly returned to the cave the wolves had claimed as their den for our operation, while I considered what I had learned. The main thing of which I was now quite certain was that trying to openly attack the camp during the night would be difficult, with massive losses almost guaranteed. The patrols would spot an attacking force, unless it was functionally invisible, and the centaurs slept next to their weapons, allowing them to quickly muster and fight back. In addition to that, the other camps were close enough to reinforce the other camps quickly. There was no way to make that a winning proposition, not without a massive army that would be spotted on approach. No, we would have to be more sneaky to deal with them.


    The next morning, we told Windpaw what I had found out and we started to make plans. We needed to test the centaurs reactions to stimulus, how fast did they strike back, did they instantly call upon the other camps if they were attacked, did they patrol at full strength at all times, how many did they leave at their camps? Those were questions we needed to answer, allowing us to strike at their weak points. But we also needed to make sure that the wolves didn¡¯t suffer losses to acquire the answer to them.


    As such, the wolves set out during the late morning, to attack one of their patrols, to see what would happen. And seeing what happened was Lenore¡¯s job - she would, once again, fly overhead, scouting. Meanwhile, I would need to stay relatively nearby, close enough to Lenore that she was able to pass information to me, who would pass it to Sigmir, who would transfer it to Ylva, who would be with the wolves. That little game of telephone essentially gave the wolves aerial surveillance capabilities, hopefully allowing them to strike where the centaur-forces were weak.


    Once the attack was done, it would be my job to summon mist, allowing the wolves to retreat without too big problems, at least that was the idea.


    We were at the edge of the forest, looking out into the plains where the centaurs were camped, the wolves stalking forward, ready to break into a sudden run. Lenore appeared on my shoulder after leaving her Hallow and took wing, while I closed my eyes, using Lenore¡¯s eyes to see. It took a little focus to keep myself on the task of focusing on my sight and reporting to Sigmir, the feeling of flying always made me a little giddy, even if only second-hand from Lenore. It was something I wanted to try at some point and I truly hoped that the next stage of my avatar-form would allow me just that.


    Lenore needed a few minutes to gain sufficient altitude before she started a slow circle while letting her eyes roam across the vast, open plains. Finding the centaurs was easy, simply because they were the only organised group that moved in the open, so, shortly after seeing them, she was high above their collum. I had to admire the centaurs just a bit, they were moving in a solid formation, two centaurs quite a distance up front, maybe a hundred meters, a pair on each side, maybe fifty meters away from the column and finally, a group of four guarding their rear, some fifty meters back. All of them seemed to be armed with a spear in a saddle-skirt and a bow, which was bad news for the wolves, especially the bows.


    ¡°Sigmir, have Ylva tell the wolves that I want to try something before they attack.¡± I asked Sigmir, essentially tossing our previous plan to have the wolves attack directly. The centaurs were obviously ready for such an attack, and out in the open, the wolves would simply toss their lives away.


    ¡°Tell them to move with the mist and attack one of the flanking pairs.¡± I continued, while pulling most of my attention back into my body, while mentally asking Lenore to tell me if something changed in the centaur formation.


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    It was time to earn my pay, I could see two ways to buy time for the wolves¡¯ den, one was to kill centaurs, the other was to make them stay inside their camp, which could be accomplished by killing some of them or by making the outside so unpleasant that they decided to wait for better weather. In the real world, wars had been decided by the weather, armies wiped out by the onset of winter, fleets sunk by sudden typhoons. While I wasn¡¯t powerful enough to create a large-scale blizzard to wipe out the centaurs, I could make their lives miserable.


    Using my hands, I quickly made a magical formation made out of three ice-runes in the air before me, using it to create simple and ordinary ice, but as I created it, I simultaneously shaped it into a larger magic circle, this one containing seven runes, primarily mist-runes but combined with cold and blizzard. I was lacking Lenore¡¯s presence to add real wind-magic into it and the blizzard-rune was overall too much of a power-drain to get a large-scale effect, which was why I mostly focused on the mist-aspect, but it was the best I could come up with in the short time I had.


    Standing in the middle of my formation, I slowly started to channel Astral Power into it, remembering the day I had first felt the power of a blizzard swirl around me, the desire to move with the storm, to dance with it as it swept across the country-side.


    With those memories in mind, I started dancing, only this time, I didn¡¯t dance with the storm, I asked the storm to come and dance with me. But the wind was a capricious dance-partner, today it was a chore to get the air to move. What I was trying was the biggest weather-magic I had tried to this day, I had manipulated the weather on a smaller scale, that was easy enough, something that I had managed only weeks after coming to Mundus.


    But weather-magic was a question of manipulation; the bigger the change I wanted to achieve, the harder it was. Causing snow to fall and mist to to billow was easy when the sky was thick with clouds, almost hanging low enough to touch the ground. It only required a gentle touch, just a small nudge, to cause the desired effect.


    What I was trying now was the opposite, the weather was about to shift, just into the other direction and I tried not only to stall that change but to cause change in the opposite direction. And that was why I had to invest so much power and effort to cause the change I wanted.


    Finally, after minutes of prodding and pushing, of Astral Power flowing into the magic circle beneath my feet, I felt the environment react as I wanted, mist billowing between the trees and, on a large front, flowing towards the area where the centaurs were. I had to keep it as wide and natural looking as possible, while trying to avoid the impression that the mist was heading towards them or they would instantly catch onto the fact that someone was using magic to target them. Hell, even without that, they might notice that the mist was heavy with magic, but that wasn¡¯t something I could change.


    Thanks to Lenore, I could catch glimpses of my effort from above and the direction the Centaurs were moving, allowing me to gently adjust the mist so that the centaurs would either have to return to camp or move into the mist, where hopefully the wolves would be able to catch a few of them, even if it might give them the idea that the wolves were working with someone directing the mists. It was a trade-off, killing a couple of centaurs and creating fear within their hearts was traded for secrecy. I felt it was worth it - at the end of the day, we didn¡¯t need to kill them all, so if I was able to pin them inside their camp by making them think that going into the mist was the same as getting mauled by hungry wolves, that was worth quite a bit. By itself, my mist-magic was mostly harmless; sure, I could add a few nasty side-effects, but the time needed to affect serious foes was simply too long to work on an army. As such, psychological warfare was key.


    And the centaurs, who had ignored the creeping mist and simply pressed on, were about to learn the first lesson about psychological warfare. I couldn¡¯t quite feel where the wolves were, nor where the centaurs were - to accomplish that, I would have to keep the mist under my direct control, which needed a lot of power and would make it obvious that the mist was magical in nature. Instead, I had only created the mist and sent it on its way, causing it to act according to its nature, until it evaporated back into the Astral River.


    Thanks to my connection to Lenore, I was able to hear the screams when the wolves demonstrated to the two centaurs on the right flank that the mist had concealed a set of sharp teeth and claws.

 Holiday Special

    Come on, Children, gather around the hearth and sit down. Sit down and listen.


    Now, that the nights are long and dark, let me tell you of times long past. History has many lessons for us and if we don¡¯t learn from it, it might just repeat itself. Tonight, I will tell you the story of the Severing, a tale of the horror¡¯s brought about by lust for power and fanatical devotion to a cause. Some say, every being is willing to become a monster for the right cause and whether you are good or bad just depends on the cause. But I digress.


    Our tale starts long, long ago, when the world looked very different, when the Gods themselves could walk on Mundus as they pleased. It was a time of wonder, a time of plenty, but even back then, it was not a paradise. You see, even today, the murderous minions of Zeus try to force their dominion over the world, deceiving some by claiming they gave them the Gift of Fire and others by calling them their most favoured Messengers.


    Back then, we Elves were numerous, linked to the World-Tree itself, the great Yggdrasil, sharing it its immortality, just as we now share with the great forests of Arbotoma and the Eldrabor. So much was lost.


    But I was telling you about the time of wonder, when the Gods of Asgard walked with the elves and the Valkyries ruled the skies along them, carrying messages along the branches of the World-Tree and to us, living in the vast forests below. It was a good time, because even as the Gods were in conflict with the minions of Zeus and his cursed daimons, the Gods themself knew that, if they were to take the field of battle Mundus itself would shatter in the wake of their conflict. Instead, they guided us mortals, teaching us in their temples and in turn we worshipped them. That is why you should listen to your teachers, children, they took over the task the Gods no longer could do.


    Sadly, not everyone was willing to be guided by the gentle Gods of Asgard, the fierce Aesir and the gentle Vanir, they shunned them, instead following the Minions of Zeus and their daimons. And from those poor, misguided souls, disaster arose when one day a young Sorcerer decided to dedicate his life to Ares. His name is erased from history, the only name we remember him by is the Sunderer, the terrible mad-man who burned down the world-tree, severed Mundus from the gods and broke the world, boiling oceans, breaking continents and burning the sky.


    We know little of his origin, he was born Human, in the Empire of Emor, the ancient Roadbuilders. While they were enlightened in many ways, they were a proud and numerous people, spreading all over the world, building their Roads even in other Kingdoms to facilitate trade. They were closely allied with the Nagas and together, they connected all civilised beings. But, while they were peaceful and enlightened in some ways, they refused to see truth, clinging to the Minions of Zeus. Even to this day, after all the horrible things their Gods have caused, they worship at the Tower of Flames, in the middle of their Capitol, remembering the glory of their ancient Empire.


    And in that Empire, the Sunderer was born, the son of a noble family and a talented Sorcerer. The stories tell of his great command over Fire but also of the lust of power that burned in his soul. Some stories tell that he was a true Genius, able to feel the Astral and directly extract runes from it, long before the Gods ever gave him his class, a born Sorcerer and once the Gods bestowed his Class upon him, he yearned to make his Legacy, to become one of the great Sorcerers of History, his Classes and Traditions shaping the System itself.


    And so, after he learned what the Temples could teach him, he went to learn from the Gods themself. His interest, magical aptitude and character, they all drove him to seek out one of the worst amongst the Minions of Zeus, the great Hound of War, Ares. The stories tell of flames burning out of control on the day he entered the Temple of the Hound of War, as if the fires knew that they would be stoked until the world would be covered.


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    At the Temple of Ares, he learned and studied, becoming more and more fanatical in his belief in his God, believing himself to be the Chosen of Ares, destined to strike at the Gods of Asgard. Maybe he was, maybe he was just deluded, it hardly matters.


    Ironically, the first step on his path of Conquest were his own people who he brought under his reign by overthrowing their old rulers and making himself Emperor. And his thirst for power didn¡¯t stop there, no, it was just the beginning. He wasn¡¯t stupid and knew that the roads that previously allowed wares to be traded all over Mundus would allow his troops to travel vast distances in short times, making his already strong armies a force that might just conquer the world, especially as the Nagas supported the young Emperor.


    His own people, you ask? They were hardly given a choice, either the Sword or the Flame, if they chose the Sword, they were pressed into his armies, made to march to war, if they chose the Flame, they were burned alive, alongside their families. Not a choice I wish upon anyone.


    He managed to conquer cast parts of the world, killing countless beings in the process, but when he started to march on the rainbow bridge, planning to besiege Asgard itself, the Gods finally decided to intervene and to take the field themselves. Little is known about the event that happened next, the Gods themself almost silent, only speaking with regret about the massacre they had to commit to stop the Sunderer. But while his armies were shattered by divine might, his people scattered, the Sunderer himself managed to get away. Some say it was Ares himself that spirited him from the field of battle, daring the Gods of Asgard to attack him and start the final battle that would destroy the world.


    But even though the Sunderer was saved from death at the hands of the Gods of Asgard, he hadn¡¯t learned his lesson, no, he only became more fanatical, now that he had lost his Empire, this throne and his people. And so, he started to seek ways to make them pay, looking for a way to slay a god. We don¡¯t know where he travelled, whom he met, but there are tales of a dark wanderer, his form black, his eyes burning like glowing embers, that remain to this day, all over Mundus. Some claim he went into the north, where he found Trees of Crystal around a pond of liquid ice, others say he went into the south, where he found a black lake of burning wind and a few people even claim that he ventured into the Wyld Lands, learning from the Fae. But that might just be superstitious nonsense, nobody ever went into the Wyld Lands and returned.


    Whatever he did in that time, he managed to find what he was searching, a way to make the Gods pay.


    Somehow, he found a Place of Power where the Astral River was so dense that it manifested itself in the real world, a place thick with the stream of Fire. And into that Fire he went, trusting on his ability to change the world with his will, to strike against the Gods and defeat them.


    The result was horrible, our stories speak of the pained groans of Mundus itself as her bones were ground against each other, making the the earth shake in pain. They speak of the sky burning before turning dark with Ash, as the Sunderer managed to set the world-tree itself on fire, making it burn for forty days and forty nights.


    And on the final day, the world-tree itself fell and with it, the connection to the Gods of Asgard was severed. But the madman had made a mistake or maybe he just didn¡¯t care, as the connection to the Gods of Asgard was broken, his own Gods, the Minions of Zeus, were banished just like them, driven from this world. And in the Severing of those connections, the areas around Asgard and Olympus were devastated by the unleashed power.


    After the Severing, the world had changed, the Astral River itself was roiling and all beings were driven from their homes. The Valkyries gathered in the highest mountains, making their homes as close to the sky as they could. The humans, they abandoned most of their former empire, settling in a small area around their Capital, well, small compared to their old Empire. The daimons, they claimed one of the newly formed continents, broken from the rest of the world in the Severing.


    And finally, we elves, we took a seed of Yggdrasil and planted it in the southern forests, a diminished people after the great northern Forests and Yggdrasil itself were destroyed.


    But, thanks to the seed that grew into Eldrabor, we managed to overcome the Severing and made our home here.


    Now, say your prayers and go to sleep, it will be a long day tomorrow.

 Chapter 218

    ¡°What hubris¡­¡± I idly thought, watching the centaurs from above. They hadn¡¯t learned from our attacks in the last couple of days, not at all. In the first attack, under the cover of conjured mist, that they hadn¡¯t respected the change in environmental conditions and fumbled into a trap might have been forgiven once. But the wolf-pack and I had repeated the same pattern three times over the last few days, a dense cloud of mist rolling in and under the cover of that mist, a group of wolves jumped the centaurs that were disoriented and unable to get their bearings. I had conjured up a couple of clouds without wolves hidden within, just to prevent the centaurs from seeing a pattern, and apparently, they had yet to catch on that the mist conveniently covered the wolves¡¯ retreat, each and every time.


    Granted, the mist worked great for the wolves, the slightly moist air carried smells even better than normal and their silver-greyish fur blended into the grey mist, making them all but invisible. Comparatively, the centaurs were all but blinded in the dense clouds, which caused them to lose their sense of direction, which, combined with the vicious attacks of the wolves, made them panic, almost like normal horses. And once they lost themselves to panic, they quickly lost their minds, even if we had let one of them get away, allowing her to charge out of the mist, driven by panic and bleeding from shallow wounds, she was our message to the centaurs. Our mission wasn¡¯t to kill some of them, it was to keep all of them back.


    And yet, despite the losses they had in the previous days, they were stubbornly marching on, taking note of the mist but doing nothing to avoid it. Trying to patrol every day, hunting for whatever game or prey they could scare up, they seemed quite driven.


    But this group might be different; for the first time, the silly ponies had brought the large, dark canines I had seen guarding their camp with them, maybe hoping to have them counter the wolves. I doubted it would work, there were more wolves than they had seen hidden in the mist, so their dogs would likely end up dead, even if they might put up a fight.


    Thanks to Lenore flying above, I was able to get a rough idea what was happening under the cover of the mist, could hear the screams of the pained centaurs and the frantic sounds of the dogs they had taken with them.


    ¡°And here you thought the ponies hadn¡¯t learned a thing.¡± Lenore mused over our connection and added her magical sight to the information she was sending me. And I had to agree, the ponies had changed something, one of the ponies in the middle of their formation was surrounded by a swirling mass of Astral Power, hinting that it was a spellcaster of some kind, about to unleash something. Judging by the colour of the Astral Power used, I was quite sure that it was some sort of wind-magic but neither Lenore nore I were sure what it would do. But most likely, it would be some sort of gusting wind, used to blow away the mist, allowing the centaurs to bring their bows and numbers to bear against the wolves.


    ¡°Sigmir, tell the wolves to retreat. The ponies have a spellcaster.¡± I said out loud, letting Sigmir relay it to Ylva, who was with the pack, hunting in the mist.


    The links between Lenore and me and between Sigmir and Ylva were incredibly useful, just moments after I had given the order, Lenore noticed hints that the wolves were retreating under the cover of the mist, just before the Centaur-spellcaster was able to finish their spell, causing a strong wind to blow from her extended arm, flowing towards the mist.


    I had to laugh when a dark, canine shape jumped from the cold mist, only to get pierced by multiple arrows, the centaurs having taken a policy of shoot first, ask questions later, which, in this case, had lead them to turn one of their own dogs into a dying pincushion. That alone told me that the attacks got to them more than they wanted us to realise.


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    And when the centaurs started to chase after the mist they had just blown away, hoping to catch the wolves as soon as the mist was fully dispersed, I realised that it was a crucial mistake, allowing us to strike a devastating blow at them.


    ¡°Sigmir, the centaurs are chasing after the wolves. Have them retreat into the forest and loop around, they will come from one direction, we will attack from the other direction.¡± I directed, planning to simply have this one patrol vanish, hopefully without any survivors and little trace of what had happened. I slowed down the ritual dance I had used to conjure and direct the mist, not wanting to simply stop, feeling that it would be disrespectful, but I had to stop dancing, there were other things to be done. Or maybe I was merely looking for reasoning in a natural process, I didn¡¯t know. But no matter what, the wind and mist I had conjured up seemed to be almost happy to be allowed to go back to rest.


    ¡°Adra, can you place your hunting-spell on us?¡± I asked once the magic around me ceased.


    ¡°Sure, give me a minute.¡± Adra agreed and we all gathered around her while I mentally directed Lenore to keep an eye on the ponies. They had found the wolves¡¯ tracks and were following them towards the forest, meaning that we had only limited time.


    ¡°We will strike the centaurs from behind once the wolves attack from the front and side. My personal target is to take out the spellcaster, I doubt that they have too many of those. And losing the complete patrol when they sent one will add to their fear.¡± I explained to the others, who simply nodded.


    Moments later, Adra finished her spell and I felt the magic settle around me, it was a nifty spell that allowed us to move a little quicker, made us harder to detect and increased the damage of the next attack we made, making it excellent for hunting. Or for ambushes, such as the one we were planning.


    By now, Lenore showed me that the centaurs had reached the forest and started making their way inside. It was quite obvious that forests were not their natural habitat; their normally quite efficient and usable formation had been replaced by a tight cluster of frightened ponies, moving close together so that each of them would be able to quickly react if one of their number was attacked. But at the same time, the tight formation would allow us to get close to their group, where we could use the trees to our advantage.


    Sigmir, Rai, Adra and I set out, checking in with the wolves to coordinate the attack, telling them where our prey was and how they moved. Thanks to Lenore, I was able to direct the wolves from above, she was barely able to make out where they were moving through the trees. It had taken her a few days of training, but by now, she was able to follow them, even through the forest.


    I watched as a small group of wolves readied themselves to attack the ponies from the front, mostly as a distraction, while the rest of the pack was waiting on the flank opposite of the direction my group was approaching from.


    ¡°Thank you, Lenore. If something changes, tell me, I need to focus on my approach.¡± I sent to my companion, knowing that I needed to focus my attention, or I would make a stupid mistake. Looking around for a second, I started to gently pull at the shadows around me, weaving them into a cloak that would allow me to blend into them, hiding myself from detection. Next to me, I could feel Rai doing the same, getting ready to strike at the centaur¡¯s rear, hoping to take out a few of them before they even realised that there were more than just wolves attacking them.  A short distance behind us, Sigmir and Adra were following us in, ready to strike on their own, even if their main task was to ensure that no pony was able to escape. They shared that particular task with Lenore who was still high above the trees, which gave her an even better perspective.


    Some distance in front of us, I heard the snarls and growls that i associated with attacking wolves, telling me that the bait-group had started their attack. That meant that in a short time, the main-group would strike at the centaurs¡¯ flank and right behind them, it would be our turn. Looking over to the indistinct patch of darkness that hid Rai¡¯s form, I softly muttered, ¡°It¡¯s time to strike.¡± before ghosting forward, a blade in each hand.

 Chapter 219

    The snarls in front of me got louder and now, there were other noises mixed in. Screams of pain, cries for help, commands to form up, as a commander tried to get his people into a semblance of order, the dull sounds of weapons hitting wood - all of it combined to form a horrific racket. It only made my smile wider, there was no way that anyone would hear Rai or me approach with that much going on.


    We ghosted past the trees until we saw the first centaurs, their backs turned to us and apparently completely oblivious to our approach. The two furthest in the back had their bows out, their heads swiffeling around, looking for threats approaching from their flanks. For a moment, I shared a look with Rai and he gestured upwards, towards the trees above us and, after a second, I understood his intent.


    Drawing upon my magic to further strengthen my muscles and delving deeper into the shadows to lighten my weight, I leapt upwards, softly landing on the branch I had aimed for. Nearby, I noticed that Rai had managed a similar feat, sitting on a branch like a squirrel, only to leap to the next. I had to shake my head at his audacity, doubting that I would have tried it, if not for him. I had acted with the limits of my human body in mind, forgetting that I had a strengthened body to begin with and was strengthening it even further using my magic.


    And the magic I used to blend into the shadows did more than visually shifting me, it was something I had been experimenting with for quite some time, ever since I had travelled through the shadows when we attacked Sigmir¡¯s former tribe. It allowed me to become partially part of the shadows, at least that was the best explanation I currently had, making my mass affect the world around less. The problem was that I needed to shift out of the shadows to attack, otherwise my weapons lacked the presence, so to speak, to actually cut anything. It wasn¡¯t just a lack of my part, at least from what I had observed in my experiments, it was more than that. For now, I just didn¡¯t quite know what it was, so I shifted from that state before attacking.


    Silently, Rai and I got into range of the two centaurs in the back, they had looked over their shoulder once, during our approach, but with us in the branches some distance above their heads, they had missed us. Which would be their demise.


    We moved in concert, with me jumping slightly before Rai did and I did something rather risky, I aimed to stab before even fully landing. The armour of the centaurs looked relatively good, except for one major downside: It was lacking a neck-protector, their helmets were simple, leather skull-caps and their leather-jerkins weren¡¯t making up for that flaw. As such, my attack was something straight out of an action-movie, both blades raised in a reverse grip, attempting to stab into the neck and body from above. It had a few advantages, the biggest was that I planned to actually land with both feet on the equine back, using the hand-hold provided by my blades to steady myself before moving on to the spellcaster.


    As I flew through the air, I let go of the shadows, allowing my form to become fully visible and corporeal, before making contact with the centaur at four points, all at the same time. My feet landed on his back, slightly spread to absorb what was left of my momentum and keep me steady but most of my momentum was absorbed elsewhere. My two blades, both as sharp as I could magically make them, stabbed into the neck-opening, using it as a guidance to slip past the bones, down into his chest-cavity, wrecking havoc as they went.


    The centaur tried to scream in pain, while bucking to get me off but I had two quite useful handles stabbed deep into his body, so I held on, not quite for dear life, but to shorten his. After the second buck, I decided to move on, only to realise that my blades were stuck. Annoyed, I let go and pushed off, using his latest buck to propel me in the direction I wanted to go, towards the spell-caster that was just turning around.


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    ¡°Ambush!¡± the spellcaster shouted, seeing me flying towards him, with the other two centaurs dying behind me. It wasn¡¯t quite as I had planned, but for now, it would have to do. He must have noticed that I was rather small, especially compared to him, and I realised that I had made a stupid mistake, I had given up my secure footing - hell, I had given up any kind of footing - sending me hurtling on a straight and predictable trajectory, one that he was about to painfully exploit. I felt Bullet Time activate, as my mind frantically tried to find a solution that didn¡¯t involve me getting stopped by the dagger the spellcaster had ripped out of his belt. That would certainly ruin my clothes, something I would rather avoid. And it might kill me, something else I wanted to avoid. I would come back, sure, but it would be a major pain in my behind.


    My best chance was to use my flying shuttles, either to block his attack or to strike at him before he could actually attack. Sadly, I was unable to move myself with them, they just didn¡¯t transfer force over to me or anything I carried. I had no idea why, it was something I had experimented with a little, it just didn''t work. Maybe there was some sort of trick to it, some sort of way to define my reference frame, but so far, I had no idea how.


    But causing them to burst from the sheaths hidden in my cloak, shooting past my shoulders towards the centaur that was about to stab me, that was something I could do. Not terribly precisely, even Bullet Time had its limits to giving me time to react, but it was enough to send one shuttle towards his knife-hand and one towards his face.


    The shuttle that stabbed into his hand caused him to slightly shift his attack and, instead of simply skewering me right through my chest, he just cut a deep gash into my upper arm and shoulder, causing me to hiss in pain, especially when I crashed into his lower body, roughly where his equine and human bodies met, before tumbling to the ground at his feet. That hadn¡¯t been my finest moment, I realised when the centaur reared up, trying to simply stomp me to death.


    ¡°You will not harm her!¡± a voice thundered through the forest, loud enough to drown everything out, even the sounds of battle from nearby, and suddenly, a glowing red figure slammed into the centaur, slightly smaller but with enough momentum to cause him to stagger back. Above me stood Sigmir and I was quite happy to see her, her shield still raised from the shield-bash she had used to stagger the centaur back, a feat only possible thanks to the fact that she had actually charged it, using her full speed and abilities to get enough force to do so, despite the difference in weight and his advantage of having four legs, which normally allowed him to brace himself with ease.


    Ignoring the wound in my arm, I managed to scurry back a little, out from Sigmir¡¯s legs, giving her room to move, before struggling to my feet. That flying tackle had been an incredibly stupid idea, but for now, I had a battle to fight. I still felt my flying shuttles nearby, still connected to me, thanks to the amount of time I had spent with them, so I used my Ice-Magic to pull them back to me, using them to guard Sigmir¡¯s back. For now, I had enough of fighting on the front-lines.


    And I wasn¡¯t the only one using ranged attacks to harass the centaurs, Adra had somehow managed to get into a descent firing position, allowing her to bring her bow to bear, shooting the odd arrow into the centaurs, trying to prevent them from actually rallying.


    Thanks to my support and the fact that she was righteously furious, Sigmir quickly managed to cut down the centaur-spellcaster, burying her axe into his chest, before we moved on, looking for more enemies. The centaurs were still in disarray, something our attack prolonged, but after a two more of them were killed by Sigmir and my flying shuttles, I felt Lenore push against my mind, getting my attention.


    ¡°We have a runner.¡± she told me, once she got me to listen to her mental voice.


    ¡°We can¡¯t have that, it would ruin our fun.¡± I answered, linking my eye to hers, allowing me to see and cast spells using her senses. What I had in mind was rather simple and thanks to her, I was able to see the fleeing centaur, despite the fact that they tried to get out on the other side of the battle. Using overflow, I channelled a burst of dark magic through Lenore, using the fact that it didn¡¯t hurt her like ice-magic would, creating a beam of Dark Radiance that shot from her eye, towards the fleeing centaur. It instantly connected and delivered the rest of the spell, a pure, stunning blast of mind magic, augmented by Lenore¡¯s affinity to death-magic, as the spell had been channelled through her. I wasn¡¯t sure if the centaur died from it, but it certainly went down hard. I would have to check it out later, just to make sure.

 Chapter 220

    ¡°You are bleeding¡­¡± Sigmir reminded me, once the fighting had calmed to the point that she had breath to care about anything other than keeping Centaurs from running either of us through. After taking a deep breath and settling my mind a little, I felt the wound I had suffered at the beginning of combat and decided that Sigmir had the right of it, I should deal with it, before it weakened me even further. The wolves had fully encircled the centaurs and were happily bleeding them to death, one bite at a time.


    Holding one hand over my wound, I sent my mind inside, feeling the blood-flow of my body until it reached the ragged edge of the wound that the centaur¡¯s dagger had cut into me. Again, I mentally scolded myself for my idiotic stunt, fighting head-on was not what I was good at. I had to remember to keep doing what I did best, use magic and subterfuge to fight my battles, either of those or a combination of them, were what I excelled at.


    Connecting the edges of my wound took a little time, healing myself was a little more difficult than healing others, the pain and the changes directed at myself meant that I couldn¡¯t focus as easily as normally but it was still something I could do quite quickly and without too much magical effort.


    ¡°How does the fighting look?¡± I asked Sigmir once my wound was closed.


    ¡°The wolves harried the centaurs as much as they could, I think a few of the wolves are wounded but the centaurs are all dead.¡± Sigmir explained and, hearing her, I took a quick look to the event-log. It confirmed her statement, there was a long, drawn-out tally of the fighting, giving an overview of both forces and stating that we had killed twenty-four centaurs of various levels, how the EXP were divided between the forty wolves and my group and that I had gained a nice chunk of twenty-five thousand EXP. Those EXP were enough to boost me to level sixty-two. There were also quite a few skill-up notices, making me quite happy.


    The travelling had caused my character-progression to slow to a crawl; sure, I had gained quite a bit of power thanks to Lenore crossing the first divide, but other than that, I had hardly progressed in a while. I¡¯d have to go look for a dungeon or three to get back on track, the others who started at the same time as I did, and who didn¡¯t travel around all the time, would completely outclass me otherwise.


    Shaking my head, I focused on the here and now, organising my thoughts before tackling the tasks I needed to fulfill after the battle. The first was healing the wounded wolves, making sure that our force was in as good a shape as possible. Another was to make sure that the signs of battle were obscured as much as possible, I had no doubt that, at some point, the centaurs would want to find out what had happened to their patrol. Keeping as much from them as possible would only serve us, to increase their sense of unease and trepidation, which would, in turn, cause them to stay in their camps, allowing us to fulfill our task without losing too many wolves. And that point, of them coming to find out would most likely be reached in a few hours, so we were on a timer.


    Finally, I wanted to have at least one of the centaur corpses to study - not just for me, but also for Rai. I knew some human anatomy and was able to make relatively uneducated guesses regarding the anatomy of other humanoid races based on that, but centaurs were different enough that I wanted to make sure what was where. They were one of the major forces that claimed the chaotic plains of Central- and West-Aretia, so more information was something valuable to me.


    ¡°Windpaw, are there any wolves who can mask and hide the tracks the silly ponies took to get into the forest? I want their tracks to simply disappear, without anyone being the wiser.¡± I asked one of the pack-leaders while starting to make a mental list of the wounded wolves.


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    ¡°While you take care of that, I¡¯ll heal those of you who need it. We need you as healthy as possible, there will be more fighting.¡± I added, gesturing for those I felt needed healing.


    ¡°What is it that you are planning?¡± Snowdust asked me, while Windpaw started to select a couple of healthy wolves.


    ¡°Simple, I want the Centaurs to be afraid. They know about wolves and the threat posed by them so I doubt that they would fear you, at least not without major attacks from you, with enough power to make them fear you. On the other hand, the unknown is something most beings fear, or at least respect, because it is just that, unknown. They have no idea what is waiting for them or if there is something waiting for them. My hope is that their minds conjure up ideas worse than anything we could come up with. Or at least as bad.¡± I explained, while inspecting the various injuries. Most were not too bad, the wolves had the prudence to stay back once they were seriously injured, preventing the centaurs from using such an injury to take them down. Unless we lost a fight, I was relatively sure that the robust and hardy wolves would last until I got to them and was able to try healing them.


    But while I could deal with most injuries, a few would need more than what I could do quickly; broken bones were still something that gave me trouble, healing wise. I could set the bones back into alignment and use ice to form practical casts but at the end of the day, the four wolves with broken bones would need time, days, maybe even a week, before they would be back up. And even that was only thanks to the system that increased their natural healing to insane levels.


    Once I was done healing the wolves that had been hurt, I started to consider how to hide the actual battlefield. Part of me wanted to try burying them but I quickly discarded the idea as impossible, or rather, impractical. Sure, it would be the way to make discovery of the corpses as unlikely as possible, yet the frozen ground would make it hard to actually get them underground. Another way to deal would be to burn them but I didn¡¯t even want to consider the amount of fire needed and the traces that would leave.


    ¡°I can deal with them.¡± Lenore told me over our link, while angling her flight downwards.


    Her statement made me curious - sure, I had seen her use magic to animate a corpse and turn those we killed into animated dead, but animating so many centaurs at the same time seemed more difficult. Shrugging, I simply took out the perch I had made for her, so she could comfortably sit, while casting whatever she was planning.


    ¡°Sounds good. What do you need me to do?¡± I asked, once she was next to me.


    ¡°If you could lend me some power, that would help a great deal.¡± she told me, so I stepped near and focused on the link I had to her, letting my Astral Power flood through it, into Lenore. Meanwhile, I called out to the wolves that they didn¡¯t need to worry, that Lenore and I would deal with the Centaurs.


    What happened next surprised me a great deal, one of the centaurs near us was glazed over with a soft, dark-grey light. Moments later, the corpse started to decompose but instead of taking weeks and months, the process only took a minute, maybe two before the centaur¡¯s body had turned into dry, slightly sludgy powder.


    ¡°Impressive but I think if we work together, we can do that better.¡± I nodded, causing Lenore to hop over to my shoulder, returning to her Hallow. With her joined in my head, I explained what I wanted to do, using my blood magic to use the fluids inside them to make the process easier and less messy. With the ice and snow in the surrounding area, I would be able to mix it with the decomposed remains, making them all but undetectable. Sure, the bones would remain - my connection to Lenore told me that it would take far too long to cause them to decompose - but the bones were much easier to hide. Maybe, some of the wolves would like them as chew toys.


    Now, together, I let Lenore take the reigns, allowing her to form our combined Astral Power, and, feeling her intent in her magic, I was able to work my own magic into the spell, causing the decay to speed up even further and reduce the amount of power needed to destroy each corpse. Together, we made our way across the battlefield, reducing the corpses to a mix of dust and snow, spreading it around to make it nigh impossible to perceive them.


    After maybe half an hour, there was only one centaur left, the one that had tried to run away and which I had attacked using the mix of Mind and Death-Magic that came natural to Lenore and me.


    ¡°Rai, come over here! There¡¯s a lesson to be learned.¡± I called out, causing Rai to hurry over.

 Chapter 221

    ¡°Yes, Master?¡± Rai asked once he was next to me, having picked up on the seriousness in my voice.


    ¡°Once, I told you that information was the key to defeating your enemy. This lesson is one on information gathering, in this case, we want to understand how centaurs work. Sadly, I cannot even begin to guess how their bodies work, the combination of humanoid and horse makes that impossible. So, we will have to learn how their bodies work, by studying them directly.¡± I began to explain the subject of our lesson, noticing that a couple of wolves were watching us. Maybe they would learn something as well, to me, it was just the same.


    ¡°This specimen here is quite useful as it¡¯s death was relatively benign; it has a couple of wounds, especially on what would be the flanks on a horse, but they are rather superficial. Its death came due to a magical attack that simply snuffed out its mind, killing the body in the process.¡± I gestured to the centaur that had tried to flee. In the time between the battle and the lesson, the body had cooled quite a bit, due to lying in the snow, but it was still warm enough to work as a teaching and learning aid.


    Drawing one of my blades, I made sure that the fighting hadn¡¯t chipped or dulled the blades and, to my joy, they were still razor sharp. With a few quick cuts, I stripped the dead body of both clothes and armour, making sure that nothing was in the was of our exploration. I needed to decide how to best go about it, the complete body was large and unwieldy, so, after a moment of contemplation, I decided to work on it in two sections. The obvious separation-point was the joining between humanoid and horse-body, so that was where I started.


    ¡°The first question we need to explore is how the joining between humanoid and horse was accomplished. If we look at both parts separately, one would expect that both have a mostly functioning internal system but is that true? I don¡¯t know, but I¡¯m sure we will find out.¡± I explained to Rai what I was doing, as I started to carefully slice the back of our specimen open, using my blood magic to keep the fluids from blocking our vision. The spine looked like I would have expected from a human, so I kept going, peeling back skin and flesh as I want lower, keeping a running commentary of my findings, mostly where muscles were on the back and how well developed the muscles of our specimen were. It was to be expected; it had been a soldier after all, and using bows and spears during what amounted to cavalry charges needed strong upper-body muscles. My blood magic helped a great deal when it came to finding out how the muscles were oriented and how strong they actually were; even after death had taken away most of the vital essence in the blood, I could still feel and, to a point, manipulate it. Idly, I wondered if there was any way to simulate the bodily processes using magic, essentially producing what amounted to a zombie, just without rotting. A magically animated yet living golem, so to speak. It was a curious idea that I would have to explore with Lenore. But later.


    For now, I had exposed the specimen¡¯s spine, down to the joining point, where a human would have their coccyx, only that with the specimen, it wasn¡¯t a vestigial feature, merely an evolutionary leftover, it was the point where the humanoid spine widened and enlarged. The basic features were still the same, a channel of bones that protected a large cord of nerve-fibers within, but the change was obvious. I had no idea what horse-spines would look like, but I could easily imagine that they would be very similar to what I was looking at.


    ¡°Sigmir, love, could you lend me your axe?¡± I asked, needing a tool to separate the spine near the joining-point.


    ¡°Sure, here.¡± She answered, placing the axe into my waiting hand. Using a saw would have been better, less damaging to the specimen, but I simply didn¡¯t have one handy and using one made from Ice would have taken too long. So, using a wedge made from Ice and the flat of the axe as a hammer, I carefully separated the spine, just above the joining-point, leaving that interesting anatomical feature intact.


    With the spine separated, I could begin the examine the rest of the body, how it was linked together and how it actually worked.


    If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.


    My next steps were a little gruesome but sadly necessary, I would have greatly preferred to work on a table or at least with the equipment to easily shift the specimen around, yet, I could only use what I had on hand.


    From the separated spine, I started to work my way to the front, cutting and categorizing muscles and organs as much as I could while explaining to Rai what I was finding. And what I was finding was quite interesting. In a human, I would have expected to find the liver and kidney in my work-area, with the intestinal tract nearby but on the centaur, that wasn¡¯t the case. As I cut, I quickly noticed that a large part of the volume was taken up by muscles and some more by four large tubes, one the equivalent to the oesophagus the other the windpipe. Only that, in the centaur, both went down, past what would be the hip in a human, and into the equine body. The other two tubes, if I even wanted to call them that, were the equivalent of the aorta, the major blood vessels. supplying the humanoid body with blood. I made special not to investigate their position, knowing that they might be a major weakness in the centaur¡¯s anatomy.


    Once the messy and rather gruesome task of separating the humanoid and the equine-body was done and I had used my Blood Magic to clean the area up, I placed the humanoid body in the snow, before starting to slowly remove skin and flesh, both telling and showing Rai what was where. I was rather surprised when I discovered that the respiratory system was even more curious than I had expected, as it was split. The nostrils were, for some reason, a completely separate system, leading to a pair of lungs in the humanoid chest, right next to an almost disturbingly human heart.


    As I continued to slowly and carefully dissect the specimen, I realised what I was looking at. The centaurs had their pulmonary circulatory system and the rest of their circulatory system almost completely separated. There was a connection - it looked almost like a valve between both systems - but otherwise, the heart and the lungs in the humanoid chest were only supplying the head. The rest of the body was supplied using the massive aorta I had discovered when separating the two parts.


    I made sure to show Rai where that special valve was, knowing that damaging or even destroying it would likely be as fatal as stabbing someone into their heart. A massive drop in blood-pressure would almost instantly cause unconsciousness, swiftly followed by death.


    With the humanoid body reduced to carefully separated parts, the bones stacked nearby and the blood completely drained and disposed off, I focused on the lower body. Sadly, I had little knowledge on equine anatomy, but thanks to my blood magic, I could make some inferences.


    Again, I started at the stomach and worked my way in. Getting rid of the fur was rather annoying, it made it harder to see what I was doing, so my first step was to skin as much of it off as I could. In addition, I had Sigmir help me get rid of the legs, telling Rai that we would take a closer look at those later. While they were not as important as vitally important weak points, crippling a centaurs legs would take them out of the fight almost as well as killing them would. But that was for later.


    With the fur stripped off, I started following the tubes from above, quickly finding a second, very impressive, set of lungs and a second heart. Sadly, neither of those were in an easily accessible spot, hidden behind strong muscles and an almost impenetrable ribcage, which made attacking them difficult.


    Still, I made sure that Rai knew where they were before continuing into the digestive system, soon finding the stomach and the intestines. I mostly left them alone and as intact as I could, not feeling the need to discover more than absolutely necessary, especially as I couldn¡¯t deal with the contents of those as easy as I could deal with blood, meaning that it would be incredibly messy and disgusting.


    After getting rid of as much of the digestive tract as I could, I discovered the remaining organs, liver, spleen, kidneys and so on, noticing that some of them were rather exposed and could be damaged, maybe even destroyed, with short blades as the ones Rai and I were using. Sure, it would take a little time for a centaur to bleed out if only their kidney was penetrated but having a spot that would cause them debilitating pain was good, just by itself.


    It didn¡¯t take me long to finish the exploration of the equine body and after that, we only had to look at the legs. Those had a couple of weaknesses, mainly near the ankles and I made sure that Rai knew where the major muscles could be separated with relative ease, but there was nothing that made me think it would be an easy target.


    ¡°We are done.¡± I finally told Rai, looking up and noticing that above me, the sky was already dark. I had spent hours on the dissection, luckily, no centaurs had come to disturb us.

 Interlude: The Forum, once again

    Official Road to Purgatory-Beta Forum


    <table><tbody><tr><td>-Morgana, confirmed Beta-Account-</td></tr></tbody></table>


    Did you have a bad day? Spent a long time walking down a lonely road? Are you looking for something to soothe your weary soul?


    Join me and let yourself be healed.


    puppies.avi


    A dark-cloaked figure is seen walking through a hallway, the walls glowing in a soft, silvery-cold light. Her hood is drawn down, hiding most of her face in its shadow and only the large, grey wolf walking in front of her gives a sense of scale, showing that the figure is a small and slender one.


    When they reach an intersection, they step into a room and a delighted giggle is heard. The scene cuts, showing the inside of the room, two more large wolves intently watch the cloaked figure who removes her hood, showing a finely-chiseled face, green eyes standing out from white-blue skin. Her silvery lips are drawn up into a smile and a moment later, the camera shows why. Between the two wolves that had been in the room, there is a large litter of puppies, easily twenty of the small furry shapes, squirming around, trying to gnaw on each other¡¯s ear, flopping around, some more, some less secure on their oversized paws.


    One of the puppies spots the newcomer and starts to move closer, the tiny tail wagging a mile a minute. The cloaked figure squats down, stretching a hand out to let the puppy sniff and slobber over it, before starting to gently pet it behind the ears, causing it to squirm in delight, while growling in obvious pleasure.


    While the cloaked figure is focused on the puppy in front of her, the other puppies were drawn by the noise and, like a many-pawed, furry cloud, the move over, curious what has intruded into their space. On of the largest puppies decided that it wants some attention, too, jumping at the cloaked figure. Caught by surprise and in a rather unbalanced squatting position, the figure is knocked off balance by the enthusiastic puppy, causing her to land on her behind while giving off a cute squeal.


    Now, with the newcomer down on their level, the puppies collectively charge, jumping onto her as a squirming mass, causing the figure to be brought down, lying on her back with all the puppies trying to sniff her, while tasting any skin that is found. The intense attention of the puppies seems to tickle as the protests of ¡°No, not there!¡± are often punctuated by squeals, laughter and giggles.


    After a few moments of getting mobbed by puppies, the figure starts rolling with them, obviously careful to keep them from getting harmed but happily joining in their play, causing the puppies to react with delighted growls. They play for a few moments, the figure trying to tickle one puppy only to get distracted by another, going after that one for a moment but the simple number of puppies causes them to ¡°win¡±, overwhelming her with demands for attention.


    The image cuts and the time-skip is quite obvious. While the figure is still dressed the same and the soft, silvery-light hasn¡¯t changed in the slightest, her black hair is tangled and her forehead covered in a sheen of sweat, as she sits with her back to the wall, surrounded by the litter of puppies, all of them tuckered out and sleeping, some completely lying on her, using her as a pillow, the others strewn around her in a large puppy-pile. The smile on her face is tired but oh, so happy, as she softly scritches one of the puppies on her lap, causing it to waggle its paws, as if running in its dream, giving off soft barks of happiness.


    The image fades and is replaced by the globe, with blue fire racing over it and a banner appears.


    <table><tbody><tr><td>Join us! On the Road to Puppytory!¡±</td></tr></tbody></table>


    <table><tbody><tr><td>Jeanyra, confirmed Beta-Account</td></tr></tbody></table>


    Ohmygawd, puppies!


    Where did you find them?!


    <table><tbody><tr><td>-Do¡¯rodra, confirmed Beta-Account</td></tr></tbody></table>


    I saw a new Morgana-Video


    Click on it, expecting some awesome battle, cool new magic and maybe zombies, ripping her foes to pieces.


    Get puppies and a laughing elf, rolling around in playful joy, attacking with cuteness overload.


    Cool to see a different side of the fearsome sorceress.


    <table><tbody><tr><td>-Tarrin, confirmed Beta-Account</td></tr></tbody></table>


    Those are wolves, right? Why on earth are quite obviously wild wolves frolicking around with you, not trying to rip you to shreds? I¡¯m a little jealous here.


    Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.


    <table><tbody><tr><td>-Goliry, confirmed Beta-Account</td></tr></tbody></table>


    At first, when I started watching the video, I thought, cool, some sort of wolf-themed dungeon crawl, but there was something odd about the wolf¡¯s behaviour. But we have seen the wolf that runs with Morgana, so I thought it might be that one, they look kinda alike.


    But then: Puppies!


    <table><tbody><tr><td>Yuthos, confirmed Beta-Account</td></tr></tbody></table>


    What¡¯s next? The Devil playing with a kitten? I¡¯m so confused


    <table><tbody><tr><td>-Harms, confirmed Beta-Account</td></tr></tbody></table>


    Bwahaha, too cute. What more could one want in a girl, cute, likes to play with animals, powerful enough to rip her enemies to shreds? I think I¡¯m in love¡­


    <table><tbody><tr><td>Villar, confirmed Beta-Account</td></tr></tbody></table>


    This has cured my depression temporarily


    Where do I find my own litter of cute puppies willing to play with me?


    <table><tbody><tr><td>Rachant, confirmed Beta-Account</td></tr></tbody></table>


    Everyone: Road to Purgatory IS TOO BRUTAL AND WILL CAUSE MASS VIOLENCE!


    Road to Purgatory: Want some puppies?


    <table><tbody><tr><td>-Tobiuno, confirmed Beta-Account</td></tr></tbody></table>


    Oh¡­ My¡­ God¡­


    I think I¡¯ll have to find some puppies and kittens for the Guild-Keep.


    <table><tbody><tr><td>Howardlight, confirmed Beta-Account</td></tr></tbody></table>


    The Crusade will not falter! How dare you to use puppies to hide your wickedness?


    out of character: Where can I get some for myself? Or maybe a kitten. Now, I want a kitten, I can call it Lux, feed it and pet it. That way, I¡¯d serve the light forever.


    <table><tbody><tr><td>Snydervine, confirmed Beta-Account</td></tr></tbody></table>


    I guess not even a fierce crusader can stand up to the pure power of cuteness.


    <table><tbody><tr><td>-Morgana, confirmed Beta-Account-</td></tr></tbody></table>


    @Howardlight: Don¡¯t worry, I¡¯d never drag puppies into a fight. Unless the fight is to first giggle, if that¡¯s the case, they rule supreme. And to answer the question where to find such cuteness, don¡¯t think that the ¡°animals¡± out there are merely that. Some of you might have the power to understand languages, either with magic or innate abilities, try to talk to them.


    In my case, I was asked to visit a wolf-city, so to speak, upon helping them and talking to them. There, I met the puppies.


    Try talking to your foes, you might be surprised what they have to say.


    Oh, and Rachant, if you want brutal, I recently investigated how Centaur-bodies work. Want me to share that? It''s really quite fascinating.


    <table><tbody><tr><td>Jeanyra, confirmed Beta-Account</td></tr></tbody></table>


    What do you mean, talking? Do you have some sort of magic that allows you to understand animals? If so, where did you learn it, would you be willing to share, maybe trade, the information? I¡¯d love to be able to speak with animals. Is that how you managed to tame your Raven?


    Please share, I¡¯d love to play with the local wildlife, but most of the time, its too busy trying to take a bite out of my face.


    <table><tbody><tr><td> Heracles, Official Pantheon Moderator </td></tr></tbody></table>


    What a refreshing change, from all the bloodshed, violence and battle. Pure, lighthearted cuteness, I¡¯ll have to share this one in the office. Far too many players focus on the traditional gaming aspects, rampaging through the world we opened up for you, without regard for its inhabitants. It¡¯s great to see someone interact with them on such an emotional level.


    Remember, the beings of Mundus are more than walking EXP-bags. Approach it more like an old-style Pen&Paper Roleplay game, instead of a modern video-game.


    <table><tbody><tr><td>Palda Hengar, confirmed Beta-Account</td></tr></tbody></table>


    Gods, I want to take her home, feed her and pet her. That¡¯s just too adorable.


    <table><tbody><tr><td>Rachant, confirmed Beta-Account</td></tr></tbody></table>


    I hope you are talking about one of the puppies, Palda. Even if Morgana is cute in this video, I have to admit that.


    And regarding the Centaur-bodies, I think I¡¯ll pass. I shudder at the thought what you consider ¡°investigating¡± what makes their bodies work. I didn¡¯t like highschool-biology and have no desire to get introduced to the nitty-gritty details.


    <table><tbody><tr><td>Terramb, confirmed Beta-Account</td></tr></tbody></table>


    Be right back, gotta buy a wolf-plush toy. Who wants one as well?


    <table><tbody><tr><td>Ruvas, confirmed Beta-Account </td></tr></tbody></table>


    Why are there two-hundred down-votes? Which monster has down-voted the video? How dare you? Do you have no soul?! Those are PUPPIES you are down-voting. Sure, Morgana is a little more controversial, but PUPPIES!


    <table><tbody><tr><td>Palda Hengar, confirmed Beta-Account</td></tr></tbody></table>


    Terramb, I want one. I might make one of Morgana in my own time, to recreate this adorable scene.


    <table><tbody><tr><td>Kiand, confirmed Beta-Account</td></tr></tbody></table>


    Just before logging off, I was hunting wolves in Road to Purgatory. Now, I feel like an absolute monster.

 Chapter 222

    After dissecting the Centaur and discussing with Rai what the best spots to attack were, Lenore and I used magic to scatter the remains, plowing them into the snow and making the snow look as pristine as it had looked before the battle.


    ¡°Snowdust, we are finished here. Do you know if Windpaw has finished his task?¡± I asked, looking around to take stock of the wolves in the area. I had noticed that some of them had been watching what I had been doing, but I had been too focused on my task to pay too much attention to them.


    ¡°We focused some time ago, the tracks to the battlefield are gone.¡± Windpaw told me, stepping closer.


    ¡°Good. Unless you see anything  that hints at the battle we fought, we can leave.¡± I told the two large wolves, while looking around, trying to see if I missed anything. When I didn¡¯t see anything, I waited for the wolves to finished their inspection.


    ¡°Nothing that I can see. There is a smell of blood still hanging in the air, but I doubt that it¡¯ll linger long, not after you made sure that no blood remains.¡± Snowdust said, sounding confident.


    ¡°Let¡¯s leave. I¡¯ll stay in the rear and hide our tracks. Move in a line, to make it easier on me, please.¡± I asked, causing the wolves to form a line, orderly moving one after the other. As I said, I took the last spot, using Ice Magic to remove any sign of our passing. We had to fight a battle of misdirection, of that I was certain. Just the single camp, even with our relentless attacks, had more than enough centaurs to devastate the hunting pack we had, and that was without considering reinforcements. No, if we wanted to win, we needed to play this smart, not hard.


    After a short hike through the snowy forest, we were back at our den and filed inside, the wolves seemed quite giddy with the successful attack. That was something I needed to step on, we needed to keep our wits about us, or we would fail.


    ¡°We need to talk.¡± I announced, once every wolf was inside and I had placed a thin  sheet of ice over the main entrance. We had dug a couple air-vents into the hill above us, in addition to an escape-tunnel, so it was no problem to close the entrance, hiding it under a snow-drift.


    The wolves looked at me with wagging tails, likely hoping that I announce further massacres. Sadly, I had to dampen their enthusiasm.


    ¡°We managed to strike a successful attack, wiping out one of their patrols without losses on our side. The centaurs will undoubtedly try to find out what happened to their people, so the best we can do, is lay low. We don¡¯t want them to get a whiff of us or they might bring in enough forces to deal with us.¡± I announced, causing grumbling and growling.


    ¡°We managed to wipe out about ten percent of their camp today, maybe twenty if we consider all our attacks to this point. What you need to remember is that that is only from one camp, there are at least two more camps out there, near enough to reinforce the camp we attacked. We have yet to find out how many more there are and how big they are.¡± I explained, letting sink it how many of the silly ponies were actually left.


    ¡°We need to avoid making them too mad, or they might try to strike into the Windswept Plains which risks our whole mission. I don¡¯t know what they plan around the Den but if it involves magic and the centaurs bring a decent spellcaster out there, they might sense changes, we can¡¯t risk that. And if they really want to go into the plains, we can¡¯t stop them.¡± I explained, causing ears to drop and tails to stop wagging. It felt bad to shatter their glee about our successful attack yet, it was necessary.


    ¡°What we will do, is make it look like the attacks came from further west. Maybe we can attack a few patrols of the next camp, making them concentrate their search in that direction.¡± I continued, mentally considering the best course of action.


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    ¡°That¡¯s it for now, we will stay near the den for now.¡± I finished, retreating to the part of the cave where Sigmir, Adra, Rai and I had placed our bedrolls. I needed to come up with a good way to distract the centaurs, directing their ire about today¡¯s losses away from the Main Den. During dinner, I discussed the problem with Windpaw, Snowdust and my party and we soon agreed that we should change our camp, attacking patrols further afield, maybe even attacking one of the other camps.


    ¡°There¡¯s another thing we might want to consider.¡± I spoke up after some time, realising something else.


    ¡°I¡¯m reasonably sure that the centaurs need a rather sturdy supply-chain, even with magical bags, there¡¯s only so much food they are likely to have stored away and their huge bodies in the cold weather with constant, strenuous activity? That¡¯s bound to burn a lot of energy, we might want to consider attacking those supplies. I once heard a saying that an army marches on its stomach. Having the centaurs go hungry has a certain appeal to me.¡± I explained, remembering the huge digestive tract, likely designed to squeeze even the smallest bit of nutrients from the food the centaurs ingested. If we forced their attention to their supply-chain, they would be hard pressed to investigate the windswept plains, not if they were busy hunting phantoms through the forests, trying to make sure that they had enough food. Sure, they might be able to hunt, but that, too, would reduce their potential for operations.


    ¡°That sounds like a good plan.¡± Adra agreed and the two wolves nodded along.


    ¡°We¡¯ll start with that tomorrow. Today, we¡¯ve done more than enough.¡± Sigmir stated. We had a little talk about reckless attacks and the stupidity of jumping around like a fool on the walk back with me making my failure during the attack into a lesson for Rai. It had been a stupid mistake, born from the exultation of jumping from tree to tree like some sort of squirrel but it had been a mistake, one that almost cost me my life. Hopefully, Rai would learn from my mistake, I certainly had. Until I had some consistent way to shift my course in the air, I¡¯d refrain from aerial maneuvers.


    With our plans for the next days lined out, I returned to one of my usual evening activities, trying to figure out the growing selection of magical materials I was carrying around with me.


    One of the materials I was trying to figure out was the Eternal Ice, mostly, I was considering the small shards, keeping the large chunk in a cocoon of Hard Ice that I replenished on a regular basis, it was just too problematic to handle otherwise. The small shards, those I could handle, but not the big chunk, not without being in a world of pain.


    The Eternal Ice was the goal I was pursuing, trying to form it by myself, and Liquid Moonlight was what I thought was the stage before that. My talks with Old Ice had been quite enlightening, even if they had failed to produce actual skill-advancement. I had a feeling that the next steps in Ice Rune Mastery would be hard, requiring me to understand what I was doing, instead of merely using the runes I had used before. Sadly, changing Liquid Moonlight into Eternal Ice was a feat I had yet to achieve, despite the time-investment. But I was reasonably sure that I was getting closer, using a medium crafted from Hard Ice and Liquid Moonlight as a base on which I projected Stillness-runes, trying to freeze the Ice in time itself. That was my current idea for producing Eternal Ice, alas, I had no success thus far.


    Another project was centered on the Crystal of the Northern Wind, the gem I had been given by Sirius. I had experimented with it, trying to channel power though it and it worked, allowing me to work with Ice easier and I had let Lenore try to use it for her wind-magic, and she, too, had reported that it felt easier, the magic flowing more smoothly, compared to normal.


    Sadly, I was far from ready to use it, there were certain pieces missing, but those were part of my final object of investigation: The Athame I had been given by Thekk, the smith in Neyto.  I was quite sure that it was the key to understand how to make a magic item for myself. I was reasonably sure that the gem used by Thekk was not as valuable and powerful as the Crystal of the Northern Wind but despite that, the Athame was superior as a spell-focus. He had told me that it was enchanted, meaning I needed to figure out what had  been done to make that focus into what it was now. Sadly, the enchantment was incredibly complex, I had stared at it for hours on end, using Lenore¡¯s sight and was not even close to understand it. Whoever had placed it, they knew what they were doing, that was for certain.


    I kept trying around, studying the enchantment and experimenting with Liquid Moonlight for hours, before finally deciding to get to the other, all-important evening activity: Snuggling with Sigmir.

 Chapter 223

    Misdirection. That was what it all came down to. Everyone agreed that trying to face the centaurs head-on would produce only one result, our death. Originally, I had believed that we might be able to actually push them back but once I had fully realised just how many of the silly ponies were in the camp and that there were more camps further west, with us merely attacking the one furthest in the north-east, I had changed my opinion. To stall them, we needed to avoid their focus, otherwise we would fail.


    After killing the complete centaur-patroul, we had split our group, three small groups of nine wolves each had been sent out to run around the area, simply producing a lot of wolf-tracks in the west of the camp we had already attacked. The rest of the wolves, all four of them, were with my group, scouting and maybe even killing a few centaurs from the camps further west. The other groups had promised to avoid combat if at all possible, leaving my group as the one that would engage our foes.


    Once again, Lenore was a key-part of our strategy, with her ability to fly and while being relatively inconspicuous, she could keep an eye on things from above, telepathically telling me whenever she saw enemies, allowing us to attack or circumvent them, at our leisure.


    Another thing we used, and I quickly got proficient in, was scrying. At first, I had needed to sit, centering myself before taking a few minutes to produce a large spell-circle around me and only after that, I had been able to use a patch of darkness to shift my view around. With quite a bit of training and careful experimentation, I had managed to take away the need for the large spell-circle, reducing it to a simple spell-formation that I could draw with my hands, creating a dark cloud in front of me that I could link to distant shadows, using the new viewpoint to leapfrog to shadows even further away. While the effect was virtually unchanged, I was able to quickly cast it on the fly, allowing us to prepare ambushes while having more information about the enemy forces than even their own leader had.


    The first day after making our way west, Lenore and I simply kept an eye on the second centaur-camp, both of us making note of the differences between the camp we had seen further east, near the windswept plains, and the one here. I was rather impressed by the disciplined way the centaurs had set up their camps, their organisation was virtually identical, the various tents looking like they had been places with a straight-edge. During noon, Lenore returned to our small camp, allowing us to directly talk about what we had seen.


    ¡°I think there¡¯s another camp, further in the south. I noticed some smoke.¡± Lenore told me, after we had discussed that the basic layout was just like the one we had already seen.


    ¡°That¡¯s not good. I have trouble understanding just why they push into this direction that hard, unless they want to conquer. But conquer who? I mean, it¡¯s not like there¡¯s some sort of political power in the region, at least not from what we¡¯ve heard.¡± I stopped, pondering just what they might be up to. ¡°And if we call it settling, that feels a little wrong as well. Sure, they might only be the security for settlers that¡¯ll come later, but for that, there are far too many of the silly ponies. I just don¡¯t get it.¡± I grumbled, annoyed that I had no idea what was going on.


    Just from what we¡¯d seen, there were about a hundred of the silly ponies in each camp, so we were talking about a force of at least four-hundred centaurs, in an area only about hundred square-kilometers. Sure, the area was large, but if one assumed that each of the camps only patroled a five-kilometer radius, that wasn¡¯t too much for their man-power. They couldn¡¯t create an air-tight security, as we were proving, but bringing an army this way would be impossible.


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    And that was the conundrum, the man-power would easily make sense if it was a border-fortification against some other, at-least medium-sized political power but the only thing even close to one was the city of Kolyug, a few hundred kilometers away. Unless one counted the wolves in their den but they lacked the motivation to venture west. That left only the Ankhegs, according to the wolves, they were quite smart but their minds were too alien to even consider communicating with them, it seemed to be impossible, at least for the wolves. Maybe they had some sort of desire to spread towards the west but I somehow doubted it.


    When I asked Sigmir what she thought, whether there was some force back in the east, she just shrugged, telling me that she¡¯d never heard of any really organised force, merely tribes of different people, similar to her old one, some more nomadic, others less.


    Ultimately, we only found two answers that explained their presence in such numbers, one was that they were an overblown precaution, securing the border against some threat that we either didn¡¯t know or that didn¡¯t existed or, which we considered the much more likely variant, that they were the first step, securing a foothold from which the centaurs were able to expand east.


    If the second idea hold true, we needed to make sure that they were unable to achieve security before the den was ready, because once they came in force, we would be unable to hold them back.


    We continued to talk about ways to make the centaurs live as miserable as we could while eating lunch and once that was finished, Lenore went back into the air, watching what the silly ponies would do. One of the biggest things we had in mind was finding out how they actually supplied the camps, as cutting off that line would seriously hamper them, forcing them to deal with the disruption or spend a lot of time hunting, if they even managed to get enough food in the area.


    I considered scrying again but at the end of the day, my vision was just too limited to observe a large area, I was only able to look out of shadows, which meant I was limited to a single viewpoint below the tree-tops, using the shadows cast by those trees. Out in the open, I was unable to observe, at least during day-time.


    Instead, I, once again, experimented with the Crystal of the Northern Wind and my Athame, watching the flow of magic through either focus, especially feeling out the differences between channelling magic through the Athame while holding its grip and thus using it as intended and merely placing a finger on the gem set in the pommel, which, in my understanding, should limit the gem to its material properties, without the added enchantment. It turned out, I was right, using the gem like that, it was quite a bit weaker, confirming my theory that the Crystal of the Northern Wind was the better focus, at least once I got it into an enchantment similar to the one in the Athame.


    Without Lenore in the area, I was trying something slightly different, carefully and with a lot of focus extruding Astral Power in its base form, even filtering out the small stream of Ice Astral Power that was naturally flowing through me and using that unaligned Astral Power to feel out the enchantment. It was slow-going, controlling the Astral Power was a headache and a half, yet, it slowly but surely allowed me to map the enchantment. It wouldn¡¯t allow me to duplicate it, at least not straight away, but I was relatively sure that I should be able to use it as a reference, just as I used spells crafted for other purposes as references to make my own spells, often getting quite far from the originals, making them purely my own.


    As I mapped the spell, part of me considered the best way to actually use the Crystal later. The Athame was great, not just because of the focusing-effect but also because of the spells that helped with my blood magic. Those were centered on the blade, in a separate enchantment than the one I was mapping, which I would tackle at a later time.


    But the Crystal of the Northern Wind was only partly aligned to the element of Ice and discarding the part that was wind-aligned would be wasteful, so I needed to make a tool that allowed Lenore to use it, just as it would allow me to use it.


    I quickly realised that I already had such a tool, the perch I had made a while back, it could serve me as a staff, something almost required to use as a spellcaster, while allowing Lenore to sit on it and if I made the enchantments right, both of us could use it to its fullest effect. It would be a good solution, at least if I could figure out the enchantment in the Athame.

 Chapter 224

    During the evening, Lenore returned once more, quickly entering her Hallow after landing on my shoulder.


    ¡°There¡¯s a storm coming.¡± she told me, sharing a feeling of apprehension. ¡°I wouldn¡¯t want to be caught by it in the air.¡±


    ¡°Good to know. Does it roll in from the south or from the north?¡± I asked, curious if there was a way to use the storm to our advantage.


    ¡°I think it¡¯s one of the last storms blowing in from the north, the last attempt of winter to keep its grip on the land.¡± she answered, likely having already felt what I was considering.


    ¡°Any more interesting things you noticed from above?¡± I prodded, wanting to get the information before we started to discuss my idea, knowing that we¡¯d likely get carried away by the discussion about magical theory. It had happened before and would likely happen again.


    ¡°No, not really. There are a few hints that they use wagons and caravans to supply the camps but I¡¯ve yet to actually see one.¡± she explained, showing me the spots that looked very much like stables, something we hadn¡¯t seen before.


    ¡°I wonder what they use as beasts of burden, somehow I doubt that Centaurs would use horses. Too closely related.¡± I mused. At the same time, I realised that even amongst humans, there had been groups that had happily used other humans as slave labour, simply using the colour of their skin as an excuse why they were less than human. With Centaurs, it would make more sense, horses were, in general, less intelligent than Centaurs, so there might be some discrimination. Time would tell.


    ¡°I didn¡¯t see them, but I agree, I doubt they would want to work with beings looking so like them but lacking sapience.¡± Lenore agreed with me, before starting to consider what we could do to use and influence the coming storm. We quickly got to the conclusion that there were two ways we should be able to influence it, either to boost its strength, causing it to furiously rage, causing it to dump a load of snow onto the area, but doing so would cause the storm to quickly expend the storms energy, causing it to blow itself out in a couple of hours.


    The other option was to try to keep it down, causing a long-lasting unpleasantness, not strong enough to actually cause damage but I doubted that anyone would be willing to work outside in mostly freezing temperatures, with a nice mix of rain, hail and snow.


    Ultimately, either would work to our favour by forcing the centaurs into their camps.


    We discussed which way would work better for that goal, soon deciding to try the second variant, creating a long, drawn-out ritual that would focus on lending the storm endurance instead of trying to have it produce the heaviest snowfall we could manage.


    It turned out that, for once, Lenore would actually lead the ritual, instead of me. Before, the rituals we had used were either fully led by me or in a cooperative effort, but for this one, it would be her. As such, I only contributed small parts to the ritual-circle we drew, mostly following her direction, while mostly focusing on the enchantment of my Athame and how to change the perch so that it would work with two sources. I managed to come up with a design while my body almost mindlessly followed Lenore¡¯s direction. When I finished, I almost stumbled, after having most of my attention directed inwards, it felt a little strange to think about what my body was doing.


    ¡°What did you come up with?¡± Lenore asked, having noticed and felt my deep ponderance, thanks to our connection, but she had been unable to actually follow it, not without focusing on it, which would have disturbed the process of preparing the ritual circle.


    ¡°I think I can make us a tool that allows us to increase the amount of power we can raise. The more we push into the storm, the more control we have over it, right?¡± I asked, almost cheekily. We both knew it was a lot more complex than just more power meaning more control but more power would help with the rest of it.


    ¡°Curious. Show me what you¡¯ve got?¡± she replied, her curiosity, a trait we shared in spades, shining through. Of course, I obliged her, despite the fact that it would increase the time needed to craft the circle and the staff, but I preferred to have her check over my design. Just as I was now checking over the design of her circle, I was unable to understand some of the runes but I could get a feel for the overall geometry and the way power would flow through it. It was both based on my own experience and a feeling I was unable to fully pin down, a sort of sixth, or seventh, eighth or maybe ninth, sense that helped with my magic.


    It was something that made me wonder from time to time, how was a game able to teach my mind additional senses, it felt as if I shouldn¡¯t be able to comprehend the information, even if I had the sense to gather them. Part of me was curious how it worked with non-humanoid races, like the centaurs we were facing, if a Traveller played one. How did the transfer from Mundus to Earth work, did they have phantom sensations of the limbs they were lacking? I had noticed that, when on Earth, the world was a lot less colourful, so to speak, without the additional beauty I was able to see thanks to my improved senses. It was similar with my emotions, ever since coming to Mundus, they felt stronger, clearer, more bright, in a way. But only on Mundus, on Earth, the emotions themselves seemed a little faded, yet in my memories of Mundus, they were clear.


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    In the privacy of my mind, it made me afraid, desperately afraid. And not just because Road to Purgatory changed me, with effects ranging out into the real world, but the bigger fear was that I would be found out. That people would come to know about the change and force me to abandon Road to Purgatory, pushing me back into the faded reality I had lived in before coming to Mundus. But now, I knew that there could be more to it.


    Shaking off those thoughts, burying them in the deepest depths of my mind, I forcibly focused on the formation Lenore had prepared and the small additions that I had placed. They were mostly there to take in the naturally occuring Ice Astral Power in my body, so that it wouldn¡¯t be wasted. Mostly, we wanted the storm to be windy, wet and thoroughly unpleasant. The Cold I contributed was useful but we had decided that it wasn¡¯t something we wanted to waste power on.


    ¡°Looks quite good.¡± Lenore told me, when I felt her mind focusing back on the world around us. I quickly told her the few observations I had about her circle, it was quite sturdy and well-crafted, causing her to caw in pride.


    ¡°Let¡¯s craft it, before we try the ritual. I think if we use a small amount of your blood, we¡¯ll be able to create channels that allow your Wind Astral Power to flow through it.¡± I suggested, causing her to grumble a little. But I felt her agree with me, even if she didn¡¯t particularly like it, due to the pain involved. I could understand that, the pain of using Blood Magic on yourself was the worst I had ever felt. Luckily, the material we were using was naturally inclined to Frost Magic, so I didn¡¯t have to use my own blood in the crafting.


    But before there was any blood-letting, we joined our minds together, not quite going into Avatar-State but using all the focus we could, simply to get the channels and magical formations we carved into the Hard Ice just right. We both knew that there was quite a bit of guessing and extrapolating involved, even with the different treaties we had on magic, mostly using the information I had traded of in Kolyug. Most of them were for a different kind of magic and for disposable items, created using non-magical materials that were later infused with magic, but I could make a few connections between both crafts.


    Slowly, ever so slowly, we carved the lower portion, the actual staff, that would be held in my hand, allowing me to effortlessly channel my power into the Crystal of the Northern Wind that would be held in the head. It took us quite a bit of time, but after about an hour of intense focus, we agreed that it should work.


    The next step was equally as intense, making the head of the staff into something that would allow Lenore to channel her own power downwards, into a formation that resembled the one we were planning to use during the night, a formation that joined Ice and Wind together, allowing both to merge and become greater than the sum of its parts. For that, Lenore had to give some of her Blood and not just any blood, I needed to take it with my Blood Magic. That step caused some irritation with her, simply because it was majorly painful, but after it was done, I carefully used the blood and the Wind Astral Power bound within to prime the spell-formations we had just carved. This was purely experimental, trying to use a type of magical power I normally couldn''t but the risk was, at least in my opinion, minor, at worst we would lose the staff I had crafted. That would be an annoyance, but not a major problem, as I could just craft one again.


    Finally, the staff was fully engraved and the magical formation at the top primed with both, my own magical power and Lenore''s. And in the middle of that formation, we placed the Crystal of the Northern Wind, the capstone of the staff we were making.


    I felt a surge of elation once the gem slipped into its slot, the icy clasps locking it in place. With a shiver of anticipation, I used the inspect skill.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="10">Staff of the Northern Wind</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="5">Rarity</td>


    <td colspan="5">Rare</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="5">Type</td>


    <td colspan="5">Staff</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="5">Base Damage</td>


    <td colspan="5">4 Damage Piercing</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="5">Base Damage</td>


    <td colspan="5">0 Damage Slashing</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="5">Base Damage</td>


    <td colspan="5">1 Damage Blunt</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="5">Strength Modifier</td>


    <td colspan="5">Low</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="3">Special Effect</td>


    <td colspan="7">Imbued - Due to the process used for the creation of this weapon, it is strongly in tune with the Ice-Magic of the Traveller Morgana. 25% lower cost when wielded by her Ice-Magic.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="3">Special Effect</td>


    <td colspan="7">Call of the North Wind - Astral Power channelled into this Staff can be used to cause the North Wind to swirl around the wielder, dampening flames and blowing projectiles astray.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="3">Special Effect</td>


    <td colspan="7">Spell Weaver - When this staff is used to channel Astral Power into Ice- or Wind-Spells, the effect of those spells is increased.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="10">This Staff was created out of Hard Ice by the Traveller Morgana. The material used, makes it lighter than normal but brittle and vulnerable to heat. Later, a rare crystal was set into the Staff, allowing it to channel formidable, magical power.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>

 Chapter 225

    I had to blink a few times, after seeing the attributes of my new weapon. Or rather, casting tool, it wasn¡¯t quite as useful as an actual weapon, just like my Athame. There had been small losses to the original Whacking Stick, it had lost a small amount of damage, it had lost the damage-amplification when used as a weapon from the back of a mount but that was it. I was quite sure those losses were the result of the reduced physical stability the weapon had, thanks to the setting for the crystal and the various rune-channels Lenore and I had carved into it. Not that I actually planned to hit people with the staff, even before it had changed from a One-Handed Polearm into a Staff, I had merely used it as a perch for Lenore. I wondered about that change but chalked it up to staves being classified as the tools of magicians and polearms as weapons, the one- or two-handed classification based on their weight. In addition to that, the rarity of the staff had gone up from Uncommon to Rare, most likely because we had used a rare gem in its creation.


    But those were the minor effects of the crafting-process Lenore and I had gone through, the real effects were the two new special abilities, one seemed to be an active effect the other a passive amplification-effect targeting Ice- and Wind-Magic.


    Other than the window telling me about the new staff, I noticed more blue windows, telling me about skill-advancements. The big one was that my enchantment-skill, something I hadn¡¯t used in months, had shot up by multiple levels, bringing it up to ten. In addition to that, my Blood Magic had gained another point, maybe due to the attempt at aligning the formation carved for Lenore with Wind-magic using her Blood. It was something new, so getting a skill-point was to be expected.


    With a smile, and filled with curiosity, I channelled a bit of Astral Power into our new staff, instantly feeling two ways to use that power. I could either use it as normal, to produce some sort of spell-effect, or I could simply draw upon the staff itself to guide it, creating that wind-barrier mentioned. I tried to create that wind-barrier and instantly realised that it was very similar to the effect of my Tempestuous Dancer-Title, only that the title only had effect while I was using Dance to control a magical ritual, the staff could be used at any time, at my discretion. Feeling the air swirl around me, I tested just how far I actually could control the wind-barrier produced by the staff and was a little disappointed when the only options I had were turning it on and off. But it made sense, I had no actual skill in Wind Magic, so no control for me.


    Dismissing the barrier with a thought, I focused on the other effect, channelling my magic through the staff. That required a bit of mental re-alignment as it added a sort of buffer between me and the actual magical effect, making it similar to a magical ritual instead of the pure free-form casting I had been doing. When I realised that it wasn¡¯t just a matter of mentally realigning myself but that there was a small delay, almost like a transmission-lag, between my mental casting and the magic taking effect, I started to frown. The delay was small, merely a split-second, but it was something I wasn¡¯t used to.


    Lenore watched me test around a little before joining in on the fun. To proficiently wield her Wind-Magic we either needed to be separated, with her outside of her Hallow or we needed to be joined in our Avatar-state. Our normal state of linked, yet separate mind was just not enough to allow her to cast her spells through my body. Maybe in the future, if our link deepened further, but for now, it just wasn¡¯t in the cards. Or maybe I would be able to create my own Hallow within her body, allowing me to use the fact that I was able to channel spells through her to cast from the inside of my Hallow.


    But those ideas were for the future, for now, she left her Hallow and took her place on the top of the staff, just sitting there for a moment.


    ¡°Let me cast on my own for now, please.¡± she asked, using our mental connection. I obliged, withdrawing my power from the staff, but keeping my focus on it. There was still a bit of mental feedback from the staff, maybe thanks to the fact that it was created by me, using my Astral Power and in this instance, I was able to watch Lenore¡¯s Astral Power be transmitted into the spell-formations we had carved into the head of the staff, smoothly flowing downwards, into the crystal that was the core of the staff¡¯s power. From there, I lost sight of it but was able to see the effect it had on the real world, as the air swirled around us for a moment before starting to form into directed gusts, strong enough to stagger an unprepared human. It wasn¡¯t serious combat-magic but I knew that Lenore was merely testing what she could do using with the staff¡¯s supporting effect.


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    In turn, I focused on the magical formations, watching them for signs of deterioration. I had tried something similar using magically charged blood and Darkness Magic but back then, the result had been utter failure. Since then, I had learned a lot more about magic, allowing me to create a stronger base-material and use my Blood Magic to prime the channels that would guide the foreign magic. And it looked like what we had in mind was working, there was a slight deterioration but it would take days of focused spell-casting to cause serious harm to the base-substance.


    ¡°Could you test out how much you can actually push through the formation at once?¡± I asked, curious if that would increase the deterioration-effect I was observing. Lenore cawed an agreement and the gusts of wind turned into rather serious air-blasts, strong enough to knock an unprepared foe down and, at least at a guess, causing rather painful impacts. For aerial foes, those would be seriously lethal, knocking them from the sky and breaking their bones with ease. The amount of power I felt flowing through the staff was surprisingly low, reminding me that Lenore wasn¡¯t a power-magician, she needed some time to work her magic. Maybe that was why she had an affinity for mind-magic, or it was something related to her ability to handle souls.


    Pushing those thoughts from my mind, I kept close watch on the spell-formation. While the deterioration was worse than before, it wasn¡¯t problematic, she¡¯d cause damage to the staff if she kept casting at full power for about two days, which put a limit on that. Curious, I tried to restore the Hard Ice as she was casting spells but I instantly felt a resistance, making it obvious that, if I tried, I¡¯d put serious strain on the material, causing more damage than I¡¯d be able to repair. I had a feeling that it would introduce a negative feedback-loop in which I¡¯d cause more damage by fixing the damage done by her, forcing me to fix the damage I had caused, which would cause even more damage. That meant, I¡¯d have to try it again but without Lenore¡¯s magic in the mix.


    ¡°Thank you, stop please.¡± I told her, waiting for the magic to subside. After a moment, I started to push my own magic into the staff, careful not using the channels of the enchantment but the ice itself, quickly finding the small imperfections, the damage caused by channelling Wind-magic through the magical formation. This time, I was able to repair the damage quickly and without problems, something I was grateful for. It meant that we¡¯d be able to use the staff regularly, without having to worry about deterioration, as long as I repaired it every so often.


    ¡°Good, that works. Now, Let¡¯s see what we can do together.¡± I told Lenore and she agreed with a caw.


    ¡°I think Wind-Magic is better to lead, carrying freezing cold with it. So, I¡¯ll supply power, you form and direct it.¡± I continued. She thought about it for a second before agreeing. While we still had our mental connection, the distance introduced a bit of, well, distance, even in the mental realm. Trying to form our spells in unison as we normally did wouldn¡¯t quite work, so we¡¯d have to improvise.


    I let my Astral Power flow into the staff, as if I wanted to cast Ice-Magic using it as a focus but I didn¡¯t supply the mental imagery for it, simply letting it sit there. At the same time, I was able to feel Lenore channel her own power into the staff and both pools of power came together in the formation around the Crystal of Northern Wind, causing it to become alight in a silvery-teal glow, mixing the colours of our magic. Moments later, she resumed the previous air-blasts, only this time, they were clearly stronger, causing not only snow to fly but actual depressions to form in the dirt below, which instantly iced over.


    ¡°I¡¯d call this a successful test.¡± Lenore announced proudly. Both of us knew that, if she had used those blasts against anything less durable than the ground, she¡¯d have caused trees to fall over or, if used against creatures of our size, caused them to get blasted through the air.


    ¡°Yes, I agree. Let¡¯s see what we can do with it in our ritual.¡± I told her, looking forward to combining the effects of Ritual Magic, the new staff and the natural storm that had caused the wind around us to slowly pick up during our experiments.

 Chapter 226

    After making sure that everything was ready for a prolonged session of spell-casting and telling my party and the wolves around us to take cover, I took up my position in the middle of the ritual circle Lenore and I had set up. For a moment, I considered sitting on the ground, as I normally did when using magic circles that didn¡¯t involve me dancing as part of the ritual. It was a curious thing, using dance to guide magic, it worked but, if asked, I hadn¡¯t got the slightest idea why, or how. I simply moved with the magic, guiding it by a rhythm that I heard during casting, the actual steps improvised along those ethereal sounds of magic. While there might be some sort of rhyme or reason to it, I had no idea what it was, I simply let myself be carried along that feeling.


    But this ritual wouldn¡¯t be use by me, it was Lenore¡¯s spell, with me merely providing power as she often did for me, so there would be no dance on my part. The idea to sit the ground was quickly discarded out of practical reasons, I needed to hold the staff roughly three-quarters of its length from the ground to get the complete effect out of the enchantments I had woven into it, which meant that, if I sat I would have to permanently stretch my arm upwards, which sounded annoying. So, with a thought, I sent my magic through my new staff, quickly creating a sturdy armchair out of ice, before adding upholstery out of snow. For me, who wasn¡¯t bothered by the cold, it made for excellent and comfortable sitting, while allowing me to place the staff next to me with ease. Lenore cawed in amusement before taking her place on the head of the staff, sitting comfortably, fluffing her feathers one last time and then it was time to start.


    For me, the whole ritual was almost ridiculously simple, I had to sit here and channel a constant load of Astral Power into the staff, allowing Lenore to weave it into her spell to manipulate the storm. At first, I channelled a strong surge of power into the staff, priming it for use and giving Lenore a comfortable buffer to work. As soon as that was done, I felt my regeneration kick in, replenishing the power I had just used and that was the amount of power I needed to channel, that way, I would be able to keep the same load, for hours on end.


    And so, I mentally settled in, letting the calmness of the Astral Meditation-skill wash over me, drawing as much power from the Astral River as I could. At the same time, I gently channelled the regenerated Astral Power into the staff, trying to find that perfect spot where the amount I regained from my regeneration and my meditation was as high as the amount I channelled into the staff.


    Delving into the Astral River was always a curious sensation, the various streams inside giving off vastly different yet similar feelings. Feeling around, I looked for the chilling cold of Ice-aligned streams, feeling that those would be the best to settle into, maybe with some of the crisp, yet playful, feeling I had felt in some of the Wind-aligned streams, those should work just as well, at least in my opinion. My normal regeneration simply took whatever there was to get, giving me a chaotic, unaligned mix that didn¡¯t lean strongly in any direction, but now, I had the mental capacity to look for the best mixture for the ritual.


    After feeling around for a bit, I found a good spot, an agitated mix between Wind, Ice, Water and Storm-streams, coming together with a certain ferocity. Maybe it was the magical representation of the outside world, a cold storm, but not a blizzard, the environment having an influence on the Astral River itself. I felt it was possible, in the valley of the Wind Raptors, after Lenore and I had created a zone of wild magic, the Astral River had changed, either as an effect of the wild magic or the wild magic zone had been an effect of the changed Astral River, I didn¡¯t know which was true.


    But here, I hardly cared, I just needed the power to help Lenore turn the storm into a lasting annoyance for the ponies.


    Feeling the Astral Power surge through me, I opened my eyes, guiding the power into the staff, causing a soft glow to emanate from it. At the same time, I started to watch what Lenore was doing.


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    The circle around us was glowing with soft light, the runes charged and ready to strengthen Lenore¡¯s magic, allowing her to change simple gestures infused with the right magic into serious changes to our environment. That simple gesture was the beating of her wings, not to create lift but instead, to cause the air to flow away from her. That airflow was then used as a base to be modified, her magic linking it to the storm, each beat guiding the storm into a series of gusts, slamming walnut-sized hail into everything in its path.


    After watching Lenore for a moment, I focused on the deeper mechanics of the magic we were crafting. For once, I didn¡¯t need to think about directing the magic, I could simply lean back, drawing power and observe the ritual in action.


    At first, I focused on the staff we were using to channel our power, curious how it stood up to the amount of Astral Power we were sending through it. The first thing I realised that the enchantments we had created were far from perfect, letting some of the power channelled through them leak out. The obvious sign for that wasted power was that the staff was softly glowing with silver and teal light, corresponding to the types of magic we channelled. The staff was still providing a bonus but I thought there might be options to improve on the enchantments to eliminate the loss. But that would require a lot of study and experimentation, so I made a mental note to get to it later.


    Widening my focus, I looked at the magic formation around us, trying to get a feeling for the streams of magic that were flowing through it, surging and merging at Lenore¡¯s command to infuse the howling storm around us with our power. Sadly, I was unable to get a clear picture without Lenore¡¯s sight, my own magical senses were based on smell and taste, allowing me to determine things like the magic in a substance, like blood, with great precision but when dealing with magical formations, I was far less perceptive. I could smell the magic that made up our ritual, even without knowing what we were channelling, it would have been easy to determine that it was wind and ice, but the exact interplay wasn¡¯t something I could see.


    There was a small temptation to use Lenore¡¯s sight but in reality, I knew that she needed her focus and that disturbing her might cause the ritual to surge out of control and, given the amount of power involved, that would be seriously bad.


    Knowing that there was little more i could do, I wiggled a little to get comfortable, settling in for the long run. At least I had the foresight to place my chair in such a way that its back blocked the wind and hail from me, otherwise, I would have been quite uncomfortable.


    For the first couple of hours, I felt elation shimmer through the bond I shared with Lenore, she was having a blast. Controlling the ritual allowed her to harness the power of something she normally feared, taking a storm to wield against her enemies. For her, Storms weren¡¯t just uncomfortable and slightly scary as they were for land-dwelling creatures, they denied her part of her being, forcing her to take shelter, so using it was a special thrill for her.


    But after those first eight hours, the new-ness and the elation ebbed off and the ritual turned into a bit of a chore, the consistent casting weighing on her mind, like a headache. Sadly, I was unable to help her with the casting itself, my magic not compatible with her wind-magic, otherwise I would have let her take a break. What I could do, and did, was use a hint of blood magic to heal the fatigue from her body. She had been beating her wings for hours on end, unable to simply spread them and glide as she would have done while flying and the pain had started to seep into our bond. After healing her, I felt gratitude through our bond and she focused back on the ritual, letting the storm batter the centaur¡¯s camps.


    We carried on and I felt my sense of time slowly slip away, my whole being focusing on the process of drawing power from the Astral River, channelling it into the staff and healing Lenore from the physical effects of the strenuous casting. How long I sat on that chair, I was completely unable to tell and I would have kept sitting there, if Lenore¡¯s body hadn¡¯t given out.


    Despite my healing, I felt weariness overtake her and felt her mind going blank. That change over our bond caused me to snap from my trance, quickly channelling the power contained in the staff into a burst of coldness while catching Lenore before she could impact the ground. She was completely out of it, deeply unconscious and I noticed that, thanks to our connection, I could still feel her body. It was unharmed and, acting on instinct, I was able to draw her into her Hallow where she would be able to rest.


    Forcing my legs to stand was a chore in itself, while my chair had been comfortable, I had sat on it for what felt like days, so I staggered a little when walking over to where I could feel Sigmir, falling into her arms, telling her that I needed to sleep before doing just that, clinging to her and let my eyes close.

 Chapter 227

    Success had never been so miserable.


    Lenore and I had managed to keep our ritual going for a little over sixteen hours, pumping an insane amount of Astral Power into the storm. After that, I had slept for a good eight hours, securely held in Sigmir¡¯s arms until waking again, to realise that the storm was still going strong, dumping buckets of water, snow and hail onto the landscape. Obviously, that included us and by the time I woke up, we all had been thoroughly drenched.


    All of us had were wet, cold and miserable, well, all but Lenore and Ylva, both of whom had decided to retreat into their Hallows. Nothing drove the unpleasantness home as much as the fact that even Ylva, who¡¯d never been one to try avoiding hardship, wasn¡¯t willing to stick things out. Sadly, none of us others had the option to hide in a mystical Hallow but now that I was awake again, we could do the next best thing, hide within a magically constructed igloo. While it wasn¡¯t much warmer, it was mostly dry and out of the wind, which increased the creature-comfort by a lot. We even had some dry wood remaining, gathered before we had entered the windswept plains, allowing us to make a fire, quickly increasing the temperature to pleasant levels. But just getting into the igloo wasn¡¯t enough to make me comfortable, while the cold didn¡¯t bother me, being drenched was supremely unpleasant.


    As a result of that feeling and knowing that, even in the comparatively dry igloo, it would take hours for my clothes to dry, I started to consider other options. One was to return to the real world for a few hours, given my clothes time but that felt as if I was letting Sigmir and the others down, using a reprieve they couldn¡¯t access to make myself comfortable.


    That left either trying to stoke the fire, which would quickly burn through our small reserve of dry wood, the forest outside was soaked to the point that the wood was saturated with water making it questionable if we would get more or I could try something with my magic.


    Knowing that, if I failed to come up with a good idea, I could still fall back to one of the other options, I started to consider what my magic could do in this regard. All three types of magic that I used had some potential associations to what I wanted to do, even if some were more strenuous than others.


    Darkness-magic was, at least partially, the magic of change and that was what I wanted to do, changing my wet clothes to being dry. Sadly, other than some rather outlandish ideas in the vein of trying to magically devour the water in my clothes, I had no idea where to even start.


    Blood-magic on the other hand dealt with blood, obviously, and, at the end of the day, blood was about fifty-percent water. But the magic I was using dealt mostly with the more esoteric aspects of blood, its connection to life and vitality. So, again, I had no idea where to start, unless I wanted to wash my clothes in blood before removing that.


    And finally, the magic I thought had the best chances to do what I wanted to do, Ice-Magic. After all, water was just Ice that had yet to be frozen. I was quite sure that I would be able to simply freeze the water within my clothes, but unless I made sure to keep it from forming a combined structure, I¡¯d most likely damage my clothes if I forcibly removed the formed ice afterwards. That meant, I needed to make sure that the formed ice-crystals were as small as possible, before controlling them in a manner similar to the control I could exert on the mist I could magically create or the few times I had used snow to obscure vision.


    Before I could start questioning if I was doing the right thing, I drew a simple magic formation made from mist, cold and ice, but didn¡¯t instantly start to channel power into it. I needed to add the mental image I wanted, the image of tiny ice-crystals forming from the water in my clothes before turning into a fine mist and floating away from my clothes. Diamond Dust, that was what the phenomen I wanted to emulate was called, a mist made from uncountable, microscopic Ice-crystals, small enough to hang in the air.


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    With that mental image strongly fixed in my mind, I started to push Astral Power into the magic formation, feeling the water in my cloak, my first target, coalesce into ice before the ice started to drift away, drawn by the call of my magic. It looked quite interesting, a fine, wispy mist, starting to form above my cloak until I took control with my normal Ice-Magic, guiding it towards the smoke-hole in the middle of the igloo.


    The others looked at me, at first with confusion but once Sigmir stretched her hand and touched my cloak, realising that it was perfectly dry, if a little cold, she had a look of comprehension followed by a smile.


    ¡°Do mine once you are done with yours, please.¡± she asked, looking adorable, almost like a drenched puppy.


    ¡°Of course, love.¡± I assured her, adding a soft kiss for emphasis.


    Now that I knew what I wanted to do, I quickly changed the target of my magical formation and the image fixed in my head, going after the water weighing down the rest of my clothes. When I added Astral Power, an inadvertent shiver run down my back when my magic turned all water in my clothes, down to the wetness on my skin, into the finest ice-crystals. Luckily, they didn¡¯t stay on my skin for long, I quickly took control and guided them away leaving me dry and much happier.


    ¡°Love, you might want to take off your clothes or it will be painfully cold.¡± I warned Sigmir, carefully hiding my smile when she instantly started to strip off her clothes. Mentally, I considered if there was any way to keep her from feeling the inevitable cold, I wanted her to be as comfortable as possible. Sadly, I had no idea where to even start, in a magical sense, so I decided to simply work quickly. I started with her clothes, so she had something to wear after I dried her off, even placing them next to the fire so that they would be at least a little warm, once I completed the procedure. It worked just as it had before, the water forming diamond dust ice and being whisked away.


    After a quick kiss of apology, I froze the water on her skin and in her hair, causing her to shudder from the cold. But, at least she was dry and huddling by the fire, while pulling on her clothes again, would quickly warm her back up. Turning around, I noticed that Rai and Adra were just as naked as Sigmir had been, their clothes next to the fire and both looked at me hopeful.


    I dried them off, just as I had Sigmir, only without the kissing, causing another cloud of tiny ice-particles to drift off.


    ¡°Adra, how long do you think the rain will last?¡± I asked, once they all had stopped shivering.


    ¡°Good question. I felt the amount of power you used, that was no joke. But it depends how strong the storm had been before, how long it would have lasted normally. There are storms that blow themselves out in a day or two, but other storms last for days, maybe even weeks. We¡¯ll just have to wait and see.¡± Adra reasoned, mirroring what I had expected but it helped to get a second opinion.


    ¡°I¡¯ll have to check what the centaurs are doing, hopefully, they are just as miserable as we are.¡± I joked, before turning to the igloo-wall and starting to draw up the magic formation I had used to scry before. I would be seriously limited in what I could see but sadly, Lenore was still deep asleep after the marathon-ritual we had used the day before. And even if she was awake, I doubted that she would have been happy to fly out into the gusting wind, the cold, almost icy rain and the piercing hail. No, we had done a good job to make the weather as unpleasant as possible but now we had to live with it.


    I quickly formed the darkness that I used to form a window, allowing me to peer out of shadows around the centaur camp and what I saw looked quite promising. Where before, the guards had patrolled at almost all times, there were now only a few guards visible, all of whom stood beneath specifically created shelter. In addition, every tent was venting smoke into the air, making me quite sure that they were occupied. Sadly, the centaurs had a magical ward erected that prevented me from shifting my scrying-focus into their camp-proper, I could only look into their camp from the outside or I would have taken a look into a couple of their tents.


    But it looked as if the storm was achieving what we had hoped, keeping the centaurs in their camp. I¡¯d have to keep watching to make sure, but it was a good start.

 Chapter 228

    The sleet kept going for four days and by the second day, all of us were bored out of our skulls. On the first day, I had enlarged the Igloo to create multiple chambers, one for Sigmir and me, one for Rai and Adra one for the wolves with us and finally, a chamber to be used as out-house, allowing our waste to fall outside and be washed away by the rain.


    But even with those chambers, there was only so much we could do inside and the conditions outside were far too unpleasant to brave them without need. What I focused on was training Rai in his Darkness-magic, experimenting with the limitations of the shadow-scrying I had used before and spending quality time with Sigmir.


    Adra also joined in my magic experimentation, trying to expand her own magic, while she didn¡¯t use elemental magic as it was, her magic had some commonalities that allowed us to compare notes, so to speak.


    Rai made good progress, his Shadow Cloaking was getting excellent, in that skill, he was even better than I was, simply due to the amount of training he had put into it. Sadly, that meant he had to experiment on his own, trying to pin down the best way to use it, when to drop it or maybe even ways to attack while he was still cloaked. To facilitate that, I had created an Ice-dummy in their chamber, which he tried to assassinate dozens of times each day. After repairing it a few times, I upgraded it from normal Ice to Hard Ice, making it harder for him to damage it which allowed me to get a good look at his progress. And his progress was quite pleasing, the wounds he dealt would be lethal on any creature with anatomy similar to humans, which I had based my training on. I would have made him a Centaur-dummy but sadly, that would have been too large.


    As I continued to experiment with the shadow-scrying spell, quite often using it to keep an eye on the centaurs, I realised that it was an incredibly powerful spell but that it also had a few major downsides. My first order of business had been to actually use my class-ability to make the spell into what I wanted it to be, creating a fixed mental process so that I didn''t just use the seat of my pants when casting it. That way, I hopefully would be able to create a stably performing spell, without any major surprises included.


    The spell essentially allowed me to create an orb of shadows, roughly the size of a soccer-ball, shifting my awareness into that ball and, if I used it with together with Lenore, let me shift that orb of shadows around in three dimensions. It wasn¡¯t tremendously fast, moving roughly the same speed as a jogging human, and it was limited in its shape, meaning it couldn¡¯t just squeeze through every gap, it needed to remain roughly spherical. Those two were new limitations that had cropped up when I had formalised the spell, I wasn¡¯t quite sure why they had manifested but it meant that I would have to improve the spell further, I had already managed to send my awareness through small gaps but the current spell didn¡¯t allow that.


    Other than those limitations, I learned one rather painful lesson and that was that I needed to keep the spell in darkness, not necessarily total darkness but even direct starlight was enough to disrupt it and give me a painful headache. Torches seemed to disrupt it when I got to close and daylight, even when concealed by clouds, meant that I was unable to get it to work at all.


    All in all, I was quite happy with the new spell and earned two skill-points in my Darkness Magic and one in my Darkness Rune Mastery, bringing them to forty-six and sixty-seven respectively.


    Another spell I was trying to get to work reliably was the strange teleport-spell that I had discovered when attacking Sigmir¡¯s tribe a few weeks back. It had taken me some time to even begin to understand what I had done, my memory of the evening was more than a little fuzzy, but it seemed as if I had managed to use Sigmir¡¯s presence as a beacon to move myself through the shadows, escaping the Shaman¡¯s hut and landing next to her. Sadly, I had been more or less out of my mind due to the backlash from abusing my Mind Magic and the strengthening effect of the New Moon that had pushed my Darkness Magic above anything I could normally use. The combination had caused me to use magic in ways I had been hard pressed to understand, let alone reliably recreate.


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    Finally, on the fourth day, the rain and snow eased up, it was still raining but no longer the brutal, freezing storm that seemed to drain the warmth right out of your body. My scrying had shown me the surrounding area and it was rather appaling. Where before, there had been open fields or meadows, hidden beneath a cover of snow, now, there was a swampy, boggy mess, the ground saturated with water, partially frozen and churned by the wind. I doubted that anyone would be able to easily traverse the area but we were willing to try, due to the fact that I had noticed a group of centaurs and oxen slowly making their way towards the camp we had been observing. While it would be impossible to attack them before they made it to that camp, we would be able to get there in time to stop them from getting to the camp closest to the windswept plains.


    I considered if there were any ways to make it look like an accident, maybe burying them with a mudslide or something along those lines but sadly, there were no adequate slopes in the area, making that an impossibility. But drenching them in water and mud before cooling them down, effectively making it look like they had been frozen to death, that would certainly be in my repertoire. If the centaurs were stupid enough to try resting out in the open, I would be willing to try.


    Before going into battle, I wanted to gather the other wolves of the pack, I was relatively sure that the storm had driven them to ground, just as it had the centaurs and I hoped that they had withstood it, even without shelter. At the end of the day, they were creatures of the wild, used to living in the outdoors year-round. Before we had split up, we had made sure that there was a series of scent-marks that any of the wolves could detect, calling for a meeting at the cave where we had made our camp in the first place. While I hadn¡¯t originally considered using such large-scale magic as I had, mainly because I wanted to keep my involvement hidden, it had worked out quite well, using the local weather to our advantage.


    Making our way to the den, while leaving scent-marks was harder than I had anticipated. While I had been able to see the soggy ground when scrying, was even able to watch the centaurs struggle with the frozen mud, it was a whole different beast to walk on it. For me, it wasn¡¯t a real problem, I was small, slender and light, so as soon as I created snowshoes out of ice and affixed them to my boots, I could simply walk atop the frozen mud, without ever disturbing it. Sigmir, on the other hand, had a tall, muscular and strong frame that, coupled with her being heavily armoured and armed, made her break the surface as soon as she stepped out of our igloo, almost falling in the mud. From the look on her face, she was mortified but sadly, there was nothing that could be easily done. I made her wide snowshoes, large enough that she had trouble walking with them, waddling along with the almost clown-sized shoes, but even with them, she had trouble.


    Ultimately, and hopefully without her knowledge, I used some of my magic to lessen the load she was pushing through the snowshoes into the ground, using the fact that the snowshoes were made from ice to work through them It reminded me of an annoying limitation in my magic, that I was unable to move myself with my Ice-Magic, otherwise, I¡¯d have made myself a set of icy armour before using Ice-Magic to levitate the armour, carrying myself that way. But sadly, that was simply impossible and I had no real idea why.


    Sigmir was remarkably stoic about her problems, I knew that, if I were in her shoes, I would have had a few choice words to say about it, but she simply took it. Yet, thanks to the bond we shared, I was able to feel that it gnawed at her, reminding me that I should be extra nice to her.


    In that manner, we managed to get to the cave where we had made arrangements with the other wolves, meeting one of the groups already there. Afterwards, it was a matter of waiting, with me scrying to check where the centaur supply-group actually was.

 Chapter 229

    My original hope, to attack the centaur supply-team during their nights-rest was sadly out of the question. They hadn¡¯t moved on after arriving at the western centaur-camp during the middle of the day, instead, they had stayed there, obviously planning to spend the night. For us, that was both good and bad news. Good news, because it meant that all wolves would be able to join in our attack, bad news because it meant we were lacking the cover of the night. Luckily, I¡¯d be able to make our own cover, the massive amount of humidity in the air made it stupidly easy to create fog. I had been doing that as much as possible, relying on the wind to carry the fog-clouds, hopefully making the centaurs accustomed to those clouds. If they never saw fog-clouds without being attacked by wolves coming out of them, the surprise-factor of the clouds would be greatly diminished.


    During the day and evening, Adra and I were outside, moving around to create more fog. Originally, I had suggested to go alone but Sigmir had strongly opposed that idea, yet, at the same time, I had noticed how difficult it was for her to move on the soggy, swampy ground we had created. That had lead to a short discussion and her acceptance that Adra would hopefully be able to keep me out of trouble.


    We moved around for a few hours, a strange combination between patrol and walk-in-the-park, as we discussed magic while keeping an eye out for possible danger. Neither of us thought there were any dangerous foes around, the centaurs had apparently hunted most of them to the point that they had either left or died off, making the forest almost eerily quiet. At one point, I stopped, the eeriness reminding me of the forest around Tegi, both before and after the Devourer had destroyed the city, making me wonder if the area was headed for the same fate. It wouldn¡¯t be as grave as the situation in Tegi had been, I doubted the centaurs were using the same form of blood-magic, but they spilled a lot of blood, the vitality seeping into the soil, some of it turning into miasma. And we would spill even more blood on top of that, exacerbating the problem. Maybe I should try to cause an intrusion of Nethersprites, simply to give the Centaurs something to worry about, it would buy the wolves the time they needed and more. When I told Lenore of the idea, she sounded quite intrigued, it was the type of plan she liked, using our enemies life-force to attract problems for our enemies. I even had a great idea for the delivery mechanism, wondering if the Centaurs had ever heard of Troy.


    ¡°What are you laughing about?¡± Adra asked, making me realise that I had first fallen quiet, before starting to giggle to myself.


    ¡°Just an idea for our next gambit, after stopping them from getting one or two supply-shipments, we¡¯ll have to alter tactics, you know? And the quiet forest reminded me of Tegi, giving me an interesting idea.¡± I explained, not going into too much detail, doubting that Adra would be happy with my idea.


    ¡°I don¡¯t want to know. Hopefully, it won¡¯t blow up into our face.¡± she quickly assured me, renewing my giggles.


    ¡°That¡¯s just fine. You¡¯ll see soon enough.¡± I grinned, before starting to create the next fog-bank.


    We returned to the den in the evening and found it packed, with a few unfamiliar wolves, their coat less silver-grey and more of a tan colour, their size clearly smaller than the wolves I had grown accustomed to. When Adra and I approached, Windpaw came to greet us, looking mightily pleased with himself.


    ¡°Greetings, honoured friends.¡± he barked, once we were close and I noticed that the new wolves looked at us with curiosity in their eyes.


    ¡°Greetings, Windpaw. I see you got our message. Who are our new friends?¡± I asked in return, looking them over without using Observe. As I had noticed before, they were smaller, looking a little scruffy and almost starving.


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    ¡°We met them when we were keeping an eye on the Centaurs. They are from a pack living quite a bit further west but they have been driven from their accustomed hunting-grounds by the centaurs, forced to leave or die, either by starvation or the spear of a centaur.¡± Windpaw explained and gave a bark, causing one of the wolves to move forward.


    ¡°This is¡­¡± the concept that he transmitted was another of the inexplicable ones, the sound of fir-needles breaking in the frost. ¡°She asked to be called Frost Needle.¡± Windpaw introduced the other wolf.


    ¡°Greetings, Morgana. We were told that we might be able to strike back at our foes here.¡± the wolf growled, sounding both annoyed that they needed the help but also eager to sink her teeth into their foes.


    ¡°Greetings, Frost Needle. And yes, we will kill some of the silly ponies but know that, right now, our mission is not to fight them, it is to delay them. Once that mission is completed we can go about killing them at our leisure but if we recklessly attack them now, we might cause an overreaction, risking our mission. If you are unable to accept that caveat, you and your wolves will have to leave.¡± I explained, keeping my voice steady but making it abundantly clear what the mission as.


    ¡°Yes, I can accept that.¡± Frost Needle nodded, both of them falling in next to me.


    ¡°Tell me, Morgana, were you responsible for the weather over the last few days? There was a smell riding on the wind that reminded me of you.¡± Windpaw asked as we walked, causing me to grin and Frost Needle to make a surprised sound.


    ¡°Lenore and I thought that the silly ponies would be much less eager to go out and make trouble if they risk sinking into the mud up to their bellies. And it worked, the camp we watched didn¡¯t send a single patroul out over those days, the only centaurs in the open are the guards and the poor sods that guard their supply-group. Want to guess who we¡¯ll visit tomorrow?¡± I asked, stepping into the den and using the trick I had learned to dry off, causing a puff of mist to float out behind me. Inside, I noticed the rather obvious smell of wet dog, making my nose crinkle while drying off Adra as well.


    ¡°You could have warned us, you know? The last few days were wet and soggy.¡± Windpaw grumbled good-naturedly, standing a few steps behind us and shaking, trying to get the water out of his fur


    ¡°We just used what Nature offered. Even the two of us can¡¯t whip up such a storm out of thin air, we just made sure that the storm lasted as long as possible and was as unpleasant as possible. If you want, I can dry you off but tomorrow you¡¯ll just get wet again. It might help with the smell though.¡± I told him, laughing at the expression of disgust. Apparently, he didn¡¯t like to get wet.


    ¡°Sure, do your thing.¡± he told me, while Frost Needle nodded nearby. I did as asked, causing him to shiver from the cold for a moment before continuing inside, while I did the same with Frost Needle.


    ¡°Now, you said something about the centaurs¡¯ supply-group?¡± he asked, the eagerness returning.


    ¡°Yes, we saw a few oxen, guarded by just a couple of centaurs and loaded down with what might be magic bags. They got to the camp we watched yesterday in the afternoon and stayed there. They¡¯ll either go back tomorrow or continue on the the eastern-camp. If they go east, I don¡¯t want them to make it, that way, the silly ponies will have to go looking for food. Maybe we can find some good grazing for them.¡± I explained, mocking the horse-part of our enemies, making them sound like prey for the wolves.


    In response to my explanation, Frost Needle made a chuffing noise that I had come to interpret as happy laughter, making me raise an eyebrow.


    ¡°Good, good, the Centaurs killed our food, starving my pack. If we can kill off their supply-group, we can starve them in turn. I like it, giving them a taste of their own medicine.¡± she growled before offering me her throat in respect and padding off.


    I told Windpaw that we would head out the next day and he was to make sure that the wolves were rested and ready, before going to the area where Sigmir was already waiting, having spent some time training Rai. Even if we had only been apart for a few hours, it felt good to be with her again and I happily took a seat on her lap, wiggling around a little until she securely held me in her embrace, causing me to quickly relax into her.

 Chapter 230

    I was waiting with a feeling of breathless anticipation. During the night, Lenore and I had, more or less jokingly, made predictions and bets on the reaction the centaurs that escorted the supply-oxen would have, once they noticed a mist-bank rolling in and how they would react once they were covered by it. The ideas started with the sensible, run as fast as they could, continued with the boring, do nothing, and finally, started to become ridiculous when Lenore suggested that they would sprout wings and turn into Pegataurs, some unholy cross between Pegasus and Centaur, a race I was almost certain Lenore had made up. Almost.


    At the end of the day, neither of us knew how they would react but both of us were eager to find out, I had used my scrying magic to make sure they were on route to the eastern camp and the wolves had taken position near the best spot to launch an ambush, in an area where the sleet of the past few days had turned the grassy plain into a boggy swamp, ready to drown and bury any too heavy creature that tried to run through it. If the centaurs thought they could run away from the ambush, they would get stuck and be ridiculous easy prey for the wolves that were accustomed to run on snow, their bodies, skills and even magic well-suited for the task. Sure, there was a difference between waterlogged swamp and powdery snow but in this case, I had been assured that it didn¡¯t matter.


    While the wolves had taken up position, I had made sure to keep my part of the bargain, once more creating a fog-cloud and coordinating with Lenore, who flew above, giving me information that I was able to pass on to the wolves, using Sigmir and Ylva as intermediaries. Thanks to her, I was able to see that the Centaurs had indeed made plans for the weather, instead of simply continuing on their path, moving into the mist, they simply circled, the four oxen laden down with what I could only assume were magical bags taking up the middle while the centaurs created a protective circle around them.


    I internally chuckled, thinking that, if the ponies didn¡¯t want to come into the mist, the mist would come to them, flexing my magic to create more, making it look like the increased amount was simply wafting out from the woods. That would be the moment of truth, would the centaurs flee, depriving their allies from supplies or would they press on into our ambush? Either way, it served us by keeping the centaur-camp from replenishing their supplies, making them focus on their rear instead of thinking about continuing on, further into the windswept plains.


    It only took a few minutes and then I knew the answer to my musing, thanks to Lenore. She showed me that, while the centaurs and, to a lesser extent, the oxen looked supremely agitated and worried about the mist, they didn¡¯t turn tail to flee, making me smile with grim satisfaction. No, they tried to stand their ground, despite the uncertainty, something that made me want to experiment a little. Leaving the cover of the forest, I quickly moved close enough to be able to channel spells through Lenore.


    Looking through her eyes, I was able to see the shadowy shapes of the centaurs and even, thanks to her magical sight, the stealthy wolves moving around in the thick mist. With a smile, I focused on one of the Centaurs, gently and ever so slowly intruding into her mind with my mind-magic. The distance made it harder to work in that manner but she was agitated enough to make her mind quickly flitter from one thought to the next, at least that was the impression I got. My current hypothesis was that, the more a mind was focused on something, the harder it was to intrude into that mind. Getting into the Centaur¡¯s mind was easy enough to validate the idea.


    Inside, I was still unable to get anything clearly, merely an impression of incomprehensive signals passing between unknown parts of her mind, body and the to me invisible soul. Yet, I had seen what fear looked like in other minds, allowing me to make an educated guess which of the impulses were fear and that was where I focused my attention.


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    Gently and hopefully imperceivable, I increased those signals, both their intensity and the amount of signals sent, curious what would happen. I noticed that the rest of her mind was increasing in activity as well and, looking at the amount of signals between mind and body, I was guessing that she was getting twitchy. Lenore, looking at our target from above, agreed with me, showing me the centaur¡¯s shape moving around frantically, stomping her hooves while her human body turned back and forth.


    Seeing that I was getting the result I wanted, I increased my efforts, until Lenore told me that the Centaur had left the protective circle. For me, that meant it was time to go, I had no desire to be linked to her mind when the wolves caught the lone, frantically fleeing Centaur. I had experienced what it felt like to be linked to a dying mind and it was an experience I wanted to avoid at almost any cost.


    After pulling back, I focused on the sight I was getting from Lenore, watching the shadowy form of the Centaur dart into the mist with the forms of the wolves converging on it until a shrill scream shattered the silence of the clouded mist. I could see the other centaurs shifting around even more while a few wolves tore into the one that had tried to flee, shredding it in a few moments. The rest of the wolves had avoided the centaurs, surrounding them to make sure none of them would go away, if they tried to run.


    Smiling, I realised that I could make the battle go much easier, by simply repeating what I had done before, so I watched for a moment to see which centaur was looking the most agitated and repeated the mind-magic, causing another centaur to break and run into a group of wolves.


    At that point, the Centaurs must have noticed that their position was untenable and would only result in getting them killed and tried to retreat, moving in an orderly fashion, creating a wall of bristling spears pointing outwards. I could watch as the wolves started to nip at the groups flank, causing them a few wounds but taking some damage in return. Lenore and I started to move the mist around, trying to disorient the centaurs even more, adding some of our magic to the mix.


    After a minute or two, the centaurs seemed to have completely lost their plot, moving more like a headless herd, the oxen seemingly forgotten. Without the strict guidance, the oxen relied on their instincts and given that they smelled and heard the wolves literally snapping at their heels. The result of that feeling was that they simply ignored the movements of the centaurs, each simply putting their head down and barrelling forward. It just added to the chaos, making me smile. The centaurs tried to keep them together but the only result of it was that they were pulled apart by the massive animals, causing their carefully maintained formation to scatter.


    I could watch from above how the wolves instantly started to exploit the loss of their formation, further attacking and isolating the various centaurs. After a short mental conversation with Lenore, we agreed to focus on the centaurs that looked as if they were getting away. With our Mind-Magic we could easily take out a centaur or three within moments, scattering their minds, leaving them as a husk of their existence. Their bodies didn¡¯t die right away but without the mind, a beating heart didn¡¯t really matter.


    It took the wolves a few more minutes to bring down the scattered centaurs one by one, some of them going down with a bang, trying to make a last stand others going down with a whimper after falling and breaking a leg in the mud, turning them into sitting ducks. Personally, I struck down two of the Centaurs who had been lucky enough to hit a gap in the encirclement of the wolves and might have gotten away.


    Once the centaurs were taken down, the wolves surrounded one oxen after the other, slowly wearing them down by attacking their flanks and hind-legs, the wounds and stress wearing them down over time. Finally, the last oxen bleated its last breath, foaming at the mouth and keeling over, ending the battle. I got some EXP for my part in the battle, enough to bring me to level sixty-three and my Mind-Magic to eighteen before starting to move towards the battlefield, to start my part in clearing up the battlefield.

 Chapter 231

    Part of me wondered if the Centaurs were somewhat related to ants. Watching them gave that impression, they looked rather agitated as they moved around camp and I thought I could smell their unease, even through the scrying magic I used to watch them.


    But it was somewhat understandable that they were spooked, at first, they had lost about thirty percent of their troops without managing to bring down even one of their canine attackers, followed by a storm pinning them into their camp for days, turing the surrounding area into a muddy, swampy bog, taking away their biggest advantage, their mobility. After that week of rain, sleet and hail, their first supply-shipment never made it to their camp, vanishing without a trace and at that point, they must have caught on that something bigger than just a few random wolf-attacks was going on.


    After those events, they had started to act skittish whenever they noticed mist rolling in, even wholly natural mist was sending the scurrying back into their camps, hiding behind their trenches and in the light of their perpetually burning torches, those had to be magical. But for now, the mission the wolves and I were on was working perfectly well.


    Sadly, there was only so much we could do without giving the game away, the uncertainty with what they were dealing was keeping them off-balance, otherwise, they¡¯d simply use overwhelming force to deal with us, forcing us back into the forest where our only chance would be to hide away. I had one more strike in mind, after which I would have the wolves pull back a little, letting them wallow in their fear, until either the mission was completed or the centaurs needed to be reminded of the fear they were feeling right now.


    And the target for that last strike was moving towards the camp, I had luckily seen it the day before, another group of oxen and centaurs, carrying magical bags like the supply-group that we had ambushed days before. Half of those bags were now used by us, the other half was distributed amongst the wolves, which was just fine. It mostly meant that we had more than enough carrying-capacity, even if there might be some way to weaponize such bags, I¡¯d have to look into that one.


    I shook off those thoughts, watching through my scrying-field as the centaurs, double the complement of the last supply-group, were moving along their oxen, with the wolves slowly shifting to get into their way. The centaurs had learned, their path was no longer the fastest and easiest path, they seemed to more or less pick their way at random, making ambushes much harder.


    Not that we had that in mind, at least not fully, the plan was to use a wide fog-bank to either pin them or drive them into the jaws of the waiting wolves. Most of them were on the other side of the centaurs, compared to me and only a few wolves would actually be in the mist as it rolled in. I had discussed it with the other wolves and they agreed, it would most likely be the hardest fight, made even harder by the fact that I needed to take down a few of the centaurs, three to five optimally, without killing or wounding them too grievously. But sadly, it was necessary for my next gambit.


    I had to smile when their first reaction to the mist rolling in was to turn the oxen and flee from the approaching cloud as fast as possible. While they were getting smarter, they were also getting predictable and being predictable was getting them killed in this case. The wolves hidden by the mist added to the speed of their flight by snarling, howling and growling, turning what had looked like a controlled change of direction into a slightly panicked flight, as they tried to keep in front of the cloud of mist I had conjured up.


    In front of them, the rest of the wolves had hidden in the grass and mud, waiting for the centaurs to come to them, if they managed to get away from the mist. I noticed a centaur falling, after stepping into a hole in the ground, maybe breaking a leg, but the rest of their party simply ignored the downed figure, moving on as if nothing had happened. It drove home just how afraid they were, abandoning one of their own, literally leaving them for the wolves. But maybe that was just part of their mission, to get the supplies to the camp no matter what, no matter the sacrifices. For me, I was quite happy about it, as it meant I had the first captured centaur.


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    When the rest of the centaurs made it to the waiting wolves, they leapt up and another battle broke out, the centaurs realising that they¡¯d have to fight back, or they would get picked off, one by one. Once the battle broke out, I abandoned the scrying spell, instead quickly making my way towards the battle-field, satisfied that my plan had worked thus far. I wasn¡¯t too far away and was able to see the end of the battle, as the wolves circled the last few centaurs that had clustered together to make a stand.


    Lenore, who had been watching the whole time, told me what I had missed, which was not a lot. The wolves had their tactics to take down centaurs, which worked quite well, especially in the muddy swamp they were fighting on and ultimately, the fight had played out very much as hoped. While some wolves had been injured and a few even died before I ever got there, they had managed to achieve our goal, four centaurs were immobilised but alive, looking as if they were praying to whatever deity they believed in to make the wolves miss them when cleaning up the battleground. Not that it would help them if the wolves missed them, I was the one with plans for them.


    Once I was in range, I started to lob a few Icicles towards the harried centaurs, causing screams of surprise and shock, once they noticed that it truly was a humanoid that was attacking them, and soon, the battle was over. I gained some experience, not enough to advance me another level, and Lenore and I started the after-battle work, healing, cleaning up and finally, the gambit we had planned out.


    The first step of that gambit was to bind one of the downed centaurs, a female, and heal her. As I did, she was whimpering, asking why I was doing this, pleading for her life and all that. Not that I really cared or listened, I had work to do. But there was a part of me that was a little curious why the centaurs were here, so I asked Adra if she would talk to the centaurs once I had healed them, to pump them for information while we relocated.


    Healing them was relatively easy, I had a good working knowledge on centaur anatomy, which allowed me to work quickly and effectively, bringing them to a point where they could walk but not without pain and running would cause the fixes I had performed to break, leaving them immobilised once again. Which was just as well, I didn¡¯t want them to flee, once they understood my plan.


    We set out all together, captured centaurs, my party and the wolves, all moving hidden in a cloud of mist, towards the north-eastern centaur camp, the one the supply-group had been moving towards. As we walked, one of the centaurs tried to plead with me again, blabbering how their herd would trade for them and the best way to go about things would be to negotiate their return with their people. I highly doubted that anything he said was true, but I let him ramble on, curious if they would give any useful information or merely misinformation. Ultimately, I would return them to their people, just not in the state they wanted to be in. Lenore, once again flying high overhead, allowed me to direct the combined group around any obstacle and, soon, within two hours of walking, we were about a mile away from the centaur-camp. The camp, seeing the massive cloud of mist, was on high alert, Lenore spoke of fully manned trenches and a bristling forest of pikes and enough archers to make her return to the safety of the cloud of mist I had conjured up.


    After coming out of the mist surrounding us, she landed on my staff, impressively flapping her wings for a moment, making the centaurs gawk. I wondered if they realised that by showing them one of my biggest advantages, I would make sure they would never live to return to their people. Shaking my head, I shackled the centaur-captives again, this time adding gags to their mouths, to make sure they would be unable to scream, it might distract me at an inopportune moment. In a fit of fancy, I created a dice to pick the first centaur to work on, drawing my Athame as I walked towards the suddenly panicking centaur with a smile.


    I loved to experiment with magic.

 Chapter 232

    Either the smile on my face or the Athame in my hand must have clued the centaur in to the fact that things were about to get interesting. He tried to break the bindings I had conjured around him, not that he had a chance to do so, the frozen chains I had bound him in were tight and solid.


    I carefully planted the staff in front of him, using a bit of Ice-Magic to anchor it in the soil beneath, making sure that Lenore could easily watch what I was doing and would be able to do her part in our plans. It took me a few moments to carefully remove the leather armour protecting the Centaur¡¯s abdomen and once that was done, I had free access to his flesh, especially the strange linking-organ that connected the two different circular systems of the centaurs. And that was where I was planning to start my work.


    The Centaur let out a strange, snorted gurgle as my Athame pierced the flesh of his abdomen, sliding into the strange organ, my blood magic channelled through the blade to prevent the blood from spurting out. I had better things in mind with it, so I had to prevent it from simply flowing away.


    With each beat of the centaur¡¯s two hearts, the influence of my blood magic was spreading through both circular systems, slowly draining Astral Power from me, the investment hopefully paying off in the long-run. It was curious, once I had stabbed the centaur, he seemed to almost calm when nothing bad happened in the next minute. Maybe he didn¡¯t quite realise what was happening or he understood that trying to struggle was pointless, making him bide his time, saving his strength for a possible later attempt to flee.


    Not that it mattered, he never had a chance to use his saved strength. Some ten minutes after I had started with him, I felt that my magic had saturated his body, infiltrating into the smallest capillaries and allowing me to feel all the blood within him, brimming with life. Reaching out with my blood magic, I started to actively separate the blood, as if I was using Blood Magic to draw out the power contained within for my use. That caused the Centaur to give a shuddering jerk, trying to escape the sudden pain that was wrecking his body but again, the chains held and moments later, his jerking stopped, his body only held up by the binding on it.


    Now, the next part of the experiment began, while I used the Power gained from his body, Lenore was slowly infusing the body with her particular magic, turning it into an undead under her command. I felt her power intrude into the body but, luckily, it didn¡¯t interfere with my plans.


    I used what I had seen in Tegi, the ideas, the concepts and even some of their magical formations, to recreate part of what they had done, using the Power siphoned off from his blood to bind the Miasma created by the use of my Blood Magic, keeping it contained inside his body. What I was using was a rather complicated spell using both Blood- and Darkness-magic and I wasn¡¯t sure how long I would be able to hold it. I felt myself start to sweat from the effort, the Miasma was trying to act as it normally would, spread out like spilled liquid and I was keeping it bound, creating slowly mounting pressure as more and more of the energy was used up, creating more and more Miasma.


    ¡°I¡¯m ready.¡± Lenore told me, the centaur now standing again but there was a slightly eerie feeling about him. Looking at him more closely, nothing but that slight feeling and the small stab-wound in his stomach gave away what he was, an undead puppet filled to the brim with Power.


    I stepped back, withdrawing the Athame and replacing the Armour above the wound and felt the connection to the Blood inside waver but it was still easily strong enough to hold.


    ¡°Let him go.¡± I told Lenore, dissolving the bindings around her puppet with a thought. For the first few steps, the centaur-puppet was stumbling but then it found a useful gait and was racing towards the centaur-camp, with Lenore and me moving to the edge of the mist, allowing us to see what was going on. On my signal, the wolves started to make a ruckus again, howling and snarling, as if they were viciously fighting.


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    The guards looked at the apparently fleeing centaur and once it was obvious that there was no pursuit, they started to move forward, as if trying to project a protective envelope forward, keeping the other centaur safe.


    Once the Centaur was almost amongst them, I added the next piece of showmanship, a beam of Dark Radiance, lancing out from the mists to strike the fleeing centaur in the back. The beam itself was just that, a harmless beam of Dark Radiance, without any additional properties. But the moment it hit, I finally let loose the blood magic I had held the whole time, allowing it to unravel. It only took a split-second for the pressure created by the miasma inside the undead centaur to shatter the unravelling magic, causing it to break free.


    Violently.


    From the distance, it looked as if the Centaur had exploded in a shower of blood, gore and viscera, splattering into the muddy snow beneath and showering the approaching centaurs. At the same time, I felt a shuddering in reality, far weaker than what I had felt in Tegi but I had been looking for it, allowing me to easily sense it and I noticed a small ripple in the distance and a Nethersprite sprung into being, instantly attacking the nearest living beings, the centaurs.


    ¡°It seems like my idea works just fine.¡± I said to Lenore as we watched the Centaurs instantly attack the unnatural being, quickly dispatching it but not without one of them getting a vicious wound on his arm. And I knew it was only the first Nethersprite, there would be more.


    Together, Lenore and I turned back into the mist, repeating the casting-process with the second captured centaur. As we walked to the edge of the mist again, I asked Lenore how long it would take the guards to start shooting their own, fleeing people, not understanding what was going on.


    She chortled in amusement for a moment, considering what the guards had just seen, before answering.


    ¡°I don¡¯t think they will, unless they realise that the dark beam is just for show. Maybe don¡¯t use it on the last centaur, simply letting it explode when it reaches their lines. That should make them extremely skittish.¡± she suggested and I considered her idea. I had used the beam to hide the fact that the centaurs were already dead, to prevent them from trying to stop things. But at the same time, it would make them wonder why their enemies didn¡¯t simply use that dark beam against them, giving them a hint that it was merely show.


    After a few moments, I started to nod in agreement, looking out of the mist towards the centaur-camp. Even from a distance, it was obvious they were spooked and I could see that a few more Nethersprites had appeared and been dispatched, making it obvious why the Centaurs were spooked. I nodded to Lenore and she let the next undead centaur escape, fleeing towards their camp.


    That was when something unexpected happened, as the centaur raced towards the camp, a new Nethersprite slipped into reality, instantly feeling the Miasma contained in the ¡®fleeing¡¯ Centaur and starting to give chase. I couldn¡¯t have produced a better distraction than that, the undead Centaur tried to evade the Nethersprite, veering off a little but still trying to reach the camp and the guards were reacting to help, trying to save the fleeing Centaur. The Nethersprite was hit with a multitude of arrows, its form shredded and right as it gave of its dying screech, I sent out the Dark Radiance, causing the undead centaur to explode in a shower of gore, hopefully linking the Nethersprites and the Dark Radiance in the mind of the Centaurs.


    Again, Lenore and I walked back towards the last captives and as we walked, I looked at notifications, smiling when I realised that I had gained a few skill-levels in Blood Magic and Darkness-Magic, in addition to a new level on my Defiler-Title increasing the amount of power but also the amount of Miasma created by my Blood Magic.


    I told Lenore about it, causing her to shrug, it was something that made Blood Magic more volatile and what I was doing was definitely worth the title.


    Two more times, we repeated the process of turning a centaur into an undead bomb, sending our trojan centaurs towards their camp and increasing the amount of Miasma around it. When we sent the last centaur, I didn¡¯t use the blast, simply letting it explode once it was amongst them, hopefully causing more confusion. Because that was what the idea was all about, fear, confusion and keeping them busy with Nethersprites.


    And with it done, we would have to let up a little or it might create a massive response.

 Interlude: A change in perspective

    Once again, the horn blew, calling the guards to the berm. It was a new concept, digging a trench around the camp, using the excavated dirt to pile up a berm that made it harder to move across the trench. That trench gave the centaur-warriors a fixed position to defend, allowing them to easily keep enemies away, instead of being forced to move out and meet them in the open field, where they could use their mobility. Without the trench, they had been greatly weakened, to the point that defending their camps was difficult.


    But how did one defend against a cloud of mist, that accursed, cold mist that had haunted them for days, before the storm had swept in and caused all operation to cease? The mist itself had been a rather big problem in and of itself. Not only did it decrease the visibility to a few meter, making it hard to see where one was going and forcing the patrols to slow down, it also fully shut down ranged combat, neutralising the two biggest advantages of the centaurs. That the mist was cold, wet and unpleasant, that was a completely different problem, sapping the will and morale of the centaurs, making them simply miserable and long for their accustomed plains.


    But the true problem was that the mist sometimes hid teeth and claws, the last few weeks, the local wolves had proven supremely adept at using the dense mist to hide their movements, springing ambushes as if they knew where the centaurs were moving, maybe guided by their excellent sense of smell. Even the domesticated wolves had been useless, other than to guard the perimeter.


    And now, the horn had been blown, calling the guards up. But not only the assigned guards started moving, after the previous week of torrential rain, most centaurs felt a little stir-crazy. The few patrols that had moved out, into the soggy, swampy mess they were surrounded by had been short and local, partially to find the wolves, partially to look for the supply-group that should have arrived a few days before. But nobody had seen hide or hair of either group, causing the camp to be suffused in an air of unease, their instincts screaming at them that something was out there, stalking them, hiding, ready to pounce.


    To say that morale had been down the drain would be an understatement. So, now that the horn was calling, everyone wanted to move, to DO something.


    Every warrior that was free, not just the called guards, took up arms and moved to the berm, standing ready to reinforce the guards, if needed. Even now, discipline was kept, knowing that their best tactic was to work as a herd was something deeply ingrained in the centaurs.


    Far away from the camp, easily hundreds of meters, out of range, even for their excellent bows, a dense cloud of mist had rolled in, the simple image looking imposing, worrying. For some of them, the mist was synonymous with wolves, snarling and snapping at their flanks. After positions had been taken up, nobody spoke, everyone tense as a bowstring, ready to snap into action.


    When the wind carried the first noises over, barely audible growls and snarls, interspersed with the odd howl of a wolf calling its pack to the hunt, the tension mounted, eyes scanning from left to right, looking for the foes that had tormented them the days before the storm. Maybe, just maybe, they would be able to actually go out and kill a few of the beasts, instead of their people vanishing in the mist, to be never seen again.


    ¡°Over there!¡± one of the guards called out, pointing to a large shape that took form in the mist, too large for a wolf, too large to be a humanoid, a shape familiar to all of them, the shape of a centaur. Seconds passed as weapons were gripped tighter when the shape broke free from the mist, stumbling for a moment, before righting itself and galloping towards the camp, towards safety.


    ¡°Fifth Group, head out to escort him in!¡± one of the officers called out, giving the reserve-team their orders. They moved swiftly, knowing that the wolves might emerge from the mist any moment, or the mist might move and catch up to the fleeing centaur, possibly spoiling their chances to save the member of their herd. In the short time they needed to move out, the fleeing centaur had managed to cross three-quarters of the distance, running as if the hounds of tartarus themselves were after him so it only took short moments for the centaurs from the camp to cross the distance, spread out to provide cover for the newcomer.


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    But just before they managed to encircle him, to keep him safe, a beam of pure, malevolent Darkness, inky black and foreboding, shot from the mist, striking the centaur into the back and causing him to die in the most horrifying manner imaginable. He wasn¡¯t just robbed of his life, he was ripped apart, blood splattering all around him, coating the centaurs that had moved out in the remains of their fallen comrades.


    Not knowing just what kind of terrible being had send the beam out, the centaurs fled back to their camp, hoping that the strange preparations of their own spellcasters would be enough to keep them safe. Sadly, the horror wasn¡¯t over for them, not by a long shot.


    Near the spot where their comrade had been ripped apart, the air started to shimmer, as if heat from a fire was rising up, before starting to twist in a most unnatural manner. Those who looked closely felt nauseated, as if they were witnessing something that should not happen, something their minds were revolted from merely witnessing it. And then, with a soundless pop, the air tore apart and a creature from nightmare emerged.


    Sickly purple, seemingly just a gaping maw with vicious teeth and barbed tentacles, a creature that looked made to violently tear things apart and devour them, greedy hunger incarnate.


    Luckily, it was also relatively small, merely coming to a centaurs stomach, still, everyone seeing it was certain, that thing should not be. With coordination born from hundreds of hours spent training, without the need for commands, the guards and many of the warriors that had taken up position behind them raised their bows, nocking arrows and loosening them in a single volley, coordinated by the need to destroy the sickening creature that had started to screech with a keening, piercing voice.


    The volley was horribly imprecise, but even the officers that would have scolded them for the lack of precision normally were too busy being terrified at what they were seeing to care about the lack of precision. What mattered had been to destroy the creature before it managed to get to them, a task that had been perfectly executed, simply by the amount of arrows loosened. Sometimes, quantity was a quality all of its own.


    It took everyone a moment to realise that, while the thing was horrifying and should not be, it hadn¡¯t been all that powerful, causing everyone to calm down, at least a little. When the next strange ripple was spotted, the officers had managed to calm everyone, ordering a single element to shoot whatever was coming out of the ripple, hopefully with a precision that was worthy of centaur warriors.


    Their efforts worked, until they noticed a second form emerging from the mist, again, a centaur fleeing from the wolves hidden in the damp mist. Everyone tensed up again, ready to spring into action as a new group of centaurs moved out, towards the fleeing form. In their focus on the fleeing centaur, they missed the newly formed ripple, somewhere in the middle between the fleeing centaur and the camp and they only noticed the nightmare creature when it started to move towards the fleeing centaur. It needed a few steps to gather speed, its gait strange but surprisingly fast and the fleeing centaur started to veer off, trying to avoid the tentacled creature.


    As archers launched arrows at the nightmare monster, the centaur managed to get to the warriors that had moved out, only to, once again, be struck from a black beam from the mists, killing them in the same way the first centaur had been killed, in a shower of blood. The group that had gone out continued on for a moment, as if they were planning to charge into the mist, but shouted commands from the officers in the camp and their own leader managed to rally the warriors, calming the rage they felt about losing a herd-member right in the middle of them. Whatever produced the strange black beams, they wanted to tear it apart.


    Instead of charging into the mist, the officer made them tear into the tentacled creature, ripping it apart in a relentless charge, even if it managed to tear a chunk out of one warrior, none of the centaurs really cared. Their bloodlust was running high, they wanted to murder something. Maybe it was quite good that two more nightmare beings appeared, excellent targets for them to vent their rage on.


    But no matter how many of the creatures were killed, there seemed to come more and more, especially when two more centaurs managed to escape the mists only to die near the camp. The officers felt a foreboding feeling, knowing that something was seriously wrong in the world around them. And not knowing what to do about it.

 Chapter 233

    For the first time in my life, I actually had a slight inclining why some people enjoyed reality TV. Using magical scrying to watch the Centaurs of the camp I had inundated with Miasma, fighting against the randomly appearing Nethersprites, scurrying about, trying to figure out the best ways to kill such foes, it was remarkably entertaining. There even was a small part of me that wondered if there was a way to make popcorn, but without corn, that idea was doomed from the start.


    The best thing about the attacking Nethersprites was that they seemed to open holes and tears in the anti-scrying field of the camp, allowing me to take a much closer look, to the point that I had given nicknames to individual centaurs, based on their behaviour. There was the loud one, that seemed to bellow whenever he exerted himself, whether it was in training or in battle, another one seemed to like watching him, maybe some sort of lusty centaur lass, it was curious to watch. I had refrained from trying to scry the inside of his tent when the female entered late at night, there were some things I just did not want to know.


    We hadn¡¯t attacked them for four days now, not since we caused the area around their camp to become defiled, a decision the wolves and I had discussed quite heavily. To me, pushing them further would have been a mistake that most likely would have caused them to call in additional troops, fortifying their position and pushing on as soon as that had happened. Instead, they had been forced to deal with the mess I had created around them, one of their supply-groups had reached the camp, this one sizeable enough that attacking it would have caused casualties amongst the wolves, while risking that some of them got away.


    Just as I was discussing with the wolves how to continue our attacks, something unexpected happened. I felt a surge of power, far away to the north-east but the power was so strong that I felt myself start to shake, despite the distance between us. Even without delving into the Astral River, I felt it surge, swell and rage, making me understand that something major had just happened. In the area around me, I felt strange surges as well, not threatening but something I had never felt before. Taking a deep breath, tasting the air on my tongue and in my nose, I was reminded of the taste the magic had in the Windswept Plains, when I had tried to get a deeper feeling for the magic contained in the wind.


    I had no idea why the Astral River was behaving in the way it did or why the surges seemed to occur in the area around me, but I wanted to find out. I felt Lenore¡¯s curiosity in her Hallow and, without really thinking, we joined our minds, using the Avatar-State to get the strongest connection we could. Shadowy, raven-black spectral wings appeared on our shoulders wrapping themselves protectively around us, as spectral claws and a beak appeared around my arms and in my face and instantly, our sensitivity spiked.


    But even with the increased sensitivity, I merely felt that the magic of the plains was reaching towards us but when looking through the world with Lenore¡¯s eyes, I realised that we were merely feeling the edges of what was happening. Most of the power we were feeling and tasting, it centered around the wolves that had accompanied us, even around the timberwolves that had come from further west, it enveloped them and slowly seeped into them but I couldn¡¯t even begin to make sense of what I was seeing. What I was quite certain of was that the surge didn¡¯t hurt the wolves, it seemed to strengthen them.


    Just as I was about to carefully starting probing closer, a new surge caught my attention, this one not anchored to anything but occurring in front of me. I took a few steps back, just in case I was wrong, and called upon my magic, ready to defend myself, either by throwing up walls of ice or by conjuring up a shadow to devour magic. Both were spells I had considered as good defensive measures, one against non-physical attacks, the other against physical attacks.


    Most of the tension left me when I realised that the magic was coalescing into the familiar form of a wolf, just a very large one. When I realised that it was a wolf I knew, the Leader of the Main-Den, Sirius, caution was completely replaced with curiosity. How did he manage to project an image out here, how did he even manage to find us? Was he able to track the wolves with me? If so, I wanted to know how, just in case it was something that might be abused. Just when I was about to launch into a barrage of questions, Lenore stopped me.


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    ¡°Let him speak first, something major is going on. You can ask questions later.¡± she told me and I felt her agitation thanks to our shared connection, I even got agitated myself as my curiosity was reigned in a little.


    ¡°Greetings, Friends. I have to thank you, you managed doing what we might have failed to do.¡± the magical amalgamation that looked like Alpha Sirius said, his voice resonating in a strange manner. Part of me was drawn to study the method he used to communicate, it wasn¡¯t an illusion, not really, calling it a magical avatar might be more accurate.


    ¡°We did as you asked, keeping the Centaurs occupied while keeping the wolves alive. I¡¯ll assume that you are finished with whatever you wanted to do?¡± I asked, part of me wondering what rewards the quest would give us.


    ¡°Indeed. And, as I can feel the curiosity burning within you, I¡¯ll even explain what we did.¡± he started and I could hear the amusement in his voice. He had me pegged quite well, I wanted to know what they had done, especially as we had been able to feel the remnant disturbance despite the distance between us.


    ¡°It was something I had considered for a while, something that every powerful being can accomplish, if they so choose. It is an innate skill for some of them, others need tools to do so, for me, it was innate but required me to bind myself, body, mind and soul, which is why you are talking to this image. I will never be able to leave the Den of the North Wind, not unless it is fully destroyed, our essence gone. You see, I turned it into a dungeon and all the wolves you met are now bound with me. We will never die but if we can still call ourselves alive? That I don¡¯t know.¡± he explained, his voice pensive and slightly depressed.


    I was taken aback for a moment, trying to comprehend what he had told me. A dungeon, like the glacial moraine or the Burial Mound, sure, that I could understand. But I had no idea what it meant for those bound to it, I understood that they couldn¡¯t die, would only turn into the black sludge upon defeat, to be reborn anew once the dungeon was reset. What that meant for living being, I had no idea, to be trapped in an endless circle of pain and death, without the option to ever fully die? Wasn¡¯t that what some religions described hell as?


    But who was I to gainsay their Alpha, he had done what he thought best for his people. I only regretted the necessity that had driven him to this step and, despite questioning his wisdom, I buried those questions in my mind, to avoid marring our last meeting.


    ¡°You did what you needed to do.¡± I told him, carefully keeping my voice neutral. Around us, the wolves that had accompanied us started to fade, turning into the black sludge I had seen when dungeon monsters perished and part of me grieved for them. Would they still be the funny, snarky and sometimes playful beings after being bound to the dungeon? And if they were, would they remain as they were once they had been slaughtered dozens or hundreds of times, only to get their loot? What did happen to the cute puppies I had played with when we were at the den?


    ¡°We will make the centaurs pay for their greed.¡± Lenore told me in my mind, feeling what I was thinking.


    ¡°That we will. Now that our friends are safe, the gloves come off. If the centaurs want to push on, so be it, but we will get our pound of flesh.¡± I replied to her, directing all the unease and grief into anger at the centaurs for having forced our friends to do what they had done.


    ¡°For you, I have something special.¡± Sirius told us and a blue window opened in front of me.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Quest Completed!</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You completed the Quest: Buying Time - Pack of the North Wind</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You gained: 450.000 EXP</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    There were level-up notices, but I ignored them, focusing on Sirius.


    ¡°And take this as well, take it and go with the Blessing of the North Wind.¡± he continued and from his figure, four objects floated towards us, one for each of us. It looked like a fang, made from silver and dangling from a short chain, like an earring.


    ¡°Sadly, this is farewell. I hope you find what you are looking for in this world, Morgana.¡± he finished and the figure started to fade away, the magic it had been made of returning to the world.

 Chapter 234

    For a moment, after the figure of Sirius vanished, I was stunned. We had succeeded in our quest, had managed to hold back the centaurs long enough to allow the wolves to do what they had to do. But now, why did it feel like we had failed, that the wolves had lost despite our efforts? They were eternally bound to their dungeon, encaged by their own volition.


    Shaking my head, knowing that it had been what they wanted, I focused on the messages I had gained. They allowed me to see the benefits of the last few days in a numerical way, especially when I realised that I had gained two levels, bringing me to level 65, thanks to the massive amount of EXP gained from the quest.


    Sadly, there was also a notice that my previous respawn-point in the Wolf¡¯s Den was no longer viable and it had been placed at the point I had selected before, the inn in Kolyug.


    Additionally, the item I had gained was an accessory, worn in the ear, giving me a boost to Intuition and Agility, while also signaling that I was a revered friend of the Wolves of the Northern Wind. While I wasn¡¯t quite sure what that would mean to other beings, the simple fact that it gave me an additional point of Intuition and two points of Agility was more than enough reason to wear it. Holding the chain to my ear was enough to engage it and after a slight pinch, it was affixed to my ear.


    I watched as the others did just the same, putting on the trinkets. But I also noted that they looked a little shaken, unsure about the course of events.


    ¡°Now that the wolves are safe and out of the picture, we can take off the gloves. If worse comes to worse, we can simply continue our journey. Let the Centaurs feel what it means to fight ghosts!¡± I snarled, eager to take out my anger and the strange feeling of failure on someone else. And, given that the Centaurs were the cause of the wolves¡¯ problems, they were a convenient target.


    ¡°Adra, you once told me that your magic is grounded in nature. Remember the book we were lent in Yaksha, with the various plants in it? If I told you about one of them, could you, either with your magic or without it, find a sample of that plant?¡± I asked, a plan forming in my mind.


    ¡°I think so, it would depend on the plant. Some of them are easier to find than others, even when using magic.¡± she told me, after a second of contemplation. ¡°Why, what plan are you hatching now?¡±


    I could see that she was a little worried, especially after the last stunt I had pulled, she hadn¡¯t been happy to see me deliberately use my blood magic to defile a large stretch of land, most likely because it reminded her too much of the situation in Tegi.


    ¡°I don¡¯t plan to use Blood Magic, at least not directly. But I think with the commotion and the constant attacks of the Nethersprites, Rai and I should be able to sneak into their camp and take a good look at their supplies, adding some special seasoning. We just need to find the right one, so we can gather some of it. And maybe I can strengthen the seasoning with a bit of magic, to make sure it has the right kick to it.¡± I explained, a smile slowly stretching across my lips.


    Looking at the others, I noticed that Sigmir looked a little conflicted while Rai wholeheartedly approved. I could understand both of them, Sigmir disliked stealthy and sneaky tricks, partially because she couldn¡¯t defend me while I was sneaking around without her, partially because such tricks had once brought her low, almost killing her. She felt it was dishonourable to use such means but at the same time, she knew that they were sometimes the best way to go. On the other hand, vengeance and retribution were concepts she liked, even if she preferred to go about it more openly, instead of with a knife in the dark. Rai, on the other hand was now fully adapted to sneaking and striking from the most advantageous position, if that meant poisoning the supplies of your enemies, it was their fault for being unable to prevent you from getting into their camp.


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    Lastly, Adra was keen on stealth and ambushes but, amusingly, didn¡¯t like to deal in retribution for some reason. But she would stand with us, despite her misgivings. She would even help us, as we were a team.


    Before logging out to go through the video of the various plants in the area, looking for a nicely poisonous one, I decided to take care of allocating the attribute-points I had gained. After a moment of contemplation, I decided to push my intelligence to forty, using the fact that I had gained one point of intelligence from my class. Judging by previous allocations, getting to forty should increase the amount of runes I could project instantly, maybe even give me a higher number of runes to combine at the same time.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Special Ability gained</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You gained a Special Ability: Rune Nonagon</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>For being a Natural Mage and having 40 Intelligence, you gain the ability to link nine Runes into a single spell. This is an advanced form of rune-magic.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Special Ability upgraded!</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>Your Special Ability, Rune Projection, was upgraded.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>For having 40 Intelligence or higher you gained an ability, based on your play-style. The ability Rune Projection allows you to instantly project a runes into a Formation, without drawing it. The Astral Power Cost to project a rune is double it''s normal cost. The amount of runes depends on your Intelligence. Instantly projectable runes: 5</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Special Ability gained</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You gained a Special Ability: External Astral Power Control</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>Every Natural Mage has the ability to control Astral Power, even after it left their body. For having 40 Intelligence or higher, you gained an ability, based on your playstyle. The ability External Astral Power Control greatly increases the influence you can exert over your Astral Power, even after it left your body.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    I had to smile, looking at the new abilities. Two were expected, upgrades of earlier abilities, but the last one could be incredibly powerful or incredibly weak, which I would have to try out. It was easy to guess why I had gained it, one of my most used abilities in recent times had been the ability to create large-scale effects by releasing Astral Power into a ritual, using it to keep some control over it. Now, it seemed that this ability would allow me to do that even better, with less losses and greater control.


    But before I lost myself in testing out my new ability, I logged off, opening the video-file I had made of the herbalism book I had borrowed in Yaksha. I had read it before but I wanted to make sure that the plants I remembered were the most useful for my plans.


    After watching it, often stopping to allow me to carefully study the images and text, I had a few plants that sounded promising. Wolf¡¯s Berries, Monkshood, Nightshade, Bane Leaf, Hemlock and Dream Seed, all those plants had the potential to give the centaurs a bad ingestion, some of them merely problematic, others seriously deadly to the point that I planned to gather some extra for my ¡®just-in-case¡¯ pouch. Delivering poison was quite easy if you could easily craft needles around a substance and even control those needles afterwards, letting them fly as you pleased and shatter with a mental command. No need for carefully forged daggers, no need to mess around with glass vials, just a few prepared needles that I could use as needed. Especially the oil extracted from Dream Seed made me curious, it seemed as if it was a powerful hallucinogenic, so combining it with my Mind Magic might create interesting effects.


    Having a nice list of poisons, I looked through the forums if there was anything that caught my eyes but other than a rather funny reaction to my puppy-video, this one of another player who had managed to somehow befriend a pride of lions and was playing with their cubs, nothing really stood out to me. But if I managed to create a trend of players befriending animals on Mundus in order to create cute footage, I was quite happy with the result.


    Once everything was taken care of, I logged back in and told Adra what I was looking for, how the plants exactly looked and what conditions they preferred. To cover as much ground as possible, Adra and I would use our magic to search, Lenore and Ylva would search on their own, while Sigmir and Rai would head out together, that way, everyone was relatively safe while having someone with good woodcraft on their team.


    After a quick check what time it was, we decided that Adra and I would start immediately while Rai and Sigmir would prepare dinner. With a smile on my face, I started to lay down a scrying formation with Lenore, looking forward to giving the centaurs a dose of medicine.

 Chapter 235

    For two days, we prepared our retribution against the centaurs by scouring the forest for the interesting plants I had looked up in the manual. The success varied a little, curiously, Rai was the one who managed to find the largest amount of herbs, literally stumbling into a clearing filled with wolf¡¯s berry bushes and nightshades and in the middle of the clearing, there was even a special plant that tried to attack him using some strange plant-magic and poisonous spores. Sigmir managed to get him out of there, but not before he was poisoned by the plant.


    Once they got away, they went back to the spot where Adra and I were using magic to look for plants, to get healed and to get our help in subduing the strange monster. Healing Rai from the poison was a little difficult, at least at first, but once I noticed that I simply needed to focus on using Magic as a filter, it was possible to isolate the poison that was still in their system and draw it out, even to the point that I might be able to re-use it.


    I was rather surprised when I gained a new skill, Alchemy, and an linked Special Ability, Ingredient Extraction. I had heard of the discipline but I hadn¡¯t expected to be able to learn it, at least not without instruction or maybe some actual equipment. Hiding my grin when the healing-process was treated as extracting ingredients, maybe because I was almost as concerned with the purification and possible reusability of the poison as I was with healing Rai. At the end of the day, he blundered and a little pain would drive the lesson not to blunder around home in a poignant manner. I wouldn¡¯t let him die, not without my permission, but suffering, that was a good teaching tool.


    Once we got to the clearing, it turned out that the strange monster was an alraune, still weakened from the recent winter. After a moment of discussion with Adra, I used Ice-Magic to produce cold air, causing the alraune to shrink back into itself, as if it wanted to go back to dormancy. After Sigmir was strengthened by Adra, she quickly moved in and, with instruction from Adra, plucked the alraune from the ground, silencing it before it could use its legendary shriek. While none of us knew if the legends about its lethality were true, we were not eager to find out. If not for the veritable treasure-trove of poisonous plants in the area, we most likely wouldn¡¯t have risked finding out.


    After the alraune was harvested, Adra and I went around the clearing, harvesting as much as we could, focusing on the plant-parts that would be the most poisonous. I created small boxes from Hard Ice, sealing them air-tight after filling them, hoping to keep the plants as fresh as possible, knowing that we had more than enough to give the Centaurs a serious headache. Or maybe calling it stomach-ache would be more accurate, at least some of the poison would be acting on their gastrointestinal tract.


    But that was only our biggest source of poisonous plants, stumbled upon by sheer chance, the rest of our harvest was gathered by simple and hard effort, roaming the forest, looking for the conditions the plants would grow in and the plants themselves. But even with all that effort and two days of strenuous searching, the single misstep from Rai was what got us more than half our harvest. Somehow, that annoyed both Adra and me, even if neither of us would have admitted it.


    Gathering the plants was only the first step to create what I wanted, the next, much harder, step was to isolate the poison inside, extract it and maybe even refine it. That last part would most likely be impossible, but Lenore and I had spared some time to consider ways to do so, while looking for plants.


    Normally, I would have needed some sort of distillation process to extract the poison, my blood magic was unable to help me with plants, but after thinking about it for a while, I had a different approach. To distill something, one would use the difference in volatility, the temperature when a specific substance turns gaseous, to separate different substances. While such a process would be possible, it would need the appropriate equipment, something we didn¡¯t have in the wilderness and it would need quite a bit of experimentation to find out when which substance vaporized, which would waste a great deal of resources.


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    Instead, what I wanted to was the opposite. I could create a sealed container, fill one side with liquid, maybe even using Liquid Moonlight, before using it to freeze the herb completely. Unless we were dealing with a poison that somehow was neutralised by the cold, something I didn¡¯t think likely, not in a cold region, I would get a chunk of ice, filled with impurities. Controlling something like that, even on a very small scale was, while difficult, slow and a large expenditure of Astral Power, completely in the realm of my abilities. In addition, I had some hope to get a feel of the different substances using my magic, otherwise, I would still be unsure what the different impurities were and I might waste something. Parts of the plant, mostly fibre, was easy but the rest, that was a lot harder. Luckily, Lenore agreed with me, even telling me that she thought that she¡¯d be able to help, thanks to a link between her Death-Magic and Poison-Magic. Apparently, there was such a think, nestled between my own Blood-Magic, her Death-Magic and a few other types of Nature-Magic. Sadly, neither of us had the affinity or the extraction would be a lot easier.


    Instead, I made a large cylinder out of Hard Ice, filled halfway with wolf¡¯s berries, added water and multiple thin Ice Blades, before sealing it air-tight and used my magic to turn it into a blender, creating a deadly smoothie. Once it was nicely blended, I froze the mixture, having to control myself so I wouldn¡¯t laugh. It looked too much like something one might find in a speciality shop, some sort of super-healthy ice-cream or frozen smoothie. Just that this particular treat would kill you.


    Once it was frozen, Lenore and I sat down together, focusing our attention and a considerable amount of Astral Power into the container, scrutinising every single ice-crystal, trying to get an understanding of what we had there. It was a little awkward, letting my Astral Power seep into the different impurities contained in the ice, but together, Lenore and I managed to get a feeling for the different parts, some were harmless and would be discarded, some gave us an itchy feeling and one particular impurity made Lenore tingle in excitement and gave me an uneasy feeling, as if there was a small part of me that knew it would be harmful to me.


    Using the Astral Power already inside, we added compartments to the cylinder and separated the ingredients, keeping those we thought had value and discarding the rest. That left us with an almost embarrassing small amount of poison, compared to the original amount of berries, but once it was concentrated, the previous feeling of unease was one of serious dread. With a little effort, I managed to identify it and was told that it was a concentrated, natural poison.


    Again, we discussed what we had with Adra and she used some sort of detection spell, one that normally was used to check for poison in food and the result made her get rather pale.


    ¡°It¡¯s poisonous, but you knew that already. I can¡¯t really say how many that batch can kill. But, it¡¯s a lot. The easiest way would be to poison their water barrels, the stuff will remain lethal, even if you greatly dilute it.¡± Adra explained, looking a little torn. She knew that what we were planning was ruthless murder, simply to make the centaurs pay but at the same time, she knew that it would allow us to gain a massive amount of experience and, even if she sometimes wanted to deny it, she was just as interested in gaining power as the rest of us were.


    As such, she only needed a few minutes of internal debate before she decided to help, to make sure the centaurs death would be quick and mostly painless, joining Lenore and me in extracting more poison from the rest of our harvest, using her magic to get a feeling for the best mixture and delivery mechanism. We stayed away from the alraune, not trusting our skills just yet, planning to use it at a later point.


    We worked through the night and continued on quite some time on the next day, before deciding that we had a good recipe, divided in dosages that would be enough to poison a water-barrel each, something the centaurs were using, as my scrying had shown me.


    The work we did together gave me a few more points in the new alchemy-skill and once we were finished, my identify-skill even called our end-product an intermediate-level poison. Sadly, I had no real idea how to qualify that, but it was a good start.


    Satisfied, I went to snuggle up in Sigmir¡¯s lap, getting some of the sleep I had missed in the night. I would need to be awake during the night, Rai and I would sneak into the centaur camp, hopefully undetected, and poison as much of their supplies as we could.

 Chapter 236

    Rai and I were rather lucky regarding the timing of our night-attack. The weather, something mostly out of my control, was playing along beautifully, the night a little windy, the sky completely covered in clouds and even beyond those clouds, the moon was merely a waxing sliver of its normal glory, which strengthened my Darkness-Magic, even if it wasn¡¯t as pronounced as during a new-moon. Still, it would be enough.


    Shrouded by shadow, we closed in onto the camp, quietly observing, watching the guards with our own eyes, not just using my scrying magic. They were on edge, that was easy to see, but that edge had dulled quite a bit, due to constant use. My little bit of Blood Magic had caused quite a few Nethersprites to come into reality, mostly on the other side of the camp, and their repeated attacks had worn on the centaurs. In addition to that, there was the uncertainty what was going on, they must have noticed the massive, magical disturbance a few days ago, even if they likely had no idea what it had been.


    After we had timed the guards¡¯ patrols and while we were considering the best time to sneak in, a shriek ripped through the night, coming from the other side of the camp. Another of the nethersprites had made its way into reality, attracted by the lingering miasma and driven by its hunger. Seeing a good opportunity when it presented itself, Rai and I tightened our magical concealment and ghosted forward, our passing merely a whispering breeze, barely disturbing the night.


    Some of the guards were moving towards the disturbance but even those that stayed on their post were clearly distracted and a wide opening allowed Rai and me to slip into their camp, with no-one the wiser. Staying in the shadows between tents, we silently made our way towards their storage-area. I knew that they unpacked the magical bags they used to transport their supplies, most likely to send them back with their supply-teams, so their supplies were in a lightly guarded area, near the middle of their camp. But as the guard was in the middle of their camp, he seemed rather unconcerned with a sneak-attack, making me itch to directly demonstrate just how wrong his feeling of security was. I held myself back, instead using the surrounding Darkness to use the sleep-spell I had thought up ages ago, when attacking Tegi, slowly but surely putting him to sleep. He even remained standing, stable on his four legs, but utterly passed out.


    After sharing an amused look with Rai, we ghosted to their supplies, quickly picking out the barrels of water and taking a close look at them. They seemed to be well made, but their lids were a little loose, tight enough to keep the water in, as long as they weren¡¯t put upside down, but not air-tight. Or, in this case, not tight enough to keep me from pushing a thin capsule made from Hard Ice into the barrel, before using my magic to crack it inside while swirling it around, making sure that the escaping poison was spread throughout the water.


    We repeated the work with the other barrels, making sure that their water was fully poisoned before taking a look at their food-storage. Sadly, we lacked a good poison to sprinkle on the food, we had used what we had on the water.


    Once we had completed our task, we ghosted right back out of the camp, without anyone the wiser, just as we had planned. If they had known that someone had broken into their camp, they might have taken precautions, but the way we had worked, the worst they would know is that one of their guards had fallen asleep during his shift. Bad behaviour and he might get in trouble for it, but not an incident that required serious investigation.


    Having accomplished our goal, we moved back towards the edge of the camp, staying in the shadows as before, but just before we got there, we ran into a bit of a snag. A patrol, equipped with lit torches, was moving towards the area we were in, most likely coming from the other side of the camp, where they had just dispatched the Nethersprite that had made the ruckus we used to get in. Looking around, there was no good spot to hide and I was about to abandon stealth, when Rai pulled me deeper into the shadows that I had deemed too flimsy a cover, especially given that they had light.


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    I glared at him, thinking that he had misjudged the shadows, when I felt a subtle pulse of magic emanate from him and the world around us turned hazy and insubstantial, as if looking through thick smoke. Not quite knowing what was going on, I readied myself to fight, but when the torch-light flickered over the spot we were hiding in, I felt the most eerie feeling, as the shadows were pushed back and we went with them. Before, I had looked out of the Shadow he had pulled me in, once that shadow was gone, we were just in a dark and hazy place. The most disturbing thing about that place was that I felt an itch between my shoulders, as if there was something watching us. That sensation made me freeze, unwilling to move, unwilling to speak, simply hoping that Rai had a plan to get us back out. It felt as if hours had passed but I was quite certain that it had only been about a minute, when the torch was carried on, the light receding and the shadows returned and with them, we were returned as well.


    I would have to talk to Rai about reckless, magical experimentation, even if it would be the pot calling the kettle black.


    I managed to quickly pull myself together, my senses scanning the area if we had been given away by anything. But the night remained mostly quiet, the soft sounds of the camp-activity around us the only thing disturbing it. We nodded to each other and continued on our way, quickly ghosting over the wide staging-area separating us from the trench and the open field beyond. Without magic, sneaking into the camp would have been next to impossible.


    Once we were back amongst the trees, we reunited with Adra and Sigmir, who had waited for us, just in case we needed rescuing. I was quite humbled that both of them were willing to attack a small army, in case Rai and I got into trouble and glad that it hadn¡¯t been necessary. As we walked, Rai broke the silence to talk. I had kept my silence about his new magic, wanting to talk about it privately.


    ¡°Master, why did we wait until now to make a night-attack? Couldn¡¯t we have poisoned them earlier, just like we did now?¡± he asked, sounding curious.


    ¡°We could have, sure.¡± I began my answer, noticing that Adra was listening in closely, ¡°But every action provokes a reaction. Before, we were trying to keep them in place and annoy them into going after us, not continue their push into the windswept plains. For that, we attacked patrols and their supply-teams but never their camp. The idea was that such attacks would provoke the reaction we wanted, which mostly worked. The storm was a lucky break, allowing us to make them miserable without giving the game away, it seemed natural.¡± I explained, to which he nodded in understanding.


    ¡°But this attack on their camp, it won¡¯t kill them all, no chance. It might, if we were in a location with nearly no available water, some sort of hot desert maybe. But here, there are abundant water-sources, sure, it will take time to gather water but after the rainfall of the last few days, it won¡¯t be a problem.¡± I continued.


    ¡°However, if one were to look at the attack, I think it would look like the precursor to a larger attack, aimed to dislodge the centaurs from their camp, to push them back into the west. Now, Rai, how would an organised group react to that information?¡± I asked, turning it into a lesson of sort. He thought about it for a moment, before I could almost see the moment of realisation and he answered.


    ¡°I can see two options, either they pull back to consolidate, ready to react to a larger attack or they reinforce their camp, depending on their reserves.¡± he started, to which I nodded in affirmation that I thought the same.


    ¡°And if they reinforce, they would also step up their scouting, pushing into the windswept plains quickly.¡± he continued, getting the point I had wanted to make.


    ¡°Exactly. I didn¡¯t know what the wolves were planning, didn¡¯t know if by provoking such a response, I would doom our friends. But now that they bound themselves into a dungeon, I don¡¯t think an organised response would matter. So, we can kill as many centaurs as we can, before moving further west ourselves.¡± I finished the point, pleased that he had understood my lesson.

 Chapter 237

    We got back to our current campsite after a bit of walking, but none of us felt tired enough to sleep, despite the sojourn into the centaur-camp. After a moment, to make sure that Sigmir knew everything was alright, I took Rai aside under the guise of a lecture. I was curious what he had to say about the shadow-magic skill he had used to hide us earlier. I was relatively sure that it was a different path to such magical abilities as the Shadow Teleport I had used when attacking Sigmir¡¯s tribe that now eluded me. Unless my guess about the mechanics of that skill were wrong, it used a connection between different, maybe all, shadows to transport the user, which would hint at some sort of shadow-realm. It was enough of a hypothesis to make me wonder and ask Rai how he had tapped into it.


    We walked a few steps into the dark forest, both of us silent, as I contemplated how to ask. Ultimately, I decided to simply ask straight out, not trying to posture as his Master or anything along those lines.


    ¡°Earlier, when you hid us, I didn¡¯t teach you that. While I think I know what you did, I would like you to explain it to me.¡± I asked, my voice deliberately calm while I felt Lenore¡¯s eagerness, mirroring my own.


    ¡°Yes, Master.¡± he instantly replied, before taking a second, maybe to organise his thoughts. ¡°When you taught me the Cloak of Shadows, I trained with it, it¡¯s a great spell and I love to use it. But it has its limits, so I started to try out if I could push those limits, without breaking the concealment. For example, finding a way to attack while cloaked, without losing the weight and sharpness of the attack, that would be great. Or a way to use it in the light.¡± he explained and I felt myself nodding along. The Cloak of Shadows was useful, but I had focused my magical experimentation and deliberation on other aspects. But, while I had tried to train Rai in a few different applications, other than the weakness-curse, he had little talent for the magic I commanded.


    ¡°While I was unable to make progress in that direction, I did manage to increase the strength of the concealment, quite literally merging with the shadow I¡¯m hiding in. I wanted to show it to you, once I got something more impressive than that, so that you would be proud, Master.¡± he finished, his tone making me blush a little. He was desperately looking for approval from an authority-figure, which was I, as his master.


    ¡°You did well.¡± I told him, letting the pride I felt for my disciple shine through. He had taken something I had taught him and pushed it to new heights, pushing the boundaries to improve himself.


    ¡°At the same time, I want you to tell me when you are experimenting with something new, magical experimentation is dangerous, of that I am the best example. Remember how often I pushed the boundaries and ended up injured or almost killed for my trouble?¡± I asked, letting the question stand for a moment, so that he would be able to think of the many incidents during which I had pushed things too far.


    ¡°There are two major differences between us, or three, depending on the way you count. The first is that I am able to heal myself, something you are unable to. Unless I injure myself in a non-physical way, I can repair the damage.¡± again, I paused for a moment before continuing.


    ¡°The second major difference is Lenore. Whenever I experiment, she¡¯s with me, looking through my eyes and watching my thoughts, making sure that I don¡¯t forget something important and helping me to keep the magic I¡¯m experimenting with under control. Sadly, you don¡¯t have that advantage.¡± Right on clue, Lenore left her Hallow, landing on my shoulder and letting out a soft caw.


    ¡°And finally, I¡¯m a Traveller. Unless I do something incredibly self-destructive, I won¡¯t die permanently in this realm, I just can¡¯t. Dying, to me, is an inconvenience, albeit a major one. Unless you have some major trick up your sleeves, dying is the end for you.¡± I finished, stopping my steps to look him over.


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    ¡°So please, don¡¯t experiment on your own. I¡¯m your master, your teacher. It would sadden me, if you died under my tutelage. And, in addition to that, you are my friend, so let me look out for you.¡± I asked and noticed that his eyes looked a little moist when I finished.


    ¡°Yes, Master, I will. And thank you, Morgana.¡± he said, bowing in respect.


    We continued walking, now silence reigning, before I decided to break it and the somber mood along with it.


    ¡°Now, show me what you did earlier, but this time I¡¯ll be looking on from the outside.¡± I ordered, eagerness to learn something new colouring my voice. I noticed that his body-language reminded me of the wolves when their tails had been wagging a mile a minute, only that he had no visible tail to wag. I hid my amusement about that particular observation, not sure how he would take it.


    ¡°Yes, Master.¡± with that, he stepped back and the shadows coalesced around him, turning his shape irregular and almost impossible to see in the darkness of the nightly forest, even with my low-light vision. That was the normal Cloak of Shadows, as I had taught it to him, maybe a little more polished, due to his repeated use. But then, that vague shape that I only saw because I knew it was there seemed to fade away and I was unable to make him out at all.


    ¡°Impressive.¡± Lenore stated, causing me to look through her eyes. Even with her magic vision, I only saw that there was some darkness-magic in the shadows, nothing more. I was relatively sure that such a perception could come from most applications of darkness-magic, be it scrying or creating the shadows, making the concealment incredibly powerful.


    Not to be outdone, I took a deep breath, thinking that maybe I would be able to sniff out more, with my differently working magic perception. But no matter how I tasted the air, trying to get more than vague hints, I was unable to get anything concrete.


    After a minute or so, the irregular shape of Rai returned and a moment later, his Cloak of Shadows vanished, allowing me to see him again. He looked quite proud of himself, having watched me for a minute trying to break his concealment, knowing where he was hiding, and failing at doing it.


    ¡°Truly impressive. If someone doesn¡¯t know where you are, I doubt that they could get at you. But don¡¯t think that you are invulnerable in there, I¡¯m pretty sure that if someone knows where you are, they will be able to hurt you.¡± I cautioned him. His concealment was good, great even, but it was no invulnerability.


    ¡°What do you mean, Master? I don¡¯t think I have a physical form when hiding in the shadows.¡± he asked, curious.


    ¡°Let me show you. Go back into the shadows.¡± I ordered, waiting the short time he needed to hide again.


    This time, I first decided to go with the simple way, taking out my staff and, joined with Lenore, create a swirling cloud of freezing wind around us, mixing Liquid Moonlight into the magic. As I did, I started feeling out with my Mind Magic, quickly finding the only strong mind other than Lenore and me, the hiding Rai. His focus was somewhere else so slipping into his defense wasn¡¯t too hard and I quickly felt that, while the effect of my ice-magic was dampened, it still reached him, even in the shadows.


    ¡°This is another way to reach you.¡± I told him, speaking directly into his mind, feeling the surprise as I did.


    ¡°And this is another one.¡± I continued before retreating from his mind and dropping my Ice-Magic, instead creating a spell of Darkness-Magic on my own, a slightly advanced version of my anti-magic spell, combining the runes for Devouring, Magic and Shadow. Once it was done, I unleashed it into the shadow he was hiding it, not directly at him, aiming at the point farthest from him, where Lenore could see magic.


    It only took a split-second for Rai to reappear, shivering from the cold and looking seriously spooked.


    ¡°I see what you mean, I could feel that last spell try to devour the shadow, including me.¡± he said, looking over his shoulder, as if there was a many-toothed monster about to jump at him from behind. I doubted that it would happen, but made sure that the spell was fully dismissed and every trace of my magic gone from the shadow, before speaking again.


    ¡°Good, now, take me with you once again, I want to make sure I understood what you did.¡± I asked him. He nodded, even if he looked a little fearful at the shadow he had just vacated but it was something he needed to get over, instantly.


    We were the monsters in the Darkness, we didn¡¯t fear them.

 Chapter 238

    I made Rai demonstrate his Shadow-Meld skill a few more times, carefully watching just how the magic worked, before trying it myself. It felt a little strange, but after trying around for a bit, I managed to get into the shadows, as he did. It added a bit of confusion, as I was unable to make out where he was, even when melding into the same shadow. When we compared notes afterwards, it turned out that while we both had felt a strange feeling of presence, different, more acute, compared to the one I felt anyway when melding into the shadows, it seemed that the shadows were able to hide us from the other.


    The obvious next step for me was to move while melded into the shadows, I considered it the next step to understand how I had teleported through the shadows once, but the strangeness of the melding into shadows was enough to cause me to fail.  Learning how to meld into the shadows and the continued experimentation gave me a nice boost to my Darkness Magic, bringing it to fifty-three. I would have to experiment with it a little more, but when I consider how, Lenore suggested that both Rai and I looked as if we were about to fall asleep standing up. When she mentioned it, I noticed the exhaustion I had previously ignored and by acknowledging its existence, it gained power over me.


    We staggered back to our camp, where Sigmir and Adra were still waiting up for us to finish the lesson. I made a beeline to Sigmir, stripping some of my armour of as I moved, before placing myself on her lap, draping one of her arms around me and putting my head onto her chest, closing my eyes. Then, I knew nothing more, falling asleep as soon as my eyes closed.


    It was late morning when I awoke the next day, still snuggled up to Sigmir but she had moved us from the log she had been sitting on, into our shared bedding, making sure both of us were comfortable. That was the first thing I noticed when waking up. The second was that I had gained a nice chunk of EXP, rewarded directly by the system, for poisoning the Centaurs. It made me wonder a little just what was rewarded there but I felt that questioning it wouldn¡¯t help, so I just accepted it. The message also noted that the one responsible had drawn the hate of the centaurs but there was no change to my personal reputation, so I could only guess that it was something that was suspended until the centaurs connected the poisoning and general trouble I had caused them to an individual, namely me.


    It took me a second the realise that games were supp¨¹osed to be balanced so, most likely, somewhere, there was a centaur who had given out a quest to ¡°find the vile poisoner¡± or something along those lines, with me as the target.


    If that was the correct answer to the question why I had gained enough EXP to boost me to level 66, then the next step was quite obvious: Make sure that the centaurs had many more reasons to give out quests to hunt me.


    ¡°Lenore, do you want to try out how much stronger our ritual magic is with the new ability?¡± I asked mentally, before even leaving Sigmir¡¯s comfortable, warm embrace.


    ¡°It would be¡­ intriguing. The centaurs are weakened right now and in dire need of water. It would be a shame if a sudden weather-phenomena, say a freezing cold winter-storm, would occur, forcing them to choose between going out and freezing to death or drinking the poisoned water. Yes, it would truly be a disaster.¡± Lenore agreed, snickering as she spoke. Not for the first time, I was reminded that there was a reason why a group of ravens was called and unkindness. But it could be worse, she could be a crow.


    ¡°First, breakfast, then, magical mass murder.¡± I suggested, before looking up and noticing that Sigmir was watching me with an amused expression.


    ¡°Did you sleep well, love?¡± she asked, before easily shifting me upwards her body, to give me a morning-kiss. Maybe both, breakfast and magical mass murder could wait.


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    It was about an hour later, that Sigmir and I decided to leave our comfortable furs, joining Adra and Rai at the merrily burning fire. The two of them had prepared breakfast, or maybe calling it lunch would be more appropriate and while we ate, I explained the plan Lenore and I had hatched. It was simple, go to the edge of the forest near the camp and find out how big a storm I could summon, with merely my own power. I doubted that it would be even close to a natural storm but at the same time, I had confidence to bring a great deal of pain to the poisoned and weakened centaurs. Unless they had something major up their sleeves, some of them would die, I couldn¡¯t be sure how many, but I would be rather disappointed if Lenore and I failed to murder half their number.


    It was early afternoon when Lenore and I had decided on a clearing and started to prepare our magic circle. We had discussed if waiting for the night and using the bonus from my class would be a good idea but decided against it. The sooner we brought the pain to them, the better.


    Just like the last time, we used my newly made staff to channel our magic only this time, the plan was to go from zero to hundred as fast as we could, a sprint instead of the marathon-casting me had used last time. The moment we began casting, we joined our minds in the Avatar-state, pumping a great deal of power into the staff, our joined mind helping to merge the different flows of Astral Power into a cohesive force, ready to batter the world.


    And battering the world, we did.


    Together, Lenore and I set our will against the world and under the weight of our magic, the world obeyed, moving as we desired. The wind around us sprung up as we started to move, fluttering around us and for the first time, it wasn¡¯t us that danced with the wind. For once, we were leading and the wind was following.


    Faster, we danced and faster the wind moved, stirred up into a storm, carrying thin needles of ice, sharp enough to draw blood and cold enough to freeze the wound afterwards. I felt Lenore¡¯s elation in our unity, she was revelling in our combined power over the wind, the power to have it blow as we pleased.


    I felt soft laughter bubble up in me, as we directed the storm towards the centaur-camp, the wind driving the hail and the cold freezing the wind, it was a marvelous piece of magic. But I also felt that Lenore and I had limits, what we had done was draining us at an insane rate, just the short minute we had taken to stir the local winds into a tempest of sleet, hail and cold had taken almost half of our Astral Power. There was no way to sustain such a working for long. But we didn¡¯t have to, it would only take minutes to shred the centaur-camp, scatter their supplies and savage their people.


    We felt the difference made by our new ability, even after unleashing the storm, I could feel it, follow it, even direct it, without needing to directly control it. It was a marvelous feeling, as if we were one with the storm, while keeping our own ego tethered to the body we shared and the magical circle around us.


    ¡°What¡¯s that?¡± I felt Lenore questioned, when she noticed something she didn¡¯t understand so I joined my focus to hers, looking at the same thing she did.


    From the central tent, a large centaur had moved into the storm, holding a strangely glowing crystal. I had no idea what exactly it was but there was a small part of me that clenched when seeing it, a strange, foreboding feeling in my stomach. My unease must have been transmitted to Lenore, because she acted on it, pulling back our control, letting the storm rage as it did and it was good that she did.


    Despite taking that metaphorical step back, I felt as if someone had hit me with a hammer, causing me to stagger and lose track of the ritual, causing the backlash to scatter the circle around us, break the unity between Lenore and me and give me a savage headache.


    ¡°What happened?!¡± Sigmir asked, crossing the circle and picking me up from the cold ground. I had no idea how I had gone down, but I knew that something had gone wrong.


    To make matters worse, Adra¡¯s voice cut through the fog that was clouding my mind.


    ¡°We need to go, the centaurs have just left their camp en-masse.¡± she called out, making my blood run cold while Sigmir simply picked me up, carrying me like a small child as they started to run.

 Chapter 239

    If I ever wanted to know what it felt like to be inside the body of a bell when it was rung, I felt like I had an adequate approximation. Even if Lenore had managed to pull our mind back a little, whatever item the Centaurs had used had resonated through the magic I had used to attack them, shaking me up.


    ¡°Are you alright?¡± Sigmir asked, as she jogged away from the sallying Centaurs.


    ¡°I think so. They used¡­ something to break my magic.¡± I answered, trying to get my bearings. ¡°Where¡¯s Lenore?¡± I asked, realising that when the Avatar-state had been broken, she had been thrown from my body.


    ¡°I¡¯ve got her, Master.¡± Rai assured me and when I focused, I could feel her mind but she seemed to have taken most of the backlash.


    ¡°Think you could cover our tracks? The forest will slow the Centaurs down, but I¡¯m not sure if it¡¯ll be enough. They seem to be righteously ticked off.¡± Adra asked, catching up to us.


    Reaching out with my magic was not a fun experience, it wasn¡¯t truly painful but it felt like I was trying to grasp grains of sand while wearing thick oven-mitts, trying to take a precise amount of sand, relying on my sense of touch. It was slow-going and frustrating but luckily, it was a task that I had done dozens of time.


    For a time, I solely focused on that task, trying to make sure that the silly ponies wouldn¡¯t easily manage to get to us or identify us. To that effect, I changed our tracks, from time to time creating false trails. At one point during my labor, I felt Lenore return to her Hallow and she wordlessly started to help me. It wasn¡¯t until about an hour later that the others started to slow down while Lenore and I started to mentally discuss what had happened.


    ¡°What do you think that crystal was, now that you had a while to think about it?¡± Lenore asked, causing me to frown. I wasn¡¯t sure how it had been done, but the closest I could compare it to was a quake, a vibration, transmitted through the Astral Power we had used to conjure up our storm.


    ¡°Some sort of resonance?¡± I replied, more questioningly than actually convinced. ¡°At a guess, I¡¯d think that it was some sort of prepared anti-magic item, maybe to crack wards or similar strong, anchored spells.¡± I continued, trying to picture how such an item might work. Sadly, I was drawing a blank, my own abilities to counter magic working completely different from what we had been subjected to.


    ¡°But wouldn¡¯t that affect every spell in the area, at least if there¡¯s enough power behind it? What was left of their wards would have been shattered as well, right?¡± Lenore continued my train of thought.


    ¡°They most likely thought that it wouldn¡¯t matter. Their wards weren¡¯t designed to deal with cold and wind, not a surprise if you ask me. The wards would have had to stop a lot of natural weather during the winter, I don¡¯t even want to think about what would be necessary for something like that.¡± I picked up where she stopped, bringing up a slight tangent. We had seen such wards, even if they had been highly specialised and, back then, we had lacked the understanding what we were looking at, but the dryads of Tegi had used something like that, a magical field to keep their grove in a permanent state of warm, moist spring.


    ¡°And if their wavering wards would be unable to stand up to our attack anyway, what¡¯s the point in keeping them active? Sure, they would have wards to keep others from scrying on the graveyard we would have turned their camp into, but what would be the point?¡± Lenore finished the idea.


    ¡°Mhm, indeed. Still, that doesn¡¯t give us a better idea what they did to us.¡± I grumbled, not happy with being taken out so thoroughly, even if they had to destroy their own defenses in the process.


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    ¡°I doubt that they would have done that, if not as a measure of last resort. And it drives something else home, we should focus on what we do best, slow, insidious attacks, letting our power seep into the target, before we devastate them with a single blow. That¡¯s what worked best for large-scale attacks, maybe you should look into ways to use it on a personal level.¡± Lenore suggested, making me smirk. But she was right, even before we met, when I had destroyed the Snowbolds, slow, steady and sneaky had been the method of success, not trying to chuck the biggest bang I could produce their way.


    ¡°Maybe you are right, but I doubt I¡¯ll give up on ways to kill enemies fast. In combat, I doubt I¡¯ll regularly have the time to slowly invade an enemy before killing them, but if we have the time, I agree, a slow and sneaky approach will be better. I think we should try to look into curses, they might be well worth our time.¡± I agreed, thinking about the various runes I had gained an insight into. Some of them might allow me to get both, a slow, insidious invasion that traded damage for disorientation but would ultimately allow me to shut down their senses. At that point, the fight would be over. It would take a combination of Darkness- and Mind-Magic, but other than that, I should be able to come up with something worthwhile.


    ¡°I think we¡¯ve lost them.¡± Sigmir¡¯s voice pulled me from my thoughts and I opened my eyes, looking up at Sigmir¡¯s slightly sweaty face.


    ¡°That¡¯s good to hear. Thank you, love, I doubt I could have run away on my own.¡± I admitted, pulling one of her hands to my lips and pressing a soft kiss to her knuckles.


    ¡°So, what happened back there? I just felt a¡­ ripple?¡± Adra asked, as Sigmir was gently setting me down, so I could walk on my own.


    ¡°They had some sort of artifact, I think they prepared it to take down large wards or something similar. It also worked against my magic and managed to ring my bell.¡± I admitted, grinning wryly.


    ¡°That explains this.¡± Adra admitted, showing me my staff. I had to suppress a groan of dismay, my beautiful, almost new staff looked like it was about to shatter into a million pieces, cracks running through it and making me wonder just how it was still mostly in one piece. Reaching out, I gently took it from Adra, simply feeling the ice, without using my magic at all. I was a little apprehensive, my magic feeling a little shaken which was obviously not the best state to work on a delicate and damaged piece of equipment.


    ¡°Don¡¯t worry about it, we made it and we will remake it.¡± Lenore mentally consoled me and, while I knew that she was right, it was depressing to see my staff that damaged.


    For a while, we continued to walk in silence, either carefully keeping an eye out for possible trouble or brooding on the events. One thing that I had noticed was that my attack seemed to have managed quite a bit of impact before it had been shattered, I had gained some EXP, sadly not enough to raise my level but it was a good start. What I considered the true benefit of the attack were the skill-level I had received. Not that there were many of them, only two, but they were well worth it. One was in Astral Meditation, bringing it to fifty-one, which was decidedly nice.


    The other was in Ice-Rune Mastery, bringing it to another milestone, seventy, and making me realise that I was inching closer to that magical state of maxing the score on that one. While it would take me a while, the progress had slowed to an absolute crawl for the last couple of points, I wondered just what would happen if I got there.


    But that was a goal for a different day, the immediate benefit was that I would be able to delve into the Astral River, looking for understanding on another rune. That had the potential to be a major breakthrough, depending on what I gleaned understanding into. If it was Eternal Ice, my prowess would sky-rocket, not only thanks to the stronger material, but because it would allow me to carefully study it and experiment with it, without using up my very limited supply.


    Part of me wanted to find a spot to delve into the Astral River right away, but another was cautious, reminding me of the magical concussion I was suffering. I also considered that it might be a good idea to wait a few extra days, simply to gain the bonus of a full moon. I wasn¡¯t sure if there was such a thing, but my Ice Magic was boosted during the full moon, so it seemed plausible that I might gain additional understanding during that period. My class had some connection with the moon, using the Astral River as a medium and waiting for a couple of days was no great sacrifice.

 Chapter 240

    ¡°Well, that clinches it.¡± I muttered, looking through my scrying spell, watching the centaur camp.


    During the night, I had discussed what steps we should take next with the others and, while Adra advised caution, they were all on board to attack the centaurs a second time, hoping that they hadn¡¯t a second anti-magic crystal weapon. To achieve that, we had only rested as long as necessary, breaking camp while it was still dark and starting to move back towards their camp.


    Once I thought we were in range to scry on the camp, I had done so but what I saw banished any ideas I had about attacking the camp a second time. It was teeming with centaurs, easily twice the number of the day before and most likely more than the camp actually could host, making me wonder how much they had emptied the camps further back. Not that it actually mattered, there would be no attack on that camp, not without some sort of miracle.


    I continued to watch for a bit, letting my focus hop from one shadow to the other while Lenore left her Hallow, flying towards the camp, to gather more information. As I did, I noticed that another group of centaurs was moving towards the camp, bringing even more reinforcements. It was hard to see, but from what I was able to see, they looked different from the centaurs I had seen before. One part of their group looked very much like a team of guards, well equipped and slightly larger than the rest of the centaurs. They also had a pack of either very large dogs or wolves with them, easily the size of Ylva and with midnight black fur, making me wonder if there might be a connection between the black-furred wolves we had clashed with before and the centaurs. But merely on the colour of some canine¡¯s fur, I wasn¡¯t willing to make guesses.


    The other part of the group was different, their equipment light but very ornate. While I was reasonably sure that it was functionable, it looked more ceremonial as strictly practical. They were also lacking visible weapons, making me start to form a theory what they were but, again, I wasn¡¯t willing to guess, so I kept watching.


    What they were quickly became obvious, only minutes after their arrival, some of them went around the camp, mostly into the area I had defiled with my blood-magic, and started to do something.


    What exactly it was, I wasn¡¯t sure but I could guess the general circumstances. They walked around, each of them carrying a strange contraption, reminding me of the incense-burners sometimes used in religious ceremonies, only that they were open and a flame was burning merrily in a bowl, suspended from chains on a long rod. But the true hint what they were doing came when, as they walked, a strange, almost white, flame sprung from the burner, landing on the ground and turning the area into a flaming inferno - without harming them in the slightest. Unless I was completely wrong, they were consecrating the area I had defiled, cleansing it of the lingering effects of my blood-magic.


    So, no more Nethersprites to keep them busy.


    I wanted to keep watching, but while that group of ponies played with fire, the another part of their group did something else. I only noticed it at the edge of my vision, the pyro-ponies had taken my attention, but as the fire started to seriously burn, I noticed that my vision of the camp had turned hazy and indistinct, making me realise that they were re-establishing their wards. As I was watching, my vision turned less and less acute, as if they were putting layer and layer of slightly smudged glass in front of me. It seemed a different way of warding compared to before, but from the distance, I was completely unable to get a good look at their actions, merely observing the results.


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    ¡°We should leave.¡± Lenore told me as she was gliding towards us.


    ¡°I agree. Would you tell me your reasoning?¡± I asked, curious why she sounded so urgent.


    ¡°You noticed the newcomers? Their guards looked like they were just reprovisioning before moving back out. I have no desire to fight a group of ten, maybe even twenty, centaurs that have crossed the first divide, not to mention the dogs they have with them.¡± Lenore explained as she landed on my shoulder, to head into her Hallow.


    ¡°True, that would be painful.¡± I agreed, dismissing my scrying spell as I stood.


    ¡°Let¡¯s go. There¡¯s nothing we can accomplish here.¡± I told the others, starting to walk away.


    ¡°What do you mean?¡± Adra asked. She was frowning but following behind.


    ¡°The centaurs, I anticipated them getting reinforcements and soon, that¡¯s why I wanted to strike before that happened. But they surprised me, at a guess, I¡¯d say that the other two camps we have observed have sent somewhere between a third and half of their manpower to this camp. And as Lenore and I were watching, they got even more reinforcements and we agree that those are most likely here to deal with us, or at least make sure that we don¡¯t bring any more misfortune to their efforts.¡± I explained, reaching out with my Ice Magic to hide our tracks. I was rather surprised when Lenore, still sitting on my shoulder, started to use her wind-magic to scatter our scent.


    ¡°Their first actions in camp was to re-establish the ward and clean up the miasma I had left on their doorstep to attract Nethersprites to their camp. The rest of their group, according to Lenore, looked like they were just resting up for a bit, before going out again. Would you want to fight a group of Centaurs who crossed the first divide, complete with hunting dogs? I certainly would rather avoid that.¡± I continued. Adra¡¯s response was a single, soft curse and muttered chanting, as she was casting the spell that helped us to avoid leaving a trace of our passing.


    ¡°So, what are we doing now?¡± Rai asked, sounding apprehensive.


    ¡°We get as far away from here as we can, without bothering the silly ponies until we are a lot further west. Sure, we could attack the camps we already know about but that would give the hunting party more information, which I¡¯d rather avoid. We just don¡¯t have to power to bring down an army.¡± I admitted, feeling a little sad about that fact. Part of me wanted to have the power to smite armies as I pleased. But to do that, I¡¯d need a lot more power.


    ¡°I can agree to that.¡± Adra nodded.


    ¡°I do as well. We are quite strong, but there are only six of us. While I would love to present their carcasses to our friends in the den, we just don¡¯t have the power.¡± Sigmir agreed, sounding rather down about it. I would have to come up with a good way to cheer her up when we stopped for the night. Maybe it would help me get rid of the strange taste walking away left in my mouth.


    ¡°Can they track us, like those Travellers did when they were hunting Sigmir?¡± Adra asked, reminding me of the last time a group had been gunning for us.


    ¡°No, I don¡¯t think so. I asked the Grandmother about it and she told me that it had something to do with authority over someone, that the leader of Sigmir¡¯s tribe could make such a focus because he had access to her bloodline, through her father, and because she had been part of the tribe he ruled over. The explanation was more complicated but I don¡¯t completely remember but those were important parts of it. So, I doubt that the centaurs have a way to accurately track us.¡± I explained, trying to remember the exact words of the Grandmother, but failing. Still, it wasn¡¯t a fun idea, I doubted that we would be able to outrun the centaurs and, judging by the short time they had needed to get reinforcements, they had some sort of swift communication, either using messenger-birds or magic. And we were heading into their territory.


    We continued walking in silence and I started to wonder just why I was feeling the way I felt, rather unsettled and a little edgy. Part of the feeling was the renewed knowledge that there would be people hunting for us, even if I wasn¡¯t sure if they had more than a slight idea where we were, but it wasn¡¯t all. I think part of the dissatisfaction I was feeling came from abandoning the task we had set for ourselves, we had planned to kill the centaurs to make them pay for driving our friends to bind themselves to a dungeon and we had failed.


    That feeling of failure, it stung. And I didn¡¯t like it one bit.

 Chapter 241

    After it became clear that there was no point in trying to engage the centaurs again, we tried to make an educated guess about the location of the ancient, imperial road, planning to use it to create distance between the elite centaur-squad we assumed was there to hunt us and ourselves. We had to make estimates about the path we had taken to the battlefield where we had met the wolves first, followed by guessing at the position of the main den and the path we had taken from the main-den to the centaur-camps. At that point, I wished that there was some sort of map-function, allowing me to get a better understanding of our position, but sadly, there wasn¡¯t such a thing, making our position mostly a rough estimate.


    But that was just fine, after all, we could only guess at the position of the imperial road, even if it seemed like a good guess that it remained as straight as it had been the whole time we had travelled on it. That allowed us to divine a route from our estimated position to the extrapolated course of the road. Or, in more simple terms, we decided to go south-west, hoping to stumble upon the road, following it once we did.


    Knowing it wasn¡¯t unlikely that the centaurs would try to track us, we stayed in as rough terrain as possible, sticking to freshly thawed bog, barely navigable, thick forest and making our way through every rocky outcropping we could find. It slowed us down, but compared to the effort needed for an equine race such as the centaurs, we were virtually speeding through the difficult terrain.


    Luckily, the local fauna wasn¡¯t too dangerous, mostly leaving us alone and we returned the favour. There were a few polecats that were attracted to the smell of food but we were able to send them off without too much trouble, getting some nice pelts in return.


    Curiously, the local flora was a lot less forgiving, some of it acting quite aggressive and, at least in my opinion, magical, trying to wrap us in vines to turn us into fertiliser or using poisonous spores once we got to close and similar shenanigans. For the first time, I wished that I had a talent in fire-magic, despite the disgusted shudder that ran down my spine, just thinking about it. The idea to simply set fire to the whole area in a bid to get rid of the vegetating pests had a strange, primal appeal, even for me.


    Without the option to simply purge the area with fire, we had to uproot the plants one after the other, after convincing them that going back to dormancy with a sudden cold snap. The advantage of that tactic, as Lenore put it, was that we could farvest the poisonous plants and leave the merely annoying ones behind, as a friendly gift to a possibly pursuing force. As we harvested a particularly nasty plant that smelled a little like mustard, I mentioned to Lenore how airborne poisons had been used to lethal effect in my world and it was as if I had triggered a switch. When she heard what little I remembered off-hand about the horrors of trench warfare during the first world war, she not only wanted to know more, no, she wanted to know everything.


    Due to that, I most likely ended up on a few watch-lists in the real world, my internet searches about the various ways people had used to kill others on a wide scale undoubtedly triggering a few watch-words. But after a few hours of searching through the internet, I had a few ideas about the best ways to combine the magical skills of Lenore and me with a lot of harvested material to create something more, something truly and viciously deadly. Sadly, at that point we had left the centaur-camps behind by quite a bit, so we were lacking easy targets to test my ideas on, not to speak of the amount of toxic plants we needed to gather and process. But it was a way to kill hundreds, if not thousands, of enemies, with our current power. We just needed the right poison to add some spice to the magic.


    When I told Lenore about it, she was delighted, picking my half-formed ideas up and running with them, fast. The sheer enthusiasm she showed made me realise just how much she wanted a way to use her magic in an offensive manner, to prove her worth. To me, she didn¡¯t need to do that, I knew just how valuable she was when working with me on a major spell, or even leading one, as she did when we augmented the natural storm, but I fully supported her in her goal. Not just because it was fascinating to see what she developed in her mind, the sheer scope of ideas how to use her wind-magic, possibly in combination with my Darkness-Magic and either natural or even magically augmented poisons to wreak havoc. The sheer, creative malice that she demonstrated made me shudder, just trying to imagine the consequences for next settlement that annoyed us.


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    Over the next few days, I rarely spoke with the others, mostly just mindlessly following after Sigmir, instead, I was caught up in intent discussions with Lenore. We bounced ideas of each other, trying to combine the research I had done outside of Mundus with our powers while, at the same time, trying to come up with counter-measures and ways to defeat such counter-measures.


    It was at that time that I realised that, while magic was a powerful tool, if we managed to bring a paradigm from Earth into Mundus, we might be able to achieve surprising results as the defenses on Mundus were geared towards what was used in conflicts on Mundus. So, an army would undoubtedly have powerful warding to keep large-scale magic away and vigilant mages to prevent anyone from simply blowing them to kingdom come with a simple spell.


    But what if, say, Lenore and I merely conjured up a wind, nothing nefarious, merely moving air. Simple physics would keep the air moving, even if the magic that had set it into motion was dispelled, until the resting air our wind was pushing into had absorbed the kinetic energy we had invested into it. Warding against simple, slow-moving air-current was next to impossible unless one were to use an air-tight spell and in that case, an army would suffocate inside. Sure, there might be magic to prevent even that, but at some point, the investment in defense was simply not worth it, without a known threat.


    Back to the slow-moving air-current, what if we managed to produce one of the gas-weapons used in the wars of Earth¡¯s past, preferably something like Sarin, without a distinctive smell or taste, invisible to the eye and incredibly deadly, and added it to our slow-moving breeze, before letting it waft over a hostile army?


    Part of me was intrigued by the possibilities, but another part? Another part was wondering just what we would unleash upon Mundus while asking myself if the developers had anticipated something along those lines or if they had made sure that such substances couldn¡¯t be used.


    That question brought me to another curious question, what about gunpowder?


    Producing it, purely from a chemical position, was comparatively easy as long as one could source the ingredients. For those, a little creative tinkering would be needed but even that shouldn¡¯t be a problem, especially in a world where alchemy was a pursued activity. From what I could see, alchemy was just a combination of chemistry and magic, which would mean that normal chemistry should work, up to a point.


    And from there, it came back to the question of defenses against known threats, as nobody could defend against everything. Defenses would always be tailored to deal with the threats that were thrown at them and finding a new way to attack would temporarily allow to bypass defenses with impunity.


    Curiously, the idea to use gunpowder to blow enemies up or to even produce something akin to a primitive gun was not an idea Lenore was interested in. When I shared the ideas regarding that, she reacted with curiosity, until she understood the concept but once she did, I could feel her bored indifference.


    It took me a few minutes to understand her reasoning, she didn¡¯t want something to replace her magic, she wanted something to enhance her magic and airborne poisons were the answer she wanted to pursue.


    Finally, after three days of discussing possible ways to combine our magic and poison our discussion came to a stop, with the result that we¡¯d have to source the needed materials first before we could continue.


    To me, that was just fine, as the night of the full-moon was quickly approaching, so putting the project on a shelf allowed me to fully focus on the upcoming delving into the Astral River.

 Chapter 242

    Looking around, I nodded to myself, deciding that the area I was in was well suited for my purposes. For the latter half of the day, we had walked through a harsh, craggy area of broken rocks and small trees, sticking out of a thin layer of soil. The simplicity and roughness of the landscape was stark, yet strangely beautiful, despite the fact that the snow had mostly melted away after the weather had changed from freezing cold to the wet and warmer weather we had in the last couple of days.


    Above me, high in the surprisingly cloudless sky, was the bright, silvery disc of the moon shining down upon me, while I looked back up. As I stood, I felt a strange kinship welling up in me, a feeling of solitude that I couldn¡¯t quite place. The others were nearby, I knew that, but I had asked them to keep watch, allowing me to delve the Astral River on my own but somehow, I felt closer to the moon in the sky than I felt to them. Alone, merely reflected into a different world, to soothe my loneliness.


    As soon as the idea crossed my mind, I banished it, focusing on the present instead of dwelling on the past and future. Using a bit of magic to strengthen my legs, I jumped onto a smooth bolder, easily making the two meter leap, landing on my feet before freezing the wetness on the rock and brushing it aside, leaving a nicely dry and cold seat for me.


    After sitting down, I closed my eyes, focusing on my breathing as my mind went into the calm, floating state of meditation. It was a familiar process, emptying my mind of one thought after the other, until nothing remained but the regular flow of air, into and out of my body. And then, even that vanished and my mind was in the realm between, floating on nothingness, on perfect stillness.


    For how long I remained in that state of no-thought, I didn¡¯t know, most likely only a few seconds, before my mind yearned for activity, for thought. My mouth might have curled in a wry smile, my mental expression certainly did, amused at the fact that I could calmly sit for hours alone in the privacy of my mind or in discussion with Lenore, but when trying to turn off that constant stream of thought, my subconscious quickly rebelled, demanding activity.


    Following that feeling, I took the simple step of allowing one thought in, allowing it to take up as much of my mind as it could, the perception of the Astral River around me. At first, I had needed the rune-stones I had started with to tune my mind to the feeling of magic, now, I was able to simply feel the constant presence of the Astral River around me and by focusing on it, I was able to swim in its magical currents.


    As I delved into the stream of the Astral River, the ethereal existence of the Astral River was filling my mind, my senses trying to map what I was experiencing into something I could understand. I was getting better at understanding what my magical perception told me, the ability I had gained some time ago helping greatly, allowing me to get a better feel for the different streams of the Astral River that was flowing around me.


    There was a stream of wind, smelling of spring and change, another that was the stoic, slowly-changing solidness of earth, providing a foundation for the river and the world, allowing the changing seasons to play out. A bit of fire, leaving the bad taste of smoke and ashes in my mouth was woven between them, its strength waxing, was riding the wind, letting it carry the warmth of spring around the world. And finally, flowing between it all, streams of water, giving live and fueling growth and bringing life.


    Those were the strongest streams, there were others and one of them, calling strongly to me was a stream, tasting similar but different from the water-stream and the wind-stream, a mix of both, but changed by something else. The stream of Ice, shining with the cold, silvery light reflected from the moon, beckoning me to dive in, to let it flow around me and enjoy the cool, crisp feeling it gave off.


    The Ice Astral Power inside me, joined with the stream outside, flowing through me and I let myself flow with it, my mind slowly leaving my body and streaming into the Astral River itself. Part of my mind kept myself tethered to my body but most of me was swimming in the endless stream and I was getting strange impressions, short flickers of images and feeling that I could hardly grasp or understand. There was something that looked like a sand-desert shrouded in freezingly cold darkness, another image was of a desolate, frozen wasteland, illuminated by the sun but barely experiencing any warmth, a stark mountain, cuttingly icy winds sharpening the cliffs into knife edges. It was a feeling of total vastness, a feeling of knowledge but my mind was simply not made to comprehend such absoluteness, causing me to shrink back, in order to keep my mind from shattering under the weight of knowledge.


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    It was beautiful and part of me considered that losing my mind to gaze upon the absoluteness a price worth paying but self-preservation managed to pull me back from that edge, even as I wanted to tumble over it.


    Instead, I focused on the singular stream I was in, looking at the concepts and information that was contained within. I knew that the Liquid Moonlight-Rune that I knew was complete, yet incomplete, that there was a greater rune that contained the Rune I knew. So, using the Rune I knew, I started to look for concepts that felt similar, that might allow me to get a bigger picture.


    In my mind, the simple pattern that I could draw in a few seconds with just a couple of strokes of my finger formed and as I focused on it, details started to filter in from the Astral River surrounding me. Feelers started to stretch out, interlinking patterns started to form as I tried to let the rune grow into what it should be. I was awed at the complexity of it, getting a slight grasp that what I was seeing and understanding was still a simplified version of a greater truth. I felt my mind start to struggle as it tried to comprehend what I was seeing, trying to contain the truth that was revealing itself before me.


    Finally, after the surroundings of the rune I knew started to grow, I understood my mistake, I was trying to comprehend more than I would be able, I was reaching too far, stretching myself too thin. What I was trying to understand was more than a single additional rune.


    Taking a step back, I let my mind wander, knowing that I had exhausted a great deal of mental strength and needed to recover. As my mind was flowing through the Astral River, I stumbled over a memory, a memory of me, or rather, an impression my spellcasting had left in the Astral. It was intriguing, to watch myself from the outside, to follow the way the Astral Power had been shaped by me, shaped into a powerful weapon to strike at my enemies. It was the massive spell I had used to attack the centaurs after Rai and I had weakened them with poison and my different perspective allowed me to watch as the artifact used by the Centaurs was activated. The change in perspective allowed me to get a better understanding of the way the artifact worked, as the medium I was watching from started to shake, to quake as chaotic waves of Astral Power were discharged from the crystal.


    It was a curious experience and I started to get an idea how I might be able to prevent myself from being affected as bad, if I was ever exposed to such a tool again. At the same time, I realised that there was something with the Mist I was using, that there was more to be understood, if I only cared to look.


    Intrigued, I let the Mist-Rune well up in my consciousness while letting the Astral River flow through me, allowing the knowledge contained within stretch the Rune I had been using for so long, to complete it.


    What I found was remarkable, a furtherance of something I had talked about with the wolves, how the smallest ice-crystals could be formed and controlled, creating something that I understood as Diamond Dust, microscopic particles that I could control, small enough to ride on the smallest breeze but, if used in the right manner, sharp enough to shred a foe, if I so wished. They were, in a way, small enough to be both, solid and liquid, the phase depending on very little, mostly orientation and linkage.


    My understanding was surging and the simple Mist-Rune had allowed me to grasp something bigger, something that I would need to study a lot deeper, as it might allow me to gain understanding in different magics, the duality of liquid and solid a remarkable feature that sparked my interest. Just what would I be able to learn if I continued that way? I just didn¡¯t know.


    Sadly, around me the light started to dull, the streams of air and fire gaining prominence as the burning heat of the sun started to replace the calm and gentle light of the moon, making me realise that my time was up and I should return to the world around me. Slowly, I pulled back into my body, opening my eyes to see what little ice and snow there was around me glitter in the first light of dawn.


    A new day had come, forcing away the loving embrace of the night.

 Chapter 243

    My new rune posed an interesting question to me, a question I hadn¡¯t anticipated. Previously, I had mostly worked from a standpoint of normal physics, but the ¡°Diamond Dust¡±-Rune challenged that, making me question just how accurate my previous assumptions were. The posed question was about the phase-state, what was a solid, what was a liquid, even, to a point, what was a gas. Normally, there were transitions that could only be accomplished by energy-transfer but with the created Diamond Dust, I started to wonder. The behaviour changed in ways that I didn¡¯t quite understand, at times acting like a fluid, at times acting like an elastic solid, at times acting like a rigidly granular solid, it was mind boggling.


    For three days, since learning the rune in the Astral River I had tried to understand the substance I could create using it, playing around with it and transforming it, but the only thing I had managed was getting a headache and more questions.


    On the other hand, I had managed to repair my Staff, using the night after full moon to gain as much of a boost from my class-ability as I could and carefully repairing the various cracks and pits, making sure that the structure was still solid while the runes I had carved in remained viable.


    But that was only a side-project that had to be taken care of.


    Mainly, we moved, especially when we realised that the Centaurs had a larger reach than I had anticipated and that they were patrolling it aggressively. None of us knew if they were actually looking for us or if they merely tried to claim territory, but we noticed quite a few patrols moving through the countryside west of us.


    One evening, I remembered that I had asked Adra to talk to the centaurs we had taken prisoner before I had used them to fuel my blood magic, back then, I had mainly done so out of the idea that it was the thing to do, when you make prisoners, you interrogate them and forgot about it afterwards, never asking Adra what she actually had found out. And after the questionable use of my blood magic, she had never brought it up on her own. But now that we might need the information she had gained, I decided to bring it up.


    ¡°Adra, do you remember, back when we captured those centaurs, you asked them questions, right? Did you ask about their plans, about their organisation and things like that?¡± I asked, curious what Adra remembered.


    She blinked for a moment, slightly confused at the question hitting her from the left field, right after dinner.


    ¡°Yes, I remember.¡± she began, before closing her eyes to aid her recollection. ¡°And yes, I asked quite a few questions. Not that they told me all that much, mostly telling me their names and personal details. I¡¯m not sure why, but one of them told me about his wife and that they had a child on the way.¡± she continued, her brows furrowing.


    ¡°The idea is that people have a apprehension to harm those they empathise with. By telling you about themselves, about their families, they want you to realise, ¡®Oh, the being in front of me is just like me, we have something in common.¡¯ which might make you hesitant to see them as enemies that need to be dealt with. For example, I doubt that there was a single Centaur in that camp that has the ability to speak with animals or knows the wolven language.¡± I explained when Adra fell silent in contemplation.


    ¡°Seeing them as just animals helps to hunt them, just as anyone of us would at least be hesitant to eat a centaur, right?¡± I continued my thought, piecing together a few things from scant evidence. Not that I could prove my hypothesis, but if felt right. Most conquerors in the history of Earth had employed the idea that the people they conquered were some sort of lesser creatures and on Mundus, with the wolves of the northern wind outwardly more similar to regular animals, it was very likely to be done as well.


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    ¡°Anyway, I apologise for interrupting you, Adra.¡± I shook my head, ending my mental tangent.


    ¡°It¡¯s alright.¡± Adra waved me off, before continuing her recollection.


    ¡°They told me they were part of the Altin Urda but I¡¯m not really sure what that it, most likely their tribe or clan. Otherwise, they didn¡¯t say anything, they didn¡¯t even make threats that their people would get revenge, only spoke about themselves.¡± she explained, shaking her head as she tried to understand them. Apparently, they hadn¡¯t even pleaded for their live, simply tried to make her emphasise with them. Maybe it had reminded her of her own time as captive in Tegi, something she didn¡¯t talk about, at least not with me.


    ¡°So, we lack any kind of useful information.¡± I concluded with a frown.


    ¡°But at the same time, I doubt that they have good information on us, the only clues that might give away that we were involved with the trouble here are the direction we are coming from and the trinkets we got from the wolves. Those might give away our identity, if that ¡®Altin Urda¡¯ actually knows who they fought against. Hopefully, we get an idea about their operation when we reach the road, we might even want to backtrack a little, to check if there is some sort of checkpoint.¡± I mused, mostly to myself.


    ¡°What do you mean, checkpoint?¡± Sigmir asked, sounding curious.


    ¡°That¡¯s how I would try to control an area. Set up checkpoints at the entry-points and patrol the rest, if you don¡¯t have some sort of pass from the entry-point, you are an enemy. At the end of the day, I doubt that they would want to choke off all trade, that would be just silly.¡± I explained, trying to remember how border-crossings worked on Earth.


    ¡°Mhm, makes sense. Trying to actually control every stretch of land would be next to impossible, unless you have some serious magical power, and even then, it¡¯d be difficult, simply because of the sheer distances involved.¡± Adra agreed after a thinking about it for a moment.


    ¡°For now, I think I¡¯ll try to see what is going on around us.¡± I decided, looking up into the sky, happy that a couple of clouds were obscuring the moon and giving me ample shadows to work my magic with. As I considered that, I realised that, depending how the magical definition of shadow was, we were obscured from the major light-source anyway, the moon merely reflecting the sun¡¯s light. Maybe the fact that Mundus was between me and the sun would allow me to treat everything as ¡°Shadow¡±, at least during the night.


    ¡°That could work.¡± Lenore agreed, having picked up my thoughts. ¡°Let¡¯s try it?¡± she asked, making me grin.


    ¡°Sure. I appreciate your help.¡± I agreed, waving my hand to create a comfortable seat for me. Creating the icy armchair I had used a few times was quite easy by now, even if I had improved it a bit by using the strange qualities of Diamond Dust for the upholstery. Or maybe calling it snow-pillow would be better. I could hear Lenore groan at the bad puns but nobody had asked her to listen to my thoughts.


    As we had done a few times before, we split the workload. I was responsible for the magic, creating a scrying window and a vessel to move it, while Lenore did the actual moving and scouting, simply because she was quite good at moving in three-dimensional space, even if she normally used her wings.


    Feeling whimsical, I changed the vessel a little, normally, I used a simple, shadow-black ball of magic, nothing more than a small cloud but today, I wanted something different. It took a little more effort but I was quite able to change it from that cloud-shape into the shape of a raven, black as the night, with a pair of silvery, slightly luminous eyes.


    To test the idea that during the night, everything was in the shadows, I created the raven in the shadow of a nearby tree, allowing me to get a good look, before Lenore took over and it took off. There was no sound as it did, with it being merely a creation of magic and darkness, but it looked quite impressive and moved at high speed, quite a bit faster than Lenore. But more important, if the magical construct crashed into something in the darkness, it was just an amalgamation of magic, not a living being I cared about, like Lenore.


    I kept the spell going for twenty, maybe thirty, minutes before Lenore gave me a mental signal that she was done.


    ¡°I found the road and didn¡¯t see any enemies between us and it. If we keep our pace, we¡¯ll make it there some time tomorrow, maybe around noon.¡± she reported. ¡°There were no patrols visible between our current location and the road, but there are fires a little further west.¡± she warned. I told the others what we had found, before we started to get ready for the night.

 Chapter 244

    ¡°Good Afternoon, Miss Jacobs. It¡¯s been a while, hasn¡¯t it?¡± the receptionist greeted me as I stepped into the gym. I hadn¡¯t been here in person for a couple of weeks, almost exclusively spending my time in Road to Purgatory and doing my training at home, when I logged out, mostly to be present if my party needed me. It was a problem I thought I should address with the developers, the impact it had on someone with a social life. I was a rare breed, someone who hardly cared about spending most of my time in a game, someone who had been able to clear the schedule for the Beta but when the game went live, I would have to either make money by streaming or making videos, which both might be possible, or reduce the amount of time I played and getting back to work.


    ¡°Good Afternoon, Mrs. Wu.¡± I greeted back, focusing on the present and the conversation I was having. Mrs. Wu, the receptionist and wife of the Wing-Chun trainer of the gym, was a kindly old lady, at least most of the time. She had a different side, one that I had only seen once when she needed to physically restrain someone during a dispute. She was one of the few people that I was seeing eye to eye, being about as small as I, and her head of white hair, kind smile and crow-feet from laughing made her look like everyone¡¯s favourite grandmother, but on that day, she had taken the guy, easily forty centimeters taller and three times her weight, in hand, bringing him to his knees when he tried to press the issue. For me, it had been a defining moment, seeing her so in control, a quiet and calm strength, I wanted to gain it. Afterwards, I had asked her to train me, only to be gently rebuffed and told to master what her husband was teaching me, before asking again.


    ¡°I have been a little busy, my schedule rather irregular, so I was unable to find the time to come here.¡± I explained, giving her my pattern polite smile, something my mother had trained me to do a long ago.


    ¡°Such is life, sometimes. I hope you kept up with your training, if not Shifu might be disappointed..¡± she smiled back, before gesturing to the changing rooms.


    ¡°I tried. We¡¯ll have to see how much I forgot.¡± I admitted, moving past her. It was only a small gym, operated by two older, married couples, the Wus and the Satoshis a japanese couple teaching a form of aikido. Just from looking at the amount of people coming and going, I was reasonably sure that it was more a hobby of those two couples than a profitable business, but I didn¡¯t know. They took a modest, monthly fee, that I was happy to pay and if you wanted dedicated training, they would offer but the amount of people coming and going were just too few to make me think it was making a real profit.


    After changing into a comfortable pair of soft pants and a top, I went out to the main floor, stopping for a moment to take in the atmosphere, it was a strangely comforting smell, sweat, mixed with leather and incense, that made me relax. Before going to the dummies, I walked over to the various machines, starting slow to warm up before seriously working out for some time, a slight pain reminding me that I had slacked off too much. It wasn¡¯t as bad as I had feared, the exercises I had been doing whenever I logged out seemed to have helped but it was worse than I had hoped. But there was nothing to be done about the past, I would have to take care of it in the future.


    As I worked on the different machines, I thought of the people waiting for me in Mundus. It was strange, outside the capsule, I felt a small distance to the me while playing. Part of me was curious if it was because I was so much more ¡®invested¡¯ in the role I was playing in Mundus that I was trying to see things from a perspective I would have had if I had been born in Mundus, as Morgana or why the character seemed to be so much more alive than previous characters I had played. Somehow, Morgana felt more real, more alive, than other characters, not just because of the much more realistic world of Mundus but also in an innate way. Maybe it was because Morgana was something I had projected myself into, not just a character I had created. It was weird, for lack of better word, but at the same time, it was a feeling I now craved. Not just because of her relationship with Sigmir, even if that was a big part of it.


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    I felt a wry smile twist my mouth, as I considered the insanity of being slightly jealous of the relationship a fictional character played by me had to a non-player character in a computer-game. A highly sophisticated one, sure, but still, I wondered if that was the way people who believed that they had a personal relationship with a manga- or anime-character felt. Only that my Sigmir was able to answer me, to talk to me.


    As I stood up from the machine I had been working on, I shook the thought off, knowing that nothing good would come from dwelling on it. What I felt for Sigmir was something I had never experienced before and if I managed to rationalize away those feelings, I would regret it, of that I was certain. I enjoyed the time I spent in Mundus, I enjoyed the time I spent with her and that had to be enough for me. Someone else might see it as some sort of high-tech sex-toy or a fetish or something else, I didn¡¯t care, couldn¡¯t care. Didn¡¯t want to care.


    Feeling my muscles tingle, I decided to go over to the area with the dummies and bags, letting my mind slip into the fight-mode I had cultivated in Mundus, where my weapons and my body were often on the line. While I hardly used pure martial arts when fighting there, they were, in a way, my last line of defense, the footwork Shifu had taught me the easiest way to keep some beastie from gnawing at me or to keep some centaur from sticking me with the pointy end of their spear.


    Starting slowly, I gave the bag a few soft strikes before speeding up, letting my mind go back to fights I had been in, imagining an enemy striking back, while dodging away. At first, I felt myself move a little jerky and I realised that there was a bit of a disconnect between my training and my body, that spending so much time as Morgana had made me a little unused to my actual body, but after a minute or two, that disconnect vanished and my movement smoothed out. It helped that the two bodies had the same shape and while Morgana¡¯s body was stronger and faster, that only went so far.


    I kept beating on the bag, flowing from circling it with defensive footwork, giving only the occasional jab, to fiercely assaulting it with my hands, elbows, knees and feet, speeding up as I went. It was a curious, trance-like state, my focus widening but the awareness narrowing as my mind kept an eye on the room around me, but only scanned for threats, discarding anything else as unnecessary. In that state, I failed to notice that Shifu Wu had moved into the area I was in, until he took a combat stance. When he did, all of a sudden, my mind registered him as a threat and I whirled sideways, keeping the bag I had been beating up in sight while getting him into view. At the same time, I got a bit of a mental jolt, shaking me out of my trance-like state back to full awareness.


    ¡°Greetings, Shifu Wu.¡± I greeted with a polite bow after a second to get my breath under control.


    ¡°Greetings, Miss Jacobs. I see you learned more of the art, even if it seems that your form suffered a little.¡± he greeted, a mischievous smile on his face. I wasn¡¯t quite sure what he meant, but when I mentally played back the movements I had used to beat the bag, I had to admit that he was right. My style had changed a little, becoming more practical or maybe more savage.


    ¡°I apologise, Shifu.¡± I bowed again, before explaining, ¡°I only had time to train by myself over the last few months, without correction. It seems that a few changes have snuck into my forms.¡±


    ¡°It happens. But I think that you might be ready to learn from my dear wife.¡± he grinned, causing me to blink in surprise. It was certainly not what I had expected but, after he gave me a signal to continue, he moved away while I returned to my training, slightly bewildered.

 Chapter 245

    When I climbed into the capsule, muscles I didn¡¯t knew I had were staging a protest about the abuse I had put them through. After Shifu had surprised me, his wife had sought me out, telling me that now, she would teach me. I was rather perplexed, not quite sure why she was offering now, or how it came about but, as it was something that I had been interested in for some time, I gratefully accepted. And was taught that the smiling, kindly grandmother was just a facade for the devil lurking below, her friendly smile never wavering as she instructed me how to twist my body into shapes that no vertebrate was ever meant to take. I had been under the impression that my body was quite flexible but the exercises she put me through taught me better. Still, when she told me that we would have a weekly session from now on, I had instantly accepted.


    I let out an involuntary sigh of relief as the technology of the capsule shunted my mind from my aching physical body into the hale and rested body of Morgana, my eyes opening to let in the light. In Mundus, it was late morning and the others looked like they had been up for some time, while my body was in the mostly intangible state it entered while I was logged out. It was another thing I felt a need to raise with Pantheon Entertainment, that there needed to be some way to allow for taking breaks while travelling without running into problems. My last quest, for example, had required me to play almost constantly, with little room for error. For me, that had been possible due to my freed schedule but for most people, that would be next to impossible.


    ¡°Good Morning, love.¡± Sigmir smiled when she realised that I had started to move.


    ¡°Good Morning.¡± I replied as I pushed myself up and moved over to give her a small kiss. ¡°Did anything happen while I was gone?¡± I asked when I realised that Lenore wasn¡¯t in range and I couldn¡¯t see Rai and Adra. We had almost reached the imperial road the day before and decided to observe a little before moving on.


    ¡°No, not really. The others just went out to check if there are patrols on the ancient, imperial road and Lenore decided to fly towards the east, to see if there was some sort of checkpoint as you mentioned.¡± Sigmir explained as she reached out and pulled me onto her lap, her arms wrapping around me. Feeling no need to move further, I simply rested my head on her chest, relaxing into her embrace. It gave me a wonderfully secure feeling, putting a smile on my face.


    We sat there, simply basking in the presence of the other, a comfortable silence around us, as neither of us felt a need to speak or move. Sadly, it didn¡¯t take long for Adra and Rai to return to camp, disturbing the silence between us. When I heard them, I remained on Sigmir¡¯s lap but twisted around a little, so that I could look over to them, with her arms still wrapped around me.


    ¡°Ah, you are up, good.¡± Adra said by way of greeting, before telling us what they found. ¡°We checked the road and it doesn¡¯t look like there are patrols moving along it. We might be wrong, but I don¡¯t think so.¡± she explained, sounding confident.


    I wondered about that, the road was mostly self-cleaning, so traces would quickly vanish, making it difficult to get a good idea by mere physical observation. In addition, it had looked like the centaurs we had fought before had advanced along a stretch of land that was mostly steppe, a mixture of grass and shrubbery between the endless forests that seemed to cover this part of Aretia. With that in mind, and under the assumption that the centaurs were actually trying to increase an area of political influence and not trying to reach some specific geographic location, it would be rather surprising if they ignored the ancient imperial road that would increase their mobility by a huge amount while allowing the same for an attacking force. No, if there was one objective to control, it was that road.


    Hopefully, Lenore would manage to get more information. Knowing that she¡¯d most likely need some more time, I decided to do some scrying myself and conjured up the cloud I used to shift my viewpoint in distant shadows. While there was a bit of distance between the forest and the road, it was just a small patch so I could simply shift my viewpoint along the shadows of the forest, while looking over to the road.


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    Sadly, my scrying without Lenore to help was still limited and I only managed to cover a stretch of about two kilometers down the road before Lenore returned. When I was unable to see any conclusive hints that it was used to shift troops or supplies, I dispelled the scrying focus, instead relaxing into Sigmir¡¯s embrace when I felt Lenore¡¯s mind enter our shared perception.


    To make it easy for her to land, I pulled out the repaired perch-turned-staff and used a bit of Ice-Magic to create a base for it, so I could stay in Sigmir¡¯s arms. Moments later, Lenore landed on the perch, ruffling her feathers to get a little warmer while talking to us.


    ¡°I found something.¡± she stated, sounding proud of herself.


    ¡°And what would that be?¡± I asked, when she stopped to preen, both literally and figuratively.


    ¡°There¡¯s a quite large centaur-camp at the edge of the windswept plains. Easily four, maybe even five, times the area of the camps we have seen before. And they look like they are there to stay, slowly replacing their tents with wooden structures as they harvest wood from the area.¡± she explained and shared a memory with me.


    Once again, I was experiencing the awesomeness of flight, even if only second hand, soaring through the skies and riding the cold wind. Beneath me, there was a large, fortified area, right next to the road. From above, I realised for the first time just how strange the sudden change in the landscape was, almost as if someone had taken a straight-edge to the land, drawn a line and said ¡®on the right side, there¡¯s forest, on the left side is steppe¡¯. While I was used to seeing straight lines on maps, courtesy of Earth and the human interference into nature, seeing something I had thought of as natural having such a straight demarcation made me question that thought.


    Focusing on the camp beneath, I took in more details. The camp itself was quite obviously an enlarged version of the camps we had seen before, only that instead of a simple trench and berm to defend it, this one had an actual palisade, to keep people out. I questioned how useful that would be for centaurs, in my mind it was more a limitation to them but apparently they thought differently. I was also able to see what Lenore meant with them settling in to stay, the middle of the camp was dominated by log-buildings that looked like a strange cross between house and stable. The rest of the camp was still a tent-city but I was quite sure that if we would check back in a month, that would have changed. Even now, there was ongoing construction, another tent being replaced by a log-building.


    Following Lenore¡¯s flight, I now saw the clear-cut area around the camp, where centaurs were dragging freshly cut logs back towards their camp, to fuel their construction. Part of me wondered if there was more involved than I could see but ultimately, it didn''t matter. We weren¡¯t here to fight with the centaurs, merely travelling through, even if I wouldn¡¯t mind to give them pain, just for the wolves that were not bound to the main-den.


    Blinking a couple of times, I shook off the memory Lenore had shared, looking at the others.


    ¡°If we take the imperial road, we will run into centaurs, no doubt about it. The camp Lenore saw would need regular supply-shipments and they don¡¯t look like they are starving. We¡¯ll have to decide how we want to go about things.¡± I explained, closing my eyes to map possible ways to continue.


    ¡°We could simply stay off the road, keeping to the forest but that would slow us down. Personally, I¡¯ve seen enough pine-forest to last me a couple of years, even if I don¡¯t see another pine. I want to see what the rest of Mundus looks like, not traipsing through the same type of forest for another couple of months.¡± I began, mentally groaning at the idea of slowly travelling through the forest.


    ¡°Or we could leave the magic bags we have taken from the centaurs, simply moving along the road without a care in the world. In that case, we¡¯d bank on the fact that the centaurs are acting as settlers and soldiers, not as bandits. If that¡¯s the case, we simply don¡¯t know but unless we are seriously unlucky, we should be fine either way, even if they attack us. What do you guys think?¡± I asked, looking the others over.

 Chapter 246

    We discussed our options for a bit, mainly refining the two ideas I had presented and what we ultimately decided on was to mostly play dumb and if that failed, we had violence as a viable alternative.


    We¡¯d simply head down the ancient road, seemingly unaware that there was a group of centaurs behind us and if we were stopped and asked about it, we would speak about a group of Ankhegs that attacked us as we had been resting, forcing us to flee in the night. As we fled, we got further north than we had planned so we had simply continued south-west as planned, instead of heading straight south, to avoid that group of monsters until we hit the forest, moving through it until we met the road.


    It was a simple story that would stand up to scrutiny, thanks to a couple of Ankheg-parts that we had collected as we passed the windswept plains. Additionally, we carefully folded all but one of the magical bags we had taken from the centaurs, hiding them in Rai¡¯s backpack, hoping to sell them further west. The last one, the one that looked the most ordinary, was hanging on Adra¡¯s waist, being used in its intended manner. For now, we didn¡¯t need all of them and if we met a patrol, it would be useful to see if they were readily identifiable. If they were, I¡¯d rather find out in the middle of nowhere, where the patrol that found out might suffer an unfortunate accident before they could tell anyone, instead of somewhere close to civilisation. Selling stolen goods was doable but only with the right contacts, something we simply lacked.


    A similar idea applied to the presence of Lenore and Ylva, allowing them to leave their Hallows at their leisure and the wearing of the trinkets we had been given by Sirius. If any of that threw up a red flag, we would have to kill the one putting up the flag. There were risks to our plan, mostly the question what would happen if those who realised that something was going on were smart enough to keep their mouths shut, not giving the game away until they were able to secure reinforcements but for that, the simple fact that we planned to travel as fast as we could should help to keep us safe. That limited the risk to magical communication, which could order people further down the road to set up an ambush but my hope was that my scrying and Lenore¡¯s airborne scouting would allow us to avoid such a thing.


    With a story agreed upon, we headed out onto the road and started walking. Sadly, the command-crystals had run out of power during the campaign against the centaurs and while I had looked at the magic inside a few times, I was far from able to recreate them and get us mounts. Maybe we would be able to buy something along those lines in a city along the way, but for now, we were reduced to walking, or rather, jogging. The loss reduced our speed by a bit, from having either Sigmir or me run along the mounts, setting the pace that way, we now had to accommodate Rai¡¯s speed, which was a little lower than mine, if I used magic to boost myself along. Still, the magic of the ancient road allowed us to advance at a ridiculous speed regardless, thanks to its stamina-replenishing effect.


    It wasn¡¯t a big surprise to me, when we ran into a group of centaurs during the first day we travelled on the road. Just from the size of the camp, or maybe calling it a garrison would be better, I had been assuming that they¡¯d need a constant stream of supplies to sustain it. What surprised me was just how big the group we came across was.


    Ylva had picked up on the sounds of their approach long before they came into view and once she had done that, Lenore had left her Hallow and taken a closer look, sharing it with me over our connection.


    Where before, the teams supplying the camps had been ten centaurs and a few oxen, the group coming our way consisted of thirty centaurs, guarding a group of eight oxen, all carrying magic bags.


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    I felt a shiver run down my spine when I realised that the idea to simply wipe out any force that spotted the incriminating details on us might have been a little arrogant. If we tried to fight the force moving towards us in a fair and open manner, we undoubtedly would be forced to retreat. In an ambush or using underhanded tactics, that changed but it hardly mattered for our plans.


    On my signal, the others slowed down, hiding the speed with which we actually moved, trying to look like a mostly idle party travelling without making haste. Hopefully, it would also hide our strength and level, our normal speed wasn¡¯t something most people could reach, never mind sustain for a long time, even with the magic of the road.


    Once they were in sight, and thus we were in their sight, we moved to the side of the road, so they would be able to pass unencumbered. It took them a moment or two but then, an advance-party of five centaurs sped up, quickly crossing the distance between us. We had talked about such a situation before and decided that Sigmir would make the best spokesperson, her imposing frame making the idea of physical intimidation difficult and making it hard for the centaurs to look down on her, quite literally.


    I had considered hiding in her shadow while they approached, demonstrating that there was more to us than met the eye but decided that it would be a little too confrontational as it could be taken as having something to hide or preparing an ambush. instead, I was openly carrying my Athame and the grimoire given to me by the Grandmother, playing the part of the pure magic-user.


    The centaur-group slowed down far enough from us to demonstrate that they didn¡¯t mean to attack, instead advancing at a walk to cross the last bit of distance.


    ¡°Greetings, travellers.¡± the centaur in the lead called out, giving a friendly wave. His body-language, what I could understand, seemed friendly and open, his weapons holstered in a quiver-like contraption strapped to his back. Meanwhile, his followers had their weapons in hand but not raised, making it clear that they were ready to fight, but not obviously threatening.


    While I observed, Sigmir had returned the greeting and even produced her Adventurers¡¯ Guild card to identify herself. When the centaur saw it, he looked quite impressed and asked us how long we had needed to cross the Plains of Endless Wind, which seemed to be their name for the windswept plains. Sigmir made a bit of a show out of the counting, as if the crossing had been something that had brought us to our physical limits, even asking me as if to ascertain that she hadn¡¯t forgotten days due to the monotonous landscape and the endless wind, only interrupted by attacks from deadly monsters.


    It was a convincing performance, she even managed to weave in the question how long we had tried to find our way after the Ankhegs had driven us from the road, making it obvious that we had been lost for some time. The centaur seemed to eat it up, asking questions about the dangers we had encountered, apparently eager to learn more about the terrain they¡¯d move into soon.


    In addition, as Sigmir answered his questions, she got in a few of her own, learning more about the movement of the centaurs, as the centaur happily bragged that they had moved from the border-region of Aretia and Valkar, where they had their home-range, trying to get more area for their people. He even let slip that they had allied with a large pack of black wolves while fighting against some orc-tribes, warning us that the orcs might attack us on sight.


    It didn¡¯t take long for the rest of their group to catch up and as the oxen walked past us, the centaur who had talked to us bid us farewell and moved to catch up with the rest of his people, followed by the four that had backed him up. As they did so, we also moved out, back onto the road, continuing our walk. Lenore, on the other hand, kept a close eye on the centaurs, hoping that if the centaur who had talked to us had suspicions, they would be relayed to the group-leader and some agitation might give us a hint if we had been busted.


    But it didn¡¯t look like it, the centaur that had talked to us was talking to another but it looked like a calm report, most likely relaying what he had heard from us.


    And just like that, the first peaceful interaction with the centaurs ended, without bloodshed, murder or even conflict. It was almost boring.

 Chapter 247

    It had been two days since meeting the first supply-team and since then, we had met one patrol and another supply-team. It seemed that my first instinct, that they heavily used the ancient road, had been correct but it also highlighted something vastly different. Part of me had held ideas of getting revenge, paying the centaurs back for driving the wolves to turn their den into a dungeon and bind themselves to it, but now that I was actually able to see more of the problem, those ideas rapidly diminished.


    It had taken me a bit of time to start thinking in terms of numbers and extrapolate from there, but just the about seven-hundred warriors we had seen so far meant that we, as a group, would have to kill two or three each day, every day, from now to the end of the beta. And that hinged on the rather ridiculous assumption that there were only the camps we had seen so far, with no organisation behind them, no support, no reinforcements, nothing. Which was so unlikely, I couldn¡¯t even bring myself to laugh about it, no, if I wanted to get a more realistic number, I¡¯d have to increase that number, for the total centaur-army, by an order of magnitude or two. One order for what would most likely be available to the push north, two orders for their complete army, but even a single order of magnitude meant that we¡¯d have to kill twenty to thirty, each day.


    And that idea, even if I thought we would be able to do so without inviting an overwhelmingly lethal response, was not how I wanted to spend my time in Mundus, going after silly ponies in the woods of Aretia.


    Sure, there was also the fact that the centaurs seemed to be allied with the black wolves of Freki, something rather surprising given that normally centaurs were associated with Greek-mythology and Freki was a creature of norse myths but again, at the end of the day, I didn¡¯t care enough to hunt them. Ylva might have had a desire to rip their throats out whenever possible, I hadn¡¯t asked her since she had devoured the blood of Freki I had extracted from that black alpha-wolf but somehow I had a feeling that she was realistic about it. As depressing as the feeling was, we just couldn¡¯t win, not in a meaningful way.


    ¡°You look pensive.¡± Rai remarked, pulling my mind back from the swirling mess that were my thoughts.


    ¡°Trying to come up with the best way to go forward.¡± I admitted, looking at the others. We had made camp near the road and eaten some of our rations. Thanks to the donation made by the centaurs we had killed further north, we didn¡¯t need to worry about hunting and could simply use up the stuff they had left for us.


    ¡°Move as fast as we can, out of the area the centaurs are interested in, right?¡± Sigmir asked, possibly having picked up on my feelings.


    ¡°Sadly, yes. As much as it annoys me, there is just no point in trying to bleed them.¡± I admitted, hanging my head, not wanting to meet their eyes. I felt as if I had failed them, failed to give them a chance at revenge, just like I had failed to defend the wolves. Intellectually, I knew that I wasn¡¯t responsible for either and that I was far from omnipotent, but it didn¡¯t change the feelings I was having. Those feelings of guilt, they were something I could easily do without but I had to take the good with the bad.


    ¡°Thank the trees¡­¡± Adra muttered, making me chuckle before I continued speaking.


    ¡°The best case scenario, if I¡¯m as optimistic as I could ever be, is that we manage to force them to abandon their plans for the region. Which wouldn¡¯t bring the wolves back, they are part of the dungeon and no longer the beings we knew. I don¡¯t even want to think what happened to the young ones.¡± I admitted and felt Sigmir¡¯s arms wrap around me as she pulled me to her lap.


    ¡°Sadly, I doubt we could manage, not even against the forces we have already seen, to say nothing of the rest of their herd. The most likely case is that we would die. We would die and while I would come back, all of you wouldn¡¯t. That¡¯s just not a risk I¡¯m willing to take.¡± I explained, feeling Sigmir¡¯s lips press to my temple.


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    ¡°You know that any of us might die at any point? Especially if we want to continue to get stronger, continue to challenge ourselves?¡± Adra asked and, from the corner of my eye, I noticed that Rai tensed a little.


    ¡°I know. That¡¯s why we try to estimate the risks, at least most of the time.¡± I admitted, grinning as I remembered some of the insanities we had committed.


    ¡°Some of the time.¡± Sigmir corrected me, giggling as she did.


    ¡°To reach true power, you have to stand on a mountain of skulls.¡± Adra stated, her voice measured as if quoting someone.


    ¡°Who said that?¡± I asked, curious.


    ¡°The Eldest Dryad of the grove I grew up in. And before you ask, I have no idea how powerful she actually is, not even an educated guess.¡± she said, preempting me from the obvious question.


    ¡°Can we meet them?¡± I cocked my head, trying to remember where exactly she had originated.


    ¡°Maybe. In all honesty, I¡¯m not sure if I want to return just yet. I don¡¯t feel I have achieved enough, I don¡¯t have seen enough. But if I return, there will be a part of me that¡¯d loathe to leave again.¡± Adra admitted, her eyes growing distant for a moment, making me curious just what, or maybe who, she was thinking off.


    ¡°Anyway, we were talking about our plans, right?¡± she asked, after that moment passed, obviously changing the topic.


    ¡°Right.¡± I accepted the change, but other than the plan to pass through the centaur¡¯s new territory as fast as possible, there was nothing more to say. Once again, we were massively lacking in information to actually make plans.


    As I thought about that part, I remembered that one of the frequent posters on the forum had invited me to visit his Orc-tribe and I made a mental note to drop a message on him, maybe that would give me some much-needed insight. But it was for later, when I logged out. It was a good idea to check the forums in any way, by now, I had some hope that someone might have compiled a reliable map from ingame-resources, something to allow me better planning.


    Leaning back, into Sigmir¡¯s embrace, I quietly asked her if she¡¯d mind me reading while she held me, to which she simply squeezed me a little and kissed the top of my head before whispering into my ear that I was welcome to do so. Smiling, I pulled the Grandmother¡¯s grimoire from my bag, reading through the newly revealed pages, trying to comprehend the complicated and, frankly, confusing paragraphs that seemed to describe the universe in terms of a river flowing through the endless dark, with specks of light causing rapids in the river. Only that the river wasn¡¯t flowing through reality but through a dream, only echoing into reality. It reminded me of a lecture on quantum mechanics I had once heard, hard to understand, confusing and yet weirdly fascinating.


    The idea of the river was something I had experienced myself, at least if the Astral River that I conceptualised during my meditation was the same river the Grandmother¡¯s writing spoke about. And I was partially aware of the endless dark, from the experience I had when I let myself sink deeply into my Astral Meditation, my link with the moon allowing me to gain a glimpse of the void around it. I also knew that Lenore and the spirits bound to the golem-horses we had used on our journey had told me that they were from another realm, similar to how the Nethersprites were from another realm, something parallel to Mundus. But just how all that connected was still a mystery to me. Looking at the neat script of the Grandmother, I continued reading, trying to familiarise myself with the occult concepts described in her writing.


    However, when I realised that I had read the same sentence ten times in a row and the only thing I had managed to accomplish was give myself a headache, I decided that I had gotten as much out of it as I could hope. Instead, I decided on more pleasurable pursuits, shifting my position in an attempt to nibble Sigmir¡¯s ear, making her giggle and retaliate in a most pleasurable fashion. When I didn¡¯t relent and instead pressed the attack, she simply picked me up and headed into the forest, away from Adra and Rai, as neither of us wanted to give them a floor show. In addition, Lenore who had read the book with me, trying to understand it alongside me, fled her Hallow, flying over to Ylva, my thoughts having given away my plans before I even started them.

 Chapter 248

    After we had abandoned any plans on seriously going after the centaurs, we stumbled on the first village near the ancient road. There had been a centaur camp, which we had carefully avoided and ignored, not wanting to stir that pot, but seeing the village late in the afternoon, we decided to check if there was an inn so we wouldn¡¯t sleep outside once again. At this point, all of us were completely used to sleeping outside, so it was mostly a psychological feeling of comfort that we were seeking, not so much a physical need.


    The village was quite small, from Lenore¡¯s fly-over I was guessing maybe ten family-units and from the architectural style, I was reasonably certain that it wasn¡¯t a centaur-village. Once Lenore had made her overflight, she landed on my shoulder, letting me carry her, instead of quickly returning to her Hallow. The time she spent inside it had greatly lessened over the last few days as the temperature had quickly gone up, to the point that I had rolled up my warm cloak and placed it in my bag. It was simply too warm for my constitution, making me a little worried how I would feel once we got further south and the season switched from spring to summer.


    We were walking up to the wall surrounding the village, heading towards the open gates and I was internally assessing just how difficult it would be to attack such a village. It felt a little sobering that I was reasonably certain any one of us would be able to wipe such a small village off the map. At the same time, it made me wonder just why people didn¡¯t actively raised their level, instead hiding behind walls and in towns, content to remain in the same place for all their life. But as quick as that thought came, it was replaced by the realisation that people like Sigmir, Adra and Rai were the absolute minority, people who had the mental fortitude to not only look death in the eye and tell it, better luck next time but also the drive to do so again and again. Additionally, I was reasonably certain that a large part of that minority simply died off or was wounded badly enough to give up. It fit with what Drega had told me back in Kolyug, a few weeks ago.


    Quickly, after we walked through the gate, we were hailed by a curiously looking man. I was a little unsure just what race he was, the only thing I was sure of was that he was some sort of beast-kin. He had a quite humanoid facial structure, without any strong resemblance to the animal he was sharing his lineage with, the only reason I was certain of his beast-kin nature were the two round, brown-furred ears that peeked out on the top of his heads. At least until I got a better look and realised that he had a bushy, almost brush-like tail growing from his lower back. Without that tail and if he had been twice his size, I would have guessed that he was a bear-kin but he was barely taller than me and quite slender, making that rather unlikely.


    ¡°Greetings, Travellers.¡± he called out, as he walked out of the shed he had been working in. ¡°What brings you to Koswanow?¡± he asked, smiling.


    ¡°Greetings, we are just travelling, heading west.¡± Adra responded, giving him a friendly smile. I had to give the guy credit, even  now that he undoubtedly saw us all and was faced with Sigmir¡¯s size and obvious, physical strength, his smile never faltered.


    ¡°We are looking for a place to spend the night, maybe exchange a few things. We¡¯ve been on the road for quite a while and a roof for the night would be greatly appreciated.¡± Adra continued,


    ¡°Ah, yes, I think we can get to some sort of understanding.¡± he looked us over for a second, before looking out of the gate again, ¡°Only the four of you? And will your animals need some special accomodation?¡± he asked, looking at Ylva and Lenore. for the first time, I thought to see a bit of nervousness in him.


    Finally, I was unable to contain my curiosity and used a bit of darkness-magic to conceal a use of Observe. Part of that was to make sure we didn¡¯t walk into some sort of trap, if he was more powerful than I expected.


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    There was no resistance to my skill-usage and, no matter how hard I looked, he hadn¡¯t reacted at all, making me relatively confident that he hadn¡¯t noticed. At the same time, a small blue window told me that we were dealing with a Sablekin and that he was level 23. As I had no idea about the general behaviour of his race that didn¡¯t help me but the low level soothed a great deal of anxiety, even if I would remain vigilant, just in case.


    ¡°No, they share their accommodations with their partners. There won¡¯t be a problem, I can promise you that.¡± Adra assured him, to which he just nodded. ¡°But is there an inn or something similar in this hamlet?¡± she asked as she looked around without seeing anything hinting that there might be one.


    ¡°I¡¯m afraid not, but I¡¯m sure that we can find a spot near a fire for you and a share of dinner.¡± he assured us. ¡°Why don¡¯t you come with me, I can introduce you to our elder, he can introduce you to the other villagers.¡± he continued, gesturing for Adra to follow him.


    ¡°Oh, and I forgot to introduce myself, I¡¯m sorry about that. You can call me Klef.¡± he told Adra, who in turn introduced herself and the rest of our party, even mentioning that I was a Traveller. When Klef flinched at that information, as if he had just been struck, I got curious.


    ¡°I don¡¯t plan to do anything untowards to this village, or its people.¡± I tried to assure him, not sure what experiences they had with other Travellers but I could easily imagine that someone had treated Mundus like a game.


    ¡°That is¡­¡± he paused for a moment, obviously not quite sure how to take my statement, before shaking his head and starting anew.


    ¡°A few weeks ago, there were a few centaur-travellers, the centaurs are normally quite polite but those two were just arrogant.¡± he told us, speaking softly as if a centaur would jump out if he spoke against them.


    ¡°Anyway, I shouldn¡¯t talk about them.¡± he shook his head again and speeding up his steps. I wasn¡¯t quite sure if he meant the Travellers or the centaurs in general and before I could make up my mind to ask, he was knocking on one of the doors. He waited for a moment after knocking before getting called to enter and pulling open the door, gesturing for us to enter.


    The house reminded me of the houses we had seen in Adernas, sturdy structures built from wood and stone, solid enough to withstand the punishment nature could throw at them, while keeping the inhabitants safe.


    A merrily burning fire in the hearth gave warmth and some light, adding to the light coming through the windows making the room comfortable for most beings. For me, it was sweltering how, making me want to shuk most of my armour.


    On a rocking-chair, near the hearth, an obviously old sablekin was sitting, looking us over with surprisingly sharp eyes. When I felt the intrusive and uncomfortable effect of the observe-skill, I returned the favour, even as I squirmed from it.


    The old man obviously felt the effect, yet his smile never faltered as he looked us over. My skill-usage told me that he, too, was a sablekin and had reached level 57, making him quite strong, at least compared to some others we had met on our journey. Compared to our party, he wasn¡¯t a threat, something I felt rather comforting.


    ¡°Greetings, Travellers. You can call me Stelur.¡± he pushed himself up and came padding towards us.


    Adra, once again acting as our spokesperson, introduced us and told him that we were looking for a place to spend the night and maybe some food.


    ¡°Yes, I think we can find a spot, as long as you don¡¯t mind sleeping on the floor. It will be warmer than outside, and certainly dry.¡± the old man said, before looking pensive for a moment. ¡°I even have an idea what you could do in return for us.¡± he continued.


    ¡°Oh? And what would that be?¡± Adra asked in return.


    ¡°A few weeks ago, a wolverine that has its range nearby crossed the first divide. Now, it started to seriously decimate the game in the area, simply due to the amount it hunts and eats. From the looks of it, I think you all should be able to deal with it, what do you think?¡± he explained and a quest-window opened.


    <table><tbody><tr><td colspan="2">Quest Alert!</td></tr><tr><td colspan="2">Stop the gluttonous Wolverine</td></tr><tr><td colspan="1">Quest Difficulty </td><td colspan="1"> Easy </td></tr><tr><td colspan="2"> Hunt down the First Divide Wolverine near Koswanow. </td></tr><tr><td colspan="1">Quest Reward </td><td colspan="1"> Experience </td></tr><tr><td colspan="1">Quest Reward </td><td colspan="1"> Food and Lodging in Koswanow </td></tr></tbody></table>

 Chapter 249

    After a short look amongst ourselves, we accepted the quest to hunt down that wolverine. Partially because it would give us some juicy experience and partially because it would allow us to conserve what little coin we had earned in Kolyug.


    ¡°Is it alright if we only head out tomorrow?¡± Adra asked, apparently wondering if it would be alright if we got the service first, before going out to repay the hamlet for hosting us.


    ¡°Yes, sure, that¡¯s no problem.¡± Stelur instantly nodded, surprising me a little. I would have expected them to want some sort of security that we wouldn¡¯t just eat their food, accept their hospitality and then simply leave them in the lurch. But as I considered it for a moment, I could understand why he didn¡¯t try to press and meekly accepted. I remembered another village, one populated by orcs, where a couple of stupid teenagers had the audacity to attack a small group of travellers, just passing by. And my, our, reaction to that attack, complete retaliation, wiping out that particular village. With such an event in mind, it made more sense.


    Unless my guess was wrong, we were looking at the highest-levelled being in the village and the fact that our group could simply take what we wanted, without bothering to be polite about it, added perspective to his friendliness. The centaurs might claim the area but they had yet to establish a lawful society, so it was a simple case of might making right.


    Stelur invited us to sit and just as we did, another Sablekin, looking similarly aged as Stelur, came walking in, smiling when she noticed us.


    ¡°Guests? Why didn¡¯t you call me, old man?¡± she asked, scowling a little into the direction of Stelur.


    ¡°Ah, dear, they just got here, I can hardly stop the introductions just to call you, no?¡± Stelur waved her off, before turning to us. ¡°Allow me to introduce the mistress of this humble abode, my dear wife, Helia.¡± he gestured, hamming up the introduction. Adra, in turn, introduced all of us, and, again, I stealthily used Observation to ascertain our security. Helia, it turned out, was only level twenty-two and, unsurprisingly, another sablekin.


    After introductions, she invited us to sit at the large dining table and to take a load off, while she busied herself by filling a kettle and hanging it above the hearth, to make tea. It was quite the domestic scene, with the grandmother-type bustling around while the grandfather sat at the table, conversing with the guests. I mostly listened to Adra and Stelur talk, while keeping an eye on our surroundings when movement near one of the doors caught my eyes. A pair of wide eyes was peeking around the doorframe, taking in the strange people that were sitting at the table. The height they were at told me that it was either a child or a kneeling adult, both roused a bit of curiosity in me.


    As I was looking at the eyes, they shifted away from Sigmir, to the person sitting next to her, namely me, and our eyes met. I noticed that there was a smile on my face, and before I had a chance to hide it, those expressive, wide eyes managed to widen a little more before the head they were in hid with a squeak upon discovery.


    The noise caught Stelur¡¯s attention and he chuckled, looking over to the door where the head just had vanished.


    ¡°The highly polite child that was peeping at us is my grandchild, Liaste.¡± he grinned at his own joke, before continuing. ¡°She¡¯s staying with Helia and me while her parents are out, working. Would you mind if I introduce her to you, it might help her to get a little out of her shell.¡±


    ¡°Oh, go right ahead, I don¡¯t mind.¡± I spoke up, remembering the absolute cuteness that were the wolf-pups. Maybe a beastkin-child was similarly cute and if so, I wouldn¡¯t want to miss it.


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    Stelur looked a little surprised, it had been the first time I had spoken more than the greeting earlier and looked over to Adra, as if unsure if I could speak for the group. Adra, in turn, simply nodded with a grin, looking rather amused at his confusion.


    ¡°Well, if that is so¡­¡± he muttered, before calling out towards the door the child had vanished through. ¡°Liaste, why don¡¯t you come out and greet our guests?¡±


    Moments later, as if there was a short, internal struggle in the girl, the head re-appeared, first peeking into the room before the child walked out, quickly shuffling over to her grandfather and almost hiding behind him.


    While guessing her chronological age was utterly impossible, I was guessing that she was roughly at the same point in her development as a five-, maybe six-year old human. But, compared to a human, she was far more adorable, her ears and eyes almost cartoonishly large when compared to the rest of her body and the tail swishing around behind her adding to the impression of the timid, small animal.


    ¡°Now, Liaste, be polite and introduce yourself.¡± Stelur pushed, gently stepping aside so that she was standing on her own.


    Part of me felt bad that she was so timid, maybe because of the size of Sigmir and Adra, so I crouched a little, making us roughly the same height.


    ¡°Hello, little one. I¡¯m called Morgana.¡± I gently greeted, causing her to ease up a little.


    The girl looked to her Grandfather for once before shuffling over to me and politely introducing herself as Liaste.


    ¡°See, that wasn¡¯t too hard, was it?¡± I asked, while reaching out to pet her head a little. Those adorable, twitching ears were calling to me, asking to be petted.


    Only, just before I could make contact, she suddenly shifted back and I heard her mutter something about cold and dark as she quickly shuffled back to her Grandfather. The two of them exchanged words, before the little girl was introduced to Adra, but I didn¡¯t want to hear anything.


    Somehow, I felt utterly devastated, watching the cute girl flee from me and, to add insult to injury, Adra was able to pet the little girl after introducing herself. Not that I cared, not at all. Seeing that I wouldn¡¯t be able to pet the adorable, little girl, I took a seat on Sigmir¡¯s lap, wrapping her arms around me, trying not to hear the happy noises coming from Adra, Rai and the two Sablekin.


    While I wasn¡¯t certain why I had been rejected by the little girl, I had an idea why, just from the words she had muttered while fleeing. I had been working with Dark-Magic and Cold-Magic, I had a strong affinity for both and there was Ice-type Astral Power permanently present in my body. So, was it a surprise that there was a slight aura of both types hanging around me? Most likely not strong enough to cause any real effects, but apparently strong enough to make a little girl uncomfortable.


    As I was sitting, and certainly not sulking, on Sigmir¡¯s lap, Helia placed tea-cups in front of each of us. I noticed that she looked a little confused at seeing me snuggled up on Sigmir¡¯s lap but I just didn''t care. If she was, for some strange reason, insulted by our behaviour, I would find a short pier so she could take a long walk off it. However, even if I cared little for their possible hang-ups when it came to public displays of affection and either relationships between the same sex or different races, I had manners, so I politely thanked her for the tea, which was mirrored by a slightly blushing Sigmir.


    I took a sip and instantly regretted it, not because the taste was unpleasant but because I had forgotten that I was severely vulnerable to high temperatures, causing the already hot tea to feel as if I had just drank a sip of pure, liquid fire. I managed to keep myself from instantly spitting it out, by quickly swallowing but I had learned a lesson. But what little I had tasted had been good, so I simply concentrated a thread of my magic, causing the tea to rapidly chill, until it was just the right temperature for me. Most other people would have called it lukewarm at best, but I was happy with it.


    After that, I looked up and noticed that old man Stelur looked at me with curious eyes, as if unsure what he had just seen.


    ¡°I apologize, I¡¯m afraid I can¡¯t stand the heat.¡± I explained without really saying anything, but it seemed enough to for him. Not that I would have told him much more, even if he had asked.


    All in all, I simply felt quite annoyed, so, after taking another drink from the tea, now at a much better temperature, I snuggled into Sigmir¡¯s arms, fully intending to shut out the cruel world of Mundus.

 Chapter250

    I kept myself consoled in Sigmir¡¯s arms as much as possible, trying to ignore the cruel world around me. I let Adra deal with the family that had given us boarding, especially when, shorty before dinner, Liaste¡¯s parents returned from their work. That got me slightly interested, simply because I was curious what they worked at but not to the point that I felt like engaging with them. No, I simply stopped ignoring the world and listened to Adra, Rai, Stelur and the two newcomer talking. Luckily, Adra seemed to be as curious as I and asked.


    It turned out that the village had adopted a curious form of hunting and gathering, in which pairs roamed together, one of them trained to scout for game, the other trained to find valuable plants while both were trained to fight and defend the other. A short glimpse told me that the two parents were actually quite close to each other in level, Luron, the father, level thirty-seven and Temia, the mother, level thirty-nine.


    Soon, Helia brought out plates, serving a hearty stew with some unidentified meat and a strange, rather hard tack that needed to be soaked in the broath to become chewable. But, all in all, it was good food, tasty and hot.


    As we ate, Luron and Temia were quizzed by Adra and Sigmir about the area, especially where the wolverine we had agreed to hunt for them had its range and the creature¡¯s habits. I silently listened, even if the information given was rather sparse. The wolverine seemed to originally have had a den beneath a large tree but after crossing the first Divide, that was no longer suitable. Instead, it had made a new one into a nearby hill but mostly it was roaming a large area, hunting and killing everything it came across before devouring it. Not even vegetation was safe, as the wolverine seemed to have a taste for some plants, devouring them to the root if it happened to come across them. Neither of them had heard of the wolverine using any obvious magic, maybe it just hadn¡¯t gained any when crossing the first Divide. We would have to see.


    The next morning, after a night in front of the hearth and a hearty breakfast, again accompanied by the quite tasty herbal tea, we set out to hunt down a wolverine. I had taken a bit of time during the night and logged out, once again marvelling at the fact that I felt perfectly rested when getting out of the capsule. Even a few days ago, when I had barely managed to crawl into the capsule after training with Mrs. Wu, I wasn¡¯t stiff or sore when getting out. Knowing that Mrs. Wu was expecting me to train and, from the evil smile she had on her face when I had staggered out of the gym, I was expecting the training to become more difficult. With that in mind, I had pushed myself before staggering back into the capsule, letting it carry me into Sigmir¡¯s embrace.


    Shaking off those thoughts, I focused on my surroundings, to make sure I wasn¡¯t walking into a tree or something equally ridiculous. It would be a little embarrassing, even if I doubted that there was anything that could seriously threaten us, not as close to the village as we were.


    ¡°Lenore, would you like to take a look from above?¡± I asked the bird that was riding on my shoulder. While walking, it was easier for both of us when I didn¡¯t use the perch-staff, instead continuing to carry her on my shoulder. Otherwise, I¡¯d either have to carefully place the staff for every step, negating the benefit of using it in the first place or I could use it as a normal walking-staff, jostling Lenore with every step I took. Either was uncomfortable for one of us, so I simply continued to carry her on my shoulder, it wasn¡¯t as if she was truly heavy for my strengthened body. She either ignored or didn¡¯t notice my ruminations and simply took flight after I asked her.


    I watched her flap her wings for a moment before she rose above the trees, vanishing from my sight. Part of me was jealous, the times I had shared her memories and mind, they made me yearn to fly, to soar through the skies. I had tried to accomplish something akin to flight using my Ice-Magic, trying to place a piece of Ice below me and push against it, using that to lift myself but it had failed, the magic simply fizzling out. Similarly, trying to use Magic to push against a stationary piece of Ice, trying to use the counter-force to lift myself had proven unsuccessful, mostly because there was no counter-force as one would expect. Magic seemed to work outside what I knew of the laws of physics, which was, on second thought, rather obvious.


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    Ultimately, I should have expected that it would be difficult, maybe even impossible to fly, especially early in the game. Pantheon Entertainment had tried to make the non-player characters as similar to the player-characters as possible, outside of the resurrection of player characters. So, if player-characters were able to fly, so would non-player characters. And magic that allowed almost everyone to take to the skies would take away huge parts of normal gameplay, especially regarding exploration and problem-solving. It would also completely change how a culture would develop if flight is easily achieved early in their technological advancement, which might be another reason, to keep a sense of familiarity and immersion.


    And so, I could only watch in envy as my partner and feathered friend vanished from my sight. Instead, I focused on my environment, making sure that I wasn¡¯t missing anything. Not that it truly matted, a bit in front of me were Adra and Ylva, followed by Rai, while a bit behind me was Sigmir, the one whom I trusted more than anyone else. It would be embarrassing to wander around in a day-dream but other than that, it hardly mattered.


    For two hours, we kept walking towards the area where the Wolverine was supposed to roam, with Lenore periodically coming back into range, telling me what she had seen, or rather, not seen. Namely, the wolverine.


    Ylva was the first to get a whiff of our enemy, literally. She suddenly stopped, her hackles rising making her look a little strange, but I knew that it signaled her agitation. At her soft growl, everyone of us stopped, weapons going into ready position as we scanned our surroundings, trying to see what had her spooked.


    ¡°I can smell it. It is¡­¡± she paused for a second, before continuing, ¡°...intense. I¡¯m not sure how long it has been, but I don¡¯t think it has been long, not if it stinks this bad.¡±


    She started to head into a slightly different direction, her nose not going to the ground, as if the smell was strong enough to get to her, even without that. Now, that I knew there was something, I took a deep breath, first only scanning with my nose, before trying to see if I was able to find something magical in the air, changing my focus to my magical senses, trying to figure out what they were telling me.


    Seconds after that idea, I was reminded that sometimes, I should think before acting, especially if magic was involved. The senses I used to parse magical information were smell and taste, while Lenore used sight. And those senses told me that I had made a grave and very serious mistake.


    There was no way to describe the vileness that invaded my senses, it was as garbage had been left out on a hot day, fermenting and seeping into the carcass of an animal rotting below. And it wasn¡¯t so much physical, allowing me to spit out whatever invaded my mouth, or the hold my nose closed. No, it was already inside my senses, polluting them.


    The breakfast I had eaten earlier decided that it didn¡¯t want to be associated with someone like me and staged an emergency uprising, causing me to bend over and vomit into the snow that remained in the shadow of a tree, stumbling as I tried to regain balance from the sheer disgust that was overcoming my mind.


    ¡°Are you alright, love?!¡± Sigmir asked from behind me, holding my shoulder and trying to gather my hairs in the back of my head, as another wave of nausea shook me, my stomach trying to purge everything I had ever eaten. I might never want to eat again.


    Answering was out of the question, as I continued to shake, the others now around me. In a bit of insanity, I instantly projected the runes for Liquid Moonlight, creating a large glob of it, before using my Ice-Magic to direct it to my mouth, gargling with it in an attempt to get the foul taste from my mouth.


    Moments later, a wave of pure cold shot from my mouth as I exhaled, the Liquid Moonlight mostly unbound and turned to Ice-Type Astral Power, creating a large, white cloud and freezing the tree I had just vomited behind.


    ¡°If that thing smells even half as vile as its magic, you have my condolences.¡± I told Ylva, trying to ignore the strange looks I was getting.

 Chapter 251

    I had to try for a few minutes to convince the others that I was fine. Especially Sigmir was a little worried after I first started to uncontrollably shake and vomit, before conjuring up a glob of incredibly cold liquid and gargling with that glob. The sudden cloud of freezing cold mist I had exhaled with a soft burp hadn¡¯t done much to assuage their disturbance. All of them knew that the Liquid Moonlight I had used as mouthwash would cause grievous harm to anyone else if they were simply exposed to it, nevermind trying to take it into their bodies. Yet, here I stood, looking more disgusted by the smell of our prey than hurt by the cold.


    ¡°Really, I¡¯m fine. I just wanted to know if that wolverine has a peculiar magic aura and searched for it.¡± I assured Sigmir, again.


    ¡°Needless to say, I found it. Not quite sure what type of magic it is using, but its vile. Maybe some sort of decay, disease or rot, nothing I came across before.¡± I continued, feeling Lenore come back into range and shared my expressions with her. All of them, without filtering them too much. Sharing was caring after all and I felt a little mean.


    While the others looked at me with worried eyes, a sharp caw cut through the air, as Lenore was processing the second-hand information from me. Moments later, she landed on my shoulder and painfully nipped my ear, before adding her own opinion to mine.


    ¡°That is just disgusting.¡± Lenore told me over our connection and I could feel her shudder in sympathy for getting the full bore of the experience I had shared with her.


    ¡°I agree, but what is it?¡± I asked, hoping to get at least something out of it. ¡°It felt similar to miasma, but not quite. Some sort of negative blood-magic?¡± I continued, a frown manifesting on my face.


    ¡°Not sure, but it is both natural and vile, we should get rid of it, simply to rid the world of that vile magic.¡± Lenore suggested, her voice hinting at the disgust she felt for the creature.


    ¡°Let¡¯s move after it.¡± I told the others and started walking, partially to get away from the spot I had just thrown up on.


    As we continued on our way, I noticed a peculiar smell, almost too weak to notice, but when focusing on it, it was rather unpleasant. A quick glance to Rai told me that he was much more affected than the rest of us and I realised that it might just be the smell of our target, strong enough to even offend those of us who didn¡¯t have the sensible nose of a wolf. I had made the strict decision that I wouldn¡¯t try to trace the beast¡¯s magic myself, not without some pressing need. And that need would have to be truly pressing, as in life- or death-pressing, but even then I might hesitate. The experience had simply been too awful for words.


    But it was curious, my idle mind pointed out, the normally defensive measure of the god-awful smell of the wolverine, something that should warn enemies away from it, was now a strong contributor to our desire to kill the thing. A creature smelling that bad was to be destroyed with extreme prejudice. I noticed a wry grin on my face at the strange priorities we, as a group, seemed to have. Sure, killing something for the simple purpose to get stronger thanks to the system was perfectly fine for any of us, but now, with the awful stench added to it? I think each of us would have gone out of our way to destroy the creature simply for offending our sensibilities, without the added benefit of the quest we had taken. Maybe we were developing an arrogance to change the world to suit us better, even with our relatively meager power, to adjust it so we would be pleased by it.


    It was another interesting idea, if we, who, in the grand scheme of things, were almost at the bottom of the hierarchy of powerful beings, wanted to change things to suit our wishes, were the stronger beings just the same? Did they casually murder another being, simply because they didn¡¯t like their smell? Or maybe their looks? But beauty, and preferences were in the eye of the individual, the beholder, as the saying went. For many people, Sigmir would be considered ugly, her face to crude, her body too muscular to fit feminine standards, her frame too tall. But to me, she was quite frankly beautiful and desirable like no other, her arms and embrace the definition of safety, her smell both comforting and arousing, her taste¡­


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    Shaking my head, I tried to return to my previous thought or visions of a naked Sigmir would cause me to wander into the next tree, something I wanted to avoid.


    I made another mental note to avoid judgements based on personal whim and preference, or we might arouse the ire of a more powerful being. If we stuck to hunting beings on or above our power-level, we should avoid random, powerful beings acting out of a sense of justice.


    My mind was pulled back to the task at hand when Ylva growled that she thought she heard the wolverine.


    Without more information, we spread out a little, Sigmir taking out her axe and shield, Adra readying her bow, Rai drawing his daggers and cloaking himself in shadows while I took out my Athame, planning to mostly use my magic in an attempt to hinder the beast. Sadly, the snow around us had mostly thawed, taking away one of the biggest advantages I had enjoyed over the last few months. If I wanted to use Ice-Magic, I¡¯d have to conjure the ice myself, not simply grab a chunk of snow and manipulate it for my purpose.


    Guided by Ylva and her ears, Sigmir led the way with Ylva next to her. I was flanking her on the left side, while Lenore had returned to her Hallow, adding her Astral Power regeneration to mine. It also allowed us to go into the Avatar-State if we chose to, causing our combined power to skyrocket. On Sigmir¡¯s other flank were Adra and Rai, Adra to support from the rear with her bow while Rai was planning to quickly circle the wolverine once we were near. By now, even I could smell in in the air, a rancid smell of blood and meat, mixed with a strange, funky smell. It was different from the perception of its magic, but similarly unpleasant.


    Sigmir stepped onto a clearing and suddenly, a snarling sound cut through the silence, it sounded like a mix between some large cat, a chain-saw in dire need of oil and an attacking dog, causing the hairs in the back of my neck to go up. It sounded vicious and I had no doubt that the wolverine had noticed us and was planning to add us to its meal-plan. Meanwhile, Sigmir gave a battle-shout on her own, psyching herself up and activating her class-ability, the red armour surrounding her, strengthening her offense and defense, before she started to jog forward, adding momentum to her charge.


    I quickened my steps, to make sure I was able to see and intervene when necessary. Staying in the underbrush, just to give me a little concealment, I was able to finally see the wolverine. It was just as large as we had been told, almost coming up to Sigmir¡¯s head while on its four feet and with a maw big enough to get my whole head in. I had no doubt that it was also strong enough to crush my head, or anything else that got between its dagger-like teeth. Maybe it was the fact that she was actively coming at it, maybe it was her shout, but the wolverine started to head towards Sigmir, its gait composed of strangely short steps. Focusing on the paws, I noticed that its claws were just as impressive as its maw and I made a note to keep away from either.


    A quick Observe told me that it was only level fifty-seven, but somehow, its sheer ferocious aggression gave me the impression that it was far more powerful than it seemed.


    Not quite sure about the best course of action, I decided to go with a tried and true method, throwing icicles at the enemy. It wouldn¡¯t kill a beast like that wolverine, not without a seriously lucky hit into its eyes, but it would hinder it, allowing my allies to get better attacks in. It would also add some Ice to its surroundings, which I might be able to use later.


    But it wasn¡¯t I that made the first hit, no, that was Adra and her bow. Just before Sigmir and the wolverine clashed in a collision of fur and metal, she shot a glowing arrow, hitting the wolverine¡¯s leading paw, causing it to stumble. It wasn¡¯t enough to bring it down, but it stopped its movement, allowing Sigmir to fully block it off with her shield before burying her axe into its shoulder.


    And then, with another vicious growl, the fight was fully on.

 Chapter 252

    My spell completed and a javelin-sized icicle was launched towards the rabid wolverine, cutting through the air with a whistling sound. It hit the wolverine just as it tried to launch itself at Sigmir, staggering it and giving her precious moments to brace herself. I started to construct the next spell, still not using anything fancy, mostly just throwing simple attacks into its direction. By now, it was an attack-pattern that I could sustain for hours without paying a lot of attention to the spells, allowing me to observe the monster, just in case there was something more to it.


    Behind the wolverine, Rai tried to get at its joints in an attempt to cut through sinews and hamstring it. I wasn¡¯t able to see what exactly happened, but he instantly jumped back after striking, creating distance.


    Meanwhile, after being hindered twice by Adra and me, the wolverine seemed to only get more ferocious, its snarls making me shudder while its claws were scattering sparks as Sigmir used her shield to repel them. But even though she was able to block the attacks, Sigmir seemed to get pushed out of position, which, frankly, boggled my mind. Sigmir had crossed the first divide, she was ten level higher than the wolverine, she had a connection to Ylva and despite all those advantages, she was getting pushed back.


    Again, attacks from Adra and me caused the wolverine to stagger, giving Sigmir time to correct her stance and get a hit into the wolverine, causing more blood to splatter.


    ¡°That¡¯s not right.¡± Lenore muttered in my mind, watching the fight through my eyes.


    ¡°What do you mean?¡± I asked back, while beginning to cast another javelin.


    ¡°There¡¯s not enough blood.¡± Lenore simply stated, while her impressions flowed over into my mind and I was able to understand what she meant. My icicle, Adra¡¯s arrow and Sigmir¡¯s axe-hits should have caused quite a bit of bleeding, especially the large, cleaving wounds caused by Sigmir¡¯s axe. Yet, the amount of blood that tainted its fur was small, almost negligible.


    ¡°Take a look?¡± I asked in return and she brought her vision to the forefront, allowing us to take a look at the magic in the area. And what we saw was quite disgusting, it was as if a corrosive mist was constantly eating away at the surroundings, taking in the life-force of everything around it, while feeding the wolverine. In a way, it was like my blood-magic draining life-force and using it for the wielder while causing some of it to decay into miasma. But it wasn¡¯t just taking blood, it was simply destroying, or devouring, everything around it.


    ¡°That¡¯s¡­¡± Lenore began, but didn¡¯t quite finish the thought.


    ¡°...bad. The faster we destroy it, the better.¡± I completed her idea.


    In essence, the wolverine would be able to slowly drain Sigmir and Rai, while also destroying the forest around it, the vegetation that was flush with life-energy, about to begin its spring growth. If it was merely the destruction of the forest, I would be concerned and annoyed but not to the point that I¡¯d feel threatened. No, what made me worry was that the regeneration of the beast might allow it to out-last Sigmir, simply by draining life from its surroundings. We had planned to slowly and carefully take the thing down, mindful of possible counter-attacks. That plan was out of the window.


    ¡°It¡¯s draining life from everything around it. We need to destroy it, fast.¡± I called out, so that the others knew my plans.


    Seeing no point in wasting the Icicle I had started, I simply let it fly, causing some extra damage in the wolverine, but it wasn¡¯t a deep wound. Sure, it bled some and undoubtedly hurt, but it wouldn¡¯t be fatal, even without its regeneration.


    Sigmir, hearing my voice and the change of plans, gave the wolverine a massive shield-bash, letting her axe drop while reaching out to Ylva. The wolf turned into silver mist and returned to her Hallow, adding some strength to Sigmir. And Sigmir used that strength for another Shield-Bash, getting enough distance for her next move. While letting go of her shield, she reached around to her back, grabbing the Lok¡¯Nar she had inherited from her father. It wasn¡¯t magical like the axe she had earned in the Barrow Den but it was a massive weapon she was deeply accustomed to. And that showed, as she drew upon Ylva¡¯s powers to increase her power, her body slightly changing and her attacks turning ferocious.


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    But I had my own part to play. With a thought to Lenore, our minds joined, spectral claws around my hands, a spectral beak changing my face and all my hair turning into black feathers. With our minds joined, I unleashed my Overload-Ability, allowing me to channel vast amounts of power and that was just what I did. There was almost no Ice in the area, and projecting runes instantly was just too wasteful, instead, I let Lenore take the lead, allowing her to use our body for spell-casting. That way, she could add her own magic to the fray, deadly winds sapping both the wolverine and the vegetation around it of life, depriving it of its food.


    As for me, what I was planning didn¡¯t need hands, my mind was enough. From the sheats hidden in my cloak, the weaver¡¯s shuttles I had created way back, in Neyto, soared once again, my Ice Magic carrying them with relentless power. Each of my mental processes took over three of them, allowing me to use them as individual objects, instead of treating them as formations of blades. I had been forced to do that before, but right now, if I only focused on them with both mental processes, leaving our body to Lenore, I could fully control them.


    Using the flight-distance from me to the wolverine to accelerate, each of the blades forming an arch at different angles, almost like two sets of claws coming from both sides, I struck. The two blades that I had angled the highest, just slightly offset from each other and the centerline were coming from above, trying to punch into its spine from both sides, hoping to cripple it. If I managed to sever its spine, the fight would be over, simple as that. I doubted it would be that simple, but it had a chance to work.


    The next to blades, angled at forty-five degrees between the horizontal and vertical axis had a different objective, a much easier one. Those two were simply supposed to cut into its shoulders, trying to get at the sinews there, but even if I missed them, they would cause gaping flesh-wounds.


    And finally, coming in on the horizontal and from both sides, only slightly displaced from each other, my last two blades were trying to cut into its stomach, hoping to savage its insides. Again, I doubted it would work but the blades would cause damage, without being slowed down too much, allowing me to let them to mostly continue on their course, by tightening the loop they were on and coming from the front.


    My blades were only in the air for a second or two, before they all, almost simultaneously, reached their target. The two aimed for the spine deeply punched into the Wolverine, transferring all kinetic energy they had into my target, in a strong enough hit to knock it down. The two blades aiming for its shoulders surprised me, they punched through their target and, with an almost instinctive nudge from me, continued on and punched into its paws, causing additional damage before getting stuck in the ground beneath.


    And finally, the blades aiming at the stomach, they cut gouges into the wolverine, before continuing on, now with all my focus on them.


    I barely noticed Sigmir, Adra and Rai attacking the wolverine just as ruthless and reckless as I was, using the opening my blades had given them. But even with that opening, the wolverine wasn¡¯t going down without a fight and it wanted to take Sigmir with it, maybe out of sheer spite.


    Even bloodied and beaten as it was, it lurched forward, trying to smash into her and sink those vicious teeth into her soft flesh and that was something I just wouldn¡¯t have. If anyone was nibbling on Sigmir, it would be me.


    The two blades I was still controlling continued on their flight, their arc rapidly tightening even as they sped up, quickly completing a full circle around Sigmir. As I pumped as much Astral Power as I could manage into them, they started to shed a silvery light, slicing through the air on either side of Sigmir before both completed their flight, just as the wolverine had launched itself as Sigmir.


    For the first time, I felt a bit of a counter-force from my magic, the impact strong enough to feel it though the connection. I lost control of my blades from the conflicting forces but the wolverine was far worse off, its massive body getting knocked over from the impact.


    Sinking to my knees, I allowed the avatar-state between Lenore and me to fade, my breathing suddenly laboured. A quick glance to the bar that indicated my Astral Power told me what was going on, somehow, I had managed to blow though almost all of it with that last stunt.


    But the blue message that told me I had killed a Gluttonous Wolverine made more than up for the weariness I was feeling.

 Chapter 253

    Pushing away the exhaustion, I managed to stand, albeit a little wobbly. There were more messages, other than the one telling me that I had gained experience but for now, I ignored them, focusing on Sigmir who had fought the thing up-close and personal.


    ¡°Are you alright?¡± I asked Sigmir, who was looking a little worse for wear, with gashes marring her skin. Part of me already knew the answer, but I still felt a need to ask.


    ¡°Yes, I am.¡± she answered, as we all came together in the middle of the clearing, near the carcass of our enemy. Here, the noxious smell was even worse, making me gag and grab Sigmir to pull her away, so I would be able to treat her wounds.


    ¡°Adra, Rai, do you think there are parts of that thing that won¡¯t smell like that?¡± I asked, knowing that there was no way I would voluntarily eat any of the meat or wear gear crafted from its hide, not unless there was some way to miraculously remove their smell.


    ¡°What are you doing?¡± Sigmir asked softly, sounding amused while I dragged her away.


    ¡°Maybe the claws and teeth, those could be useful, but otherwise? I doubt it.¡± Adra answered my question, while I took another glance at Sigmir.


    ¡°Love, I want to treat your wounds, but not next to that thing, I need to be able to focus.¡± I explained, before speaking up, to address Adra. ¡°Can you get whatever looks useful? I¡¯ll treat Sigmir.¡±


    After taking a step or two into the woods, making sure that we were upwind from the carcass, to get rid of the smell, I pushed Sigmir down near a tree, so she could lean against it. Even the few moments of calm had allowed Lenore and me to regenerate a small amount of Astral Power in addition to the bit we had left after the fight.


    ¡°Relax and let me take care of you.¡± I ordered Sigmir, ignoring the slightly amused look on her face. Meanwhile, Ylva left her Hallow and flopped down next to Sigmir, which prompted me to take a good look. I realised that she had been hit during the melee, a deep gash dyeing her fur crimson.


    ¡°Love, please take off your gear so I can get a good look at your wounds while I take care of Ylva.¡± I ordered Sigmir, not feeling up to the full-body healing I normally used. I would have to treat each wound on its own, which required me to see and directly feel them.


    Centering myself, I placed my hands near Ylva¡¯s wound and reached out, allowing my magical senses to get a better idea of the wound. What I found almost made me sick to my stomach, again. There was some remnant of the wolverine¡¯s Astral Power inside the wound, still slowly eating away at Ylva¡¯s flesh, corroding or corrupting it.


    Feeling that this infection might turn into something seriously troublesome, I reached with my blood-magic, carefully searching and scanning to make sure I wasn¡¯t missing anything. Luckily, while I had expended a great deal of Astral Power, I hadn¡¯t needed to focus a great deal so I my mental state was good. I felt Lenore rise up within my mind after she had taken a bit of time to center herself after our use of the Avatar-State and she joined me in searching. It might have been a little early, both of us a little raw and sore from the joining, but I also knew that she¡¯d never risk Ylva¡¯s health by not doing everything she could, and maybe more, when healing her. I would have done the same for Sigmir, so I forced down the discomfort and shared my senses with her.


    ¡°You find them, I destroy them.¡± Lenore suggested after she had seen what was going on.


    ¡°That¡¯s fine. Do you think you can use the Ice-Astral Power to contain what you destroyed? Otherwise, I¡¯ll discard it as needed.¡± I accepted, while adding a bit of an idea of my own.


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    Her understanding resonated within me and i started to focus on my task, looking for the remnants of power from the Wolverine. I was still unsure what exactly the magic it had wielded had been, I could see traces of Blood Magic in it but there were key-differences that made me shudder. Even after its death, the magic was progressing, making me think of some sort of curse, which might mean some sort of combination element between Blood and Darkness, or it might be some sort of disease, acting like a magical cancer. In sheer terms of lethality, it was worse than anything I could come up with, so far.


    Each of us were over ten levels higher than it had been and we had fought it as a team, yet, without magical healing, I wasn¡¯t sure if Ylva would be able to make it. I saw her body fight back against the creeping influence, quickly tagging the locations and letting Lenore help. Which she did, in a way I hadn¡¯t quite expected. When I had first noticed the problem, I had expected a need to cleanse the corruption, excising the surrounding flesh and cutting it out, before healing the damage caused by that. But Lenore had obviously a different idea, wielding her Death-Magic with utmost caution and precision to carefully destroy the corruption while leaving most of the surrounding flesh unharmed. Once the corruption was dealt with, she used the Ice Astral Power I was naturally adding into our bond to freeze the parts and extract them.


    It was an impressive feat of magic, inspiring me to focus even harder, trying to make sure that I was getting each and every speck. But at the same time, I knew that we had to hurry, as Sigmir was most likely suffering from the same infection.


    Pulling my mind back from Ylva¡¯s body, I needed to blink a couple of times, just to reset my mind into a state that was suited to looking at the actual world, instead of using my Blood Magic to perceive Ylva¡¯s body. I felt Lenore¡¯s agreement, her understanding that we had helped Ylva to the point that she was out of danger. The last step of our job was to draw out the small Ice-crystals that contained the remnants of the magic and flesh Lenore had destroyed. I was still not sure what to call it, it seemed to be both, magical energy and flesh, just that the energy consumed and changed the flesh, to propagate itself. Like a disease.


    Looking at Sigmir, I felt myself start to worry, while her wounds were a lot smaller and superficial, only scratches, there were quite a few of them. With extra time to spread, it might become a problem. We had to hurry, despite the exhaustion both Lenore and I were starting to feel.


    ¡°Let me help you, love.¡± I gently told her, pressing a soft kiss to her lips before placing my hand on the first wound. What I found, made me exhale a sigh of relief, it seemed that the amount of magic inserted into the target was proportional to the size and depth of the wound. Just like before, I was searching while Lenore¡¯s mind and magic followed after me, making sure that the influence of the Wolverine was thoroughly banished from her flesh before we closed up the wounds. Again, we used our respective talents without holding back, hunting through her body, almost subconsciously switching from wound to wound, to make sure we didn¡¯t miss anything.


    It was grueling.


    While the individual wounds, as I had first felt, were less severe, the influence seemed to focus on spreading through her body as much as possible, almost as if there was a mind controlling it. Which was an incredibly discomforting and disturbing thought, a disease that acted with intelligent purpose? Not what I wanted to feel.


    Still, we had caught it early and carefully made sure to hunt down each and every speck, acting with speed and caution.


    Finally, I felt myself sack, the healing after the fight a lot harder and more intense than the fight itself, that had been a mental and magical cake-walk by comparison.


    ¡°I think we managed.¡± I told Sigmir, letting myself sink into her arms, while I felt Lenore leave her Hallow, hopping over to the resting Ylva.


    Sigmir propped me up a little, pulling me into an embrace that was comfortable for both of us and I started to speak, explain what had happened. Maybe I just needed to vent about the supposedly easy quest which had the potential to kill both her and Ylva.


    ¡°We knew that quest-difficulty and levels are not precise. Just remember the Devourer, it should have been suicide to even attempt its destruction. This one was the opposite, it should have been easy, trivial even, but death can lurk behind every corner.¡± Sigmir explained and pulled me a little closer.


    ¡°But I wouldn¡¯t give up even a single day. We just have to live each day to the fullest.¡± she suggested, before pulling my head up, to give me a more thorough kiss on the lips.

 Chapter 254

    ¡°So this was the important task the two of you had to attend?¡± Adra¡¯s amused voice broke into the pleasant haze my mind had been in, a haze caused by Sigmir¡¯s closeness and her kisses. It took me a second to realise just what she meant, how we had to look. Sigmir had taken off her armour and most of her clothes, leaving her dressed in undergarments and her cloak, leaning back against a tree with me straddling her lap while we were making out.


    Sure, I had healed her beforehand, but I had a feeling Adra was just amused by what she had interrupted, not truly peaved, so I answered in kind.


    ¡°Why, yes, could there be a more important task?¡± I asked back, pushing myself up a bit, so I was looking her straight in the eye.


    ¡°I hope you were cautious when dealing with the carcass, its magic was still active, poisoning Sigmir and Ylva. Lenore and I dealt with it.¡± I continued, which caused her grin to evaporate.


    ¡°I¡¯m not sure. My magic-senses are a lot less precise than yours, so I don¡¯t know if what I¡¯m feeling are remnants from the fight or if there¡¯s still something active back there.¡± she admitted, looking less amused by the moment.


    ¡°I¡¯ll take a look. Lenore, would you join me?¡± I said, as I was getting up and got the staff out, so that Lenore could use it. I had a feeling that we might need it before everything was said and done.


    ¡°Love, you can either rest for a few more minutes or get dressed and follow us.¡± I continued, before giving Sigmir a quick kiss and walking back to the clearing.


    The first thing I noticed was the smell, it was even worse than earlier, the normally clean smell of blood had a certain, fetid undertone to it, which made me wonder just what had been going on with the Wolverine before it had died. I had met undead with a better, healthier smell. Other than that, I noticed that there was no live around the carcass, the new sprouts and leaves had died off, leaving a detritus of death plants strewn around it. It looked almost as if the carcass was causing the plants to die. Adra and Rai had removed its claws and some of its teeth, placing them nearby but, more importantly, they had removed the two shuttles I had used to kill it. They had placed them, alongside the other four shuttles, in the shadow of a nearby tree. They were still bloody, but at least they hadn¡¯t been damaged by the remnant warmth of the carcass.


    As there was no way that I¡¯d try to use my senses to get a better idea of what was going on, not after the nausea the wolverine¡¯s tracks had caused, I asked Lenore to take a look and share her senses with me.


    It was a little disorienting, the vision of my left eye was suddenly replaced with the sight from her left eye, only that she was sitting on the staff that I was holding in my right hand. The perspective was just close enough to make my brain try to incorporate both into an image, as if they were coming from my eyes but that only managed to make me feel as if the ground was trying to slip away beneath me. I was just able to hold myself up with my staff and quickly closed my right eye, only taking in what Lenore was showing me, which was enough to make me wish for another bout of disorientation, just so I wouldn¡¯t have to see what she was seeing.


    The mana from the wolverine was still there, slowly seeping into the ground, causing effects similar to what I had witnessed in the bodies of Sigmir and Ylva. The carcass was somehow poisoning or corrupting the earth beneath. It wasn¡¯t the same corruption caused by miasma, it was different, yet with subtle similarities.


    ¡°Could you use you Blood Magic to produce a drop of Astral Power enriched blood?¡± Lenore asked me, her voice full of curiosity.


    Looking inside, I noticed that the time on Sigmir¡¯s lap had been enough to restore most of my Astral Power, so I sent back my assent before pulling out my Athame and pricking the tip of my finger. I had learned early that, if I used the Astral Power that was stored in my hair, I could create enriched Blood without the horrifying pain that having your literal life-force drawn out was causing, otherwise, I would have declined. I was still unwilling to use it regularly to store up some enriched blood, partially because of the Miasma and partially because I wasn¡¯t sure it wasn¡¯t harmful to me, I was just somewhat skittish in that regard.


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    With a flick of my finger and a bit of magic, the drop containing a small dose of Astral Power sailed over to the wolverine, lading in one of the grievous wounds we had cut into it. The effect of the blood was a lot more obvious in Lenore¡¯s sight, the activity in the carcass suddenly skyrocketing as if someone had poured fuel onto a fire. But the carcass itself remained dead, making me wonder if it was some sort of zombification.


    ¡°We harvest and purify some of that, using it as a weapon, like a poison.¡± Lenore suggested, causing my brain to halt for a moment. Her mental voice sounded a little strange as she suggested it, so I thought about it. For another moment. My gut-reflex wasn¡¯t just to say no, but to say Hell no. Just looking at the stuff was giving me the creeps and carrying it with us would make me almost certainly sick. It might have been useful, but the sheer revulsion I was feeling convinced me that it was a bad idea.


    ¡°No. Somehow, I think that¡¯s a bridge too far.¡± I rejected her idea and felt relief flood through our bond, making it obvious that she just had wanted to suggest it before I came up with the idea myself and talked myself into it.


    ¡°How do we get rid of it?¡± I asked, not wanting to let the carcass rot as it was, poisoning the soil and surrounding area.


    ¡°Against the corruption in their bodies, my Death Magic worked quite well. It might work here as well.¡± Lenore suggested, sending an image of her idea to me. It looked quite doable to me, so I agreed and centered myself, to do my part of the casting. It wasn¡¯t a simple spell, another combination of multiple elements, two from each of us. Complicated wasn¡¯t quite doing it justice, but I had a feeling it was good training. At the same time, I wondered if some sort of priest or cleric would be able to deal with the stuff a lot easier, just from other games I had played in the past. Cleansing corruption and stuff like that was normally the job of clerics, priests and paladins, the servants of some god or a ¡°divine light¡± type of thing. Titania, the character I had played before coming to Mundus, would have been able to cleanse it with a single spell, I thought slightly nostalgic.


    Shaking off those thoughts, I focused on my part of the spell-casting. What she had in mind was a spell that essentially combined two different, albeit simple, spells from me with one larger, more complex spell from her to create what she had in mind.


    First, I created a small magic formation, purely one of ice and kept it going as I slowly channelled Astral Power into it, causing a stream of cold wind, carrying small but razor-sharp shards of ice with it. Once I had that going, I managed to split off enough of my concentration to create a second spell within the larger framework of Lenore¡¯s spell, adding the runes of magic and devouring to her spell of wind and death.


    I felt my runes slide into place, getting accepted and incorporated into her casting and the wind streaming from the formation in front of the crystal changed. There were strange black shadows moving in the wind, adding an unreal quantity to it. They looked like smoke but not, like a trick of the eye but I knew very well that what I was seeing was real. There was a small part of my mind that made a mental note to look at the effect more closely, it seemed that there was a good synergy.


    But I had my job to do, slowly, I moved the already created and channelling formation into the framework of the small, adding the razor-ice shards to the wind, creating a spell that was greater than the sum of its parts. And a lot more complicated.


    Both, Lenore and I were needed to control what we were doing, Lenore kept the spell going, while I used the connection we shared and the Ice and Coldness within the spell to guide it, causing it to swirl around the carcass, the razor-ice and the sharp wind slowly grinding it to dust while the combination of death and darkness-magic destroyed the remaining essence.


    It took far longer to grind the carcass down than it had taken to kill the Wolverine, long enough to cause me to slip into a trance state where I was barely aware of the world around me.


    But after a good twenty minutes, I noticed that we were grinding the dead soil, digging a bit of a hole. Nothing was left of the carcass, only frozen dust that we scattered with a tired gesture.


    ¡°We can leave now.¡± I told the others, feeling weary to the bone.


    But a short glimpse to my notifications helped to cheer me up.


    My Ice-Magic had gone up to seventy-nine, my Blood Magic to fifty-eight, my Darkness-Rune Mastery to sixty-eight, my Darkness Magic to 50 and my Astral Meditation to fifty-two.


    In addition, a short glimpse to my experience-bar told me that I might just get the next level when we turned in the quest. The gains made the exhaustion I was feeling a great deal more bearable.

 Chapter 255

    We made our way back to the village without too much trouble, Adra and Lenore were very good when it came to navigating, good enough that I had once jokingly asked Lenore if she was part pidgeon, causing her to go off a rant to my great amusement. It took both of us a moment to realise that the rant had been partially caused by my memories and prejudices against pigeons, the idea that they were akin to flying rats, something completely alien to Lenore. It was quite interesting just how much we influenced the other, simply due to the close proximity in our shared mental realm. At the same time, I wondered when I would start to preen. But, if I was honest, I was aware that Lenore and her love of flying had influenced me, that a part of me wanted to fly, only that I was unable to do so. But I would learn, would find a way, even if I had to subdue a dragon to serve as my mount. If not in the beta, I would have enough time to achieve that once the game was officially released.


    On the way back, Adra continued to needle Sigmir and me with the scene she had witnessed, causing Rai to blush quite a bit with her antics. But at the same time, she managed to make all of us laugh, not allowing me to dwell on the nauseating effect its magic had had on me. For that, I was quite grateful and the few comments that managed to make Sigmir blush almost as red as Rai made her simply look cute. And a cute Sigmir was one I rarely saw, fierce, beautiful, strong, those were adjectives that applied to her on a daily basis, but cute? That was a lot less common. So, I was grateful, even if I blushed just as bad from time to time.


    Sadly, the weather showed that it was starting to be spring and it first started to drizzle before turning into a full-blown deluge, drenching all of us in water.


    We got back to Koswanow in the late afternoon and I instantly felt that something was different about the town, a slight change in the air, like a bad smell. Finding out where it came from only took a few minutes once we were inside the walls, there was a small group of centaurs who had decided to rest in town. Part of me wanted to simply move on, to reduce the exposure we had to the centaurs as much as possible, but another part of me was defiant. Why should we be forced to move on, to forgo the rest and experience we had earned, just because they were here? And would we be forced to avoid civilisation until we had crossed the area claimed by the centaurs? I wasn¡¯t happy with either of those idea.


    A quick talk with Lenore and Ylva had both of them retreat into their Hallows, sure, the Sablekin had seen them, but I wasn¡¯t sure if they would mention them. On the other hand, Ylva might cause some raised eyebrows, her colour reminiscent of the wolves the centaurs had problems with further north, if that information had been spread.


    In a way, the exposure to the centaurs now served as a test, whether we would be safe to enter a larger centaur-camp, maybe even a city. It was an idea similar to the one that had us talking to their patrols when we had seen them on the road, controlled exposure, without moving into the lion¡¯s den. Or the horse¡¯s stable, so to speak.


    Once again, I decided that I would keep myself in the back, merely watching and having Adra take the lead. She was simply a lot better when it came to talking to people, with her ability to put people at ease. On the other hand, I still had problems talking to people normally, something not helped by the effect of the special abilities I had taken in the beginning.


    I watched as Adra mostly ignored the centaurs as we walked up, merely giving them a greeting but no further engagement. I noticed that some of them looked at us with a bit of annoyance in their eyes but, as Adra had, I ignored them, as if they were without consequence. When we got to Stelur¡¯s house, we knocked and were quickly asked in. Before walking in, I used my magic to freeze the water in our clothes into tiny ice-crystals using the diamond dust-rune, before drawing them out into small clouds. The others started to shiver from the sudden cold, but at least, they were dry and could quickly warm up inside.


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    There, I was treated to the funny image of a centaur, easily a head taller than Sigmir, standing in a room made for a being slightly taller than myself. I wasn¡¯t sure whether she had to slouch, but she looked quite¡­ framed, as if she was about to bash her head against the ceiling. A mischievous part of me wanted to spook her, just to check if her reaction to being spooked was the same as a horses might be - rearing up on their hind-legs to kick with their front-legs before bolting away. But no, centaur-baiting was not part of our plans, fun though it might be.


    ¡°Greetings, Stelur. As promised yesterday, we took care of your problem. Would you mind putting us up for another night?¡± Adra greeted the owner of the house right away, without showing interest in the centaur.


    ¡°Greetings, Adra. I thank you and no, I wouldn''t mind. The village has quite a few guests these days.¡± he answered and a blue screen appeared, telling me that the wolverine-hunting quest was completed and I had gained a chunk of EXP, enough to push me to level sixty-seven.


    ¡°But first, let me introduce you to Captain Khulan, she¡¯s the leader of the centaurs that grace our village with their presence.¡± he introduced the captain and, for the life of me, I was unable to hear any sarcasm in his voice, despite the fact that they were, in effect, invading his home and annexing the land.


    ¡°Captain Khulan, these are a few adventurers from the north, who happened to stop in the village and have done a service for us. Adra, Rai, Morgana and Sigmir, unless my memory has left me.¡± he gestured to each of us in turn and we all gave a semi-polite nod to the captain.


    ¡°Ah, Adventurers, are you? Greetings.¡± she looked us over and, on a whim, I stretched my magic into the shadows beneath us, extending the trick I had learned to block the Observe-skill to all of us. Just as I had expected, I felt the skill activate and gently blocked it, without adding any sting to it.


    ¡°We like our privacy.¡± I admonished the Captain, without elaborating further. She raised an eyebrow, but otherwise, she didn¡¯t make an issue of it. I was quite happy about that as, if she had continued to try, I doubted that I would have been able to keep her from looking at our information, not without being on guard for the rest of the evening and maybe even throughout the night. I considered returning the favour but, after a moment, decided against it, feeling it a little too provocative.


    Adra, maybe worrying that I was about to do something reckless, engaged the captain in a conversation, drawing her away from the rest of us. Stelur gestured for us to take a seat at the hearth, before following the two of them.


    ¡°Why do you think they were so annoyed to see us?¡± Sigmir asked, speaking softly so only I could hear. It was easy for her to do so, as I had, once again, taken a seat on her lap, snuggling up to her.


    ¡°It might just be some sort of power-play. At the end of the day, what do they gain from controlling an empty area? Unless they collect taxes or something like that, they only spend resources, without a whole lot to show for it. But if they want to collect taxes, they need to provide something for the people, or there would be resentment. Sure, it would be possible to claim that they protect them from invaders from the north, or something along those lines, but for that to make sense, there would have to be a threat of invasion. Nothing we have seen there even hints at such a threat.¡± I began to explain, trying to make connections to knowledge from the real world. Sure, not all of it would apply to Mundus but there should be some understandable basis, at least in my opinion.


    ¡°And what does that have to do with us?¡± Sigmir continued, not quite seeing the connection.


    ¡°The people here had a problem, the wolverine. If the centaurs had been here and solved the problem, they would have gained goodwill and demonstrated that they are here to help the people. We have taken that chance away from them, so there might be resentment. Or it might be something completely different, maybe they just don¡¯t like two-legged beings. Who knows.¡± I explained, not wanting my possibly overthinking answer to confuse Sigmir.

 Chapter 256

    Dinner at Stelur¡¯s was a strange mix of tension and boredom, Adra did her best to keep the captain of the Centaurs, the only one of them in attendance, occupied, while the captain made thinly veiled attempts to get more information on us. Mostly she wanted to know where we came from and about our plans, I felt it was less about us in specific and more about a relatively powerful, armed group moving through their newly claimed territory.


    But I wondered about them, from everything I had seen in Mundus, the parts of the population that turned adventurer seemed to be very mobile, enjoying their freedom to roam. It might even be a motivation to become an adventurer, a desire to move beyond the small town you grew up in, to see the world. So, would a tribe, kingdom or whatever the entity supporting the centaur-military called itself be so suspicious about a common occurrence? I just didn¡¯t know and had a feeling that if I tried to sound out the captain, she would be able to gain more information from my questions and the way I asked than vice-versa. Thus, I kept quiet and let Adra do her thing.


    What I did do, was silently amuse myself about the way the captain was sitting and moving, her body clearly not suited to use the furniture made by the sablekin. I even managed to give Rai an assignment, to study the captain¡¯s movement and compare it to his knowledge of centaur-anatomy, looking for further weaknesses. I did the same, taking note of the movements she did with ease, those that seemed to be a little uncomfortable and so on. It allowed me to add more into my mental database on the various species and their limitations, which was a worthwhile study.


    For the rest of the evening, after dinner, I mostly kept quiet and stayed in Sigmir¡¯s shadow, trying to seem as unimportant and boring as possible. In truth, I was using the centaurs as involuntary test-subjects for experiments with scrying, attempting to shift my viewpoint without the need for a large, obviously visible, scrying window. What I wanted was an equivalent to my ability to share Lenore¡¯s eyesight, allowing me to peek out of any shadow I wanted, as my ultimate goal. For now, I would be happy to reduce the size of my scrying window to small, black patch in front of my eye, while using a small magical construct of Darkness-Magic, similar to the construct I had used to help Lenore with her scouting, to shift my viewpoint.


    Sadly, their conversations were as either as benign as could be, or the raunchous sort that one might expect from the locker-room of a gym, or, as it turned out, the tent of a few young centaurs. The part of their conversation that I overheard gave me a sudden desire to go out there and geld them, one after the other, with their friends watching. It seemed that humanoid females were partially desirable, at least the upper body parts of them, and the target of their interest was my Sigmir. Apparently, physical fitness and strength were what made someone beautiful in their mind, something my Sigmir had in spades, even if they lamented that she was lacking in the lower-body departement.


    At that point, my scrying was interrupted by Sigmir, who gave me a squeeze to get my attention before kissing me.


    ¡°What brought that on?¡± I asked, quite curious. ¡°Not that I¡¯m complaining, mind you.¡± I added, to make sure she didn¡¯t misunderstand.


    ¡°You were getting a little scary. Not sure what you were doing, but some of your Astral Power was leaking out, dropping the temperature and making things dark around you. I don¡¯t think anyone but me noticed, so I got your attention.¡± she explained, making me blush a little. It seemed as if my desire to do violence on the centaurs had caused my magic to react, hinting at a link between my emotions and my magic. That magic wasn¡¯t just something I consciously called upon to change the world but that it might react simply due to me considering something. A link in the subconscious, maybe? It warranted further investigation, but not now, not while the centaurs were nearby.


    ¡°Thank you, love.¡± I gave her a quick kiss, before explaining in a whisper what had happened. She blushed a pretty shade of red while getting indignant about the centaurs, wanting to go out there and introduce them to her Lok¡¯nar. I had to smile at that and now it was on me to prevent her from doing something rash, even if a small part of me wanted nothing more than to join her in educating the centaurs. The easiest and most enjoyable way to distract her was, quite obviously, placing myself on her lap, snuggling up to her and giving her kisses. Some tasks are a great sacrifice, but someone had to accomplish them anyway¡­


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    The next morning, we quickly left the settlement and the centaurs behind, using the fact that twenty centaurs needed more time to get ready and start moving than the five of us. I even used my magic to boost my speed, making sure that we would be long gone by the time they started to move. Lenore was once again taking joy in the warmer air, flying overhead, making sure that we would have some warning if there were enemies coming at us.


    We kept going until it was time for a midday rest and I used the time to ask Adra what she had learned from the captain.


    Sadly, it seemed as if the captain had been quite adept at dodging questions, so there was little she actually had found out, mostly the captain had talked about the greatness of the centaur-clan, the strength of their leader and the vastness of their territory. Adra was quite sure that the captain had been after one of two things, either to recruit us or to make us leave their territory as soon as possible.


    Her reasoning for that was that, while the captain had mentioned the strength of their clan quite a few times, she had also added that it had a system for beings of other races to join in. When Adra explained about their system of governance, essentially a military dictatorship, with the dictator being chosen according to a complex system of personal strength and what amounted to family-connections within the clan, I was starting to laugh. It was quite obvious, just from hearing her explanation, that the system was made to make sure that only centaurs would ever be able to become the warlord, while others who joined them would always be subordinates. Those were the parts that made her think she wanted to recruit us.


    On the other hand, she also mentioned that the centaur-territory was well patrolled and people relied on those patrols to solve problems, that adventurers were simply not needed and if we were to cause trouble, we would see ourselves hunted down by their patrols. It made me worry a bit, if they had informations on us, from the assistance we had provided to the wolves further north, we would be prime targets to be hunted down. If I thought about the world like a video-game, it would make sense that reputation-gains on one faction, the wolves in this case, automatically reduced the reputation with their enemies, which would allow the centaurs to spot us out. But if I thought of Mundus as a living world, which seemed to be the intention of the developers, then, without some sort of magic trickery, there were few ways to link us with the earlier trouble. I just didn¡¯t know which applied and it worried me a great deal.


    ¡°We should take off the trinkets we got from the wolves, those that mark us as their friends. Wearing them feels right but it is simply a risk I don¡¯t want to take. Additionally, we might want to hide that last magic bag from the patrol, I know I said it should be alright, but somehow, I¡¯m starting to get worried.¡± I told the others, trying to get rid of the worry twisting my guts.


    Luckily, the others seemed to mirror my thoughts on those matters, especially knowing that we would be within the newly claimed centaur territory for a week, if we continued to hurry on the old imperial road.


    Once we had crossed that stretch of land, we would be within territory contested by the centaurs, a few beastman-tribes and some orc-clans. At least if we continued to head straight west, if we were to go south, we would stay within their territory for weeks, crossing hundreds of kilometers in the process.


    The territory we were on was newly claimed, from what Adra had gathered, the centaurs had pushed North quite recently, pushing the boundaries of their old territory. Again, it made me wonder how it was connected to the appearance of Travellers in this world, if there was one who had joined the centaur military, adding their earthly perspective, organising and driving them to that push. If so, that Traveller was very cautious, as I hadn¡¯t heard anything hinting at such a player. Which, with the way the highlight-reels worked, would be quite the achievement. Unless I was missing information. And I had a feeling, that just that was the case.

 Chapter 257

    If I ever wanted to know what a pretzel felt like, I now had the beginning of an idea. Over the last week, while we had moved through centaur-territory in Mundus, I had exited the pod every day, to perform my exercise, knowing that Mrs Wu would expect me to do my homework. When I set out to go to the gym, I had been quite confident, feeling more flexible than ever before and quite fit, ready to take on the world.


    Mrs Wu had disabused me of that idea within a few minutes, once I had been warmed up. It would have been better if my mind had been able to brush off my failure to deliver upon her demands by thinking that only professional contortionists or maybe someone born with hyperextending joints was able to do the movements and stretches I was supposed to do. But, given that she, a woman definitely in her sixties, maybe even in her seventies, was demonstrating them to me, moving without any obvious discomfort, it just shattered any excuse I could think of. And so, I dug in and tried harder, pushing myself to the limit of my ability and a little past, only stopping when the pain was pronounced enough to drive the point home that pain was the indicator that I was damaging my body.


    Another thing the lesson drove home just how sculpted the elderly Mrs Wu actually was. My mind supplied, and quickly rejected, the term ripped, her muscles clearly defined in a way that one normally associated with serious gymnasts and body-builders, not friendly, gentle Grandmothers. I also noticed that dear Mrs Wu had quite a few scars that made me wonder where she got them. I wasn¡¯t about to ask, so I kept my peace and remained quit.


    ¡°Well done, Ms Jacobs. You came further than I expected today. Continue with your exercises for the week and I¡¯ll give you something to read as well. It will add a bit of theoretical foundation for next week when the real training starts.¡± Mrs Wu told me with a smile as I was lying wiped out on the map. Part of me wanted to call her a robot and question her humanity but there was a slight sheen of sweat on her forehead. That ruled out robot or lizard-person, unless their human disguise was quite advanced.


    After taking a few more deep breaths, managing to regulate my breathing into a state that provided enough oxygen while also allowing me to talk, I thanked her before tensing my muscles to hop back onto my feet in a smooth motion. It was a fun trick and quite easy compared to the insane contortions she had me doing minutes before.


    ¡°You said there was something you wanted me to read?¡± I asked, getting a grin in return. She took me to their office and handed me what looked like a binder full of loose paper. A closer look revealed that the pages were filled with Mrs Wu¡¯s neat handwriting, I had seen it a few times around the gym. I was a little perplexed, just at a guess, there were over a hundred pages which told me of a rather significant time investment. Curious, I asked her about it and she only smiled and told me, it was merely the translation of a text in her native tongue. I was supposed to read it and consider what it spoke of, that she¡¯d ask me a few questions about it the next week and my training would progress from there.


    It felt a little out-there and strange but I had been interested in what she had to teach, so I made plans to carefully read the text over the next week and try to comprehend it as best as I could.


    After taking a shower, it was clearly necessary before I ventured out into public again, I took the bus back to do some shopping and while sitting in the bus, I began to read. The first page mostly talked about breathing exercises, similar to what I had been taught before, but coached in a more mystic language, speaking about becoming one with the Universe. I had to chuckle at that, thinking of Mundus and the experience of delving into the Astral River, wondering if the game-developers had modeled their world after similar mystic texts and ideas, to add some flavour. It certainly felt like it and I decided to try the breathing exercise in Mundus, just to see what would happen.


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    In the store, I grabbed the few things I had on my list, quickly making my way to the cashier when a rather large guy suddenly stepped into my path. I had been a little lost in thought so his sudden appearance spooked me quite a bit. What spooked me more were my actions, before I had consciously processed what was happening, my body had lowered its center of gravity, placed my legs in a stable footing, allowing me to either advance or dodge at a moments notice and my right arm had moved to the small of my back, where Morgana was wearing her blades, hidden under her cloak.


    At that point, my conscious mind caught up to the reflex my body had apparently conditioned, stopping my movement and turning my battle-ready state into a slightly awkward back-step so the guy could easily move past. I carefully avoided taking a closer look at him feeling strange enough about my reaction so that I didn¡¯t want to exacerbate the feeling by confirming that he had seen me acting as if I was about to attack him or be attacked by him.


    I paid for my purchases and made my way back to the bus, carefully making sure to pay attention to my surroundings while, at the same time, thinking about the way I had reacted a few minutes prior. While there was a part of me that wanted to ignore the obvious conclusion, that the time spend in Road to Purgatory, or rather the mental processes, the conditioned reflexes and maybe even the muscle memory, were carrying over into the real world. That was the obvious conclusion and it made me a little uncomfortable.


    If I looked at it objectively, I was addicted to the game, the mere idea to leave Sigmir behind, even knowing that our time together was limited by virtue of it being a beta, made me feel bad enough to instantly, almost reflexively banish the idea from my head. And just as I banished the idea, a smaller voice added that it was only for the year of Beta, that afterwards, I would get things under control. That I felt the need to play in order to continue the journey I had started with the others.


    In order to get rid of the discomfort caused by my thoughts, I distracted myself, reading the text I had been given. The pages after the breathing-exercises spoke about meditation, about different ways to empty your mind and feel the world within and without. Again, the explanations felt rather mystical but at least the mental aspect was something less out there, something I might try, if only to occupy my mind. But before I could try, not that I felt a bus was the right way to experiment with techniques to remove yourself from your surroundings to direct your focus inward, the bus reached the stop near my apartment.


    After taking the elevator up, I took a few moments to look out of the window, taking in the view. It wasn¡¯t spectacular but it was mine, just for me. Feeling a little hungry after the strenuous exercise, I tossed some veggies and rice into a pan before adding water and putting it on the heat. It would take a bit of time before turning into a simple risotto-like dish, giving me time to do something else. Like some gentle stretching, to work out the kinks and some of the soreness that Mrs Wu had driven into my muscles.


    By the time my food was cooked, I felt a lot better about myself and sat down to eat, pulling up the Road to Purgatory-Forum on my wall-screen. My search today was, once again, on centaurs. While probability almost assured that there were a couple of Travellers in the Centaur-clan, I wanted to get as much of a picture as I could. Another part of me wondered about the ability to play a centaur, the disconnection between the ingame-avatar¡¯s body and the real-world body would be tremendous. I wasn¡¯t sure I would be able to cope with suddenly having two extra limbs and having my lower body turned horse. It seemed so utterly alien to me that my mind just recoiled. But at the same time, the idea to use ¡®magic¡¯ to manipulate a half-dozen carefully crafted and sharpened knives made out of magical Ice, that seemed to be just natural to me.


    Shaking my head at the fact that my mind found magic easily acceptable and was quite happy to use it while the idea to have extra limbs was causing quite a bit of discomfort, I focused on my food. Part of me wondered what it would be like to play as the opposite sex but as soon as I tried to picture it, I pushed the idea away. No, I was quite happy to have an avatar very close to my physical body, even with magic added to the mix.

 Chapter 258

    When I got back to Mundus, it was another late morning for our party. The others had obviously been up for a bit and Adra had convinced Ylva and Sigmir to go out hunting with her. It was a good idea, while we had enough supplies to last us a while, the dried jerky and hard tack were obviously made to make them last, not to make them taste good. I was reasonably sure that there was cardboard that was more edible, at least easier to eat and potentially more tasty as well.


    It also meant that Rai was the only one left in the area when I got back. They had packed up the camp around me, reducing the footprint we were having as much as possible. We had decided that we would treat the centaurs as hostile forces, avoiding them as much as possible, just in case they actually wanted to do us harm.


    ¡°Rai, good morning. Did you do your forms already?¡± I asked, after getting up and stretching, working out the few kinks my body had developed over the night.


    ¡°Good morning, Master. No, not yet. I¡¯ve had a strange feeling when experimenting with my shadow-shift and have been trying to make sense of it. Without success, so far, but I¡¯ll keep trying.¡± he answered, standing up as he got the idea that I wanted him to move.


    ¡°Good. Come, I¡¯ve got a few new forms for us to train.¡± I told him and began to warm up, not wanting to damage myself needlessly. Rai joined in, following me through a series of easy stretches and exercises, designed to limber the body for what was to come. From the warm-up, I went into the easiest series of stretches Mrs. Wu had shown me. It was still something I had to work on with my physical body, but not to the point that I¡¯d hurt myself if I did them carefully. Rai watched for a moment, before starting to copy me, or at least he was trying to. It turned out that, while he was faster and stronger than the body I had outside of Mundus and even slightly more agile than my Avatar was, he was not as flexible.


    It made me wonder if there were hidden attributes, of if I would be able to train my Avatar¡¯s flexibility and how Pantheon Entertainment was handling that. I doubted they¡¯d give out attributes for normal training, not with the slim amount one got from levelling up. I also had to consider that I had never gained a single point, despite the training I had been doing with Sigmir, Adra and Rai on a regular basis, not to mention the fact that we¡¯d been travelling by foot for months, which should increase either Endurance or Agility, depending how you measured things like that. There was an advantage to training, one I hadn¡¯t just observed when looking at myself but also when looking at Rai and his progress since I had started training him.


    But there was no reflection of that in the Attributes shown in the character-screen, making me wonder if there was any way to view those ¡®hidden¡¯ stats. They had to exist, in order for the game to function as it did, at least according to everything I knew about computers and computing.


    I had to hide a grin when Rai started to struggle with the movements, trying his best to keep up, but somewhat failing. It made me wonder if I was enjoying seeing him suffer in a strange sort of retaliation for the suffering Mrs. Wu had put me through, or if maybe the old adage that misery loves company was proving true once again.


    I let him struggle for some time, moving through the exercises which slowly became strenuous to me, while watching him move, before stopping and actually teaching him, instead of simply letting him flounder around, trying to copy me and suffering for it. Some of the movements, I had to adapt on the fly for his different physiology, not just because he was a beastman with a different body-structure but also because he was male, with all the differences that made in a body.


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    We continued a little longer, before I let him move on to the normal form-training he was doing every day, practising the basics for fighting with two blades, the movements that had to be trained to a level that you could do them in your sleep. I had been doing them for years and still went through the basic forms every day, just to keep myself sharp.


    But for now, I continued the strange forms Mrs. Wu had shown me, even if the progress I made with my Avatar didn¡¯t translate into higher flexibility in the real world, knowing how it felt and how to move in the form, those mental experiences would translate over. Knowing that there was no way my normal armour would stretch in the ways needed for those movements, I considered for a moment how to make do. The solutions seemed to both be obvious and another useful way to train myself, I created a thin layer of opaque ice, right around my body, using the ¡°diamond dust¡±-rune. Or maybe calling it Ice would be wrong, the tiny particles of diamond dust only adhered to each other while keeping their relative positions. It posed less resistance to me, moving than being in water, while keeping me from being naked. The only downside was that even I felt a little chilly wearing it, but I had a feeling that once I was moving through the strenuous forms, I would warm up quite quickly.


    I wondered if some of the forms had an actual purpose, other than making someone suffer, I couldn¡¯t divine a reason why I would ever want to support my body on one arm behind my back while having both feet behind my head. Other than maybe some very strange and rather unique sex-acts but it felt like a lot of effort for such flimsy reasons. It was something I had been unable to do in the real world, but on Mundus, it seemed that my strengthened body allowed me to do so, causing Rai to stop in his movements, looking at me with a mix of fear and wonder. Maybe he was afraid that I¡¯d ask him to join me in those exercises, a feeling I could fully understand.


    ¡°That looks¡­¡± I heard Adra¡¯s voice from nearby, out of my sight. ¡°interesting.¡± she finished, obviously at a loss for better words. I decided to show off a bit, even if I needed to use magic for it, and manipulated the ¡°diamond dust¡±-shell I was wearing while pushing off with my arm, allowing me to exert a lot more force than physiologically possible from my current position. It allowed me to launch myself up, apparently just using the arm behind my back, high enough to unfurl my legs from behind my head and land on my feet without obvious effort. The disbelieving look on their faces, especially of Rai and Adra, was well worth the effort, even if I deliberately affected a nonchalant air. Sigmir, on the other hand, had a quite different look on her face, one that sent just the right shivers down my body, shivers that had nothing to do with the cold material around me. Maybe there was a point to the exercises after all.


    The others had managed to bring down a rather large hog and had yet to fully process it. Just from looking at the state of the carcass, I knew that we¡¯d be here for an hour or two, giving me more than enough time to finish my exercises and relax afterwards. But first, I wanted to see how far Rai had progressed with his Bladework.


    After taking a moment to dismiss the shell of diamond dust around me, I dressed in my usual armour. When I wrapped the cloak with my frozen shuttles around me, I noticed that it was getting a little warm, making me realise that unless I wanted to go around naked, I¡¯d have to start looking into some lighter clothes. What I was wearing had served me quite well in the cold temperatures of the North but the combination of travelling south-west and the change of seasons conspired into making me sweat.


    But when I started thinking about lighter clothes, I quickly realised that just lighter clothes wouldn¡¯t be sufficient, at least not once spring was taking hold. At that point, I¡¯d likely feel as if I was in a hot desert, which was a rather unpleasant idea. I¡¯d have to look into either enchanting my clothes or maybe some sort of permanent cooling-spell, maybe some sort of icy cold mist that I could wrap around me, or I¡¯d be in for a very unpleasant time. Or I might have to convince the others to travel during the night, that would at least spare me the heat of the sun.


    Shaking my head, I walked back to Rai, drawing my blades as I went.


    ¡°Come, Student, show me what you¡¯ve got.¡± I challenged, grinning as he took up his stance, before launching myself at him.

 Chapter 259

    It was about noon when we finally continued on our way. Cutting apart the hog had taken more time than I had thought, even if we had reduced the time needed to make the meat last by quite a bit using the simple expedient of me, freezing the meat using magic. Who needed electric refrigeration, if you could simply wave your hand and cool something far beneath freezing? It made me wonder how the relatively ready availability of refrigeration would have changed history. I had once heard that a large part of early european trade was for spice, to mask the taste of improperly refrigerated meat but with Ice-Magic, there wouldn¡¯t be such a thing, reducing the impetus, which would logically reduce the spread of ideas and knowledge even further. It was an interesting thought-experiment and, once we were on the road, I spent a bit of time thinking about it.


    ¡°There¡¯s a group coming down the road.¡± Lenore told me over our connection. She was, once again, out scouting, making sure that we didn¡¯t run into a group of centaurs.


    ¡°Centaurs?¡± I asked back, while warning the others about the possible danger.


    ¡°No, I think they are merchants.¡± she answered, adding what she was seeing. I agreed with her, it wasn¡¯t a centaur-patrol and judging by the fact that they had multiple carts, all drawn by oxen, I had to agree with her. I also noted that there were armed guards around the wagons, some of them mounted on horses, others simply moving by foot.


    After a moment of discussion, we decided that meeting them shouldn¡¯t be a problem. In addition, I wasn¡¯t certain that they hadn¡¯t spotted us, if I had ways to scout ahead unseen, who knew if they had similar tricks up their sleeves. If they had, suddenly vanishing into the woods would make us look like a group of bandits and might cause them to attack us preemptively.


    Once again, Adra moved to the front, turning herself into her normal form instead of her goat-like form. Or rather, I might call it her form a Pronghorn, at least that was the closest animal I had found when I had done some research. It made me wonder just how a dryad from her grove had seen such an animal, normally only native to North America, or Aletoma as it was called on Mundus. Sadly, Adra herself had no idea how it came to be.


    We continued at a sedate pace and it only took us a few minutes until the caravan got into view and it was obvious that they had spotted us. Lenore also alerted me that there were two people, most likely scouts, in the woods to our right, armed but not looking as if they were ready to strike. One of the escort-riders sped up, quickly closing the remaining gap before slowly down early enough to not seem threatening. It was a curious dance, a projection of strength and vigilance without trying to look threatening. I also noticed that Adra had her spear in hand, the strange, crystalline wood giving off a dangerous vibe while Sigmir had her shield in hand but not her axe.


    ¡°Hail, Travellers!¡± shouted the rider, waiting for Adra to return the greeting before approaching further.


    I kept part of my attention on the images shown to me by Lenore, who was using her special sight to track the humanoids through the forest, making sure that the rider wasn¡¯t some sort of distraction. Meanwhile, the rider and Adra had exchanged introductions, I had acknowledged mine with a simple nod, not caring that I might seem impolite. I had almost lost Lenore to a bandit-ambush once, I wasn¡¯t about to let my guard down when there might be enemies in the trees.


    Adra and the rider, an orc named Korlem, started chatting about the conditions of the road ahead, for either party and the problems one might face while travelling. I noticed that the beings hidden in the forest seemed to relax, no longer keeping hidden but continuing on their way to scout further ahead. When Adra asked about the next towns ahead, we were told that there were a few villages but that the next real town was still a long way off.


    In turn, Adra told the orc about the Ankeghs that had attacked us during our travels on the windswept plains. She even mentioned the trouble we had left behind in Kolyug when he asked about the town, obviously knowing about it. When he heard about it, he merely grumbled, saying that Kolyug had withstood everything thrown at its walls for generations, that the trolls living there would still be there when the world came to an end. It seemed that the town was more than just a little famous, a singular, civilised outpost in the hostile north, the target for most caravans. If we had got there in the spring or summer, not at the end of winter, we would have seen a bountiful trading hub, at least if we had spent more time there.


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    Finally, Adra asked about potential trouble on the road ahead for us, complaining about the centaurs heavy-handed attitude with us. When he heard that, Korlem laughed, waving it off as a military officer throwing their weight around. From what he said, there were always some groups that tried to intimidate individual adventurers and merchants but once we got to civilisation, we should talk to the Guild there, report on what had happened. Few groups wanted to actually tangle with the Guilds, something we had heard before.


    Without really thinking, I spoke up and asked why the Guilds had that much power, if there was no king or emperor who curbed them. He looked at me for a moment, before raising an eyebrow, asking, ¡°Oh, you are a Traveller, not just travelling, right?¡±


    ¡°Yes, why?¡± confirmed it, still a little confused.


    ¡°Most people would know that, unless they were raised outside of civilisation.¡± he stopped and looked the four of us over, not just me, before shrugging and explaining, ¡°There was an emperor once, long ago. But his empire has crumbled and merely relics of a bygone age remain. This road, for one, was built by them.¡±


    ¡°And for the power of the Guilds, well, it is simple. The merchants are the ones who trade over long distances, if you want something that can¡¯t be made in your clan, tribe or village, whatever you call your community, you will deal with a member of the Merchant¡¯s Guild. If you try to control what they do, they simply don¡¯t come into that territory. Through them, we, the Adventurer¡¯s Guild have our place secured as well, the Guild organises trustworthy escorts for the merchants, without that, they¡¯d have to organise their own, standing force. Can you imagine how much that would cost?¡± he explained, before continuing with a sly grin.


    ¡°Another service, other than trading, that the Merchant''s Guild provides is money. Not only do the merchants mint it, they also loan it to trustworthy groups and people. Piss either of us off and you can¡¯t even try to bribe people to trade with you.¡± he finished, sounding quite happy.


    It only took me a moment to see the interwoven power-structure and how hard it would be to trade across distances where nobody actually reigned. In past times, on Earth, Empires had sprung up to facilitate trade, using their formidable power to secure the trade-routes. Here, that wasn¡¯t necessary, the Guild filled that niche, reducing the impetus. I also vaguely remembered that, during the middle ages on Earth, some nations had essentially used a similar system of trading and lending money to build a power-base but I couldn¡¯t quite remember the details.


    I thanked Korlem for the answer, before stepping back, behind Sigmir, letting Adra take the conversation over again. Instead, I focused on Lenore, looking at the Caravan from above, making sure that nothing untoward would happen.


    ¡°You are Morgana, right?¡± a voice startled me a little, one that I had never heard before. Looking up, there was one of the guards looking at me, grinning like a fool.


    It was a beastman but I wasn¡¯t quite able to tell what sort, only that it was some kind of feline.


    ¡°I¡¯m a huge fan, so cool to see you.¡± he gushed and I quickly realized that it was another Traveller. For a moment, I had no idea how to react, so, instead of dealing with him, I pulled at my magic, causing Sigmir¡¯s shadow to coalesce around me as I stepped into the shadowrealm, hiding outside of their sight. It was a little strange, my own senses were muted as if I was deeply underwater, while the connection to Lenore remained steady, allowing me to get a good look at what was happening.


    It looked like Sigmir was about to gut the guy who had addressed me, while Korlem was standing between them, trying to calm her, while not quite sure what was going on. Not wanting to be the cause of trouble, I took a deep breath and left the shadows, wrapping an arm around Sigmir¡¯s waist as I emerged, using my magic to cause a burst of mist to emanate around me, just for the show-effect.


    ¡°I am Morgana.¡± I announced, activating Overflow, so that my eyes were glowing icy-blue, trying to get as much ¡®Kneel before me¡¯ into my voice as I could. The wide-eyed reaction from both Korlem and the unknown Traveller was quite satisfying.

 Chapter 260

    For a moment, I revelled in the looks of the two in front of me. To them, it must have looked as if I vanished for a moment before reappearing in a burst of icy mist. small crystals of diamond dust glittering in the sun. I simply waited for them to regain their senses, so I could figure out what the Traveller actually wanted.


    ¡°Morgana, watch out!¡± Lenore¡¯s thought lanced over our link, the pure purpose instantly setting me on edge. The image transmitted with the thought allowed me to get a better idea and I felt the world slow down as Bullet Time activated, giving me the precious split-seconds I needed to act.


    One of the other escorts had taken the explosion of white mist as some sort of aggressive move or attack and, in turn, raised a crossbow to his shoulder. As I watched in horror, the metallic bow straightened, sending a deadly quarrel our way. Knowing that it would only take the blink of an eye to cross the distance, I pulled on the connection I still had with the mist I had used for my show-effect, pumping out Astral Power to re-shape the world, turning the billowing mist into a sloped sheet of ice, hanging in the air between us.


    And not a moment too soon, even without my magic, it wouldn¡¯t have fallen by the time the quarrel was deflected into the woods with a scraping, rasping noise. Without thinking about it, I formed the Shatter-rune in my mind, turning the sheet into a storm of small, razor-sharp icicles, using Ice-Magic to launch them at my attacker.


    ¡°Stop it!¡± Adra¡¯s voice cut into my attention, the urgency projected by her causing me to snap back to my senses. Before the icicles had crossed the distance, or Adra managed to get out more than the s-part of her words, I used the fading Shatter-rune in my mind to use it again, shattering the icicles further, turning them into harmless diamond dust that coated the crossbow man in a dusting of freezing cold, quickly melting powder.


    The world sped back up and I realised that Adra hadn¡¯t even addressed me when she had called out, instead, I noticed a dark shape right behind the Traveller, now fading back to view as Rai dropped his own cloaking, his sharp blades reflecting the sunlight.


    The events had only taken a second or two, but suddenly, the sounds of weapons being drawn were heard and the tension was thick enough that cutting it with a knife would be difficult.


    ¡°Stand down, everyone, stand down. And who was the idiot that just shot his load?!¡± Korlem bellowed, anger in his voice. It seemed that, if anyone was starting a battle, it was him. But it was enough to keep the other guards from engaging, even if they remained on edge, not quite settling down again.


    On the other hand, I had myself back under control, not just reacting to the events. I had no desire to cause more conflict between both sides, certainly not with the numbers being so heavily skewed in their favour.


    ¡°Now, Leonidas,¡± Korlem looked at the Traveller who had startled me earlier, eliciting a snort from me, when I heard the name, ¡°why don¡¯t you tell me why you rudely interrupted my conversation with these Ladys?¡± he asked, ignoring my snort as if he hadn¡¯t heard it.


    ¡°I apologise, Captain. But when I saw them, I just had to approach, I mean, that¡¯s Morgana. Titania.¡± the Traveller gushed, sounding like an excited fan, which made his avatar, clearly designed with a need for some sort of hyper-masculine compensation, look very strange. The avatar was the size of Sigmir, which was quite impressive for most species and build as if someone had taken a certain austrian actor who would be back and crossed him with a big cat, maybe a lion or tiger. He had little in the way of fur on his body but the overexaggerated claws on his hands and the mane of hair on his head made up for it. I just wondered how the Avatar compared to his real body and how hard the difference was to reconcile.


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    ¡°What are you talking about?¡± Korlem asked, clearly unimpressed if a little confused.


    ¡°Titania, she¡¯s a legend. She lead her team to successive championships, shaping the meta into what it eventually became.¡± he started to ramble, none of it making sense to anyone not a Traveller. While I was proud of the achievements I had with my team, the way he was gushing about them made me deeply uncomfortable. I noticed that the natives around the two of us were giving me similarly strange looks, as they were giving him.


    ¡°He is talking about events that occured far from here, in a different life. They matter little for the here and now, so, Leonidas,¡± I managed to say his name without snickering, but it was a struggle, ¡°why don¡¯t you let the events that happened in the past, in a different realm, stay just there?¡± I asked, trying to sound reasonable, even if I mostly wanted to retreat back into the shadows. Sigmir looked at me for a moment, before turning back at the Traveller and giving him a look that made me shiver a little, as if she was about to cut him to size.


    ¡°You made her uncomfortable. Apologise and walk away or I will not be responsible for what I do.¡± she warned and I noticed a thin, red aura settling around her. I knew the aura, it was the one she used during fights, but I had a feeling that she was trying to suppress it but her emotions were getting the best of her.


    Korlem must have noticed the same thing and was giving Leonidas the order to get back into formation, gesturing for everyone to continue to move on.


    Leonidas looked hesitant for a moment but after a few seconds of indecision, he turned around, walking off.


    ¡°So, you are a great deal?¡± Korlem asked, looking more amused than anything else.


    ¡°To some, maybe. Here in this world, all of us Travellers had a new start, something I embraced. On the other hand, the Grandmother, a being of immeasurable power, decided to help me find my path and I think it will be one of mystery and power. But I¡¯m still on the early steps of it.¡± I explained, suppressing a smile when I noticed the recognition in his eyes when I mentioned the Grandmother. Once again, I was wondering just how far her fame reached.


    ¡°The Grandmother? I have heard legends of her, but you say you met her?¡± he sounded a little incredulous, so I simply took out the Grimoire she had given me. He frowned but took a closer look and I felt something in the air between us, making me realise that it seemed I was now able to feel someone using Identify on one of my items and I was reasonable sure I would have been able to block it, if I so choose. But I let him, wanting him to see the description.


    His incredulity quickly vanished, replaced with a look of fearful awe. It made me wonder just what legends were out there, I had made the brilliant deduction that the Grandmother of Mundus was based on the myths about Baba Yaga but what they had taken and how they had changed it? That I just didn¡¯t know.


    But the middle of a road wasn¡¯t the right place to ask about them. Similarly, I was curious why they didn¡¯t use magical bags to move their goods, the carts rolling by us were quite obviously filled and heavy, making me wonder.


    ¡°I apologize.¡± Korlem gave me a solemn bow before starting to tell Adra a lot more than he had before, giving us suggestions about good spots to camp, areas where we could find fresh water and even told us about a spot where we might be able to take a bath. I mostly tuned them out, keeping an eye on things with Lenore and feeling quite happy when I noticed that, once again, my Ice-Rune Mastery had gained a level, while my Stealth-Ability had gained two.


    Soon after, the rest of his group had rolled past us and he bid us farewell, starting to move with his people. At the same time, Lenore told me that the scouts that had been waiting in the woods had started moving as well, joined by a hidden rearguard that was moving out of sight, ready to intervene if the merchants were attacked. It was quite tactically sound, able to turn an ambush around by hidden reinforcements.


    ¡°What was that about?¡± Adra asked, obviously curious what Leonidas had been talking about. The others were looking at me with similarly curious looks on her faces, making me sigh.


    ¡°Oh, well. Let me tell you of a different world, of a different life, if you want to call it that. But we can talk as we move.¡± I told the others, starting to walk, while asking Lenore if she wanted to hear it as well. Moments later, she came winging down from the sky, landing on my shoulder.


    ¡°A long long time ago, in a galaxy far far away¡­¡± I began, smiling to myself at my joke as I described my past, trying to explain it in words that made sense to people from Mundus.

 Interlude: This is FORUM!

    Official Road to Purgatory-Beta Forum


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    Hey Guys


    Currently, I¡¯m doing a quest in which I, along with a few other Travellers, are working with a group of NPCs to escort a merchant-caravan over a vast stretch of land in Aretia. Those of you who started there or kept up with information about the northern part of the continent, what would be Russia in our world, know that it is mostly wild lands with little to no civilisation. There are villages, a few towns and even cities, but mostly, it¡¯s a mix of steppe, brush-lands and forests, all more or less teeming with monsters. Suffice to say, it¡¯s a fun place and only the ancient, imperial roads allow for travel at a decent pace.


    It¡¯s something I feel that should be changed for the life-version, if it takes weeks or months to just travel from one quest-hub to the next, it will be very hard for groups to play together and that¡¯s not saying anything about doing quests such as the one I¡¯m doing that requires you and the rest of your party to put your life on hold for the duration.


    Anyway, enough of that and have a look what happened today.


    surprise.avi


    The view pans over a pine-forest, the last remnants of snow slowly melting away between the trees. The traveller filming the footage is walking next to a wagon, drawn by a pair of oxen, near the front of the caravan. He looks around for a moment, turning to look back over the rest of the caravan, showing similar wagons, all carrying a heavy load.


    ¡°There are people coming.¡± a voice coming over the group-chat announces and the filming Traveller quickly calls out a soft warning to the leader of the guard-group, a grizzled Orc-Veteran. Moments pass, while the rest of the filming Traveller are getting a better look, while the rest of his party assure him that they are keeping an eye on the back of the caravan.


    ¡°Only four, most likely adventurers, travelling west.¡± the others announce and the information is relayed to the orc.


    ¡°Good, having one of you Travellers with the main-group, while two at the front, two at the back, that was a good idea. Those guys are a little early in the year, normally people wait longer to move back to civilisation, but maybe there are issues. I¡¯ll talk to them and get some more information.¡± the orc explains, before starting to give orders, just in case there¡¯s something out there they haven''t seen. The people on the road might be a distraction for an ambush from the sides or the back.


    ¡°They are slowing down.¡± the group-chat announces and there are figures visible far down the road, barely more than indistinct blobs.


    After a minute or two of further walking, the orc-captain gives his mount to spurs, quickly closing the distance before slowing some distance away.


    ¡°That¡¯s an adventuring party, for sure.¡± the party-chat announces, before continuing, ¡°three girls, even if one is build like a brick-shithouse and one guy? If that guy is a player, he¡¯s got the strangest taste for his harem.¡±


    ¡°Doesn¡¯t matter, Captain Korlem is going to talk to them. You should continue moving, it¡¯s your job to make sure we don¡¯t get ambushed.¡± the filming Traveller grumbles over the chat, resulting in snickering and jibes at the fact that he¡¯s just the secretary while they do the work.


    As the caravan trudges on, the recording Traveller soon comes close to the spot where the captain has dismounted and is now talking to the adventuring party. Suddenly, the camera focuses on one particular person, a small, black haired figure, petite and with almost deadly pale skin, appearing to be light blue in the sun. She is clad in black leather, clinging to her slim body, wearing a bag at her hip and the hilts of two blades peek out behind her back, one on each side.


    After a moment of observation, the Traveller filming quickly moves forward, breaking rank and approaching the talking group.


    ¡°You are Morgana, right?¡± the female blinks twice, her eyes focusing at the camera. ¡°I¡¯m a huge fan, so cool to see you.¡±


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    Suddenly, the figure turns black before vanishing, like a shadow in the light. The huge amazonian looking figure who had stood next to her, with skin a similar shade of light blue, instantly steps forward, her weapon ready to cut the recording player down, demanding to know what he was on about, why he had approached the other. Korlem, the captain, slightly shifts to stand between them, trying to calm the situation, when suddenly, with a burst of white smoke, the figure reappears, right next to the taller figure. At first, the only thing visible in the white mist is a dark shadow, with glowing, blue eyes.


    ¡°I am Morgana.¡± a voice, vibrating with power, comes from the mist, causing the recording Traveller and Korlem to take a step back.


    For a moment, nothing happens.


    But the moment doesn¡¯t last, suddenly, the mist billows forward and the footage slows down. The mist turns into a glimmering sheet of crystal clear ice, light reflecting off it before a thin line is carved into it. The footage is slow enough to show the actual crossbow quarrel for a few frames, before it deflects out of sight, into the forest.


    Just as fast as the ice appeared, it disappears, turing into a cloud of icicles, all shimmering in the sunlight as they are launched out of sight, even as a voice commands everyone to stop. The footage tries to follow but the person filming suddenly freezes as a soft voice, obviously coming from right behind them, whispers, ¡°Don¡¯t move, or you will die.¡±


    Despite the warning, the person recording looks over their shoulder, revealing a wolf-beastman, with one blade pressed against their lower back and an arm, obviously holding another blade, snaking over their shoulder, ready to cut the recording person¡¯s throat.


    At that point, the footage fades to black.


    surprise.avi end


    First of all, don¡¯t worry, I¡¯m alright. But I wanted to give a shout-out to Morgana, who, at least to me, just demonstrated that she¡¯ll reign supreme in Mundus, as she did in Craft of War. And that is not just me speaking, even Captain Korlem, who is an experienced NPC Adventurer, agrees with me. He later told me to be very respectful of her, as she was destined to great things, as if I didn¡¯t know that already. He even impressed on me not to talk too much about her, just to make sure we didn¡¯t invoke her ire. I mean, do you know about any spellcaster out there who¡¯s able to deflect a crossbow fired from what essentially had to be an ambush, with the ability to instantly retaliate?


    Anyway, I just wanted to share my meeting with the legend and give a shout-out.


    Best Regards, Leo


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    So we have a confirmed sighting. Quickly, tell us where it was, so the Crusade can proceed!


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    Was only a matter of time until we saw something of her again, the amount of videos featuring murder on ice have been sparse lately.


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    Did she teleport? Or some kind of actual invisibility? And how on Earth did she even know about the crossbow, she was staring at you and that NPC, not keeping an eye on her surroundings.


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    Jaenyra, I can¡¯t really give away my tricks now, can I? What I can do is for me to know and for you to wonder about, I wouldn¡¯t want to have no tricks up my sleeve once I meet Howardlight and his buddies. It would be far to boring if they actually know what I can do.


    And, Leonidas, maybe you can answer a few questions for me, I didn¡¯t want to hold up your caravan more than necessary.


    Why are they using wagons and oxen? To transport goods, sure, but why not use Magical Bags? Is there an in-universe explanation given or did they handwave the fact that magical bags have to be abundant when they gave almost every new player one, right after they appear.


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    I actually know that one. Yes, they could use magical bags and for important cargo, they are. But magical bags are not that cheap, those given to the Travellers were given out by the Gods, so, kinda-handwaved.


    Another reason for the wagons is kinda funny, if the caravan is attacked by bandits, the wagons can be readily abandoned, with the guards splitting in groups, each escorting one of the merchants, who might have magical bags with important goods and money. You could call the wagons bait.


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    Wow, that look in her eyes¡­


    Step on me, Mistress!


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    That, with the wagons, sounds really smart. Sure, bandits might know about the tactic, but would they risk losing their already gained loot, just to hunt after a few fleeing merchants in the hope to get more? Maybe.


    It¡¯s almost like an anti-bandit insurance.

 Chapter 261

    The others were quite intrigued with my story, even if I had to get rather creative how I described the events to make sense to them. None of them were stupid but what I was talking about was so far outside the scope of their world, it simply didn¡¯t make sense. Lenore had the best chance to understand, as she was able to see and experience my memories, imperfect as human memories might be, but even with that it was alien to her.


    Once I was done with my retelling we had walked and talked for most of the afternoon and it was time to make camp for the night. After a short discussion, it was decided that Rai would be responsible for cooking and Adra volunteered to help. That left Sigmir and me to our own devices, with me, unsurprisingly, ending up on her lap in short order. Once she had me where she wanted me to be, she had a few more questions about my past, questions I happily answered. Mostly, she wanted to know about past relationships, none, and my family.


    That took a little longer, but I told her my story as best as I could, even giving her context to it.


    I had been a miracle-child for my parents, very late in their life. My mother, when I had been sixteen, had told me that quite a few people had advised her against carrying me to term, that she, forty-six at the time, was taking a huge risk. But, both mother and father had persisted, calling me their late miracle.


    For the first time, just thinking off them, made my chest feel strangely tight, as if I there was someone sitting on me. They had been great parents, doing their very best to raise me, who, in hindsight, hadn¡¯t been the easiest child to raise. I knew that my mental peculiarities had been a challenge for them, that my mind wasn¡¯t working the same was everyone else¡¯s did. Thinking back, just remembering them, remembering the looks on their faces, the tone of their voice and the pressure around my chest increased, as if an iron band was being tightened. I even remembered the last time I had seen them, I had been home from University for the break. A few weeks later, I had been called and told that they had been in an accident, one of those many, stupid accidents happening every day. A long-haul driver, trying to make ends meet, at the end of his shift, had fallen asleep at the wheel and a little over thirty-tons of truck and freight had followed their motion-vector, ending with the small car my parents drove crushed by the unforgiving laws of physics.


    ¡°Shhh, love, it¡¯s alright. Everything will be alright.¡± I heard Sigmir gently whisper in my ears and realised that my cheeks were wet with tears. The pressure on my chest was still there, now slowly choking me out. But Sigmir was there, so, a small part of my mind knew that I would be fine, that she would protect me.


    Clinging to her chest, desperately trying to breathe, I managed to fill my nose with her familiar, calming scent, the scent that told me I would be fine. I felt her arms wrap around me, gently cradling me while I was sobbing into her chest. I had no idea what was going on, why I was feeling as if someone was choking me, but at the same time, I knew I didn¡¯t want to leave Sigmir¡¯s embrace.


    We sat there for a while and I must have drifted off to sleep, awaking when it was fully dark, still in her arms and in our furs. Still feeling strange and out-of-sorts, I considered waking her but decided against it, instead triggering the log-out process after telling Lenore that I would be back soon.


    I tried opening my eyes after logging out, panicking just a little when they didn¡¯t instantly cooperate. I needed to use my hands to physically open them and I realised that my physical body must have cried while I was crying in Mundus. The knowledge made me feel a little weird but somehow, what had been choking me in Mundus was now more distant, as if I was looking at it through a thick pane of glass.


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    Shaking my head, not quite understanding what was going on, I stood and realised that, despite the brutal workout Mrs. Wu had put me through in the morning, I was feeling great, making me smile. Meanwhile, my stomach reminded me that I was no longer conserving energy but working out quite a bit between gaming sessions and that I was supposed to feed it before continuing, so I threw a few things in a pot that could simply simmer for a while, turning into a cross between risotto and stew. I would have to stir every couple of minutes, but I could easily work out in the meantime.


    Which I did, slowly going through the exercises Mrs. Wu had shown me, making sure that my body was moving as I wanted. Before long, dinner was finished and I sat at my table, looking through the forums while eating.


    ¡°That was¡­ disturbing on so many levels.¡± I muttered, before pushing the plate I had just eaten dinner from away, not sure how to react. Leonidas, the Traveller I had met on the road, had uploaded a video of our meeting on the forum and there were a few answers that were just weird. Asking to be stepped on, calling me Mistress? Just, No, go away.


    Shaking my head in bewilderment, I decided to check the book I had been given by the Mrs. Wu, curious what else she had written down for me. Instead of reading from the beginning, as I had on the bus, I decided to leaf through it. As I did, a letter fell out, addressed to me. Curious, I quickly opened it and started to read.


    It was, unsurprisingly, written by Mrs. Wu, explaining that what was in the book was part of whom she had been in the past but she felt that knowledge was something that shouldn¡¯t be discarded, instead, she had wanted to pass it to a worthy successor. It sounded like something out of a wuxia-novel, passing on a technique or something like that, but it made me even more curious.


    So, I flipped through the book and, at a few points, had to blink in disbelief. There were detailed anatomical drawings and, at least the first few at which I looked closely, had added notations, clarifying things. The notations were giving even more details on how to break the human body, each drawing and method designed for a specific effect or with a specific purpose in mind. Some were designed to make it look like an accident, some assumed the use of poison, with a footnote to another page that had the recipes, some assumed that absolute silence was necessary, some allowed to use the least amount of force.


    Further back in the book, the drawings were still similar but the notations, I glanced at were different. Instead of bringing death, they described how to bring pain or pleasure, how to use the body to break the mind. Not just using pain to torture but also pleasure, how to use the invoked feelings to weaken a person¡¯s defenses. Curiously, the torture parts were mostly incidental, used to create chinks in a person¡¯s personality, chinks which could be pried open, until the person¡¯s core was bare, their secrets yours for the taking.


    There was a lot more in the book but I decided that if I started to read randomly, I would just waste time. I had glanced over the pages, read a few descriptions next to the images, even a few whole pages if the notations were interesting enough, but for now, I closed the book, sitting back and taking a deep breath.


    It wasn¡¯t just a single, martial technique, it was so much more. It was a veritable, step-by-step guide to assassinate people and get away with it. It was an instruction-manual to become a secret agent of some kind. I was, or maybe I wanted to be, horrified that the gentle, friendly Mrs Wu had a quite obvious dark side. Another part, deep down, was curious and wanted nothing more than to read the book from cover to cover, to accept the honour I had been given by her.


    ¡°There is nothing bad about knowledge, is there?¡± I asked my empty apartment, before tearing myself away from the book, walking over into the bathroom, stripping my clothes off as I went. It wasn¡¯t as if I would use the knowledge, so was there anything wrong with reading the book?


    I questioned myself under the warm spray of water and when the sweat I had worked up while cooking was gone, I decided that no, there was no problem with knowing things. I would read the book, it seemed very interesting.


    What could go wrong?

 Chapter 262

    When I logged back into Road to Purgatory, my mind was whirling with questions, trying to sort through what I had read and learned. The book Mrs. Wu had given me was interesting, very much so but the question why she had it was lingering in the back of my mind, like an itch I couldn¡¯t scratch. The obvious answer to it was that she had learned all those skills at some point in her life, but who was training people as assassins or spies? I had always thought that the professional assassins depicted in movies and the like were just that, fictional and that meant she might have learned it in governmental service. Which government? That was a question I couldn¡¯t even guess and didn¡¯t want to speculate, she was a good friend and teaching me something interesting and that had to be enough for me.


    The transition from my real-world body into my avatar-body didn¡¯t help with my wide-awake mind, so, instead of snuggling into Sigmir as I normally would, trying to drift back to sleep, I got up, walking to one of the nearby trees and jumping up, making myself comfortable on one of the lower branches. From there, I could easily glance up at the night-sky, the quarter-moon that was visible and the many stars. It was a beautiful sight, a night-sky without light-pollution and, for some time, I simply watched the stars.


    With my mind relaxed and a little playful, I reached out, grabbing my Weaver¡¯s Shuttles, letting them float into the air around me before letting them orbit me. I was their star and they were my planets, only that they didn¡¯t move according to gravity, they moved according to my whim. At first, I simply let them circle around me, before slowly getting more fancy with their movement, trying to see who far I could push myself in moving each shuttle on its own course. Drawing figure-eights, having two shuttles orbit on opposite paths, letting one go over the other on one round before switching it up the next, letting their orbits intersect without touching, it was an interesting mental and magical puzzle that allowed me to lose myself in the simple complexity of it. I wondered if what I was doing was akin to drawing, letting my mind roam while my hands, or in my case my magic, was acting on its own.


    I was mostly lost in thought, looking up at the stars, when one of the shuttles passed before my eyes and I realised that it looked a little strange, changed from what its smooth perfection. It looked almost as if something had eroded the shuttle, creating small gouges and valleys in the ice it was made out of. It only took me a moment to realise that I had barely looked at them after fighting the wolverine, just a few days earlier, instead I had taken care of Sigmir. After that, Rai and Adra had removed them from the creature¡¯s body and I, later yet again, had simply put them back into their sheats, without checking their condition.


    ¡°Shit..¡± I muttered, mostly to myself, but apparently, Lenore was aware and awake enough to perceive my annoyance and agitation, flying over to me.


    ¡°What happened?¡± she asked, landing on the branch next to me.


    ¡°I forgot to take care of my gear.¡± I explained, still quite annoyed, and let the damage shuttle fly over to her, while shuffling the others around me, checking them for damage using both, my magical and mundane senses, quickly finding slight imperfections, small nicks and cracks on four of them but the last one was in a state similar to the first one I had noticed. It looked as if I had placed it in some sort of acid-bath, eroding the surface and destroying the cutting edge. Using my magic to look deeper made me notice some curious structures that looked a little different from the rest of the Hard Ice but they seemed to make the whole thing stronger, not weaker. Otherwise, it was in good condition internally, just the outer part was damaged.


    ¡°Seems as if we need to repair them.¡± Lenore said, after I stuck the four mostly intact weapons in the tree next to us, placing one of the damaged shuttles atop them, so I could focus on the last one. I was reasonably sure that I could have stuck all five into the tree but I didn¡¯t want to risk damaging the eroded one even more.


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    ¡°Yes¡­¡± I continued to observe the weapon floating in front of my face, trying to come up with a good way to repair it.


    ¡°That might work¡­¡± I muttered, creating a simple runic formation in front of me, one purely made from the runes of hard ice, while reaching with my Ice-Magic to manipulate the result. What I wanted to create was a complex shape, something I had yet to try. I wanted to shape the Ice into the rune of Liquid Moonlight, using it to gain additional control over the later spell-casting.


    It worked quite well, taking quite a bit of Astral Power in the process but I had time, allowing me to slowly and carefully channel my power, reducing the waste to almost nothing. Once I had a single rune, I did a small experiment, using my Ice-Magic to have the rune take the place of a magically drawn rune in a spell-formation. It worked, creating Liquid Moonlight without additional problems, which was promising for my later work. The rune degraded a little, not by much, but it wouldn¡¯t last forever, but I had already been aware of that problem.


    With Lenore watching me, I repeated the process eight times, resting between the castings to restore my Astral Power and, as the sun slowly started to creep over the horizon, not yet showing itself but turning some clouds bright orange.


    ¡°Could you join me? I think I need the boost.¡± I asked Lenore, who hopped onto my shoulder before vanishing into her Hallow. She quickly understood what I was planning and seemed to be happy with the idea. I felt it gave us the best chance to create the effect I wanted.


    ¡°Do you want to use the Raven¡¯s Shadow?¡± Lenore suggested, making me consider it for a moment. It would help, so I nodded, reaching out to her with my mind. A tiny part of me was amused by the fact that I was turning into a humanoid raven-hybrid while sitting on a tree-branch but before I could even laugh about it, I felt Lenore join me and we became one.


    Together, we took control of the nine runes we had created from Hard Ice, positioning them around the single Weaver¡¯s Shuttle that I wanted to repair. I felt the runes link together, their power increasing with each connection, while putting a little more pressure upon me. But I was able to control the magic and the magical formation started to conjure Liquid Moonlight in its middle, where I linked into it with my Ice Magic. I felt my magic control shudder a little, when Lenore¡¯s mind intermingled a little more with me, helping me to shore up the processes I was controlling, giving me the breathing room I needed.


    The next step I took was to slowly feed the Liquid Moonlight I was creating into the Weaver¡¯s Shuttle in the middle, letting the liquid find its way inside while keeping the original shape in mind and, essentially, using my Ice Magic to create a mold into which I was pressing more and more Liquid Moonlight. I knew that I could use Liquid Moonlight to slightly strengthen Hard Ice, I had done so before, but now, I wanted to take it a step further. Maybe, Eternal Ice was just like diamonds, needing high pressure to coalesce.


    The more I pushed, the harder it was but I persisted, feeling Lenore¡¯s curiosity next to mine, spurring me onwards, pushing ever harder, pouring more and more Astral Power into the process.


    Sadly, it was not to be.


    I felt my control start to slip and knew that, if I let the spell get away from me, it would be bad. So, I started to back off, carefully keeping up the pressure to avoid damaging my Weaver¡¯s Shuttle but no longer creating more Liquid Moonlight, simply keeping what I had under control.


    Without the need to keep the nine-sided spell-formation going, we let the runes go. We both knew that there was no need to try to salvage them, the power that had been flowing through them would have degraded them to the point that we¡¯d have to use a new set for the next attempt anyway. Dropping the runes gave us the mental resources to finish the process of repairing the Weaver¡¯s Shuttle, turning the Liquid Moonlight into the slightly improved version of Hard Ice.


    Both of us were exhausted, even if the sun was only coming up, but taking a close look at the result of our work was quite promising. Not only was the shuttle back in pristine condition, when I looked deeper, the strange, crystalline formations I had noticed earlier had increased in size, making me wonder if they were some sort of hybrid between Hard Ice and Eternal Ice.


    Knowing that we had done everything we could for the day, I jumped off the tree, feeling a strange sensation as I was gliding down to the ground. It seemed that the illusionary wings of my avatar-form were not so illusionary after all. Curious.

 Chapter 263

    I had once heard the expression, nervous like a cat in a room full of rocking-chairs. Somehow, it was a lot less funny when walking through the gate of a town mostly composed of centaurs but it would have looked extremely strange to the group that had moved onto the old, imperial road if we had passed the town by, as late in the day as we got there. If we had moved on, it would have been obvious that we wanted to avoid attention or had something to hide, causing us to become a topic for conversation and getting us the attention we wanted to avoid. And so, trying to look into all directions at once, hoping to spot trouble before it could occur. At the same time, remembering about that fun, little trait I had chosen to pick at character-creation, I stuck in Sigmir¡¯s shadow, not quite using magic to shift into the shadows but trying to make myself unnoticeable.


    There was a guard at the gate and, once again, we made Adra into the face of our party with the rest of us walking behind her. The guard asked a few more questions, mostly how long we were planning to stay and where we were coming from, but it wasn¡¯t as thorough as the questioning we had received in Kolyug. I had taken a look at  their gates from afar, with Lenore¡¯s help, and knew that there was no magic imbued in or around them. With that in mind, Lenore and Ylva had retreated into their Hallows, giving us an ace in the hole, if we needed it.


    Still, from my hideout in Sigmir¡¯s shadow, I wasn¡¯t too happy with what I was seeing, there was a clear tinge of ill-concealed interest on the guard¡¯s face when he let his gaze roam over my Sigmir. I wasn¡¯t sure if it was some sort of macho-warrior-culture idiocy or something else, if the description of the powerful, axe-wielding Giantblood-woman had somehow spread. While I somewhat knew that my perception was biased, I thought that she was the one standing out the most, simply because there were few of her kind in this area and fewer still that had inherited the old blood as strongly as she had. Adra, on the other hand, if you didn¡¯t know better, she could pass for a number of species, Rai was obviously a wolfman but beastman, especially wolves, were one of the most common species in the region. And lastly, myself, as long as I kept my hood up and the shadows around me, I would be able to remain unnoticed. But without those, I would most likely stand out just as bad as Sigmir did, my race quite exotic, at least in this area.


    I sighed in relief when we made it past the gates and further into the town. It was more like Yaksha than Kolyung, the mighty troll-city still standing out as a marvel of magical engineering. The town we were now in was built from timber harvested in the surrounding forest and it was quite obvious why it had been built here. The ancient, imperial road had a crossroad with one just like itself, making me realise again just how complex the project had been.


    ¡°Is it just me or are we being watched?¡± I asked Sigmir, speaking in a whisper. She glanced around, frowning, before muttering, just loud enough for me to hear, ¡°I¡¯m not sure. Maybe?¡±


    She sounded not sure of herself but, for the last ten days, ever since we had started moving on the road, I had felt something, I couldn¡¯t describe it. It was if the hairs in the back of my neck wanted to stand up, an instinct I couldn¡¯t begin to fathom that was screaming at me that a monster was hiding behind the curtain or under the bed. It had made me a little grouchy but I had been completely unable to point a finger where it came from.


    Together with Lenore and Adra, I had tried everything, from warding the surrounding area to enveloping us in magic, hoping for some foreign influence to show up but nothing. We had tried to clear our minds of everything but what the peculiar senses that allowed us to perceive magic told us and delved into the Astral River, looking for what was haunting me.


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    And found nothing.


    But here, in this town of our enemies, I was having that feeling even stronger than before, yes, I wasn¡¯t able to pick up more than a general interest in the newcomers, maybe an increased interest in Sigmir. Where was that presence that I had felt stalking us? And who was that presence.


    At first, I had thought that it might be some centaur-spellcaster who somehow had managed to trace us from the attack on the centaur-camps. Maybe due to the blood magic I had used to defile the area, I could easily see something like that leaving a lasting, magical mark on a person, if only to keep players, Travellers, from using it as an easy ploy in warfare. But if a centaur was able to track us, why hadn¡¯t there been a hunt for us, or at least an attempt to bring us down? It didn¡¯t make sense.


    Another possibility I had considered was whoever had made the infernal bear near Kolyug, that maybe that spellcaster, who I assumed was quite skilled and high-level, had traced us, possibly to get revenge for killing his bear and warning the city. It felt more realistic, that such a character had the power and ability to come after us, but the motivation felt flimsy. And the simple fact that over a month had passed since we had encountered the bear made me question the idea even further.


    So, without knowing who or what was after us, I was trying to figure out why it was worse in the town. I quickly realised that it was an exercise in folly, that without further information, there was nothing I could do to find our enemy. But I could keep my eyes open and my magic at the ready to defend us, if the enemy that was giving me the creeps this whole time made a move.


    I stayed in Sigmir¡¯s shadow as Adra made her way to one of the stores, we had already agreed that we would stay in a group as much as possible, and bought supplies for the continuation of our journey. We had managed to restock most of what we needed from the centaur-convoy we had raided and we had the ability to live of the land if need be, but some supplies were difficult or annoying to gather, which was why we bought them. At the same time, Adra sold quite a bit of the raw materials we had gathered over our journey, the pelts, claws and teeth of the game we had hunted and even a few interesting herbs we had found.


    She haggled fast and furious, more than once threatening to simply walk away, telling the merchant that we would head further west and into civilisation anyway and we could just take our goods there. It was fascinating to watch, especially for me who had grown up in a society of plenty, where people went to the supermarket or department store and prices were not up for negotiation, at least on an individual level.


    Finally, after a prolonged verbal battle, she shook hands with the merchant and the wide gestures and loud voices of the negotiation were replaced with friendly smiles and dexterous handling of the agreed upon exchange. The switch in demeanor was bad enough to give me whiplash, but by now, I trusted Adra to look out for us. Even if there was a small, nagging voice that told me to watch out, that I had trusted Chris to watch for my interest as well, which ultimately had cost me Titania and my gaming-career. I pushed the doubt away, instead focusing my attention on more fruitful pursuits, mostly keeping an eye on my surroundings. If Adra ever decided to betray me, I had a small crystal of hard ice, hidden deep in my magical bag, with her blood in it. It was my personal insurance policy, one none of the others knew about, even Lenore only knew about it due to our mental connection. She didn¡¯t approve, wanting to trust the others, but understood.


    We left the store, Adra with a wide smile on her face, and continued on, towards the inn the merchant had recommended. The town, I still didn¡¯t know its name, mostly because i hadn¡¯t listened, had multiple, mostly due to the minor crossroad. The inn was quite impressive, large and imposing, quite obviously made with a variety of races in mind. I also noticed that a smaller side-door had the symbol of the Adventurer¡¯s Guild carved into it, making me wonder if the building was doing double duty but before I could even consider investigating, Adra pushed the door open and I followed Sigmir inside.

 Chapter 264

    For once, the popular image of an inn¡¯s common-room filled with exotic and strange beings, all boisterously drinking and carousing came relatively close to the truth. It was still early in the evening but the room was filled with seemingly road-weary travellers while a minstrel, or at least someone with a lute, was playing and trying to have his singing heard over the cacophony of the room. I wasn¡¯t quite sure which I disliked more, the smell outside, the piquant bouquet I had learned to expect from towns on Mundus, or the smell inside, unwashed humanoid with a side-note of bear and piss. That there was the distinct, equine smell of centaurs thick inside did not help my nerves in the slightest, only setting me more on edge.


    Adra had moved ahead of Sigmir, and thus of me, already talking to one of the servers, hopefully securing us rooms and food. Just from the look of the common-room, I wasn¡¯t sure we would get rooms any longer. The server gestured to the bar and Adra walked over, talking to the bartender. Sigmir stayed near the door, so I stuck with her, hiding in her shadow, trying to seize up the patrons. Would there be trouble? I remembered that there were rules prohibiting fights in a tavern but I had witnessed that those rules were broken at times, especially with my accursed special ability that turned me into a magnet for trouble.


    There were multiple obvious groups in the room and I started to wonder which of them would get drunk and start trouble. My first guess was that it would be the largest group, made up from centaurs who I believed to be local, judging by their simple clothes and the lack of cloaks, bags and weapons. They simply didn¡¯t look like a travelling group, as they lounged around a low table, pouring mugs of ale or mead down their throats. Part of me itched with a desire to slip some of the poison I had concocted into their drinks, just to see how potent it was, but no, that would be just looking for needless trouble.


    Another group looked like an escort for a merchant-caravan, their clothes quite similar to what we were wearing, a mix of sturdy travelling-clothes and armour, bags and weapons nearby and a lack of tension indicating that they felt comfortable and safe. They were, curiously, the group that worried me the least, even thought I was reasonably sure that they were the most powerful group, other than maybe our group.


    And finally, the last group was the one that worried me the most. They looked just like one of the centaur-patrols we had seen on the road, moving around with quite a bit of swagger and hitting the ale hard while laughing and making a lot of noise. Maybe I should use them as targets for my experimentation, if I was careful, it wouldn¡¯t be traced to me, would it?


    There were other people in the room, but none of them seemed to be part of a group or affiliated with anyone, so I wasn¡¯t too cautious of them. Not that I believed that there were no beings powerful enough to take us down but more because I doubted that such beings would resort to tavern-brawls to achieve their goals. No, I was more cautious about some idiot not being able to hold their liquor and dragging the entire room into a brawl, potentially with deadly weapons and magic.


    When Sigmir started to move, I pushed those thoughts from my head and stayed in her shadow, noticing a sudden shift in attention amongst the guards. I had a feeling that one of them had spotted me and had signaled his comrades, warning them of the concealed stalker in the room. Most likely, they considered the unknown a danger, just as I would have. Not wanting to alarm them needlessly, I slightly changed my magic, reducing the concealment around most of me but slightly increasing it over my face. I would still look a little threatening, a black-clothed shadow without a discernible face, but at least they would be able to distinguish my position without trouble.


    ¡°Will there be trouble?¡± the innkeeper asked, giving my form a wary eye, as we walked up.


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    Adra, apparently expecting the question just answered that we would keep the peace of the hearth but would defend ourselves to the full extend of our abilities. The look on the innkeeper was still rather unhappy but he nodded and gestured for us to go over to one of the tables. It was a rather small table, just fine for the four of us, and off to the side. Maybe, there we wouldn¡¯t attract trouble.


    Shortly after we were seated, a serving man came over, telling us what fare was prepared on this evening. Once again, there was stew, this one vegetable, but also the option for venison-roast, a lentil-soup and a couple other, simple dishes. After a moment of contemplation, we all ordered, in my case, I decided on the venison-roast paired with potatoes and some wild onions. It sounded quite tasty and remembering the fare served in Kolyug, I had high hopes. The others ordered their own food, curiously each of us was sticking with simple water to drink, Part of me had considered ordering the mead, at least until I remembered the last time I had done so and the hangover on the morning after.


    The serving-man scurried off, telling us that the food would take a bit of time, but we shouldn¡¯t worry. None of us was surprised by that and all of us were at least somewhat grateful to simply sit on actual furniture and relax in the warm room. It was a little warm for me but by now, I came to expect being too warm and started to understand that it was just part of my curse. I had even considered to abandon the quest to handle the soul-prison, to look for something else that would gain me the fame and power to gain something in the officially released version and move back further north, escaping the coming spring. But no, the soul-prison was my best chance to gain a lasting title or ability, so I would stick with it.


    Before the food arrived, a man walked up to our table, one of the group I thought were caravan-guards. I felt myself tense up, one hand going to one of my blades while my mind took hold of the six freshly repaired weaver¡¯s shuttles, not causing them to float behind me but making them ready to strike at the drop of a hat. The guy must have noticed the tension in the air as he addressed Adra.


    ¡°I come in peace, no need to get your hackles up.¡± he said, raising his hands in a supposedly calming gesture, showing us that he had no weapon in hand. Not that it worked for me, I knew that magic didn¡¯t need gestures if you were truly good, so the raised hand could just be the guiding-tool he used for magic to blast us into dust. I doubted it, but it was possible.


    Reciprocating his gesture, I took my hand off my blade but my mind was still ready to strike with my weaver¡¯s shuttles.


    ¡°What can we do for you?¡± Adra asked, sounding a lot more friendly than I must have looked.


    ¡°I wanted to ask from which direction you came. We,¡± he gestured back to the table he came from, ¡°are guarding a caravan going to Kolyug and wanted to know if there was trouble ahead.¡± he explained, confirming my earlier idea that they were guards.


    ¡°We might be able to help you, just a few days ago, we met a fellow named Korlem who was travelling a similar road. If you pull up a chair and pay for our meal, we can tell you what we told him.¡± Adra suggested, causing the guy to nod and do just that.


    ¡°So, what has your friend that spooked? That many bandits out there?¡± he asked, still talking to Adra but keeping an eye on me.


    ¡°She dislikes crowds, someone always does something stupid.¡± Adra waved him off, not really explaining a lot, ¡°About the bandits, not really, there was one group but those won¡¯t be troubling anyone else.¡± she continued with a smile that was just bordering on savage.


    ¡°Good to know. And yes, I can see why people might be interested in your group to the point of doing something stupid, three beautiful women travelling with a single guy?¡± he trailed off, looking over to Rai who looked like he wasn¡¯t sure whether he wanted to slit the guys throat or hide beneath the table.


    ¡°I go where my Master goes. And if you insult her again, it will be the last thing you ever do.¡± he replied, ignoring the insinuation that we were some sort of harem for him.


    Sigmir looked as if Rai had just beaten her to the punch but the glare on her face was quite impressive in its own right, causing the guard to blanch just a little, raising his hands in surrender.


    ¡°Or maybe it is that you are just hot-heads. That might attract trouble as well.¡± he suggested, still not cowed.


    Somehow, I had a feeling that it would be a long evening.

 Chapter 265

    Somehow, the Universe had managed to surprise me. It had done so in a sneaky and wholly unexpected fashion, doing the one thing I hadn¡¯t thought possible. Nothing happened during the rest of the evening and night.


    Adra had continued to talk with the guard, a beastman named Moraak, for a while longer and learned that we were on the very edge of centaur-territory. If we continued further west, we would leave it, a revelation that made me breathe a sigh of relief. Unless they tried to fight us in the boundaries of Olichell, the town we were currently in, it would be relatively difficult for them to get at us. And if they tried to confine us in the town, it might get them into trouble with the Merchant- and Adventurers-Guild, not to speak of the fact that I was reasonably sure I could wipe a small town such as this off the map, if they really forced me. I hadn¡¯t tried to control the large lump of Eternal Ice I had in my magic bag for a while but it was still there and still teeming with power.


    When the next morning dawned and I was still resting on Sigmir¡¯s chest without any disturbance during the night, I felt a lot better than the day before. I was still a little apprehensive about the strange feeling I had but I wasn¡¯t expecting some insane wizard to leap out from the next haystack to attack.


    It didn¡¯t take us long to get ready and we all went down to eat together. The common-room looked quite different in the light of day, where the night before people had drunk themselves into a stupor, there were now wretched forms, trying to keep their head from exploding. Just from looking at them, I felt vindicated in my choice to pass on the mead, or I might be one of those forms, trying to get my magic to work.


    Breakfast was a simple affair and finally, as people were slowly waking up around town, we were heading towards the edge of town, intent on leaving as soon as possible. As we walked, the weird feeling I had was re-asserting itself, the hairs on my neck standing up in warning. I felt as if there was a force pressing down on me, trying to suffocate me, trying to pin me to a board, like a butterfly by a collector.


    ¡°What is going on?!¡± I mentally asked Lenore, feeling my body freeze up, as I tried to shove away whatever it was.


    ¡°I don¡¯t know.¡± was her only response and she sounded as panicked as I felt. ¡°But we need to get away.¡± she added as I felt the air around me heat up.


    Not knowing what to do, I reached out, letting Astral Power flow out of me and into Sigmir¡¯s shadow, focusing the runes for concealment, magic and devouring in my mind, trying to enhance my normal Cloak of Shadows in such a way that it might protect me from the magical assault I was feeling.


    I heard Sigmir gasp in surprise and managed to crack open my eyes. What I saw stunned me for a moment, around me, the ground was steaming, the puddles that remained from last night''s rain evaporating as strange, fiery glyphs were orbiting around me.


    ¡°Love, what is going on?!¡± she asked, sounding as panicked as I felt. I didn¡¯t have a good answer, so I focused on protecting myself, trying to gather power from the Astral River as I staved off the attack. It was there, on the edge of the River, that I perceived something I had never seen before. To my mind¡¯s eye, it appeared like an enormous fiery snake, twisting embers clad in radiant flames. It was twisted through the Astral River, it¡¯s hot breath pushing out into the world, scorching me. As I tried to grasp what I was seeing, Lenore¡¯s sight joined me as our minds joined together in the Raven¡¯s Shadow and what I saw thanks to her helped me understand what was going on. The fiery snake was composed purely out of Astral Power, held together by maddingly complex symbols and runic formations. It was a magical construct, a carrier for magic, cast from far away. I had no idea where it was coming from but I knew that it would kill me, if I let it.


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    ¡°We need to push it back!¡± Lenore said, her voice strained from taking some of the mental pressure I was under. I hadn¡¯t the capacity to respond but I agreed, if we tried to wrestle with the construct, we would die. No, we needed to cut it from its source, maybe that way I would manage to survive.


    Looking down the Astral River, I noticed a small strand of Ice-Astral Power, weak due to the changing season but still carrying power. Gambling on a hunch, I reached for it, trying to reverse the normal process of gathering Astral Power from the Astral River and using that momentary influx of power to change its course, just for a split second. It took me a split-second to realise that it was like Blood Magic, just in reverse. Without letting my mind leave the Astral River, I grasped my Athame, jamming it into my hand to gain access to all the power stored in my body, using the bloody palm to reach into my bag, grabbing the first chunk of Eternal Ice I could.


    The torrent of power channelled through me was insane, the pain of using Blood Magic to rip the Astral Power from my very life itself driving me to my knees. But somehow, I managed to weather the storm, the power allowing me to twist the stream of Ice-Astral Power around the snake, the conflux between the Fire it was crafted from and the Ice around it causing a backlash that knocked me clean on my behind. My mind felt raw, as if someone had used sandpaper to strip off a layer from my brain, leaving the nerves singing with pain.


    Even Lenore didn¡¯t want to stay in her Hallow, appearing on my shoulder. She looked a little worse for wear but was in better shape to explain what had happened. While she did that, I tried to pull my mind together, not sure if the attack was a one-time deal or if there would be a follow up. At the same time, I took stock and noticed that somehow, I was brimming with Astral Power. Trying to remember my frantic scrabbling, I understood what had happened, the backlash had been an uncontrolled burst of Astral Power, infusing both sides of the connection. But where the magical formation used to attack me was made to precise specifications and had been shattered by the influx of Ice-Type Astral Power, I had been almost completely drained of power, as I had used everything I had to wrestle the stream. Otherwise, I might have suffered even worse.


    Raising my still bloody hand, ignoring the noises around me, I started painting runes on my flesh, using my own blood and some Astral Power, trying to create a ward of concealment that would keep me from being attacked in the same manner, if that was possible. I had no idea how to begin such an attack, at least without some sort of link to the person, in my case, some blood would be best. I remembered the Grandmother telling me about such links and the special meaning my hair had, as it was holding some of my Astral Power. But had I ever left behind hair to use?


    That was when it hit me, I might have. Back, weeks before, when we had fought the burning bear near Kolyug, it had burned off my hair. I had brushed off the remain of my beautiful, lustrously shining hair, dropping it where I had stood, more concerned with the bear we had fought just before.


    A very un-ladylike curse sprung from my lips, causing Lenore on my shoulder and the others around me to fall silent, looking at me questioningly.


    ¡°We should go, we are drawing a crowd. Let¡¯s hurry.¡± I said after taking a look around. There was ice on the ground around me and some of the steam caused by the earlier attack was still lingering. All around us, people were looking at our group in general and me in particular, as if there had been some sort of performance.


    ¡°Can you walk?¡± Sigmir asked, offering me a hand to get up.


    ¡°Yes, I can. Let¡¯s move, quickly.¡± I pushed, not wanting to get stopped in town, knowing that I had made a spectacle of myself and we really didn¡¯t want to draw attention. But there was nothing I could do about that now, what had happened was in the past. Now, we had to move.

 Chapter 266

    By sheer strength of will and stubbornness, I refused to stumble, setting one foot in front of the other, not wanting to have Sigmir carry me out of yet another town. While my body was stressed and weakened, my magic was thrumming with power, the excess Astral Power forced into me by the backlash slowly draining into the world around me, forming a shimmering mist. That imbalance between body and magic might have been what caused a curious effect in my mind, making me feel rather floaty. It was as if my head was floating around in the clouds, dragging my body behind it. It was a strange feeling, to say the least.


    ¡°Love, are you¡­¡± Sigmir began anew, obviously not comfortable with the way I was moving but stopped herself before finishing the question. She knew, just from looking at me, that I wasn¡¯t alright or fine, that I was hurting. But she also knew about my pride, that I disliked looking weak and that she would have a better chance to let me walk out of sight of the village before offering to carry me. I just shook my head, while giving her a wan smile, not wanting to explain my current state, not without knowing who might be listening.


    ¡°What happened? Lenore said it was an attack?¡± Adra asked, her voice sounding rather disturbed.


    ¡°I have a theory but you¡¯ll have to wait until we get out of town, there I¡¯ll explain.¡± I answered, trying to calm her, at least somewhat. It had to be quite disturbing for them, to suddenly see something try to murder me, without warning and without leaving a trace once it was blocked.


    As we walked towards the gate, a burly centaur, dressed in some official looking leather-armour stepped in front of us, raising a hand.


    ¡°You¡¯ll have to stay in town for now. Whatever that was, our mages will want to talk to you.¡± he said, sounding very officious and overbearing.


    ¡°We will leave. Right now.¡± I answered, feeling the already shaky control over my magic slip a little, freezing the water on and in the ground around me, creating a thin sheet of ice.


    ¡°I don¡¯t know who you think you are, but I¡¯ve asked you politely, as a Guard of this town and tasked by the Altin Urda to keep the peace. You¡¯ve disturbed the peace and so you¡¯ll need to stay until we are finished with you.¡± he pressed, sounding quite angry at me denying his authority.


    I felt my control slip further, the ice beneath me cracking and breaking, my magic seeping into it, forming lethal shards of ice, ready to strike with half a thought.


    ¡°Morgana, let me talk, please.¡± Adra placed a hand on my shoulder, gently pushing me back towards Sigmir who caught me, steadying me so I wouldn¡¯t fall.


    ¡°Fine.¡± I managed to growl. Moving me had caused the Ice I was connected to to move as well, causing chunks of it to float around me, slowly orbiting me, swirling with the magical mist. A small part of my mind wondered why my magic manifested as Ice, instead of Blood or Darkness and the best answer I could think of was that it was because of the slight change that permanently infused Ice-Astral Power into me, that this slight imbalance was the cause. I lightly shook my head, chasing away the idle thought, trying to keep myself focused despite the strange, floaty state I was in. As long as I focused on something it seemed to work, even if it was merely placing each foot in sequence without missing one. With Sigmir behind me, making sure I either remained upright or in her arms, that focus was gone and my mind tried to float away.


    ¡°I told you, we are going to leave.¡± I muttered after giving Adra what felt like hours of time to convince the guard not to annoy us further. As I stepped forward, out of Sigmir¡¯s gentle grip, the shards of ice around me, following my mood and will, stopped their lazy orbit and the sharp and pointy ends took aim at the centaur who suddenly looked a lot less self-assured.


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    ¡°What is going on here?¡± a voice broke the stand-off, loud enough to make me flinch, both physically and magically. The physical flinch caused Sigmir to step up behind me, making sure my legs didn¡¯t buckle beneath me, dropping me in the mostly frozen mud, while the magical flinch shattered a few shards, doubling the ammunition I had around me.


    ¡°Ah, Moraak, nice to see you.¡± Adra greeted the owner of that obnoxiously loud voice. ¡°Morgana here was just attacked by long-range magic, covering dozens of days worth of travel. She barely managed to survive and is now rather agitated to get somewhere less populated where she can set up magics and wards to defend us all.¡± Adra explained, fudging the truth a little but not much, before continuing, ¡° We simply don¡¯t know how the attack was targeted at her, it might have been someone or something here that was used to guide the magic.¡± That was purely a lie, at least to me, but I had yet to explain that I suspected it was targeted using the hair I might have left behind further north. But it was a good lie, maybe even one that Adra believed herself. In any case, it was good enough that Moraak looked distinctly unhappy.


    ¡°This guard here wants to confine us in town, without any rhyme or reason and my friend here, still reeling from the attack that almost claimed her life, is a little agitated by that and about to force our way out. Which I would rather avoid.¡± she finished, her face mostly saying, ¡°What can you do¡­¡±


    ¡°So, a member of the Adventurers¡¯ Guild is attacked in your town and you try to keep them there, so that more attacks can be made?¡± Moraak asked, sounding grim. ¡°Does that mean you centaurs were involved in the attack?¡± It was a mental leap worthy of the Olympics, I was almost certain that it was pure coincidence that the unknown Spellcaster had chosen this morning for his attack but it seemed as if the beastman had drawn his own conclusions.


    The centaur¡¯s face had changed from smug superiority when he had stepped up to confused disbelief at being on the receiving end and I felt my patience crack a little further when he made a gesture and another centaur started towards us. My magic, still leaking out and barely controlled, cracked with it and half of the shards around me shot forward, ringing the annoying centaur-guard, piercing into the ground at his feet but not hitting him. Barely.


    ¡°My patience is about used up.¡± I growled, the ice around me shattering into smaller pieces as if to provide a visual clue.


    ¡°Of course we are not complicit, but an attack was launched at someone within our community. We need to make sure that no further attacks can be launched.¡± the centaur tried to backtrack, maybe to safe face.


    ¡°It doesn¡¯t look like your protection is desired here. So, why don¡¯t we all walk away, without anyone getting hurt?¡± Moraak pressed and I noticed that the centaur looked as if he had bitten onto something sour.


    ¡°If that is your desire, nobody will stand in your way.¡± he said after getting his face back under control, his voice dripping with condescension. He tried to make it sound like he was the one wronged here, with us being rude and dismissing his kind offer. I, for one, just didn¡¯t care any longer, my mind was starting to buzz, now that the excess magic was mostly drained. I wasn¡¯t sure what would happen once that happened, it was quite possible that the stunt I had pulled had caused further damage and I just didn¡¯t know yet. I needed to get away, so that I could try to fix some of it.


    But with him out of the way, I managed to focus enough to walk again, even if Sigmir kept a steadying hand on my shoulder, gently guiding me towards the gate. Feeling the shards of ice still hovering around me, I pushed with my magic, causing them to shatter into tiny ice-crystals that I let gently fall down, almost as if it was snowing.


    It took me a few steps to notice that only Sigmir and I were walking towards the gate, Adra and Rai nowhere in sight. I softly asked Sigmir and was told that they would catch up to us, that Adra wanted to talk to Moraak a little more. I blinked for a moment, not knowing what to say before simply accepting it. At the corners of my vision, I noticed blackness creeping in, making me wonder if my Darkness-magic was acting up now.


    <table><tbody><tr><td>You have lost consciousness. Time remaining: 1:30:00</td></tr></tbody></table>

 Interlude - Forum: Questions about Kolyug

    Official Road to Purgatory-Beta Forum


    <table><tbody><tr><td>-Tarrin, confirmed Beta-Account</td></tr></tbody></table>


    Hey Guys


    A question to all those who are adventuring in the far north of Aretia, I know there are a few of us up here. Do you know what the everloving hell is going on in the area around Kolyug? Over the last few weeks, things have been getting fucking weird.


    I¡¯ve been hunting in the north for some time, moving around the mountain-range, I think they call it Yugid-Mountains and up to Yari. There was one incredibly weird situation, I¡¯ve uploaded a video on that and then I travelled south from Yari on the ancient road, just hunting, doing quests whenever possible and so on. There were some quests in Yaksha, asking to hunt down some wolves around the town but nothing too interesting, so I continued south. At that point, I¡¯ll have to insert that the area is really friggin¡¯ sparse, I mean, there¡¯s nothing up here but trees, snow and more trees, with days spent simply travelling between villages. I love Road to Purgatory but I think that¡¯s something that needs to be adjusted. Maybe, once the world is populated with more players there will be player-settlements or maybe you can get mounts when you are higher level, if so, great. Doesn¡¯t change that the area is mind-numbingly boring, you could hyperborean. And I apologize for that joke.


    Anyway, enough of my fun travels through snow-covered forests and forest-covered snow and onto the real subject of this thread, Kolyug. The first settlement that I saw ingame that I would call a city, with mighty walls, guards, a noble-district and slums, everything one would expect in a city. They even have some sort of magical sewer-system, preventing it from smelling like a train-station in the bad part of town, which is a plus. I mean, really, was that part of realism truly necessary? Some towns smell like absolute SHIT, and that¡¯s in the far north, I don¡¯t even want to think about the smell in southern cities.


    Anyway, back to topic, or something.


    Kolyug, maybe not pearl of the north but certainly immovable boulder of the north, and the fucking weird events around town. When I got here, things were mostly calm, there was some talk about a couple of idiots who had managed to get themself banished, I was asked to find out what happened to some hunter, which went nowhere without clues but that was it. Standard quest-faire, go out, kill game, come back, get paid, the usual, with some fetch and fedex quests to make things slightly more interesting or something. Nothing too exciting but hey, I got some EXP which are a precious commodity, plus money which is always good.


    But then the quests mostly dried up and the city turned into some sort of paranoia-driven hell-hole where you couldn¡¯t spit on the floor without a guard turning up and making sure you didn¡¯t try to attack the town. Even the nice, big guy that ran the Adventurers¡¯ Guild started polishing his club. No, not that club, you perverts, he had some friggin¡¯ tree-trunk of a club next to his desk and a few days ago he started making sure it would be ready to bash in some heads. No idea what you need to do to make sure that a club is ready, I mean, it¡¯s not like a club turns dull or loses it¡¯s point and needs to be sharpened but who am I to ask, the guy is friggin¡¯ huge and the club looks more like a mobile siege-engine than something wielded in personal combat.


    Anyway, where was I? Oh, right, the weird shit going on around Kolyug.


    So, without a whole lotta do in the city, I ventured out, trying to scare up some game, maybe get some EXP by killing things and there was still the question of the missing hunter, even if I rather doubted that I¡¯d find anything, the guy had been vanished for a couple of weeks at that point, out in the wilderness, without contact? Yeah, he dead.


    But now there¡¯s just no game to be found, it¡¯s as if someone swept through the woods killing everything that might be worth hunting. Spots where I was able to find at least some wolves, maybe a wolverine or bear, all abandoned. Have other players made similar experiences? Are there other parts of Mundus where such a problem occurs?


    I¡¯m thoroughly confused and about to head somewhere else, not sure where, maybe further south, that would allow me to use the ancient road, speeding up my travel.


    Regards, Tarrin


    <table><tbody><tr><td>Leonidas, confirmed Beta-Account</td></tr></tbody></table>


    If you come across this story on Amazon, it''s taken without permission from the author. Report it.


    While I¡¯m not quite certain where Kolyug or any of the other places you talk about are, I¡¯m currently working as a caravan-guard heading there. We are coming from the south and at the moment, we are crossing an insanely annoying steppe. There¡¯s no vegetation other than some low grass and the only enemies we¡¯ve seen are some bug-monsters the size of a great dane. The centaurs further south have talked about some vicious wolves but we¡¯ve yet to see any of those.


    The only thing that stood out in this blasted place was an ice-castle but when we tried to open it the place shattered, breaking into snow like some sort of frozen fatamorgana. No idea what that was about.


    Maybe @Morgana can tell us more, I mean, she was active in the area up north so she should know more, right?


    Anyway, this is Leonidas and I¡¯m out.


    <table><tbody><tr><td>Goliry, confirmed Beta-Account</td></tr></tbody></table>


    Not sure about events up in the north but here, where I am, southern Aretia, there¡¯s nothing going on, normal monsters, maybe a few more than normal and some of them seem to be young. We may want to let those be, allowing them to grow up into future sources of experience.


    We¡¯ll have to see in what way the game regulates enemies born/created with enemies killed, maybe the ¡°void¡± left by enemies killed creates impetus to have more offspring amongst the rest? Or maybe the fewer predators, because, let¡¯s be honest, that¡¯s what most of us are hunting, create an overabundance of prey, allowing more predators to be born in turn.


    Whatever happens to you, I think it is localised.


    <table><tbody><tr><td>Harms, confirmed Beta-Account</td></tr></tbody></table>


    Can agree with Goliry, here in central Aretia, there¡¯s nothing special either. It¡¯s getting warmer, so yay, spring break or something but other than that, business as usual.


    <table><tbody><tr><td>Ghostblade, confirmed Beta-Account</td></tr></tbody></table>


    Mh, I might be able to shed some light.


    We were heading out of Kolyug a few weeks ago and noticed a group of NPCs, heading out into the woods. They looked rather suspicious and we followed after them, curious what was going on.


    We kept far back, remaining hidden and all that, just watching and i can tell you, those guys were insane. They mostly ignored the local wildlife but some suicidal monster, I think a wolverine, decided to go after them. And that was no small critter, that thing was the size of a small horse, want to guess how long it lasted? One-Fucking-Shot.


    The lead-troll just casually swung his big-ass polearm and it looked like some scene from a comic being turned into life-acting, with wires suddenly dragging the monster back in a ballistic arc before depositing it in a broken heap.


    After a couple of days of going south-east, things got weird, the monsters attacking them all had some fire-power and not in the colloquial sense but firebreath, burning claws and shit. And there were more of those monsters, a lot more. At that point, we decided that we wouldn¡¯t be the cat and headed back, just trying to get away from one-shot trolls, burning monsters and all that insanity.


    Not sure if there is a connection but I¡¯d say it¡¯s distinctly possible. Makes me glad that we washed our hands off that shitty town.


    <table><tbody><tr><td>Morgana, confirmed Beta-Account</td></tr></tbody></table>


    Now, I¡¯m getting summoned like some sort of helpful spirit? Or maybe malevolent demon might be a better description. And, Ghostblade, I see the shitty pun you did there.


    But I guess I can shed some light, so call me Bringer of Light. Or Morningstar, that would work, too¡­


    And, as it works as a wonderful pun, Leonidas, your fatamorgana¡­ I guess a tricky fairy, or maybe a mischievous elf, played a trick on you. She might even be called Morgana :P


    About the stuff in Kolyug, I know that the guards were supposed to investigate some insane and insanely powerful spellcaster, if I had to place a guess somewhere in the high hundreds, maybe low two-hundreds but that is in no way an educated guess, who used an interesting combination of enchantment and a couple schools of magic to modify existing monsters. Why, how or who he actually was, I have no idea and I¡¯m rather glad that I¡¯ve been putting as much distance between him and myself, who knows what a guy like that would do with a Traveller, I mean, we are essentially the ultimate in lab-animals. And that is definitely not how I want to spent the rest of the Beta, I¡¯ve got things to do, people to kill and continents to explore.


    What you do with that information, not my problem but I know that I¡¯ll expedite my journey to the west.


    <table><tbody><tr><td>Gloinar, confirmed Beta-Account</td></tr></tbody></table>


    Okay, I know where we won¡¯t go, not if that crazy lady is scared enough to run. Nope, nope, nope, no thanks.


    <table><tbody><tr><td>Shuigun, confirmed Beta-Account</td></tr></tbody></table>


    Wait, Morgana, the one who asked people if they wanted to become test-subjects for her experiments with mind-magic calls someone else an insane spellcaster? Yeah, somehow I¡¯m glad that I¡¯m far, far away.


    Good Luck, Have fun and all that jazz.

 Chapter 267

    I logged back into Road to Purgatory just as my unconscious-debuff was about to run out, allowing me to regain consciousness. Waiting, surrounded by darkness, I was able to consider the things I had done during the forced time-out. It hadn¡¯t been a long time in the real world, just enough time to check the forums and skim some more through Mrs. Wu¡¯s interesting book about assassination, realising that it was collated in a fascinating way.


    The first part of the book was relatively harmless, at least for a book on martial arts, describing breathing- and meditation-techniques followed by forms of movement and how to use those forms to maximum effect. That was the first time it started to show its true colours, describing in great detail how much force was needed to achieve a specific result. There were ways to to render someone unconscious in a relatively safe and easy manner, there were ways to inflict crippling pain that made your opponent lose their ability to fight but wouldn¡¯t leave a permanent mark and finally there were ways to kill your opponent.


    The second part was less harmless, it described ways to scout out and sneak up on a target, even talking about modern security-measures one had to be aware of but the main part was describing methods that didn¡¯t need advanced technology and focused on the human body and simple tools to achieve maximum efficiency. There were descriptions how to make those tools from simple materials, making me wonder if the idea was that the operative had no support and had to make do with whatever they could easily acquire without giving themselves away. If so, I thought it did a good job, making me curious if I would be able to craft some of the tools described out of simple household-items. But when would I ever need a homemade grappling hook?


    The third part was both less and more concerning, it dealt with the social aspect of intrusion and assassination, tailored to be used by women. How to use one¡¯s body to gain entry into normally restricted areas, how to seduce, distract and mislead. Most of what I was reading made little sense to me but when I applied the ideas described to past experience, it shed some light on some things. Things that I had failed to understand, reactions that I had missed and miss-interpreted. It made me wonder just what other people were thinking, how they saw the world, for the conclusions reached in the book to make sense.


    That part also spoke makeup, how to use clothes to their best effect and, the most interesting section in the part in my opinion, how to hide the tools of the trade in your clothes or even within your body. The last idea needed quite a bit of dedication but I could see how it would be difficult to search down there, unless someone was very, very thorough, which should only happen if suspicions were formed and avoiding that was the whole point of the section.


    The fourth part of the book was similar to the second only instead of describing tools it was the chemistry-part. How to make certain drugs, from fast-acting knockout drugs that one might use on a dart to poisons sourced from relatively easy to acquire materials. There were aphrodisiacs, even if the notes described that milage would greatly vary and caution was advised with those and there were drugs to cloud judgement induce suggestive states. Again, the notes provided additional information how those drugs were useful but only to a point and that another section would go into greater detail on interrogation-technique, the do¡¯s and don¡¯ts of the application of those drugs and torture-techniques.


    It was even the next part that went into just those details, at first there was a detailed description of torture-techniques that made me shudder to my core, wondering what kind of mind one had to have to even consider the ideas described but still, it was fascinating material. But, even as the book described ways to inflict pain on someone that would make them wish for death, it made it very clear just how limited the actual usefulness was, that people would tell everything they thought you wanted to hear just to make the pain stop.


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    Instead, there were methods to control, to slowly use addictive substances and even pleasure as tools to break someone, slowly cracking their mind until the content was yours for the taking. Some of the ideas, they were things that I could easily use on Mundus, my mind-magic allowing me to speed some of the processes up and even introduce sensations directly, without needing to manipulate the physical body. Just how good had Pantheon-Entertainment made their world, it was something I wanted to find out. Maybe, if I ever got my hands on the Spellcaster that had tried to kill me earlier, it would make for an interesting project to break someone like that, a powerful mind, turning them into a gibbering husk of their former glory.


    The book was fascinating and I couldn¡¯t wait to go through the rest of it and read the complete thing in full detail. It was something I had never encountered before and I loved to learn new things.


    On the other hand, when I had checked the forum, I had learned that there was something going on around Kolyug, something that might have some connection with the earlier attack. I wasn¡¯t sure if there was a connection in timing or if the spellcaster simply had grown bored or if we were reaching the edge of their range, I simply had no idea. Too many variables, too little information for anything but wild speculation.


    I had to smile at the fact that the Ghost-squadron had actually managed to be useful, mostly due to their ridiculous playstyle. By following that group of guards and describing what they had seen in the forum, I was reasonably certain that the guards had used the enchanted gem Adra had cut from the bear¡¯s chest to divine the location of their adversary and decided to bring the fight to them. It also confirmed that there were more of those manipulated monsters out there, that I had merely stumbled upon one of them, maybe an earlier, possibly failed, version.


    All in all, the description made me quite glad that we had put a lot of distance between us and Kolyug as I had absolutely no desire to go toe to toe with such an enemy, he had almost managed to kill me, despite us being a few hundred kilometers away from Kolyug. In closer contact, I would have been turned to ash, especially with my vulnerability to fire and heat.


    But somehow, it felt wrong to just run away but who did I know that might be interested and able to teach such a powerful spellcaster a lesson? Just the Grandmother, for the ability part but how to get a message to her? There had been mention of her enforcing her own brand of justice if she felt like it and I was reasonably sure that her magic was ultimately grounded in the natural order so maybe someone messing with that order by implanting magical crystals into animals would ruffle a few feathers and if it was close enough to home, she might be tempted to go out and deliver a smackdown. So, I just had to consider how to get a message to the Grandmother, one tempting enough to do just that.


    I was just thinking about possible ways to get a message to the Grandmother when the countdown in the blue box in front of me reached zero and the blackness around me started to fade, with light shining through my closed eyelids. At the same time, sound, temperature and smell returned to me, all telling an interesting story. But no story was more important than the one told to me by my sense of touch, which made it clear that I was being carried. By Sigmir, unless my nose was misleading me.


    ¡°Quickly, I have no idea how long she¡¯ll be out.¡± Adra¡¯s voice, filled with urgency and sounding close-by, managed to break through the slight fog that had enveloped my mind when I had fully entered my Avatar¡¯s body.


    ¡°I¡¯m awake.¡± I told, as I was opening my eyes, quickly closing them again to avoid being completely blinded by the light.


    ¡°Thank the ancestors.¡± Sigmir gasped, sounding a little winded and getting the attention of the others.


    ¡°Want to tell me what happened?¡± I asked, while using my magic to draw a quick formation to relieve Sigmir of her exhaustion. She softly groaned as my magic was washing over her while Adra began talking.


    ¡°It seems that the ponies let us leave their town but don¡¯t want to let us get away. A couple of them came after us, trying to hunt us down. We managed to stay away from them in the forest but I¡¯ve got to admit that they are persistent buggers.¡± she explained and I felt a vicious smile spread on my face. Now that I was back and Sigmir could focus on fighting instead of carrying me, we hopefully would be able to deal with them.

 Chapter 268

    ¡°Can you show me what is going on?¡± I mentally asked Lenore who I felt nearby. Her response was lacking in words, merely a feeling of affirmation but she made it up with a condensed version of her memory allowing me to see what she had observed during the time I had been unconscious in mere seconds. The rapid absorption of information meant that I wouldn¡¯t be able to fully remember the details but for now, I knew enough.


    When I had fallen unconscious, Sigmir had reacted just in time to keep me from face-planting in the mud, picking me up and carrying me away while Lenore had taken to the air, after sitting on my shoulder during the confrontation with the Centaur. Adra and Rai had followed after Sigmir within a minute or two while she had kept an eye on the town, knowing that she would always be able to find me, as long as we were linked. And her prudence had been justified, just fifteen minutes after we had left the town, the humiliated centaur alongside a few others had left the town, obviously following the tracks the others had left behind.


    What followed was quite simple, Lenore had flown back to my body, warned the others and they had used the forest in an attempt to shake the pursuit. Sadly, with the rain during the previous night, the ground was muddy and it was difficult to avoid leaving tracks, even for those who excelled at stealth like Adra and Rai, never mind Sigmir. To make sure that the centaurs didn¡¯t catch up to them, Adra had used her abilities to delay the centaurs, launching sneak-attacks to hassle them but at the end of the day, they were persistent predators and would simply try to run us down. I wasn¡¯t sure who would ultimately win such a contest, Sigmir had crossed the first divide and had incredible stamina but she had been weighted down by my body, small as it might be, and Centaurs most likely had some racial bonuses to their stamina.


    Not that any of that mattered, now that I was back and the time I had spent unconscious had been enough to normalise my Astral Power, even if my body was still sore and feeling as if I had a sunburn all over.


    A quick glance at the current situation told me that there were only eight centaurs right behind us, with some more having broken off at some point, maybe in an attempt to cut the others off. And eight centaurs, none of them looking special in any way or with an aura of having crossed the first Divide, at least none that Lenore could detect, against the four of us? Those were odds I was willing to take any day of the week.


    ¡°Thank you for saving me, love¡± I told Sigmir, while considering plans. ¡°Now, if you let me down we can show those silly ponies the error of their ways, right?¡± I continued, causing her to chuckle.


    ¡°Yes, I don¡¯t like being the prey. I much prefer the role of predator.¡± she answered and for a moment, I noticed the yellow flare of Ylva peek out of her eyes.


    ¡°You don¡¯t like being stalked by me?¡± I asked, managing to pack those simple words with a lot of innuendo, causing her to blush bright red and sputter a little. ¡°Don¡¯t worry, I¡¯ll play the meek little prey for you big, bad wolf to devour.¡± For a second, I was afraid she was going to cause a forest-fire, just from the heat radiating from her cheeks before she caught herself and promised to hold me to that. Now, it was my turn to blush while she looked for a good spot to make our stand.


    The centaurs were still a minute or two behind them, a little more cautious since Adra had nailed one of them with an arrow earlier so when we stumbled upon a small clearing, we had our spot. It only took us a few seconds to hammer out a plan, giving us enough time to prepare our welcome.


    With me on the ground, Rai quickly clambered up into a tree, using his shadow magic to hide himself while Adra, Sigmir and I continued on, leaving obvious footprints on the clearing itself. While there were differences between Rai¡¯s footprints and mine and I knew that Adra would be able to spot the difference between tracks made by Sigmir while carrying me and while she was not, I gambled on the fact that the centaurs would be a little complacent after an hour of mostly boring pursuit.


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    We spread out in the woods on the other side of the clearing, with Adra and me flanking Sigmir who made up the center once again. Unfortunately, she had to hide by crouching behind a thicket, the trees simply not wide enough to hide her frame but Adra and I had a nice tree to hide and take cover behind.


    Our plan was to wait for all of the centaurs to enter the clearing before Adra and I started the festivities with a powerful strike, each of targeting one side of their group, just so we didn¡¯t accidentally waste resources by targeting the same centaur.


    As soon as our attacks hit, Sigmir would step out of cover, capturing their attention and allowing Rai to get his attacks in from behind, without getting instantly slaughtered by their combined attention.


    It didn¡¯t take long for the centaurs to come out of the woods, moving at the comfortable trot I had observed a few times before, a gait that allowed them to move at a decent pace for quite some time. Letting out a slow breath and regretting that Lenore wasn¡¯t in her Hallow, lending me her strength, I stepped out of cover and instantly projected the runes I had drawn in my mind. Doing it that way cost a lot more Astral Power than drawing them one by one but in this case, the simply fact that I wanted the attack to occur instantaneous justified the expense.


    The ice-runes flashed in front of me, as my favourite combat-spell took form, a shard of ice, about as long as my forearm shooting out, guided by my mind into a gap of the centaur on the right flank of their group. Once the icicle was stuck, I focused on my connection to it and caused it to shatter into shards, shredding the centaurs flesh and breaking bones.


    At almost the same time, Adra had stepped out and shot one of her glowing arrows into the centaur on the left flank, punching through the armour and piercing the organ that linked their two circulatory systems, causing the centaur to fall after a stuttering step.


    There was quite a bit of shouting in surprise on the centaurs side when Sigmir broke cover, literally, by charging through the hedge she had waited behind, her body having taken some distinctly canine traits thanks to her Avatar-State with Ylva while glowing with her red aura. The leading centaur reared up, showing that there was some part of equine instinct in them, however they had come into being, and tried to turn around. Just in time to see a shadow fall from one of the trees, landing on the back of one of his people and causing streams of blood to erupt from their neck. Rai had taken his first victim.


    Realising that I didn¡¯t want anyone here to get away, even if we might be able to hunt them down, I let my Astral Power Overflow, instantly projecting three more runic formations, burning through a quarter of my Astral Power in an instant. The projectiles needed a little help from me but all managed to pierce into a centaur, even if not into a particularly vulnerable spot. Not that it mattered too much, thanks to my continued connection with them, it was easy to cause them to explode. And few beings were able to flee far with a hole the size of my head somewhere in their body.


    In the time I had taken to rip holes into my three targets, the others had successfully overwhelmed the other centaurs, now turning to make sure the three walking wounded wouldn¡¯t suffer for long.


    The whole combat had only taken a few seconds, the centaurs carelessness being their downfall. It reminded me, once again, that Road to Purgatory was in some ways brutally realistic, there often was no fairness in encounters while there were health-bars, they were relatively unimportant in combat. My ice-lances and explosions had ¡®only¡¯ taken three-quarters of the centaurs health but also added a strong bleed-debuff, yet, the pain and sudden shock had effectively stunned them, turning them into easy prey for the others.


    ¡°Idiots¡­¡± I muttered, mostly to myself, as the combat-log told me how little EXP we had gained. But it was no surprise, none of the centaurs had been above level forty, making me wonder just what in the world they had thought to achieve by chasing us.


    ¡°Let¡¯s go. No need to deal with their bodies, I just want to get away from their territory.¡± I called to the others who had checked if there was anything of value on the bodies.


    And with that, we were off, leaving the centaurs carcasses to add to the mud of the clearing.

 Chapter 269

    We spent the rest of the day moving away from the centaur-territory, slowly creeping through the forest. It would have been faster if we had taken the old imperial road but we were not quite ready to do that, the chance that a centaur-group might use it to catch us too high for us to risk it. We might have been able to beat whatever the centaurs could have thrown at us on short notice but I wasn¡¯t fond of the word ¡°might¡± in that sentence. I had no doubt that, if the centaurs had shifted the right beings, maybe anticipating that we had fled in this direction they could take us down, similarly it was easily in the realm of possibility that they were stationing strong groups, tasked with protecting their interests if push came to shove, in border-towns like the one we had left earlier.


    I just didn¡¯t know.


    And ultimately, it didn¡¯t matter, we had more than enough time to get where we wanted to go in the time the Beta would continue, especially now that we were leaving the frozen north and slowly getting into the area that would be considered Europe on Earth. Sure, here on Mundus the names were different but as I had yet to see a really good world map, I simply used Earth as a reference, even if it wasn¡¯t accurate. Humorously, it was more accurate than the maps I had seen so far, at least for the area we were in. If we were in Africa - Daiea to the locals - or South America - Arbortoma, things would be different, the change in coastlines big enough to throw everything off. It would be interesting once we actually got closer to our objective, the southern part of Arbortoma, to actually find the Nexus we were after. Realistically speaking, I was hunting for a very cold El Dorado, with the idea to break the prison made by a God.


    If I put it in those terms, it sounded insane. But also fun and a challenge worthy to write a legend about, whether I would succeed or not.


    But all those considerations were for the future, for now, I was moving behind Sigmir while conversing with Lenore what we could do about the trouble we had earlier. She thought the idea to get the information to the Grandmother was hilarious, even if nothing came off it. On the other hand, we had heard, from multiple sources, that the Grandmother had meddled with affairs in the past so she might meddle again. And that was something I would want to see, preferably with popcorn. I might be able to get a small glimpse of what was possible at the highest levels of Magic, a question that made me curious what came after the Elemental Magic skills, what would happen once I managed to max my Ice Magic Skill for example. It wasn¡¯t that far off, even with the glacial, pun fully intended, pace the skill had been rising lately.


    Another topic we discussed was how we could protect us from attacks like the one we had suffered earlier, for now, we had done something similar to the filter we had placed over her Hallow, keeping the Ice-Elemental Power out of it, so she wasn¡¯t cold in there. But instead filtering, I had been using one of the mental processes I had gained due to the increase in Intuition to constantly keep a concealment-rune in mind, not quite using a cloak of shadows but trying to combine it with my Astral Meditation skill to hide myself in relation to the Astral River.


    Of course, I had no idea if it was actually working or if there was another reason why the attack hadn¡¯t resumed, maybe due to the backlash or the focus or something else, I just couldn¡¯t know. And that didn¡¯t make me happy, just like I wasn¡¯t happy about having to constantly use a mental process.


    In the evening, deep in the forest, Adra found a small stream, just deep enough to wade into and bathe and we decided to make camp there. The stream showed me once again just how convenient my affinity for Ice-Magic and the resistance to the effects of cold I was enjoying due to it.


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    For Adra and Rai, the stream was uncomfortable cold, causing them to rush in, quickly wash off while I was cooking before hurrying back to the fire, in hopes of getting warm. That they shared a blanket, wrapping it around the two of them in addition to their cloaks was certainly just done in the interest of warmth and nothing else.


    Granted, the stream looked quite a bit bigger than its bed would normally suggest, giving me the impression that there was quite a bit of recently thawed snow that was adding to the water, making it about as cold as water cold be while remaining liquid.


    Compared to the two of them, Sigmir had some resistance to the cold, thanks to her bond with Ylva. That meant, while I left the two shivering snuggle-bunnies watch the food, I made sure that nothing snuck up on her while she was washing up. I may have neglected my duty, not warning her of a certain Firnelf that was sneaking up on her but she didn¡¯t complain when I helped her wash up. I certainly enjoyed.


    I didn¡¯t ask her to return the favour, noticing that she was getting gooseflesh from the cold, which looked incredibly cute due to the amount of body-hair she had. She was, in my eyes, the perfect embodiment of strength, primal and passionate, even if that primality, if that was a word, sometimes clashed with modern beauty-standards. Luckily, I didn¡¯t have to care on Mundus, there was no modern here. There might be a few questions once we got into more populated areas, not that I cared.


    With a gentle pat on her gorgeous behind, I sent her to the others, asking her to call me once dinner was ready, before returning to my thoughts, sitting in the water as if it was a hot spring. I needed to use a little magic to keep the chill at bay, or rather, to allow me to ignore the chill but it was merely a trickle, just enough to bolster the amount of Ice Astral Power flowing through my body.


    As I sat there, I realised that there would be questions anyway, just because I was having a relationship with what most people would call a computer-program. Some might call it strange, a fetish or some sort of mastubatory fantasy, as if Sigmir was merely an advanced porno for me, but I knew, somewhere deep inside me, that that wasn¡¯t the case. At least I thought I knew, it wasn¡¯t like I could empirically measure my feelings. Or compare them to anything I had felt before.


    In a way, I knew, at least intellectually, that the capsule had some way to transform experiences into feelings that would normally be outside of my reach. And going by past experiences, as well as what I had been told by professionals over the years, I knew that I couldn¡¯t experience the feelings I was experiencing. Which made no sense, causing me to question my subjective reality, the processes involved in Road to Purgatory and, at times, my feelings.


    But, all those considerations, ended at a simple realisation: I wasn¡¯t willing to give up the feelings I was experiencing, even if they were only due to the capsule. There was the possibility that, somehow, the process used by the capsule to allow me to experience Mundus through the filter of my Avatar allowed me to experience feelings as a normal person would. It was my current hypothesis and if it was the case, the capsules would be a tremendous boon to people like me, who normally had problems to relate to the feelings of other people and who experienced feelings atypically. At least that was the word a professional had used with me once. Sounded better like psychopath, it wasn¡¯t as loaded with images of fava-beans and chianti.


    Knowing that my pondering was going nowhere, as it always did, I made sure that I was clean before getting up. Walking out of the stream, quite a bit after the others, I used a trickle of Ice-Magic to freeze the water on my skin, casually flicking the created diamond dust away from me. As I walked, I realised that I would be in for a world of pain further south, especially once summer was here. I would have to come up with a solution, hopefully before I was toast. I had a feeling that, if I ever got a little to much sun, I would burn like a vampire from a bad horror-movie.


    Dinner was quite tasty, the new supplies combining with some of the meat we were still carrying, kept in cold-storage courtesy of my Ice-Magic, made for tasty stew, the others grateful to warm up from the inside.


    Finally, after dinner, it was time for me to work my magic. I had a few projects to tackle and all of them were interesting.

 Chapter 270

    Walking over to the stream, I decided to make myself comfortable. Sure, it might be more traditional to sit on the earth, with my legs crossed but I had no idea how long I was going to need. In addition, the ground was still rather wet, which would just add to the discomfort. No, I could easily work in style and comfort. Drawing my Athame and channelling my Astral Power through the gem set into its pommel allowed me to create runes using less Astral Power without reducing their effect. Creating the rune for Ice was second nature by now, even if I used Hard Ice for most combat-purposes now, I had used the Ice-Rune a lot. The mental image was one that I had used a few times before and gradually refined, the comfortable armchair that had morphed into a Throne over time, the backrest formed by the wings of a raven, the armrests looking like wolves. In addition the the decorations, I added a comfortable, at least for someone who was mostly immune to cold, cushion out of diamond dust, using its strange properties to make it soft and springy.


    With my preparations completed, I sat down and started to finalise my plans with Lenore.


    After batting around ideas for some time, maybe an hour, we decided that we had our first plan. With Adra¡¯s spear, the one she had magically crafted from a piece of crystal wood given to her by Kallista, from the trees that I had only seen around Neyto, I hoped to be able to focus on those trees, maybe even cast a scrying-spell into the area. The process should be similar to what I had done to track down that one stooge, using his blood and causing him to die, from a couple of miles away.


    Placing the wooden spear in front of me, I tried to reach out with my magical abilities in an attempt to tune into it. At first, there was nothing, no feedback or anything that might help me guide me on my path. Remembering that I had once used darkness-magic to help with such a connection, even if I had used hair back then, I surrounded the wood with the oily, creeping mist that I could create, trying to use my connection to the mist to somehow bridge the magical distance between me and the wood.


    ¡°It¡¯s not working, is it?¡± Lenore asked after maybe twenty minutes of staring at the wood, battering my magical senses against that wall.


    ¡°No, it¡¯s not.¡± I admitted, wrecking my brain to come up with a way to feel it.


    ¡°Maybe that will help.¡± I told her, while raising my hand and carefully cutting it on the spear¡¯s edge. I knew from seeing Adra dispatch enemies with it that the edges were insanely sharp and, as expected, it easily cut a bloody line into my hand. From there, I forced some Astral Power  from my hair into the blood, using the enriched blood to coat the spear, trying to get a feeling on that route.


    But again, other than making Adra¡¯s spear bloody, I wasn¡¯t able to achieve anything, not even a trickle that would have encouraged me to continue trying. With a soft curse,  I closed the wound and, with a little help from Lenore, made sure that the blood I had shed was gathered in a single spot and completely destroyed with her Death-Magic, turning it into nothing but inanimate dust. It was something I had to make a habit off, not just remembering it from time to time as I did now. My blood, especially enriched with magic and my hair, they gave an enemy a far too easy time attacking me.


    ¡°Well, there goes that idea.¡± I muttered to Lenore, while scattering the dust using the frozen liquid that had been part of the blood.


    ¡°It was a long-shot, neither of us have any affinity to Wood or Vegetation after all.Let¡¯s try the next way.¡± she spurred me on and I obliged.


    The second way was both more complicated and less so. It only relied on magic I had used before but on a scale that was new.


    Calling up Darkness, as I did to create the scrying-spells I had used before, was easy and within moments a small cloud of blackness hung in front of me, creating a strange effect as if it was sucking in the light. It was curious but nothing I hadn''t seen before. The next step was also something I had done before, switching my point-of-view with a shadow, allowing me to gaze out of it. What was new was that I used the memory and knowledge of such a shadow, beneath a tree just outside of Neyto, hoping that I could shift the viewpoint from there, hopefully without triggering some lethal trap or ward of the Grandmother. I had no doubt that she had something around her grove but I was banking that the first layer was something that merely alerted her, not directly destroyed the intruder. If so, I would hopefully be able to talk to her, through the scrying spell.


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    As I focused on the shadow I wanted to reach, I felt the spell start to drain more and more Astral Power, forcing me to activate Overflow, just to keep it together. Within moments, I felt the Astral Power in my body plummet, flooding into the spell. And then, there was nothing more to drain, not without using Blood Magic and possibly killing myself. It was as if I had ran into a wall, the spell trying to drain more, dragging me behind but I was suddenly stopped. The spell in front of me shattered into motes of darkness, swirling around me for a moment, before dissipating into the Astral River again while I was leaning back on my seat, breathing heavily and trying to see the license-plate on the truck that had run me over.


    ¡°I guess it might work, in theory.¡± I told Lenore, whispering in hopes to keep my headache from killing me.


    Lenore wasn¡¯t afflicted quite as badly, but she wasn¡¯t a happy bird either. We had agreed that it was a viable option and unless I misunderstood what had happened it was, we just didn¡¯t have the power to make it work. Most likely the amount of power needed to scry was directly dependant on the distance between you and the point you wanted to see. We had been travelling away from Neyto for months, moving about halfway across a continent, so the distance was quite significant.


    Trying to soothe my mind, I let myself drop into the Astral River, clearing away everything in my mind, leaving nothing but emptiness. I felt the flow of Astral Power around me and started to slowly draw some of it into me to replenish what I had lost but that was only secondary. The calm serenity of the river, the soothing, ethereal song of the river, letting it was over and through my mind, it helped with the pain.


    Just feeling the interplay of power, knowing that we, all the beings on Mundus, were merely grains on the banks of a cosmic river, it was humbling, even as the sheer beauty of it all filled me with awe. As I was looking at the flow of Ice Astral Power, slowly interweaving with the flow of Water, a process that would take a few months as winter was turning to spring, which would bring Ice to its weakest point, I realised something. I didn¡¯t need to cross the distance back to Neyto, not a physical distance at least. But preparations needed to be made.


    I opened my eyes again, slowly, as I still had a bit of a headache and explained Lenore what I had in mind.


    ¡°It is risky, you know that, right? You could lose yourself in the flow, your body turning into a slowly withering husk while your mind fades into the background-flow of the Astral River. I have no idea what magical laws govern the transfer of your being between your world and Mundus, but what you have in mind might just kill you, permanently.¡± she objected but I could hear that she thought it was a good, if risky, idea.


    ¡°So, we make sure that I have something to guide me back. Two somethings, actually.¡± I explained, laying out what I had in mind. The first step was simple, Lenore and I were connected on a deep level, the time we had spent in each other¡¯s head allowing us to know the other like ourselves, maybe even better. Lenore would be the first anchor, sitting on my physical shoulder, while submerging her own mind into the Astral River as I had done just now. Hopefully, that would give me a beacon to guide me back.


    The second was a little more complicated but not by much. Using my own blood, enriched with the essence of my magic, I wrote my name onto the Ice of the Throne I was sitting on. Part of me wanted to create a rune that signified me and only me but I wasn¡¯t sure how that would look. I might be able to figure it out but I was hesitant, such a rune would be, in effect, the same as True Name, something that represented me in my entirety. And there was tremendous Power in such  a symbol, for good or ill.


    The Name I had given my Avatar would have to do for now and that was what I used.


    Next, I let myself drop into the Astral River, submerging myself in the stream of Ice, like I had done earlier in the small brook next to the camp. Only that now, I was letting myself go with the flow, so to speak, only keeping a tenuous hold on my body. It was a similar experience to the one I had when crossing the first Divide, only that now, I didn¡¯t have the magic potion Kallista had given me back then.


    But it worked, I felt the Astral River flow around me as I lost all sense of time. I was floating along, perfectly content, my body feeling so far away, at least until I felt a slight change, almost like a change in pressure. I was reasonably certain that it was the point of change, where the Nexus acted as a bridge between the Astral and the Physical and focused on that bridge.


    Moving in the manner I desired wasn¡¯t easy but I persisted, focusing on my goal when I felt as if I had broken through the surface of a pool of water. Grasping the Astral Power around me, I pulled together something, trying to make a form that looked like me in an attempt to project my mind into the form. Suddenly, I felt something approach, something ancient and angry, the wrath and power of that being so far off my own scale that it was barely comprehensible. It was as if a continent was pressing down on me, an angry continent.


    I was about to simply give up to let my mind flow back into the Astral, when the pressure vanished and I was gently held, cradled in the power of that being and a soft voice asked, ¡°Morgana?¡±

 Chapter 271

    I needed a moment to even form a coherent thought in my mind, the sheer awe I felt at the being next to me stunning me. I knew the being, the voice familiar but despite that fact, I needed a moment to gather myself. Even the connection to my body shook, the urge to simply let go and lose myself in the experience tugging at me.


    ¡°Greetings, Grandmother.¡± I managed to say, my voice vibrating in a strange yet beautiful manner. It was similar to the manner of speaking used when chanting spells, the words less important than the mental image, merely a way to convey something that our minds might grasp but the simplicity of the spoken word could not encompass.


    Taking a deep breath, not so much for oxygen but to gather myself, I focused on the form I had formed for myself, trying to create a mental framework for a conversation that my mind could grasp.


    It worked, somewhat.


    We were still in the Astral River, or the Nexus of Neyto, the difference not something I could truly understand but I had managed to use the memory of the Nexus to form a silvery surface, its look reminding me of Liquid Moonlight, causing a sudden flash of realisation that I filed away for later. On that surface, I had created two armchairs, not quite copies of the Throne my Avatar was sitting on but more like the original version, with a small, round table next to it. To top it off, and maybe in a flash of whimsy, I had created an ornament, a glittering crystal out of hard ice, multi-faceted and breaking the light into shimmering rays. Maybe not quite on brand for me, but it was the best I could come up with.


    ¡°Please, have a seat.¡± I asked, as if we were in a house somewhere, having tea. It was more than a little surreal but somehow, it felt right.


    The Grandmother must have agreed in some way, as she chuckled to herself before coalescing her presence into the form I had seen before, the young woman with the ancient eyes. It was just another casual demonstration of her magical ability, here I was sitting, merely using a form roughly shaped in the same way I was, made purely from silvery, Ice-Astral Power, while she was easily capable of taking her normal shape. Or maybe it was the other way around, that the indeterminate shape of continental power was her real form and she merely used the guise of a young woman to move around on Mundus.


    In a surge of pride, I focused on the surrounding Astral River, drawing some more Darkness Astral Power and Blood Astral Power, not to absorb as I normally did but to add some hair and a little colour to my form. While I didn¡¯t have the skill to even try forming a circulatory system in the shape I had formed, I could form a glossy mane of pure shadow, wearing it like a wig. With another whimsical thought, I formed a wedding-dress of pure crimson around me, without a doubt the bloodiest bride ever imagined.


    We both took a seat and the Grandmother caused a small pot of tea to appear on the table I had created alongside teacups and a small platter with cookies. Chuckling under my breath, I reached out with my mind, causing two vines to sprout from the table, carefully taking the pot and serving tea to both of us, more vines reaching out and forming what amounted to coasters in a convenient place to reach for either of us, so we could place our cups on them.


    ¡°You have come far.¡± the Grandmother stated, as I was carefully using magic to perform the mundane task.


    ¡°Thank you. I wasn¡¯t quite sure if that would work and, just like the first time we met, I have to ask for forgiveness first, just in case I have caused offense by moving into this space. If so, I apologize but I wanted to talk to you and this was the only working way I could come up with.¡± I explained, causing her to raise an eyebrow.


    ¡°You say working way? What else did you try?¡± she asked, curiosity in her voice, reminding me of a teacher, quizzing their student.


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    ¡°I did try to form a scrying focus near the village, allowing me to essentially knock on your wards, hoping that it would get your attention without intruding into your space. Sadly, I just don¡¯t have the power to make that spell work, yet.¡± I admitted and she nodded along, urging me to continue.


    ¡°The other idea was to use the wood Kallista gave to Adra, which she fashioned into a spear, as a scrying-focus, allowing me to connect with the grove around the Nexus and thus with Kallista, asking her to act as a go-between. But I¡¯m afraid my ability to work with wood is abysmal.¡± I continued, causing her to chuckle.


    ¡°Yes, I can see that. Your abilities develop nicely but you are clearly more suited to the darker paths, for death and destruction. Don¡¯t think that that is a purely bad thing, always remember, without death, there can¡¯t be life. Without destruction, there can¡¯t be growth.¡± she explained and it was my turn to nod and take a sip of the magically conjured tea. It was delicious, the flavour simply out of this world, especially for someone like me who tasted magic. Coming here had been worth it, just for the tea.


    Letting out a blissful sigh, I decided to explain why I was here.


    ¡°But why I came here is a different matter. You once told me that you disliked people playing with the natural order that you¡¯ve thrown a few people into the Barrow Den for such actions.¡± I began, remembering the tale of the Snow Queen, Sally.


    ¡°Some distance south of you, there is a city named Kolyug, quite the marvel of magical architecture, at least in the eyes of one such as me. We have been there about a month ago, just passing through, and completed a quest, hunting down a strange specimen of bear. It turned out that the bear in question had been modified by someone else, pushed over the first divide by implanting an enchanted orb of Eternal Ember in its chest. I think it might have been an experiment to merge an affinity for Fire with one for Ice but that is purely speculation.¡± I paused for a moment, taking another sip of tea.


    ¡°I have no idea is such a merge is even remotely possible, but when I saw the orb and felt the power contained within, I decided that I wanted to have nothing to do with such madness, especially not when the experiments are performed by someone quite a bit more powerful than me. We reported the quest, turned the mess over to the local Adventurers'' Guild and their Guard and decided to get away from the town as fast as our Spirit-Golems could carry us.¡° I continued, causing her to chuckle again.


    ¡°But now, I have heard rumours over the communication-channels of us Travellers that the experiments are much more widespread than I thought, that Nature around Kolyug is heavily affected and fiery monsters roam the land. I just thought you should be informed of the problems, just in case you wanted to take an interest.¡± I finished my retelling, taking a cookie and nibbling on it. The taste was as incredible as the taste of the tea had been, different but just as good.


    The Grandmother looked at me over the rim of her teacup, her gaze measuring me, once again. ¡°But there is more, isn¡¯t there?¡± she asked, the question simple but I knew better than to try obfuscating the truth.


    ¡°Well, yes. Someone, I assume that same spellcaster responsible for the experiments, tried to kill me this morning. He used a projection through the Astral River to attack me, the projection taking the shape of a great, fiery serpent. I managed to survive thanks to a bit of luck and the fact that he was hundreds of kilometers away but still, he tried to kill me.¡± she nodded again, a smile on her face.


    ¡°And you thought that by telling me, I might decide to restore the natural order and destroy that problem for you?¡± she asked, her eyes piercing me. I would have blushed, if the silvery shape I was wearing would have been able to, but it was not. As I realised that, I started to wonder how I had been able to drink tea and eat cookies but before my mind could go down that rabbit-hole, I filed the question away, for later.


    ¡°It would have been a satisfactory resolution, yes.¡± I admitted, wondering if I had made a mistake in trying to use the Grandmother, she could be mercurial after all. And if she decided to strike me down, no amount of distance would save me.


    ¡°I always liked your honesty. And I remember little Kol, he was a nice young man. I might go down to Kolyug, just to take a look what his descendants have made of the place. And I¡¯m always happy to see someone I taught, if only for a day, make progress, which your ability to come here demonstrates.¡± she paused for a moment, pondering.


    ¡°Yes, I might even teach you a little more, at least as long as you are able to maintain your projection here. Consider it another test of your ability.¡± she said, still sounding quite amused.

 Chapter 272

    As long as I remained in the Astral River, keeping the platform on the cusp of the Nexus we used to sit stable, the Grandmother was content to teach me. Holding the platform together was easy at first but the strain on my mind, the need to keep me anchored to my Avatar back in the forest, my mind anchored at that particular spot of the Astral River and the platform anchored to me, was mounting, slowly but surely. I also understood that, if I failed I would be in trouble. I wasn¡¯t sure what losing myself in the Astral River would do to a Traveller, it might be as simple as being sent to respawn or it might be more problematic, existence as a ghost in the Astral River was possible or even out-right loss of the character. But even if the punishment by the game was as simple as a respawn, I had no doubt that the Grandmother would add her own lesson to it, one on the danger of hubris.


    But, even with all that in mind, the chance to have questions answered by the Grandmother was a lure strong enough to make me push to the boundaries of my abilities and beyond. I wanted to learn from her, especially now that I had learned more and could ask more direct questions.


    Finally, after what felt like a long, long time, I realised that the platform around us was slowly crumbling, despite my best efforts. I was simply too tired, too mentally exhausted, to keep it stable.


    ¡°Apologies, Grandmother, as much as I would like to continue to learn from you, I don¡¯t think I would be able to find my way back into my body if I stay for much longer.¡± I admitted, my voice contrite and regretful. I had a feeling that, even if I came back here, the Grandmother wouldn¡¯t be in the same teaching mood she was in now.


    ¡°Yes, I can see that. Your will is still strong, your soul shining brightly with a desire for knowledge but your mind is at its limits and would soon crumble. But you¡¯ve done well, especially for one so young as you are. We might speak again, but don¡¯t attempt to reach this place frivolously. I taught you more as a reward for your growth, unless you manage to impress me again, I will not teach you again.¡± She nodded and, after a last sip of the incredibly magical tea she had prepared, I stood and gave her a polite bow, the bow of a grateful student to their teacher.


    ¡°We will talk again, someday.¡± with those words, her form turned back into complex streams of Astral Power, flowing back into the River and, for just a moment, I felt the enormity of her being around me before she retreated, back through the nexus.


    No longer needing the platform, or the form I had been using, I let both dissolve into the the simple streams of Ice, Darkness and Blood, my mind remaining in its immaterial form, as I always was in the Astral River. The power flowing around me was so soothing, inviting me to remain, to let go, but I somehow managed to hold myself together and focus on the connection back to my body. It was a little indistinct, almost frayed making me wonder if I would be able to make it back.


    But I had prepared for just that and focused on the other safeguards I had made, my connection to Lenore and the name carved into my throne in blood. Both were faintly discernible, strengthening the connection and there was a third radiance near those two, one that called to me. Instinctively, I knew that it was Sigmir, that I had to return to her and focusing on her existence allowed me to slowly swim through the Astral River, going against the current that tried to sweep me away.


    With a last push, I returned to my Avatar, its eyes flickering open as my senses regained function. There was a moment of disorientation and if I hadn¡¯t been stably sitting on my throne, I would have fallen over, trying to discern up from down. The Astral River was lacking those concepts, it was ruled by its current and the elements, which could be bent to your will, if you were strong enough. Where I could use magic to influence reality on Mundus, the Astral River wsa magic and I could use my will to bend it, at least to a point.


    Stolen novel; please report.¡°Did it work?¡± Lenore asked, her voice curious.


    ¡°How long was I under?¡± I asked Lenore, ignoring her question for now. My mind was reeling from the incongruence I was experiencing, the forest around me looked just as it had when I had delved into the Astral.


    ¡°Maybe ten minutes. So, did you manage to find your way through the Astral River?¡± she asked again, lightly pecking my ear to motivate me.


    ¡°Yes, it worked. I managed to talk to the Grandmother, for far longer than ten minutes. I guess time works strange ways in the Astral River, I could have sworn I was delving into it for hours.¡± I admitted, remembering the answers I had received and the vague hints she had dropped as avenues of future inquiries.


    ¡°That sounds as if it was well worth it. What did you learn?¡± Lenore pressed on, even as she placed her head against my temple to return to her Hallow.


    ¡°Quite a bit, especially regarding ways that we might keep us safe from attacks like the one today. And even a few possible ways to increase my strength, even if I¡¯m not sure I want to use them. They do have drawbacks, some of them rather significant.¡± I shook my head, my mind feeling rather fuzzy as the mental fatigue from my experience in the Astral River was starting to affect my physical Avatar. It was a strange experience, I had been cognisant of the exhaustion but more as a concept, a feeling of knowing that there was a limit I wouldn¡¯t be able to push through but with the return to my Avatar, it was as if now, the normal processes that were part of exhaustion were kicking in, trying to make up for lost time.


    ¡°Tomorrow. I¡¯ll explain more tomorrow.¡± I promised Lenore, as a yawn was trying to break my jaw.


    I noticed that there were a few notifications that I had ignored, so I looked through them.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Skill increased</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You increased your skill: Astral Meditation [58/100]</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Skill increased</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You increased your skill: Blood Magic [59/100]</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Title gained</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You gained a skill: Astral Traveller</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>The Astral River flows through the Cosmos, forming a bridge between realities, between realms and between worlds. You took the first steps of traversing the Astral River and lived to tell the tale.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    The boost in Astral Meditation was quite impressive, netting me six points but then, I had spent a lot of time in the Astral River. Blood Magic, on the other hand, might have gone up when I created the marking. Thinking about the marking made me realise that I had to make sure that I wouldn¡¯t leave anything that could be used against me. A short manifestation of my Ice-Magic turned the still infused blood into ice, and Lenore made sure that it lost all links to me, using her Death-magic. The only thing that remained behind were pretty, glittering crystals that would melt in the coming days.


    That only left the title to think about, not that it seemed to have any effect, other than maybe bragging rights. But I felt just too tired to deal with those, so I started walking, or rather shuffling, back to the others.


    As I stumbled into camp, Sigmir caught me, a worried look on her face.


    ¡°Are you alright, love?¡± she asked as soon as she was holding me secure on her lap.


    ¡°Yes, I am. Just tired, so tired.¡± I admitted, snuggling in, enjoying her smell and the feeling of safety her arms always gave me.


    ¡°I managed to contact the Grandmother and ask for advice.¡± I announced, hearing a soft swear from Adra.


    ¡°You talked to her?!¡± Adra asked, her voice a little strained. Maybe because she had some theoretical magical knowledge, not like Rai who was more interested in the practical aspects and thus unaware of the difficulties such a spell had.


    ¡°We did. She complimented me on my growth, you know. Can you even imagine how it feels if a being so powerful, so awe-inspiring compliments you?¡± I asked, speaking without really thinking about my words.


    ¡°I have seen parts of who and what she is. And she said I have exceeded her expectations, which was why she granted me another lesson.¡± I continued, hearing a soft gasp from Adra.


    ¡°When? How?!¡± she asked, her voice whisper-quiet.


    ¡°Time, time flows different in the Astral River. And that was where we met. I spent hours with her, even as only minutes passed here. I have no idea if that was her doing or a property of the place we were in. She made awesome tea, though.¡± I tried to form the words to convey what I had experienced but my mind was getting more and more fuzzy.


    ¡°Love, would you mind if we go to bed now?¡± I asked, snuggling deeper into Sigmir¡¯s embrace, just before the world turned dark around me.

 Chapter 273

    ¡°Wake up, sleepyhead.¡± a voice in my head shook me from the comfortable cocoon of warmth that I had lost myself in. I hadn¡¯t been asleep, not for some time, but there simply hadn¡¯t been a reason for me to start moving. When I had woken up, I had been snuggled up to Sigmir, with the furs we used as bedding wrapped around the two of us. Listening to Sigmir¡¯s breathing, I was sure that she was still sleeping, the darkness around us lending credit to the idea, so I had rested my head back on her chest and simply let go of myself, letting my mind wander without thought.


    Until the voice in my head, Lenore, was making me get up.


    ¡°And here I thought it was roosters that made you get up in the morning.¡± I sent over our link, adding just the right amount of grumpiness and humour to make the joke work.


    ¡°They, too. But I want to know what the Grandmother taught you, to protect yourself. She isn¡¯t the type to simply teach you a spell, no, it¡¯s more likely that she gave you a broadly applicable hint that you have to figure out for yourself and I am just as curious as you always are.¡± Lenore pushed, her own opinions and memories strongly influenced by my own. It didn¡¯t help that she was right, the Grandmother hadn¡¯t just explained how I could stop someone from using a link to attack me, whether through the Astral River or another medium, apparently it was possible to use almost any element, it just depended on your skill with it. No, she had used one idea I had used before and hinted at ways to expand on that idea, how it could be used to cover the issue.


    Lenore must have eavesdropped, or was that thought-dropped, on me, otherwise she wouldn¡¯t have pushed me to think of the exact idea the Grandmother had mentioned. Somehow, it turned into an interesting game, Lenore trying to badger me into thinking about the conversation with the Grandmother and what she had transmitted while I was thinking about anything but that. We were both limited to the other¡¯s surface thoughts, sifting through memories required assistance of the one who was holding them and Lenore¡¯s curiosity was driving her insane. Finally, after a few minutes of mental tag, I relented and mentally relayed the conversation, causing her to fall silent, deeply in thought.


    ¡°There¡¯s a lot more to that than concealing us from magic, isn¡¯t there?¡± she asked after quite a bit of contemplation.


    ¡°There is. I even think that I could use it on others but before I try that, I¡¯d like to experiment a little, hopefully on someone we don¡¯t care about. Unless I miss my guess, using that type of magic comes with significant risk.¡± I explained, adding the mental images and concepts I was thinking about.


    The idea the Grandmother had mentioned was the simple act of using Blood-Runes to strengthen myself, drawing them directly on my body and slowly infusing Astral Power into them. She had asked a simple question, why not make such a marking permanent? I was a Blood Mage after all, I should be able to carve a magical formation directly into someone¡¯s body, using Blood Magic to draw out the person¡¯s magic to infuse it into the formation. That way, at least according to her, it was possible to create a lasting, permanently active effect that didn¡¯t need to be consciously maintained.


    Of course, she had talked about a way to carve curses directly into prisoners, using their own magic to imprison them into their bodies, making me think of my own attempt to create slave-collars and the horrible failure that had been. Curious where I had gone wrong, brought it up, causing her a good laugh, even if she went a little pale when I mentioned the being that had tried to push through. Just that reaction made me wonder what on Mundus that thing had been, other than something that just should not be. She had told me where I had gone wrong, mostly by using an external medium to hold the magic, which caused, for lack of better word, transmission loss. If I carved the formations directly into a body, that loss would be reduced to zero as unused power went back into the body, ready to be used again.


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    ¡°Too bad we didn¡¯t know that yesterday, we could have used a centaur or two.¡± Lenore mumbled, causing me to grin at her pragmatism, it was just like my own.


    ¡°On the bright side, if we go back to the road and stumble upon the rest of them, we can combine the pleasure of taking revenge for harrying us like prey with the excitement of magical experimentation. Isn¡¯t that great?¡± I asked, causing her to break in cackling laughter. She gave a good cackle, I had to admit that, a Raven¡¯s beak and vocal cords were just made for cackling and cawing.


    ¡°Now you are making me hope that a few of the silly ponies are trying to ambush us.¡± she admitted, after calming down a little.


    ¡°What¡¯s going on?¡± Sigmir asked, her voice thick with sleep. Apparently, Lenore¡¯s laughter had woken her up.


    ¡°Lenore¡¯s just being silly.¡± I told her, before pushing myself up a little so I could give her a good morning-kiss.


    ¡°Mhm¡­¡± she mumbled, in clear enjoyment, but once I let up a little, she easily pushed me up, just a bit, so she could look into my face without her eyes crossing.


    ¡°Are you really alright? You were a little strange last night, the day shouldn¡¯t have exhausted you to that degree. Did something happen with the Grandmother?¡± she asked, remembering the sometimes mercurial temper of my teacher.


    ¡°No, it was just a little difficult to divine a way to speak with her. Transmitting my mind through the Astral River was a little exhausting but it was worth it. And I¡¯m fine, really.¡± I promised, trying to convey that I truly was fine and not putting up a front. I knew just like she did that I would try to hide a potential weakness from Adra and Rai, so if something had been wrong the evening before, I wouldn¡¯t necessarily have admitted it.


    My assurance seemed to have been enough for Sigmir and we simply laid there, enjoying the closeness of the other, until dawn broke and we decided to get up.


    It didn¡¯t take us long to break camp and return to our travels. With a little prodding from me, partially because I hoped to stumble upon a few cenaturs that would volunteer to be experimental subjects, partially because the ancient road would speed our travels up a great deal, we decided to return to it. Not directly, that would have been a little reckless, I wanted a few test-subjects not stumble into a patrol near the town, so getting to the road would take most of the day.


    As we walked, I used the time to teach Rai, relating the teachings I was learning in the book given to me by Mrs. Wu to him. I had to translate them into concepts he understood but, for example, the difference in method between overcoming a scrying-ward that was triggered by motion and a motion-sensor were minute. Sure, if you wanted to disable them you needed different skills and tools but disabling wasn¡¯t the wisest choice at all times, circumventing them was far easier.


    Sadly, I had didn¡¯t even know if some of the concepts I was explaining existed on Mundus but if I could come up with potential ways to translate real-world methods of private security into magical concepts, others would be able to do so as well.


    The biggest problem was that Rai was a little lacking in the detection of magic, he could smell its presence, similar to me, but where I had Lenore to cover the problem that smell and taste were imprecise in some manners but highly distinguishing in others, he didn¡¯t have a Lenore. So, even as I described security-ideas to him and how to counter them, I tried to figure out a way to give him some sort of universal tool, the easiest way would be to teach him a general counterspell, using the darkness-runes of Devour, Magic and most likely Shadow, something that allowed him to use his own Shadow and Magic to break others. He had some talent with Darkness, especially Shadow, Magic, so it might work. But it would take a bit of time, even if I asked Adra for help in testing the spell.


    Late in the afternoon, Lenore came flying back to me, reporting that she had found the road but that there was a small centaur-camp. Looking at her memories, I was relatively certain that those centaurs were just an ordinary party, maybe hunters or traders using a magical bag, but at somehow, I just didn¡¯t care, they were in the wrong place at the wrong, or maybe right, time.


    ¡°There¡¯s a small centaur-patrol near the road. Rai, we¡¯ll take care of them, once night has fully fallen.¡± I told my disciple, while I was beginning considering the best ways to handle the attack. If I wanted them alive, I¡¯d have to be a little more careful. Dead Centaurs made bad experimental subjects after all.

 Chapter 274

    The others had a few questions about the patrol Lenore had spotted, mostly if there was danger in attacking them. I highly doubted it, the group she had seen and I had identified as a patrol might be one, at the very least they were likely to report to the other centaurs if they noticed us, but I doubted they were part of the centaur-military. Not that it mattered but by calling them a patrol, I gave us an easy justification for attacking them, even if only to our own minds. It was a curious bit of cognitive dissonance I was experiencing, feeling better about attacking a group of centaurs and using them to test the magic I was theorising just by putting the labels ¡®patrol¡¯ and ¡®enemy¡¯ on them.


    As always when it came to sneak-attacks, Sigmir and Lenore moved with Rai and me until we were in shouting-distance, just in case we were spotted and needed to change tactics from sneaking and slitting throats to open battle, in which case we had reinforcements nearby. Once we found a nice shrub for them to hide behind, Rai and I continued our silent stalk, moving with the shadows we conjured up to hide us, towards the enemy camp.


    When we got closer, my conviction that we weren¡¯t dealing with actual centaur-military was strengthened, they only had one guard posted and that guard didn¡¯t even pay attention to the surroundings. He was just sitting, or however the centaurs called the pose in which their equine-body was on the ground but their human-body remained upright and alert, there and staring into the fire, obviously lost in thought.


    Placing my hand on Rai¡¯s shoulder, I stopped him from outright attacking and used my mind-magic as it was supposed to be harnessed, using the shadows of the night to slowly creep into the centaurs mind. I had used magic to put enemies into a deep sleep, akin to hibernation, before and combining those spells with the increased penetration granted by Mind Magic made it almost too easy. Within a minute or two, the centaur¡¯s human body slumped, obviously asleep. None of the other centaurs reacted, even as I extended the shadows I had used earlier, pushing their minds deeper into unconsciousness.


    ¡°That was easier than expected.¡± I admitted, looking at Rai who had flinched at the sound of my voice, as I had spoken normally.


    ¡°Don¡¯t worry, they won¡¯t easily wake up, I made sure of that.¡± I added, seeing his uneasiness.


    ¡°Are we just going to kill them in their sleep?¡± he asked, shedding the shadows he was cloaked in.


    ¡°No, that would be a waste. They just volunteered to help me in a few magical experiments.¡± I shook my head and he visibly winced, maybe because of the smile tugging at my lips.


    ¡°Tell the others everything is alright and they should make camp. I¡¯ll be busy for a while.¡± I ordered him, while my hands started to draw out magical formations.


    ¡°That was anticlimactic.¡± Lenore said, once Rai had left.


    ¡°Yes, I doubt that they are anything but a hunting-party.¡± I admitted, not really caring about them. There was still more than enough annoyance at centaurs to go around and I really needed some test-subjects. They were just the unlucky guys that had been handy, or rather, that had been spotted by Lenore.


    Once I had finished my magic, frozen chains sprung from the ground, immobilising and gagging the centaurs. Knowing how their bodies worked made that easy, their joints and muscles had a limited range, just like they had with humans, and once they couldn¡¯t work in the way they were supposed to, they were just helpless.


    The cold shackles caused a sudden and very rough awakening for the four centaurs we had captured but other than muffled noises, there was nothing they could do. Hell, even if they would have been able to talk, there was little they could say to stop me.


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    Humming to myself, I began my work, the night was young and I had a lot to do.


    ¡°Good Evening and congratulations. You¡¯ve been chosen, it is a great honour, you know? Not everyone gets such a noble purpose in life.¡± I started monologuing, just because I could and it somehow felt right. Not that talking stopped me from working, as I cut off the clothes and armour they were wearing on their human, upper bodies.


    ¡°You will be allowed to assist me in my research and believe me, it is fascinating. Also, experimental but hey, that¡¯s what research is for, am I right?¡± I asked, mostly myself, as I looked over the four bodies, three male, one female and had to decide which to begin with.


    ¡°Let¡¯s get going.¡± I said, still talking to myself, as I stepped over to the one who should have been on guard.


    ¡°You know, if you are supposed to keep watch, watching the surroundings and making sure that nothing sneaks up on you is the important part. Not watching the merrily burning fire.¡± I explained, not that it would help him, he wasn¡¯t going anywhere.


    Gripping his arm, I pulled out my Athame and started carving a simple runic formation into his skin, using my blood magic to draw his own magic into the shaping. It was merely a simple spell that should cloud him in Darkness, nothing fancy. Despite the simplicity of the rune, I could see that the centaur was in excruciating pain, I had used Blood Magic on myself and knew that it was horribly painful, but there was just nothing I could do, I just didn¡¯t have local anesthetics or something like that. My Blood Magic might be able to numb pain but, at the end of the day, I had to focus on my work, not on making him comfortable.


    Sadly, he wasn¡¯t cooperating, not like I wanted him to, and when I began the second rune, his struggles caused me to make a rather serious mistake, cutting a line right through the rune, making it totally unusable.


    ¡°Now, see what you made me do? I need to start over, you bloody fool.¡± I scolded, more annoyed than angry, but I knew I would have to make sure he wasn¡¯t going to mess up another formation, it took time and effort, neither I wanted to go to waste. Luckily, there was something I could do, a simple fix, so to speak.


    After creating a small icicle, I drove it into his back, carefully aiming for his spine, working my way up the back until his arms completely stilled, as he was now paralysed from the neck down. It should even help with the pain, without nerves, there shouldn''t be any pain.


    ¡°Aren¡¯t I kind. No more pain, you see?¡± I asked, still mostly talking to myself, the gagged centaurs certainly wouldn¡¯t answer and if I wanted to talk to Lenore, I simply used our mental connection.


    Now that the centaur had no longer a reason to struggle, or the ability, I could continue to work. Shifting my work-area just a little lower on his arm, I continued carving, starting with the original runes again. Curiously, it seemed as if the centaur was still in horrible pain, despite the fact that he shouldn¡¯t be able to feel anything below his neck, at all. Maybe it was some sort of phantom pain, a memory of the earlier feeling, that caused him to think he was in pain. At the end of the day, it was not my concern and without his spine, he couldn¡¯t struggle and make me mess up my work. And so I continued.


    I got a little further in my work when I was interrupted again, this time by Lenore.


    ¡°There¡¯s something going on, take a look through my eyes.¡± she told me, sounding slightly concerned.


    When I looked through her sight, I could see what she meant, the original carving, which I thought was a complete failure due to the centaurs struggles, was giving of a light, if very chaotic, glow in Lenore¡¯s sight and that glow was mingling with the new carving, causing a strange feedback-loop, the magic in both pushing the other in strange ways. I had no real idea what was going on, but there was a magical build-up that looked worrying.


    Not knowing what was about to happen, I took a couple steps back and conjured up a clear ice-wall, just in case. Proper safety-procedures were important, whether the experiments were magical or mundane and a safety-screen seemed like a good one.


    I didn¡¯t have to wait long, after a few minutes of continuous build-up, something unexpected happened. The build-up, and the arm it was in, exploded, small bone-fragments, blood and gore splattering around the camp. Some of it splatted my safety-screen, some hit the centaurs friends but most of it coated the centaur himself.


    ¡°Now, that was unexpected.¡± I muttered, trying to figure out what had caused such an extreme reaction.

 Chapter 275

    I was inspecting the magical traces left behind by the backlash that had torn the centaurs arm apart when I noticed that one of the other centaurs had slumped down, obviously unconscious. What a wimp, just because he was hit by some flesh and blood, maybe a bit of bone, he was losing consciousness? Pathetic.


    In my mind, I heard Lenore laugh at my thoughts, the sheer disdain I was having for the supposed warrior. What would he do in battle, if he had to cleave apart an enemy or be struck down, would he faint there as well? I could understand that the one who had just lost his arm was unconscious, even if the paralysis should have kept him from feeling the loss of his arm, but there seemed to be a shock-effect involved.


    ¡°I don¡¯t think you should continue with this one.¡± Lenore warned me, as I used my Blood Magic to stem the bleeding from the ruined stump of the centaur¡¯s arm. A quick Observe told me that she was right, the Centaur, only level thirty, had lost over half of his life in the process and the resulting explosion, if he died before I could finish and inspect my work, it would be wasted effort. Luckily, I had three more that I could experiment on, maybe by the time I was done with them, he had regenerated some of his health and astral power, allowing me to try again, on his other arm.


    Looking between the three possible subjects, I observed them, deciding to go with the single female, mostly because she had the lowest level of the them, making her the least interesting subject.


    As I stepped up to her, I could see the panic in her eyes and, just from the remnants of Mind Magic within her, I could feel the panic. That part was new, maybe something to do with the deeper invasion that had happened while they slept? Or something else, maybe there was an affinity for mental resistance or something along those lines and I had invaded her mind on a deeper level, that seemed possible as well. Sadly, while I would have loved to keep her around for further study, that was just not in the picture. Maybe I could expand my experiments once I found some place to study in peace, possibly at the Nexus where I planned to delve deeper into the mysteries of the soul-prison. At least it should be nicely cold there.


    Pushing those ideas from my mind, I created another icy needle and, gently and carefully, pushed it into her spine, trying to limit the damage I was causing. I wanted her to be paralysed while keeping as much of her vital essence, or whatever the correct term for health was in the lore, inside, so that I could draw upon it later. As soon as the needle penetrated her spine, I channeled a little extra Astral Power into it, essentially turning it into a blade that neatly severed her spinal cord, leaving her paralysed from the neck down.


    ¡°See, that wasn¡¯t so bad. Now, there won¡¯t be any pain.¡± I told her, curious about the effect my words had on her mind. I was still able to feel the change, the fading of sensation, when her body stopped reporting to her brain and the sudden surge in panic was impossible to miss, despite, or maybe because of, my words.


    ¡°Let¡¯s see, using shadows to conceal from magic, that sounds like a plan.¡± I muttered, grabbing her arm and using my Athame to carve the runes into her arm while my Blood Magic linked them to her Astral Power, so that she would automatically power them. Now that my test-subject couldn¡¯t struggle and ruin my work, it was a lot easier to work and this time, there was no interference from another runic formation. Curiously, I could feel pain bloom in her mind, despite the fact that there shouldn¡¯t be any connection left. Maybe because I was directly dealing damage to her health, siphoning off her vitality? That would explain why the pain caused by Blood Magic felt a little different, more direct and a lot worse, than any other pain I had experienced in my Avatar-Body.


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    While it took longer to carve the formation into her arm than it would have taken me to cast it directly, I was soon finished and felt the formation take hold. I took a step back and tried to scrutinise the results.


    ¡°It seems to have worked.¡± Lenore said, observing our test-subject. Looking through her eyes, I had to agree, there was a shadow around the woman that kept me from seeing her clearly in Lenore¡¯s vision. What I didn¡¯t know was whether it was only while the woman was in the Darkness, the shadows of night, or if only the formation had to be in shadow.


    ¡°Yes, but to what cost?¡± I replied, closing in on the woman to taste the air around her and even pricking her skin to get a small taste of her blood. I wasn¡¯t sure, and Lenore¡¯s sight was the wrong tool to quantify such a thing, but I thought that her Astral Power was lower than it had been. Which would fit with what the Grandmother had told me, that the formation would permanently drain some of the Astral Power and Health, reducing their maximum-values to fuel itself. I had just hoped it wasn¡¯t as drastic as it seemed to be with the Centaur.


    ¡°Maybe the cost depends on her affinities. Isn¡¯t she constantly casting a pure Darkness-Spell, without any skill or affinity to reduce the cost?¡± Lenore asked, making me reconsider. With that in mind, it was quite impressive, the effect of the formation was low but only by my standards.


    But for now, the proof of concept had worked and I had to figure out the limits. The first attempt had shown me that starting a new formation too close to a damaged one was a bad idea, but had that problem occured because of the damage or was there something to the formations itself that forced them into a certain distance? Was there a way to combine multiple formations into a larger one, like I could when casting normally? If I wanted to use that way of creating permanent buff-effects on myself and possibly my group, I¡¯d have to investigate more.


    Looking through Lenore¡¯s eyes, I was searching for the strange, chaotic disturbance I had seen earlier, with the damaged formation but there didn¡¯t seemed to be one near the carved formation. After making sure that the centaur-woman had enough health to let me carve another formation, I grabbed her arm again. The first formation was on her upper arm, near her shoulder, so I was planning to carve the second one into her lower arm, just below the elbow.


    ¡°What do you think, repeat the same formation or try a different one?¡± I asked Lenore, not sure how to proceed.


    ¡°Let¡¯s go with the same type for now, I think that should keep them from disturbing each other.¡± Lenore reasoned, making me nod in agreement. I wasn¡¯t quite sure, either felt plausible, that maybe having two formations of the same element would cause them to create an imbalance in the person¡¯s Astral Power flow, or that it was the other way around. Somehow, I had a feeling that I needed more test-subjects.


    Sadly, I had only those four and one of them, the first one I had worked on, looked rather rough.


    With a shrug, I began to carve the formation into the centaur¡¯s arm, making sure I wasn¡¯t making any mistakes. Sadly, once the first rune was created, the flow of Astral Power turned chaotic and I had to retreat behind my Ice-Wall, while observing the power-build-up. At the same time, I made sure to cut all lingering connections into her mind, there was no telling what would happen if I kept those open when she died. I had felt the backlash of a dying mind once and was not too keen on repeating the experience.


    ¡°We could simply cut off the arm.¡± Lenore muttered and I agreed. Sadly, it didn¡¯t really matter, the centaur was weakened to the point that the shock from losing her arm would kill her, just as the explosion a moment after Lenore said those words did. Again, my Ice-Wall was splattered in blood, only this time, the Centaur was quite obviously dead, her life snuffed out by the build-up of chaotic energies and their bursting.


    ¡°So, are you going to faint like your friend has?¡± I asked the one unharmed centaur. Not that he could answer or move but the mix of anger and despair in his eyes was quite interesting.


    ¡°No? That¡¯s good, I need to try a few more combinations but, hey, if I succeed, you might get a permanent strengthening-effect out of it and if you don¡¯t struggle, I won¡¯t have to sever your spine. That¡¯s a good offer, isn¡¯t it?¡± I asked, watching my third test-subject.

 Chapter 276

    I¡¯m not sure who was more surprised, Lenore or myself, when the Centaur nodded his acceptance when I proposed that, if he didn¡¯t struggle, I wouldn¡¯t sever his spine. But then, maybe I shouldn¡¯t have been, he was in an untenable situation and going along with my demands kept him whole, at least for now.


    ¡°A wise choice. Now, you might have noticed with your companion, I¡¯m attempting to create a permanent shield against hostile magic, mostly by obscuring you from magical scrying and divinations. I know, that is hardly a problem for you at this point, not with your meagre power, but once you are stronger, such a shield is quite useful, even if you have to keep it active at all times. Which is where my research comes in, sadly, research needs experimentation. And experimentation needs subjects, which is where you and your friends come in.¡± I explained, casually chatting while I cut off his clothes, allowing me access to his upper body and arms.


    Stopping myself from monologuing like a third-rate villain, I got to work, carving the same formation I had used on the female centaur into his left arm, watching as he ground his teeth into the icy gag in his mouth, sweat beading on his face despite his frozen shackles. I knew that Blood Magic was a pain like no other and I doubted that getting runes carved into your arm was pleasant either. But he managed to keep his arm mostly still, which was quite the achievement, in my eyes.


    Once the formation was set up, I stood back and repeated my observations from earlier, only this time, Lenore spoke up.


    ¡°I think, if you use your Athame and trace a thin line, nothing more than a scratch, over his body, feeling into it with your Blood Magic, you should be able to detect the influence of the Runic Formation. That way, you might be able to find out how far the influence stretches, without exploding another test-subject.¡± she suggested and I considered it for a moment before conceding that she had a point. It might just work and if not, well, nothing major would be lost.


    ¡°Let¡¯s find out.¡± I agreed, straddling the centaur¡¯s horse body and starting to carve a line, starting near his left shoulder towards the other shoulder, carefully drawing a tiny amount of power out of him. Watching with Lenore¡¯s sight allowed me to see the disturbance in the power that I drew out, at least if I was looking very closely. Not wanting my experiment to fail, and the centaur to explode, I gently nudged the power back into the wound, using it to close it up, even as I continued to carve.


    Short glances, using Observe, told me that while his health was slowly going down, I would be able to carve someone in that manner for hours, maybe even days, without them perishing and the whole time, they¡¯d be in horrendous pain. And once I was done, the only trace would be an elevated level of Miasma in their body, nothing on the outside. It was such an obvious and effective method of torture that I wondered if it had helped with the bad reputation of those who used Blood Magic.


    When I got to the middle of his back, the disturbances had faded, making me unable to detect any further problems. Something about that made my gamer-instincts tingle in the back of my mind, suggesting that it was possible to place on formation on each limb, maybe even one on the back that linked all four together, in a sort of slot-system. It wouldn¡¯t be the first time that Game-Developers had deployed something like that, I just needed to know if different types of formation could be used on the same person.


    ¡°This seems like a success.¡± I muttered, hopping off the centaurs back and walking to his right side. There, I looked at the arm and tried to come up with a good second formation, something either using Ice- or Blood-Runes.


    After a moment of contemplation, I decided on a spell that I¡¯d have to get used to anyway, a combination of mist and cold, allowing me to create a ward around me against heat, or I would seriously suffer once we got further south. But that was the price I had to pay for my ability with Ice-Magic, whether I wanted it or not.


    Curious, I started to carve the formation into the Centaurs arm, watching him desperately trying to suppress the pain. It was quite impressive, even if he had to hate me, he mastered himself in the hope of getting out of this alive.


    Sadly, it was not to be.


    Once I finished the formation, I took a step back and watched as the formation began to work, a thin mist clinging around the centaur, making him look like he was sweating it out. And that was the moment things started to go wrong, somehow, through Lenore¡¯s sight, I watched the two formations form a tiny disturbance in the middle of the centaur¡¯s back, making me wonder if it was just because I had carved the formations too close to the shoulders, it didn¡¯t seem like a big problem. At least at first, it didn¡¯t look like a big problem, as I watched, the different types of magic became more and more distinct in the disturbance, causing a reaction, almost like a resonance, between them.


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    ¡°Uhoh¡­¡± Lenore muttered, when a shrill scream shattered the silence of the night. The centaur, obviously in tremendous pain, had bit though the gag and was giving voice to his pain. I stepped behind my wall, continuously observing the process until the reaction between the two formations reached a crescendo, ripping the centaur apart in a violent burst of power, throwing blood and gore all around the clearing.


    ¡°I think we can mark that down as a failure.¡± I told Lenore as I looked at the corpse, fascinated at the result. Somehow, the head of the centaur was still attached to his spine, even as the torso was destroyed, the ribs shattered and most of the flesh simply gone. Looking around, I saw one of the arms in a nearby tree, blood dripping into the foliage.


    ¡°Unless we want to cause a spectacularly gory scene, yes.¡± Lenore agreed, causing me to nod.


    ¡°But I think if we either use a linking formation in the middle, something that connects the two formations and prevents the build-up or if we use the same type of formation, we might be able to have more than one formation on a person.¡± I reasoned, still looking at the gory scene in front of me.


    Behind me, I heard rapidly approaching footsteps and, when I turned, saw that both Sigmir and Rai had come running. When they saw me behind the Ice-Wall, obviously unharmed, they slowed down, walking normally.


    ¡°What happened, Master?¡± Rai asked, sounding worried, while Sigmir simply approached me and gently caressed my cheek, as if making sure that I was still there.


    ¡°A small set-back in an experiment. There¡¯s a reason I wanted to use these guys for it, not myself.¡± I shuddered. ¡°Thank you for worrying, love, but I¡¯m alright.¡± I added, to assure Sigmir, before giving her a soft kiss.


    ¡°Do you need help?¡± she asked, looking at the remains of the dead centaurs.


    ¡°No, I don¡¯t think so. I think I have some of the problems worked out, I¡¯ll have to see what happens with attempt number four. I explained and she nodded, taking position behind my Ice-Wall, together with Rai.


    ¡°Let¡¯s see how our next subject fares.¡± Lenore proposed and I walked to our last complete test-subject.


    ¡°We don¡¯t even have to paralyse this one, unless he wakes up.¡± I mused, curious if my idea would work.


    Repeating the steps I had used earlier, I carved the concealment-formation into the left arm before repeating it on the right arm. I considered using the forearms first, but decided against it, I hoped to use shoulders, as that would make it easier to hide the formation beneath clothes.


    ¡°There¡¯s a build-up.¡± Lenore muttered, slightly annoyed. I looked through her vision and saw it, too, but it was small, almost insignificant. Much more important was that, with two formations, it seemed that Lenore¡¯s sight was quite strongly impacted, making it hard to see the power inside the Centaur. If we weren¡¯t right next to him, I wasn¡¯t sure we would notice him, it was quite effective.


    ¡°Let¡¯s try something.¡± I said, hopping onto the centaur¡¯s back and visualising the two formations as if I had created them in the air, trying to come up with a good way to connect them. They both had three runes, so I¡¯d have to use seven at the very least. Somehow, I doubted that trying to create a formation with nine runes, three times the same set, would work, but a seventh rune, that might just work.


    With more haste than maybe advisable, I carved two channels from the existing formations, linking them together, placing a Magic-Rune in the center before taking a few steps back.


    Thanks to Lenore¡¯s sight, I could see it working, the disturbance was quickly fading and the centaur difficult to see in her sight, as if a cloud of dense smoke was between us.


    ¡°Success?¡± I asked Lenore, who simply sent back her agreement.


    ¡°I don¡¯t think we want to empower a random coward, what do you think?¡± she asked, her suggestion clear.


    ¡°No, I agree, it would be a waste on him.¡± I nodded, walking up and pricking his skin to gain a little more information on his condition. It wasn¡¯t bad but the formation was obviously drawing a lot of power, there was no Astral Power in his body and I was quite sure his health was affected as well, the power drained by the powerful spell-formation.


    ¡°Hopefully, that¡¯s because he¡¯s got no affinity for Darkness-Magic. Or because of his low level.¡± I muttered, drawing one of my blades and plunging it into his heart, instantly killing him.


    As I turned around, walking back to the others, Rai¡¯s eyes turned wide and I looked behind me and muttered a soft curse. The centaur I had just killed was turning into black particles, quickly fading into the wind, in an effect I had seen before. I had just killed a Traveller, who wouldn¡¯t have the courtesy to stay dead. No, he would return and tell everyone in earshot about the person who had murdered him, namely me.


    ¡°I think we should travel through the night.¡± I told the others, feeling the sudden onset of a headache.

 Chapter 277

    ¡°Rai, go to Adra and tell her to pack up, we¡¯ll move throughout the night. I want to get as far away from the Centaurs as we can. The Traveller I just killed won¡¯t be back for some two days, while his Avatar is reformed. That doesn¡¯t mean he can¡¯t get word out, so the centaurs might already know about us.¡± I told the others, trying to gather my thoughts, to make sure we would get away as smoothly as possible. Rai heard the urgency in my voice and quickly hurried off, leaving Sigmir and me behind.


    ¡°Sigmir, I¡¯ll destroy the bodies, can you scatter what will be left of them? Their gear, their bones and all that?¡± I continued. I wasn¡¯t happy that I had to leave such a disgusting task to Sigmir but sadly, I had forgotten that I couldn¡¯t just cover them in snow, that would stand out like a sign on the muddy ground.


    ¡°Yes, I can do that.¡± she agreed, as I walked over to the final centaur, the one who had lost his arm in the beginning. Sadly, I couldn¡¯t continue my experimentation, not with the possibility that time was of the essence. A quick cut to his throat and he slumped over, quickly bleeding out and dying. I had contemplated to keep him alive, if only to find out if he was a Traveller as well but at the end of the day, even if he was, I had no way to keep things from getting troublesome, so a quick death was the best choice. Luckily, he just died, his body remaining behind for me to dispose off.


    The easiest way to handle the bodies was to combine Lenore¡¯s Death Magic with my Blood Magic, decomposing them within moments, while using my Ice Magic to freeze the liquid within the remaining sludge and scattering it. That left mostly clean bones behind, looking as if they had been there for some time, long enough for the flesh to fully decompose. It wasn¡¯t perfect, far from it, but it was the best we had. And it only took a few minutes to fully destroy the bodies, especially the marks left behind from my experiments.


    ¡°I¡¯ll go back to the others before I have to leave for a moment, I need to take care of things in the other world.¡± I told Sigmir, who was busy wrapping the bones into their clothes to toss them into the woods. She acknowledged my words, asking me to hurry.


    Walking away, I was taking a moment to look at the notifications I had ignored during my work, curious what they would tell me.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Skill increased</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You increased your skill: Stealth [42/100]</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Skill increased</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You increased your skill: Blood Magic [63/100]</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Skill increased</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You increased your skill: Darkness Rune-Mastery [64/100]</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Skill increased</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You increased your skill: Enchanting [12/100]</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    While the total lack of experience was a little disappointing, even if not surprising, the skill-gains were a pleasant surprise. I had expected that Blood Magic would go up and Stealth was slowly increasing whenever I was sneaking up on people and ambushing them but Enchanting had been something I had only done a few times, quite some time ago, when I had used a strange herb to embroider some equipment for Sigmir and me. Now, it seemed that using Blood Magic to enhance the body of others was also considered enchanting, making me curious what I¡¯d be able to do with the skill in the future.


    When I got to the camp the others had prepared, Adra and Rai had been busy, the camp was mostly packed up, just a few things still lying around and a small fire burning, with a pot on it.


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    ¡°What¡¯s going on? Rai said something about a strange dead centaur who had vanished and that we¡¯d have to move quickly?¡± Adra asked, her voice a little annoyed, as if wondering what mess my experiments had created this time.


    ¡°One of the silly ponies was a Traveller, so instead of taking the secret of what happened over there to his grave, as I had intended, he took it back to our world, where he might be spreading it at this moment. I told you before, there are a quite a few Travellers who know about me, even if they don¡¯t know me, right?¡± I explained, considering how to word it best.


    ¡°Well, some of those who know about me don¡¯t like me for a variety of reasons, most of them silly. But silly or not, they¡¯d love to catch me unaware, just so they can say they caught me.¡± I continued and I could see that Adra wasn¡¯t happy about the prospect of undying beings hunting us.


    ¡°At the same time, there are those who do like me, who would gladly reach out in support. But I can¡¯t know which group will get here first, and, in all honesty, I¡¯m not too fond of those who reach out in support either. They have their own motives, which I don¡¯t share.¡± I finished and Adra seemed to understand, at least she was nodding.


    ¡°I do owe you my life and, no matter what, travelling with you will never be boring.¡± she explained and I noticed something she might not have. Rai, standing close behind her, had his blade out, making me wonder if he had been ready to cut down his close friend, if she had talked about betraying me. Pushing the thought from my head, I told the others I¡¯d be back in a moment and triggered the log-out, waiting the requisite time until I was safely out of Mundus.


    It took me a few minutes to take care of pressing business, mostly in the bathroom but while I was gnawing on a granola-bar and drinking some water, I idly checked the forum and, unsurprisingly, there was already a thread. It only had a short video, just until the Centaur had logged out, which I had taken as him losing consciousness, with a warning that he was restrained and his Avatar would remain until the restraint was gone for the requisite time to log out. He had confirmed the log-out anyway, making it obvious that he had been fleeing in horror, something his tread confirmed, calling me all kinds of nasty names. Sadly, the thread was only minutes old so there were few responses, none interesting. But I bookmarked if for later, before hopping back into the capsule, to return to Mundus.


    Even with me hurrying in the real-world, the time-difference had given the others enough time to finish packing the camp and even to distribute the food they had been preparing. It was a stew that had been, well, stewing, waiting for me to finish my work with the centaurs and now it was time for dinner. Part of me wanted to get moving but a glance at Sigmir told me that she thought I needed to eat. She was most likely right so I thanked her when she handed me a bowl of stew and happily used some bread Adra had bought the day before to eat it.


    ¡°So, what is the plan?¡± Adra asked, mostly repeating the question I hadn¡¯t quite answered earlier.


    ¡°We keep moving, obviously. The road will allow us to cover a long distance and the further away we get, the smaller the chance that they hunt us down. At some point, we head into the wild, maybe take a few days to find something worth fighting, just in case they send a force after us. I don¡¯t think so, not unless they connect us to the trouble further north, with the wolves and even if they do, who knows. They might decide that hunting us is a waste of resources that won¡¯t give them any advantage, as long as we are far away from their area of influence.¡± I answered. It wasn¡¯t really a plan, certainly not one with any complexity, relying on the simple fact that there was a lot of ground to cover.


    Sure, running down the ancient road was easy enough but once we left it, at some point during this day or the next? We¡¯d pass hundreds, maybe thousands of small footpaths and trails, all leading away from the road, some made by animals, some by a traveller needing to hide behind a bush for personal reasons, some made by people looking for something, it didn¡¯t really matter. What mattered was that they existed and if we took one of them, it would be very difficult to see which we took, especially if we took magical and mundane steps to avoid leaving tracks.


    And once we were in the wilderness, we¡¯d have hundreds of square-kilometers to hide in, even if we were slowly getting closer to the fertile plains of Aretia, where various tribes of Beastmen, Orcs and Centaurs were vying for resources. The Altin Urda, the clan or tribe or whatever the centaurs called their organisation, wasn¡¯t quite one of them, their range was further south-east from us, with them pushing here just recently and if they were to push west, they¡¯d face resistance. Hopefully.


    But for now, we had to run.

 Chapter 278

    Moving through the night was a curious experience. My low-light vision allowed me to see the world in different way, as if I was looking through silvery-blue glasses, maybe due to my affinity for Ice-Magic, so the darkness was not an impediment for me. The others were not as lucky but Adra had created a small orb that was shedding amber light, carrying it at the top of her spear.


    As we walked through the night, Rai walked next to me and spoke up.


    ¡°Master, what did you try to do back there?¡± he asked and I noticed that Adra was paying close attention as well. After considering for a moment, I decided that either of them might have a good idea how to enhance the technique further, so I started talking.


    ¡°I think I told you that the Grandmother gave me an idea in which I could develop my magic.¡± I began and both of them nodded, so I continued.


    ¡°You might have seen me use Blood Runes on myself, strengthening my physical abilities. That way, I can bridge the gap between my own, weaker, body and people like Sigmir and Adra. They remain physically more capable, especially Sigmir, but the gap no longer as pronounced.¡± I continued and now Adra was nodding in understanding.


    ¡°I know what you mean, but that ability places a huge burden on your body, doesn¡¯t it? I remember you keeling over after sparring with me.¡± she said, looking pensive.


    ¡°Indeed. And, to be honest, I don¡¯t think what I just tried out would work well with those kind of runes. But the Grandmother suggested that I might be able to carve the runes directly into my flesh, using Blood Magic to directly link them into my Astral Power. Well, I wasn¡¯t about to try carving the runes into my flesh without at least understanding what I was doing and those Centaurs graciously volunteered to help me understand.¡± I explained with a bit of a grin, causing Sigmir and Adra to shake their heads at my candid tone.


    ¡°So they weren¡¯t a patrol?¡± Adra asked, sounding a little tired.


    ¡°Depends on your definition of patrol, I guess. If they¡¯d seen us and been asked, they would have reported what they¡¯d seen. Maybe even without being asked, just because of the fact that such a mixed group as ours should be rare.¡± I told her, making her roll her eyes at my sophistry.


    ¡°It doesn¡¯t matter, really. The Centaurs were our enemies and if Morgana learned something new, all is well, isn¡¯t it?¡± Sigmir spoke up, causing Adra to roll her eyes even harder, making me worry that she might snap something inside her head, causing her eyes to completely flip.


    ¡°Anyway, I had a few ideas to conceal myself from long-ranged magical attacks, magical scrying and divination but, as I said, I wasn¡¯t about to try those ideas on my own flesh and certainly not on one of you. You saw what happened when I made a mistake, that¡¯s no laughing matter. We are talking about serious interference with your bodies magical makeup.¡± I brought my explanation back to the experiments and noticed that Rai looked very interested.


    ¡°But it did work, didn¡¯t it, Master? That Traveller-Centaur, you killed him with your blade after observing for some time.¡± Rai asked, sounding almost eager.


    ¡°Well, it kind-of did work. But that¡¯s where the problem with working on involuntary test-subjects comes in, I¡¯m not quite sure how well it worked. I know that he was concealed, Lenore and I tried a few simple ways and even her special sight was obscured. Sadly, we didn¡¯t have the time to set up a full scrying-set-up or experiment with the influence that distance has one the process, so the overall effect is a little questionable.¡± I paused for a moment, before continuing, noticing that Rai looked truly interested now.


    ¡°But the price? I¡¯m not quite sure. The senses I¡¯d use to assess the efficiency and the centaur¡¯s general state are the same that he was concealed from and I doubt that he¡¯d read his status to me, even if I wanted to let him live.¡± I told the others and Adra nodded in understanding.


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    ¡°Hm, I think I see the problem. Any idea how to overcome it?¡± she asked, having pushed all ethical considerations aside for the study of interesting magic.


    ¡°In a way, yes. My own magic-senses are based on smell and taste, allowing me to circumvent some of the concealment but they suffer from a lack of, let¡¯s call it resolution. I can find even small amounts of specific types of magic but to quantify the magic in someone or contrasting the different concentrations is more difficult.¡± I thought for a good comparison before deciding to use the obvious one.


    ¡°Think of it similar to spice. It is relatively easy to determine if a pot of stew has pepper or salt in it, but quantifying just how much salt went into the pot, that is a lot harder. Similarly, it¡¯s not easy to quantify just how much Astral Power the formation drained from the centaur, to say nothing of predicting how much it would drain from me.¡±


    ¡°There are simply too many possible factors, overall-power could be one, especially if the formation just takes a flat amount, not a percentage of your power. Or maybe it depends on your affinities, either with Blood Magic or with the magic of the formation I carved, or maybe it depends on both. In the same manner, skill in either of the magics could make the formation more efficient. I just don¡¯t know.¡± I admitted, ranting a little towards the end.


    ¡°So, what did you learn?¡± Adra asked, curious.


    ¡°Well, I did find out that, if I place two formations too close together, the Astral Power turns chaotic and rather explosive. The distance seems to be dependant on the complexity of the formation and the elements contained within. Curiously, if two conflicting formations are linked up into a larger formation, it seems to reduce the disturbance, allowing them to co-exist.¡± I listed, causing her to nod, as she tried to form a working model to explain my observations,.


    ¡°Oh, and if I drain the Astral Power to heal a wound directly from the person, I might be able to torture them for days, if I truly want to.¡± I added, almost as an afterthought, causing her to raise an eyebrow.


    ¡°I needed to determine just how far the disturbance reached, so I drained a small amount of Astral Power before channelling it back into the wound, closing it and smoothing the flow of power back out.¡± I explained, realising something interesting.


    ¡°But what happened to the Miasma? Wouldn¡¯t it get sealed back into the body? Similarly to the way I sealed it into the bodies of the centaurs I turned into zombie-bombs?¡± I muttered under my breath, sharing my ideas with Lenore.


    ¡°It is similar, yes. What do you think, could we keep someone alive long enough to slowly replace their whole blood-essence with Miasma, maybe even linking the Miasma with my own Death-Magic? They should be quite compatible, shouldn¡¯t they?¡± Lenore asked, using our direct link.


    ¡°Sounds like a worthwhile experiment, especially if we want someone to die in the most pain we can inflict. Or if we need to defile some area, saturating it with Miasma, I think that would work quite well. Why should only we have trouble with Nethersprites, just because I use one of my abilities, we can share the joy.¡± I snickered, causing Lenore to caw in amusement.


    ¡°I¡¯m not sure I want to know what you are talking about.¡± Adra admitted, looking a little disturbed.


    ¡°Oh, just a curious idea that I want to try out at some point.¡± answered, trying to banish the smile from my face but the idea was quite good, especially if there truly was a synergy-effect with Lenore¡¯s Death-Magic.


    ¡°Master, would you consider carving formations into me?¡± Rai asked, sounding quite serious and determined.


    His question didn¡¯t surprise me, his interest had been quite obvious but sadly, the answer was not.


    ¡°Consider? Yes, I will. But it will take some time to consider. I will definitely not use you as an experimental subject, that would be just wrong. I gave my word to guide you, to teach you. Not kill or cripple your due to my carelessness.¡± I told him, trying to sound stern to put the topic to rest without discussion.


    ¡°Once I have managed to make the formation work on myself, we can talk about it again, not before. Remember, if I die due to a mistake, it is only my connection to this world that is temporarily disrupted and I will return two days later, even if the place I return to might be a little distant. But that is something I can take into account, before experimenting.¡± I continued and got an affirmative nod from Rai and a look of relief from Adra who, quite obviously, was a little afraid what would happen to her dear friend if I made a mistake.

 Chapter 279

    It had been quite a while that I had pushed my Avatar in such a physical manner over a long period of time. We had been continuously moving through the night, making just a short stop for breakfast, and to allow me to step into the real world for a moment, before getting back on the road. When the afternoon was rolling around, we were only sustained by stubbornness and magic. Both Adra and myself were using our magical abilities to keep us going, with me trying to regenerate our weary bodies, mainly Rai¡¯s and my own, while Adra was using a skill that worked in concert with the ancient road¡¯s magic, further reducing the effort needed to place one foot in front of the other.


    When I tried to focus my mind enough to make a guess at the distance we had covered in the last day and night, I was unsure. It felt as if we had crossed hundreds of kilometers, constantly walking at a fast pace but I just didn¡¯t know. I was reasonably sure that we had seen towns not too distant from the road but had ignored them in favor of moving along.


    ¡°We should head into the forest, soon.¡± Adra suggested when the sun was slowly starting to go down.


    After needing a moment to push my tired mind into gear and do anything but command my body to set one foot in front of the other, I realised that she wanted to find a good spot nearby and rest for the night. In the morning, we would head away from the road, moving through the wilderness for a couple of days, giving us near certainty that the centaurs wouldn¡¯t be able to catch us.


    ¡°Agreed.¡± Sigmir muttered, sounding as tired as I felt.


    ¡°Lenore, could you take to the sky and look for a good spot?¡± I mentally asked one of the two beings that were rested. Ylva had walked with us for most of the time but once we had needed to use magic to keep us going, she had returned to her Hallow, just to make sure we had a rested combatant if needed. Lenore, on the other hand, had simply stayed in her Hallow, pondering the experiment we had conducted the night before.


    ¡°Gladly, I¡¯ve been channelling Astral Power towards you for hours, I¡¯ve got a headache.¡± she complained and left her Hallow to appear on my shoulder. Her departure made me realise just how much power she had been moving when I had thought she was asleep. I mentally apologised for thinking she had been a lazy bird but I wasn¡¯t sure if she had heard me, I was just so tired.


    Still, I stubbornly kept placing one foot in front of the other for a little longer. When Lenore came back, sharing the image of a small lake in the woods, maybe fifteen, twenty minutes away from the road, I almost fell over, the relief that we¡¯d be able to rest making me stumble.


    ¡°Lenore found a good resting spot.¡± I announced, sending wordless gratitude over the link to my spirit-companion.


    ¡°Thank the Ancestors.¡± Simgir mumbled, a sentiment mirrored by the other two.


    Knowing where to go and with a little help from Lenore and Ylva, who had left her Hallow as well, we stumbled into the forest, trying to avoid making tracks. The knowledge that we¡¯d be able to rest soon allowed Adra and me to push once more and use our magic to make sure that no traces remained of us, leaving the road.


    Soon, we reached the area Lenore had found and we more or less collapsed once we had put down our packs. None of us had anything left, so instead of starting to cook something, we just gnawed on some of the jerky we still had and shared some bread, while drinking a lot of water. Just sitting there, leaning against Sigmir, I was almost falling asleep, letting the images from Lenore filter into my mind, letting myself drift in her awareness.


    Support the author by searching for the original publication of this novel.


    The clearing she had found was a beautiful one, a decently sized brook, most likely swollen with recently thawed snow, feeding a clear lake. Around it, there were various different plants, some already in bloom, others barely sprouting buds. Using my own nose, I tasted the air, marvelling at the earthy smell of nature. As I was drifting there, I noticed something else in the air, a subtle taste of magic that made me take notice, pushing my mind back into a slightly more alert state.


    Standing, I let my nose guide the way, my eyes still closed but there was something here. Where, I wasn¡¯t quite sure but I had a feeling so I turned towards that feeling and realised that it was coming from the lake. Using our mental connection, I shared my impressions with Lenore and asked her to join me. Once she was on my shoulder, I tried to look through her eyes and thought there was something. What it was, I had no idea but it warranted caution. Tasting the air again, I tried to figure out what I was tasting, trying to understand it. Behind me, the others had shifted into a slightly more active state but none of us were in any condition to fight.


    ¡°Greetings, I apologize if we have disturbed your Glade. It was not our intent to barge into anyone¡¯s home, we are merely weary travellers, looking for a place to spend the night.¡± I said, speaking into the empty air above the lake, most likely looking like an insane person. For a moment, nothing happened and then bubbles started to disturb the quiet surface of the pond and a female figure broke through the surface.


    My first impression was that she reminded me of Adra, Kallista but also of the Nymphs and Dryads of Tegi. In contrast to them, she seemed to be a little more fluid, for lack of better word, where they were almost looking as if they were made from wood, this figure had a blue-ish tinge to her existence. Not quite as if she was made from water but that I was looking at a being of life and water was obvious.


    ¡°Such a polite greeting for one who barged into my home. You smell interesting, young one. Who might you be?¡± the being asked me, sounding both intrigued and cautious.


    ¡°Again, I apologize. You can call me Morgana, a Traveller from distant places and a Student of the Grandmother, Guardian of Neyto.¡± I introduced myself, dropping a not-so-subtle hint that I had some backing, if the Grandmother¡¯s reputation reached this far.


    ¡°These are my companions, my Student, Rai,¡± I gestured to the somewhat cautious looking beastman, ¡°my friend, Adra,¡± I gestured to the dryad who looked both intrigued and afraid, ¡°and finally, my mate, Sigmir. What might we call you?¡± I asked, still being very polite.


    ¡°I guess I can make an exception for once, at least if you explain to me how you stumbled into my glade. Normally, my magic keeps everyone but the animals out.¡± she said, sounding a bit more friendly and I thought I had noticed a glimmer of recognition when I mentioned the Grandmother.


    ¡°While I am not sure how your warding exactly works, I would postulate that it happened because we were guided here by two spirit-beasts. I will introduce them in words that I can pronounce and conceptualise, these are Lenore and Ylva. Lenore saw your glade from the air and guided us here.¡± I explained and the being nodded in understanding.


    ¡°That might be the reason, curious, curious. You can call me Leneira, the Pegaeae of this lake. Well met.¡± she finally returned the greeting and I let myself relax, reasonably sure that if she was intent on doing us harm, she wouldn¡¯t introduce herself.


    ¡°Well met, Leneira. While I would love to converse with you some more, I¡¯m afraid that my mind is currently not up to the task.¡± I explained, desperately trying to suppress a yawn.


    ¡°I can see that, the four of you pushed yourself quite a bit. Sleep and in the morrow, we can converse, I have a feeling that your tale will be an interesting one. If it is, I might even allow you to bathe in my lake, letting some of my magic seep into your body. But only if you manage to entertain me.¡± Leneira said, her voice tinged with laughter.


    ¡°A most curious idea. For now, I wish you a good night.¡± I said, not sure what entertaining her would entail.


    ¡°Sleep well, knowing that no harm will befall you on this glade. This, I promise you.¡± she said, sounding more serious than at any point before, making me take notice.


    Sadly, by now the small reserve I had mobilised when I had noticed her was used up and I barely managed to stumble back to Sigmir and once I was cuddled up to her chest, I simply fell asleep.

 Interlude: Ein kleines bisschen Horrorschau

    Official Road to Purgatory-Beta Forum


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    Before I forget it, disclaimer. There will be cursing in this thread.


    With that out of the way, WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK?! When did Road to Purgatory become the latest survival-horror with monsters stalking the world and fucking you up in ways that I don¡¯t even want to think about?


    I mean, there were early clips of some fucked up shit but I thought those were promo-material, not something that actually happened to players.


    Want to know what I mean? Well, take a look.


    horrorschau.avi


    For a moment, there is only blackness with soft noises barely audible, making you try to listen more closely, just to find out what they are. But, with a few switches from light and darkness, as eyelids blink open and close, the dying remains of a campfire come into view. The focus shifts for a moment and the debuff-display comes into focus, informing that the recording character is restrained and gagged, something that becomes obvious as the being starts looking around. Three centaurs are visible nearby, all forced to their knees and bound in strangely translucent chains that give off a bit of a sparkle in the firelight. In addition, the same material encases their jaws, gagging them with only tiny holes allowing some airflow. The movement shows that the one recording is a centaur as well and that the debuffs are caused by the chains.


    A small, slender figure, looking like a black spectre in the flickering light becomes visible and a calm, casual voice breaks the silence. ¡°Good Evening and congratulations. You¡¯ve been chosen, it is a great honour, you know? Not everyone gets such a noble purpose in life.¡±


    It is clearly a female voice and the collected way of speaking makes it even more scary. There are no emotions, no excitement in the voice, it almost sounds bored.


    But the actions of the dark figure were far from the casual commentary, drawing a blade from the same material that is used to bind the centaurs and starting to slowly and methodically stripping the clothes from the upper body of one of the centaurs, even as the voice continues to talk.


    ¡°You will be allowed to assist me in my research and believe me, it is fascinating. Also, experimental but hey, that¡¯s what research is for, am I right?¡± the voice asks, almost sounding as if making a joke, but the flat tone calls even that into question.


    ¡°Let¡¯s get going.¡± the voice announces, stepping towards one of the now naked centaurs, drawing a slender, yet very ornate knife from a sheath on her belt.


    ¡°You know, if you are supposed to keep watch, watching the surroundings and making sure that nothing sneaks up on you is the important part. Not watching the merrily burning fire.¡± the voice explains, sounding almost disappointed.


    Without further words or any hesitation, the slender figure grabs on of the centaurs arms, the strange translucent material moving with the arm, forcing it into a different position and allowing her easy access and preventing the centaur from easily moving away. Suddenly, the centaur starts to groan and grunt in obvious pain, muffled by the gag while the figure is slowly and carefully cutting into his flesh, while a strange, crimson glow pulses around the blade in a rapid beat.


    As the figure is cutting, the centaur starts to writhe more and more frantically, trying to get away, until he manages to twist his torso in such a way that gets him away from the blade, if only just.


    ¡°Now, see what you made me do? I need to start over, you bloody fool.¡± the voice snarls her anger clear. But, instead of continuing to talk, the figure stops and, after drawing some strange, silvery-glowing symbols into the air, the figure has a spike, made from the translucent material she seems to favour, in her hand. There is a moment of pause, right before she stabs the spike into the centaurs back, somewhere between his shoulder blades. The stabbing motion is repeated a few times, slowly wandering upwards along the spine and finally, the figure is just below the neck when she suddenly stops, casually tossing the spike behind her, while smiling widely.


    ¡°Aren¡¯t I kind?¡± the figure asks, who she is addressing, nobody knows, ¡°No more pain, you see?¡± she adds and, if one looks closely, the centaur has mostly stopped moving, merely the head is still a bit mobile.


    Without further words, the figure steps back to her original position, taking the arm again and cutting some more into it, this time focusing on the forearm, instead of the upper arm. Suddenly, the cutting stops and the figure seems to observe the arm, and her work, closely before swiftly taking a few steps back and, with just the wave of a hand, a translucent wall appeared between her and the centaur.


    For a few minutes, nothing happens, the dark figure stands behind the wall, watching the Centaur, when suddenly, he gave a strange sound of pain causing the camera to focus on him. Just in time, too, right after the camera focused on the centaur, the arm the figure had been working on burst in a shower of gore and blood, splattering the clearing and the kneeling centaurs.


    A blue window appears, right in the middle of the screen.


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    Warning, you are currently restrained. Your Avatar will remain on Mundus until you are no longer restrained and a short period has passed. Continue to Log-out?


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    There are two buttons and the ¡°Yes¡± button flashes, right before the screen goes black again and the voice is heard again, muttering, ¡°Now, that was unexpected.¡±


    Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.


    end horrorschau.avi


    To give a little background: Been playing for a little over a month, did the starting-zone and teamed up with a few native Centaurs, forming a hunting-party. Normal stuff, really, and tonight, when we were camping, that happened. We were nowhere near some sort of danger-zone, we were just doing our thing and now, I¡¯m most likely sent to respawn, the others are just dead. Did the ganking of new players start already, before the game even launched? I know that it has been part of gaming since the beginning but come on.


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    Anyone else recognise the voice? I sure do.


    You¡¯ve been Morgana¡¯d.


    Didn¡¯t she mention at some point that she had ¡°investigated how Centaur bodies work¡±? Seems she¡¯s not done with that, yet.


    In other words, you¡¯ve been geeked by a high-level player, sucks to be you, but shit happens.


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    Our mystical apparatus flagged this thread for repeated cursing.


    After looking at the video - Curse away, I can understand the sentiment, I¡¯ll just add a warning-label.


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    Yeah, that looks like Morgana to me.


    And it looks like something you¡¯d find on r/canwenotmeet


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    Yeah, that¡¯s Morgana, up to her tricks, killing new players for shits and giggles.


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    Can you DM me where you were attacked?


    Such cowardly actions need to be redressed!


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    More Ice-Magic but I¡¯d love to know what she was trying to accomplish. If it was merely about killing people, there are easier ways, even if whatever destroyed that arm looked nasty.


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    Looks like our glorious dark fairy is into Bondage...


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    Holy crud...


    That looks like a hard no for me!


    [...]


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    So, I was just able to respawn and my eyes just fell about out of my skull.


    My Astral Power is permanently reduced to zero and my max-health is reduced to roughly two-thirds of its original value. I asked the local healer and all he could tell me was that the strange scars, which look just like what Morgana did to Maeru, the one you see in the video, just that they are on both my arms and one on my back.


    Am I getting fucked over even after death? Or is that some fucked up bug?


    Support-ticket is written but I thought I ask here as well.


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    That sounds seriously bad.


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    Sounds bad and wasn¡¯t there an incident when Morgana did something to kill another player from an insane distance? Maybe she upgraded and now can curse you even beyond death.


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    Peculiar. I have no idea what is going on there, but then, I¡¯m just the guy who¡¯s keeping the forum clean.


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    I guess I should add my two cents in here.


    Why you were attacked, let¡¯s just call it a combination of bad luck on your part and annoyance on my part. A particular clan of centaurs has been getting on my nerves for about a month, ingame. You remember those puppies from my last video? Those centaurs also ended their lives. As you can imagine, centaurs are not very popular with me right now. We just happened to stumble over your party just as I needed some subjects to perform some magical exprimentation on, wel,.you can guess what happened. So, yeah, wrong place, wrong time, nothing more than that.


    I¡¯d say my bad, but that would be a lie.


    On the other hand, the attribute-reduction is something I can at least give you and the devs a hint where to start looking. What I did was experiment with a way to change part of a bodies Astral Power into a permanent, magical effect. For example, one of the ideas I had was a constant, low-powered regeneration-effect.


    Obviously, the concept is a little untested as you saw on the video when I made a small mistake but such mistakes are why we experiment. As you can see from the fact that you didn¡¯t get ripped to shreds by unstable magic, I learned from my mistake.


    The problem is that the magic used to strengthen you is still cast by you, even if not consciously, so it draws on your resources. But what, to me, is a simple cantrip drains all your resources, putting you into the state you are in.


    When it comes to persisting after death, I¡¯ll assume that somewhere in the system¡¯s code is a function that differentiates from your equipment and everything else, as in, things that go with you when you die and things that don¡¯t. Otherwise, you would lose your weapon, if you let go of it when you die. Or you might respawn with the arrow that killed you, still lodged into your chest. I think you get what I mean.


    Now, the problem here is that, at its core, I was studying a way to permanently strengthen someone, almost like a new piece of equipment. The equipment is just too heavy for you.


    And that¡¯s all I¡¯ll tell you about it, can¡¯t give away all my secrets now, can I?


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    I was made aware of the problem by Heracles and we are looking into it. From what Morgana describes here, I can see where the problem comes from and we¡¯ll think of a solution.


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    Wrong place, wrong time?! Well, fuck you very much!


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    Please keep it somewhat civil. While I can understand that emotions might run high, keep it on Mundus.

 Chapter 280

    Waking up a second time felt a little strange. There was still a lingering exhaustion that made me simply snuggle up closer to Sigmir, as I considered the situation.


    I had logged out for a few minutes earlier, to make sure I didn¡¯t wake up to a mess in the capsule and taken a short look into the forum. It turned out, the centaur I had played with had suffered consequences lasting beyond death which made me intrigued. Depending on the way the developers solved the problem, I might have something to give people that annoy me a lasting impression, one that remains with them, even after they die. If I had known that it would work that way, I¡¯d never have used it on some random centaur and kept it in reserve for someone who I truly wanted to punish. Oh, well, it allowed me to gain a little more understanding, both into the way the system and a Traveller¡¯s resurrection worked and how the body-enchantments worked.


    ¡°Good morning, love.¡± Sigmir said, her eyes fluttering open, just before she planted a soft kiss on my cheek.


    ¡°Good morning. I hope you slept well.¡± I replied, just as I returned the kiss.


    ¡°I¡¯m a little sore, maybe you¡¯ll give me a massage later.¡± she asked, putting quite a bit of innuendo into her words, making me grin.


    ¡°We¡¯ll have to see about that. Depending on the wishes of our host, we might even want to spend another day here, I have a feeling that, if Leneira wishes it, we are quite safe.¡± I explained, trying to put words to the feeling I had about Leneira. She was powerful, of that I was quite certain, but just how powerful, I didn¡¯t know. I thought she might be about as powerful as the dryad Tegi, at the peak of her power, which was a quite disturbing idea. Sure, we had been able to overcome Tegi but only because she had been weakened a great deal by the loss of her powerbase.


    ¡°Maybe, but somehow, I doubt that she truly wants us here.¡± Sigmir admitted, glancing over to the lake where Leneira was sunning herself in the sun, filtering through the trees above her. Following her gaze, I had to agree, yesterday, Leneira had seemed more annoyed than anything else but unwilling to simply kick us out and if I looked at her now, I could understand why she would have some prejudice against me. At its core, my Avatar was a being of Ice and Darkness, something most people would reflexively call ¡®evil¡¯. Leneira, on the other hand, was most certainly a being of Water and Life, maybe, judging by the way she was lounging in the water and letting the sun play over her body, one of Light. In this world, opposites did not attract each other.


    ¡°I think so, too. Let¡¯s make some breakfast and afterwards, we¡¯ll see how it goes.¡± I suggested, pushing myself up after giving Sigmir another kiss.


    ¡°Good idea. I think we forgot to eat dinner last night.¡± Sigmir said, frowning as her stomach gave a mighty rumble.


    ¡°I certainly did, I just fell asleep on you, again. It¡¯s just the best way to fall asleep.¡± I grinned while I opened my bag and went through the things we had that might make for good breakfast. Given that I didn¡¯t think that making a fire would endear us to our host in any way, we were limited to trail-bread, jerky and some berries Adra had managed to scare up somewhere on our journey.


    Once we had eaten, it was time to tell Leneira the story I had promised her, so I walked over, causing her to open her eyes and observe my approach. There was a clear curiosity in her eyes but also apprehension and maybe even a little fear.


    ¡°Good Morning, Leneira. I hope our presence didn¡¯t disturb your rest.¡± I greeted her, giving a slight bow. I wasn¡¯t quite sure how to act with other beings at the best of times, so what constituted proper behaviour for someone like her was a complete mystery to me.


    This story is posted elsewhere by the author. Help them out by reading the authentic version.


    ¡°Good Morning, Morgana. It was alright, I¡¯m just not used to visitors to my glade.¡± she admitted, sounding almost vulnerable.


    Before I could answer, Lenore landed on my shoulder, after having spent some time flying around and looking at things.


    ¡°The magic around this place is fascinating.¡± she said over our link, sending a flurry of thoughts and impressions. My eyes fluttered close and back open a few times as my mind had to stretch to make sense of what I had received and I had to admit, she was right.


    Despite the revulsion I felt when looking at small parts of it, it was a beautifully constructed ward. Leneira had woven together water and light, letting people¡¯s awareness flow around her glade, especially if they dependent on light to see. It also gave me a good idea why Lenore and Ylva had been unaffected, Ylva was much more grounded in her ability to hear and smell, compared to her sight and Lenore wasn¡¯t just seeing light but also magic, which wouldn¡¯t have been refracted at all. But it also meant that, if people knew what to look for, the ward would be a lot weaker and quite easily broken.


    ¡°I promise, we won¡¯t tell anyone about this place.¡± I said to Leneira, once I understood the implications and she let out a sigh of relief.


    ¡°That is good to know. But you promised me a story, so, entertain me.¡± she commanded, the smile on her face making light of the imperious tone in her voice, causing me to chuckle.


    ¡°Why, of course. Let me tell you, how I was brought to this world¡­¡± I began my tale, as always, at the moment that I had started, with nothing but simple peasant-clothes, a dagger and my wit, sitting in the snow of the far north.


    As I spoke, Leneira listened intently but I noticed that her interest was on things I hadn¡¯t quite expected. For example, hearing about the grove around Neyto seemed to excite her in a way I couldn¡¯t quite grasp but venturing into the Barrow Den merely bored her. As such, I changed what I focused on. There were a few things I wouldn¡¯t tell, for example I had glossed over the affair with the Snowbolds, knowing that they were reasonably rare and that I had found a major artifact in their cave, something I wanted to keep secret. Similarly, I spoke little about the Grandmother, merely saying that she had helped me find my path, knowing that a little mystery about my connection to her might be useful.


    Instead, I focused on the experiences I had with the elements themself, I spoke of dancing with the wind and even the memorable dance of Ice and Fire, when Sigmir and I had met Samodiva.


    At that point, she asked me to sit in her lake while I told my tale, something I agreed to after a moment of consideration. She had promised that we would be alright and I had a feeling that we could mostly trust her. Once I was sitting in the shallow water, it was a curious feeling. I could feel something slowly seeping into me, as I was surrounded by Leneira¡¯s power, a gentle and surprisingly warm power.


    Sitting in the water, I told her of the abomination that had been committed by Tegi and the punishment we had brought on the dryad, I spoke of the elementals under the glacier and the mighty storm we had summoned. I spoke of Kolyug and the clean-cut magic holding it together and the fiery beings that seemed to be created to destroy it.


    I could easily see the sadness on Leneira¡¯s face when I told her about the winter wolves and how they had been forced to seal themself into a dungeon, trying to keep those who wanted to destroy them at bay and there was a savage smile on her face when I told her about the revenge we had visited upon their foes.


    Finally, my tale wound down and I felt my throat being completely parched, my voice even a little scratchy from talking so much, when Leneira moved next to me, maybe a little too close for comfort, and offered me a drink from her cupped hand. Without thinking too much about it, I drank, letting the water flow down my throat, when a blue window appeared before me.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Attributes gained</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>By bathing in the pool of a Najad, some of her power seeped into your body, permanently increasing your Charisma by two.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    ¡°Thank you.¡± I said, after mentally dismissing the window.


    ¡°You are welcome, think of it as paying you forward.¡± she smiled and moved back a little. ¡°You gave me an interesting story, so giving you a small benefit is no problem. I¡¯ll even give you another boon, one of information. You see, if you follow the creek that flows into my lake, you will find something that might be useful to you.¡± she said, her smile a little mischievous.


    ¡°That sounds interesting. I¡¯ll have to talk to the others but I think we¡¯ll check it out.¡± I replied, standing to get out of the lake.

 Chapter 281

    After I finished telling Leneira my story, I urged the others to move on. The way she had behaved at the end of it had been a little too pushy, too intimate, to make me comfortable. In addition, Sigmir had displayed a similar sentiment, only in a more physical manner. Once I had left the lake, she had stepped up and, quite forcefully, inspected my mouth for cavities, using her tongue. Not that I complained about her forceful manner but I had a feeling that, if Leneira kept pushing, Sigmir would toss all concerns for the rules of hospitality out of the next window and introduce Leneira to her Lok¡¯nar. While there was a small part of me that wondered if we could take her, the rest of me was certain that it would be a bad idea.


    I could feel that, despite our rapid departure from Leneira¡¯s glade, Sigmir had been left with a seriously bad mood but I already had a good idea what to do about it. I also kept quiet about the fact that we were following a suggestion from Leneira, to follow the stream that fed her pond southward. I was quite curious what we might find there, even if I doubted that it would be anything simple. No, Leneira had seemed far too smug and mischievous when telling me about it, making me consider a couple of ways to make sure we didn¡¯t stumble into a trap. But at the same time, Lenore and I agreed that it hadn¡¯t been a lie, that there would be something useful to find. We would have to wait and see.


    In addition, travelling along the small stream gave us a steady and easy supply of freshwater and I looked forward to bathe in the stream, even if I was fully aware that there wouldn¡¯t be an effect like the one from Leneira¡¯s pond.


    For the rest of the day, we slowly moved further south, taking our time and relaxing from the effort of the previous day. As we walked, I let myself notice more about our surroundings and the simple, yet pure, beauty of the forest we were walking through. There was no modelling of new magic-spells, no theorising what might happen if I tried something new, no careful watching for a potential ambush, just a relaxed awareness of our surroundings.


    There was something in the air, a pleasant smell of blooming flowers and the constant, soft noise of insects, birds and the wind blowing through the new leaves of the trees. It made me think of cartoon-movies I had seen, and never understood, when I had been a child, movies with frolicking small animals, singing songs as they dance through the woods. There was no such thing here, but I felt a sense of lightness, making me wonder if some of the plants had hallucinogenic properties.


    Once I started to feel a little too out of control, I forcibly reigned myself in, focusing on potential threats and pushing the lightness away. It scared me, the feeling of giddiness that was making me act in a strange manner.


    Focusing inward, I let my awareness almost drift into a state of meditation, not quite delving into the Astral River but almost. It allowed me to taste the magic all around me, what I normally ignored as background noise, unless I observed the Astral River itself. And I noticed that the types of magic I was normally using were thin, making me realise that if I wanted to work my magic it would take a lot more effort than I had been accustomed to.


    Instead, the tastes I had learned to associate with water-, wind- and light-magic were thick in the air, making me wonder if I would be able to learn those types of magic. Especially water was thick and I realised that the brook we had been walking next to was a mirror the a stream of water Astral Power in the Astral River. Was that why Leneira had settled in the lake she was living in and created her grove around it?


    ¡°Let¡¯s stop here for the day.¡± Adra spoke up and I took in our surroundings on a more physical level, no longer focusing on the magical traces.


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    It was a good spot, I had to admit, there was a broken tree, most likely due to a storm at the beginning of winter and beneath it was a lot of dead, mostly dry wood, which would allow us a nice fire. In addition, the brook we had been following had a large bow in it, creating a comfortable slope, even with a little sand.


    ¡°Go ahead. I¡¯m still trying to figure something out.¡± I replied, putting down my pack as I let my senses drift back into the Astral. What had pushed me into that strange feeling of giddiness, was it merely the magic around me? Or was there something else? Part of me wanted to try using Mind Magic as a sort of mirror to inspect myself but I had no idea where to even start. I had tried the obvious idea, act as if I was reaching out to a different mind but when it came to my own mind, there was a blind-spot. Even trying to act through Lenore, who seemed incredibly amused by my attempts, had failed making me wonder what I was missing.


    ¡°Did you notice?¡± Lenore asked finally, after I had banged my head against a mental wall for some time.


    ¡°Notice what?¡± I asked in reply, not sure what she meant. Was I missing something obvious?


    Instead of waiting for her answer, I focused my senses outward again and noticed something that I had failed to see before. What I had seen as a pure stream of water was a little more complicated. There was something else flowing in the river, something I hadn¡¯t quite expected.


    ¡°What¡¯s that?¡± I asked Lenore, hoping to have noticed the right thing.


    ¡°Curious.¡± she muttered, making me wonder if it had been the thing she meant.


    Walking to the beach, I cupped some water in my hand, using the act as a metaphor to ingest some of the Astral Power as well, letting my taste tell me what the thing I had noticed actually was. It only took me a moment to spit the water back out, sadly doing the same with the Astral Power was a lot more difficult. There was a tiny trace of death, of rot and decay, almost impossible to notice carried in the water.


    When I shared my findings with Lenore, she turned quite curious, knowing that, if we managed to separate and cleanse the Death-Magic, it might be quite advantageous for her.


    ¡°That might be what Leienra meant when she said that we¡¯d find something interesting.¡± I mused, considering what might be the source of the magic I was detecting.


    ¡°Could be, yes. But we might only find out if we get there.¡± Lenore replied, studying the reflective surface of the stream.


    As I stood there, contemplating what I was seeing, two arms wrapped around me from behind and a soft voice whispered into my ears.


    ¡°Love, Rai and Lenore are gone for now. And we need to talk.¡± Sigmir said as she gently nibbled my ears. There was something in her voice that sent a shiver down my spine, making me wonder just what she had in mind. Just as I noticed that, Lenore did so, too, and decided that, whatever it was that Sigmir was planning, Lenore didn¡¯t want to have a ringside seat, leaving her Hallow and taking of towards the edge of the clearing where Ylva waited for her friend.


    ¡°What do you have in mind?¡± I asked and noticed that my voice was a little breathy in anticipation.


    ¡°You have been naughty, cavorting around with that nymph in the morning, splashing around in her lake. I think I¡¯ll have to remind you that you are my mate, what do you think?¡± she asked, switching her nibbling from my ears to my neck.


    There was a small part of me that wanted to push back, to assert that I was allowed to do whatever I wanted. But at the same time,  I knew that it¡¯d be hypocritical and that I would act in much the same way, if I felt that someone had tried to seduce Sigmir. Well, maybe not the same way, I was more likely to first rip apart the flirting being in an orgy of blood and pain, before having my way with Sigmir, but that was par for the course.


    But I wasn¡¯t about to simply roll over and let her have her way with me, that was just not me. Instead, I bend my back twisting in her embrace so that I could look at her in turn, whispering back, ¡°I think that sounds like a grand plan. I¡¯ll gladly show you that you, and only you, are my mate.¡±


    The declaration felt good and, just as my earlier giddiness reasserted itself, I let myself melt into Sigmir, planning to take all that delicious excess energy out on her.

 Chapter 282

    ¡°Did you hear the howling earlier?¡± Adra asked, as she was walking back onto the clearing we had made our camp on. She and Rai had been hunting while Sigmir and I had discussed Sigmir¡¯s displeasure with the way Leneira had acted towards me, giving us the privacy to have a deep and stimulating discussion. By the time they came back, we had exhausted all avenues of inquiry and were cuddled up together, listening to the quiet song of the wind, rustling through the leaves above us.


    Opening my eyes and looking over, I noticed the amused smirk on Adra¡¯s face, giving me a good idea what she was referring to, the discussion between Sigmir and me had caused both of us to get quite heated and announce the climax of each avenue of inquiry to the world. It seemed that, in the quiet forest, the sound had carried far enough to reach our courageous hunters, to Adra¡¯s amusement.


    ¡°I¡¯m not sure what kind of beast made those noises, or if it was in pain. But we might want to go and find out, don¡¯t you think?¡± she prodded, causing me to grumble in displeasure when Sigmir shifted her position to get a better look.


    ¡°I¡¯m sure that¡¯s not necessary, especially as the noise doesn¡¯t seem to have stopped you from getting some game.¡± Sigmir said, her voice languid as the arm she still had around me tightened just a little.


    ¡°It was quite loud, maybe it was important.¡± Lenore added from her perch on one of the trees, with Ylva resting on the ground below her.


    ¡°Yes, yes, you jokers are all so very amusing. But there¡¯s a lesson you should learn, before it¡¯s too late. Never mock the cook, especially not before meals.¡± I grumbled, as I got up, checking the small boar they had brought back. ¡°Who knows what I might drop into the pot, out of sheer embarrassment at being heard by you, it would be a true tragedy.¡± I added and enjoyed the way Adra¡¯s face went a little pale at the idea. I realised, we even had something I could add to the food, we had stumbled over a small patch of horseradish during the day and I had harvested a few roots. I had a feeling that those would add more than enough spice to any prank I wanted to play on them. Not that they had deserved it, yet, but if they continued, I might consider something.


    Luckily, or maybe sadly, they kept their jokes to themselves as I quickly drained the remaining blood from the carcass while the others removed skin and bones from it, butchering the boar in a quick and efficient manner, working together in a routine we had practiced plenty of times.


    ¡°Why don¡¯t you and Rai wash up, while I roast some of those nice cuts of meat? That way, we can eat as soon as it¡¯s ready.¡± I suggested. The two of them happily agreed while I rubbed a nice chunk of meat with ramson before putting it to roast over the fire. It would take some time, but that was par for the course. In addition, we had bought some potatoes that went near the fire to roast, to be served with some beebread-leaves later. It was quite the feast, for cooking with limited resources over an open fire.


    Apparently, even the system itself agreed, giving me another point for my cooking-skill, raising it to thirty-five. The growth of that skill was a curiosity to me, it had grown rapidly while we had been in Neyto and I had been able to use an actual kitchen but since then, the growth had dramatically slowed down, even if I had been cooking quite frequently, albeit only simple meals over a campfire. But when I had tried to teach the others how to cook, I had gained more points than by cooking myself, which made me wonder even more. But, unless Pantheon was willing to share or someone did a massive survey, I doubted I would ever get the specifics how different skills assigned value to different tasks.


    ¡°Say, what is our plan now?¡± Adra asked, once we had eaten dinner and were sitting around the flickering remains of our fire, crunching on some nuts we had acquired from the centaurs. At that point, I wasn¡¯t quite sure if we had looted them at some point of if Adra had bought them, not that it mattered. They were tasty and a nice after-meal snack, so I was content, especially with Sigmir¡¯s arms around me.


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    ¡°Lay low for a few days before we continue further west. You know I want to go to Arbortoma, if only to see what the world has to offer.¡± I answered, causing Adra to chuckle a little.


    ¡°Just laying low? That doesn¡¯t sound like you. Ever since we met, we have been travelling or doing something. You really want to just lay low for a few days?¡± she prodded. Apparently, she knew me quite well, or I was just a little predictable.


    ¡°Hrm, we will see. Lenore and I noticed that there is a little something getting carried by the stream over there. Something upstream is, for lack of a better word, ¡®leaking¡¯ Death Astral Power into the water and both of us are quite interested what that might be, if only to take a look.¡± I admitted, not even trying to hide my grin.


    ¡°So, we are traipsing through the wilderness, looking for something that seems to ¡®leak¡¯ the magical embodiment of death into the wild? Part of me wants to call you an idiot, turn around and run as far as I can. But, a far greater part, is just as curious.¡± Adra admitted, with a wry grin on her own. I could understand her sentiment, in a way, I even admired her. They, the natives of this world, bravely stepped into the unknown, risking their lives on adventures, to gain more power and simply satisfy that itch to see what was hidden behind the horizon.


    Maybe that was the biggest draw of Road to Purgatory, the feeling of the unknown and adventure, something that had a powerful draw for those who had grown up in western civilisation. The feeling of adventure, of discovering new frontiers and striking out into the unknown, the sentiment that made the various genres of fiction into the mainstays that they were. That feeling, only without the risk of injury, disease and death, where the worst that could happen was some pain and a loss of character-advancement, all packaged into a world so real that you could fall in love with its inhabitants and you had Road to Purgatory,


    ¡°Ah, but if you shy away from this adventure, would you really be the woman who left her grove, travelling on her own, heading into the wild north to look for adventure?¡± I asked, causing her to let out a wry chuckle, one echoed by Sigmir and even Rai.


    ¡°I guess that was just as reckless, wasn¡¯t it? But remember in what situation I was in when we met, I¡¯d rather not have a repeat of that.¡± Adra said and I noticed that Rai had placed an arm around her, almost protectively. A curious development, especially given that, just a few days before, he had been ready to strike Adra down for defying me.


    ¡°That¡¯s why we are working in a group. To watch the others back, no matter what.¡± Sigmir said when I didn¡¯t reply, due to pondering what to do about Rai.


    ¡°Well, and to have someone to talk to on the journey. Otherwise, it would be far too boring to trudge through the endless forests, all alone.¡± I added, giving the arm Sigmir had wrapped around me a little squeeze.


    ¡°But you are right about the risk, Adra. We¡¯ll have to make sure that we don¡¯t just run into the unknown. Lenore, we could try to scry for danger up ahead.¡± I suggested, looking at the bird who was resting next to Ylva.


    ¡°That might help, but remember, our scrying is not perfect, no scrying is. Just two days ago, you managed to come up with a way to defeat scrying and all this time, you¡¯ve been keeping a block active, with me holding it while you slept.¡± Lenore reminded me, before hopping over to me.


    She was right but the limited information gleaned by scrying was better than to know nothing, so I re-positioned Sigmir¡¯s arm and helped Lenore onto my shoulder. The magical formation we used to scry was reasonably simple, the main part was done with Darkness Magic, not the runes, and soon, we had a shadowy sensor flickering upstream, looking for the thing that might be the source of the problem.


    Yet, despite our efforts, we came back with nothing of interest, not in the hour we took, letting our focus travel almost half a day worth of normal walking upstream. With a disappointed grumble, I let the magic go, feeling quite drained by the effort.


    ¡°Nothing.¡± I admitted, before letting out a yawn. ¡°Love, why don¡¯t we head to bed? I¡¯m afraid I¡¯ll need some extra time tomorrow morning, there are a few things I need to do in the other world.¡± I said, remembering that I had a lesson with Mrs. Wu on the next day.

 Chapter 283

    I let out a low groan as I lowered myself into the capsule, ready to return to Mundus. Training with Mrs. Wu was a curious kind of torture, the forms and movements she was showing me were never obviously violent but, when taken in the context of the book she had given me, they all had a common purpose, the death or incapacitation of another human. In addition, what she was showing me was stretching my capabilities but the true soreness took time to accumulate, sneaking up on me as I trained. While I was in the building, and even on the way home, everything seemed fine but after some time, I felt as old as she was.


    The curious part of it was that, despite all my misgivings, I was looking forward to the lessons, despite the pain, I was feeling myself get stronger and more agile, a feeling that made me continue.


    Luckily, lying in the capsule seemed to be the perfect remedy for the sore muscles, so I didn¡¯t have to suffer for long. Once my consciousness was shunted into the reception-area of my personal space, I felt fine, looking at the temple above the clouds I had made for myself. After a short glance into the forum, smiling at the various shenanigans other players were getting up to, I logged into Road to Purgatory, opening my eyes after a moment of delay.


    A moment later, I shot up from the place I had slept and logged out during the night, my mind going a mile a minute, due to the sound of clashing weapons intruding into the moment of relaxation I had let myself indulge in. Before I was fully aware of my surroundings, I had used my Ice Magic to rip out the shuttles from my cloak, letting the fan out behind me while I drew my frozen blades, ready to strike down our foes.


    At least until I realised that the foes, fighting on the clearing we had camped on, were Sigmir and Rai, with Sigmir once again showing Rai how to handle a foe using a shield. Nearby, Adra looked at me with an amused expression on her face, clearly understanding what I had assumed and thinking it funny. With a growl, I decided to test the situational awareness of the two combatants, if they wanted to give me a heart-attack, I would pay them back in kind. A quick casting of Ice-Runes created a set of icicles, carefully made blunt, that shot out, two aiming at Rai, two aiming at Sigmir.


    Their reaction was quite satisfying, even if only from the perspective that my teammates were good fighters, looking at it as retaliation, it was quite weak. Sigmir, without taking more notice than needed, smacked the blunt icicles out of the air with her shield, even using the same movement to drive Rai back with her axe, never losing the rhythm of her footwork. Rai, on the other hand, used more resources but also a more fancy way to evade, the icicles reached him a moment later, forcing him to choose between responding to Sigmir¡¯s attack and the icicles or do something else entirely. Which was what he did, with a speed that hinted at great familiarity, he cloaked himself in shadow, vanishing for just long enough to dodge the attacks, and reappeared a bit further back but already moving forward again with a swift strike, trying to catch Sigmir off-guard. It didn¡¯t work, but it showed good instincts.


    ¡°If you want to play, love, just say so.¡± Sigmir grinned, as the two of them took a few steps back and ended their bout.


    ¡°Just wanted to make sure that neither of you is so focused on the enemy in front of you that you lose track of your surroundings. That¡¯s a good way to get yourself killed after all.¡± I replied with a similar grin, part of me itching to have a bout myself. But now was not the time, we had wasted quite a bit of daylight with me, not being on Mundus and I wanted to find out what was leaking the Death Astral Power.


    The others had already packed up our camp so within a few minutes of my arrival, we were on our way, heading further south along the stream.


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    ¡°If we keep a good pace, we might reach the mountains today.¡± Lenore said, landing on my shoulder to retreat into her Hallow.


    ¡°What mountains?¡± I asked the obvious question, not sure what she meant.


    ¡°While you were gone, I decided I¡¯d take a look from above.¡± she began, only to instantly stop herself to add, ¡°I didn¡¯t go too far, don¡¯t worry. If there had been trouble, I would have been able to find the others, of that I¡¯m sure. Not that I have any doubt when it comes to your ability to find Sigmir, but anyway.¡±


    Her assurance made me feel a little better, even if not by much. I didn¡¯t like idea that the others might be forced to move by an attack while I was logged out, splitting our group. But if Lenore was with the others, I¡¯d be able to easily find them, maybe even help them from afar. If not, I¡¯d have to try, tracking down Sigmir using our connection or one of the others with the blood that I had drawn from them as insurance.


    ¡°Anyway, there¡¯s a small mountain-range south of us, I think the stream comes from there. If we keep a good pace throughout the day, we should get there easily, unless something unexpected happens.¡± Lenore reiterated, causing me to nod in agreement. Normally, the idea to get to a potentially dangerous area late in the day was a bad idea, nightfall forcing people to stop their investigations before they could ascertain if they even wanted to stay in an area and darkness providing a cover to potentially nefarious beings. For our party, it was quite the opposite. Sure, Adra was hampered if she wanted to use her bow in the darkness and my own dark-vision limited my ability to operate at high ranges, but at the same time, both Rai and I excelled when it came to using the cover of darkness and my magic was stronger at night, depending on the phase of the moon.


    ¡°We wouldn¡¯t know the terrain but I see what you mean.¡± I agreed, before telling the others what Lenore had suggested.


    They saw the point and we changed our pace from comfortable walking to a quick, long stride ate a lot of ground. There would be some exhaustion but not to the point to keep us from being combat-effective.


    Over the course of the day, we kept our pace, with a few stops on the way to gather some of the fresh plants that would enhance what I could serve as food and to allow me to get a better read on the amount of Death Astral Power in the water. Curiously, the power seemed to be carried quite easily, not seeping into the surrounding area but staying with the water. It went against what I felt should happen, demonstrating that my instincts weren¡¯t always correct when it came to magic. In any way, the amount of power seemed quite stable, making me wonder even more just what we would find at its source.


    Late in the afternoon, Lenore took another flight, to scout out the terrain ahead of us. The images she sent back made me realise that we had come further than I had thought and the foothills were already rising to our east and west. The distance between those hills was quite vast, easily some thirty kilometers and the terrain in front of us wasn¡¯t significantly rising for an even longer distance, maybe some fifty kilometers, proving Lenore¡¯s earlier estimation to be a little false.


    A few minutes later, I felt Lenore¡¯s mind reach out to me, not with words but with a feeling of urgency.


    ¡°We better hurry, I think Lenore found something.¡± I told the others and our walk turned into a swift jog, ready to engage anything that might attack us.


    We didn¡¯t have to move far and even before we got to the area Lenore had found, we were close enough for our connection to allow the exchange of information and I could see through her eyes. What I saw almost made me stumble, due to the unexpected sight. Beneath her, forming a rough line, was a group of dwarves, standing their ground against a group of humanoids coming out of the forest in front of them.


    Curiously, the dwarves were not what caught my attention, it were the humanoids pressing into them. Their whole existence reminded me of the draugr Sigmir and I had fought in the Grandmother¡¯s Barrow Den, a few months ago. But here, they seemed to be a lot more earthy and decomposed, making me realise that what I had thought was a forest was some sort of swampy, boggy march.


    ¡°There¡¯s undead ahead, trying to kill some dwarves. Let¡¯s help the dwarves.¡± I told the others, readying myself to unleash an icy kind of hell on those zombies.

 Chapter 284

    There wasn¡¯t really a deeper reason for my decision to help the dwarves. It was simply due to the fact that we were looking for something shedding Death Astral Power and the potential for a connection between a bunch of undead coming out of a creepy swamp and death in the water seemed obvious. Maybe the dwarves had information we could draw on and if they had, having them in our debt would be useful. Another factor was that the undead looked, quite frankly, absolutely disgusting and ridding Mundus of those bloated, shambling monstrosities would be a boon to all of existence. And it should give some experience-points while being fun. All good reasons, in my book.


    Thanks to Lenore, I could get a good picture of the problem before we ever got there. The dwarves were equipped with a mix of spears, hammers, crossbows and axes but the undead they were facing seemed to mostly ignore their efforts, unless one of the axe-wielding dwarves managed to lob off a limb. Even that seemed a little difficult for the dwarves, the bloated, rubbery flesh looked a little spongy, absorbing a good part of the impact before it could be cut.


    The only reason for their continued stand seemed to be a spellcaster in the back, creating a golden glow that enveloped the other dwarves in a protective manner. My gamer-senses identified the guy in the back as some sort of priest, cleric, healer, holy-support spellcaster-type, which fit with established gaming-tropes. If you faced undead, having one of those on your side was a good thing. My party didn¡¯t have one, but we made do in other ways.


    ¡°Lenore, do you want to imitate a dragon?¡± I asked, amusement transmitted alongside my idea.


    ¡°Sounds like fun. But wait until you are a little closer, channelling that much Ice Astral Power through me will take quite a bit out of me.¡± she reminded me, to which I nodded, even as I pulled the staff we had crafted together out of my bag. It had started its life as a perch and for that, it should still be useful.


    We burst onto the small clearing the dwarves were on, just as Lenore started her attack-flight. I stopped, quickly drawing the runes into the air in front of me, letting the spell flow through my bond with Lenore and materialise from her position, allowing me to get a better angle on the undead. The spell itself was relatively simple and based on my experience with the Draugr in the Barrow Den. Back then, I had used a simple ray of cold, trying to freeze them, stopping them and making them more vulnerable.


    By now, I had grown quite a bit and learned more about magic. Instead of simple cold, what I channelled through Lenore was a torrent of Liquid Moonlight, spreading out in a cone and splashing all over the undead, the extreme cold tearing through their bodies and freezing them solid. Coming from the flying Lenore, it looked truly as if she had gone to school with dragons and learned some of their tricks, in this case, their fabled breath-weapon. Part of it was just for the show but a little shock and awe might be useful when dealing with the dwarves later.


    It worked a great deal better than I had expected but after a moment to think about it, I should have expected it. The undead had been soaked in the swamp, turning them into bloated monstrosities but also saturating their flesh with water. And water was an excellent way to transmit thermal energy, or in this case to draw out thermal energy.


    Even before Sigmir and Adra managed to get past the dwarven line, to roll over the zombiciles, the dwarves took advantage of the sudden vulnerability and use their warhammers to break the undead into chunks of frozen flesh. Their spears and crossbows were still ineffective but there was little I could do for that.


    Instead of running up, I slowly walked forward and moments later, Lenore landed on the top of the staff I was holding, radiating exhaustion. Even though I had cast the spell, the way our ability worked meant that it had actually taken more out of her than me, due to her lack of affinity for Ice-Magic.


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    But our actions had already turned the tide of the battle, especially with Sigmir slamming into the undead on the side, her aura glowing in the dimming light of the day as her Lok¡¯nar ripped through them. Overwhelming strength, always useful in a fight. And her Lok¡¯nar had been augmented, back in Neyto, turning it even more effective against undead. I noticed that Adra seemed to be quite effective as well, even if she had to wield her spear in a strange manner, almost using it as a halberd or bashing frozen undead with the blunt side as if it was a quarterstaff, but her speed served her well In addition, there was a telltale glow of magic around her, giving away one of her tricks.


    Rai, on the other hand, seemed to be struggling quite a bit. Sure, he was able to hit the undead with impunity but his short blades were unsuited to lob off limbs or break them if the had been frozen by my spell. It was almost a stalemate, he wouldn¡¯t get hit, he was too fast for that, but his hits were largely useless as well. I made a mental note that he needed some sort of way to deal with such enemies, maybe I could train him in some sort of counter-magic, allowing him to go after the power animating the undead. Or he would just have to deal with the fact that there were enemies that he was unsuited to fight against, helping him focus to get better at fighting enemies he was suited to fight.


    By the time I reached the back of the dwarven line, quite a few of the undead had been destroyed so I decided to add some more shock and awe.


    ¡°Back, everyone!¡± I called out, noticing that even the dwarves quickly made way for me. Maybe it was due to the massive, glowing magic-formation that I had begun to draw, forging nine runes into one of the biggest combat-spells I had ever used, even adding a tiny sliver of Eternal Ice from my bag, putting it into the middle.


    It only took me a few extra seconds to finish the spell once everyone was clear, which was quite fortunate. The result surprised even me, if the spell I had channelled through Lenore had worked well, this one had the same effect, only dialed up to eleven. A massive blast of Liquid Moonlight, shining with cold, silvery light burst from the formation, the eternal ice providing even more power to the effect, turning the swamp in front of me into a icy hellscape, the remaining undead frozen solid. But only for a moment.


    With a imperious gesture, I knocked the butt of my staff onto the frozen ground, instantly projecting three shatter-runes, using my lingering connection to the Astral Power I had just unleashed to destroy what was in front of me.


    ¡°That is dealt with.¡± I declared, watching the destruction I had wrought. Most of the trees were still standing, the cold having been too brief to fully penetrate but their leaves, everything that had been fresh and green, had been ripped apart by my magic. The undead were no exception but I might have gone overboard.


    ¡°I thank you, stranger.¡± one of the dwarves spoke up, his voice hesitating and a little unsure. It was quite obvious that he had been rattled. ¡°But would you please tell us what brings you here?¡± he asked. I noticed that his armour seemed a little more elaborate than the others, making me think that he might be the leader. The cleric-type I had noticed earlier hadn¡¯t walked up, they seemed to be busy dealing with the wounded.


    ¡°The disturbance here was noted elsewhere. We decided to take a look.¡± I said, remembering the word I had given Leneira, not to tell anyone about her and her grove.


    ¡°You are Morgana, aren¡¯t you?¡± another dwarf asked, this one female, sounding less awed and a lot more afraid.


    I merely looked at her, with an eyebrow raised, realising that I was dealing with a Traveller. That could be good or bad, which, I didn¡¯t know.


    ¡°What is a Morgana?¡± the original dwarf asked, sounding displeased that the other dwarf had spoken.


    ¡°She is one of us Travellers. Only that she has a¡­¡± the lady-dwarf paused for a moment, clearly looking for the right word, ¡°... daunting reputation. There are some who look at her with fear, others with awe. I think you just saw why, at least in part.¡±


    ¡°I am indeed Morgana. Now, you know my name, why don¡¯t you introduce yourself as well? It is only polite, is it not?¡± I asked, trying to project calm power, even as I mentally freaked out a little, trying to decide what the best way forward would be.

 Chapter 285

    It seemed that my demeanor managed to set the dwarves back for a moment, giving me time to think. A short glimpse to my combat-log showed me that the amount of experience we had received for joining the battle had been substantial, enough to bump me up to level 68 and pushing my control over Ice had raised my Ice-Rune Mastery to seventy-two. The amount of experience hinted that there was more going on here, more than just a normal area with enemies, if the undead hadn¡¯t done so already. But if the dwarven Traveller made the fact that I was here public, possibly drawing trouble from the centaurs after us, it would be problematic. It hinged on two question, would the dwarf spread the information and did the centaurs know where to go, even if they heard about my presence.


    The second question was, curiously, the more important one. I had noticed that, so far, every map I had come across had very limited information, just as one would expect from medieval maps. That meant, if there was no regular contact between the dwarves and the centaurs, the groups might know about the others but merely in a ¡°somewhere in that direction¡±-way, not exactly where they were located.


    ¡°I apologize, the name is Helmaic, of clan Ashenforge. We were supposed to find out what is going on in the swamp when the Shambling Crawlers attacked us. Thank you for your help.¡± the dwarf in the elaborate armour introduced himself. The Traveller next to us hesitated for just a split second, before introducing herself as Dargira. It was obvious that she had seen quite a bit of me on the Forum and wasn¡¯t quite certain that she wanted to deal with me.


    ¡°Helmaic, we should move on, quickly. There might be more of them out there.¡± one of the dwarves broke in,


    ¡°He is right, we should continue this talk elsewhere. You are invited to come with us.¡± he said, before turning to the cleric that was working on the injured with a second dwarf helping.


    ¡°Gwynlyn, can everybody travel?¡± he asked, causing the cleric to look over and the distinct lack of beard, combined with softer features told me that it was a female, just like the Traveller that was still in front of me, looking a little like the rabbit in front of a snake.


    ¡°Tornar and Magdir will need help, but yes, we can travel. Not far and certainly not fast, but it¡¯ll have to work.¡± she acknowledged gesturing to two of the resting dwarves.


    At that point, I decided that I¡¯d have to deal with Dargira, better sooner than later.


    ¡°I am not here to harm you, or any of the dwarves, Dargira. Unless I or one of mine is attacked, there will be no violence coming from anyone in my party.¡± I said, speaking in a soft voice but with enough volume to carry.


    ¡°However, if we are attacked, all of us will react with whatever force is necessary to protect us, without regard for collateral damage.¡± I added, this time speaking only to her. Hopefully, she¡¯d get the message that telling anyone about my presence would be a seriously bad idea.


    I was seriously conflicted in my plans. The rational, realistic part of me wanted to leave as soon as possible, leaving behind the swamp filled with death and undead, leaving behind the dwarves and the problems they might bring. But another part, the part that was both adventurer and gamer saw opportunity. Unless I was seriously wrong, the undead in the swamp ahead gave almost as much experience as dungeon-monsters had and there might be a whole swamp full of them. If the dwarves gave us quests to clear the swamp or even to simply kill undead, or if we found any other way to get around the penalty for repeatedly killing the same type of enemies, this could be a prime level-spot, allowing us to gain a couple of levels in a short time. Such an opportunity was worth quite a few risks, especially if they were only potential.


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    In addition, there was the fact that Lenore might profit greatly from the power that had seeped into the swamp, more than experience-points would account for.


    I shared a quick glance with the others and it seemed that they were fine with the idea to go with the dwarves, at least for now.


    ¡°For now, we will go with you, Helmaic.¡± I said once the dwarf was focusing on me again. ¡°You know this area better than we do, so lead the way.¡± I added, before taking a short look to the sky, estimating the amount of daylight left.


    He noticed my gaze and nodded, before turning back to his people, forming them into a square with the two wounded dwarves being carried on stretchers. I was able to get a cursory look at their wounds and the wounds were focused on their legs, as if something had struck from below, ripping their legs to shreds. Thanks to Lenore, I was able to see the power that was still lingering from the magical healing, allowing me to get an even better idea how they had looked like and it made me take mental note to be careful of attacks from below.


    The divine magic of the cleric had worked a minor miracle, making me realise the difference in application. My blood magic was able to do a lot but the magic lingering in the two legs hinted at a reconstruction on a level I couldn¡¯t even dream about. At the same time, there was what I could only describe as an instability, as if the magic was only acting as a band-aid, while the body beneath still had to heal. I was curious if I would be able to speed that process up but with another Traveller around, I wasn¡¯t too keen to demonstrate my ability to heal or the specifics how I healed. In addition, I remembered the original warning that Blood Magic was shunned at many places. No need to find out that our new acquaintances were in the camp that saw a tool as responsible for the morality of the actions taken by its users.


    We followed the slow march of the dwarves towards the northeast for an hour before Helmaic called to make camp. We were on a small, barren hill, giving us good vision of the surrounding area. The foothills further to the east were easily visible above the trees, still some distance away.


    ¡°Let¡¯s make our own camp, a little apart from the dwarves.¡± I suggested to the others and we split our tasks as we had become accomplished to.


    Soon, both camps had taken shape, the dwarven camp quite a bit larger than ours and the smell of cooking food suffused the area. It was interesting to watch the dwarves work, it gave me something else to do while I cooked a hearty boar-stew. There was a trained method to their actions, with different groups completing tasks for the whole troop. One such group was using long branches and tarps to set up crude tents, one group was collecting firewood while the cleric and her two helpers were dealing with the wounded.


    I also noted that my fellow Traveller seemed to be a little unsure about her actions, being mostly instructed by another dwarf. Giving in to curiosity, I used a sneaky Observe, using Darkness Magic to conceal my actions. The result was about what I had expected, she was merely a level twenty-seven dwarf, nothing special. If I had to guess, she hadn¡¯t been playing for longer than a month, most likely starting in the local dwarven hold and levelling in its surroundings before joining this troop recently.


    Overall, our small group was finished with the camp earlier than theirs, mostly due to the fact that our camp was simpler. We were lacking even the crude tents and as I sat there, finished the food, I decided that it wasn¡¯t something I was willing to accept. Instead, I asked Sigmir to watch the food for a bit and, with quite a bit of Astral Power and focus, I created a sturdy set of three sturdy walls, sheltering us from wind coming from the west, south and north, leaving only the east open, where the nearby foothills should block most of the wind. After nodding to myself, I pushed my magic once again, creating a two more slabs of ice, one on the northern and one on the southern wall, fusing them together in the middle to form a simple roof. After walking inside, I added the finishing touch, a funnel made from hard ice, letting the smoke from our fire rise directly into a tube leading outside, creating a chimney.


    ¡°Impressing the locals, are we?¡± Adra asked, speaking very softly, when she returned with Rai and a large load of firewood.


    ¡°Obviously. There¡¯s a traveller among them, I have a reputation to maintain.¡± I joked back, contemplating whether I should create my comfortable armchair throne as well or not.

 Chapter 286

    Looking at the small cottage I had just created, I nodded in satisfaction. It looked quite solid, but I could do better. I still felt a connection to the ice I had created, allowing me to manipulate a little more. It took some focus, but I was able to turn most of the ice opaque, with a couple of panes turning nicely clear, like windows.


    Walking inside, I added a nice chair for each of us, the others would need to cushion theirs against the cold ice, but I was happy sitting on diamond dust. Halting my magical construction, partially because I had to regenerate Astral Power, I checked my cooking and decided that it needed some attention. While I did that, I took a few sneaky glances to the dwarven camp and was quite satisfied at the sheer disbelief I could see on their faces whenever they looked into our direction.


    Finally, the stew was done and I called in the rest of my group, gesturing for them to take a seat while I created a table and doled out the food.


    ¡°You¡¯ve really outdone yourself, love.¡± Sigmir said with a wide grin, as she tried the first spoon of stew.


    ¡°Thank you.¡± Looking around to make sure no dwarves were close enough to listen in, I softly explained, ¡°It is partially to show the dwarves something unexpected. I¡¯m not sure how many people can do what I just did, even if they have the same power as I do. They¡¯d also need the right elemental affinity,¡±


    ¡°They¡¯d also need the idea and the will to use their magic in such a manner. Not that I¡¯m complaining, even if the walls are a little cold.¡± Adra added, quite amused.


    ¡°That¡¯s what the blankets are for.¡± I replied, before eating became the priority. It was quite tasty and having a table and chairs added a bit of comfort that we had been missing most of the times. Add some small-talk and jokes, turning the atmosphere in our small icy cottage quite warm and relaxed.


    Some time after we were done with dinner, I had created my armchair and was sitting in front of the quite complete cottage. I had added the last wall and even tried to create a door but sadly, the hinges were a little problematic. I could create the form, that just needed a great deal of focus, but I was unable to keep the different parts from quickly freezing together. Lenore and I were contemplating a way to accomplish that task, and using our magic to move the door when necessary, when Dargira walked up. It was quite obvious that she was a little hesitant, maybe due to insecurity or she might just be shy.


    ¡°Erm¡­ Greetings, Morgana.¡± she spoke up, after a second of mumbling as if unsure just what to say.


    ¡°Greetings, Dargira. Why don¡¯t you have a seat?.¡± I invited, causing the dwarf to blink, only to make a squeaky noise when a chair materialised behind her. I had to push the speed a little to make it look good but at times, showmanship was useful.


    ¡°Yes, thank you.¡± she replied, looking a little shaken and wide-eyed as she seated herself, the chair as close to perfect for her size as I could make it. That had the added effect that my comfortable armchair was a little higher, allowing me to look down on her.


    I simply waited for her to speak, as she was the one coming to me, curious why she had approached, was it due to her superior or was it on her own accord.


    ¡°I¡­ I wanted to ask about a few things I¡¯ve read on the forum.¡± she said, looking at me expectantly.


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    ¡°You can always ask. But why should I answer, and, more importantly, how would you know that my answer is true?¡± I asked, considering just how I wanted to play this. Dargira paused for a moment, obviously not sure how to answer the question instantly.


    ¡°Answering, maybe just to be nice. And for the truth, how can we know whether what anyone is telling us is true? I just have to look at your answers, look at everything else I know and make a judgement.¡± she answered, after thinking about it for a bit.


    ¡°To be nice, but am I a nice being? Ah, it does not matter, I¡¯m feeling content, so ask away.¡± I accepted, curious where this was going.


    ¡°Is it true that you, the person now animating the Avatar called Morgana, have been Titania of Amarantine in a previous life?¡± she asked, leaning forward on the seat of her chair and looking expectant. Her question rocked me for just a moment, I had rarely thought of my former team since coming to Mundus, but I managed to keep a serene mask on my face.


    ¡°A question for a question. Why do you ask a question about previous lives? They are done and over, are they not?¡± I asked in return, deciding that I¡¯d ask a question for every question she was asking me, making my responses as detailed as she was answering my questions.


    ¡°I¡¯ve played Craft of War for a few years and always looked up to the pro-teams. But the last few months, things turned a little stale so I was incredibly happy when I got a capsule in the third wave, letting me look at different things. Maybe I¡¯ll even be able to get my guild-mates to join, once Road to Purgatory officially launches.¡± she explained, giving me a quite detailed answer.


    ¡°Yes, I have been the one known as Titania in days past.¡± I answered her original question, making a mental note that I owed her some details.


    ¡°So the rumors are true, cool. There was quite a bit of talk and discussion on the forums why you left Amarantine and were replaced by Acrasia, but nobody truly knew what was going on.¡± she said, sounding incredibly insecure again, as if she wasn''t sure she should ask. Luckily, I had a few seconds to get my mind back on track and prepare for questions about that part of my past.


    ¡°You mean the flamewar, don¡¯t you. Yes, I watched that with interest, it was quite amusing. This time, I¡¯ll answer first and ask you to answer my question afterwards, why do you want to know?¡± I paused for a second, contemplating how much I should and could say, there was always the possibility that she would release a recording later.


    ¡°About my parting with Amarantine, there were contractual obligations involved, which is all I can say about it. If you have ever heard of the eighth Ferengi Rule of Acquisition, it has proven true for me.¡± I explained, keeping well inside the limits of what I was allowed to say while implying a lot of things that I didn¡¯t say. The dwarf in front of me blinked for a moment, before she nodded and answered my question.


    ¡°I wanted to know cause it felt strange. Sure, Acrasia was a lot more public and out-there but you were one of the earliest and longest-running pro-players. The switch looked great from a publicity-perspective but right after, Amarantine ran into problems and started to decline, as if the team wasn¡¯t quite mashing together any longer. There¡¯ve been rumors that Leymar considers to resign at the end of the season but nothing official has been released anywhere.¡± she explained, brining a sad smile to my face. Somehow, knowing that my old team, a team I had put in so much time and effort, seemed to be steeply going downhill was filling me with conflicted feelings. Sure, there was that devil in my heart, laughing at them suffering for kicking me out but at the same time, Amarantine had been a project I had loved. If even Leymar, one of the team¡¯s offensive strikers, was considering to leave, that would mean things were going even worse than I had thought.


    ¡°I obviously cannot speak about the current state of the team, it would be just wrong.¡± I interjected, before Dargira could ask another question. ¡°And, in all honesty, it is not just a question of morals, it is also a question of knowledge. Amarantine was something near and dear to me, the team was founded by one of the few friends I had during my time at highschool. Sure, he had left the team a while back, to pursue what he called his adult life, but it was something we built together. After leaving, I tried to keep myself from looking back, not always successfully but I certainly didn¡¯t try to keep contacts with any of the others on the team. I just could not.¡± I added, looking up at the darkening sky, remembering the time I had spent in Craft of War, wondering about might-have-beens.


    Somehow, deep inside, I felt that the way things had turned out was a good one. Maybe things had happened for a reason.

 Chapter 287

    After a moment of contemplation and looking up, at the dark sky, Dargira¡¯s voice broke the silence, shaking me out of my memories.


    ¡°Honestly, it was more than just Amarantine. Sure, they are a part of it but it feels like half the popular streamers are now playing Road to Purgatory. Even quite a few pros have admitted that they are looking into it and will be part of the beta at some point.¡± she said and I felt as if a lightbulb went off in my head.


    ¡°That might not be a coincidence.¡± I mumbled, mostly speaking to myself, ¡°Think about it, what makes a game great? Sure, the game itself needs to meet certain standards but so many games that seemed to tick all those boxes were dead on arrival. No, the game needs its player-base, obviously and to get that, it needs marketing. Where does many, many gamers learn about games? Some get information from organised gaming-media but I¡¯d wager that a whole lot more get their information from various video-sites, who sift through streams and such.¡± I mused, spinning a mental-thread.


    ¡°Quite a few streamers have their game that they play, like mine was Craft of War, but suddenly, there¡¯s a major shift, to a new one? Coincidence?¡± I continued, before stopping for a moment.


    ¡°I think not. Almost all of the famous streamers started out as simple gamers and I¡¯d wager some of them still think that way, dangle a shiny, new toy, say, a never-before, fully immersive gaming-system, in front of them, tell them, ¡®You can have that, if you stream our game¡¯ and a lot of them would be off to the races.¡± I finished, looking at a slightly confused looking Dargira.


    ¡°You mean Pantheon deliberately gave their beta-slots out to streamers and such?¡± she asked.


    ¡°I would call it a strong possibility. They wouldn¡¯t need all that many, maybe ten, twenty percent of each wave and they¡¯d get a ton of content-creators into their game while taking away the same amount from other games. And quite a lot of audiences would make the switch with them, especially as Road to Purgatory is something new and, to be honest, something awesome.¡± I pointed out.


    ¡°Yeah, I could see that. What do you think will happen with older games, once Road to Purgatory launches?¡± she asked, after a moment of contemplation on her own.


    ¡°Oh, at first, there will be a run on capsules and people will want to play like crazy, but in the long run? We¡¯ll have to see. The biggest problem I see is that, to get into the higher levels of play here, you need a huge time-investment. Let¡¯s take people like Tobiuno, who are lord of their respective domains and all that jazz, if you want to do justice to such a job, it is just that, a job.¡± I said after thinking for a moment.


    ¡°Similarly, the pain-factor might be a problem. Sure, it¡¯s only ever temporary and there seems to be no lingering sensation but, at the end of the day, only dedicated people will be willing to repeatedly get hurt like that. Well, dedicated people and masochists. The normal, casual gamer, coming home from a nine-to-five won¡¯t necessarily go into a game like this, but who knows, there might be an economic niche now that I think about it.¡± I paused, trying to put my thoughts into words.


    ¡°In a way, if someone created the necessary ingame-architecture, Road to Purgatory could become a substitute for short-time vacations. It would require some sort of fast-travel or portal-system or something, which might become possible to set up, once you get to a higher level of spellcasting and Pantheon would have to implement some sort of real-money transfer, which I¡¯m not sure I¡¯d like, but it might work.¡± I explained.


    ¡°How¡¯d that work?¡± she asked, looking a little confused.


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    ¡°No idea, I¡¯m just thinking here. But look at it this way: If you could log in with a brand-new character, step through a portal, maintained by a player-led organisation, to get to some exotic beach or to some sort of ski-resort, or really, whatever ludicrous thing you always wanted to try but didn¡¯t because of the dangers involved? Everything from hang-gliding, deep-sea diving, playing golf during a lighting-storm, doesn¡¯t matter, the worst that can happen is a moment of pain and you get send to respawn. I could see that as a draw, the only question is, how do the players setting it all up and maintain it get involved in the profit-sharing.¡± I expanded on my idea, deciding to write something up and send it to Pantheon, just in case they had missed such an idea.


    ¡°There¡¯s also the youth-market. I doubt that Pantheon will even try to make Road to Purgatory into anything but rated for adults. They¡¯d have to cut, censor and break far too much about this world to be viable. That part of gaming will remain but I think even there will be a shift.¡± Dargira said, her voice similarly contemplative.


    We continued to talk for a little longer, switching stories about Craft of War and even a few about our respective experience in Road to Purgatory. Not that I told her anything truly interesting, just a few casual tidbits that I found interesting, but it felt good to speak with someone who had a similar experience as I had. Sure, I posted on the forum but there I always tried to keep a mysterious persona, knowing that it would be useful to have an established character.


    I had done something similar in Craft of War, when I had refused to stream content with a face-cam, instead I had used a chibi-version of my character, something that the later management of Amarantine had turned into a plush-doll and sold.


    ¡°Greetings, Morgana.¡± Helmaic greeted me as he stepped nearby, interrupting our conversation. Gwynlyn, the cleric, was with him, holding some sort of stone-bowl, looking at me with obvious curiosity. Both dwarves gave a short, almost curt, acknowledgement to Dargira, their voices sounding different to me and I realised they had spoken some sort of dwarven language that I only understood thanks to Lenore.


    ¡°Good Evening, Helmaic. And greetings to you, Gwynlyn.¡± I returned the greeting, standing to be polite.


    ¡°Greetings, Morgana. I hoped we could talk to you, about the swamp and your plans regarding it.¡± Gwynlyn replied.


    ¡°Certainly. Have a seat.¡± I said, waving my hand and, using instantly projected runes to show off, created two more chairs, equal to the one I had made for Dargira. Seeing the bowl in her hand, I even added a small, round table to stand in the middle. It reminded me of my last lesson with the Grandmother and I found it regretful that I was unable to copy the causal ease with which the Grandmother had created the incredible magic tea she had offered me. Or, really, I would be content with the ability to create it, even without it being casual or easy.


    ¡°Thank you.¡± both native dwarves replied but I was able to spot a bit of awe on Helmaic¡¯s face, while Gwynlyn kept a friendly, curious but controlled mask.


    ¡°Now, you asked about our plans, so I¡¯m assuming that you have something in mind. Currently, my group is interested in the swamp but, depending on circumstances, we might simply move on. It is not as if there is something binding us to this area, or even the problems caused by the power of death tainting the land, and, maybe even more importantly, seeping into the water and spreading far and wide.¡± I stated, starting what I felt would be a negotiation, with the dwarves wanting something from us, while I had my own ideas on payment. Sure, part of the payment would be the experience gained from clearing the swamp, which would be massively increased with an appropriate quest that stopped the penalty for repeatedly killing the same creature, but that wasn¡¯t something we¡¯d directly get from the dwarves. So, I was planning to milk them for what they were willing to give.


    ¡°As you might have seen, the swamp is a problem. We could clear it, but it would cost us.¡± Helmaic admitted and I thought I noticed a wince on Gwynlyn¡¯s face.


    ¡°Indeed. I think the best way would be to contact the Thane, the leader of our hold, and ask him for his input.¡± she quickly interjected, almost as if she was keen to stop Helmaic from talking.


    ¡°If you think that, go ahead. I¡¯m sure you have your ways, I¡¯m quite curious how dwarves work their magic, I only saw a little earlier. It is fascinating, seeing the power of the Gods invoked directly.¡± I replied, smiling at the process of comparing her method of distant-communication with my own scrying-spells.

 Chapter 288

    There was a moment of hesitation before Gwynlyn placed the bowl she had carried with her on the table. I was able to get a good look and was intrigued. What had looked like a normal, earthenware bowl from the outside was inlaid with golden runes, all around the rim, forming a circle. When I looked closer, I realised that I knew most of the runes, some well, some not so much. They were very similar, almost identical, to the runes I had used quite a long time ago when I had taken the Water-Mirror spell in the Grimoire I had been given by the Grandmother and used it as a base from which I had developed my own shadow-scrying spell.


    ¡°We dwarves pride us in our ability to work with stone, metal and magic.¡± Gwynlyn boasted, sounding quite satisfied at my intense concentration when looking at her magic bowl. I simply ignored her, pushing Lenore¡¯s sight to the forefront of my mind, only to realise that the bowl, while still containing lingering traces of magic, was otherwise inactive.


    ¡°It is an interesting piece of work.¡± I admitted when I was unable to unravel its mysteries with just my eyes. Part of me considered, for just a moment, to simply murder the dwarves before they could report back but there were just a few problems with that, mainly Dargira who would respawn, no matter what. In addition, there was no guarantee that I¡¯d be able to wrestle the bowls secrets from it by myself. But maybe I¡¯d be able to trade some of the dwarven enchanting-techniques for our work.


    The still smirking Gwynlyn took out a waterskin, filling the bowl with clear water barely wetting the runes, before sitting back and placing her hands on the outside. I could feel the magic being channelled, even without Lenroe¡¯s sight, but looking through her eyes allowed me to follow the flow of magic through the runes. I realised that the differences I had noticed earlier weren¡¯t due to the runes being different but due to imperfect craftsmanship. At the small imperfections, a small amount of Astral Power was leaking out, making the spell require more power than normally necessary. I also noticed that the Cleric seemed to simply pump Astral Power into the bowl, without actually doing anything with it, a battery, or blood harvested with Blood Magic, would be able to do the same.


    Watching the spell take form was not that much different from my own spells, making me assume that the bowl was similar to the rune-stones I had received in the beginning, only a lot more complex. On the water-surface, an image formed, showing an empty room before the image of a dwarf came into view.


    Thanks to Lenore, I was able to follow the conversation in their language. Gwynlyn told the dwarf, apparently a mix between phone-operator and guard, that she had a report for the Thane. There were a few minutes of shaking, a little disorienting as it looked like the water-surface was disturbed but it was really the surface on the other side, reflected back to us, before the image resolved again, with two bearded, regal looking dwarves being visible.


    The three dwarves with me instantly stood, giving a short bow with their right hand over their hand, greeting their Thane in unison. I simply looked on, partially to demonstrate that I wasn¡¯t his subject but also because I had decided to hide the fact that I was understanding what they were saying. It might be a useful surprise, later down the line, and there was really no reason to give it away.


    It was interesting to listen to Helmaic give his report, describing how his people had ventured to one of the streams flowing out of the swamp and followed it upstream. They didn¡¯t get far into the swamp itself before they had been ambushed from below, an attack that left two dwarves crippled and a few others wounded. From then on, they had fought a slow retreat, unable to break contact with the shambling crawlers, only their shield-wall and Gwynlyn¡¯s divine magic keeping them from getting overrun and routed. They could have run, but it would have doomed over a third of his troop, something he hadn¡¯t been desperate enough to do when a group of four travelling Adventurers had intervened on their behalf. It was quite satisfying to hear me described as a powerful spellcaster, even if I had used some resources to form that massive cone of cold.


    Once that report was finished, Gwynlyn took over, reporting that the swamp was a problem that needed to be solved, soon. Otherwise, it might spread far and wide, poisoning the land the dwarves used for their hunting and to gather wild plants. It gave me the distinct impression that they had some farm-land elsewhere, maybe further up the hills or in some secluded dale, but needed the forest to round out their diet. Gwynlyn suggested that some sort of monster had made its lair in the swamp, or maybe something had awoken there, causing the trouble they were seeing.


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    Her recommendation to deal with it was to use the group of adventurers as a first measure, giving them time to gather a powerful group of their own, just in case the adventurers, namely my group, failed. From what I could tell, they were mostly pragmatic in their planning, if we managed to deal with their problem, they¡¯d pay us but if not, they¡¯d have won valuable time without effort on their own. It was a win-win situation for them, with us taking the lion¡¯s share of the risk.


    Finally, Gwynlyn turned to me, gesturing for me to come forward as she introduced me in the Trade-tongue, the language I had slowly learned from Sigmir and Lenore. I could speak it fluently, thanks to Lenore, but we had planned ahead, knowing that the bond between Lenore and me had been intended to be for just a single year and a day. I had a feeling that we wouldn¡¯t just split at the end of that year, but I had asked them to help me learn the language anyway, just in case.


    In this case, I gave a polite, if not particularly servile, greeting, treating him as I would have treated an important client.


    ¡°Greetings, Thane Ashenforge. My name is Morgana, a Traveller from a distant realm.¡± I introduced myself, considering for a moment whether or not I should reveal the connection to the Grandmother, or maybe to the winterwolves. In the end, I decided against it, knowing that Dargira was watching.


    ¡°Greetings, Morgana. We have been told that you knew about the trouble in the Deadmire, before even coming near it. How?¡± he asked, his deep eyes quite penetrating.


    ¡°It was noticed, far downstream. I am bound by my word not to reveal by whom, but it hardly matters. It was noticed and I was told about it. That has to suffice.¡± I explained, knowing that he might take that badly. He just stared at me for a moment, before nodding and mumbling something into his beard.


    ¡°I want to hire you and your group to find out what is causing the current surge of trouble in the Deadmire and, if possible, to take care of it. What do you want in return for that service?¡± he asked, straight out, without beating around the bush. Now, I¡¯d have to name a price, without any indication of the value our service would have. I contemplated for a moment, before answering and decided on my opening gambit.


    ¡°I would ask to be given access to read in the library of your hold, to study how your enchanters craft such magical marvels, like the bowl I am looking at. That, of course, assumes that your enchanters wrote down their methods and don¡¯t pass it on, from master to apprentice. In addition, I would ask for a bounty on the undead in the swamp, depending on their individual strength. We simply don¡¯t know how many we will have to fight, how many are in there and how strong they are. I could name a price for that service and both of us wouldn¡¯t know if it is appropriate. I believe in a fair price for a labour, but how to assess that price beforehand, I don¡¯t know.¡± I laid out, causing the Thane to frown for a moment.


    The conditions were quite good and fair, me, reading their tomes wouldn¡¯t cost them anything, unless I was some sort of super-genius who was able to remember everything in a single reading-session. I would obviously cheat, using the recording-function of the capsule to replicate their tomes but the Thane didn¡¯t need to know that. Hopefully, he didn¡¯t know about that. The bounty was similarly fair, if there were only few, weak undead, it would be cheap, if there were many, strong undead, we¡¯d most likely die.


    ¡°I see.¡± the Thane paused for another moment. ¡°Yes, that sounds like a fair deal. You can study our tomes for three days, how much you learn depends on your abilities. If you destroy the cause of the disruption, we¡¯ll give each member of your party a single item, crafted by one of our mastercraftsmen. As for the bounty, do five silver-coins for every shambling crawler sound fair? We can use that as a base-unit and let the system assess how the stronger undead would stack up against the crawlers.¡± he suggested and a Quest-Window popped open in front of me.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="2">Quest Alert!</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="2">Investigate the Deadmire</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="1">Quest Difficulty</td>


    <td colspan="1">Hard</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="2">Thane Ashenforge asks you to investigate the Deadmire, destroy as many undead as you can and maybe even the cause of the corruption.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="1">Quest Reward</td>


    <td colspan="1">Five silver per Shambling Crawler, proportionally more for stronger Undead</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="1">Quest Reward</td>


    <td colspan="1">Three days unlimited access to the library of Clan Ashenforge</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="1">Quest Bonus-Reward</td>


    <td colspan="1">Bonus, for destroying the cause of the corruption, one item, crafted by the Mastercraftsmen of Clan Ashenforge.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    I studied it for a moment, intrigued just how responsive the system seemed to be, before accepting the quest with a nod.

 Chapter 289

    Once I had an agreement with the Thane, the conversation shifted back to the dwarves and into dwarven, making me a passive observer. They made a plan that Helmaic would lead his man back to their town, while Gwynlyn, with a small group of guards, would remain at this place to escort my group and me back to the Ashenforge, as their home was called. It was interesting that Gwynlyn would remain behind, despite the wounded amongst the dwarves, but maybe they wanted the group staying behind to have communication, or there were other reasons.


    It didn¡¯t take them long to make their plans and afterwards, Gwynlyn let the magic powering the scrying bowl fade away, visibly relaxing. I wasn¡¯t able to get a real impression about the amount of power left in her body, not without drawing blood and tasting it, which wasn¡¯t something I was ready to ask for, not for such a small matter. But her demeanor hinted that powering the bowl, especially for a slightly longer duration, took a lot out of her, far more than I¡¯d need to scry on a nearby place. Once again, I wished for a controlled environment in which I could experiment with those questions, to nail down the rules governing magic. I had ideas which variables might be involved but there was simply no way to control the different factors I suspected to form a working model. Not that the trouble would stop me from hypothesizing or experimenting, it was just something to strive for, once the beta was over.


    ¡°Morgana, a small group of us will remain here for the next two weeks, guiding you back to Ashenforge, the ancestral home of our clan. If you are delayed for longer, you need to find the way yourself, so let me describe how to get there.¡± Helmaic explained, pausing for a second before continuing on. Ashenforge wasn¡¯t too far away, maybe a day¡¯s march if everyone was healthy. I was quite confident that we¡¯d be able to find our way, especially with Lenore scouting from overhead, so the arrangement was fine with me.


    Helmaic and Gwynlyn remained behind for a little longer, with Gwynlyn asking questions about me, apparently trying to get a better idea who I was. I answered politely and honestly but tried to reveal little that hadn¡¯t been shown on the Forum or in the highlight-reels. Soon, Gwynlyn seemed to give up and the two local dwarves excused themselves, leaving me with Dargira. We returned to our previous conversation, at least for a bit, before I felt the exhaustion creep up on me. I could feet that Lenore had already gone to sleep in her Hallow and I knew that I¡¯d soon lose my mask, if I didn¡¯t get going. I tried to be polite in my dismissal and Dargira luckily got the hint. A quick thought dispersed the furniture I had created, leaving a glittering coating of diamond dust in the area.


    Looking at the cottage, I noticed that someone had solved the door-problem in a simple way, they had hung a blanket in the doorway, creating a simple covering that should keep in some warmth without preventing us from quickly leaving, if necessary.


    Adra was still awake when I walked in, the others had already retired for the night, not that I blamed them. We had marched quite far and the battle had added to the exhaustion.


    ¡°What are our plans now?¡± Adra asked, speaking very softly.


    ¡°We were hired to investigate the swamp, Deadmire, they call it. It seems that the changes are recent, so hopefully we¡¯ll be fine. If we manage to clear it out, there¡¯ll be a nice bonus.¡± I explained before a yawn tried to break my jaw.


    ¡°It will be dangerous but I agree, it could help us gain a lot of power, especially Lenore and me.¡± Adra admitted, looking a little sheepish. ¡°Go to bed, I¡¯ll keep watch for a while, you can take the last watch in the morning. Sigmir will wake you up.¡± she added, making a waving motion towards the spot where Sigmir was already fast asleep. I gave Adra a small smile, before stripping some of my clothes off and snuggling up to Sigmir, wrapping our blankets around us. Once my head was placed on her upper arm and my eyes closed, I was out like a light.


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    Early in the next morning, Sigmir gently shook me awake, making me grumble a little in discomfort but, when she peppered small kisses all over my face, there was no way I even wanted to try to stay asleep.


    ¡°Good morning, love.¡± she softly said once my eyes were focused on her, adding a gentle kiss to my lips.


    ¡°Good morning. That might be the best way to wake up.¡± I admitted with a smile. I returned the kiss before pushing myself up and putting on some clothes, using that nifty magic trick from the Grandmother¡¯s Grimoire to make sure they were clean.


    ¡°Do you want to catch some more sleep?¡± I asked, looking over to Sigmir.


    ¡°No, I¡¯ll stay awake with you.¡± she answered, looking quite content and happy.


    ¡°Let¡¯s go outside, no need to wake those two.¡± I gestured to the spot where Rai and Adra were sharing another blanket, sleeping in a quite comfortable embrace. When they had begun, it was to share warmth but by now, I was quite sure that there was more of a connection. It made me wonder, Kallista, the dryad back in Neyto who looked so very similar to Adra, had been convinced that Adra was some sort of a reborn version of her old partner. Would those feelings return at some point? What about memories? What about the new personality and the feelings associated with it?


    Shaking off those strange, most likely unanswerable questions, I followed Sigmir outside, quickly creating a wide bench for the two of us, facing towards the east and the foothills, glowing with a faint shimmer of pre-dawn light. It was a beautiful sight, the still dark sky above filled with glimmering stars while dawn was but a hint in the distance.


    Without a single word, I created the runes necessary to form fresh Ice, using my Ice Magic to form it into a wide love-seat and cushioning it with Diamond Dust. Sigmir grinned at the causal ease with which I was now creating furniture, even the cottage the day before. It was, quite frankly, trivial for me but I just had never considered it. Sure, I had made myself a comfortable seat at times, when I had prepared to perform large feats of magic, treating the act of creating a throne as a sort of attunement to my magic and the ritual, using it as a mental focus of sorts but there really was no reason not to use my magic to make things comfortable for us, even on the road.


    Thinking about the cottage, I focused on the magic still lingering in it, once I was sitting next to Sigmir and comfortable. The magic was still there, only slightly faded and I realised that I¡¯d be able to strengthen it, not quite to the point of permanency, that would require a continuous source of fresh power, but I¡¯d be able to make it last for a month, maybe two, unless it was destroyed by outside forces.


    As I thought about it, I realised that it might be a good idea to try it out. I was reasonably sure that the key to mastering Ice Runes was in the interplay of the different parts of the magic. There was the material, Ice, Hard Ice, maybe Diamond Dust and Liquid Moonlight, and ultimately Eternal Ice, but that was only part of it. Then there was the thermal part with the runes for Chill and Cold but there had to be a stronger one, higher up there, a more powerful rune. And finally, the temporal parts, which I had the hardest time to understand. Stillness, the ultimate lack of motion, magic so cold that it froze time itself, that had to be part of Eternal Ice. It was in the name afterall. I only had the slightest inclining, partially due to the lessons the Grandmother had taught me, but even they had been vague at best.


    Maybe the key to that temporal part was to figure out how to make permanent structures out of ice, anchored to the world in a way that didn¡¯t require constant influx of Astral Power or maybe a way to link the ice itself to the Astral River, letting it sustain itself that way.


    Closing my eyes, I let myself drift to the edge of the Astral River, acting as a conduit that channelled more and more freezing cold Astral Power into the cottage, slowly turning the structure from Ice into Hard Ice. I had done that before, only on a smaller scale, so it was easy, it only took a lot of power with such a large structure.

 Chapter 290

    From the outside, the swamp was looking strangely peaceful, at least as long as I wasn¡¯t using Lenore¡¯s sight. We had spent an hour in the morning with the dwarves, with me putting the finishing touches to my frozen Cottage and setting it as a respawn-point before heading out to the swamp. Now, the mid-morning sun was just visible above the mountains to the east of us, trying to burn away the mist lingering above the swamp. We considered waiting for the sun to do its job but Lenore, who had taken a good look the evening before, felt that it was pointless.


    ¡°The mist is magical, just take a look.¡± she mentally scolded me, pushing her visual perspective to my mind, showing me what she meant. And, even if I disliked the image it presented, she was right. The mist covering the swamp was quite similar to the mist I could summon with my magic, more grounded in water than ice but the basis was the same. What really ruffled my feathers was the fact that it seemed that every part of the bog was contaminated with small specks of magic, a mix of water, earth and death, making me hesitate to even step walk in there.


    ¡°Everything is.¡± I mentally commented, knowing that we¡¯d have to be extremely careful.


    ¡°Rai, remember the spell I taught you earlier? I think you¡¯ll need it, hell, I know you¡¯ll need it.¡± I asked, looking at my disciple. The spell was a simple one, the idea was that his blades produced a shadow, which his magic could link to the concepts of devouring and magic, hopefully allowing him to cover his blades in an anti-magic field of sorts. We had tried it on the march here and it had sort-of worked against magically created ice, allowing him to cut it with a lot less trouble, but I had no idea if it would work against magically reanimated corpse. If not, he¡¯d be reduced to his, sadly, quite weak curses and blades that were just not heavy enough to cut a shambling crawler apart or shatter them like Adra could with the butt of her spear, once I froze them.


    ¡°Yes, I remember. I¡¯ll make you proud.¡± he promised, looking quite serious.


    ¡°I¡¯ll be proud if you remember your limits. Everyone of us has their specialities and yours is the quick, sneaky hit, not trying to wrestle undead.¡± I reminded him, not wanting him to do something reckless that might get him killed. It would reflect badly on his teacher if he did something foolish. He nodded in reply, his stance lightening up a bit. Hopefully it would be enough.


    ¡°Let¡¯s head in. Sigmir, could you take the lead, with Adra bringing up the rear? And be careful of your footing, there¡¯s something going on here.¡± I said, getting the others into formation. Personally, I¡¯d stay in the middle, keeping my eyes open for potential attacks from below. Visions of zombified hands, suddenly shooting from the soggy earth were strong in my head, even if I wondered just where so many corpses would come from, not like this swap was anywhere near an area where a lot of people actually travelled.


    Sigmir, maybe sensing my disturbance, simply nodded, walking ahead with Rai following in her shadows, their heads searching through and fro, in rhythm with their movement but opposite of the other. It was almost comical to watch but they had their own system. I gave them a few meters, carefully watching the earth beneath them and the disturbance they caused in the local magic. I wasn¡¯t certain that the strange magic was caused by a creature, sapient or otherwise, or if it was some sort of local phenomena, but either way, I was convinced that it was part of the problem we were here to investigate.


    With every step, I let my magical senses take the forefront in my mind, relying on my group to keep me reasonably safe while I made sure that nothing was creeping up on them with magic.


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    We didn¡¯t have to walk far for the first problems to materialise and, interestingly, it was Sigmir that spotted it.


    ¡°Over there.¡± her soft voice cut through the damp, silent mist and I saw her Lok¡¯nar point towards one of the stagnant ponds where a few waves disturbed the water.


    ¡°What have you seen?¡± Adra asked while I kept watch on our footing. The dwarves had told me that the creatures that had attacked them came from below and I was not risking things by getting distracted.


    Without really meaning to, I started to draw the runes for Ice and Cold into the air in front of me, my gut telling me that something was wrong. Just as I was half-way done with the second rune, a stench filled my nostrils, for just a split-second as if a noxious wind had passed me by and I felt myself react when Lenore¡¯s sight showed me a disturbing picture, the magic in the ground concentrating into discernable forms.


    ¡°JUMP!¡± I shouted, barely managing to finish the rune I had been drawn while using my instant projection to add the third rune, causing the formation to flash with a silver light that was mirrored in my eyes as a sheet of ice sealed the ground we had just vacated. But the magical attack hadn¡¯t been the only one, from the nearby ponds and even from a few deeper patches of mud, came creatures, jumping towards us with surprising speed. Fast zombies, joy.


    Only they weren¡¯t zombies, a small part of my mind managed to use Observe, telling me that they were Shambling Crawlers, the one I had was looking at was level 57, making it a lower level than we were but a combination of numbers, strength and surprise made the attack a serious threat. Especially with the streams of magic striking the Ice I had created, looking like skeletal hands made from earth and death. The sheet held, at least for a moment, while I had to focus on different things.


    Sigmir took on one direction, her Lok¡¯nar cleaving everything that tried to come close while Adra kept our rear safe. Between them, one of either side of me, were Ylva and Rai, protecting me in the middle.


    Meanwhile, I focused on using the vines manifested by the Eisblumen, hindering the Shambling Crawlers whenever I could while using bursts of Ice-Magic to give the others an easier time killing them. A shambling crawler with a frozen knee was a lot easier to dispatch than one that could use both legs.


    The fighting was brutal, my mind losing every track of time with only our surroundings and my comrades mattering. Only snippets made it into my consciousness, a moment in which Rai jumped forward, to take advantage of a crawler whose arms I had batted away with my Eisblumen, allowing him to cross his blades at his neck and, with a scissoring motion, take off its head. Another moment that registered was when Ylva leapt backwards, luring two of the crawlers right into the path of Sigmir¡¯s Lok¡¯nar, the massive weapon cleaving them apart in a single swing.


    For a moment, I smelt the same noxious smell I had smelt, focusing on the ground beneath us, reinforcing the areas where more power was gathering, trying to break through so the crawlers would be able to get at us. My moment of distraction cost me, letting a crawler get closer to me than I would have liked but Adra was on the ball, the spear she had made from the crystal wood given to her by Kallista easily destroying the magic keeping the creature moving. But her intervention allowed another crawler to rip a deep scratch into her side, nothing that couldn¡¯t be healed but we all had to push to keep up.


    Finally, there seemed to be no more enemies coming, allowing us to take a deep breath and a look around. There were less corpses than I had thought, at least until I realised that they were slowly turning into the same inky blackness I had witnessed in the Barrow Den, their essence re-absorbed by the swamp around us. I pushed the image out of my mind, needing to stay on guard or we might get into another ambush.


    ¡°Let¡¯s retreat for now.¡± Adra suggested and I realised that we were all worse for wear. Even I, who had been protected in the center of our formation, had a deep scratch on my neck and I had no idea how it got there. Looking closely at each of them, I was quite sure that none of the wounds were critical but that they all needed some healing, even the scratch on me seemed to be laced with some sort of Death-magic, slowly trying to make headway into my flesh.


    ¡°Agreed. We might need to refine a battle-plan.¡± I admitted, taking another look around, before shaking my head and following Adra in a reversal of our original formation.

 Interlude: Interview Leymar

    ¡°Good afternoon, and welcome to Games Talk on GNN, with Jill Ankerton. Today, I have a very special guest with me, please welcome Leymar the mesmerizing rogue of Team Amarantine.¡± the popular host on the Gaming News Network greets the camera and sounds of applause reach the viewer. On the set, in front of a screen showing various scenes from Craft of War are two comfortable armchairs, one with the host, the other empty. With the announcement, a male figure started walking in from the side, looking just a tad uncomfortable as he walks over to the now standing host. The two hug for a moment before getting back to their seats.


    ¡°Welcome, Leymar, it is so great that you are here.¡± Jill smiles at her guest, sounding enthusiastic.


    ¡°Thank you for having me, Jill, it¡¯s great to be here.¡± Leymar responds and returns the smile.


    For a bit, the two make small-talk and share jokes, mostly about their respective backgrounds, before they need to get to the more serious stuff.


    ¡°As our fans undoubtedly know, you are one of the players of Team Amarantine, playing your rogue in a striker-position. Why don¡¯t you tell me about the past season?¡± Jill starts the real interview, her voice taking on a less jokingly flirty tone.


    ¡°The past season, huh? We were still looking for our stride and Acrasia had to fill the biggest shoes a petite person could ever wear.¡± Leymar explains, sounding a little sad.


    ¡°Titania¡¯s departure left a hole, just like the loss of the most experienced team-member would. Back when Chris left the team, it wasn¡¯t as obvious because back then, Titania took over. Not officially as the captain but more a presence in the background, prodding us on. She was never the type to make big, emotional speeches. Hell, there were days that she barely said five unnecessary words but there was always the feeling she was looking over your shoulder, sending a cold chill down your spine.¡± he continues, a wan smile on your face.


    ¡°You make her sound a little scary, was she hard to work with?¡± Jill asks, feeling that, while it is far from the original direction she¡¯d wanted to take the interview, it would be an interesting twist to hear more about the withdrawn, enigmatic person behind the previous healer.


    ¡°Scary? Yes, maybe. I mean, look at her latest project, the character she plays as Morgana, that is quite scary. But back when she was Titania, it was more like a pure perfectionist streak, pushing us to minimize mistakes, to always use one-hundred percent of the options given to us by our class and opponents or, if necessary, to make options for yourself.¡± he pauses again, shaking his head.


    ¡°To be honest, I hated it, those unblinking, emotionless eyes, seeing every tiny mistake, every small fumble, not once letting something go. It didn¡¯t matter if we had a game in the bag, it didn¡¯t matter if it was practice, if it was a mistake, she¡¯d make sure you noticed it and that you knew what you could have done better. I thought it was terrible.¡± Leymar admits, causing Jill to raise an eyebrow.


    ¡°Past-Tense?¡± she asks, feeling that there was more to it.


    ¡°Yes, past-tense. Only after she left, I realised that while she demanded us to give hundred percent, she, herself, somehow managed to give one-hundred-ten percent. There was a reason why the old ascended-classes were more and more pushed to the side-lines and replaced with the newer classes in competitive play. It wasn¡¯t so much the actual power-level and more the sheer difficulty in playing them at a competitive level. The strategists weren¡¯t happy if a player had to play perfectly to get a performance en-par with the other classes and Hailstorm made it obvious that they wouldn¡¯t rework the old classes to keep them relevant.¡± again a pause and a quick sip from one of the glasses between them.


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    ¡°But somehow, Titania managed to get more than what was normal out of her character, which allowed her to compete, hell, it allowed her to dominate. In addition, the simple fact that she was the only one using the Harbinger of Light meant that people weren¡¯t as comfortable when it came to playing against her. Playing against the currently played classes quickly became routine, you knew what they did and what they couldn''t do.¡± he explains, his voice getting more animated.


    ¡°Didn¡¯t the other teams prepare for her?¡± Jill asks, to steer his rambling a bit.


    ¡°Sure, they did. But if you have some eighty seriously competing teams, each with multiple members on the roster and back-up players, you can¡¯t put that much time into preparing against a single player that you might never face. Or, well, you could but it wouldn¡¯t be worth it, especially if you¡¯d need to prepare against a machine that never makes mistakes.¡± another shake of his head, this one with a wry smile on his face.


    ¡°A machine? I think you need to elaborate on that one.¡± Jill grins, gently pulling more information from Leymar.


    ¡°Not literally, no, she¡¯s a flesh and blood human. A bloody tiny one at that, but that doesn¡¯t matter.¡± again, a short pause, ¡°You know how the old ascended classes could create some whacky effects if their spells were combined in just the right way but nobody ever fully figured out the mechanics? That there seemed to be a random component to it, which made it unpredictable?¡± he asks, getting a nod in response.


    ¡°I think she figured out how to do it, not that she¡¯d ever confirm something like that but I went back through the footage a while back and I think I found a pattern. Only that it¡¯s an insanely precise pattern, we are talking input-variances below human reaction-times, with a chain of perfect inputs, scaled to the situation ingame. If I hadn¡¯t seen the pattern myself, I¡¯d have said it¡¯s impossible but it is there.¡± Leymar explains, getting a wide-eyed look from Jill in response.


    ¡°That sounds quite interesting and it had to be a quite peculiar trigger, given that nobody seems to have figured it out for the past five years. But let¡¯s get back to our original topic, the past season It seems that the departure of Titania and the introduction of Acrasia had quite the impact on you. You just said a lot about Titania as a team-mate, what can you tell us about Acrasia?¡± Jill pushes, having a hunch that she might get some major hot-takes if she can keep Leymar talking.


    ¡°You like asking the hard questions, don¡¯t you?¡± Leymar asks in response, before gathering his thoughts for a moment, stapling his fingers together in a nervous gesture.


    ¡°Acrasia is a people-person, charismatic and¡­ energetic, for a lack of a better word. The two of them couldn¡¯t be more different in their personal styles but we had almost a decade to get used to Titania and her idiosyncrasies, so the switch was a bit jarring. I¡¯m sure the team will mesh better in the coming season.¡± Leymar explains, his voice getting a little flat towards the end.


    ¡°You think your next season will be better and give Amarantine-fans the performances they are used to? The team¡¯s record during the latter part of last season was a little disappointing for them.¡± Jill asks, causing Leymar to visibly wince.


    ¡°As I said, there were a few growing pains and we needed to mash together again. But for me, this past season was the last of professional Craft of War-Gaming. I have spoken with Amarantine¡¯s management and they have accepted my resignation. While I know that some people will see connections between my departure and all kinds of things, some will link it to last season¡¯s record, some with Titania¡¯s departure, some even with Road to Purgatory, decrying that Craft of War is doomed and will shut down as soon as RtP releases. None of that is true.¡± Leymar looks up, straight into the camera, before continuing.


    ¡°I am leaving for personal reasons. As much as I love to play professionally, I also want a family and that means I need a job that is more secure than professional gamer. It might be a sad fact but I am just not certain that my career is sustainable.¡± Leymar explains, wiping at his eye for a moment, as if to brush away a tear.


    ¡°I am sure there are many fans that will be saddened by your departure but I¡¯m also sure that the team¡¯s fans can understand that, sometimes in life, you need to make a hard choice. Personally, I wish you all the best and hope that you will find what you are looking for, both in your personal life and professionally.¡± Jill reaches out, taking Leymar¡¯s hand, looking over to the camera. Again, applause is heard.


    ¡°For now, we are going to go to advertisement before we are back to talk with Leymar some more, stay tuned.¡± she says, before the view of the studio is replaced with the GNN-Logo.

 Chapter 291

    Looking at my character-screen made me smile in delight. The last week had been a gruesome grind, but it had been worth it. After being forced to retreat by the first encounter we had with the undead of the swamp, we had healed up and tried again, without much more success. Within five minutes of entering the swamp, another group of shambling crawlers had tried to ambush us, with a similar result. At first, I had been annoyed by their attacks until I reached level sixty-nine after the second attack. The shambling crawlers gave an insane amount of EXP and the quest we had been given disabled the penalty for repeatedly killing the same type of enemy.


    So, for the last week, we had struck into the swamp again and again, never pushing in too far, instead killing undead, first by the dozens but by now, we had accumulated over two-thousand five-hundred kills, by hunting them twelve hours a day, for a week. The shambling crawlers ranged from level fifty at the low-end up to level seventy-eight on the high side, with no telling what else was hiding in the deeper reaches of the swamp, making us cautious and vigilant, even as we killed them again and again. We could have gone deeper, especially in the last few days, but there had always been the question, what was waiting for us there, and was it worth losing our current grind-spot.


    And the effort we had put into our hunting was showing a clear effect, pushing me up to level ninety-seven. It was such an insane boost that I wondered if I should report it as a bug, it seemed just too broken. For months, I had travelled and slowly gained level after level and now, just by hunting undead for a week, sure a brutal and gruesome grind, had brought me more experience than everything I had done before.


    But the extreme gain had also shown me something else, that you couldn¡¯t just grind or your abilities would start to lack behind. During the grind, despite the amount of experience being insane, I had only gained a single level in my Ice Rune Mastery and Ice Magic, with similar small, incremental gains in the other magic skills, each of them getting a point or two.


    The attribute-points I had gained over those levels had been funnelled into Intelligence and Intuition, bringing them to forty-seven and thirty-nine respectively, so once I reached level 100, both would get a nice, even number at fifty and forty. The last point went to Agility, making me just a little harder to kill. I had considered Endurance or Vitality but decided against it, my best chance was to avoid attacks, not tank them.


    Another effect of the grind had been that the special abilities I had gained for forty-five Intelligence and thirty-five Intuition were both centered around it, Intelligence strengthening my ability to freeze non-living creatures and Intuition increasing my detection-capabilities for them.


    However, compared to all my gains, the one who had gained the most was Rai. During the second night, as we had been camping out, he had finally managed to breach the first divide, using his experimentation with his strange shadow-shift-skill to break through. His new class, called Shadow Scout, was pretty much what it said on the tin, allowing him to enhance his abilities when it came to hiding and sneaking even further, while pushing that part of Darkness-magic to another level. I was quite proud of his achievement and was looking forward to the things he¡¯d be able to do in an environment better suited to his talents.


    In addition, I was planning to get a good look at his new abilities, once we had some free time, hopefully I¡¯d be able to emulate parts of it, to improve my own stealth-abilities.


    ¡°We need a break.¡± I decided, looking at the others. For me, the last week had been gruesome and brutal, but for them, it was even worse. I could log-out every night, getting a change in perspective and scenery, take a hot shower and simply relax, knowing that I was safe in my apartment for a bit. For them, it had been killing undead, keeping watch so we weren¡¯t killed by undead, sleep and repeat. I knew that my own exhaustion was slowly building up and at some point, there would be mistakes, even if we had become extremely good at killing the crawlers, simply by virtue of practise.


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    There was a palpable air of relief around Adra while Sigmir and Rai nodded in agreement, relaxing visibly at the idea.


    ¡°Where to go? Back to the dwarves and the cottage or simply away from the swamp?¡± Sigmir asked, focused on the practical issues as always.


    ¡°I don¡¯t think I want to talk to the dwarves. It¡¯s a lot easier if we present them with a fait-accompli instead of reporting the progress. Just looking at the swamp in its current state, I¡¯m not sure if they even want to destroy it, which would cost us the quest.¡± I explained, causing Adra to look up, nodding in agreement.


    ¡°You mean that they might want to keep it to train their people? Maybe even use that wish to turn the quest we did into a failure to keep their silver? Just from the undead we already killed, they owe us quite a bit. If we go by reputation, they would be greatly pleased if they can keep the silver without openly breaking their word.¡± Adra suggested, sounding pensive. Apparently, the greedy dwarf was a trope the developers had transferred into their work, making me wonder just how true it would be. Normally, tropes about whole populations were based on a feeling of animosity and an us-vs-them mentality but how would that hold true in a world like Mundus, however Pantheon had created it? Here, there might be truth to such a trope, simply because the developers had ingrained it deeply into their work.


    ¡°Would they really do that?¡± Rai asked, looking unsure of himself.


    ¡°It¡¯s not impossible.¡± I admitted, thinking back to the short talk I had with the Thane. ¡°I think that, if we fulfill the quest as it has been defined by the system, they will pay up and keep their bargain, especially as they know that they cannot permanently kill me. If they commit treachery, they will be found out, no matter what. So the idea to secretly deal with us and take what is ours is off the table. But if they realise just how much of an exp-mine the swamp is, they might change their mind.¡± I explained, agreeing with Adra on that part.


    ¡°Anyway, why don¡¯t we just head into the other direction, maybe going along one of the small streams so we have water? I can make us a nice cottage and we can relax for a day or two, before pushing into the swamp again.¡± I suggested and the others nodded, taking one last look at the swamp before we cleaned up the debris from our midday rest and headed out, going the opposite direction as the days before.


    Travelling outside the swamp was such a relief, while we were still vigilant, it wasn¡¯t the hypervigilance where every rustling leaf, every little noise hinted at an attack. The lack of mist and the rays of the sun peeking through the forest canopy helped to chase away the gloom of hunting undead. As we walked, Lenore and I were discussing what we had seen over the last week. Part of it was the question how all those undead could exist, there had to be a source for them, another part was the question who was using the magic that suffused the swamp to attack us. I had a strong feeling, the answer would be the key to fulfilling the quest we had received from the Thane. Only, would we be able to beat the source?


    The exp we gained from killing them had been levelling out over the last two days, ever since reaching level ninety the levelling times had become longer and longer. Of course, they were still not nearly comparable to the time we had needed outside, so continuing for a little longer would be useful, as long as we didn¡¯t get complacent.


    In addition, I continued a very cautious experimentation on the effect of placing runes directly on my skin and creating formations from them. I had used the basic-concept for quite some time but now, I was trying to get a feeling how the runes would work if carved permanently into my flesh. I had no desire to have my body ripped apart or, maybe even worse, muck up the process and create a flawed formation that¡¯d permanently cripple my character.


    The centaur I had ¡®gifted¡¯ with the first working formation had been helped by the developers with tattoo-removal, as there was almost nothing he could do about it, without some serious help from the other people, help which would be hard to get. But would the developers help someone who placed the tattoo on themselves, in an attempt to gain power? I wasn¡¯t sure, I had a feeling that they tried to keep their interventions into this world at a minimum, even the help they had given the centaur had been cloaked into Mundus-lore, a local cleric receiving direct, divine help from their deity to cast the required spell, apparently a seriously high-levelled healing spell.


    At the end of the day, it just wasn¡¯t worth the risk. For now, my stop-gap measure of continuously using concealment-magic on myself had worked, so there was no need to use myself as a test-subject for the Blood Magic Tattoos.

 Chapter 292

    ¡°This is a good spot.¡± Adra declared, observing the clearing she had found. Looking around, I had to agree, it was a nice place. A small, bubbling brook, not coming out of the swamp and clean of the strange corruption it was spreading, was flowing nearby, giving us fresh water and a spot to wash up. In addition, the blossoming plants all around filled the area with a fresh smell, as insects were buzzing all around. Idyllic was the first word my mind wanted to use to describe it.


    ¡°Yeah, we can stay here.¡± I declared, mentally measuring the area for a cottage made from ice. It would be easy to fit two cottages on the clearing, an idea that made me smile. If we stayed for a day of rest, I¡¯d certainly want to space to enjoy myself with Sigmir without an audience.


    ¡°Adra, Rai, do you want your own cottage or make your own camp?¡± I asked, knowing that my style of building was a little chilly from them. Sigmir, luckily, had the frost-resistance to feel comfortable even in a building of ice, but with the pleasant weather, Adra and Rai might prefer to sleep outside. The two of them shared a look, before Adra looked over to me and spoke.


    ¡°If it¡¯s not too much of a problem, we¡¯d like a second one, just in case the weather turns.¡± she told me, before asking Rai to help her gather some firewood, for cooking and such. Watching the two of them for a moment, as they walked back into the woods, I had to smile, they were quite adorable. Just as I turned back, I felt Sigmir¡¯s arms encircle me and somehow, the idea that I had to work on the cottages right now retreated into the back of my mind as something else became a lot more important.


    I managed to get to constructing the cottages before Adra and Rai returned, each with a load of mostly dry wood, but I hadn¡¯t gotten far with it. Luckily, Adra didn¡¯t make a joke about it and Rai knew better. While I continued with my work, the two of them started to work out, recently, Rai had started to show Adra some of the unarmed forms I had shown him, partially as an emergency-measure if she was ever caught without her weapon but I was quite sure that another reason was that some of the grapples gave either of them a good excuse to keep hold of the other, without it seeming odd.


    Personally, I was incredibly amused by their shyness, it wasn¡¯t as if either Sigmir nor I would actually say something and both of us knew that they had been sharing a bed, at first for warmth, later for comfort and affection. But despite that, they were shy, both with each other and in front of Sigmir and me. It was just adorable.


    With a smile on my lips, I focused back on my work, considering the best way to make windows and a door. Last time, I had simply made a small part of the wall transparent and called it a window, this time, I wanted to do better. I had, mostly as an intellectual exercise that had nothing to do with killing enemies, considered ways to make hinges out of ice, without them fusing together but so far, I hadn¡¯t come up with a solution purely based on my magic. Even making the parts out of Hard Ice didn¡¯t work, to my chagrin. Maybe, if I would be able to make one or both parts out of Eternal Ice, possibly with a thin layer of diamond dust as a sort of lubricant, but that was purely speculation.


    Instead, I had decided on a simple, partially mundane, solution, even if it irked me that I¡¯d been unable to make it magical. It was so simple that Lenore had laughed that we hadn¡¯t instantly come up with it, when considering hinges the first time, we simply made a wooden dowel, a stick really, and placed it within the lower part, setting the upper part on top of it. In addition, we had placed a thin disc around the dowel, to add another barrier between the two parts made from ice. It wouldn¡¯t last for long but for a week or three it should work.


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    Another problem I hadn¡¯t solved yet were the floors. Sure, making a floor out of Hard Ice was simple but while I had no problem with it, Sigmir wasn¡¯t quite as resistant to the cold, meaning that walking on icy floors seemed to be a little uncomfortable for her. She hadn¡¯t said anything , and I doubted she ever would, but I could see that small trace of discomfort. Sadly, just because I was aware of the problem, I was unable to do a lot about it. The easiest way was to leave the floor as simple earth, which worked for the short time but I wanted more.


    The biggest motivating factor was Sigmir¡¯s discomfort but I would lie if I claimed that my curiosity and the desire to solve a complicated puzzle didn¡¯t play a part. If I was able to create Ice that didn¡¯t radiate cold, it would be another leap forward in my understanding of Ice-Magic, if such a thing was possible. So far, the closest I had ever seen was, once again, Eternal Ice, the mystery substance that had me stumped for weeks. It didn¡¯t radiate cold, it didn¡¯t cool down the air around it, only by direct, physical contact with solid and liquid substances did it cool them down. Normal physics, at least my understanding of them, said that it should be impossible, which meant that normal physics didn¡¯t fully apply or rather that there was something unobserved that I would have to take into account.


    Or Pantheon had simply programmed it that way, without embedding it into the laws governing this world, essentially breaking them in the process. It would be incredibly boring and unsatisfying but I had to keep the possibility in mind.


    Soon, the first cottage was finished, with two small rooms, one for sleeping, the other just because I felt like it, with windows and a door. I was quite proud of my windows, they had outside-shutters from opaque ice and the window itself, opening into the cottage, was made from transparent ice. It was as close to a normal glass-window as I could make it, and looked quite good. Even the door had a small window set into the top part, to let some more light in.


    Pushing myself a little, I added a pavillion, so we would be able to cook and eat together. It was a simple construction, four large, sturdy poles from Hard Ice holding up a sloped roof with a hole for smoke in the middle, right above the fireplace. It was easily large enough to cover a set of tables and chairs that I created, before running out of Astral Power and needing to rest a little. It felt good to push my magical muscles that way, without fearing to get ambushed by a group of shambling crawlers or any kind of combat. It allowed me to relax.


    In the meantime, while I waited, I grabbed Sigmir, who had been hunting with Ylva, and together, we prepared the hind they had brought down. Knowing that we would be here for two days, I decided against smoking the meat we didn¡¯t instantly use, which we normally did, instead, I placed most of it into a large box, made out of ice, knowing that it would easily keep, especially with refrigeration.


    The rest was roasted over the fire, turning it into a wonderful meal, with some of the greens and herbs the others had gathered while they¡¯d been out. Just the smell made my mouth water and somehow managed to summon the others without the need for calling them. It looked quite funny, they all stood around the pavillion, ready to dig in but knowing that it wasn¡¯t just ready yet. But the smell was just too irresistible.


    Taking a step back and looking at what I had set up, I had to laugh at myself. The camp we had set up was half modern, or maybe even futuristic, with the ice looking like some sci-fi plastic material, and half classic fantasy, with the rustic cooking, all of us in leather and partial metal armour, earthen cookware and so on. Part of me wondered just how the algorithms set up by Pantheon would deal with the influx of Travellers into this world. It was a curious question, one that was important for immersion.


    But only time would tell, for now, we all were hungry and I had another cottage to set up, so, once the roast looked good and the veggies were done, I called everyone in and we sat down together, to enjoy a nice, peaceful dinner.

 Chapter 293

    ¡°Could you show me that again?¡± I asked Rai, trying to figure out what I had just seen.


    ¡°Sure.¡± he nodded and, just like he had a moment earlier, cloaked his figure in dark, impenetrable shadow before it split into two, both moving away from the spot he had been in. Even with Lenore¡¯s sight, it was almost impossible to discern which figure was the real one, the coat of darkness-magic hiding what was beneath.


    It was our day off and I had asked Rai to show me the different skills he had gained from crossing the first divide, hoping to get some inspiration from them, things that I might replicate for myself. I had seen the skills in action during the last week but never in a situation where I had been able to actually look, with time to understand what I was seeing. It was fascinating, for him, the new skills were as easy as breathing but when I asked him just how he did what he did, in magical terms, he was unable to explain. I would have to work it out for myself, just like the other class-skills he had gained. But, in contrast to the skills used by Adra and Sigmir, I was reasonably sure that I had a chance to understand what he was doing and possibly work out a way for myself.


    The ¡°Shadow Clone¡±-skill, as he called it, was deceptively simple in form, the concealing shadow made it hard to see him while a second shadow moved on a different trajectory, mostly mirroring his movement, but not quite. He seemed to be subconsciously controlling the second shadow, allowing him to use it as a feint, in addition to it being a distraction and tool to escape.


    I could copy the first part easy enough, it was simply an overpowered shadow-cloak, which pushed the shadow-part to the limit which, coincidentally, made it worse when it came to stealthily concealing someone. It was too focused on hiding what was beneath to allow you to blend into the surrounding shadows.


    But the second part, the figure made from pure shadow, I had no idea where to even begin with it. Maybe I needed to understand another rune, maybe I needed to understand how shadows caused you to misjudge distances and such or how optical illusions worked. Or maybe it was simply a class-skill that I had no way to replicate without additional skills in different types of magic, I just didn''t know.


    However, the ¡°Shadow Clone¡± wasn¡¯t the skill I was most interested in, no, that was reserved for the ¡°Shadow Step¡± skill, something I knew I could do, simply because I had done it once, without understanding what I had done. Back when we had raided Sigmir¡¯s old Clan, I had somehow turned myself into shadow to squeeze beneath a door, something I thought now was an application of the Shadow-Realm Rai used so often and later, I had somehow managed to move from one shadow, in the Shaman¡¯s hut, to another Shadow, Sigmir¡¯s, some distance away. To this day and despite numerous attempts to replicate or understand what I had done, it still eluded me.


    But Rai was able to do it, thanks to his new class. I had to console myself that I was able to make my own skills and that I certainly would be able to come up with skills that left his tricks in the dust.


    ¡°Thanks for showing me that. Now, let¡¯s see how well you are coming along in the forms I have taught you.¡± I ordered, mentally switching gears from the things I was trying to learn to the forms Mrs. Wu had taught me. Maybe Rai would be able to do the most complicated ones now, his new class and the additional levels should have massively pushed his agility.


    An hour later, I was exhausted and sore, wondering if I would be able to boost my regeneration with Blood Magic. Nearby, Rai looked as if he was in serious pain, even with his higher agility, the forms had pushed him in ways he wasn¡¯t accustomed to. However, I was able to see that his higher attributes would soon wipe out any advantage I had gained with hard work, making me grumble a little. The only reason I could still call myself his teacher was that he stuck to using the style I had shown him, even if he was slowly developing his own take on it. And that was a good thing.


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    During the evening, I found myself sitting in the trees, watching the world below with Lenore. Part of me wondered if I was being influenced by my Spirit-companion, with her affinity for heights and precarious perches, I had found myself drawn to rest in places where I could watch the world from above. It gave me a strange sense of peace, letting it float by beneath me. On the other hand, maybe I had that affinity from the start, my own appartement was on the top-floor of the high-rise building and the home-space I had created in my capsule wasn¡¯t made for someone afraid of heights. Whatever it was, the view from the top of the tree Lenore had found was spectacular, a sea of green with the mountains in the distance, set aflame by the rays of the setting sun.


    Earlier, when the light would have hit me, I wouldn¡¯t have liked it as much but with the twilight, a strange sense of serenity came over me.


    ¡°I wish I¡¯d be able to take to the skies with you.¡± I admitted, gently resting my head against Lenore, who was sitting on my shoulder.


    ¡°I wish I could take you with me. I feel your joy whenever I share a memory with you but at the same time, I know that it¡¯s just a pale reflection. It is my memory, dulled and jaded by a life-time of flying and I would love to let you experience it with your own body.¡± Lenore admitted, her voice filled with friendship.


    ¡°Maybe we¡¯ll find a way, at least for a time. Who knows what is possible with magic.¡± I smiled, before looking up into the slowly darkening sky. There was no moon tonight, but I could feel it overhead nonetheless.


    After taking a moment to make sure I wasn¡¯t in danger of falling off my perch, I closed my eyes and let my mind join with the Astral River, revelling in the feeling of it. I hadn¡¯t been here since visiting the Grandmother, at least not truly delving into it and the River never failed to awe me. There was a sense of connection, one that I couldn¡¯t even begin to describe. The Grandmother had told me that the Astral River connected the whole world and slowly, I was able to understand just how literal she had been. With Lenore so close to me, I could feel her, even in the Astral River but I had a feeling that there was more to it, if I only had the senses to see it.


    Before I could lose myself in the elation, I tuned into one of the streams, the one that was slowly swelling as the light of the sun left the world and the darkness of the night took over. I hadn¡¯t used a lot of Darkness-Runes during the week of grinding, but what little I had used had been enough to push me to gain another point, bringing me to seventy. With thoughts of Rai¡¯s new abilities in my mind, I was trying to use my connection to understand them, at least a little more.


    The darkness around me was soothing, like a comfortable cloak but at the same time, I felt the light, the burning light of the sun slowly retreating. A part of me shrunk back from its searing heat, my mind knowing that nothing good would come of the contact but another part of me knowing that, without light, there would be no shadow. Only the deep tunnels, the lightless depths of the earth, there could I find the true, perfect darkness. But those were thoughts for the future.


    As I witnessed the light slowly fading from the Astral River, I felt a sense of understanding settle around me, a new knowledge about the border between Light and Dark. It wouldn¡¯t allow me what Rai was doing, of that I was certain but I had a feeling that it was a step into the right direction. Twilight, or Penumbra, those were the best words to describe the name of the rune, even if it was so much more.


    My eyes popped back open and the light had fully faded, leaving me sitting in the blackest night, with only the stars shedding some sparse light.


    ¡°Let¡¯s get back to the others.¡± I softly told Lenore, after taking another look around.


    ¡°Yes. Let me join you for a moment.¡± she replied and I felt her slip into her Hallow. In my mind, I felt her ask me to join her in full, initiating the cooperative process that was our Avatar-State. For a moment, I didn¡¯t understand until the illusionary wings caught a little wind, reminding me that they weren¡¯t just illusions, they were more.


    With a smile, I let myself drop from our high perch, using the wings to glide back to the ground. It wasn¡¯t real flight, but it had to be the next best thing.

 Chapter 294

    Once more, into the mud.


    That was my first thought, looking upon the misty swamp in front of us, unchanged from the state we had left it, just two days earlier. We, on the other hand, were rested and in high spirits, planning to finally push deeper, not just roam the outskirts, hunting undead and killing them for experience. It had allowed us a massive boost in power and level but the amount we gained now, with some fifteen level on the strongest undead, was just not worth the time-investment.


    ¡°Let¡¯s see what is going on in the deeper reaches.¡± Adra muttered, taking her position in the back of our formation. In the meantime, Sigmir took the lead-position, with Rai and Ylva flanking her. Lenore and I were, as always, responsible for magical traps and attacks, keeping an eye out for anything that might harm us. Looking closely, I was reasonably certain that there had been a small change in the overall composition of the swamp, a tiny bit more death-magic in the soil, compared to water and earth, but a balance was kept.


    The undead attacked us again, soon after we entered the misty swamp, their attack quite predictable and by now, we easily and quickly dispatched them. We had killed so many of the undead, I had had dreams of them and my ability to freeze their bodies in just the right way to stop them from moving and allow the others to destroy them was something I had cultivated to the point that I literally could do it in my sleep. As always, they had magic-support but merely weak attempts to restrain us, which we could either dodge or I could block with a sheet of ice. As long as we didn¡¯t get complacent, there was no threat involved.


    For once, we didn¡¯t move parallel to the edge of the swamp after the first attack but we held course, moving deeper into the mist. It was an eerie feeling, despite knowing that the sun should be high in the sky, the swamp was dim, a perpetual twilight hanging over it. I preferred the darkness but the strange, misty twilight gave me the creeps. Even the noises seemed to be muted, no birds or other animal-sounds, just the sounds of water and occasionally wind in the trees.


    ¡°There¡¯s a light over there.¡± Sigmir said, causing us all to ratchet up the vigilance, unsure what a light might mean. I looked over and frowned, at first glance, it looked like a strange lantern but somehow, I knew better. First of all, I could vaguely see the magic radiating from it, a strange mix of fire and death but even more than that, the fire was vaguely green, a pale, unhealthy colour that made me think of death and high-school.


    Knowing that whatever it was needed to be investigated, we switched our target, carefully moving towards the light. It was a trap, as much as it could be a trap, with us assuming that it was a trap, negating the surprise-aspect of it being a trap. Maybe calling it a lure would be better. Whatever caused the light seemed to be near one of the small lakes in the swamp, a stagnant pool of foul liquid, smelling of death and decay. It was the sort of water that one wouldn¡¯t drink, no matter how thirsty.


    As soon as we were close enough to get a good look, the trap sprung, just as we had anticipated. The flame itself turned out to be just that, a floating orb of green flame, a Will-o-Wisp as Observe called it, surprisingly high level at level 85, but nothing we couldn¡¯t deal with. The other half of the so-called trap were a couple of undead, jumping out of the brackish water and trying to get a grip on those nearby, to drag them into a watery grave. It was a tactic we had seen before, only now they had additional magical support, namely the wisp.


    While the others made sure that the shambling crawlers were dealt with, I kept the wisp at bay, gathering information on its abilities. It seemed to be a dedicated spell-caster, throwing orbs of the same green fire that it was made of towards us, which I reflexively blocked with panes of ice, letting the fire splash against them and fizzle out. It worked, but not quite in the way I had anticipated, instead of turning the Ice into watery steam, the green fire seemed to burn the ice away, or maybe corrode it, without leaving anything I could detect behind.


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    Out of curiosity, I used my vines, and a large amount of Astral Power, to toss one of the undead into one of flaming orbs, with a rather annoying result. The fire seemed to be absorbed by the undead and to me, it looked like some of the damage the undead had suffered earlier was restored.


    Following that line of thought, and after ripping the test-undead apart, I broke off a thick branch from a nearby tree, using it as a bat to smack the next orb of green fire, trying to hit a homerun. My batting needed a lot of work, especially when using the vines to control the bat, but it was good enough to bunt the orb of fire. It acted as I had anticipated, quickly consuming the branch, gaining in strength but losing momentum, before dropping into the water below. Getting hit would be painful, but if we were careful there shouldn¡¯t be a problem.


    ¡°Can you immobilise the wisp?¡± Lenore asked and I could hear a strange hunger in her voice.


    I considered her question for a moment, before replying. ¡°I can certainly try.¡±


    With that, I used the water below the wisp to create a large chunk of ice, before dividing the newly created ice up into shards, forming them into a stationary cage around the wisp. It seemed to hold for a moment, before it flared up, consuming the ice around it and dimming in the process.


    ¡°Ok, that doesn¡¯t work.¡± I muttered, more to myself than anything else, before deciding on a different course of action. There was enough darkness around for me to work with and from a few of the thin shadows nearby, dark tendrils, made from translucent shadow, conjured with a mix of the Shadow- and Twilight-runes, stretched out, wrapping around the wisp. It flared again and I felt some Astral Power drain from me but the tendrils were still there, keeping the wisp immobile, right where I wanted it to be.


    ¡°That should hold it for a while, what do you have in mind?¡± I asked Lenore, curious about her plans.


    ¡°Simple, it looks tasty.¡± she answered, the earlier hunger now even stronger. I felt her leave her Hallow and land on my shoulder, before she beat her wings and took flight. For a bird of her size, holding position in the air should have involved rapid wing-beating but somehow, she was able to do it without that. She simply floated in front of the wrapped-up wisp, a strange, localised eddy holding her up, allowing her to open her beak and slowly consume the wisp. I could feel its frantic tugging on the tendrils I had used to bind it and saw it flare twice more, but to no effect. It got smaller and smaller while the colour changed, traces of flickering yellow and orange sparking away.


    Soon, a piercing screech, like chalk being dragged over a blackboard, ripped through the swamp causing the following silence to feel even more oppressive and foreboding. The wisp was gone, leaving behind nothing but fiery sparks that were quickly dying down, like a sad, small firework. Lenore, radiating a feeling of smugness came back to me, landing on my shoulder and sharing her vision with me. The dying sparks were pure Fire-Astral-Power, no longer coherent enough to stick together and certainly not dangerous.


    ¡°That was tasty. I¡¯m afraid we¡¯ll have to kill as many of those wisps as we can.¡± Lenore said, while a feeling of desire was swept along with her words. If she was able to consume enough of the wisps, she would be able to breach the second divide as soon as she reached the required level, which seemed to be one-hundred.


    Looking into my notifications, I decided to indulge Lenore as much as possible, the wisp had given me a nice chunk of EXP, even while being a few level lower than me. Ten, maybe twelve more of those groups, and I¡¯d get another level. The swamp was dreary and annoying but somehow, it also allowed us to gain an insane amount of strength.


    ¡°Any scratches on one of you?¡± I asked, looking at the others.


    ¡°No, we managed just fine. What about you, that thing looked different.¡± Adra asked, nodding towards the spot where the wisp had died.


    ¡°No problems. Hopefully, we¡¯ll be able to find a few more of those wisps, they are good exp.¡± I answered, before letting Sigmir take the lead again.

 Chapter 295

    With the introduction of Will-o-Wisps, we had decided to make sure we could easily handle them before pushing deeper towards the center. Partially because we gained a lot of EXP, partially because Lenore munched on them as if they were tasty afternoon snacks, partially because each Will-o-Wisp was counted as four Shambling Crawlers by the System and partially because we wanted to make sure that there were no surprises hidden, if whatever was deeper forced us to retreat. Over the course of a day and a half, we roamed the swamp, roughly as deep as the first Will-o-Wisp had appeared, destroying Shambling Crawlers while letting Lenore do her thing with the wisps, while I held them down.


    Their abundance was a lot lower than the amount of shambling crawlers we had hunted in the outer layer, we only killed some forty of them over the course of two days, bringing my level up by two, but it was still good experience.


    We were on our last push for the day when we heard something strange, causing everyone to freeze, trying to make out what it was.


    ¡°It sounds like someone screaming for help?¡± Rai said, sounding as confused as I felt.


    ¡°It¡¯s got to be a trap.¡± Adra said, but she looked insecure and part of me felt strange, as if something was tugging at me, to safe whoever was screaming there.


    ¡°Let¡¯s go, but careful.¡± Sigmir said, turning towards the direction the sound was coming from. I followed, still feeling strange but knowing that I needed to stay with the group.


    ¡°Lenore, what¡¯s going on?¡± I asked, pushing back the strange compulsion I felt to investigate.


    I felt her sight blink on and there was a gossamer thin net around the others, thin traces of magic focused on their head, especially their ears. Before I could manage to gather my will and magic to do something, anything, about it, Sigmir broke through some brush, ending up on the shore of a large pond. I followed behind and another scream came from the pond, causing my focus to break and Lenore¡¯s sight to fade.


    The pond looked larger and deeper than anything we had seen in the swamp and, for some inexplicable reason, there was a person sitting on a giant water-lily, a young girl, wearing a white dress and looking towards us, her face filled with hope, even as she continued to cry. Just looking towards her made it hard to think about anything but helping her and her cries made my heart weep.


    ¡°We have to help her!¡± Sigmir said, her voice urgent, while Rai and Adra were already walking towards the shore, as if planning to dive into the water, hoping to rescue the being.


    Lenore¡¯s sight blinked on again and my vision changed, gone was the placid pond of water, replaced with a fetid pool, filled with magic. Even the air was thick with weaves, like a spider-web, centered around the thing on the lily. Looking at it now filled me with revulsion instead of a desire to help, where before, a young girl had sat was now a strange, pale creature with long, white limbs and a bloated body. Gone was the pristine, white dress, replaced with streamers of algae running down her body, not concealing nearly enough of it.


    ¡°No!¡± I managed to grind out, despite the pressure around my head intensifying and with the words, some of it broke, giving me room to mentally breathe. It was room I desperately needed, if I wanted to help the others. Sigmir seemed to stop for a moment, looking back at me, but Adra and Rai continued forward without concern. My first impulse was to reach out with the Eisblumen, simply wrapping around them to stall, only to watch as Rai vanished, leaving a shadow behind, only to reappear at the shore. .


    I felt my eyes alight as a cold anger gripped me, Rai was my disciple, these were my people. Whatever it was, it was messing with their minds and that, I just couldn¡¯t condone. They were MINE!


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    Channelling my anger into magic, I instantly projected a set of five runes, a combination of Devour, Twilight and Magic, trying to use my skill in Darkness-Magic to redirect it into the strands I could see. It had to be Mind-Magic, of that I was convinced but sadly, I lacked the ability to meet whatever it was on its turf, which limited my reaction a little.


    The Darkness gushed out of the formation and I felt it join with the dim light all around us, above me, I could feel the moon, nothing but the faintest glimmer in the sky, lending me strength. The thin threads snapped, devoured by my magic, even as I tried to direct any backlash caused by the sudden destruction of the magic affecting everyone''s mind towards the creature on the lily.


    ¡°Too bad, it would have been so much less painful if you had just accepted it. You would just have wandered into the water and joined me, forever.¡± the figure on the lily said, her voice changing from a friendly, childish tone in the beginning to a dark, malevolent cackle by the end. I saw Rai and Adra shake their heads, as if trying to clear cobwebs from their mind, while stumbling back from the water.


    I managed to focus on her, using Observe in the process.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>


    Bolotnitsa, Level 110


    </td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    Unless I was very, very wrong about things, we were facing a boss, maybe the boss of this outdoor dungeon.


    ¡°Watch out, everyone!¡± I called out, starting to draw a magical formation to chuck a few Icicle Javelins at her. She had to have some form of attack, other than her Mind Magic and I wasn¡¯t quite sure if I wanted to experience what it was. The Mind Magic alone had been bad enough, the compulsion to follow her voice and help her nearly overwhelming. I had a feeling that it wouldn¡¯t work as well if she tried it again, but I couldn¡¯t be sure.


    She was crowing something that I ignored, as I let my Icicles fly, causing her to screech in anger, interrupting whatever she had been saying. A wave of brackish water surged up, powerful enough to stop my Icicles but when I detonated them, a few shards got through, giving her some shallow cuts.


    ¡°Crawlers incoming!¡± Sigmir warned, stepping between me and the water, with Rai at her side, as a few Shambling Crawlers came out of the water, larger and even more grotesk looking than the ones we had fought before. I considered what I knew about boss-fights in games, hoping not to make an ass out of myself by assuming too much.


    Generally, adds were either used as waves on a timer that needed to be destroyed before they overwhelmed your party, they simply respawned and needed to be handled while the boss was killed or they were spawned depending on the boss¡¯s health. Those were the most common ways of dealing with such a fight and I could see this one being any of those ways. Looking at the Crawlers, I was reasonably certain that Sigmir and Rai could at least stall them, allowing Adra and me to focus on the boss. If it looked like the crawlers would overwhelm Sigmir and Rai, I was reasonably certain that I would be able to destroy a larger group, especially if I combined overflow with a small shard of Eternal Ice.


    I relayed our tactic to the others, watching Adra turn her spear into a bow and launch an arrow at the freaky creature on the lily. Watching as another wall of water shot up to block it, I decided to instantly project a beam of cold, hoping to get a serious blow in, by shattering the frozen wave.


    My idea sort-of worked, the arrow was stopped and some of the ice was frozen but I felt it resist my power, trying to remain liquid. What little ice I had been able to create was shattered and lacerated more of her, but it was far from good enough to actually kill her.


    Meanwhile Sigmir and Rai had managed to dispatch three of the four shambling crawlers that had attacked, taking only minor scratches in the process. This first round of combat seemed to have been mostly a draw, at least that was what I thought until I noticed a disturbance in the lake and a dense jet of water lanced out, forcing me to leap aside. I still took a glancing blow, not penetrating my armour but causing me to painfully tumble through the air. I wasn¡¯t sure if it had broken my ribs but there certainly would be a bruise on the next day.


    For a moment, I was down, just trying to get fresh air into my lungs only to feel a sensation similar to the one I had felt earlier, when that thing had tried its mind magic on us. Forcing myself to my knees, despite the pain in my side, I saw that Sigmir had grabbed Rai¡¯s shoulder, holding him back from running towards the water. Without time, I used a brute-force method, similar to the one I had used earlier, glad that the levels I had made over the last days gave me a much larger pool of Astral Power than I had before. Instantly projecting runes took a lot of power, but at times, it seemed to be the only way to go.

 Chapter 296

    For a moment, there was a lull in the fighting, Adra was just preparing her next shot, but waiting for me to add my own attack, in an attempt to overcome the water-barrier. For a moment, I considered splitting the group, sending two people around the lake so Adra and I could coordinate our attacks to come from two directions at once. But it would mean that Rai would have to face the shambling crawlers on his own, even with his new strength, his fighting-style was not suited for that. Still, it might be a necessary tactic.


    Before the next wave of shambling crawlers got out of the water, Adra and I tried to get another attack against the bolotnisa in.


    ¡°Let your attack fly, right after my javelin hits.¡± I quickly told her, getting a nod in return. I took the time to properly cast the spell, saving Astral Power by drawing all runes as fast as I could, but also adding two additional Liquid Moonlight runes, while using my Ice-Magic to coat the Javelin with it.. Hopefully, it would freeze the water used to defend, letting me use it as a weapon in itself while giving Adra an opening to get a clean strike in.


    My Javelin, trailing glittering dust was met with another wave, just as I had expected. The Liquid Moonlight instantly mixed with the water, turning a block of it into Ice, which I shattered, using Ice-Magic to propel the attack forward. I felt my lips curl in a smile, only to let a curse slip out when Adra¡¯s arrow, shot right on time to exploit the opening, was met with another wave.


    ¡°That didn¡¯t work as planned.¡± I muttered, lashing out with my icy vines, giving Rai an opening to strike at one of the crawlers, while trying to come up with a good way to get the bolotnisa in the middle of her pond. Remembering the last wave of attacks, I conjured up a sheet of ice, as smooth as I could make it and rounded, hopefully allowing me to block a water-jet like she had used earlier.


    She wasn¡¯t as predictable, instead of the jet, a wave of water swept towards us, breaking on the shore, forcing us all to leap back. Sadly, its effect was similar to the effect of the wisp¡¯s green fire, it healed the shambling crawlers, luckily only those still moving, otherwise the encounter would be even worse. I kept Lenore¡¯s eye open for another Mind Magic-Attack, but there was none. Again, Adra and I tried to get an attack past the water-waves defending her and again, we were blocked.


    ¡°They came faster this time!¡± Sigmir called out, just as she cleaved the last shambling crawler apart, making me focus on the ones coming fresh out of the water. I considered to call a retreat for a moment, putting the fight off for later.


    ¡°Let¡¯s try something else. Rai, with me, we go around the lake. Adra, help Sigmir, once the crawlers are dead, get ready to attack. Lenore, stay here and lend me your eyes, so I can attack at the same time.¡± I ordered. Lenore left her comfortable Hallow and I felt the stream of Astral Power she infused into me vanish. As she landed on a branch next to Adra, I started to move, with Rai hot on my heels.


    ¡±Abandoning your friends? Oh, they will have so much fun with me!¡± the bolotnisa taunted, cackling as we moved. This time, two orbs of water were launched at Rai and me, forcing us to tuck and roll. I felt myself gasp in pain, the earlier wound still painful, but managed to make the move and keep running. Checking what the orbs did, I made a note that getting hit by one of those would be seriously bad, the vegetation seemed to die, just from getting wet.


    ¡°We are almost ready.¡± Lenore said, using her connection to me for coordination.


    ¡°Good. We¡¯ll get ready now.¡± I messaged back, while telling Rai to stop and get ready.


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    This time, I decided to pull no punches and activated Overflow, letting as much Astral Power surge into a nine-rune formation, not a Javelin this time but a stream of Liquid Moonlight combined with a mix of Dark Magic, using Twilight to carry a curse of magic devouring. I had no idea if it would truly work, but my plan was to retreat afterwards anyway, so getting as much information as I could was the name of the game.


    Lenore let me see through her eyes and I watched Adra draw her bow, an arrow glowing with magic nocked, just as I finished the last rune. Thanks to the visual, I was able to activate the formation at the perfect time and from two sides of the lake, magic arced out, trying to annihilate the bolotnisa. Adra¡¯s attack, supercharged as it was, managed to get through the water-wave, albeit massively weakened, striking the monster just as my magic tore into her. A shrill scream echoed over the lake but I could see that, while the bolotnisa was bloodied, she was not dead yet.


    ¡°Let¡¯s run.¡± I told Rai, just as I gripped the Shambling Crawlers with my Eisblumen, chucking them into the lake with another surge of Astral Power.


    At the same time, Lenore used my voice to tell the others to run and simultaneously, as the bolotnisa was screaming behind us and causing a massive wave of foul water to burst from her lake, we turned tail and ran away. Thanks to Lenore, who stayed with Sigmir and Adra, Rai and I could simply move in a straight line, without needing to keep track of the others. We only had to make sure that we didn¡¯t stumble in one of the many holes and furrows. As soon as we were maybe a hundred meters away from the pond, we joined up with Sigmir and Adra again and kept running. Lenore, no longer needing to guide us, landed on my shoulder so I could use her sight without losing balance due to the shifting view-point. In addition, the extra Astral Power regeneration was something I needed, the fight had taken a surprising amount of power out of me, especially the last spell.


    While we were out of the immediate range of the bolotnisa¡¯s water-based attacks, I had no idea just how far the mind magic could reach or, maybe even worse, if she had some way to use the waters of the swamp to track and hunt us. With that in mind, we simply turned towards the edge of the swamp and kept running, ready to evade any shambling crawlers that might try to slow us down. I felt an attempt to call us back, using Mind Magic, but distance and our firm intent helped a great deal. For me, the throbbing pain in my side might have helped focus my mind, but I wasn¡¯t sure about that. I knew I had to push it away, at least until we got out of the swamp.


    I made a mental note, planning to go through the whole encounter, to make plans for later. Maybe I¡¯d even release parts of it as a stream, simply to drum up some more excitement, it seemed like the right thing to do. Boss-battles and dungeons were, for some rather obvious reason, something few people released and shared, for now, they seemed to prefer hoarding the prime-information on them for their own use, maybe even to get a headstart in the official release.


    A few shambling crawlers tried to stop us on our flight, but we were having none of that. I had regenerated enough Astral Power to use my Eisblumen some more, using their interesting property of gaining strength with more applied Astral Power to simply toss our foes away. It was incredibly useful but the amount of power needed was just as incredible. Part of me was curious if there would be a limit to their power, so far, it didn¡¯t look like it, the more power I used and the higher my Ice-Magic got, the stronger they became. I was still unable to replicate them, using just my magic, but it was an interesting idea I experimented with from time to time. So many things I wanted to learn, so many experiments to try and so little time.


    Finally, we managed to step out of the misty swamp, without running into any serious problems, just a few more crawlers and the usual magic attacks, only slowing down once we were a hundred meters away from the mists.


    ¡°Why did we have to run away?¡± Rai asked once we were safe, sounding a little disappointed.


    I tried to answer, but I felt the adrenaline fade from my system and as it went, the pain from my ribs returned with a vengeance, doubling me over. I felt Sigmir''s gentle arms steady me, even as I heard Adra answer that we might have won the battle but it wouldn¡¯t have been a sure thing. In the meantime, I started to draw blood-runes, focusing on healing myself, ignoring everything around me. Sigmir was with me and would keep me safe, that much I knew.

 Chapter 297

    My magic managed to deal with my injured ribs well enough. I would be tender for a while, Blood Magic was very limited when it came to mending bones, but it would have to do. Not for the first time, I wondered if there would be some way to find a real healer, most likely some sort of divine-spellcaster, to join our group. They seemed to have a monopoly on the general purpose healing-magic, able to cure anything, if they had enough power and followed the right god. At the same time, I knew that I wouldn¡¯t just let anyone join us, there¡¯d have to be a feeling of compatibility. For now, that was all just a vague idea anyway, without even a potential candidate, there was no need to dwell on things.


    After retreating from the bolotnisa, we had made our way to the small clearing we had used for the first week of killing undead in the swamp and set up camp for the night. As most evenings, I was the one cooking, giving me ample time to think about the fight while the venison-stew was simmering.


    The fight itself, at least what we had seen from it, seemed to be reasonably simple. Shambling Crawlers came out of the water in waves, each wave a little faster than the one before, forcing people to deal with them. That could either be done by destroying them or, maybe, by getting their attention and simply running away. The crawlers were quite slow, so simply keeping a distance might work but it would allow them to accumulate.


    In the meantime, the real enemy was the bolotnisa, sitting on her stupid lily in the middle of a lake that served both as defense and offense for her. I couldn¡¯t see a way for melee-fighters like Sigmir and Rai to get at her, maybe if I created platforms with my Ice-Magic, but that seemed to be a risky proposition. No, melees were at a massive disadvantage in that particular fight. That essentially left Adra and me to destroy the boss, something we could do, but the water-waves seemed to be an excellent defense against low-powered attacks. If we wanted to get through, we¡¯d have to concentrate fire and overwhelm it. Or we could try to split, but at the end of the day, Adra¡¯s last arrow had punched through the water-defense, making me think that the water-wall simply reduced the damage by a set amount, not a percentage of the attack itself.


    For offense, the bolotnisa¡¯s most powerful weapon seemed to be her mind-magic, especially the initial spell that had started the encounter. I wasn¡¯t sure if we¡¯d fare better now that we knew about the danger, I certainly hoped so, but I had a feeling that unprepared groups would suffer severely from it. Otherwise, the lake¡¯s water seemed to be filled with deadly energy, turning it into a weapon all of itself, either as a water-jet, more a physical attack than using the properties of the water, as a wave, using purely the deadly properties of the water to damage and heal the crawlers or, finally, as orbs, combining both, but to a lesser degree.


    And finally, to round the fun out, there was the massive water-wave that had triggered after our last attack, either due to the amount of damage we dealt at once or it was something triggering depending on the total damage we had dealt, either mechanic had been used in the past. Or it was something else, which was always possible. But for now, I¡¯d go with my assumptions and base my tactics on what we had seen.


    I kept mostly quiet as we ate, still thinking about ways to deal with the bolotnisa until Adra spoke up.


    ¡°So, did seeing that thing complete our quest? Is she the source of trouble in the swamp?¡± she asked, making me stop for a moment, a little flabbergasted. I had pushed the fact that our quest was to investigate into the background, focusing on the simple task of killing the boss. But did we have to?


    A quick glance into the quest-log told us that, maybe, we did. The quest wasn¡¯t completed just yet and, if I was honest with myself, I wanted to get the bonus-objective anyway. Not just for the reward but also for the experience-points we were getting. Sure, the crawlers were giving next to nothing but the wisps were still there, giving decent experience to say nothing of the experience I hoped we¡¯d get from the bolotnisa and similar enemies. The swamp was a big enough advantage that I was questioning the wisdom of the balance-team. There had to be similar environments out there and, if the world¡¯s logic held, powerful groups would try to keep them controlled and contained, not destroy them. Sure, destroying the source would give us a lot of experience and maybe additional benefits but if a regional power had access to such a treasure-trove of experience, they would want to keep it going as long as possible.


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    That thought made me wonder whether the shambling crawlers were actually respawning, giving us a virtually limitless amount of them, or if some unknown force was guiding them towards us, maybe the same force that used magic to attack during their ambushes, and we were simply slowly depleting the massive swamp. Even with the time we had spent in it, Lenore had flown up and reported that the mist seemed to cover a huge area, maybe twenty kilometers wide and of similar length. There could easily be tens of thousands of those crawlers hiding in the muck and we¡¯d never know. Even the Bolotnisa was just a few kilometers in, not nearly in the center of it.


    ¡°No, the quest is still open.¡± I finally answered, looking over to Adra. ¡°But even without it, I think I¡¯d want to go back in there anyway. Just think about it, even you might gain a lot of power from the swamp. Didn¡¯t you use quite a bit Death Astral-Power to cross the first Divide? If we destroy whatever is controlling the power in the swamp, that¡¯s a lot of free power floating around.¡± I continued, causing her to frown a little.


    ¡°I¡¯m not sure if it would be healthy for me to absorb that. What I did with the tree of Tegi worked because she stored an insane amount of Life Energy in her tree, allowing me to balance the other energies. Here, I don¡¯t have anything similar, at least I don¡¯t think I do.¡± she explained, while Lenore spoke up, using our mental connection.


    ¡°I can absorb the power and would be grateful if we can go back there.¡± she admitted, a powerful hunger in her voice.


    ¡°Still, we gained a lot of power in there.¡± I prodded, wanting the others to agree with the idea to go back in.


    ¡°We did. Okay, what do you have in mind?¡± Sigmir asked, giving me a grin.


    ¡°I think we can defeat the bolotnisa. The real problem is that we need to get past that water-wall. You managed to pierce it, with your last arrow. How often can you use one of those?¡± I asked Adra.


    ¡°Not too often, it takes a bit of time and quite a bit of power. I might be able to shoot five, maybe six, if I fire them as quick as possible.¡± she answered, causing me to nod in understanding.


    ¡°I don¡¯t think we should try it like that. But we have one massive advantage I forgot about. Lenore, if I mostly channel Dark Magic through you, do you think you could fly above, allowing me to circumvent the water walls?¡± I asked, speaking out loud so that the others could follow the idea. Lenore left her Hallow, moving onto my shoulder, before answering, once again using my voice.


    ¡°It might work but if I¡¯m the only one going for it, I¡¯ll be attacked. I don¡¯t fancy to be the sole target of that thing¡¯s ire.¡± she admitted.


    ¡°I see two options. Either we try it with you flying above or we split, while you have to stay with Adra and Sigmir, Lenore. I need you to be with them so I can channel magic through you if that thing gets them with its Mind Magic. Sadly, I don¡¯t know if I can ward you against it, so I need to be able to help, if you get caught.¡± I explained, the others nodding in response.


    ¡°That way, we can split, just like we did for that last attack.¡± I finished.


    ¡°There¡¯s another way. I think I can use my new skills to teleport onto that lily-pad and once there, I don¡¯t think that thing can do a lot to me.¡± Rai suggested, sounding quite eager to use his new class skills. Sadly, I had to reject his idea.


    ¡°It might work, yes. But you forget one thing, it would be a last ditch, desperate effort. If you fail, or if that thing has some way to deal with attackers close up, you are dead. Unless we are with the back to the wall, that¡¯s not a valid tactic.¡± I explained, finally shaking my head. He looked a little crestfallen but Adra reached out, hugging his shoulder and pulling him close.


    Hopefully, he wouldn¡¯t try something dumb, just to prove his manliness.

 Chapter 298

    We waited a little longer in the morning, letting the sun fully rise, even if part of me wondered whether fighting at night would be better. Even days after the new moon, I still gained a nice boost to my powers during night-times, something that might be useful. Sadly, it just wasn¡¯t feasible, even with my low-light vision and affinity for Darkness-magic, I was hindered, to say nothing of Adra, Rai and Sigmir. On the other hand, we had no idea if the bolotnisa would be weakened or hindered in any way. Thus, we went in during the morning.


    Again, Sigmir led the way, only for once, we weren¡¯t trying to find enemies. We would dispatch any we came across, hopefully giving us a clear path of escape, if we needed it, but we weren¡¯t hunting for experience-points, not with the small amount we now gained from shambling crawlers. Will-o-wisps would still be relatively feasible, but even with them it would take us days for each level. I still considered to try grinding at least one more level but the problem was, we weren¡¯t sure how mobile the bolotnisa was. Making people stumble into her unprepared seemed to be her preferred style of battle. No, our plan was to deal with the bolotnisa, hopefully with as many resources available as possible.


    In addition, I saw it as a point of personal pride to beat the encounter without specifically grinding for it. If things went wrong, we could still retreat, as our first attempt had shown.


    It didn¡¯t take long for us to hear the panicked cries for help again, only this time, we were prepared. The others still looked pained and tempted, as if they wanted to dash in to help and only their knowledge was stopping them and even I felt a mounting pressure in my head, pushing me to move. Together with Lenore, I focused on my magic to dispel the attack, letting a dark glow wash over us, devouring the Mind Magic and return us to normal. A short glimpse to my health-bar showed that I had taken a bit of damage, possibly a result of forcibly resisting the magic,


    ¡°Showtime¡­¡± I whispered to the others, and we started towards the source of the attack, just as it had wanted us to. Only now, we did it with a clear mind and violent thoughts.


    ¡°How nice of you, to come back. I love company. Maybe this time, you will stay. Forever.¡± the bolotnisa greeted us, as soon as we were on the shores of her lake. This time, she didn¡¯t bother with the illusion hiding her, or maybe it only worked if you didn¡¯t know about it, either could be true.


    ¡°Let¡¯s split.¡± I ordered and started moving together with Rai while Lenore landed on Adra¡¯s shoulder. As we moved, the bolotnisa threw water-orbs at us, one on either group, but knowing about them gave us enough room to get out of the way, letting them splash against the vegetation behind us. When the crawlers started to come out of the water, we stopped, letting Rai and Sigmri get to fighting them. In addition, we had enough distance between both groups to allow us to attack without a single water-wave being able to stop both attacks.


    Using Lenore to coordinate was incredibly useful, allowing me to effectively channel a lot of Astral Power into a single runic formation, without wasting any of it to instantly manifest any runes to make the timing.


    Just as we had planned, Adra¡¯s arrow, clad in an incandescent cyan-glow, piercing through the still air and my own attack, a beam of twisted energy, Liquid Moonlight and Dark Radiance spiralling around the other, bringing deadly cold and devouring magic into play, struck the bolotnisa in the same instant, causing a pained shriek to echo over her lake. But my attack wasn¡¯t done yet, not in the slightest. I had pumped as much power as possible into the formation and only part of it had been used yet. The Dark Radiance had carried a powerful curse that was not slowly taking hold, at least hopefully.


    Help support creative writers by finding and reading their stories on the original site.


    But before I could even try to empower that curse further, the bolotnisa¡¯s retaliation came, a wave of foul water crashing towards the shore. With my athame in hand, I channelled power through it, drawing one rune normally while instantly projecting the other two, creating a triangular shield of Ice in front of Rai and me, letting the wave break on it and around us. I had to use Ice Magic to keep it solid, the corrupting influence of the water strong enough to even attack my magically created ice, but it held.


    On the other side of the lake, Adra and Sigmir had retreated some and both had used their respective powers to withstand the attack. In Sigmir¡¯s case, what I saw through Lenore¡¯s sight had me grinning at her utter lack of subtlety. She had simply done it said on the tin for her class, Mountain Cleaver, and used her Lok¡¯nar to cleave a deep trench into the soil. Adra, on the other hand, had created a strong gust of wind, pushing back against the water, keeping it away from them, especially the flying drops.


    Sadly, there had been a shambling crawler remaining when the wave came, the water healing and empowering it, just as another wave came out of the retreating water. But I noticed that the lake was visibly smaller by an almost impossible amount.


    ¡°You will die for this!¡± the bolotnisa screeched, causing my smile to widen. I could still feel the curse, tearing at her essence, and after a moment of communication with Adra, through Lenore, I started to ready another attack. Rai, in the meantime, had to fight hard against the shambling crawlers, but the best course of action for me was to end the fight as soon as possible, trusting his abilities to keep him alive.


    By the time Adra and I had readied the next attack, Rai had managed to dispatch one of the crawlers, leaving two for him to deal with. Again, our attacks lanced out, towards the bolotnisa, interrupting her attempt to strike back with Mind Magic and striking home again. The curse, still active, was strengthened even further, sapping what offense she could muster and giving us more time. Again, she screamed and again, water surged towards us.


    We dealt with it the same way as earlier but this time, we didn¡¯t try to start a new attack right away. Instead, both Adra and I helped Sigmir and Rai to deal with the mounting pressure from the shambling crawlers and together, we quickly destroyed them. If they could focus on a single combatant, they were a serious threat but faced with multiple foes, their lacking intelligence allowed us to strike at their weak points with ease. It allowed the bolotnisa to attack again, this time with a thin jet of water, but it was directed at Sigmir who simply used her Lok¡¯nar to direct it past her in an impressive feat of strength and agility. I certainly couldn¡¯t have done that without magic.


    ¡°One more time.¡± I spoke through Lenore, starting another set of runes, considering if the curse was worth it. I could see that the bolotnisa was covered in frost, the blood from the deep wounds caused by Adra¡¯s arrows freezing as it seeped out, making her look quite pathetic. At the same time, I could feel the curse ravaging her and was reasonably sure that the strength and speed of her magical attacks had been greatly reduced, making me wonder. But at the end of the day, changing a working system was a bad idea, so I stuck with the large formation that had worked before.


    Our attacks struck home again, but this time, there wasn¡¯t even a water-wall to block parts of the attack, they simply went through unopposed. While my Liquid Moonlight splashed all over the bolotnisa, Adra¡¯s arrow struck her right between the eyes, visibly penetrating in a way that should have been fatal. And it was.


    I felt my curse tear at the fading shreds of magic and I could see the lake change with the naked eye. Only that I wasn¡¯t too happy about the way it changed. The repeated waves of water had lowered the lake¡¯s water-level considerably but now, the swampy soil below seemed to raise up, the water draining away. In the middle of the lake, where previously the lilypad had been was now a strange, golden thing, looking like a mix between lichen and fur, while the black sludge that was the only thing remaining from the bolotnisa was evaporating.


    Below us, I felt the ground shake, just a little and suddenly, the ground around the golden thing erupted upwards and a truly grotesque being stood in the middle of the lake. It was almost as tall as Sigmir but hugely bloated, orange, saggy skin covering it while the strange fur I had seen earlier sat on its head, a mockery of hair. With a voice that resembled a quacking duck, it screamed out. ¡°You killed my wife. Now, you¡¯ll be my wife!¡± while pointing at me.

 Interlude - Forum: Holding out for a Hero

    Official Road to Purgatory-Beta Forum


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    I¡¯ve heard the adage that you should never meet your heroes, it would only disappoint you. Luckily, there¡¯s an exception to every rule. Enjoy.


    holdingoutforahero.avi


    A group of stocky people, everyone clad in metal armour and with weapons in hand move through a swamp, taking care where they step. Around them, the trees look withered and bent, the leaves crumbling and brittle. Looking further than a few steps is impossible, thick mist wafting through the air, making the surroundings seem to press down onto the dwarves. In the background, dim music is playing, adding to the spooky atmosphere.


    Suddenly, one of the dwarves lets out a pained scream, the viewpoint spinning around, towards the source. The screaming dwarf is on the ground, his leg visibly bleeding, a skeletal hand sticking out from the soil, painted red with blood. Another dwarf screams in a similar manner and goes down as well, while two more manage to avoid the attack. But before anyone is able to restore order, a heavy, fleshy impact is heard from the front. Again, the viewpoint spins around and a nightmarish creature, roughly humanoid but with slender, far too long limbs, covered in mud and dripping brackish water is bending over a knocked-down dwarf, one arm reeling back to sink its claws into its victim.


    With a loud, angry shout one of the other dwarves barrels into the creature, using her shield to bash it away from the downed dwarf, giving him a chance to get back up, shaken, muddy but still alive.


    ¡°Form ranks!¡± another dwarf shouts, bringing the dwarves into a semblance of order, even as more creatures, similar to the first one, appear from the surrounding mist and crawl of out the muddy soil. The music changes, away from the somber, brass sounds to a quick, electric organ, hurrying the dwarves to move. Beating back the crawlers, the dwarves manage to form into ranks, a wall of steel and muscles, slowly moving backwards, covering the wounded and those taking care of them.


    It is slow going but luckily, the creatures don¡¯t seem to be intelligent enough to go around the shieldwall, instead they simply try to go through it, only to be repelled again and again. As they move, the caw of a nearby raven cuts through the noise for a moment, only to be swallowed by the sounds of metal hitting flesh as the dwarves try to leave a lasting impression in their foes.


    The dwarves manage to retreat out of the boggy swamp, onto solid terrain, but the crawlers seem to stick to them, pressing the attack. The music in the background now has lyrics, asking where the good men went, and where the gods are. Suddenly, from a nearby tree, a dark silhouette rises into the air, flying towards the crawlers. At first, it looks like a normal raven, only that its head is bone-white, instead of black, but the impression suddenly changes when the flying form glows in silver light and a massive torrent of power erupts from its beak, inundating the crawlers and freezing the surrounding area. For a moment, time seems to freeze as well, the dwarves staring at the devastation brought by the seemingly harmless bird.


    ¡°Press the attack!¡± the voice of their leader shouts, shaking them out of their stupor and they only now realise just what the bird has achieved. Their foes, earlier almost impervious to the dwarven attacks, thanks to their spongy, bloated flesh were frozen solid, allowing their warhammers to make short work of them, shattering them into small pieces with swift blows.


    The bird was not the only surprising addition to the dwarven side, from behind their line, out of the forest, come three figures, a huge, broad-shouldered amazon of a fighter, a large, slightly strange, axe in hand, followed by a smaller form, albeit only small in comparison to her massive companion, wielding a long, white spear on one side, on the other is a wolfish humanoid, covered in darkness with two gleaming short-swords in hand. The three sweep into the remaining crawlers, taking the remaining pressure off the dwarves.


    But more crawlers, come out of the swamp, maybe drawn by the smell of blood, maybe by the sounds of battle. Or maybe, they are directed by whatever dark force animated them, making them hunt the living.


    The three fighters took off the pressure, but the new foes are fresh and re-apply it, even pushing back the three unexpected additions to the fight. Suddenly, a voice calls out from behind, ¡°Back, everyone!¡±


    Stolen story; please report.


    The viewpoint turns again, and the raven that was seen earlier is sitting on top of a gleaming, crystal-staff, held by a figure clad in dark leather-clothes, a black cloak covering her back. She seems taller than her size would make you think, her size no different from the dwarves and her slim build should make her seem small but something prevents it. Maybe the glowing, silver eyes, mirroring the earlier devastation, or the runes floating in front of her, giving off the same light.


    The dwarves obey, moving aside just in time for the runes to give of a resplendent glow, bathing the small clearing in silver light for a moment. When the light dies away, devastation remains, the swamp in front of the dwarven lines, the crawlers that were still trying to come out of it, the trees and the grass, everything is covered in ice.


    But only for a moment. The petite figure slams the butt of her staff and the sound of shattering glass seems to echo through the forest for a second, the previously frozen landscape turned into a hell of shattered ice, with nothing remaining intact, not tree, not crawler, nothing. It looks like reality broke there, if only for a moment.


    The scene shifts, to a close-up of the black-clad figure, her eyes still glowing, but her lips curled into a smile.


    holdingoutforahero.avi end


    It took me a few days to edit things as I wanted and add the music, I hope you enjoy. For me, I got to talk to Morgana a little later, it was interesting. No, I won¡¯t share that, it was a private conversation and I¡¯ll treat it as such. But she undoubtedly saved the dwarven patrol I was with and I¡¯ve gotta say, her magic makes an impact.


    Anyway, I wanted to share some awesomeness, hopefully you enjoy watching, just as I enjoyed making it. And living through it.


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    Hooo, boy, where to start? I¡¯m jealous? I mean, that¡¯s some impressive aoe-magic, not sure what sort of level those zombie-things had but just the ability to freeze and destroy such a large area, that¡¯s some crazy stuff. Makes me wonder just what spell-casters will be able to do at higher levels. Are we talking nuclear-bomb type devastation, for someone high enough? No offense to Morgana, but the beta has just not been out long enough to get into anything close to high-level and despite that, she can do shit like that.


    Also, cool to see yet another side of our favourite, cuddly psychopath.


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    Yeah, not sure how the balance will work out. I mean, no matter what, some fighter/warrior type just won¡¯t be able to do stuff like that, no way, no how. We¡¯ll have to see, hopefully it won¡¯t be some sort of spellcaster-master-class shite, that would be a massive disappointment in an otherwise awesome game.


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    Not sure, Harms. Do you see any other spellcaster whip out stuff like that? I mean, sure, there are a few that manage a small bang, maybe similar to the size of a grenade, if that. But if you look at who is making waves, other than Morgana, it¡¯s not the casters. Tobiuno is some sort of fighter but makes waves cause he¡¯s Lord of a Castle, Whisper makes waves as a rogue who knows secrets, a few more because they formed working parties.


    We¡¯ll have to see how things play out in the long run, whether there is a problem or not. For now, I don¡¯t see one.


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    Can you sweep me off my feet? No need for superman or anything, just you?


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    I think the glorious crusade better invest in some cold-weather gear.


    Or maybe they should just Let it go...


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    Fun video, even if I might be the furthest from a white knight on a fiery steed as you can get.


    For Jeanyra, I feel obligated to refute that, by calling myself a high-functioning sociopath. With your number. Maybe.


    And about the magic used, well, a girl gotta keep her secrets, right?


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    Cool video, even if we ignore the Morgana-part. I¡¯m more interested in the zombies as there seem to be few good spots to fight a lot of enemies. Any chance someone would expand on that?


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    I might be speaking out of school here, but there are quite a few such spots, allowing you to fight a lot. I was allowed to use one, controlled by the Duke of Highever. Because it¡¯s not just players, or Travellers, are interested in gaining levels, everyone is. Just that the swamp seems to be an uncontrolled area, making it curiously prime real estate, if one knew where it is.

 Chapter 299

    For a moment, I felt utterly confused. Instead of the encounter ending with the death of the bolotnisa, it had only been phase one. At the same time, I felt a pressure settle around my mind, pushing inwards to the point that I was only barely able to mentally hold on, my senses shutting down and turning inwards. Thanks to Lenore, I was still able to get an impression of what was going on, albeit only a rough one due to the distance involved, and it looked like my Avatar was surrounded by a dark, roiling mass of power.


    ¡°Don¡¯t struggle, just let me grab you and take you as my bride!¡± the grotesque figure shouted.


    Next to Lenore, for just a moment, Sigmir stood utterly still, her motionlessness unnatural, as I felt myself push back against the influence that was trying to erode my Avatar. But the moment passed and suddenly, Sigmir was surrounded by her red aura, glowing with insane power, her arms showing the signs of her own Avatar-state with Ylva and she exploded forward with abandon. As she moved, charging at the grotesque figure, she let out a howl, a mindless sound of pure fury and hatred, chilling my bones.


    Suddenly, I felt the pressure fall away, my senses returning to me, and I realised that I was next to Adra. Rai had used his own magic to pull me along on a Shadow-step, a move he was now paying for, his body shaking as he held his head in obvious pain. Adra caught him, before he could fall to the ground, while Lenore hopped over to my shoulder, lending me some magical strength through our connection.


    Thanks to the speed at which our connection allowed us to converse, we were able to put together a reasonable approximation of what had happened. The strange pressure seemed to have been an insanely powerful Mind Magic effect, one that I had barely withstood. The consequences of failing wouldn¡¯t have been pretty, of that I was certain.


    After taking a moment to catch my breath, I looked up and watched Sigmir, in a crazed, all-out assault trying to smash the grotesque thing to pieces but it proved to be slippery, slithering away from her blows like a spineless slug. The one time I saw her land a real blow, the wound seemed to vanish within moments of it appearing. It was then, that I noticed something else, as I looked around. Where earlier the mist around the lake had been dense, they were now looking strange, foreboding and dark, making me feel a profound sense of unease.


    ¡°Look.¡± I told Lenore, while switching my sight to hers, so I would be able to see what the mist was. When she did, I felt a cold shiver run down my spine, the mist formed a barrier, filled with deadly magic, roiling around the lake. Walking into it would be deadly and it looked like it was coming at us, slowly but surely. We were on a timer.


    ¡°We need to destroy that thing!¡± I screamed, causing Rai to snap out of his stunned state and try to move forward on unsteady feet. Adra followed my eyes and I saw the colour drain from her face, as she realised what the barrier was. She turned her bow into a spear and together with Rai, they followed Sigmir over the muddy ground, trying not to get stuck in the muck.


    ¡°Want to use your own magic or join me?¡± I asked Lenore who moved into her Hallow, pooling her magic with mine. Given the amount of Death-magic in the swamp, trying to hurt it with that seemed to be foolish, so I was happy with her choice.


    Together, we activated our Avatar-state and I felt our mind mingle, my sight showing me the flows of magic around us. The earth was still suffused with both Earth- and Death-Astral-Power but the water seemed to be concentrated in the barrier around us.


    Before beginning my assault, I wanted to know what we were facing. Observe told me it was called Tzar Bolotnik and level 120. That wasn¡¯t good, seriously not. Especially if I looked at the way it was using Earth-Magic in an attempt to drag the others into the muck, which was still full of Death-Astral-Power and would undoubtedly be harmful to them.


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    Using my default attack, I created the runes to start throwing Icicles at the thing, hoping that my attacks would be more impactful than theirs. Lenore¡¯s presence helped, her own Wind-Magic adding some punch to my projectiles, even if the Death-Magic produced by our bond was completely wasted.


    For a minute or so, we tried to get through the things defenses but the combination of muddy ground and its prolific use of earth-magic to defend itself and hinder the others made it difficult. We were simply unable to get it to hold still, so we could finally hit it.


    ¡°You can¡¯t defeat me!¡± the thing laughed, as it slithered away from the others, while grasping hands broke out of the muck, trying to grab them. It was the same magic that had supported the shambling crawlers throughout the swamp, only now, it manifested a lot faster, making me unable to block it. Rai barely managed to shadow-step out of the way, while I saw Sigmir get caught, her leg lacerated but she simply ignored it, fighting on.


    ¡°Look closer!¡± Lenore admonished me, pushing her focus on me. I followed her train of thought and what she had realised made me understand just how serious a situation we were in. Tzar Bolotnik was being empowered by the swamp, the death-energy spread all around us was absorbed, healing and sustaining him. If we wanted to defeat him, we¡¯d have to either fully drain the swamp or overpower the speed he was draining power with. Neither seemed to be working, not with his defenses and sturdy bulk. In addition, there was the roiling fog of death slowly closing in on us, giving us a time-limit.


    ¡°Damn.¡± I replied, readying a new spell while rapidly conversing with Lenore to come up with a countermeasure. The monster started shouting again, taunting us with our inability to shut it down, an irritating twitter of insults and boasts, making me want to shove its face into the muck and keep it there.


    I had to move forward, to keep away from the mist closing in on us, carefully stepping into the mud of the now drained lake, still trying to get an idea.


    ¡°I think I¡¯ve got an idea.¡± Lenore said, her thoughts flowing freely to me, showing me what she had in mind. It seemed possible, if difficult, and a long-shot that might kill me. But what else was new, if any of us were to make a self-sacrifice, I was the one to do so. I could come back, the others, not so much.


    ¡°Let¡¯s do it.¡± I agreed, centering my mind, using the staff we used when casting conjoined spells as a balance, setting it into the muck in front of me. After taking another deep breath, I slowly exhaled, letting my thoughts and power flow with the air, spreading my magic around me. The mist was blocking the sun out, giving me a nice twilight to work with, shadows and darkness that I was now using to my own advantage. The bolotnik¡¯s connection to the swamp was almost imperceptible, a foul taint covering every facet of our surroundings and I was trying to find all of it. I wanted nothing more than a shower, the oily taint making me feel dirty but I had to press on. If I didn¡¯t manage to find and connect to enough of it, everything might fail.


    Once I thought I had done a good job, Lenore and I started the next part of our attack, using pure intent and imagination to shape our magic and channelling a tremendous amount of power, we struck, not at the bolotnik, not at the swamp itself, but at the connection, not even trying to truly sever it, but only interrupt it for a moment. Interrupt and slip in the space created by our interruption.


    And it worked, but that was the critical point of Lenore¡¯s idea. Now, the death-magic from the swamp was still flooding through the connection but no longer into the bolotnik, but into us. I had no way to survive such a flood of Death-Astral-Power, but Lenore could, at least we were reasonably confident that she could. We instantly split up, each of us holding one side of the connection we had interrupted, our split truly severing the connection and I thought I heard an angry roar from the bolotnik, but I was too focused to pay any more attention.


    Not while I was connected to an insanely powerful draining-spell, strong enough to leave me a withered husk within seconds, but I had one more card up my sleeve. Or rather, in my bag.


    Reaching into my magic bag, I pulled out the chunk of Eternal Ice, aching at what I had to do, and slipped it into the connection, substituting it for myself. The Eternal Ice was holding a lot more power than I did, so the connection eagerly took it, trying to gobble it up instantly.


    I felt the power flow and let my eyes flicker open to witness what Lenore and I had wrought.


    And it was glorious.

 Chapter 300

    The vision that greeted me, once I opened my eyes, was incredible. I wasn¡¯t sure if it was because of the sheer density or some other effect but the strands of magic were visible, even without Lenore¡¯s special sight. And what a sight they were, both Lenore and the Tzar Bolotnik were lit up like fireworks, a light-show unlike anything I had ever seen.


    Lenore had somehow managed to get onto the staff after separating from me and that was where she perched, her wings flared outwards and her head reaching upwards, beak wide open. I wasn¡¯t quite sure what was going on with her, but I could see the ashen strands of Death-Astral-Power flowing towards her, infusing her. The sheer magnitude made it obvious that, if I were still linked into that process, I would be pushing daisies. Even Lenore was pushing the boundaries of what was possible and I could see her changing in front of my eyes.


    At the same time, the bolotnik had an even harder time, hundreds of strands connecting him to the Eternal Ice floating in front of me, glimmering with an icy, silver light. I could feel cold emanating from the strands and the bolotnik himself looked like he was in serious trouble, parts of his body freezing over, even as Sigmir was gleefully taking advantage of his stunned state, hacking into his body. It was still sturdy but under her onslaught, it was just a matter of seconds before limbs started to come off, ending the fight in a rather messy way. Sigmir must have been rightly ticked off, for even after the bolotnik had lost all limbs and was a pile of loosely connected flesh, she continued to chop him up, mincing him into a chunky, red paste. We would have to find a nearby stream before we got some supper, her savage onslaught had left her covered in blood, gore and small bits and pieces I didn¡¯t want to think about.


    Looking at the Eternal Ice, I could see that it was visibly shrunken, almost half of its total volume gone, making me realise just how powerful the draining effect of the bolotnik had been. Before I could do more than put the Eternal Ice back into my bag, I had to catch Lenore, who had reached her limit. Yet, despite the fact that she was unconscious, there was still magic flooding into her, her life-force flagging. This time, she was the one who had recklessly pushed herself, beyond her ability to control her magic and was paying the price.


    Reaching out, similar to the way I had done earlier, I pushed myself again, gathering the last shreds of my Astral Power to sever her from the magic flooding into her. The magic from the outside resisted for a moment, as if it was somewhat sentient, but I managed to push past the resistance and felt the flows unravel, bathing me in a painful cloud of Death-Magic.


    The magic made me choke, making it hard to breathe. It wasn¡¯t just its foul smell, it was a feeling of pain, unlike anything I had ever felt before. The pain didn¡¯t compare with the pain caused by blood magic but it was all over me, every bit of skin and seeping into my body. I couldn¡¯t even begin to compare it with any experience I had, no matter how hard my mind tried to come up with one. Maybe it was supposed to represent the pain of dying, one cell at the time.


    Cradling Lenore in my arms, I stumbled forward, trying to get out of the area of effect. Lenore was completely out of it, even our connection couldn¡¯t let me reach her. Without Astral Power, the best I could do was hold her gently and make sure that she was taken care of. I would have loved to draw her into her Hallow, but sadly, it was a process that required her active participation.


    Looking at the others, I realised that Lenore wasn¡¯t the only one hurt, Sigmir and Ylva were sitting a few steps away from the gory pile of chopped-up flesh, Sigmir bleeding profusely from multiple wounds while Ylva simply looked dead-tired. Similarly, Rai and Adra appeared to be standing by force of will alone. Forcing myself to keep calm so I wouldn¡¯t drop Lenore, I walked over, careful not to stumble on the uneven, now partially frozen, ground.


    Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on the original website.


    ¡°Watch over her, please.¡± I asked Ylva, gently depositing the unconscious bird next to her, so she could curl around Lenore. Ylva simply looked at me in acceptance, without the strength to even nod.


    ¡°Oh love, what have you done this time?¡± I gently asked, looking at Sigmir¡¯s wounds, trying to see which needed the most treatment. I would have loved to use my magic to simply heal them, or at least perform some sort of first aid, but the small amount of power I had regenerated since helping Lenore was barely enough to form a single rune. I was all out of Power.


    ¡°Just, hold me?¡± Sigmir asked, sounding as tired as they all looked. ¡°He wanted to take you away from me¡­¡± she mumbled, as I settled in behind her, kneeling so I could support her larger body.


    ¡°I can¡¯t have that. You are mine.¡± she continued, passion thick in her exhausted voice.


    ¡°I¡¯m here, love. We¡¯ll have you back on your feet, soon, I promise you.¡± I told her, gently stroking over her arms, just trying to soothe her and show her that I was there. Looking closer, I realised that a few of her wounds were rather serious, especially on her legs, that death-magic was slowly seeping in, poisoning her body and making her even weaker. Making an instant decision, I drew my athame, cutting into my hand to use the one resource I had on hand, my own life-force. I had only taken very limited damage in the fight, so I could use some of it. Even the last burst of Death Magic hadn¡¯t dealt a lot of damage, I could some blood magic. I just had to be careful, not to overdraw it, or I might permanently harm myself.


    Focusing on the shallow cut, I hissed in pain as my blood magic was slowly ripping out my very life, channelling it into a healing-spell directed at Sigmir¡¯s worst wounds. It was a testament to her exhaustion that she didn¡¯t realise what I was doing, that she wasn¡¯t even twitching. I could feel the remnants of Death Magic push back against me, forcing me to use more power, draining me even more, until finally, I had to stop. I was just too far gone, I felt myself shake from blood loss, pain and exhaustion. If I tried to do more, the magic would fail and just harm me, possibly permanently. Luckily, Sigmir looked a bit better, her wounds no longer getting worse.


    Feeling seriously relieved, I looked over to the others, who had rallied somewhat and were checking the pile of flesh that was slowly seeping back into the soil, like an enemy defeated in a dungeon.


    In the meantime, I took a short glimpse at the notifications and realised with some glee that I had gained two whole levels in the fight, bringing me to level 100. It felt justified, fighting two enemies in a single encounter, especially if the second one made it impossible to get away, had been a nasty surprise. Thinking about the mist-barrier, I finally looked up, only to realise that it had dispersed, that even the mist that had hung around the swamp was dispersing, getting driven off by the sun. Finally, that nasty, hot light could do something good.


    There were a lot more notifications, but those could wait for now, but I quickly distributed the attribute-points, hoping that the few points would allow me to heal Sigmir sooner. It pushed my intelligence to fifty, my Intuition to forty, both giving me special abilities but again, I ignored them.


    ¡°Should we try to leave?¡± I asked Adra, the exhaustion making me a little insecure. I had no idea if destroying the bolotnik had drained the swamp of its malevolent intent and the deadly magic, if the shambling crawlers and will-o-wisps would be gone, at least for a time. If we ran into enemies in our current state, we would be in major trouble, even if the enemies were the type we normally could wipe the floor with. On the other hand, there was lingering Death-Magic in the shallow basin we were in and even the Ice-Astral-Power the bolotnik had drained from the Eternal Ice was harmful to the others.


    ¡°Let¡¯s leave. I want to get out of this dreary place.¡± she said, getting a nod from me in reply.


    ¡°Come, love, can you walk?¡± I asked, giving Sigmir a gentle kiss on one of the few spots on her neck that weren¡¯t soiled with blood.


    ¡°I can walk.¡± she instantly answered, even if I wasn¡¯t quite sure how truthful she was. I helped her getting up before taking Lenore back from Ylva, carrying her myself, while Ylva helped me to steady Sigmir.


    It was a strange, exhausted procession, travelling away from the frozen mud.

 Chapter 301

    The change Tzar Bolotnik¡¯s death had caused were quite obvious, even if I wondered how long it would take for them to reverse. What had been a dreary place, right out of a horror-set, with withered trees, ever-present fog and strangely grey grass seemed to rejuvenate in front of our eyes, the trees seemingly straightening a little, fresh leaves appearing on a few branches and even a few animals were coming in from the outside. It was almost a little too extreme a change, too magical, at least for me. Adra seemed to simply enjoy the change, a blissful smile on her face, even if all of us were bone-tired.


    After a few minutes of walking, my natural regeneration had replenished the life-force I had drained earlier to heal Sigmir and I felt Astral Power seep back into my body. The new power soothed the headache I had gotten from overdrawing my power and I let the regeneration do its thing for another minute, before I started to channel most of it into a simple healing- and strengthening-formation, trying to help Sigmir. I was quite relieved that I was able to help her, Lenore, on the other hand, was still unconscious, but stable. I tried to get a feeling for her body, trying to see what was wrong with her, but there seemed to be some rather extreme and delicate process going on, making me wary to interfere with it, simply because I had no idea what I would be messing with. Even if I were to try to help, if I did so in a hazhaphard way, might cause a lot more harm than good.


    Luckily, the way out was clear, nothing jumping out to attack us, or we might have been in trouble. Killing the bolotnik seemed to have done the trick, cleansing the swamp of its malevolent properties and, in the process, completing the dwarven quest. Still, I only relaxed when we crossed the, no-longer as distinct, border between the swamp and the forest around it, a border we only recognised because of the time we had spent in the area.


    Heading over to the clearing we had used to rest for the last week, we were finally able to relax, Sigmir more or less collapsing once we were there. I managed to get her onto the furs we normally used to sleep, placing her in such a way that I could cradle her head in my lap while I leaned against a tree, letting her get some sun, while I was in comfortable shade.


    Ylva mirrored my position, curing up on my other side with Lenore, who was still out of it. I could see the changes in her body with the naked eye, her feathers changing colour but the change was going deeper, I could feel it. Hopefully, she¡¯d be back with us soon, so I could stop worrying. For the first time, I realised just how Sigmir must have felt when I had been out of it, after some reckless use of magic. Only that Sigmir meant a lot more to me than Lenore, even with the closeness Lenore and I had, due to literally sharing a mind, when we used the Avatar-state.


    With us situated, and Adra and Rai relaxing nearby, I finally had time to look at the gains from the fight.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>


    You reached Level 100.


    </td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Skill increased</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You increased your skill: Mind Magic [17/60]</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Skill increased</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You increased your skill: Darkness Magic [55/100]</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Title gained</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You gained the trait: Mystic</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>For reaching level 100, following the Arcane Path, you gained the Title of Mystic. Your ability to understand Arcane Runes is increased.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Special Ability gained</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You gained the Special Ability : Runic Understanding</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>For having Intuition of 40 or higher, you gained the skill Runic Understanding. At times, you can gain an understanding of runes, even without the required skill. The amount of information gained depends on Intuition and overall Runic Mastery.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Special Ability gained</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You gained the Special Ability : Runic Might</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>For having Intelligence of 50 or higher, you gained the skill Runic Might. The runes you create are more resilient, allowing you to channel more power into them at one time. The amount of additional power depends on your Intelligence and Runic Mastery.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    The new abilities made me smile, they sounded interesting and quite powerful. I¡¯d have to see just how useful Runic Understanding would be, maybe I had gained it due to my continued attempts to understand the grimoire given to me by the Grandmother, a task that required me to study various runes and her notes on them, notes that always seemed to be a little unsatisfying. It was simply impossible to describe the scope of a rune in normal words, they were more than simple words, they encompassed wide-ranging concepts with a particular feeling to them, a certain attitude, if you will.


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    Runic Might, on the other hand, was quite straight-forward and pretty much what I should have expected. I had a habit of pushing my runes to their limit, especially when using Overflow and now said limit was raised. Just what I wanted, to pack the biggest bang into a single spell.


    Finally, the Mystic-Title. I had no idea what to make of it, just like the other titles I had gained over time. They were just there, not really doing anything, at least not that I could detect it. Maybe it would just increase the rate at which I gained skills, or something like that. It would be boring but at least it would be predictable, not like the Outsider-Trait I had taken in the beginning, something that sounded rather unproblematic but proved to be a pain in the behind, especially for someone travelling as much as I did.


    With that out of the way, I focused back on Sigmir, giggling when I heard her soft snoring. I considered to wake her, to get rid of the splattered blood on her, but decided against it. Instead, I created another Blood-Rune formation, slowly and gently channelling power into it. She was still not cured and hale again, something I wanted to change. It was a testament of her exhaustion that even as the power was flowing into her, she didn¡¯t stir.


    Now, with more time to inspect her, the damage she had taken was even worse than I had thought. I had no idea how she had managed to walk with those wounds, let alone fight. The quick and simple fix I had created earlier was still there, keeping some of the damage at bay but even that would require more time and effort to heal.


    Gently stroking her face once again, I got to work. Astral Power, carefully filtered to keep the elemental Ice out of it, seeped into her body, guided by my understanding and power, cleansing her of the damaging remnants of Death-Magic, before slowly regenerating the damage she had taken due to the battle. It was hard work, requiring all my focus, but for Sigmir, there was no effort I wouldn¡¯t take. She was well worth it.


    It took me maybe an hour to make sure that there was no lingering damage in her and once it was done, I made Adra and Rai come over. I could have gone over to them, but that would have meant disturbing Sigmir, something I wasn¡¯t willing to do.


    The other two had taken a lot less damage, only a few scratches that were quickly healed. It was quite obvious that Sigmir had been the main-target of the Bolotnik, at least once she had forced him to abandon his attempt to force his will onto me, and her furious attack had left little room for her to defend herself.


    ¡°That was¡­ interesting.¡± Lenore¡¯s voice echoed through my head, over our connection. Carefully not to jostle Sigmir, I looked over to her and the changes in her had settled down, leaving her with a plumage of black feathers with white trim. Her head and beak were still bone-white, as they had been since she crossed the first divide, but now the tips of her primary and secondary feathers were just as white, giving her wings a white fringe. It looked interesting and it took me a second to realise what it might mean.


    ¡°Did you cross the second divide?¡± I asked, wanting to make sure I wasn¡¯t adding two plus two and getting five.


    ¡°I did. The power I drained from the wisps was meant to serve as a foundation but with all the power in the swamp at my disposal, I decided to push my luck. And it worked.¡± she explained and I could feel her pride over our connection.


    ¡°Well done, friend. Anything interesting you want to share with me?¡± I asked, quite curious what had changed with her. In response, she hopped a little, flapping her wings in the air and suddenly, a distinct stream of cold air was flowing out from her, looking very much like Ice-Magic.


    ¡°I guess I picked up a few things from you.¡± she explained, her mental voice highly amused. Obviously, she had somehow learned Ice-Magic.

 Chapter 302

    Reaching out with my hand, I let the chilly air created by Lenore wash over it. It was Ice-Magic, alright, and far from powerful enough to actually hurt me. Not that I had expected it to, I was rather resistant against it after all. But there was something else mixed in, hidden behind the cold, channelled with the magic just like my magic always contained a trace of Ice-Magic, unless I deliberately prevented it. It was Death-Magic, transmitted by the cold, giving it some extra bite.


    ¡°Interesting. We¡¯ll have to see what you can do with that, once you are better trained.¡± I said, considering the various, interesting ways we might be able to work together with her new ability.


    ¡°Is it only the ability or did you gain an affinity as well?¡± I asked.


    ¡°Only the ability, I¡¯ll have to train it up for a while, until it gets to a useful stage.¡± she answered, causing me to nod in understanding.


    ¡°But that brings me to something else. Originally, I offered you my help and companionship for a year and a day. I would like to change that and stay with you until you leave this plane.¡± she said, a statement making me incredibly happy. It had been a small bit of worry, lodged into the back of my mind, that once our original contract was up, Lenore might leave, taking Ylva with her. It seemed that she had made a decision on that, that she wanted to stay with me. I had felt that she was content with me and incredibly pleased at the progress both of us had made with our respective magic, something that was now proven.


    ¡°You are very welcome to stay with me, until I¡¯ll leave this world.¡± I promised, part of me hoping that I might even meet her again in the full release. It was a thought I wrestled with quite a bit, the connections I was forming with these beings, who seemed so very real to me, what would happen with them once the beta ended? As fast as the thought came, bringing with it a sharp pain at the idea of separating from Sigmir, I pushed it away, focusing on something, anything different. I would bomb that bridge once I came to it. Somehow.


    ¡°Would you mind if I hop into my Hallow?¡± Lenore asked, the thought filled with exhaustion, driving home the fact that she had pushed herself to her absolute limit when she had crossed the second Divide, absorbing as much power as possible from the swamp. It made me wonder if there was a way to empower myself, once the time came for me to cross the second Divide, something I wasn¡¯t yet sure how to do.


    ¡°No, I don¡¯t.¡± I answered, offering her my arm to climb. She happily hopped over, quickly scrambling upwards until she sat on my shoulder, pressing her head against my temple. The familiar sensation of her, entering her Hallow began, only to be replaced by a sudden, brutal pain. It felt as if someone was trying to drive an ice-pick into my skull, piercing and sharp, causing me to scream in pain.


    As sudden as the pain came, it faded away, leaving only a throbbing remnant imprinted into my mind and a disturbed Sigmir, frantically trying to get up, orient herself and deal with whatever had made me scream.


    Gasping with pain, I managed to get out that I was alright, even if I wasn¡¯t so sure of that. At the same time, as the pain faded away, I felt a strange tingling sensation, above my eyes, in the back of my neck, in my armpits and in my crotch. Before I could investigate the sensation,  a blue screen popped open, catching my attention.


    <table><tbody><tr><td>Extraordinary Event </td></tr><tr><td>A spirit, more powerful than you, sought shelter within your Avatar. It¡¯s essence was too much for your Avatar to contain, causing your Avatar to change in reflection of that. The changes are permanent and can only be reversed with extraordinarily powerful magic. </td></tr><tr><td>You gained +1 Agility and -1 Charisma. </td></tr></tbody></table>


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    <table><tbody><tr><td>Special Ability gained</td></tr><tr><td>You gained the Special Ability : Avian Grace</td></tr><tr><td>For having Agility of 20 or higher, you gained the skill Avian Grace. Those light enough to take to the sky are not durable enough to withstand the impacts of earthbound combat. Instead, they use their agile grace to avoid those strikes entirely. You emulate some of said grace, allowing you to dodge just a little faster.</td></tr></tbody></table>


    ¡°Love?¡± Sigmir asked, looking both confused, worried but also just a tiny bit amused.


    ¡°Yes, I¡¯m alright.¡± I tried to reassure her, only to be confused on my own, when she pointed to my eyebrows, now more than a bit amused.


    I was not quite sure what was going on, until I realised that the change to my Avatar might have been more than just the small change in attributes and included a physical component. With but a thought, I instantly projected a set of three Ice-Runes, pushing my will into the magic to create a simple, reflective sheet of ice, allowing me to use it as a mirror. What I saw made me raise an eyebrow, or it would have, if I still had eyebrows. There was still something there, looking almost like eyebrows but not quite, they had been replaced by feathers, small, obviously raven-black, feathers. They followed the contour of my brow but stuck off a little near the temple,  producing a slightly weird effect, especially if I raised one or both eyebrows.


    Raising my hand to feel them confirmed that, yes, they were feathers and unless I wanted to pluck them, I was stuck with them. At least, they were smooth and quite pleasant to feel.


    Remembering the strange, tingling sensation I had felt earlier, I took a good look at my neck and, indeed, the small hairs in the back of my neck, stretching forward across my neck and shoulders, almost to my clavicle, was more plumage. Further investigation, carried out then and there, made it clear that yes, the other two areas that had felt strange earlier were now feathered as well, covered in short, downy feathers.


    Even the hair on my head was not fully spared the effect, but it was a lot more subdued there. Only a few, black feathers, stretching from the back of my skull, were long and large enough to be visible between my hairs.


    ¡°Don¡¯t worry, love, it looks good on you.¡± Sigmir assured me, noticing that I was a little distressed by the sudden change to my Avatar. For a moment, I was conflicted before pushing it away from me, focusing on the fact that the only person I really cared about was fine with it. I also felt Lenore, who was to equal parts apologetic and amused, starting to relax in her Hallow. She was of the opinion that it looked good on me, but even if it did not, there was simply nothing to be done. It was an unforeseen occurrence, that had to be accepted.


    Looking over to Adra and Rai, who had managed to get themselves into something similar to fighting stances, despite their exhaustion, I called out that everything was alright, just an unforeseen event that had me spooked. The two of them weren¡¯t happy about getting jostled into action by sudden screaming but settled back down, letting the spring-sun shine down on them, burning the feeling of cold, camp mist out of their bodies and bones.


    ¡°So, what happened?¡± Sigmir asked, her earlier amusement coming back, as she wrapped me into a hug, taking the position I had sat on earlier, only now with me on her lap. I took a few minutes to explain what had happened and realised that the change to my Avatar really didn¡¯t matter. I wasn¡¯t in the habit of looking into the mirror all that much anyway, so as long as Sigmir was fine with my feathered look, I really didn¡¯t need to care.


    ¡°Lenore crossed over, huh? That¡¯s quite impressive.¡± she said, but from her tone, I was quite sure that there was something more to it and I wasn¡¯t disappointed.


    ¡°She beat me to it. I think I saw what path to take forward, during the battle. My father focused on the importance of control. But, you know, when that thing earlier declared that you¡¯d take the place of his bride, there was no control there. I simply let go, let go of reason, of fear, of anything that would stop me from defending you. I think that is the path I want to take forward. I¡¯ll have to meditate on it, but I feel like it¡¯s the way to go.¡± she explained, sounding introspective.


    Hearing the conviction in her voice, made me want to reward her, the knowledge how far she would go for me making me tingle in a very different way, compared to the earlier tingle of growing feathers. But I¡¯d have to wait until later to deal with that, for now, I only gave her a kiss, filled with all those delicious things I wanted to do with her later.


    We still had things to do, before we headed out, towards the dwarves. If possible, I wanted to get to them today, hopefully before they left their camp to travel back to their hold.

 Chapter 303

    ¡°Adra, Rai, care to share what you found on the body?¡± I called out, getting the attention of the other two. I managed to hear them grumble a little at the idea of moving from their comfortable spot in the sun, but they came over, sitting in a different sunny spot.


    ¡°Take a look. There were two items, neither of them something I would voluntarily use.¡± Adra admitted, looking a little perturbed as she pulled something from her magic bag. I blinked at the appearance, agreeing with her assessment on the face of things, but I was curious enough to get a better look with Identify.


    The first item was a raggedly torn dress, originally white and lacy but the damage was severe and the mud that clung to it made it look rather disgusting.


    <table><tbody><tr><td colspan="10">Despoiled Bride¡¯s Dress</td></tr><tr><td colspan="5">Rarity</td><td colspan="5"> Rare </td></tr><tr><td colspan="5">Type</td><td colspan="5"> Clothing</td></tr><tr><td colspan="5">Base Protection</td><td colspan="5">0 against Piercing Damage</td></tr><tr><td colspan="5">Base Protection</td><td colspan="5">0 against Slashing Damage</td></tr><tr><td colspan="5">Base Protection</td><td colspan="5">1 against Blunt Damage </td></tr><tr><td colspan="5">Special Effect</td><td colspan="5"> Bride¡¯s Lament- Channelling Astral Power into the dress projects the pained screams of the Despoiled Bride outwards, their effect depending on your Charisma.</td></tr><tr><td colspan="5">Special Effect</td><td colspan="5"> Attribute Increase ¨C While this shield is held, you gain +2 Charisma</td></tr><tr><td colspan="10">Once upon a time, a young woman was left at the Altar by her Groom. In shame, she fled into the swamp, sealing her tragic fate.</td></tr></tbody></table>


    It was an¡­ interesting piece of equipment, that was for sure. I wasn¡¯t sure what the active effect would do, my only guess was that it was something similar to the Bolotnica¡¯s initial Mind-Magic attack, something that made me want to test it, at least for the purpose of studying it. But even with that incentive, I wasn¡¯t quite sure if I wanted to wear the filthy fabric, an attribute I wasn¡¯t sure would go away with such mundane means like washing it. But there was that nifty magic spell, in my Grimoire, used to clean and even mend clothing, something I had used from time to time, when the clothes worn in our group needed it.


    The other piece of gear wasn¡¯t much better, it looked like a weird, almost phallus-shaped mushroom but from the leather wrapped around the shaft, it was supposed to work as a mace or club. Inspecting it gave me a little more insight, but no increased desire to use it.


    <table><tbody><tr><td colspan="10">Swamp-Tzar¡¯s Scepter</td></tr><tr><td colspan="5">Rarity</td><td colspan="5"> Rare</td></tr><tr><td colspan="5">Type </td><td colspan="5"> One-Handed Mace</td></tr><tr><td colspan="5">Base Damage</td><td colspan="5"> 0 Damage Piercing</td></tr><tr><td colspan="5">Base Damage</td><td colspan="5"> 0 Damage Slashing</td></tr><tr><td colspan="5">Base Damage</td><td colspan="5"> 18 Damage Blunt</td></tr><tr><td colspan="5">Strength Modifier</td><td colspan="5"> High </td></tr><tr><td colspan="5">Special Effect</td><td colspan="5"> Attribute Increase ¨C While this shield is held, you gain +2 Endurance</td></tr><tr><td colspan="5">Special Effect</td><td colspan="5"> Swamp¡¯s Binding - Channelling Astral Power into the Scepter allows you to suck an enemy into the ground, trapping them in mud.</td></tr><tr><td colspan="10">This mace was wielded by Tzar Bolotnik, a spirit ruling a borean swamp. His power to drag his enemies into the mud is preserved within..</td></tr></tbody></table>


    I offered the mace to Sigmir, who looked rather unhappy, the strange shape just too unpleasant.


    ¡°I think I¡¯ll stick with my axe, if I need to use a shield.¡± she said, revulsion clear in her voice.


    ¡°It might be useful for enemies that can¡¯t be easily cut, don¡¯t you think?¡± I asked, slightly amused that her feelings mirrored my own so closely.


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    ¡°What about the dress?¡± Adra asked, sounding a little amused at our reaction.


    ¡°I might experiment with it, just to see if I can learn something from that active effect, but in all honesty, I don¡¯t want to wear it, at least not in its current state.¡± I admitted.


    ¡°But you know that spell we use on our clothes from time to time, it might work on this as well.¡± I suggested, reaching into my nearby magic bag, to pull out my grimoire.


    The spell was relatively simple, at least for a spell that I couldn¡¯t cast by directly using the runes, only requiring a strange chant that moved the infused Astral Power into a spell-formation. Stepping away from the others, just to make sure nothing went wrong, I started to read directly from the page, not even trying to understand the sounds I was making, I had failed to do that already, instead I simply channelled Astral Power into my voice, letting it flow out.


    Some thirty seconds later, the formation wrapped around the dress and was completed, magical energy suffusing the enshrouded area to fulfill its cleansing effect. Only that the effect didn¡¯t seem to budge the dress, if anything it was a little more dirty, as if some of the dirt that had fallen away was replaced.


    ¡°Looks like the mud is as much part of it as the fabric.¡± Adra remarked, looking at it a little more intrigued.


    ¡°Sadly, you are right. There might be a way to change that, but I have little to no experience with the manipulation of magic items not made from my Ice.¡± I admitted, shaking my head in disappointment. Having a magical garment would be useful, even if my preferred choice wouldn¡¯t be a dress, certainly not a gauzy, white ensemble such as this might have been, when it had been whole and clean. No, I liked my leathers, even if they were a little restrictive at times and my feathered cloak, despite my attachment to it, was simply too warm to wear most of the time now.


    ¡°Well, the items are¡­ something.¡± I admitted, shaking my head at the look of the mace again. Part of me wondered if it was some sort of prank-item and couldn¡¯t rule out the possibility.


    ¡°What do you think, stay here for another hour or two, just to relax, before we make our way back to the dwarven camp? That way, we can stay in the cottage again and set out to their hold tomorrow morning, maybe even with an escort.¡± I asked and the others agreed to the idea.


    We spread out again, with me leaning against the tree and Sigmir¡¯s head in my lap, while Adra and Rai were catching some sun-rays nearby.


    ¡°Out of curiosity, Rai, Adra, do you have an idea about your path forward?¡± I asked, after some thirty minutes of comfortable silence. ¡°Lenore managed to break through the second Divide using the swamp and Sigmir mentioned that she might be able to cross the second Divide soon, that she has an idea what path to take. Do you have an idea what your path might entail?¡± I explained while gently caressing Sigmir¡¯s face, a proud smile curling my lips.


    ¡°I don¡¯t think I¡¯ve reached the end of the path, when it comes to that strange Shadow-realm. I¡¯ll continue to experiment with it, maybe I¡¯ll find my path in the Shadows. But I think I need a few more levels, before I can even try. I mostly caught up to you, but not quite yet.¡± Rai answered, looking pensive. I felt a surge of pride, even if his latest experiments were quite far removed from the things I had taught him, my pupil was truly coming into his own.


    ¡°I remember the writings of my elders and I don¡¯t think it¡¯ll be easy to cross the second divide, unless I bond with a tree. But that would bind me to a single place, near my tree and grove, something I don¡¯t want to do just yet. So we¡¯ll have to look for opportunities, it will take quite a bit of life-force to push me past the second Divide.¡± Adra explained, sounding almost apologetic.


    I nodded at the two of them, as I considered the differences between the races.


    ¡°What about you, Ylva? Any idea?¡± I asked, even if I had an inclining what the answer would be.


    ¡°Ideas, yes. Opportunity? Not so much. The lower the level of a spirit, the harder it is to cross the divides. And this one might be especially hard for me, given that I strengthened my Divine Bloodline. But if we find some more Divine Blood, that would help a great deal.¡± she answered, her maw clearly stretched into a wolfish smile.


    ¡°I doubt that we¡¯ll find something like that but I¡¯ll try to find out if there are more problems with the Black Wolves further south, maybe we¡¯ll find a suitable snack for you.¡± I chuckled, making a mental note to take a long look into the forum during my next log-out.


    ¡°As for myself, I¡¯m not sure where my path will lead me. I will have to meditate on it, maybe something will come to me before long. Hopefully before we stumble across something similar to the swamp, it would be a waste to gain a lot of levels that might strengthen us even more if we gain them after crossing over.¡± I chuckled, causing Adra to roll her eyes, at the idea that we would be that lucky again.

 Chapter 304

    ¡°So, you made it back¡­¡± Helmaic greeted us, as we climbed the hill we had made our camp on, some ten days earlier. The cottage I had built was still there, standing solidly, if a little thawed, making me want to take a closer look. In comparison, the dwarven camp looked a little more build-out and I was reasonably sure that a few of the faces had changed. A quick head-count confirmed that idea, there were simply more dwarves than there had been when we had left, milling around and maintaining both their equipment and the camp itself. I was quite impressed that, other than a slight raised eyebrow on Helmaic¡¯s part, there was no reaction to my changed appearance.


    ¡°Indeed, it is good to see you again, Helmaic. I hope your wait wasn¡¯t too unpleasant?¡± I asked, trying to keep up a professional and calm facade.


    ¡°Nothing much happened here, we rotated people back to the hold, making sure that there were some here at all times. We also made sure that none of those shambling crawlers started to make their way towards the hold. What about you, did you have success?¡± he asked in return.


    ¡°We did but I think I will relate the details to the Thane himself. Suffice to say, the swamp was crawling with undead. The problem is solved, at least for now. The implications of our findings will be something you, as a people, will have to deal with.¡± I explained, trying to make it sound both reasonable but suitably impressive. Judging by the grave expression on his face, I thought that I had been successful.


    ¡°Now, you said that you¡¯d guide us back to the Hold. But there are quite a few more dwarves here, what are your plans there?¡± I asked, looking around.


    ¡°We¡¯ll leave in the morning. That way, we can easily make it to the Hold in the afternoon and you can report to the Thane. Is that acceptable for you?¡± he asked, causing me to nod.


    ¡°Good. I¡¯m afraid I¡¯ll have to lead one last patrol during the evening but you can talk to Darin, my second in command if you need anything.¡± he explained and pointed out one of the dwarves.


    We returned to the cottage, the others discussing what chores we¡¯d have to do for the evening and who would do them, while I placed a hand on the cottage, slowly regaining my connection to the Ice that I had created days earlier. I was quite impressed that it was still in as good a shape as it was, despite the few sunny and overall warm days we had. There was some thawing, but nothing I couldn''t get rid of. I felt Lenore perk up in the back of my mind, watching as I used my Ice-Magic to repair the imperfections, reinforcing the structure to make sure it would easily serve us another day.


    At the same time, the others spread out, Adra and Ylva going out to hunt, hopefully getting some dinner, while Rai and Sigmir were gathering some firewood. Once I had the cottage in a serviceable shape, I followed Sigmir, helping them with the wood.


    Later, while I was cooking, Sigmir sat nearby, eyes closed and Ylva resting nearby. As I watched, her Aura flared around her and I could see the tension on her face, a snarl twisting her lips as her brows furrowed. For almost five minutes, she sat there with her aura burning around her, as sweat poured down her face and into her clothes. Suddenly, a trickle of blood was running out of her nose and with a loud gasp, her aura flared once again before vanishing.


    I could see her pale, the pained expression making me rush over and as soon as I was next to her, her eyes flickered open and I found myself engulfed in a crushing hug, strong enough that I worried about my ribcage.


    Held like that, I could feel Sigmir shake and managed to get my arms around her, to return the hug, as I stroked her back, muttering with what little breath I had that everything was alright. After a moment of the clinging hug, she pulled back and gave me a kiss almost painfully intense, bruising my lips a little. As we kissed, I felt her arms relax and the shaking fade and the kiss changed, it became no less intense but instead of needy and desperate it was pleasurable and passionate, hot enough that I was worried the nearby cottage might melt.


    You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.


    Finally, her arms fully relaxed and I could get a little distance, so I was able to look at her.


    ¡°Are you alright, love?¡± I asked, the intensity of her emotions worrying me, just a little.


    There was a strange smile on her face, some of it was sadness and exhaustion but there was more to it. Before i could even try to puzzle out what it meant, she spoke.


    ¡°I will be. While I didn¡¯t challenge the second Divide, I tried to put myself into the same state of mind as I was during the battle earlier. I tried to imagine what it would be like if I failed to protect you, if Rai hadn¡¯t managed to break you out of that strange spell. If I lost you.¡± she explained and her behaviour made sense to me.


    Not knowing what to say, I gave her a gentle kiss on the lips before standing up and adding one to her forehead. ¡°Remember, you need to relax as well.¡± I reminded her, before moving back to the cook-fire, making sure that nothing had burned in the meantime. She followed after me, simply sitting next to me, as I continued to cook.


    As the evening continued, her need to be close to me remained, with her sticking as close to me as my shadow, constantly reaching out to touch me, as if to remind herself that I was there and real.


    Later, after the moon had risen, I decided that I wanted to do some thinking on my own, the question how I would be able to challenge the second divide at the forefront of my mind. Knowing that Sigmir would want me nearby, I decided to simply plop myself down on her lap, snuggle in with her arms wrapped around me and let my mind drift.


    ¡°Lenore, could you share your experience of crossing the second divide?¡± I asked, using our mental connection to invite her into my mind.


    ¡°I could share, but I don¡¯t think it will help you. We are fundamentally different beings and our paths are vastly different.¡± she reminded me. For a moment, I considered if it would be a good idea before deciding to try on my own for now. But how?


    Before breaking through the first divide, I had felt a connection to the moon and the strange potion from Kallista had helped me to fully establish it. If I understood the laws governing magic correctly, I¡¯d need to strengthen that connection, to draw upon its power to strengthen myself. There was also the crystallisation of that connection, sitting in my chest and letting my Astral Power flow through it, I had been fully unable to do anything with that crystal, but it was there. Maybe now that I had reached level 100, I would be able to interact with it, using it to grow stronger.


    Or maybe I was running entirely into the wrong direction, that was also a possibility.


    For now, there were two avenues of experimentation, the first was the connection to the moon, the other the crystal sitting in my chest. As the moon was still small, slowly waxing over the next few days, I decided to focus on the crystal for now.


    Remembering how I had joined my mind with the Astral River to visit the Grandmother, just two weeks ago, I decided to try it the other way around. Maybe, if I sent my mind into my own Astral Power, following its flow, I would be able to interface with that crystal, the silvery tear sitting next to my heart.


    It was an interesting experience, letting my mind follow the Astral Power flowing through my body, so similar to the feeling of vastness when I delved into the Astral River. There was a confusing mess of power around my mind, not the neat and tidy streams of the Astral River, where each element was separated into its own stream. The only distinct strand within me was a single strand of silvery, cold power, the element of Ice. Maybe, there was a way to filter the Astral Power within me, so I only had the elements I had an affinity for within me, that way, my power would rise.


    It was a thought for another day, for now, I wanted to follow the Astral Power until I found the tear-shaped crystal, near my heart. But how to get there? I tried to get a feeling for the flow of power, trying to correlate what I was feeling around me to the body my mind normally inhabited.


    Suddenly, I felt a mental pull from Lenore and slowly the awareness of my body returned. And with the awareness of my body came a blinding headache and the feeling of being physically shaken.


    ¡°Stop, love, please.¡± I muttered, feeling Sigmir¡¯s arms around me, shaking me.


    An explosive sigh came from somewhere near my head and I heard Sigmir¡¯s frantic voice, ¡°I couldn¡¯t wake you. When you started bleeding, I tried but I couldn¡¯t, you wouldn¡¯t wake.¡±


    Raising my hand to my face, I felt a trickle of blood dripping from my nose, reminding me of the state she had been in, just a bit earlier.


    ¡°I guess I need some rest as well. Why don¡¯t we get some shut-eye, love?¡± I asked, keeping my eyes closed, letting Sigmir carry me into our cottage and take me to bed. Thinking was unpleasant.

 Interlude- Forum: Kolyug under Siege

    Official Road to Purgatory-Beta Forum


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    Hey Guys


    In my last thread, I asked about the events around the northern city of Kolyug and, oh boy, have there been developments. When I made the last thread, things were weird. They still are, but with an added dose of ¡°wtf¡± and ¡°holy hell, get me out of here¡±. For those not nearby, meaning pretty much everyone, I don¡¯t think I¡¯ve seen another Traveller in the city over the last few days, let me fill you in.


    I told you that there was paranoia in the air and a few others explained that there might be some powerful wizard/sorcerer, or whatever you want to call a spellcaster, lurking in the area, aiming to take over the city, or maybe just burn it down. Apparently, said spellcaster had been playing with fire, literally, and has tried to incorporate fire into the animals of the north. Why any remotely sane being thought that bears the size of a small bus with the ability to spit fire would be a good idea, I cannot fathom but apparently, that guy thought it was just what the world of Mundus desperately needed. And because just fire-spitting bears would be boring, he added wolves, elk and pretty much anything he could get his fingers on, giving them all the ability to spit fire and had them attack Kolyug.


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    Luckily, the city seemed to be rather fireproof, especially once the stupid critters and spring melted the river, giving the city an additional supply-route. Why that wizard thought sieging a city located at a large river, with a harbour mind you, would be a good idea if his forces are all using fire as their main-attack and seem to be quite allergic to water, that will be a question for someone else.


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    Well, that sounds rather f*cked up. I¡¯m currently guarding a caravan, just a day or two out, we had some trouble with normal wildlife and one of the villages the caravan normally traded a little was a complete ghost-town, but otherwise, things were reasonably calm. Can you give some more information, maybe even post a video? It sounds bad but I really don¡¯t want to abandon my current quest.


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    So, Kolyug is going down? Can¡¯t say I¡¯m sad about that, stupid trolls¡­


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    Maybe they want to test some siege-mechanics or something, somewhere where people won¡¯t be too pissed if things bug out.


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    Wouldn¡¯t that be easier in some sort of controlled sandbox, specifically set up for it, Goliry?


    And, Lenoidas, just for you:


    burningfields.avi.


    From atop seamless, dark-grey battlements, the camera looks down, over what can only be described as a hellish wasteland. The whole area, starting at the walls and for hundreds of meters, the land has been scoured clean, nothing remaining but ashes, some with a few glimmering embers remaining.


    There seem to be strange, fiery creatures still in the area, all of them keeping quite a bit of distance to the wall, prowling the burned area, looking for anything that might be flammable. A thin, slightly different coloured line stretches through the wasteland, a road made from stone, apparently undamaged despite the damage to the surrounding area. Past the wasteland are still forests but even there, some damage is obvious, burned out areas stretching into them, mostly going in one direction.


    The camera follows the battlements for a bit, providing a view over the town, made from a similar grey rock as the walls, with people scurrying from their homes, spending as little time in the open as possible. Finally, the view pans over a wide river, a few boats are out, maybe fishing, and on the other shore is more burned-down land, albeit a lot less than on the other side. But there, too, are fiery monsters on the prowl.


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    So, yeah, I think the video speaks for itself. This is f*cked up.


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    Depends, with the sandbox. If they want to see if their algorithms for a spreading effect work, as in, how would information and actions resulting from an event spread, that would require the whole world. Especially if Travellers and communications such as these influence the spread and thus the events.


    It¡¯s hard to compute how the flapping of a butterfly¡¯s wings might cause a tornado on the other side of the world and all that jazz. I could see them testing what happens if a city is destroyed in a fully simulated world, simply to make sure that they know what happens. Because, let¡¯s be honest here, at some point, some Travellers will destroy cities, castles, and countries, I can almost guarantee it.


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    Oh, my¡­ Looks toasty.


    And yeah, Goliry, I have to agree with you, they certainly want to test how the world reacts to change, whether their systems work or not. I think that maybe they even reduced the difficulty of some achievements, like governing a castle and region, just so there¡¯s a chance to test those systems.


    Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.


    No, I don¡¯t know that one, but if I think about it realistically, the Duke Highever seemed very eager, maybe that¡¯s because they reduced the difficulty, maybe it¡¯s just that way to make players feel welcome, I don¡¯t know. We¡¯ll have to see how it will look in the life-version, some time next year.


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    Holy hell, I¡¯m not all that religious but if they wanted to depict hell on earth, I think they got close.


    I¡¯ll have to talk with the leader of the caravan, maybe we¡¯ll just wait for a few days for the situation to finish developing. Cause, if I¡¯m honest, I have absolutely no desire to run into that.


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    Thanks for proving me right, game. I¡¯m so glad that my group and I are weeks away from that city. But it¡¯ll be interesting how the north reacts and how that develops further. Hopefully someone can keep an eye on it, someone other than me, that is, I¡¯ll keep my distance, thankyouverymuch.


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    Got a new development and I¡¯m somewhat stunned. During the afternoon, a guy appeared in the wasteland, looking rather flamboyant, well, not really but the pun was necessary, and started addressing the city. I only got the tail-end of his speech, needed some time to get my behind onto the battlement, but what happened next was jaw-dropping. Look for yourself.


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    waitwhat.avi


    In the middle of the burned wasteland, hovering just a little above the charred land, with a plethora of fiery creatures gathered around, is a man. He is dressed in black, flowing soft clothes and in his hand is an ornate staff of obsidian capped with a large, blood-red gemstone, shining with orange, flickering light. The fiery creatures seem to be displaying fealty to him, as he speaks in a booming voice. He is speaking normally, relaxed even, but nonetheless, his voice is thundering across the burned land.


    ¡°You have heard my demands, Kolyug. Your leader, the so-called Kol, can accept them, or the city will burn. You have until tomorrow to decide.¡± he finishes, turning around, his black cloak with a red-flame symbol billowing from the movement.


    Suddenly, a soft sound shatters the silence, the slow clapping of a single pair of hands, mocking in cadence, especially with the laughter carried by the wind. The recording focuses on another figure, this one looking quite plain in comparison to the first one, a woman, waring only simple, homespun clothes, slowly walking across the charred land. On the recording, you can see her lips moving but no voice is audible.


    ¡°What are you going to do about it?¡± the hovering figure asks, his tone mocking.


    Again, the woman answers but not in an audible way. But just from the mocking smile on her lips, it is clear that her answer was not with the reverence the hovering wizard seems to demand.


    ¡°So be it. You can serve as an example for the city, what happens if they defy me!¡± the floating figure shouts, the roar bellowing across the land. He rises higher, just a few meters, and the staff in his hand flares up, the gem shining brightly. From the fiery creatures around him come pained howls, as streams of power, visible despite the distance, are drained away from them, into the staff. With incredibly swift, secure motions, the floating wizards moves his staff, flaming runes appearing in the air in front of him, burning brightly, with dimmer lines forming to connect them.


    ¡°Now, you DIE!¡± the figure shouts, as fifteen runes flare together, a flare mirrored by the gem in his staff. From the middle of the formation, a white-hot lance shoots out, hot enough to cause visible disturbance in the air, looking like a small sun. Surprised screams are heard from the wall, the heat powerful enough to reach them, despite the distance.


    Just before the lance can reach the woman, she throws something small towards it and, in a mind-boggling display, the glowing lance simply flows into whatever she has thrown, vanishing without a trace. Focusing back on the woman, with some difficulty due to the overheated air between them, shows that she is laughing merrily, catching the thing she had thrown. A simple, small nut, no larger than an acorn. That was all she needed to stop the massive lance of fire.


    Again, her lips move and she makes a simple gesture, throwing something else towards the man, who tries to escape, only to realise that thin vines stretched from the ground, capturing his legs and holding him firm. The small object, another nut, hits him in the chest and again, the result boggles the mind. For a moment, there is a flash of green light and when it fades, the man and the fiery creatures are gone, replaced by a young oak-tree.


    Not a single sound is heard, as the woman starts walking towards Kolyug, grass replacing the ash around her, in a slowly growing circle.


    waitwhat.avi


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    After that display, the woman walked up to the gates, telling the trolls that the Grandmother has come to visit the Kol, and when she did, they couldn¡¯t open the gate fast enough. The whole friggin¡¯ city went nuts at that point, it seems that whoever that lady is, she is some sort of local legend, who has been in the area forever, teaching some people, helping others, like some fairy grandmother. Only that she also had some darker stories about her and, judging by that display above, I can see her kick serious ass.


    Apparently, she came by cause that fire-guy tried to kill her disciple and the Grandmother felt she had to teach him some manners.


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    ¡°The Grandmother¡±? Are you sure with that title? Cause when I talked to my boss and mentioned it, he got as pale as I¡¯d ever seen him. The guy is a life-long mercenary, the type that would happily charge a superior force, shouting something about dining in hell, but that got him spooked.


    So, I pushed a little and guess what? Turns out we had met the Grandmother¡¯s disciple and who else would it be, if not our very own Morgana? Apparently, she showed him some sort of book, given to her by that Grandmother, clearly demonstrating her affiliation.


    @ Morgana, care to comment?


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    Oh¡­ my¡­ fucking¡­ GOD!


    I thought I was quite impressive, casually using five-rune formations for spells or seven if I want something bigger. But FIFTEEN?! And the other simply brushes it aside like some minor cantrip?


    If Morgana was taught by that, I¡¯m calling shenanigans. But I¡¯m also not surprised by whatever rabbit she pulls out of her behind next.

 Chapter 305

    The next morning, after breakfast, the dwarves broke up their camp, while we casually sat around, relaxing a little before we would move. We had no need to break camp, once the dwarves were ready, I waved my hand for effect while invoking a mix of shatter and diamond-dust runes in my mind, channelling them through my Ice-Magic into the structure, letting it burst into a flurry of snow, that I quickly dispersed in the surrounding area. With that taken care off, the dwarves formed a formation around us and we were off.


    As we travelled, I became a little amused at the dwarven behaviour, they acted as if they were protecting us, that we¡¯d need them to guard us from harm. I had stealthily Observed them, training my ability to cast concealed spells, and none of them was above level sixty. A respectable level, at least in comparison to the general populace, if my research on the forum was to be trusted, but compared to us, especially with the massive boost we had received from killing undead in the swamp? No real comparison.


    I was not surprised that nothing tried to attack our group, few beasts of the forest were willing to attack a group that size, they¡¯d have to be desperate. It would have been even less likely if Lenore wasn¡¯t relaxing in her Hallow, hiding the powerful aura emanating from her. Just with that aura, no beast would voluntarily attack us, not without some dire need or force in play. Beasts were much more sensible to such auras, at least that was what Sigmir had told me, when I had asked. In practice, it meant that we were almost never bothered by the local wildlife when travelling, a mechanic most likely put into play to prevent high-powered characters getting annoyed by local wildlife and going on a killing-spree in response.


    We travelled mostly in silence, the dwarves occupied with their serious task of protecting us poor, weak adventurers, while none of us were in a mood to talk, with strangers present. The months of travelling in a small, contained group had turned all of us a little suspicious of outsiders.


    I spent my time conversing with Lenore, mostly telling her about my Ice-Magic, explaining why I did certain things and how I felt they connected. It was rather interesting, the difference between teaching Rai and teaching Lenore. Rai was an attentive student and, in my opinion, quite talented in Darkness-, especially Shadow-, magic but there was always the problem of language. Speaking was simply a lacking tool when it came to conveying magical theory, something grounded in concepts that often took hours or even days to explain in words and even then, something was lost in translation.


    On the other hand, the bond between Lenore and me meant that I was able to use those concepts in their full glory, letting her experience my personal understanding and allowing her to draw her own conclusions from there. It was a far superior teaching-technique, to the point that I made a mental note to look into ways to create a telepathic bond using Mind Magic. Such a bond would be a valuable tool, not just for teaching but also when it came to sneaking around, a way to communicate without speaking while retaining the full vocabulary without the need for a dedicated sign-language.


    There was some connection between Sigmir and me, not necessarily a mental one but there was one, maybe if I studied it, I would be able to learn more. Even if I only strengthened my connection to Sigmir, it would be time well spent, especially if I could do my studies and experiments while closely snuggled up to her, maybe naked for maximum amount of skin-contact. Yes, that would be a valuable avenue of inquiry indeed.


    Our path had been quite level for most of the day until it started climbing in the early afternoon. When I asked Lenore to do some scouting, she told me that we were now quite close to one of the mountain-ridges that formed the large valley in which the swamp had been and were moving into a smaller valley, leading into those mountains. Suddenly, as she was flying, I felt surprise over our link and moments later, she came back.


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


    After landing back on my shoulder, she placed her head against my temple and I felt a memory-stream burst into me, with a clarity unlike any of the memories I had received from her so far. I felt myself flying, in perfect clarity that brought a tear to my eye, above the forest, looking down onto a hill-side, with a city built into it. Small, square houses, partially buried into the hill they were built on, dotted the area, and quite a few figures, most likely dwarves were walking around. Near the top of the hill was a larger building, constructed in the same manner, but more ornate, making me think that it was important. All around the city, stretching from the lowest building to the top of the ridge above was a wall, with stairs allowing for rapid movement around the place. Before I could grasp more information, the memory cut off and I barely managed to keep myself from stumbling, as my consciousness returned to my body.


    ¡°It¡¯s an impressive city.¡± Lenore admitted, her mind comparing it to the other places we had visited and only Kolyug managed to surpass the Hold of Clan Ashenforge. These dwarves seemed to have a solid power-base, the slope making it a nightmare to siege, unless someone managed to fortify the other slope, which would be a major challenge. The only question was if they had ways to grow food inside or, given that they were dwarves, maybe some sort of tunnel-system, leading to other places, places where they had farms.


    ¡°I agree. Now I¡¯m even more excited about getting three days to study in their library.¡± I admitted, smiling at the idea to finally learn more about magic. Looking for my own path was great and all, allowing me to form my magical abilities into something uniquely suited to me but at the same time, I might overlook something, simply because I had no idea about the possibilities. There was so much about magic, so much to learn, that I wondered just how long it would take to master. It was certainly a project for the full release of the game, there was no way to even come close within the limited time of the Beta.


    We continued walking on, and soon, I was able to see the Hold with my own eyes, not just through Lenore¡¯s eyes. The dwarves led us out of the forest, up some stairs and then the forest opened up and we could see for ourselves. It was even more impressive seeing it from below, the solid wall seeming like a sheer cliff, impossible to climb. Beyond the wall, the flat roof-tops were barely visible, making me understand that it was even more difficult to attack than I had thought. If the dwarves placed some sort of ranged attackers on those roofs, with bows or something similar, they could shoot down-hill, pelting attackers as they approached.


    ¡°There, this is the Hold of Clan Ashenforge. Impressive, isn¡¯t it?¡± Helmaic said, his voice thick with pride.


    ¡°Yes, yes, it is.¡± I admitted, a sentiment echoed by the others.


    ¡°From now on, it¡¯ll be a lot more stairs. I hope you enjoy climbing.¡± he added, grinning. Looking up, I realised he was right. The Hold was high above us, a distance that reminded me of the high-rises I had seen when I had visited a major city, easily two-hundred meters in vertical height. And there was no elevator, only a lot of stairs.


    ¡°Joy. Let¡¯s get to it, We have a report to make.¡± I grumbled, getting a chuckle from Helmaic.


    As we approached, the gates opened for us, or rather for the dwarves with us, and we moved inside. I took a good look at the gates as we walked up the stairs on one side of them and they were, quite frankly, massive. Easily half a meter of solid metal, moving smoothly, without sound, like a well-oiled machine. Atop the gate-houses were more dwarves, keeping a look on things, guarding the gates.


    Inside, I was looking around, feeling tall for the first time. Other than the rest of my group, people were roughly my size or smaller, only built a lot more sturdy. As we continued to move on, there was some pointing, making me realise that visitors to this place were rare. Looking around, there were quite a few shops, places I was planning to visit once we got our money. But for now, we had stairs to climb.

 Chapter 306

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    The blue box that had popped open, just as we climbed the last set of stairs and stood in front of the Thane¡¯s seat, the High Hall of Clan Ashenforge, seemed to mock me. I had gained the Athletics-skill a long time ago, when Sigmir and I had just met and been forced to run away from her tribe, running for days on end, pushing me past my limits. It had devolved over time, because I had never really used it, whenever I had needed to push my body, I had used Blood Magic to strengthen it, which didn¡¯t count as pushing the physical body, for the purpose of Athletics. But now, in the dwarven Hold, I didn¡¯t want to use Blood Magic, just in case someone was watching who might identify what I was doing, causing us problems.


    Which resulted in a burning pain in my Avatar¡¯s thighs, which had never climbed more than a single flight of stairs and even those occurrences had been rarities. The others were in a similar state of annoyance, although for a different reason. For them, the stairs had an incredibly annoying length and height, built for the diminutive physique of dwarves, forcing them to focus on every step or risk to stumble.


    The dwarves around us seemed to carefully hide their amusement, but I had a strong inclination that it was there. Not that it mattered. There was just not enough snow and ice around to make my displeasure known.


    The High Hall itself was strangely unimpressive, a little larger than the other buildings but I had a feeling that we only saw a small part of their architecture, an entrance-hall so to speak, with the rest of the building hidden underground. Otherwise, each dwarven building was merely a square block of about five on five meters, with a flat roof on which you could walk using stairs on the side up the slope. In comparison, the High Hall was maybe eight meters wide, most of which was taken up by a gate.


    Again, we were allowed entry by the guards inside and my theory was quickly confirmed. Inside was what looked like a ready room for guards and, to my unending annoyance, another flight of stairs, this one leading down. Maybe that was the reason dwarves got a bonus to endurance or something, they loved climbing stairs. It was there that we ran into a small snag, mostly that the stairs and tunnels within the mountains were sized for dwarves. A race that had a height-range between a meter and maybe a meter and a half had no need to build tunnels in which two-meter twenty tall, Giantblood had comfortable room. She would have duck the entire time and fully bend over, just to get through doors. Even Adra and Rai would have to make themselves smaller, in order to fit.


    ¡°Helmaic, is there a place where my companions can rest easily, that way they don¡¯t need to squeeze into your tunnels?¡± I asked.


    The dwarf looked at my companions, looked at the tunnel and his face fell, making it obvious that he had simply forgotten about that small, architectural problem.


    ¡°I think there was a building built for traders, coming in from the outside. It¡¯s down on the mountain, your companions can rest there.¡± he suggested and I heard a soft groan from the others, at the prospect of climbing back down the all the stairs we had just climbed up.


    ¡°That would work. Maybe they can just rest outside, in the sun, while I have my talk with the Thane?¡± I asked, with a small grin on my face.


    ¡°Yes, we can do that. I¡¯ll ask someone from the kitchens to bring them something to eat and drink, that way they can enjoy the day.¡± Helmaic picked up on the idea and nodded, quickly sending a dwarf to another place. The others looked a lot happier with the prospect of sitting outside, in the warm spring-sun, instead of climbing down the stairs again.


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    After giving Sigmir a quick kiss, I followed the dwarves into the mountain. The tunnels were quite interesting, a lot different from the architecture outside. The buildings outside had been undecorated, smooth stone-blocks, solidly build but boring. The tunnels we were walking in, on the other hand, had beautifully carved decorations in the walls, bas relief depictions of dwarves, doing all kinds of things, from fighting to smithing, and were illuminated by gorgeous wrought-iron lanterns, shedding a clear, white light. The lanterns were obviously magical and a short peek with Lenore¡¯s sight allowed me to see more and again, I was impressed, the magic had been worked into the metal, in a way that made it look natural.


    As un-impressed as I had been with their architecture above ground, they made up for it with the work they had done underground, hidden from the world.


    We continued through the tunnels for a minute or two, Helmaic walking with me, pointing out a few particular pieces of artwork and soon, we were at a nicely decorated door. Helmaic told me it was the Thane¡¯s office and knocked on the door. I was a little surprised that there were no guards insight but maybe that was just not necessary in the Hold. A voice bade us entry, speaking dwarven, which I officially didn¡¯t understand. At least that was how I played it.


    Inside was a sturdy desk at which a dwarven woman sat, hair in a bun and with a pair of glasses, screaming secretary. I had to hide a chuckle at the way some programmer had apparently added earthen cliches to Mundus, instead looking around while Helmaic explained who I was and what I was doing here. The Thane¡¯s antechamber was decorated in a similar fashion as the tunnels outside, but with a few stone benches, for people to wait on. They were currently empty, but after a he exchanged a few sentences with the secretary, Helmaic told me that we¡¯d have to wait a few minutes before the Thane had time for us. So we sat on one of the hard benches, in a way reminiscent of any Earth waiting-room, ever.


    Luckily the wait was truly just a few minutes, not the ¡°few minutes¡± one had to wait at the doctor, that took multiple hours.


    Inside, waiting next to a wide desk, made from dark granite, was a single dwarf, with some gray in the hairs on his head and beard. He was wearing an elegant tunic made from some dark cloth with simple trousers boots. The only weapon in sight was hung behind his desk, a war-axe with a shield next to it. The way the light reflected of the weapon¡¯s edge made me think that it was quite sharp and the sturdy look made it obvious that it was a real weapon, not some sort of decoration.


    ¡°Greetings, Morgana.¡± the dwarf greeted me, while offering his hand.


    ¡°Greetings, Thane Ashenforge.¡± I returned his greeting and we exchanged a solid handshake. There was a feeling of strength and solidity, for lack of better word, making me think that the dwarf was a lot stronger and heavier than he had any right to be. Maybe it was a class-thing.


    ¡°We have done as you asked us, and dealt with the undead in the swamp and even managed to find and defeat the source.¡± I told him, triggering the quest turn-in.


    I could see his eyes going wide when he scanned the text, especially when he came to the amount of money he now owed us. We had destroyed a lot of undead in that first week, when we had constantly looked for them in the outer layer of the swamp. And that was in addition to the amount the system had calculated for the Will-o-Wisps and the double-boss.


    ¡°There were that many undead?¡± he asked, concern clear in his voice.


    ¡°Why, my Thane, what does it say?¡± Helmaic, who had come in with me, asked.


    ¡°We owe these adventurers a lot, not just in coin but in gratitude. You said that some twenty undead nearly overwhelmed your group when you entered for the first time?¡± the Thane asked, looking to Helmaic who nodded in response.


    ¡°You faced less than a percent of the forces in that swamp.¡± the Thane told him and now it was Helmaic¡¯s turn to get pale and give me a bow in gratitude.


    ¡°I will send someone to get your coin, and I will send someone to the crafters, so they can talk to you, so the items they will craft for you can adequately express our gratitude. Please, sit and tell me what was the source for the infestation, what was going on there?¡± he asked, gesturing to a comfortable couch. As I walked over, I glanced at the message that the quest was complete and I had gained EXP, albeit a lot less than I had anticipated. I would have to take a closer look, later. For now, I had a report to give.

 Chapter 307

    Reporting to the Thane demonstrated that he was an intelligent dwarf. After sending Helmaic on some errands, including one to bring tea and some snacks, he made himself comfortable and let me speak. The only interruption was from a servant, bringing the ordered snacks, otherwise he let me fully report, without interrupting, before asking his questions. And those questions demonstrated that he had experience in the field, had walked to walk and was now able to talk the talk. Not only did he want to know everything when it came to the geography but also to tactics employed, both by us and the enemies in the swamp, special characteristics, anything that might give his people an advantage in the future.


    Part of me wanted to use Observe on him, but I didn¡¯t want to come across as a rude or uncultured person, so I kept my curiosity in check. It was at that time, when my curiosity flared up that I realised just how uncommon it should be, for the ruler in a world like Mundus to be left alone with an unknown operator like me. Yet, here we were, sitting in his office, without anyone I could detect nearby. Now, whether that was a testament to their trust or stealth, I didn¡¯t know and wasn¡¯t inclined to test.


    Instead, I focused on answering the insightful questions, to the point that Lenore and I had to work together, using our connection to sift through the others memory, something I hadn¡¯t quite believed possible, to answer the Thane¡¯s questions. There were times when even both of us together were unable to come up with a good answer and in those times, he was courteous and explained why he had asked the question, in order to give us something to work with, joining us in forming theories on our observations and drawing conjunctures from them.


    What we ultimately concluded was that the changed area had been a long-past battlefield, from a bygone era, quite possibly the era of the ancient empire, and that countless beings had died there. Over time, slowly but surely, natural processes had accumulated Astral Power into the area, until the Astral Power had attracted a swamp-spirit, the Tzar Bolotnik. During the winter, said spirit had been forced to remain passive but the change in season and the accompanying changes in the Astral River had allowed it to become more active. Whether the Bolotnisa was a subordinate spirit the Tzar had summoned to his side or a local spirit that had been corrupted was a question neither of us could answer while the future of the area was unknown as well.


    We hypothesized that the spirit had infused enough of itself into the swamp to turn the swamp into an extension of itself and while Lenore had drained a lot of power from the swamp, time would allow new power to accumulate, eventually allowing the Tzar to gain a new body. How long that would take was unknown but the Thane was confident that the time would be measured in months, maybe even a year. I was rather surprised at that estimation, given that it had taken centuries for this event to occur and now he was talking in months? When I asked him about it, he explained that natural processes were generally slow but now a spirit was in the area, with a direct link into the Astral, speeding the process up by orders of magnitude.


    Finally, after the tea had been drunk and the snacks eaten, he again thanked me, declared me to be a Friend of the Dwarves of Ashenforge, with a small blue window declaring the change in reputation, and explained how we would receive our rewards.


    The silver, or gold, was easy, it would be delivered in a bag, but he asked with a twinkle in his eyes that we would use some of it locally, to buy supplies.


    The magic items were a little more complicated, he had already sent for the best Craftspeople of the Clan and they would talk to us in order to create items that we would wear with pride, remembering the Clan as we rose to prominence.


    I raised an eyebrow at that. In response, he only told me that we, as a small group, had managed to clear out an area that would have taken a bloody price from his clan, with a couple dwarves dying until they managed to figure out how things worked, especially with the Will-o-Wisp. Apparently, adventurers rarely stuck around their home, they went out on, well, adventure so only those who had little interest in gaining power remained at home, or those who were old but necessary to defend the Hold. I realised that there was something more to his tone but given that he was the ruler of this place and we were in his office, I could hardly question him.


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    And last but certainly not least, there was the time I was allowed to spend in the Hold¡¯s Library. I noticed a sly grin on his face when he told me that I would get my three days and that he would ask a Master Runesmith to join me there, so he could translate the books for me, as they were obviously written in dwarven. I had a sudden feeling that, if we the service we had rendered hadn¡¯t been important enough he might have forgotten about the translator or sent a simple scribe to do the task. It was a slightly underhanded way to do things but I couldn¡¯t complain too much, especially with my ability to speak Dwarven thanks to Lenore and the help he promised me. It made me wonder about my ability to record what I was reading, how that would interact with my ability, but I would have to see. Worst case, I would have to make notes, or rather dictate notes, for later consumption.


    Once everything was fully laid out, we both stood, shook hands again and he summoned a runner, a young looking dwarf, to guide me back to the surface and my friends. As I walked next to the dwarf, he soon began to ask questions about the world away from the Hold, about distant lands and adventures I had been on. I felt my lips curl into a bit of a smile as I spoke about a few of the places I had seen, some of them only in recordings on the Forum, causing a look of awe to settle onto his face. In return, I learned that the young dwarf, Fendelin was his name, had plans to become an adventurer himself, to travel the world, gaining power until finally returning to the Hold and become one of its protectors.


    A bit of probing garnered me the information that the protectors were a group of older dwarves, all retired adventurers, whose sacred task it was to defend the hold, that they essentially never left it. It was an interesting tidbit of information, one I should have suspected and it was certainly good to know.


    Soon, we were back at the surface, even as I questioned whether we had taken the same way up as we had taken down. I thought so but couldn¡¯t be sure. Even Lenore was rather unsure but she wasn¡¯t a fan of being below ground at the best of days, being a creature of the sky and all that. But we were back out and nearby, comfortably sitting in the sun, were my companions. I had to smile at the picture they presented, they had been given a checkered blanket and apparently a basket full of food and set up camp on one of the roofs, looking down into the valley as they were eating and soaking up the sun. I softly thanked Fendelin, who was quickly on his way, doing whatever tasks young dwarves had to do.


    Ylva must have heard me, her head swivelling around, quickly followed by Sigmir, who gave me a bright smile. I hesitated for a moment, the sun was a lot less enjoyable if you were sensitive to heat and the glare, but after that moment,I decided that it would be alright, at least for a bit.


    Sadly, the glaring sun was even more uncomfortable than I had thought, the heat instantly making me feel as if I was in an oven, sweat breaking out all over my body. Part of it was due to my still too warm clothes but the majority was due to my sensitivity. Grumbling, I considered what would be the best way to deal with it and came to the conclusion that I needed a personal cloud. A little bit of Ice-Magic quickly conjured up a cloud of cold mist, constantly replenished and cooled by my magic, making me comfortable, at least for now. I had no illusions that what I was doing was long-term sustainable but it solved my predicament and allowed me to tell the others about the events below.


    Once I was done, I focused on the notification I had received earlier, the one telling me about the fulfilled quest and the EXP gained. When we had fought the centaurs for the wolf-den, we had received a massive amount of almost half a million EXP, for the entire quest. Now, with a higher level and a similarly long quest, the reward had been a comparatively paltry eighty-thousand.


    As I thought about it, I realised the difference. The Swamp-Quest had been one we could have completed in a day, simply go in, figure out what is going on, maybe even without attacking and fighting the Tzar Bolotnik, or there might have been a way to escape without being forced to kill him, and get the EXP. The centaur-quest had been one that needed us to take the time, especially for the best reward, without giving us a nice source of enemies to grind, like the Shambling Crawlers had been. Killing them had been part of the quest-reward, in a way. And what a reward they had been.


    Just as I was nodding to myself, feeling like I had understood a little more about the system, a familiar voice brought my attention back to my surroundings.


    ¡°Morgana, you are back! Please, tell me, who is the Grandmother?!¡± Dargira asked, looking quite excited.

 Chapter 308

    It took me a second to comprehend her question and that she shouldn¡¯t know about it. Still clad in my personal cloud, I looked over to her, feeling my brows furrow.


    ¡°What are you talking about?¡± I asked, relatively sure I never told her about my connection. But I did tell quite a few natives about learning from the Grandmother, including a reasonably full tavern in Kolyug.


    ¡°There was a thread, about some town named Kolyug being under siege, incredible stuff. And then, some woman appeared, single-handedly broke up the siege in a matter of seconds and apparently said something about her disciple being attacked. Some people claimed said disciple being you.¡± Dargira explained, her voice getting more excited with each word.


    ¡°No, I haven''t seen the thread, things have been a little busy lately. If you would excuse me, I think I need to take a look.¡± I told her, giving the others a short look before triggering the log-out process, returning to my home-space.


    Setting the time-compression to a floating value, allowing me to act as fast as my brain could process information, I took a second to look down upon the clouds, from the cliff-top temple I had built in my home-space. It was a gorgeous view, making part of me ache to fly for myself, to taste that limitless freedom. But after a few moments, I moved into the library, with the ancient-looking computer, including a cathode-ray monitor the size of a small car. It was a pure affectation, the computer was as simulated as everything else, but there was a part of me that saw humour in using a computer that looked older than I was myself.


    Logging into the forum, I started looking for a thread about Kolyung, quickly finding it. I had read an earlier thread by the opening poster and given my opinion on the events around Kolyug but this one was new. Watching the videos, I was impressed, whoever that Spellcaster was, he had some skill. Those fiery monsters were tough and seemed to be controlled in some way, making me assume that the bear we had fought was a failed experiment, to be disposed. But maybe still monitored, if he had found my hair and used it to strike at me. Or someone else had attacked me, which was possible but I thought was less likely.


    Not that it really mattered, the last video was an impressive one, the Grandmother demonstrating that she was one incomprehensible woman. I couldn¡¯t even begin to guess how she had treated those small nuts to do what they did.


    On the other hand, what the spellcaster did looked a lot simpler and gave me a few ideas. To me, it looked like he had implanted those monsters around him with Eternal Ember, giving them abilities similar to those of the bear we had fought. But at the same time, he was still able to draw upon that power for himself allowing him to use a lot more energy than he might be able to harness normally, similar to my Overflow but using outside energy, not just what you had within you. It hadn¡¯t helped him against the Grandmother, making me wonder why he had fought at all, but that was a question I couldn¡¯t even begin to investigate.


    After that video and a theory that I was the disciple, thanks to something I had told a caravan-guard, the thread exploded a little. Old theories about me, being a plant for Pantheon-Entertainment resurfaced and things devolved from there.


    Stories about a being called the Grandmother were reported from various Travellers playing in the north, some simple tales of her helping a single person, others making her out to be a nearly mythical figure, akin to a force of nature. Some stories made her out to be the kindly, helpful Grandmother that gives valuable advice, alongside tea and cookies, other stories had a darker theme, speaking of a malevolent force that could only be avoided and hidden from. Meanwhile, the natives of Kolyug remembered the tale I had told in the inn, retelling and apparently embellishing it, especially my involvement with the Grandmother, and the few Travellers in town were lapping it up, adding fuel to the raging dumpster-fire that the thread had become.


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    For a moment, a brief, short moment, I considered involving myself but the prospect of the massive headache that would be made me reconsider almost as fast. Nothing good would come from arguing with people on the internet.


    Instead, I took the time to take care of a few necessities in the real world, before logging back into Road to Purgatory. I had been gone for maybe an hour, their time, most of which had been spent outside the capsule, in the shower. It was another interesting question, regarding the capsule¡¯s time compression and what it would do to society. If a person could work at a four times accelerated time-frame, thanks to the capsule, and was working all that time, would they get paid at the accelerated time, for the work done, or would they get paid the outside-world time, regardless of their accomplishments? I had a feeling that some companies would love to have employees that they could put into a capsule, no need for any real office-space, and get twice out of virtually every employee or even eight times the hours out of someone like me? I felt a small headache at the idea of auditing some of the financial records, when suddenly a work-day of more than twenty-four hours was not clear and easy indication that something was fishy but could be legitimate.


    On Mundus, nothing had really changed, the others had eaten some more from the picnic-basket the dwarves had made them, the sun had moved a little in the sky but that was it. Dargira was still there, trying to talk to Adra and Rai, who seemed to be rather uninterested in the conversation. Their focus shifted to me when I re-appeared and Dagira brightened a little.


    ¡°You are back! Please tell me who the Grandmother is, you have to know, don¡¯t you?!¡± she asked sounding excited again. Before I could even begin to answer, not that I really knew what to say, she looked over to Adra and, in an accusing voice, told me that my companions had declined to tell tales.


    ¡°I am not sure I can adequately describe the Grandmother. Suffice to say, she is an elder Power of the region and taught me quite a bit about magic. And that is all I¡¯m willing to divulge, I really don¡¯t want her mad at me.¡± I admitted, feeling a shudder run down my spine at the idea. I had no illusions about distance being a shield from the Grandmother¡¯s ire, especially not while I was carrying a gift from her with me, a gift that had been penned by her own hand and enchanted by her magic. If hair was a good link, an active magical effect should be even more potent, at least in my understanding.


    ¡°And why did she help you?¡± Dagira pressed, causing one of my eyebrows to quirk up.


    ¡°Do you mean why she taught me? Or do you mean why she appeared in Kolyug?¡± I asked in return, causing Adra to fully focus on me.


    ¡°What do you mean, appeared in Kolyug?¡± she asked, her voice relaxed but curious. Before I could answer, Dagira piped up, maybe hoping that volunteering information to Adra would make Adra willing to divulge information in return, similar to the game I had played with her a few nights ago.


    ¡°The Grandmother appeared in front of Kolyug and wasted some Firemage who was besieging the city with fire-monsters. Didn¡¯t you fight one of them, Morgana mentioned something along those lines.¡± she explained, causing Adra to nod.


    ¡°Yes, we did fight one strange fire-bear for the Adventurer''s Guild in Kolyug. Didn¡¯t you ask the Grandmother for help, right after you¡¯ve been attacked?¡± Adra asked, sounding very relaxed, as if the sun had put her almost to sleep. Dagira¡¯s eyes, in contrast, got wide as dinner-plates, flickering between Adra and me.


    For a moment, I considered to play it off but decided against it. No reason to, really.


    ¡°Yes, I did, but I had no idea she would react like that.¡± I admitted, causing Dagira to fully focus on me.


    ¡°You are saying that she went to Kolyug because you asked her to?¡± she asked, sounding almost incredulous. I could almost see the gears in her head turn, form conclusions, wondering if I had some sort of ultra-powerful backer that I could use to lay waste to any enemy I wanted. The idea that the Grandmother was obeying anyone but her own whim was ludicrous, causing me to chuckle.


    ¡°Well, I told her about being attacked, yes. Why she reacted how she did, I have no idea. Might have been boredom, might have been that I asked on a Tuesday, might have been that the sunset was particularly pretty, no idea. I have no authority over her. I doubt that even the Gods of this world can claim such authority.¡± I admitted, remembering some of the exchanges I had with the Grandmother.


    Dagira deflated a little at that and our talk switched to easier, simpler topics. Topics like our accommodations.

 Chapter 309

    The accomodations the dwarves had built for visitors some time in the past were similar to the rest of their architecture. A square, rather solid-looking, block that held the entrance into an underground living-space. There was no difference on the outside, even the door was so small that everyone but me had to duck to get in but at least the underground space was high enough for Sigmir, allowing her to stand tall.


    Once again, I was quite impressed with the dwarven architecture, what should, by all rights, be equivalent to a bunker, a depressing dungeon made from stone and earth, damp and musty from seepage and mold, was much more comfortable than I could have imagined. Sure, the architecture and art in the High Seat of the Thane had been impressive but more in the way that a museum or an old cathedral would be impressive and awe-inspiring. The guest-quarters were a homely building, the walls smooth, coloured in warm earth-tones with only few decorative carvings, the enchanted crystal-lamps giving off a comfortable glow, similar in colour to the orange of a new dawn.


    The first room, after moving underground, was a simple common-room, with two armchairs, a couch and a low table, all in front of a hearth that made me wonder where the chimney had been. I hadn¡¯t seen anything like that atop the houses and, unless I was quite wrong, we were right below the pathway between houses. It wasn¡¯t lit so I didn¡¯t have to worry, even if I were foolish enough to believe the dwarves hadn¡¯t solved that problem, a long time ago.


    Three doors, other than the one we had entered through, led away from the common-room, one staying level, leading to a pair of small bedrooms deeper in the mountain, one downwards, almost perpendicular to the slope above us with more sleeping-quarters and the final one to a dining-room and kitchen-combination. Again, a hearth was there to provide heat for cooking but what truly surprised me was that the sink could have been in any modern household on Earth, with a spigot and two levers. Curious, I tested what they did and indeed, the dwarves had warm, running water.


    With that in mind, I went back to the bedrooms and realised that there was a small door in both of them, leading to a shared bathroom, accessible through those rooms only. Again, it could have been in any modern house, with a large bathtub made from dark stone and everything a bathroom should have, but a shower. There was even a mirror, allowing me to get a better look at the changes Lenore¡¯s crossing of the second divide had caused within me. It was interesting just how well the avian features matched with my normal appearance, making me wonder if I should get some accessories for my earthen Wardrobe, maybe I¡¯d be able to find something with dark feathers. I felt Lenore¡¯s amusement at my thoughts, especially when she shared that yes, I definitely looked better with feathers, everyone did. There was an undercurrent of amusement at those silly little hairs we mammals had, alongside an image of her, preening with her gleaming, black feathers. Somehow, she did not appreciate my response, the mental image of a plucked chicken, ready to be cooked, sending back a feeling of sheer, unadulterated outrage.


    Having a friend that truly understood me was such a novel experience, bringing a few tears to my eyes. Lenore must have felt the emotions welling up inside me, emotions I shouldn¡¯t be able to feel, shouldn¡¯t be able to have and never had felt outside the capsule and I felt a comforting feeling, as if she was spreading her wings to shelter me. I only sent back a feeling of wordless gratitude, letting myself relax into the feeling, if only for a moment.


    Far too soon, the moment ended with a call from Adra that the craftspeople were here, ready to talk to us about our preferences and needs. Shaking off the melancholy that had gripped me, I left the bathroom and joined the others in the common-room.


    There were a few unknown dwarves in there, alongside Helmaic who seemed to have become our main contact with the Ashenforge-Dwarves.


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    ¡°Good Afternoon, Morgana. These are some of our best crafters who are able to pause their current projects to craft something for you. They represent different disciplines, from tailoring,¡± he nodded to one of the dwarves, a surprisingly bulky male with a bushy beard, ¡°to blacksmithing,¡± he nodded to a serious looking female, wearing her hair cut short, ¡±and even runecrafting.¡± he nodded to one of the other dwarves, one that was studying me intently.


    ¡°Master Gelorin won¡¯t directly work on your items, instead he is the Master Runecrafter the Thane asked to guide you in our library. He wanted to meet you today, to take a look at you.¡± Helmaic added, causing me to nod in understanding.


    Before any of the dwarves could speak, Master Gelorin spoke up. ¡°Traveller Morgana, I would like to use divination-magic on you, would you allow it?¡± he asked, his voice controlled and not betraying any emotion.


    I considered it for a moment before giving him a nod in response. He raised his hands and drew runes into the air, looking quite different from the runes I used myself. At the same time, I heard him mutter under his breath but as always with spell-casting, I was unable to make sense of the noise. Finally, his formation flashed with clinically white light and the spell was complete.


    The sensation was quite similar to being Observed, only more intense. There was a moment I could have intervened but I controlled myself, letting it happen. His reaction was a slight frown, as he was obviously studying what his spell had detected. It took him maybe a minute before he nodded to himself and looked back at me.


    ¡°I will help you, to the best of my ability. In addition, the excitable young dwarven Traveller in our hold claimed you have a connection to the Stonemother, is that true?¡± he asked, his voice now a tiny bit more friendly, making me wonder what he had read with his magic.


    ¡°I assume that I know the being you are referring to under a different name. Tell me, if you look at this book, does it answer your question?¡± I asked in return, pulling out the grimoire I had been given.


    He looked at it closely before nodding, this nod a little deeper and with obvious respect.


    ¡°Would you tell me why you call her the Stonemother?¡± I asked, curious about the different title.


    ¡°Certainly, what better name to give one who witnessed the birth of the stones, of the mountains and hills? One who is older than the continents, who wandered the world when it was whole, so very different from today?¡± he asked in return, the answer once again driving home just why the Grandmother was so well known. I had heard her speak and there had been a feeling of timelessness, as if the passing of time had simply no hold on her. No wonder there were myths and legends aplenty about her. If she only went out once a century, leaving one tale behind, there would be many, but I doubted that she stayed in Neyto all the time, she¡¯d get bored out of her skull. Maybe once a decade or even once a year might be closer to the truth, who knew?


    ¡°Now, I¡¯m certain you can exchange your knowledge in the coming days. The honoured crafters need to know what to make. It would be easiest if each of you would request something different, to spread out the work but we will gladly host you as long as needed. The Thane named you Friends of the Hold and we will have equipped you with a well-suited item when you leave.¡± Helmaic interrupted the Runesmith and me, before we could continue our talk.


    ¡°Certainly, officer. I¡¯m looking forward to work with you in the library, Mystic Morgana.¡± the Runesmith nodded to me, before pulling back a little. In turn, the crafters moved forward a little and started to closely look at the equipment on each of us, softly talking as they did. The close scrutiny was a little uncomfortable making me look over to Sigmir, who was beset by her own dwarves.


    ¡°Could you tell us how you normally fight? What equipment you use, what tactics and what magic, if any.¡± one of the dwarves in front of me asked and I noticed that the dwarves had slowly separated the four of us, forming four clusters and I had a feeling they all asked similar questions.


    Letting out a soft sigh, I bowed to necessity, if we wanted truly suited gear, we needed to give them information to work with. With that in mind, I began to explain in very broad strokes how I worked in combat, while the dwarves were jotting down notes, a process that was mirrored in the other three corners of the room.

 Chapter 310

    I should have expected it. The overwhelming force, the tortue, I should have seen it coming. The dwarves, their whole character, it should have tipped me off, long before walking into things, before foolishly agreeing.


    The dwarven craftspeople were relentless in their pursuit of information for the items they wanted to craft for us, probing, prodding and interrogating with a fervor that scared me just a little. Especially the burly tailor, he seemed to be almost offended by the leather-armour I was wearing, tutting and muttering into his beard, making me wonder if he was placing dark curses onto me. On the other side of the room, Sigmir was in a fervoured discussion with the blacksmith, her Lok¡¯nar held between them, as they gestured and pointed.


    Finally, the dwarves seemed to have the information they needed and retreated. At the end, I had been reduced to a state that I mainly nodded, hummed and simply agreed, not feeling up to the task of resisting the excited tailor who seemed to have very firm opinions what kind of item I should wear. It reminded me why I hated to go shopping on Earth, pushy people that I couldn¡¯t, or in this case shouldn¡¯t, freeze with my mind were a scourge upon my soul.


    I looked over to the others and recognised the look of exhaustion on their faces. I somehow doubted that they had ever experienced such an inquisitive and intrusive crowd, at least not one that you were not allowed to face with force of arms.


    ¡°How about I prepare us some dinner?¡± I asked, looking at my companions who made themselves comfortable, now that we were on our own.


    ¡°I¡¯ll help you.¡± Sigmir offered, pushing herself up. There was no way I¡¯d reject her help, so we stood together in the kitchen, using the supplies someone had placed inside to prepare some real food. I enjoyed the simple cuisine I could prepare over an open camp-fire, with limited supplies, while we were on the road but there was something special about cooking in a real kitchen, especially one with running water.


    After looking around and taking stock of the supplies, I started to chuckle, causing Sigmir to raise an eyebrow, silently inquiring why I was laughing.


    ¡°Oh, I just decided on tomorrow''s menu.¡± I admitted, realising that while the supplies would work, the dough would need some additional time, if I wanted to make pizza. There would be some effort, and a little research, involved but I was reasonably sure I could prepare the dough before going to the library allowing me to import that glorious food into the world of Mundus. I doubted I¡¯d be the first but I was quite certain that none of my companions had ever had it.


    But that was for tomorrow, for today, something simpler would have to do.


    Later in the evening, I sat in front of the house, well-fed and content, looking up at the dark sky. The darkness felt pleasant, the heat of the day slowly fading away, giving way to a cold blanket, letting me breathe easily. Once again, Lenore sat on my shoulder, looking at the moon above, the twinkling stars.


    ¡°You are going to try again, to get a feel for the second divide?¡± she asked, ruffling her feathers a little.


    ¡°Yes, I am. It¡¯s fascinating, you know? Just how similar the world within and the world outside are, the Astral River and the Astral Power, flowing through the channels within my body. I have once heard a tale about a universe in a grain of sand and it makes me wonder.¡± I admitted, closing my eyes as I let myself relax.


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    At first, my mind was drawn to the curious feeling of the night air, playing with the feathers I had grown, gently playing with them and tugging at them. I had never felt anything alike, making me wonder if it was a first step to gain an affinity for air- or wind-magic. But before I could even begin to consider gaining more affinities, I should focus on crossing the second divide.


    Getting a feel for the power flowing into my body, I followed with it, letting my mind flow with the Astral Power inside. This time, I didn¡¯t even try to get a feel for the entire system, simply letting myself go with the flow, knowing that wherever I went with the flow, I would still be within myself. I couldn¡¯t get swept away from my body, as it was all my body.


    Suddenly, I felt a curious sensation, as if something was tugging at myself and realised that, for some reason, the stream I was going with was separating in front of me, the flow of pure Ice, alongside a small amount of normal Astral Power moving away from the rest of power. Asserting my will, I anchored myself, letting the power flow around me, instead of moving with it and I realised just what I was looking at. It was the entrance to Lenore¡¯s Hallow, where I had created a barrier, over two months ago, allowing her to enjoy her Hallow without feeling cold due to the pure Ice that was flowing within me. At some point, the barrier had become a subconscious construct, functioning without my attention and keeping Lenore¡¯s Hallow reasonably warm. It made me wonder if I should try to dissolve it, now that Lenore had the ability to cast Ice-Magic, or if she would prefer the warmth.


    Thinking of Lenore made me realise that there was a faint connection of power, flowing through the gate towards her Hallow  but not into her Hallow, a connection I could feel and follow. Reaching out with my mind, I tried to do just that, follow the connection and for a split-second I felt as if I was in two places at once. It was a marvelous sensation, only marred by a pain as if I was split, not my body but my mind, a searing pain that made my mind go blank, made me want to curl up into a small ball, hoping for the pain to go away.


    I felt a strange, tugging sensation and a short flash of outrage from Lenore, sa I did just that, finding a dark, empty space and curling up, making myself as small as I could. Somehow, the tugging sensation seemed to help with the pain, so I blindly reached out, tugging at whatever it was and pulled, just trying to make the pain go away.


    Once the pain faded, I slowly regained my senses and realised that I was in a strangely dark place, but one filled with Astral Power. At the same time, I felt Lenore¡¯s thoughts again, strangely clear and filled with worry and wonder, the earlier outrage now replaced with a undercurrent of amusement.


    ¡°You took my perch away.¡± I heard her mental voice, not only in my mind but echoing around me.


    ¡°What are you talking about?¡± I asked in return, my mind not quite up to speed. In return, Lenore was sending an image, a memory of herself, sitting on my shoulder, thinking about nothing in particular, only for my shoulder to suddenly vanish, forcing her to frantically flap her wings or tumble into the dust. Once she had managed to stabilise, she realised that my body, and even my clothes, were gone, causing her to look inwards, into herself.


    And find me, as I had somehow created a Hallow, within her claws, which had now taken on a dark, crystalline appearance, even as Lenore gained a new ability, at least as long as I was within my Hallow.


    At that point, the memory ended and I slowly sat down, ending up on a throne of ice, one I didn¡¯t quite remember creating. Shaking my head, I tried to wrap my head around things, amazed by the events and my accomplishment, even if it was a purely coincidental one.


    ¡°Let¡¯s soar, Sister. Let me show you what it means to feel the wind beneath your wings, to take to the skies!¡± Lenore pushed, her mental voice filled with excitement and pure joy. And I liked the idea, I had wanted to feel it myself, ever since I had experienced it in her memories for the first time.


    ¡°Let¡¯s soar.¡± I agreed, letting my mind join with hers and a strange feeling of expansion came over me. It was similar to the feeling of the Raven¡¯s Shadow, our Avatar-state, but now I was the one in the backseat and Lenore was the master of the body.


    Yet, we were able to jump off the roof we had been sitting on, flap our wings and fly into the dark sky. Up, up we went, rising on the wind and deep within my soul I felt free. Free, without any shackles holding us, without worries, without burdens. Free, at last.

 Chapter 311

    Flying was everything I had ever imagined it to be and more. Even if I was only a passenger in Lenore¡¯s body, if I let go of my notion of self and simply allowed her physical impressions to flow into me, it was almost as if I was flying myself. For the first time, I felt Lenore¡¯s instincts at work, the small, subconscious mental processes that allowed us to use our bodies with proficiency. There was a lot more to flying than flapping your wings, concepts I half-remembered from physics class were constantly evaluated, estimated and predicted, allowing Lenore to glide on the winds, gracefully soaring into the dark night sky.


    Sadly that blackness meant that our flight was a short one, far too short for my liking. Lenore was not willing to fly far, especially with the unknown quality that was my newly established Hallow. For now, it worked just fine and as it should but was it stable? Neither of us had any idea just how I had established my Hallow, meaning neither of us could even try to predict its behaviour. Lenore reminded me that establishing a Hallow could have negative effects on the host, depending on the affinity both participants had to each other, a nebulous idea neither of us could grasp.


    In addition, Lenore didn¡¯t like flying in the night, even with her small affinity for Dark Magic, giving her some low-light vision, and her Magic Sight she felt diminished without light. Her sight was, quite frankly, her most important sense and without it, she wasn¡¯t as secure in herself. In addition, I could feel from her memories that there were quite a few dangers lurking in the darkness, nightly predators just happy to snag a carelass bird, turning them into a snack. I doubted that Lenore was in a lot of danger from random animals, not with her current level, but there seemed to be some evolutionary instinct in play that made her reluctant to fly at night.


    Once we were on the ground, we began to gently prod and poke at the Hallow, trying to make sure everything was working as it should, me prodding from the inside, Lenore poking from the outside. Our careful tests didn¡¯t reveal any problems but allowed me to familiarise myself with the function of a Hallow. It seemed that the body I was using inside was merely a representation of my Avatar, something I only noticed after a bit, when I actually looked at myself. Instead of the dark and sturdy leather-clothes I was normally wearing, I was in the most interesting outfit, a flowing, strangely cold tunic, made from what I could only describe as Ice-Type Astral Power, held together by my subconscious mind and the idea that I was supposed to be dressed. And that was the other part, the Hallow was formed from Astral Power, my Astral Power to be precise. It was quite literally my magic, creating a space for my¡­ Avatar? mind? soul? to be. I just didn¡¯t know what I was dealing with but it made me curious, made me want to know more.


    ¡°We should head back in.¡± Lenore broke me out of my stream of thought and my contemplation of how far I might be able to shape the Hallow, into a domain worthy of myself, an idea that made me chuckle, just a little.


    ¡°Most likely, yes. Let¡¯s see if I manage to get out of here, without causing permanent damage.¡± I replied, hopefully joking.


    After a moment to quiet my mind, I considered how I had managed to get into this, trying to figure out how to get out. I had been observing my own Astral Power and the channels it was moving through before noticing my connection with Lenore and following it. That meant, to reverse it, I would have to get a bigger distance between Lenore and myself, maybe by projecting my will, or rather, the non-permanent contents of my Hallow, outside. For that, I needed to perceive the outside, so I started to look around, out into the world. That part was relatively easy, as long as I did it with Lenore¡¯s senses, but I had to do it with my own, which was a lot harder.


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    It took me a few minutes to get an impression of the outside world and the Astral Power flowing through it, from there, it seemed simple. Taking everything that wasn¡¯t part of the Hallow with me, I imagined myself next to Lenore, as I had been sitting earlier. In a flash of inspiration, I used Lenore¡¯s memory, giving me an outside view, to go with my own impressions and memories.


    I felt a moment of disorientation before I was back outside, not quite sitting as I had planned but safely on the ground. Pushing myself up from my awkward, half-lying, half-kneeling pose, I made sure that every part of my body and, of lesser importance, my clothing were where they belonged. I had no idea, none at all, just where the clothes, or my Avatar¡¯s body, went while in the Hallow, but it seemed that every part had come out without trouble. That even included the tiny chunk of Eternal Ice that was left after I had used it against Tzar Bolotnik, a small sliver, something I could easily control.


    After making sure that everything was where it belonged, I looked over to Lenore, making sure that she was fine as well. I couldn¡¯t help but notice that there was a small, frozen spot under her claws, most likely an effect of our connection.


    ¡°That worked better than expected.¡± I admitted, getting a slightly annoyed caw in response, the avian equivalent of an annoyed snort.


    ¡°Let¡¯s go back inside.¡± I told her, now that I was back in my own body and didn¡¯t need to worry about leaving my Hallow, the memories of our first flight came rushing back, making me giddy with excitement. After scooping up Lenore and putting her on my shoulder, I almost skipped inside, knowing full well what to do next. Or maybe that was who to do, I was feeling quite frisky.


    For once, Sigmir was the one who woke up first in the next morning, looking at me with a bemused expression.


    ¡°Want to tell me what was going on last night?¡± she asked, once she realised that I was awake.


    ¡°I don¡¯t think you¡¯ve ever been that¡­¡± she paused, looking for a word, ¡°...exuberant before. Not that I complain, mind you, but I¡¯d like to know.¡±


    I had to grin at her candid description of my state the night before, even as I blushed a bit at the memory. I had come in and, quite literally, dragged her off, not taking no for an answer. Not that she had protested all that hard, or at all, really. Looking around in the room, I wondered just how her underwear had landed on one of the light-fixtures, before shaking my head, deciding not to think about it too deeply.


    ¡°I achieved something new yesterday, I somehow managed to establish a Hallow on my own.¡± I began my explanation, getting a surprised look in response.


    ¡°We went flying. I¡¯ve never felt that way before.¡± I admitted, before letting my mind drift a bit. Just why was I so excited by the ability to fly, why spoke it in such a way to my mind, making me feel¡­


    My mind paused, trying to come up with a word or concept to describe the feeling. It had been as if I was experiencing something I had been missing all my life, a feeling of glorious homecoming as if part of me was finally completed. I didn¡¯t understand it, I had been in airplanes before and had been excited by it but never to an even remotely similar extant. What I had felt back then was like a single snowball, compared to the might and power of an avalanche.


    ¡°And you enjoyed it?¡± Sigmir asked, pulling me out of my headspace, an amused grin now on her face.


    ¡°It was more than enjoyment.¡± I admitted, now smiling myself. ¡°It was a glorious feeling, I have to admit, one that I struggle to describe. It was almost as good as being with you.¡± I admitted, a blush creeping on my face. It had been a completely different sensation but the intensity had been similar. Maybe that had been why I had felt so, as Sigmir had put it, exuberant afterwards.


    ¡°That must have been one hell of a flight. Let me know when you go flying the next time, will you? That way, I can prepare.¡± she asked, before pulling me a little closer and gently kissing me. Before I could inquire in her plans, she shifted and from my comfortable position, lying partially on top of her, using her arm as a pillow, I was moved, suddenly finding myself lying below her, with her grinning down at me from above, her grin mirroring the grin I had the night before, when dragging her off.

 Chapter 312

    It was a doubly good thing the dwarves had discovered the advantages of proper plumbing and even installed showers in their guest-quarters, sized to allow pretty much anything smaller than the average elephant a comfortable experience. The first advantage was that, after Sigmir was done with me in the morning, I was quite sweaty and sticky in certain places. The second was that I managed to get Sigmir into the shower with me, allowing her to make sure those certain places were squeaky clean.


    Needless to say, it took us some time, even if I knew that my time in the dwarven library was limited. Sometimes, there were more important things than acquiring knowledge or rather, if not more important than certainly more pressing.


    To make up for the extra time spent during the morning, my breakfast was hasty and as soon as I had managed to inhale it, I was out of the door, with a quick kiss to Sigmir and a smile on my lips.


    ¡°You seem eager, almost as eager as yesterday.¡± Lenore joked from her Hallow, having returned to it during breakfast.


    ¡°Just like you, yes.¡± I admitted, poking fun at the fact that our method of communication allowed me to feel just how eager she was, to be in the library and learn what they had to offer.


    It took me a few minutes to walk up the mountain, to another of the square blocks of stone that the dwarves used to house the entrances to their tunnels. Looking at it from the outside, I was almost unable to make out the differences, only a small sign allowing me to be certain that I had correctly followed the directions I had been and wasn¡¯t about to barge into some dwarven families¡¯ home. The sign, written in dwarven script that I only understood thanks to my connection with Lenore, only said that I was standing in front of the library and it was then that I realised the architecture was also a sort-of defense.


    Trying to figure out which of the blocks were the ones leading into important tunnels or which of those tunnels would be interconnected was nigh impossible without serious magical scouting or maybe a traitor or two. And even if you knew where to go, most races would be hard pressed to fight in the dwarven tunnels, with their low ceilings and confusing twists and turns. It also occured to me, that if I were to devise a defense for those tunnels, I¡¯d integrate the light-sources into it, with some sort of function to turn them off or overcharge them to blind would-be invaders. Or both, being subjected to a bright flash when your eyes were straining to make things out in the darkness, maybe helped by dim torch-light would be devastating.


    Inside the building, Gelorin, the Master Runecrafter the Thane had asked to assist me, was already waiting for me, sitting on a comfortable couch, sipping some steaming liquid from a mug.


    ¡°Ah, good morning, Mystic Morgana. You are later than expected.¡± he greeted me, looking a little amused, an impression that deepened when I felt my cheeks blush.


    ¡°Good Morning, Master Gelorin. I was held up a little by the ingenious contraptions you have in the bathrooms to clean oneself.¡± I greeted him back, obfuscating the reason for my relatively late arrival with a half-truth.


    ¡°Ah, you discovered our showers. They are marvelous, are they not? There is no better feeling than to stand beneath one after a long, hard day working at the forge.¡± he nodded, his eyes distant, as if remembering one such experience.


    ¡°I can only imagine. But, I only have a few days and want to make the most of them. Let¡¯s get to it.¡± I asked him, no longer willing to reign in my curiosity.


    ¡°Certainly, let¡¯s get to it.¡± he agreed, obviously pleased at my eagerness to learn.


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    He stood and I followed him into the nearby tunnel, walking down the stairs to a quite massive looking door, forged from some sort of metal. He took out an amulet from his chest and placed it against one of the runes. A peek with Lenore¡¯s sight told me that he was channelling Astral Power into it at the same time, causing a dense net of magic crafted into the door to react and do something. It was far too complex to understand it at a glance but I could be quite certain that it would be difficult to breach those doors, without the amulet and the right spell. Maybe even the right spell-caster, if there was some sort of signature to ones Astral Power.


    ¡°Impressive.¡± I muttered, as the door swung open, silently allowing us into the tunnel.


    ¡°Thank you. Our recorded knowledge is quite important to us, you know?¡± Gelorin asked, closing the doors behind us. The tunnel we were in was interesting, especially with the help of Lenore¡¯s sight. Unlike the other hallways I had seen, there was no decorations or anything, merely a blank, smooth wall. But Lenore¡¯s sight revealed a dense web of magic, packed into the walls, reminding me of Kolyug, only this seemed less¡­ angular, more flowing and smooth. That was not to say that it wasn¡¯t precise and exacting, but it looked more natural to me.


    ¡°And I¡¯m allowed to study it to my heart''s content?¡± I asked, feeling a bit of apprehension, wondering if there was a trap somewhere.


    ¡°Yes. I think you fail to see just how important it was what you did for us.¡± he said, causing my eyebrows to shoot up in surprise that he knew.


    ¡°The Thane told me, you scouted a place of wild magic for us, an outdoor dungeon, if you will. They are relatively rare and they can be incredibly valuable to those involved. But they can also be incredibly deadly, especially in the beginning, if you don¡¯t know what you are up against.¡± he explained, causing me to nod.


    ¡°We had no information what we were dealing with, there are other things that can cause changes to an area, some even more deadly than dungeons, others more benign. Doesn¡¯t matter, really. Now, by tasking you, a rather powerful Traveller, the Thane made sure that we would get information, even if only the information on how you perished. Otherwise, we might have had to send groups of our own, quite possibly just to their death, without learning anything. We dwarves are a rather sedentary lot, we don¡¯t produce many with the drive to adventure, to strike out on their own. But only those few truly get powerful and some of them return, to guard the clan, but far too few. And the Guardians only move out of the hold if they have to defend the Clan. They are the bedrock our clan is built upon.¡± he explained, causing me to nod again.


    ¡°Letting you see the library is something that doesn¡¯t cost us anything. The information is not diminished by letting you see it and even if you read everything, it will take a long time for you to fully understand it, to put it into practise and make the magic your own. You can do it, especially given that you are a Sorceress, but it will take time.¡± he continued, a grin on his face.


    ¡°You saw that?¡± I asked, realising that it must have been something he had seen with his divination-spell the day before.


    ¡°Yes, I did, also a few of your titles. But I also got a feeling for your essence, so to speak, what makes you into who you are. You are an interesting one, I have to admit. And your feathery friend is almost as fascinating.¡± he added, a sly look on his face.


    ¡°She is a good friend and almost as interested in magic as I am.¡± I admitted, feeling Lenore pay more attention to our surroundings.


    Our conversation was interrupted when we arrived at another door, this one beautifully crafted and gilded, but just as magically infused as the outside one. Again, he pulled out an amulet, a slightly different one, and used a small edge to draw a drop of blood. I felt a surge of magic before he opened the door, allowing me to look inside.


    Stepping inside, I was both amazed and disappointed at the same time. Disappointed, because I had secret images of a library like one would see in a movie, with thousands of books in a magical place with levitating platforms and moving shelves. Amazed, because I was seeing dozens of tomes, sitting on sturdy shelves lining the walls. Other than the shelves, there were a few comfortable looking armchairs, tables and even a lectern, so you could read while standing.


    ¡°Now, where would be the best place to start? I want a comprehensive understanding of your magic.¡± I asked Gelorin, stepping into the library with the solemn mood the room seemed to demand.


    ¡°Come, let me show you¡­¡± he said, stepping past me, towards one of the shelves. Smiling, I followed after him, looking forward to the information I hoped to learn.

 Chapter 313

    As I put down the book I had been reading, I let out a slow breath. I had spend most of the morning and early afternoon with the first book Gelorin had given me to read, a thick and heavy tome, each page more akin to cardboard than the normal paper I was used to.


    It had taken Gelorin just a few moments to realise I was able to read their words on my own and started working on a project on my own, telling me to ask any questions that came up, before handing me what he deemed to be the best book to start with. It turned out, said book was essentially a book on their material science, how certain materials reacted to Astral Power of different types and their individual concentrations. According to the book, each material had its own magical conductivity, with the inverse being the resistance, and a specific resilience to the different types of Astral Power. Those values seemed to correlate somewhat but not always.


    What it meant in practise was that if you channelled Astral Power through something with a low conductivity, you¡¯d lose most of it, partially to the environment but the rest, depending on the specific resilience, damaging the material itself. That had been the problem with some of my first experiments, trying to channel Dark Astral Power through Magical Ice, the Ice was almost non-conductive to everything but Ice Astral Power and its resilience was most likely dependant on my Ice Magic or maybe Ice-Rune Mastery. Or a combination of the two, with my Ice-Affinity thrown in for good measure. However the resilience was determined, the material was a terrible conduit for almost anything but Ice-Magic.


    Those old experiments helped to give me context for the book and as I had continued to read, softly muttering notes to myself, I had become quite fascinated with the dwarven ideas. The whole book was discussing what amounted to artificial rune-stones, how they could be crafted, how they could be included into equipment and even how to use a particular material, composed out of crushed Runestones and a few other ingredients to directly engrave runes into equipment. Runesmith, that had been a title I had heard before and now it started to really make sense. If this was the foundation, it meant that their whole magic was based on what I would call enchantment.


    Standing, to move around a little after the long stretch of sitting and reading, I caused Gelorin to look up from his work.


    ¡°Ah, Morgana. Are you already done with that tome?¡± he asked, looking at the book I had placed on the table.


    ¡°I think so. I don¡¯t claim to fully understand all materials involved but the theories within are fascinating. I have had some observations and experiments myself and they fit quite neatly with what you already know. What book should I look at next?¡± I asked, relying on the dwarf to direct me. Otherwise, I¡¯d have to waste a great deal of time, trying to figure out which books included what and the best order to read them in.


    ¡°If you understand the importance of a good base-material, I guess you should learn how the material is used.¡± Gelorin muttered, rubbing his bearded chin a little before standing and walking to another shelf, gesturing for me to replace the book where he had taken it from earlier.


    Once I was done, he handed me another book, a similarly heavy tome with thick pages. part of me wondering just what the material was. It didn¡¯t feel like animal hide or tree-bark, which I remembered as being used for early writings on Earth, and it certainly didn¡¯t feel like some sort of solid rock. For I moment, I considered asking, while thinking of the Grimoire the Grandmother had given me, with its smooth and thin pages, before discarding the notion and focusing on my studies. I had limited time to understand and document a complete magic system, something I thought was a rare opportunity that I didn¡¯t want to waste.


    After a few more moments of stretching, I settled back down for the next few hours of concentrated reading. This new book was quite a bit different from the first one, discussing how to design an enchantment and incorporate it into an item or even a person, if the right inks were used. Those hadn¡¯t been described in the first book, but I could see how they could be created and made a mental note to ask for a description on them next. Even in the new book, the idea to directly enchant a body was only mentioned tangentially, without details, making me assume that it was an advanced process that wouldn¡¯t be taken lightly, especially with my own experience in carving runes directly into flesh.


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    The book I had now focused on incorporating full rune-stones into items and it made me realise that I had underestimated the dwarves quite a bit. I had thought that their magic might be a little crude, limited to simple passive effects that could be achieved with a small rune-triangle  maybe a pentagon but the descriptions quickly made me reconsider. Certainly there were such formations described but also how they could be incorporated with each other, how formations didn¡¯t need to be on the outside of an item, as long as the correct channels for Astral Power could be crafted into the item. I realised that it was most likely how their lamps and doors worked, runes within the material, integrated during the crafting, protecting and reinforcing the item itself. To damage the runes and thus break the enchantment, you¡¯d have to break the item first, which would likely be difficult if part of the enchantment was durability. One would have to block the channels that supplied Astral Power but if they were cleverly hidden, maybe integrated into the walls, things would get¡­ complicated.


    There was even something on materials that had the ability to store Astral Power almost indefinitely, slowly releasing it over time, similar to what I had tried with imbued blood before. Only that their materials didn¡¯t have the drawback of generating miasma that might garner the attention of problematic beings from other dimensions. No, they merely needed rare and precious materials, often gems or, much more rarely, specifically treated bones, horns or claws.


    It was quite fascinating how the dwarves had designed smaller runic-formations that linked together, almost like the half-forgotten memories of electric circuits we had discussed during high-school physics. Only that there wasn¡¯t just one energy flowing through the channels, there were multiple, the dwarven designs used mostly earth with a little fire and two curious combination-elements, one described as Metal, the other as Gem. It made me wonder how they fit with what the Grandmother had told me about the elements, or if one side was mistaken.


    While my runic formations relied on what amounted to magical brute force, the Intelligence of the caster forcing the runes into a pattern, the dwarven system started with single runes and using connecting patterns to form them into formations, some of them using the same number of runes I was used to, while others used whole formations, connecting them to the larger system. It was, quite frankly, mindboggingly complicated, only my instinctive understanding of runic patterns, which luckily included the connecting-patterns allowing me to parse what I was seeing.


    But if they were, what did it mean for their views of reality and the role of magic within it? I had little reason to doubt that the Grandmother¡¯s explanation had been, from her perspective, the truth, if quite possibly a simplified version of it. On the other hand, the dwarves had their own observations and results based on them, but came up with a different image of reality. I had a feeling that, unless Pantheon had messed up and didn¡¯t create a world with a comprehensive and cohesive magical system, both sides had a piece of a greater truth. Which piece was greater I didn¡¯t know, nor if either contained imprecision, but I was fascinated.


    ¡°What do you think, which side understands more?¡± I asked Lenore, using our mental connection. I had been feeling her interest quite keenly, her mind never far from mine as I was reading.


    ¡°I think the Grandmother was looking at a greater picture, looking at the Cycle of Life and Death, with its myriad complexities and intricacies. Maybe some details became lost or she simply didn¡¯t deem them worth mentioning. She only taught you for a limited time after ally. On the other hand, the dwarves have their own speciality, working with metal and stone, delving into their inner workings on great details, possibly finding things you would otherwise miss.¡± Lenore reasoned, making me mentally agree.


    I also realised that the Grandmother might have a similar detailed understanding of the processes of life and death but had simply decided not to tell me about it. Her teaching had been aimed at allowing me to make my own path, a path that had little to do with life and death but the pursuit of a full understanding of Ice and possibly Darkness. I hadn¡¯t been, and still wasn¡¯t, interested in the interplay between the natural cycles and the elements. No, I wanted to see what happened if Ice and Darkness were taken to the extremes, Ice and Cold so powerful that they could freeze everything, time included, Darkness so encompassing and empty that space itself seemed to vanish.


    But I had still a long path before me, until I would be able to claim mastery to that point. And for now, my path meant to understand how the dwarves had gone about designing their enchantments, so I would be able to take what they had done with Earth and Fire and create something using Ice and Darkness.

 Chapter 314

    Late in the afternoon, with my mind a little woozy from the tomes I had read, I emerged from the underground library. For a moment, I just stood there, letting the wind flow around me and watching the shadows around me, cast by the sun, slowly vanishing behind the mountain-ridges. It would take a few more hours before the sun would truly set, creating a calming twilight.


    Part of me had desired to stay in the library longer but after reading three of the dwarven tomes, Lenore and Gelorin had teamed up and convinced me that my mind was no longer able to take anything in, making the reading mostly pointless. My original plan to simply record what I was looking at and using the recording later had a few problems. The biggest, obviously, that the dwarven language was a mystery to me, only comprehensive thanks to Lenore and our bond. That particular problem was mostly solvable by simply dictating notes to the recording I was creating, but to do that, I needed to read and at least partially understand. Another problem was that I was getting a feel for the magic, for the theory and even the runes to a point, thanks to my mystic-title and my Runic Understanding-Special Ability. Those advantages wouldn¡¯t carry over to a recording, which was why I had made the decision to try understanding as much as possible now and not rely on the recording.


    Looking around, I gave Lenore a soft, mental push, asking her if we could soar. I felt wordless acceptance and delight flowing back through the link and her form appeared on my shoulder, with her wings spread out behind my head. Trying to remember how I had shifted myself into the Hallow on the day before, I reached out with my mind, looking for the trace of magic I had left within my Hallow. Once I was looking for it, I wondered just how I had missed it the whole time, the clear, magical connection flowing from Lenore to me and back, a true bond of equals. Maybe it was only due to the newly established parity, or my new understanding, but I was certain that I¡¯d be able to pinpoint where Lenore was, no matter how far we were apart.


    Before I could follow that idea and the interesting implications it held further, I pushed myself into the connection, pulling my Avatar with me. Lenore had to flap for a moment when her perch vanished but then we were off, gliding through the warm air. My mind needed a few moments to attune to the state of being in Lenore¡¯s Hallow, so I could feel the wind on her feathers.


    It felt glorious, a gentle, drifting breeze pushing up the valley, allowing us to soar higher without needing to work for it. We just drifted lazily with the breeze, wings spread wide, slowly gaining altitude. Below us, the dwarven city stretched up the mountain, the daylight letting me see just how uniform the dwarven buildings actually were. From above, it was as if someone had just put down blocks, each apparently the same size, each the same distance apart. And each the same, boring block of dark rock.


    ¡°Let¡¯s go higher.¡± I asked Lenore, letting myself experience her feelings. It was simply incredible, the wind flowing through her feathers, pushing us higher. I also felt her thoughts and instincts, how she felt the airflow and used it, in combination with a small bit of Air-Magic, to read it, finding streams of rising air to carry us higher. Soon, we could look down on the world through her eyes, looking into other valley and down on the mountains.


    ¡°We shouldn¡¯t go higher here.¡± Lenore suddenly thought, a distinct sending, with some context behind it. If we went higher, we might catch the attention of powerful beings that ruled the skies, some of them forces of nature, others powerful beasts. We were simply lacking the power to take on such a being, so getting their attention would be bad. Even flying closer to the mountains had some risks, as there might be flying enemies, similar to the wind-raptors we had hunted near Yaksha.


    ¡°Don¡¯t you want to see your new powers? You just crossed the second divide, don¡¯t you want to see just how powerful you are now?¡± I asked, egging her on a little. In confrontations, she was mostly cautious, sometimes even cowardly, which was a stark contrast to the willingness she displayed when it came to magical experimentation. Receiving my thoughts caused her to steel herself, determined that she would find out. Flapping her wings, she shifted our course, letting the winds take us towards one of the higher mountains, her eyes scanning the skies around us and the slopes below us, making sure that we were the hunters, not the prey.


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    We didn¡¯t have to look for long and a dark shape was leaving a nearby cliff-side, dropping for a moment before quickly gaining altitude. Judging size was difficult at the distance, at least for me, but I could get information from Lenore and quickly learned that the predator coming for us was quite a bit bigger than she was, with some eight meters wingspan. I felt myself get excited, even after crossing the second divide, Lenore hadn¡¯t increased in size, still just a bit over a meter in wing-spawn and maybe two kilograms in weight. But I also knew that size didn¡¯t matter, at least not if one of the parties had powerful magic. Hopefully, it was only one party.


    I could feel her mind gather power as the predator, some sort of raptor, according to her mind, was quickly getting closer, trying to rise up just behind us, before doubling back and striking from above and behind. It was such a simple tactic that I wondered if it would work on a normal beast. But before I could wonder further, I felt Lenore steel herself further and pull in her wings, diving down like a raptor herself, aiming for the other bird. I could feel her magic push us faster, her winds cutting through the gale. Within moments, we reached the other bird and I felt her pull at my own power, channelling it into her talons. Curious what would happen, I gave my power with full measure, letting it surge through our bond.


    We struck the much larger bird, which seemed to be incredibly confused for the short moment, and Lenore¡¯s talons sunk in deeply, my magic crashing into our prey in a way I hadn¡¯t quite experienced before. There was no forming of the Astral Power into magical effects, just a brutal, unsophisticated onslaught of Ice-Type Astral Power, surging directly into the predator. Lenore used a moment to use Observe on it, learning that it was a level fifty-five Black Raptor, whatever that meant. Momentum carried us away from our prey and forced Lenore to beat her wings again returning to a glide. A quick, banking turn allowed us to keep an eye on our prey, curious what our attack had accomplished.


    For a second, it looked as if the raptor would be able to continue flying but then it started plummeting and we noticed that there were ice-crystals forming between its feathers. Lenore kept an eye on it until it hit the mountainside, some hundred meters below us, where it shattered on impact. I had a certain idea what kind of effect such an impact should have had and what I saw didn¡¯t match it in the slightest. It looked more like a solid object, shattering into sharp pieces instead of a fleshy meat-bag, filled with blood and other liquids, bursting from the impact.


    It took me a moment to realise what had happened and a check on my Astral Power helped to make the story obvious. We had pumped a little over thousand points of Astral Power, about twenty percent of my maximum, into the Raptor, turning it into a flying popsicle from the inside. At a guess, I would have said that a beast of the Raptor¡¯s level had a thousand Astral Power, total, somewhere in the range around seven, maybe eight-hundred was more likely.


    ¡°Interesting. Crude and ineffective, but interesting.¡± Lenore observed, before flapping her wings again, flying towards the spot the raptor had launched from.


    ¡°Yeah, you can channel Ice-Type Astral Power quite well, at least through your talons.¡± I observed, realising that her learning of Ice-Magic might have more implications than I had considered before. Would I be able to channel more Ice-Magic through her now, without harming or exhausting her? It certainly was worth a try.


    Before I could suggest to try what might happen if I tried to channel spells through her from the safety of her Hallow, she started to quickly flap her wings, bringing herself to a gentle landing in the cliff-side nest. There were a few bones and broken egg-shells lying around but sadly nothing of value or interest. I could feel Lenore¡¯s disappointment, she had been hoping for loot, for shiny things to carry off. Alas, it was not to be and so, with a disappointed screech, she hopped off again, gliding away from the cliff, back down, towards the dwarven town.

 Chapter 315

    Once Lenore had landed, she gave me a gentle, mental push to leave my Hallow, so she could return to hers. Mentally reaching out, I looked out, making sure that I had an accurate mental image before pushing my mind out, pulling the rest of me with it. It was a strange feeling, a brief state of incorporation that I wanted to explore and understand more, and after a moment of vertigo-inducing travel, I was back out, this time sticking the landing. Before I could fully orient myself or get up from my kneeling position, Lenore hopped onto my shoulder, vanishing into her Hallow.


    Suddenly, I felt a surge of emotion from her, relief and excitement, combined with a feeling of sudden exhaustion and lethargy, making me think that she had been running on an adrenaline-high ever since we attacked the raptor in the air and she was now feeling safe and crashing from it.


    ¡°Do you think it would be possible to directly switch from my Hallow to your Hallow? I mean, could we simply switch places, without both of us being outside at the same time? What are the limits there?¡± I mentally asked, thinking about the possibilities. There were so many of them, most of them practical. Even just directly switching had interesting applications, what happened if we timed the switch, which took a moment of time, in such a way that it happened in exactly the moment a blastwave rolled over us? Could we dodge explosions that way? Even if not, the ability to pretend to shape-shift between my normal, elven Avatar and Lenore¡¯s avian form would be quite interesting, offering great potential for shenanigans.


    The idea to have Lenore fly down as a Raven, land in front of another Traveller and, seamlessly, turn into my Avatar was just too cool to not explore. Even just footage of flying around would be good to post, without telling anyone how it worked, I was reasonably sure that there was little footage of flight yet, a few wizards had made videos but they were shaky and relatively short, with low altitudes and rushed landings. Lenore, on the other hand, was able to fly freely, just like the bird she was. But I would need more than just the footage of one flight, even if being the death from above was excellent.


    I felt Lenore pick up on my thoughts, pushing the idea of using our Hallows to our advantage, curious what else I had in mind. Being able to cast spells while hidden in my Hallow, with Lenore flying overhead, letting death rain down from a secure position would be quite useful, especially against simple beasts that relied on their powerful, physical bodies to fight. It wasn¡¯t like a bear, no matter how big, would be able to suddenly sprout wings to come after us in the air. Another idea that I wanted to explore was to load me up with equipment and supplies before shifting into the Hallow, reducing the load we had to carry. It wasn¡¯t as important as it might be, thanks to our magic bags. There were still uses for such a trick, for example smuggling things into a city, but if wasn¡¯t necessary for general carrying purposes.


    There were so many possibilities to explore and potentially exploit that I wasn¡¯t quite sure where to start. After waiting for Lenore to calm down, she suggested to start with a smooth transition between our respective forms, figuring out if the idea to pretend the shapechange was even possible. If there was some sort of cooldown or even just a need for the one who housed the Hallow to be fully corporeal, some of the ideas wouldn¡¯t work at all.


    I mentally prepared the same processes I would prepare if I wanted to shift into my Hallow while Lenore was present and gave her a gentle, mental push, letting her know that I was ready. I felt her flow out of her Hallow, trying to figure out the moment in which I could trigger my own switch. It took me until she was fully materialised and sitting on my shoulder to find the correct spot within her and begin the transition. Where before, there had been a short feeling of vertigo, now I was feeling as if I had been put into the spin cycle of a washing-machine. The experience was unpleasant and when I finally got my bearings within my Hallow, I realised that Lenore hadn¡¯t fared much better. She had failed to catch herself when her perch disappeared, tumbling onto the ground in a graceless heap, looking a little like roadkill.


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    ¡°That was unpleasant. We¡¯ll have to train a lot, if it is possible at all.¡± Lenore told me, using our connection, as she pushed herself up. She looked a little disheveled and I could feel from her thoughts that she needed to preen herself before being able to fly.


    ¡°Let¡¯s try it the other way around?¡± I asked, carefully pulling myself together, while trying to observe the connection flowing back to Lenore. The key to making the switch work was to understand how our essence, or whatever we wanted to call it, was flowing between the two of us, For now, neither of us had a clue.


    I felt her give me the signal to initiate the switch and did so, letting myself flow out, not even trying to get into a standing position or anything complex. Instead, I opted for a kneeling position, with both shins and hands on the ground. It was barely above simply flopping onto the ground like a dying fish, but it should allow me to catch and correct myself, even if the position came out flawed.


    Going out wasn¡¯t much more pleasurable than coming in was, at first it felt normal until I felt myself take form on the outside, when suddenly a powerful impulse was flowing into me, disrupting the small semblance of control I had and making my Avatar¡¯s body twitch and flop around, as if having a seizure. It only lasted a second or two but it wasn¡¯t an experience I wanted to repeat. On the other hand, I could feel Lenore in her Hallow and it seemed she was shaken and stirred, in a similar state of as I had been earlier.


    ¡°Definitely more practise required, if we want to do these switches quickly.¡± I muttered, pushing myself up and brushing off what little dirt was sticking to me.


    ¡°But not now. That was enough for me, let¡¯s wait until we are both in better shape again.¡± Lenore added, with a slight cringe a moment later, when she realised the inadvertent pun.


    ¡°I agree. In addition, I want to make some food for the others, now that I have an actual kitchen to work with.¡± I added with a grin, before walking back towards the guest-quarters, feeling quite elated, despite the failure with the pseudo-shapechange.


    Back at the guest-quarters, I had to smile. The others had set up a comfortable position on the roof, looking very much like they had been there for most of the day and had been basking in the sun. The sun had abandoned them but they had yet to move.


    ¡°You look comfortable.¡± I said with a grin, as I walked up. Sigmir looked up and gave me wide smile, while Adra merely held a hand up and waved. On the other hand, Rai stood up, showing the proper respect for his teacher.


    ¡°I did what you asked me to. What do you plan to do with that dough?¡± Sigmir asked, pushing herself up to properly greet me. Now, we would have to see if my instructions for making pizza-dough had been adequate, just as I had to figure out how to replace the ingredients I didn¡¯t have. But first, Sigmir pulled me into an embrace and a tender kiss showed me that she had missed me.


    It turned out, either my instructions had been spot-on or Sigmir had Italian blood in her heritage and was magically inclined to create pizza-dough  I had to cheat a little, in order to create a rolling-pin but my Ice-Magic was easily up to the task and soon, I had a set of pizzas in the oven, getting baked over a wood-fire. The sauce wasn¡¯t quite what it was supposed to be and the cheese wasn¡¯t really what I would normally use but I had hopes that the pizza would be good.


    ¡°This is¡­ glorious.¡± Adra moaned, biting down on another slice of pizza, making me chuckle at the sight. There was a string of pizza stretching away from her mouth, while Rai had some sauce smeared over his face. Similarly, Sigmir had a wide smile on her face, as she reached out to grab another slice, while I stood, to get the last pizza from the oven. Apparently, the four large pizzas I had made were just enough for us.


    When I walked back into the living room, carrying the last pizza, the three of them looked up, licking their lips, looking like a pack of starving wolves, despite the fact that we had polished off three pizzas already. But their looks made me smile, as it looked like my experiment with pizza had been a tremendous success, as evidenced by the three levels my cooking-skill had gained in the process.

 Chapter 316

    After three days of studying in the dwarven library, I had a reasonable grasp on their way of shaping Astral Power to perform their magic, with quite a bit of material to study. More time would have been helpful but, at the end of the day, I was glad that I had been allowed the opportunity in the first place. During the evenings, I had explored my Hallow further, trying to better understand the mechanics of transferring into the Hallow, both for Lenore and myself.


    In the meantime, while I had been busy, the others had enjoyed some well-deserved down-time, lying in the sun during the day and enjoying the fact that I had an actual kitchen to work in during the evening. They had been given a tour of the local area, seeing the dwarven lifestyle in action, not that there was a lot to see. The simple fact that they couldn¡¯t easily use the dwarven tunnels meant that they could visit a few farms and fields in the local area but nothing terribly interesting. Mostly, they relaxed, recharging for our journey ahead.


    And yesterday, after I returned from my last day in the library, there had been a message waiting at our quarters, sent by the dwarven crafters who, somehow, had managed to finish the items they had promised us. Soon after we were sitting breakfast and were sitting out, me in the shade, using my Ice-Magic to create a cooling mist around me, the others basking in the morning sun, the dwarven crafters arrived.


    ¡°Greetings, esteemed guests. As promised by our Thane, we have laboured tirelessly to craft your items. And, without bragging, I can tell you that what we have made will not shame the name of the dwarves, for they are marvelous indeed. But, without further ado, let me show you what we have created.¡± the burly, well-groomed dwarf who apparently had turned himself into their speaker, exclaimed, after they had lined themselves up in front of you. I could see that the others were a little bewildered at the presentation, while I felt rather amused by the dwarven antics. We returned the greetings but it quickly became clear that they had a specific mode of presentation in mind and were about to be dissuaded from it.


    ¡°Warun, why don¡¯t you begin?¡± the burly presenter, whose name I still didn¡¯t know, asked.


    ¡°Certainly. My apprentices and I laboured throughout the night, sewing and embroidering a cloak fit for such a splendid stalker as the Lady Adrastea. Not only will the cloak help her blend into the shadows, making her hard to see, but it will also protect her from the elements, keeping her warm in the cold and keeping her cool in the heat. I am certain that she will use it to great effect, especially when teaming up with young Rai.¡± the dwarf explained, displaying a curiously smooth looking, dull-black piece of leather.


    Adra stepped forward, picking it up and unfolded it, letting it play over her hands. It was quite obvious that the piece was incredibly soft for leather and when she unfolded it, its form was on full display, a hooded, black leather-cloak, with a silver closure at the front, allowing it to be worn comfortably. After a moment of shaking it out, Adra wrapped it around her shoulder, making sure that it sat correctly on her shoulder, even putting on the hood. I could see that even without shadows around her, the light didn¡¯t seem to fully reflect off her, allowing her to blend into the background, not really standing out.


    ¡°There¡¯s more to it, I think.¡± Lenore muttered in my mind and when we worked together to stretch our magical senses, there was a subtle, cleverly hidden, mind-magic effect, making her seem unimportant and easy to ignore. It seemed to be carried by the light reflected off the cloak and unless one was closely looking for it, noticing the effect was nigh impossible. I made a mental note to study that effect closely, maybe learning how to do it on my own. A manipulation so subtle that you didn¡¯t even notice you were manipulated, that was what I wanted for my mind magic.


    ¡°You did your words justice, I have to admit. It is an awesome piece of gear.¡± Adra told the dwarves, giving them a bow of respect before looking over to Rai.


    ¡°Rai, could you shroud me?¡± she asked and Rai stepped forward, muttering something under his breath and a cloud of shadows appeared around her. The shadows themselves were easily discernible in the daylight but within them, it was difficult to make out where Adra was. Rai spread the shadows further, letting it wash over us and Adra managed to get quite close, before I managed to spot her. She lined back up with us and Rai let the shadows drop, bringing a smile to my face.


    ¡°Now, the next piece of gear is for young Rai. Please, step forward to receive it.¡± the burly master of ceremonies said, a smile on his face.


    Rai stepped forward and another dwarf came forward, carrying a pair of tan leather boots.


    ¡°You told us that you are able to blend into the shadows without any extraordinary gear. But what about the sound of your steps? These boots will help you with that, muffling your steps, making it hard to hear you. In addition, they will let you walk further and faster, strengthening your legs.¡± the dwarf explained and Rai received his boots. He let his hands move over their smooth lines before thanking the dwarves and stepped back to us, without instantly putting them on.


    ¡°Lady Sigmir, your weapon is next. Let Brundra show you what she managed to forge, using your Lok¡¯nar as a base. I think she did a marvelous job, preserving its form but strengthening its essence. I hope you will agree that it honours your father while serving you well in the future.¡± the master of ceremonies explained, gesturing to the solid-looking female dwarf, who had brought a large object with her, wrapped into a piece of cloth. Now she stepped forward, meeting Sigmir in the middle, with that object held up, ready to be taken up.


    Sigmir reached out, pulling away the cloth and her Lok¡¯nar became visible, the sun reflecting off the gleaming metal. Little had changed with Sigmir¡¯s weapon, at least judging from a few steps away, without a detailed examination, but I could see some differences. Originally, the Lok¡¯nar had been a rough appearance, making it look a little crude and simple but now, those lines had been smoothed out, changing little in the impression of deadliness but making it seem more civilised, if such a weapon could ever look that way.


    But the most important thing was Sigmir¡¯s impression of the weapon, who was currently balancing it in her hand, handling the massive weapon with gentle, careful hands.


    ¡°I believe the changes will suit you well. I have done my best to keep the general feel of your weapon the same, not changing its balance, only improving what the weapon already was. I have sharpened the edges, smoothing out some nicks and notches, while improving the integration of the silver, mixing some mithril in to improve the effects. It will be exceptionally destructive to undead, even allowing you to cut those without substance. And finally, the biggest change is one you will need to learn and master. If you channel Astral Power into it, you can increase the weight of one of its heads, allowing you to strike with the force of a landslide, shattering all defenses. You will have to learn how to use that ability in combat but I have no doubt that you will master it and use it to earth-shaking effect.¡± the burly dwarven lady explained, while Sigmir carefully started to swing the weapon, a pensive look on her face. After a few moments, I could feel some power gather in her hands and a glimpse through Lenore¡¯s eyes allowed me to see that one of the heads was glowing with power. When Sigmir swung the weapon again, I could feel the air move, even a few steps away and saw Sigmir stumble, trying to control the heavier weapon. Her pensive look remained while she thanked the dwarves and stepped back to our line.


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    ¡°And finally, the work that I have crafted for you, Lady Morgana, a unique piece that I take great pride in. I hope it will serve you well on your travels, as you make your name echo over the world of Mundus.¡± the master of ceremonies exclaimed. It was my signal and, with a curious smile on my face, I stepped forward. The items for the others seemed to be of excellent quality, making me excited what they had come up with for me.


    The dwarf was given a folded piece of grey, almost white fabric from an assistant and stepped forward, presenting it to me with both hands. I could feel a light sensation of magic from it and when I reached out, I could feel that it was surrounded by a chill air.


    ¡°This fabric is something we rarely use for clothes, due to its special properties. We mainly use it to make aprons for our smiths and metal-workers, those who have to handle metal straight out of the forge, those who work our furnaces. It is refined from the silk of a particular type of spider called Ice-Web Spiders and I think you can already guess why. Thanks to the refinement, it keeps the property that makes the spiders so dangerous, their webs reduce the temperature in their lairs, even beyond the surroundings, making those venturing into them slow and sluggish. It will help to keep you cool, especially if you supply it with some Astral Power. In addition, the silk conducts Astral Power easily, allowing you to gather power from your surroundings easily, especially with the supplemental effect we have woven into it.¡± the dwarf explained while I let the soft and supple cloth run through my hands. It felt wonderful, making me wonder how it would feel against my skin. The chill was pleasant, not truly cold just cool enough to be comfortable. Judging by the fact that they were making work-aprons out of it, I had high expectations for its sturdiness, the biggest concern I had regarding clothing.


    I also realised that I had been given two pieces of clothing, a long-sleeved tunic and a pair of soft pants, both made from the same cloth. Given that they were my items, I decided Inspecting them was allowed and did just that, the results making me smile with joy, despite the sudden and radical shift my style of clothing was about to undergo.


    <table><tbody><tr><td colspan="10">Ice-Web Tunic</td></tr><tr><td colspan="5">Rarity</td><td colspan="5"> Rare </td></tr><tr><td colspan="5">Type</td><td colspan="5"> Upper-Body Wear</td></tr><tr><td colspan="5">Base Protection</td><td colspan="5">4 against Piercing Damage</td></tr><tr><td colspan="5">Base Protection</td><td colspan="5">4 against Slashing Damage</td></tr><tr><td colspan="5">Base Protection</td><td colspan="5">2 against Blunt Damage </td></tr><tr><td colspan="5">Special Effect</td><td colspan="5">Chilling Weave¨C Reduces the ambient temperature, this effect can be increased by supplying Astral Power.</td></tr><tr><td colspan="5">Special Effect</td><td colspan="5"> Astral Channel - Astral Power flows easily through the strands of this fabric, increasing Astral Power Regeneration by five percent. </td></tr><tr><td colspan="5">Set-Piece</td><td colspan="5"> When the Ice-Web Tunic is worn together with the Ice-Web Pants, their individual effects are increased. </td></tr><tr><td colspan="10">This tunic was woven from the silk of Ice-Web Spiders, preserving its chilling effect. Those who can withstand the cold can use it to increase the amount of Astral Power they can gather from their environment.</td></tr></tbody></table>


    <table><tbody><tr><td colspan="10">Ice-Web Pants</td></tr><tr><td colspan="5">Rarity</td><td colspan="5"> Rare </td></tr><tr><td colspan="5">Type</td><td colspan="5"> Lower-Body Wear</td></tr><tr><td colspan="5">Base Protection</td><td colspan="5">4 against Piercing Damage</td></tr><tr><td colspan="5">Base Protection</td><td colspan="5">4 against Slashing Damage</td></tr><tr><td colspan="5">Base Protection</td><td colspan="5">2 against Blunt Damage </td></tr><tr><td colspan="5">Special Effect</td><td colspan="5">Chilling Weave¨C Reduces the ambient temperature, this effect can be increased by supplying Astral Power.</td></tr><tr><td colspan="5">Special Effect</td><td colspan="5"> Astral Channel - Astral Power flows easily through the strands of this fabric, increasing Astral Power Regeneration by five percent. </td></tr><tr><td colspan="5">Set-Piece</td><td colspan="5"> When the Ice-Web Pants are worn together with the Ice-Web Tunic, their individual effects are increased. </td></tr><tr><td colspan="10">This pair of pants was woven from the silk of Ice-Web Spiders, preserving its chilling effect. Those who can withstand the cold can use it to increase the amount of Astral Power they can gather from their environment.</td></tr></tbody></table>


    I couldn¡¯t wait to try on my new clothes and with a wide grin on my face, I thanked the dwarves who had made them, making them beam with pride.


    ¡°There is a little more.¡± Warun, the dwarf who had crafted Lenore¡¯s cloak, said, stepping forward as he spoke, a pair of cream-coloured, light leather-boots in hand.


    ¡°We have no doubt that your boots are well-made but, to be honest, they simply don¡¯t fit with your new clothes. Please, take these boots, they will serve you well:¡± he put them forward and I took them, looking them over. They were clearly made to go with the Ice-Web clothes, but subtly different. Inspecting them made me understand that the dwarves had been truly good to me.


    <table><tbody><tr><td colspan="10">Icewalker Boots</td></tr><tr><td colspan="5">Rarity</td><td colspan="5"> Rare</td></tr><tr><td colspan="5">Type</td><td colspan="5"> Lower-Body Wear</td></tr><tr><td colspan="5">Base Protection</td><td colspan="5">5 against Piercing Damage</td></tr><tr><td colspan="5">Base Protection</td><td colspan="5">5 against Slashing Damage</td></tr><tr><td colspan="5">Base Protection</td><td colspan="5">2 against Blunt Damage </td></tr><tr><td colspan="5">Special Effect</td><td colspan="5">Icewalker¨C You can walk across snow and frozen surfaces as if they were solid, dry ground.</td></tr><tr><td colspan="5">Special Effect</td><td colspan="5"> Longstrider- Exhaustion caused by walking is reduced by half.</td></tr><tr><td colspan="10"> A pair of boots crafted to allow long journeys, especially across rough terrain. </td></tr></tbody></table>


    ¡°I¡­¡± I tried to speak, only to feel my throat close up a little, choked by emotions. The dwarves had given me a lot more than they had owed me, for reasons I didn¡¯t quite understand. After clearing my throat, I tried again, thanking the dwarves effusily, promising that i would go and try my new clothes on, so they could see their craft in action, so to speak.

 Chapter 317

    After receiving my new clothes, I had excused myself for a moment to change into them. Wearing them felt just as marvelous as I had hoped, snug without being restraining and pleasantly chill. Just to see how well I could move in them, I started a simple set of martial art-forms, stretching my body to see how well they truly fit. And they stood up to the test incredibly well, fitting like a glove. I even felt the supplemental effect, making it easier to absorb Astral Power, especially compared to my earlier leather-clothes. It made me wonder if I had missed the dampening effect of my clothes earlier, simply because I rarely went around without clothes and when I did, it was mostly while engaged in intimate activities with Sigmir, during which I never really paid attention to my Astral Power regeneration. I made a mental note to check that out, later, when I had some time on my own.


    The boots fit quite well, not as perfectly as the clothes but I had a feeling I merely needed to walk with them for a bit and would be completely used to them.


    Now dressed, I placed my black, feathered cloak back around my shoulders and looked at me in the mirror. My new look wasn¡¯t quite as imposing as the former, all-black look but the contrast between the flowing, grey-white fabric of my clothes and the deep, matte-black of my cloak worked quite well, especially with the reprisal of the feather-theme on my body.


    As I stepped out to show the others, and the dwarven crafters, how I now looked, I conjured up a cloud of icy mist on a whim, wrapping it around me, especially my feet and lower body, while taking out my staff and letting Lenore hop onto the top. Pushing the cloud ahead of me, I slowly walked out of the dwarven building, playing with clouds movement while Lenore added a simple mix of wind and snow, playing along with my show.


    The others of my group looked at me with an amused expression, knowing that I liked my showy stunts but, as if to make up for their non-reaction, the dwarves looked at me with expressions stuck between awe and dread.


    ¡°Your craftsmanship is truly excellent and I thank you for the work you have performed for us.¡± I addressed the craftsman who had created the marvels covering my body. At the same time, I realised that the crowd had increased and that the Thane himself was amongst the new dwarves, alongside Gelorin, the dwarven scholar who had been helping me in the library. I noticed that Gelorin had a slightly bemused expression on his face, making me realise that he had gotten to know me quite well, in the three days we had been working together.


    ¡°Thane Ashenforge.¡± I greeted the Thane with a slight bow, not in submission but in respect. ¡°As you can see, the crafters of your clan have proven that the tales about dwarven craftsmanship, legends so famous that they cross worlds, are indeed true. With little time, they have managed to craft masterpieces for each of my party, every item a marvel suited to its wielder. There are few people who could even begin to claim the same, let alone make true on their claims. I thank you greatly and wish fortune to your people.¡± I told him, using a little magic to let the mist swirl around me.


    I could see an expression of pride on his face and he gave me a polite nod in response before speaking. ¡°I thank you for your kind words and, as friends, I would ask a boon of you.¡±


    And now, there was the reason for our excellent treatment, he wanted something more from us. I had been curious when the hook would come out, trying to sink into us to reel us in. The items he had promised us, the treatment and the resources he had given us, they had been incredible, generous to the extreme. Part of it was that we had saved them from losing valued members of their community but I had no doubt that the dwarves would have been able to clear the swamp out on their own, maybe with losses but the experience gained from clearing it would have stayed in-house.


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    ¡°As a Traveller, you might now be aware but places of power such as the swamp and its focus, the Tzar Bolotnik, are rare and valuable in this world. Quite a few groups want to control their powers, exploiting them for their own benefit and if word were to spread, great harm could befall the Hold.¡± he explained, still looking friendly.


    It was obvious what he wanted so, without making him actually say it out loud, I gave him something. Maybe not everything he wanted, but everything he would get from me.


    ¡°Yes, I can see how such places are an important resource and I¡¯m certain that, in the future, the Clan Ashenforge will be able to use it to strengthen its men and maybe even extract rare resources. You have my word, as a Traveller, a Mystic and Disciple of the Stonemother, that I will not tell anyone about the place of power we explored for you. Not only in this world, but also in the world of the Travellers. That, I promise you.¡± I formally intoned, giving a slightly lower bow at the end. My words were echoed by my companions, each of them giving different titles to formalise their bond. I felt a slight stirring of the Astral River, our words and intent echoing through the world. It made me wonder if I had previously simply missed such stirrings, that the words we said and the intent of our thoughts left an impression on the Astral River and the magic it carried, or if we had only now crossed some sort of threshold that gave our words such power.


    Whatever the reason, I could feel that there would be a lasting impression of our words, nothing serious, merely that the words spoken would remain in our mind, with a light compulsion to keep them. Nothing powerful, the stirring hadn¡¯t had enough power to truly force our minds into anything, but a reminder. A curious phenomenon and something that I wanted to explore and understand in the future, but that would have to wait. For now, the Thane looked pleased, if not fully so, by our words but unless he was willing to try to use force to get a better outcome, he was stuck and could see it.


    Part of me considered for a moment if I should throw Dargira under the bus, telling the Thane about her loose lips in the other world. It would deflect from us, giving him something else to think about and deal with, while making our silence a lot less valuable and thus, the task of keeping us silent less important. But, after a moment of consideration, I decided against it, feeling that it would be wrong to repay a fan of mine with such a stab in the back, especially after she had made such a nice video about me.


    ¡°Your words please me, more than you can imagine. Earlier, you mentioned legends about dwarven craftsmanship, tell me, do they also speak of dwarven hospitality? It is almost as famed as our craftsmanship and I would like to extend it to you, for as long as you like to stay.¡± he said, adding a bit more bait, trying to keep us here with honeyed words, luxury and leisure.


    ¡°There are tales, yes. Alas, there is something I have to do, a task of importance and interest to the Stonemother. And as a disciple, I can only do as my Teacher bids me, everything else would be improper.¡± I respectfully declined, using a bit of weasley wording to give a false impression without speaking a falsehood.


    ¡°Ah, that is too bad. Then I can only wish you the best on your continued journey. Hopefully, your task will be as successful as the one you fulfilled for us.¡± he shook his head in disappointment, before telling us that he had to return to his duties and bidding us farewell.


    With the leave of the Thane and his words of work that had to be done, the other dwarves around our dwelling quickly realised that they, too, had something to do and somewhere to be, quickly dispersing.


    ¡°Your words honer us, Lady Morgana, and I think I speak for all of us if I echo the words of our Thane. You are a friend of the Ashenforge-Dwarves and will be welcome in our Hold as long as it stands.¡± the burly crafter who had made my clothes told me, once the commotion had calmed.


    ¡°Thank you. I spoke nothing but the truth, your work truly is marvelous.¡± I complimented him and after a few more words, the craftspeople had to go back to their work as well, leaving us to our own duty. A day of relaxation and shopping, before we would head back out in the next morning.

 Chapter 318

    After we had been presented with the last of our rewards, there wasn¡¯t much that needed to be done in the dwarven town but the idea to replenish our supplies, especially those things that couldn¡¯t easily be found in the forest or on the road. To do so, we had to link up with the quartermaster of the dwarven hold, they simply didn¡¯t use a normal system of commerce internally. Essentially, their economy and division of labour was organised from the top down, in a system that seemed to be a mix between socialism, a feudal guild-system and a meritocracy. I wasn¡¯t quite sure how it worked, and neither was anyone in my party, but it seemed to do so, the dwarves had their roles and duties, completing them to the best of their ability. Part of me was curious, wanting to study it, but the overwhelmingly large part didn¡¯t really care. It worked for them and that was that.


    At the end of the day, it meant that we had to take quite some of the gold and silver we had been given by the Thane, and it had been a literal sack of gold, and give it back to their community. I didn¡¯t have a problem with it, we had yet to really need gold or have an opportunity to truly spend it. Maybe once we got to more civilised parts, not that the tales on the forum and videos I had seen of western Aretia seemed to suggest civilisation above city-states in the area. Oh, there were massive semi-nomadic tribes but I had a feeling they would have a similar mentality to us, what use was gold, could you eat it? Fight with it? Maybe we would be able to use coin, but I wasn¡¯t counting on it.


    The dwarven quartermaster was happy to assist us, even coming into the outer portion of his building, so that the others were able to easily interact with him, not just me and maybe Rai, who could comfortably enter the dwarven tunnels. He brought what amounted to a catalogue with him, made from similar material to the tomes I had been reading the last few days, filled with listings of the supplies the dwarves had in storage, their projected need for them, with cautious margins of error to prepare for unexpected circumstances.


    The accountant in me was quite intrigued by the way they were tracking their supplies, making sure that there wouldn¡¯t be a shortage unless truly extraordinary circumstances occurred. When I asked about it, the quartermaster was quite pleased with my interest and showed me what data he used for his margins and what factors he used to compute the margins of error. Those made me hide a chuckle, there were factors and contingencies for almost every imaginable circumstance and a few I wouldn¡¯t have included as well.


    Heavy winter, with extraordinary amounts of snow? Sure, preparing for that seemed like a reasonable precaution.


    Earthquake, potentially with volcanic activity, graduated for distance of the epicenter? If you were living in a tectonically active area, it was reasonable, if the area was stable with only minor earthquakes for the last few centuries? Not so much.


    Meteor strikes? Divine Intervention? Dragon invasion? Army of Undead attacking? Well, the last one seemed a lot more reasonable than it would have seemed twenty days ago, given that we had eradicated what amounted to a small army of undead in a nearby swamp so maybe he had a point. It also reminded me of that one town I had quite literally wiped out with undead, not that it had taken an army, but maybe the dwarf had a point. Maybe undead armies were a reasonable precaution. It made me consider that maybe, just maybe, the other events were more probable than I would ever think and their precautions were reasonable.


    In any way, the quartermaster was quite happy to help us, listening to our needs and going through his ledger what we would need on our journey and what would be a fair price to pay for it.


    Our interest was quite simple, we needed some trail-rations, especially things like flour and other non-perishable foodstuffs that we couldn¡¯t acquire in the wilds. Hunting for game and searching for edible plants was relatively easy but trying to find enough wild barley for flour was nigh impossible. Similarly, salt was something the dwarves seemed to have quite a bit of, thanks to a nearby salt-mine that they slowly mined, while it was something that required tremendous luck to find in the wild. The quartermaster was happy to sell us as much as we wanted and we put a large bag, more than we would need unless we started to salt every kill we made, into one of our magic bags.


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    All in all, working with the dwarf was quite pleasant and soon our magic bags were well-filled with supplies to last us for a while, at least if we kept hunting and replenishing them as we went.


    Once we were done with the mundane supplies, I had to go and hunt for something else. The tomes I had been reading had talked about specific materials that were used for the dwarven art of runeforging and I was interested in acquiring some of those materials. In addition, the Ice-Web Silk my outfit was made of had peaked my curiosity, its inherent ability to gather Astral Power and use it in what might be rudimentary Ice-Magic was something I wanted to study. However any experimentation that might damage my new clothes was off the table, the clothes were just too marvelous to risk, so I wanted to get some of the base material, maybe even an explanation of the process they had used to weave it into cloth, to work with.


    For the rune-forging materials, I went to meet Gelorin, who had become something of a friend in the last few days, a patient voice that had answered any question I had asked regarding their magic, even done some simple demonstrations for me, allowing me to understand far more than I would have managed with pure book-learning.


    Meeting him was quite easy, I simply asked one of the younger dwarves to deliver a message, asking Gelorin to meet me. The children, who had yet to be incorporated into the dwarven work-system, had the normal curiosity of children and some of them had been hanging around the rest of my party, asking questions when they allowed it.


    ¡°Greetings, Master Gelorin.¡± I greeted the dwarf when he walked out of the building containing the library.


    ¡°Greetings, Mystic Morgana. What can I do for you?¡± he asked, his voice pleasant.


    ¡°As you know, my companions and I plan to leave the hold tomorrow morning and we have been stocking up on supplies for our trip. I wanted to ask if it is possible to acquire some more exotic materials, used to further my studies of my craft, especially some Ice-Web Silk.¡± I asked, not beating around the bush.


    ¡°I expected something like that. Yes, there are some materials you can acquire but they won¡¯t be cheap. Luckily, I happen to know that you were paid a small fortune by the Thane, so I think we can come to an agreement.¡± he grinned, his voice sounding not surprised at all. It was a good thing that I had been reading their books and was reasonably sure to have an workable idea of the value of the things I wanted, or the dwarves could have overcharged me outrageously and I wouldn¡¯t even had a chance to know.


    ¡°Excellent. Now, I have a few materials in mind and hope that we can come to an understanding.¡± I told him, before starting to give him a short list. It was based on the dwarven literature and a bit of conjecture on my part, but his nodding made me think that I was on the right path.


    ¡°Yes, we have most of what you need and, as you know, it is of little use to us.¡± he admitted, giving me the look of a proud teacher. I had to nod at that, I knew that the dwarves mainly had affinities for Earth-, Metal- and Gem-Magic, with a little fire thrown in for good measure. What I had asked for was obviously aligned to Ice-, Air and Darkness-Magic, affinities that were rare amongst dwarves. It meant they had little of the material but even less of a need.


    From there on, we started to haggle about a fair price, most of it paid in silver but some of it was paid with a few shards of Eternal Ice, making my supplies dwindle further. Maybe I¡¯d be able to create some soon, once I managed to break through the second Divide.


    All in all, the negotiations were quite successful and while I left a lot of gold and silver with the dwarf, I managed to get materials to experiment with, which would make me more powerful. I considered it a win and happily swirled into my Hallow, to enjoy a short flight over the valley.

 Chapter 319

    After a long day of napping, shopping, lazing around and relaxing, mixed in with a comfortable leisure-flight in my Hallow, the dwarves served up a feast. Sadly, there was no way the other would be able to be comfortable in the dwarven feast-hall, their architecture simply wasn¡¯t built to house people above a hundred and seventy centimeters but that was no reason to despair. Instead of trying to shoehorn the others into a hall not built for them, they decided to simply use the gorgeous weather and have their feast outside, making it almost a barbeque-like atmosphere.


    There, I learned that the dwarves had a subtle, yet very hearty cuisine, filled with rich meat, mushrooms and strong ale. They didn¡¯t have much in the way of spices but what they had was used to great effect, enhancing the fresh flavour of the meat or mushrooms without trying to distract from it. It wouldn¡¯t work if the meat wasn¡¯t very well preserved, I remembered that one of the reasons Europeans on Earth had imported spice was to hide the flavour of slightly spoiled meat, but the dwarven refrigeration was obviously up to the task. I made sure to hold back on the ale, remembering my unfortunate experience with mead, instead I simply enjoyed the celebration.


    They had set up in a buffet-style, with cooks bringing more food out as the evening progressed, and almost every dwarf of the Hold was present, mingling, talking and having a good time. In addition to the feast, there was music and I even managed to dance with Sigmir, making the steps up as we went. It was wonderful, relaxed and thoroughly enjoyable.


    In the middle of the feast, shortly after Sigmir and I had made a first attempt at dancing together, an experiment slightly hindered by the height-difference between us, Dargira approached.


    ¡°Morgana. I like the new look.¡± she said, a happy smile on her face. Judging by the large, half-empty stain of ale in her hand she was very well on the way to get hammered, maybe causing the smile and her approach.


    ¡°Thank you. The crafters of the Ashenforge-Clan have made me something truly great.¡± I admitted, looking down my body. I had forgone the cloak, just wearing the new clothes crafted by the dwarves and I liked the new look. Certainly, part of it was that I didn¡¯t look as sinister as I had before, less like an evil witch, a role I played but didn¡¯t want to become a cliche of, and more ambiguous, a character that might be good or might be evil. It was more fun that way, making people guess and wonder, even if I doubted I would be able to fully shed the type I had established over the last few months. But it was fun to try, especially if I could mess with people¡¯s heads by doing it.


    ¡°It¡¯s certainly different.¡± she admitted, looking around as if trying to capture everything around us, making me think that she might be recording, for a video. Far from me to stop her from doing so, but I felt a warning would be a good idea.


    ¡°Just so you know, if you plan to make another video, other Travellers will see it. And who knows, one or more of them might use the knowledge they gain from your videos to harm the Ashenforge Dwarves, maybe even attack the Hold itself.¡± I warned her, speaking softly, so no other dwarves could hear us.


    ¡°Remember the video you made of me, and the discussion it caused about dungeons, outdoor or not, and how some groups claim them for their own use? The Thane himself asked me to keep the information on the swamp-dungeon to myself, and I promised to do so, little did he know that you had already shared it with every Traveller caring to look for it.¡± I explained, not sure if I would actually be able to make her understand that she had to consider what she shared in video, something I had tried to do from the start, keeping some of my abilities hidden as much as possible, even if the highlight-reels had spoiled it from time to time. Luckily, Pantheon had promised to mostly keep me out of them, if I produced good content on my own, something I had tried to do as much as possible, for me and for them. Soon, I would have to make a flight-video, just to make sure I had something good to share. A few of the fights in the dungeon might have worked, especially the boss-fight against Tzar Bolotnik, but that was information I wanted to keep for myself as much as possible, especially now that I had promised to keep information about the dungeon to myself.


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    My words seemed to have penetrated Dargira¡¯s mind, pushing past the haze of drink she had shrouded herself with and I could see her go a little pale.


    ¡°You mean, I might have harmed the dwarves here?¡± she asked, sounding contrite, maybe even a little morose.


    ¡°Have you ever heard the adage that loose lips sink ships? Or that knowing the enemy is half the battle? You put important information out there and yes, it might harm the dwarves here in the long run. Part of their best defense is that nobody had a good reason to try attacking them, their remote and very defensible position making it prohibitively expensive. But if it is known that a new dungeon is up for grabs? Then it depends how the swamp stacks up to other dungeons, with its rate of spawn, material-generation and danger. Those are the criteria I would measure a dungeon with, but I have no idea how the locals do it.¡± I explained, catching myself before I could drift into a sequietuer about possible dungeon-ecology and rating. Their connection with the Astral River was rather peculiar after all.


    ¡°I¡­¡± Dargira begann, before stopping. ¡°No, you are right. I think I¡¯m too used to games light Craft of War, where boss and dungeon-guides have often been written before the official release of the content, by beta-testers.¡± she admitted, looking a little sheepish and a lot more sober.


    ¡°Written, yes. But if you think that the testers put everything they learned into them, every trick and tactic, you are naive.¡± I told her, grinning at the memory. I had mostly left the player-versus-environment part of Craft of War years ago, only glimpsing at it from time to time, out of curiosity, but I remembered that the true tactics, learned in many tries and with great effort, had been jealously guarded, until the content had been fully conquered. Sure, there had been some tidbits leaked, to provide content and income for the guild¡¯s streamers, but never the truly important parts. I was reasonably sure that hadn¡¯t changed, even after i had focused on the player-versus-player aspect of the game and the team-arena, where I had been active with Team Amarantine.


    ¡°Oh. Yeah, I guess I can see that.¡± she admitted, before taking another look at her stein and draining it with a long gulp.


    ¡°I¡¯ll leave you to the feast.¡± she told me, before ambling off, maybe looking for more ale.


    ¡°Let¡¯s dance some more.¡± Sigmir, who had been standing nearby, decided, dragging my mind and body in an entirely new direction.


    The rest of the evening passed in a pleasant while, at times it was Sigmir whirling my body around as we experimented with ways to dance together at times it was my mind, wandering and whirling. It was curious how much better I got along with people on Mundus, almost like an actual, functioning member of a society, something I had never quite managed on Earth. My mind simply wouldn¡¯t let me relax as I could here, constantly seeking patterns and trying to figure out what a person was trying to say without saying, what their body-language was trying to tell me. When I had been younger, I simply had ignored it but I had been told that I needed to learn to read social cues, something I had tried but never mastered. On Mundus, in a society based on myths, legends and the fantasy of a game-designer, I was able to read those cues.


    Part of me wondered why that was. Wondered if there might be a way to transfer that skill to the real world, or maybe simply for me to learn the skills on Mundus and apply them in the real world.


    But a bigger part simply didn¡¯t want to know, afraid that too much knowledge might wake me from my pleasant dream, shatter the illusion, so to speak. Pull back the curtain..Shatter the dream and leave me as I always had been, on the outside, looking in. Back to trying to understand the mood of others, trying to read subtle, non-verbal cues.


    Back to being Samantha.

 Chapter 320

    The day after the feast, I woke up with a very light headache and an overall soreness that wasn¡¯t all that unpleasant. Especially remembering what Sigmir and I had been up to after the feast to get said soreness and with that in mind, it wasn¡¯t unpleasant at all. Our plan was to have breakfast in Ashenforge Hold before starting out again, travelling roughly south-west again, not following the path we had taken here. Sure, the Pegaeae had been overall friendly but also a little pushy, her attention making me feel uncomfortable. Instead, we simply planned to move through the countryside until we got back to the old, imperial road, much further west.


    Overall, we simply wanted to get to the western edge of the continent, what would be Portugal on Earth, looking for a way to cross over the ocean. It was still a massive distance but we had managed to cover a good portion of it, despite the many detours we had gone on. Unless things went completely contrary to plan, we would be able to reach the Nexus in the southern part of Arbotoma with time to spare. There, I would have to find out what I was carrying with me, decide if I wanted to free it and, if I wanted to, figure out how to do so.


    Once again, I had to smile at the idea, the discongruity of looking at a quest like that from a realistic, as much as that applied, perspective instead of a game-perspective. Thinking in terms of games and the quests people had been sent on in past games, it was par for the course, a group of people travelling to free some ancient being, a plotline that could be used for either the protagonist or the antagonist, depending on the ancient entity and their motives.


    But if I looked at it from a realistic perspective, the idea that I was carrying the soul of a literal God, ancient Dragon, mythical beast or some other eldritch being with me, powerful enough to necessitate its sealing because Death was merely a temporary inconvenience for it, that put a different spin on it. What on Mundus was I doing?


    It also made me wonder whether Pantheon was going to abandon the customary attempt to allow everyone to experience every player every part of the game or if they would put in parts that were restricted to only those who invested the time and effort, combined with the skill, to get there. If they were to try, things would be problematic, especially with quests like the one I was trying to complete. A just reward to such a quest would be almost earth-shattering but trying to give everyone such a quest would destroy the realistic world Pantheon had set up. The effort involved in the quest made it restricted in the beta but what when the time-restriction wasn¡¯t there any longer? Would people simply take their time to complete such a quest and emerge with whatever reward I got at the end or would there be another restriction?


    ¡°What heavy thoughts are you thinking before breakfast?¡± Sigmir¡¯s voice asked, just before she started to nibble at my ears. They weren¡¯t as long and pointy as in some depictions of elves, roughly the same size as human ears, just not as round, and highly sensitive. Just the gentle nibbling was enough to chase all thought from my mind and Sigmir¡¯s arms made sure that I wouldn¡¯t be able to escape her, if I even wanted to.


    Our planned breakfast was a little later than intended, especially because Sigmir and I had to make use of the shower after our morning gymnastics but it wasn¡¯t as if we were on an actual schedule, with people waiting for us. No, we just had a few thousand miles to travel about seventeen months to do so. The only question was just how much trouble we could get into on the way.


    ¡°Let¡¯s head out.¡± I told the others, once we had eaten and made sure that nothing was left behind in our quarters and it was reasonably clean. leaving a mess would have been a little embarrassing.


    ¡°Yes, let¡¯s.¡± Sigmir agreed, shifting the carrying strap of her Lok¡¯nar a little. It made me wonder if she actually was able to feel the minute changes to her weapon or if it was a subconscious action, that she knew her weapon had changed and a possible feeling of incongruity was in her head. Shaking my head, I followed the others out, closing the door behind me.


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    Outside, the day promised to be another wonderful late spring day, with a few clouds lazily drifting through a blue sky while the sun wasn¡¯t hot enough to be uncomfortable, especially with my new gear. It was what I would call a perfect day, if I was on Earth.


    A few dwarves had been waiting on us, especially the children who had been talking to the others over the last few days but also a few adults. They seemed to simply want to watch us head out, grinning and waving, making me wonder just how the others had become so popular, especially when they started waving back, as if to acknowledge specific people. Grinning to myself, I simply followed, letting the rest of my party bask in the attention, wondering what I had missed, holed up in the library.


    But there were even people waiting for me, separately and only two, but they existed. Gelorin, the dwarves scholar was looking on from a higher tier of the city, giving me a nod when I focused on him, while Dargira, the dwarven Traveller who called the Hold her home was walking directly towards me. What gave me pause was that she wasn¡¯t looking happy, a look that seemed to be equal parts dread, determination and despair on her face.


    ¡°Good morning, Dargira.¡± I greeted her, when she stepped up.


    ¡°Good morning, Morgana. I have a favour to ask.¡± she said, not sounding too happy. I gave her a nod, to make her continue and she closed her eyes for a moment, taking a deep breath before speaking in a low voice.


    ¡°I told the Thane what I have inadvertently done. That I might have shared some images of what I have seen in the Hold and the Swamp with other Travellers. He was not too happy.¡± she began, making me wonder just what the favour would be. My mind instantly got to two plausible scenarios, she wanted me to talk to the Thane, trying to smooth things over or she wanted to join us. Neither appealed to me, trying to influence the Thane would require me to spend some sort of resource, quite possible something I didn¡¯t have while taking her with us came with its own set of problems..


    ¡°That sounds understandable.¡± I said, nodding to myself. ¡°But I don¡¯t hear the favour just yet.¡± I pushed, trying to make her get to the point so I could decline.


    ¡°I would like to join your group, travelling with you.¡± she said in a rush, almost making it hard to understand. I paused for a second, trying to make it seem as if I was thinking it over. In actuality, there was no way I would agree without some very good reason, which I had not seen yet.


    The most obvious problem was that I had a trait that would reduce my experience when taking her with me, something that luckily only applied to Travellers, I wasn¡¯t willing to give up twenty percent experience-gain, just to take her with us.


    Another, less obvious but even more damning problem was that it would require us to incorporate both of our schedules. Thanks to my deliberately emptied schedule, I could spend all my time in Mundus, other than a weekly visit to the dojo and short breaks for sustenance, bodily maintenance and training. And even that might go down a little, with my ability to stash my Avatar in my Hallow, letting Lenore carry me around, even when I wasn¡¯t logged in.


    Adding to it such simple problems like the massive level-difference and that she had already caused problems by posting information that shouldn¡¯t be posted and I didn¡¯t really need to think about it.


    ¡°That is sadly impossible.¡± I told her, after what I felt was an appropriate amount of consideration. I could see her face fall and I felt a little guilty. It wasn¡¯t an emotion I was tremendously familiar with but I quickly decided I didn¡¯t like it. It was curious, before coming to Mundus, I had heard of the different emotions but experiencing them was something else, entirely.


    ¡°I understand.¡± she nodded, trying to put on a brave face. It made me feel even worse, causing me to quickly wish her farewell and push Lenore out of her Hallow, before transferring into my own Hallow, as quick as I safely could. Letting freezingly cold clouds of pure darkness swirl around me helped calm me, isolating me from everything around me. Sometimes, emotions were a hassle.

 Chapter 321

    After a few minutes of flying, I was able to shake off the uncomfortable feeling of guilt I had been subjected to after rejecting Dargira. It made me wonder where it was coming from, why I was feeling it. I didn¡¯t owe her anything, she had made her decision and had to live with them, why would I want to take her with us, if there were only downsides? Rejecting her made sense, it was undoubtedly the right decision, so why was there a part of me that said I should have taken her in? It just didn¡¯t make sense.


    ¡°Are you back?¡± Lenore asked, getting my attention and drawing it to the outside world. The others seemed to simply have accepted that I had done something strange once more and had continued down the mountain, with Lenore flying overhead. Thanks to Lenore¡¯s memories and eyesight I was able to see a hint of worry on Sigmir¡¯s face, making me feel a different sort of guilt, less nagging, more relatable and easy to understand but a lot sharper.


    ¡°Yes, thank you.¡± I replied to Lenore, before my mind could fall down another rabbit-hole, trying to understand feelings.


    ¡°Good. You surprised me, you know?¡± she asked, sounding a little worried.


    ¡°I apologize, that was not my intention.¡± I told her, trying to convey that I had just wanted to get out of the situation. Her answer was a wordless feeling of acceptance, combined with the suggestion to soar a bit, before returning to the others. The idea sounded great to me but I wanted to make sure Sigmir knew that I was alright and Sigmir had priority.


    ¡°I have an idea for that.¡± Lenore admitted, before gliding down, gracefully landing on Sigmir¡¯s shoulder.


    ¡°Is Morgana alright?¡± Sigmir asked, as soon as Lenore landed.


    ¡°Try to talk through me.¡± Lenore suggested, making me raise an eyebrow in surprise. But it was an interesting idea, I knew that Lenore could speak in my voice but I had a feeling that she didn¡¯t want to deceive Sigmir, something I wholeheartedly supported.


    Studying the channels of Astral Power from the inside, trying to figure out how to project a thought of mine into Lenore¡¯s mind and from there to her syrinx and into an audible form was a difficult project and would have been impossible, without Lenore. She was there, her mind right next to mine, not quite joined in an Avatar-state but almost. A stray thought made me wonder what would happen if we shifted into the Avatar-state with me, within a Hallow instead of the other way around, but it was quickly pushed away by Lenore, showing me how to operate her speech.


    ¡°Yes, love, I¡¯m fine.¡± I managed to say, a feat much harder than I had expected. I could see Sigmir¡¯s surprise at being called love by a bird, but it was quickly replaced by understanding.


    ¡°Only you¡­¡± she shook her head, the worry replaced by wry amusement. ¡°That was quite the show you put on, to get out of an uncomfortable situation.¡± she told Lenore and me, chuckling a little. I had to admit, she was right, the switch Lenore and I had pulled had been quite smooth, making me wonder if Dargira had been able to detect it, at all.


    ¡°We¡¯ll stay in the sky for a bit, just keeping an eye on things from above.¡± Lenore warned Sigmir, hopping off her shoulder and taking off, back into the blue sky.


    Flying¡­ I somehow doubted I¡¯d ever get tired of the sensation, even if slightly muted due to the second hand nature of the experience, it was an awesome feeling. Both in the colloquial sense of it being a very enjoyable feeling but also in the literal sense that it was inspiring a strange feeling of awe within me, an awe that was mixed with a feeling of freedom, awesome power and not being bound by any shackles. Looking down upon the world from above, it was indescribable, making me want to have wings of my own, to spread out behind me while declaring myself to be the Queen of the World. At least I wouldn¡¯t have to be afraid of any icebergs, especially while flying.


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    ¡°Want to do a few experiments before returning to the others?¡± I asked Lenore, after we had been flying around for a bit. It wasn¡¯t tremendously exciting flying, at least that was what Lenore felt, but to me, it was more than enough.


    ¡°What do you have in mind?¡± she mentally asked and I began explaining. The first thing I wanted to know was whether I was able to cast spells, with runes and everything, from within my Hallow, letting her use them at her leisure. If that were to work, the configuration of me, being within the safety of a Hallow, should be the default in a fight, her maneuverability combined with my spellcasting would make it a serious threat.


    With that in mind, I began to form the runes, letting Astral Power flow into them while simply keeping them at the ready within the Hallow, hoping that Lenore would get a feel for them. It took us a few minutes with Lenore trying to find them to decide that it didn¡¯t seem to work, the mental effort of retrieving something from another person¡¯s Hallow was quite high and the process a complicated one, not something that could be done in flight, certainly not in fight.


    Instead, I decided to see what would happen if I tried to channel them through Lenore, as if I was outside, using our connection to channel spells through her. It was something I knew worked, so maybe it would work now as well.


    As soon as I began, using a simple spell of pure darkness, to make it easier on her, I felt that something was wrong. My spell was causing Lenore serious pain, strong enough to make her flight falter. I instantly pulled back the Astral Power, trying my best to gently help her by filling my Hallow with a healing-effect of blood magic, but to little avail. She managed to catch herself with a few, frantic beats of her wings but it was clear that there was a problem.


    ¡°Okay, let¡¯s never do that again.¡± she muttered, her mental voice hoarse from the pain.


    ¡°Agreed. I¡¯m not sure where the effect is coming from but channelling spells through you, from within the Hallow seems to be impossible, for now. Maybe if I try to create the spells outside, as if I was preparing to leave your Hallow, but that is something I don¡¯t want to try, unless we are on solid ground. If it somehow causes me to be expelled, alongside the spell, I don¡¯t want to experience gravity that directly.¡± I thought, letting Lenore share in my idea. I could feel her agreement, expressed without words, alongside a bit of amusement that I was unable to fly. It made me want to learn wind-magic, just to be able to do so.


    For a moment, I considered to use the winged Valkyrie-Race, when the game would officially launch but somehow, the idea to be something else felt wrong. My avatar, for all its weaknesses was just who I had become on Mundus, trying to change it felt wrong, like putting on someone else¡¯s clothes. Maybe fun for a change, but at the end of the day, it wasn¡¯t who I was. No, the Firn-elf was the right fit for me, even if I needed a spirit-companion to fly.


    ¡°Anything else you want to try up here?¡± Lenore asked, her voice a little tired. The pain, combined with the sudden fright of falling, must have taken quite a bit out of her.


    ¡°No, I don¡¯t think so.¡± I answered, feeling that I should let her rest in her Hallow for a bit.


    She, with a feeling of wry amusement, tucked in her wings and down we went, diving towards the ground. There was no fear within me, not with my close connection to Lenore and her knowledge that she was in full control, only exhilaration. Part of me wanted to roar into the sky, letting the world know that I was here. But far too soon, Lenore caught the air on her wings, turning the dive into a glide before flapping her wings a few times, gently landing on the path, near Sigmir.


    Feeling her weariness, I initiated the exit of my Hallow, letting her flow after me, as soon as she was ready. It was still not as fluid as I wanted it to become, to impress locals and travellers alike, but we were getting better at the quick switch.


    ¡°Everything looks clear from above.¡± I told Sigmir, before starting to walk next to her.


    ¡°And everything looks fine down here as well. Let¡¯s just enjoy our travels, I¡¯m sure something will come up, maybe sooner than we like.¡± Sigmir told me, taking my hand with a smile.

 Interlude: Profiles of Power I

    Official Road to Purgatory-Beta Forum


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    -Kelgarn, confirmed Beta-Account


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    Hey Guys


    Allow me to introduce myself before explaining what I would like to accomplish, hopefully with everyone¡¯s help. I¡¯ve been playing since the second wave, starting as an High-elven Guild-Mage and am currently at level 57. My primary interest in-game is to gather information and curate knowledge, essentially being a librarian, if you will. Not for the advantage it can give me or for power I can gain but simply to have the information and share it. Now, what do I want to accomplish and why? Let¡¯s get into the why first.


    Part of the reason Pantheon set up the Beta the way they did was, at least in my opinion, to spread awareness and information about the game, making everyone of us into an ongoing advertisement. In the beginning that seemed to work, many people played with their streams public, the highlight-reels pushed interesting events into the limelight and recently, they outright had advertisements made directly by players. But if you look now, the highlight-reels mostly stopped, the ranking-board is a list of ¡°unknown¡± entries, made private by the players and while there are videos directly uploaded, it¡¯s obvious that the videos are carefully selected and edited to only shown and share what the players want them to. I can understand their desire to keep their capabilities hidden, hoarding information for their own use.


    Now, for the question what I would like to accomplish and why I made this thread and similar ones in the future. I want to create what I¡¯d like to call Profiles of Power, to gather information on all those high-level players, the powerful and famous. You know, those people who don¡¯t want their capabilities to be known, so I¡¯ll need everyone''s help, to scour various videos and recordings, trying to figure out what the skills and effects mean, what we are seeing. It won¡¯t be truly accurate but I think that if we combine our knowledge and information, we can figure out what they do, how they do it and what their powers are. With those profiles out there, they might be more willing to create videos and share information. Wishful thinking, I know, but hey, even if they don¡¯t share, we might be able to create something good.


    Part of me wants to use my own profile as the first one, simply to show what I mean and serve as a good example but there is just one problem: It would be pure hubris to include myself as a power-player, I have neither the time nor the inclination to reach those heights. Luckily, Tobiuno, Guild-Leader of the Blades of the Realm, has decided to share and supply the first profile to this effort. Let¡¯s get to it.


    Name: Tobiuno


    Race: Human


    current level: 94


    Current Title: Knight-Protector of Highever Castle


    Current Class: Knight


    Relevant Skills:


    Sword Mastery [Arming Sword] - 68


    Mounted Combat [Horse, Melee] - 42


    Armour Mastery [Chainmail, Medium] - 59


    Command [Squadron] - 34


    Shield Mastery - 65


    Command [Warband] - 23


    Command [Army] - 6


    Athletics - 63


    Riding [Horse] - 42


    Crossbow Mastery - 29


    Class Abilities:


    Sword Abilities:


    <ul>


    <li style="font-weight: 400">Triple Strike: For up to three strikes, your weapon¡¯s weight counts as halved for the purpose of swing-speed and doubled for the purpose of damage-calculation. </li>


    <li style="font-weight: 400">Piercing Thrust: A quick thrust that doubles your armour-penetration. </li>


    <li style="font-weight: 400">Charging Strike: The speed you are moving at increases the damage you deal but also the recoil you take. </li>


    <li style="font-weight: 400">gliding Parry: You use your sword to let the enemy¡¯s weapon glide off, making them miss and pushing their weapon out of position. </li>


    <li style="font-weight: 400">blocking Parry: You use the force of your strike to make the enemy¡¯s weapon recoil, blocking the attack. </li>


    <li style="font-weight: 400">Riposte: After a successful gliding Parry, you can attack with added force, negating parts of the enemy¡¯s agility. </li>


    </ul>


    Shield Abilities:


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    <ul>


    <li style="font-weight: 400">reinforced Block: You reinforce your shield with magic, doubling your weight for the purpose of recoil. </li>


    <li style="font-weight: 400">Magic Block: You channel magic into your shield, allowing it to block non-physical spell-effects. </li>


    <li style="font-weight: 400">Shield Bash: You use your shield to ram into an opponent, attempting to push them off-balance. If successful, your opponent may be flat-footed for a moment, reducing their ability to dodge incoming attacks. This depends on a comparison between their weight and your own. </li>


    <li style="font-weight: 400">Shield Charge: You use your shield and a run-up to slam into an opponent, attempting to push them off-balance or even to the ground. The success of this ability depends on your own weight, the speed you are moving at and your opponent¡¯s weight. </li>


    </ul>


    Leadership Abilities:


    <ul>


    <li style="font-weight: 400">Hold the Line: You order your subordinates to Hold the Line, increasing their weight for the calculation of recoil, their armour and their resistance to fear-effects for five seconds. This ability has a one minute cooldown and scales with your ability to Command Troops. </li>


    <li style="font-weight: 400">Charge: You order your subordinates to charge, increasing their movement-speed, their weight for the calculation of impact and their Strength for fifteen seconds. This ability has a two minute cooldown and scales with your ability to Command Troops </li>


    <li style="font-weight: 400">Flanking Maneuver: You order your subordinates to attempt a flanking maneuver, reducing their weight for the calculation of impacts but greatly increasing their movement-speed, strength and armour-penetration. This ability has a five minute cooldown and scales with your ability to Command Troops. </li>


    <li style="font-weight: 400">No Quarter!: You order your troops to show no mercy, allowing them to slaughter their enemies. This greatly increases their damage against fleeing targets and projects a fear-aura, attempting to make enemies flee. This ability has a fifteen minute cooldown and scales with your ability to Command Troops. </li>


    </ul>


    That¡¯s what he shared about his profile and I think it¡¯s quite interesting. It makes the strengths and fighting-style obvious, a classic sword&board fighter, commanding troops and leading them in battle, either from mount-back or on foot. Not quite what we think of the knight in shining armour, that would mean wearing plate-armour, but I think Plate-armour would make effective cavalry-work difficult.


    Anyway, I¡¯ll open a few more posts about interesting characters and we can get to work, sleuthing out their abilities and adding them to the profiles.


    Peace out, Kelgarn


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    Tobiuno, confirmed Beta-Account


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    Greetings, everyone


    As you see, I offered my profile to make the first step, agreeing with Kelgarn, the beta shouldn¡¯t be focused on gaining as much of an advantage as we can grasp, instead we all should try to present Mundus and Road to Purgatory as the awesome world it is, so that it can reach its full potential. At the end of the day, Road to Purgatory is an experiment, a completely new type of game and the established industry-interests won¡¯t quietly go into the night, even now there are voices calling for investigations into Road to Purgatory¡¯s safety, rehashing old arguments about video-games causing violence and all that jazz.


    If sharing what my Avatar can do raises awareness, I¡¯m happy to do so, even to explain what the various skills do, hopefully motivating others to share as well. To add a little extra, my character-concepts is build around a simple idea: Use Stamina and relatively simple attacks for offence, use magic for defense and support of my allies. I had to pick and choose from a few active abilities when I gained my class and that was the idea behind my choices.


    I think there is much to see in Mundus that others haven¡¯t shared, for a variety of reasons. With that in mind, I¡¯ll share two videos of dungeons I have been allowed to use to rapidly gained levels, they are under the control of my liege, the Duke of Highever. Look forward to those videos.


    Regards, Tobiuno


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    Shuigun, confirmed Beta-Account


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    I love the idea and am quite hyped to read the profile. Cheers to Tobiuno for sharing, after all, sharing is caring.


    Not sure if others will follow suit but I sure hope so.


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    Goliry, confirmed Beta-Account


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    We¡¯ll have to see if that gains traction but I¡¯d be up to collect the tidbits the various power-players have let slip, either inadvertently or out-right. It might give us an idea what the things we are seeing actually are, instead of hoping that we can pull through with luck, skill and guts.


    Personally, I¡¯m quite interested in the command-skills and how those work. I mean, buffing up a squadron, so up to five people, for five seconds is one thing, doing the same with a friggin¡¯ army, however many that are, is a whole different ball-game. I¡¯d assume that the abilities scale depending on the different command-skills, adding a bit of balance but I sure hope that there is another limiting-factor. Otherwise, those skills sound scary as all hell. Or even more scary than they sound anyway.


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    Jeanyra, confirmed Beta-Account


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    Happy to lend my magical expertise, such as it is, to the task. Let the combined power of the Internet pierce the veil of silence. Or something like that. .


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    Harms, confirmed Beta-Account


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    On one hand, I would love to know what the various high-profile player are up to, what they actually can do and I¡¯d love it even more if this project would make them share more.


    On the other hand, if I were one of them, not just a level seventy orc-grunt, I would be massively pissed if people were to try to make my information public, especially if there are people gunning for me. And, let¡¯s be honest, in some way or another someone is gunning for each and every one of them.


    It can be openly, such as the challengers trying to climb the arena, hoping to kick Clavran around, it can be in an almost religious fervor, right Howardlight, or in whatever sneaky shenanigans Whisper is caught up in.


    Anyway, I¡¯ll watch with bated breath, hoping to be pleasantly surprised.

 Chapter 322

    It was a curious dichotomy, the serenity of the forest. On the face of things, it was peaceful, a gentle wind, playing with the leaves of the trees, insects buzzing and birds singing their songs. But that was only on the surface, if one looked deeper, there was an underlying struggle for survival, the creeper-vines trying to choke the trees, the predators looking to make a meal of the happily chirping bird, maybe right as it managed to attract a mate and other predators, seizing us up before deciding that attacking a group of powerful beings was a quick way to find themselves prey, instead of predator.


    We had been travelling for a few days, away from the dwarves, Adra and Rai mostly keeping an eye on things while Sigmir and I used the time to ponder our respective challenges, Sigmir the way to channel her feelings while remaining in control while I had one main project, figure out how to cross the second divide and one secondary project, digest what I had learned from the dwarves, link it with my previous knowledge and understanding and apply it in a practical manner. The secondary one would be a long term project, especially due to the constantly expanding nature of my magical knowledge, making the crossing of the second divide a priority.


    By now, I was reasonably sure that the crystal that had formed in my chest when crossing the first divide was the key, I had meditated on the matter for quite a bit and even managed to travel the channels of Astral Power within my own body, gazing upon it directly. Viewed that way, it seemed to be a crystalline tear, glowing from within with a strange, cold light very reminiscent of Ice- and Dark-Astral-Power.


    However, just thinking that I knew the key was a far cry from managing to grasp the key and overcome the divide, so I was still trying to understand. But, the more I pondered, the more I questioned, yes, the tear had formed when crossing the first divide but hadn¡¯t I also experienced a strange journey, gazing upon the moon and the stars themselves, in the void of space? My class was called Lunar Sorceress after all, so some connection with the moon had to be there, that seemed to be obvious. Just not what kind of connection.


    As the night was falling, I was sitting by myself, having climbed another tree to get above the canopy to see the stars. Lenore was nearby, I could feel her, but had asked her to keep a distance, allowing me to immerse myself into the Astral River and seek for further understanding. It was an auspicious night, especially for me, as the moon would be full in the sky, hopefully allowing me to understand more about my connection to it.


    I felt more than saw the moon in the sky, a strange calm settling around me, as if my emotions were fading into the background allowing me to view things in a dispassionate manner. For a moment, I realised that it was quite similar to my default state on Earth but the notion vanished as quickly as it came, as I focused on the Astral River around me, letting Mundus fade into the background.


    It was a sensation that would never cease to amaze me, the display of shifting colours, streamers of power winding through reality in a twisted flow, creating a spectacular sight of mesmerizing energies. I let myself bask in the Astral River, for just a bit, getting accustomed to the sensations and feelings before heading further out. My plan was to try to traverse the Astral, letting the call of the Moon guide me. Where I would end up I didn¡¯t know but I had a feeling it would be a fascinating experience.


    Keeping a tether to my Avatar, letting it anchor me to the physical reality of Mundus, I let myself go with the flow, in a manner similar to my visit to the Grandmother, but also different. Instead of trying to follow the normal flows, I was trying to follow the connection within me, the one that allowed me to harness my Ice-Magic with more ease, drawing out more power, whenever the Moon was full in the sky. I would have been able to try the same on a new moon, using the element of Darkness but somehow, I was more comfortable with Ice. In addition, I would have to wait another two weeks for a new moon, which I certainly didn¡¯t want.


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    Moving with the Astral River was always a strange and mesmerizing experience, the reality of Mundus casting a reflection onto the surroundings, only a reflection that seemed to have gone through a fun-house mirror combined with a prism, the colours shifting and distances warping, creating a surreal effect. Some of the shifting colours were more vibrant, glowing with more than just light, radiating Astral Power that my senses were picking up, making me taste colours, allowing me to smell the scent of purple. It made me wonder if this was what some psychedelic drugs were like and if so, I could understand their appeal. Not that I would ever take them, the idea of having such an experience in reality was rather scary, but still appealing.


    For once, I wasn¡¯t moving with the main-flow of the Astral River, the power moving between  the different Nexuses but instead, I was pushing myself forward, using the power coming to me from the moon as a Guideline, wherever it might lead.


    At first, I was pulling myself in a direction I could only describe as up, away from the main-stream, the task of leaving the familiar flow a difficult one. Without the recent experiences of flying with Lenore, I might have faltered, the idea of rising into the sky too alien, too daunting, to keep my will strong enough to move against the flow. Flying without technological assistance was not something humans had never been able to, so our minds were not terribly adjusted to it, thankfully flying within my Hallow, experiencing it second hand from Lenore¡¯s avian mind had prepared me somewhat. It was still a daunting idea, even if I wasn¡¯t actually flying but travelling within the Astral, it didn¡¯t matter, it was a strange experience.


    Distance seemed to warp around me, shrinking and morphing, without any rhyme or reason, otherwise what happened next would have been impossible. Within minutes, the massive amalgamation of Astral Power that was Mundus itself faded from my senses, vanishing behind me, only the tethers I was holding, the one anchoring me to my body and the one I was following, towards the moon, remained within my perception, everything else was empty. Void. It was a scary feeling, making me clutch my tethers tighter, fearful what might happen if they got severed.


    Pulling further, I thought I was moving but without outside indications time, distance and velocity were impossible to asses. It felt as if I had been moving through the void for mere minutes when I felt a change, a burning sensation coming from behind. For a moment, I was unsure what was happening but then I realised that the earlier Void wasn¡¯t empty any longer. There was a burning heat, singing me with its power. Pain made me move backwards, instinct reacting before I could even fully understand what was happening.


    Turning, to reorient myself, I realised what had happened, feeling like a fool. There was that massive source of Power, of pure, burning heat, and I had stumbled into its radiance. Before, I had been shielded by Mundus itself, sheltered in its atmosphere and later in its shadow but now, the Sun itself had burned. I was lucky that I only saw the barest edge of it, as I was moving out of Mundus¡¯ Shadow, otherwise I was quite sure I would have quickly been reduced to spiritual ashes, without any cohesion. Maybe trying to reach the moon during full-moon wasn¡¯t a good idea for me. Not unless I wanted to pit my powers against the scorching rays of the Sun, something I decided I would leave for another day.


    Back in the dark shadows, I let myself relax,  the empty darkness around me no longer scary or unpleasant but instead, I was relishing it. It was sheltering me from the blistering, painful heat, which I was grateful for.


    Finally, I took the tether to my body firmly in my mental hand and gave it a strong tug, intend on pulling myself back into my body. There was an eerie sensation, as if I was stretching like a rubber-band and the Astral River seemed to shift for a moment, giving me an intense sense of vertigo, before I felt my senses return back to my body.


    Holding on tightly to the tree I had been sitting on, I barely managed to stay on. Vertigo mixed with blistering pain, reminiscent of a sunburn, tried to make me succumb to gravity, plummeting to the ground. Maybe perching on trees was something best left to birds, for my next experiment, I¡¯d put up my throne, that way, I had something comfortable to sit on.

 Chapter 323

    ¡°You are looking purple.¡± Lenore¡¯s amused voice pulled my awareness to my surroundings, something I had mostly ignored, trying to regain both my mental and physical equilibrium.


    My only answer was an annoyed groan, trying to convey that help would be appreciated, without actually saying it, partially because I wasn¡¯t sure if I would be sick if I opened my mouth. Looking around came with a similar problem, my eyes were tightly shut to limit the sensory information I was receiving, in an attempt to let myself become re-accustomed to my body, thus the earlier inattentiveness.


    After a moment, she pushed the information that she had landed next to me into my mind, a thought that was laced with concern, urging me to return to the safety and comfort of my Hallow. I followed that thought, letting my mind enter my Hallow, pulling my Avatar behind me. Inside, I felt better, the vertigo quickly lessening but the blistering pain remained.


    ¡°Are you alright?¡± Lenore¡¯s concerned voice asked, stopping me from investigating myself further, instead focusing on her.


    ¡°I think so.¡± I answered, not feeling entirely convinced.


    ¡°You didn¡¯t look it.¡± she told me, her voice accompanied by an image of me, when she had seen me in the tree. It shocked me, my normally pale-blue skin was an angry, blistering reddish-purple, looking deeply unhealthy. I could only shake my head at the idea that I had managed to get such a brutal sunburn, in the forest at night. Sure, I had travelled through the Astral but that wasn¡¯t my body, but my spirit or soul or whatever you want to call it.


    Curious, I conjured up a mirror, a simple exercise in my Hallow, and looked into it. What I saw caused me to frown, even inside my Hallow I looked burned. I mentally sat back for a second, thinking about it. Going by my understanding and what I had experienced, my looks within my Hallow were decided by my mind. At least if I were native that would be the case and thus far, I had always tried to act as if it was the same for me, with my Avatar. But now, I was looking sunburned and going by the pain I had felt, I had looked sunburned before seeing the image from Lenore, which, to me, meant that it was an external factor, not my mind seeing the image and adjusting my self-image to match with the image I was seeing.


    Taking a deep breath, I focused on the image I normally used for the transition into the Hallow and back out, depicting my Avatar with the smooth, pale-blue skin I had chosen on character-creation. I felt my frown deepen when the pain didn¡¯t change in the slightest but when I looked back into the mirror, the earlier deep breath suddenly shot back out, my eyes going wide. Looking back at me, now with wide eyes, was my pale-blue form but as I was watching, the sunburn returned, my skin blistering and turning purple again.


    ¡°It¡¯s your soul that¡¯s injured.¡± Lenore spoke up, her voice calm, yet concerned. ¡°From what I can see, it will take a day or two to heal. I wouldn¡¯t try to work any big magic in the meantime, I¡¯m not sure how deep your injury goes.¡± she warned me, making me grumble in pain and annoyance.


    ¡°Great.¡± I muttered, both in pain and annoyance, mentally urging Lenore to carry me back to the others. Even the emotions flowing back from Lenore, the feeling of her wings cutting through the cool night air couldn¡¯t cheer me up, the combination of pain and frustration, both at failing to accomplish my goal and at being advised against casting spells for a few days making me grumpy.


    It only took a minute or so to get back to camp, my tree hadn¡¯t been too distant and once Lenore had settled near the still meditating Sigmir, I left my Hallow, looking over to Adra, who was keeping an eye on things while Rai had already rolled up nearby, making sure to grab as much sleep as possible, before taking an early watch. I considered things for a moment, whether I should tough it out, staying within my Avatar, even as the pain was seeping into me, a steady, painful burning that quickly made the decision for me. Without a way to keep up with the group, I would have stayed but with my ability to stay within my Hallow, there was just no need to.


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    ¡°As you can see, I had a bit of an accident. I¡¯ll be gone from Mundus for two, maybe even three days, resting in my Hallow.¡± I announced, not even waiting for a reply before moving back into my Hallow and triggering the logout process. I could hear her response nonetheless, thanks to Lenore¡¯s senses, she was telling me that she¡¯d tell Sigmir and I should come back as soon as possible. I had no way to reply and soon after, I was sitting in the home-space of my capsule, looking around the mountaintop-temple I had crafted so long ago. The pain faded instantly, leaving only a lingering sense of discomfort, my mind apparently not quite ready to let things go.


    Orienting myself, I realised that it was still the middle of the night in the real-world, the double-speed of Mundus tripping me up. Instead of instantly logging out, I decided to play with my home-space a little, adjusting it to the changes I had undergone over the last few months, making it more fitting to the current me, instead of the past me. In addition, I had a few features I wanted to add, now that I was here and had time on my hands.


    My first action was to head into the library, where I had originally set up the interface to interact with my computer from within the capsule. The simple desk that I had used in the beginning, just because it was what I was used to had to go. I considered things for a second, only to realise that the entire building was a little mundane. There were options for different materials, I had used some of them when I had created the room that resembled an icy cave a while back, so what was stopping me from going the whole way? It wasn¡¯t Mundus, I wasn¡¯t limited by the rules of Road to Purgatory, so I could go wild.


    Delving into the options, I had to search for a while until I managed to spot the menus to customize the material used. Setting it to Ice, I was presented with a couple of settings, for transparency, crystal-structure and a maybe half a dozen other parameters that changed the optics of the material. Part of me wondered if there was a correlation between the Ice used in the Home-Space and on Mundus, it would make sense to re-use the graphic-work in both cases but sadly I wasn¡¯t sure if I would be able to exploit such a correlation. The Home-Space wasn¡¯t subject to normal laws of physics, allowing the creation of the most fanciful spaces, from underwater-environments filled with sunken treasure to fairytale castles built from cotton candy, everything was possible.


    Smiling, I began to change the mountaintop-temple into something else, beginning with the sheer cliffside, turning the dark grey granite into silvery-white Ice, gleaming with a dark light from within. It was as close to the colour of Eternal Ice as I had been able to get it, the effect as close to Dark Radiance as I managed. In addition, I turned down the apparent temperature and added an icy wind, complete with whistling sounds, playing around the now jagged pillar of ice upon which my temple sat.


    Next, I continued upwards, turning the walls to Ice, making them slightly transparent, just enough to make out shadows on the other side, before adding a dynamic effect into them, making it look like shadows were moving around in the walls, creating a deeply creepy atmosphere, where the walls seemed to be alive with a shadowy court. And every court needed a queen, at least in my opinion, and who better to be the Queen of this court of Ice and Shadow than myself?


    The temple to the different gods I had put in when creating the space stayed, the only change was that the statues were now carved from gleaming ice, with similar changes to the training-area and the library. Connected to those three rooms, creating a cross-shape, similar to christian churches, I created my throne-room, an almost transparent roof of ice, carried by pillars veined with flowing streams of dark-red liquid, using a colour described as heartblood. There was even an option to make them pulse in tune with the movement of the flickering shadows within the walls. Those things, combined with the whistling wind and the sheer drop around the throne-room created an intimidating atmosphere, sending shivers down my spine as I looked at it.


    Walking up, I started to smile before sitting down and finally getting to the point that prompted the renovation, setting up the interface with my computer in a more fitting manner. And what could be more fitting than the Queen of the place, influencing the world from her Throne?

 Chapter 324

    Sitting on my newly established throne, I pulled up the interface connecting me to my computer. I still preferred to have a visual representation, even if I could theoretically work without one, so I created a keyboard and mouse from crystal clear ice with blood red letters, letting them float in front of me. They were quickly joined by a set of screens, the borders defined by dark, floating shadows with thin wisps floating off, creating the appearance of holes in reality through which I was looking.


    The aesthetic was perfect, a wonderful mix of creepy and intimidating, while projecting a clear air of power, exactly what I had wanted to create. For a moment, I considered the best way to share my creation and decided on creating a virtual tour allowing people to see what I wanted to show them, without putting it all out there, for everyone to use. Sure, the tour might inspire copy-cats but that wasn¡¯t something I could stop, not without completely keeping it to myself.


    But before I created the tour, I sat back and opened up the forum, looking at what new things were going on in the wider world of Mundus. The first thing jumping out at me was that the discussion regarding the Grandmother was still going on, albeit with fewer people. However, those few had essentially dug trenches and settled in for a long flame war, happily shelling the opposing position with their respective opinions. The discussion had long since left behind any reason, making it obvious that I had made the right decision when I washed my hands off it all.


    On the other hand, there was a thread that seemed interesting, apparently describing the abilities and skills of Tobinuo¡¯s avatar. There was even a post by the man himself, supporting the idea but I was sceptical. Tobiuno was many things but stupid was not one of them. He had been a strategically savy and tactically brilliant foe in Craft of War, there was no way he was willing to just disclose his character¡¯s secret. At least not without a good reason.


    The reason put forward made some sense but I had a sneaking suspicion that there might be another, deeper, reason, hidden beneath the facade of goodwill. If he was as savy as I thought he was, he might have given away the superficial secrets, things every idiot could see when watching his stream, while keeping a few aces or jokers up his sleeve, ready to be used at a moment''s notice.


    The idea made me consider if I wanted to attempt something similar but the question was what to hide? I had managed to keep my Blood Magic quite well hidden, until I made the stupid mistake with that Traveller Centaur, using it to experiment on him, thinking that death would make sure that my secret was kept. Even worse, my Blood Magic had created an effect that had lasted through death, forcing developer-intervention, meaning that it had made a lasting impression and there were undoubtedly people who¡¯d pay attention if I would explain what it was. That meant I¡¯d either have to lie, hoping that the centaur hadn¡¯t been told what exactly had happened to him, or I¡¯d have to disclose my Blood Magic.


    My Mind Magic on the other hand should be a complete secret, even if it wasn¡¯t truly powerful yet. I had used it to stun one of the stooges but I somewhat doubted that they understood what had happened and what the implications were.


    In addition, if I played it smart, I might be able to down-play my physical capabilities, especially when aided by Blood Magic. If my enemies saw me as a pure caster, their tactics would reflect that, giving me an opening. The exact nature of my connection with Lenore was similarly something I would prefer to hide. The easiest way to accomplish that would most likely be to show her as a normal bird whose form I could take. If I hadn¡¯t shown off my ability to fly in front of Dargira, I¡¯d have tried to hide it, but that idea had flown the nest.


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    Shaking my head, I pushed off the decision for another day, hoping that I¡¯d see if there were actually people interested in collating the different videos made by people, trying to uncover their abilities.


    I continued to browse the forums for a little longer, enjoying the sheer variety of content available. There were videos on almost every topic, from battling fantastic beasts to religious services, from climbing sheer cliff-sides to a video of a farm-wife making butter with a churn. Mundus was truly a different world and we players were allowed to engage with it on our own terms.


    From the serious commitment that I felt towards that world and some of its inhabitants to the tourists who enjoyed the fact that death was merely a temporary inconvenience. The guy uploading rock-climbing footage was one of them, speaking of the moments of thrill when realising that he had done goofed, the free-fall and even the deadly impact, all experiences that he¡¯d never survive in the real world.


    If Pantheon was able to cater to both sets of people, Road to Purgatory would be more than a game, at least in my opinion. It made me wonder what more would be possible, which other worlds could be created with that technology. But it also made me worry about the repercussions and changes on Earth, the effects of giving people the ultimate escape from reality. My experiences on Mundus were far more interesting than those I had on Earth, especially for me, whose experience of emotions was so curiously different within the Capsule. I already spent most of the time within the capsule, would I ever want to leave it, if not forced? Would that be a bad thing?


    Shaking off those thoughts, I stood up from my throne and I dismissed the interface I had set up earlier. Turning around and looking back at my throne, there was something missing. A coat of arms, some sort of symbol to identify just who people were dealing with. Not the rune symbolising Morgana on Mundus, that didn¡¯t feel right. After a moment, I thought I had a good idea and set about engraving it into the back of my throne, so that it would hover above my head once I was seated.


    The symbol was a simple one, a silver waning moon-sickle, with a black raven sitting atop the moon, holding it in its talons, all set on a bluish-white background. The contrast between the silver of the moon and the background was slightly enhanced with a thin, dark-red border, softly glowing and pulsing in tune with the rest of the room. It would do. Very much so. I might even adopt a simplified version as the logo for the brand I was building around Morgana.


    For the next three hours I slowly made the tour-video, carefully adjusting camera-angles to create the images I wanted, while adding an impromptu commentary to make it more than just pretty, moving pictures. The tools Pantheon had implemented for the capsule-space were quite sophisticated, even allowing me to set up independant camera-movement, giving me interesting options to play with. And play with them I did. The final result was a video worthy to be uploaded and I had high hopes that people would enjoy it.


    Once I was done with the filming, I logged out and took a moment to do something I hadn¡¯t done in the past few years. The building I was living in was moderately high, high enough to have a descent view, and residents had easy roof-access. I wanted to take a moment and simply look up, into the night sky, watch as dawn was lighting up the sky and the sun slowly started to come over the horizon. It felt strange that I had consciously watched the sun rise and set on Mundus but hadn¡¯t done the same on Earth, not in the last few years.


    After climbing the stairway, I stepped out onto the roof, letting the pleasantly cool night-air flow around my body. But once I took a deep breath and fully took in my surroundings, I only felt a profound sense of loss. There was no night, there was no silence and there certainly was no clear air. Even at such an early morning time, when the world was supposed to be bathed in twilight, artificial light from hundreds of sources was brightening the day, erasing that magic moment I had come up to look for. At a time, when even the birds were still asleep, the city was filled with a cacophony of sounds.


    Filled with disappointment, I could only turn around and walk back into the building, morose over the loss of something that had been gone, long before I had ever a chance to experience it.

 Interlude: Frozen Spire

    Official Road to Purgatory-Beta Video Archive of Morgana


    Welcome, Traveller, to the Frozen Spire.


    You have come here in search of something, for what? Maybe even you, yourself, do not know. But now, that you have climbed the spire, braved freezing wind and treacherous ice, you find yourself in my domain. Step carefully or you mind find that you will stay, stay for an eternity, frozen in body, mind and soul.


    FrozenSpire.avi


    For a moment, the video is filled with mist and soft, string music starts in the background. The deep, vibrating tones are causing the mist to billow, until the soft noises are suddenly shattered by the beat of a drum, causing the mist to part and allowing for clear vision. On one side is a silvery-blue wall of ice, jagged icicles pointing outwards and with small cracks radiating a strange, black-purple glow. On the other side is nothing. Nothing but empty air, clouds stretching out below, obscuring whatever might be beneath.


    Between the two is a narrow path, a staircase cut directly into the ice of the spire, allowing one to climb it, if one is brave enough. And now, at the top of the staircase, a maw-like entrance awaits, into the spire itself. Icicles jut downwards, giving the impression of teeth, the sharp teeth of a predator, ready to snap shut and rend the flesh of whatever prey was foolish enough to end up between them.


    After a moment of pause, the jagged maw seems to come closer as the viewpoint moves towards it. Absolute blackness makes it impossible to see  further than the first few meters into the maw-like cave-opening, at least until the person filming takes the first step inside.


    In that moment, strange symbols start to glow all around them, some on the teeth, others further back, carved into the wall. Their silver glow is enough to see, barely, but the myriad of shifting symbols causes a strange interplay of shadows, making it seem as if there are hundreds of beings in the cave, with indistinct, strange movement everywhere. At the same time, as the runes start to glow, the music changes again, the strings and drums are joined by a guitar and keyboard, beating out a low, steady rhythm. With the change in rhythm, a quiet narrative starts in the background, giving context.


    ¡°So, you¡¯ve made it this far. Know that you are entering the domain of an old one, old and powerful.¡±


    As the viewpoint moves through the cave, more and more symbols remain alight, the shadows seemingly receding into the walls.


    ¡°Did you know that she was once known as Titania, strongest of the Lightbringers, hailed as the Harbinger of Light.¡±


    Deeper within the cave, now visible thanks to the better light, a set of stairs leads spirals upwards. When the viewpoint reaches the stairs, runes set in the wall start lighting the climbing stairs while the narration continues.


    ¡°But one day, something happened. What exactly caused the event nobody knows but many claim to know. Some of them say that it was betrayal, that Titania was stabbed in the back, driven from the light and into the dark. Others tell a different story, speaking of a lust for power that caused her to fall from grace. That the darkness corrupted her, dimming her light and as the light faded, only a cruel, frozen darkness remained.¡±


    It goes up the stairs, with small clouds of mist floating into view, until a circular room is reached, with four branches leading away. The walls seem to be lit from the other side, as shadowy figures move on their other side. Walking through the room, the narration continues.


    ¡°But the circumstances are, at the end of the day, irrelevant. Why the event happened isn¡¯t important, only its results. Titania vanished from the world, only to return shortly after on a different one. Just that she was no longer Titania, no, she had left the light, taking on a new name to signify that change. Her new form was called Morgana, even if many called her something else.¡±


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    Bravely, the visitor steps through one of the dark doorways, the image turning black for a moment, only for light to return in the new room. All around the room are shelves, all from the same gleaming ice, and carefully filed into them are records. Most of them are bound in tomes but others are recorded on rolled-up scrolls and some on stone- or clay-tablets.


    ¡°Some say that she was obsessed with magic, trying to understand its foundations, the fundamental truths of the world. Some say she failed and the Gods cursed her for her Hubris. Others say she succeeded and the Gods struck her down, afraid she would come to rival them.¡±


    However the most eye-catching feature of the room is a set of three pillars, each of them carved with distinct sets of symbols that radiate an awe-inspiring light.


    One is carved out of ice, just like the rest of the palace, but this pillar seems to be different. The Ice is perfectly smooth, not a single crack visible, and clouds of fog seem to be condensing once they get too close to it, flowing down the pillar and waft out into the room where they evaporate again. Sharp, angular runes are carved into the pillar, every single one of them glowing silver.


    ¡°Winter seemed to follow her call, but no normal winter, no, what she brought was an eternity of Ice and Snow. And not only that.¡±


    The second pillar comes into view, just not into focus. It is so dark, so indistinct, that it seems to be merely a shadow, without any light to distinguish its features, other than the strange, hard to read runes carved into it. They seem to be flowing, as if they are changing every time you look away and the only reason they can be seen at all is their dim, purple glow.


    ¡°Darkness settled over the land, like a blanket of night. Which came first, the cold or the darkness? Nobody knows. Nobody who is telling at least.¡±


    Turning, again, the final pillar becomes visible. It is just as strange as the others, it seems to be made from liquid, constantly flowing as it slowly pulses. The runes appear to be stationary, pulsing in tune with the liquid, their light a dark red.


    ¡°Much blood was shed, and the shed blood seemed to empower Morgana. And the more power she had, the more blood was shed.¡±


    The vision quickly moves side to side, before moving back towards the exit and quickly moving towards it. After stepping through the dark doorway, the viewpoint quickly moves through the circular room and the dark door on the other side of the room. There a wide, open room waits, with strange weapons in stands at the wall and various creatures standing in front of them, looking like frozen statues. Some of them are humanoid, others not so much. They all look like they had been alive when they were frozen, frozen and turned into decorations.


    ¡°Many tried to oppose her. Many tried and many more died, their frozen corpses left behind in her shadow.¡±


    A gasp is heard after a second and the image quickly spins around, moving back through the dark door. There, the viewpoint stops moving forward for a moment, panning from one door to the other. The moment passes and the viewpoint moves forward again, towards the left door.


    Behind it is a strangely different room. Instead of the previous light, shed by silver-blue runes, this room is alight with flickering, blue light, coming from torches set all around the room. Four statues, elaborately carved from clear ice, are placed opposite of each other, each of them depicting different women.


    ¡°Not all did oppose her. Some were watching with interest, others even lent her aid, either directly or indirectly.¡±


    One of them is sitting on a throne apparently carved from green crystal, with a dragon and tiger prostrating before her.


    The one across the room is standing defiantly, a cruel-looking, barbed spear raised above her head, with a raven sitting on her shoulder.


    The third statue is barely recognisable as female, the hood of her cloak hiding most of her figure but a pair of torches held in her hand lights up her face just enough to make out sharp, yet beautiful, features, a strong nose with high cheekbones.


    Last but certainly not least, the statue across the hooded figure is taller than any of the others and physically imposing, without the need for a weapon. Next to her, fangs bared, stands a large canine, ready to tear into his mistress¡¯ enemies.


    ¡°Respect is earned, never demanded.¡± the narrator adds, as the viewpoint turns around again, moving back into the first room and to the room across.


    Suddenly, just as the viewpoint goes dark in the door, the music stops, only the whistling wind remaining. On the other side of the darkness, a strange scene awaits, a throne-room held aloft by pillars, all of them looking strange and eerie, but the figure on the throne draws the eye, more than the strange room and the image focuses on her. She is clad in grey-white tunic and pants, a black cloak adorned with black feathers pooling around her. Above her head sits an emblem, a moon-sickle with a raven sitting atop of it.


    Looking at the camera the figure speaks.


    ¡°Greetings, Seeker. Let me show you the truth. It is not a nice tale or a pretty image but the truth seldom is.¡± the figure exclaims, her voice impossibly echoing through the open room as darkness seems to coalesce into distinct clouds, before showing different images, of other places.

 Chapter 325

    It had been a strange experience, spending a whole day in the real world, not logged into Mundus. Partially due to the slight incongruity between my normal body and my avatar but also because the surroundings were so different. On Mundus, I spent most of the time walking while more or less lost in my own head, either thinking or conversing with Lenore. At times, I talked to Sigmir, took in the scenery or kept an eye out for danger but the last was mostly the domain of Adra and Rai, both of whom had skills to detect danger long before it got close. In addition, the area we were travelling in was quite safe, at least for beings of our power. If we were some fifty levels lower, there might have been quite a few predators trying to separate one of us from the group for a quick kill or try an ambush during the twilight hours but that danger had mostly ceased after fighting our way through the swamp-dungeon.


    On the other hand, Earth had a lot more distractions, keeping me from getting lost in my head, not that I had some great interest to ponder, nothing that kept me mentally engaged like magic. Maybe if I was interested in learning something new, a language or a mental skill, it might be different but if I compared the mental exercise of studying the dwarven runic patterns, trying to understand them with anything I might do in the real world, it was frankly no comparison. Sure, there were interesting mathematical papers I could read but they driften far too often into what I considered intellectual mastrubation, an author trying to show off just how clever they were, without actually achieving anything of practical use. Of course, if I looked at it light that what I was doing in Mundus would be the ultimate waste of time, a true escape from reality, but somehow that didn¡¯t bother me in the least. Maybe because it was me escaping.


    Even sleeping in the real world was a little uncomfortable, partially because I had become used to the outdoor-living, the hard ground covered in soft furs, or maybe it was that there was something, or rather someone, missing that kept me from a good rest.


    Ultimately, it didn¡¯t really matter, after almost twenty hours I decided to log back in, on Mundus I would have been gone for almost two days, giving my Avatar time to restore itself. And restore itself it had. There was a slightly uncomfortable feeling, as if I was wearing some itchy garment, pasted straight to my skin, but it was miles better than the previous feeling.


    ¡°Finally, you are back.¡± Lenore exclaimed, moments after I logged in. The mental contact was tinged with quite a bit of anxiety but also anticipation and excitement.


    ¡°What did I miss?¡± I asked, curious what had caused her state. I was reasonably sure it wasn¡¯t something bad, the negative emotions associated with such an event had been missing in her mental voice, but it had to be something big.


    ¡°Someone has been quite anxious to have you back.¡± Lenore told me, amused at my curiosity. At the same time, I reached out, using her senses to experience the world around me only to be a little disappointed. She was flying, which was great, but there was nothing hinting at the cause of her mental state, nothing that could sate my curiosity. When I tried to prod her memories with wordless bursts of curiosity, she pushed back, not giving me anything to go by. There were a few memories of her sitting on a tree-branch just moments before, but nothing actually helpful.


    Luckily, I didn¡¯t have to wait for long, after a short flight, Lenore could see the others, her mind supplying that they were our destination. As we were gliding in, I was a little confused, Sigmir seemed to have changed, not by much, but changed nonetheless. It might have been the different set of sensory organs that caused it, but I wasn¡¯t certain.


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    Before I could inquire deeper into the change, Lenore landed on Sigmir¡¯s shoulder and gave me a forceful mental push, giving me the strong impression I was supposed to leave my Hallow. Pushing my mind outwards, I decided to play a small prank on Sigmir, coming out behind her and giving her a pleasant surprise.


    As I dragged my body after my mind and concentrated on the mental image of my Avatar I felt Lenore take wing again. Before I could fully orient myself after appearing, I was engulfed in a forceful embrace.


    ¡°You are back.¡± Sigmir¡¯s voice sounded next to my head, as her arms lifted me off the ground. Twisting a little, I was able to see her face, looking relieved. It made me wonder, I had only been gone for about two days, making her reaction seem a little excessive but on the other hand, we had been together at almost all times during the last eight months, so me, vanishing without telling her goodbye might have worried her. Or rather, no might about it, it had worried her.


    ¡°Yes and I¡¯m sorry to leave like that.¡± I admitted, feeling rather guilty, part of my mind forcefully pushing away any idea about Road to Purgatory being a game and what it might entail. For now, I didn¡¯t want to think about the implications and whether or not what I was doing and feeling was healthy. It felt good and right, which was good enough for me.


    ¡°Mhm.¡± she merely mumbled, her head buried in my hair, while I mentally investigated the odd feeling I had since before landing.


    ¡°Morgana, you are back. Just like I told you, Sigmir.¡± Adra spoke up from nearby.


    ¡°Maybe you should leave more often, that one gained quite the boost when she realised you were gone.¡± she added, causing Sigmir to let out a low, rumbling growl. I felt the vibrations all over my body, making me think of an earthquake. I could feel the power in my bones and when I looked I saw that Sigmir was engulfed in her red aura-armour, only that it seemed to be flaring out strongly, reminding me of her, ripping into the Tzar Bolotnik. At the same time, Adra and Rai stumbled back a little, reacting instinctively to the presence of a powerful predator.


    ¡°Calmly, love. I¡¯m here and all is well.¡± I muttered, unsure just how in control she was. She had told me she was trying to incorporate the strength gained by allowing your feelings to run rampant into her fighting but if she overdid it with that, she might lose control.


    ¡°Yes, you are back now. Please don¡¯t vanish again.¡± she asked me, or rather ordered, her forceful aura engulfing and caressing me without applying pressure.


    ¡°I won¡¯t.¡± I answered, knowing that I might be unable to fulfill the promise. But I was going to try, to the best of my ability, which had to be good enough.


    ¡°She was really quite upset, you know?¡± Lenore¡¯s voice floated over our connection, accompanied by her memory of the event.


    In the memory, Sigmir was opening her eyes after her meditation and I noticed a tinge of red at their edges. Standing up, she looked around the camp, searching, before focusing on Adra and asking where I was. Adra explained that I would be gone for two, maybe three, days, that apparently something had gone wrong with my experiment. It had been the wrong thing to do, as soon as the words were out of her mouth, Sigmir exploded, her aura flaring even more strongly than it had earlier, even her eyes started to glow red, and she let out a shout, or rather roar. The strength of that roar alone was enough to cause leaves to fall from the trees around her and Rai jumped up, shaken from his slumber, confused but ready to either attack or flee. I had to compliment his reaction, without even knowing what was going on, he had a naked blade in hand and started to scan the surroundings, behaviour I approved of.


    In the memory, Lenore flew down to the camp, landing on a relatively low branch, though easily out of range. From there, she spoke, as always using my voice, and explained a little more, that I was merely sleeping in my Hallow and that I would be back and at that point, the memory ended.


    ¡°It took her a bit to calm down afterwards and yesterday, she managed to break through the second divide. It was quite the spectacle, you know?¡± Lenore added, at the end of the memory.


    ¡°Congratulations, Sigmir.¡± I said, out loud, while twisting a little so I could give her a kiss on the cheek. I was a little unsure what else to do, how to react, so I simply let her hold me.

 Chapter 326

    The reality of Sigmir crossing the second divide filled me with a lot of pride but also a bit of jealousy and a deep-seated fear. There was a small, tiny part in my subconsciousness that whispered ideas into my mind, ideas of betrayal and being discarded, just like I had been discarded by my old team, replaced with a newer, shinier model. Just the fact that I had those feelings annoyed me, that there was a part of me that didn¡¯t trust Sigmir. I wanted to trust her, to be able to trust her, to place my full faith in her, but I couldn¡¯t.


    I wanted to catch up to Sigmir as quickly as possible but trying to Astral travel either into my body or towards the moon while moving was foolish. And so, even if I wanted to study the phenomenon that I thought would allow me to cross the second divide, the connection between the core within me and the moon in the sky, further, I would have to wait until evening. Thus, to bury those treacherous, dark thoughts and the surly mood that came with them, I did what I could while walking, focusing my thoughts on the dwarven art of rune-crafting.


    I had read a lot but my understanding was fairly limited, never mind my ability to apply what I had learned, which required me to translate it into my own magic. But it was a mentally strenuous task, forcing me to focus on my memories, to create small Hard Ice Objects, engraving them with runic formations and carefully studying the flow of Astral Power through it, both with my own senses and with Lenore¡¯s sight, which was a lot more useful to analyse distinct formations. I was better when it came to sniffing out general magic usage, especially if the magic was particularly large scale, but for tasks requiring small and precise analysis Lenore¡¯s sight was vastly superior.


    It was a slow going process, the dwarves had created their system over hundreds of years, studying and experimenting with their magic, with earth, stone and metal, slowly perfecting their formations. Similarly, the Zevarra Agha, the Grimoire given to me by the Grandmother, had large runic formations within it and it had taken me a day or two, studying the dwarven books, that the elaborate connecting patterns in the rituals had to be for a similar purpose. It gave me another point of comparison, allowing me to slowly but surely come up with connecting patterns of my own, hopefully allowing me to create specialised magical items and large magic formations on my own. Even the idea of magical tattoos looked a lot more promising with the progress I was making.


    On the other hand, it allowed me to understand more about the fundamental casting of magic, how runes and runic formations worked. When I used runic formations to work magic, I didn¡¯t need those interconnecting patterns, what I had started to call sub-runes, to connect the formation, instead I was able to connect them directly, forcing them into alignment with what I now considered magical brute force. It worked, certainly, but the idea that there might be a better way was stuck in my mind.


    My logic was relatively simple, if the formation I used normally, the connection established with brute force, was applied to an item, even if the elemental resistance and conductivity should be excellent for the type of magic, it was eroded. To me, that meant that there obviously had to be a force influencing the item, or rather, a part of the magic channeled into the formation was going astray, damaging the item. Again, my mind drew a parallel to electrical circuits, the wires getting hot from electric current flowing through them, and the corresponding loss of power. Logically, that meant that if I was able to perfect my runic formations, I would be able to get more effect out of the same amount of Astral Power, something I valued a great deal.


    It wouldn¡¯t work for combat magic, the time needed to draw even normal runic formations often far too long when fighting, forcing me to instantly manifest them at additional cost, so the idea to draw intricate sub-runes to connect the runes of a formation was ludicrous. But if I wanted to work a ritual, something where I had time to work, I would love to have more power at my disposal.


    It was an interesting task, especially when working closely with Lenore. She was either sitting on my shoulder and either cast magic on her own, lend me her sight and insight into runes or she would sit on top of the perch-turned-staff and have me cast Ice-Magic through the staff, using the staff to get better insights into the way I worked Ice-Magic. At the same time, she used our connection to observe my thoughts, which I allowed, letting her see both sides of the spellcasting-process at the same time.


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    The intimate nature of the mental contact also soothed my subconsciousness, the pure nature of the contact making words unnecessary. It allowed me to see the relationship between Sigmir and me from an outsider¡¯s perspective, especially one native to this world. Lenore was still carrying a quiet fascination for the fact that Sigmir and I were able to sense each other, without prepared formations or even the use of magic, to say nothing of the awe she felt whenever her mind called up her memories about the ritual I had worked with the Grandmother¡¯s help, to cleanse Sigmir of the malign influence she had been under.


    In Lenore¡¯s eyes and experience what we had done should be, quite frankly, impossible. Certainly, the Grandmother had helped us, but just the act of delving into another¡¯s soul, without damaging it or being damaged by it in turn was a legendary feat, something only the most experienced Arch-Mages would even consider attempting.


    Whether it had worked due to me being a Traveller, or if there had been some other reason, I didn¡¯t know but for Lenore, it simply didn¡¯t matter, it had worked and that alone was proof that the connection between Sigmir and me was something special.


    At times, when Lenore was trying something new, I watched her mind as she used her spells, especially the Death-Magic she was directing at some small plants near our path. It was fascinating how the mental processes worked to create one of her newest abilities, a ray of pure death, causing the struck plant to wither into dust within mere moments. While crushing a mundane plant was no great feat, I remembered that Lenore¡¯s strength had always been attacks on a non-corporeal level, magic that targeted the mind and soul. It made me wonder what we would be able to do, if we were to combine our power to strike at the mind of a real foe, trying to sever the connection between their soul and body.


    Without a real foe, it was difficult to even guess but I had a feeling that the combination of Mind- and Death-Magic might be one of the deadliest weapons we had in our current arsenal. That was especially true with one discovery we had in the days after leaving the dwarves, when we had moved away from the camp one evening.


    It had been far enough from everything important and the others had been forbidden from following, there, in the quiet privacy of the forest, I had clamped down on my feeling of disgust and put on the Despoiled Bride¡¯s Dress, one of the two rare items we had gained from killing Tzar Bolotnik. Part of the reason why I hadn¡¯t put it on had been its disgusting nature, still dirty and damp with stinking swamp-water, while another reason was that it¡¯s abilities weren¡¯t a good mix with mine. It¡¯s abilities, other than the active ability, that is.


    That active ability had been worth the trouble of finding a secluded spot to try it out, once activated, I had felt something well up in me, a feeling of despair and hopelessness, causing me to scream out. My scream had been echoed by ghostly wails coming from the dress, radiating out all around me, taking with it a chunk of Astral Power. The screams had manifested as a wave of Death- and Mind-Magic, being carried outwards by sound, causing the grass around me to die off, turning yellow while the leaves had been withered off their branches, even a few meters away.


    Granted, the effect had been underwhelming in power, merely destroying some vegetation, but that was with my rather low charisma, at least for my level. But afterwards, I had investigated and looked for traces of that magic, only then realising that the scope had been quite impressive. There had been traces of the magic within some hundred meters, nothing that could cause a real effect but still, they had been there.


    With that wail as basis, Lenore and I had started to theorize and consider the possibility to create a version based on our abilities, using Death-, Mind- and either Air- or Darkness-Magic. The current state of that magic was pure theory but we were slowly working on it.


    Using the dress had been worth it, even if I had had to scrub myself in a nearby pond for half an hour to get rid of the nauseating feeling.


    Shaking my head, to get rid of the memory, I focused back on the small chunk of Hard Ice in my hand, carefully carving the latest iteration of a contained runic formation into it. One step at a time, one failed experiment after the other, slowly but surely, I was understanding magic. It was a great feeling.

 Chapter 327

    ¡°Would you walk with me for a moment?¡± Sigmir asked me in the evening, after we had eaten dinner. It had been a little over a day since I had returned from my short time-out on Earth and my time had been filled with studying magic together with Lenore.


    ¡°Certainly.¡± I agreed after a moment of hesitation. The hesitation came from the seriousness that was in her tone, a solemness that made me dread what she might want to talk about. I had laughed about people saying that the words ¡®We need to talk.¡¯ were scary, had thought that conversation and an honest exchange of information could be something to be afraid of, but my imagination conjured up possible conversations that made me want to run away, just so I wouldn¡¯t have to hear her words. Still, I couldn¡¯t run, I wouldn¡¯t.


    Forcing my legs to obey, I rose, taking Sigmir¡¯s hand in the process. Having a hold on her calmed me, soothed my troubled subconsciousness. Just the idea of clinging onto her hand while she was trying to run away made me smile wryly, the image just too ludicrous. Shaking off the strange thought, I focused on the present, moving along with Sigmir.


    Silently, we walked through the dark forest, soft animal noises mixed with rustling leaves and creaking trees, until we reached a small clearing, just a small patch of grass between a couple of trees. There, Sigmir stopped, not just walking but completely moving. I stopped alongside her and for a moment, we stood there in silence, tension rising in the air between us.


    Sigmir suddenly turned around, stepping right in front of me and looking down, into my face.


    ¡°Can you please tell me what is wrong?¡± she asked, her voice thick with emotion. It was a thick mix of tension, fear, sadness but also a warm undercurrent of love and concern.


    I completely froze, unable to even breathe. I wasn¡¯t sure what to say, what to think, how to explain my fears and insecurity. I wanted to say that everything was alright, but I didn¡¯t want to lie, I wanted to explain, but I didn¡¯t want to say that I doubted her. What if she¡¯d wash her hands off me, what if I hurt her with my distrust. I felt myself start to tremble, my body shaking as I was trying to think, to break through my mental block.


    All of a sudden, I felt a comfortable warmth around me and realised that Sigmir was kneeling in front of me, her arms wrapped around me. It wasn¡¯t only a physical embrace, her red aura was flaring but not only around her, also around me. It was as if I was in a safe cocoon, protected from everything. I felt the trembling fade, my mind calming. The panic that had gripped me was receding, allowing me to think more clearly.


    Opening my eyes, I forced myself past doubts and insecurity, reminding myself that Sigmir had never given me even the slightest reason to distrust her, that she had always stood beside me, ready to give her life if necessary. To quiet the troublesome emotions still roiling within me, I drew upon my Astral Power, not trying to manifest magic instead I was simply strengthening the ever-present flow of Ice-Astral-Power within me. It only took moments for the chill sensation within me to cool my emotions and allow me to speak rationally.


    ¡°Fear.¡± I admitted, letting that single word out, alongside a small cloud of cold air. ¡°I am afraid, foolishly so, afraid that I will lose you, that you might leave me behind.¡± I continued, my voice flat and calm.


    ¡°I remember, I told you about my past, that there was a group I had founded with a friend, people I had worked together with every day in some capacity. And that, one day, that group had decided that they didn¡¯t want me any longer, that they had someone else to fill my role and take my place. And all of a sudden, I was on my own, cut adrift.¡± I told her, causing her to tighten her hug, just a little.


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    ¡°I think when I realised that you had crossed the second divide, I felt you pulling ahead of me, igniting a fear that I would be left behind again, that you would find someone else.¡± I admitted, drawing heavily on the freezing power within me, to keep me calm.


    I felt one of Sigmir¡¯s large hands cup my cheek as she pulled back a little, so she could look me in the eyes. In her eyes, I could see sadness, a tear trickling down her cheek. When her hand moved back, I noticed something glimmering on it, a tiny ice-crystal that dropped into the grass beneath us.


    ¡°Never.¡± Sigmir¡¯s resolute voice promised me, her tone one that held no doubt whatsoever. I could feel the strength of her words, of her resolution, resonate within my body and my mind, down into the deepest reaches of my soul. She meant what she was saying and would die before betraying the words she said. It reminded me of the oath I had given the Thane, only more powerful by a few orders of magnitude.


    ¡°I will never leave you behind. When you suddenly vanished a few days ago, it was as if I was missing part of my body. A part I couldn¡¯t live without.¡± she admitted, her voice soft and only for my ears.


    ¡°I know that you might vanish from this world one day, you told me as much. But I know that we will meet again, maybe not in this life, maybe not in the next life, but one day, we will reunite.¡± she continued, her voice taking on an almost desperate tone. She might have said she knew it, but the tone of her voice spoke more of a certainty coming from desperation. She knew it to be true, because if it was not true she would break. She believed in it, with a faith that would allow her to carry on, under even the most dire circumstances.


    It reminded me a little of my own, belief that I would be able to find her again after the beta, a belief that simply ignored the possibility that it might be false. I wouldn¡¯t let myself doubt my belief, not on that question. Not even the cold Astral Power running through my body could chill that emotion, it had established itself as an indisputable fact in my mind.


    Feeling the warmth of her aura and embrace, hearing the words she said and the conviction in them helped me relax and allowed me to let the Ice-Astral-Power I had channeled fade, without falling into panic again. Closing my eyes, I focused on something else, the connection between us, that indescribable bond that we shared. It was as mysterious and difficult to detect as ever, merely a faint sensation somewhere in the back of my subconsciousness that allowed me to tell where Sigmir was and a general idea of her wellbeing. I had experimented a little with it in the past but the amount of focus to even begin doing anything with it had always been a challenge.


    Now, securely held in Sigmir¡¯s arm and enveloped by her aura, I let myself be guided by the bond, trying to reach her. It was different from the sensation of shifting into my Hallow, different from delving into the Astral River or traversing it, the closest analogy was the Avatar-state I could take with Lenore, merging our minds. Only that I didn¡¯t even try to merge with her mind, I merely wanted to feel it, to feel the sincerity I heard in her voice. At the same time, I wanted her to feel what I was feeling for her, the desperation at the mere idea of being without her but also the shared conviction that we would meet again. I needed to reassure her, just as I needed the reassurance.


    Reaching out with one of my hands, I gently cupped her cheek, in a mirror of her own gesture, even as the bond between us slowly came into the foreground of my consciousness. My mind started to ignore the world around us, letting it fade away to fully focus on the bond between us, allowing nothing to intrude into the space we shared.


    Suddenly, my lips were covered by a warm and soft sensation, a sensation echoing through the bond and from there resonating through my mind and soul. For a moment, I could feel Sigmir, feel the steady burning of her love for me, feel the entirety of her emotions flowing into me. I heard a ragged moan and felt my body tense up as an explosion ran through me, lighting up my mind in pleasure. I could do nothing but shake in the storm of sensations, clinging to Sigmir, just as she was clinging to me.

 Chapter 328

    It took us a minute or five until either Sigmir¡¯s or my own body were capable of doing more than shaking and clinging to the other, as waves of sensation were sweeping through us. I had never felt anything even remotely close to it, a pleasure so intense it bordered on pain, as if every nerve in my body was lighting up at the same time.


    Finally, I was able to lean back a little, my body slick with sweat and looked at Sigmir, trying to get my mind back into a semblance of order, trying to understand what had happened. I could see that Sigmir¡¯s state was quite similar, only that her kneeling posture had allowed her to keep her balance easier.


    ¡°Wow¡­¡± I muttered, my voice feeling a little scratchy, making me wonder if I had screamed. Sigmir looked back at me, her eyes fluttering, her pupils trying to focus.


    ¡°That was¡­¡± she began, her voice sounding little better than my own, only to stop, at a loss for words. My own mind was similarly blank, every thought, every emotion purged by the overload I had experienced. It made me feel strangely loopy, as if my head was floating above the ground, my body simply dangling below it, like a marionette at its strings.


    Sigmir tried to stand but stumbled, her legs not quite willing to go along with the commands of her mind, causing her to fall over. Normally, I would have chuckled and given her a hand to pull her up but there was that small problem of me being in her embrace and just as shaky on my feet as she was. In normal circumstances I would have been able to support her and hold her up despite the difference in size between the two of us, such was the magic of the attribute-system. While I had never put any points in strength, crossing the first divide meant that I gained some, giving me superhuman strength, if barely. But all strength in the world wouldn¡¯t have helped me, not with my legs in the condition they were in.


    We went down together.


    Lying half on, half under Sigmir, in a tangle of limbs, I started to giggle at the situation. Here, we were lying in the aftermath of what I could only describe as a mind-blowing orgasm, looking more like we were about to start the naughty festivities instead of having planned a serious discussion.


    At the same time, the short moment I had gotten into contact with Sigmir¡¯s mind, amplified by or amplifying the gentle kiss she had given me had, quite literally, blown my mind. There was no doubt within me that Sigmir had meant what she said, every word and so much more. Her feelings were not made of a burning passion, even if I felt quite a bit of that as well, but they felt solid, steady, unshakeable as a mountain and rooted just as deep within her being. The mountains would get eroded and wither away before her feelings for me faded or she would consider leaving me.


    ¡°I could feel you, right next to me.¡± Sigmir whispered, taking into account the closeness of our faces and the roughness of her throat. ¡°So fierce, so proud.¡± she whispered, before pulling me closer, a gesture I gladly returned, wiggling a little to snuggle in closer, simply relaxing in her embrace. For the first time, since learning that Sigmir had crossed the second divide, there was no doubt in my mind, no questions that I didn¡¯t want to ask lest they be answered.  But now, I was feeling supremely content, secure in the truth of Sigmir¡¯s feelings


    ¡°I¡¯m sorry for doubting you.¡± I muttered, not really wanting to speak up but feeling that it was the right thing to do.


    ¡°It¡¯s fine. But I want to ask you, to never do something like that again. If you question, if you doubt, talk to me. I could feel you pulling away and was afraid I had made a mistake and was about to lose you¡± she told me, her voice still quiet but filled with emotion. At the same time, I could vaguely feel her emotions directly, not in any clear sense but a general feeling of contentment but if I focused I noticed the echoes of intense pleasure but also gripping sadness mixed with fear.


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    ¡°I will, I promise.¡± I told her, meaning it. I had once heard that communication was the key to making a relationship work, something I had forgotten previously. I would have to do better in the future.


    For a bit, we just laid there, clinging to one-another while our bodies stopped singing. Finally, Sigmir carefully disentangled herself, suggesting that we should look for a good spot to wash up, we were starting to get sticky. I had to agree, I could feel the sweat drying on my skin, a rather uncomfortable feeling. I let myself be pulled up by Sigmir, keeping her hand in mine, as we started to continue our walk, feeling closer than ever.


    I noticed a small patch of frozen ground, right where we had been standing and pointed it out to Sigmir.


    ¡°Mhm, you were rather upset earlier. Your magic was just flowing out of you, I think it might have been from then.¡± she suggested, making sense.


    ¡°Did I hurt you?!¡± I asked, realising that if I had frozen the ground without meaning to, I might have hurt her as well.


    ¡°No, you didn¡¯t.¡± she answered, making me wonder if she had used her aura because of my power going out of control. ¡°For one, I¡¯m rather hard to hurt anyway but I didn¡¯t even have to resist your powers, even when they were going out of control a part of you made sure that I wouldn¡¯t get hurt.¡± she added, giving me a gentle smile.


    ¡°Why did you use your aura then? Earlier, I mean.¡± I asked, my curiosity now awake.


    ¡°Because I wanted to protect you.¡± she answered, a little cryptically. Before I could push for a better answer, she continued, her smile growing wider and a little teasing.


    ¡°Yes, I know you want details.¡± she stopped again, just to tease me a little more, before she explained. ¡°I told you, the second divide was one of emotion for me, of emotion and control about them. Feelings and emotion can drive you to great power but they can also shatter you, just as they did with you earlier. In my case, I wanted to incorporate my emotions into my class, something many warrior who follow a path similar to mine do. For some it is hate, hate for a foe channeled into a frenzy to strike down their enemies. For others it is reverence towards a totem-animal, allowing them to take on some of its characteristics.¡±


    ¡°For me, it was my desire to protect you, the love I felt for you. It took me a bit, to find the balance between letting my emotions rule me, pushing me beyond my previous limits while keeping enough control to protect you was a little difficult but I managed. There is a little more to it, something to do with my willingness to do everything for you, even split open the skies, which is why my new class is called Skysplitter.¡± she finished, without answering my original question. It was interesting, making me wonder just how the process of crossing the divide had worked for her but it didn¡¯t tell me why I had been enveloped by her aura.


    She chuckled for a moment, looking at my face, before giving me the answer I wanted.


    ¡°You know how my aura protects me, increases my physical capabilities and allows me to shrug off some damage? I can now spread it to you as well but with a bit of a difference.¡± she closed her eyes for a moment, apparently struggling with herself.


    ¡°For you, it doesn¡¯t increase your capabilities, it only protects you. While you are protected by it, it will greatly weaken any attack striking you but instead I will have to pay the price.¡± she finished, my eyes going wide. I didn¡¯t want her to sacrifice herself for me, not now, not ever. I opened my mouth, wanting to implore her to never use it, but the look in her eyes stopped me.


    ¡°I don¡¯t want to be without you, I told you. I will protect you, no matter what.¡± she added, causing a tear to come to my eyes.


    ¡°That means I¡¯ll have to gain power, enough power to make sure that you never have to sacrifice yourself for me. Because without you, I wouldn¡¯t want to be here, either.¡± I told her, meaning every word. Once again, the logical voice that questioned, reminded me that Road to Purgatory was supposed to be a game and that the beta would end was ignored, stuffed into a box, the box sealed and dropped into a dark hole.


    For now, the world was as it should be and soon Sigmir and I found a small brook, just big enough to wash up. We helped each other wash and once we were clean, our respective self-control broke, the gentle motion of flesh having worn at it during the washing. We ended up having to wash up again, maybe half an hour later.

 Interlude: Profiles of Power II

    Official Road to Purgatory-Beta Forum


    <table><tbody><tr><td>-Kelgarn, confirmed Beta-Account</td></tr></tbody></table>


    Hey Guys and welcome back to the Profiles of Power


    This time, the person we are profiling was less forthcoming than last time so we actually have to work for the information we are looking for. In this thread, I want to take a look at Clavran, the Gladiator who managed to rise in the Arena-Ranks of the human Empire.


    Let¡¯s start with the reasonably obvious things:


    Race: Human, details unknown


    known Titles: former Slave, Champion of the Kelgarn Arena, Gladiator of Retania


    Class: harder to say, Gladiator / Swordsman / Sword-Fighter something along those lines. Some claim it is some sort of Samurai but that just feels wrong


    Relevant Skills: Even more questions


    We can reasonably assume that he has some sort of Sword Mastery, either the general, weaker, version or a specialised one, some sort of Sword Mastery [Katana].


    In addition, the same applies to a skill related to his shorter blade, Dagger Mastery, Short Sword Mastery, maybe something specialised like Dagger Mastery [Wakizashi]


    His armour seems to be a sort of light, maybe medium, armour, Reinforced Leather, with a focus on mobility instead of pure protection.


    Other than that, I can¡¯t really contribute, in this case, the fact that I¡¯m a spellcaster means I can¡¯t really compare his abilities with my own, trying to find comparisons. Maybe some of you can add parts to this.


    Hopefully this works out.


    <table><tbody><tr><td>Shuigun, confirmed Beta-Account</td></tr></tbody></table>


    Mhm, a lot less information but that was to be expected


    Now, from my side I can add that there is a skill related to Dual Wielding, the general, simple, version is called Dual Blade Mastery. I can also confirm that there are specialised versions of that, related to a specific pair of weapons, especially one that is called Weapon Mastery - Dual Dragon.


    Now, I can¡¯t confirm that he is using that but I know that there are quite a few more-or-less wannabe Samurai running around with a similar combination of dual-blades and they all have that skill.


    Granted, they aren¡¯t humans but maybe there is some overlap despite that.


    Otherwise, I¡¯d guess that there might be a footwork-skill involved, I know that some martial classes have them, allowing them to perform particular specialised movesets.


    <table><tbody><tr><td>Harms, confirmed Beta-Account</td></tr></tbody></table>


    Can¡¯t comment on more skills but I thinks I¡¯ve recognised some of his abilities. One of them is a swift stab with the off-hand, penetrating armour. Look, here:


    example1.avi


    Clavran is seen standing in the sand, a few meters away from his foe, wielding his accustomed blades but barechested. The arena seems to be build from a mixture of red sandstone and wood, looking relatively simple. His opponent is strangely equipped, having a net, the strands interwoven with barbs, in one hand but no other weapon but, as if to contrast the bare-chested Clavran, his form is clad in dull-grey plate-armour. There is nary an opening to get into and the gauntlets look stained with red, as if they had been used to beat someone bloody in the past.


    Clavran has a few wounds on his body, blood slowly oozing out, when he suddenly surges forward, using his long blade to partially entangle the net which was almost used like a whip, allowing it to scratch deep groves into his arm. In return, he manages to get close and his smaller blade flashes forward, finding an opening in his opponents armour, going straight into his foe¡¯s torso.


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    For a moment, both fighters freeze before a shout from the sides breaks the frozen moment, a loud call to stop. Both fighters seem to relax as robed figures rush onto the sand, towards them. As the clip fades to black, greenish light is enveloping the two fighters, the visible wounds on Clavran slowly closing.


    example2.avi


    Again, Clavran is seen standing on Arena-Sand. This time the arena is made from white stone, polished like marble and his foe is wielding a halberd alongside heavy armour. This time, as Clavran rushes forward, the Halberd is used to entangle his longer sword, almost breaking it in the process and disarming him. As the swift stab with the lesser blade is made, his foe twists out of the way, turning a potentially fatal wound into nothing but a scratch.


    [back to text]


    I could add more examples, but at the end of the day, it seems that whenever Clavran is faced with a seriously armoured foe, he likes to use that move, a quick rush to get into range, using his sword to block while his dagger stabs forward, into his foe. Sure, it could be pure player-skill but when looking closely, you notice that the moves seem a little too scripted for lack of better word. Yes, I know, many martial arts have move-sets they train to bring them into muscle-memory so it could be either. But I don¡¯t think so.


    The only question remaining is, is it a purely physical, stamina-based move or does it have a magical component, to make cracks in an armour where there are none. Some magic-skills have a clear visual indication but not all, so no idea.


    <table><tbody><tr><td>Clavran, confirmed Beta-Account</td></tr></tbody></table>


    Oh, dear...


    Yeah, I won¡¯t be commenting on any of this and, if I¡¯m really honest, I¡¯m not too happy about this thread.


    Look at it from my side, there already are other Travellers challenging the various Arenas and guess what, studying the opponent is part of the preparation for a battle. With a few dozen people carefully scouring the recordings made by me and looking at what my abilities are, it puts me at a massive disadvantage.


    Meh, I guess I just have to be better.


    <table><tbody><tr><td>-Do¡¯rodra, confirmed Beta-Account</td></tr></tbody></table>


    I think at one point Clavran is using a movement-ability, some sort of speed-boost that lets him move faster than normal. I know that there are two abilities like that, one allowing you to overcome the limitations of your body, the other those of the mind. The disadvantage is that they both drain resources like crazy, the mental one Astral Power, the physical one stamina, in addition there seems to be a backlash the longer and harder they are used.


    Clavran seems to have at least the physical one, the mental one I¡¯m not sure but it¡¯s possible. He¡¯s quite smart with them, not pushing himself too far beyond the limit in some insane Matrix-style dodge, instead he moves just as far as necessary.


    Or it could be something else, I just know about those two abilities, there might be many more out there. Not like Pantheon gave out a complete index, hell, some classes have the ability to create abilities on their own so there might be abilities floating around that Pantheon never thought of.


    <table><tbody><tr><td>Yuthos, confirmed Beta-Account</td></tr></tbody></table>


    Can see why Clavran is not happy with this. While I¡¯ll be watching the thread with interest, I won¡¯t be contributing, out of respect for the individual players.


    <table><tbody><tr><td>Villar, confirmed Beta-Account</td></tr></tbody></table>


    Yuthos, who cares? Didn¡¯t he say that opponent-research is part of things? So, as the senior challenger he most likely has a team of locals doing the work for him, why not even the playing field?


    Anyway, I¡¯m reasonably sure that he¡¯ll have Second Wind as an ability, it¡¯s based on Athletics and allows you to recover some stamina by taking a moment to re-focus. It¡¯s mostly cooldown-based but uses up some Astral Power. It seems to be a rather common ability for martial classes, especially those without a lot of magic in their fighting-style.


    <table><tbody><tr><td>-Kelgarn, confirmed Beta-Account</td></tr></tbody></table>


    Sorry to hear that Clavran.


    I won¡¯t stop with the threads however, I believe that collating the information is the right thing to do, regardless of your opinion.


    <table><tbody><tr><td>-Tobiuno, confirmed Beta-Account</td></tr></tbody></table>


    Harms, while I can¡¯t confirm that Clavran uses the ability, there is an ability called Vicious Counter for Dual-Weapon Users, allowing them to parry with one weapon while attacking with the other, gaining a bonus to damage and armour-penetration.


    One of our Travellers is using it, using his parry-dagger to bind the enemies weapon for a moment, allowing them to get a clean strike in.


    It¡¯s an almost pure duelling-ability, especially given its relative uselessness against people with a shield but for Clavran it should be an excellent ability.


    <table><tbody><tr><td> Heracles, Official Pantheon Moderator </td></tr></tbody></table>


    There have been multiple reports regarding this Thread.


    However, it is within the community-guidelines, so the thread will remain open, as long as people remain civil.


    Oh, and if you start insulting people, just to get this thread shut down, it will be you who is going to be shut down.


    And I¡¯m out.


    <table><tbody><tr><td>Ruvas, confirmed Beta-Account </td></tr></tbody></table>


    I think he also uses a constant, small speed-boost from wind-magic. There are a few moments when the movement of his clothes looks, for lack of better words, unnatural but that might just be a bug in the physics-engine, not magic. Hard to say, without knowing more details or even being there.

 Chapter 329

    ¡°Finally¡­¡± I muttered, stepping onto the old, imperial road.


    It had been two days since Sigmir and I had talked things out, about my fears of being left behind by her and the subsequent events. Since then, the connection between us had remained steady, allowing me to constantly know her position and, as long as we were within about a hundred meters of each other, I also knew her general emotional and physical state. At first, the connection had been a little distracting, my mind not used to receive that kind of information, but as time was passing, I was getting more and more used to having it.


    Still, we were back to the comfortable state of companionship, only with a little added closeness, that we had before she crossed the second divide.


    But while that problem had worked out quite well, my other two projects were making a lot less headway. Crossing the second divide was my main concern and I had two leads for that. The first one was the experiment I had conducted during the full moon, travelling through the Astral to visit the heavenly body, only to do it during a new moon and stay in the moon¡¯s shadow, letting it shield me from the sun¡¯s radiance.


    The other idea was a little different and I had stumbled upon it while traversing the channels within my own body, something I had done every evening, trying to learn more about the core within me While I hadn¡¯t learned a lot, I had stumbled upon something.


    What I had learned was that there seemed to be a connection between the frozen, tear-drop shaped core and the Ice-Astral-Power flowing within me, the power seemed to nourish the core directly, at least that was my impression. The effect was barely noticeable, but over a couple of days of observation and comparison, I was reasonably sure that it was there. With that in mind, I had started to discuss with Lenore what it might mean and if there was a way to improve upon it. If it was some sort of passive effect, was there a way to actively improve upon it? Maybe that would allow me to cross the second divide.


    The core was nothing unique to me, each of us had one, it was part of crossing the divides and part of the reason why crossing the divides made one stronger. What was interesting was that the nourishment of the core was not something shared by the others, at least not by all of them. Ylva told me that her core had been slowly devouring the Power we had drained from the wolves, some three months back, but since that power had been used up, it had remained dormant, not improving at all.


    On the other hand, Lenore was able to tell me more, especially thanks to our connection facilitating the transfer of images and concepts which couldn¡¯t be quite put into words. It also helped that her core had been established partially with my help, back when Lenore had been shot and I had fed her power, even going so far to directly drain life-essence into my body with blood magic. The memory of that particular encounter was a little uncomfortable for me, drinking the blood had been necessary but, in hindsight, incredibly creepy. It wasn¡¯t something I would want to do again but at the same time, I knew I wouldn¡¯t hesitate to act, if it was necessary to protect any of my comrades.


    Lenore¡¯s core had been established, as she put it, on the border of life and death, allowing her to put a claw into the realm of death without it hurting her. Thanks to her memories, I was able to experience her draining the will-o-wisps in the swamp, gorging herself on the death-energy they had been composed off. When I asked if there was a way for me to do something similar, she could only shrug, it seemed that what she had done had been as reckless as my various experiments, to say nothing of the stunt she had pulled to defeat the Tzar Bolotnik, just a few days later.


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    The problem with copying her process was that I¡¯d need an outside source of energy to pull it off, something rather major due to the process being rather ineffective. To say nothing of risky.


    One such source could have been the core of eternal ice I had looted a while back but, sadly, I had used up the vast majority of it, mostly during the encounter with Tzar Bolotnik when I had used it to give him magical ingestion. It had been necessary which didn¡¯t stop me from being a little annoyed that I didn¡¯t have enough of it any longer.


    But if I was honest, it wouldn¡¯t have helped anyway. I didn¡¯t want to only enhance my power regarding Ice-Magic, Darkness was just as integral to me as the Ice was. Sure, Ice-magic had served me well but the protective embrace of the night was not something I was willing to give up. And, while I had seen Eternal Ice as condensed Ice-Astral-Power and an Eternal Ember which was similar, just with Fire, I had yet to encounter an equivalent for Darkness. I didn¡¯t even have an inclining what such a crystal might look like, if it existed.


    The other project I had been working on was slowly getting better, I had managed to create a prototype-magic-item, a small rod made from Hard Ice engraved with a simple runic formation. The formation consisted of one Icicle-Rune, one Hail-Rune and one Hard-Ice Rune, linked together with a set of symbols I had designed myself, using the Grandmother¡¯s grimoire and the dwarven symbols I had studied.


    Now, the current prototype was relatively weak, only shooting a single Icicle which wasn¡¯t terribly fast or sharp but it only required Astral Power to work and not too much of it. For me, the rod, or wand, was next to useless, the power was simply too underwhelming but even Sigmir or Rai were able to use it. Sure, they could only use it so often before running out of power but for a first prototype it was a good start, especially as I hadn¡¯t used any limited material so far, once I got a better hang of things I was planning to use some of the material i had bought from the dwarves. That way, I might be able to create something I could truly be proud of.


    ¡°We should be far enough from the centaurs to continue on the road, don¡¯t you think?¡± Adra asked, looking both ways and pulling me from my reverie.


    ¡°Yes, I think so. I mean, for one it has been almost four weeks that we had any contact with them and they never had a real reason for hunting us, did they? If they knew we had been the source for their trouble further north, near the Wolves¡¯ Den, they might be interested but the only real contacts we had with them was in the town, when I was attacked and they tried to hunt us and when I killed a few low-level centaurs, only for one of them to be a traveller.¡± I grumbled, the memory still annoying me. Normally, the easiest way to make sure a secret was kept was to make sure anyone wanting to tell it was dead but with a traveller that just didn¡¯t work.


    ¡°You think they¡¯d still be interested in us for those things? There must be a lot of incidents all over the place, all requiring attention and some of them having higher importance than some people travelling away from their territory.¡± I continued, feeling myself rambling a little in indecision.


    ¡°They might be but I doubt it, especially due to the distance we have put between us. Sure, there are quite a few ways to share information over a long distance but it requires a reasonably skilled Mage or trained courier-animals.¡± Sigmir agreed with my assessment, stretching as she moved onto the road as well.


    ¡°But even if they do, I doubt that they would be willing to pay the price to see us killed, not if the problem we pose to them will simply go away by waiting. We are leaving after all.¡± she finished, nodding to herself.


    ¡°That¡¯s good. Maybe we¡¯ll get along better with the people down the road, especially if we give them some information on the problem the centaurs might be. I doubt the people who are living here are too pleased with the centaurs moving in, occupying the place.¡± I reasoned, starting down the road. Hopefully, we¡¯d finally be able to put the trouble with the centaurs behind us and get some quests in the cities further west, maybe even access to the libraries. What I had learned in the dwarven library had given me quite a few new ideas, some of which I¡¯d likely never had on my own.

 Chapter 330

    Smiling, I let my latest experiment float in front of me, inspecting the runes closely. Walking along the old, imperial road had allowed me to fully focus on my work, without even having to watch my steps. The last week, I had simply been walking next to Sigmir, letting her make sure I wasn¡¯t running into something and had focused on my experiments.


    That had led to a few slightly surreal moments, when I hadn¡¯t paid any attention to my surroundings for the day and, when I finally did, villages, mountains or forests suddenly appeared, at least from my perspective. Similarly, I wouldn¡¯t notice the weather most of the time, unless things got truly unpleasant and even then, my new dwarven-made clothes were marvelous. They kept my nicely cool, even in the warm sun of early summer, and were nearly impervious to wind and water. While I greatly enjoyed the cold, I didn¡¯t like being wet.


    ¡°That looks quite interesting.¡± Lenore told me, landing on my shoulder and looking closely at the object floating in front of me.


    ¡°If it works as I want it to, it might be my most lethal attack, at least for now.¡± I admitted, letting it turn while inspecting the runes closely, trying to make sure they had come out exactly as I wanted them to.


    ¡°What is it supposed to do? You already have weapons to cut people, and this one doesn¡¯t look like it¡¯s made for combat.¡± Lenore asked, as she looked at the runes with similar intensity, only that I doubted she could understand them. They stood out quite a bit, a stark, almost glowing, ruby-red in contrast to the silvery-blue ice around them.


    ¡°I decided to take a page out of someone else¡¯s spellbook and use my Athame as a reference. Remember, it allows me to use my blood-magic easier, draining the blood through a spell-formation into those two receptacles and helping me to create blood-stones? Not that I¡¯ve used it like that all that often, but it can be used that way.¡± I began my explanation, holding the slender, silver blade next to the floating ice-knife.


    ¡°While I¡¯m not quite able to reproduce the spell-work, I was able to get some inspiration on guiding-runes for Blood Magic flowing through the spellwork and designed a simple enchantment that does one thing, reinforce itself. If my spellwork works as I think it should, it will drain power from the being the blade is stuck into and use that power to drain more power. It¡¯s a self-reinforcing loop, until the enchantment breaks, releasing the power in a hopefully unpleasant fashion.¡± I continued on, admitting that the last part was a big question mark.


    I was reasonably sure that it would shatter the dagger and release a lot of miasma, enough to make me leery of testing it, even if I had someone to test it on. But just as unsure I was of the final release, I was certain of the lethality of my creation. My Hard Ice was sturdy and the frozen, magic-infused blood I had used was a good conductor for Blood Magic, even if creating it was a pain, literally. Once the dagger was stabbed into someone and I had started the draining-process, it couldn¡¯t be stopped, unless the target died or the dagger broke.


    ¡°That sounds nasty.¡± Lenore admitted, before continuing, ¡°And a good first step, what do you want to do as the next step?¡± she asked, knowing that just letting the power explode in an undirected fashion was one of the least efficient ways of using it.


    ¡°Two ideas, one is to restrain the flow of power to the point that it just keeps the drain-spell going and condense the remainder into solid blood-crystals, similar to how my Athame is supposed to be used.¡± I told her, thinking about how that would look in practise. It would require quite a bit of trial and error, to gauge just how strong the flow to keep the drain going was needed to be but otherwise, it seemed reasonably simple. I knew the runes already and, as I said, it was quite similar to the enchantment on my Athame.


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    ¡°The other one is a lot more complicated but infinitely more unpleasant.¡± I continued, feeling a grin spread on my face.


    ¡°It¡¯s similar, but not. Again, I¡¯d have to split the output-flow, one to strengthen the drain and keep it going, the other would have to be transformed into Ice-Astral-Power, to keep the dagger from breaking. That way, I could add a single-use enchantment in the hilt that spreads out barbs and breaks off the hilt, leaving the blade stuck inside, making it incredibly difficult to remove.¡± I explained and once I was done, I could feel Lenore¡¯s horrified fascination.


    ¡°Combine the two, condense a small part of the drained power and maybe we can add a final enchantment that reanimates the corpse as an undead.¡± she suggested, the mental image of a corpse, dessicated by the drain caused by my Blood Magic, rising as a mindless husk, driven only by a vile hunger. At the same time, I could feel her consider the needed enchantments, questioning if there would be a way to use the miasma produced by my blood magic to strengthen the resulting husk.


    ¡°Could we make the enchantment communicable?¡± I asked in return, letting my imagination run wild, trying to come up with a way to create a zombie-plague, something that could be used as a real, biological weapon of mass destruction. Not just area-of-effect magic attacking large swathes of land, with ice-, wind- or death-magic but something that could wipe out entire populations.


    Sadly, while I had some information on poisons, mainly thanks to two books, one from the herbalist in Yaksha, the other from Mrs. Wu, my knowledge on disease, which would be the obvious template, was limited to a few biology-classes in school and life-experience. For me, that meant I had some knowledge with psychological problems but was rather ignorant of everything else.


    ¡°I doubt it.¡± Lenore admitted, but  I could feel that she was just as intrigued at the idea as I was.


    ¡°But just the second version you explained would be incredibly deadly, especially against large enemies. The only thing I can think of to get rid of such a blade, without the appropriate magic, would be to cut out the flesh it is stuck in. Otherwise, it would just become stronger and deadlier as time passes, at least until the enchantment itself reaches its limits.¡± she brought us back to the original topic, away from the fancy ways of murdering a lot of people.


    ¡°Yeah, I agree. Just think of some massive creature, slowly dying to a tiny wound. It would be the ultimate cursed blade.¡± I replied, while transmitting what I had designed of that particular enchantment so far. It was a clear work in progress, with a few simple place-holders with descriptions of what I wanted to accomplish. It would take quite a while to finish it up, let alone test it.


    ¡°We could really do with a group of silly ponies.¡± I admitted, laughing to myself.


    ¡°Eh, the last few villages have seen neither hoof nor hair of them, I doubt they came this far.¡± Lenore chuckled in response. And she was right, the last few days we had been travelling, we had come across two villages, one filled with a mixture of various beastmen, the other an orc-settlement. We hadn¡¯t spent the night in either, the timing simply hadn¡¯t been good, but had ventured into them, with me mostly hiding in Sigmir¡¯s shadow, letting the others do the talking. They had asked about the centaurs and their spreading from their normal range and, while the locals had seemed to be a little concerned it didn¡¯t seem to really worry them.


    Apparently, there was always some force around that made moves, trying to claim territory until they spread too thin, ran into someone more powerful or had their leader die in some way. If the centaurs came, the locals seemed confident that they could come to an agreement.


    ¡°Want to go for a flight, to see if we can find something to test my dagger on?¡± I asked Lenore, hoping to find some beastie I could stick and observe.


    ¡°Warn Sigmir and we can go.¡± she answered, both amused and intrigued at the idea. In addition, she knew that I loved flying with her but hadn¡¯t done so in the last few days, instead focusing on my experiments, something I wouldn¡¯t even try to do in my Hallow.


    ¡°Love? I¡¯ll go for a flight with Lenore, don¡¯t worry about me.¡± I told Sigmir, who was walking next to me.


    ¡°Keep an eye out for danger, please.¡± she replied, giving my hand a gentle squeeze.


    ¡°Sure. See you soon.¡± I said as I returned the squeeze before shunting myself into my Hallow and letting Lenore take wing.


    Now, what could we scare up to test my new weapon on?

 Chapter 331

    Once Lenore took to the air, with me watching from the inside, I was once more intrigued by the sheer amount of information she was gathering while flying. While she wasn¡¯t consciously thinking about it, I was able to focus on the instinctual mental processes, those small, subconscious things that allowed coordinated movement and balance. I wasn¡¯t sure if the amount of information came from her ever-increasing ability with Air-Magic or if she always had been that aware but she was able to feel air-currents in a large radius around her and even used those currents to predict what was happening outside her field of knowledge. Those currents allowed her to quickly rise into the sky on an updraft, without using a lot of energy, and to stay up, simply gliding through the air on spread wings.


    From up high, we could see far, looking down upon the forests, meadows and streams beneath us, and even see a few small villages and their fields. The land we were now moving in was a lot more populated than the area we had been travelling through before, with only some ten to twenty kilometers between villages. Sure, without a reasonably high level or the imperial road that was still quite the hike but compared to the hundreds of kilometers that separated villages further north it was practically next door.


    Sadly, that meant that there were few actually powerful beasts in the forest below and none that I could see. I didn¡¯t want to stick my new weapon into some low-level beastie that would almost perish just from getting stuck with it, I wanted to attack something with actual power, to see if it could resist the effect. I had yet to see any enemy that could resist my Blood Magic but I had never tried to use it in combat, only on beaten or restrained foes, allowing me to focus on the magic. I had no doubt that an enemy would do almost everything to get rid of the pain, if I started draining them in combat as I knew the pain caused by Blood Magic.


    ¡°You see that?¡± Lenore asked, focusing her vision on a particular spot below. We had been flying for maybe half an hour, and finally, it seemed that she had spotted a worthwhile target. Looking at what she was focusing on, I saw a strange sight and needed a second to realise what I was looking at. What at first looked like a four-legged animal were in fact two humanoids, standing very close together, or, at second glance, only one was really standing, the other was being held up by the first.


    ¡°I didn¡¯t think you were interested in humanoid mating practises.¡± I grumbled, not terribly interested in watching two orcs going at it.


    ¡°Normally, I¡¯m not but look closer. The female looks to be in pain, her eyes are squeezed shut and the other is forcing her against the tree, I think even choking her.¡± Lenore answered, her words making me focus back on the scene, looking closer and I had to agree. What we were looking at might not be quite consensual, which meant that the male had just volunteered to become a test-subject, his actions something that annoyed me greatly. Hopefully, he would have enough strength to struggle against the enchantment on my blade, just so I could see how well it worked.


    ¡°I see what you mean.¡± I answered Lenore, my voice filled with a cold, anticipatory glee. ¡°Let¡¯s put a stop to that.¡±


    With my words, she started to angle down, silently riding the air, bringing us close. She had to circle a little, so we would come out of the sun, just in case he might hear something and look up, but I doubted it. From the looks of it, the female had screwed her eyes shut, wishing to be somewhere else, while the male was using one arm to hold up one leg, the other to pin her neck against the tree while furiously using her. We were still some distance away, when Lenore was able to hear his grunts, the noise sending a shiver down my spine and not in a good way.


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    Just before we were behind them, I started to focus, initiating the process of leaving my Hallow while trying to use Darkness-Magic to conceal myself. Concealing sounds was difficult but our targets were completely unaware so I thought it might work. Just because I was doing an experiment, I didn¡¯t have to neglect training my other skills.


    Leaving my Hallow with Lenore flying wasn¡¯t as easy as I had thought, it was almost like trying to step off a moving vehicle, blindfolded. I misjudged the distance to the ground somewhat, appearing in the air, motionless for a split-second before gravity reasserted itself, causing me to land. What little noise my landing made wasn¡¯t noticed by either orc, allowing me to gather my mind and step up, the new blade leading the way.


    Sinking it into the back of the occupied orc was almost too easy and once it was in and I had applied the initial burst of Blood Magic to start the process, I jumped back. In the short moment I had taken to begin the process, Lenore had managed to turn and was now landing on my shoulder, letting me watch through her eyes as the magic took effect.


    The instant effect of my stab was quite obvious and not just from the magic, the orc tried to lurch forward, away from the painful intrusion. I felt a smile creep onto my face, he was moving away from the penetration, just as the female was trying to. Before the smile could fully manifest, the female¡¯s eyes shot open and a scream rang from her lips, one that didn¡¯t quite sound like pain, much more like one of pleasure, accompanied by excited and exuberant noises.


    They, too, lasted for only a moment before reality intruded into the females mind as the body of the male in front of her was quickly getting drained by my Blood Magic, the vitality ripped away along the liquid that had once carried it. The arm that had held her up turned brittle and withered, causing her, and the remains of the now dead orc to crumble, creating a heap of desiccated flesh, naked orc and fluids I didn¡¯t even want to think about.


    The scream she let out while dropping was definitely not one of pleasure and it, too, was suddenly cut short when the dagger that had been stuck in the male¡¯s back cut into her leg when she fell upon it. I had never intended for the dagger to have some sort of friend-or-foe identification, or an off-switch for that matter, and the result was quite impressive. The enchantment had ramped up quite a bit and the desiccation of the female took even less time than that of the male, it looked as if she was crumbling in on herself, leaving behind two still intermingled, completely drained carcasses. At least for a moment.


    Once there was no more blood in reach, the enchantment tried to continue draining and, to my surprise, managed to start draining the magic used to create and sustain the dagger, something I had never intended or anticipated. It didn¡¯t work and didn¡¯t even fail to work in a way I could have anticipated, instead of simply breaking or something along those lines, the magic got tangled together, causing Lenore to instantly take shelter in her hallow while I used Overflow combined with my ability to instantly manifest runes to create a wall of ice, right in front of me and not a moment too soon.


    The tangled energy managed to untangle itself, resulting in a sudden release of undirected, chaotic energy. Some of it was pure life, causing some of the grass and a brush nearby to instantly grow to twice its former size, some came out as miasma, leaving me nauseated and with a wish to get away as soon as possible as I had a feeling nethersprites would appear soon and some of the energy was released as elemental energy in all its shapes.


    Luckily, I was able to smother the resulting fire and a small, muddy hole wasn¡¯t a problem either, nor was the tree that had been destroyed by a sudden burst of wind.


    ¡°That was interesting.¡± Lenore muttered, leaving her Hallow and landing back on my shoulder. Together, we looked at the devastation and the splattered meat, some of it sliding down the Ice-Wall I had created.


    ¡°I¡¯m not sure if I¡¯m supposed to call this success or failure.¡± I admitted, both fascinated and a little shaken by the effects.


    ¡°Let¡¯s call it a work in progress, shall we?¡± Lenore asked, looking at the suddenly enlarged brush.


    ¡°I agree. Let¡¯s get back to the others, I wouldn¡¯t want to worry Sigmir.¡± I suggested, starting to shift into my Hallow.

 Chapter 332

    I tried to make sense of the result of my experiment, while Lenore and I were flying back to the others, going over what Lenore¡¯s sight had shown me. Normally, I would have thought that trying to absorb power from anything but Blood using my Blood Magic would be impossible but, as evidenced by the event earlier, that didn¡¯t seem to be the case. Another possibility was that by using my Athame as a template, or rather the enchantment placed upon it, I had inadvertently created something new, some sort of general absorption effect. It would explain a few things, namely the resulting explosion, if that were to be the case.


    Thinking back, I brought the original enchantment back to the forefront of my mind, just going over the different runes and the parts I had copied from my Athame. As I was looking, I realised that there was a subtle pattern in the angles, one that I had seen before, within the parts I had copied.


    ¡°You feel excited.¡± Lenore remarked, my emotions bleeding through my connection, enhanced due to being in my Hallow.


    ¡°I am, I think I know what happened with the experiment just now.¡± I explained. ¡°You see, if you look at the symbols here, the angles and arcs?¡± I asked, transmitting the mental image of the blade, highlighting the parts I had taken from the Athame. If I had tried to explain what I meant, it would have taken me hours and a blackboard, but our mental connection allowed me to transmit my discovery within seconds. I could feel Lenore processing what I had shown her, followed by understanding.


    ¡°Now, keep those patterns in mind and look at this.¡± I continued, now transmitting the Darkness-Rune I understood as Devouring, highlighting a pattern of angles and arcs that was eerily similar to the other one.


    ¡°Mhm, I see what you mean. You think that the absorption-part is at least partially a universal enchantment, designed to absorb everything and only the use of Blood Magic as a skill directs it in the right way. But when you made the magic item you only started the process, directing it for the first orc. When it stuck the second orc, the original control was gone and the resulting boost in power allowed it to try to absorb everything.¡± Lenore put my thoughts into words, making it sound quite scary. What would have happened if the material had been stronger, if the spell had been able to draw power longer, from more victims, before it started to try draining the wrong thing? What if there was a way to adapt the spellwork that was currently based on Blood Magic and thus limited to handle power drawn from blood? If I could manage that part, to work with power from every source, would the enchantment be able to draw power from its surroundings, until¡­


    At that point, my thoughts paused for a second, trying to imagine what would happen. If I used the current version, it would ramp up incredibly fast until the materials limits were reached, upon which it would break and most likely explode in some way, possibly similar to what we had seen just before. But if I used the version I had considered before, the one which ramped up slower but channelled more power into an enchantment strengthening the material holding the spellwork?


    It would draw power, either until there was nothing left to draw or until some sort of diminishing returns from the enchantment keeping the physical matter together kicked in and the material was destroyed. At least that was what I thought and it seemed that Lenore¡¯s thoughts were following a similar path, at least judging by the sheer horror filling her mind.


    ¡°Let¡¯s not try that.¡± she suggested and I could only agree. We had done some risky experiments, some bordering on the insane, but this was at least an order of magnitude worse than anything we had thought up so far. Considering that I wasn¡¯t even sure that the diminishing returns I thought would kick in were something real, it might just be an end-of-the-world spell. Not something one wanted to use by accident. If I ever broke the world, I wanted it to be deliberate.


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    ¡°Too bad that the female orc died.¡± Lenore said, after a few minutes of silence.


    ¡°Why?¡± I asked in response, thinking back to the encounter, now not focusing on the magic but the two orc we had disturbed. Neither had been anything special, level wise, barely in their mid-twenties, and obviously not very perceptive. But the situation might have been to blame for that.


    ¡°There was a village nearby, maybe an hour or two of walking, near the road. If we had saved her, we might have been able to rest in comfort for the night.¡± Lenore explained, showing me the distant smoke I hadn¡¯t noticed, alongside her notion of directions and distances, to give me a good idea of the locations involved.


    ¡°I¡¯m not so sure we interpreted what we saw correctly.¡± I admitted, remembering the first scream the female had let out, a scream that hadn¡¯t been one of pain but reasonably similar to the sounds coming from Sigmir, when she got really excited. I had heard the term coitus interruptus, but never thought I would be the cause, especially not in such a final fashion.


    ¡°You think she wanted to be pinned to a tree and¡­¡± Lenore asked, her mental voice fascinated.


    ¡°I don¡¯t think I¡¯ll ever understand humanoids. Why would you want that?¡± she asked, her confusion causing me to laugh, despite the circumstances.


    ¡°Excitement, the idea of losing control while knowing that you are safe while the partner gets the feeling of conquest, of domination. I don¡¯t know about Mundus, but in my world, some of the biggest industries are all about spicing up people¡¯s sex-lives.¡± I explained, chuckling to myself. It wasn¡¯t something I had ever any interest in, not until coming to Mundus and meeting Sigmir. Before some of the other thoughts I had on that matter could leak out, along some very private memories, I clamped down on the train of thought, forcibly thinking of something different. I was reasonably sure that Lenore had only caught fragments but some things were just too private, too sensitive to share, even with someone literally living within my head.


    To distract her, I inundated her with all the varied things human had thought up, starting with the simple, images of nice, lacy underwear to the extreme, a strange porno I had been sent as a prank, once. Lenore almost fell from the sky, reeling with revulsion. Sometimes, it was good to share suffering but I made a mental note not to, when Lenore was flying.


    ¡°What is wrong with humanoids?!¡± was Lenore¡¯s only question, quite similar to my own reaction.


    ¡°I wonder. Part of it might be boredom.¡± I admitted, not sure what else to say. I was one and understood other humanoids, especially humans, less than half the time, quite often wondering what was going through someone''s head to do the things they did.


    This time, it was Lenore who forcibly changed the topic, most likely to get rid of the mental images I had shared. I was thankful for it and together, we discussed possible ways to change the enchantment on my new weapon, mostly to control the way it acted. The biggest problem seemed to be that the power of the enchantment had ramped up exponentially, to which the easiest solution would be adding a secondary effect, something that took away some, maybe even all, of the power the current version used on strengthening its own effect. If we took away all, I would have to find a way to keep it powered from my own reserves, maybe by using some of my fresh blood, right before striking, to create a link between myself and the weapon.


    One of the possible effects we discussed was rather nasty and wholly Lenore¡¯s idea, a remix of what we had done against Tzar Bolotnik. Only here, the idea was to drain away the vital energy with Blood Magic and replace it with Death Magic, turning the enemies blood into a weapon that spread their demise throughout their body. The idea was intriguing, especially with the way I thought magic resistance worked. If my hypothesis was correct, it prevented magic effects from the outside from affecting you but if it came from the inside, it circumvented some of it. That was part of what made Blood Magic so nasty, its ability to strike past resistances.


    ¡°The others seemed to have met someone.¡± Lenore muttered, causing me to focus on her senses, seeing the others, walking down the road, similar to the way they had when we left. Only that instead of our four companions, there were seven figures. Two of the newcomers seemed to be orcs, the final one was some sort of canine, either a wolf or a very large dog, I wasn¡¯t sure which.


    ¡°Interesting. Let¡¯s see what is going on here.¡± I replied, mentally urging her to land on Sigmir¡¯s shoulder.

 Interlude: Profiles of Power III

    Official Road to Purgatory-Beta Forum


    <table><tbody><tr><td>-Kelgarn, confirmed Beta-Account</td></tr></tbody></table>


    Hey Guys and welcome back to the Profiles of Power


    Today, I thought we would look at one of those who brought an old paradigm into the World of Mundus, the Light-sider. Mundus as a world is quite steeped in shades of grey, many more than fifty, with two Pantheons striving for dominance. Neither of them is what I would call sunshines and rainbows but at the same time, neither is what I would call evil. They just are what they are. Now, one group, the Crusade of Light, is going their own way, punishing wickedness and evil, whatever they define those as.


    The one we are looking at is Howardlight, their leader. Let¡¯s see what we can find out about him.


    Race: looks human, but didn¡¯t start in the human area, instead started with the Valkyries


    Class: We¡¯ve seen some glowing, shining magic but wear plate-armour. If not for the fact that there shouldn¡¯t be such a thing as a Paladin on Mundus, wrong culture. But it looks like a Paladin, walks like a Paladin and smites like a Paladin, I guess that¡¯s what I¡¯ll call it.


    So, Paladin


    Titles: Unknown


    Relevant Skills:


    This one is using a Mace (or rather a Morningstar) instead of the Longsword (or Arming Sword) most people are using but as usual there is a weapon-skill involved, most likely the specialised one. Similarly, there is going to be a shield-mastery and an armour-mastery skill, unless something is very wrong.


    But then it gets more interesting, with a sort of Light-, Holy-, or Radiant-Magic, not sure what it is called within Mundus or if it is only one skill. There seem to be multiple abilities that fit that bill, take a look what I mean:


    shield.avi


    A Figure, clad in solid Plate-Armour, wielding a spiked mace in one hand and a shield in the other, all made from polished metal, embossed with golden decorations, is standing in a line of similarly armed fighters. Coming towards them is a group of Undead, slowly shambling as low moans and groans are heard. The Undead outnumber the fighters by about three to one.


    ¡°Aegis of Light!¡± the figure shouts out, raising his shield towards the sky and from the shield, a golden light radiates outward, enveloping the fighters. The light only lasts for a second before disappearing from the shield, leaving a lingering glow on the fighters it had touched.


    The zombies crash into the fighters and it seems as if their attacks slow down, just a bit, before hitting them, as if they are moving through liquid instead of air.


    smite.avi


    The same figure as in the first video is seen again, only this time he is alone, fighting a large, the size of a small horse, feline monster, trying to rip his face off with its claws. He uses his shield to absorb some of the pounces force, letting himself get pushed aside instead of trying to take the weight of the monster and getting knocked down. Stumbling, he turns, trying to keep the monster in his sight and takes a weak swing with his Morning Star, without leverage or weight behind it. But just before he hits, he calls out the words ¡°Divine Strike!¡± and the moment his weapon makes contact, a flash of light bursts out and the massive cat gets knocked to the side, smashing heavily into a nearby tree.


    radiance.avi


    The scene seems to be a continuation of the first one, a group of warriors fighting the undead. Some undead carcasses are littering the ground but not a single fighter went down, until suddenly one of the undead gets a grip on a fighter¡¯s shield, pulling him forward. The previously impervious line is broken and while some undead try to press into the gap, many more hands try to drag the fighter deeper into the milling mass of bodies and onto the ground where the armour can be cracked open like a tin-can.


    ¡°Radiance of Light!¡± calls the original figure, raising the Morning Star high, into the sky. The spikes on it start glowing and after a second, the glow is mirrored around the downed fighter, building until it explodes outwards, both from the Morning Star and the downed figure, burning away the undead. Moments later, the downed figure rises back up, as if nothing had happened, using the opening created by the explosion to get back into the armoured line.


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    -----


    Now, as you can see he is able to use his magic quickly in a combat-situation and it also looks quite versatile.


    In addition to those abilities, he is reported to be able to heal but there¡¯s no video other than the last, in which there might be a healing-effect alongside the explosive light-effect, we just don¡¯t know. Otherwise, the usual suspects like Athletics are likely and maybe a Leadership-skill, similar to those explained by Tobiuno.


    What more have you seen from this Crusader and his character? Add your observations here, maybe we can learn more about this strange idea, a force of light in a world dominated by shades of grey.


    <table><tbody><tr><td>Howardlight, confirmed Beta-Account</td></tr></tbody></table>


    So, it is my turn now? Oh, well, let me help you out a little, with the question of my Race.


    Valkar is not just a continent of Valkyries or maybe it would be better to say that not all Valkyries are the same. While we all start out with wings, the ability to fly is a little more restricted, coming only after completing a series of quests for one of the Temples, gaining the Blessing of Heimdal, Guardian of the Gods. Otherwise, you would have to lift your full weight with your wings, something nigh impossible without insane levels of attributes, mainly Strength and Agility. The Blessing allows you to fly with about a tenth of the required attributes.


    But how does that relate to my character, you might ask? Well, you don¡¯t have to go that way and I decided to follow another path and forego the ability to fly. Sure, it would be nifty but it¡¯s just not for me. Instead, I dedicated myself to Tyr, God of War. The dedication made me into an Einherjar, taking my wings but instead giving me a multitude of other abilities.


    Good Luck with the rest of your quest for knowledge.


    <table><tbody><tr><td>Tobiuno, confirmed Beta-Account</td></tr></tbody></table>


    I¡¯m not sure if what he is using are spells, at least in the in-game. To me, it looks more like some of his skills have taken on an elemental slant, giving them additional attributes. I know that there are skills that have a similar base-line, Heavy Blow for his Divine Strike and Shieldwall for his Aegis of Light but their effects are purely physical. When looking at the videos you posted, there seems to be more to it than that.


    <table><tbody><tr><td>Jeanyra, confirmed Beta-Account</td></tr></tbody></table>


    Well, that would require us to make a definition of what counts as magic and what not. I mean, some of the martial abilities blur the line of what is normally possible without costing Astral Power while some of the magic skills just add a glow to a normal strike.


    But I¡¯d say that the abilities definitely break the normal laws of physics so I¡¯d call them magic, just to have a classification.


    Anyway, the Radiance of Light looks very similar to my own Fireblast, which instantly creates an explosion of fire at a targeted location. No healing effect, obviously, but otherwise it looks very similar. Who knows about restrictions, I know that my own Fireblast has some, especially if I want to cast it rapidly, but the rules might be different for his abilities.


    <table><tbody><tr><td>Rachant, confirmed Beta-Account</td></tr></tbody></table>


    I know that one of his Titles is Undead Hunter, which gives him and everyone in his vicinity a bonus to damage against Undead. I know, shocking effect but what do you expect? Generic title has generic effect.


    <table><tbody><tr><td>-Hammasce, confirmed Beta-Account</td></tr></tbody></table>


    I know of another title, or maybe role if it¡¯s an official title recognised by the game as such but I think so. He is allowed to act as a legal prosecutor with limited powers to judge people on the spot,


    Not certain on the procedure and limits of that authority he seems to be using it very sparingly, almost reluctant. Which is good because otherwise it would be a massive pain in the ass.


    <table><tbody><tr><td>Tobiuno, confirmed Beta-Account</td></tr></tbody></table>


    I have similar authority on the lands I govern for Duke Highever and can tell you, they come with significant caveats. I can¡¯t say that it¡¯s the same for him but I know that if I¡¯m caught abusing those legal powers, I¡¯ll get branded an outlaw and hunted down, everywhere within the Human Empire. That would mean I can¡¯t access a whole continent, would most likely lose my class and get repeatedly killed until I essentially give up the Character.


    So yeah, if someone gives you great power, it comes with even greater responsibility. I can understand why he is hesitant to use those perks, if they work in a similar way.


    <table><tbody><tr><td>Howardlight, confirmed Beta-Account</td></tr></tbody></table>


    Yes, the sword of Justice cuts both ways, there are similar penalties involved for me, just a little harsher. The standing I enjoy doesn¡¯t come from a Lord or secular Power but from the Church and Tyr directly. I REALLY don¡¯t want to know what would happen if His blessing is withdrawn.


    <table><tbody><tr><td>Yuthos, confirmed Beta-Account</td></tr></tbody></table>


    Tyr, as in the guy who gave you your Race-Change? Or advanced your Race? Most likely while crossing the first Divide? And who is likely the source of your Divine Magic?


    Part of me really would like to see the punishment for abusing your rights.

 Chapter 333

    ¡°Who are your friends?¡± Lenore asked using my voice, as soon as she landed on Sigmir¡¯s shoulder. We were both watching the two orcs carefully, curious how they would react and we were not disappointed. At first, they had looked confused when a seemingly wild bird had landed on Simgir¡¯s shoulder, without any obvious commands or signs but when Lenore spoke in a human voice, their eyes boggled, one of them making a strange sign I didn¡¯t recognise but it reminded me of some priest making a sign of the cross to ward of evil.


    ¡°They are hunters, living in a village down the road, maybe two hours from here. We thought it would be nice to spend the night indoors, maybe have a meal that you didn¡¯t have to cook over an open fire.¡± Sigmir explained while reaching up and gently stroking Lenore¡¯s feathers. It was a curious sensation, in a lot of ways. I had focused on my connection with Sigmir, to make sure there wasn¡¯t any problem with the orcs, some sort of ambush or something along those lines, allowing me to experience an echo of her sensations, such as Lenore¡¯s soft feathers under her fingers. At the same time, I was tuned into Lenore¡¯s senses, due to being in my Hallow and experiencing the world through her, giving me the slightly strange experience of feeling both sides of the contact, which was profoundly weird. There was just no other word for it, my brain trying to make sense of a sensation it had never been meant to experience and for a second, I remembered the explosive effect of the connection between Sigmir and me when coupled with actual, physical stimulation, like kissing. There was definitely a lot of potential to be explored there.


    ¡°That sounds indeed enjoyable.¡± Lenore admitted, while I was busy daydreaming, giving me a mental kick for us to switch places, trying to create an illusion of us being one entity, a shape-shifter of some sort. I knew that shapeshifting wasn¡¯t unheard off, I only had to look to Adra for an example of someone who could easily take the shape of animals, even if she hadn¡¯t used the ability in a while. Ever since we had been stripped off our mounts and thus limited to the speed Rai or I could travel at on foot, she had simply kept to her normal form, not shifting in her four-legged travel form.


    Prodded by Lenore and her hop off Sigmir¡¯s shoulder, I initiated myshift out of my Hallow, landing in a crouch next to Sigmir, rising to fall into step next to her and taking her hand. It worked out quite well, the process of shifting in and out of my Hallow something we had practised to the point that we could fluidly make the switch, even testing some magical theatrics to use with it. If turning from a Raven into a Firnelf was impressive in its own right, doing so while emitting a cloud of icy mist or inky darkness added a certain flavour to it. In addition, it was simply fun.


    ¡°A nearby village you say?¡± I asked, a funny feeling in my gut telling me that I had met two inhabitants of that village, just further into the woods. Further into the woods and quite occupied with each other, at least before I had used them as test-subjects. I had to consider how to play things, just in case the funny feeling turned out to be correct. I had no desire to add another village to the tally of places I had devastated, not without reason, more importantly, not next to the ancient road, giving people who might be hunting me more to work with. I had no idea where Howardlight and his crusaders were, just that he had started in Valkar, with the Valkyries.


    ¡°I think I¡¯ve seen it from the air, at least I¡¯ve seen the smoke.¡± I added, deciding to simply keep my mouth shut as much as possible, hoping that the two orcs wouldn¡¯t be missed until we had moved on.


    ¡°If you have seen chimney-smoke near the road, you saw our village. There are a few others in the area but only ours is near the road. The others are living a little away from it, keeping to themselves. They trade with us and we trade with travellers on the road, keeping everyone happy.¡± one of the orcs explained, trying to sound serious and respectful. I had to smile a little at his tone, it was one I had heard a few times, mostly from lawyers addressing the judge.


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    ¡°They also have better soil for farming and more game, little to be had near the road. We have to travel quite some distance to get some hunting done.¡± he continued, making me raise an eyebrow at the obvious lack of game with them. Either they had been unlucky and had to return empty-handed or their backpacks were magical in nature, similar to the packs we were using.


    My curiosity roused, I used a trickle of Darkness-magic to conceal the emanations of the Observe-skill, learning that both Orcs with us were in their mid-fifties, while their hunting canine was level forty-five. Not too shabby, but at the same time nothing to truly write home about, once more driving home the fact that most natives of Mundus had little interest in actively raising their levels, like my companions and I had. They preferred their safety and security over power. An idea I could understand, I certainly wouldn¡¯t want to risk my life regularly, living on the edge of death every step of the way.


    These two were a good example, they had most likely hunted for some twenty years, regularly killing game and whatever predator tried to contest their kills, and yet they were just a little over half our level, something we had mostly achieved in the last few months. Hell, most of it we had made during the ten days of brutal, exhausting hunting in the undead swamp, challenging groups of monsters multiple times an hour, risking death with a regularity that made it a wonder it hadn¡¯t caught up with us. It made me wonder about my companions, and not for the first time, why they yearned for power, risking their lives to gain it.


    I let the others continue with the conversation I had kicked off, allowing me to retreat back into my mind and thoughts. I liked it that way, silently observing the others as they made smalltalk, learning quite a bit more about the local situation and region. It wasn¡¯t all that interesting, the different crops and which village planted them, which animals were migrating when, those small tidbits of local lore that could be useful but, most of the time, were not. With that as the background-noise, we continued walking for the rest of the afternoon.


    It was about five o¡¯clock when we reached the village and it was about as exciting as the two orcs had described it, meaning it was not. There were some fields around it and the village itself didn¡¯t even have a fence, let alone a wall or any defensive installation. The buildings were mostly made from wood, with some of them being built out of grey stone, those being the bigger buildings.


    Our two companions told us which of the stone buildings, the largest one, was the inn, before wishing us a good day, telling us that we would most likely see them later, in the taproom. Apparently, they were planning to get a drink once they had dropped their kills off at home, confirming that my earlier assessment had been right. Not that it mattered, I doubted any of us had an interest in stealing their bags or their kills but if we had nefarious intentions, the villagers wouldn¡¯t have posed a hindrance. They didn¡¯t even have guards. We were starting to get into the more civilised parts of Aretia, something I hadn¡¯t quite expected, certainly not that stark a contrast.


    I had to smile when we stepped into the taproom, it being a part of the village that could have been in any of the villages or towns we had been in so far, from Yari, the bear-beastmen town in the far north to Kolyug, the most civilised and orderly place we had been to so far, the common-rooms of the inns seemed to be made by the same template, with small variations. Long tables, benches, overworked servers and a smell of ale and food. Maybe it was a constant for the transient people, travelling the long roads.


    As I smiled at the idea, Adra, as always our spokeswoman, walked up to the bar and got us a place to sleep for the night, alongside some food for the evening.

 Chapter 334

    It was interesting, how the perception and treatment of strangers had changed by travelling south, by leaving the rough and tough northern lands and reached a less brutal place. Here, powerful adventurers were both a rare curiosity and common, in a bit of a dichotomy. There were regular merchant-trains making stops in the small town, named Tagulet, that the inhabitants were used to them and didn¡¯t regard us with overmuch suspicion but at the same time, they also knew that angering a group of adventurers could have drastic consequences, meaning that their interest was tempered by a healthy dose of respect, maybe even fear. And that was without knowing details, without trying to Observe any of us, just from the presence we emanated, due to having crossed the first, or second for Sigmir and Lenore, divide.


    We had been given a corner of the common-room of the inn and there seemed to be an invisible line that kept the locals, other than the barmaid, away from us. They were looking our way upon entering but were quickly looking away, if any of us was obviously noticing their interest. In a way, that was quite comforting, knowing that the locals seemed to be disinclined to challenge us, making me hope that even my outsider-trait wouldn¡¯t manage to cause us trouble.


    Other than the interest, suppressed by respect, the food was decent, not outstanding but also not bad. They had a hearty stew, with lentils, some gamey bacon, potatoes, served alongside fresh greens, warm bread and fruits, creating a satisfying meal for us, especially after a few days on the road. There were just some things I couldn¡¯t cook on a campfire, especially baking was nigh impossible, without going through a lot of trouble to create a makeshift oven. Part of me wondered if Fire- or maybe Earth-Magic would allow me to do that on the fly, similar to the way I could use my Ice-Magic to instantly whip up everything from weapons to walls. Not that it really mattered, I had no idea how to influence the affinities I had gained at the start and, to be frank, even less desire to get rid of any of my magical abilities, they simply felt right. Sure, there might be others that had more power or versatility, or even a better reputation, but the affinities I had were mine and mine alone. The idea of having them changed felt akin to switching out my hands for tentacles or my legs for a fluke. They might be more versatile or better for a certain environment but I would no longer be me.


    There was also ale, the smell powerful in the room but I stayed well away from it, remembering my experience with mead in Kolyug and my suspicion that I had murdered two of their youngsters earlier. No, getting drunk would be a stupid idea. But it made me wonder if the respect of the locals towards us would be dissolved in alcohol sooner or later, making them belligerent and aggressive or if the fear was stronger. It seemed like an interesting topic of research and observation, so I kept a close eye on the steady business the tavern owner was making, with locals coming in and sitting down, well away from us.


    As I watched, I noticed that the locals weren¡¯t really drinking as much as I had thought and observed in some of the other taverns, especially the one in Kolyug. Maybe a third of them had food in front of them, savouring the food, while the rest simply had a mug of ale. Another observation was that the crowd was surprisingly mixed in sex, bucking the idea that the men went to the tavern to get drunk while the women waited at home. A little more than a third of patrons were female and, to further shatter the traditional idea of the female homemaker, roughly half of those eating were female as well.


    ¡°By the gods, if your louse of a son managed to snare my Ramona, he¡¯ll either marry her or I¡¯ll make sure she was the last he has ever defiled!¡± a loud voice cut through my idle observations and thoughts, taking my attention to another corner of the room, where a sturdy-looking orc-female was standing in front of another orc, that one quite a bit taller but slender. At a glance, I wasn¡¯t sure who had more mass but thought the female had it, especially when it came to muscles.


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    ¡°As if my Julius would ever lay a hand on your brute of a daughter.¡± the male replied, his sneer made more pronounced by the clearly visible tusks.


    ¡°That hellion of yours will most likely have to hold down any male she is interested in, or they might run away.¡± he continued, while the noise-level in the previously noisy common-room dropped rapidly. I noticed that the locals seemed to shift around a little, creating quite a bit of empty space around the two loud orcs, while making sure that they had a good line of sight. There was tension in the air, but not the tension of bloodshed, it felt more like the charged atmosphere in a stadium or maybe a movie-theatre on opening night. I almost expected the barmaid to come out with buckets of popcorn, or maybe the betting to start.


    ¡°Those two are at it again¡­¡± I heard the barmaid mutter, as she walked through the still empty space around our corner of the room. Even with the shifting patrons, the space around us had been undisturbed, which the barmaid used to get around easily. But even she didn¡¯t seem to be worried about the two orcs who had continued to trade insults, disparaging the other''s offspring.


    ¡°Esteemed guests, please pay them no mind, they have been feuding with the other, ever since their courtship fell apart some twenty-five years ago. They¡¯ve been at each other''s throat ever since and both want their children to continue the feud, but neither of them seems to be interested.¡± the barmaid addressed me, noticing my interest in the slowly escalating situation on the other side of the room.


    ¡°I¡¯m sure they have more sense than to bother you, even if it seems tempers are running higher than normal.¡± she continued, already trying to defuse a potentially hazardous situation. Hazardous for the inn that is, a bar-room brawl was one thing but if any of us got annoyed enough to do something about the brawl, both Sigmir and I had more than enough power to level the inn. Rai and Adra not so much, mostly because their abilities and fighting-style was centered on the precise application of force, not physical or magical brute-force like Sigmir and I.


    ¡°It will be alright.¡± I told the barmaid, getting involved was not on my priority-list, not at all. With that in mind, I focused my mind for a second, activating overflow and instantly projected a simple runic-formation, conjuring up a thin wall of ice between us and them. Not enough to stop any serious attack, not even with the difference in power, but more than enough to keep us from getting hit by accident.


    The sudden appearance of the wall had another effect I hadn¡¯t quite expected, the temperature instantly dropped, both metaphorically and literally. The safe-zone seemed to expand just a little and even the two arguing hot-heads stopped, looking at the translucent pale blue wall that was cutting our corner off from the rest of the room.


    ¡°Thank you, esteemed guest. It wasn¡¯t necessary but thank you.¡± the barmaid told me, her voice a little strained.


    ¡°Can I get you something else, maybe some fresh fruit or ale? We might even have some wine, if that is more to your tastes. It¡¯s on the house, to make up for the disturbance of your meal.¡± she added.


    ¡°That won¡¯t be necessary but thank you. I think it is time that we retreat to our rooms, we had a long day on the road and the upcoming days promise a similar experience.¡± Adra told the barmaid, trying to sound calm and reassuring.


    ¡°That seems like a good idea. My compliments to the cook.¡± I added, my mind reaching out to the ice-wall, shattering it into a flurry of diamond dust, which I collected into my hand before compressing it again, magically turning it into a wreath of ice-flowers which I placed on my head with an amused smile. I had done so on a whim, to avoid causing a mess when the ice would inevitably melt but the casual display of magic seemed to both awe and frighten the barmaid quite a bit, while the other patrons had similar expressions of respect and fear on their faces.


    I ignored it and stood, as did the others, heading towards the back of the tavern where our rooms were located.


    ¡°Please, I beg you, can you help me? My daughter didn¡¯t come home tonight, can you find her?!¡± the orc-female that had started the earlier confrontation asked, not quite blocking our path but clearly addressing us.

 Chapter 335

    Upon being addressed by the orc-woman, we all stopped, focusing on her. From closer up, I could see her quite easily and noticed that she was quite muscular for someone who didn¡¯t seem to be an adventurer, making me think she was doing some sort of labour. In addition, I noticed that her hands had a myriad of small scars, before focusing back to her face. Out of curiosity, I used Observe to get additional information, not caring about the discomfort it would cause her. Her eyes flashed to me but there was no aggressive movement on her part, which was smart on her part, not that a level thirty-three Orc would have been able to do anything to me, not if I was aware of them.


    ¡°How old is your daughter, it sounded like you were talking about a young adult earlier. Why do you think that she needs help?¡± Adra asked, some curiosity in her voice.


    ¡°She¡¯s seventeen but she never stayed out after dark. That Capuar boy had something to do with it, I just know he did. Always sniffing around after her, like the mangy cur he is, trying to get her interested in him. But my daughter is too smart to fall for his sweet words.¡± the orc woman explained, with impressive venom in her voice when she talked about the other orc.


    ¡°What did you call my son, Monta?!¡± the other orc, with whom she had argued earlier, broke into our conversation, glaring at the woman, again. Out of curiosity, I Observed him as well, causing another flinch and learned that he was level thirty-eight.


    ¡°Her brute of a daughter most likely dragged my poor son away into the woods, forcing herself on him. That way, she could get her fingers into my mercantile-business, the only thing of worth in this town! Please, you have to help me find him, I¡¯ll make it worth your while!¡± the male orc told Adra, who had been up front.


    In front of me, two quests popped up, asking us to find out what had happened to their respective children, one from the male, the other from the female. Looking both of the orcs over, I had a reasonably good idea what the answer was and for a moment, I considered taking the quests and trying to give a weasel-worded explanation, earning us the quest-reward without giving away the truth. But only for a brief second, I knew my strengths and convoluted public speaking was not amongst them, that would need a professional liar, meaning a politician or lawyer.


    I noticed Adra looking over to me and gave her a small, negative, shake of the head, not wanting to deal with the mess. She gave me a small nod in response before looking at the two orcs, telling them that we had no interest in inerting us into their quarrel and we would be heading out in the morning, giving us simply no time to help them. Both looked disappointed, first towards us before turning to each other and exchanging venomous glares. It made me wonder if there actually was magic to give a glare actual venom, maybe something I should look into, using mind magic. Maybe some sort of mock-medusa ability, physically freezing someone by glaring at them. I shared the idea with Lenore, giving her some amusement.


    After a few moments of glaring at each other, the two of them started up their earlier argument, insulting each other while more or less ignoring us but still blocking our path.


    ¡°Now, leave us alone. We have better things to do than listen to your barking.¡± I snarled, speaking for the first time. As I did, I felt Lenore push outwards from within her Hallow, not quite shifting into our joined Avatar-state but letting the aura of having crossed the second divide leak out. Her intent was transmitted to me and I went along, our magic mixing and joining with our combined aura, causing the temperature around me to rapidly drop as wind caused my clothes to flutter and the lights in the room to deepen.


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    With the drop in temperature, the noise in the room dropped as well, the various people looking pale and starting to sweat, despite the clouds forming from their breath. The two arguing orcs had stumbled back, looking at me with wide-eyed fear, finally silent.


    Giving them one last sneer, I hooked my arm into Sigmir¡¯s and together we started towards the rooms. Behind us, the room remained mostly silent, with suppressed noises and a quiet shuffling of feet, making me wonder if I had just cleared the tavern, to make sure their revelry didn¡¯t disturb our sleep. If so, I felt a little bad for the innkeeper but not a lot, there would be stories told for weeks, increasing his business. I wondered how big I would be in the stories and what feats of magic I would work, to awe and terrify the locals.


    ¡°Now, want to tell me what that was about?¡± Adra asked, once we were amongst ourselves, standing in front of one of our rooms. My behaviour had been quite out of character for me, putting myself out there so blatantly so her curiosity was understandable.


    ¡°Eh, I don¡¯t think they wanted to know the truth about what happened to their children. Or rather, I don¡¯t think it would have been smart of me to tell the truth and I have no idea how the system would interact with the truth that is known to me.¡± I explained, before looking around with my eyes and reaching out with my mind, trying to ascertain that we truly were alone.


    ¡°I¡¯ll tell you the rest tomorrow, once we are an hour or three away from here.¡± I added, deciding that telling them here would be foolish. I was reasonably certain that nobody would hear but there was just no advantage in telling them.


    Adra looked me over, a curious look in her eyes, before nodding and telling us to have a good night.


    ¡°We will see each other in the morning.¡± she added, before opening the door to the room she was sharing with Rai, both of them getting inside.


    Sigmir and I shared a smile before copying their actions, walking over to the next room and getting inside. It wasn¡¯t anything special, a simple room with two beds, a small table, two chairs and a washing place, a simple metal basin filled with water and a mostly clean cloth.


    Looking at the mattresses, I wondered just how many creepy crawlies we¡¯d share our bed with when I felt Lenore start to leave her Hallow, moving over to my shoulder.


    ¡°Let me handle this, please.¡± she told me and I felt her magic activate, right next to my head, a blend of air and death, blowing towards the two beds. It wasn¡¯t nearly powerful enough to harm non-living material but for the various crawlies, it would mean an instant trip to whatever afterlife bed-bugs had.


    ¡°Thank you.¡± I told Lenore, now knowing that there wouldn¡¯t be insect bites in our future. She gave me a nod before hopping off my shoulder, landing on the table as I stepped over to the washbasin.


    ¡°Love, if you wake up in the morning and I¡¯m not here, only Lenore, it means I¡¯m in my Hallow. I¡¯ve got a few things to take care of in the other world so I might be a little delayed. If so, just continue on down the road.¡± I told Sigmir, while stripping off my clothes. While washing at a washbasin wasn¡¯t terribly enjoyable, it beat not washing by a lot.


    ¡°That¡¯s fine, as long as I know about it, I¡¯m good.¡± she told me, as she watched me undressing with a smirk on her face and a gleam in her eyes.


    ¡°I just want to be sure you are okay.¡± she added, standing up from the bed and prowling over to me. I felt Lenore¡¯s amusement mixed with annoyance as she hopped down to Ylva, cuddling up with her canine friend while suppressing our connection was much as possible, not wanting to know what happened between Sigmir and me. Looking over, I noticed that Ylva had rolled up around Lenore, tucking in her head to block out the sounds and smells coming from us.


    Somehow, we ended up washing each other, taking about an hour to do so. Once we were clean, both of us were pleasantly exhausted, settling in to sleep. There was just nothing better than snuggling with Sigmir, cuddling up in her strong, warm arms. Even the prickly mattress and unfamiliar room weren¡¯t enough to keep me from getting comfortable and relaxing. Before closing my eyes and letting myself fall into the sleep of the satisfied, I set up an alarm, so I¡¯d be woken up early enough to get into my Hallow, log out and get things done in the real world.

 Chapter 336

    Getting up and leaving Sigmir¡¯s cuddly embrace was difficult, a true test of conviction and willpower. For maybe five minutes, I struggled, snuggling into her while remembering that I would have to hurry if I wanted to take a shower before heading to training with Mrs. Wu. Finally, knowing that I would have to skip breakfast, I gave her a gentle kiss and got up, shifting into my Hallow as soon as I cleared the bed. Once inside, I triggered the logout and left Mundus behind.


    Opening the capsule and standing up once again made me appreciate just how strange the capsule-technology was, and how comfortable. Normally, I would think that after lying in mostly the same position for some twelve to fourteen hours, I would feel stiff and sore all over. But I wasn¡¯t, instead I felt like I had just gotten up from a comfortable sleep, ready to face the day, even if it was early afternoon. Even hunger was merely a slight twinge instead of the growling stomach one might expect after a long session. A quick look at the wall-clock told me that no, I didn¡¯t even have time to fix that part, not if I wanted to be on time for training, so I quickly stripped off on the way to the bedroom, throwing on some clothes before grabbing an apple and two small water-bottles before heading out.


    Ultimately, I just managed to get to training on time, eating my apple on the way and drinking the water, but I managed. Changing was done almost as quickly as dressing and, maybe two minutes before the appointed time, I was on the mat, with Mrs. Wu joining me.


    After a short greeting and bow, me bowing quite a bit deeper, we started, first with the warm-up before moving on to forms and, later, sparring. During warm-up, my stomach realised that the apple was all I was planning to eat, or rather had time to eat, and began to make its displeasure known, with soft grumbles whenever I relaxed for a moment. I thought Mrs. Wu had noticed, there was a small twitch on her mostly impenetrable pokerface, but if she did, she didn¡¯t pay it any mind.


    I was able to finish the warm-up but once we moved on to the forms, I felt my energy levels flag, especially once the forms got more difficult and required precise muscle-control. But still, I endured, knowing that Mrs. Wu had thought enough of me to invite me to train with her. Failing her was something I didn¡¯t intend to do, not if I could help it.


    ¡°Good, you seem to have kept up your training-regime. Now, let¡¯s see how much you have learned. We will use the practise blades today.¡± she announced, once we had moved through a difficult set of forms. I felt reminded, again, that I was barely managing to keep up with a woman old enough to be my mother, maybe even grandmother but no matter what, she seemed to move with effortless grace where I had to strain and stretch.


    We both took up our practise weapons, short, wide blades with a solid fist-guard, before moving across the mat from each other and bowing before starting to move. I knew that Mrs. Wu preferred to wait, to flow around my attacks and strike back, so I decided to play the waiting game, not committing to any serious attack, only short feints and stabs, nothing that she could capitalise on.


    For what felt like hours but couldn¡¯t be more than a minute or two, I tried to get her to move, to do more than slightly shift out of my way or use one of her blades to alter the path of one of mine by more than a bit, anything that I could use to break through her slippery, flowing defense. But there was nothing, no opening, not even a feigned one, nothing but her inscrutiable mien, looking back at me.


    As I moved, circling around her, trying to catch her in the movement, I felt myself flag further, my mind slowly calming down, not because I felt calm or serene but because my body was simply lacking the energy to keep it working. Suddenly, she closed in, catching me just a tad out of position, forcing me to parry, pushing my blades out of position for the follow-up attack. A searing line of pain cut across my upper arm when the solid practise-sword hit, not strong enough to injure but bruising more than my ego.


    ¡°Come, don¡¯t think that your enemies won¡¯t use your weakness against you. Push through the pain, the weakness, and force your body to obey.¡± Mrs Wu ordered, her voice sharp and snapping. For a second, I considered ignoring her words, to keep up what had worked in previous sparring sessions, but after a few steps, I realised I simply could not. Without fuel, my body would only get slower, taking away the one advantage I had, that I was quick and nimble. Without that, Mrs Wu could score on me with ease, simply due to her near perfect body-control and vast experience.


    Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.


    As I felt my world grow narrow, darkness obscuring everything but Mrs Wu, I started to move in, my mind slowly fading, letting go of unnecessary notions. For once, my mind felt quiet, no patterns to be sought, no noise, only a single purpose. My blades collided with her defense, the attack sharp and furious like a winter storm, a memory from Mundus flashing into my mind, for just a split second. Dancing with the wind, becoming the storm. For a second, I felt my mind reach for Darkness-Magic, trying to let it bind Mrs. Wu and there was a glorious moment when I thought I succeeded, only to have the darkness consume me.


    When I got back to myself, the first sense returning was smell. For a moment, I simply floated there, in formless, comfortable darkness, perceiving nothing but the familiar smell of filled dumplings. Hearty, with a hint of soy-sauce and for a moment, I wondered where I was. Slowly, my mind started to supply information and as it did my senses returned as well, the softness of the surface I was lying on, the warmth of dry air brushing over my face, sharply contrasted by a cool, wet cloth lying over my forehead. Soon, my ears joined in and I heard the clanking of kitchenware and the soft, almost silent, movements of a person, mostly cloth shifting and the tapping of feet.


    Finally, I managed to open my eyes, seeing an unfamiliar ceiling, a wood-paneling formed from many small pieces.


    ¡°Ah, you are awake.¡± the familiar voice of Mrs Wu supplied the information that allowed me to ascertain that the ceiling, with its four-hundred forty-eight pieces belonged to their appartement. The couch-back next to me added the information that I lying on their couch. It was an interesting, geometric pattern that made me want to trace it, to look for a greater pattern. Pushing my mind past it¡¯s instinctive need, I focused on Mrs Wu¡¯s voice, computing what she had said.


    ¡°Yes, I assume I passed out?¡± I asked, trying to figure out if I would pass out again if I tried to get into a seating position.


    ¡°You did. But you passed a test of mine. I assume you forgot to eat, or simply missed it?¡± she asked, sounding completely matter-of-factly.


    ¡°I didn¡¯t have the time, the error was mine. Better planning is required next time.¡± I admitted, knowing that I had made a mistake, no matter how she wanted to frame it.


    ¡°In a way, it was an error. But at the same time, I think you learned something. Your enemies won¡¯t wait until you are at your best, so learn to fight at your worst. To get past the limitations of your body and end your fight.¡± she explained and I determined that I should be able to get into a sitting position. Carefully pushing myself up, I looked over to where I heard Mrs Wu, seeing her work at a stove with a small pot on it.


    ¡°But then I failed, didn¡¯t I? I didn¡¯t finish the fight.¡± I wondered, not wanting to contradict her, merely wanting to understand.


    ¡°Oh, but you did. If what we had used were sharp blades, we wouldn¡¯t be talking. Even with the training-blades, I will be feeling that hit for quite a while.¡± explained and turned around, looking towards me. Just from the way she carefully and slowly moved, I was able to guess that she was in considerable pain, her left arm held carefully near her body.


    ¡°You came after me with intent to kill, without hesitation or mercy. If you ever get into a serious fight, not on the mat but out there, where your body is on the line, I want you to remember today, to remember the feeling. It will serve you well.¡± she continued and for a moment I felt terrified. But then I remembered a line from the book she had given me, that mercy was for those strong enough to prevail. Neither Mrs Wu nor I were physically impressive species, if we had to fight, the fight would be over once we were grappled. The best way to prevent that was to end the fight before it could happen.


    ¡°But now, you managed to pass the test and I¡¯m proud that you did. However, I would be failing you as a teacher if I send you back out there without making sure that you are able to get home.¡± she told me and spooned the content of her pot into two steaming bowls, carrying them over to me, handing me a bowl of dumpling soup.


    ¡°Eat, it will help silence the monster you keep in your stomach.¡± she told me with a smile, sitting across the table and starting on her own bowl.

 Chapter 337

    I felt strangely heavy when I sat down at the table, back in my apartment, after finishing my conversation with Mrs. Wu. Once my mind had gotten back up to speed, after passing out, I had realised just what had happened and what it implied. My first question was just how hard I had hit her, for her to tell me it would have been a lethal blow and how she could just shrug off something like that. The answer was surprisingly simple, she shrugged off her training-clothes, showing me that she was wearing a thin but highly protective padded vest beneath it. Otherwise, my blow would have cracked ribs and been dangerous, as it had been coming up from below and struck her torso, even as I had been going down.


    We ate together before she checked my physical condition, making sure that the brief unconsciousness hadn¡¯t been a hint of some greater problem, other than me not eating well. It wasn¡¯t and she suggested that I¡¯d take better care of myself, before sending me off, telling me that my lessons would ratchet up, if I felt up for it. I tried to get her to tell me just where her training-methods came from and why she was training me in that way but the only answer I got was an inscrutable smile, that didn¡¯t tell me anything.


    And that statement, that my training would ratchet up, was why I was feeling a little strange and apprehensive. I had started to train martial arts for self-confidence, exercise and for the unlikely possibility that I¡¯d have to defend myself but the training-session and what Mrs. Wu had told me afterwards forced me to acknowledge that I wasn¡¯t just learning self-defense, especially what Mrs. Wu was teaching me. While she had declined to tell me where she had learned, I wasn¡¯t a complete idiot, even if some people claimed otherwise. The book she had given me, combined with the training she was giving me, strongly suggested that she had been trained in an organised, systematic way, trained as a spy, agent or assassin, something along those lines, a covert operative, working alone or in a small group. That systematic way of training hinted that there was an organisation behind it, which in turn would most likely be a nation-state. Sure, there were the various popular conspiracy theories of ancient assassin-orders hiding in the shadows for some nefarious goal or another but I doubted that there was any credibility to any of them.


    That strongly supported hypothesis and what I was learning from her made me wonder, did I want to learn more? On one hand, I enjoyed the training, the way she was challenging me both physically and mentally. On the other hand, I was both a gamer and a forensic accountant, the gaming-part currently dominating my life, but at the end of the day, I had been working in a job people would describe as incredibly boring and enjoyed my job. Why would an accountant want or need to learn how to kill people? Would learning even more change me? The way she had spoken, it sounded like the coming training was to teach me to deliberately attempt to kill someone, not just in a state of instinct but consciously and deliberately trying to end someone¡¯s life. I did my killing in the virtual world, where the consequences were a lot different and I had no interest to change that. But nonetheless, I felt intrigued by what she was offering.


    Which ultimately weighed on my mind, causing the heavy feeling I was having.


    I tried to push it aside, knowing full well that I wouldn¡¯t easily be able to solve my conundrum, instead I wanted to focus on simpler things, like the plate of take-out food in front of me. I had made a stop on the way home, not wanting to deal with cooking before being able to eat so take-out was a good option. For a moment, I just sat there, letting the smell of fried noodles, veggies and some duck-meat flow into my nose, savouring the anticipation but despite the delicious smells coming from the plate, my mind wouldn¡¯t cooperate and shut the earlier train of thought down.


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


    Grumbling to myself, I started eating but knowing that my mind wouldn¡¯t let me eat in peace anyway, I pulled up the Road to Purgatory Forum on the wall-screen, deciding that some good old, stupid Internet-drama was just the distraction my racing mind would appreciate.


    My first stop was the comment-section of the video I had uploaded to serve as an introduction to my channel and character, smiling at the compliments I had received for the videography while scowling at the people calling it cringy or annoying. Over-the-top, I could live with, it was supposed to be. After a few comments, I realised that the people thinking it annoying were mostly people who came to my channel again and again, everytime hearing the opening chords and the beginning of the video, until they found one that they wanted to watch. I could see how the beginning would become annoying after the fifth time, so I decided to try dealing with it.


    The Road to Purgatory page wasn¡¯t equipped with the most comfortable of user-interfaces, forcing me to dig deeply into the settings, until I finally found an option to make the video only auto-play for people not subscribed to me, something that hopefully would get me some extra subscribers while not annoying my already existing subscribers, making it a double-win in my book.


    With that out of the way, I started to browse the video-section in earnest, taking short looks at the videos uploaded by other spellcasters, trying to get inspiration for my own casting and research. Sadly, it looked like most people were going the route of the guild-mage and simply learning spells by rote, similar to the way I had taught Rai in the beginning. It made me wonder how the advancement of someone like that would work, would they be taught how to cross the divides, to get the result the guild wanted? Why would anyone want to follow such a simple, well-trodden path in a game that was all about exploring the unknown was a mystery to me but then, not everyone had as much time to spend on Mundus as I had. Sure, most beta-testers had agreed to play extensively, it had been part of the beta-sign-up, but there had to be classes for people who just couldn¡¯t play daily, let alone as much as I did.


    After watching the fifth video of a different guy throwing fireballs at his enemy, all using virtually the same method of casting, I decided that there was no point and moved on. To my pleasant surprise, I noticed that the Profiles of Power-Series had covered my favourite enemy, Howardlight. More information on someone supposedly hunting me was always welcome, even if it might be distorted and filtered.


    As I read, I felt a little impressed by the way Howardlight tried to set himself up as the good guy, even for a thread he had to find annoying. By volunteering information on his race, he made it look like he was supporting the public efforts but, most likely, the information volunteered was something that would be easy enough to find out anyway, there had to be others who had completed that particular challenge to change race, If I were in the habit of wearing a hat, I would have tipped it, it was a smart idea. It made me wonder what I could volunteer in a similar but different manner.


    Shaking my head, I continued to read on, not terribly happy about the contents. Light-magic was one of my banes, just the memory of full-body Astral Sun-burn was enough to make me cringe and getting blinded by a bright flash was doubly painful for my Avatar, thanks to the highly useful low-light vision I had. The special skills to fight against undead and boost his squad-mates were less worrying, I wasn¡¯t in the habit of using undead and I was reasonably sure that if I wanted to go after his squad-mates and had time to prepare my offensive area-of-effect magic would break whatever defenses he could put up. Especially if I managed to collect some human resources beforehand, allowing me to give my spells just that little extra boost.


    Continuing to read, I was suddenly very glad that my mouth wasn¡¯t filled at that particular moment, when my mind noticed a pattern, tracing it and coming up with a wholly surprising theory. After scrolling and reading it all again, I started to wonder, was it deliberate or coincidence. And if it was deliberate, on whose part? Had Howardlight inadvertently stumbled into an easter-egg, without noticing and simply ran with it? Or was he in fact a comedic genius, a troll who had elevated his trolling to an art-form? I wasn¡¯t sure, it depended on so many things.


    But no matter what, the Paladin of Light, being the Accuser of the Court and wielding a Morningstar? That couldn¡¯t be coincidence, could it?

 Interlude: Profiles of Power IV

    Official Road to Purgatory-Beta Forum


    <table><tbody><tr><td>-Kelgarn, confirmed Beta-Account</td></tr></tbody></table>


    Hey Guys and welcome back to the Profiles of Power


    After we looked at the light side, whatever that means in this game, last time, today, we look at the dark side. I¡¯ve heard they have cookies so it should be good.


    Our subject of interest today is one that has garnered a lot of attention on herself, both in the past and present. From fairy-queen to scary-queen, today we are talking about Morgana. We have little confirmed, she has been rather quiet on her abilities but we have a lot of footage to watch and speculate. Let¡¯s get to it.


    Race: We don¡¯t really know. Skin-tone and ear-form hint at elf but the size and geographic area seems to contradict that.


    Class: started as Sorceress, who knows what it¡¯s now


    Titles: Good question, we have no idea but maybe she will enlighten us. There might be something related to being the disciple of a being called ¡°Grandmother¡±


    Relevant Skills and abilities: We know that Sorcerers seem to start with only a single active ability that allows them to create their own spells. That means we have no real indication what might be a specific ability and what is simply the outgrowth of a skill, thus they are lumped together.


    We do know that she is able to use Ice-Magic in some form, either directly manipulating snow and ice or using runes for larger scale magic. The current theory is that her use of mist or fog comes from a similar vein.


    In addition, she is able to create strange, silver tentacles, looking like ice but supple and obviously controlled. Those can be used to attack and grapple at close range, with deadly effect.


    To complement Ice, she seems to be able to control wind, allowing her to create large-scale storms, making visibility low and difficult. No Traveller has yet been on the receiving end of those but it should be safe to assume that trying to fight within a magical blizzard is going to be difficult. If we combine what we have seen of her wind-magic with the deluge of icicles she has conjured on occasion, I really don¡¯t want to imagine just what that would be like. No, thanks.


    Furthermore, we have heard about a strange spell that lasted through respawn, but it was said to have been an error or bug, hopefully fixed by now. That spell was supposedly based on Blood Magic, which is also something she allegedly used to strike at people over vast distances, something that apparently was also considered bugged or too strong. It seems that Blood Magic has some issues, hopefully they will be fixed before release.


    The Blood Magic seems to be complemented with some sort of Necromancy or Death-Magic, but other than raising zombies, we haven''t seen it in use. Maybe some of the previously seen effects were the same but we just don¡¯t know.


    Other than her magic-abilities, there¡¯s the raven, we don¡¯t really know what¡¯s that about. It seems that the raven is able to speak with her voice and that there is some connection between the two, at least to the point that she can order it to act in a quite un-bird-like manner. Oh, and it seems she can speak through it and even cast spells, to some extent.


    And finally, as if the magic and bird were not enough, she is wearing what looks like light leather armour and a pair of short blades, which we have never seen in combat-use. They look like they are made from Ice, so there might be some significance or they might be used in her magic, we just don¡¯t know.


    All in all, it seems that her build is that of a rather classic spellcaster, focusing heavily on large-scale attacks while being able to inflict some pin-point damage using Icicles. Her raven allows her to stay back, out of danger, while using it to deliver punishment from well out of range.


    What else have you noticed in her videos and the highlight-reels featuring her? Please, share with us, so far this series has focused on martial classes, which I hope will change today.


    <table><tbody><tr><td>Ghostblade, confirmed Beta-Account</td></tr></tbody></table>


    Yeah, there¡¯s something you should add, two things actually.


    Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.


    The first thing is that she can use her Death-Magic to do more, a lot more, than just raise zombies. When we fought in the night, she was able to stun us and kill us off one by one. We never were aware of what was happening, we simply died, in a serious amount of pain. Without being able to fight back. Not fun, not at all. Similarly, when she experimented, as she called it, one of us simply died, without her being anywhere near.


    The other thing is that she is crazy. And I don¡¯t mean the fun, quirky kind of crazy like some chick that ditches her clothes on a hot day to take a bath in the public fountain. No, I mean the certifiable kind of crazy, the kind of crazy that dissects small animales, trying to find out how they work. The kind of crazy that kills people with a wide smile on her face, that wipes out entire tribes, just cause she can. That kind of crazy. The dangerous kind.


    <table><tbody><tr><td>Dargira, confirmed Beta-Account</td></tr></tbody></table>


    Regarding her Bird, there¡¯s more to it. Not sure what more but I know that she is able to turn into that bird, allowing her to fly. I have no idea if it is some sort of special race that can be in two places at once or what is going on there but I¡¯ve seen her turn into the bird and fly off.


    Also, add massive blasts of cold to her abilities, strong enough to instantly freeze wide areas around her. I think what I¡¯ve seen was some fifty meters of freezing and she pulled it off within a second or two.


    <table><tbody><tr><td>Rachant, confirmed Beta-Account</td></tr></tbody></table>


    Dargira, that sounds quite nasty, especially if combined with the previously mentioned abilities. If you come at her with an army, you essentially gift her an army to use against you. Or something like that, who knows about the required resources and whatever else might be involved.


    <table><tbody><tr><td>Morgana, confirmed Beta-Account</td></tr></tbody></table>


    Let¡¯s start at the top, shall we?


    I won¡¯t explain my abilities, where would the fun be in that? No, that¡¯s for me to know and you to find out, if you try to oppose me. And regarding the question of my race, I can tell you that my Avatar is a type of Elf, not all Elves look like supermodels with an eating disorder, a tautology if there ever was one.


    Ghostblade, I know that you dislike me for clashing with you and your friends ingame. I can even understand it, to some extent. What I cannot understand, tolerate or even accept is for you to attack me based on me being differently abled.


    That¡¯s like laughing at someone for needing a wheelchair, despicable and utterly disgusting. I have reported your post to the mod-team and if we ever meet again on Mundus, I will have to be very creative with what I can do to you.


    And just so you know, I¡¯ve never personally harmed any animals in the real world. It is sad that you seem to think behaviour in a virtual space is equivalent to behaviour in the real world. If it were, none of us should be allowed anywhere near other people.


    Dargira, it seems you took my advice on loose lips and are trying to sink a ship. Maybe I should have explained all the reasons why I didn¡¯t accept you into my group but that is a different question. I¡¯m quite disappointed.


    And finally, Rachant, see my statement above, that¡¯s for me to know. If you want to give me an army of undead to play with, I would be game.


    <table><tbody><tr><td>Hammasce, confirmed Beta-Account</td></tr></tbody></table>


    Just out of curiosity, did you happen to find a cursed blade? Maybe stuck in a stone, whispering to you to pull it out? Did things explode and the whispers turned clearer and made you want to kill your father, or maybe mother in your case? Asking for a friend.


    <table><tbody><tr><td>Heracles, Official Pantheon Moderator </td></tr></tbody></table>


    Ghostblade will be taking a leave of absence from the forum.


    That kind of behaviour is against the code of conduct and will result in a temporary ban, or even a permanent one, if the team feels it is necessary.


    Be nice everyone, act like adults or you will be treated like children and sent to the quiet corner.


    <table><tbody><tr><td>Jeanyra, confirmed Beta-Account</td></tr></tbody></table>


    I can confirm that there are different skills for general ¡°magic¡± which is simple manipulation of whatever the magic is related to and there is rune mastery, which allows you to use runes that represent concepts regarding the topic your rune-mastery refers to.


    Sounds confusing, so let¡¯s give an example:


    I have Fire Magic and Fire Rune Mastery.


    Fire Magic allows me to use existing Fire, or even Heat to a lesser degree, and manipulate it, strengthening it or move it, throwing it towards an enemy.


    Fire Rune Mastery gives me, for example, a rune representing a simple concept like Ignition. That, if used correctly, allows me to set something on fire, if I supply enough Astral Power even things that shouldn¡¯t be able to burn. Hell, one of the Mages at the Guild where I learned some of it was able to literally burn water. Don¡¯t ask me how it actually works, he didn¡¯t tell and I¡¯m not yet at that level.


    What does that mean for Morgana? Well, we¡¯ve seen her use different kinds of runes, one is almost certainly Ice, the other, I¡¯m not so sure. Death could be a Rune Mastery but maybe a less defined concept like Necromancy also has a Rune Mastery. We don¡¯t have any high-level player who started as necromancers, at least none that tell us about it, so I just don¡¯t know.


    In addition, she has Ice Magic, obviously and something regarding Blood. I want to say it¡¯s another Rune Mastery but again, there are few people who admit to having blood magic let alone share the specifics.


    About the Bird, no idea, shape shifting sounds incredibly complicated, let alone being able to fly.

 Chapter 338

    There was a stubborn core of anger lingering somewhere in my stomach, gnawing at me with the tenacity of a dog with an old bone. Not driving me to action, simply sitting there, a reminder that I was different and in some people¡¯s opinion lesser. Counting to ten, in a trick I had once read about, I let out a deep, slow breath, trying to expel my frustrations with idiots on the Internet with it, forcibly reminding myself that nothing good ever came from arguing with them. I had alerted the forum-mods and hopefully, they dealt with things, even if I made a mental note to come up with something unusual and seriously cruel, just in case I ever happened to meet the Ghost-nouns again.


    Ideas started to come to my mind, some practical, others not so much, when I was lying down in the capsule, getting ready to enter Mundus. One of my favourites was to combine two failed experiments before running like hell, simply because I wasn¡¯t certain what the result would be but with an inkling that it would be¡­ interesting. The discarded idea to create a slave-collar and the carving of runic formations directly into the skin, combining the two might give me a way to practically feed someone to the Nethersprites, possibly in a permanent way. Carving a runic formation into someones body seemed to tie it directly into someones magic, so what would happen if a Nethersprite latched onto that connection, sucking their essence dry? I wasn¡¯t sure but if I met the Ghost-nouns again, I would find out.


    ¡°Who made you this angry?¡± Lenore asked, instantly feeling my mental state once I was within my Hallow.


    I shared a mental image of her dropping bombs onto the Ghost-nouns bound heads before focusing on the idea I wanted to test on them. The sheer audacity of it struck Lenore speechless before she answered with an amused awe.


    ¡°That might grant us valuable information, especially if those three are willing to share. Or can¡¯t help themselves but share.¡± she mused, the idea obviously intriguing her as much as it did me. Just what would happen to them and their Avatars? I was quite curious. I could feel Lenore¡¯s mind racing, trying to form hypotheses about what might happen, coming up with all kinds of interesting ones, some of them I had considered, others not so much.


    The idea that an essentially undying being might be able to fuel a perpetual link into the realm of the Nethersprites, whatever that might be, was a curious one, turning a cursed, continuously respawning Traveller into a weapon to disrupt the place they were being spawned, whatever that might be. That is, unless the devs had changed something with the way the system worked since I had done my last experiment, which I would only find out by experimenting again.


    Another idea I had considered was that the Traveller in question might either have their Avatar devoured by Nethersprites, permanently destroying it. That would be both awesome and disturbing, perma-death shouldn¡¯t be something a player could wield without serious effort and restrictions put into place to prevent abuse but, on the other hand, if I was the only one who knew how it would put my notoriety over the top. In a similar vein, the idea that the Avatar would be dragged into the Realm of the Nethersprites would put my name out there again, with similar notoriety. Maybe I should go looking for the Ghost-nouns, or maybe the so-called Crusaders of Light or whatever they called themselves.


    ¡°On the bright side, Sigmir got to deck the orc-woman trying to make you help her, before they all left town.¡± Lenore told me after a bit, sending the mental image of said orc-woman standing in front of the others, looking agitated, her face darker than the night before, likely from blood rushing to her head. Words were shouted, accusations made and after a few moments of listening to her, Sigmir simply stepped forward and struck the woman, open-handed but with enough force to knock her to the ground. Sigmir then told the stunned crowd that they would be leaving and simply started walking, the crowd melting away from her glare. The fact that, even through the memory, I was able to feel the oppressive power of her aura made me wonder just how bad it had been for those who had roused her ire.


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    Part of me wanted to have been there, simply to cover her back but another part of me wondered if my presence would have complicated things, namely my Outsider-trait.


    ¡°Did anyone follow them?¡± I asked, hoping that they had taken precautions.


    ¡°If anyone did, I was unable to spot them so I seriously doubt it. I kept overwatch all morning and nothing untowards was visible. But they did look rather cowed, so I doubt they would go look for trouble.¡± Lenore assured me, while I focused on my connection with Sigmir, making sure that she was fine. I could feel the distance between us shrinking, making me realise that Lenore had turned towards them and was quickly flying towards her, probably ever since she had felt my presence within her Hallow. I just hadn¡¯t focused outwards, instead enjoying the atmosphere of my Hallow, the second most comfortable place for me to be in. Only Sigmir¡¯s embrace could make me feel more at home than the enveloping presence of the Astral, a mirror of the Astral Power within me.


    Before long, Lenore strongly flapped her wings to land on Sigmir¡¯s shoulder but even before she was able to touch down, I had started to push myself out of her Hallow, not even trying to land on the ground but instead letting gravity carry me into Sigmir¡¯s arms. I had been able to feel her, especially when focusing, so I hoped she would be feeling me as well and catch me. Which she did, either thanks to superior speed or by anticipating my actions. Not that it mattered, once I was wrapped around her, arms around her neck, legs around her waist, I could bury my face and take in her scent, gently nibbling at the nape of her neck, just because it was there.


    In turn, one of her arms went around my back, the other supporting me from below, lightly groping my behind, even as she held me. I loved being held by her, no questions asked, and her scent instantly brightened my day.


    ¡°Ah, you are back.¡± Adra said, her voice amused. I clung to Sigmir for a moment longer, before pulling back and giving her a longing kiss, right on the lips.


    ¡°Yes, I am.¡± I answered, once Sigmir and I had finished greeting each other, maybe a little too enthusiastically for the short separation but I had needed a little pick-me-up after the day I had on Earth. The new topics Mrs. Wu wanted to teach me were still hanging in the back of my mind, like a nagging worry I couldn¡¯t shake. Being on Mundus helped and being in Sigmir¡¯s arms helped more.


    I had to twist a little, to actually see Adra, which was only possible thanks to Sigmir¡¯s physical strength, allowing me to mostly sit on her arm, while she simply held me up.


    ¡°Did anything happen while I was gone?¡± I asked, curious if they had run into anything after leaving the village.


    ¡°Well, we had some excitement when leaving the village, that Monta-woman accused us of having harmed her daughter and wanting to cover it up, trying to make it out as if that was our reason for declining the quest and leaving right away. But other than that, it was a boring morning.¡± Adra told me, before shaking her head a little, dismissing the problem.


    ¡°But you promised to tell us why you actually wanted to decline, it might have given us some insights or even led to something interesting.¡± Adra asked, remembering my promise from the evening before.


    Hearing the question, I instantly felt Lenore¡¯s amusement as she burst into her cackling laughter, surprising Sigmir.


    ¡°Well, I guess I should.¡± I admitted, chuckling to myself.


    ¡°You know that I wanted to test my latest weapon? The runed Ice-Blade I had made?¡± I asked, and they all nodded in response, even if Adra frowned a little, not seeing the context.


    ¡°Lenore and I were looking for some beasty to test the weapon on when we saw what looked to us like a male orc forcing himself onto a female. To us, it was as good a volunteer as some beast, just as driven by their instincts and most likely as dumb.¡± I explained and noticed Sigmir mirroring Lenore¡¯s amusement, most likely guessing where I was going.


    ¡°The weapon worked, maybe a little too well and not quite as planned, the effect killing both of them. If I had to make a guess, I accidentally killed both their children, misinterpreting what I had seen.¡± I finished, shrugging while Adra covered her face with her hands, shaking her head.


    Luckily, nothing bad had happened to my group, due to my mistake. Now we just needed to get out of the area to make sure it stayed that way.

 Chapter 339

    We continued on our journey, moving ever further south-west, with me especially enjoying the weather, either blistering heat that made me incredibly glad for my dwarven-made clothes and their climate-control which I enhanced using Ice-Magic, even if it was a bit of a strain or short thunderstorms, doing little to the overall temperature but increasing the humidity in the air to the point that I wondered if swimming in it would work. In short, it was miserable, no matter how you wanted to call it.


    On the bright side, Lenore and I could cheat, using our Hallows to allow one of us to rest in their preferred climate. Switching off with her gave me quite a bit of time I could use to theorize and ponder my magical abilities, even venturing into meditating on the network of Astral Paths within myself, while within my Hallow.


    The overall effect of that was that I thought to understand a little more about the runes I had been using and what they might actually mean. That activity, combined with the studying and crafting-experimentation I had been doing managed to raise my Rune-Masteries by a few points each, bringing Ice-Rune Mastery to 75, Darkness-Rune Mastery to 71 and Blood-Rune Mastery to 60. The growth of those skills had slowed to a crawl in the recent months, as if I had to make a fundamental breakthrough to actually master them, something that had to occur before they could ever be brought to level 100.


    I had meditated on a new rune for my Blood Magic, delving the Astral River one evening to gain it. I hadn¡¯t been certain what sort of direction my magic would move in or rather, I hadn¡¯t been sure what Blood Magic could develop into but I wasn¡¯t sad about the results. The idea I kept within my mind while delving the Astral River had been the use of Blood Magic to carve magic directly into someone''s body, either to help or to hinder them, binding magic directly into their blood and being. Part of it was similar to the concept of a Curse, which I was using in my Darkness-magic and, in a more direct way, I had seen something similar when helping Sigmir to rid herself of the magic her tribe¡¯s Shaman had used against her, using parts of her Father to bind the curse into her being. I wanted to be able to do similar things.


    The rune I was able to comprehend was quite interesting, doing pretty much what I had in mind. The meaning I understood it to have was to infuse and I thought I would be able to use it to create a link between a magical formation and the blood of someone, similar to what I had been trying to accomplish with the runic formations I had been studying, using the dwarven teachings.


    The difference was that the rune I had gleaned in the Astral seemed to have a large, empty area within it, similar to the hole in a capital A and I wondered if there would be a way to design a spell-formation that slotted into that hole, linking with the rune around it to strengthen the effect.


    Sadly, the various ideas I had, spell-formations to harm or help, some designed to slot into the empty spot, some that incorporated the rune as I would have with any other, without the peculiar shape, remained untested, simply due to the lack of expendable test-subjects. Two of the spells I had designed were supposed the be used on Sigmir and Rai, one for each of them, but I wouldn¡¯t voluntarily put it on them, not without carefully testing that the spells worked as I thought they would. The image of exploding centaurs was too fresh in my memory to risk that.


    However, the new rune was the last thing on my mind, as I looked upwards in the mostly clear sky, happy that it wasn¡¯t raining or burning hot. Up, into the sky, feeling the draw of my connection to the moon, despite it being not visible. Tonight was finally the night of the new moon, the night I had been waiting for since my less than pleasant experience when trying to travel to the full-moon within the Astral.


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    I still wasn¡¯t certain if what I was planning would even work but I wanted to try. We had camped near a small river, using it to clean ourselves from the rivulets of sweat, running down all our bodies due to the summer-heat and I, together with Sigmir, had retreated there after dinner. Not for the naughty fun we would normally have in such a situation, I just wasn¡¯t in the mood, but because I felt cleaning, or maybe cleansing, myself was the thing to do before my ritual. I was making things up as I went but it felt right.


    Sigmir must have felt that I was excited and nervous in equal parts, unsure and worrying whether I would succeed or not. Remembering the last time I had bottled up my worries, I told her in detail what I was planning or thinking of doing. She knew in general terms what I was planning and let me ramble about my plans, listening without comment, simply being there for me and comforting me with the quiet confidence she had in me. Rambling allowed me to get rid of some of the nervousness, letting me get in the mindset needed for my ritual.


    Finally, after thoroughly washing myself, I stepped out of the water, drawing upon my Ice-Magic to instantly freeze and disperse the moisture clinging to my skin, creating a light dusting of snow around me, before it quickly melted away.


    ¡°This spot is as good as any, I think.¡± I muttered, looking around the riverside-clearing we had used to wash up.


    ¡°Lenore, would you mind keeping Sigmir company?¡± I asked my partner, still not sure what would happen if I tried to travel the Astral with her in my Hallow. Or, for that matter, what would happen if I made a mistake while doing so, the chance that she would be dragged into it was certainly there.


    ¡°No, I will stay here.¡± she told me, leaving her Hallow, hopping onto my naked shoulder. I was planning to do the ritual sky-clad, not sure if it had any real effect but I had noticed that it seemed to be a little easier to interact with the Astral when unclothed.


    ¡°Be confident in your abilities, I believe you will achieve your goals. Either tonight, or during some other night. I believe in you.¡± Lenore gave me her own motivating words before hopping off, flying over to Sigmir and landing on her shoulder.


    Letting out the deep breath I hadn¡¯t noticed I was holding, I drew upon my magic again, slowly and carefully conjuring up Ice, to make my throne. Once it was done, for tonight I had added a pair of humanoid skulls to cap the armrests, to honour Lenore and her affinity for Death, I sat down and closed my eyes.


    My first action was to make sure that the rune on the backrest of my Throne, right above my head, was as good as I could make it, my Blood and Magic bound into it. I had slightly altered the way I had bound the power into the rune, using my new Blood-rune, and I wanted to make sure nothing had gone wrong. But I was unable to perceive any mistakes, even as I looked closely.


    Finally, no longer dallying, I let my mind dive into the Astral River, letting it flow around me, mighty but playful. I noticed that the amount of Fire-Astral-Power in the River was even bigger than it had been during my latest visit, making me yearn for winter, the season I felt most at home, especially on Mundus. Ice, Snow, long and dark nights, those were the things I was made to enjoy. But I wasn¡¯t waiting until winter, not for this.


    And I wasn¡¯t planning to stay near the planet¡¯s surface anyway, instead I focused on my connection to the moon, to the connection that had been forged when I crossed the first Divide and would now be expanded upon. It was faint, in some ways similar to the connection I shared with Sigmir, only that the connection with Sigmir was in many ways more intimate but also less pure, for lack of a better word.


    Using that connection as a guide-post, I felt myself moving upward, towards the dark moon, staying in its shadow to avoid the deadly radiance of the sun.

 Chapter 340

    As I rose within the Astral, I noticed a slow change around me, a dimming of the surroundings, for lack of a better word. It wasn¡¯t that the amount of power around me was declining but it felt like the power faded into the background tapestry of reality, making it harder to perceive it, at least with my senses.


    I was moving carefully, remembering the painful experience I had last time when stumbling into the radiance of the sun, feeling out my surroundings as I went further, guided by the pull of the dark moon, somewhere above me. In the Astral, I was able to perceive the moon, its radiance similar but different than the light I was used to. I had a feeling it was due to the side of the moon I was moving towards not being illuminated that I could perceive its glow at all, a freezingly cold, dark radiance flowing towards me and the planet below.


    At one point during my journey, when distance in the real world had lost all meaning due to the strange properties of my mode of travel, or maybe the realm I was travelling in, I stopped moving, letting the Astral flow around me. Up here, it had faded far enough into the background of reality that it wasn¡¯t moving me, not unless I wanted to move, allowing me to come to rest. There was nothing around me, an emptiness devoid of everything, unless I focused on my connection to the moon pulling me in one direction and a pair of links, connecting me back to Mundus, to Sigmir and Lenore.


    But I was quite certain that there had to be Astral around me, just that it might be beyond my ability to detect it. Crossing my legs, as I floated in the void, I tried to widen my focus, curious if that might allow me to glimpse a little more of the world. It was pure curiosity, the drive to learn more than I had known before.


    As I sat there, I began to notice something, a faint glimmer that faded from existence as fast as it appeared. A twinkle in the fabric of reality, short sparks of power, existing for the briefest of moments. Not trying to focus, I let my senses roam, trying to catch a better impression of them, their brief existence making observation difficult.


    Suddenly, one of them sparked into existence right in front of me, making me flinch back but it wasn¡¯t dangerous, as fast as it had come, it was gone again, leaving behind a faint taste in the air around me, barely there but a change nonetheless. Now, that was something I could try to focus on, drawing in the non-existing air around me, trying to taste what was there now and hadn¡¯t been a moment before. My mind was making analogies up as I went, neither my mind nor my language suitable to describe the experience but it was either that or go crazy. Maybe more crazy than I already was.


    The void I had breathed in had a faint taste of purple, faint in power but intense in its fabric, pure in power but it was a small remnant. I associated the taste of purple with Darkness-Magic, but such an intense purple I had never tasted before. It was fascinating, to watch the sparkles spring into existence before fading and for a while, maybe seconds, maybe minutes or hours, I was just sitting there, watching the void and thinking, trying to get a better glimpse, maybe even use Identify or Observe to get more information.


    Finally, I decided that it was time to move on, I had an idea what I had observed but I had places to be. I wanted to reach the moon and while watching the sparkling void was interesting, I doubted I would be able to learn more.


    For now, I thought that I had watched the equivalent of Eternal Ice, only for Darkness Astral Power spring into existence briefly, before fading again. It fit with what I had heard about Darkness-Magic, that it was of change and concealment, making me wonder if there was a vast amount of Darkness-Astral-Power around me and I was merely unable to perceive it. I had a feeling the question would keep me awake for some time, trying to figure out what I was seeing but it would have to wait for later.


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    Distance was a funny thing within the Astral, within what felt like a short time, especially compared to the vast distance I would have had to cross if distances were equivalent to their real-world counterparts, I felt close to the Moon. I was hovering above what appeared to be an endless expanse, a desert of silvery-grey emptiness, dull with age and despair. A dim glow of Astral Power turned the darkness into a strange twilight, distances and the terrain seemingly shifting around me. There was an innate sadness, a coldness to the place that made me hesitate.


    I stopped myself, wondering if trying to touch down on the moon was a smart idea or if I would freeze myself making the attempt. The amount of power I could perceive was vast, my mind straining with the attempt to make sense of it. Looking down, I concentrated on a small part in front of me, the narrow focus working like a set of blinders, allowing my mind to process what I perceived.


    As I focused, all of a sudden, I felt a powerful surge of emotions battering against me. At first, I felt lost, my mind swept away by the force of alien power, a leaf in a storm of emotions. My first instinct was to shield myself, to try avoiding the onslaught of emotions.


    Curling into a tight ball, I embraced the darkness around me, hoping to hide in an attempt to keep my mind from shattering. I started to feel loopy and a little out of touch with the world around me, my mind straining but as the darkness around me returned my embrace, I felt the pressure on my mind lessen, allowing me to do more than cling onto the rests of my sanity. It allowed me to actually process the pressure around me, to experience it as something but pain.


    My cheeks were stained with tears as my mind was reeling with what I had just felt. I had been lonely in my life but the brief glimpse into a solitude that had lasted eons and would last eons more had my mind on the ropes. I wasn¡¯t sure what, or who, was radiating those emotions, if they were real or a figment of my imagination, my mind trying to process something I didn¡¯t understand.


    After a long moment of hesitation, I decided to try again, carefully allowing my senses to explore my surroundings again, glimpsing out of the cloak of darkness I had spun around me, like a safety blanket. I was a lot more careful than I had been with my first exploration but I was here to learn, to gain power and to understand.


    Again, my senses were overwhelmed, the sheer amount of lingering power in my surroundings enough to make me shiver and curl up again, as I narrowed my focus even more, unable to hold it together otherwise. But I wasn¡¯t blasted to the point of incomprehension, I was able to function, mostly.


    Strange sensations welled up within my mind, images, tastes and smells, sounds and noises, nothing I could easily understand but somehow, parts of my mind did understand. There seemed to be a pattern to the sensations, a strange ethereal melody, a progression of rhymes creating reason. In a way, the Astral Power I was feeling bound in the moon was a tale, a tale of solitude and longing, of sadness and wandering, of eternal stillness and constant change.


    I simply drifted there, trying to understand, clinging to the darkness around me and my connection to Sigmir and Lenore to keep my mind from crumbling under the stress. I had the impression that I was trying to shift a mountain, one grain of sand at the time, but at the same time, I was able to feel a change within me, a resonance between the core within my chest and my surroundings. I wasn¡¯t sure what was changing but change was happening.


    Finally, the change I had been feeling manifested in a physical sensation, pain radiating from my face, near my right cheek, as if I was being stabbed with an icicle. Sharp, penetrating but at the same time, it allowed me to focus on something but the feeling of eternal solitude I had been subjected to. As such, I embraced the pain, letting it drill into me but also anchor me in reality. It was a strangely welcome distraction, allowing me to endure for a little longer.


    But then, even that wasn¡¯t enough any longer and I escaped, focusing on my connections to Sigmir and Lenore, to the rune I had created on my throne and to my own body. Unsure just what I had experienced but changed by it.

 Chapter 341

    Upon returning to my body, my breath caught for a moment. The feeling of solitude I had been subjected to, just the memory of the experience, sat on my chest, making it difficult to draw breath. I wasn¡¯t sure what had caused the emotional radiation I had encountered, if there was some extremely powerful entity that put it out or if it had some other cause but the effect had been profoundly disturbing.


    Finally, I managed to get in a breath and scrambled out of my seat, my mind continuing to follow my connection to Sigmir, simply moving without thought. Safety, companionship, a refuge from the cold, lonely existence I had encountered, I was drawn to it, seeking out her embrace. She had been nearby, waiting for me, and quickly enfolded me in her arms, making noises my mind didn¡¯t comprehend. A part of me remembered that I was in a game, that I could simply log out, but another part reminded me that I had promised Sigmir not to simply vanish. And what if the feelings remained, the mind that had been affected was the same, wasn¡¯t it? I just didn¡¯t know and to return to my empty, quiet appartement, lying down in my empty bed, which had never known another occupant, with the emotions running through me? I didn¡¯t even want to consider it.


    Breathing in Sigmir¡¯s scent, primal, slightly musky, but purely her helped calm my racing mind allowing me to think a little more clearly, even as tears came pouring from my eyes, feeling strangely cold on my cheeks.


    ¡°I¡¯m fine but just hold me.¡± I asked Sigmir, speaking softly, my voice a choked whisper.


    ¡°Liar.¡± I heard Lenore¡¯s mental voice, laced with concern, while I felt her land on one of Sigmir¡¯s arms that were wrapped around me. I could feel that she wanted me to know that she was near, that I wasn¡¯t alone. I was grateful for the sentiment, per presence almost helping as much as Sigmir¡¯s did.


    Sigmri didn¡¯t try to coax me into speaking more, simply holding me, letting my emotions pour out. The safety of her arms allowed me to think a little more and finally, my curiosity asserted itself. I wanted to know what had changed with me if I had encountered the second Divide and if so, if I had been strong enough.


    Mentally calling up the log, my lips curled into a smile, happy that something good had come from the harrowing experience. I had managed to cross the divide and was profiting from it.


    <table><tbody><tr><td>You have crossed the second Divide.</td></tr><tr><td>After crossing the second Divide, your body was strengthened by the Astral River. You gain +10 to all Attributes. </td></tr></tbody></table>


    <table><tbody><tr><td>Class change!</td></tr><tr><td>After crossing the second Divide, your class has changed. You are now a Sorceress.of the Dark Moon. </td></tr><tr><td>You gazed at the dark Moon and have endured. The experience has changed you in ways you may not yet understand, a change few can comprehend. You may be one of them. </td></tr><tr><td>Your new class grants you an Attribute-Bonus of three Intelligence every five levels and two Inspiration every ten levels.


    Your new class grants you the trait: Dark Mirror.


    Your old Trait, Lunar Cycle, has changed. </td></tr></tbody></table>


    <table><tbody><tr><td>Trait changed</td></tr><tr><td>Your ¡®Lunar Cycle¡¯-Trait has changed.</td></tr><tr><td> You have learned that, just because the Darkness hides something from you it is no less powerful. While under the open sky, your connection to the Moon remains strong, granting you a bonus to Ice- and Darkness-Magic.</td></tr></tbody></table>


    <table><tbody><tr><td>Trait gained </td></tr><tr><td>You gained the trait: Dark Mirror</td></tr><tr><td>You gazed at the Moon and the Moon gazed into you. When using Mind Magic you channel the power of the Moon to strengthen your abilities but beware, not all minds can endure without breaking..</td></tr></tbody></table>


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    <table><tbody><tr><td>Companion Ability gained </td></tr><tr><td> You gained the Companion Ability: Harvester of Souls</td></tr><tr><td> Thanks to the long and intimate connection with your Spirit-Companion, some of their skills have imprinted upon you, allowing you to learn them. You gained the Death-Magic Skill. </td></tr></tbody></table>


    <table><tbody><tr><td>Skill gained </td></tr><tr><td>You gained the Skill: Death Magic</td></tr><tr><td>Life and Death are two faces of the same coin. You understand that simple truth, measuring and cutting the threads short when necessary. But you can also spin a thread a little longer, if you so chose.</td></tr></tbody></table>


    For a moment, I felt stunned. The sheer bonuses I had gained were incredible, even if part of the change had me a little worried, especially the ¡®Dark Mirror¡¯-Trait. It looked like my magic was slowly gaining a distinct pattern to it, losing some versatility in the process. But I had a new magic to work with, so losing some versatility with the other magic, in exchange for greater potential was fine with me.


    It had started quite some time ago, back in the dungeon beneath that glacier, when my reckless use of powerful magic had permanently infused my body with Ice Astral Power, forcing me to actively filter my magic for some applications. When Lenore crossed the first Divide and our combined spells had become infused with Death-Magic, the change went into the same direction and now, my Mind Magic seemed to be influenced as well, the change making beneficial applications of it a little questionable.


    On the other hand, the ¡®Death Magic¡¯-description was interesting, hinting at ways to heal or prolong life with Death-Magic, something I definitely would want to look into.


    I felt Sigmir shift against me, her hand gently cupping my chin, lifting it so she could look at my face, while her thumb brushed my cheek, wiping away my tears.


    ¡°Everything will be alright, love.¡± she assured me, her voice gentle.


    ¡°If crossing the divides would be easy, everyone would do it. Just know that I¡¯m here for you.¡± she added, before her soft smile got a little wider, turning into a grin.


    ¡°And the change looks good on you, you know?¡± she asked, her thumb brushing my cheek again, this time a little further back and I felt something on my face that I hadn¡¯t felt before, my skin shifting strangely.


    My confused thoughts must have reached Lenore, as she was sending me an image of myself, seen through her eyes. If it had been my eyes, I would have blinked in surprise, but as it was merely a memory, I couldn¡¯t do so.


    The face was obviously mine but changed, my features a little sharper, even if the tear-stained cheeks and bloodshot eyes took away some of the severity granted to it by the feathery eyebrows. But there was a new addition, a line of glimmering shards running down my right cheek, opposite Lenore¡¯s Hallow, almost like a line of tears. But the shards looked solid and when I reached up with my hand, I could feel them, sticking out of my skin. Not sharp or jagged up solid and cold, like small icicles.


    ¡°I¡¯m glad I don¡¯t need to shave.¡± a stray thought of me reached Lenore, causing her to caw in amusement.


    ¡°It¡¯s good to see that you didn¡¯t suffer permanent damage.¡± she told me, before hopping closer, onto my shoulder, finally shifting into her Hallow.


    ¡°Comfy, I like it. Before you crossed the Divide, the Hallow was a little cramped.¡± she told me, from inside her Hallow, her amusement was even stronger than earlier. I decided that Lenore could wait and I should focus on Sigmir, I was sitting on her lap after all.


    ¡°As long as you like it, I¡¯ll be fine with it.¡± I told her, pushing any concern regarding my new facial feature away.


    ¡°And yes, crossing the divide was¡­¡± I stopped, trying to find the right words.


    ¡°Difficult?¡± she asked, her smile now wry, causing me to nod.


    ¡°Before we go back, you might want to reign in your aura. I can take it but I¡¯m not sure Adra and Rai would fare as well. Ylva retreated into her Hallow when you approached, unwilling to take it.¡± she explained. I reached out mentally, trying to see what she meant and quickly noticed that I was radiating out Astral Power, roughly what I was regenerating naturally, pushing it out in an unspecified way resulting in a pressure aligned to my primary elements, Darkness and Ice. It wasn¡¯t powerful enough to harm someone with similar strength to my own but for weaker people it would certainly be unpleasant. It took me a moment to redirect the power, channelling it towards my core which was a stop-gap solution for now, until I could fully find my center and cut off the excess regeneration but I was simply too tired to tackle that.


    ¡°Better.¡± Sigmir told me, gently brushing her hand over my cheek again. I relaxed into her and simply let sleep take me, trusting her to take care of things. Thankfully, I wasn¡¯t alone, she was with me.

 Interlude: Profiles of Power V

    Official Road to Purgatory-Beta Forum


    <table><tbody><tr><td>-Kelgarn, confirmed Beta-Account</td></tr></tbody></table>


    Hey Guys and welcome back to the Profiles of Power


    Today, I am forced to present a profile to you, one that I don¡¯t want to feature. But, alas, needs must, despite my personal dislike for the subject, they have managed to cement themselves as a premier player of the game, turning himself into what appears to be the most influential supporter we currently know about. But maybe calling them the most influential would be wrong, their influence direct and centered around them, other people are reputed to have a less direct influence, covertly moving pieces around, whispering in the right ears. Pun fully intended.


    Back to the Traveller I have to talk about today, William the Bard, or as some call him William of the Shaking Spear. God, I hate this already.


    Anyway, here¡¯s what we know about William.


    Race: most likely Human


    Class: rumor has it that he started out as a Bard, getting an advanced class called Battlesinger later


    Titles: unknown, rumored to have one called ¡°Voice of Battle¡±


    Relevant Skills:


    Again, what is skill and what is ability is hard to differentiate.


    His signature skill seems to be one called ¡°Havoc¡±, a wide-area buff, boosting allied troops attack, defense and even movement-speed by a relatively minor amount. But a minor buff, applied to a few hundred people has major impact, especially as he has an apparently unique skill that allows him to layer buffs. Quite a bit on that was given to me by Tobiuno, who has some similar skills, and promised to explain in detail so I¡¯ll leave that to him.


    In addition to those support-skills that Tobiuno will explain, William has some skills suited for personal defense and mounted combat, let¡¯s get to them.


    When fighting, he is clad in light chain-armour, most likely classified as medium but it might be light, with padded clothing beneath, giving him some defense without compromising mobility. I assume that will become a stable for many Travellers, especially those who don¡¯t mind the reduced Astral Power regeneration. But who knows, it¡¯s far too early in a far, far too diverse game to talk about a meta.


    In addition to his armour he has two distinct sets of weapons. When mounted, he is armed with a relatively short, thrusting spear, easily usable in one hand, certainly no lance. It might even be a prop for his other skills or merely an affectation by the Traveller in question. He has yet to be seen fighting on horseback but I¡¯d think that he has some skills related to that, given that he rode into battle with a small army.


    On foot, he has been seen with a thin, thrusting blade in one hand and a short, heavy dagger in the other, using the dagger to parry while poking people with his foil.


    Other than those, there might be some skills related to acting, public speaking, singing and, most likely, the usual suspects that most martial characters seem to have, athletics and the like.


    But that¡¯s enough from me, what have y¡¯all seen when looking at his videos? Maybe some of you even met the avatar in question and experienced some of their skills first hand? Please, share what you know so we can further our understanding of ¡®Road to Purgatory¡¯ and the world we all have been travelling in.


    <table><tbody><tr><td>Tobiuno, confirmed Beta-Account</td></tr></tbody></table>


    And I think this is my cue to cut in, explaining a little more about support-abilities in general and what makes William such a special supporter. His abilities are similar to my own leadership-abilities, only difference that his are based on influencing and motivating people, while mine are based on a military structure and leadership. That allows me to achieve similar results but with some constraints, namely I can only command subordinates.


    Now, as explained when I was profiled, the various leadership-skills provide boosts to different aspects of combat, attacking, defending or maneuvering, some of them combining two aspects into one, others not. The important part is, you are limited to one order at a time, with one triggering a cooldown for all of them. Interestingly the cooldown isn¡¯t the same between orders, for example the cooldown between giving an offensive charge-order and a similarly offensive mobility-order is a lot shorter than between charging and holding the line. Makes for interesting tactics but that¡¯s a different topic.


    Back to William and his Shaking Spear. What makes him stand out is that he can seamlessly chain his buffs, some of them overlapping, all into one larger buff, affecting the whole battlefield. Not just allies, his motivating chants, for lack of better word, even affect the enemy, making him into a strange, spear-shaking cheerleader.


    Stolen novel; please report.


    Let¡¯s look at it in practise:


    charge.avi


    A large group of riders, all clad in chain-armour, mounted on barded horses, riding in a double-line. At the front of the group is a small contingent in different armour, one of them wearing a fancy helmet, with decorations and tassels. Another, the one the camera is focusing on, is wearing simpler armour, similar to the one worn by the rest of the riders but is carrying a banner in his stirrups, instead of a lance. The last of that group is dressed differently again, the armour seems to be lighter, the helmet is a simple metal cap with some leather and there is no lance, only a short spear, good to stab down from horseback but not much use in a charge, a fact driven home by the decorations affixed to it, tassels and ribbons.


    ¡°Form a line!¡± the one with the decorated helmet shouts, using his sabre to guide the riders from the path they are on, onto the meadows and fields around them. The camera shifts a little focusing into the distance, showing a ragtag group of people, on foot and in disarray. From the distance, it is impossible to tell who or what they are but they have noticed the riders and a commotion has broken out.


    ¡°Bard, now it is time to earn your keep.¡± the commander orders gesturing for the one with the decorated spear to take a position, behind the middle of the line.


    ¡°And you, you are supposed to learn from this, so watch closely. The battle will most likely be decided in the first few moments, whether our charge can break their ranks. Or if they can even form ranks.¡± the commander addresses the one the camera focused on.


    A short salute and both go into position, while the commander takes up a position near the bard.


    ¡°CHARGE!¡± The commander orders and the line of riders begins to gather speed while the one with the decorated spear raises his spear above his head, shouting a single word, ¡°Havoc¡±, before beginning to chant in a strange cadence. The chant had no words, only sounds. At the same time, he waves the spear in a circular manner, letting the tassels fly and flutter. The effect of his chant is quickly noticeable, the riders seem to grip their weapons tighter while they echo the noise deep from their throats, creating a massive wave of sound, beating in turn with the thundering hooves of their mounts.


    After a few moments, the riders are at full speed, ready to break into the enemy line and there, too, the effect of the chant becomes obvious, even as the cadence changes a little, some people dropping their weapons, others simply turning to flee, throwing their lines into disarray and chaos.


    As the cadence of the chant changes again, the riders crash into the enemy lines, breaking them apart, running the fleeing peasants down with ease. Before the full extent of the slaughter becomes clear, the video cuts out and ends.


    I cut the footage before the full extent of the slaughter is shown, simply because it is too gruesome and brutal. The rebels, uprising peasants, bandits, whatever you want to call them, were cut down to the last, the soldiers showing no mercy, no hesitation.


    It is difficult to really appreciate the effects on video but from reports I¡¯ve heard, William has amplified some of the emotions felt by the soldiers and peasants, lust for battle and blood for the soldiers, fear for the peasants, while suppressing others, mercy for the soldiers and bravery for the peasants. The ability to affect battle on such a scale is what makes William the most dangerous supporter we currently know off.


    <table><tbody><tr><td>-Hammasce, confirmed Beta-Account</td></tr></tbody></table>


    That sounds insane, a supporter able to scale up an army, even if it¡¯s only a small one? What happens once he reaches a higher level?


    On the other hand, I totally dig the name. Will someone rid me of this meddlesome bard?


    <table><tbody><tr><td>Rachant, confirmed Beta-Account</td></tr></tbody></table>


    I like the name, but I¡¯d love it even more if it was a female character. Just because the joke of Willhemina with the Shaking (or maybe vibrating) Spear appeals to the snickering teenage boy within me. No, I¡¯ve no idea how he got inside me, maybe it was something I ate. Or someone, who knows.


    <table><tbody><tr><td>Grace, confirmed Beta-Account</td></tr></tbody></table>


    I¡¯ve met him, worked with him. And y¡¯all seriously underestimate him, if you think he is only good on a large-scale battlefield.


    When he focuses his magic, cause that¡¯s what it¡¯s got to be, on a single person, he can make them do anything, regardless of their will. And that¡¯s all I¡¯ll say on this topic.


    <table><tbody><tr><td>Yuthos, confirmed Beta-Account</td></tr></tbody></table>


    Well, f*ck. Grace, if something happened to you that you don¡¯t want to explain or can¡¯t explain, be sure to find someone to talk to. I don¡¯t know what happened, and, to be honest, I don¡¯t want to know but that is the kind of thing that can cause real harm, in the real world.


    Please, make sure you are okay and maybe write a ticket to Pantheon if what happened had real world consequences. Remember that the technology we are playing with is new and, while I¡¯m sure that Pantheon had extensive tests, we all know that new games and new technology almost always has bugs in some form. Please, make sure you are alright.


    <table><tbody><tr><td>Tobiuno, confirmed Beta-Account</td></tr></tbody></table>


    I very much agree with Yuthos, please make sure you are alright. I¡¯ll also send you a direct message with a contact at Pantheon, you can go to them directly without jumping through hoops.


    <table><tbody><tr><td>Grace, confirmed Beta-Account</td></tr></tbody></table>


    Thanks for the support guys, but nothing happened. I feel like I should explain, even if I don¡¯t really want to.


    What happened was that we were in a play, or rather Opera, together and I had a bit of a temper-tantrum. In hindsight, I¡¯m embarrassed by it which is why I didn¡¯t want to elaborate.


    Anyway, I was screaming at him, at the top of my lungs, calling him all kinds of incompetent, which, to be fair, he is, when suddenly, my avatar just stopped. I couldn¡¯t speak, couldn¡¯t move, nothing but stare at him and breathe.


    At that point, he told me to get over it, to go away and not bother him any longer. And my avatar did, even as I was trying to continue, to tell him where to stick his attitude. It took ten minutes of walking until I was able to shake whatever he did to me which is scary enough.


    So no lasting damage, at least not to me.

 Chapter 342

    Waking up was a slow, gradual process. While my body felt fine, my mind felt like it was a little slow, not up to the task of fully operating. Half-remembered dreams, of the lonely journey the moon made through the darkness, of a slowly changing world, changed by the eternal observation of an eternally frozen observer. The experience brought back the question, just what had I made contact with?


    There were various myths about creatures living on the moon, or stories about them being sealed within the moon. The Jade Hare was, for obvious reasons, one of my favourites, the loyal companion and diligent worker, toiling away for the immortals who went to have their various shenanigans.


    On the other hand, Pantheon seemed to have taken a lot of Norse and Greek myths into their work, even the name of the company implied a Greek connection, so some deity might call the moon their home. Or I might be completely off-base, creating conjecture from missing information, filling in what I didn¡¯t know, which was a lot, with speculation, building on that speculation and coming up with a solution of two plus two equalling twenty-two.


    Another possibility I had to keep in mind, maybe a cautious mind, was that the Moon orbiting Mundus was similar to the Soul-Prison I was carrying around. Some ancient entity imprisoned within, something I might have woken up with my probing, contained but not diminished like the one within my Soul-Prison. There was a certain story-book feel to it, giving Pantheon a powerful entity that they could use in some future content, opening up new frontiers and all that, but what if they had essentially placed it there, ready to be used, and I had accidentally kicked off the festivities early? Again, lacking information prevented me from doing more than widely speculating, even as I was considering whether a bond to such an entity would be entirely bad.


    Similarly to my situation with the Soul-Prison in my pack, it would be something making me a stand-out character, not merely one of dozens, maybe hundreds or thousands of content creators covering high-end Road to Purgatory-Content using a character with a magical bend. Did I want to be one of those masses, struggling tooth and nail to get myself truly established, something inherently difficult, even with the modest fame I had from my identity as Titania and the things I had done on Mundus until now? Or did I want to be that one unique perspective, even if it might mean serious trouble down the road, in addition to being relatively limited when it came to faction-interaction?


    For now, my answer was that standing out as unique was to be desired, at least on Mundus. In addition, if I managed to time the big event I anticipated if, or rather when, I managed to crack open the Soul-Prison to be close to the end of the Beta, showing off everything I was able to do right before knowledge on my capabilities would become worthless, I would be well set-up with followers. I might even be able to secure some monetary deals from that, something I had to consider for after the beta, once my year-long vacation was over.


    But for the time being, I snuggled a little closer, if such was even possible, into Sigmir, enjoying her presence. I felt her arms wrapped around me, keeping me in a protective embrace. She must have noticed me waking, as she shifted against me, so she could look at my face.


    ¡°Did you sleep well?¡± she asked, concern visible on her face.


    ¡°Some strange dreams but that was to be expected after my experience last night. It was¡­¡± my voice trailed off, not sure what word to use. It had been confusing, intriguing and thoroughly weird but there was simply no word to briefly describe it.


    ¡°That might have been it. You¡¯ve been clinging to me all night.¡± she explained, causing me to blush a little. Briefly, I was reminded that I would have to come up with something to prepare myself for the end of the Beta and my separation from Sigmir, unless I found a way around it, but I pushed the thought away as quickly as it appeared, there would be more than enough time to deal with it later, for now it would only cause me grief. For once, I was thoroughly enjoying an interpersonal relationship, even if it might be with the result of a complex algorithm, it felt right and feeling right and comfortable was not something that I was used to feeling.


    Stolen novel; please report.


    To hide my moment of discomfort, I gave Sigmir a quick kiss before pushing myself up, using a brief spell to make sure my body and clothes were pristine. The spell had been in the Grimoire the Grandmother had given me, the first I had ever learned from it, and but crafted in a way that I was unable to understand it, the underlying principles a mystery to me. It worked but I couldn¡¯t even begin to describe why, even now. It  made me a little uneasy but the sheer usefulness of the spell outweighed my caution. It helped that Lenore and I had carefully checked to see if there was an outgoing connection or something like that, finding one.


    ¡°Where are the others?¡± I asked when I noticed that the camp around us was empty and the sun higher in the sky than anticipated, demonstrating that my sleep had indeed been deep, to make me lose track of the world to such an extent.


    ¡°They are scouting and hunting, I thought you might want to take a day off from travelling. In addition, we could use some fresh meat, our stocks are slowly running low.¡± Sigmir explained, causing me to nod, again.


    ¡°That doesn¡¯t sound too bad. It¡¯ll allow me to familiarise myself with the changes to my body and magic.¡± I admitted, prodding Lenore awake, planning to start with the biggest change, my new type of magic.


    ¡°I¡¯ll take some distance, I¡¯m not sure just how well I¡¯ll be able to control the changes.¡± I added, to which Sigmir nodded, while keeping a close eye on me. Thanks to our connection I was aware that she was worried but I didn¡¯t know what to do about it, how to assure her. Only time could do so, so time had to pass.


    While I was walking some twenty meters away from camp, Lenore turned her attention to our surroundings, mentally joining with me to plan out the best way for me to get to know Death Magic and how to use it. I had watched Lenore use it quite a few times, for everything from simply killing something ,literally ripping away its life-force, to raising up the dead as undead monstrosities or even devour will-o-wisps, something she was assuring me would kill me.


    ¡°The  easiest would be to observe the process of dying, to familiarise yourself with the magical aspects of it.¡± Lenore told me, guiding my attention to a nearby flower.


    ¡°Pick it and watch. I will lend you my sight, and show you what to look for.¡± she added and I followed her advice. It was an ability I had gained thanks to her, so listening to her advice seemed like a good idea.


    After picking the flower, a small wild-flower with white petals, I sat down, leaning against a nearby tree and started watching. When fully focusing on the flower, pushing the world around me away, Lenore¡¯s sight allowed me to gain a vague understanding of the elemental make-up of the flower, elemental in the meaning of its most fundamental parts but also of the elements, of faint traces of elemental aligned Astral Power. It was difficult to see, without my recent attribute-boosts most likely impossible, but together with Lenore, I was able to see.


    That alone was interesting, watching how the tiny amount of Astral Power within the flower was composed out of different elements, all complimenting another to form a blended whole but that wasn¡¯t what I was after. No, it was the slow process in which the Astral Power that had been within the flower was slowly changing, parts of it fading while others transformed.


    ¡°That is Death-Energy, the energy remaining after life has faded.¡± Lenore told me after almost an hour of watching the flower. My own senses had allowed me to get an impression as well, the sweet smell of life, oh so similar to the aroma of the flower itself, slowly fading away, giving off a smell that faintly reminded me of the Barrow Den.


    ¡°I see it.¡± I needlessly confirmed, she had been closely linked to my mind but it felt right nonetheless.


    ¡°Now, manipulate it. Draw it out, strengthen it.¡± she told me, her mind supplying how she would do it. I couldn¡¯t just follow her example, my mind worked in a different way but her guidance allowed me to find the right way within my mind.


    For a moment, I felt as if I was trying to push a heavy boulder uphill, a strong resistance that suddenly broke, Astral Power flowing out of me in an almost painful manner. The flower in my hand, the target of my manipulation, crumbled to dust, most of it getting carried away by the wind.


    ¡°That is Death-Magic.¡± Lenore told me, as I looked at my slightly dusty hand, that had held the plucked flower just moments before, while a blue window informed me that my Death Magic skill had reached level two.

 Chapter 343

    After sitting on the ground for a bit, I had recreated my throne, making myself comfortable while reducing flowers to dust, trying to firm up my perception of the energies released during Death and the ways to manipulate them using magic. Lenore, in an attempt to train her Ice-Magic was sitting on my shoulder, surrounding us with a thin layer of cold mist, making me quite comfortable despite the heat. Sadly, our training was interrupted when Sigmir and Ylva suddenly reacted, their silent vigil near me interrupted.


    ¡°Someone is approaching. More people than just Adra and Rai.¡± Ylva growled, caution causing her fur to stand up. Standing, I readied myself for combat as well, stepping behind Sigmir who had Lok¡¯nar at the ready. Lenore, knowing that for us, the physical body was a rather significant weakness, retreated into her Hallow, mentally closing the distance between the two of us. We didn¡¯t quite join together in the Avatar-State, due to the strain it put on us, but we were ready to do so. In addition, I took control of the cold mist while drawing the blades at my waist, pulling the Frozen Shuttles out of my nearby cloak and carefully threading the vines of my Eisblumen through my sleeve, wrapping them around my arm, ready to strike at a moment''s notice.


    ¡°Everything is fine, we brought someone who wants to talk.¡± Adra called out, before anyone ever entered my perception. Her calm voice made both Sigmir and me relax quite a bit, still not all the way, just in case some shenanigans were afoot, but neither of us remained ready to strike first, possibly ask questions later.


    With Adra¡¯s shout giving me a location to focus on, I was able to hear the approaching people myself, even if I was unable to get a fix on a number. Even if my senses had been improved by attributes, Ylva and her canine ears had me beat by a mile.


    ¡°Four are coming, two of them are Adra and Rai.¡± Ylva stated, her attention still fixed towards the forest. ¡°There are more, I think another four, remaining behind. I think they are Orcs, they smell similar to the ones we met in the last village.¡± she added.


    Moments later, just as Ylva had told us, four people stepped onto the clearing I had been using.


    ¡°Morgana, Sigmir, I want you to meet Sakgu and Tarod, two scouts for an Orc Warband. They are hunting a group of centaurs who have been raiding in the area, making off with quite a bit of loot.¡±. Adra introduced the two orcs with her, one male, the other female, before turning to the orcs. Both of them were focused on me, with the rather conspicuous display of magic around me and my throne standing behind me. It must have been a strange sight, a glistening throne of Ice, in the middle of a forest during the height of summer. But it was a comfortable seat for me, so I would keep using and creating it. In addition, it felt right to sit on it.


    ¡°As I told you, these are Morgana and Sigmir, our travelling companions.¡± she added, finishing the introduction, causing Sigmir and me to relax, while making us tense in another way. Having centaur-raiders was bad but orcish warbands were a possibly immediate threat. It didn¡¯t look like it and by now I had some trust in Adra¡¯s people-skills but I remained on my guard. Knowing that Ylva would most likely hear them long before they got close enough to harm us helped, even while my paranoia reminded me that it might be a ploy to get our guard down, that an openly approaching group was a useful distraction.


    ¡°Greetings and well met. As your companion said, my name is Sakgu. She mentioned that you had a run-in or two with the centaurs further back east and that you might be willing to trade information for some supplies to continue your journey.¡± the female Orc said, giving a strangely formal nod with her fist across her chest.


    ¡°Greetings.¡± Sigmir responded, when I hesitated for a moment. ¡°Indeed, we had and supplies would be useful in trade.¡±


    Reading on Amazon or a pirate site? This novel is from Royal Road. Support the author by reading it there.


    ¡°We would invite you to rest in our camp, while explaining your information to our leader. Will you promise to hold your peace while within our camp?¡± the orc asked, now focusing on Sigmir, after another short glance at me and the Ice-Blades still floating behind me.


    ¡°We will act honourable while in your camp.¡± Sigmir responded, her voice taking on a formal tone.


    ¡°Good, then I will formally invite you to our camp. You will be treated as guests, not harmed or hindered if you wish to leave. This, I, Sakgu of the ¡®Bright-Hollow¡¯-Clan swear in the name of our Ancestors.¡± the Orc-Lady said, matching Sigmir¡¯s formal tone. I could feel the world react just a little to the oath, similarly to the way it had reacted to the oath I had given the Ashenforge-Dwarves, hinting that there was the intent to keep the oath. It didn¡¯t mean I automatically trusted them, not without knowing the actual rules governing such things and what possible loopholes there were to be exploited. People could speak honestly of their desire to pay their taxes to the fullest, meaning the fullest extent required by law, while using various loopholes in the tax-code to pay no taxes at all. Without knowing the code, the rules, I wasn¡¯t about to trust in them.


    However, the oath seemed good enough for Sigmir, trusting the Orc¡¯s word, her stance relaxing, a relaxation mirrored by Ylva next to her. I wasn¡¯t quite convinced but could feel from Lenore that it would be a grave insult not to take their word, implying that their honour and ancestors were worthless to us. While my hands sheathed my blades using muscle memory, my mind carefully guided the floating shuttles into their own sheathes sewn into my cloak. Given that I wasn¡¯t wearing the cloak, not with the summer heat bearing down on us, getting the shuttles put away was harder than anticipated, causing me to extend the frozen vines of my Eisblumen, stretching the cloak out to allow me easy access.


    Focusing back on the orcs, I noticed a strange look on their faces, maybe due to the casual use of magic. I had noticed that the native spellcasters had been quite circumspect with their power, never really using it in public unless needed. I didn¡¯t plan to hold to such a convention, not if actually using my powers allowed me to slowly hone my control over them. Sure, I might not have my Astral Power filled to the maximum and it was exhausting at times but so was physical training. Only by using skills did they improve.


    ¡°Do you need extra time to break camp? If we leave soon, we can make it to our camp before nightfall, even without hurrying.¡± Sakgu asked, again addressing Sigmir, who looked back over to me, letting me decide.


    ¡°A few minutes should be enough.¡± I said, deciding that getting some supplies and maybe good will from the locals would be useful, especially if the locals had trouble with the Centaurs. While I didn¡¯t subscribe to the idea that the enemy of my enemy was my friend, I did believe that there was potential to ally against a common threat. It just had to be done cautiously, while keeping vigilant.


    Keeping with that idea, my first action to break camp was a quick runic-formation, instantly created despite the additional power-cost, shattering my Throne into a cloud of Diamond Dust, floating under my magical control, to join the mist around me. It made the temperature drop quite a bit while making the mist a lot more opaque, turning me into a vague silhouette within the freezing cloud, but it allowed me to maintain the mass of Ice, without making it too obvious. Compressing the Diamond Dust into solid Icicles was a simple application of Ice Magic, without the need for runes or to conjure up new Ice, cutting off time needed to attack.


    Similarly, in an attempt to project my personal power without making it too obvious, I simply used the vines growing from the Eisblumen around my arm to pack my bag, needing only moments to do so.


    Neither Sigmir nor I actually needed more than a minute to have our bags packed, the magical bags we were using quite useful for that, and soon, we were ready to depart. I made a mental note to find out what Adra actually knew about the Orcs and their Clan while asking Lenore to covertly leave her Hallow, taking a reconnaissance flight once we had an idea where we were going. But that would have to wait, until we could do so without notice. It wouldn¡¯t be a good idea to make the orcs think I didn¡¯t trust them, or their word of honour.


    ¡°What can you tell me about your mission and the Centaurs you are after?¡± I asked, trying to get as much knowledge as possible before even beginning to negotiate for anything.

 Chapter 344

    Over the next hour, I was able to learn quite a bit about the local situation and the general situation in this part of Aretia. It turned out that the orcs, like most of the other groups but the dwarves, had a semi-nomadic life-style, with a fixed village that they wintered in while travelling the region to gather and trade for supplies during the warm months. They only practised agriculture on a very limited scope, preferring to stick to their old traditions and ways, despite the possible advantages of settling down permanently. I didn¡¯t even try to argue, missing far too much information and despite some of the villages I had seen seemingly doing just that, having a permanent settlement. It seemed that Sakgu was mainly repeating what she had been taught, that the life-style of her people was the right one and was used everywhere, without ever questioning if that was true. It was a curious realisation that, despite having travelled most of her life, the Orc had never travelled outside of their home-range, leaving her mostly ignorant about more distant places.


    I would have to talk to Adra again, she had at least travelled from her home Grove north, eventually getting captured and ending up in Tegi. She had travelled the backwoods, avoiding civilisation, so the information she had were just as limited in many ways but they were better than having no information.


    But Sakgu¡¯s information on their current objective was a lot more concrete. It turned out that different groups of centaurs were annually raiding the Aretian heartland for goods and livestock but this year, their raids had been striking deeper and they had added people to the list of targets to be captured. Normally, the orcs were trying to defend against the incursions but didn¡¯t bother trying to hunt the centaurs down, the centaurs being simply too mobile. That needed mobility also meant that they were a little limited unless they were utilising Magic Bags, which they didn¡¯t, maybe for fear of triggering serious, large-scale conflict, not just the brief, relatively harmless raids.


    Now, however, with some of their people taken and rumours of a large-scale centaur incursion further north-east, they were taking things a lot more serious and had gathered a warband, with multiple scouting parties out, hunting down the centaurs, with the objective to kill them all as a deterrence and recover as much of the stolen loot as possible.


    Their warband was quite powerful, as I learned, a main group of some eighty orcs, all above level fifty, led by an orcish legend, at least a local legend, called Dura Firebringer, who supposedly was above level hundred-fifty and able to call down fire to burn her enemies. In addition to that, there were multiple scouting-parties, all with four to eight scouts, ranging out to find their enemy while making sure that the warband could continue on unopposed, bringing the total number of fighting orcs to hundred-twenty. They didn¡¯t have a real supply-train, not planning to remain in the field for long, which allowed them to carry their supplies in Magic bags with them, giving them speed to catch up to the retreating centaurs, mostly due to them having taken captives.


    The mention of that Dura made me both curious but also worried, very worried. Just the level was enough to make me worried and it wasn¡¯t helped by the fact that it sounded like she was some sort of Fire-Spellcaster, an element I instinctively disliked, it being loud, brash and far too aggressive for my liking. But I wanted to meet that woman, my curiosity strong enough to overwrite my caution, mainly because truly powerful spellcasters seemed to be rare and there was the possibility of advanced arcane knowledge. Learning from the dwarves had opened up a completely different magical paradigm for me and there was the possibility that the orcs would allow me something similar.


    It was a little concerning that the centaurs were actively raiding in the area but without confirmation that the centaurs here were connected to the centaurs we had come into conflict before, I wasn¡¯t willing to actively move against them without some sort of compensation. Sure, if they aggressively came into contact with us I wouldn¡¯t say no to gain some EXP but I wasn¡¯t about to hunt them down. Not without a good reason, like a quest to do so. I made sure to mention that we might be willing to join them, given the right motivation but it seemed as if Sakgu believed that they had enough power in their warband. I had no information whether she was right or not but her belief was enough to drive my vigilance up a notch, making me excuse myself with what had to be the oldest excuse in the books to get a moment of privacy.


    The author''s tale has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.


    Hidden behind a few bushes, I asked Lenore to leave her Hallow, flying overhead and giving warning if we were moving towards an ambush. She would also be able to tell me what we were running into, regarding the orcish warband, especially if they had looked like they were prepared for us or not. According to what I had been told, they were travelling during the day but we should be able to meet up with them without too much trouble.


    When I returned to the group, I noticed a curious smirk on Adra¡¯s face, reminding me that my excuse only worked so far with people who knew me and that my Traveler Avatar-Body simply had no need for the activity I had used as an excuse. For now, that wasn¡¯t too much of a giveaway for natives, only for those who were aware of that peculiarity and the fact that I was a traveller but it was something to keep in mind.


    Quite soon, maybe an hour and a half after we left our original camp, Lenore was transmitting her vision to me, the range we could easily communicate over decidedly increased since I had crossed the second Divide, or maybe due to the increase in Attributes coming with it. The reason didn¡¯t really matter, only that I was able to see the orcish warband from the air, moving through the forest in a reasonably ordered formation. She was able to spot a couple scouts moving around the orcs but couldn¡¯t be sure she was seeing all of them, not with the variety of skills used to hide from an even bigger variety of detection-methods.


    What we both could see was that the main-body of the orcish warband seemed to be relaxed, not nervous or hyper-vigilant, secure in the fact that their scouts would warn them from any foe strong enough to pose a serious challenge. It made me wonder, what would happen if they ran into a singular being powerful enough to both evade their scouts and pose a threat to them but then, such a being would, almost by definition, be powerful enough to make resistance mostly futile. If such a being attacked them, the ordinary grunts would have to hope that the more powerful members of their band were able to resist or their struggle would be hopeless, regardless of their initial vigilance.


    I could see that the information given to me by Sakgu looked to be true, at least regarding the orcish numbers. It gave me hope that the rest was also reliable, even if I wouldn¡¯t be able to relax until having met that Dura and parted, without getting attacked.


    Before long, our group was close enough for Sakgu to give a loud signal, using some sort of whistle that sounded like a bird, causing the scouts around the warband to react, some of them shifting to cover our approach while a ripple went through the main body, as people seemed to focus on the present, getting ready to act. It wasn¡¯t necessarily a readiness to fight, they didn¡¯t take out their weapons or affixed their shields to their arms but I could imagine that some of them had been daydreaming, lost in their thoughts, as I often was when marching and now waking up, focusing on their surroundings.


    The bird¡¯s call was answered by a similar call, a quick progression of notes coming from a similar whistle that Lenore spotted in the hands of a scout. She could differentiate between the calls made with a whistle and the call of a real bird but to my ears they sounded the same. Maybe it was just a bird-thing, I didn¡¯t know.


    However it worked, we were greeted with more interest than suspicion by the scouts, even if they looked quite surprised when they realised that Sakgu had brought non-orcs with her. Despite the surprise, we were quickly guided towards the main-group and its back quarter, where Lenore could easily see a powerful aura thanks to her sight. Powerful and unrestrained, standing out like a bonfire, making me both curious and a little scared. But more powerful than the feeling of fear was a wish to stamp the fire out, to smother it and return the world to a cold darkness. The sensation was wholly unexpected, forcing me to strongly clamp down on it, so I wouldn¡¯t cause trouble for our group.

 Chapter 345

    Even from a distance, I quickly noticed the heat turning even more oppressive than the summertime should have accounted for. The smell quickly told me what was going on, the air was saturated with Fire Astral Power, essentially overpowering the magic I was using to keep cool. As such, it wasn¡¯t that it was getting warmer, maybe a degree or two, but that my magic was pushed back. It didn¡¯t feel like a malicious attack, more like someone simply putting their surroundings under their power, in a show of confidence and dominance.


    But I wouldn¡¯t let myself get dominated that easy, certainly not by some orc. I began pushing back, limiting myself to a small radius around myself but that area was mine and I was defending it. At first, it was easy, merely needing a bit of focus on my part, until we got close enough to see the imposing Orc-Woman, built quite similar to Sigmir, just as wide and powerful but not as tall. Our eyes met across the distance and I felt like sparks were flying, a wordless challenge joined by a forceful push into my territory. Sigmir, walking next to me, instantly felt the pressure I was put under and was getting ready to strike the woman down, or at least try to. I forced myself to reach out, gripping her arm, both to draw strength and confidence from her and to restrain her. Getting into a fight in the middle of an army would be foolish and thus far, the other woman looked more interested in a contest, not in a fight.


    And contesting I did, drawing power from the Ice I had circulated in my vicinity, circulating the magic I had used to create it in the first place to fill my surroundings with magic, giving me a slight edge. But at the same time, I quickly understood that I would lose, not quickly but certainly. Part of it was that the other woman had larger reserves, part of it was the simple fact that I was pushing against the environment, the sweltering heat around us helping her.


    ¡°Do you want my help?¡± Lenore asked over our mental bond, flying nearby.


    Part of me wanted to decline, to finish and win the contest on my own but I simply didn¡¯t see a way to do so, not without using external resources, mainly ripping Astral Power out of people around me with Blood Magic. I might be able to win but the cost was not acceptable. Getting help was better, especially if the alternative was to lose.


    ¡°Yes, I would appreciate it.¡± I admitted, pushing harder to keep the territory around me from melting away in the heat. The seconds dragged on, while I was pushing out more and more power, to keep myself from being overwhelmed, feeling the first pearls of sweat form on my forehead, partially due to the heat but mostly due to the magic needed to keep my territory. Finally, I felt Lenore land on my shoulder, quickly moving into her Hallow and adding her own power to mine.


    Instantly, I was able to breathe a lot easier, together we could match the orc, despite the environment helping her a great deal. Lenore¡¯s presence also allowed me to pay attention to my surroundings, other than the ongoing magical contest. For a brief moment, I considered to push back, to take over the area as the Orc had done earlier, to assert my dominance but I could feel a warning from Lenore, reminding me that we were not looking for a fight.


    Instead, I simply looked around for a moment, noticing the looks of awe on the orcish faces around us, the quickly fading look of worry on Adra¡¯s face and the barely repressed anger visible on both Sigmir¡¯s and Rai¡¯s faces. Pulling some more Ice Astral Power into my body, I schooled my face into a cold, serene mask of pure disregard, trying to demonstrate just how little I thought of the previous contest.


    ¡°Greetings. Dura Firebringer I presume?¡± I greeted, giving a nod, not wanting to seem submissive but giving at least some respect. For a similar reason, I didn¡¯t bring up that we had been promised we wouldn¡¯t be harmed or attacked and what she had done was certainly impolite enough to be considered an attack by some people.


    You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.


    But it was funny to see the moment of pure surprise on the Orc-Leaders face, that I was now calmly holding my magical ground, with enough mental resources left to talk to her. For a moment, her eyes closed and her brows scrunched up, as the pressure around us dropped significantly, the orc forcibly pulling back her power. The look of discomfort on her face mostly confirmed that she hadn¡¯t acted in malice, but in laziness. It wasn¡¯t a good look, at least in my opinion, but then I felt that containing and controlling one¡¯s magical power was the way to go, unless it was needed to complete a task.


    ¡°Indeed I am. Greetings to you.¡± she said, her eyes darting over to Sakgu, obviously wanting an introduction, to restore some sort of normalcy to a meeting that had started anything but.


    Sakgu quickly rallied her mind, stepping forward and gesturing towards us, trying to act as if the previous event hadn¡¯t happened.


    ¡°Warleader Dura Firebringer, I present to you a group of adventurers who are travelling this area. Meet Adrastea, Rai, Sigmir and, finally¡­¡± Just as she finally turned to me, a shout interrupted her.


    ¡°Morgana?!¡± a surprisingly loud, shocked gasp caused silence to descend again, drawing everyone¡¯s attention to one of the orcs who was just pushing through to the front of the crowd, staring at me.


    For the second time, nobody truly knew how to react, especially the Warleader seemed to be a little confused. But she hadn¡¯t reached her current level without learning how to deal with surprises and unexpected situations, so her confusion lasted for mere moments.


    ¡°I greet you, travellers from afar.¡± she said, apparently deciding to simply ignore the outburst, focusing on our group.


    ¡°I have to apologize for the rude greeting I have given you, Morgana, was it? I was merely surprised that a spellcaster of your caliber would enter into my corona.¡± she explained, her tone far from apologetic but also without any implied challenge, merely a friendly, polite tone that one might have heard from any newscaster or politician. Now, it was my turn to act on spotty information, trying to figure out which of her words were important, which were merely platitudes.


    The word that instantly sprung to my attention was that she spoke of her corona, not aura or domain, corona. If my memory served me right, that described the outermost part of the sun, barely visible but hotter than the deeper layers, making me wonder if there was a significance. I had a feeling there was, but what it was, I didn¡¯t know.


    Faking a friendly smile as best as I could, I replied, trying to give her the same polite yet meaningless tone she had used with me, while also ignoring the earlier interruption, even if I was rather curious who could identify me from my looks. It almost had to be a Traveller but their disposition towards me was unknown.


    ¡°I understand, think nothing more of it.¡± I verbally waved her apology off as the meaningless words it had been. ¡°We were told that you are looking for some Centaurs, who might be connected to the groups further east and willing to trade for information. We had some run-ins with the Centaurs of the Altin Urda and can share some of our experiences with you, even some geographic information, if you are interested. After all, they will soon be closer neighbours than you might like.¡± I added, not quite explaining what I meant, merely throwing the statement out, to make her more interested in what we knew.


    ¡°Yes, I certainly would be interested. The centaurs have changed their behaviour the past few months, I would like to know why Maybe the information you know can shed some light. I, too, will extend an invitation to travel with us for the rest of the day and in the evening, we can trade. Unfortunately, we cannot rest for a long time during the day, otherwise our prey might escape.¡± she explained, causing me to nod in understanding while trying to figure out a way to deal with her, partially because my conversational abilities were rapidly approaching their limits, partially because she had started to eye me in an intense fashion that I was distinctly uncomfortable with.


    ¡°Harms, you seem to already know our visitor from afar. Why don¡¯t you reacquaint yourself during our march, I sadly have to make sure that our formation is kept and remain ready to deal with returning scouts. But I¡¯m sure the two of you have much to discuss. Sakgu, why don¡¯t you stay with them, to make sure their journey with us is smooth and without trouble?¡± Dura Firebringer ordered, looking over to the previously ignored Orc, giving me the name of my fellow Traveller. At least it was a name I knew and didn¡¯t think a Traveller that would be instantly hostile. Hopefully.

 Interlude: Profiles of Power VI

    Official Road to Purgatory-Beta Forum


    <table><tbody><tr><td>-Kelgarn, confirmed Beta-Account</td></tr></tbody></table>


    Hey Guys and welcome back to the Profiles of Power


    Last time, we looked at the apparent fan of Dad-humour that is William of the Shaking Spear, whereas today we are looking at someone much less prone to induce groans on mental anguish, instead you get a sharp, stinging pain as a well-placed, single arrow pierces a vital target. She is, to our current knowledge, the deadliest hunter and archer amongst the Travellers on Mundus, making her a good topic of investigation and discovery.


    I am, obviously, talking about Sameera, the Desert Stalker.


    What do we know about the stealthy huntress? Let¡¯s start with the basics, as always. These are things she said in her videos, so let¡¯s just roll with them.


    Race: Sunseeker-Daimon, giving her a bonus to Agility and Dexterity, while also adding some resistance to heat and bright light.


    Class: Started out as Hunter, was taught a method to gain the advanced class Sandstalker, after crossing the first Divide. The class allows her to move easier across sand, increasing her ability to sneak and strike from concealment.


    Relevant Skills and Abilities:


    Most of her videos seem to be centered around hunting down specific targets, her prey. The interesting part is that she is able to get close-up footage of those various beasties, without them engaging in combat with her. What does that mean?


    That she is able to get close to them, without getting spotted, often even invading their dens, apparently even setting traps that allow her a secure path to retreat, with her foes hindered by her preparations.


    Her main mode of combat is quite simple, a massive ranged alpha-strike, attacking from a concealed position. There have been videos of her attacking a single foe, dealing enough damage and inflicting lasting wounds to massive monsters, some of which are incredibly scary, even if it is difficult to estimate their power without them having a chance to use it.


    Maybe that is why she is making the before-hand footage, showing them living, at times fighting, before getting hunted down later. But back to her alpha-strike.


    She almost has to have a weapon-speciality centered around her compound-bow, so we know that. Other than that, we can be similarly certain about a couple of her other skills, namely Stealth and Athletics or maybe an acrobatic-version of it.


    Magically, we have seen her use a variety of magic to buff her first-strike damage, allowing her to inflict massive wounds as stated. Those wounds also add a rather sizable bleed-debuff, magnifying the damage she deals. After all, a small arrow-wound is bad, an exploding arrow that rips holes big enough to drive a truck through is worse. A lot worse.


    I would also assume that she has some way to magically augment her stealth, but as often it is difficult to recognise concealment magic, especially if the person using it is not willing to share and controls what you can see. But I would think the ability to sneak into a pride of magically augmented, fire-breathing lions is not something you can do without magic.


    Finally, her traps. They seem to be a mixture of mundane and magical, or maybe alchemical and magical, however you want to place your distinctions. Again, the information we have is simply too limited, we have seen weighted nets and harpoons being propelled by explosive force, tying pursing creatures down for a moment, but is that explosion magical, alchemical or just chemical? There is no such distinction made by the natives of Mundus, so maybe it simply doesn¡¯t matter. Whatever mechanism they are based upon, the traps seem to be focused on ensnaring and hampering movement, allowing the nimble huntress to take advantage of her prey.


    Now, those are my insights after watching a couple dozen hours of footage, mostly of her going all David Attenborough on the desert-dwelling creatures of Mundus, only that she regularly hunts down the creatures after describing and studying them.


    On to you and your observations.


    <table><tbody><tr><td>Goliry, confirmed Beta-Account</td></tr></tbody></table>


    Ah, yes, I wondered if you¡¯d feature her.


    Love this novel? Read it on Royal Road to ensure the author gets credit.


    I quite like the videos she puts out, especially the parts that focus on the original exploration, studying and observing the creatures before the later hunt.


    Did you notice that she seldomly hunts the creatures she has been observing? With that I mean, she hunts an example of that species but unless I¡¯m wrong the markings on the creatures themselves change between the two parts of her videos. I¡¯m rather curious why that is, or if I¡¯m even right at all.


    Regarding her magic, I¡¯m relatively sure that there is wind-magic involved, probably for both the shooting and the sneaking, after all being not seen is only a small part of stealth, against creatures like lions and other predators I¡¯d think that not getting smelled is even more important. And what can you use to stop being smelled, other than very good deodorant? Obviously, wind-magic.


    <table><tbody><tr><td>Sameera, confirmed Beta-Account</td></tr></tbody></table>


    So, it¡¯s my turn?


    Well, I¡¯m not a huge fan of player-combat so I guess I can explain part of my Character, namely what I¡¯m doing in-game and how my shooting works. That way, players that try to hunt me still have to figure out how my stealth works and ways to beat it. Good luck following me if you can¡¯t even catch my track.


    First of all, about the style Goliry mentioned: It is true, I try to separate the prey I hunt as much as possible from the creatures I study, for two reasons. The creatures I study are quite often the healthy populations living in my tribes territory. Those creatures are seldomly hunted, my tribe trying to maintain a balance between the predators and the prey in our territory, taking only what is needed from the prey while reducing the amount of predators as much as needed.


    To that effect, my missions often focus on hunting down singular predators that have been cut from their group, be it a pride, a pack or a pod, depending on their species, now hunting alone. Why those?


    Quite often they realise that they are no longer able to hunt for their previous prey, due to not having a hunting team of their brethren, thus they start hunting for other prey, often disturbing the delicate balance. A lone wolf poses little danger to a deer but going after easier prey, that they normally wouldn¡¯t bother until hunger forces them? Quite likely.


    Anyway, that is the reason for the split of my videos, the exploration is to make sure the healthy populations are maintained, the hunt is to cull the creatures that need to be put down. A little like a game-warden on Earth might.


    Now, about my magic. My teacher does not work in distinct elements, he told me he was taught by a shaman at a young age. He speaks of a cycle of life, teaching about the wind carrying something or the scorching rays of the sun, how it all forms a great cycle.


    The magic I was told all fits into that cycle, always focusing how the world will return to balance and how to facilitate or use that process. It¡¯s quite interesting, really, but just too much to get into it here. But if you are interested, come watch and subscribe to my streams, where I visit the fascinating creatures of Mundus, observing them in their natural habitat.


    <table><tbody><tr><td>Jeanyra, confirmed Beta-Account</td></tr></tbody></table>


    I think I¡¯ve heard about that cyclic-worldview and that there is no agreed truth, it is still debated amongst the scholars of magic. The Guild I am part of teaches that the cyclic worldview is wrong, that the world came from one extreme and will ultimately fade into the other extreme, that everything else are merely short disruptions of that slow swing.


    Curiously, one of my teachers gave me the mental exercise to describe such a process, a swing from one extreme to a different one, and the best I could come up with was a pendulum. Which would make it quite similar to a cyclic process.


    For some reason, my example and reasoning made him rather happy, giving me some books with information on the cyclic school of thoughts, helping my spellcasting a great deal.


    Maybe you would be willing to tell me a little about your thoughts of the cyclic concepts relating to Fire-Magic?


    <table><tbody><tr><td>Rachant, confirmed Beta-Account</td></tr></tbody></table>


    A sneaky hunter, going after their prey with stealth and single shots? Maybe it is good that you have no interest in PvP, otherwise you might be as scary as Morgana, just in another way. I mean, what¡¯s worse, dying without ever knowing what hit you, where the attack came from or how to get away?


    Or dying to an icicle to the chest before your corpse is used to fuel some necromantic ritual and used to kill more people?


    Actually, I¡¯m not quite sure which I would like less, so let¡¯s avoid either.


    <table><tbody><tr><td>Gloinar, confirmed Beta-Account</td></tr></tbody></table>


    Given that Morgana is able to, and maybe even likes to, strike from ambush, there might be more similarities than you think.


    Our group lost one of our players, before getting blanketed in fog. No idea where our enemies were, no idea who our enemies were, no idea what had hit us or how. Makes things really fun, believe me.


    Not!


    Back then, we used their fog-cover to quickly log out but other than that? Stealthy attackers getting the drop on you really, really sucks.


    <table><tbody><tr><td>Malaf, confirmed Beta-Account</td></tr></tbody></table>


    Correct me if I¡¯m wrong, but didn¡¯t you try to do just that to Morgana and her group a little later, only for you to get rekt, again?


    Maybe it wasn¡¯t about stealth but simply about skill?


    <table><tbody><tr><td>-Kelgarn, confirmed Beta-Account</td></tr></tbody></table>


    Guys, can we please stay on the topic for this discussion? If you have something to discuss on Morgana, there is a thread for it, please use it, if you have something constructive to say. If not, might I suggest you take to the Free Discussion, where you can discuss whatever you want to, from politics to religion, without anyone caring?

 Chapter 346

    Silence hung between Harms and me, as we were moving to the back of the orcish column, Sakgu falling in with my group, to make sure we would be alright. And to report what was said, I had no doubt of that. The silence stretched out, not a companionable silence, where no words were needed to fill the void between people but an awkward one, getting thicker with each second it lasted. Part of me wondered if it would congeal into a physical substance at some point, dense enough to stop us from moving. Maybe that was the key to create Eternal Ice, reaching peak-density awkwardness, a level where the pure social ineptitude was enough to freeze spacetime itself.


    ¡°So, how do you know Morgana here?¡± Sakgu asked, her voice breaking the silence, shattering it into pieces that drifted away on the wind. She was addressing Harms, causing him to instantly blurt out his thoughts, without taking the time to formulate a Mundus-appropriate answer.


    ¡°Everyone knows her! She was Titania!¡± he exclaimed, now making Sakgu blink, not quite sure how to react to the outburst.


    Pushing away the earlier awkwardness, drawing on a sliver of Ice-Astral Power to adapt a cold, utterly serene, mien, I looked at Harms, noticing the human beneath the orcish Avatar.


    ¡°That was another life, another world. Here, I am Morgana, nothing more, nothing less.¡± I explained, my voice calm, without any excitement. It made me realise that I had fully shed the strange attachment that had remained to my old Character, that nagging, prodding thorn in my side that made me want to scratch everything regarding Craft of War until they bled, just a little. To irritate them, as the thorn irritated me.


    ¡°But¡­¡± he began, a raised eyebrow of mine silencing him, before I focus on Sakgu, to explain things in terms that a native of Mundus could accept.


    ¡°Mundus is merely the latest world we Travellers have visited. In a different world, at a different time, there was a being known as Titania, a quite powerful being at that, famous of her mastery of Light-Magic, using it to create barriers shielding her allies and to confound her foes, bending their vision just a little, to play with distances and perspective.¡± I explained, before focusing back on Harms.


    ¡°But, as I said, that was in a different world, in a different time. What matters, and what you should judge me by, is the here, the now, my actions in this World. Let the past remain where it is, without dredging up its memories.¡± I added, getting a nod from him.


    ¡°So, if you don¡¯t want to be measured by your past in a different world, what should we judge you by?¡± Sakgu asked, causing Harms to regain momentum.


    ¡°Tales of her actions have been spread far and wide amongst Travellers. She¡¯s a powerful sorceress, bending Ice and Wind to her will, using it to crush the life out of her foes.¡± he enthused, sounding a little like an advertisement. It made me wonder if he was as socially awkward as I was, at times planning out sentences long before they would ever be used, trying to make them sound perfect, causing them to sound a little stilted or out of place.


    ¡°I do admit to having some powers, even if I will keep the extent of them to myself. Your leader learned some of it when she tested me earlier.¡± I added, trying to make myself sound a little aloof, without getting dragged into his awkwardness. It was a lot easier on Mundus, which I was grateful for. Maybe because I wasn¡¯t feeling like I was myself, that I was acting, being a character in a play.


    ¡°I see.¡± Sakgu admitted, even if her face told a different story. Luckily, Adra inserted herself into the conversation at that point, gently probing Harms, and Sakgu to some extent, for information on their clan. It allowed me to mentally sit back, listening and going over the earlier events again.


    You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.


    What I learned about the ¡®Bright Hollow¡¯-Clan was quite interesting, especially their clan-structure. It was quite unlike what other fantasy-stories had made common-sense about orcs, depicting them as warlike, brutish and oppressive, even if there seemed to be a strong martial aspect to their culture. The leadership of their clan was split in two, with a Matriarch leading the Clan during times of peace and a Warchief taking care of military matters. .


    Curiously, the decision to go to war was left to the Matriarch, whose position was also passed down hereditarily, from mother to daughter, whereas the Warchief was appointed in a mixture of ritual combat and election.


    To make things even more interesting was that the Matriarch, obviously, had to be female but the Warchief could be, and sometimes was, female, albeit not often. That had to do with the simple fact that the combat-part of the appointment was unarmed, purely physical and while there were exceptions like Sigmir, females with powerful bodies even amongst their species, they were generally a rarity amongst mammalian species. When I asked about the reason for purely physical combat, I was told that including someone like Warleader Firebringer would make things far too dangerous, that a contest of unarmed combat could cause serious harm if people weren¡¯t willing to give up but with a Shaman like the Firebringer? The losses would be unacceptable.


    Hearing the title of Shaman lured me even deeper into the conversation, more information on a different spellcaster was always welcome. It turned out that, if the leadership-structure split between a Matriarch and a Warchief wasn¡¯t confusing enough already, they had a third branch, so to speak. Those were the Shamans, a council of mostly elders, all with magical powers and a connection to Nature and the Spirits of their Ancestors. They were advising both the Matriarch and supporting the Warchief with their magic, at times even leading warriors into battle, as was the case with Dura Firebringer.


    Sadly, when it came to the actual effects of their magic, to say nothing of the mechanisms used to achieve those effects, neither Sakgu nor Harms could help me, they simply didn¡¯t know a lot. Sakgu knew that Dura was able to use fire to strike her foes, often with explosive might, but had never seen those attacks personally, having only second-hand knowledge of them. It seemed that Dura had been travelling the world for the last few years, learning abroad while gaining in power before returning to the clan after a time as a Journeywoman, to claim the full title of Shaman. It seemed that such a journey was quite common for the more promising members of the clan, others, such as Sakgu, even if she didn¡¯t say it out loud, remained behind, providing the rank-and-file of the Clan¡¯s forces.


    It seemed quite similar to the system used by the dwarves, where some of their members were travelling to gain experience and levels before retiring to the Hold once they had meaningful power.


    But then, the system made sense, to gain any real power you had to seek out opportunities, risk your life in pursuit of them and bear the scars of both failure and success. On the other hand, I wondered how a hereditary position could work out, why would a powerful member of a society bow to some weakling, just for their heritage? Especially someone who had repeatedly risked their life, staring death in the face with bared teeth, enduring pain and misery, just to gain the power they had, why bend the knee?


    It wasn¡¯t just the Orcish Clans that made me wonder, I had read on the Forum that the humans had an Empire, with nobility and everything, working on a hereditary system. The only thing I could imagine was that the nobility of the Human Empire was keeping control of information and important locations, such as Dungeons. Tobiuno had hinted at such, and his rapid rise in level added to the idea that the Human Nobles simply used controlled dungeons, most likely grouping with prepared, loyal followers, to rapidly rise in power.


    Which brought me back to the orcish clan, how could they have something similar? I doubted that each and every clan had control over a dungeon, not unless there were many more of them than I thought. Sadly, it wasn¡¯t something I could simply come out and ask, not without being terribly impolite. And I already had enough trouble with that, given my Outsider-Trait.


    That thought caused me to stumble, the outsider-trait. What if there was something similar, some sort of Noble-Trait, that automatically made those born beneath them want to submit? But then, would questioning it cause them to realise? Would showing someone my Outsider-Trait cause them to question their initial animosity towards me?


    How would I feel, if I realised that the first impression I had about someone was due to outside influence?


    What if it wasn¡¯t the first impression but the whole society, the whole way of life?


    It was a scary thought, especially the second one, and I decided to keep it between Lenore and myself, at least for now.

 Chapter 347

    In the evening, it became apparent just how serious the orcs were about pushing their speed. They kept going, even after the sun had mostly set, marching on in the twilight, only setting up a rudimentary camp just before the light had truly faded. And even then, they mostly split into smaller groups, quickly setting up a small fire to get at least some warm food, but no tents, no fortifications, nothing. We had set up our own camp a little away from the orcs, not bothering to do more than we usually did, especially with the warm nights we had for the last few days. We had just finished eating when Sakgu, who had split from us when we began making camp, returned to ask me to meet with Shaman Firebringer, for a meeting of minds.


    I noticed that Sakgu hadn¡¯t used the title of Warleader, but Shaman, making me curious if there was significance to the changed title and stood, planning to go with her. I was a little surprised when Sigmir instantly stood as well, obviously planning to join me, an action quickly mirrored by Adra. That Adra was joining me I could easily understand, she was better when it came to negotiations and social situations in general, but I hadn¡¯t expected Sigmir. I welcomed her, I would always do, but I hadn¡¯t expected her.


    With Rai keeping an eye on our small camp, we moved towards the center of the orcish camp, easily finding it thanks to a larger fire and the strong, magical emanations from Dura Firebringer. I noticed that they were a lot more subdued than they had been during the day, less radiant and hot, but still present. Part of me was curious if I would be able to take her, especially with the moon that I could feel somewhere overhead, but I was fully aware that it would be folly to try, win or lose there was nothing to gain from it.


    Dura herself stood right in front of a large bonfire, her focus on the fire itself. Looking at her now, I was able to notice distinct, magical fluctuations between her and the bonfire. I wasn¡¯t instantly able to understand what she was doing, but she was using the flames as a medium for some sort of magical ritual. Not wanting to disturb, knowing that some of my own workings were rather delicate, I stopped the others, simply waiting for Dura to acknowledge us. At the same time, I closely observed what I was seeing, using Lenore¡¯s sight to get as much information as possible.


    Together with Lenore, I was able to get a reasonably good idea of what the shaman was doing, mostly thanks to the fact that Lenore and I were quite familiar with the intended effect of her magic. It was something we had done quite a few times already, with a spell that we had studied in depth from the Grandmother¡¯s Grimoire. Where the Grimoire had a spell called Water Mirror written within, using a calm surface of water to mirror what was happening in a different place, I had repurposed it to allow me to look through the Shadows, connecting one shadow to another, using the connection to peek at what I wanted to know.


    Dura was using fire, the flames allowing her to gather information, somehow. I wasn¡¯t certain about the limitations of her method, couldn¡¯t be, not without studying it a lot closer, especially the casting-process, but I had a feeling we would learn more, anyway.


    After waiting for maybe five minutes, the emanations between Dura and the bonfire faded, the fire getting quite a bit smaller in the process. When the fire was of similar size to the other fires, Dura turned around to us, her eyes quickly scanning over our group, before focusing on me.


    ¡°There you are. The centaurs continue to move on the predicted path, hopefully we will be able to catch them tomorrow, or the day after.¡± she said, slowly coming closer.


    ¡°You said you had information on our foes, what they have been up to in the east. As neither side is able to ascertain the value of the information you have a equitable trade is difficult, so I have the following proposal: You tell me what you know about the Centaurs, as much as possible, and in turn, you will be given rations for four people, enough to last you two weeks, and I will write a recommendation to the Adventurer''s Guild, I¡¯m still a member in good standing.¡± she suggested, pulling a Guild-Card out of a pouch at her waist, an action that felt completely incongruent to the setting, a savage orc-shaman, pulling out what amounted to a business-card. I managed to keep my features placid, not starting to laugh as I wanted inside, while Adra took the Guild-Card, quickly scanning it before handing it back.


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    ¡°I think that sounds good.¡± Adra said, giving me a short glance to make sure I wasn¡¯t objecting. Part of me wanted to suggest haggling, mainly because I had read that one should never take the first offer, but at the end of the day, the information we were sharing didn¡¯t cost us a thing, only a little time. And they might give us an opportunity to get into the orc¡¯s good graces, giving us access to quests, allies and trading-partners. In that regard, the immediate benefit of sharing information was almost negligible. With that in mind, I gave her a quick, short nod.


    ¡°Telling you everything will take quite a bit, do you want the information to be known to only you or to your command-staff as well?¡± Adra suggested, to which Dura nodded, obviously pleased.


    ¡°I will gather my command-staff. Did you have dinner, do you want some refreshments?¡± she asked, before giving a quick command to a nearby aide.


    ¡°No, thank you.¡± Adra told her, while my curiosity got the better of me.


    ¡°I noticed you used magic to gather information on the centaurs. I possess some abilities to do something similar, likely with different limitations and conditions. Would you share what you learned and I will see if I¡¯m able to learn more, while Adra here tells you and your staff about the events further east?¡± I asked, getting a raised eyebrow in return.


    ¡°Gather information, you say? I think I can tell you some, not like you can use my methods, not without a deep bond to the spirits of Fire and the Sun, something you most certainly don¡¯t have.¡± she muttered, nodding to herself.


    ¡°What I did is relatively simple,¡± she began to explain, gesturing to the still-burning fire. ¡°Early this morning, when the sun was just coming up, I conjured some spirits, asking them to gather information for me and creating magical shells for them to do so. They have been riding the wind, bathing in the sunlight, all day, following the centaurs from the air and shortly before sun-set they returned to me, telling me what they learned.¡± she explained, causing me to nod in understanding.


    It explained why I had recognised some of the magical emanations, I had done the same once. Only that I had only had the help of Lenore and my own mind to pilot the magical sensors, greatly limiting what I could do with that.


    ¡°Curious, that means you are effectively blind during the night?¡± I asked, getting the impression that the shells she was using were powering themselves with sunlight, something obviously impossible during the night.


    ¡°Indeed, but I highly doubt that they will move far. They made camp when dusk just started to set in, the prisoners they took slowing them down.¡± she answered, causing me to nod in understanding.


    ¡°Can you tell me how far and in which direction they are? I will get some more information about their exact numbers, how they set up camp, things like that.¡± I told her, getting a nod and the requested information in turn.


    They were still a few dozen miles ahead of us, not an impossible distance to cross but not one I had used that type of magic over before, not without some way to ascertain my target. The easiest way would be to simply create a sensor here, linking myself and Lenore to it and moving it there but that would take time and make it obvious what we had done.


    ¡°Together?¡± Lenore asked, curious what we would be able to do joined together, now that we both had crossed the second Divide. It wasn¡¯t serious combat-magic but it was an interesting, and likely safe, experiment to start with.


    While Adra started telling the Orcs about our exchanges with the Centaurs, starting near the windswept plains, I sat down, my mind welcoming Lenore as we joined our magic together, focusing on a point miles away, using the Astral River to affect the world in that location.


    It wasn¡¯t easy, the amount of power we could send through the River greatly limited, but easily enough to create the scrying-sensor and link to it, watching the dark land beneath.


    Now, we just had to find the centaur-camp.

 Chapter 348

    ¡°Did you notice?¡± I asked Lenore, slowly disentangling my mind from the scrying-construct we had created and used to observe the centaur-camp. It had worked quite a bit better than anticipated, either thanks to having experienced flight, albeit from inside my Hallow, or because I had crossed the second Divide, increasing my abilities. Or it was an effect of my new class, with its boost to my Darkness-Magic, that was another possibility.


    But be that as it may, I had been able to quietly observe their camp, hopefully without being detected, and it had yielded some quite interesting facts. What might be most important was what I hadn¡¯t seen, at least not at first. The centaurs had made another ordered camp, with a small trench and bern instead of a real wall, likely dug with magic, and lightly guarded by centaurs. Those few guards had been what made me suspicious, back when the wolves and my group had waged a campaign of attrition against the centaurs, their guards had mostly been top-notch, always using pairs and roving patrols. Here, not so much.


    That could mean a few things, some of them good, others not so much. One of the possible reasons for their few guards was they they were confident in position, not fearing pursuit and attack. Obviously false, given that I was with a quite powerful pursuit-party, so their confidence might be something we¡¯d be able to use to our advantage.


    Or it might mean that their tactical command had made the decision to keep their troops fresh, not exhausting them by skimping on nightly guard duty, wanting to cover as much ground as possible during the day, hoping to escape pursuit that way. Which could be a problem, I had no doubt that the centaurs could escape, if they so choose, especially if they were willing to abandon their loot. Or use magical bags.


    And finally, there was the option I feared most, that the visible centaur-guards were merely there because people observing the camp, either by physically scouting or by magical scrying, would expect them. If I had observed a camp without any guards, alarm-bells would be going off in my head, fearing a trap. but the few guards the centaurs had could be a plausible guard and if it wasn¡¯t for the stark contrast between the lax, almost lazy-looking guards here and the sharp, coordinated patrols and guards around the camp further north, I might not have been more suspicious than my paranoia would make me.


    Thus, I had decided to give the camp only a cursory glance, deciding that I¡¯d be able to check more at a later time, instead focusing on the woods around the camp, looking for additional guards, maybe allies, ready to reinforce the centaur-camp, ready to encircle attackers, cutting off their retreat and any hope of survival.


    And there I stumbled upon something I hadn¡¯t quite expected, at least not in those numbers.


    ¡°They have quite a few canines guarding their camp, don¡¯t you think?¡± Lenore replied, sarcasm strong in her voice.


    ¡°Indeed, maybe ten, twenty wovles in the camp but almost a hundred around it, scattered in small hunting-groups of eight. Why, that is the most impressive coincidence I¡¯ve ever seen, all those wolves that just happen to rest around their camp, just not on the path the centaurs took or are most likely going to take tomorrow.¡± I replied, matching her sarcasm with my own.


    ¡°It¡¯s a trap¡­¡± she muttered and somewhere in the back of my mind, I heard a certain fish-head exclaim just that. Lenore must have caught some of my thought, throwing her for a loop, to my amusement.


    ¡°A tale of a time long, long ago and in a far-distant galaxy.¡± I replied, chuckling to myself, even as my mind was trying to come up with a good scenario for the orcs. I didn¡¯t really see one, their foes had them on numbers and mobility, both in the open field and especially in the difficult, sylvan terrain we found ourselves in. Maybe if the orcs had a prepared encampment, negating the mobility of their enemies and a way to bring the Firebringer¡¯s magic to bear without burning what they wanted to reclaim, but otherwise it was nigh impossible.


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    ¡°Let¡¯s ask her what she thinks, at least after learning some more about her own methods of scrying.¡± I told Lenore, finally starting to regain perception of my body, only to realise that my position had changed and familiar arms were now encircling me. I made a mental note that I was utterly defenseless when using that particular method of scrying, making its use somewhat dangerous, as I¡¯d always have to make sure that my body was guarded and safe.


    ¡°Thank you for having my back, Sigmir.¡± I quietly set, for a moment just enjoying the closeness.


    ¡°Always.¡± came the reply, whispered into my ear, pulling me just a little closer.


    After we had our moment, and a little longer, I got up, Sigmir moving with me, towards the nearby fire where Adra was still talking, passing on information to the gathered staff of Dura Firebringer.


    I waited for a few minutes, listening to Adra describe the fortifications we had seen further east and the tactics they had used to patrol until she got to an adequate stopping-point, at which I broke into the conversation.


    ¡°Shaman Firebringer, a few questions.¡± I spoke up, addressing her by what I thought was her title as a spellcaster. My questions were centered around a matter of magic, after all.


    ¡°You told me earlier that your method of information-acquisition uses intelligent spirits, just how intelligent are they?¡± I asked, when she nodded.


    ¡°How intelligent, you ask? They have their limits, obviously, but they work on intent and information supplied by my mind, maybe you should specify what you want to know?¡± she suggested, apparently not wanting to give away too much but telling me enough.


    ¡°In other words, if you were to tell them to follow the Centaurs, observe and maybe count them, you would know how many centaurs there are, whether they received centaur-reinforcements or maybe split their troops, one party moving away the plunder while the other leads us on a merry chase?¡± I asked, getting a bad feeling in my stomach, especially when I saw her nod to my question.


    ¡°What if they received other reinforcements, something you wouldn¡¯t find odd in the area in general but in a suspiciously high concentration and distribution?¡± I continued, not yet wanting to give away everything I knew.


    ¡°That depends, if it were Orcs, beastmen, centaurs or the like, they would notice. Out with it, what did you find?¡± she asked, her voice now rather forceful, if worried.


    For a moment, I considered leaving her hanging, to keep what I had learned to myself, trying to barter for an advantage down the road but as quick as I got the idea, I discarded it. Doing so would almost certainly sour the orcs towards my party, especially after trading for tangible supplies.


    ¡°In addition to the centaurs and wolves in their camp, there are a number of smaller groups of wolves scattered around their camp, all between six and nine wovles, none further than five-hundred meters from the camp, none closer than two-hundred. Nor are they near the access-path, well obscured by foliage and forest. If you were to attack the camp, you would instantly be in a trap, attacked from front and back by superior numbers.¡± I explained, watching her face fall for a second before an indecipherable poker face settled over her features.


    ¡°That does sound grave.¡± she said, her voice steady and calm, without excitement. ¡°Miss Adra, could you continue your description with my staff? I would like to get some more information from Miss Morgana.¡± she continued, looking between Adra and me.


    ¡°Certainly, I think the important things to know, the big picture, I already told you about. The tactical and operational details, I can discuss with your staff.¡± Adra replied, silently and not very stealthily urging me to agree as well.


    ¡°I agree as well. Closer comparison of our methods might yield additional information that could be useful for you. Or they just might expose what I expect to be a centaur trap, ready to be sprung on someone, maybe prepared for you and your troops.¡± I agreed, noticing that Sigmir was sticking closely to me, obviously planning to join Dura Firehand and myself.


    Dura Firehand led Sigmir and me away from the rest of the group, out of easy earshot and I noticed that her the confident, unconcerned mask slipped away from her face as the distance grew. Instead, she looked rather tired.


    ¡°What a mess.¡± she muttered, almost to herself. ¡°Please, tell me in detail what you have observed.¡± she asked, even her voice sounding less secure, worried.


    ¡°Certainly.¡± I agreed, again, before starting to speak, telling her of my observations and the conclusions I had drawn from them. It painted a truly worrying picture.

 Chapter 349

    ¡°What a mess, indeed.¡± Dura muttered, once I had fully explained what I had seen, even if I had been vague on my methods.


    ¡°I know you and your group planned to travel onwards tomorrow but would it be possible to remain with us for a day?¡± she asked, after thinking for a moment, giving me the impression she had been making a quick decision.


    I, in turn, shared a short look with Sigmir, who had been by my side the whole time. There was a frown on her face now and, over our link, I could feel a mix of emotions, some of which I could easily identify, worry mostly, but others were tangled up in a complicated mess that I didn¡¯t even try to comprehend.


    ¡°We can do that.¡± I told her, after getting a quick nod from Sigmir.


    ¡°Good, thank you. Would you mind telling me some more about the way you work magic? Your scrying seems to work similar to mine, only harnessing the powers of the night, instead of the sun. But there is also a cold, Ice-magic around you, shrouding you like a cloak. It is curious.¡± Dura said, in a bit of a non-sequitur.


    ¡°I suppose I can tell you a few things.¡± I agreed, before focusing on Sigmir. ¡°Love, do you want to sit in and listen or add your own observations to Adra¡¯s lecture?¡± I asked, my mind frantically trying to decide just how to describe my abilities, what to explain, what to conceal and what to conceal, either by leading Dura to her own, hopefully wrong, conclusions or by actively lying about things.


    ¡°I will stay with you.¡± Sigmir quickly assured me, to which I nodded happily.


    Instead of continuing to stand around, we moved to a couple of trees, which provided us with relatively comfortable backrests. For a moment, I considered conjuring up my throne but decided against it, partially because it wouldn¡¯t be as comfortable for Sigmir as it was for me, partially because sitting on a throne while Dura had to sit on the ground would be a little impolite. Or rather, a lot.


    As often, Sigmir pulled me onto her lap, her arms wrapped around me. It felt a little strange, sitting like this for a serious talk but at the end of the day, I felt good having her arms around me so I decided to simply accept it. By that time, I had somewhat of an idea what to tell, the Blood- and Mind-Magic were both something I would at most hint at, not coming out speaking of those skills. Mostly because they, in combination with my Outsider- and Ruthless-Traits might be enough to turn the Orcs hostile, something that would render our current efforts moot.


    Similarly, my freshly acquired Death-Magic shouldn¡¯t be mentioned, mainly because I hadn¡¯t managed to do more with it than turn flowers to dust. I might be able to do more, fuelling a spell provided by Lenore, but that was another aspect I wasn¡¯t sure how much I should tell about.


    On the other hand, speaking of my Ice-Magic and some of my Darkness-Magic shouldn¡¯t be giving away too much, I had shown some of it already. I had little doubt that an experienced Spellcaster would be able to guess at general usages of a particular magic, even if different people would be able to come up with different ways to go about things.


    That left my connection to Lenore and what she brought to the table. something she had undoubtedly noticed when we clashed earlier, but how much of it she had been able to understand was anyone¡¯s guess.


    ¡°I¡¯m curious, what I just saw didn¡¯t look like any magical tradition I have ever seen. Would you mind telling me which way you follow?¡± Dura asked, bringing my deliberations to a sudden end.


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    ¡°There is no tradition to follow, I make my own way.¡± I admitted, curious how she would react. And I wasn¡¯t disappointed, there was an obvious widening of her eyes, before she was able to hide her reaction.


    ¡°You¡¯re a sorceress? And, just to make sure, you are a Traveller?¡± she asked, her voice a little confused.


    ¡°Yes, to both questions.¡± I replied, leaving it at that, curious what she would make of my answer.


    ¡°Interesting. I might have to ask you more questions about that and your experience, I only talked a little to Harms and a little more to another Traveller, a Shaman who is not with us on this expedition. When I asked her how she became a shaman, she just told me it was what she had been meant to become. A little cryptic, maybe you can shed some light. And explain how you became a Sorceress, they are supposed to be rare.¡± Dura explained, her voice musing and a little distracted, maybe by memories.


    ¡°I doubt I can tell you a lot more. We are visitors to this world after all, each with their own tales and reasons, I wouldn¡¯t presume to judge the way another one of us sees the world. But how I became what I am now? I guess my past shaped me into what I am in the present.¡± I replied, trying to remain cryptical and not quite certain how to explain the idea of Road to Purgatory to someone native to Mundus. In many ways, it negated their existence or maybe degraded would be a better word. I was reasonably certain that Lenore had picked up on some of it from my mind but had never spoken of it, leaving me wondering. But I wouldn¡¯t want to make Sigmir question things, I didn¡¯t even want to question that part of my reality myself, certainly not with Sigmir¡¯s arms wrapped around me. I might consider it, further down the road, but for now I didn¡¯t see a reason to rock the boat, so to speak.


    ¡°Everyone has their secrets, no doubt about it. Would you consider telling me some of your abilities? Comparing our respective methods might enlighten the other, giving them ideas on their own. After all, Opposites complement each other, forming the sides of the endless Cycle.¡± Dura suggested, getting a nod from me in return. It sounded interesting, even if I didn¡¯t conscribe to the idea of an endless cycle. There would be no cycle, only an eternal, dark winter. Eternal Ice, never to thaw, Eternal Darkness, never to be broken by Dawn.


    Those were the concepts I had been focusing on with my magic, both absolute but complementing each other.


    ¡°We can do that, yes. I think the easiest to start would be to talk about my Ice-Magic, the cold of the freezing North and the endless winter.¡± I began, my eyes closed, remembering the distinct steps I had taken since coming to Mundus. How the environment I had found myself in had started to shape my ideas, of Ice and Snow, of freezing winds and biting cold.


    As I spoke, I felt my magic react and forcibly kept it under control. It wanted to flow out of my, swirl around me, but doing so while on Sigmir¡¯s lap would be painful for her.


    I didn¡¯t speak for long, didn¡¯t go into too deep of details, it was not needed. I only realised when I had finished that what I had done was the equivalent to using a chant to cast magic, using words to invoke the memories to distinct concepts, allowing you to use those concepts without fully understanding them. That was the purpose of chants after all, to allow someone to cast a spell you had come up with, without them needing to understand the concepts, and thus runes, that made up the spell. No wonder that my magic had reacted, I had quite literally tried to cast a spell. Only a very long, convoluted one, nothing anyone would ever try for serious magic. But maybe for ritual spellcasting it would be useful, some sort of ceremony or something like that.


    Finally, maybe a minute after I had finished, Dura cleared her throat, shaking her head a little, as if to clear out the cobwebs.


    ¡°Intriguing. I have seen some of the northern Lands, but never with your eyes, obviously. But now, let me tell you of my magic, of the burning heat of the fires, of the blazing light of the sun.¡± she said, her voice making it into something akin to a challenge.


    And a challenge it was, that much became obvious quite quickly. The tale she was weaving was one similar to my own in many ways, describing how she had always been fascinated with fire and watching the flames dance. How she took the first steps on her own, before becoming a Shaman, how she had watched the flames of the sun in the sky, basking in the blazing light. It was interesting to listen to, interesting and it made me want to smother her flames, to extinguish them, crush their embers into dust and scatter the ashes in the darkness.


    But that would have to wait, for now, working with her would hopefully be more useful.

 Chapter 350

    Talking to another spellcaster was always interesting. In the case of Dura Firebringer that was particularly true, due to the opposite nature of our powers and approach, something that allowed me to compare and contrast her ideas and concepts with my own.


    As such, it was late in the night when Sigmir and I finally returned to our camp, long after Adra had finished telling the orcs everything we knew about the centaurs, about their tactics and movements. Sigmir had remained quiet during my talk with the orcish shaman but I could feel a restlessness within her, getting worse as the evening progressed.


    When we got back to our part of the camp, Ylva growled, getting my attention.


    ¡°There¡¯s something we need to discuss.¡± she said, her growling voice quiet. It was still interesting to me, how the ability given to me by Lenore worked, allowing me to understand a language so alien to me, designed by minds quite different from my own. In this case, hearing the deep, worried meaning in the growl, gave me pause, making me wonder just what was that about, if it was the reason for the unease I had been feeling from Sigmir.


    ¡°Certainly.¡± I replied, waiting to see if she wanted to talk with just me, or if she wanted to include Adra and Rai as well. I took for granted that Sigmir would join us, their connection just as intimate as the one I shared with Lenore.


    In my mind, I felt Lenore stir, leaving her Hallow and appearing on my shoulder when Lenore gave a soft growl, indicating a wish for privacy.


    ¡°I will make sure nobody can overhear us.¡± Lenore said, her magic reaching out and causing the air around us to still, enveloping us in a zone of silence. Now, what had been a slight twinge of worry in my stomach turned into something more, just from the measures they were taking. Thinking fast, I decided to add my own to them.


    ¡°I¡¯ll help.¡± I muttered, reaching out and cloaking us in the shadows of night, making it hard to see and detect us. I was reasonably sure there was also a protection from scrying-magic but it would depend on the method used. But I simply hadn¡¯t time to come up with something better, flying by the seat of my pants, using instinct and intuition to cast my spells.


    ¡°Now, what is going on.?¡± I asked, after giving a glance to Sigmir, noticing that she looked similarly spooked.


    ¡°The black wolves, didn¡¯t you notice? At every turn they appear but you seem to think that the Centaurs are the threat.¡± Ylva growled, anger in her voice. Her words made me realise, she was right. Her pack had been attacked by black-furred wolves, Sigmir¡¯s tribe had black-furred hunting wolves, around Yaksha had been trouble with them and, as I thought about it, even the spellcaster who had attacked Kolyug had a few of them with him, only that they had likely been implanted with Eternal Embers, similarly to the bear we had fought.


    And that was only in the far north, the Centaurs that had been pushing into the windswept plains had been accompanied by black wolves, making me wonder if their attacks on the winter wolves had been as coincidental as I had thought they were, simply taking down a threat to their movement.


    ¡°You think they are connected?¡± I asked, my mind not quite ready to accept the conclusion Ylva implied. Her only response was a soft, slightly mocking, growl.


    ¡°Don¡¯t you think wolves are capable? Your species-bias is showing, a bias for those looking and thinking similarly to yourself.¡± Ylva asked, forcing me to re-evaluate my thinking. Had I, even after meeting the winter wolves and their den, after learning from them some new magic and hearing about their history, had I really been so blind that I simply discarded the possibility that the black wolves, working with the centaurs, did so as allies instead of domesticated animals? Simply because they looked like wolves, generally acted like wolves, so unlike anything I was accustomed to seeing as ¡°sapient¡±?


    Apparently I had.


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    ¡°I didn¡¯t put the pieces together either.¡± Lenore reassured me, while my mind was struggling to realign itself with the reality I had realised. It was curious, trying to look back and see if there had been other instances of me failing to notice something, just because I thought the creatures in question were simple beasts. It made me wonder, back in Yaksha, had the wolves attacked the city because the Wind Raptors had attacked it first or had wolves and wind-raptors communicated beforehand, making their plans in coordination.


    ¡°The question is, what does it mean, especially to us?¡± I asked, not just Lenore but Ylva and Sigmir.


    ¡°The most relevant thing should be that our foes aren¡¯t just the centaurs but quite possibly an alliance of two different species. We¡¯ll have to keep an eye out, and an ear and nose.¡± Ylva stated, her mind focused on the immediate, practical implications.


    ¡°More than two.¡± I blurted out, the video of the Grandmother and her fight near Kolyug fresh in my mind.


    ¡°Did I tell you about what the Grandmother did?¡± I asked, my mental equilibrium still a little disturbed. Despite getting nods from the others, I continued to recount what had been reported on the Forum, couching it in suitable terms for the natives but stressing that the being had looked Human, or at least humanoid, and been a powerful spellcaster. They had seen the attack against me, in the centaur-village, giving them a vague idea of the power involved. Not that I had a better idea, not from the short clip of the fight, if you could call it that, let alone an idea of the spellcaster¡¯s affiliation.


    ¡°That¡¯s worrying.¡± Lenore cawed, getting nods from Sigmir and Ylva in turn. Fighting a group of centaurs, that had been reasonable, at least as long as we were careful, not trying to fight too many at a time and picking our battles. None of us had thought we would get into open and direct conflict, just because it would be a nigh impossible task to push them back on our own, and that was with the centaurs alone. Now, it looked as if the centaurs were just one piece on the board, maybe not a pawn but most likely not the king. Maybe not even the queen, to stay in the chess-analogy.


    ¡°I should tell the orcs about this.¡± I decided, thinking that the changed strategic reality should be communicated to Dura Firebringer, if only because she might be able to shed more light onto the situation. But just as I was getting ready to dissolve the shroud of shadows around us, when Sigmir¡¯s arms pulled me in, hugging me close.


    ¡°Stay here. You can tell her tomorrow.¡± Sigmir muttered, her mouth near my ear. There was something in her voice, a tension that I couldn¡¯t put my finger on, that made me accept her words. To signal my acceptance, I simply snuggled into her embrace, pulling her arms a little tighter, while nodding my head.


    ¡°What do you think we should do about the black wolves?¡± I quietly asked the others, curious what they thought. Part of me wanted to simply wash my hands off the whole mess, getting my group away from the area, letting the locals deal with it.


    ¡°Revenge.¡± Ylva growled, the idea that the wolves that had originally attacked her pack being part of a larger group obviously raising her hackles.


    ¡°You weren¡¯t interested in hunting them down before, what changed?¡± I asked, curious.


    ¡°Before, I thought they were simply migrating, like packs sometimes do. That, I could understand. I wouldn¡¯t like it, but at the end of the day, it is part of life.¡± she explained, before her tone shifted, the growling deep and a little scary. ¡° But if they were moving, not driven by hunger and necessity but by greed and ambition, then I want to get even. In some way, whether it is killing some of their allies, whether it is killing some of them, whether it is spoiling their plans, I don¡¯t care how but I want to pay them back somehow.¡±


    Once again, I was reminded that wolves were a highly social species and that Ylva, despite her great loyalty and friendship to Lenore that had made her join us, had been deeply connected to her pack. Leaving it, choosing Lenore, had stung her and I was seeing an echo, a memory of that anger.


    ¡°The wolves your tribe kept, when did that start? Was it something you always did or was it a recent development?¡± I asked Sigmir, curious if there might be a connection. If I wanted to acquire control over land, working together with the locals, maybe by giving them what amounted to trained personnel, sounded like the sensible way to act.


    Now, I could feel Sigmir tense up. Before, she had only been determined to set things right for her companion but deep down, she still carried a grudge for what happened to her. Sure, we had killed the ones responsible but it was the traditional way of her people to carry out a vengeance to the end, salting the earth and everything. And if there was a power who had helped those responsible, she would want to get some retribution against them as well, even if I hoped I would be able to convince her that moving on was the sensible thing to do. At the end of the day, without them, we wouldn¡¯t have met, certainly not in the circumstances we had met in.


    And who knew what would have happened without that. In a way, I was glad for the events, they meant Sigmir was with me.

 Chapter 351

    Apparently, orcish was a good language to curse in. The invective spewing from Dura Firebringer after I explained to her our theory about the centaurs being just one part of a larger force was impressive, the translation-ability I gained from Lenore working overtime to not only translate the words but also the underlying concepts, allowing me to understand nuances that normally would have been hidden to me. At the same time, I noticed that the fires the orcs had set up to cook breakfast over were starting to be affected, their flames jumping and sparking. Even the very air itself was getting infused by her anger, heat and sparks creating an illusion of fire, forcing Lenore and me to work overtime to keep a pleasantly cool air around my group.


    ¡°You should not shoot the messengers, Shaman Firebringer.¡± I coldly stated, trying to take the wind out of the angry orc¡¯s sails. For a moment, she glared at me, the air around me flaring up even stronger, and I felt myself pressured once more. Luckily, it lasted only for a moment, not long enough to overwhelm Lenore and me, not together, the orc closing her eyes and taking a deep breath, reigning in her emotions.


    ¡°I apologize, again. You are right, attacking those bringing unpleasant information only causes people to hide such information.¡± she sighed, before speaking in a serious manner. ¡°Thank you for bringing your observations to me, I will take them under consideration. However, we have our missions and it will be carried out, to the best of our ability.¡± she stated, her voice loud and confident, projected to carry to the other orcs.


    ¡°That said, I would appreciate it if you would stay with our group, I might have an offer for you later today. I need to confirm what you told me yesterday night, before planning further.¡± she added, speaking in a quiet, carefully pitched voice that only we and maybe her closest advisors could hear.


    Giving a glance to the others, I could see that Ylva wanted to stay, an expression mirrored on Sigmir¡¯s face, even if marred by a bit of concern. Adra and Rai seemed relatively indifferent, making me think that their only interest was in power that was to be gained here. There might be a major quest to be gained, one that made another day following behind the orcs worth our while, even beyond getting revenge for Ylva.


    In addition, I had a quiet hope that we might be able to catch an even more powerful black wolf, allowing me to repeat the draining-spell that had allowed Ylva to cross the first Divide. It seemed a little too easy, catching and draining a wolf, but it might help her on her path to and across the second Divide. Even if not, the chance to study and experiment on what she had called Divine Blood was something I had on my personal list, simply because of the awe-inspiring audacity. I wanted to know how far I could go on Mundus, how far I would be able to push. And what better boundary to push against than the one between mortal and divine?


    ¡°I think we can stay with you for another day.¡± I allowed, giving the orc a nod. It was interesting to see the difference between the confidence she projected to her people, while obviously not having it in a smaller setting. A setting that, for some reason, seemed to include us, despite being outsiders. Or maybe because we were, she didn¡¯t need to bother trying to motivate and lead us, we were here for our own reasons, reasons she would only care if they came info conflict with her mission.


    She nodded back, before turning to the fire that had quietly been growing behind her and focused on it. I felt Lenore¡¯s interest perk, while she looked at the shaman through my eye, using her own vision to augment what I was perceiving.


    Once again, my own senses told me little of quantitative nature, but I could taste the heat of the sun on my tongue, like gargling pure, hot-chili sauce, distinctly unpleasant and painful, making me long for a glass of milk, I didn¡¯t have any on hand, but at a gentle prod from Lenore, I decided on the next best thing, using my Ice-Magic to create a glass while filling it with Liquid Moonlight and taking a sip. The cooling sensation was instant, but a little too powerful, forcing me to take control over the Astral Power in my mouth, to keep it at a pleasant level.


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    But while I soothed my palate from the influx of foreign magic, Lenore¡¯s sight proved, once again, to be a superior tool for analysing magic. While I wasn¡¯t able to comprehend the method used, I was able to watch as Dura Firebringer reached into the fire with her magic, infusing it and using it as a medium to call something forth. It was something I wouldn¡¯t be able to duplicate, certainly not with fire, but made me curious. From what I was able to gather, she was creating shells from pure fire, almost something similar to Eternal Ember, just not as stable, while binding something into it, in the process of creation. Those had to be the spirits she had talked about, spirits of fire, or the sun or something like that.


    Lenore was just as curious as I was, wondering about her own existence, a mix of spirit and flesh-and-blood, just like Ylva was. It was something we had never talked about, but seeing Dura Firebringer create spirit-golems in front of us made me wonder. It also made me wonder about the spirit-golems we had been given, the horses we had for half a year, and the difference in craft. Those horses, in their active state, had been indistinguishable from real horses but the birds made by Dura were obviously less sophisticated. Sure, they had the general shape of birds, but it was obvious that they were crafted from magic and, even as they took to the air, I was able to watch them slowly degrade. They wouldn¡¯t last for more than a day but then, they were not made to last, just a quick and easy way to scout out her enemies. I filed my observations away for later, wondering if I would be able to copy what she had done. There had been something lingering in the shadows, maybe there was potential hidden there. But that was experimentation for later, when we were not in the middle of an army.


    ¡°It will be interesting to see what those things can find out.¡± I said, musing mostly to myself, taking another sip of Liquid Moonlight, finding the freezingly cold experience to be quiet interesting and pleasant. Maybe I should make it a daily ritual, my own, personal morning beverage, better than any tea.


    ¡°The Shaman will have given them orders to look for the wolves, hopefully they are smart enough to make them work.¡± Lenore replied in my mind, amused at my antics, while studying the way I was keeping the magic I had ingested from harming me. It mostly worked because it was my magic and I already had Ice Astral Power flowing through me, allowing me to recirculate most of the power involved. Not that most people would be able to discern that, only seeing me drink something that would kill most people in short order, if they were able to realise what I was drinking at all.


    Dura, quite obviously, was able to understand what I had in my mug, her eyes going wide in an almost comical display of surprise when she turned around, after sending off seven of her bird-shaped spirit-golems. Trying to project an air of nonchalance, I simply took another sip, swallowing the freezing liquid while reabsorbing it, not letting it cause any trouble. The gesture had the desired effect, her eyes went even wider than before, before she managed to get her face back under control, barking orders at the other orcs to break camp and get ready to move.


    ¡°We will move in fifteen minutes.¡± she said, a slight quake in her voice, as I, quite deliberately keeping eye-contact, drank my mug almost empty, leaving just a rest behind. Once it was only that rest, I magically shattered the mug, turning it into a cloud of diamond dust, swirling around my hand, while the liquid moonlight spilled on the ground, freezing a decently sized patch, maybe a meter across.


    ¡°Certainly, we can be ready by then and follow behind.¡± I agreed, before turning around, walking back to our camp, just to make sure we didn¡¯t leave anything behind.


    ¡°Do you think we could one-up those sorry things she calls birds?¡± Lenore asked in my mind, intent on showing the shaman just who was the better spellcaster. She had us in levels and combined with the environmental advantage she enjoyed during the day, that gave her the edge in raw power. The fact that she had a teacher gave her an edge in tradition, her spells having been developed over generations. But neither Lenore nor I were willing to concede in any other aspects of magic, both of us wanting to demonstrate her that her fire would be snuffed out in the endless, freezing night.

 Chapter 352

    I had to give it to the orcs, they were disciplined. While they were individually relaxed during their march, the scouts and other parts of their formation were serious and vigilant, ready to spring into action at a moment''s notice, buying the troops the time to react to a potential threat. In addition, despite the relatively rough terrain, the speed they put out was quite fast, nothing truly special for individuals but for a small army, moving in a loose formation through a forest, I was impressed.


    During the day, Lenore and I were discussing potential ways to accomplish the various objectives we could define, the my personal ones, the objectives of my group-members and finally, the objectives of the orcs. Some of them were slightly contradictory and needed to be weighted against each other and a path planned. The most obvious objectives were my own, I wanted to enjoy my time on Mundus and I wanted an advantage when the game went live, something that would allow me to reconnect with Sigmir. That idea, of being severed from Sigmir, made my mind recoil for a moment, the reminder of the inevitable distinctly unpleasant. I quickly shoved it to the back of my mind, as something to be dealt with at a later time, focusing on the more immediate objectives, the things that needed to happen in the short term to achieve my long-term goal.


    In the short-term, keeping my party together and alive was important, as was gaining more power. The two objectives were a little contradictory, as gaining power always came with a risk but that was just the nature of the beast. We would have to continue to take risks, hopefully we wouldn¡¯t bite off more than we could chew. If worse came to worse, I would have to sacrifice myself, giving the others time to escape. I just had to make sure Sigmir was aware that leaving me behind to save the rest was perfectly valid, as I would be able to return, especially if I regularly created Ice-Cottages, setting my respawn-point there.


    The objectives of my party-members were a little less clear to me, I was reasonably certain that Sigmir simply wanted to be with me, without any true long-term goals. Ylva, on the other hand, was with us because of Lenore and the friendship she had struck up with us, even while she wanted to pay back the wolves that had decimated her pack. Lenore, similarly to me, wanted to learn, to sate her curiosity and to gain power. In that, she was quite simple and amused when I pointed it out. In many ways, we were motivated by the same things, maybe that was why we got along so well.


    Adra and Rai, both of them had originally some long-term goals, Rai had wanted to gain fame, power and fortune, so he would be able to return to his village, with pride in his step and a straight back. That might have changed, especially when considering his blossoming relationship with Adra but I wasn¡¯t sure. Adra, on the other hand, was looking for what she called her destiny, a tree to bond with for the rest of her existence. At the same time, she, like the rest of us, was after power, wanting to have as much as possible for the bonding, as it apparently would empower her tree, giving her major advantages down the road.


    What Adra didn¡¯t know, but I did, was that Kallista, the ancient Dryad living in the grove around Tegi, was under the impression that Adra was the reincarnation of her own partner, lost eons ago. I had no idea how much truth was there to that, if Adra¡¯s memories would return at some point and how that would change her. It was something that neither Lenore nor I knew how to discuss with Adra, deciding to put it off, until we had more information or any hints that it was actually happening.


    And finally, the orcish objectives, the least important to me. They wanted to hunt down the centaurs, rescue their people, recover the loot and make sure that the centaurs wouldn¡¯t attack again. Helping them seemed to be the right thing to do, not because of any grandiose, righteous reasons, I didn¡¯t really care, but because it would cement us as allies to the orcs, allowing us to gain more information, especially about our way forward. Maybe even something about local places of power, dungeons or similar things, or the orcish ways of magic. Those were all things I was personally interested in, while Ylva was after the same beings anyway. So, helping them was in our interest. We would just have to make sure that the risks involved weren¡¯t incalculable high.


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    ¡°The problem is, the centaur raid seems to be a trap, maybe simply for orcs in general, maybe for Dura Firebringer in particular. If the trap only has one layer, trying to draw them into attacking the Centaurs while leaving them open to an attack by the wolves, our presence might be enough to change things, especially after warning the orcs. But if the trap has another layer, maybe a few more powerful centaurs hidden amongst their number, just waiting for the orcs to engage we might be in trouble.¡± I explained my caution to Lenore.


    ¡°I can see what you mean. We shouldn¡¯t allow ourselves to be caught in a large group, our best chance is likely stealth. Both you and Rai should be able to conceal someone else, especially if the enemy doesn¡¯t know that they have to search. Once they are aware of us, it would be a lot more difficult to hide again.¡± Lenore replied, an undercurrent of determination in her mind. She wanted to help the orcs a lot more than I did, or rather, she wanted to accomplish Ylva¡¯s goal, while I felt caution was warranted. The centaurs weren¡¯t some mindless zombies, happily running into their doom, they had their own tactics and stratagems.


    ¡°Which we might be able to use to our advantage, their intelligence, maybe even the tactics they want to use against the orcs.¡± Lenore suggested, reacting to my mostly unformed thoughts.


    ¡°In what way?¡± I asked, curious what she had in mind.


    ¡°From what we learned further north, centaurs still share some traits with horses, once their fight- or flight-instinct switches to flight, they will run for quite a distance before reassessing the situation, right? And, in addition, they feel the most secure when in a group, isolation seemed to make them incredibly nervous and easily spooked.¡± Lenore reasoned, causing me to agree.


    ¡°Now, wasn¡¯t one of the traits you gained that your mind-magic would now carry a trace of the solitude you faced? It almost broke you and certainly changed you, how would a centaur react to the feeling in the dark of night? Large scale, low-powered mind-magic might be the way to go, maybe linking it with Darkness-Magic, maybe with Ice-Magic, a mist that takes away their sight, muffles smell and sound, driving up the isolation. That might break them before they can ever think about fighting, don¡¯t you think?¡± Lenore explained and I felt fascinated by the idea.


    I wasn¡¯t too happy that I hadn¡¯t managed to improve much on my mind magic, partially because of a lack of test-subjects but the centaurs might be a worthy target. I felt Lenore¡¯s idea had quite a bit of merit, my mind starting to form individual parts of a spell like the one she had described. I felt her mind join mine, getting absorbed in a frenzy of creative tinkering, barely keeping aware of the world around us, just to keep from running into a tree. That would be a tad embarrassing.


    It was late afternoon when the orcs surprisingly came to a halt, we had been quickly moving for the whole day, only stopping for a short time at noon, and there was still a lot of daylight left. But my confusion was quickly cleared when a small fire was prepared and I noticed the signs of spellcasting again, Shaman Firebringer using it to do something. What, I wasn¡¯t able to discern but didn¡¯t need to, the question was quickly answered when two of the bird-like spirit-golems returned, landing in the flames, causing them to flare.


    Luckily, I didn¡¯t have to stew in my curiosity for long, wanting to know what the shaman had learned, we were soon asked to join her, for a sharing of information.


    Her staff, the same orcs Adra had briefed the day before, were assembled around the fire and, just from the serious look on Dura Firebringer¡¯s face, I could see that the news she had was not too bright.


    ¡°It seems you were right. We are facing a force superior in numbers and similar in individual power. Normally, I would be able to cause devastation by attacking with an overwhelming first-strike but the distributed nature of the wolf-packs and the simple fact that it would incinerate the people we are supposed to save makes that difficult, if not impossible.¡± Dura explained, her face turning grim as she spoke.


    ¡°We will have to attack nonetheless, sacrificing both our people and the things stolen from us, unless you and your group can come up with a way around that.¡± she added, causing me to nod in understanding. While I wasn¡¯t about to commit to anything, certainly not some sort of suicide-attack, my discussion with Lenore had given me some ideas. And, while I didn¡¯t care about the implied guilt-trip, I felt that we might get a few valuable concessions out of helping. But that would all be irrelevant if the tactical situation wasn¡¯t something we could make use of.

 Chapter 353

    ¡°So, tell me, what is the situation? I¡¯ll assume you made camp early for a reason?¡± I asked, needing to know the tactical situation to make informed decisions.


    ¡°The Centaurs made camp, maybe an hour ahead of us. On the face of it, they made a major tactical mistake, moving into a valley, a quite steep one. My scrying revealed a few guards on the ridges but they are few and far between, posted on their own and relatively easily dispatched and silenced, if necessary.¡± she began creating a simple map in the earth, to illustrate her points.


    ¡°One side of the valley is quite steep and very uneven, making it impossible to move up or down quickly, the other is less steep and grassy, making it easier to move on, especially down hill. Without knowing what we know, I would see it as a perfect opportunity to charge down, hitting the centaur-camp with overwhelming momentum and routing them. Even if the charge were to fail, my people would be able to fight them, using the valley they are in to keep them boxed in, negating their advantage when it comes to mobility.¡± she continued, highlighting the north-western face of the valley, first, the south-eastern side second.


    ¡°It¡¯s a trap.¡± I stated the obvious, hearing Lenore snicker in my mind, replaying the fish-face she had seen in my mind on an earlier day.


    ¡°Obviously. It looks like a good tactical situation, as if the enemy made a mistake, that they assumed everyone would find moving down both slopes difficult, giving them a quite secure position to defend. As long as their guards are vigilant, it would be impossible to block the mouth of the valley, boxing them in, especially as it is heavily guarded. Even if it were to be blocked, they could use the length of the valley to gather momentum, breaking through with a massive charge. They might lose people but their losses would be comparatively mild.¡± she concluded, making me nod in understanding. So far, she had described what the centaurs wanted us to see and think.


    ¡°And the real situation?¡± I prodded, when she didn¡¯t continue after a few seconds.


    ¡°I had two of my spirits keep close track of the wolves, as best as they can. Would it surprise you that the wolves are mostly in the south-eastern part of the forest?¡± she asked, a grim smile on her face.


    ¡°That makes sense. They hide there, you charge into the valley, happy that your foe made a mistake, crashing into the centaurs. Just afterwards, the wolves, using the same momentum you used, crash into you, like a hammer onto an anvil, with you being the hammered metal in between. Even running away would be nigh impossible for your people, they would have to climb up the slope and the wolves could quite easily run them down there.¡± I nodded, before continuing.


    ¡°Now that we know our enemy¡¯s plan, how can we use that knowledge to break them? ¡°For now, I¡¯ll assume that we strike as soon as possible, taking advantage of their situation, not trying to attack them tomorrow, when they are on the march and will be able to use the full mobility of the centaurs if you attack in the open or face the wolves in their natural habitat, the forest. Neither appeals to me but your opinion might differ.¡± I explained before pausing for a moment, remembering an incredibly famous quote and deciding to make myself appear wise.


    ¡°It is said that, if you know your enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles.¡± I added, looking at Dura. ¡°I know myself and my group, but not you or your troops. What would you plan, and which additional resources you need to make it work?¡± I asked, not wanting to give too much information on our capabilities, especially as friends could turn to foes quite quickly.


    ¡°A good saying, yes. I know myself and I know what I want to accomplish. Driving the centaurs out of their camp, separating them into smaller groups so they can¡¯t make a mass-charge out of the valley, that would be important. I think the best bet for me would be to incinerate the defenses at the mouth of the valley, before using as much of my power to break the upcoming charge. If that were to work, my troops would have to defend against the wolves, likely attacking our flanks and the remains of the centaur-charge. We would win, but the casualties are a lot higher than I would like, especially considering that we would most likely fail part of our objective, retrieving our kidnapped people and the loot taken by the centaurs. My attacks into the valley would necessarily be poorly controlled, focused on power more than anything.¡± she explained, creating the outline of her plan on her crude map. She was projecting to approach the mouth of the valley from the east, avoiding most of the wolves in the forest, before hitting the guards from above. It seemed like a sound strategy, one that had a good chance of working, unless the unexpected happened


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    But what would my group be able to do to improve their chances?


    ¡°I see two ways to help you, two different approaches, if you will.¡± I began, quickly making plans with Lenore. One of our ideas was somewhat risky to us but had a much higher chance to yield excellent results, while the other was less risky in some ways but the results would be mediocre.


    ¡°My group should be able to stealthily approach from the west, carefully making our way down the slope, and cause a massive disturbance in the centaur-camp. If everything goes as planned, the centaurs will be forced to abandon the camp, running into your position, hopefully without the benefit of a formation and momentum. At the same time, I would be able to prevent some of your attacks from penetrating too deep into the valley, protecting the taken people.¡± I explained, not going into detail of the plan Lenore and I had cooked up. Not that the plan was finalized yet, with a few burrs to get rid off.


    ¡°However, that plan has a high risk for my group, and I would expect an appropriate level of compensation.¡± I added, looking her straight in the eye.


    ¡°Another option would be that we move with your group. Once you incinerate the defenders at the mouth of the valley, I can set up some crude fortifications made from Ice, they won¡¯t be too sturdy or last very long, even with the cooler nights but they should be useful. In addition, I can slow down the centaurs on the last stretch, making the ground slippery, maybe even muddy, causing their footing to worsen.¡± I said, neither plan made me too happy. They both had risks, the one obvious risks, the other hidden ones.


    If we went with the sneak-attack, trying to use the idea Lenore and I had been working on during the afternoon, the obvious risk would be that we were caught and in serious trouble. I felt that it was more a challenge to our abilities, especially with both Rai and me able to use the darkness to shroud the group. In addition, if things went bad we would be able to simply decide to abandon the orcs, the likely very flashy actions of Dura Firebringer taking the centaurs¡¯ attention, allowing us to slip away. But the risk being obvious gave us an advantage when it came to negotiating compensation, by creating two groups working independently, one might be able to argue that both groups were contributing the same, giving the four of us the same worth as the small army of orcs.


    The other option, with us in the middle of the orcs was, in a way, just as risky. We would have to rely on the orcs to carry the day, or we would face the full brunt of wolves and centaurs, leaving us in dire straits. There would be no attempt to quietly slip away into the night under the cover of fog and darkness, not in the middle of a pitched battle. In addition, it meant that both Dura Firebringer and Harms would be able to witness more of my magic than I might want to show them.


    ¡°What you say makes sense.¡± Dura Firebringer admitted, looking at the simple map, still in the earth between us.


    ¡°What kind of compensation would you ask for, depending on the two plans? I can only promise you so much and deliver beforehand even less, simply due to the fact that I only carry some of my personal funds and items with me. If you want more, you¡¯d have to make your way to the Brighthollow, there you could get the remainder of your rewards.¡± she asked, her voice still pondering, trying to figure out which plan would be the better one.


    I, on the other hand, simply gestured for Adra to step forward, she was, quite frankly, far better when it came to negotiations, I could hold my own in a conversation when I could flesh out my words in advance but the quick, flowing style of haggling was something I greatly struggled with. But, as I was once again reminded, Adra was quite good at it, fighting with Dura Firebringer over potential compensation, monetary or otherwise, tooth and nail, almost as hard as the fighting would be later in the night.


    I, on the other hand, simply leaned back into Sigmir, enjoying the show as the two went at it.

 Chapter 354

    The negotiations had been fast and furious, both sides trying to get useful concessions, while keeping in mind that time was of the essence, that we needed to make use of the night, if we wanted to get things done. They quickly agreed that the plan that kept both groups separated was the better one, that bringing a group of unknown elements into the middle of a difficult battle was a good way to get everyone killed. I could live with that, liking the other plan better anyway, mostly due to the increased security for us. I had fewer concerns with being able to get my group to safety by slipping quietly into the night, compared to the frenzy of a pitched battle.


    As they negotiated terms, I noticed that Adra focused on trying to get the agreement, and thus the quest we should receive, to say that we were only obliged to do our part, not that the orcs had to actually win the day, while Dura wanted that part to remain part of the deal, so that her tribe wouldn¡¯t have to pay, if things went south.


    Still, with the need for a quick agreement hanging in the air, both sides conceded some points, shaking hands on their deal after just fifteen minutes. With the handshake, I received the alert that we had gained a quest.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="2">Quest Alert!</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="2">Support the Orcish Nightraid!</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="1">Quest Difficulty</td>


    <td colspan="1">Medium</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="2">You are to support the Brighthallow-Orcs, under Leadership of Dura Firebringer, in their Night-Attack against the Centaurs and their allies. Your part is to scatter the centaur camp.


    Centaur-Camp disturbed: 0/1</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="1">Quest Reward</td>


    <td colspan="1">75 Gold-Coins, Information on a Place of Power</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="1">Bonus Quest Reward, if Dura Firebringer survives the attack</td>


    <td colspan="1">Magical Artifact out of Dura Firebringer¡¯s personal possession.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    ¡°Good. How long do you need to get your people into position?¡± I asked, once the negotiations were finished.


    ¡°We need to move quietly and carefully. I would suggest that you start your part of the attack one hour after midnight, you are able to tell that time, are you not?¡± she asked, not quite answering my question but giving me the necessary information.


    ¡°I will. You will notice when we began our attack, as the centaur-camp will be plunged into darkness.¡± I told her, my lips curling into a grin. Maybe they would even be able to hear their screams. Hopefully, they would.


    Shaking off the dark thoughts I had regarding the centaurs, I focused on the present, noticing a slightly disturbed look on Dura Firebringer¡¯s face.


    ¡°Then we will speak on the morrow. May fortune favour you.¡± she wished us, before giving out orders to organise her people.


    ¡°That means we should get going. I would like to be in position well before the orcs are, just in case.¡± I told the others, knowing that even a little bit of rest between the march of the day and the fight of the night would be useful, possibly allowing us to prevail where we would otherwise falter. But here, in the middle of the orcish troops, our rest wouldn¡¯t be very restful.


    And so, we made sure that our directions to the centaur-camp were as accurate as possible before setting out, leaving our allies behind.


    As we walked, after leaving the orcs behind, my mind was going over the potential troubles for the nightly operation. The biggest fear were that the centaurs had hidden trump-cards, something that neither the FIrebringer¡¯s nor my own scrying had revealed. In addition, the lay of the land was crucial for our own movement, approach and execution of Lenore and my scheme had to work out or we would be in trouble.


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    ¡°I¡¯ll take a look.¡± Lenore suggested. Now that we had left the orcs behind, the possibility of a showdown with the shaman was greatly reduced, giving us the freedom to split again. Neither Lenore nor I had liked the idea to be without the other, while in close vicinity of her, her mere presence ruffling our feathers. Even Lenore was starting to dislike the Sun and what it represented, the searing heat, preferring the cool darkness of the night. It was calming, to be shrouded in darkness, sheltered be the night¡¯s loving embrace.


    ¡°Be careful, will you?¡± I asked, knowing that only carelessness would get her caught. Otherwise, she would be just one bird out of many, her shape and regular size giving her an advantage that no magic could match. People tended to overlook what they were used to seeing. With another, reassuring thought, Lenore left her Hallow, quickly taking wing, leaving me with my thoughts and considerations.


    I quite liked the idea we had been working on earlier, trying to use an advanced version of the magic we had used quite some time before, during our attack on the dryads of Tegi. When we had tracked them down, in their reinforced valley, using mist and mind-magic to confuse their senses, giving us time to fight the dryad herself. If we were able to use something similar, only that instead of confusing their senses, the spell would make them feel isolated, alone and afraid. It should work well with the recent upgrade to my mind magic, while targeting what I thought was a psychological weak-point of the centaurs, that part of their nature was still herd-animal, one that was more likely to run than fight if faced with a predator.


    My biggest problem was that Mind Magic, at least what I had learned of it so far, didn¡¯t really lend itself to thorough planning, few runes could be used, improvisation was key. Tapping into deep emotions, projecting them outwards was a useful tool and I had no doubt that the memory of the feeling I had when crossing the second divide would be useful but at the same time, I wondered if there was something better to be used.


    As I was considering the best ways to invoke feelings of fear and terror, Lenore returned as we were about to make camp for a time, not quite near the centaurs but not very far either. Their wolven allies would be unable to easily detect us but we could get to them with a quick march or short flight, as Lenore had just demonstrated.


    She returned to her Hallow, sharing her memory with me, so that I would be able to know what we were dealing with. She had focused on two different topics, the centaurs within the camp, the feeling and perception she got from them and the camp itself.


    The centaurs seemed to be ordinary, no super-powerful centaurs, at least not that she could detect them with her sight, one of the better tools we had for judging the power of someone. The only way she could have gleaned more information would have been by directly using the Observe-skill, something that would have been noticed for sure.


    Other than the cenatus, the wolves in the forest were difficult to spot and even more difficult to judge when it came to their strength. Lenore was reasonably sure she had found the groups we had to take care of on our approach, but we would have to be careful. Luckily, we came from a direction they weren¡¯t covering too well, simply due to the terrain making it difficult to get into their camp from there.


    The camp, on the other hand, was a lot less planned out and rigid compared to the one we had seen before, it was clear that it wasn¡¯t planned to last more than a day. But some of the structures we were seeing were similar and, as we shared ideas, Lenore was the first to realise that I had missed a crucial detail when trying to think of a way to invoke the feelings of fear in the Centaurs.


    They had posted guards. If we were able to capture one of them, maybe using the sleep-magic I had used a few times before, I would have an excellent source of fear to use, it came even with a small supply of Astral Power, ready for the taking.


    ¡°That is one vicious idea.¡± Lenore noted, approval in her voice. She didn¡¯t like the centaurs any more than I did and using one of their own had so much potential to understand more about the magic we were using, how emotions were processed in the complex network between the areas we had dubbed Body, Mind and Soul.


    ¡°We could use our Avatar-State, just to find out what has changed after we both have crossed the second divide.¡± I suggested, looking forward to seeing the world even clearer, by joining my perception even closer with Lenore¡¯s.


    ¡°Mhm, I like the idea.¡± she agreed, the idea to experience something new intriguing to her, too.


    With most of our plans made, we settled in for a quiet, careful rest, waiting for the appointed time to make our move.

 Chapter 355

    After a light meal, a shower and a little exercise, I logged back into Road to Purgatory, a grin on my face. I couldn¡¯t wait to see what the night would bring, whether my plans would come to fruition, whether the magic Lenore and I had cooked up would work as designed. Testing yourself against the unknown was a thrill I was enjoying greatly, a challenge similar and yet unlike any I had ever experienced. Before, when playing Craft of War, I had enjoyed mapping out the many, albeit ultimately limited, paths our enemies could take, the tactics they could apply and what I was able to do to counter them. It had been a constant challenge to plan ahead, to be that one step before them and frustrate their efforts. But in Road to Purgatory, the paths that could be taken, the steps that were possible, were more varied by orders of magnitude. And yet, when in my Avatar, I enjoyed actively looking for patterns, my mind flitting around like a bird, trying to cope with a chaos that would normally render me catatonic. It was exhilarating. Giving it up, even for a short time, might be as difficult as leaving Sigmir behind, without knowing if I would be able to meet her again.


    ¡°There you are. If we want to take out the wolves quietly, we need to start moving soon.¡± Lenore said, as I manifested in my Hallow, with her already waiting for me.


    ¡°Excellent. Let¡¯s make the show impressive, I have a feeling the Gods are watching over us.¡± I replied, thinking of the short message I had sent to Pantheon, making them aware of the possibly excellent footage they might get. I was planning to make a recording myself but at the end of the day, my limited viewpoint was problematic for wide-range magic, normal sight simply not showing the full extent of the events. I could feel Lenore¡¯s curiosity at my statement but kept quiet, letting her make inferences on her own.


    Leaving her Hallow, I took up a spot between Sigmir and Adra, both checking their gear one last time before we would set out.


    ¡°Let us move, quickly and quietly. The better the initial part of the night works out, the less risk we are under later. So, let¡¯s make sure we are silent like ghosts, invisible like shadows in the night.¡± I softly said to all three of my companions, getting nods in return.


    With a final nod, I started to form magic in my mind, the darkness of the forest around me coalescing into a dark cape, my efforts soon supported by Rai, chanting under his breath. At the same time, I felt Lenore reach out, appearing on my shoulder and taking the wind under her control, muffling any sound we might make while Adra joined Rai in chanting, albeit something different. Her magic was based on Nature and in this case, she drew upon the instincts of predators stalking their prey, silent and deadly, infusing us with them so we wouldn¡¯t make any sound. Her magic was one of amplification, using our individual proficiencies in the stealthy hunt as a basis, boosting it to far greater heights.


    Our preparations complete, we started moving without a sound, Lenore¡¯s knowledge of the terrain and position of our foes allowed me to take the lead, while Sigmir, joined with Ylva, was keeping an ear out for trouble, her hearing not impeded by Lenore¡¯s magic.


    It didn¡¯t take us long, maybe a quarter of an hour, to cross the short distance between us and the small pack of wolves that was keeping an ear out for trouble, two of them sleeping, one resting and two keeping watch for trouble. They were good but not good enough, of that I was certain.


    Under the cover of darkness, shadows wrapped around us all like a cloak, we quickly communicated with gestures, making sure that each of us had their target, to take out instantly and above all silently. If the wolves raised the alarm, we would be in trouble, maybe enough trouble to force us to flee, abandoning our allies and quest. Unacceptable.


    Adra and I had the task to take out the two wary wolves, while Rai would step through the shadows, making sure that the sleeping wolves would never wake. A quiet nod, a count to three and, at precisely the same time, a glittering spear of sparkling ice and an arrow, sheathed in azure light were let loose, just as Rai vanished in darkness and Sigmir threw an axe with all her considerable strength. Our attacks struck true, just as planned, the clueless wolves easy targets, just as Rai was stepping out of the shadows, his blades already in a downward motion, stabbing into the wolves¡¯ spines without hesitation or mercy. Just as I had taught him.


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    The loudest noise caused by our attack was the meaty chunk of Sigmir¡¯s axe splitting the resting wolve¡¯s skull, killing it instantly. The other wolves died just as quickly, without any noise louder than a whimper, causing me to smile widely. The first, simple step had worked out just fine, the wolves posing no challenge, not to a party that was more than twice their level, attacking from concealment and with ample experience how to kill wolves.


    Adra, Sigmir and I shared a quick nod, while Rai made sure that the wolves were dead, mostly unnecessary but making sure that an enemy was dead had been a lesson driven into him by Sigmir, that there was no easier way to die than miss an enemy playing dead, only to stab you in the back once you turned away from them.


    Some of the spells on us now broken, we quietly made our way to the edge of the forest, near the valley the centaurs had made their camp in. From our position, we could see two centaur guards, one close, one further away. There might have been others, hidden in the darkness, but none of us were able to see them, even with the excellent senses some of us had.


    A gesture to Adra made sure that she would take care of the distant guard while Lenore and I started to weave a tendril of shadow, slowly creeping towards the closer guard, crawling around her leg and up her body, wrapping around the top of her head, like a crown. It wasn¡¯t a truly aggressive spell, especially not with the gentle care Lenore and I had taken in the casting, it was merely a sleep-spell, something we had used a few times already. Conspiring with the centaurs exhaustion after a day of marching, my magic was slowly seeping into her mind, a cool sensation, soothing in the lingering heat of the day, making her drowsy and slowly welcome the embrace of sleep, her body starting to sway even as more of my magic made sure to cradle her, keeping her upright and not giving away that anything was wrong.


    Finally, I nodded to Adra and the soft twang of her bow, surprisingly loud in the silent night, signaled the death of the other guard, just as he was a little away from the edge, so he wouldn¡¯t tumble into their camp, alerting them to our presence.


    ¡°It is almost time.¡± I mentally said to Lenore and felt her enter her Hallow, her mind closing with mine, ready to embrace the Avatar-State we shared. We had decided to use it, combining our power once again, allowing us to join our magic into one ultimate spell, something likely beyond either our ability. But together, we were more than the sum of our parts, our minds complementing and allowing us to reach greater heights.


    ¡°Indeed it is. Let them fear the winds of winter.¡± Lenore answered and together, we triggered our Avatar-State, our minds mingling and merging. But for once, it wasn¡¯t only our minds that connected, even our bodies did, in a way I hadn¡¯t quite expected. It was so very similar to moving into my Hallow, only that the Hallow wasn¡¯t in Lenore, it was in both of us. In our combined minds, I could feel Lenore¡¯s surprise, she hadn¡¯t expected it either but was just as curious as I was.


    Opening our eyes, we examined the body we found ourselves in and felt pleasure. It was an amalgamation of the two of us, mixed and matched, neither elf nor raven, but something else. It was the Raven¡¯s Shadow, cast over the world, bringing death to those who deserved it.


    Our combined form was bipedal, feet with wicked claws allowing us to grip the earth, powerful legs, covered in black feathers, allowing us to leap into the air, where our wings would take over. And what wings they were set on our lower back, feathers as black as the darkest night lined with silver feathers on the edges. We could feel that they weren¡¯t just physical, they were just as much a magic focus, allowing us to fly, as they were physical wings. My hands had similar claws to my feet, looking wickedly sharp and shining with a silver light that made me curious what I could do with them, not just as tools to rend flesh but also to channel my magic through them. Touching my face, there was no real beak but my nose was elongated, as was my chin, forming something similar to one.


    ¡°Now, let us show the Centaurs what happens when they sow the wind. They will be reaped by the storm!¡± we announced, soft, cackling laughter bubbling up from somewhere deep within us.

 Chapter 356

    After looking our new body over for a moment, we decided that we needed a name. There was power in names and we were neither Morgana, nor Lenore. We were both, yet neither, a whole that was greater than the sum of its parts. Our moment of contemplation lasted for a mere moment, knowledge of the urgency of our mission driving us to simply take the name of the Raven¡¯s Shadow, abbreviated to the Raven, as name and title for us. It would suffice.


    Looking up, we realised that the world had changed, our eyes seeing more than they ever had, letting us see into the darkest shadows, the absence of light no longer enough to impede our sight. But it was more than that, there was something more, an innate glow to many things, a soft glow from the trees around us and the grass beneath our feet, a stronger glow from our companions and the centaur up ahead. And, in the distance, a quickly dimming glow from the centaur Adra had shot just before. Looking down, I noticed that there was a muted glow below us, like a light shining through a curtain.


    ¡°Are we seeing life?¡± one half of us asked, not quite sure what to make of the strange perception.


    ¡°It might be souls. But it matters not, we have a task to complete, and complete it we will.¡± the other half answered, slowly walking forward on strange, yet familiar legs. It was as if we had become what we always should have been. Familiar, comforting. Powerful.


    Silently, we stepped up to the sleeping centaur, our mind spinning magic with an ease that made us want to crow in joy, displaying our feathers for all to see. But that would make us fail our mission, so the centaurs below would have to contend to bask in the majesty of our magic, staring into the black abyss until they realised that as they gazed into the abyss, we were looking back into them.


    Mist formed all around us, quickly spreading through the forest behind us, as we placed our hand on the centaurs head, gently stroking her cheek, only now realising that we could look eye to eye with the creature, standing as tall as Sigmir did. It was an interesting experience, not as pleasant as soaring above the world but it was good to have a lofty station.


    Using our new claws as carving-tools, we started to get to work, the centaur now fully in the grip of our magic, her mind muted and in a deep sleep. But as we were carving into her flesh, her mind started to struggle, the pain providing a focus that allowed her instincts to fight. Not that it would help her.


    We replaced the tendrils of shadow we had used before with vines of ice, wrapping around the centaurs form, keeping her upright and in easy reach, as it wouldn¡¯t do to bend over. That would be just undignified.


    With the centaur bound, we relaxed our grip on her mind, following an impulse from one part of me, wanting to tap into the centaurs feeling, trying to merge them with the spellcasting that we had in mind. Maybe it would be possible to use the centaur as a focus for the spell, casting it as if the centaur was a staff or wand, carving the runes directly into her flesh, using her mind as a resource, just as her lifeblood was powering our working.


    The idea intrigued us, the possibilities it would offer rousing our curiosity. The mind was a fascinating thing, a bridge between the physical and the spiritual, allowing a body of flesh and blood to manipulate the Astral, the essence of the Universe itself. So many possibilities, so little time.


    The runic formation we idly carved into the centaur, after stripping off her armour, was a relatively simple one, most of the runes relating to the centaurs blood and the power within, but some not, they allowed us to link the centaur to the mist that was slowly flowing out of the forest, towards the centaur-camp. So far, the night was still silent, the centaur gagged and muted, the sounds of pain muffled and concealed.


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    It was interesting, the wounds we had carved with our claws were tinged with a small amount of our Astral Power, not just due to the fact that they were a runic formation, but also innately, from the power flowing through our claws. Normally, it would allow us to freeze them with ease, causing excruciating pain and suffering but right now, that was not what we were after, not solely at least. Now, we were following the pain, using it to bypass the instinctual barriers the centaurs mind had put up, allowing us to link the pain in her mind directly into the formation, drawing it out with the Astral Power flowing through her blood.


    No words needed to be spoken, no chants to be used, a mere application of our will against the fabric of the world set the magic we had prepared in motion. The mist behind us started flowing forward, my mind keeping control of it while feeding it with power and using it as a medium for the rest of our magic. The centaur in our grasp was giving us a good template for what we wanted to affect, it really wouldn¡¯t do to cause our friends distress. It was especially important to a part of us to keep Sigmir safe. But hurting the centaurs, that was just fine in our opinion.


    ¡°Run, flee, the wolves are coming for us.¡± our voice whispered softly, letting it be carried by the wind that moved the mist, allowing our memories of centaurs, getting hunted down by wolves in a misty, snowy forest flow out. Not just into the centaur in our grasp, even if she was subjected to the brunt of it, but into the mist itself.


    Slowly, ever so slowly, as to break the centaur we were using as a focus, we were draining its life, using the power inherent within to power our spell. At first, only few centaurs down in the camp realised what was happening, the darkness of the valley concealing what was happening from the few that were awake to witness it but soon, the mist was seeping through gaps in the canvas into their tents, smothering those within, just as the confused guards were retreating from the effect, some turning to flee, others getting enveloped by the mist. And once they were inside, their minds were within our grasp.


    The emotions from our focus echoed through the mist, causing fear and anguish in the centaurs, even as we were softly whispering into the wind, letting memories infuse it, just as our imagination was running wild, using some of the things we had seen influence us. Nethersprites, burrowing through the centaurs flesh to feast on their souls, hungry wolves, napping at their heels, an endless winter killing their crops, causing their young to starve. A cold, damp darkness, swallowing them up, cutting them off from everything they had ever seen or known. The mists would be their grave, a lonely grave, until their Queen commanded them to rise, to dance for our pleasure.


    The close proximity to our focus allowed us to get a close impression of the effect of our spell and what we felt was glorious. The centaur we had in our grasp hadn¡¯t just given up, she was praying, fervently, devoutly. Not for freedom, no, just for a release from the pain, for death to claim her and end her suffering. We could feel her soul, straining to escape the mortal coil, trying to leave the flesh it was bound to, as pain was rippling through it, a pain unlike any it had ever known.


    Down below, the silence was gone, broken by screams of fear, by a pandemonium as the centaurs were trying to flee, even as rumbling explosions from the other direction caused the night to be illuminated, streams of fire burning through the air. But that couldn¡¯t be allowed, the mists were our domain, and what was ours would remain as such.


    We could feel the life of our focus flicker, trying to escape but that, too, couldn¡¯t be allowed, so we started to slowly let our own power infuse it, using the body of the centaur as nothing more but a focus, a prison for the tattered remains of her mind, driven insane by pain and fear. But her soul, her soul was still strong, unbroken. it was curious, even as the mind was a tattered mess, no coherent thoughts remaining within, the soul was straining to be free, yearning for release.


    We were curious, how long would it last? How long could we keep the soul imprisoned in the body, how long would the body last, with a broken mind and tortured soul? So many questions, so little time to figure them out.


    A tragedy, truly.

 Interlude: Of Ice and Fire

    Two centaurs, lightly armoured and with weapons at their side rest comfortably near a fire, not quite keeping watch but being awake and aware to raise the alarm, if one of the outer guards raises a disturbance. Around them, tents made from canvas create an orderly camp, with clear paths for swift movement and organisation. At the edge of the camp, almost hidden by the darkness of night, the rising slopes of a valley are visible, hiding the camp within.


    ¡°What is that?¡± one of the centaurs asks, pointing towards one of the slopes, atop which the stars suddenly disappear.


    ¡°Are you scared of a cloud now? Relax, there are guards up there, making sure that nothing bad will happen. Not only our guards, either.¡± the other centaur replies, taking a swig from a earthen jug.


    The other looks back over to him, not quite sure what to say to the older centaur, before focusing back to the rugged slope of the valley, keeping an eye out, just in case.


    ¡°I don¡¯t think clouds are supposed to do that.¡± he mutters, when dense, white mist starts to reflect some of the fire-light, blocking sight to the previously lightly lit slope.


    ¡°What?¡± the other is now roused, following the gaze of his partner and realising that something is indeed very wrong. Without a moment of hesitation, he gets up, not quite ready to raise the alarm, but almost. It wouldn¡¯t do to raise the alarm needlessly, not with the long march looming the next day.


    Suddenly, the mist surges forward, almost leaping at the surprised centaurs and now, the centaur is shouting, both in alarm and in shock. But the sound seems to be hollow, muffled by the cold, cloying mist that suddenly surrounds him, almost choking him.


    ¡°The wolves will betray you¡­¡± a soft, gentle voice whispers in his ear, making him reel around, trying to spot the speaker. But there is none, maybe it was just a figment of his imagination.


    The scene shifts, showing a group of orcs carefully moving through a dark forest, without light, without making sounds. Their leader, apparent by her size and an air of confidence, suddenly stops, listening for a moment until a bird call sounds, causing her to nod and move on. They move across a small clearing, where a few more orcs stand, one of them giving a hand-signal to the leader, drawing attention to the still bleeding carcasses of a few, dark-furred wolves. They lie hazhapahrdly strawn around the clearing and after a quick look, the orc nods, gesturing for her people to continue on.


    Soon after, they reach a steep drop, looking down on a small group of centaurs, standing in the mouth of a valley, clustered around a couple of fires. Looking further up the valley, there are a couple of fires lighting up an encampment, the sight causing the orc-leader to frown and settle down, as the image shifts again, back to the centaurs.


    ¡°Clyde?¡± he asks, his earlier bluster now gone, just as the partner he is looking for. Swallowed up by the mist, as if they had never been there.


    Doubt starts creeping into the centaur¡¯s mind, fear and uncertainty making him look hither and fro, scared what might be out there. His mind starts to conjure up shapes in the mist, snapping jaws, trying to tear into him, dark wings, ready to reap his soul and carry it into the underworld, predators lingering in the strange shadows cast by the last few flickers of the dying fire. In the distance, a wolf is howling, the noise strangely clear, as are the howls answering the first one.


    Looking around, he tries to gather his bearings but there is no way to do so, around him only a slowly moving sea of white, dense enough to obscure even the ground beneath his feet. Stumbling, he moves forward, hoping to find his friend, just so he doesn¡¯t have to face the cold mist alone.


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    For a moment, he hesitates but suddenly, he¡¯s certain that he heard someone behind him, trying to sneak up on him. Instantly, without thought or mercy, he¡¯s around, striking out at¡­


    Nothing.


    The image of the scared looking centaur fades to white mist and the scene returns to the orcs and the fires of the camp fading into darkness, as if snuffed out all at once. Despite the distance, some noise is audible, a cacophony of disturbance and a smile becomes visible on the orc-leaders face.


    ¡°That should be the signal.¡± she softly chuckles before raising her hand towards the centaurs below, quickly sketching out fiery runes while softly speaking under her breath. A shout of alarm is raised below, but far too late. Before the centaurs are able to react to the alarm, a streak of fire arcs out, exploding in their midst, scorching the ground and setting the centaurs aflame. The fire seems to stick to them, despite their efforts to get rid of it, causing them to quickly succumb, sinking to the ground as charred husks.


    Before the fires caused by the explosion have a chance to burn down, the orcs move down the slope, the last of them setting up spears and caltrops, turning the slope into a deathtrap for anyone trying to charge down. Other orcs make sure that the burned centaurs are truly dead while the leader directs some orcs to place wood they had been carrying into four of the still-burning fires. The wood seems to light aflame unnaturally quick, almost as soon as the orcs have a chance to step back, it starts blazing. And, as the fires blaze in the dark of night, the orc-leader steps up, throwing some powder into the flames, causing them to flare as she is, again, speaking under her breath.


    Moments after she finishes speaking with the first fire, the wood within starts to move, assembling into a burning stick-figure and walking out of the fire-place. With a few more words and gestures from the orc-leader, it takes up position facing into the valley, while the orcs finish their quick preparations for battle, forming lines and setting up defenses. And just in time, as the howling of wolves echoes into the valley, apparently coming from all directions, as the image fades again.


    A piercing scream, echoing strangely in the empty, whiteness of the mist, is finally the straw that broke the centaurs back, causing him to run. There is no thought in his mind, but that he needs to escape, stark terror making him flee, without even trying to do anything but get out of the valley, away from the cold, cloying mist.


    His mind starts to slowly come back from the numbing terror that had gripped him as he¡¯s able to see a bright, orange light in front of him, making him wonder just how long he had been in the cold mist for it to already be dawn. Speeding up, he wants to welcome the warmth of the sun, hoping that it will banish the mist, back into the dark realm it came from.


    Just as the heat is embracing him, he notices that it is not the Sun, that there are fires burning in the valley, a smell of charred meat filling the air.


    Again, his mind is enveloped, only this time by burning pain.


    The image follows the bolt of searing flame back to its origin, the group of orcs from earlier, in particular one of the wooden stick-figures. As another centaur comes charging out of the mist, one of the other figures raises its arms and a new bolt starts striking out, unerringly flying towards the centaur, flame incinerating another one. The orc-leader looks on, shaking her head, almost in disbelief.


    ¡°That is one scary lady.¡± she mutters, taking another look up the valley, the flames now allowing her to see that the centaur-camp is completely covered in dense, white mist, a mist that the centaurs flee, without any rhyme or reason. They seem to almost welcome the fiery attacks of her spirit-golems and her, not even trying to dodge or avoid them.


    ¡°Luckily she is on our side.¡± one of the other orcs notes, before calling out orders, as another group of wolves is approaching. Luckily for the orcs, fighting wolves with a prepared position and flanks secured by terrain is a lot easier than fighting them in the open or, even worse, the woods.


    ¡°But how long will that last?¡± the orc-leader whispers, speaking only to herself, as she conjures up another bolt of flame, ready to burn down another centaur, as soon as they escape the mist. Not that she would be easily able to do so earlier, the mist dampening her flames, almost dousing them.


    As the bolt of flame arcs out, the scene fades again, only this time it is replaced by a globe, with blue flames racing across the continents.


    ¡°Find your own path.


    On the Road to Purgatory.¡±

 Chapter 357

    As we were contemplating the sensations we received from the centaur in our claws, the howling of wolves added to the pandemonium of the region. The previously calm and quiet night was now anything but, especially as the orcs had begun their attack earlier, that much had been obvious thanks to blazing explosions. Some bolts of flame had even tried to penetrate the mist but failed to do so, their heat quickly fading in the cool, clammy fog.


    With the wolves howling in the background, we took a brief moment off our test-subject, turning to look around, noticing a couple glowing shapes approaching.


    ¡°We have puppies incoming.¡± we snarled, warning the others of the attackers, before focusing back on the centaur, taking the howls she had heard and using them to whip up the remains of her mind, driving her into a gibbering frenzy. On a whim, we let the vines we had used to restrain her grow short, yet sharp, thorns letting them dig into her flesh. The more she struggled, the more pain she was in and the more pain she was in, the more she struggled. It would work, allowing us to rip some more mental activity from her, before blood-loss and exhaustion would claim their toll.


    Or would they? A thought bubbled up, somewhere in our combined minds, a curious, yet cruel, idea. We were perfectly capable of healing, at least to a degree, so why not force her body to remain in working condition, just as we had already been trying with her mind and soul? We even had some of the right runes carved into the centaurs flesh, we just needed to change some of them and their focus a little.


    Curious what would happen, we started carving again, quickly changing what needed to be changed before letting power flow into the centaur, just enough to sustain her without easing the pain, if anything the healing would have increased the pain, giving her mind the resources to remain active.


    By now, what activity we could feel hinted at pure despair, no hope for rescue or salvation, merely a wish for a quick, final death.


    For a moment, noise behind us caught our attention, giving our test-subject a moment of rest as we focused back on our friends. The puppies we had noticed earlier had caught up with us, fighting against them in an attempt to dislodge us, maybe to force us into the valley.


    Not that it would have helped the centaurs, the noises I could hear from beyond the mist and the bolts of fiery death that had been quenched by the mist painted a picture of slaughter in our mind, making us think that our part of the job had worked out quite well. But attacking puppies needed to be taught a lesson, that they shouldn¡¯t attack their betters, namely us and ours.


    Contemplating, we thought about a way to attack, our normal means limited by the changed shape and that the items we normally used were somehow stuck wherever the bodies of Morgana and Lenore had ended up. But hadn¡¯t we somehow used something quite similar to the frozen Vines of the Eisblumen? The idea bubbled up and, as fast as it came we decided to see if we could emulate our normal item.


    Instinctively, we spread our wings and from the tips burst shadowy tendrils, darkness with a core of silver, reaching for the puppies and harassing them, striking their legs and ripping their flesh with sharp thorns. We even felt some of their life-blood getting drained, making us think that we had formed the vines with all our magic, making them especially lethal. Our sudden attack caused an easily exploited opening, allowing Sigmir and Rai to sink their weapons into two wolves while Adra managed to cripple a third, the wolves previously used pack-tactics broken.


    We allowed ourselves to smile as we moved back to the centaur, thinking of ways to use these new vines, maybe even a way to use death-magic to bind the soul. For a moment, the image of a small crystal, long since carried in our pack flashed in our mind, the soul-prison we wanted to break. There might be something to be learned from it, even if part of us highly doubted that we had any chance to break it without a Nexus, not after what the Grandmother had told Morgana so long ago. But that was a contemplation for another day, nothing that we¡¯d be able to solve while studying the unfortunate soul in our grasp.


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    It was at that moment, that the world, or at least our perception of the world changed, a sudden, overwhelming presence manifesting next to us, nothing that could be described in physical terms, if we perceived the life-force of others as gentle glow, this was the opposite. A nothingness so deep and unfathomable that words simply failed, concepts simply failed, and abyss deep enough that even a glimpse might break our minds, turning us into nothing but the gibbering mess in our grasp. Luckily, the focus of whatever it was was not on us but on the centaur.


    While a part of us, a small, defiant part wanted to challenge the apparition, wanted to hold on to our test-subject, wringing even the last drop of suffering from its mind, until it¡¯s very soul was ground to dust, instinct and a healthy dose of fear stopped even the idea of defiance. Not in the face of overwhelming power, we simply had no leg to stand on.


    Loosening our grasp on the centaur, both logically and physically, we stepped back a little, glad to gain some distance from the bottomless abyss we were feeling and, despite a part of us protesting, gave a bow of supplication, a bow of respect to the superior power. But, somewhere in the back of our mind, was a voice shouting that she would gain power, gain enough power to make the apparition bow to us. Some day. Somehow.


    To our senses, the apparition stretched out something, reaching for the centaur and, without any conflict, without any violence, the centaur simply died, her life fading away in a brief instant. Once her life was gone, her soul passed on to whatever came next, we felt a brief instance of scrutiny, the same sensation as being Observed, only magnified by orders of magnitude. We felt shivers running down our spine, our feathers puffing up, the sensation deeper than skin, deeper than bone, laying bare more than the flesh, peering into our very soul. It was¡­


    Disconcerting.


    But as sudden as the sensation appeared, it vanished again, our minds reeling, trying to comprehend just what was going on. We both were dealing with it in our own ways, the shock enough to destroy the unity within us, causing cracks to appear.


    Stumbling, I barely managed to keep somewhat upright, falling to a knee to steady myself. Lenore wasn¡¯t faring much better, sprawled in the grass with one wing propping her up in an uncomfortable manner. Reaching out, I picked her body up, partially to help her, partially seeking contact and comfort. I could feel my body shake from exhaustion, reeling from the effects of the merge and it¡¯s sudden end. But the effects were not merely physical, but my mind was feeling the strain just as well, my thoughts muddled and unfocused.


    ¡°Are you alright?¡± I softly asked Lenore, her body similarly affected.


    ¡°No, not really.¡± she answered, the exhaustion obvious in her mental voice. ¡°But I will be. And it was one interesting experience, one that I can¡¯t really compare.¡± she added, now amusement shining through.


    Pushing myself up, I looked down into the valley, after a quick check to make sure no wolves were sneaking up on me. What I could see below brought a grim smile on my face. The mist was lingering in the valley and from the sounds I was hearing, the centaur¡¯s morale was thoroughly broken, their people scattered and fleeing. But fleeing was apparently difficult, flashes of fire were still arching from the front into the valley, burning those trying to escape. A quick look into my quest-log, confirmed that we had succeeded, the quest was completed. Now we just had to make sure the orcs won their part of the battle, if we wanted to bonus-reward.


    Sigmir stepped next to me, quickly checking me over before Looking down into the mist, frowning.


    ¡°Should we head down there?¡± Sigmir asked, her voice cautious as Rai and Adra stepped up next to us. I hesitated for a moment, unsure. If we ran into trouble, it would be by stepping into the valley, possibly running into a centaur that wasn¡¯t affected by the magic I had invoked.


    ¡°Would you like to go scouting?¡± I asked, looking over to Adra and Rai, leaving it to them. I knew that I would be stupid to attempt climbing down, my body exhausted and my mind muddled by the earlier experience. Even conjuring up small magic would be taxing and my control over it questionable. In addition, one of my biggest advantages, my connection to Lenore, wouldn¡¯t be of much use, her current state quite similar to mine.


    ¡°We will see what we can find.¡± Adra decided, before looking over to Sigmir and me. ¡°Will you meet up with us later, or should we return here?¡± she asked, my state apparently obvious to her.


    ¡°We will meet up later. For now, why don¡¯t you see if you can find some of the loot the centaurs took, or maybe their prisoners? I tried to leave them out of my working but affecting many over a large area is difficult enough, without trying to be precise in your targeting.¡± I admitted, getting nods from Adra and Rai in return.

 Chapter 358

    Watching Adra and Rai start their climb into the valley, I had to nod to myself in approval. The climb would normally be easy, especially if you had dry ground and good lighting. They had neither, turning the steep slope, broken up by rocks, cracks and roots into a treacherous obstacle that needed to be navigated with care.


    ¡°Let me up.¡± Lenore finally told me, the indignity of being carried like a babe too much for her to bear. She was a prideful bird, demanding to return to my shoulder, where she was able to observe what was going on, just like I would try to get back onto my own feet, whenever I had to be carried due to doing something stupid, most of the time using magic.


    ¡°Certainly.¡± I told her, hiding my amusement, while helping her get back onto my shoulder, neither of us wanting the mental closeness that being in her Hallow would entail, not after the Avatar-state we had shared earlier. It was simply too intimate, too intrusive, to experience on a regular, let alone continuous, base, certainly not without a pressing need. And even then, the need would have to be a great one, or my mind would simply rebel, rejecting the connection with Lenore. It was akin to a stimulated nerve, once a certain threshold was achieved, the only thing reported back would be pain, even if it was normal stimulated that would be pleasant, maybe even pleasurable.


    Next to me, Sigmir simply put an arm around my back, letting her hand rest at my side, keeping me close and steady without even trying to engage me in conversation. Maybe she could feel just how disturbed and confused my mind was, still trying to make sure of my earlier experience, especially as the memory itself was quickly clouding, almost like a dream upon waking. Small parts, I could remember clearly, the name Raven was one of them. Or the experience of carving a magical formation into the centaur¡¯s naked chest, but the exact runes i had used? That I couldn¡¯t remember.


    Similarly, I could remember a feeling of dread but also of defiance but just who or what had been the cause of those feelings? I didn¡¯t remember.


    I would have to commune with Lenore later, maybe we could figure out just what we had done together. With a little luck, we would even be able to piece together the spell we had used to shroud the valley in the still lingering mist. It was curious, I could still feel a connection to the mist, but it was different than the connection I normally kept with the Astral Power leaving my body, heavy and oppressive, making it incredibly difficult to manipulate. Even something similar like shifting some of the mist around was nigh impossible but that might have been because of my exhaustion.


    ¡°Do you think more wolves will be coming here?¡± I asked, leaning against Sigmir and breaking the silence.


    ¡°No, I don¡¯t think so.¡± she replied, gesturing towards a fiery explosion lighting up the night at the mouth of the valley, making it obvious that the orcs were still fighting the centaurs, causing a major disturbance in the process.


    ¡°Mhm, you probably are right.¡± I admitted, fighting back a yawn as my body simply wanted to shut down and sleep for a day or three. But still, there was a nagging part of me that wanted to make sure we wouldn¡¯t be surprised. We were on a battle-field after all and I was in no condition to do battle with anything more ferocious than a pillow and blanket.


    A quick check told me that I had some Astral Power left, not enough for any big or flashy spells but what I had in mind didn¡¯t need a lot, the less used the better, at least in my opinion.


    Shaking off the feeling of vertigo I was struck by when I reached for my magic, I let my mind simply float, guided by my will, not trying to impose it upon my Astral Power but simply steering it, like a boat on water. Darkness, darkness was what I sought, the darkness of night and the darkest shadows, to conceal Sigmir and myself.


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    Just like that, without a runic formation or even the mental control normally asserted by my Darkness-Magic, Astral Power was flowing out of me, settling around Sigmir and me, making me wonder if I had succeeded or failed in my spellwork. Not that it truly mattered, if we were forced to fight, I wouldn¡¯t be in a worse position than earlier. Even the idea of using combat magic in my state was laughable, only that it wouldn¡¯t be a very long punchline.


    Snuggling up a little closer to Sigmir, I closed my eyes for a moment, simply to relax my eyelids, the strain of keeping them open was slowly getting to me.


    ¡°Wake up.¡± a soft voice brought me back to awareness, taking my focus away from the strangely dreamlike memories I was trying to understand. Not that I had much success, they remained strangely cloudy and murky, despite my efforts. Luckily, they also didn¡¯t seem to deteriorate further, even if I wasn¡¯t sure what would happen if I actually slept on them.


    ¡°I wasn¡¯t asleep.¡± I said, my denial instantly brought into question when I had to suppress a yawn trying to break my jaw. On my shoulder, Lenore merely ruffled her feathers, not even trying to make it seem like she was paying any attention.


    ¡°Sigmir? Morgana?¡± Adra called out from nearby. Thanks to my night-vision, I was able to see her easily but she seemed to be unable to spot Sigmir and me, despite the two of us standing in the open, even if it was dark.


    Trying to get a sense of time, I looked down into the valley, only for it to still be covered in mist, faintly radiating my Astral Power. Further down the valley, there were still fires going but no more explosions, making me wonder if the fighting had stopped, even if it didn¡¯t answer my question how much time had passed. Finally, I looked at the clock and realised that Adra and Rai had been gone for three-quarters of an hour, making me shake my head in disbelief. I was sure I hadn¡¯t rested my eyes for more than a few minutes, but it seemed as if I had been wrong.


    ¡°We are here.¡± Sigmir called back and I felt a soft ripping sensation, one that I filed away for later contemplation. At the same time, Adra¡¯s eyes focused on Sigmir and me, a look of confusion and surprise on her face.


    ¡°What the¡­?¡± I managed to hear her mutter under her breath, before she called Rai over from nearby. They both had fresh traces of fighting on them, blood on their weapons and a few smudges of dirt on their clothes but nothing that hinted at them actually getting hit.


    ¡°You did quite the number on them.¡± she said, stepping up to Sigmir and me. ¡°I¡¯m not quite sure what you did, but the few centaurs down there were broken. Some of them simply struck out, like a cornered animal, while a few others just sat there, babbling about dark wings.¡± she told us, her eyes focusing on Lenore for a moment, who was still resting on my shoulder.


    ¡°Curious.¡± I muttered, not quite sure just what Lenore and I had done, but whatever it had been, it obviously had worked out quite well.


    ¡°And the prisoners?¡± I asked, wanting to find out if it had affected only centaurs or everyone. If it had only struck the centaurs, it would be quite impressive, making me want to study it even more. A powerful area-of-effect spell that only struck pre-defined groups would be an incredible tool in and of itself but the insights we might be able to glean from studying such a spell were even more important.


    ¡°They were affected, but to a lesser degree. We freed a couple of them and spoke a bit, they were frightened and cold but they didn¡¯t suffer as much as the centaurs.¡± Adra answered, a tone of approval in her voice.


    Before I could ask more questions to satiate my curiosity, I felt another yawn coming, forcing me to keep my mouth closed for a moment, while nodding, mostly to myself.


    ¡°We delivered the prisoners we found to the orcs. They had some casualties but won their part of the battle.¡± Rai added, while I slowly relaxed my jaw.


    That was good to hear and it made my mind flicker over to the notifications I had received. Only the fact that I kept my face deliberately tense stopped my lips from curling into a wide smile when I quickly scanned them, the fight had certainly been worthwhile, even without turning in the quest. Now, we just had to talk to the orcs and get our just rewards. Hopefully, they wouldn¡¯t try something stupid and stiff us of our rewards, or I might have to get the experience points I wanted another way. By wiping out another group of foes.


    The experiment with mind-magic had been an astounding success but repeatability was the hallmark of good scientific experimentation, or so I had heard.

 Chapter 359

    We carefully made our way around the valley, paying attention to our surroundings. We had no way of knowing whether the wolves in the forest had all joined the attack on the orcs or if there were some left, just waiting to take a bite out of us. Prudence and vigilance was what would keep us alive, so it was used in spades.


    It also allowed me to see the valley from different angles, or rather, not see it. The mist Lenore and I had conjured up was still lingering, despite the fact that my connection to it had fully faded. Despite that, there was still power lingering within, my nose detecting hints of ice-, darkness-, blood- and death-magic, all woven into a powerful weave of pain and death.


    Reaching out, I could detect some lingering pain and fear, not powerful enough to affect me, at least as long as I stayed clear of the mist, but strong enough to remain. There was no doubt that using a blood-sacrifice, effectively torturing that one centaur to death in an attempt to bolster my spell had worked, maybe a little too well. I made a mental note not to talk about it, just the idea of sacrificing people in magical rituals, especially if the ritual depended on torturing them to death, would get me a kind of infamy I didn¡¯t want.


    It was the difference between being dark and mysterious on one hand or evil and dangerous on the other side. It was a subtle difference but it was one that I wanted to keep, if only because of marketing and public relations. If I wanted to make money from my content and the Character of Morgana, it needed to be one people wanted to be associated with. Dark and mysterious was good and easily sellable in a positive light, insane and evil not so much.


    Not that those considerations would stop me from exploring the different ways of magic, even those others would instantly classify as evil, I would only attempt to keep those experiments out of the public eye.


    But our vigilance was not needed, the forest remained quiet, only some noise from the valley drifting up to us.


    ¡°Take care when climbing down, the orcs made sure that hurrying would be a bad idea.¡± Adra warned Sigmir and me, carefully guiding us down the slope. I noticed that Sigmir stayed close to me, making sure that I wouldn¡¯t fall, even if I happened to stumble. Part of me was grateful for the gesture, another part wanted to prove that I could very well walk on my own, even if I was exhausted. In any case, I was grateful for Adra¡¯s warning, while the slope wasn¡¯t a deathtrap by any stretch of imagination, a combination of sharp caltrops and sturdy, wooden stakes waiting at the bottom made a charge downhill, with tremendous momentum, a suicidal tactic. It was a fact a few wolves had obviously learned the hard way, their bodies still impaled on the stakes, bleeding into the grass beneath them. Some of the wolves had been removed by the orcs, a task still ongoing, but it was obvious that the orcs had first taken care of their wounded, before starting to take care of their enemies'' carcasses.


    And wounded they had suffered, wounded and dead, judging by the bandages and a few orcs having their faces covered with their cloaks, vicious wounds visible on their bodies. A quick count told me that half of Dura Firebringer¡¯s force had been wounded and maybe fifteen percent of them killed. Quite serious losses, especially if one considered that Lenore and I had taken the centaurs pretty much out of the battle before they were ever able to fight. If the orcs had attempted to fight the battle head-on, they would all be dead, or fleeing, hunted down by wolves in the woods and centaurs in the open. I doubted that any of the orcs would have been able to escape.


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    ¡°I see you made it.¡± Sakgu, the scout we had met a few days prior, said, almost welcoming.


    ¡°We did our part of the plan and I can see that you did yours.¡± I simply stated in response, not wanting to get into it with anyone, not as exhausted as I was.


    ¡°And for that I have to thank you.¡± Dura Firebringer added, stepping up from her position nearby, where she had been staring into a fire.


    ¡°I gave my word.¡± I replied, keeping to myself that I would have no trouble breaking my word, if it was to protect Sigmir. She was a lot more important to me than any nebulous concept as honour could ever be.


    ¡°That you did.¡± she nodded, before turning towards the valley. ¡°How long will the magic last? Some of my orcs ventured into the mist but didn¡¯t get far before turning back. I could break your spell but it would take quite a bit out of me, something I don¡¯t want to do while there might be still enemies lurking in the woods.¡± she asked, some insecurity in her voice, making me wonder just how certain she was that she¡¯d be able to break my spellwork. At the same time, her question brought me into a bit of a conundrum, as I simply didn¡¯t know the answer.


    ¡°It will last throughout the night, until sunrise.¡± I answered, faking confidence, hoping that the hot summer-sun would be enough to burn away the cold mist. It should be, but even if not, I would be able to rest until then, regaining enough Astral Power and mental strength to condense the spell into a solid, that I could take with me.


    With that in mind, I decided that I wanted to try that anyway, simply because a substance born from death, pain and destruction might be a useful resource in the future, if I was able to harness it. If not, there would be no loss, letting the power I had felt remain in the valley served no purpose, other than intimidating Dura even further, which wasn¡¯t necessary at this point. She had seen what I was able to do, so the idea that an undying being of my power was out there, looking for revenge, should quell any thought of double-crossing us. Fear was a useful tool at times.


    ¡°So cold¡­¡± I heard a different voice, accompanied by the clattering of teeth, which drew my attention. It wasn¡¯t something I normally expected to hear during a warm summer-night, making it stand out to me. Looking around, I noticed a sitting orc nearby, hugging himself, staring at me with wide open eyes. He was talking, almost under his breath, muttering about the cold and dark wings, causing me to raise an eyebrow towards Dura Firebringer.


    ¡°Your allies escorted some of the captives out. Your voice seems to have imprinted on them, and not in a good way.¡± Dura remarked, looking to the shaking orc. ¡°But be that as it may, with your magic unravelling in the morning, we¡¯ll search the camp at that time. There is no way I¡¯ll send my troops into that mist, not without need, not while there might be enemies still lurking.¡± Dura decided, not looking too happy about it. But I could understand, trying to explore an enemies camp, with bad visibility, an ever-present fear-aura and possibly lingering enemies was a good way to lose people.


    ¡°We¡¯ll see you in the morning.¡± I simply told her, before moving on, towards a relatively empty part of the camp, planning to simply sleep for a while. I was still exhausted and had no doubt that the rest of my party had to be getting tired as well. Sure, they hadn¡¯t cast a major spell but they had been fighting, had been marching and had protected my back.


    We quickly set up a crude camp, simply a spot to rest, and Sigmir pulled me onto her lap, wrapping her arms around me once more.


    ¡°Sleep, love. I¡¯ll keep watch over you.¡± she told me, while Lenore, who had been sleeping on my shoulder the whole time, was jostled by her actions, waking up with a soft caw of protest. For a moment, we communicated over our connection, whether she wanted to return to her Hallow or what the best way to rest was. While we still were mentally a little sore or raw, for lack of better words, she decided that her Hallow was where she wanted to be and shifted inside. I shuddered from the sensation, the connections in my mind simply too sensitive, but once she was in, she simply curled into a mental ball, giving me only the faintest mental impressions.


    Following her example, I decided that the world in general could do without me for a while and snuggled against Sigmir¡¯s chest, closing my eyes. Moments later, I was out like a light, sleeping the sleep of the truly exhausted.

 Chapter 360

    Waking up was not fun. The alarm going off in my head managed to jostle me awake but I still felt like my mind had been hit by a truck, sore and like my head was a number too small for my brain. I didn¡¯t want to get up and would have preferred to simply stay cuddled up to Sigmir, resting on her chest but at times, needs must. This was one of those times, if I wanted to maintain the image I had tried to project towards the orcs. Looking unfazed by the battle of the night, ready to go again after just a few hours sleep, it would make me seem powerful.


    Forcing my mind into a semblance of order, I pushed myself up, waking Sigmir in the process. She didn¡¯t look too happy about being awoken before dawn but if I wanted to conserve the mist, while adding to my mystery by ending my magic on my own terms, instead of simply letting the sun and nature take its course, I had to act before that happened. After a quick stretch and a tiny bit of condensed, cool mist to cleanse my face, I Sigmir and I fished some of our rations out, sharing a simple, cold breakfast before I felt ready to actually face the day.


    Considerably more awake and somewhat sated, we began walking deeper into the valley, leaving the few orcs on guard-duty behind. There was something on their faces, maybe fear, maybe respect, but definite interest that made me cautious, even if I didn¡¯t think that they would attack.


    As we walked, I looked over the various notifications I had glanced over before, enjoying the fact that we had gained a massive chunk of experience, enough to propel me to level 102. That alone made me wonder just how the experience-points for major battles were distributed. If looking at just the foes my party had fought and vanquished in the night, it would have been just a few wolves, maybe just enough to account for a percent of the experience-points we had gained. That meant we got partial credit for the kills made by the orcs as well, but how did the system weigh the different contributions? Was the experience just added up before being distributed evenly? I somehow doubted it, and I wasn¡¯t sure if even that would be enough to account for what I had gained. Which meant there was some sort of measuring system, weighing what everyone had contributed. Or maybe it simply treated the orcs and us as two distinct but allied groups, adding up all experience-points before giving each group half?


    More tests were required, especially if I wanted to find out if there were ways to game the system, using some clever trick or mechanic to get ahead. Nothing that would be considered a real cheat or exploit, merely something to get me a head-start, allowing me to become and remain a relevant content-creator, without running into trouble with the terms of service. Or, if I found something, I might just report it as a loophole to be closed and rely on the knowledge I was gathering now to get that head-start.


    And as I was thinking of that knowledge I was gaining, I looked at the other messages, telling me that I also had gained a point each in Ice-, Darkness- and Blood-Magic in addition to a point in enchanting. I wasn¡¯t sure what the last point was for, I was reasonably sure that carving magical formations into living beings to be powered by their blood had never counted as enchanting before so there had to be something else. But what was sadly lost in the haze that my memories of the night were under. Again, more experimentation required, but away from prying eyes.


    Finally, the numerically largest gains were in Death- and Mind-Magic. The few experiments Death-Magic I had conducted with Lenore before meeting the orcs had pushed it to level two but now it had gained five more levels, bringing it to 7. It would take some time for a real, noticable change but I was well on my way. Similarly, Mind-Magic had jumped to 22, gaining four points but the bigger gain was that my skill in Death-Magic had been incorporated into Mind-Magic, adding another 20 points to its maximum, bringing it to a maximum skill of 80. I had still no real idea what the deal was with that, how I incorporated skills into the Composite Skill but a higher ceiling was always good.


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    Sigmir stayed behind me as I approached the still dense mist, curious what I would find. There was still power in the mist, that much I could feel from a distance, but by now the lingering connection I kept to my magical spells had faded, leaving me less informed than I would like. Caution made me gently prod Lenore, waking her from her slumbering in my Hallow. The sleep had helped a great deal when it came to my mental sensitivity but I still wasn¡¯t back to top form, making the idea of using the Avatar-Form again an uncomfortable one. Maybe in a day or two, but even then, it wasn¡¯t something I wanted to do casually.


    Lenore needed a moment to fully wake and understand what I had in mind, ready to provide assistance if necessary. I doubted it, at the end of the day I had created the mist so I doubted that it would be able to resist me in a meaningful fashion but caution when it came to magic was something I was trying to condition myself into. That went doubly when dealing with magical mishaps or when something had produced a far greater result than anticipated.


    Reaching out with a hand and my Ice-Magic, I made connection with the mist, feeling the power within directly and forcibly keeping myself from flinching back. Somehow, Lenore and I had managed to imbue the suffering of our centaur-test-subject into the mist, turning it into a part of its structure. The instant I had made contact was the worst, the change stark and obvious. Lingering in the mist would make the pain fade into the background, a constant, nagging ache, but it wouldn¡¯t be strong enough to truly harm someone.


    No, at least the pain wouldn¡¯t be strong enough. But with the pain, almost imperceptible, subtle and subdued was something else. Death, the antithesis of everything living, slowly seeping into me from the mist, trying to sap my life. It wasn¡¯t powerful, not even strong enough to drain more life from me than I was naturally regenerating, but for someone weaker? Maybe someone who had yet to cross even the first Divide? They would be in trouble, at least if they lingered for a day or two.


    Applying my mind, I send out my magic fully, letting it gush out to take control of the mist. There was a moment of resistance, a lingering echo of intent, but it was just that, an echo, no more, quickly overpowered and swept aside. But it also meant that I was connected to a lot of Death-Magic, increasing the amount that was flowing into me, making me wince in renewed pain for a moment before I could put a stop to it.


    With the mist under my control, I started to compress it, simply Ice-magic to turn the tiny particles into larger ones, going from tiny droplets and crystals to Diamond Dust, Snow and finally a chunk of Ice, slowly getting smaller in my hand as I compressed it more and more. I was curious just how far I would be able to push things, what my limit was and so I continued on, my eyes closing in concentration.


    Finally, after maybe a minute of two of concentration, I felt like something was snapping into place, a subtle but distinct change. Curious I opened my eyes to look at what I had created only to blink a few times, slightly confused at what I was seeing.


    When I had started, I had simply pictured something akin to a snowball, roughly round but not perfectly spherical, before compressing it down into a rough cube. What I had ended up with looked like a rounded tear-drop, similar to a half of the yin-and-yang symbol. In addition, something I had noticed when dropping it into my hand with magic, was that it felt incredibly light. I didn¡¯t really know how much the mist had weighed when filling the valley but I was certain that it should have been more than the few grams of mass I had now in my hand.


    But the most startling, even more than the weight and shape of the object in my hand was the fact that dense, white mist had been compressed into a dark object, mostly black mottled with dark-grey flecks and some bright streaks of crimson. While I was aware that grey smog could come from black particles in the air, the change was just too stark to make sense to me who had expected at least some of the white to remain. But apparently not.


    Finally, I used my ability to inspect, learning that I was holding an item called ¡°Tear of Anguish¡± but the ability didn¡¯t give me any further information than that. Shaking my head, my eyes flickered upwards from the strange object in my hand, only to widen when I saw what the mist had previously hidden.

 Holiday Special

    Greetings, dear seeker on your quest for truth.


    I do not know where you found these pages, how it came to be in your possession. It might have been a gift from a honoured mentor, who doesn¡¯t need it in their old age. It might have been given to you by a teacher, hoping to guide you down the right path. Or maybe it was stolen, taken without permission and is now read out of boredom, maybe while sitting on a throne of porcelain. I do not know, and, if I¡¯m honest, I do not care.


    Who you are, or why you are reading this matters little, as the lesson contained in these pages is one each and every inhabitant of our wonderful world of Mundus should know. So, maybe you already know what I¡¯m about to impart and will soon use these pages to wipe, as you get off your throne or maybe you will find a novel concept, that will hopefully remain with you for the rest of your days.


    What I speak of, is my answer to a question that all should consider, even if they never arrive at an answer. With that in mind, don¡¯t take my answer for the absolute truth, it is merely one of many, even if I obviously am convinced enough to write it down.


    The question, you ask? What is good, what is evil.


    Some will answer that good is what brings the least suffering to the most people, with evil being the opposite. But is it truly?


    Others will reply by quoting a holy book, a message imparted by the Gods, trusting in their Divine Wisdom to tell them right from wrong. But can Divine Wisdom truly be an answer to mortal questions?


    Before I tell you my answer, maybe I can guide you to it, so you not only understand the words, as I write them but also the reasons behind them.


    Tell me, who was good. A person, a historical figure, you consider to be good. Maybe they are revered as a Saint, maybe they are simply known for their actions and you consider them to be a Paragon of Goodness, someone who changed the world for the better.


    One such example might be the White Lady, at least that is the example I¡¯m going to use.


    Why was the White Lady seen as such a lofty figure?


    Was it her style of clothing, the loosely flowing, simple garment that she wore? No, such a superficial thing could never make someone Good, could it?


    Was it the fact that she remained virginal, never knowing one of the opposite sex, staying in a state she considered pure? There are many who would argue that mastering yourself, not giving in to desire, can be a virtue, a sign of Goodness, but self-denial? I do not think so.


    Was it the fact that she helped many beings personally and the Hospitals founded in her Memory provided aid to countless more? That might be it, but are just the healers Good?


    Maybe it was the fact that, when faced with those who couldn¡¯t be healed by her, the Savages cursed by Mother Moon, that she stood in front of the innocent, her Light sheltering them, even as it burned the Savages and Herself to ashes?


    Since that day, the Order of the White Lady has watched the wilds, making sure that the Savages she gave her life to eradicate remain gone. And, remaining gone they have, they have never been seen again, their stain wiped off Mundus.


    But, can we really call someone who wiped out a race ¡°Good¡±? Yes, the Savages preyed on others, had to prey on others, but is the wolf that eats the doe evil? Or is it just following its nature, as creation ordained it? Wouldn¡¯t that make the White Lady evil? Or is there more to it? Read the Chronicles, if you like, and make up your own mind about the White Lady. I, as many people across many nations, did and I see her as Good.


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    Maybe we won¡¯t find an answer in this direction, but we might be able to find one, if we come from the other direction and ask, What is evil? If we understand what makes someone evil, maybe we have it easier to understand what makes them good.


    Who do you consider Evil?


    Not just someone who wronged you in the past, but someone who you think better to never have existed in the first place?


    Many people would likely answer that the Sunderer was evil. After all, even the Gods themselves deemed him so wicked that they wiped his name away from history, letting his memory only serve as an example of paths one should avoid?


    Now, what do we actually know about him? About his deeds so foul that the Gods themselves cursed his name? Surprisingly little, if I am honest with myself.


    We know that he was a devout man, maybe blinded by his devotion. We know that he was powerful, one of the mightiest Mages of all time, even capable of merging the power of the Divine with his own, astral Essence, weaving a spell of unfathomable might. So, is it true that power corrupts? But then, what of the Gods themselves? Are they not more powerful than any mortal, more powerful by orders of magnitude? Or are they just so different, that their Divinity protects them from our mortal frailty?


    It makes one wonder, does it not?


    But back to the Sunderer, and his actions. He put a stop to an Eternal War, stopping much suffering but he also ended a Golden Age, sending all of Mundus reeling in the cataclysm he invoked, causing a different kind of suffering.


    And I think in this, we can see what makes him Evil.


    You don¡¯t see it? Maybe I can give another example, giving you another chance to find truth for yourself.


    Let¡¯s go with the Dark Queen. Everyone should know her, everyone should fear her. I should know, I tell tales of her dark deeds every year, teaching the children to honour the festival of Light, to keep away the darkness. She also makes a wonderful contrast with the White Lady, Light and Dark and all that. Many might be tempted to say that Light is synonymous with Good and Dark with Evil but I remind you of our second example. A Mage, commanding Fire and Light, harnessing it with more ability than anyone, only for it to singe the roots of the World. No, that cannot be it.


    But then, what is?


    The Dark Queen, what do we know of her? She brought the winter, the winter that lasted for seven years, bringing with it the hunger, the wolves and the winged Death that feasted on the flesh of the starved. Many died, but she did not wipe out a whole race, even the elves, who took the brunt of her Hate, they are still out there. They were weakened, diminished and decimated, but they recovered, thriving once more.


    Three Mages, all born with the ability to change the world, all three changing the world forever. Two infamous, history only remembering their Titles, their names struck from the records, never to be whispered again. One, remembered in Awe and Respect, her name held in our hearts, Salena of the Silver Light, the White Lady.


    Three, driven by a noble emotion. One seeking Peace above all else, one driven by Love and, finally, one driven by a desire to protect. All three, driven by a cause they thought righteous. Yet, two are seen as Evil, one is seen as Good.


    All three, spilling rivers of Blood for their cause,


    Two, honing their magic to a single point, mastering it in ways nobody has dared since, driven only by their single purpose.


    One, mastering her magic, not for a single purpose but over the course of a lifetime, a lifetime sadly cut short.


    A lifetime returned to the cycle.


    And that is what I see as evil. The purity of purpose, the purity of magic. To seek one thing, above all else, to forgo balance and merely strive to the extreme. Without balance, even the noblest of purpose will turn into a consuming flame, burning you in flames of your own making.


    Without balance, you will find yourself stumbling on your path, good intentions falling to the wayside as you blindly make your way forward. Forward into infamy, into death and destruction.


    That, in my opinion, is evil. A pure Purpose, taken to Extremes. There always has to be a balance, in Life and in Death. For that is Nature.

 Chapter 361

    The contrast was stark and that my spell had done more than just conceal the area was incredibly obvious. The whole valley was covered in grass with a few shrubs visible, at least where Dura Firebringer and her explosive spells hadn¡¯t burned that away, but the area where the mist had been was¡­ not. There was no green in sight, not a single blade of grass, only dirt and not even a healthy-looking, deep-brown dirt. To me, it looked more like the dust you would see on construction-sites, sterile and dead, a grey dust that made you choke just from looking at it.


    The Centaur-camp was still there, standing out like a sore thumb in the area that deserved the name desert. An area devoid and hostile to all life, at least for a time.


    ¡°We really need to get better at gardening.¡± I quibbed to Lenore, mostly to hide just how shaken I was. It was strange, I had no problem to throw lethal magic at other beings, to strike down centaurs or wolves with my spells, even killing them by the droves didn¡¯t bother me, they were just enemies. But seeing the devastation left behind by my magic, the death I had brought to the vegetation, the desolation left after I was finished, it shook me.


    I was just standing there for a moment, taking a few, deep breaths to restore my equilibrium, which was still shaky after the exertion of the last night. The orcs, who had been watching us, were now seeing the revealed area as well and were starting to stir. The guards currently on watch didn¡¯t start moving but I could hear a few orders being given.


    By the time I was back in balance, a few orcs were moving towards the barren area, with me watching them. I had no real desire to move in myself, even if there might be loot to be found in the centaur-camp. Instead, I was more interested in understanding the spell Lenore and I had conjured up and its after-effects. The smell of Death-Magic was strong in the area, stronger than I had anticipated with my lowly skill-level but there might be another reason. Other than Death, there was a pungent smell that I could only call fear in the air, a smell that was lingering despite the fact that the mist was gone.


    ¡°Do you smell that?¡± Sigmir asked, causing me to look over to her. Her nose was crinkled and when my eyes flickered to Ylva , who was sitting next to her, the raised fur was obvious.


    ¡°I smell something but what do you smell?¡± I asked, curious what she was perceiving.


    ¡°Fear. Cold sweat, stale urine and prey.¡± Ylva answered instead, her tail starting to lash back and forth, as if she wanted to start prowling after the smell, to sink her teeth into whatever prey there was.


    ¡°Curious, indeed.¡± I muttered when the silence of the early morning was broken by the orcs who had entered the centaur-camp, causing a ruckus. It was quite obvious that they had found prisoners, otherwise I would have expected shouts of alarm and sounds of battle, not calls for help.


    ¡°Want to see what is going on?¡± I asked Sigmir, interested in what they had found but not willing to go in alone, not as shaky as I still felt.


    Sigmir simply nodded, while Ylva stood, walking on my other side, her tail still lashing behind her.


    Together, we walked over the dead soil, the dust clinging to our boots, a stray thought making me think of the world¡¯s biggest litter box, but I quickly banished the thought, focusing on the present and the potential for enemies hiding in the camp. It really wouldn¡¯t do to die to some half-mad centaur that had hidden in their camp, just to strike at the first fool to wander near their hiding-place.


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    The orcish shouts for help guided us through the centaur-camp while I was examining the damage the camp had taken. For a spell that had been supposed to target only living things, it was quite impressive, with tents destroyed and trampled. The centaurs must have been near insane in their struggles to escape my magic, confused and reduced to their basest instincts, just as I had hoped. A growl from Ylva showed me just how insane I had driven the centaurs, the noise bringing a centaur-corpse to my attention, one of their spears stuck in her side, blood pooling below.


    A closer look made me even more curious, the blood wasn¡¯t the right colour. Fresh blood had a crimson tone to it, the exact colour varying depending on the wound¡¯s location, dried blood turned a deeper shade, almost brown or maroon, but the blood here, it had turned a blackish purple. Reaching out, I rubbed some of the blood-soaked dirt between my fingers, getting a good sniff and nodded to myself. A mix of miasma and Death-magic, obviously not enough to draw Nethersprites but it meant something.


    Curious, I reached out to the dead centaur and quickly realised that she hadn¡¯t died from the speak stuck in her side, that had merely crippled her. Even the blood loss, with the weapon still inside, wouldn¡¯t have been enough to kill a centaur with a few levels. But blood-loss, combined with the spear-wound and quite a bit of damage from my Death-Magic, that might have been enough. There were traces all in her body, of slow decomposition, but even those didn¡¯t look like they had actually killed her, merely caused her crippling pain.


    ¡°What do you think?¡± I asked Lenore, curious about her opinion.


    ¡°Her mind. There is only so much a mind can take and when working together, our Mind Magic is scary.¡± Lenore replied, the mental undertones uncertain. ¡°My memories are just as vague as yours, but just from the hazy memories of the powers we conjured up I can tell you that getting stuck within the area would be a death-sentence for any centaur. Hopefully, the kidnapped orcs have a different mental make-up or they might all be dead.¡± she added, causing me to nod in agreement. If we had accidentally killed all orc-prisoners, the goodwill we had acquired would be gone faster than mist in the morning sun.


    With that in mind, I stood, brushing off the dirt from my hands, and continued on towards the orcish calls for help, easily finding the comotion. A couple orcish warriors stood around a group of downed orcs, still breathing but obviously not in a good shape. They were shackled with iron manacles, their hand and feet bound, sturdy-looking chains connecting them to each other and a a pair of wagons, one of each side, making sure they couldn¡¯t reach either.


    Not that they looked like they would have been able to do anything, even if they had been able to reach the wagons, they looked¡­ bad.


    There was no real way to describe it, despite the fact that they looked like orc-warriors in their prime, with strong muscles and ferocious vigor, there was something about them that reminded me of old people, of hospitals and the slow, creeping decline that came with age. I couldn¡¯t quite put my finger on the reason for that impression but it was there.


    ¡°Step aside, I might be able to help them.¡± I commanded the healthy orcs, after deciding that none of them looked like they would be able to tell what I was doing. Sure, they would be able to tell that I was healing them but I doubted they had the arcane knowledge to identify blood magic. It was a bit of a gamble but I was curious to see the effects of my magic on a living subject, curious enough to take the risk of discovery.


    The orcs, after a short glance to me, stood aside, letting me get closer. The downed orcs reacted a little as well, cringing at the sound of my voice, but they condition prevented them from even trying to get away.


    Kneeling next to one of them, I carefully stretched my magical senses, getting a feel for his body. He, like the centaur I had examined earlier, had suffered from my Death-Magic, parts of him had started to decompose, despite the fact that he was still alive.


    In a way, it was the easiest damage to heal, essentially he had lost health-points, this kind of damage was the one with the clearest link between the condition of a body and their HP. Just from the damage, I could tell that he had lost roughly fifty-percent of his health to my magic, nothing that couldn¡¯t be solved.


    Letting out a slow breath, I started to draw a runic formation on him, preparing to repair what I had broken. There seemed to be little to learn when it came to the spell-effect, other than, prolonged exposure to Death Magic is unhealthy. A most obvious lesson.

 Chapter 362

    When I started to channel power into the downed orc¡¯s body, I almost instantly realised my mistake. The first effect my power had was that his teeth started to chatter, reminding me that I had been careless, that my Astral Power was always tinged with Ice and, as I noticed when paying attention to what I was doing, Death-Magic. The amount was small enough to keep the additional damage small and minor, especially as it had occurred to the freshly healed tissues, only causing some pain to the healed orc. Still, it had been a careless mistake and if I wanted to truly heal the orc, I would have to do better.


    ¡°Look closely.¡± Lenore¡¯s mental voice caught my attention and I shifted my focus as directed, curious what she had noticed that I had missed.


    Her focus was on the streams of power, especially the interaction between Blood-Magic, Death-Magic and the tissues of the orc. A moment of mental exchange showed me just what she had seen, that just as the Blood-Magic was healing and restoring, the Death-Magic was undoing it. The curious thing was just how that ¡°undoing¡± occured, that the freshly restored vitality, what I would be able to drain with Blood-Magic, changed for a moment, morphing into two distinct parts that neutralized each other. One part was pure Astral Power, a tiny representation of the Astral River in all its complexity and majesty, the other was one just as familiar. The second part was what I knew as Miasma, the side-product of my Blood Magic.


    What I saw, caused me to pause for a moment and gently, carefully, continue to work. I needed more information and the orc was as good a test-subject I would ever get. To eliminate potential complications, I made sure to carefully filter my Astral Power, dumping the Ice-aligned parts, simply channelling them away, reducing my magical efficiency but that was just a necessity. Instead, I let a small trickle of power flow into the orc, carefully making sure that it was the same amount of regenerative Blood-Magic and unaligned Death-Magic, curious just what would happen.


    Lenore, who was closely watching, was as fascinated as I was, the effect of our magic on a tiny scale but as an object of study, it was easily enough. The effect of Death-Magic on living tissue and the restoration caused by Blood-Magic, two magics so opposite working on the same area, creating a tiny cycle. Maybe that was why some studied the cyclic nature of magic, instead of following one part to its ultimate conclusion, trying to understand more about the interactions. I was about to use Blood Magic to drain a tiny amount of power, curious how the introduction of free Miasma into the system would change what I was observing when Lenore mentally prodded me, reminding me that we were working under the direct observation of a couple orcs and ostensibly helping someone.


    What we had been doing, while possibly painful for the subject, had been on a tiny scale but if we started to escale things, we might accidentally kill the subject, something that the orcs likely wouldn¡¯t like. Didn¡¯t they know that furthering your understanding took constant work and the occasional sacrifice?


    Mentally resetting myself, I focused on healing the orc, carefully making sure that no Death-magic, or Ice-Magic for that matter, intruded into my Astral Power, a process taking some concentration but not enough to stop me from working my magic. It just took a little longer and required a bit more Astral Power than I would have liked.


    As I was working, I felt annoyance well up within me, not so much at the orc but at myself. My healing ability had stagnated, partially because I hadn¡¯t used it all that much, partially because I had used very little Blood Magic to heal, instead focusing on other magical disciplines. If I had kept in the habit of using Blood Magic to heal and had continued to advance my Blood Magic apace with my other magical skills, I would still be hindered by the Death- and Ice-Magic contained in my AStral Power but not to the same extent was I was now, combining limited familiarity and those additional troubles. Overall, it meant that I was a worse healer than I had been a few months ago.


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    Overall, the speed and effect of my healing hadn¡¯t declined much but I knew that I had gained a lot of overall power, that crossing the Divides and the additional attribute-points should have improved my ability by an order of magnitude. But it hadn¡¯t. And that annoyed me somewhat.


    Lenore obviously felt my annoyance, her mind working closely with mind, and reacted with amusement. To her, it was just obvious that focusing on one part of magic, trying to reach the ultimate conclusion of a magical discipline, would slow down or even hinder the progression on another path. And, intellectually, I could agree and understand, yet it annoyed me that I had lost some capability.


    ¡°Are you planning to focus on healing now?¡± Lenore asked, her voice amused, when we had finished our work on the first orc.


    Opening my eyes, I looked at the orc in front of me and could see fearful eyes staring back at me. Without thinking about it for long, I focused on my Ice-Magic, glad to be able to fully use it again, sending a small fluttering of snow into the keyhole of the orc¡¯s manacles, creating a copy of the key within moments and using it to open the lock, all without taking my eyes off my patient.


    ¡°No, I don¡¯t think so.¡± I admitted, once again reminded why I had focused on the parts of my magic I had. They, quite frankly, appealed to me a lot more, the pursuit of knowledge, the study of inanimate substances without the need to deal with annoying people, like the now freed orc who was crawling away from me, as if I was about to attack him, getting helped up by the other orcs.


    Once that orc was back on his feet, he gave me a few words of thanks, looking like he wanted to get away from me as fast as possible. I could still see that there was some lingering damage that he would need time and rest, or a different kind of magic from mine to fix it. In addition, the forced march and the night within my magic had left the orc exhausted, even if he tried to hide it.


    ¡°Bring him up on the ridge, resting in the rising sun should help him quite a bit.¡± I told the other orcs. ¡°But set a guard, it would be regrettable if some critter comes out of the forest to gnaw on him.¡± I added, after a second of consideration. Just because we hadn¡¯t been attacked while walking in the night, there was no reason to assume that a resting orc would be safe.


    I was a little surprised when two of the orcs gave me respectful salutes, banging their hands on their chest, before moving next to the healed orc, flaking him as they started to make their way up the slope.


    I wasn¡¯t quite sure why my orders had been obeyed the way they had been but I decided to simply accept it, focusing on more important things, namely the healing of the remaining prisoners. None of them looked like they were about to die but all of them had been harmed by spending the night in the magical mist of death and pain. In addition, I was curious if their systems would react the same way the first orc¡¯s system had, if my discovery was a common phenomena or if it was something special to that particular orc.


    With that in mind, I knelt next to another orc, sending my magical senses to asses the damage and start another experiment, curious if their bodies would react to Death- and Blood-Magic the same way.


    My first action, for that particular orc female, was to make sure that she wouldn¡¯t die at the drop of a head, healing some of the internal damage, fascinated at the way her lung-tissues had been affected, before introducing a small amount of Death-Magic into her system, watching as the vitality of her body was affected, the interplay between Astral Power and misama and the fact that both seemed to be in balance, needed to be in balance. Part of me was curious, wanted to learn how misama was formed but I had a feeling that I would need longer studies to do that, that I would have to study someone for days to find out what processes created the miasma and how the Astral Power from outside was bound to it.


    It was a fascinating discovery, the interplay between messy biology and external magic but, far too soon, I decided that I couldn¡¯t experiment more, that it would stand out too much.


    And so, with a small amount of reluctance, I finished up the next orc, broke the chains binding her and continued on. Luckily, I had a few more test-subjects to go through.

 Chapter 363

    By the time the last orc was reasonably well, the sun had fully risen above the valley, bathing us all in its burning rays. Part of me wanted to simply pull back the covers, so to speak, to conjure up enough mists and clouds to block the hateful light but sadly, I did not have that power, at least not yet. But it would be a worthwhile goal to aspire to, the ability to make myself comfortable. What better goal could there be, than the ability to change the world into something more to your liking?


    Intellectually, I understood that my ideas were well past what most would consider megalomaniac, aspirations that would be impossible anywhere but on Mundus. But then, I had yet to find some great, overarching story-line in Road to Purgatory, Pantheon Entertainment had essentially given us a massive sandbox to play in and if I wanted to make myself the biggest sandcastle, who was to gainsay me?


    Standing, I took a moment to stretch myself, getting rid of the kinks caused by being hunched over for an extended period of time. As I did, I noticed that the orcs hadn¡¯t been idle, not at all, they had managed to dismantle half the centaur¡¯s camp around me and were busily working on the rest.


    It made me realise just how focused on my work I had been, not to notice the noise they made but then, the interaction between Blood-Magic, Death-Magic and living tissue was just fascinating, something I might have to study more in the future. Especially the interaction between Death-Magic and Miasma, there might be a way to improve upon my Blood Magic by using it in conjunction with Death-Magic to control the amount of Miasma I was releasing.


    Control over that aspect of Blood Magic might be the most valuable ability out there, better efficiency would be nice, or the ability to draw more power from a single source but control over Miasma would allow me to scale up my working, to compensate for either problem. I would be able to do the same by learning to eliminate the generation of Miasma but then, I had learned that using Miasma as a way to create lasting trouble for my enemies was a working, worthwhile tactic. And that was with the small amounts of Nethersprites I had caused when working against the centaurs near the windswept plains, if I could cause monsters like the Devourer we encountered in the ruins of Tegi to appear, it would make an interesting tactical tool of area-denial. Maybe even a strategic one, depending on the size and effects involved.


    ¡°Your people should be able to travel tomorrow.¡± I told one of the orcs nearby, one that looked a little more certain of himself, hoping that it was an officer.


    ¡°Lady Sorceress, Warleader Firebringer asked that you attend her, once you are finished with your work here.¡± the same orc answered, sounding almost apologetic.


    ¡°Did she. Well, it wouldn¡¯t be polite to let the Warleader wait, would it?¡± I mused, before giving Sigmir a short glance. Part of me wanted to play some sort of power-play, demonstrating that I didn¡¯t come running just because the orc told me to, that she could come to me, if she wanted something. But I had always hated it when other people did such things to me, making me waste my time. And even if it were to work, it would waste time, time that I could spend on more useful pursuits, like the investigation of the Tear of Anguish or something similar.


    ¡°Thank you, I will go see her.¡± I told the orc, who had looked a little conflicted at my musing.


    The orc took it upon himself to guide me, not that I really needed it, not in a half-dismantled camp with essentially one path out, but maybe he was afraid that I would make the shaman wait, causing him trouble.


    Finding the shaman was even easier than I had thought, the large, brightly burning bonfire was something of a give-away, especially to me. Just seeing it made me want to smother it, bury it under an avalanche of Ice and Snow before covering the whole valley in Darkness again but, again, I decided against getting truly confrontational, instead I conjured up a cooling mantle of mist, letting it linger around my person. Even in the vicinity of the bonfire and it¡¯s oppressive heat, Lenore and I would be able to keep up the cooling shroud for a while, at least if we weren¡¯t magically pressured.


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    ¡°Warleader, the Sorceress you send me for.¡± my orcish guide announced us, causing Dura Firebringer to look over, her eyes flickering up and down my body for a moment.


    ¡°Ah, yes, thank you Kresh¡¯nak, that will be all.¡± she nodded, sending the guide away before focusing on us.


    ¡°And you¡­¡± she paused, again eyeing me up and down, making a part of me tense, ready to spring into action at a moment¡¯s notice.


    ¡°Thank you.¡± she continued, giving a half-bow, before straightening back up. ¡°When I realised just how clever a trap the centaurs had laid, I thought I would be forced to pull out all the stops, so to speak. We would have won but the cost would have been much higher. You turned what would have been a costly fight into a decisive victory.¡± she explained, getting a little more animated as she was speaking, gesturing towards the valley and the still blackened areas where her magic had struck.


    ¡°We suffered some casualties but mostly from the wolves, they are quite adept at the sudden attack and quick retreat. The centaurs were broken by you, a feat I hadn¡¯t expected, certainly not in the manner you did. My scouts tell me that a few centaurs managed to climb the valley, escaping into the forest, but their assumption is that they lost almost eighty percent of their group, in addition to about half of the wolves.¡± she added, gesturing to a still-smoldering pile of ashes, what had to have been a massive pyre, likely fueled by her magic.


    ¡°Ah, speaking of casualties, there is one mystery you might be able to shed light on. Harms, the other Traveller, had a bit of bad luck. A wolf managed to blindside him and rip out his throat, the wound killing him quickly. But his body, it acted strangely, in a manner you might have seen before, when inside a dungeon of the system. Just like the beings inside a dungeon, his body faded away quickly, disappearing alongside the things he was carrying.¡± she paused, again, waiting for me to speak.


    ¡°You said it yourself, he is a Traveller. We wouldn¡¯t be able to travel for long if Death would be the end of our journey, would we?¡± I asked, getting a slow nod in response, making me think that the shaman knew something but I wasn¡¯t sure just what she knew.


    ¡°He will likely be back at your settlement before you. Or he might have continued his travels elsewhere, I do not know, it depends on the person.¡± I added, not wanting to give away too much about Travellers and our capabilities, not even in terms adjusted for this world.


    ¡°But be that as it may, I told you, we would do our part.¡± I continued, trying to get back to the earlier topic, the fight against the centaurs.


    ¡°And you did, with incredible results. I will gladly tell you that the agreement we had was fulfilled in full and you deserve the rewards promised.¡± she accepted my change in topic and her voice turned formal and solemn as she spoke. With her words, she reached into her pouch drawing a leather-pouch and handing it over. When I took it, a blue window appeared in front of me and I quickly scanned it.


    <table><tbody><tr><td>Quest Completed!</td></tr><tr><td>You completed the Quest: Support the Orcish Nightraid!</td></tr><tr><td colspan="1">Quest Reward </td><td colspan="1"> 140.000 EXP </td></tr></tbody></table>


    The pouch in my hand looked very much like a sack filled with coins but counting them would look untrusting and a little insulting. Instead, I gave a short glimpse, just to see if the promised magic artifact was inside, maybe some sort of necklace or ring, but there was none, neither had the promised information somehow appeared in my mind. As I put the pouch into my magical bag, I raised an eyebrow, looking at the orc with expectation.


    ¡°In addition, the magical artifact. I thought about what to give you during the night and decided on something but it is one of the items I don¡¯t carry with me all the time. While I could give you one of the artifacts I¡¯m actively using, I don¡¯t think it would be suitable for you and your magic. However, I promised an artifact and will give you one, if you insist on parting ways before reaching the Brighthollow. It is up to you.¡± she explained, the expression on her face a strangely wide grin, that made part of me want to wipe it off, with attack-magic if necessary. It would be a bad idea, but the impulse was there, only to be quickly squashed.


    ¡°And let me guess, the Place of Power you mentioned just happens to be in the same direction?¡± I asked, wanting to remind her that there was more to our reward.


    ¡°Indeed, it just happens to be in that direction. So, will you insist on parting ways with us, or will you allow me to invite you to the settlement of my people?¡± she asked, the earlier grin still there, maybe even a little wider.

 Chapter 364

    ¡°We will accompany you then, as your guests.¡± I accepted Dura Firebringer¡¯s suggestion after a moment of consideration. There was a part of me that was cautious, maybe paranoid, because of the look on her face but a long-honed instinct within me was smelling a chain-quest, an opportunity to advance the power of my group some more. In a way, the night-raid had been an eye-opener, even a reasonably large battle with an accompanying quest had merely given me about a full level. On the other hand, the previous weeks of travel had given me a lot less, mere percentages from some overzealous critters that thought to attack us in the night, nothing that could even be called a fight. Even the possibility of a proper quest-hub, with a few quests that could be done in a single area was enough to make me interested, very interested. And then there was the promise of information on a ¡°place of power¡±, which I hoped to be another dungeon, maybe even something similar to the Deadmire, the swamp filled with undeath.


    ¡°I¡¯ll be delighted to show you our settlement. While it might not be able to compare to the large cities of the world, it is a wonderful place to be. I¡¯m certain you will enjoy your stay.¡± Dura replied, her smile growing even more obnoxious, something I hadn¡¯t thought possible. She looked too delighted, the look on her face making me unconsciously step closer to Sigmir. Mentally, I made a note to watch my back and keep an eye on ways to escape at all times. Maybe I should make a greater effort to learn shadow-walking from Rai, he had discovered it on his own and as of yet, I had been unable to replicate his class¡¯ abilities.


    It was at that point that the talk between Dura and myself was interrupted by an orc needing some guidance, making it obvious that Dura had her own duties to attend. We said our goodbyes, learning that the orcs were planning to spend the day in the valley, fully looting the centaur-camp, sorting the loot and making sure the former captives and the wounded were ready to travel before starting their journey back to the Brighthollow-settlement in the morning.


    Given that we had just accepted to travel with them, we would have a day of down-time as well, something rather rare for my party. Normally, we relied on our powerful bodies to ignore the normal necessities of travel, at most taking it slow for a day or stopping early if there was hunting to be done.


    ¡°So, what are we doing now?¡± Sigmir asked, as we were walking away from the bonfire Dura was using.


    Her question mirrored my own thought, making me wonder just what I would do with the day. Part of me wanted to truly understand what I had done during the night but my foggy memories weren¡¯t really useful there.


    ¡°Before anything, we should tell Adra and Rai about the new plans. I think they might enjoy having a relaxing day off.¡± I replied, when I almost stumbled as an idea hit me. My memories might be a little foggy but at the end of the day, everything I was doing was recorded by the capsule my body was lying in, recorded for potential streaming-material. And that was without considering that I had given Pantheon a heads-up that they might want to take a closer look at the battle, that there might be good footage for promotional material. So, when memories were blurred, maybe recordings were not.


    ¡°Lenore, would you stay with Sigmir?¡± I mentally asked, getting an affirmative answer, before asking Sigmir to talk to the other two and quickly shifting into my Hallow. I felt my idea was a good one and couldn¡¯t wait to see just what had actually occurred, not just the fragments I remembered.


    Logging out of Road to Purgatory was becoming a little disorienting, the differences between my game-avatar and my real body becoming more and more pronounced. Even the information gathered by my avatar¡¯s senses seemed sharper, crisper, filled with so much more information, that the real world felt a little flat, at least for a few minutes until I got used to it again. Reaching for my tablet, I made a note to write that into one of my beta-feedbacks as a point of concern. If I was having problems with that, I didn¡¯t want to know how it felt for someone who had chosen an avatar with a drastically different body-plan, a centaur or maybe some sort of spider-based or insectoid race. Just the amount of limbs would have to be strange.


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    Before looking at my footage from last night, I decided to take care of the most mundane tasks of house-keeping, at least once I¡¯ve showered. That simple act helped me to shake off any lingering disorientation, maybe it was the  tactile response of washing myself and feeling just where my body was, bringing my proprioception back into line with itself or something like that. Or maybe it was just the water running down my skin, a sensation I hardly ever felt on Mundus, or it had to do with the temperature of a warm shower. Whatever it was, it tuned my mind from Morgana back to Samantha, from Dark Sorceress and magical researcher to gamer and Forensic Accountant.


    Dried off and dressed, I made myself some food, veggies with sauce and rice, a simple meal, while pulling up the official Road to Purgatory-webpage, looking for new material. I didn¡¯t have to look too closely, it was one of their top-posts, just below a compilation of Arena-Battles, mostly featuring Clavran, some snippets of musical performances, enhanced with quite a bit of magic, and  a sermon, praising Tyr and lauding him for allowing them to defeat an incursion of Undead. It showed me once more that my experience was but a tiny snippet of Mundus, that there was so much more out there that I hadn¡¯t even heard about, that there were countless stories to be experienced and told, that I was just one of many. It certainly managed to rouse my desire to stand out, to show the world what I could accomplish, that I was more than just the role of Titania I had played for years.


    But for now, the video Pantheon had made was sadly useless to me, sure I was able to see  some of the effects of my magic first hand but that didn¡¯t really help me. Knowing that it had worked as I had hoped, maybe even quite a bit better, was great but didn¡¯t tell me how Lenore and I had accomplished it.


    Letting the video continue in the background, I connected to my capsule, pulling up the footage that was recorded from my point of view, looking for the correct time-stamps. Finding them proved easier than expected, simply because there was a period of darkness following them, when I had rested my eyes, leaning against Sigmir. I had certainly not fallen asleep on my feet, being held up by her, after conjuring up my magic.


    From that point, finding the section when we had started to sneak up on the wolves, quickly dispatching them with ruthless efficiency was done quickly and I settled in to watch what had happened after. I remembered seeing the singular centaur and putting her to sleep before merging with Lenore and from that point, things got blurry.


    I was a little surprised when the recording changed at that point, shifting from the usual first-person to a third-person, following the gaze of the being Lenore and I turned into. I had to stop the recording for a moment, to take the thing in, shaking my head in wonder. It was obviously a merge of both Lenore and myself, taking the general body-plan of a humanoid but adding a lot of avian features. Feathers preserving my modesty, and hiding what sort of plumbing the merged being had, sharp, bird-like claws fully replacing the feet and hands that were more human than bird but tipped with similarly wicked claws. A short, stout beak that looked like a merge of a mouth and human nose, which it kind-of was but turning the face into something monstrous. Overall, it reminded me of Samodiva, the monstrous avian Sigmir and I had faced relatively early in our journey, on the slopes of Mount Yugid.


    Shaking my head in wonder, I continued to watch, fascinated by the actions of our merged form. Carving magical formations into living flesh was nothing new but the magic wielded by us seemed to be both sharp and crisp, an amalgamation of magical abilities with runic mastery, all combined into a deadly whole. It was quite fascinating, but largely uninformative at least until the centaur we had been dealing with was covered in a cloud of impenetrable darkness. Not that the actions we had taken were boring, it was just the old problem that I had no way of truly understanding what we had done. Seeing vines similar to the ones used by my accessoire was interesting but how I had conjured up those vines of silvery-stranded darkness, I had no idea. But the blackness, that was unexpected and interesting. Especially when the merged form stepped back after a moment, giving a bow of respect.


    Sadly, I was left with even more questions when the cloud simply dissipated, leaving behind nothing but a whole but dead body, the centaur¡¯s wounds somehow healed in death. Just what had happened there and why had Lenore and I reacted how we had.


    Shaking my head, I continued watching, but there was nothing more to be learned, leaving me with more questions than I had before looking.

 Chapter 365

    Once I was finished with the mundane tasks of maintenance in my apartment, I went back into the capsule, lying down on the comfortable gel-backing and closing my eyes. I was still confused and a little unsure about the recording I had watched earlier, the actions taken by Lenore and me together and my memories of them. Focusing on the memories brought some of them back into focus, especially regarding the runic formation used on the centaur, not enough to understand what exactly we had done but what we had been trying to achieve. In a way, it was quite ingenious, using the pain suffered from Blood Magic to augment the working wrought by the same magic, getting more bang for your buck than one would normally think. Other parts of the magic used returned, too, magical mist to confuse the senses, to disorient and isolate, tactics I had been almost since the beginning. What was new, were the parts that augmented what we had been doing with direct Mind Magic, and those were the memories I had the most trouble with.


    However, I had an idea, a plan that I wanted to try out. At the end of the day, I hypothesized that the blurry memories should still be there, shared between Lenore and me, each of us getting parts of the experience but without having the full picture, neither of our minds could make sense of things. Thus, things turned blurry, our minds trying to fill in the gaps and mostly failing, at least that was my assumption. Now, with that in mind, we might be able to combine those fragments, into a reasonably clear picture of our mental processes during that time. Lenore and I would have to get together and see.


    Back in Mundus, Lenore quickly shared the events of the hours I had been gone, the time-difference a slight annoyance, that in the three hours I had spent outside the capsule six hours had passed on Mundus, turning the late morning into the middle of the afternoon. I had to grin to myself when I became aware of Sigmir¡¯s actions, or rather inactions, during the time I had been gone. She had simply done nothing after telling the others about our day of rest, she, along with Ylva, had climbed up the slopes of the valley, finding a nice, shady spot in the forest and stretched out in the shade.


    Part of me wanted to join her right that instant, leaving my Hallow and snuggling up to her, just to enjoy being near her, but before that, I wanted to sate my curiosity. It drove me a little insane, those small flashes of memory, knowing that Lenore and I had wrought a rather impressive spell but not being able to fully remember. I wanted to know and I had a way to investigate.


    The sharing of ideas over a mental connection was almost instant, our thoughts mingling, shared between our minds and a few moments later, Lenore agreed, my theories were reasonable. Not necessarily true but certainly worthy of further investigation.


    After a few moments of discussion on the logistics, we decided that using our Avatar-form would work but completely defeat the purpose while it was questionable if using our Hallows would work, simply because of the innate power-dynamic when one was in their Hallow, they became part of the other, providing power and resources but without means to enact change on the world by themselves. In the end, we went with a simple solution, meeting on equal ground, our bodies next to each other.


    Having learned from the last time we did mental travelling on a tree-branch and my resulting fall, I left my Hallow, letting my body appear beneath the branch Lenore was sitting on, falling the last meter and landing somewhat softly. Not soft enough to keep Sigmir unaware, if she ever had been, her eyes fixed on me when I got up from the crouch I had landed in.


    ¡°You are back.¡± she said, a gentle smile on her face.


    ¡°Indeed, I am. You are looking comfortable.¡± I replied, my own lips curling into a smile similar to hers. The part that wanted to just snuggle with her grew stronger, especially when she sat up, stretching her arms, her muscles rippling just a little under her clothes.


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    ¡°Lenore and I just want to try something, then I¡¯d love to join you.¡± I added, turning my focus inward, for the next step, creating my throne. Using it had become a habit, a symbol of serious mental magic to my mind, when sitting on it, I felt more in tune with myself, more focused and powerful, both sensations that should be useful. In addition, it was comfortable.


    Sitting down on my seat of Ice, I closed my eyes, letting calm wash over me, focusing on my connection with Lenore. Moments later, Lenore¡¯s familiar weight landed on my shoulder, the smooth feathers of her head touching my cheek and temple, right where the symbol of her Hallow was. The symbol of our original connection.


    Neither of us really knew how to proceed, how to puzzle the fragmented pieces of our memories of the night into a singular whole but both of us had ideas. Mine was to simply share what we remembered, in chronological order, trying to sort the memories of the other into our own, until we created a coherent picture. Lenore¡¯s was a little different, she wanted to start with the strongest impressions of the night and go from there, each of us sharing the memories that were the clearest.


    A mental coin-flip later, we began, figuring out who had the first memory of the night.


    The whole sensation was what I would describe as trippy, flashes of my own memory merging with Lenore¡¯s memories, all seen through her own mental perspective and lense, only that the memories themselves were seen through a different mental perspective as well, making the whole thing a bit of a mess. An attempt to make a flip-book of a series of events, only that one person had drawn with crayon on paper, the other with watercolours on canvas and the end-result was on film.


    Suffice to say, it didn¡¯t quite work well, we managed to get something of an impression of the night, even if we were certain that some false memories had snuck in, parts where our minds had used my knowledge of events from the recording I had watched to complete the image we had. But it was the best we could make it, with either of our methods, leaving us with little more clarity, just as many questions and a bit of a headache.


    ¡°What do you think that black thing was?¡± I asked, resting my head against my throne, enjoying the cold sensation. We hadn¡¯t been able to get more out of our memories, merely impressions of awe, fear and respect.


    ¡°Something powerful.¡± Lenore stated after a moment, her voice carrying an undertone of respect and fear. ¡°Neither of us are easily cowed, especially you. For us to simply back down, to bow in respect, it would have to be a power that commands such respect, to force us to bow without ever needing to act.¡± she explained and I had to agree. I couldn¡¯t see me bowing to anyone, not without a social need or a genuine feeling of respect.


    ¡°So a Deity or one of their messengers?¡± I asked, half-way joking, trying to make light of my unease. I wondered if that was how my ancestors had felt, in ancient times, when they looked at lightning splitting the sky, thunder rolling across the land and decided that such incredible, awe-inspiring phenomena had to be the work of a Deity. Putting a name on what they couldn¡¯t understand, trying to make it seem less terrifying, less of a threat. Maybe something that could be bargained with, that could be pacified by sacrifices.


    ¡°Maybe.¡± Lenore admitted, taking my joke more serious than I had thought.


    ¡°But I suppose it doesn¡¯t matter, it is over and done with.¡± I admitted, trying to banish the question from my mind, even if I knew it would continue to haunt me. Maybe, in time, I would find an answer to it, but for now, it would remain unanswered, unanswerable.  Annoying.


    Opening my eyes, I looked over to Sigmir again, who had made herself comfortable again and decided that the questions of the Universe could wait. Standing, I started to make my way over, a quick thought turning my throne into a cloud of cold dust, cooling the small clearing she had chosen a little further, making it a little more comfortable for me. Summer was truly a hateful season, far too warm, but I was lacking the power to change that, at least on a large scale. For now, I would have to settle for this clearing.


    With my approach, Sigmir shifted, her arm stretching out to give me a pillow, her eyes open again, following me. I gladly took her offer, snuggling against her side and closing my eyes, a sense of contentment settling over me as I felt my mind get drowsy, the few hours of sleep during the night  coming back to haunt me.

 Chapter 366

    Waking up cuddled up to Sigmir was always a pleasure. Her smell, the warmth of her arm wrapped around my back, the solid muscles cushioning me, they all worked together to give me a sense of content peace. As I squirmed a little, just shifting my position while rubbing myself against her body, I heard a soft chuckle from above my head, making me look up, straight into Sigmir¡¯s smiling face.


    For a few minutes, we just stayed like we had slept, not feeling a need to talk, not feeling a need to move, simply content in the other¡¯s presence. But, alas, all good things had to end at some point, in this case we were driven to move by Sigmir¡¯s growling stomach. As it turned out, I¡¯d been sleeping for the entire afternoon and evening, the sun a mere memory, barely lighting up the distant horizon, somewhere beyond the forest. Normally, we would have eaten dinner before but Sigmir had let me sleep on her as long as I needed.


    ¡°Do you want to return to the others?¡± I asked, pushing myself up, straddling Sigmir. Something told me that the look of hunger on her face was in no way related to her growling stomach, causing me to smirk a little, pushing myself against her midsection. The growl that came from her lips, together with her reaching hands, made me stand up fully, getting out of her reach.


    ¡°Oh my, if you want to actually eat me, we better get some food into you.¡± I teased, backing away while Sigmir used her impressive muscles to hop onto her feet in one smooth motion, coming after me. I didn¡¯t try to get away very hard, and even if I had, there was no doubt in my mind that Sigmir would catch me, and her arms wrapped around me, her lips claiming mine. For a few, endless, moments, we just stood there, clinging tightly to one-another, frantically kissing while our hands roamed across the others back and lower. But, again, Sigmir¡¯s stomach had different plans, the growl louder, causing both of us to giggle a little, the look on Sigmir¡¯s face promising that there would be a round two. I was looking forward to it.


    ¡°Earlier, the orcs talked about a nearby stream, some running water would be nice. As would some privacy, for dessert.¡± Sigmir told me, her tone making very clear what would be on the menu after the food.


    ¡°That sounds wonderful.¡± I admitted, a smile playing on my slightly bruised lips. A quick thought to Lenore told me that she would follow Sigmir and me, together with Ylva, staying nearby, just in case. I didn¡¯t think that there were any beings that would actively attack us, not without a pressing need, but the wolves had proven that they were willing to attack against the odds. Getting caught with our pants down, literally, would ruin the mood for certain. Or would it?


    Shaking off a few memories of Sigmir, in all her ferocious, bloody glory and the distinct tingling they brought with them, I made sure that my pack, containing the supplies for a simple supper, was with me and we set off, together with our animal companions.


    As we walked, my mind started to wander, taking in our surroundings. It was curious, the forest at night was a wonderful study in contrasts, the peaceful atmosphere, with rustling leaves, some insect-sounds and a myriad of earthy smells on one hand but, if one looked closely, taking in the details, things were different. The rustling of leaves could mean a predator catching their prey, killing it in a possibly painful fashion, some of the earthy smells came from death and decay, all forming a cycle. A cycle of life, a cycle of death, two sides of a single coin.


    Chuckling, I realised that again, the contrasts were an irony in and of itself, people always thought about life as peaceful and pleasant when it was everything but. To live was to kill, to die was to nourish, there could never be death without life and no life without death.


    But, if that was the truth of the cycle, that one could never be without the other, how did that work with different cycles? Could one walk the path of Death with a mindset of extremis? When looking at my paths Ice and Darkness, there was no compromise in my mind, Eternal Ice, that would never melt, Endless Darkness, without a single light, those were the perfect states I was chasing after.


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    If I applied the same philosophy to Life and Death, or even just to Death, what would it look like?


    A world without Life, perfect and complete Death, would mean I, too, would have to perish. Maybe as the last being, but perfection of Death would always bring with it my own demise. Or, a different idea, to become Death, use the link between the Death-Element and Undead to turn myself into an undead, maybe a Lich or something like that, depending which stories you used as basis for your ideas. That might have some potential but it wasn¡¯t quite what I had in mind.


    On the other hand, what would perfection for Life look like? A world without Death, a constant state of consumption, a hunger without ever being sated? Or maybe a perfect, singular being, having consumed all others, but would that be life? Life had to be in flux, to strive and to reproduce for it to be life, otherwise, what was life?


    ¡°You look lost in thought, again.¡± Sigmir prodded, poking my side, when she caught me lost in my own head.


    ¡°I apologize, I think crossing the second divide opened my eyes to some things in the world. It is fascinating.¡± I replied, catching her hand and giving it a gentle squeeze, while transmitting my pondering to Lenore, letting her share my philosophical questions, or maybe ramblings of a madwoman would be a better description. There was a moment of silence, before I felt a sudden surge of emotion, a mix of grief and longing, flowing through our bond, taking me by surprise. The excited mood we had shared earlier was thoroughly extinguished, leaving me a little disappointed but, most importantly, incredibly worried what was going on.


    ¡°As we cross the divides, the Truth of the World is revealed to us.¡± Sigmir stated, her voice taking on an oddly formal quality, as if she was reciting a quote, a wisdom that had been passed onto her by someone else.


    ¡°The Truth of the World?¡± I asked, getting curious what she meant. ¡°What do you mean by that?¡±


    ¡°It was something my father used to say. He often spoke of the Path we all were following, those who roam the world, all willing to face death in order to become stronger. All for their own reasons. According to him, those reasons were all part of the Truth of the World, that they were all connected.¡± she explained, her voice getting distant, lost in thought.


    ¡°He sounds like a good man.¡± I said, not quite sure how to console her. How did one help a friend, a lover, deal with the death of her Father? Especially for someone like Sigmir, who had never known her mother, only growing up with her Father. What little I had heard about him painted him as a proud warrior but without any knowledge when it came to child-rearing. But, even if he had been an abusive monster, when measured by modern standards, Sigmir had loved him a great deal.


    ¡°And he would be proud of you. Didn¡¯t he teach you to take revenge when wronged before moving on? You took your revenge and moved on, roaming the World.¡± I added, my mind continuing on the mental track it had before derailing. Talk of our roaming of the world would inevitably bring up the future and that came with that knowledge stuck in my mind that half of our time together was already over. That I couldn¡¯t truly promise that I would find her again in the future, no matter how much I wanted to do so.


    ¡°Don¡¯t worry about the future, we will face it together.¡± Sigmir assured me, apparently having picked up on my distress over our connection.


    ¡°You are right, why worry about tomorrow, when we have today?¡± I agreed, even if I knew that only by preparing for tomorrow, we would be able to shape the future. Plans were needed but how could one plan if there was little one could do to get what you wanted? I simply didn¡¯t know if there was something I would be able to do, to make Pantheon agree to leave Sigmir without changing her. While they had been open about their plans for the Beta, their plans for the full release were shrouded in secrecy, giving us only a date, but no further plan, no information.


    Shaking my head again, I forced those thoughts from my mind, trying to lose myself in the moment with Sigmir. Even if I knew that I had to try something, anything, that would allow me to keep together with her. For a moment, the little book I had been given by Mrs. Wu came to mind, the things described in there, the memory of her, looking at me with a proud look on her face, telling me that I had struck with true intent to kill, that I would have killed her, if she hadn¡¯t been prepared. But the book had contained a lot more than just martial arts.

 Chapter 367

    Looking up at the stars, I had to chuckle to myself. Preparing and eating dinner on a small stretch of sand in a bend of the river had given me some time to actually think and make me realise just how ridiculous the idea was. Visions of me, dressed in tight, black clothes and masked with a balaclava, trying to sneak into the headquarters of Pantheon Entertainment in an attempt to hack their servers to allow me to stay with Sigmir, or maybe liberate her from their servers, bringing her into some sort of outside device, were just too ridiculous to even consider. There was no doubt in my mind that I wouldn¡¯t be allowed a capsule in prison and just the thought of being forced to wear orange made me recoil in terror. No, my path to staying with Sigmir had to be legitimate, something I accomplished within the rules of Road to Purgatory, maybe as a reward for exemplary achievement during the beta. Pantheon had hinted at rewards for especially successful testers, people who distinguished themselves by playing the game but also by carefully testing what they were doing.


    That testing part might be my road to success, by testing things nobody else could or would test, by delving into the deeper, more advanced, parts of magic, by gaining enough power to experiment with magic beyond what others could. If there were ways to break the system, they might be found there and Pantheon would have to decide which parts of breaking the world they wanted to remain within the system and which had to be removed. The old question, what was a bug and what a feature.


    Slowly, those thoughts started drifting from my mind, as I lost myself in the vision of the sky above. The glimmering stars high above, in a see of endless darkness, those few, frozen lights in the sky, they captured my imagination. Just what was out there, hidden in the dark? How vast was this world and what could be found, if one was brave enough to venture into the unknown? I wanted to know, wanted to find out. To go boldly where no man had dared to tread before, as the saying went. It didn¡¯t quite apply here, but the sentiment was the same.


    ¡°It¡¯s been years and hundreds of miles, yet, they are the same.¡± I heard Sigmir mutter next to me, causing me to return to the present.


    ¡°Compared to the endless Void out there, with its tiny shards of light, Mundus is nothing but a speck of dust, slowly flowing through the eons of time.¡± I mused, reaching out to take her hand.


    ¡°But does that make you feel insignificant or inspired? That is a question you need to answer for yourself. When I look up there, I see the endless things that I have yet to see, have yet to discover and I feel elated. That there will never be a day when there is nothing more to find, a time when there is nowhere new to go. That I will always be able to look above me and strive to know more than I knew the day before.¡± I continued, squeezing her hand for a moment.


    ¡°Or will you be discouraged, knowing that you will never reach the end of your journey, that everything we do, everything we are, is confined to a tiny speck of dust?¡± I asked, hoping that she would feel the same as I did, motivated to know the unknown, not fearful of it.


    ¡°Will you be by my side?¡± she asked after a moment, gripping my hand tightly, not letting go. For a moment, I wanted to be truthful, telling her that I couldn¡¯t promise her that, that I would be with her as long as I could but couldn¡¯t guarantee. But I simply couldn¡¯t.


    ¡°Always.¡± I promised, knowing that I might be unable to keep my promise. But here, on the small beach, with the stars above, it simply didn¡¯t matter.


    ¡°Thank you.¡± she muttered back and for a few minutes, neither of us talked until she began again.


    ¡°My father and I often looked up at the stars.¡± she told me, the longing from earlier back in her voice, as she was lost in memories.


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    ¡°He taught me which stars could guide, show you the way home.¡± she continued on, letting memories of her father flow out, along some of the grief she had carried with her, since his passing.


    Reaching over, I simply pulled her a little closer, letting her use my arm as a pillow for once while I listened. Now, it was my time to be strong for her, to support her, if only by listening to her, tell me a tale how her father had taken her out of the village one night, teaching her about the stars.


    After a while, Sigmir¡¯s voice started to become slurred, a little indistinct, until her words turned to soft snores. Looking down onto her peaceful face, I felt my lips curl into a smile, simply because she looked so cute. The fact that she had fallen asleep again made me wonder if she had stayed awake while I had slept on her or if her circadian rhythm was simply stronger than mine, after all, I was wide awake, thanks to sleeping most of the day. This time, it was my turn to be the pillow and assure that my loved one could rest in relative comfort. There were worse fates out there, than to serve as a pillow.


    Confined in that manner, there was little to do but let my mind return to its wandering, with the sky above as my backdrop. Slowly, ever so slowly, my mind unfocused, my eyes looking up into the sky but no longer seeing it. Instead, I started to feel the Astral River all around me, vast streams of power, intertwined with, yet apart, from reality.


    As I lay there, I started to feel small disturbances in the Astral River, eddies where it was a little closer to reality, flowing into beings on the physical plane. Given that one of the eddies was right around me and, when looking closely, mirrored my own absorption of Astral Power, and another was around Sigmir, I could make an easy guess what caused those ripples.


    When looking further, to map the physical and the Astral together, things became difficult, the streams of power too blinding to allow me to see the minute disturbances caused by the physical.


    My connection to Lenore allowed me to feel her approach, long before my limited sight within the Astral allowed me to perceive her, which happened only once she landed near my head. With her so close, I could feel her presence and effect on the Astral, a minute dip in density, for lack of a better word, where she absorbed parts of the Astral into herself. Looking closely, I thought I was able to sort out what she absorbed from her surroundings, something that might give me a hint to her affinities. It wasn¡¯t something I would learn about Lenore, I knew her affinities quite well after all, but if I was able to use her as an example,  I might be able to do the same to others.


    Sadly, I was a little disappointed when I realised that I was barely able to perceive the disturbance, trying to map the different parts of the disturbance to specific affinities was beyond me, at least for now. And, as I was lying there, I also realised that it was simply taking too long to be of any use in a clandestine manner. Staring past someone for twenty minutes was not a good way to gather information on them, not if you wanted them to remain oblivious to you. It might be useful to help someone learn their affinities, before they ever started to learn magic, maybe in a school-setting or something like that, but for now, it was a pointless exercise.


    ¡°And, what did you learn?¡± Lenore asked me, having picked up on my concentration and curiosity.


    ¡°That more study and experimentation is required.¡± I drily replied, the intense observation having manifested as a small headache, a stinging behind my eyes.


    ¡°Did you expect anything else?¡± she asked, amused at the frustration I felt.


    ¡°No, not really.¡± I admitted. At the end of the day, I didn¡¯t really focus on studying the Astral so hoping that I would learn all its secrets with a simple look, that would make those secrets rather mundane. No, if I wanted to learn more about the Astral and how to extract information from it, I would have to put a lot more effort into studying it.


    Which was an interesting topic but there were so many interesting topics, so much to learn, so much to find out. And just so little time.


    ¡°Why don¡¯t we focus on my Ice-Magic for a bit? I think there are some interesting applications when combining mist and wind.¡± Lenore suggested, hopping closer to sit next to my head.


    ¡°As long as we keep it small, sure.¡± I agreed, watching her create a tiny bit of mist, before starting to manipulate the volume of air it occupied. Helping Lenore with her magic often helped me with my own, the student learning from the teacher and the teacher from the student and all that. So, for now, I was watching the swirling cold with a smile on my face.

 Interlude: Of Ice and Fire - Reactions

    <table><tbody><tr><td> Heracles, Official Pantheon Moderator </td></tr></tbody></table>


    Greetings, dear Traveller


    This thread is for the discussion of the latest vision-shard that managed to cross the world from Mundus into our world, showing a battle between orcs, centaurs and their respective allies. Who knows what paths have been taken before both sides found themselves at this point?


    Find out, as you travel your own Road to Purgatory.


    <table><tbody><tr><td>Shandra, confirmed Beta-Account</td></tr></tbody></table>


    Cool video, makes me curious about the circumstances.


    My gut-reaction was that a savage band of orcs was murdering poor centaurs in a night-raid but given the question you posed, it makes me wonder.


    <table><tbody><tr><td>-Snydervine, confirmed Beta-Account</td></tr></tbody></table>


    Friggin¡¯ Orc-cowards, too afraid to stand and fight the centaurs in the open, they scurry around like the rats they are and attack in the night.


    <table><tbody><tr><td>-Do¡¯rodra, confirmed Beta-Account</td></tr></tbody></table>


    Why do I have a feeling that I¡¯ve seen that mist before?


    <table><tbody><tr><td>Ghostfire, confirmed Beta-Account</td></tr></tbody></table>


    Can we please nerf mages? I mean, that mage just rolled a small army, without breaking a sweat. How the hell is that balanced?


    <table><tbody><tr><td>Jeanyra, confirmed Beta-Account</td></tr></tbody></table>


    Rock: Nerf Paper, please!!!!!!11111 Scissors are fine, though.


    That¡¯s you, at the moment Ghostfire. Incidentally, what happened to Ghostblade? Oh, wait, he got banned, lol.


    Ever since Sage Gygax set out to change the world during the last millenium, Fire and Fireballs have been the way to decimate lower levelled enemies, it just is a fact of fantasy-life. If you want to send a large group of mooks to an early grave, you Cast Fireball!


    With that out of the way and regarding the video: Cool spellwork by the orc, pretty sure she¡¯s not a mage though. Makes me curious just what class she is, what level and what types of magic she actually is using. The bonfire-thingies look like spirit-golems, so I¡¯d guess some sort of summoner. But then, she also looks rather martial with weapons and armour but those might just be for show.


    On the other side, I¡¯m really curious if the mist comes from the person I think it comes from. Pantheon has become a little predictable with the people they like to showcase, almost as if they have chosen a few archetypes from the active, high-level players and are using them to showcase their game. Would be smart marketing, especially if they just happen to pick people that already had some name-recognition, such as Tobiuno (who didn¡¯t even bother to change his name) or Morgana (formerly known as Titania, according to rumour).


    And it has been a while since we¡¯ve seen something official featuring Morgana, so it was time to get something, even if they tried to be sneaky and not actually show her. Kinda cool, I¡¯ve got to admit, but we can see right through you, marketing-department!


    <table><tbody><tr><td>Goliry, confirmed Beta-Account</td></tr></tbody></table>


    To follow up on Jeanyra, there even is an equivalent to real-world military.


    In simple terms, heavy-armoured martial fighters are tanks. The treaded kind, not the one that stands in front of a boss and pisses them off hard enough that the only thing they can think about is beating that one, heavy-armoured idiot up. even if there is some overlap.


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


    Anyway, those are the guys that you don¡¯t want to get too close to, or there will be a massive clash of steel and death, most likely ending with a lot of scrap-metal.


    Then there are the mages, and various comparable spellcasters. They are artillery. If you give them time to set-up and range in, they will not only ruin your day but also the day of your thousand best friends. On the other hand, once the armour rolls over the hill, artillery has one last hail-mary shot, before they start running, in order to die tired.


    Lastly, to finish out the comparison, we have our dear, sneaky rogues who are the equivalent to special forces. You don¡¯t see them coming, you don¡¯t see them going but things start to explode. On the other hand, if either armour or artillery manage to catch them, they need body bags.


    Simplified but it works out rather well.


    And no, Healers don¡¯t get to be in the comparison. If we were to put them in, they¡¯d be the medics, hiding far behind the frontlines, waiting for the real fighters to do their job before patching them back up so they can do it again.


    What were we talking about again?


    <table><tbody><tr><td>Harms, confirmed Beta-Account</td></tr></tbody></table>


    As someone who is in the video, I might as well give some context.


    What, you didn¡¯t notice me? There are a few frames where you can see an orc, getting his throat ripped out by a wolf in the background. Yeah, that¡¯s me¡­


    No, I didn¡¯t survive, shit sadly happens.


    Anyway, on to context.


    The Centaurs have been mounting raids into central Aretia for some time, think a decade or three, but now, it seems as if their raids have changed recently. At least that¡¯s what Dura Firebringer, the orc in the video, local heroine and Warleader, described. Before, the centaurs were interested in getting some loot before moving back to the foothills and steppes just north of the mountains, their home-range.


    But on their last raid, they didn¡¯t just grab loot, they took people, too. For what? Nobody knew, maybe as slaves, maybe as sacrifices, maybe for some other purpose, we didn¡¯t care to ask. No, we only cared to get our people back, so a small battle-group was assembled, following after the orcs, led by Warleader Firebringer. I was one of the grunts that joined the force, brimming with excitement to get our people back. (and, to be honest, to fulfill the quests we had received, in addition to large chunks of EXP for participation in large-scale battles)


    Driven by righteous fervour, to save our people, we set out hunting the centaurs, our elite scouts easily picking up the tracks of them. They had a lead on us, but a few days of forced marches would be enough to catch up, as they were slowed down by their captives. Centaurs can move quite fast but orcish captives and livestock can¡¯t keep up with them. It should have been a hint for us that something was up, they had to have known that there would be pursuit, fast enough to catch them.


    Before we ever caught up to the centaurs, some of our scouts stumbled upon something else, hunters going after game in the nearby forest. Nothing terribly exciting, just travellers on their way through the region, replenishing their stores, or so you would think. They were asked to exchange information, not like the locals can use the internet to find out what is happening in distant places and cable news is really unreliable on Mundus, even more than it already is.


    Anyway, when those travellers met with Warleader Firebringer, things started to heat up, with an intense staring contest between one of the Travellers and the Warbringer, the air alight with static. Not really sure what was going on, but the Traveller was Morgana and apparently, there was something with opposite magical talents or some such, don¡¯t ask me, not sure about the details.


    Whatever those details might be, the four were asked to join us, at first for the day, later for our hunt. Again, no idea about the details but a couple of the more experienced locals seemed to think that those four, the party around Morgana, was a force to be reckoned with. Granted, the four of them raised the average level of our raid by a bit but it¡¯s kinda hard to estimate strength purely based on level. Whatever, the Warleader decided they would go with us and that was what happened from our side.


    Two days later, we had the centaurs in reach and the Warleader made their plans, plans that included Morgana and her party. Plans for a nightly assault on a fortified camp. Normally insane but it turned out, the plan was even more insane than I had thought. In hindsight, with the video, I can guess at a few things, mainly that the wolves that attacked us had been meant to be a trap for us, a trap that the Warleader sprung to get the better of them. Not like they told me what was going on, I only had orders to hold the mouth of the valley.


    From here on, I can only make educated assumptions about events in the video, but I know that Morgana and her party left us behind in the evening before the attack, moving to a different position. Looking at the video, and remembering past videos of Morgana and her mist, I¡¯d guess that she essentially gassed the centaur-camp, forcing them to abandon it and rush into our lines. Pretty brutal, especially knowing that the centaurs had captives, but I guess that there is no convention regarding warfare on Mundus.


    Well, those are some of the circumstances of what you saw in the video and with this, I¡¯m out, enjoying my forced day off from Road to Purgatory.


    <table><tbody><tr><td>Leonidas, confirmed Beta-Account-</td></tr></tbody></table>


    You mean they essentially discard the prisoners, in order to recover the loot? That¡¯s cold, seriously cold.


    <table><tbody><tr><td>Goliry, confirmed Beta-Account</td></tr></tbody></table>


    Agreed with the one above.


    But on the other hand, if you find yourself in a bad tactical position, a certain ruthlessness is necessary. That¡¯s where the ¡°heroic last stand¡± comes in, those insane ideas that go down in history, at least if they work.


    <table><tbody><tr><td>Jeanyra, confirmed Beta-Account</td></tr></tbody></table>


    Might have been more that the only way to win was to use large-scale magic. If you go with large-scale fire-magic, there is no precision targeting, just as the earlier comparison alluded to. Large-scale fire-magic is akin to calling in the artillery to shell a position, nothing will be left but burning rubble.


    She went with a solution that allowed them to recover the loot. Cold, calculating but apparently they thought it was worthwhile.

 Chapter 368

    This time, it was my turn to watch Sigmir slowly wake up and I felt a smile creep up on my face, simply because it looked so adorable. Once more, I was struck by the immense contrast, that a person so powerful, so wild, as my Sigmir could look so calm and peaceful in their sleep and upon waking up. There was no tension or vigilance on her face, just a simple contendness, especially when she took note of her surroundings, a smile curling her lips.


    ¡°Good morning.¡± I told her, reaching over to brush some of her short hairs from her forehead.


    ¡°Good morning, love.¡± she replied, before giving me a quick kiss and pushing herself up, stretching as she did. The play of her muscles made me lick my lips for a moment, before I got a hold on myself and followed suit, stretching out as I stood up.


    It was still early, barely after sunrise and I had spent a productive night, or as productive as one could be, with a Giantblood twice your size sleeping on you. Not that I complained, it had been an interesting change of pace to be the pillow for once, not the one being held and comforted but the one doing the comforting. Confined in that way, I had focused on those small things that would normally get pushed back to the end of the pile in favour of more flashy and big experiments, those small necessities that tended to accumulate.


    For one, I had made sure that the various tools and weapons I had crafted from Hard Ice were still in a working state, which, unsurprisingly, they had not been. While I sheltered my body, and thus my equipment, from the full heat of summer, I didn¡¯t expend the necessary power to keep myself cloaked in a layer of frozen air, meaning that, slowly but surely, even the magically resilient Hard Ice had been melting. Not enough to destroy any of my implements but it had been enough that both my shuttles and my blades had lost their edges, an oversight making me annoyed at myself. The shuttles were a useful tool, my preferred way to fight and support at a medium distance, easy and swift to use, if lacking the punch to decisively end a battle. But even worse, my blades were my last line of defense, what I relied on if I ever got cornered or ran out of magic. They had to be in top condition and I had been very lax when it came to maintaining them, which was the reason for the state they had been in.


    I had fixed it, for now, restoring their cutting edges but I would have to make it a daily ritual to make sure my blades were sharp. It just wouldn¡¯t do to rely on them, only to have them come up short in a crisis. If I were to die in this Beta, I would be damned if it was because such a stupid mistake.


    Another thing I had done was check the forums, especially when there were a couple notifications, tagging me by name. It turned out that Harms, the orc who had died in the skirmish against the wolves, had given his account of the battle to go with the video published by Pantheon Entertainment and had tagged Morgana in it, maybe to use some of the notoriety I had gained to promote himself. It wasn¡¯t a bad idea, I had been making some waves, getting quite a few followers and people who would happily hate-watch my content in hopes of me slipping up, meaning that he would get some of those, even if I wasn¡¯t in his video, at all.


    What I wasn¡¯t too happy about was that he actively described how I had managed to get a locally famous native to see me as an equal, especially when he pointed out how my small group of four had been assigned a role similar in scope as the whole orcish battlegroup, making it look like that locally famous native thought we had similar battle-potential. While I was happy about the promotion, I wasn¡¯t happy that he was embellishing our battle-power, it was a lot more advantageous to be underestimated by your foes. But with his description, that was impossible.


    At least he had no idea what we actually had done, limiting his description of our role in the battle, but even just the the information that we had managed to force a small army of centaurs to give up their camp and run straight into an ambush by the orcs was bad enough. I had no desire to make public that I was able to use Mind Magic, especially with the waves the Profile of that bard had made, with his ability to force Travellers to obey for a relatively long time. I had no doubt that the magic he had used had some massive restrictions and caveats, but even then, it was incredibly scary to think about. Paranoia over Mind Magic would be prevalent amongst Travellers, most likely causing a massive overreaction. At least that''s what I would do, make sure that nobody was able to mess with my head. So far, I thought that concealment combined with anti-magic taken from my Darkness-Runes was the way to go, it had worked against the magic wielded by the bolotnisa and Tzar Bolotnik. But if it would work against a Traveller, I didn¡¯t know. To say nothing of ways to create a passive defense, something that would work at all times, making it impossible to ambush me and mine, overwhelming me before I ever had a chance to use my magic to defend.


    This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.


    Yeah, I could understand why Mind Magic was feared.


    Other than those tasks, I had helped Lenore with her magic, mostly trying to incorporate more Ice-Magic into what she was doing and listening to her explain her thoughts regarding Air- and Death-Magic, how she wanted to combine the two. It was similar enough to what I had been doing, using mist to carry a variety of nasty effects, that I could easily follow, only that her ideas were even more insidious than mine, essentially targeting the lungs of those in her area of effect, binding subtle, necrotic effects to the air people had to breathe. It made me wonder, would it be possible to essentially make the oxygen in the air carry her magic, maybe with a little Blood Magic from me added into her spell, using a physical carrier to circumvent magical defenses before using magical ways to circumvent physical barriers? It would be a way to carry Blood- and Death-Magic right into the veins of someone, where it could work with incredibly lethal effect. Using the power inherent in their Blood to activate the Death-Magic where it could do the most damage. It was an interesting idea and Lenore had quickly understood what I had been telling her about the composition of air but neither of us had been able to put that knowledge to practical use, to target the oxygen in the air. It might simply be impossible or it might require a lot higher ability than Lenore had, to say nothing about me, who was piggy-backing on her ability.


    As such, we had shelved that idea for a later date and focused on the effects Lenore already knew about, using wind to carry her Death-Magic.


    After we had a simple breakfast, we made our way back to the others. As we approached, it became obvious that Dura Firebringer had done her homework. Before we ever got in sight of the camp, we noticed a couple guards keeping an eye out. They obviously noticed us but didn¡¯t approach, merely giving us a salute when they noticed us looking at them.


    Leaving them be, we got to the top of the slope, looking down on the camp and there, too, quite a few things had changed. The camp was still in the mouth of the valley but the only traces left of the centaur-camp was the dusty pit that my spell had created. Everything else had been looted and taken away. At the same time, the orc-camp was in the process of being broken down, a hustle and bustle that made it clear they wanted to leave, soon.


    Climbing down the slope, we quickly met up with Adra and Rai, who were standing on the side, watching the goings on.


    ¡°Good morning.¡± I greeted them, as Sigmir and I stepped up. ¡°Did you enjoy your day of rest yesterday?¡± I asked, mostly curious what they did.


    The blush burning on Rai¡¯s cheeks and an amused smile on Adra¡¯s face hinted at the things they had been up to. At the same time, I noticed that they stood a little closer together, not quite holding hands but not far off. It made me wonder, did I want to indulge my curiosity or was it one of those things that I simply didn¡¯t want to know?


    ¡°Yes, thank you. It was most enjoyable.¡± Adra replied, causing the blush on Rai¡¯s cheeks to deepen even further.


    ¡°That is good. You will have to tell us all about it.¡± Sigmir told her, the smile on her face making it obvious that she had picked up on the same things I had and wanted to tease the two of them, or maybe just Rai. By that time, I started to wonder if I had to use Blood Magic to restore circulation to Rai, his blush had spread down his neck, vanishing under his armour.


    ¡°Mhm, we can do that as we walk. I think we will head out soon.¡± Adra nodded, her grin getting even bigger, now watching Rai as well.

 Chapter 369

    Maybe I should have realised that a game with the name ¡°Road to Purgatory¡± involved a whole lot of roads and walking on them. Not that we truly had a road to march on, it was a foot-path with pretensions of grandeur, created by people walking across the land and later maintained by the few, brave merchants that worked the region. There simply was no overarching government that used resources gathered from a large population to maintain infrastructure, at least not in Aretia. The closest was the Merchant¡¯s Guild, and they obviously focused on the more profitable routes, especially close to the ancient, imperial roads that partially maintained themselves. Part of me was curious how that would develop, once there were Travellers in this world, making their own roads, both literally and figuratively.


    In a way, it would be akin to one of the civilisation-building games, where you had to organise and plan for hours, before you could make your ideas a reality. There had been a time when I had greatly enjoyed those games, the somewhat predictable nature in the patterns of their random elements appealing to certain parts of me. Later, when I had been at University, studying accounting, I had lost interest in them. Playing became more and more like work, and I had been told that I was supposed to keep what some called a ¡°work-life balance¡±.


    I wasn¡¯t sure if I would even want to try creating any sort of political or economic influence within Road to Purgatory, the idea to pour over paperwork, reduced to delegating and ordering people made such desires vanish faster than ordinary snow in the summer sun. No, those games I had been playing had been enjoyable because the paperwork and the necessary subordinates had been simply programs, without motivations or ego of their own. Giving a command in one of those games meant that the command was carried out exactly as given, something I would never be able to assume with the natives of Mundus. No, it would be like working in the real world, with messy humans and their various, private ideas and motivations.


    And how messy the natives could be was demonstrated as we followed the orc-army, triumphant in their return, even if some of the orcs were reduced to travelling on simple wagons, unable to walk on their own, due to wounds suffered in the fighting. I might have been able to heal some of them but I had never been asked, nor had I offered on my own.


    But it was an interesting contrast, the relative discipline we had witnessed while hunting the centaurs compared to the pure elation the orcs were demonstrating now. It was reasonable and I could understand why they were acting the way they did. For them, the battle had been one of life and death, a fight in which they had lost comrades and friends and a battle that could have been a lot worse.


    Once again, I was reminded that I was the odd one out, that I wasn¡¯t risking anything but a little time and potential compared, while they were risking the one life they had. Resurrection-Magic did exist, at least according to the legends referred to on the forum, but it was just that, the stuff of Legends, attributed to a few deities that did their thing, and only to the recently dead. What we Travellers got was, to the locals, nothing short of a major miracle.


    That subject got me into a certain line of thinking and discussion with Lenore, lasting us most of the day.


    What was Death? How would one go about reversing it?


    When we broke for lunch, we had a few thoughts more or less nailed down, even if experimental verification was still necessary. Such verification had the problem that we needed test-subjects and testing resurrection-magic had that small necessity that the test-subject needed to die first, before we could even begin testing. I somehow had doubts that finding voluntary test-subjects would be easy. There was the option to use Travellers but who knew if dying worked even remotely similar for a Traveller, compared to a native. Comparative tests would be necessary but again, a lack of voluntary subjects made such tests difficult. Involuntary was a different question but those had different problems, mostly with the other orcs. We had a few experiments we wanted to try, if we ever came across the right resources.


    The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.


    One of our theories was that resurrection would be possible if the body could be restored before the soul moved on, to whatever came next. There might be a need to restore the connections between body, mind and soul, which would require some serious magical foreknowledge or the subject would undoubtedly be fundamentally changed by the effect, but that was a subject for further research. It made me think that the first step for practical resurrection-magic was a method to capture the souls of the departed, essentially a need to devise soul-traps that triggered on the death of the wearer. That would give time to restore the body, which should be comparatively easy. It all depended on the type of wound that had caused the original death.


    If it was only a simple wound that led to exsanguination, even I was able to fix it. A slit throat, a punctured heart, things like that. I might even be able to reverse the effects of drowning and similar suffocation effects but I had yet to see their effects with my magical senses.


    On the other hand, if the body was seriously damaged, for example crushed or torn apart in some way, things would be more difficult. My blood-magic was far from capable of performing that task, but given how little I had worked with it, especially how little I had studied its effect on bodies, that was to be expected. As I had been reminded just the day before, more research and training required, as so often. Maybe a project for the full-release of the game.


    Lastly, if there was no body at all, things would get truly difficult, getting into the realm that was normally reserved for science-fiction. Growing bodies from scratch, without the benefit of a mother or some sort of egg involved, essentially magical cloning. I didn¡¯t even know where to start with that, but Lenore was deeply intrigued by the images and ideas flickering in my mind. It was such a fundamental riddle of life, that she wanted to study it closer. Maybe we should find some fertilised eggs for us to work with, to study when life began from an arcane point of view.


    It made me realise that such studies were necessary anyway, to understand how the formation of a consciousness worked, those natural connections between body, mind and soul, how did they form in the first place? Studying that process might allow me to understand how to form them myself, if I ever got to the point that I wanted to resurrect someone.


    It was also a worthwhile subject to look at, simply from a perspective of my Mind Magic, understanding how the connections between body and mind formed and in which ways they connected. Maybe it would allow me to understand the transfer of information from the body to the mind, and subsequent interpretation of the information. That hopefully would allow me to replicate such signals, letting me fool the mind into thinking that something had happened to the body, giving me a path towards the formation of mental illusions.


    But even without the ability to form such illusions, merely understanding how the sensory organs report to the mind would be incredibly valuable, possibly allowing me to stop that report-function. That alone would be a major game-changer in combat, allowing Sigmir and the others to strike with impunity. Or, going the other direction, directly inducing pain would open up possibilities. I doubted it would work to directly damage an enemies life-force but it might work to stun them, taking away their ability to fight.


    There were so many possible ways that the ability to influence an enemies perception would be useful, it was insane.


    However, not as useful as resurrection-magic, which brought me up short. If it was so easy, for a given value of easy, to come up with a way to truly revive people, wouldn¡¯t someone already be doing it? Sure, I had no idea how difficult it would be to create a soul-trap, let alone one that worked automatically, or the steps following that, but was I truly that arrogant, to think that I was the first person to have such an idea? Somehow, and Lenore agreed with me, I doubted I would be able to raise people from death, even if I were to be able to complete the steps I had thought of. Or that there would be some major hindrance on those steps, considering the lore regarding resurrection. The gods had to keep their reputation, afterall.

 Chapter 370

    Travelling with a large group of well-armed and ready to fight orcs had the expected effect on the local wildlife. Even our normally smaller, yet powerful, group had a major deterring effect on curious critters, but the orcs took that effect and dialed it to eleven, maybe even twelve. According to scouts and some scrying by Dura Firebringer, Lenore and myself, there were still wolves in the area, while Ylva reported that she could smell Freki¡¯s brood on the wind, truly confirming the connection between the wolves here and those that had attacked her pack. But, nothing came close enough to alert the sentinels guarding our flanks, let alone try to attack the main-group. Similarly, the scouts failed to hunt down the wolves, merely finding some tracks.


    All in all, the five days travelling towards the Bright Hollow were about as boring as travelling on Mundus could be. On the evening of the first day, I practised my healing a little, doing what I could to restore the injured orcs but some of their injuries were beyond my ability to heal, only time or a better healer would be able to cure them. It was vexing, I could heal internal injuries with relative ease, even ruptured organs could be restored with some effort but something relatively simple as a broken leg was beyond me.


    Sure, I could see the logic behind it, that internal bleeding was simply a problem related to blood, giving me an angle of attack with my Blood magic. Damaged organs, on the other hand, lacked that direct connection but enough power seemed to be able to bridge that gap nonetheless, but bones? Sure, there was a tenuous connection between bones and blood, via bone marrow, but it didn¡¯t look like that connection was close enough to allow my abilities to bridge it. Or so I reasoned, when I finally gave up on mending a broken leg, finally admitting defeat.


    Other than that, I conversed with Dura Firebringer, trying to learn as much about her methods of summoning Spirits, while explaining my method of scrying to her. While she had some interest in the magic I had used against the centaurs, Lenore and I were able to conceal most of our working, using the simple fact that our Death Magic was mostly cast by Lenore and her explanations left Dura Firebringer completely confused. The magic wielded by Spirit-beasts like her was simply different from what mere mortals, like the orc shaman and myself, had available. Even I was left stumped by the concepts and ideas used by Lenore, despite the fact that she willingly allowed me to witness her mind and memory as she used them, even trying to mentally explain them to me.


    The translation-gap wasn¡¯t as simple as a different, spoken language, it was more akin to trying to translate from a completely different linguistic paradigm, with different letters and a radically different logic behind their language. Compared to Dura Firebringer, I had the advantage that Lenore was willing to act as reference and help me translate but it was a major mental effort, leaving me with a headache most days.


    On the other hand, it seemed that trying to conjure up spirits for myself would be rather difficult, as it required working out agreements with major spirits. That would allow the spellcaster to draw upon their descendents, as long as they resided in the spirit-world. Curiously, the original agreement didn¡¯t depend on the spellcaster themselves, it could be passed on by introduction from a previous holder.


    That was how Dura Firebringer had gained it, one of the ancestors of the Bright Hollow Orcs had somehow made the agreement. They had a whole legend about it, but I took it with a grain of salt, something that amused Lenore quite a bit. According to their legend one of the orcs that had founded the Bright Hollow-Clan had saved a young Phoenix, eventually marrying the proud avian. At some point, even the powers of the Phoenix coursing through that ancestor hadn¡¯t been able to keep that ancestor young and, upon the death of that ancestor, the phoenix had caused a massive conflagration, the fire consuming both the body and the phoenix, while leaving the nearby orcs completely unharmed. From that day on, the Bright Hollow Orcs had been able to call upon those avian fire spirits, the induction passed down from teacher to student.


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    Sadly, that meant I would have to find my own way to get the agreement of an ancestral Spirit, like Hugin, Lenore¡¯s ancestor, who had talked to the two of us, just a short time after we had met. Maybe, if we found another place that was as aligned to the Death-Element as the Burrow Den had been, we would be able to talk some more.


    Lenore liked the idea, but had little idea how to initiate contact and, as evidenced that no such communication had occurred when we had been in a swamp filled with Death and Undead, her ancestor didn¡¯t feel a need to call. Or maybe we had just missed the call by not sleeping in that damned swamp, or there was some other reason. It wasn¡¯t like I had some sort of missed-call function for ancient, spiritual entities from another realm. Maybe I could get myself a mailbox for that, or ask them to leave a message after the beep. Or maybe not. That sounded more likely.


    In addition to learning more about the local legends, I learned more about the orcish way of life. During the summer, they practised a mix of agriculture, hunting and animal husbandry, their clan splitting into different groups to prepare for the winter.


    One of those groups, responsible for agriculture, consisted of a few, dedicated farmers, some of whom were able to work magic on the soil, cultivating the slopes of Bright Hollow, a wide valley with a small river running through it.


    The rest of the clan was split up into travelling parties, some of them slowly travelling in a wide region with their livestock, allowing them to graze wherever they happened upon good feeding grounds. Finally, the younger orcs, those who had yet to gain the experience necessary to keep the important livestock safe, travelled in a closer range, with more experienced orcs to guide them. It was their duty to keep the Bright Hollow safe while also hunting down game for the winter, bringing it back to the clan where it could be preserved. It was from those younger orcs that Dura Firebringer had recruited her force, which explained their relative inexperience. It also explained why the centaurs had been able to raid the orcs in the first place, especially with such a small force.


    As we came closer to the curved valley, I was also able to see why it was called the Bright Hollow. It was late in the afternoon when we saw it first and most of the rocks visible were a light grey, some of them even white and the setting sun reflected off them, making the valley appear to be brightly lit, even where it should be in shadow. Just the visual made me shudder for a moment, the idea of heat and light, trapped between the rising slopes of the valley made me incredibly uncomfortable. A natural oven, even with a readily available source of water if the locals wanted to steam me.


    From a strategic point of view, the valley itself seemed to be rather useless, the mouth simply too wide to adequately defend, to the point that the orcs didn¡¯t even try. The mouth was wide open, about two kilometers of flat ground before the slopes started to rise upwards, and even that was a gentle rise, making the opening about six kilometers across. Six kilometers of wall, likely too much to adequately defend, so it looked like the orcs didn¡¯t even try.


    Curious, Lenore and I started to look closer at their defensive setup, noticing two watchtowers up on the mountains. Those caught our attention for a bit, especially when we noticed movement and bright flags getting unrolled on both of them, while some of the orcs ahead of us were waving differently coloured flags back. At a guess, it was their way to communicate messages without magic, alerting defenders further up the valley.


    It hinted that they had a fortified strongpoint further up the valley, still out of sight due to the lay of the land, and the flags allowed them to retreat into it, making it difficult for attackers to get to them. Sure, one could siege the valley but there was a major difference between quick raids for loot and a serious siege, which, historically, could last months or even years.


    All in all, I was quite curious about the locals and looking forward to learning more. Maybe even about their magic, if some sort of trade could be made.

 Chapter 371

    It was obvious that the orcs just wanted to get home, making us push on despite the late time of day. Normally, we would have made camp by the time the sun was setting but, given that we were starting to move into their valley, we continued on.


    Again, the Bright Hollow made the reason for its name clear, the light-coloured stones almost glowing in the dark. Even the footpath we were following was covered in crushed gravel from the same type of rock, its colour darkened by mud and earth, but still light enough to allow us to easily traverse it. Around us, I could almost feel the last remaining tension leave the orcs, making me wonder if they had forgotten that the original attack had to have happened in this area, but I couldn¡¯t bring myself to rain on their parade, not as long as their relief didn¡¯t endanger me or mine. If they wanted to rely on defenses that had failed already, I wouldn¡¯t stop them, but I would remain vigilant and keep an eye open for ways out of the valley, if things went south.


    The fight against the centaurs had shown me that fixed defenses and ambushes could be turned against the defenders, with the right preparations and I had made a mental note not to rely on such measures. I also remembered the videos about Kolyug and the troubles they had with that Fire Mage, getting forced to hide behind their walls while he set the land on fire. Part of me was curious how the situation would have ended, without the Grandmother intervening, on what I considered to be a whim, but there was no way to know. Not unless a similar situation occurred, or, if I truly wanted to know, I might be able to create such a situation once the beta was over and I had gained a lot of power in the life-version.


    The main-path into the Bright Hollow followed the river¡¯s gentle curve and, after maybe twenty minutes of walking uphill, we came to a bridge over the river. It made me nod in agreement, if an attacker used the footpath as an attack-route, using the river as a natural barrier and the bridge as a choke-point made sense. At the same time, it made me wonder if there were additional defenses further uphill, in case an attacker ignored the bridge and pushed ahead. It would leave them open to be flanked, though, so holding it would be necessary for an attacker, just like it would be for the defenders. Again, I wondered where the centaurs had attacked, for their attack to succeed.


    Further uphill we went and soon, I was able to see that my original thoughts had been proven correct, the orcs had a serious defensive position in their valley. What had been gentle, grassy slopes, with fields and even some irrigation, had given way to a steep, rocky incline, the large, open area between the slopes had narrowed to the point that the orcs had decided that they could simply close off the whole width of the valley. At the point they had built their wall, it was only about kilometer wide, maybe less, maybe more, but even that was a serious engineering-project, one with impressive results.


    Their wall was made from the same rock that had given the valley its name, bright stones, a good five meters tall, with torches and visible guards. It took me a moment to realise that, as impressive the wall looked, as useless it was, at least when compared to beings more powerful than the average native. While I had no illusions that the members of my group were amongst the truly powerful beings on Mundus, our travels had pushed us beyond what most achieved, simply due to the limited power-level of normal animals and the way the system worked. There was no way to grind EXP by killing millions of low-level boars, not on the Road to Purgatory.


    In this case, it meant that a wall like the one in front of us was a small hurdle, easily overcome if desired. While I thought I would need magic to jump over it, to strengthen my body, Sigmir, Rai and Adra could likely accomplish that with just their physical bodies. It reminded me that the name of Sigmir¡¯s class, before she had crossed the second Divide, had been Mountain Cleaver, making me wonder if she even needed to leap the wall or if she could take an even more straight-forward approach, if she so desired. It was an amusing idea, even if there was an element to it that made me feel a little sober.


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    Considering how useless the wall would be, I tried to compare it with the other walls and fortifications I had seen on our journey. Compared to the wall of Yaksha, it was superior, given that Yaksha only had a wooden wall, one quite a bit lower than the Bright Hollow wall. But, at the same time, I was aware that Yaksha was just a small town and one of the biggest predators of the region cared little about walls.


    On the other hand, if I compared the orcish wall with the walls of Kolyug and the fortifications constructed by the Ashenforge-Dwarves, I could only shake my head in disappointment. The Dwarves had a similarly sized wall but overcoming the wall only meant that you would have to siege each dwarven-tunnel individually. And those tunnels, dark, narrow and confusing as they were, would give the dwarves a home-field advantage that would allow them to slaughter invaders at their leisure. Behind the orcish wall, I was able to see regular houses, flimsy compared to the squat dwarven bunkers.


    However, all fortifications paled to what I had seen in Kolyug, the massive walls, fortified with magic and, in turn, a massive spellcasting-device on its own, with powers that I couldn¡¯t even begin to imagine. Sure, that Fire Mage had been able to push the trolls into their walls but how the battle would have gone without the Grandmother¡¯s interference was unknown. Again, just like I had a few days ago, I wanted to know just how well the magical defenses of Kolyug were.


    Looking over to Sigmir, I had a feeling that the amused expression on her face was for similar reasons.


    ¡°We could take them.¡± Sigmir muttered, speaking softly so nobody would hear her.


    ¡°The wall? Certainly. But remember that there might be more than meets the eye.¡± I replied, even as I tried to see if there was anything magical about the fortification.


    ¡°And even if we would conquer it, what would we want to do with an orc-fortress in the middle of nowhere?¡± I continued, amused at the idea. Why would one want to conquer some random fortress, hell, what reason was there to conquer anything? Even if I had an entire continent under my control, if I wanted to get any use out of it, I¡¯d have to administer the whole, bloody thing.


    What would I gain in turn? Nothing, not really. Sure, if I had my own continent, I could acquire test-subjects for those interesting bits and pieces of magic that I wanted to try out, but that I could do with a little subterfuge and a lot of privacy, without going through the hassle of conquering some place.


    My question made Sigmir pause for a moment, before whispering back, ¡°Who said anything about conquering? The centaurs wouldn¡¯t have raided here if they didn¡¯t think it would be worth it, would they?¡±


    ¡°Not sure it works like that.¡± I admitted, even if part of me had to grin at her idea. Part of me wanted to just go for it, but a larger part didn¡¯t like the unknown odds. The simple fact that the Clan had their own territory meant that I couldn¡¯t underestimate them, especially with people like Dura Firebringer. We might be able to take her, if we stabbed her back, but she had talked of other shamans, of teachers and other fighters. No, it was just not worth it.


    ¡°Mhm, maybe you are right. Still, worth a thought, even with that Shaman, the orcs are not that impressive.¡± Sigmir muttered, a little dismissive of the Firebringer.


    ¡°Not worth it, love.¡± I told her, as we crossed another bridge, bringing us to the open gate.


    ¡°Let me welcome you to the Bright Hollow Clan.¡± Dura Firebringer spoke up, having waited for us at the side of the bridge.


    ¡°I hope you enjoy your stay, as my personal guests. You did my clan and me a great service, allowing us to recover our people and the stolen goods, while helping us to strike a blow against the centaurs who attacked us.¡± she declared, loud enough for the guards on the wall to hear her.


    ¡°Thank you for your hospitality.¡± Adra replied, taking the lead in a social situation, even if Dura Firebringer had looked at me while speaking.


    ¡°A few days of rest would be very welcome.¡± Adra continued, accepting the hospitality on all our parts.


    Hopefully the orcs had a library.

 Chapter 372

    My opinion of the Bright Hollow-defenses was not improved when Dura Firebringer guided me through the gate. If looked at from an ordinary perspective the gate was sturdy, solid wood with a thick locking-bar visible on the insight, but if I considered if from the perspective of potential threats I had already seen on Mundus, I was not impressed, especially when I took a short glance through Lenore¡¯s eyes, using her special sight to check for magic. Simply put, neither the gate nor the wall, and certainly not any parts connecting the two, had any magic on them, making me confident that each member of my party would be able to either circumvent or, in Sigmir¡¯s case, simply crush the gate, without being seriously slowed down.


    I tried to keep myself from showing what I thought about their defenses, while we were following our guide into the town itself. The town looked quite well-made, the building-style simple but sturdy and the houses seemed to be constructed from the light-grey rock and wood from the nearby forest.


    While I was studying what I could see of the town, Dura Firebringer had thanked her troops for their service, told those who had been wounded to check in with the healers and ordered a couple of her officers to take care of the loot. After a momentary glance to her, just to make sure we hadn¡¯t been forgotten about, I continued to observe the town.


    There seemed to be a strange combination of interest towards our group, which I had expected given that the locals must have been aware of the mission the orc-troop had been on, and hesitation, which I didn¡¯t understand. The orcs in town should be delighted to see that many of their tribes-people back, but the atmosphere would have felt more appropriate for a funeral. Not quite sure how to deal with the strange attitude of the people, I focused on the building, deciding that Adra could deal with the locals, once again.


    Looking at the buildings a little closer, I realised something I hadn¡¯t twigged on before, something I would take for granted on Earth, but on Mundus, it was a curiosity. The houses had windows made from clear glass, all of them, making my eyes widen in surprise.


    Dura Firebringer must have noticed my surprise and spoke up. ¡°The bright Glass my tribe makes is famous far and wide. I¡¯m certain the centaurs would have loved to steal it but even with magical bags, it is difficult to transport the glass without shattering it. Not that they ever had the chance to get into our town.¡± she explained, expressing her disdain towards the centaurs with a snort at the end.


    ¡°Certainly, it looks impressively clear.¡± I admitted, meaning it. The only glass I had seen on Mundus that could keep up with it was the glass used in Neyto and, given what I had seen of the place, I had no doubt that they used magic for their manufacture. Not that I could tell whether the orcs did the same, or if they had some other process, but just producing anything on par with the product of Neyto was quite the accomplishment, in my eyes.


    ¡°That it is. Merchants come from far away, making the arduous journey from the ancient road to our town, to buy the glass we produce. It is sold far and wide, one merchant even claimed he was planning to sell it to the Nagas, for shipping across the sea.¡± Dura Firebringer explained proudly.


    ¡°Are you part of that process?¡± Sigmir asked, one of her eyebrows raised and I thought I heard a bit of mockery in her voice.


    There was a momentary blush on the orc¡¯s cheeks, gone as fast as it appeared, before she replied. ¡°I have helped in the process.¡± she simply stated, before very deliberately focusing on the house we were walking towards.


    ¡°Anyway, if you don¡¯t object, I was planning to ask one of our house-mistresses to shelter and feed you for your stay. Normally, they provide housing for our hunting-parties in the summer, so that they have a well-kept place when they rest in the valley between their trips.¡± she explained, her voice stumbling in the beginning, just a little. I noticed Sigmir opening her mouth, maybe to needle our host some more, over the last few days she had done so a few times, and cut in.


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    ¡°And in the winter they have their own places?¡± I asked, simply to keep the topic on something relatively safe and hopefully harmless. The blush suddenly covering the orc¡¯s face made me think again but there was nothing I could do about it.


    ¡°Yes, they have. Most young adults pair up during the Harvest-Festival, to prepare for the winter.¡± she muttered, just loud enough to be audible, and I suddenly got what she meant, my own cheeks colouring, just a little.


    An awkward silence hung over our group, even if I directed a short shake of my head towards Sigmir, not wanting to linger on that particular topic.


    Luckily, our destination was nearby and Dura Firebringer opened the door, stepping inside while keeping it open for us. I let Adra go first, simply so I had the opportunity to hide the others and wouldn¡¯t necessarily be dragged into conversations. I had enjoyed talking to the shaman but during the last evening, our talks had slowly turned into a chore. I was about ready to return to comfortable silence between Sigmir and me, and the rich, mental discussions I had with Lenore. Speech was just too limited at times, too limited to bother with. It was those times that made me long for someone who could understand me like those two, only in the real World.


    As sudden as that thought appeared, I pushed it away, forcefully, not wanting to let it transfer to either Lenore or Sigmir. Not that I thought the connection to Sigmir would allow the transfer of formulated thoughts that easy, but even having Lenore feel slighted by such a careless thought was something I wanted to avoid.


    Instead, I focused on the female orc that stood in front of Dura Firebringer, her face scrunched up into a displeased, frowning face.


    ¡°So, the Firebringer returns.¡± she grumbled, her eyes roaming over our group. ¡°And who are those? You couldn¡¯t bring your people home, but you brought some strangers?¡± she continued, her voice almost a snarl.


    ¡°What hospitality.¡± I heard Sigmir mutter, right next to me, causing me to look over, an eyebrow raised. She had been a little annoyed those last few days, making me a little concerned.


    ¡°We lost few warriors and managed to recover all who¡¯ve been taken. If anyone thinks they could have done better, I invite them to challenge me, not to mutter behind my back, like cowards.¡± Dura Firebringer growled back, her voice angry and hard. Even the fiery aura she was always surrounded by flared, forcing me to magically push back, or get swept up by it.


    ¡°And who could speak sensibly anyways?! Not like anyone knew about our results, we haven¡¯t been back for more than a few minutes!¡± she continued, her aura flaring even stronger, forcing me to link with Lenore to comfortably push back.


    ¡°Calm yourself!¡± a voice snarled and I needed a moment to realise that I had spoken and the mist I normally used to keep myself cool was swirling towards the orc shaman, the conflux between our powers causing the air to vibrate with power. I felt a surge of heat flow towards me, pushed out by my power causing me to snarl, unable to muster enough power in the moment needed to stop it.


    The heat smacked me into the face, causing me to stumble in discomfort. Luckily, it wasn¡¯t hot enough to burn me but I felt like my face was being steam-cooked, while sweat was pouring out. I wasn¡¯t sure I would ever be able to enjoy steamed veggies again, the thought both amusing but also very much annoying.


    I felt Sigmir¡¯s arm steady me, allowing me to shake my head, clearing away some of the discomfort and letting me see clearly again. Clear enough to realise that Dura Firebringer looked quite ashamed, as she should, just like the housekeeper did.


    ¡°I¡­¡± the housekeeper began, her voice suddenly meek, before she cleared her throat and continued. ¡°I apologize. There was talk in the town that you eradicated the centaurs but that it was at the cost of those they took.¡± she explained, her eyes flicking between Dura Firebringer and myself, maybe due to the sudden eruption of mist in her front-hall.


    ¡°The rumors are false.¡± Dura Firebringer replied, some anger still in her voice but clearly controlled.


    ¡°We will talk about that later. For now, I will ask you to take care of these Guests, they are here on my personal invitation. Treat them as such!¡± she added, the last sentence spoken as a clear command, which got a nod from the housekeeper.


    ¡°I will leave you here, and clear up this mess.¡± Dura Firebringer told us, before looking directly at me.


    ¡°Thank you, for helping me calm down.¡± she said, gratitude obvious in her voice.


    With that, she squeezed past us, leaving before anyone could get in a word edgewise.

 Chapter 373

    ¡°That went well.¡± the orc housekeeper muttered, while shaking her head, still frowning. The others remained silent and I wasn¡¯t quite sure how to deal with things myself, instead I decided to take care of my face, which felt like I had some serious sunburns. Closing my eyes, I focused on the mist that still filled the room, using the connection I kept with my Astral Power to gather it up, letting it swirl around me. The cold mist felt like a balm on my face, especially when I added a little regenerative Blood Magic into the mix. Moments later, the discomfort was gone, and I drew the cold mist into my clothes, letting it play over my body.


    ¡°Greetings, Travellers. I hope you can forgive the commotion that just happened and won¡¯t let it spoil your stay.¡± the housekeeper said, the smile on her face appearing a little brittle to me. It made me wonder just how bad the rumors had been, while a plausible source for them appeared in my head. Harms had died in the fighting and I was reasonably sure that his respawn-point was in town, foolish as that might be, and if he was as miffed as the forum-post made him sound, he could easily be it. It would be incredibly foolish, rumors that could be traced back to you could backfire in a major way, but without information, there was nothing to do but speculate. Which I could do later.


    ¡°Greetings. Let me introduce my companions and myself.¡± Adra stepped forward, giving the housekeeper a polite nod before giving out our names.


    ¡°My name is Gera and, again, I welcome you under this roof. If you would like, I will show you your rooms so you can store what you need, before I show you around?¡± the orc introduced herself, her smile turning a little more genuine as she spoke. Adra gave a short glance to the rest of us, before focusing back to the orc, giving her a nod.


    ¡°Certainly, that would be a good idea. I¡¯m not quite familiar with your customs, how does a guest-house like this one work?¡± Adra asked, falling into step with Gera, who was leading the way.


    ¡°Oh, just act like you are at home, while you stay here. In a moment, I¡¯ll show you the dining-room, you can eat three meals a day there. If you need anything else, don¡¯t hesitate to ask, you are guests here.¡± she stressed, waving towards one of the doors to the side, while walking towards a staircase.


    After sharing a short look with Sigmir, still a little confused about the situation, we followed after the others. Up the stairs we went and I was able to hear Gera inquire about our preference for rooms. Adra asked for two rooms, adding that double-beds would be preferable, which caused me to snicker to myself. For a moment, I wondered if there would be any reaction to that, depending on the local moral code there could certainly be a reason, but the orc simply took it in stride. It turned out that they hadn¡¯t rooms set up with double-beds but it would be easy to move the bed-frames, giving us something akin to double-beds, if we had something to cover the gap between mattresses.


    The rooms we were shown to were quite close to the landing of the stairs, not terribly large but from what I could tell, everything was clean and well-made. Each room had a window, overlooking the river running through the valley, a pair of beds set on either wall, a footlocker for each bed, a single desk and a pair of tables. If not for the rustic construction, it could almost have been a hotel-room on Earth, much to my surprise.


    ¡°Why don¡¯t you take a minute to lighten your load? Afterwards, I can show you the rest of the house and you can freshen up in the bathing chamber before dinner.¡± Gera suggested, after Adra confirmed that the rooms would be perfectly sufficient.


    ¡°We can certainly do that, if you don¡¯t mind showing us around. You have to be quite busy after all.¡± Adra agreed, only to have Gera wave her concern off, telling us we shouldn¡¯t worry at all. The radical shift in treatment was seriously confusing me, at first, Gera had been angry at Dura Firebringer but once the anger had cleared and the shaman was gone, I would have expected normal, yet polite, behaviour but not the level of obsequiousness we were shown. Part of me wondered what it would take to bring back the backbone she had shown earlier but, at the same time, the idea of being deliberately impolite, simply to make the housekeeper angry felt wrong to me. It would be a bully¡¯s act.


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    Shaking off those thoughts, I stepped into one of the rooms, with Sigmir on my heels.


    ¡°We can move the beds later.¡± Sigmir decided, shedding herself of her cloak and the carrying-harness for her Lok¡¯nar.


    ¡°Certainly. Either we do that, or we simply use just one bed.¡± I replied, stepping over to the window, taking a closer look at the glass. Again, I was quite surprised just how clear it was, unlike anything I would have expected at a place with the level of technology the Orcs had shown me so far. But then, Magic.


    Turning around, I noticed Sigmir fiddling with her magic bag, trying to get her Lok¡¯nar into it. She normally never did that, preferring to carry it openly, due to the time it took her to get it into the bag and back out, far too long during combat.


    ¡°You don¡¯t trust them?¡± I asked softly, her desire to remain as combat-ready as possible without making said readiness obvious.


    ¡°I don¡¯t think the orcs will harm us, not after granting us guest-rights.¡± she replied, speaking just as softly, before continuing, ¡°At the same time, I don¡¯t like the way that shaman has been looking at you. If she tries something, I¡¯ll show her!¡± The last part was said with quite a bit of vehemence, mixed with possessiveness. That tone, in combination with the heated look in her eyes, sent a pleasant shiver down my spine, the kind of shiver that made me want to pin her to the bed, before letting her pin me to the bed. But those kinds of grappling-techniques would have to wait for later, giving the orc standing in front of the door that kind of concert wasn¡¯t something I was willing to do.


    Regarding Sigmir¡¯s observation of Dura Firebringer¡¯s behaviour, there had been moments when she had made me uncomfortable, not by active actions but simply the way she had looked at me. At the time, I had reasoned that it was due to our opposite affinities, similarly to the times I had felt an instinctive hatred well up from within me, alongside a desire to crush her, to snuff out her light and leave her broken, alone and in the dark. Given that those flashes had come shortly after feeling uncomfortable in her presence, the connection seemed to be obvious. But now, Sigmir was telling me she had observed something similar, making me wonder. It might stem from the same cause, opposite affinities, given that I shared a bloodline with Sigmir and she had quite a bit of Frost-affinity, even if I had been unable to teach her any magic, at all.


    ¡°You might be right. Better be cautious.¡± I admitted, starting to take off my weapons. Packing them into my magic bag, which I wouldn¡¯t take off anyway. There were just too many interesting things contained within, the last bit of Eternal Ice and the newly acquired, if frustratingly uncooperative, Tear of Anguish. Both materials had something in common, namely that I had no idea what to actually do with them. Sure, I had made progress with the Eternal Ice, but not so much with the tear. It would take quite a bit more study to figure that thing out, if I managed at all. Maybe once we had left the orcs behind and I could experiment more freely with it, something I hadn¡¯t allowed myself while a skilled Spellcaster like Dura Firebringer was nearby.


    ¡°Let¡¯s go.¡± Sigmir decided, once my weapons were adequately stowed, pushing open the door. Outside, Gera was making friendly conversation with Adra and Rai, who had been a little quicker than Sigmir and myself. There was another orc with them, a woman who either had a very curious physique or was pregnant.


    ¡°Ah, there you are.¡± Gera said, once Sigmir and I had left our room. ¡°I apologize, but there is something urgent I have to attend to. However, Sari here will take over for me and show you around the house. I hope that meets your approval?¡± she asked, looking over to Adra, who, in turn, gave a glance to me, a glance Gera followed with her eyes.


    ¡°Certainly, I wouldn¡¯t want to keep you from your duties. I thank you for your hospitality.¡± I replied, feeling silly at the idea to give a signal to Adra.


    ¡°Excellent, I hope you have a wonderful stay.¡± Gera said, adding a deep nod, almost half a bow, to her statement, before hurrying off, leaving us with a slightly wide-eyed orc.

 Chapter 374

    ¡°Erm¡­¡± Sari muttered, obviously stumped for how to proceed, after we had been dumped into her lap. ¡°Let me show you the water-rooms, you can wash yourself there, or your clothes. During the summer, the cool water feels great.¡± she decided, even if the insecurity in her voice made it sound like a question.


    ¡°Yes, that sounds like a good idea. You have indoor plumbing, then?¡± I replied, the idea reminding me that technology-levels varied widely across Mundus.


    ¡°The guest-houses, yes. The further away from the river you get, the harder it is to get water there.¡± she admitted, walking back towards the stairs.


    Getting downstairs seemed to be a challenge for her and I felt a twinge of worry, originating somewhere below my stomach.


    ¡°When are you due, if you don¡¯t mind me asking?¡± Adra asked, causing Rai to freeze for a moment, before his face lit up bright red, making me worry that the heat might start a fire.


    ¡°Not too long, I hope. This one has been kicking me for a while and should join us in a week or two.¡± Sari replied, her hand gently patting her round stomach, while she gave us a smile that I could only describe as radiant.


    ¡°Should you still be working, in your condition?¡± I asked, my socialisation kicking in.


    ¡°Eh, it¡¯s not like I¡¯m sick. The guest-houses are staffed by young mothers and mothers to be, that way there are always people around if something happens and more likely than not, someone will have dealt with a similar situation before.¡± she waved off, before continuing. ¡°You see, those of us who have children below three summers stay in the Hollow, regardless of our normal tasks. In return, we make sure that those who have to venture out have a comfortable place to come home to, during the summer.¡±


    ¡°That was why Gera left you in my care, she needed to take care of her daughter.¡± she added, making me nod in acceptance. Hopefully, the children would be housed in a different part of the house as us. I didn¡¯t know a lot about children, but I had witnessed the epic amount of noise an infant could produce when taking public transportation and had no desire to experience that during the night.


    We continued our tour, with Sari proudly showing us their facilities. I had to chuckle at the pride with which she demonstrated how to use their simple spigots and toilets but then, I was used to similar, only more advanced, conveniences. But even if the facilities were simple, they reminded me that the Bright Hollow Orcs were quite advanced, compared to the surrounding area. At the same time, I felt my stomach roil just a little at the idea that their sewage was simply flowing back into the river, unfiltered and untreated. Depending on the exact set-up of their plumbing, the sewage coming out of the buildings higher up the valley might flow back into the so-called freshwater pipes for the lower houses. Just the idea made me consider magical ways to disinfect any water I was working with in the valley.


    At the same time, I felt a little curious about Sari, the woman guiding us. Over the last few days, one of the topics Lenore and I had been discussing had been Death-Magic and, in turn, the question what Life and Death actually were. It made me wonder, how did the formation of new life influence the Astral within Sari? When did the child start to form its own connection to it? What about the mind, what about the soul? So many intriguing questions, suddenly bubbling up in my mind, with a potential test-subject at hand ,multiple even. But somehow, I had a feeling that the orcs wouldn¡¯t be happy with me if I started to experiment on their unborn.


    For a moment, I considered if there was a way to conduct such experimentation anyway but there simply wasn¡¯t. Even if my group would have had the power to deal with any fallout using brute force, something I highly doubted, doing so would come out, thanks to the fact that at least one Traveller counted this place their home. There were few topics that would get people more riled up than anything involving children and the unborn, adding a potential backlash I didn¡¯t want to risk. If I wanted to make a career out of playing Road to Purgatory, or anything that relied on a positive public image, I couldn¡¯t cross too many lines. And the line between the Dark Sorceress I mostly had been portraying and the insane, evil with such experimentation would make me out to be, was an important one that I had to steer clear of.


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    Back on the ground-floor, we were guided into the room Gera had gestured towards earlier, the dining room. It looked like a mix between a mess-hall and the main-room in a private dwelling, the kitchen visible over a bar that separated it from the dining-area that contained multiple long tables. The kitchen itself was large enough to have four people work side-by-side comfortably, who seemed to be busy finishing up meal-preparation.


    Sari took a moment to introduce us but before a real conversation could begin, the door we had entered through earlier opened again, allowing a group of orcs in. It was curious, as they were entering, they were carrying on, a boisterous group, relaxed and joking amongst themselves but I could watch the amusement and relaxation vanish from their faces and stances as soon as they were becoming aware of my group.


    Instead, their faces were set in angry scowls but somehow, I thought that I could smell their fear. I wasn¡¯t quite sure where the sensation was coming from and part of me wanted to flick my tongue out, to taste the air, looking for explanation in the Astral but I controlled myself, knowing that it would look strange. Instead, I slowly filled my nose, letting it parse out the smells, even if there was no way that any physical smell could have made its way from them to me. But magic didn¡¯t really need to conform to the ordinary physical laws I was used to, it broke them on a regular basis. Sadly, my nose was unable to give me more information, but my gut was doubling down that the entering group was both afraid and angry. Not a good combination, especially in a group.


    I could feel Sigmir tense next to me, either allerted by our connection or simply their behaviour and could tell that she was ready to fight, even if it meant spoiling our dinner.


    Luckily, it didn¡¯t come to that, before the situation could escalate any further, Gera hurried out of the kitchen, making me aware of another door within, looking rather frazzled.


    ¡°Honoured guests, there you are. Did Sari show you your accommodations for the next few days?¡± she asked, stressing the title of ¡®honoured guests¡¯. In addition, she was walking around the bar and, oh so coincidentally, placed herself between the approaching group and us. Part of me wondered who she was more concerned with, the orcs behind her, or us.


    ¡°Yes, she did. Both of you, thank you for your hospitality.¡± Adra replied, stepping closer to Gera and stressing the last word, making me roll my eyes at the transparent act they were putting on.


    ¡°Is everything alright with your daughter?¡± I asked, remembering that Sari had mentioned something and I had heard that showing concern for their children was a good way to connect to parents.


    ¡°Oh, yes, certainly. It was just one of those things, a child needing her mother.¡± she replied, giving me a tired but rather proud smile.


    By now, the one of the other orcs that had entered had stepped forward as a representative of their group.


    ¡°Gera, who are these guests?¡± he asked, the sheer disdain he put in the word guest quite impressive. It made me want to look down, just to check if the acid in his voice had dripped out and was now eating a hole into the floor. It might turn into a tripping hazard.


    ¡°They are honoured guests of Shaman Firebringer. She personally brought them to this house and asked me to take care of them.¡± Gera replied, again stressing that we were honoured guests.


    ¡°Certainly, we should make sure that the honoured guests of the shaman are taken care of.¡± the orc in front of us agreed, but I caught some mutterings from his group, something about ¡®kin-killer¡¯, ¡®should have stayed away the last time¡¯ and similar expressions of dislike. It seemed that the Firebringer was not liked by all of her people.


    ¡°I agree. Why don¡¯t you all sit down, the food should be done in a moment.¡± Gera directed, looking over to the group of orcs, before turning to us.


    ¡°You can take that table over there. I hope you don¡¯t mind our simple fare, we didn¡¯t know we would have guests travelling from far away.¡± she gestured to one side of the room.


    Shrugging, we agreed and soon, everyone was served a bowl of stew with bread set in baskets on the table. As we ate, I began to wonder if I should ask for a knife, so I could cut the tension in the room, using it instead of the bread we had been served. It was thick and dense enough that it should have been quite nourishing.

 Chapter 375

    After dinner, I decided that I wanted to escape the tense atmosphere, despite having some misgivings about leaving the others alone. The only reason I was willing to do so was that the orcs seemed to have focused their ire on me, reinforcing the idea that a Traveller, maybe Harms, had spread the rumour that Dura Firebringer had killed the people taken by the centaurs. Or rather, that I had done so on her orders, making me a murderer in their eyes but Gera had stressed that I was an honoured guest, removing the option to confront me outright. If they even had the guts to do so, something I doubted after a quick, concealed Inspect that revealed them to have no one above level fifty.


    Part of me would have welcomed an attack by such weaklings, giving me the option to prove my magnanimity by binding them with ice but refrain from killing them. I was quite certain that I had the power to do so and it would look good. For a second, I considered provoking them into an attack but that would be pointless. Fun, but pointless.


    Instead, I took Sigmir to the side after we were done eating and told her I wanted to look around a bit, mainly from the air, making sure we had a way out, if the valley got attacked again. It had happened once, it might happen again. But an outsider looking around their defenses and potential escape-routes could easily be regarded as a spy, abusing their hospitality to scout them out. It might even be enough of a breach of their hospitality-customs to see them revoked, getting us kicked out. On the other hand, a bird, even a large one, had a good chance to escape notice, being seen as nothing more than a bird, even if there was a mind inside, or two, in the case of Lenore, carrying me in my Hallow.


    And even if we were noticed, simply claiming that Lenore had needed to stretch her wings for a while should be enough to assuage any misgivings they had, especially if they didn¡¯t realise she had been carrying me with her.


    While I would have loved to simply open a window and simply fly out of our room, the orc-architecture hadn¡¯t yet added hinges to their windows, making them simple glass-panes set into a frame in the wall. The only way to open them was with either tools, care and quite a bit of time or a rock. A rock would do in an emergency but for now, I decided to go with the sneaky solution, and, after giving Sigmir a quick kiss, made my way soundlessly downstairs. It was a curious conundrum, try to actively sneak, purposefully moving in a way that made me difficult to notice, or even use Darkness-Magic to improve my chances to get out unseen, making me look a tad suspicious if I actually was spotted or casually moving, simply in a way that didn¡¯t make a lot of noise, but would look natural if I was detected.


    I went with the causal movement, moving slowly and gently placing my feet, trying to make as little noise as possible. There had been lessons in that, too, in the small book I had received from Mrs. Wu but I had only skimmed them. Luckily, the stairs were constructed for large nad heavy orc-bodies, allowing me to get downstairs without making any obvious noise, after stopping for a second to make sure I wasn¡¯t running into anyone in the entrance-hall.


    Hearing nothing, I quickly made my way down and out of the door, letting my eyes roam around the road in front of the guest-house. Again, I had to try striking a balance between avoiding notice and acting suspicious, so I simply turned and started walking up-hill, trying my best to act as if I had any idea where I was going. There were orcs around and I, despite my petite physique, stood out like a sore thumb or it might be because of my physique. Even from a distance, it was obvious that I was no orc and that was before noticing my pale, blue skin and delicate features.


    After just a bit of walking, I noticed a relatively narrow path between houses and turned into it, before looking over my shoulder, to make sure nobody was actively seeing me. I couldn¡¯t be sure, not in such an unfamiliar environment but I thought that nobody was actively observing me.


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    Coordinating with Lenore, we triggered the shift in and out of our respective Hallows, still trying to make the transition as smooth and swift as possible. It was an ongoing project but one we were advancing quite often and by now, the transition felt quite fluid. It was difficult to assess from the outside, without an outside observer or making a video of it, but it undoubtedly worked. Where seconds before, I had stood as a humanoid, was now just a bird, already flapping her wings to start gaining height.


    Lenore didn¡¯t even need to follow the length of the narrow path to end, instead, with a smidgen of wind-magic, she soared up, above the roofs of the buildings on either side. Together, we looked at the settlement, I hesitated to call it a city but it was too large and fortified to be called a town, from above. In some ways, I had to give it to the orcs, the wall that defended their village was impressive, at least on a mundane scale.


    But, compared to what I had seen on Mundus before, the orcish defenses had looked weak from the ground and the aerial view only reinforced my opinion. Sure, the wall made a mass-attack up the valley difficult and unlikely to succeed but an attack by a small, powerful group? Or even a weak but excessively sneaky group, intent on causing havoc and weakening the orcs. There seemed to be a dozen ways the sides of the valley could be scaled. With a little nudge from me, Lenore started to increase our altitude, allowing me to look at the ridge above the settlement.


    There, I felt a bit of relief, at least they hadn¡¯t completely neglected that strategic position, even if their defenses looked a little insufficient. If anyone took the ridge, even just one of them, and wanted to destroy the settlement, the settlement would be in trouble. Simply due to lacking the high-ground and the awesome effect of stones rolling down-hill. Just normal-sized rocks would cause massive damage after going down-hill for some five-hundred meters, to say nothing of the effects I could imagine with Earth-Magic.


    Even just my own Ice-Magic would be able to cause havoc, if I managed to get water into rock-cracks and froze it there. It would be a wholly natural but devastating effect, as even magical means to freeze ice didn¡¯t get around the simple physics. At least in this case, if I tried to increase the density of my Ice, I could do so, getting into the realms of Hard Ice but that was a whole different thing. Simple freezing water would expand, exerting quite a bit of force in the process.


    And in such an important position, the orcs had just a simple tower, lightly fortified with a few guards looking out into the mountains. Lenore didn¡¯t want to get too close to the tower and turned, simply letting the wind hold her above the valley and studying the settlement. Neither of us felt quite content to rely on the orcs to keep us safe, and, with my full consent, she angled down a little, circling the valley as she lost altitude.


    It gave us a lot of time, simply looking at the slope leading upwards and mapping out paths to escape, if something truly bad happened. At times, we also looked at the valley, speculating which building was which, our knowledge of orcish architecture too limited to let us do more than make wild guesses based on position in the valley and size, but it was fun. Similarly, we studied the wall and how it was fortified near the sides of the valley, the most obvious weakness, in my opinion. Due to the geography, the orcs had built their wall right up to the slope and fortified some distance up-hill but they hadn¡¯t been willing or able to continue their wall up the whole slope, to the ridge. Instead, they had built a tower near the wall, manned, or was that orced, it and called it a day. Again, good against an army off relatively weak foes, wholly inadequate when attacked by a sneaky or powerful foe. Let alone a sneaky and powerful foe, but then, that was one of the worst combinations anyway.


    We were just about finished with our flight, when Lenore, with her peculiar vision, noticed something odd. A concentration of Fire Astral Power, shrouding a small part on the back-slope of the valley, almost like a cloud. For a moment, the two of us considered simply turning away but then, we knew the orcs had some contact with powerful fire-spirits. It was too small, far too small, to be any sort of truly powerful entity but both, Lenore and I, were curious. And so, Lenore turned, flapping her wings to carry us towards the strange cloud.

 Chapter 376

    Flying into the cloud of magical energy made me a little apprehensive and if it had been my body, doing the flying, I would have increased the amount of frozen mist surrounding me, just to ward off the heat. Luckily, Lenore didn¡¯t share my weakness to heat and was able to enter the cloud without any trouble.


    The moment she did, we both realised that there was more going on than just the emanation of power, it almost hit me like a physical blow, despite being within my Hallow. I could feel Lenore react over our connection, the previously steady beat of her wings faltering for a moment when she, too, was affected. The cloud was more than just fiery Astral Power, I could feel a jumbled mess of emotions mixed into the power, frustration and anger, foremost amongst them. How I could feel them, especially with such clarity, I wasn¡¯t sure, just as I had no idea where they were coming from. But I wanted to find out.


    Lenore, following simple logic, aimed for the center of the cloud, what appeared to be a large rock formation on the valley-slope. The rocks looked ordinary to both of us, more of the light-coloured rock that had given the area its name, but the phenomenon going on around us told a different story. With a last flap of her wings, Lenore hopped onto one of the other rocks, looking down into the formation and what we saw was both interesting and incredibly disappointing.


    Instead of the interesting magical entity we had hoped for, maybe some connection to the mythical phoenix-spirit the clan was supposed to have gotten their power from, something we might be able to exploit to help Lenore grow in power, what we got was rather mundane. Interesting and worthy of investigating, but sadly mundane nonetheless.


    Beneath us, half-turned away from us, sat Dura Firebringer, quite literally fuming. Well, almost, there weren¡¯t literal fumes coming out of her head but now, seeing her, both Lenore and I were able to put two and two together to ascertain that she was, in fact, the source of the cloud that had lured us here. Before we could decide what to do about stumbling upon an angry shaman in, what might be, her private retreat, the place where she could go to shut out the world and simply be, she let out an annoyed growl and punched the rock next to her, leaving a glowing trace of heat, as her magical power flowed with her annoyance.


    The combination of childish annoyance, the taking out of her anger on an inanimate object, and quite impressive magical power, enough to cause rock to glow with heat, without any obvious effort, made me chuckle in my Hallow but sadly, my amusement was echoed by Lenore, making her let out an amused cackle.


    The noise, quite obviously foreign and nearby, made Dura Firebringer spin around, emotions clearly visible on her face and radiating into the cloud around us. Anger and surprise, foremost but combined with a bit of embarrassment and annoyance. Both, Lenore and I, were still wondering just why we were able to feel those emotions so clearly, almost oppressive in their intensity. But for now, we had something else to deal with, a shaman who looked like she was about to start hurling fire towards Lenore¡¯s certainly flammable form.


    We exchanged opinions for a split second, discussing just how to deal with Dura Firebringer without destroying all hope we had regarding follow-up quests from the orcs or the still-outstanding reward we were owed. It reminded me that, in the future, we should nail down potential rewards with more specificity, simply a magical item was too vague a term.


    In accordance to our short discussion, we decided that the best way to handle things was for me, in my persona as Morgana, to talk to Dura Firebringer. Other options we had considered was simply flying away, hoping that she didn¡¯t realise who Lenore was or even playing dumb. Sadly, Lenore was convinced that the shaman was intelligent and knowledgeable enough to see through such a ruse, leaving communication as the only viable option and, as much as it pained me, the fact that Dura Firebringer and I had talked quite a bit before made me more suited to the task.


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    With a mental sigh, I pushed myself out of my Hallow, timing so that Lenore and I would simply switch places, only that for once, I didn¡¯t try to emerge in a stable, kneeling position but simply sitting on the rock Lenore had perched on. It was similarly stable but didn¡¯t allow quick movement out of the position, if necessary. Which was somewhat the point, to project an image of relaxation and casualness, making it clear that I wasn¡¯t here to fight or confront her in any way. I had no desire in pushing an already agitated Fire-Spellcaster into a corner, that could only end badly.


    Watching Dura Firebringer was amusing, her emotions obvious, both on her face and in the magic around us. Parsing the surrounding Astral Power with my own senses drove things home even harder, making me wonder just how well I would be able to parse things out, if I tried. Would I be able to taste the difference in emotions from the Astral Power she was radiating? Essentially allowing me to smell someone¡¯s emotions? It was a curious idea and I had to stop myself from letting my tongue flick out, tasting the air and power. Instead, I simply watched Dura Firebringer¡¯s face, as the anger gave way to surprise, followed by embarrassment and a bit of chagrin. It was almost adorable, how the powerful, normally confident, woman looked so much like a child caught with her hand in the cookie-jar.


    For a moment, neither of us acted or spoke, the heat and power around us pressing in on me, making me break out in sweat. Without letting my eyes stray from her face, I reached out, using twilight caused by the sun vanishing behind the mountains around us, to create a chilling shroud for me. It wasn¡¯t my usual mist, not with my ideas regarding the opposite nature of our elements and the effect they had on our emotions. There was the potential that she¡¯d see it as a challenge, if nothing was further from my mind. But Darkness, especially the softer form that were shadows and the sheltering twilight, seemed to be more appropriate. The shroud helped, assuaging the heat but also shutting out the emotions pressing in on me.


    ¡°It is you¡­¡± she muttered, her voice soft but conflicted.


    ¡°Indeed. You are agitated.¡± I stated the obvious, not quite sure what to say, so I simply waited for a moment, silently observing. She let out a wry chuckle and I could feel the pressure on my shroud recede a little.


    ¡°What gave me away? The shouting? The fact that we returned home, after winning a major victory only to be welcomed by vicious rumours and lies?¡± as she spoke, the pressure increased again, as her voice got louder with every word, only to suddenly deflate, like a popped balloon.


    ¡°It wasn¡¯t supposed to be like that. I wanted to show everyone that I wasn¡¯t just powerful but that I was able to handle and control my power. That I would do what is necessary but that I don¡¯t just use my magic to power through and burn down every obstacle.¡± she continued, her voice now barely audible. At the same time, she seemed to shrink, her shoulders slumping as she sat back down, looking defeated.


    Now certain that I wouldn¡¯t get incinerated if I approached closer, I hopped down from my perch, easily landing near her. She looked up, barely meeting my eyes, and there were tears forming in her eyes. There was a part of me that sang at the look on her face, the defeat and the weakness. The previous desire to smother her bright flame returned, the flame was barely flickering any longer, easily extinguished. But at the same time, I recognised the look, it was one I had seen before. Far too often, when looking into the mirror. Loneliness.


    As sympathy welled up within me, I moved over next to her, to simply offer a, for lack of better term, human presence. For a moment, I considered sitting next to her but decided against it, taking up a spot nearby but on a different rock, simply waiting for her to continue.


    ¡°I wanted this time to be different, you know? I thought I would finally have my triumphant return home, to show people that I was worth respecting, that my flame could nurture, as well as burn.¡± her voice, when she continued to speak, was wistful, making me think that her mind was miles away.


    ¡°What happened the first time, if you don¡¯t mind me asking?¡± I asked, curious what she was alluding to. If ¡®this time¡¯ should have been different, there had to be a time before, hadn¡¯t there? Her eyes closed for a moment and when they opened again, she looked past me. Not at the rock behind me, but just into space, staring back through time, into the world of her memories.

 Chapter 377

    ¡°The last time, you ask.¡± Dura Firebringer said again, her voice soft, wistful even. She fell silent for a moment, before letting out a long, drawn out sigh.


    ¡°It was different, but, in a way, the same.¡± she began, her voice distant.


    ¡°The last time I came home, not just from a short trip but from a journey that might have taken me to my Ancestors was two years ago and I returned alone. But I hadn¡¯t started my journey alone, I was just the only one to return. And they never let me forget that.¡± she paused, gently shaking her head.


    ¡°Originally, there had been three of us, three best friends. Thronar was the oldest of us and, in many ways, our leader. He was the one who suggested heading out of the valley to go beyond the range we travelled in the summer, to see what we only knew from stories, told late at night by the fire. To see distant places and experience what the world has to offer.¡± she chuckled, a wry smile on her lips.


    ¡°What he wanted to see, the Border of Eternal Snow, far in the north of Aletoma and the Ocean of Drifting Ice beyond it. To visit the Blazing Desert and see if the Daimons truly go around naked, to escape the heat. Would you believe that he wanted to go to the elves and climb the reborn World Tree? Just the glint in his eyes, when he made his plans, the incredible deeds he imagined, as if nothing would ever stop us.¡± the smile on her lips turned brittle, before she shook her head again and continued.


    ¡°And my dear friend, my best friend, sweet Marj. She was the sister I never had. The sister I always wanted to have.¡± she stopped again, falling silent for a minute or two. I respected her silence, simply waiting for her to continue. When she continued, her voice seemed a little stronger, more composed.


    ¡°We were born in the same summer, just a few days apart, in the same house. Our fathers were out, driving one of the herds and our mothers were working in the guest-house, to have someone to stay with, in case they needed help. And to help, as much as they were able to. Marj and I have been friends, since we were born, always together, always helping the other, no matter what.¡± as she spoke, the gentle smile returned.


    ¡°You would have liked her.¡± for the fist time, since she had started to speak, her eye focused on me. ¡°She was always trying to understand something, to figure something out. She had no talent to bond with the spirits, but her mind was sharp and she managed to learn a little magic on her own. Nothing extraordinary, at least at first, but she was working hard, never letting her lack of talent get into the way. When I was trained by one of the older shamans, she had nobody, just her mind and a stubborn streak a mile wide. When Thronar suggested heading out, she was all for it. She wanted to see more, experience all there is and learn everything she could get her hands on.¡± she continued, her eyes growing distant once again.


    ¡°We set out together and it was like nothing I could ever have dreamed off. And I¡¯m glad about that, some of the things we saw, they haunt my sleep to this day.¡± her body shook visibly for a moment, before she got herself back under control.


    ¡°If I had known what we would experience, what would happen, I¡¯m not sure I would have had the courage to head out in the first place. I might have taken the cowards way out and stayed home, never daring to venture out beyond our accustomed hunting grounds. But I would have missed the good times, the marvels we have seen and the miracles we witnessed. Maybe I would have had less nightmares but I certainly would have fewer wonderful memories. All in all, I think I¡¯m glad that we went.¡± she paused again, reaching into a small, inconspicuous bag she was carrying on her waist, only for her hand to emerge with a metal flask larger than the bag.


    When she raised the flask to her lips to drink, I decided to drink with her and pushed out my magic, creating a cold, one might even say icy, mug and filled it with Liquid Moonlight. At first, I had enjoyed drinking it as a casual show of power, but somehow, I had begun to enjoy the curious taste of Ice, the intricacies inherent to my own, personal Astral Power. When Dura saw my own drink, one of her eyebrows went up and I heard a chuckle but she didn¡¯t comment, instead she continued with her story.


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    ¡°Our journey took us south first, towards the ocean. There is a trade-caravan that comes here, every year, to buy some of our wares, especially the glass we create. They take it to a port-town called Emerald Cove, selling it there. Not sure  Thronar convinced the merchants that it would be a good idea to take us with them as additional guards. I have no idea how he managed that feat.¡± she admitted, the smile now morphed into an amused grin.


    ¡°We were so clueless, part of me wants to laugh. Sure, we had heard the stories, had listened to those who had been travelling and returned. But the dangers they spoke of, we were confident that we could overcome them. How young we were, how young and reckless.¡± she paused for a moment, taking another drink.


    ¡°Luckily, the regular caravan-guards took a bit of a liking to us, especially to Thronar, he had a way with people. Without them, we might have been forced to turn back, either before we ever got to Emerald Cove, or shortly after. The lessons they taught us, they stayed with us for our journey.


    ¡°But Emerald Cove was only the first stop, the first of many. We stayed there for a while, almost a season, before we continued on, again on Thronar¡¯s urging. And again, he managed to talk someone into hiring us for a job, we had no real experience with or ability to do. That time, it was as deck-hands on a small freighter, heading to northern Daiea. He regretted that one, at least for a while, the sea didn¡¯t agree with him and he spent most of the journey feeding the fishes.¡± she laughed as she spoke, her eyes distant again.


    ¡°Those were good times. Daiea was great, especially the northern parts and the Great Desert. Even now, I can¡¯t even begin to describe the feeling of standing on a dune, feeling the burning fires of heaven above, reflected by the gleaming sands below. It was¡­¡± her voice trailed off, lost in the memory. Part of me was glad she didn¡¯t know how to describe the experience, it sounded deeply unpleasant. Why would anyone want to have the sun above reflected below? Just the idea made me shudder in discomfort.


    ¡°We travelled for years, finding friends and comrades on the way, some of them staying with us for a few weeks, maybe just for a single Quest handed out by the Guild, others travelling with us for months or, in the case of Kwyla, for over four years.¡± she paused again, taking another drink, deeper this time.


    ¡°Kwyla and Marj hit it off instantly, especially when Kwyla started to teach Marj some of the magic she had learned in the Mages¡¯ Guild. Nothing forbidden or secret, but enough to get Marj registered as a Guild Mage, giving her access to their facilities and, most important, their books. At times, it was difficult to get those two out of the library.¡± her voice grew heavy with the telling and she took another pull from her flask.


    ¡°But we continued to travel and finally, I think after almost three years, Thronar talked us into another journey by ship, back north, to a port called Julius¡¯ Fortune, on the western tip of Aretia. By that time, Thronar and I had become quite close, doing a lot of things together.¡± there was another tear forming in one of her eyes, only to be quickly blinked away.


    ¡°And, just like we had when in Daiea, we continued travelling. Doing whatever quests we could, helping some people, others not so much. It was a good life, an interesting life. We never stayed too long in one place, always on the move, at least if we managed to get our two book-worms out of their Guild¡¯s libraries. The two of them enjoyed their studies, they enjoyed each other¡¯s company and they enjoyed taking their experiments out into the wild, only for some of them to explode in their faces. But as they grew in power, so did the demands of the Mages¡¯ Guild they wanted the two of them to give up their adventures and focus on the aspect of magic they were delving into. And finally, Kwyla and Marj agreed. They decided to stay, to permanently join the Mages¡¯ Guild in Kuresu.¡± by now, another tear had formed, followed by another. No amount of blinking had stopped them from rolling down her face but Dura seemed too absorbed in her story to even notice.


    ¡°Thronar and I talked about it. I wanted to stay in Kuresu, or at least in the area. While Marj and I hadn¡¯t been as close as we had been when we set out, I still loved my sister and didn¡¯t want to leave her behind. But Thronar managed to convince me that we should continue. If only I hadn¡¯t agreed.¡± the metal flask dropped from her hand, as she hunched over, hugging herself, as sobs shook her body.


    ¡°If only I had been stronger. Maybe he would still be alive.¡± her voice was choked, barely understandable but the pain radiating from her made her words clear and obvious. Obvious enough to bring tears to my own eyes.

 Chapter 378

    For a moment, I was simply stunned. Just how was I supposed to deal with the crying orc in front of me. Part of me wanted to simply leave, returning to Sigmir and the others, but the idea didn¡¯t sit right with me. It was so easy to empathise with her, just thinking about losing Sigmir was enough to bring tears to my eyes.


    Reaching out, I placed a hand on her shoulder, simply offering silent sympathies, without acting too intimate or familiar. She shrunk a little further at my touch, making me regret the gesture but before I could pull my hand away, her hands grasped it, holding it tightly. Tight enough to hurt, but it was a minor inconvenience combined to the pain she was still radiating outwards, battering against the shroud of darkness I had pulled up. Curiously, while the emotional projection, if that was what I was feeling, had become stronger with her pain, the heat around us had mostly died down.


    For a minute, I just stood there awkwardly, my hand held in a vice-grip, while Dura was crying. I considered trying to reach her with my Mind Magic, maybe I would be able to offer a more direct form of support. For once, my common-sense won out over my curiosity, especially due to the change of my Mind Magic after crossing the second Divide but even without that change, it wasn¡¯t the right time to experiment.


    Finally, the heaving sobs died down to sniffles and her hunched over form started to uncurl a little. It was almost comical, the first thing she seemed to become aware of was my hand, still clasped and held by her and I could watch how her eyes started out at our hands, followed my arm upward and ended up looking at my face. There, she stopped for a moment, before her eyes flickered back to our hands, returning to my face after a second, before she suddenly let go of my hand, as if burned. It was difficult to see a blush due to her dark skin-tone, but this one was strong enough to show, making me wonder if she would spontaneously combust. In her case, that felt like a real risk.


    With my hand no longer gripped, I stepped back, trying to give her a little space to compose herself, and sat back on the rock I had been sitting on. In turn, she reached into the bag on her waist, pulling out a piece of cloth and used it to clean her tear-stained face. It was sorely needed, not only had the tears left wet streaks down her face, even her nose had begun running, but I chose not to focus on the sorry sight of her, simply giving her a moment. Partially because I had no idea what to say, whether to ask a question, whether to change the topic, I simply didn¡¯t know.


    How did one deal with an acquaintance breaking out into tears in front of you? I would be hard-pressed to come up with a good reaction to anyone, but Sigmir. For SIgmir, it would be holding her until she was feeling better or erase whatever was causing her pain from existence. Maybe both at the same time. For anyone else? I didn¡¯t even know where to begin.


    When Dura reached down, picking up her flask I noticed the sweet, slightly stinging smell of the liquid spilled from it, confirming my suspicion about the content of her flask. I knew about my own forays into drinking that getting drunk was a bad idea and decided to stop her, when her hand raised the flask to her lips,


    ¡°I think you¡¯ve drunk enough. Give me a moment, if you need something to drink.¡± I told her, acting before she could confirm that she was thirsty. Partially because I wanted to show off, just a little.


    There was enough heat around us, both physical and magical, that the simple Ice I could conjure with my magic would melt within moments, unless I kept it supported with my own Astral Power to stop the laws of physics. That meant, if I created tiny particles, like the Diamond Dust I could easily form, the surface-area would be massive, compared to the volume and it should melt nearly instantly.


    First, I conjured a fresh mug, made from Ice but carefully kept it connected to my own Astral Power, allowing me to keep it cold. Into the mug, I conjured a small cloud of Diamond Dust, using as little Astral Power as I could to create the biggest amount, trying to give every particle as little as possible. It worked, mostly, without looking very closely I would have missed the original particles making it look like I was conjuring water out of thin air. It wasn¡¯t real water-magic but maybe it would keep the orc in front of me guessing.


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    There was a look of surprise on Dura¡¯s face when I handed her the mug, her eyes going from my own mug, which I casually refilled with Liquid Moonlight, her flask and the transparent mug of water in her hands.


    ¡°It¡¯s so cold.¡± she muttered, her voice hoarse. It made me chuckle to myself, of course it was cold, what did she expect a mug made from ice to be? Warm? Maybe her mind wasn¡¯t firing on all cylinders.


    ¡°There¡¯s just water in your mug.¡± I assured her, when her eyes flickered to my mug again, the Liquid Moonlight inside containing enough power to cause serious harm, maybe even kill someone, if they were careless and I let it get out of my control.


    ¡°Thank you.¡± she said with a nod, after taking a small sip, her voice sounding a little better.


    ¡°You are welcome.¡± I replied. Part of me wanted to urge her to continue her story, curious just what had happened to her and her friend, but I managed to keep myself quiet, letting her decide on the course of our conversation.


    Again, it took her a few minutes, only interrupted by small sips of water, before she spoke again.


    ¡°There is a set of ancient ruins near Kuresu, maybe a week journey to the north-east of it, near the Calm Sea. Legends say that there was a mighty city there, hundreds of years ago, but something happened and the city fell. What exactly happened is a mystery, as is what happened to the inhabitants.¡± she began her tale again, and I perked up when she mentioned a mystery.


    ¡°It was a major city, that much is obvious both from the ruins left behind and the old tales and records. But today, the city is a place of despair, where not even death is a certain escape. At some point, it turned into a dungeon but one so vicious and unpredictable that nobody wants to claim it. At times, not a single undead appears in months or even years and sometimes, hundreds of them appear, suddenly flooding out of the city, bringing death wherever they go.¡± I felt myself swallow at the description, it sounded intriguing. But also incredibly dangerous and, sadly, in the wrong direction. Otherwise, I might have decided that investigating further was a good idea, even if the place had killed Dura¡¯s companion, that only meant we had to be more careful.


    I felt a mix of curiosity and apprehension coming from Lenore, who was listening just as intently as I was, even as she wondered whether it was a good thing that the place was definitely not on our way and we would have to turn around and travel in the wrong direction for a few weeks. Maybe Lenore was right and it was better that there was no temptation to actually investigate, even if it sounded like an interesting place. Some sort of intelligent dungeon, maybe?


    ¡°When we went there, it was supposed to be a dormant phase, allowing us to look around and investigate, maybe learning more. Thronar was convinced that we would manage to find something truly ground-breaking, something that was good enough to convince Marj and Kwyla that they should stay with us, that travelling would do more for their understanding of magic than years of studying in the Guild.¡± she chuckled again and I noticed her eyes going back to her flask, before she took another sip from her water.


    ¡°We were wrong. The outskirts seemed to be deserted and we ventured into the ruins, carefully making our way, until we ran into an ambush. We tried to fight but there were many of them and we had yet to get used to fighting as a pair, instead of a group of at least four. Normally, Marj would use her magic to immobilize our enemies, allowing Kwyla and me to unleash out powers, turning them to cinders. Thronar¡¯s job was to keep them back, until Marj managed to do her thing. We had planned to work in a similar manner, with Thronar holding them back for me to blast.¡± she paused again, taking another sip.


    ¡°It didn¡¯t work.¡± she admitted, her voice breaking, causing her to take a deep breath, letting it out slowly.


    ¡°By the time I had channelled enough power for a big spell, Thronar was wounded, a chest-wound. Seeing him like that, I got angry, so incredibly angry. Those rotting sacks of bone, they had hurt my Thronar, hurt him bad. I took revenge on the undead that struck him, and all others nearby. I don¡¯t think my fire¡¯s have ever burned that hot and bright, they certainly have never since. But it wasn¡¯t enough. The undead were destroyed but Thronar¡¯s wound was a fatal one. And I had managed to get the attention of every rotten thing in that place.¡± her voice broke at the end, new tears streaming down her face.


    ¡°He made me¡­¡± she croaked, her voice not getting past her lips. Raising the mug again, she took another drink, only to choke on it and start coughing. Once her coughing fit was finished, she took a deep breath, trying to talk again.


    ¡°He asked me to make sure that he wouldn¡¯t turn into one of the undead, haunting the place for some ancient misdeed. I did as he asked.¡± she admitted, her voice forcibly controlled, so it wouldn¡¯t break again.

 Chapter 379

    ¡°I never went back to Kuresu. For a few weeks, I simply roamed through the wilds, without a care where I was going. I have no idea how I managed to survive, as I was trying to die. To find something that would kill me, challenging everything I came across. More beast than orc. All I had was my grief. And my rage, I was angry at Thronar, for convincing me to go to the lost city, I was angry at Kwyla and Marj, for leaving our group, I was angry at the undead, for striking Thronar. But most of my anger was directed at myself. Why was I still alive, when Thronar was not?¡± she paused, taking another deep breath to compose herself.


    ¡°It was a bad time. But I survived and somehow, I managed to make my way back here. Back home.¡± Dura continued, her voice a little stronger than earlier.


    ¡°I don¡¯t know what I expected when coming home but not the reception I received.¡± she shook her head, her eyes going past me again, as she stared into nothingness.


    ¡°Thronar had a lot of friends, while Marj had been adored by many, for her tenacious quest for knowledge. We had set out together, but only I had returned. Alone but strong enough to stand amongst the elders, despite my young age.¡± she continued, her voice taking on a distant quality.


    ¡°I told my original teacher what had happened, at least most of it. She understood and did her best to help me grieve. Sadly, it didn¡¯t take long for people to start rumors, some of them born from jealousy, others from misguided admiration. I had the power to be an elder and people have to respect that power, but respecting me, as a person? Not so much.¡± she admitted, her eyes returning to my face.


    ¡°What about Sakgu? She seemed quite taken and impressed with you.¡± I asked, remembering the glowing tone the scout had used to describe their Warleader.


    ¡°Taken with me, or my power?¡± Dura asked in return, making me frown.


    ¡°There are quite a few who think that I will lead the clan into a bright future.¡± I snickered at her pun, wondering if it was intentional. The roll of her eyes told me that it hadn¡¯t been but the ghost of a smile appeared on her face, if only for a moment.


    ¡°But if I¡¯m honest with myself, I don¡¯t need more conflict, more loss. When the centaurs attacked my home, I got angry. But there was nothing I could do to prevent it, they took what they could before running away.¡± she grumbled, one of her hands curling into a fist.


    ¡°How did they manage to get the drop on you? I saw the guard-posts from afar and, for their strengths, centaurs are not what I would consider sneaky.¡± I asked, my curiosity finally getting the better of me.


    ¡°That is a good question, one that I¡¯m quite certain the other elders have asked while I was gone. And if not, it is one I will be asking, now that we are back.¡± she replied, a grim look on her face.


    ¡°Anyway, you asked about Sakgu and those like her.¡± she shook her head, changing the topic, apparently unhappy to talk about their valley¡¯s vulnerability.


    ¡°They respect the power I hold but they don¡¯t understand the sacrifices involved in getting that power. In addition, they see me as an Elder, even if some of them are, in fact, older than I am.¡± she explained, making me nod in understanding. It was something I remembered from my old team,the disconnect between the captain and the other members. I had never been an official captain, my personality not suited to lead, but Chris, the original captain and one of the few friends I had during my school-years, had often complained about it. He claimed that I, as his co-captain, was the only one he could complain to, without damaging the integrity of his position, or something along those lines. I had never quite understood, but I had always trouble with the intricacies of interpersonal-relationships.


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    ¡°What¡¯s worse, some of the rumors going around about me are spread by them, talking me up. I hate those rumors, why can¡¯t people just talk to me instead?¡± she asked, annoyance strong in her voice. I had to chuckle at the sentiment, the idea that people who spread rumors actually cared about the truth was just too amusing to me. In my eyes, it was the equivalent to internet-drama, someone wanting to increase their own profile by talking about someone else.


    When she gave me an unhappy glare, I got myself back under control, banishing most of the amusement from my face.


    ¡°There will always be people who spread rumors, for a variety of reasons. The easiest way, or maybe even the only way, to deal with them is by ignoring them. It took me some time, but I managed to get to the point that I can happily ignore the opinion of random people. The people who matter to me know better, and those who don¡¯t know better, don¡¯t matter to me.¡± I explained, knowing that I was fudging the truth more than a bit. But it sounded good and was advice I generally tried to follow but failed to, at times.


    In my particular case, things were made easier by the simple fact that there were few people I actually cared about. It had started after I finished University, the few friends I had went into different directions, slowly falling out of contact. Something similar had happened when I had been separated from my old team, what few social contact I had slipped away, due to lack of care on my part. The realisation that there were more beings that I cared about on Mundus, compared to the real world struck me like a blow but I managed to keep most of it from showing on my face.


    Not wanting to face Dura any longer, I stood, turning around and walking a few steps, allowing me to look out, into the shadowy valley. Below us, light was shining out of windows, making the night around us appear a little darker than it actually was.


    ¡°But shouldn¡¯t I care about my clan? This is my home, you know?¡± she asked, sounding confused.


    ¡°What is a clan? What holds it together, what binds it?¡± I asked rhetorically, never giving her a chance to respond before I continued. The questions allowed me to focus on something else, pushing away the uncomfortable realisation I had about myself.


    ¡°Relationships, based on trust, respect and, at times, blood. You said it yourself, they don¡¯t respect Dura, they respect Elder Firebringer. But what about trust?¡± I asked, without turning back.


    ¡°But it¡¯s my home!¡± she clung to the notion as I looked up into the sky, at the sickle of the moon.


    ¡°Home, home is not a place.¡± I began, remembering something I had read once. ¡°At least it doesn¡¯t have to be. Home can be where you lay your head when you roam, home can be your house, obviously, but it can also be your parent¡¯s place, even if you haven¡¯t lived there for years.¡± I felt a smile curl up my lips as I realised something.


    ¡°Home is being content and feeling safe, secure. It can be the shade of your favourite tree, sheltering you from the summer-heat, it can be so much. But it never has to be a place.¡± my mind went to the place where I felt content and safe. Secure. My home.


    ¡°Think about it, will you?¡± I asked, before giving Lenroe a mental push. ¡°We will see each other tomorrow.¡± I said in farewell, just as Lenore left her Hallow and I moved into mine, mentally pushing her to fly faster.


    It only took us a minute to reach the guest-house we were staying in and this time, there was no deception, I didn¡¯t care who might see me, I simply wanted to get to my destination. If there were orcs about, if they cared, I didn¡¯t notice them.


    I quickly made my way up the stairs, opening the door to Sigmir and my room, knowing that Sigmir was inside thanks to our connection.


    There were no words as I entered, no words were needed. She was sitting comfortably on the floor, leaning against the wall with Ylva stretched out next to her, getting her head scratched, the image making me smile. I simply stepped up, plopping down on her lap, on the other side of Sigmir, snuggling up against her chest as her arms went around me.


    Home. I was home.

 Chapter 380

    Waking up, I was in a strange mood. For once, I remembered my dreams, at least parts of them. And what I remembered was weird, there was no other word for it.


    In one dream, I, in my normal, human body, had stood next to Sigmir, two butterfly-blades like the one I was training with in the gym in my hands, ready to do battle against a group of glowing figures. Those looked like they were made from a mix of fire and light, almost like the guardian I had fought in the Snowbold-Cave, shortly after coming to Mundus. Somehow, that dream felt the least weird, even if it was weird by comparison.


    In another dream, Sigmir and I were on a date. Only that it was a date in a mall near my apartment, on Earth. And that I was in the Firn-Elf form of Morgana, wearing a slightly more elaborate version of the clothes given to me by the dwarves while Sigmir was wearing what amounted to the biker-version of her usual leather-armour. That dream was a little more weird, mostly due to the feeling of normality and acceptance I experienced on the date. The people around us, all looking like random humans, weren¡¯t batting an eye at the two blue-skinned women having a pleasant date, right in their middle.


    Then there was one, in which the apartment-building mine was in, was entirely made up from Ice and within my apartment, there was my Throne. It was obviously mine, made from the same gleaming Ice I used when creating the Throne I used for some spells and carved with the same runes I used in those spells. Finally, it was obvious that it was mine as I was sitting on it, but in normal, human body, wearing clothes similar to the ones made by the dwarves, only completely black, dark enough to lose the appearance of depth. On the wall, next to the windows, was a female figure, bound in chains of Ice. The shape of the figure, the physique and form, looked very much like Dura Firebrigner but it looked like it was made from burning light. Looking past the figure, out of the window I was able to see a dark world, covered in snow and ice.


    And finally, the last dream of which I remembered more than fragmented impressions, might just be the weirdest one. In a way, it was similar to the one with the apartment-building made from ice, but at the same time it was entirely different. In it, I was flying. Or should it be, we were flying? We were flying above a ruined world, part of me thought it was Mundus, due to the fact that there were monsters in the ruins below, shambling abominations of bone and flesh, giving me the impression of things that should not be. The impression they gave me reminded me of Nethersprites but their appearance was more akin to undead. But the ruins looked very much like a modern city, with broken cars and the crumbled remains of high-rise buildings.


    There was a part of me that wondered about my subconscious mind that had conjured up those dreams, if there was something it wanted to tell me, deep down. Maybe that I was going native, an idea that made me smile, as I cuddled up closer to Sigmir. But even as I smiled, there was a small knot of worry in my stomach caused by the simple fact that the beta would end at some point, separating Sigmir from me.


    ¡°Good morning, love.¡± Sigmir said, pulling me just a little closer and I could easily feel the content feelings over our bond. Closing my eyes, I let those feelings envelop me, basking in them, my previous worries slowly fading into the background. There was no certainty in the future and I could only wait and try to look for a solution. Trying to distance myself from Sigmir before the end of the beta seemed to be one option but as soon as I considered it, I decided against it. I was not willing to give up the happiness I had found with her, simply to spare myself possible, even if very likely, later pain. That wasn¡¯t a solution. But maybe a path would open up in the future. Hopefully.


    ¡°Good morning.¡± I replied, before raising my head a little nuzzling her cheek and taking a look out of the window.


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    ¡°Do you want to go explore this place a little? Just look around, see something other than the wilderness?¡± I asked, even if there was a part of me that wanted to remain in bed, snuggling.


    ¡°Let¡¯s have breakfast first.¡± Sigmir suggested, even as her arm wrapped around me a little tighter.


    For the next five minutes, neither of us was moving out of the comfortable embrace we shared but then, a grumbling sound from her stomach made me start moving with a silly grin on my face. After getting dressed in our usual attire, we took advantage of the local facilities to wash up and went into the dining-room to look for some breakfast.


    One of the women who ran the guest-house was there, cleaning up in the kitchen but stopped as soon as we stepped up. She supplied us with a simple but quite good breakfast of bread, some smoked meat and assorted fruits, alongside fresh spring-water. Or what they called fresh, remembering how they dumped their waste-water into the river going through their settlement, I decided not to chance things and, once we had settled down on one of the benches, channelled some Ice- and Death-Magic, making the water nice and cool in addition to kill off everything that might be lurking within. Hopefully that, along with our quite high vitality and endurance, would be more than enough to keep us from getting sick.


    Otherwise, breakfast was a quiet affair with me telling Sigmir what I had seen the evening before, the environment of the valley. Partially to make sure we would be able to get away if the centaurs returned for round two, partially to get an idea where we should go. Sadly, as far as I had been able to tell from above, the town was relatively utilitarian, without anything standing out from the air. Maybe exploring a little on foot would allow us to see something worth visiting, something other than the reward we were here to collect. Thinking of that reward reminded me that I had forgotten to ask Dura Firebringer when we would receive it, after all we were here now.


    Before we could finish breakfast, Sakgu, the scout we had met first, entered the room and made a beeline over to our table.


    ¡°Good Morning, Morgana, Sigmir.¡± she greeted us, looking a little agitated.


    ¡°Good Morning, Sakgu. What brings you here this morning?¡± I returned her greeting and asked, skipping any potential pleasantries. She looked like she was here for a purpose and I had no interest in beating around the bush.


    ¡°I was asked to deliver a message and, hopefully, act as a guide. Shaman Firebringer asked for the pleasure of your company. She wants to introduce those who helped her to her Teacher, Elder Brightsun.¡± she blurted out, her words almost blending into a single one.


    ¡°Curious..¡± I muttered, before looking over to the woman at the counter, asking if our companions had already eaten. When the woman shook her head in the negative, I asked her to prepare two more portions of breakfast, before focusing back on Sakgu.


    ¡°Sakgu, we will be along after breakfast.¡± I explained, before standing to get Adra and Rai. Part of me was glad that we had a good reason to delay, it was the middle of our meal after all. That part was petty, revelling in making the Shaman and her Teacher wait for us, even if I knew it wasn¡¯t the most diplomatic thing to do.


    I had a feeling that Sakgu would have preferred if we stopped whatever we were doing in order to follow her, wherever she was to lead us. But at the same time, I had no interest in hopping, just because someone said so, especially if that someone was Dura Firebringer. Still there was nothing she could do about it, so she nodded and settled down across the table from Sigmir. As I made my way towards the stairs, I decided that while making them wait for a little was sending the right kind of message, anything more would stretch the boundaries of propriety.


    Luckily, Adra and Rai were already up and just getting out of their room when I came up the stairs. I told them about our appointment, suggesting that they ate their breakfast as quickly as they could without looking hurried. Again, the idea to jump when Dura Firebrigner told me to jump didn¡¯t sit right with me.


    All in all, some twenty minutes after Sakgu had walked into our guest-house, we were finished with our breakfast and followed her out of the door, heading up-hill, towards some of the larger buildings, deeper in the valley.

 Chapter 381

    Walking through the orc settlement once again reminded me that the technology-level on Mundus was, at least when looked at through a normal lense, all over the place. Where in history, technology had followed a logical path, with each new discovery dependent on those before on Mundus that wasn¡¯t the case. Partially, it might just be due to developer-whimsy but from what I had seen, it was well embedded in the world and it¡¯s rules.


    Kolyug had been an excellent example of that, the buildings made from singular blocks of rock, given shape and strength with earth-magic, allowing them to build massively large and sturdy buildings, all embedded into a magical super-structure. From what I had heard, it had been built in a relatively short time, by a reasonably small amount of people. For a project on that scale, short time meant within less than a decade and few people meant a few hundred, instead of thousands. And that was before taking technology into account, on Earth, you would have to use modern, mechanized construction-equipment to even stand a chance, let alone the quite sophisticated material-requirements to get the buildings to remain structurally sound.


    To get to that point of technical development within a civilisation, you needed to follow a path, to build mechanized construction-equipment, you needed a well-equipped workshop, to build a well-equipped workshop, you needed a certain sophistication in metallurgy and so on. One step on that path was required to get to the next, but on Mundus, that wasn¡¯t the case. There were short-cuts, thanks to the use of Magic.


    But at the same time, Magic was, in a way, just another discipline of science. It advanced slowly, as there was no internet to propagate the results of different groups around a country or even the world. The closest to some sort of Academy of Science was the Mages¡¯ Guild but I had little information on them, let alone a way to join, not yet. But it seemed interesting, something to investigate.


    In the orc-settlement, those shortcuts were obvious by the well-made glass-windows I could see all around, set into buildings made from simple rock, mortar and wood, looking positively medieval to my eyes. But with what looked like modern glass-windows, even if the black rubber-fittings I was almost expecting were absent. Despite knowing where the discongruity came from, it felt strange to me, my mind instinctively expecting a certain conformity to what it deemed normal.


    As I was amused by the way my brain worked and assigned patterns it deemed normal, we moved through the settlement, standing out like sore thumbs. The only one who looked remotely similar to the orcs, with their generally sturdy and strong physiques, was Sigmir but the simple fact that her skin was a pale blue, while the orcish skin-colours ranged from a dark earthy brown to an olive-green, marking her as an outsider. And it looked like the orcs had a certain predisposition towards outsiders or maybe they had heard the rumours about Dura Firebringer and her supposed slaughter of the centaurs¡¯ captives. Either way, the looks we received had a certain hostility to them.


    What also stood out to me was the make-up of the crowd. Most of them, easily eight out of ten, were women and of those, about two of those eight showed signs of advanced pregnancy. Just looking at them made me want to study the process from a magical perspective, the creation of life and thus, the guarantee for more Death, in the future. But such studies couldn¡¯t be done, without either absolute force or the consent of the studied, something I would have a hard time getting, judging by the looks we were getting.


    I felt my lips curled into a smile, when I noticed a particular orc, standing amongst the people on one of the squares. Harms, the Traveller that had been with Dura Firebringer and my personal prime-suspect for originally starting the rumours. In my eyes, there were two possible ways for them to have started. Either a Traveller who had only seen the video had started them or a Native who had been involved in the fighting, or maybe a former captive, had used some magical way to communicate with someone in the village, spreading rumours with just enough of the truth to be annoying. I thought the second was a long-shot, as those with us had known the truth, leaving me to suspect a Traveller.


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    From suspecting a Traveller to suspecting a particular Traveller, namely Harms, was a short, logical leap, from the way he had commented on the video and the simple fact that I knew he was in the village. There might be another Traveller who had started here, but I without knowing about them, I couldn¡¯t estimate their chance of involvement, leaving only Harms.


    Who I looked straight at, fixating him with my gaze.


    ¡°There is someone I want to talk to.¡± I hissed, staring at the Traveller who, in my opinion, had messed things up a great deal. Passing on information obtained from the forums to the locals was in my opinion a good way to disrupt and potentially destroy what made the forums so interesting. It gave those who wanted to play a role on Mundus a way to communicate with others separate from that role. And it allowed them to show off things they would normally keep secret from the world of Mundus, like that one video I had uploaded in which Lenore and I had turned a small town into zombies. Selectively passing on from such a source, to people who had no way to verify and check the information given, or even the habit to verify information they received from multiple sources, was just ripe for abuse. It felt like cheating.


    Using information to alter what you did with your character, maybe adjust some things or gain inspiration, that was fine in my eyes. But trying to use information gained on the forum to influence the locals, that was just not okay.


    Adding some theatrical effect to my actions, I let a bit of cold mist seep from my sleeves and the back of my head, controlling it to cloud around me like a shroud and walked towards him. The other locals seemed to get out of my way happily, while the Traveller stared at me, almost like a mouse, looking at a cat. Frozen, and there hadn¡¯t even been the need to use magic to accomplish that.


    ¡°I hear you did not approve of my actions, helping Dura Firebringer?¡± I asked, my voice deliberately calm and cold, once I stood in front of the orc. There seemed to be a bit of sweat forming on his brow, despite the relatively cool morning, especially now that the cold mist I had spread around me was cooling the air around him as well.


    For a moment, he just stood there, before I could see his throat work, trying to swallow. Finally, he let out a cough, forcefully clearing his throat.


    ¡°What I saw looked like an indiscriminate attack, striking all, including the prisoners..¡± he responded, his eyes darting back and forth.


    ¡°And you took it upon yourself to spread that? Without knowing what happened, without even giving Shaman Firebringer the chance to respond?¡± I asked, pressing it home, trying to bring the consequences of what I considered cheating on him. I fully planned to upload something about this whole saga to the Forum, in an effort to curb the spreading of Forum-Information into the world of Mundus. There should be boundaries and he had crossed one of them, even if he might not have considered it one.


    ¡°I only told two people what I saw!¡± he blurted out, clearly getting unnerved.


    ¡°Most curious. You only told your lies to two people, but when we returned, bringing with us all those who had been taken, everyone had heard your lies.¡± I stated, trying to pitch my voice in such a way that even a normal speaking voice carried.


    Turning away from him, I decided to add one more shot, to finish things off. ¡°You might want to start running. I¡¯ve heard that cowards have a low life-expectancy amongst those bound to their honour, unless they are fast runners. And spreading false rumours is a definite act of cowardice, in my book.¡± I told him, before starting to walk away, as if he was no longer of any concern, dismissed from my mind. He was not, but I tried to make it look that way.


    The effect was just marvellous. From Sakgu, who had been following behind me, a little confused, to everyone around us, they all heard my words, especially the last part. What I had seen and heard about orcish culture was that they regarded honour as important, so calling him, and by extension all of them, out publicly worked wonders. The looks previously directed at me, suddenly shifted to him, weighing my words. The place was silent


    ¡°Sakgu, we have places to be, it wouldn¡¯t be polite to leave the Elders waiting, to deal with a coward.¡± I told the orc, causing her to give Harms one last glare, before falling in line behind me. As we left the area, I was able to hear noise starting up, as the various people began to talk about what I had said and what it might mean.

 Chapter 382

    ¡°He was the source of those rumors?¡± Sakgu asked, once we had left the square and its crowd behind. As we had left, she had fallen in beside me, resuming her place as guide but not taken the lead.


    ¡°He just confirmed it, didn¡¯t he? But, if you look objectively, it could only have been him.¡± I replied, before continuing on. ¡°At the end of the day, there were only so many who knew what had happened, to start rumours. All, but one, of those who had been at the battlefield were in our group, so they would have had access to magical communication-tools. Not even Dura Firebringer had something like that, or she would have reported ahead, making the spread of rumours even harder. The one person who had been at the battlefield but not with our group was him.¡± I explained, my words causing Sakgu to facepalm, giving off a grunt of annoyance.


    ¡°Of course. I¡¯d been trying to find out who had gotten word back, maybe with some trained birds, we use them from time to time. But you Travellers, you somehow get to live again and he died in the fight, beating us back here. I did not think of that.¡± she grumbled, her words filled with annoyance, strong enough to make me chuckle. It looked like she had been looking into things, but only looking into things from a natives¡¯ perspective, forgetting that the rules for Travellers were a little different. To be fair, such an oversight was understandable, it had likely been the first time she got into contact with the fact that we respawned, so not thinking of it was understandable.


    ¡°I¡¯ll have to admit, before he confirmed it, I didn¡¯t know for certain. I thought it was very likely, but there are other possible explanations. You just mentioned that you looked into some, here is something you also need to consider.¡± I continued on, deciding to give Sakgu and the local orcs a little insight, if only to make things for Harms a little harder.


    ¡°Travellers can, at times, see things in distant places, even after they have passed. You can think of it as a random, clairvoyant or post-cognitive vision, one that can be shared by all Travellers. Parts of that battle-field could be seen in such a vision, so any Traveller who is living in the Bright Hollow could have been the source for those rumours.¡± I told her, trying to explain things in language that made sense to her. Maybe it would give her some hints, just in case Harms hadn¡¯t been the only one to talk out of school.


    ¡°What? How?¡± she asked, confusion visible on her face.


    ¡°The how doesn¡¯t really matter and I couldn¡¯t explain it. And for what, well, the Gods themself seem to deem some events important to us Travellers, allowing all of us to witness them. Mostly, those events seem to involve Travellers in some fashion, our actions and the impact we have on this world. The battle was one such event, one of many.¡± I explained, the confusion on her face still present but with a little awe mixed in.


    ¡°Grendel should have told me that.¡± Sakgu grumbled, mostly under her breath, making it my turn to raise an eyebrow in question. The name didn¡¯t quite seem to fit with the orcish names I had heard before and that was before it was also the name of a monster in the Beowulf-myth.


    ¡°Grendel?¡± I prodded, curious about the answer.


    ¡°She is another Traveller, one who aspires to become a Shaman. I talked to her this morning, but she didn¡¯t mention anything about visions and such. And that is despite me, seeking her out to understand your kind better.¡± Sakgu explained, making me nod in understanding.


    ¡°Everyone of us deems different things important. Maybe she simply didn¡¯t commune with the Gods since they wanted to show us that vision. Or maybe she simply felt that sharing details of our connection to Them would be inappropriate. She might have her own reasons for telling you what she knows, just as I have my own reasons for telling you what I did.¡± I admitted, amused at the growl of annoyance my explanation evoked.


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    For the rest of the way, we walked in silence, steadily uphill, until we got to the last row of houses, near the point where the slope started to rise up steeply. Those houses were partially built into the mountain behind them and looked, for local standards, very impressive. Solid stone, sturdy-looking with some ornate decorations and, of course, beautiful glass-windows. The one we were walking to wasn¡¯t the most elaborate house, nor was it the largest, but it certainly was up there, part of the local elite. It¡¯s most impressive feature was a large, stained-glass window depicting a golden sun, looking out into the valley.


    Sakgu stepped to the door, giving it a solid knock, before stepping back, waiting to be allowed to enter. It only took about a minute of waiting, until the door opened and I saw what my mind could only describe as a teenager. While she was quite a bit taller than I, standing roughly the same height as Adra, she lacked the normal, sturdy physique of the adult orcs I had seen, making her look a little lanky. To my amusement, she looked quite human to me, despite the olive skin.


    ¡°Apprentice Klenda, good Morning.¡± Sakgu greeted, ¡°these are the Guests Elder Brightsun and Shaman Firebringer have asked for.¡± she continued, before introducing us individually. It was curious that my name seemed to invoke some interest, along with quite a bit of hostility, enough to make me focus on my own senses for a moment, trying to pick up the emanations of Power that surrounded Dura Firebringer, or something alike.


    While I wasn¡¯t sure, I thought there was something in the air, but where Dura Firebringer was surrounded by a dense, almost choking, stench of Fire-Astral-Power, this apprentice had just a whiff. Not enough to provoke hostility within me, merely an amused snort as I pushed out a bit of my power, magically pushing her down. Just for a moment, before letting up and retracting my power. Despite my quick retraction, it had been enough to bring a sheen of sweat to her forehead.


    ¡°Greetings, honoured Guests.¡± she replied, even if her tone was a little forced and the glare had been replaced by a fearful look. ¡°Please, enter, and I will guide you to the Elder¡¯s study.¡± she added, before stepping back, allowing us entry.


    ¡°This is where I leave you, in the capable hands of Apprentice Klenda.¡± Sakgu said, as she stepped back as well, giving us more than enough space to enter. ¡°Until we meet again.¡± she added, bidding us farewell. As we walked past her, into the Elder¡¯s abode, we returned her farewell, thanking her for the help she had given us.


    Inside, we were guided through a short hallway and into a quite large room. Upon entering, I felt as if I was hit by a sledgehammer, repeatedly. The air was thick, filled with power and heat, almost choking me out without pressing in on me. It took me a second to realise that the power wasn¡¯t actively used, merely existing uncontrolled within the room, likely remnants from hundreds, maybe thousands of spells worked within its confines. Pushing back against it was easily possible, as long as nobody was pushing against me, but it took effort.


    Taking a quick look around, some things stood out to me. The massive, open fireplace, right in the middle of the room, was one of them. The fire burning merrily within was another, its size dwarfed by the sheer scale of the construction around it. The fireplace was big enough to set up massive bonfires, four meters across, the symbols carved into the surrounding rock giving a strong hint that it was used for rituals.


    Another thing I noticed were the two orcs standing next to a desk, carved from stone. Dura Firebringer, I knew but the orc next to her, that one was unknown. Unknown and powerful, very much so. Where Dura Firebringer was a forest fire, blazing and overwhelming, she was more akin to the sun. Immensely powerful, but the power felt distant. Looking past that power, the orcish Elder looked relatively unremarkable, at least from what I could judge. Comparing her to the various orc-women I had seen on my journey so far, there was nothing that stood out, nothing visual that screamed of immense power. Just a middle-aged orc-woman, wearing simple clothes made from some unknown, brown fabric. The usual sturdy build, but quite unremarkable, compared to the various orc warriors I had seen before.


    Just as I finished my assessment of her, she seemed to have done the same with my group and fully focused on me, her lips curling into a smile, lighting up her face.


    ¡°Greetings, Traveller Morgana. A pleasure to meet you.¡± she greeted, her voice warm and welcoming. Still, the sheer power held within her was enough to send a shiver down my spine.

 Chapter 383

    ¡°Greetings, Elder Brightsun.¡± I replied, carefully keeping any show of emotion, whether fear or awe, due to her power out of my voice. Drawing a little on the power of Ice within my body helped a little, the cool sensation helping me keep my voice perfectly level, as if I was merely talking to the woman I had ordered breakfast from, just half an hour earlier.


    ¡°And Good Morning to you, Shaman Firebringer.¡± I greeted the other woman, who gave me a wide smile, somehow managing to send a different kind of shiver down my spine, one of apprehension. I wasn¡¯t sure why the smile unnerved me, but it did so, worse than the sheer amount of power held by the Elder.


    ¡°Good Morning, Morgana.¡± she returned the greeting, her voice pleasant. ¡°You gave me a lot to think about last night. But before we get to that business, I would like to square things up between us, to pay what you are owed.¡± she continued, making me frown at the mention of last night. I had briefly told Sigmir that I had met the woman, but no details, partially because it simply wasn¡¯t my story to tell, partially because I had simply enjoyed basking in that silent comfort only Sigmir could give me.


    ¡°Certainly. You promised information and a useful magical item.¡± I replied, banishing the frown from my face, keeping things strictly business. At the same time, I decided then and there that our stay in the orc-village would be a short one, even if there were interesting things to explore, like their connection to the Spirits and their magical tricks to make glass.


    ¡°Let¡¯s start with the more complicated one. Teacher, could you give them the explanation?¡± she asked the Elder next to her, her voice filled with respect.


    ¡°Yes, Dura, I¡¯ll do as you asked.¡± the Elder nodded, before gesturing to us, ¡°Please, come here. Do you know how to read a map?¡± she asked, reaching into her desk and pulling out a large parchment.


    Adra and I stepped over, Adra because she was mostly responsible for navigation and I, because I thought I had seen the most topographic maps out of our group. Looking at the map, I was lost for a moment, trying to comprehend it. The map looked relatively crude, a drawing with little detail, let alone the useful delineations of latitude and longitude, or any reference-points I would be able to use, to place it. The only thing I could understand at first, was a compass-rose, telling me where north, other than that, I had to guess. There were light-blue lines, which I thought meant rivers or waterways, but also grey lines that looked quite similar but too straight, making me think that those might be roads, especially as there was one rather solid-looking line that cut through the map laterally, likely the ancient road we had used before.


    ¡°Now, this is the Bright Hollow.¡± the Elder next to us began, pointing out a small star-symbol, near marks that I now realised stood for mountains. Again, the lack of a proper scale was problematic, making it difficult to guess just how large the mountain-range to the west was, but maybe that was something we would learn now.


    The Elder continued her explanation, explaining which landmarks we had to pay attention to and how to make our way, into the mountains and further west. The route we had to take was relatively simple, the landmarks sounded like they would be easy to recognize, especially with Lenore and her ability to give us an aerial view, similar to the map we were using. All in all, the place of power, which seemed to be deep within the mountains, in a particular valley, sounded like a place that I wanted to visit, a feeling echoed by Lenore when the Shaman described that there were powerful avians living in the area. Maybe it would allow us to further Lenore¡¯s power, in a way similar to the one we had used when boosting Ylva, with the divine Blood of those wolves. I could feel an eager hunger from her, pushing hard for the journey.


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    Finally, after some fifteen minutes of explanation and description, both Adra and I were quite sure that we would be able to follow it and find the described place. At the end, there was a warning for us, that there was danger within the valley but despite it, I wanted to head there, as soon as possible.


    ¡°Thank you, Elder Brightsun and you, too, Shaman Firebringer.¡± I nodded to the both of them, a polite smile on my face. The sheer excitement I could feel from Lenore, along my own raging curiosity, was enough for me to consider the information we had just received a worthy reward for slaughtering a bunch of centaurs. But it wasn¡¯t the only reward promised and I¡¯d be a fool if I were to forego a reward already earned.


    There was a moment of hesitation I didn¡¯t quite understand, before Dura FIrebringer reached into the magic bag I had noticed on her waist the day before, pulling a gleaming white piece of fabric out.


    ¡°And for the other reward, I want you to have this.¡± she began, shaking the piece of fabric out, revealing that it was a long, white cape, hooded and easily long enough to reach my ankles. There was a definite look of surprise on the Elder¡¯s face, her eyes almost comically wide.


    ¡°Isn¡¯t that the Cloak of Shade you brought back from your journey? The one that belonged to¡­¡± The Elder asked, her voice matching the look on her face, only to be cut off by Dura, an act of disrespect completely at odds with the reverent behaviour she had shown towards the older orc before.


    ¡°Yes, it is that Cloak of Shade. I think it will serve Morgana well, if I understand what I¡¯ve been seeing correctly.¡± Dura explained, her voice still polite even if her actions hadn¡¯t been. With those words, she turned back to me, holding the cloak out for me to take. As she did, I noticed that the shadows moved strangely beneath the cloak, appearing to be deeper and definitely influenced by magic.


    ¡°I noticed that you constantly use magic, trying to keep cool. This cloak is something we, my old party and I, bought when we were travelling across Daiea. It is enchanted to deepen the shadows beneath, warding off the sun to keep the wearer cool and comfortable, even in the heat of the Great Desert.¡± she explained and I felt myself reach for the cloak. We had earned the reward and she was right, it was something that would be useful for me, quite a bit. The last weeks had been hell and there was little indication that it would get better, especially as we travelled further south. Sure, winter was getting closer but it was still months away.


    ¡°Thank you. It is a most thoughtful reward.¡± I admitted, taking the cloak, feeling the smooth, flowing fabric, even as I borrowed Lenore¡¯s sight, curious how it worked. What I saw impressed me, the magic tightly woven into the cloth, making me think that those who had made it, had created the original fabric with just that purpose, that design in mind. Maybe longer, maybe shorter, but certainly to create a cloak to ward off the sun. Lenore agreed with me, fascinated by the way some of the individual fibers seemed to be a little different, woven in an intricate pattern, but before the two of us could lose ourselves in the study of this fascinating object, I folded it back up, put it into my own magic bag and focused on the present.


    ¡°There is one more thing.¡± Dura admitted, surprising me. The promised reward had been money, which we had been given, the information, which we had received, and finally, the magic item I held in my hand.


    ¡°What might that be?¡± I asked, my face scrunched into a frown.


    ¡°Are you certain about that?¡± Elder Brightsun asked, before Dura Firebringer could answer my question.


    ¡°Yes, Elder, I am. Your useless student will have to disappoint you, once again.¡± Dura Firebringer responded to her, a smile that could only be described as self-preciating on her face, before she took a deep breath and turned to me, reaching into her magic bag once again, her smile turning self-assured and cocky, causing my frown to deepen even more.


    ¡°I will come with you. And I will be winning your hand while travelling with you.¡± Dura announced, pulling a bouquet of red flowers out, pushing it into my hands before I could fully comprehend just what she was saying.

 Chapter 384

    For a second, I just stood there, stunned by the sheer audacity. Pain jolted me back into action, pain coming over the bond I shared with Sigmir. Reflexively, I reached out, trying to soothe her and for a moment, the connection between us sharpened, allowing me to know her thoughts. Just the idea that anyone was going to take me away was causing her pain, pain that was turning into anger, directed at the orc still standing in front of me, a smug grin on her face. Before Sigmir¡¯s thoughts could turn into action, I acted.


    Her approach would have us break the customs of hospitality, not that I truly cared about those but the protection they should award us forced me to adhere to them. Let the others break them first, bringing the detriments down onto them, not us.


    Holding the flowers with one arm, my other went up in a gesture to stop Sigmir, which was accompanied by an intense thought directed to her, through our bond. No words, merely the anger I felt towards the orc in front of me, alongside a mix of compassion regarding her pain, the desire to soothe it and finally, the simple, unquestionable truth I had discovered the night before. The place I belonged, the place I felt truly at home, was in her arms.


    My next action was to buy me a moment of time, time needed to formulate the right response, to consider the words used and the possible consequence of those. To skirt the line between making my point crystal clear, in a way that left no ambiguity whatsoever while not entirely breaking with decorum to the point that we had to fight our way out. With the Elder next to Dura, that seemed to be ill-advised. And so, I simply closed my eyes and took a deep breath, smelling the flowers I held, while rapidly conversing with Lenore.


    Together, we had a course of action and words laid out before my inhale was over, dramatic and hopefully convincing.


    Activating Overflow, I channelled as much Death-Magic as my meager skill allowed me to, to the point where I was losing health from the power coursing through me. Who would have guessed that channelling more Death-Magic than you could safely control would be hazardous to your health? Other than everyone. But it was necessary to make a point.


    With that Death-Magic, I focused on the flowers in my arms, feeling the slow processes of life, still holding on, trying to keep going despite being doomed to die, all putting out small amounts of energy, of life but also of death. And on that Death-Energy, I pounced, pushing it to the limit and enhancing it beyond anything that could ever be accomplished naturally, forcing the decay of the flowers in an instant, making them crumble into dust within a blink of an eye. Most of the dust simply crumbled away, falling to the floor at my feet but some clung to my hands, only to be casually brushed away when I looked up, my eyes hopefully still filled by the Overflow of Death-Magic.


    ¡°You will not join us. And there is no one who could replace my Sigmir, certainly not you.¡± my voice sounded eerie, even to me, raspy and cold, filled with disdain and hate. The effect it had on Dura Firebringer was almost as pronounced as the effect my magic had on the flowers, just moments earlier. But instead of crumbling to the floor, she flared up, fire quite literally in her eyes while the air around us started to buzz with energy. There was a sigh that wanted to form within me, only to be ruthlessly suppressed.


    ¡°Attack your guests, break your valued customs of hospitality, and we will defend ourselves.¡± I challenged, before continuing on, ¡°But know, while you might be able to overwhelm us, to kill us, you will not be able to end me. Remember, that I am an Immortal, an undying Traveller for whom Death is merely a temporary setback, an annoyance no more severe than a blister on your foot might be for you.¡±


    Sadly, my words didn¡¯t stop her, nor did it stop the pressure rising around us, forcing Lenore and me to push against it, while I continued speaking through gritted teeth.


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    ¡°Know, if you kill us, I will return. Not honourably, not openly, I will be a ghost in the night. And where this ghost treads, nothing will be left but Death, not a single soul. If you kill us, this will be the day that marks the beginning of the end for Bright Hollow. I will use the rest of my immortal existence, to kill every last man, woman and child that calls this valley home. By my immortal soul, my magic and my power, I swear, if you kill us, I will turn the Bright Hollow into a valley of Death, where none shall tread without remembering your folly.¡± I ground out, sweat covering my forehead as Dura Firebringer was pushing against my magic, trying to force me to my knees, both in a physical and magical sense.


    ¡°Enough!¡± the voice of Elder Brightsun, previously gentle, now sharp as a knife, cut through the air, while the magic that had been pressing against me suddenly vanished. I was only able to barely feel what the Elder was doing, magically separating Dura Firebringer from me, and again, I was impressed by her control. Without pushing against me, her magic had formed a cocoon around me, both anything I might try contained while keeping everything away from me.


    ¡°There is no need for threats.¡± the Elder said, her voice calm but the expression on her face was far from gentle. Before I could tell her that I hadn¡¯t made a threat but a promise, she continued.


    ¡°However, I think it would be best if you cut your stay short. Why, it might be advisable if you were to leave, as soon as you got your stuff from the rooms you have been given. You are no longer welcome here!¡± she declared, her voice making it clear that it was far from a suggestion.


    ¡°Certainly. For what it is worth, I will apologize that things turned out this way.¡± I added, before turning around, not even giving Dura Firebringer a second glance. There was nothing more to be said, there was nothing more I could say. Why hadn¡¯t the stupid orc tried to talk to me, before trying to force the issue? And what the hell had been up with those flowers, and acting like a conceited idiot?


    ¡°Let us leave.¡± I told my party, reaching out to take Sigmir¡¯s hand, giving it a gentle squeeze. I could feel the gaze of Dura Firebringer burn into my back, as we made our way to the door and we could hear the Elder talk to her.


    ¡°I¡¯m so sorry, little Dura. Why didn¡¯t you talk to me, before you did this?¡± the Elder asked, but before I could hear the response, we were at the door, where a wide-eyed apprentice waited for us. The look on her face was one of disbelief, mixed with a lot of hostility towards me.


    For a moment, I considered to simply brush her aside, to take out the negativity I was feeling out on her. My emotions were a mess, on one hand, I felt angry at Dura¡¯s actions and hated her for the pain she had caused Sigmir. On the other hand, I had enjoyed talking to her about magic, her style and insight into the working of it different from my own. And finally, there was the almost  instinctual need to crush her, to show her that the heat of her Fire, the warmth of the Sun, could never withstand the cold of an eternal Darkness. Maybe, if she had asked to join us, given us all a chance to talk about it, I might have agreed, if only to learn everything she knew and surpass her. The difference in level between us wouldn¡¯t have lasted and at that point, I would have been able to show my dominance, to show her that I was superior, even without Lenore¡¯s help. But she had to force the issue.


    But anything that resembled an attack was a bad idea, so I decided to simply ignore the apprentice, walking past her, as if she wasn¡¯t there. Treating her as the insignificance she was, while she started to walk with me, maybe to make sure we were actually leaving without causing any mischief on the way out.


    ¡°You should leave that cloak here. She gave it to you for a reason.¡± the apprentice told me, her voice an angry hiss.


    ¡°Yes, she gave it to me because we had an agreement. I will not leave it, we earned it, fair and square.¡± I insisted, partially because I would be damned to give up such a curious and interesting item, especially one that looked to be incredibly useful to me, but also because it would mean I was conceding. And there was no way I would concede anything, especially in regards to Dura Firebringer.


    ¡°That cloak, she brought it with her from her journey. It was always hanging in her workshop but nobody was allowed to touch it. Now, she gave it to you, before that!¡± the apprentice continued, but I tuned her and her whining out, forcefully pushing the conflicting emotions away by drawing upon the Ice within my magic, allowing me to get into a calm and dispassionate mood.


    There was nothing to be gained by getting emotionally excited, not as we were leaving.

 Chapter 385

    ¡°Did any of you leave something behind in the rooms we¡¯ve been given?¡± I asked my companions, as we made our way down-hill, ignoring the Elder¡¯s apprentice who was still moving with us. Part of me wanted to inquire why but given that I had been ignoring her the whole time, I decided to simply continue doing so. If she wanted to make sure we actually were leaving, she was welcome to do so, I had no plans to stick around. Not with the awkward situation Dura Firebringer hat put me in, with her strange actions.


    ¡°We have our things with us.¡± Adra replied, after a short look at Rai. The look on her face, however, told me that she wanted to talk, later. Something I could understand, after all I had managed to get us kicked out of yet another settlement, just that I thought my Outsider-Trait had nothing to do with it, at least this time.


    ¡°Good.¡± I nodded, mostly to myself. Just before I wanted to tell the others that we would just leave, knowing that neither Sigmir nor I had left anything in our room, Lenore pushed a thought through our connection.


    ¡°Are you certain that you didn¡¯t leave any hairs in the room? Remember what the Firemage near Kolyug managed to do with hair that was left behind after you got burned?¡± she asked, making me mentally stop for a moment. I didn¡¯t think Dura Firebringer would go out of her way to strike at me from a distance, it didn¡¯t seem to be her style, but at the same time, I wasn¡¯t willing to risk things on a hunch.


    ¡°No, I¡¯m not certain.¡± I admitted over our connection, before continuing out loud. ¡°I will have to swing by our room for a few minutes, then we can leave this place. After all, it seems we already have overstayed our welcome.¡± I snarked, giving a side-eye to the orc next to us. As I spoke, I felt Sigmir¡¯s hand tense in mine for a moment, before relaxing again, simply moving next to me.


    As we continued moving through town, a part of me expected the atmosphere to instantly shift around us, the change in relations from honoured guest to kicked out pest instantly communicated, as it would have been in other games, but no, nothing seemed to have changed just yet. Some of the orcs around us still regarded us with a bit of hostility, as they had before, some looked at us with curiosity and again others, as if they were measuring us, me in particular. The mixed reaction made me wonder about the effect of a general reputation, as described in one of the character-windows, how did it mesh with individual perception? Would someone we saved suddenly dislike us just because we had a bad reputation with the faction they were a part of? Or would individual perception overwrite the institutional one? How could there even be an ¡°institutional reputation¡±, how could a town have an opinion on someone? Only the individual people inside could hold that opinion, each flavoured with their own biases and prejudices.


    And that was on a small-scale, where things could be somewhat seen as impacting individuals. If I helped some people in a town, they might talk to their neighbours, and so on, giving me a positive reputation and spreading it. That meshed with the reputation-system. But on a larger scale, say, a nation-wide reputation? Could that even work? Certainly not in the same manner I had originally thought it might, with quests simply filling a bar, things were, as it seemed to be with everything, much more complicated.


    Maybe there were tiers to the system, so to speak. So far, I had only dealt with the lowest tier, or maybe the lowest two tiers, with individuals and independent settlements. That was, other than my dealings with the Centaurs, but for some reason, those were not in my social-tab, maybe due to the fact that I hadn¡¯t openly dealt with them, only by passing through. But if there were more tiers, possibly hidden ones, like a regional tier that would give you an indication how far your reputation had spread in a region and whether it was positive or not, or the same concept for a national or, at the highest level, even an international tier. By that logic, the Grandmother would have a regional reputation in the North, her name known to most people, along with some basic information. In the Bright Hollow, there might be one or two people who had heard the name but most Orcs would never have heard of her. Granted, the distance between Bright Hollow and Neyto was measured in the thousands of kilometers and it had taken us multiple months to make the journey, making it somewhat understandable, but still. If a being as powerful as the Grandmother hadn¡¯t been able to achieve a wide-spread reputation, how would I fare?


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    Musings like that occupied my mind, until we reached the guest-house, our silently disapproving shadow still with us. We all entered together and, as we moved through the front-room, one of the housekeepers noticed us. It was the same, highly pregnant, woman that had helped us the evening before, Sari.


    ¡°Greetings, honoured guests.¡± she greeted, only to be cut off by Apprentice Klenda.


    ¡°They are no longer guests, certainly not honoured ones.¡± she snarked, trying to look down on me.


    ¡°Indeed, due to some unfortunate circumstances, our visit has to be cut short. We will get our things, before we leave.¡± I ignored the air of superiority the apprentice tried to project and gave Sari a polite, but indifferent smile. She looked just confused at the sudden turn of events, while Klenda bristled at my explanation.


    Ignoring her again, we moved up the stairs, entering the rooms we had been given. There, I was presented with a small conundrum. I knew what I wanted to accomplish, destroy anything that might be used to form a connection with me, especially strands of my hair. My ¡°Magical Hair¡±-Trait would make that an excellent conduit to strike at me, something I wanted to avoid. The thought of suddenly getting burned by a spirit, conjured hundreds of kilometers away and sent to haunt me was not one I enjoyed. But how could I go about destroying such a connection, without simply destroying the bed and everything else within the room?


    ¡°I have an idea.¡± Lenore told me, before I felt her push out of her Hallow. Moments later, she sat on my shoulder, sharing in images what she had in mind, a combination of Death and Darkness-magic, trying to simply purge anything that was still magical within the room, anything but us, of course.


    I had no idea if the concept of Death-Magic could be applied to something akin to the Magic-Rune of my Darkness-Magic, but it seemed Lenore thought so. It would have to be used in concert by both of us, with me providing the targeting, using Darkness-Magic while Lenore would conjure up the needed Death-Magic.


    Reaching out, I took hold of the shadows lingering in the corners of the room and near the walls, filling them with my power. Once they were mine, I spread them, blanketing the entire room in Darkness while focusing on the rune representing Magic, the ability to change the world, in my mind. Everything magical, everything connected to the Astral, within the shadows was my target. Once I had that image fixed within my mind, I gave Lenore a gentle prod, feeling her mind connect with my own, taking the offered information.


    From there, things got relatively simple. I could feel her shift, spreading her wings, and lifted my other arm, letting my magic pool out of me, into the spell she was casting. Once again, I was mostly providing assistance to her, giving her power and information, while she provided the actual spell-concept.


    A simple concept, one that simply tried to flood everything with Death-Magic, overwhelming anything that might be used to connect to the realm of the living, hopefully erasing any potential link to me. Visually, it looked quite impressive, the dark Shadows I had conjured up turning grey and hazy, as if there was an invisible wind shifting them around.


    It only lasted mere moments, not even half a minute, but in those scant seconds, we pumped almost half our Astral Power into the room, thoroughly decontaminating it in the process. Nothing living was left within, hopefully that was enough to make sure nothing could be used against me.


    ¡°Hopefully that was enough.¡± I muttered, feeling a wave of tiredness hit me. Death-Magic took a toll on me, even if I only had helped with the spell.


    ¡°We will have to work on that one. Maybe we can find a way to use the Astral River to trace and destroy links to you.¡± Lenore replied, before shifting back into her Hallow. She was as exhausted as I, despite the fact that she had borne the brunt of the magical work. But then, her affinity for Death-Magic was quite a bit higher than mine, mine only a reflection of hers.


    ¡°Yes, I agree. But for now, let¡¯s get out of here.¡± I nodded, before walking out the door, a silent Sigmir still in tow.

 Chapter 386

    We managed to get out of the orc-settlement without further incident, the locals looked at us with interest, maybe because we had Apprentice Klenda walking next to us, looking visibly angry. When walking through the gates, I had been able to hear her talk to the guards, telling them that we were no longer welcome, making me decide that maybe, walking a little faster was a good idea. If there were any orcs, trying to come after us for one reason or another, distance was the best defense, alongside vigilance and caution. At the same time, if they did come after us, I wasn¡¯t opposed to gaining some more experience-points, especially if it could be done in a manner that didn¡¯t risk the others too much.


    ¡°Lenore, would you mind keeping an eye on things from the air?¡± I mentally asked, getting an exhausted sigh of acceptance in response. She must have felt that I thought it necessary, or she simply agreed that it was, pushing out of her Hallow without further words.


    Watching her gain altitude, I felt a lot better about our safety, knowing that she would give ample warning, if anyone tried to sneak up on us.


    ¡°Want to tell us what that was all about?¡± Adra asked, one eyebrow raised and a smirk on her face. Earlier, she had looked rather serious but now that we were out of the orcish town and putting distance between us and possible danger, she seemed to be rather amused at the situation.


    ¡°Which part are you referring to?¡± I replied, just to make her amusement as awkward as possible for her. Not that it would really help, the whole situation had turned into a mess, especially as I wasn¡¯t sure why it had turned out that way. Dura Firebringer and I had gotten along reasonably well, talking about our different ways to use magic had been interesting but to go from a few hours of conversation, spread out over a couple of days while travelling, to that awkward display? And where, by all the Gods of this world and any other that might be out there, had she gotten the idea to present me with flowers? Of all the things that were confusing about the whole affair, that one stood out to me.


    Not that there was anything wrong with flowers but, if I was honest with myself, they didn¡¯t do much for me. Sure, there were some that looked visually appealing, some had a pleasant scent but all in all, I could take them or leave them. If it was Sigmir, giving me a bouquet of flowers, I would be pleased that she had taken the effort, as it was a custom her people most certainly didn¡¯t have, showing that she had tried to act in a way that was to the customs of ¡°my people¡± so to speak.


    It was that line of thought that almost made me miss Adra¡¯s prodding, when I realised that it might just be that. If nothing else, Dura Firebringer had appeared to be decisive, so what would someone like that do, if faced with a topic they are uncertain of? Take the most direct route, which would either be to try courting me by orcish custom, which I had no idea what it might entail, or find out what the courting customs amongst ¡°Travellers¡± were, as if there weren¡¯t a million and two of those, depending on hundreds of factors. That might explain the gift of flowers, if a Traveller had answered an inquiry about courting-customs by telling Dura that it would be appropriate. Shaking off that line of thought as inconsequential, I focused on answering Adra¡¯s question.


    ¡°I¡¯m not certain what Dura had in mind in the first place. We talked for a few minutes, last night, and she told me that the experience of rumors being spread about her is not a new one. Maybe she thought travelling with us, a group of similar strength to her own, would give her a way to gain more power? What she had in mind when saying that she would court me, your guess is as good as mine.¡± I admitted, reaching out to give Sigmir another squeeze.


    ¡°I have all the courting I could ever want with Sigmir.¡± I added, with a smile on my face. Finally, there was some expression on Sigmir¡¯s face, she had been silent since earlier, the connection between us giving me the impression that she was lost in thought. Now, she returned my smile, making my heart skip a beat.


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    ¡°She was interested in you, almost from the beginning.¡± Sigmir inserted, the smile still on her face, now with added amusement.


    ¡°Huh¡­¡± I muttered, not quite sure what to say to that. ¡°I guess I missed that.¡± I admitted, after a moment, getting a gentle squeeze of my hand from Sigmir, who was still smiling brightly.


    ¡°And what about that cloak?¡± Adra continued her questioning. ¡°The Elder looked shocked to see it and that Apprentice essentially confirmed it. Do you have an idea?¡±


    ¡°Where she got it, yes, I have an idea. And I think I know why it is significant.¡± I admitted, pulling the still folded-up cloak from my magical bag.


    Still walking, I wrapped it around my shoulders, pulling the hood up and feeling its magic flow around me. The shadows cast by it deepened, easily blocking the warmth of the sun burning down on me,


    As we walked down the valley, I told the others the story I had been told the evening before, about their adventure in Daiea and the later split of their party. At the same time, I realised that the cloak I had been given had to have belonged to either Kwyla or Marj. Given that Dura had kept it that whole time, having it somewhat prominently displayed, I thought it had been Marj¡¯s, making me feel a little guilty for taking it. But at the same time, it had been a reward, not contingent on her joining us and certainly not on her taking Sigmir¡¯s place at my side. If it had been, I wouldn¡¯t have taken it, ever. There was nothing that could replace my Sigmir, certainly not a magical cloak, no matter how useful.


    By the end of my story, Adra was just shaking her head, letting out a long, drawn-out sigh.


    ¡°What a mess.¡± she muttered, thankfully letting the matter drop.


    I noticed that Rai, who had been silent the whole time, rather similar to Sigmir, reached out and took her hand in a rare, open display of affection. It got him a smile in return and we continued down the valley in silence, making good speed.


    Maybe two hours after we had set out, I could feel Lenore close the distance between us, after circling overhead most of the time.


    ¡°The orcs don¡¯t seem to have any interest in you.¡± she told me, landing on my shoulder. At  the same time, she shared a brief, mental summary of what she had seen, showing me images of a few cultivated fields, with orcs working them and multiple images of the town itself, where it looked like nothing was going on. Just orcs, moving about, no excitement, no gathering of people, nothing that would make me think they were planning to go after us. Similarly, the guard-posts on the valley ridges showed no actions taken, no signals given or the like. It looked very much as if the situation had been contained by the Elder, simply by removing us from the equation. It would likely sting Dura¡¯s pride for a while, but she would have to get over it.


    ¡°And, do we need to run?¡± Adra asked, some amusement back in her voice, even if there was an undertone of seriousness.


    ¡°No, it doesn¡¯t look like it.¡± I told her, before continuing on, ¡°But still, I think we should keep a good pace and not stop until we are further away from here.¡±


    ¡°I agree.¡± she nodded, ¡°Where are we heading? Do we follow the route the Elder gave us or not?¡± Adra asked, giving me a conundrum. On one hand, I wanted to follow it, my curiosity shared by Lenore who was very interested in the potential to strengthen herself in that place. On the other hand, we would be travelling a predictable route, making following us trivial. It might even allow the orcs to use a different, faster, route and prepare an ambush at some point along the way. I thought that fear was a long shot, simply because there would have to have been a reason for not recommending that shorter route in the first place, but there might be such reasons. It was a possibility I should keep in mind.


    ¡°I think we should go to that place of power.¡± I admitted, after a moment of consideration. If the orcs didn¡¯t look to be interested in following us now, when we were on their territory, hunting us down later would be even more difficult. Amusingly, the events with Dura made me more confident in going there, simply because her plan to accompany us made it unlikely that the place was a death-trap.


    Nodding to myself, I continued further down the valley, enjoying my new cloak.

 Chapter 387

    It was quite late, the sun already vanishing behind the horizon, when we decided to make camp. We had marched as fast as possible for the entire day, just slowing down long enough to get some food into us, putting a lot of distance between the orcish valley and us. We had managed to completely leave it, and the immediate vicinity, but there was simply little gain in hurrying even further, driving us into exhaustion.


    A little earlier, maybe an hour before we stopped, Lenore had gone up again, making sure that nobody was following us and had yet to return. The spot we had chosen to camp was relatively secluded, without bringing us too far from our path.


    ¡°How do our supplies look?¡± I asked Adra, knowing that we had been planning to get some fresh supplies from the orcs, a plan that hadn¡¯t quite worked out.


    ¡°We¡¯ll have to forage a little more than planned but it shouldn¡¯t be a problem, even as we travel through the mountains.¡± she replied, after checking with Sigmir and Rai, to see what they had in their magical bags.


    ¡°Good to know.¡± I nodded, sinking to the ground, the exhaustion of the day finally catching up with me. It was annoying, even now, after crossing the second Divide, I was the physically weakest member of the party. Adding to the exhaustion of travelling, the Death-Magic I had used just before leaving the orc-settlement had taken a lot out of me, something I would have to keep track of in the future. Previously, my use of Death-Magic had never caused such a backlash but then, I had never used it on a similar scope to the spell Lenore and I had woven together or in combination with the Overflow-Ability, both things that could have caused it.


    Sigmir, who hadn¡¯t left my side for the entire day, quickly picked me up, cradling me in her arms.


    ¡°Adra, Rai, can the two of you take care of the camp?¡± she asked, sounding quite assertive.


    Instead of worrying why she was acting now, I simply let her, resting my head against her chest, enjoying the comfort her presence gave me.


    The two of them agreed and Sigmir carried me, just for a few steps, before settling down leaning against a tree and gently caressing me, her strong hands applying just enough pressure to be pleasant and relaxing.


    ¡°Thank you.¡± Sigmir whispered, barely loud enough for me to hear. In my relaxed state, I could feel her, not just physically but also through our bond, the close contact helping me along.


    ¡°A woman with her power, one who can talk about the magic you love, and you didn¡¯t even notice her, didn¡¯t even recognise that she was interested in you. And when she finally told you, you never considered her as a partner. I could feel you, within my heart, within my soul. There was no hesitation, no consideration.¡± she continued, her voice filled with emotion.


    Looking up, I could see a loving smile on her face and reached out, gently touching her cheek, while looking into her eyes.


    ¡°Before meeting you, I never even knew that I could feel that way. You are the first, who gave me these feelings, nobody ever did that before. Neither in this, nor the other world.¡± I admitted, my thumb softly stroking along her cheekbones. For a minute or five, we simply sat there, gazing into each other''s eyes, basking in the love shared between us. There was no need for words, no need for actions, no lust or urgency, just a content feeling of peace.


    Sadly, all good things end at some point and in this case, the end came on black wings. I felt Lenore¡¯s approach before she was in sight, in this case, mostly due to the emotions of vigilance and anger.


    ¡°There are orcs behind us.¡± she told me, using our connection. The mental message shattered the peace I was feeling, driving away the wonderful mood building between Sigmir and me. Instead, I was filled with a disappointed anger, disappointment that the orcs would be so foolish, to start hunting us out of arrogant pride, for hurting Dura Firebringer¡¯s feelings. Anger, at their hypocrisy, trying to hunt us down and hurt us after we had been promised that we were to be honoured guests, in order to invite us into their settlement.


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    ¡°Show me.¡± I sent back to Lenore, my body stiffening, causing Sigmir to pause her gentle ministrations.


    Lenore took a moment to come closer, before sharing her memories with me, the now familiar sensations filling my mind as I focused on them. It was, obviously, from Lenore¡¯s aerial point of view, with an added steam of information that gave context to what she had seen. That stream informed me that the images were from the furthest she had gone back, allowing her to see the entrance of the valley that housed the Bright Hollow. From a high altitude, she had been able to see a small group, right on the edge of her vision, leaving the valley. That gave me a bit of hope that those orcs might be simply leaving the valley on some sort of errant but sadly, what came next didn¡¯t make that likely.


    Lenore had approached a little more, using Air-Magic to boost her speed and I agreed with her, the small group of six orcs looked like trouble. They were certainly not loaded for bear, they looked very much like the orcs that had been travelling with Dura Firebringer, geared up for war, not for a hunt. What looked like heavy weapons, armour and a distinct lack of bows and spears made me agree with her initial impression. That was no party hunting to fill a pantry, that was a party travelling to kill other sapients. Given that a similar, though much bigger party, had just returned from hunting centaurs, I somewhat doubted that they would be trying to catch up to the few stragglers we had left alive.


    ¡°Do you feel good enough to scry later tonight?¡± I asked, before checking my own condition. I could feel that my stores were getting low, major magical workings followed by a day of forced marching were not a good combination if you wanted to create complex magic later during the night, especially something as delicate and involved as scrying. I might be able to cast the spell but as tired as I was, I was more likely to fall asleep before I managed to find any useful information. Scrying only allowed me to shift my view-point, not guide me to the information I was looking for, which was problematic in this case.


    ¡°No, I don¡¯t think so.¡± she admitted, landing on the arm I stretched out from her.


    ¡°What¡¯s wrong?¡± Sigmir asked, having obviously noted the sudden drop in my mood.


    ¡°There¡¯s a group of orcs behind us, looks like they set out a few hours after us.¡± I replied, forcing down a yawn.


    ¡°So they won¡¯t reach us tonight?¡± she asked, after her face flickered into a frown for a moment.


    ¡°No, not unless they were aware of Lenore noticing them and started to prepare camp while she was watching, to throw us off.¡± I replied, shaking my head at the idea. Just from the memory I had seen, Lenore had been high in the sky, a barely visible dot in the distance, making it nigh impossible to notice what was going on. At least I couldn¡¯t imagine how one would spot such an observer, not without some sort of specialised magic or ability. Something like that was likely possible but given what I knew about magic, nothing seemed to be impossible, given the right abilities, understanding and affinities. But at the same time, worrying about every potential way magic might be used against us would be foolish, simply due to those far-ranging possibilities. Guarding against the probable, against understood and plausible threats would have to do.


    ¡°That means you shouldn¡¯t worry about it, not tonight. Neither of you,¡± Sigmir nodded, gently smoothing the feathers on Lenore¡¯s head.


    ¡°Tomorrow, after you had a good night¡¯s rest, we can think about what to do with those orcs. Setting up an ambush would work or, if we really focus on it, I¡¯m sure we would be able to simply out-run them. Hurrying would leave us open to an ambush further down the road, if they have some way to communicate with one of their travelling groups in the right direction, so we should stay vigilant.¡± Sigmir reasoned, before stopping and looking down at me again. ¡°But not tonight.¡± she continued, her tone allowing no disagreement.


    ¡°Dinner is ready.¡± Adra called over. Standing up from Sigmir¡¯s lap, I gave Sigmir a hand to get up, not that she needed it. In the meantime, Lenore vanished into her Hallow, settling in to sleep as soon as she was inside.


    ¡°We¡¯ll have to post a watch tonight¡­¡± Sigmir told the others, as we stepped up, before explaining what Lenore had found out. Neither of them looked pleased at the revelation, their responses indicating that they agreed with me, that going after guests, merely for an insult, was deeply dishonourable. But they also agreed that thinking about our followers in the morning was the best course of action.

 Chapter 388

    A night of rest had done both, Lenore and me, a world of good. In the pale twilight of the early morning, the world looked a lot better than it had the day before. Sure, there was now another place we weren¡¯t welcome any longer but had I ever planned to go back there? No, not really. There might have been quests, maybe some insight into the nature of Life and Death that I could have gained by witnessing a birth, maybe some knowledge regarding spirits and the way of communing with them, but other than those potential gains, had we lost anything? Again, no, not really.


    The only thing we had to take care of were the people following us, something I planned to do, as soon as possible.


    ¡°Love, I think today I¡¯ll go with Lenore, to check on those following us.¡± I told Sigmir, as we were having breakfast. The look on her face wasn¡¯t too happy, she didn¡¯t like it when I went off on my own, especially if it might be dangerous, but frankly, flight was a major game-changer, allowing Lenore to cross distance as a rate much higher than anything a land-bound creature could manage. If you added Lenore¡¯s affinity for wind-magic and the increase in magical potential gained by having me within my Hallow, she was able to out-pace us by a factor of five.


    ¡°Stay high and don¡¯t get caught.¡± Adra warned, before adding with a grin, ¡°Remember, most young hunters learn their archery hunting small birds and similar game. It would be a shame if some idiot child manages to put an arrow into you.¡±


    The emotion I could feel from Lenore as pure disdain, I could almost see the ruffled feathers at the idea that some child would be able to shoot her down, making me chuckle in response.


    ¡°You mean like that one silly orc, just after we left Kolyug?¡± I asked, still chuckling to myself. In hindsight, making jokes about things like that felt funny, even if it had been horrible at the time. It reminded me, there were still a few things I wanted to learn regarding Blood Magic, maybe I now had some test-subjects delivering themselves to my doorstep. It might be prudent to make some sort of disclaimer, something along the lines ¡®If you attack Morgana, you consent to any and all magical experimentation she deems appropriate.¡¯ If companies could do it with their end-user license agreements, maybe there was a way to create something similar using the system. Unlikely, but just the idea made me smile, until I felt a pain in my ear, replacing the amused smile on my face with a pained wince.


    ¡°What was that for?¡± I asked Lenore, who had left her Hallow and was now painfully gripping my ear in her beak.


    ¡°You know what. You suggested that some idiot child would be able to shoot me down!¡± she mentally replied, her feathers actually ruffling in annoyance.


    ¡°I was a lot weaker back then, it won¡¯t happen ever again. Never!¡± she stressed her statement, pinching my ear a little harder, drawing a bead of blood. Somehow, the pure affront she managed to put into her mental voice merely served to make me more amused, prompting me to open my mind a little, letting her experience the situation from my end, the way her outrage merely served to amuse me more. For a moment, nothing happened while she had to sort through the unstructured sending, before I got a reply, in a simple image of her raising her tail towards my face, essentially mooning me. Somehow, that caused me to double over in laughter, knocking her off the perch on my shoulder, prompting a squawk of outrage.


    Catching her, I sent another wave of amusement her way, trying to convey how glad I was that she was with. The response I got almost made me laugh again, demonstrating that it was impossible to deceive or prevaricate when using mental communication. On the surface-level, she was projecting indifference but beneath that feigned indifference was a deep layer of affection and friendship.


    ¡°We¡¯ll catch up to you.¡± I promised the others, before setting Lenore down and pushing myself into my Hallow.


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    ¡°Let¡¯s find out who¡¯s after us.¡± I told her, before mentally settling in to let her do her thing.


    Flying remained a wonderful experience, no matter how often I got to enjoy it. Just the sight I was able to see through Lenore¡¯s eyes, the world beneath us looking like toys, just the right side to be picked up at our leisure. At times, perspective truly mattered.


    Finding the people following us didn¡¯t take too long, with me providing additional power to Lenore, she was able to constantly use her magic to increase her flight-speed without exhausting herself so, after maybe thirty minutes, she focused on a particular spot in the meadows below, where a campfire was currently tended to by a small group. We were still too far away to make out details but just from the activity we were able to observe, I began to doubt that they were after us. Compared to the dedication we had witnessed when hunting the centaurs, these orcs seemed to be too relaxed, leisurely sitting around their fire.


    We made our way closer and their activity didn¡¯t change, two of them seemed to be preparing breakfast while the others fiddled with their weapons or armour but primarily, they seemed to simply pass the time.


    From a few hundred meters away, we were able to make out enough details to make things a little confusing. Lenore¡¯s assessment had been spot-on, from their gear and equipment, the orcs looked like a war-party, ready to fight a serious foe, not a group of hunters. But their actions didn¡¯t match their gear, if they were hunting us, they seemed to ignore any possibility of us attacking them. There weren¡¯t even guards watching the perimeter, at least none that Lenore could spot, which was unlikely as there was no cover around. Unless potential guards had ways to counter Lenore¡¯s sight, and were employing those methods on the off-chance we were scouting from the air, we would have noticed them. It didn¡¯t make any sense.


    ¡°Isn¡¯t that Harms? That Traveller who annoyed you?¡± Lenore asked, focusing on one particular orc.


    ¡°Certainly looks like him.¡± I admitted, looking through her eyes. His presence made me even more confused. I knew that he had seen a few of the videos I had created over the time I had spent on Mundus, he had to know that I preferred to attack from an ambush, deciding the battle with an overwhelming attack before it ever started. Leaving his group open to an attack like that was more than foolish, it was idiotic to the highest order, unless that was what they wanted me to think. An ambush that you knew was coming could be turned against those doing the ambushing, if you had ways to withstand their opening attack. Which made me wonder, was it some sort of double-trap, a gambit based on the assumption that we would attack first, allowing them to turn the tables on us, somehow?


    Did they have the power to do that? Harms certainly did not, unless he had somehow managed to gain a massive boost in level since dying against the centaurs. Which seemed unlikely, so what was he doing here? Was he some sort of embedded messenger, who would make sure that word got out, even if they all died?


    ¡°Maybe we should just ask.¡± Lenore suggested, making me chuckle in my Hallow. It wasn¡¯t impossible, given that Harms was a Traveller, I would be able to use the forum to send him a message. He might even have messages from me on some sort of priority that reached him, while logged into Road to Purgatory, there were settings for that, but I doubted I was on such a list, simply because we had never used direct messages between us before. But I had just lit into him the day before, for using knowledge from outside the game, to influence the world of Mundus. Now, I was here, contemplating a rather similar action.


    I didn¡¯t like being a hypocrite.


    ¡°Remember those shadow-clones Rai showed us? If we work together, we should be able to combine one of those shadow-forms with the magic we use to create a flying shape to scry. Add in a little wind- or mind-magic and we should be able to communicate.¡± Lenore continued her suggestion, making my eyes open in surprise. Suddenly, the idea seemed a lot more interesting than before.


    ¡°Let¡¯s find out, that sounds like a really interesting trick, if we can pull it off.¡± I admitted, a wide grin on my face.


    ¡°We just need a concealed spot, somewhat nearby, maybe somewhere on the forest-edge, to use our magic.¡± I added, focusing on the trees quite a distance from their camp.


    ¡°Agreed. I think I see a suitable tree.¡± she agreed, angling down towards a large tree, with a dense crown. Perfectly to conceal an elf and her bird, while we caused some magical mischief.

 Chapter 389

    Once Lenore was safely concealed within the canopy of a large tree, just on the edge of the forest, I pushed myself out of my Hallow, taking up a perch next to her. Somehow, despite my precarious position, squatting on a narrow branch, it felt good to me, balanced.


    ¡°Let¡¯s see how well this works.¡± Lenore suggested, before explaining her plan. ¡°Can you create the shell, as if I was going to use it to scry? No need to make it avian, if you prefer a humanoid form, that shouldn¡¯t matter.¡±


    Nodding, I focused on my magic, drawing upon the shadows caused by the leaves all around us, pulling them in and weaving them together. There was little runic magic involved, merely a rune of twilight as a base-line within my mind, the rest was purely artistic casting, making it both easier and a lot harder than working with runes. Runes were nicely predictable, providing a stable base for my casting and allowing me to replicate previously used spells with good fidelity. If I used a runic formation, the result wouldn¡¯t vary too much, as long as I didn¡¯t forcibly change things. Artistic casting was lacking that stable base, allowing for impressive feats of magic that I later was neither able to explain nor replicate.


    Once the shell was completed, a simple, vaguely humanoid, cloud of dense shadow, I felt Lenore¡¯s mind rub against mine, joining me in the casting of the next spell. This spell was one I had used before, the base-version was from the Grandmother¡¯s grimoire, allowing me to shift my awareness into a shadow, so I could look out from it. It was modified runic-magic, something I normally had no problem with, but in this case, it was harder. Lenore, who was normally unable to use runic magic, was the one casting the spell, so she would be able to use her innate ability to speak using magic through the shape I had created. For that, I had to hold the runes, while Lenore filled it with power, partially filtered through my affinity.


    The sensation was incredibly weird and intimate, our minds working closely together, to the point that the distinction blurred and some information were shared, without any intent behind it. Some of the flashes of memory I experienced were things I very well could have done without, like the taste of carrion, others I welcomed with open arms, like the experience of flying within a storm. The brief feeling of exhilaration, mixed with awe and adrenaline was a thrill, even if it lasted for mere seconds.


    ¡°I wouldn¡¯t allow anyone else to do that.¡± I wasn¡¯t sure who had thought that, it could have originated from either me or Lenore, but the idea was accompanied by a feeling of companionship and friendship, the knowledge that there was someone I could, quite literally, bare the deepest parts of my mind to, without fear of rejection or ridicule. The feeling was almost as comforting as the feelings I had for Sigmir, only flavoured in a different way. Family. Even if my sister lacked feathers and preferred to burn the meat before eating, she was my sister and together we would soar through the heavens.


    Suddenly, my balance was disrupted, when suddenly one of the two view-points providing information to our combined minds shifted, not enough to cause me to fall but enough to make my heart start to race. It was disorienting, getting information from two positions that essentially mirrored each other, only without the mirror involved. While the Avatar Morgana was looking at the shadow-form I had created, Lenore was supplying sensory input from the shadow-form, gathered by the magic of our scrying-spell, while looking at our perching bodies.


    ¡°This seems to work.¡± Lenore said, her voice coming from the cloud of shadows hovering in the dim light in front of me.


    ¡°It does. Once we are done here and have some free-time, we¡¯ll improve upon this spell.¡± I replied, keeping my mouth shut and using our mental connection instead. In addition, I closed my eyes, trying to tune my own senses down as much as possible, even as I realised that perching in a tree had been an idiotic idea for this. For a moment, a memory flashed in my mind, of me telling Lenore that working magic perching in trees was a bad idea. If there hadn¡¯t been a realistic chance that I¡¯d have knocked myself out of the tree by facepalming, I would have done so, likely to Lenore¡¯s amusement.


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    ¡°Now, can you move this to their camp?¡± Lenore asked, using our mental connection as well.


    ¡°Mhm, I think so.¡± I replied, before considering the idea for a moment. If I wanted to simply shift the cloud of shadows over, it would be easily visible, especially on a rather sunny day like the one we were having. A black, vaguely humanoid, blob of shadows, moving across a field of green? Tracing such a form back to the source would be a piece of cake, unless I moved along the edge of the forest first. But even then, I had no illusions about my ability to make the movement look smooth, not without quite a bit of testing first. It would likely look like a puppet on a single string, getting dragged along by magic. Not a terribly intimidating or awe-inspiring sight, thus something I wanted to avoid, especially when dealing with a Traveller.


    Feeling around a little, and exchanging ideas with Lenore, I decided on a different approach. There were a few clouds in the sky, so when one of those was slowly casting its shadow across the forest and the fields of green on its edge, I shifted the blob of shadow into the twilight cast by the cloud, turning it into a two-dimensional object that moved along the ground. No need to simulate walking, no need to bother with anything, only to keep low and near the ground. Just a harmless shadow.


    The cloud wasn¡¯t moving terribly fast but within a minute or two, it¡¯s position had moved far enough to cover the small camp. Once that happened, I changed the orientation, turning the flat image into a three-dimensional body, or something looking very much like that.


    ¡°Greetings.¡± Lenore, using my voice, spoke, surprising the orcs. They leapt to their feet, one of them managing to tangle his legs and land flat on his face.


    ¡°Morgana?!¡± Harms asked, looking at the shadow we were using. I could understand the confusion in his voice, he was looking at a form that was little more than a stick-figure, only that the form had spoken to him.


    ¡°Indeed.¡± Lenore lied, before she continued. ¡°I was asked to warn you. While there was a disagreement during our last meeting, I don¡¯t wish you ill.¡± she explained, causing me to snort on my perch. I really didn¡¯t care about Harms or his orcish friends but apparently, Lenore had a plan.


    ¡°What? Asked?¡± one of the other orcs asked, looking between the shadow-form and Harms.


    ¡°If you take the north-western path, you will almost certainly perish. I would even go so far to say that you will perish, but nothing is ever certain:¡± Lenore told them, in this case even speaking the truth. If they tried to follow us, they would die. Because we would kill them.


    ¡°Why would you help us?¡± Harms asked, sounding both confused and angry. ¡°You are the reason I had to leave the Bright Hollow!¡± he added, the anger getting stronger.


    ¡°Is that so? I am the reason? Or do you project the responsibility for your actions onto me, so that you don¡¯t have to bear it?¡± Lenore asked in response, a hint of mockery in her voice.


    ¡°Harms, stop it.¡± another of the Orcs said, this one female. ¡°Even if the other Traveller hadn¡¯t caused a scene on the market-square, do you really think Threlnar would have hesitated to throw you to the wolves?¡± she asked, giving Harms a stern look.


    ¡°No, dammit.¡± Harms snarled, before deflating, like a leaky balloon. ¡±I only told the two of you about what I¡¯d seen and the next day, everyone talks about the battle, as if they¡¯d been there.¡± he grumbled, causing me to frown. What was he talking about?


    ¡°Threlnar?¡± Lenore asked, picking up my confusion.


    ¡°He¡¯s another orc and I thought he was a good friend.¡± Harms replied, causing a sigh to come from the female who had spoken before.


    ¡°He is a good friend, most of the time.¡± she explained and I realised that I had seen her before, on the square when I had taken Harms to task. She had been talking to him at the time. ¡°But ever since his brother went out with Dura Firebringer and didn¡¯t return, he has a certain dislike for the Shaman.¡± she explained and now it was my turn to sigh. It looked like Orcs were just as complicated as humans.


    ¡°Be that as it may.¡± Lenore spoke up, giving me a mental signal to let the spell slowly fade, allowing the cloud to dissipate. ¡°The warning was delivered, the task is done.¡± she spoke, just as the spell unravelled.


    I felt a moment of disorientation when her senses snapped back to her body, but only second-hand. Somehow, I managed to reach out, keeping Lenore from falling off our lofty perch.


    ¡°Remind me to never cast spells like that while sitting in a tree.¡± she told me, almost managing to knock me off the branch by making me laugh too hard. Almost.

 Chapter 390

    ¡°And you think this will work?¡± I asked Lenore, as we were flying back to the others.


    ¡°Think about it.¡± she replied, with a mental smirk, before explaining. ¡°If, tomorrow, we would get a magical message from Dura Friebringer, telling us we would perish if we take a specific path, would you instantly decide to rush down that path as fast as possible?¡± she asked, causing me to mentally agree even if such a warning came from someone who was most likely an enemy, I wouldn¡¯t act contrary to it without a reason. I might disregard the warning and take the path anyway but I would be cautious, paranoid that it might be some sort of trap, the warning a ploy of reverse psychology. I might take a totally different path, I might decide on a number of things, depending on the circumstances, but the one thing I couldn¡¯t imagine doing was simply rushing ahead. Even if the warning came from a suspect source.


    ¡°I see what you mean.¡± I admitted, smiling at her deception.¡°What do you think they¡¯ll do?¡± I asked, curious what she thought.


    ¡°It looked like they haven''t been told about our falling out with their people. At least I think that their reaction would have looked different if they had, but I cannot be sure. But if I¡¯m right, they most likely will discuss the issue, trying to come up with an explanation before heading in a different direction, careful not to run into the trouble that would have caused them to perish. If nothing else, they¡¯ll act more careful than what I observed yesterday and this morning.¡± she explained and, again, I had to grin at the fact that she, the avian, seemed to have a better understanding of humanoid social relations.


    The rest of our flight, we spent in discussion on the way we might be able to improve upon the combination-spell we had used to talk to Harms and his friends. In many ways, it was a relatively short-range communication-spell, as such things were measured. The next step would be to experiment if we would be able to cast the spells needed from a position within the Astral River, which would be a massive accomplishment. Not just for the purpose of communicating, even if that would be a neat side-benefit, but just for the ability to scry and thus spy on people as long as we were able to locate their position from within the Astral.


    With a sigh, both happy and annoyed, I realised that the list of magical experimentation had expanded once more, Just looking at the list showed me how much I didn¡¯t know, topics I had somehow touched upon but never been able to expand on.


    Just looking at Darkness-Magic, there was the strange teleportation I had used back when we had avenged Sigmir¡¯s Father. Somehow, I had been able to move through the shadow, quite similar to the way Rai was able to since crossing the first Divide, but I had been unable to replicate my feat or duplicate his class-ability. It was something I really wanted to learn, almost desperately so, because it was a wholly different mode of movement, which would increase my survivability by a lot. Maybe by orders of magnitude, it would depend on the specifics.


    Then there was an exploration of the Magic-Rune of Darkness, based on the aspect of Change inherent to the element. I had been able to disturb other people¡¯s magic with it and broken a few spells but there were so many more possible ways that a rune like that might be used. It was just a matter of experimentation and thus time, which was preventing me.


    Now, there was scrying through the Astral that had been added to that particular list, which was merely a sub-list of the whole topic.


    Just as I considered to focus on the exploration of Darkness-Magic, I remembered my troubles with healing those orcs, just a few days prior, and the need to improve upon my Blood Magic, as it was lagging behind my other two innate affinities. I had done some experimentation with carving magical runes and formations directly into flesh, using Blood Magic to link them with the person I was carving into, but it didn''t work out quite as planned. But since then, I had learned quite a bit about the creation of magical objects from the dwarves and been able to figure out some enchantments on non-living material, mostly using my Ice-Magic. Which might allow me to go back into the process of carving runic formations into flesh, which was essentially directly enchanting the body, using the flesh as material and blood as a medium. It had worked with that centaur-traveller, to the point that the runic formations were considered equipment by the system governing our revival, making me think I was on the right path. But even if I wasn¡¯t, there might be interesting derivative knowledge in that direction, just waiting for me to discover it. Which, again, would require time and test-subjects.


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    The test-subjects were the truly problematic part, time could be made but acquiring test-subjects came with its own set of problems. I might be able to train my healing by offering those services for free in a large city, experimenting on the poor, the downtrodden, those nobody would miss, but then, such an approach had its own problems. One was that it might get me a problematic reputation, as even if I was extraordinarily careful with the disposal of my failed experiments, rumours would spread. Another was that it seemed as if religion was essentially using healing-magic as a major draw, with only a few nature-based spellcasters competing with them. Even ignoring the whole ¡°evil Blood-Magic and immoral experimentation¡±-angle, they might simply want to stop the competition. In addition, I had a rather bad track-record with cities and groups of sapients so maybe a city was not my natural habitat.


    Finally, the element I had spent the most time on, done the most experiments with and thus, progressed the furthest with, my Ice-Magic. It felt the most comfortable to me, the most natural and I thought I was slowly starting to master it, or at least one aspect of it. My use of Ice-Magic had mostly focused on the physical aspects of Ice and Cold, the manipulation of particles. But there was another aspect, as evidenced by the existence of the Rune of Stillness and by extension the freezing of Time hinted at in some descriptions.


    The connection between those concepts and the Ice-Magic I had explored thus far was only tenuous, unless I began to consider the molecular level. What happened when matter was unable to interact, what happened to time? Could I freeze time within a small area, or was there a way to interact with the underlying space, the vast emptiness between particles? Or even within particles? Concepts on that level, and trying to imagine them, gave me a headache, but it was fascinating, making me mentally poke that bear, no matter how often I ran into a mental wall.


    In addition to my innate elements, there were two more possible disciplines to research. One was the Death-Magic I had been imprinted with by Lenore, a fascinating subject if there ever was one. There were so many possible ways to go about understanding it, so many things to learn and it was a subject I was just starting with, so I would be able to celebrate early success quite often, until I got to the more difficult parts.


    The other was Mind-Magic, the composite magic that was influenced by the elements that became part of it. It was the most flexible magic, the one that seemed to be the magic that would be the most individual, unique to only me, which might be both good and bad. Certainly, it was a worthy subject to study, if only I had the time.


    Throw in the magic items we had acquired, and the ones I had created, and there was another subject to study, experiment on and understand. Just the latest, the cloak I had been given by Dura Firebringer, seemed to use Darkness-Magic to create portable shade but it felt as if there might be more to it, actually a cooling effect. But how that cooling-effect might work was a mystery I hadn¡¯t had the time to look into. Time, time, time, there was just not enough time to investigate everything properly.


    There was a saying on Earth, that modern science was capable of its feats because we were standing on the shoulders of giants, allowing us to see further than ever before. Something similar was true for Mundus, the various magical schools of thought had their own traditions, their own past that allowed them to see further than I would be able to, just standing on my own.


    But at the same time, I had once read somewhere that, if a mathematician didn¡¯t write their ground-breaking thesis by the time they turned thirteen, they would never write it. The idea was that once a mathematician was trained to think in the current paradigm, they would never be able to break that paradigm, to innovate and create a new one on their own. The Grandmother had warned me of a similar problem with Magic, that once I followed the path of another, it would be nigh impossible to forge my own path.


    ¡°Can you give me directions? We should be near them, but without your connection to Sigmir, finding them will be difficult.¡± Lenroe¡¯s mental voice broke my considerations, leaving me once again without a firm solution. Instead, I looked into myself, feeling the connection to Sigmir.


    ¡°This way.¡± I told her, mentally adding directions. Finding Sigimir, finding my home in this world, would always be a trivial task for me.

 Chapter 391

    ¡°Master, do I really have to?¡± Rai asked, looking at me with a pleading look on his face. We had been moving as fast as possible for the last three days, since leaving the Bright Hollow, giving us enough of a head-start to continue our journey at a normal pace, meaning I was able to continue with my magical experimentation. After considering what magic I wanted to focus on, I had decided to do the unintuitive thing, continuing to try mastering all forms of magic I currently had access to. Sure, it was unlikely that I would manage to truly master any of them, before the end of the beta but I had a feeling that mastering even one might be impossible.


    If there even was such a thing, an end to the understanding of magic within Road to Purgatory, at least when considering the different elements individually. It was an idea I began considering during my consideration, when thinking about the possible non-material aspects of my Ice-Magic, or that was where the train of thought began. What was temperature, what was I manipulating with my Ice-Magic? It was particle motion, but what was between those particles? Air, at its core, was mostly empty, only about a percent of a given volume effectively occupied by matter. The rest, the space in between was void, a perfect vacuum, if only briefly on a tiny scale. When I had crossed the second divide, there had been the experience of feeling the vacuum, the emptiness of space, and its connection to my Darkness-Magic. But what if that emptiness, the perfect vacuum between matter, could be manipulated by my Darkness-Magic? Wouldn¡¯t that allow me to control the temperature of matter with my Darkness-Magic, almost as if it was Ice-Magic? Imagining a possible connection between the two vastly different disciplines of magic made me curious, could there be a connection between all of them? More than just the obvious, like the one between Water and Ice, almost like the Cyclic view of the world the Grandmother had explained to me once? But what did that mean to my own exploration of the Extremes? Was that doomed to failure? Or was there a higher understanding, a level on which the differences between elements and between schools of thought simply faded and everything was just ¡°Magic¡±? Or a manipulation of the Astral?


    Sadly, that concept was something I couldn¡¯t even begin to investigate, simply because there was not enough time, not by a long shot. Which was why I had decided to diversify, to get an understanding of a broad range of magic, maybe even venturing into different disciplines, training my body and incorporating magic into my martial arts, simply so I would have a better starting-point once the official version was released.


    Which brought us to the present situation, with Adra, Lenore and myself, looking at Rai, who was trying to get out of his duties. Or, at least what I had decided were his duties for the evening.


    ¡°Yes, you have to.¡± I brushed off his complaint, before continuing. ¡°There is no way Sigmir could do it, simply due to size, and Adra wants to understand, too.¡± I explained, before raising an eyebrow and asking ¡°You wouldn¡¯t want Adra to be ill-prepared if she is attacked with Death-Magic, would you?¡±


    There was another moment of hesitation, before I could see the fight leaving him and he gave in to the inevitable, moving behind a couple of bushes with the object of the evenings¡¯ studies in hand.


    ¡°That was mean.¡± Adra whispered, while Lenore was simply amused.


    ¡°Unless we want to take turns, one studying, the other using that thing, it really is the only way. And there is no way I¡¯d wear that thing voluntarily again, once was more than enough.¡± I whispered back, shuddering at the memory of wearing the disgusting piece of muddy fabric Rai was changing into. The visible shudder gripping Adra¡¯s body told me that she agreed, at least in practise, if not in principle.


    After about a minute later, Rai shuffled back into view and I had to strictly control my face, to keep from laughing out loud. He looked a sight, the normally proud wolfman looking like a kicked puppy, a kicked puppy wearing the rags that had once been a beautiful, white wedding-dress, at least so the story went. I had decided that I wanted to begin my studies by understanding the effect of the Despoiled Bride¡¯s Dress, the garment we had looted from Tzar Bolotnik, back in the swamp. But to do that, I needed to observe the effect from the outside, which meant I couldn¡¯t wear the garment and trigger the effect, which meant I needed a partner. The rags would never fit Sigmir, the comparative size made that simply impossible, and when I had asked Adra, she had quickly made an excuse, deciding that she needed to understand the Death-Magic effect of the dress better and would like to join me on the outside. Which only left Rai, who had sworn to obey me, as my disciple. Thus, the present situation.


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    Curiously, or maybe luckily, the point of contention wasn¡¯t that he thought he, a proud and most definitely male, warrior shouldn¡¯t wear a dress, least of all a wedding-dress, that part he didn¡¯t really care about. He had grown up in an arctic frontier-town, where you wore as many layers as necessary to keep warm and putting on multiple layers of pants was a good way to lose mobility, so robes and warm cloaks had always been part and parcel of their outerwear. Similarly, they had no real concept of a ceremonial marriage, they formed lasting couples and had celebrations if one such couple officially formed but nothing like the pomp and ceremony of a western marriage, certainly not with an ornate, expensive, garment that was only worn once. Such traditions were a sign of affluence and wealth, nothing that would form in the frigid forests of his home.


    No, he was simply disgusted to wear the magically wet and muddy fabric, especially as it had to be worn on his skin, to allow him to channel Astral Power through it. A sudden shudder ran down my spine, just from remembering the clingy feeling of the muddy fabric, like tiny tendrils trying to drag me into the cold muck of the mire.


    ¡°Here goes nothing.¡± I heard him mutter and focused on Lenore¡¯s sight, so I would get a better picture of the magical effect, while also witnessing the physical effect. A moment after Rai closed his eyes in focus, I could see a strange shimmer emanate from him, my ears picking up on the faint wailing of a tortured soul. While the effect itself was mostly invisible to the mundane eye, Lenore¡¯s sight allowed me to see a lot more, a cloud of Death-Magic blowing out from the dress, while there were distinct shapes within the dress, vaguely reminding me of a runic formation.


    Nodding to myself, I closed my eyes, going with Lenore over our respective memories, each of us pointing out parts that the other had missed, before looking back to Rai.


    ¡°Thank you. Can you do that again? And how much Astral Power did you use?¡± I asked, trying to get a baseline regarding the efficiency of the dress¡¯ magical effect.


    Rai sighed, before answering my question and closing his eyes again, letting another wave of Death-Magic flow out. We had to repeat the process a few more times, until Rai ran out of Astral Power cutting my studies short.


    ¡°Master, can I get out of this dress?¡± Rai asked, his breathing laboured, one hand pressing against his temple.


    ¡°Certainly, I think we are done here,¡± I told him, amused at the look of relief flooding his face, only to evaporate when I continued, ¡°at least for now.¡±


    He instantly fled behind the bushes he had used to change earlier, as if he was afraid I would change my mind.


    ¡°Huh, that was interesting.¡± Adra muttered, staring at the circle cleared by the repeated use of Death-Magic and the gradient it had caused. The area right where Rai had been standing was completely dead, sterilised to the point that the ground was coarse dust and from there, the destruction turned less severe. Around the circle of dust, the ground was relatively bare, the grass reduced to dust but the earth beneath still healthy and around that, the grass was gradually looking healthier, showing the area of effect quite clearly.


    ¡°Indeed. There were multiple components to the spell, all of them quite interesting.¡± I agreed, before focusing on Lenore. ¡°Do you think we can copy at least parts of that?¡± I asked, curious what she thought.


    ¡°Parts, certainly. I have a few ideas, especially regarding the way the sounds seemed to have both a Death-Magic and a Mind-Magic component.¡± she replied, sharing a few abstract concepts, allowing me to follow her thought-process without the need for formulated language.


    ¡°Interesting.¡± I muttered, as I studied what she had transmitted. A raven¡¯s call, bringing Death and Despair. Cliche, but somehow still a fun idea.

 Chapter 392

    ¡°You missed our session last week.¡± Mrs Wu casually stated, as I was taking a moment to get my laboured breathing under control. My whole body was aching from the contortions required to perform the forms Mrs Wu had taught me. But, even as my body was in pain, my mind was elated, endorphins flooding my system. Finally, I had progressed to the point that Mrs Wu, my rather elderly teacher, was unable to just show me what I was learning, instead having to resort to explanations and simplified forms. While there was no doubt in my mind that I had only surpassed her in that regard due to her advanced age, it was progress, a clear indication that I was making progress, especially after I had started to question what I was learning, after she had goaded me into attacking with lethal force the session before the one I had skipped.


    ¡°I apologize.¡± I replied, once I had enough breath within me to speak. ¡°There was contemplation to be done, I had to find an answer within myself, whether I wanted to continue learning what you are teaching me.¡± I explained, after gathering my breath for a few moments.


    ¡°Is that so.¡± she looked me over, her face a perfectly placid mask. ¡°Did you come to a conclusion?¡±


    ¡°I did.¡± I replied, finally breathing normally again. ¡°Otherwise, I wouldn¡¯t be here.¡± I admitted, looking back at her, a little embarrassed.


    ¡°Would you explain your reasoning? I¡¯m curious.¡± she asked, raising an eyebrow.


    ¡°Mainly, because it is interesting. I don¡¯t think I¡¯ll ever need to know what you are teaching me, I hope that I don¡¯t need to, but nonetheless, it is interesting to learn.¡± I admitted, keeping half of the reason to myself. There was a situation where I could see me adapting some of her teachings, especially those I had read about in the book she had given me, for use in Road to Purgatory. Sure, the methods described in her book were meant to be used in a modern society, or to circumvent modern, technological systems but I was reasonably certain that they could be adapted to work against magical systems on Mundus, at least to a degree. But there was no way I would admit that I wanted to learn spycraft for a computer-game, at least not to Mrs. Wu.


    I could feel her gaze, measuring me while I fought to keep the omission from showing on my face and after a few moments of me sweating, she simply nodded, accepting my explanation.


    ¡°Curiosity is a good motivation. I¡¯ll admit, it was that inquisitive and curious nature of yours, alongside a few other qualities, that made me decide on teaching you.¡± she added, a few moments after her nod.


    ¡°Anyway, I agree that most people have no use for these teachings. Despite that, I want to continue teaching you, especially now that you have truly seen what it is that I teach and had time to think about it. I hope you don¡¯t take the knowledge I impart lightly, as it is dangerous.¡± she explained, and now it was my turn to raise an eyebrow in question.


    ¡°Yes, dangerous. What I taught you, and will continue to teach you, will allow you to end another human¡¯s life. The human body is incredibly fragile, if you know what you are doing. Killing, maiming or disabling, the difference can be one of centimeters or a few newtons of force. Never take that knowledge, the ability to do harm, lightly.¡± she softly added, after looking around to make sure nobody was nearby.


    ¡°But even just knowing those things can be dangerous, even if you never use them. While I will not, can not, explain where and how I learned, I expect my teachers would be appalled that I taught someone else. Yet, I don¡¯t care what those old men would think about my actions, not after¡­¡± she continued, a grim, sardonic smile on her face. Just the tone of her voice was enough to make the hairs in the back of my neck stand up and for a moment, I questioned if I was doing the smart thing or if I was increidbly stupid, not turning around and running as fast as I could. But if I were to do that, I would never be able to learn the things she could teach me. There were quite a few things I was curious about, after reading the book she had given me, things I wanted to ask her about. Less about the actual, physical spy-craft described but the social manipulation sounded interesting and much more useful. How to talk with people in a way that made them trust you, how to influence people and how to present yourself, how to act and blend in. Those were things that sounded incredibly useful to learn, even outside of applied spycraft.


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    Closing my eyes for a moment, I thought about the risks, trying to put them into anything I could relate to. Which was impossible, there was just not enough information to gauge the risk, too many variables. The main unknown was the acquisition of information for unknown parties. Or, in other words, would those teachers Mrs. Wu had mentioned be able to find out what I had been taught? Just from the fact that Mrs. Wu seemed to be confident to teach me and I doubted she would do so if discovery was probable, I thought the overall risk was low, unless I was foolish enough to talk about things.


    That meant the only weak-point was when using what I learned here, in Road to Purgatory. Given that the capsule was obviously able to access my memory and was operated by some sort of mental interface, the possible invasion into the user¡¯s privacy was unprecedented, on a level that was hard to describe or compare. At the same time, the simple fact that the technology was used in a videogame made me strangely confident that the risk of misuse was negligible, otherwise the capsules would never be allowed to get distributed.


    Similarly, if the capsule was misused, I doubted the misuse would be aimed at me, with that capability, the users would have much bigger fish to fry than a single person. For a moment, I remembered an old movie, about people being stuck in a computer-simulation and felt that was a more likely scenario, if only to keep people content and happy without using up too many resources.


    Pushing those strange considerations away, I decided that the risk was negligible as long as I didn¡¯t disclose what I was learning to anyone, which was simple as my social network was essentially non-existent.


    ¡°I still want to learn.¡± I assured Mrs Wu, who simply nodded again.


    ¡°That¡¯s good.¡± She looked over to her husband, giving him a nod, before focusing back on me. ¡°I think we will have a slightly different lesson today.¡± she turned, gesturing for me to follow her. Together, we walked into the back, to one of the storage-areas. There, she opened a closet and pulled out a very detailed mannequin, setting it up within the storage-room.


    ¡°While the forms I have taught you form the basis, you need to learn how to truly apply them. The forms are a bit of deception, they are often more elaborate than needed, to conceal what they truly are teaching you. Now, we¡¯ll get rid of the camouflage and you will learn their essence.¡± she explained, her tone taking on a lecturing quality.


    ¡°This dummy is reasonably life-like and will serve as a target. We will start with the things that you should never use on a living human unless you need them to die. Because that¡¯s what these techniques are for, to kill people.¡± she finished her explanation, before carefully showing me one of the forms she had taught me before, only to stop half-way, turning the normally graceful and complex movement into a vicious jab, striking the throat of the dummy.


    ¡°Crushing the trachea of a human is surprisingly easy. While it, by itself, will not guarantee a kill, it is a relatively simple way to make calling for help more difficult.¡± she explained, before making me perform, correcting my posture and precision, before slowly teaching me the exact spots to strike, in order to kill or disable someone.


    In a way, it was similar to the lessons regarding human anatomy I had learned at school, only with a very different spin. Instead of simply learning where the various organs, bones and muscles were, she was teaching me how to systematically break those parts. Sure, jabbing them with a knife worked most of the time but some could be crippled with a lot less effort and in a cleaner fashion. Once more, I was fascinated by the simple, yet efficient way the human body could apparently be broken. It was horrifying but at the same time, I was absorbing every word, learning not only how to break but why the things could be broken in a specific way and what that meant for the body.

 Chapter 393

    A single small rock, rolling down hill, was all the warning we got. Moments after that single rock started its journey downwards, towards the path we were on, a rumbling roar echoed through the mountains. The rumbling turned into a constant sound, as large parts of the hillside came crashing down towards us. Without time to think, I simply reacted, letting Astral Power gush out of me, forcing the world to obey my will. Instantly, Runes appeared in front of me, glowing with silver-white light and with a wave of my hand, the light blazed out, turning into a wall of ice, just half a meter in front of me.


    ¡°Take cover!¡± I yelled out, putting my hand against the formed wall, allowing me to pump even more Astral Power into the hastily made construct, fortifying it as much as possible, before the rockslide could hit. I managed to form it into a broad edge, so the rocks would be directed past us, instead of trying to stop the weight of the rockslide.


    ¡°It¡¯s a distraction!¡± Adra called out, pointing towards something within the rockslide. ¡°We¡¯ve got incoming.¡± she added and I took a moment to check what she was pointing at. Without her help I wouldn¡¯t have noticed them, and even with her help, I had no idea how many there might be. I only saw two, massive felines, somehow barrelling downhill along the rockslide, easily keeping up with it, maybe even directing it. Before I could find out more, the first rocks crashed against my Ice-Wall and I was forced to focus solely on keeping us alive. Even with our relatively high levels and formidable power, getting crushed by a ton of rocks or five would cause massive damage.


    I could feel Sigmir stand over me, shielding me with both, her body and special ability, allowing me to keep my wall steady with Ice-Magic, even without a way to anchor it into the rock beneath us. For a moment, I missed fighting in the frigid lands further north, where there was plenty of Ice and Snow for me to work with, allowing me to easily merge my magic into the environment. Here, in the dusty, rocky mountains of central Aretia, the environment was not my friend, and the rockslide I was keeping back made that all the more obvious.


    There was a crunching sound and I felt a massive impact into the upper part of my wall, trying to topple it over. I could feel the difference between that new impact and the previous ones, before, the rocks had followed gravity, taking the easy path and travelled along the edge I had created. With this one, the pressure remained and when I opened my eyes for a moment, I could see one of the felines I had seen earlier close-up, just on the other side of my barrier. It certainly looked impressive, tan-coloured fur that blended perfectly into the rocks and dirt around us, along with a massive jaw and sharp claws that were lodged into my Ice.


    I felt my lips curl into a smile, when I realised just what that meant. While the rockslide wasn¡¯t over just yet, most of it had gone past, giving me just a little room to breathe. And use magic for something else, if only for a moment.


    ¡°Climbing my wall, trying to use my Ice against me?¡± I snarled, while I forced the Ice to obey it¡¯s mistress, closing around the paws and freezing them in. I could hear sounds of battle nearby, but until the rockslide was over, the most help I could provide my friends was to keep the wall up and the feline stuck to it under control. A feline that didn¡¯t like to be controlled and after a few moments of struggle, I had to relent, the amount of power needed to keep its powerful legs frozen simply more than I could spare in that moment.


    Looking at the massive feline that had just leapt back from my Ice-Wall, I let out the breath I had been holding. It had been enough, the rocks had gone past, leaving a trail of destruction in their wake. But we had weathered the initial ambush, now we just had to withstand the rest of their attack. With enough mental room to spare, I focused on the feline on the other side of the wall and used Observe.


    <table><tbody><tr><td>Rock-Lion, Level 78</td></tr></tbody></table>


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    Taking a moment to look around, I could see that Sigmir was keeping two smaller rock-lions away on my right, while Adra was jabbing another one with her spear with Rai providing assistance. Without the rockslide forcing the others to hide behind my wall, they were now able to go on the offensive, just as I now had a large chunk of Ice to work with. My lips curled into a snarl, baring my teeth at the animals that had dared to ambush us as I channelled a burst of power into the wall, turning it from a defensive implement into an offensive one.


    ¡°Icicle Blast!¡± I called out, mostly to let the others know that the wall that had protected their flanks was no longer there, instead it had turned into a cloud of razor-sharp Icicles I hurled at the Rock-Lion that had tried to break through earlier, only for my eyes to widen in surprise. Instead skewering the beast, a piece of rock in front of it flipped up, providing it cover, just as my wall had earlier. My snarl turned into a grin, as I let go of most of the icicles, merely keeping the largest few under control and channelling another burst of power, making them veer around the rock and into the lion crouching behind. I couldn¡¯t quite see their hit, but I could hear the pained growl and saw some blood splatter on the ground.


    Before I could celebrate my success, the injured lion charged me, leaping in an attempt to bowl me over. Before it could get to me, a dark blur crashed into it from the side, causing more blood to splatter. A quick glance showed me that there was one lion down, killed by Adra and Rai, who were now reinforcing us. Rai had been the blur that had taken on the lion attacking me, clad in darkness by one of his skills, while Adra had stepped around, joining with Sigmir.


    Mentally reaching out, I let my Eisblumen flourish, giving me a good weapon at short distances while drawing my blades, if things got too close. I had little interest in getting too closely acquainted with the claws I had frozen earlier, but if the lion wanted to get at me, I would be ready.


    However, what happened next surprised me, even if it shouldn¡¯t have. As Rai was getting ready to strike again, the lion let out an earth-shaking roar, causing some movement in the rocks beneath us, before taking a leap, towards the last remaining lion. With Adra¡¯s back-up, Sigmir had been able to dispatch one of the two attacking her and injuring the last one. Before we could go after them, the two surviving lions took off, dashing down the path we had been on, splattering blood as they fled.


    For a moment, I considered going after them, but checked on my allies first. Sigmir had a few scrapes, one of the lions had managed to leave a bloody-mark on her but nothing serious. Rai, on the other hand, didn¡¯t look good. His leather-jerkin was ripped and blood was flowing freely, past the hand he pressed on the wound.


    ¡°Let me see that.¡± I commanded, stepping up. I had used quite a bit of power to protect from the initial attack but not enough to stop me from healing him. He sat down, while Adra and Sigmir carefully checked our surroundings, to make sure nothing was going to jump out and attack us. Once he was somewhat comfortable, I placed my own hand above the wound, carefully filtering my magic to make sure the Astral Power I used was pure, not tainted by either Ice- or Death-Magic. The wound was a curious one, I could feel a bit of Death-Astral-Power, along with some other things I didn¡¯t want to think about, seeping out of his body, beginning to poison his body from the inside.


    Starting on the inside, I carefully repaired the damage to his gut, making sure that nothing more was getting out of it, before cleansing the wound. I heard a surprised gasp from Adra, when a splatter of blood shot out from the wound, taking with it everything that wasn¡¯t supposed to be there. Once that was done, I closed the wound, not perfectly healing the flesh but making sure that it wouldn¡¯t bleed any longer.


    ¡°This will hold you for now.¡± I assured Rai, who looked a lot better than just moments before. ¡°I¡¯ll make sure you are healing well, when we make camp later.¡± I added, standing back up.


    ¡°Thank you, Master.¡± Rai said, as he carefully got to his feet.


    ¡°We are a team, don¡¯t worry about it.¡± I assured him, looking at the other two, who had started to field-dress the two lion-carcasses. ¡°And it looks like we get to try lion for dinner.¡± I grinned, part of me already using Lenore¡¯s vision to check if there was a hint of the magic the lions had used in their attack, maybe some left-over organ or something I might be able to use. Sadly, it didn¡¯t look like it.


    Soon after, we were moving again, continuing on our journey through the mountains.

 Chapter 394

    The short battle against the Rock Lions had been one of a couple we had over the last couple of days of moving through the mountains. It seemed that the local wildlife was a lot more aggressive and predatory than elsewhere, or maybe they were simply hungry. Similarly, hunting had been rather sparse and difficult, the few mountain-goats we had seen quick to flee and difficult to spot or later track. There had been some success, mostly by cheating with magic, but it was quite obvious that the area was a step up in danger, compared to the areas we had travelled through before.


    When the sun started to set, we had found a good spot to make camp, an outcropping of rock protecting us from above and even a few shrubs nearby that we could search for dry branches for a fire. That was another part we had troubles with, the lack of fuel for a cooking fire, the area both dry and dusty, almost void of vegetation. The Elder hat somewhat warned us, but only Adra had any experience in the local climate, while Sigmir and Rai had never left the northern reaches. Even for Adra, it was a challenge as she had travelled further south on her original journey, staying within the lower forests, where her nature helped her with concealment and survival.


    Once camp was made and some of the meat we had harvested from the lions was being roasted over the fire, I decided to check on Rai again, planning to make sure that my earlier emergency-treatment had worked as intended and his gut wasn¡¯t slowly poisoning him. The wound had driven something home within me, the need for competent healing and treatment. Just a simple wound, received when he was covering for me, would likely have been enough to kill him, without magical help.


    ¡°Let me see that again.¡± I ordered, gesturing towards his slowly healing stomach. I hadn¡¯t fully healed it, simply to conserve Astral Power and it looked like that had been the right call. Earlier, it had looked like an angry, red scar, not scabbed but also not bleeding, thanks to the magical healing, but now, it looked mostly fine, at least on the outside. Sending my magical senses into his body, it was easy to see where the problem had been, only that his innate regeneration had taken care of most of it. But not all, looking closely, I was able to watch, with a certain amount of fascination, his body slowly, ever so slowly, neutralising a trace of poison and Death-Magic that had escaped my earlier cleansing. It wasn¡¯t enough to be a problem, not with his resilient body, but it gave me something interesting to watch.


    While my knowledge of anatomy was rudimentary at best, mostly from highschool with a smattering of more or less accurate information acquired from novels, I thought I was able to make sense of what I was observing. To me, it looked like some of the bacteria that normally lived in his gut had managed to escape my earlier cleansing, simply an oversight on my part. It made me consider whether there was a better way to cleanse a wound than using some blood to sweep up the problem before forcing it all out, maybe some way of carefully using Death-Magic to sterilise the area but that wouldn¡¯t solve the problem, it would be more akin to using disinfectant. I still would have to actually force the sterile residue out, or there might be other problems.


    But while I made a mental note, sharing my thoughts with Lenore, I decided to closely focus on what my magic perceived as poison in Rai¡¯s tissue. When focusing closely, I felt a strange shift in perception, allowing me to differentiate between distinct particles, instead of simply a glob of poison.


    ¡°Take care, that takes a lot of power.¡± Lenore warned me and, for just a moment, I shifted my attention to the power within me, noticing it draining at an alarming rate. Not quite at a rate that would require the use of Overflow but almost. For a mere analytical spell, without any actual action being taken, it was surprising.


    Knowing that I was working on a timer, I focused back to my earlier discovery, the individual objects working away at Rai¡¯s flesh. It was interesting, it looked like the clusters were taking both matter and life-energy from their surroundings and processing them, just as one would expect from gut-bacteria. They were just in the wrong place, digesting the wrong things. Looking closely at that process, I almost had to laugh, they gave off a mix of matter and death-energy, with a small amount of life-energy separate from it. Only that the life-energy wasn¡¯t processed further, simply sitting there along the waste-products, festering in his flesh.


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    For a moment, I considered testing what would happen if I supplied one of the clusters, what I thought were bacteria, with additional energy, maybe with my blood magic, but I quickly banished the thought. Risky magical experiments on my student were not the way of a responsible master, it was bad enough that Adra and I had made him use the Despoiled Bride¡¯s Gown a few times, and that was only a threat to his self-esteem. Instead, I focused on the healthy areas of his body around it, letting a trickle of energy flow there, channelling the runes for healing and strengthening within my mind. Before I could see a change, I felt Lenore give me another mental push and noticed that I had used almost ninety percent of my Astral Power to look at the problem, leaving me almost unable to help.


    Instantly, I let go of the focused perception I had used, letting my mind settle before looking again, this time with the simple way I normally employed, nodding to myself when the problem seemed to have shrunk a bit, enough to make me think his body didn¡¯t need any help.


    ¡°There is no lasting damage, tomorrow, you should be right as rain.¡± I told him, noticing a worried look on his face. Similarly, Adra was standing nearby, watching me closely.


    ¡°Master, I felt you use a lot of power just now.¡± Rai said, not quite questioning me but obviously curious.


    ¡°That was just me, being curious.¡± I admitted with a wry smile. My curiosity was something my companions had witnessed quite often, especially when it got me into trouble. ¡°There are levels to the way I can perceive things. On the simplest level, my magic tells me what is different from the way your body should be.¡± I explained, fudging a little as I thought that there was an interplay between what I knew about the way a body should work and how a body actually worked, something I had hypothesized after dissecting the centaur a while back. Later, when I had used Blood Magic to turn a few of them into living bombs, I had been able to work that magic because I had known how their bodies worked, allowing me to use magic in a peculiar manner. But I could hardly dissect Rai, in an effort to learn how a wolf-beastman body was supposed to work, so I had to use my instinctive feel, provided by my Blood Magic and what I could infer from my knowledge on human and centaur anatomy.


    When Rai nodded in understanding, I continued my explanation. ¡°But on a deeper level, I can actually witness why something is different from the way it should be, allowing me to be more discriminating with my magic.¡± I told him, getting another nod in understanding. ¡°However, looking that closely, scrying that deeply into your body, requires a lot of power, especially when one is not quite used to it. It is highly useful and interesting but not easy, not by a long shot.¡± I finished my explanation, stepping back and settling down, instantly lost in thought.


    There was so much I might be able to do with that new trick I had just learned. So much potential, for both good and ill, just waiting for me to learn about it. A notification caught my eye, telling me that I had gained a point in Blood Magic, bringing the skill to sixty-five but also a skill-point in Death-Magic, something I hadn¡¯t anticipated. I had used Blood Magic, certainly, but Death? Maybe simply due to the observation of the interplay between life- and death-energy during digestion and the thus obvious realisation that life and death were inseparably linked, at least on that level.


    Before I could continue my thoughts, I felt a hand on my shoulder, bringing my attention back to the outside world and to Adra¡¯s worried face.


    ¡°Is really everything alright?¡± she asked, speaking softly to make sure Rai couldn¡¯t hear us.


    ¡°It is, yes. There was something that would have been a problem, but I took care of it. I wouldn¡¯t risk Rai, not without a very good reason.¡± I assured her, truly meaning it. Rai was my pupil and I had given my word that I would take care of him. Adra studied me, for just a few more moments, before nodding and turning away. The dynamic between the two of them made me smile, even as I wondered about that supposed link Adra had to Kallista, the dryad living in Neyto. Souls, yet another topic I would love to research, if I only had more time.

 Chapter 395

    ¡°This¡­¡± I admitted to Lenore, over our mental connection, ¡°might have been a mistake.¡± Once again, my curiosity managed to cause me trouble, or should I call it anguish? Earlier, when checking on Rai, I had managed to increase the amount of information I learned when using my Blood Magic as a diagnostic tool and after we were done eating dinner, I had the bright idea to use that new tool on myself. If I was able to learn a little about the local anatomy by observing the healing process within Rai, I should be able to learn more, by observing my healthy body, or so I thought.


    My idea was correct but I should have remembered what some call the sausage-principle. In simple terms, if you love sausage, you really don¡¯t want to see how it is made. Or, in regards to my own experience, just because your body is able to do something doesn¡¯t mean that you want to know too much about it. It was one thing to know that my stomach contained rather potent acid or that my gut was home to a variety of bacteria that tore apart the food I had eaten earlier, it was a whole other thing to witness it closely, by mental observation.


    It didn¡¯t help that my Blood Magic didn¡¯t come with a convenient zoom-function, it worked on my own mental focus, giving me a far too intimate image of my digestive-system than I would have liked, making me wonder if I would ever want to eat again.


    ¡°Don¡¯t think about it as part of your body, simply think of it as something you observe.¡± Lenore suggested, while sharing her own thoughts and ideas. She was quite interested in the way the micro-organisms turned food into usable energy, what I thought was Life Astral Power or Vitality and the by-products I had mentally labelled as Death Astral Power and finally the simple, material waste.


    Curiously, she was most interested in that material waste and what happened to it. I was rather amused at her fascination, wondering if the developers had foreseen this occurrence when they decided to leave out, or eliminate, the process of, well, waste-elimination from Traveller-Avatars. On the other hand, so far I had not seen any heavy-handed ¡°invisible-walls¡± on Mundus, everything had been implemented as a coherent part within the world, which made me curious how they had implemented that particular mechanic, or not-implemented it.


    Pushing away the gross sensation that came with inspecting my own body on that level, I followed the, let¡¯s call it, flow of waste-material, pushed along by involuntary muscle-contractions. Looking at it that way, it was fascinating, making me wonder if there was a way to use the death-astral-power that was created as a waste-product in some way, allowing me to empower my spells, if only a little. After a few minutes of mentally moving along the stream of material, along a few breaks to regenerate some Astral Power, I hit a wall.


    The matter simply disappeared, without any trace, without rhyme or reason.


    ¡°That¡¯s interesting.¡± Lenore muttered, her thoughts as perplexed as my own. It was as if there was some sort of barrier or portal, simply getting rid of the waste, including the magical by-products, but I was entirely unable to perceive anything. The portal-idea was the most humorous to me, especially when I remembered reading about a Japanese God of the Toilet or something along those lines. I had heard jokes about worshipping at the porcelain Throne, even if the context was a little different.


    Shaking my head, I forcibly pushed away the idea to investigate the strange barrier or whatever it was, instead deciding to focus my time on less fecal matters. Even if Lenore had the idea to use the Death Astral Power present within everyone¡¯s digestive system for a spell. So far, she only had a rough draft but that was rather intriguing. Her idea was to create a necromantic spell that essentially incubated within the gut, using the Death Astral Power to slowly form itself into a deadly curse, using the power inherent in their Blood to kill the host and reanimate them as an undead. She even had multiple ideas to propagate the curse, either using the victim''s blood to transmit, or, in a quite nasty twist, to slowly get expelled with the other waste, slowly poisoning the surrounding area. The mental imagery coming along that second idea showed the simple sanitation in the Bright Hollow, using my own worries about spreading disease as a jumping off point. Finally, the third idea was to forgo the reanimation and simply use the power gained from killing the host to transmit the curse in a deadly emanation, cursing everyone nearby to get infected with her cursed disease. It only required a small amount of power to start off, instead using the power created during the digestive process to incubate, making it both deadly and effective at the same time.


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    For a moment, I was tempted to help with her idea, trying to turn her rough drafts into something that had a chance to work, a deadly and cursed disease but decided against it. Sure, the current rough state made me think it had potential but to get from an idea I thought had potential to a working spell was a long path, one that I didn¡¯t want to go with such a spell. While it would be effective against large groups of weak people, I somehow doubted that more powerful people would succumb the same way. In addition, I wasn¡¯t too interested in slaughtering massive amounts of peasants, I wanted magic that could be used in direct combat. For that, Lenore¡¯s idea was completely useless.


    ¡°Let¡¯s continue on that other idea we had.¡± I told her, bringing the current iteration of the spell we had developed using the ability of the Despoiled Bride¡¯s Dress as a base. So far, we had managed to create a relatively simple spell that used my Darkness-Magic as a base, imbuing it with Death Magic, which was a good start. Getting to this point had been easy, as every spell Lenore and I used together carried the Death-Attribute, which meant we had a solid foundation to build the spell on, the only challenge being to allow me to cast it on my own.


    I was quite happy with our current progress, since it gave me a quite powerful non-physical attack, which would hopefully bypass an enemy''s armour, maybe even part of their natural resistance. That was one of my weaknesses, a good chunk of my magic was rather simple using physical objects, like my Frozen Shuttles, Icicles and so on, to whack the enemy. That was useful but at the end of the day, the damage I could cause with a Frozen Shuttle was so far below the damage Sigmir could cause with her Lok¡¯nar that it wasn¡¯t even funny. In regards to that, I was better off trying to strengthen my allies with Blood Magic or hinder my enemies, which had been another good chunk of my magic. Now, the combination of Darkness and Death-Magic gave me a way to hinder an enemy while dealing damage to them, maybe even allowing me to cripple their abilities while they were dying from my magic. A deadly curse, one that sapped their strength on application while slowly draining their life, that seemed to be the best way to fight with my Darkness-Magic.


    Similarly, Lenore had quite easily been able to combine her Death-Magic with her Wind-Magic, she had done so before, the only difference was that she now wanted to create an indiscriminate attack carried by her voice. Working on that was a little more difficult, at least for me. While area-of-effect-attacks dealt less damage to your allies, they still dealt damage and getting repeatedly hit with Lenore¡¯s powerful Death-Magic was, quite frankly, painful. On the other hand, her training gave me motivation to come up with a way to defend against purely magical attacks, which might be important in the future. Before, when we had been attacked by the Mind Magic of the Bolotnika, I had managed to improvise but now, I was able to methodically incorporate an anti-magic effect into the Cloak of Shadows I used for concealment. The idea was that the cloak was devouring magic that came from the outside, which worked quite well, even if it took a lot of power to keep that version active. My current idea for improvement was to use the spell reactively, only activating it if I felt a large amount of Astral Power incoming. For that, I would either need to use my runic projection to instantly create the required runes or I would have to create a magical item using those runes, allowing me to simply channel power into it, blocking attacks. And that was where I had hit a wall, the magical item creation. My work with the dwarves had been focused on my Ice-Runes and the creation of linking-formations for those runes, forcing me to start over at the beginning with Darkness.


    With a smile on my face, I began to create the simple runes, carefully feeling the flow of magic between them, trying to recognise patterns. It was a slow-going process but at the same time, it was something I enjoyed a great deal.

 Sidestory: Embers

    ¡°Oh Flamelet, why didn¡¯t you talk to me?¡± a familiar voice, filled with compassion and pity asked. At the same time, a warm hand gently caressed my cheek, spreading a wet sensation.


    ¡°You¡¯ve always been this way, charge ahead before thinking things through.¡± the voice chided me and I could just see the wry smile on my teacher¡¯s face, as she thought back on the trouble I had caused in my youth. Together with Marj. Just the memory of my dear friend managed to choke me, the happy smile on her face, the mischievous glint in her eye, how I missed it. Why hadn¡¯t I noticed earlier, before¡­


    A pair of strong arms wrapped around me, pulling me into my teacher¡¯s embrace as if I was a child, in need of comfort. There was a part of me that wanted to protest, to assert that I was an adult and didn¡¯t need to be treated like a child but that part was shouted down. I didn¡¯t want to think about what others would think, clinging to my teacher and crying my eyes out, I didn¡¯t want to be the Firebringer they looked up to. I just wanted to be Dura, if only for a bit.


    ¡°Now, why don¡¯t we sit down and you tell me what is going on?¡± my teacher asked after a few minutes, once my tears had stopped flowing out. Straightening my back, I gave a nod of acceptance, hoping that my teacher, in her wisdom, could help me understand.


    Why? Why had things gone this way? I had asked Grendel, the woman who had a connection with the ancestral spirit, despite being a Traveller, about their courting-customs and she had told me that red roses, some type of flower, were given as a display of courtship. But when I had given Morgana red flowers, she had reacted badly. And I had even made one of the apprentices ask Harms, the Traveller who had died during the fighting and had been returned to life by the Gods, about attractive behaviour to females and he had rambled on about confidence being seen as sexy or something like that. For some reason, the question had embarrassed him but still, hadn¡¯t I been confident? I had confidently told her that I would court her to earn her approval and affection but the reaction had been bad. I just couldn¡¯t understand.


    ¡°So, why don¡¯t you tell me about this young woman? Previously, you just told me that she helped you during your mission and that you promised rewards.¡± Teacher Brightsun asked, setting a cup of liquid on the table between us. ¡°But this is obviously much more.¡±


    For a moment, I didn¡¯t quite know where to start. Or how to start, for that matter. How could I explain the connection I was feeling towards this woman and the actions I had undertaken, for fear of losing that connection?


    ¡°It might be easiest if you start at the beginning.¡± Teacher prompted, gesturing for me to sit on my usual chair, the one I had always sat on when learning from her. For a moment, I hesitated before beginning to tell her about Morgana. How we had met when one of the scout-teams had stumbled over them, how that team had decided to trade some supplies for information. Such trades were generally a good idea, no matter how skilled someone was when it came to divination-magic, there was always a limit to the amount of information you could gather. Trading for an outsider¡¯s perspective might turn up interesting information or allow inference regarding a bigger picture, as it had been in this particular case.


    That first meeting had been peculiar, the feeling of winter intruding into the pleasant warmth of summer, not the gradual shift of autumn but brought by an outsider. Without thinking too much about it, I had pushed, curious who that outsider was and how powerful. There had been resistance, pushing back, making me want to find out who was stronger, especially when I realised that the woman, despite her petite physique and diminutive height, seemed to be relatively young. It was difficult to estimate the age of other races, especially given the traces of elven lineage that her features hinted at but she didn¡¯t move with the gravitas of an elder. No, she seemed to be someone of my generation, but with enough magical power and ability to challenge me. It was exciting and made me want to see more of her.


    The others of her party had been interesting in their own right, but none of them was even close to her level. There had been little time to talk, but when one of the warriors of the group identified her by name and called out, I learned that she was a Traveller and apparently famous amongst them. However that worked.


    As we continued on our path, I had asked the scout that brought them to learn a little more about that Traveller, ostensibly to gauge how trustworthy the information we would receive were, but really, I was more interested in the woman herself than the information. That freezing cold, pushing into my direct awareness and her ability to push back against me, despite the heat of summer and my higher level, I wanted to learn more.


    The opening of a door interrupted our talk, luckily I was sitting with my back to it, otherwise whoever had entered would have seen that I had been crying.


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    ¡°Elder, those people are gone and I told the guards that they are no longer welcome.¡± Klenda, one of Teacher¡¯s current apprentices, reported, causing Teacher Brightsun to frown.


    ¡°You shouldn¡¯t spread this manner around, just like you should remain quiet about what you heard earlier.¡± she gently scolded but I could hear the displeasure in her voice.


    ¡°See that you make sure those you talked to don¡¯t spread it around.¡± she ordered and moments later, the door closed again.


    Before I could ask why she didn¡¯t want it to spread, Teacher Brightsun looked at me, wryly smiling at the confused expression on my face.


    ¡°I don¡¯t think that those four will come back, not without a very, very pressing reason. Embarrassing you, without necessity, is not something I want, so we keep this episode quiet, if people ask, those four simply decided to continue their travels.¡± Teacher explained, getting me to nod in understanding. I had no doubt that the orcs who had been with us on the mission had spread news about Morgana¡¯s magical prowess, giving her a reputation as a relatively powerful being, one that was supposedly allied with me. I hated politics.


    Shaking my head, I continued my tale, focusing on the details of what Morgana and her party had told me about the centaurs actions further in the north-east and during this part of the story, Teacher was carefully asking questions, digging for as many details as I could provide. She even had me use a magical ritual to share memories with a flame, allowing her to see for herself what had transpired. It took hours and I had a feeling that those who had talked to the dryad Adra would receive a similar questioning. Finally, Teacher Brightsun was satisfied with what she had learned and I was allowed to continue my story.


    For the next hour, I told her about finding the centaurs and their wolven allies and the proposed plan to break them in the night. There was a frown on Teacher¡¯s face, but she withheld her judgement on the plan as it didn¡¯t matter any longer. The battle was fought, the casualties buried and for now, I focused on telling my impression of Morgana. Of her magic and the kindness she had shown the survivors, healing them even after working a major feat of magic and while she was visibly exhausted.


    And how we had talked about magic, her interest in the way I interacted with the spirits and in the tales of our people, how we had interacted with the spirits in the past, especially the tale of our Ancestor and the Phoenix. Back then, I had thought it was due to an interest in me, that she sought me out to talk but now, I wondered if I had just read into her curiosity and seen what I wanted to see.


    Finally, we got to our return to the Bright Hollow and the frosty reception. How I had learned about the rumours that had been spread before we ever got back and how Morgana had flared up, arguing on my side. When I got to the conversation Morgana and I had, during the late evening, my voice choked, the words not coming out as I wanted them to.


    Home, home not being a place but a feeling. I missed her. I missed my home.


    ¡°We¡¯ll have to discuss the centaurs with the other Elders. If they are united now, that might be a serious threat.¡± Elder Brightsun muttered, causing my hands to clench into fists. ¡°But we were talking about your interest in this Morgana. I think I can understand why you became interested but don¡¯t you think that your actions and your reaction to her refusal were excessive, given that you¡¯ve known her for what, a little over a week?¡± she asked, making me pause.


    ¡°What do you mean, Teacher?¡± I asked, frowning.


    ¡°Flamelet, you¡¯ve always been impulsive but you were about to throw away your place here, in the Bright Hollow. Don¡¯t you think that¡¯s a little extreme?¡± Teacher Brightsun asked, making me remember the words Morgana had spoken the night before, about home. And where to find it.


    ¡°You still miss Marj, don¡¯t you?¡± she asked out of the blue, making me freeze and the smile on Teacher¡¯s face turned compassionate once more.


    ¡°Morgana is not Marj, nor is she Thronar.¡± she reminded me, as if I needed to be reminded of that.


    ¡°But I can see the similarities between Morgana and Marj. Both fascinated by magic but both using it in a way so different from you and me. Even their physique is somewhat similar, even if Morgana is a little scrawny.¡± she chuckled to herself, before focusing back on me.


    ¡°Nobody will ever replace the place Marj has in your heart and I don¡¯t think you should try to fill that place with someone else.¡± Teacher Brightsun explained, cutting off an angry snarl from me with a look that I¡¯d received only a few times during my training.


    ¡°Make a new spot in your heart, for the next person. Don¡¯t try to look for someone to replace Marj, it wouldn¡¯t be fair to you or the one you place in that spot.¡± she counseled and for the next hour, we simply sat and talked, not about weighty problems but about simple things. It was oddly relaxing.


    ¡°Now, Flamelet, I think you should go, wash your face. It doesn¡¯t do that you look like I made you cry.¡± she grinned, getting a soft chuckle from me in return. ¡°Go, we¡¯ll speak some more later. And don¡¯t worry about that Traveller, I don¡¯t think we¡¯ll see her and her arrogance again. To threaten us in our home.¡± she grumbled, her words causing a conflicting emotion to rise within me. Part of me wanted Morgana to burn but another part? Another part was more conflicted.


    ¡°What do you mean? Is the place of power that dangerous?¡± I asked, not sure which answer I would prefer.


    ¡°Dangerous? Not really. But she will learn humility there.¡± Teacher Brightsun replied, all gentleness gone from her face, her eyes staring into the distance.

 Chapter 396

    ¡°We should get there tomorrow, right?¡± I asked Adra, while focusing on a distant image, shared with me by Lenore.


    ¡°Unless something serious happens, yes.¡± she replied, making me nod in acknowledgement. We had almost made it to the place of power Elder Brightsun had told us about and I had even managed to gain a level during those few days, due to the unusual hostility of the local wildlife. Not only were the monsters in the area relatively high level, some of them even reaching level ninety, they were quite ferocious, attacking us despite the difference in power. The only saving grace was that their numbers were low, not a single group numbering more than eight monsters at once. Still, the contrast between the almost peaceful journey on the ancient trade-road and the track through the mountains was stark.


    ¡°Ready?¡± Lenore asked, making sure that I was paying attention to our plan. It was a hunting-method we had been using these past few days, cheating with magic in order to catch the nimble, crafty and, most importantly, incredibly fast mountain-goats that seemed to be the only decent game in the region. Lenore would come at them from above, with me channelling a massive blast of mind-magic to kill them as soon as Lenore came into view. Killing them in an instant was the only efficient way we had found to kill them, otherwise they would dart away, across the cragged and rugged terrain. While Lenore obviously had no trouble to keep up with them from above and I was able to take my time killing them without the massively overcharged Mind Magic, getting the carcass in order to harvest the meat was a serious pain.


    With my acknowledgement, Lenore went into a dive and I closed my eyes, allowing me to fully focus on the images I received over our connection. It was interesting how an ability that seemed to be weak at first could turn into something incredibly strong due to their scaling, in this case the ability was one I had received upon forming my bond with Lenore, called Raven¡¯s Eye. At first, the range I could see through her eyes and channel magic through her body had been relatively low, just a few dozen meters but now, maybe due to the deeper bond between us or our increased power, that distance had increased by an order of magnitude, allowing me to be a few hundred meters away and channel magic as if I was there. It allowed me to get rid of the greatest weakness of Mind Magic, the limited range, while retaining the power and speed of that magic.


    My eyes took on an inner light as I activated Overflow, letting a quarter of my total Astral Power flow out in an instant, all turned into a simple, obliterating blast of magic, aimed at one of the mountain-goats Lenore had decided on as our dinner for the night. It might just be the simplest spell I had in my arsenal, nothing but a blast of power, but that simplicity made it quite frightening. There were two possible outcomes, either the target of the spell was instantly dead, their mind obliterated by the blast, or I would suffer a backlash, a feeling that made me wonder if that was how it felt to have your brain hit with a hammer. I thought the target would feel a similar pain but so far, I hadn¡¯t been able to confirm that.


    That binary outcome made the spell useless for most fights but to hunt, when you didn¡¯t care for fighting a powerful enemy to gain experience but simply went after weaker prey for food, it was great. And so, this time too, the mountain-goat, barely level forty, had its mind destroyed, leaving the body an empty husk, waiting for Adra and Rai to put out the light. Nobody was home any longer.


    Feeling the magic blast through her, Lenore stopped her dive, even if her flight had turned a little sluggish. While channelling Mind Magic wasn¡¯t as much of a strain to her as Ice Magic was, I had channelled a lot of power and she was paying for it.


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    ¡°You can go up there, it is done.¡± I told Adra, as I opened my eyes to search for Lenore¡¯s figure in the sky. I didn¡¯t have to wait long for Lenore to return, landing on my shoulder and relaxing against my head.


    ¡°I don¡¯t think I¡¯ll ever get used to that.¡± Lenore muttered, her mental voice tinged with exhaustion. I had to sympathise, neither of us were actively strengthening our bodies, focusing the power we gained into our minds and magical abilities. While we had stronger bodies than most, simply due to crossing the first and second divide, when comparing our physical attributes with someone like Sigmir or Ylva, who were solely strengthening their bodies, the difference was vast.


    Without a way to help her in a meaningful way, I simply let her grumble, giving her a stable platform to rest while Sigmir and I were keeping an eye on the area, to make sure no animal was contesting our kill.


    ¡°Did you notice?¡± I asked after a few minutes, when Lenore had fully recovered.


    ¡°You mean the wind?¡± Lenore asked in response, before continuing. ¡°Yes, I¡¯ve noticed. There¡¯s a lot of power in the wind between these mountains.¡±


    ¡°That¡¯s not it.¡± I told her, my lips curling into a proud smile. It wasn¡¯t too often that I was able to detect a magical anomaly before Lenore, with her incredible sight but for once, I had managed. That it was something related to her element was just the icing on the cake. Opening my mouth, my tongue flicked out, tasting the wind around us, drawing in a breath to let me experience it fully, despite my dislike for the experience.


    There was a lot of power, most of it having the light, airy taste of Wind-Magic, subtle and hard to pin down but not all of it. Within the wind was more, almost hidden but undoubtedly there, the painful taste of Fire along the sharp, stinging taste of Lightning. Once I had the taste fully in my mind, I shared the experience with Lenore before lazily drawing a set of runes in the air, conjuring up a block of Ice, turning it into a glass to be filled with Liquid Moonlight. Tasting fire-magic was always akin to gargling with hot-sauce, not something I enjoyed, but there was nothing to be done about it.


    ¡°Curious.¡± Lenore muttered as I was drinking, studying the composition of power I had noticed.


    ¡°It makes you wonder, doesn¡¯t it? The power is incredible.¡± I admitted, thinking back when I had noticed it first. At first, I, too, had only noticed that the Astral Power seemed to be skewed towards wind in the area but the day before, I had noticed those underlying forces within, making me wonder about the place of power we were moving towards. Elder Brightsun had told us that the place of power was one of Wind, but somehow, the flavour of Fire and Lightning felt deeper, more textured, compared to the wide range of flavour the Wind had.


    ¡°What worries me is that there haven¡¯t been a lot of powerful avians around here.¡± Lenore admitted, the image she transmitted along that thought was one of the hundreds of Wind Raptors flying in a wheel above our heads, conjuring up a storm. For a moment, I wasn¡¯t sure why the absence worried her, but then it dawned on me. If there was an area that should be populated by powerful avians of all sorts, simply due to their natural affinity for Wind-Magic, why wasn¡¯t it populated by them?


    ¡°You think something has claimed the place of power?¡± I asked, not sure I liked that idea. Similar to the way the Grandmother had claimed the Nexus in Neyto, there might be a powerful being that had settled on or near the place of power and challenging such a being would be exceedingly dangerous.


    ¡°Maybe. But then, would the orcs know about it and wouldn¡¯t they have been honour-bound to warn us?¡± Lenore admitted, her thoughts conflicted.


    ¡°We¡¯ll have to be careful.¡± I nodded to myself, stating the obvious. ¡°But we already knew that a place of power would be dangerous. We¡¯ll have to see what we are up against before deciding further.¡± I added, deciding to use the night for some careful and subtle scrying. Hopefully, whatever may have claimed the place of power wouldn¡¯t notice.


    It was a risk but if we wanted to increase our power, risks had to be taken. It was simply the nature of the beast.

 Chapter 397

    ¡°That¡¯s not ominous at all.¡± I muttered to myself, the vision I could see with my eyes just as disturbing as I had anticipated. We had managed to get close to the valley Elder Brightsun had told us about the day before and during the night, Lenore and I had used our magic in an attempt to gather information. Sadly, it had remained an attempt, the only thing we had been able to truly find out was that there was a strange forest in the valley, covered by an impenetrably dense cloud of mist.


    We had carefully tried to pass the mist but nothing had worked, at least so far. Nonetheless, we had continued our journey and now, a good two hours after starting the day, we were near the valley in our physical bodies, looking at the imagery we had seen last night.


    Somehow, the bright morning-light made the whole image even more ominous, compared to the shadows of night, turning the mist into an almost glowing barrier of white that covered the sky.


    ¡°It¡¯s covering the whole valley.¡± Lenore told me, as she landed on my shoulder once again.


    ¡°Too bad, no way to cheat by flying in.¡± I chuckled, having anticipated the result. Nobody who would put up a barrier that shrouded the whole mountainside would leave such an obvious opening. Even the valley gave me a strange impression, the floor quite level until it got to the slopes on the side, only that those slopes weren¡¯t gently rising but steep, almost like vertical walls, rising high into the sky. As someone who had lived between massive, artificial structures all my life, the valley felt more like an area between two high-rise buildings than a natural formation.


    ¡°Let¡¯s see what it looks like with your sight.¡± I suggested, knowing that Lenore had deliberately avoided using her special vision until she was with me, just in case something happened. We had suffered for trying to peak behind the curtain before, so we had decided to be a little cautious.


    In this case, that meant that she was sitting on my shoulder and I was merely looking at a stream of consciousness I received from her, instead of directly linking my mind to hers. If her mind got shut down from information overload, hopefully the stream would fade before I could get in trouble, too, allowing me to help her out.


    When there was no distress coming from her mind, I fully immersed myself into the stream I received, only to be disappointed. Well, in a way, what I saw was both disappointing and incredibly impressive. Where normally, magic was emitting a glow, radiating out energy, the magic in the valley was barely visible, especially given the power we could feel. It was contained, incredibly powerful and covered everything, the walls, the ground, the trees and, above all, the mist.


    But even with the power we could feel, it was nigh impossible to figure out what the magic was supposed to do or even which elements the spells were composed of. Compared to the valley, the spellwork was a beautiful work of art, tightly woven into the Astral in a way that I could only marvel at. Never before, had I seen such a perfect work of magic, causing me to get more absorbed in the images the more I looked. It was marvelous. It was awe-inspiring.


    It was frightening.


    ¡°We found a small shrine carved into the walls.¡± Adra told me, jolting me out of my reverie.


    ¡°A shrine?¡± I asked, frowning at the revelation. Knowing that there was a religious component to this place made me cautious, especially given the incredible spellwork.


    ¡°Yes.¡± she nodded, pointing towards the wall, ¡°It is dedicated to Zeus, King of Olympus, but I don¡¯t think it has been used much in the recent past.¡± she added, not assuaging my worries.


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    ¡°Show me.¡± I told her and began walking towards the direction she had pointed.


    ¡°There was also an old camp-site nearby.¡± Rai added, prompting me to raise an eyebrow, feeling that traces of relatively recent activity were more important than a shrine that appeared to be old.


    ¡°Not sure how old, but old enough for all traces but those of a campfire to have vanished. I would guess that it has been at least a week, maybe more. Hard to say and depends on the weather.¡± Rai continued, not helping with my worries. Part of me just wanted to leave, to let the place of power be, but it was a small part, the rest of me was curious, wanting to find out what it was and, if possible in any way, make it mine.


    We stopped at the old camp-site but given that Rai and Adra had failed to find any information, I didn¡¯t even try. There was a round spot of black soot and aches on the ground, but that was all that remained. Looking at things with Lenore''s sight didn¡¯t reveal any additional information, making me shrug as we continued on to the shrine.


    The shrine appeared to be simple on the surface but looking closely at it, I was impressed, again. Where the rock of the region was mostly dark grey with some reddish-brown mixed in, the shrine was a lot lighter in tone than the surroundings. What made the stone impressive was that it wasn¡¯t constructed but carved, directly into the valley, in a way that made me certain it had been done with magic. Or at least aided with magic, by transmuting the stone in some fashion, to create the contrast I was looking at. But I was also able to see why Adra thought the shrine hadn¡¯t been in use for a while, there was some dirt and dust on it, even some moss growing.


    Not touching it, I looked it over, a relief of two pillars holding up a triangular roof above an eagle with spread wings and two lighting bolts, relatively simple imagery and I could see why Adra thought it was dedicated to Zeus. The eagle was his animal after all and lighting bolts were his weapon, at least when looking at the olympian gods. Without a lot of research, and knowledge which myths Pantheon had used in their work, I had to trust the natives with their lore.


    Together with Lenore, I looked at the shrine for magic but there was nothing that stood out, it wasn¡¯t more or less magical than the rest of the valley, leaving me without any actual knowledge but some inference. Unless someone had gone to a lot of trouble, the valley was connected to the olympian pantheon, especially Zeus, which didn¡¯t fill me with confidence. On the other hand, I had managed to stumble into a place where an olympian God had hidden that soul-trap shortly after starting, so there might be opportunity here.


    ¡°We¡¯ll have to be careful.¡± I told the others, getting nods in return. Where I could return from death, it was a different topic for my companions. I didn¡¯t want to lose any of them, least of all Sigmir. But at the same time, the whole journey we were on wasn¡¯t without danger, so turning away from an opportunity to gain power without at least taking a look wouldn¡¯t help in the long run.


    ¡°Agreed, I want to see what is in there.¡± Adra admitted, looking into the misty forest with a strange gleam in her eyes.


    ¡°What can you tell me about the trees?¡± I asked, realising that plants were her thing, just as Ice was mine. Not that there was any, even the mist frustrated gentle attempts to probe it with my Ice-Magic. It seemed to be an entirely different thing, compared to the mist I was using.


    ¡°Kotinos, I think.¡± she replied, after a few moments of thought, before continuing, ¡°But they feel strange, distant. I can normally get a good feel for trees and the wild but here, there is something confusing me.¡±


    Shaking her head, she took a few steps closer to the mist, before turning back to me, her forehead creased into a frown.


    ¡°I truly have no idea what is going on with those trees but they are ancient and filled with power.¡± she told us and I could hear the hunger in her voice. She wanted that power, to take it just like she had taken the power that Tegi had within her tree. Most of the time, she was less aggressive when it came to advancing her power compared to myself but when she saw an opportunity, she was just as greedy as I was. Luckily, we were greedy for different things, not bringing us into conflict with each other.


    ¡°There might be a source of power in there, sustaining the grove.¡± she added, the hunger in her voice telling us just how much she wanted that source of power.


    Looking over to Sigmir and Rai, while they didn¡¯t appear to be filled with the same excitement that had gripped Adra and me, they gave me nods of approval, which I returned.


    ¡°Let¡¯s go in there.¡± I announced, allowing Adra to take the lead, as she often did, after reminding her to remain vigilant. There might be danger here and if we mucked up, the opportunity we were looking for might turn into fatal danger.

 Chapter 398

    Slowly, ever so slowly, we made our way into the misty forest. For the first time, since coming to Mundus, I was forced to appreciate my own methods, the discomfort of having your senses muddled and obscured. It was not a pleasant feeling, the lack of sight, the muffled sounds and the strange way that even scent was altered, it made me even more nervous, even more paranoid. That the mist wasn¡¯t ordinary had been obvious from the get-go but just how unpleasant it was made a small part of me appreciate the effort and technique, even as another part of me cursed the one who had set it up.


    It was a subtle effect, if not for the fact that it was a method I, myself, had employed a few times already, I might have missed it. Bound into the mist was an additional effect, using the natural effect of sensory deprivation as a starting point, it confused the senses, made it difficult to tell where you were going.


    ¡°Let me take the lead.¡± I told the others, making sure that they were close enough to touch, the one sense that wasn¡¯t naturally inhibited by the fog. That way, we should be able to avoid separation, the likely purpose of the mist. Either that, or it was supposed to slow us down but given that it seemed like the mist was a constant feature of the valley, I somewhat doubted that. What use was time, if there was nothing that gained an advantage from the passage of time? Without someone or something setting up defenses up ahead, any time gained by slowing us down in the mist would be useless. And on the flip-side, if the being that had set-up this barrier of mist needed time to prepare additional defenses, it would be laughable, just this barrier, complex and confusing, was a marvel of spellcraft and power.


    Using the shadows cast by my cloak, I let a mantle of twilight wrap around me, using the boundary between light and dark act as a filter, to block the confusing effect carried within the mist. The cloak made me feel a little conflicted, now that my anger had calmed and I had time to think about things. Had I done the right thing, by taking the cloak with me? If one went by the legality and projected common Earth-laws onto Mundus, I had been well within my rights, the cloak had been payment for services rendered, making it mine, no matter what additional intent the person giving it had. On the other hand, if I tried to imagine a scenario in which I were to give Sigmir¡¯s Lok¡¯nar to someone else, because she was no longer with me, and afterwards lose contact with the person I had given it, or be rebuffed as I had, the mental scenario hurt.


    Alas, the events were done, second-guessing didn¡¯t help, the situation was as it was. I might get a chance to improve it, but for now, we had a valley to investigate.


    When I felt the magic take effect, little changed, making it obvious that the mist wasn¡¯t just a magical illusion but actual, physical mist, even if I was utterly unable to interact magically with it. But at least, now I was able to see a little further and the mist didn¡¯t make me think it was moving around us, giving me back my sense of direction, as it was. Even the Astral River, what I had begun to see as a foundation of reality, was weird within the valley, making it difficult to get my bearings using it.


    Part of me wanted to move back, trying to find a better way to penetrate the mist, when a curious scent came into my nostrils. I was quite sure that I hadn¡¯t smelled it earlier, the flowery smell distinct and clear, making me frown. The moist mist was making scents more distinct but even so, it was strange. Almost magical.


    I could feel Lenore within my mind, just as intrigued by the smell as I was and stopped, taking my time to focus solely on what my nose and tongue were telling me. So very subtle, so very well hidden. Now that I was using magic to keep my mind clear, I was able to perceive the magic that carried the magical effect into the mist, the source of confusion. My appreciation for the being that had created this barrier went up a little more,  the way that the magic was arranged, each layer shielding the deeper layers from analysis, unless one was willing to step into the barrier and experience it with your own body. Marvelous.


    There was a part of me that made mental notes like crazy, the ideas I was able to see and experience, it was such a brilliant set-up. I stopped for a moment and used Lenore¡¯s sight to observe the mist, frustrated because it was even more opaque to her magical sight than it was to normal vision, but there was something that made me pay special attention. The place where I had stopped was relatively close to one of the gnarled trees that made up the forest, close enough to smell its earthy scent. But also close enough to notice the way the magic within the mist seemed to be tied into the trees, giving me a hint how the barrier was created and maintained.


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    I had wondered why the mist was just covering the forest, without deviating and dispersing, as it normally would without constant control over it. The trees were the medium that provided that control and likely some of the power as well. A self-maintaining and self-replenishing barrier, if I had a habit of wearing a hat, I would have tipped it for the idea and the skill involved.


    Sniffing, I realised that the strong scent of the trees had managed to hide the scent of magic from me, making me appreciate their skill even more. Annoying me, as well, but I was able to appreciate a level of mastery and guile that I hadn¡¯t been able to appreciate before. The Grandmother would likely have similar methods but back then, I had been blind to such wonders, making me want to go back to Neyto, just to see what I might discover now.


    Smiling to myself, I stepped away from the gnarled tree and focused on the smell I had noticed earlier, the sweet scent that carried the confusing mind magic. If I was able to follow that scent, I should reach the inner layer of the barrier, penetrating through the mists, at least that was my hypothesis. At the same time, I tried to quiet my mind and body, as I listened for any hint of movement or danger in the silent forest, any indication that there was something other than us within. A predator or guardian, a being used to the obscuring mist and mesmerizing scent would be a terrible foe, if there was such a thing.


    ¡°What do you make of this?¡± I asked Adra, letting her touch the tree I had been crouched beside. I hadn¡¯t noticed anything out of the ordinary, any hint of danger, but maybe one of the others had. Especially Adra, with her connection the plants, might have some ideas.


    ¡°I¡¯m not sure.¡± she admitted, stepping closer and placing a hand on the tree. ¡°It feels similar to the trees in the Grove where I grew up, but different at the same time.¡±


    With a shake of her head, she stepped away, slowly walking into the mist, with the rest of us following. Curious, I let her lead for a few moments, following behind silently, noticing that her path was automatically curving, at least until she was able to spot another tree and make a bee-line for it and placed her hand against it,again.


    ¡°This is confusing.¡± she admitted after a moment. ¡°It¡¯s not the same tree, is it?¡± she asked, looking at me with a frown on her face. When I shook my head, denying that it was the same tree, the frown deepened.


    ¡°They feel the same. They shouldn¡¯t feel the same, but they do. I had no idea why.¡± she grumbled, not happy that she was unable to solve the riddle, or maybe unhappy that she was unhappy to claim the power she had felt earlier.


    ¡°Stay vigilant, and let¡¯s continue deeper into this forest.¡± I told the others, before reorienting myself with the sweet scent I had noticed earlier.


    And so, with cautious steps and vigilant hearts, we continued on, through the forest. I had never thought that the absence of something could be so creepy and disconcerting, especially if you were expecting it. The forest was lacking all the things I associated with life, there was no insect-noise, no wind that was rustling the leaves, no smell of the slowly decaying detritus, as if the whole forest was frozen in time. At the same time, it was strange that there were no leaves on the ground, making me feel like we were walking across a parking-lot with a couple of plastic trees sticking out of it, to give it the appearance of life.


    Just like the valley had felt artificial, so did the forest.


    After maybe half an hour of careful sneaking, I noticed something between the trees. There was grass growing on the ground, finally a change from the dusty earth before, making me perk up, even as my vigilance shot up. Change could mean many things and it might mean danger. Walking closer, I noticed that there were colourful flowers growing between the grass, making me wonder if they were the source of the smell I had been following.


    Curious, I started to walk closer, still cautious for anything that might jump at me, out of the mist, when the mist suddenly parted before me and I found myself looking into a dim valley, likely due to the clouds hanging above.


    Instantly, the flowers, the meadow, the mist and the forest behind, they were all forgotten. For as soon as the mist parted, I was able to see, to witness. To comprehend.


    And I felt fear.

 Chapter 399

    Fear


    Awe


    There seemed to be little difference, just the scenery in front of us was able to invoke both, shaking my core, my very soul. It had taken a moment, a split-second in which my brain tried to make sense of what I saw, to bring perspective to the images my eyes were witnessing. It failed, there was no perspective that made the images less frightening. Less awesome.


    Before us, now no longer hidden by the mist, was a wide valley, a meadow filled with colourful flowers but those were not what threatened my mind. No, that was reserved for the scenery at the end of the valley. There, where the sides suddenly closed in, as if arranged that way to create a stage, was a being, a creature of bronze and fire, majestic and massive. Perspective made it difficult to do more than guess at its size, but given the comparison to the nearby walls, I thought it was easily the size of a house, and not a small one. Twenty, maybe thirty, meters in height, standing upright. .


    That creature, powerful enough to fill my mind with fear and awe despite the distance between us, was bound, thick, black chains securing it to the walls around it. There were manacles around its arms and legs in addition to one thick band of black metal going around its waist, with chains going to both sides. Other than those chains, the beings body was naked, without any adornments. Despite that, it radiated a majesty and might that shook my heart.


    Time stretched, it felt like seconds turned to hours, as we stood there, spellbound, unable to do anything but stare at this massive creature. Suddenly, a gust of wind caused shivers to run down my spine and a bird, similar sized to the being before us, flew overhead, its wings causing the cold wind to buffet us. As we watched, the bird landed on the chains connecting the beings waist to the walls and stopped, looking over to us, as if making sure that we were watching. Under the gaze of that predator, just breathing turned difficult and I felt my focus narrow, until there was nothing in my sight but those two.


    Then, once it had looked us over, the beak turned back towards the being and hacked into its torso, causing it to convulse and roar in pain. The sound itself rattled me, shaking my body and mind, but also shaking something loose within me. Just as the bird drew back, to strike again, I somehow managed to push out a little magic, to recreate the mantle of twilight I had used to block the confusing magic earlier.


    While the bird struck a second time, ripping out some more flesh and causing more blood to run down the beings torso, I activated overflow, letting a veil of twilight settle around me and my friends, hoping to help them snap out of it. As if mocking my efforts, the bird let out a shrill, piercing cry, shattering my magic and causing me to stumble under the backlash.


    Before I could fall, I felt Sigmir¡¯s arms wrap around me, to steady me, and in her embrace, I felt power return to my body.


    ¡°Run!¡± I managed to gasp out, turning away from the ghastly spectacle in front of us and back to the woods. The quiet woods that had felt so eerie and creepy before, now seemed like a comfortable and safe haven, away from giant birds and bound giants.


    Dragging Rai and Adra with us, Sigmir and I stumbled away, a primal instinct telling us that we had to run, to flee. Another pained roar, followed by the shrill cry of the eagle, followed us, making us stumble with their power.


    Clutching Sigmir¡¯s hand on one side and dragging Rai on the other, I stumbled into the woods, not caring where we were going, as long as it was away from the valley. We didn¡¯t make it far, even that bit of distance only possible due to Sigmir¡¯s ability allowing her to give me strength and protect me. But it took a toll on her and once her strength ran out, my shaken mind couldn¡¯t support me any longer and I simply fell to the ground, curling into a ball, trying to avoid the predator.


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    Too much, it was simply too much, too much to see, too much to process. Narrowing my focus, I tried to only feel the rough texture of Sigmir¡¯s hand, still tightly held within mine, letting the familiar feeling give me a root in reality. There was no massive bird devouring a bronze giant nearby, and if there was, it had nothing to do with me. Nothing, nothing that I needed to be concerned about, just Sigmir and her hand. She was there, she was real.


    Feeling my breathing ease a little, I let the earthy scent of the trees around us intrude, letting it flow in and out of my nostrils, consciously measuring each breath. As I lay there, I felt myself get moved, the arm attached to the hand I held wrapping around me and pulling me in. A new smell entered my nose, the familiar smell of Sigmir, letting my mind relax just a little more, to the point that I didn¡¯t feel like I had to hold onto my thoughts tightly, for fear of falling into a panic.


    What power.


    Now, with a little more headspace, it was easy to put a story, a legend to the display we had just witnessed. An eagle, feasting on the bound form of a titan, it was one of the most famous greek myths, the punishment for one who had rebelled against the Gods. Prometheus, the one who had given mankind the ability to wield fire, to create civilisation, punished by Zeus for his rebellion. It made me wonder what he had done on Mundus, how they had interpreted the myth. And a small part of me wanted to break those chains, to kill that eagle. But just as quick as the thought sprung to mind, it vanished, the fear too fresh in my mind to even consider such an act. No, the difference in power was absolute, no clever tricks, no brilliant strategy and no amount of pure, stupid luck could be enough to bridge it.


    Pushing away those thoughts, I focused on moving my body, wiggling to twist around in Sigmir¡¯s embrace, to embrace her back. The shared embrace had the side-effect filling my nose with her scent, letting my mind calm down.


    ¡°Are you alright?¡± Sigmir asked, hugging me just a little closer. I merely mumbled in reply, nodding against her chest, letting her strength flow into me.


    My assurance seemed to have been enough and she turned, rolling onto her back and taking my smaller body with her, so that I was resting on top of her, similar to the way we often slept. Opening my eyes, I looked around and saw Adra and Rai nearby, still curled up but slowly starting to move, too.


    It took some more time, until we all had managed to get our bodies back under control and moving, the others leaning against a nearby tree, while I was sitting on Sigmir¡¯s lap, letting my head rest against her chest.


    ¡°What power.¡± Adra muttered, breaking the silence.


    ¡°I don¡¯t think we¡¯ll be able to take that power for ourselves.¡± I giggled, the idea to claim this place of power now completely preposterous. The others joined in, chuckling with laughter, even as tears were running down their faces, until it broke a dam, fear and relief flooding out of us in a mix of sobs and laughter. Oh, what hubris we had, to come here and think we could take this place for ourselves.


    Even Lenore, still in her Hallow, was laughing along, even as I felt her desire for that power. She wanted it, wanted to devour that eagle, to rip its flesh apart, just as the eagle was feasting on the Titan.


    ¡°Maybe one day.¡± I mentally told her, knowing that such a day might never come. Even the idea that such a day might come, seemed to be difficult to imagine, the fear too fresh in my mind, the awe at their power.


    ¡°We should just get away from here.¡± I decided, once our catharsis had ended, leaving us both mentally and physically exhausted.


    ¡°What could be gained here, is not within our reach.¡± Lenore agreed, without even a trace of reluctance.


    It took quite a bit of effort to get moving, some after-effects of the valley still lingering, making me wonder. Was it just the sheer panic, the adrenaline rush our flight-reflex had triggered or was there something more? Stumbling, I took the lead again, this time carefully moving away from the scent I had followed earlier, the sweetness enough to make me shiver in fear.

 Chapter 400

    We managed to get out of the fog.


    It took us a while, far longer than the way in had taken, and none of us was eager to speak. I could feel that the experience had changed us all, had changed me. Before, when I had thought about power and powerful beings, I had mostly thought of the Grandmother, the way she seemed to be a fathomless being, able to change the world at a whim. But that mysterious power, even with the allure of the unknown, it paled before the bound Titan and the Eagle feasting on its flesh. Just seeing them from a distance was enough to cause us to quiver in fear, like a rabbit before the snake, stunned and unable to act.


    Somehow, I felt glad to see the sun again, despite my habitual dislike. Just being free of the oppressive mist made me cheer up, especially knowing that we would be able to get far away from the monsters it hid. Without communicating, all of us started to speed up, not quite running but compared to our normal travelling-speed it was clearly faster. Fast enough that I noticed my stamina slowly dropping, not at the same rate it would when jogging or running, but there was a drop.


    After a short moment of consideration, I instantly created a set of Blood Runes on my legs, channelling power into them to keep them active. It was a curious way of casting, the instant burst of Power needed to project the runes in an instant, only to switch to the controlled, careful way of feeding Astral Power into them to keep them active over a longer period of time, there was a bit of a whiplash. But if I had wanted to cast normally, I would have had to stop, something I wasn¡¯t quite willing to do. There was an unpleasant sensation between my shoulderblades, a shiver that didn¡¯t seem to go away. I felt watched, stalked, as if I was the prey of some unseen predator.


    The feeling made me turn, to look back at the shrouded valley, part of me expecting the eagle we had seen earlier to burst out of the fog, diving to tear us apart, but there was nothing, nothing I could see. Which didn¡¯t help me feel relief, if anything, it strengthened the feeling of persecution, feeding into my vigilance. Or maybe it was paranoia. But then, there were people out to get me, so i couldn¡¯t be, could it?


    ¡°Do you know what that was?¡± Rai asked, having noticed me look back.


    ¡°Maybe.¡± I replied, glancing over my shoulder again, ¡°At least I think I do, I just cannot be certain.¡±


    ¡°There is a myth, a legend I once heard, that speaks of a Titan who went against the Olympian Gods, stole a power from them and gave it away.¡± I began, not mentioning any names, as I had once been told that Names had power.


    ¡°Later, said TItan was caught and punished. His punishment was to be bound in the mountains, with an eagle feasting on his liver, his immortal body keeping him alive, regenerating only to be tortured again. An eternal punishment for an immortal being.¡± I finished, getting solem looks from Sigmir and Rai. Adra, on the other hand, looked pensive.


    ¡°I¡¯ve heard that story, even if it went a little different.¡± She told us, her voice distant.


    ¡°That long ago, Magic was the domain of the Gods, given to the Mortals using something called the Astral Chalice. But that Titan, he wanted the power of the Astral Chalice for himself and tried to steal it. He was discovered before he could get his hands on the Chalice and a fight broke out, a fight that shook the World, and in the fighting, the Astral Chalice shattered, flooding the World with its power. The raw power inundated the world, causing havoc and destruction, throwing the World into untold Chaos.¡± At this point, Adra stopped, looking back over her shoulder, just as I had done a little earlier, shaking her head after a moment.


    ¡°As punishment for his crime, the Gods chained him to the power he had unleashed, never to find peace until the World was no longer suffering for his deed.¡± she finished, leaving me wondering about the truth. Her version, it didn¡¯t ring true for me, but other than my intuition, I had nothing to base that on. Maybe, one day in the future, I would be able to find out.


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    There was little talk after that, none of us felt safe or comfortable, instead, we spent the rest of the day hurrying away from the valley holding the titan. Over time, I lost count how often I looked back or nervously tried to spot danger, to the point that when danger arrived, none of us really noticed. Maybe it was because we had been fearing a giant eagle swooping down from the sky to tear us apart, or a similarly sized Titan running up from behind and turning us to burning mush, so the appearance of a single tiger, intent on turning us into a late afternoon-snack was simply overlooked.


    Regardless of the reason, when a three meter long tiger, tall enough to look Sigmir in the eyes was flying towards you, you noticed. Especially when said tiger was clad in a swirly aura and had both, claws and fangs, bared towards us. The constant vigilance must have taken a toll on us, making our reaction a little sluggish, all of us simply scrambling to dodge, instead of using the fact that the stupid cat was in the air, and thus on a fixed trajectory, to welcome it with something pointy.


    Before we could get our bearings, the tiger let out a bone-shaking roar, making me stumble. I could feel the magic within the roar, pressing into my brain, making my movement sluggish and unsteady. The tiger showed no hesitation in exploiting the opening it had created, instantly pouncing towards the physically least imposing member of our party - Me.


    Time slowed to a crawl as Bullet Time activated, the world lost colour as my focus narrowed to the tiger coming towards me. There was no way to dodge, no way to escape, just not enough time. Astral Power surged out of me in a desperate bid to stop the attack, Ice Magic blooming in front of me. It was as simple a spell as could be, just a chunk of Ice, no worries about shape or anything, just something to stop the massive claws from tearing me apart.


    I felt Lenore¡¯s sight join my own, as a counter-blow shot out from the tiger, razor-sharp winds surging into the block of ice I had just created, turning the hastily created barrier into a rain of icicles, leaving it an open path to me.


    Somewhere, I could hear Sigmir¡¯s angry roar, but far away, so far, too far. I felt Bullet Time fade away, a part of my mind accepting that I was about to die. Almost as if the world was snapping back into focus, I could feel it speeding back up, the tiger pouncing towards me, when I felt a comfortable sensation. Shadows, covering me, cradling me in their embrace. Shadows, they were connected, weren¡¯t they?


    For a moment, I felt myself in two places at once, in many places at once, my mind trying to make sense of the experience, as confusing as it was. But maybe there was no need to understand, maybe I just had to accept it. Following my feelings, it was something I had heard before, even if I had never been able to understand. Maybe now, I could understand. To follow my feelings.


    To go home.


    Darkness swallowed me up and the world turned topsy-turvy, as if gravity was somewhere in a corner, softly crying while I was a bouncy-ball, getting bounced this way and that way, time stretching as a moment turned into seconds and what felt like hours, at least until the world returned, my mind still bouncing around in my skull, making me glad that the ground beneath wasn¡¯t trying to dodge me, or I might have failed to hit it. How embarrassing would it be, to fail to hit the ground when falling?


    It felt as if I had just opened my eyes after blinking, or maybe the world had blinked and I had somehow managed to keep my eyes open during that moment of darkness. But however it worked, the scenery in front of me had changed, instead of a tiger pouncing at me, I was now seeing Sigmir¡¯s back, as she was cloaked in a shining, crimson aura and a furious shout, without a need for words, came from her throat, echoing through the mountains.


    My focus, just moments earlier concentrated on the tiger, snapped to her and it was as if I was able to count the hairs on her arms and I felt amusement bubbling in, somewhere deep within me, my mind not quite keeping up. There were many hairs, almost forming a silver pelt, so much looking like Ylva¡¯s pelt. And Sigmir¡¯s hands, they looked less like hands and more like claws, her fingernails elongated and glowing with a silvery-blue light. I knew that light, it was the light of Ice-Magic.


    While my mind was struggling to catch up with my body, Sigmir was pouncing towards the tiger, without even taking out a weapon, she crashed into it. Two powerful beasts, fighting for supremacy, savage and brutal, without techniques.


    Closing my eyes in an attempt to get rid of the vertigo, I focused on Sigmir, on knowing where she was. How couldn¡¯t I know where my home was, so why would I need to see her? No, I knew where she was, I would always know, so I could cast magic on her, I was sure of it.


    Stretching out one hand, I let it flicker through the familiar motions of creating runes, just a simple spell to boost Sigmir¡¯s strength, nothing complicated, but it was about the limit I could contribute to the battle.


    Once the spell was cast, I let myself sink back down, simply lying there, happy that the ground seemed to be quite stable and that gravity was pulling me towards it, as it should be.

 Chapter 401

    By the time I heard approaching footsteps, I was mostly back to normal and had a good idea what I had done, even if not how I had done so. It was the teleport-trick that Rai was able to do thanks to his class, the one I had used once before, in Sigmir¡¯s home village. It had eluded me ever since, even if my powers had grown quite a bit in the meantime, but today, I had somehow managed to do it again. That somehow, it irked me, that I hadn¡¯t been able to replicate it yet and even now that I had done so, I had no real idea how.


    Before I managed to get up, a familiar presence loomed over me and I opened my eyes, to see Sigmir¡¯s worried face. Despite the blood splattered all over her face and the dishevelled state of her hair, I felt my lips curl into a smile, just from seeing her. My smile vanished as fast as it had appeared when I realised that at least some of the blood on her was hers and there were still wounds oozing more. Worry instantly cleared my dizzy head and I forced myself up, ignoring the world trying to shift away beneath me, grabbing hold of Sigmir.


    Once again, the contact amplified our connection and I could feel her buzzing emotions, something I would normally welcome. But not now, not while she was still injured, I had to focus. Pushing the connection to the back of my mind, I used my Blood Magic to get a better idea of her injuries and the results made me swallow hard.


    ¡°Rai, Adra, please keep an eye out for trouble, that¡¯ll take a while.¡± I ordered, after glancing over to make sure they weren¡¯t in an even worse state. Given that they were upright and there was no blood visible, I subsequently ignored their existence, hoping that they¡¯d do as asked.


    ¡°Love, please lie down.¡± I told Sigmir, reaching into my magic bag to use my old cloak as bedding. Part of me wanted to use Ice Magic to create a bed, something comfortable, but doing so would be a waste of Astral Power, something I wasn¡¯t sure I had enough. Defending myself against the tiger had taken a lot of power and I wasn¡¯t about to risk running out, not when I had to heal her.


    When Sigmir didn¡¯t move fast enough for my liking, still holding on to me, as if I was about to go away, I got a little forceful. She was hurt and remaining upright wasn¡¯t doing her any favours, it just delayed me in taking care of her. To an outside, my petite form forcibly pushing down Sigmir must have looked hilarious but it had to be done.


    ¡°Are you alright?¡± Sigmir finally asked, when I had managed to get her to the ground.


    ¡°Nothing happened to me, it¡¯s you I¡¯m worried about.¡± I replied tersely, when she reached out stroking my hair. Or so I thought, while she touched my hair, there was less than there had been in the moment, it seemed my encounter with the Tiger had been closer than expected.


    Shaking my head, I placed her hands back down, my mind starting to map out the various lacerations on her body. Of those, there were many, far too many. She was losing a great deal of blood, enough to make me worry.


    ¡°Lenore, I need your help.¡± I mentally asked, feeling her open her mind to me. Thoughts started to merge, my worries about Sigmir¡¯s condition flooding into her and I could feel her respond. My worries became hers and our powers combined in response.


    I felt my body shift, as if moving into my Hallow, only not quite. There was no more I, there was only us, Lenore and I joining together, not to destroy but to heal.


    A pair of black wings spread out, while a pair of clawed hands gently stroked over her body. She was precious to us and would always be. Power flared within us, carefully controlled and measured, separated into something that would heal and something that would kill. Both were needed, each in their own measure.


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    Part of us took the Power of Death and Ice, carefully controlling it like a wing, gently brushing over Sigmir¡¯s wounds, cleaning and disinfecting them. It was a coarse tool we were using, forcing that part of us to be extraordinarily careful, to not cause further harm.


    The rest of the power, now without the traits innate to both of us, was used by the other part of us, carefully and gently funnelled into Sigmir. The first thing we needed to do was to stop her losing more blood, to close the wounds we had cleansed. The wounds on her body were numerous, some long and jagged rips, others punctures from teeth, some even blunt trauma, letting blood seep into the flesh, even a few broken bones. All draining her strength, her very life, even as we were desperately pouring our power in, to stem the tide.


    As we worked, we could feel our powers wane, even as we drank in more power from the Astral River all around us. We needed more. Without hesitation, we used our claws to rip open a gash in our other palm, using the freshly opened wound to forcibly channel some of our vitality, our very life, into magic, so we could do more. It was painful, but the pain we felt paled before the idea of losing Sigmir.


    Still, we needed more power and an idea bubbled up within our mind. If we needed vitality, wasn¡¯t there vitality all around us? Not just in our other two companions, but everywhere, in every organism, every insect, every pant and every animal. We just had to get it.


    Our wings spread, beating the air and with that wind, Death came into the world, as a keening cry tore from our throat. We could feel tiny lives being snuffed out, hundreds of thousands of existences ended in moments, yet, we didn¡¯t care. No amount of lives could measure up to the one we were trying to save.


    With their Death, Vitality came to us, tiny streams of power that we could harvest and use. Each a mere mote, a tiny sparkle of life, but with each mote, we could do a little more. Yet, we needed more. Just as we were about to forcibly rip the power we needed from our companions, we could feel another power entering the area. A strong life, but as we were trying to take the power to heal, we slid off, as if something was blocking us.


    For the first time in what felt like hours, we opened our eyes and darkness was around us, a night only lit by a few stars and the moon above. Not that the darkness could stop our eyes, if anything, we could see better in the night. And now, we could see a female, surrounded by a strange, golden glow moving towards us. Our companions were nearby, standing in the direction the woman was coming from, but further back.


    Focusing on my sight, I tried to take the life that offered itself to us again, only to slide off again, the golden glow flaring for a moment. If we wanted that power, we would have to invest power to deal with the golden glow.


    Just as we came to that decision, the female raised her hand, golden light flaring, a staff in the crook of her other arm mirroring the light, shining like a golden torch and we could feel power flow into Sigmir. A gentle stream of power, curiously woven together in a way we couldn¡¯t even begin to unravel. The power wasn¡¯t directed as we would have done it, but what it lacked in direction, it made up in purity and sheer depth, touching Sigmir on a level I could barely grasp. But however the power did it, I could feel Sigmir get better, her body slowly knitting together.


    As Sigmir healed, we could feel the desperation that had driven us fading, exhaustion setting in. The parts within us, both had questions, so many questions and our thoughts started to unravel, the individuals that made up our being separating into their own forms.


    Blinking, I felt like I had been hit by a truck, my body aching all over, my mind hurting even worse. A groan came over my lips and I felt myself sway, my body close to giving out but there was something I needed to know. With the last dregs of power within me, I reached out, making sure that Sigmir was healed, that she wouldn¡¯t die. There was pain within me, as I forcibly channelled that magic, enough pain to make my eyes tear up, but I had to know.


    Moments later, I felt relief flood into me, if only for a moment. Then, I felt nothing more.

 Chapter 402

    A strange sensation overcame me, I felt watched. Somewhere, in the darkness around me, was something focused on me, giving me a feeling that I was being measured to my very soul. It was disconcerting, not only the feeling of being watched but also the darkness, instead of the usual, comforting embrace, I felt isolated, like unseen walls around me were closing in, about to crush me. I tried to reach out, to push back with my magic or at least get an inkling of what the darkness around me was hiding, but it was as if there was no power within me, nothing to reach out with.


    Suddenly, a pair of eyes appeared before me, shining with an inner fire and each the size of my head. My body froze, no matter how I tried to move, it was as if my body was paralized, rendering me unable to do anything. Then, the inner fire of the eyes burst out, racing over bronze skin, illuminating a stern face, a face I had seen from a distance before, in the morning.


    My heart was trying to beat out of my chest as I shot up, fear gripping me tightly. I felt the shadows around me surge up, finally responding to my commands, covering me up and hiding me from the burning gaze. But at the same time, I felt something strange, as if the darkness around me had changed, lacking the previous weight. The difference was stark, making me pause for a second, even as my body was desperately trying to pump enough air into my lungs to fuel my escape.


    ¡°Morgana¡­?¡± I heard a voice, calling my name, a familiar voice. That, too, made me consider for a moment, if my companions were trapped with me, they might need my help, even Sigmir might be trapped with me. It was that thought that made me snap out of my panic, to use the shadows gathered around me to observe my surroundings. And what I found was¡­


    Nothing. Or rather, nothing too extraordinary. My most important person, Sigmir, was resting nearby, close enough that I thought that I could smell her familiar scent, while Rai was sleeping on the other side of a fire, next to an unknown person. Lastly, Adra was sitting at the fire, clothed and obviously keeping watch, it had been her voice that I had heard earlier. It appeared to be our usual camp, if not for the presence of that unknown person.


    ¡°What is going on?¡± I asked, my voice rough, while my breathing was still laboured.


    ¡°Are you awake now?¡± Adra asked, her voice tinged with worry.


    ¡°Awake?¡± For a moment, I stopped speaking, instead I took in my surroundings, letting the shadows that coiled around me dissipate. While a part of my mind was still racing, screaming at me to run and hide, a rational part of me managed to take the reins, giving me the clarity to realise just what I had experienced.


    ¡°It was a dream, huh?¡± I asked, mostly to myself while I quickly checked that Sigmir was alright, remembering that I had been desperately healing her earlier. To my senses, she appeared to be fine, at least as far as I could tell, without a close and careful scan. For that, my brain needed to stop pounding in pain, a feeling I had experienced before, the after-effect of severe depletion of Astral Power, made worse by using Blood Magic to keep casting. Not a fun experience, by any stretch of the imagination.


    ¡°You are loud.¡± Lenore¡¯s tired voice came over our mental connection and I noticed her resting on a nearby perch, looking a little ruffled. While avian body-language was far different from the body-language of humans, which I had worked hard to understand, our mental connection allowed me to accurately read Lenore¡¯s mood. In this case, she was casting a baleful glare at the person who had disturbed her rest, namely me, while answering my mental query about what had happened.


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    To her, my mind had started screaming over our mental connection, to the point that even as she had tried to reply, I had been unable to hear her. Other than that, she remembered the fight against the Tiger and that we had started to heal Sigmir, before we had used the Avatar-Ability to enhance our powers. After that, just like the last time, things got murky, the separation between our memories making it difficult to get an accurate picture of what had happened.


    Quietly moving over to Adra, I asked what had happened and who the person resting in our camp was. She couldn¡¯t be an enemy, or she wouldn¡¯t be sleeping in the middle of our camp, but I had never seen her before. From what I could see, she looked human but given that we were on Mundus, with literally dozens of races that looked human at first glance, I wasn¡¯t willing to bet on it.


    ¡°What is the last thing you remember?¡± Adra asked in return, making me frown for a moment, not sure what she meant.


    ¡°The Tiger. It attacked, I barely managed to get away, you managed to kill it but Sigmir was wounded.¡± I replied, before adding, ¡°I began healing her, but needed more power.¡±


    ¡°Mhm, good, so you remember to that point.¡± she nodded, before raising an eyebrow, ¡°That winged form, what exactly is it?¡±


    Lenore, who had moved over as well and was now sitting on my shoulder, and I took a brief moment to decide just how much we wanted to disclose, neither of us the type to explain our abilities in detail, even to our trusted companions. There were only two beings, one for each of us, who we would tell everything, without holding back. Adra was not one of those two, still, she deserved an answer, maybe even a relatively complete one.


    ¡°Lenore and I; each of us has their own distinct abilities, yes?¡± I started out, getting a frown and nod in response, ¡°While we are normally able to combine some of our abilities, it only goes so far. That form, it allows us to combine all of our abilities. It gives me the ability to fly, it gives Lenore the ability to use opposable thumbs and so on.¡± I explained, not adding that I was reasonably sure it also combined the Astral Power that was flowing through our bodies and the Vitality that kept each of us alive. Whether it also gave us all our innate traits, like my increased Astral Power Regeneration, I couldn¡¯t even begin to tell, that would require more testing.


    The slow nod Adra gave in response made me wonder if she suspected that I hadn¡¯t told her everything, but it was all I was going to disclose at this point.


    ¡°I see.¡± she muttered, before shaking her head for a moment, and continued speaking. ¡°You began healing Sigmir but after a minute or two, Death- and Ice-Magic started to spill out of you, not massive amounts but continuously. Yet, you were obviously healing Sigmir, I could feel the powerful magic you used. But after maybe fifteen minutes, something changed, you scratched your hand while the previous trickle of Death-Magic suddenly turned into a flood, annihilating everything in your surroundings. It even struck Rai and me, forcing us to move away.¡± at that, she gave me an almost accusatory glance but didn¡¯t press, when I didn¡¯t respond.


    ¡°A few minutes later, Olivia showed up, she said she had felt the magic you wrought and wanted to find out what was going on. Seeing you healing Sigmir, she wanted to help. Rai was hesitant to let her get close, fearing she might harm you or disrupt your work, but she made an Oath in the name of Eleutheria that she merely wanted to help.¡± Adra continued, shedding light on the identity of the one sleeping nearby. When she mentioned the Oath, I raised an eyebrow, curious why such a thing would be especially binding, given that we had just recently been duped and given a reward that was mostly worthless. Certainly, what we had seen in the morning, the valley holding the Titan Prometheus, was a Place of Power, but our visit had awarded us with nothing but nightmares.


    ¡°She is a cleric, serving Eleutheria.¡± Adra told me, in response to my raised eyebrow.


    ¡°I do not serve, I respect and revere, but I do not serve.¡± a new, calm voice spoke up, making me look over to the previously sleeping form who was now obviously awake and looking over to us.


    For a moment, I was taken aback and wanted to tell her off for eavesdropping on us but at the end of the day, we had been talking right next to our camp, making such an act idiotic. At the same time, I was vaguely able to remember that I had been desperate earlier, when healing Sigmir, and given what Adra had just told me, this woman had helped out, saving Sigmir.


    ¡°Thank you.¡± I sincerely told the woman, who had earned hospitality by helping me save Sigmir. It was a deed I wouldn¡¯t forget, even if she was looking at me a little strangely.

 Chapter 403

    ¡°You should go back to sleep.¡± Adra advised me, or maybe this Olivia-woman who was sleeping in our camp. Or maybe both of us, as her eyes were moving between us quite quickly. For a moment, I wanted to decline but a combination of the throbbing between my temples and exhaustion convinced me otherwise. Whatever the circumstances surrounding that woman, they could be investigated and dealt with in the morning.


    ¡°Good idea.¡± Olivia agreed, a wry smile visible on her face, ¡°If the two of you stop chattering, I might be able to get some more sleep.¡±


    After one more look at the woman, trying to figure out who she was, or rather, why she was here, at this time, I shook my head and carefully moved over to Sigmir, kneeling next to her. My earlier inspection had shown that she seemed to be alright, which a second, more thorough, inspection confirmed. At the same time, I was able to see and feel a foreign influence on her flesh, where an unfamiliar magic had knit it together. The effect was complex and seemed benign, but I made a mental note to keep an eye on it.


    Once I was certain that I wouldn¡¯t make things worse by snuggling up to her, I did so. Before sleeping, I decided to check the notifications I had gained during the day and in the fight with the tiger.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Attributes gained</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You witnessed a divine Beast and lived to tell the tale. You gain +1 Courage.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    The very first notification made me frown and wonder. Why was just seeing the eagle awarding an attribute-point, especially when it had never the intent of killing us? And courage, hadn¡¯t we been frozen in fear, before turning tail and running as fast as we could? And afterwards, for the rest of the day, we had been distracted by the experience, to the point that I had almost died from a stupid tiger. But, maybe I shouldn¡¯t look a gift horse into the mouth, instead simply accepting that we had gained something, instead of nothing, from the place of power.


    Other than the attribute-gain, the messages started with the death of the tiger, which had been a Turan Tiger and level ninety-four, quite high level, rewarding me a small chunk of EXP. The amount made me think that the Tiger had crossed the first divide, as it was a lot for a singular animal, but nothing that would have an impact in the grand scale of things. It, once more, reminded me just why there were few high-leveled natives on Mundus. For the natives, each and every fight was potentially one to the death, as Sigmir had almost experienced, and with each level, more fights and more danger was needed to advance further. It was worse when travelling the wilds, as we did, where danger could lurk behind every corner, every rock and in every crevice. Of the natives who sought power, most would die at some point, long before they ever achieved the power they wanted.


    It made me wonder, what would happen in the life-game? With more and more Travellers, how would this world change? Would it be akin to the games of the past, where each Traveller was supposed to be that special snowflake, with their own grandiose title and supposedly unique artifacts? Only that everyone had them? How would Mundus look, two, maybe three years in the game, would it lose the charm it had? That feeling of being in a different world, the perfect immersion, or would there be a naked Traveller dancing at every corner, maybe trying to sell things for real-world money? Part of me was curious, another part afraid. But that was for the future.


    The next notifications were what I truly was in, the skill-improvements.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Skill increased</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You increased your skill: Darkness Magic [55/100]</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Skill increased</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You increased your skill: Death Magic [12/100]</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Skill increased</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You increased your skill: Blood Magic [67/100]</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    Two points in Darkness-Magic, four in my recently acquired Death-Magic and two in Blood-Magic, all in all, an impressive improvement for a single fight, followed by frantically keeping Sigmir from dying. Most likely, the second part had been the more relevant part, that I had used the Avatar-Form and pushed both, Lenore and myself, to the limit when we had been working on Sigmir. As I thought about it, I realised something else, that I wanted to check out.


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


    ¡°Could you come over here?¡± I mentally asked Lenore, getting an annoyed but affirmative response. Apparently, she had just managed to drift off, when I had woken her back up. Still, it only took her moments to land next to me.


    ¡°I think I¡¯ll be back before morning, but just in case, I¡¯ll sleep in my Hallow tonight.¡± I told her, getting an unhappy but accepting response. Using our Hallows, so short after we had used the Avatar-Form wasn¡¯t pleasant, for either of us, there was a rawness, for lack of better word, in our connection, as if it had been overstimulated and using it for more than chatting rubbed that raw spot. Still, it was nothing that couldn¡¯t be endured and I wanted to see what the capsule had recorded, both of the misty valley and the use of our Avatar-Form.


    After logging out, I just laid there for a moment, noticing that my body was covered in cold sweat. Once again, some of the mental stimulation I had received within the capsule had managed to have an impact on my physical body, in a psychosomatic reaction. The effect was already known and documented as similar to the effects of a regular nightmare, with measures in place to prevent more severe reactions. Nonetheless, the feeling of being soaked in sweat was unpleasant, so my first stop was in the shower.


    The warm spray helped soothe away the traces of discomfort that lingered after logging out, the memory of the fiery visage now a lot more distant and fading, just like a normal dream would. At the same time, there was a smile on my face, as part of me began to wonder.


    If there was one etiological myth with at least some truth to it and worked into Mundus, why not more? Was there a cave, in which a giant-god was bound with his son¡¯s guts while a snake was dripping poison on him? If so, I wanted to see, at some point. Maybe even interfere in the events, to claim my own place in the legends of Mundus, and the halls of fame of gamerdom.


    The smile on my face was still there when I sat at my kitchen-table, getting a bit of food while looking in the footage recorded by the capsule. The first stop was, obviously, the misty valley. Sadly, that first stop was a major disappointment, the recording showed nothing but fog, not even the trees within the forest were visible. While I had a feeling that it was intended, to keep a bit of mystery in the game, another part wondered if it was a bug and, as a responsible tester, I sent a message to Pantheon, reporting it as a potential bug.


    Once that was done, I did a spin on the forum, sharing a few thoughts with the world. It was one of those difficult questions, which I doubted could be solved any time soon. For now, I had my own stance on it, one that might be contraditionary and, quite frankly, a little hypocritical but while I could easily argue one side, when sitting at my kitchen-table or my desk, it was a whole other thing to consider it when looking at Sigmir. It was curious.


    After a bit of browsing the forum, I went to the recording of the battle against the tiger. It was more interesting than the footage of dense fog, even if some of it sent a chill down my spine. The footage showed just how close the tiger had come to catching me, to the point that I had lost a bit of hair to its claws, just as I had managed to teleport away. Would I have instantly died to the claws? Maybe, at the end of the day, while my Avatar¡¯s body was a lot more sturdy than a regular body, thanks to crossing the first two Divides, but given that even Sigmir had been severely harmed when fighting the tiger, I decided to focus on learning the Shadow Step, until I was able to reliably use it.


    Afterwards, the healing of Sigmir was both interesting and boring at the same time. Interesting, because I was able to visually see the magic expelled by our combined form and I had an inkling, half remembered half inferred, that we had done so to keep the passive effects that added Death- and Ice-Magic to all spells we cast together from adding harmful effects to our healing.


    Similarly, it was quite interesting to watch the effect of Death-Magic on the surroundings, as a barely visible cloud of darkish-red mist burst from the wings of our combined form, visibly draining the life from our surroundings, leaving nothing but death in its wake.


    Finally, the last interesting part was the appearance of Olivia, a golden glow radiating from her, especially from her chest. It was obvious that she had cast some healing magic on Sigmir, the remaining wounds glowing with golden light before fading, and I made a mental note to try studying it ingame, adding to the ever-growing pile of things I wanted to investigate.


    Finally, the whole thing was boring because other than those three instances, it was just a video of a winged, bird-monster, for lack of better words, kneeling over the fallen body of Sigmir. Nothing really happened, certainly nothing I would want to share with the world.


    Shaking my head, I washed up the dishes I had used and hopped back into the capsule. Hopefully, Sigmir was still asleep, I wanted to be there when she woke up.

 Interlude - Forum, Seeking Advice

    Official Road to Purgatory-Beta Forum


    <table><tbody><tr><td>Harms, confirmed Beta-Account</td></tr></tbody></table>


    Greetings and Salutations, Gentlebeings


    Today, I come as a humble seeker of knowledge, a wanderer lost in the desert of ignorance, asking for advice on a matter dear to me.


    The question, I am forced to ponder, is one we should all consider, regarding this world we have been allowed to travel, the world of Mundus. Namely, how are we to regard the ability to communicate with each other outside the game, across vast distances? How are we to deal with information learned on the forums, can we use them at our convenience? Are we to separate the things we learned on the Forum and the Internet from the things we can act upon on Mundus? Is it cheating to use something we learned here, to gain an advantage on Mundus?


    I don¡¯t think there will be a conclusive answer and I don¡¯t think even Pantheon could actually enforce any rules regarding such behaviour, but regardless, I would like to know your thoughts.


    Why, you might ask? I found myself in such a situation, just recently, and in hindsight, I am not too happy with my behaviour and how things played out.


    The situation was one caused by my own carelessness, I didn¡¯t adhere to the old wisdom that it is better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to open your mouth and remove all doubt. Some of you might have seen the video of the fight between Orcs and Centaurs, maybe even read my comment to it. A little later, once my respawn-timer was over, I returned to life on Mundus, spawning in the Guest-House that I had designated as home, causing a bit of concern and disbelief from the natives. I guess it is one thing to hear about the ability of Travellers to return from death, a whole other thing to see it in person, especially as the respawn-animation is apparently a little disconcerting. But that is not really the concern here, it might be a different topic.


    Anyway, I respawned and was soon asked what had happened, by a pair of Orcs I considered friends, who had even helped me acquire quests in the past. I told them about my experience, how the battlegroup I had been part of had hunted down the centaurs, how a potential ally was discovered and a trap by our enemies seen through, culminating in a description of the night-battle. At this point, I have to admit that my recount was coloured by the video I had watched, partially because it gave a much better viewpoint than my own experience, turns out that a video that you can rewind and watch again allows for better observations than being in the middle of the action, who would have thought.


    Sadly, my recollections were spread and even distorted in the local town, I later learned that one of my friends had a prior feud with the leader of the battlegroup and spread what he had learned from me, maybe even adding his own biases, causing rumours to erupt, especially as said leader wasn¡¯t too well liked in the first place.


    Envy is a terrible thing, even in a society based on personal power. Or maybe especially in such a society.


    The rumours that spread were that the leader of said Battlegroup had recklessly thrown away the lives of fellow orcs, using powerful magic that killed both friend and foe. Things turned out bad for me, when the rumours were disproven a few days later, when the Battlegroup returned, with a few losses but with the previously taken prisoners alive and mostly unharmed. They had suffered some trauma, apparently they felt cold, even when huddled in front of a fire and couldn¡¯t relax when alone, but they were alive.


    The source of the rumours was quickly traced, not like there are too many options, and I was called out on the market-square and a certain Traveller tore me a new one. The public nature of that, combined with the fact that quite a few people were grateful to the leader of the battlegroup meant that suddenly, a lot of people looked at me funny. And I mean that quite literally, getting stared at like you are some sort of animal in a zoo is not a fun experience.


    Ultimately, I decided that rather than face the consequences, I would make like a tree and leave. Might not be my proudest moment, but it is what it is.


    Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.


    Now, what I want to know is, what do you think? When is it legitimate to use things learned on the forum or the Internet in-game? Do you consider it okay at all?


    And with that, I¡¯m out.


    Harms


    <table><tbody><tr><td>Jeanyra, confirmed Beta-Account</td></tr></tbody></table>


    Isn¡¯t that a normal thing to do? I mean, using information gained on the Internet.


    People have been creating guides for video-games almost from the start, long before the Internet was a thing. So, yeah, I consider it okay.


    <table><tbody><tr><td>Tarrin, confirmed Beta-Account</td></tr></tbody></table>


    Funny enough, the question is just as old as video-games are, even if there is no correlation.


    It has been a question in the pen&paper community for decades, ever since some nerds got together in a basement and started to throw some dice and roll some fireballs, where is the line between what you, the player, knows and what your character would know.


    I think with Road to Purgatory, that question is one that needs to be asked, how far does one want to immerse themselves into Road to Purgatory? Part of me wants to say, play as your character, without invoking outside knowledge but then, how about someone who knows how to shoot a bow? Or, as some people have written, magic is based on knowledge and imagination, so should someone be forbidden to use their knowledge of physics? There would have to be some outside standard of knowledge you are allowed to use, in addition to a physical baseline, at which point, the whole, immersive charme of Road to Purgatory would be lost, at least in my opinion.


    Sadly, the more I think about the question, the less certain I get about the answer.


    <table><tbody><tr><td>Morgana, confirmed Beta-Account</td></tr></tbody></table>


    As the one who tore you a new one, as you describe it, I obviously lean towards leaving knowledge gained outside the gain, out of Mundus. But, after a few days of thinking about it, I have to admit, the answer to your question is more nuanced than a simple, leave it out.


    The whole point of streaming and making videos is that people watch you do cool or interesting things ingame and often, people want to mimic the things they¡¯ve seen on stream. That¡¯s a transfer of information, is it not? If I wanted to be stringent, I would have to stop uploading snippets, to tease streams during the life-game but that¡¯s not what I¡¯ll do.


    So, where do I draw the line?


    I think conveying information to natives of Mundus is where I draw the line. You can act on things, hell, I watched videos on other spellcasters myself and tried to gain inspiration from their actions, I even once used another person¡¯s stream to confirm something, but when you start the natives that someone did something, without you, having the ability to see it in Mundus, that¡¯s no longer okay. Or something like that.


    <table><tbody><tr><td>Tobiuno, confirmed Beta-Account</td></tr></tbody></table>


    As someone who has written a guide, I obviously think that you can use information gained outside, but, similar to Morgana, I think your actions should have some limits. Stream-sniping, for example, is something I don¡¯t condone, even with the delay baked into the ingame-system, it could turn into a problem. Sure, you could say, don¡¯t stream important things but even your position and direction can be important information, if someone wants to do you harm.


    Normally, I¡¯d say don¡¯t be an arse about your behaviour but given that we are talking about an online-game, there will be people who act like an arse, just because they can.


    <table><tbody><tr><td>Howardlight, confirmed Beta-Account</td></tr></tbody></table>


    To illustrate my point, allow me to answer in two parts:


    Part one:


    Use everything you have to purge evil, take every advantage you can get in your struggles, for only our actions will curb the spread of that plague. If you can act on information to prevent that spread, do so. If you can use your influence to hamper evil, do so.


    All in the name of the light!


    Part two:


    We are all playing a role in a game, to have fun. If you destroy your own fun, or the fun of others, don¡¯t act on information. If you enjoy fiddling with things, to figure out how they work, don¡¯t look for a guide-video.


    And, for the love of all that¡¯s holy, never ever bring the conflicts and drama of an online-game out of the game-spaces and into the real world. It is fun to verbally joust on the forum but once it leaves the game-spaces, leave it.


    Ingame, I wouldn¡¯t hesitate for a second to bash a certain dark witch¡¯s head in, outside the game, if there is ever a convention or something, I¡¯d be more inclined to buy them a drink. Or something.


    Conclusion: Conflict between characters is cool, conflict between the people playing the game is not.

 Chapter 404

    The next morning came a little too early for my tastes. After my short log-out, I had returned and promptly been kicked out of my Hallow by Lenore, the irritation due to the recent use of our Avatar-form quite unpleasant. It might have been for the best, sleeping snuggled up to Sigmir was always preferable to resting within my comfortable Hallow, even if it meant waking up early.


    Luckily, my body had mostly recovered from the magical exertion of the day before, leaving me a little sore and tired but not in actual discomfort. I took a moment to confirm, once more, that Sigmir¡¯s body was healed and closely scrutinising the traces of magic that remained within her flesh. They seemed to be slowly fading, leaving the flesh knit together and hale, without any adverse effects but it was an entirely different form of healing than my own, leaving me both suspicious and curious about it.


    Just because this Olivia had made an oath to Adra and Rai, it didn¡¯t mean that there weren¡¯t things that could have been left out, hidden motivations or double meanings and such. At the end of the day, hadn¡¯t Dura promised to give us the location of a place of power, with us thinking that it would be something that could be used, only to witness a scene of literal divine punishment? If one had ill intent, words could be interpreted as one wanted, an oath to help could justify murder, if one thought about it as mercy-killing. Hopefully, no politicians or lawyers would come to Mundus.


    ¡°Good Morning.¡± I greeted Sigmir, when I noticed her open eyes.


    ¡°Good Morning.¡± she replied, a gentle smile on her face. ¡°It is good that you were unharmed yesterday.¡±  she added, after a moment.


    I felt a tad awkward, there was a part of me that wanted to admonish Sigmir for her behaviour the day before, for rushing a dangerous foe and fighting a tiger with her bare hands, leaving her in the precarious state she had been in. But even if I wanted to say those words, they wouldn¡¯t leave my throat. Sigmir had been fighting for me and was always doing her best to protect me, could I trample on that pride? I would talk with her, but later, when there was no one nearby and after carefully considering what to say.


    Instead of responding, I merely mumbled and gave her a soft kiss, before pushing myself up to take a closer look at the unknown Olivia. From the way she averted her eyes, just as I was looking up, I had a feeling that she had been watching Sigmir and me. Maybe out of consideration for a patient, she had healed Sigmir after all, maybe for other reasons. Either way, I wanted to find out who she was and why she was here.


    What I could say was that she was a striking person, the lines on her face sharp and clear, despite some crows feet around her deep blue eyes and hair that shone with a silver luster. Maybe it was that striking, toned body that made the lack of her left hand stand out all the more, a single imperfection marrying an otherwise perfect being. But even the lack of a hand didn¡¯t seem to slow her down, as she was casually working along Adra to prepare breakfast.


    ¡°Good Morning, or should I say, Greetings.¡± I gave a nod to the newcomer once I was upright. It was awkward, I had not even the slightest idea how to handle such a conversation. We had essentially just slept in the same room but I knew nothing about the person but her name and that she was a cleric of some good. I had even forgotten to look up the deity on the internet, to get an initial impression.


    ¡°My name is Morgana, a Traveller and Mystic. Again, thank you for helping me yesterday.¡± I added, as I decided to go with a straight-forward approach, not even trying to play word-games.


    ¡°Good Morning to you. As you have been told during the night, my name is Olivia, a travelling cleric of Eleutheria.¡± she replied and I jumped on the obvious opening.


    Support the author by searching for the original publication of this novel.


    ¡°Travelling, you say? Could you tell us where you are travelling to, in these mountains?¡± I asked, continuing on my straight forward approach. The smile on her face widened, just a little, before she replied.


    ¡°To, is a bit of a question. For now, my destination is Neamov, a dwarven stronghold near the Ancient Road. From there, I am not certain. But, I think the more interesting question is, where am I travelling from, wouldn¡¯t you say?¡± she asked, making me slowly nod, not quite in comprehension but in agreement. I had a hunch where she was travelling from, mainly because we had witnessed something big the day before, but there could be other things that had drawn her here.


    ¡°And where would that be?¡± I bit on her bait, asking the question she obviously wanted to be asked.


    ¡°The same place you have seen, I would say.¡± she replied, the smile on her face now a full-blown grin. For a moment, I considered asking her about the Bright Hollow Orcs, just to throw her off, but decided against it.


    ¡°You have seen the bound Titan?¡± I asked, just to get everything out into the open.


    ¡°Indeed, I have seen him.¡± she nodded, the earlier amusement fading. ¡°In a way, it is a tragedy.¡± there was a slow shaking of her head, her eyes distant.


    There were many things I wanted to ask, foremost among them why she, a cleric to a greek god, considered the punishment of what should be a criminal in her eyes a tragedy but before I could, Adra called over and told us that breakfast was ready.


    ¡°Ah, we should eat.¡± Olivia snapped out of her thoughts and focused on Sigmir for a moment. ¡°Especially you, young lady, magical healing can help but at the end of the day, the body needs resources to heal.¡± she admonished, her voice stern, yet tinged with concern.


    Breakfast was another relatively simple affair, roasted meat, with a strong, gamey taste along with bread and a couple of dried fruits, not terribly tasty or a really balanced diet but at the end of the day, needs must and we were limited in supplies. While magical bags could store large amounts of goods, they lacked climate control, meaning that during summer, perishable goods would quickly spoil. If I had to guess, the abundant amount of meat we were eating was donated by the tiger that had tried to turn me into dinner. While it wasn¡¯t quite dog eats dog, the predator could quickly become the meal of their supposed prey.


    As we ate, I couldn¡¯t help but peek at the way Olivia was using the stump of her left arm to manipulate things. Just watching made me reasonably sure that she had lost her hand a long time ago which made me even more curious. This was a world in which healing magic existed, while I didn¡¯t have the ability to restore lost limbs, there had to be people out there who could, of that I was almost certain. Even I was able to remove scars and regenerate tissue, and that was merely with Blood Magic. If someone had magic that covered a wider array, especially some sort of Bone-Magic, they should have no trouble restoring a hand.


    But this woman was without her hand, which made me wonder. Given the fact that she was able to traverse these mountains, seemingly alone, meant that she had to have power, especially with the way she had approached us the day before. Such an approach was only possible if you had the power to keep yourself safe or you were seriously lacking in survival instinct. Which was contraindicated by her overall appearance, especially the grey hair on her head, she looked rather old. At least in her fifties or sixties, so she had to have either an abundance of luck or the skills and instincts to stay alive.


    ¡°If you stare at me like that, your sweetheart will be jealous.¡± It was just a casual remark, thrown out with a smile on her face, but it was enough to make me snap out of my thoughts and blush, realising that I had been staring at her and hardly eating.


    ¡°I apologize.¡± I told her, before looking back down at my food. For a moment, suspicion flared up within me and I mentally asked Lenore for help.


    ¡°Can you take a close look at our food, to see if there is poison mixed in?¡± I mentally asked, just to assuage my sense of paranoia. For a moment, my perspective shifted and I was able to see through Lenore¡¯s eyes, as she closely focused on my food. The result was inconclusive, with nothing visible to her sight but that didn¡¯t necessarily mean that there was nothing there, just that possible poison was either non-magical, non-existent or undetectable. Pushing my thoughts aside, I continued eating, carefully monitoring my body with magic, just in case something foul was going on.

 Chapter 405

    ¡°That Neamov you mentioned. Where exactly is it?¡± I asked Olivia once we were done with eating. My group was, at this point, a little lost. Originally, we had been travelling on the ancient road, steadily going west, neither because of open air nor for sun in wintertime, but because that was where we hoped to find a way to travel towards Aletoma or Arbotoma as North and South-America were respectively called. It was a little ludicrous and part of me wondered if continuing with the plan I had set was an example of sheer, single-minded stubbornness on my part, a refusal to accept that it was an idiotic idea, born out of a failure to understand the scale but at the same time, I wasn¡¯t quite ready to give up. I had that Soul Prison in my bag, stashed there for almost a year, and a divine-difficulty Quest to go with it, if I wanted to leave my mark in the beta and hopefully get some sort of way to reunite with Sigmir after the beta ended, I needed to leave a mark. Or something.


    Maybe freeing Prometheus or slaying the eagle tormenting him would work as well, especially if I managed to use the eagle¡¯s blood to empower Lenore.


    ¡°Are you mad?¡± Lenore interrupted my musing with a tone I could only describe as scared, even if I could feel her desire, the greedy wish to swallow and devour the power of the eagle, to become something more. Alas, as much as I would love to accomplish feats that could only be described as legendary, I was no Heracles and certainly no demi-god, making success questionable, if not outright impossible. Thinking back, to the feelings of fear and helplessness, outright impossible felt about right.


    ¡°A bit north of here, a couple of days travel, depending on the speed you are moving at, how adventurous you are and so on. The town itself was carved into the mountains by the dwarves, a trade and merchant-city, taking advantage of the two ancient roads that cross nearby.¡± Olivia explained and I noticed Adra nodding along.


    ¡°I¡¯ve heard of the town, but I¡¯ve never been there.¡± she added, before continuing, ¡°Most people who travel east and want to cross the Turian Mountains pass through there, at least that was what I¡¯ve been told.¡±


    ¡°It is as your friend says. If you want to head to eastern Aretia, you either pass through Neamov or through Roclaw, even further north.¡± At that point, she paused for a second, her forehead creased into a frown. ¡°Well, unless you want to go the long way around, travelling through the Northern Forests of Nidvanscia. You look like you would fit there.¡± Olivia remarked, her eyes measuring me.


    ¡°Interesting, I wouldn¡¯t know about that. As I mentioned, I am a Traveller, without connections to this world, other than those I forged myself.¡± I admitted, realising after a moment that the Firnelves might live in that northern forest, elves and forests had always been a classic fantasy trope. However, that didn¡¯t mean I had any idea about it, given that I had eschewed a civilised starting-location, along with any social benefits.


    ¡°Most curious. I talked with a few Travellers, further to the west, but they never mentioned anything like that. They seemed to have integrated quite well into their communities and the people around them seemed happy to have them. Skilled, hard-working yet seriously lacking in survival instinct, but if you are immortal, I guess that is less of a problem.¡± Olivia mused, a soft smile on her face again.


    ¡°Would you tell me why you lack those connections? And why you are travelling with this most interesting and diverse group?¡± she asked, still looking at me, with a gaze that made me a little uneasy. A cawing noise stopped me, before I could answer, as pure amusement flooded over my connection with Lenore, who barely managed to stay on my shoulder, given that she was laughing so hard.


    ¡°She looks like you do, when you see something magical that you don¡¯t understand.¡± Lenore explained and along her words, an explanation for her amusement was transmitted. Apparently, she thought it hilarious that the one normally inquisitive person was now the subject of investigation and disturbed by a look normally worn by myself.


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    My response was the equivalent to mentally sticking my tongue out, only to be forced into a quick catch, as that was enough to make Lenore lose her footing, from laughing too hard.


    ¡°We can talk about that.¡± I allowed, a chuckle in my voice, while holding Lenore who was still shaking with amusement.


    ¡°But not now, we are losing daylight. If you want, you can travel with us as that Neamov-town sounds like as good a destination as any. If nothing else, we have to get back to the ancient road, to continue our journey.¡± I continued, cutting off the question Olivia had just opened her mouth to ask. She stopped herself and looked at me for a moment, before nodding.


    ¡°I suppose joining you could be a good idea, at least if we can come to a bit of an agreement.¡± she paused again, studying me, before she continued ¡°Would you offer a promise that you do not intend to harm me or attempt to force me into actions against my faith?¡±


    Somehow, the fact that she didn¡¯t agree at once made me a little more confident. If she had, I would have wondered whether she had the confidence to take us all on, if we were to turn on her. But if she required a promise, likely backed up by some sort of Oath or pledge involving her deity, the question of confidence changed and turned into a question regarding the effect of such an oath and possibly the power of her deity.


    ¡°That depends on the tenets of your faith. I have to apologize, I do not know what the tenets of Eleutheria entail.¡± I admitted, after a moment to consider my words.


    ¡°Freedom.¡± she simply answered, a grin on her face, her voice brimming with enthusiasm. Or maybe calling it faith or religious fervour would be more fitting.


    ¡°My Lady takes care of those who roam, the travellers and vagabonds, unbound and free. I will not be party to banditery or attempts to rob others of their freedom. As such, if you are trying to act in such a way while we are travelling together, I will leave and would ask that you don¡¯t try to stop me. If your actions are too egregious, I might even turn against you.¡± she explained, the last sentence spoken with a wry tone, somehow unbefitting her warning words. Yet, the frank nature helped me to relax, knowing what would cause strife in the party would allow me to anticipate and avoid it.


    ¡°That sounds manageable. I would ask you for the same promise, that you will not act in a way harmful to any of us, which includes keeping secrets you might learn, like the details of our abilities.¡± I suggested, realising that such a promise might benefit us a lot more than her, given what she had already seen. If she promised, especially while invoking the name of her Goddess, I doubted she would break her word. If we managed to get the Oath worded in such a way that it would remain in place even after we parted company, my Avatar-Ability would remain secret.


    Olivia nodded and stood up, causing me to raise an eyebrow as she walked over to her bedroll, picking up the staff that was lying next to it. It was rather simple, about as long as she was tall and with a simple metal cap at one end, a bit of carving on the other. The carving resembled a sunburst, causing me to frown a little.


    ¡°In the name of sacred Eleutheria, I promise not to harm the Traveller Morgana and her travelling companions.¡± Olivia intoned, the stump of her left arm touching her chest, near the collar-bone, the right arm holding the staff that was suddenly glowing with golden light, a strange flame burning at its tip.


    Without meaning to, my tongue flicked out, tasting the air and the power radiating from Olivia and her light-show, curious how it would taste. What I tasted surprised me, I had anticipated a sharp taste, similar to the magic I had felt around Dura Firebringer and Elder Brightsun but it was vastly different, difficult to describe and pin down. Airy, not in the same way as wind-magic but more akin to the mouth-feeling of cotton-candy, just not as obnoxiously sweet. It wasn¡¯t unpleasant, especially compared to what I had expected and I could feel the power in her words. Unless I was missing something, not impossible by any stretch of imagination, she was serious and her words were binding.


    ¡°I¡¯m afraid I can¡¯t offer the same light-show, but here I go.¡± I grinned, before standing and raising my head, to look her into the eyes as I intoned, ¡°I, Morgana the Traveller, Student of the Grandmother of Neyto, promise that I will not actively harm Olivia, Cleric of Eleutheria, while we are travelling together.¡±


    Maybe I was laying it on a little thick but it felt right. In addition, I wanted to learn more about divine magic, something I had previously been unable to and a carrot by the name of Olivia was now dangling in front of me, someone who might share some knowledge on the subject while we were travelling. I would certainly ask about it.

 Chapter 406

    ¡°Say, how did you manage to travel these mountains before you met us?¡± I asked Olivia, as we were packing up our things after breakfast. It was fascinating, to watch her move and work, the way she compensated for the lack of her hand, to the point that I had to make sure I wasn¡¯t staring, again. Getting caught once was embarrassing enough, especially as I had a feeling that Olivia would call me out on it, probably with some sort of joke and a smirk on her face. She seemed to be that kind of person, not malicious but someone who enjoyed making other people a little uncomfortable.


    ¡°By walking, how else?¡± Olivia asked in response and, of course, there was that grin on her face. As I let out a frustrated sigh, she continued, ¡°My Lady watches over travellers and one of the spells she grants her followers is called Sanctuary. While it cannot stop a determined attacker, it makes it harder to commit to an attack. While under its effect, I become uninteresting, for lack of better words.¡± she explained, making me perk up, curiosity fully engaged.


    ¡°That sounds strange.¡± I admitted, trying to mentally put together how such a spell could be made to work. There were quite a few parts, many of which I could only describe as concepts, not how to put them into practise with magic.


    ¡°And it works on both, bandits and wild beasts?¡± I asked, trying to wrap my head around things.


    ¡°Yes, even if most bandits avoid attacking lone travellers, unless the bandits are either very brave or very, very stupid.¡± Olivia responded, making me chuckle. The idea that travelling on your own was making your travels safer was quite amusing to me, who had been taught that staying in a group helped to keep you safe. But then, if someone had the confidence to travel alone, in a place that was filled with wild beasts and monsters, the chance that it was someone you didn¡¯t want to offend was reasonably high. High enough not to take the risk, in any case.


    ¡°What do you think?¡± I asked Lenore, transmitting a stream of my ideas along to her. The first part, that I could only describe as a concept, was an effect similar to my cloak of shadows, only constant without the need to focus on it, almost akin to the effect woven into my cloak, but able to detect beings interested in you or around you. Some sort of automatic detection and targeting system. Another part had to be some sort of general mind-magic effect, suppressing interest, a vague concept if there was one. There had been a book, describing a SEP-field that made people ignore things, making them think that they were somebody else¡¯s problem, maybe it was something along those lines.


    ¡°It¡¯s divine magic. I don¡¯t think we¡¯ll easily be able to figure that one out.¡± Lenore replied, her words, and the wry undertone, only making me want to try harder.


    ¡°How does it work?¡± I asked, looking around to make sure we had nothing left behind and were ready to continue on our way.


    ¡°I pray to my Lady, asking her to grant me sanctuary during my travel and, as long as I¡¯ve done nothing to make her reject me, I am granted the sanctuary I asked for.¡± she responded, making me grumble under my breath, even as I could hear her chuckle.


    Part of my mind was trying to form a model that would fit the spell described by Olivia when we left the rocky outcropping which we had used as our camp-site, which was why I didn¡¯t notice our surroundings until the connection between Lenore and me made me pay attention. Feeling her surprise, alongside a bit of apprehension made me look around, quickly noticing the reason for her feelings.


    There was a roughly circular patch of barren soil, difficult to see at first but once you noticed it was obvious. In the surroundings, lichen, moss and some grasses, hardy plants that were able to thrive in the rocky and arid conditions, gave the area a touch of life, keeping it from looking like a desolate moon-scape but in that circle, even that small amount of colour, that bit of life, was gone. Drained, a small part of my mind recalled, drained to fuel the spellwork of Lenore and myself.


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    ¡°Oops.¡± I mentally transmitted, both amused and a little horrified at the destruction, even as I considered what we apparently had done. If the small flashes I remembered were accurate, that we had managed to use Blood Magic in conjunction with Death Magic, to drain energy from something that didn¡¯t have blood, it would be a major breakthrough. What if, instead of the sparse life of this mountainside, we had used that kind of magic in a forest? Filled with life, granting us far more power? Or, even better, in an area filled with incapcitated creatures, ready to be drained and used to power our spellwork?


    ¡°Impressive¡­¡± Lenore responded, as fascinated with the idea as I was. Just what sort of limits could we break, if we had enough human resources available? Or, really, any sort of living resources would do, as long as they were incapacitated and possibly connected to us using a prepared ritual?


    The installation of the dryads of Tegi sprung to mind and the way they had turned their village in the frozen north into an enclave of constant spring. The sheer amount of power made me regret that I hadn¡¯t looked closer, hadn¡¯t investigated and copied down the runes and enchantments they had used and their solution to the miasma-problem. Instead, I had foolishly blown it to bits, even if it had been the only viable option at the time, at least the only one I had managed to come up with.


    ¡°It doesn¡¯t look good, does it?¡± Olivia asked me, apparently misunderstanding the pensive look on my face, as I observed the destruction Lenore and I had wrought.


    ¡°We did what was necessary.¡± I simply replied, not going into the details of our actions.


    ¡°But at what cost? I don¡¯t think anything will grow at this place, for a generation or two.¡± Olivia¡¯s voice was heavy and I could see her shaking her head in regret.


    ¡°When it comes to my friends, I don¡¯t count the cost.¡± I told her, my voice hard. In the privacy of my mind, I replaced friends with just Sigmir, as she would always be the priority but there was no need to say that out loud. Hopefully, I would never have to choose between the other two and her, it would be regrettable to sacrifice Adra and Rai. They had become close friends over the months we had travelled together.


    ¡°Taking care of your friends is important but one day, you will face judgement for your actions. That day, the records of your actions will be examined in full.¡± Olivia admonished me, causing me to smile. Certainly, one day my actions would be examined. But who would be the judge and what would the criteria be? Good and evil, right and wrong, merely subjective labels, depending on the one doing the judging, what impact did they have on me? I would leave a mark on Mundus, a mark not even Pantheon could ignore, a mark that would hopefully grant me an advantage at that time.


    ¡°Certainly, one day. And I will be standing proudly that day, not cowering with fear. For better or worse, I will not kneel.¡± I replied, getting a little carried away.


    ¡°Your pride might be your downfall one day. But, at the same time, my Lady teaches us to stand on our own feet, to walk our own path.¡± Olivia muttered, almost too soft to hear, making me chuckle to myself.


    ¡°Now, are you going to invoke your sanctuary-spell?¡± I asked, after we had walked for a minute or two, with me watching Olivia to see that spell in practise, hoping that either Lenore¡¯s or my own senses would allow me to glean some more information.


    ¡°Oh, no, why would I?¡± Olivia asked, looking genuinely surprised. ¡°We are travelling in a group, so it would be pointless to invoke it over myself, as you would attract notice anyway. The Sanctuary can only protect me as long as I remain unnoticed, once a being actively notices me and truly wants to attack me, it would break the spell.¡± she explained.


    ¡°In addition, it would be a little impolite to abuse my Ladies¡¯ power, when it is not needed. In a group like this, I don¡¯t need to use the spell, so I shouldn¡¯t even try.¡± she added, making me raise an eyebrow at the way she pushed her protection to the rest of the group. But even as I thought about it, hadn¡¯t she healed Sigmir the day before? Maybe, letting her keep power in reserve was a wise idea, just in case something bad happened again.


    ¡°How are you going to contribute then, if we are attacked? Just healing, or how will you act?¡± Adra asked, her thoughts obviously mirroring my own.


    ¡°Healing, certainly. But often, it is wise to prevent healing from being necessary in the first place, thus, my Lady has granted her followers a couple of spells that can turn away harm or help my allies in other ways. And, as one might expect, she also grants spells that can break shackles and chains, whether they be magical or mundane.¡± Olivia replied, her voice proud.


    Hearing her made me wonder, did she simply keep her offensive abilities a secret, something I would regard as sensible, or did she simply lack such abilities? Time would tell, for now, I would keep an eye on her, just in case.

 Chapter 407

    Talking to Olivia was an interesting, yet very frustrating affair. When it came to talking about the places she had been to, and the things she had seen, it was fascinating, the recollections of someone who had spent the last four decades wandering Mundus, never staying for long in any place, they were a marvel to listen to. But, on the other hand, whenever I asked about her magic, or the spells she mentioned, how they functioned, I was left with a frustration that made me growl. It sounded like all her spellcasting boiled down to, ¡®I ask my Lady for it¡¯, without any understanding or ability on her own. Sure, it sounded like she knew what she could ask for and what effect her spells would have but truly understanding how those effects came to be? That was entirely left to her deity, a reliance that bugged me.


    Finally, after a good day of hearing those responses, I decided to stop asking about magic for a time, instead trying to learn more about Mundus and maybe her deity.


    ¡°This morning, when we were talking about where we came from, you mentioned that it was a tragedy. Care to elaborate?¡± I asked, shifting the conversation away from magic.


    ¡°Certainly.¡± she paused for a moment, before continuing, ¡°Let me ask you, what do you consider freedom?¡± there was another pause, but before I could actually think about her question and how to respond, she continued on.


    ¡°Freedom, freedom doesn¡¯t mean that there are no consequences for your actions. That would just be anarchy. Earlier, when we exchanged our Oaths, we willingly placed a binding on our actions, even invoking my Lady to witness the binding, asking her to watch that we both keep our word. If the Oath hadn¡¯t been willingly given, she would have rejected us and we would have felt the rejection.¡± she explained, in a bit of an non-sequitur.


    ¡°Society, as a whole, is essentially the same, just on a larger, yet less obvious, scale. To live within a society, you need to obey their laws, if not, the people of that society feel that punishing you is within their rights. However, to be considered just, the punishment needs to fit the crime, neither too lax nor too strict.¡± she continued and I realised that it hadn¡¯t really been a non-sequitur, not when considering the story behind Prometheus, both the original and the one recorded on Mundus. Before I could do more than nod, to signify my understanding, she spoke again.


    ¡°Alas, what is a just punishment, for a crime that changed the entire world? That killed countless beings and changed the destiny of all future generations, for all eternity? An eternal crime.¡± She asked, and I was reminded of various religious narratives and their ideas of damnation. Curiously, the analogy that sprang to mind was the Chrisitan faith and their idea of Hell, with a Devil as Jailor and Tormentor of the damned. Only that here, the tormented figure was the devil, tortured by a divine beast in an easily accessible, if hidden, place.


    ¡°An eternal punishment.¡± I muttered, apparently loud enough for Olivia to hear me.


    ¡°Indeed. An eternal punishment, an eternal reminder.¡± she paused, again, as I was thinking about the summary Adra had given us the day before, that Prometheus had essentially broken the divine monopoly on magic and was now being punished for it. As a Sorceress, as someone who loved to experiment with magic and try to understand the intricacies of Astral Power and its effect on Mundus, that punishment felt wrong.


    ¡°I wonder why my Lady wanted me to see it.¡± Olivia muttered, her words quiet, lost in thought.


    ¡°If you do not know, I certainly don¡¯t know either.¡± I responded, a little amused.


    ¡°No, that would be too much to ask wouldn¡¯t it? For you, to know the mind of my Lady? I¡¯ll have to think about it and maybe, if I can¡¯t figure it out, pray for guidance. It wouldn¡¯t be the first time that the lesson¡¯s my Lady is teaching me are complicated and hard to understand.¡± Olivia agreed, now amused herself.


    ¡°Anyway, let me tell you about that one time, it has to have been ten years since then¡­¡± Olivia continued talking, launching into another story about a different occurence when her Deity had sent her somewhere, in this case it had been on the Demon-continent, in order to help a particular tribe break a curse that was slowly turning them into salt. I wasn¡¯t quite sure about her train of thought but the story sounded interesting and she was a gifted story-teller. I wasn¡¯t quite sure how much of her tale was accurate and how much embellishment, but given that we were on Mundus and I had seen a literal god the day before, I wasn¡¯t about to simply declare a story about a desert-spirit to be implausible. If it had been a dessert-spirit, I might have been tempted but even then, it might be a thing. It made me wonder, was there such a thing as a spirit-spirit? Maybe the spirit of whisky or something along those lines, I might have to ask the dwarves in the next city about it.


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    Shaking my head, I banished those ridiculous thoughts and continued to listen to Olivia with one ear while considering other things, mainly magic. Lenore was, for once, sitting on my shoulder, hitching a ride that way, our connection still too raw to spend much time in our Hallows. Together, we tried to merge our memories of the day before, hoping to get a better insight into our Avatar-State and the magical tricks we had accomplished together.


    It was interesting, my recollections of the day before were clearer, a lot less fuzzy, than the images I had from the usage during the night-battle against the centaurs. On the other hand, Lenore¡¯s memories were similarly fuzzy when looking back at our use of the Avatar back then. Neither of us knew why that was, even as we were posing hypothesis, from the idea that I had been in a state of heightened focus as we were working to safe Sigmir to the idea that my increased power during night-time had pushed me deeper into the state, thus making it harder to recall my time spent in that state. There were indications and contraindications for our ideas, some of them regarding the entire hypothesis, some only parts of a particular hypothesis. It was interesting, to the point that I missed quite a bit of Olivia¡¯s story, despite Lenore trying to help me pay attention.


    ¡°That place looks like a good spot to make camp, what do you think?¡± Adra asked, snapping me out of my mental world. My eyes followed her pointing hand, taking in the scenery. It brought a smile to my face, the spot she pointed to was a little elevated, compared to the plateau we had been walking in, just a little up-hill. From our current position, I could only be sure that there was a brook up there, flowing down the mountain and across our path.


    Looking around, I noticed that it was earlier than we¡¯d normally make camp but a look up, into the sky, made me nod anyways. The sky was filled with ominous, dark clouds, strongly hinting that there would be rain, soon. There was little shelter to be had, especially on the mountainside we were walking.


    ¡°Let¡¯s check it out.¡± I agreed, just as Lenore was hopping off my shoulder, quickly flapping her wings to gain altitude. With a smile on my face, I closed my left eye, letting Lenore¡¯s vision fill my mind. Ever since I had been able to use my Hallow to fly with her, the vertigo caused by looking through her eyes when flying had vanished, or maybe I simply had gotten used to the experience over time. EIther way, I was able to watch the mountainside and the small plateau above us, noticing nothing out of the ordinary, just a couple of rocks, a bit of vegetation, mostly grass and lichen and finally, the spring that fed the brook, bubbling out of the mountain.


    ¡°We should hurry.¡± Olivia urged, looking up into the sky. ¡°The weather can get rather nasty in these mountains.¡± she added, already starting to make her way up the mountain.


    With a shrug, I pushed away Lenore¡¯s vision and followed Olivia up the mountain, placing my feet carefully, as loose rocks might cause me to lose my footing. Luckily, we all had supernaturally powerful and agile bodies, allowing us to climb the precarious slope almost as if it was flat ground and quite soon, we were on the small plateau. Olivia, the first one up, looked into the distance and I noticed a frown on her face.


    ¡°We need shelter.¡± she muttered and while I lacked the experience to judge the mountain-weather, the dark clouds I could see made me agree. I was about to push my magic a little, putting up a small Ice-Cottage, when Olivia started to chant, beseeching Eleutheria to shelter us weary travellers from wind and rain. I stopped, watching her gesticulate in a way that strongly reminded me of my own runic magic, even if I had no idea what the glowing symbols meant. She kept chanting for about a minute, carefully drawing magical designs into the air, as she praised Eleutheria, making me curious just what she was doing and what the magical symbols meant. Once she finished her chant, she took a step forward and placed her staff in an empty area. where it remained standing upright, even when she let go. From the carved top, a warm glow emanated, enveloping an area of about five meters radius in a dimly glowing, golden membrane. It looked almost like a half-soap-bubble, an idea that made me chuckle to myself.


    ¡°Come, my lady granted us shelter for the night.¡± Olivia nodded, a grin on her face, as I was taken aback a little. While I loved my own style of magic, the gentle, golden bubble had something fantastical about it. Furthermore, the speed with which she had created it was quite impressive, making me want to learn more, even if I knew that the answer would just be something along the lines of ¡®I asked my lady. Still, not getting wet would be nice.

 Chapter 408

    There were times that Nature reminded me of my own insignificance, when looking at the grand scale of things. Sitting within the golden soap-bubble of protection, watching the weather batter the mountainside managed to make me feel small. The winds were bad enough to pick up small rocks as the winds rushed around the land, creating an awesome symphony of howling and whistling sounds. In addition to the howling wind, rain and hail was buffeting the shield around us with a fury that made me shiver as I sat on Sigmir¡¯s lap.


    ¡°Are you certain that it is wise to make a fire in here?¡± I asked, when Olivia started to pull out some wood and tinder from an obviously magical pouch in her backpack. Even as I asked, I realised that someone who had been travelling for decades would have used the barrier before and would almost certainly have made a fire inside, making my question obsolete.


    ¡°Oh, that is no problem. The barrier lets the smoke out and even keeps the temperature at a comfortable level.¡± Olivia assured me, causing me to nod, even if I had no idea just how it could work. Not that I could even begin to guess how a barrier that could be crossed by people but kept out the wind and rain could work, so why not a barrier that did that, while maintaining a comfortable environment inside? It was barely more ridiculous and impossible, so why not?


    Lenore, sitting on a nearby rock with Ylva curled up nearby, was amused at my mental grumbling, to her, the magic used by Olivia was divine in nature and simply was. She didn¡¯t feel a true need to attempt understanding it, even if some parts of it made her curious, she simply accepted that the divine worked in mysterious ways.


    While Olivia was setting up the fire, I stood and walked over to the barrier, looking at it from up close. It was almost like a curved pane of glass, just with a pale golden glimmer and I could see the rain pelting against it, as if it was a solid object.


    ¡°Is there anything I have to pay attention to, regarding the barrier?¡± I asked, looking over my shoulder to Olivia. I wanted to try out a few things but had little interest in accidentally breaking our shelter, even if it could hopefully be recreated. Even just a minute in the storm that was raging outside would be unpleasant.


    ¡°Erm, what do you have in mind?¡± she asked in response, looking at me with a suspicious look on her face.


    ¡°I want to know how it works. It shouldn¡¯t work, it goes against what I know about the way the world works, which makes me curious.¡± I replied with a bit of annoyance in my tone, causing her to chuckle while Adra started to giggle as well. Looking at Sigmir and Rai, both of them had amused grins on their faces, while I could feel Lenore¡¯s amusement over our bond. The only one not obviously amused was Ylva, but when looking closely, I had a feeling she was amused as well.


    ¡°Keep your examination mundane, without trying to magically interfere with the barrier and you should be alright. If you do that, the worst case would be that you are expelled and unable to enter the barrier for the night.¡± she told me, the amusement obvious in her voice, making me wonder if she wanted that worst case to come to pass.


    ¡°If that happens, I¡¯ll do my best to burst your bubble.¡± I replied, a bit of malice in my tone, as I reached out to gently poke the barrier. Only, there was nothing to poke at, my hand simply went through the barrier, as if there was nothing there. I could feel the change easily, the cold rain and the wetness running down the barrier was obvious but that was merely an effect of the environment, not the barrier itself.


    Pulling my hand back, I tried something else, bringing my face and nose close to the barrier and sniffing the air, trying to get a taste of the magic creating the barrier and I thought there was that airy, fluffy taste I had perceived when Olivia had given her oath earlier, but I couldn¡¯t be sure. Getting even closer, my tongue flicked out, trying to get a better taste, only to suddenly get a cold shock when my tongue went through the barrier and tasted the rain outside. The sudden, cold sensation was enough to make me flinch back and bite my tongue. I thought there was more of that magical taste but I couldn¡¯t be sure.


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    ¡°Lenore, care to help?¡± I mentally asked, feeling a little peeved that I couldn¡¯t figure out anything. The amusement coming from Lenore doubled, as she hopped into the air, landing on my shoulder. Sadly, when looking through her eyes and using her vision, there was little to be learned, the barrier was looking almost identically to its appearance in my vision, the golden glow merely a bit more pronounced.


    Staring at the barrier, I was considering what to do next when a black shape came out of the rain, breaking through the barrier and landing on a nearby rock. For a moment, I was simply stunned as I looked at the intruder, a bird with black and grey plumage, quite similar in shape to the one sitting on my shoulder. But before any of us had a chance to react to its sudden appearance, the bird added another surprise to the tally when it started cawing in a way I could understand thanks to Lenore¡¯s ability.


    ¡°Good Evening, Sister. Would you or your companions mind if I share your shelter?¡± the bird asked, looking at Lenore.


    Flabbergasted, would be the perfect word to describe me in that moment, dumbfounded would also work, as I described that letting Lenore, the one who was addressed, answer would be the simplest solution.


    ¡°Olivia, what do you think? Morgana and I won¡¯t mind but you set up this barrier.¡± Lenore asked after turning to Olivia, using my voice once more. ¡°It might help to keep Morgana from poking the barrier some more, if she has something else to catch her interest.¡± Lenore added, after a moment, causing me to squawk in outrage. I wasn¡¯t that bad, was I?


    ¡°No, I don¡¯t mind. It is the right thing to do, to offer shelter to our fellow Travellers.¡± Olivia responded, ignoring the bit of interplay.


    ¡°You are welcome to stay, Brother. If you are interested in conversation, my dear friend and partner here is always curious to learn more, I can feel her bubbling with questions about you, the region and likely a dozen other things.¡± Lenore told the other bird, using their cawing language. To my amusement, she was right, the chance to speak to a different spirit-raven was one that I would relish, especially as it was a rare chance. Depending on the weather, or maybe even if I asked kindly, I would get another chance to poke that sort of barrier, but it was the first chance I had to speak with a different spirit-beast.


    ¡°She is not wrong.¡± I admitted, consciously trying to project the meaning of my words, along the words I spoke, using the ability my bond with Lenore gave me.


    ¡°An evening out of the rain and intelligent conversation, what more could a bird want?¡± the newcomer asked and thanks to Lenore, I could hear the amusement in his voice.


    ¡°How about a bit of food?¡± I asked in response, walking back to the others, anticipating the response. The bird didn¡¯t disappoint, hopping over to another rock before taking a few flaps with his wings, to land on my shoulder. However, before he even got close, Lenore let out a warning caw, telling him to keep his talons away from her perch, causing me to chuckle. The bird had apparently anticipated refusal and simply landed on yet another rock, before hopping closer to the fire.


    ¡°Why is he so trusting?¡± I asked, using my mental connection with Lenore. It seemed that, if we had ill-intent towards the raven, he had essentially delivered himself into our midst. Not that I planned to do anything, but it made me curious.


    ¡°He trusts a fellow spirit-raven and I¡¯d think that he knew who Olivia follows before he ever landed. I don¡¯t think Olivia, or Eleutheria, would allow anyone to turn the shelter they grant travellers into a trap.¡± Lenore explained, making me wonder just how far loyalty between Spirit-beasts went. Her words implied that there was a certain base-trust but on the other hand, I could remember the black wolves, some of whom had possessed a sapient spirit, yet they had hunted down other spirit wolves.


    But I had to agree on her other point, when taking the stories Olivia had told me over the day into account, there was no way she would agree to such a scheme.


    Reaching into my magical bag, I brought out some of our hardtack, breaking off a piece for our feathery visitor, before settling back down on Sigmir¡¯s lap and starting to ask questions. So much to learn, so little time.

 Chapter 409

    Talking to the raven, whose name I didn¡¯t even want to try to pronounce, as my mind conceptualised it as ¡®the sound of the south-wind whistling through a particular gap¡¯, was strangely boring. While he had a lot of knowledge about the local area and the unkindness he was part of but outside a narrow geographic range, he was utterly uninterested. Similarly, his grasp of magic was limited to what came easy to him, mainly wind-magic but even in that regard, Lenore was ahead of him. The only thing Lenore took note of were a few novel ideas that would allow her to navigate suddenly changing wind-currents, like those occurring between narrow gaps and cliffs, easier. It might also allow her to increase her aerial agility, if she managed to take it a step further and incorporate those ideas into her own magic and manipulate the wind into sudden gusts and eddies. It would take some time, but I could feel her fascination with the potential of those thoughts.


    On the other hand, for every question the raven answered he took five minutes to preen and prune his plumage in an attempt to look attractive. At least that was the interpretation I was able to pick out of Lenore¡¯s mind, who seemed to be both amused and embarrassed at the same time, though not to the point of closing her mind to me. That might happen if I were to tease her about her new boyfriend and his antics.


    ¡°Morgana, Sigmir, did you recover enough to take a watch?¡± Adra asked, when it was time to get some sleep. Even as Sigmir replied that she was recovered, I reached out with my magic, to confirm her state. While I trusted Sigmir to take care of me, just that was the problem. She would take care of me and push herself to take care of me, when necessary. And that definition of necessity was the problem, would she feel that increased comfort for me was worth pushing away some discomfort on her part? Certainly, just like I would push my Avatar when it came to helping her, to providing some comfort for her.


    The information I received thanks to my magic was promising but she was not fully recovered. As I scanned her body, I noticed the traces of magic I had noticed earlier in the day, slowly and gently seeping into her flesh, healing the flesh in the process. It was akin to a band-aid keeping a wound closed and clean, only that here, the band-aid wasn¡¯t restricted to surface wounds and stimulated the healing, quite the ingenious solution. It was vastly different from the way I healed, allowing the caster to heal a wound within moments and with far less impact on the body. At the same time, the healing was merely a band-aid and if further wounds accumulated before the magic could be absorbed, there would be problematic consequences.


    While I was studying Sigmir¡¯s body and the magic within, another stream of magic entered my perception, swiftly washing over her body before fading away. Returning my attention to the world around me, I noticed Olivia standing nearby, her hand still glowing with a strange, magical formation.


    ¡°You have healed, but you are not yet hale.¡± Olivia admonished Sigmir, her voice gentle but firm. ¡°You should rest as much as possible, that way, your body will recover faster.¡± she added, before she focused on me and asked. ¡°You agree, don¡¯t you?¡±


    From my own scan, I was aware that she was right, so I nodded, before looking into Sigmir¡¯s eyes for a moment before shifting my position so that my mouth was next to her ear, allowing me to whisper without anyone having a chance to overhear us.


    ¡°Love, she is right. Why don¡¯t you lay down and relax?¡± I suggested, a plan quickly hatching in my mind. Even with the way I had pushed my Avatar the day before, my endurance was enough to allow me to push through, especially if I used my Hallow to rest the next day.


    ¡°I¡¯ll take the first watch.¡± I told the others, before moving off Sigmir¡¯s lap and sitting next to our bedding, after creating a back-rest out of ice. That way, I was able to comfortably sit next to Sigmir¡¯s head, my legs just the right height to act as a pillow. It was something I had seen in romantic movies and maybe, it would be something Sigmir would enjoy.


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    ¡°You know that you don¡¯t really need to keep watch?¡± Olivia asked, looking amused at our antics. ¡°The shelter will keep out anyone with ill intent.¡±


    ¡°So you say.¡± I nodded, ¡°Yet, we still keep a watch out. You said yourself, the barrier can be broken and I¡¯d rather not have everyone be asleep, if something happens.¡± I explained, while giving a glance to the raven who had joined us inside the barrier. Ill intent, another of those wonderfully defined concepts, under the assumption that nobody, ever, could change their mind. What if someone had no ill-intent when crossing the barrier but, when realising that there were five sleeping people, four of whom were female, realised that they wouldn¡¯t mind some company? Or just mundane greed, striking when presented with an opportunity? No, a watch was needed.


    ¡°Do as you like.¡± Olivia nodded, noticing that I wasn¡¯t about to budge on that topic. ¡°But please, if anyone seeks shelter and comes in peace, let them be, like that raven.¡± she added, getting a nod in acceptance in return. Not that I thought that normal wildlife would simply seek shelter within the shield, I was reasonably sure that it was too unnatural and magical for animals to approach.


    With a few quick words between Adra, Rai and myself, we hammered out a rotation for the night and I decided to continue with my plan to give Sigmir a lap-pillow while the others bedded down to sleep.


    Pushing and prodding Sigmir a little, she was quickly convinced to lay down and entrust her head to my lap, nuzzling her face into my stomach. It was a little ticklish but at the same time, it allowed me to stroke her hair and gently massage her scalp, eliciting sounds of comfort from her. It somehow reminded me of one of the animal-videos I had seen a while back, when having lunch in the real-world, of a husky getting petted by their owner, a mental image that somehow amused me. My amusement became even stronger when Ylva plodded over, plopping down next to me and putting her hand below my other hand.


    The similarities in their actions made me grin to myself, considering just how the two of them had adapted to the other. When I shared that observation with Lenore, she was equally amused, even as she told me about Ylva, before we had met. It was interesting that what I had seen of Sigmir in the ten days before meeting our two spirit-companions and what Lenore was telling me about Ylva matched up. It made me wonder, how much of their current similarities came from the mental bond they shared, with thoughts and feelings likely flowing between them, just like they were flowing between Lenore and myself and how much was simply due to their personalities.


    As I was considering that, I began to wonder about Lenore and myself. I had heard some folk-wisdom about spouses becoming alike and pets taking after their owners, often with amusing pictures that made a visual similarity obvious. But if merely living in close proximity could do that, just how far would it go with a bond like the one between Lenore and myself, between Ylva and Sigmir and, to a lesser extent, between Sigmir and myself? And how would those interwoven bonds interact with each other?


    When I brought Lenore¡¯s attention to that idea, I could feel her interest and a beginning fascination. Both of us were interested in the working of the mind, thanks to our mind-magic and similarly, the process of influencing a mind was an interesting one. While engaging in meta-cognition when the cognition was shared to such an extent was difficult, if not impossible, especially with the constant, subconscious stream of thoughts flowing between us, it would be an interesting mental exercise.


    However, not while we were ostensibly on guard-duty, with only a thin, golden soap-bubble cast with incomprehensible magic to protect us from potential threats. And with a potential threat, if an unlikely one, sitting on a nearby rock, preening his feathers in an attempt to impress my feathery friend.


    There was no way to actually speak, not with the others sleeping, but Lenore and I continued to put together the puzzle of our memories, trying to get a better understanding of our avatar-state. It was the great thing about our mental connection, the intimate closeness, the understanding without words or preconceptions getting in the way. Just another thing that made the capsules and Mundus such a magical place.

 Interlude - This is Wild... Magic!

    -Tarrin''s gaming vlog -


    Today: [Road to Purgatory] - This is Wild¡­ Magic!


    On screen, a wolfman is slowly walking through a narrow valley, a bow in his hand, a quiver on his hip and a large wolf pacing along with him. He¡¯s dressed in dark leather-armor, with a grey cloak helping him to blend with the rocks of the surroundings. For a moment, the camera pans around him, showing more people ahead of him, before panning back to show his face. The other people are a curious bunch, their heights ranging from a tiny, barely three feet tall being, to a massive centaur, who¡¯s human head is almost three meters above ground.


    The other two are humanoids as well, the view from their back making it difficult to discern their races, though their size is relatively normal, one of them around two meters, the other about two hands shorter. More details are obscured by cloaks similar to the one worn by the wolfman.


    ¡°Greetings, everyone.¡± the wolfman speaks up, his voice casual, once the panning shot is over. ¡°As I¡¯ve told you in the last vlog, I¡¯m currently in a group with another Traveller and a couple natives, doing a quest in the mountains near Yaksha. Our objective this time is to figure out why the Wind Raptors of the region seem to have changed a bit, their abilities shifted. To do that, we are travelling towards one of their most important breeding grounds, to see what is going on there.¡±


    ¡°As travelling these mountains alone, or even with just Arjuk at my side,¡± he reaches over to pet the wolf next to him for a moment before continuing, ¡°would be a foolish idea, we are accompanied by Jarek, a Centaur Lancer and fellow Traveller, Kegrom, an Orc Fighter who will be acting as our heavy frontline, Glek, a Snowbold who is able to channel the power of the Sun, essentially a fire-mage, if I understand correctly, and Morgeral, a Bearfolk Druid, able to channel the power of the land, allowing him to heal and support us.¡±


    ¡°Well, and obviously, there are Arjuk and I, a Wolf-Beastman ranger and his companion, ready to take on the world. Or at least ready to take on the beasties lurking in these mountains.¡± he stops speaking again, the camera panning to hover behind him, showing where the party is going.


    The valley they are moving through is shaded by the mountains on both sides, producing an eerie twilight until the valley opens up into a bowl-shaped area some distance ahead. The party continues moving, with everyone carefully looking around, making sure that nothing dangerous is lurking on the slopes ahead or flying overhead, Tarrik often turning to check the path behind them. Such a valley, with its steep slopes and narrow passage would be an excellent spot to ambush or attack, if there was anyone so inclined. Thus, every small rock rolling downhill, every whistle of the wind and every small noise is cause for caution, raising everyone¡¯s vigilance to the maximum.


    Luckily for the party, no such unfortunate event happens and they manage to traverse the rocky valley, until they reach the opening ahead. As they approach, it becomes increasingly obvious that there is something going on, the dim light strangely reflecting off something ahead, creating weird, ominous shadows, as if there is a monster, with giant, sharp and jagged teeth ahead, just waiting for them to step into its maw, offering themselves up as food.


    Looking into the valley, the reason for the strange reflection becomes obvious, where the valley behind them, and most of the mountains they had climbed through, have been void of Ice, thanks to the warm summer, the valley before them is obviously different. Across the valley, the deep colour of a glacier, pushing downhill, taking with it rocks and debris, is visible but that Ice is not the cause for the strange atmosphere in the valley. No, that is left for the jagged, almost glowing, remains of winter that linger in the bowl-shaped valley. Frozen spires and forms jut out from the frozen surface, as if carved by an insane artist, indiscriminately wielding their chisel, adding to the earlier impression of danger.


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    ¡°What happened here? Why is it so cold?¡± Jarek, the Centaur, asks, looking at the seemingly chaotic field of Ice before them. Almost subconsciously, he reaches out to wrap his cloak tighter around his human body, suppressing a shiver.


    ¡°I¡¯m not certain, but whatever happened here, I think we know why the Wind Raptors changed.¡± Morgeral replies, her voice a deep, pleasant baritone. ¡°But now we need to figure out what is behind this change. Be cautious, for the unknown might hide danger.¡± she adds, looking around for a moment, before pointing her wooden staff towards the valley, the tip glowing with a vibrant, green light.


    ¡°I don¡¯t like this, I don¡¯t like this¡­¡± the small snowbold mutters, barely loud enough to be audible, just that single phrase, repeating again and again.


    ¡°What do you mean, Gluk?¡± Tarrin asks, speaking softly, to avoid disturbing the Druid¡¯s spellcasting.


    ¡°It¡¯s cold, cold and dark. There¡¯s no sun.¡± the snowbold replies, before continuing is muttering.


    After a few moments, the druid slowly starts moving forward, softly chanting under her breath as she is channelling the spell she is using to gather more information. The party moves along, surrounding the druid in their midst, making sure that nothing can sneak up and attack the concentrating spellcaster.


    But, after they have crossed most of the valley, the situation suddenly changes, when Gluk whirls around, focusing on a distant shard of ice. With an angry yelp, he holds up a dark, black object, that looks almost like a piece of charcoal, and moments later, a beam of fiery radiance lashes out, the cold air hissing from the sudden change.


    ¡°Monster!¡± the small Snowbold curses, the beam intensifying for a moment, shattering the distant Ice and creating an explosion of steam. For a moment, everyone, even the Druid, focuses on that distant spot, before they turn back, making sure nothing is coming at them from another direction.


    ¡°No, no, no¡­¡± the small Snowbold starts whimpering, as the valley seems to turn darker by the second, the steam turning to a fine, suffocating mist.


    ¡°There''s something out there!¡± Kegrom, the oldest and most experienced, of the group shouts, readying his mace and shield to receive whatever monster might lurk in the mist. But it is not him that is attacked first, when a strange, jagged shape comes flying out of the mist, towards Gluk. Luckily, Arjuk, the wolf, noticed and managed to leap at it, snapping at the small creature and battering it aside.


    For a short moment, the alien creature lies on the ground, stunned by the sudden impact, before it starts to skitter away. It looks akin to a weird mix of crab and spider, only made from Ice, glowing with an inner glow of blue and teal.


    ¡°What is that?!¡± Tarrin asks, after taking a short glimpse at the creature, before Gluk shoots out another beam of radiant heat, obliterating the creature with a sharp hiss.


    More steam boils up, shrouding the entire valley in mist and other than the heavy panting of Gluk, all is silent.


    But only for a moment.


    Before any of the party-members can consider the question deeply, let alone answer it, scraping sounds start echoing in the valley, coming from all directions and the mist around them starts to move around, creating a maze of air and shadows. Direction quickly loses its meaning, as the mist makes it impossible to see more than a meter or two, let alone back to the entrance.


    ¡°There¡¯s a cave over there, my spell found it earlier!¡± the Druid shouts, the glow of her staff intensifying, adding a green tint to the dense mist around them.


    ¡°Let us take shelter, this is bad. This is an area of wild magic.¡± she adds, her voice almost panicking. With surprising speed, given her size and the calm, lumbering demeanor she normally has, the druid forges ahead, her light guiding the way. The others, not wanting to get separated in the dense mist, follow along, working together to guard their flanks from the icy crab-spiders that leap out of the mist, trying to tear the warmth from their bodies.


    The cave, a small tunnel leading into the mountain beneath the glacier, gives them a feeling of safety, especially when the frozen horrors outside seem reluctant to enter.


    That is, until a blue screen appears, mirrored for the viewer, telling them where they are.


    <table style="width: 89.9336%">


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 98.032%">Dungeon entered!</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 98.032%">You have entered an instanced Dungeon, the Morainian Cave. Only those of your party can enter this dimension from the outside.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    ¡°This might be worse¡­¡± Tarrin mutters, as the screen fades to black, the video ending.

 Chapter 410

    Part of me wondered if I qualified as an intellectual masochist, or however one wanted to label someone who enjoyed smashing their head against a metaphorical wall, to the point that they did so repeatedly. In the three days since meeting Olivia, I had tried, again and again, to wrap my head around the way she cast her spells, only to fail, again and again. And it wasn¡¯t just that I was failing, failure, by itself, could be a step on the march of progress, just as I had repeatedly failed when experimenting with my runic enchants, until I began to make progress. But to allow for progress, the failure had to be understood or at least you had to understand the point at which an experiment went off the rails, sometimes literally.


    My understanding of divine magic didn¡¯t even get to the point that I could understand my failure, I failed at a more fundamental level. I didn¡¯t even reach the starting-line, a point where I could begin to really fail to understand as I was trying to decipher the workings of Olivia. Both Lenore and I could see the magic and vaguely feel that there was magic afoot, using our magical senses but beyond that, we failed to get even the most basic sensations, it was vexing. How was I supposed to understand something when I couldn¡¯t even begin to measure it?


    Not that Olivia was a help in my quest to understand, she was mostly amused at my antics and questions, answering me with patience and piety, pointing me to her deity for answers. While I hadn¡¯t been pushed to the point of prayer, I was beginning to wonder if there was any point in trying or if I was just trying due to a combination of obstinacy and curiosity. But I had one last arrow in my quiver, before I would focus my attention elsewhere, I was going to ask for advice.


    Not asking the gods, prostrating before Eleutheria to be granted insight, no that was just not my style, instead, I knew about someone who had a lot of knowledge and insight into magical matters, someone who had called me her Disciple. So, why not ask the Grandmother for advice? It was something I had considered even before meeting Olivia, to ask the Grandmother about the bound Titan. Given what she had told me about her age, I had hopes that she would either have direct knowledge or at least could give me the story with fewer steps of retelling, each of which might change the story just a little. Like in a game of telephone, getting closer to the beginning should give a more accurate picture.


    What had stopped me, so far, was the vicinity of the Titan and the Divine Eagle, they scared me. I had no idea what effect they might have on the Astral River or my ability to traverse it in an attempt to connect to the Grandmother but I was not willing to risk things by dipping my toes in too close to them. Now, with a couple of days of distance between us, I was willing to take the risk, even if there was a bit of hesitation. But I wouldn¡¯t let fear of an uncertain outcome defeat me, not in this world of freedom.


    After another long day of walking, I had asked Sigmir to keep an eye on me and we moved away from our camp in order to perform my ritual. While I was reasonably certain that the others wouldn¡¯t interfere with the ritual, I had only used it once before, giving me a very limited sample to work with. That was an overall problem I had regarding the work with my non-runic magical abilities, the reproducibility.


    The best example was the shadow-step, which I now had performed twice and which had been the other big thing that I had worked on that past couple of days, instantaneous movement between two shadows, without even the requirement that there had to be a line-of-sight between the shadows. Not even a continuous connection of darkness, which was something I had realised when looking at the video of the Tiger¡¯s attack on me. The shadow I had teleported out of had been cast by a cloud luckily moving in front of the sun, allowing me to escape into the shadow cast by Sigmir. There was no direct connection between the shadows, no line of shadow or darkness, nothing. Alas, reproduction had eluded me so far.


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    But my purpose that evening was communication with the Grandmother, using the Nexus of Neyto as a beacon to guide me, hopefully letting me meet her again. Finding a good spot, hidden between a couple of rocks, was quite easy and there, I set up my throne. While I wasn¡¯t certain if I actually needed the Throne or the rune I carved into its backrest, it was both a comfortable seat to perform and it gave me peace of mind, two things necessary for the ritual, even if the rune was not.


    Sitting down, I cast my mind out, into the Astral River at first simply letting my mind sit on the edge of the river, feeling my surroundings. I could feel a distant presence, in the direction I thought the bound Titan was, but I couldn¡¯t be certain it wasn¡¯t just my mind creating the sensation because I thought it should be there.


    Pushing away the sensation I focused on my surroundings, taking them in. It was always interesting to immerse myself into the Astral, to study this strange and unique phenomenon. Looking closely, I noticed something I had previously overlooked or maybe it was something I had been unable to see due to my lacking sensitivity. Previously, I had only seen a single path, a single river, but now, I was able to perceive smaller branches leading away from it.


    Letting my mind follow the stream, I realised it would take me towards the presence I had felt earlier, something I wanted to avoid, so I carefully paid attention to my surroundings, noticing a small part of the stream, an inviting part that felt refreshingly cold, that was flowing away from the presence. Latching on to that stream, I let myself be swept up and away, focusing on keeping the connection to my body while taking in my surroundings.


    There was a feeling of velocity, as the small stream I had immersed myself in moved through narrow branches before reaching a larger stream and following along with it. Navigation in the Astral was something I had never tried but I remembered the feeling the Nexus of Neyto had given me and tried to find cling to parts of the river that gave me a similar feeling, now that I was in what felt like a major stream. Sadly, after I managed to mentally anchor myself, I failed to find such a stream, the Astral around me swirling and confusing.


    After trying for some time, I decided to give up for the time being, using the links to my body, to Sigmir and to Lenore to retreat my steps, forcibly making my way against the stream, until I managed to return to reality.


    As almost always, when dealing with the Astral, the time spent within was far different from my perception of time within, what had felt like hours upon hours of magical sensing had actually only been about an hour of actual time. Even then, my mind was exhausted, to the point that I simply remained still, my eyes closed, getting accustomed to my body again.


    Sitting there, I began to wonder, why had this attempt been that much harder? What had changed?


    The obvious answer was the number of branches I had to follow, the last time, I had instantly found a major stream that was flowing towards the Nexus, but now, not so much. Which meant that even in the Astral distance might matter, with major streams essentially functioning as land-marks. Major streams, like what I thought was powering the ancient road, supplying it with the power it needed to keep itself intact and usable, while strengthening the people traversing on it.


    As I thought about it, it began to feel right. Similarly, as I considered the existence of such major flows, I remembered the smaller flows I had noticed earlier, which made me begin to wonder. How could a single river, if I could take the metaphor of the Astral River that far, supply magic, or at least Astral Power, to every point of the world? At least every part I had seen thus far and heard about? Looking into myself and at the flow of Astral Power within my body, I realised the answer, at least a possible one. The Astral Power within my body moved with my blood, following major arteries and veins, getting distributed through capillaries into every part of my body. A few, large vessels that branched out to distribute power to every part of the whole?


    I doubted that the comparison would hold true on every level, but for now, it looked adequate.


    With a shake of my head, I stood, slowly walking over to Sigmir, shattering my Throne as I went. For the day, I was done with difficult magic, my consultation with the Grandmother would have to wait.

 Chapter 411

    ¡°Somehow, it¡¯s almost like coming home.¡± I chuckled, making my way down the hill, towards the ancient, imperial road. Travelling through the rough terrain of the mountains, with unpredictable, suddenly changing weather, unstable footing and overall sparse vegetation had been more of a challenge and a lot more of a hassle than I had thought, when we had been leaving the Bright Hollow Orcs. To say nothing of the predators roaming the mountains, many of them thinking that a group of humanoids, no matter their power, would be an easier dinner than the canny mountain-goats who had managed to survive, even thrive, in these harsh conditions.


    Over the days we had been travelling together, Olivia had demonstrated her worth over and over, even with her insistence that she was unable to use offensive magic. As she put it, her Lady didn¡¯t allow to force her, Olivia¡¯s, will onto others, even if they attacked her. Instead, she was granted abilities to quickly escape and shield herself from danger. Curiously, she was allowed to help those travelling with her, to ward danger away from them, as they defended themselves, which, in turn, allowed me to focus on using my frozen shuttles and a combination of Blood-, Darkness- and Death-Magic to hinder animals attacking us.


    However Olivia truly shone outside of combat, when it came to finding a good path, to spot foes lying in wait or trying to sneak up on us and, at the end of the day, finding a good spot to make camp. That magical dome-shield she used to ward of the weather had allowed us to spend more than one night in its dry comfort, even if I had decided to demonstrate that I could create shelter, too, and set up a hut made from Ice one night. It was mostly to show that I had the ability and I think each of my companions preferred Olivia¡¯s dome of comfort but then, it was quite literally magic created to provide shelter for a comfortable rest.


    She even had a couple of spells that could be used to aid in navigation, from something simple, like finding out where North was, to more complicated things, like a spell that essentially gave her a magical GPS, only without the accurate maps. However, for Olivia who had been to many places, the lack of accurate maps wasn¡¯t too bad, as she had noted the positions of different places on her maps, allowing her to correlate the position she learned using her magic.


    Curiously, those spells were what I thought would be easiest to replicate, simply due to my increasing familiarity with the Astral River. If I somehow managed to improve my ability to navigate that realm, it should allow me to compare my position in the Astral River with previously visited places, giving me my accurate position within the world of Mundus, even allowing me to compare my position with other places that I could find within the Astral. But, to get to that point, a lot of research, learning and effort was needed, so it was placed on my ever-growing to-do list, with an asterisk that said to leave if for later.


    ¡°I can relate.¡± Olivia responded, carefully following behind, her eyes roaming across the hillside. Some distance down the road was a group of travellers, keeping a close eye on us, likely fearful that we were bandits of some sort.


    ¡°These roads, they are truly a marvel. I¡¯ve spent more days on them than in any other place.¡± Olivia continued, her tone pensive.


    ¡°Did you know, these roads, they exist all over the world, or at least in as many places as I¡¯ve been to. Built by the same people, built by the same design, enduring even long after their builders have long since passed. A true monument of mortal ambition.¡± she continued, sounding a little more upbeat.


    ¡°I¡¯ve heard tales about them, and their builders. It makes one humble, to know that a civilisation once had the means to create something grand like this. It makes you wonder, how much further could this world be, if not for the Severing?¡± Adra asked, as she looked across the hillside. At that, I had to smile to myself, knowing that while Adra had tremendous respect for their feat she wasn¡¯t too happy about the roads themselves. There was a part within her that enjoyed the wild nature, to the point that she had eschewed the ancient roads on her original way north, causing her to take many a month more than she¡¯d have needed if she had used the roads. And moved with a purpose, instead of slowly wandering, trying to make sense of her own feelings and her place in the world.


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    Olivia stopped for a moment, to respond to Adra¡¯s question.


    ¡°Who knows? Maybe the Shattering was necessary, despite the scars it left on the world. How could we, mere mortals, grasp the fate of the world, when we can¡¯t even understand and master our own?¡±


    ¡°If there even is such a thing as fate.¡± I replied, just before a small rock slid out beneath my foot, forcing me to focus on my footing, instead of philosophical debate.


    ¡°It doesn¡¯t matter what you want to call it, Fate, Destiny or Divine Guidance, what I mean when talking about the fate of the world is the course the whole world takes and how large and small actions can change that course. Who knows what would have happened if the Sunderer never had been born? Or if he had died or been killed, long before he became the one now known as the Sunderer? The world¡¯s fate would have changed but who can say if it would have changed for the better? That is a feat that might even be beyond the gods themselves, nevermind us poor mortals.¡± Olivia explained what she meant, causing me to nod.


    Over the course of our conversation, we had managed to make our way down, to the ancient road, letting its potent magic wash away some of our fatigue. Once again, I felt humbled at the complexity, the sheer effort that must have gone into the design of the magic beneath me. It was something that couldn¡¯t be described as genius, it was more, it was the concentrated effort of hundreds of scholars and millions of workers, all striving for a common goal.


    ¡°And west we go.¡± Sigmir said, once she was next to me. Looking at her, I noticed that her line of sight wasn¡¯t towards the west, but back, to the east, the direction in which her home was, somewhere far beyond the horizon. For months, we had been moving further and further away from the place she had once called home, even if the place she¡¯d called home was no longer there. Looking at the longing in her eyes, I made a mental note to try cheering her up later, to remind her that I was with her.


    ¡°We should reach Neamov the day after tomorrow, unless something unexpected happens.¡± Olivia stated, after looking around a little and casting one of the spells she used to assist in navigation.


    ¡°Good to know.¡± I replied, as we started moving down the road, our steps noticeably lighter. It was a combination of the even road-surface and the magic that permeated through us, washing away our fatigue. Truly, a marvel.


    ¡°Can you tell me about Neamov again?¡± I asked Olivia, as we were walking. Now, on the road, I had a feeling that the potential danger had changed, from wild animals in search of a slow meal to bandits, hoping to get a drop on us. But considering that we were a relatively small group, all more or less well armed and armoured, I thought that most bandits would pass on attacking us. Unless they thought we were using magic bags to carry vast amounts of expensive goods or something along those lines.


    ¡°Certainly. Sadly, I¡¯ve not seen all of it myself, some of the parts are restricted, especially the deeper parts, but I¡¯ve heard tales.¡±


    In response to my question, Olivia began to describe Neamov again, a town that was split in two. One half seemed to be above ground, outside the mountains, the other side built into the mountains around us. How very dwarf.


    It reminded me of the way that the Ashenforge-dwarves had built their homes into the mountainside, the above-ground merely a decoy and entrance to their defensive network, making me wonder how the dwarves of Neamov had gone about things.


    Just listening to Olivia describe the different parts of the city, the merchants district, the craftsman district, the commons, where the majority of locals lived and the nobles district, deep within the mountains. It made me look forward to seeing a true city of Mundus, on a scale that should even dwarf Kolyug.

 Chapter 412

    ¡°I see, you made progress.¡± the Grandmother greeted me, a kind smile on her face, looking very much like the kindly Grandmother she was named after. Not the elder power that I thought her to be.


    Smiling back, or at least trying to, I nodded. The shell of Astral Power I had constructed to communicate was more sophisticated than the stick-figure I had used the last time. Compared to last time, I had added more details, even incorporated Blood-Astral-Power into the shell, in a way that simulated blood vessels in a body, with a more concrete shell of Ice around it. My hair was still pure Darkness, as were some of my facial features. Just keeping everything roughly in the shape I wanted it to be was difficult, an exercise in concentration that I knew I would soon fail but without effort, I wouldn¡¯t be able to move forward.


    It also demonstrated just how far the Grandmother was above me, to be able to create and control a shell that looked exactly as her real form, it was incredible attention to detail, coupled with nigh-perfect control over her magic.


    ¡°Thank you.¡± I replied, carefully controlling my form, to perform a curtsey, causing her to chuckle in amusement. ¡°However, I doubt that I would be able to control this shell sufficiently, while paying the necessary attention to you, so please, excuse me.¡± I added, before vastly reducing the amount of pseudo blood vessels and simplifying some of the anatomical details I had added. It reduced the stress on my mind by an order of magnitude, to the point that I thought I¡¯d be able to keep it going, without completely reducing myself to a simple stick-figure.


    ¡°Now, I doubt you projected your mind here, just because of my tea and cookies. Why don¡¯t you have a seat and tell me about it?¡± she asked, waving her hand in the process. That simple handwave, without any magic I was able to detect, just drove home the difference between us. The simple Ice-platform I had created as a mental anchor for myself within the Astral was changed, creating what looked like a simple, if comfortable living-room in the process. There were even windows, through which I could vaguely see a couple of trees. I had a long, long way to go, if I wanted to reach her level of mastery.


    ¡°Oh, I don¡¯t know, the tea you allowed me to taste the last time, it was exquisite.¡± I responded with a smile as I sat down.


    ¡°Alas, it is not the reason for my visit, that is true.¡± I continued, trying to present a wry smile, as much as it was possible with my limited shell. ¡°No, I¡¯m here because you are the most knowledgeable being I know of, outside the Gods. And I somehow doubt that any of them would sit down with me, let alone serve tea and cookies.¡±


    ¡°That would be a miracle of a very different kind, than their usual work.¡± the Grandmother admitted, chuckling as she nodded, before gesturing for me to continue.


    ¡°A few days ago, my companions and I approached a mountain-valley, shrouded in constant mist and entered it. We¡¯d been told that there is a place of power within, it was even the reward for a Quest that had been confirmed with the system, so we thought that caution would and vigilance would be sufficient to keep us reasonably safe.¡± I could see the Grandmother¡¯s amusement on her face, even as I continued on.


    ¡°I¡¯m not sure if we are safe due to our power, our vigilance, sheer, dumb luck or because there was never any danger in the first place. I have the unpleasant feeling it is due to a combination of the last two, but I cannot be certain.¡± I admitted, part of me still scared of just the memory, the powerful image of the bound titan and its winged tormentor, seared into my mind.


    ¡°Can you tell me the story of the Titan, Prometheus, and the reasons for their captivity and punishment?¡± I finally asked the question that brought me here. There was a long moment of silence, stretching out as the Grandmother looked, for the first time since I¡¯d known her, a little lost, her normally unshakable composure cracking, if only a little.


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    ¡°The story, you say. I could tell you a dozen versions of that story, some of them closer, some of them further from the truth than whatever you may have heard so far. I could even tell you the truth, to the best of my knowledge, but there are times, where ignorance is indeed a bliss and knowledge can be harmful, to the one in the know.¡± the Grandmother explained, and for maybe the first time, her age was showing, not in the dignified way of an elder being, with powers and knowledge far beyond mortals, such as myself, but in a tired, exhausted way of someone who had been living far too long and seen far too much. Instead of trying to answer her, I simply waited, letting her continue with her thoughts, while I enjoyed the tea she had created.


    ¡°But we can discuss some of it, some of the things that will not see me harmed for telling you, or you harmed for hearing about it.¡± she decided after a few moments, slipping back into her lecture mode.


    ¡°You are already aware of the way the Gods normally dispose of those too powerful to just kill, by sealing them in Soul Prisons, letting time slowly grind away their soul and will, until those sealed are merely broken husks of themselves, fading away for eons, if they ever re-emerge again.¡± she explained, her eyes flickering to my middle, where I¡¯d normally carry my magical bag. With just such a Soul Prison within it.


    ¡°Why don¡¯t you try telling me why they didn¡¯t do so in this case.¡± She challenged me, turning the story into a lesson.


    ¡°One option I could see is that, for some reason, they weren¡¯t able to do so in that case. Maybe something about the Titan that prevented them from putting their soul into a prison. I know far too little to even estimate the truth of that idea, but I think it would be a possibility.¡± I began, missing Lenore¡¯s presence, who would normally be my go-to partner to bounce ideas off.


    ¡°But if that was the case, why would they put them into a relatively easy to reach place? While my companions and I have a modicum of power, more than many, we are far from being truly powerful, just as the difference between us demonstrates.¡± I continued, gesturing at the difference between our shells for a moment.


    ¡°Why not put him in some out-of-the-way dungeon, far below ground, hidden and guarded by powerful monsters that tear apart whatever tries to come near?¡± Thinking about it, I realised that there should be a bit of truth to my earlier idea, about our survival being mostly due to never having been in danger in the first place. We had survived, because we had never been in danger, because the eagle was not supposed to kill those that witnessed the titan.


    ¡°An object lesson?¡± I wondered, the idea felt strangely correct.


    ¡°Question, or statement?¡± The Grandmother asked, amused, continuing to speak, without letting me answer.


    ¡°But you are right. Nobody is useless, they can always serve as an example to others, you know? In this case, the Titan serves to show that nobody should rebel against the gods, or they will suffer for all eternity. And what good would an object lesson be, if nobody could ever learn from it?¡± she explained, making me nod in agreement. It also meant that there really hadn¡¯t been any danger, not unless we actively attacked. Somehow, that annoyed me, the treatment as a child, to be educated by her betters.


    ¡°Even this could be called an extension of that lesson. You, who is still weak and of little consequence, reminds me why I¡¯m living my life in Neyto, not trying to change the world to something that might suit me a little better. With each re-telling of the story, the Gods cement their superiority, driving it home just a little deeper.¡± the Grandmother continued, driving home a point of her own.


    ¡°I will not speak of it again, not unless or until I have the power to do something about it.¡± I ground out, annoyed as I realised the truth of her statement. Not every preacher needed to worship in the Gods, fearing them and spreading that fear might just be as useful to them, as worship was. There was a hard-to-read smile on the Grandmother¡¯s face, one that made me wonder if she approved or not.


    ¡°Would you tell me a little more about the Gods and their dealings? We recently met a Cleric of Eleutheria and somehow, she managed to create more questions than she could actually answer.¡± I asked, changing the topic a little, hoping to get a little more lesson-time from the Grandmother.

 Chapter 413

    Once again, talking to the Grandmother left me with a profound feeling of satisfaction, even if my body and mind were completely exhausted, the last of my energy used to return to my body. But I had learned some things, especially regarding Divine Magic. Unsurprisingly, the Grandmother had more insights into the way divine spellcasters used their powers, compared to myself. She was even willing to share some of them, especially regarding the insight an average cleric had into their spells, which apparently was none.


    Just as Olivia had said, they didn¡¯t need to understand what they were doing, they weren¡¯t even doing anything, not really. According to the Grandmother, divine Spellcasters simply had their spells, which amounted to a simple macro that called up their deities automatic spell-casting service, ordering a large blessing, with fries on the side. It was a magical spell-delivery service, only without the need for some poor sod in their car driving around the food you ordered. That allowed divine spellcasters to use spells that were vastly complex and complicated, incorporating magical concepts far beyond their level and accomplishing feats that boggled belief. At the end of the day, you didn¡¯t need to know how to cook a meal, if you had the delivery-service on speed-dial.


    Obviously, there was a massive flip-side to that, they had what their deity deigned to give them, spells that fit their deities domains and their own rank within the organisation, with little in the way of changing what they were doing. Of course, to even attempt to change magic that you had no understanding of was a foolish endeavor unless you were careful and had a solid plan. I was an excellent example of that, my foolish endeavors hadn¡¯t managed to kill me thus far, but there had been more than one close call. And I tried to expand on previous experiments, at least most of the time.


    Somehow, the explanation made divine spellcasting feel the furthest from what I was doing, my own magic based on my understanding and instinct, amusingly, the Grandmother advised me to keep trying to study divine spells, not actively but by observation. Even understanding a tiny part of it might open up a new avenue of research, with many new paths down that road. At the same time, she cautioned me that there were deities that took a dim view on mortals trying to pry into their secrets, with some rather unpleasant punishments if a mortal was too nosy. Not necessarily ¡®eagle-eternally-eating-your-liver¡¯ unpleasant, but unpleasant enough. I had no desire to trade in my two legs for six or eight, depending on the source,and I did my weaving with magic, not thread. No, thank you very much.


    Thinking about the Grandmother and incomprehensible magic made me consider something else, namely her form. The magical shell she had created in the Nexus had been purely spun from Astral Power, yet it had looked just like the form I had seen in Neyto, at least as far as my senses could tell me. There was the possibility that my method of traversing the Astral River had skewed my perspective, it wasn¡¯t like my actual eyes had travelled through the Astral, only my mind or my soul or something along those lines. As of yet, I had no complete understanding of the mechanics regarding Astral Travel, but that wasn¡¯t the important consideration at this point. It was interesting, and something to be added to the ever-growing list of things to research, but not near the top.


    But the shape the Grandmother had taken, it made me wonder. Had I ever seen her real shape or had what she had shown us in Neyto been a similarly constructed, magical shell? Somehow, I doubted that I would be able to tell, not unless the Grandmother allowed it. But if that had only been a magical shell, what might her real form look like? It made me wonder.


    If I was correct, it would be an excellent defense, a shell that was openly visible, with strong but not impossible to beat defenses, a decoy to take attacks and act while the true body was hidden somewhere, likely nearby. Maybe even hidden within the Barrow Den, or certainly somewhere close enough to use both the power of the Nexus and the concentrated power of Death lingering in that place.


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    It made me wonder, could I accomplish a similar, if far simpler, feat, namely to use simple blobs of shadow to improve my concealment in combat. Practically, I could cloak myself in Shadow but unless I carefully made sure that the shadows blended with the surroundings, which was difficult and required a great deal of concentration, that would simply mean that attackers would have to aim for the thick blob of shadows. It helped, defensively, but it wasn¡¯t nearly as effective as I would like, especially as it was purely based on sight.


    But what if I didn¡¯t try to blend my cloak into the surroundings, instead simply creating a few, three or four, additional blobs of shadow, shaped just like the one around me, moving them around the battlefield akin to a shell-game? Again, not even trying to create a solid defense but simply making attacks difficult by misdirection and concealment? Somehow, that felt a lot more suitable to both my power-set and my character. That idea, too, went onto my list of things to try out, only this one far closer to the top, as I had a feeling it would be a simple modification of current abilities.


    Finally, once I had finished my deliberations and mentally digested the lesson I had learned from the Grandmother, I opened my eyes and looked over to Sigmir, who was guarding nearby.


    ¡°Thank you, for keeping an eye on me.¡± I told her, letting a tired smile show on my face.


    ¡°Always. Did you learn something new?¡± she asked, returning my smile.


    ¡°Less than I would have liked but enough to understand. Why don¡¯t you sit down and we talk about it?¡± I replied, reaching for my magic to widen the throne I was sitting on, turning it into something between a love-seat and a sofa.


    Once Sigmir was next to me, I snuggled up to her, relaxing against her side. If there was one thing that made magical furniture awesome, it would be the ability to seamlessly modify it, to make even the strangest and most awkward seating-arrangements comfortable. Before I began to speak, I created two mugs out of ice, filling one with simple water by creating tiny ice-particles, small enough to instantly melt into water, the other with Liquid Moonlight. Somehow, drinking Liquid Moonlight always managed to make me calm, keeping me collected and comfortable.


    I began telling Sigmir about the Grandmother¡¯s refusal to tell me in detail about the bound Titan and the conclusions I was drawing from her words. If the Gods needed to set up a visible reminder of their power, especially one so gruesome, didn¡¯t that make them somewhat insecure? It made me think that there was a distinct lack of compassion, but more than that, it made me wonder about something else.


    What about the Gods of Asgard? My current assumption was that they were as real as the Gods of Olympus, with similar powers and abilities, but if that was the case, why would the Gods of Olympus leave an enemy in such an easy to access place? Why hadn¡¯t the Gods of Asgard made an effort to release the bound Titan, simply to give the Gods of Olympus an headache? There had to be reasons, they could be lazy, written as pre-conditions into the World of Mundus by a different Pantheon, one that resided in an office-building on Earth, or there could be actual reasons, woven into the fabric of this world. While I didn¡¯t tell Sigmir in detail about those musings, I asked her about her opinion, why the Gods of Asgard hadn¡¯t helped a bound Titan.


    Her answer, while making sense, also opened up a lot more questions. She simply thought that the Gods of Asgard had no desire to help a bound Giant, which is what she called the Titan. A Giant. For her, to immediately make that connection, it made me wonder if Titans and Giants actually were the same in this world, or if Sigmir simply took a ¡®large, humanoid monster¡¯ to be a Giant, or something along those lines.


    If there was a connection, I could see why the Gods of Asgard wouldn¡¯t help one of their enemies, but it opened up even more questions. Wasn¡¯t there a saying about the enemy of your enemy being your friend? Or at least that the enemy of your enemy was your enemy¡¯s enemy and you¡¯d use that enemy to defeat your enemy? Far too much animosity in that one, but that was the way of the world.


    The greek Titans and the norse Giants, myths similar enough that there most likely had been a certain amount of cultural drift and appropriation over the centuries, but what did that mean for a world where those drifting myths were supposed to be true? At least partially? And what did that mean for the Deities in the two Pantheons, who had undergone the same drift?


    I didn¡¯t know and somehow, I wasn¡¯t sure if I could ask any of the natives.

 Chapter 414

    It was already late in the night, just after midnight, when Sigmir and I returned to the area where we had made camp earlier in the night. Ylva, who had stayed behind with the others, raised her head as we approached and I noticed that she was sharing guard-duty with Olivia. Over the last week, that had become something of a habit, to have Olivia take a guard-shift but, as there was that lingering bit of distrust in my mind, I had quietly asked Lenore and Ylva to share the shift with her, just in case. In this case, Olivia had clearly noticed our approach, giving us a wave of acknowledgement, before looking at our surroundings again.


    ¡°Why don¡¯t you sleep first, I¡¯ll stay awake until my watch starts.¡± I quietly told Sigmir, in order to not disturb the others.


    ¡°And where did you sneak off to?¡± Olivia asked, once we were near the center of our camp, where she was sitting on a rock. There was some amusement in her tone, coupled with a bit of teasing but given the relationship between Sigmir and I, there was nothing for her to tease us about.


    ¡°Why, are you that interested in what a pair of lovers get up to when nobody is looking?¡± I asked, just as quietly and with as much suggestive undertone I could put into my voice. If she wanted to tease me, she needed something other than my relationship with Sigmir.


    ¡°Mhm, if I was twenty years younger, I might ask to join you alas, time is a cruel mistress.¡± she replied with an amused snort.


    ¡°You know, there is an island full of people like the two of you, in the ocean between Aretia and Daiea.¡± she added, still amused, before launching into yet another of the stories she had told me about her travels.


    This one was, obviously, about a visit on that Island, called Sobel by the locals, and their curious customs. The Amazons, for that was what the people of Sobel called themselves, seemed to be an old tribe, not quite humans, not quite like the Giantbloods of the north but something in between. Their myths spoke of a legendary heroine who had managed to bed a Titan and ever since then, they had passed on their strength from mother to daughter. In addition, they didn¡¯t quite worship the Olympian Gods, at least not like everyone else.


    Normally, Zeus was obviously considered their most important deity and everyone but those who dedicated themselves to a single deity, like Olivia, worshipped him as King of Gods, leader of the Pantheon and all that. For the Amazons, that was different, as they all dedicated themselves to a few Goddesses, mostly Artemis, Aphrodite and Eleutheria, with Zeus and the Pantheon a minor part of their worship. There were a few, interesting anecdotes regarding their rituals, especially about the time when the locals had realised that Olivia, who was apparently far from their ideal figure of Authority, was a dedicated Cleric of Eleutheria and blessed with power from the Lady.


    But her stories didn¡¯t go into too much detail regarding the society of the Amazons, which sounded headache-inducing complicated, instead she focused on what she deemed more interesting. Namely, tales of city-wide orgies, where every woman had fun with all the other ladies. Males, curiously the weaker sex, were essentially forbidden from participating and were mostly used to breed, if they had the preferred characteristics. One of the things she mentioned about their politics was that the Temple of Aphrodite had an exhaustive list of bloodlines, to make sure that they kept enough male breeding stock to prevent trouble due to breeding between too close relatives.


    While I personally doubted the scale of the orgies she described, she was grinning far too hard at my embarrassment to be taken seriously, the rest was horrifying enough to give me pause. In that pause, I began to wonder just how a society that worshipped a Goddess of Freedom was so repressive, with one sex keeping the other in what almost amounted to slavery. Luckily, the island was far enough off our path that we would have to utterly lose our way to end up there, meaning I didn¡¯t have to worry about some busty amazon trying to move in on me or Sigmir. Such a thing would be annoying, just the idea of sharing Sigmir was enough to make me consider murder.


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    Shaking my head once more, I decided to send Olivia off to bed and continue to keep watch on my own. She had no problem with that and soon, I was sitting alone in the darkness, making sure that nothing was trying to use the cover of night to attack.


    With nothing better to do, I decided to start experimenting with my latest idea, at least on a small scale. There was more than enough darkness around me, the mountains around me and clouds above me keeping out what little light there was.


    Creating a cloak of darkness to blend into the darkness around me was almost laughably easy but that was to be expected. It would be a lot more difficult, if not outright impossible, to achieve the same result during the day, let alone while in bright sunlight. Maybe, if I managed to push my darkness-magic a lot further and focused a lot of time and energy into the direction of shadows and the twilight-aspect of it, as that seemed to be the direction to interfere with Light the most. In a way, that part of Darkness-Magic was interesting, as it likely shared quite a few properties with Light-Magic, just coming from the other side. If Light and Dark were sides of the same coin, the twilight-aspect was the edge of the coin.


    As I realised where those thoughts would lead, away from my path of pure darkness, trying to find the ultimate expression of the element of Darkness, I shook off those ideas. Certainly, they were interesting and might be something worth pursuing, but not for now. For now, I would have to focus on that simple idea I had earlier, to simply use a shell-game to keep people guessing. To accomplish that, real concealment wasn¡¯t needed, only enough concealment to make it impossible to spot which of a number of equal looking shadows was concealing me.


    Closing my eyes for a moment, I created two additional blobs of shadow, trying to make them look just like the cloak of darkness around me. Sadly, Lenore was already asleep, or I might have asked her to give me a second opinion on their looks. Instead, I decided to go into the other direction first, to try moving them around. My idea was that, as long as I kept moving and shuffling the shadows, even when I was attacking, it would be difficult to keep track of the right shadow in the heat of combat. That difficulty could be increased even more if Lenore and I somehow managed to have her stay within one of the shadows, acting as a secondary point of origin for my spells but it would mean giving up on the additional Astral Power.


    Moving the shadows around was relatively easy, as long as I kept the mental processes that I used to move around my frozen shuttles in mind. That way, I wasn¡¯t accidentally moving them as fast as they actually could move, draining a lot of Astral Power in the process. The biggest mental hurdle was to keep myself from drifting and falling into a pattern. There was always a temptation to let my mind wander, while the clouds of shadow orbited around me. In combat, that would make the whole exercise pointless, it only worked if I managed to conceal which was the cloak and which the clouds.


    Finally, after I had started to get my two clouds of darkness to move around me in an independent manner, without quickly falling into the trap of forming a pattern, I realised that I had been keeping watch for almost half the night and it was already time to wake one of the others, either Rai or Adra. Normally, Rai would have had the watch after me but thanks to my intense focus on keeping watch, nothing to do with the magic experimentation, the time to wake him had long passed.


    Luckily, nothing bad had happened while I had been lost in my own mind. With that thought, I carefully moved to wake Adra, making sure that she was fully awake and aware that she had the last watch of the night, before moving over to Sigmir and making myself comfortable in her embrace. According to Olivia, we would make it to Neamov soon, just another day and a half of travelling. I couldn¡¯t wait to see the town she had described in glowing tones, making it sound like a major metropolis. But first, I had to sleep or my mind would be completely mush during the coming day.

 Chapter 415

    I let out a long, drawn-out yawn as I climbed out of the capsule. On Mundus, I had slept for about three hours before moving into my Hallow, using the fact that Lenore could move with the others to get a few things done outside the game. That was a mechanic I felt should be easier accessible, a way to keep a party together while one of them had to log out. Otherwise, most people would be almost unable to travel longer distances, simply due to the time involved. I had put my life essentially on hold for the Beta, in an attempt to get in front of a new wave of content-creators, but the vast majority of players wouldn¡¯t be able to spend all day in a capsule and it would be seriously detrimental to the players¡¯ mental health to do so.


    On the other hand, if Road to Purgatory was kept in its current state, it might give way to a different way to play the game. Most people were playing together with people they knew from before or they started to play together and kept playing together by random chance or due to compatible personalities but that wouldn¡¯t quite work, unless people had the same gaming schedule and were willing to actively accommodate each other.


    What might work would be using something akin to the Adventurer¡¯s Guild, with people congregating in certain towns, places like Yaksha or even Yari, far from civilisation, to form short-term groups to play together for a few hours before they had to log out again. Sadly, that would pretty much mean that Traveller communities would form locally and most people would remain in such a local area, without actually travelling the world of Mundus, which would be a damned shame.


    On the other hand, just the journey we had undertaken had taken us almost a year of ingame-time, granted we hadn¡¯t purposefully moved towards a destination some of the time but for quite a bit of time we had. Unless Pantheon Entertainment wanted players to focus on the Road-part of the title, I felt that they should add something to make travel more convenient, not necessarily faster but something that allowed a group of people to travel together, even if their schedule wasn¡¯t in alignment.  Even if faster travel wouldn''t necessarily be bad. It would certainly cut down on the endless trudging through the expansive forests of Mundus.


    A little lost in thought, I stood near the window to look out, only to be disappointed. The normally enjoyable sight, looking out across the neighborhood was covered in dense, low-hanging clouds with rain making the visibility even worse. Just standing there and looking at the world made me feel cold, despite my apartment being comfortably warm. After a moment, I wanted to slap my forehead as I realised something entirely different, the answer to a question I hadn¡¯t asked the night before when I had considered ways to improve my ability to fight in Mundus, how to use shadow-decoys during the day and in bright sunlight.


    I had simply discarded the idea of actually hiding while in bright sunlight, had deemed it too far off my current path of magic and discarded the idea. But why would I need to? Just looking out into the dreary sky made me realise a different way, if hiding in bright light was impossible, the idea shouldn¡¯t be to push my magic to make it possible, spending valuable time and a lot of effort on the idea, instead, why not change the bright sunlight?


    Sure, it would require a stupendous amount of Astral Power to create a large zone of darkness, though it would be possible, and I would have to constantly maintain it, eating up even more Astral Power. But that was only if I was limited to Darkness, which I was not. How often had I used mist to conceal, to confuse my enemies and even harm them directly? Creating a dense cloud of mist to cover me and an area around me, combine it with some concealment magic directly applied to me, maybe add some decoys, similar to the shadows I had began to train during the night, just made out of mist, and I should be able to keep most enemies at bay. The dull, white clothes I had been given by the dwarves would further allow me to blend into the mist, hiding me from sight. In addition to that, I should be able to push the concealment-effect to dampen sound and mask smells, just in case an enemy was using those, maybe even work together with Lenore to use Wind-Magic to hide the traces I created by moving through the wind. There were quite a few options and they seemed to line up quite well with the rest of my magic, meaning I wouldn¡¯t need to go too far off my current path to explore them.


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    While such mist would also affect me, my link to the Astral Power within it should allow me to keep some level of awareness and orientation, likely more than enough to use my frozen shuttles to harass and slowly wear an enemy down.


    Sadly, such a mist would be only usable if I fought alone, as it would hinder the rest of my group, opening up the way for mistakes and injury. But as an ace in the hole when fighting alone or as a trick if we ever got caught in an encounter we couldn¡¯t win, such mist could act as a smoke-screen to cover our escape, with me leading the others to safety. Just for that, it would be a worthwhile thing to figure out and put into my mental toolbox.


    With a grin on my face, I stepped away from the window and walked into my kitchen, looking for breakfast. The grin vanished as soon as I opened my fridge, realising that I¡¯d have to go shopping soon, or I would have to go hungry. Another look through the window made me shiver once more, while my Avatar Morgana didn¡¯t mind the cold, I had absolutely no desire to go out into the rain.


    A quick check on my phone told me that the rain shouldn¡¯t last too long, cementing the decision to delay at least for a bit. For a moment, I considered hopping back into the capsule but decided against it. Instead, I took a leisurely shower, enjoying the hot water as long as possible before retreating onto my couch and checking the forum on my tablet.


    While the usual discussions were going on, I realised that Pantheon had replied to my report about the mist that prevented me from accessing the recording of the Titan¡¯s valley. As I had expected, they confirmed that it wasn¡¯t a bug but a feature, congratulating me for discovering one of the important locations of Mundus. Just that, the acknowledgement of my achievement, brought a smile to my face. It wasn¡¯t much but it hopefully was a step on the way to keep Sigmir by my side, when I returned to Mundus. It might require some sort of sacrifice, maybe some sort of special class or some other disadvantage to balance the advantage having her next to me would bring but I would gladly pay that price when the time came.


    A good two hours later, after I had almost given up on waiting, the rain was merely a drizzle and I quickly put on a coat and went out. Shopping was as disagreeable as always, too many people, too little order but I persevered, as I always did. While I could have my groceries delivered, I preferred to inspect the vegetables and fruits myself, before buying them.


    Soon, I was back out, carrying my shopping and my face fell as soon as I realised what the strange noise I had heard inside was. Instead of raining, it was now hailing, pea-sized corns of ice, covering the surrounding area. For a minute, I stood beneath the awning, hoping that it would stop but as I looked at the clouds, I didn¡¯t think it would.


    Channelling my inner Morgana, as much as I could, I began speed-walking back home, letting the hail beat against my face. Why couldn¡¯t I have the abilities my Avatar had on Mundus here on Earth, I would be able to simply part the hail with barely a flicker of magical effort. I might even be able to simply make it stop, it would require more effort, maybe even Lenore and her Wind-Magic but I certainly wouldn¡¯t have to freeze my face off.


    By the time I was home, I was wet, shivering and miserable due to the cold wind. Before even putting my food away, I was stripped naked and back under my shower, wishing for the Ice-Resistance of Morgana.


    Once I was warmed up and dry, I finished my chores and was able to return to Mundus in good conscience, for an exciting day of walking, or rather, for a day of sleeping within my Hallow before we hopefully would get to Neamov on the next day.

 Chapter 416

    Neamov was impressive, there were no two ways about it. In a certain way, it was the most fantastic of the cities I had visited thus far. While it lacked the mystical element of the crystal-forest surrounding Neyto and the sea-shell ambience of Yugan, the Naga-Town Sigmir and I had visited a long time ago, it had something else that made it stick out.


    Scale.


    Size on a scale that made even Kolyug, with its sizable walls, look like a village, especially when seen from the air. Lenore provided me an aerial view, allowing me to appreciate the dwarven mountain-fortress in a way us landbound creatures simply couldn¡¯t. It also allowed me to get a good idea about the lay-out of the city and it¡¯s total size. The dwarves had built a semi-circle of walls around a central point, right next to sheer cliff-side that provided protection in one direction. On top of the cliff, hundreds of meters above, I could see the outline of fortifications standing out against the sky above, likely to make sure nobody had any ideas of dropping rocks into their city.


    And what a city it was. Even from above, it was difficult to get an accurate idea of the size, but if I had to put down a number, I would have said that the radius of the outer walls was about two kilometers, making it a truly massive city. Within those walls, I could see different districts, distinct due to the colour of the rooftops but even trying to guess what they were was futile. In the middle of it all was the most interesting part, a large, ornate gate, leading into the mountains, protected by an inner wall.


    While the outer walls were merely on a scale similar to that of Kolyug, akin to towering cliffs of grey stone, the inner citadel was simply daunting. The idea was similar to the Ashenforge-Dwarves and their construction-method, to maintain a defensive position above ground that protected the access into an underground network. The network was something I only knew about from Olivia but the large gate leading into the mountain was a bit of a give-away.


    ¡°That is one hell of a fortress.¡± I muttered, studying the defenses that Lenore had seen. While there were only two layers of walls, both layers had fixed positions atop them with installations that reminded me of some sort of firearm. I knew that the dwarves had steam-powered weapons of some sort but I had no real idea how they worked, the videos I had seen had been a little lacking regarding details. In addition to those fixed positions, Lenore¡¯s sight revealed a multitude of magical defenses, spanning the whole city in a dazzling web of power, with especially high concentrations around the inner walls.


    ¡°It¡¯s impressive, isn¡¯t it?¡± Olivia asked, standing next to me, as I looked down on the citadel from our elevated position on the ancient road.


    ¡°You can say that again.¡± I agreed, only to give her a glare when she started to do just that, causing her to chuckle. ¡°Can you tell me about those weapon-positions on the walls?¡± I asked her, knowing that she had by far the most worldly experience.


    ¡°Steam Projectors, they call them. At least as far as I know, I never had to face one of those in battle but when it comes to defending a fortified position, they make the dwarves almost impossible to dislodge. I don¡¯t know if you noticed, there are different variants, one directly fires projectiles in a straight line, similar to a crossbow, only smaller projectiles but a lot faster, the other variant launches alchemical charges over a long distance.¡± she shuddered at the mention of those, making me wonder just what they were, to make someone who happily wandered through some of the roughest terrain I had seen thus far, with one hand and without offensive magic, that uncomfortable. Certainly, there was a possibility that they simply had disgusting effects without causing too much damage but it could also be simply too fearsome, even when compared to guns.


    ¡°Alchemical charges?¡± I asked, trying to find out more.


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    ¡°Indeed. Again, I can only tell you what I¡¯ve heard, but there seem to be multiple variants. They are all based on magical potions, filled with Astral Power, that are enchanted to activate, causing a sudden effect a long distance away.¡± she explained, causing me to start wondering as she continued.


    ¡°I¡¯ve heard stories about a fire-version that spread out a large amount of Fire-Astral-Power, only to ignite it into a wild flare, devastating the area. Another story spoke of a light-version, that caused a tremendous ray of energy to lance out, somehow hitting their target and annihilating it.¡± she explained and I felt my mouth go dry at the idea. Brutal didn¡¯t even begin to describe it. Unless I misunderstood the effect, it was something similar to the effect my interference into the strange storm-magic of the Wind Raptors had created, forcing us to seek shelter beneath that glacier. Only that it wasn¡¯t caused by accident but on purpose, by lobbing a bomb at the enemy.


    While the second version didn¡¯t sound as large-scale devastating, I had a feeling that it was what they used to take care of powerful, individual threats. Unless I misunderstood, it sounded like the dwarves had developed light-magic to the point that they could create battlefield-ready lasers and mount them on the equivalent of mortar-shells. How they aimed those things, I had no idea but at the end of the day, it didn¡¯t really matter. I didn¡¯t want to be on the business-end of those things.


    I slowly let out the breath I hadn¡¯t realised I had been holding, once again making a mental note not to underestimate the natives. Sure, Travellers like me could grow a lot faster, especially in level, but when it came to creative ways of murdering other beings, the natives had had a lot more time to consider things, with all the fun means that magic added into the mix. Understanding and study, if I wanted to get to the top as a spellcaster, I would have to acquire as much information and understanding as I could, especially once the game was officially life.


    ¡°Why haven''t the dwarves conquered the world?¡± I asked, my mind still reeling. I didn¡¯t expect a response, but surprisingly, I got one.


    ¡°Mobility, quite frankly.¡± Olivia told me, before elaborating. ¡°A lot of dwarven technology depends on steam, using it to transport and transform energy but as far as I¡¯ve heard, they need a rather large installation in the first place, in addition to quite a bit of either fuel or magic.¡±


    ¡°There have been attempts to create vehicles, essentially carriages powered by steam but so far, the dwarves have been unable to come up with something that withstands the rigors of use in the wild. In addition, while these roads help draft-animals, they do nothing for such a contraption, making it even less efficient in comparison.¡± Olivia finished and I nodded in acceptance.


    At the same time, it made me wonder, would Travellers bring knowledge from Earth into Mundus, to push steam-technology forward? While I had no idea how it had been done, such simple steam-contraptions had been turned into trains on Earth, which made me wonder, could such a thing be done on Mundus? Unless the developers had failed to foresee such an obvious idea, they had accounted for it. How, I didn¡¯t know but at the same time, it didn¡¯t really matter. Steam-Technology sounded fun and interesting but not for me.


    On the other hand, I had noticed that some laws of Nature could be bent or broken with magic, at least my understanding of those laws. Simple Newtonian physics was broken whenever I used my Ice-Magic to move about large amounts of mass, without getting pushed back. There was some feedback, but it was far from the simple equal but opposite reaction. There seemed to be artificial limitations that didn¡¯t make any sense to me, to prevent certain actions. For example, I should be able to hover by using Ice-Magic to push Ice against the ground below, using the push-back to lift me up. Normally, that was how it should work in a Newtonian world, if you pushed something, you were pushed back by the same force. Not on Mundus, the pushback was negligible.


    But when trying to push yourself up by sitting on a block of Ice and trying to move that up, it didn¡¯t work again, as suddenly there was such feedback, preventing the Ice from rising.


    To me, that smelled a little like a developer making sure that flight was not something simply acquired with any old magic, but instead reserved for special magic and methods. Or I was missing something when it came to the underlying physics, but I didn¡¯t think so.


    ¡°Let¡¯s move on. I think if we hurry, we¡¯ll be able to sleep in an inn tonight.¡± Oliva suggested, breaking me out of my weird mood and together, we continued to move on, taking on the last leg of our journey to Neamov.

 Chapter 417

    As we were covering the last stretch on our way to Neamov, Olivia went over the rules of the city once more. While she had touched on some of their customs before, now she wanted to make sure we really knew what we were getting into. The biggest, other than the obvious laws about assault, arson, property-damage, theft and so on, was that unless one party was a registered merchant with the required permits, any commerce was a big no-no. That was how the city financed itself, taxation on goods and services sold within its walls and they made sure to get their share.


    For once, there was no humor in Olivia¡¯s voice as she described the tactics employed by the city-guard to catch people trying to circumvent the merchant¡¯s fee. Undercover-agents trying to trap people by offering to buy or sell to them, magical scrying to find clandestine transactions and a whole lot of patrols. If you got caught, they didn¡¯t imprison or kill you, they gave you a fine. Those fines were quite harsh and if you were unable to pay, you had two options. Run and pray that you managed to leave the city and region with your little life, after which the local merchant¡¯s guild would put a general bounty on your head, turned in at any Adventurer''s Guild or if you were wise, the locals generously gave you a job to work off your fee. Namely, slaving away in the mines or doing some other heavy labour. Needless to say, you didn¡¯t want to break their rules and apparently, people had long since learned to either play by them or be very cautious.


    By the time we were close to the gates, Olivia had repeated the advice not to trade anything unless the trade-partner was an established store, just to be on the safe side. So, no buying from some street-vendor with a cart and certainly not in some shady side-allies. That was a quick path to the mines.


    Even while listening to Olivia¡¯s warnings, I kept practising the Shadow Decoys, luckily, it was something that I could easily do, without making things too obvious, unlike the mist-cover that I had tried out the day before. The difficulty about it was to keep the movement of all decoys constant, smooth and unpredictable, the actual size of the decoys was irrelevant for training. Instead of using full-sized blobs of Darkness, I had reduced the size to little more than a sliver of Darkness and kept them orbiting around my hand, constantly changing their movements without falling into a pattern. So far, I mostly realised just how much more practise I needed, if my attention was diverted from my decoys, my mind seemed to almost instantly slip into forming them into a consistent pattern, which was exactly what I didn¡¯t want.


    When we got to the gate, we luckily didn¡¯t have to wait in a line, instead, we could directly proceed. The procedure was quite simple, if you had identification and a bit of coin. You simply had to show the identification, we used our Adventurer''s Guild Cards, and pay a small fee, which we could easily afford thanks to the Ashenforge Dwarves, and we could go in.


    Olivia had warned us that the guards had ways to detect beings, even while they were in special spaces, like a Spirit Beast¡¯s Hallow, so Lenore had taken up position on my shoulder and Ylva was tagging along next to Sigmir. That way, the two of them were visible and registered to Sigmir and me, respectively, with us being responsible if something bad happened. Lenore was a little amused at the idea that she had no agency of her own, but apparently, the locals had no desire to try having a bird work off a fee in the mines, so they simply designated it as somebody else¡¯s problem. In this case, it would be my problem.


    In trade for the fee we paid, we got a small brass token that we were asked to return when we were leaving, getting part of the fee refunded in turn. It allowed us to stay for up to a week in the city, afterwards, we would have to either get a longer-term permit or leave.


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    Failure to produce a permit during controls would get you a quick but lengthy trip to the mines, something the city seemed to be rather fond of. It made me wonder just why Olivia liked this place, it sounded like the locals were quite happy if you followed their rules but just as content if you didn¡¯t in that case, they got what amounted to slave-labour.


    Once inside, I quickly noticed a few things. The first thing was the smell. It wasn¡¯t as bad as it had been in some of the frontier-towns further north but it was far from pleasant. Too many people of various races, all sweating, working and not washing often enough in too close proximity and to top it off, there was a cloying scent of magic in the air, making it difficult to breathe.


    Another thing I noticed was that all four of us seemed to instinctively tense up as we tried to keep an eye on everything going on, likely both out of vigilance and curiosity. We had grown used to being in the wilds, where a slight movement might indicate a sudden attack, a predator lurking somewhere nearby, but in the city, there was too much movement, too many people all moving and bustling around. That didn¡¯t mean that there were no predators nearby, just that the normal indicators of predators weren¡¯t the ones we had to watch.


    ¡°Come, I can show you a nice inn.¡± Olivia suggested, as she looked at us who had subconsciously moved into a defensive formation where we could guard each other''s back. She seemed rather amused at it and I noticed that one of the guards at the gate was watching us and had a similarly amused grin on his bearded face. Pushing down the anxiety I felt due to the bustle around us, I mentally asked Lenore to watch my back before taking Sigmir¡¯s arm, trying to make it appear casual. Simply holding her hand helped me a great deal and I noticed some tension leaving her body as well.


    ¡°Certainly, I would be grateful. Adra, Rai, why don¡¯t you go ahead?¡± I asked, wanting them to move to the front so that Sigmir and I could watch their backs, while Lenore and Ylva did the same for us. The two of them nodded and in a slightly strange, rather tense, manner we began to move through the cobbled streets.


    The architecture around us was interesting, it reminded me strongly of the angular style we had seen at the Ashenforge-Clan but where their buildings were obviously built for their squat size, Neamov was most certainly not. The buildings around us, at least if going by the sizes of their doors, seemed to be made with beings the size of Sigmir or even a little larger, in mind. But, as I kept looking around, I quickly realised why that was the case, it was for travellers. While a plurality of people were dwarves, they were not a majority.


    Just in the streets around us, I could see a variety of body-shapes and sizes, from the obvious centaurs, they were easy to pick out, to the more difficult to identify. If a being had a simple, humanoid body-plan, concealing clothes and maybe a hood, they could be from a variety of races. Unless their body-size made it obvious, with giantbloods and trolls on one end of the spectrum and dwarves, halflings and gnomes on the other side, it was nigh impossible to determine just what race you were dealing with. Not that it really mattered, it might just be my personal curiosity that made me want to know. Luckily, I was no cat.


    Thanks to Olivia¡¯s guidance, we quickly got to the inn she had mentioned, even if the city was on the complicated side. I had a vague idea of the map, thanks to the look Lenore had taken from above, but that had been from a long distance. Without obvious features to compare that image to what we could see on a street-level it was almost impossible to get your bearings.


    ¡°This is the Pan¡¯s Flute. Don¡¯t mind the name, the owner has a strange sense of humor but they run a tight ship. I¡¯ve stayed here a few times already and the service is excellent for their price.¡± Olivia told us, as she stepped up to the entrance. Above it was a brightly painted sign-board that made me blink for a moment as my mind boggled, wondering if I was seeing things. The sign was showing an obviously male, humanoid figure, with goat¡¯s horns and legs kneeling on the ground, his hands in a rather suggestive position around a rather phallic object. Looking closely, I realised that the object was supposed to be some sort of wind-instrument, not what it had made me think first.


    ¡°Seriously?!¡± I asked Olivia, not quite believing what my eyes were seeing. The only answer I got was laughter, as Olivia opened the door to the inn.

 Chapter 418

    For a moment, I exchanged looks with the others, not sure if I wanted to enter the inn, even on recommendation from Olivia. Curiously, only Adra seemed to be bothered by the sign, making me wonder if the other two had looked closely enough or were simply following along. After the two of us exchanged a shrug, we followed Rai into the inn, as he had simply gone ahead.


    ¡°This might be interesting.¡± I muttered, mostly to Sigmir, as I went in, with Sigmir following behind me. My mind had conjured up quite a few images when seeing the sign but none of them came even close to the inside of the tavern. Instead of images of decadence or frivolous promiscuity, the inn was almost disappointingly normal.


    The main-room, spanning what appeared to be most of the building, was open, clean and currently mostly void of customers, with long tables providing places to sit and eat. Near the entrance was an obvious reception, currently unoccupied, with Olivia leaning against it, looking a little impatient and ringing a small bell. Just as I was about to ask, a door behind the reception-desk opened and a figure stepped out.


    Contrary to my original impression of a disappointingly normal tap-room, the figure was anything but ordinary, reminding me that I was a stranger in a strange place. The first thing I noticed was a pair of curved horns, glistening as the light reflected off them, the tips gilded in gold. A closer look at those tips made me wonder if my eyes were going bad or if the sign-board outside had made my mind go weird, part of me was certain that the gold decorations were modeled after a certain part of the male anatomy.


    Pulling my eyes away from the strange horn-decorations, I took in the stranger¡¯s face and found it oddly handsome, an experience that I hadn¡¯t felt before. There was something inviting in the symmetry of the man''s features, even the oiled goatee, something that I¡¯d normally view with disdain just seemed to fit. The wide, inviting smile with which he greeted  Olivia, before taking the rest of us in, helped to set a part of my mind at ease, even as a different part of my mind was screaming with vigilance.


    ¡°Ah, welcome, welcome, Olivia, wasn¡¯t it? I remember you, always a pleasure.¡± he gave her a light bow, reaching across the table and clasping her hands for a moment before he fully focused on us.


    ¡°And who are these people? Welcome, I don¡¯t think you¡¯ve been here before, be welcome in this humble establishment.¡± he greeted us, seemingly without ever taking a moment to breathe, or give anyone the chance to get a word in.


    ¡°Fillippos, it is good to be here again. These are some friends I met on the road and guided here, in hopes that we all can rest our weary feet for a day or five.¡± Olivia responded, similarly enthusiastic but without the boundless exuberance the other being was radiating. It might have been just in my mind, but I felt as if there were bells ringing as he moved, with a gentle, easy-going manner that made me think of a spring-breeze. It was exceedingly weird.


    ¡°Allow me to introduce you around. Friends, this is Fillippos, the Satyr, one of the two proprietors of this establishment.¡± Olivia told us, a wide smile on her face.


    ¡°And Fillippos, these two are Rai and Adra.¡± she gestured to the pair that had moved a little to the side to allow Sigmir and me to enter, before gesturing to us.


    ¡°And these are Morgana, her spirit-companion Lenore and Sigmir, with her spirit-companion Ylva.¡± she finished, before adding in a stage-whisper, gesturing at me. ¡°This one is quite special, she might be the one who travelled furthest to reach your establishment, far enough to be called a Traveller.¡±


    ¡°Welcome, again.¡± he repeated his greeting towards us, before focusing back on Olivia, ¡°Alas, I¡¯m afraid you are wrong, she is not the first Traveller visiting this humble establishment.¡± he told her, before giving me a wide, inviting smile, ¡°Nevertheless, you are most welcome, dear girl.¡±


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    Before I could react, Sigmir stepped forward, just a bit, partially shielding me behind her back. That merely caused the Satyr to favour her with that smile, causing me to growl in irritation. Before I could do more than growl, the smile on his face changed for a moment, the invitation fading, the smile turning innocent.


    ¡°Two blessed souls, joined together. Rejoice, rejoice.¡± he exclaimed, almost shouting in joy as he leapt up and did a backflip. In that brief, air-borne moment, I was able to ascertain that he, indeed, didn¡¯t need boots, instead his feet were hooves. It took me a moment to realise that I had seen one like him before, almost a year ago, in fact. Praxi, the leatherworker in Neyto, had been of the same race. He, too, had been a little weird. Rather, make that a lot.


    As he landed, he turned away from Sigmir and me, instead focusing on Adra and Rai.


    ¡°And such a scrumptious lad, makes up for the tree-hugger next to you.¡± he grinned, his smile changing back to the open invitation again, only that I had a feeling that there was something predatory lurking in that smile. As I looked at Adra for a moment, I could see that her smile was rather stiff, her brows creased into a frown.


    Before any of us could retort, the door behind the Satyr opened again and I managed to catch a glimpse of the kitchen it led to. That glimpse was only through the upper part of the door, the lower part was entirely blocked by the wide being walking out, a dwarf by every sign I could think of. Barely as tall as I was but almost as wide as he was tall, dark hair covering his head while a close-cropped beard of the same colour covered much of his face. Maybe to make up for his lack of height, he was wearing a rather high, white chef¡¯s hat, matching the apron that covered his body. The apron might have been a bedsheet in an earlier life, the size would certainly have been enough.


    ¡°What are you shouting about?!¡± the dwarf grumbled, glaring at the still giddy satyr, sounding so very like a rockslide that I wanted to check the nearby slopes.


    ¡°Oh, honey-bear, we have guests.¡± the Satyr told the dwarf in a gushy voice, the smile on his face even wider than earlier. Just hearing the massive, muscular dwarf that looked like someone had carved him from granite getting called ¡®honey-bear¡¯ made me mentally stop, especially when the Satyr reached out and gently started to caress his neck. There was a strange incongruity in my mind, especially when the dwarf returned the Satyr¡¯s smile.


    I felt my mind boot up again when Sigmir reached out and started to gently play with one of my ears, tickling me just a little to help me relax.


    ¡°Mrm, isn¡¯t that Olivia? Welcome back, how many rooms do you want?¡± he asked, after giving the Satyr a resounding slap on the backside, making him hop again.


    While Olivia answered the dwarf, I looked over to Adra and Rai, noticing that Rai¡¯s mouth was gaping open, just a little, his face locked in an almost comical expression of surprise and disbelief. It made me feel a little better about my mental blank earlier, at least I had managed to keep my face relatively unexpressive.


    As I looked over, I managed to pick up Adra¡¯s voice as she whispered to Rai. ¡°Watch out, if you keep your mouth hanging open like that, the goatfucker might fill it and teach you how to play his flute.¡± she snarked, before leaning a little closer to Rai, likely adding an explanation, causing his mouth to close with a snap and his cheeks to blush fire-red.


    But her behaviour made me feel a little strange, normally Adra was pleasant and sociable, allowing her to effectively communicate with everyone we had met so far. But now, when seeing this polite and welcoming Satyr, she was outright rude and insulting, if only when speaking softly to Rai. It didn¡¯t seem to fit with her usual behavior.


    Before I had a chance to think about my next step, Olivia told us that she would invite us to Dinner and even pay for two double-rooms, so we could sleep off the after-effects of our dinner, later in the evening.


    It seemed like the polite thing would be to accept, especially as the Inn seemed to be quite excellent, if one could look past the strange interaction between Adra and Fillippos. After a moment of consideration, I accepted with a nod, receiving two large, brass keys from the dwarven inn-keeper, complete with wooden tags that had a room-number written on them.


    After thanking the innkeeper-pair and asking where the rooms were, we all followed Olivia, who had a key on her own, up a set of stairs I hadn¡¯t seen in the back of the room. Somehow, my steps felt a little lighter than they had before entering the inn.

 Chapter 419

    The rooms Olivia led us to were just as good, or maybe even a little better, than the main-room downstairs had made me expect them. While a little narrow, they were light and gave a feeling of openness thanks to high ceilings and large windows. In addition to that, the rooms were immaculately clean, both by sight and smell.


    Pleased with the room, I turned to Adra, curious about her hostility towards the Satyr earlier. But it was a conversation I wanted in the privacy of our group, without outside ears, including Olivia. While I considered her an interesting person, with quite a lot of valuable knowledge, I wasn¡¯t certain about her. The bonds between us were a lot less than the bonds between the four of us, who were bound together by shared experiences.


    Noticing a door at the side of our room, I stepped inside, looking into it. It turned out to be a quite modern-looking bathroom, making me realise that a civilisation that based their weaponry on steam-technology would need ways to transport heat and water across long distances. That was especially true for the dwarves, who produced steam at a central location and used pipe-systems to provide the high-pressure their weapons needed.


    ¡°Come, see, Adra. These dwarves have good bathing facilities, like their cousins in the Ashenforge Hold.¡± I called over, hoping that only Adra would approach, giving me a moment of privacy with her.


    Luckily, my slightly simplistic idea worked, possibly because the bathroom was small enough to make more than two people a seriously tight fit.


    ¡°What is it?¡±Adra asked in a whisper, as soon as she was next to me. She obviously didn¡¯t buy that I was excited about bathrooms, even if there was a part of me that looked forward to a long, comfortable shower with Sigmir, and knew I had something else in mind.


    ¡°What was that about, downstairs? With the Innkeeper?¡± I asked, speaking just as softly as she had.


    ¡°Later.¡± she simply replied, and took a slightly exaggerated look around the bathroom, before returning to the others.


    I followed after her, noticing an amused look on Olivia¡¯s face, while Sigmir simply raised an eyebrow, curiosity obvious on her face.


    ¡°The dwarves have marvelous facilities in that regard. There is something to say about the open baths of the Empire, they can make you feel wonderfully decadent, simply soaking for hours on end, talking to friends and enjoying the floating sensations but the dwarven showers are a wholly different sort of enjoyment. Especially after a long day on the road, there¡¯s nothing better than standing under the hot spray, letting it wash off the dirt and sweat.¡± Olivia said, her eyes and voice a little distant.


    ¡°You know what?¡± she asked, before any of us could react to her soliloquy, ¡°That is exactly what I¡¯m going to do now, take a shower. Please, meet me downstairs at the seventh bell, I¡¯ll ask Drorak to prepare a sumptuous dinner for us.¡± she continued on.


    ¡°That would be fine with us.¡± I told her, after getting nods from the others. Good food was always nice, especially when one didn¡¯t have to consider the impact of over-indulging on the waistline.


    ¡°Great, see you later.¡± she waved, the amused expression she had earlier returning as she walked off.


    With a wave to Rai, Adra moved into the room Sigmir and I had claimed, closing the door after we had all entered.


    ¡°You asked about earlier, with the innkeeper.¡± Adra stated, speaking quietly. ¡°There is a certain racial animosity between our people, not enough to go to fight over, but when one like him insults me, I will return the favour.¡± she explained, her voice quite annoyed. I was rather amused at her behaviour, normally, she was calm, collected and confident, at times teasing me for my reckless research of magic or the repeated troubles I had caused with other people. But now, she sounded rather peevish, ready to give tit-for-tat to another, in a way that I wouldn¡¯t expect from her. My amusement must have shown on my face, for Adra growled under her breath.


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    ¡°What, would you like to be called a knife-ear, or maybe some sort of slur for being with Sigmir?¡± Adra asked, looking angry. The idea of getting attacked that way was something I had experienced myself, luckily not for my mixed heritage but for the fact that I was female and enjoyed playing online-games. It was one of the reasons I had constantly used an animated avatar, never showing my face on camera.


    ¡°No, you are right.¡± I accepted, thinking back to the innkeeper''s words, realising that he had warmly welcomed us all, but referred to Adra as a tree-hugger. I made a mental note to ask her about it, as it seemed a little random to be a racial slur.


    ¡°Don¡¯t bother with him, what cares the strong oak, if a boar grinds against it? Or in this case, what cares the mighty dryad, if a goat bleats in her direction?¡± Rai asked, taking Adra¡¯s hand and caressing it in a very gentle and rather intimate manner. Those small, yet incredibly sweet, instances of affection between the two of them always made me happy, that they were able to share a feeling similar to the feeling between Sigmir and myself. Strangely, I noticed that a cloud passed over Adra¡¯s face for a moment, even if she banished it as fast as it had appeared.


    ¡°The young one speaks with wisdom, how unexpected.¡± Adra chuckled, while returning the affectionate gesture to Rai. ¡°But I think our new friend is correct, why don¡¯t we enjoy the local facilities, wash the road off our backs and simply relax until it is time for the feast?¡± she asked, getting nods from Sigmir and myself.


    As Adra and Rai left our room, still hand in hand, I managed to hear Adra suggest to Rai that he could wash her back. While I hadn¡¯t been aware just how far the physical aspect of their relationship had progressed, I could only smile at the two of them.


    ¡°It does sound like a good idea, doesn¡¯t it?¡± Sigmir asked, her voice tinged with excitement. With a smile on my face, I decided that she was right, a shower was just what I needed, especially if there was a Sigmir to wash. Thinking back, the shower was easily large enough to give us plenty of space for everything one might get up to, or down to, if one was so inclined.


    But, as I could see from her behaviour, she wasn¡¯t in too much of a hurry, taking her time to pull off one piece of equipment at a time, making sure that the individual pieces were in good condition. While part of me wanted to drag her into the bath as quick as possible, the smile on her face made it clear she wasn¡¯t in too much of a hurry but two could play that game.


    Just as slowly as she did, I took out the tools I had crafted from Hard Ice over the months, carefully going over each of them, making sure that they were still in good condition. It was something I did most days, especially now that it was summer, but one could never be too cautious with the equipment that you used to keep yourself alive.


    With my Frozen Shuttles floating in front of me, I decided that I was feeling a little warm and pulled off the dwarven-made tunic I was wearing, leaving me bare to the world, after a blue window made sure that that was what I wanted.


    The summer-heat had dulled the blades of my shuttles quite a bit, requiring me to draw on my magic to restore them. While the runes necessary were simple, the better I worked now, the sharper the edges of my shuttles would be, giving me an advantage in possible fights down the line.


    Closing my eyes, to focus better on my magic also meant that the connection between Sigmir and me stood out even stronger and what I felt made me tingle with anticipation. Not wanting to lose the game she had started, I pulled a little stronger on my Ice-Magic, the cold sensation helping to push back the desire flowing within me. It wouldn¡¯t last long and I didn¡¯t want it to.


    A soft, animalistic growl was more than enough warning, allowing me to open my eyes to take in Sigmir in all her naked glory, just before her arms wrapped around me, pulling me in for a kiss.


    Returning the kiss, I shut the connection between Lenore and me down as much as possible, knowing that she had no interest in our enjoyment.


    ¡°Have fun. Don¡¯t break the shower or the bed.¡± was the last thing I heard over the connection, just as Sigmir bodily picked me up, carrying me to the bathroom. Hopefully, the dwarves had built their facilities sturdy or I wouldn¡¯t promise anything.

 Chapter 420

    Once Sigmir and I had thoroughly stress-tested the bed, and washed off the result of our vigorous¡­ testing, it was time to move downstairs, for the promised feast. Now that I was no longer engaged in the testing-process, I realised that the room was filled with the familiar magic of Lenore. It took me a second to get an idea what she had done, prompting me to thank her, as soon as the connection between us was fully open again.


    ¡°I thought you wouldn¡¯t want everyone to hear your duet.¡± Lenore told me, quite a bit of amusement in her voice.


    ¡°Since when have you been able to mask sounds that way?¡± I asked in response, gently pushing into her mind to get an idea of the processes she had used to create the barrier covering the room. It was quite impressive, especially when remembering her relatively recent acquisition of Ice-Magic and her ability with Ice to my own ability with Death-Magic.


    ¡°The idea to combine Mist and Wind is something I¡¯ve thought about for a while and using Mist as a carrier for all sorts of effects is something you should know about, right?¡± she explained, causing me to grin in response as Mist might just be my favourite concept to use in conjunction with different effects. While it lacked any real offensive power, it allowed for a wide range of applications, covering large areas, especially when it came to concealment.


    ¡°Quite impressive, I¡¯ve got to admit.¡± I nodded, taking another look at the sound-muffling barrier.


    ¡°Do the two of you want to join us feasting or do you want to retreat into your Hallows?¡± I asked after a moment. Ylva, as she regularly did, decided to join us, while Lenore hopped onto my shoulder before moving into her Hallow, without further comment. Thanks to our connection, I was able to pick up her wish for peace and quiet, something a busy inn was not likely to provide. Respecting her wish, I tamped down the connection between us, so she could fully relax in the privacy of her Hallow.


    Thinking of the inn for a moment, I decided that I wanted to do something a little different for once. With a grin on my face, I reached out and drew on my magic, coating the feathers that had grown within my eyebrows with Diamond Dust, before adding some of it into my hairs, creating a sparkly effect. By letting a tiny trickle of Astral Power flow into the Dust, it would remain frozen as long as I wanted and when I looked into the Bathroom mirror, I was quite pleased with the effect. It accentuated the avian features just enough to give me a mystical appearance, without pushing it into fully weird territory.


    ¡°Let¡¯s go.¡± I told Sigmir, after looking her over for a moment. While she lacked the obvious alien features the bond between Lenore and me had given me, when looking closely, and knowing how she had looked before, the bond between Ylva and Sigmir had caused some changes as well. Maybe the changes were lesser because Ylva had yet to cross the second Divide, but they were there. A little more body-hair, thin, silver and quite ticklish but also a certain sharpness in her fingernails, which I had experienced in a very painful fashion. Luckily, while her canines had grown a little more prominent, they didn¡¯t pose any problems,


    All in all, she looked wonderful, almost good enough to prolong the stress-testing of the bed, dressed in the rather thin clothes she normally wore beneath her armour.


    After knocking on the door of the other room without getting a response, we moved downstairs, with Ylva padding along behind us. The change within the main-room could barely be greater, compared to earlier in the day. Despite it being relatively early in the evening, the room was packed and on a small stage that I hadn¡¯t noticed earlier, a familiar satyr was performing, with a rather peculiar wind-instrument, of all things. I wasn¡¯t sure if the two round shapes near the bottom of it were some sort of resonance-bodies, similar to the body of a guitar or if they were purely for decorative purposes, whatever the case, the imagery was one I really didn¡¯t need.


    Nonetheless, I felt a little lighter as Sigmir and I walked past the filled tables, quickly arriving at the table Adra, Olivia and Rai were occupying. Luckily, it was a large corner-table and they had been kind enough to leave space in the corner for us, so none of us had to sit with their back into the room.


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    The service was quite excellent, as soon as Sigmir and I had taken our seats a waiter appeared and brought out an appetizer, curiously reminiscent of a modern greek restaurant, alongside some drinks. Once the food was served, Olivia stood, raising her glass and thanking us for the company on the road, a gesture we all returned, it had been an interesting experience travelling with her. While I wasn¡¯t quite sure how much of the stories she had told had been exaggerated for comedic effect, the stories she had shared had always been interesting and informative.


    Taking a sip from the drink we had been supplied made my eyes widen, it was delicious. The taste of grapes, alongside some herbs and honey, combined to create a flavour that was unlike anything I had ever tasted before. Luckily, the taste of honey, together with the relaxed atmosphere around us, reminded me of another time we had enjoyed a good tavern, maybe a little too much in my case. Remembering the mead I had drunk in Kolyug, and especially the brutal hangover on the next day, made me cautious. Not cautious enough to abstain but cautious enough to channel a small amount of blood magic to keep myself detoxified, otherwise I might start getting a bit too happy.


    As we ate the delicious food, the atmosphere in the tap-room became more and more enthusiastic, at least partially carried by the music still coming from the small stage. While there was only one musician, it was quite obvious that he was a master of his craft, to the point that people moved aside some of the tables to create space to dance in.


    I realised that something more might be going on when Adra, who had been a little subdued the whole evening, and Rai got up and began to dance to the music. While a part of me wanted to grab Sigmir and join them, the differences in height between us made dancing together a little awkward. When it was just the two of us, and it was more snuggling while rhythmically swaying, possibly with music, I didn¡¯t mind that awkwardness but not in a packed tavern.


    ¡°Care to tell me what is going on?¡± I asked Olivia, when I noticed that Sigmir¡¯s fingers were gently drumming the rhythm of the music, almost in a subconscious fashion.


    ¡°He is a Satyr, this is what they are, what they do.¡± she replied, speaking just as softly as I had. I merely raised my eyebrow, needing a better explanation. While I couldn¡¯t smell magic, there seemed to be a gentle influence in my mind, subtle and soft but there nonetheless. But just because the influence was subtle didn¡¯t mean it was benign, even if it might be.


    ¡°Every being influences their surroundings, with their temperature, their breathing, their aura, they all affect what is around you. Satyrs, especially when they pursue the path of pleasure, bring joy and merrymaking wherever they go.¡± Olivia explained and while I still had questions, Sigmir¡¯s hand had wandered from tapping the rhythm on the table to gently caressing the back of my neck, at times teasing my ears, distracting me.


    ¡°I will keep you safe.¡± I heard Ylva growl, just before Sigmir pulled me from the bench, placing me on her lap while continuing her gentle teasing. For a moment, I hesitated before letting my body relax into her, the music flowing around me in a most pleasant manner.


    While we were watching the various people dancing, OIivia, Sigmir and I continued to talk about our travels, sharing a few more stories, a lot of laughter all the while drinking more of the wine and eating the rest of the food. It was a good thing that I had set up the blood magic effect that kept me from getting too drunk, or I might have ended up completely smashed. Olivia, at the very least, seemed to get happier and happier, the longer the evening went on. It was quite amusing to watch, especially when the tales she told became more and more fantastical, as I somehow doubted that she had ridden a flying unicorn to the end of a rainbow, where she had found a meadow filled with golden flowers. Alas, this being Mundus, I couldn¡¯t fully count it out, but I doubted it.


    One of the things I asked about, possibly encouraged by the atmosphere, was a question that had bugged me ever since meeting Olivia. Why was she still missing her hand, in a world where magic should allow for the regeneration of it. My question must have amused her, as she had a wide grin on her face when she answered, telling me how she had lost her hand in a magical accident, when she had tried to reach for more, to control the divine power granted to her with her own will. She had failed and the resulting backlash had burned her hand into ash, her Goddess sending her on a quest to understand where she had gone wrong. Until Olivia gained that understanding, the hand would remain lost.


    It was a harsh story, even if Olivia didn¡¯t look to be impacted by the telling, ordering another round of wine, pouring some into my glass before raising her own, for another toast. At times, I wasn¡¯t sure if I was the weird one, of if Olivia was a little strange.


    Despite my normal dislike for all things loud and crowded, sitting on the edge of the party, watching, talking and relaxing was enjoyable in a manner that was new to me. Maybe, letting go wasn¡¯t too bad, as long as it was in moderation and while keeping comfortably safe. Especially when that comfort came from being held in Sigmir¡¯s arms.

 Chapter 421

    Come morning, I was rather glad that I had used my blood magic the night before, otherwise I was quite sure my head would try to kill me. Just thinking of the amount of wine I had drunk, as tasty as it had been, made me stumble a little as I made my way to the bathroom. Checking on Sigmir told me that she seemed to be mostly fine, if rather dehydrated and would likely be in a bit of pain, once she woke up. For now, she seemed to be stuck in a deep sleep, prompting me to crawl back into bed, gently snuggling up to her while letting a trickle of carefully controlled magic flow into her, removing the last traces of alcohol from her system while replenishing her body. It was a bit of tricky magic, to provide the needed fluids without waking her, but I managed.


    ¡°You had fun last night.¡± Lenore chuckled over our mental connection and I felt that she was taking a glance at my memories of the night. She was especially amused by the fact that I had made sure to use magic to essentially cure myself of a poison, while drinking more and more of that poison, a form of behaviour she simply couldn¡¯t understand. While a part of me agreed that it was a strange custom, there were times when it simply felt right to drink, especially when the wine served was so tasty.


    Thinking of the tasty wine, I realised that a certain pair of dancers had returned to our table regularly, to quench their thirst with wine, which made me realise that the two of them were liable to suffer, once they woke up. To help or not to help, that was the question. Thinking of the amusement Adra had shown multiple times when I had been suffering under the after-effects of magical experimentation, I decided I should go and help them. At least help them, after I made them suffer a little.


    ¡°Love, you are looking a little scary right now.¡± Sigmir told me, as I was trying to leave the bed stealthily. Her words made me realise that my lips had curled into a smile, when I thought about my plans.


    ¡°Don¡¯t worry about it.¡± I assured her, my smile turning genuine when I focused on her. ¡°Does your head hurt?¡± I asked, gently caressing her temple as I did.


    ¡°No, I¡¯m fine.¡± she replied, while stretching her body, reminding me so very much of a dog, or maybe wolf, in that moment, especially when she gave me a smile that let her canines show.


    ¡°I¡¯ll wake the others and we can go to sell the materials we gathered in the mountains, maybe visit the Adventurers'' Guild to see if there are appropriate quests, is that okay with you?¡± I asked, carefully keeping any kind of mischievousness out of my voice, barely succeeding.


    ¡°Good idea.¡± she nodded, before continuing, ¡°I don¡¯t know about you, but I¡¯d rather continue moving on, instead of staying in this city.¡± she admitted, looking a bit uncomfortable. Nodding in agreement, I kissed her cheek, before making my way out of the room, while she went to freshen up a little.


    Walking to the nearby door, I realised what the cause of our shared discomfort was. Out in the wilds, you had to pay attention to every noise, making sure that nothing was sneaking up on you. The vast majority of noise was simply caused by the wind in the trees or small, harmless animals, easily ignored, leaving only the rare, few causes of concern. Filtering them had become a subconscious habit but here, in the city, the noises were different, a constant din, a lot louder than the harmless sounds of nature, keeping us in a constant state of vigilance. We would adapt, likely quite quickly, if we stayed in the city but if we did, we¡¯d have to be extra-careful once we moved on, back into the wilds.


    Looking at the door of Adra¡¯s door, I placed my hand against the lock and channelled some power into it.


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    ¡°Do you think this¡¯ll work?¡± Lenore asked in my mind, as the power I had inserted coalesced into Ice, forming a crude key using the lock around it as a mold.


    ¡°Maybe. The door doesn¡¯t look to be spelled or magical in any way, so it should work.¡± I responded, having made sure of that beforehand.


    Moments later, my concerns for security in the inn rapidly shot up, when the key easily turned and the soft click of a lock told me that it had actually worked. Gently pushing open the door, making sure that I made as little noise as possible, I snuck in and closed the door behind me.


    What I saw inside made me grin widely, Adra was stretched out on one bed, on top of the sheet, with Rai cuddled up to her, his head resting on her shoulder. The two of them looked completely disheveled, yet also adorable, to the point that I wanted to bully them, just a little.


    Or maybe a lot.


    If Sigmir would have seen me, she likely would have told me that I looked scary, when I stretched out my hand with a smile on my face, forming a set of runes. Cold, Mist and DIamond Dust, a triangle that allowed me to form an icy cloud of particles, a little moist and incredibly cold, cold enough to make me shiver, just a little. Using Ice-Magic, I let that cloud drift over to the two of them, keeping it hover right above them, careful not to make any large, magical moves that might wake them.


    Once the cloud was in position, I called out, quite loudly, ¡°Wakey, wakey, rise and shine!¡± while I pushed the cloud down, covering the two of them.


    The howls of outrage, coupled with the moans of pain were music to my ears, to the point that I made a mental note to get the sound-file later. The note was amended moments later, when Adra tossed Rai from the bed in her flailing, causing him to land on the floor in a wet and shivering mess, looking like a kicked puppy.


    ¡°Good Morning!¡± I added, still speaking quite loudly, causing the two of them to wince in further pain. The look Adra sent my way made Lenore, looking through my eyes, laugh in her Hallow, luckily the two of them couldn¡¯t see her. On the other hand, I was training my poker-face, trying to present a look of wide-eyed innocence. I doubted it fully worked but I didn¡¯t mind. Maybe I would come to regret my actions in the future, but that was a problem for future-me to deal with.


    ¡°I hate you so much.¡± Adra whispered, her voice hoarse and filled with pain and suffering.


    ¡°Poor dear. Did you overindulge last night and the Gods punished you for it?¡± I asked, remembering the time that particular shoe had been on my foot, back in Kolyug. Just to add insult to injury, I move over to Rai, banishing the moisture and diamond dust from his body, while letting a trickle of Blood Magic flow into his body to help with the restoration of normal function. I even handed him a waterskin from his pack, helping him to get into a sitting position to drink, while keeping an eye on Adra. From the rocking motion of her body, I was quite sure she was in pain, but I wouldn¡¯t just help her, at least not right away. I was having far too much fun for that.


    ¡°Thank you, Teacher.¡± Rai told me, speaking quite softly even if his body should be back to normal. Maybe it was just a bit of lingering discomfort, possibly psychosomatic, that was far beyond my ability to heal.


    ¡°You are welcome, student. I hope you enjoyed yourself last night, but overindulging is not a habit you should get into. Once in a while is fine, though.¡± I told him, my voice perfectly measured, if a little loud. Out of the corner of my eyes, I could see Adra wince, holding her head in pain.


    ¡°I hate you so much.¡± she whispered, barely audibly. Loud enough for me to hear, though, prompting me to look over to her.


    ¡°What did you say? I could swear you meant to say, ¡®Oh, merciful Morgana, please grant this unworthy one the grace of your healing, I beseech you.¡¯¡± I suggested, my voice still loud enough to prompt another wince.


    ¡°Oh, merciful Morgana, please grant this unworthy one the grace of your healing, I beseech you.¡± she dutifully repeated after me, even if her tone was far from graceful. Still, I did have my fun, at her expense, so I wasn¡¯t too fussed about it, stepping next to the bed and getting to work. Nonetheless, I made another mental note, not to get into a situation where she might be tempted to take revenge, at least not until she found humour in the situation of the morning.

 Chapter 422

    Thanks to the power of magic, Adra and Rai looked quite well by the time Sigmir knocked on the door, washed up and ready to head down to breakfast. She was rather amused when I opened the door for her, especially when I narrated the scene I had witnessed earlier. Adra, on the other hand, was less amused, even if I could sense that she normally would be, if it wasn¡¯t at her expense.


    Taking the time, while Rai was in the bathroom, I decided to finally get to the bottom of the situation between Adra and Fillippos, the innkeeper. When I had asked before, the answer given was a little unsatisfying, leaving me curious.


    ¡°Now, Adra, yesterday you seemed to have fun dancing to that Satyr¡¯s tune. Care to explain what was going on when we checked in?¡± I asked, raising an eyebrow, not missing the opportunity to poke a little more fun at her.


    ¡°Racial Animosity, as I told you yesterday.¡± she grumbled in response, only this time, I merely kept my eyebrow up, looking at her with an expectant expression. After a moment, she let out a sigh and started to explain.


    ¡°I told you before, that Dryads don¡¯t come with biological sexes, like many animals do, right?¡± she asked, causing me to nod as it, indeed, was something we had talked about before. Dryads were, appearance wise, very much female and I remembered that I had wondered why that was, given that there was no need for such features. In simple terms, why did a creature that wasn¡¯t even close to a mammal, not even in the same kingdom, have tits? Or any of the other sexual characteristics associated with live birth, or any birth for that matter.


    ¡°New dryads come into existence thanks to an elder dryad bonding with a tree, now, guess why we dislike being referred to as ¡®treehuggers¡¯?¡± she asked, her eyebrow raised. While I didn¡¯t really understand, I could see that there would be a certain distaste to have a label applied to you that reduced you to your reproductive function. I would certainly dislike being referred to as some sort of breeder, or something along those lines.


    ¡°Then ¡®goatfucker¡¯?¡± I asked, both anticipating and slightly dreading the response. If Adra had used it to respond to a slur aimed at her race¡¯s reproduction, did that mean what I thought it might mean?


    ¡°Satyrs, too, are a single-sex race that reproduces sexually. Only that they don¡¯t have the advantage of a bond with a tree¡­¡± Adra explained, a gleeful look of amusement on her face. She took pleasure in the horrified look of understanding that must have shown on my face. What, for the love of civilization, did come over Pantheon to add such a race and mechanic to their game?!


    ¡°Harpies are quite similar, you know? Only they are all female and need large birds, like those wind raptors we¡¯ve seen a while back, for their needs.¡± Adra continued, the look of glee on her face getting stronger.


    ¡°Now that I think of it, they look very much like you in that other form you used when Sigmir was injured. Should we try to find you a nice feathered friend? Maybe that spirit-raven we saw in the mountains?¡± she asked, outright laughing when I began to sputter in disbelief. Similarly, I could feel Lenore¡¯s disdain welling up within my mind, the idea as abhorrent to her, as it was to me.


    ¡°She¡¯s all mine, no need for anyone else, feathered or otherwise.¡± Sigmir interjected, putting her arms around me.


    ¡°And I don¡¯t want anyone else, thank you very much.¡± I finally retorted, giving Adra a glare, causing her to laugh even harder.


    ¡°Is everything alright?¡± Rai asked, stepping out of the bathroom, looking a lot better than he had earlier. He must have noticed that there was something strange going on, given that Adra was still laughing while I was glaring at her, from Sigmir¡¯s embrace.


    ¡°Oh, we were just discussing Morgana¡¯s romantic prospects for the future.¡± Adra replied, before quickly retreating past him, into the bathroom, still laughing as she went. Rai, wisely, didn¡¯t comment, instead he apparently decided that discretion was the better part of valor.


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    To get rid of the weirdness that was magical biology, I focused on Rai and asked him about his latest magical training. By this point, the student-teacher relationship had mostly dissolved, his class-abilities helping him find his own path, with relatively little guidance from my side. Instinct, even bestowed from his class, helped him to navigate the shadows in a way that I had a hard time to comprehend. On the other side, discussing his experience with me seemed to help him make sense of what his instincts told him, allowing him to make more of it. It was the best kind of lesson, one where both the nominal teacher and the nominal student learned a great deal.


    By the time Adra was all washed up and refreshed, there were a number of shadows in the room, coalesced into dense clouds by both Rai and me, as we compared and contrasted our methods to form shadow-decoys. For a moment, I noticed her stiffen at the sight, before letting go of her caution and relaxing.


    ¡°By the way, how did you get in here anyway?¡± she asked, sounding a little annoyed. ¡°I know that I didn¡¯t give you a key and I somehow doubt that the innkeeper would simply give one to you.¡±


    Raising my hand, I quickly drew a triangle of runes and, using my Ice-Magic, formed the resulting Ice into a simple key, not one that would fit any lock I knew of but the message was quite obvious.


    ¡°Crappy, cheap locks.¡± Adra muttered in disdain, before speaking louder. ¡°Just pay attention, if I hadn¡¯t been a little drunk last night, I¡¯d have added an alarm to the door, maybe even some sort of trap.¡± she warned, causing Lenore to caw in amusement, deep within my mind.


    ¡°She won¡¯t forget in the future, of that you can be sure.¡± My feathered friend told me, only to laugh even harder when I suggested ways to break such magical measures, given that the element of Darkness contained runes relating to magic and the disruption of it. That, alone, might be the greatest advantage of Sorcerers, compared to all the other classes, that they were only limited by their imagination, affinities and ability. Sure, I had to make all my class-abilities myself but that allowed me to make class-abilities myself.


    Still looking at Adra, I focused a little more, pulling some shadows around the key of Ice I was holding, letting them play around the Ice in a manner that hopefully made the key seem more magical and a little ominous.


    ¡°Let¡¯s get some breakfast?¡± Sigmir interrupted the two of us, with a reasonable and sensible suggestion, especially given that my stomach had made a few noises here and there.


    We all trooped out of the room, heading downstairs. Maybe I should have expected it, given that the events had likely been something regular, but nothing remained of the exuberant party of the night before, the inn looking as calm and steady as a rock.


    The room was mostly empty, with a cleanly dressed dwarven woman sitting at one of the tables, while on two of the other tables, two of last night¡¯s revellers were passed out. When we entered, the dwarven woman looked up, greeting us with a warm smile.


    ¡°Good morning. My husband told me we had new guests staying upstairs.¡± she told us, causing me to pause for a moment.


    ¡°Delmar, you met him yesterday, he¡¯s the chef.¡± she added, probably noticing the general confusion. Not that her words really helped, while I could now put a name to the chef and had an idea who she was referring to, it didn¡¯t help my understanding of the situation. For a second, I considered whether I wanted to ask but for once, my curiosity wasn¡¯t roused. Maybe it was all the earlier talk about reproduction with livestock that I didn¡¯t want to get any additional information regarding the relationship between two dwarves and a satyr or maybe it was some sort of common, societal sense manifesting, keeping me from putting my foot into my mouth. Unlikely, but not impossible.


    ¡°Why don¡¯t you settle down and I''ll get you some breakfast? It¡¯s easy on the stomach, given what happens most nights.¡± she explained with a smile, while walking towards the kitchen. After an exchange of shrugs, we decided to follow the suggestion, settling down around an empty table and making ourselves comfortable.


    Just a minute or three later, the woman was back, carrying an assortment of breakfast-items, quickly setting the table for us. A bowl of a creamy, white substance caught my attention, making me think of yoghurt, something that would go quite well with some fruits and maybe bread on the side. As I reached for it, Adra leaned over to whisper into my ear.


    ¡°That¡¯s probably made from goat¡¯s milk.¡± she told me, her voice suggestive. For a moment, I hesitated before deciding that maybe, just some of the fruits were a better idea. The images springing to mind, regarding the inn using goat¡¯s milk, were not conducive to my appetite.

 Interlude - Crawling

    -Tarrin''s gaming vlog -


    Today: [Road to Purgatory] - Crawling


    ¡°Can anyone explain just what is going on here?¡± a wolfman asks, his head swiveling around to look at his companions while he is slumped against a rocky wall. The light around him is dim, shed by just a few crystals in the wall in addition to a greenish glow coming from the staff of one of his friends. None of them answer for a moment, before the one with the glowing staff responds.


    ¡°That, out there, is a wild magic field.¡± she replies, wiping a bit of sweat off her brow. ¡°Essentially, the magic in the environment got thrown out of whack, think of it a bit like a stone tossed into a pond, disturbing the water, splashing some of it around but also throwing up muck from the bottom of the pond.¡±


    ¡°What can cause those? And, more to the point, do you have an idea what caused the one out there?¡± one of the others, a centaur, asks, looking deeper into the tunnel, his spear at the ready, just in case something comes at them.


    ¡°They can happen naturally, but for that, something big needs to happen, you know, catastrophically big, think major landslides, volcanic eruptions, tidal waves, those kinds of things. But I don¡¯t think that was the case out there, it¡¯s too small for that.¡± the druid responds, frowning as she increases the amount of light given off by her staff.


    ¡°It¡¯s more likely that the one out there was caused by a magical accident of some kind, or a battle, with things going out of hand and creating unforeseen backlash. That the area is so close to a dungeon lends itself to the idea.¡± she continues, only to be interrupted by Arjuk, the wolf, who starts to softly growl in warning.


    ¡°Shit, we might have incoming.¡± the wolfman warns the others, getting up and readying a spear on his own. Curiously, the wolf doesn¡¯t focus on the tunnel that leads deeper into the mountain, or the way out, instead staring at the nearby wall. Following his partner¡¯s line of sight, the wolfman keep an eye on it as well, only to let out a vile curse that turns into a bleep after the first few letters.


    The creature that bursts out of the wall can mostly be described with a single word, teeth, and a lot of them. Forewarned, the wolfman manages to skewer it on his spear, pinning the writhing form that resembles a sleeve filled with many rows of razor sharp teeth to the wall, giving his allies an easy way to strike, quickly dispatching the nightmarish creature.


    ¡°What in all the hells was that?!¡±the wolfman asks, still shaken from the many teeth that came flying towards him just moments before.


    ¡°A earth-larvae, they feed on flesh and magic, these seem to feed on the glacier. Nasty buggers, able to swiftly move through solid terrain thanks to their magic, making them a pain in the behind, far beyond their levels.¡± the orcish fighter, their most experienced team-member replies, his eyes flickering from wall to wall.


    ¡°Feed on magic, you say?¡± the druid asks, unhappy with that idea, before explaining, ¡°I have a feeling we should dig a little deeper, it might give us an idea what happened out there. Or, if not, finding a dungeon in the wild can be counted as a lucky chance that we should exploit, what do you guys think?¡± she asks, looking at her companions.


    ¡°We were sent to find out what changed the wind raptors. I¡¯m pretty sure the valley outside is one of their breeding grounds, which is now an area of wild magic. Unless you tell me otherwise, I¡¯d think that they changed due to that.¡± the orc fighter explains, his main focus still on the environment. ¡°With that, we have completed our quest and can get our rewards. Why risk our lives even further and storm into an unknown dungeon. Sure, that larvae was weak but who knows what lingers in the deeper areas.¡±


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    The two travellers exchange a look, before nodding. Neither of them speaks up, aware that what is a matter of life and death for their companions is merely a question of temporary inconvenience, coupled with a minor permanent disadvantage for them.


    ¡°Let¡¯s go deeper.¡± the small snowbold agrees with the druid, before continuing, ¡°These caves, they feel a little like home, not like the scary place outside.¡±


    ¡°So be it.¡± the orc finally gives in, agreeing with the rest of his group. He might not like it, but at times, following along with the group is a necessary sacrifice.


    In a tight formation, the group starts moving forward and the screen fades to black, a voice speaking from the off.


    ¡°Cold tunnels, filled with monsters.¡± it says, the screen flashing an image of two more teeth-monsters coming out of the walls, with a strange, ice-monster a little further back. It¡¯s quite obvious that the group is fighting hard, each of them guarding their companions back to make sure they aren¡¯t surprised by a burrowing larvae.


    ¡°The small monsters, they were dangerous.¡± the voice continues, fading a little before returning stronger than before.


    ¡°But compared to their masters, they were merely small-fry.¡± the voice finishes and short videos flash on the screen.


    In the first video, the orc fighter is blocking a blow from a massive creature, a vaguely humanoid form made from rock, gravel and ice, the blow strong enough to stagger him back. The block staggers the monster for a moment, an opening instantly exploited by the centaur, who barrels into it with crushing momentum, spear fist. As the creature tries to recover from the blow, an arrow and a beam of radiant energy strike it, staggering it further while the orc fighter is enveloped by a healthy, green glow that invigorates him.


    Moments later, the orc fighter surges forward, making sure that the creature doesn¡¯t try to go after his companions.


    In the second video, the whole group stands in a large, empty room, their heads swivelling around, obviously searching for something. Suddenly, the wolfman leaps aside, rolling as he lands, barely avoiding the massive mouth that burrows from underground. But while the wolfman is recovering from the hasty dodge, the rest of the group has no such trouble, instead focusing their attacks on the massive bulk that is moving through the room, as the monster is returning to the ground.


    Bloody wounds appear on its body, as radiant power burns it, a mace cracks the bony plates protecting its body and a spear slips between those very plates. But, as quick as the monster has appeared, it disappears again, leaving the group above ground, waiting for its next emergence, hoping that they will be able to dodge the lethal mouth.


    And finally, in the third video, the group is fighting a creature similar to the crab-spiders they have seen outside, only that its size is dialed up to eleven. Instead of a creature that can be battered aside with a mace-strike, the monster is big enough to force the orc-fighter to carefully brace, while the others move in and out, preventing it from fully focusing.


    However, just as the orc blocks one strike, another leg comes from the side, getting past the shield and brutally bashing the orc aside. As he desperately tries to get up, the centaur charges in, the momentum of his equine bulk barely enough to push the icy monstrosity back. That, in turn, gives the druid enough time to invigorate the orc again, who manages to re-join the fight before the monster is able to smash the centaur into bloody salsa.


    The screen fades to black again, the voice returns.


    ¡°But those fights, they were just the beginning. The true master of the dungeon, the final boss, was waiting for us.¡± With these words, images return to the screen, the group standing on a small platform, with two stairs leading downward, one on each side. But there is no way to move down the stairs, as endless swarms of hungry larvae crawl up the stairs, trying to overwhelm the centaur on one side and the orc on the other.


    While the two of them, with help from the druid, hold the line, the snowbold and the wolfman stand protected between them, one shooting arrow after arrow into a distant, writhing form, the other burning said form with lances of radiant energy.


    ¡°The battle lasted for hours, each of us driven to exhaustion and beyond. Finally, after we had almost given up on hope, the monstrous boss finally perished, leaving us with the frenzied larvae, who had lost the force that guided them. With them purely driven by hunger, they turned on each other, giving us room to breathe until finally, the battle was over.¡±


    ¡°We had won.¡±


    The screen fades to black again, the globe covered in blue flames appearing, beneath it, the words.


    ¡°Join us, on our Road to Purgatory.¡±

 Chapter 423

    After breakfast, we headed out as a group, planning to go to the Adventurer''s Guild, both to pick up possible quests in the direction we were travelling, maybe something we could turn in when arriving at another branch, and get some information on local traders. At the end of the day, the local Guilds were the first stop for most adventurers coming to town, making it a prime location for merchants and a valuable contact at the same time. While it might not be the most profitable to sell to those large, long-established merchants, looking for a smaller place and comparing prices would take a long time, while giving little reward.


    As we moved through the streets, following the directions given to us by Delmar¡¯s wife, Londri, I noticed that somehow, quite a few eyes, especially the eyes of guards seemed to fixate on me, whenever I stepped into their view. Some of those eyes even stayed on me, tracking me in a way that sent a shiver down my spine.


    ¡°Why do I feel so watched?¡± I asked Sigmir, after looking around once more, making sure that it wasn¡¯t just my imagination.


    ¡°Because they are watching you.¡± she replied, speaking just as softly as my question had been. Thanks to our connection, I could feel that she, too, was rather alarmed by the attention I was getting, to the point that her hand went down, to the loop that held her axe.


    Once I thought for a moment, why would the guards suddenly keep careful track of me, I realised that I might know the answer.  After all, I knew a certain idiot who thought that selecting a couple traits that severely hampered my integration into any civilised society, especially when it came to the first impression, was a good idea. Once one added those traits to a reasonably high level of power, and a couple other distinctly dangerous traits that I had picked up on the way, would give any guard who had a modicum of experience the right, or for me wrong, idea.


    For a few moments, I debated how to act, if I should hope that nothing bad would happen, because obviously trouble never managed to land at my feet to trip me up, or if I should simply admit defeat and start a massacre right here and now. Neither idea seemed terribly realistic but luckily, I had a third option. Lenore, who had followed my train of thought, was already snickering in the back of my mind, amused by the fact that she, the spirit-beast, was better suited to exist in a city compared to me, the supposedly civilised humanoid.


    ¡°How long do you think we¡¯ll need to take care of everything?¡± I asked the others, considering the details of my plan.


    ¡°At least a full day, more likely two.¡± Adra replied, while Sigmir and Rai nodded in agreement. Thinking it over for a moment, I had to agree, even if it greatly annoyed me. Part of my plans had been to seek out the Mages Guild, if there was one in town, and get a look at the ideas of some other spellcaster¡¯s ideas, hopefully getting inspiration regarding my magic-usage.


    For a while I had been a little stuck with my magic, unable to advance. I had learned parts of the dwarven art of runecrafting, and worked to absorb it into my spellcasting but it was a lengthy, difficult process. But the process had given me the idea to take a look at the writings and research of others, thus my idea to visit the mages guild.


    But with the way I was watched, I had a feeling that I¡¯d likely get me, and the rest of the group, into trouble before I even got to the Adventurers¡¯ Guild, let alone finding the time to research for a few days.


    ¡°Love, I¡¯m afraid I¡¯ll have to retreat into my Hallow while we are in town. Otherwise, I might get us into trouble.¡± I decided, causing Adra to chuckle softly, speaking before Sigmir could reply.


    ¡°You mean like you¡¯ve got into trouble in the last, let me think about it, five, I think, towns we¡¯ve stayed in before?¡± she asked, an amused grin on her face. ¡°Maybe you begin to turn self-aware.¡±


    ¡°It might have been seven but I wiped two of those places off the map, so would you still call it a town?¡± I asked in response, trying to portray an image of confusion, ¡°For one of the times we got into trouble you should be grateful, otherwise, you¡¯d likely have ended up getting bled by those insane dryads.¡± I added after a moment, an eyebrow raised.


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    The talk of places that had been wiped off the map must have been a little louder than I had thought, or maybe that particular guard had good ears, given the way he began to pale beneath his beard.


    ¡°Anyway, you can ask Lenore if I¡¯m awake and Love, please take care of my things.¡± I added, pulling off the magic bag on my waist, handing it over to Sigmir. That way, they¡¯d be able to sell my share of the loot as well. Just as I was about to push myself into my Hallow, Sigmir reached out, giving me a rather possessive kiss that interrupted my concentration.


    ¡°I¡¯ll head out of town soon, we can wait for Adra, Rai and Ylva some distance down the road.¡± she told me, obviously unwilling to banish me into my Hallow for too long. With slightly weak knees, I gave her a nod before I vanished, forcing Lenore to quickly flap her wings in a slightly awkward hop to Sigmir¡¯s shoulder.


    Within my Hallow, I felt oddly discontent. Sure, I wouldn¡¯t bring trouble to the others or myself but at the same time, didn¡¯t I just hide away? Mentally grumbling to myself, I started forming Darkness-runes in my mind, trying to find patterns within them, in an attempt to link the runes together in a way similar to the connecting-patterns I had found for Ice-runes. It was mostly a mental exercise, without a directly obvious application, I could hardly make an item out of Darkness, as I had with Ice, and inscribe runes into it. Nonetheless, gaining a deeper understanding of runes felt like a worthwhile pursuit and it was something I could do while hiding out.


    After poking around for about an hour, I told Lenore that I¡¯d be gone for a bit and triggered the log-out process, still a little annoyed with the impact of my traits. Certainly, the positive traits I had gained in exchange, the massive increase in Astral Power and the boost to skill-acquisition, were great but their impact felt less obvious.


    Getting up, out of the capsule, I had to chuckle to myself and my biased evaluation. On ninety out of a hundred days, the benefits outweighed the demerits of my traits by a lot, it was only those ten days on which the demerits came to bear that were incredibly annoying.


    Looking out of the window, I realised that it was late at night, a time where most people would be deep asleep. Not quite hungry just yet, I decided to get some fresh air and put on a warm jacket. Morgana, my avatar, might be able to ignore the cold and control hail and snow, but my normal body wasn¡¯t quite as lucky.


    A short walk up the stairs brought me to the roof-access and after opening it, I pulled my cloak tighter around me, a cold wind billowing around me. While there was no snow, the winter-night was cold enough to be a little unpleasant, at least for a moment. Chuckling to myself, if only for a moment, I stepped outside, letting the cold air flow into my lungs.


    It felt weird, the time I had spent in the capsule, living as the Avatar Morgana, had given me a bit of a disconnect, when it came to temperature. Intellectually, I knew that the temperature around me was a couple degrees above freezing, the wind making it feel a little colder, but if I would have to make a guess based on feeling, I would have thought the temperature massively lower, simply due to the resistance my Avatar enjoyed.


    It made me wonder, how about people with less similar Avatars, after all, Morgana was strongly based on my body and the attribute-points I had used were focused on my mental attributes. While the physical capabilities of my Avatar were a lot higher than those of my physical body, my regular, physical exercise helped to lessen the disconnect, especially as it focused on self- and body-control.


    But what about someone who lacked such exercise? What about someone who played a powerful physically-oriented character in-game, but was just an average person, with little exercise outside? Wouldn¡¯t their body-control get thrown out of whack, possibly to problematic levels?


    The idea that someone might reflexively think they were able to do something, possibly something as simple as crossing the road before a car reached them, because they were accustomed to the physical stats of their Avatar, only to get hit by said car because their bodies weren¡¯t able to keep up, was a little frightening.


    How would such accidents and idocies impact Road to Purgatory? If there was a correlation between such accidents and people playing the game, things could get blown up in the media, especially if there was an actual causation.


    Shaking my head, I made a mental note to add an addendum to one of my test-reports, maybe they could add a warning-label or something like that. Just to keep the game out of trouble.

 Chapter 424

    By the time I logged back into the game, a few hours had passed and what greeted me, perceiving the world around Lenore, was a road surrounded by fields. The only one nearby was Sigmir, carrying Lenore on her shoulder.


    ¡°Welcome back.¡± Lenore told me, once my mind was fully aware.


    ¡°Thanks, it¡¯s good to be back. You¡¯ve left the city?¡± I asked, my senses greatly limited while in my Hallow. Looking out, into the distance, worked only through Lenore¡¯s eyes, even if I was able to get a sense of my surroundings.


    ¡°Yeah, even after you disappeared, there were quite a few people who had a rather distinct interest in me and Sigmir, by association. We dropped the others off at the Adventurer¡¯s Guild, gave them the pelts and stuff we acquired in the mountains and got out of there, before things got dicy.¡± she explained, both amused at the fact that I managed to get kicked out of another town without being present but indignant that she had been implicated, as if she was merely a mindless beast, following along its owner.


    ¡°Ylva stayed with them?¡± I asked, not wanting to engage with her amusement. I had a feeling it would only give me a headache.


    ¡°Mhm, that way, we can easily meet up.¡± she confirmed, causing me to give a mental nod of agreement. Before we could converse further, Sigmir spoke up, demonstrating her impressive, if slightly uncanny, ability to sense my presence, even while hidden within my Hallow.


    ¡°It¡¯s good that you¡¯re back.¡± she said, reaching up to give Lenore a gentle caress. The gesture amused me, just a little, to the point that I wanted to return it. Pushing out from my Hallow, I manifested next to her, stumbling a little on appearance. Apparently, I inherited some of the momentum Lenore had, when moving out of the Hallow, an effect that most likely would cause some physics-teachers severe headaches. Luckily on Mundus ¡®because it¡¯s magic¡¯ was a valid explanation for phenomena that broke my understanding of the laws of physics, sparing me from trying to make sense of it.


    ¡°It¡¯s good to be back.¡± I repeated my earlier statement, as Sigmir caught my hand in hers, while I took a moment to look around, taking in the surrounding area. There was little to see nearby, a mix of fields and meadows, with the mountains some distance behind us. It was reasonably easy to figure out where Neamov was, simply due to the massive cliff that towered above it. I still wanted to know if there were precautions against rockfalls or similar events, as the cliff struck me as a rather precarious place to walk beneath. Alas, that would remain a mystery for the time being.


    ¡°How long do you think the others will need to catch up?¡± I asked, still taking in the surroundings. I could see some buildings dotted about, most likely the dwellings of the farmers working the area, in addition to some copses of trees and a couple of shrubs in the distance. All in all, the land looked cultivated and tamed, making me feel a little disappointed. Maybe it was due to our previous travels, with the rather dangerous, wild lands surrounding us, but if the rest of western Aretia looked like the area around us, the travel would be utterly boring. Maybe we could find some bandits or something, just to liven things up a little.


    ¡°Likely, two days. We should look for a nice place to spend the time. I¡¯m sure we could do with some relaxation.¡± she suggested, getting a nod in agreement. I had a few ideas what we could do to spend the time, some of which even included clothes.


    ¡°Lenore, would you be a dear and take a look from the air? An area near a brook, or some other water-source would be greatly appreciated.¡± I asked, getting an avian nod in agreement, before she took off.


    Sigmir and I continued to enjoy our walk in silence, simply making our way down the road without any haste or pressure, when, maybe half an hour after taking off, Lenore returned into a range where she could transmit memories and complex thoughts. What she transmitted was simple enough to understand, images of a rough footpath, leading away from the ancient road, towards a particular stand of trees. There was a meandering creek nearby and even a couple of small ponds, with shrubs growing along their edges.


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    With a mental nod, I agreed that it looked like a good spot to make camp while waiting and told Sigmir about it. She, too, agreed with me and we paid attention to the path that was ahead of us.


    Despite paying attention, we would likely have missed the path, the spot near the road a little overgrown with shrubs, concealing it unless one was in the air or already aware of its existence.


    ¡°That doesn¡¯t seem suspicious at all.¡± Simgir remarked, a little amused at the way the path was concealed. It might have been coincidance, but it felt far more likely that someone had an interest in keeping people from following said path.


    ¡°We should be careful.¡± I agreed with her remark, mentally switching from the casual way I had been walking to a more vigilant approach, my mind ready to react to danger.


    Before we got far, I felt a suspicious ripple in the Astral River, similar to the sensation of magic usage but not quite. It was familiar nonetheless, the sensation of somebody using Observe to glean information. There was a short window between the use of the ability and its success and into that window, I managed to slam a burst of Darkness-Magic, badly focused but infused with the idea represented by the Concealment-Rune. It was crude, the magical equivalent of smacking a fly buzzing around me and it was just as effective. Instead of divining information on Sigmir and me, the user, whoever they were, got a burst of Darkness-Magic to the face. It wouldn¡¯t deal any actual damage but I had a feeling that someone nearby was questioning their life-choices.


    Focusing on the sensation, and my link to the Astral Power I had just used, allowed me to track back the skill to the trees we were moving towards.


    ¡°What happened?¡± Sigmir asked, having noticed the sudden burst of power I emitted, as she moved to shield me behind her.


    ¡°Someone just tried to divine information on us.¡± I replied, while focusing on the distant sensation, ¡°Let¡¯s see who was that curious.¡± I added, my lips twisting into a snarl.


    She acknowledged my idea with a grunt, while making sure that her shield was affixed to her arm, just in case the next measure taken by whoever was within the trees came by projectile. Similarly, I made myself ready to react with walls of Ice or shield of Darkness, depending on the situation. At the same time, I let my Eisblumen stretch out a little, wrapping around my arm, just in case something managed to close in.


    ¡°Do you know why there¡¯s someone running away on the other side of the trees?¡± Lenore asked over our connection, still flying high in the air above us.


    ¡°Someone just tried to divine information on us and failed.¡± I replied, closing an eye to see through her eyes when I felt her invitation, her intent saying a lot more than her words ever could.


    On the ground below, two running figures were quite visible. Clothed in a mix of green and brown, with some leaves and twigs stuck to their clothes, they were clearly dressed to hide out in the foliage but now, when running, their concealment didn¡¯t help them. What made them stand out even more was the lingering trace of Darkness-Magic sticking to one of them, faint but obvious to Lenore¡¯s eyes.


    ¡°And that is our someone.¡± I nodded, mostly to myself. ¡°Would you agree that their actions are not the actions of an innocent being?¡± I wondered, seeking Lenore¡¯s agreement. Moments later, I received it and decided that someone who was sneaking around, hiding in the trees and fleeing as soon as they were detected would most likely be some sort of scout or bandit. Pushing Lenore to dive down, I prepared a magical attack, waiting until she was in range and once I felt that the distance was short enough, I lashed out.


    Moments later, I regretted my action, the mind stronger than I had anticipated. Not strong enough to let my magic fully lash back against me, but strong enough to make it a painful experience. My connection to Lenore was disrupted and I felt myself stagger, just a little. Sigmir, obviously, noticed my condition, waiting for me to steady myself, keeping an eye on the trees, just in case.


    ¡°Give me a moment.¡± I told her, trying to shake the sudden headache. I was still a little out of it when Lenore landed on my shoulder, looking rather shaken as well.


    ¡°They got away, whoever they were. Your magic staggered one of them but if you ever do something like that again, I might peck you.¡± she told me, using my voice to speak out loud, instead of using our connection. I could merely nod, as even thinking too hard was painful in that moment, let alone use mental or magical abilities.

 Chapter 425

    By the time the banging in my head had stopped and we made our way to the small grove, the person who had hid out within was long gone. But while the person was gone, some tracks of their presence remained, giving Sigmir and me some clues to their status. The most obvious hint was their original position, a comfortable, well-concealed space beneath a dense shrub, making it almost impossible to detect their presence unless one was almost on top of them. Even a flying observer, like Lenore, had been unable to notice them, while the hideout was positioned in such a way that it allowed observation on the road, especially towards Neamov.


    ¡°Who do you think they were?¡± I asked, while Sigmir was still looking at the remaining tracks.


    ¡°Likely a bandit, keeping an eye on the road. Close enough to town to be profitable while far enough away to give them time to retreat if patrols are on their way.¡± she replied, squatting to take a closer look at some marks in the dirt.


    ¡°Should we leave?¡± I wondered out loud, the idea to get attacked by bandits while waiting for the others wasn¡¯t quite what I had in mind for relaxation. Doubly so, if it happened while Sigmir and I were otherwise occupied.


    ¡°I don¡¯t think that¡¯s necessary.¡± she told me, standing up again. ¡°You blocked their divination earlier, so they wouldn¡¯t know just how strong we are. They¡¯d only know that two people moved here and if we make camp, they¡¯d likely learn that, too.¡±


    ¡°But you need to remember, bandits have little interest in the fight itself, if they had, they¡¯d be Adventurers, competing for quests and power. No, for bandits, the lower their prey¡¯s power, the better and even then, they have to consider the power in relation to the potential gain. Attacking adventurers of unknown power, even if there are only two of us, is far too risky a proposition for cowards.¡± she explained, her voice showing her disdain for bandits quite clearly.


    ¡°So, stay here, make ourselves comfortable but remain vigilant, just in case?¡± I suggested, getting a nod in response. The reasons that had originally made this location a good one to camp still applied, they likely had been the reasons for the bandits to make this place into their observation-spot. Even bandits needed access to water,


    With the decision to stay made, we quickly decided on a division of labor. My job would be to create accomodations for us and, if possible, create a magical alarm-system, similar to the one we used when camping in the wild, only larger by an order of magnitude. With my head still not quite recovered from the magical backlash I had suffered earlier, Mind Magic was a bitch in that regard, I hopped into a nearby tree, making myself comfortable there and taking out the Grandmother¡¯s Grimoire. There was a version of an alarm-spell in there, I had used it before, but hopefully, I¡¯d also find something that would allow me to set a boundary around the whole area, altering us if a big enough creature entered.


    While I was reading perched on my branch, Sigmir was starting to scout around, trying to gather more information on our mysterious observer. In addition, she was looking for edible plants, just to add a little something to our diet.


    Finally, Lenore was doing much the same as Sigmir, taking a look around, only in her case, she was doing so from above.


    Taking out the Grimoire, I let out a soft sigh, the item a reminder just how much I didn¡¯t know. It was merely a single book out of many, hidden in the Grandmother¡¯s library but the method of its creation was a mystery to me. When Lenore and I had taken a look at it with her sight, the result had been almost as frustrating as the results had been when looking at the divine magic used by Olivia. The Grimoire was covered with magical formations, all of them mind-bogglingly complex and sophisticated, their functions and purpose a mystery to me. If the being that had given me the Grimoire wasn¡¯t one I considered too far above me to be interested in my downfall, I would be suspicious. But the Grandmother had, so far, been on the level with Sigmir and me, even when not considering that she had the opportunity to kill us more than once. I simply couldn¡¯t see a reason for her to scheme against us. Keep an eye on us, possibly, due to my nature as a Traveller even plausible, but I didn¡¯t think she¡¯d work against us. The idea didn¡¯t feel right.


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    Leafing through the book, I realised that a few more pages had been filled since I had looked at it last. Originally, I had only been able to read the first few pages but now, after almost a year of studying the book and the contents that slowly revealed themselves as I grew in power, I was able to read almost a third of the spells described. Some of them, maybe even most of them, were things I hadn¡¯t considered before, magic to accomplish difficult or complex tasks with less effort.


    One of the earliest spells I had read had been a spell to invigorate a field by conjuring a cloud of magical rain, reasonably simple but the amount of power needed was intense, to the point that the spell was supposed to be used as a ritual, the caster slowly accumulating power over hours, maybe even days. Interesting and it had proven useful as the basis for another spell, but by itself, it wasn¡¯t something I would use.


    Similarly, there was a spell that would allow the caster to designate an area and monitor the growth of specific plants within, with an addendum that specified how such a spell could be modified to target those specific plants with growth-magic. Or, if one was so inclined, how to exclude specific plants when using magic to wither the plants in the area, which was also possible.


    After an hour of reading, part of which with Lenore on my shoulder, I decided that my head had recovered to the point that I could do the magical heavy lifting, especially with Lenore back to lend me some of her Astral Power.


    Jumping down a tree, the short sensation of gliding through the air, was one that I greatly enjoyed. It was too bad that I hadn¡¯t gained Air-Magic from my bond with Lenore, the idea of flying on my own was a wonderful one.


    Creating a small building had become routine, still a large expenditure of power, but without any real suspense. While it was still rather warm, the magical Ice I could create was easily able to withstand the temperature for a few days,especially if I restored and reinforced it from time to time. All in all, it only took me a little over an hour to create the cottage with some simple furniture, giving me more than enough time to deal with the alarm-spell I had discovered in the Grimoire earlier.


    It was, essentially, just what I needed, as if the Grandmother, or whoever she had learned the spell from, had encountered a similar problem before. Which was likely, after all, keeping your privacy was quite important, not just for spellcasters of any sort but in general. Maybe more important for spellcasters, given that some magic required preparations and a certain wind-up time, before it was usable to its full potential, making surprise attacks a special kind of unpleasant to deal with. Thus, the development of magical alarms, trip-wires, traps and the concealment of those.


    I had a feeling that it was an entire field of magic in and off itself, with different spellcasters trying to come up with new ways to defend, while others were searching for ways to break or circumvent. A little like the development of computer-malware and malware-protection, not that I had more than the most rudimentary programming-skills. Hello, World, and all that.


    Luckily, I didn¡¯t need to reinvent the wheel, I only had to follow the steps, to colour inside the lines, if you will, while walking around the area I wanted to monitor, designating the outer wards with spikes of magic, while setting the conditions that would cause the effect to go off. The whole thing was rather crude, simply causing a prepared medium, in my case an Ice-Spike, to shatter if a living being larger than a specified size crossed the boundary. Still, it should be good enough, especially if Lenore kept an eye open during the night.


    By the time I was done with the alarm, Sigmir and I had just enough time to relax for a bit, before it was time to take care of dinner. And then, we had an entire night for all kinds of fun. Just the idea brought a wide smile on my face, nights without Adra and Rai nearby were a precious commodity and I didn¡¯t plan to waste this one. Or any of the other nights, before we re-united.

 Chapter 426

    Somehow, this was not the way I had originally wanted to exhaust myself with Sigmir.


    With a sigh, I pushed myself off the ground, looking at Sigmir, who looked down on my wiped-out form with a look between amusement and apology. Given that she had just used her shield to remind me why jumping in combat was generally a stupid idea, by swatting me out of the air, I could understand both sentiments but at the end of the day, I had asked her to help me train.


    Earlier, when I had watched the night, outside the capsule, the difference between my Avatar and my real body had made itself obvious to me, which, in turn, made me consider how that difference manifested in the opposite direction. Even before I had crossed the second Divide, my Avatar had higher physical capabilities than my actual body, allowing me to perform movements and forms with enviable ease. But I had never thought to push my fighting abilities much further than those I had learned in my real body, outside of a few reflexive movements in emergencies. Essentially, unless I was forced to react to an incoming threat, I moved as I could with my physical body.


    Which was akin to fighting in restraints, using less force and a lot less agility than I might be able to use, if I developed a fighting style suitable for my Avatar-body. And that was while ignoring the potential movements that my Avatar would be able to perform, like the rather acrobatically stupid jump I had tried earlier.


    With that sentiment in mind, I had asked Sigmir to train with me, giving me a living, breathing and, most importantly, defending partner to work with. Which was what she mostly did, keeping her shield between the two of us, blocking my blades, while using the blunted edge of an Ice-Axe to keep me on my toes. While our technical fighting abilities weren¡¯t that far apart, Sigmir¡¯s fighting training hadn¡¯t focused on them, she was still better than me, with long years of actual experience. Adding on to that, was the simple fact that she was stronger, faster and more accurate, with enough endurance to simply outlast me, to make an actual fight pointless, unless I used my magic. But that would be entirely against the idea of physical training, so I had to grit my teeth and try to come up with ways to surprise her.


    Which, more often than not, ended with me on the ground, with another spot that might bruise a little, thanks to her being very careful and gentle with me. But even getting gently swatted with a heavy shield wasn¡¯t pleasant, giving me ample motivation to do better.


    Letting out a slow breath, I decided that I was being stupid. Or maybe just obstinate, a part of me not wanting to accept that I simply was no match for Sigmir when it came to physical combat. But then, I really didn¡¯t have to be, the only reason I would ever use weapons in melee was to defend myself and get time to create distance to use my magic.


    ¡°Love, I think there is a better way to train.¡± I told her, an idea forming in my mind. ¡°Trying to close in with a physical fighter like you would be pure idiocy on my part, what I need to do, and to perfect, is a way of getting away and defending myself, not trying to attack.¡± I explained, when she interrupted me.


    ¡°I won¡¯t attack you!¡± she growled, the intent in her words palpable, a bit of the familiar red aura she used when fighting seriously leaking out.


    ¡°What about trying to catch me? We both put away our weapons and play a game. We define an area, let¡¯s say this grove, and my goal is to escape from the area, while your job is to put me into the cottage. Winner gets to perform whatever she wants on the loser, later tonight.¡± I suggested, my tongue flicking out when considering whether I wanted to win or lose. Both options were seriously tempting.


    My suggestion, or maybe the look on my face, caused her to start laughing as she shook her head.


    ¡°Only you¡­¡± she grinned, before putting her axe and shield away. ¡°Yes, we can do that.¡± she agreed, prompting me to sheath my blades and placing them on the cottage.


    ¡°Best out of three?¡± I asked, after we had taken position in the center of the grove, maybe five meters apart. Sigmir simply nodded and we agreed on a thrown rock hitting the ground as our starting signal.


    The moment the rock hit the ground, I instantly twisted to the side, trying to get as much speed as I could. I even went so far to activate Bullet Time and use Blood Magic to enhance my speed, quite certain that the first few moments were the most dangerous, the starting-position relatively open and Sigmir already close.


    It was as if I could feel Sigmir¡¯s breath in my neck, I certainly could hear her moving behind me, and decided that I needed to use all the tools in my toolbox, if I wanted to win. Which I did, not for the reward but because only by doing my best, the training would be meaningful.


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    With time as precious as it was, I activated Overflow to get a little more power out, before I was caught. Not to increase the magic used in my legs, channelling an almost uncontrolled burst of power into that particular magic would likely rip my legs apart, but to create a smokescreen.


    My Astral Power burst out of me, forming a dense mist around me, giving me a few extra moments, with Sigmir¡¯s line of sight interrupted. The mist, and my connection to it, also meant that I actually had an idea where Sigmir was, almost right behind me, as I twisted behind the first tree around the clearing. Letting more Mist burst out, letting it flow into all directions, I decided that a bit of misdirection was necessary and shifted my direction from the direct line towards the edge of the grove to a more angled one, trying to step as gently as possible. Speed was important but if I tried to win with speed, I was bound to lose.


    A thought pushed together some of the tiny particles that made up the mist, forming small hailstones which I blindly shot into the direction I had originally been going, creating noise in that direction, while I continued moving on my new path, making as little noise as possible.


    By the time Sigmir realised that I had duped her, the distance between us was high enough to allow me to get out of the grove and to safety. She managed to catch up quite a bit but at the end of the day, she hadn¡¯t been fast enough.


    ¡°That¡¯s the first round going to me.¡± I grinned, giving her a soft kiss, when she caught up. She merely nodded, while I looked into me, realising that I had used more Astral Power than I had anticipated, given the short time. With a moment''s thought, I realised that a lot of Astral Power had to be within the mist I had created and was still connected to. Pushing on that connection, I drew together the mist, forming the tiny particles into something akin to very soft ice-cream, only without flavours, before inhaling the substance, similar to how I had ingested Liquid Moonlight before. It was a little different but the power was still mine and still in my body, allowing me to recover my Astral Power by eating my magic.


    Between that and some Astral Meditation, I was able to recover my power quickly, letting Sigmir and me get into position for the second round.


    Again, the stone landed on the ground and I dashed off to the side, this time instantly channelling Power to create my distracting Mist. However, this time, Sigmir had obviously considered what to do against it and I could feel a sudden burst of power behind me, moments before a roaring howl, laced with Astral Power, shook the air around us, to the point that the trees started to lose leaves.


    The mist I had just created was instantly dispersed, leaving me out in the open and Sigmir, her red aura flaring around her, caught me before I could take more than a couple of steps. For a moment, I considered trying to get away but there was no way to squirm out of the bear-hug she had me in and a slap on my rear stopped even that attempt.


    ¡°This is my win.¡± she told me, an adorable grin on her face, so unlike the powerful aura around her, before she kissed my nose.


    ¡°Mhm, let¡¯s do another one. Do you need to recover?¡± I asked, not certain just how much power what she had done had taken.


    ¡°Give me a couple of minutes.¡± she nodded, giving me time to consider further plans.


    Soon, we were standing in the middle of the clearing again. Again, a small rock, hitting the ground started the festivities.


    My initial opening was similar to the one I had used for the second fight, using Overflow to channel as much power as possible, while using Bullet Time to speed up my mind, only this time, I didn¡¯t even try to use Blood Magic to make myself faster. Instead, all my focus went into Ice Magic, creating a burst of mist while also letting the vines from the Eisblumen I was still wearing around my arm lash out behind me, while jumping back.


    This time, I hadn¡¯t yet turned around when Sigmir¡¯s aura flared to life and her voice shook the air, dispersing the mist I had created. Unlike the last time, I didn¡¯t just try to run, instead, as I jumped backwards, the Eisblumen gained more length, enough to reach a branch overhead and behind me. Pulling on that branch, my jump turned into more of a glide, while another vine reached out and wrapped around one of the trees, allowing me a bit of control over my movement. Enough control to dodge Sigmir, who had tried to catch me by jumping after me.


    More and more Mist formed around us, enough to obscure sight quite handily and once I felt there was enough, I did my very best to blend into the mist while landing on another tree-branch. Darkness-Magic allowed me to conceal myself and the Eisblumen allowed for some movement without making too much of a disturbance, alas, I realised too late that I had forgotten something.


    Namely, if there was one person, I would never be able to hide from, it was Sigmir. Thanks to my Astral Power still connecting me to the mist, I was able to sense her, and notice when she stopped for a moment, completely stilling, making me wonder what she was doing. When I felt a tug, deep within me, I knew the answer, she was using our connection to find me, homing in on me without fail.


    ¡°Cheater!¡± I called out, just a little offended, but also amused, while abandoning any attempt at stealth, instead darting through the trees as fast as my vines could pull me.


    Alas, it was not enough and before I was able to escape to nominal safety, I was caught, again, only this time, I used the vines to give my cheating Sigmir a slap on her shapely rear-end.


    ¡°Who was it, that said all is fair, in love and war?¡± she asked me, the bear-hug she had caught me with shifting into more of a princess-carry. Grumbling a little, I conceded that she had, indeed, won this round, but I wasn¡¯t conceding the day. There would be more rounds afterwards.

 Chapter 427

    By the time Adra and Rai caught up to us, overall three days after our original exit from Neamov, Sigmir and I had thoroughly lost track of the score between us. Both of us had tried, and often succeeded, to come up with ways to catch or evade the other, while also breaking the tricks we had previously used. It was a game of cat and mouse that both of us thoroughly enjoyed, especially those short moments of playful gloating that we engaged in, whenever a round was won.


    The training had been quite effective in another way, with a few skill-points gained by hard work. Both Ice- and Darkness-Magic gained a point each, while my Stealth-Skill went up by three and finally, my Dual-Blade Mastery went up by two points. Sadly, my Rune-Magic didn¡¯t profit at all, but at the end of the day, I had hardly used it, simply because there was no time to actually cast spells with Sigmir coming after me. At most, I could instantly project a runic formation, with time and mental capacity limiting the effect I could achieve. More and more, I was forced to realise that Runic Magic was wonderful, a great ability, but only if you had time to carefully craft the runes and manipulate the result directly.


    Ultimately, my best chances had been going airborne, moving through the trees in an attempt to abuse the larger size and higher weight of Sigmir. She simply couldn¡¯t land on some branches I could use, the one time she had tried, my victory had been assured, the branch giving way with a resounding crack, sending her tumbling to the ground. Thus, most of the rounds turned into a game of getting into the trees without getting caught and using a combination of stealth and deception afterwards. The use of our unique connection was forbidden after the first time, as there simply was no way known to me to mask it. And even if there were, I wasn¡¯t willing to meddle with that particular part of me, not unless I had a full and thorough understanding of the consequences.


    Another thing I had tried to understand, again, these past days had been the ability to instantly move through shadows, It would be an incredible tool to escape, which had been the whole point of the exercise, but the skill continued to elude me. Part of me was beginning to wonder if I was going at things wrong, if I shouldn¡¯t try to figure out how the skill worked but how I had been able to use the skill before. Analysing the known circumstances, instead of speculating and experimenting with the unknown. So far, however, I had come up empty.


    ¡°That is a surprise.¡± I had to admit, when Lenore warned us that the others were approaching. For some reason, Olivia was following behind the familiar forms of Ylva, Rai and Adra. For a moment, I felt myself balk at the fact that neither Sigmir nor I had been asked about letting her join our group going forward, but quickly pushed the feeling down, at least until I knew more. There might be some circumstances involved, especially given that they were a little late.


    Sigmir and I had been on a short break anyway, so we both made sure that we were fully dressed, not necessarily a given with the warmth and our privacy, and moved towards the edge of the small forest.


    By the time we got out of the woods, the others had reached us, with Lenore having already landed next to Ylva, sharing some closeness. It looked a little amusing, the giant wolf gently snuffling and nuzzling the reasonably large raven, while the raven rubbed against the wolves nose, an image one wouldn¡¯t really expect, unless both parties had been brought up together. Which, in a way, the two of them had been, they had been together for most of their life, with shared experiences and trust.


    ¡°Good to see you again.¡± Adra greeted us, giving a short wave as she stopped in front of Sigmir and me.


    ¡°Yes, good to see you. Did everything work out well, no trouble?¡± Sigmir asked in response, while I looked the other two over.


    ¡°Eh, not really. We got mixed up in a bit of a scuffle with a couple of thugs but nothing really troublesome.¡± Adra replied, her eyes flickering to Olivia for just a moment.


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    ¡°And I have to thank the two of you, for getting mixed up in that one. They got mixed up in the scuffle when some ruffians had designs on my pack. Fools, the whole lot of them, even if they managed to take my stuff, what would they gain? Do I look wealthy to you?¡± Olivia groused, in a way that made me chuckle. It seemed that she was a little offended at being seen as a worthwhile target to rob, while I; on the other hand, wondered why she hadn¡¯t used her magic to keep herself safe. Before I could follow my curious nature and ask, I remembered the answer I had been given so often, when I had asked her about her magic, that it was the will of her deity. Not wanting to get that unsatisfying answer yet again, I decided to hold my tongue, instead curious why she had decided to follow along.


    ¡°So, how long will Trouble keep following us?¡± I asked, a little tongue in cheek, looking at Olivia.


    ¡°Trouble has been following you since long before even we met.¡± Adra threw in, before Olivia could react, causing me to snort in amusement. She wasn¡¯t wrong about that, but it might have been my ability to attract trouble that made Sigmir stumble on me, all that time ago. If the trouble I attracted whenever entering cities was what I had to put up with, in exchange for that meeting, I was gladly paying that price.


    ¡°Now, now, children.¡± Olivia gently chided us, causing laughter all around. ¡°When I heard that you are travelling West, I asked if they thought you¡¯d mind if I continued my travels with you. As it happens, I¡¯ll be continuing to travel in that direction, too, and, who knows, my knowledge of the region might prove useful.¡± she explained, before adding, ¡°I even have a couple of contacts in some of the cities along the way, nobody of great importance, but I do know about good Inns and taverns, nice towns and even a few wonderful places off the beaten path.¡±


    ¡°Eh, why not.¡± I agreed, she had been a pleasant companion the time she had been with us. ¡°The original agreement still applies, no doing harm to any of us and we are good.¡± I added, getting a nod in response, before putting the matter aside. I couldn¡¯t see a disadvantage to having her with us, other than a peevishness at not being asked beforehand, while her defensive magical abilities in combination with her knowledge were big points in her favour.


    ¡°Did you find suitable quests in the city?¡± Sigmir asked, a few moments later, when it was obvious that I didn¡¯t plan to add anything to the topic of Olivia.


    ¡°Kinda, most of the quests in the region are essentially being snatched up by the locals as soon as they are given, to keep outsiders from butting in. But there was an active quest to hunt down a bandit-group in the region, which can be turned in at any Adventurer¡¯s Guild. We accepted that one.¡± she explained, handing me a sheet of paper. The moment I took the coarse paper, a blue window appeared in front of me.


    <table><tbody><tr><td colspan="2">Quest Alert!</td></tr><tr><td colspan="2">Bandits near Neamov.</td></tr><tr><td colspan="1">Quest Difficulty </td><td colspan="1"> Easy </td></tr><tr><td colspan="2">Bandits are hiding within the forests near Neamov. Hunt down the Blood Rock Bandits, especially their Leader Delrau Ironfist.


    Blood Rock Bandits killed 0/30


    Delrau Ironfist killed 0/1</td></tr><tr><td colspan="1">Quest Reward </td><td colspan="1"> 20 Gold Coin for killing the Bandits,


    20 Gold Coins for killing Delrau </td></tr></tbody></table>


    ¡°That sounds troublesome.¡± Sigmir grumbled after thinking about it for a moment, and I had to agree. A quest like that, with the kind of intelligent enemies I had to expect in Mundus, was the worst kind of quest, especially when it was one that the locals avoided. To me, their avoidance meant one of two things, either the bandits were incredibly powerful, strong enough to make attacking them a risky proposition, or they were exceptionally good at hiding, maybe hiding and using traps and ambushes to their advantage. With the quest calling the difficulty ¡®easy¡¯, I could guess that their combat-power wasn¡¯t too high, compared to ours. But that likely meant that finding them would be the problem. While Adra was a competent tracker and Ylva had her canine senses that gave her an edge, the rest of us were rather mediocre in that regard. The quest was simply not playing to our strengths.


    ¡°How about we take a few days to explore the area, and maybe try to follow that guy we saw on the first day?¡± I suggested, not quite convinced we should use too much time in the area. The reward was nice, but was it nice enough to take weeks to traipse through the local area, without any real hint where the bandits had their hideout?


    Not in my opinion.

 Chapter 428

    The next day found us bright and early, after we had spent another night in the grove Sigmir and I had camped in. We had made some plans the night before, mostly that we wouldn¡¯t invest too much time in the search for the local bandits, while also learning more about the areas further to the west.


    Western Aretia was, just like the rest of the continent, a bit of a mess, politically. There were a lot of city-states, similar to Neamov, with smaller towns and villages filling up the various safe places in between. While there were some dangerous, even very dangerous places, mostly in regions that were dominated by swamps or within the mountains, the overall region was relatively safe, especially compared to the northern forests.


    The most dangerous predators in these lands were sapient, which was why the first stop, after breakfast, had been the location where we had seen the two scouts last. While we had no idea whether they were part of the group we would be paid to hunt down, it seemed to be a good place to start, even if the trail had had enough time to thoroughly cool. Yet, a cold trail was better than no trail at all, and there was the hope that maybe, just maybe, Adra, with her innate connection to the land, and Ylva, with her nose, would be able to pick something up where Sigmir had failed to find anything.


    While Lenore was keeping an eye open, flying overhead, the rest of us was watching and waiting while Ylva tried to find a scent. After a couple of minutes with her nose to the ground, she finally gave up, without having anything to show for her trouble. Either the time had been too long, or the people who had been fleeing had done something to obscure their scent or a combination of those two. Or something else entirely.


    But where Ylva¡¯s nose failed, Adra and a strange combination of magic, innate dryad ability and classical tracking-skill were able to achieve results. I didn¡¯t even try to ask how she spotted what she had found, while I might get an explanation, I had doubts I would understand it. What I had been able to sense was enough to remind me that she was a creature of the land, with an innate bond to nature and plant-life, in a way that I couldn¡¯t even begin to understand.


    Anyway, however she had done it, she was quite certain that she had found the track, even though almost four days had passed since the persons who had created it had left. Swept along by Adra¡¯s enthusiasm, we began following the tracks she had found, going north, away from Neamov and the ancient road, towards the foothills.


    It didn¡¯t take us long to stumble upon the first obstacle, or rather, the scouts we had driven away had used that obstacle to obscure their tracks. There were a few streams of water coming from the mountains and the tracks we had been following led right into one of them, without coming out the other side. While I wasn¡¯t a trained tracker, the others had been teaching me some of the basics, especially when it came to evading tracking and obscuring your tracks by mundane means. Using a flowing body of water had been one of the easiest ways they had suggested, to simply move into the shallow part, continue for some distance inside the water before leaving it. Bonus-points if you managed to find a nice, hard surface to leave the water, where leaving tracks was unlikely, making it even harder for potential trackers to detect the point you moved away from the water.


    Obviously, the scouts had employed that basic, yet incredibly effective, tactic and let the water wash away any sign of their passing. Again, Adra used her magic, chanting softly and slowly, the sound of her voice shifting in tone and timbre, almost as if she was singing. Her performance took almost a minute, reminding me that runic magic was far superior to the slow chanting-method, and afterwards, I could feel her power radiate outwards for a moment, moving along the stream.


    ¡°Great.¡± she spat out a moment later, her voice indicating her annoyance. ¡°There are two tracks leading away from the water, one some distance up-stream, the other a bit further down-stream.¡± she added, clearly unhappy about it.


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    ¡°They split up?¡± I asked, a little uncertain, splitting up seemed to be a bad idea, if you were trying to escape.


    ¡°Either that, or they created a false trail, before doubling back and continuing to the other location. Both are possible ways to evade trackers. We¡¯ll have to check them out one by one.¡± she explained, before turning to follow along the flowing water.


    The rest of us followed along, without much choice about it. I had a feeling that it had only been the first of multiple tricks employed by our quarry to evade pursuit.


    Soon, my feeling was confirmed in an unexpected way. After moving downstream for a few minutes, Adra stopped and pointed to the other side of the brook, where the area was turning a little muddy, the water creating a swampy area. Even I, with my admittedly mediocre tracking-skills, was able to see the tracks leading away from the water. It was so obvious that I got the feeling the tracks had been created on purpose, to lead us on a false trail.


    ¡°Can you go over to see if there is smell?¡± I asked Ylva, after taking a glimpse at Adra, who was frowning unhappily.


    Ylva gave me a growl of acknowledgement, before bounding through the water, spraying some of it around herself when she got to the other side. She put her nose to the ground and quickly gave us a negative assessment, there was no smell on these tracks, either.


    ¡°It¡¯s too obvious.¡± Adra grumbled, while I mentally asked Lenore to join us, her ability to see magic potentially giving us a hint of what was going on.


    ¡°Wouldn¡¯t you want a false trail to be obvious?¡± I asked, before realising the point. A false trail only worked if the trail was convincing, we had been almost unable to follow their tracks previously, now they turned incredibly obvious? That only made sense if there was deception involved, making the false trail lose it¡¯s meaning as a distraction.


    ¡°Unless that is what they want us to think.¡± Olivia threw in, interrupting Adra who had given me a response in line with my own thinking, that the trail was too obvious to mislead us.


    ¡°It matters not. If we follow it and lose some time, we don¡¯t lose much. We are already days behind them, what difference do a couple hours make?¡± Sigmir said, her voice quite calm and unexcited. It seemed that she wasn¡¯t too fussed about the bandits, either we¡¯d find them, or we wouldn¡¯t.


    While the others discussed our path ahead, I looked through Lenore¡¯s eyes, trying to see if there were remnants of magical activity. As obvious as the tracks were, they might simply be the result of a spell to create a false trail. A spellcaster might design a spell that left such obvious tracks, to confuse and confound a tracker after them, if they, themselves, were not too competent in stealth. Alas, there were no magical clues to be found.


    ¡°We might want to take a look at the other spot you divined first, I would prefer to avoid tracking through that boggy mess over there.¡± Olivia suggested, after taking a closer look at the swamp on the other side.


    ¡°Fine by me. Though, I doubt it¡¯s going to really help.¡± Adra nodded, turning back and moving the way we had come from. Again, we followed along, moving slightly up-hill, towards the mountains. We crossed the spot where we had originally reached the river, continuing on for a couple of minutes, until we got to a rather rocky area, just the kind of terrain I had been taught to use to evade pursuit.


    ¡°Over there.¡± Adra told us, pointing to a large rock by the river. While I couldn¡¯t detect anything about that particular rock, Adra sounded excited, happily crossing the river with swift strides, taking a very close look.


    ¡°They used the hard ground here, let¡¯s go after them.¡± she enthused, quickly gesturing for us to follow. Shaking my head, just a little, I decided that I wanted to stay dry. Luckily, I had used the last few days to train myself in aerial movement using the Eisblumen-vines. Using them as stilts was a little awkward, but I managed to get across without getting wet. Until Ylva, in the manner of canines everywhere, stood right beside me when drying her fur, by vigorous shaking.


    Now, with everyone at least slightly wet, we continued on, following the invisible tracks that only Adra, thanks to her magic, could detect.

 Chapter 429

    Few things were more annoying than competent enemies, especially if their area of expertise was evasion and obfuscation. After Adra had somehow managed to follow whatever mark the scouts had left on the hard ground, certainly nothing that I could detect, we ended up in another grove of trees, with the trail stopping near one of the larger trees. That stopping-point brought a wide and predatory grin to Adra¡¯s face, while she started to chant the words of another spell, quietly infusing the world around her with her power.


    Her happiness was understandable, if the scouts had gone arboreal to evade further pursuit, it was akin to handing a giant advantage to Adra, thanks to her dryadic connection to plants, especially trees. By my understanding, she could essentially talk to trees and glean some understanding of the events in their surroundings, not that trees had the most sophisticated sensory organs, limiting the amount of information. Climbing them, however, would be more than enough to leave a memory within their mind, or whatever trees had.


    There was some expectation when Adra stopped chanting, quietly listening for a moment, before she started to chant in a very different manner, rather vile language spewing from her mouth, her tone seriously annoyed.


    ¡°It was a false trail.¡± she spat out, after venting her annoyance for a moment. Luckily, the curses she had let out hadn¡¯t been magical in nature, or we might have needed decontamination.


    ¡°They were here and rested for some time. But they didn¡¯t climb the tree, of that I¡¯m certain. Unless they managed to completely erase their tracks, they moved back to the river and likely left it at the other point.¡± Adra explained, her voice filled with frustration.


    ¡°And went into the swamp.¡± Olivia groaned, before letting out a long-drawn, terribly unenthused, ¡°Yaaaaay!¡±


    ¡°Those guys will not get away!¡± Adra snarled, clearly getting annoyed at being led by the nose, despite her rather impressive magical efforts. By my estimate, she had burned through more than half her power-reserves while tracking them down, despite constantly replenishing power from the Astral River. Just that, was a sufficient reminder that she was currently doing some magical heavy lifting, but had nothing to show for it.


    Getting back to the swamp, and the obvious tracks leading into it, was quite quick, even if we were keeping an eye out, just in case we had missed some trick the scouts had played to get some more distance. There, Adra took the lead once again, carefully picking her steps as she moved into the muddy area, making sure she didn¡¯t lose her footing. I had a feeling that if that were to happen, we might get to see a truly enraged Adra.


    Soon after entering the swamp, a disgusting stench caught my attention, a mix of death and decay, suffusing the moist air around us with its aroma. Ylva instantly stopped, before letting out a soft whine and retreating into her Hallow, unwilling to endure more of the smell. Similarly, Sigmir and Rai, who both had improved olfactory organs, one thanks to her spirit-companion, the other simply due to race, looked like they were about to be sick.


    ¡°More tricks.¡± Adra groaned, the smell getting to her as well, while she was searching the ground for further tracks. Again, the obvious track we had been following from the water simply ended, essentially in the middle of a small clearing, the vegetation around it seemingly undisturbed, while something was decaying in a pond nearby, creating the disturbing smell.


    I had to suppress a laugh, when I heard Olivia speak a soft prayer under her breath and felt a gentle magical aura surrounding me, nothing powerful, easily broken with just a little resistance, but the effect was, literally, a godsend. The moment the aura surrounded me, the stench instantly lessened to the point that what had been utterly nauseating was merely uncomfortable.


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    ¡°Thank you.¡± I mouthed to Olivia, not wanting to disturb Adra, who, again, was chanting another spell. If that continued the way it had been going, she¡¯d soon need rest or I¡¯d have to try providing power to her spell-work, something we had done before but it was a very uncomfortable experience that I¡¯d rather not repeat.


    It took Adra longer than before, and I could feel complicated magic radiating out from her, suffusing the air around us until she finally stopped chanting, her eyes closed as she likely took in what information the magic was gathering for her.


    ¡°I¡¯ve got you now.¡± she suddenly snarled, her voice quite vicious, yet filled with satisfaction. Part of me wondered just how she would react if we found another distraction further down the line, she seemed to be so happy to have found the trail leading away from this latest one, that I couldn¡¯t bring myself to ask.


    Moving slowly, still radiating powerful magic, she continued on, not moving in the same direction as before, but at an angle, along the edge of the swamp. As before, we followed, while murdering enough blood-sucking insects that I felt we should begin to get experience for them. Part of me wanted to freeze the whole swamp into a solid block of Ice, letting the mosquitoes die a horrible death, but it would be a waste of Astral Power.


    It took us far too long, for my taste, to cross the swamp, but then, every single minute within that mess was too long. Having to pay attention with each step, to make sure you didn¡¯t lose your footing and tumble in the mud, it was a pain in the behind. While I had to give the scouts we were hunting some credit, their methods made it extremely annoying and difficult to track them. I wanted to take the credit I had to give them, shape it into a large icicle and shove it up theirs. Watching Adra get more and more annoyed had been fun at first, but by the time we got out of the swamp, the amusement had been long gone.


    I could almost hear Adra¡¯s teeth grinding against each other, as she pushed on, using her magic to find tracks none of us could even come close to detecting. Part of me wondered why she was so committed to finding these scouts, and finding them fast, especially on a trail that had already been cold to begin with but whatever her reasons, she was pushing on. The tenacity with which she continued was quite impressive, even more so than the magic she was using and I was slowly analysing. While I was far from able to truly comprehend the minutiae, I was able to grasp the broad strokes, and those strokes were impressive.


    She was gathering information from each leaf, each blade of grass, each tree and each shrub, every bit of vegetation in a rather impressive area, at least impressive for such a task, using the tiny, individual data-points she was gathering to form a greater image. Before, I hadn¡¯t been aware that such a thing was within her abilities, part of me wondering if I was mistaken, or if I had seriously underestimated our companion.


    After following the trail towards the foothills, I was slowly getting concerned with Adra and the amount of magic she was using. While it was difficult to estimate the amount of Astral Power she had available, I could feel the amount she was using, which was a lot. I had overdrafted my own power before, stubbornly pushing on despite my body giving me warning signals and I feared that was what Adra was doing.


    We were getting close to the foothills, with their shrubs and trees, making me want to suggest resting there, at least for some time, so Adra could recover and we could have lunch. It was that time of the day.


    Just as I was moving forward, to catch up to Adra, she suddenly stopped, freezing in place. Before I could ask what was going on, I felt a warning coming over my connection with Lenore, while Adra called out, warning us of an ambush. Thanks to Lenore, I knew where the trouble was coming from, an image of a humanoid moving into a standing position, likely from a hideout similar to the one Sigmir and I had seen a few days ago, transmitted into my mind, clear enough to allow me to see the bow in their hand.


    Falling back on reactions I had trained the last few days, I instantly activated Overflow, letting Astral Power gush out of me in a misty smoke-screen, taking away their ability to see, while leaping to the side.


    Apparently, we had underestimated the bandits of the area and ran straight into an ambush.

 Chapter 430

    With dense mist shrouding our position, the initial ambush was broken, those precious first few seconds in which the ambushing force could unload on the ambushed, without fear of reprisal. The moments that it took to gather your bearings and wrap your head around what was happening, while your foes were already attacking, passed in silence. Of course, the mist meant that Sigmir, Rai and Olivia had little idea what was going on, other than Adra¡¯s warning, and even Adra could only work with whatever had tipped her off.


    But it was enough for her, maybe her annoyance motivated her to push her limits, and by the time I had created the misty cover and began linking up with Lenore for more information, she had transformed her spear into a bow, drawing it while infusing magic into the arrow. Thanks to Lenore, I could see the opponents and their movement, five humanoid figures moving in the underbrush above us, all of them equipped with either some sort of ranged weapon or beginning to radiate magic.


    As I was watching, Adra''s arrow shot out of the mist, towards the one that had moved first. She didn¡¯t quite hit him, he managed to dodge by quickly dropping to the ground. But the arrow had merely been a carrier, the magic she had infused into it the real attack, exploding out in a burst of power, turning the arrow itself into magically forged shrapnell, akin to a grenade. The force was strong enough to shred their cover, likely injuring them in the process, while buying me time to prepare my own attack.


    With the mist blocking the view of my Avatar, I had to either channel my magic through Lenore or estimate their position in relation to mine, by using Lenore¡¯s vision and attack based on that estimation. Not wanting to exhaust Lenore by channelling Ice-Magic through her, I went with the second option, making up for the inaccuracy in aiming with a classical ploy. If you need to make an unlikely event happen, increase the numbers.


    Instead of even trying to attack precisely, I condensed as much of the Astral Power still lingering in the mist around us, turning it into small, yet sharp, Icicles, launching them into their general direction. Dozens of sharp projectiles rained on our would-be ambushers, further decimating their cover, clearly indicating where they were hiding and taking away most of the mist around us, letting the others see clearly.


    Our foes hadn¡¯t been sitting idle, even if we had managed to break their initial plans by shrouding us in mist, they had been planning to ambush us and had been ready to fight. With my icicles hailing down on their position, they launched their own attacks, a spear, two arrows and a multitude of stones raining down on us. One of the spell-casters had obviously had a similar idea as I, if you can¡¯t see your foe, simply inundate the area with attacks, a few will certainly hit. Only that their affinity was earth, or stone, showering us in gravel. Getting hit with rocks was not pleasant, even if a golden glow shrouded us, taking away a lot of their momentum.


    For a moment, I paused, considering my next step. Sigmir was shrouded in her red aura, charging at the enemy with her Lok¡¯nar and I noticed Rai had stepped into Adra¡¯s shadow, using it to step out of another shadow, likely behind our foes. Seeing him perform in such a stable manner made me a little envious and annoyed at my inability but only for a moment. There was a time to be envious, namely once the battle was over and I could use my envy to motivate myself into figuring the ability out, not while there were enemies at hand.


    My pause had the additional effect of making my next step clear when I realised that one of the enemies hadn¡¯t acted yet, but was using their magic to infuse what remained of the vegetation around them, likely in an effort to influence the battlefield to their advantage, some sort of hindering or snaring effect.


    ¡°I¡¯ll take care of the snares.¡± Olivia announced, just as I was drawing the first rune of a triangle designed to break their magic. Without time to consider, I simply ignored her, finishing the triangle just as she finished a chant on her own, golden light and an ominous, dark glow shrouding the area where our opponents had been hiding for a moment, washing away any and all magical effects, opening the field for Sigmir and Rai.


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    A smile formed on my lips as I realised that the ambush was only that, the enemies busy with defending against Sigmir and Rai who had managed to engage before their fighters had time to take up their melee-weapons after launching their earlier attacks. It was the disadvantage of equipping your frontline with ranged weapons as well, if the enemy was quicker to engage as planned, your frontline could be caught out.


    Such was the case now, the magic that was likely supposed to buy them a moment was shattered under the combined onslaught of Oliva and me, allowing Sigmir to directly engage. Even worse, Rai had been able to engage from behind, after stepping through the shadows, announcing his presence with a vicious backstab, taking out the spellcaster who had tried to stone us earlier. Using magic after a pair of knives had ripped apart your internal organs was a difficult proposition.


    With our foes'' attention entirely focused on Sigmir and Rai, I decided that the correct cause of action would be to remind them of my existence. Focusing most of my attention on my magic, I slowly started to walk forward, as the flying shuttles of my Weaver¡¯s Fury fanning out in groups behind me, almost akin to wings.


    Gently waving my arms, the gestures allowing me to put just a little more power into the blades that followed the movement, the razor-sharp implements of frozen death shot towards our would-be ambushers, curving around Sigmir to distract and harass them into making mistakes. The shuttles themselves lacked the mass to cause serious damage, unless I managed to land a truly clean strike, but creating openings that Sigmir could exploit? That they could do.


    And do very well, the instant they appeared, the dwarf that had managed to take up a shield and hand-axe and stand up to Sigmir for a few moments was distracted by glittering, flying blades coming for his side and hurriedly blocked them with his shield. But with the shield stopping the flying shuttles on his left side, his right side merely had his hand-axe to parry and the clash between hand-axe and Lok¡¯nar wasn¡¯t worth being called a contest, the massive, dwarven-reinforced Lok¡¯nar easily smashing through the defense and ripping apart the dwarf¡¯s torso.


    Their frontliner gone, the already shaken formation crumbled to dust. The archer who had dropped her bow in order to ward off Rai in the back was getting distracted by the gurgling sounds of her team-mate, allowing Rai to force her short-sword wide and stab his second blade deeply into her gut.


    At that point, the fight was essentially over but none of us was willing to take any chances, pressing the attack without hesitation. Another of the bandits, this one an orc with a club in hand, barely managed to ward off Sigmir¡¯s attack but his stance was completely broken. A wave of my hands let the blades converge with him in the center, his inability to move in any meaningful way allowing me to skewer him through the openings in his leather-jerkin, causing blood to gush out as soon as I ripped the shuttles back out.


    ¡°No, no, no¡­¡± the last one was mumbling, his spear lying near his feet as he tried to back away, only for another one of Adra¡¯s arrows to pierce through him from the side, nailing him against a nearby tree. As I felt the life drain from his body, I realised that we should have kept one of them alive, so that we could convince them to give up information regarding their base, their numbers and defenses but a quick check showed me that we had been remarkably efficient. None of their wounds was survivable, even with a combined effort from Olivia and me, trying to heal them back up. The closest to a survivor we had was the archer that Rai had stabbed in the stomach but when I looked closer, his attack had torn through the aorta, causing massive blood loss and trauma. Similarly, the one I had eviscerated with my frozen shuttles had his carotid artery severed, with some additional trauma but that was the big one. Again, no dice, unless I got to them within a few seconds.


    ¡°Bastards!¡± Adra snarled, as she walked up. From her stance, I could see that she was exhausted, the fight having taken a far larger toll on her than anticipated. Just before she got to us, she stumbled but Rai managed to catch her, before she hit the ground.


    ¡°Either by luck or cunning, they managed to strike just as I was almost out of Astral Power. I¡¯ll need to rest.¡± she added, while Rai helped her into a more comfortable position.


    ¡°Rest, for now. We¡¯ll check if they have anything of interest on them and you can look for tracks later.¡± I told her, after checking with Lenore, that nobody else was coming towards us.


    ¡°Did your quest track these kills?¡± Sigmir asked quietly, causing me to frown. Opening my quest-log, I realised that we still had  thirty bandits and their leader to kill.

 Chapter 431

    Awareness could be a terrible thing. While I thought the others hadn¡¯t noticed just yet, the lack of quest progress made it almost certain that the people we had just killed hadn¡¯t been the bandits we were looking for. Which begged the question, who had they been?


    And why had they been hiding in the underbrush, only showing themselves when we approached? If they were bandits, just not the ones we were looking for, all was well, but if they were not, things might turn troublesome.


    Crouching near one of the bandits, the one stabbed by Rai, I carefully checked their bloody clothes, trying to find hints of their identity. Simple leather armor, a weapon, serviceable and well maintained but nothing fancy, their gear was just what a smart bandit would use - But also what most adventurers used.


    ¡°Looting the bodies¡­ I never was a fan of that particular part of an adventurer''s life.¡± Oliva remarked, after walking up.


    ¡°I¡¯m less interested in loot, I¡¯m looking for information.¡± I replied, spotting a set of packs under a nearby shrub.


    ¡°Lenore, can you scout around a bit, trying to find similar hide-outs? I need to know if anyone is nearby.¡± I asked my feathered friend over our connection, an uncomfortable feeling settling within my stomach.


    Opening their packs, I realised that they, too, had been using magic packs, essentially the same as we did, small belt-packs that could hold a lot more than they should, thanks to magic. In this case, the pack I was looking at held everyday items, clothes, rations and a whole lot of junk but one item quickly caught my eyes. Guild-Cards, shining with a red glow, intensifying the feeling in my gut. Looking closely, not touching it, just in case, I was able to read the inscription and realisation settled well and truly in.


    Unless the group we had just fought merely used their Guild-Cards as props to venture into towns, working as bandits when no work was found or something along those lines, we had just killed a group of adventurers. Sure, we had been convinced that we had stumbled into an ambush, and the jury was still out on that one, but what if we had merely reacted to an ambiguous situation? What if they had thought we were a group of bandits, reacting to the unknown with vigilance, just how we¡¯d react to a similar situation?


    Somehow, the idea that we had killed them by mistake, that it had merely an accident caused by annoyance, carelessness and a bit of overreaction made me feel worse than if we had killed them intentionally, to reduce competition, for example. Such a meaningless death.


    ¡°Did you find anything?¡± I asked Lenore, standing up, having made a decision. As soon as I got a negative reply, I mentally added, ¡°Anyway, I need you down here.¡±


    Moments later, I could hear her approach, transmitting my ideas to Lenore even while I considered how to explain the situation to the others. Before I could come up with a good way, Lenore landed on my shoulder and I pushed the explanation back. First, we had to get rid of the evidence.


    ¡°Step back, everyone.¡± I told the others, observed the area around us, especially the strewn about corpses, just as I asked her to. The others looked at me with questions in their eyes, especially at my serious demeanor but they moved back, giving us the space we needed.


    The spell Lenore used, with me channelling Astral Power to her, was rather simple, one that we had used before. Death-Magic was able to work on the energies of the recently deceased and in this case, Lenore used her magic to increase their decay by an insane rate, turning what would have been months or even years of slow decay into a matter of minutes. Watching the corpses wither away, turning to dust at a rate the eye could easily see was rather disturbing but compared to what might happen if the events got exposed, the disturbing sight was greatly preferred, at least in my eyes.


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    Of course, death-magic wasn¡¯t so precise to keep the surroundings from being disturbed, coincidentally erasing the damage our fight had done to the vegetation. While the effect wasn¡¯t as pronounced as it was on the corpses, they were the focus after all, it was more than enough to make tracing just what had happened difficult. To further reduce the chance of anyone realising just what had happened, I called upon my own magic, creating a darkness-infused mist, blanketing the area and devouring all magic that lingered, erasing everything that Lenore could detect with her sight, while the only thing I could detect with my nose as a faint, lingering smell.


    Nodding to myself, I turned to the packs that were still behind me, spared of the destruction and any influence our magic might have had. Without knowing the exact details regarding the magical effects and abilities bestowed on Guild-Cards, I wasn¡¯t willing to risk affecting them in any way. They turned red after the imprinted owner died, that much I knew, but I I had no idea if there were additional effects, such as marking the first person touching them, or some other way they might identify the killer, if subjected to the appropriate skill. It might be mere paranoia on my part, but I had enough trouble regarding civilisation, cities and large-scale organisations already, without a need to add more of it to my plate.


    ¡°What is going on?¡± Olivia asked, when I turned around, looking at them.


    ¡°Adra, do you think you¡¯ll be able to quickly find the bandits?¡± I asked, mostly ignoring the question.


    After a moment of hesitation, Adra, still being supported by Rai, after exhausting her magical power, looked up and shook her head.


    ¡°I don¡¯t know.¡± she admitted, sounding rather unhappy, before continuing, ¡°They managed to hide their tracks incredibly well, but why are you asking that? What is going on?¡± she asked, echoing Olivia¡¯s earlier question.


    ¡°Circumstances have changed, time just turned into an essential resource.¡± I explained, without really explaining anything. By moving quickly and acting as if outside information, and not our actions, had caused the change in our plans, I hoped that Olivia failed to realise just what we had done. Even if she had taken part in the fight, I couldn¡¯t trust her to put her own safety above her piety, not with the way she had been acting. If she felt her Goddess needed her to atone for her part in the fight, she might reveal what had happened. But if there was no awareness that she needed to atone, only a direct intervention from her deity might trigger such actions. If Eleutheria even knew what had happened, deific capabilities were something I wasn¡¯t even remotely aware of.


    ¡°Adra, can you lead the others west, back towards the road? Lenore and I need to take care of something, before it turns troublesome.¡± I asked, looking over my shoulder towards the mountains, as if there was something coming from that direction.


    ¡°Please, hurry.¡± I added, finally getting a nod in response. Once they turned, moving roughly in the direction we had been coming from, I used a stick to pick up the magic packs, luckily they were light-weight, in a way that Lenore could use her feet to pick them all up at the same time. I had considered looking for valuables, especially coins, in the packs but at the end of the day, these adventurers had been quite low-level, the strongest barely reaching level fifty, which convinced me that it just wasn¡¯t worth the risk of handling magical artifacts with unknown capabilities, their Guild Cards.


    Nodding, mostly to myself, I helped Lenore grab onto the stick I had just prepared and pushed myself into my Hallow, gathering my thoughts for a moment. So far, I had tried to make the others think that the sudden change in plans wasn¡¯t related to the fight, merely a coincidence. In order to sell that, there was one more step I needed to take.


    After flying for a couple minutes, we dropped the packs into a suitable clearing, without ever landing. It was merely a precaution anyway, another of those ¡®just in case¡¯ ideas, in this case, just in case the Guild Cards send out an emergency signal.


    Once we had dropped them, Lenore landed in a nicely large tree and I left my Hallow, holding onto the tree with my Eisblumen.


    ¡°Retain some power, but we need to make this flashy.¡± I told Lenore, pulling out the staff we had made quite some time ago, after getting that magical jewel from the wolves.


    ¡°I know, I still need to fly us back.¡± she responded, amusement audible in her voice.


    Landing on top of the staff, we started to weave our magic together, into the largest waste of Astral Power we had ever conjured.

 Interlude - Forum: Weather, go home!

    Official Road to Purgatory-Beta Forum


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    Weather, go home¡­


    ¡­ You are drunk.


    Guys, I need to ask, do you think there is a bug in the Road to Purgatory-weather engine or did the weather just get strangely drunk?


    I mean, it¡¯s late summer, early fall, a balmy twenty degrees celsius and suddenly, BAM, we get a friggin¡¯ blizzard? Lasting just about a minute before the cold vanishes, leaving a thin coating of snow and hail to melt away in the warmth. No warning, no clouds, just suddenly, snow. And hail. And wind, and friggin cold. Not cool, seriously cold.


    Seriously, just what the heck happened to me and my party?


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    You know, I¡¯ve heard jokes about snow during summertime, but on Mundus, it might just be aftershocks. We¡¯ve seen some incredibly powerful native spellcasters already (makes me wonder about balance, in the long-run) and their actions can cause adverse side-effects far from their actual location. So, care to explain, or maybe even show, what happened?


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    Sounds¡­ Big?


    But regarding the actual (likely rhetorical) question, no, I never noticed any bugs in the weather-engine, in fact, I never really noticed any bugs, the game runs incredibly stable for a project of that complexity. Might have to do with the capsules, I can¡¯t even fathom how much work went into those. It certainly doesn¡¯t feel like a beta, using an entirely new operating-system running on cutting edge hardware.


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    Well, I can upload the video, Kelgarn. But at the end of the day, nothing really happened. My (native) buddies and I were in the forest, near Neamov, our current base, hunting wolves when suddenly, we were surrounded by cold wind, with snow and hail raining down on us. After a minute or five of that, the weather calmed back down, quickly getting warm again, the snow starting to thaw. We started to run and we had to move for over a kilometer before we got out of the snow-mud.


    Honestly, none of us could make heads or tails of it, which is why I thought to ask here.


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    Ok, that sounds strange. But at the same time, yeah, sounds like some spellcaster was doing something big. Remember that one vid, near some town called Kolyug, up in northern Aretia? Some fire-dude was doing his things, until he got curb-stomped and in doing his things, he turned friggin¡¯ Siberia into a hot mess. Literally.


    Something similar happened in another vid, that one was from Deiea, with a native creating a massive rain and thunder-storm to extinguish a bush-fire. Kinda makes mundane firefighters look puny in comparison.


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    Wait, Neamov you say?


    Correct me if I¡¯m wrong, but isn¡¯t that right to the west of the Turan Mountains? Because my spider-senses are tingling right now.


    Let¡¯s try summoning someone who might be able to help.: @Morgana, care to appear before us foolish mortals to enlighten us?


    My guess is, you have something to do with us but if not, you are, as far as I know, the leading player when it comes to everything Ice- and Snow-Magic.


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    That sounds interesting. Why do you think that she¡¯s involved? And how long before Howardlight gets here, to rant about the light? I swear, that guy has some sort of alert if anyone mentions her.


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    Possibly, though I¡¯m not certain why he would. Not like I frequent the forum all that much, especially not to post. Only if I have something to say.


    In this case, I¡¯ll have to go with the good, old ¡°I can neither confirm nor deny any involvement or knowledge of that particular incident.¡±


    On another note, did you know that there are some things in the beta that we literally cannot share? As in, times during which the recording-function only shows static (well, white mist), while Pantheon Entertainment confirmed that it was not a bug.


    Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.


    Anyway, on that note, I gotta run. Literally, at least ingame.


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    Well, that was something.


    So, if I read what she loudly said between the lines, she was involved and is currently running away from something that she cannot (or doesn¡¯t want to) share?


    Alternatively, it might be a red herring.


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    So, the abomination has struck again?


    Alas, part of the filth she uttered is the truth, I can confirm that we are unable to share certain parts of our journey.


    But Neamov, that means we have a clue where she is?


    Set out, Crusaders, set out. Deus Vult!


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    Well, what Morgana said sounded very much like what someone under an NDA might say, giving out no real information while implying a whole lot more. Makes me wonder.


    But if she was ¡°involved¡± maybe even the spellcaster responsible, I¡¯m seriously impressed. If the side-effects of her magic are that big and wide-ranging, I don¡¯t want to know just how big the actual main-effect is. Or, to be honest, I really want to know, but only from a safe distance. You know, an ocean away, or something like that.


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    Makes me rather scared, if we are being honest. If the one who managed to create such an effect says that, ¡°she¡¯s gotta run¡±, I really, REALLY, don¡¯t want to be close to whatever they are running FROM. Let¡¯s just say, I think I¡¯ll take my buddies and head back to the city, hopefully nothing bad happens.


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    Looking at everything, Morgana started somewhere somewhere far up north and has now travelled to the western side of the Turan-Mountains, right? Cause, if there is something coming after her, I think she¡¯s moving into my direction.


    Yeah, I don¡¯t like that. Morgana, can you tell us poor sods on your path just what is coming?


    Or, Howardlight, can you give a bit of a hint why you can confirm the part about sharing information? That way, we¡¯d have at last a bit of a warning.


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    Can share a little bit, not much. I don¡¯t want to tick the developers off, but if it¡¯s something that is hunting Morgana, giving out information might be prudent.


    When I experienced the block, I tried to make a recording of the ceremony in which I shed my wings, turning into a true Einherjar. Was a pretty epic moment, I wanted the recording but no dice, all I got was lens-flare through white-mist.


    No idea what she encountered but I think Pantheon wants to keep the main story-line and maybe the main-native players hidden.


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    You know, somehow that doesn¡¯t make me feel better.


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    Note to self: Travelling south-west is a bad idea. North?


    North seems to be a good direction, maybe North-East?


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    On a more serious note, Morgana, can you tell us any details? Or anything general, you know, anything at all, about what happened and what sort of spell you used?


    The only thing we recently got from you was that vague video with the orcs, the centaurs and an insanely wide-area death-mist thingy.


    Care to share anything about the magic you used this time? It seems you prefer mist for wide-area applications, an interesting choice there but I¡¯m not sure what you¡¯re using for single-target or small-scale attacks.


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    No, sorry, I won¡¯t go into details regarding my magic.


    Certainly not without some serious (ingame) compensation. There¡¯s a lot of magic out there, but this one is mine. I¡¯ve worked quite hard for it, partially researching myself, partially stealing other peoples¡¯ research. If you want to compare, we might meet at some point on our Road to Purgatory, which is the only place where I¡¯d make such a transaction.


    What I will tell you, however, is that the system governing magic on Mundus is incredibly complex and fascinating, I don¡¯t think any of us have done more than scratch the surface. Some might have been taught spells that cause some effect but understanding the mechanism behind that effect? That is a whole different ball-game.


    As an example, I know about a spell called Sanctuary, used by some divine spellcasters, that somehow keeps enemies from attacking them. Personally, I can¡¯t even begin to guess how the heck the effect works and I¡¯d bet none of us could.


    Just the magic system, without any story or other content might be enough to keep me interested in Road to Purgatory for years to come.


    Anyway, that¡¯s everything I¡¯ll tell you on this topic.


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    Jeanyra, confirmed Beta-Account


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    Which is honestly more than I expected, thank you for that.


    And yeah, I know what you mean. I was taught a couple of spells from the Mages¡¯ Guild but if I had to explain exactly how any of the divination-spells works, I¡¯d be hard pressed. Sure, the fiery effect of a Fireball is relatively easy, it simply compresses a mass of Fire-Astral Power before letting it flood out on command, igniting anything in the area, but more complex spells? No idea.


    Let alone the magic used by Divine Casters, which seems to be a whole different ball game from the things we can do.


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    Can we please get back to whatever insanity it is that is near Neamov? I want to know what to avoid.

 Chapter 432

    Lenore¡¯s flight-speed was markedly lower than normal. While most of the burden of the spell we had woven was born by me, she had contributed enough to exhaust herself, though not to the same level I had, leaving me with a throbbing headache, lethargy and a general unwillingness to move, speak or even think. Casting spells, even if I somehow had the Astral Power, would be an impossible task, even pushing myself into my Hallow had been a daunting, if necessary, effort.


    ¡°Was it worth it?¡± Lenore asked, getting nothing but the mental equivalent of an affirmative grunt in response.


    We had done what was necessary to sell the fiction to the others that our sudden change of plans had been facilitated by something Lenore had seen in the distance, not the killing of the supposed bandits. The final effort, which had left me in my exhausted state, had been a massive spell of wind and ice, as we had spread out the effects of a weak spell to an absurd degree, using almost all the Astral Power the two of us had combined for a simple ruse.


    The spell had been powerful enough to shatter the staff I had created using the Crystal of the Northern Wind we had received from the Winter Wolves, the Hard Ice I had used no longer strong enough to withstand the combined power of Lenore and I. Luckily, I had managed to catch the crystal, before it could drop from the tree we had perched in. The breaking of the staff had caused the spell to get a little out of control, dispersing it even further than planned but at the end of the day, the difference was minute.


    I was reasonably certain that the others, certainly Olivia and Adra, had felt the expended power, though I doubted that they had the sensory accuracy to read the actual spell-effect at that distance, which meant they should have felt that someone had used a tremendous amount of Wind- and Ice Astral Power. With me, joining up with them soon after, completely exhausted, the connection should be obvious.


    My mind must have checked out for a moment, as Lenore was mentally poking me for directions. I hadn¡¯t realised that we had already returned to the clearing we had created with the earlier fight and the subsequent clean-up. Looking into the depths of myself, I could feel the connection to Sigmir, a slight sensation that pulled me, almost like a piece of iron getting pulled towards a magnet. Truly, Sigmir was attractive to me.


    Letting the directional information flowing into Lenore, I let myself drift again, happy that I could soon check out, either by logging out or by sleeping. The earlier magic had drained me quite a bit, leaving me laughably weak. Finally, I felt Sigmir¡¯s proximity and forced myself into activity. If I wanted to sell my earlier performance, the others needed to see me.


    Taking in the outside world, I was able to perceive Lenore sitting on Sigmir¡¯s shoulder, who was bringing up the rear. It looked like they had stopped when Lenore had approached and were now looking closely at her.


    Rousing my tired mind, I pushed outwards, leaving my comfortable Hallow for the outside world. Luckily, Sigmir paid attention and steadied me, otherwise I might have fallen, my body influenced by my weary mind. Even the task of standing upright was a challenging one, my body swaying while the ground beneath me tried to slip away.


    ¡°We¡­ did it.¡± I told the others, not even trying to hide my exhaustion. There was a brief moment of confusion, as they realised what condition I was in, with Sigmir being the quickest to speak.


    ¡°Are you alright, love?¡± she asked, her voice caring, even if our connection was likely telling her quite a bit about my state.


    ¡°Just¡­ tired.¡± I replied, fighting to keep my eyes open, ¡°Didn¡¯t want you¡­¡± I paused, a yawn trying to break my jaw. ¡°...to worry. I¡¯ll slip back into my Hallow and... sleep for a bit.¡± I paused again, my eyes falling shut for a moment. ¡°Please, keep moving.¡±


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    With those words, I yawned again, shaking my head, trying to get rid of the fog that clouded my mind. For a moment, darkness enveloped me, the noise of the others getting distant, before I managed to force my mind into motion one more time, pushing myself into my Hallow. The familiar sensation of ultimate comfort around me, sheltered in the space my magic had created to perfectly suit me, I let go of my mind.


    The sensation was a strange one, as if I was floating on a calm ocean, surrounded by nothing but darkness. There was no light to see, no air to transmit sound, nothing to make my nose tingle, nothing to touch, nothing around me but a comfortable void. Not certain if my eyes were open or actually closed, I tried to blink, only to realise that it didn¡¯t change a thing. My mind drifting, I thought that I saw light above me, countless, tiny flecks of light, akin to the starlit night sky.


    A dark canvas, filled with light. True Darkness. It didn¡¯t need an absence of light.


    Opening my eyes, I was greeted by the familiar top of the capsule, the dim, red light giving some illumination, allowing my eyes to adjust after being closed for a while. It gave the user a bit of time to process, to get back into their own body, so to speak, which was a good idea, even if my Avatar was very similar to my actual body. At least physically.


    Just lying there for a moment, the change between dead-tired and reasonably awake was a strange one, my mind slowly recovering from the effect my Avatar¡¯s state had on it. It also made me realise that, for the first time, I had experienced one of the safety features, that I hadn¡¯t consciously made the choice to log out, but that the system had forcibly logged me out, likely due to my mental exhaustion reaching a threshold.


    As I did most of the time, my first stop after leaving the capsule was the bathroom. A long, warm shower restored my mind quite a bit, with some food helping me to restore the rest. I was still tired, but that might be more due to it being the middle of the night. At this point, my biorhythm was more than a little weird, the time spent in the capsule throwing it completely out of whack. It was another thing I would have to pay attention to in the long run.


    After eating, I considered a return into the capsule but instead, I stood at one of my windows, letting the cold night air flow around me. The sensation calmed me, especially after I replaced the brightly lit night outside with the darkness achieved by closing my eyes. Darkness, it was more than a lack of light.


    Shaking my head, I decided that I wouldn¡¯t return into the capsule and Mundus, instead I set an alarm for the next morning and slipped into my bed. The sensation of a bed-sheet, a modern mattress and my familiar blanket was a little weird for a moment, sleeping in the capsule had become a habit since I had received it and there was a distinct lack of Sigmir in my bed. Still, there was some psychological exhaustion clinging to me, letting me quickly slip off, into dream-land, spending my time soaring above a frozen world.


    When my alarm woke me the next morning, I needed a moment to orient myself, awakening in my own bed, not something I was used to. It was a strange sensation, but after a few moments the routine I had followed for many years, especially during University, reasserted itself. By the time I was in the kitchen, with a cup of tea brewing in front of me, my mind was fully engaged and firing on all cylinders.


    Following my routine, I started browsing the internet and stumbled over a thread regarding my recent shenanigans. It took me a bit of time to come up with a suitable deception, misleading yet without a single lie, letting people jump to the conclusions I wanted them to take.


    With a smile on my lips, I considered jumping back into the capsule right away but decided against it, instead putting on some clothes, a coat and went out for a short walk. The cold air of the night before had given way to a light coating of snow, bringing a smile to my face. It wasn¡¯t Mundus and I wasn¡¯t Morgana, the Witch of Darkness and Ice, but the snow gave the world a pristine stillness, especially once I got away from the buildings and into a nearby park. It allowed my mind to rest, to calm, to leave behind the conditioned reactions that allowed me to act like society expected me to. In the quiet park, with nothing but the crunching snow beneath my feet, I could be myself. Closing my eyes, I could almost smell the pine-trees of the northern forests of Mundus, could almost feel the Astral River flowing around me. It was a phantom sensation, but so familiar.


    Opening my eyes, I was reminded that I was still Samantha, not Morgana. Shaking my head, I cleared the cobwebs from my mind, continuing to walk while bringing back the mindset I had cultivated. The shackles that bound me.


    Mundus was truly a wonderful escape.

 Chapter 433

    By the time I was logged into Road to Purgatory again, the mundian night had passed and the others had already broken camp and returned to the road. A quick check from inside my Hallow made it obvious that they had pushed themselves hard. While Sigmir looked relatively well, likely thanks to her high endurance and vitality, the others all showed signs of exhaustion. Given that I had a reasonable grasp on the physical specs of Adra and Rai, even Olivia to a lesser degree, I was a little shocked at their fatigued state.


    ¡°Good Morning.¡± Lenore greeted me, becoming aware that my consciousness had returned.


    ¡°Good Morning, I hope there weren¡¯t any problems here?¡± I returned the greeting, receiving a condensed stream of memories in reply. Instead of trying to formulate an answer, Lenore opted for the most expedient option, sharing a highly condensed version of her memories. The sharing effectively made it as if I had been present the whole time, noticing what Lenore had noticed, remembering what she had subconsciously deemed worthy to be remembered.


    Not that there was a lot, mostly memories of sitting on Sigmir¡¯s shoulder or flying overhead, watching the others speedily move through the forest, until they reached the ancient road where they started to speed up, not quite running but definitely a speed that was only possible thanks to their system-strengthened bodies. There was even a soft glimmer around Olivia, hinting at some sort of divine assistance, allowing her to perform at the same level as the others. They had continued on, until the last rays of the sun had almost vanished, before making a cold camp, resting for the bare minimum time and returning to the road, as soon as the first rays started to creep over the horizon.


    Just from the distance travelled I could see that they had taken my warning seriously, making me quite pleased. It would certainly help to sell the idea that there had been something we had luckily managed to avoid, allowing us to return to a normal pace in a day or two.


    For a moment, I considered showing myself but decided against it. Staying in my Hallow had a couple major advantages, primarily that it allowed me to ruminate magic without having to pay attention to my surroundings. Falling over your feet because you weren¡¯t paying attention was rather embarrassing after all. Not that such a thing had ever happened to me.


    The next couple of hours passed peacefully, as I was trying to form the Ice-Runes and the connecting patterns I had learned from the dwarves and later improved upon myself into a smoother picture, allowing Astral Power to flow through an inscribed spell smoother. If I wanted to recreate the staff we had broken the day before, I either needed to improve the Astral Power Flow or I needed to use a stronger material, which would require me to figure out the processes around Eternal Ice. The best case, obviously, would be to do both, giving me a staff that might allow me to use it as a focus even while in our Avatar-State. Not that I truly knew if that would even work, the staff had been a tool to allow Lenore and me to combine our powers into a combined spell, something the Avatar-state already did, at least that was my perception.


    Finally, the others slowed, asking Lenore to look for a place to camp. Taking flight, the two of us looked around, trying to find a nice spot for a break. The airborne perspective was quite useful, allowing us to find a good area within half an hour, close enough to the road that it wasn¡¯t too much of a detour but far enough away to give us some privacy. Even from above, we hadn¡¯t been able to spot any signs of civilization, other than the ancient road, making us quite confident that we could relax.


    Feeling a little impish, I asked Lenore to land near the spot we had decided on, before pushing out of my Hallow, gently landing on the ground.


    ¡°I¡¯ll prepare some lunch, why don¡¯t you get the others?¡± I asked, a grin on my face.


    Lenore was quite amused at the idea, taking off after to get the others. Closing my eyes to consider for a moment, I decided that some light stew should be quite manageable and would provide just the right visual for the others. While part of me wanted to set up one of my Ice-Cottages, doing so would simply take far too long, even if it would have been hilarious. The earlier grin still on my face, I set out to get things done.


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    The others needed about twenty minutes to reach the place Lenore and I had chosen, my connection to Lenore allowing me to witness their approach. Both Adra and Rai easily detected the cooking fire I had set up, making them wary and cautious. On the other hand, Sigmir had undoubtedly noticed the fire as well but she also had our connection, allowing her to perceive my position and general state of mind.


    What she didn¡¯t get was an idea of my costume, as I had dug deep into my magic-bag, taking out the simple peasant clothes my Avatar had worn when first appearing in Mundus, giving me a far different appearance, at least at first glance. Sure, my face and hair were dead give-aways, but the costume was good enough to cause Adra to freeze for a moment, staring at me in disbelief.


    ¡°Why, good afternoon. You look like you¡¯ve been running quite hard.¡± I greeted them, carefully trying to emulate the ¡®kindly Grandmother¡¯-appearance the Grandmother had used when meeting us. While I lacked her gravitas, it must have been good enough, causing Sigmir to giggle softly, her eyes flickering between me and our companions.


    ¡°Get comfortable, everyone, I¡¯ve made some lunch.¡± I added into the silence.


    Once the original surprise wore off, the others plopped down, leaning against trees or sitting on a nearby rock. While I could see their desire to question me, their exhaustion and hunger won out.


    But after they had sated their immediate need, the question I had anticipated resurfaced, namely what had happened.


    ¡°Adra, do you remember the centaurs and wolves that we have come into conflict with, again and again?¡± I asked, answering their questions with a question on my own, singling out Adra as an individual.


    ¡°Of course.¡± she nodded, a frown on her face, not understanding why I was asking.


    ¡°Lenore and I noticed something, a problem that would have caused us massive problems if left alone.¡± I continued my explanation, carefully staying clear of any outright lies, instead doing my best to misdirect them using true but unrelated facts. It was similar to what I had tried on the Road to Purgatory-Forum, only using a different set of facts.


    ¡°We turned back, to buy you some time to make your get-away, while I relied on Lenore¡¯s wings to make my own escape. But as you saw yesterday, the magic we used was quite large in scale.¡± I finished my explanation, causing Adra to slowly nod. Olivia, on the other hand, latched onto the original question about the centaurs and their wolves, just as I had hoped. While we had shared some details about our previous travels, the details had remained vague. Now, with her asking about it, I told her about the centaurs and their push into northern Aretia and their apparent alliance with the black wolves.


    The tales about our previous clashes served as a distraction, turning the attention away from the previous topic and onto the unrelated one, allowing me to continue talking for a while, until they decided that they had rested enough and could continue back onto the road.


    Before we left, while I was dealing with the dishes, Adra covertely pulled me aside.


    ¡°Now, why don¡¯t you tell me what really happened?¡± she asked, speaking quietly so that only I could hear her.


    ¡°What do you mean?¡± I raised an eyebrow, trying to keep a straight face.


    ¡°When you headed off, Sigmir was calm. If you had headed towards some sort of fight, especially a serious one, she wouldn¡¯t have kept as calm as she had. No way, not possible.¡± she explained, before continuing.


    ¡°Additionally, after you returned, while we knew you were resting in your Hallow, she was a little anxious, keeping a close eye on Lenore. That makes no sense and don¡¯t think that I didn¡¯t notice that you never actually explained what happened? We only felt that massive Ice-Spell, what was that about anyway, and assumed from there on out.¡± she finished, leaving me no real way to wiggle my way out, unless I wanted to lie to her. Which I did not. Not to Adra, anyway.


    ¡°Did you check your quest? The one to hunt down bandits?¡± I asked, drawing a grumble from Adra, who likely thought I was trying to do the same thing I had done earlier.


    ¡°No. Back to what I asked.¡± she prodded, a frown on her face.


    ¡°It is related to the question. The bandits we killed, they were adventurers. I saw the Guild-Cards in their bags. I don¡¯t know if we simply mistook their approach for an ambush, if they thought we were bandits or if there was something else going on, but at the end of the day, we killed those guys.¡± I explained, causing her frown to deepen a little further.


    ¡°Without witnesses, there wouldn¡¯t be a problem, but I don¡¯t know Olivia well enough to be confident in her keeping things quiet. Which is why I decided to orchestrate a bit of misdirection. Lenore and I got rid of their packs, simply dropping them in the woods, and wasted a massive amount of Astral Power as distraction, trying to convince you that there really was something.¡± I finished, getting an acknowledging nod.


    ¡°Huh, I didn¡¯t expect that. But good to know, we¡¯ll talk some more later.¡± she muttered, turning back to the others, so that we could continue our ¡°flight¡±.

 Chapter 434

    The next three days were spent in an attempt to level my long-neglected Athletics-skill. Well, not really, but it might have been the idea behind our hurried flight, given that there was nothing we were actually fleeing from. But to keep the deception alive, Adra set a pace that pushed me beyond my limit, to the point that I would have to either cheat using Blood Magic or cheat by hiding within my Hallow, sharing the burden with Lenore.


    Given that both solutions had their own merits, one was training my Blood Magic, the other allowed me to think in peace, I used them both. With the knowledge that we weren¡¯t actually hunted, I dared to push my magic a little further than I would, if there was an actual, known threat instead of the usual vague caution against bandits and wildlife.


    Pushing things, I was able to comfortably keep up with the others, making Olivia our weakest link, even after she used her divine magic to improve her own capacities. On the flip-side, I wasn¡¯t able to keep that level of physical reinforcement up, not in the long-run, my Avatar slowly taking damage from the stress. That damage, in turn, could be healed with blood magic, delaying the problem but it turned into a vicious cycle, with me needing to use more and more magic to keep going, which, finally, forced me into my Hallow, with Lenore either flying above or hitching a ride on Sigmir¡¯s shoulder.


    When in my Hallow, I wasn¡¯t able to actively use magic on the outside, though I was able to carefully experiment within the boundary of my Hallow. That required a great deal of caution, even a small mistake led to discomfort for Lenore, something I wanted to avoid. Mostly, I created tiny runic formations, never actually providing them with Astral Power, merely trying to get a feel for the smoothness of the power flowing within. It was at those moments, that I envied Lenore for her special sight. It was a tool that helped a great deal with such analysis, especially because my mind was best suited to use visual information, compared to the sensations of smell and taste I perceived Astral Power as. It was something I would have to get better at, though, given that I had strong doubts whether I would be able to join with a companion as compatible and interesting as Lenore in the official version of Road to Purgatory.


    ¡°Oh, hey, another village.¡± Lenore grumbled, pulling my attention to the outside, where, indeed, quite some distance below, another small hamlet was visible. It was something we had become accustomed to, in the last few days, that there were far more villages and hamlets in the area. They ranged in size from a couple dozen to maybe a hundred houses, never larger but also never smaller. Lenore was also able to spot some sort of water-source near each and every one of them and a wall around the village, similar to the one in Yaksha. While they lacked the mighty walls of places like Kolyug or Neamov, the villages all had enough defenses to keep low-levelled enemies out.


    ¡°Want to check this one out?¡± Lenore asked after a few moments, once she was sure that I had taken a look.


    ¡°Not really, if I¡¯m honest.¡± I replied, not quite happy with things. It stung a little, the way I had underestimated the problems my innate traits would bring. While I might be able to ingratiate myself into a group by spending some time and effort to raise my reputation, while we were on the road, that was simply impossible. Leading to me, being almost universally ostracised wherever we went. While the treatment had turned from the outright hostility I had experienced in the beginning to fearful looks from civilians and guarded, cautious hostility from the guards, neither was conducive to relaxation and enjoyment.


    It made me wonder just how I should handle that particular problem in the future. One option, the simplest and most boring of them all, was to hide out in my Hallow whenever we were in a town. The problem with that was, I had no idea how difficult it was to detect the presence of someone within a Hallow, or even a Hallow in general. I wasn¡¯t able to do so, I had tried with Sigmir and Ylva, but when it came to complex magic, I was a novice. Compared to a place like the Mages¡¯ Guild, with centuries of accumulated information and research, what I had done was barely a drop in the ocean. And if we were discovered, hiding away, that could easily be considered a nefarious action, landing me in even deeper trouble.


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    Another option was to simply ignore the hostility, to keep any stay as short as possible and hope for the best. So far, the cities had reasonably good public safety, the guards trained enough not to act on the mere suspicions caused by the traits. It made me wonder just how wide-spread and known those traits were but that was a question for another day. Ultimately, the option was unappealing to me, as walking through a town with everyone hostile was just unpleasant. I¡¯d rather stay in my Hallow, or possibly even leave Mundus altogether, than get stared at that way.


    The last, reasonably practical, option was to simply wait outside, possibly with Sigmir at my side. While it would be the most pleasant, especially given the alone-time I would be able to spend with Sigmir, I wasn¡¯t quite sure if I wanted to impose on her that way. Keeping her out of towns to spare myself discomfort didn¡¯t feel right.


    A little lost in thought, I failed to notice that Lenore had descended, landing on Sigmir¡¯s shoulder with a practised ease.


    ¡°There¡¯s another town nearby.¡± she told the others, as always using my voice to speak.


    ¡°We shouldn¡¯t have reached Ladrin yet, that¡¯s still a day away. Another village?¡± Olivia asked, a little out of breath from the quick pace the others set. Still, that she was able to keep up that way was quite impressive, making me wonder just what her class and level were and how many divides she had crossed. But trying to Observe her would be incredibly impolite and asking was difficult, unless we were willing to disclose our own status to some degree. Outside some situation that forced her to push her power to the limit, estimations were impossible. What I could see and estimate that her physical endurance was a little better than mine, though I couldn¡¯t be sure how much the blessing of her deity and the magic used made. More data was needed.


    ¡°It¡¯s a village, no idea what Ladrin might be.¡± Lenore replied, while I was pondering the power of our companion.


    ¡°Another city-state, quite close to Neamov. Well, relatively close, most people need about ten days to travel that distance. It was built by some river-trolls. We should get there tomorrow.¡± Olivia replied, after catching her breath a little and slowing down. The others followed suit, matching her pace and relaxing a little.


    ¡°There is another crossroad there and you¡¯ll have to decide whether you want to move north, to go around the White Mountains or if you head straight west, make your way through those mountains and then start looking for a vessel to cross the ocean.¡± she explained, causing my eyebrow to rise, despite being within my Hallow.


    ¡°I told her that we were planning to sail east.¡± Adra admitted, causing a frown to join my raised eyebrow. ¡°After all, she made the crossing in the past, so asking her for advice should be useful, right?¡± she continued. The paranoid in me wasn¡¯t happy at the disclosure of information but what was done, was done.


    ¡°Dangerous journey, the crossing. Few, other than the Naga, even try to sail the seas but there¡¯s always someone, some mage or wizard, who thinks that they have the power and ability to do what the Naga do.¡± she shook her head, disappointment visible on her face.


    ¡°They then manage to convince some other fool, with more money than good sense, that a fortune is to be made by breaking into the sea-trade and taking away the Naga-monopoly. It works for a year or five, maybe even for a decade, before a mistake happens and the depths claim the ship, wizard and all.¡± she shook her head, before adding in a soft voice, ¡°And someone else has to pay the price.'''' Before anyone could ask about her statement, she continued on.


    ¡°Anyway, if you want to cross, you can either set off from one of the southern harbours, on the coast of the Inner Sea and sail through the Daish Gate or you can head all the way out west, and set sail from there. Depending on which you prefer, you¡¯ll have to take a different route at the crossroad near Ladrin.¡±  she explained, before regaining the earlier speed with the others matching her.

 Chapter 435

    The question which route to take bothered me, just a little. That it was only a little was mostly due to a lack of information, it was hard to consider which route more suitable if the only information we had was that one went through the mountains, while the other circled around them. Most likely, the circumvention would be the longer distance while going across them, we¡¯d be facing more difficult terrain. There were certainly a lot more questions to consider, especially regarding potential enemies but without outside information, making a decision that was more informed that your average coin-flip was simply impossible.


    There were two sources of information readily available to me, one was Olivia while the other was the Road to Purgatory-Forum and the knowledge aggregated therein. After a moment of consideration, I decided to ask Olivia later and check out the forum beforehand. Maybe someone had found and uploaded a map of the area or something along those lines. That would make the whole planning-thing a lot easier.


    After confirming my plans with Lenore, I triggered the log-out and returned to my capsule space. There was more than enough time before I should head out of the capsule for my training with Mrs. Wu, so I moved into the throne room I had created a while back, sitting down on my comfortable throne of ice and pulled up the simulated peripherals. It was still a bit of a weird experience, to sit on what was deliberately made to look like a magical throne, fit for the Queen of Ice and Darkness as I imagined such a being, while using a softly glowing, floating keyboard to browse a game-forum. The disconnect between the fantastical, the futuristic and the utterly mundane made the whole thing peculiar.


    Shaking off the odd feeling, I scanned over the various hot topics, chuckling a little at the impressive conspiracy people had imagined into existence around my magical fireworks, but it was ultimately meaningless. What warranted a little more attention was that Howardlight, the Paladin/Holy Warrior type who had decided that targeting me would give him and his guild the right kind of publicity, had apparently set sail on the Inner Sea, the wide ocean between Daiea, Aretia and Valkar. While I had no idea just how he planned to track me down, it wasn¡¯t like Aretia was a small place, just the fact that someone was deliberately hunting me was a little disturbing.


    Compared to the various feuds and conflicts I had taken part in back when I had gone by the handle Titania and played Craft of War, this felt more real and personal. It was most likely merely a trick of perception, due to the incredible realism of Road to Purgatory but when it came to feelings, psychosomatic experiences were as valid as reality. Amusingly enough, my biggest concern with being hunted wasn¡¯t that they were aiming for Morgana but that they might permanently harm Sigmir. Worst case, for Morgana, would be a respawn with spawn-camping. And even then, if things got out of hand, I had confidence in Pantheon and their ability to handle things. On the other hand, losing Sigmir would hurt in ways I didn¡¯t even want to imagine. Ways that I couldn¡¯t imagine.


    I would have to make sure that if they came for me, they would rue the day they decided to use me as their objective. PR on the forum, I could deal with that, hell, I was even willing to play along to a point, after all there was no such thing as bad publicity, other than your obituary. But the more I thought about real, ingame conflict, the darker my thoughts grew..


    In order to forcibly break out of the fantasies of revenge and destruction I was beginning to lose myself in, I searched for information regarding Aretian geography, political information and everything along those lines.


    The results were expectedly varied, with hundreds of threats filled with information that needed to be sorted or filtered with better search criteria. This would take some time.


    And time it took. After a good four hours of reading, sorting and searching, I had a slightly more comprehensive image of things. It was still far from perfect or even confirmed as reliable but  I felt like I had exhausted the time I was willing to spend on this particular project.


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    Overall, what I learned told me that Aretia was not quite as chaotic as imagined, at least not the western part. There were bastions of order, the various, often dwarven, city-states with a myriad of villages and towns scattered between them. The land between cities was patrolled and while near the ancient, imperial road we were travelling on, it was quite safe, a lot safer than the north where I had started. On the other hand, once you left the patrolled vicinity of the road and got into the actual wilderness, into the deep forests, the mountains and valley, and the swamp and rivers, there the competition for food and power, for survival and territory was a lot more fierce. With many monsters forced into a smaller space, forced back by cooperation and coordination, the monsters were rapidly forced to gain power, turning those places into death-traps from which the monsters could hardly be uprooted.


    Even a rat would attack a cat, once it was cornered. And here, what had been cornered weren¡¯t rats but a variety of monsters, from wolves and large cats to bears and a variety of fantastical beasts.


    Some of those places might even have been turned into Dungeons, the Astral River turning the surrounding area into a morass of power, infusing and fortifying the monsters, turning them into something else. Just that process was something I would love to study at some point, to figure out and understand it, maybe even learn to control and master it.


    The Grandmother had created the Barrow Den, to seal those she despised, to act as a magical counterweight and likely as a way to train others. Maybe, in the future, I would be able to do something similar but it was a very long-term project. At the end of the day, reaching the level of mastery the Grandmother possessed was nothing that could be accomplished in a short time, if at all.


    Similarly, the Winter Wolves had turned their den into a dungeon, binding themselves as monsters, however that worked. But there was a price involved, their souls bound to the dungeon, possibly in a way similar to the way a soul prison worked, only that the souls inhabited bodies within the dungeon. The beings we had fought in the Barrow Den seemed to have retained some of their personality, at least they had the mental activity to tell us a, possibly their, story. If that was the same for a creature that willingly bound themselves to a dungeon or a creature that linked to the dungeon by virtue of proximity was another interesting question.


    It went on the list of things I wanted to investigate and understand but didn¡¯t have the time to, at least during the beta. That particular list was growing at a faster rate than any other, the intricacies of the magical system of Road to Purgatory fascinating and complex, capturing my attention in a way that my university studies never had managed. I enjoyed working with numbers and finding patterns, but what Pantheon had created allowed me to look at such patterns in a wholly different way, with different eyes. And it allowed me to freeze those who annoyed me, or teleport or turn invisible. Well, the last two were very much work in progress, but the excitement that the magical abilities in Road to Purgatory brought to me was wonderful. Even better than flying through the skies on Lenore¡¯s wings.


    A look at the clock prompted me to close down the last few windows and trigger the log-out from the capsule-space, to return to the real world. It was time for another wonderful torture-session with Mrs. Wu, with me trying to push my body just a little further, to stretch my muscles in ways nature had never intended them to move. But for some reason, whenever I thought my body couldn¡¯t do something, but Mrs. Wu insisted that it could, she was always right. And, as I had noticed, the pain and exhaustion was slowly bearing fruit, allowing me to move my body in ways I wouldn¡¯t have thought possible. That alone, the feeling of accomplishment that came with doing what I would have considered impossible, it drew me and I craved it.


    That the skills she taught me were rather nefarious in nature didn¡¯t bother me any longer, just the feeling of accomplishment, and the times she praised me for doing better than expected, those mattered. Just the knowledge, just the ability, they didn¡¯t mean I would start actually using them on people.


    And having more knowledge and more abilities was always a good thing.

 Chapter 436

    My muscles still sore and tired from the training Mrs. Wu had put me through, I slipped back into the capsule, letting out a sigh of relief at the relaxation. If nothing else, the soft, cushiony memory-foam inlay of the capsule was incredibly comfortable, good enough to be marketed even without the electric parts, as some sort of futuristic bed. Possibly with a side-market for vampires.


    Chuckling to myself, I closed my eyes, my mind going through the latest movement-sequence Mrs. Wu had shown me. It was a strike to sever the spine at a certain point, low enough to paralyse to render an enemy completely helpless but not so low that they would die quickly, in order to allow for interrogation. Quite vicious, especially considering that she had explained how one could dangle the false hope of getting treatment for the paralysis as a carrot before their eyes, in order to motivate the disclosure of information, but from what I had read in the book she had given me, such tactics actually worked, especially compared to torture. The trick seemed to be to turn working with you into their best interest, where their future welfare and success was directly linked to your interests. Merely avoiding pain just didn¡¯t work, you would only learn what they thought you wanted to know, in order to make the pain stop. Psychology was such an interesting subject.


    Luckily, sore muscles didn¡¯t transfer over to Mundus, even if some of my mental fatigue remained, telling me that I¡¯d need to sleep at some point in the near future. For once, I was unable to easily perceive the surroundings of my Hallow and it took me a moment to realise what was going on. Normally, the majority of information I received came from Lenore¡¯s senses and was filtered through her mind. But what if Lenore¡¯s mind didn¡¯t provide information, her senses in a passive, dormant state? While her sleeping mind was somewhat vigilant, the difference in sensation was quite stark.


    For a moment, I considered waking her up but quickly decided against it, mainly because I wasn¡¯t willing to risk her retaliation for such a vile deed. Knowing her, she would come up with something so nefarious that I didn¡¯t even want to consider it and there was little I could do to stop her retribution. By now, the connection between us had turned incredibly deep, allowing us to share vast amounts of information and detailed memories, but it could also be turned against the other. Though, at least according to my understanding, the connection had only developed in such a way because Lenore and I were compatible minds, with a similar mental make-up. Whatever that meant.


    Floating in the darkness of my Hallow, I let my mind drift, back to the realisation I had a few days before. For a while, I had wondered how Darkness could ever be brought to the extreme, how there could be Darkness without Light, and conversely, how could there be Light without Darkness?


    The answer I had realised, if true or false, was that true Darkness, or whatever one wanted to call the pinnacle of the path of extreme Darkness, was not the absence of Light, it was emptiness. Out in the night, in the depths of space, there was a nigh infinite amount of Light, shed from countless stars radiating out, into the void. But without matter, without something to reflect that Light to the observer, the Light didn¡¯t matter, leaving only Darkness.


    The Void, a perfect nothingness, that was the pinnacle of Darkness.


    But what to do with that realisation?


    How could I turn the concept, the idea, that the ultimate embodiment of Darkness was Emptiness into somethin, for lack of a better word, tangible? How could I incorporate it into my magic? So many questions, so little time. But it was a question I wanted answered,


    Alas, before I could find an answer to that question, sleep overtook me, the empty darkness of my Hallow acting as a blanket, a cocoon, allowing me to rest in ultimate comfort.


    Lenore and I woke from the same stimulation, the sun rising across the horizon, its warm rays setting the world alight. There were no words between our sleep-addled minds, awareness slowly returning, bringing with it separation between our minds. There were a few moments during which I wanted to spread my wings, flapping them a little to check their preening, before my conscious mind caught up with the foreign instincts I had mentally ingested from Lenore. Similarly, I was a little amused as Lenore tried to cover her beak with one of her wings, in a gesture that could only be the covering of a yawn.


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    Pushing outwards, I moved out of my Hallow, greeting Sigmir, who had been on watch, with a gentle wave of my hand. The others were still asleep and I didn¡¯t want to needlessly wake them, not before it was time to get ready to set out.


    Carefully picking my steps, to avoid making noise, I moved next to her, nuzzling her cheek while giving her a hug. There was no need for words, simple, physical affection allowing us to convey more than saying a hundred words ever would.


    Settling down on her lap, I considered going back to sleep, at least for a bit, but decided against it. Instead, I simply snuggled against her chest, listening to the steady beat of her heart.


    Sadly, such tranquility couldn¡¯t last forever. In this case, it was ended by the noises the others made, as they were waking up. With them on the move, I decided that staying within Sigmir¡¯s arms would be impolite, instead, I began to move as well and started breakfast.


    Luckily, the others had managed to get some shopping done, back in Neamov, giving us a nice supply of preserved foodstuffs that could be used together with a couple of rabbits someone had brought down the day before. Looking at the carcasses, I was quite sure that someone had been Ylva, unless Rai had decided to forgo his blades and hunt with his mouth, the mental image bringing a grin to my face.


    Soon, breakfast was ready and the others had done their own morning preparations, settling down nearby.


    ¡°Olivia, you raised an interesting question yesterday, about the path going forward. While I have my own thoughts on the matter, I would like to hear all of yours.¡± I spoke up, changing the topic from the simple breakfast-conversation, looking at each of my companions in turn.


    It was a little amusing to instantly get three careless shrugs in response, with Adra, Rai and Sigmir signaling that they didn¡¯t care. But then, the whole journey had worked that way.


    Adra had set out from her home, now located to our South-East with a plan to see the world, without a set destination. As long as there was something new to be seen or some unknown to be uncovered, she was happy to go along. All the better if she was able to gain even more power on the way. But the gain of power was not the main part, of that I was quite certain.


    Sigmir and Rai were even simpler, in many ways. Rai had joined up with us because he had lacked a choice and getting trained by me helped to alleviate the powerlessness. He had gained a great deal of power, to the point that he¡¯d likely be able to return home and be fine, but there was his Oath to me and his involvement with Adra that kept him with us. In addition, I had a feeling that he enjoyed the adventure in and of itself, similar to Adra. Maybe that had helped connect the two of them.


    Sigmir on the other hand was a little sad, in some ways. Originally, we had joined because she was hunted and I had helped her. Despite her impressive physical size and prowess, she was rather young and without anyone to rely on, she had grabbed onto me. While we had dealt with those hunting her, and in the process took revenge for her father, that hadn¡¯t created a place for her to return to. Nor did she ever indicate she wanted to, something I was grateful for, as I needed her and the connection between us at least as much as she did. Just the idea of losing the connection caused a great deal of discomfort, to the point that I preferred to keep it as far from my mind as possible, instead focusing on the idea that exemplary performance in the Beta would allow me to avoid it.


    Lastly, Olivia. She had joined us only recently, which left her motivation for coming along in the dark. While she certainly was useful, for her knowledge and her impressive support-abilities in combat, I didn¡¯t fully trust her, even my current trust in her conditional on the oath she had sworn in the name of her Goddess.


    ¡°As I¡¯ve told you before, I¡¯ve been wandering these lands for a while but it might be time for a change of scenery. Making the crossing once more and wandering around Arbotoma or Aletoma sounds like a great plan. But for me, the Journey is what¡¯s important, the time spent on the road a devotion to my Goddess.¡± Olivia told me, a carefree smile on her face.


    Accepting Olivia¡¯s statement with a nod, I decided to simply run with it for now and keep an eye on her, just in case there was more to her motivations.


    ¡°So, you are fine with tagging along. What can you tell me about the respective routes we could take, if the destination of our journey is Arbotoma?¡± I asked, hoping that her knowledge might make up for the lack of maps.

 Chapter 437

    For most of the morning, we moved relatively slowly, keeping a pace at which we could comfortably talk. Most of the talking was done by Olivia, who systematically described the two possible routes we could take and what she knew about them.


    It was quite entertaining to listen, especially since she happily shared tales of her travels some of them saucy enough to count as a magic spell, to summon blush or maybe conjure embarrassment, or something along those lines, but they were superbly told, showing her vast experience, both as a traveller and as a story-teller. It made me want to share her talents, to the point that I made a mental note to edit out the footage of her talking, so that I could use it, maybe playing it while showing some footage taken from the sky, with help of Lenore. That would certainly make for good entertainment. Maybe some sort of series, each of her stories with different aerial footage, showcasing the gorgeous scenery? I would have to think about that.


    But the main points were quite simple, as she had mentioned the day before, there were two possible routes. One would take us near the ruins of the ancient empire, the same empire that had built the roads we were using, but to get there, we¡¯d have to cross a major mountain-range called the White Mountains. According to Olivia, it made the Turan Mountains seem positively puny but as was expected for the mountain-range around the ancient empire, they had carved their roads through those mountains. Not quite creating artificial passes but carefully building their roads, to last an eternity.


    While the ruins themselves were incredibly deadly due to lingering, reality-warping wild magic, something that somewhat aroused my interest, I wasn¡¯t quite certain I wanted to make that de-tour, just for that. Especially as it might just kill us all.


    Once we made our way past those ruins, we could head to one of the nearby cities on the coast of the Inner Sea and look for passage on a ship from there. Those ships would have to make it past the Daish Gate, the straight between the northern tip of Daiea and the southern tip of Aretia, before making the dangerous crossing to Aletoma. Apparently, very few ships went from Aretia to Arbotoma, as that crossing was apparently even more dangerous than the one between Aretia and Aletome. It would be different if we made our way to the western coast of Daiea, where we might have more luck, but that would require us to either take a ship, or cross the desert.


    If we didn¡¯t get onto a ship in one of those cities, we could continue further west, crossing the White Mountains again, until we reached the western coast of Aretia. If we went that way, we could eventually get onto the same road we would end up on if we took the northern route, near a city called Daley. According to Olivia, that town was quite famous, as it was one of the few, major cities that weren¡¯t dwarven. Instead, the town was mostly run by trolls, similar to Kolyug or Ladrin, the town we would reach next. There was another route we could take, but we¡¯d have to talk about that some more, once we got there.


    The other route would be a lot less dangerous but longer. We¡¯d have to head north, avoiding the White Mountains, before heading back west. It was a little annoying, we had been heading south for so long and now we had to head back north but sadly, that was how the roads had been built. We could have cut through the wilderness, finding our own way, but travelling through rough terrain took a lot more time and effort than travelling on a road, especially if the road was magically augmenting the traveller and replenishing their stamina. The shorter route was not always the faster route, as was the case here.


    The northern route would take us through the heart of Aretia, where Orcs, Dwarves and various beast-people were quietly vying for supremacy. Well, mostly the Orcs and beast-people did the vying, while the Dwarves had their mountain-kingdoms, each a city-state similar to Neamov, that no sane being tried to attack. Unless you were a dragon, but Olivia was far too happy when she told the story, making me question its validity. While I wanted to question the existence of dragons, especially her descriptions of them, it had just been a couple weeks since I had seen an eagle the size of an airplane and a titan that could peek into the windows of most tall buildings, so I wasn¡¯t willing to question that part. Just her grin. That was suspect.


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    Anyway, after crossing the heartland, we would eventually end up in Daley, same as with the first route, and from there we¡¯d head south-west again, until we reached the Dorrian Mountains that separated central Aretia from the Idorra Peninsula, which we head to cross until we finally, at the western edge of that peninsula, reached another, major Naga-presence and their harbours., where we would have to find a ship to make the crossing to Aletoma.


    After listening to Olivia for most of the morning, I realised that my original idea had been foolish. I had looked at the various posts describing the situation north of the White Mountains and thought it was a good idea to go that way. But looking at it from another perspective, heading through the mountains had the potential to give us more levels and while dangerous, I had greater confidence in our ability to deal with monsters, compared to the problems we would face on the other route.


    Namely, my personal inability to blend into civilisations, something that seemed to have rubbed off a little to Adra, and my propensity to get into trouble whenever I entered a city. If we avoided cities by going through the mountains, we wouldn¡¯t get embroiled in trouble within cities. An obvious solution to my problem.


    For the latter part of the journey, how to continue after crossing the White Mountains, it would largely depend on the situation at the time. Where weaker beings would almost certainly take a ship as soon as possible, for safety and for their higher speed, for us, it was almost the opposite. I had more confidence in us, remaining safe, in a situation where we could fight a threat, as we could on land. But in a naval battle, where the ship beneath us could suddenly be destroyed, things were a lot more dicey. Lenore could carry me away, but the others? They would almost certainly drown.


    And when it came to speed, the difference shouldn¡¯t be that large. Just over the last few days, we had crossed almost three-hundred kilometers, granted, it had been by pushing us all and exhausting Olivia, but we had done it, and could do it again. When factoring in that ships, while staying near land, would regularly visit ports, losing time that way, the difference might shrink even further. Unless there were even more magical shenanigans than I assumed, which was always possible.


    ¡°Let¡¯s take the shorter route.¡± I announced my decision some time after lunch. The statement was deliberate, focusing on the incredibly simple aspect of one route being shorter, in an attempt to draw out potential arguments that I hadn¡¯t considered yet.


    ¡°So, some more mountain-climbing. Hopefully we won¡¯t see another of¡­ those.¡± Adra nodded, a visible shudder gripping her. It was obvious that she thought of the bound Titan, a being that left a deep impression within her psyche. Given that I had experienced more than one nightmare, featuring the large, metallic giant with burning eyes,I could empathize.


    ¡°There are dangers but nothing on that scale. That I know of, at least.¡± Olivia chuckled, apparently much less cowed. Maybe her experience with the divine shielded her a little, or the simple knowledge that she had a being on her side that could match the TItan. Faith, trust in her Goddess, worked out to her advantage.


    ¡°I don¡¯t mind.¡± Sigmir agreed as well, while Rai simply nodded along Adra.


    ¡°Even I prefer the mountains. We might find a naturally occurring concentration of Wind Astral Power up there. That would help me balance the Death-Energy I have gained a while back.¡± Lenore piped up in my mind, sounding quite enthusiastic. Along her words, dreams of soaring above snow-capped mountains came, bringing a smile to my face.


    With no objections or arguments forthcoming, our plans for the foreseeable future were sorted out. Now, they only had to survive contact with reality.

 Chapter 438

    Once again, Lenore and I were flying above the others, scouting the way forward. Not that there was a lot to see, we had spotted a pack of wolves earlier but they had been more interested in getting as far away from Lenore¡¯s shadow as possible, running like frightened hares. Not that I blamed them, according to Lenore¡¯s estimation, they were around level twenty, barely even a bump on the road for us. If that were the predators of this region, there would be no worthwhile combat, not unless we decided to try our hand at taking out a city.


    Alas, trying that was neither realistic nor worthwhile, at least not when looking at the defensive features of the two cities I had seen on Mundus. Both, Neamov and Kolyug, had defenses against large-scale magic and trying to overcome those was not on the menu, at least not yet. I had made a mental note to try, close to the end of the beta, simply to see what would happen. Pantheon Entertainment should be grateful, especially if I managed to wipe out a city or two. People wanted to play in this ¡°garden¡± called Mundus, but for some people, that meant using a lense to burn ants. I couldn¡¯t understand the idea of taking pleasure in destruction, it was so much more interesting to learn something new.


    ¡°That is one impressive village.¡± the awe in Lenore¡¯s voice caught my attention, normally she was quite scathing when spotting villages, seeing them as far beneath her notice. Curious, I focused my mind on the outside, looking through her eyes, down onto the ¡®village¡¯ she had spotted.


    Only to realise, that was no village, it was a space station. Or rather, it was a city and a large one at that. Guessing the size was difficult, without any object to compare its size to and from a distance, but I thought it was even bigger than Neamov had been. That might have been due to the massive cliff that had towered over Neamov, towering over the dwarven construction, overshadowing it a little.


    In contrast, Ladrin, the city I was now looking at, was more sprawled out, a wide river flowing through it adding to the impression of size. The city-center was just that river, or rather, it was one of the islands in that river. There were two of them and on one of them, the reason for Ladrin¡¯s independence was clearly visible.


    Where the dwarves of Neamov had dug into their cliff to create their citadel, something I had been unable to see first hand, only knowing it from Olivia¡¯s tales, the trolls of Ladrin lacked such a possibility. Instead, what they had was a massive moat, easily a hundred meters across on either side, the river flowing around the Island they had used to construct their bastion. To make things even worse, the bastion wasn¡¯t directly connected to the shore on either side, instead, a single bridge connected it to another nearby Island, which looked fortified as well and had more bridges connecting it to the shore.


    Unless my guess was wrong, which was entirely possible, the bridges had been built by the same people who made the ancient, imperial road, which added to the awe I felt for them. Making a road that lasted many centuries was difficult, especially when the road was heavily used, but to build bridges that lasted just as long should be even more difficult, at least according to my understanding.


    Other than the Island-Bastion, the city was surrounded by sturdy-looking walls, with four obvious main-gates, one on each end of the city, almost at the cardinal points. Only one of them was on our side of the river, the other three were on the opposite shore, one gate likely continuing the road we were on, while the other two gates served another part of the ancient road system, this part following the river to the north and south. Part of me wanted to take a closer look at the actual crossroad, just how those ancient builders had created the link, but given that it was close to the center of the city, I wasn¡¯t sure how easy it would be to take a close look. Such important infrastructure would likely be at least somewhat guarded, which meant I would invite serious trouble to myself, thanks to my troublesome social traits.


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    Sadly, while the feats of magic and engineering made me feel a sense of awe, even as there was a burning, competitive spirit roused deep within me, the prospect of meeting many people and getting into trouble stung me. While I didn¡¯t overly care for social interactions outside a small, very exclusive, circle, the outright rejection wasn¡¯t pleasant. Especially not as it implicated my companions.


    ¡°Want to try again?¡± Lenore asked, likely sensing my feelings.


    ¡°Not really, but what else is there? We can cross at will, hell, even I could likely create something from ice to get everyone to the other side.¡± I grumbled, knowing that I really didn¡¯t need a bridge. Doubly not with Lenore¡¯s wings.


    ¡°But our funds are slowly dwindling, as are our supplies. Didn¡¯t you hear Adra about the lack of forage, how the forests are depleted? Though, given that everyone is using the same road, that¡¯s somewhat to be expected.¡± I continued, while thinking about potential ways to deal with the situation.


    ¡°Well, we could simply fly across and wait for the others, might take a day or three but it¡¯s not like we couldn¡¯t take care of each other during that time. That way, you don¡¯t have to feel guilty for depriving Sigmir of the city-experience, even if I feel that the experience is overrated.¡± Lenore suggested, curiously disdainful about cities. Looking into her mind a little deeper, past the thoughts she deliberately sent over our connection, I realised that some bleed-through from my mind had somewhat tainted her impression of cities, due to my impression of the ravens living in modern cities. It was quite confusing, but that was the impression I got.


    After sating my curiosity, I began considering her idea a little more seriously. It had a lot of merit, especially when taking into account that we could use the time the others were in the city to scout a wider area, maybe allowing us to find something interesting. Normally, we tried to stay within some thirty minutes of flight-time of the others but if we knew that we had time, we could actually use our wings to the greatest effect.


    The only down-side I could see was that I¡¯d be separated from Sigmir for multiple days, which I didn¡¯t like too much, but it might prove useful in the future.


    Overall, the idea felt quite good, especially the part about getting away from the road for some time, flying freely, as the road felt more and more narrow, less a place of adventure and more simply a path from one place to another. The further west we came, the less wild the land had been, turning more and more tame, until nothing near the road even thought to challenge us.


    In the depths of my mind, I could understand why that was, how Pantheon Entertainment had planned things out. The east acted as a mid-level zone, interspersed with both low-level zones, like the area in which I had started, and likely some higher-level areas as well, even if I hadn¡¯t stumbled into any. Contrary to that, the western parts seemed to be lower-levelled, more geared towards casual players that simply wanted to enjoy a fantastic world without too many dangerous monsters, or simply new players who were starting out, while also containing some of the truly high-level areas, hidden away in less accessible places, to draw the high-level players back, so the new players could see them and aspire to their awesomeness. Or something like that. It was a little akin to standing in front of the auction-house in some of the older games.


    Focusing back on my connection with Lenore, I wordlessly communicated my agreement, while considering how to explain to Sigmir what I was planning. Hopefully, she understood that I didn¡¯t reject her companionship but that I wanted her to enjoy our travels as much as possible, which included seeing the various cities of the world. It was only that I wasn¡¯t able to enjoy them the same as they could, not unless I used quite a bit of effort to ingratiate myself into their society. Not something I wanted to do on the road, not for just a few days.


    Similarly, staying in my Hallow came with its own set of problems, one of which was that I would be a little bored, unable to truly act on my own, even my magic limited to tiny experiments that could be contained within my Hallow. Seeing the cities simply didn¡¯t match up to the idea of freely flying with Lenore and the prospect of finding an adventure, maybe some place that we could lead the others to.

 Chapter 439

    As expected, Sigmir was conflicted when I suggested she should head into town with the others. She could easily understand why I didn¡¯t want to head into town, having seen my troubles with civilization from the start and I could see that she was curious about cities, having heard some of her father¡¯s tales, about adventures in distant places.


    She brought up the obvious suggestion, that I could hide within my Hallow, while she carried Lenore on her shoulder, so that I could be with them, and under her protection, while leaving the Hallow during the night so that we could be together then. But even as she suggested it, she must have picked up my hesitant feelings, her voice petering out before she finished voicing the idea.


    It got even worse for her, when Olivia mentioned that Ladrin was famous for its large, public bathing facilities, allowing you to lounge in warm water as long as you liked. To me, thanks to my affinity for Cold and the Ice-Astral-Power constantly flowing through my body, that sounded pretty much like torture, unless I used said power to lower the temperature to a point that I could enjoy. But if I did, everyone else wouldn¡¯t be too happy and I would soon run out of power, making it non-viable. Sadly, it would be an interesting prank. Freezing over the hot-springs, maybe I would be able to create a build-up of pressure, until there was an eruption.


    On the other hand, Sigmir enjoyed warm baths as much, maybe even more, than any other humanoid. It was something she could never have as a child, making it a special indulgence. With that added as an argument, she soon accepted that they would spend a few days in the city and use the connection between us to signal me, when they were leaving.


    Once the plans were made, I stayed next to Sigmir for the next two hours, until we were near the city and I decided that anyone seeing us as a group would become suspicious if only four of a group of five entered the town. After giving Sigmir a lingering kiss, I shifted myself back into my Hallow and Lenore took off, waving her wings in parting.


    For the first time in almost a year of travelling through Mundus, I parted from Sigmir with the intention of not meeting up for a few days. It was strange, when knowing that I¡¯d see her again in a few hours, even when leaving Mundus entirely and not seeing her for a day, the sense of longing was less intense. Now, knowing that we wouldn¡¯t meet for days, I was missing her intensely, just moments after we split. Once again, feelings, even my own feelings, confused me. Maybe especially my own feelings.


    Luckily, I had Lenore with me, my dear, avian friend giving me a comforting presence, reminding me that I wasn¡¯t alone. It helped, the feeling of companionship, especially when we joined our minds together to look at the scenery below. Lenore had quite obviously focused on altitude first, soaring quickly thanks to a combination of physical ability and magical support, allowing us to view a massive area of land.


    From that high up, the city below seemed puny, insignificant, a mere speck of dust that wasn¡¯t worthy of our notice. Or so Lenore wanted me to believe, the truth was, sadly, a little different. Due to the close connection between our minds, I realised why the high altitude we were at was a rare treat for both of us, normally Lenore kept a lot lower, closer to the ground, for security reasons.


    The further away from the ground of Mundus we got, the less stable the Astral River around us became, with some streams surging with overwhelming force, while others were barely enough to keep the magic we generally took for granted alive.


    Projecting my gratitude to Lenore, she started a gentle, slow descent, while letting us see as much of the city as possible, before we got too low and into danger of detection.


    North of the city, the land slowly changed to wooded hills, quite unlike the rugged, cragged mountains of the Turan Range, giving both Lenore and me an impression of safety and comfort. If only the terrain was snowed in, that would be perfect, alas, to hope for snow during the early autumn was impossible. In a month or three, things would change and give me the advantage I had enjoyed for so long in the north.


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    As we were flying above the city, heading towards the hills, the two of us were studying the streets below. There was a bit of fascination within me, as I watched the tiny humanoid figures mill about. going about their business. Maybe that was the perfect way for me to deal with large groups of people, keeping myself apart and observing them, without interacting.


    ¡°What are we going to do for the next couple of days?¡± Lenroe asked me, before continuing, ¡°Where do we want to fly?¡±


    I considered for a moment, before suggesting to head towards the north.west, not quite heading into the mountains but keeping an eye on the region between the road we would travel and the mountains. According to Olivia, more powerful monsters had to hide in the difficult terrain of the mountains, which meant that if there was something worth the challenge it would be in that region. At the end of the day, I was interested in power, even if I had a feeling that this region was quite picked over in that regard, with generations of Adventurers having taken the worthwhile bits for themselves long ago. Yet, at the same time, there should be something hidden away by Pantheon, for those who were carefully looking.


    And for looking carefully for secrets, Lenore was the best partner, as most hidden secrets should use magic to conceal them, which she could see. In addition, we were able to cover a lot of ground and search from the air, giving us another advantage.


    ¡°North-West, it is.¡± Lenore agreed to my suggestion and I could feel her focus her magic, our flight-speed suddenly increasing by an order of magnitude. We had moved this fast before, but it had always been in a dive or a short, magic-assisted dash.


    ¡°I want to test something. Can you try healing and strengthening me with Blood Magic, while channelling as much Astral Power as you can into me?¡± she asked, bringing a grin to my face.


    It was so similar to some of my ideas of magical experimentation and given how often she had gone along with me, there was no question that I would go along. Both tasks she had asked of me were both familiar and quite difficult to accomplish due to the fact that I was within my Hallow.


    The easier of the two was the channelling of Astral Power, it merely required me to delve into the Astral and draw power into me that I could then channel to her. While I wasn¡¯t sure how easy it would be if I had to sense the Astral in my surroundings, I had a major advantage, thanks to one of my traits granting me a greater connection to the Astral. Following that connection, I could reach out and increase the flow of power, allowing me to channel the surplus into Lenore, without impacting her own magical operation.


    The healing was a little more difficult, essentially she wanted me to do what I did to my own body, when pushing myself physically. But that worked mostly because I was familiar with my body, or humanoid bodies in general. When using it on others, I had to be incredibly careful not to cause damage by accidentally increasing their strength to a point their bodies couldn¡¯t handle.


    So, how was the best way to get to know Lenore¡¯s body?


    ¡°Can you do it?¡± she asked over our connection, bringing the realisation that there was a simple way. While merging into our full Avatar-form wasn¡¯t wise, I had no idea how well that form could fly, bringing our minds close together was quite possible.


    Closing the mental distance after a short warning, I almost became Lenore, our thoughts merging to a point just short of our Avatar-State. The complex wind-magic she was using to propel us forward became apparent and I gained a new appreciation for her efforts. At the same time, I understood why she hadn¡¯t used it before, it simply being impossible to keep up, unless she had help.


    When I questioned how we would find anything interesting if we moved this fast, she countered with the fact that so close to the city, there wouldn¡¯t be any secrets. We would fly fast for the rest of the day, maybe for the next day, too, and search from there. Accepting her proposal, my mind went back to the magical challenge she had posed.


    Carefully, with meticulous care, I formed the appropriate Blood Magic runes in a corner of my mind, letting them take effect slowly as the formed power started to flow outwards, out of my Hallow and into Lenore. It was a gradual process, allowing me to monitor her state from within her mind, each small twinge of pain giving me a little more information on how much we could take.


    Finally, both of us started to tire in a way that was more than physical or magical, simple exhaustion forcing us to take a step back and only then I realised that we might have pushed a little too far. Where Lenore was sore, her muscles taxed beyond their capacity, my own mind was in a similar state, making magic a little difficult.


    ¡°Looks like a good place to sleep.¡± Lenore decided, having noticed a nicely large tree below.


    Soon after, she settled down on a high branch and our minds drifted apart, as we went to sleep.

 Chapter 440

    It was almost as good as flying. But only almost.


    After spending the night in a tree to sleep, Lenore was still sore from pushing herself a little too far when the next morning came, while I was physically fine, with only a bit of magical exhaustion. With that in mind, we decided to see what would happen if we did things the other way around, with Lenore waiting within her Hallow, while I was moving my body, using my own BLood Magic, with Lenore¡¯s Wind Magic as support.


    Would it allow us to move through the forest at speeds similar to the speed we could achieve on the ancient road? How long would I be able to keep up? With such an interesting idea, and given the fact that Lenore refused to fly on her own at least for the rest of the morning, we decided to find out.


    At first, things were a little iffy, Lenore¡¯s magic worked best in conjunction with her wings, a feature I obviously lacked. Trying to apply what she used to running mostly meant that, instead of pushing myself forward faster, I pushed myself upward, leading to a strange, incredibly awkward hopping gait, each step turning into a vaulting leap.


    Unless I was willing to put on some bunny-ears and a costume for which I lacked the¡­ ass-ets, there was no way to make that part work.


    So, I decided to steal a page from a different genre and tried running with my hands stretched out behind me. Unsurprisingly, that didn¡¯t work either, even if it made me chuckle and get a little more serious, taking to the skies. Or rather, the trees.


    We were in a dense forest, with many tall, sturdy trees to move, all of which had quite a bit of distance between them. On the ground, that hardly mattered as there was enough underbrush and detritus to require some caution, but once you reached about a dozen meters of altitude, things turned a lot clearer.


    Instead of pushing off against the ground, I started jumping from tree-branch to tree-branch, using Lenore¡¯s wind-magic to make the jumps while cycling my Blood Magic to only strengthen for the moments when I pushed off and landed, conserving some power for myself. Playing flying squirrel worked surprisingly well. And it was fun. Just not as good as flying.


    After about two hours of my new mode of transportation, Lenore and I decided that pushing both of our bodies into a state of physical and magical exhaustion while traversing unknown, potentially dangerous, terrain was a foolish idea, even worse than what we had been doing.


    But just because running and flying were out of the question, it didn¡¯t mean that we had to stop. We just had to slow down.


    Remembering how Lenore had tried to use sound as a carrier for her Death-Magic, I considered trying to make things work the other way around. Instead of using Wind.Magic to carry another magic, could we, when working together, use her Wind-Magic in conjunction with my Darkness-Magic to improve my concealment even further by muffling sound and preventing the spread of smell?


    Once Lenore considered my idea for a few moments and spent a couple minutes coming up with her first idea, we continued on our path, this time going stealth-mode. Moving along the ground made things difficult, thanks to countless fallen branches, leaves and all kinds of junk that was slowly decaying on the ground, to say nothing of the various shrubs, smaller trees and roots that forced me to take each and every step carefully. It was silent, partially thanks to my slowly increasing skill but mostly thanks to the double-layer of magical muffling but it was slow. If we had time, the method employed should allow us to sneak up to most things, as evidenced when we accidentally stumbled upon a doe with her fawns.


    We noticed them from a bit of distance away and Lenore suggested we use them as test-objects. Not trying to actually do harm, just to see how close we could get, if fully focused. Feeling intrigued, and knowing that the worst that could happen was that we spooked the animals, I agreed and tried my best.


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    The stepping, without disturbing anything, was curiously the more difficult of the two processes I juggled, concealing myself with magic was trivial in comparison. Curiously, the more I concentrated on my steps, drawing additional attention away from the mental process that handled the magical Concealment, the easier it felt to use the magic. Maybe it was because there was less noise and disturbance to conceal.


    Finally, after a glacially slow approach, I was close enough to the fawns to make out individual hairs, just a step or two away from being able to reach out and touch them. But doing so would be incredibly mean, giving them the fright of their young lives, without any real benefit. Sure, their fur looked soft and a little fluffy, making me remember the wolf-cubs I had petted back in the Den of the Winter Wolves, but it was just not worth it.


    Instead, I simply waited, quietly observing and watching them, but not even trying to get closer. After a couple of minutes quietly watching them, I decided that I had some nice footage for a later video and retreated, just as silent and stealthily as I had approached.


    Once we had sufficient distance, I used my Darkness-Magic to conceal a use of Observe, curious what sort of levels these beasts had. Sadly, the moment I used the ability, the doe noticed and she, along with her fauns, fled through the woods. Still, I now knew that I could sneak up to a skittish, level 38 doe. It would be interesting how that ability would work against other beasts and humanoids.


    After the test was done, Lenore decided that she felt up to flying some more and we switched, with me moving into my Hallow while she took us to the skies. Sitting within my Hallow gave me the leisure to check if the new ideas we had tried out had resulted in an increase of my skill-levels.


    <table><tbody><tr><td>Skill increased </td></tr>


    <tr><td>You increased your skill: Blood Magic [68/100]</td></tr></tbody></table>


    <table><tbody><tr><td>Skill increased</td></tr>


    <tr><td>You increased your skill: Darkness Rune-Mastery [72/100]</td></tr></tbody></table>


    <table><tbody><tr><td>Skill increased </td></tr>


    <tr><td>You increased your skill: Darkness Magic [57/100]</td></tr></tbody></table>


    <table><tbody><tr><td>Skill increased </td></tr>


    <tr><td>You increased your skill: Stealth [47/100]</td></tr></tbody></table>


    It was a great harvest, for only about a day worth of testing. Especially the increase of the Blood Magic Skill surprised me, as I hadn¡¯t really done anything new with it, I had just continuously used a familiar concept on Lenore, maybe that was what had done it.


    Other than that, Stealth was a nice increase, even if it left me wondering why Stealth increased when used in conjunction with magic, while Athletics did not.


    ¡°Let¡¯s look for some sort of lunch, shall we?¡± I asked Lenore, my body reminding me that a hard, physical work-out required you to refuel your energy, even if you were able to magically supplement your stamina. The body was still the foundation.


    ¡°Agreed. What are we looking for?¡± she replied, lowering her altitude a little, so we could look for a suitable game to hunt, or some other forage that we could use to stretch our food-stores. While we should have more than enough in our magic bag to last the two of us until we reunited with the others, foraging was just good practise.


    Somehow, even after Lenore noticed some deer, I wasn¡¯t quite in the mood for venison. Luckily, we soon came across a stream, flowing out from the mountains, giving us a potential food-source. Fishing wasn¡¯t something we had practised a great deal of, but at the end of the day, magic was a wonderful way to cheat at such activities.


    No need for a Lure, no need to mess around with bait, a rod or anything mundane like that. No, just spot the fish, a trivial task in the clear waters of the mountain-river, focus a non-trivial amount of Astral Power into a blast of Mind Magic and crush the feeble mind of your lunch. Ice-Magic made retrieving the fish into an easy task, too, as I was able to cover it in a thin layer of Ice, allowing me to levitate it out of the water.


    Preparing the fish was the hardest task, as I had little knowledge but luckily, a quick retreat into my Capsule-Space, followed by a short online-tutorial gave me the right starting-point, allowing me to get some reasonably well prepared , grilled trout. It, together with some biscuit and onion, made for a wonderful lunch, setting the mood for an afternoon of flying and looking for something interesting. Maybe some more fish.

 Chapter 441

    Finding something interesting in the mountains proved to be difficult. Sure, Lenore and I managed to spot a couple monsters that might be powerful enough to put up a fight, one or two that would require the whole party to work together, but just finding them from the air didn¡¯t mean we actually could actually fight them.


    When we finally found a monster that was accessible enough, a massive, slate-coloured bear that was living in a valley, Lenore and I decided to try our hand at fighting it. As trying to go into melee with a bear the size of a small car seemed to be an exceedingly bad idea, Lenore had carried me onto a large boulder, further up on the slope, where we had carefully prepared the battlefield. My studies into the connecting patterns for Ice-Runes had born a bit more fruit, allowing me to create thin sheets of Ice that I could float into position with my Ice-Magic before channelling Astral Power into them, to rapidly spread Ice on the ground around them, creating a smooth and slick surface. Unless one was a very proficient Ice-Dancer, trying to run across such a surface would almost certainly end up in hilarity, making it a very efficient trap, especially when deployed on a slope.


    Once we had a few of those spread out and a path to retreat off a cliff was ascertained, Lenore and I were ready to battle. Knowing that the first strike might be the most important, I carefully crafted a large runic formation, packing a lot of Astral Power into the creation of an Ice-Spear, only to have the bear notice me. Attacking before I was quite ready, the spear wasn¡¯t as powerful as I may have been able to make it, but powerful nonetheless. Trailing silvery light, it shot out, striking towards the massive bear, when a wall of grey stone rose, my spear crashing into it.


    Ready to react to the bear¡¯s counter-attack, I used my Ice-Magic to prepare a few slabs of Ice, which I planned to move in the path of incoming projectiles while creating a Formation of Darkness-Runes to unleash a beam of magic-devouring radiance. I wasn¡¯t quite in the mental territory that required the use of bullet-time, but the prospect of a serious fight made my heart race, my body chilled and a smile on my face.


    The beautiful glow of my Dark Radiance lanced out, my own power contesting with the power that had shaped the stone into shape, quickly breaking it, returning the stone to the ground, giving me an open path to the bear behind. Only that the bear wasn¡¯t behind any longer. Instead of a fearsome monster, ready to throw down in a battle to the death, what I saw was a furry butt, scurrying into a cave.


    ¡°Erm?¡± I mentally stumbled, not quite sure how to deal with the sudden lack of opponent.


    ¡°That¡¯s one way to win a fight.¡± Lenore laughed, focusing on the distant cave-entrance. ¡°We really don¡¯t want to go in there.¡± she added, her voice suddenly very sober. Thanks to our connection, I was able to see what she saw, namely the various layers of magic that surrounded the cave-entrance, interlinked in a rather impressive display of arcane ability, especially given that we were dealing with a bear.


    ¡°We could break that magic.¡± I replied, looking closely at what she was seeing, only to realise that while we would be able to do so, it wouldn¡¯t really help. While it was difficult to understand foreign magic, I could make some relatively educated guesses. In this case, the way the magic was threaded through the rock above the cave made me think that the magic was stabilising at least some of the rock above, keeping the cave from collapsing. In other words, if I destroyed the magical traps in the cave-opening, it would collapse the cave-opening, unless I managed to only dismantle the trap-parts, a task that required precision that was beyond my ability. I couldn¡¯t even say what the various parts really did, let alone unravel which I could destroy without impacting the whole thing.


    ¡°Or maybe not.¡± I admitted, realising that there was no real way to advance. It didn¡¯t help that it felt wrong to push into the bear¡¯s home in an attempt to hunt it down, reminding me of the centaurs¡¯ attack on the winter wolves. It might even have cubs in its den, and if so, I¡¯d rather pet the cubs than try to kill them all.


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    ¡°Let¡¯s leave.¡± Lenore suggested, having felt my desire to fight fade away.


    ¡°Yeah, let¡¯s.¡± I agreed but decided that just leaving didn¡¯t sit right with me. Reaching into my bag, I pulled out two of the fish that I had caught earlier, still frozen and supposed to be dinner. Gripping the Ice around them with my magic, I let them float over, setting them some ten meters away from the cave and called out, deliberately trying to make myself understood with the ability my bond with Lenore had bestowed upon me.


    ¡°We apologize for the disturbance and will leave now.¡± I called out, before magically breaking the Ice I had placed around the fish. I had no idea if the bear actually understood or if it had any inclination to trust me, and it really didn¡¯t matter. Turning around, I took a few steps towards the rock-ledge, jumping off the mountain while pushing myself into my Hallow. Lenore took over, flapping her wings and controlling our flight, gaining some altitude to look down, into the valley we had just left.


    We circled above for a couple of minutes, but the bear remained in its den and the fish was never touched.


    ¡°Let¡¯s look for some bandits?¡± Lenore asked, sounding as unmotivated to look for more furry monsters to murder as I felt.


    ¡°I could get behind that. Or maybe some insects or something creepy and crawly. Maybe those would even be vulnerable to the cold, who knows.¡± I agreed, the idea to kill off some scummy orcs, dwarves or other two legged vermin a lot more palatable than murdering some fuzzy critter.


    With unspoken agreement, Lenore turned back south a little, getting back towards the lower forests that were between the hills and the ancient road, the area where bandits were more likely to dwell. After all, they needed to have relatively easy access to the road, or there wouldn¡¯t be any travellers to attack.


    We kept flying and looking around for the rest of the day, unable to spot anything that caught our interest. Part of it was likely due to the altitude we kept above the trees, high enough to be out of danger in case there was some sort of predator with a taste for raven hiding in the trees, or it was the simple fact that there was nothing to find.


    Finally, when the sun started to set, we started to look for a nice position to spend the night. Our needs were simple, even if I had to reject the idea of spending another night in a tree, as I wanted to perform some magical experiments after resting for most of the day. I was itching to actually do more than be a passenger in my Hallow.


    Due to that itching, Lenore landed on a narrow ledge, in the middle of a cragged cliff of grey stone. While climbing it was undoubtedly possible, trying to do so in the middle of the night was a foolish, dangerous proposition, something only someone with a pressing need would do. Without anyone knowing where I was, I should be reasonably secure. At least as long as I didn¡¯t fall down.


    To prevent that, and remembering just how disoriented and out of sorts I had been the last couple of times when experimenting with that sort of Darkness-Magic, to the point of falling out of trees, I set up my Throne, positioning it in such a way to look down upon the darkening world.


    The view touched a deep, primal part within me, watching how shadows covered the land, while the sun was setting behind distant mountains, the slow but unavoidable advance of darkness, it was inspiring. It made me want to add my own power into the mix, to spread my own darkness outwards, cloaking the world. It was a mad thought, even in a game that prided itself on player-freedom like Road to Purgatory did, the idea seemed preposterous. But nonetheless, it was something I wanted to reach, if only for a short moment.


    A smile on my face, I leaned back on my throne and closed my eyes, the dark world vivid in my mind. Calming my breathing, I reached out to the Astral River all around me, gently dipping into the stream, while waiting for the accursed sun to vanish, so that I could soar upwards, to reach for the Darkness of the Void. I had no idea what I would detect there, for once not trying to shoot for the moon.


    But to stare into the Void.

 Chapter 442

    Following the process I had used the last time, when I visited the edge of Space in the Astral, letting myself flow up one of the streams of power. In many ways, nothing much had changed since that last time. I had an easier time navigating and was able to get a glimpse of the deeper layers of the Astral, but I was still far from able to traverse the river at will. If that was even possible. So far, it felt more like an infinite onion, with each layer I was able to perceive and slowly comprehend merely an insignificant part of a much, much larger whole.


    But maybe that was what made it so fascinating. It was a mystery, confounding me to the point that I didn¡¯t even know what it was that I did not know.


    As soon as I was able to perceive the conflux of powers, where the burning radiance of the Sun was flowing past the shadow cast by the world of Mundus, I stopped, anchoring myself to my position to not accidentally get singed again. Getting a sunburn in the Astral had been incredibly painful, to the point that experiencing it again was quite close to the top of my list of things I didn¡¯t want to experience. Especially as there was no gain to experiencing it again.


    Looking out into the darkness, I had to slowly shift my mind. What was the difference between the shadow around me and the void ahead? Both could be described as ¡°darkness¡±, but one was dark, despite being filled with light, the other was dark because of the absence of light. One was a darkness dependent on that light, the other side of the coin that was light, while the other had no such restriction. But how to form such a void?


    Stillness, the concept of Ice-Magic, might be a way to go about it, to form an area without movement, where even light couldn¡¯t move, which should, in turn, create a form of absolute darkness. It made me think of black holes and my, admittedly, extremely vague understanding of them. But just the idea didn¡¯t help me to apply it in practise, my theoretical knowledge was too lacking to allow for deeper consideration. Maybe there was a way, but I would have to either study physics to a post-graduate level or find the way the developers had prepared to allow people to use such magics. If there was such a path.


    However, for now, the idea of freezing light within a space to create the perfect darkness was put on hold, pending further studies, ideas or maybe some divine revelation.


    Without any sudden revelations of any kind, I mentally settled in and began focusing on the Darkness before me. It was difficult, without anything to actually anchor that focus, causing my mind to drift, if I wasn¡¯t careful.


    It was so easy to let my mind wander, to allow a memory of Sigmir to intrude, to wonder what she was doing, what was going on in the city and all those questions that popped up whenever you were separated from your loved ones.


    Loved ones, it was such a common term, but it was one I hadn¡¯t ever used, before coming to Mundus. It made me feel a little weird, when I stopped for a moment to think about the feelings I was having, feelings that had been so alien in the beginning, yet had also given me  tremendous comfort. At least until I stopped and thought about it.


    About what Sigmir was. She acted like a person, an actual, flesh-and-blood human, or at least close to one. Yet, she was not. Unless there was somewhere a farm of Pantheon-Employees, acting the part of NPCs in Road to Purgatory, she was not a living being in the traditional sense of the words. But then, what really was a living being, what did it mean to be alive? What did it mean to be a person?


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    It was a question without answer, for humans on earth, the question about personhood had been a simple one, at least so far. Personhood had been limited to human beings, making it a simple answer, but my feelings made me wonder. What was the difference between a sophisticated, silicon-based consciousness like Sigmir and an actual human being?


    Wasn¡¯t Sigmir, all artificial beings on her level of cognisance, as much of a person as a human? Or did the fact that we had a fleshy shell mean that we were somehow superior?


    As my mind was distracted, stumbling down mental rabbit holes, I noticed a strange twinkling, for lack of a better expression, at the edge of my perception. Something was there, but when I focused on the area, trying to get a better glimpse, the thing, whatever it might have been, was gone, as if it hadn¡¯t been there in the first place.


    But I was certain that I had seen something. I didn¡¯t know what, didn¡¯t even really know where, the lightless void providing few mental reference points but I had perceived something. The success helped me focus, to retract my mind from the rabbit holes it had been going down, but sadly, it didn¡¯t help me find whatever I had seen.


    When I looked back at my interface, especially the clock I had placed there, hours had passed, fruitlessly, as I stared into the void, drifting above Mundus. Mentally exhausted, I began pulling myself back, using the connection to my Avatar and Lenore as a guide.


    Travelling the Astral, my mind went back to my earlier thoughts, more precisely, to Sigmir. I was missing her. Her smell, her touch, the comfort brought by her mere presence.


    Without thinking deeply about it, I switched my focus, changed my guide and followed the link between Sigmir and myself. It was faint but maybe the desire to see her made it easier to follow, allowing me to swiftly move through the Astral River, letting it flow around me as if I was swimming through water. There were various currents, some of them uncomfortable for me, but it was a discomfort I gladly endured, for the chance to be close to Sigmir, even if only in spirit.


    Distance within the Astral was a funny thing, as was speed. Soon, I felt close to Sigmir and slowly made my way to the surface of the Astral River, the point closest to reality, as I perceived it.


    Mundus was casting a vague impression onto the Astral, almost akin to a shadow, only less clear, making it difficult to get an idea of Sigmir¡¯s surroundings but I was reasonably certain that she was in an inn. There was another presence nearby, one that I vaguely recognised as Olivia. I wouldn¡¯t be able to point out what it was that made me think so, the closest I could come to describe it would be the smell of her presence but given that it was the way I perceived magic, it might be some derivative from that.


    But it wasn¡¯t what I was interested in. It was the familiar presence of Sigmir that drew me, like a moth to the flame, unable to stay away. I had no idea what I really wanted to do, what I could do, but just being nearby, my presence hovering next to the bed Sigmir was sleeping in, gave me a sense of comfort. She was here. She was near.


    For a moment, I considered reaching out, trying to touch her, maybe connect with her using my Mind Magic, but the idea faded as soon as I really thought about it. My Mind Magic carried with it the power of the Dark Mirror, making it inherently more powerful but also turning it into a weapon of sorts. Thanks to it, I was able to shatter the minds of my enemies, but I had no idea what it would do to Sigmir.


    It wasn¡¯t something I was willing to risk. So, I had to be content with the innate connection between us, to push feelings of comfort, of desire and of love through it, without any idea if she actually received them. I wanted to think so, wanted to believe that the feelings I got in response meant she received them. Maybe that she was dreaming of me.


    The idea made me smile, even as I retreated from her presence, the mental exhaustion I had felt earlier starting to creep in again.


    Once I returned to my body, I decided that dreaming of Sigmir had to be enough. Maybe we could be together in our dreams, if not in reality. With a smile on my face, I made sure that I wouldn¡¯t fall off my throne, before closing my eyes, my mind still filled with thoughts of that one person, who made me feel¡­ complete.

 Chapter 443

    A strange feeling of loss started to well up within me, when I woke up, driving away the comfort I had felt during my dreams. She was far from me again, after I had been so close to her in my dreams. The memories of my dreams were a little vague, blurry, but I could remember sitting with Sigmir at a table made of Ice, drinking tea, as we were talking about our day.


    Was it my imagination that had created the story Sigmir had told me about Ladrin and its bath-houses? If I closed my eyes, the images coming to my mind were so vivid, almost like one of the memories Lenore had shared with me, but they couldn¡¯t be hers. Part of me wondered if I had filled in some details with things I had seen myself, if only on the internet, but I wondered. The spigots shaped like mystical beasts or exotic animals, pouring forth water, all made from brass, the pools of marble, some with flowing water to wash in, some with still water to soak and relax, it was unfamiliar to me. Had they truly been created by my imagination or was there something else?


    My confusion was made worse when I vividly remembered a tale so very much like the ones told by Olivia, especially with the inclusion of saucy details, but told in Sigmir¡¯s voice. Shaking my head, I decided that there wouldn¡¯t be any answers forthcoming by wrestling with these questions within my mind and forcibly pushed them away. There was breakfast to be had, adventure to be sought and, quite possibly, the travel back to be considered.


    Sitting on my throne, high above the land below, was an interesting experience. It was appealing, in the most curious fashion. The feeling of lording above, of dominance and power. To simply look down onto the world from my lofty perch.


    Only two things could make it better, one to have Sigmir by my side, sitting beside me, the other to have people to lord over. Not just open wilderness, with nobody to acknowledge my superiority.


    But for that, I¡¯d need power, enough power to dominate whoever claimed the lands beneath me, to force them to grovel at my feet, to beg for mercy and pray for my grace. Such a wonderful idea. Alas, not for some time. Not until I had grasped that all-elusive power.


    ¡°But what would you do with people living beneath you?¡± Lenore asked, having followed the thoughts in my mind, quite a bit of amusement filling her voice.


    ¡°Don¡¯t you prefer to avoid people, whenever possible?¡± she added, knowing me at least as well as I knew myself. She wasn¡¯t wrong there, if given the choice between meeting strangers and having something interesting to read, I¡¯d reach for the book ten times out of then, yet, here I was having fantasies about setting up as a Queen.


    ¡°Nevermind that.¡± I replied, chuckling to myself, at the ridiculous thoughts I was having. What need did I have for people beneath me, just a throne, high above the world was enough, akin to my capsule-space. A space for myself, towering above the world, just for me and mine, where I could learn about the magic of Mundus, maybe with some way to reach out and touch the world. Maybe with some space for fluffy critters, like the Winter Wolves, for me to pet and have intruders ripped apart. That would be much better than having some peasants grovelling beneath me.


    My lips curled into a smile when I realised just how similar my ideal was to the dominion of the Grandmother. Sure, she had a few more people living in Neyto than I would be comfortable with, and there was a distinct lack of furry critters, but maybe that was just a product of the passing time. She might have started out with just a single tree, or maybe even a fuzzy-bearded dwarf, and over time, things had slowly grown into the town I had visited. Still, too few fuzzy critters, and her hut, as impressive as it was, simply lacked a great deal of height. What good was the ability to make a space that was larger than it should be, if you hid it within a simple hovel?


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    ¡°Let¡¯s head out.¡± Lenore suggested, once we both had finished eating our breakfast of left-overs from the day before. There was something to be said about the ability to have indefinite, portable refrigeration to make travel far more convenient. No need to worry about food-spoilage, if you could simply freeze it for however long you needed.


    ¡°Yeah, maybe we¡¯ll find some bandits or something like that. No need to just kill some poor critter who is just trying to get by.¡± I agreed, pushing myself into my Hallow after turning the Throne I had slept on into a glittering rain of Ice. Lenore didn¡¯t disagree and simply flapped her wings, flying along the mountains as we headed further west. It would be the last day of travelling that direction, before we doubled back to reunite with the others. It made for an inefficient route but flying around, looking for an adventure was a lot better than sitting on some tree, just waiting for the others.


    Finally, in the safety of my Hallow, I took a moment and realised that my Astral excursion during the night had yielded some results. Two points of Darkness-Magic, one Darkness-Rune-Magic and a single point in Astral Meditation. Massive gains, for a single night of effort, leaving me utterly confused. If I was looking at those gains from an outside perspective, I would think that I had made major progress but when I looked at what I had actually achieved, it left me utterly confused.


    Sure, travelling the Astral to Sigmir was something slightly new but not really, I had used a similar method to talk to the Grandmother, who had the ability to meet me within the Astral and provide a place to talk. In comparison, following my connection to Sigmir felt a little insignificant, at least on the magical side.


    And staring into the void for hours, without really seeing anything, why was that an achievement worth multiple skill-points? For the first time since starting to consciously research magic, I felt that it made no sense. Could I accidentally have encountered some type of bug and gained due to an accident of the system? It was a Beta, so bugs were somewhat expected to occur, to the point that the lack of them had been noticed.


    After a moment of consideration, I decided to write a report and not worry about it. If it had been a bug, the points might get reverted, if it hadn¡¯t been, there most likely was something I had missed.


    Lenore and I kept flying at a speed comfortable for long distances, looking down at the land, when Lenore suddenly started to quickly beat her wings, starting to circle.


    ¡°Look at that.¡± she told me, pushing her own perception at me. Shutting off my own perception, for a better focus, I looked through her eyes and instantly realised what she meant. The landscape beneath us was filled with a dense, intricate web of magic, its complexity easily rivaling the magic we had seen in Neamov and Kolyug, on their city-defenses. The magical weave we were looking at might even surpass those places, just with a very different focus.


    In the cities, the magic was part of their physical defenses, reinforcing them and adding a magical element where the physical didn¡¯t reach. But here, neither Lenore nor I could see past the concealment-magic that covered one of the valleys, leaving us a little confused and very interested. There had only been two places with more elaborate and intricate magic, one had housed the Grandmother, the other had contained a bound Titan. Just what might be hiding in this place, hidden behind the incredible web of concealment, obfuscation and misdirection.


    ¡°Wow¡­¡± I muttered, my mind struggling to take small parts of the whole, trying to figure them out one by one. It was similar to the way I had to try to comprehend the magic of the Ancient Road, only that here, I could see the whole, where I had only small parts to work with in my perception when it came to the Ancient Road, making things difficult there.


    ¡°Let¡¯s see if we can sit down outside of the magical formations and take some time to look.¡± Lenore suggested, carefully taking a distance.


    ¡°Yeah, let¡¯s stay well clear of that magic. I have no idea what the magic might do to us, but I¡¯d almost bet that whoever set it up would notice us.¡± I agreed, fascinated by the incredible complexity before us. Part of me wanted to meet the being who had created it, while another part feared who it might have been. But for now, I was happy to lose myself in the study of their wonderful, artful work.

 Chapter 444

    The weave of magic that covered the hillside before us was a work of art, there were no two ways about it. It made me want to go back to Neyto, simply to sit there for a year or five, slowly and carefully unravelling what the Grandmother had crafted, just to see how her work looked. Back then, I had been too weak to even begin comprehending what she had done and had been blinded by the sheer power of her work. Maybe now, I would be able to actually see what she had done, as I could here.


    Looking past that first layer of magic was surprisingly simple, accomplished within just a quarter of an hour, a careful application of Darkness-Magic around us allowed the two of us to shield ourselves from the effect the magic had on our senses. In many ways, it was similar to the way Olivia had explained her Sanctuary-magic, a spell that kept people from noticing you, only that the Sanctuary was more complex, fooling the mind itself, not just the senses. The magic here merely, if you could call it that, prevented people from seeing, hearing and smelling what was hidden beneath, other senses would still be able to detect the deception. Which was why Lenore¡¯s special, magical sight had only been muffled, at least that was the consensus between us.


    Once we managed to shield ourselves, a little more became visible, a fascinating sight in its own right. The magic we had noticed before wasn¡¯t just floating in the air, untethered from the physical plane, instead, it was integrated into the physical, just like it was in the defenses of Neamov and Kolyug. But where those places had anchored their magic in stone, here the magic was anchored in a web, countless wispy strands of silk, all filled with delicate magic, woven together into a frighteningly beautiful tapestry.


    Now that we were able to look past the magic that concealed the area, we were able to make out the inhabitants. I felt myself recoil for a moment, their figures too alien for me, reminiscent of the Ankhegs we had fought further to the north, in the windswept plains, only instead of insectoid, these creatures were arachnoid in nature.


    My first instinct was to retreat, to flee away from the monsters, or maybe to create a storm of jagged Ice, ripping them to shreds with razor-sharp icicles. But, at the same time, these creatures were almost certainly responsible for the weave of magic that filled me with awe.


    Calming myself, I looked at the creatures objectively, the Legend of Arachne instantly coming to mind. Similar to centaurs, their bodies had two relatively distinct parts to them. One looked almost human, a torso that was parallel to the ground, carried by a front-pair of legs, coming out of their shoulder-area, with a pair of slender, almost human, arms set a little further back. They didn¡¯t quite reach the ground when dangling, making me think that the arms, and hands at their end, were for fine manipulation and maybe for magic. Behind the arms, protruding from the torso, were three more pairs of long, slender legs, keeping the torso off the ground. Where a human would have a set of hip-joints, these creatures had something similar, behind the last set of legs, their torso narrowed before bulging out in a large, roundish abdomen.


    ¡°Have you ever seen something like those creatures?¡± Lenore asked, both horrified but fascinated.


    ¡°No.¡± I replied, before continuing, pushing down my horror as I spoke. ¡°But I¡¯ve heard tales about creatures that might look like them. You know how stories are, so I can¡¯t be sure they are what I¡¯ve heard about, and the stories don¡¯t agree anyway, but I think we are looking at Arachne.¡± I explained, hoping that the developers had used that particular myth, while also hoping that the beings we were looking at wouldn¡¯t notice us. Studying from a distance, while they hopefully had no idea we were here, was one thing, but I wasn¡¯t sure I would be brave enough to walk amongst them, assuming they wouldn¡¯t attack on sight.


    What made the creatures even creepier than their arachnoid parts was the fact that the other parts were obviously human, or at least humanoid. I wasn¡¯t close enough to see if they had the grainy skin I had seen on Adra, if they had pointy ears like an elf and even the question of their average size, possibly hinting at some sort of giantblood was moot, due to their arachnoid features. But those parts were what truly made them grotesque to my eyes.


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    At the top of their torsos, between the two front-legs, was a head, apparently human and, when looked at in isolation, objectively beautiful. Long, silky hair, finely chiseled features, a little reminiscent of the effect the switch from human to elf had during my character-creation, their facial features simply fit together very well.


    And it wasn¡¯t only their faces, while their torsos were dressed in clothing adapted to fit their strange frames, even from a distance it was obvious that they had secondary female characteristics of mammals, to an extent that would make me worry for their backs, if they were humanoid.


    Yet, for all their grotesque appearance, their actions didn¡¯t match. If you heard about a town full of monsters, there would always be an image of some sort of vicious behaviour, maybe that they were keeping prisoners to be used as sacrifices or something like that, but not the picture of mundanity Lenore and I could observe. They just walked around, oftentimes vanishing from view when they reached different parts of the magical weave we had yet to see through but there was nothing monstrous about them, other than their bodies.


    Utterly boring.


    ¡°Let¡¯s get going.¡± Lenore suggested, after we had watched for most of the day. I agreed, studying the magical weave had been interesting but I wasn¡¯t willing to risk actually moving into the area to see more, let alone make contact with the arachnoid creatures, just in case they turned out to be hostile.


    Taking to the air, we carefully made our way away from the area, noticing that there were a few more, well hidden, webs filled with magic spun between the trees below, forming what I recognized as an alarm-spell, likely set to warn the caster of intruders. Unless you were incredibly cautious, sneaking up on the area was nigh impossible, and even if you were cautious, you¡¯d need quite a bit of magical prowess to circumvent the alarms without triggering them.


    It made me wonder, was it worth it to guide the others to this place, maybe to try finding out what the arachnoids were up to, possibly even make contact in some relatively secure manner? Were they the monsters their appearance suggested or was there more to them, as their behaviour indicated? Normally, the answer would be obvious but was the same true on Mundus? That, I didn¡¯t know.


    ¡°We should hurry, the others will start moving tomorrow if everything goes as planned.¡± I told Lenore, reminding her that we were some five days ahead, if travelling normally, only one if we used magic to push her flight-speed to the maximum.


    With her agreement, I mentally embraced her, letting my Blood Magic soak into her body, strengthening her wings, while her Wind Magic swirled around her form, pushing us forward with the force of a gale. We must have made for an impressive sight, deep-red magic forming glowing runes on black feathers while leaving a trail of azure light, only that we made sure to be high enough not to be easily noticeable from the ground. It was almost a shame, really.


    By the time we stopped, the sun had set and both of us were exhausted. Travelling like we did was the fastest way known to either of us, but it came with the massive draw-back of exhaustion and was limited to the two of us.


    Instead of trying to track down a suitable spot on the ground, and with no suitable cliff-face in sight, the easiest way to find a secure place to rest was to use one of the countless trees. After landing in one of the tree-crowns, Lenore and I switched places, allowing her to rest her aching wings in her Hallow, while I had to figure out the best way to sleep in the green, leafy shelter high above ground. Luckily, Ice-Magic was an incredibly useful tool, allowing me to create a hanging bed, almost like a solid hammock, and anchoring the contraption to the trunk of the tree. While it wasn¡¯t my throne, it was both cool and secure, two things I valued a great deal, especially after the magically exhausting travel of the last few hours.


    Letting out a yawn, I decided to try checking up on Sigmir again, before getting some shut-eye and meeting the others during the next day.

 Chapter 445

    It took Lenore and me a little longer than expected to make our way back towards Ladrin, as Lenore wasn¡¯t quite willing to push as hard as possible again. Apparently, the feeling of soreness wasn¡¯t too pleasant. Instead, I took over some of the time, practising my ninja-run skills as I leapt through the trees near the road, while she supported me with her magic. It was an interesting experience and there was a slightly immature part of me that wanted to extend my arms out backwards as I ran. Ultimately, I decided against it, but the sentiment was there.


    At least until we noticed a group of travellers coming up on the road ahead, which prompted a shift from gleefully jumping through the trees to doing our best impression of a tree-branch, hiding within the forest. The combination of Darkness-Magic, Wind-Magic for concealment and a wide tree-trunk to hide behind came up trumps, allowing Lenore and me to let the people pass by. Maybe it also had to do with the fact that humanoids somehow neglected to look up, making a hiding space some fifteen meters above ground a good one, outside of their habitual area of perception.


    And it was good that we managed to hide, as I realised while they were passing by. Boldly emblazoned on their gear was a symbol I had seen before, a golden sun-disc with streamers of flame, or light, radiating outwards. It was the symbol used by the Arms of Helios, the local chapter of the Crusade of Light, as Howardlight¡¯s organisation called itself. It was the prime example of an organisation of Travellers, for Travellers, a grouping that couldn¡¯t form naturally on Mundus.


    Why? Simple, the group had, to my knowledge, two major chapters, the Arms of Helios, based on Daiea, and Tyr¡¯s Hands, who were based in Valkar. Tyr¡¯s Hands, under the leadership of Howardlight, was supposedly making their way across the Inner Sea, trying to hunt down a certain heretic. Namely, Me.


    I wasn¡¯t quite sure what I had done to deserve that particular Title, unless they knew about my possession of a certain Soul Prison, but I rather doubted that. Yet, I hardly cared about their branding of me, or about the feud they had created. At the end of the day, I could see the use of drama that generated content, as long as the drama was somewhat distant from me and didn¡¯t involve Sigmir and the others.


    Now that I noticed people close enough to potentially harm me, I would have to think about my stance again, possibly make sure that they stayed on their side of the yard and spouted off, while I kept on my side. That way, we could sling all the rhetoric we wanted on the forum, while keeping things civil on Mundus.


    For a few moments, while they were passing by, I considered trying something, as my Mind-Magic was incredibly useful for sneak-attacks from hiding, but I ultimately decided against it. Not without some sort of safety-net, something to fall back on, other than retreating into a bird and flying away. Lenore¡¯s body was wonderfully agile, especially once she got some speed and her magic going, but the first few moments after switching places were risky. Luckily, the five people I was observing were moving quickly, travelling in the same direction we would travel, once we had reunited with the others.


    ¡°Do you think you could sneak in an Observe?¡± Lenore asked, as I felt her manifest on my shoulder.


    ¡°Maybe.¡± I allowed, trying to get an idea which of them would be the least perceptive. It was a risky proposition, but given that I had used my Darkness-Magic to conceal the use of Observe before, I thought it was a manageable risk.


    Quickly forming a rune-triangle of concealment, I used it to filter my use of Observe, targeting the second guy in line, a dwarf wearing some sort of heavy plate-armour, with a shield strapped to his pack and a warhammer on his side. The one in front of him was only wearing chain-armour and looked quite similar to Sigmir, only that her skin was more slate-grey than her grey-blue skin tone.  The two directly behind him were wearing clothing similar to mine, obviously made for comfort and maneuverability, one of them a female dwarf, the other was taller, human-sized. It was the garb of spellcasters or nobles.


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    The last in line was similarly armoured to the one I had targeted but given that he brought up the rear, I assumed he was the most dangerous, positioned in a way to provide cover for his allies. While I was curious about his level, I wasn¡¯t about to start with him.


    My first target didn¡¯t react at all to my Observation, making me confident that the reading of level 74 was accurate. While I was able to block Observation, I hadn¡¯t been able to create a false reading. It was possible, likely even, that there were natives that could accomplish such a feat, I doubted that a random Traveller, if that was what they were, travelling down the road would employ such means, purely by chance.


    After taking a moment, considering my options, I decided to risk a little more and used another concealed Observe to probe the guy in the back of their formation. He obviously noticed something, calling an alarm while the blue box in front of me told me I was dealing with a level 82 Mountain Dwarf. The other had been a Shield Dwarf, whatever the difference was. It didn¡¯t really matter to me, not at that moment.


    Not wanting to stick around, I made sure that Lenore was comfortably sitting on one of the tree-branches, and pushed myself into my Hallow. Now, there was only a raven, sitting in a random tree, behind the cover of the trunk. Unless the Travellers were about to start shooting at random, I was likely safe.


    Sadly, shooting at random was exactly what they did. While I couldn¡¯t see who did it, I could feel a momentary build-up of power, causing Lenore to frantically take flight, while I did my best to cover her in a shell of Magic-Devouring Darkness. I had no idea if it would work in a similar fashion as the Blood-Magic had, I wasn¡¯t about to risk anything.


    A few seconds after we had taken flight, Lenore¡¯s body shook for a moment, as the booming sound of Thunder rolled over the land. For a moment I could feel the magic batter against the barrier I had created, before it dissipated as quickly as it had started.


    ¡°Madness!¡± Lenore muttered, mostly unharmed but just as surprised as I had been. The magic had been reasonably powerful and without the barrier, it might have managed to cause some damage to Lenore¡¯s hearing. Even I, within the Hallow, had taken a negligible amount of damage, but that might have had something to do with the way I had shielded Lenore.


    ¡°We shouldn¡¯t have taken a second look.¡± I admitted, as we quickly flew away. It had been a foolish risk, but luckily, nothing bad had happened.


    We kept flying at a casual speed, guided by the sensation of attraction I felt for Sigmir, until we got sight of the others, during the early afternoon. Just knowing that she was nearby made my heart beat faster, anticipation causing a fluttering in my stomach.


    I could feel Lenore¡¯s amusement but ignored it, mentally pushing her to hurry, until we were only a few meters above them. At that point, I wasn¡¯t willing to wait any longer and pushed myself out of my Hallow, letting gravity carry me the last few meters into Sigmir¡¯s comfortable embrace. And Sigmir didn¡¯t disappoint, easily making the catch and cradling me in her arms, while I heard a few amused snickers around us. But I didn¡¯t care at all.


    I was back where I belonged, ensconced in her comfortable embrace, able to smell that distinct odour of leather, metal and sweat, all with a hint of spice. Tension left my body, as I clung to her neck, taking a deep breath, before looking into her face and claiming those sweet, sweet lips for myself.


    ¡°Are you trying to devour each other?¡± Adra¡¯s amused voice interrupted our reunion far too soon, but sadly, she was right. There were better places than the middle of the road to show each other just how much we had missed the other. Places like our sleeping furs, later during the night. Maybe out of earshot from the others, where neither of us needed to hold back. Yes, that was a good plan.


    ¡°I missed you.¡± I whispered to Sigmir, before burying my face in the nape of her neck, gently nibbling at her skin.


    ¡°And I, you.¡± she replied after a moment, before taking a deep breath. ¡°I dreamed of you.¡± she added a moment later, bringing a smile to my face.


    ¡°Oh? I hope it was a pleasant dream, just like the dreams I had of you. Dreams I want to revisit as soon as night falls.¡± I told her, looking into her face. Objectively, she wasn¡¯t beautiful, but at that moment, I couldn¡¯t think of anything better looking than her blushing face.


    I would manage to remain together with her, as we walked the Road to Purgatory. By any means necessary.

 Chapter 446

    Despite my wishes, night didn¡¯t immediately start to fall once Lenore and I reunited with the others. There had to be some magic spell for that, maybe if I played a song on an Ocarina, but until I managed to get there, I would have to wait for Mundus to shade us from the sun. So, deprived of the opportunity to start my night with Sigmir as soon as we met, I joined them in walking down the ancient, imperial road, listening to their tales of Ladrin.


    As Olivia had mentioned before, the town was famous for its natural hot springs which had been used for public bathing facilities for its entire existence. There seemed to be some buildings that hadn¡¯t been built by the river trolls who currently occupied the place but by the people of the ancient empire, who also had created the road we were on. Their magically reinforced architecture once more proved to be impressive. It made me want to study those buildings, in the hope that the magic that held them together was locally contained, not spread out like that  magic that maintained the ancient road, the sheer scale making it nigh impossible to analyze it. It was akin to the attempt of solving a puzzle, without knowing how most of the pieces looked, or having access to them.


    What made me a little curious was the story of their visit to the Adventurers'' Guild and their search for additional quests that might net us some EXP. While most quests went to locals, there were some constant, repeatable quests to hunt down dangerous prey in the mountains, beasts like mountain-lions, wolves, bears and similar creatures. Those quests were worth some gold, a bit of experience but nothing tremendously interesting. That was reserved for a single quest regarding a Manticore that had been reported on the road between Carinthia, the town on the east-side of the White Mountains and Narristo, its counterpart on the western side. Given that we were heading in that direction, Adra had decided to take the quest, even if it was marked as a Hard Quest, even for us.


    To my understanding, that meant the monster would likely be somewhere around level 120, or there would be multiple monsters, all around our level, powerful enough to give us a serious fight. A part of me welcomed the chance, and the opportunity to gain experience-points, but at the same time, it was a risk. But so was everything that could actually help us gain further levels, especially in this place that was unsuitable for our current level. Easy quests, while highly unlikely to kill us, were either picked as soon as they turned up by local Travellers or natives, or involved having to track down something that had managed to evade everyone so far.


    At the end of the day, the quest-difficulty only referred to combat involved in a quest. It meant that, unless outside forces intervened, you were unlikely to die on an easy quest, you might fail it due to inability to find something, but you wouldn¡¯t die. On the other hand, an impossible quest was very likely to kill you, unless you got lucky or countered the quest-target.


    What made the whole thing even less clear was that the difficulty was a snap-shot, made at the time of accepting the quest. So, if you managed to get lucky and gain a couple levels while travelling, you might find that the supposedly hard quest was a lot easier than expected. But it went both ways, if the target gained levels, or worse, gained the protection of a powerful being like the Grandmother, the quest-difficulty wouldn¡¯t change, potentially leading you into certain death. Ultimately, the indication was useful, but nothing you should overly rely on.


    But even more interesting than the quests they had taken on, and shared to me, was what they had heard inside. Namely, a weird group of people talking about raiding something. It had stuck out to them, because the way those people had talked had been so reminiscent of bandits that they had paid attention, only to realise that the people simply had a strange way of speaking. But what was merely a weird way of phrasing to the others was something entirely different as the described lingo was the same that was in use on the Internet, strongly hinting at the group¡¯s identity as Travellers.


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    My interest roused led to me, asking more questions, gathering as much information as possible. It turned out that Olivia was the one who had paid the most attention to them, her interest attracted by the fact that a group of mostly dwarves and orcs was universally displaying the symbol of Helios, unusual as neither race traditionally worshipped the Olympian Pantheon. The Orcs mostly practised a shamanistic, spiritual faith, while the Dwarves mostly followed the Asgardian Pantheon or venerated their ancestors, with few exceptions. A group of such exceptions was unusual.


    What the others overheard helped to paint a quite distinct picture of a group of Travellers, planning to subdue one of the areas the locals avoided, due to the powerful monsters. It was simply a case of profit and loss for the locals, where the fact that some parts of the forest had to be avoided was simply less problematic than the loss of life the clearing out-process would incur. Most likely, that was what had attracted the Travellers, their ability to change that dynamic and, in turn, get an inside-track, either to the local Nobility or the Adventurer''s Guild. If they could demonstrate that even problematic assignments could be completed, they would get a reputation for getting the job done. Exactly what a mercenary group, or a clan of Adventurers, wanted.


    Piecing together what the others had overheard gave me a relatively clear picture of the situation and even an idea of their target. Unless there were many groups of ¡°spider-crawlies¡±, as they called it, around, they would visit the same mountain-side I had stumbled over just a day prior, following a scouting-party of five with four additional groups, for a total of twenty-five Travellers. Quite the raid, for the current state of the game, and only possible by planning ahead and gathering in an area.


    For me, the whole thing led to a simple question: How could I use that information?


    The most obvious thing might be to simply keep out of their way, But that would be boring and not a real advantage. Sure, if they happened to stumble across me, recognised me and wanted to make a name for themselves by killing me, it would be trouble, but just avoiding them felt a little too passive.


    On the other hand, I had a few magical abilities I wanted to try, especially on Travellers, so a group of hostiles, who planned to attack what I thought was a known target, seemed to be an excellent opportunity. If I did things right, they¡¯d never know who hit them, how they got hit or anything like that.


    There was potential in that idea.


    For the rest of the day, whenever there was a lull in the conversation with the others, I kept plotting with Lenore, who was just as interested in trying her Death-Magic on the curious bodies of Travellers, trying to come up with ways that not only kept the two of us safe and out of sight, but also made sure that the others weren¡¯t implicated. What made things a little more complicated was that the arachnoids would likely get involved and I wasn¡¯t certain whether they would care to distinguish between the enemy of their enemy or if they would simply go after anything walking on two legs. Their involvement, especially considering the massive, magical formation they had set up, would make things even more complicated.


    Ultimately, by the time we stopped for the night, the only thing Lenore and I knew for certain was that we wanted to involve ourselves, trying to procure some test-subjects for our Death-Magic and my Mind-Magic. If we could combine the two, it would be even better.


    That, in turn, meant we had to explain to the others that we would head out alone, again, and that I would have to set up one of my frozen cottages, to declare as my home, just in case I was killed in action. The latter part was something we didn¡¯t need to tell the others, as I had no doubt that Sigmir would object to a plan that had a good chance to get me killed, while leaving her out entirely. I knew that I would object to such a plan, if the shoe was on the other foot, but the simple fact was, I would come back from the dead. She would not.


    And that was the end of it, at least for me.


    With a rough plan made, I began to look forward to the night.

 Chapter 447

    As expected, Sigmir hadn¡¯t been too happy when I told her that Lenore and I would have to check something out two days later. Even that was a bit of a concession on my part, estimated from the place I had seen the Traveller-group the day before and assumed that we travelled at our fastest pace, not the leisurely speed we had used whenever not in a hurry.


    Still, after we had taken the night to enjoy the others'' presence and I had explained that I had discovered something interesting that I wanted to continue investigating, she finally accepted a compromise. We would all push on at our highest speed, until we got relatively close to the area I was interested in, where I would split from the others, with them waiting on the south-side of the ancient road, the area I was interested in being on the north-side. That way, if Lenore and I had to flee, we would have a place to flee to, with reinforcements waiting. Even convincing Sigmir to accept that had required a lot of quick work with my tongue.


    The next two days made a part of me regret that compromise, mainly my legs. With the others sticking with me, until we got near the area, I had to push myself hard, to catch up to the scouts I wanted to observe, as I was once more the physically weakest link. It made me a little envious of Olivia¡¯s magical tricks that allowed her to move quickly, especially when she, during an evening-chat about magic, let slip that the magic mostly helped with receiving power from the ancient road, instead of expanding her own power. Sure, it only worked on those roads, but the efficenity made me green with envy.


    As we were running, I started to wonder about something else. Namely, how the classification between monster and person worked, because intelligence didn¡¯t really work, not when thinking of beings like Lenore and that bear I had attacked a few days prior. Lenore wouldn¡¯t be seen as a person, despite being at least as smart as many people, just like that bear. The bear had quite obviously magical abilities and the wisdom to retreat into a well-prepared and secured position, instead of attacking in a frenzy.


    To say nothing of the Arachnids I had seen and their magically hidden village, if that was what their magic concealed. I hadn¡¯t actually been able to see buildings or anything like that, merely them, going about their daily business. Maybe the difference wasn¡¯t actually innate to the system but a cultural one, an understanding between the various ¡°civilised¡± races to treat each other with a certain degree of respect, while treating other races as monsters.


    Fitting in with that was the treatment of the Naga, they were considered people, even if their bodies were as monstrous as the arachnoids I had seen just a few days prior, the only difference was that their bodies were based on some sort of sea-snake with arms, or maybe sea-dragons or something along those lines. The simple fact that Naga were the premier seafarers in an ocean filled with monsters, that gave them a seat at the table.


    The centaurs, slightly less monstrous as their other half was at least based on a mammal, were a similar case, only that I had a feeling they used military strength as a deterrent, whereas the Naga used mercantile power.


    All that assumed that the arachnids were treated as monsters, but the careful concealment of their village made me think so. As did the fact that I hadn¡¯t read about them on the forum and that the others had overheard people talking about exterminating the crawlies.


    The more I thought about it, the more confident I got in the proposition that the whole monster-person differentiation was a cultural one, used to create an us-vs-them dynamic that made people feel better about slaughtering the ¡°monsters¡±..A small part of me wondered where Pantheon would go with that idea in the future, as it opened up interesting avenues for story-telling. So far, Mundus was a giant sandbox, allowing everyone to play as they went but there had been some glimpses that something more was going on, making me wonder.


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    By the time we reached the area where I would split from the others, I was thoroughly exhausted, which may or may not have been Sigmir¡¯s intention all along. Instead of setting off that day, I stuck around for one more night, taking the time to carefully set up a frozen cottage for the others, so they would be as comfortable as possible while I hopefully would be able to spectate the contest between the arachnoids and the Travellers.


    While I would have loved to show Sigmir just how much I would miss her while skulking about, I was simply too exhausted, falling asleep before I could give her more than a single kiss. I would have to make up for that, once I was back.


    In the morning, I retreated into my Hallow and Lenore and I set off, flying at a comfortable pace, compared to the punishing speed we had travelled at the days prior. Finding the Travellers was almost comically easy, as they had literally left guide-marks, leading from the ancient road into the forest, to their camp-ground. Sure, they were the scouting-party for another group, but still, couldn¡¯t they at least have tried to conceal their actions?


    It reeked of arrogance, making me shake my head while Lenore settled into the dense foliage of a nearby tree, hopefully far enough away to quickly get away, if they realised that Lenore wasn¡¯t just another bird. Or worse, if they made the connection between some of the videos that had shown images of Lenore and the curiously coloured raven sitting in a tree. While there were other Ravens with a couple white feathers, and crows with interesting plumage, Lenore¡¯s bone-white head, wing-tips and the ice-blue claws, almost glowing, claws stood out. I could cloak us in shadow, making her look like a normal, if very creepy, raven, while also blocking magical scrying but that wasn¡¯t something I could constantly keep up, not without creating even more problems.


    That meant, moving around carefully and avoiding notice were the keys to keeping safe, banking on the fact that there were countless small critters in the forest, making it difficult to investigate any single one. If you wanted to hide a tree, the forest was the best place, even if the tree was a bird of a very different plumage.


    For the rest of the day, we watched the Travellers establish and secure their camp-site, with a single pair scouting the area, while three of them stayed in the camp, guarding it, at least while they were active. It was interesting to watch them literally vanish from time to time, when they logged out, it was a process I had never really been in a position to observe. Part of me was weirded out, their fading out of existence sending shivers down my spine, much to my amusement. I wasn¡¯t bothered by creating Ice out of nowhere, I had no problem using Death-Magic to turn once living beings into dust but when someone just disappeared, it felt wrong.


    Overall, observing them was rather boring. They didn¡¯t do anything that I would consider out of the ordinary, even watching one of their spellcasters do their thing as she warded the camp-site was nothing new. I was almost certain that the spell she used was based on the same principles as the spell in the Grandmother¡¯s grimoire, only adapted to Earth. That particular revelation was actually the most interesting thing that I got out of the day, mostly because it reminded me that a warding-spell known to everyone wasn¡¯t the best thing to use.


    Sure, just because someone knew how to cast the spell didn¡¯t mean they would be able to dispel it without the original caster noticing, but it meant that dispelling it would be easier by orders of magnitudes, depending on a couple of variables, especially the question of stealth. I was certain that I would be able to break their wards, thanks to my abilities with Darkness-Magic and its dominion over the change-part inherent to magic, but unless I was very careful I wouldn¡¯t stand a chance to do so without the caster noticing. And even that chance was mostly because I had watched them cast the spell and knew a variation of the spell. Otherwise, I would be out of luck.


    But that question, how to break or circumvent their wards, along ways I could use to counter the methods I had considered earlier, for my own wards, were what kept me entertained, while they prepared fire-pits and generally readied their camp-site. Luckily, Travellers didn¡¯t need to dig latrines, or I might have called the whole idea off, there were some things I really didn¡¯t need to observe.


    Hopefully, the coming days would be more interesting.

 Chapter 448

    The night, and day after, were a lot more interesting than that first day. What annoyed me was that the first truly interesting thing happened when I had been logged out, editing a video-clip, taking a shower and getting some food. I had assumed that after the Travellers went to bed, with one of their number keeping watch, nothing interesting would happen, but as they say, to assume means to make an ass out of you and me. In this case, I made an ass only out of myself, while Lenore noticed a creeping figure, hiding in the trees just like she did, watching the camp.


    When looking closer, she realised that the figure was a reasonably large spider, roughly the size of my palm, gigantic for the area but not for a fantasy-world. The only reason she spotted it was that the figure was a purely magical construct, similar to the constructs of Darkness I had used in my own scrying, allowing a distant spell-caster to get a glimpse of the Travellers.


    In turn, Lenore repositioned herself to watch the watcher, while also keeping an eye on the Travellers themselves, but from a longer distance. Once I logged back in, we discussed it and agreed that we should keep an eye out for potential magical traps that might be spun around the camp. Neither of us had the desire to be the fly that stuck around in the spider¡¯s parlor and got an invitation for dinner.


    With me back in Mundus, Lenore could take a bit of time to sleep, with her hiding in her Hallow while I carefully balanced on a tree-branch, using magic to blend into the shadows around me. I didn¡¯t quite step into the shadows as I had done before, my perception of my surroundings was too muted when I did, but I was on the boundary, ready to fully make the transition, even if that space gave me the creeps. Whenever I entered, I felt as if something was watching me, a lurking presence right behind me, with a cold breath ruffling my feathers. But other than that uncomfortable feeling I hadn¡¯t noticed anything, making me think that it might be a feature of the realm itself.


    Combined with the knowledge that there were other realms, some deeper within the Astral River, like the spaces where spirit-beasts like Lenore originally hailed from, others side-by-side with Mundus, only separated by a thin barrier, keeping the horrors of those realms away. The Nethersprites, and to a lesser degree instanced dungeons, were examples of such realms, at least that was my current hypothesis.


    With that in mind, there had to be a reason why those realms weren¡¯t easily accessible for everyone, both within the natural laws of Mundus itself and for reasons of game-balance. The easiest way, in my opinion, was to make those realms innately hostile to normal life, with your personal affinity allowing you to endure. There were loopholes, for example the Hallow of a spirit-beast, but other than that, it was a decent mechanism. The Realm of Shadows might simply be the easiest one to access, at least of those I had any chance to access at all. It made me wonder, was there a realm of air or wind that Lenore could access, allowing her to travel at an even faster pace, without the dangers of Mundus being able to get to her? It was a question I would have to ask her, once she was back awake, as it might be an interesting and powerful ability to pursue.


    Other than the arachnid watcher, the night passed uneventfully, with the Travellers keeping a sensible watch-schedule, with each of them getting some sleep. During the morning, they had their breakfast, before a group the two male dwarves and the taller, humanoid spellcaster went out into the woods. I thought  the spellcaster was a Pan, as the male version of a dryad was called, unless I misremembered what Adra had told me, a few months back.


    That left the giantblood and the female dwarf in the camp, giving me an option to attack them, quite possibly killing them in the process. On the other hand, I could also sneak after the three who had left, to check out what they were doing.


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    After a moment of consideration, I switched places with Lenore and the two of us went after the three scouts, or rather, we went after the arachnoid watcher that went after the three scouts. There was a bit of humor in the situation, that we were now a raven, stalking a spider, stalking a couple of dwarves that were scouting the spiders¡¯ lair. Hopefully, the one laughing last would be me, or at least the one getting away at the end.


    For a few minutes, nothing much happened until the spellcaster raised a hand, prompting me to reflexively reach out, covering Lenore in a field of magical concealment, just in case they did something. We were quite far away, but luckily, Lenore¡¯s high Intuition gave her exceptional hearing, allowing her to listen to their words.


    ¡°We are being watched!¡± the Pan remarked, his head swivelling around, while Lenore could see some magic gathering in his hand.


    ¡°The same one that Observed me a few days ago?¡± the dwarf, who I somewhat pegged as the leader of their group, asked, studying the surroundings as well.


    ¡°Maybe.¡± the other replied, when the arachnid construct started to fade away, likely because the caster had abandoned the spell. My evaluation of the Pan went up by a level, when he instantly focused on the space the construct had been in, green-brown magic flowing out of him and filling the area the construct had been in.


    The three of them were moving over but other than some residual Astral Power, nothing was left there. Still, it was interesting to watch the spellcaster work, even if I was utterly unable to understand what he was doing. It looked relatively similar to the way Adra had worked when tracking those bandits near Neamov, making me rather wary. I had no idea if he was similarly able to query the trees and if so, if they would tell him about the elf lurking in their crowns. Or if they would recognise Lenore as something more than a bird and had the communication-skills to pass that information along. The whole idea gave me a headache, how was one supposed to hide within the forest, if you had to hide from the trees?!


    Tense minutes passed, with both Lenore and me ready to throw our magical prowess into the ring in a bid to escape. It wasn¡¯t what we hoped, it would almost be the worst-case scenario to get found out, but after some time, the Pan simply shook his head, looking at his companions.


    ¡°There¡¯s nothing left here. And whoever used that magic, they are skilled and know the forest well, if I hadn¡¯t been looking for magical observation, I likely would have missed it.¡± the Pan explained, his eyes still scanning the surrounding forest.


    ¡°So the spiders will know that we are coming?¡± the leader-dwarf asked, sounding rather unhappy.


    ¡°Probably.¡± the Pan admitted, when Lenore did something new. For once, it wasn¡¯t me, borrowing her magical eyesight, but she borrowed my perception of magic, allowing her to taste it on the wind and in the air. I was tapped into her senses deeply enough to help with the interpretation and together, we noticed a subtle taste of magic in the air around us. It wasn¡¯t directed, merely the Pan projecting a wide net, trying to find anything that stood out. What made the whole thing ingenious was that his magic was almost the same as the magic of the forest, the difference minute and nigh impossible to notice.


    Before he managed to notice that the Arachnid hadn¡¯t been the only intruder, Lenore took to the sky, flying away from the area, still covered by my concealment-magic.


    ¡°They are good.¡± Lenore admitted, as we were flying away.


    ¡°True, but we are going up against him on something akin to his homeground. During the night, part of his advantage will vanish, but until then, we need to be careful.¡± I replied, suggesting that we should take another look at the Arachnid-village, before returning to the Travellers¡¯ Camp during the night, carefully taking another look at them and their preparations.


    Hopefully, that would allow us an idea where the action would take place, so that we could get there first and prepare for the show. I really needed to figure out some way to make a popcorn-analogue, if I wanted to really get into the mood.

 Chapter 449

    The Travellers had made their camp maybe six kilometers from the arachnid-area, so after a short flight, Lenore and I were able to get there. What we saw made both of us pause in confusion, as Lenore circled above the area. For some reason, things had changed in the few days we had been away, the excellent concealment gone. Or rather, partially gone.


    In one of the smaller valleys, clearly visible to the naked eye, were numerous spider-webs woven into strange, interconnected structures. It looked very much like something out of a horror-movie, with countless small spiders skittering around. But not a single of the large, human-faced arachnids in sight.


    While circling above, Lenore focused her eyes, to get a look at the magic, sharing her perception with me, and what we saw made me very glad that it wasn¡¯t me controlling our movement. If it was, I might have fallen out of the sky from laughter when I realised what was going on.


    The concealment was still there, still going strong, even covering the area they had made visible. Unless I was completely wrong, they had set up a trap, creating an obvious area that was defended but not overly so, making it look like that was their target. But around the target, still cloaked behind the magic that Lenore and I could only circumvent thanks to combining our efforts and her special sight, was the rest of their lair, a parlor that just waited for a few fat and stupid flies to wander into it. It was truly a thing of beauty.


    After making sure that the tree we landed in was free from their weaving, whether magical or mundane, Lenore landed and we continued our study of their magic. The beauty of their work made me want to meet the weavers, their craftsmanship making me envious. Maybe, if I asked nicely, they would let me study some of their work-in-progress, not just spying on their finished product.


    Just the idea made me chuckle to myself, to wander into their village, as they prepared to get assaulted by other humanoids and ask them to teach me their magic. Somehow, I doubted that it would go well, but maybe after they dealt with their attackers, if I arrived bearing gifts or something along those lines. Maybe a gift of information regarding Travellers and their attackers, not that I could actually tell them much about that particular group, not unless I wanted to turn into a complete hypocrite and do what I had condemned Harms for, use Forum-Information to my advantage. It might be an option worth pursuing.


    For a few hours, Lenore and I lost ourselves in the study of their magical weaving, slowly comprehending what the various formations did and how they worked. The more I understood, the more I wanted a hat, just so I could take it off. It was a meticulous weave, numerous small formations all forming into a greater picture, countless threads that all formed a powerful web. I felt my heart sing, as my mind was studying the patterns, overlapping, never conflicting, pulling in the same direction.


    I couldn¡¯t find a single part that I would deem offensive, designed to deal damage, but the more I studied, the more I realised there really was no need. It was a weave of misdirection, of concealment and obfuscation, designed to confuse and confound, trapping the mind while guiding the body into physical weaves of spider silk. In some ways, it was the perfect antithesis to Olivia and her Faith, a magical trap purely to take away someone¡¯s freedom. Truly, a Spider¡¯s Web.


    ¡°We should head back to the Traveller-camp.¡± Lenore told me, bringing me out of my reverent trance, reminding me that we were here for a reason. And that we didn¡¯t want to get caught by the spiders, that would likely be bad.


    While Lenore flew back, I took the time to get back into the real world to fulfill the needs of my biological body. It was annoying but the alternative, namely an IV-bag or maybe a catheter, was so unpleasant that I didn¡¯t even want to consider them.


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    After hurrying through a shower and chomping down some simple food, I was back in Mundus, in time for the final approach to the Travellers¡¯ camp. Lenore had obviously taken her time, so that I could do my thing, something I was grateful for. That I had missed the arachnid-spy last night had been bad enough, I didn¡¯t want my partner to be on her own in a potentially dangerous situation. If only because I could, if needed, be a distraction that gave her time to get away while I could simply return, after failing to get away. The wonderful tactical options that the ability to respawn gave you.


    But I had no desire to get sent to respawn, so I was glad that, at least from a distance, the Travellers¡¯ camp appeared to be in barely ordered chaos, with a lot more people bustling around than there had been when we had left in the morning.


    At second glance, taken from one of the nearby trees, the rest of their raid-group had arrived and were settling in. It wasn¡¯t an overly large group, at least when considering that it was essentially a military action, but memories of Craft of War and the effort to get even a small group of gamers to move in the same direction, hopefully at the same time and if possible at the same speed, surfaced and I was quite impressed by their efforts. They were far from the organised efficiency of Dura Firebringer and her Orcs, or the centaurs we had terrorised near the Windswept Plains, but they did okay. Their camp wasn¡¯t on fire, that had to count for something.


    It made me wonder, how long would it take for the average gaming-group to adapt, how would raids later, once the game had been released for a year or five, look. Once the gaming-community had adapted to the world of Mundus and its unique circumstances, would the barely organised chaos give way to military efficiency? I had seen some videos of Tobiuno and his people, they had some of that efficiency down already, but would everyone follow suit? With a game like Road to Purgatory and a world like Mundus, how far would expectations shift? Would people see it like a second life, with a second job and take it as seriously as their life and job outside? At times, it seemed to be necessary, with the amount of involvement needed to keep up with the world of Mundus and its inhabitants. But would that still be a game? It made me wonder, and worry. Because, if only those who made Mundus their life could thrive, the Road to Purgatory would be cut short as Pantheon Entertainment was forced to sacrifice that Road on the altar of capitalism. Just another wonderful game, dead due to lack of money.


    Sadly, the increased number of people made spying on them both a lot easier and a lot harder, at the same time. Easier, because the chaos meant that it was harder for them to keep efficient watch, with the hustle and bustle going on, harder because there were more people that might look up and notice that a certain Raven looked like it was a lot more than it would seem at first glance.


    As long as we kept to the trees around the clearing, maybe one or two trees back, always wary of magical wards and traps, we thought we would be fine, but it limited us to listening to the rank and file on the edge of the camp, not the core around the middle, where I could see the scouting-party that Lenore and I had seen on the road and earlier in the day.


    Curious, we used our concealed Observe to take a peek at some of the Travellers on the edges, just a short glance before relocating, just in case someone got spooked. The levels we observed weren¡¯t anything to write home about, people between level fifty and seventy, but for Travellers, it wasn¡¯t actually bad. For a group like that, to establish themselves during the beta with limited entries, it hinted at a larger organisation in the background. Maybe one of the gaming-clubs, who were trying to get an idea how the vastly different and new technology would impact their business. Would they be akin to buggy-whip makers at the beginning of the industrial revolution or more like telecommunication-companies right before the advent of the internet?


    Not that it really mattered to me, I was done with the world of competitive gaming. In the beginning, when I had started to play Road to Purgatory, there had been a certain drive to show them all that no matter how much more marketable Acrasia was, I was superior to her in every way that should count. But now, after spending time in Mundus and with Sigmir, I had just stopped to care. I wanted to show people this world of Mundus, the wonderful magic I could invoke and, even more important than that, I wanted to understand the magic, to master its weave and travel the Astral, just to see how far I could go. That seemed much more interesting than to compete with some jumped-up model and her hot-tub.

 Chapter 450

    Come morning, Lenore and I were ready and waiting. We had overheard enough from the Travellers to have a reasonably good idea of their plan, namely to launch a direct magical attack on the small valley, hoping that their apparently powerful area-of-effect magic would allow them to carry the day against the spiders. Overall, it wasn¡¯t a terrible plan, at least the part of using area-of-effect magic to diminish the number of spiders they¡¯d face, before charging in and finishing off what their magic left over. Simple, effective and against a normal, beast-like enemy perfectly reasonable.


    Against the arachnids they were facing, they¡¯d all die horribly, but that wasn¡¯t really my problem and I certainly wouldn¡¯t want to tell them that they were getting lured into a trap, baited like fish, not even seeing the hook even as they were about to swallow it. Instead, Lenore had found a nicely tall, slightly out-of-the-way tree, with strong branches and dense leaves, where I would be able to hide easily. We had decided that I would be the one outside, with her hidden within her Hallow, simply due to my greater abilities in concealment and the option to dive into the shadows, which should allow me to escape. In addition, there was that shadow-teleport, still unreliable but it had come in clutch before and might allow me to escape from the maw of another beast, if it came to that.


    ¡°Now that¡¯s just mean.¡± Lenore snickered in my mind, as we were studying the skittering trap prepared by the spiders.


    ¡°Mh?¡± I asked, not quite getting what she meant, until I felt her vision overlap with mine, allowing me to see what she meant. Where I saw countless spiders of all sizes, some of them small, barely visible from the distance, despite my good eyesight, others almost the size of my torso, Lenore saw something else entirely. Namely, a whole lot of magic, with a few physical spiders skittering in between. Most of the spiders I could see were actually magical decoys, no more alive than the shadow-clones I had experimented with, just a whole lot more realistic, at least to my untrained eyes. To me, the spiders all looked the same, especially from hundreds of meters away.


    Before I could comment on the deception, the Travellers started to appear, carefully making their way through the forest, heavily armoured dwarves interspersed with lightly armored orcs and beastmen. Their martial forces obviously protected a smaller group of ten, all of them clad in light leather-armor or even in soft, yet-sturdy, clothes, similar to what I was wearing.


    Making sure that the shadows were completely covering me, making me no more remarkable than any other shadow cast by the surrounding trees, I allowed myself to grin. Lenore and I had made a good choice with the tree we were on, not too close to the area where the Travellers were gathering, not too close to the spider-trap but also not too far away. Just right. If only I had popcorn, it would be even better.


    As I was lamenting the lack of snack-food, the Travellers had finished their advance and instantly started their attack, showing that they had planned things out quite well. Thanks to Lenore¡¯s sight, I was able to easily perceive what they were doing, as four of their spell-casters started to glow, harnessing enough magical power to be visible even without special senses. I had to blink a little, to keep their radiance from overwhelming me, not wanting to miss what they were actually doing.


    Luckily, the light-show only lasted for a few moments, before their individual powers merged into a single spell-formation, engraved on a scroll they had brought with them. Just from that, I was reasonably impressed, especially when their magic took effect, a magical circle quite similar to one of my runic formations, only a whole lot more complicated, appearing before their lead-caster, mirrored moments later above the spiders¡¯ trap.


    The side-effects of their magic almost shook me from my lofty perch, as hundreds of lightning-bolts boomed out of the circle above the spiders¡¯ trap, striking the ground while bone-rattling thunder shook the air. Their magic only lasted for about a minute, but in that time, there was not a single moment without lightning splitting the air. It was an overkill on a scale I could quite appreciate.


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    After a moment, I understood their reasoning, they had known that the spiders knew about them, they had noticed their magical spying the day before after all, and had decided that if the spiders had set up an ambush, they would simply strike with overwhelming force, to shatter that ambush. Reasonable, if you assumed that what they had seen was that ambush and in that case, it certainly had dealt heavy damage to anyone within the area. Only that there hadn¡¯t been more than a few dozen actual spiders in the area, with magical constructs giving the appearance of a whole lot more.


    ¡°Charge!¡± A shout came from the Travellers and the armoured fighters started their attack, a few staying back to provide protection for the caster, some of whom used their magical abilities to provide cover for their compatriots. It was a thing of beauty, to watch as the hapless fighters managed to run right into the trap that had been laid out. Instead of hacking the few spiders that had somehow survived the magical onslaught to pieces and penetrating deeper into their lair, the fighters got entangled in prepared magic, while illusions settled over them, making the air hazy and things difficult to see.


    It was then that the remaining Travellers realised that things had gone off the rails in a very unexpected fashion. They unleashed more magic, likely trying to wash away the haze with blowing wind, while trying to dispel the magic that had settled around their friends.


    ¡°Want to help?¡± Lenore asked, obviously suggesting to help push the remaining Travellers into the trap, allowing me to establish myself as an ally to them.


    ¡°We could use our Avatar-form, just in case one of the Travellers realises what is going on.¡± I considered for a moment, while their actions became more desperate as it became obvious that they had fallen into a trap.


    ¡°Sounds good.¡± she agreed and I felt her mind close in with mine, closing my eyes to focus on the joining.


    With a beat of our wings, carrying powerful wind-magic, we left our arboreal perch. Our foes should see us, see us and fear us. They had yet to realise that there was more trouble approaching, their attention focused on the trap woven by the crafty spiders, when we reached out with our magic.


    Their Shadows became ours, allowing a direct path into their minds, their inattention becoming their downfall. Their world turned into a dark mirror of reality, isolating each and everyone of them from their companions, making them unable to perceive anything but what we wanted them to perceive. Isolated, alone in the dark.


    Screams started to rise, as panic flooded their systems, a wish to escape from the cold darkness that was all around them, a desperate wish to find light, to find warmth and compassion. A futile wish.


    Guided by their animal instinct to flee, they started to run, plans forgotten, even their situation barely entering their minds. There was only one wish within them, to get out of the dark. If only they had known that the darkness was within their own minds, they might have found a patch of light.


    Alas, they did not and in their panic, they moved exactly as I hoped they would, running right into the webs prepared for them and already containing their compatriots. One they were within the threads of silky webbing, it only took moments for the magic around them to take hold, trapping their minds in another nightmare.


    We waited for a few more minutes, our wings and magic allowing us to hover in a respectful distance, until we were certain the Travellers were unable to perceive anything around them.


    ¡°The Raven¡¯s Shadow greets the Weavers of Magic. We hope you don¡¯t mind that we gave them a little push.¡± we called out, letting the wind carry our voice.


    For a moment, nothing happened, until we could see magic flow through the webs from a place deeper in their territory, concealed by their powerful illusions. It formed into a magical construct, similar in shape to the humanoid-faced arachnids we had seen before.


    ¡°Another visitor? And one who is polite enough to introduce themselves? How interesting.¡± The construct spoke, the words coming out in a chittering manner, difficult to understand if not for the blessing carried by one of our bloodlines.


    ¡°I greet you, Raven¡¯s Shadow. Normally, I would invite you in, for a civilised discussion, alas, the events of the day prevent that. If you would, please return on another day, so we can speak without the troubles of this day hanging over things.`` The construct continued, her voice making clear that there would be no discussion on their stance.


    ¡°We shall return in three days.¡± We agreed, taking enough time to check with the others before returning. ¡°Where there is one now, there will be two then. As we are one, but two.¡± we left them with a few cryptic words, before our wings carried us away from the area, away from any potential treachery.

 Chapter 451

    The separation from Lenore when our Avatar-state ended was working more and more smoothly. One moment, We, together as one, had been flying above the trees, propelled by wind-magic and wings, before dropping through the foliage and splitting, slightly disoriented but far from the utterly incapacitated mess we had been when we first used the ability.


    ¡°That went well.¡± Lenore said, using an imitation of my voice to speak out loud. It took me a moment to focus on the slightly foggy memories, the memory of talking to the strange arachnid construct curiously clearer compared to the memories of the magic we had used against the other Travellers.


    ¡°Maybe. Not quite sure why we told that thing we would return. Or why we even tried to talk to them in the first place.¡± I admitted, frowning at the memories. If we returned, it would have to either be in our Avatar-form, or as individuals, having to explain one of our less well-known abilities to an outsider. Sure, I hadn¡¯t heard of arachnid Travellers so far, but I couldn¡¯t know for sure that there were none.


    ¡°Well, you wanted to get in contact with them, right? To study their magical formations and weaving, maybe even get a glimpse at that focus-thing the Travellers used, unless I miss my guess. So it makes sense that you would want to talk to them, and I know that I wouldn¡¯t mind talking to them, even if they are ¡®monsters¡¯.¡± Lenore guessed, causing my frown to lighten when I followed her line of thought. If looked at from that perspective, it made sense that a being composed of the two of us would make contact. Now, we just had to decide if we wanted to keep the appointment or if we simply continued on our journey, leaving the arachnids to themselves, acting as if we had nothing to do with either party. I told Lenore as much, causing her to caw in amusement, especially as I knew that I wouldn¡¯t really do so. The lure of new magic was strong, at least as long as we had a semblance of security.


    ¡°Do you want to fly or ride on my shoulder?¡± I asked, as we started to head back towards the area where we had left the others. Three days was simply too long to wait, especially knowing that Sigmir would worry.


    ¡°I¡¯ll fly.¡± Lenore replied, flapping her wings to go ahead and keep an eye on things from above. She even took a slight de-tour, making sure that the Travellers hadn¡¯t been stupid enough to leave something in their camp, utterly unnecessary thanks to the existance of magical bags.


    While she was away, I began to consider how to misdirect attention away from me, to keep people from realising that the winged monster that had ambushed those Travellers had been me. I doubted that anyone would actually recognise things but just the idea might get out there, due to relative physical proximity and the usage of Mind Magic. I wasn¡¯t sure just how the magic we had used had worked, but I could guess that it had been some sort of fear-effect, likely drawing on the feelings of isolation symbolised by the dark moon, maybe in conjunction with the confusion-effects of Darkness-Magic.


    A smile crept on my face, as my plans started to form, a two-pronged attack that should get people off my back and looking into a different direction. It meant a little video-editing but I had planned that all along, so it wasn¡¯t too much of a problem. Shaking my head, I picked up my pace, jogging through the shaded forest, following the invisible string that connected me to Sigmir. It would be good to be back with her.


    Travelling on foot, without the road, was a lot less comfortable than flying with Lenore. It was made worse by the fact that I¡¯d normally have her within her Hallow, giving me access to more Astral Power, as her regeneration was mostly channelled into my own, allowing me to be inefficient with my Blood Magic, using it to boost my own physical capabilities.


    Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on the original website.


    After using our Avatar-Form, the close mental contact required for such operations was simply too much, the connection between us overstimulated to the point that it would be uncomfortable enough that thought would be difficult. It would be difficult if I logged out, leaving my Avatar within my Hallow, but that wasn¡¯t quite what I had in mind.


    Curiously, I was reasonably certain that the forest allowed me to move just as fast, maybe even faster, than I would be able to move outside of it, at least without outside assistance like the ancient road with its supportive magic. Being able to push off against a tree and use the vines of my Eisblumen to redirect and control my movement allowed me to direct energy in a way that pushing off from the ground simply did not. It made me wonder how that worked with physically powerful beings, people like Sigmir. She could move faster than I but didn¡¯t need to use such tricks to direct her energy. She simply had a loping stride that seemed to devour space and was able to keep that up for as long as she wanted.


    ¡°You were right, they took everything with them. There¡¯s nothing left but some flattened vegetation, broken branches and a few cold fireplaces.¡± Lenore told me, once she returned from the Travellers¡¯ camp-site.


    ¡°As expected then. Still, it was good to check. Did you see anything from the arachnids? We know that they knew about the camp, so they would likely have taken a look as well.¡± I asked, only to get a negative response, not that it really mattered.


    ¡°Can you land for a moment?¡± I asked, making a decision regarding our travel-arrangements. I had originally planned to run back, using my connection to Sigmir as a guide, but if I wanted to get out in front of the news, I would have to be quick in editing part of my distraction.


    ¡°We need to move in that direction, I¡¯ll hopefully be back before you reach the area where the others are waiting, just in case you don¡¯t remember their position.¡± I explained, the effort to verbally express myself was annoying compared to the direct exchange we normally had, using our mental connection. Words were so insufficient to express complex thoughts, at least if you wanted to do it fast. If an image could convey more than a thousand words, a focused thought could convey more than a hundred images. Alas, not while our connection was rubbed raw from the intense use during our Avatar-state.


    ¡°Please be quick about it.¡± Lenore asked, knowing what I had in mind. She settled on a nearby branch, so that the discomfort wouldn¡¯t cause her to crash, that was the last thing we needed.


    Mentally bracing myself, I pushed, flowing into my Hallow. It required intense focus to keep myself contained, to mentally keep away from Lenore. It was almost like putting on clothes over a large, open wound, or maybe sunburned skin, painful and making you cringe away. But sadly, it was necessary for my plans.


    Luckily, my Hallow counted as secure, so the log-out timer was a short one, compared to logging out in the wild. It made me once again appreciate Lenore all the more, the connection to a spirit-beast something I could see as an almost mandatory feature for all players. Hopefully, nobody at Pantheon Entertainment would get the bright idea to put SPirit-Beasts in some sort of cash-shop, as that would likely be one of the quickest ways to kill the game.


    Shaking my head, I settled on my virtual throne, pulling up footing from earlier in the week, when Lenore and I had been flying over Ladrin. That, along the voice-tracks from Olivia talking about Ladrin, its history and inhabitants would make for good content, especially with the saucy details she had included. While I didn¡¯t really need to hear the thinly veiled allusions to the regenerative powers of male River-Trolls, boosted while they were in the bath, Olivia was a gifted story-teller and I had no problem using the files I had made to my advantage.


    Combined with the images taken from above Ladrin, it should sell the idea that we were just getting there, not that we had been there a few days ago, giving me enough time to get to the arachnid-village and attack a party of Travellers there. Not without being even faster than Lenore could fly, which already was incredibly fast.


    At the same time, I kept an eye on the forum, curious when the Travellers who had been on the raid would post about their experiences, which was the second part of my misdirection. The best thing about it was that I didn¡¯t even need to lie, at least not if I could frame things right. After all, the best deception was woven from nothing but the truth.

 Interlude - Forum: Raiding...

    Official Road to Purgatory-Beta Forum


    <table><tbody><tr><td>Kerrin, confirmed Beta-Account-</td></tr></tbody></table>


    Raiding - Or how not to do it.


    A word of advice, for all those who want to challenge the open-world dungeons and raids in Mundus: Don¡¯t.


    Well, maybe that¡¯s too harsh, but if you do, be careful, those things are deadly. Part of the problem is limited information, which is why we, internally, decided to share our experience here, so that others can learn from it, maybe contribute their own stories with this or other dungeons. Ultimately, we all want to enjoy the game and not get booted out, due to the death-penalty.


    So, what was our experience, you ask?


    It all started when we heard about a dangerous area, filled with spiders and monsters, that the locals generally avoided. As we have been quite effective in gathering a whole bunch of people and working together to quickly level up, we thought, hey, that might be the raid for us. We pretty much all outlevel the area anyway and need to move on, for greener pastures and more powerful monsters, different quests and all that, so, why not check that area out.


    We managed to gather a set of five groups, nicely balanced, with everyone between level fifty and one-hundred and set out to challenge the area. We thought that it would, at most, be a raid, maybe some twenty levels above the average for the area, which would make it around level fifty. As mentioned above, that should be easy with a group like the one we had assembled, but even if things didn¡¯t work as planned, we thought we had enough margin of error to assure our retreat.


    When our scouting party arrived in the area, they prepared a camp-site, took a look around and easily found the area in question. They especially paid attention to prepare and mark escape-paths, back to the Imperial Road, with somewhat convenient rally-points set out beforehand. You know, to make sure that if things go wrong we can fall back onto known terrain and fight there.


    Anyway, back to the area in question. The locals had given us a map, making finding it  trivial. What they found was an area filled with spider-webs and crawling with countless spiders, enough to send any arachnophobe running for the hills. Hell, enough to make anyone run for the hills or try to kill it with fire. Which is what we did. Take a look.


    raid.avi


    A large group of people is carefully making their way through a sparse forest. They all move in formation, centered around a group of comfortably dressed and not obviously armed people. The rest of the group is the opposite, each of them carrying some sort of weapon, readied for immediate, lethal use and they are all armoured, some of them wearing heavy, sturdy metal armour, others only reinforced leather or light chain-armour. But what they all have in common is the look of vigilance on their faces as they make their way through the forest.


    ¡°We are in range.¡± one of the lightly dressed people states, her voice not carrying for, but clearly audible. With that signal, three similarly dressed people gather around her, while she pulls out a piece of parchment, covered in dense, arcane runes. After a moment of checking with the three clustered around her, and the leader standing a little apart from them, her voice sounds out again, not more than a whisper, but echoing in a strange way.


    ¡°Thunderous Wrath!¡±


    For a few moments nothing seems to happen, until the parchment in her hands starts to glow, a glow expanding to her and mirrored on the other three, who stand around her in a triangle. After the glow intensifies for a bit, a strange structure appears in the air in front of her, countless, tiny symbols forming a greater whole. The glow surrounding them flashes for a moment, before winking out, leaving only the glowing structure behind.


    With a gesture from the leading caster, the structure flashes once more, and another structure, identical in form, though much larger, appears in the air, hovering above a valley deeper in the forest. Now, with the glow illuminating it, the valley truly comes into focus.


    And what is there to see, would be enough to drive any arachnophobe into a panic attack. Countless black forms, skittering around, while the trees and even the slopes of the valley are covered in complex spider-webs.


    As the glowing structure flashes once more, a single bolt of lightning strikes down from it, grounding into the earth accompanied by a thunderous crack. The bright flash makes it impossible to see the effect, especially as that bolt is only the first of countless bolts, all raining down into that valley. The thunder caused by all those bolts turns into a singular roar, strong enough to shake the earth and cause the wind to blow away from the valley, as enough air is displaced from the continuous explosions.


    Then, as sudden as it started, the air is still once more, the glowing structure blinking out of existence once more. Ahead, in the bombarded valley, the air is stirred by the explosive force, small fires making things hazy and difficult to see as the dim light of the forest returns after the magical bombardement.


    end raid.avi


    So far, so good, right? We used a rather expensive spell-focus, crafted by a native but powered by our own spellcasters, for the initial attack, to break whatever ambush might have been set-up, as our scouts spotted one of their magical scouts the day before, so they knew we were coming. We didn¡¯t think it would be bad, not with firepower like that for what we thought was a lower-level area.


    If you come across this story on Amazon, it''s taken without permission from the author. Report it.


    Anyway, after the spellcasters, our artillery, had softened up the target, we thought to send in the infantry, to sweep what remained of our enemies, secure the area and maybe find some good loot. At least that was the plan. But I guess everyone knows what is said about plans, and how well they survive contact with the enemy.


    wipe.avi


    ¡°Charge!¡± one of the others, a dwarf in heavy armour, commands and most of the frontline starts to move, quickly crossing the distance with their weapons raised and ready. Before the effects of their charge can truly become obvious, they are swallowed by the haze that lingers in the area, their forms turning vague and unclear.


    ¡°What?¡± one of the lightly armoured guards who have remained with the rest asks, looking into the haze comprehensively. Turning to the others around him, he pauses, eyes staring in disbelief when he sees something he shouldn¡¯t see. Behind his friends, hovering between the trees, he sees a monster, only vaguely humanoid, a grotesque mix between avian and human, covered in black feathers, wicked talons and a sharp beak overwhelming anything that might be seen as human. And the two wings, sitting on the beings lower back, lazily beating the air, far too slow to actually provide lift but somehow, the being seems to ignore such boring things as gravity.


    Just as he wants to scream out a warning, he realises that he is no longer in the forest. That nothing is around him but a vague, cloying darkness. Screaming in horror, he turns, his mind overcome by the single desire, to flee. To get away from the monster, to get out of the dark. Somewhere, there has to be light.


    end wipe.avi


    We used that last point-of-view as he¡¯s the only one to even see what killed us. For the others of that group, things were even worse. They were just suddenly thrust into darkness, knowing that something was behind them, instilling them with an overwhelming urge to flee. Or rather, to run away, or would you call it a flight if the only thing you achieve is to run into a trap, getting knocked unconscious without even knowing what happened? Because that¡¯s what happened to each and every one of us, the first wave ran into that accursed valley and was knocked unconscious, the second wave was subject to what I think is almost certainly a fear-effect and ran into the valley, only to be knocked unconscious as well.


    Oh, and then we died. For a few of us, it happened after a couple seconds, others were alive for almost half-an-hour. But none of us have even the slightest idea what happened.


    Personally, my best guess is that what we thought was an out-door dungeon appropriate for the level-region is actually a high-level raid or something like that. Really, I got no idea, other than that it is lethal as hell. Maybe, in the future, we can all work together to get a better idea and more information to keep shit like that from happening. Or at least keep others from blundering into situations like that. No need to pile up Death-Penalties on everyone.


    <table><tbody><tr><td>Do¡¯rodra, confirmed Beta-Account</td></tr></tbody></table>


    Okay, gotta admit, the magic looks insane. Other than that, wasn¡¯t there a similarly winged creature in one of the early highlight-reels?


    <table><tbody><tr><td>Danilli of the Raging Storm, confirmed Beta-Account </td></tr></tbody></table>


    You were not prepared¡­


    But then, how can you prepare without knowing what to prepare for?


    <table><tbody><tr><td>Tarrin, confirmed Beta-Account</td></tr></tbody></table>


    So far, I¡¯ve only played two instanced dungeons, nothing open world. Those two were quite fair, one was a cave filled with murderous ant-like monsters that spit acid, the other was a cave as well, only filled with ice-monsters that had far too many teeth for comfort.


    They were hard, requiring constant focus to not get murderized to death, but felt fair and were definitely rewarding. Curiously, when I did the first, I got a title for being the first Traveller to go in there, when I got into the second, there was no such reward.


    <table><tbody><tr><td>Tobiuno, confirmed Beta-Account</td></tr></tbody></table>


    Tarrin, that¡¯s because someone else got there first. No idea who, but I can confirm that you get a larger bonus for getting a title multiple times. I have no idea how big that bonus ultimately will be, or if there will be some sort of balance but dungeons will be difficult in that aspect anyway. Instanced Dungeons at least.


    Because the natives are wise to them, if you haven¡¯t noticed. As I have stated in other threads, I was recruited by the human empire early on and given special training. That special training was within an instanced dungeon, which we ran multiple times within a few days, essentially funnelling the experience points to me as much as possible.


    That only works if a faction has control over the area, to the point that they can let the dungeon build up power, or however that works. I hope Pantheon has some sort of system in mind, or at least some ideas how to prevent larger guilds from monopolizing dungeons and such, or Road to Purgatory will be in serious trouble. And that¡¯s from me, the leader of one of the larger, if not the largest, guild currently in existence.


    <table><tbody><tr><td>Dargira, confirmed Beta-Account</td></tr></tbody></table>


    Haven¡¯t been in an instanced dungeon yet, but I was in a dwarven patrol that stumbled into an open world dungeon. At least that was what everyone said it was. For me, it was mostly zombies, lots of them, stinking of mud and rotting flesh. That part wasn¡¯t really fun, to be honest, but I was told that there¡¯s an insane amount of experience to be had, if you manage to clear such a place. Right, @Morgana?


    <table><tbody><tr><td>Morgana, confirmed Beta-Account</td></tr></tbody></table>


    Can confirm, outdoor-dungeons give a ton of experience. But come with significant danger. You know, that old joke about opportunity and danger going hand in hand? Yeah, that¡¯s dungeons in general and the outdoor-version in particular.


    About the video posted here, and the hightlight-reel someone mentioned, yeah can confirm that one, too. A few months back, I stumbled over a being called Samodiva, looked similar to that thing, just a lot more on fire, tried to mesmerize my party and me, making us dance with her first and wanted to eat us later. Not in the fun way, I should add. At least I think she didn¡¯t mean the fun way, we didn¡¯t stick around to find out.


    What you ran into might be a similar being, or maybe a darkness?-version of her, going by colour, or some sort of harpy? Those might look like that but so far, I haven''t seen one on Mundus, so I can only go by myths and my guesses.


    Care to share where you ran into that area, just so we have an idea where not to go? I mean, it¡¯s a forest, but so far, forests are the terrain that is the most plentiful on Mundus, at least in the areas where I¡¯ve been running around.

 Chapter 452

    With my own video posted and a comment made under the thread from Kerrin, one of the Crusaders of Light, I was reasonably certain that nobody would think to connect me with the troubles the Crusaders had run into. It was unlikely to happen in the first place, with nothing but general vicinity, with me being confirmed within a few hundred kilometers of their location, and somewhat similar traits, as in, female, associated with birds, darkness and mind-magic, pointing at me, but there could always be someone who just threw out random ideas. Which, in this case, would have been a case of a broken clock being right twice a day, something I hopefully had headed off before the idea could ever take hold.


    After considering my options for a moment, and checking the clock, I decided to head out for a bit, to take care of my chores, just to wait out the somewhat weakened state using my Avatar had left me in.


    As always, there was a momentary disconnect when leaving the capsule, a short moment that I needed to adjust to my actual body and the slow-moving world around me. By now, after over half a year of using the capsule, I had mostly gotten used to it, but I had a feeling it would always feel a little weird.


    Yawning, I stepped out of the capsule, smiling when I realised that winter had left me an early present, in the form of a load of snow, almost glowing in the reflected sunlight. It would soon melt, but for now, the world was covered in a white blanket. I quickly grabbed a sweater and stepped out onto my balcony, grabbing a handful of snow, feeling the cold seep into my palms. There was a smile on my face, as a small part of my mind wanted to reach out, to grab hold of the snow with Ice-Magic, to let it flutter in the wind and float across the world. Alas, there was no Astral Power within my body, or the world I was in, there was no magic. At least no magic I could wield, the picture of the city¡¯s roofs, covered in pristine white, was magical in its own way. Just not in the same way it would be on Mundus.


    A gust of wind reminded me that, while Morgana was nigh invulnerable to cold, Samantha was most certainly not, and the comfortable soft-pants I wore while within the capsule provided little protection against the freezing wind. Shivering a little, I brushed off the snow from my hands, letting it join the still lightly falling snow outside, and stepped back into my apartment, closing the door behind me. Maybe going for a walk would be a good idea, once I had finished my shopping.


    It was always fun to walk around during the winter, when snow was on the ground, and the city descended into chaos. We didn¡¯t get enough snow to force everyone to get used to it, instead we got a few days, sometimes a week or three, of snow each year, turning the road and sidewalks into ice-skating rinks, just without the skates.


    While I had managed to carefully make my way to the supermarket, I had been quite amused, watching a middle-aged man trying to clear the snow on his sidewalk with, of all things, a dustpan. He managed to get rid of most of the snow, leaving the frozen ice beneath, nicely polished and ready to trip up the first person who stepped on it. Namely, him.


    Not that motorists had any better cards, I was easily able to outpace the cars that pretended to be snails, at least as long as I treated things like an intense exercise in balance. Mrs Wu would be proud of me, using even the weather as training for the essential skills, as she called it.


    Once my shopping was done, I went back out, towards a nearby park. After a short look at the large, open space within, and hearing the commotion caused by a horde of children, I decided not to go there, instead walking along the path around an artificial lake. It was a lot more serene and comfortable, allowing me to enjoy the quiet. The stillness, a city slowed to a crawl by ice and snow. Stretching out my hand, I watched as a few snowflakes landed on my fingers, only to quickly melt away.


    This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.


    ¡°Sam?¡± A questioning voice called out, startling me out of my reverie, ¡°Samantha, is that you?¡± It took me a moment to recognise the voice, it was a familiar one, even if I hadn¡¯t heard it in a while. Mentally switching to a polite, social mode took me a moment, but my mother had taken quite a bit of effort to make the switch a conditioned one. With a friendly smile on my face, I turned around, towards the voice of an old friend.


    ¡°Chris, hello.¡± I politely greeted the male coming towards me. He hadn¡¯t changed a whole lot since we had met the last time, a little older but that was to be expected after three years.


    ¡°It¡¯s been a while.¡± I added, my smile straining a little as I remembered our last meeting, shortly after he had announced his decision to permanently retire from his role as Team-Captain of Amaranthine, to fully focus on his schooling. We hadn¡¯t parted on the best of terms, mostly because I hadn¡¯t been able to handle the negative feelings that had come with my best friend, the one who had been the driving force behind the dream we had lived for years, had decided to quit. He had been the one providing comfort and sympathies after my parents had passed, making what I perceived as him abandoning me extra hard.


    Curiously, there was a visibly pregnant female next to him, their hands interlocked in what I could only describe in an intimate manner. Just as curious as her proximity to him was the look on her face, a look I could only describe as thinly veiled hostility.


    ¡°Sam, let me introduce you to my wife, Jenn.¡± he told me, looking at the woman next to him with a warm gaze. She looked¡­ average, like one of the countless women who filled the coffee-shops, sitting around and gossiping. Neither obese nor muscular, mouse brown hair and eyes, in a simple, shoulder-length cut. Next to Chris¡¯ and his rather large, both in height and weight, frame she seemed small, but when compared to me, she was both a lot taller and certainly carrying more weight, some of it in places where females were supposed to have that fat. Not that I could be sure it was innate or due to her advanced pregnancy, not that it truly mattered to me.


    ¡°Jenn, that¡¯s Sam, I¡¯m sure I told you about her. We used to be together, on the same Team, years ago. You know, you could say that she paid for my schooling.¡± Chris introduced her, the smile on his face wide and appearing genuinely happy, while the smile on her face twisted a little further.


    ¡°Hello, I¡¯ve heard so much about you.¡± She greeted me, her voice carefully controlled.


    ¡°Hello.¡± I replied, not quite sure how to continue a conversation. I was about to politely excuse myself and get on with my walk, when Chris spoke up again.


    ¡°If you don¡¯t need to be somewhere, why don¡¯t we go, get a coffee? It¡¯s been years, I¡¯d love to catch up.¡± he suggested, his eyes sparkling. He still looked like an overgrown labrador, his blonde hair in desperate need of a comb and his smile looking almost manic. Knowing him, he had decided that coffee was a good idea and there was little any force in the universe could convince him that he was wrong. It was that energy that had driven Amaranthine forward, following paths I had planned. He had been the energy, the leadership and heart, while I had liked to think of myself as the brain of the operation.


    ¡°Oh, I wouldn¡¯t want to disturb the two of you.¡± I tried to get out of it, using a polite refusal I had read in some book. ¡°You look like you are on a date.¡± I added, hoping to get out of the situation without being impolite. For a moment, I considered abandoning my mother¡¯s teachings of decorum and to simply walk away, but they were ingrained too deeply into me.


    ¡°Oh, no, please, join us.¡± Jenn agreed with her husband, ¡°You know, I¡¯ve heard your name so often, but I always thought Sam was a guy. How did you get that nick-name?¡± she asked, looking down on me, both literally and metaphorically.


    ¡°My name is Samantha, that is where I got the name.¡± I replied, before letting out a long-drawn out breath, resigning myself to my fate. ¡°Alright, there¡¯s a good coffee-shop over there, near the tram-station. Why don¡¯t we go there?¡± I asked, knowing that Chris most likely had no idea where to get a semi-decent cup of coffee or tea around here. If he had even an idea where to get anything like that nearby.

 Chapter 453

    By the time I closed my Capsule, ready to delve back into Road to Purgatory, I was feeling bone-deep exhaustion. There was something about the presence of other humans that just took a lot out of me. That was especially true when they were like Jenn and looking at me as if they were trying to set me on fire with their mind. She had been perfectly polite, at least as long as Chris had been next to her, but when he had excused himself to use the facilities, the fake smile on her face had faded as quick as snow on a stove. It was disconcerting, especially as I had no idea why she was so hostile, I had never met her before today.


    On the other hand, talking, or rather listening to Chris talk, had been¡­ weird. When we had been going to school together and created the guild that ultimately formed the core of Team Amaranthine, he had been the one bringing people together, social and friendly, with a quirky sense of humor I had never quite understood. But that all was gone. Instead, his interest in all things gaming seemed to have entirely faded, to the point that he barely knew I wasn¡¯t part of Amaranthine any longer. He even believed I had quit myself, to focus on my career as an accountant. He even asked if I wanted to have an introduction to the accounting-division of the bank he was working at, something I politely declined.


    Luckily, once my tea was drunk and we had exchanged cell phone numbers, I was able to escape returning to my appartement and, ultimately, my capsule-space. There, I took a quick look into the forum which brought a smile to my face. The response I had left earlier had been interpreted as hoped, making people look at the strange, winged being you saw hovering towards the raid and thinking it was a monster. It was fascinating how well a deception without any outright lies could work, I had simply given them a few true tidbits, directing their attention completely away from me. Amusingly they had declined to actually tell where their raid had been and where their home-base was, absolving me from a need to engage further. On the other hand, that reluctance meant that they possibly planned to make another attempt, possibly with better preparation, maybe additional people or something along those lines, something I Would have to keep in mind if I returned to the arachnids to learn their craft.


    Once back in Mundus, I realised that the aftereffects of using our Avatar had mostly faded, making it uncomfortable to remain in my Hallow, but not actually painful. Not that it really mattered, as Lenore had already landed by the time I had logged in and I was greeted with the sensation of her, encouraging me to leave my Hallow. After getting a short impression of the surroundings, I accepted her push, gently landing on the ground beneath the tree she had perched on.


    ¡°We should reach the others soon. You can walk on your own.¡± Lenore told me, still using my voice, instead of our connection.


    ¡°Good to know. Did anything happen while I was gone?¡± I asked, getting a feeling that she had been a little impatient to have me back.


    ¡°Happen? No, nothing happened.¡± she denied, before continuing, ¡°But it was as if there was something rubbing against my feathers, almost plucking them. The constant mental irritation, even when you were gone, without an outside sensation to focus on, it was driving me insane.¡± she complained, pushing the sensation through our connection, making me laugh as I realised that it was almost similar to an itch you couldn¡¯t scratch, or a leaky faucet, constantly irritating you and driving you crazy.


    ¡°I apologize.¡± I told her but the seriousness of my apology was overshadowed by my still escaping giggles, to which Lenore simply turned around, bending over and spreading all feathers away from her. To her annoyance, that only made me laugh harder, until she took flight, leaving me giggling beneath that tree. Still grinning, I shook my head and focused on my connection with Sigmir, using it to get my bearings. Estimating the distance, I realised that it would take me about thirty minutes to get there and set off at a light job.


    As I trotted through the forest, I began to consider my approach. Would it be a good idea to see if I would be able to sneak into our camp, or sneak up on the others? I knew that I wouldn¡¯t be able to sneak up on Sigmir, and thus on Ylva, but I was curious if I would be able to get the drop on Adra and especially if I would be able to get to Rai.


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    Once I was near them, I tried to convey a feeling of contentment, combined with amusement, to Sigmir, hoping that she would remain quiet, letting me get on with my fun. I wasn¡¯t sure if she received the message, but I felt anticipation flowing over our bond and decided to see what would happen.


    In the shadows of a tree, still a few hundred meters away from them, I closed my eyes, drawing the shadows around me into a cloak, concealing me within. Again, as I had when observing the other Travellers, I pushed into the shadows, not quite into their realm, but also not quite staying in the physical realm. Instead, I was on the border, the twilight so to speak.


    A graceful leap brought me up, onto a low branch of the tree I had been standing beneath, and from there, I began to slowly and carefully move from tree to tree. It was interesting, it felt as if gravity hadn¡¯t quite as much a hold on me as it should have, letting me jump further and balance on branches that shouldn¡¯t be able to support me but, for some reason, it worked.


    The closer I got to the others, the slower and more carefully I picked my steps, trying to listen to the wind and only move when a gust moved the leaves and trees around me, letting the sounds of nature mask the sounds I made despite trying my best to keep quiet. The magic helped but sadly, my actual stealth-skill was lacking. What was worse was my lack of information on their camp, meaning I had to slowly pick my path through the trees, trying to gather information, especially on magical or physical alarm-systems they might have said up. Without Lenore, I couldn¡¯t even see magical traps, forcing me to move slowly and taste the air as I went.


    I was barely able to catch sight of Adra, when she startled, looking around as she called out a warning that something was approaching. I hadn¡¯t noticed any active magical effects, which I took to mean that she had detected me thanks to her connection with the trees. But still, just because she carefully looked around, spear in hand, while the others, including Sigmir, were similarly alert. For a moment, I considered revealing myself but quickly decided against it, instead pushing myself fully into the shadows, feeling a shiver run down my spine, as I wanted to check if there was something behind me. I felt watched and it wasn¡¯t a pleasant feeling.


    Still, I was hidden and reasonably certain that Adra¡¯s connection to the trees couldn¡¯t detect me here and Adra just happened to stand in such a way that her shadow overlapped with another shadow. It was a bit of a strange sensation, but I managed to use my Darkness-Magic to move myself within the shadows, without actually connecting to the physical realm, shifting almost like a two-dimensional object until I reached her shadow.


    And stepped out of it, back into the physical realm.


    ¡°Hey, I¡¯m back.¡± I greeted, speaking in a casual manner, right behind Adra. I might have gotten a greater effect by placing an icecube in her neck but the squeak of shock, combined with an impressive hop was quite satisfying. Sadly, as she hopped she also twisted around and tried to skewer me with her spear, forcing me to retreat back into the shadows to avoid it. It was still painful and my health-gauge told me that I had taken a surprising amount of damage but I was quite sure it was less than it would have been if I had taken the spear to the chest.


    ¡°So jumpy.¡± I complained, after having used a combination of Overflow and Darkness-Magic to get back behind her and out of the shadows again. It wasn¡¯t quite the teleportation I had been trying to achieve all this time, but it was as close as I got when using it deliberately.


    ¡°Don¡¯t do that!¡± Adra shrieked, her breathing laboured and still recovering from the shock.


    ¡°Just wanted to see how vigilant you all are.¡± I told her, a sweet smile on my face. ¡°We¡¯ll have to get better, if I had tried to put a knife into your back, it would have been painful for you.¡± I added, even as I gently drew on my Blood Magic to regenerate the strange feedback-damage I had taken while in the shadows. It was almost as if I had received a blunt impact all throughout the area her spear would have hit, including the inside of my body. Weird, but not dangerous.


    ¡°Rai, we¡¯ll have to consider ways to prevent someone else from using the shadows to sneak up on us. If I could figure out a way to use them that way, it is almost certain that other people have done the same. I really wouldn¡¯t want to get assasinated from my shadow, that would just be embarrassing.¡± I told my disciple, still acting as if nothing had happened.


    ¡°It¡¯s good to have you back.¡± Sigmir threw in, before Rai could respond with more than a nod.


    ¡°Don¡¯t think you can sneak off without me again.¡± she added in a whisper, once I was enfolded in her arms, sounding quite serious about it. That might make returning to the arachnids problematic.

 Chapter 454

    It was a little disappointing, but ultimately I decided that heading back to the arachnids was something I wouldn¡¯t be able to do during the beta. As annoying as it was, I simply didn¡¯t have the time to ingratiate and integrate into an entirely different form of society, not if I wanted to be able to complete the quest around the Soul Prison. And the more I thought about it, the more I was convinced that the quest around it was special, maybe even something unique to the beta itself. A unique, almost impossible, challenge, to complete or fail, especially after realising that the Soul Prison was one of the things that was impossible to record. It simply didn¡¯t appear when I accessed the recordings, creating strange images when I had placed something atop of it, to see what would happen. The image of a floating Icicle wasn¡¯t as strange as it might be in a world without magic, but knowing that I had placed the icicle on the Soul Prison, only for it to disappear far quicker than it should have, was quite strange. And with that, the Soul Prison, and the quest surrounding it, remained my personal focus. If freeing a godlike being wasn¡¯t an achievement worthy of a reward from Pantheon, I didn¡¯t know what was.


    In a game that was all about player-freedom in a fantastic, yet realistic, world, it would create excellent publicity-material if they could highlight how the actions of a player, or maybe a few players, during the beta had changed the course of history on Mundus, introducing certain events for the future that were caused by those players. Maybe even integrate the characters themselves into the world of Mundus in some way, though hopefully not in a way that would prevent me from seeing Sigmir again.


    But all that was mere speculation and ultimately meaningless. I had planned out a course of action, which hopefully would lead to the desired results but I simply couldn¡¯t know whether it would or not. If it failed, I would have to find another way, though I had no real idea what that way might be. Not unless I counted that ridiculous idea of sneaking into the Pantheon Entertainment Data-Center, hacking into their computers and rescuing Sigmir that way, as amusing as the fantasy was.


    While I didn¡¯t tell the others just what I had seen, I gave them a rough idea, telling them how I had watched a group of Travellers assault one of the local monster-lairs. Sigmir got the full story, while cuddled up to her, simply because I didn¡¯t enjoy keeping secrets from her. On the other hand, Olivia¡¯s loyalty was still a little suspect, with her faith keeping me from fully trusting her, even with the oath she had sworn shortly after meeting. Could an oath sworn in the name of a deity keep her from divulging information to that deity, if she felt it was important for her deity to know? Could the deity absolve her for breaking the oath? Without any sort of reference-frame for divine accountability, it was a strange, yet very interesting, question and I had no idea how to answer it.


    Which meant, I kept Olivia in the dark regarding my more interesting ideas and plans, especially regarding the plan to free the being imprisoned in the Soul Prison, or my possession of said prison. Another thing I didn¡¯t plan to share with Olivia was a surprising result of the conversation with Sigmir, and more specifically, Ylva.


    ¡°I need your help.¡± Ylva told me, when we were a little apart from the others, using the wolves¡¯ language that I could only understand thanks to my bond with Lenore.


    ¡°What can I do?¡± I asked in response, not even considering if I wanted to help.


    ¡°I¡¯m not sure, that¡¯s the problem. When I crossed the first divide, it was with your help and a dose of divine blood. I have no idea how I can continue on the path I have thus embarked on, or where that path might lead.¡± she admitted, sounding dejected. ¡°But I know that I need to continue forward, unless I want to fall further behind and become a burden to Sigmir, making her unable to protect Lenore and you.¡± she continued, her ears and tail drooping. She looked plainly miserable, making me want to pet her, as inappropriate as it might be.


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    Sadly, I had no idea if I could do anything to help her. While I had improved my Blood Magic since then, I hadn¡¯t made any qualitative leaps, even crossing the second Divide hadn¡¯t given me any significant bonus to that particular skill. If anything, the inclusion of Ice-Magic in all my spells and Death-Magic in all spells cast together with Lenore might have decreased my ability to use supportive Blood Magic. I was about to tell her that, when Lenore pushed a thought into my mind.


    ¡°Don¡¯t you and Sigmir share some blood-connection with Ylva? I think that old Silverpelt mentioned something like that, back when we met.¡± she asked, making me think furiously. She was right, that the wolf she called old Silverpelt, the Alpha of Ylva¡¯s former pack, had said something like that, alluding to the myth that Firn-Elves had been created by Loki and that Sigmir, as a Giantblood, could apparently trace her lineage back to him as well. Or maybe to his wife, I wasn¡¯t quite sure on the matter, it was too steeped in legend and myth to give any factual, usable information.


    But the idea might have merit and it was an audacious one. Just the thought, to somehow draw on the divine Blood we all shared to strengthen Ylva, to manipulate the divinity sleeping within each of us? I had wondered if there was another way to lay claim to divine fame on the level that Pantheon couldn¡¯t ignore it and this might be it.


    ¡°Audacious.¡± I admitted, both out loud and over my mental connection to Lenore, both amazed and amused. ¡°There might be a way, as Lenore just suggested.¡± I told the slightly confused Ylva. Once more, my mind amused me to no end. The idea, as I understood it at this point, would place intense pain and suffering on all three of us, Ylva, Sigmir and myself. While I didn¡¯t relish the idea of suffering the pain of Blood Magic myself, there was a reason I only used it when absolutely necessary, and I could accept that Ylva would have to endure if she wanted to get stronger, I was hardly able to stand the idea of Sigmir suffering alongside me. The only thing making it somewhat palpable was that I knew she would feel guilty if I excluded her and took the pain on myself. If that would even be possible.


    ¡°I¡¯ll have to think Lenore¡¯s idea through some more and talk with Sigmir and you about it. For now, just know that there might be a way, but it will require a certain level of dedication from you, from me and from Sigmir.¡± I explained, not wanting to give more information out loud, not while the others might just be in earshot. It was difficult to estimate just how far sound might carry, who might be listening, especially when it came to people with high Intuition. I had noticed it in myself, that my senses were intensely tied to my focus, or rather, that my subconscious mind automatically filtered what my senses took in, with me only becoming conscious of a small fraction of the whole, namely what I was focusing on.


    To make matters worse, I had to remain vigilant of others being able to use magical constructs to scry and spy, just like I could. The Arachnids had shown that it, as I should have expected, wasn¡¯t something unique to me and that they could be quite sneaky with it. I would have to work together with Lenore, who was flying somewhere above me, to make some sort of barrier woven from Wind and Darkness, to conceal us, muffle sounds and hopefully prevent magic from entering it.


    Just that idea, how to conceal a conversation from outsiders and the possible means that could be used to spy on others kept Lenore and me busy for most of the day, without giving the idea of using Blood Magic to empower Ylva another thought. Some of the ideas we exchanged were of questionable plausibility, for example I had no idea if Mind Magic could actually be used to read minds, and if so, to what level, or if there was some sort of limitation. Or what the other elements could use to scry on others, I knew about Dura Firebringer¡¯s constructs, I had read the Water Mirror spell in the Grandmother¡¯s Grimoire and had created my own version of that, using shadows. But there were so many more ways, was it possible to trace vibrations through the ground? At that point, we most likely were merely trading hypotheticals and being paranoid, but just the seemingly plausible ideas were fascinating and scary. Magic truly was fascinating.

 Chapter 455

    My discussion with Sigmir and Ylva went roughly as I had expected it to go. Sigmir was quite happy to help her companion become stronger, easily agreeing to suffer what I could only describe as horrifying pain on her behalf, though, also as expected, she was quite wary of putting me through the same torment. Given that we, Lenore and I, had only the slightest idea where to start that project, namely by trying to detect the Divine Bloodline present in all three of us, it was purely theoretical for now anyway, but it moved to the top of my priority-list. Not only was it interesting, but it also might be a way to gain the attention of a certain Pantheon.


    What surprised me about the discussion was just how difficult it was to merge the darkness I used for concealment and to prevent magical intrusion into an area with the magic Lenore used to prevent eavesdropping. We had to carefully layer the different magical constructs to keep them from interfering with each other, or more precisely, I had to keep the magic-devouring darkness I used from doing just that with Lenore¡¯s sound-muffling magic. It worked, somewhat, but the ensuing construct was only good for a very short time, while actively controlled and monitored by both Lenore and myself. A stable ward, it was not.


    The other thing we did, while Sigmir and I had retreated a little to get some privacy, was to set up my Throne, as it was the third day since leaving the Arachnids behind. While I had given up on the idea to go there and learn from them, mostly due to time-constraints and the new, interesting idea Ylva had given me, I still didn¡¯t want to just not show up. That seemed needlessly rude, especially given that Lenore and I were still working on and improving upon our take on magical distant communications.


    As always, we settled on the Throne, Lenore within her Hallow, keeping an eye on my body and providing a guide-post to help me find my way back and I delved into the Astral River, letting the weird, floating sensation wash over and around me. Just this realm might be able to keep me interested for years, the sensations, the strange way Mundus was reflected into the Astral River, the mysteries of the deeper layers that I had barely begun to glimpse at, there was a pattern to it, a rhyme on reality that I found fascinating, that I wanted to sink my mind into, trying to figure it out. Alas, it would have to be a long-term project, handled between different necessities, because, as interesting as I thought it was, it wasn¡¯t something I could really make content from. Mostly because it didn¡¯t translate into recordings, if I were to take the record of my evening¡¯s activities, it would be of me, sitting on my Throne without moving. Not the most interesting of content.


    But those were considerations for another day, for now, I had a courtesy-visit to make. By keeping close to the top-layer of the Astral, I was able to follow the ancient road, especially as it was constructed following a powerful flow, what some might call a Ley Line, and use it to navigate. It slowed my travel down quite a bit, compared to the way I had been able to travel using landmarks such as the Nexus in Neyto, but when comparing movement within the Astral to movement outside, it was still vastly faster.


    And so, after about an hour of asserting my will within the Astral River, I was reasonably certain that I had reached my destination. Not wanting to accidentally slip into some sort of trap the Arachnids might have spun within the Astral, trying to ensnare unwary wizards, trying to scry on their secrets, I strenuously wove my magic from within the Astral, into Mundus, creating a pseudo-corporeal magical construct, essentially a shell of Darkness-Magic that I could push my mind into. It had no more mass than ordinary shadows, but it wasn¡¯t any more sturdy as well. The light from the moon and the stars above didn¡¯t disrupt it, but even the light of a torch, hell, the light of a bright candle might be enough to disperse it. Working over such a distance, even creating such a construct was incredibly difficult.


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    Flying to the arachnid-area was a weird experience, though a lot easier than expected thanks to the time I had recently spent flying with Lenore. It took another thirty minutes to reach the area, which looked completely restored, or maybe they had just recreated their concealment-magic.


    ¡°Ah, there you are.¡± A rather deep, female voice greeted me, as a magical construct similar to the one became fully visible. ¡°Greetings.¡± The voice was smooth, almost artificially so, reminding me of the tone and cadence used by professional voice-actors. Obviously trained.


    ¡°Greetings.¡± I replied, turning the Raven-shape I had used into one that hopefully looked like the Avatar Lenore and I formed together. It was surprisingly difficult to create and maintain, the form even less familiar than Lenore¡¯s but as long as I didn¡¯t try to make it move naturally, it should work.


    ¡°We are afraid pressing matters forced us to attend this meeting this way.¡± I continued, using a prepared line, having gamed out a few ways this conversation could go, together with Lenore. Trying to imitate the way we spoke together, especially with my fragmented memories added another layer of difficulty to a supposedly simple conversation.


    ¡°That is regrettable.¡± the arachnid-shape replied, moving in a way that might have been a nod, but where trying to read the body-language of a raven or wolf was difficult, doing the same with an arachnid magical construct was outright impossible.


    ¡°Could you tell me what originally brought you here? We noticed traces of you nearby for a few days but were never able to make contact.¡± the being asked. There was some more movement but I had no idea what it might mean. The communication was even more difficult than I had thought, especially when I realised that I was speaking Common, the language Sigmir and Lenore had taught me. With my mind separated from Lenore, I couldn¡¯t understand the clicks and clacks flowing with her voice that might be language as well.


    ¡°Certainly. We were fascinated by your weave of magic and just had to take a look. Its magnificence drew me, the complexity made me linger. It made me think of our Teacher, though we are somewhat able to decipher your workings, whereas Hers merely gave us a headache when we tried.¡± I explained, ¡®accidentally¡¯ revealing that there was a more powerful being behind me, just in case things turned hostile. I doubted there were easy ways to strike at me, with my body over a hundred kilometers away, but that didn¡¯t mean there were none. Paranoia and Vigilance, the line between them was often very narrow.


    There were more clicking sounds, and the being moved around some more, before she continued to speak. ¡°Thank you, for your compliment. But I have a feeling there is more to it than mere fascination with our work.¡±


    ¡°Indeed. After we left, we met with some of our companions, heard tales of a group of Travellers, from a place further afield than anyone can fathom. In those tales, they spoke of a raid, an attack on some, as they called it, crawlies. We had seen some, who we suspected to be of that group, head towards this place so it seemed prudent to take a closer look. Which brought us back to this place, allowed us to witness¡­ what happened.¡± I explained, pausing for a moment, mostly for effect, before continuing. ¡°We can¡¯t really call it a battle, can we? They danced within your web from the start, hopelessly entangled without even noticing.¡± I continued, when a weird sensation, almost like the small feathers I had since Lenore had crossed the second Divide trying to fluff up, caused me to tense for a moment, instinctual fear giving me pause. I had no idea if the sensation came from my mind, my body or my soul, but it made me afraid, urging me to flee.


    Without thinking deeply about it, I decided to trust the impulse, abandoning the construct, letting the Astral Power that had been used to create it disperse into the Astral River, scattering it as widely as possible. At the same time, I took the mental tether between my mind and my body and pulled, trying to rip me through the Astral, back into my body. Pain, similar to the pain I felt when using Blood Magic, surged through my mind and for a moment, there was only blackness before my eyes.


    Blackness, that was suddenly replaced with the gentle light of the fire Sigmir had built, while she kept watch over me. Before I could even call out for help, I bent over the side of my throne, vomiting up everything I had for breakfast, lunch and dinner, maybe even the food I had the days before. Not a fun experience.

 Chapter 456

    As we made our ways down the highway, my mind was still on the events of the night before. After I had returned to my body, and been violently sick, Sigmir had helped me to get myself back together, carefully feeding me some water, while Lenore remained within her Hallow, trying to help my mind process what had happened. With some care from the two of them, I was able to crawl into my bed-roll and get some sleep.


    Come morning, my head was still aching, a deep-seated, pounding headache that made me wonder if some dwarves had taken up residence inside and were trying to dig down into my spine. A cold compress, produced by Lenore¡¯s improved control over Ice-Magic was able to get me to my feet and on the road. Something else caused me a bit of concern however, namely that Olivia had, as soon as she had noticed that I wasn¡¯t well, tried to find out what was wrong, using her magic in the process. Turns out, her magic, supposedly divinely inspired, had been unable to find out what was ailing me, indicating that she was unable to heal me. The look of concern on Olivia¡¯s face, combined with Lenore¡¯s investigation while I had slept, were enough to make me worry.


    Somehow, I had taken damage to my soul, that ephemeral construct connected to my mind and body, not a lot of damage, barely a scratch according to Lenore¡¯s analysis, but still. A scratch on something that was supposedly indestructible, to the point that the Gods themselves used Soul Prisons to seal and slowly grind one down, gave me a headache, both literally and metaphorically.


    But had the scratch been caused by enemy action, with the most likely culprits being the arachnids, or had it been by my sudden retreat, the amount of power I had utilised to bring my mind back into my body had been nothing to scoff at. A lot of power, channelled through my body, my mind and possibly my soul? Could that have caused that scratch?


    Or, stepping back from the outcome for a moment, what had been the cause for my instinctual fear, the bad feeling that had made me retreat? Had I jumped at a shadow, caused by being overly vigilant, maybe paranoid, seeing an enemy where there was none? Had I stepped into a trap laid by the arachnids and somehow managed to escape in the nick of time? Had there been something else, maybe the same entity that caused me to feel watched whenever I moved into the realm of shadows, that caused my bad feeling?


    I had no idea, and that was annoying. I had even looked into the system-log, the supposed record for all things combat and such, but the only thing I learned from it was that I had suffered damage to my Health, Stamina and Astral Power. There was no source, no explanation, just that I had taken the damage. Maddening.


    What made matters even worse was that I was unable to perceive my soul, or souls in general. I could detect bodies, thanks to my Blood-, and to a lesser degree Death-, Magic, I could find and manipulate minds, thanks to my Mind-Magic but souls? I could somewhat get an idea that there was something interwoven into the physical elements of the body and the mental aspects that made up the mind, but what that something was? I had no idea. Working with Lenore helped but even when examining her perceptions and impressions, it was too filtered through her mind to be integrated into my own perception.


    The one thing I had decided, however, was that I wouldn¡¯t look back at those Arachnids. They may have tried to trap me, if so, shame on them, but trying to figure them out was a waste of time. There were more interesting things on the road ahead and looking back wouldn¡¯t help me get there.


    Instead, I had suggested a decent pace to the others, so that we could get to Carinthia as soon as possible. It was the last stop before we were to go into the White Mountains, and our last chance to get some extra supplies, possibly to pick up a few quests regarding the mountains and our passage through them. In addition, it seemed that the town was very much reliant on travellers and trade, making the people open to outsiders and quite polite. The tales were interesting enough that I had decided to see if that openness to outsiders also applied to my Outsider-Trait, which seemed like a reasonable assumption.


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    ¡°DId you manage to figure anything out about last night?¡± Lenore asked, landing on my shoulder.


    ¡°Still as clueless as before.¡± I admitted, grateful for the distraction. Speculating on essentially no information was pointless, but even though I knew that, I just couldn¡¯t help myself. I wanted to know what had happened, but had no way to figure it out.


    ¡°I want you to consider this: Remember how you drained the trace of divine Blood from that wolf a while back? Could you do something similar to Ylva, just not to drain it? Instead, could you use your Blood Magic to look into her, looking for that trace within her, acting as if you are looking for an injury? It should be easier to find, right?¡± Lenore suggested, bringing up Ylva¡¯s request, turning my mind into a totally different direction.


    ¡°It might work.¡± I allowed, twisting a strand of hair around my finger, a little lost in thought. It likely wouldn¡¯t be as easy as that, but I could remember the oppressive presence emanating from that single drop of blood, powerful enough to send shivers down my spine. Yet, when I thought of the Titan we had seen, and it¡¯s winged tormentor, the presence radiating from the Blood was put into perspective, Sure, if the real thing, the ancient, divine wolf that had sired the progenitor of that wolf, had been there, likely even if one of the earlier descendants had been there, the presence would have been similarly powerful. But when it had been filtered through the generations, the splendor had dulled.


    Realisation washed over me for a moment, generations, that might be important. What about the heritage of my Avatar? How many generations was it removed from the creation-event that had spawned the Firn-Elves? The experiment by Loki, using some of his own blood? How much of the divine presence, if that''s what I had felt back then, was within my own blood?


    The thought kept circling within my mind, until we stopped for lunch. Instead of helping the others, I begged off, asking them to take care of my part, as I had something else I wanted to try. Given that they knew I had run into trouble the night before, though not what kind of trouble, Olivia easily accepted, while Adra looked at me with a bit of suspicion. She knew me quite well, at this point.


    Sitting comfortably within the crown of a tree near the road, no point in conjuring up my throne for a short rest, I began to look into myself. Not trying to use the physical aspects of my Blood Magic, as I wasn¡¯t really looking for something physical. I might be able to manifest it physically, if I used my Magic, but I didn¡¯t think that the Divine Blood was something physically present within my body, that could leak out if one was bleeding bad enough. No, it was a divine quality within my blood, that could be condensed using magic, at least that was what I believed.


    For almost half an hour, while the others were working nearby, I was mentally flipping between my Blood Magic and the perception of Astral Power flowing within my body, trying to find that divine quality, looking for anything that screamed divinity at me. Or maybe that screamed chaos, deception, earthquakes or maybe even sexual perversion to me, all qualities associated with Loki. Sadly, at the end of that half-hour, the only thing I had to show for was a resurgence of my headache, luckily not as bad as it had been earlier.


    Following the call to get food, I hopped down from my tree, enjoying the short sensation of free fall, gently landing on the ground. Walking over, I decided that I would continue to look into the Blood Issue myself, but not spend all my time on it. Instead, I wanted to finally crack a mystery I had been nibbling on for months, namely the teleportation through shadows. Shifting into the Shadow-Realm, moving within it and shifting back out was as close I could reliably get at the moment, which was already good. But I wanted to fully figure out the teleportation-issue, especially when I considered that I had essentially teleported my mind through the Astral the night before.


    If those could be combined, wouldn¡¯t I be able to teleport at will? Moving across vast distances, with nothing but a single step? Even the headache I was feeling didn¡¯t manage to erase the smile on my lips.

 Chapter 457

    Walking up the Carin-Valley, I let out a content sigh. While I wasn¡¯t yet close enough to the snow-capped mountain-tops to magically reach them, just seeing the white glaciers up there, blending in with the clouds in the blue skies above, made me happy. Just knowing there was a large body of Ice nearby gave me a peace of mind I hadn¡¯t quite expected. The knowledge that I had a nearby location where my powers were amplified by orders of magnitude, where I would be able to face armies if needed, that I could realistically bury any town close to the mountains, it allowed me to breathe easily, especially with the idea to venture into Carinthia, the last town on this side of the mountains, still in the back of my mind.


    ¡°We should get there today, right?¡± I asked Olivia, the one actually knowing the geography quite well.


    ¡°Unless we take a really long break, yes, easily.¡± she replied with a grin, before pointing up ahead, along the mountain-stream that was flowing down the valley we were walking up. ¡°See that pass up there? Once we are past that, we¡¯ll reach Lake Thia, and it¡¯ll be about two hours of walking until we reach Carinthia, less if we hurry.¡± she explained, making me nod.


    For the last bit of the way, I once again, considered a way to make that shift between Shadows and the Astral, running, once again, against the same wall I had been knocking against since coming up with the idea. The closest mental comparison I had was that, if the physical realm was the path, the realm of Shadows was on the left side while the Astral River was on the right side. Getting from one to the other, without getting into the physical, seemed to be impossible, or if it wasn¡¯t I had yet to find anything that indicated so.


    Similarly, the idea to maybe shift my body into the Astral, an idea proposed by Lenore as I had the ability to shift my body into my Hallow, which possibly was kinda similar in a way, yes, we were very secure in our hypothesis, didn¡¯t work out either. When I tried, the only thing I had to show for my efforts was a headache and some damage to my health, indicating that there might be a possibility but if I persisted in my efforts, I was more likely to kill myself than to succeed.


    On the killing myself-front, I was quite relieved when Lenore reported that the ¡®scratch¡¯ on my soul had healed on the second day of our journey, reduced to the point that she was no longer able to detect it. There was a bit of a question about scarring, but again, it wasn¡¯t as if I could detect what had been wrong, making it difficult to assess any lasting damage. All I knew was that Road to Purgatory had even more layers than previously thought, driving up my already ample motivation to figure it all out, even if there was a question in my mind, whether that was even possible. The World of Mundus, it seemed so real, so complete, the efforts of Pantheon Entertainment to create a realistic, ¡®breathing¡¯ world a resounding success.


    ¡°What a sight.¡± Adra¡¯s voice, filled with admiration and awe, broke me out of my thoughts and I focused on the world around me beyond setting one foot before the other and keeping my balance. Without Sigmir next to me, making sure I didn¡¯t wander off the path or run into a tree or something, I wouldn¡¯t let myself get as lost in my head, but luckily, she was there, allowing me to deeply ponder my ideas.


    Looking around, I realised that we had reached the pass Olivia had pointed out, a pass obviously carved by the nearby river. The road didn¡¯t quite go through the middle of the path, but was some distance up the slope of the mountain, giving us a nice view of the pass beneath and the river that had carved it. Beyond the pass, the valley widened into a bowl-shaped valley, which was mostly filled by the stream, only that it widened to a mountain-lake. While I had thought the landscape before beautiful, the valley before us was right out of the musings of a poet, green meadows, interspersed with fields and farm-buildings, with a town on the far side of the river. A couple, maybe two dozen, boats were visible on the lake, likely fishing, and I could make out various herds of animals, roaming the slopes. We were not close enough to really make out details, but I was reasonably certain that there were mostly sheep and cattle, maybe goats as well. If I wanted to know, I¡¯d have to take a closer look later.


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    The most impressive thing however was the lake itself. Stretched out, reflecting the deep-blue sky above, it looked positively picturesque. It made me want to see it during the winter, covered in Ice, the valley filled with snow from the mountains. At the same time, a part of me wanted to just dive in, especially on the other side, in the area where glacial run-off was flowing in. Swimming in clear, ice-cold water sounded almost as good as walking across the glaciers above, surrounded by Ice that would never melt. Well, not unless the people of Mundus caused their own global warming, and even then it would take them a while.


    ¡°The valley has to be peaceful.¡± Sigmir remarked, looking at the various farms dotting the valley, with their fields stretching along the lake-shore. Before, the vast majority of fields had been concentrated directly around the cities and towns, allowing the people to actually live behind walls, or at least behind a wooden palisade. Here, the farms were simply out in the valley, with no protection visible from the distance.


    ¡°Well, it should be very secure.¡± I remarked, looking at the steep slopes, the side-valley leading deeper into the mountains and, especially, at the pass we were standing in. While it wasn¡¯t truly narrow, trying to march an army through it would be suicide, at least if the other side had some sort of warning. Even just a few sheep-herders with knowledge of the terrain would be able to kick off a rockslide to bury their foes, unless those foes had some heavy-duty magical support. While I would be able to use walls of Ice to keep a small rock slide away from us, I somehow doubted that the average army had one high-level spellcaster for every five people, and trying to protect more would quickly push me beyond my limits. Even then, I¡¯d have to use Overflow and possible Bullet Time to empower myself beyond my normal limits.


    On the other hand, while armies wouldn¡¯t be able to really get to the valley, small groups or singular monsters would wreak havoc, making the acceptance of Adventurers Olivia had told us about quite reasonable, if you relied on people to keep your livestock and way of life secure, you wouldn¡¯t want to shun them.


    With our current destination in sight, our steps seemed just a little lighter and a short bath in the lake during our lunch-break made it just that little bit better. The lake¡¯s water was as clear as it had looked from above and refreshingly cold. The slightly extended break meant that it was late afternoon by the time we got close to the town and curiously, I could easily see how the various herds of goat, sheep and cattle were driven towards the buildings, making me wonder why. While it wasn¡¯t the height of summer anymore, the weather wasn¡¯t bad enough to warrant such haste, certainly not as early in the day as it was.


    Shrugging, I focused back on my immediate surroundings, mentally bracing myself for the rejection of the supposedly tolerant people of Carinthia.


    ¡°People seem tense.¡± Lenore told me, landing on my shoulder. Hearing her assessment, I was almost about to simply give up before we even got there, hide within my Hallow and make note not to take the Outsider-Trait, even if I would have to take another negative trait to make up for the positives I enjoyed. While I didn¡¯t necessarily like to be in the company of people, especially strangers, getting shunned wherever I went didn¡¯t make for the best experience.


    ¡°Wait until you know what is going on.¡± Lenore suggested, remaining on my shoulder to lend encouragement. The path from the ancient road to the town-gate was a short one, though I wasn¡¯t quite sure why they hadn¡¯t built their town around the road, using it as the main-street or something. It had been similar in Yaksha, Kolyung and Neamov though I didn¡¯t remember why that had been. Ladrin, on the other hand, had been built around the roads, especially the bridges.


    ¡°Adventurers?¡± The guard at the gate asked, before we could fully step up, his voice hopeful.


    ¡°Yes, we are. Why?¡± Adra asked, sounding a little confused.


    ¡°Wonderful. If you would please go directly to the Guild, we can really use the help.¡± he replied, gesturing towards a nearby building, letting us pass without doing much more than glancing at us. I didn¡¯t even get a second glance, or one of the glares I had been subjected to before. Something very weird was going on here.

 Chapter 458

    Walking the short way from the gate of Carinthia to the Adventurer¡¯s Guild, essentially across an open square, felt incredibly weird. Even at the Brighthollow Clan, the orcs had looked at us with a mixture of interest and dislike, but here, they received us with an almost giddy excitement. It made me want to look over my shoulder, to see if there was either a hidden camera or someone else, walking behind me, who warranted such a reception. There was no scorn, no distrust, nothing of the sort.


    ¡°What is going on?¡± I softly asked Sigmir, who was walking next to me.


    ¡°I have no idea.¡± she admitted, speaking just as quietly, her head swivelling around, trying to figure out what was going on. A neutral, maybe even curious response would be understandable, a wary, hostile or at the very least cautious one expected, especially with the tension Lenore had noticed from above. But people looking at us with hopeful expectation and excitement? Not what any of us was used to.


    Stepping into the Adventurers¡¯ Guild, I realised that at least that was about what I would have expected. A reasonably clean room, a few boards filled with the various tasks open for the taking, a counter that separated the front-room for the customers from the back-portion reserved for the staff, roughly what we had seen before. Only that here, too, the smile on the receptionist¡¯s face seemed genuine and happy, if mostly hidden by a bushy beard.


    ¡°Good Afternoon, the gate-guard suggested we check in here before anything else?¡± Adra greeted the dwarf behind the counter, getting a nod in reply.


    ¡°Yes, Good Afternoon. Would you mind if I Observe you, or could you give me an idea of your power-level? While I can guesstimate from visuals and aura alone, certainty is always preferred.¡± the dwarf asked, getting straight down to business, whatever the underlying business was in this case.


    Adra shot me a quick glance, getting a shrug in reply, before I decided to give an answer.


    ¡°I would prefer if you¡¯d refrain from the use of Observe, but to give you an idea, around level hundred, with a balanced mix of martial and magical abilities.¡± I replied, keeping things about as vague as possible.


    The dwarf rubbed his beard for a moment, considering things, before nodding, mostly to himself.


    ¡°Hopefully, that¡¯ll be enough.¡± he muttered, before focusing back on us, his eyes flickering between Adra and me. ¡°To clear up your confusion, for the past two weeks, maybe longer, there¡¯s been something in the valley, some monster or maybe a pack of them.¡± he explained, letting out a sigh before continuing.


    ¡°At first, we didn¡¯t quite realise that it wasn¡¯t just individual livestock that vanished, not like all the shepherds and goat-herders exchange their tallies regularly. But once the Farmer Krem talked to his neighbour and realised that they, too, had lost a lot more than normal, a lot more than could be seen as ordinary bad luck and normal predation, he sent one of his workers around, to gather and spread information. Turns out, it wasn¡¯t just him and his neighbour, but everyone in the valley was losing livestock, and a few local youths thought it would be an Adventure to figure out what was going on. They stumbled across some of the carcasses, found some strange tracks and ran away, back into town, as fast as their legs carried them.¡± At that, the dwarf gave a snort, shaking his head a bit.


    ¡°And a good thing that they did, just the next day, one of the shepherds didn¡¯t return as normal and people went looking. They found him, or at least they found parts of him. Poor lad was torn apart, ripped limb from limb. And gnawed on. That was last week.¡±


    ¡°Could you find out what is going on, maybe even put a stop to it? There¡¯ll be a reward for you, especially if you can manage it quickly, whatever that thing is, our losses are mounting, it has started to kill indiscriminately, not just for food, but for pleasure. And it seems to have a special pleasure to kill people. So far, nothing has attacked the outlying farms, but that might just be a question of time.¡± The dwarf asked, and, as expected, a blue window asking if I wanted to accept the quest popped up. From the way the eyes of the others flickered, they, too, saw that window.


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    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="2">Quest Alert!</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="2">Hunter in the Night.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="1">Quest Difficulty</td>


    <td colspan="1">Hard</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="2">A hunter stalks the shores of Lake Thia. Find out what it is and, if possible, end the threat.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="1">Quest Reward</td>


    <td colspan="1">fifty Gold-Coins, fifty Silver-Coins


    Bonus-Reward: Cloaks made from Carin-Wool.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    After sharing a quick look with the others, I could only shrug, before giving the others a nod to accept. While time was, as always, a concern, the simple fact that it was a reasonably high-level quest, well-suited to our strength of seek and destroy, with a good reward. Even without a monetary reward, just the EXP from killing a powerful monster and completing a quest would be worth sticking around a day or two, especially with the positive reaction the town had to us.


    ¡°Can you tell us more about those weird tracks that were found?¡± Adra asked, sounding interested. .


    ¡°Not really. I mean, I can tell you where they found it, and that the lads who found them described them as large, with claw-marks cut into the ground, but not of any animal they¡¯d ever seen.¡± the dwarf explained, shrugging his shoulders, visibly happy that we had accepted the quest.


    ¡°Lenore, did you notice anything from the air? And could you take another look, now that you know there¡¯s a monster on the prowl?¡± I asked, while Adra began to question the receptionist about pertinent information, regarding distribution of recent attacks, where the tracks had been found, all those things necessary to actually begin hunting.


    With Lenore¡¯s unspoken agreement, I opened the Guild¡¯s door, letting Lenore take to the sky, before returning to the counter, where a large map of the valley was spread out. Instead of interrupting, I carefully listened, sending the information to Lenore as long as she was within range for detailed communication, allowing her to begin searching efficiently.


    ¡°We should get some rest, head out during the night.¡± Adra suggested, getting nods of agreement from us, while the receptionist looked a little unsure.


    ¡°Wouldn¡¯t it be smarter to wait until tomorrow, follow the beast¡¯s tracks and ambush it?¡± he asked, sounding concerned.


    ¡°Normally, yes. But there are special circumstances. The Beast, whatever it is, is not the only monster that likes to hunt at night.¡± Adra replied, winking at me with a grin on her face.


    She wasn¡¯t wrong about that, a part of me wanted to challenge whatever beast that was, show it that true monsters didn¡¯t need to slaughter indiscriminately, that it was no longer the master of the night around these parts.


    ¡°If you say so?¡± The dwarf accepted her words, confused but without further information, which none of us were willing to provide, he instead gave us directions to an inn where we could get some rest and food.


    We excused ourselves, knowing that every bit of rest before a potential night-hunt and battle was valuable, quickly making our trip over to the inn. We didn¡¯t have to walk far, it was just across the square and creatively named Mountain-Gate Inn. Even just the short distance demonstrated the weirdly welcoming atmosphere, though it made a little more sense if they were desperately in need of people to hunt their monster. Hopefully, it wouldn¡¯t change once things were done and we got paid, feeling welcome and appreciated was quite nice.


    The inn-keeper, a slightly portly dwarven lady, welcomed us, especially when Adra explained that we would like to rest now, get some food just before nightfall and leave, to hunt down the monster that troubled the town. Hearing that, she didn¡¯t even try to negotiate some payment for the rooms, instead she simply invited us to rest, promised to wake us when the sun was setting behind the mountains and have food ready.


    With an amused smile on her face, in contrast to the disbelief the rest of us was feeling, Oliiva accepted the hospitality and we followed into the back.


    ¡°Isn¡¯t that a lot nicer, than getting chased out of town, just before the locals come after us with torches, pitchforks and whatever implements they can get their hands on?¡± Adra asked me, her tone teasing.


    ¡°If you manage to behave, we¡¯ll be able to enjoy this treatment for a few days, resting, maybe you can enjoy swimming in that cold lake, you seemed to enjoy that. So please, behave!¡± she added, earning a scowl. It wasn¡¯t as if I had been actively trying to get us chased out of the other towns. Despite that, it happened far too often for comfort. Maybe, this time would be different.

 Chapter 459

    Eating in a filled common-room was rarely pleasant, with countless people milling around, too much noise and, far too often, drunk people being drunk. But when we came down the locals quickly recognised that we were travelling Adventurers who planned to rid them of the monster stalking their valley. That caused an annoyance of a different kind, instead of noise and hostility, people came to our table, some thanking us even if we hadn¡¯t actually done anything yet, others wishing us luck. All around, the locals seemed to try making us feel welcome and appreciated, to the point that I felt uncomfortable from the attention.


    Luckily, the food was delicious, fresh fish, with some aged cheese and still-warm bread, acting as a very welcome distraction, until we stepped into the night, cheered on by the locals. It made me wonder if they would still like us in the morning, if we failed to find their monster. Or failed to kill it. Would the joy they currently feel switch to dislike, would they hate us for dashing their excitement? Hopefully, I wouldn¡¯t have to find out.


    ¡°What did you find?¡± I asked Lenore, who had been out while we rested, looking at the various locations of interest around the valley. The biggest problem was that the beast, whatever it actually was, had apparently found a taste for killing, attacking and slaughtering without rhyme or reason, leaving the torn-apart remains of its victims all over the valley. Neither Lenore nor I had managed to spot enough of a pattern to predict where it might strike. In reply to my question, Lenore shared what she had seen all over the valley, dozens of images of shredded flesh, both animal and dwarven, making it obvious that the beast wasn¡¯t just hunting for food.


    One of the spots she had, relatively close to the valley and fresh enough that I thought the goat had been killed the night before, was what I suggested to Adra as our first destination. That way, she hopefully would be able to find some tracks, maybe giving us a better idea of what we were dealing with, while also letting us follow the tracks. Finding the beast¡¯s lair would be good, even better if we managed to ambush the beast. On the other hand, having the beast find us, while we were out in the night, would also fulfill our quest - or kill us.


    Once we reached the spot Lenore had found, Ylva and Adra started to look at the remains and looked for tracks. While they did their thing, the rest of us kept a careful watch of our surroundings. As I was studying the cragged mountainside above us, I noticed that there was something more to the coppery scent of blood that still saturated the area, slowly turning into the stink of decay.


    ¡°Do you smell that?¡± I asked, closing my eyes to focus on my sense of smell. There was something, an almost familiar smell that I couldn¡¯t quite put my finger on.


    ¡°What do you mean?¡± Sigmir asked, while Ylva padded over to me, sniffing the air.


    ¡°I¡¯m not sure.¡± I admitted, my tongue flickering out in an attempt to taste just what it was that had caught my attention. There was something, something that caused the feathers in my neck to ruffle and stand, but I wasn¡¯t sure what.


    ¡°I smell blood and rot. But you are right, there¡¯s something else. It almost smells like a wolf.¡± Ylva admitted, growling with her hackles raised. She started padding back and forth, her nose switching from sniffing the air, to snuffling on the ground, trying to figure out just what she was smelling.


    ¡°It can¡¯t be a wolf.¡± Adra spoke up, shaking her head in negation. ¡°The bite-marks are all wrong and some of the wounds look a lot more like some sort of troll or some other physically strong humanoid savaged this goat. More pulling and twisting than biting, clawing and shaking.¡± she explained, still studying the area.


    ¡°But what the guy at the guild said was right, these tracks are weird. I¡¯ve never seen anything like them. These tracks look almost plantigrade, but they aren¡¯t not really, not with the way these claw-marks have dug into the ground.¡± she muttered, more to herself than to us, before calling Rai over.


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    ¡°They most closely resemble your tracks, Rai, but not quite. I don¡¯t quite know what to make of them.¡± she explained, after looking at his feet for a moment. With her stumped, the rest of us had even less of a chance to get where this was going. Luckily, her physical skills were only part of what she could use, with her magic being her trump-card.


    And now, that she seemed stumped, Adra was using just that trump-card, softly chanting under her breath, the scent of her magic filling the area. Shaking my head, I returned my focus to the area around us, just in case the monster was sneaking up on us.


    ¡°I think I¡¯ve got something.¡± Adra called out a minute or two later, her voice confused, questioning as if she wasn¡¯t quite sure just what she had found.


    ¡°There are tracks around and I think I found the ones the monster left. But even the effect its aura has on its surroundings is weird.¡± she continued, her forehead creased.


    ¡°Can you follow it?¡± I asked, trying to get her back on track, literally.


    ¡°Yeah, now that I know what I¡¯m looking for, I should be able to follow.¡± she replied with a nod, though there was doubt in her voice.


    In a formation similar to the one we had used when hunting for bandits a while back, we continued with Adra and Ylva trying their best to follow the tracks. Curiously, while both were following the same tracks, Adra was convinced that we were following a troll-like being, a humanoid beast that towered above Sigmir, with monstrous strength, Ylva¡¯s growls and raised hackles told a different story. She looked so very similar to the way she had looked when hunting the Black Wolves, it made me doubt that was a coincidence. We might be hunting a beast-man, someone similar to Rai, but not quite.


    Curiously, even after we left the carcass behind quite a bit, I still occasionally picked up the scent of blood, mixed with that confusing something I couldn¡¯t put my finger on. By this point, I was convinced that what I was smelling wasn¡¯t physical but magical, as I was the only one smelling it. Which meant, Blood Magic, or maybe Flesh or some other derivative. And for it to linger meant it had carried a great deal of power, it was difficult to say.


    Suddenly, Ylva stiffened, her nose in the air, a growl escaping her maw. ¡°There¡¯s blood on the wind.¡± she explained, with Sigmir relating it to the others.


    ¡°Let¡¯s check it out.¡± Sigmir continued, getting nods all around. It wasn¡¯t the optimal situation, but then, we might simply be lucky for once.


    Running through the night was a challenge for Olivia, her human eyes barely able to see with only the faint light from the stars above, while the rest of us had somewhat improved senses, with mine being the best at piercing the Darkness.


    After a short run, it wasn¡¯t just the scent of Blood that guided us, but the strange, wet noises we heard ahead, easily audible in the quiet night. There was a small part of me that envied Olviia, if only for a moment, when I got close enough to actually see what we had been hunting. It might have spared me the nightmarish image.


    Apparently, one of the shepherds had missed a sheep and the monster had found it. And turned it into art-supplies, ripping off parts of its body, using the blood to paint, or something of the sort, there didn¡¯t seem to be any other explanation for the way it had spread the pieces around the slope where it had caught it.


    The monster itself wasn¡¯t quite what I had expected, though it turned out that both Adra and Ylva had been right in their own ways. It looked like a mix between troll, beastman and wolf, maybe with some gorilla sprinkled in for good measure. Standing on two quite humanoid legs, it was almost a head taller than Sigmir, despite being hunched over. Its arms, ending in massive paw-like hands with wicked claws, were long enough to reach its knees and apparently used in locomotion, in a strange, hopping manner.


    Finally, its head was the pure stuff of nightmares. Neither quite canine, nor quite humanoid, the mouth standing out, almost like the snout of a canine, but the nose slightly separated from it. And that mouth, slobber leaking from the gaps between crooked teeth, with far too many teeth for its size, it sent a shiver down my spine. How it managed to sustain itself with a maw like that, with the countless jagged and malformed teeth was beyond me.


    The thing, whatever it was, it wasn¡¯t natural. Even the Nethersprites, those monsters against the natural order of things, those abominations against nature, they seemed to be less horrifying than that.


    For a moment, I wondered if coming after a monster that hunted during the night, at night, had been the smart decision, but then, with a roar that the locals might have heard in Carinthia, the monster announced that it had, infact, noticed us. And was ready to battle.

 Chapter 460

    ¡°By the gods.¡± Olivia muttered, before her voice took on the slow, deliberate cadence of spell-chanting. She wasn¡¯t alone with the sentiment, even if none of us expressed it the same way. Adra readied her spear with a look of grim determination, aware that engaging the monster with multiple people was our best bet, preventing it from focusing on any one combatant. Similarly, Rai pulled the shadows tightly around him, turning him into another shadow in a dark night. I could still perceive him, but others would be hard-pressed to find him, hopefully including the monster. Sigmir, as so often the center of our formation, clad herself in her red aura and readied her axe and shield, prepared to take the monster head-on.


    As for myself, I let the frozen Shuttles soar from their sheats in my cloak, their physical nature making them a good tool to assist while figuring out the nature of the beast. Trying to attack a monster that was highly resistant to Ice, which was a distinct possibility for a beast from the mountains, would do nothing but strip me of Astral Power that I could use for better attacks or healing.


    It didn¡¯t look like there was any chance of the meeting being a peaceful one, so I decided to risk drawing its ire to myself, by using the Observe skill. And what I saw made me realise that the quest-difficulty was justified.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>


    Lycantroll, Level 118


    </td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    The monster didn¡¯t give us any time to make a battle-strategy, charging just after its roar failed to make us flee in panic. Sigmir moved forward to meet its charge, only for that charge to falter, just a little, when Rai slipped out of the darkness, drawing one of his blades across the beast¡¯s hamstring in an effort to cripple its legs. Sadly, other than a short stumble, the attack had no effect. It might have annoyed the beast a little more, but it didn¡¯t even give Rai a glance while he slipped back into the shadows, taking a bit of distance.


    The clash between Sigmir and the beast sounded a little like a car-crash, as its clawed hand scraped across her shield, just before their bodies crashed into each other, with Sigmir stumbling back from the impact, looking a little dazed.


    Both Adra and I did our best to harass the beast, striking at any place that might be vulnerable, my shuttles darting in and out, while Adra kept her distance and used the reach of her spear to full effect. Neither of us thought that getting hit by the beast¡¯s claws would result in anything but massive injuries for anyone, even if Sigmir might be able to use her shield to block a few of them.


    Olivia¡¯s chant culminated in a loud plea to Eleutheria, asking her to shield us from harm. Golden light shone from her staff, concentrating on Sigmir, mixing with the red glow of her aura and adding another layer of shielding, just in time for another of the beast¡¯s attacks to batter against her shield, trying to gain purchase, even as Adra and I did our best to force it back. Sigmir, not to be outdone, struck back, sinking her axe deeply into the meat of its arm, leaving a deep gash. Sadly, the joy I felt on seeing what should be a crippling wound was a short-lived one, almost as soon as Sigmir withdrew her Axe, the blood in the wound frothed a little, a strange smell filling my nostrils, and moments later, the wound was gone.


    Looking closely, all the smaller wounds, little more than scratches and pinpricks, Adra, Rai and I had struck in the short exchange had closed already, the bit of blood that had oozed out of them masking the beast¡¯s insane regeneration.


    While a few more exchanges between the monster on one side and Sigmir, supported by all of us, happened,I was quickly drawing up a magical formation, based around Blood- and Darkness-Magic, the idea being that if we couldn¡¯t quickly kill the thing, weakening it would keep Sigmir safe until it finally succumbed. Using my Astral Power to devour its strength, its speed and maybe even part of its regeneration would hopefully stop it from doing too much damage.


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    In the time I needed to draw the seven runes, three of devouring in a triangle, with a second triangle of Speed, Strength and Regeneration, both triangles bound together by a Rune of Blood, the beast had suffered and regenerated a few more wounds, while Sigmir, with the help of Olivia¡¯s shields, had blocked all but one strike, leaving a bloody gash on her upper arm.


    My magical formation flashed with light, as one of the shuttles I had used to harass the beast delivered the Blood it had drawn into the center, giving it a direct link to the beast, via its Blood. Even if the monster¡¯s coarse fur was as good a defense against magic as it was against the physical attacks we had brought to bear, using its blood would circumvent most of that defense.


    Channelling a vast amount of Astral Power into the formation, as much as the formation could stably handle, I could see the Beast stagger, the magic taken effect. My lips curled into a wicked smile, as I watched the others take advantage of its slowed speed, with Rai and Adra scoring more strikes into its legs, hoping to fully cripple it and turning it into a sitting duck, for us to dispatch.


    Before I could truly rejoice, the Monster put on a burst of speed, as a deep, red glow oozed from its pores, making it look like it was completely covered in blood. The aura brought it back to its earlier speed, as if the curse still coursing through its body wasn¡¯t even there. Along that speed came strength, enough to break through Oliiva¡¯s shield and Sigmir¡¯s block, tossing her aside like a ragdoll.


    And then it came for me, crossing the distance in seconds. Taking a risk, I activated Overflow, forcing a surge of Astral Power into the formation to prolong its effect, even as I abandoned the channelling. It would last for a bit longer, maybe a minute more, before fading. It was all I could do, before having to flee.


    As I jumped back, Sigmir¡¯s aura sprung into being around me, in an effort to shield me from harm, but even with it adding to my speed, the beast was a lot quicker. Instead of trying to outrun it, I chose to evade, by retreating into the Shadows. I barely managed to fade into them in time, avoiding the physical aspects of the blow, though the bloody aura was incredibly painful as it ripped through my incorporeal form.


    The pain was strange, lingering in a way, but distant in another, part of my mind convinced that my chest had been torn apart, even as another part of me was just as convinced that I was whole. The warring sensation remained, even as a roar of hatred shattered the air, almost an echo to the one the beast had given off earlier.


    As I returned to the physical realm, I could see Sigmir, surrounded by her flaring red aura, interwoven with the amber light coming from her union with Ylva. While I couldn¡¯t see her eyes, I knew that they would be golden, just as her hands would be tipped with claws and her arms covered in silvery fur. It was her version of the Avatar-State, though it was incomplete as mine had been before Lenore and I had crossed the second Divide.


    But, incomplete or not, it was enough to give her a physical edge, at least as long as my curse was still lingering on the beast. Where before, Sigmir had fought cautiously, after the beast had broken away from the three of them and attacked me, she had thrown caution to the wind, even abandoning her shield and axe in favour of her Lok¡¯Nar. Or maybe she had lost them, I had no idea.


    And it worked, her savage attacks were driving the beast back, her Lok¡¯Nar striking wounds that didn¡¯t heal in the blink of an eye. After another of their exchanges, the beast actually leapt back, taking some distance as it sniffed the air.


    I had been breathing hard, trying to suppress the pain in my chest while recreating the Curse I had used earlier, the exchange between the two of them too swift and savage to risk using my shuttles, for fear of hindering Sigmir.


    Yet, now that there was a momentary pause, I could see the beast clearly and what I noticed made my blood run cold with hatred and a desire to inflict as much pain on that monster as I could, to rip its mind to shreds before slowly feeding its physical form into the Nether, where the Nethersprites would devour it¡¯s life-force, keeping it in constant pain until it died. If I had a way to torment its soul, to bind it and not let it experience the sweet relief of oblivion, I would gladly do so. Alas, there were limits on my ability, but I was fully resolved to push those limits regarding the amount of pain I could cause that monster as far as possible. Really, I was looking forward to it.

 Chapter 461

    If it were only the beast¡¯s eyes, deep-set but looking greedily at my Sigmir in a way that made me want to take a shower, despite it not being directed at me, it would have been one thing. I would still have plucked the thing''s eyes out for it, and killed it soon after, but I wouldn¡¯t have anticipated nearly the same amount of pleasure in doing so. What really made me want to come up with creative solutions to prolong the thing¡¯s pain as long as possible, to rend its body, flay its mind and finally, grind its soul until nothing but dust remained, was the brightly pink appendage that stiffly stood out from its middle section. For that, it deserved an eternity of torment, but I would have to settle for whatever pain I managed to inflict before it succumbed.


    Throwing caution to the wind, I decided to take the risk of using the double-edged sword that was Mind Magic. There was little doubt in my mind that I would be able to strike at it that way but in doing so, I would open myself up to a counterstrike. It was the reason I only used direct mind-magic attacks when I was confident that the enemy was weak enough to succumb. Or if the pain I would suffer wasn¡¯t as important as the pain my foe would suffer.


    Focusing my mind, gathering some Astral Power, conceptualising it as a lance of frozen Darkness, cold like the depth of space, I waited for my chance. I doubted an attack on that scale would kill the thing, but even a momentary stun at the right time would cost it. Dearly.


    I didn¡¯t have to wait for long, Sigmir had managed to get back up, thanks to an attack by Adra, who the monster had smacked aside for her interference, and was charging back in, Lok¡¯nar drawn back to strike. Right before the monster could try to evade, I struck, my Mind Magic instantly crossing the distance and piercing into its mind. For a moment, I could feel the primal savagery of its mind, that it was nothing more than a beast, less even, simply a mass of primal instinct, purely focused on killing, consuming and mating. As I tried to freeze it in the Dark, to make it see nothing but a lightless, cold void, a place of eternal solitude, it lashed out, driving me back quickly.


    Even the short mental battle between the thing and me left me with head-ache and a bloody nose, my health-pool sapped almost to the half-way point. Between the earlier attack I had mostly evaded and the backlash from my Mind-Magic, I was hurting. But so was the thing, even a few moments of inattentiveness, as it had driven me out of its mind had given Sigmir all the chances she could ever want. Her massive axe, driven by anger, determination and her glorious, muscular body had cleaved off one of the things massive arms and even continued on, digging into its thigh. The wound in the leg was only superficial, but for some reason, it didn¡¯t seem to close as all the others had.


    But the real damage was, obviously, the lost arm and the blood that was gushing out of its wound, causing the monster to roar again, only now it was in pain. Hearing its pain, my earlier smile returned, the noise was akin to the sweetest music to my ears.


    ¡°Look at this.¡± Lenore mentally pushed an image at me, urgency making me pay attention. Thanks to her vision, she could see that the thing was more than just a beast, or maybe less. Its flesh was filled with a dense network of magic, partially Blood-Magic, but there was more to it, Darkness- and even what appeared to be the counterpoint to Death-Magic, a primal Life-Magic all mixed together with parts I couldn¡¯t grasp in an intricate curse. In its own way, it was beautiful, its complexity reminiscent of the divine Magic Olivia wielded. A part of me wanted to study the beauty of the magical craftsmanship, but that could wait until we had chopped off the rest of its limbs, especially that ugly appendage between its legs.


    During my moment of distraction, the battle hadn¡¯t just stopped to wait for me. With the beast missing an arm, Rai had decided to take the opening presented and pressed the attack, slashing at the wound Sigmir had struck, trying to enlarge it, in an effort to cripple that leg. Sigmir, too, had only backed off for a moment, to avoid the counter-strike from its other arm, before pressing back in. In the image shared by Lenore, I could see the Curse I had woven earlier, still clinging to the monster, until a flare of power, accompanied by another roar, shattered the remnants of my hindering curse, allowing the beast to move at its full speed again. Rai, who had been a little closer to the beast due to the shorter reach of his blades, was the first to get swatted aside, the beast simply body-checking him, causing him to tumble away.


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    Sigmir, on the other hand, had its full attention and despite its lack of an arm, it wasn¡¯t willing to call it quits, surging forward in an effort to grapple her. Its sheer mass, alongside the sudden increase in speed, was enough to catch Sigmir, pushing her off her feet and to the ground, with the beast on top of her. Without thought, I charged forward intent on violence, as the Frozen Shuttles I had abandoned earlier surged back, striking into its back to little effect. My own two blades of Ice were added to the mix, barely penetrating the beast¡¯s coarse fur and tough flesh in an effort to murder it. Instead of trying to rip them back out, I simply drew my other weapon, the silver Athame I used for my Blood Magic. If the Beast was willing to ignore me, as it tried to do unspeakable things to Sigmir, I would gladly take that opportunity.


    Curiously, the slender silver knife easily slid through the fur, barely hindered by the tough flesh beneath. I had been careful to stab its side, below the rib-cage, where I could sink the blade in deeply without having to care for any major bones that might hinder my weapon. With my mind still focused on my Athame, I activated both Overflow and Bullet Time, pushing my Blood Magic to the highest output I could manage, as I ripped out the energy that kept it alive and kicking.


    I had felt the pain of Blood Magic before, having used it on myself, but I had been relatively careful when doing so, trying to keep the effect as controlled as possible. Here, I didn¡¯t care if the thing was in pain, if anything I relished in the pain I was causing it, and the effect it had was obvious. As I began drawing out power, it stiffened, giving Sigmir the opportunity to push it off herself and roll away, leaving the monster scrambling in the dust for a moment, before she managed to get a grip on her Lok¡¯nar and sunk the blade into the things spine, splattering me with a bit of its blood.


    Still, it wasn¡¯t dead. Not yet. And it hadn¡¯t suffered nearly enough for my liking.


    The shattered spine had taken out its legs and before the monster could do more to push itself up with its remaining arm, Sigmir had lined up another strike, this one shearing off the second arm at the elbow, leaving it eating dust.


    ¡°Ylva wants to know if you can use the thing¡¯s blood to strengthen her.¡± Sigmir told me, her voice hoarse, both from exertion but also from pain. Wrestling with the massive monster had taken a toll on her. Luckily, she didn¡¯t seem to be really wounded, only battered.


    I had to consider the question for a moment, but it seemed plausible. At least some of the monster seemed to be canine in nature even if it¡¯s overall appearance was a horribly unnatural amalgamation. Stepping closer again, I drew out the Athame, sniffing the Blood I had already drawn, only to be confused. The blood smelled like nothing special, similar to the blood of ordinary beings, quite similar to orc- or troll-blood.


    After making sure that Rai and Adra were reasonably well, with Olivia taking care of them, I focused back on the monster. Together with Lenore, I took a closer look, both at the crippled being that wallowed in the dirt and at the Blood we had already drawn. The results were disappointing, I could see how the curse on its flesh was drawing magic from the Astral River, more than I had thought possible, in a way that I hadn¡¯t thought possible, trying to restore the monster¡¯s flesh. And for some of the wounds, it worked, even my Ice-weapons were pushed out of the wounds I had struck, landing on the ground nearby, but some other wounds reamined, including the crippling ones.


    But as impressive and interesting as the curse on the monster was, the monster¡¯s blood was utterly boring. There was literally nothing special about the Blood I had magically drawn, there was a bit of Astral Power but even the dripping Blood was more interesting as it carried some of the curse within. However, the difference alone was quite interesting, the way the curse tried to keep the flesh alive made me wonder, how far would that work? Could I dissect the monster without killing it? When would the curse break? Would the curse try to regenerate appendages, if I cut them off with the Ice-Weapons? The wounds they had struck were regenerating after all, while others did not.


    So many questions to answer, so much truth to dig out of the monster¡¯s flesh. The pain I would inflict was merely a bonus to my pursuit of knowledge.

 Chapter 462

    ¡°You won¡¯t be able to help him.¡± Olivia spoke up, as she slowly moved around the downed, still squirming, form of the Lycantroll. I had been staring at my Athame, still bloody, with Lenore¡¯s sight, trying to understand the devilishly complex magic. It was only thanks to my growing expertise with the curses of Darkness-Magic and the intricacies of Blood Magic that allowed me to get the vaguest idea what it was. The Curse afflicting the Lycantroll was almost a living being, a magical parasite that had attached itself to the humanoid host, drawing Astral Power into the body, regardless of the host''s condition, while fueling the regeneration I had witnessed earlier.


    ¡°What do you mean?¡± I asked in reply, honestly confused. Why would I want to help that creature, the only help I would ever provide it would be a release from the pain. Though, I would also be the one to inflict as much pain as I could before granting that release, so calling it a help was dubious at best.


    ¡°The Curse, I¡¯ve heard tales about it, never in Aretia though. Someone called divine Retribution down on this poor soul, their jealous fury strong enough to draw the attention of Megaera. And this is the result.¡± she explained, leaving me almost as confused as before. While it was interesting that the curse was divine in origin, explaining why it was as complex as it was, her answers had only brought up more questions, without ever touching on what I wanted to know in the first place.


    Without explaining further, Olivia finished her slow circle around the body, having set up four candles around it, in some sort of rectangle or cross, depending how you looked at it, before stepping back and starting to chant again. It was a surprisingly short chant, ending with a loudly spoken prayer, invoking Eleutheria.


    ¡°Gentle Lady Eleutheria, please grant this soul the mercy he needs and allow him to rest in your garden.¡± Olivia spoke, her eyes closed. Moments later, the small candles flared up, setting the body between them on fire with the same golden flames I had seen Olivia use before, burning without heat, but burning nonetheless. To me, still watching through Lenore¡¯s sight, it was fascinating to watch as the golden flames burned away the Curse that had infused the whole being, leaving the flesh mostly untouched yet changed.


    While part of me wanted to protest, to stop her from destroying a fascinating research-subject, I stopped myself. If the curse truly was divine in origin, I wouldn¡¯t be able to replicate it, even if I used all the time I had left in the beta for that study. It just wasn¡¯t worth alienating Olivia over information that I wouldn¡¯t be able to pursue, turning it into a mere curiosity.


    The golden flames burned quickly, leaving behind a mangled husk of a troll, the wolven features burned away. At the same time, a message in the log told me that we had received experience and that we had completed the quest. What made my eyes widen was just how much experience we had gained, almost double what I would have expected for a foe of that level, even if I included the bonus for defeating a foe beyond our level. It was, in fact, enough to boost me to level 104, while the fight and my, albeit brief, study of the Curse netted me two points in Blood Magic and a single point in Darkness-Magic, bringing them to seventy and sixty, respectively.


    ¡°I thought you didn¡¯t have any offensive magical abilities?¡± I asked, mostly in jest, when Olivia let out a sigh, looking at the body.


    ¡°And I don¡¯t. That ritual was only to grant him the release of death, nothing more, nothing less.¡± she shook her head, before softly muttering, ¡°The poor soul.¡±


    ¡°Can you tell me what you know about that Curse and what happened here?¡± I asked, taking a short look at Adra and Rai, making sure that they had been healed up and resting for a bit. Even with our rest at the inn during the afternoon, the short fight had taken a lot out of us all.


    We all retreated from the body, while Lenore left her Hallow, hopping over as she channelled Death-Magic to turn the corpse to dust. While I had the ability myself, I had used a great deal of magic and wasn¡¯t feeling too hot from using Mind Magic against such a powerful target. The anticipation of discovery had driven my aches, both physical and mental, back, but now they had returned with a vengeance.


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    ¡°Where to start?¡± Olivia muttered to herself, after we had settled down under a nearby tree. ¡°What is Justice, what is Mercy? And what is retribution, what vengeance?¡± she began, not expecting an answer?


    ¡°We talked about something similar, shortly after we met. Why He is bound as he is, how such a punishment can fit any crime? What you saw tonight is similar, an emotion born from loss and the anger that stems from such loss. The loss of a loved one, the loss of love, those emotions hold power. And when that power manifests, it is a horrible thing.¡± she paused, her hand reaching into her bag and pulling out a flask I hadn¡¯t seen before.


    ¡°What you saw tonight was pure vengeance, no mercy, no redemption, that curse was born in an act of hate. Sweet words, uttered from a forked tongue, they can cause a great deal of pain but the pain might return to the speaker threefold.¡± she continued, after taking a drink from the flask. I somewhat recognised the smell coming from the bottle, making a mental note to make sure she didn¡¯t drink too much. Or, at the very least, didn¡¯t try to drink and conjure.


    ¡°Can you explain clearly? Without the flowery language?¡± I asked, more interested in the facts than the poetry. Olivia let out a snort and took another sip from her flask, before continuing.


    ¡°Divine Magic isn¡¯t like the forces you use. In theory, anyone can call upon the gods and, if your call is strong enough, your need and your emotions pure enough to reach them, one might answer and grant your wish. In this case, a woman, well most likely, scorned, called out for vengeance and Megaera answered the call.¡±


    ¡°On Aletome, we call those afflicted Savages, though some call them Lycanthropes or Werewolves. The curse strips them of their sapience and everything that made them into who they were. It turns them into monsters, beasts without reason or understanding, driven only by hunger, by a lust to kill and destroy.¡± Olivia¡¯s voice trailed off, before she continued.


    ¡°There is no cure, at least not outside of myth and legend, the only mercy anyone can offer them is a quick death, and hope that they will find peace in the next life.¡± she sounded sad as she told us that, disappointed even.


    I could only nod in response, not quite able to relate, neither to her, feeling pity for a monster, even one made by a curse. Maybe especially one made by a divine curse. If one wanted to trust in the Gods, you had to trust that their curses would only strike those who deserved them. Which, in turn, meant that some higher power had deemed that the troll, who was slowly fading into dust, had deserved that fate.


    To me, it mattered little. Whether the troll had deserved to be turned into a monster or not, he had terrorized the valley and they had tasked us to end him. I would have liked to study the curse some more, though likely without success given its divine nature, but even what little I had seen was quite interesting, giving me things to think about for a few days of marching.


    ¡°Do you want to tell the Guild that someone created the monster?¡± I asked, before remembering that werewolves were supposed to spread their curse around, at least in the stories I knew.


    ¡°And does the curse spread, by saliva or blood or something?¡± I added, looking over to Sigmir, who had been the one taking the most hits. Luckily, there was nothing I could detect that hinted at the curse I had seen, and I knew I would keep a close eye on her.


    ¡°Again, only legends speak of the Curse spreading, and only under special circumstances.¡± she explained, studying each of us in turn, with her being the only one who hadn¡¯t been attacked, before she continued to speak.


    ¡°To reply to your other question, yes, I think we should tell them. Not that we can tell them much, the way the curse changed his head, we can¡¯t even describe how he looked. Maybe they can get an idea, maybe not, unless you have an idea how to track the caster?¡±


    ¡°Not really.¡± I admitted, considering the question. If it had been their Astral Power, I might have been able to get a taste, so to speak, and sniff them out that way. But even without Olivia burning away the curse and whatever power might have been used to create it in the first place, it was highly questionable if I would be able to get past the divine nature of the magic.


    ¡°Anyway, we should head back soon. I¡¯m sure people will be excited to hear that the monster is dealt with. Or, now that one monster is dealt with, didn¡¯t you say something about Manticores in the mountains ahead?¡± I asked, pushing the matter of the curse to the back of my mind.

 Chapter 463

    Despite my best efforts to push those thoughts aside, the Curse that had surrounded the Lycantroll kept lingering in my mind. It was a gorgeous piece of magic, mind-bogglingly complex, yet I suspected that at its core, barely any power was required. The crux of the matter was quite simple, to the point that it had taken me longer than it should to realise it, but I shouldn¡¯t have been able to parse the different elements within the Curse, even with my affinities to Blood and Darkness, divine magic was something else. Something beyond the ordinary elements, so why, how had Lenore and I been able to get an overview of a Divine Curse?


    One possibility was that Olivia was wrong, that the Lycantroll, or maybe all Savages, hadn¡¯t actually been transformed by a divine Curse, but by a mortal¡¯s work, a powerful and brilliant spellcaster similar to the Grandmother. Maybe posing as a deity, which would raise questions of its own, but it was a possibility. That was the simplest explanation, but it required such a spellcaster to exist and act in an, in my opinion, extremely illogical manner. Possible, but I wasn¡¯t happy with the idea.


    Thus, my second hypothesis was born, that the Divine Curse itself wasn¡¯t what I had seen, but that there was a smaller core, possibly even a physical carrier of said core, that was created by divine Magic. Said core would act similar to a virus, using the host and the host¡¯s connection to the Astral to fuel the curse I had seen, with the brilliant, likely fully intentional, side-effect that the power of the Astral was channelled through the mind - and a mind that was too weak to handle such a strain, which might as well be any mind, would likely be burned out, akin to an attempt to connect a microchip directly to an electric mainline. If my hypothesis was correct, I wanted to applaud the deity who had come up with the idea and study at their feet. Not necessarily worship, but such a being would undoubtedly be deserving of my respect.


    Focusing my main attention back to the outside and quickly going over what Olivia had explained while I had pondered the underpinning of the Curse, I realised that the journey through the mountains would be both interesting and dangerous. Manticores were but one of the monstrosities that had emerged from the ruins of the Ancient Empire, destroyed in a magical cataclysm, bad enough that it had affected the Gods themselves. Olivia¡¯s words, and she had been unable, or maybe unwilling, to elaborate on that. But whatever the circumstances of that cataclysm, the result was that large swathes of land south of the White Mountains were filled with wild magic, infusing and changing whatever was unfortunate enough to be in the area. At times, the magic might even create such monsters but due to obvious reasons, study had been slow, the chaotic effects caused by uncontrolled magic of such magnitude making things nigh impossible. Things weren¡¯t helped by the fact that there was no unified power on Aretia, who might have the budget and desire for such an effort, leaving it to those with both curiosity and determination.


    A part of me had already made a mental note to study the area in the future, probably in the live-game, the limited time in the beta just not enough to go there.


    But back to the manticores and the troubles on the road ahead. Literally. Manticores were chimeras, for the most part lions with the tail of a scorpion, making them problematic foes, but not impossible to handle. They were, essentially, just an alpha-predator with an additional, deadly weapon that covered their flanks.


    The real problem, and what Olivia thought we were dealing with, came when the mix wasn¡¯t between lion and scorpion but when the mix included a sphinx, a mystical cousin of the mundane lion, and coming equipped with wings. Which added to the already problematic Manticore the ability to fly and to resist magic, thanks to their mystical heritage.


    Apparently, there was another variant, this one not just a mixture of a mundane scorpion and a mythical sphinx but between a dragon and a sphinx, further increasing their magical resistance, giving them the ability to use an elemental breath-weapon and turning their deadly stinger into something worse, though she hadn¡¯t been able to elaborate on what that was. She simply didn¡¯t know but was reasonably certain we wouldn¡¯t be facing one of those, due to their solitary nature and extreme rarity. It was a little weird to be told that reports of a group of flying, mystical alpha-predators was a good thing. But that would be a problem we¡¯d have to deal with at another time.


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    Once we had sufficiently caught our breath, made sure that all injuries were treated to the best of our abilities, which meant quite a lot between Olivia and myself,we decided to head back towards Carinthia, even if they might have closed their gate during the night and while scaling the wall was easily within each of our abilities, it would somewhat send the wrong message. Or maybe the right message, if they wanted to quibble regarding our reward.


    As we walked Olivia and Adra continued to discuss Manticores and other monstrous trouble that had been spawned by the Ruins of the Ancient Empire, a region that, to my gamer-instincts, just screamed high-level area, possibly even massive, high-level open world-raid. For now, I was only interested in circumventing it and the ecological reasons why a pride of flying manticores had left their habitat and made themselves a home in the White Mountains were off lesser importance. I still listened, simply due to a sort-of morbid fascination, the descriptions of ordinary beasts, changed beyond what even crossing the first few divides would normally accomplish, were fascinating. Horrifying and scary, yes, but fascinating. As long as I, and the rest of my group, especially Sigmir, had some distance to them, I would happily listen.


    My interest in their conversation instantly vanished when I noticed that Sigmir, along with Ylva, had fallen back a little, the connection between us giving me a hint at Sigmir¡¯s mental state. She was deeply worried, even if little showed outwardly.


    Falling back to join her, I even had Lenore hop onto my shoulder, so she could use her magic to make sure the others wouldn¡¯t overhear anything accidentally. Reaching out, I took her hand, simply to physically impress that I was there, to remind her of my affection. Like that, we walked for a minute or five, with me simply waiting for Sigmir to put her mood into words.


    ¡°That beast.¡± she began, her voice soft, worried. ¡°Do you think I¡¯ll turn into something like that?¡±


    Her question threw me for a second, until I realised what she actually was worried about. Her avatar-ability, if it continued to progress as mine had, which seemed somewhat likely, would turn her into a mix between herself and Ylva, similar to the way mine turned me into the being that called herself the Raven¡¯s Shadow, different and distinct from both Lenore and myself, yet comprised of the two of us. But what would that mean for Sigmir and Ylva, would their form be something like the Lycantroll we had just killed?


    ¡°No.¡± I confidently told her, quickly putting my earlier thoughts about the curse and the nature of that transformation into a more coherent form.


    ¡°The creature we fought, it wasn¡¯t natural. It was merely a single troll who lacked loyalty and conviction. So, when someone called upon the Gods, maybe to punish him, maybe to teach him loyalty, he was struck by a curse. You, on the other hand, you and Ylva, neither of you need to be taught loyalty. Nor would I curse you, ever.¡± I assured her, trying to project complete certainty.


    ¡°What¡¯s more, the Avatar-form, the merge between Ylva and you, is something entirely different, instead of a single mind trying to channel enough power for such a massive transformation, the burden is shared between the two of you, in addition, Ylva herself adds the wolven nature, something that was entirely imposed from the outside, onto the troll. There was nothing wolven in him, only the curse.¡± I added, my mind less concerned with explaining what conclusions I had drawn and more with the necessity to ease Sigmir¡¯s worry.


    ¡°But, you know, even if you were struck by such a curse, you would never turn into a beast. I wouldn¡¯t allow it, nothing will take you from me, not even the combined might of the Pantheon.¡± I added, mustering all the conviction I could, not only trying to convince her, but also trying to convince myself. As it was a promise I wanted to keep. That I needed to keep, not just for her, but for myself.

 Chapter 464

    Who would have thought that the Outsider-Trait would have a positive effect. One useful enough that it had moved from my discard-list to my keep-list, when looking at optimising my character in the live-version of the game. Sure, it was annoying to get treated like dirt in most societies, but that treatment extended to acting like a social bug-repellant during periods of exuberance.


    After we had made our way back to Carinthia, we had realised that yes, the gates of the town were closed during the night, forcing us to spend a relaxing night, sitting on the shores of Lake Thia. The lake, lightly lit by the moon and stars above, had a unique ambience of peace, which Sigmir and I had enjoyed a great deal. Simply sitting there quietly, on a couple of rocks, dangling our feet into the water without thoughts or concerns. It allowed both of us to let go of our vigilance, of caution and paranoia, to simply be. Together.


    Come morning, we had moved into Carinthia and, with our return, rumours had instantly spread, making me wonder if they surpassed the speed of light. Certainly, no bushfire could move with such alacrity, not without galeforce-winds to drive it ahead.


    By the time we had made our report at the guild and collected the promised reward, a small festival seemed to have broken out, a joyous mood that surpassed everything we had seen on the day before. It made me wonder if these people were habitual drunks or if there was some drug in the air, something undetectable and slow-acting that made them that way. It seemed to be more plausible than a town of happy people.


    The brunch, that was akin to dinner for us, the innkeeper put up at a speed that made me wonder whether magic was involved in its creation, despite my nose assuring me that the food was free of magical residue, morphed into a close approximation to hell when the various locals started to voice their appreciation. Luckily, Sigmir quickly realised that I disliked the attention and while she wasn¡¯t able to keep them from noticing and gawking at me, with her looming above and behind me, glaring at everyone who approached while I added my own glare while thinking vicious thoughts, seemed to dissuade them from bothering us too much. It helped that the food was excellent and while I wasn¡¯t certain that beer for breakfast was healthy, it was tasty.


    On the other hand, Oliiva, Adra and Rai seemed to be enjoying both the hustle and bustle and the attention we all were getting. I was slightly flabbergasted when a couple of younger towns-people of various species started to flirt with Adra and Rai, who seemed to enjoy it. Just the idea of anyone flirting that aggressively with Sigmir made me consider murder, and the thought that it might happen to me made me incredibly uncomfortable. But maybe they had a different view. It didn¡¯t really need to concern me, as long as both were aware of the other¡¯s actions, they were relatively adult. When I realised that Olivia was flirting even more outrageously than the townspeople, hitting on locals that could easily be her grand-children, I decided that I needed more beer if I wanted to get through the day.


    The beer helped to get Sigmir and me tipsy enough to simply focus on the other, not bothering with anyone or anything around us. It didn¡¯t take long for a slightly drunk Sigmir to decide that she wanted to do things to me that weren¡¯t suitable for polite society, or a full common-room, and we retired for the rest of the day, and the subsequent night.


    By the time I left Road to Purgatory, I was quite appreciative that there was a bit of a disconnect between the Avatar and my mind, filtering and somewhat lessening the negative sensations while letting the positive parts flow through. Maybe it had been the beer but for some reason, Sigmir had been rather assertive, pushing my body in ways I had never quite been pushed before. It had been uniquely enjoyable, leaving me buzzing all over, but also sore and slightly aching.


    The nice thing was, once I had left the capsule, the buzzing was still somewhat there, allowing me to float on the memory of endorphins, almost as if I just had a very, very pleasurable dream, while the physical aches had been left behind in Mundus. Truly, the best of both worlds.


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    After a quick shower and some shopping, I was right on time for my training with Mrs. Wu, more lessons on human anatomy and how to dismantle another human with the least amount of force. It was quite fascinating, just how breakable the human body was, while her lessons on human behaviour were curiously similar to the lessons my mother had taught me, about behaving in polite society, only that Mrs. Wu¡¯s lessons often had to do with concealing something, while my mother¡¯s lessons had been on recognising what the others were communicating non-verbally in an effort to let me fit in.


    Why was it that functioning as an adult in polite society and hiding that you were an operative about to do something nefarious had so much in common? It made me wonder why humans couldn¡¯t be more honest, even if I understood the reasons. Human society was mostly built on lies, on deception and the presentation of a mask, with make-up, clothing, styling and decorum to conform. When I mentioned my observation to Mrs. Wu, she was quite amused, explaining that fitting into society was supposedly an innate ability but that the various forms of decorum that had been established over the centuries were created to identify the outsiders. It was a different form of tribalism and just as silly.


    After we were done with our direct and personal training, done out of sight in a private room at the back of the gym, she set me a set of difficult, if not particularly punishing, forms and left, to prepare dinner for her husband. I was still somewhat amused by the fact that outwardly, she was the perfectly integrated wife and grandmother, supporting her equally elderly husband in his pursuits, while I was very much aware that she had the ability to kill without question and I was as certain as I could be that she had done so. It made me wonder who the ¡°real¡± Mrs. Wu was, the kindly, grandmother or the ruthless, at times even sadistic, instructor who was training me in the art of murder. Or maybe neither was, and there was another facet of her being beneath both masks, hidden from everyone, maybe even herself.


    Flowing from one form into the next, carefully controlling and contorting my body as instructed, a part of my mind started to wander. The recent meeting with Chris made me wonder, and consider. Back at school, there had been persistent rumors that the two of us were a couple, a notion I thought utterly silly. But the same went for the idea of a romantic relationship of any kind, the idea that you needed someone to ¡°complete¡± you, someone you wanted to be close to for no reason other than they were who they were, it had all sounded idiotic. Until I had started to play Road to Purgatory and met Sigmir in that snowy forest.


    Somehow, I had changed, but had it been that moment, seeing her stand deviantly before the wolves, until her body gave out? Or had the change within me happened before that time and I had simply failed to encounter the right conditions to experience it?


    My wandering mind meandered back to the meeting with Chris, and more specifically, to his introduction to his wife. The way she glared at me, as soon as she heard my name. Thinking back to earlier, to my own behaviour in Mundus, in that common-room, and the people coming towards either Sigmir or me. Both of us had glared at them, keeping them away, to keep our privacy. I almost lost my inner rhythm when I realised that the glare she had given me was nigh identical to the glare I had given the people that had wandered close.


    Focusing a little, trying to remember what had been going through my head at the time, I realised that I had mostly glared at the young women, especially those with better¡­ ass-ets than me, that I had tried to keep them away to keep Sigmir to myself. Jealousy. In retrospect, it felt a little weird, especially without the frame of mind I normally had as Morgana. Did I really think Sigmir would pick some farmer¡¯s girl over me? Just because she had udders to rival a cow, or more ass than a mule?


    Amused, mostly at my own realised behaviour, I tried to think back how Sigmir had acted, at which people she had glared predominantly. When her soft growls had become loud enough to be actually audible and at which people those had been directed. Time and my own lack of focus at the time made it hard to judge, but I thought she had mostly growled at the approaching young men of the town.


    It took me a moment to recover after stumbling from the realisation and forced myself to focus on what I was doing, instead of letting my mind wander. But I was rather amused, at least until Mrs. Wu saw me with a grin on my face and decided that I needed more and harder exercises, if I was able to smile.

 Chapter 465

    ¡°Didn¡¯t we plan to rest up in Carinthia for another day or three?¡± I asked, right after emerging from my Hallow, taking in the camp-site on the upper slopes of the Carin-valley. Much further down-hill, I was able to make out the town, and obviously the massive Thia-Lake. Judging from the distance and elevation involved, the others had to have left shortly after breakfast the day prior, even before I had started sweating with Mrs. Wu, contrary to our original plans.


    ¡°Well, with you not being present, your love had to pick up the slack, you know?¡± Adra asked, her voice teasing and awfully amused. What made me curious enough to look over to Sigmir, was the strange mixture of embarrassment and pride I was feeling from her.


    ¡°No, I don¡¯t know, but please, elaborate.¡± I suggested, raising an eyebrow as my eyes swept across the three women, with Rai only visible thanks to my ability with Darkness-magic. He was, quite literally, doing his best to turn invisible.


    ¡°You see, it started in the morning, when Sigmir came down for breakfast without you.¡± Adra began, only to have Olivia speak up when she paused for a second, as if they had practised their act.


    ¡°And when Sigmir, tall and powerful Sigmir, sat there, all alone, after your¡­ singing voice had entertained the inn, and likely the whole neighbourhood, for the evening and most of the night, more than one of the females was interested in what she¡¯d done to you, and having the same done to them.¡± she explained, and the blush on Sigmir¡¯s face turned her purple. If not for her emotions, and the complete lack of guilt, I might have been upset, but I wanted to trust her. If she had done something, with anyone, she¡¯d feel guilty about it, of that I was certain. Brazing it out, I decided to simply ignore that the inn¡¯s walls apparently had been incredibly flimsy and by voicing my appreciation of her talent in a fairly audible manner, I had inadvertently advertised those talents to everyone nearby.


    ¡°They were quite open about it, hinting that, since you weren¡¯t with her, she needed someone else to entertain and making it about as obvious as could be that they wanted to be the one to take your place.¡± Adra continued, switching off with Olivia.


    ¡°And then? She rejected them, so it hardly seems to be a reason to leave town instantly.¡± I asked, curious to get the rest of the story.


    ¡°Well, it wouldn¡¯t be if everything she did was rejecting them. No, the trouble started when a couple guys decided to take umbrage at her popularity with the females.¡± Olivia explained, barely containing her mirth.


    ¡°And said umbrage was voiced in the most crude fashion, suggesting that they would make you scream, even louder than Sigmir had, as you obviously had to be some sort of... ¡° Adra paused, shaking her head, before continuing, ¡°Well, let¡¯s not go there.¡±


    ¡°Suffice to say, Sigmir did not take kindly to their words and dragged the loudest of them out, his friends more or less getting dragged with him. And once she was outside, she beat them, quite savagely at that.¡± Olivia added, before focusing on me. ¡°She really didn¡¯t like what they implied about you, you know?¡±


    ¡°Anyway, she left them alive and I made sure that they stay that way, while Adra and Rai took on a quest in the guild, to take kill some beasties in the mountains, mostly repeatable quests that are supposed to keep the roads safe, but also a quest regarding the Manticores.¡± Olivia continued, before Adra piped up a final time.


    ¡°And so, we got banned from yet another village. Not by your direct action, but I¡¯d argue that you are still responsible. We really can¡¯t take you anywhere, can we?¡± she asked, finally letting the laughter she had desperately holding in out.


    There were warring emotions within myself, a bit of lingering embarrassment at the idea just how audible I apparently had been, mixing with quite a bit of pride at the behaviour of my fierce protector and lover. Stepping over to her, I tried to pitch my voice in a stage-whisper, making sure that the others could hear me.


    ¡°Love, I¡¯m sure I should say something along the lines of violence not being the answer, or that their words can¡¯t hurt me.¡± I paused, motioning for her to bend down to my level before letting my voice drop to a real whisper, that the others would have to truly focus to hear me.


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    ¡°Fuck that, I love you for it, and I¡¯ll reward you in the most appropriate manner, come nightfall. My fierce wolf.¡± I spoke into her ear, before gently nipping at her earlobe, getting an adorable squeak in response.


    From the reaction of Adra and Olivia, I was reasonably certain that they had, in fact, listened in. Well, if they wanted to listen, I¡¯d certainly do my best to keep them entertained later.


    ¡°Anyway, enough of that.¡± I decided, stepping back from a blushing Sigmir, before addressing a seemingly empty patch of shadow cast by the mountains above us.  ¡°Rai, let¡¯s see how much you have progressed, your ability at hiding has certainly improved.¡±


    The others looked at the spot, likely unable to see anything, while I pushed myself into the shadows, carefully observing my nominal disciple, who had responded to my challenge by drawing his blades, an action I mirrored.


    For a few moments, we simply circled each other, getting a feel for the way each of us moved within the shadows. Rai went on the offensive first, moving just like he would outside, with me parrying in a fluid, often-practised motion. The result was different from what either of us had expected, both my strike and his parry lacking their usual weight. Instead of instantly continuing the offensive, Rai took a distance, while I didn¡¯t even try to capitalise on my successful parry, instead staying defensive.


    The brief, almost clumsy, exchanges repeated a couple of times, getting dodged and parried away by both of us, neither of us finding their rhythm or balance. When one of my dodges carried me a little too far, a part of my hand leaving the shadow of the mountain we had fought in, I experienced a brief moment of intense pain, as if I had stuck my hand into a blazing fire. In response, I blinked, disappearing and reappearing further up hill, a lot further from the edge. The brief lapse in focus made me realise something and I felt a smile creep up on my face.


    Focused movement, deliberate and highly controlled like it was needed for precision martial arts was surprisingly difficult within the shadows. Before, when I had entered them, there had been something I had to focus on, often something outside the shadows, distracting me from their peculiarities. The harder I tried to focus on the Darkness around me, the harder it was to actually understand it. But what if I did the opposite, what if I simply let myself flow or something along those lines?


    Closing my eyes, I allowed my mind to drift, back to the deepest darkness I could think of, the Void of space, where there was true nothingness. Without thinking, I shifted away when I felt the softer darkness around me twist, not even trying to understand what was going on, instead simply moving, flowing with it. Without knowing where I was, without trying to know where I was going, I could simply be.


    ¡°I yield!¡± Rai gasped out, just after I had somehow managed to push him out of the shadows against his will, leaving him sprawled before my still shrouded form. It brought me back to full awareness and I let the shadows around me go, as the creepy feeling of being watched returned with a vengeance, leaving me wondering what had just happened. I could somewhat understand what I had done, but the how was a mystery. But the feeling of epiphany, the need to jump around, shouting ¡°heureka¡± was strong within me, even if I wasn¡¯t quite sure how I would be able to practically use that epiphany.


    ¡°Are you alright?¡± I asked Rai, making sure that I hadn¡¯t been too rough in our training. I was reasonably sure that I had merely dispelled his control over the Shadows but it had been instinctual, not something I fully understood.


    ¡°Yes. Are you, Teacher?¡± he asked, his eyes focused on my hand. Following his line of sight, I realised that my hand looked as if I had the mother of all sunburns, red, blistering and, now that I noticed, incredibly painful.


    ¡°Yes, don¡¯t worry about it.¡± I assured him, trying to sound as casual as possible while hissing through clenched teeth. Even opening my fingers to drop the blade I was still clutching was impossible, though the instant manifestation of a Blood Magic rune-triangle to heal and regenerate helped a little.


    ¡°Do you consent to treatment?¡± Olivia asked, stepping up to the two of us, looking at my hand with concern. For a moment, I wanted to tough it out, simply to be the invulnerable Teacher, but while I liked to be perceived as strong, it wouldn¡¯t do to be an idiot about it, certainly not in front of my disciple.


    ¡°Yes, thank you.¡± I replied, most of my mind still focused on my own healing. Moments later, a curiously prickly sensation, quite different from the way my Blood Magic healed, swept over my hand, leaving it looking hale but I could still feel the underlying damage. Lesser now, but certainly not healed, more as if the world had been tricked into believing the damage was gone, even though it wasn¡¯t. Divine Magic was weird, but I was grateful for the reprieve of pain.


    ¡°Maybe we should be on our way, before you become unable to keep your promise to Sigmir.¡± Olivia suggested, her voice recovering her earlier teasing tone.


    ¡°Yes, let¡¯s be on our way.¡± I agreed, after a short pause.

 Interlude: Highlightreel V

    A group of well-armed soldiers is slowly advancing, each of them clad in uniform chain-armour, carrying a spear in one hand and a shield in the other. They move in a well-practised formation, their shields overlapping with spears thrust through the gaps.


    Ahead of their formation, throwing rocks and timber at them in an attempt to stop them, a few massive, humanoid beings are waiting, each taller than the advancing soldiers by half their height and twice their girth, their bodies thick with muscle. Just before the line of soldiers crashes into the massive beings, a voice calls out from behind, ordering a volley.


    On a dark meadow, four people are quickly moving in formation, a wiry humanoid with a gleaming spear leading the way. From the darkness, a tearing sound is audible and all four stop their movement, forming into a formation with the previous leader flanking a tall, lightly blue-skinned humanoid clad in chain-armour with a shield in one hand, an axe in the other. Behind them, two smaller figures are moving to opposite flanks, keeping their distance. A soft, chanting cadence is heard, though the words are impossible to make out.


    Ahead of them, hidden in the shadows of the night, is a monster seemingly escaped from a nightmare. A deformed head, almost as if someone had taken a couple humanoid parts and violently crammed them together with canine parts before adding more teeth than both of them should have together. Large, tree-trunk like arms, with oversized hands and claws that might do double-duty as daggers and are dripping with blood. Finally, legs and hips that seem similarly mis-alinged as the head, only that the figure somehow manages to stand on them, while its claws are busy tearing some poor creature apart. As it realises the approaching figures, it lets out a roar that seemingly causes the mountains around it to shake.


    In a thick forest, dimly lit by sunlight filtering through the trees, a loose formation of fighters is making their way towards an unseen goal. The center is composed of heavily armed dwarves, clad in heavy plate-armour and armed with everything from hammers to polearms. The people moving on their flanks are less armoured, some only clad in leather, reinforced with some metal pieces, armour while others are wearing slightly heavier, but much more obvious and audible, chain-armour. Not that stealth is really an option, when traipsing through the forest in a large group.


    Behind them an almost unarmed group is protected, their garb more akin to a noble overseeing their lands, or even a simple traveller, with a focus on durability and sturdiness.


    Finally, their destination becomes visible for but a moment, a wooded valley, filled with countless black spiders, ranging in size from tiny things, only visible when moving, to things that evoke a primal need to kill them with fire, before they can lay eggs. Only, it is obviously far too late.


    With the command to fire, a shower of projectiles, mostly arrows but with a few bolts of magic mixed in, arcs over the soldiers up front, who instantly pick up their pace, turning their slow advance into a sudden charge. While the arrows mostly deflect off the thick hides of their massive foes, a few manage to penetrate into their flesh, though not deep enough to deal any real damage. The magical projectiles face a similar problem, the stone-spears and icicles simply shattering on contact, the only outlier a bolt of lightning that causes charge to dance over the being hit, stunning it for a moment.


    But while the lasting damage the projectiles cause is negligible, their primary objective is to act as a diversion, a task they fulfilled perfectly. On their charge, the earlier close formation of soldiers split up, forming four groups of three, one for each of their massive foes. Their spears still leading the way, the soldiers crash into their foes mostly unopposed, without giving them time to brace. Still, only one group manages to truly cause damage to their foe, the group that struck into the one stunned by magic and thus even less able to defend itself than its compatriots. With three spears stabbing deeply into its body, the monstrous form stumbles back, wounded but far from defeated.


    With a snarling noise, the misshapen foe leaps forward, the attack brutal in its savagery, trying to tear the incoming blue-skinned fighter apart. Despite the fact that the blue-skinned fighter was taller than her wiry companion by more than a head, the beast stands even taller, towering above her and far outmassing her. Still, as a shimmering, red armour envelops the blue-skinned female, she steps up, ready to block the monster¡¯s charge.


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    Only, that charge never quite makes it, at least not in the way the monster had planned. Just before it can crash into the female, the darkness next to it twists and for a second, a gleaming blade turns visible, held in the hand of a dark, humanoid outline. Nothing but shadows, but the blade is all too real, striking into the monster¡¯s hamstring, breaking its charge and causing it to stumble, its claws striking the female¡¯s shield, doing nothing but making her stumble back.


    In the opening caused by the failed charge, the wiry female stabs her spear into its other leg, while a series of strange icicles, shining with a silver light orbits the creature, darting in to strike at it.


    The leading dwarves stop, readying themselves behind their shields, while the unarmed people behind coalesce. Four of them step together, glowing for a moment while one of them holds a scroll that seems to absorb the glow, creating a shining beacon in the dim light of the forest.


    ¡°Thunderous Wrath!¡±


    With those words, a magical formation appears above the skittering spiders and countless lightning bolts rain down, crashing into the earth, setting fires and, most importantly, devastating the gathered arachnids. Once the lightning settles, the magic formation fades, the gathered fighters charge in, ready to mop up their remaining eight-legged prey.


    ¡°Focus the wounded one!¡± The same voice that called for the earlier volley, is now ordering the archers and spellcasters to focus on the wounded monster. While the other three groups form defensive formations again, bracing their shields together, allowing them to block the heavy swipes from their massive foes, the three focusing the wounded one take another tactic. The one leading that trio is clad in silver light, stepping up to take a swipe by himself, stumbling back from the hit and taking a knee. Meanwhile his two companions press the attack, driving the monster back, into a position that allows their ranged support to capitalise.


    This time, the focused arrow-fire manages to do more than distract the being, even though most arrows only score superficial wounds. One arrow, though, manages to find its mark, guided by either luck, skill or magic. Maybe all three played their part in the perfect shot taking the monster in the eye, causing a roar of pain to echo as it rears back, making an opening that the two unharmed soldiers take, one stabbing their spear upwards, into its neck, the other driving their spear into its chest.


    The roar cuts off, turning into a whistling noise as the spear tears through its windpipe and moments later, the great beast staggers backwards, while the soldiers take their distance, to not get caught up in its death throes.


    The monster tries to overcome the female warrior again and again, clashing with her shield even as she uses her axe to strike, trying to score a lasting wound. But, thanks to the constant attacks from the female¡¯s allies, the monster is unable to truly focus. Still, none of their attacks seems to actually hurt it, the wounds quickly stopping to bleed, not hindering it in the slightest.


    Until one of the figures in the back creates a glowing, magical formation and blood red symbols shine from beneath the beast¡¯s pelt and its movement becomes sluggish, slow and weak. An opening none of the attackers miss, even the blades held by darkness make another appearance, strike into the beast but at that moment, the beast proves that it is no mere beast, glowing red in a jagged, crude mockery of the red armour enveloping the female fighter who had given it such trouble. With nary a swat, it manages to force that figure back, making an opening it instantly takes, moving at blinding speed towards the one in the back, who still has the magical formation float in front of her.


    Its claws tear through the formation and the figure behind it, only that the figure isn¡¯t tossed away like a ragdoll, like she should be, instead the claws move through her, causing trails of dark mist to waft away, before the whole figure disappears, like smoke in the wind.


    A deep, bone-rattling roar comes from the largest of the monsters and with a massive swipe, it manages to break through the shield-wall the three soldiers had used to hold it back, causing all three of them to tumble back. The two remaining allies close in, barely keeping the monster from finishing off their shaken allies. Both are surrounded in the silver glow their leader had used before, and still, they need to work together to block the beast¡¯s attacks.


    ¡°Stand together!¡± their leader orders in a loud voice, and the silver glow turns brighter, with strands of brass woven through it. The three shaken soldiers rally, joining their formation with the formation of their allies, to keep them from getting overwhelmed. Behind them, the leader shouts another order and moments later, the spell-casters who had held back before unleash their stored power, striking the largest monster, right before another volley rains down on it, though without another perfect shot.


    But while the arrows prove less effective, a crack of thunder signals another lightning-attack and this time, too, there is an opening caused by the stunning power of the lightning. An opening that is exploited by a lance, held by their leader charging in on a large roan horse.


    His lance pierces through the thick hide, shattering bones and tearing organs in the process, before he is past, leaving it stuck in the beast''s chest. While it is dying, it is not dead yet. With a savagery born of its impending demise, it strikes the leader¡¯s horse, causing the leader to tumble through the air, while the horse goes down in a heap of broken bones.


    Join us, or you all might fall.


    On the Road to Purgatory.

 Chapter 466

    It had been a while, since a message sent over the Pantheon-Entertainment Forum managed to catch my eye. Mostly, I received a mixed bag of hate, mindless adulation and people feeling entitled to the information I had gathered in Road to Purgatory, which I routinely ignored, slowly configuring the spam-filters to work to my satisfaction.


    But a message from Tobiuno, a former rival from my Craft of War-Days, was a bit of a surprise, I had read some of his posts before, and had received a positive message while the initial dumpster fire around my departure from Craft of War had been raging, but other than that, there was little direct contact. Even more interesting than the message itself, however, was the content, as he was searching for confirmation that it had been me in the last Highlight-Reel and if it was, if I would be willing to discuss the content, which would also include the other two parties in that Highlight-Reel.


    Knowing what I knew about the Arms of Helios and their troubles with the spiders, it made me wonder what was there to discuss, especially in private. If they were aware of my involvement in their troubles, they wouldn¡¯t seek a private conversation, unless they were planning to engage in some bad-face acting and publishing the conversation with their own slant and if they weren¡¯t aware, well, that made me wonder what was there to discuss.


    And so, given that I was a little sick of wandering the mountains of southern Aretia, I decided to agree to the discussion, if the specifics were handled to my satisfaction. The reply came quickly, and introduced me to a feature of the capsule-space I hadn¡¯t been aware of, the conference-mode. It turned out, you could install an ¡°anywhere door¡± within your space, allowing people to enter your space, provided you gave permission, even giving you the option to ban them from individual rooms within your space. It was an interesting feature and I already had an idea where I would install such a door, namely at the bottom of the staircase I had used in the introductory video I had made a while back. Maybe not the most convenient, and I had a feeling if I actually wanted to use the feature I would change it, but for now, I thought it would send the right message. Luckily, to leave a capsule-space, whether it was your own or the one you visited, didn¡¯t need the door, only a simple interface-command, otherwise I¡¯d be the first to put that door into a more convenient space.


    Thus, a couple of days after we had killed the Lycantroll and been travelling through the White Mountains for a few days without seeing anything more interesting than a couple rather large chamois, I was sitting on my throne, within my capsule-space. Befitting the occasion, I had deliberately altered the Avatar I was using, instead of using a reflection of my actual body. While there most likely were pictures of me out on the Internet, some with my real name attached, others linked to my former gamer-tag, I wasn¡¯t about to simply give my private information to other gamers if I could help it. The information-conscious part of me still had a slight headache after considering how much and how deeply private information Pantheon Entertainment might be able to gather using their capsules, despite their assurances that all personal data was stored locally and could neither be leaked nor deliberately used. But there was no way around the Capsule, if I wanted to play Road to Purgatory.


    At the appointed time, a blue screen, quite similar to the ones used in Road to Purgatory, informed me that Tobi Kramer - aka Tobiuno, had invited me to his capsule space. Nodding to myself, I pressed the accept-button and there was an almost nostalgic feeling of vertigo, similar to the feeling I had experienced during my original character-creation.


    It only lasted a brief moment, before the world around me appeared, only that I now was in a curious mix between a conference-room and a medieval castle, the walls and the ceiling made from hewn stone, braced with untreated timber, the floor carpeted while the conference-table and the chairs were obviously modern and looked quite comfortable.


    ¡°Greetings, Morgana.¡± the person at the head of the table greeted me. I remembered meeting him during the few in-person events I had played at, the captain of our strongest competitor and currently the host of this gathering, Tobiuno. His dress was quite similar to the room, an obviously deliberate mixture between medieval noble¡¯s wear and modern business-dress, with suit-pants, a light-blue dress-shirt and a black, long coat made from rougher cloth.


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    ¡°Greetings, Tobiuno, it is a pleasure to be here.¡± I replied, a polite smile on my face. I wasn¡¯t the first to arrive, other than him obviously, but I wasn¡¯t the last either. At the foot of the table, dressed in a similar fashion to Tobiuno, was a pair of humans, one of whom I recognised as the leader who had been fighting those oversized Trolls in the Highlight-Reel, the other one a woman unknown to me.


    ¡°If you like, you can use the window behind you to display images.¡± Tobiuno told me, and a blue box informed me that I had been granted limited editing rights to that window, a wide expanse of glass more at home in a modern skyscraper than in a medieval castle. It was mirrored across the table from me, with a pleasant, grassy meadow currently on display.


    ¡°Certainly, I¡¯ll do that.¡± I nodded, quickly mirroring the view one would have from the open meditation-area I had created in my capsule-space, looking down on clouds and windswept cliffs. It didn¡¯t quite fit with the aesthetic of the room, but I thought it was good enough.


    Before additional introductions could be made, another pair of people, one of them obviously using an Avatar out of Road to Purgatory, who I also recognised as the Pan-Spellcaster who had been with the Travellers when they had been scouting and attacking the Arachnids, the other a woman, looking incredibly out of place in her modern loungewear. Everyone else was either partially or fully dressed in medieval garb, with muted, almost drab, colours, making her, in her hot-pink sweatpants and crop-top look ridiculous.


    ¡°Hi Tobiuno, hi Morgana, nice to meet cha¡¯¡± The woman greeted, her voice sounding young to my ears, almost as if I was talking with a teenager. ¡°I¡¯m Maggy, Grand Poobah, Guild Master and overall high muckety muck of the Arms of Helios, and this is Josh, the Organiser of our Ladrin-Branch. Kem sadly couldn¡¯t be here.¡± she added, a wide smile on her face.


    I wasn¡¯t quite sure how to take her whole demeanor, forcing myself to keep the polite smile on my face, as I introduced myself as Morgana, while Tobiuno demonstrated that he was a people-person, as he dropped some of the formality he had used with me, instead greeting the woman more like one would greet a friend.


    ¡°I greet you, too. I¡¯d prefer to be called Ardros, if you don¡¯t mind.¡± The Pan introduced himself, his actions formal, as I would have expected someone to act in Mundus.


    For a minute or two, the room engaged in small-talk, during which the other two humans were introduced as parts of the Blades of the Realm, Tobiuno¡¯s guild. The Captain was called Droram, the other one his second in command, a Thunder-Spellcaster named Raia.


    Finally, once I felt that enough niceties had been exchanged, I decided to bring the meeting back on track. Clearing my throat, I got the attention of everyone and spoke up.


    ¡°Now, Tobiuno, I would like to know why I am here, what you feel needs to be discussed regarding that Highlight-Reel.¡± I asked, studying the rest of the room.


    ¡°Certainly, we can get to business.¡± he agreed, ¡°Why don¡¯t we all take a seat and I¡¯ll explain.¡± he suggested and for a moment, only the rustling of clothes was heard, as everyone took their seats around the table. For a moment, I regretted not having my Throne, but not only was the space not mine, the Throne wasn¡¯t suitable for negotiations between equals.


    ¡°Raia noticed it first, and brought it to my attention. If you could explain?¡± he asked, giving his subordinate a nod.


    ¡°Of course. I noticed that the Highlight-Reels always had a bit of a theme around them, from mass-battles to attacks on singular foes, to crafting, that kind of thing. But this last one had no such theme, not obviously at least, and maybe more importantly, it ended before the fights had played out. I know what happened with you guys,¡± she nodded to Maggy and Ardros, before looking over to me, ¡°And I somehow doubt that the monster you were fighting simply keeled over after charging you, which makes me wonder what happened. In our case, I don¡¯t mind telling you that we were fighting so-called ¡°infused¡± trolls who had been raiding farms in the area we are working in, but we have no real idea what the infused part means. They were bigger and stronger than normal trolls, but lacked any semblance of reason.¡±


    Her explanation was interesting and there was a part of me that wanted to ask questions, a lot of questions, but somehow, I didn¡¯t feel that she was telling us everything. Luckily, there was someone here who seemed to eschew every notion of conventional negotiations, instead acting as if we were on a school yard. I didn¡¯t need to wait for more than a few seconds, before Maggy started to blurt out questions and information.

 Chapter 467

    Watching Maggie rapid-fire questions at Raia was quite amusing, but asking questions without giving the other time to respond seemed to be in poor taste. Instead of watching, I wondered how I would react within Mundus, if I was truly embodying Morgana, not just wearing the body, so to speak.


    ¡°Let her reply.¡± I ordered, speaking softly into a momentary pause as Maggie demonstrated that she needed to breathe on occasion. Maggie¡¯s expression flickered for a moment, before settling into a pouting grimace, but she didn¡¯t continue her interrogation, allowing Raia to go into detail, essentially describing the rest of the battle.


    It turned out, there wasn¡¯t that much more, after the trolls had lost their leader and Droram had his steed knocked out from under him, forcing him into retreat, Raia had taken command, not that their tactics actually needed a lot of commanding. With each falling troll, more soldiers could join together in the attacks on the remaining trolls, leaving them in a quickly accelerating death-spiral. Mopping up, essentially.


    ¡°What can you tell me about your foes? What made them infused? Where do they come from?¡± I asked, looking for a pattern. I somehow doubted that Ardros would be able to tell me more about the Arachnids, though I would have to ascertain that assumption. For now, I wanted to know more about the other battle.


    ¡°Good question.¡± Raia admitted, glancing over to Droram, who, in turn, looked to Tobiuno. Passing the buck up their chain of command.


    ¡°The Blades of the Realm govern and, in turn, protect a relatively vast swath of land in the central-south of the Empire, a partially wild region, though geographically contained. The deeper mountains house monsters far too powerful to drive out without concentrated, Imperial effort, something which has yet to happen. Maybe, in the future, it will be a major raiding or high-level zone, but I doubt that anyone will be able to actually master the zone during the Beta.¡± Tobiuno explained, making me nod with understanding though I wasn¡¯t quite sure where he was going with that.


    ¡°Lately, these monsters have caused trouble in the outer, wild regions, though the location is a little weird, and we decided to nip the problem in the bud, before they could boil into the civilised regions and begin to seriously attack livestock and maybe even the people.


    Nodding, mostly to myself, I looked at Ardros, asking the same question, though I already knew the answer and had to stop myself, from laughing when he described the countless spiders they had blown up, getting almost no experience in the process, only to get feared into their webbed traps and quickly snuffed out.


    With both sides focusing on me, I decided to share, curious if they would draw the same conclusion. I was reasonably certain that the biggest hint was the Infused.


    ¡°What we were fighting was called a Lycantroll.¡± I explained, the name getting groans from everyone. ¡°Tobiuno, you and your people might have heard of the Savages, as they are called in Aletoma. It was similar to them, just replacing the human with a troll. And yes, adding the template of a monster famous for its regeneration on top of a monster famous for its regeneration makes it regenerate really, really quick.¡± I added, feeling that the information wasn¡¯t worth anything to me. I wasn¡¯t about to actually explain how we had killed it.


    ¡°Suffice to say, killing it took some time and was not fun, those claws were vicious.¡± I finished, getting nods of acceptance. I had explained the least, waiting for questions from anyone but Maggie, who was giddily asking about details.


    ¡°So, Infused Trolls, a cursed Troll and tons of spiders that give little experience when slain?¡± Tobiuno summarised, getting nods in return.


    ¡°Altered Beasts?¡± Raia asked, mirroring my earlier conclusion. ¡°Altered, by some outside force? That would fit for the ¡®Infused¡¯ moniker and the cursed beast, too. If the Spiders were somehow altered by an outside force, their experience-points might be greatly lowered to account for that.¡± she continued to reason, following a similar path as I had earlier.


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    ¡°It is plausible. The Priest travelling with me was quite convinced that nothing ordinary could create the creature we have fought, it certainly wasn¡¯t natural and the curse I observed was¡­¡± I paused, trying to find the right word to describe the magnificent spell-work without coming too weird. ¡°something else.¡± I finished, shaking my head lightly.


    ¡°Did you manage to analyse those Trolls? You must have, right?¡± I asked, my mind extrapolating connections between the information I had received. Whatever the outcome of their analysis, I had a feeling the meeting was related to it.


    ¡°We did some analysis, we even got some native Guild-Mages to help out, as you probably know, all things Divination, scrying and analysis-magic are incredibly complex, making it difficult for players to get into it.¡± Tobiuno explained, and I noticed nods all around. Once more, I was reminded just how valuable and apparently rare Lenore¡¯s sight was, especially as it came with an experienced user of that particular way of perceiving magic.


    ¡°The result was inconclusive, there was talk about remnants of Blood Magic,¡± saying that, he focused on me for a moment, ¡°but nothing that could really be understood, let alone traced. In a precise way. Maybe you have an idea, Morgana?¡± he asked, bringing a grin to my face as the reason for the meeting began to make actual sense. Merely exchanging information could have been done over the forum, if there was even a need to exchange.


    ¡°Ideas? Without even seeing what was done, I can tell you little. Blood Magic, as almost every actual Magic-Skill, is incredibly versatile, making it difficult to guess at the workings on some trolls an ocean away. I can tell you that Blood Magic has ways to strengthen a body, and as that one leaked video demonstrated, there might be ways to make those permanent, though I have yet to further my studies on that subject.¡± I explained, carefully choosing my words to give nothing of value away without making a deal for it.


    ¡°It might be possible to alter beings in a way that makes them more powerful, it might even have a side-effect of reducing their minds, making them more bestial, driven by their instincts. It is possible, although I wouldn¡¯t know how. ¡° I admitted, even as a part of me remembered that marvelous magical curse that had created the Lycantroll, that tiny seed of Divine Magic that had used the trolls mind to draw in an excess of power, frying it in the process before using that power to transform and enhance the body. I doubted that any mortal could simply use the Divine Curse, but it was quite possible to create something similar, copying the outcome, if vastly less elegant.


    ¡°And those spiders we fought?¡± Ardros asked, sounding a little bitter.


    ¡°Without more information, I can only speculate. But from what I saw in the footage, both the footage in the Highlight-Reel and the footage you posted on the forum, I¡¯d guess that those spiders knew you were coming, allowing them to prepare an ambush.¡± Raia mused, voicing her thoughts in an unhurried manner.


    ¡°But for an ambush, they needed some prey, which they presented, but why would they need actual prey? Why not simply use some sort of temporary magic to grow a bunch of ordinary spiders to giant size, letting them skitter about? No idea if that is possible, but it might be. Or maybe they used Illusions, or some mind-fuckery to draw you in without sacrificing anything of actual worth for them.¡± she speculated, accurate to the point that I made a mental note to keep an eye on that one. She seemed to be quite competent, making me curious.


    ¡°That sounds plausible.¡± I agreed, nodding along, simply to keep from giving away what I knew.


    ¡°So, we need to investigate more.¡± Tobiuno nodded, mostly to himself.


    For a little longer, I watched Maggie pester Raia, while throwing some questions my way every other sentence, which I answered with the bare minimum, just to be polite. After a while, the questions ran out and with them, the meeting did, too.


    ¡°Morgana, would you lend me a few minutes of your time?¡± Maggie asked, as we were bidding each other farewell. For a moment, I was hesitant but at the same time, I was curious.


    ¡°We can talk at my place.¡± I agreed, partially because I didn¡¯t want to let the preparations I had made after learning that people could visit my Capsule Space go to waste. I had even considered opening a part of my space to the public, allowing people to wander the lower levels of my Frozen Spire at will, the areas I used to play around, testing how some things looked, sculpting in Ice and Shadow. Trying to create art, in a way that few people would consider.


    After a second to make sure that the set-up was as I wanted it to be, I sent an invite to Maggie, before returning to my capsule-space with a quick, mental command.

 Chapter 468

    It took me a second to shift myself to the emergence-point I had set for the Door, the timing just coming out right, with me regaining my awareness a few moments before Maggie appeared in my space.


    ¡°I bid you welcome on the Frozen Spire. Act without malice, leave without hindrance.¡± I formally intoned an utterly pointless greeting. She couldn¡¯t really act in overt malice, not within my capsule-space and I lacked any ability to hinder her leaving but I thought the formality was appropriate. It certainly served to throw Maggie for a pause, especially when she looked to the side, into the abyss with a layer of clouds far beneath. If nothing else, having her squeak and press against the side of the tower brought a smirk to my face.


    ¡°Can¡­ can we go in?¡± she asked, her voice devoid of her previous pep.


    ¡°Certainly.¡± I agreed and we began to climb the stairs I had placed within the tower, through the spooky cavern. It had been something I had invested a bit of time into, trying to make the shadows just right, to make the forms of frozen creatures appear as if they had been frozen in horrible pain. To make visitors feel¡­ welcome.


    For once, Maggie wasn¡¯t chattering on as we walked, it might have been the longest in our short acquaintance she remained silent. I considered whether to guide her into my throne room but decided that it wouldn¡¯t quite send the right message, instead I showed her onto the meditation-platform, allowing us to stand in the open, with nothing but empty sky and clouds around us.


    ¡°Now, what did you want to talk about?¡± I asked, standing with my back to the void. It wasn¡¯t quite the same polite business-setting Tobiuno had set up, but I had no actual intention to make her comfortable.


    ¡°Would you like to join the Arms of Helios?¡± she asked, without preamble or set-up, the blunt question stunning me for a moment. Before I could respond, she pressed on, beginning to laud the advantages of having a large guild, promising all sorts of help if I joined up, her sales-pitch quite enthusiastic.


    ¡°After Howardlight made me out to be Evil incarnate, you want me to join?¡± I asked, more than a little amused by the time I managed to cut in.


    ¡°Eh, sure, why not? We can make up some trite about Darkness being the other side of the coin, or that one has to wander the darkness to see the light, or something along those lines.¡± she waved me off, before adding, ¡°Not like it really matters.¡±


    ¡°Why the interest? Even if we leave Howardlight, as far as I know the leader of your little Crusade, and his antics out of it, there has to be a reason why you¡¯re interested in me.¡± I pressed a little, curious what reasoning she would give. I was almost certain that it was due to my relatively conspicuous use of magic, showcased in more than a few videos, but I wanted to know her answer.


    ¡°The biggest would be that you are near one of our major groups. The Ladrin-Group has taken some damage from that failed raid and from that video you posted a few days ago, you are nearby. Getting you to join would raise the morale of that group while adding your considerable ability and knowledge into the mix. From what I could tell, you¡¯ve been travelling since the start of the Beta, so you should know quite a bit about northern Aretia, which is where Ardros wants to lead his group next. They need some new prey, something that has fewer legs and not as much magical fire-power. Though you might be able to close some of that gap in fire-power.¡± she explained, giving reasons but nothing unexpected.


    ¡°I thank you for your offer, but I¡¯m not looking to join any guilds, clans or whatever you want to call your organisation. If anything, I regard Road to Purgatory as something akin to an active retirement from the professional gaming-circuit, something I¡¯ll stream as long as I enjoy it, without taking on any responsibilities.¡± I rejected her offer, giving an explanation that was somewhat true. I didn¡¯t want any responsibilities that linked Mundus to the real world.


    There was a part of me, that wanted to be able to, one day, say ¡°Okay, that¡¯s it, I¡¯m not going to upload anything, ever again.¡±, maybe even ¡°That¡¯s it, I¡¯ll never play Road to Purgatory again.¡±. Just the idea to play Road to Purgatory without Sigmir being there was uncomfortable, I could console myself with the idea that, after the Beta ended, I would be able to find her again, but without that consolation, I didn¡¯t feel like the game would be enjoyable.


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    ¡°That is regrettable.¡± she replied and for a moment, the pep and happiness that had been present on her face most of the time were gone. Not gone in the same way they had faltered when she had looked down, into the valley, but replaced by something else, the careful, cunning look Mrs. Wu had sometimes during our lessons. After freezing for a moment, I pushed on, forcing the realisation to the back of my mind.


    ¡°However, if you are interested, we can share some of the information over an, let¡¯s call it, inofficial and private channel?¡± I suggested, curious how she would react.


    ¡°Always in cash, never in writing?¡± she chuckled, a grin on her face that seemed a little more genuine than the earlier pep.


    ¡°No need for cash, but we can trade information. Not like either of us is able to actually verify what the other trades, we can just treat it as gossip.¡± I explained, drawing on the lessons Mrs. Wu had given me.


    ¡°What do you have in mind?¡± she asked, curiosity shining in her eyes.


    ¡°Hrm, I¡¯m certain you have heard that there are parts of Mundus that you cannot record, beings that block that feature and only appear as distortions in recordings, yes?¡± I mused, carefully keeping an eye on her expression.


    ¡°Yes, I know. Guess Pantheon Entertainment can¡¯t let us record everything and give away the whole fun.¡± she grinned, to which I nodded. While we, the players, could talk about what we had seen, video was out of the question. That way, the rumors, testimonies and impressions turned into one giant rumor and advertisement-campaign, making everyone want to see those beings for themselves, to experience what some people described in glowing words, with overwhelmed awe.


    ¡°If your people go North, they are most likely going to travel past Neamov, the Dwarven City near one of the passes through the Turan Mountains. In those mountains, further south than Neamov, in a difficult to find Valley, there is one of them. One of those beings that cannot be recorded.¡± I told her, noticing the widening of her eyes and that momentary flash of desire on her face. She was just as curious as I was, her methods and the focus of her curiosity were just a little different from mine.


    ¡°Would you tell me more? Maybe how to get there, and what you saw?¡± she asked, her eyes shining as she focused on me.


    ¡°Ah, I gave you a small sample as a taste. For more, we¡¯ll have to make a trade, you know? I would be interested in opportunities in western Aretia, especially north of the White Mountains and further west, on the Idorra Peninsula and in the Dorrian Mountains.¡± I explained, combining a false trail with a true request. For a few moments, she was simply staring at me, as if trying to look past the controlled expression on my face and guess at the true thoughts beneath.


    ¡°Mhm, I see.¡± she muttered, her voice now utterly free of the earlier pep, instead there was a distinct seriousness in her voice. ¡°I will have to take a look at my documents, make some inquiries, that kind of thing. Can I send you a message regarding another meeting? I think I will enjoy working with you.¡±


    ¡°I will set my filters up to notify me of your messages.¡± I accepted, making a mental note to register the account she had used to connect to my capsule-space.


    ¡°Excellent. Do you mind if we keep the forum rhetoric going? It makes for good entertainment.¡± she asked, sounding so much more like a business-partner during negotiations.


    ¡°I actually don¡¯t mind, as long as it remains on the forum. In addition, I think we should encourage a sense of Travellers¡¯ conflict to stay between Travellers. I have no doubt that you have some native allies, just as the Blades of the Realm have their noble backing and I don¡¯t think anyone would enjoy having the world of Mundus sunk in an ocean of Blood and fire as everyone tries to take away those support-networks.¡± I suggested, trying to keep my own motivation under wraps.


    ¡°I hear you. Sadly, I¡¯m not sure something like that will ever be feasible, not with the way Road to Purgatory is set up. At best, Travellers will begin treating Mundus like a real world, without distinguishing between Travellers and Natives, maybe even trying to keep their conflicts generally non-lethal. So far, there are not enough Travellers to make an actual, serious impact on that World, but once it goes live? I just don¡¯t know.¡± she admitted, mirroring some of my own thoughts. Just a few hundred trolls who decided that they wanted to watch the world burn? Not even coordinated, simply people who didn¡¯t care for anything but the satisfaction they felt by destroying the fun for everyone else.


    Within my mind, I spoke a short prayer to any deity who might be listening, especially those of the Pantheon.

 Chapter 469

    ¡°And, did anything happen while I was gone?¡± I asked Lenore, once Maggie had left my capsule-space and I had returned to Mundus. My Avatar had been stashed in her Hallow while I had been gone and she was currently flying over the grassy mountainside of the White Mountains, some distance above the ancient Road.


    ¡°The road passed the treeline, so there¡¯ll be very little in the way of cover for quite a while. Other than that, another type of mountain-goat that might just be able to run up vertical cliffs and a buzzard tried to take a bite out of me. Stupid bird, it was barely level fifty and I¡¯m pretty sure it hadn¡¯t even crossed the first divide.¡± she grumbled, annoyance warring with pride in the last statement.


    Her nature made her far less inclined to physical confrontations than other beasts, but now that she was coming into her magic, that only gave her the appearance of weakness. If anything, she was one of the deadliest beings in our group, the ability to fly alongside the combination of Wind and Death-Magic, giving her a medium to spread magical blight across the land gave her lethal potential. Not so much against enemies at the same level, but when it came to the extermination of weaker foes, I was pretty sure she had me beat. Getting underestimated by a predator was a sure way to ruffle her feathers and tearing the predator apart would go a long way to restore her mood.


    ¡°There¡¯s always one, isn¡¯t there?¡± I asked, thinking of the few occasions I had sparred at the Martial Arts Center. My slender frame and lack of physical height had caused more than one person to underestimate me, especially the males. Sure, they could bench-press my weight, maybe even bench-press double my weight but their bodies could be broken all the same, with little force required. Not that I had ever done so, it was all done with a point-system, allowing me to win my fair share of matches. Especially if they underestimated me.


    ¡°Let¡¯s head down to the others.¡± I suggested, pushing out my senses a little, to enjoy the feeling of flight. How I would love to fly on my own, but sadly, I doubted that would be on the table. Borrowing Lenore¡¯s abilities was the closest I could get, but it was good enough.


    The time we spent descending also gave me a bit of time to consider my conversation with Maggie again, especially in what I had noticed afterwards. The great thing about conversing within one¡¯s capsule-space was that the space itself was yours, allowing you to retrieve recordings of everything that had happened within it for a short time afterwards. Going over my conversation with Maggie with a fine-toothed comb, trying to analyse the minute flashes of emotion visible on her face, the brief bursts of uncontrolled expression that had quickly been hidden away beneath her mask had been fascinating.


    While I had considered her an accomplished actor after noticing a few short moments of sincerity during our conversation, someone who used an overly peppy and excited persona to cover up her underlying emotions, the child-like curiosity allowing her to ask questions normally regarded as impolite, the later analysis made me wonder if what we had seen had actually been her face at all.


    There had been a few moments during which the moments didn¡¯t quite seem natural, a little unbalanced and misaligned. Back, right after I had received the capsule, I had tried to match the movement of the Avatar to my mental landscape, a process I had to predicically repeat to make sure my mental coordination was keeping up with the progress granted by attributes on Mundus. I wasn¡¯t quite certain if what I had seen was a small remnant, impossible to detect without recording the person from multiple angles and dissecting their movements to an insane degree, or if it simply came from the person being slightly afraid of heights.


    Either way, Maggie had managed to make an impression, as one sneaky and deceptive lady. It made me wonder just who she was on Mundus, though I doubted I would be able to easily find out her identity, not if she truly wanted to keep it hidden. Maybe Tobiuno would be able to give me an idea, but I didn¡¯t want to actually ask him, didn¡¯t want to put down a marker that might be regarded as a debt.


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    Spotting the others was simple, making it obvious why an aerial predator would love the area. There was no cover larger than some shrubs and a couple of rocks sticking out of the tough grass, making hiding entirely impossible without magic.


    After Lenore had confirmed to the others that nothing was incoming, we had a brief reunion, the others filling me in on the events of the last few hours. Not that there was a lot to fill in, the mountains were relatively boring, if beautiful.


    ¡°You might want to stick close, just in case the next bird that comes after you is not just some overconfident buzzard.¡± I told Lenore, thinking of the Manticores that had been seen in these mountains. We were hunting them, but I had no doubt that they¡¯d be hunting us, too. A part of me wondered if trying to actually hunt them was a wise idea, or if simply trying to travel through these mountains was enough of a challenge without going out of our way to aggravate the local predators. Without knowing how powerful they actually were, outside the quest-difficulty of ¡°Hard¡±, made any actual threat-assessment impossible.


    For the remainder of the day, we continued walking along the ancient road, keeping an eye out for anything that might want to attack us. Luckily, that was mostly done by the others, allowing me to focus my thoughts inwards, walking after Sigmir without taking in my surroundings at all. I had become quite good at that, it gave me valuable time to consider my magic, how to work problems that had eluded me.


    For example, how could I draw out the divine essence from Sigmir and myself, siphoning off just a small amount of it, enough that we¡¯d hopefully restore it over time and use it to boost Ylva towards the second Divide? Instinctively, I thought it would be possible, that removing a small part of the whole wouldn¡¯t permanently harm us, a little like a Blood Transfusion. Though, it was quite possible that the mental analogues I was creating were simply wrong and that there was no way for us to regain the essence I planned to use. Sadly, I doubted there was any way to find out, other than to try it.


    In the evening, once we had a camp-site between a couple of small rocks, as sheltered as possible on the windy mountain, I was able to experiment a little. For once, I wasn¡¯t using my Throne, as I mentally associated the Throne with the Astral, both with the network of Astral Power within myself and the Astral River flowing through reality all around me. What I sought wasn¡¯t in the Astral, but hidden in my Blood, a minute trace of something more.


    Using my silver dagger, long since cleansed from the blood of the Lycantroll, I made a small incision into my hand, placing the fingers of my other hand over the cut. It was utterly symbolic, at the end of the day I was constantly ¡°touching¡± my blood, but symbols had their own use. In this case, the sting and the wet sensation on my fingers gave me something to focus my magic on.


    The sensation was a confusing one, it was neither the mental clarity that accompanied my journeys through the Astral River, nor was it the purely physical experience that helped me to heal with my Blood Magic, giving me an idea how damaged a body was. It was both of it, but neither, the pulsing sensation of my Blood bringing a sharp coppery taste to my mouth.


    Keeping my eyes closed, I tried to look for something similar to the golden Blood I had ripped from the Black Wolf all those months ago, something divine to latch onto. But what was Divine, how could I differentiate it from my normal Blood, or even the Blood infused with my Astral Power that I drained with my Blood Magic? I was relatively certain that it would be closer to the infused Blood, but that would mean I needed Divine Power within my body, which I lacked, as evidenced by my character-sheet. Or was the Divine Power mentioned on my character-sheet something separate from the Divine Essence I wanted to drain?


    Had the Black Wolf I had drained back then actually some sort of magic, allowing him to gain power from the wolf-gods? More questions but no answers forthcoming.


    After the third time I had to cut the wound back open, to keep the blood fresh and flowing, I decided that I had achieved everything I could for the night, even if that was nothing, and made a mental note to talk to Olivia about the nature of Divine Power and how she channelled the powers of her Goddess. Maybe that would set me on the right track to help Ylva.

 Chapter 470

    The process of isolating the divine portion that might be within my Avatar, a remnant of the creation of its race, proved as difficult as one should expect. I had spent a couple of days trying to isolate it within myself, had tried to delve into the bodies of Sigmir and Ylva, trying to get an idea what I was looking for and there was very little progress. I had gained a point each in Blood Magic and, curiously, Astral Meditation but had achieved nothing that would constitute a breakthrough.


    By the time we discovered traces of Manticore-activity, mosty the remains of their hunts, both digested and undigested, but also some other tracks, I was almost looking forward to the encounter. It gave me something to think about, other than the riddle of Divine Blood and Power. Talking to Olivia had helped, to a point, though she had completely stone-walled me regarding the idea to use her, filled with Divine Power after her morning prayers, as a test-subject in my experimentation. While frustrating, I could somewhat empathize with her, especially given the, deservedly, horrible reputation of Blood-Magic and the other bodily subtypes of Life-magic. Only Mind-Magic had a worse reputation, which made quite a bit of sense. But that was neither here nor there.


    ¡°I think that¡¯s one of them.¡± Lenore said, speaking out loud from her perch on my shoulder. She was alternating between sitting on my shoulder or resting within her Hallow and hadn¡¯t taken to the sky since we spotted the first actual, physical evidence that we were in Manticore-territory. The idea of meeting such a beast in the sky scared her more than she wanted to admit, a sentiment I could understand.


    Looking up, the connection between us helped guide my focus to a distant object in the blue sky above us. At first, when just scanning the sky, it was difficult to make out anything but when focusing, my high Intuition allowed me to almost zoom in on it, showing that attributes made a huge difference. In this case, I was able to determine that it was indeed a Manticore, not just an eagle or other large bird flying over the mountains. Distance was more difficult to estimate, though it didn¡¯t really matter how far it was from us, given that it was obviously coming towards us.


    ¡°It¡¯ll be here in a minute or two.¡± Adra estimated, looking up as well, before looking around for a moment. ¡°There¡¯s only one of them and I don¡¯t see any cover nearby. Everyone remembers the tactic we have discussed?¡± she asked, getting affirmative mumbles in response.


    We changed our formation a little, Adra making sure that her Bow was ready, casually holding it by her side before it was time to draw, while I stepped next to her, mentally forming the runes I was going to use. Our job was to take away the Manticore¡¯s major advantage, its mobility, to ground it and allow us to fight it without allowing it to easily escape.


    Soon, the Manticore was close enough to make out without fully focusing on it, and I had a reasonable estimation of the distance. and began drawing runes of Ice, with a couple Blood-Runes thrown in for good measure. I had more than enough time to carefully draw all seven runes, as my lips curled into a smile. The creature was either arrogant or foolish, coming towards us without any care at all, thinking itself the master of these mountains.


    Next to me, Adra drew back her bow, whispering a chant under her breath and her arrow was shrouded in azure light, the air suffused with the smell of Wind-Magic.


    Just before the Manticore was upon us, we both unleashed our attacks within a split-second of each other. The central rune of my formation glowed silver and a small Icicle leading a beam of pure cold lanced out, crossing the distance in a moment and piercing the Manticore¡¯s wing, striking right next to the joint into the muscle. The Icicle itself was tiny, compared to the monster¡¯s size, optimised for speed and penetration, not stopping-power, but the Icicle wasn¡¯t the dangerous part of the spell. That was reserved for the glittering beam of pure cold and the runes of blood I had woven into the spell. Once the beam hit the blood drawn by the initial Icicle, the energy hungrily took hold, ripping the warmth from the creature''s body as I pumped in power.


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    Almost at the same time, Adra¡¯s arrow struck, too, piercing through the wing a little further out, ripping a hole into the delicate membrane before shredding the surrounding feathers when the azure energy held within the arrow exploded outwards.


    The previously graceful glide of the Manticore, aiming to use its claws to savage one of us before ascending back into the skies and out of our reach, turned into an uncontrolled tumble as forward momentum teamed up with gravity, the left wing no longer able to support the beast¡¯s wight. Or do anything, really, the combined attack had crippled the beast, permanently removing it from the sky. Now, we just had to make sure that it didn¡¯t suffer for long.


    Physics proved to be a harsh mistress, even when it came to monstrous creatures the Manticore¡¯s impact on the ground caused a sound that made me reflexively wince in sympathy, at least for a brief moment.


    Sigmir had been on stand-by, ready to approach the wounded beast and draw its attention, shielded by Olivia¡¯s magic. Clad in her red aura, she struck the still prone beast with her axe, causing a relatively small, bloody wound, proving just how tough the monster actually was, before being forced on the defensive as the vicious tail-singer lashed out, trying to skewer her.


    Now that the wings were out of commision, the tail was the major danger of the Manticore and according to our tactic, it was our next target. But before I started casting my next spell, I took a brief second to Observe the beast.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>


    Young Manticore, level 89


    </td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    If one only looked at the level, it was weak, weak enough that none of us should have any problem with it. But the massive stinger that crashed into Sigmir¡¯s shield with enough force to make me flinch from the noise made it clear that level wasn¡¯t everything, as I very well knew. I had killed higher level targets before, mostly by surprising them and not giving them anything remotely close to a fair fight. Something we would have to do here, too, even if the monster had a much lower level.


    My next runic formation was simpler than the first one I had used, but more focused in a way. The first had focused on penetration and the subsequent chilling, this one ignored the penetration entirely, instead targeting the already bleeding wound. Using a curse similar to the one I had used on the Lycantroll, I began draining away its power and here, the difference in level became apparent. The Manticore became sluggish, its movements no longer having the ferocity it displayed earlier, instead moving almost as if it was drunk, as it¡¯s very blood turned into shackles weighing it down.


    It was a massive opening, especially when Sigmir used her shield to bash against the Manticore, knocking it off balance, and Rai had waited in the shadows for just such an opening, His task had been to disable the beast¡¯s stinger if possible, or the hindlegs if the stinger proved impossible. Taking out the stinger would rob it of its deadliest weapon, taking out a hindleg would rob it of its mobility, either would make the fight a lot easier.


    Even I, with my affinity for Darkness-magic, had failed to accurately track what Rai had done, after he had hidden in the Manticore¡¯s shadow after it had crashed down, but however he had done it, the sight of the stinger drooping down limply caused me to nod in approval. He had managed to almost sever it, certainly neutralising it in the process, and greatly pissed the Manticore off in the process. It¡¯s reaction was one of pure instinct, it had been hurt and wanted to punish the person that hurt it, so it twisted around with a roar of pain and rage, swiping with its paws - at nothing but shadows.


    I was quite sure he had still taken some damage, similar to the damage I had taken from the Lycantroll, but showing its back to Sigmir and Adra was the last mistake the Manticore made, for the two of them used the opening presented and ended the fight. Adra¡¯s spear dug deep into the Manticore¡¯s side, skewering it and ripping apart its organs, while Sigmir¡¯s axe struck a crushing blow into its spine. Those two attacks, together with the curse running through its body, was enough to make it crumble, weakly batting at the air with its front-paws before stilling shortly after.

 Chapter 471

    With the beast lying dead, we first made sure that nothing else was nearby, about to attack. Olivia and Lenore had been tasked with keeping an eye out for danger during the fight, but it was better to ascertain something as important as that. When none of us called a warning, I began checking my companions and noticed Olivia doing the same. Not that I thought that the Manticore had managed to inflict any serious wounds in the short battle, but it was good to know that Sigmir was only lightly bruised, something a quick Regeneration-Spell would fix. Bruises were the easiest thing for Blood Magic to heal, even easier than cuts, though I had a feeling that most Blood Mages were better at healing cuts, as cutting into things, and occasionally yourself, was part and parcel of that particular magic.


    On the other hand, Rai had taken damage but it was that strange, whole body not-quite-bruising that came with taking damage while within the shadows. I had a feeling it was somehow the damage, however that was calculated, he would have taken from the claws, only spread out all over his body, making it unpleasant and a stress on his system but not a gaping wound through which his guts would try to escape. For those kinds of injuries, Olivia¡¯s healing was better suited and he, too, was quickly patched up.


    ¡°Anything interesting on that beast?¡± I asked Adra, who had poked around the Manticore, seizing it up for butchery.


    ¡°Claws, Fangs, those can work as trophies, maybe valuable for some enchanter or crafter-type. The stinger and the poison-glands, but I¡¯m not really familiar with them, so getting them might get messy. And the pelt, obviously, might make for a good rug, or maybe a cloak. Not really sure, certainly not worth taking for armour, anyone who could pay decently can get something better.¡± she grumbled and I realised that we would be here for a bit.


    ¡°I¡¯ll help with the stinger, might make the process less messy.¡± I decided, a magical poison, something I wanted to check out.


    ¡°We shouldn¡¯t stay in the open, certainly not here, where we fought that beast.¡± Olivia advised us, her eyes focused on the sky once more.


    ¡°They are territorial, I told you that. Killing one of their young might draw more of them here and if they find us with the corpse, things will get really messy.¡± she added, getting nods in acceptance all around.


    ¡°Adra, Rai, can you quickly look around for some sort of cave or other shelter where we can take that thing apart? I¡¯ll drain its blood, so it¡¯ll be easier to move.¡± I ordered, stepping up to the corpse, realising just how big the thing really had been. Lying on its side, it almost came up to my hip and it might have made a good mount for me, if I ever had the power to force one into service.


    The idea brought a smile to my face, riding around on a flying lion, possibly with a poisoned breath-weapon if I could find a suitable dragon-manticore variant, tickled my fancy. Maybe it would be possible if I managed to push my Mind Magic far higher than it currently was, even if I might have to figure out how to keep the insanity of the Dark Moon out of it, unless I wanted my ride to be afflicted by that. Not that I really understood how that part worked and the system hadn¡¯t been forthcoming with information, meaning I would have to experiment.


    But that was for later, probably for the live-release, not for now. Now, I needed to begin butchering the beast, before the lingering life-force fully faded, making it impossible to control its blood via Blood Magic.


    A small Rune-Triangle, drawn around the wound where Olivia and I had mangled its wing, allowed me to cause a spurt of blood to shoot out, almost as if the beast¡¯s heart was still beating. Magically, it was almost entirely inert, little better than conventionally spilled blood from a living creature, useless for anything but channelling spells into this particular creature.


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    Hesitating for a moment, I decided to capture some of the blood, as I might be able to use it to target others of its bloodline, namely parents and elders, possibly allowing me to scry on them. It wasn¡¯t something certain, but certainly worth exploring, especially as it only took a small amount of Astral Power to create vials of Ice that would easily preserve the blood for me.


    By the time there was no more blood in the Manticore, and the area around me looked rather gruesome, Adra and Rai were back, having found a somewhat secluded spot for us to use. Carrying the Manticore was another annoyance, its size requiring Sigmir and Adra to work together, while the rest of us kept an eye out for trouble. Luckily, the few local predators knew better than to investigate where the smell of Manticore-Blood came from and nothing other than the difficult terrain troubled us until we got it to the camp-site.


    It wasn¡¯t what I would call a good spot, a couple of larger boulders that stuck halfway out of the mountainside, forming an overhang that would shelter us from sight and the weather, but it was far from a truly defensible position. But needs must, and I doubted we would be able to find something better in a reasonable amount of time, so while Adra and Sigmir began to butcher the beast, carefully removing it¡¯s internal organs into a bowl of conjured Ice, I started to make our shelter a little more secure.


    Most of the openings, I simply closed off with Ice, leaving a couple to allow some air-circulation, while in others, I used the Ice similar to mortar, holding rocks in place. It wasn¡¯t pretty, certainly not compared to the lodges I had purely made from Ice, but it was quite a bit more sturdy and took a lot less Astral Power, which were important if we had no idea if another Manticore would swoop in to find out what had happened to the one the others were butchering.


    Once everything was secured to my liking, the others were mostly done with the initial butchering, having waited for me to help with the stinger and poison-glands.


    A little later, and a lot more tired and slightly queasy, I idly wondered if Road to Purgatory would be a monumental flop. I had taken to the rather rustic, often gruesome and brutal world of Mundus with glee, the simple rules of the wild allowing me to act without needing to consider the rules of society and decorum my mother had carefully trained me in, instead I could mostly fall back on simple, almost animalistic, patterns, which was liberating.


    But was that liberation worth the pain, though it was dulled, was it worth dealing with blood and gore? I thought so, but how many people would agree and how loud would the screaming be, once certain parts of society realised just how realistic the game was?


    Shaking off those thoughts, I looked at the fruits of our labour, a somewhat small bottle made from Hard Ice, filled with the poison of a Manticore. I had no real idea just how toxic it was, though I knew there was a lingering magic within it, the smell causing the hairs in the back of my neck to stand while Lenore¡¯s sight revealed a slight but telltale glow.


    ¡°Morgana, think you can make something with these?¡± Adra asked me, gesturing to some of the chunks of meat she had cut out of the Manticore''s flesh. I had no idea how it would taste, but there was only one way to find out.


    Nodding, I decided to treat them as I would treat steaks and roast them in our pan and serve alongside some potatoes and onions. As I was working, the smell the meat released while cooking made me frown, the smell being not quite mundane in nature. It made sense that a magical beast hadn¡¯t just mundane flesh. With Lenore¡¯s sight to help, I used my Darkness-Magic to partially erase the traces of magic from a thin slice before biting into it, curious at the taste.


    Wild, was the only word that came to mind. The meat itself was mediocre at best, the taste a little too gamey, and it was far too tough and rather stringy, but all that paled before the taste of magic exploding in my mouth. Normally, I tasted the air, smelled the magic in the air and got a whiff of what I was dealing with. Now, the difference was like night and day, as my tongue tried to parse the countless elemental traces within the beast¡¯s magic. It wasn¡¯t just pleasant, the taste I associated with poison-magic was bitter, the sharp taste of fire-magic a personal dislike, but overall, it was a uniquely interesting experience.


    Though one I didn¡¯t need to share, especially not when I realised that my health-bar had taken a slight dip from the small taste and looking into my body with Blood Magic showed that there was some damage to my stomach, which I luckily could heal.


    More experimentation on cooking with Manticore was needed.

 Chapter 472

    An angry growl escaped me, as I smashed the vial of Manticore-Blood I had been working with on the floor, the destructive act helping me vent my feelings. Working with the blood had been a bit of a headache, the connection between the blood I had and what I thought were the others of the same bloodline tenuous, difficult to follow and zero in on. If not for my recent exploration of Blood Magic in regards to ancient Bloodlines, I would likely have failed, which somehow made my annoyance only worse.


    Failure would have been one thing, but succeeding after hours of effort with absolutely nothing to show for, that had managed to really annoy me. All that time, all that effort and what had I learned? That the other Manticores of that bloodline were roughly South-West of us, the distance impossible to determine. They could be a kilometer away, they could be a hundred kilometers away, I had no idea. Similarly, the direction wasn¡¯t really accurate either, the directional wedge almost covering ninety degrees between south and west, though slightly more shifted west.


    The problem with that? Even without the magic, without the effort and the headache, I had that information, as it simply covered their native habitat, the ruins of the Ancient Empire.


    ¡°Everything alright, love?¡± Sigmir asked, having heard the noises from her perch on a nearby rock. I had left the shelter we had prepared earlier, allowing Adra, Rai and Olivia to relax without having to worry about disturbing my work, which, in turn, had caused Sigmir and Ylva to follow me, so that I could concentrate, without having to worry about getting eaten.


    ¡°Yes, it worked. And gave me nothing but a headache.¡± I grumbled, getting a soft chuckle and gentle hug.


    ¡°It was a long-shot, wasn¡¯t it? Just like it is a long-shot to use our own bodies to empower Ylva, yet you do your best. Don¡¯t think I don¡¯t notice you spacing out as you focus on that, you haven''t experimented with those connecting patterns since she has asked you, pouring almost everything into her request.¡± she consoled me, her fingers tenderly rubbing my temples, trying to soothe my aching head.


    ¡°But I want to help you, both of you.¡± I admitted, before continuing, ¡°If I manage to help her to cross the second Divide, it makes the two of you safer, gives you something that we don¡¯t have to risk our lives for.¡±


    ¡°Does power really matter? There will always be another mountain to climb, always be another bend in the road, always another challenge. And, you know, I¡¯m fine with that.¡± she explained, speaking quietly, her tone musing, a little as if she was lost in thought.


    ¡°Back then, I had given up, had accepted that I couldn¡¯t run any longer and my path had ended.¡± she added, catching me by surprise for a moment, before I realised that she was talking about our original meeting.


    ¡°Now, I¡¯m just following along on your path, and I¡¯m enjoying it. And I¡¯ve accepted that it is your path, and my part of it will end at some point.¡± she continued and I felt a heavy grip seize my heart. I wanted to disagree, but the calm look of acceptance on her face stopped me. Resting my head against her chest, I thought about her words, her conviction.


    The path we shared, what sorts of endings could it have. What sort of endings could any path have, really, even ignoring the circumstances? Unless we took different paths at some point, an idea she had discarded, our shared path would end when the life of one, or both, of us ended. With her protectiveness, her willingness to shield me from harm and the quiet conviction to keep me from harm, it was unlikely that the first one to perish would be me. And even if it was me, I somehow doubted that she would continue on any path other than the path towards whatever had ended me, throwing herself into a final battle, hoping to die in it.


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    ¡°It is not my path.¡± I quietly told her, looking up as a few tears trickled down my cheek. ¡°We share the path, and we¡¯ll share it to the end.¡± I added, knowing that my own path on the Road to Purgatory would come to an end, shortly after Sigmir¡¯s journey on that path ended. A Mundus without her was not something I wanted to experience.


    For a few minutes, we simply stood in the night, embracing each other, the connection between us filled with nothing but harmonious contentment. But neither of us was willing, or able, to simply stop on our journey, it wasn¡¯t in our nature.


    ¡°I just have one thing I want you to remember.¡± I told Sigmir quietly, breaking the shared silence. ¡°If I ever fall, remember that it doesn¡¯t mean my path has come to an end. Remember that you¡¯ll have to keep going on our path, and I¡¯ll catch up to you.¡± I tried to impress on her, knowing that otherwise, she might go out in a blaze of glory, trying to avenge me, if I was ever sent to respawn.


    ¡°And that might mean I¡¯ll have to take a risk to keep you and the others safe. Simply because I won¡¯t die, not permanently.¡± I added, getting a growl in response that made me look up, into her frowning face. When she opened her mouth to disagree, I quickly pressed a kiss to her lipe, before placing a finger on them to keep her from talking, as I continued.


    ¡°I know, it goes against everything you believe in. But if I ever have to choose between sacrificing myself and taking the temporary inconvenience death means to me in this World, and never seeing you again, I will take the inconvenience every day of the week, without a moment of hesitation.¡± I could see that Sigmir didn¡¯t like my words, wisps of red aura escaping her, shrouding her in a hazy outline. It looked almost like a jagged cloak, or maybe a mane.


    ¡°I don¡¯t know if I can do that. I simply don¡¯t know.¡± she admitted, shaking her head almost sadly. Maybe she was trying to imagine the situation and ran into the same wall I mentally ran into if I tried to imagine what would happen if our path came to an end. Could I go back to my previous, solitary existence? It had been comfortable, there had been challenges, there had been success and pleasure, even if the physical kind only came self-administered.


    Could I go back to that, knowing just how much more there was to life, with the right being at my side?


    Finding Sigmir, finding the connection with her, however that worked, had been like a lightning strike, out of the clear blue sky. Would there ever be a second one? Could there be such a strike outside of Mundus, or was it some strange interaction between the Capsule¡¯s reading of my physical properties and the wonky way my brain worked? Some bug in the system, a ghost in the machine? To be fixed with some future patch?


    Shaking my head, almost in a mirror of what Sigmir had done moments earlier, I pushed those thoughts away once more, into the far reaches of my mind, where I wouldn¡¯t have to worry about them. If there was ever such a bridge to cross, I¡¯d blow it up when I got there. Maybe Mrs. Wu could give me some further instructions on demolition.


    There were no more words for a while, as we shifted and looked out, into the darkness of the night. The soft starlight only gave a vague idea what was out there, vague, indistinct, uncertain, just like our future. But maybe, if we managed to grasp enough power, we could look through the darkness, without needing to worry what might be out there.


    ¡°Let¡¯s head to bed.¡± Sigmir suggested, after quite some time.


    ¡°Yeah, let¡¯s.¡± I agreed, knowing that while sitting with her in the silent darkness of the night, enjoying that there was no need for words, was wonderful, the path we were on was a dangerous one and we would need our rest. Would need each and every tiny piece of power we could get our greedy little fingers on.


    ¡°Lenore, do you think you¡¯d be able to use some of the power contained in a Manticore?¡± I mentally asked my other companion, the one who had watched over us, allowing us to relax without worries. Maybe we¡¯d be able to work something out to use the Wind-Magic present in the Manticores to our advantage, even if it was only a minor element for them, allowing them to fly. If it gave us a little more power, a small advantage, I would happily drain the lifeblood from an incapacitated body, if we ever came across another one.


    There were few things I wasn¡¯t willing to do, to keep wandering on the path Sigmir and I were on. If there were any.

 Chapter 473

    ¡°You think this will work?¡± I asked Lenore, looking at the circle we had prepared on the floor. Since fighting the first Manticore, we had encountered two more, both young and about as powerful as the first one, but things had gone a little awry during the second fight. While the fight itself had been under control, none of us had been able to do anything about the Manticore that had been flying above us, quite some distance away. There was no doubt in any of our minds that the Manticore had noticed us, and unless they were a lot less intelligent than our previous observations indicated, they knew we were here, hunting them.


    Which brought us to our current situation, taking shelter in a cave to get some rest and spending the night. It also gave Lenore and me time to conduct yet another experiment, one that was slightly different than the ones we had conducted before. We had come up with a runic formation that, in theory, should increase the power of my Blood Magic, hopefully allowing me to increase my sensitivity. With that, we had a series of experiments planned, one focused on me, one focused on Ylva, one focused on Sigmir, and a final one that would involve all three of us, trying to contrast and compare the different, minute traces of divinity within each of us. .


    The idea was that my Avatar, theoretically the most direct divine creation, should be different from Sigmir¡¯s body, with her Bloodline lasting and possibly diluting throughout the generations, and Ylva¡¯s body, who had both, the Bloodline but also a relatively recent transfusion of Divine Blood.


    Maybe, by observing all three at the same time, I would be able to share some of the power within Sigmir and myself into Ylva. Finally, Lenore would be within my mind, as an outside observer, hopefully detecting if anything went wrong and stopping things if that was the case.


    ¡°We¡¯ll only know after trying. But let¡¯s face it, we are trying something quite insane here and are most certainly pushing the boundaries of what anyone would conceive. It takes a certain kind of arrogance to even consider messing with the ancestral deity of your entire race.¡± Lenore chuckled, a little amused.


    But she was right, it was the kind of experiment few natives of Mundus would ever consider and it might even be one that was pushing the boundaries of the Beta I was working with. Somehow, the taboo was making the whole thing even more interesting, bringing a smile to my face.


    ¡°Let¡¯s do it.¡± I decided, after a few seconds of hesitation. If anything happened, I would be the one to suffer and if the worst case occurred, the cave we were in had been large enough that I had been able to declare it my home after some magical renovations, so if I died, I would respawn here in two days. Hopefully it wouldn¡¯t come to that, but it was a nice safety net.


    Sitting in the middle of the circle drawn in my Blood, completely naked, just in case the clothes and the magic infused in them would throw things off I took a second to center myself. Letting out a slow breath, I carefully carved a single, simple Blood-rune into my chest, right above my heart, nothing more but a focus for the magic. It was the equivalent to the simple rune contained in a Rune-Stone, the broadest application of Runic Magic, and thus barely above direct manipulation of Blood Magic in efficiency. Hopefully, it would help regardless.


    Lenore helped to regulate the flow of Astral Power towards the circle around us and I could feel the power well up, making my Blood Magic flow easier, for lack of better words. The difference was similar to the difference between working Ice-Magic standing in the snow around Neyto, or on the eternal glaciers above Yaksha, and working Ice-Magic here in the south. The difference between working Darkness-Magic during a new-moon night and working it under the glare of a noon-sun. My surroundings were in tune with my magic, and hopefully, it would make a difference.


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    After a while, I pulled my mind back into my body, still reeling from the experience. Blood and Astral Power, how the Blood within my body not only carried oxygen and nutrients but also Astral Power, suffusing my very being with the magic I commanded. There had been brief moments when I thought I had glimpsed at something greater, something that I couldn¡¯t even begin to grasp, but it had remained outside my sight. Maybe that was for the best.


    But what I had noticed were some traces, not quite Astral Power but similar, interlinked between the streams of power within my Blood. At this point, I was reaching, trying to make sense of the sensations that I couldn¡¯t fully understand, acting mostly on instinct.


    ¡°Love, do you want to go next?¡± I asked, as I pushed myself up. It took me a second to get my legs under control and at that point, I realised that I had used over half of my Astral Power for the experiment.


    ¡°It¡¯ll take a couple minutes though.¡± I admitted, sitting against the cave wall with a smile on my face.


    ¡°That looked a little creepy.¡± Sigmir admitted, now that I was obviously no longer concentrating.


    ¡°Mhm?¡± I mumbled in response, closing my eyes to immerse myself into the Astral River, increasing my regeneration-rate.


    ¡°The circle was shining with a pulsing light, slowing down and speeding up at times. Like the beat of a heart.¡± she explained and I felt myself nodding in agreement. The pulsing light, in a dark cave with only sparse light coming from the fire at the front of the cave, where the others were waiting, with me sitting naked in the middle, I could see that looking quite scary.


    ¡°Does the creepiness scare you off?¡± I asked, without opening my eyes.


    ¡°No, never.¡± she replied, and I could almost see her shake her head, a gentle smile on her face, even with my eyes closed.


    It took me a few more minutes to fully regenerate my Astral Power, making me open my eyes again.


    ¡°Let¡¯s do this.¡± I nodded, mostly to myself. ¡°Please, take a seat.¡± I told her, gesturing to the middle of the circle. She had already shed her clothes and for a few moments, I simply let my eyes roam her body, enjoying the view, the slight ripples of her muscles in the dim light.


    Once she was seated, I reached out again, infusing the circle with power. Stepping up, my athame in hand, I carefully carved the rune into her back, right above her heart and placed my hand onto the rune. Around us, the light started to pulse again and I sent my mind into her body, trying to categorise what I was seeing.


    It was fascinating, not just what I was seeing with my Blood Magic, but also what I could feel over our connection. For a second, I was swept up in the sensation, knowing that I was, in a way, touching one of the deepest, most intimate parts of Sigmir, part of the very essence that made her who she was. I could feel the gentle beat of her heart, feel the blood it carried, feel the ebb and flow of power within her, a soft thrumming that vibrated through her entire being, over our connection and into myself.


    The power around us, infused into the circle, the power within her, the beat of my heart, the beat of her heart, it all synchronised, beating in unison. For a brief moment, I could see a vast mountain, its peak capped with snow and I felt myself settle on its slopes, as I rested my wings.


    But as quick as the moment came, I felt a sudden tiredness and heard Lenore within my mind, frantically shouting. Pulling myself back was hard, but as I tried to focus my mind, I felt a familiar presence drag me out, severing the connection between Sigmir and myself.


    Stumbling a little, my senses snapped back to reality, suddenly incredibly tired. A trickle of Astral Power coming over my connection to Lenore caused me to realise that I had somehow managed to drain myself entirely, spending every bit of Astral Power within my body.


    ¡°That was¡­¡± I tried to articulate the experience, but words failed me. Before I had been drawn in too deep, I had seen so much, the experience so intimate, making it difficult to comprehend.


    ¡°Settle, calm down. I¡¯m here.¡± Sigmir¡¯s voice told me, as I was pulled onto her lap, letting me curl up with her smell in my nose. As she was gently stroking the hair on my head, I heard her voice mumbling softly, telling me that I could rest, that I had done enough.


    Closing my eyes, I did just that. And Darkness embraced me.

 Chapter 474

    Returning to wakefulness was a slow process, my mind not willing to let go of the wonderful dream I had been having. I wanted to close my eyes again, to fly some more, on my own wings, not merely on borrowed wings. But once I was aware enough of my surroundings, the urge to sleep faded from my mind.


    Still, I didn¡¯t instantly try to get up, instead trying to put the things I had seen in order, to make sense and form conclusions from the experience. What had actually happened when I tried to connect with Sigmir? To my understanding, the connection between us was on the level of our souls and somehow, I had managed to cause a resonance between my Blood Magic and that connection, allowing me to go deeper, so to speak, than I had ever expected. Maybe deeper than ever intended, the only analogue, the only experience that came close was the ritual the Grandmother had conducted to allow me to heal Sigmir from the affliction cast on her by her tribe¡¯s shaman. The Grandmother had explained that her ritual had allowed me to connect to Sigmir¡¯s soul and it had felt similar to that last, brief moment before Lenore had ended the experiment.


    ¡°Do you know what happened?¡± I asked Lenore, without opening my eyes.


    ¡°I¡¯m not quite sure, just that you suddenly channelled vast amounts of Astral Power. I used some of my own Astral Power to keep you from draining yourself dry and pulled you out as fast as I could, but that¡¯s all I can tell you.¡± she responded, sounding a little worried but also curious.


    ¡°I think I touched Sigmir¡¯s soul.¡± I quietly admitted, still trying to wrap my head around the experience. For a minute or so, only silence responded and if Lenore had a jaw, I was quite certain it would have dropped at that comment. Before, I hadn¡¯t even been able to perceive souls, my magic and perception had been limited to the Body, using my Blood Magic, and the Mind, using my Mind Magic.


    ¡°That¡­¡± she began, her voice haltingly, as if trying to come to grips with the revelation, ¡°makes a certain amount of sense.¡± she admitted and I could feel her mind reeling thanks to our connection.


    ¡°Astral Power flows through the soul, with the Mind controlling the flow and the body acting as an anchor. The basis of Blood Magic, when you use it to drain power from someone, forcibly severs the connection between their Astral Power and their Mind, allowing you to drain it from their Body.¡± she considered and I had a feeling where she was going there.


    ¡°And that severing is the reason why it hurts so bad? That I¡¯m literally ripping out something that is flowing through their soul and cutting it off?¡± I asked, following along. Going by her reasoning, I had somehow managed to follow the Astral Power far enough into Sigmir¡¯s being to perceive her soul, if only for a moment before the drain of using an ability outside it¡¯s normal scope had forced Lenore to act.


    ¡°Doesn¡¯t help us, does it?¡± I asked, realising that while it was a fascinating discovery and a unique experience, it didn¡¯t really help us with Ylva¡¯s problem.


    ¡°No, I don¡¯t think so. Maybe if you were able to open a connection between Ylva and the realm of Spirits that spawned her line, so long ago? That might help?¡± Lenore threw out a few ideas, none of which seemed practical, certainly not without a whole lot more experimentation. Which put them on the back-burner.


    Opening my eyes, I realised that Sigmir must have dressed me,after I had fallen asleep and had also put me into our shared sleeping-furs before cuddling up to me. Given that she was still wrapped around me and deeply asleep, I had a feeling that she had taken a watch during the night, so that I could get my rest.


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    Carefully wriggling out of her grasp so I didn¡¯t disturb her took a few moments, but it was time well spent. Looking around, we were still in the back of the cave, the circle I had used during the night still present and even a small whiff of Blood Magic still lingering in the air.


    Walking to the front of the cave, I realised that the others were all up and looking worried.


    ¡°What¡¯s wrong?¡± I asked, looking towards the entrance of the cave, just as they did.


    ¡°I saw four Manticores when I was out earlier, trying to hunt down some food.¡± Adra told me in a quiet voice. An equally quiet curse escaped me, as I realised the problem. While it was unlikely that they had detected us, there was little doubt in my mind that they would instantly do so if we ventured out during the day. And while fighting a single Manticore, especially a young one, was relatively trivial for our group, trying to take on a swarm was akin to suicide. Even a single Manticore experienced enough to avoid being crippled by ranged attacks, or sturdy enough to endure what Adra and I could throw at it, would be able to make  things difficult for us, let alone a swarm that could simply overpower us.


    ¡°Olivia, do you know their hunting-patterns? Are they active during the night, or do they prefer the day?¡± I asked, searching for more information to form a strategy.


    ¡°I¡¯ve only heard stories. The wingless ones are generally active shortly before dusk and with the coming dawn, while the winged ones are hunting during the day. I¡¯m pretty sure they can see in the dark, they are partially giant cats after all, but mostly rest during the night.¡± she replied, to which I nodded in response. It gave us something of an opening, if we moved during the night, maybe even managed to lure one in shortly before dusk, using the limited space in the cave to wound or maybe even kill, before getting away under the cover of darkness. That second was a horrifyingly risky tactic, but just scurrying away without even showing them our claws felt wrong to me. There even was a small part of me that wanted to take the fight to them, to show them that they were not the masters of the skies, that they couldn¡¯t take them from us, but I was self-aware enough to realise that if trying to fight a swarm of Manticores on the ground was suicidal, trying to do the same in the air was a step above that.


    ¡°So we are safe for now.¡± I nodded, concealment and the narrow cave taking away their strength in numbers and negating the advantage brought by their ability to fly.


    ¡°For now, yes. But we¡¯ll have to be careful and keep an eye out. You want to move during the night?¡± Adra asked, despite knowing me well enough to guess the answer.


    ¡°Of course. I think if Lenore and I put our minds to it, we¡¯ll be able to conjure up enough of a cloud to make them think twice about flying, I doubt that they¡¯d want to smash into a mountain cause they can¡¯t see where they are going.¡± I responded with a grin, Lenore agreeing that flying over the mountains with low-hanging clouds was an incredibly bad idea.


    ¡°We might even stay here for another night and I can scry to find another cave for us, further along the path. That way, we can move from one cave to the next, without ever showing us out in the open during the day.¡± I added, considering the options. We¡¯d need to hunt at some point, but if the Manticores were hunting during the day, I had a feeling that most creatures that had any capacity for nocturnal living were doing so. I certainly would want to avoid the massive, flying hypercarnivore monsters in the sky, if I were a chamois or a mountain-goat.


    ¡°For now, I¡¯ll get back to work, if we have to wait here for the day, I won¡¯t waste my time. Not if I can help it.¡± I told the others, before stepping back to the part of the cave where I had set up my circle. I would have to be careful with my experimentation, that I didn¡¯t drain myself of Astral Power again, while also making sure that I didn¡¯t do anything that caused a magical commotion that the Manticores might detect. But other than that, there was nothing that stopped me from continuing on with the experiments, especially if there was the possibility that Ylva gained a power-boost before we had to fight mature Manticores.


    Looking at Sigmir¡¯s slumbering form, I decided that a bit of delay with the experiments was fine, at least long enough to allow her to wake by herself. Sitting down on our furs, I carefully pulled her head into my lap, trying to project calm contentment over our connection, hoping to give her a nice dream. The way she nuzzled into my lap certainly made me think that everything was fine, even with the massive murder-lions soaring far above us.

 Chapter 475

    ¡°Are you ready?¡± I asked Ylva, making sure that she was on the same page as me. What I had in mind wasn¡¯t that much different from the experiment on Sigmir and myself, only that I was now working with the one I ultimately wanted to change. If I managed to gather Divine Power, this would be the application of it. Not that I had any Divine Power yet, nor did I think getting it would be easy. Thus far, I didn¡¯t even understand the interaction between the Astral Power and the Soul, which I considered a lower level than Divine Power. I didn¡¯t even have a firm understanding what Divine Power was, or how it operated, let alone how to isolate and manipulate it.


    The first step was one that neither Sigmir nor I needed, namely giving me access to the subject¡¯s skin. I had suggested shaving some of Ylva¡¯s fur, simply because Lenore and I thought it would be a good joke. The look on her face, alongside the outraged growl, was more than enough to amuse us, even if she threatened to bite us. Luckily, a bit of Ice-Magic to keep her fur frozen and out of the way was easily accomplished and I was able to carve the Rune I had used before into her skin with my Athame.


    And then the actual work began. It was interesting, just how minor the differences were between the magical mark-up of Sigmir and myself, in comparison to Ylva. But then, even the physical differences weren¡¯t that big, at least not when compared with a being like Adra. With her, I didn¡¯t even try to understand how my magic worked, luckily, she rarely got hurt in a way that I needed to fix.


    As I delved deeper into the complexities that were Ylva, I felt the magic around me thrum, slowly pulsing with the beat of my heart. With Sigmir, I had let myself fall too deep into the sensation, stumbling into areas I couldn¡¯t even begin to comprehend, something I wanted to avoid with Ylva. Instead, I focused on the way Astral Power moved within her body, especially the space where it replenished, getting channelled into the physical medium of her blood by what I believed to be her soul.


    Calling it complex and complicated was an understatement, but there was something at the edge of my perception, almost nagging at me to reach out and grab it. For a few moments, I simply focused on the intricate dance of Astral Power, the way some of it remained within her Blood, while some of it instantly continued on, infusing her flesh and bones, but finally, I gave into temptation.


    The moment I f¨²lly focused on the thing at the edge of my perception, it was as if the world around me faded away, all my senses cut off. I wasn¡¯t even sure if I was within my Avatar any longer, the sensation not unlike the brief moments of ¡°not-falling¡± when logging into Mundus, but I wasn¡¯t booted out into my capsule-space.


    Instead, the first thing I felt of my surroundings was the familiar, yet unexpected, sensation of cold. And not just any cold, a clear, crisp biting cold, akin to the blowing wind of an icy winter night, piercing through all layers of protection and stealing all the warmth from your flesh. A shiver went down my spine, as I let the cold flow through me, not rejecting it but greeting it like an old friend. As I drew out the Ice that was flowing through me at all times, the cold faded away a little, not vanishing but into the background, always there, always lingering. But not pressing into me for the moment.


    The next thing I felt of my surroundings was a greedy hunger, the darkness around me driven by an urge to consume, to take in everything but the cold. It wasn¡¯t the hunger of Darkness, to consume the light to blot it out, the hunger was a little different. But it was close enough for me to feel the similarities, to empathise, even if I didn¡¯t understand.


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    After a moment that might have been just seconds, or hours might have passed, I felt the same sensation I had felt earlier, only that now it was no longer a nagging presence, it was the full force of the being, hammering me with sensations I could barely contain, let alone understand.


    I could grasp some of the being, thanks to my affinites for Ice and Darkness, but the sensations I felt hinted at so much more. My perception was limited to the barest edges and yet, even those edges made me shudder. For a second, the burning eyes of the Titan that had haunted my dreams sprung to mind, only to be quickly blown away by the freezing cold that gripped my body.


    A howl, not quite sounding like the wind, not quite sounding like a beast shattered the silence around me, bringing sound back to my world. But there was meaning in the howl, as complex and difficult to comprehend as everything in this space had been. I thought it was a question, a query, one I knew I needed to answer, or bad things would happen.


    Focusing on the ability I had gained from my bond with Lenore, to understand languages and be understood regardless of language, I tried to speak even without perceiving my body, without knowing if there was an intelligence listening to me. My thoughts, already a little jumbled, started to pour out of me, trying to communicate that I was trying to help a friend, that I wasn¡¯t trying to trespass or intrude.


    The wind continued to howl, now whispering into my ears, communicating something out of my grasp, the cold now sapping my strength despite my affinity. Pushing back, I tried to keep my mind from failing, to keep my awareness strong. The lure of darkness was strong, to simply surrender to the comforting embrace and let myself fade. As the wind was howling around me, I felt a presence push it back, just a little, while another anchored me, letting me rest and gather my strength for yet another push.


    Reaching into the Hunger, into the howling wind, I tried to take hold of the darkness, if only to make myself felt, to be acknowledged. That I existed, that I was more than a gnat in a dream.


    In the darkness around me, two gigantic, golden eyes appeared and I could feel the weight of their gaze on me. Measuring me, judging me. Again, I tried to convey that I was trying to help a friend. I thought of Ylva, trying to convey who she was, both to me but also to Sigmir and Lenore. Why we wanted to help her, what I was trying to accomplish. At first, my thoughts had been coherent, formed in a controlled fashion but under the gaze of those eyes, I found myself rambling, barely able to keep track of my thoughts.


    The feeling of Judgement vanished and the howling of the wind seemed to convey acknowledgement, but there was an undertone of warning. Before I could consider more, think about what it meant, the vertigo-inducing darkness returned, only that I didn¡¯t return to Mundus. Instead, when I again had eyes to open, I was sitting on my Throne, within my capsule-space.


    Leaning back, I tried to stop the world spinning around me, closing my eyes again, only for them to snap back open, as memories of the judging, golden eyes intruded into the normally so calming darkness. My breath came in short, laboured gasps as if I had been trying to complete one of Mrs. Wu¡¯s exercises in record-time, or maybe running away from something. Recalling one of the exercises in her book, I controlled my breathing, letting it flow in measured breaths and counting them as I did.


    By the time I got to one-hundred, the world had stopped spinning and my usual calm had returned, even if there was a part of me that wanted to look over my shoulder, just in case the golden eyes were still watching me. But that had to wait until later.


    The mental command to log back into Road to Purgatory was one I had given countless times, the brief darkness was one I had long since grown accustomed to, even if it felt somewhat menacing for once.


    But the blue box containing a short and simple message, along with a count-down was one I had never seen before.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>


    You died. You can revive at your home in 23h57min.


    </td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>

 Chapter 476

    After exiting the game, I just sat for a few seconds, before laughter bubbled up within me. Dying for the first time, not in some epic battle or fighting against impossible odds, but because a magical experiment gone awry. It was so strangely fitting, I could only laugh at it.


    Shaking my head, I decided to do what every good scientist would do after an experiment had wholly unexpected side-effects, namely look at the data. In this case, a lot of data was lost or locked behind that countdown, but I could take a look at the recordings, hoping to find something of interest.


    What I found was what I should have expected, namely what my Avatar, the body, had done. I could see the incision I had made into Ylva¡¯s pelt, I could see myself placing my hand on the rune, and I could watch for a minute while nothing happened. After that minute, I could hear Sigmir exclaim in surprise and shortly after that, the camera circled my body once, while my Avatar faded into the black particles, leaving behind a distressed looking Lenore.


    One thing of interest was visible, namely that Ylva started to glow in a curious mixture of silver and gold, but it was only on a few frames at the end of the video, giving me very little to go on, at least not until I was able to return to Mundus.


    Before logging out of the capsule, I did my due-diligence, compiling the events into a bug-report and filing it in the appropriate system. While I was almost certain that I didn¡¯t die due to a bug, it might have been one, so reporting it felt like the right thing to do. Once that was done, I logged out, still not certain what to do with myself.


    Shaking my head again, I decided to make the best I could of the sudden, enforced vacation from Mundus and take care of a few chores I had postponed before. One of those chores was to send Chris a message, like he had asked when we had last met, something about getting another coffee one of these days. While I wasn¡¯t quite certain what he wanted to talk about, he seemed to have moved on with his life, my mother had taught me that friendships needed a certain time-investment if you wanted to remain friends. Chris and I hadn¡¯t seen each other for a few years, so maybe we just needed to invest some more time into our friendship, or something like that. If nothing else, the fact that his job and my nominal job as an accountant were in similar fields might give us something to talk about.


    After sending the message to him, I went about my appartement, doing those pesky chores that always fell by the wayside, things like cleaning the windows, dusting on the cupboards. None of the chores were urgent but at the same time, I had to do them at some point, or they would still be on my to-do list by the time the life-version came out.


    I hadn¡¯t even managed to clean one of the windows, when my mobile-phone chirped to tell me I had a reply, making me realise that Chris likely had received my message during his coffee-break, as it was roughly the right time. His message was short and to the point, suggesting a meeting in the afternoon, at a coffee-shop near his work-place. While it was a bit of a surprise that he actually had time on such short notice, I wasn¡¯t about to look a gift horse in the mouth, especially not when I had time to kill anyway.


    By the time I had to get ready, I had managed to do the piled-up chores and even had some extra time to read on the forums, though there wasn¡¯t a lot of interesting information to be found. Life on Mundus was going on as usual, despite the fact that I had died for the first time. There was a wry smile on my lips as I realised just how arrogant that thought was, but at the same time, the only being that had managed to kill me, had been myself. That had to count for something.


    Dressed in one of my professional-looking pant-suits and a dark coat, I wouldn¡¯t look out of place, which was always something to strive for. While I didn¡¯t mind standing out when within a computer-game or generally on the Internet, I disliked being stared at. It was uncomfortable enough with my diminutive physique, making me appear to be a child at times so professional dress when in social situations made me more comfortable.


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    Curiously, Chris and I got to the coffee-shop at the same time, with him holding the door for me. It brought a smile on my face, that actions of decorum Mrs. Wu and my mother had told me about were used so naturally by Chris, despite the, at times, rough way he had been as a teenager. Maybe people actually did grow up, which made me wonder about myself. Had I changed, and if so, in what way? It was difficult to tell from the inside how my subconscious actions had changed, and if so, for what reason.


    After shaking off my weird, pensive mood, more suitable for Mundus and the introspective nature of my magical studies, I focused on the world around me as we went through the motions of ordering.


    His order, some hideously complicated drink I would need a manual to make, with a mixture of soy and half-fat milk, only to add some sugary syrup afterwards, amused me to no end, especially given that he had used to take his coffee black, without adding anything. It must have been a relatively usual concoction, as they easily took his order, while my simple, green tea needed to be confirmed twice.


    ¡°So, how have you been?¡± he asked, once we were seated at one of the corner tables. As I answered his question with the meaningless platitudes he undoubtedly expected, I realised that I had fallen back on the training with Mrs. Wu. I was sitting with my back to the corner, close to the employee-only door, able to easily see the entrance and counter, just like she had taught me to. Similarly, my reply was performative to the extreme, without giving any information of substance, but the idea of talking about Mundus and Road to Purgatory felt strangely alien to me, especially when sitting in a coffee-shop, wearing professional clothes. As if that talk belonged to another world, maybe another time. Back, when we had been teenagers, I wouldn¡¯t have thought twice about talking about the latest Craft of War changes. Maybe that was proof that I had actually changed.


    Luckily, while I had very little to add to the conversation beyond meaningless platitudes, my own professional activities limited to keeping my certification active, Chris seemed to be content to tell me all about a merger he and his colleagues were working on.


    Personally, I hardly cared, but it was interesting to practise Mrs. Wu¡¯s lessons, trying to spot when he was embellishing his role and when he was genuine. It gave me something to do, while nodding along to his tale and certainly kept my mind occupied. Still, as I listened, I began to wonder if renewing a friendship was worth it, if there seemed to be nothing we still had in common.


    ¡°Say, have you thought about what you are going to do in the future?¡± he asked, after his story about the merger wound down. It caught me a little by surprise, so I merely shook my head while taking another sip of my tea.


    ¡°After we met, I looked Craft of War up, for old times and all that, you know? Wouldn¡¯t now, after leaving the old team, be a good time to make a new start? To do something respectable and professional, maybe even look to start a family?¡± he continued, making me freeze for a moment.


    ¡°There are some things in the works.¡± I replied, trying to give a professional reply without making it obvious that I was playing for time to think.


    ¡°Why do you ask?¡± I brought the question back to him, my mind looking for a fitting reply. The problem was, I didn¡¯t really have one. While a part of me wanted to sink myself into Road to Purgatory, to delve into the deepest of its mysteries, was that a viable long-term plan? Especially if there was the always-present possibility that there would be no Sigmir in the official release?


    ¡°Just the other day, I talked to one of my colleagues, and there might be a position at the bank for someone of your qualifications. You did keep your license active, as we discussed during University, right?¡± he explained, and I found myself nodding along, not agreeing but simply showing that I listened, while my mind was churning.


    ¡°As I said, there are things in the work. But I¡¯d like to think about it, if that is no problem?¡± I suggested, getting a nod in response.


    ¡°Great. Why don¡¯t we meet again, soon? I¡¯m afraid I¡¯ll have to get back to work.¡± After getting a nod, he quickly emptied his coffee and got up, while I was still sitting there, until I realised that my tea had gone cold.


    He certainly had given me something to think about.

 Chapter 477

    After the meeting with Chris, I considered his suggestion on my way home. If I wanted to follow the life-path that society generally deemed to be appropriate, accepting his offer and trying to make my way within an ordinary company would be the way to go. But was such a path really the path I wanted to pursue, either now or at all? Would I find happiness, or at least comfort and contendness, if I walked down that path? Or was my Road the one to Purgatory, living in a world that most people wouldn¡¯t see as anything more than a game?


    But at what point did a world become real? Everything around us was perceived through the lense of our senses, converted into electrical impulses and interpreted by our brains in an effort to form predictive models about our environment. While I didn¡¯t know how the capsule worked, how they interacted with our brain''s perception of reality, the world Pantheon Entertainment had created felt, in many ways, just as real as the world in which I was walking away from a coffee-shop. The snow on Mundus was just as cold as the snow melting in a few secluded spots around me, if I were to pick up a snowflake, I might be able to see similar, yet unique, complex patterns, no matter if I picked the snowflake up here or on Mundus. So, what was the difference?


    Did my stay on Earth, my life, create any tangible, impactful difference for those after me? I had no plans on having children, the whole idea of having a baby grow within my stomach was utterly unsettling to me, let alone the idea of marriage and romance. Until I had met Sigmir, I had never thought that such concepts would ever apply to me, making me consider it a miracle. Inexplicable, and quite possibly unique, something that I could hope for but not expect.


    The more I thought about it, the more my conviction was reinforced. I would have to do everything I could to stay with Sigmir. What did it matter to me, what some person on the street might think about me and how I lived my life? While we might share some of our mental and physical characteristics, at the end of the day, the only one who needed to be comfortable with my life was myself. Well, at least as long as I managed to keep food on the table and the utilities running.


    It was a little eerie, when I returned to my appartement and realised that I didn¡¯t quite know what to do with myself, now that I couldn¡¯t log into Road to Purgatory. Normally, I made careful plans to accommodate the necessary chores outside the Capsule, so that I could spend as much time as possible logged in, but now, with my character dead and thus unavailable, I was at a loss.


    Finally, after a few moments of consideration, I decided to push myself physically, hoping that exhaustion would help me to sleep away the remaining time. On a whim, I took up my practise blades after stretching, purchased on Mr. Wu¡¯s recommandation a few years back. Closing my eyes, I slowly started to move, following elaborate sequences that would only work piece-meal in an actual fight but the smooth, flowing movement helped me to relax my mind. I had done these sequences dozens, maybe hundreds of times, often enough that I could start to improvise, departing from the actual sequence and simply let my body flow from one stance and movement into another. Especially since I had started to actually use the style I had learned, and was teaching it to Rai, my familiarity had greatly increased.


    I didn¡¯t realise the passage of time, but when my arms faltered and I barely managed to keep my balance and not land in a graceless heap, I noticed that I was covered in sweat, my breathing barely keeping up with my body¡¯s need for oxygen. It took me a moment to place my blades back on their stand, my hands not immediately responding to my brain¡¯s commands, even as my body started to shake a little. I had quite obviously overdone things. Still, I forced myself to keep moving, to go through a series of gentle, cool-down stretches, knowing that I would be in serious pain if I didn¡¯t.


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    After some food and a quick shower, I fell into my bed, my body still a little achy from overdoing things earlier, but I would likely be fine by the time Mrs. Wu would get to train me some more. Keeping up my training certainly was worth it, it might even be worth it to push things a few levels higher in the coming month, all for those precious stat-points I might be able to gain during the character-creation. Even just a few points in my physical stats would pay dividends down the line, maybe I¡¯d even be able to get an additional trait, though hopefully nothing negative like the Ruthless-Trait I had acquired during the beta.


    As I floated in darkness, I could hear the wind whistle around me. Strangely, I knew it was freezing cold around me, but I didn¡¯t feel it. I was comfortable, despite the darkness and cold around me, despite the sharp gusts of wind. Maybe it was because I had no body that could be cold, no eyes that needed the light.


    There was a pattern in the whistles, ebbing, flowing, a melody and rhythm, taunting me with my inability to understand, to see the meaning in the sounds. I growled, annoyed at my failure, my growls echoing the bits and pieces of the pattern I could hear. As I was getting more and more worked up over my inability, I was startled out of my concentration, the scant progress I had made, lost. But even as a part of my mind bristled with annoyance, another, primal, part of me drowned it out, my whole being focusing on a single point of recognition. Two gigantic, golden eyes, floating in the formless, featureless darkness that I had been residing in, their attention threatening to devour my mind.


    With a yelp of fear, I shot up, darkness surrounding me. My eyes strained, trying to pierce through the darkness, but despite my affinity, I failed. I tried to call upon my magic, trying to conjure Ice to shield me, Mist to Hide me, I even tried to meld into the shadows as my arms and legs were constricted. Nothing worked, even as I frantically tried to escape the bindings that held me. I called out, trying to get Lenore to help me, even tried to blindly shift into my Hallow, but there was nothing, no reaction. As if she wasn¡¯t there.


    Suddenly, I was slipping away and after a brief moment of falling, a painful impact shook me awake. Confused, I noticed a dimly shining display, telling me that it was 4:23am. Latching onto the object, something that wasn¡¯t a featureless void or giant, glowing eyes my mind started to boot. After that, it took only a few moments to recognise the bindings around my limbs as the bedsheet I had managed to completely entangle myself in and to realise that there was no magic to call on. Now more cognisant, I looked around and quickly realised that the darkness was only so deep because it was night and my curtains drawn.


    Sitting there, on my slightly aching butt, I focused on my breathing, simply letting the air flow in and out of my lungs, the consciously measured breaths helping to calm my racing mind. It had just been a nightmare, obviously conjured up by my latest escapade in Road to Purgatory. Nothing more, nothing less, there was no giant monster with piercing, golden eyes waiting outside my window, ready to devour me. There couldn¡¯t be, if for no other reason than the fact that I was some thirty meters above ground. Though, when I thought back to the eyes, their size, and considered the size of a certain Titan and the giant eagle eating it, were thirty meters really enough?


    Shaking my head, I focused on the more pertinent truth, namely that those creatures, their size and everything to do with them was a part of Road to Purgatory. I didn¡¯t need to consider moving to a higher building, or trying to find an apartment on the top floor, there was no need for it. As if to convince myself, I entangled myself from my bedding and padded over to the window, opening the curtains to look out. Just to make sure there were no eyes, waiting to stare in.


    As expected, there was nothing outside, only the various lights of a sleeping city, the street-lights shedding light for those unfortunate people that had to work already, the warning-lights of the snow-plows that made sure what snow had fallen during the night was dealt with.


    No gigantic monsters threatening to devour me and the world around me in sight.


    Shaking my head once more, I decided that there was little point in trying to go back to sleep, not with the nightmare so fresh in my mind, and went to take a shower. The cold sweat covering my body certainly made one necessary.

 Chapter 478

    When I was finally able to log back into Road to Purgatory, the first ten seconds were a little weird. I could perceive my surroundings and look around, but I couldn¡¯t move the rest of my body. Nor did it look like my companions noticed me, with Adra sitting nearby, resting against the cave-wall.


    After those few seconds to orient myself, I became able to freely move, fully part of Mundus again. Instantly, I could feel Lenore, who obviously became able to feel me in turn, bombarding me with a cacophony of thought, worries warring with curiosity. Similarly, I could feel Sigmir through our connection, radiating joy, but mixed into it were darker emotions, worry, guilt and a bit of anger. My appearance must have made a bit of noise, Adra¡¯s closed eyes snapped open, focusing on me.


    ¡°You are back.¡± she simply stated, her voice relieved. There was something in her gaze that I didn¡¯t recognise, but it quickly vanished, when she shook her head and closed her eyes again.


    ¡°We¡¯ll need to move soon, your¡­problem cost us two days, and the Manticores found us yesterday.¡± she explained, before trying to get back to her rest. As I was still a little distracted by a couple blue boxes in my log, I was hit by an unstoppable force in the form of Sigmir, who wrapped me in her arms, lifted me off my feet and almost sent me back to respawn by squeezing the life out of me. So close up, the emotions coming over our connection were clearer than ever, almost sweeping me up. I tried to project comfort and security back at her, to show that nothing had really happened, that I was fine. I could hear her sniffle a little, as she held me in her arms, her face pressed into my hair. For a few minutes, we simply stood there, basking in the presence of the other.


    Curiously, there was one more connection I hadn¡¯t noticed before, lesser in comparison to the one to Sigmir and less clear than the connection to Sigmir. A gentle tug and a bit of focus revealed that I had somehow formed a connection to Ylva, too.


    ¡°We should let Adra rest.¡± Sigmir suggested, after giving me a deep kiss that consumed all my focus for a moment. Mumbling my agreement, I let her act as she pleased and she carried me out like a doll. It gave me a few moments to glance over the blue boxes that had distracted me earlier.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Skill increased</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You increased your skill: Blood Rune-Mastery [62/100]</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Skill increased</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You increased your skill: Astral Meditation [51/100]</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Skill increased</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You increased your skill: Blood Magic.[75/100]</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Trait gained</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You gained the trait: Mortal Hubris</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>Nothing is sacred to you, nothing safe from your curiosity. To some, that trait is admirable, to others, it is blasphemy and worthy of any punishment.


    When engaged in your chosen field of study, you gain a 50% bonus to all attributes.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Trait gained</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You gained the trait: Connection of the Pack</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>Some families are bound by Blood, others are bound by choice. Yours is bound by both, forming a unique connection between all of its members..</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>


    Divine Grace - Your death saddened a deity, who decided to spare you from the consequences of your actions. There is no penalty for this Death. Be more careful in the future, mortal.


    </td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    ¡°What exactly happened?¡± I asked Sigmir, once we were in the front-part of the cave, able to see a bit of daylight. Not a lot, I noticed that the entrance to our cave was greatly narrowed, mostly blocked off by rubble, as if someone had tried to close off most of it by causing a partial cave-in.


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    I could hear Sigmir take a deep breath, preparing to answer, while Lenore¡¯s response was a lot simpler, she pushed her memories at me. Focusing on them for a moment, I experienced the few moments from her point of view, how there had been a massive drain on my Astral Power, how she had pushed some of her power to me, in an attempt to help, how even Sigmir who had been watching had felt in, and pushed some of her power at me, essentially using my own Blood Magic, which had been thick in the air, to lend me a bit of power and support.


    And how it hadn¡¯t helped in the slightest, with me suddenly dying, leaving her scrambling to get out of her Hallow as it faded with my body. The memory cut off at that point, but right at it cut off, her focus switched to Ylva, who was glowing with a strange light.


    ¡°I could feel your fear and tried to help.¡± Sigmir responded to my question, sounding both sad and guilty. ¡°And I failed.¡± she added, her voice breaking a little.


    ¡°You didn¡¯t fail. If anyone failed, it was me.¡± I told her, shaking my head as I gently placed a hand on her cheek.


    ¡°What I did, didn¡¯t quite work the way I had intended. I have really no idea how it happened, or why or anything of that sort, I¡¯ll have to look at it with Lenore for a bit, but I somehow managed to forge a connection to someone else. Or maybe somewhere, or something, I¡¯m not quite sure.¡± I admitted, still not sure what had killed me, but certain that SIgmir had no fault. Even checking the combat-log, it simply told me that I had died, nothing about taking damage, nothing about a source, simply, ¡®You died.¡¯.


    It was obvious that Sigmir wasn¡¯t quite happy about the whole situation, and once we were out of the cave, she¡¯d likely have something more to say about it, but for now, she accepted my explanation.


    With a sudden glint of silvery light, Ylva appeared next to Sigmir, looking at me closely. Now, I could feel her even more strongly than I had earlier and her eyes were reminiscent of a pair of golden Eyes to the point that it sent a shudder down my spine. And those eyes weren¡¯t the only change, visually, they were the biggest one. Otherwise, she was just a little slimmer, though her muscles were more pronounced, making her look a little more dangerous and hungry. But while her look hadn¡¯t changed a lot, the feeling she gave off had an air of power surrounding her.


    ¡°I can explain some of it to you.¡± she growled, my connection to Lenore allowing me to understand her, even while our newly established connection helped with the emotional nuances. There was pride and gratitude within her, but also quite a bit of worry.


    ¡°What you did pushed open a door deep within me, a connection to my Divine Ancestor. I can¡¯t quite explain how it worked, but He gave me, and in a way all of us, His blessing. For that, I thank you, sister.¡± she explained, and the gratitude I had felt earlier surged.


    ¡°On the other hand, he also asked me to pass a warning to you. While he regards you as extended family, trespassing into the realm of the Gods is something to be avoided, even by accident. He decided to give you a warning, as death is only a temporary annoyance to you, He felt you needed to suffer some consequences.¡± she added, concern now obvious in her tone.


    There were so many things I wanted to ask about, so many things I needed to think about and discuss with Lenore. Latching onto one of the easier things, I asked Ylva why she referred to me as Sister.


    ¡°You forged a bond of Blood between all of us. We are pack.¡± she told me, looking between Lenore and Sigmir. I noticed, when she said pack, it contained all the associations I would normally connect to family, but there was more to it, an even closer link that even Lenore¡¯s ability couldn¡¯t quite translate.


    ¡°I guess that means we are married.¡± I told Sigmir, a cheeky grin on my face. It was the only word I could think of to describe an official family-connection for a relationship like the one I shared with Sigmir. Though, a part of my words was spoken due to curiosity how she would react.


    When her reaction was merely a shy nod, before pulling me in for a kiss once more, that mischievous part of me was a little disappointed, but the sensation of love pouring over our connection more than made up for that small disappointment.


    ¡°You are back, good. We¡¯ll need to talk about our further plans.¡± Olivia¡¯s voice pulled us out of our small cocoon of contentment. Letting out a sigh, I stepped back from Sigmir and looked over to her. The look of concern on her face didn¡¯t fill me with confidence.

 Chapter 479

    ¡°Certainly.¡± I agreed, while Sigmir turned to look at Olivia and Rai, who had just entered the cave through the narrowed opening. ¡°We were just talking about it, but I¡¯d be glad to include you.¡±


    ¡°I¡¯m not sure if you¡¯ve heard, but the Manticores found us yesterday. Sigmir insisted on staying here, until you returned and she mostly sealed off the entrance when one of the Manticores tried to get in. Which leads us to the current situation, they can¡¯t get in without massive efforts that might collapse the whole cave, burying everyone involved but we can¡¯t get out, without being spotted and quickly swarmed and torn to pieces.¡± Olivia explained, before giving Rai a look, who nodded in turn.


    ¡°I¡¯ve been trying to sneak around some, staying in the shadows of the mountains and some clouds, I don¡¯t think they noticed me from up there, but they are there, constantly watching.¡± he added, his head instinctively turning upwards, as if he had become used to flying predators. I could only nod to acknowledge the troublesome situation. Trying to fight the Manticores out in the open was suicide and they weren¡¯t stupid enough to try digging us out, they didn¡¯t need to. Without an ability to tunnel through the mountain, we weren¡¯t going anywhere and with such an ability, trying to get us within caves would be like fighting me within a labyrinth of ice, pure idiocy. Surrounded by their preferred element, the abilities of a spellcaster went up by an order of magnitude.


    Which, in turn, was the obvious solution to our predicament, following the original plan we had laid out before I had managed to get myself killed.


    ¡°Now that I¡¯m back, once the sun starts to settle and there are enough shadows around, Lenore and I will try to find another cave, that way we can move during the night. I might be able to conceal us all in the Darkness and I know that Adra has a spell that helps to conceal us from tracking. Hopefully, travelling that way for a few days will allow us to slip their net.¡± I reiterated our old plan, getting nods of acceptance. But it also made me realise just how dangerous adventuring could be, if we made a single mistake during the night, none of us would survive, even if I¡¯d return to this cave two days later. Unless I decided that a Mundus without Sigmir wasn¡¯t worth returning to. It certainly drove home why amongst locals Adventurers were considered a special breed, respected for their power, feared for the insanity they had to have to acquire it.


    ¡°Rai, could you return to your watch, now that the plan is nailed down?¡± Olivia asked, giving Rai a stern look. It made me frown, the fact that she was almost giving orders. She was the newcomer in the party and while she was the oldest and most experienced of us, that didn¡¯t mean I was letting her run roughshod over my student.


    ¡°Morgana, we need to talk.¡± she began, looking at me with a mix of disapproval and pity in her eyes. It made the feathers in my neck stand up a little and I noticed that Ylva was mirroring me somewhat, her hackles raised. Sigmir and Lenore were less obvious about it, but thanks to the connection between us, I could feel their tension.


    ¡°Is that so? I don¡¯t remember having to report to you. Or seek your approval in any way shape or form.¡± I spat back, a cold anger filling me. If she thought she could direct me, she had something else coming and I had no problem leaving her behind for the Manticores to feed on.


    In response to my obvious anger, she raised her hands in a gesture of surrender, some of the disapproval in her eyes fading but the sad pity I had noticed in them was still there.


    ¡°I¡¯m not your enemy. Eleutheria wants everyone to walk their own path, unless their path infringes on the paths of others. But that doesn¡¯t mean I can¡¯t feel that you¡¯ve changed, that there¡¯s something about you.¡± she shook her head, looking a little scared for a moment.


    ¡°I can¡¯t really describe it, when you died, I felt something weird and now that I see you, that feeling is still there. It... ¡° she paused, shaking her head again, staring into space as she was obviously lost for words. ¡°When I pray to Eleutheria, I always have a feeling of peace, even as a curiosity to find out what is at the end of the next road fills me. It is comforting and relaxing. Looking at you now makes me instinctively worried. she explained, struggling to find the right words.


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    My anger quickly faded, though it didn¡¯t completely vanish. Thinking back, it had to be the effect of my latest Trait, the Mortal Hubris. Getting a trait that boosted all attributes by fifty-percent in limited circumstances had to come with a significant draw-back and it looked like I was being introduced to them now.


    ¡°I see.¡± I nodded, not quite sure how much to tell her. ¡°Would you be willing to tell me if that feeling fades away?¡± I asked, deciding that for now, I¡¯d just tell her nothing and see if I could mask the effect of that trait, similar to how I could block Observe. Worst case, I would have to spend all my time in the company of others within my Hallow, which would make for a somewhat unpleasant experience. Though, it would likely mean that I¡¯d get myself some hide-out if there was still time at the end of the Beta, after finishing the quest related to the Soul Prison and fully focused on research. If nothing else, that trait would allow me to get much further than I would without it.


    Olivia nodded to my question and I tried to look into myself, trying to figure out the best way to hide that new aspect of myself. How to hide something you hadn¡¯t been aware of before? My first step was to cloak myself in shadows, concealing myself within the darkness of the cave. After a few moments, Olivia turned around, waited for a few seconds, and looked again, her eyes focusing on Sigmir first, before darting around the cave. Despite me not having moved away, her eyes slid past me and she shook her head.


    ¡°The sensation is gone, but I can¡¯t really perceive you, either.¡± she said, looking just a little past me. ¡°Not without truly focusing at least.¡± she added right afterwards and there was a golden shimmer around her eyes and they snapped to me, a frown visible on her face right afterwards.


    ¡°Okay, once I see you, the sensation is still there.¡± she said, the light in her eyes dying down again. As a first step, simple concealment would work, but I didn¡¯t want to be forced into permanent hiding even more than my Outsider-Trait already did, so I focused on the shadows around me again, trying to adapt the concealment. What I needed wasn¡¯t full concealment, merely something to hide myself from Observe and similar skills, but not reactively but constantly.


    Thinking back to the times I had been Observed, trying to recall the sensation and the brief moments I had to block it,I changed my cloaking just a little. I didn¡¯t need the full concealment of the shadows, but a partial concealment, Twilight instead of Darkness. As I considered the runes and their relations, I felt my thoughts clear a little and I nodded to myself, having found a solution.


    I didn¡¯t need to conceal myself from Light and Sight, those could pass through the cloak. No longer did I hold the rune for Shadow within my mind, but I used the Rune for Twilight, alongside the Rune of Concealment within my mind, pulling the thin blanket of shrouding darkness around my shoulders, like I had with my cloak, marvelling at the ease of it.


    ¡°Can you try to Observe me?¡± I asked Olivia, who agreed with a nod. Moments later, I could feel the sensation of discomfort, as if someone was trying to strip me naked to ogle me, but it never quite reached me, my magic doing its job, like a set of clothes. Just as I was about to rejoice, Olivia¡¯s eyes flashed golden and my defense started to crumble away, forcing me to pull more and more power in. Just as quickly as the crumbling started, it stopped when the light went out in her eyes, my power still gushing out, making me invisible again.


    ¡°It worked, somewhat. I might still be able to pierce it, but it would turn into a contest of power, which I think I¡¯d lose. But someone more powerful than me, or with a better-suited skill-set can still see through your new trick.¡± she assessed, sounding a little proud.


    ¡°So my best option would be to never be in a situation where someone like that noticed me to the point of trying to apply extra power? Or do you think there are people who could passively pierce my concealment?¡± I asked, curious if she would answer despite her discomfort regarding my newly acquired trait.


    ¡°Once someone gets powerful enough, they¡¯ll simply ignore your tricks, all of them. But at our level, those who can brush you off that way are rare and few between, unless you come to their attention, you should be fine. Hopefully.¡± she admitted, to which I nodded. It was just another inconvenience, in a slowly growing list of them.

 Chapter 480

    With the time-sensitive things out of the way, my newly established family retreated into our connection a little. In some ways, it was a weird idea, a family consisting of four females, none of which were the same species, two of which not even humanoid, but at the same time, the connection between us made it feel right. My connection with Lenore was unchanged, at least to my perception, while the connection with Sigmir had a little more bandwidth, for lack of a better word, allowing me to sense her emotions with a little more breadth and clarity. Lastly, the new connection to Ylva was unsurprisingly the weakest of the three, only giving me a sense of direction and an idea of her surface emotions. Still, it was there and felt right.


    For hours, we just sat together, slowly getting a feeling for the connection between us all and the effect its newly interlinked nature had on us. Mostly, we just talked about the events that had established the connection, which also served to highlight just how powerful of an effect it truly was. Where before, I had been able to project feelings of comfort and closeness towards Sigmir, essentially wrapping her in the emotional equivalent of a hug, now Ylva could directly feel what I was doing and add her own projection to it, in her case mostly a sense of protection and vigilance. Instead of individuals providing comfort to a friend, we were parts of a greater whole, able to take a part of the other''s burden.


    Curiously, Lenore privately asked me if something had happened while I had been in the other realm, making me raise a mental eyebrow. It was rare that she asked about the realm where I came from in the first place, I think it was a bit of a taboo in her mind, just like she ignored it when my thoughts strayed to certain aspects of my Reality and the place Road to Purgatory had within it. I had a feeling that deliberate ignorance wasn¡¯t quite natural, as Lenore was otherwise incredibly curious, but I had little recourse in that instance. Which only made her question more curious.


    Regardless of normal circumstances, I gave her a rough idea of Chris¡¯ suggestion and offer, though I coached it in appropriate concepts for Mundus. Weirdly, once I had explained it, she quickly lost interest and we focused back on the active conversation with Sigmir and Ylva.


    Another thing I asked about was if Ylva¡¯s crossing of the second Divide had changed the way she resided in her Hallow, or if the two of them had experimented with Sigmir forming a Hallow of her own. Given the way Sigmir blushed when I asked about the former, I took a much closer look and realised that the small hairs on both her arms had turned silver, and when I reached to touch, their softness surprised me. In addition, I noticed a shiver running up her hairs from the lightest touch, making me think those hairs were incredibly sensitive.


    Which didn¡¯t explain the blush, but the fact it intensified when my eyes roamed over her body, especially the middle of her body, gave me a bit of an idea and put an evil smile on my face.


    ¡°You should get used to hiding that nature.¡± Olivia interrupted our communion, making me realise that I had lapsed in the earlier concealment. Frowning, I re-established the cloak, while making a mental note to either get used to constantly projecting it or find a way to create the effect passively. Luckily, I had Olivia to train with in the wilderness, giving me some time to get the trick down, before things truly counted.


    ¡°Thank you, please tell me whenever I lapse.¡± I asked Olivia, the one who seemed the most sensitive to that particular effect. She gave me a nod of acceptance and continued with what she had been doing, in this case, preparing dinner.


    Seeing that made me realise that it was already late, late enough to begin scouting. After telling Sigmir and Ylva about my plans, Lenore hopped onto my shoulder and we began to weave a spell together. The work made me frown, when I realised I still hadn¡¯t replaced the staff I had broken near Neamov when creating the Blizzard as a distraction. It was another thing to do, maybe when hiding the next day. .


    For now, however, we had to make do without it. Luckily, we didn¡¯t have to make do without a Throne, we had enough space and I even had a few more ideas to try out, hoping to improve the efficiency of it, as I had very specific plans for the night. By limiting its function, only engraving it with the runes I used for scrying and linking them into the required formations around my personal glyph, it should give me a better focus for that one spell. Lenore agreed, and soon, we were sitting down, channelling Astral Power into the runic formation we had used quite a few times before, only this time, I had created the formation twice, one for Lenore, one for myself. It was an experiment, the idea that I might be able to trigger the newly acquired bonus by delving into an expanded version of familiar magic.


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    It was difficult to say if my Mortal Hubris kicked in or not, but I thought the spellcasting was easier compared to before. Still, it was a rather strange experience, projecting myself into a corporeal shadow, merely held together by my magic and will wasn¡¯t something I could get fully used to. It was made worse by the lingering feeling of my body but after I had received a rather severe backlash during the last time I had projected my mind outwards, I was experimenting with the process to increase security. Not that I thought the Manticores could harm a mind hidden within the shadows, but it wouldn¡¯t do to underestimate my foes.


    Feeling Lenore split from me, her raven wings of darkness carrying her through the shadows cast by the sun setting behind the mountains, I decided to move on my own. For once, I eschewed any form, keeping the construct I was using as a simple cloud, formless and shapeless. It made me wonder just how small I would be able to make the construct containing my mind, but it wasn¡¯t the right time to experiment with that.


    Lurking within the shadows always gave a skewed perspective of reality, distances stretching and shrinking at weird times, creatures warping into nightmarish forms without warning, but despite those draw-backs, it gave an impression of our surroundings. In the warped realm of shadows, I quickly covered hundreds of meters of distance, only to need many times longer to cross a short gap, where the shadows stretched in length. As I moved, I realised just how important the connection to my body was, as it gave me what I thought was a relatively accurate idea of the distance I had crossed and the direction involved. Otherwise, I might have gotten lost in the shadows cast by the setting sun.


    Sadly, searching visually in a realm of ever-shifting shapes and distances was far from easy. By the time I felt a poke against my physical body, alongside a mental prodding over my connection to Sigmir, I had found a lot of things, but none of them what I was looking for. My search wasn¡¯t exactly made easier by the fact that there was still that feeling of being watched, which could either come from the realm of Shadows itself or from the Manticores that supposedly kept an eye on things from the sky. With the warping shadows being what they were, I hadn¡¯t been able to find them in the twilight-sky.


    Returning to my body was a lot easier than it had been before, as I simply let my construct fade into the Astral River, while my mind followed the River¡¯s streams until I returned to my body. As long as I did things slowly and carefully, there was no backlash.


    Opening my eyes, I suddenly snapped forward, gently biting into Sigmir¡¯s finger who had been about to poke me again. My lips curled into a grin as I nibbled, making soft growling noises, causing her to laugh.


    ¡°Did you find a good hideout?¡± she asked, once I let her finger go.


    ¡°Sadly, no. But maybe Lenore had more luck.¡± I admitted, waiting for my avian friend to return to her body. Curiously, compared to me, she was less experienced with travelling the Astral River, thus she would likely use the shadow-constructs to return to the cave. As expected, shortly after I had returned, I could make out a darkening in the entrance and moments later, she opened her eyes and stretched her wings.


    We quickly compared our memories and perspective, checking if either of us had missed something during the time we had been scouting, before we even exchanged words. Given the way the shadows warped during twilight, it was better to compare notes, so to speak, before our minds blurred the memories even more when trying to make sense of them internally.


    ¡°Did you find something?¡± Olivia asked, now that we both were active again. A quick glance showed that she seemed to have finished dinner, which likely was the cause for Sigmir to call us back.


    ¡°No.¡± I admitted, just as Lenore, using my voice, told her that she had found something.


    ¡°We should be able to get there, if we hurry during the night. But it¡¯ll be a difficult marsh, followed by an even more difficult climb.¡± she added, making me realise why I might have failed to spot the hide-out she found. My ground-dwelling nature coloured my perspective, even when moving as a formless cloud of shadows.


    ¡°We should try, who knows when the Manticores will grow bored of watching this cave and decide to get serious about getting us out.¡± Olivia suggested, having taken my earlier warning to heart.


    ¡°Yes, there¡¯s nothing to be gained by waiting.¡± I agreed, ¡°But first we should have dinner.¡±

 Chapter 481

    It was interesting how the others instantly looked up, into the sky, the moment they left the cave. It might be a yearning for the open sky, born from being forced to hide in a cave for a couple of days, it might be a cautious reaction caused by the hostile presence above. I wasn¡¯t certain, and didn¡¯t want to draw attention to something so unpleasant.


    Instead, I focused on my own spellwork, what I considered to be the most difficult part about our retreat. It was one thing to conceal myself in the shadows for a relatively short time, it was a different kind of beast to hide all five of us for the entire night. But it had to be done, if we got spotted by the Manticores as we were moving to a new hideout, things would get even more difficult, as the flying monsters would know about our plans. Hopefully, they simply would keep focused on the cave for another day or three, before realising that we had left.


    For the first two hours, we moved through the night without problems. It was a dark night, with clouds blocking most of the moon- and starlight, but luckily, all of us either had some form of night-vision or were perceptive enough to get by. The most interesting thing I realised was that I had underestimated the newly formed connection between Sigmir and myself. It wasn¡¯t just emotions and such that were transmitted, but there was an aspect of our respective perception that was included. It was low-key, essentially only sharing the subconscious things your brain gathered without the mind being aware of it, for example to let you avoid walking into things or falling over roots and things like that. At least that was my perception, it was difficult to pin down due to the subtle effect. I would have to talk to Sigmir about it, and test things out with Lenore and Ylva. It might just be something similar to the sensory combination employed by Sigmir and Ylva, allowing them to react to things the other perceives while in combat.


    Suddenly, a small rock I had failed to notice decided to try overthrowing the tyrants stepping on it and slid out from under my foot. Instead of easily compensating and keeping my balance, I reacted too slow, flailing as I tried to keep myself from falling on my behind. Luckily, Sigmir managed to reach out, grabbing my shoulder and stabilising me. For a moment, I just stood there, my heart racing from the surprise, trying to calm my breath.


    That moment also made me realise just how tired I was, a good chunk of my stamina spent from hiking in the mountains while channelling a relatively powerful spell. Either of those was manageable with only a minor drain on my stamina, but combined, it took more out of me than I had expected.


    ¡°Do you need a break?¡± Adra asked, looking over to me. For a moment, I considered agreeing to a break, but the distance we had to cover during the night was far and if we got spotted in the morning, all would be for naught. Before I could answer, I felt a slightly weird sensation over our bond and realised that Ylva was about to leave her Hallow. The two of them, Ylva and Lenore, had remained within their Hallows to keep me from having to conceal them, too, but apparently, Ylva felt the need to be active.


    ¡°We¡¯ve got a better plan.¡± Sigmir spoke up, steady conviction coming over our bond. I was ready, instantly covering Ylva up with my concealment when she appeared, curious what the two of them had in mind.


    For a moment, Ylva and Sigmir just looked at eachother, before Sigmir suddenly turned into a silver glint and vanished, very much in a reversal of Ylva¡¯s earlier appearance.


    ¡°I didn¡¯t know Sigmir had her own Hallow now.¡± I muttered to Lenore, letting the part of my concealment that had covered Sigmir fade.


    ¡°She hadn¡¯t tried that, yet. I¡¯m not quite sure, but I think she wanted to remain active at all times, ready to protect you.¡± Lenore explained, while I noticed a curious change regarding Ylva¡¯s body. The fur on her ears and neck had suddenly grown, forming something almost akin to a lion¡¯s mane, the colour just a little different to her normal silver fur. It was darker, with a blue undertone that reminded me of Sigmir¡¯s skin-colour and the sensation I got from Ylva was quite a bit stronger.


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    ¡°Come, I will carry you.¡± Ylva softly growled, her size swelling to that of a decently large pony as she stepped up to me. It was a slightly amusing solution, especially as I had really no idea if riding on a wolf was that much less exhausting than walking on my own two legs, but the sincerity and desire to help I could feel over our bond made the question moot.


    A quick, careful jump brought me onto Ylva¡¯s back, where I had to scoot around a little to get somewhat comfortable. Her back truly wasn¡¯t made for riding, narrow and bony, but at least the newly acquired mane made for a decent place to hold onto. When my hands buried into that mane, the mane almost entangled my hands, keeping them warm and tightly held in place.


    ¡°What do you think the effects of having Sigmir within a Hallow will be?¡± I asked Lenore, thinking of the effect I had when within my Hallow and Lenore¡¯s when she was in hers.


    ¡°At a guess, physical strength, maybe endurance or possibly something similar to the red aura Sigmir uses in battle. Any of them, or a combination, would be quite useful, certainly better than the Ice-Effect having you riding along gives to my talons.¡± Lenore replied, her tone mocking. We exchanged a few quick, mental barbs regarding the worth of the abilities we respectively granted the other, when Ylva started to move.


    Riding on the spirit-golems we had been given in Neyto had been one thing, especially as they had come equipped with built-in saddles, but riding Ylva was a whole different pony. Or rather, not a pony, which was the problem. Even when she moved slowly, it was difficult to keep my balance, almost making me drop my concealment-spell. Not wanting to disappoint my companions, I forced myself to hold on, when Lenore suggested a solution in my mind.


    ¡°You have those vines, do you think you can do something with them?¡± she asked, giving me a good idea. Channelling Astral Power into the Eisblumen-Accessory I was wearing on my upper arm, I let the growing vines wrap around Ylva, carefully making sure that they didn¡¯t hinder her movement, while at the same time wrapping around me and binding me in a somewhat comfortable position. It made me little more than luggage getting carried on the back of a massive wolf, but it allowed me to get somewhat comfortable with my head resting on Ylva¡¯s mane. I certainly didn¡¯t have to worry about falling off.


    Curiously, lying tightly bound on Ylva¡¯s back was a lot more comfortable than expected, especially the mane made a great pillow. It was almost as if my head was cradled in Sigmir¡¯s arms, held and protected, allowing me to fully focus on my concealment-spell, letting my companions literally carry the physical burden. At the same time, the bond between us allowed me to have my eyes closed and still have a vague feeling of our surroundings, allowing me to fully relax into an almost meditative state. My mind didn¡¯t need to do anything, but pull Astral Power from the Astral River and weave it into a spell to hide us. Everything else was taken care of.


    I might have overdone it with the relaxation a little, letting my mind drift off too far, to the point where I was essentially asleep. At least it felt like I was waking up when Lenore mentally poked me, letting me know that we almost were at the cave she had found earlier.


    Blinking open my eyes, I relaxed the vines holding me a little, careful not to fall off without the bonds. My care proved instantly necessary, when a spike of pain went through my mind, the mental ¡°muscles¡± that had constantly channelled power into the concealment-spell cramping up, for lack of a better metaphor. Still, I hadn¡¯t kept it going this whole time, only to muck things up on the last few steps.


    The cave Lenore had found wasn¡¯t an easily accessible one, instead the entrance was in a crag some fifteen meters up a wall. Climbing up was certainly possible, though not necessarily easy, but without knowing about the cave, there was little motivation. And you needed hands, which were something of a rarity amongst most local beasts.


    With a growled prompt from Ylva, I got off her back and had to hide a grin a few moments later. While Ylva vanished with a glint of silver light, Sigmir re-appeared, stumbling as she tried to find her footing. It was obvious that she had tried to replicate the instant-switch Lenore and I habitually used, only to realise that the two of us had needed a bit of training to pull it off smoothly. For once, I was the one able to catch the stumbling Sigmir, even if I had to cheat with the still present vines.


    Climbing the cliff was almost trivial, each of us at least somewhat stronger than one would expect from our physiques and none of us clumsy or inept. Rai didn¡¯t even need to climb, instead he simply stepped through the shadows, going first and making sure that nothing was waiting for us in there, to make a snack out of us.


    With the first rays of the sun illuminating the peaks quite some distance above us, we all disappeared into the cave, hiding from the day and the predators it brought.

 Chapter 482

    The less said about the cave Lenore found for us, the better. It barely qualified as a cave, merely a large hole in the cliff, giving us a little shetler, but once we all were inside, it was¡­ cozy. Very cozy, to the point that Adra and Rai essentially ended up sitting on each other, while I considered retreating into my Hallow, so that only Lenore took up space.


    ¡°Are you sure the Manticores won¡¯t find us in here?¡± Sigmir asked, looking skeptically out of the narrow entrance. The entrance itself was within a crag of the cliff, giving it some cover, but it wasn¡¯t perfect, some sky was visible from most of the cave, so most of the cave was visible from those stretches of sky. If the Manticores were at just the right angle and looked down, we would be in trouble.


    ¡°No, not really.¡± I quietly admitted, trying to figure out a way to keep us safe. My first idea was to cover the cave in a cloak similar to the one I had used during the night, but that would leave me drained during the evening, if not earlier, making movement during the night impossible. A frown appeared on my face when I realised that there was a way, though not a pleasant one.


    ¡°But I have a way.¡± I added, pulling out my athame and moving to the opening of our wonderful cave. Wihtout explaining, I cut myself into my hand, drawing concentrating to channel Astral Power from my hair into the blood slowly seeping out from the cut. That way, the pain normally involved with Blood Magic was massively reduced, though it took a little longer to regenerate the Astral Power within my hair, compared to the Astral Power in the rest of my body.


    Using the infused Blood, I re-created the cloaking I had used during the night, using the shadows around the opening and in the cave itself to hide us. It wasn¡¯t a perfect solution and wouldn¡¯t last the whole day, but it was a start.


    Once I was done, I let out a sigh of relief that the dice had come up in my favour. When using Blood Magic, there was always the chance to draw Nethersprites into Mundus, especially due to my Defiler-Title that greatly increased the amount of Power I gained with it, but at a cost.


    Shaking my head, I focused on different things, namely the fact that we were forced to hide and sneak around. It annoyed me on a deep, almost primal, level, irritating me to a degree that I hadn¡¯t quite expected. Trying to fight the Manticores in the open was suicide, of that I was aware, but at the same time, there had to be a way to fight them, even at our level. I wasn¡¯t willing to accept their superiority, even if they had the ability to deny Lenore and me the skies.


    ¡°Say, Adra, how high up can you accurately hit a target?¡± I asked, stepping back from the entrance that was now shrouded in shadow, making the cave almost completely dark.


    ¡°I never tried.¡± she admitted, not needing to ask the reason for my question. My eyes flicked over to Rai, considering the way he had managed to shift the two of us into that realm of shadows, wondering if we could pull Adra with us and keep her safe and hale within. If so, we might be able to sneak to a high vista that got us into range of a flying Manticore, allowing Adra to shoot it down. Maybe there would even be a way to add some of my Ice, or some other carrier for my magic, to her arrow, allowing me to effect the struck Manticore with something nasty, making it fall even if the arrow failed to strike it from the sky.


    The idea to take the skies from the Manticores, to make them afraid of flying and ground them in their eyries until we had long left appealed to me, not to mention killing them would be a decently good source of EXP.


    ¡°Didn¡¯t we want to make them think we were still in that other cave?¡± Rai asked, his voice a little subdued but curious. At his question, an annoyed growl escaped my throat, not annoyance at him, but at the fact that he was right. If we started to hunt the Manticores, that whole ¡°sneaking around¡±-thing would have been pointless. Before I could get deeper into the idea to hunt down the Manticores, Sigmir suddenly reached out, pulling me into her arms and onto her lap.


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    ¡°No need to get all agitated.¡± she whispered in my ear and I could feel calmness radiating from her. For a moment, a part of me wanted to struggle but the moment she gently kissed my lips, any such thoughts vanished and I let myself get drawn into things. She truly was my rock, the place where I would always find a place to land and rest, protected and shielded from anything that wanted to harm me.


    ¡°Love, I think I can understand why you want to fight them. You love the open skies and to fly with Lenore, don¡¯t you? Getting forced underground, even if we are within the darkness you adore, it goes against that, right?¡± she asked, her voice gentle and when I looked up, into her eyes, I could only smile, slowly losing myself in the feelings she radiated. It was as if I could see a solitary, windswept mountain reflected in her eyes, moonlight shining on its rocky slopes.


    ¡°I¡¯m calm now.¡± I admitted, realising that trying to battle the Manticores willy-nilly was an incredibly stupid idea, born from frustration and a bit of exhaustion.


    ¡°Good. Now, why don¡¯t you close your eyes and sleep a bit, I was able to rest within my Hallow, while you kept us hidden the whole night.¡± Sigmir suggested, her hand gently stroking my hair, quite possibly noticing that its normal sparkle, caused by the Astral Power stored within, was gone.


    For a moment, I wanted to protest, tell her that I had rested on Ylva¡¯s back, essentially sleeping the night away, but when I opened my mouth to do so, a yawn escaped me and I realised that I actually was rather tired. Spellwork was exhausting, especially when it was a spell that wasn¡¯t designed for such work. Maybe, after resting, I could come up with a way to lessen the burden the Cloak of Shadows placed on me. So, instead of fighting against my exhaustion, I simply let go, placing my head against Sigmir¡¯s chest and closing my eyes. Maybe I would dream of flying and the open skies.


    If I dreamed, I sadly didn¡¯t remember it when I woke up a few hours later. The first thing I did after waking up was move around a little, to limber up my muscles after sleeping curled up on Sigmir¡¯s lap.


    ¡°You¡¯re awake.¡± Sigmir whispered, her quiet voice making me realise that the others were still sleeping, with Sigmir keeping watch.


    ¡°Mhm, yes. Seems I was more exhausted than I thought.¡± I admitted, getting a nod in response. Neither of us wanted to disturb the others, so I simply rested my head on her chest again, and focused inwards, on my magic. Could I improve the efficiency of my magic cloak? Or was there another way to facilitate safe travels with the Manticores flying above?


    The first idea springing to mind was that I still had a bit of Manticore-Blood, stored in icy shells stored in my magic bag. Was there a way to use it to our advantage?


    Using it to target the Manticores from which I had taken said blood was trivial, but useless as those were already dead. But was there a way to target the rest of them, similar to the way I had used it to track them before?


    The more I considered it, the more I liked the idea, despite the fact that it was impractical. The less focus I had within my spells, the more power they would need, so to craft a curse that afflicted one Manticore, I would need but a fraction of the power I needed to craft a curse that afflicted all of them. And that was assuming perfect efficiency without any losses for scaling up the magic, which was almost certainly impossible.


    The realisation made me a little sad, having the ability to end a whole lineage, maybe even eradicate an entire species was both an awesome and a scary prospect. The gamer within loved the idea, remembering the genocide I had perpetrated against the Snowbolds so long ago and the incredible amounts of EXP that had given me. If I somehow managed to pull off something similar, only this time targeting a powerful species like the Manticores, my level would likely shoot up. Or I would get struck by divine punishment, smitten by the ban-hammer of the Gods.


    The idea made me giggle for a moment, before I focused on more immediately relevant things, namely optimising the Cloak of Shadows for the night. Genocide would have to wait until I had some form of external power-source or a lot of living resources for my Blood Magic.

 Chapter 483

    After three days of nightly skulking and hiding in small caves by day, I was about ready to try something stupid. It grated at me, in ways I couldn¡¯t quite explain, to have the open skies denied to me. I yearned to walk beneath the stars without having to conceal myself, to let the wind play with my hair as it streamed through my fingers, maybe to climb the nearby peaks and enjoy the nigh eternal glaciers, yet, all that was impossible as long as the cursed Manticores were out there, hunting for us.


    And hunting us, they did. We had been hearing their roars for the last two days and seen their massive, flying forms during the occasional glance we had taken out of our hiding places. And as much as I wanted to strike them from the skies, to trample them into the dirt and shred their bodies, trying to do so would only lead to the demise of us all. No, if we wanted to hunt them, we would have to be careful and cunning, or we would be the prey, not the predator.


    For that, Lenore and I had been looking for something else during our daily scrying for hide-outs further down our path. If we managed to find a larger cave-complex, with multiple exits or something along those lines, we would have a point to retreat to, where the Manticores couldn¡¯t come after us, without losing their major advantages, namely their numbers and ability to fly, the combination of which would allow them to swarm and tear us to pieces. In close quarters, especially in narrow crags and tunnels similar to the ones I had visited back with the Ashenforge-dwarves, I had quite a bit of confidence in our ability to slaughter almost any number of Manticores. Their own bodies, the source of their greatest strength, would also be their greatest weakness.


    Sadly, so far, we had failed to find any such complex, or even anything that had the potential to be suitable. No, the only things we had found were narrow crags and holes, forcing us to scrabble in the dirt like animals. A state I didn¡¯t like one bit.


    Almost as if to make up for my annoyance, there was one major upside during those last couple of days. Mortal Hurbis, possibly to make up for the need to constantly keep magical concealment active and it having the very real potential to see me dead, was a game-changer in many ways. Whenever I tried something new with my magic, or experimented with it in ways I hadn¡¯t quite figured out yet, the stat-bonus activated and gave me a major boost. The best thing about it was, even minor alterations counted, such as trying out slightly different connecting patterns or changes to the way I drew my runes.


    The flip-side was that once I had figured out a new way to work my magic, like the alteration to the scrying-spell that allowed Lenore and me to use independent constructs I had figured out on the first day, the boost would go away unless I kept altering the spell-work. Which was an interesting challenge, as I had a desire to use that boost as much as possible, simply because it was that good. At first, I had considered it a true detriment, something I should probably avoid during the live-version but now, after using and abusing it for a few days, I wasn¡¯t quite as certain of that. I would have to see how it played with people other than Olivia and how difficult it would be to keep the effect concealed in a town.


    Or I might truly go a path of hermitage in the live-game, intentionally isolating myself instead of it being a feature of the constant travel, shared only with a few, mostly, trusted companions. The idea to build myself a tower, similar to the one I had created in my capsule-space and immerse myself in the magic of Mundus had a certain draw, even if I would have to figure something out for my streaming or somewhat change outside of Road to Purgatory, in a way that would allow me to balance a job with magical research, as silly as that sounded. Options and considerations, but for later. For now, there were Manticores to murder, an ocean to cross and finally, a Soul Prison to shatter.


    A smile appeared on my face when I realised that studying the soul-prison, now with greatly increased attributes, might yield some interesting results. I doubted there was a way to open it without a major source of Power, but it was worth taking a look. At least if I could ascertain that neither Olivia nor anyone but Sigmir got a glimpse of it. I trusted them, but only to a point.


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    Those thoughts kept part of my mind entertained, while another part controlled the magical construct I used to move through the shadows of the late afternoon. Slowly but surely, I had become more proficient with the particularities of the Shadows during the time of twilight, when the light was changing and thus the shadows around me, too. The effects made me curious, wondering if there was a way to incorporate the ever-changing nature of the twilight into my magic, to allow for effects I had yet to consider or understand. It was a part of the Darkness I had yet to truly explore and given that one of the essential parts of Darkness was Change, I had a feeling I should do so, at some point.


    But for now, I had other priorities, namely to find a good hiding spot, hopefully somewhere in the right direction, after we had been forced into a bit of a de-tour the last two days. The ancient, imperial road was a wonderful construct, but with our need to hide during the day, we had been forced to abandon it, simply due to a lack of suitable locations near it. I had some idea about its location, thanks to the ebb and flow of the Astral River that it was somewhat linked to, but it would take some time to get back to it.


    Abandoning the valley I had been exploring, I decided to slip into the shadows of a floating cloud, using it to cross over a nearby ridge, to hop into another valley. The moment I reached the top of the ridge, I froze for a moment. Not because I had seen something interesting up there, but because at that moment, I felt like I was touching infinity. The relatively small shadow I had been travelling merged with the shadow cast by the ridge and as it stretched so did I. My perception was flooded with information, forcing me to activate Bullet Time, just to try keeping up. But even with the boost, I was still overwhelmed, until I managed to snap back to reality and pulled my construct back together.


    The sensation left me breathless, both from the sudden exertion and the sheer potential it had. The sudden increase of the shadow I had been moving in had brought me a stark reminder that I had been intellectually aware of, but had never quite internalised. The Shadows were one, and they were infinite.


    Could I, in that brief moment, have snapped not to the position I had started out at, but to another point in my perception? If it was my magical construct, which was essentially only a magically held together ball of shadows that contained my mind, it should be possible. And if that was possible, what about the shadow-step? So far, neither Rai nor I had experimented with it beyond our immediate line of sight, moving from one shadow to another we could easily see, but was that truly the limit? Or could we, if we managed to conceptualise it, step from one shadow to any other shadow, no matter the distance? If so, the ability was, in gaming terms, completely broken, unless there was a price to be paid, possibly by an exponential increase in Astral Power-cost that made any stepping beyond a certain distance prohibitively expensive.


    Smiling to myself, I decided to experiment a little and kept one part of my focus on a pretty rock that I had spotted on the ridge while letting my perception stretch through the shadow down the mountain. For the first few moments, it worked but the increased area quickly flooded my mind again, but this time, I had another idea. Instead of trying to reduce the amount of information I was getting by reducing the area I was perceiving, I reduced the amount of information by limiting the method, so to speak. Before, I had focused on using an equivalent of sight to process information, essentially giving me eyes within the shadow that looked out. Now, I was giving up on that, my mind was simply not made to process more visual information than what I got from my two eyes. Increased attributes could help, but not far enough.


    On the other hand, my brain was perfectly capable of processing information from countless skin-cells and the nerves therein and it was just as capable when the amount of skin increased. After all, as a toddler you had a fraction of the skin-surface you had as an adult, yet you only had two eyes in both stages. To me, that meant tactile perception was the one that scaled the easiest.


    The result of mentally closing my eyes was thoroughly weird. Weird, but not unpleasant. It was as if I was slowly caressing the mountainside, letting tendrils of shadow brush past rocks, into crevices and down the slopes. Strangely beautiful, at least until I realised that I was, once again, using up Astral Power at a prodigious rate. But it hadn¡¯t been for nothing, one of the crevisses I had crept into was far more than the narrow crag could possibly hint at.

 Chapter 484

    Beneath that small fissure, barely wide enough to allow my body entry, was so much more. After a few meters of that narrow crag, it widened into a proper cave, possibly created by some ancient glacier. I could almost feel the remains of Ice in the Darkness, even if my body wasn¡¯t physically there, I thought I could taste the delicious taste of the stillness of Ice in the air. Once I reached that point, I pulled myself together, reducing the area I was perceiving, along with the amount of Astral Power I was using. Instead, I let myself fill up that cave, enjoying the perfect darkness, where no light would ever dare to shine.


    When I realised that I couldn¡¯t fill up the cave, that my Astral Power would run out before I could manage, I felt a little intoxicated. It was a place of Darkness, carved by Ice. What better place for me to be? Maybe, if I were to conduct a few rituals there, filling the cave up with the delicious scents of Blood and Death, it would be even better? Was there a way to lure one of the Manticores into that space? If so, I might be able to do something¡­ interesting.


    Snapping out of my slightly delirious trance, I let my construct dissipate and retracted my steps through the Astral River, back to the cave where we were hiding for the day.


    ¡°I found our destination for the night.¡± I told the others, once my eyes were open.


    ¡°I found a good spot, too. Let¡¯s see who has a better hide-out?¡± Lenore asked, using our mental connection. Giving her a nod, I let her experience my memory of the last few minutes, the sensations of stretching and letting Darkness caress the world. There was something about it that gave me a feeling of intimate wrongness, as if I was doing something I shouldn¡¯t do, but felt wonderful, despite that knowledge.


    In contrast to my most curious find, that I truly wanted to explore more, what Lenore had spotted was another cave, similar to the ones we had been using the last couple of days. Sure, it would work and was technically in a better location than the location I had stumbled across but that didn¡¯t matter in the slightest to me. And given the emotions I could feel over the bond with Lenore, neither did it matter to her, she was just as intrigued, even if she wasn¡¯t too fond of caves or the dark.


    ¡°That¡¯s an interesting way to scry.¡± Lenore admitted, after she fully experienced the memory I had sent her.


    ¡°Do you think you could use similar magical constructs outside of that? As a method of observation or study, maybe?¡± she suggested, making me consider for a moment. If I could feel tactile sensations through my shadows, there had to be a certain push-back, at least that was my understanding of physics and magic.


    A smile blossomed on my lips, when I began to consider some of the potential implications, not only for practical purposes but also for certain other purposes that most definitely benefited from the cover of darkness. Was there a way to imbue my mind into a shadow and wrap it around Sigmir, feeling and touching her everywhere at once? Now, that was an idea I certainly wanted to try out at some point, if we had enough space to separate from the others.


    And in addition, there were the more boring purposes, using it to gain a high-resolution image of an object, if I could do so. It depended a little on my conceptualisation of Darkness in contrast to matter. So far, I had simply acted on instinct and used that tactile sensation in a fashion similar to the way I would touch something solid with my hands, but I doubted that was necessary, after all, Darkness was everywhere, making me wonder if there was a way to influence liquids or even gas that way. If I could, it would be a major addition to my magical abilities,maybe less useful for battle, though there were implications, but just for general utility.


    I would have to seriously study that particular idea and the connected concept.


    It was then that I realised I had gained two full points in my Darkness-Magic during my scrying-session, making my eyes widen in surprise. So far, gaining two points in one of my advanced magical abilities had been reserved for insane stunts like trespassing into a Divine Domain or fighting a deadly battle against a powerful foe, not for magically gallivanting across the countryside.


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    ¡°So, where are we going?¡± Adra asked, forcing me to focus on the present instead of smiling like a loon as I considered fascinating uses of magic.


    ¡°There¡¯s a cave nearby, I think it¡¯s rather large. Large enough that we might be able to consider being more proactive with the Manticores, instead of scurrying around and hiding in the dark.¡± I responded, a little amused at the fact that we¡¯d be still hiding in the dark and scurrying around underground, but it would be by my choice, driven by my curiosity and desire to find out more about those caves, not because the Manticores forced me to hide.


    ¡°That doesn¡¯t sound too bad.¡± Adra agreed, though I could see that the lack of sunlight was slowly getting to her. She was a creature of the forests and while she could easily withstand the winter, even the winter in the freezing north, travelling the mountains, especially above the tree-line, was not for her.


    ¡°Don¡¯t worry, if that cavern is what I think it is, we should be able to take a day or two to explore it, before we start to use it, and possibly additional exits, to take the skies back from the Manticores. Once we accomplish that, we can return to the ancient road and quickly travel the rest of the way to Narristo.¡± I explained, trying to soothe her, promising that we¡¯d soon return to the trees she loved.


    The rest of the day passed quite quickly, with me playing around with my latest idea to imbue my will into shadow-constructs and experimenting with their utility. It quickly became evident that there theoretically was infinite utility there, possibly allowing for things like barriers that used the emptiness within an atom as a concept, but sadly, that utility was far out of reach. I managed to create a tactile sensation, one that Lenore could feel through her feathers, but the sensation held about as much strength as a feather. I might be able to lift tiny amounts of dust or dirt, maybe even produce a vague approximation of wind-magic by using the shadows to push a bit of air, but it had such an insanely bad efficiency that it truly wasn¡¯t worth it. While telekinesis via shadows sounded like an interesting idea, I either was on a wrong path, or that path needed a lot more work to make it viable. Thus, it went onto my pile of ideas to work on later, once I had more time.


    After night fell, we headed out again. By now, we had the drill down quite well, I was riding on Ylva¡¯s back, allowing me to focus on maintaining my spell while guiding her using our connection, with the other three following behind. Sigmir wasn¡¯t too fond of the arrangement, given that she had to hide in her Hallow, but she accepted that it was for the best and allowed her to keep watch during the day.


    Luckily, the location I had found wasn¡¯t too far out and soon, we were climbing up the slope I had explored before. It was interesting just how well my mind had conceptualised the information I had gained earlier, forming the tactile sensation I had experienced into an almost scan that let Ylva understand the lay of the land at incredible resolution. Not only where small stones and crags where, but also which stones might move and which were solidly embedded into the ground. While it wasn¡¯t easily usable, there was utility there. Maybe for some sort of  short-range radar or something like that, I would have to think about it.


    As we were crossing the last distance, I heard wings beating in the quiet night and looking up, I saw one of the Manticores just casually flying across the ridge above us. My magic concealed us, of that I was quite certain, but the way it was flying made me wonder, did it really?


    ¡°Adra, can you take that shot?¡± I asked, speaking softly enough to not be overheard. I wanted them to feel fear, just as we feared them. Shooting down and wounding a flying Manticore might just do it.


    ¡°Are you sure?¡± she asked, just as quietly, to which I nodded.


    When she drew her bow, not quite sure of my plan but going along anyway, I reached out, letting a bit of Ice form on the arrow-head, just a tiny trace that formed a triangle of runes, and carefully kept my mental link with them.


    Moments later, just as the Manticore was turning, she took the shot, the arrow filled with her magic crossing the distance in mere moments, leaving a trail of azure light and perfectly hitting the Manticore into the wing-joint. A smile bloomed on my lips, as I activated overflow and pumped Astral Power into the runes I had placed moments before, letting them explode into frozen shards, fully destroying the wing. Gravity was a harsh mistress, and seconds later,we heard the sounds of it crashing into the ground and going down-hill and got the notification that another young Manticore had died.


    ¡°Let¡¯s get underground.¡± I told the others, and we swiftly moved to the crag. It was a tight squeeze, one that Sigmir wouldn¡¯t have been able to make, and I had to help out quite a bit with a thin layer of diamond dust to lubricate while using my Eisblumen as ropes to pull the others in, but it somehow worked.


    We were in complete and utter darkness, certainly hidden from the Manticores and in a world that made me almost giddy, thanks to the purity of Darkness and the traces of ancient Ice that still lingered in the air. Now, if I could only find some Blood to spill, adding some Death in the process and it would be pure perfection.

 Chapter 485

    Once we all were well and truly within the cave, I let myself relax and took in my surroundings. Or rather, I tried to, for once, not even the night vision granted to me by my elven heritage and affinity for Darkness allowed my eyes to see. Out of curiosity, I closed my eyes for a moment, only for nothing to change. But just because I couldn¡¯t see didn¡¯t mean I couldn¡¯t perceive my surroundings. Infusing the darkness around me with a trace of my Astral Power gave me an idea of my surroundings, letting me see where no shadow was, meaning that there was something else there. It wasn¡¯t perfect, but it was good enough.


    ¡°Let me make some light.¡± Olivia softly said, but before she could finish the short chant to ignite the golden flames on her staff, I spoke up, stopping her.


    ¡°Don¡¯t, at least not this close to the exit. Even a faint flicker of light might be seen in the darkness of the night above.¡± She let out a sigh and I thought that one of the faint outlines I could perceive gave a nod, which was good enough for me.


    ¡°Let¡¯s go a little deeper, where you can make some light so you guys don¡¯t sit in the dark while I find out just how large these caves are.¡± I added, stretching the Eisblumen to give each of them something to hold onto.


    Instead of trying to fill the Darkness in the whole cave-system with my Astral Power all at once, as I had earlier, I slowly let my power seep out, not pushing or forcing anything, but simply let my own Power mingle with the faint traces of Astral Power that were present in our environment. A small part of me was surprised just how perfectly smooth the ground within the cave was, almost like a stone washed smooth in a riverbed. At the same time, I realised that the crag we had come in from was just that, an opening in the side of a much larger, longer tunnel that gently sloped downwards, roughly following the contour of the mountain above.


    After a few moments of consideration, I gently used my connection to my Astral Power in our surroundings to push it upwards, as it was the direction we ultimately wanted to travel. I had no idea if there would be more exits that way, or anything about the cave, but it seemed to be a good first step.


    Travelling in the perfect darkness, with nothing but my sense of the surrounding Astral Power was slow going, luckily the cave was high enough for Adra to stand, while Sigmir was still within her Hallow, otherwise it would be even slower. Maybe two-hundred meters of distance, until we reached a bit of a bend in the cave, took us almost an hour. By that point, I decided we had more than enough distance that a small light wouldn¡¯t be enough to be seen through the narrow crag we had come in through and stopped.


    ¡°Olivia, you can shine some light.¡± I told her and she instantly said her prayer, one that sounded even more fervent than her normal chanting did. Apparently the Darkness wasn¡¯t to her liking.


    I almost laughed when her magical torch made me realise that I hadn¡¯t opened my eyes after closing them earlier, instead completely focusing on what my other senses had been telling me. Turning, to not get blinded, I opened my eyes and let out a soft sigh of awe, one that was echoed moments later when the others stopped blinking away the spots they had suffered from the sudden change in illumination.


    All around us were tiny flecks of crystal, reflecting and refracting the light, almost like a starry sky, twinkling with the flickering of Olivia¡¯s magical flame.


    ¡°Beautiful.¡± I wasn¡¯t quite sure whose mumble it was, it might well have been mine, the scenery was truly that.


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    ¡°Olivia, you can keep that light going for a while, right? And it won¡¯t cause any bad air that would be dangerous in a cave?¡± I asked, suddenly not certain about the combustion-mechanism of a purely magical flame. Without any physical fuel, there shouldn¡¯t be any danger of poisoning us with toxic fumes, at least in my mind. But it didn¡¯t hurt to ask.


    ¡°It¡¯s no problem, I can keep it going without trouble.¡± Olivia assured me, causing me to nod and take a few steps ahead, out of the direct circle of light her staff shed.


    There, in the darkness, I drew upon my Astral Power, pushing it out not as Darkness, but as Ice, quickly setting up my throne. Once more, I included some Runes, connecting them together in the dwarvish way and again, what I tried to bolster was Darkness-Magic and the absorption of Astral Power. Not that I thought the second would work, it was essentially an idea to use Darkness-Magic to devour the magic around us, but it might work. And if not, I doubted it would cause any actual damage, not without a mind to guide the effect.


    Sitting down, I continued what I had been doing, only this time, instead of having to feel out the way for the others and me, I only needed to find out how large the caverns were. Where before, I let my Astral Power fill the whole space around me, to find anything that might cause a fall or any other danger, I used a mental image of hair, of numerous thin feelers that stretched out into the Darkness. Though, I realised almost instantly that using a large amount of feelers would quickly push me to my mental limits, as well as take a rather large amount of Astral Power, so I kept the image, but instead of hundreds of tendrils, I limited myself to four, keeping things on a level I could easily maintain. It was more similar to the vines of my Eisblumen than to hair, but it was good enough.


    Exploring with the tendrils of darkness was faster than walking in the dark, by an order of magnitude, but that still meant it was overall relatively slow. Where normally, I could flit from shadow to shadow by shifting my point-of-view into the magical construct, now I was feeling my way in the dark, having to make sure my tendrils weren¡¯t accidentally stretching into different tunnels or getting lost in crevices too narrow to traverse.


    When I took a momentary break, having to retract one of the tendrils when I realised it had gone astray, I stopped, considering my methods. Why couldn¡¯t I shift my view-point? I hadn¡¯t done so, on the assumption that it was dark, and thus seeing would be useless but was that a valid assumption? Or had I just made an ass out of me, as there was no you?


    After all, when shifting my mind into a construct of magical shadow, did I need light to see? Wasn¡¯t the perception from the construct based on something other than the ability of my eyes to perceive minute traces of light and turn them into visual information? The construct didn¡¯t have any eyes, at least not in the biological sense. Hell, I had originally created my constructs using the mental image of a floating eye, which might have very caused me to add in false assumptions.


    Leaving the tendrils where they were, I focused inwards, letting three of them mostly fade from my mind and concentrated on the last one. What was around it? Not just directly in contact, but in its vicinity. For a moment, I could feel the whole tendril swell, turning from a thin, hair-like tendril of darkness into a massive tentacle of shadow, draining a great deal of Astral Power in the process. It allowed me to feel the entire tunnel I had scouted so far, but that was clearly not the way forward.


    Pushing aside the slight headache from the draining power, I tried to change my focus, using another tendril while slowly absorbing the Astral Power I had pumped into the first one. Maybe the mental equivalent of an eye was needed, not so much in a practical sense but because my mind was used to filtering visual data through a structure I conceptually identified as an eye.


    Remembering my scrying-construct, I formed an eye-like structure at the tip of the tendril, nothing complex but eye-like enough to allow my mind to form the association. There was only darkness before me, but that didn¡¯t necessarily mean I was on the wrong path. Thinking of the way Lenore was viewing Astral Power, I tried to filter in a similar way, not looking for all Astral Power, but instead simply trying to perceive the types I had an affinity for.


    Darkness, Ice, Blood and Death, those I could feel, those I should be able to see. And in this place of cold darkness, that might just be enough to allow me to navigate.


    The only question was how to do that.

 Chapter 486

    It took me a while of fiddling around until I managed to get a somewhat useful image from my magical eyes. It wasn¡¯t detailed, or containing colour, more akin to a grainy image taken by a pin-hole camera but it was good enough to identify tunnels, simple environmental dangers and, hopefully, monsters if there were any. The range was a little short, just a few meters, but compared to fumbling my way forward in the dark, it was preferable.


    After taking a break, getting some cold food and a bit of rest, I was back on my throne, stretching a new set of tendrils out, into the darkness. I quickly realised that I had missed quite a few things when feeling my way through the tunnels earlier, crags, holes and openings were abound, some of them large enough to be interesting, others just the right size to step in and break an ankle. Instead of exploring the larger ones, I followed the main cavern, what I thought of as an old, currently dry, stream, likely carved by the run-off of a glacier higher up the mountains. The contrast between the smoothed over, lower parts and some jagged and cracked edges higher up, were quite interesting, but I didn¡¯t have the time to investigate every nook and cranny. We had places to be, and I had to find a way to get there.


    Further up the mountain, what I thought of as the main-cave narrowed, to the point that traversing it would be painfully difficult, maybe outright impossible. When it got narrow enough that I would have to squeeze on my belly, pulling me along with my magic, I gave up that direction, instead letting my eye-tendrils extend into a promising crack, hoping that it would lead in the right direction.


    Traversing that crag would be quite dangerous, though luckily it wasn¡¯t particularly jagged, the rock washed smooth similar to the crag we had entered the caves through. Further down the crag, I decided to split the tendril I had been using, letting one of them move in one direction, the other into a different hole, one that might lead into the right direction. At this point, my notion of cardinal directions in relation to the tendrils was rather vague, I had a rough idea which of the tunnels I had extended them through, allowing me to think I could follow their path, but if the tendrils were going north or south was a mystery to me.


    By the time my Astral Power was low enough to force me into taking a break, I realised just how expansive the caverns and tunnels beneath the mountains were. I had thoroughly lost track of every nook and cranny I had looked into, though I had kept the one tunnel in mind that had led to the outside. It would need some major effort to get out that way, the tunnel was a long, narrow crag that we¡¯d have to climb up, but it proved to me that there were other ways out. And we could discover quite a few things down here.


    In addition, I had noticed some living things, mostly lichen and mushrooms, but also insects and what I thought were rodents. I had only seen one of those as it scurried along the edge of my vision, but it meant there were things down here in this dark maze.


    ¡°What did you find?¡± Adra asked, once I returned to the circle of light around Olivia¡¯s staff. I could see that the three of them looked a little anxious, while Sigmir rested with her back against the wall, taking up the only space where she didn¡¯t have to duck. For her, the tunnels wouldn¡¯t be fun at all, simply due to low ceilings. Being small finally came in as an advantage.


    ¡°It¡¯s a maze down here. We should make sure to always leave behind marks on our path, otherwise we might get lost down here and never find our way back out.¡± I replied, noticing that Rai and Adra turned a little pale at that.


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    ¡°I agree, marking our path is a basic precaution. Eleutheria might bestow me with the ability to find my way back, or out, but that depends on many factors I hardly understand. The ways of the Gods are mysterious and not always for us mortals to understand.¡± Olivia added, restoring a little bit of vigor to their faces. It made me, once more, wonder just how divine magic worked, but I had learned that trying to figure out that particular puzzle would yield nothing but a headache. I would undoubtedly try again at some point, despite that knowledge, but it didn¡¯t have to be now.


    ¡°What is our plan now? You mentioned you wanted to hunt down a few more Manticores once we have a good hide-out, but I¡¯m not certain how this maze will help us there.¡± Olivia asked, getting a nod in return.


    ¡°My original idea was to hide in some cave, come out of one exit at night, set up somewhere, strike down a flying Manticore like we did with the one we saw in the night and hide again, never letting them get a good idea where our hide-out is. If we combine Adra¡¯s magic, her bow and the magic of Rai and me, we should be able to keep hidden. But this cave-system is a little large, and too difficult to traverse, for such tactics. Just getting from one exit to another would take hours, maybe days, I only discovered one other exit, which is even more difficult to use than the one we entered through.¡± I explained, getting nods of understanding in response.


    ¡°You said it was your idea, so you have a new plan?¡± Adra asked, making it my turn to nod in agreement.


    ¡°Yes, I do. We killed a few Manticores and have no real idea of their total number. We could simply continue on, using this cave-system to get as far west as possible, maybe even break contact with the Manticores if we get far enough. We would simply avoid further battles until we reach Narristo and report to the Guild. That way, we¡¯ll gain at least a partial completion while making it no longer our problem, without being stuck for weeks, maybe even months hiding and creeping around, trying to thin out their number. I don¡¯t know about you, but I¡¯d like to get away from their shadows for a while, to say nothing about our limited supplies.¡± I explained, again getting nods, this time even Sigmir joining in. She wasn¡¯t too worried about our current situation, but I could see that she¡¯d be happier if there wasn¡¯t a pride of flying, monstrous lions waiting to descend upon us and feat on our flesh. Being the hunted didn¡¯t sit well with her, and neither did it sit well with me.


    ¡°That doesn¡¯t sound too bad. If we happen to come close to an exit, we might want to peek out, maybe take down a Manticore or three, but if the tunnels lead in the right direction, we should follow them as far as possible.¡± Adra agreed, the huntress within her baring her fangs, causing Sigmir and Rai to nod in agreement.


    ¡°Excellent.¡± I nodded, before looking at Sigmir. ¡°Love, can you make a small mark here and maybe near the exit? Nothing large, but I think you should have the strength to leave something that won¡¯t fade for quite some time, right?¡±


    She nodded and curiously, Ylva shifted into her Hallow before she acted. Moments later, I had a faint idea why, when Sigmir¡¯s finger-nails turned into claws and she used une of them to scratch a deep mark into the walls of the tunnel. Once she was done, I led her back, outside the gentle light, making sure she didn¡¯t hit her head as we moved until we reached the crag we had entered through. I could vaguely make out the sunlight filtering down into the crag, though not into the tunnel itself, and guided Sigmir to leave another mark.


    Knowing that the way out was secure made me let out a soft sigh, as a tension I hadn¡¯t noticed before faded from my shoulders. It was curious, I liked the Darkness, even if it was deep enough to hinder even me, but somehow, the tunnels made me feel a little strange. As if there was an unseen weight pressing down on me, threatening to crush me.


    Shaking my head, I led Sigmir back to the others and after a few moments of consideration, we decided to keep moving. While I hadn¡¯t been able to form a map of the whole cave-system, I had somewhat of an idea where to go. We would just have to slowly make our way forward, hopefully without running into too many dead-ends or walls. Or monsters. There might very well be monsters down here.

 Chapter 487

    Traversing the caverns beneath the White Mountains was a lot less fun than I had thought it would be. Sure, we didn¡¯t have to worry about Manticores swooping down on us from the sky and tearing us to pieces, instead the dark and narrow caverns made even me feel claustrophobic, worried that I¡¯d suddenly get stuck. I yearned for the open skies, to feel the wind on my face and see the moon and stars above. Even the darkness around me had turned stale, the refreshing fragrance of Ice fading the deeper we got. Instead, there was an oppressive pressure and heat, trying to press in on me and suffocate me.


    My mood wasn¡¯t lifted by the fact that I had discovered one of the species native to this place, a weird cross between rat and insect, many legged with large mouths, many teeth and an affinity for darkness-magic. That affinity was what had made me notice them first, tendrils of Astral Power, brushing up on the strands I used to scout, almost blending in with the environment but not quite.


    Once I knew what I was looking for, those tendrils stood out to my senses, allowing me to get an idea of their numbers and what I found was adding to my bad moon. There were many of them, individually weak but I had no doubt that they¡¯d be fearsome foes in the dark, using the environment and the ambient Astral Power to their full advantage. So far, either my own Darkness-Magic, brushing off the tendrils that sneaked towards us or Olivia¡¯s light that would burn them, if they got too close, had managed to ward them off, but I got the feeling that we were being constantly watched.


    A part of me wondered why the caves we were in hadn¡¯t turned into a dungeon, the environment certainly felt dungeony, with hidden pitfalls, countless monsters and an oppressive presence that threatened to swallow you whole.


    We had travelled for two days below ground, without getting back to daylight even once and now, we were at what felt like a crossroad. One of the tunnels I had detected, comfortably wide, smooth but steeply going down was one option, the other was to continue crawling through narrow crevices, not completely descending into the roots of the earth. I had no longer any idea how close we actually were to the surface, it might be hundreds of meters of rock between us and the open sky, it might be just a few steps away, I didn¡¯t know. Only Olivia¡¯s magic that allowed her to find north, even underground, allowed us to keep going in the right direction though that didn¡¯t help for elevation or tell us what the terrain above us looked like. In many ways, we were totally lost.


    As I was considering just how deep the steep tunnel went, thinking about dropping something down there to find out, I was reminded of a famous scene in an old novel and thought better. Maybe I didn¡¯t have to dig into each and every secret, maybe there was such a thing as digging too deep, even if I wasn¡¯t a dwarf and these weren¡¯t mines.


    Still, even if I wasn¡¯t quite willing to follow the tunnel, I was curious what was down there and it was a good time for a break anyway.


    ¡°How much food do we have left?¡± Sigmir asked, leaving her Hallow which she had used almost exclusively, Ylva¡¯s four-legged form not as prone to hit her head, compared to her own, hulking height.


    ¡°We¡¯ve got enough for about two weeks, luckily we mostly foraged when above ground.¡± Adra assured her, while I started to channel my Astral Power, in order to create a Throne of Ice. It had the added bonus that after I was done, there would be quite a bit of Ice left, which I could shatter into Diamond Dust to replenish our water-reserves.


    ¡°Let¡¯s see where this goes.¡± Lenore urged me, taking up position on my shoulder, taking a few moments to simply stretch her wings. She was missing the open skies even more than I, making me reach out and gently run a finger along her spine.


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    Once more, the tendrils of darkness reached out, my eyes closed to allow me to see through them. It was interesting how my brain was easily able to handle two points of view, even if they moved apart but as soon as I tried to use a third, I quickly got a headache.


    Down the long tunnel, I could leave them together, entwining them to give me a modicum of depth-perception, similar to the way I would have it, if my eyes were floating down the tunnel. Which, in a way, they were, though I refused to call the tendrils eye-stalks, even in the privacy of my own mind. That felt just a step too far.


    ¡°I don¡¯t think this tunnel is natural.¡± I mentally admitted to Lenore, after my tendrils had stretched out for a few hundred meters of nicely smooth and mostly straight tunnel. It felt too uniform, the water-carved tunnels we had moved through earlier had been more winding, meandering as the water had carved through the softer rocks, but not this one. I couldn¡¯t distinguish different types of rock in the walls, my vision wasn¡¯t accurate enough for that, but I doubted there had been an almost perfectly round pillar of soft rock inserted into the mountain.


    Now, I just had to decide whether I wanted to find out whatever had dug this tunnel. It was going into the right direction, which was a plus but it gave me the creeps.


    Soon, after what felt like a kilometer of straight tunnel, it opened up into a wider cavern. Separating my tendrils, I started to look around, paying special attention to any unnatural feeling concentration of Darkness-Magic. If there were powerful beings down here, I was almost certain they would have some sort of Darkness-Affinity, possibly Darkness-Magic. The environment almost demanded it.


    Compared to the narrow tunnels we had been moving through, I had no idea how large the cavern I now perceived was. The walls curved away and while there was another wall a few meters from the exit, almost like a T-junction, when I let a tendril slither up that wall, it quickly proved that it was just about two meters high, ending on a ledge that I couldn¡¯t see the end of. Nor could I see the ceiling above, making me want to go there in the flesh, simply to see.


    Pulling that tendril back, I decided to follow the age-old trick of simply placing your hand on one wall, to not get lost in a labyrinth, and kept one tendril close to the wall that curved away from the tunnel I had entered through on the left side, the other on the right side.


    The three-dimensional nature of the caverns made my trick a little less useful, let alone the limited vision-range of my tendrils, but I was able to find a few cracks and holes that might be large enough to crawl into and on the right side, I managed to find a tunnel, similar in scale to the one I had entered through, this one leading upwards, possibly towards the surface. It still went further west, making me even more curious. If it had a similar length to the earlier tunnel, the two would almost cover the same distance we had covered in yesterday¡¯s day of travel, but could be traversed in an hour. Just for that, it might be worthwhile to risk going further down, despite the unpleasant feelings I was having.


    Letting the other tendril fade away, to conserve Astral Power, I stretched my sight into that tunnel, following it upwards. Just as the first one, it was almost perfectly straight, round and smooth, my earlier worry resurfacing. Whatever had dug these tunnels, I wasn¡¯t sure I wanted to encounter it.


    After some distance, by that point I had little idea of how long a distance, I perceived something new, as the tunnel opened up into yet another cavern. It wasn¡¯t the dense, impenetrable feeling of rock that surrounded me, nor was it the deep darkness that I was moving through, it was somewhere in between. Freezing, I let my tendril hover as I tried to understand just what I was seeing, and after a few moments of staring, I wanted to facepalm at my obliviousness. A flowing medium, penetrable by light, and thus shadow, in the middle of a mountain, just what could that be? Likely the most prevalent liquid on the planet, and just for that I wanted to call myself a dummy. The slightly elevated concentration of Ice-Astral Power within that medium added to my conviction, but what truly stunned me was a different realization.


    Unless I was totally wrong, I was looking at an underground river but the truly interesting thing wasn¡¯t that. It was that the river was flowing westwards, in the direction we should be heading.

 Chapter 488

    I did spend some more time exploring the area around the underground river, before pulling my tendrils back and exploring the other direction. There, it was more of the same, narrow tunnels that continued on without rhyme or reason. We might be able to find a path there, at least if we invested enough time, but it would be challenging. On the other hand, the river would reach the surface at some point, though it was just as questionable if the path it took to the surface was traversable for us air-loving creatures. It might simply flow through completely submerged tunnels, I simply didn¡¯t know enough about underground rivers to make any sort of educated guess. My un-educated guess was that the river wouldn¡¯t be at its highest at the moment, not without a lot of rain or glacial run-off, which would mean there should be some air throughout the tunnel. But I had no idea if that was accurate.


    Dismissing my tendrils, I explained what I had found to the others, trying to get a second opinion. They hadn¡¯t any more knowledge on underground rivers but the idea of not having to crawl a significant portion of the day made them all perk up quite a bit. Especially Sigmir looked outright ecstatic at the idea, understandable given that she had been forced to stay in her Hallow most of the time. Her inability to protect me in this place didn¡¯t thrill her.


    ¡°I might be able to receive some guidance. It won¡¯t be anything concrete, nor will we learn the reasons for the guidance, but it might give us some hint.¡± Olivia spoke up, making me truly curious.


    ¡°That sounds vague. What are you thinking about?¡± I asked, despite knowing that the answer would most likely be some divine mumbo-jumbo.


    ¡°The Lady Eleutheria is the patron of Travellers, so there are prayers to ask her guidance regarding the road to take. Though her advice is generally cryptic, it should tell us whether delving deeper into the mountains would be our doom.¡± she explained, making me nod in acceptance, not understanding.


    It was one of those things that just went against everything I knew about magic. How could you determine the future, unless you knew the parties and motivations involved? Answering such a question would mean to observe the complete tunnel-system, take in all parties within, the natural dangers and their likelihood of occurrence and form a model from that, which you then would have to compare to the capabilities of the asking party. While the sheer amount of power needed could be explained away by the fact that a deity did the information gathering, it would also mean that the deity used that amount of effort. Unless the deities in general had some super-multi-tasking ability, it was questionable. At the same time, I wondered if there was a way to essentially perform a distributed denial of service-attack on a specific deity. by instigating their clergy to draw on their powers at the same time. It was a rather humorous idea that made me want to try it at some point.


    ¡°It won¡¯t hurt I guess. Please, do your thing.¡± I told her, stepping back and carefully wrapping myself into my cloak of Twilight, trying to hide the existence of my Mortal Hubris-trait as much as possible. If Eleutheria did peek down on us, there was no need to rub my heretical ways into her face. Not when we were asking for her help.


    I did, however, watch closely as Olivia did her thing, not that I was able to see a lot. Some of her spells, I could see the Astral Power, with others, like the one she was casting now, I could only catch the faint scent of Power, unlike anything I had ever experienced otherwise. Divine Power, granted to divine Casters by their deities, something that apparently didn¡¯t follow the normal rules.


    Otherwise, the events would make even less sense. Olivia spoke a relatively short, though impassioned, prayer, beseeching Eleutheria to guide us on which path to take before letting her staff, still with the burning top, stand upright in the middle of the cave, between the three possible paths. It made me wonder what we should do if the ritual told us to go back the way we came from, but we¡¯d cross that bridge when we got to it.


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    We didn¡¯t have to wait long for Olivia¡¯s prayer to be answered, or she might have managed to perfectly balance her staff for about a minute, as it took that long for the staff to fall over, pointing towards the tunnel leading downwards.


    ¡°I¡¯ll go out on a limb and guess that it means we should head down?¡± I asked, partially amused, particularly annoyed at the divine magic that completely eludes my understanding, while looking like some trick to pick a path at random. The whole thing might as well be random, I had no way of checking, but given that I knew Olivia had divinely granted powers, I would give her the benefit of the doubt.


    ¡°It does.¡± she nodded, before adding a little more, ¡°You¡¯ll need to remember, however, that this doesn¡¯t mean the path is safe. It merely means this path is the best way to reach our destination on the other side of the mountains, when taking into account danger, speed and accessibility.¡±


    That explained about nothing, not without knowing how those factors were determined and weighted against each other. A portal with a ninety-nine percent chance to dismember you, but would take you right to your destination, might be considered ¡°better¡± than a relatively safe journey around the world, simply due to the distances involved. I still wouldn¡¯t want to chance the portal. Study it, maybe, but not mindlessly use it.


    But at the end of the day, Olivia seemed to be happy with the result of her magic, so we should be able to traverse that path. We still didn¡¯t know if the divined path was the one I thought about, only that going down that tunnel would be the best option at this point, so that was what we did.


    For once, we could actually move in a formation, with Sigmir leading the way, Olivia right behind her, carrying her staff as a torch, followed by myself, Adra and Rai bringing up the rear.


    As we walked I occasionally caught traces of weird, lingering magic, nothing remarkable enough to give me a real impression of the type, just enough to make me wary. Not that the tunnel itself didn¡¯t manage to do so, it was just too artificial to let me calm down, as if someone had taken a massive drill and simply gone through the mountains at an angle.


    The smooth ground allowed us to quickly reach the T-section I had found earlier and now we had light and I was able to directly look around, instead of only having two tendrils with limited sight-range.


    Looking up, I let out a soft sigh, the ceiling some thirty meters above us, with a few holes higher up in the walls. From the way our steps echoed, I wondered just how large the cavern was, and wanted to know more. For a moment, I considered asking Lenore to take wing, but she instantly rejected the idea, before I even had time to fully articulate the thought. She didn¡¯t fancy the idea of flying in a dark cave without the ability to see in the dark. If I wanted to know, I¡¯d have to climb the wall myself.


    Luckily, Sigmir had no problem with giving me a boost and while the others didn¡¯t look too thrilled, they also didn¡¯t reject the need to gather information and accepted that I was the most suitable person, simply due to my size and concealment-magic.


    Once I was up on the ridge I had spotted earlier, I could look further and what I saw stunned me, both due to its beauty but also due to the shivers of fear it sent down my spine.


    The cavern we were in was outright massive, large enough that I couldn¡¯t make out the ends, despite the fact that there was some weird, bioluminescent lichen growing near some of the tunnels.


    And there were many of them, some larger, some smaller than the one we had entered through, leading off into almost every direction imaginable. But that wasn¡¯t all that I saw, I also saw distant movement, countless scurrying things of indeterminable size. Unless I missed my guess, those were the weird rat-things I had spotted before, just instead of individuals that quickly scurried away, coupled with others that kept their distance from us, here, I could see hundreds, maybe thousands of forms, moving in the near darkness.


    There was no way I had enough trust in Eleutheria to try going that way. Hopefully, the path to the underground river was the right one, or I would suggest heading back, no matter what some divination said.

 Chapter 489

    ¡°Kill the lights!¡± I hissed, dropping down to the others, trying to land as softly as possibly. I didn¡¯t quite succeed, but given the distances involved, I was reasonably certain the rat-spider-things wouldn¡¯t be able to hear us. The light though, they might have already noticed that. Luckily, Olivia didn¡¯t ask questions, instead the golden flames on her staff instantly winked out of existence, leaving us in complete darkness once more.


    ¡°What did you see?¡± she asked, sounding concerned.


    ¡°Have you ever seen an ant-hill?¡± I asked in response, as I used my Darkness Magic to perceive my surroundings.


    ¡°Imagine that, just instead of tiny ants, you have weird, spider-like rats the size of a small wolf.¡± A shudder ran down my spine, as I wondered why such creatures would need tunnels the size of the one we had used. A spider-rat the size of a horse was not something I wanted to see, ever, but then, I would¡¯ve preferred not seeing the smaller-sized spider-rats either. There was something about their skittering movement that creeped me out a lot worse than the arachnids had done, a primal and powerful revulsion that made me consider setting their nest on fire a valid option, despite my hate for fire.


    ¡°Do you want to continue? Or should we head back?¡± Sigmir asked, cautiously moving forward a little, one arm on the wall to guide herself.


    ¡°I think we should. We asked a deity for guidance, there should be a reason for her response, right?¡± I looked over to Olivia, forgetting for a moment that she wouldn¡¯t be able to see my gaze. I had to suppress an inappropriate giggle when I saw the form that was her nod, despite the complete darkness.


    ¡°Lady Eleutheria should have her reasons, sending us down this path.¡± she replied verbally, though I wasn¡¯t sure how truly confident she was in her statement. Maybe the darkness and monsters lurking within managed to shake even her faith.


    ¡°Well, let¡¯s go, I¡¯ll guide you to the underground river I found, I didn¡¯t notice anything like these monsters there.¡± I told the others and realised that we had more than just my concealment-magic. ¡°Adra, can you please cast that concealment-spell of yours? And Rai, do you think you can push the cloak of shadows I taught you out, to cover all of us?¡± I asked them, getting one affirmative, one negative answer in return.


    ¡°My magic works with the forest, the plants around us, to hide the tracks we make and confuse trackers. I¡¯m afraid there is very little forest around us to help.¡± Adra stated, her voice nervous.


    ¡°I¡¯ll try, Teacher.¡± Rai sounded a little more confident than Adra, but the fact that he addressed me as Teacher told me that he wasn¡¯t too confident, either. He had been using my name more and more, as his confidence had grown. Not that I really minded, he had turned out to be a remarkably good student, quickly turning into a real asset.


    I could feel the waves of Astral Power flowing out of him, wrapping around us in an almost smothering cloak. It wasn¡¯t as subtle as I would have liked, a being sensitive to Darkness Magic might detect it, even at a distance, but it should conceal us quite well, while allowing me to carefully ward off the tendrils of Darkness the spider-rats used for detection and possibly other purposes.


    Once concealed, I stretched out the vines of my Eisblumen, guiding the others into a row behind me, and continued on my merry way. Without light, I was limited to perceiving the Darkness around me, just as I had with my tendrils, making it almost easier to follow my earlier exploration as things looked the same again.


    We got to the tunnel towards the underground river without incident, but just as we turned in, I heard Rai urgently whisper, ¡°Teacher, I¡¯m almost out of Power.¡±


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    His words brought a frown to my face, though I should have expected it. He wasn¡¯t a pure spell-caster, not even close, so expecting him to conceal the entire group for an extended period of time had been unrealistic. His efforts were appreciated nonetheless, allowing me to add my own Astral Power into the concealment he had used, smoothing it out as I took over. It would be a bit of a distraction to keep up, but nothing I couldn¡¯t handle.


    The tunnel towards the underground river was, again, smoothly cut into the mountain, or however it had been created, by this point I was almost certain it was artificial, not something the spider-rats had moved into. Thanks to the smooth ground, we could make quick progress, even in the dark, and after what felt like a good hundred meters, I softly told Olivia that she could light up her staff again.


    Her relieved sigh made me smile, just a little bit, even if I had an inkling just how disturbing it would be, to be completely cut off from your primary form of perception, while knowing that there are monsters nearby. As she chanted, I moved into the back of our group, ready to block off the light from spreading up the tunnel. I had no idea if the spider-rats would notice, if they even had eyes, though the luminescent lichen around their tunnels hinted at that.


    ¡°Ugh.¡± I let out an annoyed grunt, pushing the thoughts about the spider-rats and questions regarding their sensory organs from my mind. I might just have found the edge of my curiosity, something I really wasn¡¯t curious about, that I didn¡¯t want to know, not even as an academic question. I simply wanted those creepy, skittering things to be as far away from me as possible.


    With light, we could move even faster and soon, we could hear the quiet noise of the underground river. At the same time, the smooth ground turned slippery with ambient moisture and intense scents started to flow into my nostrils.


    On the magical side, it was still the all-encompassing Darkness of the underground tunnels, but now mixed with a crisp, eternally freezing cold carried by the water from the Glaciers somewhere far above us. In addition to that, there was something almost similar to the scent of Blood in the air, though it was less coppery and more primal, reminding me of the northern forests with their boundless, stubborn vitality. On the mundane side, I could smell the moisture in the air, mixed with the smell of plant-life and mold, not too unpleasant, compared to the dry, dusty smells of the tunnels.


    Stepping into the cavern itself, I quickly realised that I hadn¡¯t paid too much attention, the tunnel ending on a ledge almost two meters above the stream, something I hadn¡¯t quite internalised due to the floating nature of my tendrils.


    Climbing down was not a lot of fun, the slick, wet rock and the general horrid lighting combining to make our lives difficult. We somehow managed, mostly by working together and pushing our system-enhanced bodies, while still managing to slip and slide, getting a few bruises in the process, but we made it down.


    There, we could finally relax a little and I was grateful that we had moved into the tunnels and past the spider-rats. While the earlier tunnels had been gorgeous, with small flecks of crystals in the rocks reflecting and refracting the light to create a magical scenery, the cavern with the underground river took that to a whole new level.


    The gently flickering light from Olivia¡¯s staff was reflected by the small brook in the middle of the cavern, the moving water causing it to dance and glitter, as it bounced off the shimmering, wet walls. It was breathtaking, the light and shadow woven together in a magical fashion and for once, I wasn¡¯t sure if the cyclical view of the world didn¡¯t have a point to it. Here, in the depth of the earth, I could truly see the beauty of the twilight, the time when light and darkness co-existed, mutually enhancing each other. An endless cycle, unbroken as the two sides of the coin spun through the void.


    ¡°We should continue moving.¡± Sigmir reminded me, pulling me from my reverie.


    Shaking my head, I focused on the cave itself, instead of looking at the pretty lights. It was similar to the tunnels we had moved in earlier, before we had stumbled onto the strange, artificial tunnels, only that now, the deepest parts were still filled with running water, slowly making its way downwards. There was more than enough space to move, even for Sigmir, but keeping our footing would be challenging, due to the ambient moisture and a thin film of slimy fungus or lichen that covered the rock of the cavern.


    Taking the formation we had used earlier, we continued on our path, hopefully on an unimpeded path towards the surface.

 Chapter 490

    Travelling along the underground river was both a lot easier compared to travelling through the narrow tunnels we had travelled in the days before but it came with its own challenges. Just the cold, moist air was uncomfortable, somehow managing to seep into my bones despite my affinity to Ice and there were various colonies of mushrooms around that were not very fun guys. Rai was the first to start coughing, causing me to wonder if the air had managed to get to him, but when I checked with my Blood Magic, I realised that it wasn¡¯t just the air. Or rather, it was what was in the air, namely the countless, tiny spores that were starting to take hold within his lungs.


    Purging them required Olivia and me to work together, with her Divine Healing easily purging the spores, while my Blood Magic revitalised the affected tissues. On my own, purging the spores would have been a little difficult, as getting them out of his body with Blood Magic would be¡­ messy and while I had a theory regarding the use of Darkness-Magic to affect the empty spaces inherent to all matter, I had only just begun working on that, it was far from useable.


    Once we had healed the damage from Rai, we repeated the process with each of us and, as expected, we all had taken in some of the spores, which had started to settle in our lungs. They hadn¡¯t been able to fully establish themselves within our bodies, but I didn¡¯t want to consider what would happen without healing-magic and generally powerful bodies.


    ¡°Lenore, do you think you can use Wind-Magic to keep those spores away from us while we are resting?¡± I asked my companion, who had been rather restricted during the last few days, the dark tunnels not the best place for a bird.


    ¡°Not for the whole night. This place is almost the worst place to use Wind-Magic at, I just don¡¯t have enough Astral Power.¡± she admitted, sounding understandably unhappy. ¡°Maybe Olivia¡¯s barrier could work, though I¡¯m not sure if she is able to conjure that up on successive days.¡± she suggested, her mental voice giving away her annoyance at her own inability.


    Speaking out loud, I asked Olivia about her barrier and was told that it would keep out harmful substances, but wouldn¡¯t work against what was already there when she set it up. Useful, but we would have to remain cautious.


    Other than the spores, I noticed a couple smaller tunnels, some of them similar in size and shape to the one we had used before, others smaller and looking more natural, leading off into the distance. We had decided to follow the underground stream, hoping that it would lead us outside, but a small part of me wanted to explore, despite the spider-rats, hell, a tiny, insatiably curious part wanted to study even those. While I didn¡¯t want to get close to them, certainly not close enough to touch or even see them with my own eyes, I kept coming up with ways to study them using my magic, mainly scrying them from afar, but also considering whether there was a way to use Blood Magic from afar to study their bodies.


    It was something I hadn¡¯t been able to use at all, not without having some Blood to form a link before-hand, but it was something I wondered about. As was the question if I had a way to gain some of that Blood and if there was, whether I would be able to put some of my more genocidal ideas to the test. A Mundus without Spider-Rats sounded like a vast improvement, though I had no idea how wide-spread those things were.


    Sadly, the more I considered those genocidal ideas, the less practical they appeared to be, simply due to basic arithmetics. Blood- and Death-Magic, but also Mind-Magic for that matter, had a relatively direct and simple conversion of Astral Power to damage. The exact exchange-factor depended on both,  the spell-casters affinity and ability on one hand and the target''s affinity and resistance on the other hand. There was no real medium involved that would add a physical component to the damage, like an Icicle would when stabbing someone in the chest, making it all magical in nature. And that was where the problem came in, without some medium to carry the damage, akin to the Mist I had used when exterminating the snow-bolds early in my journey, the damage would be spread to each individual target pretty much equally, meaning if I wanted to, for example, exterminate all humans, I would need to use up enough Astral Power to overcome the combined health-pool of all humans, while also counter-acting their natural regeneration at the same time. With enough humans, even the relatively small regeneration added up, making such a plan relatively impossible. While I had no idea how many spider-rats there were, I doubted I would be able to overcome their combined regeneration, not without some extremely powerful outside source of Astral Power, preferably Death-aligned Astral Power.


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    By the end of the day, we had crossed quite a few kilometers underground, though I wasn¡¯t sure just how far we had gone in actual, straight-line distance. The river simply meandered, making it difficult to guess which way was which, unless I pestered Olivia to use her magic. Thanks to that pestering, I had furthered my understanding of Divine magic a little, when Olivia explained the difference between minor and major spells to me.


    Minor spells were simple, small spells, things like the spell that lit our way or the spell that determined directions. Those were something she could cast without drawing on the power of her deity, merely using her own, inherent Astral Power.


    On the other hand, major spells were things like the spell she used to determine our path, or the protective dome she had invoked once, to shield us from a storm. They channelled the power of Eleutheria and invoked her name, something that was never done for frivolous reasons. Curiously, her combat-spells were major in nature, though apparently, protecting your allies was always a valid reason, unless those allies were involved in something that went against the Deity¡¯s creed. For example, Olivia shouldn¡¯t actively help a slaver, or she might lose her powers until the atoned for her misdeed. Just those vague, non-specific rules and outside regulations completely convinced me that using a divine Spellcaster was not for me, not that I had truly considered switching away from my Sorceress. Trying to figure out magic was simply far too interesting to switch to some ready-made class that granted skills but limited me to those skills. In the long run, I thought that the trade-off was just not worth it.


    Once we found a reasonably large flat space near the underground river, I created some icy mist while channelling as much Death-Magic into it as possible, trying to kill off any spores in the area, before Olivia put up her protective shelter, hopefully allowing us to rest at ease. Before entering it, the two of us purged everyone¡¯s body once more, to allow as few spores into our shelter as possible.


    After everything was set up, I decided to indulge myself a little and set up my Throne, to explore the tunnels around with my scrying spells. There had to be a reason why I hadn¡¯t managed to get a single point of Darkness-Magic in the last few days, despite using it almost constantly in what I considered a new application. It was then that I frustratedly realised that Olivia¡¯s shelter wasn¡¯t just a protection against the environment, but also against magical scrying, which, in turn, meant that my tendrils couldn¡¯t leave it, making my throne a wonderful waste of time.


    Turning my old Throne into water, which we no longer needed, I stepped back out of the dome, after confirming with Olivia that I could re-enter without trouble as long as she was awake, I set up my throne a few steps away from the shelter and started to stretch my tendrils, looking at our surroundings once more.


    At first, I simply looked at the tunnels nearby, stretching into both the artificial tunnels and the natural crevices, until I began to follow one of the artificial tunnels further down, curious what I¡¯d find beneath.


    Suddenly, I felt a powerful wave of Darkness-Magic, strong enough to make itself felt through the tendril I had stretched out. It was as if something had taken the sensory pulses the spider-rats used and dialed them up by an order of magnitude or three. I had no idea just how far they¡¯d reach, or what they¡¯d really detect, but the simple fact that they were there caused me to disperse my tendrils and rapidly pulled my mind back, despite the headache the act was causing me.


    Whatever it was that was causing those pulses, I highly doubted we were ready to face it. But at least I slowly began to understand what a high-level area in Road to Purgatory was like.

 Chapter 491

    ¡°Finally.¡± I let out a soft sigh, even as a part of me wanted to pour out expletive after expletive. I had never thought that the burning light of the sun would ever be so welcome to me. For three days, we had followed the underground river, as it slowly made its way through the rocks, at times joining into other streams, easily doubling its volume of water. We had been forced to remain constantly vigilant against the spider-rats and whatever creature the powerful magic I had felt belonged to. But those weren¡¯t the only threat we had been under, no, the constant need to use magic to purge the spores from our bodies, lest they turn our lungs into fertile fields constantly added pressure to Olivia and me.


    If I had known just how dangerous the White Mountains in general and the tunnels beneath the mountains in particular are, I would have suggested heading north and taking the longer route. The power of hindsight, though I made a mental note for the future, so that I wouldn¡¯t get caught out again.


    ¡°Now we just need to get down.¡± Sigmir chuckled, looking down from our current position. The river had finally reached the light of day again, only that it ended up more or less in the middle of a cliff, forming a waterfall that dropped some ten-odd meters down into a crystal-clear pool that reflected the sky above. Getting down would be trivial for me, thanks to Lenore¡¯s ability to fly and once the sun moved a little further, Rai would be able to shadow-step down there, too.


    Luckily, Olivia demonstrated that she was the most well-travelled of us once more and simply pulled out a sturdy-looking rope from her magic bag. That, along with some creative bracing, allowed the others to make their way down one after the other, Sigmir as the heaviest going first so that the rest of us was able to secure the rope together. It brought a smile to my face, that despite our relatively high levels and great power, the solution was something achieved by simple planning and preparation. I should try to get some additional, basic supplies in the next town, things like rope, maybe some chalk, those small items that don¡¯t weigh much but might come in handy at some point.


    Once everyone was down, I packed up Olivia¡¯s rope and Lenore and I traded places, allowing her to take to the sky. The first few beats of her wings were a little clumsy but soon, she was back in the swing of things and we started to soar upwards. Neither of us wanted to instantly return to the others, especially not Lenore. She wanted to soar, darting through the sky and dancing with the wind as it whistled through the mountains.


    Just the second-hand excitement was incredible, the feeling of being able to do what she was born to do, to freely fly through the air after having been denied that pleasure by the narrow tunnels, it firmly gripped Lenore and, through our connection, washed over to me and likely, in a less pronounced fashion, to Sigmir and Ylva. She soared, and she let the world know that she was riding the winds again, her calls echoing through the valley as her magic amplified the winds around us.


    Sadly, the sheer joy didn¡¯t last forever and she was suddenly forced to land when she noticed another flying presence, the original threat that had forced us underground. A large Manticore was flying above and, unless I totally missed my guess, it had spotted us. Or maybe it was just flying towards us because the clear pool the others were currently washing up in was a wonderful spot to rest and recover, it didn¡¯t matter. For whatever reason, it was coming towards us and there was only one way for things to end, in a fight.


    Knowing that time was of the essence, Lenore quickly went into a dive, our tension transmitted through the bond to Sigmir and Ylva, who instantly reacted, their eyes scanning the sky to find out what was going on. It took Lenore only a few seconds to get to the ground, but in those few seconds, the others had already realised the incoming danger and were beginning their battle-preparations.


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    ¡°Let¡¯s try to cripple it before it can land.¡± I told Adra, once I had moved out of my Hallow in a switch with Lenore. She simply nodded in response, readying her bow as she estimated the Manticores speed for the perfect shot. Touching the arrow, a thin layer of Ice formed on it¡¯s head, as I slowly channelled Astral Power into it, not trying to increase the volume of Ice, instead trying to increase the hardness, turning the Ice into Hard Ice and pushing it beyond that. The more Astral Power I could pump into the arrow, the more I would have available  to cripple or even kill the Manticore.


    Adra drew her bow back, posture straight, looking past Sigmir who had readied herself a few steps in front of us, waiting for the Manticore to arrive. I could feel the Adra¡¯s power gather into the arrow, as she chanted a few words under her breath, the arrow glowing with azure power before her bow let out an almost musical twang, turning the arrow into a streak of light as it streaked through the sky.


    So far, none of the Manticores had been able to dodge her attack, not when they were attacking in a dive but this one managed to bank in time, though it turned his graceful attack into a splendid tumble. With Adra¡¯s attack dodged, I obviously couldn¡¯t use the power I had invested into the arrow-head to shred the Manticore¡¯s insides but that didn¡¯t mean the power had to go to waste. Clenching my fist, I turned the Hard Ice into frozen shrapnell, using Overflow to channel as much additional power into it as I could, accelerating it on a simple vector into the tumbling figure of the Manticore.


    My attack hit, though I wasn¡¯t sure how much damage the small projectiles could cause, even with the powerful acceleration of my Ice-Magic, there was simply a limit to their mass and even incredible acceleration couldn¡¯t produce instant velocity. But I could hear a pained shriek from the Manticore and that was enough to bring a smile to my face.


    The Manticore managed to stop its tumble and didn¡¯t crash into the ground but its landing was far from graceful. Still better than the alternative, having its wing ripped off by Adra¡¯s arrow, but it¡¯s legs had to hurt and my shrapnell had managed to shred some feathers and cause some lacerations in its wing.


    Sigmir didn¡¯t let the small opening caused by the heavy landing go to waste and instantly pounced, her axe leading the way as her aura flared to life. As she moved, there was a curious sensation within me, giving me an almost instinctual idea of what she would do. By now, the Manticore was close enough to Observe and when I did, I realised that it might be a little more difficult than planned. Instead of a Young Manticore around level eighty, what we were now fighting was a level hundred-ten Manticore, without the Young modifier. Looking a little closer, I could see the difference, this one had some more muscles, looking larger and bulkier. Still, there was nothing to be done, other than kill the beast.


    My first instinct was to use Ice-Magic to harass the beast, but if I wanted to cause a lasting injury, I would need an opening, or it would likely be able to dodge. Watching Sigmir do her best to create openings for Rai, while Adra helped keep the Manticore from fully concentrating on Sigmir with her arrows, I went with another option, namely calling out a single frozen shuttle and letting it lance over. The single Ice-Blade was just enough to distract the Manticore, disrupting its movement for a moment and giving it yet another scratch. Nothing serious, even the opening my attack created was negligible but that had never been the purpose of my strike.


    Even as a tiny part of my focus was on my Frozen Shuttle, guiding it back towards me, my hand was busy crafting a rune-formation, combining seven runes into a single whole. If the foe had too strong a body, why not turn that strong body weak, sap its strength and let the others deal with a crippled foe? Using a single Blood-Rune as the centerpoint, with six runes around it, forming three triangles that overlapped at that single point, each similar but a little different. Each formation contained that central Blood-Rune, a Devour-Rune of Darkness-Magic and completing the triangles was a Vitality-, a Strength- and a Speed-Rune, one for each of them. It was a curse, plain, simple but oh, so potent.


    There was a smile on my face as I transferred the blood drawn by my Frozen Shuttle to that centerpoint and began channelling Astral Power. I was curious how the Manticore would fare, with its very own blood acting against it.

 Chapter 492

    It was easy to recognise the moment in which my curse settled within the Blood of the Manticore. Where before, its movements had been sharp, putting tremendous pressure on Sigmir, to the point that only the combined assistance from Rai, Adra and Olivia managed to keep Sigmir in one piece, suddenly, the Manticore¡¯s movements became dull, its muscles no longer able to perform to the beast¡¯s desire.


    With the weakness coursing through the Manticore¡¯s limbs, Sigmir was able to keep up with its attacks, blocking its claws with her shield and guiding the poisonous stinger away from her body with the head of her axe. There was no more need for Adra and Rai to intervene in an attempt to disrupt its attacks, allowing them to go on the offensive, which they did. While Adra tried to cripple one of its front-legs, forcing it to choose between taking her arrows to that limb, its chest or getting struck in the wing. Similarly, Rai was now free to fully move around, slipping through the shadows and attacking the muscles that controlled the stinger. He was even audacious enough to jump onto the Manticore, forcing it into comical convulsions to shake the unwanted passenger off.


    Not willing to limit my contribution to the curse I had placed on the Manticore, I let two more of my frozen shuttles soar out, joining the first one in a simple formation. By mentally linking the shuttles into a single whole and controlling them as if they were one, I was able to use them, even while I had to pay attention to the magic formation I was channelling power into.


    While the shuttles lacked the mass to deal critical damage and I couldn¡¯t spare the concentration to precisely strike at the few weak-points where that lack didn¡¯t matter, using them as a distraction was well within my capacities. Trying to get lucky and hit an eye, I let my shuttles circle around the Manticore¡¯s head, letting the sensations I received from Sigmir guide me. She could see the Manticore¡¯s movement much clearer, recognise the way its muscles shifted and where it would move next, and our bond allowed me to follow those instinctive judgements from Sigmir and adapt my own attack-patterns after them.


    It made me wonder just what would happen if two melee-fighters had such a bond, or a whole group of them. Not quite fighting a single mind in many bodies, but maybe even worse, as many minds, joined by a singular purpose and in alignment amongst themselves would multiply their power far beyond their numbers. For a moment, the image of a wolf-pack sprung to my mind, working together as they encircled their prey, some distracting at the front, others nipping at the heels to harry.


    With the curse sapping the Manticore¡¯s strength, the battle quickly turned in our favour, the wounds struck by Adra and Rai quickly taking its toll. Rai managed to accomplish his goal first, his knife severing the muscle that allowed the stinger to strike with bone.crushing force, turning it into a limply dangling appendage in dire need of some blue pills.


    Once he had accomplished that, he continued to focus on the Manticore¡¯s hindquarter, slipping in whenever it tried to press an attack on Sigmir. No longer trying to reach the Manticore¡¯s back, he could use both blades to lacerate the Manticore¡¯s hind-legs, trying to take away its ability to move.


    That was the same effort Adra had been engaged in, only that instead of focusing on the hind-legs, she was aiming for the front and the arrows that stuck out of the Manticore¡¯s shoulder told of her progress. It was not crippled just yet, but the blood staining its fur made it obvious that it was only a question of time.


    A shrill roar of pain echoed through the valley, the sound loud and shrill enough to shake my concentration, causing me to drop the frozen shuttles as I fully focused on the runic formation I had drawn up. While the Manticore¡¯s wounds were bad enough to affect it¡¯s combat-ability, there was no reason to give up that massive advantage.


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    For a moment, the Manticore focused on me and I thought it would rush me the next moment, trying to get rid of me similar to the way the Lycantroll had done. But instead, it whirled in a circle, flaring its wings to force Sigmir and Rai away, if only for a moment. In that moment, just before the two of them could press back in and take advantage of the large movement that had to have disrupted the Manticore¡¯s balance, it¡¯s muscles tightened visibly and it leapt into the air, jumping higher than I had thought possible. It wasn¡¯t a graceful leap, blood splattering out of the wounds on its legs, but it was high enough to stop the initial melee-attack.


    At that moment, I realised that it didn¡¯t just try to reposition and continue fighting, the frantic beating of its wings told of its desire to escape. Not willing to let it go and bring its friends back to haunt us, I activated Overflow, first pushing as much power into the curse-formation as I could. It would fade in the next minute, but that would be enough, it had to be.


    A short glance told me that Adra was preparing one of her powerful arrows, filled with Astral Power and enchanted to enhance its piercing power and I decided to add my own attack in concert with hers. I wouldn¡¯t be able to draw up a runic formation, but I could instantly project a simple formation, it just cost a lot more.


    Focusing my will and magic, the runic formation instantly appeared and I could feel the Astral Power drain out of me as I pushed as much power into it as I could. It was wasteful and inefficient, but compared to letting the Manticore get away, I was happily paying that price. The formation flashed with silver light and moments later, a massive Javelin of Ice shot through the sky, trailed by glittering sparks, some of the power leaking out and condensing in the air for a brief moment, before fading away.


    The Manticore must have felt the mass of Astral Power approach, tucking in its wings to drop for a moment, barely avoiding the attack. I had anticipated that it would dodge and kept the connection to the icicle at the forefront of my mind, so I could still control it to an extent. While there was no way to completely change its direction, I could easily shatter it, just like I had shattered the Ice on the arrow-head earlier, causing some frozen shrapnell to lacerate it''s tucked-in wings and even injure some of the muscles controlling them.


    But while the Manticore lost quite a lot of feathers from my attack, it was far from plucked. Luckily, I wasn¡¯t the only one who was aiming for its life and while my attack had missed, the Manticore had lost altitude, coming far too close to the cliff we had climbed out of earlier. It had to frantically beat its wings, unless it wanted to crash into the merciless rock and tumble down, where it would get torn apart by us.


    Adra¡¯s arrow drew a beautiful, azure trajectory through the late afternoon-sky and the Manticore had nowhere to escape, no more tricks to dodge. The wind enchanted into Adra¡¯s arrow tore at the wing, while the arrow itself ripped a bloody hole into the membrane, likely breaking some bones inside and shredding important muscles.


    With one wing crippled, the Manticore was no longer able to fly, its frantic flight no longer following its will, instead obeying the impartial laws of physics, forming a ballistic trajectory that carried it right into the rock-wall with a painful sounding crunch. After sticking to the wall for a brief, almost comical, moment, gravity reminded the Manticore that it was the law and not to be denied and the broken form had to obey, falling almost thirty meters back down to the ground. While the sound was just as painful as its impact into the wall, there was no more need to pity the beast, as a notification reminded me that it was not the fall that killed you, but the sudden stop at the end. In this case, the Manticore had expired, leaving us with a large, pulped carcass and me with very little Astral Power.


    Olivia and I quickly checked on everyone, both to make sure that the fight had caused no lasting injuries, but also to ascertain that none of the spores we had been exposed to during the last few days were lingering.


    Once that was done, Adra and I dealt with the Manticore¡¯s body. Adra took the teeth and claws, while I used the last of my Astral Power in a combined spell with Lenore, turning the carcass into dust that would soon be scattered by the wind. There was no need to alert the Manticore¡¯s that we had resurfaced, or the problems we had escaped from by going underground would just come back and haunt us.


    Exhausted, but exhilarated at being back beneath the open sky, we started to make our way downhill, following the no-longer underground river, as we had for the last few days.

 Chapter 493

    After killing the Manticore, things went downhill, fast. Mostly because we travelled for the rest of the day without really caring for the exact direction we were moving in, simply following the river and the valley it had carved downwards. The idea was to hopefully get back below the treeline, find some forest to hide in, where the Manticores couldn¡¯t see us from above and where trees would hinder their movement if it came to a fight. Trying to return to the ancient road could wait until we had gained some distance, maybe even until we reached Narristo, the town guarding the road on this side of the mountains.


    During the evening, by the time we were looking for a good place to camp, anything but another cave, Adra suddenly paused before turning into the weird, goat-like shape she used to travel and taking off like a shot. The four of us shared a confused glance, before following our companion at a more sedate pace, moving at a fast jog instead of her dash.


    Luckily, she didn¡¯t completely leave us behind and after some ten minutes, we caught up to her, who had turned back into her normal shape, next to a couple of shrubs and a twisted pine-tree. Stepping up, we could see that Adra had her eyes closed, her head slightly bowed in a reverent manner. It looked quite peaceful, almost as if she was praying, and I could smell a tinge of Astral Power in the air, mingling with the natural smells of the vegetation near us. I could faintly guess what she was doing, letting her Astral Power mingle with the surrounding aura, in an attempt to cleanse herself from the harsh days we had spent underground. Dryads were supposed to be creatures of the forest and while there had been vegetation underground, I got the feeling it hadn¡¯t been quite what she needed, slightly reminding me of the time we had spent with Dura Firebringer, how her Astral Power and aura had pressed in on me at times, trying to suffocate me. If Adra had felt similar to that, I should make a mental note not to take her underground for long periods of time again.


    ¡°Are you alright now?¡± Sigmir asked her, likely feeling my concern for our friend.


    ¡°I am now, yes. I hadn¡¯t expected that being cut off from the forests would affect me so strongly.¡± she admitted, her voice musing, almost shily.


    ¡°Maybe it was a combination, the altitude, the tunnels, being hunted, all those things coming together and pressing you down.¡± I suggested, happy that she was feeling better, even while a part of me was disappointed in myself for not noticing her distress. If I wanted to be a leader, even if only the leader of a small group like this, I would have to keep better track of my companions'' weaknesses and their state of mind.


    I had long since decided that I wouldn¡¯t want to be active in a larger organisation again, certainly not in a purely Traveller-focused one such as the Crusade of Light, though even the idea of a semi-native organisation like the Blades of the Realm wasn¡¯t too appealing to me. That left me either going completely solo or in a team with Sigmir if I could meet her again in the future, or form a small team, like the one that had formed around me. Going alone had some advantages, mainly that leaving Mundus for longer than a day or two at a time wouldn¡¯t be a problem, but the obvious drawback was that trying to go at things alone would likely see me die quite a lot.


    And that was ignoring the whole question regarding Sigmir, which I was still pushing to the future, my plans having not made any significant progress thus far. There was a mention regarding a major event on the forum, one that involved testing a yet unfinished product for the Capsule that was in its Alpha-version with promised rewards for Road to Purgatory¡¯s release, but what those rewards would be was unknown.


    Shaking off thoughts of the future once again, I focused on the present and our current predicament, namely that there was a pride of flying lions somewhere in the area, possibly still looking for us.


    ¡°Adra, can you find out if there¡¯s a forest or some nice cover nearby? Something where the Manticore¡¯s can¡¯t easily enter, or at least not fly around in?¡± I asked, remembering Adra¡¯s skill to talk to plants, or however that worked. Maybe the local plants knew about their neighbours or something equally silly.


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    ¡°Certainly, give me a moment.¡± she replied, bringing a grin to my lips. The more I learned about magic, the more I realised how much there was to learn. When looking at some of my skills, sitting at seventy, Ice-Magic even at eighty-two, I would normally think I was slowly reaching the pinnacle of magic, at least in regards to Ice-Magic, but the list of things I wanted to learn only got longer. Watching Adra use her own magic, as she did now, served to heighten that impression, showing me how others used their abilities and making me wonder if I was merely a frog, sitting within my well and looking at the blue sky above, thinking I knew how wide the world was.


    Smiling to myself, I decided to apply what she did to my own magic, in an attempt to figure out where our flying foes were. I still had some Manticore-Blood and would be able to get a rough idea of other Manticores that shared a blood relationship with the one we had killed. If Manticores worked similar to other pack-animals, they would mainly work in expanded family-units, though I wasn¡¯t certain just how accurate my divination was.


    Taking a few steps back, trying to avoid interference between Adra¡¯s magic and my own, I pulled out the Ice-Crystal containing the frozen blood of one of the Manticores we had killed before. It was a pure work of magic, without any runes to guide the images and intent within my mind, so I closed my eyes to help with my focus and concentrated on the Blood Line. Where was more of that Blood, where were the relatives. Where were our enemies?


    The impressions I received were even fainter than before, maybe due to the Blood having decayed somewhat despite being frozen, but I wasn¡¯t after precision anyway, just a general idea. Sadly, that general idea was even less useful than the last time I had used this divination, telling me that there were Manticores to the east and to the west of us, but with a generous error-bar on either side. Those imprecise bars were almost large enough to touch in the north and south, making the whole spell relatively useless, as it only told me that there were Manticores around, somewhere.


    Luckily, Adra had more luck, or maybe an easier task and her vegitative friend told her that there were a few areas with plenty of vegetation around, one even close enough to reach before the night fully fell. Once again, I had to bow my head to her ability, I had trouble understanding the thoughts of other humans at times, but she could somehow communicate with a tree and glean useful information. It was truly magical. Or something.


    But magical or something else, we quickly set off again, moving further down hill, now with a purpose to find that dense shrubbery, as it should be a good spot to rest for the night. At the same time, Lenore moved out of her Hallow once more, taking to the sky in order to look for something that might serve as dinner, after we had been forced to rely on our rations underground. Some fresh meat would come in handy, especially if we managed to find some wild vegetables or fruits.


    It didn¡¯t take her long to spot a couple of marmots that were taking in the last rays of sunshine, or maybe waiting for the night to set so they could venture further from their burrows. In this case, it mattered little, even their habitual vigilance was made useless by virtue of my Mind Magic. It was truly a marvelous skill, striking without delay, unable to be dodged or avoided, the only thing that could keep the enemy alive was the strength of their mind. In this case, the marmot I targeted had a strong mind, forcing me to use Overflow to put enough Astral Power into my Mind Blast and even then, I suffered a bit of a headache due to backlash. But the marmot¡¯s mind was thoroughly blasted, allowing Lenore to swoop down like a slightly slow raptor, pick it up in her claws and carry it back to us.


    By the time we reached the smaller valley, with the dense shrubbery Adra had promised us, Lenore and I had managed to retrieve another Marmot and a fat rabbit, providing us with a nice dinner, if a little heavy on the meat.


    While Sigmir butchered my kills, the rest of us searched through the shrubs, looking for wood and possibly forage, though only Adra was able to find something, as the mushrooms apparently told her where to look, in exchange for a promise to spread their spores far and wide.


    Later in the evening, after we had our dinner, Lenore and I flew up the slope of the valley, sitting high up on a cliff, to look at the moon above. For once, I could understand the saying, Absence makes the heart grow fond. I had missed the comforting light of the moon, her presence in the sky.

 Chapter 494

    After spending a peaceful night under the stars, all of us were quite a bit more upbeat than we had been underground. Living underground might be suitable for some beings, but none of us was one of those beings. Even I, who arguably was more suited to Darkness, craved the open skies and fresh air, not the silent, oppressive weight of a mountain above me, pressing me down. It made me wonder, how would I feel within a mountain of Ice? Would it be similar to the feeling within the mountains or would I feel more like a fish in water, in total control of my surroundings and at ease? Maybe, in the future, I would be able to find out, to find myself an Iceberg and make my lair within. The thought brought a smile to my face, as I looked at the distant, snow-capped peaks, wondering just how much Ice was up there.


    But we had spent almost two weeks moving across the White Mountains to get to this side, there was no way I would be willing to turn around and climb up those mountains, just to sate my curiosity. Not while being on a clock and certainly not with the Manticores ruling the skies.


    In the morning, we continued on our path down the valley, keeping close to the slopes, trying to stay within the shadows as much as possible in order to hide from airborne predators. Even Lenore was back within her Hallow, unwilling to risk being spotted in the sky and giving our position away. It made me wonder just how aggressive the Manticores were, if they literally hunted down everything that flew within their territory. If so, the local biosphere would be quite devastated, with a lot of natural predators suddenly displaced or killed. What would happen once the Manticores were hunted down, by us or by anyone? Would the herbivore-population explode, with no airborne threats that thinned their number, to the point that the sparse vegetation would be wiped out, in turn leading to increased erosion?


    How did biospheres on Mundus work in general, and how would that change with an influx of essentially immortal beings, many of whom would be hell-bent on gaining Experience to raise their level? For now, the impact of Beta-Testers would be negligible, simply due to the low numbers but once the final wave of testers, those who had bought a limited preorder, arrived, that might change. That final wave had about as many people as all previous groups combined but even those numbers would likely be dwarfed by the number of people joining the live-release. I had seen a few estimates, ranging from a million players on the conservative side, to twenty-million players on the high-end, which was quite daunting. Sure, there was a whole world, but how many natives did Mundus have? It would be interesting, especially once the different philosophies amongst players started to clash, both amongst the players but also with the natives.


    As I was considering those questions, a shrill shriek cut through my thoughts, bringing the Manticore circling high above us to my attention. I had no doubt that it wasn¡¯t about to attack us, not when it¡¯s loud cries would get the attention of everyone not completely deaf, and maybe even of some deaf people. No, unless I was completely off the mark, it was more akin to a wolf, calling in the rest of their pack to hunt down a dangerous prey. It was a new tactic from the Manticores, possibly caused by the death of a mature Manticore the previous day, maybe simply due to the earlier losses, before we had moved into the tunnels.


    Whatever the reason for the change, it meant that we had to move, and quickly at that. While there were some twisted trees and low shrubs around us, those wouldn¡¯t be enough cover if the Manticores came in numbers, allowing them to fight on their terms, which wouldn¡¯t bode well for us.


    After a quick glance upwards, Adra obviously came to the same understanding, speeding up her steps, turning our comfortable, fast walk into a loping jog, forcing me to push my physical body to the limit. I would be able to push further, by increasing my abilities with Blood Magic, but that would leave me slightly weaker for a later battle. No, if the Manticores came, I wanted to have all my Astral Power available to show them the error of their ways.


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    The Manticore kept pace with us, circling above and occasionally letting out its shrill cries. If nothing else, the constant presence caused us to run just a little faster, though a part of me was scared that it might be herding us. But when thinking about it, where would they want to herd us? It wasn¡¯t like they needed us to be in some specific spot  to swoop down and tear us to pieces, every part of the mountainside was similarly dangerous in that regard. Maybe herding us into a deadend, so we couldn¡¯t escape further, but given that they were faster than us, with better mobility, that didn¡¯t seem to fit either. Or maybe it was just constantly calling out our position to other Manticores, so they could assemble a large enough group to strike.


    Whatever the actual reason, Adra kept leading us forward, with each of us occasionally glancing up to the sky, as the single Manticore turned into two, then three. When there were five of them, the cries changed just a little and when looking up, I could see them swooping down, not quite in a dive, but obviously aiming for us.


    ¡°Close your eyes!¡± Olivia called out a warning and without question, I heeded her call. Moments later, the world around me went white as blazing light burned through my closed eyelids, causing me to stumble for a moment. My eyes snapped back open, spots swimming in my vision and I felt Lenore emerge from her Hallow and pushed myself into my Hallow, as trying to run mostly blind was a recipe for disaster.


    The others weren¡¯t as affected, my sensitivity having screwed me over despite the warning, but the Manticores had been forced to abort their attack and retreated somewhat higher. maybe a little more cautious now.


    With Lenore¡¯s higher view-point, I was able to see that we were almost out of the woods, or rather almost in the forest, as the sparse mountainside gave way to a forest of low pines, mixed with shrubs. While the forest wasn¡¯t as dense as I would have liked, I had some hope that the trees would limit the Manticores¡¯ ability to fly and swoop down,  forcing them to work more akin to lions. They¡¯d still be dangerous, but compared to trying to fight a number of them while they could attack from the air, it was a lot less dangerous.


    Previously, we had been able to deal with individual Manticores by forcing them to the ground with powerful ranged attacks from Adra and myself, but that only worked against low numbers, as soon as multiple targets attacked at the same time, we¡¯d get torn apart.


    Lenore and I switched places again as we closed in on the forest, allowing me to let my Frozen Shuttles soar out, giving me a way to respond instantly to another attack of the Manticores. The shuttles lacked the weight to discourage a serious attack, but I could simply cause them to shatter if needed.


    Above us, the cries intensified once more and we all put on a burst of speed, seeking to get between the trees. It wouldn¡¯t be salvation, but compared to getting torn to shreds out in the open it would give us a fighting chance. The Manticores, seeing that we were almost there, dove down, forcing me to act. My shuttles soared up, in the grip of my Ice-Magic and with a heavy heart, I focused on the Shatter-rune within my mind, channelling Astral Power into the shuttles, causing them to disintegrate.


    For once, I didn¡¯t try to turn them into frozen shrapnell, even that wouldn¡¯t actually stop the dive of a massive, flying lion. Instead, I used the Astral Power the shuttles had been made from, all the way back in Neyto, and turned them into floating mist, glittering with Diamond Dust and robbing the Manticores of their sight. On the other hand, by using the shuttles, I had been able to create the mist half a dozen meters above us, covering most of the space to the forest as the ice slowly floated to the ground.


    We couldn¡¯t see the Manticores any longer, but I highly doubted they¡¯d try to dive down on us, if they couldn¡¯t see the ground to estimate when to stop their dive. Though it would make for a pleasant surprise if they decided to risk it, crashing into the mountain in the attempt. It would somewhat soothe the pain of having to destroy a tool I had used for over half a year.

 Chapter 495

    Crashing into the forest was a little unpleasant, our speed not lending itself to caution or avoidance. Instead, Adra and Sigmir simply barreled through, branches breaking and leaves scattering in their wake. Even I, moving in the back of our formation, got scratched up but getting under cover was vital, certainly more important than some minor discomfort.


    The shrubs slowed us down, turning our frantic dash into a quick walk, as Sigmir took the lead and used her impressive strength to make a path where there hadn¡¯t been one before. Not to escape, but simply to get a little more distance from the edge, trying to find a nicely dense patch of wood, where the Manticores with their massive bodies would be unable to bring their full potential.


    Behind us, I could hear splintering sounds as at least one of the Manticores crashed into the forest, the sound spurring us on a little more, before we reached a thicket of tangled brambles, dense, slightly prickly and a wonderful spot to stop. There were even some small trails, barely large enough for me to squeeze through, that allowed for a little mobility.


    As we stopped, there was a moment of silence, of stillness, before the noise from the Manticores above shattered the moment, their shrill cries pressing home the point that while we were in the woods now, we were far from out of the woods.


    ¡°I¡¯ll take a look.¡± Adra said, her breathing a little laboured, before she stepped to one of the slightly thicker trees, though I doubted it would hold her weight. She never even tried climbing it, instead simply placing her hand against the wood, her eyes closed, before pulling her hand away as if she was scalded a moment later.


    ¡°Incoming!¡± she warned, squeezing herself through the brambles in an effort to move. There was a sound unlike anything I had ever heard before, a mix of splintering wood, strange, ripping noises and the piercing cry of a Manticore mixing together into one unholy cacophony, sending cold sweat down my spine and a Manticore crashed into the thicket in an attempt to use its body to simply break through. It almost bounced back up, even as Sigmir took the opportunity to swing her axe, the brambles hindering her quite a bit but scoring a light cut in one of its legs.


    The Manticore scrambled around, its wings frantically flexing while its legs tried to find purchase within the brambles, only to shred those it came into contact with. None of us were willing to let the opportunity it had given us pass, Adra turning her bow into a spear and stabbing it, the reach of her spear allowing her to attack almost unimpeded, while Rai was daring, stepping through the shadows into the Manticore¡¯s space, striking at the base of one wing before dodging to the side, using his smaller body to fit into a whole.


    For me, I couldn¡¯t use my beloved Frozen Shuttles, the Astral Power they had been made of turned into a cold mist to cover our earlier escape, but I did have other means to fight. Taking a page out of Rai¡¯s book, I stepped through the shadows, focusing on the ribcage of the Manticore and landed in the brambles right next to it, a smirk on my face and a silver blade in my hand. I barely used my Athame in combat but if an enemy managed to get itself restrained in such an inviting fashion, I almost had to take advantage.


    Carefully stabbing the Athame¡¯s blade through the thick muscles and between the solid ribs, deep into the Manticore¡¯s flesh caused it to let out a noise somewhere between strangled chicken and stepped-on cat, as its movement became even more frantic, thanks to the sudden pain. I got battered by its wing a bit, but my position meant there was little leverage behind it, making it endurable, as I focused on the hilt of my Athame and channelled my magic.


    The earlier noise went up by a few octaves, a guttural sound of pain and suffering, the Manticore trying to complain to the world itself that it was in pain, in terrible pain, to the point that a few of its still flying companions echoed the cry, as if offering sympathies. Not that there was any sympathy to be had from me, I could feel the Astral Power within its blood draining out of it under the control of my Blood Magic, forming beads filled with power that I could use later. If nothing else, Blood Magic, at least in the way I was using it, had the best possible Astral Power efficiency, letting me invest a small amount, to get a larger return.


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    In this case I wasn¡¯t only after the return on my investment, but I was quite willing to use the by-product, the Miasma that formed within the Manticore, to my advantage, Lenore and I using Death-Magic to agitage the vile power even further, poisoning the weakened beast.


    Sadly, we couldn¡¯t take our time to fully finish the job, our position on top of the brambles too exposed and before we had more than a dozen seconds, one of the other Manticores was carefully swooping in, probably trying to pick me up for easier disposal. I didn¡¯t want to have anything to do with the Manticore¡¯s talons and pushed off, pulling the Athame with me and tumbling through the brambles, getting scratched up but that was a price I was very willing to pay.


    It took me a moment to reorient myself after landing on the ground and during that time, the others weren¡¯t inactive. However, the same was true for the Manticores, at least one of them had realised that trying to brute force their way through the dense brambles from above was nearly impossible, even their massive weight didn¡¯t allow that. The brambles were simply too tangled and interwoven, giving them enough strength to hold them up, making it difficult to apply their strength anywhere. It would work with a bit of time, by slowly shredding the individual vines, but during that time, they would be sitting ducks.


    On the other hand, they could follow the path we had taken, using their bodies to crash through the thicket from the side, which was what one of them was trying to do, its wings tucked in against its body, while it used its front-claws to open up the way. Sigmir stood ready to oppose that one, while Rai had taken another stab at the one entangled.


    ¡°I¡¯ve got the one above!¡± I called out, realising that each drop of Astral Power, each point of stamina, were valuable to us, that we needed to conserve resources as much as possible. My lips curled into a wicked smile as I grasped the Athame in my hand and spoke a single word, both command and curse at the same time. ¡°Die!¡±


    There was no magical meaning to the word, but as I spoke it, Lenore and I joined our minds together, casting Death-Magic and channelling it through the Astral Power within the Blood, using that as a medium to affect the Manticore I had taken the Blood from. The Blood was the perfect medium to circumvent its defenses, it even supplied most of the power needed for my spell. As if to obey my command, the Manticore that was still tangled within the vines above us let out a soft, almost mournful, cry and stopped moving after a few more twitches. A quick glance at my log told me that we had killed a level seventy-five Young Manticore.


    Sadly, there was no time to celebrate that, not while just a few meters away Sigmir was clashing with another Manticore, trying to keep it from moving further into the thicket we had taken refuge in. Everyone else was backing her up, Adra standing directly with her, using her spear to stab the Manticore whenever it tried to advance, Olivia using her Divine Magic to protect Sigmir¡¯s body and reduce the impact of the Manticore¡¯s attacks and lastly, there was Rai who used the complicated foliage around us to his advantage, slipping in and out of the Manticore¡¯s space, causing deep wounds every time he appeared.


    If our foe was only that single Manticore, the fight would be trivial, even though my Observe told me that this one wasn¡¯t a Young Manticore, but a mature one, with an impressive level of hundred-twenty. If only.


    Before the others could do more than wound the beast, another was pushing in, not following the same path and getting stuck behind the first one but forging its own path. It couldn¡¯t move swiftly but without anyone to stop it, it would be only a matter of minutes until it would be able to tear into any of us with abandon.


    Sigmir let out a loud growl that turned into a howl and I could feel her determination over our bond. At the same time, I could see her body change, as silver hairs sprouted on her skin and her head took on canine features. My own experience made it easy to guess that she was using her Avatar-form, no longer incomplete now that both, Sigmir and Ylva, had crossed the second Divide.


    She truly looked beautiful.

 Chapter 496

    Sigmir and Ylva, joined together in their Avatar-state, were an awe-inspiring sight. Their overall size wasn¡¯t that different from Sigmir¡¯s normal, hulking form but instead of the face I adored, their head was clearly canine in nature, covered in soft-looking, silvery-white fur, with a pair of cute ears on top. If we weren¡¯t engaged in a fight for our lives, I would want to pet them, simply to find out if their fur was as soft as it looked and if those ears were as sensitive as Sigmir¡¯s normal ears. A part of me also wondered about that canine tongue.


    Curiously, while their head was strongly influenced by Ylva, their body looked to be more influenced by Sigmir, retaining her bipedal nature and the opposable thumbs. There might have been more changes but I couldn¡¯t investigate further, due to combat and clothing, I would have to take a closer look once those were gone.


    But while the overall changes were relatively minor, in the grand scheme of things, the underlying change quickly became obvious. Instead of being pushed back by the Manticore she had been fighting, she was now pushing forward, using an opening made by Adra¡¯s spear to bury her axe in its neck, ripping open a gaping wound with a twist of her arm. The Manticore didn¡¯t die instantly, but from the amount of blood staining its fur, I was reasonably certain it wouldn¡¯t last long.


    While the others disengaged from the dying Manticore, to attack the other Manticore that was pressing in, I took a second to consider my next step. Using Ice-Magic would work, my spells and power allowing me to kill two, maybe three, Young Manticores near instantly but it would require the use of Overflow, leaving me near useless afterwards. On the other hand, if I managed to get my hands on their Blood, especially Blood that was drained with Blood Magic, the number of Manticores I could take care of went up by quite a bit, depending on the amount of Blood taken. Death-Magic, without a suitable medium, had an even worse mileage than Ice-Magic, while Darkness-Magic lacked the punch to deal with a Manticore¡¯s powerful body quickly.


    With my shuttles shattered, I decided to use the next best thing to harass the Manticores, while observing the situation, waiting for a chance to strike. Maybe it was fitting as we were in a thicket of thorny vines and I was extended the Eisblumen, vines of flexible Ice formed from Astral Power. To this day, I still wasn¡¯t certain how the Ice could be flexible, my best guess was that it was a structure formed from diamond dust or something similar, but I didn¡¯t know. And in the moment, it didn¡¯t matter, what mattered was that I could use the Eisblumen to tangle into the physical vines, using the combination to disrupt and delay the other Manticores, essentially binding and restraining them, giving the others time. At the same time, as it wasn¡¯t actually me who held the Manticores, but the thorny vines around us, the Astral Power cost was moderate.


    As I carefully moved my Eisblumen, sometimes to tug at the vines around us, forming them into slings, other times pulling at the legs of a Manticore, causing it to tangle in the vines and slings I created, I could feel the familiar power of Adra reach out and help me. Not in an active fashion, I could see that she was too focused on her part of the fight for that, but simply supporting the plants around us, making them a little more supple and just a little harder to tear. And all the while, the battle continued, with Sigmir and Ylva, now truly one in mind and body, tearing into the Manticore¡¯s as they tried to force their way into our thorny sanctuary.


    But I could see that the Manticores were gaining ground, not on an individual level, simply by virtue of numbers. By the time the others had killed off the second Manticore on the ground, another had moved past the dying form of the first one, starting to tear open the vines, despite my best efforts. Before the others could even engage that one, a third Manticore started to open up yet another path, almost mindless in their attempt to get at us.


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    For a moment, I wondered just why those beasts were as focused on us as they were, willing to step over the fallen bodies of their brethren, just to get at us. I could understand if people, sapients with convictions to a greater cause, had such suicidal fervour, but for a beast to ignore the basic impulse of survival, there had to be something more. It might be that they were similar to the Arachne, more than simple beasts, despite their monstrous bodies, capable of abstract thought and complex convictions. Sadly, there was no room for negotiation, so it didn¡¯t really matter. They were coming at us, thus they had to die.


    As Sigmir and Ylva buried their axe in yet another Manticore, a cracking sound got my attention, making me realise that one was coming towards Olivia and me from behind. With a mental nod to Lenore, we, too, changed, joining our minds together, to gain as much power as possible.


    Stepping through the shadows, we instantly arrived above the Manticore the others were fighting, using the perception we received from Sigmir and Ylva to move into its blindspot. It didn¡¯t know we were there, not until our talons ripped into its body and for a brief moment, we could tear out some of its Astral Power with our Blood Magic. Hopping off, moving through a space Sigmir and Ylva opened for us, we disengaged, not even wasting our power to step through the shadows, it was not needed with our other half covering for us.


    With our talons covered in Blood, a smile came to my lips, the connection between the Manticore, its Astral Power and the Blood within had yet to dissipate, allowing us to draw on it. Not strongly, but there was a faint link. A link that we grabbed hold of, even as the Blood turned into a small Icicle and flew forward, propelled by our magic.


    That small Icicle, barely the size of Morgana¡¯s pinky-finger, shot into the other, approaching Manticore, creating a connection between the two Manticores and us, a connection of Blood, of magic and, thanks to our efforts, of death. Blood Magic was a curious thing, especially once you combined it with Death Magic and in this case, it allowed us to take one Manticore¡¯s vitality and use it to poison another Manticore, turning their powers against each other.


    Loud shrieks erupted from their throats, as they cursed the world in their pain, shrieks I joined in, singing a dirge to shepherd these proud creatures from one world, into the next. They were lions no longer, before the Raven¡¯s Shadow, they had turned into sheep and the wolves were closing in.


    Another voice joined in to our song, singing of hunger and the hunt, their howls piercing the sky, adding yet another layer, one that we gladly took and wove into the Song of Death. More voices joined in, shrieks of agony as more lambs came before the wolves, their pride driving them into our fangs.


    As we rose into the sky, our song joining with the wind, howling around the mountains, there was a flicker of golden light below. For a brief moment, we considered snuffing that light out but there was no need, not while the lambs that thought themselves to be lions thought to take the skies from us. Taking their wings, breaking their will, shedding their blood and using it to rip the life from their bodies, all the while our song rose to the sky, the wind slowly turning cold as we sang of the coming end, of Darkness of Ice and of Death.


    And the lambs scattered, knowing that they were no lions, that the wolves were running free and coming for them.


    Finally, silence returned to the mountains, the winds abated as our song ended.


    We sank to the ground, hoarfrost crunching beneath our talons, sagging against our other half, as she held us, giving us a place to rest. Our wings wrapped around us, just like her arms embraced us.


    And in the silence, there was peace, as darkness slowly settled over the land.

 Interlude: Spread your wings!

    <table style="width: 90.0442%">


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 97.9845%">


    Not everyone needs to walk, on the Road to Purgatory.


    Some can just spread their wings, and soar through the skies.


    </td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    Under a beautiful, cloudless blue sky, a group of Manticores is flying, their wings beating the air in a slow, steady pace as they circle above their prey. Their cries cut through the air from time to time, calling their brethren to hunt.


    Far beneath them, their prey is desperately trying to escape, five humanoid figures running downhill, towards a stretch of brambles that cover part of the mountainside, growing out of a small valley further up. Before the prey can reach the cover they so desperately long for, to avoid the pursuit of the aerial hunters, the Manticores start diving down, angling to tear into the running figures, cutting their flight short.


    However, just before the Manticores are in range, one of the figures raises a stick to the sky and suddenly, a blazing light shines from that stick, almost as if the sun itself had made a brief appearance on that mountainside. Not willing to continue while blinded, the Manticores scatter, each of them retreating to a higher altitude, to wait until their sight is restored. Their prey won¡¯t escape, even with such a trick.


    Once the first has their eyesight restored, it starts back down, not diving but simply descending in a way that would allow an easy retreat if there were another flash of light, allowing the next Manticore to tear apart the stick-wielding humanoid.


    But there is no flash of light, instead a fog-cloud appears out of nowhere, covering the mountainside in dense mist, making it impossible to dive down. Shrieking in disgust, the Manticores circle above the cloud, their beating wings slowly dispersing the cloud. Though, their actions are futile, the cloud is large enough to reach the brambles, forcing them to circle above it, as they consider their actions for a few moments.


    Below them, now hidden by the brambles, the five humanoids position themselves, as they slow their breathing and ready for combat. Suddenly, a crashing sound makes them whirl around, focusing on a suddenly depressed part of the thicket they are in, a Manticore frantically moving around, trying to get traction to tear its body free from the vines it dashed in. Before it can get any, one of the figures stabs a spear into the Manticore¡¯s side and another of the figures vanishes, its shadow lingering for a moment before reappearing in the shadow cast by the Manticore¡¯s wings, instantly stabbing it, before tumbling down through the branches, its small body moving through holes the Manticore can only stare at.


    Still the individual vines are too weak to give the Manticore the needed traction and it is too tangled up to easily free itself, even with the pain given to it by the lesser creature motivating its movement. Another of the figures vanishes, reappearing on the other side of the Manticore and carefully stabbing a polished silver-blade into the Manticore¡¯s side. The Manticore starts beating its wings, trying to get the blade away from it, it¡¯s movements turning franting when a dim, red glow appears within the figure''s eyes. It takes a few seconds before the squirming Manticore manages to strike the figure with its wing, forcing it away, the bloody blade in its hand.


    Seconds passed, with the Manticore ceasing its struggles for a moment, as if trying to assess the situation and find a way out of the tangle it had landed itself in. Yet, before such a way could be found, a dark haze settled around it, some of the veins on its body visibly turning black as it let out loud shrieks of pain.


    Down below, the humanoids have repositioned, the largest of them meeting another Manticore, this one slowly moving on the ground to avoid getting tangled in the vines and losing traction. The humanoid form is clad in a red, glowing aura, shrouding her being almost like a suit of armour. The clash between humanoid and Manticore echoes through the valley, the ringing of sharp claws on metal joining the constant cries of the Manticores above.


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    Their clash continues, even as another Manticore starts to make its way through the vines in an effort to flank the hiding humanoids, to force them out of their burrow, where they can be torn apart and devoured.


    Suddenly, the howl of a wolf, loud enough to make the brambles shake from the sound, echoes through the air, drawing out all noise for a moment. In the brambles, the largest humanoid is briefly, for just a split-second, obscured by a silver haze and when the haze recedes, the Humanoid has changed. Gone is the blue-grey skin, replaced by smooth, shining silver fur, gone is the humanoid head, replaced with a canine¡¯s, complete with muzzle and ears on top. Yet, the beings strength has obviously increased, as the Manticore it has been fighting quickly suffers a deep wound in its chest, dyeing its tan fur crimson.


    The humanoids leave the dying creature behind, in order to face the next one, though time is starting to run out, as more Manticores arrive and start to make their way into the thicket, towards the hated humanoids.


    As the humanoids clash with the next Manticore, the shadow of one of the humanoids in the back suddenly shifts in an impossible fashion, forming a pair of black wings that wrap around the humanoid''s form, concealing it within. After a brief moment, the wings open and a changed being remains behind. Where before, it was a petite humanoid, now, there is a partly avian, partly humanoid creature, with wicked talons and large, black-feahtered wings.


    Suddenly, the creature springs forward, pushing off the vines in a seemingly impossible display of agility, its talons lacerating the Manticore its allies are fighting, before retreating into the protected back-line.


    There, it stops for a moment, holding its bloody talons in front of its chest, before swinging its talons, as if to slash another Manticore, on the other side of the brambles, regardless of the distance between them. In the middle of that slash, the blood on its talons forms a small, crimson shard that flies toward the Manticore, burying into its chest and a thin strand of dark-red energy forms between the two wounded Manticores and the beings talons.


    The Manticores let out screams of pain, while the other being stretches its wings out and, despite the thorny vines all around it, starts to beat them slowly. With each slow beat of its wings, the wind starts to swirl around it and it raises its head towards the concealed sky, starting to sing in an eerie voice, halfway between a human¡¯s and a raven¡¯s. Avian caws mix with human vocals, forming a haunting song.


    As the song starts to intensify, so does the swirling wind, the streams of air turning visible as colour starts to swirl with the invisible air, a mix of red and ashen-grey hues spreading with each wing-beat. The vines around the being start to wither, crumbling at an easily visible speed, leaves falling or turning to grey dust and swirl with the wind. The avian form starts to rise into the now-cleared sky, after the thicket has crumbled away, still singing its haunting song, when the canine form starts joining into the song, its howls forming a contra-point to the avian¡¯s voice.


    A dozen Manticores try to reach the avian that has decided to fight them in their domain, diving into the swirling air in order to tear off its wings and crush it on the unforgiving ground below, though before they can reach the avian form, the swirling light settles around them, some of them simply falling to the ground, where they are torn into by the canine, some forced to move with the wind, as their strength is slowly sapped, their power not enough to escape the unforgiving wind, their earlier calls to the hunt now forming another voice in the haunting song of death, sung by the avian in the air and the canine on the ground.


    The song rises in volume, as the winds start gaining in strength, the devastation on the ground spreading as the Manticores drop out of the air, crashing into the ground. A small, golden bubble is visible on the ground, shielding the other three humanoids from the winds, and the sound, as they watch the devastation take place.


    Finally, after the avian¡¯s song reaches a crescendo, silence falls, the winds fading away as if they had never been there, silence returning to the valley. The silence of the grave, as dozens of Manticore-bodies litter the ground, like toys discarded by an angry child.


    Blue flames start appearing all around them, blotting out the scene, as the globe becomes visible, covered in those same, blue flames.


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    Yet even if you fly, nobody can escape the Road to Purgatory.


    </td>


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    </tbody>


    </table>

 Chapter 497

    As night was falling, Lenore and I separated, just as Sigmir and Ylva did. A part of me wanted to simply close my eyes, tune out the world, but there were things I had to deal with. While my memories of the time spent in Avatar-mode were blurry and fragmented as always, I was quite certain that Lenore and I had flown into the sky, which meant the thicket of brambles we had taken refuge in was gone. Destroyed by Lenore and me, if the blurry fragments didn¡¯t lie to me, though there were very few of those regarding that action, maybe because Death-Magic was mostly one of Lenore¡¯s abilities, not one of mine.


    Forcing myself to move, I brushed against Sigmir, feeling a shiver run down her body. Both, Ylva and Sigmir, were dealing with the backlash of the Avatar-state for the first time, leaving them slightly overloaded and very sensitive, both to their surroundings and to the connection between them, maybe even to Lenore and me. Sadly, there was little I could do to help, it was just something they had to deal with, while I protected them in their state of vulnerability.


    Standing on slightly unsteady legs, I looked around, my jaw dropping at the devastation. Where before, there had been a thicket of brambles, easily three meters high and higher at some places, teeming with life and vitality, now, the mountainside was almost bare, covered in  dead leaves, some withered vines and a lot of dust. I could regnoise the residue of Death-Magic on vegetation, though I had never seen it on this scale.


    It was blown away around Sigmir and me, with another empty circle nearby. I wasn¡¯t quite sure where that came from, but Olivia was standing in the middle, looking at me with a strange gaze. Looking further, I realised just how devastating the battle had been, as Manticore-bodies were littering the mountainside, some of them obviously killed by sharp objects, while the cause of death for others wasn¡¯t as easily discernible. Adra and Rai were moving amongst them, likely taking trophies and harvesting the useful materials.


    But the amount of bodies made me take a look at my combat-log, causing my jaw to drop. There was a list of about two dozen entries regarding the killing of a Manticore or a Young Manticore, all giving a nice chunk of EXP, followed by three level-up notifications, bringing my level to 107, and a smile to my face. Those were followed by skill-increase notifications, pushing my Ice-Magic to eighty-three, my Blood-Magic to seventy-eight and my Death-Magic to a mighty eighteen.


    ¡°Love, we have to move. I know, you probably want to do nothing but close your eyes and shut out the world, but we need to move. There might be more Manticores coming.¡± I told Sigmir, gently taking her hand to give her some strength and guidance. She nodded, her eyes continuously staring into space, as if she wasn¡¯t quite there. Similarly, Ylva twitched at my words and for a moment, I thought about the best way to move a massive canine, one almost as large as myself. Luckily, as I pulled Sigmir to her feet, Ylva got up herself, moving along with me.


    ¡°Are you alright?¡± Olivia had stepped up, the fact that I hadn¡¯t noticed showing me that my focus wasn¡¯t all there either.


    ¡°Somewhat. But we really should get moving, I don¡¯t think either Sigmir or I will be of much use, if there¡¯s another Manticore coming.¡± I told her, pausing for a second, ¡°Hell, I don¡¯t think we¡¯d be of much use if a bunny decided to attack us.¡± I admitted, shaking my still hurting head.


    ¡°Not sure if there¡¯ll be more coming, you did quite the number on them. Your magic is seriously scary.¡± she admitted, looking uncomfortable. ¡°I had to shield Adra, Rai and myself from it. I¡¯m not sure what your magic would have done to us.¡±


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    I could only nod in acceptance at her statement, I simply didn¡¯t know what had happened, what Lenore and I had done. I knew that, no matter what state we were in, we¡¯d make sure to keep Sigmir safe and I was reasonably certain that I wouldn¡¯t actively try to hurt the others, but collateral damage was certainly possible. Just looking at the state of the mountainside spoke of the power we had evoked, the death we had wrought.


    ¡°Do you remember the magical dress we found in the swamp? And the ability contained within?¡± Lenore asked, speaking in my voice. When I nodded, she continued, ¡°I just gained a trait called Death Singer, increasing the effect of my Death-Magic when I use my voice to project it. The only thing I¡¯ve been working on that uses such an effect is the skill I¡¯ve been working on, the one I based on the ability from that dress.¡± she explained, not solving the riddle of what we¡¯d been doing, for that, I would have to take a look at the recording later.


    ¡°Mhm, your song certainly brought a lot of death, as you can see.¡± Olivia said, gesturing at our surroundings.


    ¡°We can debate that, but later. For now, what is done is done and I¡¯m not sure there was another way to solve the situation.¡± I cut in, gently guiding Sigmir and Ylva forward. The two of them simply were in no condition to deal with the world at the moment, so I wasn¡¯t about to get into a discussion with anyone, certainly not while there might be more Manticores coming.


    ¡°Adra, Rai, quickly get the important parts and we¡¯ll get going.¡± I ordered, raising my voice even as I noticed Ylva shuddering at the additional noise. I had no idea how exactly the after-effects of the Avatar-state hit those two, only estimates based on my own experience but her reaction made me take a mental note to avoid loud noises. The other two looked over and their movement sped up, even as I decided that they could catch up, it wasn¡¯t like Sigmir or I were about to set any land-speed records.


    Not even ten minutes later, as Lenore and I were looking at the border, between withered, destroyed vegetation and living forest, the others caught up. It was curious, just how precise the border was. It was quite obvious that the effect had worked on a certain range, but some branches that had stuck into that range had withered, too, the effect reaching a short distance outside of the original range. Yet, while the branches that had only been partially inside the effect had been harmed, they hadn¡¯t been completely destroyed, as if the part outside had absorbed some of the damage, or provided extra vitality. It made me curious about the mechanisms, as my grasp on biology, especially magical biology, was a little shaky. If I wanted to learn more Alchemy in the future, to build on the paltry points I had gained thus far, more understanding was needed.


    ¡°Let me take the lead.¡± Adra suggested, getting a grateful nod in return. Just guiding and helping Sigmir, with Ylva padding after us, took most of my attention, leaving little to actually pay attention to our surroundings.


    ¡°I¡¯ll bring up the rear. Don¡¯t worry, teacher, nobody will sneak up on us.¡± Rai assured me.


    ¡°I agree, you did plenty. Thank you, I¡¯m not sure we could have dealt with those Manticores otherwise.¡± Adra added to him, giving the four of us a look of gratitude. Again, I could only nod. While it was true that it had only been the use of the combined effort of Sigmir, Ylva, Lenore and me that we had been able to defeat the Manticores, at the same time, I was the leader of the group and had made the decision to cross the White Mountains even after knowing about the Manticores. Looking at it with that in mind, I had almost killed us all with a bad judgement. Or maybe not a bad judgement, but one that was made with too little information, which, if I was honest with myself, was a bad judgement. I would have to do better in the future, without letting the responsibility bog me down, though I had no idea how to actually do that.


    Maybe the real answer to that problem of leadership was to be powerful enough to break any obstacle, as impossible as that was. For me, I made a promise to myself to improve on my concealment-magic, to the point that I could shield and conceal the group, even during the daytime, so that, if we were unable to defeat a foe, we could at least run away safely.


    With that determination made in my mind, I focused back on our surroundings, deciding to stretch out the vines of my Eisblumen, so that I had additional hands to guide the dazed Sigmir and Ylva through the forest.

 Chapter 498

    This was bad. There were no other words for it. Certainly, the video Pantheon Entertainment had released looked awesome, the music as the unlikely pack of Sigmir, Ylva, Lenore and I were swatting the Manticores from the sky sent shivers down my spine but why did they have to make it so incredibly obvious that the avian creature and I were one and the same? Unless Maggie and her Crusade of Light had turned in their brains when getting their capsule, there was no way they wouldn¡¯t realise that I had been the one to wipe their raid. Or at least helped the arachnids to wipe their raid, they had been well and good on the way to wiping all by themselves. No matter what, the best explanation I could come up with was that it hadn¡¯t been me, that there was a different harpy-like avian that had used Mind-Magic against them. Which was an incredibly weak explanation, one that even a child would doubt.


    Or I could own up to it, though that would give them an actual reason to hunt me down, one that would be acceptable for others, something they didn¡¯t have until now.


    Or I could simply act stupid, not answering questions and hope that something shiny came up distracted everyone from the whole mess, something big, explosive and attention-grabbing.


    Was there a way for me to trigger such an event? For a moment, I considered, sitting back on my throne, mentally going over my options. The obvious one would be to contact the Grandmother, but what would I ask her? And would she actually help me? That, I simply didn¡¯t know, but I somehow doubted that she¡¯d just help me, not without a good reason. She was a teacher, but the kind of teacher that let me make my own mistakes, only stepping in when she felt like it.


    Other than her, my Outsider-trait and generally subdued personality meant that there were few contacts I could call upon and none of them really fit the bill.


    However, what I might be able to do was cause an event in another part of the world, which, in turn, would grab attention, similar to the way Lenore and I had caused a sudden blizzard, to attract attention away from a few adventurers we had accidentally murdered. For that, I could think of three potential ways, though I had no idea just how complicated it would be.


    The easiest in concept, though most likely the most difficult to actually do, would be to unleash Prometheus from his chains, letting the titan roam free. That would almost certainly get everyone¡¯s attention, leaving the fact that I could grow wings a distant, uninteresting second thought. And it would give me some major achievement, which was why I had thought about ways to release him before, only to come up empty.


    More complicated would be to rile up the Arachne near Ladrin, causing them to rampage and attract attention. It had the advantage that it was geographically close and I didn¡¯t really care about them, so causing them trouble wouldn¡¯t really trouble me. To get them moving, I would have to use the Astral River to project myself there and do¡­ something. What, I had no idea, making the idea a little impractical, though more feasible than unleashing the Titan.


    Lastly, I might be able to do something similar with the Winter Wolves, though they had bound themselves to their dungeon, to prevent the Centaurs from killing them. Which likely meant they couldn¡¯t leave as they pleased and I didn¡¯t really want them to get hurt, especially not the puppies I had played with back then. Making that idea possible, but distasteful, especially as I doubted that they actually had the power to attract attention away from me.


    Shaking my head, I decided to simply ignore things, to deal with any problems as they actually occurred, instead of trying to form plans for potential trouble now. Procrastination at its best, as if I wasn¡¯t procrastinating enough in regards to Sigmir, banking on the fact that I would find a solution, if I only continued on my course. Just the idea that I wouldn¡¯t find a solution, or that there might not even be one in the first place, brought tears to my eyes, pain to my chest and anger into my heart, the kind of anger that required me to find a solution. There had to be a solution.


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    With few other options to handle either situation, I left my capsule and took care of the few daily necessities that I had neglected during the last few days. Travelling underground, especially in a place of danger, meant that the others had needed my help, causing me to be within the capsule even more than normally. Getting into a fight and having to flee had made things worse and even now, there was a part of me that wanted to be back in Mundus, to make sure I was there when Sigmir woke up.


    A part of me was aware that what I was doing was not healthy, that I was rationalising an addiction, both to the magical world of Mundus but also to the emotions and sensations my connection to Sigmir brought me. That same part insisted that it would be the right thing to do, to either strictly limit my time in Mundus, or to quit the Road to Purgatory altogether, to look for that elusive sensation called Love and form a relationship with another human. There was just one problem with that.


    I had no idea if it could happen, if there was a human out there that could invoke the feelings I was experiencing with Sigmir, from the feeling of connection I had experienced when meeting her for the first time, to the intense bond we had developed, both by constant contact and by magical mishap, if I could call it that. That feeling, those sensations, I had never felt anything alike, certainly not towards another human, which left me wondering, could I feel them for another human? Would I ever feel them again, if I let Sigmir slip out of my reach?


    There were times that I wanted to call up a therapist, maybe one of the people who I had worked with in the past, so that I was able to function as a member of society. But what if they saw my sensations as artifacts of a little understood, new technology, as something artificial that had no basis in reality? And if their therapy would be to give up on Mundus, on Sigmir and on those emotions, could I do it? Would I even want to do it?


    Trying to get rid of the nagging questions within me, I pulled on a pair of running-shoes and did something I hadn¡¯t done in years, head out into the miserable winter-rain and start running. Not caring where I went, barely even taking in my surroundings, I simply moved, focusing my mind to drive my body onwards.


    By the time I returned to my appartement, I was soaked, both from the near-freezing rain and from sweat, pouring off my body, as my muscles burned and screamed, by teeth chattering from the cold as soon as I entered the building and was no longer running. It was idiotic, self-destructive and yet, a part of me considered it necessary.


    It took me some time to get my body into a state where I dared to get into the capsule, without fearing to be deadly sick when I got back out. I might still suffer, running in the rain was idiotic enough, but between a long, warm shower, hot tea and some soup, I thought there was a chance to be spared.


    Yawning in exhaustion, I closed the capsule and logged into Road to Purgatory, deciding to ignore the forum and any related drama, simply letting the video I had seen earlier speak for itself and if anyone wanted to make trouble over it, they could take a long walk off a short pier.


    In Mundus, quite a bit of time had passed but nothing had happened within our camp. We were still in the same overgrown dip that we had retreated into earlier, invisible from the sky and hopefully safe. Sigmir was still sleeping nearby, Ylva acting as a fluffy pillow, their first time using the Avatar-mode had completely wiped them out.


    For once, the exhaustion I had felt outside of Mundus was fully hitting me inside Mundus and I made the best of it. Without even trying to get up, I rolled over, grabbed Sigmir¡¯s arm and wrapped it around me, placing my head on her generous chest. Her scent enveloped me, driving away the few remaining doubts and questions I had.


    If I had to choose between what society called healthy and a relationship to Sigmir, I would choose Sigmir. If I had to choose between Earth and Mundus, I would stay on Mundus, not that I actually could make that decision.


    And if I had to choose between Samantha Jade Jacobs and Morgana¡­

 Chapter 499

    Sigmir moving around below me was what woke me up, with the sun high in the sky. We both needed a few moments to get to grips with the reality around us and I could easily see that Sigmir hadn¡¯t completely recovered from using the Avatar-state.


    ¡°Are you alright?¡± I asked, speaking softly just in case her hearing was still over-sensitive after melding her body with Ylva¡¯s. She didn¡¯t immediately answer me verbally, but the way her arms tightened around me were almost as good an answer. Not even trying to move, I simply stayed where I was, letting her breathe through my hair, as she liked to do when calming down and projecting calm, content thoughts through our connection. A minute passed, maybe three, before the turmoil I could feel in her mind started to calm.


    ¡°I will be.¡± she simply replied, her voice soft, but filled with emotion. Nodding, I continued my wait, only that now, I let my hand sneak up, gently caressing her face and neck, playing with her hair that seemed just a little fuller, smooth and with a slight, silvery sheen to it. Maybe an aftereffect of her use of the Avatar-state that I hadn¡¯t noticed the day before.


    ¡°The others?¡± she asked, a little later. Given that I hadn¡¯t looked around just yet, I could only shrug. Lenore, who was nearby, had to have heard her, as I could feel her push an image of our camp-site at me, showing that Olivia was sitting nearby, leaning against a tree and carving something into a piece of wood, but Adra and Rai were nowhere to be seen. Curious, I tried to take the image I had received from Lenore and push it over my connection to Sigmir.


    ¡°What was that?¡± she asked, her voice a little surprised.


    When I explained, she simply chuckled, telling me how the image she had received had been blurry, with Olivia in sharp focus, but the rest barely recognisable. A part of me wanted to experiment with that, but a rumble in Sigmir¡¯s tummy told me that any vain attempts at sating my insatiable curiosity would have to wait, until we managed to sate my love¡¯s hunger, or she might start nibbling on me. Not that I was against that particular activity, but it didn¡¯t do much for hunger.


    After a quick kiss to her cheek, I rolled off her, before jumping to my feet and stumbling for a moment, my mind insisting that my body still had to recover from the abuse I had subjected it prior to entering the capsule. As I was swaying, I realised that regaining my equilibrium was surprisingly easy, just a simple effort of re-aligning my body and mind.


    I briefly wondered if the bleedthrough was only one way, as It should be, had to be. Otherwise, the capsules would never have been shipped, and I most likely would have suffered outside the game, for some of my stunts ingame. More than just a nosebleed or two, and a couple of headaches. But I knew that the mind had surprising power over the body, the ability for mental troubles to cause physical damage, both in an indirect fashion, like lacking nutrition or sleep-deprivation, and in the very direct fashion of psycho-somatic illnesses. It made me wonder just how the capsules worked, though I was aware that my lack of scientific and technical expertise would most likely leave me akin to a fish, trying to ride a bicycle if I were to try understanding it.


    Shaking my head, to get rid of the last remnants of dizziness, I walked over towards Olivia, who had looked up when I began moving, giving me a nod as I approached.


    ¡°Is there breakfast, or some sort of food?¡± I asked, looking up to the sky in an attempt to guess how long we had rested.


    ¡°There¡¯s still some breakfast left, the others are out hunting. We are almost out of preserved food, the time underground did a number on our stores.¡± she replied, reaching into her bag and pulling out the prepared food. It wasn¡¯t anything to write home about, just some hard crackers and fruits, but it was palatable and lasted forever. Probably because no sane being would try to eat it, including bacteria, but as the saying went, hunger is the best seasoning.


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    Mumbling a ¡®thank you¡¯ to Olivia, I conjured up a plate and knife, both made from Ice, and began cutting up the fruit for Sigmir and me. It wasn¡¯t actually needed but it made me feel good, in a nurturing sort of way, maybe fulfilling a desire to take care and lavish love on Sigmir, or something like that.


    When I wanted to sit next to Sigmir, who was leaning against another tree, she reached out, pulling me onto her lap again. Not the most practical way to eat, but I wasn¡¯t about to struggle, especially not when she quietly spoke into my ears.


    ¡°Just stay like this, please.¡± she whispered, her soft voice sending a shiver down my spine.


    ¡°It¡¯s weird, how can I long for intimacy while shying away from it at the same time?¡± she asked, speaking in a way that made me wonder if she was even talking to me. Squirming a little, I turned on her lap, allowing me to look at her face without putting distance between us.


    ¡°I¡¯m here, you know that. As close as you like, as intimate as you need.¡± I whispered, caressing her cheek once more.


    ¡°Is it an aftereffect of your avatar-state?¡± I asked, trying to get her to open up about her condition.


    ¡°Mhm.¡± she nodded, her eyes closing, ¡°It was weird, I felt so alive back then. I could feel you, you know? It¡¯s been like that the last few days, that Lenore and you have been added into the ability Ylva and I share.¡± she explained and it took me a moment to realise what ability she was speaking of. She had explained it to me, so long ago, that she and Ylva shared their perception in combat, allowing them to work as a seamless whole. It also made sense with what I had felt after Ylva had crossed the second Divide, the way I could anticipate their actions and adjust as needed, allowing me to support them, without interfering in their movement.


    ¡°I want to feel like that, to feel powerful, in control. And close, Ylva and I, we were one, a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts.¡± she began to ramble, reminding me of the emotions I had experienced when using that state for the first time. At the same time, I was curious why she didn¡¯t mention the spotty, blurry memories, or if she didn¡¯t experience those.


    ¡°But now, I can barely communicate with Ylva, it¡¯s as if a part of me is missing.¡± she admitted and for a moment, there was a tiny spark of jealousy within me. It was stupid, irrational, that I envied my Love¡¯s companion, unworthy of all four of us, as I knew that my own connection to Lenore was completely different from the one I shared with Sigmir.


    Retrieving my hand, I gently put one of the slices of fruit into Sigmir¡¯s mouth, feeding her with a smile on my face.


    ¡°Your connection will return, just give it a bit of time. It was the same for me, that the connection felt raw and any stimulation was too much and painful, but at the same time, you want to scratch that itch, you want to communicate with your partner, right?¡± I gently asked, the frown on her face, alongside a nod, more than enough answer.


    ¡°I¡¯ve got an idea how we can deal with this. The easiest is, simply waiting for the connection to return to normal. That¡¯ll just take a bit of time, but waiting doesn¡¯t really comfort you. For that, we¡¯ll wait until we¡¯ve eaten before heading into the woods.¡± I told her, my lips curling into a grin as I considered the ways I would distract her from the missing connection to Sigmir. There had been that mishap, quite a while back, where we had mixed intense emotions with the connection we shared, that sounded like an excellent time to experiment with that particular incident. Maybe we could get a feedback-loop going?


    I could see her eyes widen after a moment, as she got the idea, my grin widening in response.


    ¡°There, I¡¯ll make sure that you can relax and think of nothing but what I¡¯m doing to you.¡± I added, bringing one of her hands to my lips, kissing and nibbling on her fingers. The blush on her face made me chuckle, especially when I noticed her throat working to swallow.


    ¡°That sounds wonderful.¡± she admitted, her voice a little hoarse.


    Soon, after we had both finished our breakfast, the two of us gave a wave to Olivia, before heading into the woods, simply taking a bit of distance from the camp, so that I could make Sigmir¡¯s body sing, alongside her voice.

 Chapter 500

    ¡°I think we are quite a bit further south than originally planned.¡± Olivia remarked, as we traveled along the valley we had been moving in. We had traveled for another day, after fighting the Manticores and by now, the sparse vegetation of the high mountains had been replaced by ancient forests, filled with all sorts of animals and sounds. The dense canopy made it a little difficult to maintain direction, though her spells and Adra¡¯s abilities circumvented that problem. What brought a smile to my face was just how excited Adra was, ever since we had reached a forest that deserved the name. And where her excitement brought a smile to my face, the way she fondled the trees we walked past, caressing them in a manner similar to the way I liked to touch Sigmir, made me shake my head, reminding me of the epitaphs used by that satyr-innkeeper. Maybe there was a reason why he had called her a tree-hugger.


    ¡°Do we need to hit Narristo, or can we turn in our quest further west?¡± I asked, before realizing that if we didn¡¯t go to Narristo, we¡¯d be quite low on rations, forced to rely on foraging almost entirely.


    ¡°We might be able to turn the quest in elsewhere, but I think we should go to Narristo. It¡¯s a detour at this point, but I don¡¯t think we¡¯d actually lose a lot of time, given that traveling on the Ancient Road is simply faster.¡± Olivia replied, prompting me to nod in acceptance.


    ¡°At least we should be out of the Manticore-territory now.¡± Adra muttered, obviously happy that we didn¡¯t have to constantly keep an eye on the sky above us.


    ¡°Probably, though I¡¯m not certain how many more are out there.¡± I admitted, pulling out the Manticore-Blood I had frozen quite some time ago, trying to use it to determine where creatures of the same bloodline where. The resonance was faint, and growing fainter, to the point that I could barely determine that there were more somewhere, with a slight inclination to the south. But that might be due to the time that had passed since we had killed that Manticore, it could be due to distance or it could be that the nearby Manticores in that family had died off and I was tracking some ancient ancestor.


    ¡°Regardless, we need to remain on our guard, didn¡¯t you say that the Manticores were driven out of the area south of us? That means there¡¯s something down there that drove them off, and I don¡¯t think I¡¯d want to get closely acquainted with that ¡®something¡¯.¡± I added, making another mental note to keep out of high-level areas, until we were ready to face that level of challenge. It certainly explained why people had considered the idea to travel through the White Mountains a challenging and difficult one, after the Manticores had taken up the territory.


    With that in mind, I briefly focused outward, even while cursing a little at my lacking ability. While I had high intuition, which in turn meant my senses were extraordinarily sharp, my perception and mindset were mostly geared towards the detection and analysis of magic and Astral Power. Detecting something as mundane as some carnivorous monster sneaking up on me, intent on making me a snack, was not quite my speciality. As such, there was little surprise when I failed to detect anything out of the ordinary, either from lack of such a presence or due to inability.


    We continued on our merry way, now angling further to the north, with a slight slant east-ward, not quite doubling back but certainly going out of the direct way we ultimately needed to move in. As we moved, I occasionally tried to parse our surroundings, though almost all my attention and focus were on either discussing Magic with Lenore or making sure that Sigmir wasn¡¯t suffering any aftereffects of her use of the Avatar-State.


    While she had recovered easily, and I was quite sure the session we had spent on relaxation and connecting with each other had eased any lingering discomfort, I couldn¡¯t help but worry. At the end of the day, using the Avatar-state was a massive burden on both body and mind, even as it brought equally massive advantages. There was a reason I didn¡¯t casually use that ability, even knowing that I was protected by my status as a Traveler.


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    Lenore and I were trying to puzzle out just how we had managed to swat the Manticores from the sky, with me adding the impressions gleaned from the video put out by Pantheon Entertainment to our overall knowledge, when Adra, moving at the front of our group, suddenly stopped, her hand raised in a warning sign.


    The effect was immediate, as we all shifted from mostly vigilant, but relaxed, walking into a stance of readiness, prepared to react to whatever danger Adra might have detected. Normally, I would have let my frozen shuttles soar, though I had yet to replace them, not willing to simply create a new set from Hard Ice, as it would be a paltry imitation compared to the marvel I had created with the help of the Nexus in Neyto, all those months ago. Even if I was stronger now, the purity of the Astral Power I had available back then was not something I could replicate, even now. Instead, I drew my two blades, ready to either use them normally, or by wielding them with my Ice-Magic.


    ¡°There¡¯s something over there.¡± Adra¡¯s soft voice warned us, gesturing forward, slightly off the direction we had been traveling in. For a moment, I considered whether to let whatever she had detected be, but at the end of the day, curiosity won out, prompting me to quietly ask her to lead us. At the same time, I mentally reached out, channeling some power into the concealment-spell I had used so often during the last two weeks, to the point that I felt I would be able to cast it in my sleep. While the shadows cast by the various trees weren¡¯t as deep as the darkness of the night, it was more than enough to allow me to hide us all, it might even resonate better with the concept of concealment, the shadows moving, indistinct and hazy, just what you needed to conceal yourself.


    The six of us, Ylva still not quite comfortable within her Hallow, moved forward, quietly stalking towards whatever Adra had noticed, Sigmir moving up to the front and Rai moving back, joining Ylva in covering the rear. Olivia and I remained in the middle of our formation, protected and shielded between our companions, ready to support them with our magical abilities whenever necessary.


    It didn¡¯t take long for me to hear what Adra had noticed, the cracking sounds of wood, along grunting noises that might come from the exertion of a humanoid, though they might originate from something more animalistic. What assured me that there was something sapient involved in the commotion I was hearing, was the sharp, ringing sound of metal, something I had yet to see from a beast.


    Knowing that we were about to meet with other people, I reflexively tightened the twilight-concealment I was trying to make second nature, hiding the disturbing effect of the ¡®Mortal Hubris¡¯-trait, possibly alongside a few of my other, more disturbing traits and titles.


    Guided by Adra, we arrived next to a newly created clearing, where a rather massive boar was duking it out with a group of Adventurers, for that was what they had to be. Two large forms, similar in size and heft to Sigmir, had engaged the beast in melee, using shields and axe or spear respectively to keep the beast occupied, obviously more interested in inflicting small, annoying wounds than to score that critical, battle-ending blow. That was not to say that the countless, bleeding wounds they had cut into the beast wouldn¡¯t take their toll, they just wouldn¡¯t kill a boar the size of a car quickly.


    Behind them, mostly hidden in the trees opposite of our own position, were two additional beings, one having the equine features of a centaur, the whistling sound of an arrow in flight telling of their choice of weapon, while a tell-tale, metallic-gray glow around a diminutive, though wide, form told of a dwarven spellcaster, possibly a supportive one as the glow was mirrored on the shields of their front-line.


    For a moment, we all simply watched, not certain if we should involve ourselves in their battle. Any action taken might result in unforeseen circumstances, especially given that we were hidden in the shade by my concealment-magic, making it unlikely that we had been spotted.


    Before a decision was made on our part, a medium-sized figure darted from the trees on the side of the clearing, roughly in the middle between the two concealed figures on their side and us, an almost comically large sword glinting in the shade, enveloped in the dull, metallic glow of magic, as another combatant charged into the fray.

 Chapter 501

    As the massive sword struck down, gouging the boar¡¯s side and almost driving it to its knees, the world seemed to vibrate with power for a brief moment and I was certain I could taste the sharp scent of ozone in the air. Reflexively, my tongue flickered out, taking in the air and parsing the Astral Power around us, savouring the curious taste, metallic, yet sharp and tingling. Before I could consider the elements used, and the magic in general, the boar managed to push through the pain from the sudden attack and demonstrated that it was far from breaten.


    With a great heave, it forced its massive body to move, blood spurting from the deep wound, ignoring the two large fighters with their shields who tried their best to keep the beast contained and focused on them. But it was having none of that, as its body moved, so did its head, the tusks trying to skewer the fighter with the greatsword. With a blink of my eyes, the sight in my left eye was overlaid with Lenore¡¯s sight, allowing me to see and gauge the power of magic applied to the person about to be struck. There was some magic on them, but the power seemed to be mostly spent, possibly on the attack they just made. Unless I misinterpreted what I was seeing, there was no way they would remain unharmed from the attack.


    Bullet Time was a wonderful skill, allowing me to consider the circumstances and come to the conclusion to keep watching, without acting, even though I only had a few moments to think. Sadly, Olivia didn¡¯t have the skill, or maybe she had and had decided on another course of action, as right before the person was struck, her voice began an incantation, demonstrating me that magic didn¡¯t rely on the chant, but possibly on a conditioned reflex in reaction to that chant and the trained will. A curious observation, but more important was that, despite her chant only ending after the person was struck, the shield her chant created made it in time. A golden pane of power manifested between the person¡¯s stomach and the boar¡¯s tusks, taking the hit, negating most of the force and shattered all before the chant was ever finished.


    A side-effect of her casting that shield-spell to protect the fighter from harm was that her staff started to shine like a torch for a brief moment, the golden glow very much disrupting our concealment. It was one thing to hide a few, mostly stationary, shadowy forms between other shadows, especially when those forms didn¡¯t do anything to draw attention and there was a fight with a giant boar that very much was attracting anyone¡¯s attention. It was a whole other trick to try concealing a staff that was glowing with golden, divine light that mirrored the shield placed around a group¡¯s main combattant. A trick I couldn¡¯t even begin to pull off, especially not without preparations, which I didn¡¯t have.


    Realisation brought a frown to my face, knowing that we would have to engage with them in some manner and the frown deepened when I noticed that while the boar had struck the sword-wielding figure, the figure had managed to somehow bring one arm back, taking the blow with a metallic vambrace. They still got knocked down and away, but I was almost certain that they were far from defeated.


    While that figure tumbled, struggling to regain their balance and some semblance of a combat-stance, their companions reacted to our appearance in their own ways. One of the heavy-fighters exploiting the opening left by the reckless attack of the boar, burying her axe in the boar¡¯s chest, likely breaking some ribs. At the same time, the other warrior moved to cover their companion and now, with the boar having somewhat moved out of the way, I was able to see those two heavies more clearly, and realised that the one with the spear was male, the other female. At the same time, I wasn¡¯t sure of their race, though I thought that they had some orc-blood. Their skin, with its deep earthy tone and their tusks made that almost certain, though the size of their tusks compared to their bodies made me wonder what other blood they had. My guess was either troll or giant, both races known for their impressive physique.


    Further back, the centaur launched yet another arrow into the boar, though I couldn¡¯t detect any skills, while the dwarf was gathering Astral Power for some sort of spell.


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    ¡°Olivia, want to tell me what that was about?¡± I asked quietly, uncertain how to proceed. Their group was obviously wary of additional enemies, even though Olivia¡¯s actions were far from hostile or threatening. A part of me wanted to simply fade back into the forest, but that would only leave us with potential trouble, if they managed to track us. Alternatively, murdering them was possible, but the longer I travelled Mundus, the less inclined I felt to casually murder the natives. It just didn¡¯t feel like a game any longer.


    ¡°Acted by reflex.¡± she admitted, before continuing, ¡°I¡¯ll talk to them. Adra, join me?¡±


    Exchanging a quick look with Sigmir, and letting the confidence oozing through our bond soothe me, I gave Adra a nod, pulling the tattered concealment back together, hiding Sigmir, Rai, Ylva and myself. With Lenore hidden within my Hallow, that left Adra and Olivia out, while they stepped forward, Olivia¡¯s single hand raised, her staff held in the crook of her other arm. Adra had her spear out, though casually held at her side, not in any sort of combat-stance.


    ¡°We seek no conflict!¡± Olivia called out, letting the other group decide on their action. Privately, I calmed my mind, readying myself to conjure up a cloud of mist, to cover Adra and Olivia, just in case things went south. I was reasonably certain that Sigmir, Ylva and Rai were ready to intervene, too, each of us using their own methods.


    ¡°I¡¯ve got this.¡± the heavy warrior muttered to the greatsword-wielder, while pointing his spear at us. Now, I had a little more time to study the greatsword-wielder and was still uncertain what I was looking at. Long, light-brown, almost blonde hair, smooth and almost glowing in the dim light of the forest, finely-chiselled facial features, lightly tanned skin and a slender yet muscular physique that reminded me of Adra in addition to pointy ears very similar to my own ears. So, an elf, but that was all I could tell so far. Cautiously, I channelled some of the Darkness-Magic around me to add the property of concealment to a use of my Observe-ability, as knowing who and what we were facing was half the battle.


    Focusing on the elf, with the massive sword, a blue box appeared.


    <table><tbody><tr><td>Wood Elf, Level 82</td></tr></tbody></table>


    Even without any further intervention from us, and despite on of their warriors being on guard against us, the battle against the giant boar ended quickly. The massive wound caused by the greatsword, and the subsequent opening that the axe-wielding heavy-fighter and their archer had exploited, cost the boar a lot of blood. They didn¡¯t let up, they pressed every advantage they had and within a few seconds, the boar was staggering on its last legs, as blood soaked its coarse bristly fur. The greatsword crashed down once more, and I could feel some more Astral Power vibrating out from the impact, and the boar fell, a blue box appearing in front of me, telling me that we had gained a pittance in EXP for the participation in a battle. That prompt brought a soft curse to my lips, as I wasn¡¯t sure if our help had reduced their share of EXP gained, which might cause tension further down the line.


    With their foe dead, the axe-wielder moved to join the other warrior who was covering us with his spear. Neither Adra nor Olivia moved in any aggressive fashion and I noticed that the greatsword was casually held, while the wielder looked almost bemused.


    ¡°Well, hello there.¡± the elf called out, stepping up to their frontline, placing a hand on the male¡¯s shoulder.


    ¡°I doubt they seek to harm us, if they did, they wouldn¡¯t have shielded me in the first place.¡± they said to their companions, before looking at my two companions, raising their voice to make sure everyone could hear them.


    ¡°Greetings, Adventurers. You say you don¡¯t seek conflict, so let us talk instead.¡± with those words, they stepped past their companions, the greatsword still held casually.


    ¡°My name is Phraan, and these are my companions, we are sometimes known as the Oakenrocks. Whom do I have the pleasure to address?¡± they asked, and I noticed that despite Olivia having taken the lead in talking, their eyes seemed to be fixed on Adra. Further back, on the other side of the clearing, the Centaur and the Dwarf became visible, the Centaur clearly female, while the lack of beard on the dwarf hinted at it being another female, but I couldn¡¯t be certain. Well, if there was a beard, I couldn¡¯t be certain either, but that was dwarves for you. Not that it really mattered.


    ¡°The name¡¯s Olivia, I¡¯m afraid our group doesn¡¯t have a fancy name to go by. It¡¯s nice to meet you.¡± Olivia replied, stepping forward in a gesture of goodwill. It made me wonder, did I want to leave my nicely shaded cover and step into the open, or did I wait and see how things played out.

 Chapter 502

    After a few moments of hesitation, I decided that finding out more about our environment would be important and that the people in front of us most likely knew their way around. As long as I didn¡¯t have to actually talk and negotiate with them on friendly terms, I was willing to at least demonstrate that I wasn¡¯t outright hostile to them. I would remain near the trees, where slipping back between their shadows would be easy, but I wouldn¡¯t keep completely hidden.


    Giving a nod to Sigmir and Rai, we cautiously moved forward as I let the concealment around us fade. No need to startle the natives by suddenly appearing out of thin air, or rather within a cloud of magical shadow that confused their senses. No, us coming out of the forest in a way that demonstrated conclusively that we could have simply ambushed and killed them would likely be bad enough, to the point that similar actions, with us on the other side, would result in a barrage of arrows or magic.


    Their reaction to our appearance was mixed, the two large warriors observed us, caution and vigilance in their eyes, while the dwarf was less vigilant and looked more curious. The wood-elf, on the other hand, gave only a cursory glance to anyone, but Adra and myself. The two of us were studied with an intensity reminiscent of the Observe-skill, though I didn¡¯t get the feeling it was used on us. Lastly, the centaur glared at Adra, before staring at me and I felt the familiar discomfort of the Observe-skill, reflexively using Darkness-Magic to conceal information about me.


    ¡°None of that, or I will be impolite.¡± I focused on the Centaur for a moment, remembering the centaurs I had killed, and turned into living bombs, in the past. While I highly doubted she would be able to read my mind to see the images, the idea to subtly use Mind-Magic to project some of the horrors I had wrought on beings like her, as retaliation for trying to spy on me, was appealing. I had no idea if what I did worked, or if the gloomy expression on the centaur¡¯s face came from getting caught or from the look the wood-elf gave her, over their shoulder.


    ¡°Don¡¯t be a horse¡¯s ass, Hafta.¡± the wood-elf called out, the centaur¡¯s cheeks flushing slightly, likely due to the insult. While I kept studying the Centaur, curious what we had done that roused her ire in such an obvious fashion, or if it was some sort of tactical ploy to advance negotiations, Phraan and Adra introduced their respective parties. I barely listened, instead Lenore and I focused on our surroundings, both to try figuring out the other side¡¯s strengths and weaknesses, but also to make sure we didn¡¯t get attacked by some third party.


    ¡°Have them find out information regarding the way to Narristo.¡± I told Rai, before directing him towards the talk in the middle of the clearing, not wanting to step up too close myself, just in case.


    He did as directed and stepped next to Adra, quietly speaking into her ear, before moving slightly back, not backing off but into a covering position, protecting Adra¡¯s back in an unobtrusive fashion. I could see Phraan give a measuring glance to Rai, before focusing back on Adra.


    Sadly, before their conversation could continue, I noticed something quietly moving nearby, in the shrubbery.


    ¡°Cover!¡± My shout got the rest of my team instantly moving, as I jumped back and to the side, away from the sounds I had heard, while, at the same time, the Oakenrocks moved as well, forming a defensive cluster around the dwarf. As my concealment-magic and the shadows of the forest settled around us, a metallic gleam sprung up, around the other group and the two heavy fighters were visibly tense, ready to react to anything, just as the centaur had her bow drawn back, an arrow on the string.


    For a brief second, nobody moved, the cracking sounds getting a little louder but then, things suddenly came to a head. A black, furry form came out of the shrubs and without considering further, I instantly projected a set of Ice-Runes, launching an Icicle Javelin into it. Similarly, a crack of thunder and the whistling sound of a flying arrow came from the other side of the clearing.


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    The wolverine that had likely been attracted by the smell of blood and stumbled into the clearing didn¡¯t just die, it died instantly. My Icicle Javelin, which hit right after a jagged bolt of lightning had created an arc between Phraan¡¯s sword and the creature, punched deeply into it¡¯s flesh, the subsequent shattering of it merely spreading blood and guts around the area. That the wolverine¡¯s head was pierced by an arrow moments later didn¡¯t make a lick of difference, as even my attack had been overkill, the thing had been instantly killed.


    Once again, silence settled over the clearing, which was now filled with the smell of charred flesh, ozone and blood but it was a brief silence, ended by laughter coming from Olivia and echoed by the dwarf on their side.


    ¡°Can we all calm down? That poor thing was only looking for food, not to get exploded.¡± the dwarf, his voice strongly suggesting that it was a male dwarf, called out, before continuing to chuckle.


    ¡°Agreed, though I suggest we move to a different, less bloody, place and share some food, under the rules of hospitality.¡± Olivia replied to the dwarf, the two orcs on their side nodding their agreement. For a brief moment, I had to think where I had heard about the rules of hospitality and remembered the troll inn-keeper in Kolyug talking about them and that pretty much all sapient life accepted and followed them. Unless these people were complete deviants, an agreement to act under those rules would protect us, at least until we parted ways. And even if they tried to act, I was reasonably confident that we would be able to take them.


    ¡°That works for me.¡± I admitted, deciding that changing the location might help to dispel the tension in the air. If I wanted Adra and Olivia to get more information on our surroundings, we would have to talk to these people. Or go to scout ourselves, but talking was simply faster.


    Looking over to the dead boar, I addressed the other group. ¡°Would you be willing to share some of that boar, maybe we can have some stew or grill it or something. After travelling through  the White Mountains, our supplies are a little stretched.¡± I added, trying to use honesty to foster trust. Letting them know that our supplies were limited wasn¡¯t a terrible problem, as the forest provided for good forage, especially for people as powerful as us.


    ¡°Certainly, we can share some food. You said you crossed the White Mountains? Isn¡¯t that route blocked?¡± Phraan asked, their focus now on me.


    ¡°It was not an easy crossing, but we somehow managed.¡± I nodded, before trying to fade into the background, as Adra took over the conversation again. In the meantime, the female orc was quickly and efficiently butchering the boar, with Sigmir stepping up to provide a bit of support.


    Sharing a meal with the other group was not the most relaxed experience, despite an intellectual assurance that they wouldn¡¯t harm us, there was a knot of paranoia sitting in my stomach, preventing me from relaxing. Sigmir must have noticed my feelings, I was likely radiating them over our connection, and moved in such a way that I was constantly covered and protected, which also meant I didn¡¯t have to talk to anyone, something I was quite okay with. At the same time, I wanted to get better at talking to strangers within Mundus, otherwise I would likely run into troubles on my Road to Purgatory.


    And so, I decided to try talking to the dwarf, after all, the dwarves of Ashenforge-Hold had been friendly and most certainly useful beings, to the point that I was still gladly wearing their attire. Maybe I would be able to learn something new, as the dwarf here was a spellcaster, though I wasn¡¯t sure of what kind.


    ¡°Greetings, I am called Morgana, a Traveller. I¡¯m afraid I missed your name in the earlier hubbub.¡± I introduced myself, silently regretting that I hadn¡¯t paid attention before.


    ¡°Greetings, Morgana. You can call me Jendar of the Stonecrag-Clan.¡± he nodded, before one of his eyebrows went up and he cocked his head to the side. ¡°Now, why do you look like I¡¯m about to pounce on you, not that that would work with the giantblood that keeps a very close eye on everyone looking your way?¡± he asked and I felt a flush creep up my cheeks. Why did I think that anything good would come from talking to anyone not in my group?

 Chapter 503

    Having lunch with a group of relatively powerful adventurers was a curious affair. For all the time I had spent on Mundus, there had been few situations in which I had been able to observe Adventurers in their natural habitat, other than the few I had been travelling with. While I had been watching videos on the forum, I had never bothered to look for any that showed ordinary situations, focusing on the interesting, awesome feats that others had never seen before.


    And so, when Jendar excused himself from our conversation, before I ever had the chance to ask him about magic, I was a little disappointed. Though not for long, as I could feel him focus Astral Power, slowly channelling it in the ground nearby, until a set of what I could only describe as campaign furniture started to form from the earth, just that the furniture was made from dull, grey metal.


    ¡°How long will those last?¡± I asked, once a table with a few relatively simple looking chairs was complete. It wasn¡¯t quite the way I wanted to approach a magic-related discussion, but if he gave me such a wonderful show, I wasn¡¯t about to remain silent.


    ¡°Not too long, didn¡¯t put a lot into it. The magic will have faded in a few hours, and then they will simply crumble back into dirt.¡± he replied, while I used Lenore¡¯s sight to take a closer look, fascinated how his Astral Power was infusing dirt pulled directly from the ground, turning it into something that came quite close to being metal.


    ¡°Why not conjure metal directly?¡± I asked, stepping to one chair and claiming it by creating a cushion of Diamond Dust, too cold and impractical for anyone but me.


    ¡°Takes too much power. You can freeze air, but have you ever heard of metalising air? Doesn¡¯t work.¡± he replied, his answer opening up a lot of questions I hadn¡¯t considered before. Before my mind could go down the rabit-hole of questioning my previous assumptions about magic and how the whole thing worked, I filed it away to deal with later, instead focusing on the present and the person I could actually question.


    ¡°Curious, I¡¯ve never seen anyone work like this. The dwarves I¡¯ve met before used Runes to enchant their equipment, channelling power through it to create effects, instead of directly channelling Astral Power.¡± I told him, trying to slowly get to the topic I was interested in.


    ¡°You can do that, sure. In fact, I¡¯ve put some formations on Phraan¡¯s sword, and the shields used by Gren and Gwan.¡± he explained, nodding towards the two orcs. For a moment, I was just flabbergasted, surely those couldn¡¯t be their names. After looking at me for that long moment, Jendar started snickering for a moment.


    ¡°No, those aren¡¯t their birth-names, they decided to take them during their hand-fasting ceremony. Don¡¯t ask me why, I don¡¯t understand either.¡± he told me, still snickering. It seemed to amuse him greatly, and I somewhat had to agree. But on the other hand, there was a tradition to take on the spouse¡¯s name during a wedding, maybe they had done things like this in an effort to make things equal, or something like that? For a moment, I looked at Sigmir, imagining taking on matching pair-names that showed everyone who ever met us that we were together. On one hand, it gave me warm and fuzzy feelings, on the other hand it felt a little performative. I¡¯d rather simply show Sigmir every day just what she meant to me, no need for silly names.


    ¡°Love, you wanted to talk to him.¡± Sigmir gently poked me, causing a blush to creep up my cheeks when I realised I had spent a little too long gazing at her and imagining such a future.


    ¡°Don¡¯t worry, the two of you are cute.¡± Jendar grinned, clearly amused at our antics.


    ¡°If only Phraan and Hafta could be that cute.¡± he added, speaking in a voice that made me think he hadn¡¯t quite meant to say that out loud.


    ¡°Oh? Why, what do they do?¡± I prodded, curious at the story there. There had to be a reason why Hafta, the centaur, had glared at Adra and me the whole time.


    ¡°It¡¯s not so much what they do, but what they don¡¯t do, which is talk things out.¡± he paused, shaking his head, ¡°Bah, just thinking about it gives me a headache.¡±


    ¡°Then let¡¯s talk about something else, how about that?¡± I asked, planning to use his annoyance to bring the topic back to magic.


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    ¡°You said you use runes on their gear, I¡¯m assuming Metal, but would you be willing to elaborate? The dwarves who taught me some of their art used Metal, Earth and Gems but I managed to muddle my way to connecting patterns that work with my Ice-Magic.¡± I explained, getting a raised eyebrow in response.


    ¡°That sounds interesting. If you like, we can compare notes, though I¡¯d ask you not to share my version of things, just as I wouldn¡¯t ask you to share the originals you have used to deduce your own connecting patterns.¡± he nodded, sounding quite interested and motivated.


    ¡°I can agree to that.¡± I nodded in response, pulling my chair next to his, after giving Sigmir¡¯s hand a short squeeze.


    Over the next thirty minutes, until we were interrupted by lunch, Jendar and I used small, inconsequential runic formations, carefully drawn out with connecting patterns to make them as efficient as possible, to demonstrate the way Astral Power was flowing through the formations. Thankfully, Lenore allowed me to see Astral Power in action, otherwise trying to trace those inefficiencies would be difficult. I only realised just how much of a cheat her vision was, when Jendar asked me if I would be able to form my patterns within Ice, so that he could see the wear and tear with the naked eye.


    During our talk, we swapped stories and I learned that Jendar was from further north, where the red-bearded dwarven-king ruled under the mountains. When I obviously had no idea what he was talking about, he shook his head, promising me that he¡¯d tell me the story in the evening, possibly with some good ale. I wasn¡¯t sure if he was joking or not, and when I tried to find out, he only smiled and shook his head, changing the topic back to magic.


    That was something I couldn¡¯t ignore, especially when he shared some details about his base-class, Geomancer. It sounded quite interesting, specialised in Earth- and Metal-Magic, with an emphasis of support- and even healing-magic. The closest comparison I could mentally come up with was that it was similar to a Druid, only instead of the living earth, the countless living beings that made up Life on Mundus, it focused on channelling the power of Mundus, the solid, rocky planet, itself.


    When he learned that I was a Sorceress, he gave me an appraising look, trying to take my measure. Finally, after scrutinising me for a little longer than comfortable, he nodded, before addressing me.


    ¡°There are few of those around these days. Following an established part is always easier than trying to find your own. But it looks like you are well on your way to forge your own path, that¡¯s good, the Gods called the Travellers to this world to let them find your own paths.¡± he said, managing to sound both sagely and insecure at the same time, making me think that it was something he had heard somewhere else, from someone he respected and trusted, but that he wasn¡¯t quite certain of the meaning himself.


    ¡°Who is to know the will of the Gods?¡± I asked, parroting the standard platitudes used by many natives when dealing with Travellers and the Gods themselves. There was a curious boundary regarding things I felt comfortable telling the Natives. I knew that Lenore had seen and experienced a lot of my own memories, and even dreams, but she had never questioned the images. Similarly, I had told Sigmir some of the things I had experienced but it was always in the context of another world, like Pantheon Entertainment had set things up for the context.


    ¡°That is true, after all, we are all but mortal.¡± he nodded along, before shaking his head, as if to get rid of the topic, ¡°Anyway, let¡¯s talk about simpler things.¡± he decided, his hands weaving yet another magical formation, with tiny patterns that smoothed out the flow of Astral Power.


    ¡°Jendar, can you prepare some dishes?¡± Phraan called from the fire, where he was cooking together with Hafta and Adra. Jendar let his magic fade, the sharp, metallic smell lingering in the air for just a moment.


    ¡°Take a close look, you might learn something new.¡± Jendar told me, kneeling down and placing one hand on the ground, before starting to sketch runes into the dirt. His hands were incredibly dexterous, managing to form an incredibly complicated formation without ever resorting to shaping the ground with magic. It was at a level that I wasn¡¯t quite certain I would be able to copy, but I wanted to try at some point.


    ¡°You try channelling your power into the formation.¡± he offered me, causing my eyes to widen. It was an interesting idea, though not one I had considered before.


    Placing my hands next to the formation, I spread my perception, getting a feel of things, before letting Astral Power slowly flow into it, curious what would happen. It was vastly different from my own magical formations, where I could influence the Power within, to the point that I was able to cast them without any runes, if I wasn¡¯t too particular about casting-speed, accuracy and efficiency. But this formation, I could only channel power into it, unable to change anything.


    As I was channelling power, a metallic plate emerged from the dirt in the middle of the formation, curiously with some silver trim and frost-like patterns. Closing my eyes, I focused on my nose, my tongue flicking out to taste the air, gauging the amount of Astral Power within the air, trying to get an idea of the efficiency.


    ¡°Impressive.¡± I had to admit, as I was busy re-organising what I had considered about magic and casting spells without the required skills before.


    Next to me, a grinning Jendar took the plate, giving me a nod as I retreated into my own mind.

 Chapter 504

    ¡°So, we are in agreement to work together until we reach Narristo?¡± Phraan asked, their eyes flickering between Adra and myself. Adra and Olivia had negotiated with them while they had been cooking and continued to do so during lunch, though I had only paid very cursory attention, most of my attention focused inward, considering the things Jendar had shared with me.


    ¡°Yes, we agree to that. We shall do no harm to you, or yours, during our travels and consider you allies and companions.¡± I replied, channelling a bit of the persona I imagined sitting on the Throne of Ice I had crafted in the past, a queen fitting the Frozen Spire. That the pluralis majestatis worked just as well to indicate that it was the decision of my group was just fine.


    Travelling with these people was a test of sorts, it was one thing to keep the magic that concealed active while with my party, just to keep Olivia from feeling uncomfortable, but I wanted to see if I would be able to keep others from noticing in the first place. If I failed out in the wilderness, with nobody but a few adventurers around, the consequences would be a lot more manageable than if it happened in the middle of a town. Hell, it would give me an idea of the consequences in the first place, as so far, Olivia¡¯s reaction had been the one to react the most, but why that was, I could only guess.


    In addition to having them as test-subjects, they could act as guides and having an additional spell-caster to discuss magic with was quite welcome,


    ¡°Great.¡± Phraan nodded, a smile on their lips. I was still trying to figure out their sex, it was an idle curiosity, as their figure didn¡¯t give a clear indication, and their sharp facial features could belong to either a male or a female, the fact that they were a wood-elf not really helping as the images I had seen of elves had been uniformly ambiguous. Unless I was willing to outright ask, or peep, I doubted I would ever find out.


    ¡°You said you crossed the White Mountains, right? How many Manticores did you encounter?¡± they asked, sounding genuinely interested.


    ¡°Let me think for a moment.¡± I asked, thinking back to the various encounters, especially the confusing, last battle.


    ¡°Twenty? Twenty-five? Thirty at the most, a mix of Young Manticores and their adult version.¡± I told them, getting a nod in return, but I was quite certain that the look on their face was one of surprise. That surprise was clearly visible on Hafta¡¯s face helped my perception.


    ¡°Impressive.¡± the centaur muttered, reigning in her earlier expression of dislike, into something more neutral. Most likely, she was now fully aware that we were more powerful, unless she decided to risk offending me by doubting my words.


    ¡°And troublesome. Hopefully, they won¡¯t try hunting you down further, there have been tales of Ancient Manticores following those who killed their brood for years, hunting them with incredible tenacity, to the point that they were willingly attacking major settlements, just to get to a single person inside.¡± Phraan added, causing a gasp of shock from Hafta.


    ¡°What?! We might be in danger?¡± she exclaimed, looking as if she was about to bolt into the trees, running for her life.


    ¡°Of course we are in danger, we are out in the wilderness.¡± Gren threw in lackadaisical, very much unconcerned with the prospect of a pride of Manticores swooping down from the sky.


    ¡°We fought a group of them just a few days ago. Since then, we haven¡¯t seen any more, but who is to say if that stays that way. In any case, there are few better places to meet them than a forest, as the trees limit their maneuverability to a large degree, forcing them to approach as a regular lion would, only one with added weak-points, their wings are relatively fragile.¡± Adra explained, getting nods from both Phraan and myself.


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    ¡°Or are you scared, ready to run away, pony?¡± Adra asked, sounding a little nasty about it.


    No need to be hostile, friend.¡± Olivia quietly admonished her, though I was certain everyone had heard her.


    ¡°Before we met you, we had some uncomfortable encounters with other Centaurs. But it wouldn¡¯t do to put the troubles we had with those on her shoulders. She is, after all, just one of many, just like I would never accept blame for anything another Elf did, not even if that elf was of the same tribe as myself.¡± I reminded all of them, getting a nod from Adra, while Hafta and Phraan were frowning.


    ¡°Trouble with Centaurs you say?¡± Phraan asked, again with a single eyebrow raised.


    ¡°East of the Turan-Mountains, one of their groups is trying to expand their territory but please, don¡¯t ask me which group, I barely cared at the time and I certainly don¡¯t care any longer, not with two large mountain-ranges between them and us.¡± I explained, hearing Sigmir chuckle at my dismissal of a potentially massive military.


    ¡°Well, you are correct, those matters are far away and unlikely to impact us directly. Though, it gives me an idea where you are hailing from, I was curious about that. You come from further east then, not from the northern forests?¡± Phraan asked, their hands going to their ears for a moment.


    ¡°I am a Traveller, so there is no place I hail from, no tribe that claims me or any silliness like that. I am Morgana, nothing more but certainly nothing less.¡± I explained, after considering addressing myself in plural once again. But no, that would be a little too arrogant, even for the role I wanted to play in the future. If I even kept using that role, while sitting on a Throne of Ice tickled me in ways I couldn¡¯t quite explain, a Throne normally required a Kingdom, or maybe Queendom in my case, which meant people, which was something I had very little interest in dealing with. Not unless Lenore and I could create my subjects, either by summoning spirits of Ice or Darkness, or by raising undead or something along those lines. Enslaving a population with Mind Magic would also work, but given the traits the Dark Moon had added to my Mind Magic, that seemed a little unlikely. Anyway, no subjects with actual agency and the problems that came with that, not for this Queen.


    ¡°How curious, a being not born from anyone, but the Divine. Does that make you a Deity as well?¡± Phraan asked, their lips now curled into an amused grin.


    ¡°What if it does, what if it doesn¡¯t? As I said, I am who I am and I certainly don¡¯t have worshippers or such silliness.¡± I replied, a shudder going down my spine. That would be as bad as ruling over people, only that a deity could hardly use that nice phrase, ¡°Off with their heads.¡±. Though, they might smite someone, or put curses on them, so in that regard, I might even qualify if I managed to grow in power. The idea brought a smile to my face, as it was such a fun idea for the future, once the game was fully released and I had the time to pursue it. Especially as deities could sit on a Throne, without having to deal with politics, at least if they had the right portfolio, maybe I could incorporate Solitude into it, or maybe a palace on the Moon, or in a land of Ice, those would feel thematically right and sounded like a lot of fun.


    ¡°Before we drift too far into that direction, why don¡¯t we talk about the route to Narristo?¡± Olivia asked, a pained look on her face. It only served to widen my grin even further, there was a small part of me that delighted in pushing and prodding her, trying to figure out the limits of both the power of the Gods and her patience. It was all in the name of science of course, as knowing if pushing a servant of the Gods in a particular manner, maybe one related to their chosen deity, could deprive them of their power. For example, making a Cleric of Baldr angry enough that they couldn¡¯t commune with their peaceful deity seemed rather possible, though I wasn¡¯t sure if that could be made to work the other way around, to make a cleric of Thor too calm to contact the raging Storm. More research was needed, as always.


    ¡°Certainly.¡± Phraan agreed, giving Olivia a nod and me a smile. ¡°The route should be quite simple and reasonably safe, we only headed out this far to make sure no dangerous monsters were encroaching on the surrounding area. Patrol, you know?¡± they added, before starting to describe the terrain we would have to travel through to reach the Ancient Road, which would ultimately take us to Narristo. At least if we continued heading that way, as it would be the opposite way we ultimately wanted to go.


    Decisions to be made, but later.

 Chapter 505

    Coming home from another session with Mrs. Wu, I booted up the screen on my wall, hopping into the forums to gather a little more information. Or maybe just look at the gossip people had been spreading, either about me or about anything that was actually interesting to know.


    As I had expected when seeing the latest video, things had turned into a mess, though the scope of it surprised even me. Once the video was out there, showing me turning into the black-winged harpy-like monster, anyone who wasn¡¯t completely retarded was able to make the connection between the previous incident, where I had given the Arms of Helios a little push, just in time to let them tumble into the abyss, and my revealed form. And everyone who made the connection had something to say about it, their reactions ranging from anger, to disappointment, some even projecting a feeling of betrayal on me.


    The ensuing dumpster-fire, as everyone and their grandmother, argued about my actions flared up to a point that I was reminded of my previous exit from Team Amaranthine, though I wasn¡¯t quite certain why emotions flared as high as they did this time. Part of it was that I had demonstrated the abilities to fly and transform, though I had shown that I could get aerial footage before. The only difference was, now I had shown that I could effectively cast spells and thus fight while flying, which might just be the kicker. Nobody wanted to be earth-bound while a flying enemy was dropping hell down on you.


    Sure, there were Valkyries, who had wings from the start, but they needed a blessing from one of their deities to reduce the cost of flying to a manageable level. In addition, the distinct lack of aerial content, suggested that there were further restrictions, especially when it came to fighting within the air. Otherwise, someone would have made a video of challenging a dragon to an aerial dogfight, if only to be the first person to do it. If they could find a dragon, that is.


    But none of the rage, the hate really mattered for now, though that likely would change once we moved into more habitated areas and began to run into other Travellers regularly. If that ever happened, after all, there were only so many people who had joined the Beta and they were pretty spread out. There were a few exceptions, like the Arms of Helios around Ladrin and a couple other groups that had formed outside Road to Purgatory and migrated into Mundus with sometimes limited adaptation to the world.


    The Arms of Helios were an example that adopted a suitable name, but did nothing more, while the Blades of the Realm, Tobiuno¡¯s group, had done a lot more, seamlessly integrating themselves into the framework of the Human Empire. There were times when I wondered about their success and what it would mean going forward, when the amount of Players were large enough to alter the balance of power on a larger scale, changing  the course of political events. So far, the World of Mundus seemed to be alive and thriving, but would that last when we Travellers started to intervene or would it take only one asshole, drunk on their own power, to destroy things for everyone?


    Past performance indicated that Pantheon Entertainment would intervene, at least if it could be done in a contained, fitting manner, like the removal of my Blood Magic experimentation that had turned out to work a lot better, or worse, than expected, permanently cursing a Centaur. Back then, a local cleric had received a divine revelation or something along those lines, allowing them to remove my experiment without further incident, something I was reasonably sure wouldn¡¯t normally work. So, would the divine intervene if a Traveller decided to cause large-scale destruction? If so, would such intervention also trigger if the destruction was caused by influence, rather than outright, for example if a Traveller managed to instal themselves as a King or Queen, and wage a conventional war? Or if they managed to become a power behind the Throne? How close did a Traveller need to be to a major event to trigger safeguards?


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    There wasn¡¯t even a need for actual malice on anyone¡¯s part, simply playing the game as people thought it was meant to be played would change the world of Mundus. Even I was guilty of that, after all, right after I started playing, I had gleefully murdered a den of Snowbolds, creatures I deemed little more important than rats or other vermin, excited at the EXP I gained and the smug feeling of success when what I now considered my first Ritual-Spell worked. And even now, after months of playing, in the warm comfort of my living room, I couldn¡¯t actually say I would do anything differently, that I wouldn¡¯t use abilities others would likely condemn and consider despicable, if it furthered my own interest and research.


    Hell, even something as simple as a disagreement on methods or even some stupid, possibly imagined, slight that someone took way too serious could cause serious repercussions. In many ways, Road to Purgatory wouldn¡¯t work long-term as it was at the same time too serious and real, while also having to work as an escape and diversion for the players. Otherwise, if Road to Purgatory wasn¡¯t enjoyable and fun, why bother playing and paying for it? And there was, at least in my thinking, the problem, in a world that had to be enjoyable and fun, you couldn¡¯t have too many consequences for your actions, or things would rapidly cease to be fun. But without consequences for your actions, your actions would lack significance, making things feel meaningless.


    Or maybe, Pantheon Entertainment would take an actual hands-off approach, letting Mundus develop as it would, even at the risk of having a few players turn things into a hell-scape, forcing the rest to either quit or try repairing things. Neither of which would be financially advantageous for the company.


    Whatever the case, I had a feeling that players, Travellers, would have to be the ones to set up their own rules, to allow the world of Mundus to remain in a state that everyone could enjoy.


    Thinking of that video, I pulled up the various fights we had with Manticores, looking at the footage, trying to make a video, something to showcase the entire experience of crossing the White Mountains. Sadly, the more I looked at the footage, the more I realised how difficult that would be. The initial fights had been quite boring, with us crippling the Manticore¡¯s ability to fly, grounding and wounding them before they ever got close enough to retaliate. Once on the ground, it was almost trivial to kill them, at least for a group working together, with Sigmir blocking at the front, while the rest of us further destroyed their mobility.


    One such encounter could be made into a short, relatively interesting video, but multiple would just be boring to watch. Hell, in one of those encounters, we hadn¡¯t even bothered to stick around, merely crippling the wing of a flying Manticore before letting gravity do the dirty work. That was amusing, for all the ten seconds it had lasted, but given that it had been night, there was nothing to watch, either.


    Which left that last, massive battle. Sadly, the video made by Pantheon was far better than anything I could make, simply due to the limits of the medium. Watching me act in third-person gave better perspective than watching from my own viewpoint, especially as a lot of the spells had been cast indiscriminately, simply targeting the area around us, or using the Blood of the Manticores as anchor. Which was something I would have to try replicating, simply because it opened interesting options but as with most of the spells used in Avatar-form, I doubted I would be able to easily do so.


    Unless I misunderstood how that form worked, as my working theory was that the skills only one of us had were retained in their entirety, just with some new applications as they filtered through our combined mind, while the skills we shared gained a boost, though I wasn¡¯t certain just how large that boost was. I doubted it straight-up added our skill-levels, as skill-gain seemed to be almost exponential in difficulty, meaning that a single skill at hundred was far, far more potent than two at fifty, but just how that math worked out, I hadn¡¯t got the slightest idea. As so often, the complexity inherent in the system made it impossible to investigate the underlying mechanics.


    Shaking my head, I pulled up yet another thread, this one focusing on a fight near the Snowline, in the Wild Woods, the wilderness covering Northern Aletoma. One of the Travellers involved used Ice-Magic, though in a slightly different way than I did, somehow conjuring walls of Ice far outside their immediate vicinity, creating them some thirty meters away. That seemed like an interesting skill, something I would want to learn myself.

 Chapter 506

    Travelling through the forests towards Narristo was surprisingly comfortable in its own way. The Manticores seemed to have given up on us, at least there hadn¡¯t been any sign of them in the last two days and Jendar proved to be an interesting conversationalist, his own knowledge and experience with magic quite the contrast to mine, allowing both of us to gain valuable insights during our talks. That was furthered by the shared experimentation and the more we worked together, the more I seemed to gain, something that was reflected in gaining two points in Ice-Magic and one in Ice Rune Mastery, bringing the two skills to 85 and 76 respectively. The progress made me, once again, wonder what would happen once I mastered the Ice-Magic skill, though I had a feeling the last fourteen points wouldn¡¯t be easy to get.


    Curiously, most of the progress didn¡¯t come from strictly studying and trying to understand Ice-Magic itself, but from hearing about the Metal-Magic used by Jendar, especially when I tried to contrast his understanding of Metal with my understanding of Ice. In some ways, the way he described Metal made it sound similar to the way I would describe Ice, with many properties the same. The biggest difference was that my pursuit was one of permanence, unchanged and eternal, while his paradigm accepted that nothing was truly permanent, that all things had to bend with time or they would break.


    Sadly, not all things could be enlightening conversations about the intricacies of magic. While I did welcome the few, suicidally brave, critters that thought a group of ten battle-ready adventurers was anything but lethal, those interruptions were few and far between, not to mention brief. More often than not, I would have had to instantly project a set of runes to meaningfully participate in combat, before Adra or Hafta pinned whatever disturbed us to a tree.


    And that apparent rivalry was the source of great annoyance for me, as it wasn¡¯t limited to pinning annoying critters to trees with their arrows but bled over into basic things, like looking for a camp-site, cooking, even the best path to follow, if Adra made a suggestion, Hafta had to reject it. It wasn¡¯t just one-sided, just like Hafta seemed to take glee in rejecting everything Adra proposed, Adra was quite happy to point out each and every flaw, real or imagined, with everything Hafta suggested, creating an atmosphere tense enough to cut.


    The tension wasn¡¯t eased by the fact that Phraan was quite interested in Adra, sticking close to her and trying to learn as much as possible about both her as a person and her people in general. That, in turn, meant that Rai was getting his hackles up, as the person he normally interacted with the most was now monopolised by an outsider.


    To those of us not involved in their drama, though mainly to Olivia and Jendar, their antics were a constant source of amusement, while Sigmir, Gwan and Gren simply looked on with stoic calm, impersonating mountains in their unmoved nature. That left Lenore and me stewing alone in our annoyance, simply wanting the nonsense to stop. But there was nothing, outside of simply murdering the lot of them, that we could do about it.


    Which neither of us was planning, though with each passing day, the idea became more attractive.


    ¡°We¡¯ll reach the ancient road today.¡± Jendar told me, after Hafta and Adra had argued about yet another, minor detail.


    ¡°Great.¡± I replied, pausing for a moment as I tried to compare things on my inner map, ¡°How far from Narristo will we be, when we reach it?¡± I asked, the distances involved a little nebulous in my mind.


    ¡°A day, maybe a day and a half of travel. Unless something unexpected happens, we should be in Narristo tomorrow evening at the latest.¡± he assured me, grinning when my eyes flickered to the bickering fools for a moment.


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    ¡°And here I thought we had something wonderful, dear lady, yet you seem all too eager to be rid of us all.¡± he kidded, causing me to snort in both amusement and annoyance.


    ¡°Want to discuss that wonderful something with Sigmir? I¡¯m certain she would have some impactful concerns and arguments that you¡¯d have to adress.¡± I replied, both joking and serious at the same time. As long as his words were a joke, Sigmir wouldn¡¯t care but if there was even a speck of romantic sincerity in his words, which I doubted, Sigmir would very much object. So would I, but SIgmir¡¯s objections were more likely to be physical, while I would prefer a magical, possibly even non-lethal, approach.


    ¡°Ah, I think I¡¯d rather pass.¡± he grinned, shaking his head while comically looking towards Sigmir, who simply rolled her eyes in response.


    ¡°Thought so.¡± I nodded in response, giving Sigmir a friendly wave. ¡°Mind telling me what is going on with those fools?¡± I gestured towards the area where Adra was studying some tracks on the ground.


    ¡°I can give you my best guess, though you¡¯ll have to take it with a grain of salt.¡± he prefaced, continuing when I prompted him with a nod.


    ¡°Well, I don¡¯t know about your kind of pointy-ear, but Phraan and their kind are quite connected to the forests they call their home, some sort of bond that bestows upon them part of the forest¡¯s longevity. Don¡¯t ask me about the details, I have no idea how exactly it works and frankly, I barely care, just some academic curiosity.¡±


    ¡°Anyway, that connection to the forest somewhat translates into an interest in dryads, though, again, I have no idea about details, not like they¡¯d share their deepest motivations with me. So your buddy is interesting for them, especially as she is unbound and will settle at some point. Phraan would like to see her settle in Arbotoma, at least that¡¯s my understanding of the situation.¡± he explained, leaving me almost as confused as I had been before.


    ¡°Now, if that was all, there¡¯d be no problem but Hafta is quite keen on Phraan, mostly because Phraan saved her life, before we joined up and became a team. Sadly, she never had the confidence to actually make a move, so she¡¯s been trying to get Phraan to make a move on her, yet Phraan is either clueless or not interested, stringing her along for their benefit.¡± Jendar finished, looking over to them once again.


    ¡°And you don¡¯t want to rock the boat, cause the overall group-dynamic works?¡± I asked in response, already guessing at the answer.


    ¡°It¡¯s not perfect but Phraan and Hafta both bring something to the team that makes them worth the trouble. Hafta is an excellent scout, with some druidic ability that lets her commune with the forests, in addition to being a deadly shot with her bow. And you¡¯ve seen what Phraan can do with that massive sword, especially when channelling the power of the storm. My own abilities are geared towards defense and defensive support, while Gwan and Gren are very much the immovable mountains their ancestry suggests.¡± he explained, a little defensive that apparently neither he, nor one of his teammates had taken the time to talk to Hafta. Or maybe talk to Phraan.


    ¡°That sounds like a recipe for disaster, only waiting to blow up in your face.¡± I told him, shaking my head in disbelief. While our group wasn¡¯t a perfectly harmonious family, I still held some distrust towards Olivia, compared to their dynamic, we were much better. Part of me considered trying to help, to clear the air between Hafta and Phraan but realistically, the only thing I¡¯d achieve would cause that explosion I could foresee. If anything, the best thing my group could achieve was to keep quiet, not stir the pot needlessly and split ways as soon as possible.


    ¡°Maybe you are right. Depending how the next few days go, I might try talking to Hafta once we are closer to Narristo. Would you consider talking to Phraan, maybe your shared pointy-earedness will help the two of you connect?¡± Jendar asked, looking at me with hopeful eyes. My first impulse was to not only say no, but hell, no. However, as much as I wanted to reject Jendar, our talks had been interesting and pleasant, while getting some extra information regarding Arbotoma from Phraan might be incredibly valuable in the long run, as our ultimate destination was on Arbotoma and I knew little about the place, but that it was the home of the elves and mostly covered in forests.


    ¡°Let me observe some more, before I make a decision.¡± I replied, letting out a soft sigh, asking Lenore to keep a closer eye on their dynamic in general and Phraan specifically.


    Why did my clenching gut make me think it was a bad idea?

 Holiday-Interlude: Ruins of a Broken World

    Just as announced, there was a new function within my capsule. Ruins of a Broken World(Alpha) and for a period of twelve hours in the real world, or forty-eight hours of accelerated time, I, along with all the other beta-testers, would be allowed to get a sneak peak at the next product currently in development by Pantheon Entertainment. They obviously didn¡¯t just want to use the capsule-technology for Road to Purgatory, instead it looked like they planned to have Road to Purgatory capture the fantasy-market, while Ruins of a Broken World was supposed to be a survival-horror game. Not normally my type of game, but it was free and they had announced that providing good testing-data would be rewarded during the Road to Purgatory-launch. That alone made me want to do my best, even if I had a feeling the reward would be something minor, maybe a cosmetic title or something along those lines. But it might be another drop, added to the ocean I needed to accumulate to hopefully keep Sigmir by my side.


    After logging in, the character-creation was completely bare-bones, a blue box informing me that it was not yet done and our characters would be based upon our real selves with some randomisation to provide anonymity. The only thing we could actually affect was our name. In my case, I decided not to go with Morgana, instead using the name Jade. Morgana had some baggage attached, which I didn¡¯t need to deal with. I might be recognised by my features, depending how much that randomisation was, but the name was a much stronger indication.


    The next step on my way into the Ruins of a Broken World was to pick my starting-location, similar to the way it had been in Road to Purgatory, only that there was no guide here, nor was there a map. Instead, I was allowed to pick from a variety of basic locations, from a supermarket, to a mall, a high-rise apartment, a dormitory and a suburban house with a few more strewn in. Normal places that one might work at, sleep at or visit during a normal day.


    Without information, I couldn¡¯t make an informed choice so I decided to go with what might net me the most information by virtue of height while also appealing to me on a personal level and chose the high-rise apartment. Just being able to take a look at whatever city we would be in from above should give me valuable information.


    There was a short time of waiting, before the server opened and I was shifted into the Broken World, where a blue box told me the objective, before vanishing: Survive. After a moment of disorientation, I blinked my eyes a few times, trying to adapt to my surroundings. Instead of sitting on my Throne, I was lying on a comfortable bed in a dark room. Standing, I looked around, trying to get my bearings. It was a simple arrangement, a bed, night-stand and closet, nothing standing out, other than the lack of illumination. No stand-by lights from any electronic devices, just a faint bluish light filtering in from the window.


    Walking to the window, I looked out and had to give it to Pantheon, if they wanted to make something scary, they damned well could. For a moment, I wasn¡¯t sure if the sky-box was simply not finished or if it was part of the ambience, but the faint, blue-grey fire that filled the sky and formed a horizon in the distance caused a shiver to run down my spine. There was no way to guess what time it was in this broken world or if there would be a sunrise at some point. For now, there was only the dim, blue light of the flames above, illuminating the city below.


    From my position roughly in the middle of an apartment-building, I could see quite a bit, the streets empty of the hustle and bustle one would expect. There were no cars or buses, no cyclists getting their morning exercise, but it wasn¡¯t just human activity that was absent, I was also unable to make out any animals, even the wind seemed to be silent. The only movement came from weird forms that slowly shambled around the silent city.


    Shaking my head, I walked over to the closet, only finding some clothes, choosing a practical set of outdoor clothes from them. While it wasn¡¯t exactly sturdy, it certainly offered more protection than the sleepwear I had on when ¡®waking up¡¯.


    Trying to make as little noise as possible, I walked around the apartment, finding nothing out of place in an average household, though nothing electric seemed to work. The most interesting find, from a practical survival perspective, was the knife-set in the kitchen, where I liberated a hair of filet knives and a meat-cleaver. They weren¡¯t anything to write home about, but if I had to choose between having them or not having them, I would take them every time, especially in a survival-horror. In addition, there were some cleaning-supplies in the bathroom but sadly, I had no idea if there was any way to make something interesting from them. I did grab the small box with simple medical supplies though.


    Those, alongside a bit of simple food from the kitchen, went into a backpack I had to empty first, finding a bunch of text and note-books, of which I kept one, just in case.


    My exploration of the appartement managed to do one thing, the details seriously creeped me out. On the textbooks I had found was my name, though with an added last-name of Smith, there were framed pictures of my slightly altered face standing around, even some notes on the fridge in handwriting that looked remarkably similar to my own.


    It was a little eerie, in Road to Purgatory, there was the constant existence of the interface, bare-bones as it was, to remind you that you were playing a game. Ruins of the Broken World lacked such a visual clue, which, along with the avatar that was only slightly different from my real body, made it easy to forget you were playing. Which might very well be the appeal, to immerse yourself into a horror-movie, I could bring up a menu, but that only gave me the option to log-out or contact a game-master, neither of which I needed at the moment.


    Pushing away the chills going down my spine, I put on a pair of sneakers, the most sensible shoes in a small collection, and a windbreaker before listening at the apartment-door, trying to figure out if venturing out was safe. I didn¡¯t consider staying in the apartment for too long, if I knew anything about survival-games, then it was that spawn-zones were only temporarily safe, if that. In addition, supplies and equipment would likely be limited, though being known to have any was not necessarily an advantage.


    I could hear some noise in the distance, nothing loud enough to identify, which gave me the courage to push open the door and poke my head out into the hallway. Dark and empty, some stains on the walls, with a window at the end letting in the dim, outside light. Not even a helpful, friendly green sign pointing me to the exit, not that I¡¯d necessarily follow such a sign.


    Trying to minimize even the rustling of my clothes, I carefully made my way towards what I hoped would be the stairwell, when I heard the mechanical sound of a door being unlocked, causing me to freeze, pressing my backpack against the wall and having my cleaver at the ready. A couple doors down from my apartment, another door opened and another person came out, dressed in a similar, practical fashion as I was but instead of a meat-cleaver, they had a metallic baseball-bat.


    Knowing that contact was inevitable, unless that person was a total dunce, I decided to show some initiative and let out a soft hiss, alerting the person, whom I now could identify as a slender guy with shoulder-length hair, to my presence.


    It was a little gratifying to see him flinch in surprise, before spinning around, his eyes darting around before settling on me. Moving slowly, we approached each other, wary of any sudden movements, our chosen weapons ready but not raised, stopping about three meters away from each other.


    ¡°Name¡¯s Jade, want to work together?¡± I asked, trying to pitch my voice as low as possible. The whole ambiance made me want to avoid any loud noises.


    ¡°Sure, I¡¯m Trevor. Any ideas where to go?¡± he asked, with a nod. Stepping a little closer, I shook my head, as I wasn¡¯t sure about tactics either. Nor was I certain that there were enemies, though the shamblers I had seen from the window certainly hinted at that.


    ¡°Let¡¯s try to get somewhere with options for flight and retreat, first floor or ground-floor.¡± he suggested, getting a nod in response.


    Trying to remember every lesson on stalking, sneaking and prowling I had learned on Mundus and from Mrs. Wu, I followed after my newly acquired ally and meat-shield, as we made our way to what turned out to be the stairwell.


    While a part of me wanted to move up as high as possible, the high-ground wasn¡¯t the place to be, it would only cut off space to retreat and avoid. Instead, we started to make our way down, hearing more movement in the apartments behind us. For a moment, Trevor looked over his shoulder, as if to check what was going on, but he never turned around, quietly going down the stairs.


    After descending two flights, we heard a shrill scream of fear, coming from the level above us. We shared a look, before nodding to the other, turning back to investigate. At this point in time, information was key, understanding what was going on might just allow us to survive. People didn¡¯t just scream for no particular reason, unless they wanted to use the noise to bait, so careful investigation was in order.


    The hallway we found ourselves in wasn¡¯t much different from the one above, next to our rooms, only that there were a few open doors here. Across the hall of one, a female form was sitting, back pressed against the opposite wall, staring into the open door. Even at the distance, I could see her rapidly moving chest, making me think that she had been the one screaming. Another door had been opened by just a crack, though I couldn¡¯t make out if someone was trying to look out from it.


    As I was considering whether to approach, my temporary companion started to move, taking the decision from me. For once, I was quite fine with his initiative, if he wanted to find out if the native zombies bit, I wouldn¡¯t want to hold him back, just observe from a distance. Which was what I did, keeping my distance, keeping an eye out for opening doors, and my meat-cleaver firmly in hand.


    Once he made it to the front of the door, he first took a look inside, letting out a clearly audible curse, before reaching out giving the woman¡¯s shoulder a shake. For a moment, I thought she didn¡¯t even notice, but then, she shook her head, visibly focusing on the guy in front of her, quietly asking something. I wasn¡¯t quite sure what, she had spoken too quietly, so unless I wanted to abandon my companion at this point, I had to walk over.


    While a part of me was apprehensive of a possible trap, it had only been a few minutes since the game started, meaning that people didn¡¯t really have the time to form groups and prepare traps, so the risk should be manageable. With that in mind, I walked over, taking a glance into the room, just as the others had done.


    I managed to keep from swearing, though it was close and I could understand why the woman had screamed earlier. Right behind the door, maybe two meters away, hung a body, though hanging was relative. Mrs. Wu¡¯s lessons on anatomy sprung to mind, though I wasn¡¯t sure if the normal rules applied in this game. If they did, there had been someone who killed the hanging person, as the chair lying nearby just wasn¡¯t high enough to break the neck when falling down, yet the neck was clearly broken as  the tissues had stretched grotesquely, as the body was half-slumped on the floor. For a moment, I considered stepping over the body, to investigate and possibly loot yet another appartement but decided against it, just as my companion suggested that we move.


    ¡°We should get going,¡± he said, reaching out to give the woman on the floor a hand.


    ¡°Agreed. Name¡¯s Jade, this is Trevor. Want to go down with us?¡± I asked, not even trying to hide a smirk at the awful joke.


    ¡°Eh, I guess either we all hang together, or we¡¯ll get hung separately.¡± the woman nodded, pulling herself up on Trevor¡¯s hand. ¡°I¡¯m Cass, let¡¯s get away from here.¡± she introduced herself, and we began making our way back to the stairwell, the hidden observer never making a move.


    Now, in our group of three, we continued making our way downstairs and my ears started to pick up signs of activity around us, most likely other players. Or it might be monsters, if the starting-zone was only a very temporary safe-point, that quickly flooded with monsters, to force the players to start moving. Shaking my head, I glanced at the two people in front of me, before focusing on our surroundings again, especially the area behind us.


    You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.


    ¡°This might work better than the bat.¡± Trevor muttered, after he pulled open a fire-safety locker of some sort that was installed in the stairwell. Inside, I could see a heavy, red-coloured fire-axe, obviously made to act as an emergency-lockpick to open doors in case of fire. It would certainly open other things too, like chests and maybe skulls, though it wouldn¡¯t work for me. While I was strong for my physique, Trevor had roughly twice my mass and even Cass had a more physical presence, though that might be due to the two sizable lumps on her chest. She ended up with the bat Trevor had liberated, while he took up the axe and even put on a helmet and heavy coat he took from the locker. He looked a little ridiculous, though the equipment was supposed to protect in case of fire, hopefully it would do so in case of zombies as well.


    We weren¡¯t the only ones moving in the stairwell, I could hear people talking softly above and there were some people below, too, though we hadn¡¯t caught sight of them just yet. When we were about to reach the third floor, we could hear a shout of warning from below, followed by a deep, guttural moan that caused shivers to run down my spine, and not the good kind of shivers. Whatever it was, when we froze in response to the moan, banging noises caused us to jump back into action and cautiously continue moving downwards.


    There, pressing against the fire-safety door, were two guys, one equipped with a golf club, the other holding a kitchen knife. On the other side of the fire-safety door, we could make out a humanoid form, its eyes alight with blue fire. In addition to the burning eyes, the fact that the metal safety door had a visible dent in it drove home the fact that I didn¡¯t want to get close to that thing.


    ¡°HELP!¡± one of the guys holding the door closed called out, taking a glance over his shoulder. Trevor moved up, adding his own weight to their effort, while Cass and I took a close look at the way the door was constructed, looking for a way to wedge it closed. The problem was, these doors were supposed to keep fires from spreading, while allowing people to escape, not keep in ravenous zombies, who were strong enough to dent metal with apparent ease. A loud bang, accompanied by another bulge, added urgency to our movements, until Cass simply pulled off the helm Trevor was wearing and wedged it into the door as good as possible, providing a limited, though hopefully good enough, seal for the door, before calling out that we all had to run.


    While dashing into danger wasn¡¯t really my idea of a good time, moving upwards and ultimately box ourselves in would be just as problematic, so with the zombie trying to get out, we simply ran down the stairs, speed substituting stealth in our flight for survival.


    The sound of movement all around us, as if a switch had been flipped, managed to give us wings, one of the guys that had held the door shut crashing into the entry-door, breaking it open so we all could escape into the creepy, blue twilight.


    Staying behind Trevor, Cass and I ran down the street, trying to get distance so we could take a moment to regroup and maybe get some planning done. Suddenly, a dark shape came lunging out from behind a dumpster, tackling Trevor to the ground. The blue, glowing eyes easily told the story of what we were facing and with no hesitation, I plunged the kitchen-knife into its spine. Compared to the many times I had killed in Mundus, this felt somewhat different, the lack of an interface blurring the line between game and reality. Still, Mrs. Wu had trained me well and the stab had gone between the disks and severed the spine, making the zombie flop ineffectually.


    ¡°You alright?¡± Cass asked, pulling Trevor up while I needed a second or three to get my mind back under control. It was just a game, just like Road to Purgatory.


    ¡°Yeah, thanks.¡± he nodded to me, and we continued moving, not quite as hurried as before but still, trying to move fast, without making noise.


    ¡°We should get off the main-street.¡± I suggested the smaller, narrow paths giving us options, especially if there were more than single enemies.


    Trevor simply nodded, pausing right next to yet another alley between buildings, waiting and listening for a moment.


    ¡°Nothing, I think.¡± he observed, before turning to move into the alley, with Cass and me following behind. As we walked, I realised that with every minute, the overall noise-level was rising, as if the city was waking up, or maybe the zombies were waking up and starting to hunt.


    Cass and I froze when Trevor raised his fist, his focus on a nearby dumpster. Focusing on the dumpster, too, I realised that there was the sound of movement within, scratching of some sort. Turning around, I made sure that nothing was trying to sneak up on us, taking advantage of our distraction. I had no idea just how intelligent these zombies might be, but I wasn¡¯t taking any unnecessary risks.


    ¡°Cover me.¡± Trevor quietly told Cass, using the hook of his axe to open the dumpster, dodging away as it swung open, while Cass was already swinging down the bat, trying to bash the zombie hiding within. The screech coming out of the dumpster was piercing and shrill and a quick glance, right as Cass hit the metal rim with a loud clang, let me witness a raccoon, obviously scared out of its wits, clamber out of the dumpster, running for its life.


    ¡°Shit!¡± Cass swore angrly, rubbing her hand that had to sting from the rebound force. I was about to laugh, when I heard the sound of gravel above me. Looking up, I was just able to call out a warning to the other two, when a zombie used gravity to move at a good clip, trying to land on Cass and bring her to the ground. Cass managed to get away, thanks to the warning, while Trevor used his mighty axe quite proficiently, chopping off one of the arms.


    The now armless zombie got its second arm bludgeoned by the recovered Cass, sending it tumbling to the ground again, where Trevor split his head with a mighty swing.


    Hearing more noises from behind me, I took a glance, noticing a trio of zombies shambling into the alley.


    ¡°Up.¡± I ordered, stepping on some crates, to leap up the closed half of the dumpster before using the lid that was leaning against the wall behind it to scramble up even further, somehow managing to get a good grip on the roof above. With Trevor giving me a bit of support, I managed to scramble up easily, watching the Zombies come closer.


    Cass wasn¡¯t quite able to copy my movement but with a step-up and mighty heave from Trevor, she managed to crash into the wall high enough to let me catch her flailing hands. A small part of me winced in sympathy, that crash couldn¡¯t have been pleasant, but at least she had a pair of air-bags that stopped her from hitting the wall face first. It took previous seconds, but Trevor and I were able to get Cass onto the roof and from there, Cass and I got him up, too, at least after he climbed the dumpster. It was just in time, or he would have been zombie-chow.


    ¡°We¡¯ve got the high-ground, let¡¯s find some spot to hide.¡± Trevor suggested, getting a nod in reply.


    Making our way across the gravel roofs was a fun challenge, the distances we had to leap just short enough to allow us to get across, though it did limit our potential directions quite a bit. Below, we occasionally glimpsed both zombies and survivors but neither seemed to be interested in what was above them.


    A quick balancing act across a dividing-wall, followed by a hop, skip and jump across a parked car that allowed us to access the roof of a car-port. From there, we could hop over a hedge and latch onto a sunroof, climb higher and finally, scramble up a drain into a couple of shrubs that were planted there. Looking through the shrubs, we saw a wonderfully planted, roof-top garden, complete with a gazebo in the middle. Whatever else it was, for us, it was the shelter we so desperately craved.


    Looking around for a second or five, we decided to rest in the gazebo, at least for a bit, before moving on, if we even did.


    ¡°Let¡¯s stay here, until we have to move again.¡± Cass said, her breathing laboured.


    ¡°Sounds good.¡± Trevor agreed, wiping off sweat from his brow. The heavy coat he was wearing had protected him from the odd zombie, but it had to be incredibly hot.


    ¡°I¡¯ll take a moment to look around.¡± I told the other two, after catching my breath for a minute. Neither of them looked all that enthusiastic to move and I could understand them, our position was a good one. No easy scent-trail leading up, if the zombies followed that, no direct access and excellent visual cover in addition to relatively easy escape, if we were willing to jump down into the shrubs around the property. Not necessarily pleasant, but compared to getting gnawed on by a zombie, that sounded like a good idea.


    ¡°How long has it been?¡± Trevor asked, as I was quietly moving away, trying to get a good idea of the place.


    ¡°An hour? Five? I have no idea.¡± Cass admitted and I realised that I had little idea as well. The perpetual twilight, the blue glow from the burning sky, it messed up all sense of time. Shaking my head, I decided time didn¡¯t really matter, this would be over, when it was over. Worrying about it would only distract, which, in turn, would kill us.


    The opening into the house itself made me shake my head. For some reason, the owners had installed a small, artificial mountain, with water flowing out the top, forming an artificial spring that bubbled downwards, into a small, natural pool. The door was set into the mountain, cleverly concealed to look just like another part, but there were only so many places the entrance could be and when looking closely I had been able to find the seams.


    Opening it was another problem, at least until I noticed a strangely out of place flower-pot that was set upside down near the pool. Turning it over revealed a key and a little careful searching revealed the lock it fit into, hidden behind a plastic cover to make it look like the rest of the mountain.


    I had to contemplate for a moment but decided that there was safety in numbers, even for such a discovery. If nothing else, having Trevor up front if we ran into yet another zombie might be useful.


    After getting the two of them, we made our way into the house and down the stairs, amazed at the opulence of the dwelling we were breaking into. It was gorgeous, with high ceilings, curious, modern decor and every appliance I had ever seen, and some I had never even heard of. We stuck together at first, but when nothing jumped out at us, we split, each of us looking on their own.


    ¡°Found something!¡± Trevor softly called out, his voice leading me into the library, arriving there just ahead of Cass. I had to stop myself from laughing, when Trevor pulled on one of the books and the shelf-unit swung open, revealing a secret door.


    ¡°Cliche much?¡± Cass muttered, causing a chuckle to escape my control.


    ¡°What was the book?¡± I asked, curious why he had pulled it.


    ¡°Dante¡¯s Divine Comedy, the Second Part.¡± he replied, causing Cass and me to exchange a confused glance. But when there was no further explanation, we simply followed, as Trevor led us into the secret room, our collective nature as gamers and greedy loot-goblins taking over.


    If the upper part of the house was gorgeous, modern opulence, the hidden part was mad-scientist¡¯s lair, through and through. White, almost plastic-looking walls, bare, gleaming metal, a couple dark displays, nothing that actually gave away what the place was.


    Still, curiosity managed to lure us further, when suddenly, with a loud, metallic chunk, a heavy blast-door crashed down behind us, sealing us in the room we had just entered. Before any of us could investigate further, a roaring sound got our attention and another door fell open, revealing a zombie. Or maybe calling it a monster would be more appropriate, the thing was easily twice the size of Trevor, who wasn¡¯t a small man by any stretch of imagination. No, we were dealing with what I would have to call a Boss-Monster, humanoid in form, elongated arms that ended in razor-sharp claws and not only eyes burning with blue fire, but an entire skull that was burning with that blue fire, giving the distinct impression of a crown.


    ¡°Fuck!¡± Cass'' single curse managed to sum my feelings up very well. For a moment, nobody moved, all of us frozen in indecision. The moment didn¡¯t last though and with another roar, the beast moved forward, faster than a thing of its size had any right to, a massive limb trying to crush me into paste. My dodge was equal parts luck and training, as I somehow managed to vault over the swing, making it look easy.


    Sadly, Cass was either lacking in the luck- or the training-department, or maybe those airbags on her chest simply got in the way, causing the next swipe to hit and sweep her off her feet. The crack I could hear when she hit the wall wasn¡¯t promising and the minor scrape Trevor managed to inflict when hacking into the thing¡¯s shoulder with his arm and what looked like all his strength finished off any optimism I had.


    Not one to give up, I circled around, striking the moment the beast tried to go for Trevor, using the meat-cleaver to hack into its knees in an attempt to bring it down. There was a wound, there was a bit of blood but it was far from limiting its mobility. At the same time, the beast swung for Trevor, who managed to dodge away from the blow just in time to only take a glancing hit.


    ¡°Fuck.¡± I echoed Cass¡¯ earlier sentiment, before dodging away from a smash that made the floor jump a little.


    For a minute, Trevor and I moved in, attacked, dodged away, constantly moving, taking scrapes and trying to find anything to stop the monster.


    For a minute, nothing worked.


    For a minute, our strength was slowly sapped away, until Trevor failed to dodge, the monster managing to get one of its massive paws on him and squeeze. The sound was one I didn¡¯t even want to remember, a wet, squelching sound and the smell of blood instantly filled the room, just as Trevor¡¯s pained scream filled my ears.


    Before I could consider a new tactic, the monster came for me again, charging like a bull. Desperately dodging, I jumped up, somehow managing to get a moment of purchase on one of its arms, scrambling to get leverage, anything to help me move. Blindly stabbing with one of the kitchen-knives, I felt it get yanked out of my hands, just as my body was flung aside, hitting the wall with a crunching sound.


    There was only pain in my neck and I noticed absentmindedly that I wasn¡¯t feeling my legs. Or anything of my body, really, just a slow, creeping cold where those sensations should be. I considered trying to fight the cold, but cold was my friend, I liked the cold. So, instead of trying to fight, I embraced it and somehow, my eyes popped back open and if I had been able to breathe, I would have laughed.


    My desperate stab had, by hook or crook, lodged itself into the eye-socket of the zombie and as it had continued its charge after flinging me aside, it had slammed into the wall, maybe blinded by the pain. That slam had driven the knife into its head, the handle barely visible on the outside.


    With my vision growing dim, I wanted to laugh. We had killed the zombie. If only any of us had been alive to claim the spoils.


    Just before my vision turned black, I was shunted back into my capsule-space and received the message thanking me for my participation in the Ruins of a Broken World-Alpha. With a sigh, I leaned back on my throne and set about writing a test-report.


    It was an interesting diversion, but I couldn¡¯t wait to return to Mundus.

 Chapter 507

    ¡°Phraan, can we talk for a bit?¡± I asked, as we were walking down the ancient, imperial road. Reaching it had proved simple, without anything that would seriously impede our travels. Compared to the White Mountains themselves, the foothills seemed to contain only minor monsters, nothing strong enough to threaten either of our groups individually and certainly not both groups together. Thus, the local critters didn¡¯t even try, as attacking a group of powerful and well-armed beings was an almost certain trip to whatever afterlife that being might subscribe to. Attacks would only be made by the desperate, either desperate for food or to keep us from threatening their young, something not really applicable in the fall.


    ¡°Certainly, Morgana. I was curious if we would find the time to speak.¡± they replied, a friendly smile on their lips. Once more, I was reminded that there was a reason why elves had a reputation for beauty, as Phraan¡¯s facial features had clear, yet sharp lines and perfectly clear skin, without a single blemish in sight. It was as if they were wearing expertly applied makeup, which I knew they were not.


    ¡°You know, you are the first Elf I¡¯ve met in this world and I was wondering, could you tell me about Elves? I only know very little about my people, and even less about yours.¡± I asked, deciding to first assuage my curiosity before trying to involve myself into the mess that was developing between Phraan, Adra, Hafta and Rai.


    ¡°Tell you about Elves, you say.¡± they paused for a moment, looking up, into the sky. ¡°You make it sound so easy. Well, I guess, I can speak, you can listen and maybe, you will learn something from my rambling. But keep in mind, while I will speak about the Elven society and what parents might tell their children about our way of life, each elf is an individual and what is true for one, might be false for another.¡± they prefaced their words carefully, making me nod in acceptance.


    ¡°Where to start?¡± another small pause, ¡°You have heard that Elves are a long lived race, that our life-span can last centuries, with a few remarkable beings even lasting a millenium?¡± they asked and I nodded again. While I wasn¡¯t exactly conscious of that, I had heard about it on the forums, though the accuracy of that sort of information was always questionable.


    ¡°Well, that¡¯s generally true, though what you might not know is that, ever since the World-Tree was burned, that longevity is no longer inborn, it is conditional. Our people need something to provide the life-force needed to last, either forming a parasitic or a symbiotic relationship. The Elves of Arbotoma live in harmony with the Great Forest, the Arch-Druid, our leader, exists in close communion with the Ancient Tree at its center. The forest gives us life, and we give life to the forest and so, the cycle continues.¡±


    Their explanation left me with quite a few questions, some of which I wanted to ask later, others I didn¡¯t dare to ask. One of those I wouldn¡¯t dare ask was if it would be possible to acquire the life-force needed using Blood Magic. On the other hand, what they described was very close to the method of a dryad¡¯s immortality, though unless I remembered incorrectly, Adra had told me that the tree also benefited, gaining vitality and an increased life-span from the dryad.


    ¡°Like the dryads do?¡± I prodded, curious about their answer.


    ¡°It is somewhat similar, though sadly, our methods are but a pale imitation of their perfection. We adore Dryads in our Realm, welcoming them with open arms if they wish to settle down. Sadly, few Dryads desire to venture far, if they leave their grove at all. Most travel for a few days, letting themselves be carried by the wind on their back, before they settle down. It takes one with rare courage to make her way across the ocean.¡± They explained, leaving me with little more knowledge but a bit more comprehension.


    For the next quarter-hour, I listened to Phraan expounding on elven social culture, as they described the worship of the Gods and the forest, their political system, which amounted to a mix of theocracy and monarchy, and trying to go into social convention, a mess based on social and familial connections, received education, personal power and a couple other factors, all coming together to determine the relative position of a person in society.


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    If I took away one thing from their explanation, it was that I did not want to live in elven society. It sounded far too similar to the cliques I remembered from High School, only formalised and lasting centuries.


    ¡°Can you tell me about Firn Elves?¡± I finally asked, breaking their stream of thought.


    ¡°Firn Elves, you say?¡± they paused, looking me up and down and for a moment, I could feel the unpleasant effects of the Observe-Skill in action. Reflexively, I blocked it, before trying something new, namely trying to focus my reflexiv block onto the aspects I actually wanted to hide, such as my level, my class and those all-important traits. My race, even my name, weren¡¯t things I necessarily needed to hide and the idea of being able to selectively block information sounded quite interesting and appealing. Maybe working on it with Sigmir would be prudent.


    ¡°Apologies.¡± They gave me a tight smile, before shaking their head. ¡°I¡¯m afraid, I know very little about those people, your people. After the fall of Yggdrasil, most of the elves ventured South, eventually making their way on Arbotoma, but not all of us. Some remained in the North, despite the hardship and there, in the frozen wastes now known as the Wild Woods and in the Northern Forests, they made their home. There are also tales about some elves settling beneath the hills, though that sounds like a horrific myth to me, living underground, like the dwarves?¡± I wasn¡¯t sure if the momentary shudder running down their body was merely an affectation for effect or if there was genuine revulsion at the idea of living underground. Not that it truly mattered, even if there was that part within the backstory of my race that spoke of them being underground dwellers.


    ¡°That sounds like something you would only do in desperation.¡± I shook my head, thinking of the few days we had spent underground and how unpleasant that had been. The idea of spending my whole life that way just gave me the creeps, even without some spider-rats that may or may not live in the vicinity.


    ¡°I can¡¯t even begin to guess what might make someone deny themselves the open air, the light of the sun and moon and the falling rain.¡± as they were shaking their head again, it was obvious that the topic was not to their liking, even to someone with limited social experience and ability to read social cues.


    ¡°You spoke about that social hierarchy amongst elves. Where would outsiders like me, or non-elves like Hafta fall into that hierarchy?¡± I asked in a change of topic, trying to weave the other topic I had been asked to talk about into the discussion.


    ¡°Visitors generally don¡¯t partake in our social customs, they are guests. Their status is a reflection of their host, though it also falls onto the host to make sure they fit within Elven society.¡± They paused for a moment, studying me again.


    ¡°Now, someone like you, an Elf, though one of a peculiar lineage, that I¡¯m not sure about. You would have to integrate, to demonstrate the society you want to become part of the power of your conviction. That show, that initial contribution, would go a long way to establish your place in society.¡± they explained, after a brief contemplation.


    ¡°Why the differentiation between customs for outsider-elves and non-elves?¡± I prodded, not liking the implicit racism in their explanation.


    ¡°A non-elf could never become part of Elven society.¡± their direct, almost crass, rejection made me recoil just a little. It was one thing to hear from elders, people like Mrs. Wu, about overt racism and something else entirely to get smacked into the face with it.


    ¡°Don¡¯t misunderstand me, we do not see other races as our lessers. It is merely a simple, sad fact that  their lives are short and transient, almost not worth the effort to befriend as they simply keel over from old age by the time you get to know them.¡± Their explanation failed to make me feel better, something that may have shown on my face.


    ¡°Is that why you string Hafta along, like some fisher using life-bait?¡± I asked, slightly angry at the insinuation that getting to know a person like Sigmir was not worth the effort.


    ¡°Hafta? She is a friend, nothing more, nothing less.¡± Their tone was calm, even, without even the slightest ripple. Sadly, it was also loud enough to be audible and the look on Hafta¡¯s face as she heard them made it obvious that they had heard.


    Why did I think trying to mediate a social situation was the smart call on my part?

 Chapter 508

    The look on Hafta¡¯s face made me realise something I had missed before, likely due to her height. It was difficult to see someone almost double your own height as a child, even if they were of another race. But the open, unguarded look of surprise, swiftly morphing into anger, was something I would not expect on the face of an adult, even if they had heard something they really didn¡¯t want to. Or maybe something they didn¡¯t want to be true, as may be the case here.


    ¡°Mhm, I see.¡± I nodded, desperately trying to either change the topic or leave the conversation, just in case the angrily staring Centaur decided to come over.


    ¡°Anyway, about Arbotoma, can you tell me more about the geography?¡± I asked, my choice of topic only barely more subtle than asking about the weather. But then, I may as well have asked about that, and likely would ask about it next, as the idea to trudge through a tropical jungle was not one I cherished. Having to constantly surround myself with a cold mist, in order to keep cool, had been a minor nuisance, but the weather had generally been quite temperate, with a few, highly unpleasant, exceptions.


    There was a moment of confusion on Phraan¡¯s attractive face, but it quickly faded and out of the corner of my eyes, I could see Gwan step up to Hafta, talking to her in a whisper. Even my ears couldn¡¯t pick up what she was saying, though I could see that she was trying to hold Hafta back, likely so that distance would open up as Phraan and I continued on.


    ¡°Telling you about the geography of a whole continent in anything but the most general terms will take some time.¡± they finally said in a slightly amused voice. ¡°But again, I can talk and maybe you¡¯ll be able to learn something. Let¡¯s start with the area I originally grew up in, it¡¯s in the North-Western part of the continent, in an area we call the Forest of Dusk. It is one of the more unique places in the Eldra Dominion, sandwiched between the Mountains of Fire to the north and the Mountains of Ice.¡± they explained, and questions started to appear in my head, as I was unfamiliar with the terms.


    ¡°I¡¯m sorry, but can you explain what the Mountains of Ice and Fire are? And what you mean by the Great Forest.¡± I interrupted, stopping them before they could go into details I had no way to relate to.


    ¡°Certainly.¡± they blinked, looking at me with a bit of surprise, as if they couldn¡¯t believe I wasn¡¯t aware of those terms. It made me feel like a bit of an idiot, but then, how was I supposed to know them, if I hadn¡¯t been exposed to an elf before?


    ¡°The Great Forest is the name we use to describe the forest that covers most of the continent, spreading out from Eldrabor in its heart.¡± I nodded, signaling that I was aware that Eldrabor was the massive tree they worshipped. It was likely that there was also some sort of capital around it, their seat of government.


    ¡°The Mountains of Fire are the mountain-range that spreads from Helar south, filled with, well, fire and many menacing monsters. It¡¯s a dangerous, dangerous place, somewhere you really don¡¯t want to be.¡±


    ¡°The Mountains of Ice, on the other hand, are less dangerous, but that is only relative to the Mountains of Fire. The mountains themselves are widely populated by dangerous monsters, but the monsters are not that powerful. No, the real danger there comes from the frequent storms, strong enough to tear the flesh off your bones and cold enough to freeze the blood before it stains the ground.¡±


    ¡°The Mountains of Ice start on the north-eastern coast, almost as if continuing the Islands of Death, and curve across the continent, cutting off the Forest of Dusk from the rest of the Dominion before reaching the west-coast and following it along.¡± The description of the Mountains of Ice made me want to know more about it, after all, I was searching for an elemental Nexus that I knew to be somewhere in southern Arbotoma, attuned to the element of Ice. If there was anything I¡¯d consider a hint, it was a mountain-range covering the area being named Mountains of Ice.


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    ¡°Now, back to the Forest of Dusk. Our remote location, isolated between the Mountains, but at the same time the only way to reach the western coast of Arbotoma, turned it into a meeting-place of sorts, with Naga, Valkyries, Humans and Elves living there, mostly in harmony. We Elves are still the majority, but the other races are tolerated, welcomed even. There even is a land-route through the Mountains of Ice, but it is dangerous and only used with sufficient escorts. That¡¯s the route I took when I left for the first time.¡± they explained, and again, I nodded along, happy that they had mentioned the route, as it was what I wanted to know.


    ¡°If you had to return there, from here, how would you do it?¡± I asked, as it sounded like an excellent place to begin my journey on the Elven continent, especially given its close proximity to the Mountains of Ice. They studied me for a moment, before beginning to speak.


    ¡°If I just wanted to go home from here, I would probably go to Arranya first. It¡¯s the closest port on the coast of the Inner Sea and you can cross over to Daiea from there, reaching Doran, near the Daish Gate. Passing through the Daish Gate is a dangerous undertaking, especially in the winter, but staying there till spring would make it comfortable. In spring, I would get myself passage to Mahuri or Surinan, both Naga-Towns on the east-coast of Arbotoma, south of the Mountains of Ice. Once in Arbotoma, I¡¯d have to wait until another caravan crosses the Mountains of Ice, or find a group to join, even I wouldn¡¯t want to try crossing alone. Maybe if the other Oakenrocks would come along, I might dare, but it is a dangerous crossing.¡± I felt myself go pale, realising that the journey was even longer than I had thought, especially the waiting involved. If I had to wait until spring before I could really start out, we would never make it in time.


    ¡°And if time was of the essence? Is there a different way?¡± I asked, hoping for a better answer.


    ¡°There is, but it is a dangerous route. You remember the Islands of Death I mentioned? They sit some distance off the coast of Helar and just like that cursed place, they are dangerous. The name¡¯s not just for show. There are, however, some who dare traverse these dangerous waters, trading between Mociabi in the Forest of Dusk and Phalladri, on the tip of Aletoma.¡± Thinking back to the rough maps I had seen on the forum, I nodded, having a rough idea what area he was talking about.


    ¡°Reaching Phalladri from here is a lot faster than trying to reach Mahuri or Surinan, especially if you make the effort to cross the Dorrian Mountains and the Idorra Peninsula, once you reach Olisipo, finding a ship that crosses over to Aletoma, either to Hatterion or Phallandri directly should be reasonably simple. And the biggest advantage would be that you avoid the Daish Gate, as nobody dares going through it during autumn or winter.¡± again, I nodded along, only to blush when I realised that their explanation had changed from what they would do, to what I could do. My intent had obviously been seen through.


    ¡°As I said, it is a dangerous route and I would advise against taking it, especially if you are travelling with Adra. Taking the slow, steady route and travelling the Great Forest would undoubtedly be the better choice.¡± They added, clearly intent on driving home just how dangerous the explained route was. At the same time, I had to wonder just how honest their explanation was, as it seemed to be focused on getting Adra to Arbotoma and having her spend as much time within the forest as possible.


    ¡°We shall see.¡± I replied, when a nearby shout caught my attention, making me realise that Gwan¡¯s attempt at deflection had failed.


    ¡°Love, maybe it would be best if we leave them to their discussions.¡± Sigmir stepped up, almost as if trying to shield me from harm. A quick glance into the direction I had heard the noise from, made me agree as Hafta was in a huff and almost trotting towards either Sigmir, myself or Phraan. The look on her face made it obvious that she was about as far from happy as one could be and given the conversation I had with Phraan earlier, I realised the reason. And I also realised that I had no desire to be caught up in the almost inevitable blow-up that I had feared.


    ¡°Right, that is something we should keep our noses out of.¡± I agreed, taking her hand and quickening my step, certainly not running away from the angry teenager that might kick like a mule. We merely decided that power-walking was a fine and excellent sport.

 Chapter 509

    As Sigmir and I quickly walked down the highway, we could hear angry voices behind us. Looking over my shoulder, just to make sure Hafta wasn¡¯t doing anything stupid like trying to shoot us, allowed me to see Gwan and Jendar blocking Hafta, while Phraan looked on, an amused smile on their face, almost as if they were enjoying a show. Gren, who had been in the lead, was walking past us, going back, while Olivia simply waited for Sigmir and me to catch up.


    ¡°What a pleasant relationship.¡± Sigmir muttered, when we reached Olivia, who fell in with us.


    ¡°What happened?¡± Olivia asked, looking back for a moment, before focusing on me again.


    ¡°Jendar asked me to try talking to Phraan, thinking we might find some common ground, you know, both of us being elves.¡± I explained and could see how quickly Olivia¡¯s face warped into a mask of amused horror.


    ¡°Oh, dear.¡± she chuckled, her head shaking with helpless laughter, ¡°That was a mess before we ever met and I doubt anyone could have solved that with a few words, certainly not you.¡±


    A small part of me felt insulted by the certainty in her words, but then, if I was being honest with myself, I was aware of my sorely lacking social skills.


    ¡°At least things are out in the open now, no longer festering in the dark.¡± Sigmir said, looking a little annoyed at the situation.


    ¡°Better for their mess to boil over here, barely a day from town, than somewhere in the wilds, where they need to rely on each other to get back home, that sounds like a recipe for disaster.


    ¡°True, even if they all decide to walk their own path, breaking up their group, they can easily return to Narristo.¡± I agreed, before pushing their mess out of my mind. I shouldn¡¯t have tried to meddle, but how could I get better at handling social situations if I always remained in the background? At least, this way the damage done wasn¡¯t to my group, or anything I really cared about.


    After a quick mental exchange with Lenore, she flew off to notify Adra and Rai, who had been scouting ahead. If anything, I had a feeling the two would be glad if it turned out that our journey with the other group ended prematurely, as I had no desire to push back into that mess, especially if either Hafta or Phraan blamed Adra or myself for their troubles. Especially Phraan, something about their confident, pleasant yet completely indecipherable demeanor gave me the creeps, as if they were simply looking down on everyone around them.  If Jendar, the only one I had actually liked talking with, caught up with us, I¡¯d be willing to continue on with them, but the impetus had to come from them.


    Once we caught up with Adra and Rai, we simply informed them that the other group had some interpersonal trouble and we likely would split ways at this point, even as we continued down the same road. They simply accepted with shrugs, making it obvious that it was no skin off their back, especially as we would reach Narristo on the next day.


    As we continued walking, I began to consider my conversation with Phraan, going over what they had said and what I had said, trying to extract as much information as possible from our exchange. The most important part, to the point that I considered using the replay-function of the capsule to isolate and save it, was the explanation about the geography of Arbotoma, especially given that our destination was on that continent. It also helped a great deal with our current plans, confirming that we were on the right path, even if we had to speed it up a little. With that in mind, I considered our overall money-supply, which was limited, and whether there was a way to travel quicker. The problem, so to speak, was that the Ancient Road allowed us to travel at an incredible pace, at least if we really pushed it, something that couldn¡¯t really be increased, even when using mounts.


    ¡°That comment about the forest providing their life-span, that sounded interesting.¡± Lenore butted in, after landing on my shoulder. From her question, it was obvious that she was going over the same memories as I, just from a different angle. For a moment, I considered her words, before I realised that for a native, it certainly would be. For a traveller, not so much, as at the end of the day, my time in this world was limited, but not necessarily by the life-span of an elf, or even of a human, but by the life-cycle of Road to Purgatory. Still, the idea to channel massive amounts of power with Blood Magic to accomplish some purpose was intriguing, especially as the sheer amount of power needed to constantly rejuvenate an entire race of people had to be immense.


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    ¡°That, it does. But it makes me wonder, the energy they use, there has to be a down-side, right? I mean, if they use the energy, the forest is then lacking that energy, unless they manage to bind themselves into the natural cycle in some way, making sure that the forest replenishes at least as much energy as they take.¡± I mused, trying to imagine the sheer scale of it all. It also brought up another question, namely one of numbers. Could the elven forest supply arbitrary numbers, or did elves practise some sort of population control, limiting the birth-rate or something along those lines, to keep their immortality going?


    ¡°But how would we control it all?¡± Lenore asked in response, obviously amused, ¡°The Elves likely use their forest, with the tree in the center, as a giant magical formation, generating and distributing the power through a living network of some sort. Unless we¡¯d be able to form a ritual the size of a continent, there¡¯s no way to handle that much power.¡±


    ¡°We wouldn¡¯t really need that much, just improving the way Blood Magic absorbs and transmits power would do. With that, and some natural resources, we¡¯d be able to do some interesting magic.¡± I replied, my mind starting to consider ways to improve just that. So far, I only had the Athame, its enchantment forged into the blade itself in some way I didn¡¯t understand.


    ¡°Do you think we could use the connecting patterns we¡¯ve been researching for a while to improve transmission of power within the Blood Magic, maybe allowing us to generate less Miasma? Cause I think that would be a major hindrance, if we try to do something really big with it.¡± As I put my thoughts into words, I could feel Lenore¡¯s mind join mine, and together, we started to form models, trying to adapt the connecting patterns we had used for Ice-Magic to Blood-Magic. The frustrating part was that we were almost working blindly, trying to fumble our way to a solution without really understanding what we were doing. Adapting the dwarven patterns, partially developed for Crystal-Magic, to Ice-Magic had been one thing, there were many similarities as my talks with Jendar had proven, but Blood Magic was something entirely different.


    By the time I felt we had bashed our head against that mental wall for long enough, it was almost time to camp for the night. Quite some distance behind us, easily visible for anyone who cared to look, I could see the Oakenrocks move along the road, not trying to catch up but also not falling behind. Maybe they had somehow managed to talk things out, but it was quite obvious that they had no desire to make contact again, otherwise they could have caught up with a bit of effort.


    ¡°Lenore, want to look for a camp-site?¡± I suggested, causing her to hop off, taking to the sky again.


    ¡°Olivia, any ideas on how we could increase our rate of travel?¡± I asked, causing her to study me for a moment.


    ¡°There might be a way.¡± she replied, her voice pensive. ¡°Tell me, why do you need to move quickly?¡±


    ¡°You have heard that we Travellers are supposed to learn in this world?¡± I responded to her question, with a question of my own.


    ¡°I have. that¡¯s the reason the Gods let you travel to this world.¡± she nodded and for a moment, I considered how to put things, to remain truthful without telling her about the soul-prison as having possession of that might very well be seen as blasphemy.


    ¡°My teacher gave me a quest, something I want to resolve while in this world. To do so, I have to travel to the other side of the world and find a particular place.¡± I explained, only fudging the truth slightly. ¡°For that, I need to keep moving quickly, or I might run out of time on my journey. Yet, at the same time, I want to follow the task of the Gods, to learn, to train, to experience.¡± I finished, hoping that I wouldn¡¯t be caught in a lie. It might get awkward if I did.


    ¡°I see and I think I understand.¡± for a moment, she paused and studied me again, ¡°I will ask for Eleutheria¡¯s help, to hasten our steps. That way, we should be able to travel swiftly, at least as long as we are in relative safety, as the blessing will take quite a bit of power out of us all, as we will need to pray together, each morning.¡± she finished, leaving me wondering if that would be worth it. Time would tell, but I was willing to try.

 Chapter 510

    ¡°So, how does this work?¡± I asked in the morning, curious what Olivia had in mind. The night had proven uneventful, though it was interesting to observe that the cooperation we had with the Oakenrocks was well and truly broken. They had set their own camp, roughly in the same area with enough distance to make their intent obvious. While the loss of the connection hardly bothered me, I was somewhat annoyed at failing, especially the way I had failed.


    ¡°It doesn¡¯t, at least not today.¡± Olivia replied, her amused grin once again on her face. Raising an eyebrow, I got an explanation after only a few moments of waiting, likely because she knew it would irk me.


    ¡°Invoking a prayer like the one I intend to use is not to be done frivolously, certainly not to walk a few hours into town. We can use it to cross the distance, but it has to be worth it.¡± she explained, leaving me almost as confused as before.


    ¡°Any reason you didn¡¯t offer it before? For example, when we were moving away from Neamov?¡± I prodded, trying to learn more about the divine way of spellcasting, even while I was aware that it was almost certainly pointless.


    ¡°There is a reason, yes.¡± her grin widened, just a tad, as if to annoy me further. Sadly, I couldn¡¯t raise my eyebrow any further, so I simply stared at her, hoping she would get the hint.


    ¡°Back then we were fleeing. Now, we are travelling towards your destination.¡± Even without her wide smile, I would have wanted to start throwing things at her. Giving in to the impulse, I conjured a small ball of Diamond Dust, purposefully made to be loose and fluffy, and chucked it at her, using my Ice Magic to ensure that the snowball remained intact until it struck her head, covering her in freezing cold fluff.


    ¡°Deserves you right. What on Mundus is the difference, we are moving on the same road, at the same speed, in the same direction.¡± I growled, letting her try getting the snow out of her hair for a moment, before using my lingering connection with it to let it float away harmlessly.


    ¡°Ah, the violence of the ignorant.¡± she sadly shook her head, though the effect was greatly marred by the twitching of her lips, as they tried to curl back into a smile and the mirth in her voice.


    ¡°There is no material difference, in that you are right. But not everything in the world is purely material, the difference in this case lies in the intent and emotions behind the actions taken. Killing a deer, to make sure your family doesn¡¯t starve is good, killing a deer because you revel in bloodshed and murder is evil. Intent and emotions make all the difference.¡± she explained, while I began to wonder. Did intent really make a difference there, or would emotions? And to whom would they make the difference, certainly not to the deer. It would be dead and I knew I wouldn¡¯t care why some predator killed me, I would fight back and struggle as much as possible, trying to remain alive. Nor would I care behind the intent of anyone harming those dear to me. If anyone harmed Sigmir, I would bring vengeance to them, until their entire world was covered in frozen darkness. No matter who they were, no matter their intent, no matter their emotions. I would avenge her.


    ¡°Don¡¯t worry, once we are done in Narristo, we can speed up our travels.¡± Olivia reassured me, likely because I had a frown on my face. Banishing the frown, I simply nodded, deciding that trying to learn more would only result in another headache, I seemed to regularly get those when trying to wrap my head around divine magic.


    A little after noon, we were able to see Narristo, nestled in a larger valley, similar to the way Carinthia had been. We had been aware that we had been getting close before, as there were dozens of farmsteads, fortified with palisades but nothing that would actually stop a serious attacker. Close to their walls, we could easily see their fields, some filled with ripe crops of some sort, others already harvested. There were people working on those fields, though none of them close enough to make out details. Further away from the farms, we could see livestock moving around the valley, protected by shepherds and their dogs.


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    ¡°Sigmir, can you keep an eye on Lenore? I will remain within my Hallow during our stay here, I have no desire to get into further trouble with the natives.¡± I asked, my failure with the Oakenrocks still annoying me.


    ¡°Sure, I¡¯ll even make sure to get a room just for myself.¡± she grinned, causing me to shake my head with a smile on my face. It was the best in an annoying situation, though there was a part of me that didn¡¯t really mind. As much as I wanted to be able to navigate social situations without causing some mishap, spending time with just Sigmir was a lot better than spending time in a crowd.


    ¡°I¡¯ll try to be there, though I¡¯ll likely return to the other world for some time.¡± I replied, before shifting into my Hallow, as Lenore landed on Sigmir¡¯s shoulder, a perch she used almost as often as my own shoulder. Something about the higher altitude allowing for a better view.


    Concealed within my Hallow, I allowed myself to fully relax. The concealment making sure nobody would notice the apparently unsettling aura caused by my Mortal Hubris was allowed to fade for the first time in days as I let my mind drift. A part of my attention remained on Lenore¡¯s senses, allowing me to retain awareness of our surroundings, even if I had no actual desire to emerge at this point. Certainly not within the town.


    Within my mind, I once more considered what I had learned from Jendar, trying to integrate what he had taught me into my own magic, to perfect the connecting patterns, if only those for my Ice-Magic.


    But no matter how much I thought about them, there was a part of me that wanted to delve into another question, namely the question of immortality. What Phraan had told me about the elven forests and their symbiosis and what Lenore thought it might mean for Blood Magic, that there might be a way to achieve a similar result. I somewhat doubted it, as so far, the natives of Mundus seemed to have a good grasp on the possibilities of magic and I hadn¡¯t heard anything about Immortal Blood Mages. However, Blood Mages were supposed to be hated and rare, mainly because their abilities allowed them to prey on the living with impunity, Imbued Blood providing an excellent link into their bodies, letting them bypass magic resistances, shields and defenses.


    But what if that dislike had caused the discipline to atrophy? If nobody was allowed to teach Blood Magic, nobody would pass on knowledge, meaning every Blood Mage would essentially have to discover their art, just like I did. Only, without whatever boon the Sorcerer-class provided and without the help the Grandmother had given me, mostly in the form of the Zevarra Agha, the grimoire she had given me.


    Or maybe the awareness was there, but the powers that be, most likely the religions, had an anathema on Blood Magic, to keep others from becoming immortal. That sounded like a relatively reasonable conclusion, though I would have to ask Olivia about it, as she was the only religious type I knew, and she had never said anything about my use of Blood Magic.


    So, maybe something only known to the higher-ups, but that also didn¡¯t make much sense.


    Internally shaking my head, I pushed the question away for now, focusing back on the intricate forms of the connecting patterns. A quick glance to the outside showed me that I had been lost in thought longer than I had thought, the others had already reached the gate of Narristo and were talking with a caprakin, a goat-type beastman, who was guarding the gate.


    Luckily, I was within my Hallow, as I was completely unable to control the snickering laughter when I realised that the goat-person had indeed a goatee on his pointed chin and I completely lost it when he started to slowly stroke the beard while the others told him that they were looking for the Adventurer''s Guild.


    Once they had directions, they continued on, quickly reaching the nearby guild and entering. The building was empty, with a single, bored-looking employee waiting behind a solid counter where they quickly turned the quest regarding the Manticores in, selling off some of their parts for coin. But the coin wasn¡¯t the best thing about it all, no, that came from the blue box that floated in front of me, telling me that I had reached level 108. Maybe crossing insanely dangerous areas was worth doing.

 Chapter 511

    ¡°Well, birdy, I¡¯ve got to hand it to you, I did not see that one coming.¡± Maggy told me, a grin on her face. I had been rather surprised when she had asked for a virtual meeting, happily accepting the invite into my capsule-space, where I received her sitting on my throne, using a modified version of my current Avatar. While the white, almost diaphanous clothes I was wearing in Mundus worked well, especially with my black hair, they didn¡¯t quite send the right impression for an audience. They were more fitting for a forest-fairy, maybe with a hint of mist wafting around my form, than they fit the Throne-Room of a Dark Queen.


    ¡°I would have been disappointed if you had seen it coming.¡± I gave her a thin smile, ¡°After all, a girl has got to have her secrets.¡± I added, waving my hand in a pre-set gesture, causing some of the mist I had placed right under the ceiling to move, revealing hints of something dark hidden in the clouds, but without showing anything. It was the latest addition, an attempt to make the room more atmospheric than a simple ceiling. Sadly, the hidden object was only a rough draft, an attempt to form something looking like a dragon¡¯s skull from Ice, hidden by darkness and mist. It looked somewhat decent and imposing, but I wasn¡¯t quite happy with it yet.


    My words had an interesting effect, it had been meant as a seemingly offhand gesture, both a joke and a bit of showmanship, but the serious look on her face, studying and measuring me made me wonder just how she took my words. For a moment, the almost goofy smile she almost constantly wore returned, before, after a moment of hesitation, she shook her head and it faded as quickly as it had appeared.


    ¡°Indeed. But never let the mask you wear, become who you are.¡± she warned, her voice serious in a manner I hadn¡¯t heard from her before. There was nothing I could do, but give an equally serious nod in response and for a few moments, neither of us acted. Finally, after what felt like an eternity, she moved again, a smile back on her face, though it didn¡¯t look as goofy.


    ¡°But enough of secrets, I¡¯d rather talk about the future.¡± she suggested, getting a nod in response, while I pulled myself back together, projecting what I wanted to cultivate as my royal aura.


    ¡°The future, you say? What sort of time-frame do you have in mind for that future?¡± I asked in response, curious where she was going.


    ¡°If I had anything to say about it, I¡¯d say from now, until the end of time.¡± she paused for a moment, ¡°Mundus, as it is now, is a wonderful world, filled with life and experiences that can only be had there. But if enough people go there, the world will change. Now, there is a beautiful dichotomy, the wild places and the so-called civilised places, adjacent but never touching, filled with their secrets that just wait for us to uncover them.¡± she explained, her voice distant


    ¡°I want to find out what people hide in their hearts, I want to find what is hidden beneath the sands of the desert, uncovering the ruins of an ancient civilisation, I want to see it all.¡± she paused for a moment, her eyes staring into the distance before they closed and she took a long, deep breath.


    ¡°But how the fuck can I discover shit, if there are people who¡¯d burn the world, just for shits and giggles?!¡± she snarled, the earlier breath exploding out of her in anger.


    ¡°I know it, you know it, everyone who played online for any length of time knows it, there will be some shitface who wants to do nothing but fuck things up for everyone. And if we don¡¯t all pay attention, those shitfaces will manage.¡± she ranted, swearing with palpable rage, as if she was about to bite those people.


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    ¡°That sounds like you have a plan?¡± I asked, a little amused at her swearing and anger, it was so different from the happy-go-lucky persona she had projected so far. But then, so had the earlier seriousness. ¡°What is it that you propose?¡±


    ¡°Partnership, exchange of information, whatever you are willing to accept. I want everyone who is visible and influential to be on board, not necessarily working together ingame, shit, I don¡¯t care if we murder each other from time to time, but I want everyone to work togehter outside, to make sure Mundus can remain as beautiful as it is. And if some shitheel tries to stir up trouble, or fuck over the world, I want us all to come together and spawn-gank the fucker until they leave the game.¡± she declared, the earlier anger still in her voice, joined with a fierce determination.


    ¡°I see.¡± I simply replied, considering the implications and potential results of such an idea. ¡°And I can also see many ways that could go horribly wrong, especially if a small group takes control and imposes their definition of ¡®stirring up trouble¡¯.¡± I added with a frown on my face.


    ¡°Now, don¡¯t get me wrong, I¡¯m all for keeping Mundus in a shape that we can all enjoy, but who would you want to have the power to decide which shape that would be? Personally, I want to get deeper into the magic and the magic-system, though that doesn¡¯t make for particularly interesting content in the long run. I¡¯ll have to see how I play in the long-run.¡± I shook my head, before continuing.


    ¡°But what if someone has their eyes set on being a ruler, taking what Tobiuno does to its ultimate conclusion, trying to either take the throne or make a kingdom of their own? The impact on Mundus would be massive, especially when it comes to those ¡®secrets held in peoples¡¯ hearts¡¯. Coups are seldom bloodless after all.¡± again, I paused, this time for effect.


    ¡°Who are you, to enforce your vision of how the game should be played on the world? And even if you did manage to enforce your rules, what would you do if people simply walked away? To put it in the simplest of terms, if Road to Purgatory flops, Pantheon Entertainment will not keep the lights on.¡± I finished with a warning, curious how she¡¯d reply.


    ¡°Not my rules, that¡¯s the whole point of trying to get everyone on board. If all high-level and influential players get together to discuss things, we should be able to keep everyone engaged and interested without causing everything to turn to shit, at least that¡¯s what I hope.¡± it looked almost as if her earlier fire had run out, the anger burned out of her system, leaving behind a weariness, though she was still smiling.


    ¡°Let¡¯s say, I agree in principle that the World of Mundus deserves to be protected, and I certainly don¡¯t want it to get destroyed. At the same time, the more I think about it, the less likely such a scenario appears.¡± I admitted, as a certain event sprang to mind.


    ¡°What do you mean?¡± she asked, apparently confused.


    ¡°A while back, a spellcaster using Fire was conducting some weird experiments and threatened a city. As a result, a seriously powerful being came out of their hermitage and ended the spellcaster, it wasn¡¯t even a fight. You might remember, she called herself my teacher.¡± Maggy nodded in response, a frown on her face.


    ¡°Now, I¡¯d love to claim that she did that because the guy attacked me. Maybe she did, the guy certainly attacked me, it wasn¡¯t pleasant. But she might just have decided to clean up her backyard and take out the trash, so to speak. Frankly, we all have no idea just how powerful the natives really are, I think we barely scratched the surface when it comes to hidden powers. And that¡¯s without taking the Gods into account.¡± I added, the last thought sending a shiver down my spine, as large, golden eyes sprang to mind.


    ¡°I was aware of the incident, but I never really thought about it.¡± she admitted, looking a little pensive.


    ¡°You are right, the native powers that be would likely be able to keep a lid on things for a while, but with undying Travellers, don¡¯t you think that we¡¯d get too powerful at some point? After all, death is merely a setback for us.¡± she asked, looking like she wanted to pace.


    ¡°Certainly, if someone invests countless days, maybe a couple years, in increasing their level and power in Road to Purgatory, they¡¯ll get powerful, no surprise. But think about it like this, if someone invests that much time, that much effort and love, do you think they¡¯d just burn down the world for the hell of it?¡±

 Chapter 512

    ¡°So, did anything interesting happen while I was gone?¡± I asked Lenore, as I was looking out from my Hallow. The others were still in Narristo and judging by the surroundings my guess would be that they were replenishing our supplies. Lenore was sitting on the edge of a roof, looking down as they moved around a relatively busy market-square.


    ¡°Eh, just a little bit. It seems that Hafta visited the tavern we are staying in last night, got drunk and accused Adra of trying to steal Phraan. Loudly and enthusiastically. Luckily, it seems that the silly pony is unable to hold her drink, to the point that she managed to knock herself out, before things could escalate.¡± Lenore explained, causing me to laugh when she shared the images. There was something hilarious about a centaur stumbling around like a foal, trying to find their balance while her four legs didn¡¯t quite seem to work as she wanted them to. That she was having a large stein of ale or something in her hand, somehow managing to drink from it as she was cursing out Adra made the whole thing only funnier to me.


    ¡°If only I could have been there.¡± I lamented, thinking of all the times Adra had made fun of me, for getting in trouble during social situations. Finally, the shoe was on the other foot, or maybe the horse-shoe, and I couldn''t even be there to watch.


    ¡°Knowing your luck, if you¡¯d been there, she¡¯d have gone after you, miss elf.¡± Lenore chortled, poking fun at me. The sad part was, there was no way I could refute her, I seemed to have horrible luck in social situations. Part of it was due to the traits I had chosen and picked up, but I refused to believe it was all due to that.


    ¡°Want to explore a little?¡± I asked Lenore, who happily accepted. It looked like she wasn¡¯t too excited to hang around town, watching the others buy the various supplies we couldn¡¯t just harvest in the woods.


    ¡°Let me tell Sigmir, we don¡¯t want her to worry.¡± she reminded me, hopping off the roof to glide over to her shoulder. It was a little disconcerting to hear an uncannily accurate imitation of my own voice, while knowing that I wasn¡¯t saying the words, and Sigmir didn¡¯t look too happy about Lenore and I harrying off on our own but she accepted it.


    For a bit, maybe an hour, Lenore winged from roof to roof, watching the people move beneath, at times using a small amount of Wind-Magic to have some harmless fun. Small things, like using a gust to cause a skirt to ruffle, or trying to steal the toupee from an apparently image-conscious caprakin. We also explored the town and I quickly realised that there was very little to actually do. I considered switching places with Lenore, using a bit of magic to make it seem like I was a spellcaster capable of transforming into a raven, but even in my humanoid form, there just wasn¡¯t anything exciting. There was an outpost of the Merchant¡¯s Guild, the Hall of the Adventurer''s Guild, a couple stores and inns but that was it, nothing that actually drew my interest.


    It didn¡¯t take us long to realise that there was only so much mischief we could get up to, before we would turn from an amusing and harmless nuisance into an annoying pest. Instead of letting that happen, and maybe cause trouble for the others, we decided to head out of town for a bit, where we could play around with magic without having to pay attention to our surroundings.


    From a little higher up in the air, Lenore¡¯s eyes could see a small gorge, maybe a kilometer from town, rocky and jagged, without a single living thing inside, not even grass or trees growing between the rocks. After another quick look, to make sure we didn¡¯t simply miss some monster, Lenore landed on the largest rocks and we switched, Lenore using a bit of Ice-Magic to create mist to hide our transformation. If we perfected that trick, we would be able to pull off the illusion of shape-shifting.


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    For the rest of the day, until the sun started to set beyond the horizon, Lenore and I were experimenting with magic, or playing around with it, depending on your point of view. My current project was to perfect the connecting patterns, especially since my conversations with Jendar had given me a curious idea, namely an attempt to inscribe complete runic formations, allowing me to instantly use their magic without the need to instantly project them at greatly increased cost.


    So far, that only worked when using Rune Stones, which came with their own disadvantages, normal materials simply unable to bear the strain caused by the runes. But my thinking was that the strain caused by the runes was essentially a side-effect of the inefficiencies inherent to connecting runes. My understanding was that my mind and Rune Magic ability took the runes and forced their connections allowing me to mold the results to a degree but also wasting some of the Astral Power used and that wasted Astral Power was what seeped into the surroundings, manifesting as a tell-tale glow when forming the runes in the air, or eroding the material a rune was carved into, if there was one.


    If that understanding was correct, I should be able to eliminate the wasted power with perfected connecting patterns, taking the ability in Rune Magic out of the process entirely, allowing me to rapidly form my spells. The disadvantage would be that, with the elimination of the Rune Magic ability, I would also eliminate the parts of the magic that were molded by my mind, taking away any versatility. It would be a runic formation that could only do a single thing, for example could only launch Icicles of a pre-set size, along a pre-set vector, fixed in direction and imparted kinetic force. For some applications, that would be suitable, not so much for others.


    The process of trying to figure out the exact patterns needed was tedious to the extreme, as I had to repeatedly cast Icicles, working as consistent as possibly, trying to alter only a single variable at a time, while Lenore watched the magic take for with her particular vision, trying to fiangle out what changed in the flow, when I changed variables.


    Calling the process mind-numbingly boring would be no exaggeration, even I, who loved to follow and figure out patterns felt my mind slowly turn to mush as I tried to cast the same spell for the two-hundredths time, a spell I had been using ever since coming to Mundus.


    ¡°Enough!¡± Lenore finally caved, bored into submission by the incredibly frustrating task. With a mental flourish, I changed the forming formation, adding another pair of runes, turning the simple icicle I had been casting over and over into a playful spray of diamond dust. I would barely classify it as combat-magic, something that would only work against a thinly dressed, cold-blooded reptile or some sort of fire-elemental that was highly susceptible to the cold, not that I planned to use it for anything serious. Just to blow off some steam.


    Reaching out, I used my Ice-magic to turn the flurry of snow my runic formation was constantly channeling out into a dancing cloud of Ice, letting it swirl around me, slowly turning with the movement. I could feel Lenore beat her wings, darting through the snow to land on my shoulder, while whipping up a bit of wind that joined the flurry of snow, twisting around us. Spreading my arms, I let more and more Astral Power flow into the still active formation, letting the amount of snow increase more and more, my previously slow, spinning movement turning into a dance, as the wind was moving around me.


    I could feel Lenore lead the wind in a counter-movement, trying to disrupt and control the flurry of snow and air around us and started laughing as my own magic moved to counter hers. As I slowly danced in the middle, with Lenore sitting on my shoulder, the air and snow were dancing around us, twisting and turning, each of us trying to take control.


    Finally, the power we had bost channeled into our surroundings reached a crescendo, bursting outwards and upwards in a barely controlled explosion, coating the valley we had been training in with snow, some of the powers we had unleashed forming icicles and twisted spires.


    Out of breath, I pulled some of the lingering power inwards, forming my Frozen Throne, cushioned with Diamond Dust and my personal insignia, before landing on it in a sweaty, tired mess.


    ¡°I love magic.¡± my exhausted laughter echoed across the snow-covered valley, joined by Lenore¡¯s cawing amusement. After resting for a bit, I shifted myself back into my Hallow, but not without letting my throne burst into a blast of mist, hiding me from any observing eyes, not that I thought there were any. But it was fun, bringing a grin to my face as Lenore was flying back, to re-join the others.

 Chapter 513

    ¡°So, are you now going to tell us how this will work?¡± I asked, looking at Olivia with a raised eyebrow. When Lenore and I had returned to their accommodations last night, Olivia had told everyone to be ready to leave before dawn, without specifying why. In the morning, she had guided the others out of town, with me still riding along in my Hallow, to a nearby meadow, as the pre-dawn light was slowly brightening the mountains in the distance.


    ¡°Dawn is the time of beginnings, so it is suitable for a ritual to call upon Eleutheria¡¯s blessing for the coming journey.¡± she explained, though I was less interested in the question of timing and more in the mechanics of her spellwork. Not that I thought I would get an answer on that, or that I¡¯d understand the answer if it was given, yet, I wanted to know. Every bit of knowledge might allow me to glean a little more understanding.


    ¡°Please, form a half-circle, holding each other''s hands. And Yvla, please move out of your Hallow and take up a position next to Sigmir.¡± Olivia asked, directing us to stand with our backs to the west, with her standing in front of us.


    ¡°I will lead you in prayer, you do not need to pray with me, but remember, we are asking Eleutheria for her blessing, so please, be at least respectful.¡± Olivia seemed to stare at me, as she explained.


    ¡°You might feel a small draw on your Astral Power, especially you are liable to notice, Morgana. Please, just let it happen.¡± she added, her stare growing in intensity, before she turned her back to us, staff in hand, and looked into the distance, waiting silently.


    After a few minutes, just as the first real rays of the sun crested the distant mountains, she started to sing in a soft voice, asking Eleutheria for her blessing on our current journey. Next to me, Rai and Adra were joining in, while Sigmir simply lowered her head, eyes closed, a gesture I mimicked. It was weird, it was almost as if I could feel the world around us a little clearer once my eyes were closed, as if a thin veil had been taken away, letting me see the colours in their full splendour, the scents growing just a little more intense and vibrant.


    Relaxing my mind, I could feel a trickle of Astral Power flowing out of me, barely more than I naturally regenerated over time and as Olviia had asked, I let it happen. I could feel the power flow to Oliva, before continuing on somewhere else and as I was just about to try following that tendril of Astral Power, using the slight connection I maintained with my own Astral Power for a brief amount of time, I remembered Olivia¡¯s warning, that we were asking a favour. I also remembered the last time I Had tried to follow a trace of power into a deity¡¯s domain and had no desire to find out if Eleutheria would smite me in the same way Fenris had. That seemed like an excellent way to muck up Olivia¡¯s efforts and piss off an apparently very easy-going deity.


    Olviia¡¯s song didn¡¯t take long and the moment it ended, with a praise to Eleutheria, I could feel a brief moment of stillness, as if the world was holding its breath before letting it out in a slow, controlled gust. This wind that wasn¡¯t wind was flowing around us and I could feel my burdens ease, not only the weight of my body but also the weight of responsibility, my worries and aches, they all faded away, leaving me exuberant, ready to dance and sing. Or ready to run and that was what we did.


    With Olivia in the lead, we started to move, first at a quick walk, before falling into a jog that soon turned into a run, as we were dashing down the ancient, imperial road. The magic of the road seeped into us, allowing us to move at a pace that a horse would be hard-pressed to match but even as we ran down-hill, away from Narristo, I realised that no horse would be able to keep moving at such a pace. Yet, despite dashing faster than I had imagined myself capable of, I didn¡¯t feel any exhaustion, my body feeling great, my breath smooth and calm, even as my legs pushed me forward.


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    My mind started to slip into a primal state, the land around me turning into a blur with only the road ahead staying in focus, my whole body focused on nothing but running. Time began to lose it¡¯s meaning, seconds turned into minutes, turned into hours, as nothing mattered but the movement of my legs.


    Finally, I felt the effect start to fade, reality sending a stark reminder that it was not to be ignored. Ahead of me, Olivia¡¯s previously smooth, loping gait slowed down, turned into a gentle jog before she was simply walking, as if she was out on a stroll. My mind started to snap back into focus and for a few moments, I was afraid that there would be a backlash, similar to the way I suffered when using Blood Magic to push my body past its limits, but when I focused my magic inwards, there was nothing, no exhaustion, no strained muscles, nothing that even hinted at the fact that we had been running at an insane speed for most of the day.


    ¡°Keep walking, your body and mind will need a few moments to get back into sync.¡± Olivia told us, and we did just as she told us to. In my case, I took a few slightly quicker steps, to get next to her so I could ask a few burning questions, ones that I needed answered.


    ¡°What would have happened if we had been attacked?¡± I asked, the realisation just how heavily her spell had affected me settling in.


    ¡°For a few moments, we are protected by Eleutheria¡¯s blessing, hopefully long enough to let us fight back.¡± Olivia admitted, a part of me horrified at the implications. An ambush might be able to take us out, as we were running, hitting us before we could ever notice that the enemy was there. I had been completely caught up in the movement, with little regard for my surroundings.


    ¡°If I had to guess how powerful the protection would be, I¡¯m reasonably certain that it would stand up to multiple, direct hits from Sigmir¡¯s Lok¡¯Nar or a pair of Adra¡¯s magically infused arrows.¡± she added, and for a moment, I stopped, rooted to the spot in surprise. What she described was some hard-core protection, as I knew just how much power one of Adra¡¯s arrows had, more than enough to shatter a swiftly summoned Wall of Ice and pierce someone hiding behind. Similarly, Sigmir¡¯s strikes had enough power to cleave rock if they scored clean, direct hits, making what I had thought to be an insane risk into something quite manageable.


    ¡°I see.¡± I muttered, after taking a few more quick steps to catch up to Olivia again.


    There was another surprise for me, when Lenore moved out of her Hallow and took to the sky, stretching her wings a little. I could feel disbelief flooding her mind, alongside images and for a moment, I didn¡¯t quite get what she was so incredulous about, until I realised that it wasn¡¯t what she was seeing, but what she wasn¡¯t seeing.


    Namely, she wasn¡¯t seeing the White Mountains, even after completely clearing the trees around us, they were invisible and it wasn¡¯t like there were hills or anything that blocked her sight. Only once she had risen quite a bit into the air, was she able to make out their faint outline on the horizon, almost entirely lost in the distant haze.


    ¡°How far did we move?¡± I asked Olivia, a part of me fearing her reply.


    ¡°Compared to moving at our normal pace, we roughly travelled the same distance we would travel in a week.¡± she replied, and I barely kept myself from stumbling.


    ¡°How?!¡± I blurted out, my mind not ready to accept just how powerful her blessing had been. No matter how I tried, I was nearly certain I wouldn¡¯t be able to replicate such an effect, certainly not without using a great deal more Astral Power. There were ways to use Blood Magic to boost and regenerate at the same time, I had used such spells before, but there were diminishing returns, making it more difficult both, as time went on and with a more powerful boosting effect. Olivia had boosted us to an absurd degree, with no apparent backlash and with very limited Astral Power used.


    ¡°The Lady Eleutheria¡¯s grace is wonderful, is it not? Letting us be free, letting us travel freely. That is her blessing.¡± Olivia replied and I could hear the grin in her voice, more than I could see the corners of her lips curl into a faint smile.


    ¡°By the gods.¡± I muttered, only to hear her chuckle in response. By the gods, indeed.

 Chapter 514

    Eventually, we settled down and made camp, my mind still somewhat reeling from the sheer magnitude of Olivia¡¯s spell. Jealousy and pity were warring within me, both directed at her, as I was jealous of the tremendous power she was wielding, the effect of her divinely granted spells simply something I could only envy.


    But at the same time, I pitied her. The power she was wiedling, the beauty and impact of her spells, she didn¡¯t truly understand just what she had. She was pressing the button on a jukebox, letting the music play and listening to it, she wasn¡¯t playing the music. I wanted to be the artist, the one directing the power and creating the music, not just someone who could press 1 for fast running.


    ¡°Do you feel that?¡± Lenore asked over our connection, landing on my shoulder after stretching her wings with a quick scouting-flight. For a moment, I had no idea what she was referring to, before I calmed my mind, pushing away my thoughts and feelings regarding Olivia, allowing me to focus on my senses. I even closed my eyes, letting my tongue flicker out, as I had no doubt that whatever she meant was magical in nature and tasting the air was the best way I had to perceive that.


    Even focused inward, with nothing to occupy my mind, I needed a few more moments before my eyes shot back open when I realised what Lenore was referring to. There was something, almost out of the range of my perception, like a deep bass-sound that one couldn¡¯t hear but just barely felt from the vibrations of the air around you, and it was powerful, powerful enough to send a shiver down my spine. Just trying to pin down what I was tasting, to conceptualise it in something I could relate to proved to be difficult, as there were countless tastes all overlapping at the edge of my perception.


    ¡°Wow.¡± I let out a soft gasp, my mind now trying to get a better grasp of the barely-there sensation. After a few more moments of standing there, staring into space and trying to make sense of something I barely even felt, having only noticed it thanks to Lenore, I shook my head and decided that I wasn¡¯t smart about it. With a few quick gestures, I formed a set of runes, relatively sloppy and casual, barely more than a focus for my Ice-Magic to create my throne. I could probably have done the same even without the runes, I had created the throne often enough to be used to it, but the runes reduced the strain.


    Sitting down, I started to ponder just how to go about things best. It wasn¡¯t as if I had dedicated magic to increase my perception, so I had to be creative about it, if only to trigger Mortal Hubris. My chosen field of study, at least in my mind, was Magic, as a general concept and force so investigating whatever that weird sensation was should qualify, certainly if I used a newly devised magical technique for it.


    Given that I was barely able to feel whatever it was, and I was perceiving magic by taste and smell, I decided to try to increase the size of my tongue, so to speak. Smell and taste were conducted better in moist air, which was why smelling the rain, or smelling cut grass after it had been rained was possible and often quite intense, and in many ways, the Mist I could create was moisture in the air.


    With that idea in mind, I started to let mist waft around me, forming into a dense cloud still tightly connected to my mind and on a hunch, I channelled Concealment towards the outside of the cloud, not in an attempt to conceal me from outside observation, but the opposite, an attempt to conceal most of the outside from me, to allow me a greater focus on what I wanted to perceive.


    My final idea, before delving deeply into my perception, was to imbue the misty cloud around me with the runic concept of magic, as it was what I wanted to perceive and filter. Again, I had little idea if it would work, but just the concept felt about right.


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    With the giant cloud of mist wafting around me, I tried to tap into my connection to it, in an attempt to widen my perception, to channel whatever I was feeling, whatever magic was hitting the cloud towards myself, where I might be able to understand it. I could feel Lenore on my shoulder, her mind subtly joining with mine, experiencing what I was feeling, what I was picking up and helping me process it.


    For a few moments, we floundered around, grasping at a feeling that was simply out of range, when I had the idea to change the shape of the diffuse cloud around us, trying to form it into something akin to an ear or funnel, the outside lined with concealment to filter anything that wasn¡¯t coming from one direction. That change allowed Lenore and me to slowly move the open side of our funnel, trying to get a better idea just where the sensation was coming from, other than south. It helped a little, giving us an even wider range of perception, but even so, neither Lenore nor I could make heads or tails of what we were feeling.


    Joining our minds even tighter, we started to compare and contrast the sensations, looking for common ground in the things both of us perceived in our own frames of reference. What neither of us could achieve alone, we managed together, even if there was little we could actually do with the information, as even with the widened range of perception I gained with the mist around me, there was no way for us to filter the volume of magic we were being exposed to. It was akin to staring into a bright light and trying to filter the light hitting my eyes into a spectrum. Just that I was tasting the purple, while Lenore was seeing the sound, neither of us able to fully conceptualise the sensations.


    ¡°It has to be the wild magic covering the ruins of the ancient empire.¡± Lenore concluded, and I had to agree. We had heard about the WIld Magic that had consumed the Ancient Empire, leaving nothing but the roads they had made, some saying the remnants had moved across the Ocean, to found the Human Empire. What remained on Aretia, was a massive scar on the land, destruction covering hundreds of square-kilometers, though curiously, the destruction wasn¡¯t centered on their base of power, but further to the south-west.


    Given our recent experiences with the Manticores, our plan was to stay well away from the place those murderous sky-lions had fled from, driven out by some other, likely even worse, monster.


    ¡°Do you want to try scrying things?¡± I asked, my curiosity not as easily smothered.


    For a few moments, Lenore hesitated before she agreed, though she insisted on keeping our mind anchored here and using a Mirror of Darkness, a construct much akin to a window that reflected the area around our scrying construct. It was an early version of the scrying-spell, reverse-engineered from a spell that used water to scry on a different place, and it added a layer of protection, something I appreciated especially after the troubles I had run into when meeting the Arachnids using a similar technique of remote projection.


    To add one more layer of protection, I used the mist we had already formed around us and reversed the concealment I had infused into it earlier, now longer trying to filter out the world around us, to allow greater focus, but now keeping us concealed from anything that might try to follow the magic we were using to scry.


    Finally, Lenore and I were confident in our protections and started to actually work on the scrying. First, we needed a construct to move and as always, our chosen shape was that of a raven, formed out of Shadow.


    Letting Lenore control the magic we had infused into the darkness, the raven took off, soaring into the darkness of the night, blending into its surroundings almost perfectly. It was a little too dark, darker than the black of the night, but there was nothing to be done about it.


    While Lenore was letting our magical sensor soar, I formed a secondary construct, pushing the link I had to the magic infused into the raven flow into it, allowing us to get a shadowy image of what we would see from the raven¡¯s perspective. It was similar to whatI had used when scrying underground, a blurry image in shades of black, but it was the best I could do, at least so far.


    Leaning back, I started into the dark shape in front of me, studying the land the raven was flying over.

 Chapter 515

    On my travels through Mundus, I had seen quite a diverse range of terrain, the frozen forests and tundras of the north, the windswept plains further south, the cragged, dusty mountains of the Turan Mountain Range and finally, the forested areas between the Turan and White-Mountains. All of them beautiful but at the same time realistic, only the creatures and some of the architecture giving away that it was a fantastical world. The closest to truly fantastical lands I had seen so far were the tunnels beneath the White Mountains, but that might just be because I had very little to compare it to.


    The area of Wild Magic Lenore and I were scouting out with our scrying construct changed that.


    It took us a while to cross the mundane terrain that kept us safe, the immaterial nature of the scrying construct allowing us to move it far quicker than even Lenore could move, if she pushed her flight with Wind Magic, but even so, we needed almost two hours to get there. The terrain we were flying over during that time was interesting in its own right, the forests slowly thinning, trees getting smaller and warped, almost as if we were moving up in altitude, until there was a stretch of grassland before we got into the weird area.


    The change was obvious, for more than one reason. The most obvious was that gradually, the image Lenore and I were creating through the window of Darkness, became colorful, instead of grayscale. Vibrant shades of green, deep earthy tones of brown, with pulsing shards of red interspersed, the colors appeared to be stronger and deeper than they normally were, almost as if I was seeing the world in high-definition compared to my normal sight.


    And it wasn¡¯t just the colors that changed, the terrain, too, was fundamentally altered. Rocks were sticking from the ground in sharp, jagged spikes, untouched by wind and weather, still looking like they would cut Lenore¡¯s feet if she tried to land on them. Nearby, the ground had swelled up, like a large wave breaking near the shore, only to freeze in that overhanging, unstable form, the grass growing on the underside of the overhang making it obvious that the wave had been there a while.


    In addition to the terrain, the vegetation was clearly affected as well, the plants moving in ways that were too deliberate and far too irregular to be naturally caused by wind, the swaying of the grass reminding me more of tentacles that were searching, reaching for prey that might stumble nearby. For a moment, I questioned if my mind was playing tricks, when Lenore directed our scrying towards a certain tree, that casually strolled along, its roots moving in and out of the ground in a manner that reminded my of the vines manifested by my Eisblumen-accessory.


    Its leaves shone with an emerald light in my vision, a stark contrast to the reddish brown of the bark, almost matching the color of dried blood. That color suddenly turned a lot more ominous when one of the branches suddenly shot forward, moving just like a spear would, stabbing into the ground before dragging some small critter up from underground, skewered on the branch. For a brief moment, the critter wiggled on the branch, before it was tossed towards the trunk and into a gaping maw that suddenly opened in the wood.


    ¡°What in the world?!¡± I asked, not quite sure what I was looking at. If I ignored the fact that the tree had suddenly grown a mouth, was obviously carnivorous and mobile, even if I ignored all that, the way the wood had been large enough to be larger than the tree was wide, akin to a snake unhinging its jaw. A part of me wanted to call it comically huge, but the casual ease with which it had swallowed that critter made me just a little queasy. It was easily large enough to fit a raven, or, for that matter, a person.


    Shaking my head, Lenore and I decided to look elsewhere and moved our scrying construct away from the walking tree, curious what other insanity was lurking in the area. For a few minutes, there was nothing that topped the moving tree, though a few shrubs looked like they weren¡¯t as placid and rooted to their location as one would expect them to be.


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    ¡°What¡¯s that?¡± Lenore asked, subtly changing the focus and for a moment, I wondered what we were looking at, before I realised that yes, that patch of dirt was casually floating in the sky. It didn¡¯t look like anything special, just a nice patch of damp-looking, somewhat spherical, brown topsoil, with brightly glowing, emerald grass on top that floated along like nobody''s business. Which it likely wasn¡¯t but I had certain expectations, one of which was that gravity was around to do its job. After all, it was somewhat important, holding everything together and all that.


    ¡°We should keep a bit of distance.¡± I suggested, staring at the small, floating island.


    ¡°You might be right.¡± Lenore agreed and we continued to move our sensor, when I noticed a bit of movement, almost on the edge of my field of vision. Shifting the focus, my eyes widened in horror, as a set of crystalline-looking projectiles sped towards me, too fast to react in any coherent way. My body started to evade by conditioned reflex, but by the time I had tumbled out of my throne, the crystals had long since pierced the sensor and continued on their merry way. Lenore changed the focus, kept the spell going, and traced the crystals back to their point of origin while I got back up, looking into our scrying construct with equal parts trepidation and curiosity.


    What I saw made me shudder, just a little. The monster had the general shape of a scorpion, but instead of normal, somewhat camouflage plates on its body, it appeared to be made wholly from grey, metallic-looking crystal, similar to the few it had shot through our construct. In addition to being made out of metal, the thing was the size of a bus, and not necessarily a small one. The pincers alone had the size of cars and getting caught in them, would undoubtedly allow the monster to bring its stinger to bear, and if I had been respectfully cautious of the Manticore-Stingers, the stinger on the scorpion was easily enough to make me afraid, even if it might be a case of size not really mattering and the poison being what sealed the deal. Not that it would need poison, not with a stinger that could simply smash me to pulp.


    For a moment, I noticed the stingers glow with an eerie, purplish-dark glow, so very familiar to the Darkness-Magic I used. There was a moment of realisation, the fact that my Astral Power always remained connected to me flashing in my mind. Having a connection between me, the construct and whatever magic a massive scorpion might wield was not something I was comfortable with. As the Mirror of Darkness Lenore and I had set up started to flicker, I dropped myself into the Astral River, letting its flow wash around me, the rapids in this place ripping my mind with them, just as I hoped they would. For a few, brief moments, I simply let myself get carried, the chaotic streams washing around me, some scorching, others battering me, pain washing through me, as I forcibly pushed out all Astral Power within me, all Astral Power that I was connected to, letting it mix and merge into the chaos around me. Hopefully, the mix would shatter any connection left, making it impossible to trace anything back to the core, me.


    Not trying to remain, I pushed myself back out of the Astral, my head feeling like it had been beaten with a hammer and I felt incredibly tired. For a moment, I simply lay there, not quite up to the task of even moving my body, or investigating why I was on the ground, before realising that the Throne was part of my Astral Power and thus purged away.


    Lenore landed on my shoulder, looked quite ruffled, as if she had been flying in a storm.


    ¡°Tomorrow, we should keep going like we did today. As fast as possible.¡± Lenore suggested, sounding just as shaken as I felt.


    ¡°Agreed. If that was just a random inhabitant, I don¡¯t want to meet the actually powerful inhabitants.¡± I admitted. Just knowing that some possibly random scorpion not only had the ability to strike at me, through a remote, magical construct but do so in the magic used to create said construct made me shiver. It either was a massive coincidence, or I had vastly underestimated just how dangerous the area was. Or maybe both.


    ¡°But we are not running away, just travelling towards our destination with great haste.¡± I laughed, remembering how Olivia insisted her magic wasn¡¯t for running away. No, we wouldn¡¯t run away. No matter how quickly we moved.

 Chapter 516

    After we spent a week, each day praying to Eleutheria and running for hours and hours afterwards, the distance we had covered was somewhat mind-boggling. Hundreds of kilometers, passing by multiple cities, two of which the others had entered for a night and to get some shopping done and countless other travellers, especially after the second day, when we passed a cross-road of the Ancient Road, our east-west track crossing one that was leading north-south, though I doubted that the southern direction received much traffic, as it was leading straight into the Wild Magic. On the other hand, the northern road was a main trade-route, connecting various kingdoms north of the White Mountains with the ocean and thus the world.


    One of the cities the others had checked, with me staying within my Hallow to make sure my penchant for attracting trouble wouldn¡¯t rear its ugly head had been Arranya, one of the port-cities on the Inner Sea. There, they had used the afternoon and evening to investigate options for our travel, Olivia and Adra talking to the locals, trying to figure out if the Daish Gate was really as dangerous to traverse as we had been told. The results promised little, as it sounded like the Daish Gate was truly impassable during the late fall and winter, unless you had the power to tussle with hundreds of sea-monsters, who all seemed to seasonally travel, moving up the coast during winter until they reached the northern seas. Why they migrated, and why they moved north in the winter and south in the summer, nobody knew but it sounded like scientific research was a lot more difficult, if the subject of your research was some twenty meters in length, had a foul temper and the ability to capsize most ships with their Water Magic.


    But, whatever I might think about the weirdness of sea-monster-migration, the route through the Daish Gate was impassable and nobody dared to even try getting through there. Not until spring set in, which would give us precious little time to travel across Arbotoma. Thus, our route would take us to Aletoma where we hopefully would find a sailor to take us past the Islands of Dead. It would give us more time, but the name didn¡¯t fill me with confidence, only with curiosity.


    Another thing we had seen on the road, at least in passing, were bandits, but for some reason absolutely unknown and certainly not due to our insane speed and the casual ease with which I had prevented their attempts at Observe-ing us, they didn¡¯t want anything to do with us fading into the brush as fast as they could. If not for the bother, I might have attempted to hunt them down, but there was little reason, we had no quests to hunt bandits, they were smart enough not to try attacking us and there was the possibility that it would annoy Olivia, thus costing us our improved speed.


    During the evenings, Lenore and I kept scouting, scrying and simply studying the environment around us, and I noticed a distinct change in levels of the surrounding creatures, the forests around Narristo somewhere around level eighty to a hundred and by the time we had reached Arranya, on the other side of the peninsula that contained the ruins of the Ancient Empire, the levels had dropped off to a mere twenty, before climbing back up.


    Now, with the Dorrian Mountains, the last hurdle keeping us off the Idorra-peninsula and, finally, the Oceans and Naga-cities, the beasts around us looked to be almost worth hunting, their levels ranging between seventy and ninety. Maybe, we would find something worth killing in the mountains, even if the only monsters with bounties on their head were undead. Apparently, there were countless old battlefields in those mountains, from a time when the Demons tried to cross the Daish Gate and take over Aretia, at times managing to take over the Idorra-peninsula in the process, before other races, under the leadership of the Valkyries, drove them back out. Centuries of warfare, dating back to time immemorial, before the Ancient Empire had ever existed, had left its marks on the land, and those marks, together with copious amounts of Astral Power, had left the mountains a rather interesting and dangerous place.


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    If we had travelled further north, something I had considered but it would have meant weeks of detour, Lenore and I could have walked the Valley of Death, a narrow, long canyon that was the only readily traversable route through the northern White Mountains, a place where, for thousands of years, people had killed each other. It was a natural choke-point, necessitating armies to force it, while allowing even small numbers of defenders to kill many times their number - though, at the same time, once the defense was broken, there was no quarter given, no mercy as the victors avenged their losses on the staunch defenders, inflicting as much pain as possible before their eventual passing. Those gruesome, brutal deaths, in turn, caused an even stronger defense during the next attack, slowly but surely poisoning the land with grief, pain and anger. In a land of Magic and Astral Power, those emotions had taken on a life of their own, ending the endless battle, both sides forced to defend their lands from the powerful, endless horde of undead, fueled by the countless years of battle. Alas, it was not to be.


    And it wasn¡¯t as if there wasn¡¯t enough pain and bloodshed to go around, ever since the Dorrian Mountains had become visible, there had been a faint, lingering trace of Blood in the air, whenever the wind was blowing into our faces, a soft, subtle, taste of death and decay.


    ¡°What do you think we¡¯ll find in those mountains?¡± I asked Lenore, the taste floating on the wind making me curious. So far, I had very little experience with undead, only those within the Barrow Den, quite possibly created by the Grandmother or simply under her watchful eye by natural processes.


    ¡°Not sure, but I think it¡¯ll be less dangerous than the White Mountains.¡± she suggested and I agreed with her. The White Mountains themselves had been quite harmless after all, it had been the aerial murder-pride, with their strong bond and ability to swoop down and tear us to pieces. Unless the local undead had some weird fraternity going, where you would be attacked by all undead if you harmed a single one, we would likely be alright. Especially if I focused on Darkness-Magic and its ability to counter and devour magic.


    ¡°Whatever it will be, I¡¯ll be able to have a feast. Even if I¡¯m a little worried that I¡¯ll tilt myself too far towards Death, my ability to wield and ride the wind suffering.¡± Lenore admitted, her reasoning obvious. While she could use local concentrations to prepare for a future divide, if she only used Death-Astral Power, the results of breaking through the divide would completely skew towards that element, meaning her ability to enhance her flight with magic wouldn¡¯t advance, maybe even atrophy.


    ¡°Maybe we can find some place where the bones of the dead have been exposed to the wind, the mountains should have some nicely windy places, right? One of the mountain-tops might have some place like that, where the ceaseless storm has imbued the bones of the dead.¡± I suggested, the idea sounding logical to me. If an army had been encircled, trying to retreat upwards, using the high-ground for a last stand would make sense and if there was enough hate, their foes would simply leave them there, exposed to the elements.


    ¡°We should keep an eye out.¡± she agreed, sounding quite intrigued. We would need a lot of work to make up the levels needed to cross the next divide and unless we ran into multiple dungeons, it was unlikely that we¡¯d get there during the beta but that was no reason not to try. Especially as even just preparing granted nice benefits, just like it had been a massive benefit, though a detriment at the same time, when I had used the Eternal Ice beneath the glacier and stained my soul with it.


    ¡°There are the others.¡± Lenore told me, my focus following her mental direction, taking in what she was seeing. The others had been in a nearby town, I had forgotten its name, trying to see if there were quests for our crossing of the Dorian Mountains. Hopefully, there would be and if not, maybe some information on interesting, or simply dangerous areas within the mountains. Thankfully, Olivia¡¯s magic had spared us weeks of traveling through the low-level area we had traversed and now, I wanted to gain some new levels. The White Mountains had been a bit of a bust in that regard, the only worthwhile prey the Manticores, which had been a little too annoying to be worth it. And dangerous.


    Hopefully, the Undead of the Dorian Mountains would be more interesting.

 Chapter 517

    ¡°Welcome back.¡± I greeted the others, after pushing myself out of my Hallow. ¡°What did you find out?¡± I asked, after giving Sigmir a hug.


    ¡°We received a quest, but it¡¯s a weird one.¡± she replied, while Olivia and Adra simply nodded in agreement. As she said so, a blue window popped up, sharing the quest with me and I, too, had to nod my agreement after reading it. The quest itself was rated at an easy difficulty and the rewards were practically non-existent, a pay-out of a single silver per hundred destroyed undead. There wasn¡¯t even a promising non-cash reward and it took me a moment before I realized why anyone would take on such a quest, namely that monsters killed in the pursuit of quests didn¡¯t suffer from the experience penalty suffered when killing the same type of monster over and over again.


    ¡°It¡¯s just to avoid the penalty?¡± I asked, a small, private part of my mind trying to wrap itself around NPCs actively exploiting the systems put in place as part of the game. I could easily accept players doing their best to find and use loopholes to meta-game but somehow I hadn¡¯t expected the natives to do the same. One more piece of evidence for the sapience of the natives, something I had emotionally accepted shortly after meeting Sigmir while the pile of pure, rational evidence was growing too large to ignore for my rational mind. But what that meant, in terms of ethics and morality, I wasn¡¯t quite certain.


    ¡°Yeah, from what we¡¯ve heard, the experience-gain traveling through the mountains would be utterly abysmal otherwise. They give out those quests to encourage the destruction of Undead in the mountains, to keep their numbers down.¡± Sigmir explained, and I could only shake my head in wonder.


    ¡°Is there anything special you can do to deal with the Undead?¡± I now addressed Olivia, to make sure our roles were planned-out once we marched into the mountains. I remembered that some divine spell-casters had abilities tailor-made to smite and destroy undead, I simply didn¡¯t know if Olivia had access to those, maybe some sort of spell that facilitated travel towards the underworld for departed souls, something along those lines might fit the Travel- and Freedom-portfolio she occupied.


    ¡°No, I¡¯m afraid not, that is the domain of Hades. It will be on you, to send those unfortunate beings on their way.¡± she shook her head, making me nod in acceptance. Sadly, that meant our set-up to deal with some forms of undead, especially armored skeletons like those we had fought back in the Barrow Den was quite bad.


    Adra used piercing weapons exclusively, trying to poke holes into the enemies vital organs, something in short supply when it came to undead. Destroying the flesh of a zombie did help to slow them down, but unless her attacks hit and destroyed the joints of a skeleton, her arrows would simply go through one.


    Similarly, Rai focused on swift, light attacks, trying to accumulate damage unless there was an opening to deal a singular, critical hit that would either kill or cripple the enemy. Undead simply didn¡¯t care for the pain he could inflict, their endurance, the stuff of legends. I would have to try teaching him a variant of my devour-magic combination, maybe something that channeled through his blades in an effort to slash the magic animating the undead. That might be the most suitable way to give him something to deal lasting damage.


    ¡°Adra, any chance you can switch to supporting us, alongside Olivia? I¡¯m not sure how much your attacks will do otherwise.¡± I suggested getting a pensive look and a nod in response.


    ¡°I¡¯ve got an idea of my own.¡± Lenore added, speaking within my mind. She also transmitted her idea, a replacement for two of the items I had destroyed during our travels. Back near we had destroyed the staff set with the Crystal of the Northern Wind I had received from the wolves and just recently, when fighting against the Manticores, I had destroyed my Weaver¡¯s Fury, a loss that still stung somewhat. Lenore¡¯s solution was to use the crystal as a center-piece, binding together a set of flying shuttles with a central focus, something worn on my head, near her Hallow, so she could try channeling her own powers into the shuttles. The problem with them had been limited force, Ice-Magic not suited to imbue them with great speed and even less suited when it came to maneuverability. That left their weight as the only metric we could manipulate, decreasing their maneuverability even further, at which point I was better off simply conjuring Icicles and launching them at my foe, especially when I used the Shatter-Concept to increase their damage after the initial impact. Adding Lenore¡¯s Wind-Magic to the mix would mean the maneuverability would increase by orders of magnitude, as would their speed, allowing us to use them to harass and harry, fulfilling their initial job again.


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    ¡°How could we create such a set? I mean, we¡¯d have to bind the flying Shuttles to the focus.item, so that they all gain the benefit of the Crystal.¡± I pondered the problem for a few moments, not seeing a solution.


    ¡°We¡¯d have to make them in the same process, in one breath, so to speak. One Mind, united in purpose.¡± she explained and it took me a moment to realize what she meant. If we used our Avatar-Form, we were capable of performing feats of magic far greater than either of us could on their own, as our minds and, to an extent, our powers joined together, forming something greater than the sum of its parts.


    ¡°It might work¡­¡± I allowed, before quickly warning the others that I wanted to try something out, asking them to keep any curious critters from disturbing me. Neither Lenore nor I had even the slightest idea just how large of an event we might cause, or if it would even work at all. We had our ideas, some vague hypotheses how those ideas might come into practical effect and now, we had to try it out. Experimenting, the root of all scientific progress.


    For once, the avatar-process manifested in a slow, careful manner, our minds slowly flowing together without hurry or haste. Joined together, we first created a seat, so we didn¡¯t need to stand while working. The Throne Morgana used for her pondering was reasonably well suited, even if it needed some adjustment to allow room for the wings, with additional support allowing them to rest easily. A flight of fancy prompted us to add some additional symbols, signifying that it was not Morgana who sat the throne, but the Raven¡¯s Shadow.


    Sitting, we let ourselves drop into the Astral River, curious about the difference in perception between the memories of our individual halves, each having a different view of how the Astral River manifested. For Morgana, it was a river, streams of power flowing just beneath a thin veneer of reality, while Lenore saw it akin to air-currents, flowing above the reality we normally saw. What was the truth behind either of our perceptions, neither of us knew, but the combination between the two was fascinating. Streams of power, unconcerned with gravity were flowing around us, creating a magnificent sight.


    Sadly, we didn¡¯t have time to marvel at the magnificence, we had work to do. Reaching out, spreading our wings, we connected to the streams of Power around us, drawing it in and using the power for our own purpose.


    Awash with power, we focused outwards, the Crystal of the Northern Wind floating before us, held aloft by the Astral Power we channeled, one of our wings turning into clear, icy crystal as the Astral Power from the river flooded through, barely contained by our will, the other turning airy and translucent, from the Wind Astral Power flowing through it.


    Neither of our halves could spare a lot of attention, the focus needed to channel the immense amounts of power we drew in was incredible, but there was just enough between the two of us to fulfill our purpose.


    The first thing we molded were blades of Ice, sharp and light, the wind flowing through them and sharpening their edges until they would rend the air itself, a set of nine, though each set of three could combine to form a greater whole, allowing us to wield three larger spears or nine smaller blades.


    Next, after a moment to gather even more power, we turned inwards for a moment, determining the shape of the focus needed. The answer, after brief contemplation, was obvious. To rule the frozen winds of the North, we would need a Crown of Ice, set with the Crystal of the Northern wind.


    Again, our power surged from our wings, enveloping the Crystal of the Northern wind in Ice, slowly compressing and hardening it, as it was molded by the ceaseless storm, until only the very core, the hardest and coldest essence of it all remained. Laughing, as the wind swelled around us, we placed the diadem on our head, crowing ourselves Queen of the Northern Wind.

 Chapter 518

    As smoothly as we had changed into our Avatar-form, the process to release it was still jarring and more than a little confusing. Some memories of the last hour were clear, almost as if they were my own, especially the mental process of constructing my Throne, others were blurry and fading quickly, like a half-remembered dream. There was a cold sensation on my brow and I remembered creating the focus Lenore had suggested, even if we never had specified the shape, with ideas ranging from a pendant, to an earring or helmet. Or even a crown, which was the shape the focus had ended up as.


    Or maybe calling it a diadem would be clearer, a simple circlet of crystal-clear Ice, shimmering slightly with both azure and silvery light, sized to perfectly fit on my head, sitting just above my brow. It even incorporated the feathers I had sprouted in my eyebrows after Lenore had crossed the second Divide, the circlet¡¯s decorations forming a pair of wings sitting just above my brow, holding the Crystal of the Northern Wind in it¡¯s center, right before my forehead. After making sure that Lenore had overcome the aftereffects of the Avatar-state as well, and was comfortably resting on my shoulder, watching what I was doing, I took a close look at the crown in my hands, activating Inspect to see what we had wrought.


    <table style="border-collapse: collapse; width: 100%" border="1">


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 97.4558%; text-align: center" colspan="2">Crown of the Northern Wind</td>


    </tr>


    <tr style="text-align: center">


    <td style="width: 20.2987%">Rarity</td>


    <td style="width: 77.1571%">Unique - Artifact</td>


    </tr>


    <tr style="text-align: center">


    <td style="width: 20.2987%">Type</td>


    <td style="width: 77.1571%">Headwear - Focus</td>


    </tr>


    <tr style="text-align: center">


    <td style="width: 20.2987%">Special Effect</td>


    <td style="width: 77.1571%">Imbued - Due to the process used for the creation of this Focus, it is strongly in tune with the Ice- and Wind-Magic of the Raven¡¯s Shadow. Ice- and Wind-Magic channeled through the focus cost 30% less.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr style="text-align: center">


    <td style="width: 20.2987%">Special Effect</td>


    <td style="width: 77.1571%">Blades of the North Wind - The nine Blades of the Northern Wind can be controlled by channeling Astral Power through this focus</td>


    </tr>


    <tr style="text-align: center">


    <td style="width: 20.2987%">Special Effect</td>


    <td style="width: 77.1571%">Spell Weaver - When this focus is used to channel Astral Power into Ice- or Wind-Spells, the effect of those spells is increased.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 97.4558%; text-align: center" colspan="2">A Crown of Eternal Ice, fit for a Queen. Only the most powerful of beings can claim Dominion over a primal force. This Crown was created with the intent to do so by a Mortal, but is that claim Hubris or Confidence? Only time will tell.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    Blinking for a moment, I wasn¡¯t quite certain what I was to think about the description, or the stats for that matter. There was no protection whatsoever, which was to be expected but in turn, the magical effects were rather impressive. The description on the other hand made me wonder if I was meddling in matters above my paygrade but what gave me pause was the gleeful anticipation welling up within me the moment I imagined doing so. That I had finally managed to create Eternal Ice was just the icing on the case, a thought that made me giggle, causing Lenore to look at me slightly confused.


    Queen of the Northern Wind, it sounded quite impressive, even if the title would only be applicable to Lenore and myself, together. There was a grin on my face when I reached out with my magic, channeling it through the Crown in order to take control of the Blades that were placed on the wings of my Throne. They obediently followed my mental commands, though the focus needed to control all nine of them was barely within my ability to handle. Letting them float in front of me, I looked them over.


    <table style="border-collapse: collapse; width: 100%" border="1">


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 97.4558%; text-align: center" colspan="2">Blades of the Northern Wind</td>


    </tr>


    <tr style="text-align: center">


    <td style="width: 20.2987%">Rarity</td>


    <td style="width: 77.1571%">Unique - Artifact</td>


    </tr>


    <tr style="text-align: center">


    <td style="width: 20.2987%">Base Damage</td>


    <td style="width: 77.1571%">17 Damage Piercing</td>


    </tr>


    <tr style="text-align: center">


    <td style="width: 20.2987%">Base Damage</td>


    <td style="width: 77.1571%">15 Damage Slashing</td>


    </tr>


    <tr style="text-align: center">


    <td style="width: 20.2987%">Strength Modifier</td>


    <td style="width: 77.1571%">none</td>


    </tr>


    <tr style="text-align: center">


    <td style="width: 20.2987%">Special Effect</td>


    <td style="width: 77.1571%">Imbued. Due to the process used for the creation of this weapon, it is strongly in tune with the Ice and Wind-Magic of the Raven¡¯s Shadow. 30% lower cost when wielded by their Magic.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr style="text-align: center">


    <td style="width: 20.2987%; text-align: center">Special Effect</td>


    <td style="width: 77.1571%; text-align: center">By Royal Command - When these Blades are controlled using the Crown of the Northern Wind, their performance is greatly increased</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


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    My earlier smile widened in size, the multiple bonus to the performance of my latest creation stacking up nicely. At least I hoped they stacked up in some way, with the Imbued-Effect taking effect on both ends when I channeled power through the Crown. I would have to try things out, especially to find out how the ¡®By Royal Command¡¯-Effect worked, as the blades would sadly be inferior to my old Weaver¡¯s Fury without it. Only marginally inferior, proving just how powerful of a support-effect the Nexus had provided back then, but still, inferior.


    A second glance wiped a part of the smile off my face, when I realized that the wording of Imbued had changed, from supporting my magic, to supporting the magic of the Raven¡¯s Shadow, the name of my Avatar-form. In some ways, I should have expected that as a consequence of creating them in that form but it annoyed me a little. Using the Avatar-Form was something neither Lenore nor I wanted to do lightly, due to the weight it placed on both of us and now, my previously go-to equipment essentially needed that form to perform at its peak.


    ¡°Those are some interesting effects.¡± Lenore said, using my own voice to do so. Hearing her that way was always a little weird, similar to listening to a recording of your voice, just with the added layer of creepy that came with knowing it wasn¡¯t you saying those words.


    ¡°Let¡¯s find out how good they are, at least the parts that I can use on my own.¡± I decided, reaching out with my Ice-Magic, setting the crown aside so I wouldn¡¯t be tempted to channel through it. The Blades floated, their performance similar to the performance of my old Weaver¡¯s Fury, but controlling the nine blades in a fluid manner was beyond me. Grouping the blades into mental formations that moved the same way, not shifting their position in regards to the other blades in the formation, it became easier, but not easy. I would have to see what would happen if Lenore channeled her own magic in conjunction with mine, maybe that would help.


    Taking the crown and setting it on my head, I tried again, carefully threading the magic through my brow and into the Crystal set as a centerpiece, immediately noticing that there was a slight roughness that I had never encountered before when using the Items I had formed from Ice. It wasn¡¯t sharp or jarring, only my focus allowing me to notice it at all, but it was there, likely due to the focus¡¯ attunement to my Avatar-Form.


    Regardless of that roughness, there was no additional effort involved when channeling Astral Power through the crown and the moment I let the blades move, I could tell the difference. There was a distinct silver glow within them, a thin trail of glittery mist remaining where they passed by, slowly drifting in a breeze that seemed to be caused by their passage. Trying to determine their actual power was difficult without hitting anything, but just from the way they moved, I got the feeling that the increase due to the crown was somewhere in the twenty, maybe thirty percent. Significant, but not game-changing.


    ¡°Let me help?¡± Lenore asked, to which I nodded, curious what she had in mind.


    As I was still moving the Blades, trying to get used to the mental strain, she hopped onto my shoulder and I felt her own power flow into the Crown, not trying to take control or assert influence, simply letting me wield the power she provided. The effect was immediate and obvious, azure light joining the silvery glow and the glittery mist moving with purpose in a stronger wind. Their movement changed, too, becoming faster, yet lighter, allowing me to control them as if the Blades had forgotten that inertia was a thing.


    ¡°Now, that, I would classify as a success.¡± I grinned, as the blades started to swirl around me in an orbit.


    ¡°How bad is the power-consumption?¡± Lenore asked, bringing my mind back from playing around with my new toy, to testing a new weapon that we wanted to use in combat.


    ¡°Manageable, at least if you take half the burden.¡± I replied, trying to get a better feel for the mix of power we were using. Without having the Weaver¡¯s Fury, it was hard to compare accurately, but by my best estimate, the Blades took slightly more power from me to use. Fine for most battles, but if I wanted to use them in a truly protracted fight, if the battle lasted for hours, the cost would add up. So far, there hadn¡¯t been such a fight, but the Weaver¡¯s Fury had been my go-to attack when feeling things out, something I could use with negligible cost and the Blades of the Northern Wind didn¡¯t fit that niche.


    Letting the Crown and Blades be for now, I took a glance into my log, curious about the skill-ups I had gained. My eyes widened when I saw a single skill-up in Ice-magic, bringing it to eighty-six, two in Astral Meditation, bringing it to fifty-three but a whopping seven skill-ups in the Enchanting-Skill, bringing it to twenty and making me curious why I hadn¡¯t gained Enchanting-skill for creating items from Hard-Ice before. A conundrum to be researched later, if at all.


    ¡°Well, they will be useful. Maybe not against the undead, but they will be useful.¡± I decided, bringing the blades back, letting three settle against my crown, using a tiny bit of brittle, normal Ice to make the connection, while sheathing the others in the sheaths originally prepared for the Weaver¡¯s Fury.

 Chapter 519

    There were many ways one might react to seeing Undead slowly shamble towards you. Showing fear or anger would be reasonable, a demonstration of grim resolve commendable. But bursting out in amused laughter, not even trying to hide the giggles that shook me, as I saw skeletons slowly move towards us, their eyes burn in unholy, green fire?


    Most would call me insane, just for that reaction.


    ¡°Are you alright?¡± Olivia asked, while Sigmir just rolled her eyes, obviously knowing the answer. She could feel the glee within me, as I watched the dry, dusty bones, held together by a vile mix of Life- and Death-Magic, with some other types thrown in for flavour, shamble up the path towards us, moving slow enough to allow even the elderly ample time to run away. On the flipside, the Skeletons would never get tired and unless you ran fast and far, they would get you¡­ eventually. But not us.


    ¡°If only we had more time.¡± I lamented, my hand rising up, as I started to etch runes into the air, a simple triangle of Dark Radiance, Magic and Devour, quickly drawn and even faster empowered, with a lingering channel that allowed me to keep the spell up. As the runic formation flashed with dim, purple unlight, a beam of darkness, eating away the dim light in the vicinity lanced out, striking the first skeleton, some fifty metres away from us, into the chest, washing over it for a brief moment, before my Darkness-Magic changed the trajectory of the beam, aiming at the next skeleton.


    The one struck remained upright for the briefest of moments, before the magic holding together the bones, binding the creature into a mockery of life fizzled out and gravity stepped up, reminding everyone that it was the law and not to be trifled with. We were too far away to hear the clatter of bones and by the time the bones had dropped, I had already targeted the third skeleton that was shambling up the narrow path, only to be reduced to clutter shortly after.


    ¡°Now, that¡¯s what I call super-effective.¡± I laughed when no more skeletons were visible, my eyes flickering to the log, checking the experience-gain. It was a pittance, their levels barely high enough to count, but it was better than nothing, especially given the casual way I had destroyed them.


    ¡°Anyway, let us continue.¡± I shook my head, looking over to Adra, ¡°If you find larger groups, I¡¯d love to get some additional EXP, as you can see, those things are easy, as long as I can attack from range and they don¡¯t have a swamp to hide in.¡±


    Adra didn¡¯t even bother replying audibly, simply nodding her head before pushing on, further up the Dorrian Mountains. Ever since we had moved into the area, Adra had turned quiet and subdued, the necrotic energies that had ravaged the land apparently depressing her. In a lot of ways, I could empathise, even without her affinity for Nature, the crippled and mutated trees were depressing. The trees were still alive, both of us could feel that, but at the same time, they looked very much dead, similar to the skeletons that wandered the area. The only more desolate area I had ever been to, had been during the second visit to Tegi, after the Devourer had sucked the life out of the area, but that had only been a relatively small, localised event, not spanning a whole mountain-range.


    Still, we had to get over it, literally, and for that, we had to keep moving. And if I was able to turn a few more, maybe a lot more, undead into just-dead, I was happy with it, doubly so if they gave some good EXP.


    ¡°I¡¯ll take a look from above, so far, we haven''t seen anything that was flying around, so I should be good.¡± Lenore decided, hopping out of her Hallow and into the air.


    ¡°Did you see what I did?¡± I asked Rai, deciding to push yet another lesson on him, even if this one was only theoretical. He had some training with the anti-magic from the Deadmire, near Clan Ashenforge, but I wanted him to get those tricks to the next level, so he would be able to quickly and easily deal with any undead foe, especially those who had an armour of rotten flesh, hiding and concealing the magic keeping them animated beneath.


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    ¡°I think so, Teacher.¡± He nodded and, on my prompting, formed a dark glow on his weapon. Normally, I would need Lenore to gauge just how effective his spellwork was, I couldn¡¯t lick the magic on his weapon after all and even smelling it was a little weird, but Darkness was one of my specialities and it was a spell I had taught him, so I knew how it should look and act. And he wasn¡¯t there just yet.


    ¡°You are making progress.¡± I admitted, the cohesion of his spellwork better than before, ¡°But you aren¡¯t there just yet. Try slicing this.¡± I ordered, casually creating an orb of Darkness, nothing but a small patch of concealment he could attack. The nasty part was, unless he was able to overpower the magic, as I had done with the Undead, he had to find and destroy the connections, literally cutting the spellwork apart. Relatively easy, if you could see the magic or if it was obvious, like the magical threads between the bones of a skeleton, but within a cloud of shapeless, featureless all-encompassing Darkness it was a lot harder. Which was why I made him train on it.


    We continued on our merry way, not even trying to avoid the few undead in our path, instead simply crushing them as we walked past. For skeletons, I didn¡¯t even bother with rune-magic, or even Darkness-magic, instead I tried something different, namely what would happen if a reasonably powerful Death-Sorceress starts messing with the necromantic magic keeping an Undead animated?


    The results were most curious, making me almost feel bad inside, even as I laughed. In the most simple terms, the Magic holding them together was akin to strings, and quite precise in nature, necessarily so. When I started tugging at the strings, I stretched them, sometimes even accidentally ripped them if I exerted too much force and once ripped, the effect was similar to the effect of a partial dispel, causing the limb that the magic was previously attaching to drop.


    With that discovery, I started to happily tug at different parts of the magic, even stopping to study more as I slowly took individual skeletons to pieces, trying to figure out where the magic originated and thus, where I could cause the most havoc. If I could find the core, a strong tug might simply rip all the threads, causing them to flop just like my dispel did, while also giving me skill-experience for my Death-magic. Destroying them with Darkness-magic was an old hat, not something that I learned something from.


    ¡°Lenore¡¯s coming back and she found something.¡± I told the others, when I felt my companion enter my range of perception, filled with eager anticipation. The others stopped, Adra looking over her shoulder to look at me, before focusing outwards again. Moments later, Lenore landed on my shoulder, spreading her wings for a moment.


    ¡°And?¡± I asked, speaking out loud, so the others could hear, too.


    ¡°You¡¯ll want to move up the mountain, not along the valley. If you head a little further east, it¡¯ll be a relatively easy climb, following a small brook and you can cross the ridge into the next valley and up yet another slope.¡± She said, copying my voice. At the same time, she let me see what she had seen, the way she advised us to take, and ultimately, why she thought it was a good idea. The next valley was relatively empty, crippled trees, sparse, grey shrubs and grass, nothing too inviting and the valley on the other side of it was where the party could start. Even from a distance, while flying high above, Lenore had been able to make out the unholy, green glow of undead, the corrupt mix of life and death that animated them and there were a lot of them filling that valley, hundreds, maybe thousands.


    All in a relatively small, steep valley, just right for some magical bombardement.


    ¡°Agreed, that should be good.¡± I added, already moving past Adra who looked a little confused. ¡°There are hundreds of undead ahead, I think our best bet would be to stay up, on the hill, with the four of you defending Lenore and me, while we make something magical happen.¡±


    Lenore happily hopped into her Hallow and we started to discuss the best way to blow up an entire valley, while giving the others a rough idea what we were moving into. While they weren¡¯t too happy about wading into combat with so many enemies, they did agree that striking from a distance and retreating as soon as things got too dicy, had the potential to give us massive amounts of EXP, something all of us, but Olivia, were interested in.

 Chapter 520

    ¡°Those are a LOT of undead.¡± I muttered, looking down into the valley Lenore had guided us to. The valley itself was unremarkable, sparse vegetation, many rocks and nothing that looked like thriving life. But then, given that there were countless figures, all with glowing, ghastly green flames in their eyes, a distinct lack of flesh and blood, all slowly shambling around in the valley, driven by some unknown desire or command, that lack of life became understandable.


    I could hear Adra swallow heavily, a sheen of sweat on her brow despite the cold wind flowing around us, high on the mountain-ridge and I had the distinct impression that Olivia was just a little green around her gills. But then, if I had to hazard a guess, there were some fifteen-hundred undead in the valley, stretched out over a mile or two and while individually, they were weak fodder, their sheer mass was¡­ impressive.


    ¡°Go with our plan?¡± Lenore asked, pushing herself out of her Hallow. Looking down, it was obvious that we wouldn¡¯t be able to use our Avatar-Form, not to start things out at least, the duration was simply too limited. No, we needed to do this slow, steady and with a massive ritual that would blanket the whole area, disrupting and destroying the Undead as efficiently as possible.


    ¡°Yeah.¡± I agreed, stepping back from the slope to clear a bit of space to work.


    After a deep breath, both for air and to raise my own tension, I started to work, raising my throne in practised motions and taking a seat, my newly created crown resting on my brow. Lenore hopped onto my shoulder, our minds rubbing against each other, as we moved into close communion, ready to do some serious magical heavy-lifting.


    The first step was simple, half Ice-Rune Magic, half Wind-Magic, channelled through the Crown of the Northern Wind, giving us a medium and a means to spread it. Sitting on the Throne, I used a curious feature I noticed in the Blades of the Northern Wind, namely their ability to channel Astral Power to draw Ice-runes. Wind-Runes might work, too, but as I didn¡¯t have the mastery and Lenore didn¡¯t work in runes just yet, we couldn¡¯t test it. But for the simple runes of Cold and Mist, it worked, the pair floating on either side above my Throne, forming a Rune-Triangle with Lenore and me as the third point.


    As we slowly, carefully channelled Astral Power into the formation, Mist started to billow out, driven forward by Lenore¡¯s Wind-Magic, joining seamlessly into my Rune-Magic thanks to the Crown, allowing us to create something new and interesting. But we weren¡¯t done just yet, it was merely the first step, the opening, so to speak. The mist would billow out driven forward by the wind and down by good, old physics, as heavy, dense things moved downwards.


    Done with that first step, we pushed the Magic-Formation into the back of our minds, letting it passively continue the slow drain of Astral Power from our massive reserve, giving us a continuous medium, to which we were still connected.


    And that connection was the basis for the second, the real step, a combination of Darkness- and Death-Magic, not even trying to destroy the undead, but only to disrupt and dispel them. Darkness was the Magic of Change and our idea was to Change the Death-Magic inherent to the Undead, using their very existence as their undoing, unbinding the force that held them together and letting them fizzle out, as their changed forms wouldn¡¯t function any longer.


    It was a bit of a reach, based on the fiddling I had done with the skeletons earlier but Lenore and I were reasonably certain that it would work. And if not, we could always turn around, run down the hill on the other side into the valley and escape that way. We had spent a couple hours, the entire afternoon, making sure that there was no unpleasant surprise waiting for us, ready to jump out just as we ran. Even now, Rai was keeping an eye on our avenue of escape, soon to be replaced with Adra, who¡¯s eyes were better suited to keeping watch.


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    ¡°I command them to fall!¡± I spoke, my voice soft, the words more directed at myself, as I started channelling Darkness-Magic, joining it with the Death-Magic channelled by Lenore. Sadly, we didn¡¯t have an item similar to the crown for Darkness- and Death, but that only meant we had to do the heavy lifting ourselves, our joined minds carefully guiding the caustic mix of Power into the Mist. The effect was most curious, what had been a white, billowing mist instantly turned darker before settling into a colour of bleached bone, dried and eroded away by the elements over countless years.


    Despite the cold wind, I could feel myself starting to sweat, the effort of pulling Astral Power from the Astral River and channelling it into the spellcasting slowly eating away at my stamina. Without the throne, I would likely have faltered under the heavy load, falling to my knees or even passing out. But just sitting on my Throne, in control and command over the Cold and Wind, it gave me the boost needed to keep going.


    Around us, the natural wind that swept the mountain-tops got drawn into our spellcasting, shifting ever so slightly as it danced around us, acting as a counterpoint to our spellcasting, the sound a soft, whistling dirge for the lost souls below. But they wouldn¡¯t have to endure for long, for I was coming to set them free, free from this mortal coil, from the endless, dark fate of wandering the valley, lost in the shadows of Death.


    Lenore and I could easily feel the moment our mist fell onto the first Undead, the chaotic power holding it together rebelling against the slow, seeping effect of our mist, getting eroded by its caustic nature, the delicate balance necessary to keep an Undead going disrupted. They didn¡¯t fall instantly, but there was an instant effect, their shambling movement even less secure and steady than it normally was. Normally, their march was slow but sure, inevitable like the march of seasons, but now, suddenly winter wasn¡¯t leaving to make way for spring, instead trying to hold on, until it could lead into fall again. Instead of moving the right leg forward, the right arm moved, instead of maintaining balance on it¡¯s skeletal feet, the skeleton was making a fist. Chaos, where normally order ruled, disruption where balance was needed.


    Normally, the first skeletons would have reached us within maybe ten minutes, as they made their way up the mountain-side, but now, some thirty minutes after our magic had reached the first skeleton, they hadn¡¯t managed to get half-way up the slope and the damage they were taking was slowly piling up. A minor disruption within the magic holding them together, but with each moment, with each disrupted and confounded command within their spellwork, the damage was mounting.


    Not mounting fast enough though, after about an hour, I could hear Sigmir let out an angry grunt, just before the shattering sound of bones assured me that the first skeleton had made it up the slope, only to get punted back down with prejudice. But, taking a moment and a tiny bit of focus, allowed me a quick peek, letting me realise that while the first had made it, that didn¡¯t mean an army was about to run us over. No, it was simply the first that had enough Endurance and Vitality to make it up the mountain, an outlier in toughness that had literally stepped over dozens, maybe hundreds of its brethren. Only to meet Sigmir¡¯s Lok¡¯Nar, with its silvered edge and bone-crushing force behind the swing.


    A quick scan of the mist told me that over half of the skeletons had already succumbed, the number rising slowly but steadily, just as the advance of our mist had been.


    ¡°What¡¯s that?¡± I asked Lenore to pull her mind out of the constant, deep focus necessary to keep the magic running at a high level. The short distraction would cost us Astral Power, as we couldn¡¯t replenish without full focus, but we had reserves, hopefully they¡¯d be enough. But the weird vortex that had formed in the middle of the valley, drawing in the mist we had created and even the wind, that required investigation.


    ¡°I¡¯m not certain.¡± she admitted, uncertainty colouring her mental voice.


    Before we could discuss the issue, the wind suddenly shifted, a burst of magic and wind blowing out of the valley, forcing away the mist and letting us see. Where before, there had been hundreds of skeletons, there was now only one, not much larger than those who had gone before, but the pressure it let off was on a different level.


    ¡°Ooops?¡± I muttered, looking at the massive monster and realising that it was staring right back at me.

 Chapter 521

    ¡°Lady Eleutheria, protect us!¡± Olivia¡¯s soft prayer broke the silence that had gripped us, right after the massive undead had formed. It was both, mundane plea for help and magical incantation, causing a golden light to settle around us, bolstering our courage against this dangerous foe. And a dangerous foe it was, the aura spreading around it, absorbing some of the Power still gathered in the valley made that obvious, and even without it, the suit of dark, dull plate-armour and the massive glaive from the same metal in its hand would have given it away.


    Rising from my throne, I mentally got ready to fight and not just bomb enemies from afar, quickly realising that running was not an option, not from this foe. In just the few seconds we had watched in stunned incomprehension, it had started to move and crossed half the distance between us, moving at speeds that would make an olympian sprinter consider if they really needed all that flesh or if skeleton was the way to run.


    ¡°Cover me.¡± Sigmir softly asked and I realised that our normal formation of Sigmir being up front, with Adra and Rai supporting her flanks wouldn¡¯t work, not in a situation where Adra had no real way to threaten our foe. Despite the situation, a happy grin spread on my face, any opportunity to help and support my love was a welcome one.


    Behind us, Adra started to softly chant her own magic, her casting speed a lot slower than Olivia¡¯s or mine, but at the end of the day, magic just wasn¡¯t her focus. Her spells would help, but her ability to impact the battle was greatly limited due to bad compatibility.


    In the few seconds we had before the skeleton could reach us, I placed a hand on Sigmir, quickly drawing a set of Blood Magic runes on her, using my own Blood to empower them even more. The connection between my blood and myself would fade, especially as I hadn¡¯t channelled Astral Power into it with Blood Magic, but it would take a bit of time.


    The skeleton was still completely focused on me, charging right ahead, the rough slope and uneven ground barely slowing it down. When it was a mere hundred metres away from us, a distance it would cover within a second or three, Sigmir let out a howl of anger, the crimson aura of her Rage settling around her, a soft, gentle echo of it springing up around me and I felt my own physical strength rise. Ylva, having rested next to Sigmir, joined the howl, her body swelling to her full size, her shoulders drawing level with Sigmir¡¯s and there was a hint of golden and red lights springing up around her, not quite forming into an aura as Sigmir had it, but there was something there.


    Surging forward, Sigmir and the skeleton clashed and for a moment, I was stunned. Sigmir had accelerated downwards, letting her reach top speed with a few steps, my own buffs, her own aura and the buffs from Olivia, all stacking up and empowering her even more, turning her into someone who could split mountains and cleave the sky. Well, almost. And yet, in the clash with the Undead, weapon striking weapon, she had been defeated, her own weapon smashed aside, leaving her open to a lethal follow-up strike by the Undead.


    In the briefest of moments, Lenore and I communicated over our connection and Astral Power flooded into the crown adorning my head, Wind and Ice mixing together to give us a blizzard of power, carrying forward the Blades of the Northern Wind. The trails they drew glittered with the light of the aurora, snowflakes forming in their way as the air around them froze. Guided by our combined will, driven by the need to defend my loved one, the blades struck, not even trying to destroy the undead but simply attacking its arms in an attempt to delay and deflect the Glaive, before it could strike Sigmir.


    At the same time, Rai stepped through the shadows, his goal similar to my own, flanking the undead and forcing it to deal with him, so it wouldn¡¯t be able to focus on Sigmir. His blades, the ominous shadows of Darkness-magic forming around them, hunted for an opening in the armour, a place where they could penetrate and cut the vulnerable magic beneath. Not that I had high hopes that he¡¯d be able to break apart the magic, the sheer volume radiating outwards made it nigh impossible.


    As my blades crashed against the armour, frost spreading around the joints of one arm and the wind carrying my attack pushing the massive figure off balance for a moment, I snuck in a quick Observe, curious what the skill would give me.


    <table>


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    Skeleton Lord - Level 156


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    </table>


    The blue box informing me was welcome, even if the news really weren¡¯t. It was one thing to clash with foes just above our level, but a beast that had almost fifty levels on us, with no surprise on our side and no obvious vulnerabilities that we could exploit? That was a challenge and thus, a danger. But what was it they said about a crisis being composed of danger and opportunity?


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    Sigmir and the undead clashed again, this time, Sigmir didn¡¯t even try to push things, instead simply using her axe to parry the glaive away and doding aside, letting it pass her by harmlessly. Still, she was being pushed and even with all the buffs heaped upon her, the undead was stronger and faster than she was. In the momentary opening after its strike had forced her aside, the undead didn¡¯t even try for a follow-up, allowing her to get a quick strike in as it suddenly moved, using the opening she had left to get past her. Charging right at me.


    Drawing back my flying Blades, I didn¡¯t even consider using my own, physical weapons to attack, I had my butterfly-blades in hand, but using them would be a last resort, and even then, only to parry.


    ¡°Avatar!¡± Lenore gasped, the single word conveying her idea over our mental connection, and we both pushed, not to enter a Hallow but to merge together into the Raven¡¯s Shadow. If it wanted to attack us, let it try.


    With a contemptuous caw, we spread our wings, soaring upwards, while the Blades of the Northern Wind, driven by our full power, struck against its armour, causing it to stumble. With utter contempt, we laughed at the undead on the ground, mocking it for its inability to fly, as our blades struck again, the frost on its armour thickening.


    Our laughter almost got stuck in our throat, when it, instead of chasing after us on the ground or attacking Sigmir, simply pointed its glaive at us and suddenly, a massive, crackling beam of deadly green energy shot out and only a quick, unceremonious drop got us out of the way. Unable to stabilise our fall, we dropped all the way to the ground, only desperate strikes and blocks with our Blades of the Northern Wind and the continuous attacks from Sigmir and Rai letting us dodge the follow-up attacks of the chasing undead.


    Abandoned was any thought of counter-attacking or trying to take advantage of openings, not with the way it recklessly went after us ignoring anything Sigmir and Rai were throwing at it. It was obvious that it would happily take any punishment we could dish out, if it could sink that glaive into our flesh in turn.


    Strike after strike came at us, forcing us further and further back, our wings helping with balance whenever necessary and allowing us to glide for brief moments, never long enough to motivate it pulling out those deadly beams of energy again. A few of our dodges hadn¡¯t been as fast and clean as necessary, leaving us with bleeding gashes all over our form, especially our wings had suffered some punishment, black feathers scattering around the area.


    But for every strike it had thrown at us, Sigmir and Rai were hacking into it, its complete focus on me leaving it wide open to them and they were striking with similar fervour. Adra and Olivia were doing their own part, golden shields springing up around me, only to be quickly shattered while the sparse vegetation around us was animated, trying to snare and trip the undead, only to be ripped to pieces by a casual exertion of its strength.


    Yet, it didn¡¯t look like they actually managed to damage it, its armour looking only slightly scuffed, despite the massive blows it had taken from Sigmir, one of them even ripping off its helmet, and even the strikes Rai had managed to sneak into gaps in the armour and into its exposed skull hadn¡¯t evoked a response.


    A sudden spark of realisation sprung up in our mind, and our magical perception sharpened for a moment, leaving a brief opening that the undead instantly capitalised on, adding yet another wound to our body. But the brief glimpse had been enough, allowing us to realise that it wasn¡¯t immortal, that it was taking damage constantly, each strike leaving a mark. Only that those marks were constantly regenerated with the power floating around the valley, our earlier magic, the magical remains of the numerous undead we had destroyed, it all lingered and was absorbed.


    ¡°That¡¯s our power!¡± Anger rose up within our mind, that thing wasn¡¯t just trying to kill us, it was stealing our power in an attempt to do so, the Astral Power we had used and even the power we had rightly won from its predecessors, that, too, was ours by right on conquest.


    The earlier spark of realisation provided a crystallisation-point, a nucleus around which our anger could coalesce, forming into a dense and hard matrix of vengeance. And from that matrix, an idea was born. If it wanted our power, if it wanted to absorb what was our, let it do so. We would gladly help.


    For once, instead of dodging, we took the strike, blinding pain ripping through our body as the glaive bit into our hip but in turn, we could strike. Wreathed by energy, Darkness- and Death-Magic crackling around our claw, we struck forward, our talons digging into the skull of our foe and with a loud shriek of outrage, we exerted our power, magical energies far outstripping any physical strength we might have. We even managed to pull on the lingering connection we maintained with all our Astral Power, allowing us to push from the inside of the monster, not just pull from the outside.


    For a moment, there was a balance, the undead trying to keep its head attached while we did our very best to take it for our own. Finally, something started to give, as the magical energies we had inserted managed to dig into the process we had aimed for, the absorption effect, and the skull came loose.


    Holding it, we laughed again, as we fed the absorption-effect all the power it could ever want, pushing it to drag in as much energy as it could, but at the same time, we changed what that energy would do, using it to funnel power into the skull. Not to maintain an undead monster, but to create something new. Something¡­ interesting.

 Chapter 522

    Just trying to breathe was a challenge and I didn¡¯t even try to rise from my kneeling position, the pain in my side making sure I knew that to be a very bad idea. Lenore was nearby, half-sprawled on the ground, her feathers ruffled and I could vaguely feel her exhaustion over our connection.


    Pushing past the headache, I realised that we had won, the skull still clutched in my hand was definitive proof of that.


    ¡°Love?!¡± Sigmir knelt next to me, one arm wrapping around me, carefully making sure that I wasn¡¯t about to collapse. At the same time, she was careful to keep myself still, to not aggravate the wound in my side further, obviously some of the damage having carried over from my Avatar-state.


    ¡°I¡¯m¡­¡± I tried to claim that I was fine but the lie died on my lips. Sigmir would know the truth anyway, trying to act tough with someone who literally had a window into your mind was a foolish idea.


    ¡°I will be fine.¡± I remanded my words, letting myself lean on her.


    ¡°You better!¡± she groused, giving me a squeeze. ¡°What happened? You suddenly dashed in, taking that glaive to the side, ripped that skeleton¡¯s head off and then things got weird.¡±


    For a moment, I tried to remember but the vague memories and blinding pain convinced me that it wasn¡¯t a wise approach.


    ¡°Weird? How?¡± I asked instead, trying to use her observation where my own were insufficient. Nearby, Ylva was carefully nosing Lenore, making sure that her avian friend was in an okay shape.


    ¡°You held up that skull and the whole valley was covered in a vortex. Then you collapsed and your Avatar shattered, leaving Lenore and you split apart.¡± she explained, leaving me almost as confused as before, though it prompted me to look at the skull again, this time actually looking, not just glancing in the general direction of my hand. If Sigmir hadn¡¯t been holding me, I might have stumbled from surprise. I was fairly certain that the undead had a simple skull of bone, with flames in its eye-sockets. Even in my faint and vague memories, the image of Sigmir playing golf with its helmet was vivid.


    But the skull in my hand was anything but ordinary or simple, instead of bone, it felt like some sort of crystal, slightly cold to the touch and glinting with a faint, dark lustre, reminiscent of polished stone, something like dark marble. And instead of flames flickering in its eyes, one was filled with a purple crystal, glowing with a dark, inner light, the other with a grey one, opaque like clouded glass. Holding it felt¡­ right, though I wasn¡¯t sure why. Before I could Inspect the skull, Olivia was next to me, quietly giving orders.


    ¡°Put down a blanket, that wound looks nasty, I need to do something, now!¡± she ordered Adra, before kneeling on my other side, opposite of Sigmir.


    ¡°You are still with us, good.¡± she muttered, sounding worried, ¡°Don¡¯t even try to use your own magic, I¡¯m pretty sure that glaive was cursed and you¡¯ll need some extra healing, or you might bleed out. I have no idea what your Blood Magic might do, if it interacts with the curse, it might exsanguinate you instantly.¡± she warned, before quickly speaking a prayer, causing a weird, warm sensation to well up in my side. I could feel the pain recede, though there was still a lingering wrongness that I hadn¡¯t quite noticed.


    An angry growl caught my attention, all eyes flickering to Ylva and I realised that Lenore¡¯s feathers were tainted with blood, welling up from a deep wound in her side.


    ¡°She has the same wound I have, adjusted for anatomy.¡± I reasoned, realising that we both were the Raven¡¯s Shadow, so both of us would remain wounded. ¡°Go, help her, I¡¯ll be fine.¡± I told Olivia, who gave me a quick nod, before ordering Sigmir to put me on the blanket Adra had set up next to us.


    ¡°Just breathe, calmly, quietly. Try to relax.¡± Sigmir gently told me, her bond filled with comfort, care and support, all conveyed with a lingering worry. Her voice managed to bring a smile to my face and I simply let my eyes fall closed, not trying to sleep but trying to let the tension drain from my body, so Olivia¡¯s magic could get me to a place where I could fix myself.


    Soon after, Lenore was placed on the blanket next to me, stabilised by Oliiva¡¯s magic but not cured yet, just like me. In the meantime, I had noticed that there was a faint draw from the skull I had been clutching, a soft, creeping drain on my health. Given that I was already wounded and losing HP despite Olivia¡¯s earlier stop-gap measure, I had quickly placed it aside, admonishing Sigmir to leave it alone and the drain had stopped the moment it left my hand. That, in turn, made me curious just what the Raven¡¯s Shadow had wrought there. Inspect gave me some answers, though I was still wondering.


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    <table style="width: 90.0442%">


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    <td style="text-align: center" colspan="11">Skull of Cursed Deliverance</td>


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    <td style="width: 13.0029%" colspan="10">Rarity </td>


    <td style="width: 88.0836%">Unique - Cursed Artefact</td>


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    <td style="width: 13.0029%" colspan="10">Type</td>


    <td style="width: 88.0836%">Focus


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    <tr>


    <td style="width: 13.0029%" colspan="10">Special Effect</td>


    <td style="width: 88.0836%"> Imbued - Due to the process used for the creation of this Focus, it is strongly in tune with the Death- and Darkness-Magic of the Raven¡¯s Shadow. Death- and Darkness-Magic channelled through the focus cost 30% less.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 13.0029%" colspan="10">Special Effect</td>


    <td style="width: 88.0836%">Unweaving - Spells channelled through this Focus that disrupt or destroy the Undead have an increased effect.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 13.0029%" colspan="10">Special Effect</td>


    <td style="width: 88.0836%">Death¡¯s Gaze - Channelling Astral Power into this Focus allows you to direct Death¡¯s Gaze, dealing damage to whatever is caught in it. Damage dependant on Death-Affinity of the wielder, bypassing many resistances.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 13.0029%" colspan="10">Special Effect</td>


    <td style="width: 88.0836%">Cursed - This focus is strongly attuned to Death, if the person holding it lacks in affinity, Death will claim them.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td style="text-align: center" colspan="11">Condensed from the lingering energy of hundreds of Undead, this Focus serves as a powerful implement to deliver anyone from the Realm of the Living, to the Realm of the Dead..</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    The description itself was interesting, to the point that I felt annoyed at being unable to actually use the thing properly. But other than that, I started to wonder just how powerful Death¡¯s Gaze was, or could be. Or how it worked, not that I was about to test things out, not easily at least.


    ¡°You infected me.¡± Lenore softly cawed, once more using my own voice. There was obvious strain in her voice, coming from the pain she had to be under, but at the same time, there was elation and mirth audible.


    ¡°What happened?¡± I asked, a small part of me worried at her words but the tone almost stopped those worries. Almost.


    Instead of replying verbally, she moved her head a little and a blue box appeared in my field of view, obviously shown to me by her.


    <table style="width: 90.0442%">


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 97.9845%">Trait gained</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 97.9845%">


    You gained the trait: Nevermore.


    </td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 97.9845%">Servants of Death carry mortal souls from the Realm of the Living, into the Realm of the Dead. You might become one of them and this trait is one step on that Road.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    For a moment, I had no idea what to say. My first impression was that it was huge, though the exact implications were a mystery to me. Just the mention of a major concept like Death was enough to bring awe, and the idea of becoming a direct servant was beyond my comprehension. There were myths of Ravens doing the described job, but those Ravens were direct servants of the Divine. If that applied here, Lenore had just taken a major step up.


    ¡°What does it do?¡± I asked, hoping that she had something more quantifiable to share.


    ¡°Not sure.¡± she admitted, and as I looked at the window again, I stumbled over the wording and used Inspect on the Skull again, my lips curling into a smile. The skull wasn¡¯t for me to use, it was an item that the Raven¡¯s Shadow had created for Lenore, just like the crown was mine.


    ¡°Take a look.¡± I prodded her, to take a look at the skull, while my own eyes flickered to my log. There were countless kills of Undead in there, ending with killing the Lord. Most of the undead gave no EXP at all, their level too minor, but just sheer numbers added up, the Lord bringing the kicker that gave me levels, two of them, bringing me to 110. That, in turn, meant my Intelligence went up by three, my Intuition by two automatically, while I also gained two assignable points, though I wasn¡¯t sure where to put them. Shaking my head, I decided to think about it later, once I wasn¡¯t in quite so much pain. In addition to the level, there were skill-increases in Darkness- and Death-Magic, no surprise there, bringing them to 65 and 22 respectively.


    An untranslatable caw brought my attention back to the outside, the sound vibrating with confusion and annoyance. Looking at Lenore, the impression I got was pure outrage.


    ¡°How am I supposed to wield that thing?!¡± she asked, my eyes moving from her, to the piece of equipment tailor-made for her. Only that it was almost as large as she was, much to my amusement.

 Chapter 523

    A painful twinge pulled my awareness back to my side, where Olivia was carefully healing me, or at least that was what I thought she was doing. The pain was contra-indicative of that, as Divine Healing was supposed to be painlessly perfect, a miracle of power that no mortal could ever mimic or something like that. Sadly, it looked like she had bugged Eleutheria once too often and was now on some sort of divine do-not-disturb list, because that healing seriously hurt.


    ¡°A little careful, please, that hurts.¡± I chided her, simply in too much pain to play tough and pretend I didn¡¯t hurt.


    ¡°The curse makes healing you difficult. I put up a stop-gap measure earlier, now I need to expunge it. That is what hurts.¡± she explained and I focused inwards, pushing past the pain because curses were inherently part of Darkness-Magic, so having an example to study was great. If only it wasn¡¯t on me, I¡¯d be utterly thrilled but that was the hand I had been dealt.


    Finding the curse, now that I was looking, was utterly trivial, creeping into my flesh from the wound cut into my side. The wound itself was painfully deep and might even have killed me without magical healing but manageable. Reaching out with my Blood Magic, I tried prodding the flesh a little, only to let out a pained gasp the moment my magic came into contact with the area, the curse welling up, wrapping around my magic and devouring it, surging in strength as it did. At the same time, I noticed my health-bar drop precipitously, blood spurting from my side to take me into uncomfortable territory. Not to the point of making me keel over instantly, but one or two more surges like that and I¡¯d be in trouble, respawning in a distant cave. That realisation brought up the reminder that I needed to get better at establishing base-points or maybe figure out if my Hallow within Lenore could somehow be declared my home, or I might find myself in trouble at some point.


    ¡°Don¡¯t prod it, it¡¯s bound to your magic. I warned you, didn¡¯t I?¡± Olivia grumbled, before continuing her chanting, now even more focused than earlier. Passively looking at the curse, I would have flushed if I had the blood to spare, realising that I had just made her work harder by feeding the curse additional magic.


    Instead of being an idiot and prodding the curse again, I mentally settled back, simply watching, observing how my body reacted and, more importantly, how it interacted with my magic. A curse that could prevent magical healing, even if only partially, sounded like a great ability to learn. So far, we had mostly avoided getting into fair fights with any sapient enemies, mostly using ambush, surprise and overwhelming force to make sure our enemies never had a chance to fight back but that wouldn¡¯t always work out. Hell, so far, we hadn¡¯t really faced enemies that used healing magic, the closest to that had been the Lycantroll near Carinthia, but a single healer managing to keep their people alive might be devastating.


    Another advantage of my intense focus was that the pain drifted into the back of my mind, no longer pressing as hard as it had, the headache even subsiding a little, probably because neither Lenore nor I tried to engage with the other.


    Over the next hour, I could watch Olivia switch between Lenore and me, using her magic to slowly drive the curse back and was able to make up something of an idea for the way it worked. I even had knowledge of the concepts and runes, to the point that I considered using it against the next applicable enemy in the future, simply to see if it worked.


    By my understanding, the Curse was in two parts, the first a combination of Blood, or maybe Flesh or something similar, and Devour, essentially a simple damage-effect that took some power and dealt damage to the afflicted enemy. But that was merely the boring part, the interesting part was the Curse-Effect that actually stuck, clinging to the Blood, or maybe Flesh, and feeding off the magic inherent to it. That feeding-off was essentially another part of a Devour-effect and it was that devour-effect that was the crux of it. It was strong enough to make the curse perpetual against a foe with enough magic in their body, unless you had the ability to draw your magic out of a living part of your body, something I couldn¡¯t do, just the idea made me shudder. It was akin to trying to draw your blood out of a part of your body, without using Blood Magic. I couldn¡¯t even conceptualise doing so, though I briefly considered the idea to drain all your magic, before using Blood Magic to overdraw it to the point that the body was devoid of magic. Painful, depending on the wound, lethal all by itself, but it might starve the curse. Possibly, maybe. Not that I wanted to try.


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    Outside magic directed at the flesh was drawn in, something as I could watch as the curse was slowly devouring the stop-gap measure Olivia had put into place, even the Divine Magic unable to actually withstand the curse, not while it was bound in my flesh. Once within the curse, it made sure that the wound couldn¡¯t heal by itself and any left-over power was dedicated to worsen it. Against a sufficiently powerful foe, it would be a perpetual wound, unhealable and killing them rapidly, unless they had the power to simply overpower the curse¡¯s ability to Devour magic and having enough left-over to deal with the super-charged effect, either by directly dispelling it or by out-healing it all. The Grandmother might be able to brute-force it but I wasn¡¯t certain. If it was on somebody else, she would be able to, but when directed at her, the curse would be attuned to her magic, raising the difficulty by an order of magnitude. No, she, too, would have to do what Olivia did, putting in a stop-gap measure to staunch the wound before slowly unravelling the curse.


    Finally, after an hour of pained waiting, Olivia let out a sigh and her magic swelled, the flow different from before, and healing magic flooded over my side, re-knitting my parted flesh and filling the gaps with a magical substitute that would slowly be absorbed as my body truly healed.


    ¡°We are done.¡± she announced, having finished with Lenore just earlier.


    ¡°Thank you.¡± I replied, feeling truly appreciative. Without her, I would be dead and Lenore would likely be, too, unless I had managed to pull the effect on her apart, while dying from my own wound. Not a nice way to go.


    ¡°What happened to the weapon it used? I¡¯d like to take a look.¡± I asked, trying to push myself up only to get stopped by Sigmir who had been hovering around me, especially after my mind had pulled back from reality to focus on the curse.


    ¡°It crumbled, just like the rest of it.¡± she told me, but the hand on my chest made it obvious that I wasn¡¯t going anywhere to check anything. With a frustrated sigh, mostly at the inability to figure out more about the curse by studying the weapon that had delivered it, I simply rested, letting myself slowly heal.


    ¡°Say, could you do that again? I could feel the bound souls fading, their existence returning to the Cycle, to be born anew some day, somewhere.¡± Olivia quietly asked me a while later, once I was cleared to sit up and have dinner. It had been decided we would camp here, the undead destroyed by the earlier attack and any nearby beings unlikely to investigate in the dark. I had to consider her question for a moment, would we be able to make a ritual like the earlier one again? That was easy, sure we could. But destroying the final boss, that was a more difficult question.


    ¡°No, we can¡¯t.¡± Lenore spoke up, stopping my considerations dead in their tracks, ¡°You forgot, we acted in Mortal Hubris.¡± she told me and I needed a moment to understand, but once I did, I shuddered a little. What we had done, devouring the power inherent to the souls and binding it in the Skull shouldn¡¯t have worked. Not with our current level and stats, hell, even the wound we had taken would be a lot worse if it hadn¡¯t happened in a moment of ¡®Research¡¯ as we tried to increase our knowledge by doing something possibly ill-advised. In that moment, Mortal Hubris allowed me to succeed, by boosting my attributes by fifty percent, giving me those massively increased attributes  that I normally wouldn¡¯t have.


    Trying to replicate it might work, as replication was an important part of research but I couldn¡¯t be sure and I wouldn¡¯t know until it was the moment of truth, which could very well kill me right after.


    ¡°No, she is right. I doubt we¡¯ll be able to do that again.¡± I admitted, a part of me crying at the amount of EXP we wouldn¡¯t get. Hell, if the quest-log of the system was right, we had earned sixteen silver for killing undead, equating to a grand total of sixteen hundred destroyed undead. Sure, the individual EXP was bad, the vast majority simply too low to give any, but still, two, almost three levels had been awarded for emptying the area, bringing me from some two-percent of level 108 to almost ninety percent of level 110.


    And we couldn¡¯t grind it, certainly not safely.


    Letting out the sad sigh of a gamer, unable to harvest the glorious EXP nearby, I got back to eating my stew and trying to come up with a way to safely dispose of the boss-level undead. If we could manage that, our power would soar.

 Interlude: Highlightreel VI

    A thin figure, clad in a dark robe, with a staff of twisted ebon-wood held aloft above its head stands, hands and staff shrouded in an aurora of green and purple energy, constantly circulating and twisting. With a hoarse cry, the figure brings down the staff, the energy unloading into the ground.


    A skeletal arm shoots out of the dry, cragged ground, the bony fingers scrabbling around for a few moments, before finding purchase. Nearby, more arms come out of the ground, almost in a grotesque parody of growing plants, shooting for the sun. The arms assert their undead strength, bestowed by necromantic magic, pulling the rest of their skeletal bodies from the ground, as they shamble to unlife, eyes aglow with green flames.


    Above the dim glow around a large group of shambling undead, slowly moving back and forth, performing a weird reenactment of fragments from hundreds, maybe thousands of different battles. There is little order in their performance but, as if guided by some outside force, some puppeteer masterfully pulling hundreds of strings, they never collide, never interfere with each other as they perform their macabre play.


    While the hoarse cry is still echoing between the walls, a still figure is surrounded by an aura of green and purple, dead flesh getting infused with fel magic, the cry getting louder until it reaches a crescendo and the magic dies away, if only for a moment. In the sudden silence, a strange sound, almost akin to a mix between sigh, groan and a deflating balloon is clearly audible and the still figure is no longer, its limbs twitching and shuddering.


    A group of warriors, clad in gleaming, metal armour marches through a gloomy darkness, their eyes aglow with dim, silver light. With each of their uniform steps, their long, metal spears strike the ground and their heavy, oaken shields strike against their armour, creating an echo to the relentless cadence of their march. In the middle of their formation, protected by walls of flesh and steel, march three figures in grey robes, their staves matching the spears around them in length, adding their own beats to the rhythm of war.


    Far above the undead, a shadow forms, massive, dark wings unfurl and a pair of shining, silver runes appear. In the light of the setting sun, clouds of billowing mist refract the light, creating a mirage-like effect as shadows fall across the countless undead and the mist starts to roll down the slope, quickly reaching the first of the shambling skeletons.


    The formerly dead, twitching figure begins to move, woodenly, almost as if there are too few threads to fully control the puppet but move, it does. Another, wordless cry echoes between the dark, damp stones and the control smoothes out somewhat and the dead body, mostly decayed, stands, its eyes filled with unholy fire. Streamers of Power surround the figure and around the decayed limbs, metal is forming, creating heavy, protective armour and within the figure¡¯s hand, a sword is forming, black and foreboding, the edge dripping with something foul.


    Moving skeletons freeze, their heads suddenly turning to all stare in a single direction. Out of the gloom, the line of warriors emerge, standing side to side, their shields forming a solid wall, while their spears stick out, giving that wall some thorns. Hidden behind them, the robed figures are chanting their voices echoing with otherworldly power. The warriors, standing ready to do battle, join in the chanting, the conviction in their voice making up for their lack of otherworldly power. As if to answer the challenge, the skeletons start moving towards the line of battle, dark power gathering around their limbs.


    The moment the drifting mist hits the first skeleton, they all react, moving towards the slope, even as the saps their energy, causing them to slowly stumble forwards, towards the shadowy wings far above.


    The black-armoured figure moves forward, causing soft sounds of rasping metal to follow its footsteps, while the robed figure follows behind. Around them, the forest seems to lose its vitality, grass wilting and leaves falling. Ahead of them, a massive bear notices their approach and starts rushing towards them, it¡¯s angry roars causing the trees around to shake.


    Rushing skeletons crash into braced spears and gleaming tips slide harmlessly past bone, never touching, but silver light around the spears corrodes the skeletons, causing bones to crack and movement falters. But the rushing skeletons know no fear and pain is merely a distant memory of their mortal days, long discarded as irrelevant. Without those impairments, they easily shamble over the bones of their fellow Undead, all in an attempt to circumvent the gleaming spears, bypass the protective shields and tear at the delicious flesh of the living, in an attempt to induct them into their undying horde.


    Skeletons crumble, as the cold mist erodes their limbs, bones scattering on the floor, even as their fellow undead shamble over them. Like waves crashing onto a beach, each wave pushing the water a little further ahead, the skeletons march on, desperately trying to get through the mist, up the slope and to that shadowy figure. One of the skeletons manages to make it out of the mist, only to be shattered by a tall, armoured figure, swinging a massive, double-bladed axe.


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    A beam of green energy arcs around the black-armoured figure, striking the charging bear, causing it to stumble for a moment, as the energy forms lingering patterns on the bear¡¯s skin, shining through the fur. Moving forward, to meet it¡¯s staggered foe, the armoured figure raises its sword, swinging down even as the bear swipes in retaliation. Blood scatters into the wilting grass, even as the armoured figure is swatted aside.


    The chanting voices reach a crescendo, the silver glow on the warriors in front of them explodes outwards, causing the skeletons to melt, the flames in their eyes snuffed out and their bones scattered on the ground. The warriors form a circle around the three robed figures who quickly start setting up their staves in a triangle, each figure taking one of the points, their chanting now less urgent but just as fervoured.


    The last skeleton falls to the mist and suddenly, wind starts to move the mist, causing it to swirl through the valley, revolving around a point in the middle. There, a figure starts to coalesce, bones forming from the dust in the air, shadows melting to become weapons and armour. The swirling wind stops, and unholy flames erupt from between the gaps of the armour, bringing the figure to a mockery of life and after a moment of pause, it starts to move, charging through the mist that seems to almost melt out of its way.


    Bear and armoured figure continue to exchange blows, the armour denting under the powerful swipes of the bear, even as the bear¡¯s fur is matted with blood, drawn from the strikes of the blades. But where the armoured figure is relentless, the damage shrugged off and exhaustion long forgotten, the bear is getting worn, blood loss, foul blade and fel magic all working together to sap its strength, weakening the proud guardian of the forest.


    Around the chanting figures, runes start to form, lines of power starting to connect the runes, driving back the surrounding darkness. From that darkness, more skeletons start to emerge, throwing themselves at the guarding warriors, skeletal hands forming into claws, even as gleaming metal shatters bone. Wave after wave, crashing against the solid wall of wood, metal and flesh.


    The charging, armoured figure gets staggered by soaring blades of ice, right before axe and glaive crash into each other in a single, brutal exchange. But instead of engaging it¡¯s  armoured foe, the undead side-steps the tall figure, taking a quick, glancing blow in the process, even as yet another figure manifests in its shadow, dark blades trying to find a gap in its armour. And even that figure gets ignored, the undead focused on a target further back. The undead¡¯s target, a crowned, avian figure, it¡¯s hands aglow with magic, steps back, escaping into the sky with cackling laughter, only to be forced back to the ground by deadly bolts of energy, shot from the undead¡¯s glaive.


    After another bolt of green, cursed energy strikes the weakened bear, the armoured undead wastes no time, burying its sword into the bear¡¯s skull, bringing it down. The robed figure, who had comfortably waited in the back, now moves forward, stepping up to the quickly perishing bear and dipping a finger into the warm blood that is flowing from deep wounds.


    The chanting ebbs and flows, the runes gathering more and more power, even as more and more undead charge into the light. Slowly, even the solid walls of flesh and steel get pushed back, forced inwards, but the warriors are holding the line, their protection impenetrable.


    The armoured undead swipes at the avian figure, only to get evaded again and again. The other figures try to bring down the undead, only to have their attacks glance off the armour, the cracks they cause quickly fading away and even if they manage to score a direct hit, the unholy flames undo the damage instantly. With a snarl, the avian moves forward, clawed hands gripping on the undead skull, even as the glaive buries itself into the avian¡¯s side. Magic corruscates around both figures, the avian¡¯s eyes aglow with power and in a heave of mundane and magical exertion, the avian manages to rip off the Undead¡¯s skull, holding it aloft and the air starts to swirl once more.


    Using the blood of its vanquished foe, the robed figure starts drawing runes onto the bear¡¯s fur, at times using an obsidian blade to cut into the flesh beneath. Behind them, the armoured undead keeps watch, silently waiting. Stepping back, holding their staff aloft once more, the robed figure starts chanting again, the magic now gathering around the bear¡¯s fallen body. And suddenly, the bear starts twitching again, only that there are fel flames burning away its eyes, mirroring its armoured killer.


    The three chanting figures raise their staves, the runes around them rising into the air to mirror. With a single, echoing voice, all of them call out a prayer, bringing down the power of their God as the robed figures bring down their staves, the runes following again, striking the ground with indomitable might, shaking the earth as they sink in. Around them, the air stills and above them, the gloomy sky breaks up, moon and stars shedding light onto them.


    The swirling air centres on the skull, held aloft by the avian figure and with each revolution, the wind seems to pick up, more and more power flowing into the skull, slowly turning it into crystal, even as two gems take form in the eye-sockets. Finally, once the air in the dry valley has cleared, all the gathered power is sucked into the skull, the avian drops to their knees, wings folding in obvious exhaustion and blood soaking their side.


    With cackling laughter, the robed figure directs their newest tool to lead the way, while the armoured undead follows behind, guarding their back.


    The exhausted warriors, together with the robed figures, take a knee, as they speak a prayer of gratitude to their deity, thanking them for the invested power that allowed them to vanquish their foe.


    The winged figure, skull still in hand, turns blurry, falling forward while their companions rush to them, in an attempt to stop their collapse.


    A world, covered in blue fire appears.


    Sometimes, even the dead have to walk on The Road to Purgatory.

 Chapter 524

    A wide smile stretched my lips, as I put the finishing touches on the latest addition of my arsenal. Making an item that wasn¡¯t recognised as one by the definitions of the system had been a bit of a challenge, but careful control of my Astral Power and a piece-by-piece approach had made it possible.


    My struggle had started soon after Olivia had cleared me for light activity, after the Skeleton Lord had tried to make me a half-elf by cutting off my lower half with its cursed weapon. At that point, Lenore had recovered to the point that she could try to move the skull we had created together and in her capable talons, it very much looked like a ferocious weapon, though there was that small problem with aiming. She could carry the skull, despite it being about half her size, but that didn¡¯t mean she was agile with it, or that she could actually aim it while carrying. Bird-Talons were great for many things, but aiming ranged attacks didn¡¯t appear to be one of them. Or maybe she just needed more training with a point-and-shoot weapon. Either way, she wanted a better solution, especially as it turned out to be impossible to take the skull into her Hallow. Why that was, I had no idea, I could take my items with me, but for reasons unknown, it didn¡¯t work for her. Maybe it was relative size, or relative mass or maybe some other obscure reason. It could be anything and we didn¡¯t have the means to change it.


    Carrying the skull in my magical bag came with its own problems, namely that there seemed to be a link between the bag and its owner, a link that carried the curse. Carrying it that way, I was constantly losing a small amount of HP, not enough to kill me but a constant annoyance.


    And that was where the idea of a staff came from, a tool that I could carry but the first iteration I made was similar to my other items, a staff that mirrored the effects of the skull but also carried its curse. Carrying it that way didn¡¯t work, obviously, so I had to try again, magically separating the staff and the skull. Or rather, make the staff in such a way that I could set the skull into it, safely secured, without making it part of the weapon.


    The answer to the conundrum was, in hindsight, quite obvious: Make it non-magical, without any of my Astral Power feeding into it. That was accomplished by creating a staff-head out of regular Ice, carefully molding it to tightly grip the skull, without interfering with Lenore¡¯s seat on top and her channeling of Astral Power. That head was then encapsulated in Hard Ice and placed above a fire, with me carefully keeping the Hard Ice from melting while the normal Ice within was less sturdy and got turned into water, dripping out of the mold. That task had been head-ache inducing, violating the laws of physics, even in such a gentle manner, was not something done casually.


    Filling that Hard-Ice mold with normal, ordinary water from one of our waterskins, procured from a nearby stream and letting the water freeze was trivial and once that was accomplished, I only had to carefully shatter the Hard Ice, turning it into gently falling Diamond Dust and I had my staff-head. Creating a sturdy staff of Ice, with a setting for the head, was easy as well and once the ordinary Ice of the head was shedding a little water, it quickly froze against the perpetually cold Hard Ice of my new staff and the bonding was complete. Lenore would have to use her Ice-Magic to keep the head from melting, but she was well capable of that trivial task.


    ¡°Do you like it?¡± I asked, as Lenore hopped onto the staff, cackling in delight.


    ¡°I love it.¡± she replied, and suddenly, an intertwined twin-beam of purple and bone-grey energy shot out, harmlessly striking the nearby rocks. ¡°Let¡¯s find some undead to blast!¡± she urged me, her wings flapping wildly. I had to laugh despite myself, the image of Lenore flapping about, like an excited crow with a new shiny was just too adorable, so completely different from her normally composed persona.


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    ¡°The Curse doesn¡¯t bother you?¡± I queried, filing that curious fact away, as the Skull and its curse were something I wanted to study in the future. The Curse on the destroyed weapon was something I thought usable and was reasonably confident I would be able to place it on an enemy, if an appropriate enemy came along. The only problem was that I had yet to figure out a good way to apply it from range, striking someone to apply it didn¡¯t seem to be the best method.


    Finding Undead in the general vicinity of our path wasn¡¯t too hard, there seemed to be the odd skeleton under every tree or brush, often completely inert unless a living being came too close, at which point they shambled to life, their long, bony fingers trying to tear into flesh.


    For the first skeleton we came across, that shambling didn¡¯t last long, Lenore let it get to its feet before a ray of energy struck it, Dark- and Death-energy washing over it and once the energy faded, the skeleton was gone. Not just the magic animating it, as I had done before, but even the bones were gone, leaving just a little bit of dust swirling away on the wind that constantly swept the mountains.


    ¡°Wow¡­¡± I muttered, slightly amazed at the effect. ¡°How much Astral Power did that take?¡± I asked the important question. Destroying trivial skeletons was one thing, and while turning them to dust had some major style-points, if that needed massive amounts of Power, it wasn¡¯t worthwhile.


    ¡°I already regenerated the power used.¡± Lenore replied and I let out a low whistle. That made the effect efficient, to the point that using it as a primary mode of attack would be worthwhile. That way, I could engage in a supportive fashion, most likely using Walls of Ice, maybe conjuring some sleet to coat the ground in a slick sheet of Ice, while Lenore did the blasting.


    ¡°Let¡¯s find a few more, I think I can do more with it.¡± Lenore told me, and I kept sniffing the air as we all continued on our path. Sadly, the entire mountainside smelled of Undead, making my own perception of magical effects relatively pointless.


    Nonetheless, we soon came across a few more, this time a group of three that rose from their positions around a smooth rock, as if they had used it as a table. Again, Lenore let them get up and, to add a little extra to the test, I instantly conjured up a sheet of Ice, using enough Astral Power to spread it from the tip of my shoes to the shambling undead some ten meters away from me. It took a boat-load of Astral Power, making it completely inefficient, but I wanted to see the performance.


    Lenore must have noticed the Ice and patiently waited for the first undead to try moving across it, its feet finding little purchase and I learned that the skeletons were quite flexible, this one could, in fact, do the splits without issue.


    ¡°This somewhat works.¡± I mumbled, when the Skull in my Staff flashed, only this time, there were no concentrated beams of Power, twining around each other until they struck a target. No, there was just a flash, Darkness and Death spreading away from the crystal eyes almost like the beam of a flashlight. But the flash did just as much as the earlier beam had done, the Undead simply gone, as was quite a bit of my conjured Ice. What really opened my eyes however, was that a tree some thirty meters away, had lost all its remaining leaves and had visibly withered to the point that I would have thought it dead for years.


    ¡°And this works, too.¡± Lenore crowed, audibly amused.


    ¡°It does indeed. How¡¯s the consumption?¡± I agreed, already trying to puzzle out the exact effect.


    ¡°Rather large, that short flash took almost fifty percent of my Power. It¡¯s seriously powerful though.¡± she boasted and I had to agree. Sure, destroying trees was trivial, plants had been the first test-subjects of my Death-Magic, but still, if the effect didn¡¯t lessen, that was a massive number of Undead. Not enough to start clearing valleys whole-sale, but enough to go and hunt down a few smaller groups, in the dozens or something like that. If my understanding of the effect wasn¡¯t wrong, we should be able to crush those without major foes appearing, especially if we used the Skull to do the crushing, the effect seemingly tailored to destroy undead, with a combination of Withering-Death and Dispelling-Darkness.


    There was a bit of a spring in my step, as we continued on our long journey west.

 Chapter 525

    As yet another skeleton fell to the ground, scattering into its parts, I had to smile. This one had been destroyed by Rai, who had taken to the anti-magic aspects like a duck to water and was now happily slicing through the magic animating skeletons and had even managed to convince Olivia to help him with training, learning to cut through the simplest of her divine protections. That he had managed to convince her was, in my eyes, quite amazing as she wasn¡¯t too fond of using her magic without true need but his arguments must have been good.


    Sadly, while we had destroyed another five-hundred skeletons in the four days we had been traveling, that had only amounted to a single level, the vast majority simply too frail and weak to give us any experience-points. On the other hand, I had gained a single point in Ice-Rune Mastery and two in Ice-Magic, mostly due to figuring out how to create frozen Constructs at range. In hindsight, it was annoyingly simple, at least the way I had stumbled across was. There might be other ways to accomplish the same task, mine was to create semi-permanent items and use those as focus. By creating the initial nucleus right next to me and making sure that it remained connected to my Astral Power, I could use formed Ice-Runes to trigger a near-instant effect, even at range. Or, in simple terms, the small, hand-sized chunk was moved into position with Ice-Magic and once there, I could channel a burst of Astral Power into it, turning it into a large, wall-sized obstruction or coat the ground in a sheet of solid Ice.


    More options to perform in a fight, especially as the destruction-aspect I was normally responsible for was easily covered by a gleefully cawing Lenore, sitting on her skull of skeleton-destroying doom, blasting undead left, right and centre. Of all the undead we had destroyed in the past days, she had the highest numbers, simply due to her ability to instantly shatter large groups of chaff, allowing Sigmir, Rai and, to a lesser degree, myself to clean up the rest. I did double-duty, corralling the undead together with Adra, her plant-manipulation combining with the newly figured out walls funnelling the undead into Sigmir¡¯s axe, where they were broken, physically. With that tactic, we had cleaned up four medium-sized groups of fifty to hundred-fifty undead each, the rest of the destroyed undead being kills of opportunity as we were wandering from group to group.


    ¡°We¡¯ll have to decide just how much time we want to spend in this area.¡± Adra reminded me, as we had crossed roughly half of the mountain-range, even with our rather slightly meandering course, going off track whenever Lenore noticed a nicely sized group of undead nearby.


    ¡°True. We could continue to gain power here, but I¡¯m not sure how worthwhile that¡¯ll be. Maybe if we had the ability to destroy the actually large groups, like that first one, but I¡¯m wary of having to face another Lord. That thing could easily have killed me, or any of us.¡± I admitted, shivering at the thought of the Lord and it¡¯s cursed glaive. Without Olivia, I¡¯d have been dead.


    ¡°While it pains me to leave the souls trapped here, I think we should continue our journey. You said your teacher gave you a task, one should respect their teachers, even if you disagree with them. And a Journey of Mastery is, traditionally, the road you have to travel to become a master.¡± Olivia threw in, giving me additional food for thought.


    And she was right, if it wasn¡¯t the beta, I¡¯d gladly take my time, grind the undead to dust, maybe even figure out a way to actually cleanse the area of them to the point that they wouldn¡¯t rise again but while the EXP would definitely be worthwhile, grinding for a higher level, without having a chance to enjoy that level due to the Beta ending would be foolish. No, continuing on would be the thing to do.


    ¡°Master, do you feel that, too?¡± Rai suddenly perked up, his eyes focused past a nearby mountain. For a moment, I was flabbergasted, not sure what he was referring to, even as I focused in the same direction, there appeared to be nothing there. I was about to ask what he meant, bewildered that he might have detected something I had overlooked, when I felt a distant twinge, a slight fluctuation in the world, right on the boundary between light and darkness, hidden deep within the shades of twilight. Now, I was even more amazed that he had noticed it at all, without knowing that there was something to look for and I realised that in this particular subject, my disciple might have passed me by, simply because he solely focused on manipulating and hiding within the shadows.


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    ¡°What do you think that is?¡± I asked, not sure what to make of the fluctuations.


    ¡°Don¡¯t know. But I want to find out.¡± he replied, before looking at each of the others in turn. , ¡°Could you all wait here? I want to go there, check it out.¡±, focusing on me, he added, ¡°Master, would you guard my back? We need to remain utterly hidden, so that I can observe them, without disturbing them.¡±


    ¡°You go ahead, I will follow behind with some distance.¡± I agreed, before turning to the others. Sigmir didn¡¯t look too happy, neither did Adra, but Olivia looked resigned.


    ¡°Can you please make camp? We should be back in the morning.¡± I asked them, pulling the shadows around me once they accepted.


    Nearby, Rai did very much the same but once again, I realised that his concealment was just as dense as mine, the Shadows surrounding him, covering him in a cloak of twilight that I could only perceive because I knew it was there, otherwise, noticing him would have been a serious challenge. Without exchanging any additional words, I followed him as we ghosted across the cragged landscape, moving just within the boundary of light and shadow, the twilight allowing us to move quickly and without hindrance from such mundane things as difficult terrain.


    With our mode of travel, it barely took any time at all, before I decided that I was close enough. The closer we got, the stronger a certain foreboding feeling in my gut became, making me uneasy about approaching further. After giving a curt nod to Rai, I moved to the side, floating onto the ridge so I could see further.


    While Rai moved past me, I settled in to watch, focusing on my senses in an attempt to get a better idea where Rai was and what he actually was after. Now, with the shorter distance, it was a lot easier to figure out what the fluctuations were and once I managed that, the uneasy feeling within my gut made perfect sense.


    There was a crag, maybe three, four metres across, in the land of the valley before us, physically there was nothing special about it that I could see from the distance, just another part of the desolate lands, but to my magical senses, there was more to it. The smell of magic in the air was pungent, the sweet, alluring scent of Darkness strong enough to be sickly, too strong for even me and mixed with so much more, with life, with death, with miasma and decay, a whole bouquet of magic that my senses could barely grasp. And from the crag, ghostly shades, barely visible in the dim light of the setting sun that filtered past the clouds, moved creeping across the land for a short distance, before vanishing back into the shadows, disappearing from my senses.


    I had no real idea what they were, my best explanation was that I was watching some sort of incorporeal Undead, ghosts, spectres or wraiths, whatever this particular version was called. And Rai, now quite some distance away from me, was heading straight into the centre of their lair, the deepest concentration of them all. I was about to move, to conjure up a magic-eating mist that should be highly effective against creatures that were nothing but shadows and magic, but Lenore spoke up, stopping me.


    ¡°Let him. You would hate it, if anyone were to stop you, just because an experiment of ours is a little risky.¡±


    Her warning rang true, I had taken risks most would deem insane, hell, I had died for one of my experiments and had been near-death more than once. If I stopped my disciple because I was worried, without even knowing what he had in mind, I would be a failure as a teacher. Letting out a deep sigh, I settled in, focusing on the spectres and on Rai, ready to spring into motion the moment it became necessary. At the same time, I felt a sense of pride well up within me, as my disciple started to step out of my shadow, making his own way and finding his own subjects to research. Hopefully, he would survive whatever he had in mind. Otherwise, I might have to go there myself, both to find whatever he was looking for and to avenge him by utterly destroying those spectres.

 Chapter 526

    Watching the spectres, while keeping an eye on Rai, was fascinating. At first, I had thought their movements were random, purely the product of chance and malignant intent to feed or something along those lines, certainly not part of something greater. But the longer I watched, the more their movement became predictable and I got the feeling that it wasn¡¯t just mindless creatures moving back and forth, that there was a certain pattern to it, a certain grace. Almost akin to a dance, only one without touching, without legs and certainly without music. Or maybe, I just couldn¡¯t hear the music.


    Closing my eyes, relying on Lenore to keep watch on my immediate surroundings, I focused on my smell and taste, as my tongue flickered out to taste the air again and again, looking for that ephemeral something that I thought had to be there. Magical creatures, for as much as I disliked undead, they certainly qualified, engaged in a dance, there had to be a magical component to it, I was almost certain. And there certainly was magic in the air, I had noticed it before, failed to properly parse the different scents and tastes in that overwhelming bouquet but now I was taking my time.


    As I was crouching there, I noticed that my fingers had taken to tapping out a rhythm on a small rock, a rhythm that somewhat correlated to the overall movement of the spectres. Their back and forth matched the ebb and swell of my tapping, at least if I didn¡¯t focus on my hand but let them move along the odd sensation I was tasting.


    ¡°I think the magic is binding them.¡± I told Lenore, sending the weird sensation I had noticed along with the thought, causing her to mentally still.


    ¡°There is certainly something. Can you take a look through my sight again?¡± she asked and I did as asked, opening my left eye, letting the right remain shut to allow full focus on that single sense. Even my smell and taste drifted into the background of my mind, as I fully focused on the patterns of magic Lenore could see. And there were patterns, not necessarily in the overall form, but in the brightness, for lack of a better descriptor.


    ¡°Fascinating.¡± she muttered, completely absorbed in the images we were seeing. A part of me wanted to start dancing on my own, to move along the pattern that held the wraiths in thrall, that caused their endless dance. I wanted to find a place of my own in their dance, even if I had a feeling that I didn¡¯t belong amongst the dead. At least not yet.


    Rai on the other hand lacked those compunctions, when I took another glance at him, I noticed that he had moved even closer, still hidden within the boundary of twilight, between the shadow of night and the light of day but his faint form was moving with the wraiths. His addition to the dance changed it in subtle ways, the forms becoming a little clearer, more regular, giving me a few more hints at that underlying order. The taste of the music became stronger and I found myself getting pulled in, watching their performance.


    When the clouds parted, just a little, the light of the moon shining down, giving the wraiths something more, a substance they had lacked before and as they gained substance, Rai seemed to be losing some of his. He became something different, something closer to the wraiths he was moving with, his form shifting between the indistinct realm of twilight and reality, only that in reality, his form kept some of the hazy qualities inherent to the twilight.


    That thought brought another with it, the realisation that Rai might be shifting into something in between, just like the Twilight was in between night and day, he became something between wraith and normal being. At least that was my assumption, I would have to wait until his dance ended and he returned, to take a close look at him, both on a physical and a magical level.


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    Lenore was quite fascinated with my assumptions, adding her own observations in an attempt to understand what we were watching. There were even moments in which a wraith seemed to be moving through Rai, interacting with him like an equal.


    I wasn¡¯t sure how Rai knew how to move and interact with them, but the longer I watched, the more obvious the pattern became. By the time he had moved with them for about an hour, I was almost certain I would be able to join in, to follow their dance, yet I remained where I was. Whatever was going on there, I didn¡¯t think it was for me, it was Rai who had noticed it, Rai who had joined in, it just wouldn¡¯t do for me to interrupt whatever their ritual was.


    Their dance continued through the night, the pattern of their movement constantly changing, but always within the same, rigid form. When the first rays of the sun started to creep across the distant ridges, the shadows started to change and shift, the twilight returning and the underlying form of their dance changing once more. In that change, Rai ceased to be part of their pattern, gracefully moving back into the twilight and ghosting away from their constant movement, making his way back to the ridge upon which I waited.


    Just before he reached me, I lost track of his form when he moved into the sun, his existence seemingly fading away. At the same time, I felt a vague disturbance a few metres away from me, whirling around, my magic primed and ready to be used only to watch his form fade back into my perception, not quite visible, not quite corporeal but definitely there.


    ¡°You succeeded, disciple?¡± I asked, desperately trying to hide just how disturbing the sensation was. He had managed to fade from my perception and I couldn¡¯t even put a finger on the method to do so, I had barely noticed him reappearing and I had trained him, so I should know his tricks and how to counter them. But I didn¡¯t know, not any longer. What if an enemy had similar tricks, ways to evade my detection to the point that I would only notice them the moment a blade pierced something vital? Pushing down the unpleasant sensation of vulnerability, I focused on him and made a mental note to work on my perception, both magical and mundane.


    ¡°I did, Teacher. I crossed the second Divide.¡± he reported and I could only nod in acceptance and compliment. Looking at him, I noticed that he seemed to have changed, that it was almost as if he had aged a few years, not physically, but there was something about him that made him feel older. The set of his mouth, a shadow in his eyes, they all made me more than a little concerned.


    ¡°Would you tell me about your experience?¡± I asked, knowing that it was something intensely personal, something only to be shared with those closest to you. I certainly wouldn¡¯t share the details about my Divides with Adra or Olivia and with Rai, only if I deemed it necessary to teach him. But I asked nevertheless, not only to assuage my curiosity, but also in concern as his teacher. He hesitated, but only for a moment, before nodding.


    ¡°I noticed the call of the shadows yesterday, but I didn¡¯t know what it was. When I saw the Shades, I felt their call, their request to dance.¡± he explained and I noticed that his fingers were tapping the rhythm I had noticed during the night against his leg.


    ¡°There was so much death here, so many lingering desires and regrets. The souls that imprinted those feelings on the land have long moved on, but their passing has tainted the land.¡±


    ¡°That crag, it was a mass-grave, only that the buried weren¡¯t always dead.¡± he softly added, a shudder racking his body and I felt the hairs in the back of my neck stand. That was a horrific way to go, dying in the crush of bodies, buried alive with your dead companions, slowly suffocating as their weight pressed the air from your lungs.


    Taking a deep breath, I pushed the mental images from my mind, focusing on the present, on my surroundings. Placing a hand on Rai¡¯s shoulder, I tried to give him some comfort and support, as I could see that he was much more affected by the experience.


    ¡°The dead will linger, but we will continue to move.¡± I assured him, before adding, ¡°But I hazard that the experience will always linger with you.¡±


    He nodded, closing his eyes for a moment, before replying. ¡°I know.¡± he paused, taking a deep breath, ¡°I think I managed to give them some relief, share some of their pain.¡±


    ¡°A burden shared, is a burden halved?¡± I asked, getting a shallow smile in return. He was obviously not ready to share platitudes but the way he appeared gave me hope that he¡¯d be okay.

 Chapter 527

    Finding the camp the other had made was easy enough, their living presence, the subtle movement and flickering of their fire sticking out in the dead environment like a sore thumb. When we returned, Adra instantly noticed that something had changed with Rai, that his shadow was a little less pronounced and that a small part of himself was always within the boundary of Twilight. I had asked about it, and it seemed that he could now find shadow, even under the light of the Sun, that there was always Darkness within the light. While his explanation made a bit of sense and I was able to follow his words, the implications inherent to it went against my own understanding. They were, fundamentally, grounded in a cyclical view of the world, the understanding that there was always a part of the counter-force within the original force, that Life and Death were but two sides of a coin.


    I could accept that he was thinking that way and I wasn¡¯t too disappointed that he was wrong, but it also meant I wouldn¡¯t be able to easily copy what he was doing, simply because he saw the world in a different manner.


    Adra¡¯s concern brought with it Olivia¡¯s interest and, in turn, made me realise that the changes caused by crossing the second Divide might be the equivalent of a Mind Magic effect. That realisation made me look closely, not trying to actually use my Mind Magic, which was inherently destructive thanks to the effects of the Dark Moon, but simply trying to observe.


    At first, there was little to see, or rather, understand. Any mental architecture, the interplay between the physical, the emergent and the spiritual was beyond complex, brain, mind and soul working in concert to create the being I knew as Rai. Thanks to Lenore, being right there and mirroring her own mind to mind, not quite slipping into the avatar-state and physically merging but riding right on the cusp, I could see the vague, nebulous construct of his soul, interwoven between his body and mind.


    Given that I had never even tried to deeply scan his, or any, mind, never got a feel for how it should look, spotting differences was next to impossible. There was nothing that stood out as wrong, only an organised web, vibrating with emotion, almost like the string of a violin.


    When Adra and Olivia began to question him, getting into the details of his experience, that calmness changed, the web beginning to vibrate with emotion and thought. Half-listening to their questions and his responses, I began to quietly parse what I was seeing, trying to filter what I thought were his true emotions and a possible interference by the wraiths trapped within that chasm. I didn¡¯t think I would be able, or should even try, to remove such influence, given that it was all tied up in the crossing of the second Divide but I wanted to know about the influences on him, and wanted him to know. It was one thing to be under the influence of a mind-altering effect and not knowing about it, a whole other thing to know about the effect, accept that it was there and be able to muster your will to deny it, if necessary. Or know about it, accept it, even revel in it, if you considered the effect pleasing.


    In this case, my lack of experience was hindering me but as I was watching, I could see a slight interference in the vibrations of his emotions, in the music of his soul. That interference dampened things, if only a little, taking away the sharper tones, the jarring, desperate sounds of terror, smoothing them out and leaving only reasonable fear in its wake. Instead of quivering in terror at the experience, he was able to speak with reason and respectful caution of it. Unless I completely missed the mark, always a possibility, crossing the second divide had given him either a large increase in his courage-attribute or it had simply made him resistant to fear.


    A small part of me wanted to push things, to see if I would be able to magically induce fear into him, but that would shift me from careful, passive observation to an active use of Mind Magic, bringing with it the madness and solitude of the Dark Moon. He might be resistant to that, too, but I wasn¡¯t about to attack his mind to find out.


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    Watching his mind and soul vibrate with his emotions, as he answered the questions, also gave me an interesting insight into his state in regards to those answers. For example, just from the sheer amplitude of emotions vibrating through his being as he told of the remnants bound in the grave, especially those that had been buried alive, it was obvious that he considered their fate worse than just dying. Given that it was part of his new class, and his previous combat-style, I was reasonably certain that he would lean even further into the deadly side of things, giving up on wounding or disabling for that single, absolutely lethal strike. A bringer of mercy, even if only it was only a clean and swift death.


    Prompted by Adra¡¯s questions, he even resigned to showing off his new skills. A wide smile sprung to my face, even as my careful scanning of his mind ended, interrupted by the sudden surge of action.


    The first thing he demonstrated was something I had already seen, the ability to teleport, even under the light of the sun. It was very much like his previous shadow-step, only that I was reasonably certain it suffered from increased cost and cooldown. Watching with Lenore in close, mental contact, I also noticed that there was a surge of power, transmitted through the faint boundary of twilight, that I might be able to interrupt, if I acted on reflex. It wasn¡¯t instant, only near-instant, the near being the crucial modifier. If one managed to interrupt him, I wasn¡¯t sure what would happen but doubted it would be good.


    The next thing he showed was an evolution of his ability to clad his weapon in magic-consuming Darkness, something I had taught him recently. The devouring aspect had been retained, but by his description, it also gained the ability to devour life, making it a thoroughly nasty enchantment. If he somehow managed to turn it into a curse, it would be very much akin to the ability of the Skeleton-Lord that I had been researching.


    His third major ability was something he called Wraith-Form. It allowed him to turn incorporeal, not only shifting into the shadows but truly incorporeal, avoiding the vast majority of attacks, slipping through solid matter, all that good stuff. He even demonstrated how he could slip through the earth, though he was admonished to be very careful with that, as fading into corporality while buried would be very unhealthy.


    The last, but certainly not least ability, was one that was almost unchanged from its previous incarnation, the ability to create short-duration shadow-clones, still indistinct and hazy, especially under the light of the sun, but that was less of a problem now, given that he, too, could turn into his indistinct and hazy wraith-form. In that way, he looked just like his clones and it became nigh impossible, even for me, to distinguish them, unless I used a boat-load of Astral Power to blanket the area, essentially overwhelming his ability to adapt.


    When he used them all in sequence, blurring into Wraith-Form, creating a bunch of clones to distract before switching position with one of the clones to attack from a blind-spot, I had to applaud, for the combination was thoroughly lethal. The way he was now, I had my doubts I would be able to fight him, even with Lenore on my side. He was simply too slippery to avoid, difficult to detect and the ominous glow of his enchanted blades made their lethality obvious to me. In terms of simply killing a single target, especially one that wasn¡¯t heavily armoured, he was now the best in our group.


    It was a little amusing to watch Adra, who seemed just a little miffed at the development. Or maybe envious, would be a better word. She had been stronger than him, we all had been, but time and sharing risks at our side had allowed him to truly catch up and overtake her. From her demeanour, I could see that she would be looking for a way to cross the second Divide, though I wasn¡¯t quite sure how she could do so. The divides were dependent on perseverance, accumulated experience and a healthy dollop of luck.


    Hopefully, she, too, would find her way, but I wasn¡¯t all too optimistic, finding a source of living energy, one that could be harvested without drawing the ire of the Divine, would be challenging. Time would tell, and a small part of me relished the idea of challenging the Divine on their home-turf, even if rationality reminded me of the last time I had looked too deeply into their affairs.


    For now, we had skeletons to crush and miles to travel.

 Chapter 528

    With Rai having broken the second Divide, there naturally had to be testing. It was one thing to test his abilities outside of combat but a whole different question to use them in actual combat, even simple sparring was enough of a difference.


    And so, we decided on a second day of camping and rest, letting Rai try out some of his new tricks. Testing his weapon-enchantment was somewhat simple, Sigmir volunteered, with Olivia and myself standing ready to clean up any damage. The effect wasn¡¯t weak, causing necrosis around the wound but against an opponent of Sigmir¡¯s Vitality, it was nothing more than a nuisance. In addition, the ability to pierce magical shielding, like Olivia¡¯s barriers and even weaken the effect of conjured, physical obstacles, like my Ice Walls remained. It was difficult to compare just how strong the effect was, but for now, the assumption was strong enough, when he managed to shatter a ten centimeter thick wall of Ice. Breaking a similarly thick wall of Hard Ice took him a few strikes, but given that it took Sigmir just as long, if she used her red, empowering Aura, it was quite the feat.


    We even dared to do some very careful testing with his Wraith-Form and even his teleport, trying to see what happened if he ran into someone with the ability to disrupt the magic. Finding out the results of such disruption in the middle of combat was unadvisable, and so, simply in an exercise of caution, we went ahead.


    Even if I only disrupted his Wraith-Form, forcing him back into the physical world, he described it as being run over by a herd of deer, while getting knocked out of a very short range teleport was described as being struck by a bear. On a physical level, I was intrigued that the disruption caused bruises to form all over one side of his body, as if he had been subjected to a brutal, physical beating on that side, the side my disruption originated from. A part of me wanted to study more, but after we established the effect once, Rai was no longer willing to even test the effect.


    At the end of the day, we decided that just testing his abilities amongst us wasn¡¯t good enough, that we needed to find something that he could go wild on. With Lenore searching from the air, we quickly found a nicely sized group of undead, maybe some hundred-fifty that we could destroy.


    Unlike our previous efforts, we didn¡¯t start with a large-scale area-of-effect attack using Lenore¡¯s recently acquired skull, instead, I got the task of opening things up. Given that the undead were milling around on one of the slopes of a wide valley, we had approached from below, past experience giving us a good idea how close we could get before they would react to our presence. Just that, that they had a very distinct range of their response, and their almost binary modes of existence with an obvious switch from careless, idle movement to focused, aggressive and ready for battle made destroying them so much easier, at least for the weak undead.


    Staying outside their response-range, I conjured a sheet of Ice, covering the ground before liberally sprinkling it with Diamond Dust, creating a wonderfully slick and treacherous surface they would have to cross. In addition, I conjured up a couple walls, nothing fancy or overly sturdy, simply something Sigmir could use to cover her flanks.


    Those measures were taken before we ever ventured into their range, causing them to ignore me in their mindless state. Once our preparations were done, and a suitable battle-field prepared, we sat back and let Rai do his thing.


    It was quite fascinating to watch, Rai ghosting towards the milling skeletons, his passage barely disturbing the scattered dust, let alone the ground, almost invisible in the twilight. The skeletons had no chance, never noticing him, not until his blades struck, slipping between the disks of a spine, the magic coating his blades disrupting the magic animating the skeleton, causing it to crumble. For a moment, the skeletons froze and Rai moved into his Wraith-Form, slipping deeply into the boundary of twilight and moving some distance away, unseen, unheard. Maybe unremembered?


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    It was fascinating to watch the skeletons¡¯ reaction, the brief freeze, a minute of frantic searching, not venturing outside their range but moving within that range as quickly as their undead bodies could, searching for the disturbance, only to never find it. And return to their previous, slow and idle milling, almost as if they had already forgotten about the attack.


    ¡°If we ever decide to seriously work with undead, we need to make them better and smarter.¡± I mentioned to Lenore, using our mental connection. No need to tell anyone what I was contemplating.


    ¡°Yes, they seem a little¡­¡± she left it unsaid, disappointment creeping into her voice, ¡°But I don¡¯t think I¡¯ll be raising any undead in the future, I¡¯ve been experimenting with the Nevermore-trait, I¡¯m pretty sure it is similar to your Frozen Soul, increasing my affinity with Death-Magic but adding a limitation. In my case, the limitation is that my Death-Magic is utterly incompatible with the vital energy needed to raise the Undead.¡± she explained, sounding unsure if her conclusions were correct. I merely nodded, watching as Rai moved in for a second time, having circled the undead and given them a bit of time after returning to their idle state. Maybe he had also waited for his Astral Power to regenerate, or the cooldown of his Wraith-State to become available again.


    Twice more, he moved in, killing a single undead and moving back out, the undead reacting exactly the same each time. His movement changed a little during his attacks and I was reasonably certain that he was trying things out, a combination of distance and his concealment preventing me from perceiving the details of his actions.


    Finally, he decided that there was nothing more to gain by killing them off one by one, not against mindless undead. And so, after striking one more surprise-attack, he didn¡¯t ghost away, instead, he continued his attack, flowing from one strike into the next. Again, there was a moment of indecision on part of the skeletons, I could almost see the mental cogs grind within their heads, switching from idle movement to battle-mode. In that moment, Rai managed to finish his second attack, his blade slipping past the bones of yet another undead, striking into its chest and a brief burst of magic made me think he had channeled a brief burst of power through his blade, destroying the undead from the inside.


    And then, the fight was on.


    Rai was in the middle of undead, having deliberately moved there to test himself. Without another combatant in the fight, the undead focused on him, all of them. It looked almost comical, the surge of bones going towards their middle, creating a press of bodies while Rai used his superior speed to his advantage, slipping past their bodies, dealing swift and deadly strikes in passing  but it quickly became obvious that there was a time-limit on that tactic. By the time he had killed five more of them, the undead around him were too concentrated to easily move past, their bodies blocking his movement. All speed in the world wouldn¡¯t help him if there was nowhere to go.


    For a moment, he blurred, his form being replaced with one made of pure Astral Power that kept their attention for a second or three, before their attacks disrupted the shell he had left behind when teleporting away, sinking his blades into an undead at the edge of the crowd, slipping towards us as he retreated, the skeletons in hard pursuit.


    It was obvious that he could have simply continued running and at some point, they would return to their area and their idle state but that wasn¡¯t what we had planned. Instead, he moved towards us, gliding across the ice, and I could see that he was breathing hard, quite a bit of stamina and Astral Power spent as he moved behind Sigmir.


    ¡°I¡¯ll move out again, once they are engaged with you.¡± he explained, before shutting up and trying to regain as much of his breath as possible. In turn, Sigmir stepped forward, moving between the walls I had set up, ready action.


    The approach of the skeletons was almost comical, their fleshless feet unable to find purchase on the slick ice, causing them to slip, slide and tumble, any resemblance of order and intelligence gone. But as so often, sheer numbers won out and their undead nature allowed them to act in ways the living wouldn¡¯t easily consider, the initial group that had fallen simply spreading their bony forms across the ice, making themselves as wide as possible, while those behind them stepped over them, forming a bridge of bones towards us.


    Once again, I was fascinated by the intelligence they demonstrated in combat, the previous encirclement and this gambit showing that they were more than just mindless, in obvious contradiction to their previous, idle behavior.

 Chapter 529

    With Rai hiding, the attacking skeletons crashed into Sigmir, who was happily holding the line. Looking from behind, I almost had to laugh when Sigmir started to swing, timing her strikes in such a way to keep the Lok¡¯Nar move in a perpetual dance of destruction. The skeletons moved in and before they ever were in reach to strike at Sigmir¡¯s body, they were swept aside by her weapon, crushed by her incredible strength. For a moment, I lost myself in a fantasy of that fierce strength, only that it was not wielded to crush our enemies, but to hold me close.


    Shaking off those pleasant ideas, I focused on the battle-field, making sure that nothing came across the walls I had put up, and the few that tried, got destroyed by either Lenore, Adra or myself. Adra was the least efficient in that regard, simply due to the bad match, but her arrows could easily destroy them, she just wasted quite a bit of power doing so. Our purpose wasn¡¯t to actually destroy the undead, we were merely here to experiment and test.


    And that meant, once Rai had caught his breath, he moved back out, teleporting through the twilight so that he could conceal himself again and start striking at the back of the skeleton-group that was breaking against Sigmir.


    As more and more skeletons forced their way across the slick Ice I had prepared, the Ice started to crack and break, the shards acting as annoying caltrops for any living being, but skeletons were mostly immune to the cutting shards beneath their feet. No flesh to cut into, their bones strong enough to withstand the force their weight applied. To make sure that Sigmir would be able to keep them back, I stepped up behind her and carefully applied Blood Magic, channelled into regenerative and enhancing Runes, so I could take some of the strain from her body. She would still get tired, at some point, but with me replenishing her, that point was pushed back by a lot.


    Watching Rai work, his movements and tactics, I realised that I should attempt to train him in yet another discipline, or rather, that there was a technique I should explore and teach to him. The way he moved and worked, he was becoming the prototype assassin, the hidden killer, concealed within the shadows themselves, able to become a literal ghost until he needed to attack.


    That meant, the best way for him to affect combat was to attack and either disrupt or kill high-value back-line targets, people like Olivia and myself, with a lesser focus on people like Adra, when she was using her bow. To take out someone like Adra, he simply needed to be swift and sneaky, while being able to deal enough damage on that first attack, before she could attempt to escape. His weapon-enchantment was a good first step to make his strikes lethal and maybe, sticking with the idea of an assassin, we could find him some poison to use.


    On the other hand, people like Olivia and myself would have some sort of magical defence, something like the Eisblumen that could swat him away, or the Sanctuary Olivia had shown me before. Or some other method, an active defence similar to the potentially instant strikes of my Mind Magic, capable of stopping his attack at the speed of a thought. If he found a way to bypass such magical effects, to get a magical defense of his own, to off-set theirs, he would be a holy terror on the field of battle. An assassin, sneaking up on a spell-caster, able to cut through their defensive magic and immune to a last-second magical counter-attack? That sounded like something no healer on the battle-field wanted to think about, nor any mage. But it also sounded like an excellent ally to have.


    While I pondered, half-heartedly keeping an eye on the field of battle, Sigmir and Rai continued to demolish our attackers. They simply couldn¡¯t get past Sigmir and curiously, they didn¡¯t really try. Instead of trying to get across the walls, the absolute majority tried to get through Sigmir, despite their allies blocking the way. It was another display of their nonsensical nature, a single-minded focus on attacking the nearest, living target, instead of some tactical intelligence. Some turned around, if they noticed Rai, but those, too, were far and few between, quickly killed by him. The rest simply focused on Sigmir and almost waited their turn to get dispatched by her axe.


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    ¡°We never noticed just how strange they act.¡± Lenore muttered within my mind, watching the same, confusing behaviour I was.


    ¡°No, we always attacked them like we would approach intelligent beings, with a powerful strike to thin the herd, so to speak, before moving in as a group.¡± I shook my head at the sheer absurdity, the dissonance between the necessary intelligence to recognise the slick Ice as an obstacle and instantly apply the most direct, if simple, tactic to deal with it, while failing to recognise the walls as obstacles, simply because there was a convenient opening, with a living being ready to do battle guarding it.


    ¡°Rai?¡± I shouted, loud enough to be heard across the field, ¡°Are you still testing new things, or can we continue on?¡± I asked, as the slow battle a simple waste of time if he wasn¡¯t testing any longer. Moments later, as he vanished on the other side of the field, I noticed his teleporting approach, the repeated exposure allowing me to track him more readily.


    ¡°I think I¡¯ve got the basics down, I¡¯ll have to think and experiment to get more.¡± he replied, after stepping out of the shadows.


    ¡°Good.¡± I turned to Adra, ¡°You got anything you want to try?¡± When she shook her head, I nodded, giving a glance to Olivia, simply to make sure she wasn¡¯t about to test something before stepping to the wall, near Sigmir.


    ¡°The enchantments will fade in a few moments.¡± I warned her, just so she wasn¡¯t surprised by the sudden loss of strength and speed. When she gave a brief nod of acknowledgement, likely aware through our connection, I jumped up, easily landing on the Ice Wall. It was mine, and no matter how slick, I would never slip off it.


    Standing high above the skeletons below, they instantly noticed me and started to surge towards me, now recognising my existence as a target, just like they recognised Sigmir. Again, they demonstrated their weird mental processes, flooding against the wall and starting to form a ramp of bodies, kneeling so others could step onto their bony backs to get at me.


    Not that it truly mattered, not once Lenore landed on the staff I was holding out, the skull set within glowing with dark radiance and death. For a moment, I could smell the power in the air, strong enough to send a shiver down my spine, the amount of pure Death, the stillness and silence of the grave, wafting off the skull, conjoined with the comfortable scent of Darkness. After the power was gathered, it radiated outwards, the skeletons coming apart, getting swept away by Lenore¡¯s power, with nothing but piles of bones remaining.


    Once she was done, her power spent, Lenore hopped off the staff, flowing into her Hallow to recover. It would take her some time but given that all but five skeletons were crushed and those five looked quite battered, for undead skeletons, there wasn¡¯t a need for her to return to the field of battle.


    With the lowered number, Sigmir charged out for the first time, just as Rai was stepping through the shadows, reappearing behind one of the skeletons further back. Two quick stabs later, one with each blade, and the skeleton fell apart, while Sigmir¡¯s Lok¡¯Nar swept through the attempted parry of another, causing bones to break and scatter.


    Another of the skeletons suddenly exploded into shards of bone, an azure line leading back to Adra, who had used an overcharged arrow to deliver enough Wind-magic to blow it to pieces. It was incredibly inefficient, the entire strengthening effect her magic had on her arrows wasted but she didn¡¯t want to just laze around. Demonstrating proper efficiency, I used the Ice-Astral-Power I had used to conjure the walls and the slippery floor, turning them into a shower of razor-sharp icicles and shredding one of them, easily landing on the ground as it fell apart.


    The last skeleton was charged by Sigmir and Rai stepped through the shadows, appearing behind it and I wasn¡¯t quite sure who managed to end it. Rai¡¯s blades were within its skull, glowing with magic-devouring darkness, while Sigmir¡¯s Lok¡¯Nar had scattered everything below the skull. Either way, it was very thoroughly destroyed.


    I was just about to look through the event-log, just to check if there was anything out of the ordinary when Rai let out a gasp.


    ¡°We need to leave. Now!¡± he ordered, his voice sharp, fear and caution warring within. While I was curious, I wasn¡¯t about to ask, not with that kind of urgency and we all followed his order, booking it down-hill and away, as fast as we were able to run.

 Chapter 530

    As the joke went, we were not fleeing, we were rapidly advancing towards the rear. Or maybe we were running away, no shame in running away from an unknown threat, it was the way to preserve the lives of those around me. Even for me, dying would be a major hassle, setting me back a great deal, though I would come back.


    The scents floating on the wind, as we were moving, told me a great deal, yet nothing at all. I could taste that there was a powerful being coming, the scent of death and decay, of rot and the lingering emotions of life overpowering. But that scent was all around us, the whole mountains were filled with the stench of Undead, only now, it was amplified by orders of magnitude. With the pace Rai was going, I needed to channel Blood Magic to keep up and even then, I could feel my stamina slowly draining away.


    After running for about an hour, Rai slowed down from the earlier, frantic run to a fast walk, the rest of us following suit. Olivia and I started to try getting our breath back, barely cognisant of our surroundings, when Adra spoke up.


    ¡°What was that?¡± she asked, her voice subdued, as her head swiveled around, as if trying to find the source of the intimidating, magical pressure I was feeling. It was still there, almost like a wind blowing against my back, still urging me forward and sending shivers down my spine.


    ¡°I don¡¯t know.¡± Rai admitted, looking back as well, ¡°But I felt the dead around us shudder, as if a great predator was coming.¡± he shook his head, obviously not certain what to make of the feeling.


    ¡°There might be¡­¡± I muttered, trying to regain my breath, ¡°a reason why this region is the way it is.¡± Pushing myself upright, I brew in a deep breath, forcing myself to talk.


    ¡°If you kill too many undead at the same time, or if you aggravate too many of them, or by some other mechanism, you draw the ire of the powers that be and they attempt to do something about us.¡± I explained, getting worried looks in response.


    ¡°That might be so.¡± Olivia agreed, shrugging as she drew in a deep breath. In my mind, there was a certain amount of logic to it, both from a realistic viewpoint and from a gaming-viewpoint. Realistically, if a bunch of semi-high-level beings could clear off the undead, even if they needed a certain affinity to the task, the place would have been cleared out long ago, if only to provide the EXP people needed to increase their powers. That was assuming that there was a way to disable their respawn, or to harvest it, but even without such a way, I would think people would constantly and happily grind them up, yet, we hadn¡¯t seen anyone and that was with a quest that kept the EXP-reduction for repeated kills from occurring. Similarly, having a grinding-zone in a game was good, but only if there was a process that kept it from being monopolized, so having some boss, somewhere in the zone, that smacked people if they overdid their grinding made a certain amount of sense. It wasn¡¯t the solution I would have chosen, but I only played games, I didn¡¯t design them.


    ¡°Anyway, I think we¡¯ve overstayed our welcome.¡± I decided, a part of me longingly looking back, wishing that we¡¯d be able to grind some more. Yet, we had places to be and there would be more opportunities to gain EXP.


    Once we no longer deliberately looked for enemies, our traveling-speed got up to a better pace, even if Olivia wasn¡¯t using her magic to boost us again. She promised she would, but only once we left the dangerous area we were now in, which hopefully would only take a few more days.


    Overall, travel became both more and less interesting, due to the fact that we stopped hunting the undead. The encounters with the undead had been a nice way to break up the day, especially watching them crumble to dust from Lenore¡¯s blasts of Death-Magic or the way their bones scattered from hits by Sigmir, there was a certain visceral feeling to their destruction that was quite pleasing.


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    But, on the other hand, ever since we had felt that powerful force reach out, a few, more powerful, undead were coming after us, not at the level of the Skeleton Lord that had almost killed us, but powerful enough to make the encounters challenging. Part of the challenge about them came from a rather nasty trait of theirs, namely a near-total immunity to magic, a dark shell that I desperately tried to understand and copy swirling around them, shredding any magic I tried to lob through it, be it a ray of dispelling darkness or a singular, conjured Icicle.


    Curiously, that only affected magic projected at them, buffing Sigmir or Rai, or Rai and Adra using magic to empower their weapon-abilities worked just fine, only that sadly, I didn¡¯t have any real, non-magical weapons. The Blades of the Northern Wind, bound to the crown as they were, weren¡¯t something I was willing to test against their dark shell and while my Butterfly-Blades weren¡¯t key to my combat, using them would get me into melee with powerful undead, not a place where I wanted to be. No, for once, I was relegated to purely supportive functions, buffing up Sigmir and Rai, healing their wounds, things like that.


    And study that ability, to learn all about it, copy it and, if at all possible, break it and shove the broken shards down their throat.


    Their appearance did something else, it added a great deal to my personal conviction that there was an intelligent force directing the undead, or at least keeping an eye on them and directing those Skeleton Hunters, as they were called, against us.


    I couldn¡¯t think of any other explanation why a single, powerful undead would find and attack us, every day, one attack during the late hours of the morning, an hour before noon, and a second attack later during the day, about an hour before dusk. For three days, they kept that schedule, bringing us to ever-greater levels of paranoia, as their ability to precisely schedule their attacks meant they had the ability to track and strike at us at will, and the repeated attacks of singular opponents, all within a ten-level range, meant that they were deliberately sparing us, while making sure we knew that they could wipe us out, almost at will.


    Studying the dark shell every day was, in some ways, incredibly interesting, watching how their shell unraveled the spells we threw at it gave me all kinds of ideas. Were there ways to prevent that unraveling, maybe by binding the magic together more tightly? Would I be able to disrupt the shell by striking directly at the chaotic Astral Power that was swirling around the Undead to create the effect? Could I somehow mimic their ability?


    So many questions to which I wanted answers, and Rai oftentimes helped me trying to get them. His own ability to detect and disrupt magic were growing by the day, the Skeleton Hunters giving him good, powerful targets to flit around and stab into and his attacks gave me additional information, both from watching him attack and from his reports on the sensation.


    By the fourth day, I was wondering if we should attempt to remain in the area, simply so I could study that effect some more but when I dared to suggest so in the privacy of my own mind, Lenore was strongly opposed to the idea. When looking at it objectively, I had to agree but the siren¡¯s song of new knowledge was strong, especially as their shells were something I wanted to be able to overcome. An almost direct counter for every spellcaster reliant on direct attacks? For me, that meant the only ways I could use were weapon-attacks or using the environment to strike, which required the right kind of environment. I had, for example, no doubt that using Ice Magic to cause an avalanche if there was enough Ice in the area would crush one of them, simply because the momentum I instilled with magic wouldn¡¯t simply vanish, just because the magic did. I wanted to be able to get around those, if only to have a lethal surprise for any Travelers, who had figured that trick out, or gained it from their Class.


    Sadly, by the fifth day, when we left the Dorrian Mountains and their infestation of Undead behind, I was still trying to figure it out and had no doubt that I would continue to do so, until I stumbled across some other effect that caught my attention, at which point I¡¯d likely file the Anti-Magic Shell away for later research and try to figure something else out.


    All in all, the crossing of the Dorrian Mountains had been quite lucrative, Lenore had gained that incredibly powerful Skull-focus and I had gained some valuable experience, one of the last Skeleton Hunters raising my level to 112, and a few skill-points in Blood- and Darkness-Magic, raising them to 79 and 67 respectively.


    But the biggest winner of the whole ordeal was undoubtedly the happily teleporting and ghosting Rai.

 Chapter 531

    The terrain was slowly shifting, from the rough and largely desolate slopes of the Dorrian Mountains to gentle, rolling hills, covered in a couple of forests and large, almost steppe-like meadows. From our elevated position, we could make out a few farmsteads in the distance, the buildings surrounded by palisades and cultivated fields around those.


    ¡°Lenore, can you go up and look around, so we can find our way back to the Imperial Road?¡± I asked, knowing that there should be a town near the ancient road. We hadn¡¯t used the Ancient Road within the mountains, mostly due to the fact that it had been used for past invasions and part of it was now rather infamous for the amount of slaughter that had occurred there, making it a prime-location for undead. As such, we had made our way through the mountains on our own, scouting the path as we went and hunting undead on occasion. But now, we needed to get to town, to turn in our quest, get a few fresh supplies and maybe find out if there are tasks to increase our local reputation, so I would be able to board a ship to cross the ocean.


    ¡°You want to join us when going into town?¡± Olivia asked, looking at me with a raised eyebrow when I made my desire known. I could understand her surprise, as I had eschewed going into towns for weeks, to make sure I wouldn¡¯t be the cause of trouble. The decision was mostly because I wanted to be there when we turned in the undead-hunting quest, to receive the huge sum of twenty silver, a veritable pittance for the work we had to do for it. But at the end of the day, the Adventurer''s Guild had a limited budget and for an essentially unlimited quest like the undead hunting quest, that meant they had to keep the payout small.


    ¡°Indeed. If nothing else, I will have to get used to moving into towns, or crossing the ocean will be¡­¡± I paused, looking for the right word, before settling on a simple, ¡°difficult.¡±


    ¡°You could remain within your Hallow for the journey. Might keep us from getting into trouble.¡± Adra snarked, causing me to sigh. She wasn¡¯t entirely wrong and I had considered that approach, but at the end of the day, I wasn¡¯t willing to take a week-long break.


    ¡°I can¡¯t always shy away from contact, unless I want to retreat to some distant mountain-top and kill anyone who enters my domain.¡± I told them, getting nods in acceptance.


    ¡°You might want to cover the head of your staff with something less¡­¡± Rai reminded me that I was still carrying Lenore¡¯s Skull-Focus on my staff, the image rather ominous and not at all in line with my preferred perception, even if a certain intimidation-factor might be quite useful. I could move the


    ¡°Hmh, right.¡± I accepted, considering for a moment. The easiest solution was to simply cover the skull in Ice, at least if I managed to make the Ice cloudy enough to conceal what was within. I might look a little strange, carrying a staff with a big chunk of Ice at the head but a chunk of Ice was a lot less ominous than a slightly glowing humanoid skull. Acting on the thought, I conjured Ice, covering the skull, instantly noticing that it was slowly destroying the Ice and if I kept the magical connection to it, I was suffering damage through the connection.


    Grumbling to myself, I dispelled the Ice, making a note that Lenore needed to cover the skull, that way, she would be linked to the Ice and hopefully wouldn¡¯t suffer. Once more, I realized that, while a great weapon, the skull was a massive pain in the rear.


    It didn¡¯t take Lenore long to return, having found the town from the air. The images she shared with me were about what I had expected, though there was a rather obvious slant in their defenses, the wall on the eastern side, the side towards the mountains, much higher and five out of seven towers located on that side. Unless my guess was entirely false, there might be some sort of migration going on with the skeletons, though I didn¡¯t know what might motivate undead, that seemed to be very much content to just wander around in circles, to migrate.


    Sadly, as so often, the distance we had to cover on foot took us much longer than it had taken Lenore to find the town, so instead of the thirty minutes she had to fly, boosted with her magic, we had to walk for hours, moving up and down the hills.


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    During that walk, Lenore kept scouting ahead, once she had concealed the skull, with Adra and Rai keeping an eye on our surroundings. According to Olivia, the local beasts weren¡¯t a real problem, their levels and strength limited, but after getting hunted by the special skeletons for the last couple of days, there was a lingering feeling of paranoia, making all of us a little twitchy.


    While we didn¡¯t encounter any beasts directly, we all noticed a few of their tracks, nothing out of the ordinary, mostly boar, deer and rabbit, with the usual wolves, foxes and bear that made a lunch out of them. Overall, that didn¡¯t mean that we could assume ourselves the king of the local hill, but given that the last, ordinary beast that had given us trouble had been a massive Turan Tiger, I had some confidence. Not enough to make me drop my vigilance, but some.


    We pushed on into the twilight, as the sun was setting slowly in the distance and were likely the last travelers to enter the gates, before they closed things up for the night. The guards at the gate were Trolls, neither the Ice-variant I had seen in Kolyug, nor the River-variant inhabiting Ladrin, but a somewhat smaller variant, their build more like dwarves, only scaled to a height of five to seven feet, making them massively wide and sturdy beings.


    As always, I remained in the back of the group, carefully keeping my wards and magical defenses active, while trying to appear inconsequential. The usual questions were asked and Adra answered them without problem, getting us into the town and directions to an inn and the local Adventurers¡¯ Guild. While I couldn¡¯t be sure, for some reason, the guard appeared to be almost happy to see us.


    For once, we had to move through most of the entire town, not that it was terribly large, maybe home to a thousand people, to reach the Guild, which was near the fortified, eastern walls. The Guild itself was built on a square, right in front of a much smaller, already closed gate that was flanked by two towers. The whole construction around us was almost an extension of the fortifications, making me wonder what that was all about.


    ¡°I think that¡¯s a kill-zone.¡± Olivia muttered, speaking barely loud enough for me to hear.


    ¡°What?!¡± My tense question made her look back at me, giving a quick shake of her head, before falling back and walking next to me.


    ¡°Not for us. I think, if the walls are threatened, they open the gate, creating a choke-point through which mindless foes can make their way in, the fortified buildings creating a kill-zone, allowing them to strike at their leisure. A controlled break, instead of a forced one at some other point, I think.¡± She explained, and looking around, I could somewhat see it. None of the doors, other than the one of the Guild, was opening into the square, the only windows were on the second story and appeared to have heavy shutters.


    ¡°I see what you mean. Do you think they get attacked often?¡± My question made her pause for a moment, before she shook her head.


    ¡°No, I don¡¯t think so. But then, the whole town is close to the mountains, making it an obvious target. So, maybe they get attacked more than we¡¯d think.¡± she paused for a moment, before letting out a mirthless chuckle. ¡°Often enough for them to plan their town accordingly.¡±


    ¡°These buildings look old, so either their preparations were needless, or they worked very well.¡± I looked around, nodding to myself, ¡°But either way, I doubt that it will be relevant for us. I certainly don¡¯t want to get caught in a skeleton-siege or something like that.¡±


    ¡°That would be unpleasant, yes. Though, I do think that Lenore and you would make for excellent people to have around, when an army assaults a town.¡± she agreed and the two of us fell into silence, as we all approached the Guild.


    Inside, we were greeted by the usual architecture, with all the charme of an office-building that served double-duty as a butcher¡¯s shop. Behind the counter stood a rather small, brown-haired humanoid, someone even I could look down upon, looking back at us with a curious expression on his face.


    ¡°Good evening. What may I be able to help you with?¡± he asked, the deep, bass voice surprising me, as Adra stepped up.


    ¡°Greetings, we just crossed the Dorian Mountains and would like to turn in the Undead clean-up Quest.¡± Adra replied and I noticed the Guild Clerk¡¯s eyes flicker away from her face for a second, before a wide smile appeared on his face.


    ¡°Great. Let me get you your money,¡± he nodded, reaching under the counter and the moment he nodded, a blue window informed me that I had completed a quest, though the EXP were not enough to grant me a level. It was a nice chunk though.


    ¡°Would you be interested in some follow-up work? We do have a bit of a pickle nearby.¡± he asked, a hopeful look on his face. A part of me wanted to step up and inquire about the obvious follow-up quest, but given my social ineptitude, I kept back, letting Adra handle things.

 Chapter 532

    ¡°Elaborate, please.¡± Adra asked, just as interested in the follow-up as I was. There had to be a reason for him to ask us and not the locals, meaning that it most likely was dangerous, and thus, an excellent potential source of EXP. Or of death, but that was always the risk


    ¡°Certainly.¡± he nodded, and I briefly wondered about his species, though not enough to risk using Observe. Even with my Darkness-Magic to conceal the usage, there was always a risk and inviting scrutiny, or maybe even turning the town against us, was not something I was willing to do. Within my mind, Lenore noticed my thoughts and we got into a brief discussion, noting the beings physical traits and our location, before comparing it to the known species in this part of the world, quickly coming to the conclusion that we were talking to a Halfling.


    ¡°You see, there¡¯s always a bit of trouble around these parts, our eastern neighbors aren''t the type to just lie quietly, always on the move, always making trouble.¡± he rambled, or maybe he thought he was explaining the situation, as words tumbled out of his mouth.


    ¡°One of the ways they do, is by blighting the land, causing the power of Death and Decay to accumulate. That, in turn, causes more undead to rise and allows them to affect a larger area.¡± Adra nodded along, while I was slightly confused at the situation. I could understand what he explained, and why it would be a problem, but I couldn¡¯t even begin to guess at the underlying mechanics. Which sounded incredibly interesting.


    ¡°Every so often, our local clerics have to move out and consecrate those places, to disperse the accumulated power and return life to the land. Sadly, the undead are not too happy that we do so, and try to murder the priests, so they cannot do their job. That¡¯s why the town provides an escort of Adventurers, to make sure our clerics can work undisturbed.¡± Finally, he got to the point and I felt my enthusiasm die a quick death. An escort-quest, those had always been the biggest pain in the rear imaginable, doubly so one that went back towards the undead. On the other hand, the halfling looked quite eager to see it done, meaning there might be a good reward involved.


    ¡°Now, another group, one that recently arrived here, is supposed to do the mission but quite frankly, they are newcomers, with a limited reputation within the Guild. You, on the other hand, have crossed the mountains and destroyed a good chunk of undead while doing so. The clerics need to be kept safe and I don¡¯t mind sending two groups, if that is necessary to make sure things go smoothly.¡± His explanation made sense, though there was a part of me that wondered just how impressive the numbers we had racked up were. Or how they compared to the numbers other people achieved, while marching across the Dorrian Mountains.


    Not that it really mattered, as the real question was a simple one: Did we want to be saddled with a second group, with potential murky chains of command, while trying to keep a group of clerics alive to do their thing? And if not, just how badly would the rejection reflect on us? In some ways, it was a lose-lose situation, where we either had to accept a potentially incredibly annoying and dangerous mission, or had to reject the Guild in a time of need. Neither was palpable, and I had little idea which would be worse.


    ¡°We would like to have a rest, discuss things amongst the group, and give you our response in the morning. If you could give us some additional details, about the mission itself, the clerics and the group that is supposed to work with us, it would be appreciated and allow us to make an informed decision.¡± I inserted myself into their conversation, getting a nod of agreement from Adra.


    ¡°Hm, certainly, I can see that you need your rest.¡± he agreed, looking us over. ¡°And I can also see that getting thrown together with another, unknown party can be troublesome.¡± he nodded, before giving us the details.


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    The objective itself was reasonably close by, a little over a day of marching away from town, a small crag in the land within which the necrotic energies gathered. For a moment, my mind flashed back to the crag at which Rai had crossed the Second Divide, making me wonder if there was a connection, before focusing back on the explanation. Our task would be, as mentioned, to guard a group of three clerics from town, two of them apprentices while they were doing their ritual. That would take a full day and night, with them working in tandem to keep going through the night and it was very likely, if not certain, that Undead would be drawn to the ritual.


    So far, the mission sounded doable, if annoying. Which left the question of those team-mates we were supposed to pick-up, that new group.


    Sadly, the clerk didn¡¯t know a lot about them either, just that they were a group that had recently made a bit of a splash in the low-lands of the Idorra Peninsula, with an almost meteoric rise to power. Normally, that meant either incredible recklessness, stupidity or skill. Or, in this case, it likely meant Travelers, though he didn¡¯t say so, maybe he was simply unaware. It wasn¡¯t like you could see that status just from the outside and if they kept a low profile, they actually might fly under the radar. He promised to introduce us to them in the morning, so we would be able to make our judgment then.


    Finally, the reward was mentioned and while a sum of thirty silver per person was a nice enough reward, it wasn¡¯t anything  that flashed us, not at our current power. Though, when I asked about connections within the port-cities and the possibility of getting passage there, he gladly offered to add a letter of recommendation to the pile, without extra charge.


    That, of course, meant that if we declined, we might find ourselves rejected in turn, when it came to seeking passage but my plans were to work with the Naga anyway and I didn¡¯t know just how close the connections between a random Guild-clerk in the mountains and the Naga down at the sea would be.


    After a few more questions, we decided to leave, heading to the inn. By that time, it was late enough for night to have fully fallen and when we got to the inn, the town had mostly gone to sleep.


    When we entered, there was nobody there and it took a few minutes of waiting, until the innkeeper made his way from his living space into the common room, looking as if he had been relaxing in front of his fire. There was something slightly surreal about a troll, about as tall as I was, but just as wide as tall, dressed in what looked suspiciously like a bathrobe walking out, scratching his head while yawning. I managed to keep any amusement hidden deep within my mind, while Adra negotiated for some food, sadly only cold cuts, bread and butter, and a place to sleep for the night. It was obvious that the innkeeper wasn¡¯t really bothered by haggling about the price, that he wanted to simply get back to sleep and it only took a few minutes before we could take a seat and were presented with food.


    It wasn¡¯t bad, the cold meat nicely seasoned and the bread a delight after days of traveling rations due to the sheer impossibility of foraging within the Dorrian mountains. The only thing that would have made the meal better would have been additional vegetables, but we had to be content with some fruits, apples and pears.


    While eating, we quietly discussed our options and quickly decided that the Quest would likely give a decent chunk of EXP and we would have to at least check out that other group in the morning. If nothing else, meeting them might give us a good reason to reject the quest, deflecting some for the consequences onto them.


    Soon, we were sated and the sleepy innkeeper guided us to one of the rooms. He had rejected our request for separate rooms, as he would have to specifically prepare them, guiding us to a corner of the common sleeping room, where we could use some straw and our bedrolls to make a reasonably comfortable camp for us.


    It couldn¡¯t compare to a real bed, certainly not to a modern one, but compared to sleeping under the sky, with nothing but our furs and bedrolls to rest on, it was comfortable. As always, Sigmir and I cuddled up, while Ylva took over the night-watch, a silent presence nearby, keeping an eye on our group and making sure that nobody took advantage of our rest.


    With the smell of fresh straw in my nose and a cuddly Sigmir in my arms, I dropped off to sleep, wondering what kind of people the other group would turn out to be.

 Chapter 533

    When we returned to the Guild in the morning, it turned out that we¡¯d have to wait a few days to meet the rest of our prospective group. Originally, the mission had been planned to start within a week of our arrival, the clerics busy with preparations, which, in turn, caused the group to head out, partially to scout the area, partially to gain a couple extra EXP. It wasn¡¯t a bad idea, especially if they were Travellers and thus wouldn¡¯t permanently die, even if they were killed. However, in this case, it simply meant we would have to make a decision, sight unseen.


    After discussing our options with the Guild-Clerk, who was either still there or had gotten up quite early to meet us, it was decided that we¡¯d do likewise, head out and kill a couple of undead, something the people of Gaber always appreciated and meet up with the other group in three days time. That way, we¡¯d be able to get to know each other, before either declining the mission or setting out together. It wasn¡¯t a perfect solution, but it was the best solution anyone could hope for. To give us a small incentive, he even suggested a relatively simple quest, gathering some strange lichen that grew in a nearby valley, to add some EXP and silver into our pocket. It was rated as Very Easy, meaning it should essentially be trivial for us, and thus it¡¯d be normally not given to a group of our level, instead going to a lower levelled group, so they could get the full benefit of the system-awarded EXP.


    With that quest accepted, we decide to do some shopping and relaxing in town for the day, simply to get rid of the accumulated mental fatigue caused by crossing the Dorrian Mountains. While I had the ability to retreat into my Hallow and log out for some time, especially when it wame to visit Mrs. Wu, the others had been in a tense situation for days on end, never quite knowing when an attack would come. Just because the Undead had their patterns and were generally easily dealt with, it didn¡¯t mean they could be completely relied on, necessitating a certain caution.


    Given that being in town was somewhat stifling for me, the constant need to shield my presence, always on guard to never let my focus waver for even a brief moment, it was the complete opposite effect for me, not allowing me to relax at all. Thus, I promised the others to return the next day and shifted myself into my Hallow. It took some doing, and quite a bit of focus on both, my own and Lenore¡¯s parts, to get the skull-focus shifted with me but it worked - At least to an extent.


    Previously, we hadn¡¯t even tried, if I had moved into my Hallow, the staff had been given to Adra, allowing her to carry the skull so Lenore could provide her devastating magical attacks if needed, but that wasn¡¯t necessary in town. What neither of us had expected was that, upon shifting into her Hallow, the skull changed form, forming into a hood, or maybe helmet, that covered Lenore¡¯s head. The only problem was, the powerful, magical presence of the skull overpowered her ability to see magic, forcing her to suppress that ability or be almost entirely blinded. When Lenore asked Sigmir to take the helmet off her, it returned to its normal form, leaving them with a cursed object to carry around, or hide away in a magical bag and slowly suffer the effect of the curse.


    It took another round of shifting around to get the skull back into helmet-form and onto Lenore¡¯s head, leaving both of us just a little annoyed and determined to investigate the artefact we had made more thoroughly at a later date. Maybe even to utilise the Raven¡¯s Shadow to do so, but that would be a bit of a last resort, partially due to the long time between uses of that ability, partially due to the discomfort during that time and, most importantly, due to the way our memories blurred afterwards. It was rather pointless to thoroughly investigate, if you forgot the results immediately afterwards. Our best bet would be to essentially dictate our experience and use the recording of that dictation to get an idea of the findings. But that limited the amount of information transmitted severely, and some concepts were almost impossible to express accurately in words.


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    Leaving those matters for later, I logged out, returning to the Capsule-Space and checking into the forums. If there were Travellers in the region around the Dorrian Mountains, there might be some information to be found, especially if they were of the rather loud and vocal group that constantly used the Forum. There were a few of those, an overall minority, but they existed. The vast majority of the player-base was generally quiet, keeping their discoveries for themselves, likely only shared in a small, somewhat familiar circle. People they had known from other games, or people they met ingame and got along well with. They might post on the forums for gossip or drama, or if Pantheon Entertainment released some of their highlight-videos, but what they did ingame, was kept quiet. I was one of those many players.


    And even amongst the vocal posters, there were two categories, so to say. One were the people who shared everything, looking for adoration and acknowledgement, while the others were part of a larger group, using the information gathered, and likely filtered, by their Group to raise the status and reputation of said group.


    Using the search-function, I was able to find a couple threads that mentioned the Dorrian Mountains, and even more that mentioned the Idorra Peninsula. Sadly, there were no threads about Gaber, the small town we currently were at, but that might simply be due to the group¡¯s discretion, a defence against people doing exactly what I was doing.


    From there, I started to filter and scan, occasionally pulling up a thread with a promising title and reading through it. There were a couple of interesting things about the undead, especially a description of their respawn-mechanic, that they seemed to return to the place they raised from each day during the witching hour, if they got destroyed. They didn¡¯t necessarily rise up at that moment, but a curious Traveller had diligently studied their behaviour for a couple of days, camping a spawn-point and checking the time it took. I made a note of the name, Tycho, and set up notifications so I would get a message when they posted.


    Other threads discussed the best methods for dealing with Undead from range, their slow speed and general stupidity making them easy targets for a variety of magical attacks and even some people who used slings and similar weapons to deliver blunt force from range. None of them seemed to have been able to push the Mountains to the point that they got chased out by magic-immune skeletons, but there was a mention about special, much faster, skeletons that had wiped out a group that had grinded the Undead for too long. The more I read and learned about the region, the more I wanted to dig into it and its secrets, my instinct telling me that there was something interesting there.


    That was a general trend on Mundus, that the general overworld seemed to give a good level-speed until you reached around level fifty, after which you needed either special locations like the Dorrian Mountains or you had to find the coveted dungeons to gain more EXP. Alternatively, large-scale military conflict seemed to be a possible way to gain levels, but that had its own problems.


    Based on that realisation, and a couple threads I found on the forum, make me guess that Pantheon Entertainment might not have put in a hard level-cap, but had instead limited the ways you could level after a certain point. Unless you sought out those special locations, there¡¯d likely be no way to level past somewhere around level seventy, maybe seventy-five. At those special locations, you could get further, but the locations had limits, either due to their limited nature, like the few dungeons we had discovered or due to special circumstances, like the malevolent intellect I suspected to control the undead in the Dorrian Mountains.


    During the beta, that understanding mattered little, but once the game went live, finding and occupying those spots in an efficient manner would be key. It was almost assured that, once the limits became public, large scale Guilds would attempt to monopolise the best spots. How Pantheon would deal with such attempts would be another key-factor to a healthy game and despite my near certainty that the company wouldn¡¯t have overlooked such an obvious problem, I decided to write out my thoughts and submit it, as a good tester should. Hopefully, future trouble could be averted, especially the kind of trouble that might kill the game.


    That done, I left the capsule, to take care of my daily necessities and some training.

 Chapter 534

    Sweaty, tired and thoroughly cold, I stumbled back into my apartment, a small part of me cursing out Mrs. Wu as I went. That smiling face of hers, as she ordered me to perform one set of exercises after the other, while having me describe the effects my strikes would have, if the training-dummy was an actual human, never letting up, driving me to exhaustion and beyond. By the end of our two-hours session, my mind had started to drift in and out of focus, the dummy becoming a blurry outline and my strikes stopping to be conscious efforts, instead simple, conditioned movements. I wasn¡¯t even certain that I had been using words to describe my efforts, as requested, or if I had started to grunt instead, no longer capable of forming words.


    The tea Mrs. Wu had served me after a shower had helped, returning the sapience to the drifting animal that I had become, only for her to give me yet another task. Luckily it was only a simple set of forms, something I might have been able to perform in my sleep. Yet, with the lingering exhaustion, it had been a challenge, though, despite the challenge I had noticed that my movements felt strangely sharper, a little more polished. And that was despite being dressed in street-clothes, ready to leave. Afterwards, she had reminded me that the training was to be used in the real world, that I would have to realise that I should always be ready to move, always vigilant and ready to defend myself. Or ready to kill, if that was required.


    After some food and yet another shower, taking my time and letting it wash away as much of the exhaustion as I could, I dropped back into my capsule, logging back into Road to Purgatory. There was the usual, brief sensation of falling, before settling back into my Avatar, the sensation almost akin to waking from a dream. Letting my senses spread outward, I realised that it was already night-time and Lenore was comfortably sitting on a chair, completely asleep. Not wanting to wake her, I simply let myself relax, my Hallow being the most comfortable space for me. With a little bit of focus, I could even change the space, to an extent, allowing me to lie on empty air, as comfortable as any bed I had ever heard about. The remaining exhaustion from training was more than enough to quickly send me into a deep slumber.


    In the morning, when Lenore woke up, the echoes of her mental activity woke me up as well, fleeting dreams of flying fading under the dawning day. From what little I remembered, I was almost certain that I had shared in Lenore¡¯s dreams, riding the wind through the darkness.


    ¡°Good morning.¡± I greeted her, the curious sensation of stretching without a body one I couldn¡¯t ever get used to. ¡°Anything interesting happen yesterday?¡± I asked, after she returned my greeting. From her non-verbal response, I could tell that she was still somewhat tired and immersed myself in the stream of consciousness that was flowing along, her memories of the previous day flowing over to me.


    Nothing really stuck out, just an overall relaxed day in town. The others had visited a couple craftspeople, making sure that their equipment hadn¡¯t suffered from continuous use, commissioned some quick, magical repairs for a bit of coin and done some supply-shopping. It was utterly mundane, but from Lenore¡¯s memories, I could tell that they had needed it, to get rid of mental exhaustion.


    Noticing that, on the nearby bed, Sigmir was waking, too, I pushed myself out of Lenore¡¯s Hallow, landing without much of a sound. Olivia must have heard me nonetheless, she had been getting up from the bed on the other side of the small room and her head instantly spun around, following the sound.


    ¡°Good Morning.¡± I greeted both of them, getting the expected replies and even a quick kiss from Sigmir. Listening to them tell me about their time the day before, we headed down to get some breakfast, meeting up with Adra ans Rai on the way. The plan for the day was to quickly move out, towards the valley where we would be able to find the lichen and return the next day, to meet that other group. Given that my research had been inconclusive, I was somewhat curious if they would be Travellers or if it was a mere coincidence, but that revelation would have to wait for the next day.


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    Moving with a clear, nearby destination was somewhat different from our usual way of travel, instead of either following the ancient road whenever possible or navigating by aerial or magical reconnaissance, we now had an actual description, with landmarks that we could look for and navigate by. There wouldn¡¯t be a case of suddenly finding out that Lenore had missed a chasm from the air and we had to either cross it or move around it, nor would there be a case of Adra¡¯s ability to commune with Plants sending us down a sheer cliff, simply because she hadn¡¯t noticed that the plants she had been communing with were creeper-vines.


    Now, we just had to keep a lookout for curiously shaped trees, rock-formations or guess how far we had travelled. It was a different kind of challenge and we made a bit of a game of it, trying to see who of us managed to spot the landmarks first.


    With the landmarks our trip was easy and relaxed, we didn¡¯t fully let our guard down, but compared to travelling through the Dorrian Mountains, the short trip to the valley was a walk in the forest. Literally.


    Having taken our time in the morning, we didn¡¯t quite make it to the valley during the day, instead we had to camp out, as we were accustomed to. Adra and Rai used the opportunity to do a bit of hunting, recruiting Sigmir and Ylva to help them along, their senses and natural abilities eclipsing even the magical advantage Adra had, let alone the mundane tracking-skills of Rai.


    In the meantime, Lenore and I experimented with the unexpected transforming-property of the skull,focus, trying to find out how, or why it worked. The problem was, we had no idea. There didn¡¯t appear to be a reason why it changed its shape and moved onto Lenore¡¯s skull if I tried to take it with me into my Hallow and no other item had acted in that way. On further experiment, it even happened if it was stored within my Magical Bag, completely refusing to enter my Hallow.


    Given its classification as an Artefact, whatever that entailed, we tried to see what would happen if Lenore tried to take the Crown of the Northern Wind with her, when shifting into her Hallow. The result was most curious, though the effect didn¡¯t affect the Crown, it simply appeared on my head, but the Blades of the Northern Wind, which had been frozen to the crown, changed.


    They turned into a necklace, the blades shrunken to barely the size of a finger each, and connected by simple Ice, wrapping around my neck. Removing them, either with Ice-Magic or by mundane means, simply meant they shifted back into their normal form, taking about a second to grow but doing so almost inexorably. It made me wonder, what would happen if I tried to stuff one into a tight crack, how much force would it exert to regain its size? I wasn¡¯t about to test it, just in case it would destroy the blade, but it was an interesting question.


    The next step in our experiments was to see if there was Astral Power involved, and if so, how did it appear. I wasn¡¯t able to smell anything, and tasting the air only gave me the usual sensation of forest, though there was the taste of the Dorrian Mountain¡¯s necrotic wind in the air but with the effect occurring on me, Lenore was able to leave her Hallow and watch.


    To see nothing.


    There didn¡¯t seem to be an active, magical effect at play, the item simply changed, without any overt Astral Power involved. Neither Lenore or I had the slightest idea what was going on, our entire understanding of Magic had been based on the idea that it either occured due to Astral Power being applied or Divine Working. But unless Artefacts were inherently divine working, that understanding went out of the window.


    Frustrated, Lenore and I pushed the question from our mind, simply accepting it and moving on. There were other things we could work on, for example that Anti-Magic Shell we had recently witnessed, or the abilities Rai had gained after crossing the Second Divide. At least those might be something I could understand, hopefully.


    But before that, I could hear Adra and Rai returning, and it was my turn to prepare dinner.

 Chapter 535

    From afar, the valley we were told the lichen was growing in was peaceful. Nothing seemed to be out of place, just rocky slopes, some sparse trees, some evergreens and leaves scattered on the ground. There was a small brook, maybe a remnant of the water that had, in days long past, dug the valley from the mountain and on the upper slopes, near that very brook, we were told to look for the peculiar lichen. Blood Moss, a red lichen, almost dark enough to be called black, and apparently, it was famed for its antiseptic properties and could be used as an disinfectant.


    ¡°I don¡¯t think I like this valley.¡± Adra admitted, looking skittish, like a fawn that was staring at the wolf, not sure if she should run just yet, or if that would only carry her into the jaws of the hunting pack.


    ¡°Can you elaborate? He said there might be undead and sometimes, beasts settled nearby, but I can¡¯t see anything.¡± I asked, stepping up next to her, looking down the slope, my face scrunched into a frown.


    ¡°No, it just feels¡­¡± she paused, clearly lost for words, ¡°just weird. I can¡¯t put my finger on it, but it¡¯s almost as disturbing as the Dorrian Mountains themselves.¡± she admitted, shaking her head.


    ¡°Undead? Wouldn¡¯t surprise me.¡± I prodded, my tongue flicking out to taste the air, hoping to detect their scent. There was something, but what that something was, I wasn¡¯t sure. But somewhere in the back of my mind, I was sure I knew the scent, I just couldn¡¯t recall why.


    ¡°No, it¡¯s a different kind of weird.¡± she kept shaking her head, though there was a forced smile on her face now,


    For a moment, I considered creating a scrying focus, but the valley wasn¡¯t large enough that anything obviously visible could hide from Adra¡¯s eyes. A quick check with Lenore, who had scouted ahead and was on her way back confirmed that there was nothing, at least nothing visible. However, absence of evidence was not evidence of absence and I wasn¡¯t about to discard Adra¡¯s instincts, just because I didn¡¯t share them.


    ¡°Can you try concealing our tracks? I¡¯ll try to hide us, it¡¯s early and cloudy enough that there are enough shadows to work with.¡± After a nod from Adra, I got to work, spreading a film of twilight around us, feeling that Rai joined in, twisting the veil of magic I put out, making it more transparent in some places and denser in others. I let him work, knowing that in that particular discipline, he was better than me, the concept of Twilight coming naturally to him.


    Once Adra had finished her own magic, the scent of nature and the forest lingering in my nose for a second, we set out, carefully making our way down the valley, keeping our eyes open for any potential danger.


    ¡°It¡¯s quiet.¡± Sigmir whispered, after we had moved down half the slope, planning to reach the brook in the middle first, before following it up the length of the valley. While we had been told that the Blood Moss mostly grows in the upper valley, it apparently liked to grow in any moist and dark places within.


    For a second, we all froze, our ears busy scanning for sounds, and I realised that she was right. Before, there had been the soft sounds of the forest, the rustling of dry leaves in the wind, some animal noises, the occasional bird-call, all those sounds of life that were so much part of nature. But here, they had all gone silent. Silent as a grave, as the saying went.


    No sound, but somehow, the absence made things only more disturbing. But how could you get rid of the absence, without completely abandoning stealth, daring whatever might be lurking to come out and attack.


    Even more vigilant, now completely convinced that there was something here, we continued on our way, slowly creeping towards the brook. As we got closer, the quiet, bubbling sounds of water broke the silence, letting us calm down, if only a little. At least there was some sound, not the absolute, creepy silence.


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    Following along the stream, we made our way up the valley, checking potential spots where the Blood Moss might grow and even finding a few, small patches, but far from enough for our task.


    After we had crossed roughly three-quarters of the valley, I felt the amount of Astral Power needed to maintain the concealing shroud around us suddenly skyrocket, to the point that I would have to activate Overflow to keep up.


    ¡°Watch out!¡± I snarled, warning the others, before I let the shroud dissipate, our concealment fading away, like mist under the sun.


    The others instantly moved into defensive positions, all our senses scanning for the threat that had wiped away my magic, when I felt the sun hit my skin, barely warm enough to be uncomfortable to me. At that moment, it dawned on me and I realised what had happened, it hadn¡¯t been a magical attack at all that had shredded our concealment, it had simply been the sun, finding a hole in the clouds and shining down on us.


    Still, vigilance was warranted, with our concealment gone, who knew what might jump out and attack us.


    ¡°Left side, in the back!¡± Rai called out, causing Adra and myself to look over, while Sigmir made sure nothing was coming at us from the other side. Olivia, in the middle of our formation, was busy, scanning in all directions, providing back-up.


    In the direction Rai indicated, I was able to spot movement, a brief, flickering glimpse between the rocks, some hundred metres away.


    ¡°Ankheg!¡± Adra identified it, apparently having managed a better look than I. Hearing her, a soft curse escaped my mouth, our previous fights against Ankheg still vivid in my mind, despite the time that had passed. The large, acid-spitting insects we had fought together with the Wolves of the Northern Wind had been a pain, quite literally, due to their annoying ranged capabilities and incredible internal coordination.


    After considering for a moment, I remembered what one of the wolves had told us, the Ankheg were normally subterranean dwellers, especially during the cold months, only appearing after the snow had thawed or if they were desperate for food. If they didn¡¯t like the cold, I certainly would give them something to think about.


    Activating Overflow, without considering longer than a second or two, I rapidly drew a set of Runes, only three of them, creating a dense stream of Liquid Moonlight that was launched outwards, in the general direction of the Ankheg. There was no chance I would be able to hit the agile creature, not at that distance, but I didn¡¯t aim to hit, I merely wanted to get as much Liquid Moonlight, and thus Astral Power perfectly aligned to Ice and still connected to my control, in the area around it.


    The Liquid Moonlight splashed against the rocks, some of them cracking from the sudden temperature-change and I pushed it, my mind focusing on the Rune for Mist, pushing the concept into the Astral Power making up the Liquid Moonlight, even while keeping power flowing into the runic formation that created it.


    What started out as a stream of frozen light, turned into a bitter-cold mist, the volume expanding and filling the whole area. There was nothing detrimental about the mist, not in and off itself, but at a guess, I had plunged the temperature in the area by some twenty degrees, pushing it from a balmy autumn-day to the onset of winter. Some moisture fell from the air, as the mist billowed around, causing an almost snow-like effect and I felt a smile creep on my face.


    ¡°Keep watching, I don¡¯t think they¡¯ll want to move through that, but Rai, please keep an eye out.¡± I ordered, as we continued moving forward, now forewarned about the danger.


    We continued upstream, each small rock that got kicked loose in our passing making us freeze, the clacking sounds so similar to the chitinous claws of the Ankheg on rock, but nothing happened, even as we reached the upper section of the valley, where the water was cascading down some steep rocks.


    Given that Adra was the best at finding plants, we let her do her thing while we made sure nothing could sneak up on us.


    At times, I was certain that there was movement further down the valley but it might have just been a trick of the eye, it was hard to tell due to the distance.


    ¡°We¡¯ve got enough.¡± Adra finally announced, after she had been crawling between rocks and into crevices for almost two hours.


    ¡°Good. Let¡¯s get out of here, up the slope.¡± I decided, feeling that the more difficult climb up the steep, upper part of the valley was so much more sensible than moving back, through the valley with its insectoid inhabitants.

 Chapter 536

    Looking back down into the valley, after we had climbed the rough and rocky northern walls, the movement was obvious. Compared to earlier, when we had entered from the south-eastern slope, the contrast was too extreme, the Ankheg were swarming, reminding me of ants, after somebody had disturbed their hill.


    ¡°We should keep going, we¡¯ve got what we wanted.¡± Adra suggested, looking just a little queasy at the skittering mass below.


    ¡°Agreed, and we should warn the Guild that the valley is now rather dangerous. Maybe they¡¯ll issue a quest for a clean-up or something.¡± I nodded, having no desire to climb back down and wade into the insects. While Lenore and I would easily be able to decimate their number, who knew if they would be as kind as the Skeletons and simply let themselves be slaughtered? If they retreated underground, or if they were to strike from below us, catching us off guard, a trivial encounter could quickly turn deadly.


    ¡°If we push hard, we should be able to get back to town today.¡± Sigmir mentioned, and I had to nod in agreement, the idea was sound. On the way here, we had started out earlier, but our pace had been casual, with little resource expenditure. If we pushed things, to the point that I would have to magically support myself, we should get back just after dark. With nods all around, we set off, our walk morphing into a slow jog for a minute or two, before further accelerating to a speed that forced me to use Blood Magic to sustain it for a long time.


    Once more, I realised the strange disconnect between my mental and physical capabilities. I was intellectually aware that I was moving far faster than I could run in my physical body, that my speed was more akin to a car driving within the city, but at the same time, my increased reaction-time and mental speed allowed me to move as if I was merely walking, with enough time to place my feet and no need to fear the uneven ground.


    The speed at which we were travelling added another layer of intimidation to our already powerful auras, sending a strong signal to any living creature in the area that we were not food. While some mindless undead might attack us, simply because we existed, most beasts we were passing by would keep their heads down, unless they were either on the verge of starvation or corrupted by some outside magic. It made me wonder if moving openly, without stealth, would have been the smart play earlier, relying on our power to scare off the Ankheg. Though, if that had failed, a fight would have been inevitable.


    With only a short break for lunch, we continued moving and managed to get back to town earlier than expected, arriving at the gates before sunset. The guards gave us a cursory check and we soon were back at the Guild. This time, there was another Clerk, a female dwarf who frowned for a moment after seeing us, before her face cleared up and she greeted us with a smile.


    ¡°Greetings, what can the Guild do for you today?¡± As always, Adra did the talking for our group, stepping up and returning the greeting, before quickly explaining that we had completed a quest. I could see the Clerk¡¯s eyes flicker downwards, likely focused on her interface and moments later, I received a notification that the quest had been completed, while the Clerk started counting out some coins, while Adra placed down the collected Blood Moss. While the EXP weren¡¯t anything to write home about, the money would come in handy at some point. All in all, for a simple, two-day task, it was incredibly well paid, though that likely came with the territory, if you were willing to venture out into danger and got results back, you would be paid well. And we were.


    Finally, Adra told the Clerk about the Ankheg in the valley, getting a frown in return, especially when she reported their number and that we hadn¡¯t been able to verify their level. Regardless of her frown, scouting hadn¡¯t been our task, so there was nothing to be done and she simply nodded.


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    ¡°You are the ones who Weise asked to join with the purification-mission, right?¡± the clerk asked, after noting down the details Adra had given her.


    ¡°We are, why? Did something change?¡± Adra asked, sounding partially annoyed, partially curious.


    ¡°In a way. One of their Group is back in town and when she heard about you, she asked that you take the time to talk with her.¡± the clerk explained, getting a shrug from Adra, who, in turn, glanced at me. I simply nodded, not seeing a reason why we shouldn¡¯t talk to another Adventurer, especially one who might be a Traveller. The clerk noticed the exchange, giving me a longer, appraising look, though I didn¡¯t notice any magical probing and after a moment, she simply nodded.


    ¡°Excellent. She told me their group rented one of the smaller houses in town, so they don¡¯t have to pay for an inn the whole time. If you like, you can go looking for her, or I¡¯ll send over a message and she can meet you at your inn.¡± she offered, this time looking directly at me and I gave her a shrug, before promising that we¡¯d pay them a visit.


    With directions to the rented house, we left the Guild and, after a short exchange, decided to pay an evening visit. There was no guarantee that we¡¯d find anyone there, but it was worth the attempt, especially as it was quite nearby, almost on our way from the Guild to the inn.


    When we got there, the house was about as interesting as all the other houses in the area, a simple, white-washed building from wood and stone, with a steep, tiled roof and a smoking chimney. Without the number on it, there was no way to differentiate it from the house next door, to the point that I assumed both were owned by the same landlord and rented out to Adventurers that stayed in the area for a moderate amount of time.


    After using the knocker, we didn¡¯t have to wait long and within a minute, a short and stout figure opened the door, the dwarfs'' eyes scanning our group. She looked quite pretty, with shining copper hair, freckles and deep, green eyes, emeralds to my own jade. The apron on her body was stained in rather interesting colours, nothing I had ever seen in nature had such an extreme tone of neon-purple and the smells tickling my nostrils were anything but ordinary, a crazy blend of magic wafting out of the door.


    ¡°Good Evening, what can I do for you?¡± she asked, her tone polite, if vigilant.


    ¡°Good Evening, we were told you wanted to have a word? The Guild offered us the Purification-Quest and apparently, your group was offered it, too?¡± Adra explained and for a moment, the dwarf looked over her shoulder, flinching as a strange sound reached my ears. Next to me, Rai was staring into the house, looking more than a little disturbed.


    ¡°Ah, yes. Please, come in and excuse me for a second, I¡¯m a little busy.¡± she blurted out, before turning and dashing back into the house, the door swinging fully open.


    The five of us exchanged amused looks, not quite certain what to make of the strange dwarf. With a shrug, I decided to simply follow, curious what was going on and what I was smelling. None of the magic I could perceive was powerful enough to be worrying, nor did it seem to actually be controlled, more resembling traces of spells that were dissipating in the air.


    ¡°Let¡¯s see what that¡¯s all about.¡± I said, bravely stepping into the house. Sigmir followed right behind me, the others bringing up the rear, one after the other.


    The house itself was slightly bare, the floor simple, smooth stone, the interior walls panelled with wood but bare, without any decorations. It took me a moment to catch the noise coming from deeper in the house, the clinking sounds of moving glass, along vile curses, muttered in the voice of our dwarven host. Her voice wasn¡¯t loud enough to make out the words, but just the angry, hissing tone resembled a breakaway steam-engine if nothing else.


    Following the noise, we got to a room in the back of the house, the walls inside bare stone, without the wooden panelling, with smoke wafting out of the door. Looking inside, I could see our host again, holding a smoking glass flask, the bottom filled with dark residue. More curses were flowing from her lips, the vernacular making me quite certain we were dealing with a Traveller.


    Finally, after a string of curses that might make a sailor blush, the dwarf looked up, eyes focusing on me. ¡°Morgana.¡±she greeted me, her voice sounding almost defeated, before she paused for a moment, letting out a deep breath. ¡°Let¡¯s talk business, you can call me Mal.¡±

 Chapter 537

    ¡°So, Mal, is it? Good Evening and nice to meet you.¡± I returned her incredibly enthusiastic greeting, an amused smile on my face.


    ¡°Malachite, but, as I said, you can call me Mal.¡± she replied, before her eyes focused back on the flask in her hand, if only for a moment.


    ¡°Talk about Business, you said. What business do you have with me? Or is it business with the group you expected to join your group on the purification-quest?¡± I prodded, making the important distinction.


    ¡°Both.¡± she let out a sigh, placing down the flask on a work-table. ¡°Let¡¯s start with the more important part, the business with you, personally.¡± she said, only to be interrupted by Sigmir.


    ¡°Love, care to tell me what¡¯s going on? Who is this and why does she act like this?¡± there was a bit of tension in her voice, with a bit of annoyance mixed in, likely due to the rather rude behaviour.


    ¡°She is a Traveller. I suspected that there would be some in that other group, and obviously, she has heard of me.¡± I told her, not taking my eyes off Mal. There was a bit of a flicker on her face when Sigmir spoke, but other than that, she ignored her.


    ¡°That¡¯s exactly what the business is about, that I¡¯ve heard of you. And that my group has no desire to get dragged into your¡­¡± she paused, looking for a good expression to describe the mess that seemed to always occur when I was mentioned on the forum, ¡°drama.¡± she settled on a mild descriptor, to my amusement.


    ¡°No interest in Infamy, I take it?¡± I asked, quite amused at this point.


    ¡°No, not at all. We just want to be here, do our thing and meet up with friends, after. I¡¯ve got work to do and while Jakyl is currently on break, he¡¯s got his own job to worry about.¡± she explained, annoyance obvious in her voice.


    ¡°So, if you would promise to be..¡± her eyes went over to Sigmir and the others, clearly choosing her words to be suitable for natives, ¡°discreet in your actions and keep them amongst those present, it would be very appreciated. In fact, I would insist on it, or my group will not join in that quest, as annoying as that would be for us.¡± she explained, her voice not quite demanding but it was obvious that she felt strongly about the matter. For a moment, I simply studied her demeanour and mannerisms, trying to get a read on her. Without a lot to go on, I decided to simply take her at her word and considered her request.


    ¡°I believe I can agree to that, assuming you agree to the same.¡± I replied, confidentiality being something quite valuable. I could have denied it but that would have caused problems between their group, the Guild and us, something I didn¡¯t want to deal with. At the end of the day, her request was fairly sensible and understandable, getting lumped in with me would likely bring an end to their comfortable existence under the radar.


    ¡°Certainly.¡± she agreed, relief visible on her face.


    ¡°However, that leaves something else that needs to be discussed, namely whether or not we even join you on that Quest. For that, I would need some details on your group, nothing overly sensitive, an overview will suffice for an informed decision.¡± I added, getting another nod in return. Out of curiosity, I decided to test how sensitive and capable she was, internally invoking Darkness-Magic to conceal the activation of yet another skill, namely Observe. Using it that way took a bit of Astral Power, but for the current me, it was a minor expenditure.


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    Hill Dwarf, level 63


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    Little in the way of information, but I had never even attempted to develop that particular ability further and my class didn¡¯t add anything either, so it was to be expected. Given the lack of reaction on Mal¡¯s part, I was quite certain that she hadn¡¯t noticed.


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    ¡°Yes, I can do that.¡± she nodded, before looking at the flask still in her hand. ¡°Would you mind waiting for a few minutes, while I clean up?¡±


    ¡°Not really, but in that case, I¡¯ll have to ask you to meet us at the inn, once you are done. We came straight from the Guild and have yet to have dinner.¡± I replied, getting a nod in return.


    ¡°I can do that.¡± she promised, showing us out.


    On the street, there was little I could tell the others about my connection with Mal that they didn¡¯t already know, they were aware that Travellers came from another world and that there were some in that world that knew about me, with a subset of them not liking me. Acceptance came easily and soon, we were at the inn and food was on the way. Luckily, we had managed to arrive before the inn-keeper had absconded to his private domain and there was freshly made food. Simple fare, porridge made from grain and goat-cheese, alongside some carrots and onions. Filling and tasty, but far from fancy.


    By the time we got served, Mal turned up, too, ordering some beer and sitting at our table.


    ¡°Now, my group. I guess I¡¯ll start with myself.¡± she began, after a short exchange of pleasantries and introductions to our group.


    ¡°Malachite, a Hill Dwarf and currently level 63. I¡¯m an Alchemist, so I mostly do my job outside of battle, using a light crossbow to support and deliver some fun surprises to enemies during a fight. Got a few class-features to really boost my product¡¯s effect if I personally administer them and learned quite a few interesting recipes for all kinds of mischief and mayhem. So, if you are looking for anything from distilled essence of flatulence for a prank to bandages that quickly stem bleeding, prevent sepsis and promote fast healing, I¡¯m your gal.¡± she explained, making me instantly curious. There was so much I wanted to ask, but for now, I held my tongue.


    ¡°Then there¡¯s Jakyl, the other Traveller. He, and two of our other companions, came over from Daiea early on. He¡¯s an Orph, think tall and slender, almost elf-like, with coal-black skin and violet eyes. He¡¯s a Bard, in battle, he uses a light blade and armour but the real thing is his ability to support and increase the power of those fighting with him. Makes them faster, lets them hit harder and even weakens the enemies around him.¡± There were nods all around, and I thought Rai looked quite intrigued at the prospect.


    On the other hand, I had only very limited information on Bards, but what I knew made me wary, their abilities were based on influencing the minds of others and while that influence might be benevolent for their allies, I had no illusions about the danger they represented. Mind Magic was no laughing matter, even if I had managed to push mine into the likely least dangerous path, that of insanity and direct damage. It was saying something that I considered the ability to drive others mad, or snuff out their mind with but a thought as the least dangerous option in offensive Mind Magic, but then, Mind Magic was the way I would look at, if I wanted to permanently enslave others and bind them into my service. There was a whole lot of potential for bad juju there, and I was quite glad that it was commonly regarded as dangerous. The only problem was, Bards got a pass because a lot of people saw them as oversexed but mostly harmless jokes. I shouldn¡¯t be surprised that a class of people based around manipulating others¡¯ perception would be good at public relations.


    While I was slightly lost in thought, Malachite had given introduction to two more of their members, two Natives who had made the crossing alongside Jakyl. Once again, I was reminded that Daiea was home to multiple sub-species of Daimons, with the two companions apparently from one called Enya and both of them were fighters, using spear and shield while fighting in formation, together with a splash of magic, to increase the damage they could dish out. The description reminded me of a mix between Sigmir and Phraan, the elf we had met not that long ago.


    ¡°Finally, there is Gilo, a halfling who decided that she wanted to join me, when I left Galam, the city I stepped into, when arriving in this world. She¡¯s mostly responsible for making sure we don¡¯t run into too many deadends, for tracking foes, laying traps and all that. We make an excellent team, especially since I figured out some fun surprises for her traps and she learned to infuse them on her own.¡± there was a decidedly nasty smirk on her face when she mentioned the traps and I simply nodded in acceptance, my mind already looking at their party-composition analytically. It wasn¡¯t a bad combination, maybe a little light on pure, classical magic, but then, you couldn¡¯t have everything.


    ¡°I see. Now, if you don¡¯t mind, I would love to ask you a couple of questions about your alchemy.¡± I grinned, by now mostly finished with my food. There was something new to be learned, and I certainly wouldn''t hold back on the questions.

 Chapter 538

    Sadly, my hoped for discussion on Alchemy with Mal didn¡¯t happen, at least not during the evening. By the time the introduction of her team was done, it was time for her to head off and for us, to head to bed. But she promised to answer a few questions in the morning, if I did likewise. Exchanging knowledge was always a good thing, so I happily agreed, before following Sigmir to bed.


    After a quick breakfast, we split up, each of us doing their own thing. The town was secure enough that we didn¡¯t need to move as a group and even Sigmir decided that listening to Mal and me discuss Alchemy and Magic was not really what she was interested in. She had offered to accompany me, but the bond between us allowed me to feel her lack of enthusiasm. Not wanting her to feel bored, I had thanked her and sent her off to do some shopping, or rather, to check with the local smith if they could do some maintenance on her gear.


    And now, it was only me who was knocking at Mal¡¯s door, though Lenore was resting within her Hallow, just as interested in the discussion as I was. Again, it only took a short time of waiting, before I was allowed in. Mal looked similar to the day before, only the apron was missing and her hair was somewhat frizzy, giving her the appearance that she had just woken up.


    ¡°Good Morning.¡± I greeted her, enthusiasm at learning about a fundamentally different form of magic, seeping into my voice.


    ¡°Mornin¡¯.¡± she mumbled, the contrast stark, making me think that she only picked Alchemy because it was likely the discipline that would have the easiest time to produce coffee. ¡°Come in, we can sit and talk while I have some coffee.¡± She stepped back to invite me in, gesturing to a nearby door. Inside the room, there was a simple, metal stove, a fire merrily burning within, a tea-pot sitting up top and a kitchen-table.


    ¡°Take a seat. Do you want some coffee, too?¡± Mal asked, stepping into the room behind me.


    ¡°Sounds good. I¡¯ve yet to try that on Mundus.¡± I accepted, before seating myself, watching her bustle around, pouring the water from her pot into two mugs, adding some powder.


    ¡°Takes about five minutes, the taste is somewhat¡­¡± she paused, stirring the liquid in her mug, ¡°eh, it¡¯s an acquired taste.¡±


    For a moment, I wondered why she would drink it, if it had such a unique taste, or why anyone was going through the effort to get used to peculiar tastes within Road to Purgatory, but in the end, it didn¡¯t really matter.


    ¡°So, Alchemy. Could you tell me a little about the basics? Assume I know nothing.¡± I asked, stirring the cup in front of me, a part of me already curious how it would taste.


    ¡°The most basic explanation would be, to use the unique, magical properties of some material to create or enhance certain effects. Those effects can range from the most basic, smoke from burning material, to the incredibly powerful. Legends speak of the Elixir of Immortality, so you can see, there are no real limits. And of course, anything in between, from explosives to curatives.`` Nodding at her explanation, I tried to incorporate it into the framework of magic I understood so far. Where it fit, what it meant for other conclusions I had drawn previously, but I needed to know more before I could do that.


    ¡°So, could you make a Mana Potion? Or rather, a potion that recovers Astral Power?¡± I asked, knowing that such a thing was possible, it had been offered to us by the Winter Wolves after all, but I was curious if she could do it.


    ¡°Iffy, to be honest. There are ways to either directly recover a certain amount of Astral Power or to increase your Astral Power recovery for a time. The first requires someone to charge the potion beforehand, basically binding their own Astral Power into the potion, to be used later. There are a couple of problems with that, so let¡¯s leave it for now. The other is possible, but you need a bunch of rare ingredients and it¡¯s difficult to make. I only know the rough recipe, due to quests to collect certain materials, not the details and definitely not the procedure.¡± Her explanation, again, made sense and I could already guess at some of the problems with the direct recovery potions, the similarities to my Blood Magic quite obvious. Given that using Blood Magic released Miasma, I could only guess that there was a similar problem, when using Alchemy to store Astral Power.


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    I was about to ask about Healing Potions, the logical other side of the coin, with Stamina Potions making up a third side, when Mal gestured to me that the coffee was ready. Curious, I took a sip and had to carefully control myself, to make sure I didn¡¯t immediately spit it back out. If not for the fact that Mal had taken a large gulp, right before I had taken my sip, I would have suspected her of either pranking or trying to poison me, but that seemed far-fetched. The taste was simply vile.


    A quick glance to my Interface told me that I was under a buff, the effect similar to my Bullet Time, only with a much smaller magnitude. Where Bullet Time increased my mental speed by almost a factor of ten with my current attributes, the coffee-buff only increased it by five percent, but in turn, the coffee-buff lasted for two hours, with the demerit of increased stamina consumption when using Astral Power.


    ¡°I don¡¯t think this is a taste I¡¯m looking to acquire.¡± I decided, the positive effect of increased mental speed simply not worth the torturous taste.


    ¡°Eh, to each their own.¡± Mal shrugged, taking another gulp from her cup. Wondering if dwarves had special taste-buds, or maybe no taste-buds at all, I shook my head, pushing the cup away before deciding to show off, just a little.


    A quick, magical flex created a beautiful, ornate mug, made from clear Ice, with a tinge of silver to it, before the cup started to fill with a glowing, silver liquid, from the bottom up. Without careful control, the freezing temperature of the Liquid Moonlight started to cause mist to billow away from its surface, filling the mug and spilling over the sides, gliding downwads while it mixed with the surrounding, warm air to vanish again. The whole thing made for a wonderful spectacle, and when I took a gulp, Mal¡¯s eyes turned quite wide.


    ¡°That¡­? What?¡± she looked completely flabbergasted.


    It took a bit of effort to keep my features utterly serene and I helped things along by taking another sip.


    ¡°You have your tricks, I have mine. I would offer you some, but I¡¯m afraid it would be very much detrimental to your health, unless you have a high affinity for Ice Astral Power or incredibly high Vitality and Endurance. Otherwise, you would most likely die.¡± I warned her, giving her a moment to gather her thoughts.


    ¡°Anyway, you said curatives are possible. What about the classic Healing Potion?¡± I asked, bringing our talk back to Alchemy. The speed at which her face fell was quite impressive and she let out a soft growl of annoyance at the question.


    ¡°I¡¯m trying, okay?¡± she grumbled, before letting out a slow breath. ¡°Jekyl asks every time, after we had some down-time. Not like recipes grow on trees and a universal curative is amongst the most interesting things an Alchemist can make. I mean, I can do a bit of healing by directly infusing a potion, but that only works if I directly administer it, they can¡¯t really take them out, if I have to stay behind because I have to log out for work.¡± she complained, giving me a bit of insight into the party dynamic.


    ¡°Why don¡¯t we focus our discussion on Healing Potions? I have a bit of insight into the magical side of things, though limited in scope, and you might be able to get some clues on how to tackle the problem. If a universal Healing Potion is even possible, I certainly can¡¯t just cast a spell that simply cures, no matter what the problem is. My Healing Magic works only with direct application and focus, I need to mentally control and direct things. The sort of Healing Magic you are talking about might be within the domain of Divine Casters but even they have to do some directing. At least that¡¯s what Olivia told me.¡± At my explanation, a frown appeared on Mal¡¯s face, her mind digesting my words.


    ¡°There are, I¡¯ve seen one.¡± she insisted, before asking a few more questions about the way I healed, which I answered without giving away too many details and we were off to the races, both of us asking detailed questions of the other, trying to find answers to our own questions that might be hidden within the other''s mind. Neither of us fully understood the connections between our disciplines, but connected they were and we both wanted to know more. And so, we kept discussing, regularly refilling our respective drinks as we talked.

 Chapter 539

    ¡°What in the¡­?!¡± An intense voice ripped me from my focus, making me realise that I had zoned out. Sadly, the surprise meant that my hands shook for a moment, spilling the liquid I had been pouring into a different beaker, causing it to land on the table below and starting to enthusiastically rip the heat from it, freezing it instantly.


    The sudden hissing and cracking caused Mal next to me to drop the vial in her hand, shattering on the table, introducing a secondary reagent into the already troublesome mix and I helt Lenore give out a cry of warning, bullet time activating instinctively. Falling backwards, I instantly projected a set of Ice-runes, willing a wall of Ice into existence between Mal, myself and the mess glowing in bright colours in Lenore¡¯s magical vision. Even in Bullet Time, the world seemed to shift into a slower gear and I had the illusion that I was seeing the air distorting from the shards of frozen glass that shot away from the magical discharge, before piercing into, or shattering against the hastily put-up wall.


    ¡°Ouch!¡± Mal landed next to me, mostly on her behind, while I stumbled, barely catching myself on my arm.


    Two pairs of angry eyes flicked over to the door, where the mouth of a dark-skinned humanoid was hanging wide open, staring at us. From the descriptions given, it was obvious that I was looking at Jakyl,


    ¡°Why are you interrupting?!¡± Mal next to me flared up, jumping to her feet and looking very much like she wanted to tear the interloper apart.


    ¡°I called out!¡± He defended himself and I could see his violet eyes flicker back and forth, going from the mess on the table, to the wall of Ice before landing on Mal and me, only to flicker back to the table.


    ¡°Gods, I need a do not disturb-sign.¡± Mal complained, some of her anger dissipated but when she turned back to the table our experiment had been on, I could see that her hands clenched into fists.


    With a wave of my hand, I dispersed the Wall of Ice, turning the invested Astral Power into Liquid Moonlight and forming it into a small orb, so it could peacefully disperse back into the Astral River.


    ¡°Look at it from the bright side. We now know that a combination of hyper-cooled metal, Ice-Astral-Power and a solution of Fire-biassed salt causes an energetic release of energy.¡± I spoke up, sniffing the air around the table, my tongue flicking out to parse the magical elements in the air. There was definitely some fire left, alongside something acidic, likely due to the solvent Mal had used to dissolve the salt, which couldn¡¯t be done in water, as even mundane water was water-biassed in the magical sense. While I hadn¡¯t seen it myself, the combination was apparently quite energetic on its own, though not as nicely explosive.


    At my words and actions, Mal stepped up next to me, ignoring Jakyl at the door and inspecting the mess on the table, shards of broken glass, small puddles of smoking liquid and even a couple hard grains of some unknown substance.


    ¡°True, we should try to figure out what happened here. Not quite how I wanted the experiment to go, but them¡¯s the breaks.¡± she muttered, gently prodding one of the piles of glass, only to realise that it was fused together.


    ¡°Don¡¯t ignore me!¡± Jakyl complained from behind us, causing both of us to turn around, staring at him.


    ¡°What else?¡± Mal angrily asked, her voice almost a hiss.


    ¡°What is going on here? Why is she here?¡± he asked, pointing at me. In that moment, I could feel the disturbing feeling of ¡®Observe¡¯ creeping around my body, subtle, yet pervasive. The moment I felt it, I instantly pushed back, smothering it in Darkness, before pushing a spike of Mind-Magic through the established connection, not powerful, just enough to give the user a taste of the Solitude of the Dark Moon.


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    ¡°Stop that!¡± I commanded, as Jakyl stumbled back, the lash of Mind Magic catching him unprepared.


    ¡°Could I trouble you to make introductions?¡± I asked Mal, hoping that she could clear up any misunderstandings, or whatever drove Jakyl to act the way he did.


    Mal let out a sigh, before calling out, ¡°Mibo, Myra, Gilo, if you are here, come over.¡±


    Shouted acknowledgement came from the front of the house and I could see that Jakyl was staring at me, a frown on his face. It didn¡¯t take long for the rest of their team to assemble and I got a good look at them. Gilo, the halfling, was even smaller than me and just as petite with a pair of clear and curious eyes that took me in for a moment, before focusing on the mess on the table behind us, amusement shining in them. The other two Daimons were taller, though not as tall as Jakyl, broad in the shoulder and with an air of restrained strength around them. Not as brawny as Sigmir, nor as sinewy as Adra, but a mix of the two. One could have taken them for humans, if not for the horns on their forehead and the shade of their skin, a graphite-grey no human could achieve without weird make-up.


    Once they all stood in the door, crowding the narrow opening, Mal explained that the Guild had assigned a second group to the upcoming mission, to ensure success. The rewards wouldn¡¯t be lowered, it was simply to make sure an important mission would succeed and for that, the Guild was willing to pay out double the amount. It would lower individual experience-gain, simply due to the higher number of people, but that wasn¡¯t considered a problem, especially as the inclusion of the Clerics already meant that any battle would be counted as large-scale, with the EXP-reduction inherent to that.


    I was introduced as part of that other group, a spellcaster and someone who was working together with Mal on some research, while the rest of my group would be introduced the next day. I could feel the eyes of the natives studying me for a few moments, but there wasn¡¯t that intrusive feeling of ¡®Observe¡¯, only a quiet measure before they nodded in acceptance.


    ¡°Anything else?¡± Gilo asked, her eyes going to the table behind us and a grin appeared on her face.


    ¡°Don¡¯t come in here and disturb me while I¡¯m working?¡± Mal asked in response, a bit of the earlier anger returning.


    ¡°As you asked us before.¡± Mibo nodded, before he and Myra turned around to leave.


    Gilo, on the other hand, came in, looking me over at close range once again, before giving a happy nod of acceptance.


    But while the three natives took the whole affair with little concern, Jakyl looked as if he had bitten into something sour, his face starting to distort the moment Mal had explained that the Guild had changed the quest on them.


    ¡°This is such bull¡­¡± he muttered, just loud enough for Gilo to hear him.


    ¡°No, it¡¯s reasonable.¡± she chided him, not snarling with anger but there was a certain disdain in her voice. ¡°You need to remember, not everyone is able to come back after they die. For us, this is our one life, we are not chosen by the Gods like some Travellers are. And even if we ignore the fact that death is a very real possibility on this Quest, can you take responsibility if we fail? Even if we manage to protect the Clerics, if they don¡¯t manage to complete the ritual, the next time the purification can be attempted, it will be more dangerous by an order of magnitude. Sending only one group, if two are available, would be utter foolishness.¡±


    With that Gilo focused back on Mal, giving Jakyl no opportunity to answer.


    ¡°Now, what fun thing did you try here?¡± she asked, poking the shards of glass on the table.


    Mal gave me a glance, which I returned with a shrug, before we started to explain that we had been experimenting with differently biassed materials. Once Mal had managed to get over her surprise earlier, and had taken a close look at the Liquid Moonlight I had been drinking, she had concluded that it was essentially Ice-attuned Astral Power, not highly concentrated and condensed but still quite pure and useful for experimentation.


    Given that I wasn¡¯t about to try creating Eternal Ice, let alone allow her to experiment on my Crown of the Northern Wind, we had settled on testing the effects my Liquid Moonlight could introduce into her Alchemy.


    The morning of experimentation had turned into an afternoon, and at that point, Jakyl had interrupted as. On the plus-side, his interruption had managed to bring my attention to my log, making me realise that it had been incredibly productive. My alchemy had jumped from a lowly five, gained by playing around with a couple of magically attuned plants during my travels, to a fifteen, the value of concentrated and systematic experimentation obvious.


    Not wanting to disturb the group further, I suggested clearing up, promising that we would meet at the Guild the next day, to set out for our mission.

 Chapter 540

    The next morning, we all assembled at the Guild. Jakyl still looked a little grumpy, but the smiles on Gilo¡¯s and Mal¡¯s faces seemed to be genuine. Mal took the initiative to approach me, even before Weise could speak up, to introduce the two groups to each other, or introduce the three unknown people who were present, their garb making me assume them to be the clerics. The simple, sturdy travelling clothes, combined with the singular, ornate torch-amulet each of them was wearing gave that impression.


    ¡°Good Morning. Jakyl agreed to the conditions we put on ourselves.¡± Mal quietly assured me. While I wasn¡¯t convinced that I could trust either of them, the fact that they had given their word to keep my presence quiet in order to stay out of any forum-related drama gave me a bit of hope. Not enough to let them see all of my cards, but they would be allowed to see a few. In response to her assurance, I simply nodded, moving to stand next to her, the rest of my group following along.


    ¡°Wonderful, you are all here.¡± Weise, the Guild-Clerk, greeted us.


    ¡°Let me make introductions, before we go over the details of the quest.¡± he added, before giving a short introduction regarding each person present. The three I hadn¡¯t met before were, as expected, the Clerics, all of them followers of Persephone. A part of me was interested how the three very different people had come into the worship of the same deity, they didn¡¯t even share a race, one, their leader, a Halfling, while the two apprentices were what was likely a Daimon of some sort and a Caprakin. But any questions I wanted to ask would have to wait, until we were on the road. In my head, I could feel Lenore¡¯s curiosity perk up, servants of a Goddess of Death might have some answers regarding her recently acquired Nevermore-trait and they might even be willing to share.


    There was a slightly awkward round of greetings, before Weise went into the details. For that, he teamed up with Kirl, the leader of the clerics, who filled in some of the information needed. The outline was quite simple: travel to a location a few days'' march away, make sure the clerics don¡¯t get hurt on the way, clear away all undead and continue protecting the clerics while they perform a ritual, before returning back to Gaber. Nothing complicated, but as always, the devil was in the details. Or rather, the unknown, as the unknown variable that could turn the quest from a walk in the forest into a death-march was the number of undead that we would encounter and their strength.


    With a soft sigh, I decided that not warning Weise and Kirl would be irresponsible and so, I spoke up.


    ¡°You will have to make a decision if you truly want us to join this Quest. During our crossing of the Dorrian Mountains, we might have been too effective. At least that is my hypothesis, after we destroyed a large group of Undead, special undead started to appear, not necessarily to kill us, but to drive us away. Skeleton Hunters, they were called, swift fighters, immune to any magic we could throw at them and relentless. Even more disturbing was that, no matter what we did, their attacks came regularly, twice a day, and always at the exact same time of the day. I don¡¯t think I need to explain why that is troublesome.¡± I explained, noticing a quick glance passing between the locals.


    ¡°There have been reports of similar events.¡± Weise nodded, before letting out a sigh of his own. ¡°There are quite a few unknowns about the Dorrian Mountains, and quite frankly, few have an interest in exploring the mountains too deeply, to try wresting their secrets from them. To my knowledge, none have succeeded.¡± he paused and Kirl spoke up, as if taking over.


    ¡°I believe having you with us will be advantageous, especially if those hunters aren¡¯t after you, but simply a new variant, moving around for whatever reason. If nothing else, having you with us will allow us to survive, if we get attacked by such a threat and retreat to town.¡± she paused for a moment, before continuing to speak. ¡°For your information, the current quest is necessary but it is not deeply urgent. The ritual can be done during any full-moon night, so we have five days to travel there and it needs to be done within the next four month, or there will be trouble. But if the undead are changed this month and we are forced back, it won¡¯t be the end of the world, annoying, yes, but not catastrophic.¡± she explained, and I had to nod in understanding. It was refreshing to hear that the scheduling wasn¡¯t tight, that the Guild was smart enough to plan contingencies.


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    ¡°If Cleric Kirl decides that the quest needs to be aborted, it will still be counted as success on your record, if all three clerics are returned to town unharmed. The reward will be greatly diminished in that case, but nothing will be held against you. The survival of the clerics, and obviously your own survival, is the most important objective.¡± Weise added, getting nods all around.


    After a moment to allow any additional questions, he nodded one more time and a blue window popped open before me.


    <table><tbody><tr><td colspan="2">Quest Alert!</td></tr>


    <tr><td colspan="2">Purification of the Shadow-Cleft - Escort</td></tr>


    <tr><td colspan="1">Quest Difficulty </td><td colspan="1">Medium </td></tr>


    <tr><td colspan="2"> Escort the three Clerics to the Shadow-Cleft before the Full Moon and protect them during their ritual. </td></tr>


    <tr><td colspan="1">Quest Reward </td><td colspan="1"> 5 gold-coins


    Increased Merit with the Adventurers¡¯ Guild </td></tr></tbody></table>


    After a quick check, I nodded, accepting the quest. With nothing more to do, and a definite time-limit, we didn¡¯t dawdle and directly set out. A few quick questions revealed that the daimon-cleric, Eronui, and Mal were the slowest in our group, meaning they set the pace. Curiously, keeping her comfortable pace was quite easy for Mal, apparently a dwarven trait that allowed her to march long distances with little effort, allowing us to chat and discuss Alchemy and Magic. We were joined by Gilo, who had an interesting outlook on the topic, mainly in practical questions and applications. Or, more generally, how to use the somewhat theoretical ideas Mal and I were discussing, to cause maximum havoc.


    Her very down-to-earth outlook gave me some ideas for my own work, especially when it came to applying Ice-Magic at a distance. It was something I had seen in a video on the forum, another Ice-Spellcaster creating Walls and Shields of Ice, but not within an arm''s reach, as I did, but at a distance.


    It took us a few iterations, but after two days of testing and discussing, I had a working prototype, a shard of Hard Ice, internally engraved with a runic formation and set with Liquid Moonlight. It gave me enough Astral Power to work at a distance, while insulating the Liquid Moonlight and keeping it from dissipating. I had no idea if the other spellcaster was using the same method, and doubted it, but my new method allowed me to set up walls, only at a distance. I only had to move the shard, roughly the size of my hand, into position, focus, apply a bit of Astral Power and the wall froze into existence. It wasn¡¯t anchored, with only it¡¯s weight and my Ice-Magic holding it in place but it was a good first step. I had some ideas to incorporate the runes for Stillness into the next version, but that could wait until we separated from the other group.


    Another offshoot of my vigilance against the other group was a bit of theatre with Lenore. Instead of our normal, swift changes when moving out of her Hallow, I made it appear as if I was summoning her, creating a cloud of Darkness in front of me, ¡®channelling¡¯ Astral Power into that cloud, before the Black Bird was emerging from the cloud. I even went as far as to activate Overflow and channel some Darkness-Magic, simply to give my eyes the ominous shine when I called her out. The idea was to make her appear as a simple extension of myself, not an independent entity, something Sigmir and Ylva mirrored.


    Overall, the three different groups meshed together quite well. Other than the trio formed by Mal, Gilo and myself, interested in all things magical and alchemical, Sigmir and the two Daimon-siblings Mibo and Myra got along quite well, especially after a short sparring-match during the first evening. The few times I joined into their discussions, it was all about the best ways to fight and what to expect when facing the undead. Similarly, the three Clerics and Olivia formed another group, discussing lore and theology, joined by Jakyl more often than not.


    Lastly, Adra and Rai stuck together, often-times moving ahead to scout, sometimes joined by Gilo when the discussion between Mal and myself turned too theoretical.


    All in all, the first three days travelling through the forest were quiet and peaceful. No animal was willing to go after such a large group and the handful of undead we stumbled across were quickly dispatched by Rai.


    And then, shortly before we reached the Shadow Cleft, things changed¡­

 Chapter 541

    From above, the change was quite obvious, the trees going from healthy evergreens, with some fall-coloured deciduous trees mixed in, to the sad image of bare tree trunks, stripped of their branches and even the bark having died and fallen off. The tall, white trunks reminded me of skeletons, the branches on the floor giving the impression of a graveyard, only that I noticed movement amongst some of those bones.


    On my request, Lenore moved ahead a little further than normal, in order to get sight of our objective before we moved into the obviously blighted zone, just in case the undead wanted to register their objection to our presence. When she left the range I could share her senses, I focused all my attention back into my body, speaking up to warn the others.


    ¡°Gather around.¡± I called out, making sure all could hear me. We didn¡¯t quite move in a tight formation, but all remained close enough to support the others. As expected, Sigmir was the first who reached me, other than Gilo and Mal who had been next to me, all of us trying to figure out a way to create a better smoke-bomb. The method-comparison between their smoke-creation and my own mist-creation was quite fascinating, though I doubted I would be able to use their methods, as they required fire. Something I wasn''t willing to touch, not on a magical level and only out of necessity on a mundane level.


    ¡°We are about to enter the afflicted area, we need to be careful. Depending how things look further up, we might want to make camp here and only push in tomorrow. Otherwise, we¡¯ll have to camp in the blighted area, not quite sure how restful that would be.¡± I explained, getting a few questioning looks in return.


    ¡°How dangerous does the area look?¡± Olivia asked, obviously knowing that Lenore was scouting for me. Making a vague gesture with my hands, I simply shrugged.


    ¡°Can¡¯t really say, there are undead but the amount of deadwood on the ground makes it impossible to guess just how many or how powerful they are.¡± I explained, only to zone out when Lenore entered the range at which we could share our senses again, transmitting a stream of memories.


    Raising my hand and closing my eyes for a moment, I focused inward, looking at the memories. If the land before us was blighted and dying, the Shadow Cleft was a rotten corpse, leaking decay into the surrounding area. In Lenore¡¯s memories, I could see the rotting power spread, like sewage seeping into the land, defiling everything it touched. Swallowing, I forced down the bile that was rising from my stomach, the impressions from Lenore¡¯s memories enough to make me sick.


    ¡°By the gods¡­¡± I muttered, my eyes blinking open to reveal Sigmir¡¯s worried face.


    ¡°What did you see?¡± she asked, her voice gentle, caring.


    ¡°It¡¯s like an open, infected wound, the infection slowly killing the land.¡± I replied, reaching out to steady myself against Sigmir.


    ¡°And if we don¡¯t make sure the wound is cleansed, it will turn septic, the land dying from necrosis.¡± Kirl threw in, her voice filled with a calm sadness.


    ¡°I see.¡± I admitted, a shudder running down my spine.


    Closing my eyes again, I focused on the images once more, pushing the magical impressions from my mind, focusing solely on the visual images. Trying to count the undead, to find out what else was out there, waiting for us to engage. Sadly, the shadows around the cleft were obscuring most of the area, the magic inherent to them enough to conceal any Undead from Lenore¡¯s perception. There might be hundreds of skeletons hidden beneath, or countless of incorporeal Spectres concealed within the dark cloudy shadows.


    ¡°We¡¯ll have to move in today.¡± I decided, knowing that we¡¯d need the extra time to make sure the cleft was cleansed of undead, so that the clerics could set up.


    ¡°So, what is going on?¡± Mal asked, looking more than a little confused at this point.


    Instead of explaining, I simply shook my head when an amusing idea shot through my head. Knowing that Lenore was about to land, I directed her to land on a branch behind Mal and her group, before I cocked my head to the side, my eyes wide open and flashing with the purple tint of Darkness.


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    ¡°Never one¡­¡± I spoke, citing an old video-game line, mentally coordinating with Lenore.


    ¡°... without the other.¡± my voice spoke, only it wasn¡¯t coming from my mouth, but from behind them, where Lenore had silently landed, using her ability to speak in my voice. Their reaction was amusing enough to make me work hard to keep my features eerily still, especially when they whirled back around ,their heads swivelling from Lenore to me and back. From the corner of my eyes, I noticed that Lenore had cocked her head to the side, too, mirroring my own position, keeping eerily still as well.


    Using the Darkness-Magic I was channelling, I reached out, forming a tendril of emptiness, trying to connect with Lenore through the void inherent to all things, similar to the way I had previously tried to move things. It was difficult, the light all around us dispersing some of my Astral Power, but with a wasteful expenditure, I managed. Lenore, noticing the connection and amused at my idea, played along, pushing herself through the connection into her Hallow, vanishing in a puff of feathers, made from darkness.


    ¡°What?!¡± Mal asked, the expression on her face pure confusion. Again, I simply shook my head, refusing to explain, and turned away, moving forward again.


    ¡°There will be undead soon. We¡¯ll need to remain vigilant, especially you, Rai. They appear to hide within the dead branches on the ground.¡± I warned, ignoring the group with us.


    ¡°Okay, what was going on there, Morgana?¡± Mal pressed me, after catching up to me.


    ¡°You remember that impression I shared, flying above Ladrin?¡± I asked, using language appropriate for Mundus, as Gilo was listening in to speak of a video I had posted in the past. Mal obviously needed a few moments to think, her face scrunching into a frown before she nodded, still looking rather insecure.


    ¡°Well, there you have it. Such abilities can also be used to make sure we aren¡¯t running into foes, what did you think I was doing the whole time?¡± I explained, carefully choosing my words so they were true, without giving away just what Lenore actually was. She simply nodded, looking pensive and somewhat confused, the desire to ask many questions still lingering in her eyes. But she had obviously received the message that I wasn¡¯t about to tell her everything and accepted that.


    In silence, we continued on and within a few minutes, we reached the area Lenore had seen from above and while it lacked the scale that gave such a severe impact from above, the intensity on ground-level was striking in its own way. The change from healthy, evergreen forest to stripped trunks and scattered branches on the ground was stark, a distinct line, almost as if drawn with a straight-edge.


    To my senses, the scent of Death was pugnant in the air, overpowering everything else and making me somewhat nauseous. It was just as bad as it had been in the Dorrian Mountains, only that there, it had been a gradual exposure as we travelled up the hills, not such a sudden change.


    ¡°Be very cautious.¡± I warned the others once again and now, we moved into a tight formation, Sigmir taking up the rear, the two Daimons taking up the front, together with Adra, Gilo and Jakyl. The clerics, Mal and I, were protected in the middle, while Rai joined Sigmir in the rear, his ability to teleport allowing him to strike at every point in the formation at will.


    ¡°I really don¡¯t like this.¡± Mal whispered, her head swivelling around, trying to spot the undead, hidden between the bone-white, dead branches.


    ¡°Neither do I.¡± I admitted, drawing on Lenore¡¯s sight in an attempt to find our foes. Sadly, the branches were filled with necrotic energy, providing ample camouflage, at least against my senses.


    ¡°Incoming.¡± Rai warned behind us, before disappearing in a flash of Darkness. Moments later, his form reappeared some fifteen metres to the side, blade already clad in Darkness and stabbing down. While it was impossible to see what he had attacked, the dozen skeletons rising all around us gave me a reasonably good idea.


    ¡°Stay in formation, destroy those that attack us. Let Morgana deal with them from a distance.¡± Sigmir commanded, keeping an eye on the overall situation and objective.


    It only took me a moment to decide on a course of action and show some of my power. I was tempted to let Lenore deal with them, the power of her focus was incredibly effective against Undead, I wasn¡¯t about to give away all my secrets. My ability to use Darkness-Magic was wide-spread enough for me to consider it common knowledge about any who wanted to know and the ability to destroy Skeletons was not something I needed to keep concealed.


    Instead, I went in a different direction, giving them shock and awe. Bullet Time activated to give me the extra time to focus and direct and I materialised a dense orb of Darkness in front of me, quickly drawing a set of Runes into it with my other hand, the activity hidden within the darkness. Once that was done, I could use my Darkness-Magic to form the Astral Power into beams of magic-devouring Dark Radiance, striking all skeletons that had risen, sending them back to the ground in scattered bones.


    It was an utter waste of Astral Power, the efficiency atrocious, but a quick glance on the faces of our companions showed me, it had been worth it.


    ¡°Let us continue. We don¡¯t have unlimited time.¡± I announced coolly, as if I hadn¡¯t just blown through a good third of my Astral Power reserve to deal with a dozen skeletons below level sixty.

 Chapter 542

    My opening gambit settled things, though not quite in the way I had intended to. While there was quite a bit of shock and awe going around those in the group who weren¡¯t used to me, it mostly manifested in a changed distribution of effort. Instead of staying in one large group, we split up, with my group providing close protection for the clerics while Mal and her group took over the lead, leaving some thirty metres between the different groups, That way, their group was able to do some fighting on their own, gaining experience without my group trivialising the encounter.


    Watching them make their way through the forest had its own charme, it was quite interesting to simply observe. Their team-work was quite solid, with Gilo scouting some distance ahead, the rest following behind in a tight formation, leaving Mal in the back while the two Daimon¡¯s were on the sides, ready to move into any direction. It was a different paradigm, suited for open areas that made sneaking up on them hard. In tight spaces, where the terrain might hinder them from adjusting, it might get problematic. But not here.


    Their tactics were quite simple, Gilo used gestures to warn the others if she spotted an enemy she wasn¡¯t able to comfortably kill on her own and one of the Daimon-Siblings alongside Jakyl moved up, taking care of things. If necessary, the second Daimon-Sibling joined them, leaving only Mal to provide overwatch and cover, warning them in case of emergency. That tactic left Mal rather open to ambush, but to ambush her, you¡¯d need an intelligent foe, with the capability to evade detection by Gilo and Mal, that also had the ability to take her out near instantly. Risky, but they made do, mostly by having her move up somewhat close to the fighting.


    Their tactic remained steady, leaving us out of the fighting and bored, until there was a change. Instead of the usual gesture I had noticed, Gilo used a different gesture, her fingers flashing and Mal made a short, affirmative gesture in reply. Curious, I stopped the others, leaving the space between the groups open instead of catching up, while Gilo, quite some distance up ahead, took out a slim bottle and took a short sip from it. Just from the movement, I was quite sure she couldn¡¯t have drunk more than a single mouthful before putting the cork back into the bottle.


    For a moment, nothing happened with her and after that moment, she suddenly moved a great deal faster than before. Not blindingly fast, the distance between us was far enough to allow me to keep track of her easily enough, but at close range, that might have been different. She moved with a speed and agility that only Rai could match in the group and even he would need to push himself. It was quite impressive, though I had no doubt she would be paying for the enhancement after the potion wore off.


    With her newly enhanced speed, she gave up any pretence of stealth, dashing forward, throwing small objects as she went, hitting something ahead and off to the sides. From the spots hit, skeletons began to rise, not just a few but an actually larger group, some thirty skeletons, gathered in a reasonably small area.


    ¡°Interesting.¡± I muttered, curious how they would handle that, as none of her companions appeared to move forward to support. Not that they needed to, Gilo was weaving through the bare trunks, just staying out of reach of any skeleton coming too close but drawing them in, quickly. It was a classic tactic I recognised from other games, though it wasn¡¯t one I would be willing to use in Road to Purgatory, where a single mistake might be enough to get hit, tripped and murdered in short order.


    Looking over to Mal, a grin appeared on my face and for the first time, she was readying her crossbow, a complicated mechanical monstrosity, with springs, cogs and wheels, almost steampunk in its appearance.


    I wasn¡¯t able to see what she loaded, but I was quite curious. Bolts were no use against skeletons and given that Gilo had gathered all those skeletons together, I was suspecting some area-of-effect.The dim glow visible in Lenore¡¯s magical sight was promising an interesting show, especially as it would give me a better idea on the efficiency of Mal and her Alchemy. How much of its power was simply due to applied magic and how much was that power amplified by the physical catalyst. If the efficiency was good enough, I was curious if there was a way to use physical catalysts in my own sorcery.


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    Mal called out a warning, just as the Skeletons were nicely bunched together, and Gilo took off, putting on a burst of speed, directly away from them. At the same time, Mal raised her crossbow far too high, making it look like she was aiming somewhere into the trees and pulled the trigger, launching a projectile on a beautiful, ballistic arc. Just for that arc, I was willing to applaud, the crossbow must have some mechanism to manipulate the finely, and the two of them must have trained together quite a bit, as the arc ended right in the middle of the skeletons, the bolt striking the ground.


    And disintegrate in a thunderous explosion, strong enough to topple two of the bare trees, scatter a whole lot of deadwood and, most important of all, destroy the bunched up skeletons. Curiously, there was no fire in the explosion, from where I was watching, it appeared to be purely concussive force or sound or something along those lines. Destructive, but there was no sudden wildfire to worry about. The tree-loving elf in me approved.


    ¡°Beware, we don¡¯t know if the sound will draw in more foes.¡± I quietly warned. My warning wasn¡¯t loud enough to be heard by the group up front, but from their movement, they were well aware. Their formation opened up, letting Gilo into the middle, while the three rest looked outward, vigilantly watching for any threats. Looking at Gilo, I was reasonably certain that she was resting, possibly waiting out the duration of the potion, or trying to avoid any additional backlash.


    ¡°Let¡¯s catch up, I don¡¯t think there¡¯s anything coming.¡± Adra suggested, looking around. ¡°And maybe, you can help the Hafling, she looks like she¡¯s suffering.¡± she added and I had to agree. In the thirty seconds, Gilo had stood in the middle of their formation, the look on her face had gone from composure to tension, sweat beading on her forehead despite the somewhat chilly autumn air.


    ¡°Not bad.¡± I complimented Mal, when we joined them. ¡°That grenade was almost as destructive as your coffee.¡± I added, getting an amused glare in return.


    ¡°But Gilo, you don¡¯t look too well, backlash?¡± I looked her over, noticing that there seemed to be faint vibrations in her legs, reminding me of the state I was in, after one of Mrs. Wu¡¯s most brutal sessions. For a moment, I truly sympathised with the halfling.


    ¡°I will be fine in a minute.¡± she insisted, wiping off the sweat. For a moment, I considered helping her anyway, if my suspicion was correct and the problem were overexerted muscles, curing her would be well within my capabilities but ultimately, it was her body. If there was an emergency and we needed her active, I would simply do as necessary, but if she wanted to be stubborn and suffer, so be it.


    With a shrug, I stepped back, observing as the shakes faded, but there was no doubt in my mind that some exhaustion remained. It made me wonder just how wise it was, to let the weaker group deal with things and accumulate fatigue while depleting their resources, but at the end of the day, it mattered not. Even if they depleted all their resources and turned into utter dead weight, my group was capable enough to fulfil the mission, or at least retreat if necessary. Still, I made a note to discuss it with the others during our next rest.


    It took another five minutes until Gilo was recovered enough to continue and during that time, only two undead turned up and were quietly dispatched by Rai, not that the other group really minded.


    Continuing on our way, we moved back into the observing position, letting them deal with things, until we reached the area around the Shadow Cleft. Here, even the thirty metres between our groups were an unnecessary risk, one that I was not willing to take.


    At first, there was a look of rebellion on Jakyl¡¯s face, a look that quickly vanished, when a spectre appeared out of a nearby shadow, howling towards him, dark claws reaching out to rip into him. It never made it, though not due to one of his allies, before he could do much more than raise his lightly glowing weapon in an effort to defend himself, a beam of darkness struck the spectre, dispersing it before it could do any harm.


    ¡°Playtime is over. We have no idea what is lurking here and taking unnecessary risks would be just stupid.¡± I warned, squashing any objections as we moved forward, to start clearing the Shadow Cleft.

 Chapter 543

    ¡°Rai, Gilo, the two of you are dealing with flankers. Gilo, I¡¯ll support you against incorporeal creatures, Rai, you¡¯ll have to deal with them on your own. Take a flank each.¡± I ordered, taking control of the situation. Just because the first attack had only been by a single spectre, didn¡¯t mean there wouldn''t be a lot more incoming, soon.


    ¡°Myra, Mibo, Jakyl, the three of you will form up with Sigmir. Love, you¡¯ll take the lead.¡± I continued, getting nods from the three Daimons, though Jakyl looked somewhat conflicted.


    ¡°Adra, the two of us will be in the back, Olivia, Mal, on the sides, keeping Kirl, Eronui and Ulchia safe in the middle.¡± Another round of acknowledgement, just in time for me to turn another spectre into slowly dissipating Astral Power, the magic holding it together utterly destroyed.


    ¡°Move, we have no idea how long they¡¯ll take.¡± I noticed a glance passing between the three clerics, but they, too, followed my orders, taking up position in the middle of our formation, while I was in the very back, only Adra next to me able to watch my back.


    ¡°You¡¯ll cover our back, tell me if there¡¯s trouble.¡± I quietly told her, before fully focusing forward. Another Spectre was darting out of the shadows, only to be cut down by Myra, her halberd shining with a fiery glow. The Spectre seemed to like that even less than my dispelling darkness, it¡¯s form going up like dry tinder.


    With Sigmir in the lead, we began to move forward, Rai and Gilo staying near the group, ready to intercept any ranged attacker. By now, there was little need to find threats, there were threats all around us and we never knew when one would emerge. Where before, we had seen only the occasional group of skeletons, they were now coming in an almost constant stream, only to be shattered by Sigmir or one of the Daimons.


    Olivia was happily using her divine magic from the back, golden shields shining around Sigmir and the others in the lead, ready to intercept blows. Similarly, Jakyl was singing a soft yet driving melody and even I, vigilant against any effect that might influence my mind, was getting drawn into his pace, moving in sync with the others. From the back, I could see that it wasn¡¯t just me who was affected, everyone of us seemed to move in a synchronised, smooth fashion that I had only seen between Sigmir and Ylva before. Even with the pack-bond between us, I hadn¡¯t been able to integrate my fighting to the same degree.


    Fully buffed up, we were able to slice through the undead like a knife through butter and I noticed that Sigmir carefully kept a slow pace, making sure that we never ran into too many to handle as we steadily advanced forward.


    In the back, I was able to remain relaxed, there was simply no need for me to intervene. Similarly, Rai and Gilo were quite idle, the three in the front, encouraged by Jakyl¡¯s singing, were drawing any approaching undead towards them. Nonetheless, letting our guards down would be foolish, so I carefully kept watch, just in case.


    The further we advanced, the more undead appeared, in addition to the skeletons rising from the debris and the Spectres swooping in from the gloomy darkness that blanketed the area, there were a few revenants, still covered in decaying flesh. They were slower than the skeletons but a lot more sturdy, their ability to shrug off normally devastating damage quite impressive. Only true dismemberment, fire or high-powered magical disruption seemed to reliably deal with them. For Jakyl and his thin rapier, made for swift stabbing attacks, they were about the worst kind of opponent. No vital organs to stab, no mind to beguile, just a lump of flesh and ill intent.


    A part of me was quite amused when he tried to actually take one of them on, darting out from behind Sigmir, apparently quite happy to finally have a fleshy opponent to stab. The skeletons were similarly lacking in vital organs, but also in flesh to stab in the first place but here, there was a lot of meat to pierce. Which he did, with a flourishing, almost theatrically beautiful stab to the chest. A normal humanoid would have been stabbed through the heart and gravely wounded, if not dying. The revenant on the other hand, simply ignored it completely, instead trying to grab the piercing rapier and the arm holding it, forcing Jakyl to hurriedly pull back, pursued by the undead.


    Mibo had some pity on him, his shield bashing the revenant away, leaving it wide open to any follow-up attack Jakyl wanted to make. Only to have the follow-up attack, another well-aimed thrust, this one piercing the throat, maybe even damaging the spine and yet, the revenant didn¡¯t show any additional discomfort. This time, Myra moved up, her Glaive hacking into the dead flesh, cutting half-way through the undead¡¯s torso, the force of the blow enough to knock it down.


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    It still got back up, only to fall down again, revealing Rai who had stepped into its shadow, piercing the spine with magically enhanced blades and disrupting the magic that kept the thing moving, before stepping back to his assigned position.


    On and on, we went, the initial trickle of undead slowly turning into a stream that Sigmir and the others cut through, only now, Rai and Gilo were forced to fully engage. Not due to the numbers, but because some of the skeletons were spell-casters, their hands alight with unnatural flames in shades of purple and grey. The first time we saw one of those, it managed to throw a fiery projectile at Sigmir, shattering against the Shield Olivia had set around her. Immediately afterwards, Olivia gave order to stop further attacks of that nature, leaving it up to Rai and Gilo to deal with them.


    Gilo was a lot less effective, while her ability to remain undetected was en-par with Rai¡¯s and her ability to scout and track was ahead of his, when it came to mobility, especially on a gloomy, shadowed battlefield, Rai¡¯s shadow-step left her miles in the dust. To keep the magic-skeletons from throwing their purple-grey fire at Sigmir, I decided to intervene, keeping track of Gilo and striking if she wasn¡¯t able to stop one of the skeletons. Luckily, the focus on magic meant that they were even more susceptible to my devouring attacks.


    Finally, after a hard-fought five-hundred metres of land, we managed to get to the cleft. It was a weirdly unnatural scar in the land, maybe a kilometre in length and two-hundred metres wide at the top, almost entirely straight, as if someone had taken a sword and sliced through a hillside, letting the wound gape open. The steep sides turned gentle at the end, the bottom of the cleft rising up and meeting the down-slope of the hill, allowing entry and exit on either side. Either end was almost as wide as the top, though I was reasonably certain that it was a lot narrower at the bottom.


    From ground-level, it was even more depressing than it had been from above. From above, the clouds simply shrouded the land, akin to smog, difficult to see through but simply beneath the flyer. From the ground, we could watch the roiling, dark shadows seep out of the cleft, some rising into the air before drifting to the sides, others simply dispersing on ground level, covering the land. It was almost like looking at a chimney, with black smoke rising from it, defiling the land. Here, the stench of death was as worse as it had ever gotten within the Dorrian Mountains, strong enough to make me want to block my nose.


    When looking through the dark shadows, I could see movement below, the cleft was filled with moving undead, streaming towards the two exits in an effort to get to us. With Lenore¡¯s planning, we had managed to come out roughly at the middle of the cleft, above the deepest point, making the way to us as long as possible, giving us the maximum amount of time.


    ¡°If you have any more of those bombs, maybe now would be a good time.¡± I told Mal, before focusing on one side of the cleft. Closing my eyes for a moment, I decided on a course of action. I needed to get Astral Power into the cleft, quickly and under my control. One way would be to simply conjure Icicles and lob them down, but that lacked a bit of flair. Instead, I pulled out the seedlings I had created to create Walls of Ice at a distance, controlling a pair of them with my Ice-Magic and let one float above the opening, the other towards the middle before activating Overflow.


    My eyes glowing with silvery light, I channelled as much Astral Power into the floating seedlings, letting them instantly germinate into full.fledged Walls of Ice and without continuous support from my Ice-Magic, they followed the Law, in this case, the Law of Gravity.


    The impact was strong enough to cause soft vibrations in the ground, the sound loud enough to be a little painful to my sensitive ears but the effect, helped along with a focus on the Shatter-Rune was quite impactful. I couldn¡¯t be sure how much the walls had weighed at the end, but a couple hundred kilograms of Ice, falling some sixty metres before exploding on Impact, had destroyed quite a few undead.


    And, more importantly, filling the cleft with the freezing energy of my Astral Power, still connected to my mind, ready to be used. With an effort of will and concentration, I used the freezing cold Astral Power down in the cleft, let it mingle and mesh with the Darkness down there. And enforced my will on it, forming a freezing cold mist to devour all magic.


    If not for Sigmir catching me, I might have stumbled, the effort to wrest the power inherent to the cleft itself under my control, if only a small part of it, was immense. And so was the effect, I had seen videos of bombs exploding, and that was what it reminded me of. The mist I had created, cold and white as snow, suddenly exploded outwards and upwards, winds buffeting us as air rushed in to fill the void left by the freezing temperatures, dispersing some of the unnatural darkness that had oozed from the cleft, revealing a winter wonderland below. A quarter of the cleft was covered in Ice and snow, with not a single undead in sight.


    A wide smile appeared on my face, as I leaned against Sigmir, observing the expressions of my companions. Shock and awe, indeed.

 Chapter 544

    The looks on the faces around me were simply priceless. Disbelief and fear warring with awe, making the smile on my face just a little wider, the effect having surpassed even what I had hoped to accomplish. Using the naturally occuring Astral Power, not quite on the level of Wild Magic but certainly higher than usual, had given me extraordinary results, possibly due to the Darkness-attunement the place had. That same attunement was the reason Undead could flourish here, the Aspects of Change and Magic supporting the effect I suspected to come from the Dorrian Mountains.


    ¡°How is it going on your side?¡± I asked, looking to Mal, who had dropped multiple of her thunder-bombs donw into the cleft, the effect quite destructive, likely even enhanced due to the narrow space, but there was just no comparison. Higher level, related traits and titles in addition to the naturally aligned effect all coming together to allow me a performance greater than usual, it simply overwhelmed everything she could do. Not that I was about to explain the exact mechanism I had used. Keeping secrets and a bit of mystery was quite useful.


    ¡°Your concealment slipped.¡± Lenore warned me, in the back of my mind, and I realised that apparently, the magical experimentation had pushed Mortal Hubris into high-drive, my intense focus on my spell-casting making me lose the twilight-based concealment.


    Focusing, I quickly reestablished the effect, noticing that some of the strain left their faces, the fear fading a little, leaving the awe behind.


    ¡°Let¡¯s focus on the incoming enemies.¡± I chided them, to make them focus on the incoming undead. Mal¡¯s grenades had decimated them, but there were still a couple dozen Undead moving towards us. Those, too, had been battered, some bones broken, but they were still mobile and wanted nothing more than to tear us limb from limb.


    The smart move would be to move backwards, following the path we had taken on the way in, all the while battering them from a distance, the fighters amongst us picking off the few faster Undead. Wading in, fighting them directly would normally be an incredibly stupid move, but in this case, it was exactly what we did.


    ¡°Love, why don¡¯t you lead the way?¡± I asked, the earlier grin still on her face. Sigmir looked at me for a moment, before mirroring the grin on my face, in her case with added savagery.


    She let out a wild howl, her red aura springing to life around her and I could feel that she was drawing on Ylva¡¯s strength. Not quite moving into the Avatar-state, but getting close to it.


    Our companions looked at her with wide eyes, and I placed a hand on her shoulder, letting my own power flow into her, Blood Magic bolstering her already impressive strength and speed to another level. I couldn¡¯t push too much power into her, not without exhausting me even further, but with Lenore within her Hallow, I regenerated Astral Power incredibly fast. Fast enough to buff Sigmir without lowering my reserve.


    ¡°Rai, cover her back.¡± I ordered, getting a serious nod in response, even as Sigmir started trotting forward, slowly accelerating until she was full-on running, Rai dashing after her.


    ¡°If you want to play, go ahead.¡± I told the others, letting them make their own decision. By the time I had spoken, Sigmir had covered the distance to the Undead and her Lok¡¯nar was unleashed on the relatively low-levelled Undead, the difference in power blindingly obvious. Each of her strikes was sweeping widely, as she was moving with insane speed and grace through their number, shattering bones and scattering flesh with her silvered weapon. From time to time, I could see Rai appear, shred apart a stronger Undead or one of the Spectres, before moving back into a covering position. Around both of them, golden shields from Olivia were in effect, blocking or blunting any attacks that might make it through.


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    Myra, Mibo and Jakyl had caught up to them, taking up flanking positions and I noticed that Jakyl added his own buffs again, turning the five of them into a destructive blender, their advance slowed by the Undead but never stopped. They simply tore them to shreds.


    ¡°Most impressive.¡± Kirl stated, watching as the others destroyed the last remaining Undead.


    ¡°A simple difference in power. With superior power, superior numbers only mean so much, especially on favoured terrain.¡± I replied, getting an understanding nod in reply.


    ¡°With this, we might manage to take things one step further.¡± Kirl mused, making me raise an eyebrow in question.


    ¡°Explain, please? What do you mean by taking things a step further?¡± I asked for clarification.


    ¡°The ritual we are planning to do, the original plan was to only conduct the simplest version. It is something any of us three can use, even after having supported the group that escorted us magically.¡± she explained and I nodded along.


    ¡°But now that the overwhelming power of both groups together allowed us to hold onto our own power and we never were in danger. We should have enough power to perform the ritual at a higher order. We might even manage to cleanse the cleft for good, not only suppress its effect for a year or three.¡±


    ¡°What would that higher order ritual entail?¡± I prodded, before realising that I didn¡¯t even know the details of the ritual in the first place, ¡°That said, what do you need us to do, anyway?¡±


    There was a thin smile on Kirl¡¯s face, but she explained nonetheless.


    ¡°The basic ritual could be conducted from here. Any of us three can perform it and It¡¯ll take the entire night. The Undead would come swarming in, you would defend against them, with support from the other two, if we were still alive and healthy.¡±


    ¡°The higher order ritual is similar, but it would require us to take up position in a triangle, one on the other side of the cleft, conducted by myself, the other two on this side, on either end of the cleft, conducted by Eronui and Ulchia. The problem is, all of the three sites need to be protected and all of them will attract Undead.¡± she finished, leaving me considering her ideas.


    It was incredibly risky, splitting the group in three parts and separating them like that. But on the other hand, the excitement and hope in Kirl¡¯s voice was palpable, making me wonder if there was a way to accomplish her plan.


    ¡°How important would that be? How big a benefit, because the risk should be obvious. And would the ritual fail, if the worst comes to pass and we have to retreat from one of the spots, maybe even two of them?¡± I asked for more information, to make an educated decision.


    ¡°I can¡¯t even guess at the exact effect, but I¡¯m confident that the effect would be profound. As I said, it might even cleanse the valley. And yes, even if two of the rituals are disturbed, the last will still function, though with a lessened effect.¡± she paused for a moment, her eyes shining with emotions.


    ¡°Please, let us attempt this. It finally would allow us to push back the Undead of the Dorrain Mountains, not only lessen the effects of its spread. Please, it would mean a lot to me personally, to the Temples and the Adventurers¡¯ Guild.¡± she pleaded, her words having little impact on me. But little impact was not none and there was that other part, my own desire to demonstrate the worth of my group to the Guild. Getting their recommendation to smooth over potential problems with the oddities of my group that might prevent us from finding a ship to carry us across the ocean had value on its own.


    ¡°Let me consider it. We¡¯ll need to rest anyway and I¡¯d like to determine how many Undead are still in the region. I might be able to create some simple fortifications that could allow us to withstand a larger group of Undead, even when divided.¡± I finally replied, still not certain what the right answer was. Take a risk, for a potential greater reward or play things safe, get a lower reward but suffer from possible backlash, if Kirl held a grudge for destroying her hope.


    Glancing at Mal, who had heard the whole exchange, I could only shrug, determined to bring it up to the others. My thoughts were interrupted, when a blue box appeared, telling me that I had participated in a battle and had gained experience, scaled by the impact of my group¡¯s effort. Moments later, another box appeared, telling me that I had levelled up to level 113.

 Chapter 545

    With the destruction we had caused, and the suggested spike in difficulty of our quest, we decided to remain near the cleft as we made camp. It was time to make camp anyway. It would also give us a bit of an idea how many Undead were in the area and how much trouble we would have to expect, while preparing fortifications on the next day.


    The evening¡¯s discussion itself was surprisingly short. The natives could see the desire radiating from Kirl, the passionate wish to cleanse the land permanently. To do something that was simply right. The desire to do good was a powerful one, especially as it promised benefits to us, too, making it doubly attractive. In turn, the risk was impossible to estimate. My group had seen incredibly powerful Undead before, but the other group had only seen the weak Undead we had swept aside with little trouble. I had spoken in warning, but I wasn¡¯t sure just how well my warning had been heard.


    For the Travellers among us, the promise of increased rewards was a siren¡¯s song, attractive even to me, and I had confidence that, if the worst happened, Sigmir and I would be able to escape. Being among the most powerful of a group had its advantages, when fleeing, one did not have to be faster than the lion, only faster than the slowest member of the group.


    The night passed mostly uneventful, a few Undead trickling in, but no great assault, nor any of the Hunting Skeletons we had been facing during our journey through the Dorrian Mountains.


    In the morning, I took Kirl, Adra, Myra and Mibo to the other side of the cliff, in order to construct some simple fortifications. Hopefully, that would give us a reasonably sturdy base to defend.


    On our short journey, we didn¡¯t run into any serious opposition, just a few skeletons that appeared to have recently risen and were quickly destroyed by one of the two daimons. Their way of battle was similar to how Sigmir fought, only instead of using pure, physical might, they were using elemental magic. That gave them additional, explosive damage but greatly limited their staying-power, both in terms of stamina and endurance. They simply couldn¡¯t fight as long as Sigmir could, nor could they take as much of a beating and keep going, and that was assuming they had the same level. Regardless, they were enough for the short jaunt, leaving Sigmir and Rai behind, to keep things secured.


    The other side of the cleft was just as desolate and decayed as the one we had arrived at. Dead trees, scattered branches and the wind whistling down from the mountains, carrying a chillingly cold air, filled with enough disturbing power to make even me shiver made the whole scenery deeply disturbing. No horror-movie could come even close to the visceral discomfort I was feeling. The others weren¡¯t much better off, especially Adra looked pale and shaken, her connection to Nature and the land making her especially vulnerable. The same problem had occurred in the mountains, so I knew she could deal but made a mental note to inquire about her condition, simply to show support.


    ¡°Can you guide us to the best site for your ritual?¡± I asked Kirl, not certain what her ritual needed in terms of locality and space. She nodded, guiding us to the highest point above the cleft, roughly in the middle. There, she walked off a circle, maybe twenty feet in diameter, before turning back to me.


    ¡°Here, this is where I¡¯ll perform the Ritual of Cleansing.¡± she told me, looking determined.


    ¡°And we will keep you safe while you do so.¡± I promised, my eyes measuring the land. It wasn¡¯t really flat and there were a few dead trees in the way, but it would have to do.


    ¡°Mibo, Myra, can the two of you clear those trees away?¡± I asked, pointing the offending trunks out.


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    ¡°Certainly. What do you have in mind?¡± Mibo asked, looking slightly confused.


    ¡°You shall see. Please, get to work, as will I. Adra, please keep watch.¡± I ordered, before starting off a few feet away from the circle Kirl had pointed out, carefully creating a rune from Hard Ice. What I had in mind would need a rather massive amount of Astral Power, so having solid runes in place would make things easier. If there was snow on the ground, I would be able to use that but there was none, so I had to make my own.


    Forming one Rune after the other and carefully connecting them in the dwarven style I had learned, I made my way around the circle, surrounding it with a large runic formation. By the time I reached them, the daimons had cleared away the trees, their strength coming in handy, and I was able to complete the circle in a reasonable time-frame. Still, after crawling around for a good hour, I was glad for the endurance-attribute that kept me from feeling too much pain.


    Taking a deep breath and letting it out slowly, I stepped back, gesturing for the others to move back, too.


    ¡°This might take a bit of time. Please, guard my back, I won¡¯t be able to defend myself.¡± I asked them, closing my eyes for a moment, feeling the prepared formation. It was the largest I had used, thus far, but it was simple, not a strain on my ability.


    Focusing power through the crown on my head, I channelled Astral Power into the formation. A part of my mind was focused on that task, while another large part, together with Lenore, was focused on drawing in Astral Power from the Astral River around us and filtering the unpleasant Death-element out. That filtering was mostly done by Lenore, who took it into herself, her affinity allowing her to use it without much trouble. My own affinity was simply not high enough to use it without suffering for it.


    The first few moments, the formation simply lit up, Astral Power gathering until finally, the concentration was high enough and the foundation was set. Hard Ice rose from the formation, my mind carefully forming it into the fortification I envisioned. Nothing fancy, simply a sturdy wall, with an opening at one spot and a walk-way up top. It would allow us to focus our defence on that one spot. Hopefully, the Undead would remain as unintelligent as they had been in the Dorrian Mountains. If so, the defence would be easy, especially with a ranged attacker up on the wall, giving me excellent vision and some protection.


    Wiping off sweat, I turned around, looking at the others. The looks on their faces were quite similar to the way they had looked after I wiped out the Undead in the cleft. Apparently, pulling a small fortification out of thin air was impressive, making me wonder just how I measured up with other spell-casters. From what I¡¯d seen on the forums, most spell-casters had their fixed tricks and very little when it came to the free-style casting inherent to the pure Magic-skills. Or it might be that it was portrayed that way on the forum.


    ¡°Let¡¯s head back. My plan is to put up similar fortifications at the other two ritual-sites and I¡¯ll need a bit of time to recover after setting them up.¡± I ordered, before explaining my plans further.


    ¡°This site will get four defenders, one of you,¡° I pointed at the two daimons, ¡°together with Olivia, Jakyl and Rai. That should give this group a good combination of staying-power, magical attacks and healing. In addition, Jakyl¡¯s supportive effect can affect the largest number of people.¡± I explained, getting some nods in return, before continuing.


    ¡°On the other side, one group will be composed of Sigmir, Adra and Mal, the other will be composed of Gilo, myself and the other of you.¡± I finished. It wasn¡¯t a perfect plan, but in my opinion, it would give us the best option. Putting Sigmir and myself on the same side of the cleft also added the nice benefit that I would be able to let Lenore fly over and, with reasonable difficulty, would be able to channel power over, if I moved close enough. It also made sure that if either of the lesser sites got overwhelmed, we could focus on one, while I had the ability to fly across the cleft if needed, reinforcing the major site.


    In addition, we distributed the Travellers, our unique abilities adding an extra layer, even if there were some restrictions. If there was a better distribution, I didn¡¯t know what it would be.


    ¡°If you think that is the best set-up, it will be done that way.¡± Mibo accepted, before looking at Myra for a moment, ¡°Will you stay here? I will stay with the other group.¡± he suggested, getting a nod in reply. With that, the set-up seemed to be decided. With nods all around, we quickly started back to the other side of the cleft. I still had about two hours until noon and I hoped to get another fortification up before then.

 Chapter 546

    Standing atop the Wall of Ice I had conjured, I looked down at the three people with me. Ulchia, the Cleric, was getting ready to perform the ritual, while Mibo and Gilo stood at the opening in the wall, looking nervous. They fingered their weapons and I could see them look up from time to time. Gilo had taken some time earlier to prepare the area before the opening, setting some simple traps and tripwires, hopefully disrupting attacking forces.


    Finally, I could feel the moon rise in the sky, despite a few clouds covering it. It was a feeling likely shared by Ulchia and her voice rose to the sky in a hymn, invoking the power of the Gods. In the distance, I could faintly hear Kirl and Eronui, their own voices adding to the ritual.


    At first, I simply closed my eyes, letting the sounds flow over and around me, curious feelings welling up in me. A part of me wanted to join in the song, to add my voice to the chorus though I neither knew the words, nor the magical forms. Even trying to join in, might disrupt their efforts so no matter how curious and drawn to the magic I was, I had to remain silent. To say nothing of my duty to defend the ritual.


    For the first few minutes, the three voices simply remained in song and I could smell a faint scent of Power below me, gathering around Ulchia. Glimpsing through Lenore¡¯s vision, I could see a mixture of power, Astral Power mixing with what I assumed to be Divine Power. Finally, Ulchia started to move her hands, gesturing in a precise manner and the power around her started to move, flowing with her gestures. A moment later, I realised that they weren¡¯t only using song, but that they also used dance and I was watching the beginning steps.


    Sadly, I was unable to continue watching, as I noticed a spectre approaching in the distance. For a moment, I considered the incoming threat. While I had rested after conjuring the two fortifications, that hadn¡¯t removed all lingering exhaustion and it would be a long night. On the other hand, neither Gilo nor Mibo were ranged combatants, meaning they¡¯d have to face the Spectre after it bypassed the fortifications, its ability to fly and possibly simply move through walls making that easy.


    ¡°Lenore, can you take care of the Spectre?¡± I asked, deciding that letting her take the lead, while I continued to rest and relax would be the best option.


    ¡°Certainly,¡± she replied, happy to finally move. While she could understand why I had been trying to obfuscate her capabilities as much as possible, especially after gaining a bit of an understanding regarding the spreading of information amongst Travellers, it rankled her. Flying out, taking the fight to the enemy, gave her a satisfaction that was difficult to put in words. And so, despite destroying Undead was merely a side-objective to the main task of keeping Ulchia safe, she took off, her wings quickly carrying her towards the approaching spectre.


    Not that she really needed to head out, even from the distance, I could faintly see her evoke her magic, causing the spectre to fade into nothingness. Fighting an enemy so far below her level was simply a joke.


    That Spectre was the first of many and below me, I could see Mibo and Gilo destroy approaching skeletons. The fortification helped a great deal, forcing the skeletons to attack from a single direction unless they wanted to try scaling the walls. By the time the moon was high above, none of them had shown such initiative, giving me some confidence. All in all, the fighting had been sporadic, single Spectres and groups of up to five Skeletons approaching at a time, nothing that posed a challenge. Lenore had taken the time to fly around during one of the many lulls in the fighting, checking out the other two ritual sites and reported that they appeared to be just fine, with no problems in sight.


    The low, overall volume of fighting gave Lenore and me more time to marvel at the ritual invoked by Ulchia below us. It had taken me a bit of time, and a change in perspective thanks to Lenore¡¯s ability to fly, to actually see what was going on and ever since I had, I was torn between awe, curiosity and sheer, unadulterated jealousy.


    Each of the three rituals was complex on its own, while I was unable to follow the forms they were using, I could vaguely understand that Ulchia was forming a tremendously complex spell, slowly building the formation and filling it with vast amounts of power, even as naturally occurring power, the power of the Full Moon, the power of the Night and various other aspects, came together all infusing the spellwork.


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    But from above, Lenore and I could see that it actually was just a third of a greater whole, the complex ritual I was witnessing was just a single node in a magical formation, nothing more than one of my runes in a rune-triangle. Only filled with enough power to let the air vibrate and shine with divine, silver light, even without Lenore¡¯s vision. Even trying to comprehend just how much power was gathered was difficult and more than enough to awe me.


    And yet, I was fairly certain I wouldn¡¯t be able to emulate their doing, that no matter how much I learned and studied, magic of such scale and complexity would be out of my reach. To say nothing of the power invoked. It was born from centuries, maybe millennia, of study and advancement, in combination with quite a bit of Divine Inspiration and simply not something I would be able to match. Or maybe I would be¡­


    The thought, the grandiose idea, to match a Divine working, simply from effort and inspiration alone, it burned through my body, flowing along with the Astral Power within, freezingly cold and terrifyingly intense. While I wouldn¡¯t be getting donated Power from the Divine, there were other ways to gather power from outside, the Nymphs of Tegi had been an excellent example. I simply didn¡¯t accept that their ability to craft their paradise of perpetual spring, in the middle of a land of eternal winter, was something I wouldn¡¯t be able to emulate. It would only take some time. And sacrifice, but when making an omelette, there would be broken eggs.


    A wide smile on my face, I focused back outwards, leisurely putting together a beam of darkness to disperse another of the Spectres. If the Undead wanted to stop us, they¡¯d have to do a lot better. And they most certainly tried.


    As the night went on, their numbers increased and the directions they attacked from diverged, yet, their intelligence remained lacking. As long as the skeletons did not try to scale the wall in numbers, Lenore and I could focus on dispatching the Spectres while occasionally supporting Mibo and Gilo. The biggest challenge was to remain alert and active for the entire night, never able to relax for more than a couple of minutes at a time, before there was another attack.


    When the light of the false dawn was starting to colour the sky bright, the moon slowly setting, things finally changed. Instead of the constant, low-level attackers, a single foe was approaching, a skeleton clad in dark armour. It reminded me of the Skeleton Lord we had faced in the mountains, but the aura of menace it radiated was far weaker.


    As before, we let the skeleton approach and I noticed a look of focus on Gilo¡¯s face and a faint trace of Astral Power connecting her to something further ahead, roughly in the path of the skeleton.


    Before I could try figuring out what it was, the skeleton put on a burst of speed, dashing towards us, only to be suddenly blasted off its feet by what I could only describe as a magical landmine.


    The staggering Skeleton was an opening Mibo didn¡¯t let go by, instantly charging out and smashing into it, Astral Power covering his weapon as he struck with abandon. The Skeleton was never able to regain its balance and my own magic only added to its problems. While the beams of darkness I had used throughout the night glanced off the dark armour, the Blades of the Northern Wind made sure that it remained off-balance, flailing around ineffectually, as Mibo and Gilo took it apart. Literally.


    We were catching our breath when a powerful surge of Astral Power behind me caught my attention. Turning around, I noticed the first rays of dawn come across the horizon, just as the ritual reached its crescendo, a massive orb of silvery light manifesting in the centre between the three ritual sites, bathing the cleft in divine light.


    Transfixed, I was staring at the sheer, magical beauty they had invoked, almost forgetting to breathe. A part of me could feel the silver light cleanse the taint in the valley, driving away the unnatural darkness that had held the land in its grip.


    Finally, the light faded away, like the moon setting across the mountains, leaving behind the calm stillness of the morning.


    ¡°We did it.¡± Ulchia cheered below me, her voice thick with fatigue.


    I was about to agree, when a sudden, explosive burst of magic turned the cleft dark once more, if only for a moment. The feeling assaulting me was familiar and it took me only a moment before realising that it was one of the dangerous skeletons, materialising in the cleansed cleft. Maybe tasked with taking the cleft back, maybe with destroying us.


    Not that its mission truly mattered. Killing us would certainly be on its agenda.

 Chapter 547

    For a moment, I froze, possible ways to proceed flickering through my mind. The sheer power emanating from the being in the cleft made it relatively easy to track its movement along the cleft, away from me and towards the exit on its other side. From there, it would be able to attack either of the other groups, though I guessed that it would take on the main group, simply to deal the most damage before we could scatter. Not that I planned on scattering just yet.


    A glance at Ulchia told me that she was wiped out, her strength drained to the point that she was barely standing. Keeping her alive was part of the mission, and I wasn¡¯t about to compromise that just yet.


    ¡°Mibo, Gilo, stay with Ulchia, if possible get her away from here. We¡¯ll be able to catch up.¡± I ordered. For a moment, I considered trying to utilise the fortification, but the Astral Power had settled, detaching itself to the point that bringing it under my control once more would be a difficult, time-consuming process, the amount simply not worth the effort.


    Given that all of them could feel the power and sheer malice emanating from the cleft, there was no debate, they simply nodded in acceptance, likely happy not to have to fight that thing.


    Springing into motion, I leapt off the wall, exchanging places with Lenore as I fell through the air, letting her take wing. She, too, was somewhat tired from fighting through the night, but both of us had taken as much rest as possible, giving us some room to work with.


    ¡°To Sigmir first,¡± I asked her, taking the minute to calm myself and recover some of my spent power. Lenore simply sent acceptance over our bond, and I could feel that she was worried for the rest of our pack.


    To my surprise, the Undead was easily able to keep up with Lenore¡¯s flight speed, staying ahead of us as it made its way through the cleft. If it exited and immediately moved up the slope to attack Sigmir¡¯s group, it would get there a few moments before me. Just that speed drove home how dangerous that thing was, that we wouldn¡¯t be able to run from it.


    When it didn¡¯t move towards Sigmir¡¯s group, but up the other side of the slope, towards the main group. Despite some worry for Rai, I was feeling relief, simply because Sigmir wouldn¡¯t be in danger before I could get to her.


    Landing on the icy fortifications I had set up, Lenore looked around for a moment, both of us taking in the scene. Sigmir looked slightly battered, though overall fine, while Adra and Mal looked somewhat exhausted. None of them had any lingering injuries I could see, letting me breathe a sigh of relief. Eronui, on the other hand, looked just as wiped out as Ulchia had.


    ¡°Adra, Mal, grab Eronui and regroup with Mibo and Gilo. Get the clerics out and, if necessary, back to Gaber.¡± my command was relayed through Lenore¡¯s mouth, the immediateness making it feel almost as if I was speaking through her beak, using my own voice. Slightly weird, but more comfortable than having her just use my voice.


    ¡°Sigmir, Ylva, we¡¯ll go and help the others,¡± I added, getting a nod of acceptance from her. Adra looked resigned, while I had a feeling Mal wanted to argue, but there was simply no time. Instead of letting her get a word in edgewise, I prompted Lenore to take wing once more, simply flying off, relying on Sigmir to catch up, as Lenore simply soared across the cleft, trying to catch up to the faster Undead.


    Even the brief time we had spent giving orders to their group had allowed the Undead to get more of a lead, negating any advantage Lenore gained by taking a shortcut across the cleft. It didn¡¯t take long for us to hear the noise of combat and moments later, we had sight of the fortifications, the Undead and the others, desperately trying to stay alive.


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    The Skeleton didn¡¯t look too outrageously special at first glance, another one that was clad in the dark, metal armour, this one wielding a large, one-handed sword and a shield, though when seen through Lenore¡¯s magical sight, it became obvious that it was at least as dangerous as the Skeleton Lord we had faced before, maybe more so. In Lenore¡¯s sight, tendrils of Death-Magic were swirling around it, likely harming and maybe healing the Skeleton constantly.


    Myra, Rai and Jakyl were fighting together at the front, while Olivia provided support. Kirl, as expected, looked wiped out, kneeling on the floor as if she was about to collapse entirely. At first, the fight looked almost even, Myra holding the skeleton¡¯s attention, with golden shields layered around her and Jakyl providing his magical support, binding the three of them into a single fighting unit. But the difference in power was simply too much.


    Lenore was pushing herself forward but there was nothing I could do, as the Skeleton used its shield to ward off one of Myra¡¯s attacks, pushing her off-balance and abusing the opening to strike at her. Just before the Skeleton¡¯s sword could impale her, Rai stepped through the shadows, getting into its range, blades dark with magic.


    His furious offensive managed to divert the blow that would likely have killed Myra, despite the golden shields Olivia had layered around her. As things were, it went high, piercing through the shields and biting deeply into Myra¡¯s shoulder, leaving behind lingering traces of magic.


    Rai and the Skeleton began exchanging blows, while Jakyl tried to get Myra out from underfoot. It instantly became obvious that Rai would lose. His blades were great weapons when he had time to precisely strike into his foes, especially when they were distracted, but against a heavily armoured foe that was focused on him, they lacked the reach and heft to deal meaningful blows. The bastard sword wielded by the Skeleton drove him back, almost ripping the blades from his hand when he tried to parry, ultimately forcing him to delve into the shadows to evade.


    Thanks to Lenore¡¯s sight, I could see a brief clash of magic in the shadows, a clash Rai decisively lost. Instead of turning into a wraith, allowing him to reposition and maybe find an opening, he staggered back a couple of metres away from the skeleton, looking decidedly stunned.


    Without hesitation, Lenore and I acted, triggering our Avatar-form as it was the only method we could use to overcome the difference in power. Magic flared around us, as the winds came to our aid, pushing our flying speed beyond what Lenore could achieve on her own. Our blades, carried by the cold winds of the north soared forward, a stream of attacks diverting the Skeleton from finishing off any of our companions, but, as it had been with Rai, the attacks lacked mass.


    Interposing ourselves between the Skeleton and our companions, we raised the Skull of Cursed Deliverance in our talons and began pushing back the magic that surrounded the Skeleton. Faced with our speciality, the one that staggered and was overwhelmed was it, if only for a moment. While we could force its magic back and harm it, simply destroying it was beyond us.


    There was a slight change in the Skeleton¡¯s movement, a deliberate care that caused our feathers to ruffle. Where before, there had been an almost negligent, playfulness, something we would never have associated with the Undead, we were now faced with the Skeleton Lord, for that was what it Identified as, taking the fight seriously.


    With blinding speed, faster than our body could react, it charged forward, shield raised to ward off any blows we might manage to deal. The only weapon in our arsenal fast enough to stop the charge was magic. Runes instantly appeared before us, our eyes and the crown on our head flaring with silvery-blue light for a moment, as a Wall of Ice appeared right before us, blocking the brutal swing of the Undead but taking a chunk of Astral Power to do so.


    But regardless of the cost, the wall had bought us a moment and it was a moment we used. If many blades lacked the mass, we simply had to change that. The Blades of the Northern Wind struck into the Wall of Ice we had just made, the Astral Power still connected with us, even the Astral Power that had been wasted in the inefficient creation and was quickly returning to the Astral River, there was still a faint connection. And we pulled on it, forcing the Ice brought by the Northern Wind to obey its Queen.


    Laughter bubbled from our lips, as the Blades of the Northern Wind united.


    ¡°We have sown the Winds.¡± We cawed out, a massive Blade of Eternal Ice floating before us, controlled by the Ice-Magic we channelled through our crown.


    ¡°Now, it is time to reap the Storm!¡± Silver light flared all around us, snow starting to fall and flutter in the winds surrounding us, as our Ice-Magic raised the Blizzard Blade, ready to do battle.

 Chapter 548

    Before the Skeleton Lord could attack again, the massive chunk of Ice that was the Blizzard Blade struck, forcing it to block with its shield, just as it had earlier. Only now, instead of individual, small but swift blades we were wielding a single, massive Blade. It took a lot of Astral Power, even with the reduction in cost from the Crown of the Northern Wind, what we were swinging around, easily out-massed us by a factor of three. If not for magic playing fast and loose with the laws of physics, the blade would be swinging us, not the other way around.


    There was a loud, rumbling sound as the Ice crashed into the shield and we felt Astral Power surging out of us, forcing the blade forward. At the same time, the Skeleton was pushed back, the charge utterly stopped. It tried to circle but we kept hounding it, slowly getting used to the weight of the Blade and how to best utilise it. But even as we did, the realisation came that, even if we were pushing it around and even beating it to the ground on one occasion, we failed to inflict actual, meaningful damage. The armour it was wearing, together with the aura of Death that slowly drained the vitality of everything around it was too much to overcome on our own.


    ¡°Rai, get your act together!¡± we shouted, our voice echoing through the forest, even as I felt the magic of Jakyl settle around me. It wanted to make us move at his pace and for a moment, our rhythm was disrupted, allowing the Skeleton Lord to recover its position. Pushing back on the magic connecting our minds, we forced him to dance to our tune, a tune that echoed to Rai.


    Rai entered the fight, just as the Skeleton Lord was charging forward once more, betting on us, being able to disrupt the charge. Once again, Astral Power flooded out of us and into the Blizzard Blade, breaking the charge. Only this time, we had been smart about it and realised that weight was key and in this case, we had the mass advantage. Instead of trying to strike from the front, we had struck from below, forcing the Skeleton to stagger but not fall.


    As Rai¡¯s blades sought out the Skeleton¡¯s back, the Winds of the North surged around the Blade, using the moment that Rai¡¯s blades impacted and disrupted the Skeleton¡¯s recovery to our advantage. Our strike was not meant to disrupt or unbalance, this strike, with the full weight of the Northern Wind and a wave of Astral Power behind it, was meant to lift.


    Instead of tumbling back, the Skeleton Lord was knocked up into the air on a ballistic trajectory. Laughing with cawing sounds, we struck again, letting Astral Power flood out of us, as we struck it, again and again, using the fact that it had nothing but air to push against to our advantage, allowing us to inflict some damage with heavy hits that it couldn¡¯t brace against or parry away.


    It also gave us an idea and the strikes started to come from one side, and one side only, battering the tumbling Skeleton Lord through the air like a broken kite. Towards the cleft, formerly known as Shadow.


    Our breathing cames in gasps, the sheer amount of Astral Power we had channelled in a short time physically exhausting us, but it was enough and with one more surge of power, the Skeleton Lord was batted out, on a trajectory that would see it crash into the wall on the other side, some seventy metres down.


    Sinking to our knees, our wings folding protectively around us, we tried to catch our breath. We had dealt the Skeleton Lord a brutal blow, the sheer rock walls acting as the ultimate, blunt weapon, but we had yet to destroy it. The battle was paused, but not over.


    It took some focus, to maintain the balance between our two halves, to maintain the Avatar-State without a foe to battle, but if we split now, we would have to fight the Skeleton Lord separately or try to escape. Neither seemed like a wise idea.


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    ¡°Get ready, it¡¯ll return soon.¡± We warned the others, walking over to the spot where Myra lay, still prone.


    ¡°Olivia, help us, we need to get her back to her feet,¡± we ordered, spinning our Blood Magic to staunch the bleeding so that Olivia¡¯s magic could take it from there. It wouldn¡¯t be perfect, but it should get her back up in time.


    Following the progress of the Undead was simple, the power emanating from it now full and truly unleashed. We had a feeling, the Undead was seething with rage, a curious thought to have about an Undead. Maybe, it was not so mindless after all.


    We froze, when the pack-bond between Sigmir, Ylva and us twinged, the focused mental state of combat bleeding through it. The Undead, on its journey back up the hill, had found and engaged them.


    ¡°Rai, with us, fast!¡± We ordered, beating our wings to speed towards the other two, dragging the Blizzard Blade with us. Getting to the other two, only took a few moments but in that short time, the Undead had started to push them. An angry howl echoed across the land and I felt our other half, the wolf to our raven, take the field, Sigmir and Ylva becoming one, just as we had.


    Hearing their fight in the distance, we started to dive, pushing us forward with Wind Magic, even as our Ice-Magic anchored the Blizzard Blade to our talons, so we could add the weight of our body to the blow.


    Feeling our approach, the Wolf pushed the Skeleton Lord off balance, forcing its shield wide, just in time for us to land a crushing blow from above. Finally, the armour on its arm gave way, the blow strong enough to crush it outright, pieces of dark metal falling away.


    ¡°We stand¡­¡± we began, taking a breath just as the Wolf finished ¡°...Together.¡±


    With those words, four beings in two bodies started to engage the Skeleton Lord, exchanging blows, Wolf and Raven flowing around each other, knowing where the other was at all times. The pack worked together, as one, seamless unit.


    Fighting as one, nothing could stand against us.


    The pup joined in after some time, not part of the unit but as the student of a part of us, he was part of the pack. His movement wasn¡¯t as integrated but the repeated attacks from the flank took the Skeleton Lord¡¯s attention, pushing its demise further and faster. Openings were exploited, especially the shattered pauldron, the large gap in the Skeleton Lord¡¯s armour a perfect target to strike.


    The Skeleton¡¯s sword-arm was the first part of it to break, the gap in the armour just too large to allow it to keep things together.


    With its main weapon gone, it was forced to solely use the edge of its shield to attack, each of its strikes generating an opening for the others to exploit and those openings quickly turned destructive. Without the threat of the sword, the pup and the Raven could focus their attention on their magic, not attacking the physical structure of the Skeleton Lord, but striking at the vulnerable magic hidden beneath the armour. The armour, that still had a massive hole in it.


    It tried to strike down the pup, the edge of its shield chopping towards his midsection, but the pup merely vanished in a slowly dissolving cloud of darkness, reappearing a few metres away. The failed strike unbalanced the Skeleton and with a howl of determination, the Wolf struck in the opening, the large, silvered blade of their axe shearing through the flexible armour around the Skeleton¡¯s knee, sending it to the ground.


    With no leg to stand on, the Skeleton Lord tried to defend itself with blasts of magic, only to be denied by the working of the Raven, allowing the Wolf and the pup to land crippling blows.


    Only undead determination allowed the Skeleton Lord to fight back, as the Wolf and the pup methodically destroyed its armour and the body below, neither of them hesitating while the Raven kept them safe from the Lord¡¯s deadly magic.


    Finally, raising the Skull of Cursed Deliverance, the Raven focused magic into one last, final blast, to deliver the Skeleton Lord into the next life. Where it might find peace once more.

 Chapter 549

    As the Skeleton Lord¡¯s Astral Power faded away, the dark armour that had surrounded its form crumbled away, leaving behind nothing but dust and the shield it had used. Knowing our foe was defeated, the gestalt formed by the Raven¡¯s Shadow and the Unyielding Wolf faded away, as did the Avatar states that had made it possible in the first place.


    Gasping, trying to centre myself in the maelstrom of emotion, I desperately clung onto Sigmir, just as her arms wrapped around me, holding on for dear life. Fighting as we had, both of us blending into the other''s mind was intimate in a way impossible to describe. We didn¡¯t cease to be who we were, but we became something more. A part of a greater being, the Unity of the Pack. It was simply overwhelming.


    ¡°Teacher, are you alright?¡± Rai asked, sounding worried. Neither Sigmir nor I had the energy to rise from our kneeling position, holding the other, both to close and to keep upright, but I managed to gather the energy to speak.


    ¡°We will be. It was just a difficult fight.¡± I explained, before going back to taking deep breaths, Sigmir¡¯s smell helping to calm my rampaging emotions.


    ¡°Sister, let¡¯s follow Adra. That way, we can keep Morgana¡¯s obfuscation of our abilities going.¡± Lenore suggested, using my voice. Nearby, the panting Ylva pushed herself up, her actions all the response needed.


    While Lenore took to the sky, her flight a little wobbly, Ylva was trotting downhill, following along.


    I had to smile at Lenore¡¯s decision, even while I was grateful for it. This way, Adra, Mal and the others would know that we had won and could wait, and by the time we caught up, our mental connection would hopefully have calmed to the point that they could return to their Hallow to rest.


    ¡°There you are,¡± Olivia called out, coming down the hill towards us. Looking over, Myra was in the lead, with Olivia following close behind, together with Jakyl and Kirl.


    ¡°Graceful Eleuthera, grant these victorious fighters relief from their wounds.¡± Olivia intoned, once she was nearby and gentle, golden light settled around us, healing to soothe the manifold aches the combat had brought with it. Curiously, even the mental connection between the pack was calming down a little.


    ¡°Thank you,¡± I told her, finally having the strength to push myself up, even if I had to lean on Sigmir a little. In return, I carefully braced myself, allowing her to pull herself into a standing position, too.


    ¡°Are Ulchia and Eronui unharmed?¡± Kirl asked, looking worried.


    ¡°They should be. When I felt the Skeleton Lord approach, I asked Mibo and Gilo to escort Ulchia away, repeating the same orders to Mal and Adra in regards to Eronui.¡± I replied, taking a deep breath before continuing.


    ¡°I wanted to ascertain that, if we failed to beat the Skeleton Lord, not all three of you would perish,¡± I added. Kirl¡¯s relief at my words was obvious, though some of the earlier worry lines remained, likely due to the situation her request had brought us into. The fight had obviously been incredibly close and if anything had gone wrong, or if Sigmir and I were a little less powerful, we¡¯d all have died.


    ¡°Look at the upside,¡± I told her, glancing into the Cleft, formerly known as Shadow. ¡°We did a great thing here. The land will heal, at least in time.¡± I reminded her, getting a grateful smile in return.


    ¡°Let¡¯s grab the shield and head back towards town. Who knows what¡¯ll crawl out of the ground next.¡± Sigmir suggested, causing a soft groan from me. I really wanted to simply curl up on her chest and sleep for a few days, but sadly, I also knew she was right. We were in no position to fight anything and remaining where we had a good chance to be attacked would be unwise.


    The procession that set out after the rest of our group had to look rather amusing from a distance. A massive Giantblood, leaning on a tiny elf, a small Halfling being supported by a human, all while two Daimon¡¯s and a Wolf-Beastman led the way, none of them looking all too well.


    Following the path we had taken to get to the Cleft, we continued to march, until we stumbled onto a camp in the final stages of preparation. A brief, mental communication from Lenore shared what she had told the retreating group, bringing a smile to my face.


    Once Lenore had caught up to them, she had informed them of our victory in my voice, asking them to prepare a camp nearby, as we were all battered. Once the message was delivered, she had created a small cloud of mist and winged it, trying to make it look like she had disappeared. While I had no idea just how effective her deception had been, she and Ylva had been hiding nearby and were by now fast asleep.


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    ¡°Sit, relax. We¡¯ll take care of you.¡± Mal told us and for once, I had absolutely no problem getting ordered around. Once Sigmir was seated, leaning against a tree while sitting on some furs, I plopped myself on her lap, leaning against her chest.


    ¡°Here, take this. It¡¯s not coffee, but it should help some.¡± Mal told me, handing me something that looked suspiciously like an energy bar. Grinning into Sigmir¡¯s chest, I started to gnaw on it, not caring that Sigmir was having one herself and a few crumbs landed in my hair. I was simply too tired to care, even if I knew I¡¯d regret it, once I had to wash my hair.


    ¡°What¡¯ll happen to that shield?¡± Jakyl asked once we were all situated. ¡°You just grabbed it, but it¡¯s not like you¡¯re going to use it, right?¡± he glanced at Rai, the one who had been carrying it.


    ¡°I will not. Far too heavy, and Teacher taught me to use two blades.¡± He replied, pulling it from his Magic Bag.


    Reaching out, I placed a hand on it, using Identify to see what we were dealing with.


    <table style="width: 90.0442%">


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="10">Shield of the Undying</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 50.9751%" colspan="5">Rarity</td>


    <td colspan="5">Rare</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="5">Type</td>


    <td colspan="5">Shield</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="5">Base Protection</td>


    <td colspan="5">15 against Piercing Damage</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="5">Base Protection</td>


    <td colspan="5">15 against Slashing Damage</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="5">Base Protection</td>


    <td colspan="5">12 against Blunt Damage</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="5">Special Effect</td>


    <td colspan="5">Defiant in Death¨C Increases Endurance by 5%, for every 10% your HP is below 50%.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="5">Special Effect</td>


    <td colspan="5">Attribute Increase ¨C While this shield is held, you gain +2 Courage]</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    For a moment, I glanced at Sigmir, trying to remember the attributes on her shield. She had been using it for a long time, and while she¡¯d always tried to maintain it, taking it to a smith to get repaired whenever possible, it had taken a literal beating on our travels.


    ¡°Love, do you want it?¡± I asked quietly. Apparently, not quietly enough to avoid being heard by Jakyl.


    ¡°What, you want to give it to the two-hand weapon user over the shield-user? Lovely.¡± he snarked, glaring at me with sudden vigour. Behind him, Mibo looked rather eager, staring at the dark metal shield, dim light reflecting off its surface. Bristling up, I pushed myself from my comfortable position, standing and glaring at him.


    ¡°Do you truly believe you¡¯d have had even the remotest chance of defeating that thing without us? Gods, I doubt you¡¯d have managed to get that far, the Hunting Skeletons would have done you in.¡± I growled, not willing to back down.


    Before Jakyl could answer, a hand gently squeezed my shoulder.


    ¡°It¡¯s alright, I prefer to keep using my Obsidian Shield,¡± Sigmir told me and I let myself be pulled down, back onto her lap. If she felt she didn¡¯t need it, arguing with idiots would only allow them to pull me to their level, where they could try to defeat me with their experience.


    Once I was leaning against her chest again, she quietly whispered into my ear.


    ¡°In addition, I really don¡¯t like the feel of that shield. It sends shivers down my spine, and not the good kind. Nothing good will come from that thing.¡± she told me, and I glanced at the shield myself, not trying to identify or even use magic. Just looking at the dark, gleaming metal, the creepy artwork and the decorations and felt myself agreeing with her. There was something wrong with it, though I couldn¡¯t tell what. Sniffing, I tried to detect the scent of malicious magic, but there was only the lingering smell of Death coming down from the Dorrian Mountains.


    For a moment, I considered warning Mibo, but after a moment, I decided against it. If their greed brought them misfortune, on their heads be it. If they found a competent spell-caster, they might be able to find what Sigmir¡¯s instincts were warning her about, but that, too, was not my problem.


    Snuggling in, I closed my eyes, pulling Sigmir¡¯s arms around me for comfort. Ensconced in her warmth, I decided to look at the messages from the battle. For a moment, I considered scrolling through them, before deciding that I couldn¡¯t be bothered, instead, I looked around to find the filter for kill notifications. I simply didn¡¯t care how many Undead had been destroyed and how much EXP each had given. The important part, was that I was now level 115, gaining another three points in Intelligence from my Class and enough free points to push it to seventy.


    That done, and with an additional point into Intuition, bringing it to 52, I let my mind float for a moment, trying to feel the subtle changes.


    A grin came to my face when a Blue Box told me that one of my traits had been upgraded, that the Astral Power I channelled into the world now retained a stronger connection to me, thanks to my rising intelligence. While I couldn¡¯t be certain of the effects, I could guess that it would allow me to work large spells easier, as I would be able to store more Astral Power in a formation while working. Just for that, the increase in Intelligence was more than worth it.


    In addition, there were a few Skill-Ups, Darkness-Magic rising to 69 and Ice-Magic rising to 89. Just those, but given that they were two of my more important skills, getting two points in one and a single point in the other was great. It made me wonder what I¡¯d get, once I finally raised Ice-Magic to 100, but as slow as the skill had been growing lately, I wasn¡¯t holding my breath.


    With visions of Power, the Ice I conjured covering the world, I let myself fall into a deep slumber. If there was one place I could relax, it was in Sigmir¡¯s arms.

 Chapter 550

    The way back to Gaber was entirely peaceful. It might have been due to the cleansing of the Shadow Cleft, or simply because the undead needed more time to return, but either way, nothing even tried to bother us.


    As on our way towards the Shadow Cleft, Mal, Gilo and I discussed Alchemy on the way back. Only now, Mal and Gilo were much more interested in the way I used my spells, especially the larger formations I had used to create the fortifications. They hadn¡¯t missed that using so much Astral Power was similar, on a technical level, to the divine Ritual the Clerics had used and the implications they drew from it were clear. If you wanted to change the world, Rituals were the way to go.


    Not that I disagreed, it was a simple function of power channelled over time, the more power you wanted to use, the more time you needed to invest. No matter what, there was only so much power I could draw from the Astral River in a given time. Any improvement in magical efficiency, for example by using the connecting runes of the Dwarves, just increased the percentage of Power applied in the desired manner. Lesser efficiency could be compensated with more power, and Rituals were all about slowly building up massive amounts of power.


    To them, a ritual equivalent to slowly empower an alchemical product would allow incredible efficiency. Their idea sounded somewhat plausible, and I had a great time discussing it, even as I had to repeatedly shoot their suggestions down, simply due to the way magic worked.


    Channelled Astral Power didn¡¯t like to remain within the physical plane, it returned to the Astral River unless there were special circumstances involved. Ice-Magic, and any other magic that created seemingly permanent items like Earth- or Metal-Magic, only created semi-permanent items, they slowly faded back into the Astral. How quickly that happened depended on a variety of factors, but outside a single type of material, it seemed to hold true. That single type was truly condensed Astral Power, something like the Eternal Ember we had discovered near Kolyug or the Eternal Ice we had found beneath the glacier. Or that I had made my crown out of.


    While not immediately fruitful, the discussions allowed us to quickly pass the time and gave me a few ideas of my own. Previously, I had once used the Astral Power bound within Eternal Ice to create a spell far beyond my capabilities at the time. Granted, there had been a backlash, but it had worked. That, in turn, meant that if I got my hands on the right materials, materials that either had innate Astral Power, similar to the reagents used in Alchemy or had Astral Power channelled and stored within them, I might be able to with the latest trait I had gained, new doors would open for me.


    The simple part would be, to use stored Astral Power to increase the amount of Power I could access at a time, it would have to be stored shortly before I wanted to use it, meaning there were some logistic problems, but those could be overcome.


    The truly interesting part was that using outside materials would allow me to use types of Astral Power I had no affinity with, without having to use extraordinary amounts of effort and with horrendous efficiency. What would happen, if I were to infuse Astral Power aligned with Metal or with Gems into a working of Ice? Would the Ice become even harder, could I make some sort of metallic, bendable Ice? There were interesting questions I might want to explore. Or some sort of Life-aligned Astral Power, infused into Blood Magic, in an effort to compensate for the Miasma? Questions, so many questions, all begging me to explore them. But so little time, so few resources, I simply couldn¡¯t even begin to work on them.


    When we got back to Gaber, Kirl asked us that we all head to the Guild first, so the official procedure was taken care of. During our Journey, she had been torn between exuberantly happy, boiling with excitement at being able to completely cleanse the Shadow Cleft and pensive, glancing my way from time to time, maybe due to the risk she had put the Group under. The battle had been a lot closer than anyone wanted to admit and it could have ended very differently. Maybe realising that she had almost condemned the whole party to death, due to her zeal. The Shadow Cleft had been purified in the past, without any incidents, but she had pushed for it to be fully cleansed, leading to the appearance of the Skeleton Lord.


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    Entering the Guild, Weise looked up from the counter and immediately perked up, a happy smile on his face.


    ¡°You¡¯re all back. The purification was a success?¡± he asked, and Kirl stepped up.


    ¡°In a sense.¡± she replied, pride radiating from her straight back, ¡°Not only was the Shadow Cleft purified, after the extraordinary efforts of these people, I decided to hold the ritual at a higher circle, increasing the effect by an order of magnitude.¡± she proudly announced.


    ¡°We succeeded, despite the Undead making a massive effort to stop us. And when the radiant light of dawn met the gentle light of the moon, the Shadow Cleft was cleansed. Not merely purified, to fester once again, but fully and utterly cleansed, the taint on the land washed away.¡± she explained, before proudly adding.


    ¡°The Shadow Cleft is no more.¡±


    For a moment, Weise stared at her, before his eyes flashed downwards, where he was likely seeing a blue box. A moment passed, before his mouth curled into a wide smile.


    ¡°Extraordinary.¡± he declared, ¡°And all three clerics are safe and sound. Great.¡± he nodded, looking almost a little giddy.


    Before me, a blue box appeared, as he pulled two purses from beneath the counter. Giving it a quick glance, I nodded to myself, reading that the Quest, ¡°Purification of the Shadow-Cleft - Escort¡± had been completed, including the hidden bonus objective. As a reward, we received a greatly boosted amount of EXP, in addition to a large amount of Merit with the Adventurers¡¯ Guild.


    There was a ding that resounded through my mind, as a massive amount of EXP pushed me up yet another level, to hundred-sixteen.


    ¡°I will prepare the introduction letter right away. Here¡¯s the money you were promised.¡± Weise announced, already fiddling around with some paper and a feather pen.


    ¡°If you are interested, there is another Quest that needs to be taken care of,¡± Weise told us, as he was writing the letter, his hand flying across the paper in an impossibly speedy fashion. As he spoke, a blue window appeared before me. From the glances of the others, the same had appeared before all of us.


    <table style="width: 90.0442%">


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 98.2302%" colspan="2">Quest Alert!</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 98.2302%" colspan="2">Exploring the Shadows</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>Quest Difficulty</td>


    <td>Hard</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="2">Unnatural Shadows have been drifting from the Dorrian Mountains. Explore what hides within them and report back to the Adventurers¡¯ Guild in Gaber.</td>


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    <td style="width: 51.6949%">10 gold-coins


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    ¡°I¡¯m afraid we¡¯ll have to decline.¡± I decided, my heart bleeding as I declined the Chain-Quest. If not for the simple fact that I had an objective to accomplish, that I wanted to see the quest with the Soul Prison through, I would have pursued this quest-chain, simply because it might be the one that would, eventually, see the Dorrian Mountains cleansed.


    ¡°I see. Regrettable, what about you?¡± he asked, looking at Jakyl and the others.


    There were a couple of looks shared between their group before a nod was given.


    ¡°We will take the quest. It might take us a couple of days, but this doesn¡¯t sound too time-sensitive, right?¡± Mal asked, looking rather eager.


    ¡°No, it¡¯s not time-sensitive, take as much as you need,¡± Weise replied.


    ¡°Ah, here¡¯s your letter.¡± He pushed the money and letter to Adra.


    ¡°Thank you for the service you¡¯ve done for our town. People will hear about the great deed you did. Really, thank you.¡± he told her, looking almost teary-eyed.


    ¡°I, too, have to thank you. If not for you, we¡¯d have never been able to even try the ritual. The last time we purified the Cleft, we Clerics had to actively support the group escorting us, not like this time, where we actually felt safe. You have my gratitude, and I pray to the Gods that they will watch over you, Travellers.¡± Kirl added, giving a deep bow to us, together with her fellow Clerics.


    ¡°Walk under the moon, Sister Kirl.¡± Olivia returned the bow and, feeling that it was appropriate, I mirrored her, as did the others.


    ¡°Now, why don¡¯t I tell you all about the circumstances you are heading into?¡± Weise asked, focused on the other group.


    With another round of goodbyes, my group left the Guild, heading towards the Tavern. For once, the looks I was getting on the street were those of respect and admiration. It was an oddly satisfying experience.

 Interlude: Forum - Im not even mad

    Official Road to Purgatory-Beta Forum


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    -Jakyl, confirmed Beta-Account-


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    Why, hello there, fellow Travellers


    Recently, my ground and I got one of those dreaded escort-quests. Granted, they are much better in Road to Purgatory as the natives actually act like intelligent beings, not just avalanche-poodles that you need to keep safe while they do their very best to commit suicide, to the point that a call to the prevention-hotline feels justified. But that¡¯s neither here nor there.


    Guild gave us a schedule for the quest, because rituals need to be held on certain days or somesuch, the other Traveller in our party had to do real-life stuff for a couple days, so the natives in our group and I headed out. When we came back, guess what, Guild decided that our group isn¡¯t good enough or something and a second group will join the quest.


    Blergh, but whatcha gonna do.


    Met that other group, higher level than us, four natives and a Traveller. Recognised the Traveller, it¡¯s friggin¡¯ Morgana.


    Went out, did the escort. Gotta say, FRIGG Morgana is one scary lady. I mean, holy frigg, in my party, I¡¯ve got a Halfling whose hobby is to blow shit up and slit throats, and a dwarf who likes to make thigns that blow up, more often than not even when desired. The two are besties, always looking for more shit to blow up. They don¡¯t scare me, I mean, it explodes, big whoop. But Morgana? Well, you¡¯ll see what I mean later, it gets good.


    Main escort guy feels that difficulty should be turned up a notch, wants to split the party into three, so ten people, with three NPCs to defend against an onslaught of undead. Discussion ensues, more or less decide to go along, cause Natives feel ritual is important and Travellers want the phat lewt and EXP. Or maybe the others had their own reasons, I didn¡¯t really ask.


    Three places have to be defended, around some hole in the ground in the middle of a forest, so no real way to work together. Morgana goes, ¡®Oh, we need some fortifications¡¯ and I¡¯m just, well, sure, do you carry any in your backpocket?


    Turns out, frigg, she DOES. Walks around, makes some Ice on the ground and pulls a friggin small fortress out of her behind, walls and everything. No gates though, but just having a wall around you is useful.


    So, with walls around us, we split up and settled in to defend. Started out normal enough, Skeletons, some ghost-things, the usual suspects. Sucked that it lasted the whole night, constant attacks that needed to be stopped. No downtime, at least not longer than a couple minutes. Shit¡¯s exhausting.


    We dealt, morning came, some Super-Undead appeared, stronger, faster, armoured, the whole nine yards. Got it down, having a high-level cleric and some teleporting rogue/assassin-type is insane.


    Then shit got suddenly real. Road to Purgatory is insanely realistic in the first place, things there just FEEL real, immersive and all. You feel like you¡¯re in another world, with magic and all. But in that moment, on that cold friggin hill, I felt evil enter the world and walk towards me.


    Good thing Travellers don¡¯t really need to, you know, or I might have soiled my pants.


    After Super-Undead was defeated, we suddenly got Ultra-Undead or something and yeah, it was scary as¡­


    My party-member, one of our fighters, tried to engage, got whipped like a little girl, despite three more people trying to help. Level¡¯s be real. Let¡¯s just say, I was ready to respawn.


    You know, there are a few videos of people flying around in Mundus. Turning into birds and stuff, or the Valks with their ritual of wingitude or whatever it¡¯s called. Most can¡¯t really fight in the air, but awesome, they can fly.


    Then that video of Morgana dropped, with her going all harpy meets tornado and slaughtering some flying lion-skorpions. That¡¯s what happened, only with Skeleton-Boss.


    Swooped in, I might edit the video later, got some glittering Icicles that fly along, crown on her head. Looked sick, dangerous and frigged-up at once. Anyway, the battle.


    Took her a few moments to get things into gear, but she was swinging a giant Icicle around, beating the skeleton around like a pinata. Not just pushing, as you might expect when two fighters collide, but literally knocking the thing, which was wearing full plate-armour, into the air and playing badminton with it. Knocked it out of the park, and off a cliff.


    Apparently, the fight continued afterwards, which shows just how sick the boss actually was, but dayum. Morgana is one scary lady. And I¡¯m not even mad about it.


    If you spot this story on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.


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    Harms, confirmed Beta-Account


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    Could have told you that, my friend. Could have told you that she¡¯s incredibly scary.


    And the simple fact that almost a third of all spellcaster-videos directly released by Pantheon Entertainment feature her, should tell you something else.


    Scary lady is scary, and scary lady will be scary for a long time.


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    Agreed, scary lady is scary.


    I¡¯m playing a spellcaster myself, and frankly, I have no idea how she does the shit she is pulling off in those videos. It doesn¡¯t fit any magical tradition I¡¯ve been able to find, which might make things even more scary.


    And it makes me wonder just how much time she¡¯s spending in Mundus, but that¡¯s neither here nor there.


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    Is it wrong that the image of Morgana, with Wings, a crown on her head and a sneer on her face makes me horny?


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    Tobiuno, confirmed Beta-Account


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    Scary Lady has been scary for a long time. Even back in the ¡®Craft of War¡¯-days, she managed to pull stunts that nobody really understood. Well, that and the fact that I don''t think anyone has seen her smile or laugh. There were rumours that she wasn¡¯t human but a Robot-Assassin from the future, cause of her preternatural sense of timing.


    We have yet to determine if those rumours are false.


    And I wouldn¡¯t bet on it.


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    Palda, yes that IS wrong. At least I think it is.


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    Jakyl, confirmed Beta-Account


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    Oh, she does laugh. At least, as she was magically annihilating a bunch of skeletons, she was grinning and laughing like a maniac.


    Eh, she might be a robot. Would explain why she¡¯s so cosy with that NPC of hers, the huge one that appears in most of her videos.


    Would that be akin to a vibrator getting stuck in a fleshlight?


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    There was a question whether Morgana is Scary, with a capital S? Or maybe something else, often abbreviated with that letter? I would like to point you to my own experience.


    I have yet to manage to sleep without a night-light, and that is outside of Mundus.


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    Malachite, confirmed Beta-Account


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    Really, Jakyl?


    Fuck you, very much.


    Both of us asked for a promise when teaming up with her, and you just go, fuck it, and break it? I gave my word that we wouldn¡¯t share what we saw, and here you go, posting about it, you fucking asswipe.


    Thanks for that, nice to see just how much your word is worth. A bunch of views and likes.


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    Heracles, Official Pantheon Moderator


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    Please, keep it civil.


    While I can understand that sometimes, emotions run high, please keep them on Mundus.


    And Kelphram, if you experience psychological troubles from playing the game, please, PLEASE make sure to contact customer service. While Pantheon Entertainment conducted extensive testing, brain- and mental architecture is utterly dependent on the individual.


    While we are confident that the Capsule-system is safe for consumption, individual differences might make you extremely susceptible to certain conditions. Just like a vaccination can be perfectly safe for some 99.99999% of people, if you are that one in ten-million for whom it is not, it can be dangerous.


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    Malachite, would you elaborate, please? I¡¯m curious.


    Given that my word is my bond, I would very much like to know what is going on.


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    Malachite, confirmed Beta-Account


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    I¡¯m a teammate of Jakyl and when I got told that a person called Morgana would join us on that quest, I didn¡¯t want to get dragged into the drama around her. You know, Howardlight and his buddies starting their RP here on the forum? That kind of drama.


    No thanks, to that.


    So, I suggested to her that we keep our interaction entirely on Mundus, not post videos or anything and once the quest is done, we happily go our own ways. We even made an oath to that effect, all formal and everything. Jakyl agreed to it, promising me that he¡¯d keep things quiet.


    And now, here we go. All very quiet, don¡¯t you think?


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    That sounds unwise, on his part.


    The last time someone managed to annoy Morgana, they were stuck in the stocks and got shit on by a bird.


    Maybe that¡¯s what he is after all along.


    If so, enjoy. And if so, Morgana, we¡¯d all like a video of that.

 Chapter 551

    We spent two days simply walking around the small town, sometimes venturing into the countryside for an hour or two, but mostly we let ourselves relax, did some shopping and generally bumbled about. I used the time to run some errands outside of Mundus and even went to have coffee with Chris. He asked again, if I wanted to come work for the bank he was working at, or if I wanted to have dinner with him some time, but given that I was fully immersed in Road to Purgatory, I declined.


    When I returned to my Capsule-Space later that day, there were a lot of notifications, telling me that someone had tried to contact me, or tagged me in a post. Not quite sure what was going on, I looked at the contact requests first, with some ninety percent of them coming from Malachite. I was still confused about what was going on when there was another request for contact.


    With a thought, I was on my Throne, comfortably sitting, and accepted it.


    ¡°Morgana? I¡¯m so sorry.¡± she blurted out, my confusion only increasing, though now with added worry.


    ¡°What is going on?¡± I asked, not liking this one bit. Wordless, Mal sent a link over, to the official Road to Purgatory-Forum. Scanning the thread quickly, my face darkened and I was getting seriously annoyed. Though, reading Malachite¡¯s responses to the thread, my annoyance changed direction, from the initial impulse to shoot the messenger of bad news, to shooting the person responsible.


    ¡°I see.¡± I frowned, trying to remember just how much of my abilities I had shown during my time with them. But that train had sailed, so it was no use crying over spilt blood. But maybe spilling some more blood would help.


    ¡°What are your plans now?¡± I asked, more curious than anything. The way Mal had posted in that thread, it made it very obvious that she wasn¡¯t happy with her teammate.


    ¡°Leave of course. What good is a team, where you can¡¯t trust your teammates? So, fuck that guy. He can take all those likes he got and shove them up his arse, maybe they¡¯ll taste like skittles on the other end.¡± she snarled, her words enough to make me chuckle.


    ¡°Mibo and Myra won¡¯t really care, I think. Gilo will probably stick with me, but what we¡¯ll do, no idea. Leave Gaber for once, look for some new teammates in one of the cities, or maybe focus on Alchemy for a time.¡± she shook her head, a frown on her face.


    For a moment, I considered things. On one hand, Jakyl had proven that someone¡¯s word wasn¡¯t worth much, at least in his case. On the other hand, Malachite hadn¡¯t broken her word, so rejecting her for the actions of her teammate, when those actions were the reason she quit the team, wouldn¡¯t feel right, either. After all, what other action would I want her to take, in order to distance herself from Jakyl? On a third hand, there was my Lone Traveller-Trait, that incentivised travelling without a party of Travellers, but did it really matter? The area until we reached the coast was rather calm and peaceful, a low-levelled area. There wouldn¡¯t be a lot of combat, certainly not high-level combat, until we reached the coast and ports, where we¡¯d likely split up anyway.


    ¡°If you are interested, you can journey with us to the coast. We are headed to Torop.¡± I offered, maybe a little impulsively, but I wanted to learn more about Alchemy and see if her ideas would push my own magic a step further.


    ¡°I¡¯d love to, but I¡¯m not sure it¡¯d work. I¡¯ve got some obligations in the real world that I need to attend, meetings and such. Most of my work, I can do in a home office, or the capsule, but some of it, I have to meet people in person.¡± she explained, looking reluctant.


    ¡°We can try. If you have the first few days mostly open, we¡¯ll get out of the hills and into the lowlands, where travel is mostly safe.¡± I suggested in return, the reluctance leaving her face.


    ¡°Thank you.¡± she gave me a smile, ¡°I¡¯ll see you in Mundus in about an hour?¡± she asked, getting a nod from me in reply.


    This narrative has been purloined without the author''s approval. Report any appearances on Amazon.


    ¡°Certainly. See you on the flip-side.¡± I nodded before we closed the connection.


    Looking at the thread again, my frown only deepened. By now, there was a short video of myself clashing with the Skeleton Lord, obviously from his perspective, and another one, showing the Shadow Cleft, a massive chunk of it covered in snow.


    Luckily, neither of those fights showed me using anything actually new or interesting. The Blades of the Northern Wind were simply an application of the flying Icicles I had been using since the beginning, and while the conjuring of that Wall of Ice before using it to turn the nine blades into a single, temporary weapon, was interesting from a magical standpoint, so far, nobody had pointed out how I did those. But even if someone did, recycling my own Astral Power wasn¡¯t some game-breaking trick, not with the inefficiencies involved. Useful? Most certainly. But nothing more.


    But the comments of Whisper made me wonder. I had heard about her, the Daimon of Secrets, as some called her, an information broker in one of northern Daiea¡¯s desert towns. She wasn¡¯t a prolific poster, so why did she pay attention to that particular thread?


    Pushing the question away, I closed the browser and triggered the log-in to Road to Purgatory. Wondering about the actions of a deliberately enigmatic player would only give me a headache.


    But how to deal with Jakyl? Killing him, especially in a nicely brutal and messy fashion, had a certain appeal. Maybe encasing him in a block of Ice, watching and waiting as he froze to death sounded like a fun thing to do. But there was the problem with the quest his group might have taken, killing him in, or even near, Gaber would likely cause the residents to dislike us, simply because they lost their capable helper.


    The residents'' dislike wasn¡¯t too important for me, but the Guild certainly had the means to cancel out the positive influence completing the quest and getting the letter of introduction had, simply because they had spread the matter in the first place.


    So I needed a different way.


    Remembering just how serious the natives took their oaths, I decided on a different path. Far less satisfying but without drawing hate on my own group. If anything, I might be able to get a lock of hair, or maybe some blood, and with that, all kinds of fun magic tricks from a distance would become available. If he just happened to be cursed, a day or three after we had left, well, that was too bad but I wouldn¡¯t shed a tear, after all, it had nothing to do with me. I was long gone.


    But before that, immediate justice needed to be done. When I opened my eyes within my Hallow, I immediately prodded Lenore, urging her to find Rai.


    ¡°What is going on?¡± she asked, clearly confused at the sudden urgency.


    ¡°For once, I need him to steal something, not kill,¡± I replied, a grin on my face. While getting Blood, especially if I was using Blood Magic to draw it, would be preferable, fun things could be done with hair as the focus. Fun things indeed.


    Finding Rai, who was together with Adra, didn¡¯t take long, an aerial view was useful for that, and quietly ordered him to sneak up to Jakyl and rip out some hair, making sure he got the roots, was done in a few sentences. Blessed be my disciple, he didn¡¯t even question me, simply nodding when I told him to do so. Adra raised an eyebrow, but when I shook my head, she simply accepted the rejection and moved on.


    ¡°Lenore, can you take to the sky and find him?¡± I asked, getting an affirmative reply.


    Jakyl, just like Adra and Rai, was in town, replenishing supplies together with Myra.


    When I was walking up, I deliberately let some Ice Astral Power seep out, forming a cold mist around me.


    ¡°Jakyl. I name you Oathbreaker.¡± I loudly announced, focusing on the indignation, the knowledge that he had given his word to keep the events secret.


    ¡°Before the Gods, do you have any defence for your treachery?¡± I further asked as he stared at me with a look of shocked confusion..


    ¡°What are you talking about?¡± he finally rallied, to which I only nodded, as if in acknowledgement.


    ¡°So, you deny it, before the Gods?¡± I asked again, letting more Astral Power flow out. The air around me started to become dense with mist, even a few snowflakes forming and falling. When Jakyl didn¡¯t reply out loud, merely muttering something under his breath, I nodded, again.


    ¡°Your denial, before the Gods, will be remembered. May they know your treachery and punish you for it. In this life or the next, it matters not.¡± I announced, letting the Astral Power around me fade.


    Leaving him behind, I simply turned away, taking a step and turning into a raven, Lenore taking to the skies. Around the market square where I had confronted him, the people started to point and talk.


    Now, what would happen to his reputation if he got struck down by a mysterious curse in a few days? Divine Punishment or the act of a vengeful spellcaster? Either way, people would talk.

 Chapter 552

    Lenore and I took a flight around town, simply watching the people move about, riding the winds coming from the mountains. It was simple, relaxing and uncomplicated, Lenore was in charge and I had to do nothing but lean back and enjoy the feeling of freedom. It was wonderful, the feeling of wild freedom only second to the comfortable security of Sigmir¡¯s embrace. One made me wish for the world to stop, so the moment would last forever, the other made me yearn for an eternity, so I could enjoy this world forever.


    Finally, we decided that we should talk to the others. They deserved to know, especially now that I had sicced Rai on Jakyl and publicly denounced him. We returned to the inn, only to find that they were all out. Not much of a surprise, but there were ways to call them back.


    Setting up in our room, I closed my eyes, letting myself sink halfway into the Astral River. There were few major streams in town, but the River was everywhere. The more I immersed myself, the more I realised just how little I had known before, how much more there was. At first, I had thought it was a singular river, of distinct streams with nexus at the intersections. But if so, where did the Astral Power that slowly replenished what was in your body, as you spent it, come from? If there was no Astral River, how could there be Astral Power?


    It made me realise just how foolish the idea of distinct streams was, there was only one Astral River, but it was more akin to a body¡¯s circulatory system, with major vessels connecting the different parts while progressively smaller vessels filled in the gaps, supplying power to every place in the body.


    And if every place was connected, wouldn¡¯t I, if I used that network in conjunction with my Mind Magic, be able to reach everyone, especially people I knew well? I had felt their auras around me for so long, wouldn¡¯t I be able to recognise them, simply from the way their bodies interacted with the Astral River?


    It was a curious idea, one that I wanted to try out and given that we were in a reasonably safe place, it invited the experiment. Compared to using the Astral River to commune with the Grandmother, all the way back in Neyto, it was similar, yet different. Instead of following the increasingly larger pathways to the Nexus, I had to remain in the small, almost impossible to detect, pathways and find the familiar auras.


    The first one I found, without even really looking for it, was Sigmir. She stood out to my mind, even in the Astral River, the connection between us drawing me like a magnet. Even without using Mind Magic, I was certain that she could feel me searching for her, and when I gently pushed a thought through to her, asking her to return to the inn, I immediately felt a sense of response and acknowledgement.


    Similarly, finding Adra and Rai wasn¡¯t too hard. There was a faint connection, the one between Teacher and Disciple, between Rai and myself. While it was far from the bond that Sigmir and I shared, it existed and was recognised on both sides. In addition, I had taught him often and knew his magic and aura from that teaching, giving me some confidence. Pushing the message through was harder, needed more magic and I was pretty sure I accidentally gave him a headache, due to the influence the Dark Moon had on my Mind Magic. Contacting Adra, who was next to him, was a little harder, but I thought she got the message.


    Lastly, contacting Olivia was the hardest. Not only did I know her the shortest time, the connection was also rather faint, an acquaintance and travelling companion instead of a friend and disciple. Even by the time the others had returned, I didn¡¯t manage to find her, leaving me with no option but to give up.


    Withdrawing from the Astral River, I looked over to the door, where Sigmir just entered.


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


    ¡°Welcome back.¡± I gave her a smile. ¡°There¡¯s been some development.¡±


    She walked over and gave me a quick, gentle kiss on the forehead.


    ¡°Would those have something to do with a certain Traveller getting threatened with divine punishment?¡± Sigmir asked, sounding amused.


    ¡°Possibly, yes. We¡¯ll have to see if I have to give the whole divine punishment thing a shove to get it started or if the Gods actually pay attention. Breaking Oaths should be punished. If the Gods are not willing, I¡¯ll have to take a shot at it.¡± I replied, grinning as she sat down behind me, letting me lean against her chest.


    ¡°But the more important part, at least for us, is a different outcome of that situation. Jakyl broke an Oath he gave, and Malachite had vouched for him.¡± I added and could feel Sigmir physically flinch behind me.


    ¡°She is not happy and wants to have nothing to do with him any longer. Given that staying here, in Gaber, is rather useless for her, I offered that she could travel with us, into the lower regions, maybe even to the coast.¡± I explained, getting a thoughtful hum from Sigmir.


    ¡°Just remember, travelling in a larger group means that any fight we get embroidered in will automatically be treated as a battle by the system, massively reducing the EXP any of us can gain.¡± Considering her words, for a moment, I let out a hum. She was correct, it was a hindrance but a minor one.


    ¡°Think about it, how often did we have to fight on the road from Ladrin to Carinthia? Not just some wolf or badger sniffing around, thinking we have food, but a real fight that was worth the effort?¡± I reasoned, getting an amused snort in response.


    ¡°Not a single one. Other than that bear you told me about, and those spiders. But I wasn¡¯t there for them.¡± she grumbled, ¡°Though, things got more interesting in the mountains.¡±


    ¡°And are there any interesting mountains between us and Torop?¡± I chuckled, especially when she sacked against my back, leaning onto me morosely.


    ¡°No, nothing but hills, forests, fields and meadows.¡± she lamented. ¡°We might find some bandits.¡± she realised, her voice perking up.


    ¡°And I¡¯m certain, any bandit that sees a group of five armed, armoured people, shrouded in high-level divine magic, will most certainly step up in an attempt to rob them. Because that¡¯s how you get a lot of coin, not to mention how you survive as a bandit. Right.¡± I snarked, poking a hole into her enthusiasm for highway robbers. Or rather, for killing them.


    ¡°They might.¡± she tried to defend her idea, though it was clear that her heart wasn¡¯t in it.


    Not even dignifying that idea with a response, I instead pulled her arms tightly around myself, snuggling in. We remained that way, until Adra and Rai returned soon after, with Olivia in tow.


    ¡°Teacher, you needed to see us?¡± Rai asked, his face scrunched into a frown.


    ¡°So the message worked. Excellent. Did you feel any discomfort from receiving it?¡± I asked, focusing on the newly explored magic first. Exchanging messages and conversing with a being like the Grandmother was one thing, or directly using the bond between Sigmir and myself, but expanding that ability to others was useful.


    ¡°A brief moment of pain, followed by an intense feeling of loneliness,¡± Rai replied, while Adra next to him nodded emphatically.


    ¡°For a moment, I thought I was all alone, in a desolate, cold wasteland, trapped in a place without light,¡± Adra added, a visible shudder rippling through her body.


    ¡°Please, never use that on me again?¡± she asked, almost pleadingly.


    ¡°Mhm, interesting,¡± I muttered, rubbing my chin. The effect was a lot worse than I had expected, making it unsuitable for anything but emergencies. On the other hand, it had some potential as a weapon, especially if I tweaked some parts of it.


    ¡°Did you hear words, or how did you comprehend the message?¡±


    ¡°No words. I just knew that you were at the inn and needed to talk to us all.¡± Rai replied, adding another interesting observation to my latest experiment.


    ¡°Adra, I will not use that method outside of dire emergencies. I will try to reduce that aspect of my magic as much as possible.¡± I promised, before shaking my head briefly, ending that part of the conversation.


    ¡°Let me tell you why I sent the message in the first place.¡± I began, before laying out the situation with Jakyl and Mal.


    By the end of it, it was time to meet Mal, so we all went down together.

 Chapter 553

    When we got down into the inn¡¯s common room, it turned out there wasn¡¯t just Malachite there. In addition to the somewhat expected Gilo, the other three of her group had followed after them as well, with Jakyl glaring at me, as if I had already done him the mischief I was planning to.


    ¡°Malachite, Gilo, so good to see you.¡± I gave her a smile, utterly ignoring the three uninvited people.


    ¡°There will be no problem if you want to join us on our journey to the west, at least until we reach Torop.¡± I continued, the rest of my party nodding along.


    ¡°Thank you for that. Gilo decided that she wanted to join us as well.¡± Malachite kept her voice unfailingly polite and, just as I had, she completely ignored Jaykl, Mibo and Myra, treating them as if they weren¡¯t even there.


    ¡°Don¡¯t ignore me!¡± Jaykl growled, obviously unhappy with our treatment of him. ¡°Why are you quitting the party now? Just because I¡­¡± he whined, only to be cut off by Malachite.


    ¡°Just because you broke a promise? Because I gave my word that you¡¯d keep it, and you broke not only your own oath but broke my word as well?!¡± Malachite snarled, anger palpable in her voice. Even the nearby innkeeper flinched at the venom in her voice.


    ¡°¡®Oh, I was just saying stuff.¡¯, ¡®Oh, I didn¡¯t mean it like that.¡¯ Is that what you want to say?¡± she continued, her voice taking on a mocking tone, her arms wildly gesticulating, almost as if she was about to slap him.


    Reaching out, I placed a hand on her shoulder, trying to calm her down a little. Not that Mal let my hand stop her, she just barrelled on, hate pouring out of her mouth.


    ¡°I¡¯ve heard it before, I even believed such drivel once.¡± Given that she was only building up steam, there was little anyone could do to stop Malachite. In my eyes, her reaction was a little extreme, maybe even over the top. But there might be other factors I was unaware of involved, either way, I decided to sit back and simply watch with amusement, as Mal was shouting at Jakyl.


    ¡°What about our quest?¡± he finally managed to ask, when Mal had to take a deep breath, in order to have enough air to keep shouting.


    ¡°What about it?¡± she snarled, before sarcastically continuing, ¡°There¡¯s fuck all chance that I¡¯ll go on any quest with you. To work together, one needs trust. Guess what I don¡¯t have, and never will have, for people who treat their promises like farts, forgotten as soon as the smell dissipates?¡±


    ¡°You¡¯d abandon the quest? Leave the town to suffer?¡± he asked, subtly changing his tone and pitching his voice in a way that carried, trying to guilt-trip Mal. As a frown formed on my face, Mal was already speaking.


    ¡°I¡¯m not conceited enough to believe that leaving will have any great impact on the town. It has been here for many decades and it will remain here for decades to come.¡± she refuted him. Curiously, her voice sounded a lot calmer now. There was still anger, but it wasn¡¯t a burning rage any longer, instead, calling it cold disdain might be more fitting.


    ¡°And what about you, Gilo? Are you certain that you want to leave? There¡¯s an excellent opportunity to grow here, to become something more.``He changed his target, now trying to divide and conquer, likely giving up Malachite as a lost cause. Remembering that he was a Bard, I used Lenore¡¯s special sight to make sure there was nothing untoward going on. Carelessness, in the face of Mind Magic, would only result in suffering.


    ¡°I only recently began to delve into practical alchemy. If nothing else, spending a year to develop that skill-set and learn, together with Malachite, will let me be a lot more effective in the future.¡± Gilo calmly refuted, shaking her head in refusal. ¡°In addition, I decided to travel with Malachite in the beginning. Why would I abandon her at this point?¡± she asked rhetorically.


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    ¡°And you.¡± Jakyl apparently decided that there was no way to push Gilo. Or maybe he simply didn¡¯t want to bother, given that a scout was a lot less important in a party, compared to a healer. Doubly so, given that scouts were among the most common adventurers, as hunting was a widely spread occupation, with only a small step from a hunter to a scout.


    ¡°What was that silly act all about? Do you think you are some sort of divine messenger, calling down the Gods¡¯ retribution on anyone?¡± he snarled, looking at me.


    ¡°It might be a mortal¡¯s Hubris, but I sincerely believe that you will not come to a good end. An Oath broken will invite retribution.¡± I calmly replied, trying to figure out a way to get some of his Blood. Having it, especially if I was able to take it using Blood Magic, would make things so much easier. Sadly, as satisfying as simply stabbing him would be, it just wouldn¡¯t be subtle enough. No, the stab I wanted to give him was far more insidious, leaving a deeper wound that would fester and grow, until it consumed him.


    Something about the smile on my face must have been off, as he stared at me for a moment, his face turning pale and his voice leaving him.


    ¡°Either way, Mal, how much do you need to get from your former base?¡± I asked, demonstratively turning away from Jakyl and going back to ignoring him.


    ¡°We took everything that belongs to us.¡± she assured me, getting a nod of acceptance in reply.


    ¡°We will leave tomorrow morning, so if you need to buy anything, you should. In addition, you might want to converse with Weise at the Guild, we wouldn¡¯t want any misunderstandings,¡± as I emphasised the word, I turned to stare at Jakyl, before going back to looking at Mal, ¡°to occur. It really wouldn¡¯t do if someone, ¡° again, I took a moment to stare at Jakyl, ¡°were to spread rumours after we left.¡±


    At this point, I wasn¡¯t so much dropping broad hits, I was taking them and clubbing Mal over the head with them. If she didn¡¯t catch them, I would sincerely worry about her cognitive ability.


    ¡°I¡¯ve got it.¡± she nodded, before she, too, turned to Jakyl and the others, ¡°Is there anything else? If not, Gilo and I have a few errands to run.¡± she sternly told them, a bit of anger still simmering in her voice.


    Finally, it seemed that Jakyl was letting things go. Or maybe he just didn¡¯t know what else to try, given the firm refusal he had met.


    Letting Mal and Gilo run their own errands, I retreated back into our room with Rai and we began to scheme. A part of me wanted to simply use hair for my later mischief, but having Blood would be so much better. It would allow me to weave my curse deeply into Jakyl¡¯s body, maybe even his magic if I managed to procure it using Blood Magic. It would be worth it, just for the experiment and with the added benefit of retribution, I truly wanted to see what could be done.


    And so, during the late evening, Rai and I set out together, heading towards the house the other group occupied. From Malachite, I had learned that Jakyl, just like me, preferred to sleep in Mundus, as it allowed him to rest for a comfortable eight hours, while only four hours passed in the real world, thus giving him more time.


    Getting into the house was almost laughably easy. There was a wide gap beneath the door, and the shutters holding their windows close were far from perfectly tight. While I wasn¡¯t able to flit around an enemy by dodging and weaving in and out of the shadows during a fight, I could take single steps, especially if I took my time. In this case, two shadows calmly stepped into the house, quietly moving towards Jakyl¡¯s room.


    Finding it was easy, though Mal and Gilo might wonder why I asked about it, and once there, we could just as easily step in. Neither Rai nor I dared to even breathe, we remained in the shadows as much as possible for fear of waking him. When he didn¡¯t snap awake, I quickly put together a magical formation, enveloping his head with a cloud of darkness, one that put him into a deep torpor, one that he wouldn¡¯t wake up from easily.


    Once that was done, I drew my athame, carefully piercing the skin on his arm, just a little to let blood flow out and focused on my Blood Magic, using it to draw out the Blood. He shifted in his sleep and I could faintly feel his consciousness struggling against the magic keeping him under. Activating Overflow, I channelled more power into the magic keeping him under, the drain almost frightening, and quickly finished up what I had come for, his magically drained Blood stored in globules of Ice. It would last for a couple of days, easily long enough for me to do what I had planned.


    There was a wide smile on my face, as Rai and I made our way out of the room, after making sure that his arm looked just like it had before we arrived. Now, I only had to wait a few more days for the New Moon, before I could enact my plan.

 Chapter 554

    There was no fanfare when we set off the next day. Nobody to see us off, merely a polite nod from the gatekeeper of Gaber. We didn¡¯t even use Olivia¡¯s magic to speed up our travels, at least not for now. That would come, once we left the mountains and reached the foothills, where we could travel in relative safety.


    As promised, Mal and Gilo travelled alongside us, and once again, we discussed Alchemy as we walked. There was only so much actual Alchemy we could do without a laboratory, but on the side of my own expertise, spellcasting, some things could be done. The small foci I had created before, in order to allow me the swift creation of a large wall of Ice had an additional potential I had missed. Why not infuse them with as much Astral Power as I could, making the Ice as dense and hard as possible. While I couldn¡¯t push it into the state of Eternal Ice, making it a truly permanent item that didn¡¯t fade back into the Astral River over time, I could make the Astral Power last for a while.


    There was an interesting curve of diminishing returns, the more Astral Power was invested, the quicker it drained until I reached a point of saturation, where the invested power drained as fast as I could channel it. But to reach that point, I needed to purely focus on channelling for hours on end, and while the power level quickly dropped, the objects retained a significant amount for quite some time. So far, I hadn¡¯t been able to get accurate measurements, but I was certain it could be used, either for rituals or for a more direct approach. As the attack on the Shadow Cleft had shown, having the ability to project large amounts of Astral Power at a distant location was rather impactful.


    There were some ideas Mal had, ways to change the affinity of the Ice I was using. She had some herbs that had a faint attunement to Darkness and in an experiment, I tried to see what would happen if I infused them with additional Astral Power. It was an interesting process, finicky and volatile, prone to destroy the material in a curious variety of ways.


    It was bad enough that, after the second day of experimentation, Mal decided that we¡¯d only continue that path of inquiry if we had a source of those herbs, as apparently, simply destroying them willy-nilly wasn¡¯t what she considered economical. Maybe there was a way to infuse the soil, letting the plants naturally increase their affinity as they grew, but such experimentation would have to wait until we had a lot more time to spend and a proper location, likely far away from all prying eyes. After all, some would say that infusing the ground with foreign, magical energies was defiling the World of Mundus.


    But all that was secondary, more interesting was my plan for the night. We had been travelling a few days and it had been a little over two weeks since the ritual at the Shadow Cleft. There would be no moon in the sky tonight, the perfect night for dark deeds and dark magic. And it didn¡¯t get much darker than magically cursing someone, using their blood as the medium.


    After we made camp for the evening, I removed myself from the group, taking a bit of distance and setting up on an empty hilltop. Sigmir had followed me at my request, to keep an eye out, and I had a feeling that Mal was rather interested in what I was doing. She was still with the others, but I could almost feel her stare in my direction.


    Working slowly, I set up my ritual, using Ice and Blood to draw shapes into the soil. As I was working, I attuned myself to the moon high above, invisible to the eye but a dark beacon in the night to my magical senses. The Astral River was teeming with Darkness, to the point that I felt embraced by it, power flooding into me and back out channelled into my formation. Even the Ice I was using to draw it became tinged with darkness, turning a faint purple, long before I filled the runes and symbols with Blood to empower them.


    The Ritual had two parts to it, the inner part, that would use the Blood I had taken to locate my prey. It was relatively simple, infused Blood being an excellent focus for scrying and remote strikes. That I wanted to bind my curse into the Blood was just a positive side-effect.


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    The outer part was more complicated and would require a large amount of freeform-casting, as I wanted to use the Lycantroll-Curse I had seen in the past as a basis to weave my own curse. Though, instead of draining the target¡¯s power to turn it into a beast, I merely wanted to use the power to give him a headache. Nothing too vicious, merely filling his dreams with the isolation of the Dark Moon. He was a Traveller, so it would be a massive headache, but it wouldn¡¯t kill him, not directly at least. He might want to die, but that was his problem.


    It took me a while, almost two hours, during which I constantly infused Astral Power into the formation but when I was done, there was a palpable shadow lying over the hilltop. Nearby, Sigmir had quietly dispatched a few Nethersprites, attracted by the shed blood and the used Blood Magic. I hadn¡¯t used too much, just enough to strengthen my bond to the Ritual Circle, so things were still under control. For now.


    ¡°Let¡¯s do this, my friend.¡± I quietly said to Lenore, before we stepped into the middle of the ritual.


    Once again, we needed to channel a massive amount of Astral Power, weaving a curse that would last for a lifetime, though I had a feeling that the lifetime would be very short. Travellers, after all, didn¡¯t truly fear death, as it was but a setback. But what a nice setback it would be.


    Taking out the globules of Ice I had used to store the Blood I had stolen from Jakyl, I placed them into the prepared slots of my ritual, letting out one last breath before I started to move.


    Slowly, at first, my hands started to draw shapes in the air, not runes but simple movements, guided by the shadow of the moon high above. There was no sound, and yet,I could hear the music of the Dark Moon, a howling cry of solitude, driving anyone trying to listen too deeply mad. I had touched upon it before, and today, I was using it, drawing in the power of the Dark Moon and sending it onwards. To punish the Oathbreaker, to make him feel what it meant to be abandoned by all who had ever trusted him. A warning, and a punishment.


    In my mind, Lenore¡¯s voice started to join mine, her thoughts mingling with mine, adding her own meaning to the sensations we were feeling, bearing some of the incredible strain I was under. Strain enough to break a weaker mind, both from the powers we had invoked and from the complexity needed to guide them.


    Seconds turned to minutes and finally into hours, as I moved beneath the Dark Moon, more and more Astral Power filling my surroundings as a part of my mind delved through the Astral River, using the Blood I had stolen to locate my target. It was far away, the connection between us was weak, and yet, I was not dissuaded. He was out there, and if the Gods didn¡¯t punish him, I would take their place.


    My breathing came in deep, jagged gasps as the massive amounts of magic I was channelling took a toll on my body, but finally, I felt things fall into place. There was another force, gently guiding what I was doing, not truly aiding but giving hints, teasing my mind with vague suggestions that might just make things work. There was something familiar about the presence, a faint scent that I could swear I had never smelled before but was always around me. Impossibly omnipresent.


    Finally, with a shout of effort, I spent the last of my Astral Power in an attempt to close the gap between what I could achieve, a last-ditch effort to make the Ritual work and let all the accumulated power go where I wanted it to go. My mind blanked, the power surged and suddenly, it was all gone, the echoes of power rippling through the Astral River as the forces I had unleashed did their work.


    As I fell to my knees, utterly exhausted, the formation started to crumble around me. Even the hill itself was affected, parts of the powers I had channelled feeding back into the formation and the soil. The shadows covering the hill became deeper and a dark mist started to rise from the ground. The site would be marked, maybe forever, by the powers I had wrought this night.


    As a pair of warm arms wrapped around me, a familiar scent filled my nostrils. Sigmir¡¯s voice, gentle and yet so far away, told me I was secure and in that security, I started to feel faint. Neither Lenore nor I had any more strength and in the safest place we could ever be, we both let go, letting ourselves fall into the deep oblivion of unconsciousness.

 Chapter 555

    Waking up was a pleasant experience. There was Sigmir¡¯s familiar scent lingering around me, and while I was a little sore, it was a good soreness, the one that came from pushing yourself just a little further than you had thought possible. Painful, yes, but also so very satisfying.


    After stretching and wiggling around between the sleeping furs, I rose, looking around for a moment. The day was already half-over, the sun on its descent towards the western horizon and not too far away, I could see the hill I had been working on throughout the night, shrouded in a hazy gloom.


    Letting out another yawn, I started to frown. There was something niggling in the back of my mind, but I couldn¡¯t quite grasp the sensation. I was certain I had forgotten something, but what that something was, I had no idea. A dream, fading under the light of the sun.


    Shaking my head, I banished those vague, dream-like impressions of darkness, flickering torches and amused laughter back where they belonged, into the realm of my subconscious and imagination. Maybe I shouldn¡¯t be too surprised to have some strange dreams, after creating and conducting a massive ritual to curse someone who had wronged me.


    ¡°You¡¯re awake,¡± Olivia stated, looking at me with a frown on her face.


    ¡°Apparently.¡± I grinned, stretching myself again, ¡°Though, I¡¯ll admit, I could sleep some more.¡±


    ¡°That¡¯s not a surprise. The amount of power you channelled yesterday was¡­¡± she paused, shaking her head, a wry smile on her face, ¡°It was impressive. Or maybe insane would be a better descriptor.¡± she admitted, turning to look at the nearby hill-top.


    ¡°Thanks for the compliment,¡± I replied with a grin of my own.


    ¡°What exactly did you do?¡± she prodded, and for a moment, I needed to consider my answer. How much did I want to tell her? At the end of the day, I had proclaimed that the Gods would punish Jakyl for his actions and yet, I had given him the punishment he deserved. Would a Cleric like Olivia see that as blasphemy and if so, did I want her to know just how little regard I held for deities of her Pantheon, of any Pantheon, really? Crusades had been started over lesser offences.


    ¡°Grand-scale magic, using celestial bodies to boost the power of my working. The purification ritual at the Shadow Cleft inspired me.¡± I briefly replied, without going into details. She looked at me expectedly, but before I had to come up with a better reply, we were interrupted.


    ¡°Morgana, you¡¯re awake. That was nuts last night.¡± Mal came jogging towards us, Gilo in tow.


    ¡°Do you have a moment? Traveller-trouble.¡± she asked, quietly gesturing a little away from the group. Curious what was going on, I excused myself from Olivia and Gilo and followed her over.


    ¡°Just so you know, Jakyl¡¯s thread blew up during the night. Apparently, he was struck by a divine Curse this night,¡± she told me, her eyes flickering to the gloomy hilltop.


    ¡°Anything you want to tell me?¡± she raised an eyebrow, while I felt my eyes widen in surprise. Certainly, I had cursed him, and had tried to use a Divine Curse as the basis for my working, but that the system would classify my magic as divine, not just divinely inspired, was unexpected.


    ¡°Did he give any details?¡± I asked, curious to hear if I actually had done what I had intended or if there was something else going on.


    ¡°He posted screenshots, the curse is apparently called Curse of the Restless Night, inflicting him with nightmares whenever he tries to sleep. There are some conditions for the curse to be lifted, but he didn¡¯t share those,¡± she explained, her voice vibrating with curiosity.


    It sounded as if I had succeeded, though I wasn¡¯t quite sure what the conditions could be. So, calling it a half-success might be more appropriate. As I thought of my success, I decided to glance at my log, as large-scale magic had a habit of raising skills, sometimes even giving titles or traits.


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    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Title gained</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You gained the Title: Maleficar</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>Few have the ability, or the ruthlessness, to weave their magic into the Blood of their foes, to curse their essence and turn it against them. To blight their mind and make them their own worst enemy. For your actions, you have been named Maleficar.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table style="width: 90%">


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Special Ability gained</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 97.9085%">You gained the Special Ability: Dark Moon¡¯s Justice</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 97.9085%">


    Not all Justice can be carried out in the light of day. Sometimes, Justice requires dark deeds during the darkest of nights. The Justice of the Dark Moon is not merciful, it cares little for excuses or justifications. Only to avenge wrongs. Curses you weave in the pursuit of a just cause gain the strength of the Dark Moon, making them harder to remove, until Justice is served.


    </td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Skill increased</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You increased your skill: Darkness Rune-Mastery [74/100]</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Skill increased</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You increased your skill: Blood Rune-Mastery [63/100]</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Skill increased</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You increased your skill: Blood Magic [81/100]</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Skill increased</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You increased your skill: Darkness Magic [70/100]</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Skill increased</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You increased your skill: Astral Meditation [54/100]</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    As I read through the skill gains a smile grew on my face. The title was, as they often were, a little unclear, leaving me with little information other than that it was problematic. Similar to Mortal Hubris, I¡¯d have to conceal the title and slowly try to figure out what it did.


    The Special Ability, on the other hand, sounded incredibly interesting. A part of me wanted to experiment, to find out what constituted a ¡®just cause¡¯. Did I need to be convinced of the ¡®justice¡¯ of my actions? If so, could I successfully delude myself, or were there outside checks and balances? There had to be some, or the subjective nature of ¡®Justice¡¯ would make the ability either incredibly powerful or incredibly weak.


    Shaking my head, I decided to essentially ignore it. Without knowing the conditions that triggered it, I couldn¡¯t rely on the effect and trying to look for the right conditions might invalidate those conditions as the spells woven wouldn¡¯t be cast in the pursuit of a just cause, but in the pursuit of knowledge.


    Focusing back on Mal, I gave her a smile.


    ¡°Well, I did say that he¡¯d get his just deserts, didn¡¯t I?¡± I grinned, my smile turning just a little bit smug.


    ¡°And you just happened to hold a ritual during the night he got cursed? A ritual big enough to leave a permanent mark on the land?¡± she paused, holding up a finger, ¡°Want to pull the other one?¡±


    ¡°Well, do you know what it takes to contact certain deities in this world?¡± I asked rhetorically, though I tried to make the question sound serious. ¡°And what better night to phone a friend, than an extreme point of their power?¡±


    As I tried to obfuscate what I had done and misdirect Mal, I realised that it might even be what had happened. My ritual had been large and I had tried to use the curse of a Goddess of Vengeance as a starting point. Who knew if that was enough to get their attention, maybe even push them into action.


    ¡°Either way, what¡¯s done is done. He is no longer our concern and we¡¯ll continue to travel west,¡± I shook off my contemplations, focusing on the present and future.


    ¡°If we break camp quickly, and hurry until nightfall, we might get far enough from the mountains to use Olivia¡¯s rituals to speed up our travel. I¡¯ll have to ask her about it. When do you need to log out next, you mentioned you had some obligations?¡± I asked, completely changing the topic and laying the question of divine curses to rest. At least for now, I certainly would keep an eye on that forum¡¯s post.


    For a moment, Mal studied me, as if she wasn¡¯t sure if I was sincere or not, but she let it go.


    ¡°I¡¯ll need to log out tomorrow evening, it¡¯ll take three hours in the real world, so I¡¯ll be gone for the night,¡± she told me, and I nodded in reply, pulling up my own menu to make notes.


    ¡°How did you do it with Jakyl and the others? The scheduling must have sucked.¡± I frowned. This time, the timing worked relatively well as it was similar to my next session with Mrs Wu, but that was merely a coincidence. The amount of time needed to seriously engage with Road to Purgatory made playing together difficult, which, once again, made me worried for the game.


    ¡°We scheduled our travels around me as much as possible. Honestly, it kinda sucked but if I want to eat¡­¡± she shrugged, and we continued to discuss and plan our schedules for the next few days. Luckily, I had my Hallow and Lenore could carry me along, or things would be a real pain in the neck. Maybe there was a way to get Mal a Spirit-Beast of her own, though I doubted it. Sigmir and I had been incredibly lucky to encounter them, especially so early on.

 Chapter 556

    As a rumbling sound ripped through the air, a satisfied smile appeared on my lips. The latest in a series of experiments conducted by Mal, with support from Gilo and myself, was a success. An explosive success.


    ¡°Where did you learn about demolitions?¡± Mal asked, giving me a side-eye, a frown on her face.


    ¡°Here and there.¡± I paused, before adding, ¡°I only know how to make and use some improvised munitions.¡± The moment those words were out of my mouth, I realised what I had said, my face flushing. Mal paused for a moment, outright staring at me, before shaking her head.


    ¡°Nope, I won¡¯t ask.¡± the expression on her face showing a mix of curiosity and fear.


    ¡°Maybe for the best.¡± I replied, having recovered from my earlier blunder. ¡°Anyway, I¡¯d say our magical claymore works just fine. Your opinion, Gilo?¡± I pushed aside the whole question about improvised explosives. We had an experiment to evaluate, with each of us having played our own part.


    ¡°From a pure combat-perspective, there¡¯s quite a bit that needs improvement. The size, trigger-conditions and camouflage all need a lot of work, let alone stability.`` Gilo ruthlessly graded our experiment as useless for practical use. But that was okay, it had been an early prototype, so getting it right on the first try was unlikely.


    The design I had proposed was taken from a world without magic, and thus without the myriad complications it brought to the table. Having a bomb that went off when something disrupted a beam of light was wonderful, but magic got involved, it was utterly insufficient. And camouflage by using foliage worked well against basic visual senses, but against something akin to Lenore¡¯s sight, or some other improved mode of perception? Again, insufficient.


    If we wanted to have a combat-ready weapons system, we would have to slowly design it ourselves, testing it each step of the way.


    ¡°How about you, Mal? Any ways to improve the explosive strength? What we have so far is okay against enemies below level thirty or forty at a guess, but against more powerful foes, it just won¡¯t cut it.¡± Gilo passed the ball to Mal, who appeared thoughtful.


    ¡°I think I¡¯ll have to go back to the drawing board.¡± she admitted, disappointment slowly spreading over her face. ¡°What I used just now is essentially black powder, more chemistry than alchemy. Alchemically, it¡¯s almost entirely inert, making it very difficult to magically empower it. The Astral Power simply flows off, making it incredibly inefficient.¡± she explained, sounding a little annoyed.


    ¡°Before you do, let me take a closer look at your black powder. When it comes to the magical side of things, I¡¯m more capable than you.¡± I reminded her, getting a nod in reply.


    ¡°I¡¯m afraid that the packaging, the shape and all that will need some more work, too. Making it out of Ice is useful for experiments but really, you¡¯d want to use metal in the final product, or you limit the efficiency from the get-go.¡± I shook my head, trying to remember Mrs. Wu¡¯s lessons in regard to the ancient art of blowing stuff up.


    We continued discussing for a little longer, before we returned to the camp, where Sigmir and the others were already waiting for us.


    ¡°And, did it work?¡± she asked, looking at the somewhat displeased expressions on our faces.


    ¡°The prototype worked. But from prototype to finished product is a long journey.¡± I shrugged, before plopping down on her lap, making myself comfortable. Instead of trying to work or do anything active, I simply relaxed, letting myself get spoiled by Sigmir¡¯s gentle hands and comfortable presence.


    ¡°Morgana, I¡¯m afraid I¡¯ll have to rest for longer than anticipated.¡± Mal told me a little later, looking frustrated.


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    ¡°Everything okay?¡± I asked, a little concerned. If she had trouble outside of Mundus, there was little I could do to help.


    ¡°Just some family stuff I got to do.¡± she waved off my concern, her demeanour not really convincing, only increasing my worries.


    ¡°Anyway, I¡¯ll be gone until tomorrow. Gilo promised to wait for me, so if you have to leave¡­¡± she paused, before shrugging, ¡°Eh, it is what it is.¡±


    ¡°It is what it is.¡± I nodded in agreement. ¡°We¡¯ll wait for you, unless something forcibly changes our schedule. If so, I¡¯ll let you know.¡± promised, deciding that a day or two wouldn¡¯t hurt our overall progress, not when weighted against the advances my Alchemy had made over the last few days. Systematic experimentation, combined with actual instruction was surprisingly effective, even if the effect I gained from the instruction was reduced.


    Regardless, I had gained a neat ten points in the Alchemy-skill, bringing it to twenty-five. In addition, I was comfortable preparing some of the mixtures in Mal¡¯s recipe-book, especially those that were explicitly harmful. That still left a wide range of substances, where the dosage made the poison, while a low dosage, combined with subtle magical assistance turned them into effective tonics, but overall, if it killed, I seemed to have an affinity for it.


    ¡°Can you leave me some of the black powder?¡± I asked, deciding that I wanted to experiment with it for a bit.


    ¡°Certainly.¡± Mal nodded, pulling a small pouch from her magic bag.


    Taking it, I immediately poured out a bit, onto my hand, in order to start my own analisis. Mal would leave soon and I wanted to have her available for clarification, in case I noticed anything weird.


    Looking at the coarse grain through Lenore¡¯s sight, I could only detect a confusing, tangled mess of Astral Power, a wide variety of types and patterns all blended together. It was no wonder that trying to magically enhance the stuff was so difficult, even Lenore¡¯s sight had difficulties making out the differences or telling me anything but that it was a mess.


    Letting out a low, humming sound, I brought the powder to my nose, carefully sniffing the air, trying to differentiate from the magical smell emanating from my hand, the ambient magic and the emanations coming from the powder. It told me a little more, with traces of fire, death and decay a bit more pronounced but regardless, I wasn¡¯t able to glean any real information.


    ¡°No choice, I guess.¡± I mumbled, before taking a few of the grains into my mouth, causing Mal to let out a soft swear.


    ¡°What are you doing?¡± she asked, her voice a mess of confusion and exasperation.


    I didn''t bother to respond, not immediately. Instead, I focused on the riot of sensation in my mouth, doing my best to separate the weird, but mundane, taste of the black powder from the magical elements.


    The magical elements were more distinct, now that they were isolated within my mouth, allowing me to slowly parse them out as the substance got dissolved in my saliva. Holding up my hand to stop Mal from getting more worried, I isolated the different, active traces, trying to map them to the mess I had seen earlier. The explosive chemical reaction was only the foundation, on that, we wanted to build an alchemical, magical reaction, strengthening it and turning it into a real weapon.


    My problem was,a decently large part of the magical elements were aligned to Fire, making them completely antithetical and disgusting to me. The longer I kept the gunpowder in my mind, the more I felt like I was gargling with raw sewage, making me want to spew.


    Finally, I couldn¡¯t persevere any longer and spat the whole mess out, before hopping off Sigmir¡¯s lap, taking a few steps to the side and noisily vomiting out the remains of our lunch.


    ¡°Blergh.¡± I spat a few more times, trying to get rid of everything in my mouth, even as my stomach roiled.


    Reaching out into thin air, I activated Overflow and conjured up a mug of Ice, filled with Liquid Moonlight. If nothing else, it would get rid of the disgusting taste. With that in mind, I took a mouth full, before spitting it back out, trying to clear my mouth. The moment the Liquid Moonlight hit the ground, it released its power, causing a cloud of mist to explode off it, as the ground beneath froze.


    After taking two more mouths of Liquid Moonlight and spitting them back out, I deeply drank from my mug. Being able to constantly refill your own drink had its uses. Finally, I felt less nauseated and turned around, looking at the wide-eyed Malachite.


    ¡°Okay. I think I¡¯ve got an idea regarding your black powder.¡± I assured her, keeping a straight face, despite the urge to laugh at the look on her face.


    ¡°I¡¯ll discuss it with Gilo while you are gone, maybe experiment some more. Once you are back, we can go over the results.¡± I promised, getting a numb nod in response, before she walked away, shaking her head in disbelief.

 Interlude: Forum - "Now, Im mad."

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    Well, guys, I need some help, as I¡¯ve got no idea what to do.


    A week ago, I made that thread about Morgana, with a few videos, all nice and dandy. Things got a little heated, but I didn¡¯t think much of it, it¡¯s the internet, of course, there¡¯s drama. When Morgana went to find me in-game, bitching up a fit and threatening curses and divine retribution, I still didn¡¯t think much of it, just that a certain someone has gone native.


    Chill, Lady, it¡¯s just a game. An incredibly immersive game, but still. It¡¯s JUST a GAME!


    Yesterday, when I logged back in, I got a fun notice in-game. Wouldn¡¯t you know, I¡¯ve been cursed. Curse of the Dark Moon, or some such, no description given, nor a duration. Nothing but ¡®Yeah, screw you¡± and that¡¯s it.


    What¡¯s a bloke to do, but head to the nearest temple in hopes to get rid of it, even if I had no idea what it does. I mean, curse equals bad news, should be common sense.


    Sadly, again, joke¡¯s on me, the Cleric did some light-show and lo¡¯ and behold, I was told, ¡®Yeah, sorry not sorry, that¡¯s a divine curse, tough luck and have a nice life. Maybe try appeasing the Gods, so that they will lift it. Could I interest you in our Lady and Saviour, Lady Persephone?¡¯


    Well, I¡¯m paraphrasing, but that¡¯s the gist of it. They didn¡¯t even have the courtesy of giving back the money I had donated to get the diagnostic magic, even if their help was utterly worthless.


    Now, why am I here, you may ask?


    Obviously, I want to get rid of the curse. Cause I learned what it does and dayum, is it nasty.


    Simply said, I can¡¯t sleep. Doesn¡¯t sound too bad, does it?


    But let me explain:


    If I try to sleep, the moment I fall asleep, I¡¯m suspended in a dark void, with nothing but the cold and a sensation of something sneaking up on me, scaring me out of my mind and back into the waking world. So far, I didn¡¯t manage more than 2 minutes of sleep, since getting the curse. No, ¡®Hello Darkness my old friend¡¯ here.


    Utterly sucks, I mean, I¡¯m probably not the only one who uses the capsules and Mundus as a way to get some extra sleep, the time-compression thingy, however that works, is incredibly useful. Hop in the capsule for four hours, experience eight hours of sleep, wake up nice and dandy with extra time to game or do anything. Hell, the capsules could be marketed just for that. You know, get extra sleep and all that.


    Anyway, I want to get rid of the curse, heck, I even made a ticket to find out more, cause so far, I¡¯m stumped. And given that a certain someone literally told me I¡¯d suffer divine retribution, I thought I try to get @Morgana to explain. Or maybe someone else has an idea.


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    So, Morgana said you¡¯ll suffer divine retribution and now you did?


    @Howardlight, that might be up your alley. Aren¡¯t you the great specialist of all things divine, or at least one of them? And with a grudge against Morgana to boot?


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    Wasn¡¯t it said that Morgana is a Sorceress? If so, how in the hell is she able to call on actual divine magic? That¡¯s an entirely different path, it¡¯s not even on the same road.


    Unless she hired someone to curse you, but even then, Divine Curses are not something thrown around for money.


    I¡¯ll look into the Dark Moon-part, cause that sounds rather interesting.


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    I¡¯ve heard about Divine Curses, though I¡¯ve yet to see one. I don¡¯t think clerics actually get to cast them, at most, they can Condem someone, essentially tattling on them to their divine big brother or sister, who may or may not take action accordingly.


    Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.


    Lifting them is difficult, if not impossible because you need divine intervention, which boils down to, you need the deity that cursed you to lift the curse. Good luck with that, be prepared to grovel.


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    Well, I can positively confirm that Morgana didn¡¯t pay anyone to curse you. We¡¯ve been on the road for the last couple of days and I don¡¯t think we¡¯ve seen more than a handful of people, none of whom looked like the type that can call upon divine magic to Curse anybody.


    And for those who think that maybe the cleric travelling with Morgana is responsible, she¡¯s a cleric of Eleutheria, so Freedom and travel are her jazz, pretty sure there are no curses in her portfolio.


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    Interesting, when I got the curse stuck on me, it wasn¡¯t divine, it wasn¡¯t even a real curse, I call it that for convenience. I also didn¡¯t get a nice explanation to what was happening, I just died.


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    Oh, my¡­


    With the previous topic drawing some heat, I decided to look into your ticket and I¡¯ve gotta say, Oh, my¡­


    You managed to annoy a rather scary being and now, you¡¯ll get shafted for it.


    I guess there¡¯s going to be a few labours assigned to you, working in penance, you know the drill. Go to the temple, ask to do penance, it needs to come from you, and the first step is to acknowledge you did wrong.


    Alternatively, you can die, which is where you are headed. Exhaustion is a bitch..


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    Dear me, now, I¡¯m really intrigued. A divine curse, and so nicely connected with Morgana? It could be a coincidence, but let¡¯s be real, does anybody here believe that? I mean, I believe in coincidences, they happen every day, but really, this is a little too on the nose.


    Interesting though that an actual, official mod has given game advice, I thought you only concern yourself with the conduct on the forum?


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    Eh, I¡¯m allowed to give advice, as long as I¡¯m only pointing people in the right direction to test mechanics we need to have tested. In this case, getting rid of a divine curse is an involved process, so it¡¯s good that someone suffered from one, makes it so we don¡¯t need to throw down random curses, that people have to get rid of.


    Or maybe that¡¯s what happened here, who knows, it might all be a coincidence.


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    Pointing fingers, why does that remind me of someone?


    Anyway, I firmly believe you got the retribution you deserve and I certainly have not outsourced any revenge to anybody. Vengeance is mine, says Morgana, I don¡¯t need no stinking Lord.


    Incidentally, I was busy with Alchemy, as Malachite can confirm, fascinating subject. She might even be willing to post a short clip of one of our experiments if she feels like it.


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    If you put it like this, I¡¯ve got something.


    [foul.avi]


    In a sparse forest, a petite, blue-skinned elf is sitting comfortably on the lap of a far larger person. Just one of the larger person¡¯s arms is almost the size of the elf, but the position seems to be in harmony. The elf takes a pinch of coarse, dark powder out of a small pouch, muttering to herself. After studying the powder in her palm for a few moments, she raises her hand, sniffing the powder. With a frown on her face, she takes a small pinch, putting it into her mouth, her lips distorting in disgust as she tastes.


    Her eyes close, as if deep in thought and her jaws start to tremble as time passes until finally, her eyes snap back open, she moves away from the larger person she had been sitting on, before noisily vomiting on the ground, spitting and sputtering in disgust.


    Suddenly, a weird, almost clear mug materialises in her hands, automatically filling up with a silvery liquid and she instantly takes a sip, before spitting it back out. The moment the liquid hits the ground, mist starts to form as the ground starts to freeze over. That action is repeated multiple times until the elf is entirely shrouded and hidden.


    [/foul]


    Now, kids, what do we learn from this?


    Alchemical analysis should not be done on the tip of your tongue. Or in other words: In Alchemy, as in chemistry, we don¡¯t lick the spoon.


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    Really, you picked that one¡­


    And here I hoped that you show off your stuff, not make me look like a fool.


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    Ah, yes, the fearsome dark lady, Queen of Frozen Dorkness or something.


    Not so scary, that look on your face, just adorable.


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    Not gonna lie, that was utterly cute.


    Bit weird, but cute.


    What was that strange mug at the end, though? Some sort of infinite mug, and if yes, where can I get one with ale or mead? And what was it that you drank?


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    Really, I don¡¯t care. I want to get rid of the curse, so can we please stay on topic?


    And thanks, Heracles, I¡¯ll see what can be done.

 Chapter 557

    Once again, Lenore and I were scouting ahead, using our aerial advantage to the fullest. Below us, hidden in the trees, were a few humanoids. They were well camouflaged against detection from the road, but easily visible for a being able to detect the magical emanations of any living being.


    ¡°You think those are bandits?¡± I asked, observing through Lenore¡¯s eyes.


    ¡°Are you sure you want to call them that? Wouldn¡¯t volunteers for magical experimentation be much more fitting?¡± Lenore asked, rather amused at my hopeful tone.


    ¡°Why not both?¡± I replied and if I had lips, they would have curled into a grin. ¡°We¡¯ve been thinking about the best way to give Mal¡¯s latest batch of magical black powder a go.¡±


    At my insistence, Lenore turned back towards the others, cutting our flight short. In the two weeks since leaving Gaber, we had gone through dozens of iterations of black powder, starting with a mostly mundane substance and tinkering with it daily. It had been an interesting process, especially once I had a realisation regarding Darkness-Magic, one that solved a conflict within my own understanding.


    Ever since we had wandered beneath the White Mountains, I had wondered, how had I been able to differentiate water from solid rock in a place with no light? Or why a fungus was closer to water in my perception than to rock? Why were there such sharp differences in my perception of those materials?


    We had been discussing grain structures and material density when the realisation came to me. What I was perceiving wasn¡¯t the material as such, it was the empty space, the void, between the particles. Not as individual spaces, but as a dark emptiness that was more pronounced in some, less pronounced in other materials.


    That realisation, that I was detecting density and, with a bit of effort, could use the crude darkness-telekinesis I had stumbled upon a while back, to smooth out the distribution of ¡®void¡¯ within a material allowed me to slowly help Mal refine some of her ingredients. My process was time-consuming but gave her incredibly fine grain, which resulted in a marked improvement in efficiency, especially when I began to nudge the distribution of Darkness Astral Power in her material.


    That, along with my prior observations, allowed us to slowly refine the black powder recipe until we reached our current product. While we had set off a pair of them, simply to see their effect, we all wanted to observe their effect in actual combat.


    Stepping out of my Hallow, just as Lenore was landing, we once again exchanged positions smoothly. By now, it was a truly flowing process that obscured the fact that it wasn¡¯t a shapeshift but an exchange of bodies. I was certain Mal and Gilo had noticed that Lenore and I weren¡¯t a single being, but neither had asked about it.


    ¡°There are some bandits up the road,¡± I told them. Gilo and Mal had a rather inappropriate smirk on their faces when their heard my words, looking a little too eager to face murderers and robbers in bright daylight.


    ¡°They don¡¯t look too powerful, so I¡¯m guessing they¡¯ll disappear into the forest as soon as they realise we are trouble,¡± I added, the smirks falling a little.


    ¡°I can sneak up on them, maybe with Rai?¡± Gilo suggested, fingering the pair of experimental grenades she was carrying.


    ¡°But I want to test the bolts,¡± Mal complained and by now, Adra, Rai and Sigmir looked incredibly amused at our behaviour. Arguing about who got to kill bandits was probably not the appropriate, or sane, reaction but there was only a limited number of them and each of us had our own things we wanted to test.


    If you come across this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.


    ¡°I can conceal you, especially if Adra helps,¡± I told them and Mal suddenly looked at me as if I was her very best friend in the world. There even appeared to be a bit of sparkle in her eyes, all because I gave her the opportunity to kill some people in a very messy fashion. Maybe, I wasn¡¯t the only crazy in this group.


    After deciding on a far too elaborate battle plan for wiping out a group of bandits, we continued along the ancient road, hidden by the trees and a combination of Adra¡¯s and my own magic. Rai and Gilo were moving ahead, intent on preparing some explosive surprises for the bandits, while the main fighting would be done by Mal and her crossbow.


    It didn¡¯t take long to reach the area and with Adra¡¯s gift to commune with the plants around us, we quickly mapped out the enemy''s locations. Using a tree to hide, if your foe is capable of talking to trees, was a bit pointless.


    ¡°Let me flush them out, we don¡¯t want to harm the trees,¡± I suggested, focusing on the locations Adra and I had determined.


    When Mal gave me a nod, I reached out with a grim smile on my face. For once, I wasn¡¯t using my Mind Magic to directly blast an opposing mind, nor did I try to afflict them with a lingering curse, there was no point. Instead, I simply instilled them with a deep fear of the shadows around them, wrapping them in tendrils of isolation as the Curse of the Dark Moon took hold. They were criminal scum, preying on the weak and for that, they deserved no mercy.


    My Mind-Magic took hold, powerful enough to affect them all thanks to my high level and multiple traits, special abilities and titles all boosting the effect, and what an effect it had. Around us, the previously quiet forest was suddenly awash with shouts, cries and screams, as the previously well-planned ambush suddenly devolved into utter chaos, as each of the bandits felt they were the last person in the world, while dark tendrils reached out to devour them.


    Like headless chickens, they tried to escape the shadows of the forest, fleeing as quickly as their legs could carry them. Their screams quickly gained the bass-rumble of explosions as an accompaniment, creating a curious melody when the traps set by Gilo and Rai began to claim their victims.


    ¡°Sing, sing as the Dark Moon dances¡­¡± I quietly muttered, laughing as I pushed more Astral Power into the Mind Magic causing the musical of mayhem around us. We just needed a fat lady to sing, and the performance would be complete.


    As I slowly swayed to the melody of murder, letting wash around me, when yet another instrument joined in, the twang of Mal¡¯s crossbow provided a quiet counterpoint to the rumbling explosions that echoed each twang, as her explosive projectiles claimed their victims.


    The battle, if we could even call it that, didn¡¯t last long. None of the bandits were ever cognizant of the fact that they were under attack, they certainly didn¡¯t realise who was butchering them. Caught up in an utter panic, they became easy victims and got ruthlessly butchered. Looking for traps became remarkably difficult, if all you could see was darkness, all you could feel was the void closing in on you.


    Given their levels, we could have fought them without going to such length, and the meagre amount of EXP we gained was certainly not worth the effort, and any thought of looting was quashed by the state the corpses were left in. The amount of coin any bandit could have was not worth digging through the shredded remains of humanoids, mangled to the point that their race was utterly unrecognisable. And yet, I felt dealing with them was well worth it, as we had gained some valuable insights and important observations.


    Walking out of the forest, we began to quickly discuss the observations we had made, which of the different prototypes had the best effects, how they had interacted with the magic fed into them and so on.


    We were a little engrossed in our discussion, when Adra raised a hand, stopping us in our tracks.


    ¡°There¡¯s a group coming up ahead. Mounted, but not too many,¡± she warned us and our previously excited mood instantly evaporated, replaced by caution.


    ¡°More volunteers for our experiments?¡± I quietly suggested as we stepped towards the trees, ready to use the forest to our advantage.


    It didn¡¯t take long, maybe two minutes after Adra had noticed them the first time, a group of thirteen riders came down the ancient road, all mounted on massive, armoured goats. Even from a distance, it was obvious that the riders weren¡¯t human, but a small race, halfling or dwarf.


    Adra, as our representative, stepped forward, raising her hand in greeting as the riders slowed down, one of them closing the distance, the rest of their group waiting behind, ready to react to any hostile behaviour on our part. Hopefully, there would be no need for more combat.

 Chapter 558

    ¡°Greetings, Travellers.¡± the rider called out, stopping some twenty metres away from Adra. Even at the distance, I could see the halfling on her goat nervously fidgeting. Maybe that was par for the course, given that she was essentially sent out as an avalanche poodle, testing if the ground was safe and if not, she would be the only one dying.


    ¡°Hail, Soldiers,¡± Adra called out in response, looking quite relaxed in comparison.


    After a moment of observation, the halfling spurred her goat onwards, approaching Adra to a normal conversational distance, stopping maybe three metres away.


    ¡°You wouldn¡¯t happen to know what caused the earlier commotion? We heard it miles away.¡± the halfling asked, still looking a little on edge. Luckily, I had enough Insight to be able to listen, if I focused on the two of them.


    ¡°Some bandits were lurking in the woods. They lurk no longer.¡± Adra confidently replied and the halfling up front briefly froze, looking very concerned all of a sudden.


    ¡°Would you mind giving my captain some details? This sounds problematic.¡± the halfling asked, after glancing over her shoulder at the group behind her.


    ¡°No, I don¡¯t think our leader minds. Exchanging information on bandits can be beneficial to all, except those vermin.¡± Adra replied, her tone distinctly disdainful of bandits. Not that I was terribly surprised, no traveller liked those who lurked in the woods and preyed on the unsuspecting.


    ¡°Thank you. Would it be possible to share a fire under the rules of hospitality?¡± she asked and I had to smile at the ploy. The rules of hospitality were tremendously important amongst many cultures on Mundus, to the point that they were widely considered to be sacrosanct, sacred to both major Pantheons and huge swathes of the populace. If my accusation of oath-breaking against Jakyl had been detrimental to his reputation, an accusation of breaking the rules of hospitality would be worse, especially for travelling people. Inns and taverns, places that lived with the rules of hospitality as their foundation would bar them, as would many stores.


    When Adra glanced at me, I gave her a nod of acceptance, curious what the group of riders had in mind. We had come across a few small groups on our way from Gaber, but none as grand and militaristic as this one.


    ¡°Certainly. What a nice day for a picnic this is.¡± Adra agreed, drawing an amused snort of surprise from the halfling. Moments later, the halfling blushed bright red at her own outburst, before turning around and riding back to her captain.


    Curious, I attempted to focus my senses on them, trying to see if I was able to listen to them, despite the distance. It was faint, almost impossible to hear, but I managed to capture a few snippets. That they were talking in an unknown language was no obstacle, thanks to the ability I gained from my bond with Lenore. How curious, that the captain addressed another soldier, dressed just like any of the other halflings, as Prince, sounding quite subservient. Somehow, I was smelling a conspiracy.


    It didn¡¯t take long to set up a simple camp, and soon, the smell of food and tea was filling the air. There was little conversation beforehand, both parties simply preparing their side of lunch, which would be shared afterwards, alongside some talk.


    ¡°Olivia, would you do the honours and offer a blessing?¡± I asked as the food was passed out.


    ¡°Certainly.¡± she nodded, understanding my obvious intent. ¡°Lady Eleutheria, may you bless this food and let it ease our travel onward.¡±


    There was a brief moment of solemn silence, a brief sensation of divinity washing over us all. If either side wanted to break the rules of hospitality now, there would be dire and certain consequences.


    ¡°We were told you spoke about bandits?¡± the captain began the exchange of information, nibbling on some travel bread.


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    ¡°Indeed. A short distance down the road, we detected a group of marksmen hiding in the trees. Given their positioning and apparent intent to prey on travellers, we decided to register our complaints with them. They did receive them and will not pose further challenge.¡± Adra explained, euphemistically describing our slaughter of the bandits. Talking about dismembered bodies wasn¡¯t seen as a suitable lunch conversation.


    ¡°What does she mean?¡± the person earlier referred to as ¡®Prince¡¯ asked quietly, easily overheard in the sudden silence after Adra¡¯s explanation.


    ¡°They killed them.¡± came the quiet, slightly exasperated reply from one of the underlings.


    ¡°That, we did. There were some fifteen of them, all in prepared positions with crossbows.¡± I explained, joining into their quiet conversation with a bit of extra information. ¡°None of you feel particularly powerful and if I had to guess, their initial volley would have seen half of you, maybe more, gravely wounded or dead. Or maybe all of your mounts, that¡¯s what I would go for if I wanted to ambush a group like yours.¡± I added, stirring the metaphorical pot. A glance at the fire told me I also had to stir the literal pot, so I stood and walked over, quietly doing just that, leaving the halflings to consider their situation for a bit.


    As if on command, I could feel the probing of Observe and quietly squashed the attempt, refraining from striking back through the connection.


    ¡°Decorum is a two-way street,¡± I said, speaking quietly and in an utterly unconcerned tone, before focusing my eyes on the Prince, who just happened to be the one who had probed me. Looking closely, I realised that he was both the youngest and weakest of them all. Curious, I decided to return the favour, and used Observe, concealing the use as much as possible, only to be surprised. The skill took effect, but bounced off, running into a solid, magical wall that allowed no information to leak out. While divination wasn¡¯t a type of magic I was particularly good at, just the difference in level I could sense should have allowed me to get something back.


    An awkward silence settled over the camp at my statement but the captain quickly broke it, asking Adra to give him some details about the attackers. When she did, not that there were a lot of details, mostly due to the messy fashion in which they had died, the captain¡¯s expression soon became dire.


    ¡°Mercenaries.¡± muttered, shaking his head before falling silent again.


    ¡°You are Adventurers¡¯, duly registered with the Adventurers¡¯ Guild?¡± he asked, after a few moments of contemplation.


    ¡°We are,¡± Adra replied, pulling the Guild card out of her back and showing it to the captain. He looked it over, before glancing at the rest of us. There was a disgruntled look on his face, but after a few moments, that look vanished and he, once again, looked over our group, carefully studying us one after the other. There was no skill-use I could sense, but it was obvious that we were being judged.


    ¡°I would like to offer you a quest. Join this group and escort us to Galam. There will be excellent remuneration for you.¡± he offered and a blue window appeared before me.


    <table style="width: 90%">


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 99.7372%" colspan="2">Quest Alert!</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="2">Escort to Galam</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 49.9343%">Quest Difficulty</td>


    <td style="width: 49.8029%">Easy</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="2">Join the group around Captain Erok and make sure they reach Galam unharmed.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 49.9343%">Quest Reward</td>


    <td style="width: 49.8029%">


    20 gold-coins per person


    Reduced if the escorted party suffers severe injuries.


    </td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    Looking at the quest, a small part of me was feeling tempted. Twenty gold coins was a lot of money, especially given that it would be for each of us. In fact, it was too much for an easy quest, meaning there were additional factors and the captain was likely being creative in his use of the system, obscuring the details of the quest and the dangers involved. Just for that, I wouldn¡¯t take the quest, despite the temptation of money.


    But far more problematic was that Galam was in the south, behind the Daish Gate, and so completely out of our way. With that in mind, I mentally declined the quest, causing the window to vanish.


    ¡°I¡¯m afraid that Galam is not on our way. You will have to make do without us.¡± I explained out loud, shaking my head.


    The captain accepted my refusal with a nod, before focusing on Gilo.


    ¡°You, young woman. Can we at least convince you to join this group, it would be greatly appreciated by our people,¡± he asked, his voice stern and trying to be intimidating. There was a look shared between Mal and Gilo and after a few seconds, Mal gave a nod of acceptance.


    ¡°Morgana, I believe Gilo and I will take their quest,¡± Mal told me, her voice calm. Blinking, I checked to make sure there was no magic influencing their mind, finding none. Not certain what was going on, I frowned but nodded in acceptance. I would have to ask Mal later.


    ¡°Certainly. It was a pleasure cooperating with you and I wish you good luck in future endeavours.¡± I told her, briefly shaking her hand.


    And with that, our group was back to five people. I was going to miss the two, the discussions on Alchemy with them had been fun.

 Chapter 559

    Curiously, the group of halflings seemed to be almost happy that five of us were not interested in travelling with them. It might have been a simple issue of race, that they were uncomfortable with those of us not commonly seen in this part of the world, or it might have been a size issue, that they were uncomfortable with someone like Sigmir who could look them in the eyes, while they were mounted on their giant goats. Either way, they happily accepted that our group would split, with the two of them taking their quest and escorting them to Galam.


    After lunch, we did just that, splitting the party. Malachite and Gilo turned around and headed back the way we had just come from, together with the mounted halflings. Watching from above, courtesy of Lenore, it looked a bit pitiful, two people jogging along, keeping pace with the giant goats thanks to their reasonably high stats while the rest was happily mounted.


    Ultimately, it didn¡¯t matter to me. We had always known that our time together would be brief and merely an alliance of convenience. The potential, long-term payoff for joining with the Prince and his guards was immense, especially if they managed to gain the Prince¡¯s trust and ingratiate themselves into his following. If they played their cards well, reputation and chain-quests would be theirs, of that, I was convinced.


    For the rest of us, travel continued as before, speeding along the Ancient Road with Olivia¡¯s magic. Unless we actively, deliberately and very persistently looked for a fight, nothing near the road was willing to challenge us. At best, we might stumble across some beast that didn¡¯t manage to run away fast enough, but unless we needed some food, we didn¡¯t bother, there was just no need.


    Instead, we continued to press on for a week of hard travel, crossing hills, forests and a lot of fields and meadows, passing by towns, villages and homesteads. Sometimes, if we came across a place at the right time, we took a bit of time to enter, replenish our rations and rest at an inn, but mostly, we continued to move.


    Outside of Mundus, I deliberately kept in contact with Mal, using the Capsule space to discuss a few things and get updates on their progress. It turned out that it hadn¡¯t taken the Halflings long to slip up, within three days, the status of the prince had come out and, soon after, the whole story.


    To make a long, complicated story short, the Prince was the heir of a Halfling-Principality, but had been in Torop for studies and was now returning to his rightful place. There were some political shenanigans going on, with different factions and groups vying for power, trying to restrict the others, the Prince and gain whatever advantages they sought, making the situation as clear as tar, but Mal sounded quite interested.


    Curiously, she seemed to somehow have gotten into contact with Maggy who, for some unknown reason, was quite informed on the situation in that Halfling Principality and able to give advice.  I had my doubts whether the advice given would actually be good, as I considered Maggy to be a flake, if not an outright idiot, but with the distances involved, I wasn¡¯t in any position to give advice, either.


    Before we ever saw Torop, we saw something much more impressive. The distant horizon turned blue and a unique smell assaulted all of our nostrils. Compared to the deep blue, almost green, waves of the northern Sea Sigmir and I had seen before, the water of the Mare Tempest was a bright, almost radiant blue. Contrary to its name, the ocean looked perfectly peaceful, at least from a distance. Who knew what was hidden beneath those quiet waves.


    Torop itself was built on the steep slopes around the Roduo river, using its mouth as a natural harbour. The hills around the river gave the city a certain verticality to it, the higher areas well-protected, be that against sea monsters or storms.


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    Those circumstances also turned something else wonderfully transparent, namely the social hierarchy. In other words, the higher up you lived, the higher up you were, both in a literal and metaphorical sense. The top of the hills was occupied with magnificent castles, overseeing the harbour and defending the land while the houses near the docks were occupied by those who had to make a rough living, fishing in the sea and working the docks.


    The one difference was the sizeable Naga-enclave, their curious architecture an obvious, almost alien presence in the city.


    There was a wall around the city but it was puny, low enough that each of us would be able to scale it within moments and I wouldn¡¯t have bet against Sigmir if she had claimed that she could simply jump over it. It almost wasn¡¯t worth the effort but then, since leaving the Dorrian Mountains, we hadn¡¯t been in a fight worth having, so maybe, there simply were no wild dangers that threatened the city and for sapient threats, a wall would be no obstacle, not even enough to slow a foe down. No, for that, powerful magic and strength of arms were needed.


    And when it came to the powerful magic, my earlier impression about the puniness of the wall was overturned once we got closer. The magical emanations of the wall manifested as an overpowering scent to my senses and when I made the mistake of trying to look through Lenore¡¯s sight, I almost ended up on the ground, the light so blinding.


    The whole thing wasn¡¯t a wall, it was a magical formation masquerading as a wall, a ward powerful enough to remind me of the Nexus in Neyto, of those brief, few seconds during which I had been able to behold some of its essence. I had no idea what the function of the ward was, it was far too complex for me to unravel and understand in any reasonable amount of time, but one thing was clear, we had to obey the rules and be very, very careful about them.


    Looking at the ward, I made a radical decision, namely, I split from the party. Given the more problematic nature of some of my traits, especially the Mortal Hubris, I couldn¡¯t even guess the reaction of the guards and the ward. If I was detected and there was an attempt to detain me, I might be able to flee or, in the worst-case scenario, would escape by dying. If I was with the group, the others would be implicated and in trouble with me, but without my abilities.


    The plan was that I would enter after them, with some time between us, and Rai would keep a covert eye on the gate, just in case something happened to me. In that case, they would get transportation for us all, hopefully convincing a Naga captain to allow me to board out in the ocean, using Lenore¡¯s wings to reach them. If nothing bad happened, I could simply join them again. The connection between Sigmir and myself was key for that plan, as it would hopefully allow me to easily keep an eye on them if things turned bad.


    A little annoyed at the precautions I had to take for something as simple as travelling into town, I waited for a good half-hour after splitting from the others, making sure to let at least one party on foot pass me by to create a gap between us.


    Afterwards, I started down the road, soon reaching the gate. From up close, the ward was even more impressive than it had been from the distance, with enough power flowing through the air to make my hair stand on end.


    Almost as an afterthought, or maybe to control the flow of traffic, two guards were standing in front of the gate, keeping an eye on things. Given that I didn¡¯t know about the effects of the ward, Lenore was sitting on my shoulder and I had wrapped my magical Cloak of Twilight around me as tightly as possible.


    There was a moment of discomfort when one of the guards focused on me and I knew he had just used Observe. For a moment, I considered resisting but instead, I tried to focus my concealment around the problematic aspects of myself, letting them see my level and race, maybe some other things like the Mystic Title, but not things like the Ruthless-Trait or my Mortal Hubris.


    A tense moment passed, as we waited for the guard''s verdict until the queue in front of me moved on. Thankfully, I was simply waved on in, with nary a raised eyebrow at my level. Letting out a soft sigh, I stepped aside, looking around a little, taking in the sights of town from up close. The gate itself was halfway up the hill, the area nearby dominated by defensive installations but beyond them, I could see a well-maintained but not terribly magnificant-looking neighbourhood. The sort of place where I would expect craftspeople, lower merchants and such middle-class people to live.


    Now, I just had to find the others and a ship to take us across the ocean.

 Chapter 560

    Closing my eyes for a moment, I focused on my bond with Sigmir, easily finding the tie that connected us, our very own red string. Gently tugging on it, I could follow along and after leaving the vicinity of the gate, Rai joined me, having waited nearby to make sure nothing untoward happened.


    ¡°There doesn¡¯t seem anyone interested in following you,¡± he confirmed my own perception, my tense nerves gradually relaxing. Now, instead of worrying about the guards and official trouble, I could start worrying about the press of people around me, making me feel as if I was about to get crushed.


    ¡°Indeed.¡± I nodded, trying to keep calm and not start making a scene. For a moment, I considered hiding in the shadows but given the clandestine nature of such actions, it would be easy to construe them as malicious, something to be on guard against. If I were to make a protective ward around a city, especially one with that amount of power, I would most certainly include protections against magical concealment and skullduggery.


    The inside of the ward was suffused with power, less dense than the edge but pervasive, giving me a creepy sensation of being watched. Slipping away might be possible but at the same time, it might get me into deep trouble. Risking it, just to avoid discomfort, would be foolish.


    Letting out a deep breath, I pushed forward, using agility and small size to slip through the crowd, following the bond with Sigmir.


    ¡°The others wanted to wait for us at the Adventurer''s Guild.¡± Rai quietly told me, giving me a destination to go with the direction I was already heading in.


    Continuing forwards, towards the Guild, the press of bodies slowly became too much for me. Not in a physical sense, the streets were wide enough, but in a spiritual sense. As if the world was slowly pressing in on me and I was getting crushed. Intellectually, I knew the feeling was utter nonsense, that even if I had no magic at my disposal, the strength of my body alone was sufficient to guarantee my safety from mere pedestrians and if taking my magic into account I would be able to annihilate the weaklings around me with a hard glare.


    And yet, I was getting pushed and squeezed, my petite statue preventing me from getting the respect I deserved. If I had Sigmir¡¯s imposing size, or even Adra¡¯s gymnast¡¯s physique, that alone, without awareness of my power, would assure me enough space in the crowd. But my power was internal, making me unremarkable, especially with the Cloak of Twilight blocking most of their perception.


    Maybe that was the key, if I wanted to have space, I needed to make them feel my power. The idea was a slightly risky one, but compared to getting pushed and squeezed further, until I snapped and did something drastic, a controlled, limited measure might be more prudent.


    Stopping for a moment, hearing an angry grumble from the person behind me who had to walk around, I closed my eyes and reached down into me. My magic, normally tightly controlled in my body, sprang to follow my will, a faint, cloak of Ice Astral Power flowing around me, forming a thin mist and lowering the temperature. But more importantly, the measure gave me a vessel to impress my will on my surroundings, to make the space mine.


    I could feel the magic of the city-wide ward react, pushing inwards and tasting my magic, and I let it, not pushing back but allowing the ward to mingle into my magic in a gesture of good faith. I was in their house and wouldn¡¯t disrespect whoever controlled the ward, but the space around me was now mine.


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    The effect on the people around me was far more pronounced than the faint aura of magic would account for, the aura of a being who had crossed the second Divide more than enough to assure me the space I needed, and more.


    Rai, moving into the suddenly cleared space, let out a soft chuckle, following behind me like a canine shadow.


    As I continued to move, the space ahead cleared, as if by magic. It allowed us to easily and quickly reach the Guild, and Sigmir who was waiting in front of it. The Guild¡¯s building was a surprisingly wide, single-story building, located roughly a third up the mountain, right on the border between the middle-class areas higher up the mountain and the low-class area near the docks. There were quite a few people around, with a visible void in the crowd around the others. They didn¡¯t need to spread their aura, their physique giving them enough of a presence to get the space they needed.


    Along the way, I had noticed a couple of guards who gave me brief looks, but none intruded into my space or investigated too deeply. Maybe it was a courtesy afforded to the strong, or maybe they simply deemed the cost of annoying a powerful being that did nothing more than push aside a few pedestrians too high. Either way, I could get my way without trouble, happily stepping up to Sigmir.


    Noticing the aura still lingering around me, I restrained my presence again, not wanting to stick out in their company. They restrained their aura, so I should do the same.


    ¡°Everything went smoothly?¡± Adra quietly asked, as Sigmir simply placed her hand on my shoulder, holding me close to her in an almost protective stance.


    ¡°I believe so.¡± I nodded, before glancing around. ¡°What is our next step? Where would be the best place to inquire about transportation?¡± I asked, well aware of my lack of interpersonal skills. Most likely, I would silently remain in the background, watching as Adra conversed. Even my presence would be more due to a desire to remain in control than any actual benefit.


    ¡°We¡¯ll talk to the Guild, in order to get a recommendation or introduction to the local Naga. If we want to get across the Mare Tempest, that¡¯s our best bet.¡± Adra explained, to which I nodded.


    ¡°Please, go ahead.¡± I gestured towards the Guild¡¯s door, following after her when she moved.


    Inside, it was about what I had expected, only scaled up. Instead of a single clerk manning the counter, there were four of them, and they even had a queue. The size of the building was far too large to only hold the lobby we had entered and when I glimpsed past the counter, I could see a long hallway, likely lined with offices. More of an administrative complex than a service building.


    Just like everyone else, we waited in line, not trying to push ahead using intimidation and after a few minutes of boredom, it was our turn. Or at least Adra¡¯s turn. She handed over the letter from Weise, letting the Clerk take a look while she quietly explained our intent.


    The Clerk, a female dwarf, gave a nod in response and asked Adra a few questions and inspected our Guild Cards. The questions were simple, basically just a confirmation of our identity, which the Clerk jotted down on a piece of paper. Once she was done, she gave Adra some directions to the Naga enclave and handed the page she had written on to Adra. The whole exchange didn¡¯t take more than a minute or two, after which Adra stepped away from the counter, with the rest of us following behind. It must have looked a little weird, one person talking with four quiet followers, but that wasn¡¯t my concern.


    ¡°Can I see that?¡± I asked Adra, holding my hand out for the form she had been given.


    ¡°Sure.¡± she grinned and handed it over. Quickly scanning it, I had to struggle to keep my poker face and not laugh out loud, as it was an official form to request transportation. Apparently, the Adventurers¡¯ Guild had to provide such introductions often enough to set up a standard form, one that was mechanically or magically reproduced.


    It simply gave our names, a rating of the Guild¡¯s confidence in our trustworthiness and a rough description of our past travels. There were no details, merely an explanation that we came from the far north and that was it.


    ¡°Well, let¡¯s go and find a ship,¡± I told Adra, nodding towards the door. I was curious if the details with these Naga would be as pleasant as those Sigmir and I have had, so long ago, right after I had come to this world.

 Chapter 561

    Even from afar, the Naga enclave stood out. Where the town around it was built in a style that reminded me of Ashenforge-Hold and other dwarven settlements I had seen, just slightly more rounded, less angular and strict, the Naga enclave was entirely different. Where the city was built from stone, with some wooden accents and reinforcements, the enclave was built from the shells of various sea creatures, the accents almost incorporated into the shells as if they had been grown that way. What little reinforcement was needed was made with different structures, looking almost coral-like. The whole enclave appeared to be grown, not built.


    It was right at the water but where the area around it was almost a slum, there was a sharp divide between the enclave and its surroundings. A sharp, enforced demarcation with Naga guards around the enclave keeping an eye on anyone approaching.


    When we walked up, heading right towards one of their gates, one of them slithered up, not quite challenging us but certainly indicating that we were to talk to him. While I had little prior contact with Naga, only a single day over a year ago, I had done some research on the forum, enough to know that the impressive double-crest and the four arms indicated a powerful member of the race. The pattern of his scales, in this case, a fascinating blue-green mix that scintillated in the sun, could be read much akin to a genealogy, indicating the house and affiliation of this guard, but only if one knew the details, which I did not.


    ¡°Greetings, what brings you to the enclave?¡± he asked, his speech clear, yet with a slight, hissing accent.


    ¡°Greetings. We¡¯ve got a letter of introduction from the Adventurers¡¯ Guild and area seeking passage. ¡° Adra replied, showing the guard our letter. He briefly inspected it, studying us one after the other, before handing it back to Ada with a nod.


    ¡°I will call for a guide,¡± he told her, before turning around and calling out into the enclave, letting out a series of weird sounds. It was an entirely different language, completely composed of hissing and whistling sounds. It was an interesting experience, to be able to understand the language thanks to Lenore¡¯s ability, despite it being utterly alien. The way some of those sounds oscillated held meaning, the frequency and the way it changed, and all those tiny things gave meaning where I wouldn¡¯t expect it.


    The guide didn¡¯t need long to slither up, and it was a good example of the wide range of Naga physiques. Where the Guard was massive, the serpentine body about five metres in length, towering over Adra when upright and thick as a barrel, the guide was a lot more like me in physique, maybe two metres in length, not even coming to my chin when rising up and thin enough that I¡¯d think Sigmir would be able to encircle his body with her hands.


    ¡°Bring them to the Wavespeaker.¡± the guard commanded the guide, giving us a nod as he moved aside.


    ¡°If you would?¡± the guide politely asked, giving us something that looked somewhat like a bow.


    We happily followed behind the guide, into the enclave and the change in atmosphere was palpable. The city around it was bustling, a little noisy with countless people milling around on the streets. On the other hand, the enclave was quiet, with only some splashing or bubbling sounds interrupting the silence, the sounds of people almost entirely absent.


    Our guide silently led the way, moving towards the centre of the enclave and into one of the shell-like buildings there. The air inside was somewhat moist, but not unpleasantly so and a curious tang hang in the air, giving it an almost spicy aroma. It was quite obviously a waiting area, but a rather alien one.


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    ¡°Please, the Wavespeaker will be with you in a moment,¡± he assured us, gesturing to a set of hammocks, strung between the walls.


    ¡°If you want to take a seat while waiting, feel free.¡± he paused, before asking, ¡°Do you require refreshments?¡± I felt a little weirded out at the level of treatment, there had to be more adventurers who wanted to cross the ocean, and even if we had a letter of introduction, this felt over the top.


    ¡°No, thank you.¡± Adra waved him off, before carefully sitting on one of the hammocks, making sure she didn¡¯t take a tumble.


    The guide didn¡¯t leave, instead, he remained near the entrance, not like a guard watching us, but attentive, like a servant ready to fetch and carry at a moment''s notice. He almost blended in with the wall behind him, unobtrusive enough that I suspected the use of the Stealth-skill or something related. We didn¡¯t have to wait long, maybe five minutes, for a female naga, clearly recognisable by the single crest on her head, to slither into the room.


    ¡°Greetings, Travellers.¡± she gave us a nod, while we rose to our feet. ¡°No need for that.¡± she waved us off, before introducing herself, ¡°My name is Wavespeaker Kelartis.¡±


    Remaining on her feet, Adra returned the polite nod, maybe a little deeper than Kelartis had, before giving introductions.


    ¡°Greetings, Wavespeaker Kelartis. My name is Adra and these are my travelling companions.¡± she continued, giving each of our names and we gave the Wavespeaker a polite nod and a word of greeting when it was our turn. When Adra came to Sigmir and me, the Wavespeaker looked a little surprised, briefly focusing on the two of us.


    ¡°Morgana and Sigmir, you say. Curious,¡± she muttered, sounding pensive. ¡°Siranda mentioned your name, but it has been a while back. You came far, in a short amount of time.¡±


    ¡°Who mentioned our names?¡± I asked, a little perplexed.


    ¡°Siranda, the village-head of Yugin.¡± she replied, a grin spearing over her face at the look of incomprehension on my face.


    ¡°You did a service to a Naga-village, in the frozen north, a little over a year ago,¡± she explained and I nodded, as we had done so. But I had completely forgotten the name of the village, let alone the village head.


    ¡°We did. But how do you know about that?¡± I asked, trying to make sense of the situation. I could see people using magic to talk over long distances and had done so, but this was akin to helping an old lady on one side of the country out and, a year later, getting polite treatment for it on the other side of the continent.


    ¡°We are not called wavespeakers for nothing, young lady.¡± she chided me, the amusement in her voice taking any sting out of her words, ¡°Her village is far away and remote, but that doesn¡¯t mean that she¡¯s isolated from the rest of us. And given how rare she can report good news and new friends, she is eager to take any opportunity to do so.¡± Kelatris explained, before focusing on Adra again.


    ¡°Now, what brings you here?¡± she asked, getting us back on topic while I was slowly accepting the insane range of the Naga information network.


    ¡°We are seeking passage across the Mare Tempest. Any settlement along the east coast of Aletoma would do, but really, we need to reach the Forest of Dusk on Arbotoma.¡± Adra explained, getting a frown in response.


    ¡°The Forest of Dusk, you say. We won¡¯t be able to help you with that, we don¡¯t sail past the Island of Death, for obvious reasons. Too many dangers, too little profit.. It¡¯s simply not worth risking the major ships that can sail the Mare Tempest in those treacherous waters.¡± Kelartis instantly rejected it, firmly shaking her head.


    ¡°I believe that there are some crews, using small vessels, relying on speed and stealth, that sail between Phalladri and Mociabi, in the Forest of Dusk. Those would be your best bet,¡± she added, confirming what we already knew.


    ¡°Now, to the east coast, that is manageable. There is a ship setting out in five days, sailing for Nobost in the north of Aletoma and there will be another, sailing for Hatterion but it won¡¯t sail for a month at least,¡± she explained, giving us some options.


    ¡°Or you can take one of the many ships that head to different ports. Sadly, few are heading in the direction you need, most going north, towards the Islands of Mist or past them, to the northern forests.¡± she shrugged.


    ¡°With the winter near, the Mare Tempest is dangerous and given that sailing near the Daish Gate is suicide, trade in that direction is a little slow. But slow doesn¡¯t mean non-existent.¡± she grinned, letting us consider our options.

 Chapter 562

    With uncertainty regarding future opportunities, we decided to take the ship to Nobost. It would mean about a month of travel down the coast if we went by foot to get from Nobost to Phalladri. Hatterion would be roughly at the halfway point, but without knowing whether there¡¯d actually be a ship, none of us wanted to take the risk.


    The other possibility would be to take the ship to Nobost and look for connections from there, as the Naga ships were stupidly fast, especially the large ones. I had asked Wavespeaker Kelartis and she had told me that the crossing would only take about a week, due to limited weather influence. That seemed utterly insane to me, to cross a distance we¡¯d need two months to cross within a week. But then, the ship didn¡¯t need to sleep or rest, they could forge ahead at full speed, hidden from sea monsters by their magic and the ship certainly didn¡¯t need to take the road into account. Though, I had a sneaking suspicion that it was set up that way to allow Travellers to move from one continent to another with relatively little down-time, as months of enforced ingame down-time would likely be a no-go for a lot of players.


    Alas, a week was quite some time to be stuck on a ship, but really, it wouldn¡¯t be too bad.


    As I thought about it, I began to mentally compile another report for Pantheon, Entertainment regarding travelling. The extreme limitations on intercontinental travel would likely be a stumbling block for players, the whole travelling was incredibly cumbersome. On one hand, it made the world feel alive, with countless inhabitants and potentially interesting things around every corner. On the other hand, it meant that if you wanted to play with your friends, it might take months, or even years, to meet up if your starting locations were too far apart.


    Maybe, Pantheon should look for a middle path, where the whole world was relevant and interesting, without making players travel for months on end to get from spot A to spot B. Immersion versus convenience, the current system was completely on the side of immersion, which might deter some players.


    Pushing away those considerations, for later compilation, I focused on our surroundings, where Adra was talking to Kelartis, making an agreement regarding our passage to Nobost. It would take a chunk of our hard-earned coin, but that was somewhat expected. Boarding would be in five days, early in the morning, as the ship would be sailing with the tide. That meant we had those days open, with nothing pressing to do.


    I considered looking for quests in Torop, or even for Travellers who frequented the port, but really, I had little interest in some urban fetch quests. While I had no doubt that there would be other types of quests as well, some sort of investigation or maybe even ones that required a direct and violet resolution, trying to navigate the laws and customs regarding them sounded like a pain in the behind that I would rather not deal with.


    Instead, I decided to leave Mundus for a time, stashing my body in my Hallow and dealing with the various chores and obligations that had piled up in the real world. On my list were such wonderful things like thoroughly cleaning my apartment, taking care of some errands and other exciting things. But with the time I had, there was even the option of visiting Mrs Wu for an additional session, going for a long walk in the park and giving Chris a call, he had been suggesting meeting for dinner.


    My first call went to Mrs Wu, who happily suggested meeting up during the afternoon. Contrary to our normal practice, she suggested meeting at a shopping centre near their gym, an alteration to our usual routine that made me curious. Some of the lessons she had given me had been regarding blending into a crowd and moving within one, but I wasn¡¯t quite sure I actually wanted to put them into practice. It wasn¡¯t as if I actually wanted to put those lessons into practice, certainly not outside of Mundus. And within Road to Purgatory, I was using the skills she taught me less and less, as my magic was taking priority. Alas, she was teaching me something interesting and learning it wouldn¡¯t be a disadvantage. Once that call was taken care of, it was time for a dreaded aspect of life, social interactions outside of a rigidly defined setting. In other words, freely socialising with friends.


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    After finding Chris¡¯ number, I sent him a message that my schedule was unexpectedly cleared and I would be open for the dinner he had suggested. I had previously declined but given my Mother¡¯s teaching about the maintenance of friendships, I felt that an effort should be made, His reply came surprisingly quick and within a minute of sending the message, my phone rang with his number.


    ¡°Yes?¡± I picked up, curious why he called instead of sending a message back.


    ¡°Who is this?¡± a female voice asked, momentarily confusing me. The display had given Chris¡¯ number, so why was a woman calling back?


    ¡°Shouldn¡¯t I be asking that?¡± I retorted, just a little amused, ¡°This is Samantha, now it¡¯s your turn.¡± I added, trying to place the voice. Sadly, I was bad with those, so other than it being female and a little sharp, I wasn¡¯t sure.


    ¡°Samantha? That¡­¡± the voice paused, and I heard a soft noise in the background, ¡°This is Jenn, Chris¡¯ wife.¡± she told me and finally, the penny dropped with a chiming sound, giving me the context I needed.


    ¡°Ah, Jenn, yes. We¡¯ve met a while back, at the park. How are you? How¡¯s the baby?¡± I asked, frantically trying to come up with a sensible way to continue the conversation.


    For a moment, there was an awkward silence on the other end. It stretched a little but finally, she replied after a brief sigh.


    ¡°So it¡¯s you. I¡¯m feeling well, thanks for your concern. Why did you suggest meeting my husband for dinner?¡± she asked, a weird emphasis on the word ¡®husband¡¯.


    ¡°He invited me a few weeks ago, but I was a little busy. Now, my schedule has mostly cleared up, so I thought to give him a word. When would it be good for you?¡± I replied, curious if Chris had told her about it. He should have, given that she was his wife, I¡¯d expect any dinner invitation to include her.


    There was another silence but this time, it didn¡¯t last long enough to turn awkward.


    ¡°I see.¡± I could almost hear the frown in her reply, ¡°Let me take a glance at his calendar, I think he should be free tomorrow evening. Would that work for you?¡± she asked, and I briefly did the calculations of what time that would be in Mundus.


    ¡°That would work.¡± I briefly paused, considering my next words carefully before deciding to go for simple honesty. ¡°I¡¯m afraid I don¡¯t know just how restrictive your pregnancy is. Are you comfortable visiting a restaurant? Any special considerations I should be mindful of?¡± I asked, trying not to be rude while asking about fairly intimate topics.


    There was a brief chuckle on the other end and it seemed that the ice had broken, as her voice suddenly gained a bit of warmth.


    ¡°I¡¯ll admit, I¡¯d rather avoid a restaurant.¡± she paused for a moment, before continuing, ¡°Are you a good cook?¡± she asked in a non-sequitur.


    ¡°I¡¯d consider myself a fair cook, why?¡± I asked, only to realise the answer, ¡°If you like, I could come over tomorrow and prepare dinner at your place. That would be easiest for you, wouldn¡¯t it?¡± I suggested, trying to navigate the bounds of propriety and decorum. Sometimes, those could be a pain.


    ¡°If that would work for you, I would appreciate it.¡± she admitted, ¡°We¡¯ve got a few dietary restrictions, what did you have in mind for the menu?¡±


    For the next couple of minutes, we discussed their preferences and restrictions, making sure that the food I had planned would be suitable. I wasn¡¯t planning anything fancy, just a classic dish of stir-fried vegetables, chicken and rice, with a mildly spicy sauce. Some might even call it boring, but given that Jenn was pregnant, stimulating her too much might be a bad idea.


    ¡°Why don¡¯t you come over around six? Chris should be home around seven, that way, dinner would be ready then,¡± she suggested, once everything was ironed out.


    ¡°That works for me, yes.¡± I agreed, ¡°I¡¯m looking forward to meeting you again:¡±


    ¡°Yes, it¡¯s been nice talking to you.¡± she replied, ¡°See you tomorrow.¡±


    We both said our goodbyes and I put down the phone, feeling good about myself. If that wasn¡¯t an effort to re-establish and maintain a friendship I had let slide over the years, I didn¡¯t know what would be.


    Sadly, before that, I still had a bunch of chores to do in my own apartment. Letting out a sigh, I got out the vacuum, to take care of another thing I had let slide for a little too long.

 Chapter 563

    ¡°Good afternoon, Samantha,¡± Mrs Wu greeted me, a friendly smile on her face. It was fascinating, intellectually, I was aware that she was incredibly dangerous, both as a direct combatant but, much more important, due to her other skills. With her hands, she could kill a person in front of her, with the lessons on demolition and homemade explosions she had taught me in the past, she¡¯d be able to level a building- such as this shopping centre.


    And yet, standing there in her brightly-coloured jacket, with a knit cap on her head, she looked very much like a kindly old grandmother, who couldn¡¯t hurt a fly.


    ¡°Good afternoon, Mrs Wu.¡± I returned the greeting, almost instinctively giving her the polite bow of a student to her teacher, but we weren¡¯t in the gym and it wasn¡¯t quite appropriate for the setting we were in. Situational awareness and adaptation were two topics she had lectured me on, and given our surroundings, I had a feeling it would be a practical lesson now.


    ¡°Walk with me, student.¡± Mrs Wu told me, slowly starting into the shopping centre. It was quite full, with Christmas decorations already set up, despite it being over a month away. Walking alongside her, I realised that she effortlessly slipped through the crowd, easily finding gaps and openings, where I had to struggle, sometimes stopping to let someone pass, other times having to step faster to avoid other pedestrians.


    After we walked through half the centre, she stepped into a side passage, with me following after her.


    ¡°Now, lesson time,¡± she gave me a grin, once I had caught up. ¡°One aspect of your training is moving within crowds. They can be your best shield, giving you excellent obfuscation and letting you slip away, with none the wiser. The best escape is one, where the opposition walks right by you, never even knowing whom they were looking for. Blending into a crowd allows you to become virtually invisible. Just one, of countless people.¡± she explained, her voice quiet but intense.


    ¡°Even electronic eyes,¡± her own eyes flickered upwards, to a surveillance camera. I hadn¡¯t noticed it, due to the unobtrusive and concealed nature of its placement, but she obviously had. Looking around, I was able to see a few more but I was reasonably certain we were in a blind spot. ¡°Incredibly useful but oh, so very limited if you know how to work with them. For now, we should keep moving. It is unlikely that the cameras are monitored live, but you never know. Coincidences happen all the time.¡± she warned me, before continuing on our way.


    ¡°Now, electronic eyes and their limitations. The biggest is that they lack intuition and unless your opposition has a ridiculous amount of manpower, they¡¯ll never commit enough manpower to carefully check every moment of the footage. They¡¯ll set themselves a start-point and attempt to trace their target through different cameras. That can be used to your advantage, by turning into someone else.¡± she explained, as we walked into another part of the centre.


    ¡°Be cognizant of what people notice and have something in place to alter it. Stealth doesn¡¯t always need to be about being hidden, it is about not getting detected. A subtle but significant difference. If you look like that guy over there,¡± she covertly gestured to one of the janitors cleaning up some spill, ¡°nobody will give you a second glance. You fade into the scenery.¡±


    ¡°Similarly, if you are what people expect to see, they will simply ignore you. No matter how loud you yell, jump and scream, you¡¯ll be ignored if you are at a concert or in a stadium. Know your situation, adapt to it, blend into your environment and you will become invisible.¡± she continued her lecture, turning another corner. Just as I continued after her, I could only briefly see the movement of fabric before being shown a distinct example of her words.


    In front of me was what appeared to be a woman much younger than Mrs Wu, wearing a distinctly different coat, instead of her earlier jacket. Without her height and our relative positions, I wouldn¡¯t have realised that it was the same person, especially when I noticed a white mask around her arm, ready to be deployed on her face. When she did, the mask and wig she had donned instead of her hat gave me pause. Without knowing it was her, I would have walked right past her.


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    ¡°A turncoat,¡± she told me, gently tugging at her jacket. I couldn¡¯t see her face, but hear the grin in her voice.  ¡°Turn it over, let down a few cloth flaps hidden on the inside and the jacket becomes a coat. With a little more time, you can prepare heels or inlay soles, giving you a few precious inches of height, as that will be the biggest distinguishing factor, especially for distinct people like us. We are just too small.¡± she continued walking again, now with a deliberately different style and pace, her whole body language different.


    ¡°A lot of tradecraft happens down here.¡± she gestured with her hand, hanging down at hip height.


    ¡°Far below eye-level, where nobody will see by coincidence, especially in a crowd. Other bodies will block you from all but the most skilled observers. A skilled pair can make exchanges without getting spotted, even if the observers know when to look. Nothing but a brief fluttering of newspaper, to the point, that even a high-speed camera is unable to record the drop.¡± she paused briefly and I thought I could hear her sigh.


    ¡°Well, newspapers used to be great tools of the trade. They gave an excuse to sit somewhere and wait without being obvious about it. Nobody would question if a business person is reading their newspaper intently and suddenly looks at their watch, stands up and quickly walks somewhere. At most, they¡¯d think that the person failed to watch the time and is late for a meeting. Even just leaving the newspaper would be seen as nothing more but a little rude and if someone else comes by shortly after, sits down at the same table and reads the paper left behind, nobody would think twice about it.¡± she explained and I understood that the newspaper could easily be prepared to hide something.


    ¡°In addition, the fluttering pages will distract the eye, even a trained observer can fall victim to that. You can conceal small amounts of material between the pages and make an exchange on the go, or you can even drop it off somewhere, to be picked up by another courier. Sadly, they have all but vanished to the point that you might become more noticeable due to their presence.¡± she sighed again, ¡°As I said, know your situation, adapt to it, blend into your environment and you will become invisible.¡± she repeated her earlier point.


    ¡°Now, another necessary skill, pickpocketing. It¡¯s an outgrowth of the ability to make a quick and hidden exchange. If you think about it, stealing is a sort of hidden exchange, well-enough hidden to even escape the one whose wallet you just exchanged with empty air.¡± At this point, I interrupted her lecture, after intently listening the entire time.


    ¡°Teacher, I¡¯m not certain that is a skill I want to learn,¡± I told her, hoping that she¡¯d understand.


    ¡°Mhm, acceptable.¡± she nodded. ¡°Normally, I¡¯d now give you a set of cards, to plant on people without them noticing. That way, they won¡¯t be able to complain overmuch, even if they catch you.¡± she grinned, showing me a set of small business cards. When I looked closely, I realised that they were from a local church, with a small prayer on them.


    ¡°If you get caught, you can simply act embarrassed and shy away. Few people would give you too much trouble about that, at least in this country. Know your situation, adapt to it, blend into your environment and you will become invisible.¡± she stopped herself, after repeating that phrase for the third time.


    ¡°But I guess, if you aren¡¯t interested, we can go over some tricks to track someone, within a crowd. How to remain unnoticed while doing so. It¡¯s similar to what I¡¯ve told you earlier, just from the other side. What to watch out for, what is suspiciously boring, how to be professionally paranoid - And recognise when you are no longer professional, but just paranoid.¡± she suggested, getting a nod in response. That sounded just as interesting as being socially concealed but without the troubling implications of stealing.


    ¡°Excellent. Let us continue to walk and I¡¯ll give you some examples. We might even try the whole thing live, I¡¯ll place those cards and you¡¯ve got to spot me doing so, while maintaining some distance.¡± she decided and once more, we were off into the crowd. If anything, I wanted to learn her tricks to swim through a crowd, like a fish through water. Hopefully, that would be part of her lesson.

 Chapter 564

    Compared to meeting Mrs Wu at the shopping centre, visiting Jenn and Chris at their place caused a different level of anxiety. Meeting Mrs Wu outside of the usual setting had been a little unsettling, and I wasn¡¯t a fan of crowds in the first place, adding another point of worry. On the other hand, there would be no crowd at Chris¡¯ place, there¡¯d likely only be him, Jenn and me. Which made me wonder if I would manage to hold a polite conversation with real people in a social setting, without alienating them.


    Maybe after dealing with the life-like natives of Mundus, I could translate that skill into the ability to hold a conversation, similar to the way I could talk to Olivia. I wasn¡¯t incredibly close to her, and there were only limited obligations between us, so it might be the closest comparison. Which just left the question of what to talk about open. With Olivia, our conversations were mostly about the current situation and environment, or magic and the divine workings of the Gods. Neither was a suitable topic for dinner conversation but on the other hand, talking about the weather was just so terribly¡­ insipid.


    After a quick search on the Internet, I found suggestions to talk about shared interests or characteristics, but that didn¡¯t really help much. Considering interests, I had little idea what Jenn was interested in and while I had known Chris very well in the past, it had been years since we talked in-depth. Back then, his interests had focused on Craft of War and information technology and later, after Amaranthine had taken off, he had gained an interest in finance. That interest had slowly transformed into his current career, something we somewhat shared. He was mostly providing financial advice, while my own job focused on the numbers, the small minutiae that needed to be taken care of. The hundreds of thousands of numbers that had to remain in balance, or someone, somewhere would be seriously upset. After all, those numbers represented their money.


    There was some intersection, but he worked with people, I worked with numbers. And that idea completely ignored Jenn, leaving her out would be terribly inconsiderate. But what did I share with her? What did I even know about her, other than that she was pregnant and married to Chris?


    Maybe that was something to do before Chris got home, get to know her, at least to the point that we could make conversation.


    Letting out a sigh, I did another check on the ingredients, making sure that I had everything I needed before heading out. Luckily, it was reasonably good weather, with only a bit of snow on the ground and little wind, making it not too miserable.


    As I waited for the bus, I idly considered whether to buy a car at some point, but I didn¡¯t need one. Living in the city, I could either walk or take public transport anywhere I needed to go, making a car a useless money-sink but sometimes they were useful.


    After a wonderfully boring time on the bus and a short walk, I arrived in suburbia, where white picket fences ruled and every house appeared to be a cardboard cutout of the one next to it. Even I, who enjoyed regularity and order, was taken aback by the nightmare of conformity around me, a world where everything looked the same. There was nothing individual, even the few hedges and the lawns appeared to be made with the same template.


    A shudder ran down my spine and I began wondering if I had wandered into a nightmarish hellscape and would soon be hunted by the pod-people with the intent of turning me into one of theirs. Looking around, I felt almost a little dizzy at the uniformity, focusing on the street signs to find the right place.


    The realisation that my former friend was one of the pod-people, completely assimilated into their collective, was a harsh shock. Their house looked just like the one next door, with only the most minor alterations. In the past, I had thought that such uniformity was a goal worth striving for, a world where I could be at ease that nothing stood out, nothing to be counted or considered. But seeing it now, I felt anxious, my mind starting to doubt my senses, hyper-focusing on those few, minute details, those little signs of personality.


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    Taking a deep breath, I rang the doorbell, waiting for a minute until I was buzzed in.


    ¡°Samantha, hi.¡± Jenn greeted me, a friendly smile on her face.


    ¡°Hello, Jenn. It¡¯s so good to see you.¡± I replied, subtly studying my host. Compared to the last time I had seen her, she had expanded, going from slightly pregnant to a sizable bump. A part of me was a little taken aback, the belly didn¡¯t fit with the rest of her body, giving me the impression that it was an alien object, tacked onto a human frame, but I quickly pushed down that eery sensation, hoping that nothing showed on my face.


    Given that the door wasn¡¯t slammed in my face, I had a bit of confidence that my thought hadn¡¯t been visible on my face.


    ¡°Why don¡¯t you come in? Chris sent me a message that he¡¯ll be a little late.¡± she invited me. Inside, the home was well set up, comfortable with a surprising amount of personality compared to the outside. Following Jenn, we moved into the living room, where she sat down on the sofa, letting out a sigh.


    ¡°Please, have a seat.¡± she invited me, pointing towards an easy chair.


    ¡°Thanks.¡± I sat down, smiling awkwardly as I tried to come up with something to say. Luckily, while I was feeling incredibly awkward, Jenn seemed to have no problem, easily drawing me into a conversation about my shared past with Chris. It sounded as if she hadn¡¯t heard too much about it and soon, I was telling her a lot of the stupid and ridiculous things we had done during our school days. Back then, Chris had been the leader of our merry band of nerds, happily getting us into and out of trouble.


    ¡°I¡¯m sorry, I was sworn to secrecy regarding the video incident.¡± I shook my head, realising that I had already shared too much. The incident that had occurred when we had managed to tap into the school¡¯s surveillance system and record an explicit scene between the vice-principal and one of the teachers was best forgotten, the images having scarred my eyes and brain enough at the time. There were things no teenager was meant to see, and watching one of your favourite teachers ploughing the strict disciplinarian that was our vice-principal was one of them. Just thinking of it made a shiver run down my spine, even without considering the aftermath.


    ¡°Mhm, I guess.¡± she grinned, an air of disappointment around me. ¡°Well, if you can¡¯t tell me about Chris¡¯ time at school, why don¡¯t you tell me a bit about Samantha?¡± she asked, her eyes brimming with curiosity. With her focus changed, she started to gently prod and probe, getting me to talk about myself. Some of the things she managed to pull out of me made me blush brightly, especially when I let my difficulty to comprehend emotions slip. That I had needed to learn something as basic as why people smiled, or what the sensations within myself meant, made me feel¡­ defective.


    ¡°So, you have never been in love?¡± she asked, before blushing herself, shaking her head, ¡°No, you don¡¯t need to answer that. I¡¯m sorry that I asked such a personal question.¡±


    I felt my own face heat up and closed my eyes for a moment. There was that small, tiny spark within me, a memory of another world, where strong arms and a gentle smell enveloped me, held me close and protected me. Letting the air flow slowly out of my nose, I gave Jenn a gentle smile.


    ¡°How does one know love?¡± I asked, knowing that there was no answer, ¡°If she holds me close, I feel safe. If I smell her scent, I feel whole. If she touches me, I feel alive.¡± I shook my head, still blushing brightly.


    ¡°Tell me, is that love?¡±  I repeated my question and now, Jenn was blushing just as brightly as I.


    ¡°It certainly sounds like it.¡± she nodded, before taking a glance at her watch.


    ¡°Oh, dear, I¡¯m afraid Chris will be home soon. I¡¯m so grateful that you offered to prepare dinner,¡± she added, sounding a little uncomfortable with the idea of the guest preparing dinner.


    ¡°I offered and really, I can¡¯t make you cook, can I?¡± I smiled at her, before continuing, ¡°Just like I would stand and give up my seat on the bus if a pregnant lady needs it, I¡¯ll help. And it lets me re-connect with Chris, my mother always told me that I need to put in the effort to maintain friendships, that I can¡¯t just pull back into my shell.¡± my smile turned a little sad, as I remembered my mother and her ceaseless efforts to help me navigate the weird, incomprehensible world of humans, the complexity of society and the myriad niceties that allowed thousands of humans to live in cities without them all killing one another. Not that it always worked, but society worked, more or less.


    ¡°Anyway, Chris has been a friend for years and while we have lost sight of each other for some time, I want to make the effort to reconnect. If I get to add you to my tally of friends, I¡¯d consider that a bonus.¡± I nodded, stressing to myself that I had the correct reasoning.


    I had dinner to prepare.

 Chapter 565

    ¡°Honey, I¡¯m home,¡± Chris¡¯ voice echoed through the house, accompanied by the jingling of keys. Jenn was sitting in the kitchen, watching me prepare dinner, salivating a little at the scents coming from the wok I was using.


    ¡°In here,¡± she called back, a grin on her face.


    ¡°It smells great,¡± he complimented, the voice coming closer, ¡°but isn¡¯t cooking too tiring in your state¡­?¡± he asked, only for the voice to suddenly stop. Looking over my shoulder, he was standing in the kitchen doorway, his hand still loosening his tie, a confused from on his face.


    ¡°Huh?¡± he grunted, his eyes flicking between Jenn and me. The obvious confusion on his face made me assume that Jenn had forgotten to tell him about the plans we had made. Maybe she had wanted to give him a surprise, though Chris hadn¡¯t been a huge fan of surprises unless he was in on it.


    ¡°Sam messaged a few days ago, asking about your plans for dinner. Out of consideration for me, and my condition, she offered to visit here and even cook for us,¡± Jenn explained, a wide grin on her face.


    ¡°Oh, that¡¯s wonderful, thanks for that,¡± he told me, a grin on his face. It looked a little weird, a bit stiff, but I couldn¡¯t really focus on him, the food was almost ready and burning it now would be bad.


    ¡°It¡¯s nothing. You asked about dinner before, but I was busy. Now, I can reciprocate.¡± I replied, my eyes focused on the wok in front of me. With a quick shake, I made sure nothing was sticking to it, before stirring with the chopsticks once again.


    ¡°Dear, why don¡¯t you get out of the suit.¡± Jenn suggested, ¡°Sam, you said it¡¯ll take ten more minutes?¡±


    ¡°It will, yes.¡± I nodded, ¡°If you direct me to the dishes, I¡¯ll set the table.¡± I added, looking over once I was certain that nothing would burn if I diverted my attention for a moment.


    ¡°That closet over there,¡± Jenn pointed, before giving a glance to Chris, who had yet to move. ¡°Don¡¯t you want to change? It¡¯d look a little silly, with you all dressed up and the two of us in casual clothes.¡± she prodded and I had to agree. While I wasn¡¯t dressed shabbily, I was in simple jeans and a blouse, while Jenn¡¯s maternity wear was obviously tailored for comfort first, and fashion a distant, secondary consideration. Chris, on the other hand, was dressed in a neat, black suit, a white, starched shirt and a dark tie, giving him a serious, almost sombre, appearance. The type of person you wanted to entrust your money to, hoping that it would come back with a lot of friends. It was such a departure from the extremely casual, maybe even sloppy, appearance he had in high school, I almost couldn¡¯t recognise him.


    Curiously, while conversation during dinner was mostly an exchange of old stories, told by Chris and myself, it was Jenn who kept the conversation going. The longer we talked, the more I realised how she managed to guide us, I even noticed some of the interrogation techniques Mrs Wu had spoken about in action. I wasn¡¯t certain if she was using them consciously, but it was an interesting discovery.


    At one point, the conversation shifted a little, and Jenn started to gently prod Chris, trying to get him to tell stories about me. Now that the shoe was on the other foot, the previous story-telling felt a lot less fun and I felt myself blush when he mentioned some of the foolish things that had happened to me. When she started to ask about relationships, there was an awkward silence settling over the table.


    ¡°It wasn¡¯t like that. Sam¡¯s been one of the nerds, not a girl.¡± Chris objected, only to blush even stronger when I snorted at the idea.


    ¡°It has been difficult for me. Learning about that kind of thing, without the emotional context is¡­¡± My words died on me, a first in a while, and I sat there like a fish out of water, my mouth opening and closing.


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    ¡°Now you broke her.¡± Chris grinned, having seen me in that state before. He even told a story just a few minutes prior, during which I had ended up in the same state. Jenn suddenly looked worried, her eyes going to the amused Chris and even as I began to feel guilty, I focused on the lessons I had been taught for mental overload.


    With my eyes closed, focusing inwards, I slowly calmed my breathing, letting the roiling sensations within me flow out with my breath. Memories of Sigmir sprang to my mind, of her scent, and it gave my mind a focus and direction, letting me snap out of my stunned state much faster.


    ¡°I¡¯m so sorry,¡± Jenn told me, once my eyes opened back up.


    ¡°It is no problem,¡± I shook my head, trying to dispel the negative emotions she was subjected to. ¡°It sometimes happens, my mind simply gets stuck in a loop.¡±


    ¡°You got better, didn¡¯t you?¡± Chris asked with a faint note of concern in his voice.


    ¡°I believe so.¡± I nodded, ¡°I mean, it has been a while since it happened but that might be due to less social exposure.¡±


    ¡°Or because of your girlfriend?¡± Jenn suggested, getting me to blush again.


    ¡°Maybe,¡± I allowed, not really wanting to go deeper into that topic. It was one thing to experience the sensations and even faintly verbalise them, but talking about a relationship with an artificial being? As that was what I was now convinced Sigmir was. An artificial intelligence, with enough sophistication to experience emotion, though I wasn¡¯t certain if the Sigmir I knew was the entirety of the entity or if there was more to it, a single artificial entity controlling a multitude of characters within Road to Purgatory.


    It wasn¡¯t a comfortable topic to think about. It was one thing for the person you¡­


    It was one thing for your person to be non-human, as long as the person was yours in their entirety, but it felt different if your person was only a small fragment, a shard or role that a larger entity played.


    ¡°You¡¯re in a relationship?¡± Chris asked, his voice a little weird. ¡°When did that happen?¡±


    ¡°It¡¯s been a while.¡± I pushed the messy thoughts in my mind away, focusing on the present.


    ¡°Bring her next time. I¡¯m sure Chris would love to meet the girlfriend of his best friend, right?¡± Jenn suggested, emphasising the two titles for some reason. Why was my girlfriend important to my best friend?


    ¡°Yeah, that sounds great.¡± Chris agreed, though with far less enthusiasm than shown by Jenn.


    ¡°We¡¯ll see.¡± I stalled, before deflecting, ¡°There are some circumstances I can¡¯t really get into.¡±


    ¡°Oh, that¡¯s so sad. People should just learn to let others live as they feel right ¡° Jenn shook her head, a morose smile on her face. ¡°What does it matter a relationship is between the same sex?¡±


    It made me wonder if she had misunderstood something, but I was glad that I wasn¡¯t forced to come up with lie after lie, to keep away from that topic.


    ¡°If you need help, you only need to ask,¡± Chris promised, with Jenn next to him nodding along.


    ¡°Thanks for that, but it is not something anyone can really help with,¡± I explained, before resolutely shaking my head.


    ¡°Anyway, it is what it is.¡± I shrugged and for a few moments, silence settled around the table.


    After the awkwardness around the mention of my relationship had passed, Jenn did her best to get the conversation going again but it never regained its earlier vigour. It didn¡¯t take long for dinner to be finished and for me to leave their house. In my mind, the earlier discussion was still percolating, the questions I didn¡¯t have an answer for, the thoughts I didn¡¯t want to consider, even in the privacy of my own mind.


    What was Sigmir? Walking through the dark suburb, I began to wonder. What could I even know about her? All my interactions with the entity behind the character were through the filter of that character. Even the world within which we were interacting might be partially controlled by that entity.


    Why were emotions so complicated? I could barely recognise them in other humans and now I was supposed to comprehend and understand them in an entity I couldn¡¯t really comprehend and only interact with on its terms?


    And yet, despite those questions and troubles, I couldn¡¯t imagine not trying. Walking away from Sigmir, just the idea made me sad. Was there a way to reach the entity behind the character, without going through the interface provided by Pantheon Entertainment?


    A question worth considering, while I continued to try travelling the Road they had laid out. Even if it might lead me to purgatory.

 Interlude: Highlightreel VII

    On a steep, snow-covered mountain slope, a group of people is slowly trudging upwards. The world around them is covered in ice, with only a few jagged rocks sticking out. In the distance, the mountain peaks seem to pierce the clouds, reaching into the high heavens. Four of them move in close formation, following after a massive, armoured figure, slowly ploughing a path through the snow. The three behind that armoured figure can only move on that path, the snow easily reaching their chests. They are dressed in warm cloaks, trimmed with fur, worn above light leather armour. One of them is carrying a large, heavy bow, with a quiver of arrows at their hip, one is carrying a staff, the other a sceptre. The one ahead is clad in heavy plate, a shield slung over their back and an axe is dangling from their belt.


    The fifth member of their group is entirely different. Dressed in little more than light clothes and a simple, red cloak, she is walking ahead, not sinking into the snow but almost skating on top of it. And yet, despite skating on top of the snow, she can look the armoured figure clearing the way in the eye, her frame slim, giving the impression that she is only the size of one of the warrior¡¯s arms.


    ¡°We are almost there,¡± the small figure tells the rest of her group, just loud enough to be heard over the cold wind. At her words, the warrior takes the shield off their back and the others make themselves ready to battle.


    In a dark cave, a pair of small, canid beings converses, their voices hushed and barely above a whisper. There is no light and only the vaguest light in their eyes tells of their existence. Their bodies are clad in simple, dark leathers, crudely but efficiently made, the blades at their belt appear similarly simple, but the glint on the edges speaks of the sharpness.


    ¡°They are coming, they are almost there. Warn the others.¡± one of them warns the other, causing it to nod and quickly scurry away, moving through passages cleverly hidden and impossible to traverse for anything standing higher than a metre. Even the small canids have to crouch and, at times even crawl. The canid that is moving away quickly reaches a different chamber, where dozens of similar creatures wait, small crossbows, slings or blades in hand.


    ¡°The Intruders are almost here. Get ready.¡± the messenger tells them in a yipping voice. All the gathered canids become still for a moment, nothing moving between them, before they all, with grim determination, move through yet another small tunnel, the group splitting up, scattering through a maze-like hive.


    In a dark forest, a hooded figure carefully sneaks forward, weighing every step and carefully avoiding any unnecessary noise. High above, a clouded sky hides any stars, covering the world with a pitch-black cloak. The cowl of the being''s hood hides a strange apparatus covering their eyes, faintly glowing lenses, set in leather, allowing her to move smoothly through the night, with nary a rustle marking her passing.


    ¡°I¡¯ve scouted the way we can move to phase two now.¡± the cloaked being says, surprising another hidden figure. With a nod, that second figure starts moving, obviously getting guidance from the first one and together, they slowly make their way through the lightless forest.


    ¡°Let¡¯s go.¡± the heavily armoured warrior shouts, shrugging off his heavy cloak. His voice rouses the fighting spirit of the people with him, a faint light shining in their eyes. Ahead, dug into the side of the mountain, is a cave, partially covered in ice.


    Before that cave sits their foe, a massive, malformed creature, easily twice the size of the massive warrior, with claws sharp as scythes, a gaping maw filled with crooked teeth and coarse, grey-white fur, allowing it to blend into the surrounding ice. But the most disturbing thing is the chest, where a gaping hole makes a mockery of the natural order, looking like a secondary mouth with which the creature can feast even more.


    Hearing the warrior¡¯s challenge, it answers it with an angry roar, echoing from the distant mountain peaks. As both sides charge forward, an arrow shoots by the warrior, striking the beast¡¯s chest and sending it stumbling sideways.


    ¡°Everyone is in position.¡± another small canid reports and the original small canid peaks through a gap between a false wall, staring into the tunnels on the other side. There, a group of humanoids, far taller than the canids, is moving through a wide tunnel, barely high enough for them, but they make it work. The two up front are clad in heavy armour, shields at the ready and gleaming steel in their hand. The one in the back is dressed in simpler armour, a mere chain-shirt, and is wielding a crossbow, carried in front of their chest.


    In the middle, two robed figures move along, one carrying a simple, slender wand, the other holding a book in one hand, an orb that sheds bright, soothing light in the other.


    The canids wait silently, who knows for what, as the humanoids march past. Just as the last one is next to the original canid, only separated by a thin wall of woven straw caked with mud, a tinkling sound stops the humanoids, causing them to freeze and get into defensive positions, ready to fight. Seconds pass in tense silence until the humanoids start to lower their weapons, thinking it only a coincidence. As their tension fades, it is time to strike.


    The two small figures quickly move through the dark forest, reaching an equally dark mountainside. But the valley below is far from dark, in the night, it shines with the light of dozens of fires and the din of hundreds of people is carried by the wind, to that silent mountain slope.


    ¡°We need to be fast,¡± the original figure tells her silent counterpart and together, they swiftly move across the mountainside, placing items at regular intervals. Unseen, unheard and unnoticed, they make their way from one side of the mountain to the other. There, sitting in a narrow pass, a group of other small beings awaits them, riding on large goats.


    ¡°Everything is prepared, your highness.¡± the second figure tells one of the riders, speaking for the first time in a quiet and solemn voice.


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    The moment the monster¡¯s charge is staggered, the warrior puts on a burst of speed, trying to close the gap. Despite the snow, his charge carries him into the reach of the monster and his heavy axe bites into the monster¡¯s blocking arm. One of the robed figures in the back speaks a simple word and the axe ignites, burning the monster¡¯s flesh around it.


    The monster reels back, letting out a howl of pain, only to get staggered by another arrow striking it. But instead of flinching back from the pain, it seems to invite the battle, using its heavy claws to swipe at the warrior, scattering sparks of golden light as he blocks them with his shield. Despite the block, the warrior gets pushed back from brute force and the monster bends forward, the howl in its throat suddenly sounding like the frozen winds of the north and a burst of freezingly cold air covers the entire group, only barely held at bay by a shield of golden flames, raised by both spellcasters.


    Behind the monster, a clapping sound is heard and after that single clap, a moment of silence reigns, as the small, lightly-clad figure from earlier dashes across the snow with light, almost floating movements, belying the incredible speed and the pair of dark, smoky arms floating behind her, in place of her actual arms, still pressed together in the position of that single clap that silenced the world.


    With a ripping sound, the false walls are torn away and dozens of projectiles are launched at the five figures, caught in the ambush. Coming in low, the canids only need to aim up, to make sure they won¡¯t hit their allies on the other side.


    In the sudden crossfire, the fighters up front are suffering the least, their heavy armour and shields allowing them to block most of the attacks, despite being caught flat-footed. The one in the back is less fortunate, the lesser armour and lack of shield letting some of the projectiles strike true, drawing blood and causing painful bruising.


    But least fortunate are the two caught in the middle, without armour and unprepared. The canids seem to take great pleasure in targeting those two vulnerable targets, the few with melee-weapons yipping as they stab their legs and, the moment the first of them stumbles, everything else they can reach. The furious attack only takes a few seconds and before the two warriors can do more than take a half-hearted swipe at the retreating canids, the smell of blood fills the cave, coming from the two gravely wounded spellcasters, who are quickly succumbing to their injuries and their attackers¡¯ poisoned weapons.


    As the group is caught in the frozen breath of the monster, the small figure on the flank is quickly crossing the distance, the dark appendages floating behind her flexing just a little, pulling back as if to strike. The moment the small figure closes in, she starts to move sideways, keeping the distance, her fingers barely moving in their position before her chest and yet, those small movements seem to cause the spectral arms floating above to strike with tremendous force. The blows appear to be almost weightless and yet, each of their strikes staggers the much-larger figure.


    The monster swipes at the annoying fly that causes it so much pain, and yet, the small figure manages to slip past each of the blows, forcing it to turn with her, leaving its back wide open to the rest of the group.


    None of the others can ignore such an opening and a barrage of attacks is launched, a flurry of strikes with the heavy axe, dozens of dazzling shards of magic and a single arrow, gleaming with deadly power. They all strike the monster¡¯s open back, tearing flesh and breaking bones, causing it to stagger forward. And yet, it doesn¡¯t fall.


    Rising from its half-prone position, it lets out an earth-shattering howl and the mountains around them seem to shake under the power of its roar. Far above, a rumbling sound seems to answer the call, the group turning pale at the sound of an approaching avalanche.


    ¡°It¡¯s done, those two won¡¯t burn any of us.¡± the original figure quietly yips to another of the canids, as they quickly scurry through the small tunnels.


    ¡°Regardless, we need to move to the next ambush. There are more of them coming, and we need to make sure they rue this day.¡± the other one replies, letting out a yip of laughter.


    The two warriors in their heavy armour, still reeling from the sudden attack, watching the tunnels around them in hyper-vigilance hear that single laugh Then another, until their entire world is filled with the yipping laughter of their foes, taunting them as the crossbow-wielder desperately tries to save their companions.


    ¡°It is time.¡± the figure addressed before declares, staring at the one who spoke, ¡°We will move the moment your task is finished.¡± the figure adds before turning their goat around, moving back down the pass, to take up position at the front of a line of goat-riders.


    ¡°Let¡¯s show Morgana we¡¯ve learned her lessons well.¡± the original figure quietly tells her companion. With a nod, the second figure takes out a small, crystalline object, apparently made from different crystals, fused by some unknown method. Together, they walk to the front of the pass, looking down on the valley they circled in the night. Looking down at the army camped there.


    ¡°For science,¡± the second figure says, the voice half laughing, half screaming. The crystalline object in her hands flashes with light, shining brightly for a few seconds as beads of sweat form on her forehead. Then, with a tinkling sound, the object crumbles to dust, falling from her hand.


    For a moment, nothing happens.


    And then, with a sudden, rumbling sound, the mountains before the two collapse, massive landslides racing down the slope, carrying countless rocks and incredible force. Right towards the army, who are just now realising the perilous situation, they are in.


    ¡°Let¡¯s leave.¡± the first figure suggests, ¡°We don¡¯t need to watch the slaughter that comes next.¡±


    ¡°No, we caused it, we should observe to the end.¡± the second figure shakes her head, her voice a mix of elation and horror at what she wrought, ¡°I never thought it would work that well.¡± she quietly admits, as the forces, she unleashed bury hundreds of people, some of them lucky enough to die from the impact, the others doomed to die slowly as they suffocate in the valley that would become their grave.


    As the avalanche unleashed by the monster races towards them, the group has little time to bother with their fleeing foe. Survival takes priority and they quickly hunker down, the warrior taking hte lead while the two spellcasters set up their defensive magic again. The archer has little to contribute, shooting a few quick arrows after the monster that fled into its cave.


    Right before the avalanche strikes, the small figure reaches them, gracefully landing in their mid, the spectral arms floating behind her wrapping around the group, sheltering them in a dark embrace.


    The avalanche strikes the shield and for a moment, it holds, but as more and more ice and snow crashes into it, it starts to buckle, until it gets overwhelmed. The arms hold, the small figure surrounded by her friends starts to tremble from the force, until finally, with a guttural roar that sounds far too savage for such a small creature, she rips her palms apart, the arms that had sheltered the group suddenly explode outwards, scattering shards of darkness and power, taking the ice that had buried the group with it.


    Sitting in a deep, newly dug hole, the small figure staggers forward, almost falling but one of her companions manages to catch her, holding her limp and suddenly so fragile-looking body.


    The camera leaves the frozen mountain, the dark cavern and the mountainside, slowly illuminated by the light of dawn. As it leaves those places, it floats upwards, until the world is visible. A world, covered in the blue fires of purgatory.


    ¡°Great power sometimes comes in tiny packages. Fear the fury of the small folks.¡±

 Chapter 566

    After dealing with the real world for two days, being back in Mundus was an interesting sensation. The feeling of expansion, as my mind started to compute the information my Avatar¡¯s senses could receive. Just the sensation of the Astral River following around me, the magic of this world, some of it at my fingertips it was a heady sensation.


    ¡°I¡¯m back,¡± I mentally whispered to Lenore, letting my mind slowly mingle with her. For a few minutes, I experienced her memories of the last four days, watching what had happened to the others. Lenore had mostly stuck with Sigmir, sitting on her shoulder or remaining in her vicinity, acting as a mostly silent companion while Sigmir ran her errands. Because that was what Sigmir had done the last few days, wander around town, get some maintenance on her gear done and do some shopping.


    If it had been anyone but Sigmir, I couldn¡¯t have cared less about such things, but if it was about her, there was some interest.


    ¡°Did you see anything in town that might interest me?¡± I asked, after flitting through the shared memories.


    ¡°Maybe,¡± she allowed, before focusing on one part of the memories she had shared, a particular building. While it didn¡¯t stick out on the physical level, on a magical level, it was akin to a beacon, radiating a lot of power and magic. Whoever was working there, they were a competent and powerful spell caster, with an incredible variety of magic at their disposal. From what I could see in Lenore¡¯s memory, there were all common elements present in the casting and some power flows appeared in a manner I hadn¡¯t seen before. Whoever they were, they had prepared their lair well. Breaking it would require me to go all-out and even if I did, it might not be enough if they had been intelligent enough to add some redundancy.


    ¡°What¡¯s that?¡± I asked, my curiosity roused, ¡°Who¡¯s living there?¡±


    ¡°The Mages¡¯ Guild.¡± was Lenore¡¯s unexciting response. In that case, it made sense that there was a variety of magic around the building, not indicative of an incredibly versatile spellcaster. Individually, the flows she had seen weren¡¯t that impressive, nothing I wouldn¡¯t be confident to break with some effort.


    ¡°Do you want to check it out?¡± she asked, the suggestion obvious in her voice.


    ¡°Certainly,¡± I agreed, before focusing on our immediate surroundings. Lenore had been out with Sigmir, who had long since sensed my return, walking away from the crowded streets and into a small side alley, where we¡¯d have some privacy.


    Before I had fully materialised after leaving my Hallow, I was already swept up in an embrace and a greedy mouth tried to devour me. The sensation hit me like a brick and I realised just how much I had missed her. All my confusion, all the worries and questions were swept away, leaving only a glowing sensation in my chest. Enthusiastically returning the greeting, I wrapped my arms and legs around Sigmir, holding on and returning the kiss for all I was worth.


    Ultimately, her higher Endurance- and Vitality-attributes allowed her to keep going for longer, she simply had more breath than me. Gasping for breath, my head swimming with the desire to just rip off her clothes and have my way with her in the secluded, slightly dirty back alley but sense prevailed. If nothing else, I wanted to keep her wonderful singing voice in the throes of ecstasy all to myself, away from the world. It was all mine, and I was not sharing it.


    ¡°I missed you,¡± she quietly murmured, still holding me against her chest.


    ¡°And I, you,¡± I mumbled back, rubbing my head against her leather-clad chest, her unique scent filling my nose, relaxing and arousing at the same time.


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    For a minute, maybe two, we just stood there, basking in the other¡¯s presence. There was no need for conversation, no more words exchanged, only the simple pleasure of holding the other.


    Sadly, some beings simply couldn¡¯t read the mood.


    A small, idle part of my mind had remained vigilant, noticing the approaching steps but had ignored them as trivial. When Sigmir grumbled, a harsh vibration coming from her chest, I leaned back a little, so I could see what was going on.


    There, from the other side of the alley she had moved into, came a group of four males, two beast-men, one orc, one human. While their races were different, their demeanour and dress were identical, the same grin, the same rough and simple clothes and the same cudgels held in their hands. They looked like some sort of dockworkers, common ruffians and rabble.


    For a moment I considered how to react, but when the sensation of Observe swept over me, that uncomfortable and invasive feeling, I acted without thought and quashed it, extinguishing the faint traces of divination inherent to the skill and striking at their minds in response. I held back, not wanting to immediately kill them, but even a weak response was enough to send them staggering.


    Suddenly, the alley was filled with clattering noise, as the cudgels they carried dropped to the road and the earlier, confident steps were replaced with a sudden rush, as they ran away as fast as their staggering legs could carry them.


    Sigmir¡¯s annoyed grumble turned into deep laughter, watching the idiots flee. Before we could decide whether to smack them down or not, more steps came from the other side, this time only two sets and when we turned around, another pair of ruffians rounded the corner, looking like they were a set with the earlier four.


    When they looked into the alley and saw Sigmir and me, still standing there, with Sigmir laughing while I was somewhere between annoyance and amusement, they stopped as if someone had pressed the pause button. Watching as their faces morphed from amused anticipation, mixed with a touch of cruelty, to confusion before suddenly switching to fear gave me a certain grim pleasure.


    Before I could decide on the most appropriate reaction, they suddenly stopped running, moving in a very calm and orderly fashion, trying to hide the cudgels behind their backs.


    ¡°Afternoon, ladies,¡± one of them greeted, as they were squeezing against the other side of the alley, trying to get past us while looking like nothing more than harmless passers-by. That they carefully tried to conceal their weapons gave the whole thing a truly surreal feeling, to the point that neither Sigmir nor I knew how to react. They were quite obvious no threat to us, simply by virtue of our superior power and before either of us had mustered up the will to strike them down on general principle, and for the crime of interrupting our reunion, they had managed to scurry out of the alley, moving at surprising alacrity without appearing to run. It was enough to make me wonder if they had some sort of power-walking skill that allowed them to do so.


    Shaking my head, I looked up to Sigmir, who still held me close, but I could see that the lust and ardour we had felt was thoroughly extinguished, washed away by the interruption. For a moment, I considered finding and murdering the ruffians but decided against it. If that was needed to reignite my passion, I should do some deep introspection and reevaluate my mental state.


    ¡°Why don¡¯t we go to the Inn? We have the whole day before we¡¯ll ship out tomorrow¡­¡± Sigmir suggested, her intent obvious in her voice. For a moment, I considered following her lead, to see just what we could coax from the other¡¯s body but an impish urge struck me and I shook my head, even while rubbing against Sigmir in just the right way.


    ¡°Later, love.¡± I told her, changing the angle of my rubbing a little, my grin deepening when I smelled a familiar scent in the air, ¡°I want to check the Mages¡¯ Guild, they might have something that interests me.¡± I explained, not stopping my movement.


    ¡°Oh¡­¡± she tried to form a coherent answer, while I pulled myself up a little so that my mouth was near her neck. There, I gently started to nibble, letting my teeth play against her skin and gently lapping and tasting her skin with my tongue. Her words were carried away by a moan and just when her muscles tensed around me, I slipped out of her embrace, landing next to her.


    ¡°Tonight¡­¡± I told her, my voice thick with desire, as in teasing her,  had managed to tease myself as well. ¡°Tonight¡­¡± I promised, slowly walking away from her, noticing a deep, animalistic growl behind me. When I looked over my shoulder, I could see her staring at me, her eyes alight with lust and her breath heaving.


    Tonight would be incredibly fun¡­

 Chapter 567

    Seeing the Mages¡¯ Guild up close gave me a weird feeling. When looking at the building without the benefit of Lenore¡¯s sight, it looked like a completely ordinary building, not any more special than the ones to its left and right. There was a funky smell in the air, the amalgamation of dozens of different spells and types of magic mingling and the Astral River being repeatedly disturbed in this place, but I doubted I would have noticed it just passing by, as it seemed rather subdued.


    With Lenore¡¯s sight, however, the magic around the place was obvious, even with the thin veneer of Darkness magic they employed for concealment. It merely kept the power from disturbing the passers-by, the power and complexity were far insufficient to hide anything from a determined observer.


    For a few minutes, we simply stood there, with Sigmir behind us, quietly observing the magic emanating from the structure. The different spells and formations, all existing in the same space, it was a fascinating sight, especially the interaction between the spells. There were harmonies and conflicts, some of them overt, others covert and concealed. Some of the spells appeared to support other mystical structures, only to slowly siphon off energy, while others directly clashed, scattering sparks into the Astral River and causing small eddies.


    If I had the time, I could have stared at the structures for days, the countless minute intricacies and interactions, all giving me a small insight into different mystical elements and the interactions between them, it was a fascinating sight. Alas, as so often, we simply didn¡¯t have time.


    Letting out a deep breath, I focused on the world around me, noticing the curious glances from some of the locals, spellcasters from the feel of it. They were emanating their own Astral Power, some of them almost entirely concealed, others proudly and out in the open. It made me wonder if some of the people around me, who appeared to be nothing special, were able to conceal their power to the point that I missed them.


    For a moment, I considered speaking to some of the spellcasters but ultimately, I decided against it. If they wanted to talk, they could approach me, I wasn¡¯t about to pester some random person on the road, merely because they had a bit of power.


    Walking forward, I passed through the magical formations of the Guild, using the Twilight Shroud I constantly kept around me to bypass some of the gentle probings, while calling on the Shadows beneath my robe to squash the more direct attempts. I wasn¡¯t about to let anyone but Sigmir probe me, either magically or physically. Similarly, I extended my protection to encompass Sigmir. I was the only one who could know her body and soul on such an intimate level.


    When I stepped up to the door, there was one more attempt to probe me, this one even more insidious and powerful than those before, to the point that I needed to activate Overflow and Bullet Time, just to give me the resources to deal with the magical scan.


    Letting out a sigh, I questioned whether I wanted to go in at all, and possibly face further, even more determined, probing or simply leave but before I could decide, the door opened, as if inviting me inside.


    Looking past the magic on the outside, I realised that the inside appeared to be fully devoid of magical formations, making me wonder if the outside formations were some sort of test. With the door already open, I walked in, my curiosity overwhelming my caution.


    The inside wasn¡¯t what I had expected, even if I hadn¡¯t been certain what to expect. A part of me had expected some mystical space, far larger on the inside than on the outside, something reminiscent of the Grandmother¡¯s Hut, with rooms that existed in different spaces and even during different times. Another part had expected something utterly mundane, akin to the Adventurers'' Guild, an office building so ordinary it could have been built in the real world.


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    What I saw in reality, was neither. Most of the building was ordinary, without any interesting parts, not even magic running through the construction, at least none that I could detect. But other parts, some small, others large, were decorated with tiny, magical formations and glowing with power, fulfilling some unknown functions.


    There was a set of elevators, constantly running in a nearby shaft, only that there was no connection rope or shaft, the platforms were moved solely with magic. I stared at them, after coming in, trying to figure out what I was seeing, before tearing my gaze away.


    Only to get stuck on another object, a gilded mirror, decorated with gold, inlaid with runes and glowing with magic. I didn¡¯t even try to delve into that item¡¯s secrets, instead, I focused on the receptionist, standing behind the counter.


    The perfectly ordinary-looking counter, that was glowing in Lenore¡¯s sight with enough power to send a shiver down my spine.


    ¡°Welcome, Magister.¡± the attendant greeted me, his voice filled with respect. ¡°What can we do for you today?¡± he asked, giving me a deep, almost submissive bow.


    I was taken aback for a moment, not quite sure how to react to the title or the sudden submissiveness.


    ¡°Did you mistake me for someone?¡± I asked, stepping up to the counter, ¡°It is my first time in a Mages¡¯ Guild, so¡­¡± I let the words hang in the air, an eyebrow raised. I noticed the attendant¡¯s eyes widen in surprise, but the polite smile on his face stayed there, only twitching a little.


    ¡°Most impressive.¡± he nodded, ¡°But the door opened for you. That means you either hold the rank of Magister, or you are to be treated as such, in respect for the power and ability you have.¡± he explained, before repeating his earlier question, ¡°What can we do for you today?¡±


    ¡°So, the magical examination on the door determines the power of the person approaching, and if the person is capable enough, it automatically opens?¡± I mused, nodding to myself, feeling it an interesting approach. ¡°Curious.¡±


    ¡°Anyway, I¡¯m here to peruse the literature in this place. I¡¯ve been told that the Mages¡¯ Guild has a library of sorts, where various spellcasters pool their research and resources?¡± I suggested, getting a nod in response.


    ¡°We do, if you move through the door over there, you¡¯ll find the reference room,¡± he directed me, before looking at Sigmir behind me, a confused frown on his face.


    ¡°She¡¯s with me,¡± I told him, after deflecting another use of Observe.


    ¡°Certainly.¡± he nodded, his focus back on me. ¡°Is there anything else?¡±


    ¡°No, I will take a look at the reference room,¡± I told him, walking over to the door he had indicated earlier. Sigmir stuck right behind me, acting both protective but also staying within my space, so I could protect her. Reaching behind me, I gave her hand a quick, reassuring squeeze, having a notion that she wasn¡¯t too comfortable in the magically charged building. While there was no magic in the air around us, there was enough in the stonework and the surrounding area to give it a faint aura of power.


    The reference room was similarly designed to the Guild itself, with low-key magic covering the shelves and a couple of small appliances providing some comfort. One such small construct, set with gems and magical formations was in the corner, providing warmth, or cooling if desired. The shelves on the other hand were covered in small-scale magic, some of which looked similar to the Ice-magic I was using, just with some subtle differences.


    Studying the magic and its flow, I slowly became convinced that it was the same result, that of stillness, but without using the concept inherent to Ice. Two roads, arriving at the same destination.


    Shaking my head, I focused on the books themselves, my eyes quickly scanning across the names, taking a few of them and reading the introductions. Just from that, I soon realised that I wouldn¡¯t benefit too much from being here. The writing on topics I was familiar with was too low-level to help me, one of the texts on Ice-Magic simply made me shrug and think, ¡®Well, duh?¡¯, but the texts on topics I was yet to become familiar with, lacked the basic information to introduce the topics to me. Neither Lenore, whose mind was closely aligned with mine nor I had the wide, systematic foundation necessary to make use of the research unless we had already made some inroads into the subjects on our own.


    Letting out a sigh, I gently pushed Sigmir, who had been quietly following after me, onto a chair, took one of the books on Scrying, a topic I was reasonably familiar with, and sat down on her lap, snuggling into her arms, while starting to speed-read the text.


    Maybe I would find some interesting nuggets of information, something to advance my own ability.

 Chapter 568

    The Mages¡¯ Guild¡¯s rules were a curious thing. It was quite obvious that with power came privilege, but there seemed to be more to it. While I sat on Sigmir¡¯s lap, there were a couple of curious beings who couldn¡¯t help but take a glance, either from outside the reference room or coming inside, using the pretext of looking for specific texts.


    None of the beings was daring enough to actually interrupt me, but it quickly became apparent that they were interested in who I was, judging by the glances given and the slowly changing frequency of those visits.


    At first, there was a slew of people, almost a dozen beings of various races and power levels in the first few minutes, all unable to help themselves but to sneak a peek. Only one of those, the most powerful by my reckoning, was brave enough to actually venture into the reference room, all the others remained outside, glancing in. My assumption was that they had been in the Guild before I got there, likely working in other rooms and my appearance was a curiosity they just had to check out. I certainly would feel a need to check out some strange and powerful visitor to my institution, if I were in their shoes.


    Once that initial wave had come and gone, the frequency of those visitors dove off a cliff, with only a handful stopping by over the next couple of hours. But as if to make up for the lower number, their power levels were much higher, each of them at a level where I would have to take them seriously. They refrained from using Observe on me, a courtesy I reciprocated, but just the feeling I got raised my vigilance.


    By the end of the day, I had read a few of the texts in the reference room and while they were raising interesting questions, I wasn¡¯t certain how much I could gain without in-depth study and experimentation. It just added new observations and ideas to the ever-growing stack of things I was interested in. I doubted I would ever manage to chew through all of those, certainly not before the end of the beta.


    ¡°We should head to the inn,¡± I suggested to Sigmir, pushing myself up from her lap. She had been incredibly patient with me, happily acting as my seat for most of the day, holding me and, at times, looking over my shoulder as I was reading. In turn, I had made sure to gently rub against her, especially against her chest, trying to keep her at a low level of arousal the whole time. From the look on her face each time I stood up, the lightly glazed eyes and the delicious scent permeating the room, I had been quite successful.


    ¡°Mhm?¡± she mumbled, her eyes blinking a few times, as she focused on me. ¡°What?¡±


    ¡°The inn¡­¡± I repeated, poking her chest and just coincidentally hitting the centre of it, causing a shiver to shake her body.


    ¡°Oh, yes,¡± she agreed, instantly standing up with enough force to almost topple the chair. Giving her a grin, I held a hand against her, not quite pushing her back but clearly acting as restraint. That my hand just happened to land on her chest, well, that was another of those pesky coincidences.


    ¡°We should get some food first,¡± I told her, the smile never leaving my face, even as my restraining hand gave a slight squeeze, causing her to shudder, ¡°We wouldn¡¯t want to run out of stamina during the night, would we?¡±


    ¡°No, we wouldn¡¯t,¡± she replied, her voice full of lust. The look on her face made me swallow hard, a barely restrained expression that made me shiver, both in expectation and a little in worry. Regardless, I had coiled her up to this point, I would have to take the release later - and enjoy it.


    We gave the receptionist a nod as we left and I continued to brush the divination magic around the Guild aside, the reasonably difficult magical task forcing my focus away from the planned festivities of the night. It helped to let me cool down a little even as the introspection made me aware of the connection to Sigmir - and the sheer lust and excitement radiating across it.


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    The realisation brought a smile to my face and I began considering if I could actually use it. There were some interesting ideas, especially as I remembered that magic moment in the forest when we had stumbled about the emphatic link and the emotions and sensations that could flow across it. We had never actively tried to use it, but maybe this would be a good time to see what was possible.


    As I began to consider it, Lenore squawked in my mind, protesting that such actions would doubtlessly have some bleed-over to Ylva and herself. The idea was a little awkward, while I loved Lenore, it was a familiar love, the love I imagined for a sister, similar to the love directed at a parent but without the inherent submissiveness of that relationship. Having her be part of a sexual encounter between Sigmir and myself, even if only peripherally, was almost enough to extinguish any lust I felt.


    ¡°You think we could set up a small magic circle for the two of you, so you can shield yourself from the effect? Some sort of Darkness-Magic, maybe some Ice to cool the emotions and some runes of Torpor to keep the two of you a little sedated?¡± I asked, ideas spinning up in my mind.


    ¡°It could work,¡± she agreed, her mind following mine, as we continued towards the inn.


    ¡°Anything wrong?¡± Sigmir quietly asked from behind me, likely having noticed the sudden shift in my mood.


    ¡°A small matter,¡± I shook my head, before looking up at her, ¡°Nothing to worry about, I promise,¡± I assured her, reasonably certain that the magic circle would work. And if not, I was certain that Lenore and Ylva would survive, it would be awkward as hell in the morning, but if what I had in mind worked, I doubted we¡¯d notice it in the moment.


    When we got to the inn, Sigmir was somewhat calm again, as I had no opportunity to tease her during the walk. The innkeeper looked at me a little confused, having seen me enter a few days ago but never leave. Regardless, Sigmir was with me and quite obviously possessive, so he didn¡¯t question my presence, merely looked at the two of us with a raised eyebrow.


    ¡°Dinner, now,¡± Sigmir ordered, her voice almost a growl. Maybe I had underestimated the effect an afternoon of teasing had on her. She seemed to still be quite wound-up, her intensity bringing a smile to my face.


    Looking into the taproom, I realised it was almost full making me reconsider. I wanted to tease Sigmir during dinner but I had no desire to make a spectacle of our intimacy. I enjoyed seeing her that way, not having others see her that way.


    ¡°We shall eat in our room. Something simple, if you would.¡± I told the innkeeper. He gave me a questioning glance but nodded.


    ¡°Certainly, I can do that,¡± he replied, calling our order into the back.


    It didn¡¯t take long and in the meantime, I amused myself by leaning against Sigmir, gently and covertly rubbing against the insides of her thigs, my hands wandering across her body. Sadly, before I could achieve any real results, we received a simple meal of bread, fruit and fish. Sigmir happily paid for it, not even bothering to ask for change and grabbed it in one hand, putting the other hand on me and dragging me along. Maybe I had achieved something after all.


    I let myself get dragged and she didn¡¯t even glance at Olivia when we passed her in the hallway, determined to get to our room as quickly as possible. When we got there, she had to let go of me, in order to open the door. Inside, I stepped away from her.


    ¡°Eat, you must be hungry, love,¡± I told her, before giving Lenore a gentle push to make her leave her Hallow, ¡°And ask Ylva to leave her Hallow. I believe she should be with Lenore.¡± I added, before focusing on the magical circle I had in mind.


    ¡°You keep the magic active, I believe you can manage. If nothing else, it¡¯ll give you something to focus on,¡± I told Lenore, as I was weaving my Darkness-Magic into a cocoon that should isolate the inside from the outside, hopefully even blocking the connection between our souls. When she understood my intent, I felt a trickle of her own magic, flowing in an unfocused state from her, allowing me to take hold and add it to the working. It wouldn¡¯t allow her to control the magic, merely supply it with power, but that would hopefully be enough.


    With the magic circle spun up, Lenore and Ylva hiding within, I looked at Sigmir, who looked at me with hunger in her eyes, even after quickly devouring the food.


    ¡°Now, love, where were we?¡± I asked, slowly walking towards her sitting form, letting my cloak drop from my shoulders.


    Tonight would be a good night.

 Chapter 569

    When I woke up, forced from a sated slumber by Lenore incessantly cawing into my mind, I was greeted by an image of destruction. I was lying atop Sigmir, who was resting on the remains of the bed, the mattress mostly torn, with the stuffing beaten out of it, the frame utterly broken, as super-human muscles had strained against it in the throes of ecstasy. The air around us was saturated with a delicious scent, one that made me want to dive right back in and wake Sigmir up, but a certain soreness made me realise that it might be a bad idea. Especially given that we would have to head to the ship soon, or we would miss our passage.


    ¡°Hey, wake up,¡± I gently shook Sigmir¡¯s shoulder, getting a mumbled moan in response. Her state brought a proud smile to my face, knowing that I had caused her to be in that state.


    ¡°Mhm,¡± she mumbled, affectionately rubbing against me, but not quite waking up.


    ¡°You might want to hurry,¡± Lenore warned me, her voice filled with an amused mockery. ¡°I did my best to keep the noise and effects of your nightly battle contained, but I¡¯m fairly sure that there was some leakage,¡± she added, the amusement bleeding through quite strongly. Along the amusement came memories from her point of view, showing how Sigmir and I had been going at it. Loudly. Not only loud, in the sense of noise but in the memories she had shared, I could detect a different sort of emanation.


    Looking at the situation in her memories, I tried to correlate it to my own actions during the night and realised what I had been up to. At one point, I had decided to use the Eisblumen as ropes, lightly tying Sigmir up and testing just how much I could do to her if I combined the bond between us with light, manual stimulation while she was unable to move.


    The results had been rather glorious but the memory showed me that both of us had utterly lost control over our aura. Normally, we restrained the aura of a powerful being, one who had crossed the second divide as a matter of course, it had become ingrained in us to the point that we barely needed to speak about it. Just like a trained singer wouldn¡¯t use the full power of their voice during a normal conversation, we only used the fullness of our existence when necessary.


    Or, apparently, in the moments of highest ecstasy, when all internal restraint was lost and only the bindings I had wrought around Sigmir held her down, her muscles straining against them, and breaking some furniture in the process.


    ¡°Ooops?¡± I sent to Lenore, grateful for her effort to keep most of the effects contained while wondering just how much chaos the radiation had caused. Just thinking of it made me shake my head, the idea that we now had to consider radiation-shielding, just to enjoy ourselves, as if we were some sort of nuclear weapons. Utterly ridiculous, though there was a sort of phallic symbology to missiles. Not that any had been involved in our night.


    Looking around once more, I realised just how devastating our encounter had been. All the furniture was either broken or stained and with a bit of help from Lenore, I was able to smell the air, thick with all sorts of alluring scents. None of which I planned to share with anyone.


    ¡°Help me?¡± I asked Lenore, and she projected pure mirth, but hopped over, landing on my shoulder. Together, we wove together a spell of Death, Darkness and Wind, while Sigmir quickly packed our few belongings, before stepping close. The spell took effect around us, power howling in the air, devouring anything that had ever been alive, even scouring away the top layer of any wooden surface. When my gaze focused on the remains of the bed, I felt overflow activating, my power swelling, as the frame and mattress were engulfed in darkness, the shadows devouring it and leaving nothing but dust in their wake. Dust, that was soon carried away by the wind, to never be seen again.


    Sigmir and I were visibly exhausted, both moving in a rather slow and tender fashion, as we made our way down into the common room. Curiously, while almost anyone noticed and furtively glanced at us, none were bold enough to take an open interest. When I accidentally stepped into the path of a serving maid, she briefly met my eye and instantly turned a deep shade of crimson, even the tips of her slightly pointed ears blushing red.


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    At the reception, Sigmir calmly paid for the room, not telling the innkeeper about the devastation we had caused. Luckily, he wasn¡¯t too interested, there was a blush on his face that gave me an idea why and as we talked with him, the others walked up, looking a little embarrassed themselves but also incredibly amused.


    ¡°It sounded like you enjoyed yourselves last night,¡± Olivia chuckled, as we walked out of the inn, onto the streets of Torop.


    ¡°Why, yes, we most certainly did.¡± I brazenly replied, doing my best to act utterly unconcerned. In the privacy of my mind, where only Lenore could catch the notion, I felt a little embarrassed just how carried away we had gotten but when remembering the sensations, that embarrassment faded quickly.


    Olivia only shook her head, amusement oozing off her, as she couldn¡¯t help teasing us. Curiously, Adra didn¡¯t join in for once, instead, she exchanged some furtive, but very telling, glances with Rai, rousing my curiosity.


    I considered asking but while I was incredibly curious, there were some things I didn¡¯t really want to know. Occasionally seeing Adra, Rai and even Olivia naked was one thing, mostly unavoidable if you travelled in the conditions we moved in, but it was a whole different question to consider Adra and Rai getting intimate. Just imagining how it would look made me shudder, quickly extinguishing any curiosity I might have.


    On our way to the Naga Enclave, we noticed a few guards, heading straight for the inn. It was only after we had passed them that Lenore made noises of amusement within my mind, making me realise that we had channelled a rather massive spell of Death, Darkness and Ice in the middle of the city, barely caring to keep the effects contained or concealed. In a city that was covered in a massive magical formation.


    ¡°Oops?¡± I mentally stuck my tongue out, much to Lenore¡¯s amusement. It made me wonder what the guards made of the room, magically scoured clean, both on a physical and a magical level. There simply shouldn¡¯t be anything left behind, but a quickly fading aura of magic. Realising that it would linger for a bit, I pulled the concealing cloak of twilight closer around myself, carefully sticking in Sigmir¡¯s shadow, a little worried that I might have messed up.


    By the time we reached the Naga enclave, the others had noticed that I was acting weird, but hadn¡¯t done more than frown, ask if I was alright and remain vigilant when I tried assuring them.


    The Naga guards around the enclave gave us a quick nod as we walked past them, into their territory. Compared to our previous visit, there was a lot more going on now, with dozens of Naga slithering around, in and out of buildings, carrying weird crates, looking more like the shell of some sea creature, from one building to the other.


    There might be a method to the madness, but I wasn¡¯t able to see a pattern that made sense to my mind. Limited perspective might be to blame, or some sort of internal logic, but given that I was quickly developing a headache as I tried to keep an eye on all the Naga and look for it, I focused on Sigmir and let them do their work.


    ¡°Wavespeaker,¡± Adra gave a greeting to Wavespeaker Kelartis, who seemed to be the one directing and controlling the many Naga around us. ¡°Where do we go from here?¡± she asked when the Wavespeaker focused on her.


    ¡°Take up position over there,¡± she pointed towards the shore, where a simple quay extended into the harbour. At the end of it, gently moving with the waves, was the weirdest ship I had ever seen, not that that meant much. Following the design and aesthetics I had seen from the Naga, it looked more like a large sea creature, with a shell-like exterior, forming a fully enclosed space. There were no sails, no deck or anything, just that one, large shell, floating on the waves.


    ¡°Certainly, we will try to stay out of your way.¡± Adra nodded, ¡°Please sent someone once we can board.¡± she added, getting a nod in response.


    ¡°The Wavecaller of the ship will do so. Now, I have work to do.¡± she waved us off, before adding, ¡°May the waves shield you and the tides guide you,¡± she wished us, before focusing on something else.


    Despite the slightly abrupt treatment, none of us was offended, it was quite obvious just how busy she was. Doing as we were told, we moved to the side, waiting near the quay as we watched the spectacle.


    Soon, a Naga from the ship approached, bidding us to board their strange vessel.


    The next step on our journey was about to begin.

 Chapter 570

    Boarding the weird vessel was a process of organised chaos. We simply had to follow after the Naga who came to guide us, our small group moving through the hustle and bustle like a fish through the sea, unconcerned with the activity.


    From up-close, the ship was even more alien and impressive than from afar, especially on a magical level. The whole structure was infused with Astral Power, on a level that easily rivalled the Mages¡¯ Guild we had visited the day before, only instead of a hodgepodge of power, thrown together by many spellcasters over the years, without a unified theme or plan, the magic holding the ship together was a work of beauty. It was a dense tapestry of interwoven magic, acting and moving in sync, the individual flows all part of a greater whole. With Lenore¡¯s sight, I even noticed some distinctly different flows, different elements, working in concert in a way I had yet to see.


    If not for Sigmir walking behind me, I might have stopped and stared, mesmerized by the incredible magical engineering around us, but her hand on my shoulder kept me moving, even as most of my mind started to zone out, immersed in my observations.


    ¡°Greetings, I am Wavecaller Vajira,¡± the voice of a Naga jolted me out of my thoughts and I focused on our present situation. The Naga who had come to get us was standing behind a proud-looking female Naga, similar in attire and demeanour to Wavespeaker Kelartis. There was a palpable air of power around her, a sense of command and confidence, the projection that the space we were in was hers. Unless I completely missed the mark, this being was the leader of the ship. That Naga had just addressed Adra and her words reminded me that Kelartis had told us the Wavecaller would send someone for us.


    ¡°Greetings, Wavecaller,¡± Adra returned the greeting, before introducing the rest of us. After introductions, we were subjected to a brief, if slightly intimidating, study, as the Wavecaller¡¯s eyes seemed to bore through us. I wasn¡¯t certain if there was a skill involved, but I didn¡¯t feel the usage of one, leaving me a little disturbed. Once the Wavecaller seemed to be satisfied, she nodded to one of the other Naga.


    ¡°That is one of my assistants, Tideseeker Relani,¡± the addressed Naga stepped forward, giving us a polite nod, ¡°She¡¯ll be your point of contact and she speaks with my voice,¡± she announced, getting nods of acceptance from us.


    ¡°That being said, I hope you will have a calm and pleasant journey,¡± she gave us a nod, before turning and, after receiving our thanks and farewell, slithering out of the room she had greeted us in, most of her entourage following behind. The Tideseeker remained with us and gave us her own introduction. I thought her voice sounded a lot less secure and quite a bit younger than the Wavecaller had, but their snake-like features made judging body language and facial expression nigh impossible.


    ¡°Now, there are a few rules passengers need to obey, for the safety of the ship. These are non-negotiable and if you cannot oblige, you will be asked to get off the ship immediately.¡± the Tideseeker warned us, sounding polite but determined. Thinking about the things I had heard about sea travel on Mundus, I could understand her stance, if there was a good chance to encounter deadly sea monsters if you weren¡¯t cautious, I¡¯d want to have some clear and hard rules in place, too.


    As we intently listened, the Naga slowly and carefully went over the rules, warning us what we had to be cautious of and even giving us a couple of tips, on how other land-dwellers had dealt with the sensation of sea travel in the past. Apparently, the enclosed Naga vessels had a habit of making people seasick, and without a horizon to balance your mind against, it got really bad, really quick.


    But the main point of the talk was to make sure we knew what not to do. Things like loud sounds, powerful, magical emanations, anything that had a chance to attract attention towards the ship was to be avoided at all cost. Unless specifically ordered by the Wavecaller or one of her deputies, doing so would result in a one-way trip into the ocean, without the benefit of any sort of floatation aid. If you wanted to play with the sea monsters, they were happy to facilitate the trip and let you do just that - As long as you didn¡¯t drag them along with you.


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    Suitably warned, and after enduring a couple of jokes and teasing looks regarding noise from the others, we were shown to the passengers¡¯ quarters, a long and narrow hallway, lined with simple sleeping nooks. There were almost no creature comforts, only the bunks and simple sanitation facilities at each end of the hallway. Looking around, I realised just how boring the journey would be. There were no windows to look out, not that there would be a lot to see, no entertainment but what we brought and the limits placed upon us meant we could only train in the most limited fashion.


    With the realisation came the question, did I want to stay with Sigmir, simply to spend time with her, or did I want to log out, so I could get some entertainment and stimulus. In the end, it would most likely be a mix of both, something I should see as a blessing.


    ¡°This will be your home for the next week.¡± Tideseeker Relani told us in her sibilant accent, before gesturing to the door we had just entered through. ¡°If you will follow me, I will guide you to the mess, where you can have food outside the designated times.¡± she motioned for us to join her.


    As we walked, she further explained the journey to us, especially the shift system they used and when we were asked to remain in our quarters, so we weren¡¯t underfoot during shift change. There was little we could do but shrug and accept it, and soon, we had been guided through the public areas of the ship. My earlier judgement seemed to be confirmed, this would be a boring journey unless something went horribly wrong. In that case, it would be a boring journey with a sudden, incredibly deadly, ending.


    Soon after we returned to our quarters, a few more travellers trickled in from their own guided tours, most of them looking both apprehensive and excited. They were a mixed bag in age, appearance and race, a couple of dwarves, a few halflings, and even a pair of valkyries. The curious thing was, they moved as four obvious groups, not formed by race. My guess was that they were groups of adventurers, looking for greener pastures, an assumption I thought justified due to their pretty uniform state of physical fitness and a faint sensation of power I felt from them.


    The odd group out was one made entirely of humans, with clearly defined roles within their group. Some of them were guards, with a pair being the ones they were guarding. I idly wondered what their story was but decided that the cautious look those guards were giving the other groups didn¡¯t invite socialisation.


    The different groups split up without much ado, each claiming a part of the room and taking up the beds there, with very little conversation. The passenger quarters were easily large enough to allow everyone their space, as limited as it was, and soon, a faint, magical emanation tingled my nose, right before a magically projected voice reached my ears.


    ¡°All hands, prepare for departure.¡± the voice, which I recognised as Wavecaller Vajira¡¯s, ordered and there was a faint feeling of excitement running through the ship, as I sat down on Sigmir¡¯s bunk, not willing to climb up into the one I would be using.


    Next to me, Sigmir grabbed my hand, squeezing it with almost painful strength and I realised that she was shivering.


    ¡°Are you alright, love?¡± I quietly whispered, moving to put my other arm around her, while still holding her hand.


    She gave me a nod, ¡°I will be,¡± she tried to assure me, but the look in her eyes spoke of something far different.


    Instead of trying to figure out what was scaring her, I simply held her close, as the ship beneath us started to move with a subtle jolt. From now on, our fate was entirely in the hands of the Naga crew.


    That realisation gave me my own shiver of discomfort and I realised what scared my beloved so much: We were no longer masters of our own fate.


    Pushing down my anxiety, I focused on the warm body in my arms, trying to soothe the woman in my arms, who suddenly looked so very vulnerable.

 Chapter 571

    ¡°Ultimately, using two opposing types of Astral Power allowed me to make them resonate, the two extreme points increasing the flux in a loop until an extreme peak is reached,¡± Mal explained, while I tried to put the concepts she explained into a mental model. Outside of Mundus, that was near impossible but I wanted to try and the capsule space was the next best thing.


    Regardless, I could only shake my head in amazement at what she had managed. The images shared in the highlight reel were incredibly impressive, more so now that I had a bit of an explanation of how much power had been invested. Creating a massive effect with equivalent power expenditure was to be expected and the higher the efficiency, the greater the leverage, the more impressive the magical accomplishment.


    What she had done with her magical explosives was something I would be hard-pressed to emulate, needing days to prepare and likely a whole bunch of human resources to sacrifice, despite having forty levels, the crossing of the second Divide and Lenore¡¯s presence on her.


    We had been discussing her accomplishment for the last hour, sitting on the terrace of my mountain temple. If there was one thing the capsule space was good at, it was facilitating meetings. Despite neither of us knowing the other in the real world, despite the distance between us on Mundus, we could sit together in a space of the host¡¯s choice, with whatever resources and refreshments we liked. Even wearing whatever body, clothes and accoutrements we desired.


    Looking at the sheet of ice I had used as a whiteboard to put together her methodology, I could only shake my head.


    ¡°I can see how it might fit together, now that it¡¯s laid out this way,¡± I admitted, looking at the beaming Mal, ¡°But kudos for putting it together in the first place and, most of all, for actually making it work. If I was wearing a hat, I¡¯d tip it for you,¡± I added, a grin on my face.


    ¡°It was just an expansion on the experiments we had done prior,¡± she shrugged, looking embarrassed and smug at the same time, ¡°The insights and materials you shared regarding Ice and Cold, allowed me to form one side of the resonance. My Gunpowder, with a few recent advances, was good enough to form the other side, representing Fire. Forming the necessary crystal patterns to begin the resonance was the most difficult, those had to be incredibly precise, or the energy would simply have been lost. No loop, no accumulation, no resonance, only a pile of shattered crystals.¡±


    ¡°But it worked. And while you got shattered crystals at the end, you also got a shattered mountain, a broken army and, most likely, a whole bunch of EXP.¡± I challenged her with a raised eyebrow, the earlier smugness now back in full force.


    ¡°Oh, I certainly got EXP for it. Apparently, the system recognised Gilo and me as independent actors outside the Prince¡¯s army, giving us the glut of EXP from the whole ordeal. Getting twenty levels at a time was an incredible rush.¡± Others might have been disturbed by the grin on her face, especially considering that the event she was grinning about had been the destruction of a small army, the killing of hundreds of sapients, but I could only marvel at the accomplishment.


    ¡°I have experienced it at a lower level, nothing like what you managed there,¡± I acknowledged, getting a raised eyebrow in return.


    ¡°A den of Snowbolds, killing dozens of creatures, all either at or above your own level gives a lot of EXP.¡± I briefly explained, getting a nod of understanding in response. ¡°But enough of that. Why don¡¯t you tell me about ¡®your Highness¡¯?¡± I asked, curious about the halfling who had hired them.


    ¡°So you heard that?¡± she looked a little amused, ¡°You could have warned us.¡± the chiding tone in her voice was quite gentle, making it obvious she wasn¡¯t really serious.


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    ¡°Anyway, turns out that he¡¯s the heir to their Principality, but that there are different factions, both in their nobility and even in his family, all with their own agenda and all interested in either putting their own candidate on the throne or making sure that the one rising to the throne is indebted or dependant on them,¡± she explained, shaking her head, the earlier amusement now replaced with disgust.


    ¡°I thought we¡¯d get access to some nice quests, maybe open up different factions on a higher level instead of having to slowly work our way into their good graces, so we¡¯d get to the good stuff earlier, you know?¡± she asked, a bit of frustration in her voice.


    ¡°Well, we got the attention of a couple of factions, but not quite in the way I wanted to. People whispering promises of power, a couple even insinuated that Gilo might make a good consort for the Prince,¡± she complained, the frustration mixing with disgust. ¡°After the Battle of the Broken Valley, things got only worse. I talked to Whisper a bit and she suggested that the impact of my actions had been reaching further than anyone thought.¡±


    ¡°I can see that,¡± I frowned, considering the possible scenarios, while a little wary about the enigmatic Whisper weighing in. Sure, it was far from her power base in northern Daiea, and just because of that, it called for additional vigilance. ¡°The faction broken at the valley, it was a major one, wasn¡¯t it? A serious contender for that throne you are fighting over?¡± when she nodded in reply, I continued, ¡°And it was utterly crushed, forcing the other factions to either submit or rally together, to stand a chance. While also giving opponents of your Prince a cause, namely the lopsided massacre of the Broken Valley.¡± I shook my head, not envying her position. In some ways, it was a good one but at the same time, it was incredibly precarious.


    ¡°There are already people complaining about the number of deaths there, calling it a slaughter and claiming that the Prince is a merciless monster. Some even mentioned my name as the architect of the battle,¡± she added, filling in a bit more of the picture I was getting.


    ¡°Better be ready to get out of there, just in case you¡¯re being made scapegoat,¡± I warned her and to my surprise, she was only chuckling at the warning.


    ¡°Whisper told me the same thing,¡± she smiled sadly, ¡°Gilo and I are ready to leave at any time and have set up a few surprises, just in case. We should be fine,¡± she assured me, before shaking her head once more.


    ¡°But enough of that, what are you up to?¡± she changed the topic, her expression forcibly cheerful.


    ¡°Sailing, and let me be honest, it is boring, with capital B,¡± now it was my turn to complain, which I did with relish. If I could get more voices to complain about the sea-travel system, it might be changed and getting stuck in a small room, staring at the unchanging walls would be a thing of the past. After some twenty minutes of venting my frustrations, Mal was thoroughly amused at my description, while making some emphatic noises at the situation.


    ¡°But enough about unchanging walls,¡± I groused, letting the topic go, ¡°Did you keep up with Jakyl¡¯s situation?¡±


    ¡°Only a little, things he posted on the forum or shown on his stream. Not like he¡¯d actively talk to me any longer, I think he likes me even less than you,¡± she shrugged, clearly not too bothered by the ire of her former companion.


    ¡°The strange curse that mysteriously struck him,¡± she gave me an amused look at that, ¡°ultimately killed him. Simple exhaustion did him in, slowly but surely, until the exhaustion crossed the line and he keeled over. Once he was back, he could sleep again, though the curse still lingers, making quite a few natives very reluctant when talking to him. Massive negative initial rep and all that.¡± I nodded at that, not even trying to hide the satisfaction of getting my revenge.


    ¡°Oh, and once a month, on nights with a dark moon, he still gets the nightmares, as if to remind him of what he did, or something like that.¡± My smile got only wider, it fit just too beautiful. In the long term, it wouldn¡¯t be a tremendous punishment that made it impossible for him to stay in the game, merely a perpetual annoyance that forced him to put in more effort or adapt to the situation and only work with those who didn¡¯t care about his oathbreaker-status. But even if he did, monthly reminders of his actions would continue to haunt him.


    ¡°That¡¯s just too bad, really,¡± I insincerely told her, ¡°Anyway, do you want to try some more liquid Moonlight?¡± I asked, offering her the carafe, filled with the closest equivalent I had managed to create in the capsule space. It wasn¡¯t quite the real deal, but close enough.


    She accepted with a nod, and soon, we were back to gossiping about another topic.

 Chapter 572

    If there was one thing I learned during our first few days at sea, it was that I needed to find a way to avoid further sea journeys. While I could have simply opted out, logging out for the few days the week-long journey would take, there was a major problem with that. Or rather, there were two.


    The first problem was that Lenore was incredibly susceptive to getting seasick. Maybe it was due to her avian nature, that she simply wasn¡¯t built to endure these kinds of movement, the sort of isolation from our surroundings or something along those lines, but her sense of balance was utterly out of whack, leading to her moving around as if completely drunk and when she tried to fly around a little within the enclosed space, the results were¡­


    She made me promise to never mention that attempt, ever.


    The second, even bigger, problem was that Sigmir had an incredible dislike for sea travel. It wasn¡¯t that she was getting seasick, though there was a bit of that, too, but that her mentality was that of a protector. She hated the idea that the safety of our group wasn¡¯t in her hands, that she had to rely on others to let us reach our destination. She needed to know that she was protecting me, and the easiest way to give her that sensation was to calmly remain within her harm, letting her shield me from the world around us.


    From what I could see, simply holding me in her arms reduced her anxiety by orders of magnitude, to the point that I tried to keep my times logged out as short as possible, even more so than I normally did.


    And that led me to the question, what to do? While there was always the option of teasing Sigmir, enjoying the feelings her body could invoke in me and seeing just what sensations I could evoke in hers, we were in an open area, with incredibly limited privacy. Even without the uncertainty of just how far the emanations of our activities would be perceivable, potentially breaking the rule that nothing you did was allowed to be perceived outside the vessel, I wasn¡¯t about to let a bunch of people watch the two of us going at it.


    Due to the rule that nothing we did was allowed to be perceivable outside the ship, I also couldn¡¯t delve freely into the Astral River, simply because I had no idea if my activities would disturb and disrupt the incredibly complicated enchantments of the vessel we were in. I had taken a bit of time to study them and realised that some of them were similar in nature to my Twilight Cloak, designed to avoid attention and facilitate hiding in plain sight.


    Their enchantment had some additional properties, likely because it was made for water, not light and air, but the essence was the same. However, it certainly meant that magical experimentation was incredibly limited and had to be kept on the smallest scale, preferably internal.


    The idea of internal experimentation joined together with the idea to soothe and comfort Sigmir, giving rise to a project I had considered for some time. A careful and subtle exploration of the connection between us. What was it, how deep could we see into the other, what could we actually do with it. All those interesting and deeply intimate questions that we could figure out together.


    Given the intimate nature of the exploration, we had used some curtains to completely hide the space on her bed from the outside, giving us a relatively quiet and dark space. Out of everyone¡¯s eyes, I straddled Sigmir¡¯s lap, my head resting against her chest, while her chin rested on my head, closely embracing each other. as our breath started to slowly synchronize. With my head against her chest, I could hear Sigmir¡¯s heartbeat, the slow and steady thrum, and felt my own heart slow down as if to match hers. At the same time, her heart slowly sped up and soon, they beat together.


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    Letting my mind sink into the faint connection between us, trying to reach her, I felt a sensation of welcome, of comfort and intimacy. Her scent filled my nose and through my nose, my mind. She was right there and through our connection, she was within me and I, within her.


    Behind my closed eyes, images started to appear, elusive and ethereal, as if the world was filled with a strange mist, or maybe akin to heat rising in the desert. There was a flurry of ice and snow, drifting around a massive mountain, imposing as it reached into the sky, the sheer rocks and cliffs a faint blue colour, akin to freshly frozen ice. Just like Sigmir¡¯s skin. As my mind sunk deeper into our connection, the images started to fade and shift, as I was no longer seeing them within my mind but experiencing them with my body.


    Where before, I could only see the mountain, now, I could feel myself wrap around it, the wind carrying me as my claws settled down. Within my mind, I could feel myself resting against Sigmir, just like I rested against her in the world around us. Only, in my mind, there was nothing but the two of us.


    Beneath me, the mountain slowly shifted, glacially slow but inexorable, the movement already an established fact, reality only had to catch up to the certainty. In that shift, a cave opened up for me, the mountain giving me rest and shelter, a space for only me. Only us, a space where there was nothing but I, surrounded and protected by the mountain around me.


    As I rested in my cave, my head supported by my claws, I could hear the howling of a wolf in the distance, echoed by the call of a raven. Our pack was out there, hunting near the mountain and the perpetual storm that marked my domain. The storm that would eternally surround the mountain, for only here, I could be myself, could be who I would always be.


    My eyes started to close, my mind starting to get drowsy from the pure comfort, the knowledge that I would always be safe here, but before I could fall asleep and lose myself in the shelter my mountain had provided for me, the calls of the Raven became more and more urgent, drawing me back from my mountain.


    With my mind slowly separating, I started to become aware of more than the reality within my mind, the world around Sigmir and me intruding into our realm. Lenore was urgently calling over our connection, panic filling her voice, asking me to respond.


    ¡°I can hear you,¡± I replied, my mind feeling strangely floaty as if I had yet to fully settle back within my body.


    ¡°Finally,¡± Lenore let out a great sigh of relief, ¡°The two of you have been sitting there for an entire day.¡± she chided me and with her worlds, sensations started to intrude.


    From sitting still for an entire day, my whole body felt stiff and rusty, the muscles protesting against the slightest movement. Beneath me, Sigmir started to move, a groan escaping her. Trying to push myself up, my legs started to cramp after remaining in an open, half-kneeling position for a far-too-long time and while the position of hugging Sigmir was one my arms were accustomed to, staying in it for that long wasn¡¯t too pleasant.


    Unable to keep my balance, I fell forward, fully planting against Sigmir and for once, she wasn¡¯t able to remain sitting, her muscles in a similar, cramping and stiff, state as mine. With the addition of my weight, slight as it may be, I pushed her over the edge and she fell back, her head thudding against the wall behind us, causing her to let out a hiss of pain.


    While I was unable to rise, I managed to roll to the side, still half-lying on Sigmir, but I wasn¡¯t pressing against her upper body. She must have noticed my movement, as she followed me to the side and we came to rest lying on her bed, still hugging but in a different position than earlier.


    ¡°That was something,¡± she muttered, only audible thanks to the close distance between us.


    ¡°It was,¡± I agreed, whispering just as she did, while carefully trying to move my legs, the stiffness making it painful and awkward. And yet, that pain was so insignificant, in comparison to the indescribable feeling of comfort and completeness I had experienced earlier.


    Instead of trying to get up, to move my stiff limbs and maybe even find some food, I only placed my head back against Sigmir¡¯s chest and closed my eyes, a faint echo of the earlier feelings returning.


    With Sigmir¡¯s arms again wrapped around me, I quickly fell asleep, knowing that my mountain was sheltering me.

 Chapter 573

    After a week at sea, I was thoroughly annoyed with Pantheon Entertainment. Before, I had seen their commitment and efforts to make Road to Purgatory the incredibly immersive game that it was as something commendable, the time spent on the road an often-times interesting and rewarding experience. The sensation that the Road was the goal, that behind every tree could be something hidden, every valley inviting exploration and a nice brook sending an invitation to linger.


    But while travelling by ship, there were no interesting experiences, no secrets behind trees, no explore-worthy valley and certainly no brooks to linger at. We mostly sat around in our quarters, talking with the other travellers and slowly going crazy. Or maybe crazier.


    Without repeated experiments to explore the connection between Sigmir and me, I might have done something else to sate my craving for excitement and interesting experiences, something likely ill-advised. Granted, without her, I¡¯d probably simply have logged out and not bothered entering the capsule for a few days, only returning to disembark, but that was a whole different consideration.


    The report I wrote about the affair was a rather scathing one, decrying that people wouldn¡¯t want to pay for the experience to stare at a wall all day, one that lacked even paint to watch dry. Curiously, there even was a reply, something I hadn¡¯t expected.


    What¡¯s more, it read as if it was written by a human, though that didn¡¯t mean much when thinking of the incredibly realistic citizens of Mundus and the capable capsule assistant. If a company had such incredible capabilities, wouldn¡¯t it be an obvious step to employ them to smooth out their own workflow? Heck, just thinking that they used the technology they had to make a game made me shake my head a little, as it didn¡¯t seem to be an efficient use of the investment. But given that I was one of those who greatly profited from their investment, I wasn¡¯t about to complain. Only wonder.


    Sadly, their response was both helpful and incredibly useless at the same time. It was wonderful to read that it was possible to create long-distance magical portals and to be encouraged to do so if I wanted to cut down travel times. But at the same time, adding yet another bullet point to my ever-expanding list of research topics felt like a kick to the shin.


    After getting their permission, I added my report, alongside their response, to the topic that collected complaints about certain in-game mechanics, alongside suggested alleviations that players could develop on their own.


    Going to that threat made me realise that the company did a rather smart thing there. If players were the ones who actively changed the world of Mundus, it would make them feel more connected and immersed within it, making it less likely that those players would destroy that world, and the sandbox we all wanted to play in. I even went down one of the link-rabbit holes and found a thread of various spellcasters, all pooling their ideas, some of it backed by a level of in-game-achievement, to create such teleportation circles. After a bit of hesitation, I added a couple of ideas based on my own experience with shadow stepping and Astral Projection, the idea to link those two sounding reasonable in my mind. I never went out and explained how exactly the effects I described could be achieved, or what limitations there were, but it might help someone, without exposing more of my abilities than I was comfortable with.


    But the journey wasn¡¯t just experimenting with Sigmir and complaining on the forum about sea travel, I occasionally joined the far-more sociable members of my group, which were all of them, in talking to the other travellers.


    Curiously, the group of humans was utterly uninterested in conversation, treating everyone, even their fellow human Olivia, with completely guarded, yet polite, decorum. They talked amongst themselves, but never in anything but a whisper, giving cautious glances to us all while huddling in their corner. A part of me was curious about them, the idea to dig up their secrets somewhat tempting but at the same time, I wasn¡¯t sure I wanted to wade into their mess, not if we had to remain in closed quarters.


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    On the other hand, the dwarves, halflings and the two valkyries were quite happy to talk about their experiences and plans, though I mostly remained a passive listener. As I had expected, they were all adventurers and were heading across the Mare Tempest to seek different adventures. While I felt there was something subtly off about their statements, I was never able to put my finger to it. Another curiosity, but one that I didn¡¯t even consider trying to solve, as it would require me to work and get along with people. Or magically rip the answers from their head. I wasn¡¯t sure which would be easier.


    Either way, I wasn¡¯t willing to make either effort, so they could keep their secrets.


    With such thoughts in mind, I felt overjoyed when I felt the now somewhat familiar magical emanation that precluded the captain¡¯s announcements. There had only been a few, the one when leaving the harbour, a single warning about rough weather and a few general orders to the crew, to quickly organise manpower. In a way, the journey itself had been about as interesting as the loading screens that occurred when changing areas in the games of old, only that this loading screen lasted a week. A thrice-damned week.


    ¡°We are on pace to dock in Nobost in thirty minutes,¡± the Wavecaller¡¯s voice announced, bringing a happy smile to my face. During our meals, I had been able to catch that we were on schedule, but it was a great thing to hear it confirmed.


    The other passengers around us let out quiet sighs of relief, I don¡¯t think anyone had actually enjoyed the journey, and people started to pack their stuff up.


    As so often, time slowed to a crawl when having to wait for something, to the point I checked if I had accidentally activated bullet-time. I hadn¡¯t and finally, after what felt like a small eternity, a shudder ran through the boat and Tideseeker Relani came to get us, so we could depart. She had been the primary contact between us and the crew, a liaison of sorts, making sure that we were in an okay state and would get ourselves, or their ship, into trouble.


    ¡°Follow me, you can disembark while we plan the unloading process,¡± she told us and all passengers followed after her, all too happy to get off the ship. The humans were even more vigilant than they had been all journey, their stances reminding me a little of a porcupine, putting up all their quills and guarding against anything that might come too close. Their odd behaviour made my own hairs stand on end, and I felt myself get tense, ready to fight if anything untoward happened.


    ¡°Welcome to Nobost,¡± a different Naga greeted us when we got off the ship. She exchanged a quick, hissed greeting with the Tideseeker, before focusing back on us.


    ¡°The local authorities seek to have a record of all people who enter their city. You will have to go through their checkpoint or make your way out of our enclave on your own.¡± she paused for a moment as if waiting if anyone wanted to slink off, before glancing at Tideseeker Relani.


    ¡°I hope you all had a pleasant journey, I know it can be a little hard on passengers. May your journey follow the currents, and the tides be in your favour,¡± Relani gave her greeting, alongside the slightly strange half-bow of the Naga.


    ¡°Thank you, Tideseeker. The journey has been as pleasant as one could hope for, considering the circumstances. May the tides be in your favour,¡± Adra returned the greeting, before moving to follow the other Naga. We all gave a brief greeting to the Tideseeker who had taken care of us and followed along.


    As we walked, I looked around to sate my curiosity. It was a different continent, and yet, the Naga architecture looked just like the buildings in their enclave in Torop. They were so similar in style, I wondered if they had been grown from the same mould and considering their crustacean appearance, I didn¡¯t know how unlikely that thought was.


    In the meantime, Adra began to inquire from the local Naga, asking about connections to move further south. It turned out, the Naga did very little trade along the coast, something about regulations and taxes making it incredibly difficult to compete with the land- or river-bound trade. It sounded like a major annoyance for them, but there was little they could do about it, outside of abandoning the entire continent.


    Closing my eyes for a moment, I let out a deep sigh. Yet another major step on my journey had been taken and what a journey it had been. And how much further it would be, from here, down the coast, across even more water and through the elven forest.


    All, to fulfil a quest that promised questionable rewards, all for the purpose of getting an achievement grande enough to be able to remain with Sigmir.


    If that was even possible, and I wasn¡¯t just deluding myself.


    As sudden as that thought appeared in my mind, I quashed it. There had to be a way, and if there wasn¡¯t, I would have to make one. How, I didn¡¯t know just yet, but I would find one.


    I had to.

 Chapter 574

    Compared to the one-sided security around the Naga enclave in Torop, there actually were human guards around the enclave in Nobost, there even was a low fence in the middle of the road. It looked a little weird, the fence giving the impression of a mere symbol, after all a fence less than a metre high wouldn¡¯t stop anyone but the truly infirm or infants. A glimpse through Lenore told that, while the fence itself had some magical properties, there was nothing in the air above, nothing that hinted at the sort of warding I had seen around Torop at least. Just from looking around, I felt confident in my ability to simply leave the enclave without any trouble and, ironically, that confidence only served to make me nervous.


    If there had been some sort of detectable, magical defence, I could have considered its power and aspects to determine the threat level, but now, where I couldn¡¯t detect anything, I wondered if I failed to detect because there was nothing, or if I didn¡¯t detect anything because their defences were so far beyond me that I didn¡¯t even notice them. If the former, weird, but no problem, if the latter, I may have a serious problem.


    Either way, the uncertainty meant I wasn¡¯t going to do anything that might cause some unknown magical security to trigger. Due to that, Lenore left my Hallow and after a word from me, Ylva did the same, padding along with the rest of us.


    The checkpoint was a simple affair, an opening in the fence with a small guard post next to it, housing a pair of guards and a single official.


    ¡°Good Afternoon, welcome to Nobost. If you would present your papers, please?¡± the official asked Adra, a polite smile on his face.


    ¡°Greetings,¡± she gave him a polite nod, before continuing, ¡°What type of papers are you referring to?¡± she asked, a little confused. The smile of the official didn¡¯t change a single bit, unfailingly polite and as natural as plastic. Likely just as biodegradable.


    ¡°You need either an identification card issued by one of the great Guilds or you need proof of citizenship of the Empire,¡± he explained, getting a nod of understanding from Adra.


    ¡°Certainly, here is my Adventuerers¡¯ Guild card.¡± she pulled the card we had received so long ago, in the frozen north, out, handing it over. The official briefly scanned it, and I felt a subtle surge of power, focused on the card, before shifting to Adra.


    ¡°Seems to be in order. You are good to go but please remember, if you want to engage in commerce outside of your Guild, you need to have official permission,¡± he warned Adra and while Adra gave a nod of acceptance, I made a mental note to investigate the laws governing those kinds of things. It was quite obvious that Aletoma was a lot more organised and united, compared to the lawless and wild Aretia we had been travelling through before. Just the existence of the Empire meant that there was a level of organisation above the city-states and tribes we had been dealing with before, and that annoying one party might haunt us, even hundreds of kilometres away. Knowing their laws and avoiding notice would be crucial.


    As I was pondering that, Rai had been processed and it was Olivia who stood at the front. When she presented her Guild card, the official glanced at it and a brief frown crossed his face.


    ¡°Did you lose your citizenship papers? If so, I can direct you to the relevant authorities to have your status confirmed,¡± he asked, sincere sounding concern in his voice.


    ¡°No, thank you. I will visit my hometown soon, and there, all things will be sorted out,¡± she replied, a gentle smile on her face. There was something in her voice that I couldn¡¯t quite put a finger on, but I wasn¡¯t about to ask about it, not right in front of the guards and officials.


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    ¡°Certainly. Welcome home,¡± the smile on his face morphed just a little before the earlier, artificial smile returned after he scanned her card.


    With Olivia sorted out, it was my turn. After the polite greeting, I presented my own Guild card, and it was scanned, just like the ones from the others had. Then, it was my turn to receive the magical attention and I felt shivers run up and down my spine, resisting the reflex to shred his attention and make sure none of the secrets I held got detected.


    I could feel that he was far below me, in terms of power, likely not even level forty but that he was quite capable with his skills, possibly some variant of the general Observe-skill I knew. Regardless, I wasn¡¯t about to strike against an official doing his job, I even let his magic scour me, despite the unpleasant, intrusive sensation. Instead, I pulled my concealment in, trying to focus it on the aspects of me I wanted to keep hidden. Things like the Ruthless trait, my Mortal Hubris and the few Blood Magic related traits and titles, those would get me into deep trouble.


    ¡°There¡¯s something¡­¡± he muttered, focusing fully on me and I felt his power surge. Closing my eyes, I activated Overflow and carefully controlled the Cloak of Twilight to keep him from penetrating my concealment. After a few seconds of increased pressure, he shook his head and the sensation faded. ¡°Eh, just don¡¯t make trouble,¡± he advised me, obviously noticing that there was something off, but now willing to get into things. He gave Lenore a brief glance, but only let out a sigh, waving us through.


    Sigmir stepped up after me and he studied her closely, making her squirm. I felt my face twist into a scowl, angry that he was intruding on my love¡¯s privacy in that manner but kept my cool. No matter how good it would feel to seal him in eternal darkness, the satisfaction wasn¡¯t worth the trouble. Luckily, he didn¡¯t give her as much scrutiny as he had given me, quickly waving her through and looking at Ylva.


    For a moment, I wondered if she would be asked for her papers, too, but he only looked at Sigmir again.


    ¡°Please, take note that you are responsible for your wolf,¡± he warned her, treating Ylva like a normal animal. I wasn¡¯t able to stop the mirthless chuckle from escaping, the irony too much to bear. While I wasn¡¯t certain about Ylva¡¯s attributes, I had a good idea about Lenore¡¯s and could say with certainty that, by measure of the system, she was smarter than the human before us. While Ylva was more focused on physical attributes, I was confident that she could hold her own with most humans, especially those who were weak enough to serve as ordinary guards. But it was their town, if they wanted to treat Spirit beasts that way, I wasn¡¯t able to do anything about it, not without starting massive trouble.


    Not worth it.


    While I briefly considered if large-scale annihilation-magic was the right answer to their lacking decorum, Adra asked the guards for directions to the Adventuers¡¯ Guild, before setting off, with the rest of us in tow.


    As we walked, I began to look at the old, somewhat ramshackle buildings around us. There was no consistent style or material used and I quickly realised why. If the docks in Torop had been the city¡¯s slum, the docks in Nobost were even worse. The locals used whatever materials they could find, making repairs whenever possible. When I breathed in a little too deep, the disgusting smell of old fish, rot and unwashed human entered my nose. It was bad enough to overwhelm me and I started to gag, almost vomiting into the streets. I briefly considered stepping up to Sigmir and burying my nose in her clothes in an attempt to lock the smell with her comforting scent but common sense prevailed. Instead, I conjured up a small mug, taking a quick drink before letting the Astral Power escape as mist from my mouth.


    ¡°We should head out of town as fast as possible,¡± I suggested, trying to breathe through my freshly cleansed mouth. Sadly, that only meant I tasted the air instead, making me grimace.


    ¡°Why don¡¯t we visit the Adventurers¡¯ Guild, we should get the lay of the land at the very least,¡± Adra suggested, though the expression on her face told me that she was just as interested in getting out of town as I was.


    ¡°I suppose,¡± I nodded, a frown on my face as a sigh escaped my lips. Luckily, the Guild wasn¡¯t far from the docks, the better areas of the town had been built further from the water and the danger it represented. The Guild, while prestigious in its own right, was an institution for all levels of society and so it was located where everyone could comfortably reach it, and likely where the prices were somewhat reasonable.


    Following behind Adra, I walked towards the surprisingly small and simple building, curious what we¡¯d find.

 Chapter 575

    If the outside of the Adventurers¡¯ Guild was unimpressive, the inside was even more so. It took all the features of a drab and dull government building in the real world, dialled them up to eleven and took away anything that might be shiny, sparkly or remotely interesting, leaving behind nothing but stale rooms painted eggshell-white. The Guild offices I had seen in the past had been practical but never managed to evoke such a boring image in my mind.


    There was a clerk behind the counter, looking up as we entered. She was a human, something I had expected, and the only person in the building. Even during the early afternoon, that was a bit of a surprise, given that the office was supposed to serve the entire city.


    ¡°Good afternoon, welcome to the Adventurers¡¯ Guild,¡± the clerk greeted us, as we stepped up, ¡°How can I help you?¡±


    There were small sparks of interest in her eyes, and a bit of enthusiasm in her voice, though, thanks to the open book on the counter,  it was quite obvious that she had been utterly bored, sitting in the empty building and waiting for customers.


    ¡°Good afternoon,¡± Adra returned the greeting, taking the lead as always, ¡°We just got off the ship from Torop, in Aretia and are seeking to travel further south. Are there any quests that could be completed on the path there?¡±


    The smile on the clerk¡¯s face turned a little weird as she replied, ¡°Give me a moment to check, but I don¡¯t think so,¡± she shrugged, taking out a stack of notes from beneath the counter, quickly checking them as she leafed through them, her expression falling a little as she did.


    ¡°How far are you seeking to travel?¡± she asked, briefly looking up from her notes. ¡°And what roughly, is the scale of power you seek to work at?¡±


    ¡°We seek to travel far,¡± Adra replied, ¡°Our plan is to travel all the way down to Phalladri, with a stop-over in Hatterion. Regarding power, high double, low triple digits with a full, balanced group.¡±


    I could see the clerk visibly swallow at our levels, looking up with a bit of awe in her eyes. When none of us added anything to Adra¡¯s words, she looked back down at her notes, a frown forming on her face.


    ¡°Are you planning to make a detour out west or travel on or near the coast?¡± she asked, after looking at a few more pages.


    ¡°Straight down the coast, I believe we are somewhat pressed for time,¡± At Adra¡¯s reply, the clerk¡¯s frown deepened even further, before she finally looked back up.


    ¡°I¡¯m afraid there are no quests for your level range,¡± the clerk shook her head, an apologetic smile on her face. ¡°There are few quests to begin with, the guards make sure that civil order never deteriorates to the point that private individuals need to step up. Anything on the scale you are seeking crops up, the nobles are obliged to take care of it, swiftly and efficiently. They got their own groups of enforcers out there, organised into Guilds, as they like to call them.¡± there was a trace of disdain when she mentioned the Guilds set up by nobles, making it quite obvious that she considered them to be a cheap imitation of the Adventuers¡¯ Guild.


    ¡°Well, that is annoying,¡± Adra grumbled, ¡°Anything else we should know about when it comes to travelling south?¡±


    ¡°You said you came from Aretia, yes?¡± the clerk asked, getting a nod in reply, ¡°Please be aware, if you seek to sell anything, you need to have the proper documents in place, otherwise, you will be seen as a criminal. You can harvest the necessary proof of kill if it is for an officially licensed quest or by order of the responsible noble. Outside of those, hunting and killing the local wildlife is poaching. There are exceptions for self-defence but if you head into the woods, trying to come across wildlife that might attack you, so you can defend yourself, you¡¯ll get in trouble. The nobles and their Guilds don¡¯t like people trying to play their rules.¡± she patiently explained, my face falling a little at her words. That sounded like a proper pain in the behind, a rather massive one at that. Sadly, it also sounded as if there was little to be done about it, little but quickly travelling southwards, until we could leave the confines of their Empire.


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    ¡°Do you have a local map? So we have an idea where best to head?¡± Adra asked, hoping for help as none of us knew the lay of the land. While Olivia had been in the region before, it had been decades ago and a lot of things had changed or she had forgotten them.


    ¡°Certainly,¡± the clerk nodded, ¡°Take a look.¡± she pulled out a few large parchments from one of the shelves behind her desk, letting Adra take a look. I also stepped up, prodding Lenore so she shared my eyes, so she could compare what she saw on the map to what she saw from above.


    The map quality itself wasn¡¯t too great, more artwork than a nicely scaled map but it would give us a good idea about directions and a few landmarks, even without going too deeply into distances.


    ¡°Thank you for your help,¡± I told the clerk, stepping back.


    Next to me, Adra nodded in agreement, ¡°You have been a great help, thank you. Have a nice day.¡± she added-


    ¡°Have a nice day and journey,¡± the clerk wished us, as we were walking towards the door, leaving the clerk to her reading.


    ¡°Well, that wasn¡¯t too promising.¡± I sighed, as we were walking down the street. I wasn¡¯t quite certain where, Adra was still leading the way but I thought it wasn¡¯t towards the gates, at least not towards the nearest gates.


    ¡°If you are looking for adventure in the wilds, the Empire isn¡¯t quite the place to go,¡± Olivia told me, reminding me of a few stories she had told me in the past. It was one of the more advanced civilisations on Mundus, at least by her reckoning. From what I could tell, it was certainly the most authoritarian, while the city-states of Aretia were the least authoritarian but also the least civilised, as there wasn¡¯t any real, overarching civilisation.


    On the other hand, Daiea was composed of a wide variety of smaller societies, ranging in scale from small tribes with a few hundred members to massive countries composed of multiple cities, all held together by a larger, divinely inspired framework. How that framework functioned, I had little idea, but it kept the different groups all moving in roughly the same direction or at least kept internal friction down.


    ¡°So, what do the people here do to level?¡± I quietly asked, not convinced that everyone here was happy to sit around, be resigned to their lot in life and sing kumbayah.


    ¡°I believe there was a saying in the Ancient Imperium, something about humans being their own, biggest predators.¡± Olivia admitted with a shrug, ¡°There are some who refuse to conform to society, either leaving it altogether and retreating into the mountains and valleys or while remaining within, but taking what they need, thieves, rogues and outlaws.¡±


    ¡°So, bandits?¡± I asked, remembering the few encounters we had with such folk in Aretia. Those had been few and far between, mostly done in desperation or with a great deal of caution and vigilance, always ready to flee or hide if the situation turned against them.


    ¡°Sure, those too.¡± Olivia nodded and now it was my turn to shrug.


    ¡°We¡¯ll see,¡± I sighed, before focusing on Adra, ¡°Where are we going, anyway?¡± I asked as we were moving deeper into the city.


    ¡°Shopping, obviously,¡± she replied in a voice that almost made me see her rolling her eyes, through the back of her head. ¡°Didn¡¯t you pay attention? We can¡¯t hunt to supplement our rations, or we¡¯ll be seen as poachers,¡± she reminded me and I let out an annoyed sigh. There had to be something to do around here, either quests or battles or anything.


    As we walked, I carefully kept my eyes open, scanning for people who didn¡¯t quite fit in, who looked out of place. Sadly, there wouldn¡¯t be any golden exclamation marks to guide me, but maybe, I would be able to pick up a quest or two, or at least a lead to get any.


    Otherwise, the next few weeks of travel would truly be boring, without even the threat of monsters.

 Chapter 576

    During our shopping spree, I became aware of two things. The first was, that I needed to get back into the mindset of concealing myself, of hiding in the shadows as much as possible. I was attracting attention and the looks I was getting were a mix of fearful caution, arrogant disdain and covetous, greedy lust, depending on the person. None of the attention was pleasant, so I tightly wrapped the Cloak of Twilight around myself and took shelter in the shadow of my Mountain.


    The other thing I realised was that the prices here were insanely high. It might have been due to Nobost being a large trade-city, with an important seaport, so the demand for preserved rations was constantly high, or it might have been a simple feature of the Human Empire, either way, the prices would do a number on our savings, especially if we were unwilling to break the law and happily poach for our supplies. Without a source of income, it would take a few weeks, maybe two months, to burn up all the money we had accumulated over a year of travel and a considerable number of killed and harvested beasts and completed quests.


    Shopping took far longer than I would normally have liked, thanks to Adra and Olivia hunting for the best prices, trying to save some money. They were successful in that endeavour, but where I¡¯d have taken an hour and paid the price for my haste, they took five and saved the coin. Coin that was immediately re-invested into our stay at a nearby inn, because by the time they were done, leaving town would have been a little foolish.


    None of us minded camping in the wilds, but if there was an inn available, a good rest under a sturdy roof was a nice thing. Especially a sturdy roof that didn¡¯t move and in rooms we didn¡¯t have to share with two dozen others.


    The inn they had found for us was between the docks and the craftsman district, close enough to the water to have that slightly unpleasant smell of rot and fish in the air, but not so close that the noise would keep us up at night. The benefit of the location was that the inn was reasonably cheap, as no wealthy merchant, let alone any nobles, would lower themselves to sleep in such a place.


    When we first entered, a hush settled over the taproom. If a lone woman walking into the place was a little unusual, a group of four women, with a single, young male amongst them was even more so. And while none of us were objectively beautiful, we all had a palpable aura of power, even suppressed as it were, we radiated a low sense of danger and intimidation. Unless someone was well and truly drunk, for which it was too early in the day, it was obvious that annoying us would come with dire and immediate consequences.


    The innkeeper might even have some skill to detect incoming trouble, as he immediately approached us, carefully cleaning his hands on his apron. Given his rather chubby body, I had a feeling the food in this place should be quite good, especially when I took a moment to sniff the air coming from the kitchen. While there was the scent of the unwashed masses lingering in the air, the delicious scents from it couldn¡¯t be covered up, which said a lot for their strength.


    ¡°Fair evening, good people,¡± He almost bowed, a bead of sweat forming on his brow. ¡°How can I be of service?¡± he asked, his voice utterly submissive, to the point that I raised an eyebrow at Sigmir, who only returned a shrug.


    ¡°We are looking for food and a place to rest. Multiple rooms, if at all possible.¡± Adra explained, looking around the room, ¡°Peace and quiet would be wonderful, we¡¯ve just got off the ship.¡± she added, letting out a sigh, knowing that those would likely be hard to come by.


    ¡°I see, yes,¡± he nodded, walking quickly to the counter from which he had moved to greet us. There, he pulled out a ledger, checking a couple of pages before looking up.


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    ¡°Well, we¡¯ve got the rooms, how many do you like? I¡¯ve got three singles open, a double and a triple. In addition, if you are truly after peace and quiet, I could offer you a space in the attic, we normally use it when the other rooms are full, it¡¯s furthest from everything and should be as quiet as you¡¯ll find in this neighbourhood.¡± he explained and I could almost see Adra¡¯s face light up at the mention of an attic-room. When she glanced over her shoulder to look at Sigmir and me, I could confirm the happily amused grin on her face.


    ¡°That attic room sounds perfect, far enough away that they won¡¯t disturb us,¡± she muttered, just loud enough for me to hear. And for the innkeeper, who looked just a little confused. ¡°I¡¯m sure they won¡¯t destroy yet another room¡­¡± she added, her voice still pitched to carry a little further than necessary and the innkeeper¡¯s confusion turned into a deep, fearful frown.


    ¡°Destroy a room?!¡± he squeaked, only for Adra¡¯s face to turn into an almost comically wide smile.


    ¡°Oh, I¡¯m certain they¡¯ll manage to restrain themselves,¡± she assured him, though her grin didn¡¯t exactly help.


    ¡°Restraining was the problem if you really want to know,¡± I told her, forcibly suppressing the blush that wanted to light up my cheeks. If nothing else, Blood Magic gave me a modicum of control over the blood within my body and keeping blood from showing my emotional state was quite possible. Next to me, Sigmir blushed brightly, unable to prevent her reaction, causing the innkeeper¡¯s gaze to flicker from her to me and back. Moments later, he shook his head, clearly deciding that whatever was going on, it was none of his business, at least as long as there was no destruction involved.


    ¡°If you don¡¯t mind, I¡¯d like to have a deposit of five gold coins, if you are already talking like this,¡± he told Adra, causing her to chuckle.


    ¡°Oh, I don¡¯t mind,¡± she laughed, clearly amused that Sigmir and I had to fork a deposit over. Given the look on Sigmir¡¯s face, a curious look of embarrassment, desire and curiosity, I wasn¡¯t certain I actually minded. Looking at her, I gave her a happy grin and stepped a little closer, not minding the grumble from Adra.


    ¡°Anyway, they¡¯ll take your attic,¡± she nodded towards Sigmir and me, muttering quietly under her breath, ¡°I hope it¡¯s either far enough or soundproofed well,¡± before looking back at the innkeeper and continuing, ¡°In addition, we¡¯ll take a double- and a singles-room.¡±


    ¡°Oh, and some food,¡± she added, as an afterthought.


    The innkeeper looked like he wasn¡¯t certain he actually wanted the business we were bringing but after letting out a deep sigh, he nodded. ¡°Yeah, I can do that.¡±


    ¡°Jenn, come over here,¡± he called out and after a couple of moments, a helper came over.


    ¡°Yes, boss?¡± she asked, looking a little harried.


    ¡°Take these customers upstairs, they¡¯ve got a double, a single and the attic,¡± he told her and I noticed her eyes widen a little in confusion.


    ¡°The attic?¡± she shook her head, before shrugging, ¡°Well, sure.¡±


    ¡°Follow me, if you would?¡± she addressed us, walking through the common room. A couple of people gave us looks, but none of them did more than that, the moment I tried to meet their gaze, their food or ale suddenly became a lot more interesting.


    We were first led to the actual rooms and I took a brief look inside, noting the simple but clean furniture.


    ¡°If you like, you can freshen up a little and there¡¯s a washing room over there, the boss sprung for a perpetual water source. You know how those work?¡± she asked, after gesturing to a door at the end of the corridor.


    ¡°I¡¯m sure we can figure it out, yes,¡± Adra assured her, getting a nod in return.


    ¡°Great,¡± she looked at Sigmir and me, ¡°Now, you wanted the attic?¡±


    ¡°Yes, please lead the way;¡± I told her and she guided us to a narrow and hidden staircase. Following her up, we were led to a small but nice clean room, with a straw mattress on the ground. A quick glance around told me it would do quite nicely, especially when I considered that there were thick walls between us and everyone else.


    ¡°That¡¯ll do nicely,¡± I assured her, already putting my arms around Sigmir, who had followed me up. ¡°That¡¯ll do nicely indeed.¡±

 Chapter 577

    While Sigmir and I were settling in, Lenore pushed out of her Hallow, intent on getting some time in the air. After over a week of being stuck within her Hallow or dealing with the enclosed space, she needed some wind beneath her wings.


    ¡°You can relax,¡± Sigmir told me, realising that a part of me wanted to be with Lenore, at least in spirit. To see this strange new civilisation from the air and observe their culture. Giving her a grateful smile, I relaxed against the wall next to the window, letting myself zone out as my mind synchronized with Lenore. By now, our bond was deep enough to allow me to share her senses from hundreds of metres away, maybe even more than a kilometre, and even cast spells through her, if needed.


    In this case, I had no interest in actually doing anything but observing but knowing that I could help my partner if needed was quite the comforting thought.


    From above, the separation between economic, and likely social, classes was incredibly apparent. Around the docks, the buildings were mostly small and somewhat ramshackle and the further away from the sea you got, the better the buildings, until there was something curious. My first instinct was to wonder whether the distance between Lenore and me was getting too large and if some sort of limitation distorting the information I was receiving, but when she turned her head and focused on other parts and my sight returned to normal, I realised that it wasn¡¯t the case.


    ¡°They are warded?¡± I asked, trying to make out the magic behind the distortion we were seeing.


    ¡°Likely, yes,¡± Lenore agreed, keeping her distance from the magically protected buildings, simply flying parallel to them. Given that there were hundreds of crows, dozens of ravens and countless seagulls in the air around town, neither of us was worried that another raven was drawing attention unless she was close enough for people to make out details or observe. No matter how good your senses, unless there was reason to focus on something you would simply ignore it.


    For a good half hour, Lenore was flying above the warded areas, studying the magic concealing the individual buildings, slowly getting a better idea of what was going on. Compared to the ward around Torop, the warding was on a much smaller size but when it came to power, the individual wards were quite good. Without moving into the area, it would be difficult to make out details but that, in turn, would cause us to be exposed. From a distance, the concealment was good enough to prevent Lenore from making out details. If I was there, I might have been able to circumvent the concealment but Lenore simply lacked the affinity.


    ¡°Love, it¡¯s time for dinner,¡± Sigmir¡¯s voice intruded into my quiet observation, causing me to retreat from her mind and focus on my own body, while Lenore turned to fly across the walls and into the countryside.


    ¡°Thanks, dear,¡± I blinked my eyes open, taking her hand and pulling myself up. Instead of simply helping me stand, she pulled me further, taking me into her arms.


    ¡°You know, if we are careful, nobody will hear us up here¡­¡± she quietly whispered in my ears, her voice thick with desire. When I was about to respond, she gently bit the sensitive tips of my ears, causing a shiver to run down my spine and an involuntary moan escaped my throat. Before I could retaliate, she stepped away, leaving me just a little frustrated as I watched her walk away. As the saying went, I hated for her to leave, but I loved to see her go.


    During dinner, I remained quiet, occasionally chatting with Sigmir or Lenore, once she got back into range, but mostly, I was listening to the various conversations going on around us. What I could hear confirmed my earlier suspicion, that there was a strict social order, based on wealth. But given that wealth was very much a hereditary good, the wealth was concentrated in the nobility, with only a few merchants able to accumulate money, which, in turn, allowed them to rise into the ranks of lower nobles.


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    Similarly, it seemed that there were certain obligations in keeping a noble title, but from the one story I could overhear, I was unable to ascertain the specifics.


    Overall, the Empire sounded like a rather unpleasant place for me, strictly bound in their customs and their civilisation, with very little room for those who wanted to move according to their own cognisance. It was, in so many ways, just like the real world, where you had to move according to the dictates of society or face the consequences. Exactly what I wanted to escape from when entertaining myself in Mundus.


    After dinner, Sigmir and I retreated to our room and luckily, Lenore was back and willing to help us out a little. With her help and the remote location, Sigmir and I were able to¡­ let go.


    Come morning, both of us were wonderfully relaxed and a little sore, the room filled with exotic scents but undamaged - Mostly.


    There was a bit of smirking when we checked out, especially after we had one of the employees check that the attic was still intact, which turned bright red, but we got our money back. As we were walking towards the gates, we got further away from the water and the buildings around us got more prosperous. I had seen that trend from above, but on the ground, it was even more obvious.


    Along the road, we could see the wealthy quarter, where Lenore and I had seen the wards from above. There were active guards keeping watch at the gate there and I noticed further magical wardings around the area. A part of me wanted to stay nearby and take a jab at those protections but decided against it in favour of keeping moving. Not enough incentive, with far too large a possible downside.


    Not that the guards could really have made trouble for us, there was simply a vast difference in power involved. The nobles might see themselves as lords of their fate, but looking at the magical formations at a glance, there was no way they could actually stop Lenore and me. Not if we simply wanted to damage them, especially after some recent considerations on Blood Magic. The Nobles would be wise to extend a certain courtesy to powerful beings, or those beings might decide a little social shuffling was in order. I certainly would do some shuffling, if I were to be forced to go to extremes.


    When we got to the gates, there was some more unpleasantness. Where before, few guards had given those leaving their settlements more than a cursory glance, the guards in Nobost inspected each and everyone who left. That resulted in a long queue, the wait slowly grating on my nerves.


    ¡°Make way!¡± a shout came from behind and when I glanced over my shoulder, a group of five humans, equipped in a mixture of metal and leather armour strode past the queue, looking as if they considered it their due right. The only uniform piece of equipment was a cloak, embroidered with an insignia I hadn¡¯t seen before, a sword surrounded by a wreath of laurels. Unable to contain my curiosity, I used Observe, doing my best to keep the activated concealed and hidden with Darkness-Magic.


    The one I had targeted, a solid-looking bruiser wearing heavy armour, moving in the second position of their party, twitched a little, his face twisting into a frown but other than looking around for a few moments, he didn¡¯t react.


    The result of my Observe was truly disappointing. While I couldn¡¯t measure the whole party by a single member, seeing a level fifty-five weakling, who hadn¡¯t even crossed the first divide by the feel of it, swagger around as if he was the greatest was just¡­ disappointing.


    Rolling my eyes, I watched their party move past, keeping my opinion on their strength and arrogance to myself, though I made a mental note of the insignia on their cloaks. A white sword on blue ground, surrounded by a wreath of laurels, it made for some quite fetching imagery. Likely something along the lines of victory in battle but I had really no idea. What I could see was that their cloaks all had a similar, weirdly sterile, magic on them.


    ¡°I¡¯ve seen that one before,¡± Lenore warned me, and I raised a mental eyebrow. In response to my query, she shared images of her flight last night, showing that very banner flying in the wind above a large mansion.


    ¡°I guess we know whom that group belongs to,¡± I muttered, shaking my head as I watched those people easily bypass the queue. Arrogance, but no true power to back it up, only the fetid stench of rotten social dynamics.

 Chapter 578

    Leaving Nobost was a breath of fresh air, both figuratively and literally. There were no more complications in line, just a couple of annoying guards who wanted to take an intimate look at us as we passed them, but the moment Sigmir and I stopped controlling our innate auras, the interest evaporated like dew in the sun.


    With every step we took, the scent of the city, the stink of badly washed humans, of perfume mixed with fish guts, of slowly rotting algae, swamp and shore, all faded into the distance. Sadly, that didn¡¯t mean the air was automatically fresh and pristine, not with the farmland around the city giving off a different kind of odour. Scents of livestock and fertiliser came to my nose, less pungent than the malodour of the town, but almost as unpleasant. Still, almost was not equal, making me wonder just how the people of Nobost managed to live in a place that smelled worse than literal bullshit.


    A different, unfortunate realisation came as we walked along the road and I realised that there was something missing, the subtle influx of power of the ancient roads. There was a bit of magic on the road, that I couldn¡¯t miss, but it was far less potent than what we had been accustomed to. What¡¯s worse, when I began to study the magic of these roads, it was tightly bound into the road, reinforcing the stone and making sure it didn¡¯t wear away, it did nothing for the people moving along it, at least not for us. There were some tendrils reaching out, but they didn¡¯t latch onto us, making it hard to guess their purpose.


    As we moved down the road, along the river that eventually would lead into the bay forming the natural harbour of Nobost, we had to pass multiple wagons, slowly trundling down the road and could see other travellers, some of them on horseback, others on foot like us. It wasn¡¯t truly crowded but compared to the long, deserted roads in large parts of Aretia, it was an incredible change.


    For the first morning, there was never a time when we couldn¡¯t see or hear other people, the constant sensation making me increasingly nervous. Intellectually, I knew the people were simply other travellers, moving on the same road we were but hearing them, seeing them again and again, it raised the hairs on my neck. Each loud noise made me reach for my weapons, each time we saw a group after rounding a corner or moving across a hill or out of a copse of trees, I tried to decide if we were about to run into an ambush.


    By the time we stopped for lunch, I was a frazzled mess. My crown had been sitting on my head for most of the morning, and I hadn¡¯t truly let myself relax or fall into the comfortable thinking zone I normally used to pass the time, pondering some more or less meaningful idea regarding my magic. Even Lenore had been affected, getting drawn into my vigilance and infected with my paranoia, ready to lash out at a moment¡¯s notice.


    While starting to place the third warding formation around the small, shaded area near the river we had chosen for lunch, Sigmir pulled me into her arms, forcing me to stop. For a moment, I was about to struggle, fearing that she had been mentally compromised, struck by some sort of charm-magic or an enchantment, but the solid, stoic strength I could feel over our bond stopped me. My mountain hadn¡¯t fallen, and would never fall.


    ¡°Love, calm down,¡± she whispered in my ear, still holding me in her arms as the familiar scents of comfort filled my nose, replacing the scents that had surrounded me all day. Letting out a shaky breath, I clutched at her body as I realised just how tense I had been. In my chest, my heart was racing as if I had been running for the whole day, even if I hadn¡¯t done anything but walk, without any real exertion.


    Closing my eyes, I focused on my breathing, consciously drawing in one slow breath after the other, trying to narrow my senses to the point that I experienced nothing but Sigmir. The more my mind was filled with her presence, the calmer I became. My mountain gave me shelter, and within her arms, I didn¡¯t need to worry.


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    Finally, after a few minutes, I blinked my eyes back open, leaning back a bit and looking up at her.


    ¡°Thanks, dear,¡± I told her, pushing myself to my toes and giving her a kiss.


    ¡°Are you alright?¡± she asked, not letting go of me.


    For a moment, I considered the question, before nodding.


    ¡°For now,¡± I added, not certain just how long it would last. Her presence kept me calm, but we couldn¡¯t really walk if she had to hold me in her arms. Well, we could, but getting carried the whole time wasn¡¯t quite how I imagined our continued journey.


    ¡°Take as much time as you need,¡± she gently stroked my back, as I laid my head against her chest again. There had to be a way for me to keep calm, without completely abandoning the instincts and vigilance that had served me so well the last year.


    ¡°Retreat into your hallow for now,¡± Lenore spoke in my mind, ¡°I¡¯ll stay on Sigmir¡¯s shoulder, that way, you can remain calm.¡±


    Her idea was a possible solution and while a part of me rebelled against the idea of hiding and making her face any potential danger, I was aware that it was the easiest solution to implement. While having to retreat due to my own weakness, my own lack of mental fortitude and control irked me, it would allow us to continue our journey after lunch.


    ¡°I will,¡± I promised Lenore, before looking up at Sigmir, ¡°I¡¯ll rest in my Hallow for a while, she¡¯ll remain on your shoulder. We can talk later, once we make camp for the day,¡± I told her, getting a nod of acceptance. She didn¡¯t look too happy but could see that it was the easiest solution.


    After I had calmed down somewhat and was sitting on Sigmir¡¯s lap, cradled in her arms, we could proceed to lunch. With my earlier freak-out, the others were looking at me with a bit of concern, especially Rai, but none of them said anything, even if m head snapped up on occasion, staring in the direction of some distant noise my ears had picked up.


    For once, those elven ears were a bit of a pain, especially as I started to subconsciously focus on them, trying to take in as much information as possible. Each breaking branch, each squirrel searching for nuts, even the leaves getting blown off the trees by the wind, they all became indications of malicious actors within the forest, making me tense up, until Sigmir gave me a squeeze, making me relax once more.


    Those cycles of tension carried on throughout lunch and once it was over, I gave Sigmir a grateful look and a quick peck to the cheek, before pushing myself into my Hallow, the familiar, perfectly calm surroundings allowing me to let go of the tension still within my body.


    ¡°Better,¡± Lenore muttered over our connection, and I could feel her relax as well, ¡°With how much tension you were radiating, it made me all aflutter,¡± she jokingly added, but I could hear the truth to it.


    With how close our connection had grown over the last year, if one of us was under the influence of intense feelings, the other would be so, too, unless we deliberately blocked things out, leaving the other to deal with their emotions alone. Doing so when Sigmir and I were intimately engaged had become par for the course, but in today¡¯s case, Lenore couldn¡¯t know which of my cautious twinges was paranoia and which a legitimate threat, drawing her into the same spiral I had been in.


    ¡°I¡¯m not sure how to deal with this,¡± I admitted, letting my body go slack as I relaxed one muscle after the other, ¡°Trying to blind myself and block my ears would make sure I wouldn¡¯t notice any outside influence, but really, that would only make me more paranoid, to say nothing about actual outside threats.¡±


    ¡°Maybe getting a bit away from the road,¡± Lenore suggested, making me frown. ¡°That way, there wouldn¡¯t be so many people around, and their sight and noise wouldn¡¯t automatically make you nervous.¡±


    As I hung in the comfortable darkness of my Hallow, I considered her idea. Idly, I kept myself linked to her senses, watching as she hopped onto Sigmir¡¯s shoulder and they started walking again.


    Lenore¡¯s idea had merit and while the road had some benefits but at our level, those were minor. Walking on a road or walking through the forest, it made little difference. Maybe I should bring it up to the others, even if a part of me was incredibly annoyed at the idea of avoiding my weakness instead of overcoming it.


    But it would be better than having to retreat into my Hallow and giving up entirely.

 Chapter 579

    After resting in my Hallow for the entire afternoon, I was reasonably calm and fully rested when we started to make camp in the evening. The others had found a small hill some distance from the river and the road next to it, giving us some privacy.


    ¡°Better now, love?¡± Sigmir quietly asked after I stepped out of my Hallow. The smile on my face might have been a little gloomy from my disappointment at my mental weakness but when I gave her a hug and kiss in addition to the smile, she accepted my assurance.


    Once we were separated, Olivia came over as well, looking a little concerned.


    ¡°You don¡¯t look as twitchy as you did around noon,¡± she observed, her eyes studying me.


    ¡°I¡¯m better now,¡± I assured her, before adding, ¡°On Aretia, if you meet a single traveller during the entire day, it¡¯s a remarkable event. Here, I¡¯d guess if you don¡¯t see one for ten minutes, you should prepare for an ambush.¡±


    She grimaced a little at my observation but shrugged shortly after.


    ¡°We are moving along one of the Empire¡¯s main trade routes, of course, there are a lot of people around,¡± she reminded me and I could only nod in agreement. ¡°And with enough people, you get others preying on them,¡± she added, looking a little disappointed in her fellow humans.


    ¡°Why work hard to achieve something, if you can simply stab someone else in the back and take it?¡± I rhetorically asked, only for her to shake her head.


    ¡°It¡¯s more complicated than that,¡± she sighed, before explaining, ¡°The Empire is stratified, as you may have noticed. For those born in the upper strata, the nobles and those with the favoured Bloodlines, their life follows an open, smooth road, trod by our forefathers since the first of our people set foot on these lands, looking for the Golden Fleece. As long as we don¡¯t stray from that road, our life is wonderful and we don¡¯t have to worry about those little things, ever.¡± her sad smile turned a little sardonic with her words and she gesticulated with the stump of her arm.


    ¡°But that is only for those born into power and privilege.¡± she sighed again, her smile fully fading. ¡°For the rest, some can learn the trade of their father, but the amount of tradespeople a city can support is limited. As is the land a farmer¡¯s son can inherit.¡± she shook her head again, looking into the distance, ¡°For those who can¡¯t inherit a position, they have to find one. Some can rely on their talents and join the Army or Clergy, but competition is fierce. If you want to be more than a simple soldier or wandering priest, you have to compete with some Nobles'' second and third sons, who have been trained their whole life. Good luck competing with them.¡±


    ¡°No, for many, simple labour, barely yielding enough coin to feed yourself, let alone a family, is all they can hope for.¡± she paused, looking at the forest around us, ¡°As long as they stay within the system, that is.¡±


    Her words made it obvious what the other option was. Leave the cities and towns, step outside the law, and try taking what you need from those who have it.


    ¡°You only talked about sons,¡± I frowned, not sure I wanted to know the details, ¡°What about the daughters?¡±I asked, my curiosity overcoming my apprehension.


    ¡°Again, it depends.¡± she shrugged, ¡°Amongst nobles, the firstborn generally inherit, regardless of sex. There is more than enough healing magic to make sure no nobles have to die in childbirth. Regardless, given that the Imperial Bloodline is inherited on the male side, until you reach Zeus, by way of Alcaeus, there is a certain preference for the male side, and there are times that an excellent match is found for the eldest daughter, giving her everything she would ever want,¡± she sneered, ¡°everything but her freedom, that is.¡±


    ¡°But that is neither here nor there.¡± she reigned her facial features in again, ¡°Amongst the common people, it depends as well, on their wealth and inborn talents. But again, given that males have a much better chance to proliferate their line, the preference is there. After all, it is easy for a wealthy male to father about as many children as he wishes, just look at our dear, Divine Forefather,¡± there was genuine anger in her voice, something I had rarely heard of her, ¡°and look at the tales of Divine Metis, struck down because a child born by her might be a future threat. If even the Gods can die in Childbirth, what chance does a mortal woman have?¡± she asked, looking up into the sky, a little forlorn.


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    Hearing her words, I could only glance over to Sigmir, remembering that she had told me about her mother, whom she had never met. Dying to give birth to her daughter, killed by the bloodline Sigmir had inherited so strongly. Sigmir might have noticed my gaze, looking over to Olivia and me, with a curious frown on her face. Giving her a minute shake of my head, I tried to signal that she needn¡¯t worry about me and could focus on her own exercises.


    Returning my gaze to Olivia, I had no idea how to reply to her words. I had always been too focused on my own life, too busy trying to make sense of a society I could only understand thanks to long hours of training, to consider bringing another life into the world. And that was without considering the mechanics of that process, that other being that would be involved.


    Letting out a sigh, I could only shake my head, ¡°I don¡¯t know what to say to that,¡± I admitted, making Olivia laugh a little, maybe despite herself.


    ¡°You are not of this world, there is no need for you to say anything,¡± she grinned, her earlier bad mood apparently lifted, ¡°The Gods brought you Travellers into this world, to learn and gain experience. For what you need to learn, I don¡¯t know but you shouldn¡¯t squander the opportunity. You should try to learn what you can, not only about magic but also about the lives of other beings, their cultures and practices,¡± she reminded me, slipping back into a teaching voice, her earlier gloominess gone. The impeccable switch made me realise just how adept Olivia was at controlling her facial expression and demeanour, making me wonder how much I actually knew about this woman, who had travelled with us for over two months. How often had she shown us a facade, hiding what she truly thought inside, how many of her stories had been lessons she tried to impart and how many had actually happened?


    I simply didn¡¯t know.


    ¡°What do you think there is to learn from a society that treats its people like this?¡± I asked, a touch of hostility in my voice.


    ¡°That there are times when necessity trumps everything,¡± she sagely reasoned, before glancing up at the sky, ¡°But that once the necessity has passed, traditions need to be adjusted and not kept in place to benefit those in power.¡±


    ¡°As they are wont to do,¡± I frowned, thinking about the various traditions and cultural norms I was familiar with. A lot of them had been founded on perfectly reasonable and necessary ideas of their time but the steady march of progress had changed what had been reasonable and necessary into something that could only be described as cruel and unreasonable.


    ¡°Though the question remains, how can those without power, force the ones in power to change the traditions they benefit from?¡± I rhetorically asked, knowing that there was no nice and easy answer. Or if there was, it would be one following the adage that there is always an easy solution to every human problem - neat, plausible and wrong.


    ¡°Slowly, gradually and carefully.¡± Olivia grinned, ¡°Trying to force such things is how people get burned and lose their touch,¡± she laughed, raising the stump of her hand.


    For a moment, I was flabbergasted, trying to come up with a reply. Her tone seemed to joke, but given that I had heard four different variations of the story of how she had lost her hand, all of them somewhat fantastical and with a lesson embedded in them, I wasn¡¯t sure she was serious. But I also couldn¡¯t assume she wasn¡¯t serious, because she may well be.


    While I might have looked the fool, wordlessly staring at her, I managed to keep myself from opening my mouth and removing any doubts she might have had. Instead, I simply nodded without elaborating what I was agreeing with and focused back on Sigmir, who was training nearby.


    The question of how to resolve social conflict and problems, either on Mundus or in the real world, was luckily one I didn¡¯t have to solve. If such problems tried to impact me on Mundus, I could simply act first and impact them right back. The consequences of my actions would, ultimately, be limited and if truly necessary, the ¡®Gods¡¯ could intervene. Outside of Mundus, no such luck, but there, social problems were luckily even further from my comfortable life. And while I recognised that way of thinking as a coward¡¯s way out, it allowed me to live, without driving myself further insane. It allowed me to focus on the things I was good at and if I focused back on the accounting business, I would be able to make a bit of change, in my own, little way. Or maybe I was deluding myself. There were times I felt I was good at that.

 Chapter 580

    Sometimes, less was more. Or rather, more was less.


    Since the others had decided to leave the roads and travel through the more difficult terrain of the forest, taking a longer path, our travel had sped up and we covered more ground. That paradoxical result came due to the lessened need for constant vigilance, the relaxed atmosphere letting us move faster. The forest with its cover allowed us to relax, our high intuition and perception allowing us to easily locate any potential enemy trying to hide, especially Adra¡¯s abilities shone in the forest, each tree and shrub whispering into her senses.


    While some beings could sneak up on Adra in the forest, Rai and I were trying to do so for training purposes occasionally, with mixed results, I doubted that any being of that power would be bored enough to stalk the forests, looking for a suitable target of opportunity. There were simply too few worthwhile targets.


    On the other hand, travelling by road meant that each and every travelling party might be a concealed group of mercenaries, ready to rob or strike someone, the well-travelled road a constant supply of victims and foes for them. The existence of EXP meant that ambushing a group that could pose a challenge and murder them swiftly was a ruthless but somewhat effective way to gain levels. If you could pull it off without getting brutally murdered right back in the process, that is.


    Anyway, travelling in the forest, we didn¡¯t have to bother with that. There were no dangerous beasts, just a few wolves that instantly showed their bellies when Ylvy or Sigmir growled at them and a few bears that took one look and decided that a little more hibernation was the right answer to their problems. The few two-legged beings wandering these forests, we mostly managed to avoid during the day and at night, they mostly didn¡¯t bother our camp.


    Well, until a week into our travels on Aletoma, when our evening suddenly turned a lot more interesting than the usual sitting around the campfire, telling stories, experimenting with magic or training amongst ourselves.


    ¡°There¡¯s something coming,¡± Adra remarked, looking up from the wooden figurine she had been working on, slowly forming the wood into the desired shape, using nothing but her magic. It was a subtle and slow process of tiny, gradual changes that left a seamless and pristine figurine and also helped her train Astral Power control. I could do something similar with Ice, but given that I could simply conjure more whenever I wanted, it was just a game for me, no practical exercise.


    Looking up, I followed her gaze, curious about what she had detected, only to come up empty. The others were also stirring from their activities, Sigmir and Rai putting down the wooden weapons they had been used for sparring, Olivia opening her eyes that had been closed in prayer, something she had been doing a lot since coming to Aletoma. Even more so than before, which said something for a devout priestess.


    Sadly, I was unable to detect what Adra had sensed, only the wind blowing through the surrounding forest. Looking back at her, I saw that she was already on her feet, slowly moving past our fire, her weapon in its spear form in hand.


    ¡°They¡¯ll be here, soon,¡± she warned, putting a hand on the ground, her eyes closing for a moment.


    ¡°Who?¡± I asked, moving next to her, making sure that my crown was on my head and the Blades of the Northern Wind were not stuck in their sheaths. The others joined us, their tools of battle ready and in hand.


    ¡°A group of four, running;¡± Adra replied after a moment, her face twisted into a frown. She closed her hands again, this time, I could feel a bit of power emanating from her and mentally followed along, focusing my senses. With the direction provided by her, I was able to catch the distant footsteps, now also able to focus on them. Improved senses and their incredible range were wonderful, but without a way to focus on what you needed to sense, it was difficult to actually utilise those senses. Maybe with additional training, but that only came with prolonged exposure and experience.


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    ¡°They are being chased,¡± Adra now added, still looking in the same direction.


    ¡°What are we doing about it?¡± I asked, noticing that the fleeing group was moving right towards the small gap between a pair of hills we were using for shelter. Maybe due to coincidence, maybe by design, either way, they were coming towards us, at a remarkably good speed.


    ¡°If they simply pass by, we should let them,¡± I decided, not really wanting to bother with some group of people. We had no idea what was going on, it might be bandits, fleeing from authorities, it might be victims, fleeing from bandits, it might be something else entirely.


    ¡°Let¡¯s douse the fire, take a bit of cover and be ready for anything,¡± Sigmir reasonably suggested, following a course that would allow us to deal with any hostility on their part, if they had even noticed us.


    ¡°Fair,¡± I agreed, briefly focusing on the fire and snuffing the heat out. It was a wonderful feeling, being able to simply erase a fire with nothing but my mind, one that would likely never grow old. To treat the hated flames with nothing but the contempt they deserved.


    With our light source gone, we swiftly moved into the shrubs and trees, hiding in the darkness of the forest. As so often, I choose a lofty perch, easily hopping into the tree beneath which Sigmir took cover, the two of us instinctually sticking together so we could support each other. Ylva was sitting in the shrug next to Sigmir, using the sparse evergreen leaves to hide her silvery pelt, her aura completely withdrawn Lenore, on the other hand, was in her Hallow, not wanting to deal with the troubles of combat at night while providing me additional power.


    Knowing where to focus, I was able to track the two groups without input from Adra, though I couldn¡¯t resolve what I was hearing into a clear picture. What I knew was that the pursuers were composed of multiple groups, having split up to cover more ground and were trying to encircle the fleeing group, slowly gaining ground.


    In the five minutes, they took to cross the distance between the position we had heard them first and our camp, the pursuers had made quite a bit of progress. Just as I thought the fleeing group would manage to get away, one of the flanking groups put on a burst of speed and moved past the fleeing group and onto one of the hills we were camping between. Unless they had something different in mind, they were trying to use the very location we were camping at as their ambush position.


    It was quite amusing to me when the chasing group pulled up and smelled the lingering scent of our campfire, suddenly freezing and trying to ascertain what was going on. Sadly for them, we all were quite adept at hiding in the forest and in the brief moments they had to get into position, they didn¡¯t manage to find us. The darkness of the forest was no obstacle for me and I could watch them move into position, taking cover in the trees on the other side of the clearing, giving them excellent lines of fire. Judging by the uniform equipment, all wearing similar, dark-green cloaks and bows of the same make, these were part of some organised group, not simple bandits. The authorities, if you will.


    Thanks to their inability, we had a front-row seat when the fleeing group broke into the clearing, a mottled group of humans, dressed in a mix of leather and sturdy canvas clothes, carrying simple weapons and smelling of sweat, blood and battle. I could see the wounds on their bodies, speaking of a recent fight and while their weapons looked simple, the blood on them told me that they had returned the wounds their wielders had suffered.


    No words of warning were shouted, no attempts to stop the fleeing people were made. The first hint they got that they were running into an ambush was the twang of a short bow, launching an arrow across the small clearing we had used as a camp earlier. If not for the impressive reactions of the one in the lead, the arrow would have found its mark somewhere in his chest but as it were, it buried itself into the hastily raised shield.


    Acting quickly, the fleeing group managed to take cover behind some of the shrubs, trying to cover each other with their shields, as more arrows were launched in their general direction.


    Looking down from my lofty perch, I wondered again if it had been fate, coincidence or some sort of scheme that had prepared our front-row seats for what would likely be a brief, brutal and bloody battle.


    And at the same time, I wondered if we should intervene.

 Chapter 581

    After the first arrow, the drama beneath me started to ramp up quickly. Forced into cover by the sudden arrows, the rest of their pursuers managed to catch up before the fleeing group had time to rally and realise they needed to break through the encirclement. The ambush had caught them by surprise and they apparently lacked the discipline, or madness, to run head-first into the ambush¡¯s kill zone or they would only be slowly ground to death. And that lack of madness was what doomed them in this case, the thought bringing a small measure of amusement to my mind, as I watched their foes slowly refine the positions in their encirclement.


    In a fit of curiosity, I channelled a bit of magic and overlaid Concealment with the Observe skill, stealthily checking just what levels this group of fleeing humans had. The blue box popping up in my field of view told me the one in the lead was level sixty-two and a quick glance at the other three made it clear that he was the highest level in their party. The others were a little below him in level, the two females at fifty-nine and sixty-one, the other male at a mere fifty-five, though I could feel a faint stirring of magic from him, making me think he was some sort of spell-caster. Nothing special in the grand scheme of things, but it warranted a bit of additional interest.


    Glancing at the figures who had ambushed them, and were shooting the occasional arrow in their general direction, I realised that the pursuers were, at least, ten levels below the fleeing people, mostly in the level thirty to forty range, at least the five I could see in the shrubs beneath my perch.


    The whispers I could hear from the runners somehow managed to bring a smile to my face, the drama I was watching slowly gaining a plot and characters. The leader and the two females were trying to convince the spellcaster of their group that they would break through the encirclement and buy him time, so he could escape. The urgency in their voices made it obvious that they knew their time was limited, that their foes were convinced the four of them were trapped and could be weakened with repeated arrows until wounds, exhaustion and a broken moral made the task of overwhelming them simple.


    On the other hand, in a direct confrontation, the best the four runners could hope for was to sell their lives as dearly as possible, taking as many of their foes with them as they could. But as the joke went, no war was ever won by dying gloriously for your country, but by making sure the other bastard died gloriously for his. They didn¡¯t need a path to die gloriously, they needed a way to survive.


    Through our connection, I could feel Sigmir¡¯s emotions faintly reaching me, a curious mix of disdain and compassion. Intrigued, I closed my eyes, ignoring the drama beneath for the much more important exploration of my beloved emotions and delved into our connection.


    There were no words coming across, but images and memories. It took me a moment to place them, the framing of Sigmir¡¯s mind a little different from what I was used to, her mental architecture different from mine, or Lenore¡¯s for that matter, but I knew her well enough to make the connection.


    The images I was seeing were shortly before our first meeting, as Sigmir had been chased through the forest by her tribe and their hounds. She emphasised with the fleeing group, the feeling of being chased and hunted vivid in her memory but at the same time, she disdained them, and her past self, for being weak enough to be brought down by their hunters.


    Opening my eyes, I realised that the smile on my face was wide and excitement bubbled up within me. If Sigmir projected her past self on these people, watching them get slowly exhausted and ultimately murdered might make my beloved sad and while I could comfort her later, not having her be sad in the first place was much preferred.


    On the other hand, simply murdering a group of uniformed fighters, possibly guards or soldiers, could cause serious repercussions down the line, especially if there was some sort of divination involved that allowed them to mark their killers.


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    Obfuscation, confusion and subtlety would have to be the name of the game. And while I wasn¡¯t always the most subtle of spellcasters, confusion and obfuscation were things I was quite good at by now.


    Mentally explaining Lenore my plan took mere seconds and while she had some ideas and suggestions, we could quickly incorporate them into my plan. While mental communication and discussion was incredibly fast, in this case, enough time passed for one of the arrows to find its mark, wounding the weaker woman below, adding urgency to their situation.


    Slowly, as the situation below got more and more desperate, Mist started to form in the forest around us, the temperature dropped and even the trained soldiers started to be unable to make out their surroundings. It was as if the stars above and the moon no longer gave light and even the abilities the soldiers had learned to operate in darkness started to lose their effect.


    I could hear their complaints and curses, they made me smile even more, as I increased the amount of Astral Power I was channelling into the spell-formation I had created. It wasn¡¯t terribly complicated, a variation of a formation I had used to great effect in the past. Mist, combined with Concealment and Confusion, but the real test was whether or not I¡¯d be able to actively control the whole magical construct, to hold it together while I used the confusion-effect to slowly separate the different groups, guiding them into different directions.


    By the time I truly took active action, my magic had caused the entire situation to devolve into chaos. Everybody¡¯s sight was limited, the darkness and cold made them feel isolated, helped along by a generous dose of the Dark Moon¡¯s Madness and their mind was utterly unable to tell in which direction they should be moving and shooting. Some of them had even succumbed to the point of wounding their allies and only interference from me had prevented casualties.


    Stronger enemies might have been able to shake off the effects, or maybe dispel it to the point that they could escape, but these people lacked such power.


    With the help of Lenore, who had left my Hallow as the mist had started to completely obscure the stars, I started to form the mist into individual clusters, each surrounding one or more of the people below. A bit of manipulation, letting them get the impression that the mist was less dense in one direction, gave them direction, the desire to escape the cold, creepy sensation I had conjured overwriting their common sense and caution.


    Luckily for them, I had no desire to do something truly nasty to them, like letting them walk off a cliff, I merely wanted them to walk in different directions of my choosing.


    From Lenore¡¯s perspective, overlapping in a corner of my mind, it looked completely hilarious. She could see the Astral Power that made up the dense mist with her sight, and to her, it looked like a dozen clusters of glowing clouds, slowly drifting through the forest, at times moving within mere metres from each other, as I lured, cajoled and confused hunted and hunters alike.


    ¡°What are you doing?¡± Olivia asked, once the mist around us had drifted away and they didn¡¯t have to guard their mind any longer. I hadn¡¯t focused the magic on them, but they had been slightly affected.


    ¡°Keeping more blood from being shed,¡± I replied, dropping into Sigmir¡¯s waiting arms. Climbing down from my perch would have been quite difficult with the amount of focus I needed to maintain my spell.


    ¡°An admirable aim,¡± she allowed, though I could see the frown on her face. ¡°But what are we going to do next? Unless you want to keep them wandering for hours longer?¡±


    ¡°No, I don¡¯t.¡± I shook my head, glimpsing through Lenore¡¯s eyes, observing a clearing similar to the one we had been on, just beyond a pair of hills to our south. ¡°Though I¡¯ll admit that I¡¯m curious what¡¯s going on there.¡±


    ¡°You¡¯re planning something,¡± Adra accused me, the grin on my face likely giving me away.


    ¡°Maybe,¡± I allowed, looking in the direction of that clearing, the direction in which the four hunted just happened to be wandering, all in their own clouds, slowly getting desperate in their isolation.


    ¡°Why don¡¯t we go and meet those people?¡± I suggested, drawing a groan from Adra and making Olivia¡¯s frown a little deeper.

 Chapter 582

    Presentation was important, especially when it came to first impressions. As such, I had taken quite a bit of care to prepare the small clearing for the people that had been hunted through the forest, to the point that they may, or may not, have been forced to wander around a little longer, isolation, cold and likely fear slowly wearing them down a little more. None of them was gravely wounded and I could easily keep enough of an eye on them to make sure they didn¡¯t die, but putting them into a weaker state would only make things easier for me.


    Setting up the timing to make sure they stumbled onto the clearing at the same time had been a bit of a challenge, as their individual speeds weren¡¯t constant, at times they moved faster if they thought they could escape the mist, and at times they slowed down, due to difficult terrain.


    But either way, with Lenore¡¯s help, I had been able to push and prod their progress to the point that they stumbled onto the clearing at the same time, weary, cold and exhausted, only to grind to a halt, staring at me and their companions, all coming out of the forest at the same time, only on different sides of the clearing.


    To my delight, the weather was cooperating, the clouds opening up overhead and I didn¡¯t even have to use stupendous amounts of Astral Power to make it so. The clearing had naturally filled with silvery moonlight, adding a nice, glittery touch to the decor of silvery Ice I had put up. I hadn¡¯t gone all-out and set up my throne, doing so would evoke the wrong image, but sitting on a comfortable seat of Ice, in the middle of a dark forest gave me a certain air.


    The rest of my group was nearby, carefully hiding in the forest, concealed by mist, while Lenore was sitting on a high branch, giving me an additional angle if I needed to see something behind me.


    ¡°Greetings,¡± I addressed them, fully immersing myself in the Character of Morgana. I didn¡¯t give them time to gather their bearing, intent on making them focus on me and not so much on the situation itself.


    ¡°How nice of you to join me,¡± I continued, looking at the four flabbergasted faces, ¡°Why don¡¯t you introduce yourself, now that you are within my parlour?¡± I asked, exerting a small amount of power to make the mist lingering in the forest around us swirl a little.


    ¡°The name¡¯s Daniel, my lady.¡± the one I had previously identified as their leader moved forward a little, not trying to get close but trying to make space behind him, so his allies could take shelter there.


    ¡°I¡¯m Isabel,¡± the stronger female introduced herself, carefully making her way over to Daniel.


    ¡°Please, call me Jenn,¡± the other woman followed suit, a curious mix of trepidation and curiosity in her voice. In addition, she inched towards me, not her allies,


    The last of them was staring at me, mouth agape and eyes wide, not saying anything. My lips curled in an amused smile, as I looked him over, waiting for a moment, before focusing on Daniel, their leader.


    ¡°You may call me Morgana, a Traveller to these lands,¡± I told him, rising from my seat and smoothly turning it into a cloud of mist that kept swirling around me, ¡°Imagine my surprise when a group of people got hunted down, like animals, only they were hunted by their own kind.¡±


    I studied them for a moment, letting the silence linger, ¡°Why don¡¯t you tell me what had you hunted in that manner?¡± I asked, staring at Daniel. I could see him swallow but to his credit, he didn¡¯t look at his companions, his eyes steadily on me.


    ¡°Some might call it a misunderstanding,¡± he began, only to fall silent when I raised an eyebrow, trying to convey my disbelief.


    ¡°You, answer,¡± I ordered, turning to Jenn, who was staring at me with glittering eyes. She had moved up further than her companions, allowing me to let a bit of mist billow from the trees, creating a subtle barrier between her and her friends.


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    ¡°They call us rebels,¡± she stammered, her eyes flickering towards her companions, only to be shrouded by mist. I could hear a soft noise from Daniel and Isabel and when I took a peek through Lenore¡¯s eyes, I could see that they were grimacing.


    ¡°How rude of them,¡± I chuckled, trying to make myself sound amused, ¡°A rebel, but a rebel against what? There are so many ways one can rebel and so many things you can rebel against,¡± I mused, slowly walking towards Jenn, letting the mist build up between her and her companions, cutting her further off.


    I could hear Daniel clear his throat and saw him move through the mist, towards his teammate. The way he moved made it obvious that he was trying to avoid moving toward me, as impossible as that might be in the situation.


    ¡°We disagree with the way the Empire is run,¡± Daniel said, placing a hand on Jenn¡¯s shoulder. The sudden contact made her squeak a little but shook her out of the daze she had been in, blushing as she hid behind Daniel. Isabel, on the other hand, had taken the time during which my attention had presumably been occupied to walk over to their spellcaster, shaking him out of the shock he was in.


    ¡°And those in power don¡¯t take kindly to being questioned, I¡¯m sure,¡± I nodded, studying the four as I moved back into the middle of the clearing, reforming my chair as I went.


    ¡°What do you plan now?¡± Daniel asked, pulling Jenn towards his other two teammates, trying to appear casual but I could almost smell the fear oozing out of him. The calculation in his mind was obvious, I had managed to bring them here and would have my own reasons for doing so.


    Before I could reply, Isabel let out a soft curse, making both Daniel and me look over. By now, the spellcaster who had yet to introduce himself was only upright because Isabel held him up, otherwise, he¡¯d have slumped over. Sniffing the air, I noticed that the tang of blood in the air had become stronger and there was a dark patch spreading on his clothes, blood oozing from an unseen wound.


    While I hesitated, considering whether to break character and help or keep playing up the mysterious Fey-creature, a rustling in the bushes told me that the decision was out of my hand. Looking through Lenore¡¯s eyes, I saw Olivia stepping into the clearing, ignoring the surprised noises from the other three humans and walking over to the spellcaster.


    ¡°I¡¯m not letting someone die for your games, Morgana,¡± she warned me and the surprised expression on the human¡¯s faces morphed from surprise to confused anger, as they realised I had made them actors in my play. I had also saved their lives, so their anger was misplaced, something I would have to remind them of, later.


    ¡°I¡¯ve been keeping an eye on their vitality the whole time,¡± I assured Olivia, letting the mysterious, musing act drop. ¡°You can come out,¡± I told the rest of my group as I sat down on my seat, morphing it into my Throne and moping, just a little. Playing with these humans had been fun, but Olivia had to spoil it.


    ¡°What¡¯s going on here?¡± Daniel demanded, the confusion now fully turned into anger.


    ¡°A group of fools managed to bungle onto our camp-site, disturbing our night¡¯s rest, making another group of idiots trample after them,¡± I snarked back, not amused by the accusation in his voice.


    ¡°Instead of ignoring it, I decided to lend a hand and exerted a considerable amount of effort to do so, making sure none of you would die in the process.¡± Looking at him, I noticed that he was less focused on me and more interested in Olivia, who completely ignored him.


    ¡°Put him down, carefully,¡± Olivia ordered Isabel, who rushed to obey. Together, they put their spell-caster friend down on the ground and Olivia¡¯s hands started to glow in golden light, slowly seeping into his body, sealing his wounds.


    ¡°Thank you,¡± Jenn, who had stepped away from Daniel in the chaos, said to me, having stepped closer to my throne and eying me with curiosity in her eyes.


    ¡°No need for that,¡± I waved her off, blushing a little at the attention. Before, the look of awed adoration in her eyes had felt good, just as the feeling of mastery over their lives had. The knowledge that I was able to choose who lived and died, without needing to take their input or feelings into account, like a deity, distant and aloof.


    Now, they were close and far more relatable, making me a little uncomfortable.


    Maybe noticing my discomfort, Sigmir came out of the forest as well, briefly pulling me up from my throne, before plopping down herself, pulling me onto her lap, making Jenn blink in confusion at the slightly strange action.


    ¡°I¡¯ve managed to stabilise him, there should be no further issues;¡± Olivia spoke up, pushing herself from her kneeling position.


    ¡°Can we please talk about what is going on?¡± Isabel asked, almost pleadingly, while the look on Daniel¡¯s face was quite hostile, as his eyes flickered between me, Olivia and his wounded teammate.

 Chapter 583

    ¡°We could, but why should we explain our actions to you?¡± I sulked, leaning back into Sigmir¡¯s embrace. ¡°We saved you and now you are questioning the methods we employed and how we acted in saving you?¡± I paused for a moment, shaking my head before looking out into the mists I still maintained around the clearing and loudly sighing, ¡°Humans¡­¡±


    ¡°You were a little theatric with them, you¡¯ve got to admit that,¡± Adra remarked, moving out of the darkness as well, Rai at her side. I could see that Rai was both a little embarrassed at the act I had performed but also rather amused.


    ¡°So what?¡± I asked, not admitting any wrongdoing. ¡°Why shouldn¡¯t they repay my efforts by providing a bit of amusement to me? Are their lives so cheap that they aren¡¯t even worth that much?¡± I paused, letting my gaze pass over the four humans, a vicious grin on my face. As I studied them, the eyes that were looking back at me started to become visibly worried.


    ¡°In that case, I don¡¯t mind taking their lives as repayment. I¡¯m certain I could get some worth out of their bodies and if not from their bodies, them from their minds and souls,¡± I mused, trying to estimate just how much power I would be able to harvest if I deliberately kept those three alive and slowly drained them. Maybe the dryads of Tegi did have the right idea, using worthless mortals as fuel for their ward. The biggest problem would be transporting my human resources unless I somehow managed to figure out a way to permanently enslave a mind. My one, and only, experiment in that direction had ended with such abysmal failure that I hadn¡¯t tried again. Maybe I should.


    ¡°No, no, no, we are grateful,¡± Isabel quickly assured me, while the previous look of anger on Daniel¡¯s face had morphed into fear. Somehow, that only served to widen the smile on my face.


    ¡°Yes, thank you very much,¡± Daniel joined in, though his words of gratitude came with a pungent wind of fear. Still shielded behind him, Jenn nodded along, though the expression on her face remained a little¡­ odd.


    Before I could decide what to do next, Olivia rose from the kneeling position she had taken when healing their spellcaster.


    ¡°He should be fine, soon, though he lost a lot of blood,¡± she reported, looking over to me, ¡°Would you?¡± she asked, clearly asking that I helped him replenish his reserves. For that task, her Divine Magic was far less suitable than my Blood Magic.


    After considering for a moment, I rose from Sigmir¡¯s arms, calling a tendril of mist from outside the clearing. Mere theatrics, but I had decided on a role and I wanted to play it as much as possible. The looks of awe and fear on the faces of those three humans tickled something deep within me, making me feel a weird satisfaction.


    Stopping next to the fallen spellcaster, I let more mist float in, making an act of weaving it together in the air above his body, part of it drifting down, towards his eyes, nose, mouth and the wound in his torso. At the same time, I stretched my senses as far as possible, to use Blood Magic without actively touching the body I was working on. Without a connection to the blood, using that sort of magic was incredibly difficult but the connection I kept with the Astral Power still bound up in the mist allowed me to stretch that link. It wasn¡¯t powerful, greatly limiting the amount of power I could channel into the body at once, but it was good enough.


    Hidden in the mist around my hands, I put together a formation of Blood Runes, the deep, crimson glow lending a macabre atmosphere to the whole thing, making it look like I was weaving together a large cloud of dark blood, the glow slowly seeping down and into the body at my feet.


    From the sounds I could hear behind me, the three companions of the guy I was helping weren¡¯t quite certain what was going on, but under the suppression of my teammates, they could only watch.


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    With more and more power, and moisture, seeping into the body, I realised that he was about to wake up. Letting my control of the mist fade, it started to seep downwards, some of it melting away, some of it seemingly flowing into the body. Keeping a close eye on the body, I managed to step back, just before he rose into a sitting position, letting out a loud, almost desperate-sounding gasp.


    ¡°He should be better now,¡± I announced, casually turning around and walking back to Sigmir.


    ¡°Now, where were we? I believe you wanted to thank me for the help I provided you?¡± I prodded, sitting back on Sigmir¡¯s lap.


    ¡°Maybe they should give us information,¡± Sigmir suggested in a rumbling voice, speaking for the first time in the whole encounter, ¡°They called themselves rebels, but never went into details.¡±


    ¡°Mhm, yes, information would be something good. I¡¯m curious about your view on the nobility and governance of Aletoma, I¡¯m sure you¡¯d have fascinating insights,¡± I mused, my voice a little mocking. Though there was some merit to Sigmir¡¯s suggestion, if the official faction didn¡¯t have the sort of quests and content I wanted, looking elsewhere was a perfectly valid track to take. If these people could introduce me to a different quest-faction, it wouldn¡¯t be a loss. We didn¡¯t have a lot of time to play around on Aletoma, not if I wanted to complete the quest regarding the Soul Prison, but a couple of days could be spared.


    Creating a line of benches with a wave of my hand, I gestured for them to sit. The benches just happened to be smaller than the seat I had created for me, and with Sigmir sitting below me, it meant I was easily looking down on them, despite my diminutive size.


    After they sat down, Daniel started to give us information, while Isabel took care of their companion, quietly explaining the situation to him. While my eyes remained fixated on Daniel, I made sure to keep an ear on their conversation, as it revealed somewhat more interesting information.


    Daniel mostly spoke of the oppression from the nobles, famine, high taxes and the need to survive, even if one had to break the law. While I couldn¡¯t truly emphasise, having grown up well in a first-world country, I could understand to a degree. If you had to choose between breaking the law and watching your loved ones slowly starve to death, taking risks and breaking the law seemed to be a natural reaction.


    On the other hand, the conversation between Isabel and the spell-caster, whose name turned out to be Nick, was focused on them and the task they had before. The three fighters had been escorting Nick on his way back to their camp, making sure that a precious spell-caster didn¡¯t get hurt after he had done some sort of mission.


    ¡°What should we do with them, Olivia?¡± I asked, once their tale was finished, ¡°You worship Freedom, but aren¡¯t these people very much in need of that? At least to my ears, it sounds as if they are being oppressed, yearning to breathe free.¡± I prodded, curious how my companion would react. There had always been that dichotomy, she was preaching about liberty but how could one be truly free, if there was always the divine above you?


    How could Freedom and Submission co-exist?


    As I waited for her to respond, I began to wonder. Would I have to break the law, not just the laws of Mundus, but those of the world outside, in order to stay with Sigmir? And if so, would I be willing to take that risk?


    Looking into myself, I realised that I was asking the wrong question. It wasn¡¯t so much a question of if I was willing to break the law, but a question of whether or not breaking the law would bring me closer to her.


    If I failed, I would get into trouble and I highly doubted they would allow conjugal, virtual visits if  I got myself locked up. On the other hand, if I didn¡¯t take the risk and failed to find a way to keep Sigmir with me if I returned to Mundus, wouldn¡¯t there be hope to find her again?


    If not her current persona, wouldn¡¯t her essence, that which made her who she was, remain, waiting for me to find her and make new memories?


    Before I could find an answer to that odd question, Olivia spoke up.


    ¡°We should help them,¡± she announced, the strength and conviction in her voice surprising me a little, ¡°If nothing else, lending them some indirect support, but I believe we should actively support them.¡±

 Chapter 584

    It was quite fascinating to see Olivia struggle with her own convictions. From what I knew about her, she was completely devoted to Eleutheria but with that devotion came a certain connection to the whole Pantheon of Olymp and, indirectly, one to the nobles of the Empire. After all, the Imperial Family itself based its claim to power on their supposed connection to Alcaeus and his father, Zeus. Similarly. the Nobles were allegedly descended from the mortal companions of that hero, some of them carrying divine bloodlines of their own.


    Which left the question, could you be devout to one part of a system while actively working to undermine another part? Especially if the part you wanted to undermine was a rather major one, as rebelling against the mortal descendants of Zeus could easily be seen as a rebellion against Zeus himself? Such delicious irony, it was almost as tasty as the idea of submission to the Goddess of Freedom.


    Either way, with the oppressed people right in front of her eyes, Olivia wasn¡¯t willing to look aside and her enthusiasm was enough to arouse my curiosity. It took some effort from Olivia and Adra to convince the humans that they should introduce us to their people and into their base, but they managed. Having saved their lives helped, as did the simple fact that we were powerful. Why would a group of people above level 100 try to deceive a few around level 60, if good, old force would do the job just as well.


    They knew that capturing them would be child¡¯s play for us, I had aptly demonstrated that they couldn¡¯t resist me if I wanted to mess with them, and, apparently, there were abilities that made information-gathering via torture work. Mind Magic, mostly, but there seemed to be more, a revelation that made me a little grumpy, as my own ability in Mind Magic was more and more turning into just another club in my arsenal of magical devastation. Sure, scrambling someone¡¯s mind, shrouding them in fear and desolation was a wonderful, highly effective, ability if you wanted to harm someone but if I wanted to actually help? Or communicate, or do any of the many interesting things that should fall under Mind Magic? That, I still needed to learn and the traits I had picked up made learning incredibly difficult.


    Alas, maybe once the beta was over, I¡¯d have a chance to re-think some of my choices and traits. I was happy with most of them but some, I could do without.


    Either way, the four humans had decided that they¡¯d guide us to their base after spending the night in our impromptu camp. Given that the situation with them was dealt with, Lenore and I decided to find out what the other humans we had messed with were up to. To do so, we had moved away from the group, before I disappeared into my Hallow.


    The mist that had confused and scattered them had faded some time ago, the Astral Power it had been made of flowing back into the Astral River but that only meant they were all alone, somewhere in the forest. By the time we had dealt with the four rebels and we were looking for the others, some of them had managed to reunite, but some were still stumbling through the forest, confused and alone.


    On a whim, Lenore silently landed on a branch above one of them.


    ¡°What brings you here?¡± she asked, for once not using my voice. Instead, she modulated her voice to make it sound raspy,, almost inhumanely so. The human below, a male, maybe in his early twenties, whirled around, trying to spot the speaker in the dark forest. I wanted to wish him good luck with that, as his first instinct was to search the ground, not the high branches.


    ¡°Who?¡± he asked, sounding both scared but also angry, ¡°Who are you!?¡± he demanded, trying to project confidence but failing.


    ¡°Who, who, who,¡± Lenore mocked, hooting like an owl, before breaking into cackling laughter.


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    ¡°Wouldn¡¯t you want to know, boy?¡± she asked after laughing for a bit, ¡°But I ask again, what brings you here, all alone and tasty-looking?¡±


    ¡°I¡¯m not alone!¡± he squealed, his head swivelling around, trying to find the being that talked to him. ¡°You,¡± he began to stammer, trying to sound intimidating, ¡°You should better flee, or my comrades will catch you, and it will be you who dies!¡± he managed to threaten, the intimidation a little spoiled by the fact that his voice cracked, making it sound more like the whine of a child and making me adjust my earlier assumption of his age down by a few years.


    ¡°I¡¯m sure they will be here any moment,¡± Lenore mocked, drawing a bit on my Ice-Magic to create a bit of mist in the trees around us, ¡°Any moment, after they escape the endless mist I trapped them in, that is.¡±


    ¡°They¡¯ll be here!¡± he tried to insist, but the mist around him made his voice shake in fear.


    ¡°Oh, child, don¡¯t try to lie to me, it¡¯s pathetic,¡± Lenore chided, letting out a sigh, very much sounding like a disappointed mother that was listening to their child insist that they hadn¡¯t taken a cookie, while their mouth was smeared with crumbs and chocolate. It was quite the impressive imitation, given that I doubted Lenore had ever seen the real thing. Though maybe, some things crossed species lines and mothers being disappointed by their offspring might just be one of those things.


    ¡°Tell me what I want to know and I might point you in the right direction,¡± she prodded and by now, the guy was with his back to a tree, staring into the darkness - and still not looking up the fool.


    ¡°Please don¡¯t eat me,¡± he pleaded and I was pretty sure there were some tears running down his cheeks, ¡°The count sent us to hunt some rebels,¡± he blurted out, still trying to find Lenore. With the first step taken, Lenore started to poke and prod, at times moving from tree to tree, using her wind magic to make her voice sound from different directions, messing with the guy¡¯s mind as she dragged the information we wanted to know out of him.


    Not that he could tell us a lot, but he most certainly was cooperative. By the time Lenore was done with him, I was pretty sure he had been willing to tell her everything he had ever done, including sneaking a kiss from the miller¡¯s daughter a few years back. It was quite pathetic.


    ¡°Back to the others, or should we try finding someone who knows more than a peasant with delusions of ability? ¡° I mentally asked, not impressed by the cognitive abilities of the guard if that was a prime example of them. It most likely wasn''t, but any organisation that let such a rookie into an active operation didn¡¯t deserve my respect.


    ¡°Let¡¯s go back to the others,¡± Lenore sighed in my mind, disappointed by the intelligence of the guard beneath us. ¡°Go east, fool, and you should find one of your companions,¡± she instructed the boy ¡°And you should consider looking for another job,¡± she advised, before flapping her wings, easily taking to the sky. For once, she didn¡¯t use magic to make herself unheard, causing the boy to look into the sky as we were vanishing. I doubted he had been able to see, but couldn¡¯t be certain.


    On the way back to the others, we spied a few more guards that were stumbling through the forest but given the situation, we didn¡¯t try to engage another one. If one guard was telling tales of voices in the dark or speaking birds, he¡¯d likely be seen as muddle-headed or confused by the situation but if there were corroborating statements that¡¯d likely change.


    The reassuring thing was, none of them appeared to move towards the camp, meaning we should be fine for the night until we moved towards the rebel camp in the morning.


    When we reached the clearing we used to camp, the reactions were predictably different. I let myself drop from the sky, dropping right in the middle of them. Sigmir had felt me approaching for a while, so she wasn¡¯t surprised in the slightest while Adra was perceptive enough to spot me without trouble and smart enough to recognise Lenore.


    Rai and Olivia were used to my shenanigans, so while they reacted with surprise, they weren¡¯t too shocked.


    But for the humans? They heard a soft, whistling noise and suddenly, I was in the middle of them. All four of them jumped, the three warriors fumbling for their weapons, the spellcaster managing to channel some Astral Power, only for me to snuff out the fire he conjured.


    ¡°None of that,¡± I chided them, walking over to Sigmir, ¡°But I don¡¯t believe we¡¯ll have trouble during the evening, everything looked quiet out there.¡±

 Chapter 585

    ¡°Are you sure we can trust them?¡± the wind carried Isabel¡¯s quiet voice to my ears, almost impossible to hear. If I hadn¡¯t been sitting on one of the higher branches, watching the moon and stars in the slightly clouded sly, even my high Intuition wouldn¡¯t have been enough to catch their conversation. But when I had heard Isabel and Daniel sneaking off, I had become curious and focused my senses on them. Sitting in my tree, I wondered whether I would hear an argument, a tryst or maybe even a conspiracy, only to hear that single snippet. No promises of love, no declarations of vengeance, only boring mundanity. Alas, that was life, boringly mundane, even in the magical realm of Mundus.


    Hearing it, I wasn¡¯t sure if I should be happy or disappointed, worry about our intentions was so predictably boring. Of course, they¡¯d worry about bringing a group of reasonably powerful people, with a balanced mix of magical and martial abilities into their camp, if they weren¡¯t I¡¯d wonder if they had been dropped on the head as children. And yet, they couldn¡¯t easily refuse us, as the potential upside was massive, gaining additional allies and avoiding insulting us, both important for the rebels.


    ¡°No,¡± Daniel replied, as if to confirm my thoughts, ¡°But that Olivia, she seems sincere in her beliefs and convictions, no servant of a God could act in direct contradiction to the ideals of that God.¡±


    ¡°Eleutheria, of Freedom,¡± Isabel quietly mused, an almost sad note in her voice, ¡°If only more people felt that freedom is the highest ideal, that Liberty is worth dying for.¡± The sigh followed those words said almost more than her words before. Yearning, mingling with hope and disappointment, the melancholy almost made my teeth rot.


    For a few moments, there was nothing but silence, making me wonder how their faces looked in that moment. Were they exchanging deep, sorrowful glances, were there tears running down their faces? Or were they simply wondering what to say next, as I often did in conversations, staring into space as I hoped for my conversation partner to continue?


    ¡°Anyway, I¡¯m not worried about her,¡± Isabel admitted, my ears perking back up. ¡°That Morgana, there¡¯s something wrong in her head,¡± she continued, my lips twisting into a snarl.


    ¡°And yet, she¡¯s incredibly powerful.¡± Daniel let out another sigh. They seemed to like sighing quite a bit, maybe I should give them reasons to sigh, or cry, scream and moan. So many involuntary sounds I could rip from their throats if they continued mocking me. ¡°Or maybe, because of that, she is insanely powerful,¡± Isabel let out a soft groan at the pun, though I had to hide a snicker. Insane and thus insanely powerful? I liked it. Maybe there was truth in advertising after all.


    ¡°And yet, you want to bring her into our camp?¡± Isabel asked, her voice almost mocking.


    ¡°Would you want to have her out here, maybe bored? She¡¯s looking for excitement and you heard her, she¡¯s a Traveller. They can¡¯t truly die, so why wouldn¡¯t they look for excitement. I wonder why the Gods brought them here, how could countless Undying beings, all with their own ideas, agendas and pursuits not destabilise our World?¡± Daniel complained, disdain in his voice, ¡°As if there¡¯s not enough trouble in this world, without some bored Undying adding to it?¡±


    ¡°Leonard is a useful ally, even you¡¯ve got to admit that,¡± Isabel reminded him, her voice sounding like they were rehashing an old argument, one she was tired of.


    ¡°He can be useful, at least most of the time,¡± he admitted, ¡°But only if he wants to be, there¡¯ve been times when we needed him and he was nowhere to be found. I¡¯d rather have an ally with less power, but one that I can rely on.¡±


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    ¡°So don¡¯t rely on them, don¡¯t trust them to have your back,¡± Isabel suggested, ¡°Point them at the enemy and use their powers to preserve our own reserves. Why should our people die, if they can take care of that?¡± There was a brief pause and I thought I heard the rustling of leaves beneath boots as if one of them was pacing, ¡°That¡¯s what the nobles do, don¡¯t you realise? They are promising the moon and the stars, privileges for the brief time they are here if they use their Undying existence to gain them an advantage.¡± she complained and while her words weren¡¯t addressed at me, they made me wonder.


    How would the introduction of effectively immortal beings, a lot of whom would focus on combat and getting more powerful, would change a world and its societies? And how did those societies came to be in the first place? Had they been made up from whole cloth by Pantheon Entertainment or had there been a procedural generation, an evolutionary algorithm that had created the world of Mundus in its current state from a defined base-state? If it was the first, the developers would have had to create each character in the world specifically which sounded like a lot of work for little gain.


    But if it was made with an algorithm from a base state, where was the mental and emotional difference between the NPCs in the game and people? It was a question I had been pondering in regards to Sigmir but had never really cared to ponder in regards to all the other beings in the world of Mundus.


    Either way, it sounded like the locals of Mundus were wondering how to react to the introduction of Travellers far more than Travellers normally thought about the natives. Thinking about it, that was to be expected, for the natives, the world of Mundus was their whole existence. For the Travellers, it was a momentary distraction and losing their existence on Mundus, their life so to speak, would be nothing but a temporary annoyance, if that. It didn¡¯t have any real impact, the loss of a toy, a favourite toy maybe, but a toy nonetheless.


    Sitting on my tree, still somewhat listening to the discussion between Daniel and Isabel as they discussed their decision to bring us to their camp, or rather to one of their camps, I wondered if I should start taking the World of Mundus truly serious?


    Would that kill the enjoyment, the game aspect? If I started to treat everyone as people, what would that include? Beings like Ylva and Lenore made it obvious that even the ¡®beasts¡¯ could be spirit-beasts and if I remembered that bear I had attacked near Ladrin, which had simply used earth magic to wall off its cave and ignored me, actions which spoke of a certain intelligence and capability for cognitive thought. Back then, the idea of hunting and killing that bear had become abhorrent but what about chasing and fighting for a quest?


    During our travels, we had mostly fought against things that attacked us, even fighting the manticores in the White Mountains had mostly been to defend ourselves. The exception to that were the undead in the Dorrian Mountains, but did undead count? I simply couldn¡¯t say.


    Now, I was considering jumping into a rebellion, a civil war in the making. If they accepted working with me and gave quests, they¡¯d most certainly be along the lines of my talents, so magical mass destruction or sabotage.


    How could I square that with the idea to take Mundus seriously, to treat the locals like I would treat people?


    When was killing right, when was killing wrong? My mother had taught me to obey the law, that harming others outside of self-defence or in the defence of others was wrong and that I should only use necessary force to defend myself. It had been a major reason why she had wanted me to learn martial arts in the first place, to learn what ¡°necessary force¡± was.


    How did that apply to Mundus? If I judged that it would mean following the Empire¡¯s laws, wouldn¡¯t that mean turning the rebels in? The idea didn¡¯t sit right with me, especially after talking to Olivia about the government of the Empire.


    Maybe I should talk to Olivia and Sigmir some more, they might be able to shed light on my conundrum. Given that Mundus was their world, I probably should take their views into consideration, especially Sigmir¡¯s.


    Letting out a sigh, I realised that Isabel and Daniel had returned to camp some time ago and the forest had returned to its previous, quiet state. Looking up, to the moon high above, my mind started to drift once more, the previous thoughts quickly fading as the subtle surging of the Astral River filled my mind.

 Chapter 586

    With the dawn of a new day, the four humans with us looked a lot less subdued and uncomfortable than during the night. Might have been due to the light showing them that the five of us weren¡¯t just monsters tricking them or maybe because a full night of rest had helped to restore their strength and confidence. Either way, when I was preparing breakfast for all of us, Nick, the spell caster, came over and asked a few questions regarding the magic I had used to save them.


    His whole attitude was so removed from the shivering, frightened mess he had been during the night, that it almost made me wonder if they had somehow managed to switch the person out.


    While his enthusiasm and curiosity for magic were refreshing and somewhat flattering, I kept things general and vague, not delving into the details of what I had done, crediting the Grandmother for my abilities. He had never heard of her, his lack of knowledge giving me an opening to shift the topic away from me. While I couldn¡¯t give him a lot of information about the Grandmother, I simply didn¡¯t know a lot of details, but I could tell stories about her. That way, I could keep talking, without ever telling him anything about my abilities, all without the need to actually lie. For once, I empathised with politicians and the need to speak a lot, yet say nothing. Luckily, Nick had no way to verify what I was telling him and no desire to actually call me out and insult me, allowing me to deceive him.


    He might have noticed that I wasn¡¯t actually telling him about my abilities, but with the difference in power between the two groups, there was nothing he could do about it.


    Finally, once the breakfast was done, I invited everyone to get some food, the humans had lost their packs during their flight and Lenore and I had no desire to go looking for them in the night. If there had been anything important in them, too bad, so sad, but not our problem.


    It was somewhat amusing how much they praised the simple food I had prepared, how they tried to flatter me. And yet, hearing the praise, I couldn¡¯t help but notice that I wasn¡¯t as annoyed by their presence. Even my lips curled into a grin when Jenn¡¯s praise was particularly enthusiastic.


    Maybe it was similar to the way people reacted positively to dogs wagging their tails at them, to the attention and interest shown by their canine companions. There was really no need for modern people to keep such pets, they were not needed as hunting companions or, in the case of cats, to chase down mice. And yet, there were actual, tangible benefits gained by the association. Should I consider getting a human pet? And if so, where could I get one?


    Shaking off the weird thoughts, I focused inwards, discussing the magic we had used last night with Lenore. How we could improve performance and if there were ways to use the mist we preferred to carry magical effects to greater effect. How to layer more effects into it, how to let it spread easier, and how to make it even more powerful.


    If nothing else, it was our most utilised effect and likely the most versatile. It lacked the pure power of elemental cold, coalescing beams of Cold to strike at our targets, but while those beams were incredibly powerful, they used up just as much Astral Power. They were like a hammer, with limited utility but capable of shattering most defences.


    On the other hand, using Icicles as carriers to bring an effect to the enemy reduced the consumption, the physical form much more stable compared to pure, elemental power but with that added physical stability came the reduction of impact by physical defences. If an Icicle hit armour, the armour got cold and unless it was of incredibly bad quality, I¡¯d need a lot of impacts to get anywhere.


    However, trying to avoid an area-effect as encompassing as the mist I could conjure, spanning hundreds of metres if I put enough juice into it? Good luck with that.


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    Using such an effect brought the conflict to a different level, where I had to prevent enemies from dispelling my magic. So far, that hadn¡¯t been a major problem, but I had never been faced with a caster at even remotely the same level. The closest had been Dura Firebringer and we had never really competed, not while prepared and actually trying to use magic to harm the other.


    Maybe that was my biggest weakness, I had never been forced to work directly against another spellcaster. The idea made me wonder, how would I prevent an enemy from doing what I did to my enemies to Sigmir and the others? I could imbue effects of Devouring and Magic into my Darkness-magic but had no idea if that would be enough. Could such a shadowy shield be overpowered or simply ignored? It should work very well against spells without physical components, like my Icicles, but if an enemy simply used magic to lob a rock at me, there¡¯d be almost no resistance. For that, I¡¯d need an actual, physical shield or master Darkness magic to the level that I could make my shadows tangible.


    Such mastery had to be possible, I had realised how to use Darkness-magic to influence the nothingness between all matter in order to manifest minor telekineses, so there was darkness everywhere. But to turn that omnipresent darkness into a physical shield? Just the idea began to give me a headache but the good kind of headache. As if I was on the cusp of realisation but not quite there.


    No longer willing to listen to the constant talking during breakfast, I stood, startling the others.


    ¡°I need to get some silence to think,¡± I told them, getting startled looks and a frown from Sigmir. ¡°Love, will you get me when you¡¯re all done and ready to move?¡±


    With a nod from her, I was off, pushing my Avatar¡¯s body to the limit, virtually flying through the forest. The movement was pleasant and after a few seconds of dashing, I hopped onto a low-hanging branch, quickly jumping to the highest branches that could carry my minuscule weight.


    There, right at the border between the shadow of the forest and the sunlight of the treetops, I reached out, focusing on that boundary, my eyes falling closed as I started to delve into the shadows, into the boundary. And into the light.


    Even as my mind was in burning pain, I could feel it, the darkness. Omnipresent, subtle and all-encompassing. It could never be removed, there would always be darkness. I realised that Darkness wasn¡¯t the absence of light, it just was. The light could briefly banish the most obvious Darkness, but the underlying darkness that was present everywhere? That was utterly unaffected.


    Pushing my Astral Power into the light and into the darkness within that light, only to feel it melting away like snow in the sun. Unwilling to concede, I focused harder, activating overflow and pumping more and more power into it. There was a feeling of cracking, maybe within my mind, maybe within reality, and my eyes flickered open, only to blink back shut and open again.


    What my eyes could see, my mind couldn¡¯t really comprehend. Hovering before me was a small orb of blackness, slowly expanding with every moment. But it wasn¡¯t normal darkness, not simply a patch where there was no light. it seemed to suck in the light, making everything around it darker.


    Not quite sure what I was looking at, I carefully reached out with my magical senses, sniffing the air. Curiously, there was no smell around it, only a faint chill as I got closer as if the sunlight around me was fading, taking the warmth with it.


    More and more Astral Power drained from my body and, unable to figure anything out with my magical senses, I simply looked. First with my eyes, but they were unable to discern anything, there was nothing but a black, almost two-dimensional appearing object, maybe round, maybe many-sided, I couldn¡¯t tell. Frustrated, I used Lenore¡¯s sight, trying to see the magic, and almost fell out of the tree.


    It looked like I was draining the faintly bright Astral Power constantly flowing through the sunlit world, the Darkness I was channelling into the spell slowly replacing it. Reaching out, I carefully and ever so gently touched it, feeling a cold, incredibly hard and solid, object.


    Before I could try figuring out more, I realised that I had, in a dozen, brief seconds, drained a quarter of my Astral Power.


    Calming my mind, I let the power fade, the light quickly banishing the field of utter blackness but for a few moments, it managed to hang on before melting away.


    Leaning back against the tree, I was utterly flabbergasted, not sure what to think.

 Chapter 587

    Before I had been able to make heads or tails of what I had done, what it meant and how I could use it in the future, Sigmir¡¯s voice called me back into reality.


    ¡°Love, come down,¡± she called out, obviously standing at the trunk of the tree I was on, ¡°We¡¯re about to leave.¡±


    Shaking off the considerations, I remembered to take a glance at the log, as the discovery of solid darkness and its weird, light-absorbing properties almost had to give me additional skill points and, lo and behold, there was a notification in the log.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Skill increased</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>


    </td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    Two skill ranks, an incredible gain at my current level and yet, I had a feeling that it was only the beginning. Understanding the solid shadows was key and had to be my next course of study. If I managed to make them more efficient, they might just be the strongest shield out there, capable of blocking mundane and magical attacks alike.


    ¡°Love?¡± Sigmir called up, stopping me from getting lost in my mind again. Instead of responding, I simply let myself slip off the branches, my Avatar¡¯s body agile enough to easily turn the uncontrolled tumble into a graceful descent, gliding from branch to branch, until finally landing next to Sigmir. At least that was my plan, but instead of landing next to her, I was caught and given a quick kiss and a grin after she set me down.


    ¡°Let¡¯s leave,¡± I returned her smile, taking her hand, ¡°What do you think of the humans with us?¡± I asked, for once using a language only the two of us shared, J?tun, the language of frost-giants. Eavesdropping on the humans last night had reminded me that in a world of skills and levels, simply using distance and common sense to keep your communication private wasn¡¯t enough. I had no illusion that using a different language was a perfect measure, there were abilities like the Universal Understanding I had gained from my bond with Lenore. If one such ability existed, I was almost certain there¡¯d be more of them.


    Sigmir blinked in surprise, shaking her head in incomprehension.


    ¡°What?¡± she asked, speaking the same language, but haltingly making it obvious that she hadn¡¯t done so in a while.


    ¡°I asked what you think of the humans with us,¡± I repeated and now that she knew to listen for the different languages, she could easily understand.


    ¡°They seem a little weird,¡± Sigmir admitted, ¡°Their whole existence is weird,¡± she let out a weary sigh, ¡°All humans seem to work hard, in order to accumulate coin, only to hoard it for all eternity. Especially the nobles, they aren¡¯t any more capable, they aren¡¯t any smarter, they might have different classes or even a higher level than most, but really, they are just humans,¡± she shook her head, reminding me that she came from a small, personal place, where the leader of the whole tribe had been someone you could see every day. Here, the leader of the whole ¡®tribe¡¯, the emperor, was an existence only an incredible minority of people could see in their lifetimes and yet, the decisions that existence made impacted them all, through countless layers of agents, nobles and bureaucracy.


    ¡°Society, just like your people banded together for strength, the humans banded together on a larger scale, for that very reason. A single powerful figure can be a threat, but if you have that much land, and that many humans, how many talented figures could emerge to become powerful? If they all work together, united under a single banner, it is an incredible force. Remember the Centaurs, individually or in small groups, we had the ability to kill them in droves, as did the Winter Wolves. And yet, when they brought the might of their horde against the wolves, just a small part of the horde was enough to force them into desperate straights.¡± I reminded, getting a thoughtful nod in return. Looking at it like that, the empire suddenly felt threatening to her.


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    ¡°But wouldn¡¯t there be just as many foes, as there would be talents on the side of the empire?¡± Sigmir asked, her head nodding in the direction we were going, back towards the others, ¡°These few don¡¯t seem too incompetent, even if they need to train and experience more. If they exist, wouldn¡¯t there be countless more?¡±


    ¡°Not necessarily countless, but yes, the bigger the society, the more foes it gets. I wonder how the different growth rates relate to each other,¡± I mused, trying to form a coherent mental model between the number of loyal individuals, rebels and the size of society. It immediately became apparent that such a model was impossible, as there were far too many not-correlating variables but it was a fun idea.


    ¡°Either way, I wasn¡¯t asking about humans in general, if a thing like the average human even exists, just about those few with us,¡± I brought us back to my original question.


    ¡°As I said, they seem competent and I wouldn¡¯t mind working with them. A little weak, but when they were trapped, they worked together well to survive, covering for their companions,¡± she paused for a moment, ¡°None of them tried to escape alone,¡± she concluded, her voice sombre, making it apparent that she felt that was the most important part. The willingness to fight to the death at the side of your companions, to remain strong and not give in to fear.


    ¡°Who knows if that was due to their conviction or due to a lack of opportunity,¡± I mused, not convinced that the humans were all that noble. But they might surprise me in the future.


    ¡°We¡¯ll see what they would like us to do,¡± I concluded, before mentally switching back to common, as we were almost at the camp.


    The others had already packed up everything and were ready to leave. When Sigmir and I walked up, they simply nodded and Adra looked at Daniel.


    ¡°Now, we are ready to go. Do you want to lead the way, or give me directions?¡± she asked, a bit of disdain in her voice when she asked if he wanted to lead.


    ¡°We need to head further west, towards the mountains. Once we¡¯re there, I¡¯ll give you more guidance.¡± he simply replied, not taking the bait.


    Adra also didn¡¯t continue to quibble, instead, she simply turned, striding forward with her spear in hand. Rai gave the humans a brief glance, before following after her, remaining a couple of metres behind her, in a position from which he could immediately support her, if necessary. Olivia gave them a gesture, motioning for the humans to move with her and followed after our scouts, keeping some distance. Planning to bring up the rear, Sigmir and I waited for a moment, only to realise that neither Nick nor Jenn were following the main group.


    When I looked at them, an eyebrow raised and a frown on my face, Nick spoke.


    ¡°Would you mind telling me more about your teacher as we walk, maybe even teach me some of your magic?¡± he asked, looking hopeful. Jenn had a similar expression, as if curious as well.


    Frowning, I considered the question for a moment. Normally, my time was spent almost lost in my mind, pondering and experimenting with magic, but to talk about it? It was somewhat similar to talking to the Firebringer, something that had given me quite a few novel ideas but at the same time, was it worth disclosing some of my secrets in the hopes of gaining inspiration?


    ¡°I can share some stories,¡± I decided, still not planning to give him any actual information, maybe some lessons along the lines of those I had shared with Rai in the past. Nothing complex, certainly not without knowing what he could do.


    ¡°And you?¡± I asked, looking at Jenn, ¡°What do you want?¡±


    Jenn didn¡¯t seem to mind my somewhat rude tone, weirdly, she even seemed a little delighted. ¡°I just want to listen to your stories,¡± she assured me.


    Shrugging, I decided that telling one person or telling two made no difference. If she wanted to simply listen, i didn¡¯t mind and if she annoyed me, I could simply stop talking.


    ¡°So be it.¡± I agreed, setting off after the others.


    ¡°Now, let me tell you about an Elder Dryad we met,¡± I began, speaking quietly, just loud enough for them to hear me, ¡°For reasons unknown, that Dryad decided to build her grove in the frozen north of Aretia.¡±


    As I recounted the story of Tegi, with a few minor alterations to conceal my own abilities, turning it into a cautionary tale regarding the use of Blood Magic and that even the cleverest spellcaster couldn¡¯t avoid some laws of Nature and Magic, the two of the listened with great interest.


    And just like that, we started our journey west.

 Chapter 588

    ¡°That¡¯s your base?¡± I asked, my voice filled with disbelief. I wasn¡¯t quite sure what I had expected, but it most certainly wasn¡¯t what was before my eyes. Nestled between two tree-covered hills, hidden within a small valley was a village. It wasn¡¯t quite bustling, but when thinking about ¡®secret rebel base¡¯ my mind had conjured images of small jungle camps or maybe a cave, with a couple dozen hardened rebels, all grim and gruff. Not a mostly ordinary village.


    For that was what it looked like a village just like the dozen villages we had passed by on our way south from Nobost, filled with hardworking farmers and a few craftspeople, all trying their best to eke out a living. From afar, the only extraordinary thing was the small houses, which combined with likely carefully maintained evergreens meant that trying to spot the village from the air was almost impossible. Looking down between the trees, I realised just how cleverly designed the whole thing was, with small vegetable crops, growing between the houses, their fields incorporated into the forest ecology.


    ¡°It is our home, yes,¡± Daniel quietly replied, looking a little apprehensive.


    ¡°It¡¯s fascinating,¡± Adra mumbled, staring intently at the buildings, ¡°It¡¯s almost part of the forest, I never thought a settlement could be so¡­¡± she paused, mentally grasping for the right words, ¡°so natural,¡± she finished, looking at the humans with us.


    ¡°Who did that?¡± she almost demanded, staring at them.


    ¡°What do you mean?¡± I asked, now curious what she was sensing.


    ¡°The village, it¡¯s almost as if the forest is hiding it,¡± she shook her head in disbelief, ¡°It reminds me of home, of the grove. You won¡¯t be able to find it unless the elders want you to. This feels somewhat similar.¡±


    ¡°Curious,¡± I agreed, realising that some sort of magical concealment was almost mandatory if you wanted to rebel in a world like Mundus. Otherwise, they¡¯d simply have a wizard scry your location and murder the whole rebellion without ever leaving the comfort of their tower. I was pretty sure that I could annihilate any number of low-level people from almost any distance if I figured out a way to actually cast spells through the Astral River. I knew it was possible, I just hadn¡¯t been able to make it work.


    Sniffing the air, I tried to find the magic that hid the village, but the bouquet of foresty smells was overwhelming, making me unable to distinguish what was artificial concealment and what was an actual smell. My tongue flickered out, tasting the air, trying to get a better idea, but even with a mouthful of scent, I was unable to taste anything.


    ¡°It¡¯s quite well done,¡± I admitted, adding Lenore¡¯s sight to my investigation, only to come up empty once more, ¡°Really well done,¡± I complimented, briefly considering the use of a bit of Darkness-Magic to probe but decided against it. There was curiosity and looking at a door and then there was using a hammer to knock against the door, to see how sturdy it was.


    ¡°If you would follow us, we¡¯ll guide you to our leader,¡± Daniel suggested, his voice somewhat more confident than I had ever heard it before. For a moment, I wondered if there would be a trap and mentally readied myself, calling up Lenore¡¯s sight again, to guard against magical attacks. I noticed that Adra, Rai and Sigmir were similar vigilant, ready to move at any moment, and we followed Daniel and his three companions down into the valley.


    ¡°You don¡¯t need a wall?¡± Sigmir asked, making me notice the lack of it.


    ¡°No, not really,¡± Isabel replied, ¡°There¡¯re few dangerous beasts in this forest and if we ever get attacked, a wall would be more a hindrance than a help. To say nothing about how difficult it would be to conceal one.¡±


    ¡°Everyone but the smallest children here are supposed to be ready to fight. If some wolf comes in, it¡¯ll be turned into EXP and mediocre jerky. Taste¡¯s far too gamey.¡± Jenn threw in, getting a chuckle and nod from Isabel.


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    ¡°I see,¡± Sigmir nodded, ¡°My people don¡¯t have walls either, but our village wasn¡¯t always in the same spot. We just set up some fences to keep the livestock in.¡±


    ¡°That sounds¡­¡± Isabel shook her head, apparently not quite sure what to make of a nomadic lifestyle. Or she maybe couldn¡¯t imagine a land free enough to roam like that. The human empire seemed to be very organised and controlled. There was very little wildness or wilderness.


    ¡°Can you tell me more about your people?¡± Jenn asked, looking from me to Sigmir, ¡°And how do your people live, Morgana?¡±


    ¡°I couldn¡¯t tell you,¡± I admitted, my face impassive, ¡°Remember, I¡¯m a Traveller. When the Gods sent me here, I was left all alone, in the middle of nowhere. It took a little over two weeks to meet the first person.¡± I explained, giving Sigmir a soft smile and squeezing her hand. Other than some Snowbolds that I had annihilated and that annoying Sun-elemental, she had been the first person I met in this world.


    ¡°She¡¯s the first one you met in this world?¡± Jenn asked, her voice quite excited, ¡°That¡¯s so romantic, it must have been fate,¡± she gushed, looking from Sigmir to me and back.


    ¡°I don¡¯t know about fate, but I know that I would have left this world, if not for her,¡± Sigmir quietly admitted, her eyes fixated on me. ¡°She saved my life, there¡¯s nothing more to say about it.¡±


    Nodding, I accepted Sigmir¡¯s declaration and spoke no more. When Jenn opened her mouth, maybe to ask something more, both Sigmir and I focused on her, glaring. Our glares must have been quite scary, making her go pale and visibly swallow, her mouth snapping shut.


    When we walked between the houses, the tension ratcheted up. While I was unable to detect any overt magic in the area, I could feel the looks of suspicion and vigilance piercing into us and hear the quiet mutterings and even a few metallic noises, making me think someone was making sure their weapons were ready.


    ¡°Daniel, who do you have with you?¡± a middle-aged woman asked, looking at Daniel with caution in her eyes, before letting them wander over us, obviously trying to make sense of our odd group. A human, alongside four beings that should be quite rare in these parts, walk into a human rebel base. There had to be questioned, maybe even a joke or two.


    The woman was an interesting contradiction. Outwardly, she didn¡¯t look like anything special, with medium-length auburn hair, not too tall, not too small, not visibly buff and no great beauty. But she carried herself with a confidence that few could match, an air of command that was apparent, even to me. I couldn¡¯t feel any impressive magic on her, making me doubly curious.


    ¡°They saved our lives,¡± Daniel announced, speaking loud enough to be heard in the surrounding houses, ¡°We were trapped in an ambush but they were kind enough to intervene, allowing us to escape with our lives.


    ¡°Then they will have our thanks.¡± the woman nodded her eyes fixated on us, before focusing back on Daniel,¡± But it doesn¡¯t explain why you brought them here,¡± she questioned, her voice sharp again.


    I could see Olivia twitching, about to move forward and intervene when I nudged her with my elbow, getting her attention and subtly shaking my head. Trying to speak here wouldn¡¯t work, we were the outsiders. They had to deal with the initial questions amongst themselves, only then could we make our case.


    ¡°They offered their help and the help of multiple quite powerful spellcasters is nothing to scoff at,¡± Daniel explained, and now the focus was back on us. I felt a surge of discomfort, the sensation of being stripped and analysed to the bone, of being Observed, and reflexively, I pushed against it, obscuring the five of us with a blanket of darkness. They had no right to simply rip what they wanted to know from the system, they could ask, like polite people.


    ¡°Oh?¡± the woman raised an eyebrow, and the sensation briefly intensified, forcing me to match her efforts. I wasn¡¯t pushed into using overflow, but it was quite apparent that she wasn¡¯t weak.


    Out of curiosity, I reciprocated, openly using Observe, only to be rebuffed.


    ¡°Well, at least they are interesting,¡± the woman nodded, focusing on me, ¡°My name is Doris, do you promise to uphold guest rights while our guests?¡± she asked, now a lot more cordial.


    ¡°You can call me Morgana, a Traveller. I will observe hospitality while in your care.¡± I replied, feeling a little awkward at the formality.


    The others gave their own acknowledgement, Doris¡¯ eyebrows rising a little when Olivia introduced herself as a Cleric of Eleutheira and invoked the name of her deity in the promise.


    ¡°Excellent,¡± she nodded, giving us a light bow, ¡°Enter without malice, leave without hindrance,¡± she offered, turning aside a little and inviting us deeper into their village.

 Chapter 589

    ¡°Daniel said you offered your help,¡± Doris asked, after taking over the task of guiding us from Daniel. ¡°What do you have in mind when you offer that? Are we talking about moral support, the creation of magical items, donation of resources, some behind-the-scenes help or something more concrete?¡±


    ¡°That partially depends on what you need,¡± I replied, ¡°We won¡¯t be in the area too long, merely passing through, we still need to venture further south, to Phalladri. We can spare a few days, maybe a week, and help you in that time if you have something worth our while. And I¡¯m not necessarily talking worth our while in terms of gold, if it is a task that has a good chance to grant us a large amount of EXP, gold value can be negotiated.¡±


    ¡°I believe the easiest way would be to have us operate as an independent unit, I doubt trying to integrate the five of us into a larger group would work in the timeframe. We are used to working as a group, so let us work as a group, give us a worthwhile target, information on that target, some gold and support and let us do our thing,¡± I suggested, getting a thoughtful look from Doris.


    ¡°Depending on the target, I would refrain from joining you,¡± Oliva threw in, making me raise an eyebrow. ¡°I will gladly heal your wounded in the meantime, but you always knew the limitations Eleutheria places on me. I cannot enforce my will on others, and I believe that whatever you do to help the rebellion, it will include some of that.¡±


    Olivia¡¯s words were reasonable, if disappointing. But she was right, I had been aware of her limitations, and from the expression on Doris¡¯ face, she hadn¡¯t expected anything different either.


    ¡°The help of an additional healer is always welcome, somehow, there¡¯s always someone who needs aid, and never enough people to provide that aid,¡± Doris shook her head, a sad smile on her face, ¡°Would you mind working with a group to provide healing to the poorest, those most in need? While the temples provide healing, they only provide healing at their place of worship. Places many of the poor and sick simply can¡¯t reach, due to their infirmity and the guards keeping the unwanted out of town.¡±


    ¡°And they call themselves ¡®Servants of All,¡¯¡± Olivia snarled, almost under her breath. The anger in her voice was unmistakable, an emotion I hadn''t heard often from her. She had always been calm and composed, even in the direst of circumstances, so the intense emotion made me raise an eyebrow.


    ¡°I will help however I can,¡± she promised, without giving me a glance.


    ¡°Your help will be greatly appreciated, of that I¡¯m convinced,¡± Doris replied, before focusing back on me, ¡°Now, for you, I¡¯ll have to talk with some of the other leaders about what sort of missions would be most suitable. Can you give me an idea of your capabilities as a group? You can be vague if you want to keep your methods concealed,¡± she asked, the expression on her face making me think that vagueness was almost expected here.


    ¡°I believe our greatest advantage is stealth, maybe with a bit of magical sabotage. Depending on the opponent''s countermeasures for magical assault, we should be able to infiltrate into areas of lesser, maybe even medium, importance and use large-scale magic to cause havoc there, before vanishing back into the cover of darkness,¡± I explained, unwilling to suggest direct confrontations. The best way would be something similar to the night raid we had done together with Dura Firebringer and her orcs, sneak in during the night, strike hard, cause confusion, but never actually engage. If the enemy was unable to see my companions, they couldn¡¯t be attacked.


    ¡°A reasonable course of action, one similar to our usual tactics. Sneak in, take care of business, sneak back out. If possible, without the opponent knowing who was there or why so subtlety and distraction are incredibly useful,¡± Doris nodded, only for me to grimace a little. We could be sneaky, but subtle wasn¡¯t really in our playbook. When I told her as much, she merely shrugged.


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    ¡°If you can¡¯t be subtle, don¡¯t be subtle. You can always act as a distraction, while others do the subtle business, that works just fine,¡± she assured me, though the expression on her face made me think that she even preferred us to be distractions, letting her people move undetected. It also meant that we wouldn¡¯t need to be told too much about their objectives, only a time and location where to attack for the distraction, which might even be a mere ruse. Mrs Wu had told me about attacks to measure response times and habits, trying to learn how an opposing force reacted to certain stimuli without actually committing to an attack. Such tactics could easily waste enemy resources and make them less alert when the actual attack came.


    Doris continued to show us around, casually probing into our background, intentions, abilities and further plans. I let Adra do most of the talking, fading into the background with the excuse that I was a Traveller and thus, my background was rather obvious, I simply didn¡¯t have one. I had literally just appeared in this world, by divine intervention,


    Instead, I focused on the village around me and, more importantly, the faint magic in the background. The longer I was exposed, the more I became aware of it, the incredibly subtle and soft undertone, woven into the scent of the forest, concealing the village by making it feel like part of the forest. It was masterfully done, not with great amounts of power but with incredible care and skill.


    Finally, after gently tugging and sniffing at the patterns for what felt like hours, but may only have been thirty minutes, I finally found a snag, a small artificial regularity in what should be pure, natural flow.


    With a smile on my face, I couldn¡¯t stop myself from following that trace, tracking the pattern back to its origin. Doris spoke up, calling out to me, but I merely waved her off, following the trail I had picked up, with Sigmir hot on my heels. I didn¡¯t try to unravel the magic, that would be akin to burning a book or destroying a painting, but I wanted to see more.


    When I came to what felt like the centre, I stopped, staring at a seemingly unremarkable tree, near the edge of the clearing. It was a pine tree and outwardly, there was nothing special about it. If not for the strange pattern, I wouldn¡¯t have given it another look and even when I did, using Lenore¡¯s sight, there wasn¡¯t anything that stood out to me.


    Reaching out, I tried to touch it, only for a hand to reach out of the tree and catch mine.


    For a moment, I was utterly flabbergasted and before I could react, the hand pushed out further, followed by an arm and, moments later, an entire female body.


    At first, the body was completely naked, a petite figure, roughly my size, only more voluptuous, with light-coloured skin and reddish-brown hair, hanging down her back. The skin was far lighter than any of the humans I had seen so far. The humans all had shades of olive, some more tanned, others less, but none had that shade. Somehow, it reminded me of a cupboard I had in my apartment, it had roughly the same hue.


    ¡°Now, who might you be?¡± the female asked, sounding incredibly curious, ¡°Who are you, to try fondling me?¡±


    ¡°This is Morgana, a guest,¡± Doris replied to the female, glaring at me,¡± A very rude guest, I might add.¡±


    ¡°Oh, I don¡¯t mind her,¡± the female smiled at me, ¡°But I think she¡¯s taken,¡± she added, glancing at Sigmir behind me. Her gaze continued to wander, before settling on Adra.


    ¡°And there¡¯s a sister. You are still wandering, aren¡¯t you?¡± she asked, letting go of my hand, taking a swift step forward and grasping Adra¡¯s hand.


    ¡°I am,¡± Adra nodded, before trying to give a respectful bow, the greeting apparently a lot harder with her hand held by the other female, making her look a little clumsy. With the title given to Adra and the direct comparison, I was now able to identify her as a dryad, without needing to use Observe or something similar. Which meant the tree I had been about to touch was the tree she was bonded to - So I had been about to touch what amounted to her naked body. No wonder I was called rude.


    ¡°You can call me Tani if you like. Welcome to my grove. Do you want to take roots here?¡± the Dryad introduced herself, now completely fixated on Adra. Adra, in turn, looked a little helpless, obviously unsure what to do or what to say. Somehow, seeing the usually composed and confident Adra, suddenly being reduced to the same state I was in far too often made me incredibly happy.


    Reaching out, I created myself a mug of Liquid Moonlight and a couple of thin, waver-like chips of Ice, for good entertainment had to be accompanied by tasty snacks.

 Chapter 590

    Watching Adra and Tani, alongside Rai, was incredibly adorable. There was something naive about Tani, making me think she was either young or inexperienced. And yet, despite that naivety, she somehow managed to pester Adra, pushing and prodding her verbally until Adra could do nothing but stutter around, completely off-balance. Rai tried to help Adra out and intervened, only to get the sharp side of Tani¡¯s tongue, and quickly retreated, leaving Adra to face the verbal onslaught alone.


    It was great entertainment, and from the exasperated expression on Doris¡¯ face, it might not be the first time something like this happened. It made me curious how much of Tani¡¯s behaviour was an act and how much was genuine, but knowing that type of social predator, there was no way to tell. She might not even know herself, the naive mask already completely fused with her personality.


    ¡°What are you munching on?¡± Jenn quietly asked, trying very hard not to disturb the trio. I was just bringing another chip of Ice, this one flavoured with some Darkness- and Death-Magic to my mouth, having started to experiment with different compositions of Astral Power, curious how it would affect the taste.


    ¡°Just some Ice,¡± I replied, just as quietly, and produced a thin, waver-like chip of clear Ice, this one with quite a bit of Darkness, likely giving it a sharp taste. ¡°Want to try?¡± I asked, offering the chip to her.


    She reached forward, the look on her face rather confused at my ability to conjure up snacks, but she took a bite out of the Ice, an expression of curiosity on her face. At the first moment, there was no reaction, but after a second, her eyes bugged out, an expression of disgust on her face.


    Sigmir just gave her a look of distaste and let out a snort, before placing an arm around me, pulling me against her chest.


    ¡°Some people just don¡¯t know how to appreciate things,¡± she muttered, just loud enough for Jenn to hear.


    At the same time, the spectacle between Tani and Adra entered a new round, with Tani now changing her target to Rai, trying to convince him to stay, so that Adra would stay with him. It was quite hilarious, especially because Tani started a full-out charm offensive, flirting outrageously with Rai, making his fur ruffle up in embarrassment.


    ¡°This might take a little while,¡± Doris said, after walking over to Sigmir and me. ¡°Why don¡¯t we speak about the potential operations a little more? You said you¡¯ll be travelling further south, didn¡¯t you?¡± she asked, apparently intent to ignore the spectacle.


    ¡°We do, what do you have in mind?¡± I asked, curious. Sigmir similarly looked at Doris but didn¡¯t comment.


    ¡°Honestly, we need to consider. We might just send you to clear out some of the dangerous locations in the area, places we would like to use but can¡¯t, due to dangerous monsters lairing there. There are a few zones of Wild Magic, do you think you might be able to cleanse one? Otherwise, if it becomes too big, it might attract unwanted attention to the area.¡± she explained, the apparent change in plan confusing me. Before she was all too interested in sending us to cause chaos and disruption, now she was speaking about clean-up of magical hazards? Quite the departure.


    She must have noticed my frown, not that it was terribly well-hidden, and explained.


    ¡°Problem is, I¡¯m not sure we have the ability to move just yet. If we make a big push and fail, there¡¯s going to be an even bigger counter-push. We can¡¯t deal with the full might of the Empire, not without creating the right situation first. We have thousands of trained fighters, spread around dozens of bases. The Empire has legions of soldiers guarding the borders and countless guards keeping order. We can¡¯t fight them all, not if we want to win.¡± she explained, sounding a little resigned, before quietly adding, ¡°And even if we could, I don¡¯t think the price would be worth it.¡±


    ¡°I believe i know what you mean,¡± I nodded understanding. High-level beings had the ability to kill hundreds, if not thousands, but few had the ability to do so without massive damage to the environment. Sure, I might be able to conjure up a frozen, life-devouring mist, sending it against my enemies but it would also destroy everything around them. If a Fire-mage threw a Meteorite, as the largest-scale fire-magic was known as, at an army, the army would perish. And so would everything in a kilometre or two, without considering the potential for later wild magic development.


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    Quite similar to Nuclear War, an all-out magical war wouldn¡¯t be won by those who were right. But by those who would be left.


    By now, the spectacle between Adra and Tani was winding down, or maybe, Tani was getting tired of playing the cat and mouse game with Adra. Either way, I decided it was time to step up and maybe get some information on that most curious concealment magic. Given the subtlety of it all and the way it was anchored within the forest, it was most likely some sort of life magic, or maybe some sub-category, controlled and created by Tani. Biting through my last ice chip, I stepped forward, letting the blend of Darkness, Ice and Death crunch between my teeth.


    ¡°Tani, could I have a word or three?¡± I asked, a grin on my face. If nothing else, she had been incredibly entertaining and as long as she didn¡¯t try to do what she did to Adra to me, I was happy to indulge her a little.


    ¡°You can have as many words as you like, I¡¯ve heard they even made some sort of letter-shaped noodles. If you don¡¯t digest them right, ¡­¡± she began to make an off-colour joke, only for me to raise a hand, stopping her.


    ¡°Please, none of that. Serious conversation or I¡¯ll leave,¡± I warned her, trying to make my stance clear from the beginning. Given how Adra still looked flushed and huffy, I wasn¡¯t about to get into a war of words with Tani.


    ¡°Boooring,¡± Tani complained, but when I raised an eyebrow, she simply blew out a breath and poked her tongue out at me. ¡°But fine,¡± she added, waving her hand and a seat grew out of her tree.


    ¡°What do you want?¡± she asked her entire demeanour shifting, gone the previous naive facade, replaced by a serious, almost predatory glint in her eyes.


    Reciprocating, I waved my hand, coalescing a Throne of Ice, to keep myself on a level with her and sat down.


    ¡°I thought we could discuss concealment-magic, mine seems to work with different principles than yours and while the same is true for Adra, she is not much of a scholar. We discussed some of her abilities in the past but sadly¡­¡± I explained and now there seemed to be a trace of curiosity in Tani¡¯s eyes.


    ¡°Doris said you¡¯re a guest, so I guess we can talk for a bit. I doubt that you¡¯ll learn a lot, but hey, you never know. Maybe I¡¯ll be able to learn something that helps during the winter months, those are hard for me.


    ¡°Maybe, though my concealment is mostly working with Darkness and the boundary with the light,¡± I replied and we were off to the races, discussing how to weave different types of magic into a single whole and how to blend those with the background. Soon after the beginning of our discussion, Doris excused herself, leaving us with Tani and Jenn, who was tasked with taking us to our residence when Tani and I were finished.


    Curiously, it wasn¡¯t my actual magic-ability that let me glean the greatest insights, but what I had learned during my delves into the Astral River and how it permeated the land. For that was how Tani managed to hide a village in the forest, by turning the individual houses into something not much different from trees, in a magical sense. She was, quite literally, hiding the trees within a forest, making it incredibly difficult to detect.


    It was quite the fascinating idea, though sadly one I wouldn¡¯t be able to truly utilise, as it relied on an intimate knowledge of the environment and careful blending of the individual parts into a greater whole. It was simply not suitable to be used on the fly.


    On the other hand, Tani seemed to be fascinated by my understanding of Ice and Snow. My pursuit of the extremes of Ice, trying to Ice that would never melt and be Eternal was completely alien to her. To her, the essence of winter was its temporary nature, that it was a time of rest and endings, but one that would always lead to the renewal of spring.


    The idea that there could be a winter that would never end seemed to be shocking to her, almost impossible to comprehend and very uncomfortable.


    We didn¡¯t stay long on that topic, instead, we focused on something more applicable and practical, namely the utilisation of mist for concealment, magical and mundane. Talking about it made me realise that I had, instinctively, been applying quite a few of her principles to my own working, concealing effects and magic in a greater whole, only where she was hiding trees within a forest, I had been hiding snow within the mist.


    Finally, Tani and I wound down as night started to fall.


    ¡°Thank you for the exchange of knowledge,¡± I gave Tani a light bow, truly grateful. The discussion had been fascinating, and I had learned quite a bit.


    ¡°It has been a pleasure, Morgana,¡± she stood, giving me a bow of her own, ¡°May you always find shade during your travels.¡±


    With those words, she stepped back against her tree, merging back into it, leaving me a tad confused.

 Chapter 591

    It took until the next morning for Doris to return to us. We had been given a nice, little cottage in the middle of town, where everyone could keep an eye on us, and spent the night in comfort. I used that time to delve into the boundary of the Astral River, carefully examining the way Tani had anchored her magic to reality itself, learning quite a bit and gaining two points in Astral Meditation, bringing it to fifty-six. Other than that, the night was wonderfully peaceful.


    We were having breakfast, using our carried rations, when Doris walked up to the cottage.


    ¡°Good morning,¡± she greeted us, looking far too cheerful for the early hour.


    ¡°Morning,¡± I gave her a nod, waving towards one of the empty chairs, ¡°Have a seat. You need some breakfast?¡± I asked, just to be cordial.


    ¡°No, thank you,¡± she waved off, looking at the simple porridge in Sigmir¡¯s bowl, ¡°Though it looks delicious, I already ate,¡± she assured us, managing to keep any possible sarcasm out of her voice.


    ¡°What I¡¯m here for is quite simple,¡± she began, ¡°I got into contact with a couple of others last night, and we decided what we would like to ask of you. Olivia, if you are still willing, we¡¯d ask you to join one of our teams that canvases the remote villages, those places distant from the main trade routes, healing and offering help. You will be posing as Adventurers, so there should be very little danger involved, but obviously, without danger, there¡¯s little opportunity to gain power.¡± she explained, getting a thoughtful nod from Olivia.


    It sounded like our journey with Olivia, temporary as it had always been planned to be, was coming to an end. For better or worse, I wasn¡¯t sure if I was happy or sad about it. On one hand, having her with us had been an excellent safety net and support, allowing me to focus on the more direct and offensive aspects of my magic. On the other hand, there had always been the nagging worry that she wasn¡¯t loyal, that she always had the greater loyalty to her deity, with all that entailed. Either way, it would be an amicable parting.


    ¡°Now for you,¡± Doris looked at the four of us, specifically at me, ¡°You said you want to travel further south and could do some work for us if it is suitable.¡± I nodded at that but didn¡¯t bother to reply verbally, instead I continued to shovel the porridge into my mouth.


    ¡°There¡¯s a section of forest between us and a base near Hatterion that has always been plagued by wild magic, causing a wide variety of weird effects, dancing lights, random discharges of magic and other things. There also seems to be a component that drives people insane, but that part is unconfirmed. By now, it might be a field dungeon, but due to its strange nature, the remote location and a couple of other factors, no faction has taken claim of it.¡± she paused, letting out a sigh, ¡°If you could find a path through the area, or get us some additional information what we are dealing with, we¡¯d be grateful.¡±


    ¡°In addition, the group near Hatterion plans a large-scale raid, you could join as a distraction team, there are a few valuable targets that could be incredibly lucrative to hit. They managed to locate a few vaults, where different nobles try to hide some of their wealth from the Imperial Tax agents. We considered giving the information to the Empire, and if you manage to get in there and steal their treasure, that would add some wonderful trouble to people we don¡¯t like, especially if you manage to get their wealth without letting them realise they were hit. Makes it less efficient as a distraction, but would cause so much more chaos in the long run,¡± she explained, the last part with a wide grin on her face.


    The idea to tell the Imperial Tax agents where the ill-gotten gains of those nobles were, only to take the gains away and let the nobles try convincing the agents that it hadn¡¯t been the nobles that hid the monies sounded like a rather good one. If there was one thing I had learned in my real-world job, it was that tax bureaucrats had no sense of humour, and could be incredibly petty when someone tried to make a fool out of them. In the real world, they often were hampered by various loopholes in the rules they were supposed to enforce and from what I knew, a lot of them hated those loopholes and were all too glad to nail someone that they could catch. Maybe it would be the same on Mundus.


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    ¡°How do we find that other base of yours?¡± I asked, quite certain that they wouldn¡¯t just give out a map to their secret base. Landmarks to meet someone on their side were a possibility, another was to send a guide with us. If I were in their shoes, I would send a guide, simply because such a guide would likely gain quite a bit of EXP on the journey.


    ¡°We debated it, and if you were amicable, we¡¯d like you to take one of ours with you,¡± she replied and I had to control myself to keep from being smug about having the right idea. ¡°We asked for a volunteer and Jenn offered to join you.¡± Hearing that, Sigmir let out a very soft snort, making me raise an eyebrow.


    ¡°We will discuss it amongst the four of us,¡± I replied, neither agreeing nor declining.


    ¡°Another thing,¡± Doris took my response as an end to that part of the discussion and changed the topic, ¡°There¡¯s another traveller among our numbers. He asked if you would be willing to meet and talk with him.¡±


    Now, that was an interesting idea. If I were in that person''s shoes, I would want to keep my involvement as secret as possible, simply because there might be some sort of meta-gaming going on. Being known as a rebel could come with some severe disadvantages and if he had the option to remain hidden, he should certainly take it, not seek out another Traveller.


    That he did so made me automatically put up my guard.


    ¡°I can meet with them,¡± I agreed, already considering what sort of safeguard I might have to put up. ¡°Are they covered under your hospitality?¡±


    ¡°So suspicious of your own people?¡± Doris asked, sounding a little surprised.


    ¡°Always,¡± I nodded, ¡°We Travellers are all individuals, all with our own needs, interests and motivations. Just because someone else is a Traveller, I don¡¯t trust them any more than any other being. Maybe even less, given that I cannot fall back on their cultural background to assume general patterns of behaviour. Not that such prejudices are always true, but they exist for a reason,¡± I explained, only to add, ¡°At least, they exist for a reason most of the time¡± I considered my words for a moment, before changing them even further, ¡°Or maybe they exist for a reason sometimes?¡±


    Shaking my head, I decided not to dwell on the validity of prejudices in comparison to cultural norms any longer and focus on the problem at hand. An unknown Traveller wanted to meet me.


    ¡°What can you tell me about them?¡± I asked, curious how their ally would describe them. If nothing else, it should give me an idea about Doris, depending on how her description compared to the actual person.


    ¡°Leonard is a bit of a strange fellow,¡± she began, her tone rather amused, ¡°Parts of him are incredibly dependable, especially in regards to his work. He loves to work metal and is incredibly talented but in some other ways, he can be a complete dunce.¡± she chuckled, shaking her head, ¡°Extraordinary focus, to the point that there might be a battle going on right next to him and he¡¯d ignore it, trying to get his work done.¡± She let out a sigh, her amusement somewhat fading.


    ¡°Sadly, his focus sometimes takes him in strange directions. He heard about the steam technology of the dwarves, over in Aretia, and decided that he could do something similar. So far, he died three times, trying to make it work and have it explode in his face.¡±


    I could only blink in disbelief at her words. Sure, I had done a few questionable things in my pursuit of magical excellence, but so far, I hadn¡¯t died from it. Almost died, yes, but I had always managed to keep control.


    Looking back at a few of my stunts, I wondered if I might have more in common with that Leonard than I might want to admit.


    ¡°I¡¯ll meet with him,¡± I repeated my earlier reply, curious what kind of person he would be. If nothing else, he might have some ideas in regards to magic, as anyone planning to play as an inventor would pick up a bit of magic, just to keep options open.


    ¡°Great, I¡¯ll send him over once you are done with your breakfast, say in about an hour. That way, you can discuss whether you want to take Jenn with you or if you¡¯d prefer another method,¡± Doris excused herself and it was only after she left that I realised she had basically assumed we¡¯d agree to her arrangements.


    Looking at the others, especially at Olivia, I raised an eyebrow, ¡°Now, what are we going to do? Do we want to work with them, and do you want to leave the group, Olivia?¡± I asked, putting the important question out front.

 Chapter 592

    After Doris left, we all exchanged quiet looks, nobody willing to start. One after the other, we started to look at Olivia, collectively deciding that her plans would have to be settled first. If she decided to stay with us, unlikely as it was, the option to take Jenn with us would fall off the table, as the System had a bias against groups of six or more people.


    For a moment, Olivia just returned our looks, her face impassive, before letting out a soft sigh.


    ¡°It is as you think,¡± she quietly began, a soft smile on her face, ¡°It¡¯s time for us to part ways. I¡¯ve been gone from my home for decades and it looks like, it¡¯s time for me to return and stay.¡±


    ¡°You told us in the beginning, that you¡¯d only travel with us for a time. I guess that time is now up.¡± I accepted her decision, not really surprised by it. There had been a sliver of hope, or maybe expectation, that she¡¯d decide to stay with us after all, but given that these people were fighting for the very thing her Goddess embodied, she had to follow her path.


    ¡°Regrettable,¡± I added with a nod, ¡°But I can only wish you the best and hope that you find what you seek here.¡±


    ¡°Now, we need to consider what that means for the four of us.¡± I changed the topic, focusing on Adra and Rai. I was certain Sigmir would follow me anywhere, into the very depths of hell if so needed and there was such a place, but Adra and Rai were here for their own reasons.


    Adra had been seeking power and experiences, with the ultimate goal to settle down somewhere. The offer Tani had given her might be an interesting one if she could accept the pushy Dryad, something she had to decide for herself.


    Similarly, Rai had started out with us because of the training I had given him, but by now, his path had diverged far enough to make that training relatively useless. While Darkness-Magic had given him the start on his path, by now his class abilities had mostly subsumed the general magic I had taught him. He might be able to expand on it in the long term, possibly giving him more or stronger options when it came to the Divides, but that was only a vague possibility. There was no need for him to follow me, only a notion of debt, duty and friendship keeping him with me. Well, and his relationship with Adra, adorable as it occasionally was.


    ¡°We know you plan to go to Arbotoma next, but you have yet to tell us why you are heading there. There has to be a good reason for someone to travel around the world like that, and don¡¯t tell me you just want to travel the worth, to put truth to the title of Traveller,¡± Adra asked, her voice rather amused, as if she was aware there wouldn¡¯t be a response.


    ¡°There¡¯s something I need to do in Arbotoma, in the Mountains of Ice. What and where exactly, I can¡¯t tell you, as I don¡¯t know myself,¡± I let out a sigh, trying to misdirect them by conjuring up a bit of snow, letting it flutter around my hand.


    For a moment, Adra studied me, probably realising that I wasn¡¯t telling them everything, she knew me well enough by now, but after the moment passed, she simply nodded, accepting my lie. Or maybe deciding that travelling to Arbotoma was the right call for her, especially in light of the interest Phraan had shown in her. If nothing else, she would be welcomed there.


    ¡°I think the easiest way would be to take Jenn, or whomever, with us. With Olivia leaving, there won¡¯t be a real problem, we just need to remind them that if the person they send with us is incompetent, she won¡¯t make it to the other side. Maybe we should ask for some landmarks, just in case,¡± Adra reasoned, her callous attitude making me chuckle.


    ¡°Yes, that would work. Though we really need a bit more information on that area of wild magic, depending how and why it has formed might be crucial if we want to cleanse the entire thing, or at least create a safe path through it,¡± I mused, my mind already trying to form models how such a thing could happen.


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    So far, I only had direct knowledge of a few wild magic phenomena. There was the one from Dura Firebringer¡¯s tales, the necropolis she had explored in the past. Or, from our recent past, the entirety of the Dorrian Mountains, maybe even the Shadowcleft as individual location. Or, from direct exposure, the glacial valley, where I had accidentally caused the wind magic of a swarm of Windraptors to resonate out of control. In a way, the Windswept Plains could also count, but the magic there was widely distributed and incredibly low level, making it dubious.


    With just those few examples, I could already see that not all wild magic was created equal. No matter how powerful those raptors had been and how deeply I had managed to tap into the primordial power of the glacier below, there was no way for a bunch of birds and my past self to create a truly powerful, permanent effect, something strong enough that even other casters could only watch it awed impotence. On the other hand, the necropolis had been there for centuries, never conquered, never cleansed, still defiling the lands around it, constantly creating vengeful Undead.


    The best two examples for comparison might be the Necropolis and the Dorrian Mountains, both were constantly creating Undead, affecting a large area and were ancient. The Dorrian Mountains had, allegedly, been created due to the amount of suffering and death occurring there, as countless people were thrown into combat and died there, their death permanently staining the area.


    Which made me wonder, how did that weird, controlling intelligence I suspected come to be? The force that had chased us out originally, sending Undead Hunters after us in an incredibly predictable pattern? Was it a God, or maybe proto-god, or something else entirely? Or, thinking on a meta-level, it might simply be some future content, something to explore for high-level players and there simply was no deeper in-world reason.


    Shaking my head, I pushed those questions away, deciding to gather more information on the area we were supposed to be heading in and deal with it as appropriate. If the quest we would hopefully get didn¡¯t rate it as impossible, deity or something along those lines, making the attempt would hopefully be fine. If it was rated as deadly, we¡¯d have to consider but we had accomplished deadly quests in the past, so there was a chance. There always was a chance.


    ¡°Anyway, I¡¯ll go and talk to that Leonard fellow, maybe you can find out some more about the area we are supposed to head into? Anything would be useful, tales, stories but especially reports from people who¡¯ve been there.


    ¡°I¡¯ll go with you,¡± Sigmir instantly decided, rising from her chair before I had a chance to get up myself.


    ¡°Sure, I¡¯ll happily bring you, I¡¯m not sure what that guy wants anyway. Maybe just a discussion, maybe something else, who knows?¡± I shrugged, rising myself.


    Finding Leonard was a lot easier than expected, we only had to ask one of the locals to be directed toward one of the outlying buildings. There was a weird smile on their face when they directed me and the words, ¡°You cannot miss it,¡± were slightly suspicious, too, but once I reached the area, I could only nod my head. I really couldn¡¯t miss it.


    There, near the edge of the village, was an incredibly strange building. Parts of it looked like a smithy, others like a tannery and as we approached, the smells seemed to confirm that thought. It, quite frankly, stank to the high heavens, making me think that it had been located here so the prevailing winds would carry the stench away from the village, hopefully someplace it wouldn¡¯t hurt anyone.


    Other parts looked more akin to a loading dock mixed with a woodworking shop, giving me the impression that it was a car garage, only transmuted into working with a lot of wood, not sheet metal. There even was a wooden crane, currently holding up some strange contraption of wood, metal and stone. Blinking, I activated Lenore¡¯s sight, looking at the odd building through her eyes and, as I had expected, magically it was just as weird as on a mundane level. It gave me a profound appreciation for Tani and her mastery of magic, if I hadn¡¯t been literally standing in front of the building, I wouldn¡¯t have noticed anything amiss. But given that I was in front of it, the riot of magical streams almost made me dizzy, none were particularly powerful, but there were many of them, making me think of a mad painter, throwing paint at a canvas to see what stuck.


    Just as I was about to walk to the door and knock, the sound of an explosion rang out of the building, making me switch into combat mode, six of the Blades of the Northern Wind hovering behind my shoulders.

 Chapter 593

    The thunderous sound of the explosion was still ringing in my ears, as the door of the strange house in front of us flew open and a soot-covered figure came dashing out. My first instinct was to protect myself and Sigmir, making me jump back and position the blades in front of me, forming them into a petal-like shield. Sigmir moved in a similar fashion, cautiously blocking in front of me, ready to move from defence into offence at the drop of a hat.


    Given that the soot-covered guy wasn¡¯t wearing any armour, there were no weapons visible and I could not detect any sort of powerful magical emanations coming from him that hinted at the use of serious magic, I refrained from following the maxim that the best defence was a good offence. Frankly, the guy looked almost like a stereotypical mad scientist gone steampunk, it made me wonder if it was on purpose.


    He stopped a couple of metres from the door, ignoring the dark smoke still pouring out of it, bent over and started coughing his lungs up. It looked quite pitiful, but it gave me a bit of time to look closer. He was wearing a simple, undyed coat of some unknown material and leather goggles with a variety of arms sticking from the headband, all holding extra lenses that looked like they could be moved in front of his eyes, similar to a monocle or magnifying glass. A glance with Lenore¡¯s sight showed me there was delicate magic in all of those goggles but from afar, I was unable to see any details.


    Sigmir and I watched for a minute or two, until the strange guy stopped coughing and slowly pushed himself into an upright position, still wheezing from the exertion.


    ¡°Leonard, I presume?¡± I asked, stepping up a little. I was still vigilant but had moved the blades from the shield-like petal formation in front of me into a less threatening one, where they were hovering behind my shoulders.


    ¡°Whu¡­? Who?¡± he looked around confused and I noticed that soot had completely covered his goggles black, making them impossible to see through. As I was watching, he reached up, wiping across them to clear some of it, only managing in smearing it around. Finally, he opened a clasp at the back, letting them drop to hang around his neck and look at me directly.


    ¡°Whoa, you¡¯re Morgana!¡± he exclaimed, only to start coughing again, the sudden shout too much for his still strained lungs.


    ¡°That, I am.¡± I nodded, chuckling a little at the display. Finally, he managed to get his breath back and under control, looking at me with a mix of awe, curiosity and longing.


    ¡°Come in, come in, I¡¯ve got a few things I want to ask you!¡± he exclaimed, reaching out to grab me. Instinctively, I stepped back, dodging his reaching arm, only for the arm to get stopped well before ever getting hear me, the spike of Sigmir¡¯s axe blocking the way.


    ¡°If you want to keep the hand, don¡¯t try grabbing her,¡± Sigmir told him, her voice completely devoid of emotions, no anger, no passion, merely a freezingly cold warning. And yet, that cold voice made my heart beat a little faster.


    ¡°Oh, okay,¡± Leonard nodded, looking rather confused. ¡°Well, if you would follow me?¡± he asked, slowly backing away, trying to invite us in.


    ¡°What a strange male,¡± Sigmir muttered under her breath, making me chuckle as we followed the weird guy into the equally weird house.


    Inside, the air was still filled with smoke and soot, pouring out of one of the doors in a thick, black cloud. While I was small enough to be mostly below the smoke, Sigmir was getting a face full of it. Frowning, I mentally asked Lenore for help and she obediently shifted out of her Hallow, emerging on my shoulder and quickly cast a wind spell, causing a strong wind to blow through the building, dispersing the smoke.


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    And causing Leonard to panic, ¡°Stop, stop, my notes!¡± he yelled, making Lenore stop her magic halfway, leaving quite a bit of smoke still polluting the air around us. There were also sheaves of paper, fluttering in the wind, dancing like blown leaves.


    ¡°Dammit, I¡¯ll have to clean that up later,¡± Leonard cursed, before opening one of the doors and calling us in.


    Inside was a simple kitchen, only that half of the kitchen looked more like some sort of alchemist¡¯s laboratory, making me wonder if the guy combined the two disciplines. However, looking at the general state of hygiene in the area, I also made a mental note not to consume anything I hadn¡¯t conjured up myself. While I might have a decently high Vitality and Endurance, I had no interest in finding out how well those attributes protected me from disease.


    ¡°Have a seat, please,¡± he gestured to two of the chairs, before walking back out. Sigmir and I sat down, not quite sure what was going on. I could hear him bustle around in other parts of the house, maybe cleaning up or something and idly played with Sigmir¡¯s fingers, gently caressing and teasing them. Finally, after a few minutes, he returned, plopping down across the table from the two of us.


    ¡°Morgana, I saw the last reel and heard that halfling mention your name. Can you give me some details, please?¡± he asked, his voice filled with anticipation and longing. Unbridled curiosity was shining from his eyes, almost causing sparks to spontaneously appear around his head.


    ¡°That entirely depends on what sort of details you want. I don¡¯t know how exactly she did what she did, but I can make educated guesses. However, I won¡¯t blindly share the ideas we discussed in the past and how I think she expanded upon them, those secrets are hers to keep or share,¡± I tried to slow down his enthusiasm from the start, to make sure there were no false expectations. I wouldn¡¯t just give away Malachite¡¯s work, not after she had done the hard part and demonstrated what was possible. Replicating someone else¡¯s success was always easier than breaking new ground.


    I could see Leonard deflate, but he nodded. ¡°Fair,¡± he let out a sigh, ¡°I guess I have to be content with that.¡±


    With a nod, I began to share the very basics of Alchemy, on a level he most likely already understood and from there, I slowly began to explain the direction in which Malachite had gone. From the questions he asked, it was obvious that he had some understanding of it and was able to follow along and likely extrapolate from there, but I didn¡¯t feel I had given him too much to go on. It would still take a lot of work to get anywhere close to the things Malachite had been working on and was likely now expanding on.


    Finally, after a while and two mugs of Liquid Moonlight to keep my throat moisturised, Leonard let out yet another sigh.


    ¡°I think I can see where she¡¯s going and from what I saw in the ¡®reel, I believe I even understand some of the mechanisms involved,¡± he shook his head again, an expression of awe on his face, ¡°Using opposite forces, to create resonance, causing an exponential build-up from the Astral, until saturation and catastrophe are reached,¡± he sighed once more, a look of longing in his eyes.


    ¡°If you are interested, I might be able to introduce the two of you, so you can discuss your different approached to the topic?¡± I suggested, quite interested in what would happen if the two of them got together and going. If I managed to set their meeting up in my capsule space, I would be able to listen in and while I wasn¡¯t focused on Alchemy, the principles could be applied to magic as well, at least to a degree. Maybe there¡¯d be quite a bit of utility in their discussion.


    ¡°You would do that?¡± he asked, his earlier dejection utterly gone. ¡°That would be so great!¡±


    ¡°Well, I might, if you tell me something about your work,¡± I challenged him, an eyebrow raised. My challenge must have been exactly the right or the wrong thing. Either way, it was enough to get him to let out a stream of consciousness, words pouring from his mouth without break, as he enthusiastically described his efforts to merge woodworking, smithing, alchemy and pure magic. His goal was to make magical tanks, or at least, that was what it sounded like. There was something in there about walkers, mechas and similar things, but by that point, his ideas had left the realm of possibility behind, diverging firmly into pure fantasy and dreams. Why one would want to make a steam-powered, giant robot was beyond me, but it sounded very much like that was his ultimate goal.


    After a while, I decided that putting him together with Mal would be the best thing to do, at least if Mundus survived the result. Either way, it would be interesting.

 Chapter 594

    By early afternoon, we all met again, comparing the information we had found about the place we were supposed to clean up. Sadly, the more we talked, the more it became obvious that the information we had managed to gather wasn¡¯t quite making sense. Some of it meshed well, painting the picture of a magical forest, inhabited by strange spirits, what some called Fey. The image presented was one of mischievous, but ultimately innocuous creatures that merely wanted to exist in their own, little corner of the world. Other tales were much darker, speaking of stolen children, dark dealings and horrific monsters that tore honest people apart.


    Which of those two pictures was the right one, we had no way of knowing, but I had a feeling it would be neither. Either way, we just had to travel through the area and, if at all possible clear a path. Or remove the obstacle entirely, but that wasn¡¯t the preferred way of handling things.


    When we retreated to our cottage for dinner, Doris came to meet up with us again, just like she had in the morning.


    ¡°Good Evening,¡± she greeted us, her usual, polite smile on her face. If I wasn¡¯t aware that she was amongst the leaders of a rebel base, I would think her some sort of customer service representative, trying to keep a diverse set of personalities from causing too much trouble. Calm, polite, professional but never speaking so much that she got herself into trouble. ¡°Given your inquiries over the day, I presume you are going to take the quest I offered you?¡± she asked, after the usual exchange of pleasantries.


    ¡°We plan to at least take a look, we won¡¯t promise more than that. It highly depends on the System¡¯s rating of danger and how we rate it ourselves, once we are close enough to actually take a look,¡± Adra replied, following the previously agreed script. Given that Doris was quite adept at negotiations, I had decided to take a step back and let Adra handle things as much as possible.


    ¡°That¡¯s all we can ask for,¡± Doris nodded in acceptance, ¡°Now, to make this formally, do you accept Jenn as a member of your party?¡± she asked, looking at the five of us. There was some apprehension in my mind, I barely knew Jenn and she wasn¡¯t really an asset to us. From what I¡¯d heard, she was a reasonably competent fighter, with a bit of training as a tracker, her skill-set quite similar to Adra, only without the powerful dryad magic to build upon. Jenn apparently had some minor skills to hide that bordered on magical but weren¡¯t quite there yet. Maybe in the future, with some instruction, she would manage to get abilities somewhat close to Rai¡¯s, if she had the affinity for them, but maybe not.


    Either way, for now, she was weak and not terribly skilled, making her a burden. But sadly, the burden was the one who knew where to go and would likely act as a leash on us as well.


    ¡°We accept,¡± I formally replied, after getting prodded by Adra. Intent and perception were the key in the formality, and the system recognised me as the group¡¯s leader, so I had to act as it.


    ¡°Thank you, I accept entrance into your group,¡± Jenn nodded and there was a faint change, subtle and barely noticeable, but she became a little more familiar to me. Not in some powerful way, but a soft and gentle nudge, connecting us just a little. If the connection between Sigmir and me was a thick, powerful rope, strong enough to anchor a ship, the freshly formed connection was more akin to a string of twine, easily snapped, more a reminder than a restraint.


    ¡°And with that done, I would ask you to clear a path through the Forlorn Forrest. A safe and hidden road to our other outpost would give us massive advantages, especially when it comes to the evasion of hostile forces.¡± As Doris finished her words, a blue box appeared before us, giving us the details.


    <table style="width: 90.0442%">


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 99.7531%; text-align: center" colspan="2">Quest Alert!</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td style="text-align: center" colspan="2">Forlorn Road</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 49.8765%; text-align: center">Quest Difficulty</td>


    <td style="width: 49.8765%; text-align: center">Hard</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td style="text-align: center" colspan="2">


    The Free People have asked you to clear them a path through the Forlorn Forest.


    </td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 49.8765%; text-align: center">Quest Reward</td>


    <td style="width: 49.8765%; text-align: center">EXP, Information on a valuable location</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.


    From the corner of my eyes, I could see Jenn tensing up for a moment, visibly swallowing, before reaching forward in an all too familiar gesture.


    After a quick glance at the others, I repeated that same gesture, accepting the quest and looking at Doris again.


    ¡°We shall do as you ask,¡± I formally addressed her, getting a smile in return.


    ¡°Thank you for that,¡± she looked at Olivia, ¡°If you don¡¯t mind, we¡¯d send you out tomorrow, there¡¯s going to be a group heading out. When would it be convenient for you to head out?¡± she asked, now focusing back at us. While she wasn¡¯t quite kicking us out, it was quite obvious that she wanted us to leave and take care of that problem as soon as possible. Or maybe, she just wanted us to leave.


    ¡°I believe we can set out tomorrow, too,¡± I looked at Adra, Sigmir and Rai, to confirm their thoughts on the matter. They all nodded, while I briefly considered what supplies I was carrying in my bag. Given the local laws about hunting, we needed to get some extra, as there was little possibility to head into town.


    ¡°Jenn, what do you need to prepare if we want to head out tomorrow? And could you spare some time for us later, I believe we need to find out just how competent you are in a fight If you are travelling with us.¡± I asked her, mentally dismissing Doris.


    ¡°I have most of my things packed, I can easily be ready in the morning,¡± Jenn promised, looking eagre and scared at the same time.


    ¡°Excellent,¡± I nodded, ¡°About that training?¡± I prodded and she accepted.


    After dinner, Sigmir and I headed to one of the clearings with Jenn. It was used for training, so there was a bit of equipment there.


    ¡°Sigmir, why don¡¯t you test her abilities first?¡± I asked, conjuring up a blunt Axe of Ice for her to use. It wasn¡¯t a Lok¡¯Nar, the weight would cause serious injuries even with a blunt edge, more something to give Jenn some reminders if needed.


    Jenn prepared herself, wielding a morningstar, a shield along with sturdy leather armour, reinforced with some metal. It was quite similar to Sigmir, only less well-made than her dwarven-made equipment.


    Sigmir let Jenn show her stuff first, dodging, blocking and working defensively, merely using some feints and jabs to keep her on her toes. That went for a minute or two until Sigmir started to actively fight, slowly at first but quickly speeding up and forcing Jenn into a more and more difficult position. For once, Sigmir wasn¡¯t fighting to win a battle or training to help a partner, she was fighting to find out how competent her foe was.


    Some might compare it to torture, and Jenn was certainly receiving some painful blows, but far more than that, Sigmir was pushing her to the absolute limit, forcing her to fight as well as she could, or suffer some painful, and at times humiliating, blows.


    Finally, after a good ten minutes of brutal training, far worse than anything Mrs Wu had ever done to me, Jenn was sprawled on the ground, some unbidden tears in her eyes and a lot of bruises and welts all over her body. Sigmir had been careful not to cause lasting wounds, but the pain Jenn was feeling had to be intense.


    ¡°She¡¯s not bad,¡± Sigmir judged, looking down at the panting figure, ¡°Why don¡¯t you heal her up and test her yourself?¡± she asked, a vicious smile on her face. Nodding, I stepped up to Jenn and placed a hand on her shoulder to send my magic into her body. I had to leave it to Sigmir, she had beaten Jenn black and blue, to the point that I doubted she¡¯d be able to move for a couple of days without healing magic. But luckily, I had just the magic to help her.


    A few minutes later, Jenn was still covered in a cold sweat from the pain, but her body was no longer bruised, only exhausted.


    ¡°Get up, now you can show me what you got,¡± I challenged her, ¡°And better step up, I¡¯m only a feeble Sorceress, so don¡¯t think I¡¯ll be as gentle as Sigmir was,¡± I added, noticing that the sweat suddenly intensified, even as she forced herself into a standing position.


    My method was very similar to Sigmir¡¯s and I pushed Jenn more and more, even using Blood Magic to speed both of our bodies up, simply to let her experience the possibility. Granted, I wasn¡¯t kind enough to constantly heal her, letting her feel the pain of her body tearing itself apart as she was forced to push it beyond her limit, but it was a lesson that would stick.


    By the time I was done with her, she was more dead than alive, fainting away the moment I let the magic that kept her going fade.


    ¡°She¡¯s got a bit of potential,¡± I judged, making sure that she¡¯d recuperate during the night. Healing wounds you caused yourself was always the easiest, especially if you were careful how you caused those wounds.


    ¡°They say pain is the best teacher,¡± Sigmir smiled, as we started to walk back to our cottage, ¡°I reckon she has learned a lot,¡±

 Chapter 595

    Compared to the way Olivia had entered our companionship, the way she departed was quiet, almost causal and with little fanfare. Two groups, one solely composed of humans, one composed of the four of us, plus our new guide Jenn, met up in front of the rebel village early in the morning.


    There was a moment of hesitation and Olivia walked up to Rai, giving him a hug and quietly saying something into his ears, quiet enough so only he could hear. Then, she moved on to Adra and Sigmir, repeating the process, until she reached me.


    ¡°May you always roam free, my friend,¡± she quietly whispered, ¡°But don¡¯t forget that the destination is not the important part, it is the one you are travelling with,¡± she added and I could see her glance towards Sigmir.


    ¡°I will keep your words in mind,¡± I replied, ¡°May you find what you seek,¡± I added, speaking equally quiet. She pulled back, taking a few steps back so she could easily see all five of us.


    ¡°Farewell, my friends,¡± she told us. We all bid her farewell, too, and she turned, walking out of our lives on her own path.


    ¡°We should start as well, we have some distance to cover,¡± Adra sighed after Olivia was no longer in sight.


    There was nothing more to be said or done and so, without delay, we started on our way as well. I could feel a subtle sensation lingering in the magic around us, the faint smell of pine needles teasing my nose, making me think that a certain Dryad was quite attentive to our departure. Or, more likely, was quite interested in Adra and her departure. Curious what would happen, I softly pushed back, feeling a brief sensation of contact and connection, before it faded away, leaving me rather amused.


    Travelling with Jenn was both amusing and disappointing at the same time. Amusing, because nothing really changed. Given her lower level, a part of me had expected that she¡¯d become a burden, dragging our speed down but thanks to her martial leanings and training, she could keep up, if barely. Disappointing, because nothing really changed¡­


    When it came to hunting, Adra was still the primary, with Sigmir and Rai occasionally assisting her, when it came to navigation, we all could easily plot the direction and keep it, using a wide variety of methods. For me, I could constantly feel the Moon¡¯s presence, giving me a guiding beacon, augmented by Lenore¡¯s innate abilities to navigate and find her path.


    When it came to training, Jenn was purely in the student role, none of her abilities significant enough to give any of us lessons.


    Her role was, disappointingly, that of a mascot and not a particularly cute one at that.


    But at least she tried.


    We travelled through the forest for a few days, slowly getting to know and understand each other, or rather, we got to know and got used to Jenn. It turned out, her story in life was tragic in its mundanity. Her parents used to be farmers, one year their harvest was bad, the family was starving and the father decided to do something about it - and got caught.


    He went into the mines to work off his sentence, the mother had to try and make ends meet, overworking herself and falling sick, dying within a few years, leaving Jenn and her older brother on the streets where they got recruited by the thieves that doubled as an arm of the Free People. Amusingly, the gang that recruited them was called Robin¡¯s Hood, the name making me laugh despite myself. She looked rather insulted by my laughter but a brief explanation about the amazing coincidence was enough to assuage her irritation.


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    But it made me wonder once more, how had Pantheon created this world? Small tidbits, such as that name, made me think it was deliberately crafted by hands, by people who had the humour to include such easter eggs. But the sheer scope made that nigh impossible, the world of Mundus was simply far too large for that. It would be akin to trying to write the complete history of the World, using just a few writers. Every person was the main character of their own story in life, but to write those stories, past, present and future? The scope was incredible. Impossibly so.


    But an algorithm couldn¡¯t have humour, could it? The question brought a headache to the front of my mind that I had stridently and forcibly ignored since meeting Sigmir, how intelligent were the Natives? If there was a controlling intelligence behind the curtain, a Deus in Machina, so to speak, what did that mean for Sigmir? Was she merely a sock-puppet of that being?


    One evening, after Lenore had taken off to stretch her wings, I decided to experiment a little. If there was a mind behind the curtain, could I contact said mind?


    And if I could, would I be able to find out anything in regards to Sigmir?


    Just mentally asking the question made me a little uncomfortable for a variety of reasons, one of which was the fear of the unknown. While I had taken a few computing classes in University, I had forgotten quite a bit of it, but even if I remembered all of it, I couldn¡¯t even begin to fathom the technical miracle that Pantheon Entertainment had wrought with Road to Purgatory and Mundus. I had, quite literally, no idea what limitations or motivations the intelligence behind the curtain might have. I could project my own mind and mindset onto it but that was likely a foolish endeavour, for many reasons.


    But my best bet. If such a being had the capacity for humour, it had to have some capacity for empathy, unless it was simply using a large database of content and creating new jokes based on the patterns involved. If such a creature had empathy, it might also have curiosity.


    It was a vague hope, but I wanted to try it anyway.


    A part of me was apprehensive when I closed my eyes, letting my mind drift downwards, into the Astral River. It was the closest I could get to the other side of the curtain, so to speak, with the hope that the Intelligence on the other side could hear me. In addition, there might be fewer people in the Astral River, so I assumed that events there would rate higher interest in a controlling intelligence, adding yet another assumption to the stack.


    But what to say? And how to say it?


    Following the idea that the simplest solution should be tried first, I decided to simply call out a greeting. Nothing more, nothing less.


    With the idea that the Astral River, that ghostly mirror of Mundus, was the key, I decided to follow the rules of the place, using Astral Power to communicate. Focusing on a few, simple concepts in my mind, I pushed out Astral Power, trying to let my magic speak for me, as it returned to the Astral River.


    At the same time, I drew in fresh power, trying to channel it through me and create a signal, a call, to that controlling intelligence I hoped for.


    Seconds passed and slowly crawled on, the sheer amount of Astral Power I was channelling, straight from the Astral River and back into it, weighing me down. My body became a mere conduit for the reality around me, nothing more than a vessel through which power was flooding.


    As seconds turned to minutes, I felt my mind slowly fading, the connection only kept with sheer willpower and focus, the desire to keep going and find that hope.


    But sometimes, even the strongest will and the sharpest focus weren¡¯t enough. My mind was fading but as it was fading, I thought there was something. A scent, one that I had detected before, impossibly distant and faint, but oh-so-familiar.


    With one last push, I forced my mind to keep going, to send out one last pulse of greeting.


    One last shout into the void.


    The shout echoed, but whether there was someone to hear me, I had no idea. My mind was exhausted and my will spent. The Astral River around me was fading away, the streams and streamers of power disappearing from my perception. I couldn¡¯t hold on any longer and Darkness, the comfortable Darkness, embraced me, as I fell unconscious.


    But why did I feel that the Darkness was somewhat gentler, more comfortable, than ever before? Almost like a motherly caress?

 Chapter 596

    When I woke back up, I was lying in Sigmir¡¯s comfortable embrace. When I tried to move, stinging pain in my arm stopped me, making me hiss in discomfort, catching Sigmir¡¯s attention.


    ¡°Love, you¡¯re awake,¡± her voice was gentle as she spoke, though filled with a mix of relief and reprimand, ¡°Are you alright?¡±


    ¡°I think so,¡± I tried moving again, only for the stinging pain to return. ¡°Though my arm hurts,¡± I admitted, leaning against her chest. My Astral Power had mostly recovered, but not fully, making me wonder how long I had been out.


    ¡°You really shouldn¡¯t do your experiments while sitting on the high branches,¡± Sigmir gently chided me, sounding both exasperated and relieved at the same time. ¡°You overdid it again and fell from your tree. What if next time, you don¡¯t hurt your arm but break your neck?¡±


    The mental image of that made me flush with embarrassment. It was one thing to die due to a magical experiment, encroaching into the realm of a God to go awry and kill you, it was a whole different story to die by falling off a tree.


    ¡°Thanks for collecting me,¡± I snuggled in, drawing on my recovered Astral Power to repair the injury. It wasn¡¯t grave, a simple fracture, and while my Blood Magic wasn¡¯t efficient at recovering those, with enough magical brute force, it was possible.


    ¡°Always,¡± she quietly promised me, hugging me close to her.


    As my bone was slowly fusing back together, I looked into my log, curious if I had gained anything. There had been that strange sensation towards the end and I wondered if there were any hints in the log.


    Sadly, the only new entries were the increases of my Astral Meditation skill, rising from fifty-six to fifty-nine. A nice boost, but not a clue that allowed me to understand this world. Maybe I should have expected that it wouldn¡¯t be this easy to peek behind the curtain, but I had hoped.


    ¡°I failed,¡± I sighed, feeling a little morose.


    ¡°Shouldn¡¯t you be used to that by now?¡± Sigmir asked, and I felt a soft chuckle shake her chest. ¡°I mean, of all your experiments, doesn¡¯t the vast majority end in failure, with a small gain in knowledge?¡±


    ¡°Well, yeah,¡± I admitted, not too happy about that quota.


    ¡°Your willingness and ability to keep trying is what makes you a great Sorceress,¡± Sigmir stated with utmost conviction in her voice, ¡°Combined with your willingness to take insane risks, as much as it pains me,¡± she added, her voice a mix of worry and mischief.


    ¡°You know I won¡¯t die,¡± I reminded her, mentally checking that my broken arm had set correctly.


    ¡°And yet, I worry every time you get hurt,¡± she replied, pulling me closer to her.


    There was nothing I could say to that, nothing that mattered. Instead, I remained silent and simple cuddled with her, letting myself get lulled into sleep by her presence and the steady beat of her heart.


    The next day, Jenn pointed a particularly shaped hill out to us, telling us that it was one of the most important landmarks. It wasn¡¯t terribly impressive, merely an odd formation of rock, but it sat close to the area of Wild Magic we were supposed to investigate and hopefully cleanse.


    My first instinct upon knowing that we were near was to call for a stop. If at all possible, I had no desire to expose the whole group to some strange magic, not if I could help it. With a few practised motions, I conjured up my Throne, getting a strange look from Jenn as I did.


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    ¡°I¡¯ll take a look from here,¡± I promised the others, sitting down on my Frozen Throne, the Crown of the Northern Wind sitting proudly on my head.


    With the others watching, I began to swiftly construct the now-familiar magic in my mind and the shadows beneath me started to squirm. While there was still light out, the forest had enough shadows to allow for some scrying, though far less than I could accomplish at night.


    An unkindness of shadow-constructs, formed into Ravens, took off from beneath my throne, the images feeding back into my mind, making me a little dizzy. It was akin to watching multiple videos at the same time, trying to pay full attention to each of them. Without Lenore to monitor the construct¡¯s movement and direct them, I wouldn¡¯t have been able to get anywhere.


    The swift-moving ravens only needed a few minutes to cross the distance to the area we were supposed to explore, though sadly, there was little to actually see. The forest looked just like it had before, even after flying a few minutes into the area, maybe the forest was a little more lush and green, but nothing truly special. No signs saying ¡®Wild Magic Forest, keep out,¡¯ or maybe some sort of hint about what was going on. Just a lot of trees, shrubs and insects.


    Finally, I noticed a bit of movement through one of the constructs and focused my attention on its vision. Between the leaves of one of the trees was some creature, I couldn¡¯t clearly see it and before I could get closer or try anything, there was a flash and the construct I had been looking through was destroyed. Losing the connection, especially while focusing on it, gave me a brutal headache, as if an icepick was driven into my skull, but sadly what was done was done.


    Drawing back my mind, I let the other constructs fade, not planning to expose myself further.


    ¡°There are creatures there, alright,¡± I told the others, probably sounding rather grumpy. ¡°And they either don¡¯t like getting spied on or are reflexively destroying my shadow-constructs,¡± I added, looking around the area we were in.


    ¡°We should find a spot to prepare camp, we won¡¯t be heading into the area for now. We really need more information, or we might die without knowing how or why,¡± I shook my head, using a wave of my hand to dissolve my Throne. ¡°Let¡¯s get to work.¡±


    After looking around for a bit, we found a nicely secluded spot, a wide clearing with a pond in the middle of it. Lenore, Adra and I worked together to make sure no strange magic creatures called that pond home before all of us started to set up a base camp.


    Compared to our normal camps, what we set up now was a little more involved. Instead of planning to simply rest for a night, we now wanted to have a fixed base from which we could head out to explore and we were in potentially hostile territory. While there was nothing that hinted at the creatures and magic of the Wild Magic area being able to leave it, there was nothing that guaranteed that they couldn¡¯t. Caution was advised and so, more effort had to be invested.


    Rai and Jenn helped Sigmir to prepare the camp itself, while I began moving around the area, carefully measuring and setting up magical alarms. It wasn¡¯t something I had actually studied myself, but luckily, the Grandmother¡¯s Grimoire had a few useful spells for that. Nothing fancy, just a weave of magic I could spin between anchors, alerting me if it was broken by another living thing.


    Adra was working in a similar fashion, setting up her own early-warning system, trying to keep us safe from detection and harm. Neither of us was truly skilled at this, but together, we managed to weave something that should protect us.


    Finally, once night had fallen, I summoned my throne once more, Sigmir remaining nearby to protect me. Compared to earlier in the day, I was even more cautious, creating an orb of Shadows, modelled after the Water Mirror spell from the Grimoire and linked that orb to a shadow construct. It was something I had used in the past to create a cut-out between me and the scrying construct, keeping me safe.


    Once that was done, Lenore manifested on my shoulder and together, we let the raven soar into the night. Hopefully, the night would allow us to see more of that strange forest, maybe find out what was waiting for us between those ancient trees.


    Sadly, even after travelling for almost half an hour, the only difference we could see from above was that the trees were steadily growing taller, according to Lenore¡¯s judgement. Given that we had little way to compare them, I could only trust her expertise.


    ¡°I don¡¯t think we¡¯ll find what we are looking for this way,¡± Lenore grumbled in my mind.


    ¡°Probably, simply seeing from above is not enough, we¡¯ll need to use our own senses to find the magic that messes things up here,¡± I replied, just as grumpy.


    With little to show for it, I pulled my Astral Power out of the construct, carefully venting it into the Astral River where it would rapidly fade into the background. No need to alert anyone to our snooping, if there were people looking for it.


    Standing, I looked at Sigmir, who had been watching over me the whole time. ¡°Nothing,¡± I told her.


    ¡°Not a big surprise,¡± she grinned, ¡°If it was easy or could be done without taking risks, the Empire would have taken care of this a long time ago.¡±

 Chapter 597

    Walking into the area of wild magic physically made a massive difference. Compared to my scrying during the night, where the visual changes had been few, to the point that I could barely tell it was an area of wild magic, the changes in the Astral River around us were strong enough to make themselves felt like a hammer blow. The air was almost sparking with magic, the scents and taste in my nostrils and mouth almost overpowering, cloyingly strong and pervasive. Compared to the dry, dusty sensation in the Dorrian Mountains, the Forlorn Forest was teeming with life, but also decay. The clash of those disparate natures was radiating outwards, both extremes pulling at the other and causing an ever-increasing resonance. Outwardly, the powers were in balance, but I could only shiver when imagining what would happen if that balance broke.


    If Death became overpowering and devoured the Life, the resulting wave of necrotic energies would be enough to lay waste to dozens of kilometres of forest. If Life became overpowering, the explosion of vitality would cause spontaneous mutations, cancerous growth sweeping every living thing in an equally large radius, turning previously simple creatures into monsters.


    A small part of me found it amusing that life would be the more destructive force in this case. Death would only destroy a finite amount of land, turning massive swathes of forest into dust and killing countless living creatures. But their remains would slowly nourish the earth, allowing life to spring forth once more.


    On the other hand, the explosion of life would spread outwards. Initially, there would be a wave of newly empowered monsters, infused with immense amounts of vitality and mutated by the pure essence of Life. The struggle for survival would mean that those monsters would spread, trying to take over as much land as possible. For themselves and their descendants, for the prime instinct of living things was to procreate.


    ¡°This could be interesting,¡± I muttered, looking over to Adra. If nothing else, she was a dryad and, thinking back to Tegi, she had been able to absorb some of the powers of life and death to propel herself across the first Divide. Looking at her now, I could see a faint sheen of sweat on her brow, the sheer amount of power probably quite intimidating to her.


    ¡°What do you think?¡± I asked her directly, a grin on my face, ¡°Want to risk it all?¡±


    At my question, her face turned quite pale as she considered my idea. It was audacious to the extreme, failing could have massive consequences, not just for us, but for countless beings all around the area. Absorbing all the power would be impossible for any mortal, but taking some of it would likely unbalance the whole resonance and cause it to spiral out of control rapidly.


    ¡°You mean, take some?¡± she asked, swallowing hard as her senses expanded outwards.


    ¡°There has to be some sort of nexus somewhere, not a full nexus I think, nothing like the one in Neyto, but a conflux of power. If we get there, we should be able to do a couple of things,¡± I explained, a grin on my face as the plan took on more concrete forms.


    ¡°It could work,¡± Adra admitted, now also considering things from a practical standpoint. If nothing else, it was near impossible to find another source of such potent Life- and Death-energies, especially not in a nice balance that wouldn¡¯t require us to balance the energy ourselves.


    ¡°We¡¯d have to be careful,¡± I reminded her, already feeling out the streams of energy, trying to get an idea about where they¡¯d congregate and form a nexus.


    ¡°What are you talking about?¡± Jenn asked, inserting herself into the conversation.


    ¡°They are trying to gauge the nature of the land here, the magic of it,¡± Rai quietly explained, sounding a little annoyed, ¡°If you are unable to understand, keep quiet and don¡¯t disturb them, we need to rely on their senses.¡±


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    After a few more minutes, Adra and I came up with something resembling a plan. First, we had to scout some more, maybe find out what, other than the sheer amount of magic, was dangerous in the area. Once we had a better understanding, we would be able to make an actual plan.


    ¡°We should go this way,¡± Adra suggested, her eyes following one of the streams of power in the area. It was mostly comprised of life, but not solely.


    ¡°Sure, why not,¡± I agreed, even as my face twisted in distaste at the vibrant energies of life the area was teeming with. It was almost as if I could feel the countless worms and insects crawling across my skin, filled with that filthy energy, driven to feed, procreate and die, forming a constant cycle, without ever coming to a proper end.


    ¡°I¡¯ll lead the way,¡± Adra decided, already moving forward. The rest of us formed into a formation behind her, Jenn taking the second spot, I took the third while Rai and Sigmir brought up the rear. By now, moving in formation had lost quite a bit of importance. While all four of us had their competence and speciality, we had branched out enough to be adequately competent in personal protection. The only weak spot was Jenn, her level and attributes simply not en-par with the rest of us, but that was her problem. We wouldn¡¯t coddle and escort her, she would have to keep herself safe.


    Not long after we had started our trek through the Forlorn Forest, Adra raised a hand, signalling caution. Looking past her, it took me a second, and Lenore¡¯s sight, to realise the problem. While the whole forest teemed with energy, the area in front of us had a particularly strong sheen, almost radiating the energies of life and death, flavoured with a lot of decay.


    Whatever was there, it was greedily devouring any living thing that came close, letting the vitality inside decay, before using the energies released as nourishment for itself and the area around it.


    ¡°Let¡¯s see,¡± Adra muttered, barely audible to my long ears. Right afterwards, she raised her hand and mumbled something, this time completely under her breath and inaudible, before a strange, green orb formed in her hand, almost looking like a ball of leaves.


    Moments later, she gently lobbed it forward and as it tumbled through the air, it unfurled, forming into a small, leaf-green rabbit. Once it landed, the rabbit hopped forward, indistinguishable from a normal rabbit, if not for the colour.


    After a few hops, the rabbit entered that strange area. For the first three hops, everything was fine but in Lenore¡¯s sight, I could see movement in the soil. On the fourth hop, just as the rabbit had jumped off, roots shot out from underground, easily skewering the rabbit mid-air, causing the magically formed construct to instantly dissipate. I could see the energy Adra had used to construct it get instantly devoured, vanishing into the soil, but from what I could see, things weren¡¯t over just yet.


    ¡°Spread out,¡± I called out, noticing the magic in the soil stretching towards us, ¡°Those roots are coming for us!¡±


    All five of us moved back and apart, making it difficult for the unseen attacker to catch us all. At the same time, I realised that we weren¡¯t just fighting some sort of magical tree, but that about a dozen trees in front of us were moving weirdly, their branches swaying in an unseen wind.


    After a moment of consideration, I leapt up a different tree, one I was confident wasn¡¯t part of the strange, living collective. Crouching on a branch, maybe halfway up the tree, I quickly formed a magical formation, a grin on my face. If the trees wanted to move and be spry like it was spring, why not remind them that winter was always coming?


    Drawing runes of Ice and Darkness, I conjured up a freezing cold mist, infusing it with Death-Magic at the same time, before sending it forth to enshroud the few trees up front. Given that they couldn¡¯t really move, only stretch their roots and sway their limbs, escaping my attack was impossible.


    With Lenore¡¯s sight, I could see how their vitality started to contest against my magic, as I slowly but surely channelled more and more power into the spell, letting it linger and devour the life within them.


    It took far longer than I had anticipated, the trees able to withstand the devouring power of Darkness and Frost for almost ten minutes but finally, the trees stopped moving, their withered husks looking like a strong gust of wind would be able to blow them over.


    At the same time, I noticed a notification in my log, telling me that we had defeated fourteen living trees, their levels between eighty and ninety.


    Hopping from my arboreal perch, I looked for the others, realising that the ground nearby was quite devastated from their efforts to dodge the roots and prevent them from uprooting the tree I had sheltered on.


    A quick check on them told me that they were mostly fine if a little dirty.

 Chapter 598

    After destroying the small copse of Living Trees, a name I found weirdly amusing, Adra and I quickly noticed something wrong. Their destruction caused a strange, magical echo, almost akin to a beacon.


    ¡°What do you think?¡± she asked me, as we stared at their withered husks, slowly shedding the magic they had devoured in life.


    ¡°Not sure, but at a guess, something is coming,¡± I frowned, considering things for a moment. My first impulse was to retreat, to remain cautious and avoid conflict until we knew what we were dealing with. On the other hand, my previous attempts to discover the nature of this place had completely failed, so some direct reconnaissance was necessary.


    ¡°Rai, join me,¡± I ordered, already starting to weave together some Darkness-magic. The shadows beneath the thick canopy were deep and a wide variety of shrubs provided ample cover at ground level. ¡°Adra, deal with the plants, we need to remain hidden.¡±


    Once Rai stood with me, I urged him to add his own abilities to mine, our teacher-disciple relationship faintly helping to harmonise things, as the foundation of his magical skills came from my teachings. At the same time, Adra was chanting next to us, her magic influencing the plants and gently shifting and encouraging them into letting us blend with them. Remembering how Tani had concealed the rebel village, I tried to emulate the effect, carefully studying the Astral around us and trying to meld my concealment with the surroundings, achieving some effect. How much, I couldn¡¯t really be sure but time would tell.


    With the three of us working on it, we only needed a few minutes to create a magical shelter we were happy with. It was stretched, encompassing Sigmir and Jenn and all five of us quietly settled in to wait, curious who or what might be attracted by the escaping Astral Power.


    We didn¡¯t need to wait too long, maybe for half an hour, before things started to happen. At first, there was only a slight fluctuation in the Astral River, a faint scent tickling my nose or maybe a gentle breeze flowing through the trees. I had to focus on the spell I was maintaining, adjusting it to the changes to keep it meshed into the background, to the point that I could barely see what was actually happening around me.


    There were about a dozen small figures flying towards the area the trees had been, maybe ten centimetres in height, though the bright, green light they shed made it difficult to tell. In the dim light of the forest, they were like fireflies, buzzing around on insectile wings, circling the area. As they circled, the scent of rot and death, still lingering after the destruction of the Living Trees, was rapidly fading, forcing me to work extra hard.


    I didn¡¯t dare try to Observe them, hoping that Rai would manage, his personal and active concealment even better than mine, especially with the help I was giving him already.


    The strange, small beings didn¡¯t stay long, only a few minutes of buzzing and when they vanished, flying back into the depths of the forest, the withered husks of the trees were completely gone, replaced by small saplings. The saplings looked far too large and old to be natural, no tree should be able to grow from nothing to the thickness of my arm and three metres in height within a few minutes. Looking with Lenore¡¯s sight, I could see the lingering Astral Power, though the exact mechanisms involved were a mystery to me.


    After the small beings were gone, we quietly waited for another thirty minutes before we slowly crept away, constantly keeping the concealment active, just in case they left behind some sort of hidden watcher.


    Once we had taken enough distance to relax our vigilance a little, we crept into the shadows of a couple of trees and I relaxed my mind a little. The concealment wasn¡¯t tremendously intensive in the Astral Power department, but it required incredible focus, leaving me with a faint headache, as if I had been staring at a screen for far too long, constantly working spreadsheets to find a balance.


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    Letting out a deep breath, I looked at Rai and Adra, ¡°What did the two of you see?¡± I asked, hoping that they would have some insight.


    ¡°The trees were communicating with them, quite similar to the way I do.¡± Adra began and I noticed she looked a little pale around the nose, ¡°I think they didn¡¯t ask the right questions, or maybe they didn¡¯t care to ask, I was unable to understand them. It was as if they didn¡¯t really care what had happened, just to do their job and absorb the lingering power,¡± she shook her head, still looking a little disturbed. ¡°I¡¯m not sure my influence over the trees would have won out against theirs if they had tried to assert themselves.¡±


    ¡°I managed to Observe one of them,¡± Rai added, sounding slightly confused and apprehensive, ¡°It came back as a Level ninety-eight Forest Sprite, whatever that is.¡±


    ¡°Obviously, trouble,¡± I replied, though I had little actual information. Looking over to Jenn, she could only shrug in ignorance, obviously not knowing more than we did.


    ¡°So, some sort of Fairy or something, acting as a messenger or patrol, but not taking things too seriously, or they would have checked what actually killed those trees?¡± I asked, thinking out loud.


    ¡°But why did they come in the first place? If they don¡¯t care who destroyed the Living Trees, why show up at all?¡± Rai asked, his question making me frown. Why exert effort, it it wasn¡¯t needed?


    ¡°The Astral Power escaping from those trees, Adra, what do you think would happen to it normally?¡± At my question, Adra began to frown before her eyes flashed with understanding.


    ¡°It would fade into the Astral River, returning to the cycle once more. But here, it would also impact the balance of Life and Death in the forest, pushing it a little more towards the side of Death,¡± she hypothesised, making me nod in agreement, as her idea made sense. If there was some power in the background that used that balance, maybe harvested some of the power, it would make sense that they wouldn¡¯t want any random event to disrupt their scheme. Which would make the Sprites the equivalent of mall cops, barely competent to do their job, apathetic about the circumstances and generally uninterested to do more than tick the box and collect the pay-check.


    ¡°But who controls them? Or should that be, what?¡± I mused as I considered my current hypothesis, that there was some elder power in the Forlorn Forest that had created the peculiar balance of Wild Magic and maintained it for their own reasons. It made quite a bit of sense, much more than thinking there was some random area of Wild Magic that just happened to be in a highly complex and volatile state of balance by sheer chance. Sure, it wasn¡¯t impossible but outside agency was the far more plausible answer.


    Sadly, it was also the far more troublesome answer, the difference between taking some random stuff from the ground and breaking into someone¡¯s home to take their stuff. With the hypothetical ¡°someone¡± being capable of employing high-level Sprites to do their bidding, even if they were unmotivated.


    ¡°You mean those things serve a master?¡± Jenn asked, having caught up to the conversation between Rai, Adra and me. ¡°Then shouldn¡¯t we try to make contact with that master, if we want to create a road through the forest?¡±


    For a moment, I considered her question, before shaking my head. ¡°I doubt it would be so easy. If it was, the Empire would have done just that a long time ago and maybe they even did just that,¡± I shrugged, before I elaborated, ¡°Think about it, I doubt we are smarter, stronger or more experienced than the collected Adventurers¡¯ of the Empire, going back a few hundred years. I mean, sure, we are awesome, but it would be the height of hubris to put us on such a pedestal,¡± I shook my head, as I considered our objectives and the supposed difficulty. It couldn¡¯t be impossible, or the quest would likely have indicated that. Instead, it had indicated that our task was merely ¡°hard¡±.


    There had to be a solution, one that wasn¡¯t brute force. To negotiate was a potential solution, but I couldn¡¯t rely on that avenue, not with my past track record. Even if Adra was somewhat skilled in the field, she wasn¡¯t a specialist and unless there was something weird going on, that would be whom the Empire had sent in the past.


    ¡°Let¡¯s gather some more data, maybe if we see more, the picture becomes clear. We might just be missing the forest, due to the trees,¡± I joked, looking at the dense forest all around us.

 Chapter 599

    For the next few days, we tried to gather information. The primary problem we had to be keep in mind was that we didn¡¯t want the Sprites and their suspected Overlord to catch wind of our existence, meaning our experiments and attacks had to be spread out and, if at all possible, the methods involved varied. We roamed along the edge of the area and hunted down a wide variety of enemies.


    After we destroyed that first copse of Living Trees with Ice-Magic, the next target, a large boar with some metallic threads running through its pelt, got killed by Adra, with support from Rai and myself. Rai kept us all concealed, while Adra channelled a huge amount of power into an arrow, onto which I added as much Death-Magic as I could safely control. The resulting projectile hit the boar¡¯s chest, piercing deeply into its body, before the combination of Wind-Magic from Adra and Death-Magic from me tore out of it, ravaging its internal organs. There was no fight, but amusingly, it took just as much Astral Power as the destruction of the copse had taken, maybe even a little more.


    At that corpse, the Sprites appeared again after some time, but they didn¡¯t absorb the Astral Power in the area, instead, they used Death-Magic to swiftly destroy the body by increasing the rate of decay, turning it into fertiliser within a few seconds. It returned the vitality of the boar to the cycle, maintaining the balance of life and death in the forest.


    It was a curious realisation that the Sprites carefully controlled both sides of the equation.


    Either way, we continued gathering information but sadly, there was little we actually learned. From travelling directions, reaction times and observed speed, we were confident that the Sprites came out of the deeper forest, the areas where I had seen the highest trees when scrying during the first night.


    We had yet to try fighting the Sprites, an attack on them undoubtedly alerting the powers-that-be to our existence. So far, they hopefully would think they were dealing with multiple groups or maybe a broad probing action by one large group, not a single group travelling around Obviously, there was only so much we could do to spread things out, but hopefully, our efforts to obfuscate would bear fruit.


    Ultimately, the whole probing action was quite successful in one department, namely when it came to levels. While the biggest winner in that regard was Jenn, we all gained some levels, in my case two, and a few skill points. For me, those gains were a single point in Darkness-Magic, two points in Death- and Mind-Magic, and a point in Stealth. Quite the pleasant harvest, even if it sadly lacked any meaningful gains in Ice-Magic or my rune-magic.


    The point in Darkness-Magic was likely caused by repeated experiments into that strange, utter Blackness that even absorbed light, as long as I supplied Astral Power. A part of me wanted to call it a Black Hole, even if it was most certainly not that, but the name sounded imposing. From my experiments, I was able to conclude that I could stretch the area in any shape I wanted and that nothing could pass through it, not physical and not magical, at least nothing that Lenore threw at it managed to pass through.


    On the flip-side, blocking things required an immense amount of Astral Power, likely scaling with the amount of force an object carried when hitting the barrier. That included thermal energy, as well as kinetic energy, those were the two I had been able to test. It had been quite strange to see a prepared, burning branch hit my shield, only to instantly stop, the fire was extinguished and replaced by rime. I hadn¡¯t been able to test how the shield affected the air around it, simply because I hadn¡¯t been able to conjure one for long, but it would likely create a cooling effect.


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    Altogether, there was massive potential, but sadly, I hadn¡¯t been able to get it to work in an efficient manner. Maybe if I managed to combine it into my Rune-Magic, I¡¯d be able to stabilise the effect or make it easier to handle. Either way, I hadn¡¯t managed to do so yet. Thus, it was added to my ever-growing list of magical experiments.


    One advance on that front had been an interesting discussion between Leonard and Mal, hosted in my capsule space. When I asked Mal if she would mind if I invited another player to our regular discussions, she had been quite interested in exchanging ideas with someone else outside the completely open forum. She had made a few posts there, but ultimately, she wanted to keep most of her ideas and discoveries private, to have an advantage when Road to Purgatory was fully released. Just like me, she had ambitions and was curious how far she¡¯d be able to take things with the right preparation.


    Leonard was quite understanding and highly enthusiastic. Curiously, their two approaches to Alchemy and magic were completely opposite, Mal was mostly seeing Alchemy as Chemistry with some extras, while Leonard mostly worked in the mechanical department, using Alchemy to improve or enable larger mechanisms. A chemist and an engineer, so to speak.


    Their middle-ground was quickly established as fuel and their discussion regarding magical fuels and their efficiency was quite interesting. I mainly remained a quiet observer, only occasionally bringing my own views into their discussion, mostly in regards to the enhancement of already existing material, similar to the work Mal and I had done with her black powder.


    The more the two of them talked, the stronger the shivers running down my spine became. What had started as ideas to enhance a simple combustion reaction, to make fuel burn stronger, had slowly morphed into a discussion on how to take a combustion reaction and make it self-sustaining, by drawing in energy from the Astral River and letting it react with the air.


    Or in other words, how to set the air itself alight and watch as it spread across the world.


    A part of me wanted to kill both of them before they could utter a single extra word but sadly, I had no idea where they lived. So killing them was out and I could only listen in fascinated horror. And even as I was horrified, a part of me was fascinated as I considered my own understanding of the Astral River and how it could be exploited to achieve massive things. Thinking back to the Nexus in Neyto and my previous exposure to it, I started to wonder, was it possible to use a Nexus to affect the Astral River directly, to introduce a magical reaction into the very fabric of Mundus itself? And what could such an effect do, how far would I be able to take it?


    After all, I knew that the Astral River wasn¡¯t quite bound to space and time, or at least that there was no transmission lag I could detect. When I had been talking to the Grandmother the last time, it had worked perfectly well, despite half a continent between us. Maybe I would have to experiment some more in that regard.


    More practical than ideas for apocalyptic magic were a few ideas Mal had suggested, regarding the infusion of Astral Power into substances and objects. For her, that meant to enhance her black powder, but for me, it might open up a way to effectively store Astral Power in drained Blood, similar to the orbs I could create with my Athame, only more efficient and with a higher energy density.


    By the end of the discussion, my mind was awash with ideas and I could barely wait to do some experiments on Mundus. Sadly, I actually had to wait, due to a need for human resources, something I couldn¡¯t acquire in the deep forest.


    But while I couldn¡¯t begin with Blood Magic experiments, after a week of hustling around the border areas of the forest, testing our opponent''s reaction time, Adra and I decided that further tests were needed and our next step would directly involve the Forest Sprites that came and disposed of the energy released when something died in the forest.


    We just hadn¡¯t decided what we wanted to do, whether we would follow one such group back to their origin or whether we wanted to ambush one, testing what the powers of the Forlorn Forest would do if one of their squads was destroyed.


    Both ideas had their own, inherent risks and both had their own challenges. Either way, our next step would be a dangerous one but without danger, there couldn¡¯t be any excitement.


    And without excitement, there couldn¡¯t be growth.

 Chapter 600

    With a loud crash, the massive, slate-grey rock bear fell to the ground, the weight enough to cause a perceivable tremble and shake some needles from the nearby trees. Sigmir stood above it, her chest heaving with exertion as she had taken on the bear alone in an effort to diversify the employed methods of death and destruction.


    ¡°Well done,¡± I complimented her, giving her hand a brief squeeze before pulling her into the shadows and the concealment we had prepared beforehand. While we were relatively sure the Sprites wouldn¡¯t arrive for at least twenty minutes, there was no point in taking a risk and having them appear early.


    As we all waited, I focused on the Astral Power leaking from the dead bear, still trying to comprehend the methods employed to control the Astral River in the Forlorn Forest. So far, I hadn¡¯t been able to recognise what caused the effect, forcing me to observe the working of it, in an effort to find the deeper truth. I was relatively certain it was something akin to a magical formation, somewhat similar to the crystal forest around Neyto or the Ancient Roads that spanned Aretia. The Roads were probably the better comparison, only that there, the magic was linked into the road itself, while in the Forlorn Forest, I wasn¡¯t sure what the magic was linked to. I couldn¡¯t even directly tell that the magic existed, only from the effects, it asserted on its surroundings.


    A frustrated sigh escaped me, when after twenty-five minutes, the Sprites appeared, swirling around the carcass like flies and turning it into dust. Once their work was done, they didn¡¯t linger in the surroundings, instead, they swirled around and flitted back into the depths of the forest, just as they had done at the last dozen sites we had observed them.


    This time though, we didn¡¯t just let them disappear, instead, we moved as swiftly as we could while concealed by a combination of my own Darkness-Magic, Adra¡¯s specialised magic and Rai¡¯s skills, all working together to erase any mark of our presence. In addition, we all had some skill when it came to ordinary stealth,


    Following the Sprites was both hard and easy at the same time. The easy part was the actual following. While the Sprites moved incredibly fast for their size, their speed wasn¡¯t anything to write home about on a macro level. For the five of us, it was no problem to keep up and losing them was almost impossible, thanks to the aura that constantly surrounded them with a bright, green glow. Like fireflies, they were easily visible in the dim forest.


    The difficulty was to keep hidden while moving at their speed and avoiding any measures that might give our presence away. That also meant we had to carefully avoid and circumvent the various critters and sentient plants the Sprites simply flew across, protected by some unknown mechanism.


    As we moved deeper into the forest, I noticed more and more things I could only describe as weird. In the outer parts of the forest, where we had roamed the last week, the creatures had been somewhat normal, the weirdest being the Living Trees we had fought initially. Otherwise, we had mostly dealt with monstrous forms of normal beasts, simple animals empowered by elemental magic.


    But following the Sprites, we came across other things, some of which sent a cold shiver down my spine. There was a colony of fungi, cartoonishly perfect shapes, almost a metre in height, their caps a bright red with white spots on them. That wasn¡¯t enough to make them weird though, their weirdness came from the fact that they started singing when the Sprites buzzed by, their caps opening to reveal a massive maw and some gooey strings stretching from the two sides, reminding me of a spider web, ready to trap any prey that they got their mouths on. What truly weirded me out, was that their song actually sounded quite pleasant, if one managed to ignore the meaning of it, delivered to me by Lenore¡¯s Universal Understanding Ability. There was something profoundly wrong about a wonderful auditory experience that spoke of tearing flesh from bone and devouring people whole. The entire song was about murdering and eating other beings, especially sapient ones.


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    A little further in the forest, we saw a likely reason why the Living Trees were called such, in the Non-Living Trees. Sadly, just because they weren¡¯t living any longer didn¡¯t mean they had ceased to be. Instead, their limbs were bone-white, somewhat similar to birch trees and thanks to Lenore¡¯s sight, I was able to detect the vast amounts of Death flowing through them, just like Life was flowing through normal trees. I hadn¡¯t seen anything that aligned with death before, even the Undead of the Dorrian Mountains had been more ¡®alive¡¯ than these, even if the ¡®life¡¯ within the Undead had been something of a mockery.


    In addition, there were strange shapes, composed entirely of Astral Power, weirdly reminiscent of small swathes of mist that seemed to move with purpose between the trees, in addition to a couple of birds sitting in the trees, shining in Lenore¡¯s sight.


    At one point, I gestured for the others to stop, even if the Sprites hadn¡¯t stopped yet, I wasn¡¯t confident in remaining undetected if we continued to chase them. Before us, the forest opened up a little, the trees becoming far larger, with few limbs near the ground and almost no shrubbery between them, only a thin layer of detritus covering the ground.


    Looking closely, I could see some small structures built into the trees, similar to a woodpecker¡¯s den, only fitted with carvings, a landing and something resembling furniture.


    The whole area was filled with enough Astral Power to make me a little dizzy, the scent intoxicating and the sight blinding, to the point that I could even see faint outlines and shapes without Lenore¡¯s sight to allow me to view magic directly.


    Even without the magic in the air, I would have thought things were weird. The colours looked more vibrant, the dark bark of the trees almost gleaming like metal, the few needles I could see had an impossibly vibrant green colour and everything looked a little¡­ unreal.


    We stopped in the shadow of one larger tree, a short distance away from the weird structures, observing the creatures living there. Or maybe I should say, observing the people living there, for that was what I had to consider them as.


    Otherwise, a squirrel wearing a dark, red vest in contrast to its light red coat and, for some, utterly unfathomable reason, a black top hat was just too weird. I had no idea how the top hat stayed on its head, I saw it jumping from tree to tree with it or why it had the top hat in the first place and I wasn¡¯t sure I wanted to know.


    In addition to fancy squirrels, I could see some worms with bags slung around their bodies, a couple of spiders carefully working together to weave some sort of object and even a couple of birds, flying around while carrying goods from tree to tree. Even a colony of giant ants was visible, carefully working around a tree, trying to accomplish some unknown project with the help of a few rather large beetles. Some of the creatures, like the squirrels, were only slightly larger than they should be, but an almost fifty-centimetre tall beetle wasn¡¯t something I wanted to see too often.


    If I wasn¡¯t quite certain that I hadn¡¯t imbibed anything, I would think the whole experience was a drug-induced hallucination, or maybe some weird fever dream. But I was quite certain that I hadn¡¯t been subjected to any drugs and my Avatar hopefully wouldn¡¯t get sick without my notice. A glance at my status screen told me that there were no debuffs present and I wasn¡¯t able to feel anything when looking inward with my blood magic. Nothing, but a slightly elevated concentration of Astral Power.


    ¡°Let¡¯s leave,¡± I whispered, suppressing my voice as much as possible. Luckily, it was enough for the others to hear and understand and we began our way out of the forest, away from the insanity that was near its centre.


    A part of me was fascinated, wondering where the creatures, the magic and the whole weirdness came from, another part was completely weirded out, trapped in an uncanny valley by behaviours that I completely associated with people, displayed by animals I would only consider pests. It was one thing to see sapience in beings like Ravens, Wolves or even Spiders, but a whole different kind of experience to see it in bugs and worms.


    We continued to carefully retreat until we reached the edge of the Forlorn Forest, where I studied our forms once again, trying to make sure we hadn¡¯t picked up any magical residue or some sort of tracking magic or something of the sort. Just to make sure, I bathed us all in a magical devouring mist, hopefully getting rid of anything unwanted.


    Only then, we all returned to our camp, with more information than we had in the morning but also a whole lot more questions.

 Chapter 601

    Compared to the weird, almost cartoonishly happy, world the Forlorn Forest had been during the daytime, when we returned during the night, the forest¡¯s name felt a lot more appropriate.


    After our sojourn during the day, we had discussed what we had seen and what it might mean, ultimately coming to the conclusion that things were weird and we needed more information. Hoping that the creatures, as alien and strange as they might be, would be less active during the night, we carefully snuck back under the cover of darkness. The additional benefit of that was that my Concealment was part of my Darkness-Magic and as such was extra effective in the shadows of the night.


    Which brought us to the side before us, one that made the name ¡®Forlorn Forest¡¯ seem perfectly suited to describe. Where before, there had been busy little critters, bustling around like it was happy hour, it now looked like the graveyard shift at the morgue. Not that I had ever been at a morgue during the graveyard shift, but it was how I imagined it to be. Cold, quiet and incredibly spooky, with nothing but the ghosts of the deceased there to keep one company.


    There were a few creatures visible, but they, too, were not of the happy, bustling variety, or even the cartoonishly weird variety like the fungi we had seen during the day. No, they were simply alien monsters, mockeries of living things with malformed limbs, grotesquely large heads and an aura that made Nethersprites feel wholesome.


    The first look I took at them, accompanied by the first whiff of their Astral Power, almost made me sick to my stomach and only iron-clad willpower and self-control kept me from noisily vomiting into the dried, dead grass beneath us. For that was another part of the strangeness, where before, the forest had been vibrant, green and alive, it was now withered, grey and seemingly dead.


    ¡°Can you tell what is going on?¡± I quietly asked Adra, not willing to move further into the heart of the forest before we had more information. Adra only quietly shook her head, looking just as spooked and confused as I felt, before stepping up to one of the withered and crippled trees and placing her hand against the trunk. For a moment, I could feel her Astral Power stretch out, before snapping back into her as she staggered away as if hit by a sledgehammer. One of her hands went to her head, clutching it, a pained groan escaped her lips and I noticed a trickle of blood running down her nose and even her eyes started to cry bloody tears.


    Rai immediately caught her, holding her in a protective and supportive embrace, while she leaned against him, barely able to remain standing.


    ¡°I¡¯ve got you,¡± he promised her, gently stroking her back. With her in that state, I focused on our concealment, trying to make sure nothing could find us while she was incapacitated, aware that she might have been struck by some sort of warding or some other security measure.


    ¡°I¡¯m alright,¡± she promised after a few moments, pushing herself to stand on her own, but not quite leaving Rai¡¯s embrace. ¡°That wasn¡¯t fun,¡± she grumbled, looking over to me.


    ¡°The trees are¡­¡± she paused, struggling to find the right word, ¡°They are wrong, I don¡¯t know how to describe it, they aren¡¯t dead but also not alive. Not undead either, I don¡¯t know,¡± she mumbled growing rather agitated.


    ¡°It¡¯s like they look like trees, smell like trees and even superficially feel like trees but in truth, they are something else. I can¡¯t explain it,¡± she gestured with her free hand, the blood she had wiped off her face almost glowing in the dark.


    Frowning, I looked at the tree through Lenore¡¯s sight, trying to see what she meant. Sadly, when I looked at it, it looked just pretty normal. Sure, the Death-aligned Astral Power was overwhelming but compared to the undead trees we had seen during the day, it wasn¡¯t that extreme. There was still some Life and Vitality within them, nothing that gave me a feeling bad enough to warrant her reaction.


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    Pushing away my preconceptions, I stepped a little closer to it, fully focusing and trying to find that weirdness. I even stretched out the understanding of my Blood Magic, trying to glean a little more insight and that was when it hit me. Not as bad as it had hit Adra, but bad enough to make me stagger back into Sigmir¡¯s waiting embrace.


    ¡°Ugh, I see what you mean,¡± I groaned, blinking to get rid of the tears swimming in my eyes.


    Her earlier words, about being unable to describe what she had seen, made sense to me now, the state of that tree was truly too weird for words. It was as if the fundamentals of magical existence, how the small building blocks of Astral Power, fit together were inverted, or maybe put through a distorting mirror. It still fit together but everything in my mind said it shouldn¡¯t that things were WRONG, in all capital letters. Life was death and death was life, up was right and down was somewhere over there. If it wasn¡¯t localised and internal to those trees, I wasn¡¯t sure we would even be able to exist in that weirdness.


    ¡°Should we continue?¡± Rai asked, clearly disturbed by the state Adra and I were in. If both of us got knocked about, just from investigating what was going on, how could we probe deeper?


    ¡°Yes,¡± I nodded, noticing a frown on Sigmir¡¯s face as I did. ¡°We need more information and I think these creatures aren¡¯t the most perceptive.¡±


    I looked at the strange monsters in the area before us. Despite the actions we had taken and our, if quiet, talking, they simply continued to move about, not caring for us in the slightest.


    Carefully, now even more vigilant and paranoid, we continued sneaking from shadow to shadow. Around us, the forest was moving in an eerily quiet manner, the critters silent despite their weird nature, or maybe because of it. I could see one such critter, a rodent of unusual size, its head almost as large as the rest of its body, with an almost skeletally thin tail that stretched five times the length of its body, scurry around. Its movement looked incredibly clumsy, maybe due to the mismatched sizes of its body parts, but despite that clumsy movement, it was swift and silent. Almost as if the clumsiness was a mere distraction.


    It took us almost an hour of incredibly slow and careful sneaking to reach the heart of the forest, or at least I was pretty sure that was what we had discovered. The first thing we noticed was the massive tree in the middle, the trunk even thicker than the previous, massive trees we had seen, almost fifteen metres in diameter. We couldn¡¯t see any branches, even my elven eyes, supported by my affinity for Darkness, couldn¡¯t pierce the distance and deep shadows around its trunk.


    But what we could see were the strange sprites buzzing around it, quite similar to the Forest Sprites in appearance, only where the Forest Sprites were surrounded by a vibrant, green glow, these sprites were giving off a sickly, purple glow and a smell of rot and decay was in the air, thick enough to make me choke.


    As before, we settled in to observe, carefully making sure that the shadows were concealing us. The sprites seemed to perform some strange, elaborate dance but when looking through Lenore¡¯s eyes, I could see that there was a lot more to it.


    They weren¡¯t just dancing, each of the Sprites was controlling a strand of magic, weaving it together with the others, the dance a slow but incredibly elaborate ritual. The focal point of that ritual was quite curious, a large, dark rock sticking out of the roots of the massive tree, maybe even embedded into the trunk itself, I couldn¡¯t tell.


    Focusing on that rock and looking closely, I could see that it was filled with power, far more than I had ever seen before. It made the Eternal Ice I had created in the past look like something you would use for your drinks, perfectly mundane. I couldn¡¯t even begin to tell just how much power was bound into the rock, but I truly wanted to find out.


    That much power, what could I do with that? How much could I change, how far would I be able to push my magic?


    I didn¡¯t know, but I was itching to find out, even if the power contained in the rock wasn¡¯t one I had an affinity with, the sheer scope was intoxicating.


    But would I be able to control it? Changing the world was one thing, bending it to my will, but destroying it? Wouldn¡¯t that also destroy Sigmir¡¯s world?


    The realisation sobered me up quite a bit. allowing me to calm my laboured breathing as I reminded myself of the most important thing. Power was great, but all the power on Mundus was useless if I couldn¡¯t remain with Sigmir.

 Chapter 602

    We stuck around, watching the purple sprites dance their magical ritual, curious how long it would take. When there hadn¡¯t been any change for over an hour, we realised that it might very well be some sort of permanent, or at least all night, activity. I briefly wondered if we had just happened to arrive during a significant night, something that might boost their powers like the full and new moon had done for me prior to crossing the second Divide, but I couldn¡¯t think of any events of such significance during this night. It was just an ordinary night.


    ¡°Should we wait for dawn? Maybe that¡¯ll change things,¡± Rai quietly asked, obviously unsure if we should simply continue watching, even if none of us was able to figure out what was going on.


    ¡°We¡¯d have to hope we can escape without the cover of night,¡± I reminded him, not sure just how fast the local population would switch from the monsters of the night to the weirdness of the day. There might be some sort of downtime between, just like extremely few people moved about just before dawn on Earth, the weird beings might want to sleep in, while the monsters might go to sleep early. Or maybe they had some overlap and trying to escape at dawn was the worst we could do.


    ¡°Do you think we can sneak around the clearing and get to the large tree from the other side? I¡¯d like to get my hand on it,¡± Adra admitted, looking at it with a certain longing in her eyes.


    ¡°Are you sure that¡¯d be wise?¡± I couldn¡¯t help but ask, remembering how the last commune with a tree had affected her. If the same happened in their centre of power, it would likely be bad, and that was ignoring the very real possibility that the tree was somehow intelligent and independently thinking, maybe even the lord of the place or bound to it. In that case, trying to commune with it would likely raise every alarm they had and see us in serious trouble.


    ¡°I want to try,¡± she insisted, the longing in her eyes turning even stronger.


    A part of me wanted to reject her idea but I could understand her thinking. We were united in a desire for power and the tree and the power it contained would likely be enough to propel Adra past the second Divide, a chance she had been looking for since we had battled Tegi and she had stolen that Dryad¡¯s power. If she could get her hands on this, it would be a major accomplishment.


    But with the potential for massive gain came massive risk. Looking at Rai and Adra, I thought that the two of them should be able to escape if things went bad. Similarly, if I only focused on Sigmir, I was reasonably confident to keep her safe and escape together with her.


    ¡°Okay,¡± I accepted Adra¡¯s request after a few more moments of thought. Risk and reward had to co-exist and I had done some pretty risky things in the past, trying to get stronger. Taking a risk for Adra was just fair.


    Without any additional discussion, we retreated back into the forst, carefully making our way around that central clearing. There were quite a few alien monsters scurrying around, all of them moving almost perfectly silent, adding to the incredibly eerie atmosphere of the forest. Every instinct in my body told me that these things really shouldn¡¯t be and slowly but surely, the sensations began to give me a headache.


    It took almost two hours to creep around the clearing, despite only crossing about two kilometres of distance in that time. The terrain wasn¡¯t really difficult, we just had to be incredibly cautious.


    The central tree didn¡¯t look too different from the backside, compared to the front. There was a large pond near its roots, with some of them directly reaching into the water, but otherwise, it was simply serene.


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    ¡°Rai, watch out for Adra, she might need the help. I¡¯ll keep us concealed as best as I can,¡± I ordered him, before briefly hugging Sigmir and whispering into her ears, ¡°If anything happens, I rely on you to get me out. I¡¯ll be completely focused on our concealment, so you might have to carry me and run.¡± Given that I had lowered my voice as much as possible and deliberately used the old Jotun-tongue only the two of us spoke, I was reasonably confident she was the only one who knew what I had said.


    She studied me for a moment, before giving a slow, deliberate nod. Her acceptance took a load off my shoulders, if worst came to worst, the two of us would get out.


    The last stretch across the open ground was nerve-wracking. Sure, I could call upon the shadows of the night to conceal us, but anyone looking closely would notice something amiss. It was concealment, not invisibility and no amount of crouching would allow you to cross an open field without being seen.


    It might have been pure luck that no creature looked closely enough, or maybe a certain arrogance that nobody would dare approach their tree in the middle of the night, either way, we managed to get there without waking up everyone.


    Adra first stepped to the small lake near the roots, carefully placing her hand in the water. Her action made me raise an eyebrow, as it was far too gentle and careful to be without purpose, so I stepped up myself, looking through Lenore¡¯s eyes to see if I noticed something. Curiously, just with Lenore¡¯s eyes, I was unable to detect anything but when I got closer, I could detect a faint, almost imperceivable scent in the air and it drew my attention.


    My tongue flicked out, almost instinctively at this point, and I tasted the air, trying to make sense of what I was smelling. It took me a moment to realise what I was smelling and tasting was the clear, almost illusionary taste of moonlight, but not the ordinary moonlight that fell from the sky, but something more tangible. If my Liquid Moonlight was the magical essence of the moon¡¯s cold, this taste was something similar. Moonlight, only devoid of the cold, of the darkness it had passed through, purified into something more. Or maybe something less, it all depended on perspective.


    ¡°It¡¯s the water, isn¡¯t it?¡± I quietly asked Lenore, getting on one knee next to her and carefully cupping a bit of water from the pond. In direct contact, I could detect a faint trace of the cold and darkness of space in the liquid, but it was almost gone, the light washed and bound by the water.


    ¡°It¡¯s fascinating, the tree feeds on the light, taking in power from Sun and Moon. Duality,¡± Adra quietly whispered, staring at the massive trunk before us. ¡°It merges with Death and Life from the forest, giving birth to something more.¡±


    ¡°Do you think you can take what you need?¡± I asked, speaking just as softly. I had no idea how the change, the alteration, of the moonlight in front of me had occurred, I could barely tell that it had been moonlight in the past. And that ignored how one could bind light into water. It was fascinating, but also more than a little worriyng.


    ¡°Give me a moment, I need to prepare,¡± she replied, as she took off her shoes and stepped into the cold water at our feet, wading through the shallow water and to the roots that were stretching into the water.


    Rai was following along and I moved back to Sigmir, focusing back on the concealment, trying to strengthen it as much as possible. If Adra did something big, I might be able to prevent or at least delay detection, giving us a bit of time to flee. Next to the tree, I could see Adra pause, clearly focusing inwards. For the first few moments, nothing much happened, just a tiny ripple starting in the water, moving towards Adra.


    Finally, she looked up again, likely staring at the roots in front of her and raised her hand to tough the tree.


    The moment Adra placed her hand against the tree¡¯s roots, I could feel a ripple go through the Astral and did my best to smother it in Darkness. For a moment, I managed to push down that one wave, only to feel another, this one slightly different from the last. Lenore¡¯s mind was with me and we started to quickly work, smoothing some of the waves with our own power, letting other waves ripple outwards, but injecting some concealing Darkness into them, making them more difficult to detect.


    As the seconds dragged on, I felt the waves getting faster and more chaotic, to the point that Lenore and I couldn¡¯t just work together, we had to work as one. With little but a mental shift, we merged, becoming the Raven¡¯s Shadow once more, eager to cover our companions under our dark wings.

 Chapter 603

    As the waves of power coming from the massive tree became stronger and stronger, we spread our wings, covering Rai and Sigmir beneath them. In unity, we were able to shift the burden away, the differing affinities of our individual parts coming to the fore, both sides necessary to withstand the power flowing around us. If not for our position in the centre of the effect, allowing us to channel the power towards the path it wanted to take anyway and direct it outwards, we wouldn¡¯t have been able to withstand it, even if we worked together.


    But in the eye of the storm, the winds were the calmest.


    And yet, even the calm wind in the eye of the storm was only calm in comparison to the galeforce winds outside, where the powers of Life and Death, as well as the powers of the Moon and Sun, were causing havoc.


    We could feel that some of the power of Life was drained away, taken in by Adra who was still holding onto the roots of the tree. But with her actions, the balance of power was broken and all the power contained in the tree was gushing out. It was too much for us to bear, the power we had to handle too varied to diverse for us to withstand.


    ¡°We need to disperse some of the power,¡± one part of us decided, as the strain on our wings intensified. Reaching out, that part managed to snag some of the unleashed power, barely managing to take control.


    Remembering the nearby receptacle, prepared to contain the power of the Moon, we channelled the Death we had just grabbed, pushing it into the Moon and trying to bind it there. The power of the Moon had been cleansed of the Darkness and Cold of the Void, leaving it somewhat empty, ripe to be filled anew.


    With the power of Death flowing past us, no longer battering against our defences, we could relax a little. The power of Life was still trying to corrupt us, to infuse us with its primal, savage needs but in comparison, it was gentle. It was destructive, but not directly, it was a corruptive influence that would infect a being, turning it into something that would only seek to proliferate and replace others with their own lineage.


    On the other hand, the power of the Sun was more destructive, the burning light enough to ignite flames here and there and even burn through the protective Shadows we had summoned to allow our wings to withstand the bombardment.


    Pain coursed through our being, as more and more of the burning light of the sun lit up the night.


    In comparison, the light of the Moon was more akin to the primal force of Life, spreading, infecting and inducing insanity where it went. Most of it was bound in the pond, getting influenced and changed by the pure, cleansing power of Death we channelled into it, becoming something more. What, neither of our halves knew but both of our halves were curious, fascinated by what we were creating.


    We were about to buckle when some of the power battering us started to flow away, getting absorbed somewhere. Sadly, neither of our parts had the mental wherewithal to follow that trickle of power, even as it turned into a stream. We had more important things to focus on, namely, how to survive.


    As the seconds trickled by, it felt like hours to us. Fatigue, both physical and mental, accumulated, our reserves quickly draining away as the stress of pushing against the increasingly powerful waves of Astral Power from the ancient tree took its toll.


    A part of our mind was linked into the Astral, busily taking in power, only for the power to be vented back out in a desperate attempt to keep our companions alive. Our whole reality started to shrink, the focus narrowing until there was nothing in our minds, nothing but the waves of power we had to withstand and the Astral River that gave us the power to do so.


    Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.


    Finally, there was a massive, crushing wave and it took everything we had to withstand it. Our body was battered and our united mind exhausted, to the point that the individual parts had almost entirely faded, merged and blended, to the point that it wasn¡¯t an Us any longer, but an I.


    We desperately drew in fresh Astral Power to prepare for the next wave, but there was just nothing. Only small, insignificant ripples in the Astral River, no more waves of power that threatened to drown us.


    As relief flooded through our system, our individual identities made a push to assert themselves. With a desperate push, we moved away from each other and I staggered to the ground, my mind spinning.


    A pair of strong arms stopped my tumble, cradling me carefully and a familiar scent entered my nose.


    ¡°Thanks, love,¡± I whispered, desperately clinging to my consciousness, even as my body wanted to shut down. We were, quite literally, not out of the woods yet and I couldn¡¯t allow myself to fall unconscious.


    With nothing but strength of will, I managed to dredge up a small amount of stamina from the depth of my body, catching a second, or maybe third, wind. There were quite a few blue notices, but I simply ignored them, as there were more important matters to deal with. Nearby, Lenore had already passed out after Ylva had caught her, cradling her in a canine embrace. The sight brought a grin to my face and I wanted nothing more than snuggle up to Sigmir and sleep for a week, but later.


    Looking around, I was flabbergasted at the sight. In the distance, dawn was breaking, bathing the world in a dim, hazy glow, but around us, things were incredibly strange. The massive tree we had approached was mostly gone, leaving behind a withered, crippled husk, looking as if it had decayed rapidly, parts of it broken, other parts simply disappeared without a trace. Adra was kneeling near the point where she had stood before, Rai holding her shoulders, keeping her from keeling over.


    The small pond next to us, where they had gathered the distilled Moonlight, was gone too. Instead of the clear, shimmering water, there was an ashen-grey crystal, roughly the size of my fist. Even from a few metres of distance, I could feel the power dwelling within it, enough to make me shiver despite myself. There was enough power there to move a mountain. Or at least, to bring Death to everything on a mountain.


    Intrigued, I reached out, hissing in pain when I touched the crystal. Just touching it was painful, my affinity for Death-Magic was too little to let me handle it without trouble. I didn¡¯t have the Astral Power to enclose it in Ice, so I could only grit my teeth and lose almost ten percent of my total health in the process of storing the crystal in my magic bag. But there was no way I¡¯d leave such a potent artefact and source of power just lying around, not if it was right there for the picking.


    ¡°Where¡¯s Jenn?¡± I asked Sigmir after picking up the crystal. The added strain and the pain turned my voice into little more than a hoarse whisper.


    ¡°After everything was over, she was gone,¡± SIgmir shrugged, her voice quite unconcerned.


    ¡°Oh,¡± I could only mumble in response, realising that I hadn¡¯t even tried to protect her. But then, I had barely managed to protect Sigmir and Rai, so if I had, it might have doomed us all.


    Letting out a sigh, I turned my focus outwards, towards the forest around us. It, too, had changed, almost as distinctly as the ancient tree in its middle. Only where the ancient tree had withered and lost all the power it had gathered over years, maybe even centuries, the forest had been inundated with power, mutating and changing everything.


    Countless trees had grown taller, some of them had turned mobile while others had been set ablaze by the violent power of the sun.


    ¡°We need to run,¡± I ordered as a sudden realisation made my face turn even paler if that was even possible. If the trees had been inundated by the Sun, some of them would have burned, but a lot would probably become some sort of Wood and Sun elemental, a rather frightening combination as it should synergise quite well. And if that happened, they would become empowered with the day, making our flight nigh impossible.


    Hearing my words, Rai picked up Adra, who was still out of it from the massive amount of power she had ingested, while Sigmir placed me on Ylva¡¯s back and picked up Lenore.


    Clinging on the Ylva¡¯s back, I drifted in and out of consciousness, as the others ran through the forest. Finally, I couldn¡¯t hold on any longer and passed out.

 Chapter 604

    There was something other than Sigmir¡¯s comforting smell in the air when I woke back up. It smelled of charcoal, almost as if someone was grilling some delicious meat nearby but once my brain was fully engaged and started to trace the Astral Power that came with those scents, the saliva that had gathered from the smell of grilled meat almost turned into gastric acid and I had to fight my gag reflex.


    The air around me was thick with the power of Sun and Life, strong enough to make me nauseous and when I pushed myself up to look around, I began to wonder if we had wandered into hell. The forest around us was still teeming with life, the trees slowly swaying in an unseen breeze, their leaves almost glowing with power as they absorbed the energy of their surroundings.


    ¡°Don¡¯t try to move, some of those are dangerous,¡± Sigmir warned me, pulling me into her embrace.


    ¡°What happened?¡± I asked, trying to remember the escape from the giant tree, only to come up empty. After Sigmir had put me on Ylva¡¯s back, I only remembered brief flashes of silvery fur and Ylva¡¯s unique scent, a mixture of ice, snow and canine.


    ¡°The forest became rather busy. I think in addition to the mess Adra and you made of that tree, you managed to wake up some other being, there was something in the air, a suffocating feeling. Rai worked desperately to hide us and he must have managed, or maybe that being didn¡¯t care so much for us and was more interested in other things, I¡¯m not sure. Either way, we managed to run away. The trees around here are mostly placid, eating up the power you unleashed, but a massive amount of animals have become serious trouble.¡± she explained, sounding incredibly tired.


    ¡°You need to rest, I¡¯m fine now. Let me keep watch,¡± I told her, gently pushing her to reverse our positions, with her resting on the fur and me cradling her head, gently stroking her hair. The fact that I had easily been able to push her down spoke of her exhaustion or she would likely have put up some token resistance at the very least and given me a couple of kisses on the way.


    Her breathing evened out within moments and I could feel her mind settling over our connection as she fell into a deep sleep of exhaustion. I kept watch, guarding her sleep and took a glance at the log, curious what had been gained.


    There were dozens, if not hundreds, of lines indicating partial credit for a kill, the actual EXP gained an utter pittance but the sheer number made up for it. The biggest one was from the first kill we had struck, namely the destruction of an Ancient Sapling, the name implying all sorts of curious things, but that was to worry about later.


    One new type of message was the notification that a quest had failed and our relationship with the Free People had become unfriendly. Looking at the massive mess around us, I had a feeling that unfriendly relations were the least we had to expect on that front. But maybe we¡¯d be lucky and get out of human lands before the mess could boil over.


    The upside of the large number of kills was that I had gained another level, bringing me to 119 while my Darkness-Magic and Death-Magic each gained a single point, rising to 79 and 25 respectively. There were no titles or traits gained, but I had a feeling that Adra had reaped the glut of the benefits this time and began to wonder where the intrepid Dryad was.


    I didn¡¯t have to wait for long, and soon, I noticed a change in the shadows around me, their behaviour just a little unnatural. If not for my high affinity for Darkness, I wouldn¡¯t even have noticed, but previous exposure and experience allowed me to see through Rai¡¯s concealment and immediately detect Rai and Adra quietly moving through the trees.


    ¡°Welcome back,¡± I greeted them, looking at Adra who was wandering next to him, her spear out and ready.


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


    ¡°Thanks,¡± she replied and just from looking at her, I could barely tell that she had grown stronger. There was something more about her and I thought the way she moved carried more power and grace, but she wasn¡¯t radiating danger, not unless she wanted to.


    ¡°Are you pleased with your gains?¡± I asked, prodding to satiate my burning curiosity, though it would be incredibly impolite to ask her outright. Luckily, she knew me quite well and simply laughed, quietly, so she wouldn¡¯t disturb the sleeping Sigmir, and answered.


    ¡°A new road has opened for me, one that was quite unexpected. I¡¯ll need some time to think and consider,¡± she shook her head, preventing any additional questions.


    ¡°How are you? I couldn¡¯t have done this without you,¡± she admitted, her eyes now filled with concern and gratitude. Not enough gratitude to tell me the details of her gains and progress, but genuine gratitude.


    ¡°I¡¯ll live, which is a lot more than we can say for Jenn. I don¡¯t even know what happened to her, I didn¡¯t have the time or mental capacity to worry about her. Grabbing Rai and Sigmir was the best I could do,¡± I shrugged, mostly disappointed about the failed quest.


    ¡°She kinda just¡­¡± Rai looked visibly uncomfortable, ¡°I don¡¯t know fell apart? Didn¡¯t take more than a second, her arms were gone before they hit the ground,¡± he shivered from the memory. Suddenly, I was quite glad that I hadn¡¯t seen that particular event.


    ¡°At least it wouldn¡¯t have hurt for long,¡± I swallowed, quickly pushing the image from my mind.


    ¡°We¡¯ll need to move soon,¡± Adra added, looking in the direction I thought we had come from. ¡°When I took the power, I interrupted something. I¡¯ve got no idea what was actually going on there, other than the tree being a giant collector for a variety of powers, but it belonged to someone. And we made a mess of it.¡±


    ¡°And they might want to have a stern conversation, especially with the one who took some of their carefully gathered power for her own use and unbalanced the whole system,¡± I raised an eyebrow, incredibly pleased that for once, it wasn¡¯t me who had caused a large-scale magical event.


    ¡°You know, the humans might want to sue you for the damage you caused to their forest, to say nothing of the monsters you unleashed. Pretty sure those monsters will spread out quickly and make a massive nuisance of themselves, don¡¯t you agree?¡± I prodded some more, not even trying to hide the schadenfreude I was feeling.


    ¡°Rai, you should provide your sweety there a Cloak of Shadows, who knows if the powers that planted that tree are capable of magically tracking her down? If so, I¡¯d prefer to have her concealed at all times,¡± I added for Rai, realising that it might be a future problem. He turned a little pale at the idea and I felt the shadows subtly shift.


    ¡°That hopefully helps. I¡¯ll try to come up with some warding of my own, but having multiple layers of protection will be useful,¡± Adra nodded, mostly looking at Rai.


    ¡°Why don¡¯t the two of you get us some dinner? I¡¯ve got a feeling that we won¡¯t be easily able to buy food, not if word magically spreads that we were involved here. The rebels will most certainly have an inkling, so it will likely filter to the government at some point, too,¡± I asked them. Sure, rebels and imperials were enemies but if both their interests got damaged by a third party, I had no doubt that the rebels would share some information, trying to get an advantage out of it. And the identity of a criminal who caused a major, magical disaster would certainly have some value to those in charge.


    ¡°Um, sure?¡± Adra nodded, looking at me with a certain doubt, clearly wondering why I wanted them to leave.


    There were two reasons for that, the more important one was that I didn¡¯t want to disturb Sigmir¡¯s rest. I wanted to leave once she was back up and running, which meant she needed all the rest she could get. Knowing her, she most likely had made Rai rest for some time after getting here but hadn¡¯t rested herself. My silly love.


    With silent pressure from me, I waited for Adra and Rai to slip back into the shadows, looking for some mostly uncontaminated beast to hunt. In the meantime, I leaned back, getting my torse away from Sigmir without disturbing her, conjured up a bit of magical concealment around me and opened my magic bag, looking for the second reason I had sent them away.


    The crystal of corrupted Moonlight and Death I had inadvertently created. The power contained in that thing was no joke and having a massive amount of Death-attuned Astral Power, alongside the Moon¡¯s power, even if corrupted by Death, would most certainly come in handy at some point. Or it would kill me. One or the other. Or both.

 Chapter 605

    Just touching to pull the crystal out of my Magic Bag was painful. I could feel it drain the life out of my hand, the sensation similar to countless needles piercing my flesh and travelling along through, up my arm.


    I didn¡¯t even try holding it, instead, I dropped it next to me and watched the grass and vegetation start to wither around it. Looking at the crystal directly sent a shiver down my spine, a cold sensation that had nothing to do with the temperature swallowing my body. For a moment, I wasn¡¯t sure if there was another living soul out there, or if I was completely alone in an empty world of eternal, dull emptiness.


    ¡°That¡¯s some nasty stuff,¡± Lenore remarked, her voice shattering the illusion I had been trapped. She spoke softly but out loud, using my voice as she always did. Given our recent use of the Avatar-state, there was no way we¡¯d be able to communicate mentally for a few more hours, not unless we wanted to torture ourselves.


    ¡°True,¡± I agreed, bracing my mind and using the Inspect ability on the crystal, curious what it would give me.


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    Corrupted Mooncrystal - Unique


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    The blue box didn¡¯t give me a lot of information, but it was better than nothing. At least we now knew that what we had done was something remarkably rare, to the point that the system classified it as Unique. Just what that meant, I had no idea, but it ultimately wasn¡¯t that important. What was important was the power of Death and Madness radiating from it.


    ¡°Think we can control it?¡± I asked, lacking the confidence to try myself.


    Lenore stared at it for a long moment, her feathers ruffling up in something I recognised as discomfort.


    ¡°Not easily,¡± she admitted, her eyes still spellbound by the shiny crystal and the shimmer, deadly light it gave off. A light of madness and solitude, invoking discomfort and visions of a lonely, silent world in anyone gazing upon it.


    ¡°We might be able to use it as fuel in some spell if we don¡¯t care for the spell exploding out of our control, but controlling it will be difficult,¡± she added, breaking her gaze away from the crystal.


    ¡°That¡¯s not always a bad thing,¡± I grinned, ¡°Having the ability to overcharge one of our spells far beyond anything we could do can come in handy, you know? Just think of the glacier-dungeon, without the Eternal Ice, defeating the boss would have been a lot more difficult.¡±


    ¡°Yes, but your very soul got invaded by Ice,¡± she looked at me and I could feel the solemness in her gaze, ¡°If the same happens with this crystal, there¡¯s going to be nothing left of you, the Death and Madness would utterly consume your soul,¡± she warned me and I could only nod in acceptance, not quite sure how that would interact with my nature as a Traveller. Perma-character death most likely, so nothing you wanted to play around with.


    ¡°I¡¯ll be careful,¡± I promised her, even as my mind was starting to consider how the Mooncrystal could be used with reasonable safety. What was the use in having a bomb but being unable to use it?


    My musings were cut short when I noticed Sigmir shiver in her sleep, wondering if the proximity of the crystal had disturbed her dreams. With a frown on my face, I steeled my mind against the pain and picked it up, quickly dropping it into my Magic Bag, hoping that it would be enough to insulate Simgir from whatever radiation this thing might have.


    Once it was dealt with,I started to stroke her hair gently, whispering quiet words of love to her and her sleep soon calmed again. What a nasty piece of work that crystal was.


    Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author.


    For a few hours, I was left guarding Sigmir¡¯s sleep, quietly talking to Lenore or simply relaxing, considering the events of the previous day. There was a small part of me that regretted how things had played out, wondering if we could have gone about it differently. Losing Jenn rankled me, not because of whom she had been as an individual or something like that, but because she had been part of my group and she had died. To me, that meant the leader of the group, in this case I, had failed.


    How I could have managed to protect her, while also getting the power Adra had needed to cross the second Divide, I had no idea. Maybe there hadn¡¯t been a way, or maybe retreating first, after we had been able to gain access to the Ancient Sapling would have been the right call. Either way, what was done was done and I had a feeling we should try to cut our stay in the human lands as short as possible, given that we had thoroughly pissed off the rebels and the authorities wouldn¡¯t care for us one bit.


    Finally, Sigmir¡¯s eyes blinked back open, looking at me with a sleepy, a little dazed expression.


    ¡°Hey, love, had a nice rest?¡± I asked, smiling at her adorably fluffy and sleepy expression. She looked a little like a huge husky, woken from a deep slumber.


    ¡°Mhm,¡± she mumbled, ¡°Where are the others?¡±


    ¡°I sent them hunting a while back, I don¡¯t want to rely on shopping to replenish our supplies. Who knows if the Imperials have somehow got word that a group of four has disturbed the Forlorn Forest, things could get ugly,¡± I winked at her and she nodded in agreement.


    ¡°True, I doubt the local authorities wouldn¡¯t have made contact with those beings. Who knows what agreements and treaties they had in place,¡± she yawned, before wiping the sleep from her eyes, her head still resting on my lap.


    ¡°Doubtful they¡¯d just ignore a place like that. The effort to mess with it likely outweighed the benefits or maybe it was even part of another noble¡¯s efforts, there can be dozens of reasons why it was there. And there could be just as many, if not more, groups that resent us for stirring things up,¡± I grinned, not terribly worried. At the end of the day, our plan to get to Arbotoma relied on smugglers and similar shady groups, I had even considered asking the rebels for introductions, but that ship had sailed.


    ¡°It¡¯ll work out somehow. Things always do, just not always in the way we want them to,¡± she returned my grin, wiggling around a little to make herself more comfortable.


    Before we could get a nice snuggle session in, Adra and Rai returned, a part of me wondering if they had managed to keep track of the clearing, to be able to detect Sigmir¡¯s awakening. A part of me doubted it, but I couldn¡¯t be sure, the timing was too much of a coincidence otherwise.


    ¡°We got a good haul,¡± Adra announced, as she stepped onto the clearing with Rai. ¡°We should be fine for a couple of days, at least in regards to meat. Though you¡¯ll have to check and make sure there¡¯s nothing influencing the meat, I don¡¯t want to have any of the energy swirling around the area enter us through our diet,¡± she added, looking a bit queasy at the idea.


    ¡°So taking it in directly doesn''t matter, but you are squeamish to eat it?¡± Sigmir asked, sounding quite amused at the idea.


    ¡°It¡¯s not that,¡± Adra admitted, ¡°Just, some of the things we¡¯ve seen out there,¡± she shivered, visibly despite being a few metres away from us, ¡°They are just not right. There¡¯s too much life in the area, some of the monsters have been devouring each other but they just couldn¡¯t die.¡±


    ¡°That doesn¡¯t sound too nice,¡± I agreed, quite uncomfortable at the idea. The image of two snakes, trying to devour each other''s tails, only to constantly regenerate wasn¡¯t a nice one.


    ¡°No, really not. Let¡¯s just get away from here, please?¡± Rai asked and there was agreement all around.


    We quickly packed our stuff and started through the forest, carefully concealing us in the shadows. As we travelled, I realised that the others had carefully picked the campsite, as the forest all around us was a lot weirder. The plants were moving around, some of them reaching out with tendril-like branches, grabbing anything that came near them, pulling birds and small game into strangely gaping maws. Some of the insects were just as strange, butterflies with wings of fire, bursting into jets of flame when caught, ants that let out distinct jets of acid, sizzling through wood and causing the wood to burst into flame.


    While our concealment was good enough to avoid most creatures, some of them managed to stumble into us by sheer chance. There was no way to deal with the insane monsters, other than to put them down, which we did with prejudice.


    The whole situation made me wonder, how did things look outside the forest? Just what had we unleashed?

 Interlude: Furious Forum Flames

    Official Road to Purgatory-Beta Forum


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    -Kess, confirmed Beta-Account


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    For once, I understand the grievance of someone who wants to know how they died. Or maybe that¡¯s why they died?


    Either way, I¡¯m trying to figure out if there¡¯s an event going on that I missed, or what I¡¯m missing, why was I ganked by some burning deer on steroids with a high-enough level to return only question marks when using Observe on it?


    I¡¯m in the fraggin¡¯ starting area, so what¡¯s going on there?


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    Tarrin, confirmed Beta-Account


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    Some more information is needed, maybe you stumbled somewhere you shouldn¡¯t have, or it might, as cruel as that sound, simply have been a situation of wrong place, wrong time. Remember, Mundus is a living world, or at least Pantheon Entertainment did their very best to make it feel like one. If, in the real world, a mudslide takes out a road, there¡¯s no agency behind it, only bad luck for everyone involved.


    You might just have gotten caught up in some magical mudslide and there¡¯s nobody actually to blame.


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    Marud, confirmed Beta-Account


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    Pics or didn¡¯t happen, or maybe even a vid, so we can see what happened for our own. That way, we might be able to help. If not, Dhaha.


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    Kess, confirmed Beta-Account


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    Well, I guess, here¡¯s the video. For context, I was just outside of Whitebridge-by-the-river, my starting town in the Human Empire, collecting some herbs for the local alchemist to complete a quest. You know, your bog-standard gather-quest that is basically infinitely repeatable, at least as long there ain¡¯t enough player to swamp the area. I¡¯ve done similar quests the last couple of days and never ran into anything more vicious than a fox that stole my lunch.


    Stupid little bugger.


    But see for yourselves what sent me to respawn.


    [thehell.avi]


    A young human female, dressed in sturdy-looking, brown leather armour is slowly making her way through the forest, using a long staff to push aside branches and vines that might otherwise block her path. Sheathed at her side is a short blade, while a crossbow is strapped to her back, partially hidden beneath a green cloak that lets her blend in with the surrounding pines.


    For a few moments, nothing much happens as she pushes aside yet another branch, making sure that it doesn¡¯t snap back and hit her face when a strange noise, somewhere between reeving car and angry bull is heard, coming from somewhere to her left.


    Freezing, she moves into the space hidden by the branch she had just pushed aside, pulling her hood down to completely blend in with the tree, crouching in an attempt to vanish completely. Her cloak flutters a little, as she prepares her crossbow, her staff leaning against the tree next to her.


    The noise becomes louder and she is staring towards it, trying to spot the origin, when suddenly, the forest ahead partially bursts into flames, some of the trees igniting like tinder, only instead of actually burning to ash, it looks more as if the flames animate the trees, turning them from stoic, enduring forest-giants into burning torches with an appetite for destruction. The trees start moving in the most unnatural fashion, burning branches waving back and forth, one of them even starting to move across the ground, carried by tendril-like roots.


    ¡°What?!¡± the female mutters, only to fall silent the next moment, when a giant deer, easily twice her size, struts into view, regal, red fur and, most eye-catching of all, a wide crown, its ten points all ablaze with flickering flames.


    Focusing on the strange monster, the female instinctively raises her crossbow and in the shared log, a blue box appears, displaying the result of her skill usage.


    This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it


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    Radiant Stag, level ??


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    The stag, possibly disturbed by the Observe, focuses on the tree the female is hidden in and lets out a snort, a few flames shoot from its nostrils and suddenly, it becomes obvious where the earlier noise came from. Despite, or maybe because of, the abysmal failure of her Observe, the female raises her crossbow, intent to not go down without a fight. Sadly, there is no fight, the tree she is hiding in suddenly bursts into flames and while the flames don¡¯t seem to bother the tree too much, it happily starts moving around, getting engulfed in flames most certainly bothering the female. Even before the tree branches between which she had sought shelter could bludgeon her to death, the heat and the flames had done her in, leaving behind nothing but a corpse that quickly turned to ash, even as her essence was drawn back into her sanctuary.


    As the message of her death is displayed in the log, the video ends.


    [/thehell.avi]


    So, that¡¯s what happened to me. A single look, a single snort and I was turned into ashes.


    I don¡¯t mind dying, okay that¡¯s a lie, I don¡¯t like it, but if I die, I at least want to know why, not just get smashed to death by randomly falling rocks or deer with a penchant for pyromania.


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    Tobiuno, confirmed Beta-Account


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    Not sure if it¡¯s related to your situation, I don¡¯t know all the small towns in the Empire, but there¡¯s been a report about some major trouble in the east, near the coast. Nobody could actually tell me a lot and we in Highever are quite some distance away, so we only got the most basic information.


    There was mention of Life and Sun-Astral Power in that missive we got, which could very well be what you saw. I mean, Radiant Stag sounds kinda sunny, if you know what I mean?


    Doesn¡¯t help you, but I think it might simply have been a case of wrong place, wrong time, but I¡¯ll try to look into it, I¡¯m curious.


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    Dean, confirmed Beta-Account


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    At least I¡¯m not the only one who burned, pretty much the same happened to me. Only for me, it wasn¡¯t a giant, burning stag that stared at me, it was a sounder of wild hogs, all of them on fire and even more ornery than ordinary hogs that happily trampled me.


    I managed to get an Observe through on one of the smaller ones and the system told me that it was level 74, making me think that the rest of those things were higher in level. Makes my little, scrawny level 30 ass feel reeallly good, to get stomped by a gang of those things.


    Additional Fun fact, I was a few days march away from Whitebridge, so it¡¯s not even really localised, it stretches across at least a hundred miles, maybe more, who knows.


    Not to be a bitch about it, but I¡¯d like to have an explanation from Pantheon, it¡¯s no fun to get murked by surprise-hogs, burning or otherwise. Low-level areas should be exempt from high-level events or your newbies will die off faster than they can join and soon, your game will be a graveyard.


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    -Kess, confirmed Beta-Account


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    Thanks, Dean, it makes me so happy to hear I¡¯m not alone in getting burned to a crisp¡­ Not.


    Anybody in Whitebridge or one of the nearby towns and can share what¡¯s going on there? Are those things only out in the woods, or did they light the towns on fire?


    Tobiuno, if you manage to find out anything, I¡¯d be grateful.


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    Dean, confirmed Beta-Account


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    You¡¯re very welcome, trouble shared is trouble doubled, as me mum used to say.


    Still hoping for an official statement, but getting some info would be neat, Tobiuno.


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    Tobiuno, confirmed Beta-Account


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    Well, I managed to get a bit of info from native sources but sadly not a lot, simply because there¡¯s not a lot t begin with.


    Day before yesterday, in the morning, a major event happened in one of the local Wild Magic Zones, from the reports it¡¯s called Forlorn Forest. Danger-rating by the Empire is High, and outsiders are prohibited from entering, regardless of level, so what actually happened is unknown. The event itself was picked up by Imperial Diviners, looking out for such things and involved a major release of Life- and Sun-Astral Power, by some unknown mechanism.


    The released Astral Power seems to have morphed the local Astral River and infused a wide variety of beasts, turning them into Monsters that, as one would expect, have begun rampaging, either fighting amongst themselves or getting forced out of the region, into the rest of the Empire.


    Most towns have magical formations to withstand unless there¡¯s some serious assault so the towns are safe but outside of the walls. The Eastern Empire has just become a much more dangerous place.


    That¡¯s all I can tell you, sadly it ain¡¯t much, but it¡¯s what I could gather. I¡¯ll keep asking around.


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    Tarrin, confirmed Beta-Account


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    Why does that remind me of the situation in Kolyug not that long ago? Bunch of magically enhanced beasts, all hell-bent on raising the town because some cooky mage got a hate-boner for the city.


    Anybody got an incredibly powerful, ancient witch sitting around in the Empire and could call them? Maybe that¡¯ll help.

 Chapter 606

    It took us quite a bit of effort to find a suitable location to make a camp for the night. There was simply too much chaos, too many creatures changed by the incredibly volatile Life-aspected Astral Power we had unleashed and infused with the rampaging energy of the Sun, the fusion of those two powers driving them beyond the limits of sanity.


    It was as if they had decided that survival of the fittest meant they would survive if everything else died off. And so, they rampaged or fled the rampage of others to rampage elsewhere.


    It was a mess.


    Without a whole of Darkness- and Nature-aspected concealment, laid down in concert by Adra, Rai and myself, we¡¯d have been swarmed by dozens, if not hundreds of monsters, all of them equipped with nearly inexhaustible vitality and burning, often literally, with power.


    In some ways, it was an unlimited banquet of EXP, just there for the taking but infuriatingly, if we did more than nibble, we always risked getting mobbed by dozens, if not hundreds, of monsters, all far too happy to but their individual differences aside to burn the interlopers, those not infused with their radiance, to cinders.


    We risked a few nibbles whenever possible, nabbing us enough EXP to gain a level, bringing me to 120, a big one. My class gave me three Intelligence, two Intuition and two free points, bringing me to seventy-three Intelligence and fifty-four Intuition before distributing the two open points. They could round out my Courage, currently sitting at a lowly twenty-nine, only there thanks to the points gained by crossing the Divides, push my Intuition to fifty-five in the hopes to gain something, or do the same with Intelligence, though that would come automatically once I reached hundred-twenty-five. It would take a while unless we managed to stumble across a dungeon suitable to grind, something incredibly rare, so it might not happen before the beta ended.


    Looking at things, I made a snap decision and put both points into Intelligence, planning to push it all the way to eighty, if I managed to get to the next attribute points. That might give something special, as I had some hopes that the smartest person at the end of the Beta might gain some nifty titles for the official version, maybe even something that gave them a tangible benefit in the life-version.


    The fighting with them gave me another benefit, far beyond, or apart from EXP and levels. It finally allowed me to gain some additional understanding of the working of magical resistance and affinity.


    The creatures we were now fighting were clearly attuned to the Sun and throwing around Fire like nobody''s business, their fire strong enough to burn away a casual Ice attack before it could ever do damage. Similarly, I could easily neutralise their flames if I applied a surplus of Ice, especially in the form of freezing mist, simply smothering their flames.


    That realisation and practical use of that discovery allowed me to pierce what I had considered a resistance by simply focusing my power down in scale, creating a more concentrated attack. Where an Icicle made from simple Ice was burned away, an Icicle of Hard Ice managed to go through their defence and once it hit? Well, the reaction was akin to my own reaction when getting struck by a fire-aligned attack, causing massive damage.


    In comparison, when shooting an Ice-aligned monster with an Icicle, the attack would easily go through, the elements not even clashing but without a clash, the impact was moderately unspectacular, the elemental power largely getting absorbed. An Icicle could still pierce, but it would be minor in comparison.


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    Sadly, as almost always when realising some new truth about magic, I noticed exceptions and areas where it didn¡¯t quite apply. In this case, Life and Death seemed to be exceptions, or maybe they worked under some other paradigm. Where Ice tried to overwhelm Fire, and Darkness tried to smother the Light Life seemed to almost invite Death in, the opposing energies mingling and neutralising each other without much fuss. Sure, Death magic would kill a creature infused with Life-energy, just like it would kill everything else, but it wasn¡¯t particularly suitable to do so. Ice, for example, had a much easier job, purely from an elemental aspect.


    Discussing our new gains in magical understanding with Lenore was a little bit of an annoyance. Our recent use of the Avatar-state had left our mental connection raw and, for lack of better words, sore. making it ache whenever used. Speaking was so incredibly limited when it came to advanced concepts that we gave up quickly and focused on the simpler things, like the concealment formations we had to put up around our camp.


    It was only after we were reasonably confident that our camp was secure, that things became routine. If not for the slightly weird aspect of the game Adra and Rai had caught, it could have been an utterly normal animal and some Magic-devouring Darkness allowed me to cleanse away most of that taint, rendering it harmless and, more importantly, tasty to me. I didn¡¯t even want to think about trying to eat meat that carried Sun-aspected Astral Power, not with my magical senses tied to my taste and smell and my inherent bias against all things fire and light.


    Cuddled up to Sigmir, I fell into a deep slumber, my body and mind still exhausted from the exertions of the previous day.


    Hours later, I woke back up, my whole body covered in a cold sweat, my mind filled with weird, vague memories, images of giant, crimson eyes, slit like those of a snake had been staring at me and I was quite confident that there had been words, but none I remembered. Only the sibilant hissing, rumbling with power, deep enough to shake my very bones were left in my mind. Just thinking of the eyes, I was reminded of the dreams that had haunted me after the visit to the Dorrian Mountains and the bound titan, only back then, there had been an air of intimidation. Here, there had been interest and curiosity, at least as far as I could feel it. Not that the interest of such a being wasn¡¯t intimidating all of its own, the feeling of power had been palpable, strong enough to make me wonder if it could snuff me out instantly.


    Knowing that we had just ticked off some major power, for I was quite certain that was what had set up the Ancient Sapling, it made me wonder why the being in my dreams was interested and not hostile. Maybe a competitor of that great power? It certainly didn¡¯t feel like they were haunting my dreams to punish, threaten or attack me, just¡­


    That they were interested. Curious.


    ¡°I¡¯m fine,¡± I finally managed to assure Sigmir, who had noticed my condition but had been hesitant to wake me, especially as she could feel my mind and likely felt no true distress there. Looking around, I focused on the formations still surrounding our camp and found, to my mild amazement, that they hadn¡¯t been broken at all, there was no sign of intrusion or disruption on them. Making my dream either a simple, regular dream or created by a being capable enough to reach me past our wards without triggering them.


    Unable to do anything, I assured Sigmir some more, before logging out for the night, intent on getting my maintenance outside of Mundus done quickly before returning. Just in case things went sideways.


    Outside, as I was quickly eating some food I noticed a thread on the forum and, for once, was incredibly happy about my rather easily recognisable magic and style. There was almost no way that anyone who didn¡¯t already know the circumstances would guess that I was, at least partially, responsible for the massive wave of monsters terrorising the eastern parts of the Human Empire. If it were Ice- or Darkness-Monsters, sure, some might have guessed it, but when the monsters were largely aspected towards Fire and equipped with tremendous, unnatural resilience? It was just too far off-brand to be associated with me.


    Time would show if Leonard or any of the other Travellers undoubtedly working with the rebels would give out the information that I had been travelling through the Forlorn Forest if they even heard about it. Either way, for now, there was a huge mess, spilling all across the eastern part of the Empire and people would be running from it. Why not use the chaos to our advantage? There had to be a lot of people trying to get away and if there were a few more, though, with higher levels than most, it shouldn¡¯t warrant too much additional attention.

 Chapter 607

    As I had privately expected, in the face of catastrophe, even the most rigid government couldn¡¯t just stubbornly cling to their clear and well-defined order and simply continue on. No, when the peasants started to starve, they began to go to where the food was. Or in this case, when the monsters started to come knocking, the peasants began to flee, just trying to get to some sort of safety. The military and the guards tried to maintain order, but from the videos I had seen on the forum, that was getting increasingly difficult. Killing a few peasants to frighten the mob was one thing, but indiscriminate slaughter invited indiscriminate rebellion. If they had nothing to lose but everything to gain, even the worst chance suddenly looked quite appealing.


    Not that the struggles of peasants or guards had a lot of impact on our journey, after two days of sneaking through the area directly affected by the fall-out of our actions, we were mostly clear, the monsters having spread far and wide with little chance for them to simply swarm us and use numbers to tear us apart. From the sneaking, carefully concealed skulkers, we became more confident and all-too-eager to tear into some hapless monster that thought to bar our path.


    ¡°Found something new,¡± Adra whispered. as always in the lead. ¡°I think those are the Forest Sprites, only that they are hopped up on the energy of the Sun. Want to see how strong they are now?¡± she asked, the four of us concealed by Shadows and Nature, working in concert.


    ¡°It might give us some insight into the one we pissed off,¡± I nodded, a shudder running down my spine when I thought of the dreams that had haunted me the last few days. Those serpentine eyes, gazing deep into my soul, measuring, judging, no matter how I tried to shield or conceal myself. If there had been any hostility, it would have been utterly terrifying, and even without it, it was incredibly disconcerting.


    ¡°Guide Sigmir into position, Rai and I will sneak around and come at them from the rear,¡± I suggested, getting quick nods from the others.


    Without any additional words, Rai and I blended into the shadows, melding into the darkness of the forest as we jaunted just on the edge where all shadows became one. It allowed us to move swiftly and without risking discovery on the material side. Recently, even the immaterial side was incredibly quiet, gone was the nervous feeling I had when jaunting through the shadows. Maybe it had to do with the intense amount of Sun-aligned Astral Power that had inundated the area, driving away the natives of the plane, but I didn¡¯t know. It might also come from the corrupt Mooncrystal I was carrying around, that the madness and Death inherent to it had a restraining effect. Or it was something else entirely.


    Either way, Rai and I managed to ghost into position, hiding in the shadows of a couple of trees on either side of the small clearing the Forst Sprites were using to dance in the sun. A part of me wanted to use Observe, the changes they had gone through were quite intriguing, to the point that I wondered if they really were the same kind of creature, but I didn¡¯t want to give the ambush away early.


    Feeling Sigmir on the other side of the clearing, ready to pounce, I slowly and carefully started to weave together some frozen nastiness, with a nice amount of magic-devouring darkness mixed in for good measure. By working slowly, there was no tell-tale glow or aural fluctuations that might give away that someone was working magic here, allowing me to remain hidden until it was time.


    The strange sprites, changed by the massive influx of power, twice the size of their previous existence, the green glow they had been shedding now replaced with a fiery aura, looking very much like a tiny sun, were happily dancing around, wings glittering in the sun-light as they twirled around the clearing. Their dance paused for a moment, and there was a fluctuation of power going on, some sort of exchange, and for me, it looked very much like an opening. They were doing something special, so no reason not to stab a couple of backs, as a distracted back is an easily stabbed one.


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    Even when working carefully and slowly, there was a limit to the amount of magical nastiness I could keep controlled and hidden, in this case, four large Javelins crystallised from Hard Ice, all infused with magic devouring darkness that would lash out as soon as they hit something. All four of them lanced out, targetting the four closest of the eight sprites and feeling my actions, Sigmir used that very moment to show herself, breaking through the undergrowth already clad in her crimson aura, weapon in hand and ready to do violence.


    The javelins struck the targets I had aimed for, easily piercing the radiant corona around them, causing a discharge of darkness that instantly washed the rest of that barrier away, while the Icicles themselves struck the Sprite¡¯s bodies, piercing into their backs. I was pretty sure I had managed to take out two of their spines, both of the Sprites dropping from the air, while I had managed to hit a third Sprite high in the torso, undoubtedly dealing some critical damage. The last Sprite had only been hit in the lower back, roughly where the kidney was for a human, but I had no idea how the Sprites were built anatomically. They looked vaguely human or elven, but the proportions were all wrong, to say nothing about their wings.


    The screams of my victims added a nice amount of panic to the distraction Sigmir had caused, the six remaining sprites suddenly whirling around in fluttery panic that only lasted a moment, cut short by the buzzing sound of an arrow, coming from behind Sigmir and piercing the Sprite I had struck high in the torso, adding a second hole to her chest and sending her to the unforgiving ground, likely out of its misery.


    Already starting to weave my next spell, another frozen Javelin as they clearly worked, I took a brief moment to use Observe, curious what it would tell me.


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    Radiant Sprite, level 85


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    To my surprise, Sigmir¡¯s first attack with her axe didn¡¯t actually do anything but cause the corona around the Sprite to flare, blocking the attack. Rai tried to attack as well, striking from the shadows but his attempt, accompanied by a surge of darkness, was washed away by the other three, all flaring their auras at him.


    Trying to support Sigmir, I shot the Javelin I had conjured at the same Sprite. After flaring its aura, some of it had faded away, but there was still enough power in there to melt away half of the Icicle, so when it hit the corona, it shattered harmlessly.


    The Sprites fighting Rai didn¡¯t need to focus on defence, even if two of them had to protect their other, wounded ally from another of Adra¡¯s arrows, so only one of them could strike back at him. And striking back it did, a flare of fire and light arcing away from its aura, moving fast enough to be little more than a beam of light that seared through the cloak of shadows around Rai, causing him to scream in pain as it burned his shoulder. But at least, the radiant corona around that Sprite had lessened a great deal.


    ¡°Focus,¡± I ordered, abandoning my efforts to summon Ice entierly. I didn¡¯t need to strike them, I needed to smother the light, and smothering was what I did. Overflow activated, my eyes turning completely black and I let my Astral Power surge outward, into the shadow I had been hiding it, empowering it and taking command.


    Commanded by my power, the Shadows surged forward, imbued with the same magic-devouring effect I had come to like and the Sprites saw the darkness coming and did the only thing they could do, let their lights flare up and push back.


    I felt Darkness and Light struggle and I felt them push the Darkness back, by sheer virtue of numbers. I could easily overpower one of them, likely two thanks to the devouring effect imbued into the Darkness, giving it a conceptual edge.


    But with four of them, all focusing on the Darkness I had summoned, I was losing what little ground I had made, their power threatening to wash away the shadow I was hiding in and me alongside it.


    Luckily, I didn¡¯t have to fight them alone and their efforts suddenly dropped off by a lot, as two of them were forced to defend themselves from Sigmir and Rai, while a pained, high-pitched scream told me that Adra¡¯s arrows had found yet another victim. Emboldened by their success, I pushed, and now, it was only two of them - Until another scream, accompanied by a triumphant howl, told me that Sigmir had overcome her foe.


    And then there was only one defending against me.

 Chapter 608

    The last Radiant Sprite was overwhelmed by a flurry of attacks and a hush fell across the clearing. it was only disturbed by quiet noises of pain from Rai, still burnt from the desperate counter-attacks of the Sprites and my own, laboured breath. I was feeling a little light-headed, the exertion of flooding the world with that much Astral Power nothing to be done lightly, even if it had been effective to overwhelm the sprites¡¯ defences, allowing us to destroy them.


    ¡°We learned something,¡± I mentally told Lenore, making my way out of the shadows of the forest and onto the clearing itself. Just looking at the bodies, I continued to learn, even if this lesson was an annoying one, namely that the sprites weren¡¯t studied casually, not even in death. Upon their death, their bodies had set themselves alight, burning with a fierce flame, radiating strong magic, to the point that I had a feeling their bodies themselves became the flame. Elf-immolation, if you will.


    ¡°Mostly that they are incredibly fragile, even worse than normal spellcasters. What did you call it, glass cannon?¡± Lenore asked, remembering one of the phrases I must have used in my mind at some point.


    ¡°But I don¡¯t think we¡¯ll be able to figure out anything with their bodies, look, there¡¯s almost no Death in their systems, they simply burn away as the Fire in their soul gets unleashed,¡± she added, even leaving her Hallow to get a better look.


    ¡°It¡¯s almost as if their bodies are merely shells that hold their spirits,¡± I muttered, looking at the strange sight through her eyes. There were implications there and things I had to consider, but for now, there were more important things.


    Instead of focusing on the small bonfires that were the sprites, focusing on my companions, remembering that we no longer had the privilege of having two healers in the party, but that without Olivia, the responsibility rested on me alone. Rai had visibly taken a couple of wounds, while Sigmir looked completely fine, her aura somewhat frayed but her body uninjured.


    ¡°Let me see,¡± I ordered, stepping up to him, pushing him upright so I could actually see his wounds. He let out a hiss of pain and I was taken aback by the damage he had taken. The worst wound was on his shoulder, where an almost palm-sized patch was completely black and carbonised, making me swallow hard, realising just how dangerous those things had been.


    ¡°This has to go,¡± I muttered, noticing that there was already faint energy of Death spreading from the carbonised flesh, slowly poisoning the rest of his body. Letting out a soft curse, I drew out my Athame, calling Lenore back into her Hallow. A brief glance and a surge of Death-Magic made sure that the Athame was completely clean, before pushing Rai to the ground.


    ¡°What?¡± he asked, taken aback by my sudden actions.


    ¡°The flesh on your shoulder is dead and needs to go, or it¡¯ll poison the rest of your body,¡± I told him, calling out to Adra, ¡°Adra, help me, I might need your magic,¡± I told her, already considering what to do. She came over, her bow still ready, but her magic wasn¡¯t really suitable to heal.


    Maybe it was something in my voice, maybe he could feel the damage himself, but he didn¡¯t try to argue but let me go to work. Lenore returned to her Hallow, and I briefly closed my eyes, shutting out all extraneous thoughts, completely focusing on the task at hand.


    Filleting my disciple.


    ¡°Take his hand, you¡¯ll need to give him company,¡± I told Adra, realising that he would either have to suffer the side-effect of my Mind Magic or the pain of getting his shoulder carved up. Hopefully, having Adra at his side would somewhat alleviate the effects of my Mind Magic.


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    She didn¡¯t quite get what I meant, but dutifully took Rai¡¯s hand, while I pushed his mind with mine, ready to smother at least some of the pain he was about to feel. I didn¡¯t have any anaesthetics, so it was the best I could do.


    With a resolute mind, I pushed my Athame into Rai¡¯s shoulder, guided by my ability to see and feel the dead flesh. The carbonised flesh had to go, all of it, or infection and greater trouble would follow. With my actions, I could see Rai twitch and detect the signals fired from his body into his mind, telling him that something was wrong. The universal bodily signal for trouble, pain, the body telling the mind, ¡®whatever it is you are doing, stop it, idiot,¡¯ only in this case, stopping would mean a slow, agonising death in the future.


    And so, I pushed against the signals, trying to blunt them as much as possible, even if it meant that Rai had to endure the curse of the Dark Moon that had become part of my Mind Magic.


    I couldn¡¯t allow myself to be distracted any further and focused on the dual task of cutting away the burned flesh while using Blood Magic to keep him from bleeding too badly from the wound I was creating. If not for the use of the Athame, made to focus my Blood Magic, it would have been incredibly difficult and even with it, I felt myself start to get a little wobbly. Other than the massive wound on his shoulder, where I had to cut away almost a centimetre of flesh, there were other wounds that needed to be treated and so I had to keep cutting, even as exhaustion had me in its grip.


    ¡°Adra, your hand,¡± I ordered, as I focused on yet another wound on Rai¡¯s body. The moment she held it out to me, I pierced a wound into her palm, giving me access.


    ¡°Need some power,¡± I explained, not bothering to explain further. Instead, I placed my own hand over the wound, drawing some of her magic out and causing her to hiss in pain. Having Blood Magic used against you was never a pleasant sensation, even if she tried to help with the transfer of power as much as possible, it was a violation of her being. A necessary one, but a violation nonetheless.


    I felt Sigmir step up behind me and some physical strength was flowing into me, some resilience. I recognised her Aura, transferring an echo of her power in an attempt to protect me, but it was more of an intimate gesture than practical use, her ability was to protect me from physical harm, not to give me strength when exhausted. But just her presence allowed me to push on.


    Finally, as the last bit of blackened flesh fell away, I let myself lean into Sigmir, magically completely exhausted.


    ¡°I¡¯m done,¡± I told them, feeling bone-weary. Looking at Rai and Adra, I could see that they were just as wiped as I, and even Sigmir looked a little tired.


    ¡°Love, can you gather some of those ashes? They might tell us something, or maybe not,¡± I asked her, trying to stand by myself.


    ¡°Certainly,¡± she promised, helping me stand and quickly moved to do as I had asked.


    ¡°We should get going, you alright, Rai?¡± I asked, getting a nod, though his pale face told something different.


    ¡°I collected samples from each of them, kept separately,¡± Sigmir said, after quickly gathering some of the ashes into small bags.


    ¡°Great,¡± I replied, a tired smile stealing across my face, ¡°Let¡¯s get going, I¡¯ll keep an eye out from above,¡± I promised, pushing myself into my Hallow, relishing that I could use it again. Lenore took off, flying from tree to tree, not really trying to move away from the party, not staying too close. A convenient distance.


    ¡°What do you think about those Sprites?¡± I asked Lenore, now that we had a bit of time.


    ¡°They, too, have been infused,¡± Lenore muttered, sending me some of her memories and impressions of the fight. With her eyes, it was quite visible that the creatures hadn¡¯t primarily run on Vitality, as a living being would but more as if they had been running on Astral Power. It made me wonder. What would happen if I managed to get my hands on them and use Blood Magic? Something to consider and maybe try out at some point.


    I left most of the scouting and guarding to Lenore, as my mind slowly drifted away, the safety of my hallow luring me into sleep. Magic was hard work and contending with a group of Sprites even harder still.


    Maybe just running away and ignoring the incredibly dangerous creatures would be the wise thing to do.

 Chapter 609

    For a week, we focused on staying hidden, occasionally killing the Radiant Monsters that plagued the countryside before we finally managed to get ahead of their migration. During our nightly rest, Lenore and I had been scrying for information, looking at the world from above and sending our gaze far across the land. Thanks to that, I was able to witness the Imperial response to the disaster and was quite impressed. While they hadn¡¯t been able to contain the monsters and quite a few farmsteads and small towns had burned, when it came to larger towns and cities, they were largely untouched. In Lenore¡¯s vision, shared to inspect the information from our scrying, we could see the towns glow like beacons, magical formations surrounding them with powerful shields. Similarly, we had been able to spy on one kill squad of Adventurers, travelling to take out the monsters wherever they met them. We didn¡¯t manage to see them in action, but just from the impression I got, I was reasonably certain they were as powerful as the four of us, maybe even stronger.


    Researching on the forum basically confirmed what I had learned by scrying, there were dozens of such teams roaming the countryside, suppressing the monsters, and probably Rebels alike. One of the commenters postulated that the Empire had such teams seeded throughout their land, for such eventualities, some of which might even be largely retired but get a stipend to keep in shape to assist in disaster relief. Good, if boring, governance.


    But there was something else I found during my research on the forum, something that made my blood freeze. The first time I noticed, it was a few days after the fact, merely a glimpse in a video focusing on the defence of that particular town and its shield. But looking closely, it was a face I recognised, surrounded by Imperial guards, hands adorned by quite obvious shackles.


    Somehow, Olivia had managed to get captured and detained. With only that single glimpse, I wasn¡¯t able to make much of it, but it gave me a place to start searching and on the second night of my search, a video came to my attention, adding greatly to my annoyance.


    It was from Hatterion, one of the major harbour cities and biggest towns of the Empire, the scene having garnered attention for its uniqueness, less for the participants. It wasn¡¯t an everyday occurrence that a Priest was tried in a secular court, especially not with the consent of the major temples.


    Most of the proceedings were arcane and quite boring, Olivia not even trying to defend herself, simply standing there in silent dignity, back straight and a soft halo of flames around her head. I recognised those flames as the ones normally adorning her staff, but given that it was gone, they were now around her head, much like a radiant crown. Clearly not a divine Judgement, but it didn¡¯t seem to matter to the magistrate.


    Nor did it matter to the crowd, and while the guards made sure that nothing was done to the servants of the court, that didn¡¯t extend to Olivia, who was peppered with a variety of projectiles, from rotten produce to rocks.


    By the time all was said and done, Olivia had been sentenced to Death for aiding the Rebellion and a few religious crimes. The Traveller filming had stuck to the procession as she was led out of court and once outside, between court and the prison where she was to be held, Olivia suddenly stopped, the flame atop her hand burning brightly, like a torch. The jeering crowd that had followed the procession suddenly fell silent and I was pretty sure I could see a rotten apple fall from a person¡¯s hand, rolling away.


    Before any of the guards could act, the shackles around her arms shattered with an audible crack, she raised both arms and suddenly, the stump of her hand was sheathed in flames for a moment and before anyone was able to do anything about it, the flames winked out, her previously severed hand back, but at the same time, in the middle of a busy plaza, she was petrified. With only a video, I couldn¡¯t really tell anything, but either, Olivia had been masterfully teleported out after some sort of light show and replaced with a statue of her,


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    Or she had been petrified by some unknown force and from the way the guards and clerics were milling around, not a force they could trifle with. The video continued for a few more minutes, there were a few attempts of clerics and mages to do something about the statue, but nothing happened before the video ended. A further comment, made hours later, explained that the statue was still there, standing untouched and proudly, despite the authority''s best efforts to remove it.


    While a small part of me was amused, there also was a terrible wrath within me. An icy chill that wanted nothing but consign those responsible for the death of my former companion to a dark void, where they would wallow in insanity until the end of time. Cursed to be awake, aware and yet unable to ever escape into the sweet release of insanity or death.


    When I logged back into Road to Purgatory, Lenore and Sigmir immediately picked up on my emotions and I could feel their concern.


    ¡°What happened?¡± Sigmir asked while I felt Lenore¡¯s worry through our bond.


    ¡°Olivia is dead,¡± I replied, my voice seething with cold fury. At the same time, I let Lenore see the images I had seen, the trial and her ultimate fate.


    ¡°Huh?¡± Sigmir let out a confused noise, ¡°What happened?¡±


    ¡°I don¡¯t know the details, only vague images. She was captured a few days ago, taken to Hatterion, tried and consigned to death. I believe her Deity intervened and removed her from the mortal plane before the punishment could be carried out, but functionally, that changes nothing. She is dead,¡± I explained, my anger radiating outwards.


    ¡°We shall take revenge in her stead,¡± Sigmir placed a hand on my shoulder, giving me a gentle squeeze. Revenge, the way of her people. Strike those who strike at you, pay back any wrongdoing a hundredfold.


    ¡°We shall,¡± I agreed, a terrible smile on my face. But who to strike against? The Rebels who had promised to keep her safe? Or the Imperials, who had put her to trial? Or maybe just both, to let them all feel our retribution.


    ¡°Lenore, do you remember the details of that rebel plan? They wanted us to act as a distraction for an operation of theirs, right? Did you hear any details?¡± I asked, before repeating the question out loud, asking Adra, Rai and Sigmir. If the rebels were planning an operation on the Imperials, especially if it was an operation targeting Hatterion, I wouldn¡¯t mind mixing things up a little. And make them all pay the ultimate tribute to my companion.


    For a moment, none of the others replied, all trying to recall any details.


    ¡°They didn¡¯t exactly say much, I heard a few talks about a raid to give a few nobles tax troubles,¡± Rai replied, his face scrunched in a frown.


    ¡°I heard that, too,¡± Adra nodded, ¡°I think it was a noble near Hatterion and they needed to be done before the Tax-Collectors come around in a week or two, they were quite tight-lipped on the details.¡±


    ¡°As they should be,¡± I agreed, already considering how I could get the information I wanted and position us so we could have our revenge. There was a small part of me that considered leaking the rough position of the rebel village to the authorities, but that didn¡¯t sit right with me. Revenge should be taken as personal and direct as possible, a strike by you against those who wronged you, not by helping your enemies, even if they might also harbour hatred for another of your enemies. No, Vengeance would be wrought by my mind, delivered by my hand and magic.


    For the rest of the evening, even while I was supposedly on watch, a large part of my focus was consumed with the question, how could I properly avenge my companion? How could I get rid of the anger swirling around my body, the drive to send as many of those idiots to a frozen grave?


    If the people had allowed Olivia to face her accusers with honour and dignity, without disgracing her, without the cheers at her sentence, maybe I would have had a bit of mercy for them. But, even if only on a video, seeing crowds bay for the blood of my companion, to see people, to see even children, be excited and happy about the death of a kind soul like her? Someone who had gone through life without raising her hand against others, with an Oath to not impede the freedom of others?


    If they wanted to cheer for the death of a good person,


    I would show them what the revenge of an evil person would be. For I was certainly not good or benevolent in any way, shape or form.

 Chapter 610

    As the adage went, revenge was a dish best served cold.


    But how to prepare that dish, how to punish those who had killed my former companion? It was a question Lenore and I had discussed at length, as it most certainly would have to be a magical solution. Sure, pure violence could be applied but even if Sigmir, Adra and Rai were incredibly powerful in their own right, their ability to direct violence was much more direct and focused. If you want to direct violence at a large area, or a large number of people, you needed magic and quite powerful magic at that.


    But it wasn¡¯t only thinking that we had done over the last few days, just as important that the thinking had been the scouting. We had travelled near Hatterion, setting up camp about half a day¡¯s march away from the city, carefully hidden in the forest. From here, Adra and Rai had been heading out, looking for traces of the Rebels, while Lenore and I had done similar things, scrying and searching from the air.


    Sadly, neither of us had been able to detect any direct evidence of their activities, the best leads we had found were a couple of game trails that showed signs of being used by humans in the past. But if those humans were rebels, simple poachers, bandits or something else entirely, we couldn¡¯t tell from the traces left behind.


    Ultimately, Lenore and I had decided that it didn¡¯t matter. There most certainly would be rebels in town. While we couldn¡¯t positively conclude that Olivia had been betrayed by her compatriots, we also couldn¡¯t rule it out, leading us to decide on a similar, fate-based approach. If the rebels in the city were lucky enough to evade our vengeance, or simply not be there in the first place, it could be seen as a judgement from the Divine, allowing them to live.


    If they were hit, well, then the Gods had judged them and they would be culpable. Either way, the havoc we would cause would most certainly implicate them, if only because the Empire would be in an utter uproar. To quell such uproar, an enemy was quite useful, an image that you could direct the public¡¯s ire towards. And if such an enemy had years, maybe even decades or centuries of hatred directed at them, there was almost no low Humans wouldn¡¯t stoop to, if directed by callous people.


    ¡°You made a decision, didn¡¯t you, love?¡± Sigmir asked, as my mind returned to my body after Lenore and I finished yet another of our scrying attempts. There was a lot of information to be gathered before we could strike, so we had spent most of our time sitting on my throne, using shadowy ravens to observe the world.


    ¡°We did,¡± I nodded, letting out a sigh. There was much work to be done before we could turn the grand plan Lenore and I had hatched into a practical reality. Or rather, there were a lot of human resources to be acquired.


    ¡°We¡¯ll need people,¡± I explained, ¡°Quite a few of them, they don¡¯t need to be willing, just alive and as unharmed as possible,¡± I added, a small part of my heart asking if Olivia would have wanted us to avenge her with such ruthlessness. But it was only a small part, the much louder part of my heart and mind wanted them to pay. They hadn¡¯t even given Olivia¡¯s trial the proper gravitas but turned it into a spectacle. If they wanted a spectacle, I would give them a spectacle they wouldn¡¯t forget in their lifetime, as brief as that might be.


    ¡°That won¡¯t be a problem,¡± she nodded, a vicious smile spreading across her face. If nothing else, she was looking forward to taking revenge a lot more than any of us, as only if death was avenged, could the soul move on into the next life. Given how Olivia had lived and how she had died, there was a lot of debt to be paid in her eyes. For her friends, she was willing to spill oceans of blood.


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    Convincing Adra and Rai of my plan was remarkably simple, even if that small voice somewhere in my heart grew louder, asking if I was acting for Olivia or if I was taking her death as justification for my own desires. Did I want to avenge her, or did I just want to see how far I would be able to push things? Had I been influenced by what I had seen Mal do, and was just yearning to test a few hypotheses of mine?


    But did that even matter? One did not preclude the other, I could avenge Olivia, satisfy my own curiosity and, maybe, even gain an achievement worthy of great renown.


    Driven by those thoughts, the four of us spent a few days preying on the locals. It was incredibly disheartening just how easy it was to capture them. Rai and Adra kept watch, making sure we were undetected, while I simply used magic to put the small groups we were targetting to sleep. No actual violence and the sheer difference in level meant the locals couldn¡¯t even begin to resist, they simply fell like puppets with their strings cut, as soon as they got struck by my magic.


    There was no fuss, no struggle, just a bunch of people who fell unconscious between steps, the worst wounds caused by their falls. A lot of scraped knees, a few broken bones, bleeding lips and knocked-out teeth, but nothing actually troublesome. That would come later.


    Once they were out, Sigmir and I carried them into the trees and I pushed the magic deeper into their minds, letting them fall into a comatose state, unable to act, dream or even think. It was almost as if they were dead and I doubted they¡¯d wake up without some major, magical interference. Of course, that also meant we were on a timer, as it would only take a few days before the people would simply start dying off and our collection would be pointless.


    Luckily, it only took us two days of preying on travellers on a major trade route to capture the forty people we had aimed for and, to my amusement, one of the last groups we caught was even a group of guards, possibly send out here to investigate. If they were, the Empire was even more impressive than I thought, as I was reasonably certain that I had blocked all attempts to divine our location and actions and to obfuscate what was going on. If someone had managed to get a glimpse regardless, it was quite the achievement.


    Once we had collected the necessary ingredients, during a clear, cold night, Lenore and I went to work, slowly drawing a huge ritual circle, hundreds of interlocking runes and their connecting patterns. For each of the bodies we had gathered, there was a small, magical formation prepared, three on the outside, feeding into the larger formation on the inside. On one side of that central circle was my throne, once again carved with dozens of runes. As always, it wasn''t really a place to sit on, but a focus to allow me to channel immense amounts of power, more than I¡¯d normally be able to.


    The whole ritual was primarily designed for that, as my plan was incredibly simple, the use of magic I had used hundreds of times in the past. Just not on this scale.


    Opposite my throne, on the other side of the central circle, was a small receptacle of Ice, ready to accept the corrupted Mooncrystal, the major component of the ritual. Without it, I doubted I would have the sheer power to pull off what Lenore and I had in mind.


    ¡°Adra, Rai, Sigmir, please be ready to protect us, just in case. If you are about to get overwhelmed, flee, Lenore and I will be able to catch up to you,¡± I told them, as I was getting ready to begin the ritual.


    For a moment, Sigmir looked as if she would refuse and I had a feeling she might just say the words but ultimately refuse to retreat anyway. Loyalty and love were shining from her eyes, alongside sold trust.


    ¡°We will,¡± Adra nodded, looking at the many bodies surrounding my throne. She had seen me do quite a bit of ruthless magic, but nothing on this scale. And yet, there wasn¡¯t a bit of worry in her eyes, merely calm, brutal acceptance. Our friend had been hurt and those who had done the deed had to pay for it.


    ¡°We¡¯ll be fine, Teacher,¡± Rai promised, after tearing his eyes from the formation. He wasn¡¯t a mage but he understood some magic and had a rough idea of just how much power I was about to evoke. And I had a feeling it scared him something fierce.


    ¡°Let¡¯s do this,¡± I said to Lenore, as I carefully walked into the centre of the circle, a grin spreading across my face. Sitting on my throne, I closed my eyes, letting out a deep breath, before I began to channel my magic, letting it seep into the ritual, slowly infusing the hundreds of runes.


    It was snowtime.

 Chapter 611

    Magic was flowing into countless runes, slowly infusing them until a threshold was reached. At that moment, Icicles shot up all around the ritual site, piercing the restrained humans, letting their blood follow prepared channels, all linked to the Silver Athame stuck in the middle of the circle, the power of their Vitality starting to infuse the ritual. At the same time, the loss of vitality in their bodies caused another process to start, the decay of bodily functions, as some of the Vitality was decaying, forming the energies of Death.


    Some of the restrained people were awoken by the pain of getting pierced, or maybe by the pain of having their Vitality and parts of their soul ripped away, either way, they were in pain and wailing, their despair filling the air with a nauseating stench. And yet, even though it was the smell of blood and death, to me, it smelled delicious.


    The combination of Astral Power derived from Vitality was channelled into the ritual circle and, guided and transformed by our Blood Magic, was channelled towards the middle, where the corrupted Mooncrystal had been prepared. Vitality and the complementary power of Death began to fuse, forming into truly pure and potent power, only one still infused with the corrupting insanity of the Moon.


    The moment the corrupted Mooncrystal was involved in the ritual, the power we had been slowly accumulating suddenly shot through the roof and the people providing the additional power had to compensate for it. It took only moments for them to succumb, as their essence was drained into the ritual and in the moment they died, even more power was freed up.


    On our throne, Lenore and I fully merged, our wings spreading out behind us, the Crown of the Northern Winds resplendent on our head, the Gem set prominently into it shining with a cold, silver light, mirroring the glow of our eyes.


    For a moment, I felt as if I heard a song on the wind, as magic coalesced around us, the ritual flaring up as the slow, cautious build-up of the previous hour reached a sudden crescendo and all the power was unleashed at once. The corrupted Mooncrystal was shining in its receptacle, the glow eery and madness-inducing, its power fully unleashed.


    Snow started to fall and the shadows started to dance and we started to sing, a counterpoint to the ethereal sounds of magic vibrating in the air. The cries of a crow, combined with my own voice started to form words, words of vengeance. A song to a lost friend, taken from us and her memory tarnished by those blind to the world. Those who had wronged our friend, we would bring vengeance to them, so nobody would dare disrespect one of ours ever again.


    Somewhere, far beyond our perception and yet right next to us, we felt a response, as if something was singing in harmony with us, cursing the world, infusing the magic we were weaving with their own essence.


    Moments passed as power was flooding out of us, our song rising in strength and volume, until it all reached a single peak, the single point where everything came together. It was an intense feeling, unlike anything we had ever felt, the closest comparison could be the moments of oblivion I had felt with Sigmir, the seconds before the crash.


    Only here, there was no sweet release in the arms of my loved ones, only immensely powerful magic that we had to channel through the Astral River into markers we had set up beforehand. The markers were just outside the magical boundaries of Hatterion, mere trinkets that gave us the ability to find the city in those precious few seconds before the power we had unleashed overwhelmed us.


    A moan of relief broke from our lips as the power flooded through the prepared channels, forming into that grande magic. We couldn¡¯t see what was happening, there was simply no time or mental capacity to behold anything, we could only control the flow of power as much as possible and hope that we didn¡¯t fade before the power we had unleashed did.


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    For the first few seconds, everything was alright but soon, the pain started to set in, the pressure of power simply too much for a mortal body to bear. Stubbornly, we grit our teeth and set our will against the very world and the power we had unleashed. We had dared to raise that much power and we would not fall by our own hand.


    We could feel the power roaring through the Astral River and for a moment, there was a blockade, as if something or someone was trying to hold us back. But with the sheer volume we had unleashed, especially with the sacrifice of innocents to bolster and flavour the magic, there wasn¡¯t an easy way to block our attack. It flooded out from the markers we had prepared, forming into the single, grande spell we had wrought. Nothing fancy, just a spell that combined Blood, Ice and Darkness Magic into the Mist of Devouring, draining the vitality and life of everything it touched. In addition, the corrupted Mooncrystal was consumed in the ritual, adding its own effect to the magic. I had no idea how that¡¯d turn out, but sadly, I wouldn¡¯t be able to see the effect, at least not directly.


    Finally, the pressure was gone, the magic spent. Our body vibrated with exertion, raspy breaths forming into pained moans as we started to slowly fade. With a gentle push, Lenore and I separated back into two distinct beings and I forced my eyes open to take in our surroundings.


    A tired smile played on my lips when I realised that the entire clearing was devastated. The ground was covered in snow, Death-Magic had spread from the centre, tearing apart dozens of trees and leaving the ground blighted, the bodies had been morphed by the intense magic we had unleashed, to the point that magic lingered on them. Unless I was very wrong, they¡¯d rise again in the near future, twisted caricatures of life, infused with a desire for vengeance. Vengeance against whom, that only time would tell, it might be us, who had killed them, it might be their society or even the gods and life itself. For a moment, I considered destroying them, or asking the others to destroy them, but as a tired smile spread on my face, I decided against it. We would soon leave this place anyway, so their vengeance would never reach us.


    ¡°Love, help,¡± I rasped out, calling for Sigmir.


    She instantly moved over, pulling me into an embrace, uncaring for the remains of our ritual or anything but me.


    ¡°We need to leave,¡± I told her, feeling the lingering magic of our ritual starting to warp the world around us, the pressure had changed this place forever. I had no idea what would become of it, but given the forces involved, I was certain I didn¡¯t want anything to do with it.


    As Sigmir was picking me up from my throne, carefully carrying me in her arms, the magic around us started to twist and warp, the sensation eery enough to make her run.


    Looking over her shoulder, I could see the figures slowly pushing themselves up from the ground and the Ice I had used to construct my circle, now stained with the blood of the fallen, moving, forming something different. With the little Astral Power i had regained, I formed a rune in my mind, trying to make the Astral Power lingering in the Ice shatter, to destroy all traces. There were a few, crisp sounds of breaking Ice, but I had no idea if it was enough. Leaning against Sigmir¡¯s broad chest, I couldn¡¯t do anything more, just holding Lenore in my arms and onto my consciousness was hard enough.


    Behind us, we heard howling noises and I felt Sigmir speed up, running alongside Adra and Rai.


    ¡°Love, I¡¯ll retreat into my Hallow,¡± I quietly whispered, ¡°That way you¡¯ll only have to carry Lenore, I¡¯m a lot heavier than she is.¡±


    For a moment, I felt her arms wrap around me extra tight as if she didn¡¯t want to let go.


    ¡°Go, but come back soon,¡± she implored me.


    ¡°Tomorrow,¡± I promised, before pushing myself into my Hallow. The agony of doing so, right after the Avatar State had ended was intense, to the point that I almost blacked out. If I had a physical body, I¡¯d likely have soiled myself but luckily, without a body, that couldn¡¯t happen.


    Moments later, the sweet relief of the log-out came over me and after a moment of floating, I found myself in the capsule space, back on my throne.


    With the fading pain came relief and with relief came exultation. We had done it.


    Just how much we had achieved, I didn¡¯t know just yet but judging from the intensity of the magic we had unleashed I was quite certain, we had done something incredible.

 Chapter 612

    After logging out of Road to Purgatory, I didn¡¯t leave my capsule immediately. Instead, I pulled up the official forum and its list of active life streams, trying to see if anyone was currently active in Hatterion. By official decree, all life-streams came with a delay, making the communication between host and viewers difficult but maintaining a certain distance between the audience and those on Mundus. One of the intentions was to make it difficult for people to actively look into the streams to gain information on their competition but it was a hotly debated topic, with many content-creators preferring direct communication with their audience. So far, Pantheon hadn¡¯t dropped their requirement, but I had a feeling they would or at least give the host the option to remove it.


    In this case, the delay was quite useful to me, as the real part of the ritual had only taken an hour, so the effects should still be visible. If I found a streamer with open replays, I¡¯d even be able to see the entire thing.


    Looking at the titles, I soon found one titled Hatterion Nightlife and immediately clicked on it, opening two windows, one with the current display, the other allowing me to scroll through the recording and witness the events from the beginning.


    In the current view, things looked incredibly dire. The host was a female human and currently pressed into a quite familiar barrier of golden light. While I couldn¡¯t be entirely certain without direct exposure, it looked very much like the one conjured up by Olivia on occasion, making me think that some priest had waggled their fingers and annoyed their divine boss.


    Outside of the golden shield, a dense mist was wafting, the white swathes intermixed with clouds of red and black, looking quite intimidating and sinister. Things didn¡¯t get better when the streamer glanced over to a few humans fighting in the mist, striking at each other with the desperation of wounded beasts, even as their bodies were quickly withering from the influence of the magic.


    From what I could see, the host wasn¡¯t going anywhere from her sheltered position, so I looked into the other window, scrolling back to a timestamp some fifty minutes earlier. The scene immediately shifted and the gloomy mist and frightening noises were instantly replaced with the hustle and bustle of a thriving city.


    It turned out that the host of the stream, or maybe just that particular episode, focused on something I hadn¡¯t seen when it came to playstyles. It was a date stream. And not some sort of scam where a female tried to entice lonely people to donate money for the illusion of a romantic relationship but more akin to reality TV, simply watching the host and her partner, another Traveller, go on a date in Hatterion.


    After watching the host babble about some building, introducing its features, I began skipping forward, past a scene where the male host fed the female some strange, sticky candy and a more or less tasteful kiss scene to get to the interesting part. The massacre.


    The host was just speaking about a temple when a sudden, loud clanging noise stopped the city cold. Bells were ringing, and not just the usual, slow gong to indicate time but making a racket as if the life of the ringer depended on the amount of noise they could make.


    For a moment, nobody in the street was moving everyone just looking around fearfully and confused. The confusion didn¡¯t last as it was utterly swept away when a cracking sound washed over the city and for a moment, the barrier that was supposed to protect the city was visible, before shattering away in golden fragments.


    In that moment, silence shattered, too, and the screaming began. People started to run, much akin to chickens with their heads cut off, some trying to get to their homes, others seeking shelter elsewhere. The two travellers remained quite calm in the chaos, moving to the side and away from the teeming masses, at least until the first swathes of mist became visible and exemplified just what was going on.


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    The silent, slowly advancing swathes of silver, black and red mist didn¡¯t care for the screaming and as they crept forward, people started to flee from it. Nobody truly knew what it was, but everybody could see that it was bad news. For a moment, I could see a person get swallowed by the mist, an elderly male unable to run from it and I could see how his body started to tremble before withering away rapidly. A victim of the Death-Magic invoked with the sacrifice of forty lives and the use of a corrupted Mooncrystal.


    As the couple started moving, I noticed a curious effect, the shouting and screaming only came from one direction, from the people already fleeing the mist. In the other direction, out of the mist, there was complete silence, barely disturbed by a few, soft echoes.


    Even from the video, I couldn¡¯t help but swallow as I beheld the effects of my magic, the raw panic of the people trying to escape from the devastation. There were a few visible barriers around what I believed to be temples or noble manors, glowing with power and resisting the effect of my spell but also barring the people outside from entry. Some attacked those barriers, only to be engulfed in golden flames, leaving bodies twisted in searing agony, while others just kept running, trying to outrun the devastation.


    There was fighting in the streets, as people started to well and truly panic, no longer thinking but only following their instincts, the nature of the beast in man coming to the forefront as the need for survival overwhelmed any societal conditioning.


    And yet, even in that devastation, I noticed a few, brief glimmers of hope, the father protecting his children, the mother protecting his back, lovers that worked together to escape. But for every example of honour and heroism, there were ten of cowardice and cruelty. Clothes were ripped away, maybe in an effort to take the purse, maybe in the pursuit of dark lust, the host didn¡¯t have the time, leisure or interest to investigate, leaving me with only a brief glimpse into the horrors of a frightened human¡¯s mind. And frightened, they were, especially those that managed to escape after a brief touch of the mist.


    Those especially caught my attention, those with the withered limbs, corrupted by the Death-Magic I had wrought and the wilds eyes as the Insanity of the Dark Moon, channelled and enhanced by the corruption of the Mooncrystal took hold,


    The pair I had been watching was separated in the chaos, the male vanishing somewhere while the woman wasn¡¯t looking, leaving her all alone in a mob of fleeing humanity, all running from the mist.


    Running, until they couldn¡¯t run any longer, the harbour looming ahead, the dark waters of the Mare Tempest giving them a choice between trying to swim for safety or hoping that the mist wouldn¡¯t kill them. While it wasn¡¯t the depth of winter any longer, jumping into the cold water would almost certainly kill them, a slow, agonizing death as the cold sapped their strength until they finally drowned.


    But with the screaming around them and the freezing, foreboding silence from the mist, a few decided to take the plunge while others decided on a third option, trying to kill themselves with whatever weapon they had at hand.


    Suddenly, there was a literal light in the darkness, a golden glow quite similar, yet unlike the cold barriers enshrouding the noble estates and the rich temples. It looked more akin to a warm bonfire and the people started to stream towards it, seeking shelter in the light.


    For a moment, I was utterly stunned when I saw the source of the light, the statue of my companion, still unmoved, still unmarred, holding her staff just like she had in life, only now forever bound in stone. On top of her staff burned a golden flame, sending out the same warm glow it had before, forming a large area of inviting radiance and the people made for it, moving into the glow, some falling to their knees in abject awe as they prayed.


    Others, especially those with wild eyes and blood on their hands weren¡¯t so lucky.


    While they didn¡¯t get burned, they also weren¡¯t sheltered and as the mists advanced, they either had to flee or the people sheltered in the light could see up close what happened to those who didn¡¯t flee.


    They died, their bodies rapidly withering away, as their mouths screamed in pain and their eyes quickly faded, their minds broken by the Dark Moon.


    Curiously, even as the mists lapped at the barrier, I couldn¡¯t see any conflict. It looked more as if the light from the barrier was seeping into the mist, the darkness and the blood in the mist slowly fading away and it was almost as if I could hear my former companion chiding me, reminding me that her path had been the path of Freedom.


    But looking at the people she sheltered, the good people who hadn¡¯t given in to their base desires and abandoned their honour in the need to survive, I began to wonder what the ultimate effect of my vengeance would be. What changes would come after?

 Chapter 613

    As the forum was exploding, with parts of the few videos of Hatterion being shared and re-posted, I slept fitfully, strange dreams haunting my sleep. It was one thing to feel righteous anger and take revenge for a murdered companion, but had I truly hit the right people? They most certainly had suffered and would continue suffering as the nobles had to scramble to respond to hundreds, if not thousands, of dead in one of their major towns and I had a feeling that there would be utter chaos. But had that been worth condemning everyone to the same fate? The innocent, alongside the guilty, they all had become collateral damage, a necessary sacrifice, simply because I lacked the power and ability to strike only at those truly guilty. I couldn¡¯t even accurately identify those guilty, leaving only a broad, ruthless attack as my only option. If not for a massive area of effect attack, I couldn¡¯t have touched those guilty. And even that touch was mostly secondary, the pain inflicted on them came from the destruction I had caused and the effort needed to clean up the mess that left, not directly from me. Was that worth it?


    At the same time, I wondered if striking those responsible for Olivia¡¯s incarceration and subsequent death would leave the populace actually in a better spot. If the dead were concentrated amongst the nobles and guards, there would be just as much chaos, only without the likely stunning effect that a catastrophe on such a scale had.


    When I logged back into the game the following morning, the itchy, uncomfortable sensation from being in too close mental contact with Lenore after the end of our Avatar-state immediately assaulted me and, without thinking too much about it, I pushed myself out of my Hallow with only a brief glimpse to ascertain Lenore wasn¡¯t flying high in the sky.


    Instead, I materialised right where I wanted to be most, safely held in Sigmir¡¯s arms, as she demonstrated incredible reflexes and maybe the power of our connection when she managed to catch me right as I appeared.


    ¡°Did anything happen while I was gone?¡± I asked, even as I was busy strengthening my concealment in the Twilight as I was certain that there would be diviners looking for me. After the attack on Hatterion, there had to be, the Empire had failed to stop the attack so someone had to pay a price for that. If that someone was me, they¡¯d be happy but I had a feeling that some nobles would just as well trot out some Rebels or rivals and have them tried and executed if they could make it stick.


    ¡°It was surprisingly quiet,¡± Sigmir assured me, a note of amusement in her voice. ¡°There were some beings in the air but we managed to remain undetected.¡±


    ¡°Teacher, if you could take over the concealment?¡± Rai asked, looking incredibly stressed out and haggard. It was so pitiful that I couldn¡¯t help but smile as I reached out with my magic, getting a feel for the mantle that shrouded the four of them. It wasn¡¯t just Rai who had done it, I could feel Adra¡¯s magic in there as well, but adding to it, so he could let his efforts fade wasn¡¯t too difficult.


    ¡°It¡¯s done,¡± I assured him, feeling his magic fade as he let out a sigh of relief.


    ¡°They¡¯ll be looking for you, that¡¯s for sure,¡± Adra reminded me, ¡°I felt the amount of power you unleashed, that was no laughing matter. I doubt you managed to get it all where you wanted it to go, but you caused some damage.¡±


    ¡°You can bet I did,¡± I grinned savagely, thinking of the images I had seen the night before, ¡°Hatterion got struck, and struck hard. I don¡¯t know how many I managed to get but the ferry down there should be quite filled at the moment. Olivia won¡¯t have to ride it all on her own.¡±


    ¡°Then we have taken our vengeance and need to move on. No need to give anyone an opportunity to strike back at us,¡± Sigmir pragmatically reminded me, getting a nod from everyone. There was no need to stay in the area, not when the heat would come soon. There were few EXP to be gained unless we began to actively work with either of the major factions and we had neither the time nor the inclination to do so. Thus, continuing to move, it was.


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    Still carried by Sigmir, I decided to check the notifications for my ritual and the first that I noticed greatly disappointed me. Or rather, it was the lack of notifications that greatly disappointed me. There were no notifications that told me about EXP-gain, everyone I had killed had been so far beneath me that they were considered negligible, or maybe I had just been too far away. Either way, there were no gains in EXP for massacring so many humans.


    On the other hand, there were a few skill gains that delighted me.


    I had gained one point each in Darkness-Rune Mastery, in Ice-Rune Mastery and in Mind-Magic, bringing them to seventy-five, seventy-eight and twenty-eight respectively. In addition, I gained two points for Blood-Rune Mastery, bringing it to sixty-five and Astal Meditation, pushing that to sixty-one. But the biggest gain of the night was undoubtedly the five points in Death-Magic, bringing it to a nice thirty.


    Additionally, there was a pair of traits, one that was merely an increase of a previous trait, the Magician of Massacre, further increasing damage and skill-gains when using magic to affect large amounts of people, while the other was new and sounded quite ominous. I was now a Bane of Humanity, which likely meant I¡¯d have to make extra sure my Twilight-Cloak didn¡¯t slip and that towns would only be visited while hiding inside my Hallow. Not that I really minded, the trait increased all damage I dealt to Humans and was given after killing a thousand humans, making me wonder just how many people had died in Hatterion. Maybe there would be an achievement at the end of the Beta, greatest destruction caused or something like that and I¡¯d know, but for now, I could only guess.


    But either way, the gains were quite nice, even if it had required the sacrifice of the corrupted Mooncrystal to get my way. Well, and a few people, but who was counting?


    As we continued moving, trying to stay in the shadows and the forest as much as possible, only crossing open fields and meadows in the depths of night, it was almost amusing just how little happened. Given that I had wiped out a sizable portion of a major city, I would have thought there would be countless people hunting for me, and, judging by the conversations on the Forum, there were.


    While it hadn¡¯t been confirmed that I had caused the Cold Night, as the incident had been dubbed, the discussion on the forum had postulated me but only a few people had taken it seriously, mostly due to the fact that the majority of my activities had been on Aretia, on the other side of the Mare Tempest, but also due to the scale of the incident. No players truly believed, or maybe wanted to imagine, the ability to wipe out that many people in the hands of a player. It strongly demonstrated just how problematic high-level spellcasters would be and how little the normal populace could do to withstand their attacks.


    Nobody knew just what had gone into the magic I had wrought, how much Astral Power had been involved, even I could only guess and estimate, but by my understanding, I had managed to channel roughly ten times my normal pool into the Ritual, mostly thanks to the combination of life-sacrifice, Blood Magic and a strongly death-attuned source of condensed Astral Power. Without the Mooncrystal, I wouldn¡¯t have managed to get even a fraction of that power, even with the sacrifices, while without the sacrifices, it was more probable that the crystal would have torn me apart instead of empowering the ritual.


    During our travel south, that very fact and the sheer synergistic effect we had managed to achieve was the main topic between Lenore and me, The question of how Astral Power could form into solid, permanent objects had been one we had been wondering about for a while. For some elements, mainly Ice but likely Earth and its associated elements as well, it was relatively simple, merely an extension of their conjuration aspect. But how could Fire be made solid, or how would solid Air work? One of the major aspects of Air was its ability to move, even more so than water.


    While I had no clue how to create solid Death or even how to conjure Death in material form, applying some of my earlier ideas to Darkness started to glean results. The experimentation went slowly, as one would expect, but I more and more managed to form temporary voids, areas of space where there was nothing, spaces that even Light couldn¡¯t pass through, by expanding the Darkness between matter with my magic. It took a lot of power but with each passing day, my understanding increased.


    Though, whether or not I¡¯d be able to understand in time was a different question.

 Chapter 614

    From high in the sky, Lenore and I could see incredibly far. With our increased attributes, it was quite easy to rise to altitudes normally impossible for birds and our Intuition allowed us to see further than normal, too. It allowed us to see the entire peninsula, clear to the tip where Phalladri, the southern-most port of Aletoma was located.


    Since Hatterion, we had been travelling swiftly and carefully, always moving in the forests and towards the south, staying away from any larger town and if we ever got close to one, I was either hiding in the shadows or within my Hallow. Most of the time, both.


    Either due to those precautions or by simple luck, we had managed to get away from any potential pursuit, we even got ahead of the rumours. At first, we had occasionally heard of some insane Mage who had performed horrific magic and attacked Hatterion but after a couple of days, those rumours had fallen behind us, as all of us pushed ahead at the fastest pace possible. Certainly, some mounted couriers could have kept up, but those rarely focused on spreading rumours and gossip. It would take a few days for those to catch up, which was evidence of just how quickly we had been moving.


    Well, only part of the reason we had been moving that fast was the need to avoid and outrun pursuit. None of us was foolish enough that an event like the Cold Night wouldn¡¯t be spread across some magical communication channel, informing the nobles of every suspicion, so speed wasn¡¯t just to flee.


    No, another part of it was that there were incredibly few interesting encounters on the way, there were no monsters that could challenge us and due to us sticking to the forests and backroads, the few people I suspected to be bandits didn¡¯t even try to fight us. As always, without some good reason, intelligent people didn¡¯t try to attack the massive, heavily armoured fighter rushing down the road, or they might suddenly get a tip, and a spear right behind it, or get axed out of nowhere.


    With little to do but run, we had covered the distance quickly, though I had managed to grind out a skill-point in Darkness Magic, partially due to the constant need to conceal myself, partially by studying the strange, complete darkness, the void that even swallowed light.


    From what we could see from up high, Phalladri was quite similar in structure compared to Torop, the whole city built around a bay, the hills around it and, most importantly the river feeding into the bay. It was easy to see just how important the harbour was, but also the dichotomy between the danger of the ocean, or rather the monster living inside it, and the wealth that came with it.


    The sheer discrepancy in wealth and status between the area around the docks and the large, noble manor houses up on the slopes and hill was clearly visible with the naked eye, making me wonder just why people were content to wallow in poverty if the option to head out and literally fight for a higher level and status existed.


    But when considering it, it wasn¡¯t so different from the real world, the situation of the Empire a rather sad mirror on reality. Sure, everyone had the theoretical option to head out, but how many actually had the chance? Without equipment or information, without a start to get anywhere, how many people could just start killing monsters and gain power?


    If it was so easy to gain power, everyone would do it. No, from what I had seen during our journey, most beasts were between level twenty and thirty, strong enough to be a lethal threat to even groups of normal people, while far too weak to be a threat to actually trained fighters, making it easy to guard the towns but hard to give power into the hands of the common people.


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    It made me wonder how levelling in the Human Empire would work for Travellers, surely not everyone would be forced to either content with much more powerful foes or submit to a faction from the start? While it felt realistic, sometimes realistic and fun couldn¡¯t co-exist. But then, there were many oddities with the length Pantheon Entertainment had gone to provide immersion and fantastical realism that didn¡¯t mesh with a classical gaming experience. Only time would tell just how well the masses outside the relatively few, selected testers would feel about the game.


    Winging down, Lenore kept quite a bit of distance from the city, carefully approaching to avoid any magical detection. We were out here scouting, so getting caught would be troublesome at best and lethal at worst. We simply didn¡¯t know how well the city was defended magically and if there were measures taken against people entering from within their Spirit Beasts.


    As expected, even from afar, there was a trace of magic in the air. It wasn¡¯t as powerful or concentrated as the shield we had witnessed in Torop but there was a tricky subtlety to it that made me frown inside my Hallow.


    ¡°We might have to study it a little more,¡± I suggested to Lenore, who kept circling closer, though staying a safe distance away. For once, her ability to see magic wasn¡¯t as useful, the structure was too spread out, too wide, to be grasped with a single glance, forcing us to slowly make our way around the city, trying to parse together what the magic actually did.


    If it was defensive in nature, it was a strange defence, it was more akin to an elevated level of certain elements in the air, not necessarily able to actually affect anything but more akin to a scent that would cling to people. To what purpose, I wasn¡¯t able to deduct, though I had a couple of theories.


    ¡°Do you think it reacts differently to different beings?¡± Lenore suggested after we had studied the strange effect for some thirty minutes.


    ¡°Possible, it could also just be a simple, first step, a tag to mark people that can be detected with further spellwork, closer to the city,¡± I replied, reminding her that the strange concentration started almost half a kilometre away from the city, rising high enough to cover the highest peaks within the town.


    ¡°Stay high and let¡¯s fly across town. Maybe we¡¯ll be able to detect something else from above,¡± I suggested and Lenore immediately flapped her wings, climbing back up into the sky.


    Up there, still quite a distance above the cloud of magic that lingered around town, we started to glide across the formation, making very sure we wouldn¡¯t actually get into range of it. If nothing else, trying to infiltrate a town by air would be the most obvious weakness of walls so I didn¡¯t want to get caught in whatever preparation was made to defend from airborne attackers. It could be something as simple as the prepared, heavy crossbows we had seen in Yaksha to something much more sophisticated, like the Shield of Torop.


    ¡°I think I recognise some of that spellwork,¡± I muttered, trying to figure out just what we were looking at. Compared to the soft shield that covered the outside area, there was a clear, almost crystalline hardness to the magical formation closer to town, something that made me frown. Parts of it looked quite similar to the Magic Devouring I had used in the past, almost as if it was built to achieve the same effect but using different parts. If that actually meant it was a dispelling formation or something entirely different, I just couldn¡¯t distinguish.


    ¡°We should try and see what happens if we scry the place, but carefully. I don¡¯t think we can be too cautious, we don¡¯t want to get into trouble before we bid farewell to Aletoma,¡± I sighed, feeling that the Human Continent was far less fun compared to Aretia. Rigid structures, deep intrigues and far too many schemes and annoyances stretched across the land akin to a spider web, the wonderful hallmarks of civilisation. If anything, I made a mental note to avoid the place as much as possible in the future. Some people might enjoy the experience, but for me, it felt stifling, almost like the real world. If I wanted to muddle around in a structured, civilised society, I could do so without logging in, what I wanted in Mundus was the excitement and the challenge, the wildness and open skies. Wondering what was behind the next bend in the road, not seeing a sign on the road that told me the name of the next town and how far it was.


    For now, we had a town to infiltrate, a passage to book and a monster-infested ocean to cross. All in a day¡¯s work.

 Chapter 615

    After the eighth consecutive failure, I let out an angry grunt, no longer interested in trying. So far, Lenore and I had attempted eight different ways to understand the warding around Phalladri and while we had gleaned some information, the only thing we truly knew was that we didn¡¯t know enough.


    The magical protections around town were sophisticated and subtle, not tremendously powerful but incredibly tricky, making it difficult to guess how many there were and how they interacted. According to our understanding, the outer layer was merely the first part, set up to mark beings as they passed through and the inner layer we had barely glimpsed from above was actually the primary defence that you could only bypass if you were marked.


    That combination made the city quite secure as trying to bypass the outer layer would render you vulnerable to detection from the inner layer, which was set up to only focus on unmarked people, making the amount of power it could apply to the problem tremendous.


    Avoiding pursuit was often accomplished by becoming a needle in a haystack, but the combination of magical warding made sure to detect all the hay beforehand and if a needle tried to slip through the cracks, it would immediately get noticed. And trying to look like a piece of hay, while getting marked for further examination wasn¡¯t easy, the way the magic seeped into people as they passed through the outer ring meant that my Twilight Cloak would likely be defeated by it. Or rather, I could either let the magic seep in and have it possibly detect those problematic traits and titles I had accumulated or I could keep it away and thus make myself vulnerable to the detection mechanism in the inner ring. Avoiding both seemed to be impossible, the challenge of washing my hair without getting wet.


    So far, neither Lenore nor I had any idea how to circumvent the magic, even remaining in my Hallow wasn¡¯t a surefire way to defeat their magical detections. We had attempted to carefully move into the outer layer, once with me hiding within my Hallow and once while I wasn¡¯t inside and the magical trace she had picked up had been different each time, indicating that the formation had some sort of detection-mechanism capable of detecting my hidden presence.


    ¡°I see two different possibilities,¡± I told Lenore, as we hopped onto a branch some distance from the warded area.


    ¡°Oh?¡± she asked, quite curious, as neither of us had made real progress when it came to this problem.


    ¡°Mhm, either circumventing it and flying out to the ship, once the others have boarded or we can be tricky,¡± there was a mischievous grin on my face as I suggested the second option, ¡°Let¡¯s try something else, I think it¡¯ll work. Move into the area again,¡± I told her, pushing myself into my Hallow, just as I had done before. Only now, I wasn¡¯t just sitting inside, but I pulled on the concealment magic as well as I could morphing the environment of my Hallow into a deep, dark void and wrapping myself into that void, trying to become one with it. My mind was completely filled with the concept of concealment, the rune forming in striking clarity in my mind. All those small, tiny nuances I had learned about it were circulating as Lenore was flying towards the formation.


    I thought I could feel the change, the tiny feathers in my neck sticking up from the sensation of a predator lurking somewhere unseen and I immediately tried to improve my concealment, wanting nothing more but to completely hide within the Shadows. I even tried to morph the darkness around me into that perfect, light-devouring void, the perfect Darkness that absorbed everything. Inside that void, I felt myself relax, though I also noticed that I wouldn¡¯t be able to keep it up for long. While it was far easier to conjure the dark void up while in the darkness of my Hallow, it still took a lot of power.


    The void was so strong, I couldn¡¯t even contact Lenore so I simply waited for ten minutes before letting the Void fade away to the point that I could feel Lenore¡¯s presence again.


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    ¡°Did it work?¡± I asked, realising that we had left the area again.


    ¡°It worked, but can you keep that up constantly?¡± she asked, noticing just how much Astral Power I had used.


    ¡°No,¡± I admitted, feeling a little dejected, ¡°I guess we need to cheat,¡± I admitted, the dejection turning into annoyance at my incapability.


    ¡°Try again,¡± I told her before triggering the ultimate move: Logging out.


    Sitting in my capsule, I patiently waited for five minutes, so ten would pass within Road to Purgatory, before logging back in. A part of me was deeply annoyed that the only way I could think of to get around the barrier was basically cheating but in this case, results mattered more than honour. If we could get around the barrier without having to fly out to sea, and hope that no monsters decided to turn Lenore into a tasty afternoon snack before hitching a ride on the ship the others took, a bit of creative exploitation of game mechanics wasn¡¯t too much of a problem.


    ¡°Did it work?¡± I asked, once my mind was synced with my Avatar again.


    ¡°The effect was akin to the effect while you weren¡¯t in your Hallow to begin with,¡± Lenore confirmed, ¡°We can¡¯t be sure if there¡¯s a difference between Spirit Beasts bound to someone or if there are other effects but I think this could work. We should try with Adra and Rai again,¡± she suggested, getting my nod of approval.


    And so, instead of letting the others head into town as soon as they arrived, Adra and Rai had to each walk into the warded area and wander around for a few minutes, before walking back out, all under the watchful gaze of Lenore and I.


    The results were quite encouraging, the trace on them didn¡¯t look different to the one on Lenore after she had been in there on her own, or while I was logged out in my Hallow, giving me some confidence that sneaking in that way would work.


    ¡°I¡¯ll have to be gone for a few days until you are on the ship. If you don¡¯t get a cabin or some privacy, I might even have to remain gone until you reach Arbotoma,¡± I quietly told Sigmir, after Lenore and I were confident in our findings.


    The look on Sigmir¡¯s face was far from a happy one, a deep frown marring her normally stern face.


    ¡°I don¡¯t like it,¡± she admitted, looking a little bit lost.


    ¡°There¡¯s no other way,¡± I sighed, carefully caressing her face, trying to smooth out her worries.¡±I¡¯d love to be with you the entire time, but I just can¡¯t risk getting caught. If the people here knew what I¡¯ve done, they would spare no effort to see me hang, or whatever method of painful execution is used here.¡±


    My assurance didn¡¯t really make her happy but it made her accept my words, especially after I took quite a bit of loving effort to coax her into happiness.


    ¡°Fine,¡± she finally nodded, after we had been kissing for quite some time, ¡°I¡¯ll miss you.¡±


    ¡°And I, you,¡± I looked into her eyes, feeling the tender emotions flooding over our bond. There were no words, maybe there didn¡¯t need to be words, but what I felt was far more expressive than any words, poems or songs could ever be.


    ¡°How long do you think it¡¯ll take to book passage on a boat and head out to sea? A few days, or maybe a week?¡± I asked, trying to estimate how long I¡¯d have to remain gone.


    There was deep regret in Sigmir¡¯s eyes, even as the others considered the question.


    ¡°Probably at least a week,¡± Sigmir sighed, looking none too happy.


    ¡°Better make it two weeks,¡± Adra suggested, the regret in Sigmir¡¯s getting deeper. ¡°We need to be certain, if you return while we are within the shield, things won¡¯t be as simple,¡± she reminded us and again, there was a round of sighs.


    ¡°Fine,¡± I nodded, giving Sigmir another, deep kiss, trying to fill the hole that would be left by a two-week separation. At least for me, it would only be one week, but for her, she¡¯d have to endure the whole two weeks.


    Finally, after trying a few times unsuccessfully, we split apart and I pushed myself into my Hallow, aware that Sigmir and I hadn¡¯t been separated for that long ever since our meeting, almost two years ago.


    With a heavy heart, I began the log-out, knowing that it would be a week until I could return to meet her again. And by all Deities out there, I hated the feeling.

 Chapter 616

    After logging out, I felt at a loss. For the last ten months, my life had mostly revolved around Road to Purgatory, my immersion into the world of Mundus probably unhealthy in most peoples¡¯ eyes. The way I had taken to Mundus and its magic was almost scary, the experience had given me a sense of wholeness and purpose that I had never experienced before. In some ways, it had been the difference between continuing to be alive and living.


    And now, for the next week, I wouldn¡¯t be able to experience that sense of purpose, only anticipation of returning to Mundus.


    Shaking my head, I looked into the forum, the earlier craze about the two major disasters on the East Coast of Aletoma slowly fading, even if the damage was still there and people were dealing with it. There were quite a few threads about the activities in that area, especially a focus on the quests that revolved around the civil war.


    Curiously, Pantheon Entertainment had been completely silent on the matter, barely acknowledging that something had happened there, but not using any of the material in their regular promotions, or even inquiring if they could. It was almost as if they were a little uncomfortable with the scale of the destruction, or that anyone had actually tried to find out what would happen if you directed large-scale magic at a civilian population.


    However, that just didn¡¯t make any sense. Someone would certainly have done so, maybe not for vengeance, but simply because players would want to see how far they were able to push a certain mechanic. It was just in the instinct of a certain amount of gamers to try breaking the system.


    After the Cold Night, the Human Empire had given out a ton of quests to natives and Travellers alike, all of them focusing on tracking and fighting the Rebels. From what I had seen, there were quests to hunt down individual Rebels, others were research quests, focused on finding their base and method of concealment and more. Pretty much every flavour of quests one could think of was there, including infiltration. I had sent a message to Leonard, curious how the Rebels were reacting but thus far, there hadn¡¯t been a reply.


    Finally, after I couldn¡¯t mess around the forum any longer, I exited the capsule, and started walking around my apartment, looking for something useful to do. My first instinct was to start cleaning, something I had procrastinated on recently, with the mess in the Human Empire. I simply had been unwilling to spend a lot of time outside the Capsule, just in case Sigmir and the others needed me. But now my presence might very well be the thing getting them into trouble in town, so the best way to support them was being not there. Incredibly annoying, but true nonetheless.


    After cleaning everything, even the windows, in my apartment, I sat on my balcony, looking out, across the city. I still didn¡¯t know what to do with myself, the loss of my primary activity over the last few months just reminded me of how few other things I had been doing during that time.


    Finally, I picked up my phone and scrolled through my contacts. The lack of messages in the last few months just adding to my morose mood. The most recent message came from Jenn and was a little over a week old. It contained a happy image of Chris, her and a tiny, rather squished-looking baby. The caption was a simple announcement that they now were a family of three, welcoming their baby Sebastian into their lives.


    Looking at the squished baby that looked quite¡­ crumpled, there was a mess of thoughts in my mind. Babies and family, two concepts that hadn¡¯t been part of my mental processes in years, certainly not since the loss of my parents. There was the theoretical knowledge about the biological part of the human reproduction process but when it came to the whole sociological part, I was thoroughly weirded out.


    If not for Road to Purgatory and meeting Sigmir, I would have been certain that the previous diagnoses were correct, and that I simply lacked the emotional capacity to engage in romantic relationships. I had never felt about any human the way I was feeling about Sigmir,


    I could understand the evolutionary underpinnings of family and its use in society, that without constant reproduction, a species would only face extinction. Similarly, I could understand that a family structure was the safest way to raise children and ascertain the continuation of a particular genetic line.


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    But by that logic, should I even consider having children in the first place? Part of my mental condition was inborn, and thus could be passed on to my children. Did I want to have a child that may have to face the same questions, the same problems, I had faced? Would I be able to do what my mother did, love that child unconditionally, or would I face it with the same indifference I faced all other humans, with a mask only created by the love and education given to me by my mother?


    And that was ignoring all environmental factors, overpopulation and limited resources, wouldn¡¯t the responsible decision be to not reproduce?


    After the question churned around in my head for some time, I let out a snort when I realised something. The question was entirely irrelevant on its face and immediately answered when considered in a practical fashion. If I asked myself, would I want to have a tiny creature growing inside my abdomen, siphoning off nutrients like some parasite, before causing massive trauma as it exited, the process certainly life-altering and possibly life-threatening?


    Once I put the question in practical terms, cold shivers started running down my spine and I got goosebumps all over. Unconsciously, my hand wandered to my lower abdomen and I almost felt the creepy sensation of something moving around my skin, pushing from the inside, as if trying to fear through me on its way out.


    My whole body shook and I stood, my head shaking from side to side, pushing away those creepy thoughts before looking around my apartment, searching for something to do to distract me.


    While the first thing entering my eyes was the capsule, I immediately discarded the idea and walked over to a set of resistance bands, picking one up and slowly starting to stretch, using the band to enhance the effect.


    Quite some time later, I felt sweat run down my whole body, all muscles aching as I had pushed them far beyond my usual exercise, using the physical exertion to clear my head and force away those earlier, creepy thoughts.


    As I was heading into the shower, my phone gave a chirp, indicating an incoming message. Curious, I walked over and took a glance, my eyebrow going up in surprise. It was a simple invitation from Jenn, asking if I wanted to stop by for tea one of these days. For a moment, I was flabbergasted, wondering if there was some sort of connection between the invitation and my earlier creepy thoughts but immediately shook off the idea, sometimes coincidences just happened.


    I briefly considered the question, checking my schedule with Mrs Wu to avoid scheduling conflicts, before sending back an affirmative answer. Maintaining social relationships was important after all.


    After sending off the reply, I began to wonder about the etiquette of such a visit. Did my immediate reply violate some sort of decorum, would it have been polite to demure at first? Did I need to prepare some sort of gift or should I bring anything with me?


    Paralysed by uncertainty, I began to search through the internet, phrasing and re-phrasing my search queries, trying to get a definitive answer to my dilemma. Sadly, as with most social interactions, there was no definitive answer to be found, there were answers, suggestions and ideas, but nothing that held any sort of authority.


    Why couldn¡¯t social customs be less complicated?


    When a drip of sweat dropped off my nose, I remembered that I was stll mostly naked and covered in sweat, so I put down my phone and walked into the shower, still uncertain about the correct way to interact in this situation.


    Even the simplest external circumstance that would alter the situation evaded my grasp, did Jenn consider me a friend? By my normal definition, just two meetings and a few phone calls would make her an acquaintance at best, or maybe even just somebody I knew. But she also was the wife of someone I had considered a close friend for a long time, even my best friend. That would alter the social calculus, wouldn¡¯t it?


    And she had invited me in a moment of physical weakness, to my knowledge the trauma of giving birth didn¡¯t completely vanish within three weeks, to say nothing of the exhaustion from dealing with a newborn. Such an invitation spoke of intimacy, of a close friendship.


    But I didn¡¯t feel like I knew her well enough to be such a close friend with her, the exchange of information was simply too lacking.


    As water cascaded down my body, my face twisted into a frown and I felt a headache form. How long did one have to know somebody, to consider them a friend? How did a person switch from somebody you were introduced to, to an acquaintance before becoming a friend? What did those classifications mean in terms of exchanged information volume, or was there simply a requirement for a certain emotional connection? And could that connection be quantified into something I could understand?


    Letting out a snort of annoyance, I turned up the water, trying to wash my uncertainty away with everything else.


    Why did people have to be so complicated?

 Chapter 617

    Once again, I was standing in what could only be described as a suburban nightmare. The white picket fences were still there, still gleaming white, though quite a few were dirtied by the remains of winter mud and it seemed like the most individualistic part of the houses were the garish Christmas lights still hanging outside. Luckily, those were in the minority, a small blessing but a blessing nonetheless.


    As requested, I didn¡¯t ring the doorbell but sent Jenn a text and after a brief wait, the door was opened. A strange, funky smell wafted past me and an odd creature stood inside, looking at me through half-closed eyes. For a moment, I couldn¡¯t recognise her, wondering if somehow a zombie from Mundus had made its way to suburbia, its presence likely livening up the neighbourhood quite a bit but before I could consider ways to kill said zombie, I recognised Jenn.


    ¡°You look rough,¡± I blurted out, before remembering that proper decorum required a greeting, followed by polite inquiries about her wellbeing and the usual lies about your own state. But the words had been spoken and other than blushing lightly when I realised my blunder, there was nothing I could do about it. And it was true, there were deep circles beneath her eyes, making her resemble a panda, her hair was looking like a bird would soon start building a nest and she was moving with a tired sluggishness that made a sloth seem energetic. And yet, even in that state, she radiated a strange, calm gentleness that didn¡¯t quite fit. It felt odd.


    ¡°I feel it,¡± she nodded, a tired grin on her face. ¡°It¡¯s good to see you.¡±


    I followed her in and was directed into the living room. There was a small bed in the corner, with the newborn inside, now no longer looking as squished and unfinished, but still far from properly human.


    We sat down at the table and I was facing a serious challenge, small talk. We had to speak quietly, so we wouldn¡¯t disturb the baby, but the lack of volume didn¡¯t help me with finding topics. A part of me wanted to ask about her experience, but it didn¡¯t really feel right. Too intimate. In addition, a far larger part remembered those weird thoughts I had a few days ago and shivers started to creep down my spine.


    Before our conversation could run out of topics, the doorbell rang and immediately, a secondary noise started up, a loud and piercing wail, coming from the baby. I had no idea how such a small creature could produce that volume of noise, there had to be some mutation in its lungs, or something along those lines, that couldn¡¯t be normal.


    ¡°Can you take care of Sebastian, please? I need to get this,¡± Jenn asked, already moving towards the door.


    With absolutely no idea what to do, I walked over to the crip, desperately thinking. Sure, there were physical ways to stop the screaming, but smothering the baby was definitely not what Jenn had asked me to do, even if ¡®taking care of someone¡¯ could be used as a euphemism. Reaching out, I gently poked the baby¡¯s cheek with my finger, hoping that getting its attention would maybe help with the crying.


    For a moment, the baby ceased, or maybe it simply had to take a deep breath, so I poked again, just as its chubby, little hands started to flail wildly and the screaming continued.


    Luckily, Jenn didn¡¯t take a long time and before I had to resort to desperate measures, she returned, carrying a small package.


    ¡°Sorry, had to take this,¡± she apologized, taking the baby out of the crip, before starting to hum a small melody as she gently swayed back and forth, as if dancing with the baby.


    Somehow, her actions worked and the screaming quickly faded away, as she started to talk to the baby, quietly asking why it was screaming. I began to question her sanity, the thing most certainly couldn¡¯t answer, so why was she asking it? Shouldn¡¯t she understand how to properly care for it?


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    ¡°Well, I guess you are hungry, little man,¡± she muttered after a few other mutterings hadn¡¯t produced anything but bubbling noises.


    Looking quite pleased with herself, Jenn sat down on the couch, leaving me standing next to the crip, feeling a little lost.


    When she opened a flap on her dress and started breastfeeding the baby, the awkwardness I was feeling greatly intensified but sadly, I had no idea how to act. There was nothing in the social customs and the decorum I had learned that dealt with such a situation. Generally, when someone exposed themselves, indifference was suggested, alongside simply ignoring the situation. When the exposure was done by a third agent, a similar reaction was appropriate if the act was consensual, a call to the police if the act was not.


    But in this case? I had no idea and decided to go with what I had been taught and ignore the situation as much as possible. And so, I simply walked over and sat down on an armchair, trying to remember the last topic of our small talk, hoping to bring it back up so we could continue. Not because I was deeply invested in the topic, but because I felt that sitting quietly while she fed her baby wasn¡¯t appropriate.


    And yet, my mind didn¡¯t come up with the topic we had been talking about but began to wander. Just like with human reproduction, I knew the biological theory about breastfeeding, but the practical terms managed to creep me out. Having another being suck their nutrients right out of you, didn¡¯t that mean they were basically feeding on you? Again, the comparison to a parasite came to mind and with that thought, the previous shivers started back up.


    ¡°God, I¡¯m feeling so bloated,¡± Jenn complained and I barely managed to make the appropriate sounds, indicating that I was listening. Very quickly, I began regretting accepting her invitation, as her complaining continued and began to include circumstances I most certainly wasn¡¯t interested in.


    A part of me could empathise with her situation, she had previously told me that Chris was taking his paternity leave mostly piece-meal, two days a week, leaving her with most of the work around the baby. It was a solution and from her description even a quite smart one, not leaving his career stranded while giving some support to her but at the same time, it put a lot of stress on her.


    When she finally pulled the baby off her breast and gently patted its back, only for said baby to barf up what looked like more white slobber than its size suggested should fit into it, I felt myself getting queasy. The smell was¡­ disturbing.


    ¡°Do you want to hold him?¡± she asked, that same, gentle smile on her face, as she somehow managed to fix her clothes, while still holding the baby, now in the crook of her arm. Just the idea to hold it, and possibly get barfed on, turned my queasiness into outright nausea and only pure strength of will kept me from stepping back in fright.


    ¡°No, thank you,¡± I politely demurred, even as my mind was frantically searching for reasons why I had to leave. Would it be overblown to claim some sort of emergency, possibly after checking my mobile?


    Maybe attracted by the noise, the eyes of the baby focused on me and the pudding-like features turned into a smile.


    ¡°Look, he likes you,¡± Jenn grinned, stepping towards me, bringing with her the strange smell and the potential biohazard in her arms. This time, I didn¡¯t manage to stop myself from stepping back.


    ¡°No, really, thank you, I¡¯ve never held a baby before, I¡¯d be afraid to drop it,¡± I repeated my refusal, trying to come up with a good, polite reason. I didn¡¯t just want to tell Jenn to keep her biohazard to herself.


    ¡°Don¡¯t worry about it, mothers have been doing this for millennia,¡± she prodded again and I thought there was a bit of mischief in her eyes but it came and vanished too fast to be certain.


    I continued to refuse and, as politely as possible, excused myself, determined to leave Suburbia and its barfing babies as quickly as possible. The whole experience managed to clear up the weird line of thought from a few days prior. Unless there was a major change in my personal situation, I would not reproduce. There was no way I would want to experience what Jenn had described and what little I had witnessed.


    But at the same time, I started to wonder. If reproduction wouldn¡¯t be part of my future plans, what plans should I make for the future? What meaning did I want to give my life?


    It was a question without an answer, but at the same time, it had an answer that I would have to search for. Otherwise, what was the meaning of life? Maybe once I was forty-two, I would know.

 Chapter 618

    After a week of absence, I could barely wait to jump back into Mundus. It was frightening, just how much I missed it and how much of it I missed. It wasn¡¯t just the separation from Sigmir that left a hole in my heart but almost as stinging was the absence of Lenore and the conversation we shared. There was more than one occasion when I was looking out of the window or working out somewhere, something that had filled most of my time, the physical activity an excellent distraction, that I had tried to converse with her, only to come up empty. Even Rai and Adra had grown close to me over the long time we had journeyed together, though the longing for them was far lesser compared to the pain being separated from Sigmir caused.


    Hell, even the mundanity of my body, the physical and mental inability, quickly became glaring, especially during exercise. On Mundus, I could easily jump three, or four metres high, without the need for magical or physical crutches and could run for hours, without serious repercussions. If I boosted myself with magic, I could do even more. The biggest limitation on my senses became my ability to process information. I had to concentrate on a particular location or sound to fully bring my senses to bear. Otherwise, my mind would quickly become overwhelmed by the sheer amount of information pouring in.


    And magic. How I missed my magic.


    Almost every night, I dreamed of Mundus, of Sigmir, of holding her and kissing her, it was almost torture. Other dreams were of my capsule space, the Frozen Throne on which I rested and the countless runic decorations I had woven into the walls, my very own magical sanctum.


    But finally, I could log back in. The familiar sensation of vertigo washed over me and moments later, I felt Sigmir¡¯s presence, our link snapping back into focus. All the longing burst from deep in my heart and briefly, I couldn¡¯t think of anything, only she was filling my mind. But only thinking of her just wasn¡¯t enough, I wanted to hold her, so I needed to interact with the outside world.


    Around me was the comfortable darkness of my Hallow, keeping me sheltered and hidden, while Lenore allowed me to perceive the world. To my surprise, what I perceived through her mind wasn¡¯t a ship or even a port-town, all around Lenore was a warm, humid forest, the trees towering while a few, small shrubs fought for what little light could penetrate the dense canopy above.


    ¡°Welcome back,¡± Lenore greeted me, excitement palpable in our mental contact. Focusing on her, I knew that her wings were rapidly flapping, wind-magic boosting her speed, as she carried us back towards Sigmir. Just as I could begin to feel her excitement at my return, she could feel my longing for Sigmir. The distance between us shrunk quickly, and I accepted Lenore¡¯s memory of the past two weeks.


    Watching memories was a curious experience, especially if they weren¡¯t just short-term. If not for the vast experience I had when it came to Lenore¡¯s mind, I likely wouldn¡¯t have been able to live them as I did, but after those almost two years, understanding what went on in her mind was second-nature to me.


    After I had logged out the last time, she had moved onto Adra¡¯s shoulder, the two of them playing up the nature aspect and having her act as a trained companion to Adra, not a bonded Spiritbeast. There were quite a few rangers and archers who used a trained animal, though mostly hawks or hounds, in their work, so having one more wasn¡¯t a tremendous surprise.


    Inside Phalladri, they had asked around and quickly found a captain. As ¡®Luck¡¯ would have it that captain was quite amendable to sail for Arbortoma at the earliest convenience, even if she wouldn¡¯t necessarily have the optimal freight, after they shared some of the news they had heard during their journey. Who would have thought that news of large-scale catastrophes would make people want to be elsewhere? A lush, temperate forest turning into a fiery hellscape filled with monsters, one of the major port cities losing almost a quarter of its population in a single night of misty mayhem? Completely unreasonable that anyone would want to be somewhere else.


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    Driven by such motivation and some coin, they had set sail within twenty-four hours of entering Phalladri, basically, as soon as the captain had been able to verify enough of their tales to be scared, they had left.


    Their passage had been quite easy in comparison, no monsters had harassed them and they even caught a favourable current, the trip that would normally take a week only taking them four days. Lenore¡¯s memories of the journey itself were quite simple, with little difference from the journey across the Mare Tempest. A lot of staring at the wooden hull while sailors were working all around them. Sigmir did have some troubles but there was little anyone but I could do and I hadn¡¯t been there, leaving her to suffer in silence.


    Mociabi, the port they had arrived at was quite impressive in her memories. It was located at the mouth of a strangely shaped bay, the mouth incredibly small before opening up into a massive body of water, large enough to almost be called a small interior ocean. Sitting at the mouth, Mociabi controlled access to that body of water and its natural bounty.


    Most impressive of all was the magical significance and the sheer amount of Storm and Lightning-Magic infusing the area. From what Lenore had seen, there was enough power in the air to make casting spells of that nature almost trivial, allowing even the weakest spellcasters who could wield such magic tremendous power. Thanks to that, Mociabi was one of the most powerful cities on Arbotoma, as any assault on its walls could be met with tremendous retaliation. Similarly, they had incredible wealth, thanks to their access to one of the few not monster-infested oceans.


    After the others had debarked from their ship, they had explored the town a little, looking for quests and information, before starting their way south, moving at a slow pace due to their lack of information. They knew I needed to travel south-west but our exact destination was a mystery to them. Given that it was a mystery to me, too, that wasn¡¯t too much of a surprise.


    Lenore also gave me her impression of the elves of Arbotoma, mainly that they were weird. A little snooty and arrogant but also whimsical and stupid, generally unable to stay on track long enough to get anything done but capable of impressive feats if they truly put their minds to it. An odd dichotomy that we would have to explore further.


    It felt a little weird, theoretically, I would be an elf amongst elves but somehow, I didn¡¯t think things would be that easy. But only time would tell how the nature- and forest-inclined elves of Arbotoma would react to an elf of Ice, Darkness and Death.


    Just as I was quickly sifting through Lenore¡¯s memories of the last few days, a leisurely journey through a hot and humid tropical forest, we reached the others, who were in the process of making camp, despite it being the middle of the day.


    The moment we arrived, I shoved myself out of my hallow, dropping the last few metres to the ground. I simply didn¡¯t want to wait and, from the way I never reached the ground, neither could Sigmir, who caught me in mid-air and began to take away my breath.


    For the next few minutes or maybe hours, she held me in her arms, thoroughly kissing me and showing just how much she had missed me. It didn¡¯t take long for our reuniting to shift from the vertical into the horizontal and I briefly noticed that Lenore and the others had taken their distance, giving us privacy.


    By the time we were done reuniting, I was quite sore and tired, but also very satisfied. The longing for Sigmir was somewhat abated, though I wanted nothing more than to snuggle into her arms and get some rest. Somehow, sleeping without her just wasn¡¯t as restful, the gentle beat of her heart the best lullaby there was. Given that the sky above us was already getting dark, I wouldn¡¯t have to wait for long but first, we called back the others and began to prepare dinner.


    Over dinner, I listened to the others about their experiences on the journey, their perspective subtly different from Lenore¡¯s but just as interesting. Listening to Adra describe how she had negotiated with the captain, or how Rai had managed to get into trouble in Phalladri because he had run into a few sneaky criminals was quite amusing. During dinner, Sigmir said the least, mostly she just physically demonstrated how much she had missed me, constantly reaching out and giving me a gentle caress and after dinner, I simply sat on her lap, her arms wrapped around me, as we continued talking.


    It felt good to be back with them and in the morning, we could seriously begin to take on the last leg of our journey. Further south, through the hot and humid forest, until we could climb the southern mountains and reach the nexus somewhere deep within them.

 Chapter 619

    In the middle of the night, I woke up with a start. Those eyes that had haunted my dreams back in Aletoma were back, only now they were accompanied by deep, burning hunger. I had no idea what to make of it, nor where they might come from, but by now, I was certain that they weren¡¯t just figments of my imagination.


    Focusing on the memories from my dream, I managed to conjure up a fragment of that sensation, only now I was fully conscious and in control. Letting the image fill one part of my mind, I spread the other part outwards, trying to see if there was something that caught my attention.


    Almost immediately, I noticed a subtle pull to the southwest, not quite in the direction we would ultimately need to go but in a similar one. It wasn¡¯t tremendously powerful but it attracted the fragment of my dream, and the hunger became much, much worse. It was as if there was something starving with my dream and it was now smelling their favourite food, turning them ravenous. The fragment, even if it was only part of a memory, held enough power to cause my stomach to grumble and saliva to gather within my mouth.


    Not wanting to have my mind influenced by anything, certainly not by fragments of some weird dream, I pushed it away, forcibly purging it from my mind. I even let some Astral Power run through my mind, carefully mixing Mind and Devouring Darkness magic, simply to make sure to get rid of the traces. Having some other presence, one I didn¡¯t know about, in my mind was incredibly scary.


    Lenore and Sigmir were both woken up by my mental activities and Sigmir¡¯s arms instinctively wrapped around me, pulling me close and sheltering me.


    ¡°What¡¯s going on?¡± she asked, her voice a whisper, just as Lenore was conveying the same question through our connection.


    ¡°A nightmare,¡± I replied to both of them, letting Lenore experience a bit of what I had dreamed. It wasn¡¯t on the same level as the fragment I had conjured up, but it was enough to give her a vague idea.


    ¡°Are you alright?¡± Sigmir asked, her concern immediately palpable. I gave her a gentle smile in response, nuzzling in a little and making myself comfortable.


    ¡°It¡¯s one of those things. Nothing actually happened, to my perception at least, but something or someone managed to get an idea into my head, a sensation. That¡¯s incredibly scary,¡± I admitted, her embrace helping to calm me down.


    At the same time, Lenore had I were mentally discussing the event, trying to gather information from the circumstances. We knew that the first time we had that particular type of nightmare, with the serpentine eyes, after Adra crossed the second Divide. That could be a hint or it could be a coincidence. I would have to talk with Adra about her crossing if there was something that she could tell me. If not, it might have to do with the entity behind the Ancient Sapling we had destroyed in the process, or even the sapling itself. There had been a tremendous amount of power involved.


    With that as the first hint, Lenore and I began considering the alteration to the nightmare. Before my absence, the eyes had only observed me in my dreams, silent and easily dismissed as strange figments of my imagination. But now, with the manifestation of that hunger, there was something that influenced me, evidence the dream had a power of its own. A power that could directly influence my mind, despite all the wardings I put up to avoid detection and divination.


    Given that the most famous thing about Arbotoma was the endless forest spreading all across it and the initial trigger had been the destruction of a tree, there seemed to be a connection. But why something was hungry for trees and, at the same time, interested in influencing my mind was weird. To say nothing of their ability to ignore my magical obfuscation.


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    Sigmir looked at me a little confused when I reached out and slapped my forehead, a realisation coming to my mind. My magical wardings were all wrapped around me, akin to a cloak. If something was within those wardings, they would do next to nothing.


    Reaching into my magical bag, I pulled out an object from almost the bottom of it, one that had accompanied me for almost my entire journey across Mundus. The moment I touched it, I could feel the same sensation of ravenous hunger, the mental and magical activity within the Soul Prison far stronger than it had been when I first ripped it from its fading Guardian. Not only could I feel it, it even tried to push into my mind, sharing it with me. For a moment, I considered lowering my mental defences, to see if communication could be achieved but given the circumstances, I decided against it.


    For a few moments, I felt the influence batter against my mind, only to break, the activity within the crystal ebbing as if conserving its strength. That was a little worrying, but at the same time, the simple fact that the activity that had been almost gone when I found the crystal originally was now quite a bit stronger. Maybe I could feed it some more, to the point that communication became possible.


    ¡°That seems to be the source,¡± Lenore muttered, her focus on the Soul Prison.


    ¡°The Grandmother told me there¡¯s some incredibly powerful entity bound within, one that was fading,¡± I reminded Lenore, ¡°Seems like that entity is quite hungry and its favourite food is trees,¡± I grinned, before focusing on my memories of that fateful night when Adra had crossed the second divide. Sadly, due to the avatar-state we had used, my memories were fragmented and blurry, unavailable even with Lenore¡¯s help.


    ¡°We could try feeding it?¡± Lenore asked, eyeing the countless, massive trees around us.


    ¡°We could,¡± I agreed, following her train of thought. We¡¯d be unable to break the prison unless we managed to harvest an inordinate amount of Life and Energy but maybe we¡¯d be able to satiate a bit of that hunger the entity was projecting outwards. Given that I had already decided to complete the quest of breaking the Soul Prison, helping the being inside should be within my interests.


    Leaving the question, how to feed the soul of a monster bound within a magical crystal prison? I somehow doubted that using a spoon would work, especially as I didn¡¯t have a real idea what it would feed on. The hunger was directed towards trees but placing it just against the bark seemed silly.


    Shaking my head, I decided to consider it the next day and put the crystalline prison back into the magic bag, putting a layer of warding around the bag and snuggled against Sigmir to get some more sleep.


    The next morning, we continued our journey and now, in the light of day, I could get my bearings a little better. The subtle pull south I had noticed wasn¡¯t just from the soul prison, looking at it now, I realised the pull was all around us, the entire forest had a subtle connection to that southern nexus. From the feel of it, I was almost certain it wasn¡¯t the nexus connected to the one in Neyto, there was far too little Ice in the air for that but that it was some sort of magical locus, binding the entire forest together.


    With that idea, the hypothesis that the pull was coming from the Elder Tree, the mystical heart of the forest and centre of the entire Elven civilisation wasn¡¯t too far off. I had a vague idea where that tree was, the stories on the forum were good enough for that, and the direction was roughly correct. Given the incredible margin of error when it came to my own position, the vagueness of the feeling and how spare the information was, it was good enough, leading to the idea that the monster in the Soul Prison was interested in that tree, with the same kind of intensity a starving lion would eye an injured gazelle.


    During the morning, I did a single feeding experiment, feeling quite silly as I placed the Soul Prison against the bark of a tree, only for nothing to happen. Even the mental and magical activity in the crystal seemed to be a lot lower now, compared to the intense fluctuations during the night.


    Putting the matter aside for the day, I joined Sigmir and the others, as we made our way through the forest, following one of the major trade routes. Compared to the Human Empire, the Elven civilisation seemed to be quite interesting, at least from the tales I had heard from the others.

 Chapter 620

    It took me two days before Lenore and I could seriously consider the question of the Soul Prison. That was mostly due to an annoying infestation of magical vermin, locusts the size of my hand were swarming the area. The forest was filled with dense Astral Power, strong enough to turn the individual trees into giants of the forest. At the same time, that power turned normally harmless pests, like those locusts, into something that was actually threatening. Usually, their size limited them to a diet of aphids and similar crawlies but here, the aphids were almost ten times their usual size from digesting the sap infused with Astral Power. That, in turn, meant that their predators became slightly more than ten times their size and in this case, it meant that their diet not only included those super-sized aphids but it also included everything else they could get their stingers into, like humans.


    Fighting those pests had been almost entirely my job, none of the others was terribly gifted when it came to the destruction of large amounts of enemies. Sure, Sigmir was able to wrap some of her power around her axe and send it out in a cleaving cone, but that only made for one large, cleaving swing. Sure, it could destroy some of the locusts, but it was clearly more suitable for larger targets. Adra could cause magical air bursts and was, after me, the most capable to destroy them but her magic was focused on improving her archery and communing with the forest, not large-scale destruction.


    My mist, on the other hand, was supremely effective and for two days, I froze millions, if not billions, of those locusts, sometimes even experimenting with the inclusion of Death-Magic into my usual mist spell. It worked quite well, earning me a point in the skill, but it also increased the destruction I caused amongst the plant life.


    But overall, the locusts were a nuisance for us, not a serious danger. What they managed to do, however, was motivate us to move at our highest pace, trying to cross the area they infested as quickly as possible.


    Due to that, it was on the third day after returning to Mundus that I stood in front of one of the giant trees and began to seriously experiment with the Soul Prison. Prior to my experiment, I had asked Adra about her experiences when she crossed the second Divide, quite certain that the Soul Prison had somehow siphoned some of the power involved for itself, but Adra couldn¡¯t contribute any useful information. To her, the crossing had been a struggle between herself and the Ancient Sapling and she had only been peripherally aware of the help supplied by Lenore and me. If there had been another power involved, she hadn¡¯t been able to notice.


    My first idea was the most obvious. While Blood Magic was named thus due to its affinity for the, well, Blood of living creatures, the magic governed the use of magic to influence the vitality of living things with a special focus on the transmission-substance. So, while trees didn¡¯t have blood in the same sense mammals and similar animals had, they had sap which carried their vitality, from the roots, into the trunk and out, to the leaves. Not a circulatory system, but countless capillaries, no heart or blood pressure but the transfer existed.


    Striking a blow with my butterfly blades, I stripped off some of the bark, allowing me to get direct access to the sap and placing my hand against it. It felt incredibly weird, trying to reach into a tree with my Blood Magic, my entire experience rebelling against the attempt but slowly but surely, I was able to gain an impression. It was incredibly vague and confusing, nothing responding as I was used to, but there was a response and there was a faint trace of power. Nothing more was needed.


    In an attempt to gain those precious first impressions, I tried pulling the power in, only to realise that it was akin to trying to push a boulder up a mountain. It was heavy and sluggish, no matter what I did, I didn¡¯t seem to make progress. I was simply too weak, which meant I was going at it from the wrong direction. With Mortal Hubris, as I was most certainly experimenting on the use of Magic and my high level, I should be strong enough to drain a tree, if I went at it the right way.


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    Closing my eyes, I let the magic I had invoked fade, no longer trying to directly drain, instead, I pulled out my silver Athame, the dagger that had accompanied me for so long, and started to carefully carve symbols into the tree. It was slow-going, the blade not made to carve wood, not even to truly carve flesh, a symbolic tool to focus magic, not a practical knife.


    And yet, I felt that the symbology was needed, a slow and meticulous approach working with enough care to let me carve the runes without damaging the blade. A smile appeared on my face when I realised that these were some of the first runes I had used on Mundus, back when I had only just learned to use Blood Magic. Those snowbolds I had sacrificed in order to wipe out their entire camp, it was the same idea. A slow and gradual drain of their powers, without requiring me to invest as much upfront.


    Placing the Athame in the middle of that runic formation, I sent my magic out once more, empowering the runes and trying to drain the vitality of that tree once again.


    Sadly, while there was progress, it was meaningless. It was the difference between trying to lift a skyscraper and trying to lift an apartment building, sure, the skyscraper was orders of magnitude heavier but that didn¡¯t mean that I was able to lift the apartment building either.


    Still, I was obviously going in the right direction.


    Letting out yet another sigh, I tried placing the Soul Prison against the quillon, trying to let it interface directly with my magic but there was no change. However the Soul Prison worked, physical contact didn¡¯t help or maybe I was going at it wrong.


    One change I did notice when holding it was that the hunger inside was still powerful, maybe even more intense now, as if the entity noticed and understood my efforts.


    Sadly, while it might have noticed, it was either unwilling or unable to give me direction, some sort of, ¡®Feeding sealed Ancient Souls for Dummies¡¯ or something along those lines, leaving me to muddle along.


    Shaking my head, I decided on yet another experiment, going at the problem from the other direction. Leaving the runic formation and the Athame in place and constantly channelling some Astral Power into it, I split my attention, calling on Lenore to help.


    If the Vitality inside the tree was too sluggish to move, maybe I just had to make it move, make it limber. Together with Lenore, I let some Death-Magic seep into the tree, trying to use it to separate the Vitality from the sap, to enhance my Blood Magic. In the moment of Death, the greatest Vitality could burst forth, so I just had to bring that moment to the tree.


    As the Death Magic began to infuse the tree, I suddenly felt a rumbling roar, not audible but a deep, bone-shaking sensation that vibrated in my very soul. The hunger I had felt radiating from the Soul Prison in my hand intensified by orders of magnitude and I could smell the earthy scent of Vitality in the air as the Death Magic forced the tree to fight back. At the same time, I could feel the work of my Blood Magic get easier and pushed more of my magic into the runic formation, glad that I didn¡¯t have to actively think about what I was doing with it.


    The tiny trickle of power I had managed to wrest from the tree started to swell and I channelled it through me, until it reached the Soul Prison in my other hand, where I let it seep into the crystal, trying to feed the beast inside.


    Another roar vibrated and suddenly, the odd combination of magic Lenore and I had created turned incandescent, flaring with incredible power. My mouth gaped open when in an instant, the massive tree in front of me, easily eight metres in radius and tall as a building, turned into black dust, raining down on me.


    Not a single drop of the power unleashed at that moment was left behind it all was channelled into the crystal in my hand, leaving me to shake my head in disbelief.


    Apparently, I had found a way to feed the beast.


    Just as I was about to celebrate my discovery, Adra stepped onto the clearing, her eyes wide and face pale. Her expression didn¡¯t ease when she saw me standing in front of the hole left by the destruction of that massive tree, a few dead leaves and a lot of grey dust raining down around me.


    ¡°What have you just done?!¡± she screamed, looking incredibly scared.

 Chapter 621

    For a moment, I wasn¡¯t sure how to respond to Adra. The look of sheer horror on her face made it obvious that there was something going on that I couldn¡¯t see, some sort of disturbance only she registered. Given the rather delicate and problematic identity of the Soul Prison still clutched in my hand, I wasn¡¯t sure how to respond. Sure, she was my companion and I trusted her, but at the same time, the thing I was holding had been locked away by multiple deities. Just that would bring tremendous pressure to almost any native of Mundus.


    ¡°Just a small, magical experiment with Blood- and Death-Magic, it worked a little better than I had expected,¡± I fibbed, trying to deceive her with the truth.


    ¡°Whatever you¡¯ve done, I could feel the entire forest shudder in¡­¡± she paused and I could see a shudder shaking her, ¡°terror? It felt as if there was a terrible predator stalking the heart of the forest.¡±


    ¡°That doesn¡¯t sound too good. You mean other people may have noticed my actions?¡± I asked, realising that she wasn¡¯t the only being attuned to the forest.


    ¡°True,¡± she nodded and I felt myself turn pale, ¡°We should go,¡± she suggested, an idea I immediately agreed to.


    Given that my action had likely been felt throughout a massive area, especially by spellcasters attuned to the forest, staying anywhere nearby would be idiotic to the highest degree. From everything I knew, the elves were living in symbiotic unison with the forest, so if my actions were felt, it was akin to striking the foundation of their entire way of life.


    Instead of resting for the night, we roused Sigmir and Rai, eating some of our rations dry and cold, before continuing on our journey, cloaked in the shadows of the night.


    As we ran, a small part of my mind was focused on the earlier experiment. It seemed that the Soul Prison, with a little help, was capable to exert some power on our surroundings, or at least enhance my spell-casting if the entity within was motivated to do so. Empowering my Blood- and Death-Magic might only be one way it could do so, I would have to find out more in the future.


    Spooked by the intense reaction I had caused, we continued to run through the night pushing our bodies to the limit, both Adra and my magic continuously deployed to conceal our tracks. And it was necessary, as we travelled, we noticed multiple groups of elves.


    The first, only an hour after we had started running, was spotted by Lenore when she was scouting high above us, flitting between the massive trees. It wasn¡¯t a unified group but a flight of elves, riding massive avians. Luckily they were above the canopy and she noticed the magical emanations of their wind magic, or it was likely that she would have been spotted. Instead, she instantly dove down, hiding between the trees and returning to her Hallow as fast as possible. My assumption was that those elves were the first responder, trying to figure out what had caused the earlier event and then start looking for the culprits.


    A few hours later, an hour after sunrise, we noticed another group of elves. Instead of an entire flight of scouts, this was a small group of four, all well-equipped with leather-armour, short bows and curved blades, mounted on massive, quite intimidating, felines. They weren¡¯t moving with purpose in the direction we were coming from, but it looked more like a scouting patrol, Looking for something. Possibly us, but in that case, we either hadn¡¯t managed to conceal our tracks or the elves were incredibly agitated by my actions.


    Either way, their presence was problematic. And even worse was that we couldn¡¯t take them out, or it would be akin to a giant signal, telling the elves that something problematic was in this area. That would only lead to more people investigating and ultimately, we would fall. There was no way for us to fight all the elves.


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    No, we needed to run, even faster and further, without getting noticed.


    Thus, we continued running. For two more days, we kept running, day and night, resting only briefly, eating dried rations on the go as we pushed our endurance to the limit. Both Adra and I had to pull double-duty, keeping a constant magical cloak around us, the effort to do so slowly draining our strength.


    During that time, we spotted a few more groups of elves, some riding on those felines, others above the trees, either propelled by personal wind-magic or on the back of some sort of flying mount.


    And it wasn¡¯t just mundane patrols, during our flight, Adra and I both noticed the occasional weird pulse of energy flowing through the forest. While I could only feel the presence of that magic, Adra identified it as a peculiar type of Divination Magic, an attempt to have the very forest assist the elves in finding us. At its base, it was what she used to commune with plants right next to her, have them work in tandem with and even give information to her, only that here, the effect was spread out across a vast area. Thankfully, Adra was confident in her ability to prevent that type of magic from detecting us, or we might have been spotted. Given that hiding within the forest needed more than tricks of light and shadow, I wasn¡¯t certain whether I would be able to magically conceal myself and even less confident when it came to hiding Sigmir.


    As we ran, we noticed a few elven settlements, their presence relatively easy to detect due to their peculiar construction, or rather, the peculiar construction of their walls. The elves didn¡¯t build walls like everyone else, instead, they were growing them.


    Their walls consisted of specifically grown trees and shrubs, the trees forming a lattice structure the shrubs and various vines were using, forming an impenetrable thicket. What made it even worse was that, according to Adra, the whole thing was one creature, similar to the forest around Neyto, and just like that forest, those walls were host to a Dryad.


    It became incredibly obvious when we saw a large feline try sneaking into one of the small settlements, the moment the feline came too close to the wall, a cluster of tendrils struck out, ensnaring and twisting it, before dragging the mangled carcass into the wall, to never be seen again.


    Without seeing it personally, I wouldn¡¯t even have noticed that the walls were able to strike out some thirty metres, the vines more akin to striking snakes with incredible power. I tried to cautiously use Observe to gauge the thicket¡¯s level, only to get an incredible headache when my attempt was foiled.


    Once that happened, the idea to maybe have one of us sneak into town to replenish supplies died a sudden death and we were running again, glad that the elven forest offered bountiful forage. It was almost as if the elves, or maybe even the forest itself, had cultivated some of the trees, so their fruits turned into something more than a vehicle to transport seeds.


    On the third night, we finally had to rest. While I was capable to rest during the day by switching with Lenore, the others had been running the whole time and their exhaustion was mounting.


    While they slept, I kept guard, sitting on one of the larger shrubs, the trees around us having no suitable branches to sit on. A part of me wanted to climb up, into the canopy, so I could actually see the night sky above but that would make the guarding almost entirely ineffective.


    During the darkest hour of the night, when the shadows were at their deepest, I felt something, a faint tugging at my mind. I was used to mental contact, thanks to my connection to Lenore and Sigmir, but this was different. Where the bond between us was one woven on both sides, this was entirely foreign, almost akin to someone knocking on the door to my mind.


    For a moment, I wasn¡¯t sure what to do, my first instinct was to draw the cloak of shadows I wore tightly around me, scared that some scrying elf might have found me and was trying to find out who or what I was. The contact didn¡¯t feel hostile, but just the detection of my presence could be problematic.


    Despite the utter darkness around me, the knocking didn¡¯t stop, if anything, it became more distinct, as if the shadows were helping it.


    Remembering a previous situation where the cloak was unable to conceal me, I reached into my magic back, pulling out the Soul Prison. The moment my hand touched the crystal, the knocking faded, replaced by a flurry of sensations.


    Delight, hunger and desire, all mingled together in an impressive bouquet, the breadth of the emotions strong enough to make me sway on my branch.


    Whatever was in there, it was slowly regaining a bit of power.

 Chapter 622

    Once I managed to overcome the awe contact with an existence as powerful as the one sealed in the Soul Prison brought with it, I steadied myself on my branch, my mind churning furiously. Such power, it was incredible, intoxicating. The being in there was so much more than I could comprehend, even just that small part I could experience was overwhelming. And that was likely only a small part of its power, nothing more than I could experience through contact with the Soul Prison. What would happen once the being was free, no longer bound into its crystalline prison and maybe able to regain a body for itself? I couldn¡¯t imagine that a being as powerful as that needed a body, or wouldn¡¯t be able to create one, simply by virtue of its powerful soul. Such a soul had to have some impressive magical or mental or something abilities. I was guessing, but I wasn¡¯t willing to believe that it didn¡¯t have power.


    It made me understand the writings about beings too vast for a human mind to comprehend and I had a feeling that trying to do so, without having my mind thoroughly enhanced by attributes, would shatter my mind and soul.


    Somewhere, deep within my mind, two neurons collided and a greedy thought sparked into existence, the idea that maybe if I shattered the prison, I might be able to gain some of that power for myself. To rob such an existence of its power, oh, how glorious it would be? What an achievement!


    Becoming something akin to a god, wouldn¡¯t that be a crowning achievement, one that entitled me to the highest of rewards Pantheon Entertainment was willing to give out? Wouldn¡¯t that be my best chance to legitimately keep Sigmir by my side?


    The idea brought a smile to my face, even as the vast majority of my mind was rebelling at the sheer audacity. It was madness and yet, maybe I had to be mad if I wanted to stay with Sigmir.


    How could I make that audacious thought work? The question began to percolate, even as another question sparked into existence. Wouldn¡¯t working with that existence be an option, too?


    There were clerics in this world, people who channelled the power of greater beings, of Deities, so wouldn¡¯t there be an option to gain some of its power, if it was willing to share? Maybe not in the same way a cleric or priest gained their power, but something similar to the previous feeding, where it greatly enhanced and empowered the effect of my magic? If it could do so while sealed in a Soul Prison designed to slowly grind its soul into oblivion, just how much more could it do once it was free?


    Cooperation or Obliteration?


    Or, in other words, how audacious and greedy did I dare to be?


    Both ideas kept swirling around my head, but before I could even begin to actively work on either, I would have to find out more about the existence in the prison. That way, I could actually form plans from those vague ideas, maybe even try coming up with some sort of ritual to put those potential plans into reality.


    Getting Lenore¡¯s help, later in the day, would definitely be a necessity.


    But first, the inhabitant of the Soul Prison.


    Reaching out again, I put my hand against the prison, closing my eyes to focus inward, on that connection I was receiving. Or rather, the wave of sensation and emotion that was transmitted through my hand and almost washed away my consciousness.


    It was not an attack, not specifically, but more akin to the call of a blue whale, simply far too loud and powerful for my puny mortal body. I could hold on, but it was a near thing.


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    ¡°Hello?¡± I tried asking, projecting my response towards the prison, as if I was mentally communicating with Lenore.


    There was no response, and certainly no words, only endless waves of sensation swirling around my mind. It was clear that the being hungered, that it needed me to feed it more power.


    I tried to communicate, trying to project my own emotions back when words failed, trying to suggest patience, promising that I would feed it, as soon as I could do so without bringing the entire elven civilisation down on my head. Sadly, no matter how I tried to communicate, there was no response, it felt as if the being didn¡¯t even notice my attempts.


    Maybe I would have more luck if I tried combining my attempts at communication with another feeding session, especially if I managed to enlarge the effect. It was quite obvious that even a single tree was noticed and brought an overwhelming response, so a ritual that drained a couple of trees shouldn¡¯t escalate further. Not unless they had some sort of dragon riders, teleporting mages or something along those lines. Airborne cavalry should, hopefully, be near the top level of responses for trouble in the middle of the forest.


    Or maybe there was a way to sacrifice one of those thicket walls to the entity, the scope and power of such a being should be a wonderful snack. The response should be equally insane, but it was a fun idea.


    Letting out a sigh, I focused on my surroundings, ignoring the attempts of the being to make me feed it more power. Just because there was incessant mental interference from the Soul Prison¡¯s inmate knocking on the door of my mind, trying to get my attention and feed it, I couldn¡¯t neglect my guard duty.


    A chuckle escaped me when I had to think of Jenn and the troubles of having a newborn. There, you had loud nightly wailing, the baby telling you it needed attention, NOW while my ¡®newborn¡¯ was knocking against my mind. I wasn¡¯t sure what was more annoying, but at least with a newborn, you could feed it without having the entire region gunning for you.


    The knocking continued through the night, only stopping when I felt dawn breaking somewhere on the hidden horizon, the powers granted to me by the Dark Moon fading under the light of the sun. Amused, I let out a snort at the realisation that apparently, the creature inside was stronger at night, too, just like I was, or maybe it was weakened by the sun. Given that the Elemental I had taken the Soul Prison from in the first place had been some sort of fire- or sun-creature, such a link was likely.


    When Lenore awoke, I described to her the events of the night, including the multiple hours of mental knocking, the sensation incredibly obnoxious, to the point that the idea to chuck the Soul Prison had felt quite attractive. Not one to be seriously considered, not after carrying it for over twenty months and across multiple continents, but attractive nonetheless.


    ¡°We¡¯ll have to feed it,¡± Lenore quickly accepted my thought, even if it came with serious problems. But compared to having a constant knocking against your mind, those problems were manageable, the knocking was a serious threat to my mental and emotional well-being.


    ¡°But we can¡¯t just pick out a tree and get cracking, I highly doubt it¡¯ll be a one-and-done kinda thing. We¡¯ll have to keep feeding it, until we reach the Nexus and can actually break it. And in that case, we can¡¯t simply do it where we are, or it¡¯s going to be akin to an arrow, pointing right at us. Any idiot could find us with that much information,¡± I grumbled, the idea to lead our enemies right to us not terribly attractive to me. No, we needed to obfuscate and conceal as much as possible, or we¡¯d be on the losing end of this deal.


    ¡°What do you have in mind?¡± she asked, quite curious.


    ¡°Do you think we¡¯d be able to work through the Astral and feed it that way?¡± I asked, a vague idea of projecting my mind somewhere else and spreading the feeding across a massive area coming to my mind.


    ¡°I doubt it?¡± Lenore replied, ¡°If you could draw the power you gained with your Blood Magic into the Astral, wouldn¡¯t that power just return to the Astral River and get absorbed back into it? Without you getting anything. And I¡¯m quite certain you can¡¯t just take the Soul Prison through the Astral, or you could simply take it in there and let it absorb as much as it needs,¡± she elaborated and my idea died a quick death. I would still experiment, but I had a strong feeling it wouldn¡¯t work.


    ¡°How about the two of us fly somewhere else each night? It would still give our foes a rough vector, but it wouldn¡¯t be as bad,¡± I suggested, getting a brief silence from her as I could feel her consider the idea.


    ¡°That might work, we¡¯d have to be careful not just to keep the same distance from our route each night and maybe even double back at times, but I think we could do something like that,¡± she agreed, ¡°We¡¯ll have to be incredibly careful though, those avian mounts of the elves are faster than I am,¡± she added, sounding quite concerned at the idea.


    Now, we only had to convince Sigmir that it was a good idea. Something unlikely to succeed.

 Chapter 623

    Just as expected, Sigmir¡¯s enthusiasm for the idea that I would head off in the middle of the night for some magical experimentation with the ability that had brought our current troubles was¡­ impactful. She didn¡¯t even try to talk or let me explain, instead she simply said no, before grabbing me, carrying me off and doing her very best that the only sounds coming from my body were moans, some panting and screams of pleasure.


    Sadly, as great as both of our stamina was, at some point, our bodies simply couldn¡¯t indulge any longer. Still, our activities had successfully made Adra and Rai scurry off, giving us perfect privacy so I could explain my dilemma. It was either to feed the Soul Prison or get driven mad quite quickly, the incessant knocking would likely accomplish that within a few days. Just a single night of it had left me irritated and thoroughly annoyed, so I didn¡¯t even want to consider how I would feel after a week. And that was assuming the inmate didn¡¯t have any other tricks up their disembodied sleeve, it might just play nice at the moment, trying to get me to work with it on my own accord.


    She suggested that I should give her the Soul Prison to carry and I seriously considered her idea, but there were a few things that made me hesitant. One was that I wasn¡¯t sure if the Soul Prison benefited from the constant concealment I maintained around me, the Cloak of Twilight that hid such problematic traits like my Mortal Hubris. If so, it might also conceal the Soul Prison from those divine Powers that had originally sealed it, something that might be necessary, especially now that it was becoming more active thanks to the feeding.


    Another was that I was somewhat confident in my own mental defences, thanks to my high mental attributes and magical abilities, especially Mind Magic. Sigmir was a wonderful being, but her focus was on her physical body, leaving her mental abilities only somewhat enhanced, far from my level.


    And lastly, I simply didn¡¯t want her to be at risk, not if I could carry that risk. It was an opinion she mirrored, unwilling to let me carry the burden but with a few gentle kisses and soft coaxing, she accepted, letting me keep the Prison. And accepted that I would have to move somewhere in the night and feed the soul inside.


    After another exciting day of running, I shifted into my Hallow, after Adra and I had warded the campsite to the best of our abilities, and Lenore took off, carrying me northwards. We didn¡¯t plan to go too far, only about half an hour of her flying her top speed just above the forest¡¯s canopy, with plans to further that distance each coming night. That way, it would hopefully look like we were on a somewhat curved trajectory, leading towards the Mountains of Fire and the border between Arbortoma and Helar. Hopefully, that would be enough of a false trail to let us slip any net they might put up.


    As soon as Lenore and I found a suitable location, I began my hard work. Instead of putting a formation into one tree, I carefully drew out a formation on the ground, shifting and designing it in such a way that each of the focal points was located beneath one of the giant trees. Those giant trees on the focal points were then carved with a formation of their own, hopefully linking them into the greater whole.


    It was incredibly exhausting, hard work, but when I put a hand on the Soul Prison, the hunger was now joined with salivating anticipation and exuberant joy, to the point that I had a mental image of a dog, hopping around and wagging its tail hard enough to almost tumble to the ground, just because it heard the soft rattling of food in its bowl.


    With a grin on my face, I stood in the middle of the formation, each of the trees around me anointed with my blood and raised my hands, one holding the Soul Prison, the other the slightly bloody Athame. It was a bit of a risk, using my own blood as the link to connect the ritual, but at the end of the day, it was a necessity. Otherwise, I¡¯d have to drain each tree individually, making the feeding a lot harder and slower.


    Letting out a hiss, I focused and began channelling my magic, the formation beneath me glowing with pulsing, red light, even as dim tendrils of ashen grey spread around me, slowly infusing and priming the trees for the ritual. At first, it was a slow process, the trees needing to be stimulated with Death Magic until I felt the tipping point, their Vitality at its strongest and most motile, completely energised to push out the Death Magic I had infused them with.


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    In that moment, I felt Overflow activate and my heart started pounding, my eyes glowing with that crimson light and pulsing to the beating of my heart. The Blood Magic around me focused on the blood coating my Athame, thrumming with power until I placed the bloody knife against the Soul Prison in my other hand.


    And suddenly, there was another burst of power, even stronger than the pulse last time, draining some of my Astral Power and stamina in the process, leaving me reeling in body and mind. The sheer amount and quality of power that had surged through me, stronger and so incredibly pure that I could only compare it to Eternal Ice, robbed me of my breath, the rush of power flowing through me almost orgasmic.


    Despite the incredibly high I was experiencing, I didn¡¯t forget that I wanted to communicate with the being inside the Soul Prison and tried to send images along the power, entreating it for patience and promising that I would try to feed it to the best of my ability. I didn¡¯t try to negotiate for a reward at this point, simply because of the limited method of communication, but I had a feeling the being inside could understand more than I could communicate.


    As I came down from my high, I stood there, grey ashes from the drained trees raining around me and, to my surprise, strange, bone-grey flames flickering on the crumbled remains of those trees. For a moment, I was utterly flabbergasted, staring at the flames and wondering just why I didn¡¯t get the usual feeling of revulsion before I realised that hanging around would be utterly retarded. Considering the meaning of those dark flames would have to wait for later when I wasn¡¯t standing on a crime against the very realm I was currently in.


    Utilising what power I had left, I caused Darkness to surge, destroying and purging the traces of magic in the environment, trying to destroy as much of the evidence as possible. The formation I had set up shattered, the magic that had seeped into the ground turning the clearing into an utter mess, before I did my best to guide the Darkness back into the Astral, leaving nothing but torn earth and a locally jumbled Astral River.


    Once that was achieved, I pushed myself back into my Hallow, before Lenore pushed herself, darting away through the darkness, leaving the place behind as quickly as possible. I had no doubt that someone, somewhere had noticed the events and there would be trouble coming.


    As if to confirm my impression, just a few minutes after Lenore and I had fled, I felt a surge of Astral Power behind me, nothing I could identify but powerful. Possibly some sort of teleport and if so, it was likely a good idea that Lenore was wrapped in a concealing Cloak of Twilight and flying above the canopy again, trying to remain out of sight as much as possible. And heading north.


    Only after moving north for half an hour would we double back, hopefully avoiding any tracking and escaping potential pursuit. Trying to guess what countermeasures were necessary and what measures were unnecessary without understanding the options our foes had to track us was a pain in the neck, but there was little we could do about it.


    But one thing we could try and so, after some ten minutes of swift flight, Lenore headed into the canopy, landing on one of the branches where I shifted out of my Hallow, creating a window of Darkness, through which we could observe the images from a scrying construct. It was an indirect way to scry, designed to avoid backlash if anyone noticed our construct and destroyed it, but it had its drawbacks, mostly in regards to controlling the focus.


    Not that we needed a lot of control, the jumbled mess we had made of the area we had fled was easily recognisable in the Astral, especially for us who had caused it. From there, it was simple to create the scrying focus, nothing but a particularly dense cloud of darkness in the shadow of a tree, letting us see what was going on.


    There were a few elves scurrying around the clearing, some of them with weird, winged cats and none of them looked happy. But they also didn¡¯t look like they were actually getting anything from it, until one of them looked up, suddenly focusing on the construct I had created.


    Immediately, I forced the Astral Power back into the Astral River, letting it merge with the mess there and withdrew, before turning the Astral Power I had invested into the window of Darkness into a magic-devouring shadow that swiftly devoured itself, leaving very little evidence, while I shifted back into my Hallow and Lenore started to dart to the east, hopefully making sure that nobody was able to follow us.

 Chapter 624

    Lenore and I continued to move around the forest randomly, trying to create multiple false trails, if the elves could even find those. To disrupt things further, we kept switching in and out of each other''s Hallow, at times I stepped through the shadows to interrupt the trail I had been on and even logged out, just in case there was some sort of magic that followed my essence. In addition, I thoroughly inundated both of us with Dark Magic, trying to cleanse and burn away anything that might be tracked, magical or mundane.


    The only thing we couldn¡¯t remove from this realm was Lenore¡¯s Soul, but given that she had only passively given me Astral Power, we had a bit of confidence that there was no way for anyone to track her presence. She didn¡¯t even touch the ground or any of the trees, sitting on my shoulder whenever possible, or within her Hallow.


    Finally, once we had done anything in our power to ensure we didn¡¯t create a track back to the others, we returned, still hidden by concealment and repeatedly stepping through the shadows. I even considered trying to step through the Astral itself but at this point, I wasn¡¯t confident enough that such an action wouldn¡¯t leave more trails than I wanted. Experimenting was good, experimenting when hunted by a hostile civilisation, not so much.


    When I entered the clearing, I was greeted by an alarmed Adra, her spear at the ready, showing that I hadn¡¯t managed to conceal myself from her wards.


    ¡°Can you check if there¡¯s anything giving away my presence? I¡¯d rather avoid getting detected by the forest,¡± I asked her, knowing that her senses and abilities worked on a different level than those of Lenore and I.


    ¡°Certainly,¡± she nodded, starting to slowly move her spear in a circular fashion, casting a spell of her own. I wasn¡¯t sure what it did, but after a minute of slow chanting and creating magical formations, she finally shook her head.


    ¡°There are parts of your aura that are noticeable, even if you cover them up very well, but those have been there for a while, nothing new,¡± she assured me and from the look on her face, I was relatively certain she meant things like my Ruthless- and Mortal Hubris-Trait, both of which she had always described as a stain on my aura. Whatever that meant.


    ¡°But they can¡¯t easily be detected from a distance, right? That¡¯s all I¡¯m concerned about,¡± I reminded her, not really bothered if troublesome elements could be detected by close examination. In a situation where I could be examined that closely, I had different problems anyway.


    ¡°Not by me, but you know that I¡¯m a youngster of my people. What an elder Dryad, long bonded with her tree and rich in experience, can do is vastly different,¡± she reminded me, her words making me frown. It was an annoyance, but there was little I could do about it.


    ¡°Go back to sleep, I¡¯ll keep watch,¡± I told her, intent on trying to commune with the Soul Prison again, now that I was within the relative safety of our combined wards.


    ¡°Sure,¡± she nodded, letting out a yawn,¡± If you like, Sigmir¡¯s watch comes up in an hour, up to you if you want to wake her,¡± she added, before plodding over to her bedroll and laying down.


    There was some temptation to wake Sigmir instantly, but instead, I conjured up my throne.. There was no real need for it but the comfortable seat and the runic decorations gave me just a little extra confidence, something I really wanted when dealing with what might very well be a deity. Or at least something the gods had wanted to get rid of.


    Closing my eyes, I drew out the Soul Prison, holding it in front of me, feeling the mind reach through my hands. There was still the sensation of hunger, but the burning need had abated a little. Letting out a sigh, I leaned forward, putting my forehead against the smooth, slightly cold, surface of the crystal.


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    Instantly, the sensations I felt became stronger, almost overwhelmingly so and I felt my own stomach clench, letting out a low rumble as if I was starving. Controlling my breath, I tried to reach out with my Mind Magic, trying to make contact and project my own thoughts back to the entity, hopefully forming a connection so we could communicate in words, not just vague feelings and the odd nightmare.


    Suddenly, I could see without opening my eyes. Only there was nothing to see around me, only endless, gloomy darkness, something even my elven eyes, enhanced by my Darkness-affinity, couldn¡¯t pierce and yet, I could feel something out there, around me. I could feel the shadows themselves, stretching out endlessly, unobstructed and never hindered by light. This was, quite frankly, the darkest place I had ever been to.


    ¡°Hello?¡± I tried calling out, only to realise that I had no mouth, vocal cords or anything normally used to speak. I was, quite literally, a nobody in this place.


    But that wouldn¡¯t stop me, Lenore didn¡¯t speak using her beak, after all, she used magic for it. And while I was unable to use Wind-Magic as she did, I was quite certain that we were in a realm of consciousness, a purely mental place. Following that logic, I projected my thoughts out as if I was talking to Lenore, only using my Mind Magic and directing it into the area around me.


    Moments later, I heard sounds, a soft, rustling sound that I couldn¡¯t place and what made it even odder was that it came from all around me. Trying to shift my perception, as if I was controlling a scrying construct, I tried looking around, only to see more darkness. There weren¡¯t even shadows moving around, nothing to give this place any of the depth I knew was there.


    The rustling stopped and I heard a sound, a deep, raspy hiss, something that shook me to my very soul, animalistic and filled with power. And yet, I could hear meaning in the sound, could understand that it was a greeting. Before I could consider a response, a pair of massive, slitted eyes stared at me, eyes that I had seen before, after we had destroyed the ancient sapling. I couldn¡¯t see the being those eyes belonged to, only make out a vague, serpentine head the size of a house.


    Stunned, I just stared, unable to tear my gaze from those eyes, literally the mouse before the snake. It wasn¡¯t just the difference in size and physical might, but I could feel something at the edge of my perception, something beyond my sight, something me. The being in front of me was more than I was, maybe more than I could ever be, superior in ways I couldn¡¯t even comprehend.


    Before my mind could even begin to digest what I was seeing, the slitted tongue flickered out from the serpent''s maw. Almost reflexively, I did the same, taking in the Astral Power of this place, a rich taste of Darkness-Power spreading through my system, accompanied by a smattering of other flavours, Blood and Death I could readily identify, but there was so much more. More than I could identify at first taste, maybe more than I could ever understand. The very air was thick with power if there even was air in this space and not just congealed darkness.


    Another hissing rasp echoed through the endless space around me and again, I could understand the meaning of the sound. It was a mix of command and plea, telling me to feed it, to sate its burning hunger.


    Before I could gather my mind and reply, I felt a stinging pain in my head and realised that I had drained the entirety of my Astral Power. The effort had been strenuous enough to drain some of my stamina, leaving me completely exhausted. The space around me vanished, leaving me sitting on my throne, panting for air and a stinging headache pounding in my skull, as if someone was trying to drive a nail into my brain. There was an odd wetness on my face, the stickiness making me realise I was crying tears of blood, but that all didn¡¯t matter.


    Success!


    I had managed to exchange words with the being inside the prison and even managed to see its form, that of a giant serpent.


    Leaning back on my throne, I had to fight not to burst out laughing, partially due to it being the middle of the night and partially due to my splitting headache. Slowly, I managed to control my breathing, while I let my mind drift into the Astral River, letting its streams soothe away the pain of my tortured head, as fresh Astral Power washed into my body, replenishing my depleted reserves.


    ¡°I did it,¡± I told Lenore, letting her inspect my memories of those few, infinite seconds, my mind still reeling from the sheer magnificence and awe-inspiring aura of that being.


    For once, there was no Mortal Hubris within me, only overwhelmed awe.

 Chapter 625

    Armed with a few keywords and ideas, I did the obvious thing. The writers at Pantheon Entertainment had obviously taken a lot of inspiration from various Greek and Norse Myths, so looking at those to gain a few ideas in regards to the inmate of the Soul Prison was an obvious idea.


    If my memory served me right, the Grandmother had told me that ¡®Sunna¡¯ had created the Soul Prison to hold ¡®one of the Great Beasts¡¯. A quick check on ¡®Sunna¡¯ told me that it was either a founding document of Islamic law or an ancient name of the Norse deification of the Sun. Given that there was nothing Abrahamic about the lore of Road to Purgatory, my assumption was that the Grandmother had talked about the Norse deity.


    As such, a ¡®Great Beast¡¯ caught by that deity was likely to stem from the same source, at least that was my first assumption. So, I had the keywords of Serpent, Darkness, Norse and Death to work with.


    The first result my search got me was the Midgard Serpent, also known as J?rmungandr. However, a massive part of that one¡¯s lore was related to water and the sea, it being the giant sea-serpent that circled the entire realm of Midgard, the world of Man. In the dark space, I had felt a lot of things, but there had been nothing that made me think of the sea, something I would expect when meeting the Midgard Serpent. In addition, while the serpent had been massive, it was far from the titanic size the ¡®Girdle of the Realm¡¯ would be, though that might simply be a feature of the Soul Prison.


    In addition, it was a sibling of Fenris, son of Loki, and as such could be called a distant cousin to my Avatar¡¯s entire race. However, when looking at the Serpent I had seen in the dark space, there had been no feeling of connection like I had felt when meeting Sigmir and Yvla. Awe, certainly, but no recognition or kinship.


    Another result of my search was Fafnir, a dwarf-turned-dragon guarding a hoard of gold until slain by the hero Sigurd, who then used the Dragon¡¯s Blood to turn himself mostly invincible. Curious about the details, as it might be the entity I was facing, I looked into the saga and soon discarded it, when I read a passage describing how the dragon was stabbed into the shoulder. While the serpent I had faced could easily be called a dragon, I was certain that there had been no shoulders to speak off. I might have simply been unable to see, but given the complete lack of hints that it actually might be a transformed dwarf guarding a hoard of gold, I put it at the bottom of the list of potential entities.


    Next, and even less likely, was the nameless serpent bound above Loki during his imprisonment. Given my Avatar¡¯s connection with said deity and their bloodline, I didn¡¯t think that an entity whose primary role was to torment that god would view a member of that bloodline with anything but hostility. Working with one would be impossible, in addition, the brief mention the serpent got wasn¡¯t enough to make me consider it a great beast.


    Finally, the candidate I felt most likely, bestowed with the wonderful name, or maybe the title, N¨ªeh?ggr, or Nidhogg. Malice Striker. It was described as the serpent that gnaws on the roots of the world tree, which made me realise that I had overlooked a keyword, namely the trees. The Soul Prison had regained some vitality, or power, or whatever, after we had destroyed the Ancient Sapling and even back then, I had wondered how a tree of that size can be a sapling. But if it was a sapling of the world tree, or maybe a sapling of the species that eventually became the world tree, then it would make sense. And it would make sense that Nidhogg would be empowered by doing what its foundational myth spoke of: Gnawing on the roots of the world tree.


    The introduction didn¡¯t go into too much detail, but there were mentions of shadows and poison. That part certainly fit with what I had seen and felt, making me reasonably confident that I had found the right serpent. I continued reading a bit, before looking into the possibility that it wasn¡¯t a serpent of Norse mythology. Looking into the Greek myths, there were a couple of dragons or serpents that might be possible options, but none of those looked actually likely. Most were either multi-headed or partially humanoid, with either a serpentine body at the bottom like they had given Naga, a serpentine head, or even serpentine hair. But nothing that screamed giant snake lurking in the dark.


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    With that in mind, I began to ponder what Pantheon Entertainment might have lifted and put into the game and what that might mean for me and the entity in the Soul Prison. What did it mean if the entity was Nidhogg, the Malice Striker? What could I do with that knowledge?


    Either way, I now had a bit of insight and could look deeper into things in the future and with that new knowledge, I could return to Road to Purgatory.


    After the brief moment of vertigo faded, I was back in my Hallow, quickly exchanging information with Lenore. She told me what had happened on Mundus, which wasn¡¯t a whole lot, even though I had been gone for the entire day, while I informed her of my speculation regarding the inmate. She accepted it quite calmly, though I could feel her apprehension at a being with power similar to the Raven that was the ancestor of her entire bloodline or the wolf that had spawned Ylva¡¯s. And yet, even with that apprehension, she couldn¡¯t hide just how excited she was, to have such a being in our hand - literally.


    Once the exchange of information was done, we exchanged positions, with me starting to run with Sigmir and the others, making sure that Rai had managed to maintain the concealment spells I had set up before logging out.


    ¡°The forest is more lively than it has been yesterday,¡± Adra warned me, looking a little concerned. ¡°They are looking for us and what you did yesterday was noticed.¡±


    ¡°As expected, there was little I could do to stop that from happening. And yet, it had to be done. Even worse, I¡¯ll have to repeat it in the future, giving our foes even more information. I¡¯ll have to think of a way to distract them, or something like that,¡± I admitted, the elven reaction pretty much along the lines I had it expected to be. Sure, their search was focused further north, but my actions had changed their search from completely aimless to one concentrated in one direction.


    The expression on Adra¡¯s face told me what she thought about that better than any words could. Sadly, her distaste didn¡¯t mean much, especially now that I had an idea of what might be in store for me if I kept feeding the beast. Sure, I would still need to use the Nexus to actually break the prison, but if I fed the monster, I might get some additional benefits.


    We continued running and I began to think. If the forest itself was the enemy, with Dryads acting as bridges between the Elves using the forest and the forest itself, would I be able to burn those bridges? I didn¡¯t plan to cross them, so there might be some potential.


    Those thoughts, along with silent meditation regarding the darkness I had witnessed in the odd space the Serpent had pulled me in, carried me through the rest of the day, until it was time to make camp. As always, our first steps were the creation of magical wardings, concealing us from any unwanted attention and visitors.


    That last bit was most important, as the Forest of Dusk was one of the most dangerous areas we had been in thus far. We didn¡¯t encounter too many enemies, thanks to our travel speed and constant concealment but that didn¡¯t mean that we didn¡¯t notice them. The average level of beasts in the area was in the seventies, with some even reaching level hundred, something utterly unprecedented for normal, ¡®open¡¯ areas. Getting pounced on by a level hundred Jaguar would be serious trouble, trouble we didn¡¯t want or need.


    Luckily, beasts that reached such a level had quite well-developed survival instincts and understood that attacking a group of well-armed and dangerous travellers, all at higher levels than themselves, was a bad idea and should only be done in desperation, so even if our wardings failed, an attack wasn¡¯t likely.


    But prudence was necessary when playing a lethal game of hide-and-seek with an entire civilisation. And that was who was after us, to the point that I had noticed a few threads on the forum, asking why the elves suddenly had a bee in their bonnet. So far, nobody had made any connections with us, but I had a feeling that it was only a question of time before the brown matter would hit the rotary impellor and at that point, things would get¡­ interesting.

 Chapter 626

    To keep things unpredictable, I had waited for one night, before Lenore and I headed back out, this time travelling multiple hours to the northeast, essentially travelling back in the direction we had come from. That way, it hopefully would obfuscate our speed and give a false impression of our destination. I was aware that such tricks would only work for a few more days, or rather a few more feedings, but for now, my tricks would lead them to false conclusions.


    Finding a suitable location was quite simple, there were countless clearings in the forest and after a quick check of the surrounding area, I began to prepare my ritual. Given that I suspected that Nidhogg was the entity bound into the Soul Prison, I decided to experiment a little, making the effort to unearth the roots of the trees I was targetting, so as to allow the serpent to gnaw on them. I had no idea if it would do anything, but this was magic, the artistic kind, not the strict, almost mathematically precise kind guided by runes.


    I had scribed runes into three of the trees, when an odd noise caught my attention, triggering my vigilance and making me wrap the concealment around me even tighter. Looking around, it only took me a moment to notice the large, rodent-like mammal, not attracted to me, but to the faint smell of sap, coming from the roots I had unearthed and carved with the runes to guide my ritual.


    For a moment, I considered whether to deal with it or not, it didn¡¯t actually notice me, only interested in the roots, so I could simply ignore it, but that would mean the destruction of my ritual. I wasn¡¯t willing to let the efforts I had made go, just because some stupid jungle rat wanted to have a meal.


    A quick check with Observe told me that it was a Capybara, with a proud level of fifty-five. Pathetic, in the context of the area, but quite impressive for a gunnie-pig with delusions of grandeur. But not impressive enough to make me give up my work.


    Slowly and silently, I drew my blades, making sure not to make the rat notice me, so it wouldn¡¯t cause any commotion and waited, letting it move towards the sap. Without moving, I was nothing but a shadow in the night and even the careful rodent didn¡¯t notice me, at least not until it was too late. It might have noticed that something was amiss in that last moment when I suddenly moved forward, and one blade, carrying with it the power of death and lethargy, cut into its spine, the other striking at its throat. Even with a scissor strike, I wasn¡¯t able to cleanly decapitate it, but the attack was easily enough to send it on to the next world, whatever that might be.


    There were no EXP for me, but the fat gunnie-pig would make for some¡­ adequate rations for the next few days, after we butchered it later in the day.


    After freezing the capybara and putting it to the side, I began to continue carving the runes for my ritual. By now, I had some practice in carving them, so it didn¡¯t take too long but before I managed to complete the circles on the five trees I planned to target, another intruder interrupted me. My first instinct was to hide, so when an elf, wearing a mix of browns and greens, with leaves and vines stuck to his body in order to obscure his silhouette, I was deep within the shadows of a tree. Sadly, the dead capybara was still near the spot where I had killed and frozen, quickly attracting the elf¡¯s attention to itself and the dug-up roots next to it.


    Without considering for more than a second, I decided to strike. A quick concealed Observe told me that the elf was only level seventy-six, so nothing overly problematic and given that he was carelessly walking over to the capybara, I didn¡¯t think he had noticed me.


    Given the situation, I wanted to strike silently and, hopefully, in such a manner that he wouldn¡¯t even know what hit him, so I once more drew my blades and invoked the runes for Devouring, Blood and Magic on them, in order to give me that extra edge.


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    Weapons enchanted, I slid forward, silently moving across the ground, like a ghost in the night, until I was right behind him. As I struck, there was a feeling of resistance, as if an invisible barrier was trying to stop my strike from landing in the elf¡¯s back, so I activated Overflow and channelled as much power into the runes I had previously invoked, causing them to flare with power. For a moment, not even the blink of an eye, there was parity between the invisible shield of primal energy and the devouring power of Darkness but once that moment passed, the shield shattered into motes of light and power, creating a beautiful dance of brown-green sparks.


    With the shield out of the way, my sharp blade easily stabbed past the light armour of my foe, one blade sliding into his lungs, the other into his heart before the remaining power of my enchantment was unleashed, pouring into the elf¡¯s body with deadly force. With a blade in his heart and a massive amount of deadly, blood-devouring Astral Power dumped right into the centre of his circulatory system, there was no way for the elf to live, not without some major divine intervention and here, in the darkness of the forest, there was none of that. With only the softest gurgling, as the air was pressed from his lungs by my blade, his life was snuffed out and I unceremoniously dropped him, before invoking some more Death-Magic to scatter his flesh into dust, leaving only a few of the larger bones behind.


    Annoyed at the interruption, I rushed to finish up the ritual, fearing that something else might turn up and everything would be wasted, or I might even get caught. Once more, I held up the Soul Prison, channelling power into it, and unleashing my Blood- and Death-Magic at the same time, the trees stemming against my power in an effort to stave me off, only to fall into my ritualistic trap. The moment these trees were bringing their greatest strength to bear in an attempt to endure, I felt the power inside the Soul Prison flare, a tiny tendril slipping out and taking over my efforts.


    And with that tendril, I was only the conduit, no longer the one actually using the magic, the effect somewhat reminiscent of what I had read about divine Spellcasting, only more intimate in a way. Under the entity¡¯s control, the effect of my magic was elevated, as the difference between a novice who had only studied magic for a little under two years and an eldritch entity, ancient and experienced in the ways of magic, was made completely obvious. In that brief moment of contact, I tried to exchange information with the entity, asking their name and trying to bargain for power. It was a long shot, but if there was one thing I had realised, it was that I would miss a hundred per cent of the shots I didn¡¯t take.


    The roots of the trees, dug out and vulnerable, had no chance to stand against the power brought to bear and I even thought that I could hear the faint, ephemeral dragon¡¯s roar of triumph when they crumbled into dust, the black flames of devouring I had seen before dancing on their scattered ashes. In the echo of that roar, at the edge of my mind, I could feel the dragon¡¯s desire for power, their hunger for the roots of the world tree and finally, the absolute ecstasy that they might escape the wretched prison they were bound in. It wasn¡¯t an outright confirmation, but I had a feeling that it was as close as I could get until I shattered the prison.


    Once everything was done, I immediately returned to my Hallow, urging Lenore to quickly leave. We barely managed to get away from the clearing, before I could feel the Astral River surging behind us and when Lenore banked, to fly around one of the massive trees, I even got a glimpse of the now quite enlarged clearing behind us and I could only gawp at the events.


    One of the remaining trees was shimmering with a gentle, golden light, a maybe three metre circle of its bark moving, as if it was liquid. Before I could see more, Lenore was behind the tree and out of sight, but I was pretty certain that the elves had employed some sort of portal, allowing them to travel from one tree to another, just like I was able to travel from shadow to shadow. Only that their trick apparently worked even without line of sight.


    Slightly disturbed, Lenore and I continued to dart around the forest, once more trying to obscure our tracks and lay false trails before returning to the others at the crack of dawn. The game between the elves and me was heating up, even as the distance between the Mountains of Ice was getting shorter. Hopefully, we¡¯d be able to make it there, before the elves managed to catch us.


    As Lenore grouped up with the others, who had already taken down camp, I felt my face twist into a grim smile and made a decision. I needed something to make sure that if the elves caught up to us, it would be them who¡¯d rue the day.

 Chapter 627

    If nothing else, the third feeding of the Soul Prison managed to stoke a fire in the elven realm. While we, in the field, didn¡¯t notice all of it, mostly increased patrols and magical activity sweeping through the forest, the forum gave me additional insights that I wouldn¡¯t normally have. From what I could see there, and in a few of the elven Travellers who streamed their gameplay openly, it was bedlam.


    The elves didn¡¯t know who it was they hated but hating they did with a burning passion that rivalled the sun. On a few streams, I could see groups of elves near the gates of their cities, staring at the incoming travellers with eyes that promised a slow and brutal death if the person was suspected and there even was a thread that talked about a lynching. No evidence of wrongdoing, simply a person suspected of being in cahoots with ¡®dark powers¡¯, whatever that meant, who was tried and hanged by a mob. That a person powerful enough to cause that much damage wouldn¡¯t just let themselves be hanged never entered their mind.


    In addition, the few Travellers currently based in the Forest of Dusk had started a discussion, wondering what sort of large-scale event was going on there. It had taken a day or two but they had noticed that they all, despite being in different locations within the Forest of Dusk, had received near-identical quests. They were either tasked to ¡®find the Dark Force that is destroying the Forest¡¯ or to ¡®stop the Dark Force that is destroying the Forest¡¯


    Furthermore, other elven Travellers, those who had started in the primary Forest of the Elven Empire, south of the mountains, were getting quests to travel north, into the Forest of Dusk, to prevent a calamity.


    I was somewhat amused when I read that, wondering if I, alone, was enough to earn the title of ¡®Dark Force¡¯ or if it was only thanks to Nidhogg and the Soul Prison. The calamity most certainly was due to it, otherwise, I was far too weak. After the events in Hatterion, I had a relatively good idea of how much damage I could inflict on something like a society and while I could call myself a disaster, I wasn¡¯t yet at the level of a calamity.


    What the posts from various elven Travellers managed to do, was make me wonder why the elven reaction was so extreme. Sure, I had destroyed eleven trees and killed an elf but just for that, it felt too much. Far too much.


    If the quests would mention Nidhogg directly, or go into deeper detail, I would understand why the elves were so agitated, but none of them did. In addition, the quests were all rated somewhere between medium and hard difficulty, nothing above, even if the Traveller accepting it was only in the high eighties, the lowest I had seen thus far. That would make sense for a quest that just sent people through the Forest of Dusk, but if someone at that level wanted to challenge our party? Deadly didn¡¯t even begin to describe it and that was without the potential that the Soul Prison would somehow react to a quest designed to stop us.


    And then there was the curious capitalisation of ¡®the Forest¡¯ in the quest texts I had seen, making me think that my actions weren¡¯t just destroying those trees. It didn¡¯t matter too much, but I wanted to understand, so I made plans to talk with Adra about it, as she was the resident expert in all things Forest.


    When I returned to Mundus after yet another strenuous session with Mrs Wu, I was once again treated to the sensation of soaring through the sky within Lenore¡¯s Hallow. If there was one thing I would likely never get enough of, it was this. Sure, the magic was awesome and I loved tinkering with it, finding out more and experiencing the ultimate joy of completion, when I managed to crack some tough magical riddle but compared to flying?


    I had never known just how wonderful that feeling of ultimate freedom was. Nothing holding you down, even gravity having to relinquish its claim, it was uplifting. If not for the connection my Avatar shared with Sigmir, I would consider picking a Valkyr when the game officially launched. But that was a question future-me had to answer. Present me was just enjoying the second-hand sensation of living rent-free in Lenore¡¯s mind.


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    ¡°There was some trouble,¡± Lenore warned me, washing away my leisurely mood.


    ¡°What sort of trouble?¡± I asked, already concerned.


    ¡°An elven patrol, Rai didn¡¯t manage to keep up the concealment and they were noticed. The elves were suspicious and asked some questions but didn¡¯t press the issue, they simply decided to stick with the others, claiming that they were travelling in the same direction,¡± she explained and I wondered if it might have been a boon that I hadn¡¯t been present. Sure, my presence might have prevented detection in the first place but at the same time, if I was detected, the secrets on my body might be discovered, from the mostly mundane like my Ruthless-trait to the troubling, like my Mortal Hubris or even the ultimate condemnation of the Soul Prison or my Maleficar-title. Those last two would see me hang, or whatever method the elves preferred to send their most vicious criminals to the next life.


    ¡°What now?¡± I wondered, not really expecting an answer. We either had to kill them or hope that they¡¯d lose interest in the others before the repeated magical scrying of the Dryads managed to detect me. For now, Lenore was concealed by Adra¡¯s ongoing magic, while I was hidden in my Hallow but that wouldn¡¯t last. Approaching them and trying to convince them I was no threat, joining the others with some innocent excuse was possible, but not for me. Such an act would require excellent acting and deception skills, alongside a good personal charisma, none of which I had. So, killing it was.


    The few images Lenore had shared made me quite certain that I wouldn¡¯t manage alone but given that the others were only being ¡®escorted¡¯ and under careful watch, probably due to our levels, they would most certainly join the fight the moment it started. Maybe even beforehand, given my connection to Sigmir and Ylva.


    For the next few hours, we deliberately shadowed the small elven patrol that just happened to travel in the same direction and at the same speed as Sigmir and the others. It was probably the easiest way for them to avoid offending high-levelled and thus dangerous Adventurers while also making sure that those Adventurers weren¡¯t the cause for the damage done to the forest. In addition, there was Adra¡¯s presence and given Phraan¡¯s reaction to her, back in the White Mountains, I was quite certain that the local elves would treat any Dryad with a certain amount of respect.


    There were seven of them, all mounted on those feline mounts they used, making it even more obvious that they were slowing down intentionally. Otherwise, their mounts would easily be able to move ahead, especially because Sigmir and the others were moving at a comfortably slow pace. I wasn¡¯t able to get close enough to Observe them, not without risking discovery, so I could only estimate their levels somewhere around level hundred. Unless these guards were complete incompetents, they¡¯d certainly be a match for us, unless I managed to catch them by surprise and even the odds before the actual fight started.


    ¡°We¡¯ll strike when night falls,¡± I decided after considering the time for a moment. Hopefully, I wouldn¡¯t get detected beforehand, or things would get really messy. For now, Lenore and I continued to shadow the others, while slowly trying to estimate their abilities and personalities. At the same time, I tried to come up with the best way to strike at them and we studied their magical defences, looking for weak points. From what we could see, the elves were simple rangers, using relatively short spears for close combat and shortbows, for the longer range. They didn¡¯t look bulky or strong, making me think they would be finesse fighters, using the reach of their spears alongside their innate, elven agility to fight. Their bows most likely would never enter the equation, they were probably their primary tool for ambushes and traps. Hunting probably as well. We couldn¡¯t tell if any of them were mages, but none had a truly powerful aura of magic, their leader being the most remarkable, but just getting to roughly the level of Rai, likely a fighter who enhanced her combat-ability with some magical tricks.


    If nothing else, we were quite impressed, while the normal guards had just their basic gear, well-made but not imbued with overly powerful magic, their leader actually had magically enhanced armour. Or maybe it was another part of her gear, either way, something was infusing her skin with quite a bit of Astral Power, making her glow in Lenore¡¯s sight. It was difficult to estimate what that would do, but after watching for a while and looking at the way the magic was flowing within her and the armour, we came up with the idea that it gave her skin the toughness of wood while retaining its elasticity. In addition, it looked as if the magic would distribute the force of every hit across a larger area, making it so that she would get pushed but not actually harmed.


    She would have to be the first to die.

 Chapter 628

    We closed our eyes, for a brief moment of stillness, to bring our concentration to the maximum. The positions and expected actions of the elves below filled our mind and our plans to deal with their conditioned reflexes were checked once again before the moment to strike had come.


    Silently, we stepped off the high branch we had prepared on, a mere silent shadow in the night, our wings catching just the smallest bit of air, to keep our descent controlled. A second passed then two, as the Blades of the Northern Wind separated from the crown on our head, spreading out along the lines of our wings like falling feathers.


    One of the elves below made a joke, causing laughter, only to suddenly stop, their attention shifting to Sigmir who had tensed when she felt our determined approach. Her hand didn¡¯t go to her Lok¡¯Nar, but there was a faint hint of danger they could feel from her aura. Not that it would help them, the danger wasn¡¯t coming from her.


    ¡°What?¡± One of them asked, rising as if to prepare to fight with Sigmir, her voice sounding funny to our ears, as Bullet Time activated in our mind, giving us all the time we needed. Our eyes flared with multi-coloured light, as Wind, Ice, Darkness and Death were all warring for supremacy, intense amounts of Astral Power flooding out of our body, for that all-important opening attack.


    Darkness- and Death-Magic were coiling around our talons, completely focused for that one, singular strike that would shatter the elven leader¡¯s defence and take her out of the fight, hopefully even killing her instantly.


    Ice- and Wind-Magic, channelled through the crown resting on our brows, flared around the Blades of the Northern Wind, no longer falling but now moving with deadly intent, each targetting one of the elves, not in a strike to end them, but in a strike to wound, distract and disrupt them. It would give the others all the opening they needed to take out one of two of them, hopefully turning what should be a deadly fight into a manageable encounter.


    Another of the elves must have noticed something, his eyes over to our falling form, only to freeze, blinking in confusion, if only for a moment.


    But a moment was all we needed and before he could even open his mouth to shout a warning, our attack arrived and suddenly, nobody needed a warning.


    The elven leader never knew what hit her. Her magical defence flared, primal energies trying to resist but the powers of Death and Darkness were perfectly suitable to pierce through a defence based on the vitality of the forest, the powerful carried nothing more than a flimsy membrane, easily penetrated and stripped away under the brutal plunge of our claws. For a moment, we could feel the life of the elf, the blood flowing through her body and with a savage rip of Blood Magic, we not only took her life, but also the power flowing through her, an orb of blood, teeming with stolen power, floating between our claws.


    The other elves had better luck, our attack on them, while strong and quite deadly, hadn¡¯t been perfect, it had only been a simple and quite straightforward attack. Only one of them was gravely wounded by the falling blades, the weapon piercing past the collar of his armour and striking deep into his chest, the wound likely lethal, even if nobody added any attacks. The wounds of his companions were lighter, a few deep flesh wounds, some cuts but nothing that would be fatal in and of itself, just enough to make them focus on me, not on my companions.


    And those companions had been ready to strike, before the elf I had slain had followed the call of gravity and collapsed, Rai had jumped into action, smoothly stepping through the shadows to arrive behind one of the lightly wounded elves, the one furthest away from us, somehow already with a blade in hand.


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    There was a moment of realisation in the elf''s eyes and he was trying to dodge but that moment he needed to realise that it wasn¡¯t the large, dark-winged shadow they needed to fight, but that amiable wolf-man they had been talking with during the day was enough to delay his reaction. Rai didn¡¯t care for the elf, of for a fair fight, his blade swiped across the elf¡¯s neck, the attack not instantly fatal but adding to the flesh wound the elf had sustained from my attack, it would likely cause the elf to bleed out unless treated. And unless anyone else stabbed more holes into his body.


    Sigmir was just as fast to react as Rai, only that she had to physically move, not simply fall into the shadows and appear behind her target. Her aura flared around her, making it obvious that she was involved in the fight and her Lok¡¯Nar swept out, crashing through the hasty parry of her opponent, through her armour and biting deeply into her side. Another wound that would likely be fatal, and most certainly took that elf out of the fight for the moment. She was more concerned with keeping her intestines inside her body than with continuing to fight the angry Giantblood.


    Ylva got into the mix as well, her size shifted to make her the size of a horse, her maw opening wide enough to get an elf¡¯s head between her jaws before snapping shut with a sudden, wet-sounding crunch. There was nothing the elf¡¯s leather helmet could do against that, nothing but maybe give Yvla ingestion if she hadn¡¯t spat it out, before turning towards the feline mounts of the elves and we could feel a trace of canine eagerness as she set about chasing those cats.


    Adra was the slowest to react, not that it really mattered, it seemed as if the elves were ignoring her, almost as a matter of course. By the time she had pulled out her spear, my second strike of the fight was already cast.


    Blood, especially blood drawn with Blood Magic, ripped away from its owner with brutal disregard for their life, was a wonderful thing. The precious vitality that made it so important for a creature¡¯s life was rapidly decaying into miasma after it was stripped of the Astral Power normally keeping it balanced, Astral Power I could then use, now faintly aspected to Death, instead of life.


    A small twist of that Astral Power and suddenly, the crimson liquid, still warm, bloomed into Ice, a flower as beautiful as any rose, and with just as many thorns.


    But just freezing the blood into Ice didn¡¯t consume all the Astral Power we had ripped out of that unfortunate elf, there was still some of it left, more than enough to turn the freshly-bloomed rose into a rain of deadly petals, streams of sharp shards flowing towards the remaining elves.


    One of them managed to dodge, only that he dodged right into Adra¡¯s spear, finally ready for combat, while another, still suffering from the initial attack of the Blades of the Northern Wind, wasn¡¯t as lucky, the small petal-like shards ripping into his armour, some of them finding their way into his flash and creating deep, freely bleeding wounds. Wounds that would soon fester, as the miasma inherent to Blood Magic took root. It wouldn¡¯t harm this elf, he would just decay along the blood that began the process early, but that was scarce comfort to him.


    Suddenly, there was only one elf left, one lone elf who hadn¡¯t yet fully comprehended the situation. But then, they had been lax, maybe lulled into a sense of security due to their numbers and home-field advantage, maybe due to Adra¡¯s presence, as a Dryad would never work with enemies of the forest, right? That Adra had advanced along a different trajectory than other Dryads, more akin to a strangling vine, ripping the life out of old trees and taking their power for her own, was something they had never noticed.


    The poor, lone elf didn¡¯t have to suffer for long. As we quickly flapped our wings, joining Rai and Ylva in hunting down the escaping cats, Sigmir¡¯s Lok¡¯Nar broke the elf¡¯s spear with a resounding crack, leaving the elf completely open to Adra¡¯s spear, the wooden weapon easily piercing into the elf¡¯s back.


    Soon, the cats were dealt with, none of them managing to escape the pursuit of two dogged wolves and a guiding raven and silence settled across the forest once more. The battle was won, but all of us easily understood, it would be the first of many.


    The idea that nobody would miss the patrol or notice our deeds, was ludicrous to the point that nobody dared entertain it. We didn¡¯t know how long it would take, minutes, hours or with an incredible amount of luck a few days, but we knew one thing: The hunt was on, and we were the prey.

 Chapter 629

    After the Avatar state ended, I staggered for a moment, my mind needing those few seconds to catch up with my body. Around us, the smell of blood was thick in the air, the elves all lay dead while their mounts were either dead or dying, none of them had managed to escape.


    ¡°Adra, renew the protections to conceal us, I¡¯m certain somebody is going to take an interest in dead elves,¡± I ordered, before closing my eyes, drawing out the rest of my magic, amazed at the sheer amount of power Lenore and I had thrown about while transformed. It reminded me that, after the Avatar ability, Overflow might be my most powerful one, simply for the option to channel vast amounts of power into a brief, incredibly deadly burst. Sure, it was inefficient but sometimes, efficiency wasn¡¯t as important as volume.


    My hands flickered through the familiar patterns, drawing runes and applying power to them, binding them into a greater whole, a runic formation of darkness and concealment, using the shadows of dusk to bind it, giving it the power to last through the night.


    ¡°We¡¯ll have to move, soon,¡± I reminded the others, the order surprising nobody, staying around the killing field would be foolish in normal circumstances, the scent of blood luring predators to take an interest but here, where we had slaughtered a group of elven guards, it would be worse than that.


    As the shadows settled around each of us, I didn¡¯t let go of my magic, instead, I draw deep, pulling out some of my reserves and continued casting my spells. The next move was to obfuscate as much of the events as possible, to delay elven action as much as possible. I could see Lenore flapping her wings nearby, conjuring up an ill wind of death that turned the corpse of a fallen feline into little more than dust and bones, so the physical evidence would be taken care of by her. On the other hand, I had to take care of the magical residue.


    Reaching out to draw on my link to the residual Astral Power, I managed to regain control over some of it, the blend was not really useful for anything, but with control, I could disperse it. It took a bit of mental effort, and some Darkness-Magic, to purge the Astral Power around us, feeding it back into the Astral River and turning things into an as natural state as possible. Anyone looking at it directly would notice, but on a magical level, it looked just like the forest should, maybe with a bit of extra Death magic in the area, but that wasn¡¯t enough to stand out. Things died all the time in a forest, so as long as there wasn¡¯t anything that stood as a red flag, like the slowly decaying residue from a lot of used Astral Power, we should be fine.


    Nearby, Adra finished up her magical casting and looked at the ground, her powers letting the roots open up shallow graves, maybe promising the trees some fertiliser, before scattering the elven bones, hiding them where nobody would stumble across them.


    ¡°Anything out of place?¡± I asked, looking around the clearing. It was quite impressive what we could do if truly pressed for time. Rai and Sigmir had taken care of the worldly possessions of those elves. They had separated them into the identifiable, like the ornate dagger with a small crest on it and the unremarkable, the things that were so common nobody would think about identifying them. Things like food or coin, those we could keep after a quick sweep by Lenore, Adra and me, to make sure there wasn¡¯t anything magical lingering. It would be quite embarrassing if the food had some sort of magical tracker enchanted into it but from the looks of it, that wasn¡¯t the case.


    The identifiable stuff, on the other hand, was taken care of by Sigmir and Rai. They made a game out of it, tossing those things into random directions, scattering them as widely as possible in an effort to mislead any pursuit. Finding a few shallow graves filled with bones was a lot harder if you couldn¡¯t simply scry for the dagger one of them carried and with the Death-Magic used to destroy the bodies, no animal would willingly dig up those graves, there was simply nothing there to attract them.


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    Around me, the others made one last check, nodding as we went, and then we were off to the races, once again pushing our speed to the maximum, regardless of exhaustion. If we managed to get away from this mess before it was connected to us, we could count ourselves lucky. If not, things would get seriously messy.


    As we ran, I took a brief look at my notifications, quickly scanning the gains of the brief battle. There was nothing on the level-side, the elves were simply too weak, and while I had made some gains in my Blood- and Death-Magic when feeding the Soul Prison, bringing the skills to eighty-two and thirty-four respectively, there was little else. I needed to find some major epiphany to gain those last precious points in Ice- and Darkness-Magic, or some great insight into their respective runes. It felt like those skill gains were very much on a logarithmic scale.


    Or maybe I was simply not looking at the right places, there were those complicated concepts I could explore further if I had the time and leisure. Ever since we had entered the Forest of Dusk, I had very little time to spare attention for research and experimentation, leaving a lot of my ideas on the back burner. But in turn, there was the Soul Prison and the Nidhogg inside, another source of knowledge and power. If I managed to tap that well, I would gain a lot. What I would gain, I had no idea. It might be something akin to Divine Magic, where I simply asked a different entity for their help and they threw some magic my way but I didn¡¯t think so. My hope was that it might be something more like the empowerment I had experienced during the feeding, where I allowed another entity to briefly use and control my magic, their own insights and ability bringing out far greater effects. If I managed to get empowered that way, I would get to see and experience such powerful magic first-hand, allowing me to go further and gain insights into magic far beyond what I would normally be able to accomplish.


    For the first few hours, nothing much happened. We could feel the usual divination-magic washing over our wardings, unable to find purchase and allow the caster to realise that something was amiss but that had been the case for the last few days. Apparently, nobody had noticed that the patrol was gone.


    But as one would expect, our luck couldn¡¯t last forever. Shortly after the break of dawn, Adra and I could feel a disturbance in the Astral River. It wasn¡¯t aimed at us, but who-, or what, -ever was acting, they were putting in some effort. Powerful attention was focused on the area we had vacated, powerful enough to give me pause. The closest comparison I had, was when that insane spellcaster had tried to snuff me out from hundreds of kilometres away, using my hair as a focus. It was somewhat similar, only more intense and luckily not aimed at me.


    ¡°They brought in someone powerful,¡± I warned the others, a shiver running down my spine.


    ¡°Rai, help me with the concealment. Maybe if we all work together, we¡¯ll be able to remain hidden,¡± I ordered him, diverting most of my focus to smooth out the magical concealment around us. If we managed to blend into the magical background, we¡¯d just be another shadow in a forest full of them. If they managed to pick up that there was something here, they¡¯d simply push past our concealment with the difference in power. Only by not giving them the opportunity in the first place could we remain safe.


    I could feel Adra and Rai focus on the magical weave around us, both of them working in a slightly different fashion both of them finding different edges and burrs, before smoothing them out. Things that one of us wouldn¡¯t have noticed or focused on, another found and dealt with.


    Behind us, I could feel powerful magic flare, just the fact that I could actually feel them was frightening. We had been running for an hour and continued to move at a quick pace ever since, giving us dozens of kilometres of distance, and yet, I could feel the disturbance in the Astral. Just how much power they brought to bear, I didn¡¯t even want to imagine, or how powerful they had to be to channel such power.


    ¡°They are trying to influence the forest again,¡± Adra warned, ¡°I¡¯ll try to blend us deeper into our surroundings.¡±


    Once again, I could feel the subtle changes Adra made, our aura changing a little, not so much in the concealed way but adding a few small things that made us seem like a part of the forest, nothing of interest.


    I didn¡¯t know if she was successful, but from the way sweat accumulated on her brow, I could only hope she was managing. Given that nothing bad happened, things looked good, but using the absence of deadly magic as a hallmark for success was a low bar.


    But as low a bar as it might be, I was quite glad that we had managed to pass it.

 Chapter 630

    Once again, I felt a pulse of magic in the distance, the elves communicating amongst them in their hunt for us. They hadn¡¯t been able to find our tracks, the combination of Adra and my magic enough to ward them off so far, but they were trying to create a net to trap us. The magic they used to communicate was relatively crude, more akin to shouting than a magical mobile phone, but it got the job done. They were hours behind us, and yet, I could feel their efforts, making it obvious just how strong those signals were to reach us here.


    ¡°We just need to escape until night falls,¡± I told Adra, trying to cheer her on as I spread my senses outward, making sure that the concealment wrapped around us was still intact and keeping us hidden.


    ¡°At night, Lenore and I can head north again and cause some mischief, that way their efforts should shift away from us,¡± I explained, not accepting that our previous efforts to mislead the elves had completely failed. Hopefully, the elves would assume that there were two different groups causing mischief or would even write the loss of their patrol off as a random accident, not caused by enemy action. But I could only guess at their assumptions, the intensity of their search making it obvious that they were greatly interested in the fate of their patrol. Maybe we should have let Yvla tear into the corpses, making it look like the attack of a beast, but that left other problems open.


    ¡°I don¡¯t like it,¡± Sigmir grumbled, but she could see just as well as I that it was the best way to keep us all safe. We couldn¡¯t fight all the elves and their mastery of the forest meant that once they knew where to look, they would find us eventually. So far, their inability to find us was wholly due to the wide area they needed to take into account, or they would, at some point, have broken the concealment wrought by Adra and me. To keep that haystack as large as possible I had deliberately created false trails with the feeding rituals, performing them far from the group, thus obscuring our position.


    And I would have to keep doing so.


    The day dragged on, the elves unable to find us, but that didn¡¯t mean they weren¡¯t looking. They likely weren¡¯t putting their all into the search just yet, but even so, I could feel the occasional pulses of magic and there was a faint scent of danger in the air, the Astral River roiling with their efforts.


    By the time the sun was setting, we all were on edge, to the point that Adra actually used her magic to implore one of the nearby trees to open a small cave between its roots. There, hidden in the earth, Adra and I wove a dense web of magic, trying to blot the presence of our camp out completely, only leaving a small opening for Lenore and me to leave through later. From the outside, it looked like a simple burrow, something one of the many critters living in the forest might dig. Hopefully, it would be enough to hide them.


    With a new set of buffs, freshly cast by Adra to conceal Lenore¡¯s presence against the repeated divinations of elves and dryads, trying to find those who were harming their forest, we set off. For once, feeding the Nidhogg in its prison was a side-effect, the main goal being to distract the elves from our actual position, making them think we were further north and that the death of their patrol was simply an unrelated coincidence. They might still investigate, but hopefully, the pressure would lessen.


    We kept darting through the canopy, Lenore using her wind magic to fly, pushing her speed to the maximum she could sustain for longer distances and I felt the Astral Power I would normally regenerate flow into her, a benefit of being in my Hallow. Just like she often provided power to me, now it was my turn, to provide power to her.


    We had estimated a position for the next ritual, based on the previous two, trying to make them assume our speed and direction based on those. It was somewhat risky, as even two rituals might have given them a good enough idea to place a trap, but that was why we only estimated the area, not trying to actually hit the right spot. The elves would likely be in the vicinity, but that only meant we¡¯d have to vanish as soon as the ritual was over.


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    Finding a spot was just as simple as it had been the last time, only this time, I made sure to place some wardings around the area, trying to make sure no stupid rodents were wandering in and disturbing me.


    Putting up the familiar runes was a simple, but somewhat tedious chore, yet it had to be done. I simply didn¡¯t have the ability to throw such a complex spell out without preparing it, I needed the runes to guide the magic into the right forms, so the Nidhogg could latch onto it and complete things, absorbing the power for itself.


    Once everything was completed, I took out the Soul Prison, immediately feeling the anticipation and realising that the being inside was getting more and more awake, for lack of a better term. As if the destruction of the Ancient Sapling had started the process and the feeding was giving it the energy to continue sustaining itself, even if the power was far from enough to actually break the prison. It was a fascinating idea and I truly wanted to converse with the being, as it had to know incredible magical secrets, that much I could tell from the brief moments it controlled my own powers during the feeding.


    Taking a deep breath, I triggered the ritual, letting my magic burst out Death agitating the Life in the trees to the maximum, only for the Blood Magic to latch onto that life and allow the Nidhogg to tear it out, turning the formerly massive trees to dust, leaving little more than crippled husks burning with a black, devouring flame of death.


    The elves didn¡¯t disappoint me, their reaction was as swift as I had anticipated, the ritual¡¯s effects hadn¡¯t fully faded before a surge of magic was gripping a nearby tree, likely to open the gate I had seen before. A vicious grin appeared on my face and I forced my tired mind to follow my previously prepared plan, quickly throwing together a magical formation, using the Darkness all around us, especially those dark flames that still burned with a combination of the Nidhogg¡¯s and my own power.


    For a brief moment, I felt almost drunk with power, the sheer intensity of those flames exhilarating on a level I hadn¡¯t ever come into contact with, the ability to Devour the entire world, to rip out the magic and life from it all. Shaking my head, I forced those thoughts away from me, focusing on the portal that slowly rippled into existence and threw a beam of Dark Radiance at it, my mind focusing on the runes of Devouring, Magic and Chaos.


    The flames surged, my power still lingering within them, even if I wouldn¡¯t be able to ignite them on my own, of that I was certain. Unless I completely missed my guess, these were the Dragon Flames of Nidhogg, a power I simply didn¡¯t possess on my own. But I could borrow it, a beneficial partnership between me and an ancient, primordial dragon.


    That thought was enough to widen the smile on my face and when those very flames, spurred and projected by me, struck into the portal, igniting the very magic within, even as it was devoured back into the Astral River, I could only laugh with glee. The tree they had chosen started to burn, crumbling under the night of the black flames and I could feel the portal destabilise, wild magic lashing out as it crumbled, destroying the tree it had been conjured in.


    A scream rippled through the Astral, one of pain, rage and despair, the smile never leaving my face as I pushed myself back into my Hallow, urging Lenore to get away from here as quickly as possible. We had given the elves a bloody nose and from the notifications in my log, killed quite a few of them in the process, enough to push me to level 121, a realisation that only made me laugh harder. Finally, the cherry on top of it all, were two points in Darkness Magic, bringing that to a wonderful seventy-seven. Now, I just had to understand those Dark Flames, maybe comprehend their rune, and I would be exhilarated.


    As I thought about it, my stomach clenched in hunger, and I felt famished as if I hadn¡¯t eaten in weeks. Despite that, the smile on my face never faded, as I focused inward, the various Darkness-Runes swimming through my mind, especially the one for Devouring.


    Outside of my Hallow, Lenore was swiftly fleeing, once again laying down a false trail before we would return to the others. Hopefully, this would buy us some time, maybe even enough to reach the Mountains of Ice, where the elves would have a much harder time coming after us.

 Chapter 631

    It was early morning when Lenore and I managed to get back to the others, the first rays of the sun just hitting the canopy high above. It would easily take an hour, maybe two, for those rays to filter down to the gloomy shrubs near the ground and that twilight was something we had to use.


    A quick tug on our connection called Sigmir and the others from their underground shelter, all of them looking somewhat rough and tired, the night not terribly restful due to the constant pressure generated from the elven attempts to locate us.


    From what Lenore and I had felt during our flight, we had managed to shift the elven attention northward, but just how much of it would remain in the vicinity, we didn¡¯t know. We had to keep moving, to slip the forming net, or things would only worse and worse, as the elves managed to seal off the area. Sure, it was an incredibly massive area, spanning tens of thousands of square kilometres of forest, but we were dealing with an entire civilisation, one that was symbiotically integrated into the forest.


    With few words spoken, we began our run, Lenore retreating into her Hallow to catch up on some sleep, while I had to keep moving for both of us, keeping up with the others despite my exhaustion.


    There were a few moments when I felt as if darkness was creeping into the corner of my eyes, my head drooping for a second before I woke back up and all the while, my legs kept pushing me forward, one step after the other, never stopping, never resting. Without Sigmir, I would have fallen countless times, the rough terrain tripping me and yet, despite her repeated offers to carry me, I refused, stubbornly carrying on.


    Finally, after an hour of rushing through the forest, Ylva was the one to break the stalemate between Sigmir and me, by shifting her size to that of a small horse and threatening to carry me by the scruff of my neck. Given just how sensitive the feathers I had grown in that area were, I relented at that point, giving up my dignity and pride and tying myself to her back, letting me get carried like a bag of luggage.


    Lying on her bag was surprisingly restful, given that there was no saddle, no blanket, nothing to keep her bony spine from poking me but her fur. Or maybe it was that very fur that helped me and made me comfortable, the scent so very similar to Sigmir¡¯s, easily lulling me into a sense of comfort and security. I didn¡¯t fall asleep, but I felt my mind start drifting, memories of the night flooding into the forefront of my mind and my lips twisted into a grin.


    Those flames, the flames of Nidhogg, their appearance was burned into my brain. How could they not be, flames that didn¡¯t disgust me, flames that had nothing to do with fire, heat or the sun? No, these flames were different, there was nothing disgusting about them, in fact, they were some of the most beautiful things I had ever seen.


    What was fire, what could it do? It devoured, it ripped apart the fuel, taking away the energy inherent in the material and spilling it into the atmosphere, leaving nothing but the wasted ashes after it was done consuming.


    And these flames, they were just like fire, but they didn¡¯t just spill the energy they ripped out of their fuel, no, they weren¡¯t that wasteful, they kept the energy and devoured it for later use, a perfect, sustained embodiment of the rune of Devouring.


    But weren¡¯t they just as much an embodiment of Blood Magic, the concept of ripping energy from a medium, leaving it nothing but a shrivelled husk, while some of the fuel remained behind, the miasma, or ashes, of the process?


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    Theories sprang up in my mind, as I tried to truly connect the two disparate concepts, scouring the runes i knew and looking for spaces where they might fit. Could there be some greater whole, a greater puzzle where these runes fit together to form a greater picture? One that unified Darkness and Blood, maybe with Death mixed in, too?


    For a long time, I had been trying to form the complete picture of my Ice-Runes, ever since I realised that some parts of Stillness, Hard Ice, Eternal Moonlight, Cold and other runes shared some similarities, parts where it looked like they could fit together, akin to pieces of a puzzle. I had never managed, maybe due to limited time and the simple fact that I had often been distracted by other, more immediate, ideas that I wanted to investigate, leaving my Ice-Rune Mastery to largely stagnate but now, when realising that there might be a greater image between Blood- and Darkness-Magic, those old ideas came back to the forefront of my mind.


    But how to make them a reality? I simply didn¡¯t know, but those flames, they might be a clue to guide me. According to my understanding, they combined aspects of different types of magic, so wouldn¡¯t a clue to my Ice-Runes be to combine different types of runes, to form that greater whole?


    To combine the Cold with Hard Ice, possibly receiving Eternal Ice? But Eternal Ice wasn¡¯t just colder than Hard Ice, thinking back, it wasn¡¯t feeling really cold at all. When handling the Eternal Ice I had found beneath the glacier, I had concluded that it was more akin to a solid form of Ice Astral Power, making it cold to the touch but not to the air around it.


    Discarding the idea to try analysing things from that direction, I focused back on the flames I had seen and suddenly, a grin appeared on my face. At the end of the day, weren¡¯t my runic formations at their core combinations of different runes, working together to form a greater whole? The connecting patterns I had learned from the dwarves allowed me to decrease the waste, decreasing the need to brute force the flow of Astral Power with my skill in Rune Magic.


    So, if there were patterns that allowed to combine different runes into a more efficient whole, wouldn¡¯t that mean that all runes could possibly be connected? And if runes were visual representations of a greater concept, allowing me to focus my mind on that concept and form it with my will, wouldn¡¯t that greater whole be a visual representation of all magic?


    The idea made my mind tremble, a rune, for lack of a better word, that represented all magic, something far more complete and complex than the simple Dark-rune that I had thus far understood as Magic. Bringing that rune to the forefront of my mind, I tried to dissect it, trying to see if I might manage to find that greater truth within the simple rune.


    The rune took shape within my mind, and the moment I tried to focus deeply on it, stinging pain shot through my mind, as the rune shattered. Countless smaller fragments were scattered through the darkness behind my closed eyes, my mind completely empty.


    Lenore¡¯s concerned voice shook me out of the stupor I had been in and I realised that only the vines I had used to tie myself to Ylva¡¯s back had stopped me from tumbling down.


    ¡°I felt that one,¡± Lenore complained and a quick glance at the three bars that represented my condition showed that I had managed to deal massive damage to myself, half my HP, all my Astral Power and three-quarters of my Stamina simply gone.


    ¡°As did I,¡± I admitted, my mental voice shaken and a little hoarse.


    ¡°What did you do?¡± she asked, curiosity strong in her voice. For a moment, I considered showing her the rune and telling her to focus on it, but the mischievous idea instantly faded, it would be an incredibly vicious prank. Who knew if Lenore would even be able to do what I had done, or if she was, what the results would be? It had almost killed me, so I should tread carefully.


    Instead, I gave her a simple, verbal explanation, carefully making sure to seal the memories of the event within my mind. There was no telling what i had stumbled upon, it most certainly was incredible but at the same time, it was utterly useless. The dichotomy made me chuckle softly as I cursed the lack of time. How could I find the time to try comprehending that fascinating discovery when I only had so little time remaining and those incredible flames and all the rest?


    There was so much to do, so much to discover, but I only had so little time. And I needed that time to somehow get the status and ability to keep Sigmir by my side, even after this Mundus ended. I couldn¡¯t waste my time on things that didn¡¯t allow me that.

 Chapter 632

    Why couldn¡¯t the elves be less competent?


    That question flashed through my mind, just as yet another wave of magic washed around us, kept at bay by the combination of wards cast by Adra and myself. By now, we were reasonably confident that the elves wouldn¡¯t be able to detect us with their sweeping, wide-area scans, otherwise they would have done so a while ago. But it didn''t mean we had no problems just because we could keep those at bay.


    Such as yet another group of elven scouts, leisurely making their way through the forest, taking their time to check any minute disturbance. They even used some strange magic to scale one of the massive trees when a large bird disturbed the canopy above, making it obvious that they were incredibly cautious.


    So far, we had managed to avoid too much scrutiny, mainly by hiding in the shadows and remaining completely still, but each time we hid, we stuck in our concealment for at least thirty minutes, until we were confident that the elves had moved on.


    It was stressful. We could never relax and if we made the slightest mistake, things could get troublesome incredibly fast. If we ever got caught, there¡¯d be a fight, I had no confidence in the assumption that the previous contact that elven patrol had with our group hadn¡¯t been reported, only for them to turn up gone shortly after.


    Given our races, especially Sigmir¡¯s and Rai¡¯s, we were an incredibly distinctive group, one that would easily be recognised. There might be another Frost Giantblood running around in the elven lands, even if it was somewhat unlikely, their home being, as far as I knew, in the far north but there might be one who had travelled here. Maybe even one that looked somewhat like Sigmir.


    Similarly, there might be more wolf beast people in the elven lands, but again, not their home range, so it would be someone who had travelled around half the world. Not impossible, we had done it after all, but somewhat unusual.


    Combining these two unusual personages amplified their recognisability, making the connection incredibly obvious. And if any diviner managed to connect the feeding events with Nidhogg and sent that report ¡®up the chain¡¯, so to speak, until it reached the Gods themselves who had originally sealed the Nidhogg and likely knew where they had placed the Soul Prison? Well, at that point, a group containing two visitors from that part of the world would raise not only alarm bells, more something like air-raid sirens, with firecrackers and maybe a person with a megaphone screaming directly into your ear that we were suspicious.


    Nobody would overlook that.


    Anonymity and the sheer area the elves had to cover were the only thing keeping us safe, any blip on their radar, any small hint would reduce the area and make it more likely that we¡¯d get caught. Thus, constant vigilance was the maxim, hoping we¡¯d fare better than the originator of that phrase. Getting stuck into a travelling trunk for a year was not something I wanted to experience, even if there might be some similarities between that trunk and the capsules.


    But with constant vigilance came constant stress and slowly but surely, that stress kept mounting. Having to permanently keep a part of your mind focused on those wards, ever ready to tweak them a little if a wave of divination-magic threatened to break them drained mental focus and it was difficult to get a good rest in when you always had to be cautious, ready to move at a moments notice. All of us were feeling it, but Adra and I bore the brunt of it, to the point that Rai and Sigmir were taking on a larger part of the simple duties, trying to take our burden as much as possible.


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    A soft growl from Ylva stopped us all in our tracks, her canine hearing the strongest in our group.


    ¡°Three elves,¡± I warned, having understood her growl thanks to the ability gained from my bond with Lenore. Quickly scanning around, I noticed a small opening beneath one of the giant trees, mostly hidden by a shrub growing at its base and waved towards it.


    All of us quickly moved over and slipped in one by one, while Adra placed her hand on the tree, her eyes closing as she communed with it. A quick look at the opening showed me that there wasn¡¯t enough space for all of us, so I looked at Sigmir and nodded towards Ylva, the two instantly getting my meaning.


    Seconds later, Ylva disappeared into her Hallow, decreasing the volume of our group by almost half and Sigmir squeezed into the narrow hole, following after Rai. I went next, plopping down on Sigmir¡¯s lap in an effort to keep some space for Adra, who followed moments later. With all of us squeezing into the small cave it was incredibly cosy but needs must.


    Reaching out with my mind, I pulled on the darkness around us, turning the shadows just a little deeper, making it impossible to notice that we actually were there. It was a small, dark hole, nothing more to see here.


    Adra did something similar, the brush outside shifting just that tiny bit, making it even harder to notice the cave and from then on, it was time to wait.


    We didn¡¯t have to wait long and soon, I could hear the noise of soft boots, the occasional rusting of cloth against leaves and a bit of mumbling. Sniffing the air, I noticed a faint scent of magic, a weirdly monotone variant. Normally, there were those small differences, tiny traces that gave the magic an individual note but with this one, there was nothing.


    Not certain what it actually did, I carefully warded it off, using the darkness of the cave around us to enhance the Cloak of Twilight I constantly used, making sure that it didn¡¯t stick to any of us.


    My heart almost stopped when I heard the elves speak, the voices allowing me to pinpoint their location. They were right outside the cave, just a few metres away from us, almost close enough to touch if we were to move out of our hideout. While listening to their conversation, I tried my best to remain calm, so the beating of my heart would remain as quiet as possible, or they might actually hear it.


    ¡°Anything?¡± one of them asked, sounding a little annoyed.


    ¡°Just like the last five scans, nothing¡¯s picked up,¡± another voice replied, this one sounding less bored and more cautious.


    ¡°Does anyone know why the forest is this agitated?¡± the first voice grumbled and for some reason, the mental image of a complaining teenager sprung to my mind when I heard the voice. Their voices were getting further away from us and I could hear the fluttering of leaves as if one of them had kicked against one of the shrubs.


    ¡°There¡¯ve been mutterings, something about a parasite that feeds on the forest¡¯s vitality. You¡¯ve felt it yourself, haven¡¯t you? There¡¯s Dark Magic afoot, something evil creeping in our forest,¡± the other voice replied, a hint of anger in her tone.


    ¡°Can¡¯t say I have, no. Heard a whole lot of shouting, people claiming that the end is near and such nonsense. There¡¯s going to be some malcontents, trying to grab some power for themselves and once they got it, they¡¯ll be trying something stupid and die for it. As if anyone could shake the forest itself, I say let them make their fuss and kill them once they get caught. No need to send out half the army to hunt down a phantom,¡± the first voice complained, reciprocating the anger of the other.


    ¡°Not our place to complain, the Dryads are speaking with the voice of the Eldest Druid and the Forest. They say that something evil lurks and we need to stop this before it can spread. So that¡¯s what we do,¡± the second voice rebuffed the first, the tone one that didn¡¯t allow for any refusal. And yet, I thought I could hear one but by this point, they had moved on, too far away to let me hear them any longer. Looking at the others, I simply shrugged, not sure what to make of the few words we had heard and leaned against Sigmir, closing my eyes to rest a little.


    It would take a bit of time until we dared move on and I had a bit of magic to consider. Namely, what had that odd, clean magic been that washed over us? The only time I had felt something similar had been when dealing with the human city barriers, so there might be some similarities, but it had to be considered.


    And it wasn¡¯t as if we could continue moving, not until those elves had moved far enough away.

 Interlude: The Hunt is on!

    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>


    Sometimes, you don¡¯t just walk along yourRoad to Purgatory.


    Sometimes, you are the hunter on the road, sometimes you are the prey.


    </td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    Bare, grey rocks reach into the clear, blue sky, some of them capped with snow, others completely bare. There are a few clouds of ash, hovering in the distance, speaking of the tremendous magic inherent to these mountains and yet, despite the danger, there are large avians slowly gliding through the air. Mounted on those feathered steeds are warriors, dressed in simple, yet sturdy, leather armour, large recurve bows slung to their saddles, alongside quivers, one side containing a few short spears, balanced for either throwing or thrusting, the other side holding bundles of arrows, enough to rain death on their foes for a long time.


    Darkness reigns near the ground where small shrubs, vines and various fungi vie for the little sun and few nutrients that escape the giants of the forest, the massive trees that make up the majority and form the thick, almost impenetrable canopy above.


    In that damp and gloomy darkness, a few branches shake, almost imperceivable, until a few seconds later, a pair of figures move into the open, each carrying a short blade, more a machete than a sword, a short bow slung to the quiver on their back. Their armour is camouflaged with countless vines and leaves, carefully made in such a way that it blurs their silhouette. making them look more like the small shrubs they have just moved out of.


    On a wide, open clearing, a singular, large tree stands, the wide canopy stretching across the peaceful meadow below. From an opening within the trunk, a small waterfall is pouring into a placid lake, sunlight glinting off the water''s surface. Through the opening in the tree, a wide, airy hall is visible, ramps leading further up, following the flow of water. There are no marks that hint at carving, nothing that disturbed the bark of the great tree as if the hall has grown directly into the tree.


    Following the water to its source, there is a small pond, far too small to contain even a smidgen of the water that is constantly pouring out of it and yet, the flow never changes. next to that pond, standing in the sunlight that somehow shines into the room from somewhere above, a single woman stands, with bright, green leaves as hair and nut-brown, smooth skin, dressed in a simple, yet beautiful, dark-green robe. Her hands spark with a soft, magical glow, the light mirroring the colour of her hair, as she slowly but with great confidence, draws patterns into the still air.


    On an open path, with some sunlight filtering through the trees above, a group of large, orange felines is slowly making their way through the forest. The felines all carry a rider, dressed in leather armour, each equipped with a bow and spear. The riders¡¯ eyes are constantly scanning the forest around them and from time to time, the rider in the lead takes out a small pendant. Each time she does, the pendant briefly lights up from within, shedding soft, green light onto the rider¡¯s armour, before fading. And each time it fades, the rider lets out a soft sigh.


    A wide river, almost too wide to see across, is slowly meandering through the dense forest, with no bridges in sight and only a few, small fishing boats plying their trade. In the distance, a settlement, built directly into the trees, is faintly visible, the home of those fishers.


    In the shallows, near the banks of the river, a trio of females is sitting, their hair dark, algae-green, while their skin is a damp brown, like fresh, moist earth. Each of them shares some features, a tall, slender build, long legs that end in almost fin-like feet and comparatively short arms that end in claw-like hands. Their faces are narrow, almost gaunt, and their eyes carry the same, placid light as they slowly move around.


    With a shrill shriek, the flight of eagles suddenly banks, their slow, gradual pace instantly accelerating as they go into a perfectly coordinated dive. The riders on their backs have to carefully hold on, all eyes, mount and rider alike, focused on the ground, hunters searching for their prey between the craggy rocks, scanning the narrow crevices and the rough terrain, unwilling to let even the smallest shadow escape them.


    The leader even has his bow ready, an arrow sitting on his finger and the moment his mount spreads its wings, breaking the dive and, for a single, fleeting moment, hovering in the air, he instantly knocks the arrow, smoothly drawing the bow back and sending it flying, racing through the still air as it trails a shower of emerald light, vanishing into a shadowy crag.


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    The two, slow-moving figures in their camouflage armour stop, their stances tense as their eyes scan around, looking for any sort of threat. Atter making sure that there are no threats around, they exchange a nod, one of them pulling out a pendant from beneath his cloak, focusing on it for a moment, until it starts to glow.


    Both figures softly speak into the pendant, light reflecting into their eyes. After a few moments of communion with the pendant, both nod firmly, the light winking out as they exchange yet another nod and turn away from each other, vanishing into the shrubs one more, each following their own path.


    In the massive tree, the dryad¡¯s gestures stop, patterns of light decorating the entire room until they start shining with an azure glow, the glow reflecting from the pond in the middle, the water turning opaque for a moment, before reflecting the light. Images become visible in the light, an endless, green carpet, stretching further than the eye can reach.


    As the dryad studies the images, they start to change, rapidly moving across the shining surface and as they do, the dryad starts to sway back and forth, sweat beading on her forehead. Her breathing quickly becomes laboured, her gown sticking to her body from the sweat, until finally, the light winks out, the dryad sinking to the floor, visibly exhausted.


    Once again, the leading rider checks her pendant, and for once, the glow doesn¡¯t simply fade away. Instead, it sparks for a moment, before the light detaches from the pendant, forming a small orb of glowing energy, small, ember sparks occasionally scattering away from it. The rider makes a swift gesture and the orb starts moving away from the road, into the forest beside it, the entire patrol following behind, their mounts suddenly no longer leisurely padding along but dashing, occasionally using tree trunks as springboards to cross areas of difficult terrain, all the while following behind the sparkling light.


    The three naiads in the river stop their comfortable bath, their focus shifting up the river and the water around them starts roiling, their forms turning opaque as if they are melding into the river water. In the middle of the triangle formed by the three of them, an orb of water materialises, all three reaching out in unison, touching the orb.


    From the orb, a school of fish, entirely made out of water, springs forth, the volume of the orb never changing as the fish start darting up the river, their presence immediately vanishing as they delve into the water.


    Moments after the glowing arrow vanishes into the crevice, a large, goat-like animal comes tumbling out of it, the arrow lodged into its flesh. Unable to keep its balance, it rapidly falls down the mountain, the wound caused by the arrow quickly becoming the least of its problems. The eagles follow after it, their earlier urgency entirely gone.


    The stalker, now on his own, suddenly stops, sniffing the air, his eyes closing as a frown settles on his face. His focus shifts, as does his movement, as he occasionally sniffs the air, following a scent trail.


    He quickly reaches a clearing and the frown lines on his face become deeper when he notices the carcass of a large rodent. Moving closer to investigate, he freezes the moment he realises that for some reason, the rodent is frozen.


    That brief moment of confusion stretches into eternity, when suddenly, from the gloomy shadows behind him, a dark figure rises, two glinting blades in hand. Before the stalker ever has a chance to realise that he no longer is the hunter, but the hunted, the two blades pierce into his body, faint traces of magical light scattering away from the wounds as the light disappears from his eyes, his dessicated body falling to the ground before the dark figure.


    The felines burst through the tree line, suddenly standing in the middle of a clearing, or maybe calling it a site of devastation would be more fitting. There is no grass, no shrubs, nothing that would take advantage of the ample light, only torn earth and scattered dust. There are five gaping holes, as if a gigantic creature ripped out some weeds, leaving nothing behind but devastation. The entire patrol dismounts and starts searching around, their eyes scanning the ground, occasionally exchanging annoyed noises, as they fail to find what they are looking for.


    There is nothing left in this place, nothing but the stink of death and the dust of the fallen trees.


    The swarm of watery fish surges through the river, until they stop, swarming near the bank. The water in the area is frothing, hints of blood appearing only to be instantly washed away by the endless flow of the river.


    The fish form into a greater form, a vaguely humanoid representation of the naiads further down the river and through the watery eyes of that figure, the naiads see the area and watch as a large crocodile continues to tear apart an elven warrior who had failed to detect the lurking predator. Moments later, the water making up the figure returns to the river, the magic fading away.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>


    On yourRoad to Purgatory, will you be hunter - Or will you be hunted?


    </td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>

 Chapter 633

    ¡°Well, damn,¡± I muttered, looking out of the forest, the wet boundary before us stopping our progress.


    ¡°Yes, a dam would help here,¡± Adra snickered in reply, making me let out a soft growl of annoyance at her joke.


    ¡°Harharhar,¡± I grumbled, shaking my head at the idea of damming up a river of that size, wide enough to make the forest on the other side hazy in the distance.


    ¡°So, where do we go from here? We¡¯ve been heading straight southwest for the last two weeks, but I¡¯m not sure we can cross this river without getting noticed,¡± Adra asked, watching the muddy water with concern. Sniffing the air, I focused my own senses and noticed that there was something curious about the scent, somewhat similar to the prevalent scent of the forest but with a different flavour.


    Remembering the trailer Pantheon Entertainment had launched and the Naiads lounging in a muddy river and using what I could only assume was scrying magic similar to what I usually used to inspect disturbances, I had a good idea of what I was sensing, the influence of the Naiads that manifested similar to the influence of the Driads over the forest. Only that we had no allied Naiad, making it difficult to conceal our crossing from them.


    Closing my eyes, I focused past the physical world, into the Astral, trying to see if we were close enough to the Nexus so I could sense it. Back in Aretia, I had been able to find the Nexus in Neyto from quite the distance, a few hundred kilometres if I didn¡¯t miss my guess and my perception had grown a lot since then.


    The first thing I felt was the forest around me, its very presence pulling on the Astral, infusing it with its energy and getting infused in turn. It was almost as if the Forest was a single, massive organism, not sentient, let alone sapient, but with a certain awareness nonetheless. Now that I was aware of it, its influence was strong enough to be felt without focusing on the Astral, at least until I managed to block it from my mind, just like one wouldn¡¯t be constantly conscious of the clothes one was wearing. They were simply there, but unless something changed or you focused on them, their presence wasn¡¯t intruding on your mind.


    Similar to the forest¡¯s presence, I could feel the river ahead and here, I was quite surprised. I could understand, on a conceptual level, why the forest could manifest into a single, large entity and I had read about certain trees that essentially cloned themselves, sprouting countless trunks, all connected by one massive root system. I doubted this forest was the same, but I could see that living trees could serve as the basis for a ¡®living forest¡¯.


    But a living river? What were the individual units, water was, at the end of the day, not alive, it might contain living things, from bacteria to the massive crocodiles I could see in the distance, but the vast majority of volume was no more alive than the air around us?


    And yet, I could sense a certain¡­ existence from the river ahead of us.


    Pushing past the influence, I focused deeper, remembering the influence of the Nexus in Neyto and how it had tugged at me. I wasn¡¯t willing to fully delve into the river and start sifting through the currents, travelling along the small tributaries, into the larger channels until I reached the Nexus, and even if I did, I wasn¡¯t certain I would be able to connect the sensation to the world around me, but I wanted to find the Nexus.


    For a minute or five, I simply felt the river until I became attuned enough to the minute ebb and flow of it, those tiny fluctuations that were almost drowned out by those two titanic presences all around us. To make matters worse, the larger influence on those minute fluctuations was something I wasn¡¯t willing to focus on, it felt akin to the influence of the Forest, only far less immediate as if the influence was projected from far away and yet, it was powerful enough to be felt.


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    The other influence was subtle, flowing only through a small part of the Astral River but amusingly, the river ahead was carrying the majority of that influence. There was Ice there, but it wasn¡¯t pure or strong enough to truly be felt, making me think of glacial runoff, the Ice had thawed but it would carry traces of its origin for a long time.


    Feeling that connection, I tried to glimpse a direction, something more concrete than ¡®south-west¡¯, staring into the Astral and trying to relate it to the dimensions of the physical world.


    Sadly, even after trying for a few long minutes and starting to get a headache, there was no progress, other than the quite obvious realisation that if the river was essentially a physical representation of a part of the Astral River, following it upstream would, at some point, bring us closer to the Nexus, hopefully, close enough to feel it. I doubted that the source of the river and the nexus were in the same place, the elements didn¡¯t feel right for that, but a physical connection was likely. Possibly the same mountain range, or a glacial run-off that eventually connected into the river, either way, if we followed the flow of water, we¡¯d also follow the flow of Astral Power and thus, at some point, reach our destination.


    ¡°We should stick to the river,¡± I told the others, getting a sigh of relief from Adra.


    ¡°Good, ''cause I don¡¯t think there¡¯s a way to cross it without being noticed. You feel their influence, don¡¯t you?¡± she asked, warily eying the river.


    ¡°The Naiads?¡± I asked, getting a nod in response, ¡°Yes, I can feel that there¡¯s a whole lot of influence going on. The river and the forest are curiously interlinked, I think,¡± I mused, before shaking my head, pushing away those rather metaphysical and somewhat mystical connections. The river, a source of life providing the forest? Possibly, but there definitely was something more going on.


    But nothing we could investigate in passing.


    Following the river was incredibly simple, there was even a path doing just that. Or maybe I should call it a road, depending on what the locals felt about such designations, either way, it was obvious that we weren¡¯t the only ones travelling this path.


    Which was why we immediately retreated back into the forest, our plan to occasionally check the river¡¯s course so we wouldn¡¯t get lost.


    ¡°You know, you might want to consider some deception,¡± Lenore suggested, a sly amusement in her mental voice. We had been following the river for maybe an hour at this point and noticed a few elves guarding it, and, of course, the constant presence of the Naiads.


    ¡°Mh?¡± I perked up, the idea of deception, especially when connected to such amusement quite intriguing to me.


    ¡°Think about it, they¡¯ve got to have a good idea of our speed and direction, just using the last few rituals. But they also have to know just how difficult crossing the river unnoticed would be for a landbound being, right? I mean, unless they are completely retarded and somehow missed the massive, magically infused river that winds its way through their equally infused forest, quite possibly partially from said river,¡± she chortled, the idea quickly making sense in my mind.


    ¡°So the moment they realise that there is an incident on the other side, they know we can either teleport or fly, neither of which are easy abilities to come-by,¡± I now shared her amusement, already imagining just how annoyed the elves would be. Sure, high-level spellcasters would always look for ways to improve their battlefield mobility, it was one of the best ways to avoid having some fool stick a pointy bit of metal into your squishy bits, but from what I had seen so far, and read on the forum, those abilities weren¡¯t all that common. They greatly depended on your personal affinities and abilities.


    ¡°We shouldn¡¯t just try to fly, though, that might be a too common way,¡± I mused, looking towards the river with a bit of apprehension. There had been a great deal of power in those waters and I wasn¡¯t about to see what happened if a magical bird casually tried to fly across. It might do nothing, as countless birds had to fly across constantly, but I wasn¡¯t willing to bet Lenore¡¯s life on it.


    ¡°Shadowstepping would work, too,¡± she sighed, before suggesting ¡°Tonight?¡±


    ¡°Tonight,¡± I agreed, already looking forward to that particular endeavour. Maybe I would get some extra insights into the Nidhogg¡¯s flames, their composition and aura fascinating me to no end.


    Hopefully Sigmir wouldn¡¯t be too annoyed at the idea that I would use yet another night to deceive our foes, hopefully getting us enough time to escape their net.

 Chapter 634

    Once again, a bunch of trees were consumed by the black flames of Nidhogg and power was being siphoned off by the soul prison. Lenore and I kept incredibly close watch, making sure that no portals were opening nearby and the moment the drain from the Soul Prison faded, I pulled the remaining Astral Power to me, using it to step into the shadows, dispersing it into the strange realm that connected all the Shadows. There, it became nothing more than background-static and quickly faded away.


    Stepping into that realm for the second time during the night, the first being when Lenore and I used that realm to teleport across the river to avoid potential defences against aerial intruders, I instantly noticed that something had changed. Spreading my senses outward, it took only a moment for recognition to set in.


    The all-enveloping darkness, which most would find incredibly oppressive but was only a comforting embrace to me, I could recognise it. Or rather, I finally made the connection between this realm I rarely used due to the sensation of being watched I occasionally got here and the realm that I had experienced in the dream I had seen the Nidhogg in. It was the same darkness and now, with the magic of the Nidhogg fading into the realm, I could vaguely feel its presence.


    For a moment, I considered hanging around and trying to commune with it once again, but given that I had just lit up another piece of their precious forest and likely triggered any magical sensors from here to who knows where I wasn¡¯t about to stick around. Sure, we were in the realm of shadows but this realm and the physical shadows outside were connected, so a competent being would likely notice me hiding here. And if that happened, I would almost certainly die.


    Pushing myself with my will, I quickly traversed the realm of shadows, feeling my Astral Power drain away in the process. While the distance travelled within the shadows didn¡¯t completely correspond to the distance outside, there was some stretching and shrinking involved, it had some correlation. Moving through the shadows used up Astral Power and the further I moved within them, the more I had to use, the increase almost exponential. Stepping from one side of a room to the other was simple, stepping from one side of the continent to the other impossible, at least for me.


    By the time my Astral Power dropped to a quarter, I hoped we had travelled far enough and pushed my senses outwards, taking in the foliage around me, realising that this particular bit of shadow happened to be cast by the moonlight shining into the canopy of one of those massive trees. With a grin on my face, I pushed outward, stepping into the physical world again and started dropping. I could feel the burden on my Astral Power fade instantly after leaving the Shadows and even while falling, I kept pushing, exchanging places with Lenore.


    There was only a brief moment in which I had been in the physical world and hopefully, it wasn¡¯t enough to leave a trace. Lenore, knowing what I needed her to do, never landed on the branch beneath the one casting the Shadow, instead, she spread her wings and started gliding through the canopy, making no disturbance, just another bird making its life in the branches of the great elven forest.


    It was difficult to estimate how far we had actually moved, or in which direction, but with the connection between Sigmir and me, I would never lose her. Focusing on that connection, I could give Lenore a direction and she started flapping her wings, never straying from the shelter of the canopy.


    Within my Hallow, I once again contemplated those flames. There was something that made them stick within my mind, a fascination I just couldn¡¯t explain. Sure, I could understand that I wasn¡¯t disgusted by them, as I was by normal fire. If not for the incredible benefits normal fire had, such as having warm meals, I would have done away with it a long time ago, simply to avoid having to look at it. But those black flames, they were so much more, there was nothing fiery about them, they were just a perfect force of devouring, nothing of that wasted heat, wasted light, just pure consumption. What they burned didn¡¯t just get turned into ashes, light and some fumes, it was utterly devoured by the shadows that had spawned them.


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    However, going from ¡®not being disgusted by them¡¯ to ¡®being completely fascinated by them¡¯ was a bit of a stretch and I wasn¡¯t quite sure what pulled my mind to them like this. Not only did I want to conjure and watch them, but I also wanted to master them, to make them my own, even if a part of me understood that they weren¡¯t mine and could never be. They were the flames of Nidhogg, not the flames of Morgana.


    That simple, quite obvious, thought brought my mind to a stop. The flames of Morgana, the idea had such a wonderful ring to it. What would my flames be? The flames of Nidhogg, at least from what I could see, were a representation of Devouring, the Darkness that ate the world, or maybe the Darkness that gnawed at the root of the World Tree, if one took the myths I had read into account.


    But what did I want my own flames to be? Sure, there would have to be an aspect of devouring in them, Darkness was one of my primary affinities and Devouring fit flames so wonderfully. But I wasn¡¯t just a being of Darkness, Ice had to be incorporated as well and even Blood might need to be part of my flames.


    Raising my hand, in this space that was mine, and mine alone, I conjured some Liquid Moonlight, looking at the gently moving liquid, not allowing any heat to intrude into my construct. Flames that devoured, flames of ice, the answer seemed to be quite simple, flames that devoured heat. Perfect cooling, maybe a lingering, empowered version of those Beams of Cold I had used in the past, used and mostly discarded outside of special environments, simply due to their lack of physical punch. But if I managed to conceptually enhance them to linger on my target and freeze the target on their own accord, maybe by combining cold with the concept of devouring?


    For a moment, I considered infusing the Liquid Moonlight with that concept, to form something similar to the flames of Nidhogg, but before I could put thought into action, I discarded the idea. Or at least postponed it, forming a potentially unstable, magical effect based on two of the most destructive concepts I knew about, in an attempt to synergise them together to make them even more destructive, while being within my Hallow, a space that was conceptually within Lenore, seemed to be incredibly reckless. Sure, I controlled this space but there was no guarantee that I would be able to control my own magic any better than I could outside.


    ¡°You know, you could try to add Death into those flames you are considering,¡± Lenore suggested, obviously both amused and relieved at the thought that I had considered forming something like that in my Hallow but also glad that I had seen the folly of the idea instantly.


    ¡°Maybe,¡± I allowed, letting the idea percolate in my mind for a few moments, trying to imagine the result, ¡°But I don¡¯t think so,¡± I shook my head.


    ¡°It would be too spread out, I think. I don¡¯t even want to add Blood Magic into that idea, even if it might have potential. Flames based on the idea of Devouring Heat, sound like something that would work, it¡¯s a logical and direct consequence of combining Ice- and Darkness-Magic. But adding Death-Magic into it, that doesn¡¯t quite fit, I think. It¡¯s not that I seek to devour Life, which could work, if I based it on Darkness and Death, or maybe even Flames that Devour the Life in your Blood, to push Blood Magic into it, increasing the power but limiting the breadth of my Flames, It¡¯s not what I want,¡± I rambled, unable to combine those concepts in a satisfactory manner.


    ¡°If you say so,¡± Lenore could only shrug, obviously unable to fully understand where I was going with this.


    ¡°Either way, we are almost back at the river, you might want to focus outward, so we can get back into the shadows. Focus, I¡¯d prefer not to get lost,¡± she reminded me, an amused undertone in her voice.


    Realising how long I had been pondering those flames and the question of how my own flames should look, I did what she suggested, focusing on the immediate problems, not some future troubles.

 Chapter 635

    ¡°I¡¯m getting worried,¡± Sigmir quietly admitted, whispering into my ear as I was held in her arms. Normally, these moments were reserved for those delicious, sweet nothings that made my heart beat faster and still managed to bring a blush to my cheeks, so her confession of worry was not something I liked to hear.


    ¡°What worries you, love?¡± I asked, speaking just as quietly as I pulled her a little closer, removing that tiny bit of space between us and pressing against her, trying to bring some assurance to her mind.


    ¡°Adra, she¡¯s been getting a bit¡­¡± she paused, clearly not certain how to describe it, ¡°She¡¯s been getting antsy, that we get hunted by the elves and you flit off to throw them off our trail hasn¡¯t helped. She¡¯s trying to figure out what you¡¯ve been doing out there and I don¡¯t think she likes the conclusions she¡¯s been drawing,¡± Sigmir finished her words, uncertainty and worry filling her voice.


    I let out a sigh, not sure how to react. A part of me had been worrying about Adra ever since I fed the Soul Prison for the first time. Back then, she had fallen for my misdirection that it had merely been a bit of magical experimentation that had gotten out of hand, probably because I had a history of magical experimentation getting out of hand. But as time had dragged on, the conflict with the elves, who would likely welcome her with open arms and the continued pressure from their divination was getting to her. Knowing that those living in symbiosis with the forest, a state that was likely the most natural and comfortable for her people, were hunting us would put a strain on our party bonds, even if her bond to Rai and the bonds of camaraderie formed with Sigmir and me kept her. For now.


    How long those bonds would remain, I couldn¡¯t even guess and that was where I had the biggest problem. We needed Adra, even if I wasn¡¯t certain about my ability to trust her. If not for the simple fact that we needed her to conceal us from the Dryads and their bond with the forest, I would likely have split off from her, taking Sigmir with me. As things were, I wouldn¡¯t even trust Rai, my disciple, to remain with us, simply due to his romantic bond with Adra. Could I trust someone after he had to choose between his teacher and his girlfriend?


    Looking at my own convictions, I would fight anyone to the death who wanted to force me to split from Sigmir, I was even willing to take on the very masters of this world of Mundus to stay with her. There was no way I would trust him after splitting away from Adra.


    ¡°She¡¯s wavering,¡± I finally replied to Sigmir, after sorting my thoughts, ¡°There¡¯s nothing we could do, I think I¡¯ll stop my efforts to mislead the elves for the next few days and stick with you. Hopefully, that¡¯ll give her some time to calm down. In addition, I¡¯ll try to come up with a few suitable experiments that make it look like my efforts are in a direction that doesn¡¯t frighten her as bad as the reality sealed within that crystal,¡± I told her, already trying to come up with something that looked flashy and dangerous but wouldn¡¯t make her feel threatened. She had always accepted that you sometimes had to break a few eggs in the pursuit of power, the only question was, when would she feel that breaking off from the party was more beneficial than staying?


    ¡°I¡¯ll help you keep an eye on her,¡± Sigmir agreed, not sounding any happier than me. She understood just how important Adra was for us at the moment and that her importance wouldn¡¯t fade until we left the forest. Once we were out of the elven woods, things would change, but for now, she was necessary, as dangerous as that might be.


    ¡°I¡¯ve heard jokes about keeping your friends close, but your enemies closer. I hope Adra¡¯s not about to switch from close to closer,¡± I chuckled mirthlessly, the feeling of impotence was not a pleasant one. Getting tied up and being under somebody else¡¯s control was only enjoyable if Sigmir did the controlling and tying up. The potential to get screwed over by Adra was simply too high.


    The next morning, we continued our path along the massive river, making sure none of the elves living on its shores were able to spot us. We had to slow down our pace somewhat, simply to make sure we didn¡¯t accidentally run into someone but given our circumstances, that was simply a price we had to pay. We didn¡¯t quite know where to go, but with the river, we had something of an idea.


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    Luckily, the increased population near the river meant that there were a lot fewer monsters and none that were capable to bypass our concealment unless we literally stepped on them. In one case, I failed to notice a serpent hanging out between a couple of branches and almost brushed against it but either the thing was too lazy to react to the almost contact or it simply didn¡¯t notice me. Either way, it allowed us to move with less care and a bit more relaxation.


    In order to distract Adra from the feeding sessions I had performed and maybe give her something else to think about, I decided to carefully work on my magic again, making sure to keep any effect at the lowest possible threshold, so it wouldn¡¯t attract attention.


    My first interest was, obviously, the idea I had during the night, a flame of my own. At first, I focused on Liquid Moonlight, trying to infuse minute amounts of it with Darkness-Magic attuned to the concept of Devouring, trying to get the two concepts to harmonise. Sadly, My initial attempts didn¡¯t quite work, there were some effects, but nothing that made the two different aspects work together in a fashion that made the product greater than the sum of its parts.


    During those experiments, I made sure that Adra could see me, I even let out the odd grunt of annoyance, some of them even feigned. To my great surprise, after half a day of experimentation, a notification popped up, telling me that Darkness Magic had levelled to seventy-six, something I hadn¡¯t expected. Maybe the idea I was working on was a good one, and I only needed to push it a little further.


    In the evening, I changed my focus a little, working on that odd expanding darkness, those black holes I could create. They weren¡¯t truly black holes, at least I was nigh certain of that, but given that they seemed to be areas that couldn¡¯t be entered by anything, it was as good a name as any. There was little progress with them, it seemed that I needed some kind of inspiration, some idea that would allow me to progress with them and so far, I was just drawing a blank.


    My experimentation wasn¡¯t made easier by the fact that we had to, once again, huddle between the roots of a tree, sheltered in the burrow of some animal, expanded by Adra¡¯s magic. We simply were too close to an elven settlement and couldn¡¯t risk venturing out into the open.


    The night passed pretty uneventfully and in the next morning, we set out once again, travelling quickly to get some distance from the elven town. We had only seen it from a distance, but given the amount of magic inherent to the thorny hedges around their settlement, I wasn¡¯t willing to take any risks there.


    We had just managed to bypass what I considered the most dangerous area, when Adra and I froze, reacting almost at the same time. I froze due to a faint scent of magic coming from up ahead and when I looked through Lenore¡¯s sight, I noticed a quite well-concealed figure, creeping through the forest with the aid of magic. I was pretty sure it was one of the elven scouts and, so far, they hadn¡¯t noticed us just yet.


    Adra, just like me, must have noticed them, probably thanks to her ability to commune with nature and just like we always had when faced with elven scouts, our first course of action was to hide, trying to simply let the scout move on before we moved on ourselves.


    While the forest, filled with the light of the mid-morning sun wasn¡¯t completely dark, the dense canopy cast enough shadows to make it a comfortable twilight, easily good enough to use for my magic. Once we were well-hidden and magically concealed, we set in to wait the scout out, watching as they were creeping around. They weren¡¯t really moving away but it didn¡¯t look like they had noticed us and were trying to stall for time.


    When I heard laughter echo through the forest, I wasn¡¯t quite sure what was going on, until I focused and realised that there was a group of children, or maybe teenagers, running around in the nearby forest, making an absolute racket. Their presence allowed me to relax a little, from everything I understood about sapient creatures, one of their primary instinct was to protect their young and if the elves had noticed us and were preparing a battle, they¡¯d certainly not bring in their young as a distraction.


    As the weight lifted off my shoulders, I felt myself relax, only for the tension to snap back into full force when an arrow, accompanied by more wild laughter, whistled by my head, missing by more than a metre but being far too close for comfort. And far too close to bypass the concealment we had woven, piercing right into the shadows we had used to hide and suddenly vanishing.


    Right under the eyes of an elven scout¡­

 Chapter 636

    Focus, as so often, was the bane of concealment. It was relatively simple to remain undetected if your opponent wasn¡¯t actually looking for you. You just had to trick their eyes and blend into the environment and they might never know that there was something to look at. But the moment that arrow shot into our concealment, subtly disrupting the spells before getting swallowed by the shadows and disappearing from their view, the elven Scout, and the elven teenagers who had shot the arrow in the first place, knew that something was up.


    Due to his surprise, the scout failed to keep the necessary discipline, becoming clearly visible, his mouth gaping open in shock and confusion. He took a deep breath and, thanks to Lenore¡¯s sight, I could see magic gather on the pendant he wore around his neck and react. With a burst of magic, I manifested a beam of Dark Radiance, devouring the magic he was focusing on and disrupting whatever he was trying to do. At the same time, Rai disappeared into the shadows, only to reappear right behind the scout, his blades already in hand and striking down. The surprised elf had no chance to avoid the attack, or maybe he was just too slow and went down, blood gushing from two deep wounds in his neck.


    Sadly, while that one elf had died, there were more where this one had come from and nearby, the laughter had already morphed into screams and I could see some of the teenagers already fleeing towards the nearby town, while others were gawking at Rai and the three of us who had now become visible. Even worse, I noticed the air distort in multiple nearby places, hinting that there were more scouts, who were now starting to move after their comrade had died.


    Turning, I instantly created a set of runes, nothing special, just conjuring up a few Icicles and launching them at those odd distortions, forcing the scouts to react. My broad attack revealed that there were three more and, to my utter surprise, one of them was hit by my probing attack, the Icicle sticking in his shoulder.


    ¡°We need to run,¡± Sigmir reminded me, even as she pulled out one of the Ice-axes I had previously supplied her with, lobbing it at another of the scouts and scoring another hit. Just those two hits made me realize that the Scouts were still in training and not a huge threat but where there were trainees, the trainer wouldn¡¯t be far away.


    ¡°I¡¯ll give them something to think about,¡± I told the others, before ordering Adra to get that last scout. Focusing on the teenagers, some of whom were still gawking in utter incomprehension, I quickly drew up another set of runes, conjuring up another volley of Icicles. If there was another, more experienced, scout nearby, I wanted to give them something to think about, something that they would have to deal with if they wanted to protect their young.


    I didn¡¯t bother to carefully aim my attack, merely launching them in a lazy arc in their general direction but that was enough to cause panic to break out. Not even waiting for my attack to land, I started running, fully aware that I had reduced the speed of my Icicles, not out of mercy or compassion but because the panic of their children would force the adults to deal with them, buying us more time. With a thought, I took control of two of those already launched Icicles over the lingering control with my Astral Power and accelerated them, increasing their velocity by an order of magnitude and letting them pierce one teenager¡¯s leg and another one¡¯s arm. The wounds would be painful and, if not treated, eventually lethal but it would take time and in that time, the elves would have time to save them. If they didn¡¯t focus on chasing us.


    Just before the Icicles I had launched could land amongst the fleeing elves, I caused them to shatter, peppering the elven teenagers with razor-sharp fragments, their screams filling the air behind us. More tasks to accomplish before the adult elves could chase us.


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    Knowing that the elves would hunt us down and that we were far too close to disappear into the shadows again, we simply ran. Not even five minutes after the initial encounter, I could hear shrill whistles in town, shouts and screams as some of the teenagers made it back and moments later, I could feel magic reaching out for us, divination to mark and track us, maybe something worse. Without a lot of thought, I lashed out again, sending my Darkness-Magic out to disrupt their working, but it was only a stop-gap measure.


    Before long, the first wind riders, mounted on their avian steeds, were above us, skillfully weaving between the trees and chasing after us. This time, it was Adra who turned, an arrow already knocked on her bow and without even stopping, she smoothly launched the arrow at our pursuers, the projectile imbued with potent magic. The arrow burst apart in mid-flight, turning into a volley of splinters, none too big but all imbued with that magic and all aimed at the mounts that were hunting us. The elves tried to dodge, some of them successful, but a few of their mounts were struck and one, in a lucky shot that struck a critical hit, even went down. Clearly, these elves were not their best and brightest.


    But they didn¡¯t need to be, even as we managed to force these elves to stay further back, I could hear more elves coming in the distance. If they were mounted, it would take only a few minutes to catch up with us and even if we managed to kill those there was an entire town just a few kilometres away from us.


    ¡°Keep running,¡± I told the others, deciding that I needed to do something, or there would be a never-ending stream of elves, all coming after us. Deception and misdirection were what was necessary.


    After stopping, I quickly drew a set of runes and channelled a burst of Astral Power into it, not caring too much if I was efficient, just trying to get the magic to manifest in as broad a scope as I could manage. Moments later, the previously somewhat dark and gloomy forest was shrouded in dense and cold fog, blocking what little light managed to get through the canopy and spreading rapidly. Retaining my connection to the formation, I turned and started to run after the others, Astral Power pouring out of me and, in turn, mist pouring out of the runic circle.


    It was merely another stop-gap, something to delay the elves and hopefully avoid the encounter we could not confidently win. There was no upside to fighting the elves, it would merely slow us down and allow them to bring in more forces and at the end of the day, we couldn¡¯t kill them all.


    That conviction only grew stronger when I noticed the familiar fluctuations of a portal manifesting in a tree ahead of us, luckily close enough to me, so I could cast another blast of disrupting magic, turning the elven portal against them as it collapsed. I couldn¡¯t use the Flames of Nidhogg, so I wasn¡¯t able to kill them all mid-transit, but the tree they had been using burst apart as the magic went wild, the portal never opening on our side.


    After a brief stint in my Hallow, letting Lenore use her wings and wind magic to dash and catch up with the others, I popped back out, just in time to watch Sigmir charge one of the elves and cleave her in twain with a swipe of her Lok¡¯nar, the light leather armour no hindrance for the heavy weapon. Nearby, Rai was kicking another elf from his mount, before landing on the feline with surprising grace.


    ¡°Hop on,¡± Sigmir called out to me, as she leapt on the mount she had just liberated, holding out a hand to me and quickly pulling me up, while I could see Adra¡¯s body shift into the four-legged ungulate she used as her travel-form.


    Holding onto Sigmir, I could watch a brief struggle between Rai and his newly acquired mount but it seemed that for the simple task of fleeing as quickly as possible, little control was necessary, just to make the mount scared, something both Sigmir and Rai managed with ease.


    Closing my eyes, I focused on the mist I had conjured and could already feel the elven magic batter against it, trying to dispel it, or at least remove the effects I had imbued it with. Trying to hunt people through a dense fog filled with confusion and madness couldn¡¯t be easy but then, I wasn¡¯t trying to make it easy for them.


    No, I was trying to make it as hard as possible for them to catch us.

 Chapter 637

    The cats we had appropriated from the elves were quite impressive sprinters. Sadly, their ability to cross long distances at that pace was less sufficient, after only ten minutes of dashing at their fastest pace, their speed started to flag rapidly and no matter what Sigmir and Ria did, they just couldn¡¯t pick back up. But their somewhat unwilling efforts had bought us just that little bit of extra time.


    ¡°Dismount,¡± I called out to the others, gesturing for Rai to close the distance. Just because the felines couldn¡¯t run any further didn¡¯t mean they had lost all their use, if nothing else, they were two currently living creatures with a decent level.


    We dismounted and I quickly stabbed both felines with my dagger, drawing a bit of blood before bringing my Blood Magic to bear, not caring about the Misama I was created by ripping the life and magic out of the cats, no, I was welcoming it. All to create a bigger mess the elves had to deal with before they could focus on hunting us down.


    The magic I drained didn¡¯t go into any great working, only into more mist to further conceal our tracks before I started to run after the others again.


    All around us, I could smell the elvish magic, the stench thick enough to be annoying and far too dense to even try parsing what was going on. I was pretty sure some of it was communication magic, some divination trying to pin us down and probably all sorts of spells they were using against us. So far, the cloak of twilight I had spun around us was holding, preventing them from simply killing us at range but how long that¡¯d last I wasn¡¯t sure. It was the problem when dealing with ancient civilisations who should have seen most things already and probably have a plan to deal with them in some cabinet, it took a bit of time to pull that file from the archives and dust it off.


    With the mist spreading out all around us, and the disgusting feeling of wrongness that came with the unrestrained use of Blood Magic lingering in the air, we kept moving, leaving yet another mess for the elves to clear up.


    It didn¡¯t take long for us to run into more elves, the magic they used to coordinate giving them away. Just because I was completely unable to understand their communication didn¡¯t mean I was unable to notice the magic they used for it. From what I could perceive around us, they were trying hard to create a net around us, making sure that we couldn¡¯t escape and such nets needed coordination. If we managed to rip through enough of the strands in the net they spun, we¡¯d be able to escape.


    The first strand we encountered was just a single elf, lightly armed and armoured like they all were. We came dashing out of the mist and again, before the elf even had time to react, Rai and I stepped through the shadow, Rai coming in low and stabbing upwards, an attack the elf managed to avoid, only for me to come in from behind, using gravity to punch my blades through the armour covering his shoulders and into his torso. He went down, with me landing on top of him and instantly putting my hand on the wounds, ripping what magic I could grasp from his body. More power for me to throw at the elves, a bigger mess for them to clean up.


    With my hand on the bloody wound, I heard a cracking sound and my head snapped up, focusing on a nearby shrub and the movement therein. Without thinking, I used the freshly acquired power and launched a few small icicles into the shrub, uncaring for what I was aiming at. There was a noise of pain, could have been an elf, but we didn¡¯t have the time to care about it, I merely caused the Icicles I had launched to shatter, ripping whatever I had hit apart and kept running. The further we could go without getting caught, the better.


    As we ran, I frantically tried to come up with ways to escape. Escaping alone would be relatively simple, the combination of stepping through the Shadows and hiding in my Hallow while Lenore took to the skies made it incredibly difficult to pin me down, but if I escaped, what about Sigmir? I had little hope that the elves wouldn¡¯t take their anger out on her, so she had to come with me. Would Lenore and I be able to carry her, if we switched to our Avatar form? That form greatly boosted our strength, but would it be enough to carry her and escape the elves mounted on those giant birds?


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    I just didn¡¯t know.


    We continued onwards, running into more elves, their screams and shouts guiding the rest of them to us. Where at first, we only had to kill one elve every few minutes, the number of elves that managed to catch up and throw themselves at us in an attempt to slow us down quickly increased and our progress slowed down. Individually, none of the elves was a threat, their levels only between forty and sixty, but sometimes quantity was a quality of its own.


    Sigmir stuck close to me, making sure that none of the elves could pin me down while allowing me to wield my Blood Magic to its fullest extent. Not only did it allow me to throw spells at other elves without depleting my Astral Power too much, it also allowed me to cause more chaos, as not only elves showed up to the party but a few Nethersprites were attracted by the miasma I was spilling into the land. They were no allies of ours but they most certainly were enemies of the elves, who could only see them as abominations that defiled their sacred forest.


    The fighting turned more and more chaotic, to the point that I lost track of Adra and Rai. Only the connection between Sigmir, Ylva and myself allowed us to act as a unit, verbal communication was completely impossible due to the shouts, screams and screeches that filled the forest.


    In my mind, Lenore started to push concepts at me, things I could barely grasp myself but I was able to simply follow her mental process. It was Death Magic, twisting it into a direction I had never truly managed to grasp and the next elf that got stabbed with my blade wasn¡¯t just killed. No, instead I used my Blood Magic in synergy with that Death Magic Lenore had shared and my own Mind Magic, burning out most of its brain and turning it into a mindless shambler. Once I was done, the elf still dropped while Sigmir and I kept moving but this elf didn¡¯t stay down, a few seconds after we had moved on, it got back up and attacked the nearest target with mindless hunger.


    Not a zombie but I doubted the elf who got suddenly gnawed at appreciated the difference and the combination of mindless savagery on one side and surprise on the other was enough to drag that elf down, too. Not that my shambler managed to live much longer, other elves plunged a spear into it, but not before it managed to tear out its prey¡¯s throat.


    And by that time, I had already moved on to the next elf, turning it, too, into a mindless shambler that started to sow chaos, even as a Nethersprite popped into existence and joined the fun, hungering for the sweet vitality of the living.


    As we fought, things started to become blurry. More and more elves were engaging, trying to work together to tie us down and stronger elves started to come in, taking over from their weaker companions. Wounds started to accumulate on Sigmir, Ylva and myself and our flight crawled to a halt, as the chaos around us intensified.


    The scent of Blood, Miasma and Death was thick in the air, to the point that the magic of nature, wielded by the elves, started to get pushed back but there was no joy within the shared minds of us, only urgency. We needed to get out of the elven encirclement, or this forest would certainly be our death.


    ¡°Let¡¯s push our limits,¡± I felt Sigmir¡¯s thoughts across our connection and saw Ylva lead towards her, vanishing into her Hallow. Moments later, she let out a loud, piercing howl, thin silver fur growing all over her body and the elves around us were briefly pushed back as a golden glow started to shine from her eyes, joining together with her crimson aura.


    With her going into her Avatar-state, I had to follow suit, if this was our bid to break through the elven encirclement, I had to give it my all.


    After ripping the magic out of yet another elf and turning her into a mindless monster, Lenore and I started to think in sync, feathers and wings sprouting, as the Raven¡¯s Shadow took the field, joining together with the Protector of the Pack.

 Chapter 638

    With the cry of a raven and the howl of a wolf, the next phase of our battle was started. Now, there were no longer four individuals fighting, it was only us, united in common purpose as a pack, willing to do whatever was necessary to break through the elvish encirclement.


    The Protector, now no longer split in two but united in body and mind, pounced forward, the speed enough to take the elves by surprise and suddenly, it was no longer they who pressured us, it was us, who forced them to react. Our previously stopped momentum started to pick back up, the Protector clearing the way while we turned into her Shadow, following in her wake, deflecting attacks and creating openings.


    The Blades of the Northern Wind swirled around us, their strikes not to kill but to parry and force the elves to react, each Blade capable of distracting one of the elves. And each time one of the elves came too close to our claws, their life would be ripped from their body and they would be tossed into their friends, where they would rise back up, hungering for their erstwhile allies'' flesh. It was pandemonium and with every moment we fought, the chaos was growing.


    Bodies started to pile in our wake, as not only our attacks but also the Shambling Husks and the Nethersprites started to take their toll on the elves, to say nothing of the many bodies the Protector produced in her furious rampage.


    Each cleave of her mighty Lok¡¯nar was enough to split the mountains, only that there were no mountains here, just the giants of the forest. And they, too, could be split, adding the groaning and rumbling of falling timber into the symphony of death we were conducting.


    Pearls of laughter started to fall from our beak, echoed by howls of joy from our protector, as we started to revel in the slaughter, the sensation of crushing our foes beneath us exhilarating us in a way few things had. They were trying to stand in Our path, and We would not stand for it.


    Soon, they no longer dared to approach, merely shooting arrows through the foliage, trying to slow us down that way. Our wings flapped, whipping up the wind and turning their rain of arrows into a mere drizzle and even helping to push us along.


    Now, we were running free, dashing through the forest, occasionally sending out some Icicles or a howling wind of Death to keep the elves honest, while the Protector made sure that none of them could block our path. Joy was surging within the pack, our path to freedom was clear.


    The forest started to open up before us, light shining onto a large clearing and suddenly, the Protector veered off, staying away from the open space and looking out, we could see a large group of elves, dozens of them, maybe even hundreds and before we could run far, a volley of arrows was launched our way, the wind around us sending them astray but it was enough to saturate the area, some of them glancing off the Protector¡¯s aura that had spread around us, causing them to stumble.


    We kept running, as only movement would keep us alive, if we stayed and fought, we wouldn¡¯t go far. In anger, we started to send out blasts of cold, freezing a chunk of the elven forces that had dared to venture out in the open, forcing them to slow down.


    There was another open area and this time, we had no choice but to enter it, despite the elves that were waiting for us, prepared in a battle line and ready to fight. With the river on one flank and elves ahead, in the rear and to our other flank, we could either break through the elves or try diving into the river, where the Naiads would be in their element and ready to tear us apart.


    With a frenzied howl, the Protector charged ahead, their aura flaring with gold and crimson, their armour bathed in blood and their Lok¡¯Nar gleaming in the sun and we kept up with them, staying as their Shadow, our magic striking the elvish lines and sending them to a cold grave. The line started to flex, elves getting pushed back or torn apart and for a moment, we felt victory in our grasp, only for more elves to pile on, fortifying their ranks, encircling and confining us.


    Again, bodies started to drop around us but as if they were flies and we an open flame, they simply kept going, even as more and more shambling husks started to form and Nethersprites started to pop up again.


    We needed to break them, to break through and the push to break them needed to be struck now, or this place would be our grave. Feeling the trust of the Protector, we reached out with our magic, ideas and concepts coming together, forming a coherent whole. The jewel set into our crown started to shine, the Blades of the Northern Wind forming a barrier around us, giving us the time we needed. Rising into the air, we flapped our wings and with that flap, we had sown the wind.


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    Moments later, the air started to move and the winds we had sown started to swirl around us, forming a vortex before billowing outward, now freezing cold. Now, we were reaping the storm. It was no quick working, no mere cantrip or simple spell, what we had conjured up was a true blizzard, our magic changing the weather and radiating outward. In the winds, echoed our call, for we had called Winter and now, Winter was coming.


    The chilling winds ripped the moisture from the air, gathering and turning it into hail, small, yet deadly, small icicles that moved around with lethal force, tearing through elven skin and flesh, at times even through their armour. But the hail wasn¡¯t their biggest problem, no, their biggest problem was the cold.


    The elves, adapted to their hot and humid forest, couldn¡¯t withstand the arctic chill we had brought to their land, their movement slowing down and their weaker people quickly dropping, their bodies unable to withstand what we had wrought.


    Victory in our grasp, we started to laugh and the howling of the pack joined in, while our Protector began to rampage, feeling right at home in the freezing winds.


    Suddenly, a presence struck against us, powerful magic flooding the clearing we were on, the forest itself pushing against the storm and forcing it back, the cold we had conjured fighting against warm winds and humid air, life itself trying to push against the unnatural cold.


    Oh, how we fought, the very elves around us becoming nourishment for our storm, their blood joining into the spell, sacrifices to our ambition but no matter how many we slew, more came and all the while, the dryads, their distant and content masters were warring with my storm, forcing it back again and again. The elves were dying and yet, we still couldn¡¯t escape.


    As exhaustion started to creep in, the storm started to slow down, our power dwindling and even the Protector was tired. Our bodies and minds were at their breaking point, a flickering flame on the verge of fading.


    A howl echoed through the storm, the protector once again moving as a pair, no longer one, but two. Pushing ourselves to the limit, we forced our mind to work once more, a trickle of power flowing into us, the flame within us flaring once more as the trickle became a torrent of power, of warmth and comfort. Of home¡­


    And with the flame within, a flame ignited around us, as inspiration struck us. These were our flames and in them, our enemies would burn. The winds around us ignited with ghostly, blue flames and the storm exploded outwards, blowing past any interdiction and resistance set up by our foes. There was no heat in our flames and yet, they burned the flesh, their touch cold enough to scour the flesh as they raced outward, washing across the clearing and into the forest.


    Our power spent, the storm started to slow, unveiling a frozen tundra, so very much like home, inhospitable to most life and yet, it was where I longed to be. There were no more elves standing, nothing was standing, even the distant trees had been uprooted, their trunks shattered when the cold froze the water within.


    Sinking to our knees, our mind and body shattered, breaking into two once again as we were utterly spent. Holding Lenore in my arms, I pushed myself to my feet, stumbling from exhaustion and looked around.


    Seeing Sigmir¡¯s form, lying motionless on the ground, shocked me enough to bring some semblance of order to my mind. As I stumbled forward, the lack of something registered in my confused mind, Sigmir¡¯s presence, the comforting feeling that always protected me, was gone, I could feel Lenore¡¯s mind, quite clearly thanks to holding her in my arms, and I could feel Ylva, who was panting nearby, but when reaching for Sigmir, there was nothing there.


    Only the silence of an empty void.


    Falling to my knees, I touched her face, gently caressing it in hopes that I was simply too exhausted, that my mind couldn¡¯t process things but even when touching her face, there was nothing. No breath, no warmth, no reaction.


    ¡°No, no, no, no¡­¡± I began to babble, not wanting to believe this reality but regardless of how much I wished it to change, for it to be a simple nightmare or maybe a figment of my imagination, I couldn¡¯t will reality to accommodate me.


    Weeping over her body, my tears started to fall like rain, the drops freezing before they could hit the ground. With each caress of her face, I noticed a bit of dark, grey dust floating off and when I tried to reach out with my magical senses, her body suddenly started to collapse even faster, turning into dust and getting swept off by the wind.


    The only thing remaining from her was her gear and a small, glowing crystal that I had never seen before.


    ¡°We need to go, she wouldn¡¯t want you to fall here,¡± Lenore reminded me, her voice just as exhausted as I felt.


    ¡°Can you fly?¡± I asked her, knowing that it was our only way out. I had no idea how to take Ylva with us, but I could barely think anyway, grief ripping at my heart and mind.


    Suddenly, a blue window appeared in front of me, right in the middle of my vision, demanding attention.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>


    Mental parameters outside of safe values, emergency log-out initiated. 00:10


    </td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    Knowing that I only had ten seconds, I grabbed Sigmir¡¯s stuff and pushed myself into my Hallow, entering just in time before the familiar sensation of vertigo gripped me, ripping me out of Mundus.

 Chapter 639

    Tears were still streaming down my face, as I was shunted into my capsule space, my mind whirling from what had just happened. How could Sigmir be dead?!


    Unwilling to believe what I had seen, I quickly pulled up the recording, quickly skipping past the fragmented images recorded during my Avatar form and to the moment when Lenore and I had split apart once again.


    There I was, kneeling on the desolate field, the forest around us destroyed by the freezing cold we had summoned. Lenore was in my arms, I remembered glancing at her, before realising that my connection to Sigmir had faded. Just remembering it, I instinctively reached out, trying to grasp for my beloved, only to come up empty, as if the string I had always followed was suddenly cut. Fresh tears ran down my cheeks, blurring my sight for a moment, before I forced them away, staring at the recording once more.


    Sigmir¡¯s body, lying on the field. It was unmistakably her, no matter how I deluded myself, I would never mistake her for anyone else, the body was hers. Only that she wasn¡¯t in there any longer.


    In the video, I saw myself gently caressing her face, my fingers twitching with the memory of her touch, my mind recalling her scent, her texture and even her taste, all those sensations that were deeply engrained in my mind. No, it was her body.


    The recording continued and I watched Sigmir turn into that grey dust and for a moment, a small part of me was hopeful, thinking that I had maybe seen it wrongly, that she hadn¡¯t turned into grey dust but the black sludge that Travellers turned into when they returned to the land prior to respawning. That would have meant that Sigmir had lied to me, that she had been a Traveller, but at least she wouldn¡¯t be dead.


    Only, once again, reality and the recording were merciless, washing away my delusional hopes, leaving only stark, naked truth. It wasn¡¯t the mechanism that returned a Traveller to the land, it was something else, something I was somewhat familiar with. It was the same grey dust that remained after the Nidh?gg in the Soul Prison consumed the entire essence of the trees but I was reasonably certain that the Nidh?gg hadn¡¯t acted in the battle. Which left a simple, incredibly painful conclusion.


    Somehow, Sigmir had managed to exhaust the entirety of her essence and being during the battle. And thinking back, to those fragmented memories that remained of my Avatar state, I had something of an idea when it had happened. That torrent of power, that feeling of being embraced, of being at home and at peace.


    My face twisted in a smile just from the memory, how couldn¡¯t I recognise that sensation and the emotions evoked by it, those were the very same emotions Sigmir had always brought to me with her embrace.


    Which left the mechanism, but really, it didn¡¯t matter at all how she had done it. Just that she had done it.


    A small part of me started to curse her for it. Why did she have to sacrifice herself, couldn¡¯t she have simply left me to die and fled alone? I would simply return, a little worse for wear, but after a few days, I¡¯d be back in top shape, I might have lost the Soul Prison, depending on how careful the Elves were and what mechanisms were in place for something like that, but really, I didn¡¯t care about that, not when compared to Sigmir¡¯s wellbeing.


    Pushing a shaky breath from my body, I focused again, forcing myself to be rational. It was hard and I wasn¡¯t sure I even wanted to be rational, but I had to be. The reality was, Sigmir had perished for me. No matter how many tears I spilt, I couldn¡¯t change that.


    But that didn¡¯t mean I simply had to accept it.


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    Fresh anger spilt from my heart and my mind began to consider things, to scheme and plan. How could I get Sigmir back? And how could I get back at the elves for taking her from me?


    My hands curled into fists and the grief-stricken smile on my lips warped into something else, twisting and pulling back. I had no idea how I would look for an outside observer and I really didn¡¯t care, but I had something of an idea.


    If I wanted Sigmir back, I had to make sure that Pantheon couldn¡¯t simply continue with the World of Mundus as it had been. If the world couldn¡¯t be used any longer, they would have to start it anew. And if they had to start the world anew, Sigmir might be brought back alongside the world. Maybe not with her memories, but we could make new memories and at least, I would get her back.


    The moment the idea solidified in my mind, I began to consider how to accomplish the task. The first step, somewhat unrelated to actually destroying the world of Mundus, was to take revenge on the elves and the dryads. If they hadn¡¯t forced us into a corner, Sigmir wouldn¡¯t have died. So, they had to pay.


    Maybe I would be able to find one of the trees that housed a dryad, as I had seen in the video released by Pantheon, or maybe I would have to find some other measure, but I would have some measure of revenge. If nothing else, making them pay would make me feel better and it might give Sigmir some solace in her afterlife if there was such a thing.


    For the other part, I would need to get more power. But luckily, I had a rather powerful being, trapped in the Soul Prison, who likely had the ability to plunge the world into Chaos and destruction, otherwise, the Gods wouldn¡¯t have sealed them away.


    So, I only had to stay the course, in order to get my revenge. I would have to push things further than I had intended, but there was something enticing about the idea of an endless winter.


    Freshly motivated, I began wiping the tears off my face. The pain still lingered in my chest, like an open, bleeding wound, but focusing on vengeance somewhat dulled the pain. Having something to focus on was truly important.


    However, instead of returning to Mundus, I decided to leave the capsule space entierly, to get back into the real world and get a bit of distance.


    Opening my eyes, I looked at the capsule¡¯s top and for a few minutes, I simply remained still, fresh tears running down my face. Out here, outside the Capsule space, the pain was dulled somewhat, no longer as immediate, but still there, still painful and fresh.


    Shaking my head, I pushed the capsule open and rose, stepping out of it and into my living room. Just standing there, I felt lost, uncertain what to do.


    Normally, I¡¯d go and have a shower or look for something to eat, but somehow, I didn¡¯t feel any appetite and even the comforting warmth of a shower didn¡¯t feel appealing. Looking out of the window, I realised that night had fallen at some point and some snow was coming down from the sky.


    Without thinking too much, I put on a pair of sneakers and a warm coat before walking out of my apartment and up, onto the roof of the building I was living in. There, I could look up into the oddly bright sky, the light of the city around me blotting out all the stars, leaving only an oddly bright darkness.


    In the cold night air, my tears started rolling down my face again and I began sobbing. Stepping forward, I moved to the edge of the building, letting my tears fall down, into the void, as I stared out across the city.


    Feelings of loss and emptiness welled back up within me and I began to wonder once more. Those sensations, those feelings I only ever had for Sigmir. Could I feel them again, if I managed to crush Mundus and force that world to be reborn? Or were those feelings tied to the person I had met and our experiences together?


    Closing my eyes for a moment, I remembered Kallisto, the dryad living in Neyto. She had lost her beloved centuries ago, a timeframe longer than I could truly comprehend and yet, she still lingered, still waiting for her to return. And still, she could let Adra go, despite thinking that Adra might be her beloved reincarnate, simply because Adra wasn¡¯t her beloved just yet and might never be. A mere echo, a memory. Worth hoping for, but not what she had waited for.


    Would I have the strength of will and mind to wait for Sigmir, if I could meet her again? Or would I try to form her into the one I had lost, maybe twisting her in the process as I could only form her from my perspective?


    Wiping off my tears, I turned back, uncertainty filling my head and heart and yet, despite being uncertain if I was doing the right thing, I had no doubt that I would be continuing on that path.


    Right or wrong, I simply didn¡¯t care.


    I wanted my beloved back!

 Chapter 640

    After about two hours, the siren¡¯s call of the capsule proved too strong for me to resist. Those lingering traces, those memories and even the sharp, immediate pain I had been feeling while on Mundus, all those things proving and reminding me of my relationship with Sigmir, I wanted to feel them. Outside the capsule, the pain was dull and blunt, making the experience not as immediate and almost unreal. It just wasn¡¯t enough.


    Delving into my capsule space, I still felt that there was something lacking, the emotions were clearer but not as sharp as I wanted them to be. But I had something that I wanted to do first before I could return to Mundus. I needed to remember and immortalise.


    Stepping through space, I reappeared in the temple I had set up in the beginning, where four alcoves housed statues of four goddesses, each of them a distinct form of power in female form. All of them held their own appeal, but none of them could compare to my Sigmir.


    Shaping Sigmir¡¯s form was simplicity itself, the memory of her body was deeply engraved into every facet of her being and the capsule space allowed me to form her image directly from my thoughts. No need to mess around with any tools, pure imagination and clarity of thought were enough.


    Soon, Sigmir¡¯s statue stood in the middle of the temple, a little bigger and more prominent than even the deities around it. Here, I would be able to return and remember her, whenever I wanted.


    Sitting cross-legged in front of the statue, I mentally triggered the process of logging into Road to Purgatory, letting myself fall into that world once more. The world where I had found my most important person and the world where I had lost her. The world that I was willing to destroy if it brought her back to me.


    After the brief moment of vertigo that came with logging into Mundus, I found myself in my Hallow, the raw, irritating sensation that followed the use of my Avatar state irking me but compared to the sharp pain in my chest, it was only a nuisance.


    ¡°You¡¯re back,¡± Lenore greeted me, exhaustion palpable in her mental voice.


    Spreading my senses outward, I was stunned for a moment. Lenore was flying through the sky, that much was expected, but nearby, just a few metres away from her, was Ylva, running¡­ through the sky.


    Below her paws, I could faintly see a shimmering glow, as if there was a faint, almost translucent something she was running on, but what that might be, I had no idea. But from the looks of it, the two of them had managed to get away from the elves.


    ¡°Can you take over? I¡¯m about to fall asleep mid-flight,¡± Lenore asked me and after a moment of consideration, I gave my assent. We still needed to hide from the elves, or history would repeat itself, so some care was needed.


    ¡°I shall carry you,¡± Ylva offered, her voice filled with profound grief, one that I could easily understand. She, too, was grieving, her connection to Sigmir just as strong as mine was to Lenore, partners, friends, family, all those labels and many more could be used to describe it and now, that other half of hers was gone.


    Pushing out of my hollow, I dropped with gravity, only to step into the shadows of the forest and back out, gently landing on Ylva¡¯s back and holding on, letting her carry me.


    ¡°She is gone, but I will carry you in her stead,¡± Ylva promised me, her words bringing a fresh wave of grief to my heart. But at the same time, I could feel Ylva¡¯s warmth, the connection formed by the bonds of our small pack still there, reminding me that I wasn¡¯t alone, wasn¡¯t the only one who had lost. Maybe misery shared truly was misery halved.


    ¡°Are you alright?¡± I asked, knowing that Ylva wasn¡¯t but needing to ask regardless. The only response I got was a soft chuff, accompanied by a wave of grief and pain flowing through our connection, the emotions just as sharp as my own.


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    Wrapping my arms around her, I simply held on, my tears wetting Ylva¡¯s fur as she continued to dash through the sky, staying just beneath the canopy.


    Feeling restless, I needed to distract myself, to find something to focus on. A part of me wanted to immediately rip out a chunk of the elven forest to feed the Nidh?gg in the Soul Prison but that would come later. First, we needed to get some rest, to recuperate for a bit, before we could deliver their share of pain to them.


    Instead, I looked at my log, where hundreds of messages waited for me. It had been an incredible battle and while the losses most certainly outweighed the gains, there had been some gains.


    The first pair of messages stopped me in my tracks as if I had crashed into a solid wall.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>


    You reached level 157.


    </td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>


    You have been the target of the Eternal Embrace Ability. The entire EXP of the user have been transferred over to you.


    </td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    Level hundred-fifty-seven. A jump of thirty-six levels, or something thereabout, maybe thirty-four or thirty-five, depending on how much EXP the previous battle had given me. Regardless, it was an utterly insane jump, a jump which Sigmir had paid for with her life.


    There were no more tears running down my face, only a profound numbness, the words of the message imprinting in my mind. Eternal Embrace. What a nice name.


    Mentally numb, I opened up my character sheet to see the numbers there. Fourteen free attribute points were easy. But my intelligence had been increased by a whopping twenty-one, bringing it to a mind-boggling ninety-six, while my Intuition had been raised to sixty.


    The increases should make me ecstatic, but somehow, I couldn¡¯t make myself care. Numbly, I put four of my free points into Intelligence, bringing it to an even hundred, triggering a new notification.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Special Ability gained</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You gained the Special Ability: Perfect Magic Control</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>For having an Intelligence of 100 or higher, you gained Perfect Magic Control. You can now control the entirety of your magic, infusing it into your spells at will and even retaining your control for a time while your magic is in your vicinity.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    Blinking, I couldn¡¯t quite believe what I was reading. Perfect Magic Control, it sounded incredible and yet, there was no joy within me. The joy that should be there had already turned to dust, leaving only a cold and empty void.


    Shaking my head, I pushed onward, quickly scanning down the various skill increases, numbly taking in the information, not truly caring that pretty much all my magical skills had gained a point or two and even the improved traits, further increasing the power of my large-scale magic could barely move my mood. There was even another increase of my Defilement-trait, further empowering my Blood Magic but also increasing the chance that Nethersprites appeared when I used it casually.


    In addition, I gained a Title called Stormcaller, increasing my ability to conjure up storms and similar violent weather phenomena.


    And yet, regardless of all those gains, it was as if all the joy I had been experiencing had been sucked out of Road to Purgatory and Mundus had turned from a wonderful world that I felt at home in, into a sea of misery, no better than the reality I had been escaping from.


    A part of me thought about simply logging out, maybe tossing the capsule to the trash and never bothering with the world again. But even as that thought wandered through my mind, I could feel Ylva and Lenore, both of whom were with me, keeping me company even as they were grieving themselves.


    No, I couldn¡¯t just leave those two. And I couldn¡¯t let Sigmir¡¯s sacrifice be in vain, not if there was a chance to meet her again. I couldn¡¯t let myself drown in despair, I needed to keep looking forward and to stay my course.


    Fanning the anger in my heart, and the desire for revenge, I managed to gain a semblance of motivation. I needed to keep going if I wanted to meet Sigmir again.


    Raising my head and sniffing the air, I began to plot. I had a few things I wanted to accomplish and only so much time. The elves and the dryads would be looking for us and without Adra, I had no idea how long it would take them to find us.


    Better to give them something else to think about, a single devastating blow that would disrupt their communications and shatter their cohesion.


    A vicious smile appeared on my face, as I noticed a faint, almost imperceivable trace of magic in the air, something that suffused the entire forest. The connection of a dryad to the forest, it was their strongest trait and the greatest tool in their arsenal. And I was quite certain it also made them into the best treats for a certain Dragon with a taste for trees.

 Chapter 641

    ¡°How exhausted are you?¡± I asked Ylva, knowing that she had to be running on fumes by now. She had fought just as hard as Lenore and I had and now she was even carrying me to safety.


    ¡°And how are you flying in the first place?¡± I added, my curiosity pushing past the grief, if only for a moment.


    ¡°We are pack, acknowledged by the Ancestor,¡± Ylva replied as if those words explained everything.


    ¡°So?¡± I pushed, unwilling to give up just like that, ¡°What does it mean?¡±


    ¡°You helped me awake the Ancestor¡¯s Bloodline and today, the Ancestor felt that I needed a bit of help, so he granted me a blessing. The blessing allows me to freely run through the sky,¡± she explained and while I still was unable to understand why wolves could run through the sky, the explanation that it was a divine blessing could at least be chalked up under some sort of ¡°divine bullshit¡±-category.


    Shaking my head, I decided to focus on my other question, ¡°And how exhausted are you?¡±


    ¡°I¡¯ll have to rest in an hour, maybe two,¡± she replied, finally giving me a simple and straightforward answer.


    ¡°Can you head in that direction?¡± I asked, giving her the direction towards the dryad attuned to the forest around us. I couldn¡¯t tell how far she was away, but she was south of us and she had an appointment with my blade and the Nidh?gg. It would be rude to keep her waiting overlong.


    ¡°Sure?¡± Ylva agreed, though she obviously didn¡¯t know why, ¡°What are you planning?¡±


    ¡°Isn¡¯t it obvious?¡± I asked, letting out an angry snort, ¡°They took my beloved from me, what do you think I¡¯m about to do?¡± I didn¡¯t even wait for her to consider, before answering my own question, ¡°Revenge, what else. This day will go into elven history, as a day of mourning and a day of remembrance. If there even will be an elven history, once we are done with them.¡±


    The thought brought a smile to my face, just the idea that there wouldn¡¯t be any elves to tell their story made me feel quite happy.  Maybe I should create something to chronicle why the elves would be suffering, just so those coming after them would know their crimes.


    The smile didn¡¯t fade from my face, even as I closed my eyes and fresh tears started to trickle down my face. I had no idea how I had any tears left, but my avatar somehow managed to surprise me. I tried to rest, maybe get a bit of sleep while Ylva carried me forward, but somehow, the moment I closed my eyes, Sigmir¡¯s form appeared before me.


    It was akin to a revolving lantern, images of Sigmir flickering through my mind, from the moment I had met her, fleeing from the hounds unleashed by her tribe, to that last moment, when she turned into dust. So many memories, so many sensations of her. Images of her, memories of her scent, of her taste and texture. They were all running through my mind, never stopping, never letting me rest. And yet, I welcomed those images, no matter how painful it was to have them in my mind, I wanted to experience that pain, even if it was only a faint reflection of the pleasure those sensations had brought me before.


    As I was floating in the darkness, a pair of arms wrapped around me. The familiar sensation of Sigmir¡¯s presence entered my mind, the sensation of comfort and home wrapping around me. Held in her arms, I felt myself relax, my mind falling into darkness as exhaustion claimed me.


    ¡°Morgana, you need to wake up,¡± a growl shook me from my sleep, a wonderful dream fading like mist in the morning sun. For a moment, I felt the lingering sensation of Sigmir¡¯s arms around me, only to realise it had been nothing but a dream. For a moment, I couldn¡¯t breathe, feeling as if someone had punched me in the gut and a sob escaped my mouth.


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    ¡°I¡¯m awake,¡± I told Ylva, who had woken me up.


    ¡°I need to rest for a bit,¡± she told me and I realised that her previous, steady and secure gait was flagging, making her look like she was very much on her last legs.


    ¡°I¡¯ll carry you,¡± I immediately promised, knowing that stopping would mean the elves could easily hunt us down. I wasn¡¯t sure how I would be able to carry Ylva, she was quite sizable after all, but I was confident I¡¯d be able to find a way.


    ¡°Catch me,¡± Ylva told me, and suddenly, I wasn¡¯t holding her back and riding her, but I was hugging a tiny puppy and realised that she had essentially done the reverse of the ability that turned her huge and made herself tiny. However, given that I wasn¡¯t riding her any longer, I was now falling. For a moment, I was stunned before I managed to get my legs under me and absorbed the shock while holding onto Ylva.


    Looking at the pup-sized wolf in my arms, I realised that she had truly been on her last legs and had already fallen asleep. Even as I kept running, I shook my head and put her around my neck, her size just right to serve as a furry scarf. That way, she wasn¡¯t in the way and could rest reasonably well.


    It took me a few hundred metres to realise that I couldn¡¯t stay on the ground. The trees, and the forest around me, were the territory of the elves and while I was reasonably certain that the trees couldn¡¯t see me, I wasn¡¯t certain whether they were able to feel movement on the ground. Without Adra, I couldn¡¯t even ask how her ability exactly worked, but it didn¡¯t truly matter, I needed to get off the ground.


    Knowing that Lenore was still completely out of it, I did the next best thing, if I couldn¡¯t fly, I could at least fall in style.


    Looking up, I fixated on the shadows between the canopy high above and far ahead, stepping into the shadows around me and back out, high in the air. Gravity immediately did its thing and I started to plummet, only to step through the shadows again, coming out some distance ahead and at my previous height.


    After a moment, I decided to conjure up a sheet of Ice behind me, shaped into a thin triangle, giving me an approximation of wings, slowing down my fall and turning some of the downwards velocity into an impulse that carried me forward. Gliding, instead of flying, but it was good enough and allowed me to quickly travel, as long as I kept stepping back into the air.


    Step after step, I kept moving forward that way, a part of my mind fully focused on regaining Astral Power, while the rest of me had to focus on mechanically picking a shadow and stepping through them. It was a lot more efficient compared to taking a single, long-distance shadow step, but it was exhausting.


    ¡°What are you doing?!¡± Lenore¡¯s mental voice jostled me from my focused state and I almost missed the next step. Luckily, I had already reinforced the wings of Ice on my back, allowing me to easily glide for some distance, even without stepping back into the canopy.


    ¡°Avoiding the ground,¡± I replied, letting Lenore share in my thoughts. There was still some rawness, but she could easily understand my thoughts, even returning quite a bit of appreciation. While she was able to fly naturally, she could recognise the effort I had taken to fly on my own.


    ¡°What are your plans now?¡± she asked, maybe noticing that some of the grief within me had morphed into determination. While a part of me wanted to wallow in misery, a much larger part of me wanted those who had taken Sigmir from me to wallow in misery instead.


    ¡°Make them pay,¡± I replied, letting her understand the entire plan I had been hatching, the idea to first strike at a dryad or two until we managed to make it to the Mountains of Ice. And there, I would be able to crack the Soul Prison, not only allowing the Nidh?gg to return to the cycle of reincarnation but if I was able to pull it off, bringing the dragon back to Mundus proper.


    ¡°Ambitious,¡± she commented and I could feel both awe and apprehension at the ideas I was forming. She could appreciate what I had in mind and was quite obviously in favour of it, but at the same time, she worried whether it would work out or not.


    ¡°It is,¡± I acknowledged, ¡°But think of the upside. Bringing a primordial being back into the world, you and Ylva would gain a lot from it. And I¡¯ll vanish from this world, following after Sigmir.¡±


    ¡°If that¡¯s what you feel you need to do, I¡¯ll support you. And I know that Ylva will help as well,¡± Lenore reminded me, though I could feel a trace of sadness in her voice as if she wasn¡¯t fully on board with my actions.


    ¡°I¡¯m not long for this world anyway,¡± I reminded her, not wanting her to think I was abandoning her out of grief. She was my dear friend and if I could, I might even stay with her, but given the circumstances, I could only hope to meet her again in the next world.


    Both of us fell silent, as I was silently gliding through the forest, stepping through the shadows to gain altitude from time to time. Always towards the dryad, resting in the burrow of her tree, not knowing that death was coming for her on wings of Ice.

 Chapter 642

    ¡°There seems to be nothing around here,¡± Lenore mused, her mental voice filled with disbelief. I could empathize with her, seeing the massive tree and the empty meadow around it didn¡¯t invoke images of an incredibly important sanctuary and yet, it was exactly what we were looking at.


    It had taken us the entire day and most of the night to cross the distance to the dryad in control over this stretch of forest, carefully following the magic traces and making sure that none of us ever set foot on the ground. To our understanding, the Dryad¡¯s awareness through trees used vibrations in the ground and tactile sensations of the trees themselves, so cutting those off would prevent them from passively noticing us, now that Adra was no longer with us.


    I still had no idea where she and Rai had ended up, I could vaguely feel that Rai was still alive, the connection between master and disciple strong enough for that, but determining in which direction or how far away he was was not within my abilities. Maybe with a lot of work, a large ritual and some luck, but really, it might just be for the best. Adra had been getting antsy and now, she could continue travelling wherever she wanted with Rai. That is, until I managed to accomplish my revenge.


    And now, it was time for the first step of vengeance.


    Shifting my weight, I angled the sheet of Ice I had used to glide upwards, momentum rapidly bleeding off and just before I would plummet down like a stone, I pushed myself into the all-encompassing shadows of the night, stepping into the opening of the massive tree below.


    From that moment on, speed was of the essence, I had to assume that the tree had already noticed my intrusion, despite my concealment-magic and stealth-ability. Moving quickly, I stepped up the stairs, following the currents of magic and divination that were flowing with the water from above, homing in on my target.


    The dryad looked quite surprised when we barged in, Ylva running next to me, while Lenore was once more in her Hallow, watching through my eyes.


    ¡°It is pointless, you will not be able to slay me, monster,¡± the dryad calmly told me, looking at me with an air of careless superiority. As if I was merely an ant, unable to touch her lofty pride. A pride she had reason to hold if my understanding of her people held true.


    From various conversations with Adra, I had a reasonably good idea of a Dryad¡¯s capabilities and the biggest part was the connection to their tree. But what if that tree wasn¡¯t just a singular tree, imbued with powerful vitality but ultimately nothing that couldn¡¯t be destroyed by an axe, a lightning strike or even some simple fire? What if the tree the dryad bonded with was part of a larger organism, hundreds of thousands of trees, all part of that single organism, with hundreds of dryads bonded to them?


    Wouldn¡¯t that mean a dryad had an almost infinite pool of vitality to draw on, making it virtually impossible to kill them?


    The complete lack of magical defences had given me some confidence in my assumption, anything else would be foolishness to the point of stupidity, but if the dryads, in their opinion, couldn¡¯t be killed, why expend resources to guard them? Why not simply let them live as they liked, without the shackles brought by guards and security?


    ¡°We shall see,¡± I growled back, noticing that the dryad was extending her magic into the tree around us, causing branches to sprout around us, trying to box Ylva and me in. Ylva simply jumped to the side, before pushing off mid-air, using her newly gained abilities to fly to her full advantage.


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    In the meantime, I stepped through the shadows, appearing behind the dryad and stabbing both blades into her defenceless back, only to get stuck. It was almost as if I was trying to chop wood, some old and gnarly oak, hard and unyielding. From the dryad¡¯s reaction, or rather lack thereof, the wound I had caused wasn¡¯t even enough to be considered a scratch. There was only a sigh before she turned, her arm swinging with indomitable momentum. Her strike carried enough force to crush rocks or impudent ants that challenged a dryad in her burrow, forcing me to abandon my blades and frantically dodge aside.


    ¡°See, pointless,¡± the dryad snorted before another swipe of her hand forced Ylva to back away.


    The dryad wanted a point, and I would give her one. Briefly hiding in the shadows, I reached into my bag, pulling my Athame and the Soul Prison out. Feeling for the moment using my bond with Ylva, I stepped back out, managing to catch the dryad off-guard again and creating another thin scratch in her skin. My athame simply lacked the sturdiness to cut into her, but I had managed that scratch and it was enough.


    Keeping the blade in the wound, even as it sealed around it, I pulled, putting my newly acquired Perfect Magic Control to the test, employing it to flood her system with Blood- and Death-Magic. I could feel the boundless vitality of the dryad, the attacks Ylva and I had launched not even enough to threaten the body before us, let alone the countless trees she was linked with. But this had never been about threatening them or exhausting their vitality.


    Before the dryad could get her bearings and push my magic out of her system, I did just that, ripping on the Blood Magic I had infused into her and establishing that vital link to the Nidh?gg.


    Suddenly, her eyes opened wide and a shrill, pained screech was ripped from her throat, all the arrogant superiority stripped from her by the pain of having her magic and vitality ripped from her. Normally, that would be far from enough to threaten her, there was likely no non-divine Blood Mage strong enough to channel the entirety of the forest¡¯s vitality. Even if Blood Magic took the magic from another, it still required some effort from the caster and this was far too much for me to channel.


    But it wasn¡¯t me who was channelling the vitality, I was merely a bridge that established the initial contact. And the moment that contact was there, I could feel the Nidh?gg in their prison rearing up and taking control of the spell, power flooding through my system, allowing me to feel the edges of something more, something unbelievably vast and powerful.


    It was intoxicating, strong enough to make me forget everything around me, my whole existence flooded with awe and fear. For a moment, I could feel those black flames, the power to destroy everything but then, the sensation was gone, leaving me a little disappointed. While I had my own flames now, the fascination I felt for the Flames of Nidh?gg remained quite strong.


    Then the process was complete, mere moments after I had initiated it and the Nidh?gg was in full control of the Astral Power I had forced into the Dryad, using it as if the power had been theirs in the first place.


    I could feel the massive fluctuation of power, the tree around us starting to burn in black, heatless flames but there was so much more. It wasn¡¯t just that single, massive tree, there were hundreds, if not thousands, of trees around us, the very forest that surrounded this meadow, I could feel the vitality of it all, all getting devoured by those black flames.


    Laughing, I looked at the dryad, keeping hold of my athame, savouring the mixture of pain, fear and despair in her gaze and the air around us.


    ¡°You wanted a point,¡± I mocked, ecstatic to literally plunge a dagger into one of those who had killed Sigmir. Plunge a dagger into their back and make it stick.


    The dryad was no longer capable of communication, or reason, or anything other than screaming in pain, the sounds both painfully loud but also incredibly pleasant to listen to, the music of vengeance.


    The feeding lasted for a few minutes, the air around us thick with power, even as the tree rapidly crumbled and yet, there was enough power in the air to allow me to stand on the very air itself, coalescing the shadows into a solid form. It was the technique I had used to create those black, impenetrable voids, only now I had enough power at my disposal to easily sustain one. At least until the Nidh?gg was done feasting.


    Turning, I could see the forest burn with black fire, as far as my eyes could reach. The world itself was trembling under the powers invoked until finally, a satisfied sensation of gratitude reached me from the Soul Prison, the dryad nothing more but a withered husk that rapidly turned to dust.


    The first blow of my vengeance had been struck.

 Chapter 643

    Letting the Darkness around me dissipate a little, I let myself sink down to the ground. While the aftermath of the Nidh?gg¡¯s devastation wasn¡¯t as welcoming and homely as the frozen wastes left after the ice storm we had conjured had faded, but the darkness wasn¡¯t too bad. It was quiet and solemn, nothing around to disturb me.


    There was no life in a massive radius, nothing I could see, just enough magic to soon turn into an area of Wild Magic. Only, for now, all that magic was still faintly linked to me, giving me a heady rush. From what I could feel, I was relatively certain that the Nidh?gg had devoured almost all of the Vitality linked to that dryad, leaving only a tiny percentage of inefficiency that was lingering in the area but even a small percentage of a humongous amount was quite a bit of power. That power, along with the lifeless wastes around me, gave me the confidence to relax a little.


    With a minuscule amount of effort, I conjured up my throne, sitting down comfortably and for a few moments, I simply let my gaze wander around the wasteland, taking in the devastation. It was incredible, far beyond what I had thought possible, even if I sacrificed hundreds of people. There was nothing left, no trees, no grass, no life, nothing but grey dust, as far as my eyes could see in the darkness of the night.


    Another thought created a stand for the Soul Prison, a dragon¡¯s claw of Ice that reached up from the ground, allowing me to place the Prison there, while I considered the next steps.


    Feeling the magic still linked to me, I could estimate that the radius of devastation around us was about two kilometres, the realisation making me both grin with happiness but also feel a little gloomy. Sure, we had laid waste to a wide area of the forest but in the grand scheme of things, even this massive area was nothing but a speck of dust, a smudge on the map.


    Stretching out my hand, I let some of the Darkness around us coalesce again, my mind lingering idly for a moment, not willing to take the next step, to deal with the next issue. Messing around with magic might distract me from my grief for a few moments but even as that thought came, the grief flooded back, the magic no longer attractive.


    Instead, I reached into my magic bag and pulled out the things I had shoved in earlier, Sigmir¡¯s possessions and what little remained of her. The grey dust she had crumbled into was still there, lifeless like ashes and no matter how I touched it, magically or physically, I just couldn¡¯t feel anything from it. It was just that, dust, the matter retaining no connection to the person once composed of it.


    ¡°Some wind, please,¡± I quietly asked Lenore, gently nudging her to leave her Hallow and she obliged, stepping onto the armrest next to me, softly flapping her wings and conjuring up a swirl of wind.


    Reaching out, I placed my hand into the wind, letting freezing air flow from it, turning the wind cold, adding snow and Ice. It was far from the storm we had conjured up earlier but it was a nice touch of home, of the frozen forests of the north where I had met Sigmir.


    I knew we wouldn¡¯t be able to create any permanent memorial, not here, not without the elves desecrating it, but giving Sigmir a small send-off felt right.


    Rising from my seat, I let the dust sprinkle into the wind, letting our magic carry it up before letting it fall back down, dust and snow mixing together, landing on the devastated soil all around us. This had been where we struck the first blow of our vengeance and this was a suitable place for Sigmir to rest. A memorial of a different kind, the first of many, a scar that wouldn¡¯t easily heal. Maybe that was the best memorial for a warrior like her, a cairn built from the skulls of our enemies.


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    Next to me, Ylva was howling, her sorrow filling the air with a mournful sound. I wanted to join in but simply lacked the necessary organs to produce a suitable howl. Instead, I closed my eyes and let my magic move with my emotions, trying to impart my sorrow onto the wind and into the world. Lenore joined me, our magic turning the gentle wind to a whistling storm, hail whipping around, as the sky itself wept for my lost love.


    The dust had long since been blown away, scattered across a massive area when the winds around us died down, no longer getting whipped into a frenzy by our magic. Wiping away some of my tears, I took in a deep breath and sat back down, looking at the next item from my bag.


    It was Sigmir¡¯s weapon, the Lok¡¯nar of her father, originally well-crafted but time, hard usage and repeated maintenance in less-than-ideal circumstances had slowly taken their toll. Looking at it, I could almost see Sigmir¡¯s hands taking it back up, ready to charge into battle once again. It made me wonder what her father would have thought about me, our relationship and the path we had taken. Would he despise me for leading his daughter to her death? Or would he rejoice for Sigmir, for the conviction she had shown in walking her path to the end? But of one thing I was certain, he would be satisfied with the vengeance we would wreak. If those slain in Sigmir¡¯s honour would accompany her to whatever afterlife there might be, my beloved would have a train worthy of a dozen kings and queens.


    Putting the Lok¡¯nar aside, it would never be used again, I simply lacked the mass to swing such a weapon, even if I might have the strength, I reached back into the bag, pulling out her armour. There were some tears in it, some cuts and some areas crumbled by blunt impacts, showing just how hard that last battle had been. Looking at my own clothes, I could see similar marks, but mine were almost pristine compared to Sigmir¡¯s. It showed just how well she had protected me.


    Shaking my head, I put the armour next to the Lok¡¯Nar, intent on burying them somewhere together, somewhere where the elves would never be able to disturb my beloved¡¯s rest. Maybe in the Nexus we were heading to, or high in the mountains, near the eternal Ice of the glaciers, where the cold winds of the mountains could keep her company?


    I would find a good place, one where Sigmir could rest until this world ended and I came for her once again.


    Looking into the bag once more, there were a bunch of miscellaneous items remaining and something I had yet to understand. The small, pale-blue gem that had coalesced when Sigmir¡¯s body had vanished. What it was, I had no idea but was eager to find out.


    Looking at it normally, all I could see was a dim glow, reminiscent of Sigmir¡¯s skin colour but not quite. It appeared to be cut, countless facets fragmenting the glow out, but where that glow originally came from, I couldn¡¯t see. Giving it a sniff, there was a faint scent about it, one that I immediately recognised as Sigmir¡¯s, the scent of her aura and person, that completely personal scent devoid of any outside traces.


    Fresh tears welled up in my eyes and I pulled my legs inwards, curling up on my throne as I held that gem in hand, my eyes closing as the scent enveloped me. Memories of that scent, of times when I could let myself lose in that scent, right after Sigmir and I had taken a bath played in my mind. Her voice echoed in my mind, sweet nothings she had said to me, sounds of pleasure and contentment I had pulled from her throat, all those wonderful memories, they were flowing through my mind, oh so sweet but also so incredibly bitter.


    ¡°I¡¯ll always be with you¡­¡± My ears twitched when I heard that voice, carried on the gentle wind that was still swirling around the throne I was sitting on. Instantly, I shot up, my eyes darting around, searching for the source of my beloved¡¯s voice, only to see nothing, but devastated wastelands.


    Looking at Yvla and Lenore, both of whom had been resting, I was reasonably certain that they hadn¡¯t heard her and yet, I was certain that I had.


    Shaking my head, I finally decided to use the Identify-Skill on the gem, getting a simple, blue box devoid of anything but a name. Lover¡¯s Memory.


    Nothing more, nothing less.


    And yet, I knew I would keep that gem with me, for as long as I drew breath. Pulling out my dagger, I made a cut into my forehead, pressing the gem into it and using my Blood Magic to encase it there. Now, Sigmir¡¯s memory would be forever in my head, right where I wanted it to be.

 Interlude: Call of the Crusade

    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>


    Everyone walks their own Road to Purgatory


    But sometimes, a Call is made and all Roads must bend to follow the same direction¡­


    </td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    In a dark forest, a lonely, black-clad figure is slowly walking, until the figure stops in the middle of a clearing. With a wave of a dainty, pale-blue hand, five massive trees around the clearing start to glow with a malevolent, blood-red colour, slowly pulsing to an unheard beat.


    The figure starts to laugh softly, before raising their hand, holding up a crystal that glows with a faint, purple light. Moments later, the five massive trees burst into black flames, rapidly turning to dust.


    ¡°We need to send out a call,¡± a female voice declares, her tone gentle but filled with conviction.


    A small group of teenagers runs happily across a clearing, playing at being the Wild Hunt, chasing an unseen prey across the land. Their leader is sending an arrow into the shadowy forest ahead, laughing all the while.


    Suddenly, the teenagers freeze, staring into the forest with fear in their eyes, before turning around and running away, screaming. The view shifts, showing the teenagers running away as seen from inside the forest, only that there¡¯s a dark blade in the foreground, dripping blood.


    Moments later, a hail of razor-sharp Icicles starts falling between the teenagers, the Icicles exploding just before they hit anything. All, but two, teenagers fall to the ground, their flesh lacerated, their mouths screaming in pain as their blood soaks into the torn earth.


    ¡°What call are we sending out, your Holiness?¡± a male voice asks, humble, almost servile.


    A group of cavalry sets out from a massive thicket of thorny vines, mounted on massive felines, clad in leather and armed with spears. Alongside them run a group of guards, clad similarly but their arms are sheathed, carrying gurneys and medical supplies. With them is a teenager, one of those who managed to get away before, returning to help their friends.


    Before them lies a field of slaughter, the teenagers who had just been running away, now bleeding and screaming for help. The mounted guards give a quick salute to their counterparts, before setting off, charging into the forest. In the meantime, the medics begin directing the guards, trying to help the injured teenagers, to rescue as many as they can.


    In the forest, a group of elves was carefully moving through dense fog, thick enough to turn those more than an arm¡¯s length away into vague silhouettes. Their movement is slow, methodical, when suddenly, one of them lets out a sharp scream, only to be cut short moments later. All of the elves turn, trying to find their attacker when a massive figure quickly moves past them, a casual backswing of a giant axe sending another elf flying.


    Following behind that silhouette are more shapes, smaller, following in the bigger one¡¯s wake. One of the elves jumpers forward, trying to intercept, only for one of the running figures to strike, faster than the elf¡¯s attack. The elf falls and suddenly, an eerie, inhuman screech echoes through the forest, striking fear in the hearts of all sane beings that hear it.


    Near the fallen elf, a grotesque being tumbles out of the air, a maggot-white monster with a soft-looking body, five legs and far too many tentacles, all ending in gaping maws, lined with sharp teeth. The creepy monster wastes no time, leaping on the mortally wounded elf, tearing into their flesh for a moment, before attacking the next elf. Seeing that abomination, the elves abandon their pursuit and focus on killing the monster before them.


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    ¡°Ancient evil is stirring¡­ We are calling for a Crusade,¡± the female replies, pausing for a moment to let out a sigh.


    In the middle of a large, calm meadow stands a massive tree, towering over the land. High above, the moon and stars shed some dim light past a few clouds, a gentle wind makes the grass sway and the leaves rustle. From a burrow in the middle of the tree falls a small waterfall, dropping into a placid lake.


    Suddenly, a dark figure appears in that opening, only for a moment, before vanishing again. Moments later, the tree bursts into black flames, flames that race across the meadow in a wave of dark fire, incinerating the distant forest. From above, past the clouds, the area becomes visible, miles upon miles of forest, engulfed in black fire.


    ¡°Who¡­ who are we calling?¡± the male voice asks again, breaking as if terrified.


    Between the trees, three figures are fighting against a group of elves. A massive female, clad in leather, flanked by a silver wolf and a smaller female, clade in cloud-white, diaphanous garb, her black hair sparkling in the dim light. The two women are surrounded by a crimson aura, shining brightly on the large female and dimly, almost like a reflection of the other one. Each swipe of the giant¡¯s axe forces the elves back, while the smaller one suddenly darts forward, blades tearing through elven flesh with incredible brutality.


    The elves are trying to encircle them, to use their numbers to counter their opponents'' superior strength. Only, it isn¡¯t working.


    Their smaller foe suddenly vanishes, leaving just a rapidly fading shadow behind, only to reappear from the shadow of a tree, blades already striking. Her chosen target tries to dodge, only to stumble and fail, the blades piercing into his back. For a moment, the elf¡¯s mouth gapes open in an unheard scream, his eyes burning with a mix of grey and blood-red light, before the female lets the elf drop, like a toy that was thrown into the trash.


    Moments later, after the two females have already moved on, the dropped elf rises again, eyes now completely grey, only now, the elf looks completely feral. With an animalistic growl, the elf leaps forward, trying his best to sink his teeth into the unprotected face of a former compatriot, the sudden attack sending both of them to the ground.


    ¡°Everyone¡­¡± the female orders, now only steel remaining in her voice.


    In the middle of an open clearing, a wolf-headed giant, holding a massive axe cleaves into a line of elves, trying to hold her back. Following in her shadow is a raven-headed monster, black wings unfurled, swooping out of her shadow, striking with wicked claws of shining ice. Each strike of the raven sends one of the elves flying, only for that elf to rise moments later, eyes devoid of life and driven by a hunger for their former compatriots.


    Chaos reigns and a rain of blood falls all around them.


    Suddenly, a dreadful howl pushes the elves back for a moment and the giant is visible in all her crimson glory., golden light shining for her eyes. As if to echo the howl, the raven lets out a loud call and for a moment, the world is still as the raven rises into the air.


    Then, a beat of black wings and the world starts to move again, at first there is only a gentle breeze, barely moving the trampled grass but with each beat of those black wings, the wind becomes stronger, turning from gentle breeze into brutal blizzard, fog and hail turning shapes blurry. Within that storm, flowers of crimson blood bloom, limbs go flying and the cries of the fallen get carried away, never to be heard again.


    Finally, as if to mock the desperate elves, the frozen wind ignites with a pale-blue flame, the fire cold enough to burn their skin and turn their lush, tropical forest into a frozen tundra. One last beat of the black wings and the flames race outward, trees bursting from freezing winds, all life snuffed out by those cold, blue flames.


    As the pale-blue flames race outward, they turn into a deeper blue and just as the globe becomes visible, blue flames spreading across the land and oceans, a hand becomes visible, supporting the globe from below and a golden-robed figure turns around, their face hidden in the shadows of her cowl.


    ¡°...Everyone, who wants to live under the Sun.¡± the female voice finishes, full of conviction.


    As those words echo, countless people are seen. From petite gnomes to slender elves, from stout dwarves to hulking Giantblood, from serpentine Naga to winged Valkyrs, people of all races are gathered under a single banner. The banner of the golden sun.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>


    Will you follow the call? Or will you try to keep your path, on your Road to Purgatory?


    </td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    The image fades to black and the logo is shown, an image of the globe, with ghostly blue flames racing across it until it is completely shrouded in an aura of blue fire.

 Chapter 644

    With a step into the shadows, I disappeared from the area devastated by the Nidh?gg¡¯s flames. Everything I had planned to accomplish was done and I had even gained a point in Darkness-magic from messing around with the immense amount of power left after the feeding. In addition, killing the dryad and helping the Nidh?gg consume those acres of land had somehow netted me enough EXP to push me to level hundred fifty-eight. A pleasant surprise but not a tremendously impactful one.


    Appearing high in the sky, I conjured up another sheet of Ice, spreading my arms and encasing parts of them in it, so I could ride the wind. Angling downward, I quickly began to accelerate, towards the distant trees, only to step into the shadows once more, appearing yet higher up and quickly moving forward.


    Looking down, I could see the full extent of the devastation we had caused and a grin appeared on my face. This would light a fire under the elves, forcing them to prepare and adapt for me, so we couldn¡¯t sneak into another of their precious trees and assassinate another dryad. Setting up defences and guards would take time and consume resources, which couldn¡¯t be used to actually hunt us down.


    Sure, we wouldn¡¯t be able to kill another dryad and as much as I had enjoyed the look on the dryad¡¯s face when the Nidh?gg¡¯s power had consumed her, I was okay with that. I had bigger fish to fry anyway.


    No, our main objective was to cross the last remaining distance to the Mountains of Ice, it should only take another week if we could remain in the sky, longer if we had to go to ground. Once there, once I managed to find and conquer the Nexus, I would be able to channel those vast amounts of power in order to break the prison and unleash the Nidh?gg proper. Maybe, with a bit of work and persuasion, I would even be able to create some sort of golem-body for it, allowing it to remain on this plane and not venture on to wherever souls went after they died.


    It didn¡¯t take long for Ylva and Lenore to catch up with me and once again, I had to wonder about Ylva¡¯s ability to run on air. But then, considering that the primordial Ancestor who had given her the ability was supposed to be able to swallow the sun, it wasn¡¯t as strange. If you wanted to swallow the sun, you had to get there in the first place, right? In addition, there were a lot of myths that associated wolves with the northern Wind, which could be another connection. Or maybe I was thinking too much about it and the primordial Ancestor was a deity and could do whatever he wanted. Somehow, I had a feeling that the last reason was the most realistic one.


    ¡°Morgana, you¡¯ll have to rest,¡± Lenore entreated me, gracefully landing on the wings of Ice I used to glide in the air. For a moment, I looked at her dumbly before focusing inward. It was as if either her words or that self-reflection was the trigger and suddenly, exhaustion hit me like a brick, my mind blanking for a second.


    ¡°Mhm,¡± I acknowledged, not resisting her suggestion. Seconds later, the wings I had used turned into fine dust and I disappeared, reappearing in Lenore¡¯s hallow. There, floating in the comfortable darkness, I exhaled, letting the tension of the day flow out of me alongside my breath.


    Touching my forehead, and the gem I had encased there, I could only shake my head. It had been an act of impulse and emotion but somehow, it felt right. Closing my eyes, I immersed myself in those sweet memories of Sigmir and, once again, tears started to stream down my face.


    When I opened my eyes again, I realised that I was elsewhere. No longer floating in the comfortable darkness of my Hallow but walking on the slopes of a giant mountain, stretching far into the sky. Looking around, I could see the sheer cliffs until they disappeared in the endless fog that shrouded the land below the mountain. It was as if this mountain was the only Island in an ocean of mist.


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    Feeling the cool wind caress my skin, I decided to idle for a bit, not feeling a need to climb up just yet or move anywhere. Here, I could simply be, without concern or sorrow. Sitting down on the rocks, I looked out, my wind starting to wander.


    Before it could go far, I felt a familiar pair of arms, wrapping around me. Leaning back into the embrace, I lay down, looking at the crescent moon and the stars above. Peace filled my heart as I inhaled Sigmir¡¯s scent and longing for my beloved filled my soul.


    ¡°I¡¯ll always be with you¡­¡± that familiar voice whispered in the wind and I felt the soft caress of her lips brushing my forehead for a moment, only to fade away once more.


    Blinking open my eyes, I was surrounded by the darkness of my Hallow, those wonderful feelings lingering in my heart. Reaching up, I gently touched the gem set in my forehead, whispering into the darkness, ¡°I¡¯ll never forget you, my love.¡±


    Wishing to see my beloved, I triggered the log-out, reappearing in my capsule space. Not on my throne, as I normally would but in my temple, right in front of the life-sized statue of Sigmir, standing proudly on her pedestal in the middle of the four deities enshrined here.


    Folding my legs beneath me I sat down, telling my love about the things that had happened over the last day. Just sharing with her, my mind started to conjure up her responses and reactions. The gentle smile when she heard about my magical experiments and progress and her nodding along, listening carefully despite having little interest and ability in magic. We both knew that she didn¡¯t care about the magic itself, but about my magic. I could almost hear her exasperated sigh when I told her about shadow-stepping into the shadow of the canopy, high above me, without a real plan, other than to keep stepping and only realise that I could conjure up wings to glide once I was up there. That sigh, a roll of her eyes and helpless chuckles as she gave me an embrace, I could see it in my mind and even feel her arms wrap around me for the briefest of seconds.


    And yet, I was all alone in the quiet temple.


    Rising, I walked over to my throne, sat down and opened up the various windows I used to traverse the forum and Internet. The first thing I saw was that Pantheon had launched yet another trailer and after watching it, I wasn¡¯t sure whether to laugh or cry. But given the number of tears I had shed for Sigmir, I could only laugh at their actions.


    Though, after watching it for a second time, I had to admit that they had done a good job. Their trailer made me look very much like the villain and that last bit, juxtaposing my flames with the flames that were used in the game¡¯s logo, it was genius. The colours didn¡¯t quite match but it was difficult to see unless you paid close attention. But I knew my flames and the flames in the logo were different, both in colour but also in the impression they gave me.


    But it mattered not.


    Looking into the forum, I could see that there was an animated discussion regarding the trailer, the suspected closing event of the Beta and my role in all that. Given that there were only a few weeks remaining before the beta ended. Thinking about it, I realised that I might be able to play along and even buy into it and get a benefit from cooperating with their marketing. If they wanted me to act as the villain, I should get something out of it. Otherwise, there was nothing they could do to stop me, rendering this whole campaign empty, if I simply stopped playing. To cut off all things that reminded me of Sigmir and try to move on. In some moments, that had been a tempting idea.


    Looking at the rapidly rising view of their trailer I decided that I had to try to convince them to work with me. Or rather, have me work for them in making the conclusion of the beta into a spectacular event. A player, showing just what was possible in their game? That could be quite the unique selling point.


    Opening the contact form I could access as part of their beta-testers, I began to type, even including a proposal for my reward. Nothing that would alter the game¡¯s balance, just a high-end quest to bring back the Soul of fallen Natives from Hades or Hel, whichever system of Afterlife they planned to implement. Given the interactivity of the natives, I could see such a system be incredibly popular, especially once more players bonded with Natives. Maybe not as deeply as I had with Sigmir, but who knew?


    Either way, I felt it was a good idea on its own, to the point that I even split my submissions, one for the idea, the other for the proposal to work with them on the final event.


    Now, I just needed to wait for their replies.

 Chapter 645

    It almost felt odd, to put my feet back on the ground after five days of constant flight. After we had destroyed the dryad and the forest around her burrow, the three of us had decided that landing might allow the elves to trace us, something we wanted to avoid. Lenore agreed with me that the trees most likely used vibrations in the ground and direct touch to detect anomalies and thus, staying away from the ground became paramount.


    That led to a slightly amusing shift system, where I was gliding through the night, often with Ylva in her puppy-form resting on my back, trying to get as much sleep as possible, while Lenore slept in her Hallow. Then, during the day when my ability to shadow-step upwards to gain altitude, was greatly inhibited, I was sleeping in my Hallow, or logging out, letting Ylva and Lenore fly together.


    During my time outside of Mundus, I continued to communicate with Pantheon Entertainment. As so often, the communication with their team was quite tedious, the representatives not authorized to make far-reaching decisions but only collected and collated feedback and reports for the actual developers. That, in turn, meant that it took multiple exchanges to go from the rote ¡®Thank you for your feedback¡¯ to an actual answer and even longer until I got something that might have been written by a human.


    Sadly, those replies had very little concrete information and certainly no confirmation to collaborate. Instead, I was told that outstanding performance in the Beta would be rewarded while the reply to my idea for a quest to venture into some sort of Underworld was that they couldn¡¯t comment on potential features, merely on things Travellers had encountered in the Beta itself. It could mean anything and nothing, leaving me a little annoyed.


    But for now, I decided to play along with their scheme, for what could be considered more outstanding than to act as the final Boss of the Beta, featured in multiple Trailers as a leading role?


    With our dense schedule and the quite incredible pace we managed to achieve that way, we had crossed the distance far quicker than anticipated, arriving above the foothills the day before and now, after soaring across them, we had reached the furthest reaches of the elven forest. The day before, I had watched in fascination as the trees beneath us became progressively smaller the closer we came to the impressive mountains ahead, morphing from the towering giants of the forest into normal-sized trees before being replaced by shrubs and grass, the land too sparse to sustain the larger trees.


    Further up ahead, we could see the foreboding mountains stretching into the sky, snow-covered peaks, some vanishing in the clouds, rocky passes and even a couple of meadows and shrubland. It was gorgeous and after the time spent in the verdant ocean controlled by elves and dryads, the scraggy and deadly mountains were a welcome change.


    No more trees the elves could use to teleport through, no more bonded vegetation that would give us away, nothing but deadly cliffs, ancient glaciers and freezing winds. It was almost as if we were returning home.


    Touching the ground, I let my mind relax and focused on the flow of magic. Compared to further north, in the forest, the Astral River was vastly different, lacking many of the streams of power but containing some others. There was an overwhelming amount of Earth Astral Power, alongside Wind, Ice and some Fire. Water was sparse and Life, there was almost none. It was remarkably similar to the Windswept Steppes in that regard, the arid tundra we had crossed after leaving Kolyug, only that there had been some outside influence that I had never been able to investigate.


    Waxing my hand, I set up my throne, looking down across the verdant ocean, until it disappeared in the distance.


    ¡°All these lands will be your memorial,¡± I softly told Sigmir. For a moment, I was certain that I could hear a hum of approval and touched the gem set in my forehead, closing my eyes as I did.


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    ¡°And I will live forever, in their memories¡­¡± I heard her voice whisper and had to smile. Yes, my beloved would live forever, her name engraved into the hearts and souls of the elven people, carved into the very land they called home.


    Forever, they would rue the day they killed her, forever mourn her passing.


    Shaking off the bout of melancholy, I focused on the Astral River, letting my mind fully delve into it. The streams of magic were complex and the more I immersed myself, the more I could feel and learn. The Nexus, our ultimate goal, was somewhere in these mountains and now, I needed to find it.


    Finding the flow of Ice was almost trivial, as was detecting which direction it was flowing from. Following that stream was a little more difficult but I had some experience with Astral Meditation and travel.


    Finally, after letting my presence flow through dozens of conduits, I felt the pulsing heart of the area, the Nexus of Ice, the conflux of the strands of power. I didn¡¯t dare approach too closely, caution and vigilance keeping me from encroaching as an Astral Presence, and focused outwards, into the physical plane beyond the Astral River.


    Weaving tougher a magical scrying construct, I peeked into the physical plane, letting my gaze sweep around, only to see very little.


    The entire area around the strand I had been following was white, with some grey mixed in, an endless expanse of Ice and clouds. What I could see told me that the Nexus was in or on a glacier, one that was high in the mountain but just that wasn¡¯t truly useful. There were countless glaciers and a lot of them were high up and occasionally covered in clouds.


    To get an accurate direction, I focused on the feeling of the nearby Nexus while also focusing on the sensations my Avatar, still sitting on my Throne, was receiving and compared and contrasted until I managed to nail down the pulse of the Nexus, the slow and steady thrum of power.


    Nodding to myself, I dispersed the scrying construct, keeping a mental lock on the direction and sharing it with Lenore.


    ¡°Looks cosy up there,¡± Lenore snarked, watching through my mind as I had been studying the area.


    ¡°Well, I think it does,¡± I refuted her, the idea to live on a field of eternal Ice, far from any others who might disturb me, was quite attractive to me. Having a source of near-endless power nearby was merely Ice-ing on the cake.


    ¡°You know that there¡¯ll be something living there?¡± she reminded me, her snark not yet defeated. ¡°What do you think it¡¯s going to be?¡±


    ¡°No idea,¡± I admitted, ¡°And I don¡¯t care. It¡¯s either going to accept us moving in and using the Nexus for a time or we¡¯re going to have a fight to the death,¡± I shrugged, now a lot more confident in my power, compared to my original meeting with the Grandmother. But then, even now I couldn¡¯t even begin to guess Her power.


    ¡°But before we follow the track, I want to build a memorial for Sigmir. One that only we know about, where she can rest,¡± I told Lenore, rising from my throne to look at the mountains. One of these would be my beloved¡¯s place to rest and I had to pick the right one.


    Thinking of the various dreams I had of her these last few days, the sweet, the bitter and the bitter-sweet, I studied what I was seeing. I wanted the mountain to be covered in Ice but somewhat standing alone. Not just one of many, but an outstanding mountain.


    In my dreams, I had been resting on the slopes of a mountain quite often, with Sigmir embracing me from behind, unseen but felt and missed. I wanted her resting place to be on such a mountain, where the mountain would eternally embrace her.


    But at the same time, I wanted there to be a glacier, the Ice embracing her and keeping her comfortable, regardless if it was the winter of our home or the blazing heat of summer.


    Looking at the various mountains, I finally decided on one, one that gave me a good feeling. It wasn¡¯t the biggest of them, nor the most outstanding but looking at it, I felt a calm steadiness. It reminded me of Sigmir and of home, which were the two things I wanted it to encapsulate.


    ¡°This, this is going to be her resting place,¡± I pointed, getting nods from Lenore and Ylva.


    ¡°It looks good. Wolves would be at home at its feet,¡± Ylva agreed, her impression similar to mine but not quite.


    With a thought, I disappeared into my Hallow, letting the Throne turn into Diamond Dust that was carried away in the wind, as Lenore jumped into the air, taking us back into the sky.


    Towards the final resting place of my heart.

 Chapter 646

    Looking at our chosen mountain from the air, I felt even better than before. Lenore was carrying me in my Hallow, as the sun was still shining and thus there were no shadows for me to step into at altitude so I couldn¡¯t glide. We approached from the North and it felt like that slope was the most suitable. The foot of the mountain was covered in low brush, with some tall grass and ferns growing further up until only a bit of moss and lichen grew on the sparse rock. Finally, the peak of the mountain was fully covered in Ice, with a few clouds drifting around it. Parts of the slope were cragged, with massive cliffs and jagged cracks running up the mountain, making me wonder what brutal force had carved them, but I just couldn¡¯t tell. Maybe some ancient beast, maybe just random acts of nature or magic.


    Either way, the environment felt right to me.


    With Lenore soaring through the sky, I could focus on studying the terrain, looking for a spot that Sigmir would like. It took a bit of time until I found an area I liked, high up, just below the glacier, was a small terrace in a high cliff, just a few metres of roughly even ground running along the mountain. Amusingly, the glacier had grown across the cliff above, acting somewhat like a roof, only twenty or thirty metres above that terrace. Just due to that, I decided I wanted Sigmir to rest there.


    Getting there was nearly impossible for anything unable to fly or be a goat but with Lenore¡¯s wings, it was trivial.


    She easily landed and I pushed out of my Hallow, standing on the rocky ledge and looking down, across the slopes, as I studied the terrain.


    The verdant ocean in the distance, looking almost like waves crashing against the unforgiving Mountains of Ice, with that bit of greenery playing the part of seafoam that clung to the rocks. It was a beautiful picture, one that I thought Sigmir would enjoy.


    ¡°You¡¯ll like it here, Love,¡± I quietly told her, closing my eyes as I listened to the whistling wind.


    ¡°It¡¯s a nice spot,¡± she replied and I felt a faint smile play across my lips. Yes, this was a good spot, one where she would be able to watch the elven forest as it burned in the Black Flames of Nidh?gg and the Frozen Fire of Morgana. A funeral pyre worthy to send her off.


    Unwilling to just dump her gear, what I wanted to enshrine in the memorial, on the ground, I pulled hard on my magic, immersing myself in the Astral River to drain more power into me. The environment was quite good, massive amounts of Ice Astral Power were streaming down from the glacier above, ready for me to use and yet, even with that near-endless source, I had to work hard on what I had in mind.


    The first step was, amusingly enough, to set up my throne, the ritual seat giving me that bit of mental help and calmness to work my magic. It was merely a crutch but when you had difficulty walking, a crutch was quite useful. You just had to try weaning yourself off, if that was even possible.


    Sitting down, i began channelling magic through the Crown of the Northern Wind on my brow and drew a runic formation, nothing complicated, just to conjure up some Hard Ice. Letting my magic flow through that formation, I applied my will, trying to compress and strengthen the Ice, turning it Eternal even as I conjured it. It was incredibly difficult, slowing my speed down by orders of magnitude, but I didn¡¯t want the memorial to be simple, to melt in the sun, I wanted it to be Eternal.


    Layer after layer of Ice was laid down, a torrent of Astral Power flowing through my body, the mental and physical effort of channelling such an amount of power slowly draining my stamina but I held on. I had to get this right and making mistakes was not allowed.


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    The sun set as I was working and the moon began rising, countless stars sitting in the sky above. The cool light of the moon lifted my spirit, bringing a faint smile to my face as I worked. Around me was a faint, swirling wind and I almost thought Sigmir was gently stroking my hair, making sure that it wasn¡¯t sticking to my face and distracting me as I worked.


    The moon was high in the sky when I let out a cold breath, the Ice Astral Power flowing through me enough to chill my body to the core. Without my naturally high affinity, further strengthened by the Ice Touched Title, the strain wouldn¡¯t have been possible and trying would likely have just killed me.


    But I wasn¡¯t so weak and now, after hours of effort, there was a large, quite ornate, box sitting in front of me, not quite a coffin but almost. Given that it wouldn¡¯t hold a body, I didn¡¯t need to make it that big. It would only hold my beloved¡¯s gear, the items she had used in life, as her body had already returned to the land. A memorial.


    Standing up, I began to gently place each item into the coffin, humming a sad dirge as I did. Lenore moved out of her Hallow and Ylva, who had enjoyed sleeping on solid ground for once, woke up. Both of them joined into my song, both letting their own grief flow out.


    I could feel the wind move, almost as if even nature itself was grieving with us, as I gave each item a final caress, a gentle touch that couldn''t reach Sigmir any longer. With each item placed in the tomb, more tears started to fall from my eyes, turning to Ice before they could hit the ground.


    Finally, I put down her Lok¡¯nar, giving the blade she had used so often the protect me a gentle kiss on the handle, where her hands had gripped it before stepping back and sitting back down on my throne. Tears continued to stream down my face, as memories overwhelmed me, wretched sobs leaving me breathless.


    It took a while for my emotions to calm down to the point that I could tear myself out of my memories, away from Sigmir¡¯s gentle caress, and focus on the present. There was still work to be done, even if a part of me wanted to do nothing but curl into a ball and let the world around me end. But if not for me, how could it end? No, I had to do that myself.


    Channelling my magic once more, I closed the tomb, sealing it into a singular piece of Eternal Ice, impossible to open, unless it was actively destroyed. Once it was sealed, I kept going, crystalline statues forming on the four corners of the tomb and one in the centre, a little larger than the other four.


    The statues were familiar, the same four deities that were enshrined in the Temple of my capsule space were now enshrined on Sigmir¡¯s tomb, guarding it forever. I had no idea if their presence would accomplish anything, but they were there.


    The central statue was of Sigmir, standing there calmly, one arm stretched forward, as if reaching for the land below, the other resting on her hips. On her face, I carved a calm, gentle smile, the look she had when embracing and holding me, without lust, only tender and loving. Protective.


    Finally, I inscribed a memorial for her, so she would never be forgotten. There was no talk of peace in my words, only a reminder for the world who rested here, waiting for the day of her return. Sigmir, Beloved of Morgana, Protector of the Pack. These were the name and titles I gave her, the ones that felt important. No mention of her tribe, there was simply no need for that. She would be remembered for who she was, not whom she had been born to.


    Looking at the four guardians, I closed my eyes, imagining what beings they would be. What a deity might be. I had never truly prayed, had never felt the need to, but maybe, they would shield my beloved, to prevent some hateful elf from disturbing her rest. There were few words, only a simple request to guard my beloved¡¯s rest, but maybe it would help.


    ¡°Goodbye, my love. Rest here for a bit and watch the world below. You will be remembered, forever,¡± I quietly promised, meaning every word. Turning, I dispersed my throne, letting the frozen dust get carried away by the wind, and stepped off the cliff, into the darkness below.


    For a moment, I wondered if I even wanted to conjure my wings, if not simply letting myself fall and vanish from this world would be easier and less painful.


    But no. There was still something to be accomplished if Sigmir was to be remembered forever. Vengeance would be mine.

 Chapter 647

    It was quite amusing, travelling through the Mountains of Ice was just as dangerous as travelling through the elven realm, maybe even more so. The elven forest had required us to conceal ourselves constantly and as long as we managed to stay hidden, and avoided their greatest strength by keeping away from the trees, there was little that could challenge us.


    On the other hand, the Mountains of Ice housed a wide variety of monsters, all with their own territorial instincts and we had little information on those territories. Given the jagged cliffs all around us, a large number of predators in the region were avian, similar to the giant eagles the elves had been riding, but there were many more. And with such avian predators, the rest of the beasts was obviously used to airborne threats, ready to either hide from such or strike them down before they could ever come close.


    At first, we tried to keep to the skies, with Lenore flying during the day and me during the night, but after Ylva and Lenore had to contend with a flight of Wind Raptors, we began to consider. Sure, they had managed to fight them off without too much trouble, but if there were more powerful threats deeper in the mountains or more enemies, things could easily get hairy.


    Lenore, Ylva and I discussed the issue until we decided to switch our plans up a little. Most avians were sight-hunters, active during the day or in the twilight of dusk and dawn, so travelling during the dead of night was our best bet. There, I could easily shadow-step to avoid trouble, the endless shadow of the night granting me near-limitless mobility. By now, I was even confident to shepherd Ylva through the shadows for an extended duration, at least as long as she morphed into her smallest puppy form and Lenore could obviously hide in her Hallow, so she could come along, too.


    On the other hand, during the day, we looked for one of the many small caves, some opening in the middle of a rocky cliff, where we could hunker down and rest. During those times, we could also try foraging for food, to add to our rapidly diminishing stock. It had to last until I was done with my vengeance, there was no way for me to head into civilisation ever again and foraging on an alpine glacier wasn¡¯t really possible.


    Like that, we kept travelling for a few days, following the siren¡¯s song of the distant nexus, moving around the high mountains when possible and even visiting a few of the glaciers during the night. Standing on them was exhilarating, the sensation of endless power, tightly bound and contained in the Ice, strong enough to never melt, even under the heat of the sun, it was inspiring. I wanted to reach out, to add my own power into the glaciers, to bring them to cover the entire world, so everything was bound in Ice.


    But I knew that I didn¡¯t have the power, covering the world in Ice was a beautiful fantasy, just like snuffing out the sun and letting the icy darkness reign supreme. All things in this world needed power and I simply didn¡¯t have enough. Yet.


    I was tempted to stay on that glacier and meditate for a decade or five, the cold, dispassionate nature of the Ice perfectly uncaring for any mortal suffering, its timelessness slowly shifting my perspective. Or rather, my perspective was shifting as i tried to comprehend it, because the Ice simply didn¡¯t change. It was perfectly still, giving me the impression that nothing would ever move it, even if the world beneath collapsed. It was an illusion, but it was a comfortable one.


    Sadly, I simply didn¡¯t have the time to meditate here, at least not long enough to get results. Vengeance was still calling and I had to heed the call.


    On the other hand, the Nidh?gg was surprisingly quiet and calm during our journey through the Mountains of Ice. Maybe it was temporarily sated by devouring the dryad and the trees bound to her or maybe it was capable to understand that there was nothing for it to feed around here and annoying me wouldn¡¯t be useful. Either way, I occasionally tried commuting with it, to get a better understanding of what it could do for me and what I could do for it.


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    Sadly, while there were a few reactions, it felt more akin to a dog, twitching its fur in an attempt to shoo off a fly that kept annoying them. Unwilling to get swatted, I didn¡¯t try overly hard and let sleeping dragons rest.


    It was quite interesting to feel the difference high attributes made with my own body. There was a part of me that physically felt the thin air high in the mountains, that knew the cold was biting and would normally kill someone without warm clothes in a short time and yet, I was perfectly fine. My Ice-affinity, combined with my somewhat high attributes, meant that I could stand in the middle of the glacier in my thin, dwarven-made clothes and not feel the cold. If the wind became too biting, I might wrap myself in my cloak, but other than that, there wasn¡¯t a need for it.


    Similarly, the thin air was simply no problem. I would lose stamina a little faster if I strenuously exercised, but normal activity was perfectly fine. It was quite intriguing, making me wonder just how deeply Pantheon Entertainment had gone in their programming and a part of me wanted to begin testing, to see how deep the rabbit hole went, but we had things to do.


    When it came to monsters, there was an interesting variety to them. Most of the beasts we faced were avian, Wind Raptors, Giant Vultures and even a kettle of large bats. Those were the most annoying, their ability to use ultrasonic waves to communicate was potent enough to give me a headache and make me a little dizzy. Dealing with them had required conjuring up a storm of Ice, countless small, razor-sharp blades that Lenore and I controlled with the wind, creating a rotating vortex around us that tore anything trying to get in to shreds. It was only then that the kettle retreated, leaving quite a few of its broken members behind.


    In addition to the avians, there were large insects crawling from underground colonies, few of them truly threatening individually, but while fighting one was simple, fighting a million was not. We mostly just left when dealing with such a threat, our interest to tussle with insects the size of large dogs quite literally zero.


    But while those threats were something we could either deal with or avoid, there were other problems as well. The mountains contained spirits or maybe calling them Sprites was more appropriate, as they seemed to be related to Nethersprites. The first time we faced one of them, it was a malformed bird-like creature, Observe giving us the description of a ¡®Windsprite¡¯, and while its combat strength was nothing to write home about, it was merely level eighty, it was curiously able to avoid Lenore¡¯s wind-magic, forcing Ylva to dispatch it directly. When she chowed down on it, it turned into a disgusting slime, which, in turn, soon faded away. Later, we realised that these creatures were inhabiting bodies made of Astral Power, somewhat similar to conjured creatures but naturally occurring. How that happened, or where they came from, we had no idea but we soon learned that there was a wide variety of them and all of them were a pain to deal with.


    Using magic of their own type against them merely meant we were feeding them and even other types of magic were quite ineffective. Using Mind- or Death-Magic on them was completely pointless, it didn¡¯t even seem to register. Mostly, they were left to Ylva or we simply ignored and avoided them. It wasn¡¯t like we wanted to fight or train in these mountains, we wanted to get somewhere.


    And getting somewhere, we did.


    It took us almost a week of travel through the mountains until we reached the high glacier within which I could feel the Nexus. If the Nexus in Neyto was subdued and calm, this one was somewhat different. Less like a placid lake of endless cold and more of an unstoppable glacier pushing forward, not fast or violent but containing endless power and unstoppable force. The Ice was piled high between mountains, covering the valley and stretching upward, covering the slopes and the peaks of the surrounding mountains.


    Everything was covered in freezing mist and from here on out, our objective changed.


    No longer were we going somewhere, no, now we had to conquer something, to make the glacier and everything around it ours. Now, the time to slaughter had come.

 Chapter 648

    The glacier housing the Nexus was eerily silent. Dense fog turned the visibility to nearly zero and a cold wind swept through it at all times. How the fog could linger, despite the wind, I had no clue but maybe, the sensation of the cold wind, or maybe even the fog, were caused by the uncontrolled Ice Astral Power constantly flowing out of the Nexus, turning the entire area in one of Wild Magic. Here, the normal laws governing reality were partially suspended and magic ruled, potentially turning the impossible possible and the laws of nature into something more akin to a set of mild suggestions. Something generally followed but only if nobody set about breaking them.


    We advanced cautiously, under no illusion that we were the most powerful beings far and wide but at the same time, we were here to take over. If the natives didn¡¯t give way voluntarily, that was too bad and I would gain some more EXP. Just the close vicinity to the nexus was exhilarating to me, the sheer amount of Astral Power in the air making the use of Ice-Magic trivial, allowing me to wield far more power than I normally could. The only problem was, those living here had the same advantage and were most likely used to the cold, attuned to it as much as I was.


    We hadn¡¯t gone far when I felt something in the mist. Thanks to my vast experience in using cold mist to attack, to the point that I considered it one of my signature spells, I had managed to gain a faint connection to the mist around us. Not to the point that I could fully control it but enough to get an impression of our unseen environment.


    I could feel a vague sensation of hunger, a cold need to devour the warmth and life of these intruders. The creature out there wasn¡¯t just hunting for food, it was searching for warmth just as much, needing the warm blood of its prey to sustain itself and thrive.


    Its approach was perfectly silent, what noise it might have made swallowed by the dense, dampening mist. That, together with the coat of white fur that blended into the mist and snow meant the creature¡¯s assault was supposed to come as a complete surprise, just like Rai¡¯s attacks in the past. Only, the mist wasn¡¯t a hindrance to my senses, it complemented them. I couldn¡¯t see through it, but by knowing that there was a roughly two metres high, vaguely bipedal, void in the mist, a void that moved towards us, I didn¡¯t need to be a genius to realise that we were being attacked.


    Shifting to the side, the creature¡¯s first attack missed, its long arms and wicked claws harmlessly waving through the air in an attempt to grapple me. Now, I could finally see our foe and for a moment, I was stunned. I had seen a few ugly creatures during my time on Mundus, especially the malformed Nethersprites, but this thing easily took the top spot. While its coat of white fur wasn¡¯t too bad, it fell far behind the beautiful silver coat of Ylva, the thing¡¯s fur tangled and dirty, as if it had wallowed in its own filth. Worse was that the thing only had a vaguely humanoid shape, its head dominated by a massive, oddly simian, nose, with a pair of small, beady black eyes on either side of it and no mouth. At least no mouth on its head, the mouth had migrated downward and expanded, to the point that its entire chest area gaped open, revealing massive, jagged teeth, ready to shred whatever prey those long arms could catch. Finishing the thing off was a pair of short, stubby legs that would look more suitable for a dwarf than a creature towering far above me.


    ¡°Ugh,¡± I muttered, unwilling to even look at the thing, but I couldn¡¯t just walk away. No, I had to murder the thing and all its friends. Using Observe, I learned that the system referred to it as a Yeti, with an impressive level of hundred-twenty. Fairly powerful, especially for a wild creature, but nothing we wouldn¡¯t be able to deal with.


    In an attempt to gain a bit of space, I used my Ice-Magic to whip up some of the snow around us, using it to create a wall between the Yeti and me. The wall promptly blocked another swipe of the Yeti, forcing it to pull back a little, or its momentum would have had it run into the wall and while I had only hastily pulled it from the everlasting Ice around us, that didn¡¯t mean that it was weak.


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    After the Yeti¡¯s swipe bounced off, the Yeti took a step back and lumbered around the wall, while Ylva got ready to flank it from the side. Observing it, I realised that the thing had abundant strength and good dexterity but its agility was utter crap. It could sneak, it could strike but it was slow and cumbersome, likely more used to tanking and enduring hits than avoiding them.


    Watching as it started to gain speed after moving around the wall, I decided to put my idea to the test and continued using my Ice-Magic, only that this time, instead of pulling a wall from the glacier, I pulled up a few icicles, sharp spikes of ice, even equipped with nice, sturdy barbs, right in front of the things face. If not for the abundant Ice around us, I would have had to work much harder but with that much Ice and power to work with, such feats were trivial.


    When the Yeti proved my idea correct, I couldn¡¯t help but smile. Instead of moving around the spikes, it barrelled right into them, impaling itself on them, one even going into and through its mouth. Curiously, despite it being skewered like an incredibly ugly butterfly for later preservation, it didn¡¯t look like the thing was in pain, it even briefly tried to munch on the ice spike, only to immediately give up on that.


    ¡°I think there¡¯s more to that maw,¡± Lenore observed, pushing her sight onto me. Now that we had more time, the thing wasn¡¯t going anywhere soon, I took on her view and had to agree. It looked like the maw was some sort of vortex, drawing in and devouring heat, or something like that. I couldn¡¯t fully make out the details, but that was the impression it gave me. Not that it truly mattered for me, if I got caught and munched on, it hardly mattered whether my flesh was ground up by those massive teeth or if the heat of my body was siphoned away, both would be equally deadly.


    ¡°That thing is tough,¡± Ylva had to compliment, watching how the Yeti struggled, trying to free itself. If not for the angle of my spikes, stopping it from using its legs to leverage itself, I had no doubt it could have pushed against the ground, breaking the spikes, even if it would have taken massive damage from such a move. So far, it was restrained but it didn¡¯t look truly hurt, even with multiple spikes going through its body.


    Luckily, we only had to deal with one of them so far, giving us some time to experiment.


    ¡°Death-Magic or Blood-Magic, which should I try first? Maybe some Mind-Magic, but I think that would be better for the next test subject,¡± I mused, deciding to go with Blood-Magic first, as getting a restrained subject wasn¡¯t always possible.


    Stepping up, I slipped past the thing¡¯s swiping arms that tried to get me despite its precarious position and pulled my Athame out. From up close, the fur looked even worse than from afar and the smell was nauseating, to the point that I wanted to step back, just to get out of the stench. But needs must and to get a blade into its back, I had to get close, as much as I hated it.


    Piercing the flesh was easier than expected, but the moment I used my Blood Magic, I ran into a problem. Sure, the thing had blood and vitality but it wasn¡¯t about to give either of those away. If trying to drain the vitality of the trees in the Elven Forest had been akin to trying to suck wood through a straw, trying to drain the Yeti¡¯s vitality gave me the impression that something was sucking on the other side of my straw. It tried to drain my Blood Magic into itself, take away the power that I tried to use to drain it. If not for my Perfect Magic Control, I was pretty sure it could have drained me faster than I could drain it. At the same time, as I drained it, it turned berserk, frantically moving around to the point that it managed to shatter the thick spikes I had driven through its body.


    Shaking my head, I focused on those spikes and channelled a bit of magic shattering them into sharp Icicles and wreaking havoc on its insides. Few creatures could defend against such an attack and the Yeti was no different. The moment the Ice shredded its insides, blood started to flow from its maw and when it moved to attack me again, I simply shot another Icicle into that maw, before exploding it.


    Heavily wounded, it staggered a little and I began channelling some Death-Magic, quickly finishing it off. However, doing so allowed me to realise that the thing was quite resistant to Death-Magic, not to the point of immunity but not as vulnerable as I might have hoped.


    Still, the first Yeti was dead, allowing me to understand them a little better. Even if it only allowed me to understand that they were incredibly dumb and sturdy.


    Well, one gone, only who knows how many more to go.

 Chapter 649

    Moments after the first Yeti died, it started to dissipate into Astral Power, a disgusting mix of tainted power that made me nauseous to my core. I could easily identify the base types of it, Ice, Wind and Darkness, all bound up in a strange way that I couldn¡¯t quite identify.


    The body hadn¡¯t fully evaporated when I heard distant howls of rage and hunger but far more concerning was that I could also feel more presences in the mist, presences that were far closer. The distant enemies were howling, maybe calling in even more, while those closer to us tried to sneak up on us.


    ¡°Incoming,¡± I warned the other two, sharing the impressions I was getting with Lenore.


    Her reaction was to mentally move closer to me, getting ready to use our Avatar-state but I didn¡¯t feel like it was time just yet. We might need that important ability later when we faced the current ruler of this place, not while fighting the mob of monsters around it.


    ¡°Let¡¯s see if we can beat them at their game,¡± I added, looking at Ylva and beckoning her closer. At the same time, I channelled my magic, creating a cloud of fog of my own, mixing it with the all-encompassing mist around us and gradually starting to take over that mist.


    The dense fog was great to hide in, especially when combining it with Darkness-Magic which allowed me to conceal myself and, by projecting the mist further out, confuse our enemies. I could feel them coming, thinking they were sneaky, only now I knew what to expect. Focusing on one of them, I used my Mind Magic, trying to increase the hunger and channel the insanity of the Dark Moon to induce a bloodthirsty frenzy.


    Moments later, I heard a wet impact and a faint smell of blood spread through the valley, the damp mist and moisture making the scent even more intense and I knew that I had struck gold.


    Moving backwards, keeping myself concealed and hidden in the mist, I focused on yet another of the Yeti, ignoring the one I had just influenced and the second one the influenced one had attacked. From the impressions i got, they were happily murdering each other, with little regard for anything but how much violence they could inflict as they went down.


    A second one was influenced and started to behave erratically, but given the speed of their approach, I couldn¡¯t just influence them one by one, I needed to expand my area of control. Luckily, I had nearly limitless Ice at my disposal, making that a far more efficient way to kill them, compared to my Mind Magic and I would be a fool not to use it.


    Clearing up a small void in the mist, I created a vaguely humanoid Ice-Statue, even using a bit of Blood Magic to infuse a bit of blood with Astral Power taken from my hair and smearing it onto the Ice before retreating, hoping that it would dupe the Yeti into attacking my decoy. Once done, I realised that the Yeti were coming for it and continued moving away, channelling more magic to raise spikes of Ice around it while making the mist extra dense. The sheer number of spells I used and the mental effort to control multiple magical processes at the same time started to drain me but thankfully, the Mist I had been channelling since the start had expanded quite a bit, giving me a lot of space to play with.


    Within that space, I could already feel three dozen of the Yeti, a few of which had been turned insane by my Mind Magic, creating a violent furball of teeth, claws and madness as they attacked their brethren. Those clumps of violence were quite useful, their noise masking whatever noise I might make, while the blood spilt by them masked my scent. Now, the remaining Yeti had to track me using their sight, nearly impossible within the mist I controlled, or some other special sense that was hopefully blocked by the Cloak of Twilight I had wrapped around Ylva and myself.


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    A grin formed on my face as I continued to keep my distance from the Yeti, happily watching as more and more ran into the mist, some of them impaling themselves on the spikes I had set up, while others fell victim to the confusion-aspect I had imbued into the spell, unleashing their natural inclination. It made me wonder who, or maybe what, had been keeping them under control previously, as their descent into vicious savagery was a little too quick and far too violent. It was as if they had just been waiting for a reason to start killing each other.


    Watching my enemies massacre each other, while I kept nearby, continuously pushing them into an ever-growing frenzy of blood, gore and violence didn¡¯t get old. Sadly, before enough of the Yeti had perished in the scruff, I felt a massive suction force, the wind fading and even reversing, and the mist around us was starting to get drawn away. Trying to keep control of the Mist I had infused with my power became difficult and I quickly realised that I was spending far more Astral Power to keep the mist around than was sensible, so I let go.


    The force was strong enough to make me stumble, dragging me forward. Unwilling to get sucked into whatever was playing vacuum cleaner here, I pushed my Ice-Magic, dragging up a piece of the glacier, forming it into a shield behind which I could take cover. And even on that Ice, I could feel the wind trying to rip the Ice out of the ground and drag it into whatever was there. Luckily, the Ice was still part of the glacier and this Ice wasn¡¯t going anywhere.


    It only took half a minute until the mist was cleared away, letting Ylva, Lenore and I see the area before us and the killing field we had created. Looking at the havoc we had wrought, was quite proud of myself. It was one thing to feel vague shapes collide in the mist and smell the ever-thickening scent of blood but a whole other thing to see the gory remains of our enemies, some still twitching, others already fading back into the Astral River, their bodies disintegrating.


    But while some of our enemies had perished, there were far too many still remaining, their claws dug into the Ice, prostrating before the thing that had cleared away the mist and disrupted my work. It was massive Yeti, more akin to a moving snowdrift than a living creature, easily fifteen metres in height, with a maw that could swallow anything. From afar, I could see and feel how the Astral Power I had imbued into the mist was swallowed into that maw and the moment it did, my connection to it faded away, as if it had never been there in the first place.


    With the appearance of that massive abomination of a monster, the mist had been cleared out and now, there was no way for us to hide. In addition, the big Yeti let out a howl of rage once it was done eating the mist and the moment it did, I could feel the remaining Mind Magic gripping the Yeti shatter, a stinging pain feeding back into my mind.


    ¡°We can¡¯t take to the sky,¡± Lenore immediately warned me and I had to agree. If we got caught by that suction while in the air, we were doomed unless we managed to hold onto something. Still, trying to go into close combat with that thing sounded like a really bad time and I wasn¡¯t sure our spells would even do anything.


    But we had to try and so, I experimentally pulled up a few frozen Javelins from the Glacier, sending them at the thing in a probing attack. The effect was even worse than I had thought, two of them simply shattered against the thing¡¯s chest, ruffling some of its fur, while three more struck home, going into the gaping maw - And immediately vanishing from my senses, as the thing bit down, crunching them into nothing but tasty snacks within a few moments.


    As if responding to my attack, the thing swiped with one arm, grabbing two of the Yeti around it and lobbing them at us in a casual toss. For a moment, I couldn¡¯t believe what it was doing but after that split-second of disbelief, I drew a few fresh spikes from the glacier, setting them right into their landing spots.


    The splatter was quite artistic, the toss had enough force to mangle the bodies badly and even shatter the spikes but given the mass of Yeti the thing still had around it, and the additional Yeti I could see approaching from everywhere in the valley, I wasn¡¯t sure if I could win a battle of attrition, especially if the thing began moving towards us.


    No, we needed to find some sort of solution, or we would have to retreat. And hope that we could make it.

 Chapter 650

    Given that the small Yeti, for a given value of small, were again charging in our direction, Ylva and I started to retreat. Without the cover of the mist, we couldn¡¯t conceal ourselves any longer, making us sitting ducks for these physically powerful foes.


    As we were running away, I kept manipulating the glacier beneath us, pulling a few spikes up to delay their approach but given their sheer number and the width of their attack, there was no way to stop them from getting to us. Pushing myself to my physical limit, I could only try to evade but that was a fool''s errand. I was about to enter the Avatar state and hope to use the ability to fly as a trump to escape when a familiar sensation surrounded me. Feeling Sigmir¡¯s warm embrace, I almost stumbled but managed to keep my footing and even sped up. Hearing a faint noise, I dodged to the side, letting another living projectile from the big Yeti pass me by and as I moved, I noticed a familiar, red aura surround my arms and body.


    Shrouded in Sigmir¡¯s embrace, I felt my strength and agility increase by an order of magnitude, giving me enough speed to avoid the Yeti. With her by my side, I knew I wouldn¡¯t falter. And I wouldn¡¯t fall.


    We managed to reach the side of the valley, where the Ice was climbing up the mountainside, turning it into a treacherous slope filled with crags, sharp edges and difficult footing. Difficult, even for the Yeti calling this place home.


    With a push, Lenore and I became one, and now we could use our ability to fly to avoid the difficult terrain while staying close enough to the ground to get into cover if the big Yeti tried to suck us in.


    We pulled a chunk of Ice from the mountainside, giving us a few metres of sheer cliff the Yeti couldn¡¯t just run up, adorning it with spikes to give them a hard time. It would only give us a couple of seconds but those seconds could very make the difference between victory and rout.


    Once we had the high ground secured, we began to casually launch volleys of Ice at the Yeti, not truly trying to hurt them, but merely to distract and delay them. At the same time, we began to work on something bigger, combining Wind-, Darkness- and Mind Magic, both of our halves contributing their own to it.


    Together, we started singing, the Song of a Raven. It was no pretty song like that of a nightingale, it was a song of slaughter and madness, our minds filled with countless battlefields and the ravens that roamed them, of frozen carcasses and endless slaughter. As long as there was death, there would be ravens and as long as there was war, we would be there. Into the song carried by the wind, we wove the concepts of Hunger and the Madness of the Dark Moon, trying to break what few bonds the Yeti might have between them, to induce a killing frenzy once more.


    And how gloriously it worked, we could watch as the Yeti started to get affected, the power of the Wind carrying the song across the entire valley. and where the song passed, the Yeti started to fight. Or maybe it wasn¡¯t truly a fight, they didn¡¯t just try to kill each other, they tried to devour each other, tearing into their former brethren with savage fury, trying to rip off parts to shove into those gaping maws.


    Some of them, to our great amusement, even started to bite into one another, creating a caricature of a kiss as they literally tried to devour each other. It was so grotesque, we couldn¡¯t help but laugh, our cackling laughter joining into our song, driving those mad creatures into an ever-greater fervour.


    But just killing the small fry wasn¡¯t enough and while the big Yeti hadn¡¯t seriously looked at chasing us, now that we were sitting on our small cliff, looking down on the madness we had induced, it seemed that it wasn¡¯t content to sit back and occasionally lob things at us, it seemed to be getting serious.


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    And while our small rampart had been sufficient to delay the Yeti, allowing us to create the wonderful song they were now listening to, it wouldn¡¯t delay the big Yeti, not when the rampart merely reached the middle of its chest. And sure, we could try pushing ourselves higher, but it would take time and cost progressively more Astral Power, to say nothing of the possibility that it might just have the strength to topple whatever we could build.


    Noticing a sudden spike of power in the big Yeti, we crouched down, pulling some more Ice up to give us additional cover, fearing that it might try to suck us in, when it let our a roar, loud enough to cause a storm, as if all the air and power it had previously sucked in was forced back out, all at once. The Ice we had drawn up started to crumble under the force as we cowered behind the shelter we had created and all around us, the glacier was breaking.


    Our cover was shattered and we tried to take to the sky, the sound shaking our body and mind, the wind tossing us through the air like a leaf. Ylva, our dear friend, managed to grab hold of us, pulling us with her and helping to stabilise our tumble, making sure we didn¡¯t crash anywhere or break our wings.


    Holding onto her, we managed to fly, looking at the devastation below. The roar of the Yeti had been completely indiscriminate, pulverising dozens of its brethren and burying many more under the avalanche it had caused all around the valley.


    Shaking our head to clear away the headache we tried to find a way to strike at the Yeti, only to realise it was opening its maw back up, trying to draw us in. High in the air, there was no place to find cover and we were dragged along, helplessly flapping our wings like a moth in a tornado. But we were no moth, we wouldn¡¯t just fly into the flame like a fool.


    Knowing that a contest of strength would be impossible, we banked everything on speed and agility, the world slowing down around us as our mind sped up. Just moments before we tumbled into that insatiable maw, a surge of magic forced up a pillar of Ice from the glacier, giving us a windbreak almost in our path. We still tumbled, but instead of tumbling into the maw, we crashed into that wall and slid past the Yeti, instinctively grabbing onto the fur of its back.


    With an open back to strike, it would be a shame not to stab into it and while our talons weren¡¯t perfect for stabbing, they were what we had. Burying them into the Yeti¡¯s back was incredibly satisfying, though the way its sucking breath cut off, replaced by a roar of primal pain was even better. Unwilling to just leave it at that, we decided to gamble. If the Nidh?gg could drain an entire forest, it would hopefully be able to drain the Yeti as well.


    From within our magic bag, the Soul Prison appeared in one blood-covered claw, while the other was still dug into the Yeti¡¯s back and we began forcing magic into the Yeti, acting as if it was a tree in the elven forest. Power clashed, the strange physique of the Yeti trying to drain us, our power sublimating into it, only to recoil. It wasn¡¯t just Blood Magic we were using, our other hand was channelling Death-Magic into it and by trying to sublimate that, it only brought where the power would be the most effective. And yet, despite those potent energies ravaging the Yeti¡¯s body, it showed no signs of weakening while our Astral Power surged out of us in a massive torrent.


    For a moment, we could feel amusement radiating from within the Soul Prison, accompanied by a bit of acknowledgement and, once more, we could feel the power of the Nidh?gg take control of our magic, turning what we had wrought into something greater.


    Our powers ignited and the Yeti was shrouded in cold, black flames, burning merrily as it roared once again in pain, trying to shake us off. It even dropped, rolling across the Ice in a bid to shake us off and we got crushed against its furry back, our body craking in pain, one wing snapping from the force. Now, two screams of pain echoed through the valley, though the red aura embracing us allowed us to hold on, as the Yeti quickly started to weaken.


    The world started to blur before our eyes, pain and exhaustion trying to wrest control of our spell from us but if we lost focus now, we would die. Holding on with pure willpower, we kept our magic going until finally, power was flooding back, our Blood Magic successfully ripping control of the Yeti¡¯s vitality from it.


    Most of it was absorbed by the Nidh?gg but some of it, a mere tithe, was flowing back into us as if the nIdh?gg was consciously giving us some of its meal. For us, the power was just what we needed, allowing us to regenerate some of our health to keep us from passing out.


    Finally, the big Yeti stopped moving, the body rapidly getting burned away by the black flames, the power it had been composed of getting devoured by the Nidh?gg.

 Chapter 651

    As the giant Yeti died, power surged through the glacier, flooding the entire valley. It was a wild mix of Astral Power, enough to turn visible to the naked eye, to say nothing of our special sight. Reaching out, we tried to take control of the power, to harness it for our own needs, only to realise that the flood was too wild and powerful. This was no tame pond, like the Grandmother had set up in Neyto, this was a riptide, strong enough to wash away any fortification trying to break the surge.


    There was nothing for us to do but cling to Ylva as she carried us away, into the sky above and onto one of the mountains. There, we split apart, exhaustion and pain taking a toll on our body, the load lighten when it was distributed to two bodies.


    ¡°This was something,¡± I panted, looking down into the valley, where wild magic was surging, creating arcs of deadly power that lashed out, the few remaining Yeti either scattering or getting annihilated.


    ¡°We¡¯ll need to set something up to deal with that, or we¡¯ll get destroyed,¡± Lenore commented after hopping onto my shoulder and studying the magical mayhem below.


    ¡°Some sort of focus, akin to a staff?¡± I mused, not quite sure just how big a staff I¡¯d need to channel and control that much power. Chuckling to myself, I realised that it wouldn¡¯t really be a staff to carry around but more akin to a tower, standing here and controlling the power flooding from the nexus and into the environment.


    Ideas flickered through my mind, potential ways to tame the Nexus and use it for myself. If I wanted to break the Soul Prison, I would have to harness the power but from the looks of it, that wouldn¡¯t be easy. Every minute that we were watching, the Wild Magic grew more pronounced, making me wonder if the entire glacier would shatter or if we were just watching something akin to a volcanic eruption and once the pressure was alleviated, things would calm down.


    Either way, it was fascinating to watch and I wanted to begin taming the nexus as soon as possible.


    But before I could start with that, I had notifications to go through, we had killed a lot of Yeti after all and I had a feeling the big guy would give something nice, at least if the kill was credited to me and not the Nidh?gg.


    Looking at the messages, I wasn¡¯t disappointed. Two levels, bringing me to 160 and multiple points in Ice, Darkness, Blood and Mind-Magic, bringing them to 93, 80, 84 and 40 respectively. Granted, the Giant Yeti had given almost no EXP, making me think that it had mostly been devoured by the Nidh?gg, or maybe using what could be considered a Divine Artifact gave some sort of negative penalty to EXP-gain, either way, it was a little disappointing. But a good haul nonetheless.


    Trying to rise, I noticed just how exhausted I was and decided otherwise. Both, Lenore and I, would need our full strength to deal with it and for that, we needed to rest. Just how to rest, out in the open on the slope of a mountain next to an incredibly volatile area of wild magic was another question, but I had an idea that might just solve the problem.


    ¡°Ylva, can you keep watch up here? I believe we should be reasonably safe here,¡± I asked, looking at my canine friend. If she stayed around, Lenore could retreat into her Hallow and then I could log out, leaving my Avatar safe while Lenore would be hidden by the same mechanic. She wasn¡¯t a fan of that and I had no idea how the backlash of our Avatar-state would influence her while I was logged out, but it was worth a try. If she had to leave, she always could, at least according to prior tests.


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    I quickly explained my idea to the other two and while Lenore wasn¡¯t overly happy to leave Ylva alone in the mountains, our canine friend was well-equipped to keep herself safe, while we recuperated.


    And so, without even trying to deal with the mess in the valley below in our exhausted condition, I logged out and returned to my capsule space. While I couldn¡¯t actually create magical formations there, the skills and attributes normally supporting that simply weren¡¯t there, I could brainstorm before testing my ideas in the game.


    But before doing so, I first went into my temple, sitting down in front of Sigmir¡¯s statue, leaning my back against the pedestal, and telling her about the battle. It had been incredibly challenging and, in the privacy of my own mind, I had to admit that I had been incredibly lucky. The fight certainly was not one a single player, even with the support of two Spirit Beasts, had any business winning.


    Not just the big Yeti in the end, which I only managed to kill thanks to literal Divine, or maybe primordial, intervention, but also the normal Yeti. Just their number would have overwhelmed me, if not for their weakness to Mind-Magic that tried to turn them against each other.


    As I told Sigmir about the fight, I realised that I still wasn¡¯t sure how the red aura had appeared around me, the familiar feeling of Sigmir¡¯s embrace sheltering and helping me. Could it be some sort of side-effect of the Eternal Embrace she had used to transfer her strength to me, or something else?


    Either way, I wanted to know and understand, simply so I could feel her arms sheltering me.


    Wiping away a few stray tears, I moved over to my throne, pulling up the recording of my battle and even pulling a few images. Some of those could be used to hype Road to Purgatory and while Pantheon Entertainment didn¡¯t quite promise me additional rewards if the impromptu-¡®end-of-beta-event¡¯ they had come up with was a success, it had been implied. So, creating a few good clips and maybe even a meme or two would hopefully help spread the word. For example, that moment the big Yeti sucked away all the mist, suddenly revealing itself and all its friends in their incredibly grotesque glory made for a good image, maybe captioned with something like ¡®when the boss-music starts playing¡¯.


    After making sure that my location wouldn¡¯t be easily deduced from the images, I put them into the forum, setting off yet another discussion about current events and whether or not I was a plant for the developers. It was bedlam and if there was one thing that generated hype, it was controversy. People arguing online could easily spread and generate interest.


    But that hadn¡¯t been why I had logged out n the first place. Instead, I pulled up the editor of my capsule-space and after making sure my current set-up wouldn¡¯t be changed, I began creating anew. The setting was a desolate, frozen valley and as it just happened, I began designing with the idea in mind that I wanted to have a tower that could double as a magic staff. Trying to imagine how the power would flow gave me a massive headache, but I felt I was getting the right idea, at least until I started spacing out, my mind simply too exhausted to continue.


    Back in my temple, I laid down in front of Sigmir¡¯s statue, a blanket a mere thought away, and let myself drift off, sleep quickly claiming me.


    ¡°You¡¯ve done well, love.¡± Hearing Sigmir compliment me lifted my spirit and I leaned back, into her embrace. For once, we were sitting a little higher up the mountain, I could feel the cold from the glacier behind us and yet, despite the frigid weather, I was feeling warm, my beloved¡¯s embrace sheltering me.


    ¡°We were lucky,¡± I admitted, letting out a sigh.


    ¡°Some say luck is part of your skill. Others would call it fate and say that your fate hadn¡¯t come to an end,¡± she reminded me, pulling me a little closer into her arms.


    ¡°But what about your fate? Would they say it¡¯s over?¡± I asked, unwilling to accept such an arrangement. If there was such a thing as fate, I would find a way to break it.


    ¡°Do you think it¡¯s over? Or are you still keeping me in your heart?¡± she asked, her words making me chuckle. That was a question not worth asking, she would always be in my heart.


    ¡°As long as I¡¯m in your heart, my fate has not ended. It just has taken the road less travelled,¡± she added and I reached out, trying to caress her face. For a moment, I could feel that familiar, tanned skin a little coarse and rough but more comfortable than the smoothest silk. But only for a moment, before the sensation faded away, replaced by one of deep, aching loss.

 Chapter 652

    After a good rest, the world had changed quite a bit. Looking from above, we could see that the surging levels of Wild Magic had stabilised, effectively turning the valley below into a quite lethal area that would tear apart pretty much anything entering it. On the outskirts, we might be able to survive and work with the power but we could only guess how intense the power deeper in the valley would be. There was simply too much going on for us to see.


    ¡°We can work from the outside in,¡± I mused, changing a few of my previous ideas and trying to come up with something that would work. The greatest understanding I had when it came to channelling outside Astral Power came from Blood Magic, allowing me to channel and control Astral Power drained from others without making it mine first. That might be the best way to approach the problem, as trying to channel the sheer volume of power we could feel in the valley below through my body would undoubtedly be lethal. It was just too much and unless one was some sort of purely elemental spirit, some sort of Ice-Elemental, I doubted anything had the required affinity to survive. And that was only considering the power of Ice, there were other elements mixed in and even those could easily kill you.


    With Lenore on my shoulder, I began to carefully make my way down the slope. Ylva was with us, reporting about the events of the night and telling us how the Nexus had surged until it formed the current, relatively calm, conditions. Sadly, her mystical senses were less about detecting precisely what was going on and more about detecting if anything was going on and trying to avoid it, so her observations were less enlightening than one might hope.


    But it was good to hear that pretty much every surviving Yeti had decided to look for whiter glaciers and fled after the original fight had left them utterly destroyed. We wouldn¡¯t have to bother with them for now, maybe forever.


    Studying the valley, I realised that I would be able to approach the centre, where the power coming out of the Nexus was strongest, only up to a certain distance, any closer and I would suffer. That meant I had a radius of operations I could work with, a circle that I could approach and use the power of the Nexus to tame it.


    Previously, I had used ritual circles to channel power, maybe I would be able to accomplish something similar here, forming a ritual circle with the Nexus in the centre and using that circle to control the power.


    Lenore and I kept working on my idea as we travelled around the valley, studying the area and making sure there were no other critters that wanted to know what was going on.


    Finally, after almost four hours of discussion, we began to work on the first corner after coming up with an incredibly complex formation that would hopefully allow us to tame the power around us. Reaching out with my own Power, I didn¡¯t even try to touch the unstable energy of the Nexus, not initially at least. Instead, I focused on the glacier itself, controlling and shifting the Ice to form a large pillar, some ten metres thick and thirty metres high, into which I could engrave runes from afar.


    That pillar itself was slowly turning into the equivalent of a staff, wielded by the planet itself, a focus to turn the surging power of the nexus into a controlled flow, a flow that was currently simply channelled into the air, creating a glittering shower of diamond dust around it. It was the simplest way to expend the power harmlessly, allowing me to use it at a later point.


    With the power in this area getting channelled away, the Wild Magic abated somewhat, but given the symmetry we wanted to achieve, the other pillars couldn¡¯t be closer to the Nexus, not if we wanted to use the formation Lenore and I had planned out.


    At night, I began a concentrated effort to try communing with the Nidh?gg inside its prison. My initial attempts were fraught with trouble, at first there was no reaction but soon, I got one. Only, the reaction was not one I could fully comprehend and it wasn¡¯t even a problem of language, the ability shared by Lenore took care of that. It was more a problem that my puny mind was simply too weak to handle the amount of information it could pack into a single growling hum, for that was what its speech sounded like to me. It was filled with images and concepts on a level I simply couldn¡¯t keep up with. But with each headache, I got a feeling I was getting a little closer.


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    For the next two days, we kept moving around the Nexus, slowly raising four more pillars of Ice that controlled the power of the Nexus, turning the frozen glacier into a beautiful winter wonderland filled with glittering diamond dust. It made for a spectacular view and I felt almost sad that I would have to disrupt it, but I would need the power.


    Curiously, we noticed that there was something strange going on in the valley, all three of us occasionally feeling watched. None of us had been able to detect what caused those eerie feelings but we began to get suspicious. While all of us were vigilant, it was normally not to the point of paranoia. However, if we were unable to find what caused the sensations, we could do very little about the situation, other than remaining cautious and keeping a lookout while we were working.


    The upside of the work was that I had gained one of the incredibly coveted points in Ice-Rune Mastery, bringing the skill to eighty and allowing me to comprehend another rune. The glacier we were on, and the glaciers all around us made that almost trivial. Delving into the Astral River, I could feel the timeless, eternal nature, their core never changing. Eternity was an incredible concept but I had begun making inroads to it, the Eternal Stillness of Ice giving me the first glimpse of it. The sheer magnitude was breathtaking, and I had a feeling that fully immersing myself in it might be a bad idea.


    Once the construction of my pillars was complete, it was time for the next step. The power in the centre had been controlled to the point that I could move into it without freezing to death within seconds and that was exactly what I did. Lenore was along for the ride, hiding in her Hallow and complaining about the cold. How she felt the cold neither of us knew but she was here, not only supporting me morally but also with additional Astral Power and mental processing.


    In the centre of the Nexus, we began to work in earnest, the central pillar not just a pillar but hollow, a tower that would allow us to engrave even more runes and turn it into a massive staff that we could use to control and channel the power of the Nexus.


    Just raising it, working in shifts as the cold took a toll on me despite my affinity, took four days, the base almost a hundred metres wide, the entire glacier acting as a foundation. The tower tapered inwards, from the initial hundred metres to a mere forty metres at the top, almost two hundred metres above the glacier. It was utterly over-designed, compared to the amount of power that remained untamed, but the idea was to build something that could control the entire Nexus at the same time, even without the five outer pillars.


    But even after those four days of raising the tower, we were far from done. The week had been incredible, both incredibly exhausting but also incredibly enlightening. My attempts to converse with the Nidh?gg were slowly bearing fruit, to the point that I could glimpse some of the concepts it tried to impart to me. Or maybe it simply realised that it was talking with a stupid elf, not another dragon, and deliberately dumbed things down to a level I could understand. Either way, it was fascinating and I even managed to work a bit of my new-found understanding into my Spellcraft. It was similar to the connecting patterns the Dwarves had introduced to me, only so much more complex and complicated. It made me want to start completely new, to work on my understanding of magic from the ground up, as I felt my previous work had been a clumsy insult to all things magic. But given the time left to me, I simply couldn¡¯t even try.


    And so, slowly but surely, my tower was taking form.


    Finally, ten days after I had slain the large Yeti, I placed the last rune at the top of my tower, a surge of Astral Power flowing through the valley and into the Throne I was sitting on. For a moment, my hands clenched, the sheer volume of power in my hands almost too scary to consider. But only for a moment, before I pushed those fears away. Now, I could begin to truly work on my vengeance.


    I was just about to start drawing on the Nexus when a blue box appeared before me, asking me to name my creation. After a second of consideration, I decided to call it the Frozen Citadel.


    The moment I confirmed my choice, a pair of blue boxes appeared.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>


    Heroes, the world needs you. The Ice Queen of the Frozen Citadel plans to unleash Calamity upon the world of Mundus. Head into the Mountains of Ice and break her rule, to stop the End of the World.


    </td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    Ooops¡­


    <table style="width: 90%">


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 97.9085%">Title gained</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 97.9085%">You gained a title: Ice Queen</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>


    While you have to be born a Princess, you can rise to become a Queen.


    You now rule your own frozen domain, its inhabitants yours to command. But will your rule be benevolent or tyrannical? Only time will tell.


    </td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    Double Ooops?

 Chapter 653

    It took me a few seconds to recover after seeing those two boxes. I could easily accept the title, and it even tickled me that I had gained it, though I had no idea what it would actually do. It wasn¡¯t as if the glacial valley I had just claimed was filled with subjects to lord over, if I was lucky there were a couple of lichen remaining after the intense exposure to Wild Magic during the last week, everything else had either fled or died.


    But the other box, that might be a problem. I was nearly certain that it wasn¡¯t just a notification for me but one that had been sent to every sapient being on Mundus, Traveller and Native alike, maybe with an added quest to deal with me. And if there was no automatic quest, I could already see every official with the authority to issue quests putting one out there, given that the notification talked about the end of the world.


    Which also made me smile with pride, being judged by the system to hold the power to substantially alter the course of the world was not something I had expected but I greatly appreciated it. Now, I only had to carry out my vengeance before I was dealt with and maybe add a bit of flair to my valley, if the system set me up as a boss, I would have to bring something to the table that made me worthy of that label.


    Just as I was coming to terms with my new title and role as enemy of the entire world, I felt something odd. It was as if my senses had undergone a minute shift, allowing me to perceive something previously hidden from me, a presence that was staring at me. Looking up, I focused on that presence, at first thinking it might have some relation to the Nidh?gg, only to see a weird disturbance in the air.


    Focusing on that disturbance, I smelled a faint scent, giving me the impression of age, decay and death, not quite akin to the smell of a grave but close enough to understand. What I was looking at was a creature of pure Astral Power, similar to an elemental but not as primal, more akin to a spirit.


    Pushing on my bond with Lenore, I asked my friend to attend me, only to realise that she already was on her way, pushing her wings to reach me as quickly as possible. In the meantime, I kept an eye on the disturbance, only to notice that it wasn¡¯t the only one. There were a couple of them, though only one had actively approached me.


    It took a few minutes for my feathery friend to swoop in and I could feel concern and curiosity over our link.


    ¡°Did you see that message of the world?¡± she asked as soon as she was in range, not even giving me time to speak.


    ¡°The one calling for all heroes? Yes, I did. And yes, it appeared the very second I finished the tower, named it Frozen Citadel and gained the Title of Ice Queen. Unless there is some incredibly amusing coincidence going on, I think it¡¯s safe to say that it¡¯s aimed at me,¡± I replied, trying very hard to act unflappable as if being declared enemy of all was nothing to be concerned about, just another day on the job. Sadly, given the close connection between us, trying to deceive Lenore was not something I could accomplish unless I deceived myself first.


    ¡°I see,¡± she accepted my words, but I could feel that the confirmation had shaken her. ¡°What are you planning to do? The elves will be here soon, it¡¯s only going to take them a few days and there will be more coming. We can¡¯t fight an army, can we?¡± she asked, the previous, fatalistic certainty that we¡¯d be unable to fight fading, maybe as she remembered just how many Yeti we had fought in this very valley. A feat we had accomplished before we had constructed the magical focus we were now standing on. The focus, powered by the Nexus, very much gave me the ability to fight an army, or at least throw incredible amounts of power at them.


    ¡°For now, I¡¯m planning to borrow your sight to find out what that is,¡± I nodded towards the disturbance, shifting my sight to look through her eyes as she was looking at it. Curiously, to her senses, there was nothing there.


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    Intrigued, I asked her to move into her Hallow, so I could use the sight myself and once she did, I could see a strangely shapeless clump of Astral Power, primarily comprised of the elements I had smelled earlier but mixed with traces of something else.


    ¡°Who and what are you?¡± I asked, pushing my thoughts through the ability gained by my bond with Lenore, the Universal Understanding. If the thing was capable of thought, it would be able to understand me and vice versa.


    Just as I finished, the thing fluctuated wildly, not projecting outwards but shifting rapidly, the movement making me think of a child hopping down in excitement. The response was almost as curious, somewhat similar to the way the Nidh?gg spoke, only far less powerful, allowing me to understand their speech with only a little effort.


    The longer we communicated, the wider the grin on my face became, as it turned out, I had some subjects after all. Not living subjects, but I wouldn¡¯t discriminate against them for their lack of body. They, both the formless blob of power before me and the many similar blobs all around my valley, were remnant spirits, left behind fragments of living beings that had coalesced here due to the power of the Nexus. I was pretty sure they were not ghosts, not intrinsic individuals but more something like conglomerates of thoughts and power.


    But due to their presence in my domain and the fact that I had become the queen of these lands, it made them my subjects, something the one before me was both incredibly excited about but also completely confused by. They never had agency before, so being ruled by another didn¡¯t change things but suddenly there was someone who had agency over them, not just the mindless binding power of the Nexus that kept them here.


    Given our location and the previous inhabitants, it seemed that the remnant spirits had some understanding of hunger, consumption and hunting but that was pretty much it, they had no understanding of agency or, as it seemed, could even comprehend such a thing. They simply were, and unless moved by an outside force, would continue to be, maybe until the world itself ended.


    Now, what to do with such spirits, other than experiment on them to find out what made them actually tick? Lenore and I quickly began to consider what could be done with them and our first idea was to create a magical construct, similar to the ones we always used to scry upon our enemies and try binding the spirit to it. Or maybe invite the spirit to inhabit it, given the disposition I had observed that would very much accomplish the binding, without us having to try magically influencing it.


    Our first construct was relatively simple, a raven-shaped construct modelled after Lenore, roughly fifty centimetres in length and with a wingspan of about a metre. We had done little to give it the ability to move, only added some runic circles that would allow for manipulation of the Ice, before offering it to the blob I had talked with.


    It took a bit of explaining but once I managed to get the idea across, there were some fluctuations before they moved into the construct and I could feel an attempt to take over the Astral Power I had formed the construct with. The power was still mine but I relinquished control, allowing the blob to bind with it. In the process, I could see how the spirit infused the construct, almost becoming one with it, the Ice losing its crystalline lustre and gaining an ash-grey taint. Curiously, the area where their eyes would be changed even more, turning black with a smudge of silver in the middle, giving the bird construct a quite sinister feel.


    As the construct was infused by the spirit, I realised that the changes weren¡¯t just optical. Before, the construct had simply been part of my power but now, it was more akin to an independent creature and while I might still be able to take back control over the Astral Power I had used, there had been a fundamental change, some sort of disconnect. I would have to take a closer look at the implications but my current hypothesis was that the construct had become the body of that spirit.


    ¡°This has potential,¡± I mused to Lenore, quite happy with the looks of my newest project. ¡°Do you want to instruct our newest subordinate on how to bird, Lenore? You are the resident expert, after all,¡± I grinned, noticing that our effort hadn¡¯t gone unnoticed, more of these odd blobs moving to the top of my tower, streaming towards it from all around the valley.


    Maybe this Queen-gig was even better than I had thought.

 Chapter 654

    After knowing that I might, eventually, get a veritable host of spirit-infused Ice constructs, I had a wide smile on my face. Maybe, for once, we wouldn¡¯t be hopelessly outnumbered. But before I could begin working on those constructs, I had some other work to do.


    While Lenore was training that first spirit I was busy, trying to understand if there was some drawback to giving them bodies. For example, if I were to permanently lose the portion of Astral Power used to create the body once it becomes theirs, I would most certainly not create more of them, not unless I could find a way around it. But if I could create them without problems, I would happily give bodies to all the spirits in the valley, literally raising an army from the Ice.


    Restoring the first order of business, I pulled out the Soul Prison. I had a few ideas about how I might be able to break it, allowing the Nidh?gg to break free but it would still need a lot of effort. Especially as I didn¡¯t just want to let the dragon out, with its disembodied spirit returning to the river of reincarnation to be born anew some time in the future, I wanted to give it a body, so it could remain on Mundus and do what good apocalyptic dragons did.


    Sitting on my throne, I pushed my mind towards the Soul Prison, curious if there would be a change, now that I was crowned Queen. The moment mental communion was established, I could feel amusement but also acknowledgement and even a bit of admiration, right before a flood of images and concepts inundated my mind. While the torrent of thought wasn¡¯t chaotic, it certainly was overwhelming, with instructions, requests and even a short notion of congratulations mixed all together.


    Shaking my head, I pulled back a little, trying to process what I had just experienced. Maybe the most important part was a hint on how to funnel power into the Prison, using a method similar to the one I had used before, where I had allowed the Nidh?gg to influence and use my own spellcraft. The important difference was, this method didn¡¯t use my body, it could be used to create a siphon, allowing an outside power source, such as the Nexus, to be directly funnelled into the Prison. It would take some time and delicate carving to create the funnel but I already had an idea of how to do that.


    Sliding down the tower, I walked over to one of the pillars I had created to allow me access to the inner part. These pillars were, now, redundant, the central tower theoretically able to channel the entire power of the Nexus. But I didn¡¯t just want to turn the tower into that power siphon, simply because it was mine, my very throne the key to controlling it.


    But these pillars, strong enough to channel roughly three-quarters of the Nexus¡¯ power output, they could be used and I had little emotional attachment to them. Focusing, I raised an Orb of Ice from the glacier, channelling power from myself and the pillar to infuse it. It was remarkably simple, the Ice of the glacier, infused by the Nexus for uncounted years, was almost Eternal in its own right and pushing it over that edge was no great feat of magical prowess. The only problem was that I had to make sure the runes and formations I wanted to build into the Ice were there before the process was finished, or even I would be hard-pressed to carve them into the Ice. Eternal Ice was, as one would expect, incredibly difficult to change, once it was fully established.


    Whistling to myself, I walked around the valley, creating a focus orb for each of the pillars, before finally, some eight hours after I had started, I set the last orb next to the pillar it was supposed to bind with. By now, night had fallen, allowing me to simply step through the shadows and appear on my tower.


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    However, the moment I stepped into the Shadows, I realised that now, I truly wasn¡¯t alone. There were countless beings around me and only thanks to the previous encounter with the remnant spirit, I was able to recognise them. They were just like that one, only they were bound in the Shadows, instead of the physical plane. Maybe, if I got Lenore to help, I would be able to either keep them in the Shadows, to stop others from doing what I did or I could bring them into the physical world, working as scouts and assassins. Either way, it was an interesting and quite welcome discovery.


    Stepping out of the shadows on top of my tower, I plopped down on my throne and for a few minutes, I simply relaxed. It was surprisingly comforting to know I had the entire power of the Nexus at my fingertips, strong enough to move mountains or bury them in Ice if I so desired.


    But no, I still had work to do, namely, create the Keystone to link the five focus orbs around the tower together, so they could funnel power into the Soul Prison, strengthening the Nidh?gg until we could strike the Prison, a blow from the outside linking to a blow from the inside, the combination enough to shatter it.


    Reaching out, I pulled a large chunk of Ice from the glacier, almost three metres in diameter and let it float to the top of my tower. Just that relatively simple feat would have drained a lot of my Astral Power, but with the Nexus at my disposal, it was trivial. With a grin on my face, I let it sit above the platform up top, slowly forming and carving it, turning it into the keystone I needed. As the night went on, that irregularly shaped chunk slowly turned into a finely carved crystal, with countless small runes carved on every surface. Finally, I felt that I was finished and reached out, putting my control over the Nexus to the test, to move all five of the focus orbs at the same time, putting them on top of their respective pillars and linking them into the Nexus. Power linked up, the focusing orbs were locked in place by the power flowing through them and I could let go and watch as they did their thing.


    At that moment, power surged all around the valley, beams of pure Astral Power shooting from the five pillars to the keystone in the middle, a beautiful web of silvery light. Once it reached the keystone, the crystal lit up with that very power, all the runes starting to glow as the five streams merged into one and began flowing into the Soul Prison.


    It would take some time, a few days, maybe even a week, for the Nidh?gg to get enough strength to shatter the prison and in the meantime, I could only access some of the Nexus¡¯ power. But compared to what I could do by myself, even a small part of the flood the Nexus could produce was enough for me to work with.


    With the siphon installed, I leaned back on my throne, letting my eyes fall shut. Creating the tower had been exhausting enough and adding the fiddly, detailed work needed to create the power siphons had finished me off.


    ¡°Quite impressive, love,¡± Sigmir¡¯s voice whispered in my ear and I began to smile.


    ¡°Thank you, dear. I just hope I¡¯m doing the right thing. I believe I am, but is it truly right to employ any means necessary to accomplish my goal? I don¡¯t know the long-term consequences of my actions,¡± I admitted. It was something I had never dared to consider, not even in the privacy of my own mind. I was, at the end of the day, dealing with an elder power, one I hoped to use as a scourge to get my vengeance. I was under no illusions that I could actually trust the Nidh?gg, at least not outside of very distinct circumstances. It would be in my debt, that was one thing I had going for me and what I wanted was, at least according to legend, its own purpose. But how far could i trust the legends, how close would my experience match them?


    I simply didn¡¯t know.


    ¡°Only you can know that. I, for one, trust in you and your judgement, that you are following the path you are on because you believe that it is the right one. The only question is, who set you on that path in the beginning?¡± she asked, my smile fading a little. But before I could consider the question too deeply, I felt my mind fading, the dream around me getting faint and indistinct.


    Trying to hold onto Sigmir¡¯s presence, I slipped into a deep slumber, my only focus on her comforting embrace.

 Chapter 655

    After five days of hard work, the valley had completely changed once again. Not only were there creatures roaming around the valley, but there were even multiple walls protecting the perimeter and the individual pillars. That, together with the glittering web of Astral Power in the air, from which occasionally a bit of diamond dust dropped, gave the entire place a somewhat magical feel. Standing at the top of my tower, I couldn¡¯t help but be proud of my accomplishment.


    As I was watching the movement below, Lenore landed on my shoulder, after she had checked the last batch of avian constructs, the creatures we had dubbed Nevermores, in honour of the poem that had originally given Lenore her name. We had created quite a few of them, the last batch our most successful one. The original constructs were mostly designed to search for our enemies from the air, maybe perform a bit of harassment or attack other airborne creatures but the last batch was so much more.


    Made from Eternal Ice, they were quite sturdy, could regenerate damage to a point and, the achievement I was most proud of, could even conjure sharp, feather-like Icicles and shoot them at their foes, airborne our ground-bound. It made them excellent aerial attackers, the only problem was their limited range. They simply couldn¡¯t last as long outside the valley, compared to the original constructs that could range out for days at a time.


    ¡°What do you think of their performance?¡± I asked Lenore, curious about her point-of-view, as an expert at all things bird.


    ¡°They aren¡¯t bad. The initial batch is quite agile and I sent some of them out, to make sure there would be no unpleasant events. Given the call to the entire world, I would be highly surprised if there are no enemies coming for us,¡± she replied, more details flowing over our connection, comparing the flight performance of the newer construct to the old ones. From the looks of it, I had been a little short-sighted in thinking the new batch was best, and the old ones had their own advantages. Speed, agility and reach against durability and attack power, both variants had their uses.


    ¡°Agreed, it was quite motivating, wasn¡¯t it,¡± I grinned, the challenge thrown down by the system cutting both ways. If I was being cast as the ¡®enemy of the world¡¯, well, then I had to put up a good show, right? And that was what almost my entire effort over the last few days had been directed at, making sure I would be a memorable enemy, one the world would remember forever. If that wouldn¡¯t net me some sort of performance bonus at the end of the beta, I didn¡¯t know what would.


    ¡°Did Ylva say anything about our other project?¡± I changed the topic, curious if Lenore had talked with our canine friend.


    ¡°A lot of grumbling, she¡¯s happy to have the pack expanded but they are not wolves, so she¡¯s also grumpy,¡± Lenore replied, her voice filled with mirth. She even transmitted her memory of Ylva, who, as Lenore had said, looked incredibly happy, her tail twitching uncontrollably, while her words and some of her behaviour spoke of annoyance as she complained about the other set of constructs we had created.


    Those had been modelled after her, almost two metres from snout to hindlegs and about a metre and a half in height, they were designed as ground troops. While we had no chance to copy Ylva¡¯s Fenris-given ability to fly, the canine constructs had strong jaws and their bodies made from Eternal Ice should be able to withstand some punishment. As with the avians, their range of operations was a problem but by my estimation, they should be capable to operate for three days outside of the valley, if they didn¡¯t have to seriously fight. They lacked ranged abilities but they really didn¡¯t need them, the idea was that they would use wolfpack-tactics, acting as hit-and-run harassment in the mountainous environment around us.


    ¡°Their abilities are growing,¡± I mused, taking in Lenore¡¯s observations and comparing them to the previous ones I had seen. It was quite obvious that the canines were now working together as a pack, just like normal wolves would. Maybe even a little more vicious, given that they were made from Ice and thus lacked pain receptors and their only vital point was the rune-engraved core set in their chests. As long as that core was undamaged, they could recover, especially when it was particularly cold.


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    Stepping forward, I focused downward, looking closely at the walls I had raised. The walls themselves were not that impressive, a mere three metres high and two metres thick, but they didn¡¯t have to be. They weren¡¯t really supposed to work as walls, they were more akin to fences for the final variant of Ice-constructs I had raised. Those were, in some ways, the least sophisticated of them all, four metres high and vaguely humanoid, with stocky legs, a blocky torso and long, thin arms that ended in a sharp, pointed blade. They didn¡¯t even have heads, their eyes directly integrated into their torso, giving them a somewhat alien, rather intimidating feeling.


    There were only ten of them, but I had made them for one purpose, and one purpose only, and that was to fight. They wouldn¡¯t be able to leave the valley, they wouldn¡¯t last long outside of the Nexus that constantly provided them with power, but here, they were incredibly strong and durable. With that in mind, I had given them the ability to launch Icicle-Javelins and reconstruct themselves slowly, if they were damaged. Five were to defend the outer walls, and one each was stationed next to the pillars and their smaller walls, with orders to defend their post to the last.


    In game terms, I wanted them to act as mini-bosses, to give attacking Travellers something familiar if any ever made it here in the next few days. If not, I would be a little disappointed, for what good was a collaboration between Pantheon and myself, if I couldn¡¯t show the other Travellers, and the world, what was possible on the Road to Purgatory?


    Looking at the fortress surrounding my tower, I considered making some sort of trailer myself, a challenge to the other Travellers, to come and venture into the Frozen Citadel. Maybe that would work as bait, allowing me to cement the set-up Pantheon Entertainment had started and, ultimately, give me the maximum reward at the end of the Beta.


    Shaking my head, I stepped back and shelved the question for now. While there was an argument for it, I didn¡¯t want to give away all the surprises I had designed and most certainly not the special constructs I had created inside the tower itself or those hiding in every shadow around the valley.


    Those in the shadows had been the most difficult to make, made from pure Darkness and only able to leave the shadows for seconds before they had to return. But that just meant they were perfect assassins, even if their ability to scout was rather limited.


    Sitting down on my throne, I looked at the Soul Prison on its stand, right below the crystal siphon. The power channelled into the crystalline prison was no joke and unless my estimation was off, it would only take a few more days before I would be able to shatter the prison and unleash the Nihh?gg on the world.


    When I noticed one of the Nevermores quickly flying directly to my tower, I was intrigued. They had mostly interacted with Lenore, treating me with an odd sense of caution and reverence whenever they got close to me. And yet, this one gave off a sense of urgency, quite unlike their usual manner.


    Making myself comfortable, I waited the minute it took the Nevermore to reach the tower, my mind idly taking in the rest of my domain.


    ¡°Ice Queen, I bring news,¡± it greeted me. Their ability to communicate had advanced quite a bit and now they were capable of using words, even if there was still a lot of conceptual speech transmitted with those words. The reverent, almost worshipful, concepts embedded in my title managed to bring a faint blush to my cheeks while the cautious, vigilant undertones of the ¡®news¡¯ made me frown.


    ¡°Show me,¡± I ordered, pushing my mind towards the bird as if it was Lenore. Given that they were partially part of my power, I could connect to their minds, it just strained my mind, and theirs to a degree.


    What I saw in the Nevermore¡¯s perception only solidified my worry, it had been one of the first I had made and travelled quite a distance, taking a look at the lands they had never been able to traverse. It had only returned when it saw something strange, out of place. Something that I recognised as an army.

 Chapter 656

    Observing by myself, the images were even clearer than seen in the memory of the Nevermore. It truly was an army that made its way up the mountains and, almost certainly, towards my valley. Seen from above, it was a disciplined group of elves, though curiously, they neither had the giant avians we had seen them ride before nor did they have those riding cats. It was purely an infantry force, without even wagons to carry supplies. But then, given the wide availability of magic bags, that shouldn¡¯t come as too much of a surprise, it was far simpler to use a magic bag to carry your load than it was to use a wagon.


    There were maybe a hundred elves in the main body of the army but I¡¯d have to carefully observe to see if there were more, to scout out the path and prevent unfortunate surprises.


    ¡°We should put our forces to the test,¡± I mused, watching the processing crawling up the mountain. They would need at least five days to reach my valley, simply because they couldn¡¯t fly across the mountains, giving us more than enough time to bring our newly created forces to bear.


    ¡°Lenore, have the Nevermores scout widely, I don¡¯t believe the elves would only send one small army, not with the message we all received,¡± I ordered, before focusing on Ylva.


    ¡°Organise the wargs,¡± I ordered, using the new name for the canine constructs. Ylva had objected to calling them wolves, so copying a name I had heard before worked just as well. ¡°They are to go hunting in packs. Their job will be to blind that army and take a few chunks out of them. I¡¯d like to know what the elves are planning,¡± I continued, making my doubt about the elvish tactics obvious. I didn¡¯t believe the elves would send such a small group against us, not after they had lost about as many of their troops in the large battle after they had cornered Sigmir and me. Unless they had some sort of confidence or plan in mind, that would almost certainly make them lose their people.


    Pulling my mind back, I dispersed the construct I had used to spy on the elves. Ever since I had started to create bodies for the remnant spirits, my ability to conjure and control constructs had gone up but at the same time, I realised just how many limitations there were. Without some sort of animus, I had to control them directly and while a dedicated construct was easier to control than my Ice Blades, it still took a lot of effort and focus, for relatively little gain, at least most of the time.


    It made me wonder about the classes that could actually create constructs and use them. Were they similar to what I could do with the remnant spirits, infusing constructs of Astral Power with an outside force? And if yes, did that mean that a patient and thorough person with such a class could amass an army? Sure, it would take them orders of magnitudes longer than it had taken me with the help of the Nexus, but just because it would take some time didn¡¯t mean it was impossible.


    As I considered it, I realised that things weren¡¯t as easy. The constructs I had created could sustain themselves due to a single, simple reason, namely the environment we were in. The Nexus had infused the area with Ice Astral Power for a long time and in that environment, the constructs could constantly take in a bit of power. Otherwise, each construct could run for some time, before the Astral Power originally infused into them was used up, leaving it as little more than a chunk of conjured Ice.


    Movement broke me out of my reverie and I rose from my throne and looked into the valley. Ylva and Lenore were in the process of ordering the different groups and sending them out into the field. The first Nevermores had already taken flight and on their way out of the valley, they circled around the tower once, respectfully dipping their wings in passing.


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    Further down, the Wargs were moving into distinct groups, each made out of eight constructs that would act as packs. It was a structure we had planned before, small units working together, forming into a larger group. Eight packs of eight wargs formed a Chase and, in theory, eight chases would form a Hunt. So far, we didn¡¯t quite have enough wargs to form a Hunt, we were a few short but that didn¡¯t really matter. I had no doubt that getting harassed by hundreds of magically conjured constructs would be problematic enough to the elves. Especially given that the Wargs were only part of our forces.


    Knowing that trouble would soon come into the valley, I logged out of Road to Purgatory, to deal with the usual necessities before things would get crazy.


    Looking into the forum, I wasn¡¯t too surprised that discussions regarding the Ice Queen, the various trailers and the end-of-beta event were at the top of the list. Some people were still questioning whether or not I had been a plant from the start, while others were complaining that only Arbortoma was getting an event.


    Curiously, I noticed that it was almost entirely players of the later waves who complained about the event, while few of the initial waves did. It made me wonder, to the point that I sent a message to Mal, curious about what she had heard. We had been exchanging messages but after what had happened to Sigmir, I never really had the mood to ask.


    Shaking my head, I decided to add a bit of fuel to the fire and posted a few images of the Frozen Citadel, nothing that would prepare anyone for the surprises I had prepared but enough to make people interested. While I wasn¡¯t really interested in generating hype for the sake of interactions, I was proud of what Lenore, Ylva and I had done in that valley, in many ways it was a crowning achievement in my gaming career. It felt far more personal and important than even the titles I had won in the past. Maybe because I was, most likely, the only one who had managed this, while the titles I had won in the past were titles that were given out every year.


    Once I was done with the Forum, I moved into the temple and began telling Sigmir about my achievements and troubles in the valley. I was quite proud of being the Ice Queen and important enough to have armies after me, even if it might become a pain in the neck. Maybe it was due to being acknowledged and treated as a ¡®raid boss¡¯, though I would have to make sure that nobody got any ideas about farming the Frozen Citadel, not that there would be any real loot.


    As I was talking, new plans and ideas sprung up in my mind, some ideas feasible, others completely ridiculous but fun to imagine nonetheless. Here, in my temple, it didn¡¯t feel like Sigmir was gone, and I could even occasionally hear her voice, reminding me of something or prodding me to think of a different solution to a problem. As if she was still with me.


    It was a bittersweet sensation and one that I both hated and craved. After immersing myself for a bit, I moved out of the capsule, deciding on future plans. The beta would end within the month and my vengeance would be complete sooner. Once that was accomplished, I didn¡¯t really plan to return to Mundus, until after the official launch was complete.


    Even after the launch, there was a part of me that was hesitant, wondering whether or not I truly wanted to return. If there was no chance at reuniting with Sigmir, would I want to be reminded of what I had lost every day? Or would I want to try and¡­


    Shaking my head, I pushed that thought from my mind and focused on more important matters, namely how to get the best start into the official launch. To me, it was quite obvious that I would have to go with the challenging way to generate my attributes, it had served me very well and I was planning to remain as Morgana and not change a lot about my choices.


    That meant I should make sure I was in top form, so I could get the most out of those initial attributes, hopefully giving me a small headstart. It wouldn¡¯t be massive but it might be the small edge I needed to succeed.


    With a plan in mind, I gave Mrs Wu a call, scheduling some extra time at their gym for the next week. By then, my work on Mundus would be done, either in success or in failure.

 Chapter 657

    A frown creased my forehead, as I was looking down at the elvish army. I couldn¡¯t believe that they would be this reckless and predictable, simply marching up the valley without taking any additional precautions. Sure, they had deployed a company of scouts, some of whom had been torn apart by the Wargs we had sent out, but that was it, at least that was all I could detect from afar. Trusting such a simple measure would be foolish beyond all belief and yet, they appeared to have done just that.


    It reeked of a trap but none of us was able to detect where the trap was, so we had decided to take a few precautions of our own before springing it. The good thing about the remnant spirits was that they didn¡¯t fear death. We didn¡¯t even know whether they could die, so far the few experiments we had done indicated that they would likely return to the Nexus if their physical forms were destroyed but it would take some time. Either way, they didn¡¯t really care, they enjoyed their corporeal form and were looking forward to fighting.


    Looking to the horizon from my lofty perch, I could see the sun setting, the valley below quickly getting devoured by the twilight of the night, which meant things were starting now.


    From beyond a ridge on the right flank of the elves, a flight of Nevermores came winging in, the latest model that was capable of raining down feathery Icicles, and before the elves could do much more than raise the alarm, a hail of Icicles started to hail down on them. The elves managed to avoid some of the damage, thanks to their armour, shields and magical equipment, but it threw their camp into chaos and destroyed some of their gear.


    Having accomplished exactly what we had wanted to, the Nevermores retreated, as the elves launched retaliatory strikes, arcs of magic and streaks drawn by enchanted arrows adding a bit of colour to the nightly twilight. Some of the Nevermores got struck but from the looks of it, none was completely destroyed. They were damaged but managed to get away, only to circle around and make another attack in a few minutes.


    But for now, the elves were in chaos, officers shouting around, trying to restore order amongst their troops. But all that shouting and chaos meant one thing, namely that nobody could pay full attention to the snowbank to their left, where well-hidden white shapes were padding through the snow, undetected by even the famed elvish ears and eyes.


    Even for me, knowing where to look and what to look for, it was difficult to detect the Wargs on their approach. They had managed to blend into the snow near-perfectly, moving slowly and waiting for the Nevermores to throw the camp into chaos and now, they were making their move. The first indication the elves got that the attack wasn¡¯t just from the air was the scent of blood spreading through the night, after the first pair of guards, distracted by the chaos, died without even managing to raise the alarm.


    Just as planned, the wargs only tore into the camp for a few moments, not even trying to stick around and get into an actual fight. That wasn¡¯t the plan, they managed to tear a few,, maybe a dozen or so, elves to pieces before trying to retreat back into the snow.


    The elves tried to pursue, to pin the canine shapes down and bring their weapons to bear, only to hear the sounds of wings in the air and suffer another shower of icy feathers, pouring down from the returning Nevermores.


    So far, the attack had gone exactly as planned but when I felt a surge of magic, I knew it wasn¡¯t going to continue that way. One of the elves waved their hand before raising a pendant high above their head. From that, a green sheen of magic surged forth, banishing the Twilight and suddenly, massive vines sprung out from the ground, rapidly growing and entangling the wargs.


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    Nodding to myself, I tried to understand the magic, as the Wargs tried to break free, the vines entangling them keeping them pinned as the elves started to advance. By now, the Nevermores had completed their attack and been forced to retreat by the elvish attacks and this time, multiple Nevermores had taken critical damage, dropping into the snow. I wasn¡¯t sure if they were completely destroyed or would recover in time, but it didn¡¯t really matter, the elves would likely make sure they¡¯d never fly again. Just like they were trying to destroy the pinned Wargs.


    Knowing that my Wargs were about to get decimated after their greatest strength, their mobility and speed, was sealed I made a move of my own. With the power of the Nexus at my disposal, things that would have been utterly impossible just two weeks ago were now child¡¯s play. Things like manipulating a large bank of snow, a few hundred metres above the elvish camp.


    Before the attack, I had planned to keep my involvement to a minimum, in an attempt to obscure the nature and strength of our force but that didn¡¯t mean I would let my Wargs die just like that. Their biggest advantage was their frozen Nature and while the blunt impact of an avalanche would hurt them, the Ice would also sustain and heal them, giving me confidence that they could dig themselves back out and return to the valley. But the elves? They would stay on this mountain forever, an eternal, frozen guard to my realm.


    Humming to myself, I pulled power from the Nexus and a rumbling sound echoed through the mountains, heard far and wide, as hundreds of kilos of Snow started to move and quickly turned into tons of moving snow and ice. It looked quite interesting, first the slow movement as I artificially moved the snow, before gravity and momentum took over and the whole process sped up.


    And then, the elves noticing the movement and panic sinking in, the order their officers had so painstakingly restored instantly shattered. One of them, the same one that had used the amulet earlier, was trying something similar, again that waving motion and again, plants started to grow, trying to form a wall. But even a wall of entangled thorns and vines wasn¡¯t strong enough to withstand the impact of an avalanche.


    I could watch as the snow crashed into their hastily created wall and for a moment, I felt a tugging, as if someone was trying to influence the snow, to divert it around the camp. Letting out a snort, I focused on that sensation and noticed a familiar magic. Someone amongst the elves was capable of Ice Magic. That realisation only made the smile on my face wider and I bore down on that sensation, crushing it with the entire power of the Nexus. The Avalance turned from a mix of ice and snow into something harder as large chunks of snow were infused with Astral Power and turned into razor-sharp Icicles, just as they were hitting the elvish camp.


    The wall, only standing with the magical support, was ripped apart within a few seconds, the vines unable to withstand that amount of force and the spellcaster that had tried to influence the avalanche was likely now suffering, the magical force I had simply smacked into their connection to the Astral River nothing a mortal could casually withstand.


    The rumbling sound passed and below, the camp was completely gone, with no elves, no tents, in sight. There was nothing but freshly churned ice and snow covering the area.


    I was about to withdraw when I felt a disturbance in the air. Looking over, I flinched when the radiance of the Sun, which should have already vanished behind the horizon, hit me, blinding me for a moment. Moments later, as I was throwing up a wall of Ice to protect myself, I could faintly see a few flying forms in the air, winged and somewhat similar to the shape the Raven¡¯s Shadow took. Valkyries, and powerful ones. They were all close together, forming an odd formation and from the middle of that formation was a ball of burning, radiant light.


    Rays of burning fury hit the wall I had hastily set up and I could feel it melting rapidly, despite the amount of Astral Power I had imbued. Distance and my own physical body limited how much power I could channel and they were bringing some serious power to bear. Knowing that it would take them little more than seconds to burn through the wall, no matter how much I struggled, I changed my approach, throwing all power I could muster with my perfect magic control into a single, simple attack. It was a curse of madness, using the darkness of the night they had banished and the light of the moon above.


    Just as I was finishing the curse, their light burned through the remainder of my wall and, moments later, burned away my presence on that mountain ridge.

 Interlude: White Friday

    At the edge of the Elven Forest, where the dryad-bound giant trees of their home have to give way to the smaller, ordinary trees that grow near the slopes of the Mountains of Ice, a small army is marching out of an emerald-green opening within one of the trees. Four abreast, they march, quickly forming up and starting their way towards the nearby mountains.


    They have to march, none of the elven mounts are suitable for extended operation in the Mountains of Ice but that doesn¡¯t mean much. They are elven rangers, some of the best troops of the realm, and travelling through the dangerous mountains is easy for them. And travel, they must for there is something wicked growing within those mountains, something that may portend doom for the entire realm if it¡¯s not dealt with.


    The foothills offer little challenge, no beasts are foolish enough to challenge an army without a dire need and their supplies are plentiful, providing for them to ascertain a good speed. Only when they reach the actual Mountains of Ice, with their harsh terrain and frozen peaks do they have to slow down. But still, onwards they march.


    High above, hidden between the clouds and concealed by the wind, a flight of Valkyries keeps pace with the elves. They have not told their supposed allies about their presence, for they are above them, the elves only there to guide the way and lure out the prey they are hunting. The oracle has spoken, given them guidance on their path, and that path they have to follow, no matter where it leads. And if a few knife-eared forest dwellers have to take the lead on this path, so be it. They are on a mission from God and they will succeed.


    Looking back down the slope, one of the elven scouts wipes a bit of perspiration from his forehead. The high mountains are different from their forests, far more difficult to traverse and the beasts that roam the mountains truly make them a place of death. Frowning, the scout focuses on the snow further up the mountain, trying to ascertain if there was danger. Luckily, predators need prey to thrive and in these sparse mountains, prey is at a premium.


    Exchanging a few gestures with her fellow scouts, she continued moving upwards, making sure none of these predators of the mountain manage to sneak up on their comrades.


    Holding his verdant spell-focus, the captain finishes his communication with the superiors back home. Plans have been made and are now carried out, some of them by his men, some by others, back in the forest. The ominous oracle shocked a lot of people and made everyone take notice. Before, they were wary of a fiend haunting their forest, a monster gnawing at the roots of their beloved trees. But now, in light of the oracle, nobody dares to be negligent, every elf, every faithful, has been called upon and they all march to war, against this heretic Ice Queen.


    None shall threaten the peace of the forest.


    The elves continue their travel upwards, their climb difficult and exhausting. There are no paths, nothing but cliffs, gravel, rocks and a bit of lichen, at least until they reach the snow-covered passes and slopes. Up there, only the strength of each individual, their equipment and the magic bestowed upon them by the forest allows them to hang on.


    The scouts up ahead managed to subdue the predators of the region, turning some of them into coats and sustenance for the warriors but they are speaking of something different that lurks in these mountains. Not the Ice Queen they were warned about but something else. Sprites, creatures of pure magic and malice, dwell in these mountains and the scouts have already been bloodied by them. Driven by vigilance, the captain pulls his troops closer together, especially once they reach the snowfields, where cold, white death covers every surface.


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    Marching through the snow, one elven scout stops, a frown on his face. There is something in these alien lands, something that stalks him and his comrades. He is about to call for reinforcement, simply due to the way his gut is clenching, when movement in the corner of his eye makes him turn around.


    Only to get bowled over from behind, his face getting stuffed into the snow before he has a chance to scream, a chance that never comes as frozen, crystalline teeth rip into his back and quickly snuff out his life.


    It has been a day since the elves reached the snowfields, their speed slowing down even further. Night falls quickly in these mountains, the deep shadows of the valley blocking the last rays of the sun. Unused to the snow, even the famed, elven eyes are suffering, the blinding white snow burning in their eyes. Camp has been established and the various soldiers are getting comfortable, some quietly celebrating that they don¡¯t have to guard at night, others making sure they will be ready to march, come dawn.


    Suddenly, the faint whistling of the wind catches the attention of a guard, making him turn and squint, the twilight casting odd shadows. Still, shadows don¡¯t make noise, so the guard calls out a warning, keeping his eyes trained in that direction.


    Only a light glint, a bit of reflected light striking a glimmering surface, serves as a warning, just before a rain of frozen projectiles starts to land on the guard and the camp around him. Canvas tents, armour, shields and flesh all suffer from the rain of ice-shards and finally, the guard is able to recognise their attackers.


    Gliding on the wind, an unkindness of strange, grey ravens is surging past their camp, frozen, blue eyes staring at the elves as they beat their wings, each beat sending out more of these frozen shards.


    Screams of the wounded echo through the camp, alongside shouts of their officers, trying to restore order and strike back at these feathery fiends. Bows are knocked, arrows are shot and magic surges as each of the soldiers tries their best to destroy their aerial attackers before they can vanish across the mountains, making pursuit impossible.


    In the chaos, the damp noise of a body falling in the snow is overheard and in the twilight, the scent of blood spreads across the mountainside. At first, it¡¯s faint and those smelling it only think of the hail of icy shards that has just rained down on their camp, until the scent is too heavy for minor injuries.


    Warnings are shouted, as the silvery-grey predators that have infiltrated their camp are discovered and in an attempt to push them back, more commands are ordered. Elves move together, into formation to prevent their canine foes from singling out individuals and tearing them apart one by one. As if these strange wolves know their tactics, they quickly begin to retreat, just as the ravens from the earlier attack return, sending down another wave of shards.


    The captain steps up, tossing out a handful of seeds and with a shout, he invokes the power of the forest. Emerald power surges from his focus, as the seeds instantly sprout, thick vines piercing through the snow and taking root in the frozen soil as they wrap around some of the wolves. They won¡¯t last long, but they will last long enough.


    Half of the army steps forward, to deal with the wolves while the other half starts launching attacks at the flying ravens, causing them to fall from the sky. The earlier chaos fades and order is restored, as the soldiers advance on the bound wolves, ready to end their existence.


    Only for chaos to return, when a rumbling sound echoes through the valley and a wave of snow comes crashing down the slope. Screams of fear echo through the night, only to be drowned out by orders from their captain, in an attempt to form ranks and take cover. Fresh vines sprout with magical support and each spellcaster is doing their best to avert the sudden disaster.


    But there is too much snow, too much weight crashing into the elven camp and soon, everything is washed away by the unforgiving force of nature from above.


    Far above the tragedy in the valley, the flight of valkyries judges the situation. The surge of power that caused the avalanche was unmistakable, allowing them to hone in on the lone figure standing on a nearby slope, looking down on the destruction caused.


    A lone figure, commanding massive amounts of Ice Magic.


    Determined, they all move into formation and invoke the Judgement of Heaven. Burning sunlight streams out, the chorus of their voices turning the night to day, banishing the darkness and sunlight flares. The figure tries to invoke defensive magic, only for the magic to rapidly burn away. In an attempt to strike at the Chosen of the Sun, dark magic flares, trying to dissuade the Judgement of Heaven by threatening mutual destruction. But the Chosen are on a mission.


    And the mission will not fail, even if they have to lay down their lives.

 Chapter 658

    Slowly shaking my head, I blinked a few times, trying to get rid of the spots shimmering in my eyes. These had to be wholly psychosomatic, the radiant attack that had scorched my simulacrum had been some two dozen kilometres away after all, but that didn¡¯t change their presence.


    Leaning back, I mentally went through the events, trying to get a grasp on the Valkyries'' abilities and their tactics. Having just one flight of Nevermores, a single Chase of Wargs and my latest toy ambush the elves had been the right decision. I had no idea what those birdies could have done if I had sent more of our forces, though the likely answer was that they wouldn¡¯t have done a damn thing. They had been hiding, keeping themselves concealed high up in the air, and only struck when they noticed a powerful, magical emanation, probably thinking it was me.


    Standing up from my throne, I stepped onto a flight of stairs, using the shadows to swiftly navigate my tower, and moved into my workshop. There, I looked at a sculpture made of Ice, its form and features roughly modelled after my own and grinned. While there was still some more work to be done and I thought I might be able to make some improvements in the future, the experiment had been a complete success. Using a combination of Blood Magic, Astral Mediation and the observations I had made while crafting the constructs for the remnant spirits, I had managed to create these humanoid constructs, only that instead of allowing a Remnant Spirit to use them, I had linked myself into them, allowing me to remote-control them and use my magic through the Astral River while remaining safely on my throne.


    That I could directly draw Astral Power from the Nexus and greatly reduce the ineffectiveness of casting through the Astral River thanks to that connection made the whole thing practical, allowing me to wield a substantial percentage of my power through the simulacrum though that knowledge only served to highlight just how powerful those Valkyries had been.


    Shaking my head once more, I pulled a hair from my head, making sure that it remained filled with my Astral Power as I did, before placing it onto the frozen statue before me. Next, II pricked my finger with my Athame and let a drop of blood well up while infusing it with my Astral Power, before smearing that drop of blood onto the Ice, right across the hair I had just placed.


    Focusing on the Astral Power that had formed the statue and my hair and Blood, I connected the three, briefly closing my eyes to link into the statue, which was now a simulacrum, ready to be controlled.


    Nodding to myself, I stepped back, confident that I could use the simulacrum if there was another situation that required me to endanger myself, something I preferred to avoid, now that I had access to the Nexus. Having it simply allowed me to wield tremendous amounts of power and moving out of my tower, away from my throne that was the focal point of that power would be foolish.


    With the new simulacrum prepared, I moved back to my throne, while a sliver of my awareness was split off, moving it to the entrance of the tower. Inside the tower, I hardly needed it so having it somewhere I could deploy it quickly seemed like a good idea.


    Back on my throne, I focused on Lenore, who was flying above the valley, giving some of our Nevermores a few more lessons on aerial combat. They were learning, quickly, but they had only been birds for a couple of days, leaving them a little inexperienced.


    ¡°I need your advice, friend,¡± I told her, giving her a few moments before dumping the memories of the brief combat on her. As she was parsing them, I focused outwards, on that last curse I had cast on the Valkyries, trying to track their presence. I was quite confident that I had struck them, but there had been no notifications telling me that I had killed any of them, leaving me a little uncertain. But then, it hadn¡¯t really been a killing curse, merely one that should strike at their minds and leave them confused, their communion and maybe even their communication with the divine broken. The idea was that the Dark Moon represented solitude and loneliness, giving me the idea that it might be able to stop them from seeking solace and power from their deity.


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    Closing my eyes, I immersed myself in the Astral River, seeking out traces of my own Astral Power and soon, I could feel a faint trace of my magic. Projecting my mind there and creating a shadowy construct of Darkness, using the form of a Raven, I manifested, taking in the environment.


    By now, night had completely fallen, leaving the snowy slope I found myself on in a curious state of twilight, only a bit of moonlight reflecting from the pristine snow. Looking around, I noticed the crumbled form of a Valkyrie, groaning in pain and tainted with my Astral Power. Grinning, I moved the construct, letting the Raven hop across the snow to take a closer look.


    The Valkyrie didn¡¯t look too hot, her wing seemed to be broken and there was quite a bit of blood spilling from her mouth, making me think there were internal injuries. But what¡¯s more, she looked as if she had been hit quite hard by the impact, the snow doing little to cushion her fall.


    ¡°You thought you could come here and stop me, did you?¡± I asked, projecting my voice out of the raven-shaped construct. Sadly, my conversation partner didn¡¯t look like she could actually respond, or was even really conscious.


    Not that I cared.


    With a mental flicker, I used the Snow she was lying on to flip her over, causing a moan of pain as she landed on her broken wing. but the pain seemed to be enough to bring her to awareness. Her eyes flickered as she stared at the raven that had hopped onto her chest, what I knew to be deep purple, almost black, eyes staring back at her.


    Faintly, I thought I could hear a prayer bubbling past the blood and spittle running from her mouth, a thought that amused me. Clearly, there was no god here, only me.


    ¡°Your Gods have forsaken you,¡± I mocked, enjoying the role of the villain quite a bit at that moment. The sneaky, underhanded nature of their actions was annoying me. Shadowing the elves and then striking from ambush didn¡¯t feel heroic to me. They were supposed to be the good guys, defeating the evil me. Underhanded was supposed to be part of my portfolio.


    But if I couldn¡¯t hold a monopoly on underhanded, I would have to add something else to my tools. And given that I was the villain in this play Pantheon and I had written, Corruption sounded like such a great thing to add.


    Reaching out, I called upon a few of my Wargs, sending them to collect this broken bird, even as I hopped onto her head, using the Blood on her lips as a link to channel a bit of Blood Magic into her system. Not enough to heal, far from it, just enough to keep her alive, at least until I decided what to do with her. To kill or to corrupt, such a difficult choice.


    Before I could make a decision, Lenore pushed against my mind. Leaving the construct sitting on my new toy¡¯s chest, I pulled most of my mind back to my body, looking at the bird sitting next to me.


    ¡°Your opinion?¡± I asked, curious what she¡¯d think.


    ¡°A probing attack, the elves were both bait and distraction. A few scouts have returned and mentioned they have seen similar shapes in the distance but so far, none of those who have gone to take a closer look have returned. We should know more in a few hours,¡± she reported, my mood souring. So the elves hadn¡¯t put all their eggs in a single basket but had split those eggs, trying to make sure something would get to me.


    And most likely, there would be more Valkyries as well, waiting to take their shot at me.


    ¡°I see,¡± I agreed, before focusing my conscience back on the fallen Valkyrie, where the wargs had now started to approach, their presence making my fallen prey tremble in fear.


    The wargs weren¡¯t gentle with her but made sure not to cause any additional damage as they dragged her away. They were still about a day of travel away from the valley, giving me some time to make a decision regarding her. But there were other priorities before that.


    ¡°Have the Wargs and Nevermores focus on delaying the approaching enemies. I¡¯ll be helping as much as I can, but the main objective is keeping them away until I can crack the Soul Prison.¡± I ordered Lenore, pushing the question regarding the fallen Valkyrie to the back of the queue. Maybe I could make use of her, but if not, she¡¯d be a liability, one that I wouldn¡¯t allow in my domain, no matter how interesting it would be to add a corrupted Valkyrie to the guardians of my tower.

 Chapter 659

    Gently touching the Soul Prison, I felt the power pulsing within. The difference was incredible, from the faint, almost extinguished presence it had when I first found it, to the palpable sense of power it now emanated, there was just no comparison. Sending out a tendril of mental energy, I established a connection, the Nidhogg¡¯s presence leaving me stunned for a brief moment, as I struggled to comprehend the greeting it had sent me.


    As always, communication with it was a massive headache, literally, the amount of information it packed in even the simplest and most mundane exchange put pressure on my feeble, mortal mind. It made me remember the Grandmother and her habit of avoiding all but my mundane senses, saying it was for my own good. Now, I began believing it, simply as I couldn¡¯t imagine a being that had controlled a Nexus for centuries be a simple existence. But it didn¡¯t really matter.


    Once I was finished parsing the information from the Nidh?gg, I began to grin, realising that we were almost done. The next few steps were important, requiring both my full attention and a great deal of power, but once we completed them, things would get easier. I would likely need Lenore¡¯s help to complete the last steps, but we had discussed it and she was willing.


    Waiting for Lenore, I tried to impress on the Nidhogg the current state of the world and our objectives in this world. I had no illusions that just because we had a creature of vast potential power on our side, there would be nothing that could stop it. The memory of the Bound Titan was still vivid in my mind, despite the months that had passed since then and I had no desire to see the majestic giant serpent I had seen in the mental space be bound in a similar way.


    Before settling in for the final push of cracking the Soul Prison, I briefly left the capsule, making sure that nothing would go wrong outside of it. A brief glance in the forum told me that there was little new going on, just more discussions about my actions and whether or not this whole event was genuine or a huge PR stunt, trying to make people think the game actually allowed you to become someone with enough power to threaten the whole world.


    Amusingly, the vast majority was convinced that it actually was a stunt, simply because nobody could be allowed that much power, not if Road to Purgatory was supposed to be viable long-term. Once people achieved this level of power, things went off the rails, or, as some quoted, ¡°Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.¡±


    Even I, though only in the privacy of my own mind, wasn¡¯t certain if my achievements would remain possible in the live version, as some of them had hinged on the Soul Prison and whether or not it had been a coincidence that it was in a low-level area and I had started out almost on top of it. But that was a question I couldn¡¯t answer by myself and even if I could, I wasn¡¯t sure if I wanted to know the answer.


    Either way, after a quick look through the forum, some food and a shower, I was back in Mundus and ready to unleash the Nidh?gg.


    Lenore was already waiting for me at the top of my tower, reporting on the various groups of Wargs and Nevermores she had sent out to keep the different groups that were moving towards our position from getting to us.


    Acknowledging her, and Ylva¡¯s, efforts, I sat on my throne, giving her a brief caress before focusing on the crystal floating in front of me. Letting out a deep breath, I closed my eyes, letting my mind delve into the Astral River so I could begin drawing power from it.


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    Deliberately keeping my breathing controlled, I let power flow through me, my very being infused with it, even as the power channelled through the Tower my throne was sitting on merged with my own. It was an incredible amount of energy, enough to move a mountain, or create one of Ice, and it was all at my fingertips.


    One more deep breath, as my mind formed concepts and ideas, the magic not following strictly defined runic rules but the free-form of pure magic, my mind shaping reality following my desires and instinct. The pale, blue flames of Ice I had come across ignited in my mouth and a soft, almost gentle, breath carried them from my mouth onto the Soul Prison. They carried an immense amount of energy and my whole being became a funnel, solely concentrated on pulling energy from the Nexus and keeping those flames burning.


    I could feel the Nidhogg pushing against the prison from the other side, primordial determination crashing against the crystalline manifestation of divine will, even as my own power was slowly eating away at the powers imbued in the Prison. It was slow-going, the effort quite literally impossible without the limitless supply of power that allowed me to replenish myself and channel most of the power through the Tower and Throne I was sitting on, otherwise I would have drained myself dry multiple times.


    Time began to blur as my mind started to drift in and out of focus, the exertion taking a toll on me. Even with a near-limitless source of magic, there was a burden on the caster and the burden was mounting as time passed by. I wasn¡¯t sure how long I had been keeping the flame burning on the Soul Prison, how long the Nidh?gg had beaten against it from the inside, but I could feel the impossibly hard crystal slowly weaken.


    ¡°You should watch out,¡± I heard a familiar voice warn me, the words breaking me out of the vague, floating state I had been in, where I was merely concerned with the constant, repetitive task of pulling power from the Astral River and infusing it into the flames I used to burn the Soul Prison.


    If I had a face, I would have frowned but like this, I could only focus inward, trying to find the danger. And there it was, not so much a hammer blow but more a seeping, slow strangulation, trying to limit and choke off the power of the Nexus itself. If not for the warning, I might have not noticed until things were too late.


    Adjusting my focus, I mentally called out to Lenore, asking her for help. She had been on standby right next to me for just that reason, to join me if things went wrong. Her mind brushed against mine and I welcomed her in, our minds fusing and we knew Morgana was no longer sitting on her Throne, but the Raven¡¯s Shadow.


    We quickly split our tasks, one of us making sure that whatever it was that tried to choke us out was pushed back, while the other kept the flames going, the Soul Prison weakening under our assault.


    And yet, even with us working together, it took time.


    Finally, we could feel a weakening, the constant assault finally taking its toll. Drawing deeply once more, we focused all the power we could draw into our Talons, standing from the Throne and stepping forward, before striking down on the Soul Prison, massive amounts of Magic discharging from our talons as it hit.


    For a moment, the power flared and surged, battering against the prison, until we found a tiny crack, an imperfection revealed by the constant burning and battering the Soul Prison had endured. And into that crack, we forced our power, seeping into it like water seeping into rock, only to freeze over and break the rock.


    That final moment, when the Soul Prison gave way, was almost anticlimactic. There was a faint howl in the distance, we weren¡¯t sure if it came from Ylva, from one of our Wargs or from somewhere else, but it sounded both desolate and triumphant.


    On the Soul Prison, nothing but a single, sharp crack announced our success. The flames we had summoned were still burning on the crystal but now, there was a crack in the previously perfect matric and through that crack, we could see an impossibly deep blackness.


    Before, we had believed that the light-absorbing Darkness we had created with our magic was the deepest blackness we could ever see, far darker than even the void of space. But now, we were taught better.


    There was something darker than black and we were staring right into the depths of its soul.


    And now that we had unleashed it, it was staring right back at us, jubilant with success.

 Interlude: Assault on the Citadel

    Looking up, into the massive mountains surrounding them, Clavran could only shake his head. Just a week ago, he had been fighting in the Arena of the White Tower, fighting to entertain the masses and nobility. And then, all of a sudden, things had gone to the devil, when a small, oh-so-inconspicuous, notification told the entire World of Mundus that someone had decided to go all four horsemen on the world and call in the apocalypse, or something along those lines.


    Given that the notification had all hallmarks of a major event, only one that seemed to be at least partially player-driven, the highly involved, and thus high-level, players had decided they wanted in on that, curious to see what truly was going on. Private messages had been exchanged and under the guidance of a few experienced Guild-leaders, people had been organised. While it was a bit of a surprise to Clavran that he was invited, he should have expected it. Sure, he was, most likely, the most capable duelist under the Travellers and one of the strongest general fighters but he hadn¡¯t joined any of the Traveller groups. Instead, he had prefered to stay in the Arena and fight, testing the intricacies of the combat system and making sure everything was working as well as possible.


    Not that the testing and the skills he had acquired in the hot sands of the arena were truly useful in this campaign. Just getting to the Mountains of Ice had been a small adventure, one that had shown him just how little he had actually seen of this World of Mundus and how little he understood. The people he had been in communication with had directed him to a small shrine, where a fiery portal had opened up, allowing him to make the journey from central Aletoma to central Arbotoma with a single step. There had been nothing on the forum indicating that such a feat was even remotely possible, to say nothing of the next step, where he, alongside thirty-nine other Travellers and forty natives acting as guides, had stepped into another portal, this one swirling green and somehow opening in a tree.


    That second portal had brought them close to their destination, a chain of giant mountains, stretching high into the sky, snow-capped peaks partially obscured by clouds. The Mountains of Ice, as he had been told, where the Ice Queen had built her Citadel.


    From there on, things had been a little odd. There was a strange sense of discongruity, a disconnect between the arduous journey and the mood people had been in, one was almost tortuous, the cold wind and difficult terrain hard to endure but at the same time, every Traveller had been, at some level, looking forward to the brutal and merciless fight at the end of the journey. The Natives had looked at their allies with some apprehension, seeing their companions possibly as utter lunatics but that hadn¡¯t dampened the mood amongst the Travellers. Someone had even suggested a name for their group, their Raid, Korbal, apparently meaning the Unbeaten in some obscure fantasy language and everyone was motivated to see what this first, and likely last, Raid of the Road to Purgatory-Beta had to offer.


    And how Morgana, who everyone was convinced had taken the role of ¡°Ice Queen¡± was fitting in the whole deal, there had been rumours that Morgana wasn¡¯t a normal player but had been directly guided by Pantheon Entertainment as a publicity stunt but Clavran wasn¡¯t quite convinced of that. Either way, the discussions had been quite interesting, especially with the added objective to keep their communication out of the Forum, so Morgana wouldn''t be tipped off. Not that it would help, if Pantheon Entertainment was actually supporting her, but it had been agreed upon to keep quiet and only post videos later.


    After a few days of climbing through the mountains and getting annoyed at the local, mostly aerial, wildlife, the Korbal had managed to get close to the region their guides had declared as their destination, the Frozen Citadel.


    ¡°We will attack at dawn. We have little knowledge of the internals of the fortress, there is quite a bit of magic involved that keeps me from investigating, so we¡¯ll have to do things the hard way. On a positive note, I¡¯m pretty sure I managed to conceal our presence from these strange bird things we had seen the last two days, so there¡¯s that. Everyone, rest for now and we¡¯ll get going soon. This is going to be big, so make sure there¡¯ll be no trouble elsewhere,¡± one of the officers by the name of Whisper ordered. The female was dressed in strange, flowing desert garb, completely out of place in the frozen mountains, but she made it work.


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    ¡°Got it, Mags,¡± one of the other travellers replied, causing soft laughter, especially when Whisper gave the offender a withering glare. There was little banter after that, as everyone made sure that they would be able to play for hours on end, to challenge the Raid without issues.


    In the first light of dawn, the Travellers marched off, leaving their native guides behind. The guides gave them a last salute, likely considering the whole thing a suicide mission, but that didn¡¯t stop the Travellers.


    It didn¡¯t take long for the Frozen Citadel to come into view, oddly small walls of crystalline Ice, overshadowed by a massive tower in the middle of an Ice-covered valley, with strange arcs of power flowing from smaller towers to the central tower. It looked both intimidating and oddly beautiful, but the elemental beauty wasn¡¯t why the Korbal had come. They were here to challenge the place.


    And a challenge it was. Just overcoming the outer walls proved to be incredibly difficult, with repeated attacks from strange birds that shot razor-sharp projectiles of Ice at them, often accompanied by ferocious giant wolves that didn¡¯t bleed but shattered. It was almost as if everything in the valley was made of Ice.


    There were a few attempts to circumvent the wall but the Ice it was built on was impervious to the attempts some of the spellcasters made to control it and when one of the Valkyries tried to fly across, things got ugly. Instead of individual foes, the Valkyrie was suddenly targetted by everyone in the complex, hundreds of frozen projectiles saturating the area above and around her, forcing a quick dive to safety. When another tried to use some odd teleportation technique, he managed to stumble away with a deep cut in his neck and only the quick and efficient healing from another stopped him from leaving Mundus for an involuntary time-out.


    However the biggest problem didn¡¯t come from the harassing attacks but the guardians of the wall, massive, two-legged creatures of gleaming, crystalline Ice, with long arms that could easily push back everyone but the strongest warriors and, even worse, an ability that allowed them to throw multi-metre long Icicles as if they were throwing a simple Javelin. Over and over, until someone managed to engage them in melee and stay there.


    Luckily, as powerful and threatening as these creatures were, they were incredibly stupid, almost reminiscent of an old, badly scripted NPC. Compared to the life-like natives of Mundus, these were truly dumb, holding the wall, attacking everyone who got too close or attacking those attacking them or the wall. That allowed for quite a bit of wiggle-room to exploit, with individuals drawing their attention, allowing others to concentrate fire as the creatures were distracted. Didn¡¯t mean it was fun for the pure melees like Clavran, but it worked, mostly.


    Their progress would have been even sweeter, if not for the ominous presence at the top of the tower, slowly swelling over the morning. As time passed, the various spell-casters were getting increasingly worried, muttering about the amount of power gathered there and what it might mean.


    Regardless of those mutterings, a little before noon, the Korbal had managed to shatter the outer gates and were storming the inner courtyard, with multiple smaller fortifications but also the main tower. It took quite a bit of effort to clean a way and after a brief discussion, it was decided to take a stab at one of the outer towers first, to see what happened, before going for the main tower.


    Just as the gathered Korbal engaged yet another of the Ice Collosi, now without the protective wall, the creatures had been hiding behind, a sudden change swept over the world. For a moment, it felt as if dusk was setting in, the entire valley shrouded in shadows. Somewhere, in the distance, a wolf was howling, the noise chilling their very bones and far above them, at the top of the tower, a deep, inky black sun was rising, the source of the darkness.


    ¡°That¡¯s not good, is it?¡± someone asked, just as Clavran was pushed back from the Ice Colossus he had been fighting.


    ¡°Probably not, but we are here and we won¡¯t go just because there¡¯s trouble. Let¡¯s get to it, we¡¯ve got a tower to raid and an Ice Queen to kill!¡± another, the leader of their merry band, the Paladin Howardlight, announced as he led the charge against the damaged Colossus.


    Soon after, they had managed to fall the creature and were now advancing on the gates, having decided not to attack the smaller fortifications first, not after the spectacle in the sky.


    Something was brewing and none of the Korbal liked it.

 Chapter 660

    A cloying, almost overpowering presence seeped out of the Soul Prison, wrapping itself around Lenore and me, the two of us separate once more. The presence was faintly familiar and I intellectually knew it was the Nidh?gg, free of its prison thanks to our efforts, but that knowledge and familiarity didn¡¯t help too much. Every instinct in my body, every coherent thought, screamed a warning at me, quivering in fear of the incredibly powerful predator.


    For a moment, I couldn¡¯t even think, let alone breathe and only by closing my eyes, focusing inwards while the protective embrace of Sigmir wrapped around myself, emanating from the crystal set in my forehead, I could regain some measure of coherence. Forcing in a single breath with all my will, I pushed past the oppressive fear and overwhelming presence.


    ¡°Greetings, oh Dark One,¡± I greeted, my voice shaking and far from steady but at least I had managed to speak.


    ¡°Greetings, oh Ice Queen,¡± a voice replied, coming from all around me. There was amusement in that voice, but also a faint trace of gratitude and an underlying current of power.


    ¡°You have my gratitude and will be rewarded,¡± the voice continued, as I noticed a sensation intruding over my bond to Ylva, ¡°But the details of your reward will have to wait. Your actions have not gone unnoticed and there are some who seek to strike against us, even now.¡±


    I could feel the presence retreat, pausing for a moment as if considering where to go and suddenly, I felt a sense of pressure on the Astral Power Siphon we had used to infuse the Soul Prison. I had crafted enough constructs to realise that it was similar, only so much more powerful, to their attempts at infusing my constructs, only that the Nidh?gg could do so without my consent. Given that I still wanted to work with it, I let my control over the Siphon fade, though I kept control over the Throne and Tower. These were mine and none would take them from me.


    With my control over the Siphon fading, I could see a few tendrils of darkness coming from the crack in the Soul Prison, wrapping around the Siphon and infusing it, the previously silvery-blue crystal rapidly turning black. While the Siphon was infused with the Nidh?gg¡¯s presence, that presence around Lenore and me faded, allowing me to perceive the outside world once again and that was when I realised what the Nidh?gg might have meant.


    Cracking the Soul Prison had taken hours, all throughout the night and well into the day and from the sounds I could hear, the Frozen Citadel had been attacked some time around dawn. I could feel that some of my constructs had been destroyed and the outer wall breached, much to my annoyance. Heavily sitting down on my Throne, I spread my awareness outwards, taking in the state of my domain.


    To my surprise, it wasn¡¯t an elven, or even a Valkyrie, force that had broken into the citadel proper, but it was an incredibly diverse force, of pretty much every race I had heard about and some I had not. What¡¯s more, there were both Daimons and Valkyries, the two races supposedly eternal enemies, and I could even see a Naga, despite being about as far from the sea as one could get.


    Something wasn¡¯t adding up and the only explanation my exhausted mind could come up with what that I wasn¡¯t looking at a force of natives but a force of Travellers. How they had managed to get something like forty people to cooperate, travel into the depths of the Mountains of Ice and work together long enough to reach, and breach, my citadel was a complete mystery but somehow, they had done just that.


    Despite my exhaustion, a grin started to spread across my face, genuine happiness at some Travellers challenging the defences I had set up. I was curious how they would fare, the whole thing an interesting, magical experiment, even as I felt the Nidh?gg¡¯s presence radiate outward, from the Siphon it had occupied.


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    It was much akin to a black sun rising, a palpable sense of power spread across the valley and the noon-sun high above suddenly didn¡¯t seem to be quite as bright any longer. As if the world had put on a set of shades. If nothing else, the dark presence gave me an intense feeling of security, as if I was suddenly concealed from a dangerous foe that had been staring at me, allowing me to relax, protected by the powerful predator.


    ¡°This is different,¡± I mused, looking at the exhausted Lenore next to me. ¡°What do you think just happened?¡±


    ¡°We are being shielded, it¡¯s similar to the concealment you sometimes weave, only so much more,¡± she replied, sounding both awed and curiously relaxed, given that there still was a hostile force fighting the few Wargs and Nevermores we had in our citadel, a force that had just attacked another of the Ice Collosi I had created. It would take them hours, if not an entire day to climb to the top of my tower, but that didn¡¯t mean I could just ignore them.


    Or could I?


    I considered for a moment, whether I should simply strike against them and likely annihilate them with the overwhelming might of the Nexus or if I should leave them be. In some ways, I wanted to leave them be, to let them enjoy their last hoorah, before I cut off their hope. At the end of the day, they had already lost, they just didn¡¯t know yet. The Nidh?gg was freed and while I had yet to get my rewards, the dark presence shrouding the valley as it drew Astral Power from the Nexus was my victory. I had managed the impossible, I had spat into the face of the Gods and that, alone, should give me some rewards.


    But it wasn¡¯t enough, not if I wanted to reunite with Sigmir.


    The next step was to wait for the Heroes, before letting them fight me for a bit and, once I grew bored, I would disable them in proper Villain-fashion and allow them to watch me destroy the world. For that, I already had a few ideas, now that I didn¡¯t need the power of the Nexus to weaken the Nidh?gg¡¯s Prison but I would have to discuss things with the Dragon at some point.


    Amusingly, that meant, for now, I actually could relax, focus on regaining the strength I had spent to destroy the Soul Prison and wait until my intrepid challengers managed to reach the top of the tower if they ever managed. While the challenges I had set up were not impossible, they also weren¡¯t trivial. Hopefully, it would make for good entertainment.


    Sitting back on my throne, I let myself fall into a trance, my body completely relaxed, my mind immersed in the Astral River, the existence of the Black Sun above me allowing me to feel safe in a completely different manner the comfort provided by Sigmir had let me feel. It was a curious distinction, one that I couldn¡¯t quite describe, maybe one was a personal connection and the other was one towards something greater. Just like some people were fiercely loyal to their nation of birth, taking pride in belonging to that nation and being sheltered by it, I could take refuge under the Black Sun projected by the Nidh?gg.


    ¡°Some would call it Faith, my love,¡± Sigmir¡¯s voice reminded me and, when I looked around, I realised I was once more lying on the familiar mountainside, with her holding me in her embrace from behind.


    ¡°Is it, though? I don¡¯t believe in the Nidh?gg, no more than I would believe in the ground beneath my feet. I feel and see the Nidh?gg¡¯s presence and the shelter it provides,¡± I replied, not quite sure if Faith was the right concept.


    ¡°You believe that the presence will shelter you. You feel that its presence is more comfortable than the light of Sunna. Yet, neither is a statement of true knowledge, is it? So, why not call it Faith?¡± she asked, making me humm in acknowledgement. Maybe I was believing in the Nidh?gg, but given the circumstances, it was more akin to a belief of the enemy of my enemy is my friend. Even if that wasn¡¯t necessarily true, in my circumstances, I only needed the enemy of my enemy to be my enemy¡¯s enemy. Though I wouldn¡¯t say no to being allied with a gigantic, primordial dragon of Darkness, Death and Poison.


    ¡°Maybe I do believe. Just as I believe that we will reunite,¡± I smiled, letting my mind fade from her wonderful, soothing embrace and return to Mundus, leaving the dream we shared.


    Looking around, I realised that only a few minutes had passed and now, the intruders had destroyed the Ice Colossus they had been fighting and were moving on to the Main Gates. Right into the Simulacrum, I had set to wait there.


    With a grin on my face, I merged my mind into the frozen Figure, looking forward to give my visitors a more personal challenge.

 Chapter 661

    I was somewhat amused when I realised that I actually recognised the leader of this motley band of adventurers. Or rather, of Travellers, for I was now completely convinced that they all were from beyond, just like me.


    Controlling the simulacrum, I moved it forward, making sure that the cloak of twilight concealed the statue both physically and magically, trying to make it appear like it was actually me who was challenging them at the bottom of my tower.


    Howardlight stepped forward, bellowing out a challenge, something about the blood of my people and, for some reason, my father, calling for me to answer for my crimes. I had no idea what that was all about and couldn¡¯t help but laugh, high above them on my throne. There was no way for me to actually reply, that would have required the use of Wind-Magic which I just didn¡¯t have, but luckily, Lenore was right next to me and happily took that part over for me.


    ¡°You speak of Justice, Paladin? Of cowardice? Come forth, and we shall show you the true meaning of fear, for a dragon, you are not,¡± Lenore mocked, using magic to project her voice as if it was coming from the simulacrum. At the same time, I channelled some more magic, letting a cold mist swirl around the simulacrum¡¯s feet, billowing forth and giving our visitors the chills. I could see a few of them step back, somewhat intimidated, but Howardlight happily pressed forward, his armour clad in golden light, pushing back some of the darkness the Nidh?gg had spread, and his morningstar raised high.


    With nary a thought, I conjured up some extra Ice, making it look like the Simulacrum was now suddenly three metres tall, clad in armour of Ice and holding a massive great sword, oversized even for the increased size of the statue, in hand. I was no expert with such a weapon but then, I wasn¡¯t really swinging the weapon with my muscles, I was wielding it with my magic. Had to be good enough, especially as it was supposed to be a welcoming encounter, not destroy my guests outright.


    The battle was fun. For some ten minutes, I let the simulacrum clash with the attacking Travellers, mostly using that oversized sword, simple, telegraphed blades of Ice that I sent out in a nicely predictable pattern, keeping them on their toes as they battered the frozen armour of my simulacrum. Finally, I decided that it was time for the battle to end and let the statue falter, fall to one knee before shattering in a violent explosion of Ice. That last attack was enough to bring multiple attackers down, but I had no doubt that the healing magic I could feel from below would patch them back up. After all, if they all died, the rest of my tower would likely fall by the wayside, wasting the efforts I had made to set the thing up.


    Keeping one mental eye on the Travellers, as they rested and, a little later, continued their advance into my tower, I focused on the now completely black Astral Siphon and the Soul Prison connected to it, looking forward to truly speaking to the ancient dragon.


    ¡°Ancient One, could we converse?¡± I asked, stepping towards the artefact. There was an odd pressure on me, making me want to bow and scrape as if I was approaching a being far superior to me, but this was my tower. I would not bow and most certainly not kneel.


    ¡°Ice Queen, yes, what is it?¡± the voice from earlier asked, the voice now clearly coming from the Astral Siphon.


    ¡°We broke your prison for a reason,¡± I began, leaning on the role of Ice Queen to give me the confidence to negotiate with the incredibly powerful being before me, ¡°What we sought was power, power to take vengeance. From what I understand of your role, you are the one gnawing on the roots of the World Tree, yes?¡± I asked, trying to get confirmation of my earlier conclusions, before going further.


    ¡°Yes, that was me,¡± the voice replied and I could feel some images getting transmitted amidst the words, vague memories of a divine eagle, of a squirrel that acted as a messenger and of oh-so-delicious power, devoured directly from its source, the World Tree itself. With those images, I could confirm that the ancient sapling seemed to have been of the same species, only that the World Tree had been so much more, the presence in the memories far eclipsing the most powerful beings I had seen before, the Bound Titan.


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    ¡°The object of our vengeance are the elves of Arbortoma, their forest, their dryads, everything about them. We seek to see their forest burn, be it in Your Black Flames or in our own flames. Either way, their civilisation shall wither, the few survivors forever singing their songs of mourning, mourning my beloved. For Her death is what doomed them all,¡± I declared, cold anger flowing through my body at those memories. As I spoke, a faint wind started to blow and for a second, I could feel Sigmir¡¯s embrace and hear her voice in the air as she thanked me.


    ¡°Ambitious¡­¡± the voice replied and I could hear a faint amusement in it, not mocking but more the amusement of a teacher that sees a student doing well. ¡°And something we can help you achieve.¡± the voice continued and I felt a vicious grin spread over my face. A huge part of my ideas had hinged on that, if the Nidh?gg could help me crush the elven realm, maybe to the point that the entire World of Mundus was plunged into a cold, dark winter, Pantheon would have no choice but start the world anew. And maybe, I would be able to leverage my actions into a revival for Sigmir, hopefully with the option to help her regain her memories further down the line.


    ¡°For now, I need to regain strength. The cursed Sun restrains me and your foes have already found us. You felt it, did you not, when you broke the prison holding me?¡± the voice asked and I had to think back, before nodding. There had been that odd sensation of strangulation when breaking the prison, forcing me to bring in Lenore for help.


    ¡°The Arch Druid, Bound to the Elder Tree, has tried to use their power to stop you. An attack would fail at this point, while their power is at its strongest. Wait until the dead of night, when our power reaches its peak and their power wanes to strike. Then, we shall sing together, as I regain my body and you fulfil your vengeance,¡± the voice promised, the words radiating with malice and a promise of violence.


    ¡°There are a few outsiders in my domain, Travellers from Beyond, just like I am, and at least one Valkyrie we have managed to capture. Will those be useful for the ritual or should we just toy with them at our leisure, before crushing them like the insects they are?¡± I asked, curious if the Nidh?gg had a use for sacrifices or if we would simply use the power of the Nexus. My original idea, to try corrupting the Valkyrie, didn¡¯t seem feasible any longer, especially as she was still getting dragged back by the Wargs and, by now, quite tattered.


    ¡°If we had hundreds, maybe thousands, of sacrifices it would make a difference,¡± the voice replied, the dismissal of those few lives clear, ¡°Especially the Travellers, their souls are bound elsewhere, destroying their Avatars would be¡­¡± the voice petered off, before an audible snort came from the Astral Siphon, making the Nidh?gg¡¯s opinion quite obvious.


    ¡°Then we shall have some fun with them, maybe let them come before me, only to see their pointless endeavour come to an end at my feet. Could you ascertain that they are incapable of stopping their Gods from interfering directly? A few days ago, a flight of Valkyries used a quite powerful spell, far too powerful for them to accomplish it on their own, to strike at a simulacrum of mine. I would prefer not to get ambushed by some divine shenanigans,¡± I asked, trying to cover all the potential bases. I had no doubt that I would remain victorious if it was only the Travellers but Divine Magic was an unnecessary wildcard.


    ¡°I can keep the Divine from seeing their progress, or hearing all but the common prayers,¡± the Nidh?gg promised and I felt my face split in a grin, as I realised that the role of the villain came naturally to me. Shaking my head I focused on the distant Wargs, giving them permission to tear the Valkyrie apart. That one would be of no use to me, so letting a potential foe live any longer would be foolish.


    The Valkyrie¡¯s end was mercifully swift, she never woke from her stupor before the warg that had been carrying her broke her neck, ending her life, before leaving her in the snow.


    ¡°Would you like to watch, as these intrepid adventurers make their way up our Tower, only to find themselves outmatched and grovel at our feet at the end? We believe it would be quite entertaining to watch,¡± I suggested, even as I began to prepare, making sure that there would be no silly mistakes. As someone had once said, the world was a stage, and we were all but actors. This was my stage and I had to write a compelling script.

 Interlude: Challenging the Tower

    ¡°What on earth is he talking about?¡± Clavran asked one of his fellow Korbal, as Howardlight finished his challenge to the dark-cloaked guardian that had stepped forward to meet their attack. From the sound of it, it was Morgana but it was difficult to say, the voice matched, but the appearance was completely concealed by a dark cloak and Observe was similarly blocked. It was as if the opponent wasn¡¯t even there, making it hard to guess what was going on.


    ¡°No idea,¡± the heavily armoured knight next to him replied, only to suddenly move, blocking a Javelin of Ice that had been launched by the now much larger figure, as if the person had entered some sort of elemental armour, one that made Clavran think of some anime he had watched in the past. The ridiculously oversized sword would certainly fit into those stories.


    It wasn¡¯t just his companion who had to enter the fight, Clavran, too, had to engage or get skewered at a distance. The massive armour was surprisingly agile, the first swing enough to push one of their strongest guardians back, barely able to deflect the attack with her shield. Golden light gathered around one of the other guardians, helping him to block the follow-up attack, leaving an opening for others to exploit.


    After hundreds of fights in the arena, Clavran could recognise openings as quickly as anyone, even if the opening was on a three-metre-tall armour made of Ice and with a push of power, he surged forward, one hand on his blade, already using the technique known as Lightning Draw. His curved sword flashed from its scabbard, crackling power surrounding it and cleaved into the Icy figure, trying to reach the faintly visible person within. The attack cut deep, the lightning discharging and shattering the Ice in the surroundings, leaving a spiderweb of cracks that brought a grin to his face as he retreated.


    Only for the grin to falter almost instantly, when the cracks disappeared and the cut was mended, leaving the armour as pristine as it had been before the attack. His fellow Korbal had similar problems, their attacks didn¡¯t seem to stick on their enemy as if the armour was constantly being restored. After a moment of thought, Clavran wanted to slap his forehead in resignation, why wouldn¡¯t the most powerful Ice-Mage amongst the Travellers be capable of repairing the Ice-Armour she had created to fight?


    ¡°One burst,¡± Howardlight ordered and after a few moments of frantic defence from the frontline, every fighter trying their best to keep the armour bound in combat, a call from the backline made them all scatter, just in time to let a massive barrage of magic through. There were jets of Fire, blasts of lightning and streamers of light, only for a shield of Ice to suddenly appear right in front of the armour, blocking most of the attack before shattering into sparkling dust. What little remained of the barrage splashed against the armour, only to be quickly healed away.


    ¡°Attrition, it is!¡± Howardlight called out, just as he was launching some strange, glowing orb at the armour, only to have the orb get parried by the giant sword. ¡°Don¡¯t take risks, just chip the thing down until we get the squishy within, it¡¯s only one person,¡± he ordered and for the next minute, that was exactly what happened.


    The frontline fighters used their attacks mostly to keep the armour engaged and stop it from moving past them to attack their companions further back. Those companions were now in what they commonly called conservative mode, trying to keep their resource expenditure roughly equal to their regeneration, doing their best to aim their attacks in such a way that supported the frontline, without wasting power. Similarly, the fighters worked hard to dodge and avoid, instead of parry and block, every bit of damage that had to be healed a waste of power that might be needed further down the line.


    It seemed that their tactic was working, the massive sword certainly capable of dealing tremendous damage but only if it hit. And with multiple people, all supported by magic, working together to keep that blade from landing, things became a lot easier. There was still a risk when fighting a three-metre tall armour even a backhanded slap or a simple kick would cause serious damage but it was manageable.


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    Or so the Korbal thought, until the armour took a large step back and struck out with a wide, sweeping strike, the sword gleaming with cold, silvery-blue light. In the wake of that strike, a set of five large Javelins, each easily two metres long and shining with deadly magic, manifested and was launched outward, at the casters in the back. They had just enough time to jump aside, the attack powerful but quite obvious, though it left them shaken, especially after it crashed into the back wall, a lacerating hail of shards showing just how much force the attack had carried.


    A few curses echoed through the room but ultimately, this new attack changed little. Sure, it forced people to stay on their toes and get the hell out of the way when a massive spear of Ice was flying in their direction, but there had been enough warning to manage.


    And so the battle continued, the sounds of battle echoing through the frozen hall. The armour didn¡¯t reveal any additional tricks, only those javelins and the, admittedly, tremendously powerful sword, wielded with some skill but, more importantly, against all common sense. It was that lack of form that almost did Clavran in multiple times, his fighting style honed against humanoid, or the odd beast, in the arena and now, faced with an enemy that could move in ways a living being was simply not supposed to, he had some trouble. Without the allies around him, the armour would have killed him without trouble, a realisation that humbled the swordsman.


    Here they were, forty of the strongest Travellers they had been able to find and they were fighting, and struggling, against a single Traveller, someone who didn¡¯t have more time to hone her skill and power than them.


    Clavran¡¯s thoughts were interrupted when the armour suddenly surged forward, crashing through the blockade of the frontline and towards the backline, only to stumble and fall to a knee from the brutal strikes the fighters had launched into the opening caused by the reckless breakthrough.


    They were about to converge, intent on finishing the wounded enemy off, only for a shout of warning to make them back off, one of the mages screaming in horror. Moments later, the armour exploded, razor-sharp shards of Ice going everywhere, dropping multiple of the fighters, and one archer who had been too close.


    From the corner of his eye, Clavran had noticed a faint, dark shape that shot upwards with tremendous speed, vanishing in the gloom above.


    ¡°Healers, go, save them,¡± Howardlight called out, as he, himself, was shrouded in golden light, restoring the wounds he had suffered. The Paladin was incredibly tough, his ability to withstand attacks and recover from them enough to make Clavran somewhat apprehensive, wondering if he could take the other if they ever fought in a duel. Not that it mattered, any illusion of superiority had been thoroughly shattered in the earlier battle against Morgana.


    Clavran, along with some of the others, started to explore the ground floor of the tower, dispatching a few scattered enemies, more of the strange wargs and the avians, now close enough to be Observed as something called a  Nevermore. Nobody had heard of such enemies but given that they turned into Ice when slain, some of the casters had been talking and theorising.


    ¡°This has to be a plant,¡± one of the other fighters muttered, inspecting one of the smaller chambers.


    ¡°You think?¡± Clavran asked, only to feel his foot sink a little further than it should. Jumping back, the space he had occupied just a split-second earlier was peppered with more of the sharp Icciels, only that they had shot out of the wall.


    ¡°Trap,¡± Clavran warned, picking himself up, ¡°Honestly, I¡¯m not sure. Have you listened to the Casters, they were talking about the amount of power in the air. But either way, this raid is interesting enough for me, whether it was made by Morgana alone or with support from Pantheon, this is awesome. Though I¡¯d love it if it was made by her alone, just think of it. Making your own dungeon, playing at dungeon lord. That sounds pretty epic,¡± Clavran grinned, fond childhood memories in his mind. Playing with friends, the only limit to their adventures their collective imagination and sanity, it had been great.


    ¡°If you say so,¡± the other replied, carefully testing if there were more traps in their chosen area of exploration, ¡°No matter how epic, the loot completely sucks.¡±


    At that, even Clavran had to nod. Apart from some strange chunks of Ice, too cold for anyone to touch, there had been no loot, making many of the Korbal increasingly cranky. They wanted loot and they wanted it now. If only the massive sword hadn¡¯t vanished, it would almost certainly have been a really cool sword. Even if a little on the large side.


    But before they could get at the goodies, they had a tower to raid, there had to be some sweet loot in it somewhere.

 Chapter 662

    Watching the Travellers as they cautiously made their way up the stairs, only to realise that they were in full view of my Throne, without any cover nearby and freeze like a deer in the headlights was quite amusing. To be fair, they were in a pretty rough spot, climbing the tower had been rather difficult, the various enemies and traps that had barred their way leaving a number of them dead and the rest either wounded, exhausted or both. And now, they were here, at the top of my tower, the lightly armoured scout that had been leading the way staring at me, as he tried to decide whether to step up, onto the open area or stay, hiding in the perceived safety of the narrow stairway. In truth, it didn¡¯t really matter, this was my tower and I could kill them either on the stairs or out in the open but that would be so incredibly boring.


    ¡°You may approach the Throne and plead for mercy, if you so desire,¡± I spoke casually, letting Lenore take my words and amplify them, so they echoed all around the valley, almost like a magical stage whisper. From the look of fear on the scout¡¯s face, I must have hit the right note, though the fear might also have been caused by the visual impact, the large Throne of Ice on a small dais, with the Astral Siphon that was now looking like a Black Sun acting as a backdrop, the staircase placed just so, to make the visual impact that much stronger. And on that throne, maybe somewhat eclipsed by the Black Sun behind me, was my relatively petite form, with Lenore sitting on the backrest and Ylva lounging on the ground on my other side, watching the staircase with me.


    ¡°Or you can step up and make your stand. It might be entertaining. But know, if you continue to scurry about like rats, I will treat you like vermin. You would not enjoy that treatment,¡± I continued, Lenore making sure that my calm, casual voice was heard throughout the tower. We had discussed what sort of demeanour I should try to project and decided that a calm, regal demeanour as if the attacking Travellers and the armies the Elves had sent were of no greater concern to me than what tea to prepare. Only worth my notice if they made a nuisance of themselves, otherwise a brief entertainment and distraction, nothing more.


    We were the Ice Queen and here, in our domain, we had to act like it.


    There was a brief discussion, easily audible thanks to my high Intuition, as the Travellers didn¡¯t quite know what to make of me. So far, all enemies they had faced, other than my Simulacrum at the entrance, had appeared mindless, constructs of Ice infused with Spirits, acting in a planned and almost programmed manner, the spirits not quite certain how to act in a body. Fighting them had been difficult, some lives lost to mechanics they hadn¡¯t been able to foresee or spent to allow another to land a finishing blow. But now, they were no longer dealing with mindless foes, they were dealing with me. And from the looks of it, they had no idea how to do that.


    It took them a minute but they made their way up to the platform, caution, awe, excitement and fear all visible in their motley crew. I watched them move into a formation, not acting aggressively just yet, but clearly not begging for mercy. Waiting for a few seconds, I decided that the one person, quite gravely wounded and hiding in the stairway, would not join the fight and, with a tiny bit of magical effort, sealed the entrance with a sheet of Ice, making the staircase disappear.


    ¡°You spoke of Justice earlier, Howardlight,¡± I mused, my voice light as if considering an especially amusing joke, ¡°Let¡¯s see what happens if you look into the mirror and it shows you who you really are.¡±


    My statement was the planned trigger and the Nidh?gg brought its will to bear on the world. The Black Sun behind me gave off a burst of Dark Radiance, turning the polished, frozen surface of the platform into a mirror, reflecting the Travellers. It was merely for show but moments later, the reflections became corporeal, stepping out of the Ice and taking up position in a twisted reflection of the Traveller¡¯s formation.


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    We had decided to give them a multi-stage fight and this was the first stage, courtesy of the Nidh?gg and some of the remnant spirits of the valley. The Mirrored Shadows the Travellers now had to face were created by the Nidh?gg, constructs that mirrored their shapes and the abilities shown further down the tower, though only a shadow of them. The Nidh?gg had given them a few extra tricks, but nothing much, they were supposed to be an appetiser, not the main event.


    ¡°Fight, and entertain your Queen,¡± I laughed softly as I commanded the Shadows and moments later, the platform was filled with the sounds of fighting. I had no idea how the Nidh?gg had done it but the shadows it had created were a lot more advanced than any construct I had created thus far and the spectacle was quite impressive. The Travellers had obviously more training with their abilities but that didn¡¯t mean they could simply dispatch the shadows, making the whole thing a rather hard battle for them.


    But not an impossible one, the Shadows weren¡¯t supposed to defeat them after all, just entertain me and weaken them. And that was exactly as it went, I was greatly entertained to watch the Travellers fight with the closest approximation of themselves we had managed to create and from the wounds they were sporting at the end of the fight, despite quite a bit of magical healing being thrown around, they had been weakened. In addition, there had been a few rather large surges of divine magic, likely powerful, prepared spells going off, or some sort of high-value cooldown, something similar to my Avatar state.


    Amusingly, the only casualty of the fight was one of their scouts or maybe calling her an assassin would be more suitable. She had thought that just because I was sitting on my throne, I was easy prey and had tried to end the battle by decapitating the dragon, namely me. It had not gone well for her and from then on, none of them had even tried to attack me on my throne.


    Either way, the shadows had provided a great show and now it was time for the second act.


    Still seated on my throne, I gave slow, polite applause, an amused grin on my face. Good entertainment deserved applause after all and after I gave them a minute to catch their breath, I gently scratched Ylva¡¯s ears, giving the second signal.


    Ylva rose from her casual position, padding down the stairs of my dais, her form growing as she did and her fur taking on a silvery lustre, as I surrounded her with a thin, but incredibly dense, coat of Ice. Each hair of her fur was coated individually, the conglomerate acting as armour and protecting her as she fought. Given our plan, she was to fight but not outright kill them, so I had to make sure my friend wasn¡¯t wounded.


    Similarly, Lenore took to the sky, her loud call echoing through the valley, her body similarly protected. This was the second stage of the fight, The Wolf and the Raven. Ylva let out a howl, starting the battle, and with a flex of my Astral Power, eight large wargs appeared on the platform, while Lenore was joined by a murder of Nevermores.


    Again, what ensued was less of a battle and more of a play, the Nevermores and Wargs, under the leadership of Ylva and Lenore playing with the Travellers, pushing and forcing them to fight, but not seriously trying to kill them. They acted in a somewhat predictable manner, focusing on the fighters while mostly allowing the backline to act unhindered, the Nevermores only occasionally setting up a strafing run with their Icicles, never during times when the Wargs were pressing their attacks. And yet, even if they didn¡¯t actually try to kill the Travellers, it was quite obvious that the battle was taking its toll.


    To be fair, the battle also took a toll on my constructs and my two companions, though a far less obvious one. The Wargs and Nevermores could fight until they, quite literally, dropped, their bodies made of animated Ice, not mortal flesh, and the protection I had woven around Ylva and Lenore held, regardless of what the Travellers threw at them. They might get bruised, maybe a few feathers ruffled, but they didn¡¯t get hurt.


    Until finally, the last Warg fell. The Nevermores quickly dropped out of sight with Lenore in the lead, while Ylva hopped onto the dais, morphing back into her usual size. The Travellers had managed to overcome the second stage and now, it was time for the third and final act.


    Mist billowing out from behind me, I rose from my Throne, the Blades of the Northern Wind rising into the air around me, as I spoke, my voice carrying a hint of amusement.


    ¡°Fine, I¡¯ll do it myself.¡±

 Chapter 663

    As I walked down the stairs to the platform on which my visitors had been fighting for my entertainment, the air started to stir and shift. It wasn¡¯t just the air of intimidation I tried to project with my calm, unhurried approach, it was also a huge amount of Ice Astral Power I had drawn from the Nexus, some of it manifesting as fog, the rest just there, ready for me to use. The few spellcasters that had survived the previous encounters started to look pale and one of them decided to strike first, lobbing a ball of fire at my face.


    Without even blinking, I channelled some Darkness Magic, the Astral Power nearly invisible in the already highly saturated atmosphere on top of my tower, and snuffed the fire out. My steps never changed their rhythm in those few moments, the attack completely beneath my notice.


    ¡°Come, and know despair. For you will fall, and so will this world,¡± I challenged, stopping in the middle of the platform, allowing them to make the first move, not even acknowledging the previous fireball as an attack.


    For a few moments, none of them dared to move, until finally, Howardlight, the leader of their so-called Crusade, let out a powerful bellow, his Morningstar glowing with radiant light, trying, and failing, to pierce the gloom that shrouded my tower as he charged at me.


    A small part of me was quite amused, looking purely at the physical side of things, I was horribly outmatched. All of the attacking Travellers were taller than me, most of them by more than a full head or more and the vast majority had twice my mass, none of them as petite as I. Adding to that the contrast between the light, flowing clothes of dwarven fabric I was wearing compared to the heavy armour, thick clothes and fur they had donned, it couldn¡¯t be a greater difference. And yet, as I lightly twirled out of the way of Howardlight¡¯s attack, one of the Blades of the Northern Wind meeting the attack, the difference didn¡¯t seem to matter at all. There was more than enough magic here to make the difference and I was perfectly willing to use that magic, it was why I had built my tower here.


    Encouraged by Howardlight¡¯s charge, the rest of his exhausted troops started attacking as well, trying to pin me down and spill my blood but I kept moving, deliberately keeping my movement flowing, not even trying to kill them, merely playing with them.


    The play I had been directing had yet to be finished and while Mrs Wu would either kick my ass for playing around in a fight, it had to be done. Or maybe she would agree, that this was not a fight but a performance, a deliberate show to guide the attitude and opinion of others, in which case the script I had planned would most likely be seen as something good.


    As I twisted out of the way of a swift, and quite deadly, combination attack, I had to marvel at the difference my magic made. While I was confident in fighting each of them individually, simply by virtue of my higher level, they were skilled combatants and before the boost given by Sigmir¡¯s sacrifice, some would have been a challenge, depending on the environment of our battle. And yet, here, on my tower, I could casually play with them all at the same time, the magic in the environment sustaining me and replenishing the vast amount of Astral Power I was using to keep myself functioning at this level.


    Deciding that the play was quickly reaching its climax, I stopped teasing them and occasionally mixed in a few serious attacks. Or made it look like the attacks were serious, there was nothing special about those Palm Strikes, other than a showy, silvery-blue aurora around the hand that performed the attack, the special part came from the area around us all, as Ice started to rapidly form after my strike, capturing them up to the neck. While it wasn¡¯t the same Eternal Ice the tower was made from, it was Hard Ice, bound to the tower and easily able to withstand their attempts to free their allies.


    I made sure to keep these strikes to one every thirty seconds, slowly whittling down their numbers, as I fought a defensive battle, steadily avoiding their attacks and dispelling their magic, forcing them deeper and deeper into a dire situation.


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    The Travellers quickly noticed the glowing strikes and desperately tried to avoid these attacks, turning the battle into an almost amusing game of keep-away, with twenty-five seconds of them, chasing after me, before I made my hand glow for five seconds and chased after them.


    Only, I began to play dirty after they began running away, throwing out volleys of Icicles when nobody fought me in melee and actively using the Blades of the Northern Wind to go after their backline. One of their archers and one of their spellcasters took deadly injuries from those attacks, forcing their fighters back into melee with me and the dance continued.


    Once the first Traveller had been bound in Ice for four Minutes, an arbitrary time I had set in advance, I used another burst of Ice-Magic, a spike shooting out from beneath him, shattering the Ice but impaling him, the already weakened Traveller dying with a pained scream.


    That death gave my foes additional motivation and with loud shouts, powerful abilities were used, Astral Power, Divine Magic and purely physical strength fueling that last resistance, only to break against the unyielding Ice I was wielding. Their attacks pushed me and I had to fight to keep my movements unhurried and my face unbothered, even as my mind went into Bullet Time, drawing vast amounts of Astral Power out of the Nexus to withstand their onslaught, Blood Magic healing the attacks I couldn¡¯t block or avoid.


    But I managed, both to overcome their onslaught and to stay in the character I had decided on, the battle continued as if nothing had happened. Right on time, my hands started to glow again and another of their melees was bound in Ice and a little later, another scream filled the air, when the four minutes of my second victim were over.


    As we fought, I deliberately kept Howardlight unbound for the end. His fall would make for a wonderful climax and once all the melees but him were bound in Ice, I began branching out, stepping through the shadows and taking their backline by surprise, putting them into a frozen time-out as well.


    Finally, it was only Howardlight who remained unbound and by now, he was frantic. Exhaustion was warring with desperation as he tried to stop my inevitable movement, his attacks either parried by my Blades, blocked by a thin sheen of Ice on my skin or avoided entirely.


    Curious how my special variety of Mind Magic would affect him, I blasted him, the attack sending him to his knees as sobs started to shake his body. A small part of me, the part that remembered my mother¡¯s lessons, felt bad for him but in the script I had written, I played the villain. And I would play my part.


    ¡°Now, Howard, where is your light now?¡± I asked, my tone as calm as it had been earlier, nothing betraying that I had just fought a major battle. He couldn¡¯t answer, only shaking his head as tears dropped from his face, turning into Ice as they fell due to a careful application of Ice Magic on my part.


    ¡°There is no light here, Howard. The Light has forsaken you. Your Gods have forsaken you,¡± I continued, Ice starting to creep up his legs, binding him in place.


    ¡°This world will fall. It is inevitable and your efforts amount to nothing. There will be no new dawn, no spring that thaws away the Ice. Winter is coming,¡± I managed to keep a straight face and my voice steady, even as I stole the iconic line, ¡°And it will never end!¡±


    With no more targets to go after, the time they spent in the Ice was shortened, their screams filling the air as they died, one by one, even as some of them started to log out. Their minds could escape, but their bodies died, only without the screams.


    Finally, it was Howardlight¡¯s turn, he had been shouting for his god, trying to Invoke Tyr¡¯s name, only for his attempts to call upon a higher power to fail, smothered by the overwhelming influence of the Nidh?gg.


    ¡°There comes the shadowy Dragon, flying from the Dark of the Moon Hills. The Dark Sun rises, as he carries the bodies of the fallen in his claws. And here, the World falls,¡± I quietly whispered into his ears, before the Ice parted above his chest and my hand, clad in a gauntlet of Ice, punched through his chest, ripping out his heart. It was pure show, and from the looks of it he had logged out before, but I was playing to the audience.


    And for that audience, I turned around, walking towards the Black Sun and my Throne and casually tossing his heart aside, the frozen flesh vanishing off my tower. The moment it was out of sight, I pushed my Astral Power once more and the bodies I had bound here, all of them completely frozen by now, were shattered into Diamond Dust and carried away by the wind.


    ¡°Now, let us sing,¡± I told the Nidh?gg, ¡°Let us sing about a time of wind, a time of wolves. And about the end of the world.¡±

 Chapter 664

    With the evening¡¯s entertainment dealt with, I focused on the main event. Above the shroud of shadows the Nidh?gg had woven, the sun had set, leaving us in a wonderfully black night. There was no moon, only a scant, few stars, allowing us to view the complete and utter Darkness adobe in its full glory.


    Lenore had already returned but we had decided that this would be a ritual only I would participate in, if at all possible. What we had planned was dangerous, of that we had no doubt, and it was quite possible that the incredible power would destroy my Avatar we planned to evoke. It was enough power to destroy a world, after all, and while the Tower would take some of the strain out of it, it was still a huge burden to be placed on a mortal body. Thus, Lenore would remain nearby and offer moral support but wouldn¡¯t be in her Hallow and we wouldn¡¯t use the Raven¡¯s Shadow.


    Sitting on my throne, I started to draw power from the Nexus, letting it fill the Tower and remain ready at my fingertips. At the same time, I could feel the Nidh?gg draw power, parallel to my own draw but more diffuse, while I primarily took in power from the Nexus, it was able to take in power from everywhere, especially the infinite void above. I had no idea how that worked, but it felt quite fascinating and I tried to etch these impressions into my brain, not because I thought they would be useful in this world but out of sheer curiosity.


    Neither of us spoke as we prepared, the power slowly infusing the world around us, filling it with Ice, Darkness and a whole lot of other energies, courtesy of the Nidh?gg until finally, a saturation point was reached.


    There was no signal, we didn¡¯t need one, only a grumbling hum coming from the Astral Siphon, carrying with it a mesh of intentions, impressions and knowledge. It was no mere sound, it was pure power, vibrating everything in the vicinity, be it physical or magical. Even I felt myself vibrate, the power enough to shake my mind, body and spirit, but I had been prepared for it.


    In response, I began to sing, softly at first, weaving together the sound of my voice and the power of the Nexus, allowing the Nidh?gg to take the power I was drawing, to direct it further. Under its guidance, we delved into the Astral around us, following the currents of the river and I could faintly feel a bit of recognition, though not from my own memories, but from those of the Raven¡¯s Shadow. It was in these channels where Lenore and I had thrown back the outside influence while cracking the Soul Prison, the power that had tried to choke us out had come from our destination.


    And now, it was us who were going in that direction, following the metaphysical traces, the tracks of power the Nidh?gg could somehow sniff out. I had no illusion that I was the Nidh?gg¡¯s equal, there was simply a wide gap in ability and experience between us, but that didn¡¯t mean I was completely unable to watch and learn.


    Soon, I could feel the vast power before us, a wide sea of verdant power compared to the unfathomably deep, freezingly cold well of the Nexus. There was no way to guess just which ultimately held more power, but the sea in front of me gave me the impression of lethargy as if the primary source was asleep. The honourable approach would have been to wait until that power was at its strongest, but neither the Nidh?gg nor I actually cared about honour or anything but our own success.


    Letting my voice echo through the Astral River, I returned the prior attack, letting the biting cold of winter rage across the endless Verdant Sea and the Nidh?gg added its own melody and its strange concept-words spread across the world.


    ¡°Axetime, Swordtime, shields are sundered¡­¡± the Nidh?gg invoked a song of endings, and the world started to burn. The Verdant Sea went up in flames as the Black Flames of Nidh?gg started to spread out.


    I continued with my song, even as I felt an additional influence, trying to rouse the Verdant Sea, while the Nidh?gg was directing its own power at that sea, trying to drink it dry. Unwilling to allow this interloper to just do as they pleased, I began to focus my own magic at it, as I was singing my own song. A song of endings and of winter, of a world that was about to fall. Maybe there would be a new spring in the future, but only once my power waned.


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    Singing of Eternal Cold and perfect peace, I directed my magic, frozen sounds striking the Astral Presence, trying to bind and contain it, even as they were drawing power from the verdant sea and throwing it back at me.


    Minutes turned into hours as we were locked in a magical struggle, vast amounts of power clashing as both of us tried to contain the other, to snuff out their essence to allow our partners to reign supreme.


    All around us, the Black Flames of Nidh?gg started to spread and I began to grin as I channelled my own Flames of Morgana, the cold, faintly blue fires not directed at the verdant sea, that had shrunk quite a bit by now, but at the interloper who tried to defend the sea.


    They tried to block my flames, sending out energies of Life and Growth, trying to contain them in a lush, green jungle but there was no way for the jungle to contain the ever-hungry cold. I merely needed to keep my flames burning to win, and with the Nexus allowing me to wield an impossible amount of power, I was bound to outlast. I had eternity on my side, so this interloper was doomed to fail unless they managed to rouse the Verdant Sea.


    But the Verdant Sea was a sea no more, under the Black Flames of Nidh?gg, the sea had shrunk, and turned into a lake and even that lake was quickly fading, as the Nidh?gg¡¯s presence was getting stronger and stronger. If before, the Nidh?gg had been intimidating, it was no utterly terrifying and only the knowledge that I was the Ice Queen and this was my domain kept me from shivering in abject terror.


    Finally, the interloper was no longer able to withstand my flames and with a wordless scream of despair and fear, they threw a last, desperate attack against us, their very life fuelling this last struggle. I channelled my own magic, weaving a wall of solid Stillness, an eternity of Ice against the desperate struggle crashed, the energies ravaging my own mind, as I held on, the power of the Nexus quickly soothing my aching soul.


    As the attack faded, so did the interloper, their life and soul spent and as they faded, so did the Verdant Sea, as if the two of them had been one. It took me a moment to understand, the Verdant Sea of power came from the Elder Tree, the giant tree in the centre of the Elven Forest and the interloper that had tried to defend against us must have been the Elder Druid, Leader of the Elves. That realisation made me laugh with glee, the leader of my enemies lay dead and with them, the precious tree of the elves. And unless I was completely wrong, the Black Flames of the Nidh?gg hadn¡¯t just devoured that Ancient Tree but they had set the roots of their entire forest ablaze.


    For a moment, I considered creating a scrying construct outside of the Astral but I quickly decided against it. As much as I wanted to witness their suffering, to laugh as they were devoured, it would open the Nidh?gg and me up to retaliation, our primary location was shrouded by the Nidh?gg¡¯s power, no need to give our foes any additional information.


    Seeing that the Verdant Sea lay dry, Black Flames devouring the last scraps of power that were pouring in and following those shallow tributaries back to their sources, we began to withdraw. Our first blow had been struck and the Nidh?gg, glutton that they were, had devoured the power of the Elder Tree, taking enough power for our next step.


    Because as much power as the Nexus gave us, it was just not enough for what we were planning, we couldn¡¯t use just that one source of power.


    But now, with the Nidh?gg having devoured the accumulated power of the Elven Race, their entire forest nothing but kindling to fuel our next step, we should be able to continue. And even if we were not, I was willing to bet it all and try, I had a feeling that the punishment for stopping and failing would be the same. For a brief moment, the image of the Bound Titan flickered in my mind and I had no doubt that divine punishment for a mortal like myself would be much, much worse.


    Withdrawing into my body, I felt myself shake with both excitement and exhaustion. A brief glimpse into my log showed me dozens of messages, but I couldn¡¯t bring myself to truly care. A few levels, some additional Ice-Magic and a title or two, nothing that would change our next step.


    Nothing that would give me Sigmir back and thus, irrelevant.


    Taking in a deep breath and pushing it back out, I focused once more, to weave the last spell I would cast in this world. And what a wonderful coincidence that it was the spell that would shatter this world.

 Chapter 665

    The song the Nidh?gg and I wove together continued, now no longer directed into the Astral River and towards a distant place, but influencing the world directly around us. This time, I was able to monopolise the power of the Nexus, the Nidh?gg had devoured enough power from the Verdant Sea to hold their own as we wove the streams of power together.


    It was quite interesting just how the Nidh?gg had assimilated the power they had devoured, making it no longer lush with verdant life but filled with noxious poison, before we combined it with the freezing cold power I could draw from the Nexus. Both powers were those of finality, of a complete and final ending. Unlike a large fire, after which the ash would serve to fertilise the land once more, what we did would only bring an end. There would be no spring that thawed the Ice I created, there would be no fresh forest springing up after the Black Flames had passed by. Just dearth and death, devastation and ruin.


    Together, we sang, our voices filling the air around the tower with Power. To my surprise, it wasn¡¯t just the two of us who sang, countless voices started to join us. All of them were familiar, but none of them belonged to the living, it was the dead who joined us, the countless remnant spirits that had been drawn to the Nexus. Some of them had been given a body by me but many more were out there, lingering in the cracks of reality. And now, they were being drawn out, into the chorus of the Nidh?gg¡¯s and my own power.


    More and more power started to condense around the tower, winding and coiling, forming a solid entity. What we were doing was, amusingly enough for a spell that would end the world, a spell of creation. The powers we were invoking were coiling around the tower, slowly forming into a physical form as Eternal Ice and Deadly Poison combined together, forming into a greater whole.


    The form was completely out of my control, I was responsible for giving it strength and durability, a body that was eternal and would never weaken. I could feel the power of the Nidh?gg seep into the scales I was crafting, strengthening them further and giving them their own, deadly defences, oozing poison so that anyone foolish enough to challenge the dragon would immediately fall. Teeth, Wings, Claws, they all had to be carefully crafted and I was slowly losing myself in the task, the craft both beautiful and deadly, detailed and vast.


    Coil after coil, I crafted the Nidh?gg¡¯s body, letting it rest around my tower as the tower itself was drawing Astral Power from the Nexus, the shell of Ice being filled by the Nidh?gg¡¯s poison and spirit, giving a semblance of life to the construct we were building. I had no idea how the Nidh?gg was capable of creating a living entity from its poison, it was a fascinating process that I could only observe, not understand.


    The countless lingering spirits took a tiny tithe of the power we had gathered, just the dregs neither of us could contain, the slivers that dropped as we were working, and used that power to construct bodies of their own.


    Influenced by our song, and by the dozens of constructs I had created in the previous week, the bodies they formed were either shaped similar to the Wargs I had created, avian, like the Nevermores or serpentine, like the draconic body we were crafting for the Nidh?gg. Neither of us had a problem with them taking those dregs of power for themselves, as they, too, would be forever within our grasp. Birthed from our power, they would never be free of our influence, and that was just fine with us.


    Well, they¡¯d mostly be within the Nidh?gg¡¯s influence, simply because I would not linger in this world, giving the ancient Dragon an army to conquer the world with.


    But it wasn¡¯t just a body that we wove, some of the magic I was weaving went into the air itself, spreading, now no longer hampered by the vast, magical presence of the Elven Forest, I could stretch my magical influence far and wide. And, more importantly, I could stretch it upwards, high into the atmosphere, where the rapid winds were blowing, incredibly powerful streams of Wind Astral Power that circled the entirety of Mundus. And into those streams, I sent my power, chilling the wind and introducing Ice, using their power to increase my reach.


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    I couldn¡¯t be the Girdle of the Realm, circling the world with my body deep in the ocean, but I could use the eternal winds of the upper atmosphere to circle the world with my power, to spread the freezing winter far and wide.


    The Nidh?gg felt what I was doing and approved, its power following my own, bolstering and boosting, turning the Ice I was introducing black, oozing with poison that would melt out of it, as it hailed down on the land. Deadly and devastating, just as we wanted.


    As the night dragged on, I felt my exhaustion mounting, my body slowly crumbling from the incredible stress I was putting on it. While my Throne and Tower were able to lighten the load by channelling the vast majority of the power I was using, there was still a lot of stress put on me and that stress was taking its toll.


    ¡°You¡¯ve almost done it, love. The elves felt your wrath, their forest is burning,¡± Sigmir¡¯s voice cheered me on, an exhausted smile forming on my lips, even as a few tears trickled down my face. I knew this might be the last time that I heard her voice, at least in this world. But we would meet again, in the next world.


    ¡°Almost. The world will never forget you, love,¡± I promised her, pouring everything i had left into the creation of the Dragon, binding the winter we had spread across the world to its existence. As long as the Dragon existed, the winter would continue, whether that would be for a few months, for seven years or forever. And given that the Tower was slowly getting absorbed by the Dragon¡¯s body, the staff-like construct becoming one with the dragon¡¯s claws, I had a feeling it would be a very long winter. Eternity had been a primary concept of the Nexus and now that eternity was infused into the Dragon.


    ¡°I love you, Sigmir,¡± I quietly whispered into the howling wind, the storms we had summoned raging around my Tower, ¡°We will meet again. Not in this world, but in the next,¡± I promised, wiping away the tears I had just shed, my mind turning resolute once more.


    As the sun was slowly creeping into the sky, the Nidh?gg and I were finishing our ritual. The Astral Siphon, the Black Sun the Nidh?gg had used as a temporary body, was shining with its dark glory and as the sunlight burned into the black mist the Nidh?gg had created, I could feel the presence within the Siphon stir. The Soul Prison, still housing part of the Nidh?gg, despite them having infused much of their existence into the Astral Siphon, flashed with power, before crumbling to dust. Coiled around the Astral Siphon, I could see a dark, winged presence, before the Siphon, too, was vacated, crumbling to dust as the Nidh?gg devoured the power I had infused into the Siphon.


    ¡°Freedom, once again,¡± the Nidh?gg¡¯s voice rumbled across the land and I could feel the glacier below us shift and crack, avalanches rumbling down the mountains in the distance. The very presence of the Nidh?gg brought disaster and I could feel that presence drain the life out of me and the Astral Power out of my tower.


    ¡°Strike this world, and complete my vengeance. That is all I ask of you, for shattering the prison that bound you and crafting your new body,¡± I shouted, looking at the massive head that now stretched above my tower. Just seeing the dark, scaled body sent shivers down my spine, a primal fear of one who could end the world.


    ¡°I shall do as you ask, little Sister. But it will not be all you receive, for what you ask is only that I fulfil my destiny. No, you shall find your reward, not in this world, but in the next.¡± the rumbling voice told me, as I felt the tower beneath me start to crumble, the devouring presence of the Nidh?gg draining the power I had used to construct it.


    Moments later, the Sun crested above the mountains and immediately, I felt the change. Radiant power was burning down, a contest between divine radiance and primordial dragon, with me, the poor, foolish mortal in the line of fire. Before I could even try putting up resistance, I felt my body get burned away. There was no pain, only oblivion.


    And the moment I opened my eyes again, I was back on my Throne, sitting in my capsule-space.


    Victory, but at a cost. The Nidh?gg was unleashed and the Elven Forest was burning.


    And I had died for my vengeance.


    Totally okay with me.

 Interlude: Beta-Forum Finale

    Official Road to Purgatory-Beta Forum


    <table>


    <tbody>


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    <td>


    -Howardlight, confirmed Beta-Account-


    </td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    Morgana, you shall never get away with this. The Gods will smite you and all you have created will come to nought. The People of Mundus will never accept a tyrant, be it one of Ice or anything else. You shall fall and the Light will prevail.


    Now that that¡¯s out of the way, my personal thoughts about the final event of the Beta, as it has pretty much drawn to a close for me. The Crusade, as far as anyone can tell, has failed and the Korbal, the group of forty high-level players that managed to assault the Frozen Citadel has been destroyed.


    Now, first of all, I¡¯ve got to congratulate Morgana. I have no idea how much support you got from Pantheon Entertainment, but the Frozen Citadel was incredible. Your act as the Ice Queen managed to send shivers down my spine, and not just because of the temperature, but also from the entire atmosphere and design. Honestly, Kudos.


    Pretty sure the various other Korbal are editing their videos, while we all are currently waiting to respawn after you crushed us.


    Just to satiate my curiosity, I¡¯d like to know how much of your performance was possible thanks to deliberate additions and how much can be normally achieved. If you can¡¯t tell us, it¡¯s cool but I¡¯d love to know.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>


    Jeanyra, confirmed Beta-Account


    </td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    Agreed, the battles were epic. I have no idea how some of the stuff was done, though I¡¯ll have to admit those Ice Collosi were fun, having an actually dumb enemy that you can play with like the enemies in old games was cool. Normal enemies in Road to Purgatory are far too smart to play around with, unless you are massively overlevelled, so having enemies that had power and toughness but no smarts was really funny.


    <table>


    <tbody>


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    <td>


    Palda Hengar, confirmed Beta-Account


    </td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    I wish I could have been there.


    Alas, I¡¯m just not high-level enough, makes me sadge.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>


    Malachite, confirmed Beta-Account


    </td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    From the way I understand Morgana, I doubt that she got any help from Pantheon, but that¡¯s just the impression I got from her. Looking forward to those videos.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>


    Do¡¯rodra, confirmed Beta-Account


    </td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    You say you failed, Howardlight?


    Now, I¡¯d love to know what¡¯s going on.


    Why the heck is the Elven Forest burning? Not just parts of it, from what I¡¯ve heard, the whole thing is burning in some weird, black fire. The flames aren¡¯t hot, they don¡¯t feel hot at least, but they turn everything to ashes nonetheless.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>


    Harms, confirmed Beta-Account


    </td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    Over in Aretia, we don¡¯t have burning Forest, but we have some strange rain and hail. Poison falling from the sky, either frozen or liquid, killing everyone and everything exposed to it.


    If that¡¯s all caused by Morgana, I¡¯m not sure I want that to be possible without dev-interference.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>


    Morgana, confirmed Beta-Account


    </td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    Guess I have to speak for once, not just lurk and watch.


    First of all, thanks for the compliment, Howardlight, it was fun to play the Ice Queen.


    For the other part, I¡¯ll just assume that I can share, given that I wasn¡¯t told that I can¡¯t.


    Unless they fundamentally change something for the official version, what I¡¯ve done can be done without dev-help, I certainly didn¡¯t get any that I know of. There were a few things that could have been coincidences or maybe it was planned, but no idea.


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


    I mean, my original starting location, back when I created my character, was in the middle of a frozen forest, with some annoying Snowbolds living nearby. They annoyed me and one of my first, great feats of magic was to kill them. Fun times.


    The major piece of the puzzle responsible for the destruction currently going on, was found in that cave. So, was that deliberately done by the devs or was it a combination of coincidence and an incredibly motivated and rather ticked-off player? I can¡¯t tell.


    The rest, the Frozen Citadel, the enemies you faced and the consequences of your failures? That was all on me, again, with no outside interference, other than maybe the way I died at the end. That might have been done deliberately by the Devs, or it might simply be some sort of automatic reaction that once you do something big enough, your character gets wiped, that¡¯s what happened to me. Not just killed, the character is gone, not that I really care, it¡¯s only two weeks until the full release drops anyway.


    Anyway, I¡¯ll take these couple weeks to relax and prepare - See you on the flipside.


    <table>


    <tbody>


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    Harms, confirmed Beta-Account


    </td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    Wait, you can¡¯t just drop that on us and dip. We need some details!


    <table>


    <tbody>


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    <td>


    Kelphram, confirmed Beta-Account


    </td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    Pretty sure she can, and just did. But I¡¯ve heard a few things from native sources, primarily amongst the clergy and what they said, things are bad.


    No idea how she did it, but they speak of the end of the world and they don¡¯t seem to be kidding. There are a ton of quests to prepare for winter and the coming darkness, so those of us who want to earn some last-minute accolades can do, even if I doubt anyone can top what Morgana did.


    The first video of the Korbal-Raid just dropped and I gotta say: Holy F*CK!


    <table>


    <tbody>


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    <td>


    Tobiuno, confirmed Beta-Account


    </td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    I sadly couldn¡¯t join the Korbal, but the videos look incredible.


    Though I¡¯ve got to admit, if what Morgana did will be possible in the official game, I¡¯d think a couple of us should work together to make sure nobody breaks the world the same way. A few weeks of having a broken world can be fun but I¡¯d rather not lose everything I achieved in-game because someone else throws a hissy-fit, not gonna lie.


    Morgana, I¡¯d like to consult you on that, given that you actually managed to break the world, because that¡¯s the only way I can describe the current state of affairs, broken. Or maybe apocalyptic.


    <table>


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    Jeanyra, confirmed Beta-Account


    </td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    If everything we¡¯ve seen is possible without help from the devs, I gotta join the ¡°Not sure I actually want that¡±-Camp. Sure, it¡¯s epic to give players the ability to influence the world on a truly large scale, and I mean not just in a small region or town but across a continent or, as it looks like, the world, but on the other hand, I agree with Tobiuno, I don¡¯t want to lose everything just because some chucklehead felt like the world needs an apocalypse.


    Maybe if Morgana would be willing to share just how it was done, to give us an idea if some other players could actually pull a rabbit out of their arse and do something similar or if there¡¯s a possibility to prepare and prevent things like that.


    <table>


    <tbody>


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    <td>


    Whisper, confirmed Beta-Account


    </td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    I can only give a few estimates, information-gathering has been difficult, even before the assault on the citadel.


    To my understanding, the key to her actions was access to a Nexus, basically a place of power where the Astral River is dominated by one element and near the surface. The Gates of Fire in Daiea are apparently something similar, though they are controlled by a local clan who keep that place locked down. So, no idea how Morgana got access to her own Nexus, but given that there are only a limited amount of those, as in, maybe twenty or thirty across the entire globe, all with their own specific elements, I wouldn¡¯t worry too much that someone uses them on a whim.


    But there has to be more, or the events wouldn¡¯t have played out the same way, some other sort of influence, especially given that Morgana just told us she had her character booted, while it looks like the situation on Mundus gets progressively worse.


    Hopefully, Morgana drops in again and sheds some more light, though I wouldn¡¯t bet on it, she seems to be more into Darkness.


    <table>


    <tbody>


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    <td>


    Tarrin, confirmed Beta-Account


    </td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    Can confirm the ¡°global¡± part of things. We got the same black hail Harms mentioned and I¡¯m currently in the northeastern part of Aretia, near the Sea of Ice. And things here are bad, whatever that black ice is, it¡¯s melting the normal snow and ice, or maybe seeping into it? I¡¯ve got no idea but where the black hail fell, the normal ice becomes that black ice and everything that touches it begins to die.


    Sunlight seems to slow it down a little, but slowing is not stopping and we currently have a glorious hour of sun each day, so there¡¯s that. Maybe it¡¯s better in the south, but the northern reaches are pretty much done for.


    <table>


    <tbody>


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    <td>


    Do¡¯rodra, confirmed Beta-Account


    </td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    Well, at least it¡¯s not just us Elves who got the sharp end of the stick.


    Though, there was some talk of black fire a few weeks back, when the mess was going on in the forest of Dusk. So, the Nexus somehow allowed you to spread that fire across the entire continent? What sort of Fire is that anyway, I mean, Morgana was always Ice, Darkness and sometimes Mist, right? Why the dramatic shift?


    <table>


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    Jeanyra, confirmed Beta-Account


    </td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    She always was Mist, yes. And there was that brief video in which she seemed to be using a weird, blue flame, so no idea how you get to black. Maybe some sort of Darkness-Magic, while the blue flames were Ice?


    Though how that makes sense, I¡¯ve got no idea and unless she wants to share, I don¡¯t think there¡¯s going to be an answer.

 Chapter 666

    Things had been interesting these last few days. After the battle for the Citadel, the World of Mundus and the forum had been on fire. Literally, when it came to Mundus. From what I could tell, looking at the widely varying accounts and videos, the Nidh?gg had successfully been resurrected, even if some angry deity had burned my Avatar from the face of Mundus in retaliation, locking me out of my account. After their resurrection, the Nidh?gg had taken the incredibly cool body I had crafted for them and had begun to do what an apocalyptic dragon does best. Destroy the World, building on the events we had set in motion together.


    Amusingly, the Forum had been in almost as much chaos as the World of Mundus and that without an apocalyptic dragon wreaking havoc. No, the chaos there came from the various players, all having their own opinion on what I had done, how I had done it and whether or not Pantheon Entertainment had their fingers in play. I had given a brief statement, but nothing more, returning to lurking and watching the fun, and somehow, that statement hadn¡¯t helped matters. If anything, I might have made matters worse but on the Internet, you could never know. Silence could be taken as anything from violence to a tacit admission of complicity to a silent refusal or anything. Similarly, negative statements could be interpreted as denial to avoid responsibility, or as deception or, again, anything that the reader wanted to read into your statement. People had their opinions and more often than not, something as insignificant as statements of fact had no power to influence those.


    To make matters worse, Pantheon had switched to complete radio silence, not even moderating their forum beyond what appeared to be an automatic and relatively crude filter that stopped the worst curses and insults. There might be a good reason for it, but I couldn¡¯t fathom it. So close to the release of their ground-breaking product, community management should be one of their priorities, not some afterthought that could be ignored. But what did I know, there might be some strange outrage strategy behind it, the smoke from the burning dumpster that their forum had become attracting attention to their product.


    Instead of letting myself get embroiled in shouting at strangers on the Internet, I spent a large amount of time at the gym with Mrs Wu.


    Amusingly, after I had previously asked Mrs Wu for extra training, she had somehow decided that I was about to embark on some sort of secret mission. I had been unable to correct her misunderstanding, not that I really wanted to, her behaviour was quite useful. In her eyes, I needed to make sure my skills and physical state were in perfect condition for the coming mission and given that I wanted to be in just that condition for the manual attribute generation process that had granted me my slightly inflated stats at the beginning of the beta, I wasn¡¯t about to deny her. Even the smallest advantage in the beginning might be the key to reuniting with Sigmir.


    And so I perspired, panted and cursed, only under my breath and in my mind, as Mrs Wu pulled out all the stops, pushing me as hard as possible while providing me with a tailor-made diet for these last few days before my mission.


    My days had become a mix of working out, getting strange lectures from Mrs Wu, eating and sleeping, with little else I could do. The only thing keeping me from succumbing to exhaustion was the special diet she provided and plenty of sleep, making me feel decidedly odd. If I were to sleep this much normally, eight hours each night and a two-hour afternoon nap, I¡¯d feel groggy and lazy but given the insane levels of exercise Mrs Wu pushed on me, it became a necessity.


    One big advantage of the extra sleep was that my dreams had become incredibly pleasant. Each night, Sigmir returned to me, as I sat on the snow-covered mountain in the mist, holding me in her embrace and quietly talking to me. It gave me something to look forward to, even if I could never see her on the mountain, only feel her presence and hear her voice.


    You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.


    At times, especially when I sat on my balcony in the evening or went up to the roof terrace of the apartment building I was living in to watch the night sky, I could even faintly hear her voice in the wind, asking me about my day or what I planned to do next.


    Sadly, my plans to reunite with her were very much in the air. Pantheon Entertainment had sent me a message regarding my performance at the end of the Beta, though, as expected, they didn¡¯t actually give me any details. Just that I had performed far beyond expectations and that the results of my actions would become known after the end of the Beta.


    It was a little maddening, not knowing whether or not I had managed to perform well enough to reunite with Sigmir or what their actual plans were but there was little I could do. I had checked where their headquarters were, even looked at a couple of street-level images to see if there was any way to physically infiltrate their computing centre and somehow acquire Sigmir that way, but those ideas were pretty much dead before they could ever fully form. There were simply far too many problems and I lacked the practical ability, no matter how much Mrs Wu had taught me, I wouldn¡¯t be confident in going down that route, not if there was hope to reunite with Sigmir without risking everything.


    Finally, it was the day I had been waiting for. The Beta was officially over, the actual ending being a bit of a let-down, given the chaos I had wrought prior. The Nidh?gg had been seen in the elven lands, poison, carrion and death dropping from its body, as the remnant spirits in the corporeal forms we had created for them hitched a ride, adding to the devastation its very presence was spreading. But other than those few sightings and the general devastation caused by my final spell, nothing more happened. That knowledge had managed to bring a grin to my face, knowing that I had essentially ascended to become the last boss of the Beta, it was an exciting feeling.


    Sadly, due to my location, the game would start for me late in the evening, almost at midnight. To be able to dive straight in, I had slept through the day, only waking up in the evening and after an odd evening-breakfast, I decided to head up to the roof terrace, to enjoy the cold wind and the night, before heading into the capsule, to see what my efforts had brought to me.


    Sitting on my usual bench, I looked up into the sky, frowning due to the light pollution obscuring all the stars, leaving only a gibbous moon in the sky, far from the glorious nights I had been able to see on Mundus.


    ¡°Say, love,¡± I faintly heard Sigmir¡¯s voice, as the wind was blowing past me. Leaning back, I thought I could feel her arms resting around my torso, sheltering me from the wind and letting me feel comfortable. Letting out a content hum, I acknowledged her presence, hoping that she¡¯d continue to speak.


    ¡°Do you know why the moon is blue?¡± her voice asked, and for a moment, I had no idea what she was talking about. Focusing upwards, I realised that the moon was truly blue.


    But more important than it being blue¡­


    It was also on fire.


    Blinking, I tried to get rid of the odd image, to blink away the confusion, even shaking my head and standing, though that also removed Sigmir¡¯s arms and the comfort they provided.


    Regardless of what I did, the moon stayed as it was, shrouded by blue fire and now no longer the gibbous form it had before, but a full moon of blue fire.


    ¡°What in the world¡­?¡± I asked, not expecting an answer.


    And there was no answer, not even Sigmir¡¯s voice providing one.


    Instead, when I looked around, my eyes were drawn towards the horizon and for a moment, I wondered if dawn had come early and why it was coming from the west today. Only, the light wasn¡¯t nicely orange, it was blue, the same blue tinge the moon had taken. The same blue flames I had seen, whenever I looked at the logo of Road to Purgatory, a small part of my brain reminded me. Those same blue flames had formed a wave and were now surging towards me.


    Before I could do anything but stare in awe and fear, the flames swept over me, leaving me seemingly unharmed, if not for one thing.


    A blue box.


    <table><tbody><tr><td>System Integration Beginning. Please stand by as the Planetary Astral River is formed, infusing the World designated as ¡°Terra¡±. </td></tr></tbody></table>

 Chapter 667

    For a moment, I was utterly flabbergasted. Discombobulated. There were so many wonderful words floating around in my brain, I just couldn¡¯t find the right one. My mind was an utter mess, not accepting the reality before me, if that was even reality and not some incredibly weird hallucination.


    Before I could make a determination in regard to that question, I felt as if a hammer had hit me, right between the eyes. Pain flared, first in my head, then rapidly spreading across my entire body, before surging deeper as the world around me lit up with streamers of sound. Somewhere, at the edge of my understanding, I thought I could hear colours talking, a gold-yellow cursing me, while a deep, calming purple wanted to soothe my pain, neither able to reach me and I certainly couldn¡¯t understand them. But what I could do, was hold on, trying to keep my will together as a deep, soul-searing pain coursed through me, tearing at my consciousness and flaring through my very essence.


    There was a moment when I considered giving up, simply laying down and letting myself die, but if I did, I would never meet Sigmir again. That thought allowed me to hold on and deep within my being, I felt as if something connected. Some wires that had always been cut, suddenly welded together, completing me. I had no idea what was going on there, but the odd sensation helped me hold on, despite the tempest that I was engulfed in.


    At the edge of my perception, I felt something and when I focused, a new blue box appeared, asking for confirmation.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>


    Welcome to the G414-T34 System. The Gods have bestowed a legacy upon you, for good or ill. Do you wish to accept the Legacy of Morgana?


    </td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    Just seeing the name I had used, I immediately wanted it. I had no idea what it would do to me, but in this strange world of streaming sounds and talking colours, that name was something I could hang on to. For good or ill, I had been Morgana for almost two years and if I could follow that path again, I would most certainly do so.


    Pushing my mind, I accepted and for a moment, power flared around me and the pain surging through my body lessened. Things became bearable, to the point that I could push myself up from where I had crumbled in pain, trying to keep my head from bursting. There was something weird at the edge of my vision but before I could focus on the blurry weirdness, I became aware of the world again. And what I saw, made my eyes widen in fear and banished all other thoughts from my mind.


    Looking around, there were blue flames, the same blue flames I had seen wash across the city. They hadn¡¯t just washed past, they were lingering, licking at nearly everything I could see. The concrete the building was made of, the metal railing around the terrace, even the ground far below. When I looked down, I realised not only the building, but even my clothes were the same and for a second, I was just staring in disbelief. It didn¡¯t feel hot, it felt as if there was nothing there and yet, my eyes told me that there was.


    I wanted to drop and roll, but the flames were everywhere and when I looked around, I realised that the other buildings I could see didn¡¯t seem to fare much better. And yet, I wasn¡¯t getting burned - Yet.


    As I was staring in stunned disbelief, the flames on a nearby satellite dish flared up and suddenly, the thing started to combust, not with the blue flames that didn¡¯t seem to emit heat, but with orange-red flames that were most certainly hot. Within seconds, far faster than I would have thought, the satellite dish was starting to tilt, before crashing down from its position, some sparks shooting from the freshly disconnected cables. It might have been my imagination, but those sparks had the same, blue hue as the flames I was seeing everywhere.


    Before I could investigate further, an explosion rattled the neighbourhood and when I looked down, I saw a car sliding along the street, only that it wasn¡¯t rolling on its wheels, it was sliding on burning rubber, the entire thing engulfed in flames. I had always thought cars only exploded that way in movies, but it looked very much like the result of one such explosion to me - if not for the visible, flailing human at the wheel, until the human stopped moving, still on fire.


    Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.


    And the car wasn¡¯t the only thing that was suddenly destroyed, it looked like everything was going to hell and without the need for a handbasket. Streetlights, apartments, everything that was lit up remained lit, only that instead of the white or yellow lights normally used, it was now flickering with blue, oftentimes swiftly replaced with the orange-red of normal fire.


    Sniffing the air, the first, noxious fumes of smoke and fire trickled my nose, urging me to move. If everything was starting to burn, I didn¡¯t want to be stuck at the top of a building. Firefighters would have better things to do than help me if they could even act at all.


    Panicked, I scrambled to the stairwell, ripped the door open and stumbled down the dark stairs, the odd, blue flames providing little to no illumination. I didn¡¯t even trying to turn on the light, that seemed like a profoundly stupid idea. Somehow, I was able to vaguely see things before me and managed to make my way to my apartment without falling down the stairs. The smell of smoke was getting worse, only that it wasn¡¯t the worst thing I could perceive, that spot was held by the screams. Screams of fear, screams of pain and, worst of all, something I could only describe as feral screeching, somewhere between an angry cat and a car engine, interspersed with the sounds of heavy impacts, as if someone was slamming a slab of meat against a wall.


    Driven by a primal need to escape, I focused on nothing but returning to my burrow. My apartment, my home, the place one place I could reach that would make me feel safe. The only place better, would be safely held in Sigmir¡¯s arms, but¡­


    I pushed the thought away, the entire can of worms far too much for me to handle at that moment, escape had to come before everything else.


    Fumbling with my keys for a moment, I managed to open my door, stumbling inside and closing the door behind me, trying to lock out the strange noises that came from all around me, the scents and everything. My home was my castle, and here, I was safe.


    But I knew that the safety was an illusion, just sniffing the air for a moment, I could detect the smoke and when I looked into my living room, I could see that my TV set was already smouldering as if it was about to burst into flames at any second. The entire apartment felt a little too warm for comfort, despite the winter, making me wonder if there was fire in the walls or something.


    Shaking my head, I forced myself to keep moving and ignore the blue flames all around me. Running into my bedroom, I grabbed a backpack and frantically tossed in the bare necessities, clothes, some important documents, things like that. I had no idea what was going on, but I knew I didn¡¯t want to stay in a burning building, be the flames blue or not.


    As I was moving, my eyes briefly fell on the blades I had been gifted by Mr Wu, the actual, sharp blades, not their practice counterparts. I had always seen them as ornamental, a gift of appreciation not something I would ever consider using.


    But now, after seeing the world literally go up in flames, I wanted to have something sharp and pointy with me, just in case.


    Grabbing the blades and their sheats slowed me down, especially when I felt the need to change the jacket I had been wearing to a long, warm coat that, coincidentally, would conceal the blades, just in case. In case of what, I wasn¡¯t sure, but I wanted to be prepared for things going to shit, as that was where everything seemed to be headed.


    I only wanted to get somewhere where I could see my surroundings, where there was nothing that could fall on me, or trap me, or start burning below me. Somewhere, I could feel at least somewhat safe.


    Running outside, a tiny, idle part of my mind wondered why there was no fire alarm, or at least the smoke detectors going off, but I couldn¡¯t focus on the question. Hurrying through the hallway, I was almost hit when a doorway slammed open, crashing into the wall next to me with enough force to crack the wooden frame.


    What I saw stumbling out of the door might have been the most disturbing thing I had seen the whole evening. It was my neighbour, a guy in his early thirties who did some sort of home office, someone I had exchanged greetings with when meeting in the hallway, an acquaintance.


    But now, that acquaintance looked like the caricature of a human, skin taunt, blood streaming from a somewhat crooked nose and, worst of all, those eyes.


    His eyes, normally a somewhat muddy green-brown were gone, replaced with flames, flames of that blue colour that I immediately recognised, given that it was the same colour as the flames that were not-burning all around us.


    Before I could fully react to his wasted appearance, he lunged forward, moving a lot faster than I had ever seen him move before.

 Chapter 668

    Reflexes, conditioned by long hours of training with Mrs Wu, took over, making me twist to the side and back, even as my hands came up to guide my assailant. Without thought, I gripped his collar, pulling him forward, even as my other hand pushed, sending him stumbling past me, further into the hallway. What improvements he seemed to have made in speed, and strength judging by the destroyed door, hadn¡¯t greatly improved the mental side or his balance. He stumbled, crashing to the floor, unable to catch himself.


    Before I could consciously decide what to do, he moved in a way I would have thought impossible, pushing himself off the ground with only his arms, as if he was making a push-up, only that he pushed himself up into the air, legs straight, without any extra preparations. He even managed to turn around and swipe at me, his hands twisting into rather ugly claws.


    I could feel time slow down around me and easily watch the attack coming towards me. Trying to move aside was akin to moving through molasses, slow and cumbersome, but I recognised the sensation, it was one I had felt hundreds of times on Mundus. Bullet Time.


    Going with the flow of sensation, I focused on my magic and channelled Ice Magic through the Darkness of the hallway. The result was far from what I had expected, instead of turning my foe into a frozen guysicle, all he got was a bit of rime in his hair and he might have slowed down a little but otherwise, he seemed to be unharmed. While I felt the drain, my breath catching for a second. Not a winning move, not in the slightest.


    Wanting to move as quickly as possible, I twisted around the next attack, pushing him back into his apartment and slamming the door behind him. I had no illusion that the door would stop him for more than a second or two, but given that I was in a burning building I didn¡¯t plan to stick around anyway.


    Dashing down the hallway, the sounds from the apartments around me made my heart pound in my chest, fearing that any second the next horrifyingly mangled person would crash through a door, trying to tear me apart. Behind me, I could hear the noise of breaking wood, but given that I didn¡¯t hear footfalls, or any other noise indicating pursuit, I kept going, pushing open the fire door and flying down the stairs.


    It was a small miracle that I managed to get down the dark stairs without falling, there were a few close calls, but I made it to the ground floor without running into any further trouble, be it man, fire or monster.


    Finally, when I got to the lobby, I almost ran into another person, even two of them. I had seen them before, a couple living in the building, and we had even exchanged greetings, but didn¡¯t know their names. They looked as frightened and confused as I felt, not wanting to run out, into the burning streets but also not wanting to stay inside, even if the lobby looked relatively fire-free.


    ¡°What¡¯s going on?!¡± the woman asked me, her eyes wide and her voice almost hysterical.


    ¡°Fuck if I know,¡± I replied, the curse slipping out unbidden, ¡°But I want to out and away from anything that might burn me from above,¡± I added, heading for the door, not caring that there might be more of the strange monsters out there. I just wanted to get away from the fire.


    ¡°Wait,¡± the guy called, reaching for my arm to stop me, ¡°There¡¯s something out there!¡± he added when I dodged, his voice a hoarse whisper.


    Stopping for a second, I peered outside, trying to see what he might mean. And then I saw it, not that it was terribly hard to see, now that I was looking. The form looked very similar to the one I had seen upstairs, the same empty eyes field with flames, only that this one was a little more toasty. I couldn¡¯t tell if it used to be a female or male, either way, it used to be a motorist and one of the cars burning in the streets had been theirs, leaving their body a charred husk, still flickering with flames.


    You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.


    For a few moments, I froze, staring at the monster outside. Shaking my head, I turned around, trying to remember the layout of the ground floor and where the emergency exits were located. There had to be a better way out, than through the monster, that was what fire safety measures were for. Sure, I doubted that anyone had planned those for a combination of ¡®World covered in magical fire¡¯ and ¡®Zombie Apocalypse¡¯, but that didn¡¯t mean they wouldn¡¯t be useful.


    ¡°We need to get out of here,¡± I looked at the two people who had been staring outside, trying to jolt them into action, ¡°Do you remember the other exits?¡±


    My words must have shaken something loose in the woman and she nodded, looking into the merrily burning hallway. Luckily, the flames were mostly of the faint, blue variety. So far, they had been harmless to me, to the point that I ignored them when one flared up on my body, but the two people apparently hadn¡¯t caught on just yet.


    ¡°Through the utility room in the back,¡± she explained and I turned, not planning to waste any more time, before realising that there might be strength in numbers.


    ¡°You coming?¡± I asked and for a moment, they looked at each other, indecision visible on their faces. The deciding factor came from above, when the lights in the stairwell flickered on for a moment, only to explode in a colourful shower of sparks, spreading shards of glass everywhere and causing a few new fires to flare up.


    Leading the way, I rushed through yet another dark hallway, sliding to a halt when I heard a noise inside one of the ground-floor apartments. My stop was just in them, if I had kept going, the door would have hit me, possibly sending me to the ground and what stared at me was just about what I expected, another of the fiery-eyed monsters, only that this one was female and covered in blood.


    Letting out a curse, I managed to evade the bloody, swiping claw, the strength again far more than a normal human had any right to have, As I was pedalling back, the bloody monster followed after me, only to get the door slammed into it, courtesy of the guy that had been following me. Not waiting for the monster to get back on its feet, I continued running, hoping that the few seconds we had would be enough.


    We all made it past the door, before it crashed open again and the monster started to come after us, luckily, it didn¡¯t seem to be overly fast on foot, just deadly with its lunges and we made it to the end of the hallway, where I tried to open the utility-door. For a moment, I wasn¡¯t sure if it was locked or stuck, but I didn¡¯t manage to open it, when the guy moved me aside, frantically trying to rip it open.


    The monster behind us was still coming and given that the third member of our group didn¡¯t seem to be a fighter, I acted on reflex and focused on my magic. It had been a part of me on Mundus and while the Runes I had used for those two years were fuzzy and indistinct in my mind, I still remembered a few of them. Hail was one of them and while I was far from what Morgana had been, it was enough to launch a hailstone in the monster¡¯s face.


    It wasn¡¯t enough to destroy it, but I managed to stagger it, buying the guy enough time to open the door with a crack, maybe causing it to become unstuck, maybe just breaking it. Either way, we now had a way out and all three of us ran out, past the burning, sparking fuse-box, getting a few, nastily stinging burns in the process, but we made it to the backdoor.


    None of us was willing to wait, not with a burning, sparking fuse-box nearby and a monster following after us, so after the barest of glances outside, the guy simply shouldered open the door and booked it, his girlfriend hot on his heels, after giving me a look that was very much akin to the look she had given the monster before.


    For a moment, I considered running after them but given that they seemed to be running along the street, towards the city centre, I decided against it. Sure, there was strength in numbers but I wasn¡¯t about to trust numbers, not when my biggest ability was one that might see me burned at the stake. After all, now there were witches to burn, even if I considered myself to be a Sorceress. Or had considered myself to be?


    I needed some space and quiet to process everything, hopefully somewhere that wasn¡¯t on fire, or with monsters nearby, or with suspicious people.


    Shaking my head, I turned in the other direction, following a narrow footpath that I knew headed towards a nearby park. As I moved, I instinctively tried to minimise my footfalls and tried drawing on the Darkness around me, to keep myself concealed. Whether it worked or not, I wasn¡¯t sure, but what I knew was that I had magic, it was just far from what I had commanded on Mundus. But what this all meant, I had no real idea.

 Chapter 669

    A part of me was rather amused at the realisation that a nice, dark alley in the middle of the night, a place anyone should normally avoid, was a lot more comfortable than the building I had called home. Granted, that was mostly due to that building, along with everything else, being on fire and yet, thinking of a stereotypical dark alley as the safest spot felt weird.


    Or maybe my mind was just latching on to random thoughts, trying to cling to small bits of sanity, in a world that had gone completely off the rails. It wasn¡¯t just the burning buildings, the blue flames getting increasingly replaced with ordinary, yellow-orange fire, or the cars that seemed to randomly explode, worst of all were the people, or what was left of them. Just on the short dash between the backdoor and the dark alley I had retreated into, I had seen more of those monsters, mostly on balconies far above but some were in the process of reaching the ground. In one case, that process demonstrated just how insanely sturdy those things were, when it jumped off its balcony on the third floor, crumbling into a heap on impact, only to stand back up, as if nothing had happened.


    And then there was the noise. Not just the screeching, snarling and generally monstrous sounds of the changed humans, but the screams of fear and pain, the sounds of destruction and chaos. It was enough to hasten my steps, even if haste could easily ruin my stealth. I just wanted to get away from it all, somewhere I might be able to close my eyes for a second and catch my breath, both figuratively and literally.


    My considerations were interrupted by movement, as a burly shape stepped into the alleyway, blocking my way. The flames in its eyes gave away that it wasn¡¯t human any longer and knowing that the space was simply too narrow to avoid it, I readied myself for battle.


    For once, I wasn¡¯t just bumbling into it, my stealth and Darkness magic enough to avoid immediate detection, but that just gave me extra time. It took me a second to draw one blade from beneath my cloak, keeping the other hand free to use my magic. With practised ease, I managed to draw the runic formation with just a few, rapid swipes of my hand, the sizeable hailstone smashing into the creature''s head, with me following just a few steps behind.


    I idly noticed that the magical impact seemed to be causing quite a bit of damage, especially when I controlled the hailstone with Ice Magic, smashing it into its head again, the distraction enough to let me get within striking range. It had either ignored me, not recognised me as a threat or something else entirely, but whatever the reason, it only started to react after I jammed my blade into its chest, hoping that basic anatomy would hold true and getting an arm¡¯s length of steel into the chest was a bad thing, even if your eyes were burning pits and there was very little human about you.


    Ripping the blade back out, I backed up, just in time to dodge a brutal swipe that would have caved my head in. Thanks to my dodge, the attack only managed to hit a metal trash container, caving in the side and reminding me that these creatures were stronger than they had any right to be. But with their increased strength, there came a massive decrease in intelligence, as it demonstrated when it lunged forward, putting itself on a nicely predictable path and giving me all the momentum I could ever wish to exploit. The result was another clang and the trash container was further deformed when I guided the lunge into the metal, the creature bleeding heavily by now. But not heavily enough and in the brief moment it was stunned after the crash, I stabbed down once again, this time aiming for the neck.


    For a moment, my blade caught on the spine before it continued to move with a rasping sound that made me cringe in disgust. It was only thanks to the experience of Mundus, hardening me against the horror of violence and the sensation of killing, that I managed to keep a grip on my blade as I watched the monster still, the light fading from its eyes.


    In death, it looked so remarkably like the man it had been in life, I had to fight to keep my breakfast from making a push for freedom. My hand started to shake as reality crashed into me and I stumbled back.


    If you discover this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation.


    This was no game, there was no capsule, this had been a person. One I likely had seen before, passed by on the street. Who was now lying dead, killed by a stab to the chest, blunt trauma to the head and a second stab to the neck. Killed by my hands.


    There was a flash in the corner of my eyes and I realised it was a tiny, blue disturbance, one that had been there for a while.


    Pushing the disturbance away, I kept going, needing to get somewhere safe before I dealt with it all. And there was a lot to deal with, even if most of my mind was busy with my immediate surroundings, trying to remain as quiet as possible while keeping an eye out for monsters and flames, a small part of me was analysing the overall situation.


    And unless I was completely insane, in the grip of a massive, large-scale hallucination or some sort of lucid dream, the entire area, probably the entire world, was undergoing a fundamental change, with profound consequences I couldn¡¯t even begin to imagine. Road to Purgatory, the name flickered through my mind for a moment and I had to forcibly suppress a harsh laugh. What came at the end of the Road? Purgatory, the flames that cleansed the deceased from their sins by virtue of burning them away.


    Looking around, it was such a fitting name and about as subtle as a punch to the face. Only, nobody would have imagined it being that fitting, or maybe somebody had but decided that it was laughable. Who would imagine that a company would set up a game to warn or prepare for the end of the world, or whatever they wanted to accomplish with it.


    Another piece of the puzzle tumbled through my distracted mind, as I made my way across the road, making sure to stay as far from the burning cars as possible, sticking in the deepest shadows I could find. Sticking where my magic could conceal me.


    Pantheon Entertainment, and the Gods bestowing the Legacy of Morgana on me?


    But what did that mean for Mundus? Had it all been real all along? An almost forgotten memory sprang to my mind, from long ago. Sigmir had shown me a system message, right after we had cleared out the Barrow Den, all those many months ago. It had spoken of a group of visiting Travellers, needing to be taught by the natives.


    Needing to be taught, taught for what? Taught for the coming apocalypse?


    Shaking off the questions, I focused on my immediate surroundings, trying to figure out just how deep the rabbit hole went could come later For now, I needed to reach a safe location, to figure out the next steps to ensure my own safety and survival. I had no doubt that the current situation was bad but I was just as certain that it would get worse. How much worse, I wasn¡¯t sure, but from what I had seen, I would think a lot worse.


    As I moved, I could see a few humans, those without burning eye-pits, but I could see many more creatures with them and that was ignoring the ever-spreading flames and the way anything electric seemed to be either exploding or not working outright.


    Pushing past the dread and uncertainty, I pushed myself to keep going, focused on the immediate future. The park was looming ahead of me, a nicely dark place, with only a few, sparse blue flames and no real fires. The street lights were already gone but with the distant fires, there was enough light for me to navigate, or maybe my night vision was getting better. Darkness-Affinity had always improved my senses in the dark, so maybe¡­


    For a moment, I considered just sitting down on a park bench, but after a second of consideration, I decided against it and pushed into a gap between some shrubs, trying to conceal myself as much as possible.


    There, I finally could take a deep breath, my mind uncoiling from the tension of a prolonged flight-or-fight situation and beginning to unpack things in a rational manner. When a scream threatened to rip out of my throat, I hurriedly stuffed a fist into my mouth, biting down and tasting a familiar, coppery taste on my tongue.


    With my fist still in my mouth, I finally focused on the small, blurry blue notification in the corner of my vision, willing it to open up, just as I had done in Road to Purgatory. Or was that on the Road to this Purgatory?

 Chapter 670

    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="4">


    Basic Overview


    </td>


    <td> </td>


    <td> </td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>


    Name


    </td>


    <td colspan="3">


    Samantha Jade Jacobs


    </td>


    <td> </td>


    <td> </td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>


    Race


    </td>


    <td colspan="3">


    Emerging Firn-Elf


    </td>


    <td> </td>


    <td> </td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>


    Level


    </td>


    <td colspan="3">


    1


    </td>


    <td> </td>


    <td> </td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>


    Health


    </td>


    <td>


    141


    </td>


    <td>


    Astral Power


    </td>


    <td>


    221


    </td>


    <td>


    Magical Hair


    </td>


    <td>


    74


    </td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>


    Stamina


    </td>


    <td>


    141


    </td>


    <td>


    Divine Power


    </td>


    <td>


    -


    </td>


    <td> </td>


    <td> </td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td> </td>


    <td> </td>


    <td> </td>


    <td> </td>


    <td> </td>


    <td> </td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>


    Strength


    </td>


    <td>


    10


    </td>


    <td>


    Agiility


    </td>


    <td>


    14


    </td>


    <td>


    Dexterity


    </td>


    <td>


    12


    </td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>


    Intelligence


    </td>


    <td>


    17


    </td>


    <td>


    Intuition


    </td>


    <td>


    16


    </td>


    <td>


    Charisma


    </td>


    <td>


    9


    </td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>


    Courage


    </td>


    <td>


    13


    </td>


    <td>


    Endurance


    </td>


    <td>


    11


    </td>


    <td>


    Vitality


    </td>


    <td>


    12


    </td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    Looking at my character-sheet, as ridiculous as the idea to reduce my entire existence into a few numbers, I could only shake my head. The numbers looked very much like those I had gained at the beginning of the Beta, maybe one or two points off, but it had been a while. My name was there, but what ¡°Emerging Firn-Elf¡± meant, I had no idea. But the familiar image was yet another indication that whatever happened to reality around me was linked to Road to Purgatory, but whether the ¡°game¡± had been a link to another world or some sort of divine illusion, I had no idea. Either way, reality around me was no game and I highly doubted there would be a respawn. So, survival was my first priority, with gaining power to ensure my continued survival and freedom as a linked secondary objective. A world quest, so to speak.


    Focusing again, I opened up the other notifications I had received, curious about what had come with the ¡°Legacy of Morgana¡± that I had received.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Trait gained</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You gained the trait: Legacy of Morgana</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You follow a Path you travelled before. Skill-Gains for skills you learned before are increased and some traits of a prior life linger.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Trait gained</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You gained the trait: Sun Cursed</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>For the deeds of Morgana, you have been struck with the Curse of the Sun. The Light of the Sun greatly weakens you.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Trait gained</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You gained the trait: Moon Blessed</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>For the deeds of Morgana, you have been Blessed by Hecate.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Trait gained</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You gained the trait: Dragon-Touched</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>The Touch of a Dragon lingers on your Soul. Your body will slowly change and you may call on the Flames of your Elder to augment your own.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Trait gained</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You gained the trait: Raven¡¯s Shadow</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>A long bond with the Raven has left a Shadow on you. You can use one of your bond''s abilities, though doing so will be exhausting.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    For a moment, I could only stare at the long list of blue boxes, not fully taking them in. There were many of them, almost all familiar, though some not. Sun Cursed, Moon Blessed, Dragon Touched, Raven¡¯s Shadow and Emerging Race, those were new. Guessing where most of them came from was quite easy.


    Sun Cursed was trivial. As Morgana, I had shattered the Soul Prison and unleashed the Nidh?gg, a being that had been sealed by Sunna, the Goddess of the Sun and at the end, Morgana had been burned away by the light of the sun, likely in a clash between the Nidh?gg and the Goddess, or some sort of divine agent. Either way, that Sunna might have a bone to pick with me was to be expected and having a Curse as part of Morgana¡¯s legacy was something I would have to bear.


    Raven¡¯s Shadow was even more obvious than Sun Cursed. Morgana and Lenore had spent almost two years closely bonded, even merging together as one at times. Even without the trait, I knew the contact had changed me, this only made it more obvious. Though I was curious whether I would be able to use the Universal Understanding or her magic sight, either would be an incredible boon, depending on what was coming for me.


    Moon Blessed was a little less straightforward, but what I remembered of Hecate indicated that she was less concerned with the world, but interested in Magic. Giving a Mortal who managed to unleash magic on the level I had managed with the help of the Nexus her blessing wasn¡¯t too surprising. Especially as there had been that title, oh, so long ago, that had indicated that the Goddess of Magic had taken note of me. This might be an outcropping of it, but I wasn¡¯t certain. It might also be simply some sort of investment, trying to claim me, as I was confident that I would be one of the strongest spellcasters, eventually. Or I would be dead, but that was always a risk.


    Lastly, Dragon Touched. It undoubtedly came from Nidh?gg and I remembered his last words to me, promising his ¡®Little Sister¡¯, as he had called me for some reason, that I would receive my reward in the next world. I hadn¡¯t thought much about it and only now, with the good, old hindsight goggles, I was able to make a bit of sense of it. There were still a lot of missing details, for example why the Ancient Dragon had called me sister, but I would take the trait, not that I had a choice about it.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Special Ability gained</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You gained the Special Ability: Overflow</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>For having Intelligence of 15 at your level, you gained the skill Overflow. Overflow allows you to let your Astral Power burst forth, the charge a spell beyond the maximum, increasing its effect. Most spells however can only take a limited extra charge before shattering with unpredictable consequences.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table style="width: 90%">


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 97.9085%">Special Ability gained</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 97.9085%">You gained the Special Ability: Bullet Time</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 97.9085%">For having Intuition of 15 at your level, you gained the skill Bullet Time. Bullet Time allows you to boost your mind to the maximum, decreasing your perceived flow of time, giving you more time to plan out your actions. Note that this does not increase your physical speed. The duration depends on your Intuition, your Intelligence and your remaining Stamina and is not known beforehand.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    Two of my foundational Special Abilities, simply for being who I was. I was confident that they would serve me well.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Trait gained</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You gained the trait: Natural Mage</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>Natural Mages have an inborn connection to certain elements, which allows them to gain an understanding of the true runes of that element. This allows them to read those runes and create new combinations, that become the ''spells'' of later generations.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>


    You gain the Special Abilities: [Rune Meditation], [Rune Comprehension]


    You gain the Traits: [Rune Affinity: Ice], [Rune Affinity: Darkness], [Rune Affinity: Blood]


    </td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Special Ability gained</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You gained the Special Ability: Rune Meditation</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>Allows you to meditate on Runes, possibly increasing your Affinity with them or inferring different runes of the same type. The ability to infer runes depends on your Affinity and the specific Rune-Magic Skill</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Special Ability gained</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You gained the Special Ability: Rune Comprehension</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>Allows you to gain understanding on the meaning of Runes. You need to either draw, see or meditate on the runes to understand them. The complexity of the runes you can comprehend depends on your Rune Affinity and the specific Rune Magic-Skill.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table style="width: 90%">


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 97.9085%">Special Ability gained</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 97.9085%">You gained a Special Ability: Rune Triangle</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 97.9085%">For being a Natural Mage and reaching 10 Intelligence at your level, you gain the ability to link three Runes into a single spell. This is the basic form of rune magic.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Special Ability gained</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You gained a Special Ability: Rune Pentagon</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>For being a Natural Mage and reaching 15 Intelligence at your level, you gain the ability to link five Runes into a single spell, increasing their possible uses.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Trait gained</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You gained the trait: [Rune Affinity: Ice]</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>This trait grants you an understanding of runes regarding the element Ice. The element Ice stands for freezing, solitude, calculated action and eternity.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Trait gained</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You gained the trait: [Rune Affinity: Darkness]</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>This trait grants you an understanding of runes regarding the element Darkness. The element Darkness stands for concealment, uncertainty, devouring and change.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    Stolen story; please report.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Trait gained</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You gained the trait: [Rune Affinity: Blood]</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>This trait grants you an understanding of runes regarding the element Blood. The element Blood stands for sacrifice, regeneration and the cycle of life.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    Seeing the Natural Mage Trait, I began to wonder. Where did it come from? In Road to Purgatory, I had gained it via those odd, floating runes, but in reality? Was it simply an accident of birth, or was there something else going on? Either way, it was an incredibly powerful trait, allowing me to easily step onto the Arcane Path once again, following the footsteps of Morgana.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Trait gained</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You gained the trait: Ruthless</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>


    You don''t hesitate to do what you have to do to reach your goals.


    Your allies are less likely to trust you to guard their back.


    </td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    The Ruthless Trait, maybe one of my most defining ones. By now, I had a bit of an idea of what it signified, the stark contrast between the treatment of those I considered ¡°Mine¡± and the ¡°Others¡±. For those closest to me, I was willing to destroy the world, while those further from my heart, could easily be sacrificed. Even now, I had no idea what had actually happened to Adra and Rai, after the battle that had cost Sigmir¡¯s life. Their situation had simply ceased to be of interest to me, in the pursuit of my Vengeance for Sigmir¡¯s death.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Race gained</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You are emerging as a Firn-Elf.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You are one of the few existing Firn-Elves, a product of the experiments of a mad god on a distant world. Nobody knows how many there are or where you came from, or if there are more like you in this world. Rumours have it that the mad god not only used the blood J?tun in his experiments but also his own blood that has spawned many a monster in the past.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>


    You gain Attributes: +2 Intelligence, +1 Intuition, -1 Charisma, +1 Agility, -1 Endurance, -1 Strength.


    You gain traits: [Frost-Resistance], [Lowlight Vision], [Denizen of the Dark], [Denizen of the Eternal Ice], [Heat-Sensitive],[Glare Sensitivity]


    </td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table style="width: 90%">


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 97.9085%">Trait gained</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 97.9085%">You gained the trait: Emerging Race</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 97.9085%">Your Race is new to this World. Your physical characteristics have changed and will slowly emerge over the next thirty days.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    Looking at the Notification that my race had changed, I was a little stunned, my hands automatically going up to my ears. They were still human, for now, but only thanks to the Emerging Race Trait. It was giving me a thirty-day grace period, for which I was grateful. Maybe my ability to speak my language would be gone at the end of it, replaced by the ancient Jotun dialect Firn Elves were speaking. What would that even do to me, changing the very foundation of my mental processes? Would I even notice if my thoughts were no longer in the familiar language, or would I only realise it when speaking to somebody else?


    Even as a shudder went through me at the idea, I realised, it could be much worse. How would someone who had picked a Centaur feel? Maybe happy because they would grow a horse¡­ Well, unless they were female. But what about a female who had decided to play a male character, just to see how it felt? Or the other way around? Luckily, Morgana had been physically almost identical to me, with only minor alterations that wouldn¡¯t throw me off too much.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Trait gained</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You gained the trait: Frost-Resistance</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You are used to a cold and chilly climate. Arctic cold is no danger to you and magical cold deals reduced damage.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Trait gained</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You gained the trait: Lowlight Vision</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>Your Ancestors lived underground and did not need light to live. That trait is weaker in you but your vision is strong enough to make you able to see normally in dim or gloomy light. The total absence of light or magical darkness robs you of your sight like everyone else.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Trait gained</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You gained the trait: Denizen of the Dark</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>Your people lived in the Darkness for a long time, they became accustomed to it, melding with it, taking it into their very souls. Your affinity with the Darkness element is increased.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Trait gained</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You gained the trait: Denizen of the Eternal Ice</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>Your people lived in the eternal Ice of the North for a long time, they became accustomed to it, melding with it, taking it into their very souls. Your affinity with the Ice element is increased.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Trait gained</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You gained the trait: Heat-Sensitive</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You are not used to hot climate. In hot climates, you suffer from increased Stamina consumption and magical heat deals more damage.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Trait gained</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You gained the trait: Glare Sensitivity</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>Your eyes are used to low light conditions, sudden, strong glares will disorient you and cause intense pain. Your eyes are unable to adapt to extremely strong light sources.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    These were all the Traits of a Firn Elf. I wasn¡¯t sure if they would instantly activate or if they would slowly come into effect, over those thirty days. Given that my night-vision wasn¡¯t at the level it had been on Mundus, I was guessing it would take some time. But I couldn¡¯t know for sure.


    <table style="border-collapse: collapse; width: 100%" border="1">


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 98.5882%">Class gained: Sorcerer</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 98.5882%">Sorcerers don''t have class skills. They are however able to define their own skills by trial and error, formalizing them and gaining class bonuses on such self-created abilities.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 98.5882%">You gained a Special Ability: [Spell Crafting]</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table style="border-collapse: collapse; width: 100%" border="1">


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 98.5882%">Special Ability Gained</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 98.5882%">You gained the Special Ability: Spell Crafting</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 98.5882%">This ability allows you to create and formalize your own spells. Formal spells can be cast easier, trained and simplified, increasing their potential and making it easier to teach them to others. A spell can be based on runes, gestures, chants or for very advanced Sorcerer even thought itself.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    The notification that I had gained my class brought a grin to my face. It was the most barebones class for Spellcasters, giving me little outright, just the tools to explore my own magic. It might just be perfect for this changed world, given that I doubted there would be any convenient, magical library just popping up. Maybe the Gods could help, but I had a feeling their help would be focused on the various Clerics and similar folks out there.


    <table style="border-collapse: collapse; width: 100%" border="1">


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 98.5882%">Trait gained</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 98.5882%">You gained the trait: Magical Hair</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 98.5882%">Your hair is able to store up to 33% of your total Astral Power, in effect increasing your pool by that amount. You need to have at least twenty inches of hair to store the maximum amount and if your hair is cut, you lose the stored power.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Trait gained</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You gained the trait: Astral Power III</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You can store extra Astral Power within your body. This increases the maximum stored amount of Astral power by 33%</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Trait gained</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You gained the trait: Astral Regeneration III</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>Your connection to the Astral Rivers flowing through the world is especially close. You regenerate Astral Power 75% faster. That regeneration always occurs.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Trait gained</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You gained the trait: The Road is my Teacher</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>


    You are able to learn skills 25% faster without a teacher


    You are able to learn Special Abilities easier by discovering them yourself.


    When learning from a teacher, skills train 25% slower.


    You are unable to learn Special Abilities from a teacher.


    </td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Trait gained</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You gained the trait: Unbound</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>


    You belong to no Country or Creed.


    Maximum starting reputation with any large faction is Neutral.


    </td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Trait gained</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You gained the trait: Outsider</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You don''t belong. Even among your own people, you are the one who doesn''t fit. People are more suspicious of you, making you the prime suspect if something bad happens.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Trait gained</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You gained the trait: Child of the Wild</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>


    You were quite literally raised by wolves. You don''t belong to any family, tribe or community.


    You have no starting faction.


    </td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Trait gained</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You gained the trait: Lone Traveller</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>


    You walk the world alone, or with only your closest companions by your side.


    When in a group with unmarked people, you gain 10% less experience.


    When alone or in a group with those you have marked, you gain 10% more experience.


    The number of people you can mark depends on your level. Current number of marks: 0


    After using a mark, you regain it during the full moon.


    </td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    And that left me with the various traits I had taken when creating Morgana. Back then, I had been trying to get as much power as possible, taking a lot of negative social traits to buy off the positive ones. It had felt like a good idea, I hadn¡¯t been in a good place back then, angry about having been forced to leave the team I had founded and not wanting to have anything to do with other players. Seeing a trait like Lone Traveller had only strengthened that idea, to work with the Natives as opposed to other Travellers. And it had worked, too, giving me some incredibly strong traits without too many problems, some of them mitigated by luck, like my starting location, others by virtue of class choice, the Sorcerer not really needing someone to teach them.


    But now, all those choices were coming back to haunt me. I had no idea how some of the traits would manifest in this world, and I wasn¡¯t sure I wanted to find out. Child of the Wild, for example, might just not do anything, as my parents had left this world years ago, so did a trait that said I had no family matter? There were a few distant relatives who I hadn¡¯t talked to in years who might no longer recognise me as family, as opposed to not recognising me at all, due to not knowing me, but other than that? I just didn¡¯t know.


    Similarly, what did it mean to belong to a creed or country, given that it didn¡¯t look like countries would be able to endure the situation I had been seeing all around me? So far, I had not lost my ability to speak English, but maybe in the future? That was not a cheery thought. Or maybe I was jumping ahead too far, assuming too much from limited information?


    Lone Traveller? I didn''t even know how the marking would work, but I had a feeling it wouldn''t be something I could do casually. There was something about marking other people that felt... wrong to me. Though, I did wonder what the system meant with "people". Would someone like Lenore count? I had no idea and no way to find out.


    I just didn¡¯t know and finding out would be difficult. This was suddenly a dangerous world and for me, the danger didn¡¯t just come from the monsters, my fellow humans might be just as dangerous to me. As I considered that thought, I had to stifle a sobbing laugh, they were no longer fellow humans, I was now a Firn Elf and within a month, I wouldn¡¯t even look human any longer.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Skill gained.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You gained a skill: Unarmed Combat[1/100]</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>Even without weapons or magic, you can still cause harm to your foes.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Skill gained.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You gained a skill: Ice Rune Mastery [1/100]</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>Runes are mental representations of a distinct concept within the greater whole of an Element. In this case, the Runes you are mastering represent concepts within the Element of Ice, allowing you to focus your magic into efficient forms. You currently understand the Runes [Ice], [Hail] and [Chill].</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Skill gained.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You gained a skill: Darkness Magic[1/100]</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>


    This skill allows you to manipulate Darkness and bend it to your will. What you can do with it only depends on your imagination, your will and your power.


    </td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>


    Shattered died. You have gained some EXP.


    </td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Skill gained.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You gained a skill: Short Sword Mastery [1/100]</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You are trained in wielding Short Swords to harm your enemies. When attacking with a Short Sword, you deal increased damage and your Short Swords are less likely to break in combat.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Skill increased</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>


    You increased your skill: Darkness Magic [2/100]


    </td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    Notifications for the skills I had used, nothing special about them. It made me wonder how fast they would grow, given that I could remember using them, in a world far, far away. If that had even been a world, and not some sort of illusion, dream or some other divine construct. Could I even know for sure, without some sort of outside confirmation? Could I ever know that what was around me was real? Could I even know if I was real, or if Morgana and Mundus had been the reality, a reality I had destroyed? Or she had destroyed?


    Shaking off these weird thoughts, I focused on the present and on things that might be important. The description of Firn-Elf, now that I looked at it again, was one such thing. It declared me a member of a race created on a different world. Not within a divine Illusion, or something like that, indicating that Mundus had been real. As real as the system, so for now, I would work under the assumption that it was real. Just as real as I was, as the world around me was.


    And if Mundus was real, Sigmir hadn¡¯t been some sort of artificial intelligence or one process within countless in one. She had been a real, organic being, with a Soul, memories and everything that made a person into one.


    I had to bite my hand again, to stifle the shout of glee. If Sigmir had been a real person, I would be able to meet her again!


    There were countless myths that spoke of people being revived if someone was willing to pay the price. Even Kallista, the dryad in Neyto who had considered Adra her partner reborn, waiting for her to regain her memories, came to mind. But she had been a fool, letting the love of her life continue travelling in an attempt to let her come back on her own. To love someone is to set her free, was it? I most certainly wouldn¡¯t just wait for Sigmir, I would be more proactive.


    But that meant I needed Power. With a capital P and a whole lot of ower behind it, enough power to pierce the veil between worlds, enough power to find and take hold of her soul. And enough power to make a body for her, here, in this world of mine.


    Surviving and gaining power. It came all down to that.

 Holiday Interlude I

    Dense, white mist was billowing all around the four fleeing figures. Looking over, Adra could see the silhouettes of their leader, the slightly insane Traveller Morgana, and her stoic lover hurrying along, using the stolen Sabrecats to gain as much distance as possible. It wouldn¡¯t last long, not in the dense forest, not with an elven town so near. Going to ground would be risky and, quite possibly, foolish but compared to trying a forcible breakthrough, it had better odds of success. Trying to fight all the elves just wouldn¡¯t work, there were simply too many of them.


    But her two companions didn¡¯t seem like they were about to try hiding, Morgana had struck with vicious brutality, attacking the idiotic children that had accidentally broken their concealment, an action that was, sadly, not too unexpected for the mercurial elf. Firn-elf. But then, Morgana had been getting more and more unstable, ever since the foursome had arrived in the Forst of Dusk, even compared to her behaviour in Aletoma. There, she had taken bloody vengeance, literally, for an executed teammate, how she had found out about the execution, Adra didn¡¯t know but Morgana had insisted. Sigmir hadn¡¯t even considered asking questions, just hearing the petite elf relate Olivia¡¯s death had sent her on a mission to avenge the cleric while Rai, Adra¡¯s friend and occasional lover, hadn¡¯t protested too much. He simply accepted his teacher''s order, even if the teaching was mostly a thing of the past. Rai had matured rapidly, as people braving the unknown and daring to adventure often did, his level increasing and with the level came the class divides and rising attributes. They had changed him, from the foolish pup getting caught up in a bit of intrigue into a competent and quite vicious scout.


    And yet, none of that mattered now, not with hundreds, maybe thousands of elves, all coming after them, Morgana¡¯s behaviour had been odd, her sneaking off in the night to do something had been suspicious, and when the forest started to heave in a mix of disgust and anger whenever she did, it was difficult not to get suspicious. Magical Experimentation, she had called it, but what sort of experiment did that? Sure, all spell-casters needed to do some experimentation if they wanted to push their magic but this seemed to be too much.


    Too much fear, too much power and now that the spellwork Adra had woven before was shifting, no longer concealing Morgana and Sigmir as part of the forest, the forest was reacting to them. Maybe reacting just to Morgana. Either way, Adra could feel attention focus in this area, the trees shuddering as power was poured into them. Her eyes flickering over to the other two, she noticed that they had leapt off their mount and were now fighting on their own, that stupidly massive axe dancing as if it was a twig in the giantblood¡¯s hand, while the elf was using her magic to cause havoc. And the forest was shuddering in disgust, as vile magic started to defile the area. No, Adra needed to get away from here.


    ¡°Let¡¯s go, we need to go,¡± she pulled on Rai¡¯s hand and there was a moment in which the dryad worried that her friend and occasional pillow would follow his teacher on a mad, suicidal rush into the elven forces. They might be able to kill fifty, maybe a hundred or even two hundred. But there would always be more, Adra could faintly feel the movement of countless boots through the ground, roots all around her picking up the vibrations.


    Adra pulled once more, ready to let go and simply flee, when Rai moved with her, their contact allowing Adra to blend both of them into the forest just a little more. Not enough to evade everything but enough to make them hard to notice, especially with the complete and utter chaos caused by the other two, on their suicide charge.


    ¡°Quiet,¡± Adra hissed, pulling Rai in a perpendicular direction to their previous course. Soon, they should either double back or find some nice burrow beneath some tree to dig in, letting the elves finish their battles and sneak away a day or three later. Hopefully, by then everything would have died down.


    Thankfully, Rai cooperated, using his own class skills to conceal them, or maybe it was some sort of shadow-magic Morgana had taught him, the different parts of his skills often overlapped. The innate abilities gained from his class had stemmed from the training Morgana had given him, sending him down the path he was now on, and she had occasionally continued to teach him, though a lot of the skills he now had came from his own dedicated training and study.


    The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there.


    Going from fleeing at a dead run to creeping along silently was an odd change of pace. At every moment, Adra was convinced that one of the elves still rushing through the forest would see through their magical concealment, would hear the beats of their racing hearts or maybe catch their panting the moment they failed to control their breathing. It was nerve-wracking and yet, it seemed to work out. None of the elves focused on the two creeping shadows, not with the screams of the wounded and dying, clangs of metal and general noise of battle coming from the other direction. To say nothing of the incredibly vile sensations Adra could feel through her connection with the forest, the trees screaming at anyone with the senses to hear that there was something filthy that way. Many filthy things, different filthy things, the forest was as furious as could be, the trees all but willing to pull up their roots and walk over there, even if they really couldn¡¯t.


    But the fury was there, the hate to remove something that was desecrating their forest. Adra felt herself shiver, wondering just what Morgana had done to evoke such a reaction. And realised that she didn¡¯t want to know. Maybe getting away from the elf was for the best, before her often-times insane, reckless curiosity pushed her down a path of no return, if that hadn¡¯t already happened.


    ¡°Down there?¡± Rai asked, gesturing towards a narrow opening between the roots of an ancient tree. It would work, Adra thought after a moment, before accepting with a nod. It might be a bit too tight a fit, but she was confident that the tree would be accommodating if she asked nicely. But only if it was necessary.


    Absorbing her wooden spear into her body, she crouched down, sliding into the dark burrow feet first. It was a tight hole, filled with a mix of old leaves, hairs and earth, a damp, loamy scent filling her lungs as she looked around. It would work, at least it was enough for Rai and her.


    Moments later, Rai slid into her, pushing her back into the wall as they were squished together. Placing her arms around him, as he adjusted himself so both of them were somewhat comfortable, they settled down, Adra stretching her magic outwards, supporting and comforting the tree that everything here was as it should be. Nothing to be alarmed about, nothing to worry about, nothing of concern going on, just two forest dwellers seeking shelter from the chaos outside.


    The tree didn¡¯t settle down but it also didn¡¯t focus on the two huddling creatures between its roots, what little awareness it had, courtesy of the connection between hundreds of trees in the area was focused on the disturbance. The vile magic.


    ¡°We got away,¡± Rai muttered, ¡°Do you think the others managed?¡± he asked, his voice thick with guilt. Leaving his allies behind, just like he had when Morgana, Sigmir and Adra had found him, all those months ago.


    ¡°I don¡¯t know,¡± Adra admitted, not willing to lie about that. Lying wouldn¡¯t help. She was just about to consider tapping into the forest, to listen to the communion between the trees and their distant bond partners but hesitated. And it was good that she did.


    Moments later, she felt herself shiver, as incredibly powerful Ice-Magic swept through the forest. It was far enough away, and they were underground, so the sensation was mostly a physiological one, but what power!


    Power that she recognised. Only far, far more than she had ever believed could be wielded by Morgana  What had pushed her to this extent?


    The forest around her was shrinking back, the smaller plants simply shrivelling as arctic winds pushed past them, the larger trees screaming their pain out into the forestsphere. They were being burned and even through the thin bond Adra had to the trees around her, she could feel phantom pain. So cold it burned, so hot it froze, she simply couldn¡¯t do anything but whimper, clutch at Rai and endure.


    Luckily, the sensation quickly faded, leaving her shivering from fear and cold, desperately praying that whatever had occurred was a singular event. One that she would never experience again.


    When a loud, desperate scream filled with grief shredded the silence, neither Rai nor Adra moved. Fear held them in place, hiding in their tiny burrow like all the other critters of the forest. Fear from a great predator that had awoken.

 Holiday Interlude II

    The past few weeks had been difficult. Leaving Teacher and her lover, running on their own, Rai had been wondering if he and Adra made the right call. Could they have changed the course of events? Made it so that insanely powerful Ice-Magic would never have been used, preventing the destruction of vast swathes of forest in the process? And that scream afterwards. It was still haunting his dreams, the familiar voice of his Teacher, screaming in a way he had never heard before. The despair, the rage, there was a part of him that could easily imagine what had prompted the scream. Loss.


    Ever since that day, Adra had pulled him northwards, not even trying to head back towards the coast, not even trying to go anywhere. It was nothing but frantic flight, something Rai could understand. If Sigmir had truly fallen, Teacher would take her revenge and she wouldn¡¯t care who was caught in the crossfire. He was grateful for her to start him out on his path, to show him that being in the shadow wasn¡¯t an inherently bad thing - That the question was if you were the master of the shadows, or if it was the shadow of your master. But Rai wasn¡¯t about to willingly walk to his death, not if there was another path for him to take.


    They had posed as simple travellers, adventurers from far afield who had heard about the Forest of Dusk and its welcoming climate, playing up the couple-aspect while vaguely hinting that they might be looking for a place to settle down. Initially, things had been a little tense, the elves incredibly on edge for some reason, with whispers of Dark Magic in the streets. Those whispers had made him cautious, pushed him to focus on the physical aspects of his abilities and how they complemented Adra, who had taken centre-stage, her affinity to trees and the forest itself assuaging most of the suspicions.


    Dryads were welcome, especially powerful ones, but he was only along for the ride. There was a part of him that was irked by the dismissal and his own weakness, making him wonder if he had ever progressed, stepped up for himself. Getting snippy with the elves wouldn¡¯t help anyone, so he had composed himself, letting Adra do the talking, again. Even if he hated the elven snickers and the whispers of lapdog, along with a few incredibly insulting suggestions regarding his tongue. He did, but why was it their business?


    ¡°Have you seen the message?¡± Adra asked, staring into the air before her, just like Rai was staring at the blue box that had suddenly appeared before him. They were in the middle of the market, and it seemed that everyone was staring.


    Moments later, he could smell fear everywhere around him. Not a huge surprise, something important enough for the system itself to issue a warning, he hadn¡¯t even heard about such events.


    ¡°The elders spoke of such warnings, that the fate of the world hangs in balance,¡± Adra muttered, her eyes wide, her voice spooked.


    ¡°You think?¡± Rai began, his mind making the connection between their eventual destination, the ¡®Ice Queen¡¯ and his Teacher, who had continued on their journey filled with hate, grief and, from what he understood of her, an almost compulsive need to make those who had wronged her pay. Even back then, just after they had met, she had taken her revenge for a slight not even directed at her person, but one that had been directed at Rai. And yet, Morgana had taken her revenge in the most brutal, direct and permanent fashion.


    ¡°Yes,¡± Adra nodded, the fear in her voice now dominant. She knew Morgana just as well as he did, maybe even a little better given that the three females had been travelling together when rescuing him.


    ¡°We¡¯ll gather whatever resources we can, as we travel further north,¡± Adra immediately made a decision, planning their further flight. Planning for the worst to come to pass, that Morgana would succeed. There was a small part within Rai that still called him a coward, that he had abandoned his Teacher and pack. That he should stand with her, be by her side.


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    But at the end of the day, his first instinct was to survive. Just as his Teacher had always taught him to, only by surviving could you become powerful. Not that she had followed her own teachings, but as a Traveller, she had a lot more room for error.


    After the Message, Adra and Rai continued on their journey, only now, they were moving with urgency. Exchanging whatever they could, so they had as much food and supplies as possible, preparing as best as they could. For what, they weren¡¯t sure but neither of them thought it unwise, if nothing else, they were confident in the tenacious nature of Morgana. She would have her revenge or die trying and if she died, she would come back and take it anyways. Nothing would stop her, nothing short of the Gods themself. And even then¡­


    They were almost to the Mountains of Fire when they felt it. They had been in their tent, cuddled together for comfort and a little bit of warmth when a wave of sorrow swept over them. Even Rai could feel it, but where he merely picked up on the latent emotions surging through the Astral River, Adra was hit by the full brunt.


    Rai could do nothing for his friend, nothing but hold her close and whisper comforting words into her ear, as she shook with pain and despair, tears, snot and blood running down her face. She was in that catatonic state for what felt like hours, alternately sobbing in despair, screaming in pain or whimpering in fear and all he could do was hold her. He was tempted to take her into the shadows, to let the smooth, stillness of that realm calm her nerves but even just touching his own magic was enough to send Adra into a deeper state of panic. And so, he could only lie there, hold her and pray. He hadn¡¯t prayed in a long time.


    Finally, dawn came and with the light of the sun, the tremors and pain gripping Adra calmed down to the point that she could control her own body, to do more than lie there and suffer. Rai crawled out of the tent, only to stop, staring at the environment in disbelieving terror.


    ¡°What is it,¡± Adra asked from behind, her voice cracked and hoarse from the night of suffering. And yet, she had insisted to get out of the tent, that she needed to look around.


    For a moment, Rai wasn¡¯t sure if he should let her out. If he had the ability, he would have bundled her up and kept her hidden, or concealed the world around her, to spare her the pain.


    When they had prepared their camp, there had been countless massive trees all around them, giants of the forest that the elves seemed to almost worship. It was their forest, their home, and these trees were the pillars that held that home up. Adra had always liked those trees, feeling a certain latent connection to them, she had at times told him that she might even settle down at some point and bond with one. It had never felt like a serious consideration, more an amusing idea for the distant future, just like he had sometimes imagined his future pups. A someday-idea


    But now, all those majestic trees were burning with black flames. Flames that sent a cold shiver down Rai¡¯s spine, as he realised that these flames shed no light, held no heat and cast no shadow. They were Shadow manifest, darkness devouring everything in its passing. And they were destroying the forest.


    Regardless of his opinion, Adra was insistent. With his help, she managed to crawl out of the tent. Luckily, she wasn¡¯t on her legs when she began to look around, or they would have given out on her, even now, she needed his help to keep her from falling over.


    ¡°No, by the Gods,¡± Adra whispered, her eyes wide as she looked around, ¡°Please, no!¡± she desperately pleaded, but there was nobody that could hear her pleas, Nobody that could do anything about it, Rai was just as powerless as she was.


    Nobody, but the system and before her eyes, a blue box appeared.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>


    The forest is burning, the dryads are dead. You are the last dryad of Arbortoma, do you wish to take up the mantle and guide the forest on the road to recovery?


    </td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    For a moment, she hesitated. She wasn¡¯t sure if there could be recovery, she recognised those black flames. They were what Morgana had experimented with, only now, it felt like they were far more dangerous and destructive than anything their former companion could have conjured up.


    ¡°Yes,¡± Adra whispered, deciding that she would cling to hope, instead of abandoning herself to despair. Maybe the forest would grow once more.


    Or maybe, the black fires would bring the end, with her giving the final struggle before they all went out into the long night.

 Holiday Interlude III

    Looking around, Rai was quite proud of what they had accomplished in the months since the black flames. After Adra had decided to accept her fate as the last dryad on Arbortoma, the two of them had searched for a good spot to settle and start their efforts to rebuild. The black fires had burned for a few days, leaving nothing behind but dust, dust and despair. But under Adra¡¯s guidance, the smaller trees, the shrubs and all the plants that hadn¡¯t been part of the giant elven forest had begun to flourish. Trying to wrest as many resources from the ground and the choking dust, the plant life had started to reach for the sun once more, despite the cold winds coming from the south.


    And their small oasis of green had started to attract people. At first, only a few but with each day, more and more people joined their efforts, the vast majority elves but others, too. The Oasis was focused on rebuilding, even as armies from other continents marched across the desolate, dust-chocked landscape, travelling towards the Mountains of Ice. There, as the rumours went, the Mad Queen of Ice had unleashed death upon the world, ignited the black flames and called forth the frozen storm. In turn, the gods had struck her down, burned away her very existence, but the damage was already done and now, it was in the hands of mortals to fix the damage. Mortal hands had wrought it, mortal hands had to fix it.


    But why armies were needed to fix the damage, nobody had explained to Rai. Thus, his focus, and the focus of everyone in Oasis, was on rebuilding. On tending the gardens, on making sure that Adra, the glue holding everything together, was cared for and on protecting those who were doing the same as him.


    Because sadly, not everyone felt that working together and rebuilding was the way forward. They felt that their voices needed to be listened to, and if people didn¡¯t want to listen, they sought to force the issue, often with violence. Others simply saw the peaceful and flourishing Oasis and made designs on it. They wanted to rule over the place, to control its people, and if that wasn¡¯t possible, they sought to destroy it.


    That had been a harsh and incredibly disillusioning lesson. Rai had learned a lot from Morgana, something he didn¡¯t dare to voice, just in case anyone connected the Traveller Morgana and the Mad Queen of Ice, but some lessons, he had thought exaggerated. That one should never trust unless one could verify, that one should always be careful of honeyed words. Those lessons, the distrust, the vigilance and the outright paranoia, Rai had never fully believed in. Sure, some people wanted to take advantage, that was a lesson he had learned when leaving his village, but just how many people only saw their own benefit, who felt that as long as they could take advantage, the sacrifices didn¡¯t matter, that had been a harsh lesson.


    There had been nights during which he had rested in Adra¡¯s arms, tears streaming down his face, tears shed for the lives he had been forced to take in the shadows. To protect what he and Adra had created, to protect their people. And the next day, even after weeping for the lives lost, he went back out and did what had to be done.


    As time passed, those with designs on Oasis had increased more and more, especially as the realisation kicked in that spring wasn¡¯t coming. Around Oasis, crops and plants grew, thanks to the dryad¡¯s blessing given by the last living dryad of the continent, but everywhere else, the combination of dust, the cold winds from the south and an acidic, poisonous rain had caused widespread famine. And as more and more people had to go hungry, they became desperate. Desperate to control the Oasis and the food grown within Adra¡¯s domain.


    To make matters worse, the armies that had travelled south before were returning. Or what remained of them was returning, at first, it was only a few deserters that trickled back north but some time during what should have been the middle of summer, that changed. Instead of deserters, trying to flee the war, speaking of abominations of Ice, of howling wolves and murderous ravens, the survivors were travelling north, fleeing their own defeat. The war in the south had been lost, the armies defeated and their supply lines crippled. Every soldier was only trying to survive and whispers of the Oasis had spread, making it a target for everyone.


    ¡°Lord, one of our scouts returned. We need to report,¡± a voice shook Rai out of the contemplative state he had been in, thinking about the future while carefully tending to the patch of salad he had been working on.


    ¡°Yes?¡± he stood, turning to the messenger, followed by a dark-clad soldier, one of those who had sworn to defend the Oasis and Adra as their spiritual leader.


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    ¡°Wargs have been sighted and Nevermores darken the sky. We need to prepare, they will be here soon. It¡¯s just a matter of days,¡± the scout explained and Rai could only let out a sad sigh. He had hoped that the war would pass them by, that their Oasis would be spared. Hoped, but not counted on.


    ¡°Spread the word, we will follow the plans laid out in Preparation Two,¡± Rai ordered the messenger, declaring which of the plans they had prepared for certain scenarios to use. The messenger only nodded, leaving Rai and the scout behind. Rai continued to ask questions, while everywhere around them, various people were preparing for battle, according to the plan laid out in advance. There was a mix of desperation and determination filling everyone, they all knew, it would be incredibly difficult to withstand the coming onslaught. But if they didn¡¯t fight, they would simply die regardless.


    Finally, Rai had managed to dredge up every piece of information from the scout and dismissed him with a nod, focusing on his own part in the battle. And inform Adra of the trouble ahead.


    ¡°Dear, the battle is coming towards us,¡± he quietly told his friend. The last months had strengthened their bond, the secrets they shared, the connection to Morgana a burden and bond neither of them could deny.


    ¡°And we have to fight,¡± Adra nodded, regret oh-so-obvious on her face. She had decided to try and rebuild, to make Arbortoma their home. And now, they would pay for it. She had felt the changes in the earth, had noticed the very essence of life fade. At first, she had thought it was due to the destruction of the black flames, that life would recover eventually. She had managed to use some of the destruction, to turn life into death by harnessing the endless cycle, but now, she was reconsidering. Death was flooding the Astral River, coming from the South and while she had been pushing against the flood, there was only so much she could do. And while she had some affinity for the end of life, she was feeling her own limit, was realising that if she went much further on the path of Death, there would be no turning back. She would cease to be a dryad and become something¡­ different.


    ¡°Together,¡± Rai gently reached up, touching her face.


    ¡°So, you want to stand and die together? Or would you like to live?¡± A different, incredibly familiar voice broke through the silence, shattering both the affectionate feelings between them and the sombre mood that had been pressing down on them.


    ¡°Teacher?!¡± Rai asked, his eyes darting around, searching for his teacher despite knowing that all Travellers are gone from this world. Have been for months.


    ¡°No,¡± the voice replied and a figure emerged from the shadows, ¡°It is only me. Morgana has left this World, but her legacy is still there. And given that you are part of that legacy, the Lord has agreed to give you a chance. Or at least a stay, if you are willing to take it,¡± Lenore explained, landing on one of the tables.


    Rai simply looked at Adra, keeping his mouth shut. Uncertainty was written all over his face in capital letters, whether to abandon what they had built or to remain, even if it might mean death.


    ¡°What¡­¡± Adra began, before having to pause to clear her throat, ¡±What would that entail?¡±


    ¡°Morgana has given her word, that she would keep an eye on you. While she failed to do so in the throes of her grief, now, we can offer you shelter and, if you are willing to take it, passage to one of the safest places on Mundus. The Lord conversed with the Grandmother and she agreed to offer you shelter.¡±


    Rai looked at the raven, his face a frown. He had heard of the Grandmother, the figure of myth amongst his people and apparently, the teacher of his own teacher.


    ¡°We will take it,¡± Adra agreed as if she didn¡¯t even need to think about it. It was a lesson she had learned years ago. Only by living, can you fight another day.


    ¡°Simple,¡± Lenore replied, quickly flapping her wings. Her beating wings shoot out feathers of Ice, creating a perfect circle and suddenly, that circle turns black, black as the depth of night.


    ¡°Step into the portal, and the Lord will facilitate your travel to Neyto. With that, Morgana¡¯s debt to you will be paid, Adra, and you, Rai, will have completed your studies with her. You both shall step forward on your own merits, unbound by your connection to her,¡± Lenore explained, looking at the two humanoids.


    ¡°But isn¡¯t she gone anyway?¡± Rai asked, suddenly feeling uncertain.


    ¡°Gone from this world, yes. But she still exists. I can feel her, weakened, lost but still striving. We will meet again, one day. Of that, I am certain,¡± Lenore replied, her voice filled with utmost conviction.


    Rai hesitated a moment longer, wondering if he should remain, maybe join Lenore and her Lord. To hope for the return of his teacher and stay true to her. But after another look at Adra, he follows her, into the portal to a distant place.


    Behind them, the raven let out an amused caw. Oasis would crumble without its spiritual and military leaders, while the promise Morgana had given to Kallista was fulfilled. As things should be.


    Leaping up, Lenore returned to the shadows, soaring through the sky on unseen black wings, back towards the Lord she had sworn fealty to. And the countless dead, she was ferrying into the afterlife, as she continued on her own path.

 Chapter 671

    Finally taking my fist out of my mouth, I realised where the odd taste had come from. When stabbing the Shattered, I had gotten blood on my hand and thus, when biting down on my hand to keep from screaming, in my mouth. Spitting in an attempt to get rid of the taste didn¡¯t help and I realised that I wouldn¡¯t be able to conjure up Liquid Moonlight, my favourite drink on Mundus. But even if I could, I doubted I would be able to drink it, not without increasing my Ice Magic, or maybe my Ice Affinity, one would be easy, the other not so much.


    But it made me realise that while I had grabbed clothes and documents, I had missed something even more important, namely food, drink and similar supplies. A bigger backpack, maybe a sleeping bag, all those things would be important and incredibly valuable in the future and I doubted that supply would increase.


    No, I had to act, and I had to act now, or it might be too late. Acting during the day would only make me suffer from the Curse of the Sun, so it was now or never.


    Pushing myself up, I began to carefully make my way out of the shrub I had used to hide, remembering all the lessons Sigmir, Adra and even Rai had taught me about stealth and remaining unheard. It wasn¡¯t enough to get me the skill, but nothing attacked me while leaving the shrub and with the bit of Darkness Magic I had been able to regain, I was somewhat confident that I wasn¡¯t seen as I began to make my way through the streets.


    The situation hadn¡¯t improved during my brief stint in the shrub, things were still royally messed up, maybe even worse than before. The blue fires had mostly faded, but instead, there were now normal fires everywhere, houses, cars and even a few bushes burning, making the night much brighter than I would have liked.


    While moving, I noticed that there were a lot of Shattered, the former humans that had now burning pits instead of eyes, going around but after considering for a moment, I started to wonder. Sure, there were a lot of them, but compared to the number of people who should have been in the area, there were too few. I doubted that anyone living would stay in a burning building, whether the flames were blue or red, so where were the people? The Shattered I saw made up maybe a tenth of the people that had lived in the area, adding maybe the same number of Shattered out of sight, which left some eighty per cent of the populace missing.


    Swallowing, I realised where some of them might have gone. They might have been sleeping, right next to their beloved spouse, or maybe down the hall from their child, when the change had hit. And their spouse, or child, might have been unable to withstand the infusion of Astral Power and everything else. They might have Shattered, their eyes burning out and their minds, or maybe their souls, being replaced with something else, something that only knew hunger. Given the strength the Shattered I had seen had displayed, I had no doubt that a human, stunned by the pain and confused by the events, would be easy prey, especially if the attacker wore the face of their loved ones.


    What a horrible way to go.


    Shaking off the horror, I continued moving forward when I noticed another Shattered moving around the alley I was planning to head into. For a moment, I considered moving around, before realising that power was what I needed. I had no idea what the future would bring but I knew that having power was infinitely better than having none.


    Letting out a breath, I considered my approach for a moment. My blades were excellent weapons and with a sneak attack, I would likely be able to kill the Shattered. But at the end of the day, I was a Sorceress, not a rogue, assassin or fighter of any kind. Magic was what I had been good at in Mundus, and magic was what would bring back my Sigmir.


    So, Magic would be what I had to train, even if it would be difficult in the beginning. I would have to craft myself a new set of shuttles, or some sort of blade I could wield with my Ice Magic, but that would take time, something I didn¡¯t have right now.


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    Glancing around, I made sure that nothing seemed to be nearby, before carefully drawing a five-rune formation, composed of Ice and Hail. It was the strongest direct attack-spell I could use at the moment and I channelled as much power into it as I could until the formation almost unravelled. The result was both excellent and utterly underwhelming, the mental dissonance between the two emotions quite amusing to me.


    When I compared it to the power I had casually thrown around as Morgana, it was less than a fart compared to a hurricane, but when considering the way the Shattered was bodily tossed to the ground when hit by the fist-sized hail corn, I was quite happy, especially when I realised that the corn was still there, allowing me to seize it with my Ice Magic and batter the Shattered, not letting it get back up.


    It only took two more strikes to shatter the Shattered¡¯s skull, the flames in their eyes going out, leaving me with some EXP and, much more importantly, a notification that I had gained my Ice-Magic Skill and that my Ice Rune Mastery had levelled to two, both making me quite happy.


    Keeping my head on a swivel, I kept sneaking forward, my breathing calm and even, trying to regain as much of the Astral Power I had just spent as possible, until I noticed another Shattered.


    Again, I wove together the same runes, conjuring up another Hail Corn and smashing it into the Shattered¡¯s head, before using my Ice Magic to bludgeon it, until it stopped moving. Sadly, the second Shattered I had attacked had made a lot of noise thrashing around on the ground and I could hear movement.


    Unwilling to bet that it would be a fellow survivor, I immediately began weaving together another Hail Corn, the initial strike important to stop an attacker¡¯s momentum, only to let out a quiet curse when I saw that it wasn¡¯t one Shattered that came out between the houses but a pair of them.


    Regardless, I needed EXP and power, so they had to die.


    They noticed me, just as my spell was ready and the first one had their movement toward me broken, when the Corn smacked into their face, sending them tumbling to the ground. As the Hail was travelling through the air, I quickly drew my blades, trying to split my attention between bludgeoning the one I had sent to the ground and engaging the other one but I quickly noticed that I wasn¡¯t there yet.


    Trying to focus on my Ice Magic only really worked if I stopped, something I couldn¡¯t do while fighting. Thus, I only managed to smash the hail corn into the first Shattered once, before their partner was on me.


    Brutal strength, excellent endurance and a near immunity to pain, those were the biggest advantages of the Shattered, as far as I could see. It made them a pain in the rear to fight but it also made them predictable. Letting them lunge, before evading and striking them would be my best bet, only possible thanks to countless hours of training with Mrs Wu. If I could evade the strike of a trained agent cum assassin, I could evade the mindless lunge of a Shattered, even if their strength gave them inhuman speed.


    I had yet to learn all of their vital spots, but the spine seemed to be one of them, maybe they used the human nervous system in some way. Either way, as I ducked under the swiping arms of the Shattered, I managed to step forward and into it, allowing me to pierce one of my blades into their spine, roughly in the middle of their back. It wouldn¡¯t completely paralyse a person, but it would take out their legs, which was good enough for me.


    Leaving the blade in, just in case there was some sort of regeneration going on, I made myself ready for the other one, stepping clear of the one that had just gone down.


    It didn¡¯t disappoint me, coming at me with the same, brutal lunge, only this time, it was already damaged. Curious how my blades would compare to the impact of my magic, I didn¡¯t go for the spine, instead, I simply started slashing it, testing its reactions and to see how long it would take to kill it.


    The answer was, far too long for my tastes. By the time it went down, there were dozens of deep cuts on its arms, all of them leaking far too little blood for their size, with a few more across its torso, adding to the mess. Looking at the cuts, trying to estimate which I had made first and which later, I concluded that the Shattered were regenerating, and not even slowly at that. So, I had to add regeneration to their advantages, making me curious about what would happen if I used Blood Magic on them.


    The idea brought a grin to my face, when I looked at the other Shattered, still alive, dragging its body towards me with its arms as if it wanted to volunteer for the advancement of Magic in this new world of ours.

 Chapter 672

    My lips curled into the first, genuine smile since this whole mess had started. Magic, and learning more about it, that had been my second favourite thing about Mundus. Only Sigmir had been better, but she was and always would be, in a class of her own.


    When I stepped a little too close to the downed Shattered, it tried to grab me, forcing me to dodge, the grin fading a little. I only wanted to find out how Blood Magic would interact with their abnormal physiology and was hoping that it might give me some insight into the events. Why had people turned into instinct-driven monsters with burning pits instead of eyes, attacking other humans on sight? Or maybe attacking other living beings on sight, I hadn¡¯t noticed whether they attacked cats or other pets as well. Maybe they simply hated the un-Shattered.


    Without a convenient tool to pin the Shattered down, decided to be a little nasty about it, circling the Shattered who, with only its arms to move its body, just couldn¡¯t keep up. The tattered remains of a wide, silky smooth pyjama didn¡¯t really pose a problem to pulling up its leg, though I noticed a small oddity with the feet. They didn¡¯t look like the feet of a creature that had been moving around barefoot, they looked too pristine for that. Unless the person who later Shattered had been some weirdo with incredibly thick and sturdy calluses on their feet, of which I couldn¡¯t see any indication, there should be something visible, some blemish, scratch or cut, but there wasn¡¯t anything.


    After a second of consideration, I filed that up under confirmation for the regenerative abilities of the Shattered, maybe alongside some increased physical toughness that allowed them to straight-up ignore damage below a certain threshold. If that ability also extended into the magical, things might get seriously interesting with regards to my Blood Magic, if it allowed them to avoid being damaged by it, while still letting me harvest power. Infinite Astral Power, after the experience with the Nexus, I really wanted that again. But I doubted it would be that easy.


    With its paralysed leg in my clutch, the Shattered had some trouble trying to crawl, despite its strength. Arms were simply not designed for that.


    Its clumsy attempts gave me ample time to test the physical resilience of its skin, noticing that it seemed to be harder to cut into, and certainly harder to carefully carve than it should be, more akin to thick leather than fresh, human skin. A curious tidbit, but not necessarily immediately important.


    My first action was to simply try draining power with Blood Magic, straight from the wound, without any runes to provide guidance or focus. It was difficult, far more so than I thought it should be as if something was trying to prevent me from draining. It faintly reminded me of the fragmented memories I had from the fight against the Giant Yeti, where my foe had tried to devour the Blood Magic I was using, to make it their own before I could actually use it. This might be something similar, only now, I didn¡¯t have the ability to use Death Magic to poison their well, so to speak.


    Curiously, as I started to drain power, the Shattered let out a shrill, keening wail, sounding very much in pain and causing movement all around the area. Maybe drawing in more Shattered, maybe catching the attention of any nearby humans, or maybe just irritating some dog with the loud, high-frequency noise, I couldn¡¯t be sure and wasn¡¯t about to stay and find out. Fighting two Shattered had only worked thanks to an overwhelming first strike against one, fighting more would be foolish.


    Stepping onto the Shattered¡¯s back, I stabbed my second knife into its brain from behind, twisting and stirring to make sure whatever was in there, was nicely scrambled, the fire in its eyes going out and a few notification telling me I had gained the Blood Magic skill, gained the Dual Blade Mastery skill and, last but certainly not least, had levelled my Ice Magic to two.


    Not enough EXP to level up just yet, but one or two extra Shattered would be enough. Curiously, the EXP-Penalty that had punished repeated kills on Mundus was absent, at least from what I could see. I certainly didn¡¯t mind but was curious about the reason. But that would be something to investigate later, for now, I had stores to¡­ explore and supplies to¡­ acquire.


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    After a quick dash, trying to get out of the area the Shattered had screamed in, I slipped back into the shadows. There was audible movement and while I wanted to kill the Shattered, I knew I had no chance to kill them if they mobbed me, I lacked the levels, skills and, in a way, the allies to fight them. If I had someone like Sigmir up front, willing and able to act as a wall, I would feel much better about my chances in a two-vs-many fight, but with just me, things were a little dicey. Things to consider for later, especially as a Lone Traveller.


    Sneaking through the shadows, relying on both the skills I had learned from Mrs Wu and my burgeoning skill in Darkness-Magic, I managed to sneak to the nearest shopping centre. It wasn¡¯t anything really big, just a dozen stores or something like that, spread across two levels.


    With a faint grin, I pushed open the door, unlocked to allow people to access the ATM just inside. There was another door, just a few metres further, forming a sort-of lobby, with only a few, fritzing lamps and video cameras to keep an eye on things. There likely was some sort of night watchman somewhere nearby, maybe even off-site, but I was quite confident that they had bigger problems than a little supply acquisition.


    Pulling back my fist, I tried to smash through the glass with the hand guard of my butterfly blade acting like a knuckle duster. For a brief moment, I could hear the alarm gearing up to wail, only for a rasping, cracking noise to cut through it, making me think that the electronics had burned out, or something like that. Either way, it didn¡¯t look like there would be a problem with it. Sadly, that didn¡¯t mean I could just enter the building. After my punch, there were some cracks in the glass, but nothing to write home about. The glass was clearly designed to withstand greater force than what my petite body could bring to bear, especially without further enhancement from the system.


    But as the saying went, if there¡¯s a will, there¡¯s a way, and with magic, I would find that way. For a moment, I considered trying to freeze the glass and shatter it, but it would take a lot of magic, probably more than I had to comfortably spare. Instead, I formed a spike of Ice, using my magic to smash it into the glass, until I had a small, thin hole. From there on, I could simply grow the Ice into the glass, or rather, into the thin, previously empty, layer between sheets of glass.


    It took a few minutes, but given that I was hidden and not making any noise, I could simply wait, relaxing my mind and slowly trying to draw in fresh Astral Power, to replenish what I was using. Finally, the entire inside of the glass was covered in Ice and with a somewhat forceful shove, I applied pressure all along the pane. The result was quite good, making me think that the glass had been designed to withstand impacts from outside, but not from inside the glass, simply because there should be no way for force to ever get applied there.


    But thanks to magic, I now had an easy entrance into the shopping centre, with a large supermarket and, more importantly, a good-sized outdoor store just ahead.


    A quick thought splintered the Ice I had just conjured into shards, some of them nicely sized to be used as blades, so I picked them up, stacking them on top of my small backpack. They would melt, sure, but not too fast, so I could likely use them for a fight or two.


    Or to crack the windows of the outdoor store, their panes luckily a lot less sturdy than those to the outside. A few strikes with the sharper shards of Ice were enough to create an opening and some sweeping gave me an entrance. Inside, I hurried to get a large backpack and some other equipment, mostly tools that would allow me to forage, instead of going for straight-up food or supplies, Sure, I grabbed a few nutrition bars and similar emergency supplies, but only because I was passing by.


    Either way, after less than twenty minutes I was back out, now carrying a much larger, mostly empty backpack and making my way over to the supermarket.


    There, I continued my rapid acquisition, this time going for things that wouldn¡¯t spoil or would be hard to acquire outside. Spices, for example, might become incredibly valuable, so having a pound of pepper might be worth its weight in gold, at some point. Similarly, salt went into the bag and a whole lot of rice.


    By the time I was back at my exit, my bag was stuffed and quite heavy, making me consider ways to efficiently drop it in a fight. But for now, I had to look for a place to hole up come morning and hunt some Shattered on the way there. Supplies were acquired for the short-term, and now I had to begin the Power-acquisition. Or in other terms, it was time to start killing.

 Chapter 673

    Walking the streets at night was a little eerie at the best of times. With fires spreading, replacing the light normally shed by the streetlamps and screams, some distant, some nearby, replacing the general din of life, it was worse.


    And yet, in these eerie streets, I was feeling remarkably safe. After killing a dozen Shattered, I had already reached level three, their uncoordinated movement and somewhat solitary nature allowing me to fight them with confidence, raising my abilities in the process. The biggest beneficiaries were, as one would expect, Darkness Magic, keeping me constantly concealed, Ice Magic, allowing me to bludgeon my foes to death after the initial strike, and Ice Rune Mastery, for that all-important initial strike. The skills had reached level four for Darkness Magic and Ice Magic and level five for Ice Rune Mastery. All in all, a nice harvest, though the Sun would be rising soon, making me look for a quiet place to hide and rest. While I was planning to test just how much the Curse of the Sun would afflict me, I wanted to be somewhere that would allow me instant shelter, if I happened to start going up in flames, vampire style. Or worse, start to sparkle.


    With that in mind, I made my way towards the worst part of town, where quite a few buildings had been abandoned in recent years. I had considered breaking into some random, solitary house, hoping that I wouldn¡¯t run into the owners, or if I did, that they¡¯d already be Shattered, but I decided against it. Simply not worth the hassle, and given that electricity seemed to be the cause of the spontaneous fires, I wanted to go somewhere the power had been long since cut. Finding an abandoned house would have been the best, but barring that, I would take any abandoned place, hopefully finding shelter there.


    Looking at the sturdy, yet derelict fence, the thick layers of graffiti and the mix of broken or boarded-up windows, I was reasonably certain that the building I was looking at had been abandoned a while ago, at least a year, maybe longer. Either way, I doubted there would be many people interested in it, certainly not with everything going on. Just the place for me to hide out and rest.


    Getting past the fence was quite simple, I just had to follow it until I found the spot that had been cut, maybe by the artists that had sprayed layers upon layers of ¡°street-art¡± onto drab, grey walls, or maybe by somebody else. There might have been homeless using the building as shelter, or some other groups. Not that it really mattered to me, or to anyone at the moment. I was quite confident that people had bigger fish to fry.


    Sneaking up to the building, I made sure to be as quiet as could be, intently listening, just in case somebody was already there, Shattered or not. Either way, I wanted to have the initiative, just in case somebody needed a hailstone to the head or a blade in the back.


    Moving around the building, I soon found a smashed-in window, one where someone had already removed all the glass, making for an easy entrance, if you were somewhat fit. For me, it was easygoing, at least without my backpack.


    Landing softly inside, I pulled my bag after me, setting it down a short distance from the entry point in a dark corner, my senses still dialled up as much as possible. They were telling me quite a bit, making it obvious that there had been people here recently. The scent of urine was pungent in the air, making my face scrunch up in disgust, even as I tried to be extra careful in the dark building.


    I almost felt as if I had my longer, elven ears back when I tried to twitch them towards a distant noise, an almost inaudible clicking that came from another part of the building, but given my circumstances, the only thing I could do was focus my eyes in that direction and pull my blades, making sure that I was ready for combat. By now, I had experimented enough that I could draw runes with just one finger extended, allowing me to hold the blades while stretching my pointer-finger so I could draw. It wasn¡¯t the best solution, but it was adequate and allowed me to cast my spells while armed, which was good enough for me.


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    For a few, tense seconds, I simply waited, before I continued forwards, trying to find out where the sound had come from. Moving to one of the partitioning walls, I noticed a concrete staircase leading upwards and more openings, to other parts of the building. A small, idle part of my mind tried to figure out what this might have been in the past but the attention needed to search for whatever threat might be in here soon forced it to the back of my mind.


    It likely didn¡¯t matter what they had done here, the change seemed to have made a lot of ideas obsolete anyway. The best examples of that were the exploding electric appliances and the spontaneous fires breaking out everywhere. I had yet to understand where those might be coming from but I was confident that things had changed on a fundamental level, not just the living, but everything. The system, and magic, had infused the entire world and at least for now, that meant chaos. Uncontrolled magic¡­


    Wild Magic?


    The thought flashed through my mind, as I remembered the vast swathes of land that had been deemed hazardous by the inhabitants of Mundus, too dangerous to even attempt to settle there, due to the chaotic effects of magic in the area. Just the idea made me shiver, for that would almost certainly spell doom for all of humanity. If the levels of Astral Power remained at such a high level, magically induced mutations would warp and distort everything, minds, matter and even souls would be changed.


    I resisted the temptation to delve into the Astral River, just to experience it in this new world, but that would be utter foolishness, given that I most likely wasn¡¯t alone in the building and just sitting there, spaced out while my mind was wrestling with the literal force that was currently in the process of changing the world wasn¡¯t most conducive to good health. Not if some random Shattered, or even a normal human, might attack me at any time.


    Another soft noise chased away all the unnecessary considerations, making me focus. Now, I even managed to locate the sound and follow after it, both blades at the ready. Past yet another hole in the wall, what had been a doorway in days past, my eyes were immediately attracted by the Shattered that was trying to hide, maybe to ambush me. Its efforts brought a harsh grin to my face, the idea to hide in a dark room, when your eyes were literally pits of burning, blue fire, didn¡¯t speak highly of its intelligence. But compared to the other Shattered that had just shambled towards me, trying to grapple or tear me to pieces, it spoke of a certain cunning.


    I didn¡¯t like it.


    And to demonstrate that dislike, I rapidly drew a magical formation into the air, just three runes of Ice and Hail, my body slowly building the muscle memory to go with the mental abilities. Just knowing their shape was just a small part of the battle, the more important part was to have them down instinctively, so that the mind could take a backseat and focus on connecting the shapes, to give them true meaning and power. That ability was slowly coming back but it would take a while to get it to Morgana¡¯s level.


    But in this case, that wasn¡¯t needed, while the Shattered was immediately attracted by the glowing and the movement, I was quick enough to get the Hailstone into the air and its face before it could reach me. Staying at a distance, I focused on my Ice Magic, beating the blunt block of Ice against its head, until it slumped to the ground, just like the other Shattered I had killed this day.


    Looking around once more, I tensed, realising that even after the Shattered had crumbled into a motionless heap, I wasn¡¯t alone in the dilapidated building.


    Claws made soft, clicking sounds as a canine shape came out of a dark corner, moving slowly and keeping an eye on me as if trying to determine whether I was friend or foe. What made me frown was that the canine looked normal, no burning eye-pits, nothing that made it appear to be more than a very large dog. Its back easily reached my hips, making it roughly the size Ylva had been when we first met, though the fur was completely different as was the physique.


    Trying to imitate both Ylva and Sigmir, I pulled myself up, trying to appear as big as possible while staring at it, the bloody chunk of Ice hovering above my shoulder, ready to strike if the dog chose to attack.

 Chapter 674

    The seconds stretched as I stared the dog down, not wanting to kill it, unless it attacked me first. From somewhere deep within my throat came a growl, deeper than anything I had ever produced and I felt my lips curl into a snarl, willing the dog to give up and submit. I didn¡¯t want to kill the furry critter, but if I had to, I would do so in a heartbeat.


    Finally, the dog looked down, breaking eye-contact and slowly padding towards me, its tail hanging down, almost between its legs. It stopped about a metre away from me, clearly not intent on attacking, and plopped down on its belly, before starting to crawl towards me.


    It was such an obvious show of submission that I mostly relaxed and sheathed one of my blades. Now, with one free hand, I squatted down, gently rubbing the dog¡¯s head, realising that the fur was incredibly smooth and soft, giving me a wonderful, fluffy feeling, so unfitting to the bedraggled location that I had to stop, feeling around if there was a collar or something that indicated the dog came from some luxurious place.


    By the time the checking and petting was done, I had found nothing that indicated such. Just a well-cared-for dog, with a simple collar and a need for scritches, nothing out of the ordinary. If one ignored that the Shattered in the room had obviously ignored the dog, while he had also been intelligent enough to try ambushing me. What that might mean, I had no idea.


    After rubbing the dog¡¯s belly again, she had rolled over at some point, with her tail starting to sweep the floor, I stood back up, planning to take another look around. As I did, the dog stood as well, moving over to the Shattered¡¯s corpse, sniffing it a few times, before letting out a soft, mourning howl. It sounded so much like Ylva that my chest tightened for a second, a tear trickling from my eye.


    For a moment, I wondered how my two friends had fared in Mundus, after I had kicked off the Fimbulwinter. I was confident that they would be able to thrive, even in an endless winter, but had the gods taken vengeance on them? They had accepted my plan for vengeance, had helped me to the best of their abilities, but what had they received for it?


    I could only shake my head in wonder, asking myself why they had never even tried to convince me that kicking off the Apocalypse was a bad idea, even as I was deeply grateful for their loyalty and friendship.


    But both of them were far away, or maybe even long away. There was that time-differential between Mundus and Earth, or maybe calling it Terra as the system announcement had made more sense. Either way, if one hour on Mundus was equal to thirty minutes on Terra, what did that mean for their physical relation? It was an impossible-to-answer question, there was simply not enough information known, let alone confirmed. I had only vague suspicions, not even knowing what I didn¡¯t know.


    And there were more important things to focus on, like the dog that was giving me the occasional glance, while mourning her lost master. Walking over, I remained somewhat cautious, even if my heart was telling me the dog wouldn¡¯t attack me, my mind remained vigilant. The Shattered was, or rather, had been, most likely a homeless person, looking for shelter in the abandoned building. His clothes were old, with many mended rips and tears, more threads than fabric and while his body had been deeply changed by the Shattering, I could vaguely recognise some traces of hard living, badly healed scars, some blemishes and calluses, things like that. All of it, especially the metal, military tags still around his neck, could have told a tragic story but given the state of the world, I didn¡¯t have the mental capacity to care. He had lived a hard life and now, we all would be living a hard life.


    Shaking my head once again, trying to get rid of the cobwebs of exhaustion that were starting to wrap around my mind, I began dragging the body away. While I hadn¡¯t made too many holes in it when killing it, the head was quite messed up by repeated strikes with a hard, frozen object and sharing my shelter with a corpse wasn¡¯t going to happen. If I had more power, I would have simply destroyed the body but my magic was far from strong enough to get there. At some point, but for now, I could only drag the body off and shove them through the window, so I could drag it some more distance.


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    When the dog managed to easily hop through the window, my lips curled into a grin, it was obvious that doggo had been living here for a while, especially when she quickly moved around the area, marking a couple of spots before returning to me. While she did that, I managed to drag her previous owner between a couple of old containers, leaving him there, somewhat hidden and sheltered.


    It was amusing, I had killed over a dozen Shattered during the night, leaving them all lying where they died, but this one, I felt a little bad about my inability to give him a funeral. Maybe it was because his dog was grieving for him, the similarity to Ylva uncanny, despite the differences in their physical traits.


    Shaking off the strange feeling, I made my way back into the building, the dog following along, after one last glance at her previous owner. Somehow, I could accept a dog behind me far easier than a human. At least the dog didn¡¯t have hands, to hold the knife to backstab you with.


    Inside, I began to explore the rest, making sure that there were no further enemies or other troubles, like the adorable furball that had decided to follow me around. That said furball was bigger, heavier and probably stronger than me didn¡¯t change things in the slightest, it seemed that she had accepted I was the leader of the pack and she¡¯d just follow along.


    Either way, by the time the sun was rising outside, we had checked the rest of the building, finding nothing but a rather large, stinking area, complete with tissues and other traces that it had been the previous occupant''s bathroom. That he used the interior of the building, while his dog had learned to take her business outside was mildly amusing, but there was only so much amusement I could have while next to a decently large puddle of¡­ filth.


    After managing to keep myself from being sick, I, shamefully, added to the mess, before retreating to the other side of the building, where I found the stuff the previous owner didn¡¯t need any longer. Some clothes, some questionable foodstuff, a little money and some canine-care equipment. Amusingly, the stuff for the dog had the best quality, including the dog food I had found, it looked more appetizing than the human food.


    Shaking my head once again, I took some distance and made my own camp, quietly watching the light outside get brighter and brighter, while the area I was in remained firmly in the shadows.


    To distract myself from my upcoming experiment, I decided to take care of my hair. By now, it was nicely sparkling with the magic I could passively store within, intrinsically linking each hair to me, making them powerful tools for my magic - Or for others to use against me.


    Sitting on the mat I had acquired before, I leaned against the wall, slowly brushing through my hair when a heavy weight plopped down on my lap. Looking at the furry monster that tried playing at being a lap dog, I could only smile, the fantastically fluffy fur managing to cleanse me of all my worries. What apocalypse, I had a furball with me, and no landlord to gripe about it.


    Taking out one of the brushes I had found in the camp here, I began to gently brush her fur, making her wiggle in what I could only describe as canine glee. Her goofy actions managed to bring another grin to my face, as my mind slowly began to relax, coming down from the hyper-vigilance I had pushed myself into.


    One slow breath after the other, the stress of the previous night was cresting within my mind, wave after wave battering against my self-control, as my hands started to shake and tears started to run down my cheeks.


    My mind started to waver, between horror, spawned from the events of the night and the hardship that was sure to come in the future but also glee. How could I be elated when the world had literally been set alight, when countless people were dying and here I was, my heart filled with gleeful happiness?


    Was I truly that self-centred that I could dance on a pile of corpses, happily laughing despite their demise, if it only meant I had a chance to reunite with Sigmir?


    Reality was now answering the question I had never dared to ask myself in Mundus. The question, would I have taken the same vengeance, would I have willingly and knowingly tried to consign an entire world to the frosty hell that the Fimbulwinter was?


    The answer was, quite horrifyingly, yes. It made me wonder, what would my mother have said about it. And at the same time, as I wondered, I realised that I wouldn¡¯t have cared. If it was for my Sigmir, I would have sacrificed them, too.

 Chapter 675

    Getting nudged by a cold, slightly wet, nose was enough to pull me out of the depths of my mind into which I had spiralled. Indecision, guilt and the question of whether or not I should have the feelings I had, all those emotions and thoughts were pointless. The past, and my actions in the past, were already set in stone. I couldn¡¯t change them, so I had to accept and acknowledge what I had done and the question of whether or not I would do it again, or what my mother would think about it, those questions were meaningless, until the situation came up. Wondering and worrying would merely cause me more anguish, needlessly so, in a situation where I had more than enough on my plate. Survival and gaining the power to pull Sigmir¡¯s soul, her memories and everything that made her into the person I love, those were the important things. Everything else was meaningless.


    ¡°Thanks, fuzzy,¡± I told the dog that was still taking up my entire lap, acting like a furry blanket. ¡°I don¡¯t suppose you can understand me?¡± I asked, trying to push the question in the same what I would have when using Lenore¡¯s ability to universally translate my speech into something anyone would be able to comprehend. There was no reaction, neither from my Astral Power, nor from the furball so the ability I had gained from the Raven¡¯s Shadow was not the Universal Translation ability.


    Looking around, I realised that I had been lost in my mind for far longer than I had thought and by now, the sun was far enough up to enable to experiment I had in mind, to see the Curse of the Sun¡¯s effect.


    ¡°Move, fuzzy,¡± I gently tried pushing the dog off my lap, only to have it look at me with a happy expression, as if I was petting it some more. Pushing harder, I finally managed to get her to stand up, though, from the way she was bouncing around, I had a feeling she thought we were just playing a game.


    Shaking my head, I moved towards one of the boarded-up windows, where a long stretch of sunlight was shining through a narrow gap between the boards. Taking a deep breath, I held my hand into the light, not quite sure what to expect.


    The first moment, I didn¡¯t feel anything, no pain, no flames causing my hand to burst into flames, nothing that would indicate trouble. But looking at my hand, I felt something drain from me and could see a faint mist starting to form. Looking inwards, I realised that there truly was a drain, that my Astral Power was draining away from me, slowly, the drain not even enough to overpower my natural regeneration, but it was there. And that was with only a few square centimetres of skin exposed to the sun.


    To learn more, I covered my hand with a bit of fabric, blocking the direct sun from it and the drain was reduced, though not eliminated, even without direct sunlight. Frowning, I tried looking inwards, to feel the drain, searching for the minute traces of Astral Power that were constantly taken from me. Finding it, I pulled my hand back into the shadow, focusing hard on that drain, trying to observe the change.


    And now that I knew where to look, I realised that even in the darkness created by all the concrete around me, there was a drain. It was faint to the point that I only noticed it because I was searching for it and knew where to look, but it was there.


    Grumbling, I walked over to one of the broken windows, where a lot more light came into the building, through the opening and the dirty shards of glass around it.


    Stepping fully into the light, I let out a hiss of discomfort. Here, the Curse made its presence obviously known, Astral Power draining from all over my body at an alarming rate. Like this, I would be completely drained within ten minutes, even with my regeneration trying to keep me supplied. At the same time, I realised that I felt physically sluggish, far more than the killing during the night accounted for. Exhausted and weak, not a good combination.


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    Walking back to my pack, I picked up a sack of rice, simply to use as a weight. Lifting it up a few times, I tried to gauge how hard I had to work, how much strain I received from the effort, before walking back to the light and stepping into it.


    Even without lifting the sack, I noticed the change, I was far weaker in the sunlight. After pushing the sack up a few times, I started to pant, the small workout exhausting me far beyond what it should.


    Getting back out of the light, I tried to estimate the differences before I began laughing at myself. There was a system, supposedly giving me all the information I needed if only I looked.


    Opening my character sheet, I stepped back into the sun and felt myself cringe at the change. The light cut my physical stats in half, while my Astral Power regeneration was inverted, power draining from me as fast as I could normally pull it in.


    Letting out a curse, I raised a hand and gave the sun the finger before fleeing from the hazardous rays. There was no way I would be able to work in the light of day, not with my physical strength and speed crippled and my magic almost completely sealed.


    Taking a deep breath, I forced myself to return to the sun after putting the sack back, to see what happened once my Astral Power was completely drained. I wasn¡¯t sure I wanted to know, but I needed to know if only so I was aware of how screwed I truly was.


    Far too soon for my taste, I could feel a bone-deep weariness, my thoughts slowing down as if I had been awake for a week and my mind was barely functioning. After blinking a few times, I opened up the character sheet and could only sigh. Now, without Astral Power to drain, my mental stats had been reduced by half, too, from the level of a genius, thanks to the racial increase to my mental stats, to a decidedly below-average intellect.


    Cursing again, I moved back out of the light, my Astral Power slowly returning as I did so. At the same time, my attributes returned to normal over the course of a minute, the feeling somewhat itchy and unpleasant.


    ¡°This sucks,¡± I complained, though the only answer I got was a furry snout pushing me, seeking attention. ¡°Guess that means I¡¯ll be stuck in here and won¡¯t be going anywhere during the day, ever,¡± I griped, while rubbing the large head, the fluffiness helping with my mood. ¡°Or maybe not,¡± I realised, a grin forming on my face.


    Reaching out, I focused on the Darkness around me, trying to pull it in, so I could create a shroud for myself, to keep the harsh light away from me. The dog next to me let out a soft growl, not threatening but more along the lines of fear or confusion, watching me with canine suspicion.


    Now, shrouded in shadow, I stepped back into the light and to my delight, the Shroud kept my attributes from getting halved. Only, to keep the Shroud active, I had to channel an absurd amount of Astral Power, changing the time the light would take to drain me dry from roughly ten minutes to less than one minute.


    ¡°Well, shit,¡± I complained once again, stepping back out of the light. ¡°But at least it¡¯s something.¡±


    It was a start and given my low level, both in actual and skill level, I probably should be delighted that I could last even that long. If I managed to raise my skill far enough, I should be able to shroud myself from most of the hassle, just as I had shrouded myself on Mundus, to keep some of my more problematic traits under wraps.


    But those were considerations and ideas for the future. For now, I simply wanted to roll up somewhere concealed, close my eyes and not think for a while. Just imagining the situation outside was painful, even if the area around me was abandoned to the point that the screams in the distance were far away and I could mostly ignore them. But that didn¡¯t mean that they weren¡¯t there, telling me how other people suffered.


    Or rather, how the humans suffered, I couldn¡¯t really call myself one, could I?


    Shaking my head, I added a simple English textbook to the list of things I wanted to acquire and store, just in case part of my emerging race was to change my native language to the ancient Jotun dialect of the Firn Elves.


    Later, though.


    For now, I simply wanted to sleep and the large, fuzzy heater that plopped down nearby was quite welcome, not just for warmth but also for security and comfort. It was amazing how quickly I had taken to the fuzzball, maybe because I was so used to Ylva.


    I would have to look around, trying to find out if the fuzzball had a name, or I would have to give her one if she was to stick around.

 Chapter 676

    My sleep was uneasy, with nightmares, bittersweet dreams of Sigmir and the situation all around me all conspiring to keep me from getting rest. Distant screams ripped me from a light slumber more than once, while images of a forest burning down around Adra and Rai, with both of them screaming in pain didn¡¯t help matters. But the worst for my rest were the dreams of Sigmir, dreams in which I was lying down on my mountain, my body curling up so I could rest my head on my claws as I watched the mist passing by. They were so wonderfully peaceful, so comforting, that waking up hurt physically, a stabbing pain in my chest.


    Not even the fuzzy presence of roughly sixty kilograms of canine could stop the tears running down my face when I came out of those. Trying to return to my dreams, only seemed to throw me into another nightmare, the stark contrast driving the pain and longing only deeper, to the point that I thought I heard Sigmir outside, calling my name. She couldn¡¯t be here, not until I pulled her into this world, but I thought I heard her. And a few times, I walked to the windows, peeking outside to check. Only to be disappointed.


    Finally, when the afternoon was rolling around, I had enough. Lying there, drifting in and out of sleep, didn¡¯t help me any, it only made me more irritable and worsened my mood, so there was no reason to torture myself.


    Knowing that there was no way to move out of the abandoned, still empty, building, I focused inwards, on things I could do inside. I needed to regain my Darkness Rune Mastery, my Blood Runes and my Astral Meditation skills, all of which I could do here. In addition, my skills were so rudimentary that I could simply train them, without needing an enemy to push me, just the act of using and meditating on them would allow me to increase my proficiency.


    All it took was time, and while I was trapped in the empty building, I had quite a bit of that particular resource.


    ¡°Well, fuzzy, I¡¯ll be experimenting with my magic, maybe make myself a few weapons. Nothing will hurt you, so you can simply watch, or do whatever you like. Sleep some more, or something, maybe head over to the sun?¡± I suggested, before remembering that I still needed to find her name.


    Deciding that my training could wait a little longer, I walked back over to the other campsite, going through their stuff with the light of day helping. Sure, I could see in the darkness but the trait was still emerging, leaving me with good, but not excellent, night-vision.


    Sadly, I came up empty. There was a lot of stuff but nothing that told me what Ms Fuzzball was called and when I tried calling her that, the look of canine disdain was completely obvious. She did not like that name.


    So, given that she seemed to be quite capable to communicate and understand me, at least in a rudimentary fashion, I decided to give her a few names to choose from, otherwise, I might have to learn to bark or growl if I simply asked her to introduce herself. It was, amusingly, a problem Sigmir and I had faced with the beings we later named Lenore and Ylva, their names were designed to be used with their language and their method of communication, not for the languages designed by humanoids.


    When fuzzball finally agreed to a name, I had to mentally track back for a second, trying to remember what I had just said. I had been simply rambling on, giving out one name after the other, until she let out a happy rumble, obviously agreeing with the name. When I realised what it was, I was stunned for a moment, not sure what to say or think.


    Silva.


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    That was the name she had chosen. A combination of Sigmir¡¯s and Ylva¡¯s names,


    Destiny, coincidence or some odd trick of my mind, that the longing I felt had been infused into the name that was a combination of Sigmir¡¯s and Ylva¡¯s names, something fuzzy might have picked up on? Even if I hadn¡¯t really been paying attention myself?


    ¡°Really, that¡¯s the name you want to go with?¡± I asked, looking at the fuzzball who looked back with a canine grin on her face. Not the kind that showed her teeth in a gesture of intimidation, but one that made her eyes light up in delight, her tongue lolling from her snout a little.


    After trying to suggest a few more names, just to have fuzzy respond with unhappy growls, I decided to simply run with it. Maybe Sigmir and Ylva would get a kick out of the fact that I was running around with a dog named in their honour, I would certainly ask Sigmir once I managed to get her into this world, and into the world of the living.


    ¡°Okay, okay, Silva it is,¡± I accepted, to which my newly named companion gave a soft wuff of agreement. By now, I was quite confident that she wasn¡¯t just acting on instinct or anything like that, but that she was truly understanding me, even if I had some trouble understanding her. Having Lenore¡¯s Universal Translation ability would be incredibly handy, but my avian friend was far, far away.


    Silva decided to celebrate her new name by pushing her head into my belly, insisting on getting scritches. It took quite a bit of time until she was satisfied but her actions definitely lightened my mood, to the point that I realised just how famished I actually was. I had been running around all night, with nothing but a few survival bars to sustain myself and now, hunger was definitely a concern.


    Given that I wasn¡¯t about to use fire, for a wide variety of reasons, I took some oatmeal, some nuts, dried berries and a bit of water, turning it into a bland, boring porridge, with nothing to show for but nutritional value.


    Silva had her own food and focused on that, after a brief glance at the sludge I was slowly eating. It didn¡¯t taste great, but when taking stuff at the supermarket, I focused on things that would last for a long time, so I didn¡¯t have to consider what to eat first. I had a few, fresh fruits, some of which became dessert but I made a mental note to look for some things to enhance the taste if I stumbled across a source of food sometime later.


    Once I was sated, I sat down, focusing inwards. My first goal was to regain my Rune Magics, both Blood and Darkness. I could remember the runes, but their shape was a little fuzzy in my mind, blurring as if they weren¡¯t quite fixed, either in reality or just within the confines of my mind. What that might mean, I had no idea but I was quite certain I couldn¡¯t just start drawing high-level runes and get a result. No, I needed to sift through the Astral River once more, looking for meaning and understanding.


    Closing my eyes, I focused on what I had been doing with my Darkness-Magic the whole time, concealing myself. It had been one of my main tricks on Mundus, the rune part of countless spells I had used. Things hiding in the Darkness, the unknown, all those concepts were connected to the Concealment aspect of Darkness. There were details to be filled in later, things to be expanded upon, but Concealment was one of the foundational concepts of my Darkness-Element.


    It only took a few moments for the rune I remembered to become sharp again, gaining clear contours and even branching out a little. Connected to it, I could feel the other foundational runes of the element. One of the interesting parts of the element was that it started with broad concepts that could apply in a wide variety of situations, before adding focus and strength with later runes.


    Thus, the second rune I was able to grasp, named for the element itself, was the Darkness-Rune. It could apply in so many ways, from a blurry shadow to the depths of space, where no light was ever reflected. There were so many ideas contained within, so many tiny pieces of a puzzle that I could try to dissect but for now, it was only the broad concept, vague and a little intimidating, just like Darkness itself.


    Lastly, the third foundational pillar of the element was the idea that Darkness devoured. It wasn¡¯t just the absence of light, or the absence of matter so no light was reflected, there was an active part to it. It sought to Devour all light, so only Darkness would remain. Memories of the Nidh?gg and their black flames were vivid in my mind, bringing both a smile to my face but also a twinge of guilt into my gut.


    Shaking my head, I opened my eyes, noticing a blue box that told me I had gained the Rune Mastery: Darkness skill and was currently understanding the Runes Devour, Darkness and Concealment.

 Chapter 677

    Once my Darkness Rune Mastery was back, I began the slightly more painful process of regaining my Blood Magic. The initial runes there had to do with the simplest processes of healing and harm, of staunching a bleeding wound and of splattering the blood out. The foundational rune of it all, similar to the way it was in Darkness and Ice, was the rune that symbolised the element as a whole, the Blood Rune. The three gave access to ordinary manipulation and the ability to shape it in a predominately helpful or harmful way.


    To truly apply them, I needed access to the substance in question, namely blood. Carefully drawing my blade across my hand, I let out a hiss of discomfort, as blood started to quickly well up from the cut. Stopping myself from reflexively using Blood Magic, the simple, direct manipulation, to lessen the cut, I instead closed my eyes, remembering the vague shape in my mind. My other hand started to move and within moments, the combination of my memories and the Legacy of Morgana came together, guiding that hand and letting Astral Power flow into the world. Once the Rune was complete, I infused it with power, focusing the energies onto the bleeding wound in my hand and with a flash of power, the rune was complete, unleashing its effect into my blood.


    And causing me to cry out in pain, as the Spout-Rune caused blood to gush from the wound of my hand, splattering on the floor nearby. The room was immediately filled with the coppery scent of blood, causing Silva to pace vigilantly, looking for any potential enemy.


    ¡°Girl, that was me, nothing to worry about,¡± I assured her, even as my hand was quickly flashing through the air again, drawing a second rune. This time, it was about healing, about staunching the flow of blood, letting it clot and heal.


    Once the Clot-Rune took effect, I let out a sigh as the pain faded away, leaving behind nothing but a faint scar, and even that would soon be gone.


    Now, I just had to remove the splattered blood and luckily, a combination of Blood and Devour-Runes was perfectly capable of doing that, leaving the floor mostly clean and certainly without any magical significance or link to me. Of that, I was certain and made a mental note to make sure not to leave any hair or similar objects behind. While I was mostly confident that nobody had the ability to use such foci just yet, forming a vigilant mindset couldn¡¯t begin too early.


    Next, I decided to test if I had gained Lenore¡¯s magical sight from the Raven¡¯s Shadow Trait. I knew there was magic in the area, I knew what types, so I should be able to make some sense of things, if I saw something. And if I saw nothing, I would know that I hadn¡¯t gained her sight.


    Remembering how it had felt when she shared her sight, I focused on my Astral Power, trying to channel it into my eyes. For a few seconds, there was nothing but a slowly growing irritation as I wanted to blink until I felt as if a switch had flicked and suddenly, it was as if a filter was placed over my eyes, only this filter didn¡¯t change the colour of everything into sepia, it added a thin layer of colours to my sight, differing in vibrancy and depth, likely indicating the amount of magic of a given type I was looking at.


    The area I had used to experiment had the obvious traces of Blood- and Darkness-Magic, but what surprised me was there there was a lot more in the area, not just on top of the world but within the world itself.


    For a moment, I just stared, my mind wrangling with my senses, trying to interpret what I saw and form a coherent image from the data my eyes were gathering. Finally, it was as if I was looking at one of those optical illusions, in which you first see two wine glasses, until your mind shifts and suddenly, you see two kissing people. It was a similar shift, only instead of kissing people, I realised that I wasn¡¯t just looking at the mundane matter. I was looking at matter that was being infused with vast amounts of Astral Power, enough to overload my senses. My senses must have simply ignored them, refusing to acknowledge the existence of that power in self-defence, only for my mind to stare into the sun, with the expected effect.


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    Cursing, I rapidly blinked, trying to get rid of the dancing spots before my eyes. A small part of me wondered what would happen if I focused on my innate magical perception. It let me perceive magic as scent and taste, the information never as open as Lenore¡¯s senses had been, but better when it came to parsing minute differences, recognising and following traces. Both had their advantages, though I readily admitted that for a lot of activities, sight was the more important sense. Likely because my mind had evolved to process visual information, in opposition to something like a canine mind, which likely would be able to glean even more from scent and taste than I, but given that my mind was, at least for now, mostly human, there was nothing to be done about it.


    But having learned my lesson, I didn¡¯t try to use my own senses, instead, I closed my eyes, letting my mind relax. Delving into the Astral River had always been a comforting and calming activity, allowing me to learn quite a bit about the world of Mundus. Now, I had to introduce myself to that odd realm that covered the entire world, within the ground, in the atmosphere and even beyond that. Or maybe it was to re-acquaint, I had never learned just how far the Astral River stretched, the furthest I had gone on Mundus was to the frozen surface of their moon.


    The best comparison I had managed to come up with was that it was similar to a circulatory system, carrying power to every part of the planet, just like the circulatory system carried blood to every part of the body. And just like within a circulatory system, there were major and minor veins, some easily detected, others only inferred by the simple fact that there was Astral Power in the area.


    Slowly easing my mind outwards, I opened up my senses, not trying to directly enter the Astral River, but merely glimpsing it, dipping my toes in to test the waters, so to speak. Given the roiling, chaotic nature of the magic infusing everything, I was going in carefully, trying to get my bearings before I was swept away.


    And it was a good thing that I did, if the Astral River I had experienced on Mundus was akin to a wide, placid stream, the Astral River I could feel here was more akin to a torrential flood, streams of power breaking through the previously magically inert reality and carving their channels into the world.


    The streams of power were raging, violently ebbing and swelling as they infused reality. Just imagining delving into them sent a cold shiver down my spine, as I could almost feel my mind and soul get swept away to some distant place, maybe with enough force to sever the thread that connected my spiritual body to my physical body. If that happened, I was relatively sure my body would simply wither and die, as if my spirit had been extinguished by powerful magic, while my spiritual body would linger, until the last of my Astral Power was drained and it would fade, too. A lost soul, fading away into whatever afterlife might have in store for me.


    For a while, I simply let myself observe the roiling Astral, not trying to interact with it in any way, just watching. It was oddly calming, akin to watching a thunderstorm through a window, the extreme violence of nature just a short distance away from you and yet separate.


    But the Astral wasn¡¯t truly separate and I knew that. A single misstep would see me ripped away, my spirit torn to pieces by the powers that were changing the reality I had always lived in.


    Finally, I opened my eyes back up, somewhat refreshed and calm. A message informed me that I had gained the Astral Meditation Skill and had even levelled it to two. The gain was welcome and yet, in the whole ordeal, it was the least I had gained. The change in perspective I had gained was much more important, allowing me to see the world in a different light. The damage and horror Morgana had wrought, I had wrought, on Mundus had been mere superficial changes, at most I had unleashed a being that shouldn¡¯t be sealed, a necessary entity in the cycle of a world.


    Compared to the forces of nature that ravaged my world, my actions were akin to a tempest in a teapot. The changes brought by the forces I could see were altering the very fabric of reality, turning it into something fundamentally different. Compared to that, I was nothing.


    Somehow, that knowledge helped me calm down, as amusing as it was to my thinking mind. Emotions could be truly weird and understanding them would likely always be a challenge for me.


    But at least night had fallen and I didn¡¯t need to hide from the accursed sun.

 Chapter 678

    Making my way out of the building, my face twisted into a scowl. While the sun was gone, covered by a combination of thick clouds and the planet itself, as it was setting somewhere in the far distance, those same clouds sent down a drizzle of cold rain. The cold didn¡¯t really bother me, even with my diminished level and affinity for Cold, my Firn-elven traits only coming in, I was resistant enough to withstand some bad weather. But the clammy wetness was unpleasant, making my clothes stick to my body in a thoroughly displeasing way.


    However, needs must and I wanted to make the most out of these first few days, if I managed to get ahead of the curve and stay there, I wouldn¡¯t need to be too worried about other people. That meant killing the strongest enemies I could find, primarily the Shattered with their great physical strength but weak magical resistance. So far, they had been unable to beat the combination of mundane sneaking and magical concealment I employed and now that I had my Darkness Rune Mastery back, allowing me to greatly improve said magical concealment, I was quite confident that they wouldn¡¯t find me first. Once fighting broke out, all bets were off, but I would get the first strike.


    If I could manage to regain my Mind Magic, I might be able to simply tear what passed for a mind in those shells apart, destroying them with nary a thought. It was a worthwhile goal for the night, even if my primary focus was on simply killing them for skills and EXP. Maybe I would even be able to gather some magically enriched blood or acquire some additional supplies, even if I was somewhat confident that the other survivors would have looted as much as they could get their hands on during the day.


    Silva happily padded along with me and I added kibble to my mental looting-list if I came across a store that had some. Maybe some saddlebags or something, so she could carry her own food, I was somewhat confident that her strength was actually higher than mine. But that all was dependent on what we could scare up.


    The first thing we found was, unsurprisingly, a Shattered, just casually shambling down the street. If not for the blood on the ripped clothes and the burning eye pits, I might have thought it was some sort of university student, on their way home after a long day of drinking, or something like that. But the eyes were a dead giveaway, so dead was given away to the Shattered.


    The hailstones remained the best weapon I had against them, the magic hitting them comparatively harder than physical strikes would, making me theorise whether there was something extraordinary going on with their resistance against mundane attacks. There had been enemies like that, mostly among the undead, but those hadn¡¯t been especially vulnerable to physical impacts caused by magical means. Hitting them with a club made of conjured Ice would cause the same damage, whether swung by muscles or magic.


    That thought made me pause for a moment, even as I launched the hail corn at its head, a small part of my mind drifting, even as most of it was controlling the hail corn to bludgeon that thing after it fell from the first strike. What if the difference wasn¡¯t so much in the means that the object was swung with, but in the creation of it in the first place? My weapons, and likely all weapons currently used, were created before the change, without the system. I hadn¡¯t even bothered trying to identify my blades, had simply taken them as they were. What if that was the difference, that conjured objects were part of the system and thus treated in some sort of special way?


    I considered how to verify that thought, even as I heard a snarl from nearby and saw Sivla squaring off against another Shattered that had just jumped from a window above, landing awkwardly but not crumbling from the fall. A better attack than the ambush the night before, possibly flanking a busy opponent, but not good enough. Certainly not good enough with Silva next to me, who didn¡¯t even give the Shattered time to get up, instead she pounced the moment she heard my command to attack. It made me wonder if I should try giving her some preemptive commands to attack Shattered, just to make sure I wasn¡¯t getting taken by surprise or something. Another consideration for the list.


    For now, I was quite happy to watch my canine¡¯s partner¡¯s back, making sure that no more Shattered tried to come for us, while she took that one apart.


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    Her ferocity made me swallow hard. The way she had acted and how easily she had submitted to me, I had taken her for a gentle giant, more interested in cuddling than combat, but the savaged Shattered was a strong piece of evidence against that idea.


    Silva had used her weight to run the creature over while it hadn¡¯t recovered from its jump, sending it sprawling, only to leap on top of it. The Shattered had tried to block her biting maw with its arm, which Silva had gladly taken. And ripped off, with nothing but a quick shake of her head, pulling it straight out of the Shattered¡¯s shoulder. Just that feat was enough to make my eyes go wide, especially when she ignored the other arm as it tried to dislodge her, got her maw on the Shattered¡¯s neck and¡­


    By the time she was done, the head was a couple of metres from the rest of the body, all of it looking like it had gone through a meatgrinder. Silva, now with a bloody muzzle, came bounding back over to me, her tail wagging and a canine grin on her face. I managed to dodge out of the way when she tried to cuddle with me, the switch from savage predator tearing apart its prey and cuddly fluffball was just too sudden and I had no desire to let her wipe off her bloody maw on my clothes. I made sure to compliment her for her combat prowess and give her some scritches while using my magic to get rid of the blood before we continued to move.


    A quick check on the notifications told me that I had gained a point in Darkness Rune Mastery for my continued concealment, bringing it to level two. Nice, but the more important part of the battle were the EXP and the confirmation that they were still boosted by Lone Traveller. Meaning, Silva didn¡¯t count as a person, though I had no idea what the distinction was. She had shown more personality than quite a few people I had met in the past. Maybe those people wouldn¡¯t count as persons either, soulless corporate zombies that they were.


    Out of interest, I had used the Observe on Silva, making her ear twitch in distaste, a growl coming from deep within her throat. She didn¡¯t like it, but I now knew that she was considered a level two Hound.


    To confirm the question of whether System-equipment worked better than what had been here before, I used Identify on my blades. The result was rather disheartening, it wasn¡¯t even rated as a weapon, the box simply identifying them as Butterfly Blades, the text grey in a way that made my eyes twitch. It was so similar to the ¡®trash¡¯ items I had seen in many games, it was either a cruel twist of fate, or the system considered these well-crafted, modern blades as nothing but trash.


    Which made me wonder, was it due to the material, a lack of enchantment or something else entirely? Either way, I had a slap-dash way to find out, while I wasn¡¯t a great enchanter by any stretch, I had my runes and could simply draw a simple enchantment onto the Blade, it wouldn¡¯t be permanent, would likely only last for two or three attacks, but it would tell me.


    Using my Blood, enriched with Astral Power, as ink, I drew a simple runic formation of Blood, Devour and Cold onto my blades, so that channelled Astral Power would make them cold while devouring the warmth of any blood they came into contact with. I wasn¡¯t certain if it worked, but by the time I was done, I heard another growl from Silva, her fur standing up as she stared at a volunteer test-subject.


    Compared to the other Shattered I had fought, this one simply shambled towards me from between a few buildings, almost inviting a hailstone to the face. But I wanted to test, so I simply moved towards it, Silva keeping pace with me.


    Just before we made contact, Silva sped up, jumping so that her front paws made contact with the Shattered¡¯s chest and if not for the snarl and the open jaw, I could have imagined it as a happy welcome, trying to play. Only, this was no play and when some sixty kilograms of canine, moving at something around twenty kilometres per hour rammed into a human, or Shattered, the result was obvious, unless the humanoid had been braced for impact.


    The Shattered had not, leaving him below the furry missile, trying to dislodge it, even as she got her jaws on its arm. Unwilling to let the test go to waste, I simply moved past the two, so I could have a stab at the Shattered¡¯s head.


    Stabbing down, my eyes went wide when the blade went in easily, draining quite a bit of my Astral Power in the process, likely to fuel the enchantment. It was enough to turn the fire in the Shattered¡¯s eyes off and make me step back, giving Silva the command to stop. A skill-point in each of the Rune Masteries was welcome, bringing Darkness to three, Blood to two and Ice to six, thanks to the continued use of it to kill Shattered.


    Another tool in my toolbox, one I had to consider and perfect during the next day. For now, I simply placed the same runes, drawn in my blood, on one of my blades, putting it aside as an emergency tool. We still had Shattered to hunt, supplies to loot and skills to train.

 Chapter 679

    Hunting with a partner was so much more comfortable than alone. It added a wonderful margin of safety, allowing me to focus on magically striking the Shattered while Silva was guarding me at my side, warning me of Shattered that were hiding out of sight and barrelling them over when they tried to come for me.


    With each Shattered we came across, our coordination grew and I noticed that Silva was getting more accustomed to fighting them, a growth that made me consider the intelligence of my furry partner. By now, I was completely convinced that she could understand me, not just listen to the tone of my voice but comprehend the words I used and that she could actually think tactically, about how to best take down the Shattered. Even if I assumed she had some hunting instincts from the wolves that had been domesticated long ago, those instincts would focus on hunting in a pack, or alone in a pinch. Not on working together with a spellcaster and yet she managed to adapt to my actions without trouble.


    It was, amusingly, both a great comfort and a small worry. Comforting, because an intelligent partner could be incredibly useful, especially given that a stupid partner could be a worse hindrance than any enemy but worrying because it made me wonder just how smart she was. Would she eventually betray me? She had the intelligence to bide her time until she could guarantee the success of such a betrayal, but was she scheming that much? I just didn¡¯t know.


    Either way, having her with me was a great boon. We could easily kill Shattered and in the first few hours of the night, I managed to gain another two levels by methodically and steadily killing them off. The Attribute Points I gained went into Intelligence, bringing it to nineteen, while my Ice Rune Mastery was raised to seven, my Ice Magic to five and my Darkness Rune Mastery to four, thanks to all the killing and sneaking. I hadn¡¯t Observed Silva again, unwilling to subject her to the uncomfortable sensation that entailed, but from the changes I had felt in her, I thought she had reached level four when I was about half-way to five.


    But it wasn¡¯t all killing and sneaking, I also took the time to explain the system and the various attributes, skills and traits to Silva. I wasn¡¯t certain if she had access to her sheet, or if hers would even work the same as mine, but I wanted her to have the information, in case it was useful to her. I had tried to have her show me her sheet, but other than a goofy look on her face, I didn¡¯t get any response.


    Maybe four hours after night had fallen, I felt a wave of Astral Power wash over us, coming from somewhere to the south. For a few seconds, my senses were overloaded with the scent of dusty earth and dense rock, somewhat reminiscent of the scents I had smelled during the time we had been under the White Mountains, concentrated Earth Astral Power, the essence of earth and stone.


    Just as the scent started to fade, the ground beneath me started to shift and move, forcing me to focus on keeping my balance. Luckily, Silva and I had been in the middle of a street, with nothing above us to fall on our heads, but others were not as lucky. I could hear the sounds of falling objects and even saw a building crumble in the distance, adding to the desolate ambience. A few buildings had burned down during the last night, leaving behind hollow husks and now, some of those and some others simply crumbled thanks to the shaking earth. The shaking didn¡¯t last long, just a few seconds, but it was incredibly worrying.


    The city I was in didn¡¯t suffer earthquakes. It just didn¡¯t happen, the worst movement in that regard was normally caused by heavy construction equipment driving by and would, at most, cause a badly hung painting to fall. That, along with the magical wave before the quake, made me confident that it wasn¡¯t a natural quake, or at least not natural in a way that it would have happened before the change. But natural in the sense that it wasn¡¯t caused by an intentional agent, of that I was confident, too. Just from the wave of magic prior, I could vaguely estimate how much power was involved, though the unknown distance made it more difficult. If the original spell had been cast within a kilometre of me, someone with the power Morgana had wielded at the end would have been enough, without the use of the Nexus. If the distance was greater, which I thought it was, the power of the Nexus would be necessary and even then, it was difficult to estimate. I simply didn¡¯t believe that anyone had the magical abilities to cast such spells, especially because I didn¡¯t think the Astral River had settled enough to actually form Nexus anywhere.


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    Next to me, Silva let out an uneasy whine, pressing her head against me as if she was looking for safety or shelter. I couldn¡¯t do much more than pet her head, tell her everything would be alright and keep watch, trying to make sure nothing was sneaking up on us.


    About a minute later, it felt as if things had settled, everything that was shaken loose by the quake had fallen and an eerie quiet spread through the world. Maybe the quiet was even worse than the previous commotion, it showed just how desolate the world was now. There were no sirens and I couldn¡¯t hear shouts for help or even screams of fear. It was as if Silva and I were all alone in the world, with nothing but Shattered to keep us company.


    Shaking my head, I pushed past the sensation. I didn¡¯t need anyone to reach my goal, I only needed power. Power to get Sigmir back, to draw her into this world. Everything else was secondary, all other humans could perish for all I cared.


    But even as I tried to focus my mind, a more sensible voice in my head reminded me that even if I got Sigmir back, we¡¯d need some people around. If only because neither of us was a farmer and I doubted Sigmir would want to become one, I certainly didn¡¯t. If we wanted to be able to delegate some of the more annoying, menial tasks, we needed some people to delegate to.


    A distasteful idea, but one I would have to keep in mind.


    Before I could dwell on it, Silva let out a warning growl, her head swinging towards one of the nearby houses and I followed her gaze. There, hidden in the shadows, I could vaguely see a shape, smaller than Silva but four-legged as well, trying to sneak up on us. My immediate reaction was to rapidly draw a runic formation, conjuring a hailstone to lob at the thing. I didn¡¯t manage to finish the spell before the feline came pouncing from its hideout, eyes suddenly ablaze with blue fire. Shattered, but capable of hiding that, or at least hide the tell-tale flames.


    Silva met the pouncing beast, I couldn¡¯t call it a cat, in the air, her greater mass overcoming its momentum and sending them both crashing down a few metres away from me. The beast, roughly three-quarters of Silva¡¯s size and about half her mass, let out an angry yowl, clawing at Silva who had bounced back faster than it to dodge. She had done her part, giving me enough time to finish my spell and as she dodged back, the hailstone struck the feline who hadn¡¯t paid attention to me, sending it sprawling once more.


    Controlling the hailstone, I tried to strike the feline again, only for it to dodge out of the way. Silva had retreated a little, guarding me behind her back, and moved forward once again, right as the feline tried to pounce. The beast managed to scratch Silva but it didn¡¯t look too deep, while Silva managed to get her maw on the beast¡¯s back and, with a rapid shake of her head, broke its spine and stepped back, leaving the beast for me to finish off from a safe distance.


    It only took one strike with the hailstone, and I thought even that was overkill, but it was what I had.


    Once it was dead, I quickly made my way over to Silva who was already licking her wound. When I approached, she let out a quiet whine, not really happy that I pushed her head away from the wound but I needed to touch it to heal.


    The initial Blood Runes weren¡¯t all that powerful, but they were enough to staunch the bleeding and turn the deep, bleeding scratch into a scabbed wound. It wasn¡¯t perfect and might leave a scar, but it was far better than it had been before. Silva didn¡¯t seem to agree and kept licking at the wound for a bit until she realised I was, after a brief look at the Shattered Cat, continuing on my way.


    There were more Shattered to kill and now, that didn¡¯t mean just the potentially thousands of people, it also included the pets and, maybe far more worrying, the pests. I really didn¡¯t want to imagine Shattered Cockroaches. But knowing those things, they wouldn¡¯t Shatter, they would just keep going. Maybe I should add Raid to my looting list.

 Chapter 680

    As the night continued, we luckily were spared more earthquakes or similar troubles. Only more Shattered, many more of them, falling at our feet. It was a pure grind, we had a target-rich environment, no competition and a desperate need to get stronger, driving us into a killing frenzy that would make any serial killer blush.


    There were only three brief pauses, one to have a late-night snack, essentially our lunch, one to loot yet another mall, adding to the supplies I had previously acquired and the final one to a pet store, getting a large supply of dog food. Amusingly, the saddle-bags, normally for a motorcycle, fit Silva quite well, with a bit of adjustment. That way, she could carry her own food and supplies, though we had added a quick-release so she could get rid of the thing if needed. It had a bit of a do-it-yourself look to it, with clearly cobbled-together parts but it would serve well, even if not to win a beauty pageant.


    With full bags and yet another level for me and two for her, bringing both of us to six, we began our way back to our shelter. Skill-wise, I hand only gained a point in Darkness Rune Mastery and Blood Rune Mastery, bringing them to five and three.


    I had considered looking for another base before leaving earlier, but at the end of the day, it was a serviceable and remote place, leaving me somewhat confident that we wouldn¡¯t be disturbed there. In a few days, we¡¯d have to head out of town, simply because I had no doubt that, even in the cold winter air, the decay of countless bodies and the diseases springing from them would make the town a death zone, even without any Shattered or monsters around. Until then, I wanted to gain as many levels as possible and have a nicely sorted stash of supplies, even if I could only carry so much. Silva carrying her own gear helped, but only to a point. Without her, I certainly wouldn¡¯t bring dog food along, nor the assorted treats she had convinced me to get by abusing that even a sixty-kilogram canine with a bloody snout from tearing apart Shattered could make puppy-dog eyes with the best of them.


    It was an odd scent that stopped me, one that I couldn¡¯t quite place. It was both disgusting and yet inviting at the same time, a confusing dichotomy. The easiest description of that light, almost joyful, scent would be sunny and it only took me a moment to realise that I wasn¡¯t smelling a mundane scent, I was smelling magic.


    Sniffing the air, I felt my hackles rise, the type of magic rapidly becoming clear to me. Divine Magic, not the same flavour Olivia had used back on Mundus but something else. For a few moments, I tried to place it but the only similarities I could tie it to was the divine magic I had tried to study in Kolyug, from the retired adventurer that became an Innkeeper, a cleric of Frigg, and the divine magic that had been used to burn me from the face of Mundus at the end. It wasn¡¯t quite the same as either of those but closer to the second, with traces of the first. Either way, it deserved to be investigated and, quite possibly, the one responsible killed before they could become a threat. I had been cursed by the Gods and if they wanted to have their agents hunt me down, I would have to make sure none of their agents had the power to do so.


    Following the scent, I slowly and carefully made my way forward, making sure that I wasn¡¯t spotted as I prowled through the streets, a quiet Silva by my side. Compared to the earlier, somewhat joyous, hunting for Shattered, this was different. Sure, Shattered had begun to plot and scheme, some more than others, but now I was planning to go after humans.


    Finding the source of magic was almost trivial, just a few houses down and I could see the obvious, bright-yellow light shining out between a couple of buildings. Moving in that direction, blending even deeper into the darkness, I continued on, now with my blades in hand.


    Peering out between a few dumpsters, I could actually see the building and had to bite my tongue to keep from laughing. Whoever had cast the magic, they were in a YMCA building. That they had chosen the building of a Christian organisation as their shelter, protected by what should be called pagan magic by Christian standards was somewhat amusing to me.


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    And it wasn¡¯t just one person holed up, even from afar I could see two guards standing out front, protecting the building behind them. The light was coming from an orb set above the entrance, with multiple other light sources shedding their own light on the other sides of the building, making it a bright beacon in the night. Blinking, I focused a bit of Astral Power into my eyes, allowing me to see the magic as if Lenore was with me. I didn¡¯t try to look too deeply into the structures or into the general ebb and flow of magic, merely focusing on the light to get a vague feeling of what it might do. It was familiar, awfully so, not quite the magic of Sunna, but so infinitely close. It might even be that magic, the differences due to my imagination or due to the differences in spellcaster, I didn¡¯t know. But it was divine light magic, almost certainly received from the Norse Pantheon.


    For a few seconds, I simply watched, trying to understand the complicated mess of divine magic I could see across the road when Silva moved a little, causing a bit of noise. Nothing major, but it was enough to be audible in the dead silence of the night, loud enough to spook one of the guards on the other side.


    He immediately picked up his club, peering warily into the night. His body copied his movement, but I could see from the frown on his face that he hadn¡¯t heard Silva. For a moment, I was simply watching and waiting, to see what they might do, but they didn¡¯t do anything. They simply waited, vigilantly, standing in their light.


    To test a little further, I picked up a small rock and tossed it into the darkness, just to see if they would react. The rock made more noise, spooking the two a little further but they didn¡¯t move to investigate, even if one looked a little irritated.


    When he moved forward, his buddy held him back, reminding him to stay in the light. Provoking them a little more, I tossed a second pebble into the night, making more noise but again, nothing. Only the irritated one getting reminded that they needed the light to kill the zombies.


    Letting out a soft sigh, I stepped back a little. I really wanted to kill whoever was responsible for the light, if only to sever a link of Sunna to this world but looking at it, I was quite confident that the people within the YMCA wouldn¡¯t be able to survive without the spellcaster¡¯s help.


    Remove an irritant from this place, someone who hadn¡¯t done anything but asked for help in a desperate situation and doom a bunch of people to death or leave them, allowing them to possibly grow into a danger. I had no doubt that Sunna had a bone to pick with me but no idea whether that had filtered down to her faithful.


    Moving back forward, I used Observe on the guard, quite pleased with the way he twitched, shouting out into the darkness that I was to show myself. Now even more cautious, both guards stared into the dark, as I disappeared again. One guard was a level two, the other a level three human, neither of them a threat to me. Killing them would be quite easy, especially if I simply attacked from afar, using Ice to strike them, forcing them to fight me in my element.


    But, as I admitted to myself, I couldn¡¯t just kill them. Not if I had no idea how many people I would doom if I did. I had no desire to destroy this world, not as I had on Mundus after Sigmir¡¯s death. I wanted this world to be flourishing, at least to the point that Sigmir and I could live comfortably here.


    That didn¡¯t negate my previous consideration, that I wanted to have enough strength to make sure the faithful of the gods couldn¡¯t just strike me down, but it put my needs into perspective. The path, I wanted to take wasn¡¯t the one to kill those that might become a threat to me, but to improve myself to the point that they couldn¡¯t be a threat to me. At the moment, all humans were at roughly the same starting point but when it came to advantages, I should be the one with the biggest. The Legacy of Morgana gave me incredible advantages and I could only blame myself if I squandered them. Sure, I could only really function during the night, thanks to the curse that came with the legacy but many predators were nocturnal, I¡¯d simply be one of them.


    Moving back into the night, I started to take some distance, my path heading back towards the abandoned building. The only difference was that I was even more aggressive when it came to hunting down Shattered, the need to get ahead and stay ahead of everyone strengthened by the realisation that I wasn¡¯t the only one growing. That there was a potentially hostile cleric in the city.

 Chapter 681

    On our way back to our hideout, Silva and I kept destroying Shattered, trying to gain as many EXP as possible. The task had almost become rote, the Shattered quickly ceasing to pose a challenge to us, causing the speed of our advance to diminish. It made me wonder, would we have to start hunting people to keep going or would the Shattered advance as well, gaining strength in their own ways?


    I had taken the opportunity to Observe some of them, causing shrieks of discomfort that drew additional enemies towards us. Their levels were between two and four, meaning that they seemed to have advanced unless they somehow were formed at those levels but it also meant that their advance on its own wouldn¡¯t be enough to keep me at an advancement rate I was content with. I needed more, or others might be able to catch up to me.


    One such opportunity for ¡°more¡± came to my attention when I noticed a feline slinking in the shadows as Silva and I destroyed yet another of the Shattered. The cat was incredibly stealthy, carefully keeping an eye on us but wisely not attacking. The primary reason I took notice was the vague sensation of magic around it, though the irony that its innate Concealment Darkness Magic was what drew my attention was not lost to me.


    Once our Shattered foe was destroyed, I focused on the cat, even using Observe, despite the risks involved. The cat let out an angry yowl, before darting off into the darkness, faster than I could follow. Silva¡¯s head shot up and around, an angry growl rumbling from her throat and I could see her twitch with the suppressed desire to hunt down the feline. But hunting a level four feline wouldn¡¯t be worth it, not after it already fled and dawn was coming soon. Knowing that there were animals capable of gaining levels without being Shattered was interesting all of its own and well worthy of being investigated at some later point. But maybe I shouldn¡¯t be too surprised, given that the System had turned me from Human to Firn-Elf, so why wouldn¡¯t it turn animals into beasts, or even into sapient versions of their old selves?


    Whatever this new world was, it might not be just a world of Humans. Or ex-humans like me, no longer human according to the system and likely soon no longer appearing human. Which opened up an entirely new avenue of targets that I might be able to hunt and kill, allowing me to cull the enemies that my fellow survivors could level up against while also giving me additional EXP. Not that I was about to start hunting cats, that wouldn¡¯t really be worth it, but there were more animals than pets in a human city.


    Unless my guess was completely off-base, there had to be hundreds, if not thousands of rats in the sewers of the city. Depending on numbers and probabilities I had no way of knowing, that meant that there would either be swarms of rats, all of which were slowly gaining levels down there, or there would be countless Shattered Rats, possibly working on their own, possibly organised in swarms, as their instincts would dictate. Given that Shattered Humans were capable of working together in a very rudimentary fashion, I wouldn¡¯t immediately discard the idea that rats might be better at it. Which was an incredibly scary thought.


    Though, after a few moments of consideration, I wasn¡¯t sure which idea was worse. Mindless, Shattered Rats in swarms or system-enhanced, intelligent rats that could breed and multiply their number at the same speed rats had always bred? Only now, they had nearly limitless food in the area, by way of the countless dead bodies produced by the change, dead due to Shattered, the fires, the recent earthquake or likely hundreds of other possible causes. It would be an all-you-can-eat buffet, allowing rats and similar scavengers to breed at leisure, especially without humans and their poisonous traps and similar hazards around.


    While we kept killing Shattered, I idly began to wonder how to best go about getting EXP from killing rats. Just the thought amused me, memories of old games popping up in my mind, where you started your adventure by killing ten rats and collecting their tails or something similar, only to realise that apparently in that particular world only a fraction of rats actually had tails, forcing you to camp the spawn of those same ten rats for hours. Sadly, killing rats would be a lot more troublesome in reality, unless I managed to regain the Mist-rune and use it to build the devastating large-scale attacks Morgana had become famous for on Mundus. Such attacks would allow me to clear out the sewers, especially if I managed to get my hands on some humanoid resources to fuel my Blood Magic.


    I doubted I would find a Soul Prison in the sewers but the boost from killing hundreds, if not thousands, of rats would go a long way to cement my dominance, at least while I wasn¡¯t weakened by the sun.


    My thoughts were interrupted by yet another Shattered who desperately wanted to donate to the Samantha Empowerment Program and it was a welcome donation. By now, I didn¡¯t even need to re-cast the runic Hail spell, I simply used Ice Magic to bludgeon the Shattered as it approached. Using that same spell had essentially stopped raising my skill level anyway, so I took the simple brute-force approach.


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    By the time I had struck the Shattered twice and had a feeling another strike would finish it, my ears tried to twitch at a noise coming from my other side and looking back, I noticed a pair of Shattered trying to come at me from a blindspot. It might have worked, if not for Silva and my own vigilance, allowing us to notice their approach before they could get too close.


    Moving forward, towards my original foe, I created some distance, even as I increased my efforts to destroy that first Shattered. Just as I thought it would keel over the next moment, it suddenly moved with unprecedented speed, closing the gap between us and turning the final blow I had planned into a glancing blow.


    Letting out a curse in my mind, I dodged aside, readying myself for the pain that would undoubtedly follow shortly after. A furry missile passed me by, as Silva tackled the Shattered, bringing it to the ground where both started to tear at each other, one with a bone-crushing maw and somewhat sharp claws, the other with inhumane strength and a total disregard for its own life.


    For a second, I was tempted to help her but I just didn¡¯t have the time. If the other two Shattered got to Silva while she was tangled, they would destroy her. If I tried to tangle with two Shattered without preparation, I might win or I might not, it would become a game of luck.


    Forcing my mind into overdrive, I activated Bullet Time, using the additional processing time to channel Astral Power through both my hands. It took intense focus but I could create two runic triangles, my hands flashing through the motions with a practised grace that made it look easy, even if it wasn¡¯t. My mind had to split focus, and I felt a trickle of blood run from my nose as a blood vessel couldn¡¯t stand the pressure but I managed to complete both spells as my eyes flashed with the silvery blue light of Overflow.


    The two new hailstones shot forward, each aiming at one of the Shattered while I controlled the other hailstone, smashing it at the form struggling beneath Silva. The controlled hailstone struck, but only managed to break a shoulder while one of the two Shattered managed to completely dodge the hailstone I had shot at it, the other tried to dodge but got struck in the side, the impact enough to stagger it.


    I wasn¡¯t yet at the level to control multiple objects with my Ice Magic, not quite, and yet, I knew that it was possible. And I knew that I had done so. My mind still running in Bullet Time, Overflow channelling vast amounts of Astral Power, I forced the two hailstones to obey my will. With a wrench of magic, I ripped the momentum that had carried them forward away from them, smashing them into the back of the uninjured Shattered, one striking its head, the other roughly in the middle of its back, the double impact sending it stumbling forward, only for the two hailstones to strike again, finishing it off with a double hit to the head.


    I felt light-headed, the amount of Astral Power I had rapidly used leaving an intense strain on my system, but I couldn¡¯t stop just yet. But I also couldn¡¯t use any additional powerful magic.


    Reaching down, I gripped my blade and channelled the last remnants of my Astral Power into the runes I had previously drawn onto it and took a step back.


    That step brought me right next to the Shattered that was tangled up with Silva. Neither of them had yet emerged victorious but, under the fading effect of Bullet Time, I was capable of changing that and stabbing the downed Shattered in the head, ending the threat and freeing up Silva.


    She sprung up, her fur matted with blood, and moved towards the last Shattered, with me following behind her. My head was already pounding with a vicious headache and I felt utterly drained, both my Astral Power and a lot of stamina spent by Bullet Time but I wasn¡¯t done yet. The Shattered managed to avoid Silva¡¯s initial attack, using its arm to block her maw and while she managed to tear into that arm, it opened her up to a retaliatory strike from the Shattered. Moving up, I stabbed at the free arm, going for the tendons that, even in a magically driven, inhuman monster were necessary to bring the force of its empowered muscles to bear.


    I didn¡¯t manage to completely stop the blow but I managed to cripple the arm to the point that the blow only dazed Silva, not even hurting her enough to make her open her jaw. And with the arm controlled by her; I could circle around the Shattered and go for the spine.


    With a blade in its back, it finally fell, while I dropped to one knee in exhaustion.


    A quick glance into my log made me curse. The first Shattered had been level seven, the other two level six. So much for my earlier assumption, that I was growing faster than the Shattered. But at least, I had gained another point in Ice Rune Mastery and Ice Magic, bringing them to eight and six respectively. And I levelled to seven, thanks to their donation.


    ¡°We really can¡¯t take the Shattered lightly. They are growing and I have no idea where their development is taking them,¡± I quietly warned Silva, as I tried to gather enough Astral Power to treat her wounds. I had been foolish, thinking it was a coincidence that the Shattered had been heading towards us, despite my concealment. No, this had been premeditated, though I wasn¡¯t sure whether targeted at us or at any living being that came down this road. Either way, I had to do better, there would be no respawn if I messed up too badly.


    Hopefully, this would be the last surprise of the night. So far, the surprises weren¡¯t to my liking, whether it was the earthquake, the divine spellcaster in town or the continuous growth of the Shattered.

 Chapter 682

    When Silva and I finally made it back to the abandoned building we had taken as our home, I let out a sigh of relief. After the fight against the three more powerful Shattered, I had healed her, my Blood Rune Mastery jumping to four in the process and once that was done, we had stuck to the shadows and avoided anything that might be a threat.


    Now, about an hour before the sun would start to rise, we were back. It was amusing how much the building, despite its rundown and, in parts, utterly disgusting state, had become shelter and home to me. We checked everything out, making sure that nobody and nothing had snuck in while we were away, before having some of our respective food.


    Silva happily wolfed down her food with incredible speed, while I ate at a more sedate pace, the cold oatmeal was not too bad but the fresh fruits I had pilfered during the night made it a true treat, one I would likely miss in the coming days. Fruits simply had too much water to be suitable as travel rations and the drying process just took something out of them. Water, mostly, but also enjoyment when eating them.


    The moment Silva was finished, she came over to me, her massive head nudging against my legs while she quietly whined as if she hadn¡¯t been fed in weeks. There was nothing I could do about her but laugh, especially when I finally caved in and offered her a small chunk of oatmeal, only for her to sniff it, before looking at me with a look of betrayal, as if I was trying to poison her. Why couldn¡¯t humans be as easy to read, their motives open and their feelings worn on their faces?


    After we were both fed, Silva plopped herself down in our corner, quickly falling asleep. While I was considering whether to join her in her slumber or do a bit of magic training, a quiet whimper drew my attention and I saw her legs move, as if she was running, while she made those soft noises. Her ears started to flutter, moving around rapidly, as the noises coming from her grew more aggressive, the whimpers turning into warning growls.


    Walking over, but keeping a good two metres of distance, I began to talk at her, not trying to wake her up but simply communicating that I was present, hoping that my voice would reach her, even in a dream. It might have helped, for her growls quieted down, even if her ears and legs kept twitching. I decided that I could now move up without risking life or limb to a sleepy canine, sitting down next to her and scratching her head. Her ears kept twitching for a little longer before they stopped moving and her breathing became quiet and even.


    With a grin on my face, I put on a set of clean clothes I had designated as sleeping clothes and crawled into my sleeping bag, one arm resting against her body and gently scratching her ears, and soon, I drifted off, too, joining my canine companion in her sleep.


    After a surprisingly restful sleep, given the apocalyptic circumstances, I awoke about an hour after noon, rested and ready to take on the world. If not for that giant ball of curse-bringing fire, high up in the sky severely limiting my options. Even worse, while the day was overcast, I wasn¡¯t willing to risk things in the hope that the weather stayed bad, getting caught out in the sun would severely mess me up.


    But it wasn¡¯t as if I couldn¡¯t do anything with the day, I just had to stay indoors. There were ways I could train my magic while inside, getting at least some skill levels, even if solitary, safe training didn¡¯t have the same results as using magic in a fight. But trying to come up with new ways to use your magic while in a fight for your life was a desperation move, not something to rely on, especially now, that I no longer had the safety net of the respawn mechanic I had on Mundus.


    Trying to puzzle out how the Gods had set up the entire Road to Purgatory experience would be an interesting mental challenge but one I wasn¡¯t about to try just yet. It was undoubtedly highly complex and far too irrelevant to my current circumstances to waste time on, even if I was curious. My initial assumption was that it was somewhat similar to the way I had controlled to simulacra made of Ice, using my blood and magically infused hair to create a link, only far more involved. Shaking my head, I stopped myself before I could start going down that rabbit hole, knowing that even if I managed to puzzle the entire thing out, I would at most get a pat on the head from Hecate for being a clever mortal. From all the deities I had heard about on Mundus, there were only two I thought would respect something like that, one was Hecate, the other Loki, progenitor of the Firn Elves and the Frost Giant Blood. And apparently, a bit of an insane scientist, if I considered the various myths and what I had heard about. In addition, the Bound Titan. Not a Deity, but I had a feeling that there was more to its story, not that I had any avenue to investigate and likely wouldn¡¯t have for a long time.


    Shaking my head once more, I had to grin and wonder how to keep myself from going down the various intellectual rabbit holes. The easiest way would likely be to actively engage with something that took my entire focus, so I wouldn¡¯t be distracted by wandering thoughts.


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    Given the troubles and realisations of the previous night, I decided that I wanted to have something more permanent for my primary weapon, my Ice Magic. The shuttles I had used on Mundus had been an excellent fit, capable of both slashing and piercing, even if the slashing power had been relatively negligible, due to their low weight. Unless I wanted to try hacking them into enemies, instead of slashing past them, that would always be an issue and if I went there, I could always just pierce into them. More often than not, the squishy bits on the inside of a body were the more important parts anyway.


    Centring my mind, I settled on the edges of the Astral River, letting Astral Meditation increase my regeneration to the maximum. Without having the parallel thought streams I would unlock soon, I couldn¡¯t simply have the meditation run in the background but I thought I would be able to split my focus enough to channel magic while keeping it up.


    Letting my breath slowly flow out of me, I started to work with deliberate slowness, trying to draw the runes as perfectly as I could. A small mistake could be corrected with magical brute force but each small mistake would cost me in efficiency. If I merely wanted to create a single hailstone, that was no problem but if I wanted to create a complex item from Ice while I was conjuring it, every bit of efficiency was important.


    My mind sunk into a meditative, trance-like state, completely filled with the process of aligning Ice-Crystals and forming the strongest, most compressed Ice I could at this point. It wouldn¡¯t be on the level of Hard Ice and far from the Eternal Ice I had worked with at the end of the Beta, but it would be better than the usual Ice I used. It also took a great deal more Astral Power but with my meditation going, that wasn¡¯t much of an issue.


    Finally, I could let my Ice Magic flow around the object I had just created, feeling the smooth curves, the sharp edges and the deadly point. Opening my eyes, I was assaulted by a light headache, the intense focus had taxed my mind greatly, though not to the point of complete mental exhaustion. Before me, held aloft by my Ice Magic, was a crystalline blade, glinting just a little in the gloomy light of the dark building. The weapon was, as always, completely designed with Ice Magic in mind, without a hilt or crossguard or anything that would allow normal usage but be a hindrance when using it with Ice Magic.


    Just as I was about to identify the item I had created, a blue box opened up, demanding my attention.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Title gained</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You gained the title: Magical Creator</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You are amongst the first to create a magical Item on your world. That act of creation will forever strengthen magical items you create, as you forge the path for your entire world.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table style="width: 90%">


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 97.9085%">Special Ability gained.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 97.9085%">You gained a Special Ability: Spell Channelling</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 97.9085%">


    Sometimes, it''s not the instant release of magical power to accomplish something that you seek, for example when healing a strong instant shock could destroy the patient before being able to heal him.


    Those who are able to channel spells can release their power over a period of time, making their effect gentler and less jarring.


    </td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    A grin started to form on my lips, the title quite welcome, especially if I had to conjure up all my equipment in the future. Though I was rather amused at the idea that others would try to follow my path, I doubted that weapons of conjured Ice would be an option for anyone but those with the resistance to withstand their cold and the affinity to properly maintain them. A shame, it made for really¡­ cool equipment.


    The Special Ability, on the other hand, was one I had almost forgotten about, so fundamental to my abilities that I hadn¡¯t even thought about trying to get it. But it was incredibly welcome and would allow me to do more things with my Rune Magic, interesting and quite powerful things. After all, there was a limit to how fast I could channel my Astral Power into spells, even with Overflow.


    <table style="border-collapse: collapse; width: 100%" border="1">


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 100%; text-align: center" colspan="2">Frozen Shuttle</td>


    </tr>


    <tr style="text-align: center">


    <td style="width: 50.0589%">Rarity</td>


    <td style="width: 49.9411%"> Unique</td>


    </tr>


    <tr style="text-align: center">


    <td style="width: 50.0589%">Base Damage Piercing</td>


    <td style="width: 49.9411%">8 Damage Piercing</td>


    </tr>


    <tr style="text-align: center">


    <td style="width: 50.0589%">Base Damage Slashing</td>


    <td style="width: 49.9411%">4 Damage Slashing</td>


    </tr>


    <tr style="text-align: center">


    <td style="width: 50.0589%">Strength Modifier</td>


    <td style="width: 49.9411%">none</td>


    </tr>


    <tr style="text-align: center">


    <td style="width: 50.0589%">Special Effect</td>


    <td style="width: 49.9411%">Imbued: Due to the process used for the creation of this weapon, it is strongly in tune with the Ice-Magic of Samantha Jade Jacobs. 40% lower cost when wielded by her Ice-Magic.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr style="text-align: center">


    <td style="width: 50.0589%">Special Effect</td>


    <td style="width: 49.9411%">Brittle ¨C This weapon does not bend, it will break. May shatter if too much force is exerted.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 100%; text-align: center" colspan="2">Created by the Magic of Samantha Jade Jacobs and one of the first magical creations in a changed world.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    I tried to remember the details of the weapons I had used on Mundus but just couldn¡¯t recall the numbers. I thought these were higher, especially the one in the imbued trait, but I wasn¡¯t certain. But I was quite confident that it would be more useful than the hailstones I had used thus far. In addition, I had gained two points in Astral Meditation during the creation, bringing it to four, one point in Ice Rune Mastery, bringing it to nine and, finally, one point in Ice Magic, bringing it to seven. I was almost at the point that I could try delving into the Astral River to learn another rune, even if I was somewhat leery of that idea, given the turmoil the river was in.

 Chapter 683

    While I recovered from the strenuous act of conjuring my first weapon, I considered my options. The Shuttle would make for an excellent ranged weapon but the brittleness was worrying. My Ice Magic allowed me to hold the weapon together but if I wanted to use a similar weapon in melee, as something to resort to if my Astral Power was low, that wouldn¡¯t be an option. Maybe keeping my mundane, if judged crappy by the system, blades would be to my advantage, as I was somewhat confident that they wouldn¡¯t just break. Hopefully, I wasn¡¯t quite sure if the change had affected mundane materials, or in what ways it might have. The various fires were an indication that at least some metals had changed and the exploding cars were proof that gasoline had. But while I knew how to clean and oil a blade and could even sharpen one in a pinch, I wouldn¡¯t even know where to begin assessing the material¡¯s condition after magical exposure.


    Out of curiosity, I tried looking at them through the magical sight I had inherited from Lenore only to realise that I lacked a comparison to interpret what I was seeing. There was magic within the blade, some of which possibly a residue of the temporary enchantment I had used on it, but also in the material. Raw Astral Power infusing the material structure in a way I simply lacked the reference points to know how it should look, or what the structural infusion would result in on a physical level. Tests were needed to find such reference points, tests and careful experimentation, with multiple samples to minimise the margin of error and the influence of material imperfections within the sample. Tests that would undoubtedly be incredibly interesting, even if metal wasn¡¯t my preferred material to work with, but also tests I completely lacked the necessary resources to conduct. Maybe one day¡­


    With my shuttle soaring around me, a combination of familiarisation exercises for my new weapon and training for my Ice Magic, I tried to consider how to improve my strength further. For now, the shuttle and my magic would likely be the best weapon I could get my hands on. When it came to protection, some sort of light armour would be wonderful but so far, I hadn¡¯t seen any stores that might sell something like body armour or anything along those lines, I didn¡¯t even know if we had such stores in our city. And even if we did, my incredibly petite size meant that, most likely, I wouldn¡¯t be able to find anything there.


    That left utility, which could be both protective and offensive, depending on the way it was used. Something like the Eisblumen artefact I had found in the Barrow Den would be wonderful, the vines it had allowed me to construct and control had been an incredible boon throughout my journey on Mundus, made even better by the fact that they had scaled with my Ice Magic ability. However, even after studying it for quite a bit of time, I wasn¡¯t quite sure how it had worked, to create Ice that was both supple and hard, it seemed to be a contradiction. Sadly, that made it unfeasible to create a similar artefact here, at least in the short term. Another idea for the ¡®maybe one day¡¯-list, while I moved on to more practical considerations.


    As I was considering enchanted Items, I realised that I had access to two relatively rare resources. One I had even already used, my Blood, enriched with my Astral Power, to create the temporary enchantments on my blades, while the other was similar in nature, just less gory. My hair, just like my Blood, carried my Astral Power and I had a bit of control over the power within. If I managed to form strands that solely carried one type of power, before plucking that hair out, I should get a strand of hair about as perfectly attuned to my magic of that type as possible. There might be still imperfections but unless I somehow managed to work in the condensed form of the Element, such as Eternal Ice, condensed from my Astral Power, there would always be imperfections. And for now, even the idea to conjure up Eternal Ice was ludicrous.


    But plucking out a few of my hairs? That was a little painful and I would temporarily lose a bit of Astral Power but as long as I was careful, I should be able to harvest some without any real drawback.


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    And with such a wonderful resource, I should be able to embroider runes onto some cloth, turning it into a simple magic item, allowing me to use the efficiency of a runic spell, without a need to cast that runic spell. There would be a small loss and a bit of degradation, simply because I doubted I would be able to perfectly embroider the runes into fabric, let alone the connecting patterns that were necessary to prevent magic from seeping into the fabric but it would do, at least for a while. I didn¡¯t need the perfect artefact that would last for hundreds of years, I didn¡¯t even need an artefact that lasted one year. If it lasted for a month, I would be happy and even a week would be a step in the right direction.


    Sadly, while I had the idea and the raw material was growing on my head, I didn¡¯t have any sewing needles or anything similar. I would need to look for those while hunting, and maybe search for a suitable piece of fabric as well. I habitually imagined the concealment spell I used, which was one of the two spells I planned to embroider immediately, as a Cloak of Shadows, or Darkness with my current runic abilities, so using something akin to a cloak would be suitable. The long coat I was currently wearing, though already a little roughed up by the fighting, was faux-leather and quite water-resistant so I wasn¡¯t about to stitch into it, especially as the tough fabric would be relatively hard to embroider. Thus, some sort of cloak, especially one that was black or dark and maybe even water-resistant went onto my list. I doubted I would find anything like that but maybe I would stumble across some sort of costume store and could get something that would work. And if not, I could simply use a towel and a bit of string to create a quick release, if I managed to ignore how silly I would look.


    In addition, embroidering a simple healing spell onto my clothes would be useful, and one onto a small scarf for Silva. Both would save valuable time and if we were seriously wounded, that time might be the difference between life and death. If I somehow managed to keep Astral Power stored within the hair, even while it wasn¡¯t directly connected with me would be even better, so that I could essentially pre-cast the spells and only had to trigger them if the need arose, without even having to provide the Astral Power at that moment. Maybe my Blood Magic could open some avenue in that regard.


    I would have to experiment with these ideas, once I had some needles.


    Shaking my head, I glanced out of the window, noticing that there was still a lot of light outside, far too much for my taste. I didn¡¯t even want to consider what would happen in the summer, at least the days were quite short now, even if they got longer each day.


    Taking a deep breath, I noticed something else, namely that I was getting rank. Two nights of strenuous exercise without the benefit of a shower or any way to wash more than my hands had left me with a serious stench, exacerbated by the blood and gore I had occasionally been splashed with.


    In Road to Purgatory, that hadn¡¯t been so much of a problem, initially, Sigmir and I had cleaned ourselves with snow and once I received the spellbook from the Grandmother, I had found a few incredibly simple spells inside that allowed the Mending of clothes and simple maintenance for weapons and another that cleansed the body, essentially functioning as a quick and easy magic shower. But those spells had been black boxes for me, something I could only cast thanks to the book, the only input from my end the Astral Power. I had tried to reverse engineer them, similar to the way I had used the scrying pool spell from the book to eventually construct my flying magical constructs but had only ended up in failure.


    Now, I didn¡¯t have the book and stank, an unpleasant situation I wanted to change.


    Considering my runes for a few moments, I tried to come up with a way to clean myself magically, as I had no desire to carry around enough water for regular showers. Even when thinking of the runes I hoped to unlock in the near future, I could only see one plausible combination, trying to use Darkness Magic to Devour everything around me that wasn¡¯t me. It would require careful control and application, but it might just work.


    Under Silva¡¯s confused eyes, I quickly stripped off my clothes, before beginning the experiment, Magical Shower.

 Chapter 684

    Cleaning myself with Darkness-Magic was incredibly weird. On one hand, it took insane amounts of Astral Power. Without Overflow, I was barely able to conjure enough of the all-devouring Darkness I used to cover one of my hands, and using Overflow, cleaning more than one arm at a time was exhausting. But it worked well enough, cleaning off the sweat, grime and dirt without a problem while, luckily, not affecting my body or the still-connected products of my body, such as small hairs and, much more importantly, my finger- and toe-nails. That had been a worry of mine, that the dead keratin wasn¡¯t truly part of my body and I would accidentally destroy my fingernails. I had lost one fingernail in the past and it had been insanely painful and annoying, not something I wanted to deal with again.


    But the idea worked and after almost an hour of spell-casting and using Astral Meditation to regain my Astral Power, I was wonderfully and completely clean. Only to realise that my clothes were still a grimy, bloody mess. There was no way I was wearing them again unless I was seriously desperate.


    As I dressed in fresh clothes, I looked at the bright side. I was now completely clean, with a way to clean myself repeatedly, as long as I had the time and leisure to do so, with no water required. In addition, the concentrated and repeated use of a highly complex Darkness Magic had increased my skill level in both the Rune Mastery and the Magic by two, bringing them to six and seven respectively. Soon, I would be able to form yet another rune, if things went as hoped, it would be the Confusion Rune. Wonderful utility and the first step to regaining my ability to mess with an opponent¡¯s mind.


    Looking outside, I realised that it was almost time to head out and hunt for more Shattered, prepare clothes for the coming days and look for other interesting things. I was still considering how to deal with other survivors, simply ignoring them had the potential to bite me in the ass but killing them was also questionable. I couldn¡¯t even guess how many humans had survived the change and the two days since, so any death I caused might be the straw breaking the camel¡¯s back, leading to extinction in the area. Unlikely, but I simply lacked the information to make an informed decision.


    Unless the humans attacked me first, I wouldn¡¯t kill them. If they did, all bets were off. The decision didn¡¯t make me completely happy, simply because I could oh-so-easily imagine a scenario in which most humans became faithful to the Asgardian or Olympian deities, creating a permanent clash between the two sides, one that wouldn¡¯t be as neatly contained to the different continents as it had been on Mundus. Only that I would be an enemy of either side.


    It was one thing I had been thinking about, why had Road to Purgatory been created? I was somewhat convinced that Pantheon Entertainment was just that, one of the Pantheons, or maybe even both, acting as a front, just to create that game. Maybe the employees were just humans, inspired, controlled or somehow guided to make it, maybe it was a more direct interference, with some sort of Avatar, similar to the simulacrum I had created in my Citadel. Either way, I was certain that no pre-system human would have been able to link the capsules to Mundus, even if they managed to create them in the first place. Especially not linking them in such a way that the timing sync¡¯s up neatly with the change, that required an observer within the system, or an observer capable to observe the system.


    It was simply too big a gap in power and information for me to accept it.


    But why would the gods have created Road to Purgatory? Simply out of the benevolence of their hearts? That didn¡¯t track, not with what I had seen and heard about them on Mundus and not with the various myths I had read in the past. In them, the Gods could be benevolent but they could also, and were more often than not, prideful, capricious and selfish.


    So, there likely was something in it for them.


    Seeing the divinely created light and sanctuary I now had an idea of what that ¡°something¡± might be. Faithful. Lots of them. A whole, new world, to be precise.


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    Sure, there were countless dead, thanks to the change, and many more would die in the coming days, as disease, hunger and conflicts took their toll, but unless humanity went completely extinct, the surviors would be singing the Hymns of Asgard and Olymp. Just because in their hour of need, the Gods had answered their prayers.


    The sanctuary and the protective light around it had been complex, far more complex than any spellcaster could pull off easily. I might have been able to create a similar effect, some sort of protective mist barrier, but it would have taken me at least ten times the Astral Power I currently had, and I would need higher attributes to link more runes and higher skill levels to link those runes. It was just impossible so soon after the change.


    Anyone who had played Road to Purgatory would recognise the system boxes, the connection was just too obvious and on the nose, so who would they pray to? Some might pray to the God they had believed in all their lives but unless that God was connected to the system, I wasn¡¯t sure if they would answer. Or if they were even real.


    But some would follow the understanding of Mundus and pray to those gods, gods who could most likely answer their prayers, just like it had happened for the spellcaster at the YMCA. Answer their prayers, grant them a miracle and thus, create a highly devout group, who had literally been delivered from great peril by that god. It wasn¡¯t a stretch that such a group would follow the cleric who had channelled the divine power and might.


    If similar exchanges happened everywhere, a majority of survivors would follow the clerics and actively try to convert more to their flock, especially if there was some sort of power donation going on, where many dedicated their Astral Power to the gods, giving their cleric an abundance of Divine Power in exchange.


    It would fit with my understanding of divine magic and, if it worked, it would forge the Gods into the foundation of the new society that formed after the change. An investment to get in on the ground floor, it might take a century to pay off but unless my understanding of Gods was completely off-base, they had nothing, if not time. They could simply wait and watch as their investment matured.


    Or I might be speculating wildly off-base, as there was very little supporting evidence. It just felt right, though that could be due to my dislike for the divine and their deeds, partially stemming from their treatment of Olivia, partially due to the curse laid upon me. In hindsight, I couldn¡¯t really blame them for trying to stop me during my vengeance, I was trying to end the world after all. Trying and, quite possibly, succeeding.


    Which left me at a bit of a loss.


    The gods were active in this world, the YMCA proved that, and if the people who received power from the gods were not complete morons, they would spread their faith. Having more adherents that lend you their power was beneficial, Olivia had told me as much, and more power meant a better chance to survive. Not using that advantage would be foolish.


    Which meant, even if my previous speculation about divine intentions was incorrect, the end result would be similar, divine adherents in high positions of the eventually forming society. And if history taught one thing, it was that religion and politics merged incredibly well, simply because both were major elements to dictate a society¡¯s direction.


    And I was, and likely would remain, an enemy to one of the major Gods, marked by their curse.


    Muttering a few choice words under my breath, I climbed out of the window Silva and I had used before, still not sure how to deal with others. It was a mess, I needed them, or at least some of them, to survive so that eventually a society could reform. I didn¡¯t want to be forced to learn how to farm on my own and I wasn¡¯t sure conjured creatures like the ones I had created at the Frozen Citadel would be able to.


    But the society that would likely form was hostile to me unless I somehow managed to change the direction of what very well might be a divine plot.


    I really needed a lot more power and I needed it now. Or at least soon.


    ¡°Come, we¡¯ve got Shattered to kill,¡± I told Silva who came bounding up to me after relieving herself, ¡°I really need to get Darkness and Ice Rune Mastery to ten, that way I can start with some serious Area of Effect Magic. If I get to level ten, that would be even better.¡±


    It was simple. No matter how hostile a society formed in the rest of the world, if I had unquestioned, overwhelming power, I would be able to dictate the conditions around me. Even better, if I managed to gain control over a Nexus, I could create a sanctuary similar to Neyto, a place of safety that no crusade could threaten.

 Chapter 685

    After the trouble we ran into the night before, I had learned a valuable lesson. No Shattered could be underestimated, unless I had Observe¡¯d them and even then, it wasn¡¯t a certain thing. It could very well be that there would eventually be Shattered completely specialised in speed, capable of striking me before I had a chance to react or even those able to obscure their level from me. This was no game and there would be no respawn. I needed to carve that mantra into my soul, so I would never be careless.


    In the spirit of vigilance, I decided to first test my new weapon. The Frozen Shuttle, wielded by my Ice Magic without Overflow, worked quite well. While there was still a bit of adjustment, the first Shattered I saw was cut down with two controlled strikes. It had only been level three but I had a feeling that there had been quite a bit of overkill. For now, I wasn¡¯t able to destroy them with one strike, unless I took a risk.


    Out of curiosity, I tried that with my next attack, using Overflow to increase the amount of Ice Magic I could channel into the strike, sending the shuttle on a simple, straight trajectory, all my power focused on speeding it up. For a moment, I was enthused by the sheer beauty of it, the shuttle trailed a thin trace of glittering frost behind it, Ice Magic that couldn¡¯t be fully converted discharging into the air. Somehow, the crimson flower that bloomed at the end of that journey only added a somewhat macabre counterpoint without truly harming the beauty of the attack. There was no follow-up strike needed, the shuttle had struck centre mass and pierced through its body, dropping it instantly, as crimson blood splattered out its back.


    Curiously, I was somewhat confident that I hadn¡¯t destroyed anything I considered a vital organ in shattered, sure, its heart and lungs were pulp, to say nothing about the destroyed blood vessels but given how resistant Shattered had been to stabbing before, I wouldn¡¯t have assumed that such an attack was enough. And yet, I had received EXP.


    The next few Shattered were simply cut down like the first, quick, controlled strikes with the Frozen Shuttle. It was good enough to give me yet another level in my Ice Magic, bringing it to eight, while the repeated use of Darkness Rune Mastery to conceal myself was enough to bring it to seven. It was a highly efficient way to hunt but if I wanted to expand my skills, I wouldn¡¯t be able to use it. Too simple, too efficient, not enough innovation, Ice Magic and Darkness Rune Mastery would continue to grow but at a snail¡¯s pace.


    But having a lethal weapon in reserve allowed me some leeway to experiment with the first strike. If the initial attack failed or wasn¡¯t enough to kill, I would always be able to follow up with the shuttle, especially if I used Overflow to boost my ability to channel magic.


    Thus, after those initial test subjects, I changed tactics and began to use Rune Magic for my first attack again. My first test was to change the runes in the Rune Pentagon I used, adding the runes for Chill and Blood into the spell, before launching the Hailstone. The result was interesting, the Shattered seemed to slow down quite a bit, making the follow-up attack with my Shuttle trivial. I would have had enough time to cast another Rune Formation but didn¡¯t want to take the risk that the Shattered was faking it. To my surprise, that simple experiment was enough to give me another point in Blood Rune Mastery, bringing it to four, but given just how low the skill was, maybe I shouldn¡¯t be surprised.


    My next experiment was to slowly channel magic into a simple runic formation of one Ice and two Hail runes, concentrating to make the forming Hailstone into a sharp, icicle-like projectile. I needed to create a burst of power at the end, increasing the cost of the spell by almost fifty per cent and the time needed to cast was almost doubled, but in turn, the Icicle-like Hailstone struck the Shattered in the chest, sinking deeply into it and giving me some EXP, along with a crucial point of Ice-Rune Mastery, bringing it to ten.


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    A wide smile split my grin at that realisation and a part of me wanted to immediately delve into the Astral River and nail down that Mist-Rune. It had been such a crucial element of my magic on Mundus, giving me access to a wide-ranging, easily spreading physical medium that I could imbue with all sorts of effects. It even had the bonus that it was naturally confusing and hindered sight, making some applications even easier.


    But no, I couldn¡¯t go there just yet. Not while it was my prime hunting time and I had more Shattered to destroy, more EXP to gain. I wanted to push Darkness Rune Mastery to ten as well, and that would need some more effort, especially as I had primarily used it to conceal myself.


    Though that didn¡¯t mean I had to keep doing that, or only keep doing that, there were more ways to apply my magic than shoot hailstones at enemies, I just needed to be creative.


    Given how unsuitable the simple Darkness Rune was as a carrier for ranged attacks, I decided to emulate my first experiment as I sought out another Shattered. This one hadn¡¯t noticed me yet, so I used another rune pentagon, Ice and Hail to provide the Projectile, while two Devour and one Blood Rune would cause the actual damage.


    The Hailstone shot across the distance, striking the Shattered in the chest and there was a faint discharge as the power contained within the attack was transmitted to the target. There doubtlessly was some loss of power, or the attack might have outright killed the Shattered but as it was, the Shattered merely sunk to the ground, struggling to rise again.


    Grumbling to myself, I focused on my Ice Magic, the Shuttle next to me striking out and piercing into the Shattered¡¯s chest, sending it back to the ground while I gained some EXP.


    The test had worked, but it clearly wasn¡¯t there yet. Maybe I should try to create an ambush, infuse a patch of Darkness with a Devour-Blood rune combination before luring a Shattered into it, that might increase my skills faster.


    Or there might be an even easier way. More efficient way? Either was fine with me, but it needed a bit of setup and there was some risk involved.


    Sneaking towards the next Shattered, I quietly whispered to Silva next to me, asking her to cover me as I acted. She had done so the whole time, but this might be a little more dangerous.


    Conjuring a simple Hailstone, like I had done dozens, maybe even hundreds of times since the change, I shot it at the Shattered across the street, only for once, I wasn¡¯t targeting the chest or the head, I was targeting the legs, the knees to be precise.


    ¡°I used to be a Traveller like you, but then I took a hailstone to the knee¡­¡± I joked under my breath, amusement flowing through my body as the Shattered¡¯s knee was destroyed by my attack, the leg now mostly useless. With no leg to stand on, the Shattered crashed to the ground, while I kept moving the Hailstone, targeting the other knee, destroying that, too, before going for both shoulders. I didn¡¯t manage to destroy them as thoroughly as the knees, but from the looks of it, the Shattered was quite immobilised.


    Taking advantage of my opponent¡¯s weakness, I moved up to it, my physical blade in hand. It would deal little damage but, amusingly, that was just what I wanted, I didn¡¯t want to end the Shattered with the blade, I had other plans.


    Carving a rune triangle into a squirming target that tried its very best to hurt you was quite a challenge. It was, most likely, the sloppiest and crudest rune carving I had ever done, but it should be enough to channel magic into the formation and that was all I needed.


    Runes flared to light, as I used my magic and moments later, the Shattered stilled, the last remaining vitality in its body devoured.


    In turn, I was rewarded with some EXP and, more importantly, the message that my Darkness Rune Mastery had gained another point, bringing it to eight. Two more to go, and I was somewhat confident that the direct application would give me another, maybe two points if I brought down a few more Shattered this way. Good enough, if things worked out.


    With a plan in mind and a grin on my face, I continued on my way, looking for the stores that would carry what I needed or some Shattered that would allow me to gain more power. Either was fine in my eyes, I just needed to keep going.


    Always forward, until I had the power to do as I pleased.

 Chapter 686

    The Shattered we killed during the next two hours were spared the humiliation of getting disabled before being turned into experimental subjects by virtue of being part of larger groups. It seemed like they were congregating, instinctively forming groups, even if they didn¡¯t do more than shamble about the streets. Their actions were weird, seemingly completely without any rhyme or reason and I wondered how they acted during the light of day. But that confusion didn¡¯t stop me from happily killing them by the dozens, each kill a tiny step on my path to greater power.


    I considered disabling the last Shattered standing but it was simply not feasible to do so in the shifting tides of a fight. Most of the time, Silva had to engage the attacking Shattered to keep them from going for me, while I tore through them with my Frozen Shuttle. The fights were quite profitable in the EXP department, netting me another level and bringing me to eight, but skill-wise, it wasn¡¯t too great. Maybe the problem was that I had been clobbering Shattered to death with my Ice Magic for two days now, without much in the way of variety.


    During my prowling through the night, I stumbled across a theatre costume shop and was now in the process of stalking the streets around it in a bid to secure the location. Noticing that one of the Shattered was all on its own, I decided to disable this one, too, and get some more experimentation done. Not only did I need to continue levelling up my Darkness Rune Mastery, I also needed to get some progress on my Blood Magic and, to a lesser degree, my Blood Rune Mastery. All of those were, at least initially, best when applied to a disabled for, or, in the case of Blood Rune Mastery, used to heal others. But given that I had no interest to see Silva hurt or search for wounded survivors to offer them healing in an attempt to train my skill, so using it on downed Shattered was my best bet.


    Cutting the legs out from beneath the Shattered was quite simple and a quick glance of Observe told me that I had struck gold, the Shattered was a nicely high level, at level six. It still made me wonder just how their levelling worked unless they were hunting survivors and getting a lot of kills. But if that were to be the case, there had to either be wounded or there was something odd going on, with their bodies being able to devour far more than they should be able to, giving them the ability to destroy the bodies of their prey.


    Once the Shattered was crippled and its keening wail at getting Observed failed to drag additional foes into the area, I moved up, intent to carve into it. My attacks had left it lying on its stomach, the shoulders shattered and its arms flailing around uselessly, while crippled legs desperately tried to move it but it was all to no avail. I considered severing the spine of the next, but for now, I had work to do.


    For a moment, I considered simply carving the same runes into its back, just to get some more levels into my Darkness Rune Mastery, but decided against it. There were more experiments to be done and those, too, would give me what I needed.


    And it wasn¡¯t like my current idea didn¡¯t have Darkness Runes in it, it only focused more on the Blood Rune Mastery and Blood Magic. The Shattered tried to squirm, but I managed to carve into its back, a simple, runic triangle of two Blood-Runes and a single Devour-Rune. Placing a hand on the formation, I focused my magic, slowly channelling my power into it, while controlling the Effect. I didn¡¯t just want to let the darkness Devour the vitality within the Shattered¡¯s blood, I wanted to drain the Devoured power and use it for myself. Previous attempts to use Blood Magic on Shattered had been met with rather limited results but I hoped a proper, runic formation would make the difference. I wished for a nice Athame, but sadly, there was no way to get an enchanted blade, unless I made it myself. Or maybe found somebody else, but I highly doubted anyone had the skill to make one just yet.


    Using Blood Magic on the Shattered was an odd experience. Thanks to the formation, the sensation of it trying to take the magic I was using to drain the Astral Power within its blood was greatly subdued, but it was still difficult. In my memories, the sensation had always been relatively effortless, at least if the target wasn¡¯t struggling but now, it was more akin to dragging something through molasses, the process itself subject to heavy resistance. It felt weird, but given that there was no way for the Shattered to stop the process, other than more high-pitched screaming, I simply continued.


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    My ears perked up when I heard quick, shuffling movement and focused in the direction I heard it coming from, my hand lighting up with stolen power as I quickly created a runic formation of Ice, intent on disabling the approaching Shattered. The one I was currently working on was almost drained, so having another one would be quite useful.


    The moment the lone Shattered tried to rescue its screaming friend, I activated Overflow, ripping the last rest of Astral Power out of the Shattered and leaving it a withered husk, while the power I had gained was immediately channelled into the formation I had prepared, a hailstone launching across the road and breaking yet another kneecap, sending the Shattered to the ground.


    To my surprise, the Shattered continued dragging itself forward though from the looks of it, the focus of its urgency wasn¡¯t on me, it was completely locked onto the now-dead Shattered that had screamed.


    Taking a few steps to the side, keeping the growling Silva with me, I kept observing and even decided to Observe the new arrival. It was only level four, but beggars can¡¯t be choosers and I was desperate for more experiment subjects, especially those delivering themselves to me.


    My interest only went higher, when the Shattered continued on its path, still focused on its dead brethren For a moment, I wondered if there was some sort of Shattered society, that the living one might be trying to get to a friend or something but that idea died the moment the Shaterred got close. Instead of trying to ascertain the state of its friend, it simply flopped around next to the body, inhaling deeply, looking like some caricature of a junky that was getting the hit it so desperately needed.


    When I felt a change in the flopping Shattered and noticed that its knee was somewhat mended, my interest was well and thoroughly roused. Had it somehow absorbed the Miasma produced by my Blood Magic? Out of interest, I Observe¡¯d it again and now, it was level five.


    Not certain what that particular piece of information meant, I simply used the Hailstone I had conjured before to break its limbs, crippling it just like I had crippled its friend and drained its power, too. There were no more approaching Shattered, so the drained power went into the beginning of a Shield, a simple square of Ice with a handle on one side, primarily so I could hold it, before using Ice Magic to control it if necessary. It would likely never be on the same level as the Frozen Shuttle, the basic effort made with the drained power was not even enough to make the system recognise it as an item, but it was a start.


    That start, alongside the previous combat, was quite lucrative in terms of skill gains. Two points in Blood Magic, one in Blood Rune Mastery, one in Darkness Rune Mastery and one in Ice Magic, bringing them to three, six, eight and nine. All in all, a wonderful gain, especially with the new, confusing piece of information the Shattered had delivered.


    They were levelling by absorbing Miasma, or maybe Vitality before it decayed into Miasma? I wasn¡¯t quite certain, even on Mundus I hadn¡¯t been able to fully comprehend the effects and methods involved, only learned to apply and work around them to some degree. But this was a new world and I wasn¡¯t reckless enough to simply assume that everything would be the same, that seemed like a good way to get myself killed.


    One of those minute differences I had noticed was that the runes didn¡¯t quite look like I remembered them. Almost as if they were written in a different font, the change small but I was confident that it was there. But what it might mean, I had no idea.


    Shaking my head, I focused on the store I had approached, using the Hailstone I had used to cripple the Shattered to break the window. It took a few strikes but by now, the Ice I was wielding was almost as hard as stone and I could put a lot more force behind it with my mind, than I would be able with my body, making such casual vandalism a piece of cake.


    Careful not to cut myself, I moved into the store after giving it a few minutes, to make sure the produced noise didn¡¯t attract additional trouble. Silva sadly couldn¡¯t easily enter, not with shards of glass lying around, but she didn¡¯t look too fuzzed about it, simply sitting in front of the broken window. Given that the store still had a sign outside, warning that dogs weren¡¯t allowed inside, it made for a rather hilarious picture. Alas, I doubted anyone was around to take it and upload it to some social media.

 Chapter 687

    Skulking through the costume shop was an interesting experience, as so many things were. It was a mix between haunted house and shopping, the deep shadows and the darkness of the night creating a curious contrast. I noticed that my returning Darkness Magic was slowly increasing my ability to see in the night, maybe the emerging of my Firnelven lineage was helping as well, though I wasn¡¯t sure. So far, I had not noticed any serious physiological changes, though my ears might have started to become more sensitive, a little pointy and more mobile. Or it might simply be my imagination, the change had only come three days ago, so who knew? I certainly didn¡¯t.


    Looking around the costume shop, finding capes was easy enough. There were dozens of them, hanging down the back of manikins, some sweeping the floor, others hanging loosely, so they would billow artistically in the right conditions. For me, neither was an option, mostly because they were sized for an average adult, so someone twenty to thirty centimetres taller than me. Even those that were supposed to billow would easily drag across the ground and I had no desire to sweep the streets. It would be even worse if there was actual snow on the ground, something not completely impossible even as the end of winter was near.


    Going through the various clothes and fabrics, I placed my hands on them, trying to get a feel for their properties. I had no idea what might make fabric well-suited for enchantment, or ill-suited but given that I lacked time and resources to seriously experiment with them, I needed to make a decision. Given that simple touch likely wouldn¡¯t work, I decided on something more involved and channelled Darkness Magic into my hands, coating them with blackness, while looking at the fabric with the Magic Sight inherited from Lenore. That way, I could see how the Astral Power interacted with the fabric, checking if the fabric was immediately dissolved, if it was damaged or if the Astral Power was pushed out of it, something that might disrupt enchantments.


    It was rather amusing just how different the various fabrics reacted to my experiments. I had expected major differences between the various base fabrics, that something like silk would react differently compared to polyester blends or cotton, which they did. But what I hadn¡¯t expected was that the colour of the fabric was similarly impactful, that my darkness-magic, for example, reacted quite strongly, and destructively, with any light colours, while flowing smoothly through anything black, dark blue or deep purple. There was, to my understanding, no real reason for the magic to care about the dye and yet, it did. Or it might be my mind associating the Darkness Magic with those colours and thus creating some sort of resonance effect. Either way, it was rather fascinating and by the end of my checking, I had found a nice, deep purple cape that hung down to my knees, likely designed as a half-cape for regular-sized people. It was made from pure silk, giving off a glossy sheen that made me a little hesitant but given just how well the Darkness Magic was flowing through it, there was little to debate. It was the best fabric to hold the enchantments and it might even allow me to dip into the concept of Twilight far sooner than I had managed on Mundus, simply because of its interaction with light.


    And it most certainly was a better fabric than the polyester blend, when I had tested a creme-coloured cape made from that, my magic had literally burned small holes into that, d as if it was some sort of potent acid. Intrigued by that interaction, I decided to experiment a little more, draining a chunk of Astral Power in the process, and ultimately learning very little. It had been fun, though. And the whole experimentation was enough to increase my Darkness Magic by one, bringing it to eight.


    Knowing that I would likely need a different fabric and colour for the blouse I imagined, embroidered with Blood Magic Runes that allowed me to heal myself if needed led me to abandon the costume shop after a brief run of experiments. I achieved the best results with cotton but given the limited selection of styles and sizes in the store, I decided to head elsewhere. There was a faint sense of amusement bubbling within me, that I now was suddenly conscious and willing to spend inordinate amounts of time looking for just the right clothes, compared to my utilitarian shopping before the change but given that I wasn¡¯t searching for aesthetic reasons but to get the best function out of my clothes, I didn¡¯t mind too much. Either way, my search brought me past a small tailor shop that I promptly raided for yarn, needles and similar tools until I ended up at another mall, one of the bigger ones in town.


    This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.


    During that time, I didn¡¯t bother experimenting too much with my Darkness Rune Mastery or Blood Magic, instead, I focused on efficiently and quickly ending as many Shattered as I came across, enough to net me a level up, bringing me to eight. None of the Shattered had been above level five, but I noticed that there was a constant increase in the average level of Shattered, from level 1 on the first night, when they had all been human before, to level two or three on the second and so on. It made me wonder just how that worked, and if there was more to EXP-gains than I knew. On Mundus, had never really questioned that only quests and killing gave EXP but now, looking with the goggles of hindsight and the understanding that it hadn¡¯t been a game, there had to be more to it.


    Otherwise, how could a herbivore reach higher levels? There had been elk and deer around level fifty and if only killing gave EXP, that would be difficult. And to get an increase in average level, each Shattered would either have to kill a few people or fellow Shattered. I hadn¡¯t seen evidence of either, though I had noticed a few bodies in the streets. Dirty bodies, wielding crude weapons, things like clubs, fire-axes and similar tools, their limbs broken by the inhuman strength of the Shattered, their flesh rend by their claws. More often than not, it was trivial to guess what had happened, other survivors trying to raise their own level, only to fall in battle. There had been dozens of such bodies, but far from enough to explain the increase in Shattered level.


    For now, I was grateful that I could keep a somewhat decent levelling pace, thanks to the continued increase in Shattered levels, though I was a little concerned about what it would mean in the long run. I didn¡¯t want to share my planet with only these burned-out husks of humanity and the awakened beasts, as I had started to think about the animals that were gaining levels.


    Those were around, too. I had mostly noticed stalking cats, their size a little on the large size for housecats, but I was certain there were more around. Rats and various birds had been considered pests in human cities and now, they could increase their power and gain abilities. I wasn¡¯t sure I wanted to know what a swarm of rats could become, given enough levels, or what happened if a pigeon managed to reach level hundred, or something equally ridiculous. But those were worries for the distant future, for now, I had greater concerns. Soon, the city around me would be filled with disease, the cold air of winter was slowing the decay process but that would only help for so long.


    I gave myself at most four more days until I would leave the area, looking for something smaller, maybe even an area completely devoid of humanity¡¯s remains. There had been a small mountain range south of the city, around sixty kilometres away. Going there might be a wise idea but I would have to make that decision once I had more information.


    Looking through the mall, I noticed that I wasn¡¯t the first person to raid their stores. The various restaurants had been broken into and when Silva and I snuck past one of them, I heard noises inside, something that sounded like a crying child and a voice trying to calm that child. I briefly considered checking up on them, before deciding against it. Children, especially at the age that made them prone to crying randomly, would get people killed in this situation. I wasn¡¯t about to try playing the hero, not if I needed to ascertain my own continued survival and rise in power first.


    Everything else had to take a backseat in comparison to that. Charity was a virtue reserved for the strong. For now, I had neither. Maybe I would be able to help others, once I was in an unassailable position of power. Or maybe I was deluding myself, trying to assuage the morals my mother had trained me to follow. Only time would tell.

 Chapter 688

    Undyed, creme-coloured bio-cotton.


    That was the material my Blood Magic was flowing through comparatively well. Why cotton, I had no idea. It might just be one of those things I shouldn¡¯t even try to understand but simply accept that it was the material of choice for Blood Magic. It was far from perfect, making me think that any formation embroidered into it would destroy the material within a dozen or so uses, but it was the best I had found. Even the real leather I had tried had failed, at least if the tag had been genuine. The faux leather I had stumbled across had drained a lot of Astral Power and created incredibly odd puddles, after dripping to the floor. A part of me had worried that those puddles would start moving, just from the swirling colours within, but maybe I was simply unable to channel enough power to create whatever abomination would be spawned from the synthetic.


    Either way, bio-cotton worked, I didn¡¯t need to pay the five-times inflated price for it and now, I had a few shirts of the stuff to embroider later, even if I had to raid the children¡¯s section to get a fitting size. There were times at which I hated being petite, though, at the same time, my physique was as much a part of me as my other quirks. They simply made me who I was.


    In addition to the shirts, I had found a pair of scarfs of the same material and taken them as well. Those would eventually become equipment for Silva, allowing me to hopefully channel Astral Power into healing her from a distance but that wasn¡¯t the project for the night.


    I considered dropping in on the other survivors, just on general principle, curiosity to talk to a being that didn¡¯t have four paws and regularly dropped enough hair to fill a pillow but there was a part of me that was hesitant. Mainly because I had no idea how to act.


    Simply walk up, maybe call out a warning, going all, ¡®Hey, I just met you and this is crazy, but did you notice there¡¯s an apocalypse going on?¡¯


    I could see that go over incredibly bad, especially given that I was completely unwilling to actually help anyone but myself long-term, simply because I wanted to use the Lone Traveller Perk as much as possible. I had no idea how it would work long-term, what sort of beings would remain possible companions, unless I decided to forgo the bonus and accept the reduction. Something I wanted to avoid, at least until I managed to reach a point where it no longer mattered. Likely a stage of power that rivalled the Gods, so a rather long-term goal.


    Another option was to sneak up on them, simply look, just to see a few people who weren¡¯t burned out by the flaring Astral Power, their minds or souls or something burned to a cinder. But would I be happy with it, would it help me any?


    When Silva started to nudge my stomach with her massive head, I got the hint, shaking my head and continuing on my path. There were still a lot of Shattered that needed to be destroyed on my quest to awesome power and I needed to increase my Darkness Rune Mastery a little further and grind to level ten.


    In addition, I should begin to keep an eye out for the best place to initiate a repeat of the great Snowbold genocide, only this time with sewers and rats. Sadly, unless I went into some sort of city planning office, I doubted I could glean any useful information from ground level but I would keep looking. Maybe I stumbled across a sign that said ¡®Rat-Central, down this sewer!¡¯ or something, but I doubted it. And if I did, I might be too spooked to attack them, simply because such a sign was a sign of higher intelligence and thus, in animals, of either incredible power or a spiritual nature, similar to Lenore. I wasn¡¯t interested in replacing my avian friend, but attacking an entire clan of similar beings sounded like a rather bad idea. As in, getting hunted down and murdered, bad.


    If you come across this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.


    Back out on the streets, I continued prowling, searching for targets. Any Shattered were fair game and any lone Shattered turned into an experiment. Either in trying to figure out how their increase in level by Blood Magic worked, or in trying to push my Darkness Rune Mastery further. Given that there were quite a few Shattered around, their number didn¡¯t seem to diminish much, as if Shattered from other places were moving into the areas I had cleared of them before, or I might simply have been imagining things.


    By the time I settled down to have a late-night snack, what I now considered dinner, I had managed to get to level nine, but only just, while Darkness Rune Mastery, Blood Rune Mastery and Blood Magic all had levelled. My Darkness Rune Mastery was just lacking that last point to get the next rune, sitting at nine, while Blood Rune Mastery was at seven and Blood Magic only at four. But it was progress, something I was quite happy about.


    My ears perked up when I heard an animalistic hissing noise, not coming from too close but further afield. Silva and I both immediately focused in that direction and started moving towards it, completely stealthed and hidden as we stalked through the dark streets.


    What we found made me pause in surprise, it wasn¡¯t anything I had expected but here they were. I had known that there were racoons in town, locks on dumpsters, signs to remove all foodstuff, things like that had been prevalent, but seeing a gang of them was a bit of a surprise.


    But an even bigger surprise was what they were doing. I had always imagined racoons as the dumpster diving hobos of the animal kingdom but here I was, watching a gang of five take on a Shattered. And from the looks of it, they were winning quite handily, using a combination of hit-and-run tactics and even tools to their advantage. I had no idea how, why or where those black-faced furballs had managed to scavenge a few metres of clothesline but they had and were using it to entangle the Shattered¡¯s legs, three of them distracting and harassing the Shattered while two were binding it.


    For a moment, I considered attacking, simply taking down both sides, but before I could come to a decision, the two tying racoons were done, suddenly tightening the cord around the Shattered¡¯s legs and bringing it to the ground. Two of the other racoons went for the Shattered¡¯s face, only for one of them to get swiped by a flailing arm, the other jumping back in time to dodge. But their feint was enough to allow their last member to jump on its back, tearing through the spine with claws that seemed to be clad in some sort of magical enhancement and at that point, I wasn¡¯t sure if I was under the influence of some sort of drug. I could accept many things, but tactical death-squads of magic-wielding racoons? That was¡­ out there. At least they already had their masks, no need for bandanas.


    Watching them made me re-focus on my rat-genocide plan, if racoons were starting to hunt and level, I was pretty sure rats were right there with them, if not ahead. Just like crows and ravens, those had been smart before and now, I was quite confident their status wouldn¡¯t have diminished.


    ¡°Silent,¡± I admonished Silva, who was right next to me, almost vibrating with a need to pounce on the furballs ahead. But I had other plans, as I was considering going after the rats, I could just as well go after the racoons and for the best effect, I needed to know where to find them. Thus, we stayed in the shadow, watching as the racoons took their injured member in the middle of their group and started moving, with Silva and me now creeping after them.


    A part of me wanted to laugh at the idea of a human and some sixty kilograms of canine sneaking after a mob of racoons, both of us outmassing them quite easily, but I wanted to find their nest. Or lair, or whatever one called the place where death-squad racoons were hanging out.


    To my continued surprise, they were using magic to blend in with their environment, only that their ability was completely outstripped by my own. I could still follow the scent of their magic, even as Silva looked increasingly agitated, as if unable to smell them any longer.


    Soon, they vanished into a drain, making further pursuit impossible but it was a target. Marking the place on my mental map, I began moving back, towards my own place, killing any Shattered I was coming across. I still needed some EXP and that last point in Darkness Magic, if I got those, the next night would be incredibly fun. Genocidal, murderously efficient fun.

 Chapter 689

    To my annoyance, it hadn¡¯t been enough. Despite killing any and all Shattered I came across on our trek back to our shelter, I didn¡¯t manage to get either Darkness Rune Mastery nor my actual level to ten. It was a massive pain in the rear, even if I was planning to get those last points in Rune Mastery by experimenting. As for the actual level, I would get it during the night, allowing me to use the points before I went hunting for racoons or rats.


    Not completely tired just yet, I decided to get some work done before going to sleep. Looking at the new clothes I was planning to embroider, I decided to work with the cloak first, simply because it had a larger, likely easier-to-work-with surface area.


    Looking at it, I realised that I needed to do something else, before actually putting the stitches in, I needed to ensure the runes remained in the shape I was creating them in. I wasn¡¯t quite certain what would happen if the material the runes were embroidered in shifted around, distorting their form and possibly their function, but I didn¡¯t want to find out, not outside a laboratory setting with precautions in place to keep me safe.


    So, the first step to creating my Cloak of Concealment was to add a rigid section into the cloak, using some debris I had found in the abandoned building. It was set roughly into the middle of the cloak, making it so the hard section would simply hang down my back normally, but it made the cloak a little heavier, and less pleasant to use. I had no idea how I would handle that problem with the shirts, I didn¡¯t want to wear a hard surface, but I would cross that bridge once I reached it. Maybe I could train myself to reduce the runes¡¯ size to the minimum, not the easily hand-sized runes I was planning to use now. Size made them easier to embroider and given that I had very little ability in that, I wanted to make it as easy on myself as possible.


    Drawing onto the section with a bit of dust was quite easy and I finalised my plans for the runic formation. Three Concealment runes in a triangle, linked to two Darkness runes, a simple formation but hopefully one that worked well. I had considered adding Chill and Blood Runes to it, to give the concealment a focus to suppress any senses that targeted my Vitality or the warmth of my body but decided against it. Those runes would make it much stronger against enemies using such senses but the runes I had now drawn would make it a stronger general-purpose enhancement and I could still use the other runes if I encountered enemies that had those special senses. Even if I suspected the Shattered could feel vitality and use that special sense to find other living beings, or maybe some sort of sense that allowed them to find other humans, that would somewhat track with a Shattered falling to a gang of racoons. Or it might be something else entirely, I wasn¡¯t sure.


    When I pulled my hair over my shoulder, so I could get a better look at it and the state my recent conditions had left it in. The last few days since the change had been hard and my hair had always been one of the few physical features I had taken pride in, and thus meticulously maintained. But with the change, I hadn¡¯t been able to do anything but cleanse it with Darkness Magic, making me fear the worst.


    To my pleasant surprise, the hair was nicely glossy, with traces of Astral Power twinkling along the strands, giving it a somewhat otherworldly look. Just for that, the Magical Hair perk was worth it, even if it had some drawbacks when it came to enemies using a strand of hair as a magical focus to attack me. But it also meant that I could do what I had planned, use those same strands of hair to create suitable crafting material.


    Staring at one long strand of hair, I focused, trying to move the Astral Power within my hair to focus as much of it as possible into that strand. At first, it was difficult, the hair wasn¡¯t as connected and fluid as the rest of my body was and the Astral Power within reflected that. If my normal Astral Power felt akin to water in the way I could direct it, the Astral Power in my hair was more akin to tar, sticky, viscous and thoroughly unwilling to move as I wanted it to.


    But with enough time and patience, I managed to give the strand of hair I had focused on the odd light-absorbing quality of Darkness-aligned Astral Power, making it stand out to both my mundane and magical senses. While trying to keep as much of the power contained by sheer force of will, I pulled on the strand, ripping it free in one fluid motion. It hurt far more than it should have, a stab instead of a pin-prick and I could feel the drop in my available Astral Power. Looking at the strand through my magical sight, I could see that some of the power was fading into the environment but another part seemed to remain within, seeping into the physical structure, just as I had hoped it would.


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    Nodding to myself, I began stitching, carefully tracing the runes I had drawn, without actually connecting them just yet. Just one stitch after the other, slowly but surely weaving the strand of hair into the fabric of my cloak.


    It took over an hour, and dozens of hairs, to finish just one rune to my satisfaction and by that point, the sun was rising and I was starting to get seriously tired. Cuddling up to my canine pillow, I went to bed, sleeping the day away. There were some noises in the distance, but nothing loud or urgent enough to truly rouse me.


    And so, I slept the day away. My dreams took me back to the misty mountain deep within my mind, where I could doze on the slopes, watching the clouds go by. It was quite amusing to a small part of my mind, that I was dreaming about sleeping, but when it came to dreams, the dreams of my mountain were some of the most pleasant. Especially when I heard Sigmir¡¯s voice in the wind, asking me how my day went. Talking to her, even if only in a dream, filled me with bittersweet emotions. During those moments, it was wonderful, my mind was at peace and my heart calm, even if there was a small, nagging part of me that reminded me it wouldn¡¯t last and that soon, we would be separated once more. Separated by the boundaries of reality, between the living and the dead, separated until I managed to gather enough power to shatter those boundaries and get her back to my side.


    Early in the afternoon, I woke back up, my mind filled with conviction, even if my heart was aching from the separation from Sigmir. Letting out a soft sigh, I promised my beloved that I would find her, that we would reunite. No matter who or what stood in our way.


    Silva looked at me, confusion filling her canine face before she started to pace around, trying to find with whom I had been talking. Chuckling to myself, I prepared some food for her, and myself, making sure I was fed before I continued my work.


    There were four more runes to weave and by the time I was finished, dusk had settled in. The work on the cloak wasn¡¯t quite done, there was one more step. Carefully channelling my Astral Power, I focused on the runes, staring at the fabric through my Magical Sight. I could see the paths my Darkness Rune Mastery tried to use to connect the runes into a working formation, where it tried to force the Astral Power to go through the fabric and did my best to memorise those pathways.


    Once I had a good idea of how the formation would connect, I began tracing those connections with more of my hair, trying to give the magic a path of least resistance. It was slow-going, there was little rhyme or reason to how those paths were flowing, but with my Sight, I could get an idea.


    Finally, I was done and could look at my completed work. The cloak looked a little strange, not because of the almost invisible embroidery, my hairs were blending in nicely with the silky material, but due to the metal I had used to reinforce the area around the formation, making sure that it wouldn¡¯t bend or fold and disrupt my work.


    Looking at my notifications, I had to smile. The work on the cloak had been enough to push Darkness Rune Mastery to ten, just as I had hoped. But surprisingly, there was another pair of notifications that I hadn¡¯t expected.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>


    You have reached level ten.


    </td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>


    The Touch of a Dragon lingers on your soul. You gain +1 to all attributes.


    </td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    That, I hadn¡¯t expected at all. Depending on how often I got such an attribute-boost and what else the trait did, the Dragon Touched trait might be insanely powerful or somewhat underwhelming. Something to find out in the future, especially as there had been a part about calling upon the Dragon¡¯s Flames, something I wasn¡¯t yet ready to even test, simply because of the Powers involved. My eyes began fluttering as I felt the minute changes settle over my body, while yet another set of blue boxes appeared, telling me that I had gained traits.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Trait gained</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You gained a Trait: Nimble</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>For having fifteen Agility at your level, you gained a fitting trait. The Nimble-trait increases your sense of balance and makes it easier for you to dodge attacks or move silently.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table style="width: 90%">


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 97.9085%">Special Ability gained</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 97.9085%">You gained a Special Ability: Rune Projection</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 97.9085%">For having 20 Intelligence at your level you gained a fitting abillity. The ability Rune Projection allows you to instantly project a runes into a Formation, without drawing it. The Astral Power Cost to project a rune is double it''s normal cost. The amount of runes depends on your Intelligence. Instantly projectable runes: 1</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    One was familiar, the other not so much, but that might just be my memory. If I had such a trait in Road to Purgatory, its passive nature had simply been too mundane to burn itself into my memory.

 Chapter 690

    Shaking off the surprise from getting EXP and, subsequently, a level from crafting, or whatever had given them to me, I focused on the item I had just completed. There was still a lot of work to do before I could head out and I wasn¡¯t sure I would get everything done in time.


    <table style="border-collapse: collapse; width: 100%" border="1">


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 100%" colspan="2">Cloak of Concealment</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 50.0589%">Rarity</td>


    <td style="width: 49.9411%">Uncommon</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 50.0589%">Type</td>


    <td style="width: 49.9411%">Cloak</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 50.0589%">Base Protection</td>


    <td style="width: 49.9411%">0 against Piercing Damage</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 50.0589%">Base Protection</td>


    <td style="width: 49.9411%">0 against Slashing Damage</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 50.0589%">Base Protection</td>


    <td style="width: 49.9411%">1 against Blunt Damage</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 50.0589%">Special Effect</td>


    <td style="width: 49.9411%">Concealment - Allows you to blend into the darkness.


    </td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 50.0589%">Special Effect</td>


    <td style="width: 49.9411%">Enshade - Channelling Astral Power into the cloak allows for Improved Stealth


    </td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 100%" colspan="2">A thin cloak that provides only minimal protection but greatly enhances the wearer¡¯s stealth capabilities.


    </td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    A grin flickered across my face as I read the description. It was exactly what I had hoped for, even if a little more protection would have been appreciated. But at the end of the day, it was just thin cloth, so hoping that it would provide protection above cushioning some blunt strikes was a little unrealistic. So, my best option remained not to get hit.


    On the other hand, I had the two Rune Masteries I had been waiting for and there was nothing stopping me. The Sun was mostly gone, hopefully taking with it any influence it might have over the Astral River, so I could dip my toes into it. Not dive into it, I was a little afraid of that, due to the frothing, agitated state the river was in, but getting a glimpse of the runes that symbolised the concepts I was looking for should be possible.


    Making myself comfortable, I closed my eyes, feeling the magic around me. It was interesting, I knew that there was more than just the strong, surging flows of power in the earth beneath me, I knew that Astral Power was infusing everything around me and yet, I could only feel those beneath. A problem of perception, of Intuition and power. I simply didn¡¯t have the strength just yet. Remembering that I still had two points from my level-up, I put them into Intuition, sadly only bringing it up to nineteen. Twenty would have been a nice milestone, but I probably shouldn¡¯t be greedy, getting those nine extra points from Dragon Touched was a major boost, even if it wasn¡¯t a boost focused on my strengths. But covering my weaknesses might not be a bad idea either. Not that I could actually control that trait, so I should be grateful for what I received instead of bemoaning what might have been possible.


    Regardless, even with nineteen Intuition, I was unable to feel more about the Astral Power flowing through the world around me, so the only method left was to focus deeper, into the streams of power flowing through the earth beneath me.


    Just like it had been on Mundus, there was a lot of it. On Mundus, the best mental image I could draw had been the image of a placid river, similar to the Amazon or maybe the Nile, hundreds upon thousands of cubic metres of water, slowly but ceaselessly moving across the land. Here, with the Astral River I could feel beneath me, the only image I could draw was that of a flood, first the initial tidal wave that crashed across the land, the change, followed by an endless amount of water, carving through buildings, streets and everything, until, hopefully, at some point in the future the pressure lessened and both, the power and the world, found a state of rest. How long that would take, if it would even happen, I had no idea, so for now, I had to deal with the raging waters.


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    I didn¡¯t dare to delve into the floods, instead, I remained adjacent, merely feeling the river while I focused on the concept I had in mind, picturing the rune that had represented it on Mundus in my mind. I was searching the Mist, countless, tiny pieces of Ice, light enough to drift through the air, before ultimately fading away, either molten by the sun or dropped to the ground as snow. It filled the air, much like a cloud on ground level, spread around corners, trying to achieve maximal dispersal while slowly sinking, unless pushed up by the wind. It was cold, clammy and chilly, wafting and billowing, creating illusions and confusing the senses.


    I could easily remember all those properties of Mist, I had conjured it up dozens, maybe even hundreds of times in my time on Mundus. And now, I could feel an interaction between my memories, the Astral River beneath me and something else. Something deeper, more fundamental but also incredibly far away and faint, giving me only the vaguest idea that it existed. Or I might be imagining it, I simply couldn¡¯t be sure.


    But in the darkness behind my eyes, I could feel the rune I remembered grow clear, solidify into a shape, though if it was exactly like the rune I remembered or if it had changed just a little, I couldn¡¯t be sure. But I knew it now, knew what it represented and knew that I could use it to conjure and command the cold Mist, just like Morgana had.


    For a minute or five, I simply sat there, letting my mind relax and recover while my hands idly petted Silva¡¯s fur. Communing with the Astral River, even if I didn¡¯t dare to delve into it, was hard mental work and I was planning to repeat that feat as soon as I felt recovered.


    Soon, I placed my hands on my knees again, as my mind was focusing outwards once more. Back towards the Astral River and towards the Darkness within. Sill not willing to enter, I drifted on its shores once more, only this time, instead of the cold Mists of Ice, Darkness and its confusing, confounding effects filled my mind.


    Darkness wasn¡¯t just the absence of light, it was what robbed so many beings of their primary sensory organ, it symbolised the loss of perception. Getting lost in the dark, unable to find your way, that was one of the fundamental fears of humans. Losing your way in the dark, confused and lost, that confusion, that loss of your way and mental faculties, that was what I was searching for. The first step to mess with others¡¯ minds, something I had enjoyed on Mundus.


    Mild vertigo started to shift my mind around, as my mind started drifting. Focusing back on the concept and on my memories, I sharpened my mind, pushing away all unnecessary thoughts. Confusion could be a wide concept, one that could be achieved in many ways, but the one that was linked to Darkness was mine, represented by the rune that slowly became clear within my mind.


    Soon, the Rune was completed, no longer fuzzy and nebulous, even if it retained a shifting, somewhat confusing quality if I focused too hard. Again, there was a brief sensation of interaction and feedback, before it faded away, leaving me with a small headache and the Rune shifting around in my mind. It remained a little confusing, but given what concept it represented, that wasn¡¯t too much of a surprise. I would be able to use it, to imbue it into my spells and that was all that mattered.


    It took me a little longer to recover from my second communion with the Astral River, my mind whirling with images and sensations. Maybe I had overdone it a little, maybe I had been caught up in a flare of power, I wasn¡¯t sure. Either way, I had gained two levels in Astral Meditation, bringing the skill to six, and, much more importantly, I was now fully capable of using those two runes.


    Two runes that had been fundamental in the area of effect magic Morgana had commanded and that I would now be able to command.


    ¡°I did it, Silva,¡± I told my canine companion, a wide grin on my face. ¡°Now, we can hunt those hiding in the sewers, can drive them from their burrows and slaughter them by the hundreds.¡±


    Maybe my canine companion could fully understand me, maybe she simply picked up on my enthusiasm, but she happily jumped up from the ground where she had been relaxing and getting petted and started to bounce towards the window we had been using. Night had fallen over an hour ago, and I had places to be, and beings to kill.


    Following Silva, I set out, retracing the steps I had taken the night before, moving towards that racoon-den. They would be the first to fall to my mists, and afterwards, I would start looking for the rats and clear the sewers. Large-scale pest-extermination, magic style. The idea only deepened the eager smile on my face.

 Chapter 691

    My new cape was a wonderful creation. While it was hard to judge just how well I was hidden, I felt a lot more comfortable with it wrapped around me, the magical formation I had embroidered into it taking just a bit of Astral Power to maintain. It felt a lot more efficient and easier compared to repeated castings of my Cloak of Shadows and took a lot less Astral Power or concentration. Silva was a little suspicious of my new gear, often moving next to me and occasionally sniffing my body, as if trying to make sure I was still there, which just added to my confidence.


    Getting to the area where we had seen the racoons was quite easy, even if the Shattered had gained in strength once more, almost all of them were now level three or higher, with some outliers even reaching level seven. That I had killed a level seven two days ago only added to my worries. Sure, that one had been an incredible outlier, but if I compared the rate that one had gained strength at and extrapolated, I estimated their strength to be around level thirteen or fourteen. Higher than my own strength, something I wasn¡¯t willing to simply accept. And thus, the answer was genocide.


    To make sure there would be no Shattered that attacked while I focused on my spellcasting, I disabled all Shattered I could find in the area, before dragging them near the drainage and starting a drain of my own. The Blood Magic slowly ripped their life out of them, turning it into magical power I could use while attracting any additional Shattered in the area. Hopefully, the racoons weren¡¯t aware of what the keening wails of the Shattered meant, other than that it was bad news and to be avoided.


    Only one additional Shattered was drawn from the surrounding buildings, making me assume that the Racoons had killed all the other Shattered in the area, with only a few more having wandered in during the last few hours, those few that I was now killing. The vitality of the Shattered as funnelled into the construction of a simple dome of Ice, a small shelter that would hopefully help Silva in keeping me safe, while I focused on my magic later. It was far from the Throne I had used on Mundus but given that I was far from the power I had wielded there, I felt it would be hubris to use it. Not yet, I was no Queen yet.


    A part of me wondered if there was a way to negotiate or work with the racoons, but really, without the Universal Translation ability I once had been given by my pact with Lenore, I doubted that would work. And even with it, I wasn¡¯t sure but I felt it was more likely, given that the one group that hadn¡¯t intensely disliked me on Mundus had been the pack of the Winter Wolves in the Windswept Plains.


    Maybe I should consider diplomacy some more, even if I would have to find some way to communicate.


    Just as I was thinking how to go about communicating with a band of bandana rats, Silva let out a harsh growl and bounded forward, rounding a corner and disappearing from sight. When I followed after her, I only heard an angry growl from her, before a notification told me I had gained EXP for killing a racoon. A racoon that I saw moments later, hanging crumbled from Silva¡¯s maw.


    Well, that put the idea of racoon diplomacy down, I had my doubts that anything of that sort would work if you showed up to their doorstep dripping the blood of their kin. Shrugging, I returned to the initial entrance I had found, where a pair of Shattered was still waiting with broken limbs.


    Sacrifices for my Blood Magic.


    Settling down, I carved the necessary formations into both Shattered, pushing away one of the spasmodically flailing arms so I could actually work. Once everything was done, I ordered Silva to guard my back before starting to channel my Astral Power. The formation I created was relatively simple when compared to the formations I had used on Mundus but for this plane, it was remarkably complex, with my two new runes incorporated into it.


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    For once, I didn¡¯t use a simple pentagon, with all five runes the same size, instead, I used a huge square, with four runes at the corner points and a single, larger, rune filling the centre, connected to the other four. Two triangles, connected at a central point. I wasn¡¯t sure if my idea would actually improve the power, but I thought it would. The upper triangle was composed of the runes for Confusion and Darkness, with the Mist-rune in the centre while the lower triangle used that same Mist-rune but was connected to Devour below the Darkness-Rune and Blood below the Confusion-Rune. It felt curiously symmetrical, the two triangles connected and connecting, to the point that I even felt a faint connection between the two triangles along the vertical lines of the square.


    Creating it had taken a lot longer than any normal formation would, each move of my hand careful and considered, filled with Astral Power and an image of what I had in mind until finally, the glowing formation was floating before me.


    Putting my hands on the sacrifices, I began drawing the vitality from their bodies, turning it into Astral Power for me to use. The power immediately went into the formation, causing the cold, dark mist to billow forth. The moment I didn¡¯t need to concentrate on the two sacrifices, because their usefulness, and life, had expired, I focused back on the formation. There was quite a bit of power inside and I began to slowly channel my own power into it, while letting the mist seep down, into the drainage.


    Mist automatically spread out, trying to fill as much space as it could, so initially, my entire focus was on the upper portion of the formation, just spreading out a confusing mist. It would sink and seep into everything down there, filling as much of the system as possible. At the same time, I was barely aware of my body, my focus constantly switching between the formation and the Astral River, a meditative state in which nothing mattered but those two. Feed the formation and draw power from the Astral River, nothing else mattered.


    After what might have been an hour of focused channelling, I switched my intentions. No longer did I want the mist to be primarily confusing, now I focused on the other half of the formation. To devour the vitality of all those caught up in the mist.


    Little changed about what I actually did, I still channelled Astral Power from the Astral River into the formation, but what the formation did with it, that was completely different. It might have been my imagination, but the previously dense, somewhat dark, mist that made me think of thunderclouds changed. Now, there was a faint tinge of blood in the air, and I thought there were traces of red running through the mist, almost like bloody veins or strands of red lightning. But the visuals were merely an outward expression of a fundamental change, from a spell of confusion and disorientation to a spell of death. All that were within the spell would be affected and soon, they would all be dead.


    It was a great spell - It was a horrible spell. Or it might just be the spell that I needed.


    Again, time started to blur as seconds turned into minutes and finally hours. Slowly but surely, I could feel a headache starting up, the toll of my constant magical channelling mounting. All magic had a small physical component to it, put a bit of strain on your body, but to have the body be the limiting factor on a spell, it required what I was doing. Slow, constant channelling of vast amounts of power.


    Finally, I let my connection to the spell die off, no longer supporting it with that constant stream of power that had allowed it to grow and, finally, drain all that were trapped within. The mist would linger for a little longer, simply because such huge amounts of Astral Power didn¡¯t immediately fade, but soon, it would disappear.


    For a few minutes, I simply sat there, meditating and breathing, recovering myself as much as possible. I wasn¡¯t sure how long I had channelled my spell, three, maybe four hours was my best estimation but I wasn¡¯t sure. I was quite confident that everything down there was dead, I didn¡¯t feel that faint, lingering unease of combat but that might simply be because everything I had affected was running away.


    Letting out a long, drawn-out breath, I looked at the notifications I had gained, curious just how much power the one, massive spell had given me.

 Chapter 692

    The list of blue boxes that greeted me was¡­ exhaustive. I didn¡¯t even try to read through all the different kill notifications, there were hundreds of them, a long list that I simply let scroll by, barely reading it. It looked like the vast majority were mentioning rats, spiders or various bugs, though I wasn¡¯t certain I wanted to know just how big a spider or bug had to become to actually be considered something the system assigned a level to. It was a rather disturbing idea, a bug with the same ¡°worth¡± or however the system assigned levels, as a normal, basic human. There were so many things implied with that idea, and the idea of levels in general, that I felt a headache, just trying to make a list of them. And so, the whole idea of investigating the system was put onto the same mental list that held all my various magic-research projects while the system was confined to a game. The list of ¡®Shit to be dealt with later¡¯.


    But other than countless kill notifications, there were a few interesting ones. Namely, four level-ups, bringing me to a wonderful level fourteen, likely cementing my position as the strongest former human around. Skill-wise, I gained two points in all three Rune Masteries, bringing them to twelve for Darkness and Ice, and to eight for Blood, a single point in Ice Magic, bringing it to ten and a rather massive three points in Astral Meditation. Maybe those three points were due to a trait I regained, namely the Combat Meditation trait. It had been one I had on Mundus but most of the time, I had used it in the background with a secondary mental process, while my primary mental process was controlling my body. Wonderfully useful stuff, increasing my Astral Power regeneration by a great deal.


    Looking over to Silva, I noticed that she had a little extra blood around her maw, looking quite proud and pleased with herself.


    ¡°You protected me, didn¡¯t you, girl?¡± I asked her, fluffing her fur when she bounded over to me. ¡°Such a good girl, aren¡¯t you, the best,¡± I muttered, happily delivering the cuddles she was so obviously interested in.


    ¡°This was quite the fight, as amusing as that sounds,¡± I grinned, pushing my body up from the ground, a little woozy from the exhausting mental work I had done the entire time. There always was a bit of amusement when I realised just how hard and physically exhausting it could be, to sit in the same spot for hours and not really move at all. My body felt like I had put it through the wringer, similar to some of the more intense sessions with Mrs Wu.


    Thinking of her, I paused for a moment, a trickle of guilt running through my body. I had been so focused on myself that I had neglected the people I should have cared about, those who I considered friends. Friendships could only be maintained by regular contact, Mother had taught me that, and a real friend would offer help if their friends needed it. That had been another of her lessons. And now, in a situation where I could likely provide help in a way nobody else could, I had focused on my own desires, my own goals, not even bothering to think about my friends.


    ¡°Shit,¡± I softly cursed, the sensation running through my body thoroughly unpleasant. Guilt, just as Mother had described it to me, an unpleasant pressure in my chest, gnawing at my heart. I didn¡¯t like that sensation, not one bit, but considering the time and that there most certainly weren¡¯t any busses running at the time, there was little I could do to get to them this night. No, I would have to make the trip towards their gym the next night, maybe interspersed with another magical massacre, targetting another section of the sewers.


    Killing huge quantities of vermin would likely be the best way for me to level, simply because quantity had a quality of its own. It wouldn¡¯t last forever, at some point, I would have to seek out higher levelled enemies. Or find a way to make my strength known, so any beast trying to increase its strength would come for me, trying to take me down, donating its existence to the Jade Empowering Fund.


    But no, such an act would bring with it more troubles than it was worth, especially given that I was ignoring the question of how to spread such a challenge. It wasn¡¯t like I could post on a forum that people should come to some place for a fight, there simply wasn¡¯t any communication I knew about.


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    Hell, with the way technology and everything had malfunctioned during the change, I was pretty sure the highest communication tech around would be two cans on a string, outside of some magical shenanigans. Maybe there were some people out there who could use some form of magical construct to communicate, possibly something similar to the scrying constructs I had used on Mundus, or the inspiration for them, the Water Mirror.


    Alas, it didn¡¯t really matter. I certainly wasn¡¯t able to construct something like that so whether or not some specialised class out there had some sort of toy, it didn¡¯t matter to me. I had other priorities, things that I wanted to accomplish.


    Silva and I kept slowly walking through the dark streets, my speed limited by my fatigue and when I noticed a Shattered, I simply looked down at Silva, quietly telling her to get it. It was a complete reversal of our usual tactic, which had me strike from the shadows, more often than not ending the fight within moments but Silva needed to train as well. She had protected me well while I was concentrating but our fights would only get harder in the future. She gained EXP alongside me, but when it came to skill levels, or whatever equivalent she might have, were earned individually.


    I remained in the shadows, watching Silva bound towards the Shattered, gaining quite a bit of momentum over a short distance. The Shattered noticed her, though I had a feeling it had detected the massive canine incredibly late, especially considering that Silva wasn¡¯t even trying to be stealthy. It tried to brace for impact when she jumped up, both of her paws impacting against the Shattered¡¯s chest, while her maw went for the throat. The bracing wasn¡¯t enough and the Shattered was completely bowled over, though it managed to block the maw with an arm, only that the arm didn¡¯t last long.


    A quick shake of Silva¡¯s head and the arm was broken, another, and the lower part of the arm was ripped off and spat out, nothing more but a piece of flesh and bone. It gave the Shattered the time to strike at Silva, pushing her off its body, but that only meant she had some more space to move, getting away from the flailing legs and the single remaining arm.


    I noticed that the fight had attracted attention, a single cat sneaking up on the two battling foes, clearly sticking to the shadows. I wasn¡¯t about to strike at it first, but I was mentally ready, my Frozen Shuttle floating just above my shoulder and Overflow at the cusp of activating. If the cat made a suspicious move towards my canine friend, I would protect Silva¡¯s back.


    Silva, in the meantime, was still trying to get at the Shattered¡¯s throat, to separate its head from the shoulders only that even with a broken and torn arm, the Shattered had managed to block yet another attack. This time, she didn¡¯t try to rip the rest of the arm off but instead dragged the Shattered trying to turn it onto its belly, so she could break its spine.


    Just as she was about to achieve her goal, the cat started to move, pouncing towards Silva in an impressive display of stealth and agility. The cat was roughly double the size of a normal housecat, so maybe half Silva¡¯s size, but its pounce seemed to easily cover eight metres, far more than I had initially expected. It didn¡¯t help the cat, maybe the pounce was even harmful as its pounce would only work while concealed with its impressive stealth. Otherwise, the pounce was just putting it on a predictable trajectory that almost screamed for someone to strike it out of the air. The problem was, that stealth was accomplished by quite a bit of magic, Darkness and Shadows concealing her presence, just like my own presence was concealed. Darkness and Shadows I could easily see through.


    Before the pouncing cat made contact with Silva, who had noticed the attack and was trying to dodge, a silvery line pierced through the cat, trailing frozen dust in its wake. The cat started to falter mid-air, the impact enough to thoroughly disrupt its trajectory, letting it flop a few metres away from Silva. Silva, on the other hand, focused back on her prey, trusting me to deal with the attacking cat. There was little more to be done about it, the cat was already bleeding, the Frozen Shuttle had ripped a deep wound through its chest and from the looks of it, the cat wasn¡¯t about to get back up.


    I kept an eye on it while Silva finished off the Shattered, before sending the cat off to wherever cats go after their death. Likely hell, because everyone knows that only good dogs go to heaven if there was such a place.


    Either way, both enemies were dealt with, allowing Sivla and I to continue on our path. Only now, we both considered everything feline a valid target.

 Chapter 693

    Looking for trouble was an interesting activity. Given how sensitive Shattered seemed to be to Blood Magic, or rather to miasma, I had decided to try and use that to my advantage. Simply looking for Shattered on the road was well and good, but it wasn¡¯t enough, I wanted more, wanted to find the higher-levelled Shattered, like those level six and seven Shattered that had attacked us two nights before. To continue my levelling pace, I either needed to kill an obscene, and ever-increasing, number of enemies, or I needed to find stronger ones, higher quality enemies.


    Thus, my hope that such enemies might be attracted by Misasma and give me something worthwhile to kill.


    To ascertain a good tactical position, Silva and I broke into one of the many apartment buildings, breaking the front door with Ice Magic before making our way up the stairs, carefully creeping until we reached the top floor. There, we began making noise, enough noise to attract a number of Shattered, drawing them all to the top floor and onto the roof.


    Where we cut them off at the knee, the narrow stairwell creating a natural funnel that would have allowed us to kill hundreds, if not thousands of them, if only there had been enough. Not that killing was our aim, not in the initial stage. Instead, Silva let the first one through before blocking the rest off, allowing me to break that one¡¯s limbs and begin the process I had envisioned.


    Once the Shattered was broken, I carved the runes of Blood and Darkness into its body and immediately began draining its power, using that power to spread some Ice at the opening of the stairs. The escaping miasma drove the crowd of Shattered wild and I called Silva back, allowing a few of them to get through, only to break their limbs, forcing them to crawl towards me. Silva kept blocking the horde, the Ice I had spread making sure they were lacking purchase, while I broke their limbs as quickly as possible, all without killing them.


    It was a messy process and Silva and I only managed to keep roughly a quarter of the Shattered alive for processing, the rest either died from our attacks, from the press of bodies or from going after Silva instead of the miasma I kept releasing in regular intervals. The release of miasma and the keening wails the Shattered gave off when I used my Blood Magic on them had attracted a few extra Shattered, adding to the total we had to fight but with the good position we were in, all worked out.


    Finally, when all was said and killed, we had eight Shattered with broken limbs lying on our rooftop, all well and ready for the next stage of my plan. That all of those Shattered had gained a level during the process was a rather amusing side-effect, making me wonder if I could actually deliberately funnel miasma into individual, broken Shattered in an attempt to raise their level enough to make them worth EXP or if there would be some sort of penalty involved with such actions.


    Either way, for now, my plan was a different one.


    The first Shattered to be used as bait was the one closest to the edge of the roof and just like the other ones, I carved in the usual Blood and Darkness Runes into its flesh, only instead of simply draining it, I established a magical connection to the formation, activated Overflow to rip as much magic out of it as possible before shoving it off the roof. The moment it started falling, I used my Blood Magic and I even managed to keep the connection to my formation until the Shattered landed and, well, shattered. Or broke?


    It died on impact but given that it had been gravely weakened by the continuous Blood Magic, it released a great deal of miasma into the air, enough to give me a small bit of backlash, despite the distance involved.


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    With that much miasma released, and the screams of it travelling quite far in the quiet night, it didn¡¯t take long for a few more to show up, while I prepared the second of my bait to follow after the first.


    Once the additional Shattered showed up, I attacked them from above with conjured hailstones. My shuttle would have been more efficient, but I didn¡¯t want to use it at that range, it would take too long to call it back to me in case of emergencies. And hailstones worked perfectly fine when used from above as if they always had been intended to crash onto things after a long fall.


    A pair of Shattered made it into the building, one of them joining my bait collection while the other was destroyed by Silva, before I sent yet another Shattered over the side of the building, Blood Magic ripping its essence from the fallen body while it screamed.


    After the fifth Shattered went over the side, something new approached our fishing spot. It was easily visible, even compared to the fiery-eyed Shattered, for the thing reminded me of the burning Shattered I had seen on the first night. That one had, at least to my understanding, been set alight by spilling gasoline but hadn¡¯t actually died from it. This one was similarly burning, but the burns were focused on its arms, giving it flaming hands, and on the top of its head, in an approximation of hair.


    Curious how it would act, I lobbed a Hailstone at it, before trying to use the Observe skill the moment my attack hit. The level eleven Scorched, as Observe told me, managed to partially dodge the hit, instead of getting struck on the head, I only managed to get its shoulder, but that was enough to likely break the joint.


    Only, for once, the height didn¡¯t completely keep me safe. The Scorched waved its functional arm in something that might have worked as a throwing motion and a burning orb was lobbed towards me. Ducking down, I took cover behind the edge of the roof, before shooting more Hailstones at the Scorched, quite happy to engage in a shooting contest with it. I had cover, while the stupid Scorched simply stood in the middle of the road, getting struck repeatedly, until it finally keeled over.


    Still, it took quite a few hits to get to that point and given that I had little idea about other abilities of the thing, I was glad that I had fought with the high-ground advantage and cover. Without those, fighting the Scorched would have been troublesome.


    But, on the positive side, I was quite confident that I had gained quite a few EXP by killing it, so I kept trying to bait more Shattered, or Scorched. Sadly, the remaining six bait failed to draw further Scorched and only two more Shattered, a rather sad quota. But the entire experiment was rated as a success by myself and the continuous killing was enough to bump me up to level fifteen by the time I was done, while it also increased my skills. Mostly in Blood Magic, which gained two points and was now level six, one in Blood Rune Mastery, bringing it to nine and, amusingly, one in Unarmed Combat, possibly for kicking the Shattered off the roof. But given that the skill had only been level one, I wasn¡¯t about to complain. Just laugh.


    With the level up came another, important question. Did I want to risk things for the bigger reward, or did I want to play it safe and get the rewards I knew I would receive? If I decided to risk things, I could put the two attribute points into Intelligence, bringing it to twenty-two, while leaving Intuition at nineteen. If I gained another point in all stats at level twenty, I would immediately be bumped to twenty Intuition, while the two free attribute points I¡¯d get at that level would be enough to bring me to twenty-five Intelligence, possibly giving me some sort of major ability. From the way the traits and abilities regarding attributes were worded, the lower your level when you reached the milestones, the bigger the benefit, at least that was my interpretation.


    So, did I want to take the safe way and definitively get the benefit of twenty Intuition, my first parallel thought stream if I remembered correctly, or did I want to see what twenty-five Intelligence, an almost impossible-to-reach number at level twenty, would give me?


    It was something I would have to consider carefully, both sides had massive upsides but potential downsides, too. I simply lacked the information to make an informed decision. Maybe a good day¡¯s sleep would give me an easier time deciding.


    With that in mind, Silva and I made our way back to our Shelter, ending a few more Shattered as we went. By now, killing them felt almost trivial and I had to remind myself that I always needed to be vigilant. That I didn¡¯t know if there were equivalents to the Scorched around. Pride, as the saying went, came before the fall and I didn¡¯t want to fall. I wanted to be the one to kick my enemies off a building.

 Chapter 694

    No powerful Shattered, angry felines or swarms of rats attacked Silva and me on our way back to our shelter. If anything, the amount of Shattered we came across was incredibly low, as if the Shattered were purposely avoiding the area around my shelter, but somehow, I didn¡¯t truly believe that. Sure, we had been killing them but nothing I had seen indicated actual intelligence or the ability to communicate.


    Nothing had changed in the shelter and after a quick meal, I began to experiment a little. Keeping myself clean with my Darkness Magic was well and dandy but I also wanted to have clean clothes. So, I had to figure out how to magically clean my clothes or had to manually launder them. For now, I could get away with simply throwing the worn clothes away and stealing new ones but as soon as I left the city behind, and the abundance of stores, that wouldn¡¯t work any longer.


    Given that I already used Darkness Magic to clean myself, I tried to clean the shirt I had discarded the day before with it. The results were, as I maybe should have expected, suboptimal. That my magic wouldn¡¯t directly harm my body was, maybe, to be expected, or there might be some sort of mental barrier that prevented you from accidentally burning away your body. Or something else entirely, but however the difference worked, it obviously didn¡¯t cover my clothes. And so, while my Darkness Magic certainly managed to devour and destroy the dirt, sweat, blood and grime that had covered my old shirt, it had done the same thing to the shirt itself, requiring the use of Overflow and taking a huge chunk of Astral Power out of me in the process. It had given me a point in Darkness Magic, to my amusement, but if I wanted clean clothes, this wasn¡¯t really the way to go. Or if it was, I needed a huge amount of training. Realistically, though, I decided to look for other ways.


    Given that I was pretty low on Astral Power, I decided to get some sleep. Cuddling against my furry canine blanket, I quickly fell asleep. The past few days had been an odd mix of relaxing, exciting and utterly exhausting. It was weird, I had never realised how stressful interacting with other humans was. Maybe that was why I had taken to Road to Purgatory and Mundus as much as I had, my mind considering the natives as something other than human, something I don¡¯t need to carefully control myself and be mindful of my mother¡¯s teachings. And yet, even without being actively mindful, I had acted in a civilised manner most of the time, at least as far as I understood. Maybe I had spent a little too much time lost in my own head, ruminating magic and contemplating previous ideas, but that wasn¡¯t a huge faux-pax. Granted, the repeated murder and eventual genocide likely made my mostly polite behaviour moot, but some things just couldn¡¯t be changed.


    ¡°Yes, some things can¡¯t be changed, love,¡± Sigmir¡¯s voice agreed with me. Opening my eyes, a familiar mountainside, with endless clouds hiding the world below, appeared before me. Above, the sky was shrouded in complete darkness, with no stars in sight. The only bright spot, as it were, was the moon high above, the radiance it gave off strangely dark.


    ¡°Mhm, I¡¯ve heard a prayer once, asking for the serenity to accept the things you cannot change, the courage to change what needs to be changed and the wisdom to know the difference. And yet, some things need to be changed, even if the whole world screams that they shouldn¡¯t be changed. That serenity should prevail,¡± I felt a soft smile form on my lips. Even in hindsight, I didn¡¯t really regret my actions on Mundus, no matter how much the morals my mother had tried to teach me said that they were horrible.


    ¡°But maybe the prayer is wrong. Asking for courage is not needed. You don¡¯t just need courage to change the world, you need power. But asking those with power to simply hand it to you, so you can change the world?¡± I felt a mirthless chuckle escape my throat, ¡°No, that would never work unless your changes would enhance their power. No, power needs to be taken, to be gained with your own efforts, if necessary ripped from the hands of those in power. Or traded for, but even a trade requires something the other side wants. But serenely accepting your fate, that is not for me. Maybe I simply lack the wisdom,¡± I laughed, the rumbling sound shaking the mountainside.


    ¡°Maybe, or maybe you simply seek to change the world, instead of letting the world change you,¡± I felt Sigmir¡¯s arms gently rest around me and felt myself relax at her words. I would change the world, for a world without Sigmir in it wasn¡¯t a world I wanted to be in anyways. So why not be the change needed? The worst thing that could happen was that I would perish and leave the world, but wasn¡¯t that also an acceptable alternative?


    This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.


    Maybe. But I wouldn¡¯t give up, not without being forced to.


    A strange, wet rag rubbed across my cheek, causing me to frown and shudder. Why was that rag so rough and warm? When a somewhat cold thing touched my face, followed by air getting drawn across my skin, I felt myself wake up and suddenly, my entire field of vision was dominated by a mix of brown and black fur, a large, brown eye and I had a nose full of canine breath.


    ¡°Get off me,¡± I growled, pushing Silva away from me, only for her to bounce up and jump around our shelter, far too perky for my tastes. My entire cheek was covered in dog slobber, making me frown in distaste, especially when I remembered what she had been doing with her mouth the last few nights. It was one thing for a dog to clean its nethers with its tongue before giving you a kiss and a whole other thing for them to tear things-that-had-been-people to shreds. Just the rude awakening would have earned the perky pup a scolding, but adding that mental image? The scolding was doubled. It was far too early for this, but maybe there simply was no good time to get canine kisses, at least not for me.


    Grumbling to myself, I conjured up some Darkness, dragging it across my face to get rid of the slobber and everything. I continued working, stripping off my clothes and cleaning the rest of me before I looked at the growing pile of laundry.


    Darkness hadn¡¯t worked, but maybe something else would. Conjuring up mist had almost been second nature on Mundus and I was quite comfortable working with it. It had some peculiarities but I thought I could work with them.


    I didn¡¯t even try to make anything fancy, merely conjuring up a small amount of mist, trying to make the individual particles as small as possible, while keeping the volume as contained as possible. I wanted the mist to be as close to normal water as I could make it, while still being able to control it with Ice Magic and hitting that sweet spot wasn¡¯t particularly easy. A few drops of water rained down, taking some Astral Power with them, while I focused, poking and prodding at the cloud as I went.


    Reaching out, I held the already damaged shirt into the mist, swirling the cloud around, and as much as I could through, the fabric, trying to get the dirt to stick to the mist, almost like a washing machine. A very cold washing machine, without any detergent or soap, making the whole thing rather crude.


    But, looking at the shirt afterwards, I felt that it worked. The fabric was still a little smelly, cold and clammy, even after I dragged the mist away but compared to its before, state, it was a world of difference.


    Grinning to myself, I began working, laundering one piece of clothing after the other, dumping the dirty mist in the same area that I used as a toilet since coming here. That part of the shelter was getting increasingly nasty and I was quite happy about the cold temperatures, or the whole thing would already be a biohazard.


    When a message informed me that I had gained a point in Ice Magic, bringing it to eleven, I took a break for food and to cuddle with the incredibly excited pup. As I was comfortably sitting there, biscuit in one hand, the other buried in Silva¡¯s fluffy fur, my canine partner suddenly shot up, her tail between her legs and her head swinging side to side. When I stood up she immediately hid behind me, piteously whining, making it obvious that she was scared. Not sure what was going on, I readied myself, the Frozen Shuttle floating above me and, in an effort to have as much power as possible, putting one of the free points I had into Intuition, bringing it to twenty and to the milestone I knew about.


    <table>


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Special Ability gained</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You gained a Special Ability: Parallel Processing</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>For having 20 Intuition at your level you gained an ability, based on your actions. The ability Parallel Processing allows you to truly multitask, holding fully separate tasks in mind, though your body is still limited. A higher Intuition allows more parallel processes to run at the same time. Currently possible parallel processes: 2</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    With that, I could also draw a runic formation, keeping it armed and ready to have Astral Power channelled into it, just in case an enemy was here. Seconds turned to minutes, Silva still incredibly disturbed and scared, when suddenly, the world lurched beneath me.


    The magic formation before me was shattered and my Frozen Shuttle almost dropped to the floor when my focus was suddenly needed to keep my balance. Dust started to rain down as the world shook beneath me, waves of Earth Astral Power were surging around me until finally, peace returned.


    ¡°Well, crud,¡± I muttered, looking around. Nothing seemed to be damaged, at least nothing in the building I was in. But for two earthquakes to happen in three days, something was seriously messed up. Somehow, the shaking, trembling earth felt like a far more immediate concern than the system and the flames it had brought. After all, the earth beneath me was the foundation of it all, even if a part of me wished that the foundation beneath me was an endless glacier.


    ¡°Well, crud,¡± I repeated myself, cuddling with the still-disturbed Silva. Something was going on and I had no idea what. And I hated that sensation.

 Chapter 695

    It took quite a bit of time for Silva to calm down after the earth stopped shaking. Using that time, I finished off the rest of my laundry, getting dressed in gloriously clean clothes. Getting the moisture from the fabric was a bit challenging, requiring me to use a combination of Rune- and normal magic, carefully cooling the moisture down to the point that I could use the cold-aspect of it to gain minute influence. It was incredibly finicky, largely useless for anything but training my control and only possible thanks to my ability to control two different magics at the same time thanks to parallel processing but for drying my clothes in safety, it was good enough. And, more importantly, it was enough to give me a point in Ice Rune Mastery and another point in Ice Magic, bringing them to thirteen and twelve.


    I had to chuckle a little when I realised that, from a magical ability standpoint, doing my laundry was on the same difficulty level as killing hundreds of creatures at the same time. But that was just how the system defined things.


    ¡°Silva, we¡¯ll take everything with us tonight. We¡¯ll be heading towards Mrs Wu¡¯s gym, look for another good spot to flood the sewers with deadly mist and get some EXP. I¡¯d like to find out what happened to my teacher,¡± I explained to my partner, her tail starting to wag quickly, maybe due to my tone of voice. I had no idea, but it seemed she wasn¡¯t too fussed about things, so I went through the stuff I had looted these past few days, trying to decide what to take and what to leave here. There simply was too much to carry but maybe I¡¯d come back here at some point.


    The sun was just about to vanish, giving me the freedom of movement once more, when Silva stiffened, her fur standing up in an obvious display of intimidation. She let out a soft, warning growl, looking over at me for a second before focusing towards one of the closed doors once more. I had never even tried to use them, simply because the broken window gave me all the access that I¡¯d ever need, an entrance that was nicely hidden and yet easily accessible.


    Making myself combat-ready with my blades in hand and the frozen Shuttle floating above my shoulder, I channelled Astral Power into my cloak, all but disappearing in the deep shadows of the gloomy dusk. Listening carefully, I could hear voices, speaking softly and after a minute or so, I could hear metal scraping against metal, right on the other side of the nearby door.


    For a moment, I considered simply leading Silva away, to disappear through the broken window, but there was still a bit of sun in the sky and I wasn¡¯t about to subject myself to that curse. Not if I could help it.


    From the sounds I could hear from the other side of the door, it was relatively easy to imagine what was going on. Soft, whispering voices, speaking of the setting sun and a need for shelter, intermingled with lingering fear from the earthquake and the Shattered, questioning whether or not they would manage to get back to their base before the city is covered in darkness. Other survivors, trying to pick the lock on the door of my shelter, looking for a place to sleep.


    Slipping deeper into the darkness, I moved near one of the corners, not quite into it but trying to find a position that one wouldn¡¯t expect. Ready and waiting. At least one of the voices outside is female, one male, the other uncertain. Maybe either. Worse was that I couldn¡¯t be sure if there were more, I could faintly hear the rustling of clothes but trying to put a number on that was just impossible, at least with my current attributes. Silva might know more but sadly, she didn¡¯t tell me what she was hearing.


    Finally, the lock opened with a soft click and the door swung open with the tortured sound of unoiled hinges. Four people became visible, their positioning pretty idiotic, none of them using the wall for cover, they just stood in front of the door, as if asking to be skewered by an attack from the inside. What idiots, maybe their survival was more due to luck than skill.


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    The idiot-squad trooped in without a care in the world, their eyes swivelling around but not actually securing the area. As if they were on a sightseeing trip, wandering through a museum or something like that. Sure, I was using my magic to conceal myself, but that only helped, it wasn¡¯t as if I was invisible. Even worse, they missed Silva at first glance and she didn¡¯t even seriously try to hide, simply waiting in the middle of the room, near the door that led to the window we used as entrance. In a good position to flee at a moment''s notice, demonstrating that her tactical ability is superior to those who had just entered.


    ¡°Ugh,¡± the fool who entered second suddenly stopped, almost causing the one behind him to collide with his back. ¡°Good doggo?¡± he pleaded, looking at Silva with wide-eyes. ¡°Are you a good boy?¡± he continued, trying to appease Silva who now started to growl in a deep, threatening manner.


    ¡°Shit, that beast¡¯s level fourteen,¡± the third in line, and owner of the female voice added, staring at my dear partner, having obviously Observe¡¯d her. Silva wasn¡¯t happy with the invasion of her privacy and her growl deepened, her hackles rising.


    Curious, I used my own Observe, only that I focused on the concealment-rune at the same time, channelling them both using my dual thought streams. It was a trick I had picked up on Mundus and while I wasn¡¯t sure if it would completely conceal the use of Observe at my level, it might stop them from noticing.


    Knowing their levels, I could only shake my head. Two of them, the one in the lead and the one in the back, were level six, the second in line level five and the girl who had just spoken a mighty level four. Pathetic.


    ¡°We might manage to tame the dog, don¡¯t make any aggressive moves,¡± the guy in the back suggested, looking past his team to see Silva looking ready to pounce and rip the four of them apart.


    ¡°If anyone makes an aggressive move, it would be me. Or maybe my dog. And she¡¯s not a good boy,¡± I mocked them, my voice catching them completely off-guard. It was a hard challenge to keep myself from laughing at their reactions, one of them even managed to drop the makeshift club he was carrying around. Or maybe I should call it a make-shit club?


    ¡°Who¡¯re you?!¡± the girl squeaked out, her eyes trying to focus on my still-concealed form.


    ¡°The one who has taken shelter here?¡± I replied, before letting out a soft whistle to call Silva to my side. Walking across the room with slow, measured steps, Silva cut quite the intimidating figure, intimidating enough to make the one in the lead take a step back.


    ¡°Why are you here all alone?¡± the guy in the lead asked, looking both confused and somewhat agitated.


    ¡°Because I prefer to keep my own company. And I wouldn¡¯t say that I¡¯m alone,¡± I replied, gently petting Silva¡¯s head when she reached me. At that moment, I felt the greasy, intrusive sensation of Observe washing over me and tried to squash it, only to fail.


    ¡°Stop that,¡± I warned the girl, who suddenly went very pale. ¡°It is beyond rude to rip away someone''s privacy like that. Some would kill for it, be grateful I¡¯m in a forgiving mood,¡± I snarled, the blade floating above my shoulder twitching forward. That I had Observe¡¯d them myself was something I wasn¡¯t about to share. If they weren¡¯t able to notice, they just didn¡¯t need to know and didn¡¯t deserve their privacy.


    ¡°Level fifteen!?¡± the girl blurted out, her face going pale.


    ¡°Yes, I¡¯ve been quite successful,¡± I grinned, quite amused at the expressions on their faces. ¡°You may stay here for the night, or you can fuck off for all I care. Just don¡¯t get in my way,¡± I told them, having already decided that I wouldn¡¯t come back. Not if there were people near enough to casually venture over, people I didn¡¯t trust.


    During our talk, the sun had set to the point that I wouldn¡¯t be subject to my curse any longer, so I made my way towards the door. No need to hop out through the window, if it wasn¡¯t necessary. With practised ease, I strapped Silva''s bags across her torso before we started to walk out of the building.


    My movement brought me close enough that they could actually make out my physique through my concealment and one of them, the second in line who was also the idiot who dropped his club earlier, started to mutter something that sounded suspiciously like ¡°just some little girl,¡± but he didn¡¯t get further than the first syllable of the word little before an elbow silenced him.


    The other two simply moved out of the way, giving Silva and me a wide berth, not even trying to recruit us. Fear could be a wonderful thing, especially when it kept people from bothering me.

 Interlude: Survivors 101

    Under a dreary, grey winter sky, a trio of dishevelled figures is fighting to contain another figure, this one barely looking human. The three are bruised and dirty, their clothes sporting numerous stains and a few rips, but compared to their foe, they appear to be in pristine condition. That foe, though humanoid, looks far from human. Its clothes are nothing more than rags, barely hanging onto the gaunt frame, its hands have twisted into claws, fingernails elongated and thickened, and its skin has turned leatherlike while the hairs have turned into a grimy, tangled mess. And the sight that haunts the dreams of many survivors, the ghostly, azure flames that have replaced the eyes of those who were shattered, dimming and flaring as it fights with those who merely want to survive. It¡¯s almost impossible to tell whether the creature used to be male or female, now, after the changes it has undergone, it is nothing but a Shattered husk of the person it used to be. The only thing it has left is aggression, the desire to rip those who withstood the change apart. And in turn, those who have survived are fighting back, scouring the city for supplies to carry back to their shelter.


    Shelter, the place the lost souls have decided to call home, is the small bastion of light after the fires have swept the Earth. Created by a young woman who has spoken to the other survivors, telling them about the system that came with the change. She told of another world, of a chance given to the people by the Gods. Guidance, as she said, guidance to allow as many as possible to live through the times of change. A chance to avoid the purgatory of the Change. At first, her words fell on deaf ears, panic, grief and rage taking over, pushing people to their limits and beyond. But in the face of miracles, however small they might be, people have started to see hope. Hope that the times of change will pass, hope that the world will go on. Hope, sanctuary and their fellow people, that is what everyone is fighting for. And that is why four young people ventured out, clad in little more than their dirty clothes, armed with what little equipment has been salvaged. Fireaxes, clubs, kitchen knives, whatever was handy, whatever could be used. Hunting for supplies and, if possible, hunting for the precious EXP, the currency that allows everyone to become more than they are. To make their own miracles, thanks to the chance given to everyone by the Gods.


    For EXP, people have to fight, even if the fight is dangerous. Especially if the fight is dangerous. And that is why three people, with the fourth acting as rearguard, scout and guard, are working together to fight a Shattered, despite the monster being stronger, faster and more durable than them. Fight, for a better tomorrow.


    And so they fight, even as each swipe of those wicked claws forced one of them back, as each lunge made them frantically dodge aside, often rolling across the ground, earning more bruises and dirty clothes in the process. But compared to the alternative, compared to being ripped apart by the inhuman strength of the Shattered, bruises are a welcome payment.


    ¡°Stun incoming,¡± Arlan, the innately strongest of the three calls out, even as he pulls on that weird, nebulous sensation that has settled in his gut, ever since the blue flames swallowed the world. The next moment, he feels the warm mist flood through his arm, into the simple club, fashioned from a thick branch and wrapped with some cloth to provide a grip, making the club give off a soft, crimson glow. Heavy Blow, the system calls the skill, increasing the strength of the next attack and potentially stunning a foe, if the hit connects fully. Just like a dozen times before, Arlan leans into the swing, timing it so his attack strikes just after the Shattered tried to go for Jeff, the nimblest of the three. With a whistling sound, the club swipes through the air and even as the Shattered tries to dodge, connects heavily, sending the Shattered reeling. Not in pain, it seems that the creatures don¡¯t feel that, but in a brief moment of stunned disorientation.


    And just as they have planned, Kenny swoops in, taking full advantage of the opening. His fire axe connects with a meaty chunk, the sound more akin to hacking into wood than the soft flesh of another human. The strike smashes into the Shattered¡¯s shoulder, the force enough to send it to the ground. And there, without any mercy for what was a human just a few days ago, the three pounce, to make sure that the Shattered will never rise again.


    Hesitation has been beaten out of them, the brutal reality of the changed world is a simple one. If it has burning eyes, it has to die. Otherwise, it will tear you apart or it will tear your friends apart. If the Shattered don¡¯t die, one of your comrades will get hurt.


    Finally, the Shattered stops moving and the three fighters stumble backwards, sinking to the ground in exhaustion.


    ¡°I levelled,¡± Arlan crows, a proud smile on his face after the system told him that he has reached level six. The first of the four of them, making him one of the strongest people living in the Shelter. Only their leader, their unassuming Denmother who explained as much as possible about the system, has a higher level, thanks to the divine miracles she can call upon.


    ¡°Me too,¡± Jenny, their scout and rearguard, adds only to pause, staring towards a nearby alley.


    ¡°Guys, get up, we need to run,¡± she commands, her voice filled with urgency. The three on the ground know the tone and immediately react, pushing themselves to their feet and doing just that. Run, as another Shattered comes from that alley, hopefully not yet in range to fully catch onto them.


    Frantically, they run, keeping to the main roads so they can hopefully see other Shattered before running into them until they can duck into an alley to escape, to break contact and hopefully return to the slow, sneaky prowling they have been using the whole time.


    Jenny is best at that, at finding spaces to hide and circumventing the Shattered. She is also the only one their leader inducted into the worship of Frigg, giving her special guidance to help her guide the flock. She has, as of yet, not managed to create any miracles, but by now, she believes. God, the one Jenny has learned about in long-forgotten sermons, has no place in this new world. Here, only results count and she is feeling that strange, uplifting feeling growing within her, even as her prayers leave her almost as exhausted as a day of running through the city.


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    ¡°We won¡¯t make it back,¡± Kenny curses, looking at the sky and the dimming light. They have run too far, have been forced into too much of a detour to avoid further conflict.


    ¡°We¡¯ll find something,¡± Jenny promises, silently praying for a miracle. And somehow, she gets a feeling of direction, a soft pull giving her something to follow. Emboldened by that feeling, she continues to guide her friends, even as she starts feeling lightheaded.


    Twice more, they have to sneak around Shattered and once, they manage to take another one down, allowing Kenny to reach that coveted level six as well. A small part of Jenny is jealous, wishing that she, too, would get that little bit of power that is keeping her from reaching level five, the level where she¡¯d gain her first Attribute Points. She has seen the changes her friends have undergone, not so much visible but oh-so-obvious. Stronger, or faster, strengthening their advantages even further. Hopefully, those points will be what allows her to truly commune with the divine, to call forth miracles.


    But first, survival.


    Guided by her feeling, the four reach an abandoned factory, abandoned long before the changes have ever hit. Jenny has no idea why it feels safe to her, but given that they haven¡¯t seen a single Shattered in the last ten minutes, she trusts her feeling.


    ¡°Locked,¡± Kenny simply states, trying to open the rusted door.


    ¡°Give me a moment,¡± Jeff suggests with a grin, kneeling before the door and pulling some simple tools from his pouch. Glances are shared but nobody asks. The life they had before, it is in the past. Nobody asks, nobody wants to be reminded of what they have lost.


    Only what skills are available to survive


    After a short wait the door clicks open and Kenny moves ahead pushing it open as a screech of unoiled hinges rips through the evening gloom.


    ¡°Holy shit,¡± Jeff mutters, moments after they entered. In the gloom, a huge hound awaits them, big enough to look Kenny, the tallest of them, in the eye if it stood on its hind legs. Big and with obvious traces of blood around its snout and an aura of power that causes them goosebumps.


    ¡°Good doggo,¡± he continues, trying to keep the dog placid, even as it starts to growl softly, ¡°Are you a good boy?¡±


    ¡°Shit, that beast¡¯s level fourteen,¡± Jenny gasps out, staring death in the face. So far, they have run from everything above level six, focused on enemies around level four or five. Now, they face something far beyond their strength, even if that something is a dog.


    ¡°We might manage to tame the dog, don¡¯t make any aggressive moves,¡± Arlan suggests, visions of powerful pets that do all the fighting for them floating through his mind.


    ¡°If anyone makes an aggressive move, it would be me. Or maybe my dog. And she¡¯s not a good boy,¡± a mocking voice echoes in the empty room, seemingly coming from the shadows around them. Eyes wide, all four of them look around frantically, trying to locate the speaker while Arlan managed to drop his club, letting it bounce on the concrete floor.


    Jenny is the first to notice the speaker, a dark shape, seamlessly blending into the shadowy gloom of the abandoned building. Looking closely, the shape appears to be female, just as the voice had been. Only, the shape is far too small and petite for an adult, it can¡¯t be much more than a girl. Or something in the shape of one.


    ¡°Who¡¯re you?!¡± Jenny asks, trying to control her agitated voice. Now that she sees the shape, she can feel power rolling off it, threatening to drown her out entirely as cold sweat starts running down her back. Somehow, the petite female shape feels far more threatening than the dog.


    ¡°The one who has taken shelter here?¡± the monster in the body of a young girl asks, clearly amused by the question, before calling the other monster to her side with a soft whistle.


    ¡°Why are you all alone?¡± Kenny asks, angry at the irresponsible people who left a young girl alone with such a beast. What if the beast had eaten her up?!


    ¡°Because I prefer to keep my own company. And I wouldn¡¯t say that I¡¯m alone,¡± the shape responds, gently petting the other monster¡¯s head, completely unafraid.


    Unable to stop herself, Jenny decides to use her Observe ability, she needs to know what this monster is. After a brief flicker, the familiar blue box appears, telling her that they are facing a human. A level fifteen human.


    Unable to keep herself from gasping, Jenny goes pale, the cold sweat now soaking her shirt.


    ¡°Stop that,¡± the young girl commands, her voice allowing no resistance, ¡°It is beyond rude to rip away someone''s privacy like that. Some would kill for it, be grateful I¡¯m in a forgiving mood,¡± she adds, as a strange, silvery white object darts out of the gloom, only to disappear back into the darkness moment later.


    ¡°Level fifteen?!¡± Jenny asks, her voice taking on a pleading tone, knowing that it is only benevolence that has kept the monster from slaughtering them all.


    Hearing Jenny, the three with her realise just what they are facing. A boss-monster, or something with the powers of one. And they are woefully unprepared.


    ¡°Yes, I¡¯ve been quite successful,¡± the girl-shaped monster replies, a savage grin on her face. ¡°You may stay here for the night, or you can fuck off for all I care. Just don¡¯t get in my way!¡±


    With these words, the monster sauters forward, clearly not seeing the four of them as a threat. Casual, as if this was an ordinary day, not nightfall in the middle of the apocalypse. Even the girl¡¯s clothes, while the cloak is weird, she looks perfectly sorted out, clean and tidy, while her hair has an impeccable sheen, the small lights glinting within giving it the appearance of perfect styling. In the middle of the apocalypse. All four move out of the way, unwilling to get close to either of the two monsters they are facing.


    Finally, the two monsters are far enough from them and tension drains from their bodies.


    ¡°What on earth was that monster? Why did it look like a girl?!¡± Kenny asks, his voice cracking.


    ¡°That was not just some little girl,¡± Jenny insists, the knowledge that the monster was human somehow making things only worse for her. ¡°If we ever see her again, be polite. Be very, very polite,¡± she adds, trying to keep her trembling legs under control. The monster told them they can take shelter here and given what sort of monster has taken shelter here before, this might be the safest place of them all.


    Maybe, for once, she can sleep without nightmares.

 Chapter 696

    As Silva and I walked away from the foursome, I could hear them for a little while. For a few seconds, they were completely flabbergasted, stunned to the point that they were completely silent. If not for the voices that I could hear after those first dozen or so seconds, I would have thought they might have simply gone into the building, exploring what we had just vacated. But no, as soon as they managed to collect their jaws from the ground, they started speaking in hushed voices, trying to come to grips with encountering me. Luckily, they couldn¡¯t see the wide grin on my face, simply because my back was turned to them, when they were wondering what sort of monster, or deity, I was, trying to reconcile the discrepancy between my petite physique, female sex and the fact that, quite obviously, I had killed a lot more Shattered than all four of them together.


    The change might have been worth it just for this sensation, to be able to stand proudly, without being underestimated for your physique, sex or any other arbitrary characteristic one might think of. Or rather, that the primary characteristic people would be judged by was their level, giving rise to a whole new host of problems but for now, I was riding the crest of the wave, likely standing above all others. At least above those four. For once, I was the biggest, baddest bitch in town and it felt glorious.


    And to keep that lofty perch, I needed to keep going. After leaving the foursome behind, Silva and I headed towards Mrs Wu¡¯s gym. Normally, it would take me a good thirty minutes by bus, but now, I would have to roughly walk four hours, depending on how many Shattered crossed our way. That meant we had about eight hours of time for other things, a little more if we did those other things while moving in that direction.


    Sadly, it seemed that the previous night¡¯s level boost had left me rather overlevelled for the common Shattered. Sure, they gave a bit of EXP but far too little to make actively hunting them worthwhile. There were simply too few of them to use large-scale attacks and individually, they weren¡¯t worth it. Unless I decided to do something similar to the fishing on the rooftop last night, I would have to think of other ways to keep my levelling pace going.


    Things like flooding another part of the sewers with my deadly mist, that was something I was planning to do, but I wasn¡¯t sure where the best position for that was. To just send mist down a random drain felt just that, random. It might kill hundreds of rats and other pests, it might be a complete waste of time.


    But given that last night¡¯s misting had mostly killed critters I had never heard about, it might be worth it nonetheless. Maybe not in the same, hour-long ritual but a shorter one, simply conjuring mist for twenty, thirty minutes, letting it spread before turning up the devouring force for another ten minutes, that should destroy any low-levelled enemies and net me some EXP. The damage dealt by my mist was relatively low, but a few minutes should be enough regardless.


    With that idea in mind, I decided to clear yet another smaller area before trying it out. A pair of Shattered was brought low by breaking their legs, before they were turned into Blood Magic bait, the Astral Power in their blood turned into Ice to give me a bit of cover when I worked my magic. Their demise drew another three Shattered from nearby houses and their lives, too, were used to fuel my continued growth in power.


    Their essence was imbued into the same magical formation I had used the night before, only now, I realised that I could do a whole lot more. With my second thought stream, I could have one part of my mind completely focused on the Astral River, floating in a comfortable, meditative state, even as the other half of my mind was frantically pumping Astral Power into the runic formation before me. That change alone almost doubled how much Power I could funnel into the magic, my physical stamina quickly becoming the bottleneck for how much and how long I could actually channel my power.


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    For my first experiment, I decided to conjure for twenty minutes and the amount of Mist I could produce in that time was almost as much as I had conjured in an hour the night before. When I felt that it was enough, that my influence had spread far and wide, I mentally switched gears, even deciding to activate Overflow to speed things along. The mist instantly took on an ominous, grey tinge, with streaks of visibly pulsing red running through it and I felt my Astral Power drain at an alarming rate.


    I put almost three-quarters of my maximum power into a minute of frantic channelling, the total amount quite a bit lower than what I could have done with a slow, consistent channel but I wasn¡¯t overly interested in that. My goal was to catch as many enemies as possible before they could run out of the mist. Sure, the mist had a confusion component, but that might not be good enough for every enemy I caught in it, some might have escaped the previous night. This night, escaping would be a lot harder.


    Finally, I felt the tension leave my body, there were no more living creatures trapped within my cold mist. The change wasn¡¯t as obvious as it had been in Road to Purgatory, there might be something more to the whole differentiation between being in combat and not being in combat but I hadn¡¯t looked into it, not yet. I could recognise the difference most of the time, but nothing more for now.


    Looking into the log, I was, again, able to scroll past a lot of kill notifications and again, the levels were mostly pitiful to the point that I didn¡¯t gain any EXP for most of them. Not even enough to give me a full level, I merely got about half a level out of it, while I felt a small change in Silva next to me, making me think that she had hit fifteen.


    ¡°Well, that was a bit of a bust, girl,¡± I told her, petting her fur in disappointment. Sure, killing hundreds of potential monsters was great but what I was doing was more akin to pest control than anything that would get me levels. Stronger enemies were needed if there currently was such a thing. Maybe more rooftop fishing was indicated, even if the Mist-conjuring was currently quite good when it came to providing skill ranks. This time, I had gained one in each of the masteries and in Astral Meditation, getting Ice to fourteen, Darkness to thirteen and Blood and Meditation to ten.


    Which would give me my next rune, once I meditated on things. I wasn¡¯t sure which way to go there, I could either try to get something more in-tune with life-force, something like Vitality, that would allow me to strengthen the devouring I was using with my Mist, thus increasing the damage. Or I could go for something along the lines of the Sacrifice-rune I had stumbled across in Mundus, allowing me to easier interface between a runic circle and my Blood Magic. It had less overall viability but, in turn, when I could apply it, the concept was incredibly strong. Or maybe something that would help with my healing, even if I had rarely used it thus far. Once I needed it, having as powerful healing as possible could save lives, namely Silva¡¯s or mine.


    But I had quite a bit of time to consider, for now, I simply left the cover I had conjured and stood, intent on continuing on my path. This would be the last drain I flooded with mist for the night, but I would look for a good apartment building to use for Blood Magic fishing, that would continue to give EXP. The enemies in the sewers were, at least for now, simply too low-level to allow me further growth, I needed my enemies to be at least around level seven or eight, and if they were in the double-digits, it would be best.


    A snort escaped me when I realised just how ridiculous my thoughts were getting. Wishing for stronger enemies, as if this was a game. Shaking my head, I put my mind back into the survival-mode of the first night when every Shattered had been a potential threat. Destroying them as soon as I noticed them, keeping to the shadows and concealing myself. I couldn¡¯t let myself get arrogant with my power, that way was an early grave.


    Even my arrogance with the other survivors earlier had been idiotic in hindsight A foolish risk, one that I shouldn¡¯t take again. I should have simply slipped away, shouldn¡¯t have risked standing out in the open with nothing but a flimsy bit of Darkness to conceal myself. I could assume that I was the strongest person in the area but reality might make an ass out of me.

 Chapter 697

    There was something weirdly satisfying about throwing a Shattered off a roof. I wasn¡¯t sure why it felt so damn good, if there was some strange, primal sense of dominance that I got from taking the high ground and, quite literally, standing tall as king of the hill or if it was something else. Maybe it was the satisfaction that, for once, I could look down on somebody else, instead of being the smallest person in the room, I wasn¡¯t sure. But whatever it was, each time I kicked one of them down, draining the magic from their blood as they fell, my lips curled into a wide smile.


    But throwing Shattered off buildings wasn¡¯t just to satisfy my inner Napoleon complex if that is what it was. It allowed Silva and me to use them as bait, my Blood Magic saturating the area with the miasma that they seemed to crave, allowing me to attack them from a secure position with a large amount of cover available. And drawing them out seemed to be necessary, the stronger Shattered, and Scorched, were smart enough to remain hidden, not wandering the roads to get picked off. Or they might simply be incredibly rare, but when we had cleared out the building earlier, it had drawn another one. It had been enough to get me to level sixteen while adding another point in Blood Magic and Unarmed Combat, bringing them to seven and three. Not the greatest advance, but given that it had only taken about forty minutes, it wasn¡¯t too bad.


    We continued through the city, with me mostly remaining hidden and letting Silva fight and train her skills. She needed the training and, in some ways, it would also help me to train my Blood Runes, if she ever got hurt. Not that I wanted that, but I knew that she would be, at some point. That was simply part and parcel of this new life.


    It took a while until I decided on the next building I wanted to clear out, yet another apartment complex that would hopefully bring out another high-level Shattered or Scorched. While they were rare, they also were the only enemies that gave a reasonable amount of EXP, compared to the pittance I gained when killing individual Shattered.


    But looking at the levels I gained and comparing it to my past experience levelling on Mundus, I realised that it actually wasn¡¯t that bad. It seemed that there was some force at play that allowed for faster levelling, maybe in reaction to the change, maybe due to some other reason. Or Shattered, simply by virtue of some special characteristic, gave more EXP. I couldn¡¯t, for the life of me, remember just how many EXP one enemy on Mundus had given me, in order to compare it. I remembered killing many enemies, enemies that deliberately ran away or hid, making the search and hunt often take longer than the actual fight, but that might be the reason for the perceived faster levelling. That the Shattered didn¡¯t try to run or hide, they came at me, almost like zombies, and died for it.


    Just like the two times we had cleared an apartment building before, we quietly made our way to the roof, avoiding combat as much as possible, until we reached the adequate choke-point. Once we were there, and I had fortified the position further by icing up the stairs to make them extra slippery, Silva let out a loud, angry growl, making sure that every Shattered in the area noticed us. With my heightened Intuition, I was able to feel an almost imperceivable tinge of magic on the sound, a faint scent of blood travelling with it. Without really noticing, I drew one of my blades, making myself ready to fight when I realised what I was doing.


    Looking over to my canine companion, she was completely focused on the stairs, her hair standing on end, and I could hear why. Shattered were coming, quite a few of them, just like we had planned.


    With the narrow stairs and the slippery ice, I sat back, watching Silva deal with the Shattered. Just like before, she focused on separating individual Shattered out, making me realise once more just how smart she was. She was deliberately trying to let them through one at a time, so I could incapacitate them for my Blood Magic.


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    Once the first got through, I decided to add my own lure to her earlier taunt, carving the runes I used for my Blood Magic into the crippled Shattered before ripping the life and magic from its body. The resulting miasma spread out, driving the Shattered on the stairs a little wild, but Silva managed to withstand the pressure.


    I was just about to ask her to let another one through, after checking the surrounding area to see how many more were on their way, when Silva let out a warning growl, catching my attention. Moments later, the Shattered that had crowded the stairs were viciously shoved aside, some of them falling, one of them even falling over the railing and another Shattered made its way up the stairs. This one used to be female and was, amusingly, not that much taller than me, if a little on the chubby side. What made it stand out was the fire in its eyes, a deeper blue compared to all the others, more of a royal blue, compared to the cerulean of the others.


    And with the change in eye-colour came an increase in power, that much was instantly obvious.


    ¡°Let it pass, Silva, keep the rest back,¡± I ordered her, already striking with my Frozen Shuttle. We needed to make use of the choke-point, or we would get swamped. To increase the chances of the Shattered ignoring Silva and coming after me, I used Observe on it, learning that it was a level thirteen Shattered, stronger than any I had seen thus far.


    And my scheme worked, the Shattered happily bypassed Silva, while she focused on keeping the others back. Sadly, that meant I now had to fight a physically stronger foe with limited space to dodge. Luckily, I had my second thought-stream, allowing me to fully focus on defending myself with my butterfly blades while the Frozen Shuttle was harassing my enemy, carving bits and pieces of flesh off its body. It slowly advanced on me, swiping with hands that had, just a few days ago, been similar to mine but now, those hands had turned to wicked claws, the nails growing longer and encasing the fingertips completely.


    Carefully keeping my distance, I dodged and used my blades to redirect its blows, making sure to never take on head-on. Just from the way it had shoved the other Shattered aside, I knew that trying to block would just wrench my weapons from my hands, or possibly break my wrist, the thing was that strong. I made one attempt to cripple the Shattered by taking out the knee but sadly, it looked like the Shuttle lacked the punch to manage.


    Luckily, while it had massive strength and formidable endurance and vitality, it was lacking in agility, maybe also in dexterity. It was faster than I was when it came to straight, linear acceleration but when it came to turning and redirecting its momentum, it was far weaker.


    Letting its claws scrape along my blade once again, I stepped further back, dodging around one of the air-conditioner units on the rooftop in an attempt to gain an advantage. Even I had to move sideways to fit through the gap and I hoped that it would the Shattered would either try to follow or move around, giving me valuable time that might allow me to use my rune magic. Even a simple, three-rune spell would be incredibly useful, as the blunt impact of a hailstone might be enough to break bones.


    It chose to move around, a smile growing on my face as I drew out the runes I was planning to use to cripple it, when I noticed its muscles tense in an extreme way. Bullet Time activated by reflex and it was a good thing it did. Instead of moving slowly and deliberately as it had done the whole time, the Shattered leapt forward, its speed far beyond anything it had shown so far. There was no way to finish the rune circle, even if I tried to instantly project the third rune, so the only thing I could do was jump aside, away from its trajectory.


    To my surprise, it tried to correct its course mid-air by kicking against the air-con unit, but that gave me an opening, too. It was already moving towards the edge of the building, so I happily activated Overflow, channelling a chunk of Astral Power into my Frozen Shuttle, letting it crash into the Shattered¡¯s stomach, digging in deeply. And shoving the thing across the edge, letting it fall to the ground far below. To make sure it wouldn¡¯t get back up, I immediately followed up and started to draw another rune triangle, ignoring the potential waste of Astral Power.


    The conjured Hailstone slammed down, accelerated further by my Ice Magic, striking the Shattered in the head and once that stone fell, there was no question that the Shattered was dead, its head was cracked open against the sidewalk. Now, I just had to help Silva finish the rest of them and decide whether or not we wanted to fish for more.

 Chapter 698

    Even with the number of bruises and scrapes Silva had suffered, she didn¡¯t look like she was in too much trouble and I still had over half my Astral Power and Stamina. With that in mind, I decided that we would try to fish for more. I had no idea if there would be Shattered of similar power to the one I had just knocked off the building in the area or if the Shattered were somewhat territorial but given that we needed EXP, it seemed prudent to use the set-up we had to its greatest effect.


    ¡°Silva, let one in, I¡¯m done here,¡± I told her as I started to cast a thee-rune Ice spell. Just as before, Silva stepped aside and I used Observe on the Shattered that had been up-front, trying to get past her, only to repeatedly get knocked back by the canine, or get its legs ripped out from beneath it. This Shattered was level six, so nothing too special, an assessment that amused me to no end when I remembered the survivor group I had seen earlier. Level six, nothing too special - but also the strongest member of their group.


    As planned, the Shattered took the opening, pushed past Silva and started to charge at me, only for its already damaged leg to get utterly destroyed by my hailstone. By now, I was getting really good at disabling their limbs without dealing too much damage to their flesh or spilling their blood. I didn¡¯t want to kill them with my attacks, just disable them so I could drain them later. It was grimly amusing that I had to actually try to keep them alive, but it was also a point of pride for me, that I was getting powerful enough to stand tall. Or as tall as someone below five feet could stand. Maybe that was why I enjoyed kicking my enemies off buildings. It allowed me to look down at them.


    For the next ten minutes, Silva and I started to carefully take the Shattered out one by one, until I could see the end of the throng. Once there were only two remaining on the stairs, I started to drain the first one and kick it off the building, ripping its Astral Power out of it before it could hit the ground.


    One by one, I tossed the bait down, creating a thick could of miasma while using the Astral Power I freed up to cast runic spells on any Shattered that approached. I didn¡¯t manage to kill them outright, but I could break a leg or shatter a shoulder, making our job a lot easier once they got up here.


    Soon, a dozen Shattered were stacked on the sidewalk in front of the building and it was then that I noticed a Shattered approach with greater speed than the rest of them, roughly as quick as the one I fought earlier. A grin appeared on my face and I immediately began casting a five-rune spell, trying to get as much strength into my opening strike as I could.


    With Overflow active, I spiked the runic spell as much as I could, imbuing it with the entire Astral Power of a Shattered that immediately followed its friends down the building, and launched my attack. My Ice Magic latched onto the flying hailstone, not trying to truly control it but possibly give it some direction. As it turned out, I shouldn¡¯t have worried too much. The Shattered was so focused on the delicious miasma that it didn¡¯t even try to dodge before getting struck in the chest by my hailstone, the attack strong enough to cave the chest in and send it to the ground. When the hailstone bounced back, I took control of it and used my Ice Magic to strike again, this time targeting and destroying the head, successfully turning the flames in its eyes off. The combination of Rune Magic and direct magic manipulation was a wonderful tool, easily my strongest weapon.


    Sadly, that one particularly powerful Shattered was the only worthy prey we managed to draw. The rest of the Shattered were, quite frankly, nothing special, just enough to add some much-needed EXP to the tally. Not enough to get me to level seventeen but most of the way there. Though, again, the biggest chunk of that was from the two higher-levelled Shattered, the second one clocking in at a respectable level fourteen.


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    In addition, the fight had been quite beneficial for my Blood Magic, the continuous use enough to bring it to level eight, while my Dual Blades levelled to two, I hadn¡¯t used them much, and my Ice Magic to thirteen. All in all, an excellent haul, especially after I healed Silva up and gained a point in Blood Rune Mastery, bringing it to eleven and making me realise that I had barely healed anyone since the change. It simply had never been necessary, most of our fights had ended before the enemy could get to either of us, thanks to the combination of stealth and powerful magic. That the Shattered were neither the quickest nor the most perceptive of enemies made the whole thing only easier.


    Not that I believed that would last, at some point, things would get dicey. Maybe I should look to find another meat-shield, someone I wasn¡¯t attached to, though I doubted that would work. Not only did the Lone Traveller Trait prevent me from cycling through allies, at least if I wanted to keep things efficient, it also meant a certain investment into those allies. I hadn¡¯t figured out what it meant to ¡°mark¡± a person, even after the number of possible marks ticked from zero to one the moment I hit level ten, but I doubted it would be something I¡¯d ever be willing to do casually. Maybe looking into summons would be a wise idea, I was relatively certain that the Remnant Spirits I had used on Mundus at the end wouldn¡¯t count as ¡°people¡±, no matter what metric was used. Sadly, creating such constructs, to say nothing of the spirits to inhabit them, would be difficult, unless I deliberately made them temporary. Something to look into, but later. For now, I wanted to get to Mrs Wu¡¯s gym and hopefully link up with them.


    And if linking up with them was impossible, I wanted to give her, and her husband, their well-deserved rest, not let them wander around these streets as a Shattered caricature of themselves. They deserved better.


    Silva and I continued on our merry way, the few Shattered that shambled into our way dispatched in an effort to improve Silva¡¯s skills further. I noticed that her movements were getting a little sharper, though I wasn¡¯t sure if that was simply from increased attributes, if she even got those, or if her actual skills were improving. If she had those¡­


    Not being able to have your teammate respond to you was a bit of a hassle. I had been explaining the system to her from day one, but whether or not it worked the same for her, I didn¡¯t know. Maybe I would, at some point, be able to regain the ability I once had been granted from my bond with Lenore, but I wasn¡¯t holding my breath. Even if those abilities had been incredibly useful.


    Thinking of my avian friend, I wondered if I would be able to regain my ability to wield Death Magic. I doubted I retained the affinity, but that merely meant my efficiency and ease of use would go down, not that I wouldn¡¯t be able to use it at all.


    Driven by curiosity, I disabled the next Shattered we came across, before placing a hand on the body. Mentally reaching out, I tried to get a feel for its life force. That process was somewhat similar to my Blood Magic, it might even be an adjacent skill, but I wasn¡¯t trying to separate out the Astral Power that dwelled within the Blood, bound into the life force of the target, I was merely trying to feel it.


    The moment I felt that force, I focused on my Astral Power. Remembering how I had wielded Death Magic on Mundus, I pushed my Astral Power outwards, trying to extinguish the life force, pitting my own power against that power.


    Astral Power was draining from my body at a rapid pace, leaving me panting from the strain, but I could feel death ripping through my foe. Sadly, I could also feel death ripping through me, luckily at a much lower rate. Death Magic had always been a bit of a double-edged sword, only an individual''s affinity keeping it from destroying the caster alongside the target.


    But it had some unique properties and when I shifted my focus away from the expired Shattered beneath me, I could see a blue box telling me that I had gained the skill, just as planned.


    Controlling the breath that was flowing out of me, I pushed myself to my feet, staggering a little from the strain.


    ¡°I¡¯m okay, girl,¡± I assured Silva, petting the concerned dog. ¡°We¡¯re almost there, you know?¡± I added, looking around the area. We were almost at the bus station I normally used, just a few minutes away from the gym. Still, just because we were almost there didn¡¯t mean that we could relax. Shaking my head, I slipped back into the darkness around us, continuing on my silent prowl.

 Chapter 699

    Amusingly, the last bit of the way was the hardest for me. Not because of enemies but because of ever-increasing tension and worry. Even before the change, I hadn¡¯t been good when it came to handling other people and now, with the change hanging over us all, I doubted that my clumsy and often awkward manners would help ease tensions. No, if anything, I felt it was more likely that I¡¯d insult someone, making them snap and forcing me to defend myself. It was so easy to imagine such a scenario going down, it was almost sad. In addition, there were those wonderful traits I had picked up, Outsider chief among them. Those would almost certainly add to my troubles, but there was nothing I could do about it. And yet, even with all that in mind, I wanted to check on Mrs Wu.


    Silva and I had waited till twilight set in, giving us almost an hour to cross the last bit of distance, until the sun would actually rise and those hateful rays would bring their curse with them. I had decided to wait, simply because I felt an approach while there was a bit of light out would be seen with less suspicion than an approach during the dead of night, where it was harder to tell friend from foe. Sure, I might have been able to make the approach undetected but I had a feeling that wouldn¡¯t go over well, after all, if I could sneak up on them, the logical conclusion would be that others could do so, too. Regardless of my level, regardless of my ability with Darkness Magic, people would worry and tensions would rise.


    As we moved, I noticed quite a few dead Shattered on the ground, some of them with broken arrows in them, the others merely with holes where arrows had likely been removed. Realising that there were people nearby, I decided to take a risk and remove my concealment. With twilight creeping across the sky, the Darkness I used to conceal myself wouldn¡¯t last forever and at some point, people would notice me. Or they wouldn¡¯t and I could march into their base, wherever that might be, unopposed, at least until I wanted to talk to them. At that moment, people would obviously notice me and given that I¡¯d be within their base, they¡¯d have plenty of reasons to see me as a threat and react accordingly. Not the best first impression.


    On the other hand, if I let the locals make contact on their terms, while I was outside of their controlled zone, they¡¯d hopefully see me as a fellow survivor, not a threat that had invaded their base. But that didn¡¯t change the fact that walking down the street without my concealing cloak of darkness wrapped around me was making me feel self-conscious as if I was walking down the street naked.


    We never made it to the gym itself, one intersection before we got there, I noticed movement on one of the rooftops. Looking up, while casually staying behind one of the many parked cars on the side of the road, I called out.


    ¡°Hello on the roof,¡± I called, trying to pitch my voice so I didn¡¯t disturb everyone who might be sleeping while making myself heard. The figure I had noticed up there shook, making me think that they had been half-asleep, not fully paying attention.


    ¡°Who?!¡± the voice called back and from the pitch, I had a feeling that they were quite young. Moments later, before I ever had the chance to get a better look or respond, the figure disappeared from my view, taking cover up on the roof or something, but I was able to hear a few words regardless. It sounded like the guard I had noticed first was getting somebody else, the course of action quite amusing, given that they hadn¡¯t really made contact with me.


    After a moment of thought, I decided to stay put even if I hadn¡¯t been told to. That way, the locals could make their own determinations and I wouldn¡¯t be seen as a threatening figure. If I simply marched on, that might be what would happen. And given the dead Shattered I had seen, I had no doubt that somebody here was quite adept at taking down threats to their little community.


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    It didn¡¯t take long, maybe a minute, until another figure showed itself. This time, instead of a juvenile youth, the figure looking down at us was a middle-aged male, maybe in his forties, with a longbow in hand. I was relatively certain I had seen him before, likely on my way to Mrs Wu¡¯s gym, but I had no idea what his name was.


    ¡°Show me your eyes,¡± he called down, without even giving me a greeting. In turn, I pushed back my hair, making sure that my entire face was easily visible, and looked up, allowing him to ascertain that I actually had eyes, instead of the flames marking me as Shattered.


    ¡°Well, she¡¯s human,¡± he muttered, too soft for a normal human to understand, ¡°What brings you here?¡± he asked, though the tension in him had already decreased quite a bit.


    ¡°Looking for someone, Mrs Wu, the owner of the gym over there,¡± I replied, nodding towards that building. It only then occurred to me that I had no idea about her first name, I was certain I had seen it at some point, but I just couldn¡¯t recall. Even in my mind, she had always been Mrs Wu, or Teacher Wu.


    ¡°Head on in, most people have holed up at the gym, turned it into a shelter,¡± he directed. Looking around, I noticed that it wasn¡¯t the only building that had people on the roof, there were guards watching each approach into the area, protecting those within. It made me wonder if they had preparations for the underground approach, or if the vermin in the sewers hadn¡¯t made itself known to them.


    Regardless, I simply called out my acceptance to the guy on the roof and kept going. Soon, the sun would rise and I had no desire to be outside at that point.


    We continued on, and I felt a strange itch between my shoulder blades as if my instincts were warning me that there were armed people at my back, people who may or may not have my best interests in mind. After days of hyper-vigilance, it wasn¡¯t easy to push that feeling aside and relax, nor was I certain that I even wanted to relax. These people likely knew Mrs Wu, but I didn¡¯t know them.


    When we reached the gym¡¯s doors, there was another guard, also with a bow in hand, giving me the once-over, before she opened the door fully.


    ¡°Looking for Mrs, Wu?¡± she asked, her eyes wandering from Silva to me and back, looking a little intimidated. So far, she hadn¡¯t tried to Observe us, at least from what I could tell, but maybe the weapons at my side or the splattered blood that coated Silva made it obvious that we weren¡¯t messing around.


    ¡°Yes, she has been my teacher in the past. After all this, I wanted to make sure she is well,¡± I replied, leaving out the other option, that I wanted to make sure she had dignity in death.


    ¡°She¡¯s probably still asleep, but come in. You know your way around?¡± the guard asked, looking a little less tense.


    ¡°I knew the gym before the changes hit but I don¡¯t know what changes have been made,¡± I told her, and she gave me a quick explanation, telling me that the main workout room had been turned into the sleeping quarters for women and children while the smaller one was for the men. I had no desire to really mingle with either group, not until I had talked with Mrs Wu and made a decision about my future actions, so I simply moved into the foyer, away from any windows, and made myself somewhat comfortable. Hopefully, Mrs Wu would appear at some point, or I would have to go look for her.


    ¡°Samantha,¡± a familiar voice brought me out of the light doze I had been in, my eyes flickering open. ¡°It¡¯s good to see you well,¡± Mrs Wu told me, standing a few steps away from the position Silva and I had chosen.


    ¡°Teacher, I¡¯m glad you are okay,¡± I told her, rising to my feet. There were a few more people in the area, some of them looking at me with a mix of suspicion and caution, but overall, the reception wasn¡¯t overly hostile. Cautious, sure, but given the situation we all were in, that might be expected.


    ¡°Come, tell me how you fared these last few days,¡± Mrs Wu invited me, gesturing towards the door to their living quarters. Nodding, I followed along, Silva plodding behind me, clearly not intending to leave me alone.


    After sitting down on the couch, a strange feeling arose within me, the situation was so familiar, so similar to the talks we had after my lessons before, but also so very different.


    ¡°Would you like some tea?¡± she asked and I had to hold a giggle in, her manners hadn¡¯t changed at all. The world had burned, and she was just the same. Shaking my head, I let out a sigh, before starting to tell her about my last couple of days.

 Chapter 700

    The talk with Mrs Wu was interesting. On one hand, I initially wasn¡¯t sure how much of the backstory I should give her, as the things that I had done as Morgana weren¡¯t things normal people would consider ¡®good¡¯. Hell, if I merely looked at my actions on Mundus through an outsider¡¯s lens, I would have to consider myself evil and yet, when looking at the things I had done and my motivations, I didn¡¯t feel evil. It was something that made me a little introspective and had me questioning my concepts of morality.


    On the other hand, I wanted to give Mrs Wu and her merry band of survivors, for I was almost completely convinced that Mrs Wu would be in a leading, or at least influentially advising, position, as much information as possible, if only to pay her back for the instruction she had given me. While I knew that my actions on Mundus had been highly influential when it came to my survival after the change, I couldn¡¯t discard that Mrs Wu¡¯s instruction had allowed me to thrive. To say nothing about the physical effects her training had, without that, I doubted I would be anywhere near as fit as I was now.


    At the end of the day, however, it turned out that my considerations were all moot. Mrs Wu could easily spot my fibs and use simple, seemingly innocuous, questions to draw out the truth, making me realise that yeah, trying to pull the wool over a highly trained and experienced spy and interrogator was a fool¡¯s errant and a half. To say nothing about the fact that the vast majority of my ability in deception and the navigation of tricky conversations came from her. What little social graces my mother had managed to instil into me had been more along the lines of trying to avoid insulting people while making sure I was capable of communicating my points clearly. Though, thinking about it, maybe that training had been quite similar, both designed to keep me from saying too much, or from saying things too bluntly. A curious realisation, but not a truly important one.


    The big point of uncertainty, and of trust, was that Mrs Wu would prefer my help and the power I, at least temporarily, offered to her and her community to any benefit they might gain by betraying me. It was questionable and if I had gotten even a whiff of divine magic, I might not have dared to try, but I could only hope. And so I decided to tell her most of what I knew.


    By the end of our talk, Mrs Wu knew what I had been up to since the change and had a good idea about my theories in regard to Mundus, Road to Purgatory and the Divine. I had yet to figure out why two ostensibly competing Pantheons had worked together to get people to Mundus while giving the Travellers the option to pick either of the groups, but I didn¡¯t feel that was overly important, at least for now. It might be important later if the Gods decided to split the world in a similar fashion to how Mundus had been split between their spheres of influence, but for now, it didn¡¯t matter. What mattered was the continued survival of the people here, and of myself.


    Once we were done, Mrs Wu offered to tell me about their experience but by that point, I was simply too tired. It was clearly past my bedtime and Mrs Wu noticed, offering to let me stay in a guest-room, instead of the general sleeping quarters for females, an offer I gladly accepted. She offered me a candle, reminding me that electricity was completely out and that their water supply was limited, but I waved off. I wasn¡¯t able to navigate in perfect darkness just yet, but I was getting there. The slight gloom in the depths of her house was no problem for me, I was more worried about getting too much light and getting afflicted by the Curse of the Sun.


    Mrs Wu had never asked why I had only been hunting at night, but it didn¡¯t take a trained agent to realise that there was something going on. It was something I wasn¡¯t sure I wanted to be known. It was just too damn easy to hear about someone only active at night and jump to sinister conclusions. Simply human nature, there was a reason why one of the euphemisms for mystical monsters was ¡®things that go bump in the night¡¯, with me being one of those things. I didn¡¯t want to be known as some sort of nightstalker and I certainly didn¡¯t want to get staked through the chest.


    The guestroom gave me a bit of whiplash. It was so ordinary, so completely and utterly normal, that a small part of me briefly wondered if the whole change had been a delusion, conjured up by a cracking mind. But until the people in white coats came and offered me a special jacket so I could always hug myself, I would continue to treat the environment around me as if it was real. Even if I had spent months treating an environment with remarkable similarities to mine as a game.


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    Shaking my head, I made sure that the room was fit for my special needs. Once the curtains were drawn, I placed one of the blankets in front of the window, blocking out all light. The cursed Sun wouldn¡¯t get me, or was that the cursing sun? Either way, I was safe from those hateful rays and with a small early warning system, just some metal rigged to the door in a fashion Mrs Wu had taught me to, I decided that I was reasonably safe from intruders. Likely not from Mrs Wu, not unless I managed to incorporate magic into my defences, but safe from most people.


    Silva walked around the room a few times, sniffing around various corners and inspecting everything before she plopped herself down next to the bed, apparently satisfied with the situation. In turn, I put on some fresh clothes and laid down myself, trying to relax and get some sleep.


    It was a lot harder than I had anticipated. Before the change, I sometimes had trouble sleeping but now, after the change and the hypervigilance of the last few days, it felt as if any small noise, of which there were many, was booting me back into a wakeful, ready-for-action state. Only to crash moments later, when the adrenaline faded and my conscious mind discarded the noise as just another sign of nearby humans.


    In addition, the bed was keeping me awake. It was far too soft, after days of rough sleeping on a thin foam mattress, the comfortable, soft mattress felt just wrong. As if some sort of slimy, gooey monster was trying to swallow me up and devour me whole, it gave me the creeps.


    It took an hour of stubborn tossing and turning for me to decide that apparently, beds just didn¡¯t agree with me any longer. Instead, I put the mat I used outside next to Silva, who merely raised her head for a moment, studying me with her dark, brown eyes, before going back to sleep. Lying on the mat helped, as did cuddling up to Silva, her protective presence allowing me to rest a little easier.


    Whether or not I truly fell asleep, I wasn¡¯t certain. I might have been drifting for hours, or I might have actually fallen asleep, but eventually, my mind snapped back into focus, taking in the world around me once more. Hours had passed, from morning to afternoon, leaving me a little groggy, my mind a bit disjointed but somewhat rested.


    Sitting up, I decided to delve into the Astral River. On Mundus, the stream had been a wonderful, peaceful sanctuary for me, allowing me to relax my mind and body, revelling in its cosmic magnificence. Here, on Terra, I couldn¡¯t do that just yet. The Astral River was still in turmoil, roiling from the changes it imprinted on our reality but somehow, that turmoil had its own charm.


    Instead of a seemingly endless ocean, it was more akin to a small stream, with rapids that crested in white foam and a mix of placid gurgling and thunderous roars as it cascaded through the bedrock of reality. Fascinating in its own right and I had a feeling that witnessing what I could see here was a rare thing that only few could enjoy.


    But enjoying the world-changing magnificence wasn¡¯t the only reason I had delved into the Astral. Here, surrounded by all those vibrant, living humans, I would likely have an easier time pinning down the streams of blood and vitality that ran through the World. I needed to define one of my Blood runes and by now, I had made a decision. I wanted the power of sacrifice, to harvest the inherent energies of other living beings and make them my own.


    I remembered the rune easily, I hadn¡¯t carved it all that often on Mundus but when I did, it changed the world. Sacrifice was what had given me the ability to create large rituals, things beyond what I could do on my own. It wasn¡¯t purely evil, not inherently, but the way I had used it, most people would deem it such. And I didn¡¯t care. Moral Judgements, Mercy and those wonderful virtues, they were reserved for those with the strength to uphold them. Or for those who begged those with more power than them, by submitting and serving, like the disgusting wretches they were.


    Filled with my disdain, I felt the rune solidify in my mind, the harsh lines that could so easily be carved into the flesh of my resources reminding me of the havoc I had wrought in the past. And would in the future.


    After the Sacrifice rune was fixed in my mind, I remained there, my mind sitting at the edge of chaos as the primordial Astral River of my realm was digging into the fabric of reality. I couldn¡¯t understand what was going on, it was far beyond me, but I could watch. Watch, remember and maybe, one day, understand.


    No matter what, it seemed that my quest for magical understanding would remain with me, maybe forever. There were worse quests, all things considered, even if I had a more important one to handle first. Get my Sigmir back. No matter the price I would have to pay.

 Chapter 701

    At some point, I decided that I should speak to the locals and Mrs Wu some more. I didn¡¯t want to permanently stay here, hell, with the effect the proximity of this many humans had on my sleep I didn¡¯t even want to briefly stay here. If not for the persistent feeling of obligation towards Mrs Wu, I would leave as soon as the sun set. There was no ledger to tally what her training had given me, but I wanted to give her and her people a leg up. And I had three ideas that would likely work.


    One idea was that I would give them a brief overview of arcane magic and sorcery. I doubted I would find anyone with elements I could directly teach them about but I could give them an idea of where to start their own journey, maybe even direct them to a higher power, as galling as it felt to me. I remembered that Hecate wasn¡¯t really a god that interfered with mortal affairs, more a silently amused observer, as far as I knew, but one that might help mortals help themselves. Maybe, I wasn¡¯t sure and I wasn¡¯t about to ask, even if she had blessed me.


    The second idea was to lend a hand for something more immediate and possibly threatening. The locals had realised the obvious threat and were making sure that no Shattered could get to them, be it night or day, but that didn¡¯t mean they were ready for the stronger Shattered or the Scorched. Drawing one or two of them out, showing a few of the locals how to fight and donating some of my EXP to their cause was something I was willing to do. It would be inefficient, thanks to Lone Traveller, but it would be a minor expense on my part. An expense that might be the difference between their community surviving and getting wiped out.


    Lastly, and maybe most important, was to inform them of the sewers and the potential trouble brewing therein. The locals most likely wouldn¡¯t realise just how many animals had been changed, I certainly hadn¡¯t realised that even bugs and spiders had gained levels and would likely rise in power rapidly, simply thanks to their numbers, not until I had cleared the first sewer of them. If a wave of hundreds, if not thousands, of rats or similar vermin swept up from underground, their rooftop posts wouldn¡¯t hold, not for longer than it took the rats to scurry through the buildings. Hell, even before the change, rats could be a serious danger and now, with levels and the system potentially making them even stronger? They would likely go from pest to serious threat that could wipe out nations.


    If there were any nations left, something I highly doubted.


    Before going out of the room, I cleaned myself and my clothes, making sure that I was as immaculate as possible. Silva, too, was harassed with a cloud of mist, trying to clear her fur and, most importantly, maw of all the traces the various battles had left on her. She wasn¡¯t a happy dog, piteously whining at me while looking as if I was seriously torturing her but she let me work. And at the end of it, she shook her entire body, making me realise that a lot of the Ice that made up my mist had melted against her warm body, turning her into a wet dog and requiring me to clean myself again. And some of the room.


    Finally, I could go out, Silva on my heels. The moment she walked out of the room, her previously playful behaviour evaporated, her ears raised and her head swivelling back and forth, taking in our surroundings and making sure there were no threats.


    Similarly, I let my secondary process focus on listening to the people around me, taking in as much information as possible. My high Intuition allowed me to hear far more than I should have, given the hushed tones everyone was speaking in. Eavesdropping wasn¡¯t something I was proud of, but given that I wasn¡¯t sitting in the eaves, I felt it was fine. In addition, I was in dire need of information.


    I could hear a few of them discuss me, having apparently heard that I had simply shown up early in the morning without a care in the world. Others were discussing the Circle of Elders, apparently, the group who led them, and what they might do in the future. But the vast majority of things I heard were simply gossip, as insipid and mundane as it might have been before the change. Maybe with a little more blood and gore, but I had never really been interested in gossip before, so I couldn¡¯t be sure.


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    And didn¡¯t really want to know.


    My other senses, not just my hearing, were also gathering information and I noticed a few things that were unusual about the people around me. There were dirty faces everywhere and all clothes were stained with unidentifiable substances and torn, cut or otherwise damaged. People were walking around with their shoulders or heads hanging down and more than once, I noticed individuals just sitting there, staring into empty space with deep bags under their eyes. In addition, the entire gym was permeated with a funky smell that was far worse than any lockerroom I had ever been to, worse even than the worst cities I had visited on Mundus, the stench of the unwashed masses, mixed with a faint scent of blood filling the entire area. It was quite sickening but given the resource limitations, there was little that could be done about it.


    It took me a bit of time to track down Mrs Wu, partially because I had to make sure to stay away from the sunlight filtering through a few windows but I finally made it. She was talking to a similarly aged man, someone I was relatively sure had been living in the neighbourhood, a convenience store owner if my memory served correctly. Either way, he looked far from the simple, unassuming shopkeeper now and more like a veteran reporting to their superior.


    What I could see from their interaction confirmed my earlier supposition, that Mrs Wu was part of the leadership, and what I had heard about the Council of Elders seemed to confirm that. Looking at them, I noticed that their stances were different. Neither of them looked defeated, Mrs Wu looked just as she always had, her stance relaxed, her shoulders pushed back and an air of confidence surrounded her as if nothing would be able to shake her. Similarly, the shopkeeper stood straight, his tone calm and collected. While their faces and clothes weren¡¯t completely clean, it was obvious that they were doing their best, with limited resources available. Clean-shaven, hair combed, they didn¡¯t look like they were running away or had been defeated, they projected an air of confidence.


    ¡°Ah, Samantha, good that you could join me,¡± Mrs Wu greeted me, as I walked up to them, stopping a polite distance away. ¡°I wanted to talk with you more, but you were just too tired earlier. Meet Mr Wong, you might remember him from before, he owns the store across the street,¡± she introduced her companion who gave me a measuring look, followed by a polite bow and greeting, both of which I returned. I was tempted to use a concealed Observe but given that nobody had Observe¡¯d me here, I didn¡¯t want to start being rude.


    ¡°Comes with the territory, I¡¯m afraid. As I¡¯ve told you, I focused my actions on the night, as it gives me some rather major benefits to do so,¡± I gave her a smile, before continuing, ¡°Earlier, you said you¡¯d tell me about your situation here. While I obviously don¡¯t know the details just yet, I believe there are a few things I would be able to help you with. Given the past training you have given me, I would like to provide you with some aid.¡±


    ¡°Things have been difficult, as you can imagine. We¡¯ve been getting as many people together as possible, seeking strength in numbers. Many of the older people have served in a military and we all stand together to protect ourselves in these trying times,¡± Mrs Wu paused and my stomach decided to let out a rumble in that brief moment of silence.


    ¡°Why don¡¯t we get you something to eat, you sound like you need it. While you eat, I can tell you about the details and you can tell me what you¡¯ve got in mind,¡± she suggested with an amused smile on her face. When I nodded to her suggestion, she turned to Mr Wong and gave him what could only be described as marching orders. It was clear that they had been discussing things before and she was now making a decision, demonstrating just how far up their chain of command she was.


    Once they were done, she guided me back into the sitting room. There, I was offered food but insisted on using my own, not wanting to deplete their resources further. I didn¡¯t plan to stay here and eating their food would be the first step to becoming one of them. I couldn¡¯t afford to idle here, I would soon have to venture out again, searching for more and more power, if I wanted to be more than another survivor.

 Interlude: Wuts going on?

    The Change came silently, and yet, somehow, a sleeping figure managed to wake just moments before it hit. Maybe it was instinct, honed by years of intruding into places she wasn¡¯t welcome in and doing things nobody was allowed to know, maybe it was simple coincidence, a result of having a little too much tea after dinner.


    Either way, when blue flames started to flare up on the curtains, those instincts honed by years of active duty to a country she eventually betrayed took over, pushing her into motion. The unknown intruded into her familiar routine, normally a sign that something was going wrong. Routine was what kept operatives alive, to be one with their role and not give away that there was something hidden beneath that role. The unknown could easily mean that the role was shattered and that could easily lead to a trip into custody, interrogation and, eventually, a quiet execution and burial in an unmarked grave.


    The woman now known as Wu Chunhua had managed to avoid those slings and arrows throughout her career, even managed to eventually ¡°die¡± in the service while retiring to a comfortable life abroad. Not quite a tropical island, but with a man she still adored after decades of marriage and a job that kept her busy, there was little more one could want from life. Children would have been nice but alas, she had not been blessed with them. Not that the lack of an heir meant she was unable to pass on her skills and knowledge. Just that it wasn¡¯t blood that chose her successor but interest, character and ability.


    Knowing her body, the elderly operative noticed the strange current invading it, a small part of her flashing back to her interrogation resistance training and the use of electric shocks, but these currents weren¡¯t the painful shocks of electricity, they were something else. And yet, getting invaded by something foreign was not something she could easily tolerate.


    Without information about where the current came from, there was little one could do to evade and so, she tried to push against it with nothing but her will. Trying to will it all away. There was a momentary flicker of something blue within her field of vision but that, too, was pushed away, ignored in favour of the senses she had honed over decades.


    Nearby, her husband let out a strangled, pained gasp, the noise making her heart clench in her chest but even with the knife in her hand, there was nothing she could do about this, without knowing what ¡°this¡± all entailed. Strange, cold and not truly burning flames on the curtains, shedding just a tiny bit of light, even as more flames flared to life. Primal instinct said to run, but primal instinct was stupid and could easily be exploited by opponents, running into the unknown could be even more dangerous than staying put in a familiar position.


    Reaching out, she tried to touch her partner, to soothe the obvious pain he was under, only for him to flop over, onto his back, a strangled wail of pain escaping his mouth, his entire body straining against some unseen force. Suddenly, his eyes, those calm, deep-brown eyes she had sometimes gotten lost in, were consumed in a flash of blue fire, leaving nothing but those flickering flames.


    Instinct was the only thing that saved her, as she was staring at her husband¡¯s body, her mind reeling. Instinct was what allowed her to dodge aside when a hand tried to strike her, a crude strike but one that was filled with a savage strength, so unlike the controlled movements both she and her husband had mastered and taught to their students.


    Instinct was what drove her to counter, to use her attacker¡¯s momentum against him, bring him trying to control her attacker. Her enemy. Instinct was what drove home the realisation that her husband was gone, that only the enemy, a savage beast remained, a savage beast that was trying to kill her.


    And yet, instinct couldn¡¯t keep the tears at bay, after she broke her enemy¡¯s neck, the flames flickering out in his eyes, leaving nothing but scorched pits. Scorched pits and a strange, changed body. Subtle changes, but she had lived with the man for decades and been in close, intimate contact with him just as long. She knew his body, just like she knew her own, maybe even a little better. And this thing, it no longer was her husband, even before she had broken its neck.


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    Confusion, grief, horror and a whole host of negative emotions were taken and packed into a small box, to be dealt with later. The situation didn¡¯t allow for any weakness and in stressful times, emotions were one.


    Pushing aside the curtains, a little more light was shed on the situation. The weird, cold flames were now not only covering the curtains but starting to flare up everywhere, even on her own body. They didn¡¯t burn, weren¡¯t even warm, but they gave a strange, tingling sensation, similar to carbonated water, only that it was everywhere, seeping into her body.


    Outside, the night was incredibly dark, the only light coming from the weird, blue flames and, much more pressing, from a few actual, normal fires.


    With the limited information at hand, the aged operative formulated a plan. Given that there was fire everywhere, the blue fire harmless, the orange, normal fire not so much but that there didn¡¯t seem to be any electrical light, an isolated incident, targeted at her, was discarded in favour of a large-scale incident of unknown nature, possibly an attack with enhanced weaponry of some type. Outside help, while possible, was deemed unlikely in her mind, meaning any plan could only rely on local resources and allies.


    The first step of her plan was to collect some additional information, gain some allies and secure a shelter. Moving according to plans a lifetime of paranoid vigilance had spawned right after moving into the area, Wu Chunhua moved outside, keeping an eye out for neighbours or trouble. Whatever had happened to her husband, it was unlikely to be an isolated incident. Not with the way the blue flames were everywhere, the same blue flames that had consumed her husband¡¯s eyes and turned him into a monster.


    Maybe it was luck that she ran into one of her neighbours, acting in a similar manner as she did, maybe it was the result of similar habits, formed in the service of another country, with another purpose but formed due to similar circumstances. Few words were needed between the two operatives, just a few glances, signs and the odd gesture, nothing that would give away their position.


    Together, the two aged operatives continued on, moving into a small square between the various buildings, gathering more of their neighbours as they went. And taking care of some things that wore their neighbour flesh and bones, setting their bodies to rest as their spirits had long departed.


    ¡°Over there,¡± Wong Chehai, one of the retired soldiers that had made a new life for themselves in the area, called out, gesturing towards one of their neighbours who was desperately trying to escape from one of the monsters.


    Another of their companions, two generations younger than the aged operatives and still working as a policeman, pulled out his service sidearm, aiming in a smooth motion before pulling the trigger. A controlled, clean shooting a double tap that hit one in the chest, one in the head. Or it should have, if the weapon hadn¡¯t misfired the second shot, the charge detonating with a pathetic amount of force, barely enough to get the bullet out of the barrel.


    Luckily, the first shot was enough, sending the strange monster to the ground and giving the fleeing woman time to escape. To gather, with all the other survivors.


    ¡°Gather up, we need to organise,¡± Wong Chehai called out, his aged voice having lost little of the authority he once wielded.


    ¡°We need to make sure our homes don¡¯t burn down, we need to organise supplies and we need to make sure those monsters don¡¯t tear us apart. If you are trained in hand-to-hand combat, join Ms Wu. If you are trained in first-aid, join Ms Sugimori, if you are trained in neither, join Mr Sung.¡± he commanded and the many people looking for direction in the chaos, did just that. With someone in charge, groups were formed and organised, people were dispatched to keep the trouble contained. Working together, even if nobody truly knew what was going on.


    And so, in the middle of chaos and bloodshed, order was formed. Order, created by people who had been forced to get used to chaos and violence, had thought they had long-since escaped. But for the sake of their community, they all were willing to delve back into their old skills, their old mindsets. Because if nothing else, it would keep them alive.

 Chapter 702

    Mrs Wu¡¯s story took far longer than it took me to finish my food. Thanks to Parallel Processing, I was able to eavesdrop on the people around us, even as I focused on her words and participated in the conversation. That way, I not only had her perspective but was able to glean some more information and largely corroborate her story. Sure, it was only corroboration from the others living here but it felt better than nothing.


    Her story was both surprising and roughly what I had expected, as contradictory as that felt. It was surprising because I hadn¡¯t expected anyone to be able to make people work together that quickly and on that scale, not without some idea of what was going on. And yet, the elderly of the small, primarily south-east Asian, enclave had done just that. They had managed to gather the people fleeing the burning buildings, pulled them together into a cohesive whole and given direction, preventing fires from spreading and destroying the Shattered as quickly as possible.


    At one point, I had to offer her my condolences, when she, with a mask of dispassion, spoke of her husband. He had turned Shattered and Mrs Wu had been forced to strike him down to defend herself. While she managed to keep her face under control, the second or two she closed her eyes to compose herself gave away just how badly that had hurt her.


    And she wasn¡¯t the only one who had lost loved ones that night. They had managed to keep things together better than most, that was why they had this many people, almost a quarter of all people living in the area had turned Shattered. Before the locals had managed to put them down, only about sixty percent of the people were left. It was a horrifying number if looked at in a vacuum but from what I had seen, they had been incredibly successful, which made it only more horrifying.


    But that was what should have clued me in on Mrs Wu¡¯s story. The state of the area we were in should have told me what had happened even before she gave me her side of the story. Given the devastation I had witnessed on my path through the city, the number of dead and the few survivors I had noticed, the small enclave here was akin to a miracle, something only made more impressive by the obvious absence of the stench of divine magic. Elsewhere, many buildings had fallen victim to flames, and some of those had been further destroyed by the two earthquakes, but here I hadn¡¯t noticed any burned buildings. This success was something I wanted to support if only to make sure one community was not dominated by divine magic and kept from the clutches of those who dealt the opium of the people.


    Amusingly, the people had a reasonably good baseline understanding of the System, though their introduction had mostly been done by trial and error. That was why they didn¡¯t really use the Observe-skill, the sensation when it was used on another of the community enough to keep it from being commonly used. I had to hide a grin when Mrs Wu likened it to strip-searching someone. Sure, it gave some valuable information but it was invasive and those you did it to would likely be tempted to punch you in the nose. Though, I noticed a small glint in her eyes when I mentioned that there were ways to avoid the skill usage being noticed. She didn¡¯t ask questions about it, but I had a feeling she would in a more private setting.


    ¡°As I mentioned, there are multiple ways I would be willing to help,¡± I began, once her side of the story had wound down. She gave me an encouraging nod and I told her about my ideas, that I was willing to teach them the basics of magic as I understood them and that I could help a few of them gain a couple of levels while making sure that the more powerful threats in the area were dealt with for now.


    When I spoke about the sewers and the insane amount of vermin-turned-monster down there, I could see her face pale. Just like me, she could imagine how impossible it would be to push back a massive swarm of rats unless you had some sort of area-of-effect weapons. Or rapid-fire weapons at the level of a machine gun, but I doubted they had anything like that if those even excised any longer.


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    The thought brought me to the question of what had happened to guns, and given that I was somewhat confident Mrs Wu had some in her possession, I asked about it.


    ¡°Guns are problematic,¡± her face scrunched up in distaste. ¡°It seems that something strange is going on with the gunpowder. Our tests have shown that the charge is either far too little, leading to misfires or little more impact than a slingshot, or the charge is far too energetic, leading to accidents and destroying the weapons outright. One of the others almost lost a finger due to an exploding revolver. After the first mishap, we went to simple weapons and did a few tests on guns. Those showed about a ten percent chance that the ammunition works as normal, making guns utterly unreliable until we figure out what is going on,¡± she explained, letting out a sigh at the end. It sounded quite bad and given my previous suppositions regarding chemical reactions and the introduction of Astral Power into materials, it was about what I had expected. If gasoline had turned energetic enough to actually explode and a whole lot of buildings had spontaneously ignited thanks to their furnaces going haywire, it was only logical that gunpowder would be affected, too.


    Sharing my ideas only got me a wry smile and a shrug of Mrs Wu¡¯s shoulders, alongside the question if I had any way to detect those changes I was speaking of, to make ascertain which ammunition was safe and which was not. When I had to admit that I doubted I could d that just yet, she simply nodded, waving off my theory as inconsequential. Which, at this point, it really was. Knowledge was wonderful but knowledge without an immediate, practical application was pretty much useless.


    ¡°How long do you plan to stay?¡± Mrs Wu asked, having clearly understood that I wasn¡¯t willing to become part of their community.


    ¡°I don¡¯t know, a day, maybe two or three, but that would only work if I move into one of the abandoned buildings. Otherwise, this environment is far too loud, crowded and stressful for me,¡± I admitted, getting a chuckle from her. Here, everyone was banding together in order to survive, while I was looking for a space of my own, searching for peace and quiet.


    But despite her amusement, she nodded, suggesting that I could start with the lessons immediately until I would head out during the night. As expected, she had picked up on my habit of moving during the night but hadn¡¯t asked about it. Maybe she had even picked up on my active avoidance of any sunny spot, but I wasn¡¯t sure about that one.


    ¡°Whatever you are willing to give, I would be grateful. How would you go about the teaching of magic?¡± she asked, ending the topic of the duration of my stay.


    ¡°I believe a short explanation for everyone who is interested, so people have the basic idea before moving on to teach those with actual potential would be best. Wielding magic is like every other skill, ninety percent effort, alongside ten percent talent and yet, those ten percent talent are crucial,¡± I grinned, already considering how to best structure a basic magic lesson. I wanted people to turn to their own magic, their own efforts, instead of taking the lazy way and go beg the gods. For that, the people here needed to know what they could do on their own, what power was inherent to them.


    ¡°That does sound like a good idea,¡± she agreed, before excusing herself to organise things. It seemed it would take a bit of time for word to travel, but that didn¡¯t mean I couldn¡¯t get some work done already. There were maybe ten people in the open foyer and I simply asked loudly if anyone had a trait that granted affinity to one of the elements, or any affinities, really. If there were, I might be able to have an assistant during my later lesson, someone would possibly show some early results.


    Just simple theory wouldn¡¯t get people hooked and while I could show off some of my powers, the people here didn¡¯t know me. If someone who had been powerless was suddenly able to do something they couldn¡¯t, their interest would skyrocket.


    When one of the younger women, maybe in her late teens, and one of the older boys both raised their hands, I couldn¡¯t hide a grin on my face. If this worked out, the gods wouldn¡¯t get their clutches on this community.

 Chapter 703

    ¡°So, affinities,¡± I began, once I had my two prospective students seated across the table from me, ¡°Affinities are the easiest place to begin learning magic. Having the trait means you have enough innate talent that the system deems it worthy of recognition, or something along those lines, I actually don¡¯t know the mechanism behind it. Either way, while it is possible to learn magic without having an affinity for it, it¡¯s a lot harder and less efficient. Why don¡¯t we start with introductions and go from there?¡± I suggested, noticing that the talk of magic had roused both their interest.


    ¡°Now, you can either call me Samantha or Jade, I¡¯ll answer to both. Even Morgana would work, but it¡¯s a name I¡¯d rather leave behind,¡± I introduced myself, noticing that the boy¡¯s eyes widened in recognition.


    ¡°Morgana, Road to Purgatory Morgana?¡± he asked, looking at me with an uncomfortable amount of awe.


    ¡°That¡¯s so awesome, I wanted to play but you can¡¯t until you¡¯re eighteen,¡± he gushed, getting a little loud for my taste. ¡°But I¡¯ve seen so many videos, especially those last few of the citadel. That was so cool!¡±


    ¡°Nice to meet you, I¡¯m Sandy,¡± the young woman introduced herself, looking at the boy with a mix of teenage disdain and confusion, before focusing on me, ¡°I hope you don¡¯t mind that I have no idea what he¡¯s talking about?¡±


    ¡°No, it¡¯s okay but I guess I should explain,¡± I admitted, before giving them, too, a brief overview of Road to Purgatory and what I thought about the change. That the gods had used a ¡®game¡¯ to introduce some people in this world to the system prior to its emergence so that they would get into the foundation of as many societies as possible that way. Their reactions were rather fascinating. Kevin, as I learned the boy was called, readily accepted my explanation, showing intense curiosity and interest, as if the whole apocalypse was just a game. Possibly a coping mechanism, but I knew too little about children to truly understand. Hell, I knew too little about humans to understand, but given that children were somewhat human, that made it only worse.


    Sandy, on the other hand, was unconvinced at first. She wanted evidence that a ¡®game¡¯, a word she used with the sort of teenage disdain that could only be created by social pressure, could have any connection to the circumstances we were under. Amusingly, she easily accepted my claims of the divine but a prophecy-turned-game, that was a step too far. It took me describing my acceptance of the Legacy or Morgana and a brief demonstration of my Ice-Magic for her to accept my words, though I could see a bit of lingering disbelief.


    ¡°Now, you said you have affinity traits, could you tell me what they do? Normally, you should never share your traits or abilities, as they reveal your strengths and weaknesses, but I¡¯m supposed to teach you, so I need the knowledge,¡± I explained, getting nods from both.


    ¡°I¡¯ve got the trait Runic Affinity: Water,¡± Kevin shared, sounding rather proud of himself. Maybe that was why he had been eyeing the Icicle I had conjured up with such interest.


    ¡°Mine just says Magical Affinity: Nature,¡± Sandy shared, a faint blush creeping up her cheeks. An interesting reaction, though I wasn¡¯t quite sure where it came from. Something to investigate, but later, for now, I had two hopeful apprentices.


    ¡°And your classes?¡± I probed further, hoping that it would be something useful, something along the Arcane path.


    ¡°Classes?¡± Sandy asked, while Kevin only showed confusion.


    ¡°When you look at the basic overview within your system, what does it say above your level?¡± I asked, a little confused. Did they not have classes?


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    ¡°Undecided, when I focus on it, it tells me to reach level ten,¡± Kevin explained and now I realised just how important the legacy had been. Just how many of my traits would I have, if not for the legacy?


    ¡°And your current levels?¡± I looked at both, getting a one from Kevin and a two, with a small blush, from Sandy. Given that she didn¡¯t look like the type to go out and hunt Shattered, I was curious about what had brought that on. Given the blush on her face and the almost challenging look she gave me, daring me to ask, I decided to wait and ask her in private.


    ¡°Curious, but no matter. I believe I can help you regardless,¡± I nodded, mostly to myself. For now, I wasn¡¯t sure how to best teach them. The easiest would be to get Kevin to gain runic magic and his first three runes, which would require him to delve into the Astral River. Not something I wanted him to do without supervision, not if I wanted to use him as a showcase of my teaching ability. On the other hand, Sandy didn¡¯t have a runic affinity but a general magic affinity. I wasn¡¯t sure how the difference would manifest in practice, but I decided to have her focus on basic, magic manipulation first. Afterwards, I would try to get her to gain the rune mastery but that was for later.


    After a moment of contemplation, I decided to reach for an ability I had on Mundus, though I had only gained it a lot later, with stronger attributes and more magic ability. But given that I had managed to pigeonhole myself with it in the past, I hoped that this opportunity would allow me to gain it in a more general, possibly more competent manner.


    ¡°Now, Sandy, I want you to find yourself a simple, potted plant. You have a source of power within you and while I could forcibly show you where it is, I would prefer if you find it on your own. You should be able to use it to heal, especially heal plants, strengthen their growth and so on. Nature Magic is insanely versatile, which, in turn, means that your mind needs to give it focus and direction. Otherwise, your efforts will simply spread out too far to accomplish anything in a human¡¯s lifetime,¡± I paused, frowning as I realised I hadn¡¯t actually made sure that the system hadn¡¯t randomly distributed races to everyone, making them emerge in thirty days, ¡°You are still human, aren¡¯t you?¡± I asked, just to make sure.


    ¡°Of course I am,¡± Sandy replied, visibly confused. Kevin simply nodded, looking almost as uncertain.


    ¡°Excellent,¡± I focused on Kevin, letting Sandy go and try on her own. If she managed, good, if not, I would try helping her after helping Kevin.


    ¡°Now, you. You have a Runic Affinity, which means it¡¯s easiest for you to channel your power through runes, instead of using it directly. You will be able to do both, I¡¯m quite sure of that, but runes allow you to work with much greater focus and direction, making things easier on you. More efficient, too,¡± I explained. amused at the way he was intently listening to every word.


    ¡°To gain runes, you need to commune with the Astral River, the network of magical conduits that spreads across the world. Across multiple worlds, actually,¡± I continued, pausing for a moment in realisation. If the Astral River spread across multiple worlds, as I assumed, it would connect this world to Mundus, which was how I thought I had gained Morgana¡¯s legacy. But that would mean I would be able to commune with beings on Mundus, like the Grandmother, Lenore, Ylva and even the Nidh?gg. Though I wasn¡¯t sure I wanted the last one to be aware of Terra, the attention of an apocalyptic dragon might be bad. One apocalyptic event at a time, for now, we had the change to contend with, the coming of the Nidh?gg had time for next year, or the next millennium. Any time, but now, really.


    ¡°Now, I will try to guide you. You should feel a tug in your mind,¡± I told Kevin, reaching out to gently touch his temples on both sides. My intent was to regain, and use, my Mind Magic to give him direction and guide him into the Astral, hopefully remaining connected to him so I would be able to supervise his actions within. Remembering the sensation of reaching for another mind, I focused on my magic, not quite in the same way I would to use Blood Magic, not quite in the way I would use Darkness Magic, but in a more neutral way. I didn¡¯t want to hurt the boy, but I wanted to guide him.


    For a moment, nothing happened, I felt my eyes flutter close as my focus sharpened, the world narrowing down to a pinprick, where nothing existed but the head, and the mind, between my fingers.


    Finally, I felt a minute shift and could sense the mind before me, not well enough to read the thoughts within, but well enough to sense the combination of confusion, hesitation, curiosity and disbelief.


    Feeling it, I let myself sink into the Astral River, giving the mind I was connected to a tug, trying to guide it along. To guide it into the strange realm in between, the realm of magic.

 Chapter 704

    The emotions I could feel over the mental link I had established were almost amusing. Fear, amazement, disbelief and an overall sensation that I could only verbalise as a loud scream of ¡®what the f¡­¡¯ flooded over loud and clear, to which I tried to send back a sensation of collected calm. Given that both of us were disembodied balls of mind and soul, floating just above the Astral River in its resplendent glory didn¡¯t really help. The human mind wasn¡¯t made for this, at least until it formed a framework to conceptualise the experience. Mine had always been that of a river, using small tributaries to conceptualise the smaller strands of the Astral River, though I had, at some point, mixed in the idea of a human circulatory system. Not that it truly mattered what framework one used, I was somewhat confident that the entirety of the Astral River was far too much for any mortal mind to comprehend, but that was neither here nor there. A framework was needed, a framework my companion sorely lacked.


    But it wasn¡¯t as if I couldn¡¯t help him, I had some experience after all.


    Beckoning a bit of Ice up from the river, I created a platform beneath us, giving us an objective direction to define down against and, with the same thought, formed myself into a vaguely humanoid shape, a body of Ice, mixed with Blood and Darkness to give some accents. It was far from a human, or elven, body but it served as a referable shape, one that Kevin could focus on. He couldn¡¯t form such a shape for himself, but it seemed to help calm his mind, allowing him to focus on our environment. As long as he didn¡¯t look at himself, he should be able to pretend everything around him was just fine, not like there were any mirrors in this place, nothing that reminded him of his disembodied state. My perception of him and the conclusion I could vaguely draw from the smell and taste his mind and soul had taken on were something I kept from him.


    Luckily, almost two years of constant mental communion with another mind had given me the tools to compartmentalise, allowing me to use one thought stream to provide him with guidance and try to calm and comfort him, while the other stream focused on analysing him and filing away the information I could glean from the was his soul was laid bare to me.


    ¡°Now,¡± I began, my intentions transmitted across the temporary bond I had created, ¡°think of what Water means to you. Below us is the Astral River, the stream through which all magic spreads and flows, nourishing the physical realm beyond and giving rise to the impossible. It, too, will contain the runes you seek, the three initial runes that will allow you to give form to your magic, to guide it into a shape you desire and require. Think what you need, think in concepts, the broader, the more flexible they will be, the narrower, the more power a rune will contain,¡± I explained, giving him a bit of time to consider what he actually wanted to do.


    Far faster than I had thought possible, I could feel his mind reach out and, to my surprise, I could actually feel and see the shape the first rune took. While I lacked the Runic Mastery, at least for now, to actually use it, I now knew the Rune he had conceptualised as Water.


    It wasn¡¯t fancy but it was vast, containing sweeping strokes that held deeper layers and meanings, none of which I could even begin to understand. Compared to the runes I had always used, it was a world of difference, as if we were looking at different writing systems. Different shapes, different intentions, different minds. It made me wonder if he would be able to use my own runes or if the differences would be too big.


    Before I could understand more, he was already continuing and I could feel the pressure on my mind as the rune formed and quickly withdrew. It felt similar to the few times I had tried to divine more runes than my skill allowed, a brutal, splitting headache that almost knocked me flat. Before that could happen to me, I took my gain, the Rune of Water, and withdrew my mind a little. Still holding his hand, so to speak, but no longer looking over his shoulder to read along and steal his efforts.


    A few minutes later, I could feel the exultation in his mind and gently pushed him back towards the waking world, away from the Astral River. As we faded away, I dissolved the constructs I had used, letting the magic fade back into the river below, leaving no sign of our presence in the pristine world.


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    Opening my eyes, I first glanced across the blue boxes, noticing with a grin that I had gained my Mind Magic skill, only this time, it wasn¡¯t a composite skill composed of multiple skills but an ordinary skill, one that went up to a hundred. I would have to take a look and try finding out the difference but for now, I was just happy that I had it and that it had levelled to three. In addition, Astral Meditation had levelled twice, bringing it to twelve and there was a box that notified me I had gained the rune of Water. No mastery just yet, but maybe that would come if I used it a few times, I wasn¡¯t sure. Last, but certainly not least, I had gained a level, bringing me to seventeen, with some EXP left over to start my path to eighteen.


    ¡°Want to show me what you learned?¡± I asked Kevin, after taking a moment to steady myself. Helping him into the Astral and steadying his Mind had taken more out of me than I had thought but given the gains I had made, I wasn¡¯t about to complain.


    ¡°I levelled up!¡± he enthused, looking at me with pure, undisguised awe.


    ¡°Congratulations,¡± I gave him a polite smile, feeling a little overwhelmed by the intensity in his eyes, ¡°Your magic? Depending on your intelligence, you might have a special ability called Runic Triangle that allows you to link three runes, giving them extra power. If not, try focus on the magic you felt within the Astral River and draw the rune into the air, focusing that power into your finger,¡± I explained, before demonstrating, drawing a single Ice-Rune and channelling magic into it, using it to conjure a small block of Ice. It was just a little more efficient than straight-up using Ice Magic, but it gave him an example, showing him how it looked.


    He scrunched up his face in concentration, while I leaned back, watching him act. Out of curiosity, I engaged my Magical Sight, watching his progress. He was concentrating Astral Power into his hand, before clumsily and slowly drawing a single rune, magic seeping into the environment as he was unable to control it.


    Moments after it was completed, the rune flashed, an orb of water manifesting in its centre only to follow gravity and start to drop. Activating Overflow, I used Ice Magic to near instantly change the chunk of Ice I had conjured previously into a wide basin, placing it into the path of the dropping water, and catching it before it could splash all over the floor.


    ¡°Not bad, youngling,¡± I grinned, proud of his success, while he was breathing heavily, the first proper use of his magic had taken a chunk of stamina and Astral Power from him.


    ¡°That¡¯s¡­¡± he stared at the water, likely comparing it to the exhaustion he was experiencing and likely feeling utterly underwhelmed.


    ¡°A first step,¡± I gave him a grin, putting the bowl of Ice down, ¡°You need to learn to walk before you can start running. You just took your first step, hopefully, the first of many. If you follow the Arcane Path, it will take you far. Water is an incredibly flexible element, I could see you act as an attacker, using beams of pressurised water, I could see you provide healing, as water is the foundation of life, I could see you provide support, using water¡¯s purifying nature. I can see you master your magic, and become a force to be reckoned with. It only depends on you, your efforts and your talents.¡±


    He hung on my lips, the disappointed expression on his face quickly fading away, replaced with one of fascinated interest. Maybe he could see what I described before his mind¡¯s eye, imagining some awesome battle. He said he had seen some of the Road to Purgatory videos, so he might have an idea of what was possible. Now, he saw himself in them and imagined what he could do.


    ¡°Now, you have a bowl of water. If you are anything like me, you will be able to manipulate it, using your magic. Just like I re-shaped the Ice before your eyes, you will be able to shape the water, though I doubt you will be able to easily make it keep its shape. Something for you to try, but later. Check your Astral Power, you don¡¯t want to run dry, the headache is terrible. But if you carefully,¡± I stressed the need to be careful, ¡°delve into the Astral River, you will regain your power faster and it will help you train for later. Astral Meditation is an incredibly useful skill to have, one that you should level when you can.¡±


    There was a proud smile as he closed his eyes, his mind likely focusing inwards. My first student in this world, and he had already taken his first step. Now, I only needed to figure out what to do with the other, before meeting with the rest of the people here, maybe finding a few more students. If teaching magic gave this much EXP, it might actually be worth my while to stay for a bit, to teach and guide. It would provide me with an activity other than sleeping during the day, even if magical experimentation could have provided that just as well. Once more, I realised that I would soon have a lot more things to do, than time to actually do them. But there were worse problems to have.

 Chapter 705

    Soon after Kevin dropped into his meditative trance, Sandy returned, looking a little disgruntled.


    ¡°No idea what you thought would happen,¡± she grumbled, sitting down across the table from me, ¡°So, any better ideas than to think really hard and try making something happen?¡±


    ¡°A few ideas, yes,¡± I nodded, looking at the young woman, ¡°As you can see, your companion has taken the first step on his path. We shall try to facilitate your own path, just the same,¡± I told her, gesturing towards the basin of Ice, still holding the conjured water.


    ¡°What am I looking at?¡± she asked, the frown on her face deepening.


    ¡°He conjured the water. It will fade, likely over the course of a day unless it is actively maintained, but it will work just like regular water until then. It will quench one¡¯s thirst, it could be used to wash up or launder clothes. Unlimited, fresh water, though I¡¯m not certain about mineral content, I would assume it to be similar to distilled water. But I don¡¯t actually know, not being a water user myself,¡± I explained and it took her only a moment to realise just how big that was. For now, they had water, thanks to a few tanks and some raided supermarkets but that wouldn¡¯t last, not forever. But with Kevin, they had access to fresh water, as much as he could conjure. Just that would turn Kevin into a very important person, far above his previous self as just another boy.


    ¡°Could I do that, too?¡± she asked, looking a lot more enthusiastic than she had moments before.


    ¡°Conjure Water? Possibly, I¡¯m not certain about the limits of your Nature-affinity. But from what I¡¯ve heard, it mostly deals with plants and the natural cycle of things, as in growing and dying. If I were to summarise the core concepts of it, I would think they would be to Grow and to Wither. The cycle of life and all that,¡± I explained, a little amused that she was suddenly an attentive student. Maybe the idea of unlimited showers had managed to crack her ¡®disinterested teen¡¯ facade.


    ¡°And if we were to put it into perspective, he is able to conjure water for the community. Long-term, you can easily be just as important, thanks to an ability to grow crops without the need for fertiliser, pesticide or similar chemicals that won¡¯t be easy to get. Probably even at a pace that will only be described as magical. And that is only one of the aspects of your affinity, I could imagine you being able to heal or help out in combat by conjuring plants to bind your foes or maybe use poison in some fashion. You have an incredibly useful and powerful ability if you have the will, imagination and tenacity to walk the Arcane Path to the end,¡± I added, noticing a thoughtful expression on her face.


    ¡°Would I have to fight?¡± she asked and suddenly, she didn¡¯t look like the mix of disdainful teenager and young, prideful woman any longer. No, she simply looked like a frightened girl, making me drop my previous estimation of her age by a few years. Not to the young age she looked at that moment, but from something around twenty-three to somewhere around seventeen.


    ¡°Have to? Maybe, but I don¡¯t think so. But you¡¯ll have to ask yourself, do you want to. The people here, or anyone who knows and understands your affinity would happily take you and put you into a comfortable position if you manage to learn how to grow crops, especially if you can do it quickly. But it would be a cage, a nice, secure cage with wonderful golden bars, but a cage nonetheless. You will have to consider whether or not you want to live in a cage. Liberty compared to security, it is a trade-off you will have to decide on for yourself,¡± I told her, trying to give her perspective without influencing her. It should be her decision, she would have to live with it, maybe for the rest of her life.


    ¡°I think I know what you mean,¡± she nodded, though I had no idea what she was thinking. Maybe she had no idea either, I had given her quite a bit to consider, even if all of it was theoretical and for the future. It wouldn¡¯t matter one bit, if she didn¡¯t manage to take the first step.


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    ¡°Now, magic,¡± I grinned, bringing things back on track. Reaching out, I simply placed a hand above the basin of water, channelling a bit of Astral Power to freeze some of the conjured water. It was more difficult than expected, but well within my abilities, making me wonder if the increased difficulty was due to the purity of the water or because it was created from another¡¯s Astral Power, or maybe a combination of the two. Not that it truly mattered and I doubted that Sandy would be able to notice the difference, making it wholly irrelevant for now. But I had easily managed to create a small block of Ice, pulling it from the water with my magic and letting it float between us.


    ¡°Compared to runes, what Kevin used just now, pure magic is less precise. It relies on you and your will, not on formulae or symbols. That makes it more flexible,¡± I pushed some more Astral Power into the floating Ice, shaping it from a roughly cubical block into a thin, almost needle-like Icicle, similar to those I would use for combat. ¡°But the lack of an external focus means you need to provide said focus. Otherwise, you will either vent Astral Power into the environment without achieving anything or the result of your efforts will differ from your intentions.¡±


    I paused, giving her a moment to consider my words. I had a feeling that the pure magical skills would be more difficult to teach but I wanted to give her another chance, before going to plan B or C. If she managed on her own, she would become a better spellcaster in the long run.


    ¡°Why don¡¯t you get a potted plant, maybe I can give you a bit more guidance,¡± I suggested, stopping myself from suggesting to head outside. For about three more hours, that would be a pretty bad idea, unless I made sure the exit was in the shade.


    She looked at me for a moment before scurrying off. While she was gone, I considered how to best demonstrate Nature Magic without having any knowledge or affinity for it but I decided that a showing of Blood Magic, trying to heal a plant would hopefully be a good enough example, with Death Magic providing the withering aspect.


    Otherwise, I would try and drag her into the Astral River, too, to get her into touch with her Astral Power, with the last option being to cut into her palm and use Blood Magic to pull out a sliver of her power, the pain would likely be enough to show her where to look for her power. It might also put her off magic altogether, so I kept the Blood Magic as a last-ditch attempt.


    It didn¡¯t take long for her to return and by that point, Kevin had come back out of his meditation and had taken a glance at the slightly lowered level of water in the basin, before looking at me with a confused expression when he noticed the Ice floating there. I had just waved him off and told him to try manipulating it, before focusing on my other pupil.


    She had simply sat down, putting the plant on the table between us, waiting for me to act. Just like I was waiting for her to make an attempt, curious how things would play out.


    When she didn¡¯t move, I decided to give her a push and put a hand on the plant, carefully channelling a bit of Death Magic. I had to control myself to keep from wincing, Death was not a pleasant element to channel, but it worked, the leaf I had touched immediately looked as if it was about to wither.


    ¡°Now, heal your plant. Otherwise, it will soon die,¡± I challenged her, noticing how wide her eyes went. Out of interest, I activated my Magical Sight, curious if she would manage.


    For a moment, she simply stared, first at me, then at the plant. If I was correct, she needed to truly will the action, not just think about it. Motivation was key and if I had managed to give her that motivation with my display, I was happy about it.


    Finally, as the seconds dragged on and the bit of Death Magic was already starting to fade, I could see some Astral Power focus in her hand, before getting pushed into the plant and quickly replacing the vitality my Death Magic had consumed.


    ¡°Well done,¡± I complimented her, keeping my face controlled, despite the angry look on her face. I wasn¡¯t certain what sort of expression I should make anyway, on one hand, she was glaring at me, on the other hand, I had gained some EXP for some reason. Curious and something to be investigated, but for later. Now, I had to make sure to make her keep going, so she would be able to call on her magic whenever she wanted.

 Chapter 706

    A part of me wanted to continue straight away, to try pushing Sandy into Rune Magic, simply to see if it would work. If it did, and I managed to get another EXP infusion similar to the one I had received when Kevin learned the skill, I might make level eighteen, though I doubted it. Teaching was profitable in terms of EXP but not to that extent. Or maybe it was teaching magic that was profitable, possibly as a result of that nifty blessing I had received. From what I knew, Hecate was in favour of teaching magic to the people, to put them on the path of figuring stuff out themselves instead of relying on the divine to guide them. With that as a caveat, it would make sense that she would support the teaching of magic, making it worth the teacher¡¯s while, though I wasn¡¯t sure why the blessing was a Moon-blessing. Maybe just Her personal flavour. Or I was speculating wildly off-base and the EXP I was getting came from somewhere else, I really had no idea.


    And it didn¡¯t really matter if I was rewarded for the teaching I was doing, good, I would give the people here some more guidance, in order to repay the perceived debt to Mrs Wu, without falling off the power curve.


    But before I could try teaching Sandy further, I realised that the room had filled up and people were focused on Mrs Wu who seemingly had gathered everyone. When I looked over to her, she gestured for me to join her. In turn, I grabbed Kevin, intent on demonstrating just what magic could do, even without a lot of experience. Hopefully, it would give people the idea to better themselves, to thrive instead of just trying to survive but I wasn¡¯t certain.


    Before Mrs Wu had a chance to begin and explain to the crowd why she had called them all together, I stepped up next to her, quietly telling her that I already had my first success. Her eyes widened at that, a mix of surprise and a few other emotions I couldn¡¯t quite identify before it was all hidden away under her usual, genial smile.


    After giving me a nod, she turned to the crowd and began, telling them about me, that I used to be her student before the change and that I was now offering to teach the people here some magic. There were a few rather sceptical looks in the crowd, it did sound a little out there, even during an apocalypse, but then, I could simply demonstrate.


    Stepping up, I remained silent for a moment, quickly drawing a runic formation into the air before me. From the formation, a chunk of Ice rose, never touching my hand, as it started to soar around the room carried by my magic.


    ¡°Now, as you can see, magic is real. If you have doubts about it or don¡¯t trust your eyes, that¡¯s on you. What I will demonstrate and explain has nothing to do with gods, devils or whatever else you want to imagine, merely with an individual¡¯s will and innate talent. In this new world of ours, Changed by the Astral River and the system that came with it, it is a reality and a path to power. Not the only path, but it might be the least intuitive, the one that requires the largest mental leap to start on it,¡± I began, bulldozing over a few voices, simply continuing to speak in a calm and measured voice.


    ¡°Some of you will wonder where my knowledge comes from, given that the Change has been unexpected for everyone. That includes me, I did not know it was coming, though in hindsight, it was somewhat obvious. A year ago a certain video game was released,¡± at that, a few more voices became loud, clearly confused about the apparent non-sequiteur, but I simply continued on.


    ¡°It was called Road to Purgatory and, for the time, it was a complete revolution. Fully immersive, technology that felt as if it was right out of science fiction. But it worked so people simply accepted that they had underestimated what was being cooked up in research facilities around the globe and ran with it. Played the game, and enjoyed the World of Mundus the game allowed you to explore. Now, with hindsight on our side, it becomes obvious that ¡®Pantheon Entertainment¡¯ was a rather apt name, just like ¡®Road to Purgatory¡¯ was very apt. At the end of the ¡®Road to Purgatory¡¯ came what we see now. A Purgatory of blue flames, just like the game¡¯s logo showed to all who could see. But nobody, to my knowledge, made the connection, simply treating it as just a name. The system we have now is either linked to the game or to a cosmos-spanning system and the moment the connection was made to earth, Terra as they call it, we got what I call the Change. Thanks to that game-that-was-not-a-game, I have information you don¡¯t have and can teach those who are interested magic. And now, we go back to the original topic, Magic,¡± I finished that part of my introduction, trying to give them the information they needed to understand without telling them what I had been up to on Mundus. I felt that telling them I had committed genocide wasn¡¯t quite the image I wanted to portray.


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    ¡°For those who wonder what magic can do, the answer is quite simple. Everything,¡± I paused for a moment, letting the idea sink in before giving the crowd a grin and continuing on.


    ¡°Well, everything but with a few caveats. You need to be able to imagine your goal. That much should be obvious, if you don¡¯t know what you want, there¡¯s little that can be done. Next, you need the power, the Astral Power to be precise, to accomplish whatever it is you desire. However, most tasks would take far too much power to accomplish, unless you increase the efficiency. For that, you need the appropriate skills, which increase the efficiency you use magic with, while also giving you additional tools to increase that effect. And lastly, the most difficult thing to gain, is Affinity. Affinity comes in different flavours, but to put it simply, it is a measure of how suited you are for some type of magic. I have no idea how the system defines the term or how it is measured but magical, runic or elemental affinity traits are how the system describes said affinity. If you have a magical affinity for, let¡¯s say as an example, Water Magic, you will have an easier time learning and using said magic. That¡¯s not to say that you can¡¯t learn magic without the affinity but it will require more effort on your part and the part of any teacher you might have, thus, my teaching will focus on those with those traits. It is simply a question of prioritising resources to those who will gain the greatest benefit, while the survival of this community is still in question,¡± I finished my explanation, amazed at just how disciplined the people here were. None of them had interrupted and after a bit of conversation at the beginning, I had been the only one speaking.


    ¡°Now, as a demonstration,¡± I looked to Kevin, who appeared to be incredibly nervous, ¡°Kevin here has been taught magic for about half an hour, with a similar amount spent in self-study. Anyone who has ever learned a complex skill will understand that he has barely scratched the surface and yet, I believe you all will be sufficiently amazed by his accomplishment.¡±


    Gently pulling him to the centre of the stage, I quietly told him to simply conjure some water. At the same time, I pulled the Ice I had conjured before next to me, forming another basin.


    Compared to his earlier casting, the rune leaked less Astral Power but otherwise, it was just the same. Water appeared and dropped down, landing in the basin before it could splash across the ground.


    ¡°Water,¡± I grinned, noticing quite a few surprised looks and wide eyes in the crowd, ¡°It will remain in this world for about a day, at least if my prior experience with Ice translates over. During that time, it can be used just like the water from bottles, to drink, wash yourself or launder clothes. For now, he can only conjure relatively small amounts, but if he keeps at it if he gains some levels and increases his skill? Then he will be able to conjure torrents of water, washing away thirst and sanitation issues,¡± I paused again, letting the gathered people take the idea in. They all looked at Kevin with a strange mixture of awe and respect, while he was rapidly turning green at the attention.


    ¡°To finish things up, because I¡¯m sure everyone has better things to do than listen to me ramble on. For those of you who have one of the aforementioned affinity traits, I offer you lessons, either in small groups or one-on-one. If you are interested, we can schedule a session and explore what you might be able to do. For those who lack the affinity, you can attempt to get in touch with your magic on your own, or you can seek to train in martial arts. As I mentioned, there are multiple paths to power, with magic being just one of them. Maybe the Martial Path, something Mrs Wu can train you in, would be a better fit for you. But know this, with the Change, our old social norms will quickly crumble and this new world of ours is not as nice and comfortable as the Western World we have been living in was,¡± with that, I finished up my part and gave another nod to the audience, before moving away from my previous position, trying to retreat a little.


    Soon, it would be time to get back out there and hunt some more.

 Chapter 707

    The evening¡¯s gloom couldn¡¯t have come soon enough for my tastes. After my short speech, overall interest in magic had been intense, it felt like everyone who had an affinity had approached me and even those without were showing interest. It hadn¡¯t been limited to me, Mrs Wu had received just as much attention, maybe because she was the de-facto leader, and even Kevin had turned into a center of attention. The poor boy looked as if he was looking for a crack in one of the walls to hide in, a feeling I could completely empathise with, but no such crack had been available for either of us.


    By the time I managed to escape, I had agreed to hold classes the next afternoon, giving me the entire morning to rest, a choice that caused some grumbling but there was little they could do. My plan was to go look for a place to stay during the night, maybe get another level or two under my belt, before coming back here. The night after, I could make my own lair somewhere nearby, allowing interested people to come to me, without being in the middle of things. Just being in a large group felt somehow wrong to me, an itchy feeling between my shoulder blades that just wouldn¡¯t go away. Maybe it was pure paranoia, maybe there was someone who had a dislike for me, maybe it was one of my traits acting up, I wasn¡¯t sure. But what I was sure of, was that I wanted to teach as many of these people magic as possible, before continuing on my way, so I could be well clear of the city when pestilence started to take over.


    That sensation, the desire to teach magic, was a little surprising to me. Sure, there were multiple good reasons for doing so, it would turn into an advantage and the EXP were, quite frankly, excellent, but it felt a little too strong for just that. Not quite compulsive but like something I should do, not just for myself but for¡­ That was where my train of thought ran into a small mental gap.


    For whom?


    For the people? I had never been overly concerned with society while living in it, why would I now be concerned with people I had never met?


    For Mrs Wu? That was the closest to making sense, that I considered myself to be in her debt for the training I had received and wanted to repay her. While I had paid for the lessons, she had gone far beyond the scope of the offered classes, never asking for payment commensurate to the efforts and experience she brought to the table. Just what she had everyone pay, a modest salary for a normal person but far below what an expert of her ability should receive. Maybe that was why I felt the debt but was my mind truly that calculative? Did I feel that strongly about a perceived debt? I wasn¡¯t sure, so maybe the desire came from something else.


    And that was where I started to worry. I had been blessed by Hecate, a blessing that was as forthcoming in information as the deity herself, which is to say not at all. I had no idea what it did, but what if her blessing was what gave me the EXP and included a subtle compulsion to spread the teaching of magic? It would make sense, from what I had learned on Mundus. Hecate was supposed to be rather distant, caring little about mortals, only interested in those who reached the peak of magical ability. Thus, having a blessing that encouraged mortals to start out on the arcane path and encourage others to follow suit would make sense, otherwise, nobody would reach the lofty heights she was interested in.


    I wasn¡¯t sure how comfortable I felt about a possible divine compulsion on my mind, but I also wasn¡¯t sure if there was a way to do anything about it. I certainly wasn¡¯t powerful enough to break a divine compulsion, if that was even possible. Just remembering the divine Curse I had seen on Mundus was enough to turn the idea into an academic question and that had been a mortal curse infused by divine energy, at least to my understanding. I was relatively sure that what I was under hadn¡¯t been cast by a Cleric of Hecate and infused by Her will, but directly by Her. That would likely make it even more powerful and even I wasn¡¯t arrogant enough to consider myself equal to a Goddess of Magic. Not yet, maybe never.


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    Or maybe it was something else entirely. I had no idea if the system portrayed all traits a person had, for example, there was nothing about my peculiar mental makeup included. While my compulsive pattern-seeking was still in evidence, I had noticed that my mental state had undergone some changes. In many ways, I felt a lot more like I had on Mundus, instead of the way I had felt before the Change. At times, I even thought of myself as Morgana, instead of as Samantha. The affection I felt for Silva, too, was something I had not experienced before. Maybe it was because I never had a pet before, only considered Dogs as interesting due to their loyalty and protective instincts but now, there was more. As of now, I had been unable to properly categorise these changes, but they were there. And maybe, what I was feeling now was an outgrowth of those changes.


    The idea was a little unsettling, who was I if I wasn¡¯t Samantha any longer? Would I truly become Morgana? Who even was Morgana? Had it been just a role I had been playing? A divinely created Avatar that I controlled for my own amusement? Could I even consider myself to be Sigmir¡¯s past, and future, partner, if I didn¡¯t accept that I was Morgana, that Morgana was me? If so, what about my past as Samantha? Would I have to discard everything that was Samantha to become Morgana?


    By the time I found my first Shattered of the night, I decided that it didn¡¯t really matter where the instinct or desire or whatever I wanted to call it came from. Teaching was, at the end of the day, to my own advantage. There would likely be some complications, with my traits that was almost guaranteed, but those could be dealt with. From a purely analytical standpoint, teaching was worth it. It gave me an additional source of EXP, had the potential to increase my powers in ways I hadn¡¯t considered before, as evidenced by the Water-rune I had learned while Kevin gained his initial runes, and would give me future allies. Allies who weren¡¯t governed by the divine, which was a massive advantage.


    Just before I had to head back, I reached level nineteen. Baiting and hunting Shattered was getting increasingly difficult, their levels simply couldn¡¯t keep up with me. I still gained a good amount of skill-levels, my Ice Rune Mastery reaching level fifteen, my Darkness Rune Mastery fourteen, my Blood Rune Mastery thirteen, my Ice Magic fourteen, Darkness Magic eleven, Blood Magic ten, my Astral Meditation thirteen while Mind Magic got to four.


    Death Magic quickly turned into my least favourite skill, simply because it was painful to use and, at least for now, not really worth it. The damage wasn¡¯t even as good as what I could do with a combination of Darkness and Mind Magic. For non-rune magic, it was a relatively easy combination to pull off, the concept of Devouring synergized quite well with my Mind Magic, though I wasn¡¯t pushing things. I didn¡¯t want to accidentally lock myself into purely damaging Mind Magic, as I had on Mundus, that didn¡¯t seem like a good idea. Not after realising just how useful the skill could be for teaching.


    Realising that I was almost at the edge of town, I decided to climb one more building, to get a better view. From up high, I could see a light in the distance, far outside town. Maybe in one of the small, farming communities that lined the outskirts, their fields not yet swallowed up by urbanisation and the growing suburbs. Maybe another ten, fifteen kilometres, it was hard to estimate in the darkness but relatively clear evidence of other people.


    After finishing yet another attempt to fish out a more powerful enemy, I left the building, a little disappointed that I hadn¡¯t caught anything. Maybe I would be lucky on my way back, but I wasn¡¯t overly confident. I made sure to note down where I had seen the light from and roughly how far away it had been, Mrs Wu would want to know, before starting my way back.


    ¡°It¡¯s strange, how even the most horrifying and gruesome things can become routine, isn¡¯t it?¡± I quietly asked Silva, as we made our way through the dark city. Her only response to my voice was to nudge my side with her head, asking for scritches. Or maybe offering comfort in her canine way. I wasn¡¯t quite sure, but I would take what I could get.

 Chapter 708

    Nothing much happened on our way back to the gym, there were a few Shattered but none that were actually worth killing. The speed at which they gained level had slowed down a little, most of them were still between six and nine, meaning there was little to be gained if I killed them. Not unless I got really creative, or used one of my under-used skills. Skills like Unarmed Combat, my Dual Blades or even the recently acquired Death Magic, if I were to purely fight with those, they would rise. Against some Shattered, I did just that, pushing myself to get those ranks, even if I wasn¡¯t certain they would ever be useful. I doubted that I¡¯d ever manage to push them to the same level as my primarily used magic skills.


    It wasn¡¯t a lot of fun, especially as I had a niggling suspicion that my skill-gains were lowered due to the low risk I was under, simply due to my ability to destroy them at a moment¡¯s notice with the combination of Darkness and Mind-Magic I had been starting on or with my Ice Magic. Others were left to Silva, though I had no idea if her skills actually went up or if she merely enjoyed playing with them as if Shattered were her version of a doggy-chew toy.


    Either way, by the time we were back at the gym, I gained two points in Unarmed Combat, one in Dual Blade Mastery, and another one in Death Magic. All in all, good gains but compared to the rest of my skills, they were lagging behind at level five for Unarmed Combat, three with the Blades, and two with Death Magic.


    On the way back, we had also decided on our new shelter. It wasn¡¯t anything special, simply a house that had escaped the fire and while some of the windows had been shattered at some point, it was still intact enough to serve us. Getting in had been trivial, without anyone to call the police, or the police in general, nothing stopped me from climbing through a broken window, after my frozen Shuttle removed the remaining glass. Once inside, I just had to kill the pair of Shattered in residence, something I managed without spilling any blood thanks to my Darkness and Mind-Magic, and open the door with the key still in the lock. Trivial.


    Less trivial was the removal of the slightly decayed corpses, ripped to shreds by the Shattered and dealing with the weird feelings I got from it. Maybe my discomfort stemmed from the story the bodies, and Shattered, told, of the husband who got killed by his wife turned Shattered and their younger child, who likely was done in by their older brother. Even knowing that I had given peace to the wife and brother didn¡¯t really help, nothing really did. Not even a brief cuddle with Silva, after rolling the bodies into their bloody sheets and dragging them out, helped. I simply felt¡­ weird.


    Regardless of my weird feelings, I still managed to get back to the gym before the sun rose, thankfully the nights were still quite long and the dense cloud cover only made things easier for me. Near the gym, Silva and I were welcomed without undue scrutiny and could get inside and under cover. I even managed to secure some food, this time taking from the supplies in the gym. Granted, I also placed some of the supplies I had foraged during the night into their storage, so I didn¡¯t feel bad about it, especially as what I had taken would perish before the stuff I had replaced it with.


    While I was stuffing my face, a few people came over to ask about magic and magic training. I managed to keep things civil, even if a part of me just wanted to growl at them until they went away. Luckily, I noticed Mr Wong, the person who had reported to Mrs Wu the day before and waved him over. WIth him there, fewer people would bother me and I had actually something important to tell him.


    Namely, the location of multiple other groups of survivors, I hadn¡¯t really mentioned them to Mrs Wu the day before. Only after noticing the light during the night had I remembered that more people might be something they were interested in, either to recruit or to ally with in some fashion. It was a dangerous world out there and additional hands could be useful.


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    He had an obvious interest in the group at the YMCA, even if a part of me bristled at telling him about it due to the divine influence there. The group in the field, on the other hand, required additional investigation in the form of an old, paper map. It was spread across the table and we had to estimate distances and angles until we had a relatively good idea of where the light had been. There were a few, old farmsteads out there, families that had farmed the land for decades, in some cases centuries, but which one had been illuminated was difficult to guess. But that there were other people out there was of obvious interest to him and everyone within earshot. That the news distracted the people around me from asking questions about magic was a pleasant side benefit, allowing me to escape with relative ease.


    After eating, I wanted to test the Water-Rune I had gained from helping Kevin learn Rune Magic. I had no idea if I could use it, or how it would function and I wanted to know. I had pushed the experiment back, simply because I wanted to use the night to work on my actual combat skills and I doubted that water would ever become part of those. So, shortly after my return to the gym, I was standing in the defunct showers, the incoming waterpipes emptied to prevent trouble and slowly drew the strange rune.


    Even with my extensive experience in drawing runes, I needed a few tries. The difference in, for lack of a better word, alphabet was just too much for my fingers to adapt, making me wonder where the difference stemmed from. Unless it was a rather strange coincidence that Blood, Darkness and Ice used the same alphabet, while Water and possibly other elements used another, it had to come from me. Possibly some connection to those runes through my Race, that I instinctively used an Elven, maybe Firn-Elven style, while Kevin, the human, used a different one. I wasn¡¯t sure and by the end of it, I didn¡¯t really care. My fingers were starting to cramp but at least, I had managed to draw the rune.


    No formation just yet, simply the individual rune and a slow, careful amount of Astral Power channelled into it. That resulted in an equally slow dribble of water pouring from it, somewhat like a faucet at a quarter-strength. Closing my eyes, I tried to estimate how much power I needed to keep it at this level, trying to calculate how much water I could create, when the rune fizzled out, sending a jolt of backlashing pain through my skull. Apparently, I couldn¡¯t channel power into Water-runes as easily as I could into Darkness, Blood or Ice-Runes, but I should have expected that. Nevertheless, I was now able to conjure water, in a volume that could easily sustain Silva and me, unless I was in some state that permanently drained my Astral Power. Like, constant exposure to the sun.


    And not only could I provide all the water to sustain us, but I might also be able to create an actual shower, if I managed to increase the amount of Astral Power I could channel through the Water-Rune, or incorporate it into a runic formation. A cold shower, sure, but I didn¡¯t mind that part too much.


    Sadly, my headache precluded any further experimentation and with a sigh, I headed to bed, avoiding as many people as possible. Luckily, it was early enough and only a few people were up and about, most of whom were in the dining room, keeping the number of people I had to ignore as low as possible. Thanks to Mrs Wu, I kept my own room and from the next day, I would retreat into the building I had cleared earlier, making people who wanted lessons come to me during the day, instead of having to hang around the gym. The building was just a block from the guarded area, so the trek should be mostly safe, the small amount of risk acting as a small hurdle. Those who wanted to learn magic should have the courage to overcome such a small obstacle, or they could just beg, scrape and humiliate themselves before the Divine. A bit of Pride was needed, to start out on the Arcane Path.


    Or maybe I was just evil, the jury was still deliberating on that one.


    Sleeping still felt awkward, the constant, low din preventing me from a true, restful slumber but cuddled up to Silva, I mostly managed. She had somehow managed to put on even more muscle, likely thanks to her levels and increased strength and I was pretty sure she was outmassing me now by over fifty percent, weighing in at something around ninety kilograms, without any real fat on her body. Just a lot of fur-covered muscle, making her a wonderful companion in a fight and a perfect warm blanket when it was time to sleep. In combination with her canine loyalty, her presence helped to calm me tremendously, allowing me to get any sleep.

 Interlude: Survivors 102

    Five people are sitting around one of the many improvised tables in the Wu¡¯s Gym, the place where the local survivors have taken shelter. They softly talk, discussing their plans for the day, where to go, what to gather. Each day, the teams have to range out further, looking for stores that have neither burned nor been already looted, to gather more supplies. Each day, the amount of food, water and fuel that is gathered by the various teams gets less and less, and the time needed to find the supplies gets longer and longer.


    Luckily, the water situation might have taken a turn, the demonstration the previous night was certainly promising but just how promising, time would have to tell. The magic demonstration, something none of the five survivors would have taken seriously, if not for the obvious, easily visible and almost impossible to deny, demonstration. But after the initial disbelief had worn off, it felt strangely acceptable, almost expected. The world had gone to shit, blue windows were floating in your view as if this was some sort of video game, so why not magic? To say nothing of the description of an actual video game that somehow foreshadowed the change, even giving benefits to those who had played.


    And that Samantha certainly has received some benefits, Cheng Hu, the leader of their group, is certain of it. He has seen her before, training with Mrs Wu at the gym, not just the usual martial arts but something more demanding and a lot more dangerous. He has been curious about what the two petite women were up to, but at the end of the day, it hasn¡¯t been his business. And now, that same petite woman is walking around with an intimidating air of confidence, her mere gaze enough to send shivers down his spine. Cold, dangerous, those are the words his instincts whisper in his ear when he looks at her. Don¡¯t mess with her, is the warning his guts scream, even as a part of him worries what she might do, even without getting messed with. But what she has shown, what she had her student show, it is an unbelievable feat. Sure, she spoke of rules, of affinities but at the end of the day, a bit of weird finger waggling and suddenly, water appeared. Clean, drinkable water, what others have to spend hours searching for, dodging or destroying their former neighbours, friends and families. A miracle, in this trying world.


    ¡°Cheng Hu, I need a word with you and your group,¡± the voice of Wong Chehai addresses the five of them, his attention focused on their leader. If one had to put a title to Wong Chehai¡¯s job, it would be commander, for he is the one making the plans and keeping records of the already explored and cleared areas.


    ¡°What is it?¡± all five of them rise, not quite coming to attention but not far from it. Each of them, just like most of the others who go out and gather supplies, has served in the military in some form or another. Habits, ingrained by long hours, days or even years, of training, are hard to shed and in a situation like this, they serve their purpose. Maybe not quite the original purpose they had been trained for, but the purpose of protecting their people.


    ¡°We¡¯ve gotten word that there¡¯s some light out at Apple Gate Farm, or there about. Could you take your team and check it out, might be other survivors, might be something else,¡± for a moment, their commander¡¯s voice dropped, obviously trying to avoid being overheard, ¡°You know that our position here isn¡¯t tenable, not in the long term. We can¡¯t deal with all the dead and soon, there¡¯s going to be a plague. We need options,¡± he explains and all of them nod. They, too, have noticed the smell out there slowly getting unpleasant, the bodies in the streets and the various houses. There¡¯s simply no way to deal with them, they don¡¯t have the numbers, tools or time to deal with this many bodies.


    ¡°Wait, you got word? How strong is that light and who saw it?¡± Cheng Hu asks, not sure how far even a strong light can be seen during the day. If there¡¯s some sort of large fire, he¡¯s not sure he wants to march his group out there, just to witness more death and destruction.


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    ¡°Samantha Jacobs, the old lady¡¯s student, told me. Fuck if I know why she prefers to run around at night, but she was in that direction and saw it. Said it¡¯s just a normal, small fire, nothing big,¡± Wong Chehai explains, getting nervous swallows in return. Venturing out during the day is bad enough, but going out at night? None of the five men would voluntarily do that, but to prefer doing it?


    ¡°The old lady has been training her in some weird shit, maybe that¡¯s part of it? Some sneaky stealthy stuff, maybe that¡¯s why Jacobs only has that monster of a dog with her. Or maybe she¡¯s just utterly nuts, I¡¯m not sure which,¡± one of Cheng Hu¡¯s group suggests, having obviously noticed their training before, as well as the sheer intimidating presence of the petite woman.


    ¡°Maybe, don¡¯t know, don¡¯t care. She could be a vampire, as long as she gets us results and doesn¡¯t harm our people, I can¡¯t be bothered to worry about her,¡± the commander admits with a snort, aware of the sheer weirdness of the woman but also aware that she is most likely able to take them all out if she so wishes. Maybe not the old lady, that one is far more dangerous than any physical indicator suggests but that doesn¡¯t make things better. Those two are cut from the same cloth, maybe that¡¯s why the old lady trained the other before things went to hell.


    ¡°Guess we¡¯ll go and check out that farm,¡± Cheng Hu nods and immediately, the other four quickly wolf down their food, while he waits for their commander to add any additional objectives.


    ¡°Go there, find out who¡¯s out there, talk to them, that stuff. Maybe exchange some notes on this insanity,¡± the commander adds, before bidding Cheng Hu a quick farewell and walking off. Once the boss is gone, Cheng Hu, too, focuses on his food, so the group can use as much of the daylight as possible. Apple Gate Farm is some distance away but easily reachable in about two hours if they rush or four if they take their time and are cautious about it. And they will have to be cautious, with the Shattered wandering the streets and the tales of stronger variants, with burning hands that can throw fire, only adding to the danger out there. To think that somebody goes out alone, with only a dog. At night, too. Madness.


    Soon, the five of them gathered the necessary supplies, making sure that they can last a few days out there, and checked their equipment once more. Yes, they might look silly in their damaged and haphazardly thrown-together gear, but looking silly and being alive is far more important than looking good and being dead. Only a few people can pull off looking good and surviving.


    Moving in formation, they all cover their individual vectors, making sure that they miss no Shattered and prevent from stumbling into an ambush. While they have yet to see those, other groups have, and have lost people to them. To say nothing of the groups who never came back in the first place. Only three groups never came back but that¡¯s still fifteen people, vanishing without a trace. Maybe fleeing, maybe dying, but just not coming back.


    Either way, they have a farm to reach and so their focus is less on exploring, or even checking potential supplies but keep moving, steadily making progress. A lot of progress, one might even say too much progress.


    ¡°What¡¯s going on, boss?¡± James, their archer and rearguard quietly asks, after they didn¡¯t see a single Shattered for half an hour. At least not one that as still moving, there were quite a few dead ones.


    ¡°You heard that the commander said Jacobs was out here, didn¡¯t you?¡± Cheng Hu asks in response, ¡°Guess this is all her doing.¡±


    ¡°Fuck, have you seen some of them? They look mangled,¡± another one of them remarks. He made the mistake to be a little too curious and check one of the broken bodies, only to realise just how savaged it actually is.


    ¡°The dog, I guess. Fucking monster,¡± James remarks, shuddering at the thought of a giant dog, with a bloody maw ripping through Shattered with bestial ferocity. No matter what they are now, Shattered used to be human. Killing them is one thing, but to destroy their bodies like this?


    ¡°Fucking monsters, I don¡¯t believe for a second that the dog is the more dangerous one,¡± Cheng Hu reminds them, trying to make sure nobody sees the petite, almost childish body and the baby face and thinks to take advantage, or some other idiocy. Nobody trained by the old lady is harmless and Jacobs doubly not. Just the idea is enough to make his gut churn in fear.

 Chapter 709

    Giving magic-lessons was a strange mix of relaxing and stressful. After waking up, I managed to get some more food before taking over one of the inner rooms, inviting those with affinity-traits to join me. Once those interested had gathered, I had given them my explanation in regards to Astral Power, the Astral River and magic, stressing that it was simply the concepts and images I used to understand something that could be influenced by our own understanding of it. For them, the images might be different or other images and concepts might work better, it was something they had to experience and understand for themselves.


    After giving them that explanation, I had my seven pupils introduce themselves. Other than the two from the night before, there was another younger woman, somewhere around sixteen, two middle-aged men, one middle-aged woman and an older woman, likely somewhere in her sixties, all with magical affinities and an interest in learning. I had no idea if these were all who had affinities, or if there were more, just not willing to learn from me, and I didn¡¯t really care.


    The younger woman introduced herself as Noriko, adding that her affinity was Light-Magic and she was level two. I managed to keep myself from flinching at that, there was still the memory of getting scoured from Mundus by the overwhelming power of the sun, making that my second least favourite type of Magic. Fire-Magic remained my least favourite, but only just. That her affinity was of the Rune-Magic variety didn¡¯t help things, making me consider whether or not I wanted to help her delve into the Astral. On one hand, I wanted to do my best when it came to teaching, on the other hand, I wasn¡¯t sure I wanted to be in close, mental contact with somebody messing around with Light Magic.


    Next, one of the middle-aged men introduced himself as Kenji, his affinity being to Wind-Magic and his level a rather impressive five, making me think that he had been guarding the place and fighting back Shattered, maybe even going out to hunt them. In regards to his affinity, I had no idea how Wind and a slightly stocky, heavyset male fit together, but outward appearances were just that, appearances. By looks, I would have thought he might be, or become at some point, a dwarf and Wind-Magic was the furthest from dwarves I could think of. Thankfully, I had some memories of Lenore using Wind-Magic and while I wasn¡¯t sure I could do it myself, I had some ideas about where to start. Maybe I should try to learn it myself, at least make an attempt, it might open doors that I had considered closed to me. Maybe even allow me to reclaim the sky, at some point.


    The other man introduced himself as Leon, level four, one of the few people not of some sort of Asian descent in the small community, though I had no idea how he fit into the group. Not really my business but simply a small curiosity. Learning that he had Earth-Magic, I simply nodded in acceptance, having no particular preference or hate for that type of magic. Some concepts from Ice-Magic applied, things like crystal-structures and magic to mould rigid materials, those worked for Earth, Rock, Metal or Ice, similar ideas, different materials.


    The middle-aged lady, finally, gave me a serious surprise. Aiko, also level four, as she introduced herself was lucky enough to have an affinity for two types of magic, with Flesh-Magic, something I had only vaguely heard of as an equivalent to Blood Magic, and Nature-Magic, a combination that I was quite envious of. It would make her a tremendous healer and supporter if she wanted to go that route. Both her affinities were Rune-Magic Affinities, making me wonder if the Rune Magic was something inherent, or how that worked. Something to investigate, though the limited sample size might make it difficult. Either way, having her work with Sandy might be useful, allowing them to contrast and compare their abilities. Or it might stifle things, turning them into copies of each other, with one innovating and the other simply copying without thinking about her own magic. Time would tell.


    Lastly, the older lady, who introduced herself as Ling, adding that she had reached level two, had a most curious affinity that threw me for a loop. Weather-Magic didn¡¯t fit with the elements I had learned about and given that she didn¡¯t have a runic affinity, it made me wonder where to even start with her abilities. Sure, my Ice Magic could affect the weather, though the effect was quite limited at a low level. For now, I could create mist, but my power was far from enough to truly affect a system as large and complex as the weather. Regardless, I made a note to have her listen in to my explanation of Air-Magic and Water-Magic, as either might help get her into her own affinity.


    Knowing what the different people had access to, I began to work with them individually, though everyone was invited to listen. My first step was to ask Kevin and Sandy whether they had made progress in their self-study. Kevin eagerly stepped forward, reporting that he had managed to link three runes together in a Runic Formation, a concept I had only vaguely touched upon the day before.


    After praising his initiative, I asked if he had gained the Special Ability governing three-rune formations, only to get a negative reply. Curious, as that had been one of my initial abilities, making me wonder what blocked it for him. Checking my sheet, I realised that I had gained it as a sub-ability of my Natural Mage-Perk, with an Intelligence requirement, though the requirement was likely low, as I had gained the five-rune version at the same time.


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    Given that he had yet to unlock Water Magic, that was what I had him work with next, as the magic ability linked to a Rune Magic made things a lot easier, allowing for a massive increase in his repertoire. Hopefully, he¡¯d be able to learn it. For now, I had Ling watch him and try to get a feeling for water, simply because the weather was closely linked to the water cycle.


    Sandy hadn¡¯t progressed far, she could make her potted plant grow another leaf, but nothing more. For her, I wanted to try unlocking the Rune Magic, but before, I had her work with Aiko, trying to have Aiko unlock Nature Magic before we worked on her Rune Mastery.


    That left me with the two older males. Given that I wanted to have Ling listen in when working with Kenji and she was occupied with Kevin, I started with Leon. Talking to him for a bit, I realised he knew much more about the material we were working with than I did, especially on the microscopic level. When I asked him about it, he told me he had been working as a Civil Engineer, mostly designing fire protection and safety solutions but that things like concrete and similar building materials were part of his job. It made me wonder if he had leaned into that career due to his affinity or if he had the affinity due to his career. Either way, I decided to tell him about the dwarves and their way of magic. I remembered enough from my studies to design my own connecting patterns at the Ashenforge to give him some ideas, but most of it would have to come from his own efforts.


    Lastly, there was Kenji. He was quite amusing, almost childlike in his eagerness, with a permanent grin on his face as he listened to my explanations for the others. I had to keep myself from laughing at the image of a roughly forty-year-old, slightly chubby guy bouncing around as if he was a little boy but his ebullient curiosity was infectious. He wanted to learn, that was obvious, and I wanted to teach.


    After getting Ling to listen in, I began speaking of the Wind and air, telling them about my time with Lenore and what I had learned from her and the contact with her mind. By the time I was finished, I was a little hoarse but filled with a combination of nostalgia and longing, missing my feathered friend. For a moment, I was tempted to delve into the Astral River, trying to reach her in the distant plane she was in, but I knew better. I lacked the strength to reach her, for now, but that didn¡¯t mean I couldn¡¯t think of her.


    Closing my eyes, I remembered how she had moved the air, how the wind had yielded to her wings, while her wings had used the wind. A constant cycle of motion, without the stillness so ingrained into my Ice Magic. For a moment, I felt a barrier and pushed against it, feeling a chunk of Astral Power leave my system. In turn, I noticed the air around me move a little, barely enough to rustle my hair but the movement was clearly unnatural. Or completely natural, if magic was part of Nature.


    Wind Magic, not enough to gain the skill but it was enough to make me think I would get there. Similarly, I was certain that Kenji and Ling had seen what I had done, looking at me with slightly wide eyes.


    ¡°Well, something like that. Wind is not my element, but as I told you, I know a few things,¡± I grinned, before giving them a few pointers on where to start.


    Finally, it was time for my last pupil. I wasn¡¯t looking forward to being in direct contact with someone meditating on the Light element, even if I intellectually knew that it had nothing to do with Sunna and getting scoured off Mundus. And yet, there was a slight cramp in my gut, an uncomfortable, twisting sensation.


    But not one I would let myself be stopped by. If nothing else, knowledge was power and knowledge about an element I was uncomfortable with might be doubly important. Know thy enemy, and all that. If I could learn enough about the Light-Element from teaching her, I might learn how to easily counter it.


    ¡°Now, Noriko. Your Affinity is with Light Magic,¡± I began, ¡°Don¡¯t make the mistake to think that Light automatically means good, for it does not. There are some implications, but they go more in the direction of Order and towards a certain directness. As far as I know, Light does not hold any inherent healing properties, though I believe purification would be well within your grasp if you venture into that direction. Think of it like a sterilisation process using high levels of ultraviolet radiation. For that, too, is light. I don¡¯t know the limits between Light-Magic and something of a higher order, likely some sort of Radiance or Radiation Magic, but that¡¯s for you to find out,¡± shaking my head, I paused, giving her a task before continuing.


    ¡°For now, I will guide you into the Astral River, where you can form the first runes that will guide your magic. Generally, you will be able to form three initially, so think about what three concepts you want to use as the foundation of your Light Magic. The more specific a concept, the more powerful it is, but the less versatile and vice-versa. But even a less powerful concept can be used to incredible effect if you apply it in the right way.¡±


    Looking at the others, I realised that the same held true for all of them, especially those with Rune Affinities.


    ¡°It is something you should all consider. What concepts do you want to use as the foundation of your abilities? They should be what you consider the foundation of the element you have an affinity with, at least that¡¯s my understanding. Maybe you could ask Kevin what his first three runes are, and use that to consider your own. Hopefully, I will be able to guide each of you into the Astral and back, allowing all of you to utilise Rune Magic. But we shall see,¡± I told them, giving them a bit of time before we continued.

 Chapter 710

    Once my pupils were busy, I decided to do a small experiment myself. My plan was to have everyone try to pick up the rune mastery of their respective elements, so I wanted to see if I was able to pick up Death Rune Mastery, assuming there was such a thing. While I lacked the affinity, I hoped that my previous exposure and current possession of Death Magic would make up for the difference. And if not, I hopefully wouldn¡¯t lose too much, just a little time.


    It was something I had only realised after the change, no matter what magic I picked up, it might come in handy at some point. On Mundus, I had focused on increasing my skills with the elements I had an affinity with, but given that I would hopefully live for decades, maybe even centuries as a Firn Elf, there was no reason not to start learning skills early. It might even open up interesting options when I started crossing the Divides, those were unique opportunities that might grant me far more power now, compared to the improvements I had gained on Mundus.


    Closing my eyes, I let myself drop into the Astral River, not bothering with the visual trappings I had used for Kevin. I didn¡¯t need to orient myself, nor did I need to create an Avatar to give myself a frame of reference, I simply existed on the imaginary shore of the surging Astral River. It hadn¡¯t calmed at all, if anything the chaos was a little worse, with more frothing ripples as the Astral River splashed across the stones of reality but that would cease at some point.


    For a few minutes, I simply remained there, watching the ebb and flow of power, before focusing on that one stream I was interested in. It was quite powerful, the countless deaths during the change still echoing through the Astral River, accompanied by the similarly large number of casualties in the days after, they all empowered that particular flow.


    Careful, ever so careful, I stretched a tendril of my will into the surging power, trying to project it as Death Magic to insulate me from the, quite literally, deadly power. I had no interest in getting immersed in it, doing so would undoubtedly kill me. Even the careful contact from a distance sent a spike of pain through my head, drilling through my left eye and setting in to form a brutal instant migraine.


    Taking a bit more distance, I considered for a moment whether to try to reach for some sort of Mind Magic Rune Mastery, before deciding against it. I already had a headache and didn¡¯t need to make things worse. For now, Death Rune Mastery was obviously out of my reach but maybe I could get it at some point.


    Returning to reality, I was met with a clutch of worried students, all of them staring at my face as if they had seen some sort of spectre. Blinking my eyes, I noticed a strange, wet sensation on my left cheek and a lot of gunk blurring my left eye. Reaching up, I realised that I had cried tears of blood and not just a few but enough to make a mess on my blouse.


    Blinking a few more times, I looked at Kevin.


    ¡°Did you manage to gain Water Magic by now?¡± I asked, mostly ignoring the mess I had caused. He simply stared for a few moments before shaking his head.


    Not wanting to bother with anything, I used my magic to create another bowl of Ice, ignoring the fresh spike of pain running through my head, before gesturing for him to fill the bowl with water. Once it was in, I quickly washed my face, the cool liquid helping tremendously, before I conjured up some Cold using the respective Rune and simply brushed the now-frozen water off my skin. That got me a few strange looks, but I simply ignored them, alongside the mess on my shirt.


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    ¡°Let that be a small example of what can happen if you reach for things outside of your ability. You will suffer from backlash, and the bigger your overreach, the worse it will be. Backlash can typically range from a simple headache but there is pretty much no upper limit. If you mess up too much, you can die from it. But in turn, only by stretching your reach, by pushing your abilities, you will be able to truly advance. But everyone on the Arcane Path needs to determine their own pace, goal and method. I doubt there is some sort of perfect way to walk the Arcane Path, no matter what some people might claim. It is a path of discovery, both the discovery of yourself and of the world around you,¡± I lectured, noticing the mix of fear and curiosity on the various faces around me. Some of them would go far, others not so much. But I could only guess who would be what.


    ¡°Have you finished what I asked of you?¡± I prodded, getting a couple of sheepish looks and one conviction-filled nod from Noriko. Swallowing I took a few more moments to prepare myself for potential exposure to Light Magic, before nodding.


    ¡°Sit down. I will guide you into the Astral River and you will carefully reach for the stream of power that draws you in. You will need to feel for Light Magic, I cannot really help you there, I can only lead you to water, so to speak. You will need to drink for yourself,¡± I told her, before gently placing my fingers on her temples.


    As gently as I could, I stretched my magical feelers out into her mind, not trying to intrude or read anything, the contact more akin to a poke and an offered hand. When I felt feedback, I dropped back into the Astral River, feeling her mind follow along the channel I had opened.


    Back above the chaotic streams of power, I quickly prepared the same trappings of reference I had created for Kevin, giving Noriko¡¯s mind something to focus on and anchor herself on. It was a crutch but for now, that might just be what my pupils needed.


    At first, nothing much happened. Noriko was likely trying to make sense of the chaos around and beneath us, something I could empathise with and I took the time to simply bask in the glory of change, as creation and destruction were flowing around us in equal measures. It made me think that on this level, the Cyclic view of the world was the correct one. Nothing was eternal, nothing was still, it was a constant ebb and flow. But what about other levels? Was there some ultimate end, was there some absolute beginning? Either would point to the extreme view of reality and maybe I simply lacked the ability to see far enough.


    When I noticed a change in Noriko, and felt her connect to the Astral River, I didn¡¯t try to mentally follow her mind. If anything, I took a bit of distance, letting her connect with the streams of Light Magic on her own, without any interest to experience that particular communion. I had a feeling the result would be just as bad as with Death Magic, maybe even worse, given my particularly bad affinity to the Light. No, I would happily stay in the Darkness and let others bask in the far-too-hot light of the sun.


    Not long after, I felt a sense of exhaustion, alongside the feeling of accomplishment over the connection I had established and gave her another gentle, mental push, trying to prod her back into her body. It took a few tries, either for her to understand or for her to find the right path, but she managed and I followed along, moving into my own body.


    ¡°Congratulations, I believe?¡± I asked, looking at the proud-looking Noriko, who was wiping a thin sheen of sweat off her brow.


    ¡°I did it,¡± she grinned, one of her hands rising and starting to draw a Rune into the air between us. Realising that she would most likely unleash some sort of bright light, I pulled down the hood of my cloak, wrapping myself tightly and turning my head away just in time to block out the flash.


    ¡°Caution is warranted,¡± I chided her, happy that I had been in time, otherwise I¡¯d likely look a lot worse than the others. Ling and Leon had mirrored my actions to a point and didn¡¯t look too worse for wear, but the others were blinking as if they had looked into the flash of a camera.


    ¡°Anyway, you have runes to play with, just like Kevin. Maybe you should talk to each other and try to gain a better understanding of your magic, while I help the others find their own Rune Magic?¡± I suggested, briefly glancing at my EXP-bar, noticing that helping her had granted me a nice chunk of EXP. At a guess, two or three more would push me to level twenty, something I was looking forward to.

 Chapter 711

    By the time I had introduced each of my students to the Astral River, I was beyond exhausted. Not just from the repeated task of pulling them into that space and giving them a frame of reference but mainly from my attempts to gain the same runes they were trying to gain. But it wasn¡¯t as if I had nothing to show for my efforts, in some ways, teaching for a day had been more successful than a night of grinding Shattered might have been.


    Sadly, not all of them had been successful. Kenji was only a partial success. He didn¡¯t have the Rune Magic affinity, but managed to gain his first Rune, the Rune of Wind, but failed to gain more. Afterwards, he put in some concentrated effort while I was working with the others and managed to unlock the Rune Mastery. Amusingly, I managed to understand the same Rune by watching him, though I didn¡¯t have time to expand on it.


    Similarly, Sandy failed to gain her Runes, but she achieved partial success, understanding the Rune of Nature but failing to gain more. With Kenji as an example, I encouraged her to work more, especially with Aiko, who had more luck.


    Aiko was an interesting case. She managed to unlock the initial three Runes of both her affinities and observing her allowed me to gain a Rune myself, though not quite in the way I had thought I would. When I observed her learning the Rune of Nature, I failed to learn it, just like I had failed when observing Sandy and when she reached for the initial Runes of Flesh, I managed to understand the first rune, though it wasn¡¯t part of a separate disciple of magic for me, it was added to the Runes of Blood Magic I knew. I would have to try and learn more if I wanted to understand the intersection between the two disciples and how her differently written Runes interacted with my own magic.


    Either way, her success had been what pushed me over the edge and granted me another level, bringing me to twenty. The moment we returned from the Astral River, all of my students started to stare at me with that familiar mix of awe and disbelief, making me guess that they had felt something. When I didn¡¯t explain or elaborate, they soon gave up and continued with their own projects, leaving me to marvel at my gains.


    And what gains there were. Not only had I gained that level, and the Dragon-Touched Trait had reared its head again, giving me another point in each of my attributes. That, in turn, pushed my Courage to fifteen, granting me the Courageous Explorer trait. In some ways, it wasn¡¯t anything special but it increased the effect of my Courage when dealing with the Unknown by thirty percent. Useful, but nothing earthshaking.


    But it left me with a bit of a conundrum. I had three unspent attribute points remaining and knew that I would get a trait for pushing my attributes to fifteen, while at level twenty. Dexterity and Vitality were both at fourteen, while Endurance was at thirteen, putting me in range to get them to that threshold but spending more than one point would prevent me from reaching twenty-five intelligence at level twenty-five. If I only spent one, I could get there, but it would, in turn, prevent me from getting twenty-five Intuition at level thirty, assuming that Dragon-Touched granted me the plus one to every attribute every ten levels.


    The traits would grant me some extra, immediate power but I thought that the traits or abilities I would hopefully gain by pushing my primary attributes to higher milestones would make up for it in the long run. Or at least I thought they would, I would have to see.


    Either way, it was nothing I had to decide at that moment, so I focused on my students and continued my work with Leon.


    His delve turned out to be successful, too. Sadly, his success had only given me a vague idea of what the basic Rune of Earth looked like and I hadn¡¯t managed to understand it just yet. Maybe I would be able to, at some point, but for now, I could only try and experiment with it, or meditate on the concept of Earth. I wasn¡¯t sure how to advance it, just like I was uncertain how to work with Nature Magic, but I had a starting point for either and planned to put in some time when things calmed down.


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    Lastly, Ling¡¯s delve was another complete failure. The only thing she managed to get was a headache, one that I shared thanks to my efforts to understand the basic Rune of Weather if there even was such a thing. It wasn¡¯t as brutal as the headache I had given myself by trying to gain Mastery over the Runes of Death, but it was unpleasant nonetheless.


    Finally, when all was said and done, I looked over the notifications and checked for skill upgrades. Three levels in Mind Magic, bringing it to seven and two levels in Astral Meditation, bringing it to fifteen, all in all, a nice reward for my efforts. Nothing in comparison to the level and the knowledge gained, but that was to be expected.


    ¡°Now, I believe all of you have something to work on. I¡¯m afraid it will be hardest for you, Ling, simply because the Weather and Weather Magic is a far-reaching and complex field. That doesn¡¯t mean its weaker or worse, just that you¡¯ll have to put in more work at the beginning but I believe that your efforts will be rewarded,¡± I began to close down the lesson, planning to take a nap before heading back out and get some hunting done.


    ¡°From tomorrow on, I¡¯ll hold lessons at another place. You might have noticed that I¡¯m not the most sociable person,¡± at that, there were a few ill-concealed laughs and snickers, none of which I actually minded, ¡°Due to that, I secured one of the nearby buildings, taking down the Shattered that once lived there and giving their victims a more dignified final rest. If you have questions or want to experiment and would prefer a second opinion and oversight, you can meet me there in the afternoon.¡±


    From the looks of it, all of my students were quite exhausted from the lesson and none of them had additional questions, so I gave them the address of my new lair and dismissed the class. For a few moments, they milled about before starting to file out. As they were leaving, Aiko more or less grabbed Sandy, probably to discuss Nature Magic, while Kenji, Ling and Kevin had already put their heads together and were walking together, likely in an effort to understand how Weather Magic was supposed to work. With Water and Wind, they¡¯d hopefully have a bit of success.


    Leon simply walked away, apparently not interested in working with his fellows on the Arcane Path, which left me with Noriko. Light Magic User, Noriko.


    For a moment, I was tempted to send her away, maybe claiming some sort of prior engagement but I stopped myself. Disliking somebody simply because of the magic they wielded was the sentiment that had pushed Blood Magic to the edges of society, or even out of society on Mundus. If I started that foolishness now, I would be no better than those who had done so there, a bigoted fool with too much power and not enough sense.


    Taking a deep breath, I simply waited for her to speak, curious why she was lingering around.


    ¡°Mrs Samantha, could I ask a question?¡± the young woman looked at me, clearly apprehensive. I managed to keep myself from laughing at the address, though it was a near thing.


    ¡°I believe you just did,¡± I raised an eyebrow, before adding, ¡°And cut that Mrs business. Just Samantha, Miss, if you have to. I¡¯m not married and I don¡¯t think I¡¯d ever let some supposed higher authority try to dictate my relationship.¡±


    ¡°Right¡­¡± she paused, clearly confused.


    ¡°Ask away. Make it quick, I have something planned for later. What is it that bothers you?¡± I prodded, hoping to get this done quickly. For a few moments, she simply stared at me, before taking a deep breath and speaking.


    ¡°Not so much bothers me, but I would like to know if I have insulted you. You seem to dislike me, but I don¡¯t know why,¡± she asked, looking rather uncomfortable at being this direct.


    ¡°Ah, that,¡± I scratched my head, not quite sure what to explain and how to explain, before deciding to give her a partial answer.


    ¡°See here,¡± I raised a hand, conjuring a cloud of Darkness around it, ¡°I have an affinity for Darkness, which, in turn, means I have a certain innate dislike against Light and brightness. You might have noticed the same in yourself, that you dislike the Night or dark spaces. Have you?¡± I asked, getting a nod in return and even I could easily read the apprehension on her face.


    ¡°There is more to it, in my case, but I¡¯ll endeavour to keep my prejudices from interfering with my teaching of you. But now, I believe you have some training to do and I would like to get some rest. Pulling people into the Astral River and guiding them is not as easy as it might look,¡± I added, gently shooing her away.


    This time, she left without further complaints.

 Chapter 712

    ¡°I¡¯ve heard you¡¯ve been quite busy, Samantha,¡± Mrs Wu interrupted my quiet, restful meditation, pulling my attention from the shores of the Astral River where I had studied the changing chaos. I was still unable to make sense of what I could see but made sure to remember as much as possible, for one day, I would be able to understand.


    ¡°Teaching was surprisingly interesting,¡± I admitted, looking at my old teacher. She looked pretty good, though exhaustion was marring her features, a deep weariness that made me worry for her. She didn¡¯t look like she was getting enough sleep, but it shouldn¡¯t be a surprise, given that I knew she had been forced to put down her husband just a few nights back. Nightmares could get even the most experienced people.


    ¡°You know, it¡¯s amazing,¡± she grinned, the weariness on her face only getting more profound as she took a seat across the table from me, ¡°We¡¯re in such a mess, with problems that threaten our very survival everywhere around us and yet, your simple presence is enough to antagonise some people. Why they can¡¯t just mind their own business and let you be, let you teach those interested, I have no idea,¡± she shook her head, a touch of exasperation entering her voice.


    ¡°But no, there have been people voicing their worries, suggesting that you are corrupting the younger people. It¡¯s such a headache,¡± she started rambling, quietly complaining about some of the people in the community. Listening to her, I started to feel uncomfortable for multiple reasons. One was that I was, objectively, the reason for some of her troubles, my presence, and possibly some of my traits, acting as catalysts to bring those problems to the forefront. Without me, the problems might have remained unvoiced until the situation was less tenuous and more mental resources were available to deal with it. Another was that Mrs Wu had always been a person I had respected as a teacher and there was a childish part of me that expected the teacher to have all the answers. Not to be a failable human that struggled with their own problems.


    And yet I listened, trying my best to give her good advice, or if I was unable to do so, to keep my mouth shut. If nothing else, I could let her vent and hopefully, voicing her troubles would make things better.


    Finally, after an uncomfortable fifteen minutes, Mrs Wu calmed herself back down, the emotions that had leaked through her inscrutably calm mask reigned back in, leaving her as calm as a placid lake in winter.


    ¡°Anyway,¡± she shook her head, mask firmly back in place as she changed the topic, ¡°You spoke to Mr Wong about those other groups. We¡¯ve asked a few of those who have started to explore this changed world to make contact but I¡¯d still like to ask for your opinion about them. It would give us a bit of an idea of what to expect,¡± she asked and I tried my best to recount what I knew of the people I had encountered. Not that I knew a lot, my only real encounter had been short and a little tense but I did my best.


    When I came to the group I had only vaguely heard while breaking into one of the shopping centres and mentioning that I had heard what I thought to be an infant or toddler, her mask cracked once more, a morose sadness overwhelming her features.


    ¡°Those poor people,¡± she shook her head, ¡°I can¡¯t even imagine how they must feel, the bond between child and mother can be the strongest there is.¡±


    Looking at her, I began to question my previous considerations, had I truly acted right? Even now, I couldn¡¯t confidently say that I would be able to keep myself safe regardless of circumstances. My success was due to constant violence and my experiences on Mundus, without those, I¡¯d be far from my current level. Could I extend the tenuous umbrella of protection over another human, especially one that was caring for a toddler and thus a physical and emotional liability?


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    ¡°And yet, I can¡¯t say that I¡¯d have acted any different, certainly not when I was your age. What a shitty situation,¡± she continued to commiserate before we returned to our previous topic and discussed what I knew about the people at the YMCA and that group I actually had met. Discussing the gods was interesting. Amusingly, she quickly followed my previous reasoning and began questioning divine motives. Just like me, she didn¡¯t believe that any Power would aid others just out of benevolence, there had to be something in it for them.


    Or as she put it, people don¡¯t get rich by giving their money away without it being an investment. Power, in her eyes, was just another currency, or maybe it was that money was just another form of power.


    Amusingly, she was already worrying that some people would take out a loan without the ability to pay it back and at some point, they would default. Only defaulting on a loan of power from a divine entity might be a lot worse than defaulting on a loan from even the most vicious loan sharks. That she thought it only a possibly worse outcome made me wonder what some loan sharks did and the look on her face convinced me that I didn¡¯t want to ask.


    Ultimately, we agreed that there was very little anyone could do in regard to the gods. They, just like the banksters before the change, were removed from us simple mortals, holed up in their lofty temples, or something like that. She could only try to guide her people and I could only try to teach those willing to learn, to help them find their own power. Just like she and those who had prior training would, try to teach those willing to learn and hope that they wouldn¡¯t take out a loan with their soul as collateral.


    Amusingly, she was quite supportive of my plan to move out and set up my own domain nearby. It wasn¡¯t that she wanted me gone, quite the opposite, but with some people already concerned but too cowardly to target me directly, it was for the best. One of the worries she had mentioned was that I wanted to take control of the group, apparently, I had some sort of intimidating aura. How that worked, I had no idea but according to her removing my presence would help calm things back down. But not removing me far enough that I wouldn¡¯t be able to help or act as a deterrent against people trying to make trouble. Not that there were any troublemakers just yet but Mrs Wu thought it would only be a matter of time until somebody decided to do something stupid. Listening to her, it sounded as if it was inevitable, only making my prior conviction not to hang around stronger.


    But it made me remember my old plan, to leave the city and the reason for doing so. That there were thousands of dead bodies in the area, likely with millions of animal bodies adding to the total. Rot, decay and disease would spread, that was almost inevitable, and while higher levels and increased attributes might blunt some of the pestilences, I had no idea about the details.


    And, horrified, I realised that I had no idea what the amount of Death in that short a timeframe might do. Or the countless, unconsecrated dead left to rot. Similar occurrences had led to literal fields of death on Mundus, places where Death and Wild Magic had come together to blight the land. The Dorrian Mountains were one such place and while those had been formed by countless battles and wars going back and forth, I wasn¡¯t sure how the death toll in those compared to our situation, or how the use of magic in the battles changed the outcome. Just as I had no idea how the change would affect the situation here, it could turn into anything.


    When I explained the sudden changes of my expression to a worried Mrs Wu, she only let out a slow, defeated sigh.


    ¡°We can¡¯t really do anything about that. I know what you mean about disease and we¡¯ve been discussing plans to prepare camping supplies and set up some distance from the city, maybe in one of the outlying farms or something like that. It¡¯s been why we¡¯ve been quite interested in those lights you saw out there, it might be worthwhile to make contact with the people there. But we¡¯ve only just managed to get things together here. Some people will want to stay behind, and that might lead to a splintering of the group. Morale and discipline are what keep us alive and moving the group might destroy both. But we have to move anyway, unless we somehow magically,¡± she chuckled at that, ¡°manage to keep the bodies around us from rotting,¡± she shook her head, before rising, leaving me to consider my options.


    Sadly, if I wanted to help these people and maintain my best chance to affiliate myself with a community, there was little I could do. Well, for now, I could spend a night to make sure no swarms of rats or similar vermin were coming out of the sewers and tearing them apart. Not the most efficient way to gain EXP, I doubted I would gain any, but it would be useful. Maybe I¡¯d drag some of my students along, it might give them some EXP.

 Chapter 713

    Finding most of my students was easier than I expected, they hadn¡¯t gone far. The sheer novelty of their magic had sent most of them into a bit of a tizzy, even Ling who was quite the sight with her white hair acting in stark contrast to the childish glee all of them were emanating. Only Leon was missing, but that might have been due to a difference in personality or that he was of a slightly different bend. More focused on the scientific side, possibly due to his engineering background, and perceiving magic through that lens. Not as something to be enthused about, or something miraculous, simply another facet of the things he had studied and applied for years. A different mindset, but I wasn¡¯t certain which was the better one.


    Either way, given their proximity, I offered the life practice to them first and got immediate interest. Especially Kevin muttered something along the lines of riding the bus to uba-powa, sounding both amused and flabbergasted at the idea. That got the others even more interested, though Sandy didn¡¯t look too enthused when she realised it would entail a lot of killing and death. Understandable, but not a useful mindset in this world. There were no soldiers who made sure that danger and death were kept far from the Western world we were living in, and no police trying to enforce a governmental monopoly on force. Just individuals, each of us having to provide our own safety, giving us ultimate and complete agency and freedom. Freedom truly wasn¡¯t free.


    Given that I assumed the usual rules I had learned on Mundus would apply here, too, I told them that three of them could join Silva and myself, letting them figure out who could go and who couldn¡¯t. That led to a rapid and spirited round of rock, paper, scissors, something that amused me to no end given that it, theoretically, could be counted as a test of Intuition and Dexterity, both important attributes to budding spellcasters and a party containing Ling, Kevin and Noriko. Amusingly, the three lowest-level people had won while the others showed varying degrees of relief and disappointment, ranging from the mild to the outrageous. Kenji acted as if he was in deep despair, at least for a few seconds, before his mood shifted once more, now displaying a gleeful smile as he mused about the food prepared for the evening.


    After getting some food for myself, and warning my three students that it would likely be a long night, we gathered at the entrance, the three of them looking at me, and sometimes Silva, with a lot more apprehension. Maybe seeing the darkness outside was driving home just how real this was, that I planned to go out there and hunt, not just guard the territory here. They each had some sort of simple weapon, Ling what looked like a kitchen cleaver, Kevin a baseball bat and Noriko a Kusarigama, a chain-sickle, that I had seen in Mrs Wu¡¯s collection. None were system-approved, making their efficiency utter crap but it was likely the best they had. Hopefully, they wouldn¡¯t need it.


    Looking at each of the three in turn, I raised my hand and softly intoned, ¡°Until dawn, I shall guide you three in fellowship. You shall learn from me, learn of this world and of magic. In turn, you will guard my back while I work, as I guard you.¡±


    The words didn¡¯t have any power of their own, but I had learned on Mundus that intentions mattered and in this case, my intention was to invite them into the party, the fellowship, Silva and I had established, with me as their leader. For a moment, all three looked downwards, indicating that a blue box had appeared in their vision, before they all voiced their agreement, in varying degrees of formality. Amusingly, Noriko was the most formal, trying to match my previous formality and tenor.


    ¡°Until dawn, I shall follow you in fellowship. I will act as you direct and learn as you teach. I will guard your back and trust that you guard mine,¡± she promised and for a moment, I wondered if there was a way to make her words binding. But no, even the attempt would be a grave breach of trust, my students trusted me to act as their teacher, and even just trying to suborn them would betray that. It felt oddly wrong, not just the faint, lingering memory of my mother teaching me how to act but something else. Something deeper. Possibly that blessing, coming back to haunt me, trying to make me act as a good teacher?


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    Shaking off the confusion, I led my fellowship out, Silva easily moving alongside me. I wanted to try and thoroughly clear out the sewers, making sure that nothing was growing down there to threaten the community here. It would be a merely temporary solution but hopefully, they wouldn¡¯t need more, having moved before things could become truly problematic.


    As we moved, I considered using my cloak to fade into the gloom of the night but decided against it. My students were already nervous enough, especially after I had forbidden them to light a torch or have Noriko use her Light Magic to illuminate our surroundings, having me seemingly disappear on them would only stress them out needlessly. Instead, I let my Frozen Shuttle flit and weave around us, trying to increase the precision of my control while simply giving them a small show and distraction. The main part of my awareness was out there, focused on my senses to the point that I barely registered where I was going, more interested in what we would find when we got there.


    Given that this was supposed to be a training trip, I began to quietly lecture about Shattered and the weaknesses I had noticed before. They weren¡¯t the only enemies out there, but the ones my fledgeling students would mostly face for now.


    Realising that I hadn¡¯t even asked them whether they had figured out some sort of attack magic, I did just that. Kevin nodded enthusiastically, while Noriko frowned before giving me a hesitant nod. Ling, on the other hand, only smiled wrily but given that she had, so far, failed to learn any magic, that wasn¡¯t a surprise.


    ¡°We¡¯ll see if there are any Shattered that will work as training dummies. That way, you can get used to fighting them in a reasonably safe situation,¡± I told them, noticing that the prospect didn¡¯t make them look too enthused.


    Regardless, this was training for them, so I had them demonstrate, targeting a nearby wall. Kevin¡¯s attack was a little sad. He managed to combine three runes into a formation, for him a challenging feat, a fact that made me praise the traits ¡®Natural Mage¡¯ and ¡®The Road is my Teacher¡¯, but the actual power of the spell was lacklustre. I recognised the doubled Water-Rune he used and guessed that the other one was something like splash, spout or spring, something that implied movement, but it only turned into one big wave of water that splashed against the wall. Likely strong enough to push a Shattered back a step or knock a person over, but nothing more. It wouldn¡¯t truly damage them and he needed multiple seconds to cast it.


    On the other hand, Noriko¡¯s attack was incredibly effective. That is, if I was the target. She, too, tried a three-rune formation with Light as the central part. Her intent was likely to try turning it into something akin to a laser however the result was a bright flash that left me blinking away the spots in my eyes, despite my attempts to shield them.


    After acknowledging their attempts, I began to explain the problems with their spells. Mostly the lack of penetration and the problem of friendly fire. As we walked, I tried to help them understand how to link Runes, hoping they would unlock the Runic Formation ability, before moving on to talk about the Spell Channelling ability. If they had those two, their spells might actually be useful.


    Even after we left the area guarded by archers on rooftops, there were very few Shattered around. Those few that noticed our small fellowship were dispatched before they could close in. As the Shattered died, I made sure that my students were getting EXP, sadly they didn¡¯t get a lot and began considering leaving a few for them to train.


    Like that, with a mix of teaching, walking and a few Shattered interruptions, we made our way to a nice, large manhole cover, just a few hundred metres outside of their protective envelope. I had noticed it the night before and decided it would be the place to insert my mists, hopefully making sure nothing tried to escape the carnage by charging into the gym.


    After making sure that nothing problematic was nearby, I settled down, calming myself before creating the five rune formation I habitually used. Time to show my students a bit of my actual prowess.

 Chapter 714

    ¡°Watch well,¡± I instructed my students, as I made myself somewhat comfortable above the manhole cover. A part of me still wanted to conjure my Throne but I simply lacked the power to do so easily. Maybe at some point I would be able to reclaim it, but for now, it was simply too much expenditure for too little advantage.


    ¡°Each of you can learn something from what I¡¯m about to do. Parts of the working pertain to each of your affinities, in some way. While the Mist I use is from Ice, I strongly believe that Water-Magic holds a similar concept. It is an excellent medium to cover a large area, allowing a highly efficient spread of Astral Power. In addition, natural Mist is a Weather-Phenomenon, so there should be a connection to your weather-magic, too,¡± pausing for a moment, I looked at Noriko, after explaining to Kevin and Ling what their connection to my working was.


    ¡°Now, for you, it¡¯s more difficult. You wield and seek to comprehend the Light. I can offer only a little help there but I can show you the Darkness. It might not help you directly but maybe, if you understand some of the Darkness I¡¯m about to unleash, it will allow you to understand the light, at least on a superficial level. It helps that the Darkness I¡¯m using at the moment is merely the absence of light, not the true Darkness of the Void,¡± I mused, noticing a frown on her face as I mentioned the true darkness. It made me long for the ability to delve deeper and investigate the depths of space and the void there, where the diffuse light of distant stars was bound into an empty void, unable to shine on anything and thus, ultimately lost in the empty darkness.


    Shaking off the nostalgic memories, I focused on the present and the massacre I was planning. My hands flicked through practised motions, forming the five rune formation I had used before and starting to channel power into it. Just as always, the build-up was slow and steady, a constant stream of mist floating into the manhole below, following gravity¡¯s inexorable pull. The three fledgling spellcasters around me were staring at the glowing runes before me and I could hear Noriko mutter under her breath, even saw a full-body shudder run through her. Realising that there was little I could do to help them, I closed my eyes, letting my mind drift into the disassociated state that allowed me to channel vast amounts of power from the Astral River into the runic formation before me.


    For some fifty minutes, I stayed like that, drawing Astral Power from the River and pushing it into the runes, faintly feeling the mists spreading out through the tunnels, pipes and cracks beneath, spreading far and wide. Finally, I decided that they had spread enough and I changed my focus, pushing the second part of the formation to its fullest, even activating Overflow to pour as much power into it as the formation could take.


    A soft gasp almost distracted me from my efforts, the noise something unusual and normally alarming but knowing that Silva was there, protecting me, I kept my focus. More and more power surged through the formation and into the mist and I could almost feel the countless creatures trapped within slowly perish as their life was devoured right out of their bodies.


    Finally, I decided that it was enough. My connection to the lingering Astral Power was faint and only remained thanks to the constant stream of power I poured into the Runic Formation, so the feedback I received was vague, but it didn¡¯t feel like there was anything still there. Everything was dead, just like I wanted.


    Opening my eyes, I first looked at my notifications. They were quite disappointing, countess notifications that told me I had killed something but received no EXP until I finally got to those that told me I had gained a level in Darkness Rune Mastery and Ice Magic, bringing them both to fifteen.


    ¡°Now, what did you see? What did you learn?¡± I asked my students, only to notice that they were all looking quite rough, holding their heads as if in pain. Only now, I realised that the massive influx of EXP apparently was quite rough on them, reminding me of the pain I had suffered after my original clearing of the Snowbold Den, back on Mundus. Far too many levels, too much EXP, all pouring in at once could easily overstimulate the system.


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    With a discrete and concealed use of Observe, I could read their levels and didn¡¯t even try to hide the grin from my face. They had all gained, massively and had been instantly pushed to level five. The small EXP difference between Kevin and the two females was apparently small enough that it had been swallowed up, leaving them all equally in pain. Apparently, the threshold was based on your own level, gaining five levels at level ten, an increase by forty percent, but at level one, as Kevin still had been? A five-hundred percent increase and something he was paying for.


    Looking at them, I began to consider. Could I do something similar with more people here? And if yes, should I try doing so? Would I help the people in the long run, or harm them? A high level was useful, the higher attributes neat but without personal combat experience and skill, they would be negligible. They would die just as quickly, maybe even more quickly, and their higher strength might even attract unwanted attention. For now, I doubted people would actively hunt other high-levelled people to increase their own, but at some point, that might happen. If I considered my present situation, where no creatures were actually worth fighting, I wasn¡¯t sure that point was far off. A few idiotic people that were levelled by someone with a skill-set similar to mine for a few days, pushed forward by large-scale killings or maybe the deliberate baiting and slaughter of Shattered, they could be harvested for their EXP and at a guess, it would be a worthwhile investment, until stronger enemies appeared.


    ¡°What was that?¡± Ling asked, still holding her likely aching head.


    ¡°Levels, you are likely amongst the more powerful people around, at least when it comes to your level. Five should give you some Attribute Points, those will allow you to fundamentally improve yourself. Don¡¯t assign them yet,¡± I warned, getting soft groans in response. Kevin was still curled up in the fetal position, holding his head and groaning. Sniffing the air, I noticed the tang of blood spreading and guessed that he either had a nosebleed or bit his tongue, lip or something.


    It took him a little longer to come around and by the time he was aware of the world around him again, I had made a decision. Each of my students would get one boon, one session during which I would dedicate my time to training them and increasing their level if they were interested. It would create a slight imbalance between their level and skills, maybe even lower the traits they got when reaching attribute thresholds, those were based on your actions after all, but that was a choice they would have to make for themselves. If they decided to forgo the session, I would take some extra time to teach them, or something along the lines to make up for it. What a strange thought.


    ¡°Now that you all have been granted some levels and gained your first attribute points. I presume you know what the attributes do, if not, ask now,¡± I continued and, to my consternation, Ling asked. In response, I rose and began to walk, deciding to scout the surrounding area while checking for additional manhole covers, hopefully giving me a better idea of where to send another wave of deadly mist into the sewers. With my students following behind, I began to explain the attributes, going over them sequentially. While I didn¡¯t remember the actual explanations given from that guide during the creation of my Avatar for Mundus, I remembered enough and had the experience to fill in the blanks. How the attributes interacted and how they might interact with future classes, once they got theirs. Due to that, my advice in regard to their attribute-points was to keep them until they got their class or, if they didn¡¯t want to wait, use them to bring Intelligence, Intuition or similarly important attributes to a multiplier of five. Those seemed to be what the system used to assign traits, so getting there would be useful.


    Sadly, the more I talked, the more I realised that there wasn¡¯t a perfect way. Everyone had to decide for themselves, just like I had to decide where I wanted to put my focus. It was all a trade-off and there was neither a walk-through nor a guide that could tell us what would be best. And most certainly, there would be no second playthrough, no new game plus. Every choice we made would remain with us, until the day we died.

 Chapter 715

    The rest of the night was dedicated to teaching my three students. With my guidance, they tried their hand at killing Shattered using their magic, though only Kevin was having any real success. But on the skill side of things, they had made great strides, it seemed that experimenting and getting taught while, theoretically, in live combat was quite effective. It made me wonder whether that was a function of the system or some other reason because I didn¡¯t think the live targets were actually doing anything against them. Why had Kevin managed to learn the special ability to link three runes together within the first few Shattered I had him attack, Shattered that all had their legs crippled at the start of the fight. They were no more threat than the average trash can, their mobility reduced to a slow, dragged crawl. Even a geriatric relying on a walker would have been able to outrun them and return to the gym, making them no threat at all to us.


    And yet, the skills of my students soared, the improvement visible to the naked eye without them sharing their notifications. Kevin went from that blunt, wave-like splash of water to a sustained, quite powerful stream of water, not strong enough to cut through rock but strong enough to push a Shattered back and batter them to death. After discussing things, I suggested that he might want to try his hand either at my Ice-runes or at Earth-Runes, to add some sort of solid matter to his stream, greatly increasing the penetration. Alternatively, just simply turning the water Cold with a rune could be useful, slowing and hindering targets or making them suffer from hypothermia.


    Noriko went down a similar path, managing to focus her light into a bright and hot beam, roughly the size of a hand. While it lacked the impact of Kevin¡¯s water beam, the attack was nearly impossible to avoid, given that the fine-tuning of the runic formation was done mentally. As long as Noriko was able to see her target and focus on it, the beam would hit, unless there was some sort of obstacle or shield in the way. For now, the power was only at the level of giving a human rapid sunburn, maybe some blisters, it was damaging enough to harm Shattered. It took a bit of time, but it killed them just fine.


    Even Ling made some progress, though hers was the least. For most of the night, I had a conjured cloud of fog floating next to her, the constant control after conjuring it amusingly enough to level my Ice Magic to sixteen, allowing her to attempt a deeper insight into her Weather Magic. By the end of the night, she was capable of moving around my Fog, at least if I didn¡¯t oppose her, and even conjure a bit of wind of her own. She also told me that she finally gained the Weather Magic skill, not that any of us actually knew what to do with it. Maybe I could try formalising some spells as a Sorcerer and try teaching them to my students, but that was a different consideration. Having them become Sorcerers and figure out spells of their own might be a better path for the future.


    Either way, I dropped them off at the gym about two hours before sunrise, all of them completely exhausted by the night before moving to my chosen home. Digging a shallow grave in the backyard, to dispose of the bodies of the previous owners, took me almost until sunrise and at that point, I was dirty, sweaty and exhausted. But I also had a place to stay just for Silva and myself.


    Inside, I immediately used the bathroom and experimented with the Water-Rune I had acquired, still trying to gain the mastery-skill while taking care of my business and having a shower. It was cold, the stolen conditioner smelled as if I had fallen into a fruit basket and the spray was utterly pathetic, nothing but a constant splash akin to water coming from a low-pressure hose. But it was utterly glorious. Cleaning myself with Darkness magic worked, it took care of the grime, sweat and everything but there was a part of me that still felt dirty. A part that wanted to have water run down my skin and wash away all the traces of the day, it was much more about the ritual than getting clean.


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    My sleeping arrangements were another thing to consider. It was one thing to take over someone¡¯s house, not terribly problematic given the circumstances, but taking over their bed, especially after they had died in that bed? Even just considering it gave me the creeps, sending uncomfortable shivers down my spine. Another solution was needed and luckily, there was a nicely furnished den, with a large sleeping couch that I decided to use. Beig underground, with only a few air-vents and no windows the sun could come in, meant it was the perfect space for me. Well, almost perfect, I was still unable to see in the absolute dark but I could make out enough with a bit of light filtering through the vents and down the stairs.


    Silva wasn¡¯t overly enthused about the state of things but accepted it, curling up next to the couch as I fell into a light slumber, a part of me still wary of potential trouble from the outside.


    Waking up a few hours later, I stayed in bed, my mind awash with images from the night. My dreams remained filled with images of Sigmir, a mix of memory and figments of my imagination. It was bittersweet, the images far from enough to sate the craving I felt for my love and yet, it was only in dreams that I could reach her at all. I wanted her to be with me, to hold her, not just rest on the slopes of my mountain when I was drifting through the dreaming world.


    Closing my eyes once more, I felt myself drift off, not into the world of dreams but into the Astral River. The world was still shifting, streams of power cracking open the foundation of reality and making it anew. Just looking at it was inspiring and once more, I found myself dipping my toe into it, my mind gently tugging at the streams of Death Magic. The siren¡¯s call of knowledge, it drew me, even as I knew I was touching a hot plate. But maybe, one day, I would manage to touch it without burning myself, I would master the secrets held in that stream. Death Magic, if I could gain mastery over the Runes of Death, I might be able to reach for Sigmir. Not to bring her back, I doubted that would be so easy, but maybe just to call out to her? To talk, to communicate, maybe touch her in dreams that were more than memories?


    Alas, it was not the day for me to gain the mastery, the only thing I gained was a stinging pain in my left eye, blood running down my face and a brutal headache that made me glad to be in a dark room.


    But I couldn¡¯t languish in bed forever. Once my brain wasn¡¯t trying to leak out of my ears, I had some breakfast and began to work. It was still the middle of the day, so my focus was on my magic, namely trying to gain those skills I was lacking.


    Practising Water Rune Mastery was interesting. Trying to fill up the bathtub, as the water drained right back out was challenging, forcing me to put all my focus on the runic formation and keep it stable. that allowed me to get a better idea of the flow of magic through it, especially when I used my Magic Sight to augment the connection to my Astral Power.


    At the same time, I occasionally tried to magically flick against the water I was conjuring, to alter its flow and movement. What I was trying was similar to the process I used for my Ice Magic, only that I wasn¡¯t targeting Ice but water.


    Within an hour or so of trying, I finally had it click for me and I started to understand how it differed from my Ice Magic. It was close and yet so completely different, making me wonder how water could ever become Ice, how Liquid Moonlight could be so similar while being nothing like it.


    But I had managed to gain both skills, Water Rune Mastery and Water Magic, both augmenting my magical repertoire, even if I knew that both skills would be far less efficient than my Ice or Darkness Magic. It was simply a question of affinity, but I was damn proud to have learned them.


    Grinning like a loon, I realised that I was already getting exhausted, the constant focus and casting had tired me out. Instead of trying to accomplish a similar feat with Air, or try delving into one of the other types of magic, I started to stretch and move through one of Mrs Wu¡¯s slow routines, the familiar physical movement allowing my mind to rest and drift off into a state between meditation and sleep.

 Chapter 716

    ¡°It¡¯s good to see that you keep up your training,¡± Mrs Wu¡¯s voice ripped me from my trance-like state, causing me to stumble and almost faceplant. I hadn¡¯t paid any attention to my surroundings, completely losing myself in the movement and hadn¡¯t even noticed her arrival. Though, in my defence, she was a highly trained operative and may have snuck up on me, something I wouldn¡¯t discount. It was unlikely, given that my students were following after her and just outside the house, but possible. Silva, my trusty hound, seemed to have filed Mrs Wu under friends or something like that and not warned me of her approach, or maybe she simply had a sense of humour and thought that letting somebody spook me was hilarious. Looking at her and the rather obvious look of canine amusement on her face, I was sneakingly suspicious that this was the case.


    ¡°Though you would be served to keep track of your surroundings, even while training. Maybe especially while training,¡± Mrs Wu added with a mirthful chuckle.


    ¡°Some guard dog you are,¡± I quietly chided Silva, fluffing the fur on her head and gently flicking one of the sails she used as ears, causing her to twitch them in an attempt to take flight.


    ¡°Hello, teacher,¡± I greeted Mrs Wu, curious about what brought her over. ¡°What brings you by?¡±


    ¡°Your students told me you had them come here for your lesson and I hope you don¡¯t mind me dropping by, I have a favour to ask,¡± she explained, making me nod in understanding. I wasn¡¯t sure if I was happy that my students were bringing people here, but I didn¡¯t mind Mrs Wu. If there were others, it might be a different thing, it was something I would have to mention to them.


    ¡°When you spoke with Chehai you told him about a possible group of survivors, out in one of the outlying farms. He had one of our groups head over there as quickly as possible and they have yet to return. Could you head¡­¡± she paused, staring into the air in front of her, the line of sight on the position the system normally projected its notifications to.


    ¡°Why did I just get an interface asking me to define the exact task, the conditions of success as well as rewards and potential consequences?¡± Mrs Wu asked, still staring at that same position.


    ¡°A quest?¡± I asked, realising that those would be a thing if the system worked just as it had on Mundus. Or at least similarly enough. ¡°That allows you to have the system monitor my progress, making sure that I can¡¯t just lie about something. For example, a quest could be to kill ten Shattered, I would go out and do just that and when I return, you¡¯d know that I actually killed ten Shattered and not just hung out somewhere. Makes it so you don¡¯t have to lug around ears or some other trophy as proof of quest-completion. In terms of rewards, on Mundus money was usually used, alongside EXP and reputation,¡± I explained, only to mentally pause for a moment.


    Just how would reputation work? Would the system actually force people to react in a certain way, would it modify their thoughts? That sounded incredibly creepy, not something I wanted to have a part in, even if the concept of an ¡°objective¡± reputation had a certain dark draw. No need to guess, no need to try reading people, just a simple, system-defined value that anyone could understand.


    ¡°Does money even have any worth now? Painted paper, I don¡¯t think you can use it for more than to wipe on the toilet. Just not absorbent enough,¡± Mrs Wu asked, getting sidetracked a little while trying to wrap her head around the idea.


    ¡°At the moment? No. But it¡¯s interesting that the system recognises this as a Quest, but nothing else you did before. I think it means the system recognises the people currently living at the gym as a community, one large enough to issue quests,¡± I mused, my curiosity coming out to play. On Mundus, I had accepted the system and its functions as simply part of the game, the various factions as simply something that the programmers had set up. But now, there likely were no programmers, so there had to be objective values that defined something as a faction. And the survivors here had apparently just achieved that status.


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    ¡°You can simply put your task in, I don¡¯t really need a reward. If it gives you the option, EXP would be great and, just for the sake of experiment, a bit of money. I don¡¯t care how much, I just would like to know how it works, if you have to somehow show the money to the system, put it in escrow or something like that. I never questioned how these parts of the system worked, or why, that was simply part of the game and how games worked. No need for a greater reason,¡± I asked, curious even though I had no interest in actually becoming the leader of a faction. That sounded like a monumentally bad idea.


    Mrs Wu simply nodded and a little later, a blue window appeared before me.


    <table style="border-collapse: collapse" border="1">


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 99.9873%; text-align: center" colspan="2">Quest Alert!</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 99.9873%" colspan="2">Investigate the Farm and locate Cheng Hu</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 50.0363%">Quest Difficulty</td>


    <td style="width: 49.951%"> Easy</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 99.9873%" colspan="2">


    Wu Chehai, leader of the Survivors in Wu¡¯s Gym, needs you to investigate the Apple Gate Farm and locate Cheng Hu and his team who have been sent there before.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 50.0363%">Reward: </td>


    <td style="width: 49.951%">EXP, increased reputation with the Survivors in Wu¡¯s Gym, two ten-dollar bills.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    Looking at the window, I raised an eyebrow, before mentally accepting it. Interesting that the system had used Mrs Wu¡¯s full name, or maybe it had been her.


    ¡°What did you put in as rewards?¡± I asked, curious if she¡¯d have to sacrifice EXP, or if she somehow controlled how many EXP were given. If she did and didn¡¯t need to pony up the EXP beforehand, there would be many ways to exploit the system. Though, would one really want to? What you received after crossing the divides wasn¡¯t fixed, of that I was certain, and if you achieved the level by tricking and exploiting the system, I could only imagine what you would be rewarded with.


    ¡°Just twenty dollars, though it even asked the denomination I wanted to use. I put in two ten-dollar bills,¡± Mrs Wu replied, causing me to nod in understanding.


    ¡°I was offered those two, plus EXP and ¡®increased reputation with the Survivors in Wu¡¯s Gym¡¯,¡± I put air-quotes around the last part, not sure how that part worked.


    ¡°Makes sense,¡± she nodded, not even questioning the reputation.


    ¡°How? I mean, how can the system assign reputation?¡± I asked, curious how she reasoned things.


    ¡°You go out there, find our people. That¡¯s a task nobody here can easily do, Cheng and his group were one of the stronger groups here, we¡¯d just put more people at risk. You do it and people will talk how you helped them, thus increasing and improving your reputation amongst our people,¡± she explained, taking it as a perfectly normal thing. Listening to her, I could see how harmless it sounded, though a part of me was still unsure.


    ¡°And the numerical value?¡± I prodded a little further.


    ¡°Something similar to the old political approval ratings, just conducted by the system?¡± she shrugged and I could see how it could work as she described. Nodding, I accepted her reasoning, even as a part of me was hesitant to ever become part of a faction if there was the possibility that I¡¯d be mentally influenced by the opinions of people around me.


    ¡°Well, I¡¯ll go over there tonight, the system gave the quest a difficulty of ¡®easy¡¯ for me, it should be no problem. But then, I¡¯m pretty good at staying unseen, so I doubt there are many things out there that can actually find me if I hide,¡± I shrugged, knowing that the system¡¯s definition of difficulty was primarily focused on the quest itself, not necessarily the way there and back.


    ¡°Thank you,¡± she nodded, before gesturing to the students who had filed in after her and watched our exchange with interest. ¡°I¡¯ll leave you to your lessons, I¡¯m presuming you won¡¯t head out before sundown anyway?¡±


    ¡°True, we¡¯ve got more than enough time to have some lessons. I¡¯m curious how my students have progressed, especially Noriko, Kevin and Ling,¡± I admitted, looking at the three I had pushed up in level during the last night. They didn¡¯t have much time, but I maybe they had still made some progress with their newly increased Astral Power.


    After Mrs Wu left, all seven of my students exchanged glances, before Sandy started to ask questions, her focus mainly on the increased level of the three. That opened the floodgates and soon, we were engaged in a deep discussion of levels, attributes, potential classes and, far later, the divides. Trying to find the best way to gain levels, without risking later advances by having another do all the hard work. Hopefully, I hadn¡¯t messed up the future of my three students by pushing them a few levels up.

 Chapter 717

    Teaching my students was getting more and more interesting. While their practical skills were far from mine, their imagination and ideas were providing a constant challenge, making me question what I thought I knew about magic and oftentimes giving me a new perspective to consider.


    Things got even more interesting when I demonstrated my sorcerer-ability to define and teach spells, largely regardless of affinity. Well, I could teach the spell to all of them but the use of it, that was another question. My first attempt was a simple, three-rune formation of Cold, Mist and Concealment with a bit of defining Ice-Magic thrown in that I turned into a verbal mnemonic spell accompanied by a simple gesture. It became a short verse, invoking the Cold Mists of Winter to conceal your flight, and interestingly, the words that flowed from my tongue came out in ancient J?tun. Or at least I was pretty sure it was ancient J?tun, I wasn¡¯t cognizant of the slip in language, but when the others tried to repeat after me, their tongues had some trouble. They all managed to do something, even if that something was mostly wasting Astral Power but they could work on it in their own time.


    But the spell made for a good first step, at least for me. It was something I hadn¡¯t really considered on Mundus, when I had treated Road to Purgatory as a game, with fixed rules and a deliberate balance. But here, there were no devs that made sure things remained balanced, here, I could try to exploit things to my heart¡¯s content.


    When the verse was spoken at the required calm and measured pace, the three runes I had used to define the spell appeared in the air before me, forming their formation. Once it was completed, it took about a second longer than I needed to draw the formation by hand, a quick, twisting gesture brought the three runes together and activated the formation, spilling out a cloud of mist, concealing the area. It would be useful as a smokescreen, or maybe a distraction, at least against sight-based enemies.


    But what I was interested in was the question, would I be able to cut things down even further? From a full verse that took a few seconds to recite to something more akin to a single word, maybe just a gesture or even a thought? Complex magic that I could use while moving sounded like an incredibly useful tool. The current version didn¡¯t work, the spellcaster had to remain within arm¡¯s reach of the formation or it broke, but maybe if I worked at the spell some more? It was a project worthy to be on my list, quite high on it in fact.


    In addition to my realisations regarding my long-neglected class abilities, I managed to gain the Wind Magic ability. I wouldn¡¯t be able to do too much with it, at least for now. it just took a lot of Astral Power for relatively minor gains, making it yet another work in progress. Maybe once I gained a higher skill-level, or more general levels or worked it into a type of magic I was better with. Still, I made progress, more magic to work and play with was always welcome.


    The other magic abilities, to say nothing of the Runic Masteries were still out of reach by the time the sun was setting but it had been a successful session nonetheless. All of my students were progressing, all starting their own journey on the Arcane Path. It was an odd sensation, to feel pride not for an accomplishment of my own, but for the future accomplishments of my students.


    But I had a quest to complete, so I wasn¡¯t about to linger once the sun was no longer a threat. It had been cloudy the whole day, so I might have been able to dart between more solid shadows but I wouldn¡¯t do so without a great need. The Curse of the Sun was a pain, though luckily one I could work around. Somebody without my affinity to Darkness and the Night would have been seriously screwed but for me, it was an inconvenience and not a terrible major one, at least during the winter. There was more than enough night to get things done, giving me the day to sleep or practise indoors.


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    My original plan for the night had been to train my other students if they were interested, but with the quest, that plan was shot. So, Silva and I set out as soon as the sun was gone and moved through the city. It was quite interesting just how much faster we could move if we didn¡¯t actively go hunting Shattered, or searched for good spots to bait them in. With my cloak and a concealment spell around Sivla, we had mostly free reign, the only Shattered able to perceive us were the more powerful ones.


    And ¡®more powerful¡¯ didn¡¯t mean a serious threat. On the way out of the city, we only came across two enemies able to perceive us and those two were level a level twelve Scorched and a level fourteen Shattered. I considered leaving both to Silva, she needed the training but decided to support her against the Scorched. Not because she couldn¡¯t handle the thing but because she¡¯d get singed by it and I had no interest in having my furry pillow get singed. Luckily, a thick layer of cold mist was more than enough to dampen the thing¡¯s flames to the point of impotence, allowing Silva to take it apart with ease. The Shattered was a bigger challenge, but only because I was just watching, allowing her to play with it on her own. She won, but needed a bit of healing afterwards, the effort enough to push my Blood Rune Mastery to fourteen. I hadn¡¯t been healing a lot, so using it for that still gave me good levels.


    When we got to the outer parts of the cities, Silva and I slowed down. Neither of us knew what was out there if there were enemies we had to be cautious of or something like that. We had been travelling the city for the last few days, so we roughly knew what haunted the dark streets but these bare fields? They were unknown. The unknown meant potential danger and potential danger meant we had to be cautious.


    My concealment magic remained strictly in place and we kept a bit of distance between us, just a few metres in case of subterranean attackers. It was unlikely that any moles or insects or something like that had grown large enough to threaten human-sized prey but unlikely didn¡¯t mean impossible.


    I considered walking through the shallow ditch next to the road but a single look at the stagnant water and muddy ground in it made me discard that thought. No amount of cover or concealment would be worth trudging through that, not if I didn¡¯t even know whether I needed it either. Without any threats, there was no need to make things harder on Silva and me.


    Whenever the road got close to anything that might provide concealment for threats, Silva and I became even more vigilant, carefully sneaking and constantly checking whether anything was hidden between the shrubs, behind some tree or in some sinkhole. Just because the night was peaceful and quiet out here didn¡¯t mean it would remain that way. We noticed a few things hiding in the grass or between shrubs, but when Silva went to check, whatever was there simply fled, skittering off while trying to remain hidden. I managed to Observe one of those hidden beasts, learning that it was a level six fox, making me unwilling to even try hunting that thing down. Just now worth it.


    I could vaguely see the light in the distance, glinting through some distant trees, so I wasn¡¯t worried about getting lost, just about the terrain between the light and us.


    When we were maybe twenty minutes away from the farm, a gust of wind hit me straight in the face. There was a weird scent carried by the wind and an itching sensation tickled my nostrils. Worryingly, Silva didn¡¯t even react, meaning that what I perceived as scent here, was actually magic.


    Sniffing the air, even briefly tasting it, allowed me to realise what it was that had alerted me. Death, but neither the fresh, somewhat wet, scent of a bloody death in battle, nor the sickly sweet scent of rot and decay that came with the decay of bodies. No, what I was smelling was a deeper, grave-like scent of dust and endless silence. To me, it was harsh and foreboding, given that I had only smelled something similar in two places. One was the Barrow Den, the place where the Grandmother buried the bones and souls of her enemies, the other had in the Dorrian Mountains, where endless wars had created a Wild Magic zone that spawned countless Undead. And now, I was smelling it here, though this was far weaker, thinner, even with my diminished senses.


    Regardless, I was relatively certain that somewhere ahead, the dead weren¡¯t quietly resting in their graves.

 Chapter 718

    Luckily, the scent of death I had smelled didn¡¯t come from the farmstead I was approaching. When I reached the long driveway to the lit farm, the scent was still blown in my face by the wind, roughly coming from the direction I had been going in. I couldn¡¯t tell where it was coming from, not in the darkness with the various shrubs and trees interspersed between fields and the few buildings out here, but I was glad it didn¡¯t come from my destination.


    Walking down the driveway, I considered my options. Wait or go, try to enter their farm in the middle of the night, possibly trying to stay hidden as I did or wait until it was light out and openly move in before dawn. It was just as annoying a question as it had been when approaching the gym for the first time, with no correct answer. Trying to sneak in would mean I was safe and wouldn¡¯t expose myself to danger, in case the people here were hostile. Sure, I was almost certainly higher level than them individually and easily capable of killing them all, but that was only if I moved during the night. Once daytime came around and the sun hit me my strength would drop to the point that nearly anyone could overpower me. On the other hand, sneaking in could easily be considered a hostile act and if I got caught, or chose to expose myself, things could get troublesome. Again, the Curse of the Sun meant that I couldn¡¯t just leave.


    Shaking my head, I decided to make a third option. Not sneaking in but also not openly approaching in the middle of the night, instead, I would approach about an hour before the sun crested the horizon, when the false light of dawn gave humans enough light to see but not enough to weaken me. In the meantime, I wanted to move around the area and find some shelter, just to make sure I had another option if I wasn¡¯t welcomed.


    Looking around, I realised I was a little out of my depth. In the darkness of the night, even my sight was limited, even if it was far superior to that of a human and getting better with each day. But differentiating whether a vague shape in the distance was a figment of my imagination, a building, or shrubbery was difficult, if not impossible. That was made even worse by the fact that, most likely, the buildings were concealed by shrubs or trees, shielding them from sight and noise from the road.


    Given that I had no desire to run into whatever I was smelling from the road ahead, I turned back, moving towards a driveway I had passed some ten minutes ago. If there was a driveway, there would be something to drive to, or so I thought.


    Following the muddy dirt-and-gravel road was no fun, the wet sludge clinging to my boots and trying to drag me down and drown me in the dirt. Silva seemed to enjoy the surrounding area quite a bit, padding off to sniff at various things and occasionally squatting to mark her territory as we went.


    Finally, we reached a fence with a gate and I stopped, letting out a long sigh. Sure, the path had gone somewhere, only that somewhere wasn¡¯t a place where I could take shelter. Not directly at least, there was a large, dark shape nearby, maybe some sort of shed or a trailer, but I couldn¡¯t easily tell in the dark. Hanging on the gate, beneath the wrecked electric wire, was a sign, telling people that the horses were well cared for and didn¡¯t need you to feed them, with some warning that feeding them the wrong stuff would make them sick.


    As I was looking around, I noticed some weird sounds coming towards me but was unable to place the. Focusing in the direction I heard them from, I saw a rather ominous sight, a massive beast of a horse trotting towards me with its ears laid back and the tail flicking back and forth. I wasn¡¯t sure how powerful the thing was, but just physically, it was intimidating. Standing at almost twice my height and likely fifteen times my weight, I wasn¡¯t interested in a physical confrontation, especially not without additional information. Concentrating on the concealment rune, I pushed an Observe through, checking its level.


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    The result came back as level five, so not necessarily a threat, only that the thing seemed to have noticed my actions and came barrelling towards me with flying hooves, ignoring the gate and fence between us. Calling on my magic, I pulled out my Frozen Shuttle and sent it shooting towards the charging beast. Instead of trying to dodge, a red aura, familiar in hue but far, far weaker than what I remembered from Sigmir, surrounded the beast and it just kept going. The Frozen Shuttle managed to tear a deep, bloody wound into its side but instead of trying to flee, the aura around it simply turned up in intensity and it accelerated.


    Silva let out a deep, threatening growl but with the sturdy fence between us, she couldn¡¯t easily intercept it, so she simply readied herself. Just before the beast hit the fence, it managed to stop in a manoeuvre I wouldn¡¯t have thought possible, turned on a dime and kicked out both its hindlegs, smashing into the fence and sending splintered wood towards us. But even worse than the splintered wood was a wave of pure force that travelled through the ground, strong enough to unbalance me and cause me to slip in the mud, almost making me fall.


    Once I had my balance back, I realised that the horse had already fled, with Silva having turned back to me after running a few metres after it, unwilling to chase down the beast. Grumbling, I called back my Frozen Shuttle, annoyed at the mud that was no caking my legs but also fascinated. The beast clearly didn¡¯t stand a chance and from the looks of it, it had been well aware of that. Its charge had likely been a feint, followed by a distraction that gave it time to flee. Why it hadn¡¯t fled in the first place, I wasn¡¯t sure but it might have tried to buy time for others, horses were herd animals after all.


    After taking a few more minutes to make sure no further attacks were incoming, Silva and I moved towards the shed I had noticed before. If it wasn¡¯t too flimsy, it might serve as an emergency shelter but I didn¡¯t want to rely on it without checking.


    As t turned out, it used to be a construction trailer that was now set on a simple brick foundation. Breaking in was rather trivial, there was just a simple padlock keeping the door shut, so I placed a runic formation to conjure some Ice before it, carefully filling the lock in order to make a key. It didn¡¯t quite work out, my fine control wasn¡¯t what it used to be on Mundus and instead of making a perfectly fitting key, my Ice broke the mechanism, forcing me to flex my Astral Power and fully break the lock.


    Regardless of the method used, I got the door open and entered the trailer, looking around in the storage space, a little amused at the state of it all. The small windows near the ceiling were covered in dust and grime, making me wonder if any sun would make it through. There were a few saddles, some bridles and assorted leather equipment, in addition to multiple boxes that smelled of horse. Looking into them revealed a wide variety of brushes and other tools, non of which I could place. Not that it mattered, from what I could tell, the place would work. There was even a sack of carrots and a few apples if I actually got hungry. They didn¡¯t look perfectly fresh but that was true for a lot of the food out there. Unless it was non-perishable, things were starting to spoil. Luckily, the relatively cold weather delayed things a bit, but that wouldn¡¯t work for long, especially given that spring should soon arrive.


    Confident that the trailer would work as an emergency shelter if I wasn¡¯t welcomed at the farm, I made my way back there. Sun wouldn¡¯t rise for another two hours, so in about an hour, the sky would be bright enough that humans could see me approach.


    Hiding in the shrubs near their driveway, I settled down a little, trying to focus my hearing on the farm. It didn¡¯t really work, there simply weren¡¯t any loud noises, but that was a good sign in my eyes. Loud noises could mean combat and from the moving lights I occasionally could see, there were people moving around.


    Finally, I decided there was enough light out and started to make my approach, staying on the driveway and even dispelling the concealment I normally kept up. Hopefully, this would go just as smoothly as the introduction to the group at the gym.

 Interlude: Survivors 201

    Leaving town feels weird. The switch from somewhat narrow roads, with possible danger lurking around the next corner or behind every dumpster, to wide open fields, with only a few shrubs, stands of trees and the ever-prevalent irrigation ditches providing any kind of cover is both disturbing and refreshing. Sure, it means that enemies cannot suddenly jump out of their hiding places and pounce on you but it also means that if there are enemies, they see you. They and all their friends see you coming, possibly from miles away.


    When the group of five leaves town, it doesn¡¯t take long for them to run into trouble. Or rather, for trouble to spot and run into them. From behind them, out of a narrow alleyway, a group of two Shattered with one of the burning Shattered, a Scorched, emerge, the two Shattered rapidly picking up speed in their pursuit of the five, while the Scorched doesn¡¯t need to follow. It can simply lob viscous globs of fire after them, the flames creating brightly burning pools as they impact the ground.


    ¡°Run or fight?¡± Clarence, one of their front-line fighters asks, looking for direction from their leader, even as James launches an arrow at one of the Shattered, narrowly missing its leg.


    ¡°Run,¡± Hu, their leader, declares, after a quick scan of the surrounding area. No enemies in sight, other than those running at them from town. So far, Shattered and Scorched have not shown interest in chasing people over long distances, hopefully, the pattern will hold true, even out here. A whistling sound cuts through the air, when James shoots again, this time hitting one of the Shattered in the leg.


    The five of them fall into a ground-eating lope, not quite sprinting but also not jogging, something in between. It is a pace that they have occasionally used before when they felt that speed was more important than stealth, a pace that gave them the Athletics skill and even some points in it. None of them can endure the pace indefinitely but luckily, they don¡¯t need to. The Scorched lobs a few more globs of fire at them but by the time their lungs scream for air, they have left the Shattered far enough behind them that the creatures gave up.


    ¡°Fun,¡± James grumbles, a little annoyed at the flight. Out here, his bow allows him to strike before any enemy can reach them and he even has unlocked a few skills that enhance his potential further. His only problem is ammunition. The well-made arrows he received from Old Lady Wu, perfectly straight carbon projectiles with sharp, machined metal points are far less effective than the arrows he carved himself, despite the lacking accuracy of his craft. Launching, and losing, two arrows might become a problem in the near future, he only has so many of them.


    ¡°No need to get into a fight, if we can avoid it,¡± Hu reminds him, though he can understand where James comes from. None of them truly know what they are, the strange, almost game-like, situation messes with them all, warps and twists their perception and understanding of reality. What just a few days ago was perfectly normal and common sense is now completely bizarre and suicidal, while the opposite also seems to be true. What used to be considered wrong and immoral turned into the normal and expected. Ordinary office workers putting in their nine-to-five, or craftspeople who worked their normal hours fixing stuff suddenly had to become soldiers, or mercenaries or whatever you wanted to call them. Fighting became necessary, not something you did to improve your physical fitness and self-confidence. No longer were the people preserving everyone''s freedom the soldiers who made sure that any war was fought in foreign lands, or the policemen who did their best to keep crime contained and away from ordinary citizens. The state¡¯s monopoly on violence was well and thoroughly broken, or rather, the state was broken, leaving nothing but chaos in its wake. Now, they have to adapt to the chaos, or they will be swept away. They and those few loved ones who survived the night of blue flames.


    Their way to Apple Gate Farm turns out to be far longer than expected. They manage to follow the road, at least for a time, but far too often, they have to make detours and sneak through the fields. Only distance and staying hidden keeps them from running into the large, incredibly intimidating beasts that roam the area. They dared to disturb one, the first they encountered, a massive cow. After it started to run at them, shrouded in a red aura with what seemed to be steam shooting from its nostrils, none of them was interested in challenging it. Only a quick dive into a shallow ditch allowed them to escape, the beast not terribly interested in chasing them down and digging them out. It was in that ditch, that they buried any desire to fight these things, at least not without some better weapons.


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    For Clarence, the whole thing feels bizarre. He remembers the road, remembers driving down here to get some cider for a party just last year. The Apple Gate Cider was delicious but now, they have to walk there, to find out who is still alive. More than once, he woke up in the night, questioning if the whole thing was just one infinitely prolonged nightmare. And if he would truly wake up, if he just pinches himself hard enough.


    Now, the trek out to the farm resembles a combat patrol, with danger lurking everywhere. If only he could wake up.


    When they reach the farm, they are met with a rather enthusiastic welcome. The people there fled the city and surrounding farms on the day the changes hit and their livestock turned problematic. Instead of docilely waiting to be fed, a vast majority of their previously harmless livestock turned aggressive, driving away humans and stomping to death those amongst their number who turned Shattered. By the time morning had rolled around, and the flames of the night petered out, the newly empowered beasts wrecked the spaces that previously held them in, moving around the old fields with abandon. Attempts to herd them back, or to get them under control, were met with brutal resistance. Without any modern tools or weapons, just the thought to bring a herd of cattle to heel was ludicrous.


    And so, the locals gathered on one of the produce farms in the area, Apple Gate Farm, forming a community of about thirty people. Gathering together for safety and protection, in a world that went mad.


    When the group of five from the city arrives, it doesn¡¯t take long for the two groups to start comparing notes on the system. What either side has found out is shared, in an effort to understand the bizarre new world everyone finds themselves in. Talk of magic soon spreads, partially spurred by a similar talk the five from the city heard the night before and as time passes, it becomes clear just how much everyone doesn¡¯t know.


    It takes hours of discussion and debate, to even nail down points that everyone can agree on. Some details seem to be dependent on the individual and even their preconceived notions in regard to such a system. Various novels and even tropes are suggested as truths, only for calmer heads to prevail and remind the younger generation that, so far, nobody even knows what is unknown, to say nothing about what might be possible in the future. Trying to use and exploit a system without actually knowing if those ideas are even possible is rejected as foolishness and by the end of the day, the five people who came from the city realise they have to stay the night. Simply because otherwise, they¡¯d have to hike through the night, an experience none of them are ready for.


    When the next day dawns, the discussion continues for a few hours, interspersed with physical training for those interested. Especially Clarence and Hu are stepping up as trainers, their prior experience and training in Wu¡¯s Gym serving as a reference, all while goodwill is formed and the potential for the two-hundred people who have found shelter at Wu¡¯s Gym to move out into the surrounding area is explored. The people need to leave the city, or disease will sweep through them, sending many more to an early grave.


    In the afternoon, the five of them decide to head out, back to the gym. Two people from Apple Gate Farm decide to join them, in order to get a better idea of the situation within the city limits and exchange some ideas with Old Lady Wu and Commander Wong.


    Only, they don¡¯t get far. Between the city and the farm, a herd of cattle, easily a hundred strong, maybe even bigger, is peacefully grazing. Peacefully, until the seven people step too close, the moment that happens, multiple cows are moving towards them, shrouded in a red sheen of energy. The experience of the previous day is strong in them and their retreat is swift, even if people will worry about them.


    One thing is for certain. Just because the countryside has less Shattered, it isn¡¯t less dangerous. Only differently dangerous. And that carrying a mobile-phone for their entire adult lives has made them too reliant on technology.

 Chapter 719

    The situational awareness of these people was atrocious. There was no other way to describe it, Silva and I had calmly walked down the driveway, stopping maybe ten metres from the fence around the property they were living on and two people had walked past the gate without noticing me. Both were likely supposed to be guards, given that one was carrying a long, straight stick that could serve as a quarterstaff in a pinch, the other a wood-cutting hatchet and both had torches to give them a bit of light. And yet, they hadn¡¯t realised I was standing here, watching and waiting to be noticed.


    Finally, hatchet-man walked past again and I decided to make myself known.


    ¡°Good Morning,¡± I called out, loud enough to make myself heard but not loud enough to wake up everyone in the area. Waking people up needlessly was a good way to make yourself disliked.


    ¡°Who the f¡­? Who are you?!¡± he screamed, jumping at the sudden noise and dropping his weapon. A true warrior, that guy.


    ¡°A Traveller, is that not obvious? I was asked to look for a group of five who supposedly came out here two days ago. With whom would I have to talk about that?¡± I asked, unable to keep the disdain I was feeling for this bad excuse of a guard out of my voice. Guards like that were the reason tragedies happened, unable or simply unwilling to do their job. Lazy or incompetent, I wasn¡¯t sure which was worse.


    ¡°Wha?¡± his eyes flickered from me to Silva, who decided it was the perfect moment to yawn, showing off just how large her maw was and how big her teeth were. I managed to keep myself from laughing, as the guy¡¯s eyes widened and his face went pale enough to notice the change, despite the distance between us.


    By now, his scream had brought more people, one in just a pair of sweatpants with a shoddily crafted spear in hand, another the stick guy I had seen before and finally, a tired-looking guy I recognised from the gym. I had no idea about his name, but I had seen him before, he had been at my initial magic lecture. Had looked both intrigued and confused, if I recalled correctly, but that was true for most people there.


    ¡°Miss Jacobs?¡± the guy I recognised asked, looking at me with a mix of interest and a small bit of trepidation.


    ¡°Aye, Mrs Wu asked me to go look for you and your team. Is Cheng Hu around, I was told he¡¯s the leader of your team,¡± I asked, mostly ignoring the other guys who looked from Silva, to me, to the guy I recognised and the original guard, obviously confused about the situation, looking for the emergency that necessitated screaming like a banshee.


    Deciding that I didn¡¯t care to talk loudly enough to make myself heard ten metres away, I slowly walked up, Silva padding alongside me. I noticed that hatchet-guy didn¡¯t look too good, his eyes trained on Silva as if she was about to pounce on him and devour him, but the other two looked pretty calm and reasonable. Well, the stick guy looked calm, sweatpant-man mostly looked cold. Foolish of him to run out here, without even putting on shoes.


    ¡°Boss is asleep, we¡¯ve been sharing some of the things we learned about the situation and the system, trying to help these people out. There¡¯s something weird going on at the old slaughterhouse¡­¡± he paused and I almost heard the click of things falling into place in my head.


    ¡°The slaughterhouse, it¡¯s in that direction, right?¡± I asked, pointing in the direction the wind had blown from earlier. The direction I still could faintly smell the scent of Death-magic from. Either the change had given somebody an affinity with Death Magic, or something similar, maybe a connection to some Death-God they used to literally raise hell with, or the change was affecting the deceased, regardless of species, as if it had been some sort of Wild Magic. I didn¡¯t even want to imagine what the right, or wrong, kind of Wild Magic would do to a graveyard without some sort of magical protection or consecration, I remembered there had been videos during the Beta of people venturing out to restore such consecrations and the sheer number of undead they had been forced to fight was staggering. The implications were incredibly troublesome, but there was little I could do about the grand picture at the moment, only focus on the present situation.


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    ¡°Yes?¡± he nodded, looking a little confused, though his confusion was completely eclipsed by that of the other three guys, they were apparently completely lost on how to deal with the situation.


    ¡°Shit,¡± I muttered, before finally focusing on the three locals, ¡°Well, you¡¯ve got problems, not sure anyone can help you with those,¡± I shook my head, before continuing.


    ¡°Anyway, I¡¯m Samantha Jacobs, you¡¯ve got a problem if I stay for the day? I might be able to help with some of your troubles, I¡¯ve noticed some things on the way here,¡± I offered, finally focusing on sweatpants-guy, mostly because he looked very much as if he wanted to get back inside.


    ¡°Yeah, sure, come on,¡± he offered, clearly not fully caught up with the situation, ¡°Name¡¯s Mark, by the way,¡± he introduced himself, turning around and walking back towards the house with me and the guy from the gym following behind.


    ¡°Apologies, I don¡¯t recall your name,¡± I told the guy I recognised, though I doubted I had ever been introduced to him in the first place.


    ¡°Clarence Sugimoto,¡± he introduced himself in the western style, his given name making me think he had grown up here.


    ¡°Anything you can tell me about their situation? Goes for you, too, Mark. I¡¯m probably the most powerful being in a fairly wide area, so I¡¯m the most likely to be able to help,¡± I added, happy that none of them had tried to Observe me yet. While I could partially block the skill, I wasn¡¯t yet powerful enough to be confident in that block and I really, really hated the sensation of having my intimate information stripped bare.


    For a moment, Mark didn¡¯t reply, obviously considering. Then, with a sigh, he began to explain their situation. They suffered from two rather major problems, though each was of a different sort. One of their problems, of which I unknowingly had encountered part of on the way here, was the livestock, or rather what used to be livestock. Not only had the horses gained power in the system, gaining levels at the same speed or faster than the humans, cattle, hogs, chickens and even the few geese in the area had done the same. Especially the geese, these had apparently been a menace before the system and now they were¡­ worse.


    The locals had been fighting back but at the end of the day, it seemed that the animals had weathered the change better than the humans, something I had observed as well. There were far fewer Shattered animals around, compared to Shattered humans and that was not only by absolute numbers but also by percentage.


    Their other problem was a little more mysterious. Strange noises, odd movements and a general aura of dread around the old slaughterhouse made it so that nobody dared to investigate. They knew something was wrong, but in their situation, they collectively had decided messing with things they didn¡¯t understand would be bad. A wise choice, in my eyes, especially if things out here were truly as dangerous as they described.


    After listening, I gave them my perspective, by now we had entered the house and a few more of the locals, as well as the five members of the party I had been sent here for, were in attendance. They listened closely when I described the strange sensation I had encountered and what I thought it meant. That led me into a small tangent, during which I briefly explained why I knew more than them, even given a demonstration of my magic, conjuring a basin of water for them, but at the end of it, they accepted my observations, even if they couldn¡¯t confirm them.


    If they wanted to fight against the livestock, they needed more people, if they wanted to explore the old Slaughterhouse, they needed more people. Good thing that the people at Mrs Wu¡¯s gym needed to leave the city soon, or disease would sweep through their ranks, thanks to the massive amount of bodies rotting in the streets.


    Given that I wasn¡¯t a well-polished social operator, I didn¡¯t bother to start negotiations, merely mentioning that it might be something they¡¯d want to explore, before asking for a quiet space to rest during the day.


    One of the women, the wife of the farm¡¯s owner, guided me into one of their guest rooms, offering me premium space, given that most of the people on the farm were sleeping in one of their barns from what I had observed.


    I was just about to unpack some food to share with Silva when the woman, who was named Kira, spoke up.


    ¡°You mentioned magic,¡± she began, clearly uncertain about something but soldiering on anyways, ¡°You showed us magic. Can you use that magic to heal?¡± she paused again, her voice breaking.


    ¡°My daughter¡­¡± another pause, as a sob escaped her, ¡°Can you save my daughter?¡±

 Chapter 720

    For a moment, I was tempted to simply reject her plea. After trudging through the mud the entire night and too little sleep during the day, I was rather tired and wanted some sleep. But no, she was the hostess, so I should at least hear her out.


    ¡°What happened to her? While I have some healing abilities, they are rather limited,¡± I asked, regretting that I had focused my Blood Rune Mastery in a different direction.


    ¡°She¡¯s changed,¡± Kira sobbed, her composure fading with every word, ¡°Ever since that night, she¡¯s been trying to attack everyone and her eyes have burned away. We had to lock her up!¡±


    ¡°So, she¡¯s become a Shattered?¡± I prodded, getting a wail that might have been a yes in response. In the interest of decorum, I managed to keep from sighing, knowing that the woman didn¡¯t want to hear my initial response, which was to kill the Shattered and be done with it. But maybe that was for the best, if they had managed to contain her daughter, I would have some time to study a Shattered under relatively controlled circumstances, which was a novelty.


    ¡°I¡¯ll have to take a look,¡± I let out a sigh, not sure how to best keep expectations down without making myself hated. Offering help but being unable to provide it could easily lead to blame being assigned to me, something I didn¡¯t want.


    ¡°But I can¡¯t promise you anything, only that I¡¯ll try. I honestly doubt that I¡¯ll be able to help, the Shattered transformation is far beyond anything I¡¯ve seen before,¡± I explained, thinking of the different examples of incredible magic I had seen on Mundus. Nothing really came close, maybe the Lycantroll I had seen in the White Mountains, as it was a full-body transformation, while giving additional abilities. Different sources, but it was the closest I could think of.


    For a moment, I considered the transformation and the mechanism behind it. The source was obviously the system or the introduction of the Astral River. Or something moving alongside the Astral Power within that realm. That being said, I wasn¡¯t even sure if the Astral River was the source of the System, or if the System was the source of the Astral River.


    Either way, given the timing, I could confidently say that Shattered came from the change. With their name, ¡®Shattered¡¯, it was logical to assume that something had Shattered them or had shattered within them, which led me to believe that the introduction of Astral Power into their biological system had broken something, some connection that was supposed to regulate the power within them or guide that power. Somehow, instead of giving people the capacity to wield Astral Power in some form, many had been left¡­ Shattered.


    Shaking away my thoughts, I focused on the frantic woman, giving Silva a few head pats and following her to take a look at her daughter, while a large part of my mind was continuing my thoughts in regards to Shattered. Given how their levels had been increasing over the days, their levels were likely connected to the depth of the infusion of the Astral River into our reality, or they simply gained levels over time. Maybe by absorbing Vitality in some way, which would explain why they were so drawn to the Miasma released by my Blood Magic. They could turn it back into Vitality, or maybe they could absorb it and mix it with Astral Power in some sort of reverse Blood Magic, giving them levels in turn. There was so much I didn¡¯t know, it was hard to even hypothesise on the mechanics, let alone come up with a treatment. If such a thing was even possible.


    Kira led me into their laundry-room, before pulling open a heavy trapdoor, leading into a cellar. For a moment, I worried about it being a ploy to catch me off-guard and unaware, an ambush of some sort. Wary, I almost fell into Bullet Time but as seconds passed and Kira started her way down the stairs, nothing happened and I realised there would be no ambush. If there were, I could simply hole up in the cellar, fill the entire area with deadly mist and wait until nightfall, before disappearing. Power was a wonderful security blanket.


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


    The staircase was narrow, almost a ladder and the room downstairs was almost entirely dark. There was a tiny window, but that helped only so much, especially in the pre-dawn gloom. The only real light came from the candle my hostess was carrying and the eyes of the Shattered. Not that I really needed the light, but she obviously did.


    In the darkness of the cellar, the blue flames of a Shattered¡¯s eyes were incredibly startling and while a part of me was fascinated at the creature bound down here, another part was horrified. The Shattered, Kira¡¯s daughter, used to be a tall, lanky female, judging by her size and Kira¡¯s age an older teenager or young adult, if Kira had children very young. Certainly younger than me, but how much younger, I couldn¡¯t even begin to guess.


    The horrifying part came from the condition she was kept in. The Shattered was held within a sturdy cage, likely designed to hold even the most aggressive and angry animal, maybe dogs of some kind, and there was little in the creature that remained human. Its, her, clothes were torn, likely in attempts to escape the cage and her body was battered, blood coating the bars of her prison.


    Our approach must have woken the creature up and it tried again to break her cell, straining against the bars while making hissing and snarling sounds, even as her blood started flowing from her attempts. There would be no way to observe the creature, for she was far from docile. And yet, looking at the flames that had replaced the eyes of Kira¡¯s daughter, I was startled to notice how they flickered as if they were about to fade. A quick use of Observe told me that it was a level four Shattered, no threat to anyone, really, but to bring the human she once was back, that was difficult. Maybe even impossible.


    ¡°Sleep,¡± I commanded, pushing my Mind Magic to its limits, even activating Overflow. There was an Ice Rune, the Torpor rune, linked to the state of suspended animation some creatures went assumed during the cold time of the year, but sadly, I didn¡¯t have it yet. So, the closest I could do to temporarily disable the creature without destroying it, was to try using my Mind Magic. To my surprise, the creature immediately slumped over, sinking against the bars while I felt a decent chunk of Astral Power flow out of me, enough to simply kill a creature at that level if I had used a different type of magic.


    Ignoring the noise of surprise coming from Kira, and the blue window telling me my Mind Magic had levelled to eight, I walked up to the cage, studying the creature. It didn¡¯t look comfortable, slumped against the bars, but that was hardly the point of the exercise. Curiously, the flames in its eyes were still there, though the flickering was far less agitated, more akin to a calm candle flame than a blazing fire whipped around by the wind. Maybe a window into the mind of the creature, the agitation of the flames mirroring the agitation of the creature? A distinct possibility.


    ¡°As I said, I do not know if I¡¯ll be able to help your daughter, at least not in a permanent fashion. For now, the Shattered sleeps and I have more time to study it,¡± I told her, trying to dismiss her.


    ¡°Anything I can do to help? She¡¯s my baby,¡± Kira pleaded and for a moment, I wanted to reject her again.


    However, instead of doing so, I decided to distract her.


    ¡°There¡¯s nothing you can do but pray,¡± I told her, having noticed the cross above the threshold of their house. Maybe it would distract her and give me time to work. If nothing else, praying to the Christian God would hopefully innoculate them from being influenced by the Deities worshipped on Mundus.


    ¡°Yes, I¡¯ll have everyone pray for my baby,¡± she frantically nodded, almost running up the stairs in an attempt to get their prayer meeting going. I was tempted to chuckle, given that she had taken the candle with her, leaving me in almost complete darkness.


    Letting out a sigh, I placed a hand on the Shattered, trying to first use Blood Magic to get a better idea of its bodily functions. Understanding its body seemed like a good first step, followed by an attempt to understand its mind and, last and most difficult, understand its soul. Even now, I barely understood what a soul was, from the conversations with Lenore I had on that topic. She had been able to perceive them but that was a skill I hadn¡¯t inherited.


    Poking and prodding at the Shattered, I was fascinated by the changes. What used to be a human was now something entirely different, some organs having shrivelled up to near non-existence, while others had enlarged, though not to the point that would explain their strength. Either way, it didn¡¯t look good for Kira¡¯s request. The thing was even less human on the inside, compared to the outside.

 Chapter 721

    More and more of the strangely simple body plan of the Shattered was becoming clear in my mind. It felt almost tragic, these creatures would survive for a time, but they were a dead end. No reproductive capabilities I could detect, making them nothing but monsters that would terrorize the survivors until they were finally taken care of. Almost as much of a dead person walking as if she was a zombie, just the energy animating them was different.


    Looking at them through my magical sight, I could see more, especially if I focused deeper, pushing that sense to the point things became painfully overwhelming. The power flowing through the Shattered was raw, for lack of a better term, wild and untamed. Primal in a way I could barely comprehend and staring at it gave me a headache.


    Sitting back, I let my mind drift, trying to figure out if there was a way to help the creature, or at least do something to keep it from wilting the way it did. By the looks of it, it won¡¯t make it another day, not unless it was set free to roam and feed as it needs. Something about the captivity, or maybe the presence of other humans, stifled it, prevented it from sustaining itself, like its brethren outside did. Something needed to be done, or the creature would not live to see another day. Even as I considered what that ¡®something¡¯ might be, the information regarding the feeding and sustenance of Shattered was filed away, as something that might come in handy some day.


    I doubted the Shattered could actually draw power from the Astral River, so they needed a different source. Or maybe they had to adjust what they could take from the River, how they took in power. Either way, it was a fascinating observation, to study the internal existence of a Shattered in a controlled setting. It might be even better in this case, as the Shattered was starved, almost to the point of death, weakening the system and giving it an instinctual need to feed, to take in sustenance in any way it could. It was, quite literally, starved for power. Power I might be able to provide. Power I had to provide if I wanted to succeed.


    Blood Magic came to mind for the second part, it needed sustenance and given what I had seen before, I could be somewhat confident that Blood Magic, or at least Miasma, would do the trick.


    From outside, I could hear faint voices filtering in, Kira was speaking to others. A part of my mind perked up, still petering between vigilance and paranoia, and listened in, trying to catch as many of their words as possible.


    They were speaking about prayer, it became obvious that Kira hadn¡¯t told everyone about the Shattered in the small cellar I was now in, but was trying to convince people to pray for her daughter. At one point, I could make out the words that blood was thicker than water, though I failed to hear the context. Hearing them, I almost had to laugh, that phrase was one that amused me to no end, ever since I had read about it and the full context in which it had been written.


    On its face, it seemed to describe that a blood relation would always be the strongest, that blood-related family trumped the watery bonds of camaraderie and friendship or something along those lines but when looking at the original, a wholly different image emerged. It spoke of the blood of the covenant, of a blood ritual between a people and their God, that cemented stronger bonds than those stemming from the waters of the womb. Not family, but ritual was supposed to be the stronger force.


    Not a terribly surprising revelation, given that the phrase literally stemmed from the organisation deriving power from said covenant, so the idea that the covenant was supposed to trump and overwrite any other loyalty only made sense. If you can influence people, bind them to your cause.


    The idea of a covenant stuck within my mind and outside, I could hear faint chanting now. They were praying, and praying as a group, following along with their leader like the sheep they were. Hopefully, they¡¯d fail in their invocation of a higher power, I had no interest in having more clerics run around.


    As my mind drifted back to the Shattered before me and what could be done to bring the girl it had once been back, a scent tingled my nose. Raw Astral Power, unleashed by the fervent prayer outside was drifting through the area and things began to click in my mind.


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    A covenant, sealed in Blood and magic, pushed into the Shattered¡¯s mind with enough power might bind it to the covenant, instead of the madness the raw Astral Power pushed it into. A grin formed on my mind, thoughts speeding up, as I considered things. Time was slowing down and I decided to try.


    Cutting into both my palms, I pushed magic into the blood pooling in my hands, pain ripping through my body. Sacrificing my magic was never pleasant but it served as a conduit, a conduit I needed. Reaching out, I tried to grab hold of the raw Astral Power the people outside had unleashed, trying to force it to do my bidding. There was no god here, only I and I would be the answer to their prayer.


    Letting the blood and magic from my hands drip into the creature''s mouth, I felt a connection form, my own power, accompanied by the power I was taking from the prayer meeting held outside, was flooding into its body and I decided to use that flood to add something else. Channelling Astral Power into my Mind Magic, I tried to let it flow with my blood and power, to forge a connection.


    Faintly, I could feel the moon start to set somewhere beyond the horizon, as dawn was breaking, signalling the beginning of a new day. A new dawn, a new day, while the creatures of the night had to sleep. A new start. As if to welcome that new start, the Shattered below me, after just letting my blood flow into its mouth, started to gently lap at my hands, suckling on the wound as if nursing. More and more of me was flowing into the Shattered, leaving me a little light-headed but I could feel the magic work, feel it settle into the creature and change it into something else. Something more.


    Feeling the Astral Power within me deplete, I used my secondary mental process to drag in more Astral Power, drawing it from the Astral River as quickly as possible. It was almost akin to channelling power into a runic formation, only that now, I wasn¡¯t just channelling power, but I was using my blood as a medium, to channel Astral Power and even part of my mind into the Shattered. There was a strange sensation of resonance coming from the Astral River, surging through me, until it was flowing into the Shattered. It felt helpful, allowing me to deepen the connection, to set it into the furthest recesses of the creature¡¯s mind, beyond the animalistic impulses that dominated its existence.


    Closing my eyes, I could feel the creature move towards me, curiously the primary sensation I could perceive was fear. It was afraid, in need of care and guidance. Guidance I could provide, turning it from a mindless monster into something more. Something that didn¡¯t need to be afraid.


    ¡°Greetings,¡± I tried to project, only to realise that the Shattered had yet to gain the ability to use language. The sensations I felt over the link were more primal, bestial in some ways. For a moment, I had no idea how to communicate, until I focused on the basics. What did a creature need? Shelter and sustenance were the most important, with something like companionship following far after those first two.


    I could offer the creature sustenance, the blood still dripping into its mouth was proof of that, and shelter could be organised. Companionship, if the creature wanted to follow me, it could, just like Silva was following me. But it needed to learn and obey.


    Outside, the power was welling up even more, maybe the breaking dawn was pushing the praying congregation to a fever pitch, or maybe it was something else, either way, I could feel the power and with a ruthless smile, I took as much of it as I could, letting it flow through me and into the Shattered. The resonance increased and it was almost as if there was some sort of plan, a design for what I was trying to do. And with the help of that design, the changes I had wrought were taking hold in the Shattered.


    Or maybe I shouldn¡¯t call it a Shattered any longer, as I felt my body grow heavy from exhaustion and blood loss, I could see the flames fade away, flesh starting to form around the blackened pits that remained behind. The Shattered¡¯s eyes were regrowing, as words started to tumble from my mouth. The covenant, the binding that turned the creature that was Shattered into something else. Not something whole, the cracks of Shattering would remain, but something¡­ more.


    ¡°By my Blood, be bound¡­


    By my Will, be guided¡­


    By my Magic, be mine¡­¡±


    Whispers were falling from my eyes, invocations of a foreign world, as I slipped into the ancient jotun-tongue, binding the new-born to myself. What I had seen in the Shattered¡¯s body was fascinating, a creature so perfectly suited for combat, strong and durable. With my mind to guide it, to give it purpose, it would become so much more.


    A perfect weapon, forged by my magic and bound to my will.


    Outside, the magic started to fade, the new day overcoming the night just as my own power overcame the Shattered and fully filled it. Turned it into mine.


    Looking into newly formed, crimson eyes that stared back at me in confusion, I let myself drop to my side, laying on the ground in exhaustion. At the same time, I made sure that my eyes never left hers. The mended creature, no longer Shattered, but not human all the same. Something new.


    I had succeeded.

 Chapter 722

    Blue windows cascaded through my field of vision, multiple notifications vying for my attention as I felt a surge of power flow through me. The surge wasn¡¯t enough to soothe all my aches, especially that feeling of light-headed ache that settled somewhere within my skull, but it helped to drive away the exhaustion of the night.


    Noticing that my creation had broken eye contact with me and appeared to be reading blue windows of her own, I quickly looked through mine.


    <table style="border-collapse: collapse" border="1">


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 98.9983%">You performed a miraculous feat of creation. As a reward, you gain five levels.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table border="1">


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>You have reached level twenty-five. </td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table style="border-collapse: collapse" border="1">


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 98.9983%">Trait gained</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 98.9983%">You gained the trait: Titanic Ambition</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>


    When Mortal Hubris joins Draconic Desires, Titanic Ambition is born. You desire to look behind the curtain of reality, to challenge and explore its very foundations. Some will see you as an inspiration, and others will see you as a heretical creature that needs to be destroyed.


    When engaged in your exploration of the unknown, all your attributes are increased by 100%.


    </td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 98.9983%">Your Path has permanently shifted.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table style="border-collapse: collapse" border="1">


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 98.9983%">Title gained</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 98.9983%">You gained the title: Primordial Mother</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 98.9983%">By your will, a new race was born into this world. All offspring of that race will recognise you, as they are part of your domain.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table style="border-collapse: collapse" border="1">


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 98.9983%">Skill Increased</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 98.9983%">You increased your skill: Mind Magic [11/100]</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table style="border-collapse: collapse" border="1">


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 98.9983%">Skill Increased</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 98.9983%">You increased your skill: Blood Magic [14/100]</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table style="border-collapse: collapse" border="1">


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 98.9983%">Mark of the Lone Traveller</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 98.9983%">You have marked a creature as your travelling companion. You can currently mark no other creatures and will regain the ability to mark another creature during the next full moon. </td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table style="border-collapse: collapse" border="1">


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 98.9983%">Astral Depletion</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 98.9983%">Your actions have severely depleted your Astral Power. For the next twenty-four hours, your Astral Power is halved and will recover slowly afterwards. Further strain to your reserves, before your Astral Body has fully recovered, will result in severe, permanent harm to it. </td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    For a moment, I was utterly stunned. I thought I had healed and improved the Shattered, but from the looks of it, I had done a whole lot more. Just the five levels were insane but adding the two traits and altogether seven points in two magical skills, and I was completely blown away. The Astral Depletion was worrying,  as was the rather ominous warning that my Path had shifted, but it was something I would deal with. While the term Astral Body didn¡¯t ring immediately ring a bell, I could make an educated guess that it referred to the pool of Astral Power within me, but I wasn¡¯t certain. That I apparently had marked the previously Shattered creatures as a travelling companion was a distant concern, but nothing I wanted to even think about now. It was, quite frankly, the least of my concerns and considerations.


    The Titanic Ambition was easily my biggest concern, trumping even the state of the Shattered I had mended. An insane bonus, that was for sure, but knowing that ¡®my path had shifted¡¯ was worrying, to say nothing about the other part. Titanic Ambition, and what it implied, was as awesome as worrying.


    ¡°Thank you, mother,¡± the no-longer Shattered quietly spoke, pulling my mind from the rabbit hole I had fallen into. For a moment, I didn¡¯t fully comprehend the words she had said, as if she was talking in a foreign language but after a moment, my mind finally caught up. If I hadn¡¯t been lying on my side, my chin would have dropped at the address. Suddenly, even the promise of being chained up on a mountain and having my liver eaten repeatedly faded to the background of my mind, at the prospect of suddenly turning into a mother.


    You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.


    Being called mother by a person no more than ten, at most twelve, years my junior was something I had never expected. Hell, I had never expected to be called mother by anything, at least not outside some weird jokes.


    ¡°Huh?!¡± I spluttered, trying to catch my bearings, while the crimson eyes simply stared at me, as if my sputtering emissions were the grain of all truth.


    ¡°Why do you call me that?!¡± I finally managed to synchronise my mouth and my brain, at least to the point that I could string words into sentences.


    ¡°What else would I call you, mother? You gave me life, where there was only desolation. You brought order into the chaos and allowed me to think once more. I am yours, for without you, I would be nothing,¡± the Shattered quietly intoned, her words spoken with a solemn sincerity that made me listen with equal seriousness.


    ¡°Not mother,¡± I couldn¡¯t help but insist. I didn¡¯t want to become a mother, certainly not without Sigmir. With her by my side, I might have considered but alone? No.


    ¡°Mistress, it is. You are my Lady, the one I will follow,¡± the Shattered decided and again, there was no hesitation, nothing but acceptance. As if I only had to say a word, and this creature would do its best to accomplish whatever I asked of it. I wasn¡¯t sure I liked that tone or the quite obvious devotion in her gaze, it was intense enough to send shivers down my spine. The trust she was displaying, open, unguarded, made me feel responsible for this creature. But then, judging by the title I had gained, I was quite literally the creator of her whole species, just like Loki was supposedly the creator of the Firn Elves.


    ¡°Do you know who you are? What do you remember?¡± I asked, still trying to gather the facts and understand what was going on. The Shattered had gone from mindless, starving beast to conversant, devoted¡­ follower in a matter of minutes, the change intense enough to give me whiplash.


    ¡°I¡­¡± she paused, her crimson eyes flickering close for a moment, ¡°I remember¡­¡± she continued, her voice hesitant and insecure.


    ¡°My name was Chantalle, my parents own and operate Apple Gate Farm,¡± she slowly continued speaking, weaving the biography of a rather ordinary seventeen-year-old. But there was something in her tone that felt familiar, a distance to the tale she was weaving, as if she was talking about a person she knew, not even a friend she was emotionally invested in.


    ¡°And now? Who are you now?¡± I couldn¡¯t help but ask, interrupting her report on her schooling.


    ¡°Now, I am whoever you want me to be,¡± she replied, her eyes opening again, staring at me with intense focus. I had no idea how to react to her actions or behaviour, but I needed to make a decision here. Her mother had asked me to heal her and that had, at least partially, worked. She was lucid and remembered her life, only that it didn¡¯t look like she remained the person she used to be.


    ¡°For now, you shall reply to the name Chantalle and act as you did before the change, at least to your mother,¡± I ordered her, getting an immediate nod of acceptance. I had expected a bit of hesitation, but there was none, she simply obeyed. Looking at the creature before me, and realising that her body was still very much changed from a human one, I was tempted to Observe her. But before I did, I remembered that there might be an easier way.


    ¡°Can you call up your status-sheet and show it to me?¡± I asked, before having to explain to her how to do that. Moments later, she reached out, her status-sheet displayed above her hand, allowing me to read it with perfect ease.


    Only for my eyes to widen when I got to the second line of her sheet. The first, her name, was simply blank, making me wonder what needed to be done for her to have a name displayed. But the second line, the line recording her race, was a major surprise.


    <table border="1">


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Primordial Vampire</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    Somehow, just reading that line brought my headache back with a vengeance, pulling a groan from my lips.


    ¡°Mistress?¡± the Vampire I apparently had managed to create asked, her voice filled with worry and vulnerability. Shielding my eyes for a moment and rubbing my temples, I tried to push on, to ignore the implications, as glaring as they were and look at the rest of her sheet.


    "Nothing, just trying to make sense of what happened," I admitted, before focusing on her sheet again.


    It was, quite frankly, incredibly impressive. High stats across the board, especially her Strength, Agility, Endurance and Vitality, all sixteen or higher, but even her other stats were high for her rather underwhelming level four. Nothing below a ten and an average around fifteen, higher than even my own rather impressive attributes. The attribute bonuses applied by the Vampire-racial template were, frankly, insane.


    However, as with everything, there were drawbacks. When I had her show me the details of her regeneration, I realised that while she had good stats, her Astral Power regeneration was a negative value, she constantly lost a small amount of Astral Power, simply for being who she was. There was a mention of feeding on Astral Power, taken from blood and I didn¡¯t have to be a genius to realise what that meant. The newly created Vampire needed to drink blood in order to replenish her Astral Power and while the constant drain wasn¡¯t high, it was there. A brief moment of calculation told me that, if she had a full tank, she could go about twenty-six hours without replenishment, before she was dry. I wasn¡¯t sure I wanted to know what happened then.


    In addition, her sheet had the same Curse of the Sun as mine, though I wasn¡¯t sure if the mechanics were the same. Not something I wanted to explore just now, not with everything going on. There was more, affinities mirroring my own for example, a couple of interesting traits that I wanted to look into some more and even a Title declaring her as First of her Kind, which was partially responsible for her incredibly high attributes. All interesting stuff and worthy to be explored, but later. For now, I just wanted to withdraw into my mind and come to grips with this new reality. I was just not ready to be a mother and certainly not ready to be the mother of the Vampire Race. Or face whatever Titanic Ambition implied about me.

 Chapter 723

    ¡°Mistress, can you grant me a name?¡± the newly minted vampire asked, looking at me with crimson eyes that seemed to sparkle in the dim gloom of the cellar. Hopefully, that was the only part of her that would ever sparkle, otherwise, I would be the eternal sinner who brought sparkling vampires into the world. In that case, the only solution would be to make her not only the first but also the last of her kind, which sounded a little sad to me. Creating a race of my own, only to doom that race to extinction because I didn¡¯t quite get it right? No, not unless I had to.


    ¡°Isn¡¯t Chantalle your name?¡± I asked in response, not sure how she conceptualised her life before the change in connection to her existence now. She remembered the before, claimed to not remember anything between then and now, and had her present. And some thirty minutes of past, in her current state.


    ¡°It used to be,¡± she gave me a sad pout, before continuing, ¡°I used to be Chantalle, daughter of Kira. I used to be human. Now, I¡¯m no longer either of those, I¡¯m your creation. Your daughter and the first of my kind. I would like to have a name that matches this.¡±


    For a moment, I didn¡¯t reply and considered her words. I could empathise, easily so, given that I used to be Samantha until I had taken on the Legacy of Morgana, a Legacy of my own making. Now, I didn¡¯t feel like I was Samantha but I also didn¡¯t consider myself to be Morgana. More than once, I had considered taking on a new name, to separate my existence before the change from my current existence. Even now, as the changes from human to Firn Elf were taking effect, I was considering whether or not I was Samantha.


    As of now, only the name Samantha and the contact with Mrs Wu remained of my identity as Samantha. Much more of who I was now, came from the Legacy of Morgana, which felt separate from the identity of Samantha. The two were linked, but they were not identical.


    ¡°I think I see what you mean,¡± I admitted, studying her. Even now, she was in the cage, trapped like an animal. She hadn¡¯t complained, but I didn¡¯t think she was comfortable. Looking around, I noticed a set of keys hanging on a nail, one of them looking like it would fit the padlock keeping the cage close.


    Making a decision, I retrieved the key and stood before her closed cage. If I wanted to give her a new name, she wasn¡¯t the only one who would change. I, too, needed to acknowledge that I wasn¡¯t who I used to be. That Samantha Jade Jacobs was gone but that I also wasn¡¯t Morgana. I was turning into an amalgamation of both and I felt that my name should reflect that.


    Jade Morgana, a name uniting both parts that made up my current existence and fitting. Speaking out, I tried to make the world listen to me. Not with my magic, simply with my conviction. I was who I decided to be. ¡°I am Jade Morgana,¡± I intoned and for a moment, nothing happened. Nothing overt, no earthquakes, nothing. But when I looked into my status screen, I could see that I had a new name.


    From her cage, the vampire was watching me, looking a little confused at my sudden declaration but I wasn¡¯t sure if she had even known my old name. Not that it mattered. Standing before her cage, I continued to speak.


    ¡°In a moment, I will open your cage. You can step out of it and into your new life. You will have a new name, one bestowed by myself,¡± I told her, getting a wide-eyed and hopeful look in return. A happy, hopeful vampire with sparkling eyes. That needed a name. Hopefully, the name I had chosen would suit her.


    ¡°Step out of your cage, step out of your old life. From now on, you will be known as Carnelia Morgana,¡± I intoned, feeling the formal ceremony necessary to signify the new start. She did as I told her to and while there wasn¡¯t any physical change, I could feel something. I wasn¡¯t sure what, it didn¡¯t feel like any magic I had ever experienced, neither arcane nor divine, but there was something. Just like before, no overt change, but something subtle.


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    ¡°It¡¯s a nice name, Carnelia. Thank you,¡± she gave me a smile as she crawled out of her cage. I reached out, offering her a hand to stand and when she did, I was feeling a flash of jealousy. She was almost a head taller than me, even if her body looked a little starved right now. She would need some sustenance and I doubted blood would be enough, even a Vampire¡¯s body needed the basic building blocks to make new flesh, blood and muscle. Protein, carbs, all the good stuff a body needed in order to be strong. Sadly, I didn¡¯t have any at the moment and didn¡¯t think I should leave just yet, not without setting down a few ground rules and assumptions.


    ¡°First of all, on the topic of names. Would you like a nickname, to go with your new name? Or would you like to be addressed by your full name, at least outside of this compound? Here, you will have to answer to the name Chantalle, just like I will continue to answer to Samantha. Otherwise, there will be questions I¡¯m not yet willing to answer,¡± I asked, as I realised I also had to do something about Observe. If she was Observe¡¯d and it came back as Vampire¡­ I had no idea what would happen but I doubted it would be good. Kira had asked me to help her child, to heal her. Somehow, I didn¡¯t think she had this in mind.


    ¡°If it is just the two of us, could you call me Lia?¡± she asked, looking quite excited at the prospect.


    ¡°Lia, yes, that works. Now, Lia, I need to try something. This will most likely feel unpleasant but it has to be done,¡± I told her and used Observe, not even trying to conceal my action. She immediately let out a hiss of displeasure, while a blue box appeared before me, telling me that she was a Vampire, just like I had feared.


    ¡°Well, it worked. And you¡¯ll have to learn something, real quick. How to block Observe, that¡¯s the ability I used on you just now. Almost everyone has it, at least as far as I know, and if someone Observe¡¯s you and learns you¡¯re a vampire, things will get troublesome. So, you¡¯ll learn how to block it and nobody needs to know about your new race. The name has far too many troublesome connotations,¡± I sighed. Luckily, Lia had inherited my affinities, though not the Natural Mage Trait. Hopefully, she would be able to learn how to block Observe without it, and learn to do so fast. Otherwise, I¡¯d have to come up with some external way to block it, something like the cloak of twilight I had used on Mundus, only woven into an item.


    ¡°Now, Darkness Magic¡­¡± I began, after having her sit down next to me in one of the dark corners. She needed to learn, even if my body was slowly shutting down, exhaustion and blood loss taking their toll on me, to the point that my speech became slurred.


    ¡°Honey, you¡¯re alright?!¡± an excited voice ripped me from the comfortable darkness of unconscious, forcing my mind back into wakefulness. I must have fallen asleep, or maybe I simply passed out at some point and now, Kira was checking on her daughter and me.


    Blinking my eyes open, I realised that Lia, Chantalle, had turned my cloak into a makeshift pillow and guarded my sleep. Currently, she was facing Kira in a half-defensive stance, while Kira had wrapped her arms around Chantalle, sobbing into her shoulder.


    ¡°Mother,¡± she began, speaking quietly, ¡°please, calm down. You¡¯ll wake¡­ Samantha up,¡± there was a small pause, making me think that Lia wasn¡¯t sure how to address me. Curious how their interaction would play out, I stayed still, letting the newborn vampire do the talking.


    To my surprise, Lia managed to hold the conversation quite well, at least once she managed to talk Kira down to speak in barely more than a whisper. I could still hear them just fine, but they were making an effort. Listening to them was incredibly interesting and it made me realise that Lia wasn¡¯t truly a newborn, she had taken in her memories and was using them to almost frightening effect.


    The tale she spun was well-crafted, appealing to emotions far more than to logic. She spoke about being trapped in darkness and how I had pulled her out. That she was, at least for now, sane and lucid but it wouldn¡¯t last, that she needed me to remain this way. She carefully laid the foundation to remain by my side, to the point that nobody, not even Kira, would question if Lia followed after me.


    Listening to them made me realise just how easy manipulation came to a Vampire.


    I would have to make sure that skill wouldn¡¯t get directed at me, or I¡¯d be in trouble.

 Chapter 724

    It was fascinating, just how good Lia was at running interference. Not only did she manage to keep Kira from disturbing my rest, she made sure that nobody did. While I had woken up during their conversation, I had remained in a dozing state, not quite awake but also not fully asleep. It was a state I had plenty of experience in, though mostly from my time on Mundus, when Sigmir and I had slept together and I lingered in her arms, enjoying the warm, comfortable embrace. Even now, I could feel the sensation of her arms wrapped around me, evoking fond memories and bittersweet dreams. My mountain, the place where I could lay down my head and rest, it was so infinitely far away and yet, I could almost feel it next to me, calling for me. How I missed her.


    A plate of food was what actually pulled me from my daydreaming memories, the scent of a fresh, home-cooked meal simply too strong to resist. Lia had managed to talk Kira into bringing down some food, allowing us to eat in peace. From what I had overheard, Lia had convinced Kira that she, Lia, didn¡¯t want to attract too much attention, at least not until it was clear if her healing had been a fluke miracle or something reproducible. If it was the first, nobody needed to know that one Shattered had been healed, if it was the second, we¡¯d have to be incredibly cautious.


    The topic of Lia¡¯s creation was what we discussed while eating. Mainly, I was giving Lia background information on the current state of the world and the events of the last few days. Given that she had gone from her ordinary student life into this basement, with only some scant information I had given her before going to sleep, it was a minor miracle that she had managed to set things up as well as she had.


    Either way, plans would have to be put in motion, some ideas accelerated and others discarded.


    Once I finished my food, another topic came up. Namely, how to feed Lia. she wasn¡¯t human any longer, and while we didn¡¯t plan to introduce her as a vampire, her needs had changed. Food was still necessary for her, her body needed those basic building blocks to work, but she also needed blood. Or rather, she needed Astral Power and the only way to replenish that was by taking in blood, at least that was what her character-screen implied. It had come up during our discussion of her traits and special abilities, some of which were incredibly powerful, while others were restrictive to the extreme.


    To both of us, it was obvious that simply preying on the local humans would be out. Partially because it would weaken an already threatened community but also because it would harm our standing. If we wanted to remain in the vicinity, if I wanted to keep working with the local spellcasters, we needed that standing. I couldn¡¯t be seen as a predator, not after the levels I had gained by creating Lia. As amusing as it was, with those five levels, I was likely over-levelled to the point that nothing out there would give EXP if I hunted it down. Just too weak.


    Simply waiting and working on my skills was an option but not one I wanted to take. I wanted to keep gaining more levels, I wanted to keep getting more powerful and for that, I apparently needed to teach, or create or however the system distributed EXP. The message I had received after Lia¡¯s creation hadn¡¯t mentioned a fixed value of EXP I had received, but five levels. It was possible that the amount of EXP distributed that way wasn¡¯t dependent on the level of the person doing the teaching but was defined as a percentage of a level. If that conclusion was true, a feat that was rewarded with five levels at level twenty would reward the same five levels at level five hundred. Only that the threshold to qualify as a ¡®miraculous feat of creation¡¯ was likely far higher for a higher level.


    Sadly, there was no manual to read, and certainly no customer support to ask, unless I was willing to try calling the celestial customer support, or however people called their prayers now. Maybe summoning demons worked, there were legends that they answered questions if the right deal was struck. And they shared quite a few characteristics with customer service people or HR. Lawyers, too.


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    Who knew what legends were actually true, or at least somewhat connected to the system, and what were just tales of old. Not that I was about to summon some demon, or pray to some god to receive answers. No, I wanted to understand the world on my own, by testing and experimenting to see what worked. If I were just handed all the answers, I would soon become terribly bored and likely go look for new challenges. And at that point, a dwelling far from any other habitation would become necessary.


    But sadly, when it came to understanding the reward structure, I was running into a bit of a problem, namely a lack of consistency. Teaching Lia magic, mainly Darkness Magic to block Identify hadn¡¯t rewarded me any EXP at all, despite the effort on my side and the rewards on her side easily outstripping the efforts I had made to teach the students at the Gym and Lia¡¯s results were quite impressive. She wasn¡¯t able to consistently manage to block Observe, but she was getting there, especially once I put together a pure darkness spell to do just that. I was another of those simple spells, using a gesture and a hissed word to activate, making me far more interested in that class feature than I had ever been before.


    Before, I had managed to strip the drawing of the needed runes from the casting of a spell, and while the mechanics still didn¡¯t allow the spell to be cast while moving, it was a step in that direction. If I managed to accomplish a similar feat, or somehow managed to create spells that could be cast on the move, it would be a major feat, not only for me but also for my students. Sure, such spells would likely be far less efficient but there was always a tradeoff, just like my ability to instantly project runes had such a trade-off.


    The last thing I did before Lia and I headed up to meet with the rest of the people here and converse with those I had been sent to find was put four points into my Intelligence Attribute, bringing it to twenty-five, catching that major milestone. The last free point was added to Intuition, hopefully allowing me to catch the twenty-five once I reached level thirty and got another boost from the Dragon-Touched trait. Which might just have some connection to the Titanic Ambition Trait, now that I thought about it, that one had mentioned Draconic Desires.


    The moment I mentally pulled that lever and distributed the points, a blue box popped open, informing me that I had gained a trait.


    <table style="border-collapse: collapse" border="1">


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 98.9983%">Trait gained</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 98.9983%">You gained the trait: Arcane Adept</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 98.9983%">For having an Intelligence of 25 at your level, you gained a fitting trait. Your quest on the Arcane Path is not limited to the Elements and Magics you have an affinity for, instead your drive to learn and explore is boundless. Your affinity with all Magic is increased.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    Just reading the blue box stunned me for a moment. It was, quite frankly, insane, or it had the potential to be. As so often, it depended on the fine print, which was sadly so fine that it wasn¡¯t even there. Though, even if it was only a small boost, it was universal and thus, incredible. Closing my eyes, I tugged on the darkness around me, curious if I could feel the difference immediately.


    At first, I wasn¡¯t able to tell if there was a difference. The Shadows around me heeded my demands, just like they always had. It might have taken a little less power, but without extensive testing, I doubted I would be able to tell.


    Curious, I decided to test it with my newly discovered Wind Magic. Sure, I knew less about the skill but I had far less affinity to begin with, hopefully making an improvement more obvious.


    Gently tugging at the air around me, I immediately felt the difference. The wind was more responsive and it took far less effort for a minor breeze to spring up. A quick thought stilled the wind, returning the cellar to its previous quiet as I became even more curious. Would I be able to learn Earth, maybe even Fire magic?


    The mere thought of wielding fire immediately disgusted me, but at the same time, a part of me wondered. Just how would it feel to dominate Fire, to make the very flames that might burn me one day my proverbial bitch? Somehow, that felt far less repugnant to me.

 Chpater 725

    It was early afternoon by the time Lia and I moved back up, into the primary residence. I had warned her about the Curse of the Sun, making sure she knew to stay out of direct sunlight, though even indirect sunlight was somewhat painful. Luckily, the day was overcast, allowing us to move freely indoors and even going outside might have been possible, though incredibly risky.


    The moment I was off the stairs, a rapidly approaching, clicking sound caught my attention, making me whirl around to face the incoming threat. Only, there was no threat, only a furry missile that apparently had something to say about her person staying in a cellar with a too-narrow staircase to accommodate her canine furriness. In order to make her displeasure known, Silva bowled me over, pushing me flat to the ground before starting to absolutely cover my face in doggy kisses. The first moment, I tried to protest and stop her but once I was on the ground, I kept my mouth closed, not interested in getting slobber into my mouth, it was bad enough to have my face covered with it.


    Lia, on the other hand, reacted amusingly hostile. She had been behind me on the stairs and when I was bowled over, she jumped and demonstrated just how impressive her newly gained physical abilities were. With a single leap, she somehow managed to get past Silva and me, and with a second leap, landed on a cupboard, from where she hissed down at Silva.


    And here I thought I had accidentally created a Vampire, not some sort of cat.


    Silva was quite unimpressed by Lia¡¯s threatening hisses and summarily ignored her, at least until she felt I was thoroughly chastised and allowed me to push her off.


    ¡°What is that beast?!¡± Lia asked, her voice an angry hiss. Maybe Silva could understand her, maybe she simply didn¡¯t like her voice or maybe she had even reasoned that Lia was the cause of my prolonged stay underground. Either way, with Lia hissing at Silva, Silva decided that reciprocity was fair play and began barking up a storm. In a possible further indication of Lia¡¯s vampiric felinity, said vampire scrambled up, onto a higher shelf, squeezing between the top shelf and the ceiling, while hissing down.


    It looked incredibly hilarious. While I had no idea how Lia had looked before turning Shattered and now Vampire, she had become a tall female, though far from Sigmir¡¯s towering height, with long, almost gangly limbs and a mess of wavy, copper-coloured hair. Her most distinctive, and obviously inhumane, features were her eyes, the iris overly large, almost completely crowding out the sclera, and deep crimson, mirroring the colour of my Blood Magic. Luckily, her hands looked completely human, though I had noticed a special ability on her sheet that was called Retractable Claws. An earlier test had shown that she could manifest crimson claws around the last segment of her fingers, hard and sharp enough to leave visible scratches in the metal of her old cage.


    After watching for a moment, I felt the onset of a headache and told both of my companions, for that is what they were, to knock it off and, to Lia, to come down, making sure to call her Chantalle where others might hear. They obliged, though from the looks passing between them, I was quite sure this wasn¡¯t the end of it.


    Silva¡¯s barking was enough to bring a few people over and the reactions to Lia¡¯s presence were curious. I wasn¡¯t sure why, but most of them looked at her with a frown, apparently unsure of what was going on, while one middle-aged guy had a few tears run down his face in an expression mirroring the one Kira had earlier. Disbelief, relief and joy, all mixed and tangled together. Though that might have been due to her looks, her sleepwear was ragged, thanks to her attempts to break her cage as Shattered, and wrapping her in my cloak only did so much. Or rather, did very little, given that it was sized for my diminutive physique, and deliberately short even for that. But better than nothing, if only barely.


    ¡°Sweetie,¡± he exclaimed, quickly approaching and pulling Lia into a bear hug, completely ignoring Silva and myself. From the looks of it, that had to be Chantalle¡¯s father, it would certainly make sense with the awkwardness Lia was displaying.


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    ¡°Everything¡¯s fine, my dog was just a little too excited,¡± I tried to assure the people around, not quite certain how much was known about the situation with Chantalle and now Lia.


    ¡°Miss Jacobs, may I have a word, please? Clarence said you were looking for us,¡± another guy asked, his voice deferential and hesitant. I recognised him from Mrs Wu¡¯s gym and was relatively sure his name was Cheng Hu, the guy I was supposed to find.


    ¡°Certainly. Is it something that needs to be discussed privately?¡± I easily accepted his request, given that it likely was something about the reason his group had stayed here this long.


    ¡°No, not really, whatever works best for you. Just that we¡¯d appreciate it if you can help us get back to the Gym, please. When we tried yesterday, but had to turn back due to wild animals. Hopefully, travelling with you will solve that issue,¡± he explained, making me frown.


    ¡°What happened? I didn¡¯t really notice anything too troublesome, just a horse that wanted Silva and me to get away from the area. We just walked down the road, nothing to it,¡± I asked, needing more information as apparently, I had missed something troublesome.


    It led back to what Mark had told me earlier, livestock getting powers thanks to the system and remembering that a human without the right tools had very little that they could use to press a point with thousand pounds of angry cattle. Before the change, livestock had been domesticated into relying on humans for protection and nurture, now the tables had turned. Instead of the livestock getting onto our table, they could eat us for dinner, if they were so inclined.


    ¡°Well, my plan was to head back, no problem. Just that we¡¯ll travel by night, but I should be able to guide you, I can easily see through the night. Any additional plans with the people here, or anything I need to know?¡± I easily accepted his request, not really bothered by it. With the boost in level, I was confident that I could survive against anything, even if there might be things out there that could force me to flee.


    ¡°I¡¯ll go with you,¡± Lia immediately jumped into the conversation, interrupting the talk with what I assumed to be her father.


    ¡°What?¡± said father questioned, sounding angry and insulted, ¡°I just got you back, you aren¡¯t going anywhere, young lady!¡±


    ¡°As I told mom, I¡¯m not healed. I¡¯m stable, but it¡¯s a stability bought by her, at a high price,¡± Lia shook her head, gesturing towards me. Hearing her, the desperate plea in her voice, made even my chest feel tight, her father turning pale and swallowing hard. His eyes flickered between myself and Lia, who looked at him with determination in her eyes.


    ¡°Please, don¡¯t force me. I don¡¯t want to lose myself in the darkness, not again. Please, dad,¡± she continued, laying it on thick. And succeeding.


    ¡°You,¡± he looked at me, his face all twisted up to the point that I couldn¡¯t read him at all, ¡°You¡¯ll take care of my daughter!¡± he told me, his voice almost breaking. Desperation, pleading, anger, hope, it was all tangled together into a rope that choked him out.


    ¡°Dad, don¡¯t put this on her, she saved me,¡± Lia interrupted again, shielding me behind her body. With my diminutive size, that was quite easy, easy enough that it irked me. I could destroy everyone here with nary a thought and yet, this teenager felt she could protect me?!


    ¡°Maybe this is something that should be handled privately,¡± I made myself heard in their conversation for the first time, noticing that the entire area fell into an almost eerie quiet at my words.


    ¡°Please, I¡¯ll show you my room. We can talk there, right, dad?¡± Lia asked, though I had a feeling that she would do it anyway, whether her father accepted or not.


    ¡°Yes,¡± he nodded, following after us when Lia gently guided me.


    As we walked away, I could faintly hear people talk behind us and, unsurprisingly, the topic was on Lia and myself. Hearing them, I was somewhat certain that Kira and her husband hadn¡¯t told the people what had happened to Lia, at least not the whole truth. Earlier, I had only listened with half an ear as Kira and Lia had talked about their future plans, leaving me with a bit of an information deficit. Something to solve in the future.


    But for now, I had a worried father to handle, making me wonder how I should go about doing that. I didn¡¯t want to alienate him, the farm was likely the best place to stay while investigating that Old Slaughterhouse, something I had put on my to-do list. The scent was rather interesting, and I wanted to know what was going on. If there was some super-powerful necromancer, it meant a lot of EXP for me, if it was a phenomenon of Wild Magic, I wanted to know, cause it likely meant that the dead wouldn¡¯t stay that way.


    If that happened, we¡¯d have another mess on our hands, one we really didn¡¯t need right now. And weren¡¯t prepared for, at all.

 Chapter 726

    It was a little surreal, getting pulled into what looked like a completely ordinary bedroom, furnished for an older teenager, by a vampire, only to notice movie posters that, quite prominently, featured characters that were, at least according to my sketchy pop-culture knowledge, vampires. Coincidence or fate? I couldn¡¯t even begin to guess.


    There was a brief moment of contention when Lia shut the door in Chantalle¡¯s father¡¯s face, keeping him out with the excuse that she needed to change, while pulling me in with her. Not that I really minded, but I had no interest in any sort of suggestive behaviour, so I simply turned around and walked back out, waiting with him.


    If the looks he gave me were any indication, he couldn¡¯t decide whether to be grateful or hate me, turning his face into an impressive study of expressions. He switched from scowling to a resigned smile every couple of seconds, to the point that not all of his features were always in sync. A frown between his brows, while his lips were in a gentle smile, making it rather disturbing.


    I considered trying to calm him down but decided to wait until Kira and Lia could join that conversation, mostly because I wanted to impress upon them that what had happened to Lia was akin to a miracle, not something that was easily repeatable, maybe even entirely impossible. I didn¡¯t need the emotions that came with the possibility of people getting put together again after they became Shattered. People would both revere and hate me, likely with equal measure, until they realised that I couldn¡¯t save their loved ones. Then they would just hate me.


    By the time Lia was done changing and called us back in, Kira had joined us, noticing the whole commotion and deciding that she needed to put her word in.


    ¡°We need to talk about what happened to Chantalle,¡± I began, once we were all inside the girl¡¯s room. ¡°I don¡¯t think we should talk about it, partially because I¡¯m not certain it is permanent, partially due to the danger she would be in if people find out about her. I have no doubt that countless people all around the world would love to get their hands on her, if only to find out how to put together their loved ones. They wouldn¡¯t care if your daughter gets Shattered again, or if they have to kill everyone involved,¡± I let out a sigh, not sure how far to twist the truth. For now, I was relatively certain that I was powerful enough to keep her safe, simply due to my personal power, but I couldn¡¯t be certain it would last.


    My power had grown fast, incredibly so, thanks to my area of effect abilities, the teaching I had done and the miracle I had pulled off creating the first Vampire. I had no idea if the teaching would continue to give the same amount of EXP, if it would give any, or if I could find any enemies that gave EXP when I killed them. I had yet to figure out the formulae to know what level my enemies needed to have, but when I was level twenty, nothing with a single-digit level had given me EXP. If that now jumped to fifteen, with a simple ten-level gap, I would be hard-pressed to find enemies that gave any EXP, let alone enough EXP to level.


    Until stronger enemies appeared, my levelling would slow down, allowing others to catch up, at least to a point. I doubted that anyone would overtake me, not without coming across equally lucky chances, but if a group of five, or ten, with somewhat decent levels managed to corner me? It could be dangerous.


    But luckily, from the looks of it, neither Kira nor her husband needed to be convinced, they were looking at Lia with worry as if their darling would vanish the next moment.


    ¡°Mother, as I told you, I¡¯m not whole. Not yet, maybe not ever. Jade gave me a part of herself, it is what allows me to think, to keep my mind together. Without that, without her presence, I¡¯m not sure what would happen. I need to follow her,¡± Lia spoke up, causing a sad look to appear on Kira¡¯s face.


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    ¡°But why can¡¯t you stay here? Why do you need to follow her, go out there?¡± her father asked, focused on me.


    ¡°Many reasons, mostly because I need to accomplish something. A goal, a dream, whatever you want to call it, it already pulls me away from here. I will happily let her follow me,¡± I nodded towards Lia, ¡°but I can¡¯t stay here. I will watch over her and I believe at least for a time we will remain in the area but long-term, we will move somewhere else. Where, I cannot even tell you yet, but we will be travelling. There¡¯s a whole new world out there and I want to see it,¡± I added, remembering the drive to explore and travel I had felt on Mundus. To find out what was behind the next bend in the road and how far away the horizon was.


    Chantalle¡¯s father wasn¡¯t happy with that and began to argue. Her mother and Lia joined in, bickering back and forth, while I leaned back, making myself comfortable against Silva and mostly zoned out, letting the three come to their own decisions. Or rather, give them the illusion that they did, at the end of the day, Chantalle was dead and I was quite certain Lia would come with me.


    ¡°I¡¯m afraid there is very little that can actually be argued,¡± I finally spoke up again, after their arguments had circled the room thrice. ¡°Chantalle is no longer who she used to be. I can only vaguely speak about the experience of becoming Shattered, but I doubt that any earthly experience can compare. She was changed, beyond anything you can see on the surface, regardless of how extreme those external changes are. It would be foolish to believe that she will allow herself to ever be in such a vulnerable position, where her very existence is twisted by forces beyond her control. If a survivor of sexual assault would seek training in martial arts, to gain the ability to defend themselves, would you think it foolish?¡± I asked, looking at the two older people. Neither of them could meet my eye at that moment, so I looked over to Lia, who had her shoulders pulled together in a somewhat defensive posture.


    ¡°That would be an assault on their body, a scar on their mind. Horrifying and nothing I would ever wish on a person, and yet, I believe that becoming Shattered is worse because it not only involves an assault on their body and mind but a twisting of their very soul. Chantalle will come with me, she will learn how to defend herself and until she can stand proudly before all who would seek to harm her, I will keep watch over her as if she was my own child. Does that assuage your worries?¡± I asked, laying it on thick even if there was a kernel of truth to my words. She was my creation and I wanted her to thrive, not just survive.


    Looking at her, I had to fight to keep myself from bursting into laughter. She looked just too adorable, with her tall, lanky frame and large, crimson eyes, looking at me all hopeful. Reaching out, I gently petted her head, similar to the way I would pet Silva, only for Lia to lean in and curl against me.


    Looking at us, her father seemed to age a decade, his head dropping defeated.


    ¡°I hate this,¡± he admitted, though there was only desperation in his voice, no aggression or anger, ¡°I hate that this happened to my daughter, I hate how our world has changed,¡± he began to ramble, only for his wife to reach out and take his hand in a show of support and comfort.


    ¡°Please, take care of her. And visit us, whenever you can. As long as I¡¯m alive, you¡¯ll have a place here. Both of you,¡± he promised, trying to push past the despair and find hope in the future.


    ¡°Please, take care of my baby. I¡¯d rather have her fight out there, to learn whatever you can teach her than have her waste away in the cellar,¡± Kira said her own piece, wiping away a few tears that escaped her eyes.


    ¡°And baby, if you ever want to return and simply live here, we¡¯ll welcome you, any time, no questions asked. Just, be well,¡± she added, reaching out to hug her daughter¡¯s body, while Chantalle¡¯s father wrapped both of them in his arms. Trying to keep his family together, even if he knew it was impossible.


    Quietly, I stood and left the room, allowing the three of them a bit of privacy, before Lia would join me to head out into the night. Guiding the five people from the gym back to safety. It would be interesting, to travel in such a large group. But I had no doubt I¡¯d manage to keep them safe, though I would have to look into training for Lia, maybe one of the people at the Gym could help, while I taught the spellcasters.

 Chapter 727

    Night hadn¡¯t quite fallen when we began our trek back to town. The skies were completely overcast, a thick layer of clouds blocking the harmful rays of the sun, giving me enough confidence to make the move.


    Silva, Lia and I were accompanied by the five people who had come over from the Gym and two people from the farm. Mark, the guy who had greeted me when I entered the farm first, and a woman roughly my age were coming along to get a better idea of the people who were interested in moving into their community, or at least in the general area. To me, and likely to Mrs Wu as well, it was obvious that staying in the city wasn¡¯t a viable option, not with the threat of disease spreading from the countless decaying bodies and the gradual collapse of weakened buildings. Each new earthquake shook a few more buildings down, and there was no way to tell whether the few we had thus far, two big ones and a few smaller shakes, were the only ones.


    Where I had begun worrying, was whether or not the other shoe would drop soon. The strange scent blowing in from the old slaughterhouse told me of unquiet dead and horrors that walked day and night. Unless there was a necromancer who had somehow managed to far outstrip me in the power department, which I seriously doubted, I hypothesised that the undead had been created by a wild magic phenomenon. If that happened again, which I thought more probable than not, I could easily see all the creatures, people, animals, maybe even Shattered, that had been killed in the city rise again, only now with far less social conditioning.


    If that came to pass, keeping the survivors alive would become incredibly difficult, unless the spellcasters trained by me managed to pull off a minor miracle. Without the Gods to lend their aid, something I wanted to avoid if at all possible. The people would have to do anything themselves and especially the warding necessary to avoid mass-rises of undead would be a challenge. Maybe a combination of Nature and Death Magic could accomplish such a feat, but I wasn¡¯t sure. Research was necessary, but time was limited. Without a teacher, it would be nearly impossible and I couldn¡¯t teach what I didn¡¯t know.


    For now, we could still see quite far and for the first time, I could actually see how many beasts there were on the stretch of grassy fields between the city and the farm. It was difficult to make out species, the difference between a cow and a horse, when standing about a kilometre away from it, wasn¡¯t that great, large, four-legged shapes that occasionally put their head down to eat. Similarly, I had no idea if the medium-sized shapes were goats, pigs, sheep or even dogs, they were simply too far away and concealed by some shrubs, but just seeing that they existed, that much I could accomplish.


    Luckily, it looked like we were far enough from them all to make us not worth the effort to run down, or too far away to be considered any sort of threat. The consideration made me wonder, would these beasts in the future act more like herbivores or carnivores? For herbivores, to attack was the immediate response to anything that might become a threat, or that spooked them or even just looked at them funny if they couldn¡¯t tell for certain. For a carnivore, whether to attack was always the question, was it worth the energy to hunt the prey down, unless the animal, or its young, were threatened. It was that, somewhat amusing, difference that made herbivores generally far more dangerous than carnivores, simply that the herbivores often attacked and asked questions never.


    If the cows here had decided to follow one of their closer, still wild-living relatives, the black water buffalo, I knew I didn¡¯t want to catch the cattle''s attention, or the only thing I¡¯d be able to do was conjure fog and run. ¡®Cause, if a bull weighing in at over a ton decided that you were a threat to its way of life, you wanted to be far, far away, or it might send you to heaven, physically, before burying what is left after it, and about a thousand of its herd, tapdanced on your body.


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    ¡°Ms Samantha, how are we going to do this?¡± Cheng Hu, who had sorted the two from the farm into the formation his group used, asked me quietly. We had been quietly moving for about half an hour, and luckily nothing had happened so far. The seven of them had moved in a loose formation, with Cheng Hu in the middle, alongside the two from the farm, while his four teammates formed a cross around them.


    ¡°What is it you are asking? We¡¯ll just keep moving, and I¡¯ll keep teaching my newly acquired ward,¡± I tried to understand his problem, only to remember that crucial little detail I had forgotten. Humans had relatively shitty night vision and with the thick cloud cover, the night would be completely dark. Dark enough to hinder even me, limiting my visual range to maybe thirty metres, beyond that, I¡¯d be limited to vague shapes and silhouettes.


    ¡°Oh, the darkness,¡± I frowned, trying to play off my lapse, ¡°We¡¯ll be sticking to the road, do you see enough to follow it? We can warn you if there¡¯s any trouble ahead but I¡¯d prefer to keep things dark, concealment is a greater boon to us than it is a hindrance,¡± I explained, making him look like he had just bitten on a particularly bitter lemon.


    ¡°We can try,¡± he hedged, looking from me, to Lia and over to his group, possibly considering if his idea was really that great. ¡°Please, warn us before we land in a ditch somewhere?¡± he asked, forming his group into a line in the dying light.


    Silva, Lia and I let the seven of them move ahead, while we quietly kept pace behind them. The last bit of light was fading fast, the clouds making sure that no light was getting anywhere near us, and it showed. As it got progressively darker, their pace slowed down, while they tried to get used to it. They didn¡¯t quite stumble around, they were smart enough to move in a line, keeping a loose connection to the person ahead, while the one in the lead was using a staff as an aid to keep from wandering into the ditch. A procession of blind ducklings and from the smirk on Lia¡¯s face, the night vision she had inherited from me was up to snuff.


    But that just meant I could use the time to start training her if I made sure our ducklings didn¡¯t get into trouble.


    ¡°Silva, go ahead and take the lead. You can tear any threat apart, I¡¯ve got your back,¡± I quietly ordered my hound, amused at the looks of disbelief I was getting from Lia, and even Cheng Hu looked over his shoulder to stare in the direction he must have heard my voice from, a grimace of disbelief on his face. What they didn¡¯t know was that Silva was likely more intelligent than some of them, the lack of shared language and opposable thumbs made them underestimate her.


    As if to prove me right, Silva let out a quiet huff before trotting up front, smartly moving ahead of the guy who used to be in the lead, close enough that her tail, stretched out as far as possible, acted as a guiding leash, only that the one taken for a walk was the human, not the dog.


    That performance was enough to make Lia break down in helpless laughter and even I couldn¡¯t help but join in. Shaking my head, I managed to catch my breath, before focusing back on Lia. I had quietly instructed her on the art of stealth, passing on the lessons Mrs Wu had given me months ago and expanding on them using what I had learned on Mundus. There sure, I had mainly used my magic since the change happened, but that didn¡¯t mean the ability to move around unnoticed was useless, especially because Lia wouldn¡¯t have Astral Power to throw around.


    Sadly, things couldn¡¯t progress smoothly. It was a quiet growl from Silva that caught my attention and focusing my senses up ahead, I noticed a few shapes in the distance, blocking the road. I could only guess that there were some cattle standing on the road, possibly sleeping, but I wasn¡¯t sure.


    ¡°Stop, give me a moment to scout ahead. If you hear screaming, jump into the ditch and keep your head down. Maybe you¡¯ll survive,¡± I told them, before focusing on Lia.


    ¡°You¡¯ll keep some distance, I¡¯ve got my cloak to hide me, you just have about an hour of verbal instruction. Don¡¯t do anything stupid,¡± I warned her, hoping that there wasn¡¯t enough teenager in her to make her do succumb to teenage stupidity.


    Creeping forward, I noticed with relief that Lia stepped up next to Sliva, waiting together with my hound. Hopefully, Silva could keep any idiotic ideas from becoming reality.

 Chapter 728

    After instructing the others to stay back, I channelled power into my cloak, blending into the night, and started to move forward. I wasn¡¯t about to get too close to the shapes I had stopped ahead, I simply had no way of estimating how perceptive they were so I wasn¡¯t about to take any stupid risks. If I spooked the herd of unknown size, it would be dangerous even for me. Without knowing how far they might be spread out, or how many there were, I couldn¡¯t be certain that we weren¡¯t in the middle of their herd and trapped between them all, I¡¯d likely be unable to escape. No matter how many additional levels I had, if I got smushed between two heavy objects moving with enough force, I would be squished.


    To say nothing about the fact that, even with my levels, I only had the base vitality of an exceptional human. There was a level component to the Health-calculation, just like there was one to the Astral Power calculation, but I had no idea just how it factored in. I only knew that I now had four-hundred-eighty Health and Stamina and that I started with hundred-forty-one, while I had nine-hundred-twenty-six Astral Power, from a start of two-hundred-twenty-one, not including the third that was sequestered in my hair. In addition, I knew that the formula Astral Power formula also took into account Intelligence and Intuition, but I had no idea in what way, or if there were additional variables. I knew my Astral Power had gone up by twelve when I put that one point into Intuition and by around seventy points when I put the four points into Intelligence, so there was some complexity involved. Without a few sheets of paper, some time and a whole lot more data points, I wouldn¡¯t be able to figure out the formula, if there even was one. I might be too stuck in considering the system as part of a game, and thus bound to relatively simple, mathematical formulas but who knew how it worked? I certainly didn¡¯t, I had no idea how an ephemeral and nearly impossible-to-quantify quality like ¡®Intelligence¡¯ could be boiled down to a single number. Unless it signified some measurable quantity within the brain, something along the lines of ¡®neuron-firing-speed¡¯. Not that I¡¯d have any idea how that qualified or how it would increase the ¡®power¡¯ of magic, but there was that. Delving into those fine minutiae would be a lot more involved than I could afford, even if the train of thought had been a welcome distraction while I quietly snuck closer to the cows.


    By now, I was close enough to ascertain that they were that, cows, standing in the middle of the road and looking bored, or maybe asleep. I had no idea if cows could sleep standing up, I could see some lying in the grass near the road, but one of those on the road appeared to be moving, if only a little. Maybe chewing? I wasn¡¯t sure, even my night vision had some limits at this distance.


    Letting out a quiet, almost inaudible, sigh, I decided to move back and warn the others, before starting to look for a path that avoided the cows as much as possible. The others lacked my ability to move around undetected and I was, for now, unable to cast a concealment spell strong enough to cover all of us. Maybe if I gained a few dozen more levels, possibly also crossing the first divide, but for now? I just didn¡¯t have the power, unless I wanted to conjure a cloud of mist and disrupt the senses of the entire herd. If they couldn¡¯t sense anything, they¡¯d be unable to sense us, but such a blockade might just stampede the entire herd, possibly getting us trampled in the process.


    ¡°There are sleeping cows ahead,¡± I quietly spoke up, once I was close enough to the others to speak without risking waking the cows. Sadly, while my own voice was quiet, the reactions of the others weren¡¯t exactly that. They apparently had completely failed to notice me, even when I got close enough for our hands to touch if both sides reached out and my voice spooked them. They didn¡¯t quite go shouting to the high heavens, but there were quite a few curses and something that sounded suspiciously like a squeak.


    Letting out a quiet curse of my own, I immediately commanded them to move into the ditch, even taking action to facilitate their moving into cover by virtue of a few shoves. Lia and Silva helped me push the humans around and luckily, we managed to get them into cover before anything could happen.


    There, hidden in the ditch, we all waited for the cows to go on a rampage from being spooked, only to wait. And wait.


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    Finally, after a good five minutes in the cold, soggy ditch, I let out a huff of annoyance. Maybe immediately taking cover had been an overreaction, though I would never agree that there was such a thing as being too cautious, not when your life was on the line and nothing could be gained by taking a risk.


    ¡°As I said, there are cows ahead,¡± I quietly repeated myself, noticing a soft, somewhat amused snort from Lia. ¡°Apparently, they aren¡¯t too easily spooked, but I¡¯m not about to risk you wandering into them, who knows what happens if they wake up. I¡¯ll go looking for a safe path, you guys wait here. You can move back on the road, but quietly. Girls,¡± I addressed Lia and Silva, ¡°help them and keep watch.¡±


    With that, I left them behind once more, quietly sneaking across the field and mentally noting where the cows had spread. And there were a lot of them, clustering in groups of five to ten, with a couple of dozen metres between the group, some lying and chewing, others standing around either dazed or dozing. Either way, from my observations, I couldn¡¯t even guess whether the cows would manage to notice a group of humans sneak through, but I wasn¡¯t about to have the others take the risk.


    Instead, I moved back, approaching them just as quietly as before, only this time, I dropped my concealment a little earlier, allowing Lia to notice me. I was quite certain Silva had noticed me even with the concealment, at least once I was close enough, but the dog hadn¡¯t warned anyone. Luckily, Lia was more courteous, giving the poor humans a quiet hiss of warning, preventing another loud disturbance.


    ¡°No way you can sneak past them, they are stretched out for hundreds of metres. Unless you think you can silently trudge through at least a kilometre of worked fields in the dark without making noise, that is. So, no way,¡± I judged, looking at the seven humans. ¡°Luckily, you don¡¯t need to, you just have to trust me to guide you,¡± I declared, desperately trying to keep the amused grin from my face.


    ¡°What¡¯s the plan?¡± Cheng Hu asked, speaking just as quietly as I did.


    ¡°I¡¯ll conjure up enough mist to prevent anyone but me from sensing anything. Unless the cows start rampaging around wildly, we¡¯re golden. If they do, I¡¯ll notice and you can take cover in the ditch, it should be safe enough,¡± I explained, not mentioning that, if the cows had no idea the ditch was there, they couldn¡¯t avoid running into it.


    None of them seemed to really like my plan, but the alternative was heading back, so there was that. Without another word, I settled down and started casting. For once, I didn¡¯t include any damaging components to the mist, only adding runes for concealment and confusion. Instead, I added a Rune of Water, curious to see if the addition would fundamentally change my conjuration, while also hoping that it would be enough to activate my Titanic Ambition.


    The smile on my face couldn¡¯t have been wider when I felt magic surge into, and through me, powered by attributes far outstripping anything that should be remotely possible at my level. And yet, the effect was lacklustre at best. For the amount of power I was putting into the spell, it should do more, a lot more. Incompatible, a small voice in my head warned me and after a moment, I realised what the problem was. Normally, I only used the Mist-Rune as a medium, imbued with the effects of Darkness, Confusion and possibly Devour, with a specification to target Blood. The medium was always just the simple mist but now, I was messing with the medium, turning it from Mist into Mist and Water, causing me to falter.


    In this instance, the excess amount of power provided by Titanic Ambition made it work, but it was something I needed to keep in mind for the future.


    Soon, the Mist had spread far enough to make me feel comfortable and as I stood, I realised that it was far denser than normal. Likely a side-effect of the Water-Rune, or maybe just from the sheer amount of power I had pushed into it. Either way, we were ready to go, though I needed to know how to best accomplish it. If Lia could guide some of them, I could guide the rest. In addition, I realised that my Water Rune Mastery had gained a level, bringing it to a mighty two, and my Ice Rune Mastery had also levelled, to a much more impressive sixteen.


    After quickly checking with Lia, I let out a quiet huff of annoyance, when she told me that she was just as blind as the other seven. Even Silva stuck to my leg as if worried she¡¯d lose me in the billowing cloud before us, so there was nothing I could do but have the guy who used to be in the lead take my hand and, literally, create a procession of ducklings, with me as the leading duck.


    In that, rather ridiculous manner, we waddled our way forward, moving slowly and cautiously, even when we were just a few metres from a ton of beef, that could easily plough us over. The joy of escort quests, how could I ever have forgotten it? How nice it was to know that some things never changed, even if everything else did.

 Chapter 729

    It was hair-raising, and not just due to the cold, clammy mist I had conjured. Amusingly, it was only I who truly knew just how close we got to the cattle, the mist was dense enough to dampen any scents and the concealment runes I had imbued into its creation meant that even sounds were deafened. I could pierce through it, it was still my magic, and thus I could perceive the cows which nervously twitched but didn¡¯t dare to move. They likely wouldn¡¯t, unless they were able to perceive a threat. I just had to make sure they didn¡¯t.


    After a tense hour of walking through dense mist far too slowly, I was finally confident that we had passed the entire herd, the mist slowly moving with us thanks to my Ice Magic. I was drained, the Water-Mist-Mix far harder to move than I had anticipated, and my Astral Depletion didn¡¯t help matters. But we had managed, and now, I could feel the mist brush against the first buildings. In town, we could dodge the cattle far easier, if necessary, so I mentally let go of the mist, letting it slowly disperse. It would last long enough to get us to safety, and that was all I needed. For a moment, I considered experimenting with it further, maybe sending it back to the cows and trying imbuing additional magic into it, some Mind Magic to drive the cows into a blind stampede, but decided against it. Sure, it would be an interesting experiment and this many enemies might even net some EXP but it wasn¡¯t worth the risk. Not while I was escorting someone, not while I was severely magically depleted.


    ¡°Thank god,¡± Cheng Hu muttered, barely audible, when he finally stepped out of the mist. I had to hide a grin at that, knowing he had nobody to thank for but me, though I couldn¡¯t deny a small shudder of delight running through me at the idea. To be praised as a god, there were some parts I completely disagreed with, mainly those parts that required interaction with followers and servants, but the sheer power to earn the label? That sounded wonderfully attractive. Maybe something to aim for, now that I wasn¡¯t bound by a time limit, a long-term goal, so to speak. Likely very long-term, but why not shoot for the moon? Even if I missed, I would be in the perfect void of space and deeply immersed in the Darkness Element. Maybe deep enough to become something else, not a god, but a titan? My grin only got deeper at the idea, until I had to hide it away when the humans became a little antsy.


    ¡°We still got some distance to cover, do you need a break?¡± I asked the others, curious how well they had weathered the mist. They looked a little pale but I wasn¡¯t sure if that was just a trick of the darkness or their actual pallor. That their skin colours ranged from a rather tanned olive to a pale caucasian white with multiple shades in between didn¡¯t help matters, only made reading them more difficult.


    ¡°Give us five minutes, please,¡± Cheng Hu asked, after looking at the other six humans.


    ¡°Certainly. Young One, on me,¡± I commanded Lia, before stepping a bit aside and returning to my previous lecture. There were still so many things she needed to learn, from magic, to fighting, to hunting and even feeding, there was so much I had to teach her, and so little time. I wasn¡¯t confident I would be able to sustain her by myself, nor was I sure I even wanted to do so, but if I wanted to keep her around, she needed sustenance. Draining other humans was a measure of last resort, as it would rapidly destroy any goodwill I had gathered with the local survivors.


    Hunting Shattered might be possible but that came with their weird resistance to Blood Magic. I had no idea how Lia¡¯s feeding would ultimately work, but I could only guess that it was along similar lines. Thus, feeding on Shattered would likely be difficult, if not impossible.


    However, one thing I was considering was whether the feeding required actual ingestion. If my assumptions were correct, she primarily needed to take in Astral power and drinking Blood was simply the easiest way to get it. If she was able to use Blood Magic, she might be able to simply drain her opponents of their magic and siphon said magic off into her body, maybe by touch or something along those lines. If nothing else, I might be able to test that by using the Sacrifice-Rune, draining Blood and Astral Power from a target and letting her experiment with it. If nothing else, it would give her something to drink.


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    Finally, the others were ready to continue and we moved on. There were still a couple of Shattered around and the large group appeared to be almost a beacon to them. If it was only Silva and me, we never had to fight this many, they simply kept coming.


    I was tempted to stay back and let Lia fight but throwing her into the deep end, just to see if she would sink wasn¡¯t the right call, not in my eyes. Sure, she was stronger than she had any right to be, and likely just as hardy as the Shattered but I wasn¡¯t about to expose that to the other humans. They looked at her with suspicion already, no need to confirm their ideas and have her labelled as a monster just yet.


    Instead, I decided to forgo any EXP they might get and simply let Silva lead the way and had her rip apart the Shattered. It caused a slightly amusing effect, the humans managed to turn even paler than before, to the point that I was wondering if any blood would come out if I cut into their faces, but I wasn¡¯t about to voice that thought. Instead, I made sure that none of the Shattered came close to us, easily ripping them to pieces with my frozen shuttle or conjuring up a hailstone and breaking some bones.


    ¡°Monsters,¡± the guy from the farm muttered under his breath, likely trying to make sure nobody could hear him. Sadly for him, my twenty-two in Intuition was well up to the task, though his words only made me grin wider. On the other hand, Silva seemed to have heard him and once she finished tearing through the Shattered she was fighting, she bounded back, muzzle bloody and tried to clean it off on his shirt. I was busy trying not to burst out laughing, while killing a few more Shattered, so I just couldn¡¯t even try to stop her. And, truthfully, I didn¡¯t want to try, the look on his face was just hilarious.


    With such a strange combination of merriment and gruesome slaughter, we continued on our path. Even with the amount of Shattered, we made good time and about an hour before the sun threatened to rise above the horizon, we were in the neighbourhood of the gym.


    This time, I didn¡¯t need to worry about the guards noticing us, with nine people and a large dog, there was more than enough noise to alert them, though it also meant that a quick glance was enough to have them ascertain that we weren¡¯t Shattered. So far, it seemed that no people had started to cause trouble in the area and humans were deemed safe. Hopefully, that would last but deep down, I knew it wouldn¡¯t. At some point, somebody would decide that they wanted to be king, that there were no more laws but that of the jungle. Mrs Wu and her fellows had managed to hold that off at the Gym but eventually, it would happen.


    And then, it wouldn¡¯t just be Shattered that killed off survivors, it would be survivors killing off survivors and with my penchant for social trouble, I would be one of the first to be targeted. Unless I managed to get to the point that even the idea of targeting me and mine was enough to make even the wildest megalomanic consider it suicide. Though, at that point, I¡¯d likely get into a different sort of trouble, with people trying to drag me into their squabbles.


    But it was a bridge I¡¯d avoid at that point, maybe by freezing the river it crossed.


    ¡°Stick with me, young one,¡± I reminded Lia, ¡°Cheng Hu, I believe my task with you is complete. Could you please ask Mrs Wu to meet me at my quarters once she is up?¡± I asked him. He gave me an affirmative nod and after a quick goodbye to the people we had escorted, I walked right back out of the gym, Lia and Silva in tow.


    ¡°Your quarters?¡± Lia quietly asked once we were moving through the neighbourhood again.


    ¡°I don¡¯t feel comfortable staying with this many humans,¡± I admitted, noticing a strange look on her face, ¡°I believe you¡¯ll feel similarly, it is easier, more comfortable, to keep some distance. They can come to us, especially during the day when it is better for us to rest, and we can easily move around at night, without disturbing them,¡± I explained.


    Soon, we reached the house and inside, I made Lia an offer she just couldn¡¯t refuse. I offered her a shower, possibly earning her eternal gratitude.

 Interlude: Survivors 202

    ¡°Ms Samantha, how are we going to do this?¡± Cheng Hu quietly asks Samantha, uncertain if she has a plan to actually move through the night. Because, given the thick clouds and fading light, it will soon be impossible to continue on normally. They will simply be blind and without being able to see, their pace will drop to the point that walking becomes almost pointless. Maybe if they use a stick to feel their way through the night it might be possible but even then it would be difficult. Given that Samantha is habitually travelling through the night, she might have a better way.


    ¡°What is it you are asking? We¡¯ll just keep moving, and I¡¯ll keep teaching my newly acquired ward,¡± she asks, looking at him with an expression of utter incomprehension.


    ¡°Oh, the darkness,¡± she finally adds, trying to gloss over the previous moment as her expression morphs into one of contemplation.


    ¡°We¡¯ll be sticking to the road, do you see enough to follow it? We can warn you if there¡¯s any trouble ahead but I¡¯d prefer to keep things dark, concealment is a greater boon to us than it is a hindrance,¡± she suggests, sounding so utterly convinced of the feasibility of her plan that it¡¯s near impossible to refute. Hearing her say it makes it sound so easy, but really, trying to continue moving in the complete darkness with nothing to guide them, nothing but hopes and maybe a tapping stick? Even blind people get to use a guide dog, but they are stuck with only a stick, between the seven of them. And no time to get used to their new condition, while monsters roam all around them. A part of Cheng Hu wants to desperately curse the possibly insane monster, but given that the person he is talking to is that monster, he holds his words, though it¡¯s a struggle.


    ¡°We can try,¡± he allows, not sure what else he can do. Turning around would be possible but what then? Hope that the cattle move away, maybe, but would that solve their problem? They¡¯d still be a rather large group, hoping to get through town without losing one or two of their number. No, dealing with the darkness and the insane monster, that luckily was on their side, was simply safer.


    ¡°Please, warn us before we land in a ditch somewhere?¡± he pleads, knowing that the seven of them are at the monster''s mercy. Whether they want it or not.


    Clarence takes the lead, using his stick to feel out the way in an attempt to stay on the road, and avoid the occasional cow patty, while the other six line up behind him, holding onto the person in front of them. None of them like it, they can all feel the tense shoulders and arms they touch and yet, it¡¯s the only way to continue. Curses are muttered but nobody dares to voice their displeasure out loud, not with the dearth of other options. Instead, they all try their best to continue moving, to keep in line and not accidentally stumble or do anything to drag the group down.


    In the darkness, it¡¯s almost impossible to guess how long they¡¯ve been walking, time seems to lose all meaning. Just set one foot before the other, keep your senses on alert and try to keep your mind from playing tricks on you. There are no unknown monsters out there, hiding in the darkness, only the three monsters that set out alongside you. Somehow, that sentiment helps some of them to calm down. At least those who know about the monsters with them.


    At one point, the hound takes over the lead, acting very much like a seeing-eye dog, only without actually having a lead. But hitting Clarence with the tail works just as well, making sure he knows where to go, even if he¡¯s unable to see. The quiet laughter that followed them only seemed to make things eerier but none of the blind could even try doing something about it.


    The strange night parade continues on, until after an indeterminate amount of time, a quiet voice calls it to a stop.


    ¡°Stop, give me a moment to scout ahead. If you hear screaming, jump into the ditch and keep your head down. Maybe you¡¯ll survive,¡± the voice orders and somehow, it doesn¡¯t serve to keep people calm. A few words, too quiet to be audible to them, are spoken to the monster¡¯s new companion and then, there¡¯s silence.


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    Standing there in the dark, hearing nothing but the quiet sounds of wind and what little noise eight standing people and a dog make. The sounds of breathing seem to become louder and louder and even the beating of their hearts feels like the echoes of a drum.


    Seconds turn to minutes and maybe even to hours. Nobody can truly guess how long they have been standing there, nobody dared to talk, for fear of alerting the monsters in the darkness.


    Suddenly, a voice speaks again and to their sensitive ears, it sounds like a loud shout and coming from far too close for comfort.


    ¡°There are sleeping cows ahead,¡± the voice warns, only to be answered by gasps and even a quiet scream.


    ¡°In the ditch, now!¡± the same voice commands with dire urgency. When the people don¡¯t immediately start to move, they get shoved. The force of those shoves doesn¡¯t seem to fit with the monster¡¯s petite statue and yet, they move. After staggering into the ditch, they crouch down, their ankles getting soaked by the icy water, and wait with bated breath, wait for whatever horror might come out of the darkness. Now, their ears start to get sensitive once again, while their breathing slowly calms down from the horror-induced gasps.


    ¡°As I said, there are cows ahead,¡± the monster repeats, speaking quietly but with enough amusement in her voice to elicit a snort from the new monster.


    ¡°Apparently, they aren¡¯t too easily spooked, but I¡¯m not about to risk you wandering into them, who knows what happens if they wake up. I¡¯ll go looking for a safe path, you guys wait here. You can move back on the road, but quietly,¡± the voice continues and moments later quiet movement is heard as the little monster disappears once more.


    ¡°What exactly is going on here?¡± Mark asks, entirely unhappy with the situation. Sitting in the cold water, not knowing what is out there, it makes for an annoyed man.


    ¡°Mi¡­ Samantha is scouting around, trying to find a path around those cows. We¡¯re supposed to wait here, so we¡¯ll do just that. If I tell you to duck, I expect you to obey,¡± the little monster quietly explains, sounding far too amused with the situation. That her voice sounds as if it¡¯s coming from above, outside the ditch, doesn¡¯t help.


    Again, time passes slowly, though now, the people in the ditch quietly crawl out of the cold water, trying to keep their feet warm. It¡¯s difficult in the cold air, but compared to the water, it¡¯s not as bad. Suddenly, there is a quiet chuffing noise coming from the dog, and a soft, golden glow pushes the water away, drying the various feet. If they could, the people would have exchanged looks of disbelief but somehow, that doesn¡¯t work in the dark.


    ¡°Mi¡­ Samantha is back,¡± the new monster warns them and moments later, the other voice speaks once more.


    ¡°No way you can sneak past them, they are stretched out for hundreds of metres. Unless you think you can silently trudge through at least a kilometre of worked fields in the dark without making noise, that is. So, no way,¡± she explains, as the seven people crawl out of the ditch. Cheng Hu wonders just what that golden light was, but it doesn¡¯t really matter, there are more important things to worry about.


    Namely, ¡°What¡¯s the plan?¡±, he asks, trying to speak as quietly as possible.


    ¡°I¡¯ll conjure up enough mist to prevent anyone but me from sensing anything. Unless the cows start rampaging around wildly, we¡¯re golden. If they do, I¡¯ll notice and you can take cover in the ditch, it should be safe enough,¡± the monster explains and, given the situation, nobody can say anything about it.


    For the seven people, nothing much changes. The air becomes a little moister and some cold grit floats in their face, while they are led in a line, with the monster walking up front. Just like earlier, nobody can see but now, they also can¡¯t hear, smell or do anything but walk. Even their legs seem to disappear below them, making it feel as if their torsos are simply floating through the thick fog.


    Without touching the others, madness would surely await them in the mist, their senses deprived of everything, their minds slowly spinning off their axis.


    Again, time starts to warp, nobody has even the slightest inclination just how long they have been walking until finally, the fog fades away.


    Compared to the dense, impenetrable fog, the night seems to be almost bright. The moon and a few stars above managed to break through the clouds, giving just enough light to make out vague shapes as they continue their path.

 Chapter 730

    It was early afternoon by the time Mrs Wu managed to come by. After feeding Lia some of my Blood, infused with a bit of Astral Power, I started her on some simple martial arts exercises. She needed to have a balanced stance and learn how to throw a punch, how to kick without overbalancing and so on. Her incredible physical attributes required some adjustment of those techniques, but ultimately, her body was human enough for them to work. Once that was done, I demonstrated a simple routine that let the different movements flow smoothly from one into another, and set her to work.


    ¡°Good to see you again, Samantha,¡± Mrs Wu greeted me and for a moment, I considered asking her to call me Jade. But the moment passed and I decided against it, simply because I wanted to keep some tether to my past, even as I embraced my future.


    ¡°You completed my quest, and I want to thank you for it. Cheng Hu and the others told me about the troubles they ran into, and how you helped them out. We¡¯ve been talking to Mark and Jessica and are considering our options in regard to future living space,¡± she explained and for a moment, silence reigned between us.


    ¡°Huh, interesting,¡± she cocked her head, clearly studying a blue box before her, ¡°Here, this is for you,¡± she added, before handing me two ten-dollar bills. For a moment, I just stared at her, before a blue box of my own told me I had completed the quest she had given me and received some EXP and an increase in my reputation with the survivors here.


    ¡°What was that about?¡± I asked, feeling that there was more to her actions.


    ¡°I was curious what would happen if I gave you a quest but decided against giving you the rewards we had agreed on. Say, what would happen if I had changed the two bills I just gave you into a single twenty?¡± she explained, and I found myself getting interested. It sounded like something worth investigating and apparently, she agreed.


    ¡°At first, nothing happened, even as I stated you had completed the quest. Only when I mentally focused on the idea that you should receive your reward and that I would leave after did I get a message warning me that attempting to renege on quest-rewards would have ¡®dire consequences¡¯, ranging from loss of quest-giving privileges to the eradication of all the survivors at the gym. With such a warning, I obviously wasn¡¯t willing to experiment any further, I hope you understand,¡± she explained and I could only nod.


    ¡°Though, the warning is interesting. Makes me wonder, who would be the executioner of such a warning? Is it simply compiled from the effects such actions had in the past? As in, has a past quest-taker who wasn¡¯t given their promised reward simply taken the quest-giver¡¯s life, thus making them lose their quest-giving privileges, or maybe killed the entire village the quest-giver was part of? Or would it be some sort of system effect that makes everyone just drop dead? Or something subtler, like increasing the EXP an attacker would get if they kill one of the people here? Such a boon would, eventually, become a death sentence for everyone affected,¡± I mused, as always curious about the intricacies of the system''s operation.


    ¡°Any of those is possible. It would be best if it was the first because I could debate with the quest-taker if necessary, but if it is an automatic effect? That would be more troublesome, a lot more,¡± she sighed and I could feel the worry emanating from her.


    ¡°Though, I wonder, what would happen if the quest-taker just happen to suffer from an accident on their way back? Would somebody be able to inherit the quest or would the quest-giver just be off scot-free, possibly getting away with murder?¡± I mused, wondering just how intuitive and intelligent the system actually was.


    It was easier when the system was, in my mind, only part of a video game, with the rules that applied there. If you completed a quest, you could turn it in without fear, unless there was a chain quest that activated on the attempt. But here, in reality, the person who gave the quest might decide that it was cheaper to issue a second quest and have somebody assassinate the quest-taker on their way back. Or even have the guards, in the case of a noble, bar the quest-taker from their estate, thus making it impossible for them to turn in the quest,¡± there were so many things I didn¡¯t know, partially because I never had focused on quests while playing Road to Purgatory, leaving me at a loss. Shaking my head, I decided that I would have to consider system quests as a bonus in the future, not something I could ever rely on. In other words, I couldn¡¯t trust a system quest any more than a random request asked by anyone, not unless I understood all the mechanisms in play.


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    ¡°Well, be that as it may, I have a request of my own,¡± I told her, curious if that was enough to trigger a quest, but knowing that I wasn¡¯t powerful enough to actually qualify as a quest-giver. And that my request was a little too simple to turn into a quest.


    ¡°As you likely know, I brought somebody with me,¡± I told her, before calling out to Lia, ¡°What you maybe don¡¯t know is, that Lia here was, at least in her current form, born yesterday morning. Who she used to be before, was Shattered during the change,¡± I explained to Mrs Wu, causing her eyes to go wide. I had previously debated with myself whether I should tell my teacher about Lia and her previous state and decided to do so. Mrs Wu was, in many ways, my guarantor amongst her group, so having her in the know should assuage any future troubles. And chances were, if the people from the gym had enough contact with those at the farm, the truth would come out eventually.


    ¡°And you healed her?¡± Mrs Wu asked, her eyes wide in shock, ¡°Is that something you can repeat?!¡± she pressed, her normally inscrutable facade completely shattered for once.


    ¡°In the strictest sense, yes, I healed her. For a given value of healed, at least. And no, it¡¯s not something I can repeat, it was, in many ways, a combination of circumstances and incredible luck. And it was not without a price, either,¡± I added, making her nod in understanding, before she forced her eyes closed and simply sat there, breathing in a highly controlled, almost meditative fashion.


    It took her a few minutes to open her eyes, minutes Lia and I gave her. She had been forced to kill her husband, after he became Shattered, so a certain sensitivity in regard to that topic was to be expected.


    ¡°Where are you going with this?¡± she asked, studying Lia who stood at my shoulder.


    ¡°She¡¯s no longer who she used to be. It¡¯s more that the person she now is and the person she once was share a body and some memories as if they had read the same book. She¡¯s my responsibility, as much as if I had given birth to her, maybe even more so,¡± I explained, trying to express the separation in words.


    ¡°You trust her, mistress?¡± Lia asked as I was struggling, to which I simply nodded.


    ¡°Madame, you have the Observe ability, do you now?¡± Lia asked Mrs Wu, getting a from and a nod in return, only to continue, ¡°Use it on me, I believe it will answer some of your questions. Not all of them, but at least some¡­¡±


    A few moments passed and I noticed a tremor shake Lia¡¯s body and Mrs Wu¡¯s pupils go wide, just as Lia continued to speak, ¡°... And bring up a whole lot more,¡± she finished, an impish grin on her face.


    ¡°That¡¯s not what I expected,¡± Mrs Wu admitted and I noticed her focus snap over to me.


    ¡°No, I¡¯m not a vampire,¡± I assured her, grinning a little, ¡°Not yet, not ever. But I view it as my responsibility to teach her, to make sure that she¡¯s going to be a person, not some sort of monster,¡± my words managed to bring a frown to Mrs Wu¡¯s face, making me wonder what the people I had escorted said about me.


    ¡°I want you to help me train her, at least for now. We¡¯ll be sticking around the area, though I cannot say how long. In turn, I¡¯ll keep training those living here in magic. I¡¯m pretty sure it¡¯s a good deal for you,¡± I offered and now, she let out a resigned sigh.


    ¡°You have a deal,¡± she promised, ¡°Why do I have a feeling I just made a deal with the devil?¡± she quietly asked, only that both Lia and I had good enough ears to hear her.


    ¡°Not the devil, no¡± I assured her, though my assurance was far from comforting to her, that much I could see. ¡°But let us be honest, would you truly mind in these times?¡±

 Chapter 731

    After an afternoon spent focused on teaching magic to my students and giving a bit of guidance to Lia, it was once more time to head out. My students and I had discussed whether they wanted to have their level rapidly increased and to my surprise, none of them was interested.


    For some, namely Sandy, it was because she didn¡¯t want to fight at all. Instead, she had been focused on growing plants, healing and strengthening them. By doing so, she had managed to gain another level and, according to her, was close to getting another. Sure, combat, especially if I was pushing things, would get her to a higher level quickly, but she wanted to focus on her skills. That, the focus on skills, was the reason the others had declined themselves. They had considered what I had told them, about the class they¡¯d hopefully unlock at level ten, and didn¡¯t want their own efforts to get diluted by having me increase their level, hoping to get a stronger class this way. I had no idea if that would work, but made a mental note to have Lia fight on her own, maybe even try to send her out without me, at least until she reached level ten. Just to make sure the Vampires I had created wouldn¡¯t become the wimpy, sparkling variety.


    All these considerations made me hanker for some popcorn, while Silva and I were discreetly hidden by my concealment magic, while Lia was fighting nearby. I hadn¡¯t told Lia that we¡¯d shadow her and was curious whether or not she¡¯d actually notice, so she was effectively killing the Shattered by herself. It was quite fascinating to watch, her growth was so pronounced, I could watch it in real-time.


    From flailing and mainly managing to overpower the Shattered due to her high attributes thanks to being the first of her kind, she rapidly refined her movements. Not into a polished, anticipating style but into something more instinctual, a savage style of swiping claws, brutal pounces and crushing kicks. There was no grace in her fighting but damn, it was effective.


    While watching Lia happily tear through the Shattered, I was training myself in keeping my concealment around Silva and myself active while using other spells. Nothing overt or big, that would be nearly impossible to conceal, but trying to gently move the air around me with Wind Magic or work on my Water Magic, using a bit of previously conjured water, was slowly becoming easier. It was still hard work, to the point that I gained another point in Darkness-Magic, alongside a point in Wind- and Water-Magic each, bringing them to twelve and two each, respectively.


    In addition, I tried to claim my Wind Rune Mastery but even with my increased affinity, that was slow going. It took me most of the night to get it, though the effect was a little underwhelming. However, I considered whether there¡¯d be some way to make warm wind, in order to get a non-fiery way to increase temperature into my magic. While I didn¡¯t mind the cold showers too much, the temptation of a nice, hot shower was impossible to ignore, even for me.


    Shortly after I gained the Wind Rune Mastery, Silva let out a soft growl, getting my attention. It wasn¡¯t loud enough to alert Lia, who was still ignorant of our presence and fighting about forty metres ahead, but clearly told me something was going on.


    When I focused on my trusty partner, she stood with her fur standing up and the tail sticking straight out, staring into the night.


    ¡°Trouble?¡± I quietly asked her, getting a quiet wuff in return that I took as affirmation.


    ¡°Lia, come here, we¡¯ve got trouble,¡± I called out, shattering the concealment around us. Noticing that Lia still had an enemy to contest with, I sent out a single Icicle, braining the Shattered and ending the fight, allowing her to run over.


    The look on her face was an amusing mix of consternation, surprise and annoyance, she was clearly uncertain how she was supposed to take our presence. Or maybe it was that she failed to detect our presence at all,


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    ¡°Silva has something, we¡¯ll all go check. Until dawn, you shall follow,¡± I intoned, feeling the connection of a fellowship form when she gave a nod of acceptance.


    ¡°Also, good job with your fighting. You managed to get to level seven, didn¡¯t you?¡± I asked, having noticed distinct changes in her power during the night.


    ¡°I did,¡± she reported with a beaming smile, ¡°I¡¯ll need some power, soon. Fighting is more exhausting than I ever thought,¡± she added, looking a little sheepish.


    ¡°Later. I¡¯ll also have to think about a way that might allow you to drain power while fighting. Not some strange neck-biting thing, but maybe some effective way to drain power when you draw blood, your claws are quite good at that,¡± I told her, as Silva started to prowl into the night.


    We quietly followed after Sivla, the few Shattered that crossed our path getting battered away by my magic. The growth of Shattered had apparently slowed down even further, they might have gained a level on average during the last two nights, but it was sill far from challenging for me.


    Soon, I heard strange sounds, snarls, growls and the scratching of claws across concrete. When we closed in on those sounds, I almost stumbled from the insanity I saw ahead. Stopping, I had to pinch myself to see if I was dreaming and even tried to push my Mind Magic inwards in an attempt to get rid of any kind of illusion. But no, what I was seeing appeared to be reality.


    Silva had continued on, bounding towards what I could only describe as a battlefield, where a pack of wild dogs, a wide mixture of breeds and sizes, was facing off against a cavalry charge of boar-riding racoons. To make matters worse, or at least weirder, the dogs had formed what I could only describe as a battle formation, with some of the larger, or at least heavier and more muscular, breeds forming a front line, shielding the smaller dogs behind. But those smaller dogs weren¡¯t all idle or hiding, no, some of them darted through gaps in the line, biting at ankles and trying to cripple their larger foes.


    ¡°What the¡­¡± Lia quietly asked, looking just as confused as I felt.


    ¡°I have no idea,¡± I admitted, not sure what to think, do or say. This was a madness I had not expected, leaving me at a bit of a loss. Luckily, Silva wasn¡¯t feeling the same and as she closed in on the almost two-dozen dogs, she let out a series of loud barks and was surrounded by a sheen of golden light.


    Spellcasting, from the looks of it some sort of divine variant. Coming from a dog. My dog.


    My earlier attempts to dispel mental influence, confusion spells or illusions were repeated, only to change nothing at all. Again, I pinched myself, even asking Lia to pinch me, because I obviously was dreaming.


    But again, no, the golden glow that now surrounded the pack of dogs, apparently shielding and supporting them against the racoon cavalry was still there. Or maybe calling it cavalry was wrong, unless my memory failed me, the word cavalry had some etymological link to horses. So this couldn¡¯t be a cavalry charge I was witnessing, the racoons weren¡¯t riding horses, they were riding boars.


    Shaking my head in an attempt to bring my mind, which had tried to escape the madness I was seeing by putting my head in the sand by focusing on trivia and definitions, back on track worked, at least to a point.


    ¡°We should help the dogs. At least Silva thinks so,¡± I reasoned, watching as said dog crashed into one of the boars, dismounting the racoon that had been riding on porky and tearing into the pre-bacon.


    ¡°Yeah, we should,¡± Lia agreed, before slowly jogging towards the madness, while I began my own advance, slowly moving and sending Icicles flying towards them. Soon, Lia made contact with the battle, coming in high by jumping off a container and pouncing on one of the racoons. Sadly, the boar the racoon had been riding wasn¡¯t anticipating the increased load and its legs gave out, causing a rolling slide that Lia only escaped by jumping again, landing in a crouch while letting out a rather feline hiss.


    With our addition, the battle didn¡¯t last long. Just Silva alone, with her strange magical abilities, was enough to turn the tide but adding Lia and me, and things became a rout. To make matters worse, for the racoons, the smaller dogs that had previously just been hiding behind the canine frontline were now yipping in a rather coordinated manner and I noticed a faint aura spreading around them, engulfing the other dogs and clearly increasing their strength. More magic, though I had no idea what sort that was.


    At this point, I was just trying to keep up with what going on. The riding racoons were running and the canine crusaders were rounding up, most of them keeping a wary eye on Lia, a few looking at me. Silva, on the other hand, seemed to receive a highly respectful greeting. And somehow, I was feeling the beginning of a headache.

 Chapter 732

    Now that the battle was over, an awkward silence fell over the street. Neither the dogs nor the people truly knew what was going on, the previous cooperation might have been more a case of ¡®my enemies enemy is my friend¡¯, or at least an ally with whom I can cooperate to defeat my enemy, but now, without that enemy? Nobody knew how to interact, nobody except maybe Silva.


    She wasn¡¯t just standing there, vigilant and half-expecting hostilities to break out any moment, she was moving between the dogs, snuffling some of them and exchanging low growls, chuffs and barks with others. What she had done earlier, or how she had done it, I wasn¡¯t sure, but I could guess. I recognised the tell-tale glow of divine magic, so an investigation was warranted.


    ¡°Lia, come over here,¡± I ordered, wanting to have my second ally close by, just in case the situation changed. Lia obeyed, keeping her distance as she circled past the dogs and the dead hogs, some blood dripping off her hands as she went. She didn¡¯t look seriously hurt, but without checking more closely, I couldn¡¯t tell.


    When she was with me, I closed my eyes, trusting her to at least give me a warning if trouble approached, and started sniffing the air. Even my tongue darted out, tasting the air to parse the scents more easily and separate the magical from the mundane.


    The mundane was obvious, blood, gore and diverse bestial scents, those were easily recognisable, but the magical side was less clear. My Ice-Magic, obviously, lingered in the area and there was a secondary scent, filled with blood and darkness, that I presumed came from Lia using her abilities to their full extent. Given that she had said they used up Astral Power, magical traces were to be expected, almost as if she was using spells. In addition, there were some small amounts of darkness-magic lingering, not quite the same flavour as what I¡¯d use but something different. Foul, unpleasant, I couldn¡¯t completely understand it, I only knew that I wanted nothing to do with it unless I was in control. Not the revulsion I would feel from fire, but more an instinctual caution warning me off. I wasn¡¯t sure what it meant, but I was confident it wasn¡¯t what Silva had conjured.


    Sniffing the air, I finally parsed the traces of Silva¡¯s magic, the faint scent of divinity lingering. Normally, recognising which deity the magic belonged to was difficult, I might be able to parse out what domains were involved but nailing down the patron was hard. Not so in this case, I recognised the magic, or at least I was pretty sure I did. I had never truly experienced it, I doubted many people had, but I could feel a resonance between the magic and my Blessing of the Moon, my mind¡¯s eye conjuring an image of a statue I had created oh-so-long ago. Hecate, Goddess of Magic and so many other domains, Holder of the Key, Torchbearer, accompanied by her loyal dogs. Somehow, I didn¡¯t think this was a coincidence.


    Lastly, there was another trace of magic, that one completely alien to me. It smelled of dog, strongly so, but there were some primal undertones to it that made me think of Adra. It wasn¡¯t the same, far from it, but there were subtle similarities. Shaking my head, I pushed the thought away, I was relatively sure it was some sort of primal magic of the dogs, maybe stemming from the strength of their pack, maybe from the land itself, something along those lines. Nothing I¡¯d be able to understand or harness, so I didn¡¯t keep bothering with it. It would only give me a headache, with little to show for.


    ¡°Silva, anything you want to tell me?¡± I asked, looking at the silly dog. She was still snuffling the other dogs, exchanging quiet snuffles and a few growls, making it sound like there was a quiet conversation going on. In addition, she had used her magic a few more times, nothing big but small spells to treat minor wounds and such. When I called out, she looked at me with her usual, canine grin, almost daring me to call her to task. In her eyes, she had done what was right and it was up to me to do something about it.


    And doing something, I did. Letting out a soft growl, I stalked towards the dogs, taking notes of their injuries as I moved. There were too many injuries, and there was something clinging to them, a creeping, seeping darkness. Silva was already healing some of the wounds, but she wouldn¡¯t manage alone. She was getting tired, and quickly so. And so I approached, not to attack but to heal. However, the difference didn¡¯t seem to filter through to the dogs, making them think I was hostile and growl to threaten me.


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    ¡°Silva, I will heal them. Have them stand down,¡± I commanded, staring the dogs down. Silva, in return, let out a soft, non-threatening growl and it seemed to work, the dogs dropped the threatening behaviour and I could start working.


    Amusingly, Lia wasn¡¯t as welcome. Or maybe she wasn¡¯t willing to get too close, she had remained where I originally stood, warily watching Silva and me move amongst the dogs.


    It was good training, healing the dogs. Not only did they have numerous small cuts and punctures from the racoon claws, but there were massive bruises under their fur, courtesy of the hogs impacting their line. Healing those was quite the challenge, as I had to carefully redistribute the blood that was pooling below the skin, reduce the swelling and try to remove the pain, all without overly stressing the patient.


    But while I¡¯d normally be able to heal the small cuts and punctures with simple Blood Runes, there was something clinging to them, seeping into the dogs¡¯ bodies and afflicting them. I wasn¡¯t sure if it was poison, disease or curse, or none of those, but I could feel that it was magical in nature and partially darkness-affiliated. Drawing it from the wounds was hard, requiring a combination of Blood and Darkness-Magic, alongside intense concentration. Not so much a task of power, but one of subtlety and precision. A headache, but one I could deal with before I could actually heal the wounds.


    Lastly, there were the broken bones. Those, I just couldn¡¯t heal at the moment, I simply lacked the runes for that. Or maybe I might have been able to, but to even try healing one bone, I would have had to use almost my entire Astral Power, and even then, it wouldn¡¯t have been a sure thing. Thus, triage was the order of the night, making sure that the wounds we could treat efficiently were prioritised, especially the creeping affliction. I had no idea what it might do if left alone. It might trigger an actual infection, or corrupt their bodies. Long-lasting effects could cause tremendous damage, even with minimal power investment.


    It took a while, but finally, there was nothing more I could do. Silva had done some work on the broken bones, and her divine magic was able to heal them more efficiently than I could, but at the end of the day, I was a much stronger spellcaster, and it showed.


    However, my efforts were far from unrewarded, healing the dogs netted me a couple of skill increases. My Blood Magic, for once not used to rip the life from my foes, went up by three, reaching level seventeen, while my Blood Rune Mastery only went up by one, reaching level fourteen. My Darkness Magic, maybe due to the quite unusual way I had been wielding it, went up by two, reaching level fourteen.


    Amusingly, that meant my Blood Magic had overtaken my Ice Magic, despite my continuous use of Ice Magic to strike my foes. Going by the sheer number of applications, my Ice Magic won out by a long shot, but I had used Blood Magic in multiple, somewhat opposing, ways, to heal, to sacrifice and even to create a new race. The versatility must have made the difference, while my Ice Magic was mostly used to control my Frozen Shuttle, hailstones or mist. Nothing innovative, at least nothing of importance. Maybe I should try to find something interesting there, in order to get my skill higher.


    But before I could consider that, there were other things to deal with, namely my four-legged partner who apparently had somehow managed to become a cleric, or something like that, of Hecate. How, I had no idea and given that I had yet to learn the dog language, I doubted Silva would tell me.


    Standing, I moved back to Lia, intent to deal with Silva once we were away from the other dogs, hopefully, she¡¯d give some indication of what was going on. However, as I moved, Silva followed after me, and behind her, the rest of the dogs moved, keeping a close and rather disciplined formation.


    ¡°Have you recruited them?¡± I asked Silva, not really expecting an answer. To my surprise, she gave a happy bark that was mirrored by the dogs behind her, only softer. It sounded very much as if I had somehow acquired a pack of canine crusaders.


    ¡°Guess this is the new Army of Dog?¡± I quietly asked, laughing to myself. I could only shake my head in disbelief, as I started my way back to the shelter. Maybe it was all just a dream, and there wasn¡¯t an army of dogs following behind Silva. Maybe I had hit my head somewhere and by the time dusk rolled around, all would be normal again.


    Somehow, I didn¡¯t believe my own escape from reality, but it was a nice illusion.

 Interlude: Somewhere far beyond...

    In a place, far removed from Terra, mortal toils have thwarted divine plans. Radiant light streaks through the sky, blazing across a crossroad before flaring into a marble building and materialising into a humanoid shape, crafted from nothing but golden fire.


    ¡°What is the meaning of this?!¡± a shrill shriek shatters the blessed silence of the ever-growing library. Sharp enough to crack crystal, high enough to torture the dogs outside into a barking frenzy of protest and obnoxious to the point that even the polecats that organise the stacks flee in protest from the auditory attack. Only one form is not impressed by the divine fury, calmly sitting at a comfortable table, a scroll in hand. Where the intruder is pure golden fire, the inhabitant of the library is much darker, pale, silver flesh shrouded in the shadows of night, three faces looking at their visitor while radiating enough mirth to block out the sun.


    ¡°You will have to be a little more specific. I believe I have done just as the others asked, you have received exactly what you have traded for,¡± the three faces speak in three voices, yet all three are in perfect harmony. One voice young, one voice mature, the last one cracked from age and yet, they are all filled with the same amusement.


    ¡°You blessed that mortal! My curse should have left her withered and soon dead as it deserves! But no, your blessing counteracts the curse and that blasted snake just had to add its own magic to that thing. It will spell disaster, just like it did in the realm we allowed them to visit!¡± the radiance rages, fury burning bright.


    ¡°You have your domain, just like I have mine. What is heretical to you, is sacred to me. That mortal might just walk the same path I once walked, maybe not following in my footsteps but making her own. What she has achieved in years, others fail to accomplish in their lifetime. She might never have called upon me, never even considered wielding my power, but she might just be my greatest champion. You know that I do not simply hand out power to mortals, just because they shout loudly, they have to earn it. And I am merely watching, and maybe give them a small push or two,¡± the mature voice explains, some of the amusement now gone, replaced with quiet, cold anger.


    ¡°And I¡¯ll have you know, the mortal''s antics greatly amused me. Just how far she will go, if she doesn¡¯t manage to cut her own path short, I don¡¯t know. Did you know, her Avatar was only destroyed twice- And both times, it was by one of us. Just for that, she should get another blessing or title from the system, but alas, it has no sense of humour,¡± the young voice added, sounding as if all the mirth that had left the mature voice shifted to hers.


    ¡°Humour?! You think this a laughing matter?¡± the radiance rages, light bursting out and setting fire to the scroll in the other figure¡¯s hand. The fire doesn¡¯t last long, nor does it consume the scroll, but the fury burns hotly in the air around them.


    ¡°So much of our efforts, down the drain, wasted just because some mortal had to meddle?! It broke the prison, unleashed catastrophe and you blessed that wretched thing. How many of our believers have died? It will take ages for Mundus to recover, if it ever does. We have no idea if the people will keep their worship or if others will rise. They might even get influenced by another group,¡± the anger of the radiant voice dims a little but remains, a smouldering ember of rage, ready to burst into flame anew.


    ¡°You mean, so much of your efforts, do you not? Not a single one of my followers was harmed by her,¡± the ancient voice interjects, calm, collected and utterly unphased. If anything, it sounded as if the voice was wholly unconcerned with the raging being, or the matter at hand.


    ¡°I dare to say I actually will gain quite a few thanks to her efforts. Not conscious efforts but she manages to convert some, simply by being who she is,¡± the younger voice adds, the mirth back in full force.


    ¡°As if you have followers to be harmed in the first place. Just your stupid pets, nothing more,¡± the fiery voice blazes up again, spewing venom. For a few moments, they continue to snarl at each other, until they both fall silent at the same moment. The moment a ripple goes through both of them, shifting their attention away from their talk.


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    ¡°How curious,¡± the three voices remark, speaking as one again. ¡°Now, let¡¯s see what just happened,¡± with a wave of a hand, space ripples along the path of her gesture, opening into a window of blackness that swiftly resolves into an image. Within, a tall, vaguely female-looking creature, clothed in nothing but old rags convulses on a dirty concrete floor. Only, instead of eyes, the figure has flames within her eyesockets, flames that flicker like a candle in the wind, about to fade away. Another figure, far smaller, with a petite build, crouches above the first, a bloody hand held to the first figure¡¯s mouth.


    ¡°What is it doing now? What insanity?!¡± the fiery voice snarls, only a few breaths away from erupting into anger once more.


    ¡°A ritual, it seems. Quite the curious one,¡± the mature voice replies, curiosity brimming in her voice. As they are watching, the larger figure stills, the flames vanish and for a moment, both of the watching entities wonder why their attention was drawn to the scene. Only, just as they were wondering, liquid starts to pool within the eye-sockets, filling them in moments and forming new eyes.


    ¡°Oh, my,¡± the young voice crows, watching with fascination, ¡°You don¡¯t see that every day.¡±


    ¡°That shouldn¡¯t be possible,¡± the fiery presence shakes its head, irritation and disbelief warring in its voice. ¡°This can¡¯t be possible, a mortal can¡¯t do that!¡±


    ¡°And yet, this mortal just did,¡± the elderly voice calmly rejects the rising anger of their fiery visitor. ¡°There are no rules about what a mortal can and cannot do. Just because no mortal, to your knowledge, has accomplished a feat like this, doesn¡¯t mean that they are incapable. Simply that you have not witnessed or heard of it. Do not presume to be omniscient, it is unbecoming.¡±


    ¡°That, it is. Just because your rays shine brightly on our worlds does not mean they reveal everything. Many things are hidden in the darkness, sequestered in the deepest shadows that your light will never reach,¡± the mature voice adds, a hint of teasing audible in it, ¡°And you know, the deepest shadows fall into my domain and even your followers and eyes rarely dare venture into them. No, it would be a lot more surprising if you had witnessed a mortal accomplish such a feat, though you have undoubtedly seen the result of such rituals. Why, this might even be one of the more successful ones I have seen.¡±


    The radiant figure focuses on the window in reality once more, studying both figures before flaring up once more. Calmly, the other figure waves a hand, shielding the library to make sure nothing gets damaged by their visitor''s anger.


    ¡°Temper, temper, you wouldn¡¯t want to burn yourself out, would you? That will be such a tragedy,¡± the young voice gently chides their visitor, only succeeding in enraging them even further.


    ¡°And see, she even managed to carry our gift forward. Should I call you their mother, or do you want to be their father?¡± the young voice continues their teasing, completely unrepentant. ¡°If you don¡¯t have a preference, I would love to be their mother, though I don¡¯t think they¡¯ll acknowledge me for some time. Maybe I can be the grandmother, once the mortal takes her rightful place.¡±


    ¡°It is an abomination that should be destroyed. Look at the path she has just begun, it cannot be allowed. It will bring a premature end, it will waste so much of our efforts. All our efforts on that world will be destroyed if she can cross enough hurdles!¡± the fiery figure starts to lose themself in their anger, though now, there is a trace of fear within. Fear of the unknown, fear of an uncertain future. A fear obviously not shared by their host, who simply starts to laugh.


    ¡°Nothing lasts forever. Time marches steadily forward, one turn of the wheel after the other. Maybe they will burn brightly, a magnificent flare within the eternal cosmos before darkness envelops their world forever, maybe they will flare up for a moment, before smouldering for a long time. You and the others can trade with mortals for power, can allow them to wield yours. But we are not to judge those outside of our domain. That is not for us,¡± the elder voice declares, before falling silent once more.


    ¡°You know, more than one of the others has mentioned their interest in this mortal. We shall see how far she¡¯ll go,¡± the mature voice reminds the other, only to watch in amusement as their visitor flares up once again, leaving their library in a flash of fire, to race across the skies once more.


    ¡°So predictable,¡± the three voices chuckle as one, before focusing back on their work. There is always something new to discover, a lesson their blessed is currently learning.

 Chapter 733

    I had heard jokes about herding cats and luckily, herding dogs was a lot easier. Likely due to their inherent instinct to form packs, even if a normal wolf pack wasn¡¯t formed like this. Not by a collection of unrelated dogs, banding together for protection and strength, but by a breeding pair collecting their young year after year, until those young split off and formed their own pair and pack. What the dogs were doing was much more similar to the way humans banded together, making me wonder just how much they had learned from us.


    We easily took some distance from the battle, retreating to an area that we had cleared earlier. A part of me wanted to simply take the four-legged furballs home, but there was a small, paranoid part of my brain that protested. If it weren¡¯t dogs but people we had rescued, I¡¯d be much more cautious, but there was something about dogs that made me positively predisposed towards them. Possibly the influence of Hecate, but I couldn¡¯t be sure. It was one of those things that I couldn¡¯t objectively analyse, simply because the tool to analyse it, my brain, was also the thing that might be compromised. So, I had to judge things as I went. And in this case, I went with the simple solution of retreating before trying to figure out just what was going on.


    Looking at Silva, figuring out what was going on didn¡¯t seem like an easy task. But then, sometimes the simplest method could yield surprising results. In light of that idea, I went with the simplest idea I could come up with, namely simply asking my canine companion.


    ¡°So, Silva, looks like somebody managed to teach an old dog some new tricks?¡± I jokingly asked, getting an insulted huff in return. ¡°Could you show me your class and level? Maybe even some additional information?¡±


    To my surprise, she let out a soft bark, information was transmitted, likely the information I had asked about. Only, I had no idea how to translate the cascade of scent and sound into anything I could actually understand. It wasn¡¯t just a question of different languages, but one of the completely different mental architectures. Their minds processed information in a different way, their senses focused on different information and it seemed like the system was accommodating them. For creatures who used sight as their primary method of information-gathering and writing as their primary method of information-storage, the blue boxes I was used to were understandable. But for creatures who mainly used their ears and nose to gather information and transmitted information via scent-based marking? Blue boxes wouldn¡¯t make sense to their mind, they might be able to comprehend them but it would be as difficult for them, as making sense of the cascade from Silva was for me.


    ¡°Yeah, that doesn¡¯t work,¡± I admitted, getting an amused huff in return. Trying to figure out how to comprehend the information from her system was akin to learning an entirely new language, only one that wasn¡¯t spoken or written.


    It faintly reminded me of meeting Lenore and Ylva. Only, at the time, they weren¡¯t known as Lenore and Ylva, they had their own names, names that were based in the unique mental architecture of avians and canines, names that Sigmir and I couldn¡¯t comprehend outside of the mental connection we shared. Due to that difference in mentality, they accepted our suggestions for names and became Lenore and Ylva. This would be so much easier with their help.


    ¡°Guess we need to do this the old-fashioned way,¡± I sighed, ¡°Now, I¡¯m pretty sure you can understand me a lot better than I can understand you. Shows just how close the system¡¯s measure of intelligence and ability to speak are linked,¡± I mocked, before settling down and trying to puzzle things out using simple, yes-or-no questions.


    ¡°Silva, did you have the ability to use magic when we met?¡± I asked, getting a growl that I took as disagreement in return. So, a negative answer.


    ¡°Can I refer to your abilities as magic?¡± I decided to ask, simply to cover my bases. When I got another negative growl, I started at the basics and worked from there.


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    It took a while almost an hour of questions, growls and chuffs, but by the end of it, I was somewhat confident in my assessment. Unless there was something lost in translation, Silva had gained her abilities when she reached level ten and, something I hadn¡¯t noticed, gained a class. Or something similar to a class, I wasn¡¯t quite sure how it worked for her and her growls and chuffs had been inconsistent enough to make me think there was more to it than we had been able to communicate.


    Either way, at that point, she had felt a connection that reminded her of me, and via that connection, she had gained the power to protect her pack. At that point, a small, highly amused, part of my mind conjured up a word to describe her class. She was, unless I was overlooking something vital, a Paladin, at least when using the popular definition of one.


    Helping other dogs was part of the payment she had to provide in exchange for her powers, making me wonder if she¡¯d soon start preaching to the dogs. The idea was highly amusing to me, the combination of impossibility and amusement enough to override my dislike of all things divine. In ancient Egypt, cats had been revered as gods, so why not have a congregation of dogs? It was absurd enough, even in the current situation, that I could only shake my head and accept it. It was either accepting the insanity or trying to fight reality and become a different sort of insane.


    ¡°So, what is going on here?¡± Lia asked after she had watched my quiet conversation with Silva and by the end of it, she looked as confused and disturbed as I felt. I explained to her what I concluded, namely that Silva had accepted some divine assistance and was, in exchange, providing some earthly assistance to the dogs in need of help.


    ¡°So, are the fleabags coming with us?¡± she only asked, not really bothering to question why a dog could be a cleric.


    ¡°I guess?¡± I could only ask and look at Silva, who happily let out a few barks, lining the dogs up in formation.


    With a sigh of surrender, I gave up.


    ¡°Well, let¡¯s get back to our house. We might have to hit up a few stores on the way, just to make sure we have enough kibble, I don¡¯t think we want our canine crusaders to get a taste of Shattered, not if we can help it. And certainly not where the humans can see it, they might get a little queasy if you eat what used to be human,¡± I shook my head and started walking away.


    ¡°Mistress, I have a question,¡± Lia spoke up, realising that there was little chance of stealth, not with about twenty dogs of various sizes following behind.


    ¡°You talk about the humans as if you are not one. May I ask, what are you?¡± she carefully spoke, clearly trying to avoid any offence.


    ¡°Just like you, I used to be human,¡± I easily admitted, before I explained about Road to Purgatory and the Legacy of Morgana. I had shared some of it before, but now, I went into more detail, including the detail about my race. That I was undergoing metamorphosis, just like she had, only that mine was stretched out over the course of a month, and likely a lot less traumatic.


    ¡°It will be interesting to see then. I will not change too much and I believe the humans will remain as they are, but there were some races on Mundus where the transformation would cause just as much, if not more, trauma than yours did. Could you imagine becoming a centaur, with a whole equine body and everything? The sheer difference in mass would make that one insane change. Sure, the centaurs I met on Mundus were more pony-sized, their back only as high as my head, but still, that¡¯s one massive change. I have no idea where the mass would come from, would someone like that have to eat the whole thirty days to gain enough mass?¡± I shook my head, knowing that I likely wouldn¡¯t be able to find the answer to that. It, most likely, came down to it simply being magic far greater than I could control, but it wasn¡¯t a satisfying answer. Maybe I¡¯d have to hunt down a centaur or two at some point and try to revert the transformation. It might give me some insights, but it was a project of much later when I had the power to act as I pleased.


    By the time we got back to the house, we had looted two supermarkets, both of which had been emptied of pretty much everything usable for humans - But the dog food was luckily left behind, apparently, humans hadn¡¯t been that desperate just yet.


    It took a bit of effort to secure multiple large bags on the bigger dogs, but with their help, and a shopping cart, we managed to bring home enough to last the dogs for a while


    When we got home, I simply stopped caring. The dogs were directed to keep watch against Shattered but not attack people and to stay indoors, with Silva as their literal boss-bitch, while I went and had a shower, before looking for a dark corner to rest.


    I was more than a little done with surprises at that point.

 Chapter 734

    After sleeping for about half the day, I woke up and began working on my magic. Mainly trying to improve my understanding of the elements I hadn¡¯t studied on Mundus, trying to figure out how they worked and in what ways I might be able to incorporate them into my spellcasting. Sadly, without the affinity to them, progress was slow going, though I did manage to push my Water Magic to level three and the long shower afterwards was enough to push my Water Rune Mastery to three. Getting a handle on the temperature of the water was still eluding me. Still, I thought that pure focus and Water Magic might be enough, or would certainly be enough if I managed to incorporate a concept of a geyser, or some sort of natural hot spring.


    Sadly, my work was cut short when a loud barrage of loud barks announced that something was happening. Walking up the stairs into the almost uncomfortably bright upper floors of the house, I only needed a moment to figure out what was going on. My students wanted to visit and the army of dog had decided to protect the house, barking in an attempt to warn them off, while also alerting Silva and me.


    ¡°Silence,¡± I commanded and for a moment, the effect startled me. The noise immediately died down, as if somebody had pressed the mute button on the remote. When I took a cautious look outside, making sure to stay out of the sun, I was greeted by the sight of a good dozen dogs, standing more or less at the ready, keeping their eyes trained on my students - Who were standing on the street, staring back at the dogs and looking rather perturbed.


    ¡°They are my students, let them in,¡± I commanded and again, the dogs demonstrated just how intelligent they were when they moved aside to open the path.


    My students, obviously not confused by the situation made the best of it, and simply went with it, no matter how strange. Maybe it was a good opportunity to make them more accepting of the weird and insane, something rather useful on the Arcane Path. At least if it was properly harnessed, most things weird and insane were fascinating but it could also kill you if you weren¡¯t careful. And sometimes they could kill you, even if you were careful, but that was just one of the pitfalls on our path.


    Grinning to myself, I watched as my students entered, before moving into the room I had used as the classroom.


    ¡°Lia, come here, it¡¯s class time,¡± I called out, stopping Lia¡¯s martial training. She had shown incredible enthusiasm, both for the lessons I had given her and what little Mrs Wu had shown her thus far. In addition to the enthusiasm, she seemed to have quite a bit of talent, or maybe the experience of the night had jostled her in the right direction, when I had briefly checked on her earlier, her progress had been readily visible. It would still take her hundreds of hours to perfect her style, but she went from wild flailing to the beginnings of a fighting style.


    ¡°Ms Samantha, what¡¯s with the dogs? Before, you only had that huge dog but now, there¡¯s a whole pack of them,¡± Kevin asked, looking out the door, to the gathered dogs, with a look that mixed awe and fear. Sure, the individual dogs were relatively weak, only between level four and seven by my reckoning, but with twenty of them, they could do quite a bit of damage. And that was while ignoring their magic.


    While we waited for Lia to appear, I gave them a simplified version of the events, just telling them that Silva, Lia and I had saved the pack and the dogs were now working with and following us. Mostly Silva but I was relatively sure that the humans considered dogs, even an incredibly powerful dog like Silva, as something beneath them. And while Silva was my follower, I doubted she¡¯d follow anybody else if something were to happen to me.


    Finally, Lia appeared and I began the lesson, trying to make sure everybody had a similar foundation, to build their skills on.


    ¡°Today, we¡¯ll talk about different types of magic, not only the differences between elements but also the fundamental differences between innate, arcane and divine magic. Amusingly, all three can have very similar effects, only the way one goes about creating them is vastly different,¡± I started the lesson of the day, partially using the experience with the dogs the previous night to illustrate, partially trying to help Lia with her own self-exploration and understanding. It was an interesting subject, even if my own knowledge of it was somewhat spotty and routed in speculation.


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    Especially when it came to the boundaries between the skills. The easiest to differentiate was divine magic, if the power came from a deity, or any higher power, really, it was divine magic. Sure, I was relatively certain that the foundation of divine magic was either a parasitic or a symbiotic partnership between deity and follower, which it was I had no idea, but that was neither here nor there. Just because mortals originally supplied the Astral Power during prayer didn¡¯t mean that the power wasn¡¯t filtered or changed by contact with the divine, giving it attributes that it normally wouldn¡¯t have.


    Amusingly, the closest analogy I could come up with was the tax system, prior to the change. Everybody, at least theoretically, in the community gave their fair share, to give a higher power the means to supply its agents with the ability to enact positive change within the community.


    But that was neither here nor there. Divine Magic was, quite frankly, the least interesting of them all, as it was simply having a patron do the heavy lifting, while you supplied that patron with the sweet, sweet Astral Power of the congregation.


    Innate Magic, on the other hand, was more interesting, while also being less complex. However, it was not something that could be trained, at least not directly. Class Abilities could be considered innate, at least to a point, as could racial abilities or those that were otherwise acquired. Prime examples were Lia¡¯s claws and my own Magical Sight, both abilities that used Astral Power to allow the user to do something normally impossible.


    Lastly, Arcane Magic. The widest category and what we all were studying. I classified everything that could be taught to others as arcane, though that might simply be my personal bias. If there was a chance to teach the ability to another, it was an arcane ability.


    For a few hours, we were discussing the varied abilities out there, my students considering how their own abilities might fit into a wider paradigm and how they might be able to improve them. In my eyes, only understanding allowed you to progress on the Arcane Path, and that was what my lessons were focused on. Understanding of the self, of the physical world and the Astral, all three were necessary to master the arcane path, at least that was my conviction.


    Amusingly, by the end of the discussion, I noticed that the dogs had clustered around us, especially the smaller dogs. The dogs that had used magic the night before, I was almost certain they were listening and only the language barrier on their end prevented them from joining in.


    Maybe that should be my next project, figure out a way to speak with dogs, especially Silva. There was much to learn there and having a few extra bodies, all with their own abilities, could prove vital.


    But that was only half of it. According to my students, there were more people at the gym with affinities, though apparently none of them was brave enough to learn directly from me. Even with the help I had given the survivors here, there was a certain fear and distrust directed towards me, but that wasn¡¯t anything new. So, instead of trying to force the issue, I decided to give my students some resources so they¡¯d be able to teach on their own. It would almost certainly reduce the quality of the lessons but the other people with affinities would at least learn something.


    And I was curious if there¡¯d be some sort of paying forward thing going on, where I¡¯d get EXP for teaching people how to teach. I doubted it, but if it worked, it would be incredible. Though I was relatively certain that if there was such a mechanic, Mrs Wu would have outstripped me in level already, simply due to the number of people she was teaching.


    Regardless, it was something that would ultimately improve the chances of survival for the people here, while costing me nothing but some time.


    With that in mind, I began to give my pupils instructions to gather information. THere were so many affinities out there, I couldn¡¯t even begin to speak of them all. Even if we focused on those that were present, it would take a few days but that was time I was willing to spend on the experiment.


    Somehow, my original plan of moving on within a day or two had changed, making me wonder, just how long would I stay here? How long should I stay, how long did I want to stay?


    And where should I go, once I decided to leave?

 Chapter 735

    ¡°It¡¯s time,¡± I quietly informed Lia, knowing that I had delayed enough, maybe even too long. We had lingered near the gym for a little over a week, bringing us to day twenty since the change had happened, and by now, the whole area was getting ripe with the smell of decaying bodies. It hadn¡¯t been so bad earlier, when temperatures had been hovering between five and ten degrees celsius, but now, with longer and warmer days, that was quickly changing.


    That pretty much everything that could be looted had been taken at some point meant that there wasn¡¯t a lot of unspoiled food left in the supermarkets, so something else had to be done. Fields had to be cleared, wild beasts had to be driven off and preparations made. It was the shift from reactive survival, where the biggest concern was to survive until the next day, to a more long-term mode, where survival for the next year was what plans were made for.


    I knew that Mrs Wu had been preparing her people and had been in negotiations with both, those at the YMCA and those living at the farm, though I wasn¡¯t fully informed when it came to results. I had deliberately kept out of it, both because i didn¡¯t want to bother and because I had a feeling my traits, and even my name, could become a problem during such talks. Thus, I had made it very clear that I wasn¡¯t part of their group but that the dogs, Lia and I were our own group.


    My students were the biggest link between my group and the survivors under Mrs Wu¡¯s leadership, they still visited every afternoon, though not all of them came regularly. I knew that they had been passing on some of my teaching to others at the gym, most of whom didn¡¯t have any affinity but were trying to learn some magic anyway. It wasn¡¯t what I would have tried to do, it involved far too much effort on my part, but it apparently worked for them.


    Sadly, I didn¡¯t get any EXP for the teaching my students were doing, so my EXP gain had been a little limited, especially as there still were few enemies that could challenge me.


    Regardless, I had managed some progress during those days, even if it only came to a total of three levels, bringing me to twenty-eight, but I had been focused on my skills. Those had made greater progress, my Ice Runes had gained seven levels, bringing them to twenty-two, my Darkness Runes had gained six and reached twenty-one, while my Blood Runes had gained seven as well, thanks to repeated experimentation with Lia, bringing the skill to twenty-one as well. In addition, my Ice Magic had gained eight levels, thanks to experimentation with combinations of Water and Ice, bringing the skill to twenty-four, my Darkness Magic had gained six levels, reaching twenty and lastly, when it came to magic, my Blood Magic had gained six levels, bringing it to twenty-three.


    Astral Meditation had been one of my primary foci in that time, as I had been trying to understand the changes the Astral River carved into our world, how it changed the fundamental nature of reality and how things were in flux. It was an exploration I could only undertake thanks to my Titanic Ambition, otherwise, I simply didn¡¯t have the brain-power to manage and even with the boost, it was tiring. Still, I had gained a limited understanding when it came to the ebb and flow of power, though I was far from being able to actually do anything with it. But it earned me ten points in Astral Meditation, bringing it to twenty-five.


    Death Magic was still difficult, but I made some progress with it. Not a lot of progress, but a bit. My experimentation had earned me three points, bringing the skill to five, though it was still limited in what I could do with it. My living body simply wasn¡¯t attuned to death, making it painful to wield and even worse to experiment with. Maybe I would have to put the skill aside, at least for a bit, until I could find a way to wield it without killing me as much as I was killing my target.


    Mind Magic was far better in that regard. I had been exceedingly careful to keep my exploration into the skill balanced, to avoid earning a trait similar to the one I had on Mundus, where the skill was purely offensive. Instead, I had used it to train with Lia, and occasionally helped my students meditate on the Astral River, while I occasionally used it to influence or even damage the mind of a Shattered or another enemy. All in all, the work I had managed with it was a little limited, but I had managed to earn five points with it, bringing it to sixteen.


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    Then, there were the magical skills I had partially pilfered from my students. Water Magic had gained three points, likely thanks to the experimentation I had done with it in conjunction with my Ice Magic, bringing it to five, while my Water Rune Mastery had gained four points and reached level six. Wind Magic had been interesting to study, too, earning three points and reaching five as well but sadly, my progress with Wind Runes was a little lacking, only earning me two points and level three.


    Lastly, the project that had taken quite a bit of my time, was an attempt to fill out the elements, so to speak. I had seen a bit of Earth Magic from Leon, and had studied some of it with the Dwarves on Mundus, so I felt I should be able to gain the skill. Ultimately, I succeeded, but the effort involved was immense. It was only level one and felt a lot weaker than my other magic abilities, but it was there and it would, eventually, grow.


    Whether I¡¯d ever get to that point with Fire Magic, I wasn¡¯t sure. I had tried to gain the skill, had forced myself to meditate on fire and even delved into the Astral River and tried to glean some insight, but the only thing i had to show for was the magical equivalent of sunburn. I could conjure up a small spark, nothing that a lighter couldn¡¯t do a lot better, but it was a sort of progress. Glacially slow progress but maybe, if I invested a century or so into the idea, I might get somewhere. But not soon, so the idea to control all four base elements had been put on the back burner until I had the leisure to invest the time.


    Similarly to Earth-Magic, I had made some progress in the acquisition of Nature Magic. By my understanding, it was linked to both Blood Magic and Death Magic, with one being part of the Life-side of things, the other obviously the counterpart of life that was just as much part of Nature. It hadn¡¯t been an easy thing to do, but I had managed to get the two contradictory elements to work to the point that they combined, though I had failed to acquire Nature Magic just yet. The element wasn¡¯t as antagonistic to me as Fire was, but it was close. Still not as bad as Light, but none of the three was something I actually wanted to channel.


    When it came to runes, I had done some delving into the Astral and tried to ascertain the proto-Earth-Rune I had partially seen in Leon¡¯s delve into the Astral River but so far, I hadn¡¯t managed. On the other hand, Nature, Fire and Light Runes were things I hadn¡¯t dared touch with a ten-foot pole, the elements were just too hard to handle.


    On the other hand, with my three original Runic Masteries above twenty, I had been able to draw out a new rune for each of them from the Astral River. Instead of trying to recreate my past successes, I decided to go with runes that I remembered being useful.


    I had considered trying to get the freeze-rune, the improved rune of Chill that would eventually lead into Frozen Moonlight and, hopefully, Eternal Ice, but decided against it. The rune had its uses, but compared to the Blizzard Rune, which I managed to dredge up, it was just too weak. Blizzard had been the rune I used for most of my simple, offensive magic on Mundus when I wanted to lob a chunk of Ice at an enemy without using my Ice Magic. Once I managed to get the Icicle-Rune, I would be able to recreate the frozen Javelins that had served me quite well in the past.


    Similarly, Shadow wasn¡¯t the most powerful of the runes I remembered, but it was incredibly useful for personal concealment and warding. No real offensive potential, but it allowed me to remain unseen and undetected, while hopefully letting me get back into the travelling through Shadows. That part hadn¡¯t been Rune Magic, but getting a better understanding of the concept by understanding the rune might get me there.


    Lastly, the Blood Runes. Instead of trying to get the runes that improved my own strength, I had very deliberately tried to get the rune that bordered what Nature-Magic should hold, namely the Regrowth-Rune. It had been about the strongest healing rune amongst the Blood Runes and should be useful to get a deeper understanding of Nature-Magic and also for its practical application, healing people.


    While I wasn¡¯t quite certain where we¡¯d go next, I had pushed back the exploration of the Old Slaughterhouse for the whole time but now that we¡¯d have to leave town anyway, it was time to check that out. It would be interesting to see what we¡¯d find there.

 Chapter 736

    Moving out of the lair we had occupied for about two weeks felt weird. It had been such a short time, yet, the lair felt like home, almost more so than the apartment I had lived in for years. The strange sensations didn¡¯t stop me from packing my bags and walking out with my companions, but they made me feel odd.


    Other than the night we had brought them home, we had never moved with the entire army of dog, it would have been just overkill. Instead, with Silva¡¯s help, the dogs had split into individual parties, each with a somewhat balanced composition around their individual physiques and strengths, in order to get as much EXP as possible while they roamed, hunting Shattered and the rough-riding racoons. Mysteriously, the dogs had managed to add to their number, locating either individual dogs that had been hiding away, or even a few packs that had banded together for protection. Personally, I found it rather amusing that the dogs appeared to be much more practical about their ensuring their survival, namely, they simply submitted to the biggest, baddest bitch around, in this case, Silva. Or maybe me, but given the communication barrier, I couldn¡¯t be sure whether they obeyed my instruction because Silva was obeying me, or if they accepted me as more powerful due to my own abilities.


    Either way, we now had almost forty dogs moving with us, most of which had managed to achieve level ten and gain a class. I wasn¡¯t sure if Silva had been proselytising amongst the dogs, which was an amusing thought of its own, but even without drawing power from Hecate, some of the dogs had stabilised their magical abilities. They were more like druids, at least from the feel of it, but their exact abilities were a mystery to me. Maybe I¡¯d find out in time, but for now, I hadn¡¯t worked enough with them to know.


    If it had been a group of forty humans, moving through the night, the noise would have caused tons of Shattered to come after us, possibly even some of the more intelligent, non-Shattered threats out there trying to pick off one or two of our number, but the dogs were nearly silent as they moved. Maybe not as stealthy as cats, but the only noise they made was a soft clicking of claws on asphalt, barely audible even with my excellent ears.


    But given that I suspected Mrs Wu would try to get the people at the gym moved as soon as possible, we did our best to cull as many of the Shattered as we could. Luckily, the dogs had long since committed the scent of Shattered to memory, allowing them to hunt them down with speed and confidence, even if it caused a few issues around Lia. From what I could tell, Lia didn¡¯t completely smell like a Shattered any longer, but it was close enough that the dogs had growled at her more than once. Amusingly, her response was to instinctively seek shelter on the highest, least accessible platform she could conveniently reach, even after she had grown strong enough to take down a pack of dogs without issues.


    It hadn¡¯t taken her long, within days of her change, we had managed to come up with a significant upgrade for her, namely, a way to harvest Astral Power without having to directly drink blood. It turned out, her claws were somewhat malleable and with enough focus, she could carve a runic formation directly into them. With five claws, the solution had been obvious, namely a five-rune formation. It had taken her some trial and error, but afterwards, the skill she had gained to manifest her claws had changed, turning the rune-inscribed versions into the default to be called up. That way, she simply had to sink her claws into her prey to not only rip out chunks of flesh but also draw some power back into herself, allowing her to sustain herself while fighting. There were some performance issues when it came to Shattered, but when we managed to track down a racoon, or their porcine mounts, she reported excellent efficiency.


    With the problem of her Astral Power regeneration in combat somewhat reduced, I had begun showing her some of the simpler spells I had come up with. Things like conjuring up a cloud of fog, or darkness, to hide her movement, simple healing spells to bolster her, admittedly, impressive physical resilience, nothing overly complicated. She didn¡¯t need to be a magical powerhouse, though I was planning to give her some arcane training as time progressed, she needed to be able to keep herself alive in a fight. From what I could tell, she lacked to interest to delve deeply into the arcane mysteries that fascinated me so much but she enjoyed getting into the thick of things, to rend flesh with her claws and bathe in the blood of her enemies.


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    All in all, she had made great progress since I put her Shattered being back together and even gained her class a few days back. Since then, she had continued her strides, reaching a somewhat impressive level sixteen. Class-wise, she had embarked on the martial path and taken on the martial version of the Sorcerer, simply called a Fighter. There had been other possible options, but after some discussion, she had decided that she didn¡¯t want to limit herself. She wanted to train with me, focusing on her innate gifts and merging those with the magic lessons I had promised and by the time she managed to reach level fifty and cross the first Divide, she¡¯d earn a class just for her.


    With instruction on arcane matters from me and a combination of practical experience, instinct and Mrs Wu¡¯s teaching for the actual martial matters, she didn¡¯t need the specialised skills some of the classes would provide. Instead, having the broad, basic abilities of her fighter-class would allow her to build from there.


    There had been a few classes that might have been suitable, chief amongst them the Scout class that Rai once had held, but they all lacked a little something. She wasn¡¯t just a sneaky predator, she was also a brutally effective front-line fighter and with her burgeoning healing magic, she was becoming damn hard to kill.


    Silva¡¯s progress had obviously been lesser than Lia¡¯s, simply because she, too, had far outstripped the threats we faced. Still, she had managed to gain quite a few levels, reaching a comfortable twenty-two in the service of Hecate. So far, she hadn¡¯t been required to draw on her divinely granted abilities once again, instead, she had gone back to the basics of canine combat, tooth and claw. If not for the many, many dogs that followed us around, I would have considered the one night a strange fever-dream, but with the way the army of dog had been growing, that just didn¡¯t work.


    Personally, I thought it was quite amusing that she used her class abilities the least among the dogs, but maybe that was just part and parcel of the divine path. That you tried to solve your problems on your own, without always bothering your divine patron for help. If I was a patron, I certainly would hope that my followers tried to solve their problems themself, before coming to me. But that might just be me, who didn¡¯t know a lot about the mystical interaction between devout and divine.


    We managed to reach the edge of town with only small delays, mostly Shattered that needed to be dealt with and from here on out, things would get interesting. I had been back a few times, simply to check on things, and from what I had seen, the cows didn¡¯t continuously stay in one spot, they seemed to wander with no pattern I could discern. Their presence fluctuated from no cows in sight, to hundreds, possibly even a thousand of them, clustered on the fields and the road out of town.


    On this fine night we had chosen to migrate, their presence was amusingly middling. There was enough starlight for me to see, even an almost full moon helping out, allowing me to see the roughly three dozen cows idling about.


    Silva must have been able to discern their number, too, and she looked incredibly excited.


    ¡°You want to put some beef on the menu?¡± I quietly asked her,already considering how we might be able to fight the cows without getting trampled. Sure, some of the bigger dogs might be able to take one down with their innate abilities, but I wasn¡¯t sure how powerful the cattle was. No, I wanted a better plan, something that was mostly foolproof and, if nothing else, wouldn¡¯t see all the cows engaged. Sure, I would likely be able to kill them all by conjuring up the killing mist, carefully surrounding them before draining their life, but what then?


    Three dozen cows, each somewhere between five-hundred and a thousand kilograms, that meant literal metric tons of meat. No matter how gluttonous the dogs were, the vast majority of our kills would spoil, even if we tried to get the meat to the farm. No, it was better to drive some of the cows away, while taking down two or three of them, leaving the others alive to be harvested some other day.


    The only question remaining was, how. Luckily, I already had a plan.

 Chapter 737

    Quietly, but with a wide grin on my face, I made my way towards the dozing cows. Some were likely awake enough to keep watch for their sleeping brethren, but it didn¡¯t really matter, we didn¡¯t plan to kill them all. Waste not, want not, and all that.


    No, the plan was far simpler, to play on the innate responses of all prey animals. Fight or flight, it was ingrained in every animal, though the degree varied with the beast¡¯s intelligence. These cows would likely either try to gore whatever disturbed their rest or flee if they found themselves unable to gore. Playing on that would hopefully be simple, with me merely having to induce a flight response in one or two of the guarding cows, before they started to flee, drawing all the others into their reflexive flight. Once they were running, Silva and Lia would come from the flanks, take down a cow each and we¡¯d all be able to have some nice steak.


    A simple plan, but the best were.


    Lia had the most difficult approach, her task was to bypass the cows entirely and come from the other side. We had made the initial approach together, keeping low and ducking into the ditch along the road as much as possible, before I decided that the position I was in was suitable. From there, I had to wait and estimate, for even I was unable to track Lia at a distance, not if she wanted to move about unseen. About thirty metres in open terrain was the maximum distance I could track her in the dark, despite my ever-increasing ability to see in the dark as my Firn Elf heritage was emerging. A testament to her growing skill, even if it occasionally left me a little annoyed.


    I¡¯d have to look into regaining my scrying abilities and especially find out whether or not my constructs would be obstructed by the curse on me. If not, I could simply use the constructs to scout during the day, even if there were some difficulties with that as well. Even conjured shadows didn¡¯t hold up too well under the light of day, but there were always shadows around, one only had to look for them.


    But that was something to explore later, now, I felt I had waited long enough to give Lia the time to get into position.


    Staring at one of the cows furthest from me, I focused on the darkness between us, on the ever-present shadows that were really just one shadow. One shadow, and through that shadow I could reach. It took an inordinate amount of focus to channel magic through the shadows, leaving no trace in the outside world, but it could be done, luckily without reducing the efficiency of my magic all that much.


    Whispering to myself, I tried to evoke images of fear, flight and unseen predators.


    ¡°Run, right behind you, there, in the dark, flee, blood, pain, prey, behind you,¡± the words weren¡¯t overly important, I was fairly certain cows didn¡¯t speak enough English to understand me anyway, but they allowed me to draw on certain images, certain concepts and a certain state of mind as I pushed my Mind Magic against the cow¡¯s presence. Images of stalking predators, of unseen hunters in the night, projected directly into the beast¡¯s mind, where instincts immediately took over.


    A loud mooing broke the nightly silence, and while that alone hadn¡¯t been enough to spook the entire herd, the one cow had started to move, trying to get away from me.


    Focusing on a second cow, I repeated the process and it took even less time and power to make it work. Merely a small push, instead of the previous shove to get the beast moving.


    With two cows starting to move, both quite far apart and both moving with a certain urgency, I targeted a third cow. Here, I merely needed to make contact with its mind and project the barest whisper to have the beast flee.


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    It was that third cow that broke the herd, they sleeping cows had been awoken by that first, loud moo and now, with multiple cows starting to flee, they all started to flee. Instinct and the drive of a herd to stay together, even if no cow could actually see the predator they were fleeing from.


    It was a sobering thing, to feel a slight shaking transmitted through the earth, as the three dozen cows started to lumber away, quickly gaining speed in their flight. The herd had a physical presence beyond any system-granted attributes, a weight that was intimidating simply due to the amount of sheer mass and momentum. Any instinct I had told me to never be in the way of that force, or I would simply get overrun and trampled.


    Luckily, the direction the cows were fleeing in was exactly as I had hoped and planned, away from the ditch I was hidden in, across the open fields.


    Knowing that Lia was on the herd¡¯s right flank, I focused over there, launching a hailstone at the last cow to make its escape over there. It would most likely be that cow Lia was going to target but I wasn¡¯t certain whether or not she was strong enough to bring the cow down. With my hailstone smashing into the cow''s hind leg, its speed was lowered enough to allow Lia an easy time pouncing on it, and even the cow¡¯s balance was interrupted to the point that she could bring the beast down, before sinking her claws into its flesh and ripping the life right out of it.


    On the other flank, Silva, along with a few of the strongest dogs, had managed a similar feat, without my help.


    Despite knowing that our hunt had worked just as planned, I kept watch on the cows. It just wouldn¡¯t do for them to realise that the fearsome predators they had fled from were actually far smaller than they likely thought, that it would be a lot easier to simply trample over dog and vampire alike, stomp them into the ground until they stopped twitching.


    But no, from the looks of it, the herd was gripped in the panic I had deliberately instilled, drawing on the primal of the dark and unknown, until they were simply fleeing, running until the threat was no longer present.


    It took some five minutes, but by that time, I was confident that the cows had well and truly fled. Whistling softly, I gave Silva the agreed-upon signal, which she relayed with a bark, calling the rest of the dogs onto the field. While they were approaching, I moved over to Lia, simply to make sure there was no trouble.


    ¡°Well done,¡± I quietly complimented her, having to hide my smile at the adorably proud expression on her face. She had fought quite a lot, but mostly Shattered or smaller beasts in the city, nothing the size of a cow. And despite this being a world of levels and attributes, physique and mass had their own impact, as had bringing down a beast of the cow¡¯s size.


    ¡°Did the runes work well?¡± I prodded, stopping myself from inspecting the inscribed claws she had manifested. She had used them before, but, obviously, not on anything this big.


    ¡°They did, though no matter what I do, I seem to gain far more if I drink from you, Mistress,¡± she admitted, looking at me pleadingly.


    ¡°Not surprising,¡± I nodded, ¡°I have far more Astral Power than you can hold, and I control it myself. When I feed you, I deliberately enrich the blood, before letting you have it,¡± I explained until I felt my ear twitch.


    Looking into the direction I had heard the noise from, I could see almost two dozen dogs come bounding out of the darkness. It was a little eerie, to have that many dogs come running towards you, especially with many of their muzzles covered in blood.


    However, they actually were just as adorable as Lia, clustering around me and staring at the cow Lia had brought down with hungry eyes.


    ¡°It¡¯s Lia¡¯s kill, she gets the first bite,¡± I told the dogs and their interest immediately shifted to Lia. Lia, in turn, simply reached down, sinking her claws into the cow¡¯s shoulder and ripping out a bloody chunk of flesh, before starting to chow down. It wasn¡¯t something I was about to participate in, I preferred my meat medium, certainly not still warm after being ripped from the beast¡¯s body, but to each their own.


    Stepping back, I simply kept watch as both Lia and the dogs started to tear into the cow¡¯s carcass. It was incredibly gory, making me quite glad that all food I had with me was vegetarian, simply because I had gone for non-perishable stuff. Otherwise, their display might have put me off my feed, but no matter how bloody their feeding was, I would happily eat my oatmeal, nuts and berries.

 Chapter 738

    With a little guidance from Lia¡¯s memories, finding a suitable farmhouse for us to take over was relatively easy. We had considered going back to the Apple Gate Farm, at least for a night or two, but ultimately, decided against it. Meeting Chantalle¡¯s parents, with her no longer being Chantalle but Carnelia was simply uncomfortable for her, while I could see how horribly wrong things could go and, given my various traits, titles and general social ability, would go. It was one thing to meet them for an hour or two but a longer meeting? That was simply a bad idea.


    The building Lia showed us was one her parents used to have quite the business with. Apple Gate Farm¡¯s primary product was, unsurprisingly, apples. Most of them were sold directly, simply as food items but that worked only for those picked directly from the branch and without blemishes or deformities. Anything that was picked from the ground or not within rather tight quality standards for visual perfection had to be discarded. Or had to be sold to become something else, either to be turned into applesauce or into cider.


    The primary cider producer of our region, who also used to buy all the discarded apples from Apple Gate Farm, used to own the buildings we were standing at now. We had chosen this building for its cellar. Apparently, cider needed a relatively temperate and dark place to mature and instead of using a large-scale electrical refrigerator, this place simply used a deep and reasonably massive cellar. While we couldn¡¯t be certain that the cellar had survived the change and the earthquakes undamaged, it was our best bet for a perfectly dark place, secure from any and all sunlight.


    But before we could make the buildings and their cellar ours, we needed to make sure that no survivors were already living here. Otherwise, we might accidentally kill them all, as I was planning to flood the entire area with my life-draining fog, simply to clear out any pests that might have made their home here. I had no desire to find out there were plus-sized bugs living inside the walls, or rats or any other critters.


    There were far too many species that I could imagine turning into dangerous menaces after being empowered by the system. It all came down to a question of scaling, how did the system enhance an ant''s ability to lift multiple times its own weight, if the influence of the system increased the ant¡¯s weight by ten times? Would that mean a critter the size of a poodle could lift a car? It wasn¡¯t really an image I wanted to contemplate, and just one of the many factors that made me grateful for the change coming during winter. If it had been spring, or fall, with swarms of mosquitoes and similar bloodsucking insects buzzing around? It might not have been me who created vampires, but a magically induced mutation of one of the many diseases transmitted by insects.


    Shaking my head, I pushed the images of swarms of giant insects, all out for blood from my mind, happy that my mist was a quite suitable weapon to deal with such pests. I made a mental note to look into turning the mist into a semi-permanent effect, a sort-of enchantment that I could power daily, to maintain a barrier against intruders. But first, I had to secure our new lair.


    The last approach was for me alone. Sure, Lia had made great progress with her stealth, but when I pushed my magic to its current limit, I was still quite a bit better. The difference might be mostly academic, I doubted that anyone else could actually find either of us in the dark, but it was there and so she stayed back, together with Silva and the dogs.


    For once, I didn¡¯t just push magic into my enchanted cloak, using its effect to blend into the darkness, but I also used a five-rune formation, tying Shadow, Darkness and Concealment together into another powerful effect that I layered on top of the concealment from the cloak.


    I could hear Lia¡¯s breath hitch when I simply faded from her senses, despite her best attempts to perceive me. Given that I hadn¡¯t actually moved and was just a few steps away from her, her reaction brought a grin to my face. Sadly, I was somewhat certain Silva could perceive me, or at least could detect my scent, but it might simply be the scent that lingered from my previous presence. But I couldn¡¯t be sure, maybe I could test it sometime later.


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    Moving forward, I moved through a small gap in the fence, easily getting to the rather interesting building. It was a mix of modern and classical, the wooden framing seemingly out in the open, between white-washed panels, painting the image of a medieval, European farmhouse but the doors and windows were far from medieval, they were easily as modern as anything I had seen before. Thanks to my training with Mrs Wu, I even noticed multiple well-hidden surveillance cameras, but given that everything electric had fried during the change, I wasn¡¯t worried about those.


    Half of the building seemed to be designed as a house, a home for the family living here, while the other half, from what I could tell, was filled with various metallic machines, likely where they made their cider. A small distance away from the house, I noticed a ramp going down into the earth, an entrance to the cellar Lia had described, probably to allow access to the finished cider, so it could be loaded onto trucks for delivery.


    Sneaking around the house, I listened for any noise coming from within, peeking into the ground-floor windows to look for movement or the tell-tale glow of Shattered eyes. With each window I looked through, my confidence was rising, This might be the place to stay, at least for a while. Ultimately, I would still have to move on, simply because I needed more than levels to revive Sigmir, but getting a lot of levels, and crossing the first divide, those were my immediate needs.


    Once I achieved those, I could begin considering how I got my beloved back, given that even the Grandmother had been unable, or unwilling, to pull Callisto¡¯s lover from the beyond, instead having her wait for the cycle of reincarnation to turn. For me, that was no option, not only did I lack any guarantee that Sigmir would reincarnate on Terra, I also rejected the idea that she would be a new person, no longer my Sigmir. Maybe someone who could become my Sigmir again, but not my Sigmir. So, waiting for reincarnation was no option for me. There had to be something else, but what, I currently didn¡¯t know.


    Soon, I managed to circle the building and was as confident as I could be that nothing human-sized had entered since the change happened. That meant, unless the people inside had simply battened down the hatches and completely sealed themselves in, nobody I should care about was inside. Still, it wasn¡¯t impossible that they had, so more investigation was necessary.


    Picking the backdoor¡¯s lock, in full view of a surveillance camera, felt a little strange but luckily, the lessons Mrs Wu had given me were up to the task. It took me almost twenty minutes, and a bit of magical cheating, but finally, the lock opened with a soft click.


    Opening the door just a little, I was immediately greeted with a scent that turned my previous confidence into a certainty. There was no way anyone living would have kept the house sealed while the stench of decaying meat was getting this heavy, it was bad enough to make me gag, even with my robust stomach.


    I didn¡¯t even try to taste the air for any magical influences, I simply took a step or three back, and started to create my usual runic formation, conjuring up the mist of confusion and death. Channelling Astral Power into the runes, the mist started to flood out and only my control pushed the cloud into the crack I had left open, flooding into the house.


    I wasn¡¯t sure how much space or how well the seals were, but I decided to err on the side of caution, keeping the spell going for almost half an hour, easily long enough to thoroughly cleanse the place.


    Once that was done, I called in the others, though given that the stench inside lingered, as well as some minor after-effects of my spell, nobody wanted to enter just yet. Instead, I held my breath and moved through the building, ignoring everything but finding my path to the main door. There, I opened and escaped outside, before daring to breathe again.


    With a channel open between both doors, I began calling on the wind, happy to use the element I had spent quite a bit of time training in. Setting a runic formation right into the open door, I simply let my Astral Power flow through the house, pushing out all the unpleasantness until finally, the building was clear.


    Now, we just had to deal with the source of the stench, open up the cellar and make the place our home. By the looks of it, getting it all done by the time dawn rolled around would be a challenge, but at least we didn¡¯t have to roll up at Apple Gate Farm, still drenched in blood from feasting on the cattle. I had a feeling that wouldn¡¯t go over well.

 Chapter 739

    Checking out the aired-out house turned into a morose affair and showed just how distanced Lia was from the memories of living as Chantalle. It turned out, the family had been home, a father, a mother and two children. Only, they hadn¡¯t beaten the odds of becoming Shattered. One of the children, a barely teenage boy, was lying in the door of the main bedroom, with a hole in his head and burned-out eyes. A gunshot, by the looks of it. The mother was inside, similarly dead, with similarly burned-out eyes and a few more holes. Finally, we managed to find the father, the gun lying next to where he had blown his own brain out. He was slumped over the torn-apart body of a girl, maybe six or seven years old. It looked very much like the work of a Shattered, likely the boy, if I read the course of events correctly. I wasn¡¯t sure I should consider the father lucky, for having his gun work on every shot, or unlucky, because nobody should feel the kind of despair that came with having to shoot your wife and son, only to find the ripped-apart body of your daughter.


    And yet, as horrible as the whole affair was, I intellectually knew that this kind of event was somewhat commonplace, maybe even what had happened to a majority of people. Still, knowing how often it had to have happened didn¡¯t make things easier, especially when Lia began to quietly speak about the family, as she used to babysit the two children from time to time. Hearing about them, having their habitual, sometimes adorable, behaviour described as we were carrying out the slowly decaying bodies put a strange pressure on my chest, one that I didn¡¯t like one bit. I had considered trying to decompose the bodies magically, but I knew that I lacked the magical power for that, at least for now.


    Instead, we carried them out and I flexed my recently acquired Earth Magic, pushing it beyond everything I had managed before. I wanted these people, whose house we were taking over, to have a decent grave, even if we couldn¡¯t give them a real funeral. Around me, the dogs started to let out soft, almost wolf-like howls, as the earth parted into a deep pit. As Lia and I placed the family into the grave, trying to give them as much dignity as possible, the dogs continued their eerie song. After climbing back out of the grave, I sniffed the air and noticed the scent of magic, divine magic, coming from the gathered dogs. The power was concentrated on the grave, though I couldn¡¯t really tell what Silva was trying to accomplish. Hopefully, it was something good, these people deserved their rest, after the horrific way they had departed the mortal coil.


    Pushing my Earth Magic once more, I closed the grave, returning the earth to its previous, undisturbed state. It felt a little empty, but I wasn¡¯t really sure what more to do. Planting a cross, as would be culturally appropriate before the change, didn¡¯t feel right but I wasn¡¯t sure what the appropriate symbol for Hecate would be, if She was to watch over these people, as Silva¡¯s magic hopefully indicated. Looking over to my canine companion, she looked at the grave for a bit, her head lowered, before plodding away. She wouldn¡¯t tell me, and I wasn¡¯t sure if I actually wanted to try praying. Sure, I had that blessing of Hecate, but I had never done anything with it, at least not to my knowledge.


    Either way, burying the dead gave me some peace of mind and pushed my Earth Magic up to two, a little underwhelming for the effort I had put in, but I knew raising it wouldn¡¯t be as easy as raising my Darkness or Ice Magic would be. I simply lacked the affinity for it.


    Shaking my head, I went back into the house. There was still some work to be done before morning rolled around, and I certainly wanted to explore the cellar. That could be done during the day, but something about the idea of a large, sun-protected space that I could set up just as I liked drew me in. There were quite a few ideas I had, rituals that I might be able to set up, even a few ideas for potential permanent enchantments, I almost couldn¡¯t contain myself.


    Neither Lia nor I spoke a lot while we cleaned up the place. The same pressure that had constricted my chest when we buried the people earlier returned, a strange sensation that I didn¡¯t like one bit. It felt eerily wrong to simply take over their place, to make it as if they had never existed in the first place.


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    On Lia¡¯s suggestion, we decided to keep the personal spaces mostly as they had been, though we cleared out the blood-soaked linen and the mattresses. I even pushed my magic once more, this time my Death Magic, and turned the dried rust-coloured patches of blood into dust. It didn¡¯t really help the looks but it made me feel better, even as the pain of channelling Death Magic was gnawing at my system. Somehow, the pain distracted me from the strange sensation I had been feeling, making me feel¡­ weird. Not worse, not better, just weird.


    Finally, the upper space was done, just in time for us two photosensitive people to disappear underground. Finding the entrance to the lower level was easy, as Lia had been shown the space in the past. There was a lift in the cider brewery, or whatever the space where cider was made was called, to easily lower the barrels into their storage facility and nearby was a stairwell. The door to the stairs was locked but given that the key was hanging on a hook right next to it, I didn¡¯t even have to try picking that lock.


    After moving down a long, long stairwell, almost twice the length of a normal flight of stairs, we got to another door, this one unlocked. Opening it, I got my first look at our new living space and I felt my chin drop.


    At first glance, it looked more like an underground parking lot, only that instead of cars, there were barrels stored in the parking spaces. Everything was neat and orderly, though there was a certain sweet scent lingering in the air, strong enough to make me lick my lips.


    ¡°Wow,¡± I managed to mutter, already imagining how much I could do down here. If we set things up nicely, Lia and I could both have almost as much space as we wanted, unless one of us wanted to set up an indoor football field or something, the space was that big. Without knowing about it, I would never have guessed just how huge things were if I even had noticed the ramp down here in the first place.


    Investigating that ramp showed that the motor opening the shutters was fried, but luckily, there was a smaller door right next to it, allowing people to move in or out, without having to open the shutters made for trucks.


    ¡°I guess we can stay here, right?¡± Lia asked quietly, studying the area.


    ¡°Sure, if you like we can drag the mattresses from the guest room upstairs down here, maybe even the beds,¡± I grinned, looking forward to setting up the space just right. There was so much of it, I couldn¡¯t wait.


    ¡°You know, there are a few things I want to try out, some of which I never could try in the other world. We spent most of our time moving around, so there was never time. I only know a few things about alchemy, basically chemistry only with magic mixed in, and I want to try. There are so many things I could learn,¡± I gushed, feeling myself getting giddy with ideas.


    Looking around, I realised that there was a small area filled with glassware, likely to test the produced cider. Sure, it wasn¡¯t a full laboratory, but it was an awesome start.


    I had a few ideas about what the change had done to our world, especially why it had caused the fires that had destroyed so much. My primary theory was that the change hadn¡¯t just affected living things but everything. Maybe including energy, which would mean electricity had suddenly gained a magical element to it, a magical element that insulation had never been designed to handle. Unless the insulation was changed in the same way, it could easily lead to cable fires. Even if the energy hadn¡¯t been changed, if the conductors or the insulation were changed in the wrong way, it could lead to the same.


    But, if the change had affected inorganic materials, they might be magical in nature, or at least potentially magical. This meant, there were countless things I could explore and understand, to say nothing about the living materials that had been changed, if I was correct, everything was now at least partially magical, with infinite potential. Just the little bit of enchanting I had done with my cloak had yielded awesome results and there was so much more to explore and discover.


    I couldn¡¯t wait.

 Chapter 740

    We should have moved far sooner. If I had been aware of just how wonderful a space we could make our own, I would never have settled near the Gym, instead immediately moving here. Instead of having to make sure that the curtains were always drawn, that no sunlight could intrude on my resting space, the massive, dark cellar gave me perfect protection from the hateful light. Only a rather powerful earthquake, or enemy action, could break the metres of concrete and dirt between the surface and us. Sure, it meant that getting out, if something truly serious happened and we were trapped, would be equally difficult, but there was no reason to expect such an occurrence.


    Either way, we had a huge space that we could set up as we liked, without having to concern ourselves with the light intruding on us. Luckily, both of us were capable of seeing in the dark, at least across short distances and in greyscale, but it meant we didn¡¯t need light, because electrical light was impossible and would likely remain that way for a long time if it ever was made possible again. It might simply be discarded, with easier alternatives taking over. I could certainly see a world in which light was provided by enchanted light spheres or something like that, I had seen Noriko conjure up light with ease and there was no reason to assume it couldn¡¯t be enchanted into items in some way. Similarly, I was reasonably confident that some sort of Cold-enchanted box would replace refrigeration, or maybe something along the lines of a stasis-enchantment. This new world wasn¡¯t just filled with danger and despair, it was also filled with wonder and opportunity.


    But before such wonders could be explored, we had an old slaughterhouse to check out. With our move, the location was just about half an hour away from us, and that was if we moved carefully. If we made haste, we could get there in half, maybe even a third of that time, depending on what we ran into on the way there.


    And so, after a restful night spent deep underground, Silva, Lia and I set out once more. We had considered taking another two dogs with us, but at the end of the day, the dogs lacked the power to make a difference. They had grown in level, but compared to the First of her Kind Vampire, they were lacking in strength.


    Due to that, they would venture out, carefully, and do some hunting on their own, just like they did in the city. I had asked them to primarily hunt animals that weren¡¯t really usable as food, large insects, spiders, and critters like that, while only taking what food they needed. I was relatively certain they¡¯d have done so anyway, overhunting seemed to be more of a human trait, but I couldn¡¯t be sure just how intelligent the dogs had become. Would they understand the advantage of hunting more and gaining a higher level and could they also see that overhunting the animals that we could use as food would be disastrous?


    As we moved, I noticed quite a few beasts out here, from hogs to cows, from horses to chicken, everything that had once been raised as livestock was now running wild and oftentimes, it seemed that they had been directly afflicted, far more than humans.


    When we passed a few hogs, I noticed an odd shale smell, one that I associated with magic. Looking closer and using some Astral Power to engage my magical sight, I noticed that the dirt caking their fur and skin wasn¡¯t just dirt, it was faintly glowing to my sight in a hue that I associated with Earth Magic. Some sort of protective magic, unless I missed my guess, but the strength of it I couldn¡¯t even begin to guess. I considered testing them or at least sneaking close enough to covertly Observe them, but decided against it. We had an old Slaughterhouse to check out and that had been on the agenda for quite a while.


    Even before we got close enough to see the old Slaughterhouse, I knew it was there. The air was rife with magic, the scent cloying and almost suffocating, all-encompassing enough to be reminiscent of the Dorrian Mountains on Mundus. Not the same depth, but it was obvious that countless creatures had been killed here.


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    The darkness around us was getting weird as well. It wasn¡¯t really noticeable, due to it being already dark, but I could feel a difference in the shades, the temperature of the darkness. It wasn¡¯t just an absence of light, it was more, something beyond the shadows, or maybe beneath. There were no words to describe it, it was as if something wrong had seeped into the cracks of reality here. I wasn¡¯t sure how the place would look like in the light of day, whether the sun would be strong enough to drive that weirdness out, but I certainly wouldn¡¯t stick around to find out. Maybe I could ask someone from Apple Gate Farm, but I wasn¡¯t sure if they would be able to notice.


    The building itself didn¡¯t look like anything out of the ordinary, it was a large complex, looking a little like a cross between a barn, an industrial complex and a warehouse, with countless installations on the roof, likely for refrigeration and air control.


    Pausing before we got too close, we observed for a little while, noticing a bit of movement around the area and some strange noises coming from within.


    Focusing on one of the areas I had noticed movement in, I began drawing up a runic formation, Three runes of Blizzard, linked with two runes of Ice, trying to conjure up the strongest projectiles I currently could. Focusing my will and slowly channelling my power, I tried to morph the spell from the usual single projectile into a rain of Ice, a true blizzard. I wasn¡¯t going for individual precision, I wanted the equivalent of covering fire, striking the entire area and everything within. It wouldn¡¯t be an efficient use of power, most of my attack would miss, but some of it would hit, drawing out whatever was there. That way, we wouldn¡¯t be caught out and surrounded, instead we could see what we were dealing with and retreat if necessary.


    The faintly glowing projectiles saturated the area, immediately causing weird, squeal-like shrieks to break the silence of the night. I had never heard anything alike, and only moments later I knew what had made them.


    A group of five skeletal pigs came dashing through the darkness, some with Ice lodged between their bones, one even with a few broken ribs from my attack. All of them looked rather aggressive, with strange, red-grey glowing orbs in their eye sockets.


    Realising that I¡¯d be relatively useless, the only weapon I had to really deal with these creatures would be blunt strikes using Ice Magic, similar to what I occasionally used to cripple Shattered. These strikes had their limits though, and against five rapidly approaching enemies, I most likely wouldn¡¯t do too well. I might be able to use Darkness against them, trying to confuse their minds, but I wasn¡¯t sure how much of a mind was in these creatures.


    Luckily, Silva was already bouncing towards the pigs, Lia following right behind her. Instead of trying to overly involve myself and possibly overlook something, I stepped back a little, making sure that I had ample room to dodge and kept an eye on the surrounding area.


    The clash between Silva and the skelepigs wasn¡¯t overwhelming, she managed to pounce in a move that allowed her to avoid the initial rush of the first of them, get her maw on its spine and shake its body like a ragdoll, using it as a shield against its compigtriots. I could hear the bones cracking, and when Lia moved in, side-stepping another of the pigs that tried to run into her knees, likely in an attempt to unbalance her, things got interesting. Despite the remaining difference in levels between the two, Lia¡¯s traits and titles easily made up for it, giving her unfairly high attributes and she abused that advantage ruthlessly. She was strong enough to pick the skelepig up, just like Silva was, only instead of simply shaking and breaking it, she managed to use its spine as a heft and its head as a cudgel.


    It wasn¡¯t graceful or coordinated, more a wild swinging of a flailing skeleton, creating what I could only describe as a mess, but it was surprisingly effective. Maybe there was enough magic in the skeleton to make the impact stronger, possibly in order to compensate for their lack of mass, but the flailing strikes managed to send two more of the skelepigs flying.


    At that point, I decided that it wasn¡¯t dangerous enough to require me to keep an eye out, and moved al little closer, allowing me to Observe the undead. At level fifteen, they were stronger than expected, but nothing overly dangerous. But if the monsters outside of the Old Slaughterhouse were already this powerful, what would await us inside? I couldn¡¯t wait.

 Chapter 741

    We battled five more groups of skelepigs around this side of the building until we had to make a decision. We now had cleaned up this area, there were no more undead around that I could detect but there likely would be just as much on the other side of the building, likely in other areas, too.


    We could continue hunting them, they were good EXP for Lia and a trickle for me, but it would take time. With me relatively useless against them, only blunt strikes with my Ice Magic effectively working, I was limited to support. Sliva and Lia were more effective, but the fact that there was no flesh to rend for Lia, no blood to rip Astral Power from, limited her a great deal. Amusingly, the destruction of their groups had given me another point for my Ice Rune Mastery and my Ice Magic, bringing them to twenty-three and twenty-five.


    Or we could move into the building and find out what we truly were dealing with. I was nearly certain I was looking at a dungeon of some sort, which meant we¡¯d get a first explorer title if we were the first to clear it, making it very attractive. I was somewhat confident that nobody had been able to clear out the undead around the area as we had, unless they were far weaker during the day, to say nothing about actually clearing the dungeon, meaning the title would still be up for grabs. Given its permanent and stacking nature, combined with the natural limitation on gaining it, there would be only so many dungeons that could be cleared for the first time by anyone, I was willing to take some risks for it.


    ¡°Let¡¯s go in there,¡± I quietly told Lia, before starting to make my way across the open space we had cleared, aiming for the main entrance. We could have gone for the loading docks on the other side, but this was where the workers used to enter and exit from.


    The door was hanging precariously on its hinges, looking a little warped and beaten, as if something had forcibly ripped it open. Shaking my head, I moved forward with my concealment wrapped tightly around me, Silva and Lia following a few steps behind me.


    The moment I crossed the threshold, a blue window opened, just as I had expected.


    <table style="border-collapse: collapse" border="1">


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 98.9983%">You have entered an instanced Dungeon, the Dark Slaughterhouse. Only those of your party can enter this dimension from the outside.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 98.9983%">You are the first to enter the Dark Slaughterhouse. For the first three hours, you gain the Dungeon Traveller-Buff, granting Bonus EXP. </td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    Nodding to myself, I felt a grin form on my lips. This was even better than I expected and I made a mental note to eventually run some tests with the locals in regard to this dungeon. I wanted to know how the dimensional mechanics of this instancing worked, if it was a sort of magic I would be able to replicate. I was somewhat confident that it was possible, given that the Grandmother had her own essentially private dungeon, but comparing myself to her was, a stretch and would remain one for a long time. I was confident that I¡¯d eventually gain power comparable to hers, but it would take a while and a lot of effort. Effort for which I could now lay the foundations if I was willing to take a few risks and crack some skulls.


    The inside of the building looked decidedly odd. I was relatively certain that magic must have made a lot of alterations, as I doubted the normal engineering code allowed for solid walls of interlinked bones, occasionally dripping some glowing and distinctly unpleasant-looking orange goo. If nothing else, that had to be a huge hygiene concern, to say nothing of the many sharp edges I could see. The only light I could see came from the glowing goo, almost like mood lighting, but the only mood this lighting could evoke in me was disgust.


    With only three of us, we were limited when it came to formations, mainly, we had Sliva move up front, with Lia in the middle and me bringing up the rear. Normally, I would have had Lia bring up the rear but at the end of the day, One-of-a-Kind-Vampire or not, I had a dozen levels on her, to say nothing of the vast amount of actual experience in battle. She might be stronger and more durable, but if it came down to it, I was confident that I could destroy her ninety-five fights out of a hundred, even if I was unable to use any magic.


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    Before we actually moved into the building, I did a few experiments on the walls, testing their durability and potential susceptibility to my magic. If I would be able to circumvent some of the challenges this dungeon had to offer or could find some other secrets, it would be time well spent.


    Sadly, even a five-rune Overflow Blizzard Icicle, propelled by an additional burst of Ice Magic simply shattered against the walls, not even leaving a scratch mark. This was some durable stuff and when I tested my Death Magic, it did nothing, other than give me a headache. Similar experiments on the goo yielded similarly disappointing results, the stuff seemed to simply ooze out of the otherwise solid bones. No, if I wanted to disrupt or assert control over anything here, I needed vastly more power.


    Thus, the intended approach had to be followed, moving through eerie hallways of bones, worrying that some sort of bony aboneimation tried to jump out and bone us. It didn¡¯t take long for trouble to come for us, only it was a different sort of trouble.


    Instead of undead trouble trying to murder us, meat-hooks were swinging from the ceiling, acting like a pendulum with far too much power to be physically possible. They swung at speeds that made the air whistle, only to stop on a dime when reaching the ceiling and, a few seconds later, swing back the other way. Given that even the chains the hooks were swinging by looked more like an assortment of barbed wire, I doubted trying to handle that was a good idea.


    Instead of trying to dodge our way through, I first tried to cheat. The meat-hooks were close enough together that a strong impact on one of them should send it careening into the others, creating a wonderful tangle that hopefully even the magical force animating this place couldn¡¯t instantly solve. So, given that there was no way I was willing to get close to meat-hooks moving about at the speed of stupid, I conjured up a hailstone, crashing into one of the hooks, in the middle of its downward motion. Bullet Time allowed me to hit the timing near perfectly, only for the hailstone to shatter on impact without changing the hooks trajectory in the slightest.


    For a moment, I considered trying to throw a non-magical object at the thing, just in case that changed things, but with our current lack of suitable items, I had to give up. Just as I was contemplating sacrificing one of my bags, Silva decided she had enough and simply moved.


    With her superior strength, she had quite the acceleration, pushing her body right after a pair of meat-hooks swung down, moving beneath them as they were on the way up on the other side. She made it look so easy, and maybe it truly was.


    ¡°Can you manage?¡± I asked Lia, studying the tempo and patterns of the hooks for a bit.


    ¡°I think so, yes,¡± Lia nodded and the moment I spotted an opening, I made my move. Bullet Time once more activated, not that it would help me much, as I dashed past the swinging hooks. I was lucky that I was slender, otherwise I might have been gutted on the way, as it was, I easily made it.


    On the next opening, Lia gracefully slid underneath the hooks, making it look easy, but she had the highest physical stats out of all of us, so maybe it actually was easy for her.


    But either way, it was only the first obstacle, and I had a feeling there would be more.


    A feeling that was proven right only moments later, when a few more skelepigs came tumbling out of the walls, immediately beginning to dash towards us. Given that there was no way to retreat, we all moved forward, even I was engaging in melee.


    Where my companions had the brute strength to simply tear these things apart, I had to be a little more intelligent, but that was okay. I didn¡¯t need brute strength, not if I could use their strength against them. Just as the thing tried to take out my knees so I could be trampled at their leisure, I spun aside, pushing it forward and past me as much as possible. With the momentum I managed to add to its already high speed, the skelepig had no chance to slow down before it crashed into the swinging hooks, with explosive results.


    We were all showered in small bone fragments, the skelepig broken far beyond what even the insane force of the hooks should cause.


    Grinning to myself, I watched as Lia copied my solution, bodily tossing two more skelepigs into the swinging hooks of doom, while Silva simply broke them with brute force. Maybe she liked the taste of bone, it would explain why she happily carried a large bone in her mouth, as we continued on our path deeper into the facility.

 Chapter 742

    As we moved through the complex, I began to wonder. What sort of mind had come up with this design, where did it come from? It was far too complex and, quite frankly, scary to be a product of random chance and the less I thought about the enemies, the better.


    At first, we only faced the skelepigs, and the idea that skeletons could be reanimated by magic wasn¡¯t far-fetched. However, after a while, we came across what I could only consider a boss monster, as ridiculous as that idea was in reality. This was no video-game, but then, Road to Purgatory hadn¡¯t been either and there had been boss monsters there.


    Either way, we found ourselves facing an abnormally large, undead pig, its size more appropriate for a calf, or maybe a pony. Compared to the previous ones, this one was still fleshy but just thinking about the flesh was enough to twist my stomach. The meat was clearly rotting, the stench strong enough to make me gag and I thought I could see maggots wiggling around at the surface, cursing the brief moment I focused my gaze there.


    Moments after Silva entered the large room it was in, the walls started to form a barrier behind Lia, giving Silva virtually no chance to retreat back out, while Lia and I had to choose between retreating and leaving our comrade or staying and fighting. Neither Lia nor I hesitated, both moving forward, while my mind was rapidly considering tactics.


    ¡°Stay back,¡± I commanded, realising that my best shot was an overwhelming initial attack, one that I knew worked incredibly well on zombies. Amusingly, zombies had one major weakness people rarely considered, one that was shared with all fleshy undead. They were cold, or rather room temperature, and yet, their flesh was still moist, in this case even wet enough to rot.


    Grinning to myself, my hand danced through the runes while my mind activated overflow, all thoughts fading away as I focused. Astral Power was pouring out of me, filling up the deceptively simple formation, just four Runes of Cold around a single Rune of Water, while my burgeoning Water Magic forced the result into a beam, lancing across the room towards the zombie pig. It was far from powerful enough to become a cutting beam similar to what Kevin had used before, but I lacked the Water Runes associated with movement, and I doubted Hail or Blizzard Runes would play well with Water. It was too big a difference in concept, I would be more likely to get some sort of sleet instead of rapidly moving water.


    But in this case, I didn¡¯t care about the impact of the water, I only cared about the massive amounts of heat the supercooled water was ripping from the moist flesh as it soaked the right shoulder and leg of the pig.


    The nice thing about magically conjured water was, it didn¡¯t necessarily behave exactly like mundane water, just like conjured ice had its own interesting properties that differed from mundane ice. In this case. I was relatively certain that there was no way for water to be this cold without turning into ice. The same didn¡¯t apply to the moisture in the pigs leg and without any heating, that meant one thing. The shoulder, and much of the leg, froze solid, causing it to stumble when it tried to move. It couldn¡¯t even try some sort of three-legged run, at least not immediately, because the stiff leg stabilised it on the ground. The combination of trying to start barrelling towards us and that stabilisation caused it to tumble, crashing to the floor with a series of cracking sounds.


    The fall was enough to break the ice, and in turn, break the flesh and even shatter some of the bones beneath. Or maybe the damage had disrupted the magic keeping the thing in roughly one piece, either way, its leg was utterly destroyed, leaving the beast crippled. It had taken a large chunk of Astral Power from me, but it was well worth it.


    ¡°Now you can go for it,¡± I told my two companions, readying myself to evade, dodge and maybe create a few patches of Ice on the ground, limiting the thing''s mobility even further. It didn¡¯t look terribly agile, which was something we could exploit.


    Amusingly, Silva didn¡¯t even try to bite into the zombie pig. Instead, she let out a strangely vibrant growl, causing her front paws to emit a strange purple glow that made my nose itch. With those glowing paws, she struck at the creature, causing the undead flesh to wither away, turning into gooey dust. Some sort of divine magic, but I had no idea about the details, though I was curious. It looked quite potent, so studying it sounded like a good idea, at least when I didn¡¯t have to dodge the stumbling carcass.


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    Lia, on the other hand, had far fewer sensibilities than Silva and I. She managed to expand the claws that normally sheathed her hands into gauntlets that almost came to her elbows, without losing any of the claws sharpness. With those gauntlets she tore into the body, happily using the various openings I managed to create with my Ice.


    The fight was still brutal, the zombie pig was able to withstand tremendous amounts of punishment, but ultimately, we managed to bring it down in a pile of mangled flesh.


    Once it fell, blue windows opened before me, and a wide smile split my face.


    <table style="border-collapse: collapse; width: 100%" border="1">


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 98.9983%">You reached level twenty-nine. </td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table style="border-collapse: collapse; width: 100%" border="1">


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 98.9983%">Skill increased </td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 98.9983%">You increased your skill: Ice Rune Mastery [24/100]</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table style="border-collapse: collapse; width: 100%" border="1">


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 98.9983%">Skill increased </td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 98.9983%">You increased your skill: Water Rune Mastery [7/100]</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table style="border-collapse: collapse; width: 100%" border="1">


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 98.9983%">Skill increased </td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 98.9983%">You increased your skill: Water Magic [7/100]</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    A level, two points in Water Magic, one in the two Rune Masteries, a wonderful harvest. Though there was another part that had to be harvested, a prospect I wasn¡¯t looking forward to at all. If this was anything like the dungeons I was used to on Mundus, it meant that the zombie pig boss would have loot, likely somewhere in its body. And given that neither Lia nor Silva knew what to look for, I would likely be the one to dig through the rotting flesh in search of treasure.


    Luckily, just before I could talk myself into doing something stupid, like trying to use Death Magic to decompose the body and probably hurt myself terribly in the attempt, the body dissolved on its own accord. I wasn¡¯t sure why, but it looked somewhat reminiscent of the process that had dissolved Traveller Bodies when dying on Mundus. Not quite the same, there the land had absorbed the body, here it looked more like the body was absorbed by the entire environment. I wasn¡¯t sure what to think about it, but looking at the three items the dissolution had left behind, I didn¡¯t mind too much.


    The first was a meat cleaver, though rather oversized if one wanted to use it in the kitchen. It looked more like an axe, easily capable of chopping through armour and meat alike, than anything one would use to prepare food. At least if one was human.


    The next was a necklace of teeth, with two tusks that might have fit on a boar capping the teeth on both sides. It looked a little like a caricature of a native ornament, but that might have just been my opinion.


    The last was the most unfortunate. It was a bottle, filled with some mysterious liquid and suspended within the liquid was a pig¡¯s foetus, or at least I hoped it was a pig. I had no idea the distinct characteristics of any foetus, so it could be of pretty much anything. Maybe not an octopus, but that still left a wide variety of options, some of which were¡­ worrying.


    Stepping up, I used my Magic Sight, checking for any suspicious curses, before touching them one by one, using the Identify Skill on each.


    The foetus was the easiest, the system simply identified it as a ¡®Life that never was¡¯, whatever that was supposed to be or whatever it might do. I had no idea but guessed that it might be useful to craft something. Or drink the liquid, but that wasn¡¯t anything I was willing to test.


    The necklace was next, and luckily with a bigger, immediate use. It was a Rare necklace, called Boar¡¯s Run, granting the wearer a plus two to Endurance and a passive bonus that reduced damage taken while charging at enemies. After a moment of consideration, I carefully placed it around Silva¡¯s neck, amusing how the two tusks were dangling along her shoulders. It simply was the most useful to her, neither Lia nor I were really charging at our enemies.


    The Cleaver on the other hand simply went to Lia. It wasn¡¯t anything tremendously special, simply a melee weapon that counted as an axe, with rather brutal damage values for slashing and bludgeoning damage, with a special ability called amputation, making it easier to lob off limbs. Lia would have to train a lot if she wanted to wield the thing proficiently, but the increase in range might be useful for her. Either way, we had dealt with the thing, and the way forward was open.

 Chapter 743

    After the zombie pig¡¯s corpse had disappeared into the environment, I took my time after the next group of enemies we faced, observing their scattered bodies. It took a little longer than it had with the boss, but eventually, they disappeared as well, absorbed by the environment.


    Or maybe it would be more accurate to say that they were absorbed by the dungeon, whatever that might mean in this context. Possibly that the dungeon was trying to conserve material or power or something along those lines, keeping us from carrying out the bodies of our fallen foes to reuse them later. It would fit with my understanding of conjuration magic, the mechanism that caused my Ice to slowly vanish back into the Astral River, instead of melting into water, could be at play here, or at least something equivalent to it. If the monsters were constructs created from Astral Power, keeping them within the boundaries of the dungeon might enable it to re-absorb the power used to make them, enabling the dungeon to repopulate itself easier. But I was only speculating at this point, my hypothesis far outpacing what I could reasonably infer from known data, even if I believed my reasoning followed logically.


    Either way, whatever happened with the bodies didn¡¯t directly concern us. Even if the dungeon would grow more dangerous in the future by recycling its constructs, it would only help us. More danger meant higher level, meant better rewards, a cycle that was beneficial for those at the top of the power curve. I merely had to make sure nobody could outpace our own power, even if they had the benefit of higher manpower. And so, we simply considered killing and dodging our way through the dungeon.


    After the zombie pig, the skelepigs were starting to get replaced with something just as bizarre. Instead of lumbering, yet relatively sturdy, undead pigs, we were faced with clucking chickens, completely impossible abominations constructed from bones, beaks and feathers. It was as if somebody had taken a rough idea of what a chicken skeleton might look like, fluffed up some of the parts with feathers, put a beak at the front and launched them at their enemies. However, where the skelepigs had been designed to be sturdy, solid and hit like a truck, the clucking chickens were pretty much the opposite. They had no durability to speak of, to the point that a single strike with my Frozen Shuttle was enough to destroy one, but what they lacked in defence, they made up in speed and power.


    The first of these things almost took Lia¡¯s head off, it was only a combination of luck and vigilance that allowed me to shove her out of the way in time, causing the thing to crash into the wall and crumble from the impact. At that point, I decided to conjure up a simple shield made of Ice, nothing truly sturdy or fancy, but it was good enough to act as a buffer, allowing me to let them crash into the shield. They were their own worst enemies, or maybe they were simply designed as suicide attackers, their purpose only to strike an enemy and demolish them with a single, brutal attack.


    Whatever their purpose, their addition amusingly allowed us to dispatch our enemies quicker than before. Where before we had to demolish half a dozen skelepigs, all of which were quite sturdy for their level, not Silva and Lia could take care of two or three of them, while I was playing catcher against the clucking chicken, letting them break against my shield or skewer them on my Frozen Shuttle. In those fights, I purely focused on my Ice Magic, and it showed, especially when the orange goop in the walls started to be turned into traps, suddenly launching globs of goop at us. Given how unhealthy it looked, and the strange, chaotic magic I could feel from it, I wasn¡¯t about to let it hit any of us. That lead to my shield occasionally breaking, or rather being eaten by the goop, and I had to repair it, but things worked out. Somehow.


    By the time we made it to the next boss, I managed to get another point in Ice Magic, bringing it to twenty-six, and one additional point in Blood Rune Mastery, bringing it to twenty-two, from having to occasionally heal up my allies. In addition, the constant combat gave a lot of EXP, thanks to the Dungeon Traveller Buff and the growing level and number of our enemies, allowing me to steadily progress towards level thirty. I hadn¡¯t reached it yet, but I would soon get there.


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    But before I could, we were faced with the second boss of the Dark Slaughterhouse, a monster that took the insanity that were the clucking chicken and pushed it to eleven. Or maybe twelve.


    The Chicken Shredder was a bizarre construct made of metal, bone and insanity. It looked like a washing machine had a baby with a kitchen mixer and exploded afterwards, turning into a constantly spinning, whirling and twisting abomination that randomly launched pieces of bone, chicken and feathers at us. The room it was in luckily had quite a bit of cover, broken chicken cages lying around everywhere, allowing us to hide from the madness. Sadly, the Chicken Shredder also produced a steady supply of baby clucking chickens that tried to crash into us and take our heads off with their suicide attacks.


    When faced with the onslaught none of us really knew how to tackle our foe. If Lia or Silva even considered getting close to it, the volume of attacks increased tremendously, forcing them back into cover, while I wasn¡¯t sure my Ice Attacks would cause any damage at all. It looked far too chaotic and random for precision attacks to work, I simply didn¡¯t know what to go for.


    So, when faced with a foe you don¡¯t know where to hit, try hitting it everywhere at once. Instead of moving up to it and risking injury, Lia and Silva were tasked with stopping the baby clucking chicken from disturbing me, while I focused on taking our foe down. While it lacked the innate moisture I had used against the zombie pig, I only had to add the moisture myself, by combining Water and Ice Runes in an attempt to first drench the thing, trying to get as much water into the more delicate parts of the insanity we were faced with, before freezing the water.


    Compared to the easy victory against the zombie pig, the Chicken Shredder took a lot of time. However, with each orb of water I launched into the moving parts of it before channelling a surge of Ice Magic through my lingering connection to my Astral Power, I could feel the thing slow down a little, could hear the more delicate parts deep within the construct crack. Minute after minute passed with me moving from cover to cover, constantly guarded by my two companions, while I repeated my spells, slowly but surely whittling the thing down.


    Finally, after what felt like hours of combat, but realistically had just been ten minutes, the thing¡¯s mechanism finally broke and it started to spin uncontrollably. We couldn¡¯t do anything but duck behind cover and wait, while the construct completely came apart, shattering into countless pieces.


    While the pieces were still raining down all around us, some crashing against the cover we had hid behind, I glanced into my notifications, grinning widely when I read through them. More skill levels, again in my Water Magic, Water Rune Mastery and Ice Magic. Water Magic gained one level, bringing it to eight, Water Rune Mastery got two, bringing it to nine and Ice Magic got one, bringing it to twenty-seven. Sadly, it hadn¡¯t been enough to push me to thirty, but I was almost there. A few more of the groups that had been attacking us relentlessly, and I¡¯d get there.


    But before that, I carefully watched how the various parts of the Chicken Shredder disappeared back into the environment, trying to trace and understand what might be going on here. Sadly, even with my Magical Sight, the mechanisms involved were simply too advanced for me, I didn¡¯t even know where to begin deciphering them. I tried to commit as much as possible to memory, but I had no idea if I¡¯d be able to decipher things at any point in the future.


    ¡°This is so weird,¡± Lia muttered, studying the items the boss had left behind. Moving forward, I went to have a look myself and had to agree with her. The items the boss had left behind were almost as weird as the boss itself had been, to the point that I began to wonder what sort of mind, or intelligence, had come up with them. This couldn¡¯t just be random, so someone, or something, had to have designed it, but what sort of being would design a mechanical monstrosity that launched undead baby chicken at its foes? Just bizarre.

 Chapter 744

    After picking up the loot from the Chicken Shredder, we continued on our merry way. The items were luckily not as strange as the boss had been, though they had their own oddities. There was a necklace with a wishbone pendant on it, granting the wearer an increase to their Charisma, which we gave to Lia, a pair of gloves that suspiciously looked as if they were made of rubber, granting the wearer greatly increased protection against corrosive damage to their hands, in addition to increasing their dexterity by a single point, and finally, an egg that was simply described as ¡®mysterious egg¡¯ by the Inspect-Ability. I had tried the gloves on, but while they shrunk to fit my hands, I wasn¡¯t happy with the way my magic was flowing through them, so they were put away. Lia didn¡¯t even try them, as her claws made them a non-starter. Maybe I¡¯d use them for my alchemical experiments, but not for combat.


    Our battles continued apace, with clucking chickens trying to kill us, only that now, the skelepigs were completely phased out and replaced with their bovine equivalent. Going from skeletal pigs trying to run us over and trample us to death to skeletal cows trying to do the same wasn¡¯t terribly surprising but incredibly annoying. Before, Lia and Silva had been strong enough to grapple the skelepigs and slowly break them apart, but the cows were too heavy for that. Lia had to work with the cleaver she picked up after fighting the first boss and literally dismember the skeletal cows, while Silva guarded her back and I focused on using my Darkness Rune Mastery and Mind Magic to confuse our enemies.


    It made the battles tedious and brutal, forcing me to repeatedly heal my comrades between fights. But at least the battles did quite a bit for my skill-levels, the healing increased my Blood Rune Mastery to twenty-three, while the repeated use of Darkness Rune Mastery, often in conjunction with Mind Magic to push the attacks home increased the Rune Mastery to twenty-two, and Mind Magic to seventeen. Realising that I had done quite a bit of attacking with my Mind Magic, I made a mental note to try using it to help Lia, as it would push my abilities back towards a beneficial direction, hopefully reaching an equilibrium with my offensive use of the ability.


    It was obvious that the dungeon was supposed to be tackled with a group of five and while the challenges were possible for us, and the EXP great despite my high level, it was getting harder.


    Luckily, it didn¡¯t take long for me to reach level thirty, the harder battles, alongside the Dungeon Traveller buff giving enough to push me over. As expected, I immediately gained an increase in every attribute from my Dragon-Touched trait, which, in turn, pushed my Dexterity and Vitality to fifteen, granting the respective traits.


    <table style="border-collapse: collapse; width: 100%" border="1">


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 98.9983%">Trait gained</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 98.9983%">You gained the trait: Dexterous Casting</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 98.9983%">For having fifteen Dexterity at your level, you gain an appropriate trait. Dexterous Casting increases the speed with which you can draw runes during spellcasting by ten percent. </td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table style="border-collapse: collapse; width: 100%" border="1">


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 98.9983%">Trait gained</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 98.9983%">You gained the trait: Blood Vitality</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 98.9983%">For having fifteen Vitality at your level, you gain an appropriate trait. Blood Vitality increases your blood production and decreases magical exhaustion''s effects on you. </td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    Looking at the traits, neither was terribly powerful, not compared to some of the others I had received. Still, given that they were granted for accomplishing certain attribute goals before reaching level-milestones, I couldn¡¯t be too disappointed by them. I was getting stuff for free, after all, so I should be content with that. But those two weren¡¯t what I had been after. It was a different milestone, even if I had to make a decision. Either, keep the two points, allowing me to reach thirty Intelligence at level thirty-five, or use them and get twenty-five Intuition at level thirty. The problem was, both attributes were important to me, each in their own way.


    Intelligence directly increased my magical power and memory, allowing me to put more force into my spells. Intuition, on the other hand, increased my perception, not just of the physical world around me, but also my magical perception, making it easier to notice connections and comprehend things. In addition, it allowed me to think a little faster, increasing the speed at which my mind operated.


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    I doubted there was a ¡®correct¡¯ answer to which was the better choice for me, both were necessary. As such, I decisively put the two points into Intuition, trying to keep a certain balance between the two. Otherwise, I¡¯d be tempted to keep pushing Intelligence up, always chasing the next milestone, until I was knifed in the back by an enemy I didn¡¯t see coming. There was simply no telling what I might miss if I didn¡¯t keep my Intuition high enough. A balance was necessary, even if I might miss out on certain traits for my Intelligence.


    <table style="border-collapse: collapse; width: 100%" border="1">


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 98.9983%">Trait gained</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 98.9983%">You gained the trait: Magical Instinct</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 98.9983%">For having twenty-five Intuition at your level, you gain an appropriate trait. Magical Instinct increases your ability to make intuitive leaps when trying to understand magical processes.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    Closing my eyes, I tried to comprehend the difference between before and after. There wasn¡¯t some sort of immediate epiphany, no great lightbulb in my head starting to shine, nothing obvious. And yet, I felt something tingling at the edge of my perception, realisation teasing me, trying to draw me in. Opening my eyes, I began staring at the walls, blinking my magical sight on and off, trying to make out the puzzle pieces I needed, only to come up empty.


    ¡°What just happened?¡± Lia asked me after I had been staring into space for almost two minutes.


    ¡°Level-up, I¡¯m now level thirty,¡± I told her, grinning proudly when her eyes widened. She had been catching up quickly, but now I was continuing my path forward. Sure, she would almost catch up at some point in the future, at least if she was always with us while fighting, but that was just part of being in a party.


    ¡°Congratulations, Mistress,¡± she gave a bow of submission, before standing straight with a grin on her face, ¡°There was more, right? I felt¡­ something,¡±


    ¡°One of my traits periodically increases my growth, it just happened again, increasing every attribute at the same time. Making me just a little better,¡± I explained, causing her to frown but she didn¡¯t ask further, and I didn¡¯t offer any additional explanation. Instead, I continued moving forward, happy that she had pulled me from my mind before I wasted more time. The Dungeon Traveller buff was slowly ticking down and every moment wasted meant a potential loss of EXP, if the buff ran out before we finished the dungeon.


    In addition to multiple groups of enemies we had to dispatch, there were also traps. The meat hooks we had seen before, and the explosions of goop continued, only now the floor started to become unsafe. When we first came across that sort of trap, it almost did me in, only a minute difference in the visual texture of the floor clued me in that something was there. The entire area was coated with a thin film of goop, a different goop from the one oozing from the walls. This goop was nearly transparent and mostly harmless, until it suddenly turned sticky, nearly immobilising you. Most of the time, that was no problem, we all were strong enough to break free, but the traps weren¡¯t random. Most of the films were right where an enemy might notice us, or in the area of effect of another trap. Dodging a swinging meat hook was rather difficult if your foot was suddenly glued to the floor.


    The floor traps were so annoying that I didn¡¯t mess around, and didn¡¯t care about how much time it took, I made sure to wash each of them away with conjured water. Sadly, just conjuring water did little for my skill level, I had done that conjuration so often when showering that it simply didn¡¯t count any longer, but I managed to deal with that sort of trap, allowing us to progress smoothly, if slowly.


    Finally, we reached the next large chamber. By now, I had pretty much no idea where in the building we were, the hallways made from the strange bone-like substance had twisted and turned randomly, making it so I had pretty much lost all sense of direction, to say nothing about the few dead-ends we had walked into, each of which had housed nothing but groups of enemies. Not even a single treasure chest, as disappointed as the gamer within me was for that.


    Looking around in the wide open room we had entered, I could almost hear the boss fight music play. Moments after I warned the others, I noticed movement near the ceiling and readied myself for a fight- Dropping down from above was another bovine skeleton, only this skeleton wasn¡¯t from a cow or a bull. Our enemy stood on two legs, tall enough to tower even above Sigmir if she were here, and that was within taking the long, wickedly sharp and pointy, horns into account. Its arms didn¡¯t end in hands or hooves, one ended in a chain, tipped with a wicked-looking hook, the other in a blade, quite similar to the one Lia had picked up.


    Staring at it, I activated Observe, knowing that combat was imminent, and learned that we were facing a Moonotaur, at a rather impressive level of twenty-eight.

 Chapter 745

    How a skeleton, bovine or not, could roar loud enough to disrupt my balance with the sheer force of its voice was not something I wanted to contemplate. If the necrotic energies that animated it strengthened the other ¡®muscles¡¯ to the same extent, I knew I didn¡¯t want to get hit by even the most glancing of blows, the force of it would be enough to send me flying through the roof. Silva let out a protesting whine at the sound before her entire form was shrouded in the golden glow of her divine magic, hopefully shielding her from harm.


    And then the battle was on. The Moonotaur, a name that made me question whether it was named for the moon or the moo-ing sound a cow was supposed to make, started twirling its chain rapidly above its head, creating an area of danger that forced us to keep our distance. The only chance Lia or Silva had to get close would be to try leaping over, or crouching under, the twirling chain, likely having to dodge the length multiple times on their approach. Given that the chain was moving fast enough to produce perceivable air currents, even on the other side of the room, trying would be foolish, so I had to act.


    Drawing out a simple formation of three runes, one of Darkness, and two of Confusion, I pulled on the darkness of the room, trying to push my magic into the boss. I could feel a feedback, as if the moonotaur was pushing back, trying to defend against my magic, but I forced more power into the link, even activating Overflow to slam it home. For a moment, I could see the beast¡¯s head become shrouded in even deeper darkness than the gloom that filled the Dark Slaughterhouse and the twirling chain¡¯s rhythm was disrupted to the point that it struck the ground in a shower of sparks.


    Lia and Silva immediately used the opening, charging forward while I wrestled with the beast¡¯s will, trying to keep its disorientation going. Especially if I had managed to blind its eyes, or whatever the skeleton used to perceive its environment, it would allow the others to strike critical blows without being in serious danger.


    Sadly, just after they managed to strike their first blow before they could even try finding weaknesses or causing serious damage, the moonotaur moo-ed again and the air was vibrating with power. It was strong enough to stagger me once more, my concentration completely shot as I had to focus on staying on my feet. Moments after my concentration was disrupted, the magic I had put on the monster faded and with it, the confusion it had been under. Immediately, it started swinging the cleaver on its other arm, forcing Silva to leap back and even with that instant reaction, the attack was quick enough to graze her magical armour, causing her to tumble. Only her four legs allowed her to remain upright, a two-legged being would have fallen.


    With its backswing, the moonotaur went for Lia. Luckily, she had more time to dodge and managed to get away, even landing a strike against its other arm in an attempt to keep it from swinging that chain. Both managed to retreat out of the chain¡¯s reach before they were torn apart, bringing us back to our original situation. They couldn¡¯t get close and I wasn¡¯t sure whether I¡¯d be able to damage the boss with my Ice Magic.


    Despite knowing that it was unlikely I¡¯d be able to destroy a skeleton with nothing but attacks using my Frozen Shuttle, I tried anyway. The shuttle was nimble enough to thread through the whirling chain and strike against the moonotaur¡¯s bones, only that I couldn¡¯t see any actual damage. It might have caused a scratch, but if it did, the scratch was small enough to be invisible. The moonotaur didn¡¯t even acknowledge the attack.


    ¡°Stay back, I¡¯ll conjure some mist,¡± I told the others, hoping that the deprivation of sight, combined with a confusion and concealment aspect woven into the mist would be enough to hide us from the thing. That way, I¡¯d be able to slowly whittle it down, maybe even conjure Water or Ice around it until it was immobilised.


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    My plan might have worked if I hadn¡¯t forgotten one important part. Namely, the chain was whirling fast enough to produce air currents in the room quickly distributing my mist all around the area. The room was big enough to decrease the concentration to the point that it was mostly harmless, while the moonotaur made sure to move in my direction when I started conjuring, forcing me to abandon the attempt before I managed to fill the room, turning it into a waste of Astral Power and time.


    With no better ideas coming up, I repeated the small success I had managed earlier, conjuring some Darkness in an attempt to confuse the thing, allowing Silva and Lia to get an attack in.


    Again it worked, both attacks struck true before the two of them immediately retreated. Baby steps, but at least we were moving forward.


    With a path forward, the battle continued. While my companions were dealing the damage, I was making sure that they actually could get to the thing, either by confusing it with a combination of Darkness and Mind Magic or by combining Water and Ice Magic, trying to freeze its joints or even encase its skull in ice. While I didn¡¯t manage the last one, the other two methods worked, allowing us to get our strikes in. Sadly, it was slow going and I wasn¡¯t sure who¡¯d actually win the battle of attrition. We were damaging it, at least I hoped that the attacks of Lia and Silva damaged it, but the two of them were occasionally struck as well, and the repeated booming moos of it were starting to give m a pounding headache. It was only a question of time until one of the glancing blows would strike true and I had no illusion about the ability of my companions to withstand a blow that looked like it would shatter concrete.


    Finally, after a dozen or so attacks of my two companions, Lia finally got lucky. She had abandoned trying to claw the moonotaur in favour of using the cleaver and, in a lucky strike, had managed to sever one of its legs at the knee. Deprived of its mobility, Silva and Lia pounced on the creature, while I was now able to focus my attempts to restrain it a lot better. The moonotaur defended itself with wild, mostly random, flails of its chain, trying to get one of my companions as they were darting in to finish it off, while it frantically struck out with the cleaver trying to keep them at a distance but ultimately, its attempts were futile.


    By the time the thing stopped moving, I was starting to stumble from exhaustion and headaches, while my companions didn¡¯t look much better. But the moonotaur finally fell apart into a pile of bones, while all three of us simply dropped, trying to calm our laboured breathing and regain some Astral Power before I healed my friends.


    After watching once more how the remains of the boss dissolved into the environment, only to be replaced with a set of three items, I noticed a pattern there, I forced myself to my feet, planning to heal my companions before dealing with anything else.


    Only, there was a problem I hadn¡¯t quite kept in mind, namely that Lia had been using Astral Power the whole time, and by now, she was looking sweaty and had started to shake, making me think she was in bad shape. Not from wounds, from what I could see, so the cause was obvious.


    Using my shuttle to pierce my hand, I focused on what little Astral Power I had managed to regain into the wound and the blood that was flowing out, before allowing her to drink. It was a slightly surreal experience, to stand straight while my daughter knelt before me in what I could only describe as submission, gently, yet urgently, licking my hand and taking in the blood. It felt utterly weird, and I wasn¡¯t quite sure I was comfortable with the obvious submission she displayed, but given that I wasn¡¯t sure I¡¯d be able to get back up if I made myself comfortable, there was nothing else I could do.


    Looking at me, barely staying upright, and Lia, looking like she had been on a three-day bender, Silva pushed herself up, trotted over and let out a soft whine, shrouding us in the soft glow of divine magic. I could feel a strangely comfortable presence within the light, faint and distant, yet oddly familiar and instinctively welcome. My exhaustion lessened a little, and the few wounds I had sustained started to heal, though the magic wasn¡¯t strong enough to heal the hole I had made in my hand. But it was enough to allow me to stop swaying, and even Lia managed to get back up.


    Now, we just had to get our loot and see what came next - Or maybe go back through the Dark Slaughterhouse and leave. I wasn¡¯t sure I¡¯d be able to recover enough to win another battle.

 Chapter 746

    As we walked over to inspect the magnificent items the moonotaur had deigned to leave for us, my gaze flitted over to the notifications. My face curled into a wide grin when I read through them.


    <table style="border-collapse: collapse; width: 100%" border="1">


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 98.9983%">You have cleared the Dungeon Dark Slaughterhouse.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 98.9983%">For clearing a Dungeon under the effect of the Dungeon Traveller-Buff you gain Bonus EXP. The Dungeon Traveller-Buff expires.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table border="1">


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>You reached level 31.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table style="border-collapse: collapse; width: 100%" border="1">


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 98.9983%">Title gained</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 98.9983%">You gained a Title:: Dungeon Explorer</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 98.9983%">For clearing a Dungeon while under the effect of the Dungeon Traveller-Buff, you gain the Title Dungeon Explorer. While exploring a Dungeon for the first time, you gain bonus EXP.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table style="border-collapse: collapse; width: 100%" border="1">


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 98.9983%">Skill increased</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 98.9983%">You increased your skill: Ice Rune-Mastery [25/100]</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    Almost an entire level, from a single boss-fight was quite impressive. The biggest part came from the clearing while under the effect of the Dungeon Traveller Buff, but that was par for the course. Clearing an unknown dungeon, while under a time limit was no mean feat, but one that I wanted to repeat. In addition, knowing that the dungeon was actually over was a huge relief, I was incredibly exhausted. Even travelling back to the lair sounded like a huge chore, but I wasn¡¯t about to just camp somewhere nearby, not when we had a comfortable base within somewhat easy walking distance.


    But first, there was loot to take.


    As before, there were three items waiting for us. Just from looking at them, I was somewhat certain they¡¯d be as weird as the rest of the dungeon had been. The first was a rather large cowbell, apparently designed to be held in hand, not worn around the neck, the second a helmet, possibly inspired by bad Viking images, somewhat shaped like a bull¡¯s skull with horns sticking almost ten centimetres out on either side and the last was a thick bone, possibly from a cow¡¯s leg. Just the bone was bigger than my forearm, including meat and muscles, about twenty-five centimetres long and thick enough that I wouldn¡¯t be able to wrap one of my hands around it.


    After a brief check with my magic sight, trying to make sure that the items didn¡¯t radiate dangerous magic or some sort of curse, I picked them up and inspected them one by one. The helmet was relatively simple, giving a bonus to endurance and strength, and when channelling Astral Power into it, the person wearing it could let out an empowered warcry. What that meant, I wasn¡¯t quite sure, but my guess was that it might be similar to the loud moo the moonotaur had used in battle against us.


    The cowbell was curious. It came with an increase in vitality and courage, both nice to have, but the important part was that magic could be spread out by channelling it into the bell and ringing it. The description wasn¡¯t overly informative, but it certainly sounded like something I would want to experiment with. If I was lucky, it might become something akin to the bride¡¯s dress we had found in the swamp, which ultimately gave Lenore the inspiration to channel her magic through her calls, allowing her to affect a wide area with her Death Magic.


    Lastly, there was the bone. Inspect simply called it a ¡®thick soup bone¡¯, with no additional information. The only thing I truly knew about it was that Silva had started to drool just from looking at it and was occasionally whimpering in an attempt to make us feed it to her. I was considering it, but as of now, she hadn¡¯t convinced me.


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    The distribution of the items was pretty obvious, even if we briefly tested just how far the adaptability of items dropped in dungeons went. Sadly, while we managed to put the helm on Silva, it didn¡¯t really fit her, or adjust in any way that made us think it would work. Her rather sad whine at the attempt sealed the attempt as a failure, the helmet simply didn¡¯t work for her.


    So it went to Lia and while she didn¡¯t look nearly as adorable as our small calf when wearing a horned, cow-skull-shaped helmet, there was a certain flair to it. Not a flair of practicality, but a certain wildness that fit her quite well. It made me think of some mediocre advertisements I had seen in the past for weird fantasy western crossovers. Maybe we¡¯d find her some tight black leather clothes at some point to round out the look, likely with far too many spiky adornments. Thinking of clothes for Lia, we had to get her some decent light armour at some point, either trying to process leather or looking for some police-grade body armour. So far, we hadn¡¯t come across anything suitable, let alone anything fitting, but we might at some point. Similarly, I should try to find something that we could adapt for Silva, both of them had taken far too much damage in the dungeon for me to be comfortable. Sure, they had managed to avoid major wounds, but each minor wound was only minor because they had managed to dodge in time. At some point, chance would strike against them, and the wound might be one I wouldn¡¯t be able to heal.


    Lastly, the bell went to me. I wasn¡¯t about to experiment when I was close to fainting from exhaustion, but I wanted to find out how it worked and what I could do with it. I had a few ideas I wanted to try out, but only once we were back home and rested.


    With the loot distributed, we walked through the exit tunnel and, after walking around a corner, I was staring with disbelief. I was nearly certain we were looking at the door we had entered through, almost three hours ago, coming from a direction I would have sworn was blocked by a solid wall.


    Walking forward, I even noticed a few traces on the ground, looking as if the wall had simply disappeared in this area, causing me to shake my head at the strangeness of this dungeon. It was far less natural and seamless in comparison to the dungeons I had seen on Mundus, and both enemies and loot had simply been odd. A part of me wanted to stick around, trying to figure out just how this dungeon worked, maybe recruit some of the locals as testers, even if I knew they¡¯d get slaughtered in here. Even the three of us had some trouble, despite our high levels and my experience.


    Walking through the door, we were back in the cool night outside, a cool drizzle trying to wake me back up. Not that the cool shower really helped, I was just too exhausted. However, there was something I wanted to try.


    After walking out of the dungeon proper, I immediately turned around, curious how it would look when the others emerged. To my disappointment, there was nothing to indicate that they had been outside of our reality, as the label instanced dungeon would imply, but it might simply be because I had been in the same dungeon as they had been.


    Once they were outside and the door to the building closed behind them, I tried to walk back in, only for the door to be stuck. A blue box informed me that we had completed this Dungeon and wouldn¡¯t be able to enter for twenty-two hours, forty-seven minutes, meaning the time counted since our initial entrance. Intrigued, I made a mental note to return the next day, just to see how much EXP and loot we¡¯d be able to milk from the dungeon.


    But before we could do that, we needed to head back to our lair and get some rest.


    The way back was far more exciting than I would have ever wanted. Where before, we had been aware and awake enough to easily circumvent the few groups of enemies we spotted but now, all three of us were exhausted and at least somewhat caked in blood, making that far harder.


    And yet, it was even more necessary, as none of us was in any real shape to fight. Lia and I had even started to support each other, holding onto the other for balance and stability, as we staggered our way back. If there had been anyone watching us, their initial assumption would likely be that we were completely smashed. Certainly not in any way fit to drive, let alone wield deadly weapons or magic.


    Maybe by providence, maybe by skill, either way, we managed to make our way back, without getting into any more trouble. Once we were underground, Lia and I simply staggered into our respective sleeping areas, sadly not yet turned into actual chambers, and dropped off. I somehow managed to strip out of my gear before falling into bed, but how I accomplished that feat, I had no idea.


    The moment my head hit my pillow, I was embraced by the darkness and fell asleep, dreaming of my beloved. One day, hopefully soon, I would have her with me in my bed, no matter the cost. But I needed to be powerful enough to pay the price needed, I doubted any entity that could help me revive Sigmir would take an IOU.

 Interlude: Survivors 301

    Once again, Kira let out a soft sigh. A common occurrence, nowadays, as she and all the others living at Apple Gate Farm are waiting for the other shoe to drop. The first few hours after the change had been pure hell. Waking up in the middle of the night, pain surging through her body, only to notice strange blue flames flickering all around their bedroom had been bad. Hearing her daughter, her precious daughter, scream in anguish and be powerless to do anything about it only made things worse. Realising that their daughter was mad, had turned into some sort of monster? It had almost been the straw to break both Kira and her husband.


    They had managed to lock sweet Chantalle into the basement, but neither of them had known what to do next. They couldn¡¯t just leave her there, that was their daughter, no matter what form she might take. As long as their precious child was alive, there was hope.


    But that hope started to dwindle with each passing day, with each earthquake shaking their farm, with every neighbour that sought refuge on their farm, seeking strength in numbers. Their farm had turned into a rallying point for their large storage facilities built for the apples they grew and the wide, fenced-in property. And maybe for their location, nicely between the nearby lake, the edges of the forest and the city, nestled in between the various fields. Nothing too close, nothing too far away.


    Still, even as their hope had been slowly dwindling, Kira and Frank had been plodding on, just trying to get through each day. At first, they managed to cling to their hope, but when their hope started to die, they started to pray. Anything, if only they could get their daughter back.


    And then their hope was reignited when a group of fighters came marching onto their farm, having walked to them from the city. What a ridiculous sentiment that would have been, just ten days prior, before the world had changed. Armed fighters, and needing to march and fight just to cross the fields around the city, it had been unthinkable. And yet, it was necessary now, driving home just how much the world had changed. Changed further than any of them had really realised, as they learned when the grizzled men in blood-stained clothes spoke of more than just monsters roaming the streets when they told of magic and what some of them could do.


    Hearing of magic was enough to cause hope to bloom in Kira¡¯s heart, a hope that her daughter might be saved, might be brought back from the feral, fiery-eyed state she was in. Maybe she could hold her baby once more. Samantha, the men said, Samantha was the name of some pale young woman with strangely glowing hair and the ability to do the impossible. Samantha became her hope, became the name Kira hoped for. Prayed for. The name she tied her last hope to when she realised that her daughter was getting weaker.


    Things became a little scary that afternoon, when an entire herd of cows started to move across the fields around them, sometimes gathering, sometimes wandering apart. It was obvious, even from a distance, that the cows had changed just as much as the people, maybe more. And that without modern tools, wrangling cows that seemingly had shed millennia of domestication overnight and returned to the trampling ways of their wild ancestors, would be a herculean task, or maybe just straight-out impossible. Even the fighters who had fought, killed and bled on their way here just took a look at the cows before turning back and asking if they could have shelter for the night.


    The next day didn¡¯t change much, the cows were still roaming and wandering, leaving the group of fighters at a loss, though they did their best to help the people, even wandering out and taking down one of the pigs that were on a similar course as the cows, returning to nature.


    It was only when the third day dawned that things changed. Early, just as the first rays of the sun started to be visible behind the horizon, a surprised scream shattered the silence of the night. People started to wake, Mark, one of the younger men who had taken charge of the defence, was rushing about, while Kira started to wake up slowly, not quite sure why she was so restless. A part of her was scared, worry had been eating at her the entire time, worry about her daughter. Poor Chantalle had looked worse than before, trying to break out of the cage they had been forced to put her in. Trying, and hurting herself each time she tried. If nothing else, her daughter certainly had kept her stubborn nature.


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    It didn¡¯t take long for Kira to hear a name, softly spoken from one of the fighters. Samantha. Ms Jacobs. The name of the miracle, the name Kira had hung all her hopes on.


    Desperate, Kira moved through her house, ignoring the massive dog that eyed her warily, homing in on the petite female figure, clad in a strange mix of clothes and a thick, dark cloak like some sort of theatre actor, shrouded in a strange aura of danger that made Kira break out in cold sweat.


    And yet, despite the palpable danger the woman was exuding, Kira started to plead. Her voice filled with the desperation of a mother wishing to save her daughter, she asked the young woman¡¯s favour. An impossible task, from everything she had heard, and yet, the woman accepted. Accepted to at least take a look, even if she promised nothing more. Warned that it might be impossible.


    Under Kira¡¯s guidance, everyone who wasn¡¯t busy with a necessary task had been praying after Kira brought the dangerous young woman into the basement, and had her meet with her sweet Chantalle. Just that meeting had filled Kira with relief, relief that her daughter was sleeping for the first time since the change had hit. Maybe the young woman could be her miracle, and if that required prayer, Kira would make everybody pray.


    And so, everybody who couldn¡¯t find a good excuse was praying, led by a desperate mother they spoke half-remembered words from a time that felt like it had been so long ago, even if it had only been a week or two for some of them. And yet, it felt like it had been a lifetime.


    For a long time, after they had spoken every prayer they could think of, Kira was scared to go into the basement. Scared that her hope wouldn¡¯t be fulfilled, scared that nothing had changed, that she would have to watch her daughter fade away and die, unable to do anything.


    The basement was quiet, oh-so-terribly quiet and it took until the early afternoon for her to gather her courage. With a heavy weight on her chest, Kira made her way down into the basement, carrying a plate of food, desperately hoping that she¡¯d be able to feed her daughter, even if it might be her last meal.


    In the flickering candlelight, Kira could see the cage, could see that it was empty. For a moment, fear gripped her, had her daughter broken the cage? Had she run away after killing that woman? Was her poor baby just gone?


    But no, once she looked around the room, Kira could see a tall figure, tall like her daughter had been, leaning against the wall, a far-smaller figure resting in her lap.


    ¡°Mother,¡± the figure quietly spoke and even in the faint candlelight, Kira could see that it was her daughter but also not. Some parts of her daughter were clearly visible, others had changed. Despite the faint light, Kira could see that her daughter¡¯s light-brown doe-eyes were gone, replaced with orbs of gleaming crimson, radiating danger in a manner that made her swallow for a moment. But just like there were parts that had changed, others were still there, it was still her daughter.


    Relief almost made Kira drop the candle as she swayed, but she caught herself, before offering the plate of food to her daughter.


    ¡°I appreciate it,¡± her daughter responded, her voice barely above a whisper. ¡°I will eat later, with her,¡± she nodded towards the petite figure curled up on her lap, now looking even smaller and far less scary than before.


    ¡°She saved me. Without her, I would still be mindless,¡± Kira¡¯s daughter continued, obviously speaking in a whisper to avoid disturbing the sleeping woman. ¡°We can talk. I can¡¯t tell you a lot, only that helping me has taken a lot out of her. She needs her rest, and I¡¯ll make sure she gets it, no matter what.¡±


    Flooded with relief, Kira simply joined her daughter in her solemn, mostly quiet vigil, speaking in hushed tones as Kira tried to explain to her daughter what had happened. Because as little as Kira knew, her daughter knew even less, after spending the entire time trapped in the basement. But now, she was back, her sweet babygirl was back.

 Chapter 747

    Upon waking, I let out a long groan, my entire body feeling as if skelepigs had been tapdancing on me throughout the night. I was utterly sore, my head felt like it was filled with cotton and there was a funky taste in my mouth. I couldn¡¯t even blame the state I was in on alcohol, I was simply beaten. Beaten and bruised.


    With a few more groans and a couple of sounds that made me wonder if I needed some mechanical maintenance because a body shouldn¡¯t crack and grumble as mine did, I managed to get out of bed and made my way to the showers. Well, to the drain that was installed to allow for easier cleaning of the underground area, but given that I was providing my own water, I didn¡¯t really need the plumbing that provided water, just something to get rid of it. Though; maybe I should try getting rid of it on my own, it might improve my Water Magic even further and the dungeon run had demonstrated just how useful the school could be.


    Despite my exhausted and bruised state, I tried to experiment a little with my magic. After drawing out the runic formation I used to conjure up the water for my shower, I tried to channel the Astral Power I focused into it with my Wind Magic, using a mental image of a warm summer wind.


    There might have been some change to the way the water rained down on me, maybe it was even warmer than usually, but sadly, I wasn¡¯t able to tell. For now, my shower wasn¡¯t anything other than cold, though it might be getting towards a more temperate state, or maybe I was simply getting even more used to the cold, thanks to my emerging Firn Elf physique.


    And that physique was most definitely emerging, by now, the colour of my skin was getting distinctly inhumane, though people might simply assume that I had some sort of skin condition or was naturally pale, at least for now. Soon, my skin would turn from a pale, blue-white to a more distinct icy blue and at that point, it would be obvious unless I was hidden in the dark. Similarly, my ears were gaining a slowly sharpening point, which I could hide in my hair if I so wished. Luckily, those were pretty much the major changes to my physique, I really didn¡¯t want to consider how I¡¯d feel and change if I had picked a different race, like a Centaur or something. Even a Valkyrie, with their wings, would be discomforting and that was with my love of flying and heights.


    Clean, and feeling a lot better, I began to make plans for the day. I knew that my students wouldn¡¯t come by, they simply didn¡¯t know where to look for us, and that I wanted to head to the dungeon during the night. In addition, I wanted to turn the lair into a better base, add some creature comforts and improve the facilities in general.


    Food Storage could be incredibly important in the coming days, especially with the army of dog that was living in the house above. They needed their canine diet, and the best way for that was to provide them with an area that could store meat. Creating a magical fridge, or even just a space that I repeatedly filled with conjured Ice, to keep things cold would be trivial, the only question was how fancy I wanted that fridge to be.


    Experimenting with more Water and Wind Magic to dry myself off, I began designing the fridge. There was a part of me that wanted to make it self-powered, or maybe with some sort of runic formation that would drain blood of its Astral Power and power it that way, but I quickly realised that it just wasn¡¯t practical at the moment. Too many intricacies, too much effort, for something that we¡¯d most likely abandon in a few weeks, maybe a month or two. I wasn¡¯t planning to stick around the area forever, just for now. I still needed more power, and power had to be sought out and acquired. Sure, I could gain some extra power by quietly training and introspecting, but to truly grow? For that, I needed to travel, to hunt and experience. Quite literally.


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    So, instead of spending hours upon hours to make the perfect fridge, I simply used a good chunk of my Astral Power to coat one of the upstairs rooms with a generous layer of magical Ice. The nice thing about the magical Ice in this context was, it didn¡¯t melt. At least not into water, only about five, maybe ten, percent of conjured Ice ever managed to become water and what little water there was, disappeared back into the Astral soon after. Unless the conjurer deliberately tried to increase the Ice¡¯s density, as I had with my frozen shuttle, and repeatedly used Ice Magic to restore and conserve conjured Ice, it wasn¡¯t permanent. Not until one was able to conjure Eternal Ice, something I was far from.


    Maybe it was even possible to create Eternal Ice in a roundabout way, by repeatedly, over the course of a year or two, increasing the amount of Astral Power within a chunk of Ice, constantly increasing it, never letting it melt. It was an interesting idea, one that I wanted to explore further, at least to a point. I hoped to regain the ability to conjure Eternal Ice within a year, but even if I could conjure it directly, learning about the process might grant me invaluable insight into the nature of reality and magic.


    Once the room was full enough for my tastes, I informed the dogs about it, telling Silva that they could store meat in there, making it so it wouldn¡¯t spoil quickly. We¡¯d have to experiment quite a bit with distances and the amount of Ice and cold I packed in there, I doubted the dogs would enjoy trying to gnaw on frozen carcasses, but it was a good first step, something I could build upon.


    The fridge made, I started to focus on the items I had collected, especially the bell. Just holding it didn¡¯t do much, I could see the numbers go up on my character screen but it wasn¡¯t as if there was a distinct change that came over me just because I had one extra point in courage and vitality.


    When I rang the bell, nothing happened either. It clanged, loudly, but there was no magic emanating from it, nothing I could see or smell. So, I started experimenting, sending Astral Power into the bell, trying to channel it as if the bell was a runic formation that I fueled. That seemed to be the right step, the bell started to absorb Astral Power and I could smell the distinct scent of the elements I used when sniffing the air near it. But there was no other effect.


    Until I tried ringing it again, this time while channelling Ice Magic into it.


    The effect was immediate, the air around me started to instantly chill, though with the limited amount of Astral Power I used, it wasn¡¯t anything extreme. Nothing broke or froze, just a chill surging through the air.


    Grinning, I began to experiment with the mental images I used when channelling my magic, trying to see just how much the bell could actually do.


    Soon I learned, it could do a lot. With the bell, I could manifest my magic anywhere within my line of sight, as long as I was ringing it. Or, more likely, I could manifest my magic anywhere within the disturbance range of the bell¡¯s sound, but underground, that was everywhere I could see, trying to cast magic into areas I couldn¡¯t perceive in any way was rather difficult. Maybe if I had a mental image I¡¯d be able to, but I wasn¡¯t about to try channelling magic into the various casks of cider, just to see if I could. Maybe into the stairwell, or I could go upstairs and use the rooms there but for now, it was line of sight.


    Which was already huge.


    It was pretty much equivalent to a rune defining the medium of a spell, like I had used conjured water to carry the cold I created with my Ice Runes when fighting the zombie pig, only I didn¡¯t need water, I only needed sound. And sound was incredibly fast. Sure, not as fast as light, but at the range the current battles were fought at, the difference was pretty much academic. It didn¡¯t matter if you tried to dodge a bullet on hearing the sound or seeing the flash of gunpowder, you were screwed either way.


    A wonderful tool that increased my arsenal quite a bit, even if I had to think about the best ways to master it. Now, I only had to figure out what was going on with the weird foetus, the mysterious egg and the bone. Only, I had no real idea where to start.

 Chapter 748

    After dark, Lia, Silva and I headed out, intent on visiting Apple Gate Farm. Partially to inform the locals about our presence, we might want to trade with them in the future, partially to warn them about the undead and maybe to offer help in creating a freezer. I wasn¡¯t quite ready to tell them about the dungeon, but I was curious if they had any information about it. If I wanted to study the way a dungeon and its entrance interacted with the world around it, I¡¯d need guinea pigs at some point, people outside of my immediate group to venture in while I watched. I wasn¡¯t sure I wanted to have the dogs venture in, at least not with their current strength, as they most likely would be slaughtered, not a fate I wished upon them. But a full group of the stronger people here might be capable enough to venture in and make it back out. Maybe.


    Thinking more about their capabilities and my state of ignorance about whether or not one could actually leave the dungeon without clearing it, I decided to wait with my experiments, at least until the locals actually wanted to venture in on their own. If they reached that point, I could still watch from the outside, maybe speak a word of warning or two, and observe as they marched to their potential death. And people would die in that dungeon at some point, of that I was sure. Human nature, greed and curiosity made it a near certainty. If I cautioned them, the blame wouldn¡¯t necessarily fall on me, while it certainly would if I were to be the one to suggest people enter the dungeon.


    On our way to the farm, we came across a few of the escaped pigs and decided to put some more meat on the menu, not only for us but also for the people on the farm. Given that I doubted they¡¯d want to have a carcass that was torn apart by teeth and claws, I cautiously sneaked up on the pigs, climbed on a nearby tree and harvested two of them with a combination of Mind and Death Magic. It was a combination I had begun using on Shattered and learned that it was quite effective in destroying the impulses that governed their behaviour while leaving the body intact. If I understood things correctly, I essentially turned them braindead, leaving their bodies alive, at least for a time.


    One more surge of mind magic later, and the only pigs in my vicinity were the two I had taken down, the rest had scattered into the four winds, running in desperate fear, running from the unseen force that had slaughtered their two brethren.


    Sitting in my tree, I watched their flight, quite amused that two of them were still lying in the middle of the space they had been resting in, never to get up again. It was quite interesting, how a body could be considered dead but was still breathing. It made me wonder just where the system drew the line, especially when considering my blood magic.


    Hopping down from my tree, I called out to Lia and Silva, getting them to come over as I approached the downed pigs.


    Filled with curiosity, I drew my old blade and made a small cut on one pig¡¯s neck. Placing my hand over the bleeding wound, I stretched out my Blood Magic, quietly observing the changes within the beast. With my knowledge of Blood and Death Magic, I could faintly observe and feel the processes of life slowly shutting down, while the presence of death started to gain influence. It was rather fascinating, the change was so much cleaner than what happened when I used my Blood Magic to drain the life, Astral Power and vitality contained in the blood of a creature, leaving only a mess of violent miasma behind. The natural change was so much more efficient, leaving far less mess, only the inert, quietly corrosive death. Nothing that could be used by another creature, not even by a Nethersprite.


    Fascinated, I tried to draw a bit of Astral Power out of the process, quietly watching how things shifted, how some of the vitality that had previously been linked to that Astral Power started to flip, to turn into Miasma.


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    The newly formed miasma was simply hanging there for a little bit until I noticed that it was slowly spreading, consuming the vitality in the blood and leaving the Astral Power behind, which started to fade back into the Astral River.


    Using a bit of Death Magic, I tried to extinguish the Miasma, in order to make sure it didn¡¯t spread or multiply. I wasn¡¯t sure whether Nethersprites could get to our world, but I didn¡¯t want to accidentally bring some insanely powerful monster here. I still remembered the dread I had felt back on Mundus after I accidentally granted access to an insanely powerful Nethersprite with one of my Blood Magic experiments. It had only been thanks to Sigmir, her mental resilience and fortitude that my Avatar hadn¡¯t been turned into a husk. Though, in hindsight, I began to wonder if it would have been my Avatar or my actual body that would have been affected. There were a few instances that now, with the power of hindsight, made me wonder just how well the insulation between Mundus, the capsule and the body within the capsule had worked, times during which I had exited the game and found myself with a splitting headache, a nosebleed or something similar. Things that had mostly occurred after I had pushed my magic, especially my Blood Magic, to its limits, or rather beyond those limits. Now, knowing that Mundus was most likely a real world, I wasn¡¯t quite certain that there hadn¡¯t been any damage to my¡­ soul? Mind? Body? Any of those three, that I hadn¡¯t sent more of myself across the connection than was intended.


    I couldn¡¯t tell, even if a part of me was quite curious. Maybe I could travel back to my apartment at some point and take a closer look at the capsule, there had to be quite the magic within it or some incredibly advanced artificing. The capsules, if I understood things correctly, had been able to forge a connection between a normal, non-magical, being outside of the system and intimately link that being to a divinely created Avatar on Mundus, linking them close enough that the being outside the system was recognised by the system once it registered those. Or at least recognised their access to their avatar¡¯s legacy.


    I didn¡¯t know a lot about cross-realm travel, nothing really, but just my explorations of the Astral River on Mundus and my observations of the changes the Astral River brought to our world as it burrowed into reality made it obvious that the Gods had managed an incredible feat. Hell, even just reaching our world before the Astral River reached it was quite impressive as any magic I could imagine was moving through the Astral River, not beyond it. And yet, they had managed to get their influence, technology or magic, however, they had created the capsules, to Earth years before the Astral River managed.


    Were the Gods part of the system or were they something separate? It was an interesting question, which was the higher power so to speak. Did the Gods operate within the system, as any interaction I had with them indicated, or were they beyond it? They could influence and partially command it, but at the same time, I was relatively sure that the system also limited and bound them. Otherwise, why bother cursing me with the curse of the sun, if a deity could also simply wipe me out? It didn¡¯t feel efficient.


    Unless the blessing I had been given, or maybe the influence of the Nidh?gg, had shielded me from their wrath. That seemed like a possible explanation and I wasn¡¯t quite sure how to feel about it. If Hecate had saved my existence, didn¡¯t that mean I was indebted to her? That I should be grateful, possibly respectful or even subservient? It was a notion I didn¡¯t like, I could see myself respecting the Goddess for her magical prowess, but doing so out of gratitude or due to a debt? That felt wrong.


    Shaking off my thoughts, I focused back on my experimentation, pushing around Blood and Death, while making sure that the meat wasn¡¯t actually contaminated by anything. I wanted the people at the farm to have good, healthy meat, not some spoiled, necrotic crap.


    Finally, after gaining a point in my Death Magic that brought the skill to six, I finished the pigs off by cutting their throat and using Blood Magic to drain as much blood from their bodies as I could. That left a bit of a mess, but both pigs were quite a bit lighter than they had been before. One of them was placed on Silva¡¯s back, making it look a little amusing, the other was carried between Lia and me. With our harvest secured, we continued on our way to the farm, making haste as I still wanted to visit the dungeon again, later this night.

 Chapter 749

    There was still flickering light around Apple Gate Farm as we approached and a few people were moving around the property, despite the darkness. It was quite impressive how much they had done in the week since our last visit, there was a whole new building set up. It looked rather simple, just a wooden frame with a sheet metal roof, likely only good to keep out rain and wind, but it was newly made and so without any advanced technology.


    We made our approach openly and again, the so-called guards didn¡¯t notice us until we were far too close for comfort. If we had ill intent on these people, I, alone, could have killed them all, though maybe I was a bad example in that regard. If I truly intended to kill them all, I was pretty sure I could manage, even if they knew I was coming. It would just take a lot longer, if I had to hunt them all down individually, if I managed to spread my mist around the property they would all just die.


    Shaking off my morbid thoughts, I greeted the guard and walked past, not about to tell them how to do their job. I¡¯d tell the local leader, I think the name was Marcus or something, and he could deal with their ability and attitude. Not my problem, but given that I had noticed it, sharing felt like the right thing. It hopefully was, if I invested time and effort into these people, especially if they joined with the people from the gym, I wanted them to survive, otherwise, all my efforts would be wasted.


    ¡°Mistress, I will go meet my parents,¡± Lia quietly told me, her voice so soft that even I had to strain my ears to hear her. ¡°I believe if they know I¡¯m happy and thriving with you, they will be deeply indebted to you, as you gave their daughter a path forward by creating me.¡±


    ¡°Do so, L,¡± I interrupted myself, mentally switching gears, ¡°Do so, Chantalle. We will go together, so your mother can show me what room I can convert into a freezer. In the meantime, you can tell them about your training, but maybe focus more on the magical stuff, I doubt that the parents of a teenage girl would enjoy knowing she is trained to fight,¡± I paused again, thinking about it.


    ¡°Or maybe they would like to know that. In this wonderful new world of ours, knowing how to fight is a rather important skill, one might even say it¡¯s vital. Do as you will, you have more information about them anyway and I believe you are more socially adept than I am,¡± I instructed her as we continued.


    Finding Kira wasn¡¯t too difficult, she was talking with a few other middle-aged women, maybe gossiping, maybe planning, we didn¡¯t get to listen in before she noticed us. The moment she did, their conversation was completely forgotten, with Kira almost running over to embrace Lia. I failed to stifle a giggle at the embrace, partially because of the brief moment of stiffness Lia went through when Kira hugged her but mostly because Lia still had the pole we had used to carry the killed pig on her shoulder.


    ¡°We thought with this many people here, you could use some extra food, and I can prepare a place where you can store it. We¡¯ll have to see how long the storage can last so I can return to refresh the charge, but it should work out,¡± I spoke in the general direction of the gathered women, hoping that somebody would supply a bit of direction. I had a feeling that getting between a mother and her returned daughter would be seen as impolite but I also wanted to get the pig off my shoulder, it was heavy, and to get away from the humans. We had things to do later in the night.


    ¡°Er, sure?¡± one of the women replied, looking a little confused at the situation. Not that I could really blame her, I doubted there were many people carrying dead pigs around, at least not without having a previous plan for those pigs.


    ¡°Chantalle, why don¡¯t I take your companion and deliver the meat to our butchering station? And what do you mean by storage?¡± she asked, the last part addressed at me.


    ¡°Just what I meant, it won¡¯t be anything fancy, but filling a room with magically created ice should create a simple approximation of a freezer. Let¡¯s you store the meat until it¡¯s needed, or you can prepare some reserves, just in case your hunting is disrupted for a few days,¡± I explained, getting a frown and a nod in response.


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    Two of the women took over the pole from Lia, while one of them came over to help me. While Lia stayed behind with her mom, the rest of us moved to the edge of the property, where a shed was located. Behind that shed, they had set up a camping table, now covered in blood, and a couple of hooks set into the wooden wall. It was an incredibly simple set-up, but I could see that people had repeatedly butchered animals here.


    ¡°We¡¯ll take care of this, the quicker we cut those up, the better the meat will be,¡± one of the women assured me, while another one told me she¡¯d show me where I might set up that Ice of mine.


    ¡°How much drainage do you need? I mean, how does your ice work?¡± the woman asked me, as we were moving back towards the primarily used parts of the property.


    ¡°No drainage needed,¡± I assured her, ¡°The Ice doesn¡¯t melt into water it, for lack of a better word, evaporates back into the Astral River. It turns back into the non-physical stuff I use to conjure it in the first place. If I conjure a ton of Ice and simply let it sit, you¡¯ll be left with maybe a bottle of water by the end of it. And even that water doesn¡¯t really stick around in the long term, it¡¯s complicated,¡± I explained, trying to describe the processes I had observed in terms people could understand. It took me a moment to realise that it was similar to that law of thermodynamics, whatever number it was, stating that energy couldn¡¯t be created or destroyed. It was similar with Astral Power and the material I conjured using it, I was simply changing the state, for lack of a better word, of the Astral Power into a physical version of itself with physical properties that mirrored the element I was using to conjure. At least that felt like the most parsimonious and logical explanation in my mind, though I had a niggling feeling that there was more to it. For now, I managed to give the woman next to me an explanation that was good enough, I doubted she was interested in listening to me ramble on about magical theory and my hypothesis.


    ¡°If you say so,¡± she simply shrugged, before starting to ask how one could learn magic. I began a spiel similar to the explanation I had given with the people at the gym, even showing similar tricks, namely the conjuration of water. By now, I was good enough with the runes and the magic that I could simply manifest a rune and let it flash for a second, making it manifest a floating ball of water. My demonstration made the woman guiding me look at it with a mix of awe and suspicion for a moment before she asked even more questions. Her first, and quite good, question was if the water could be used to quench thirst, or if it would disappear like the Ice.


    I had done some experimentation on that and was somewhat confident in my observations. The water could be drunk, and would sustain a person, at least it did for me, because the process of drinking it turned it into something else. I wasn¡¯t sure why that didn¡¯t apply to melting Ice, maybe I had to experiment some more, but it was the best explanation I could come up with.


    By the time we got back to the main building, the woman looked quite interested in magic, making me consider giving a few magic lessons here, too. Maybe it would get some more magic users started, which might prove important if the slaughterhouse was only the first location to change. Sure, a lot more beings had been killed there than in town, at least per square metre and over time, but that didn¡¯t mean the dead wouldn¡¯t rise in town.


    But that was a problem for another day. We met Lia and Kira back at the main building and Kira guided me to a small walk-in freezer, now completely dark and empty. As we walked in the light of the torches near the building, Kira looked at me with a bit of confusion in her eyes, making me realise that my emergence as a Firn Elf was almost complete, giving me unnaturally pale, light blue skin. In the darkness, it wasn¡¯t too bad, but once I was in real light, there might be questions.


    But that would be a problem for another day. For now, I froze over the walls within the freezer, trying to keep the ice focused on the walls so that the people had as much useful storage area as possible.


    Once that was done, I pumped out some more Astral Power into the area, filling it with as much Cold as I could. Hopefully, that would increase the time the Ice would stay frozen, giving them a longer-lasting freezer. When I was done, Kira and the woman I still didn¡¯t know the name of thanked me, the woman scurrying off to get some of the perishable supplies.


    ¡°Did you tell them that there are undead at the old slaughterhouse?¡± I asked Lia, just to make sure that the messages I wanted to send were delivered.


    Lia nodded and after as little small talk as I could get away with without being highly impolite, the three of us left, making our way back to the dungeon. There were undead to destroy, skills to be increased and levels to be made. I couldn¡¯t wait.

 Chapter 750

    For the next five days, things settled into a rhythm. Each night, we headed into the dungeon, leaving a part of me utterly flabbergasted at its continuous replenishment. Every time we entered the dungeon, we were faced with a similar challenge. While the details varied, the experience never fundamentally changed. The only real difference was the quality of the loot, the first night¡¯s loot being vastly superior. We still got one or two items from each boss, though only one was of similar quality to those we had received the first night, the other of lesser quality, and the EXP were lowered as well. Or, more likely, the EXP were back to their normal amount, while the first night had granted a hefty bonus, thanks to the Dungeon Explorer buff.


    Either way, five nights of dungeon crawling were enough to boost me to level thirty-four and pretty much all my skills were boosted quite a bit. Constant combat was quite good at pushing you to improve, at least if the combat didn¡¯t kill you. My Rune Masteries increased across the board, with Ice Rune Mastery keeping its lead with a gain of three points, bringing it to twenty-eight, likely because it was one of my primary combat tools. Darkness and Blood Rune Mastery didn¡¯t improve quite as much, only ticking up by two points each, bringing them to twenty-five. Still, it was good progress.


    Amusingly, while I had used a lot of Water Magic and Rune Mastery in the dungeon, as Water was an excellent medium to conduct Cold-Runes, the skill only went up by two, bringing it to eleven, but it was enough to grant me another Rune from the Astral River. I had tried to get something along the lines of Waterfall, or maybe Geysir, something along the lines of swift, forceful movement of water, but sadly, the best I had managed to pierce together was a Flow-rune, helping me to focus the streams of Water I could conjure, even if I didn¡¯t force it with Water Magic.


    In comparison, my Wind Rune Mastery seemed to be rather pathetic. I had done quite a few experiments and tried things out in an effort to gain some understanding, but I had only managed to increase the ability by one, bringing it to four. Clearly, there was still a lot of work to be done.


    My pure Magic skills went up as well, especially once I realised that I could push and prod at magical constructs with my Darkness Magic. Darkness Magic held the domains of Change and Magic, both of which could be used to influence nearly everything, even if that influence was horribly inefficient. But by pushing, prodding and jabbing the magical forces keeping the Undead together, I was able to test a few ideas I had in regards to the dungeon and its magical operation, though nothing I actually could harness just yet. But the whole process pushed my Darkness Magic up by incredible five points, bringing the skill to a respectable twenty-five after it had languished for some time.


    In comparison, Ice Magic went barely up, only going up by one, bringing it to twenty-eight, but that might have been due to the limited use it had been in the dungeon. I probably had gained all points I could for moving around Hailstones of my Frozen Shuttle, if I wanted to keep increasing the skill, I¡¯d have to change things up. Either create additional tools or create additional shuttles, always pushing myself to control what I could do.


    Similarly, without sacrifices, my Blood Magic didn¡¯t get much use, just a little bit to harvest meat on the way back, or when we visited the farm. It wasn¡¯t much, but what little use it got was sufficient to push it up by one, bringing it to twenty-four. I¡¯d have to do some work with it, or maybe teach Lia more about it. Teaching her had likely been the major source of my own improvement, as teaching and understanding went hand in hand.


    Water Magic, just like its Rune Mastery, had made some progress, going up by one, bringing it to nine, while Wind Magic had managed to outstrip its corresponding Rune Mastery, going up by two, bringing it to seven. While I was rather happy with the progress I had made, I had invested most of my downtime into them, hours upon hours of training. When comparing it to the strides I had made with my Ice and Darkness Magic when those were at this level, it felt a little lacklustre but maybe that should be expected. Ice and Darkness were my primary elements after all, and the entire Legacy of Morgana was based around them.


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    When it came to Death Magic, my progress remained rather minuscule. I had managed to brute force my way to another point, bringing the skill to seven but I had a feeling I would be hitting a wall soon. Trying to channel more Death Magic, trying to accustom my body to the deadly energy, simply didn¡¯t work well, there had to be something else, some trick I was missing. Maybe I¡¯d figure it out eventually, but for now, I doubted there was much more progress to be made.


    Mind Magic, on the other hand, had made another leap, though not in combat. Given that I didn¡¯t want to edge myself into a dead end, I had done quite a bit of work with the skill in conjunction with Astral Meditation and Lia, helping her delve into the Astral River and even trying to teach Rune Mastery to her directly, primarily with Blood Runes. It had been a wild ride, one where we had both suffered a headache of five, but Mind Magic had gone up by four on that wild ride, bringing it to twenty-one, while Astral Meditation had gone up by two, bringing it to twenty-seven, though that wasn¡¯t just from meditating with Lia.


    Another skill I had yet to apply to combat was Earth Magic. I had done some work, some pushing and prodding, and managed to get the skill to three, raising it by one. However, the bigger success was conjoined with the increase in Astral Meditation was my success in gaining the Earth Rune Mastery. I only had access to a single rune, Earth, which was a general Rune just like Ice, Water or Wind, allowing me to conjure material I could envision as part of that domain, though I had yet to really experiment with it. There was simply not enough time, even if I spent most of my time working on my magic.


    Amusingly, with all the time spent training my magic, my Fire Magic remained as rudimentary as it had been. I could create sparks, even a flame the size of a flickering candle, but that was it. No skill gained just yet, but maybe, it would appear soon. I wanted the skill, if only to round out the set, just like I wanted the Rune Mastery. That desire was only spurred on by the curiosity to see if there¡¯d be a special reward for gaining the four basic elements, or mastering their runes, as implied by gaining the Rune Masteries.


    But it wasn¡¯t just skills and EXP we got in the dungeon. We also gained quite a few items, some weird, others less so. There was an obvious theme to them, or rather there were multiple distinct themes. The first group were items based on some equipment used in a slaughterhouse, for example, the Cleaver Lia had found on our first run or a chain ending in a meat hook that increased Strength and Dexterity and allowed the user to restrain targets from a distance. At least if those targets had meat and the wielder was skilled. There also was a lighter blade, more a fillet knife than a cleaver, that I took for myself, even if I missed the refined forms of my Butterfly Blades, especially the protection they provided my hands.


    The second group was equipment decorated with some animal parts, mostly bones, horns or teeth, the solid stuff. Lia¡¯s helmet, Silva¡¯s necklace and a few similar items came into our possession, though sadly, nothing truly impactful. We still needed to get some decent armour, but we now had a few things we¡¯d drop off with the other survivors when we visited them again. It was stuff we didn¡¯t need and while I had no illusions that the other survivors could actually pay us in any impactful way, giving them powerful gear would hopefully boost their opinion of us. They needed stuff like that, so it should be very welcome.


    The third group of items was just weird. The large bone, the egg, stuff like that. We had to figure out the way to use those animal products for ourselves and I only had managed to do so with the bone. Placing it in boiling water somehow resulted in a surprisingly delicious broth, one that the three of us had shared. After taking the bone back out, I noticed that it shrunk a bit, so I wasn¡¯t sure how many servings we¡¯d get out of it, but we had found two more of that kind of bone, so we could make soup for a while.


    Sadly, when we returned to the dungeon on the eighth night, the door remained shut and a blue window told me we couldn¡¯t enter for almost fifteen days. We needed to find a new space to grind, or maybe focus on something else for a while. Maybe visit Apple Gate Farm again, they might have some news.

 Chapter 751

    Somehow, it never got old. Every time we quietly approached Apple Gate Farm, using the cover of the night to avoid the ghastly sunlight, the guards let out frightened noises, either squeaks, squeals or even outright screams. Lia had suggested to actually try sneaking up on them, just to see how close we could get, maybe poke them from, or into their, behind, with points given for proximity, how loud the resulting scream was and a few other factors that could be taken into account. It was a rather amusing idea, but for now, I hadn¡¯t agreed on it, the guards might take offence if we played such tricks on them.


    ¡°Do you want to visit with Kira first?¡± I asked Lia, knowing about her somewhat twisted emotions in regard to the woman. In her memories, Kira was a loving presence and intellectually, Lia knew that Chantalle, the person she once was, had loved her mother. But while they shared their memories and Carnelia¡¯s body was transformed using Chantalle¡¯s body as the base, they were not the same person. I wasn¡¯t quite sure how to empathise with her, with either of them, but I did my best to give Lia an anchor, somebody to relate to and relay her feelings to. That I, myself, struggled with emotions made things a little difficult, but we had talked about our respective struggles, though given that those talks had mostly taken place while resting after a particularly hard battle, it might not have been in the best atmosphere. But it had worked, at least to a point.


    ¡°Why don¡¯t we put the meat away first? I¡¯m sure she¡¯ll find us at some point,¡± Lia suggested and I simply nodded, changing course to walk towards the butcher¡¯s shed I had been guided to last time. As we moved, I noticed that there were a couple of tents set up near the main building, making me wonder what was going on.


    There weren¡¯t many people around, but I noticed that there were more than there had been before. Not many more, but some, and most of those, I actually recognised. There were people from the gym here, and when I realised that and begin to sniff the air, looking for trace amounts of magic, I could tell that I wasn¡¯t the only spellcaster around.


    ¡°It seems like my other students are around, at least some of them,¡± I mused, sniffing the air again. I wasn¡¯t quite sure, but I thought the scent I had picked up spoke of Earth-Magic, with some Nature mixed in.


    So at least two of my students, unless they had managed to branch out from their initial affinity. I doubted it, neither Sandy nor Aiko had given me the impression that their interest was in the elemental aspect of nature, Sandy had been more interested in plants, while Aiko had felt drawn to the synergy between the animalistic parts of her Nature-Magic and her Flesh-Magic. To use old terms that might just come back, one a budding Druid, the other possibly a beast tamer. Or maybe going down a darker path and not only taming and healing beasts but also enhancing them in ways nature wouldn¡¯t quite agree with. Time would tell, and I thought it would be quite interesting what paths my students would eventually explore.


    Looking at the other possible candidate, a cross-branching didn¡¯t become much more likely. Leon had looked at his Earth Magic as an extension of his engineering ability, to the point that he had partially shunned my lessons and focused on his own explorations. I couldn¡¯t wait what he had learned, and what I might learn from him. Hopefully, he had managed to find his footing and turn his magic affinity into something big, otherwise, I would be a little disappointed at the waste.


    ¡°It will be good to see the others,¡± Lia admitted, a faint smile on her face. She had met them before we moved over here, with somewhat mixed results. There had been a bit of fear, some confusion and a lot of questions, but ultimately, they had accepted that Lia¡¯s creation had been a fluke, a stroke of chance and miracle, not something I could recreate. It hadn¡¯t stopped Aiko, if anything it had spurred her on, but I doubted she was anywhere close to experimenting. And if she got to that point, I was looking forward to watching her progress and maybe learning something myself. There was simply far too much about magic that I didn¡¯t know yet and far too little time. If my disciples managed to find out something new and taught it to me, gave me a different perspective, I would count it as a win for me. After all, it had worked splendidly with science, countless people, working all around the world and exchanging ideas, their combined efforts culminating in the advance of all who could take part.


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    Maybe that was something I should invest some time and effort in, to cultivate a certain mindset of exchange and sharing. If I made sure that my disciples were accustomed to sharing their work with me, they¡¯d keep doing so. And if I had to share some of my knowledge, maybe even some of the items we had acquired in the Dark Slaughterhouse, to get that process started, it would pay off in the long run.


    ¡°Miss Jacobs,¡± It was Kevin¡¯s voice that broke me out of my reverie, a voice I hadn¡¯t expected. As always, he used a form of address as if I was a school teacher and he the pupil just happy to attend lessons, regardless of the fact that we were walking across a dark farmyard, carrying a dead pig, in the middle of the apocalypse. Maybe the familiar form of address helped him to compartmentalise, to shield this part of his life from the horrorshow that was reality.


    ¡°You are looking rather pale,¡± he looked at me with a frown on his face, as if trying to figure out what was going on.


    ¡°Hello Kevin,¡± I greeted him, while Lia exchanged her own greeting with him. ¡°Just a small side-effect of everything, nothing to be concerned about. What has been going on around the gym?¡±


    For a moment, it looked like he was about to ask another question, but as I simply continued to walk, it looked like he decided not to bother. They had repeatedly tried to ask about Lia and who, what or why she was, and never received an answer other than it being nothing to be concerned about. Hopefully, my students had learned that lesson.


    ¡°The stench became seriously bad, Mrs Wu had people start moving over here. I was part of the second group coming over here,¡± he explained, causing me to nod. It was to be expected, the city must be drowned out in the stench of the dead, the last few days had been relatively warm so the previously slowed decomposition would start catching up.


    ¡°Who else is here? We set up nearby if you are interested in more lessons,¡± I offered him, getting an enthusiastic nod in return.


    ¡°Sandy and Leon came over with the first real group,¡± he replied, causing me to nod. No wonder I had been smelling their magic, and the selection made sense. Sandy would eventually be able to boost crop yields, possibly the most important magical ability on a macro scale, and Leon would soon be able to raise buildings with nothing but his magic. Maybe not the most comfortable buildings, it would be little more than the equivalent of concrete shells, but without modern equipment, it would be the best anyone could ask for. There might be a few people who had read about medieval construction techniques, but I doubted anyone could easily apply those.


    ¡°Interesting. We¡¯ve discovered something that might be worth your while, at least once you gained some more strength, maybe found an ally or two,¡± I began, getting a curious look in return. ¡°It seems that our reality has become even more like a video-game than we previously thought. Maybe silly of me, not to expect that our world would become fundamentally like Mundus, the world I¡¯ve explored in Road to Purgatory, but maybe I simply failed to suspend my disbelief enough,¡± I shrugged, a part of me still unable to comprehend the how and why of instanced dungeons. It was powerful magic that simply sprung into existence, while somehow mirroring what used to be at the location, at least that was my current hypothesis. It felt nonsensical, and yet, it was real.


    ¡°Doesn¡¯t that sound ominous?¡± Kevin quietly snarked, making me chuckle.


    ¡°Not necessarily, no. You see, we came across a dungeon. And not just a normal, underground dwelling with a few monsters that moved in, but an actual, instanced dungeon, separate from the surrounding reality, at least as far as I can tell,¡± I grinned when his eyes started to bug out. Kevin wasn¡¯t the most intellectual of my students, his magic more driven by his curiosity and instinct, but even he knew enough to realise just how insane that idea was.


    ¡°How?!¡± he gasped out, staring with pure disbelief.


    ¡°Excellent question, I¡¯ve got no idea. My guess is that somehow, the sheer amount of Death that occurred there left a stain on reality, so to speak. With the coming of the Astral River, that stain filtered into the River and turned into something else. Namely, a dungeon filled with undead, possibly reflecting the strongest emotions directed at the location,¡± I explained, his incomprehension not completely fading until it suddenly got replaced with a look of pure horror.


    ¡°Sheer amount of death, you say? Like, the death of an entire city, of an entire world?!¡± his voice strained from fear as he put together what I had been afraid of for some time.


    ¡°Possibly, yes. I doubted the entire world will turn into a dungeon, but I could see the city turn into an open dungeon, there has been precedent for such on Mundus,¡± I admitted, only now remembering the tales the Grandmother and Dura Firebringer had told me about that city of the Death. I didn¡¯t remember its name, but that might be what our hometown would become.

 Chapter 752

    Watching Kevin lose his mind was strangely amusing. After a few seconds of stunned silence, the implications of what I had said fully kicked in and he went briefly pale before starting to stutter and try running of in order to warn people. He didn¡¯t get far, after literally tripping over his own feet in his haste, and continued to flail and panic on the ground, like some sort of frantic insect.


    ¡°There¡¯s a reason why I advised Mrs Wu to bring the people at the gym out of town as quickly as possible,¡± I reminded Kevin, my voice somehow managing to get through to his panicked mind.


    ¡°If the town turns into a dungeon, or even if the dead ¡®only¡¯ rise again, likely just as aggressive as the Shattered, there is nothing we can do about it. We simply don¡¯t have the people to bury the dead, let alone cremate them or something like that. Change what you can, accept what you cannot and learn how to tell the difference. This is something that cannot be changed, so it needs to be accepted and dealt with,¡± I quietly lectured, shamelessly stealing from a famous prayer. It seemed to work, or at the very least, Kevin stopped flopping around like a landed fish.


    ¡°Now, why don¡¯t you tell me what you¡¯ve been doing here? What new things have you discovered about your magic?¡± I prodded and it seemed that Kevin was quite grateful for the changed topic. As we walked, he began telling me what he had been up to, mainly using his magic to provide water but also working with groups to head out and hunt. It seemed that the locals had started to make long-term plans, trying to optimise who gained EXP and push those who had the talent and interest up in level whenever possible. It sounded like a good idea, trying to keep the magicians who could provide for the community safe while at the same time trying to help them grow as much as possible, so they could do more for the group. In some ways, it was the beginning of a barter society, where different people exchanged services that they couldn¡¯t provide for themselves.


    By the time we reached the butchering shed, Kevin¡¯s tale had largely wound down, until he suddenly paused, looking at me with a frown on his face.


    ¡°Wait, earlier,¡± he began, his voice a little hesitant, ¡°You said something about a dungeon, right?¡± I nodded, not sure where he was going with this, ¡°Can you tell me more?¡±


    ¡°Sure, what do you want to know?¡± I asked in return, only to regret it a moment later. To Kevin, a dungeon was still mentally connected to video games, so a dungeon was automatically fun. Not life-threateningly dangerous, filled with creatures and traps that wanted nothing but tear you to pieces. So, my innocuous question unleashed a flood of questions that nobody could have expected, not even the Spanish inquisition. But then, nobody expected the Spanish inquisition, so it might just be fair.


    Either way, as we walked back towards the primary farm buildings, no longer burdened by the meat Lia, Silva and I had acquired, I did my best to dispel the idea that dungeons were fun. Sure, they were useful, but if Kevin didn¡¯t take them seriously, he would die.


    As I thought about his chances in the dungeon, I realised I had failed to ask an important question, or rather find out an important fact, namely Kevin¡¯s level. Curious, I decided to experiment a little and focused my mind on the concealment-rune, using it to filter my intent to Observe. It was a little crude, but it had worked before, both on Mundus and here. Moments later, a blue box appeared before me and Kevin hadn¡¯t even stuttered in the question he was asking. Level fourteen, he had made progress. I hadn¡¯t really tracked their level but maybe I should have paid more attention.


    ¡°So, did you get your class by now?¡± I asked, interrupting his question about the dungeon walls and their make-up.


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    ¡°Well, yeah, I thought I told you about it? I¡¯m an Aquamancer,¡± he replied, looking at me with a frown on his face.


    ¡°Not that I remember. What does your class do? Skills, abilities? It sounds rather specialised in Water Magic, you might want to consider branching out before you reach the first Divide at level fifty,¡± I advised him, simply because I couldn¡¯t imagine only having access to a single magical element.


    ¡°Well, it passively increases the effect of my Water Magic by thirty percent and the water I conjure remains for fifty percent longer. I¡¯ve been testing a little and now, the water I conjure lasts for two days, even if I don¡¯t try to keep it around,¡± he began, before going into a few spells he had put together. It sounded as if he could craft spells similarly to what my Sorcerer-Class could do, only he was limited to water magic, but in turn, he gained increased power for that water magic. As always, it was a trade-off, but I wasn¡¯t sure it was worth it in this case. The increased versatility of multiple magical elements was simply too big an advantage to pass it up, though it wasn¡¯t as if he had truly chosen things this way.


    Nodding along, I thought about the water I could conjure, water that disappeared after about twenty hours, making me wonder where the rest of the difference came from. Affinity, most likely, which meant this might be a way to begin measuring magical affinity. With access to such objective ways to measure affinity, it might be possible to create tools for it, because the system only gave a simple, binary trait or no-trait to differentiate a person¡¯s magical affinities. But as I had demonstrated, you could learn the respective skills even without the affinity, so it might be worthwhile to provide training to everyone above a certain level of affinity, a level that might be below what was needed to gain the trait. Or maybe it would be more prudent to focus on other things and simply use the trait to differentiate.


    Soon, we reached the primary buildings and it didn¡¯t take long for Kira, Chantalle¡¯s mother, to catch up with us. With her guidance, I managed to get into contact with a few of the higher levelled locals, as I wanted to tell them about the dungeon, warn them just how dangerous it was and give them some of the loot.


    Lia and I had previously discussed the idea, it was a little circumspect but hopefully, it would work out. I didn¡¯t want people to blame me if somebody went into the dungeon and died but I also wanted people to go into the dungeon so I could get some reports that I could compare our own experiences with.


    So, after the dungeon locked us out for the rest of the month, Lia suggested that I give grave warnings of the danger, provide them with as much information as possible about the interior and hand over a few of the items neither of us wanted to us, in order to strengthen the locals. All wonderful acts of kindness that no reasonable person could fault us for. But we were talking about humans. And at least some humans would be greedy, would see two little girls, at least in their eyes, alongside a dog, who had the capacity to venture into the dungeon and they would ignore levels, magic and everything. They¡¯d be convinced of their own superiority and venture forth, into their own demise.


    Hopefully, a few of them would survive to report back so I could get the information I wanted, it would be such a waste if they all died inside.


    ¡°Miss Jacobs, are you okay?¡± Kira asked me, once she could see me in the light of the torches. Letting out a soft sigh, I tried to explain the hue of my skin away, but I could see that she was looking at me with quite a bit of worry.


    ¡°You won¡¯t transform into one of those monsters right? My baby is safe, isn¡¯t she?¡± Kira prodded, her hands starting to fidget.


    ¡°I will not shatter. You could say that this is merely a side-effect of my magical focus. In becoming the way I am now, I gained greater mastery over it, a trade I was willing to make, one I doubt I will regret,¡± I tried to assuage her concerns, though I wasn¡¯t sure whether she actually believed me or not. Either way, she simply nodded, before guiding me towards a group of their strongest fighters, so I could inform them about the Undead and the Dungeon. Hopefully, their questions wouldn¡¯t be as annoying. Maybe I should simply tell them about the change of my race and damn the consequences but I wasn¡¯t certain. There could be people considering my emergence as a different race as some sort of betrayal of humanity, or thinking that non-humans somehow had caused the change, with me being an embedded agent of some sort.


    People could be so incredibly illogical at times, it was a nuisance.

 Chapter 753

    Telling the most powerful people at Apple Gate Farm about the dungeon was rather amusing. Especially when I began mentioning levels, with the Undead outside being between level sixteen and twenty, while the enemies inside ranged from twenty-two up to level twenty-eight for the last boss. Their faces twisted in such stunned disbelief that I had to send out a stealthy Observe to find out their levels, having to hide a grin when the most powerful of them was at level nineteen, the weakest a mere fourteen. Moments later, I felt an Observe pry at my secrets, only to swiftly swat it away with a surge of darkness magic, making sure that my secrets remained my own. I wasn¡¯t sure if I would register as Firn Elf just yet, but I wasn¡¯t taking a risk. If that secret was announced, it would be my own decision.


    ¡°Mark,¡± I addressed the leader of their fighting forces directly. He wasn¡¯t the strongest, but he apparently had some prior training, though far less than Mrs Wu, and had the locals¡¯ trust. ¡°My team has secured some magical items from the Dungeon I mentioned. I believe handing them out gives some of your people a boost in strength, a boost that could very well be the difference between survival and death. We give those to you in good faith, I hope that the sentiment will be returned in the future.¡±


    Sadly, I was unable to create magically binding contracts, nor would I want one that was so vague. For now, I was giving little that was of practical use for us, while hopefully earning vast amounts of goodwill, as goodwill and hope for future benefits were really all the people here could give us. Maybe some food, but given that my party consisted of a carnivore, an omnivore and a hemovore, or maybe that should be something else as her diet wasn¡¯t so much blood as it was the magic therein, we really didn¡¯t need all that much food that we couldn¡¯t hunt for ourselves. Just the two pigs we had delivered to the farm today would be enough to feed us, and all the dogs we had recruited, for two, maybe three, days. No, the best we could hope for was good relations with these people, so that we¡¯d be able to easily buy food once the preserved stuff ran out at some point. Until then, we could get by with the grains we had, some fruits and greens we could harvest outside and whatever livestock-turned-game we could hunt.


    One by one, I handed the items we had found over, some of them were as bizarre as could be, and others were brutally straightforward. With each item, I could see the eyes of the people receiving them get wider and wider, they likely had a few ideas about just how valuable the things I was giving them were. Priceless, mostly because you needed a currency that had value to define a price. On Mundus, these items would be cheap, nothing that a journeyman couldn¡¯t produce, some might even be at a level an apprentice could craft but here, where there was no tradition of magical crafting, where many old traditions and methods had been forgotten or replaced? Here and now, they were simply invaluable. And I was giving them away for little more than flowery words.


    Soon, the items I could give away ran out, with about half of them still at our base, waiting for Mrs Wu and her people. I wasn¡¯t about to put all our eggs into one basket and I felt a much stronger connection to Mrs Wu than to the people here, even if one of them was the mother of Lia¡¯s body.


    ¡°Let¡¯s get going,¡± I told Lia, happy to finally get away from people. While I liked teaching my students, that was less about them and much more about learning new magic or understanding my own magic better. If there was a way to teach without involving other people, I would happily do so, but sadly, the productive learning effect of teaching was tied to students asking questions and challenging their teacher, forcing them to thoroughly comprehend the material they were working with. But regular people, who wanted to talk with me about things other than magic? Those were something I wouldn¡¯t miss at all, making the greatly reduced amount of such people the second biggest upside of the whole change. The biggest was obviously that I eventually would meet Sigmir again, not in a different world that I had thought to be an electronic dream but here, in my world.


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    Just as we were about to leave the primary building, the woman I had talked to last time intercepted us.


    ¡°Excuse me, Ms Jacobs, right?¡± she asked, looking straight at me. There was a brief moment of confusion but she quickly shook it off when I nodded, trying to remember her name. Luckily, she didn¡¯t wait for an actual acknowledgement or greeting, instead, she simply continued, ¡°We¡¯ve seen some of those magicians in action, they told us that you taught them. Would you be willing to teach a few more people, we¡¯ve gathered all who have an affinity trait. That nice young man, Kevin, explained some things to us but he insisted that you are far better at it, that he only repeated what he heard from you first.¡±


    I managed to keep myself from sighing while considering the question. Given that the dungeon was locked to us, there was really nothing to do outside. I could do a few more experiments with the reagents we had found in the dungeon, maybe go around the fields and search for plants that were infused by magic during the change, there might be something worthwhile I could sniff out with my magic sense.


    But it wasn¡¯t really worth it. If I took an hour or three to teach these people, it would only strengthen my position, and maybe grant me some more EXP, something travelling outside would almost certainly fail to do. While the time I had used to train Lia had been enough of a pause to let the most powerful creatures in the area catch up with me, the dungeon had been enough to push me back ahead. Maybe, if we ventured into town, we might find some Scorched or advanced Shattered that would give me some EXP but it was unlikely.


    ¡°Well, I can spare some time for you. Do you have some space where we can discuss things quietly so that we don¡¯t disturb the people who need to sleep? Alternatively, you could visit our current shelter tomorrow. We have decided to take over the Golden Cider Brewery, it has excellent facilities for those with our specific needs,¡± I explained, letting them make the decision. There was a part of me that wondered if telling them about our shelter was wise but at the end of the day, I wanted my students to keep learning, and the easiest way to accomplice that was by teaching them. Unless I wanted to visit them regularly, they needed to know where to go for their lessons.


    ¡°Do you know what happened to Scott, Melanie and their little ones? We haven¡¯t seen them since that dreadful night. They might have found shelter elsewhere if they weren¡¯t at home,¡± the woman asked, sounding concerned.


    ¡°Sadly, we do know. Two adults and two children were at home and did not make it through that night, we have since then buried them. Hopefully, they will find peace in whatever comes next,¡± I quietly explained, noticing a tear escape the corner of her eyes.


    ¡°So many didn¡¯t make it,¡± she shook her head, eyes distant, before catching herself and focusing back on me. ¡°If you don¡¯t mind, we can gather outside. The weather is nice after all unless you want to be somewhere enclosed?¡±


    ¡°No, outside is fine. We might need a bench or something, somewhere you can sit. There are a few things I can do to help you learn that are better done in a stable position, so sitting, lying, or something like that. How many interested people are there?¡± I asked, after thinking about it for a moment. If my students didn¡¯t mind, I certainly wouldn¡¯t mind teaching outside. The night was blissfully clear and while the moon wasn¡¯t full, standing under its light was incredibly soothing. I still didn¡¯t know what the Blessing I had actually did, but I had a feeling that was exactly the intent behind it. Maybe one day I¡¯d learn, but for now, I simply enjoyed the moonlight.


    ¡°There are five of us, well, six, but Zila is a little too young, at least in the eyes of her mother,¡± the woman shrugged and I began to wonder about the true number of affine people at the gym. I knew that Kevin and the others had shared my teaching with a few people, but had never inquired about the exact numbers. But if a group of about thirty people had six with an affinity trait, and a group of almost two hundred had only seven, there was something wonky. Or it was an incredible coincidence, but I didn¡¯t think so.


    As for the too-young person, I didn¡¯t agree that anyone was too young to learn, certainly not with the current state of society. But at the same time, I wasn¡¯t about to open that can of worms and teach some tyke magic against the explicit wishes of their parents. That seemed like an excellent way to alienate everyone here.

 Chapter 754

    By the time I was done with the locals, midnight was but a fond memory. Teaching people was always an experience, some of the questions would likely always surprise me. Sure, there were the usual staples I had been asked before, but I had a feeling some would always be new. Or maybe that would only last so long, at some point, when I got to the Grandmother¡¯s age, that might taper off. Or maybe it wouldn¡¯t, as both the world around me and my understanding of magic evolved, the questions and their answers would evolve, too.


    But the biggest take-away of the teaching was a somewhat welcome surprise, namely that I had managed to cobble together the FIre Magic skill, quite possibly by peering across the shoulder of an aspiring FIre Mage as they gained their initial rune. Getting the Fire Rune Mastery skill would be a challenge, but the four primary elements were mine now, and with them came a neat title.


    <table style="border-collapse: collapse; width: 100%" border="1">


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 98.9983%">Title gained!</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 98.9983%">You gained the title: Elementalist</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 98.9983%">For gaining access to the four primary elements, you gain the title Elementalist. It grants you a minor increase in your affinity to all elemental Magic.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    It wasn¡¯t terribly fancy, but I was quite curious about the definition of ¡®elemental Magic¡¯. I doubted it would include Blood, Mind or Death Magic, but I wasn¡¯t sure. Darkness Magic was a bit maybe and even Ice Magic was questionable. Sure, it could be considered as a combination of Water and Wind, but I wasn¡¯t sure. When I tested it, the boost wasn¡¯t readily perceivable, but that didn¡¯t proof anything. It might simply be a case of the minor boost being too small to register compared to my already rather high affinity. Either way, it was a wonderful thing to gain, hopefully allowing me to branch out even further. I wanted to learn all the magic, to make my path as broad as possible, especially before I crossed the first divide. I had no idea what I might gain, but hopefully, I would get some major benefits from it.


    In addition to learning Fire Magic, I also gained two more points in Mind Magic, bringing it to twenty-three and one more in Astral Meditation, bringing it to twenty-eight. Sadly, I also gained a headache to go with the increases but that was just a consequence of delving into other minds and carefully pulling them into the Astral River for guidance. Or maybe it came from the one person with a Darkness Affinity, I had decided to get fancy and pull Lia in with us, allowing her to get a good look into our shared affinity. Delving into two other minds, pulling two people into the Astral and protecting them there had been challenging.


    But what¡¯s a mother Mistress, to do? Helping my child charge felt¡­ right as if it was the thing I should do. That her increased strength helped me as well was just a side benefit, but a part of me wanted her to flourish and prosper, to become the best and strongest she could be. It was an odd sensation, but strangely not an unpleasant one.


    ¡°What are we going to do with the rest of the night?¡± Lia asked as we were walking away from the farm.


    ¡°Not quite sure. We could get some hunting done, but we still have a cow back at our lair. Maybe look at the flowers, we¡¯ve been focused on the change to the animals and people, no idea what the change might have done to the plants. There were some rather interesting plants on Mundus, and Alchemy could do some insane things. I¡¯ve never really worked in it, there were a few poisons I had looked into, but nothing really big. I always preferred to focus my efforts on my magic, trying to perfect it as much as possible,¡± I admitted, thinking of the poison I had used against the Centaurs. Poisoned supplies could be rather nasty, especially if the people poisoning were still out there, trying to make sure that you couldn¡¯t get any extra.


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    ¡°Well, and I made some dye once. It kinda worked but at the end of the day, we were travelling most of the time. There was simply no space or equipment to focus on preparing some potions or something like that, but I know they existed. Maybe, if we go looking for it, we might be able to sniff out some interesting plants, something that could give us and advantage. What do you think?¡± I asked my two companions, getting a chuff from Silva but a more thoughtful answer from Lia. Maybe Silva wasn¡¯t too happy with the idea of hunting for grass, not while there was better game to be hunted.


    ¡°Do you think something like that would work on me? My condition is a little¡­¡± she paused, maybe not quite sure how her vampiric condition compared to the vampires of the pre-change fiction. Granted, I had no real idea myself, though I knew she wasn¡¯t truly undead, the difference might be an academic one. Her body wasn¡¯t animated by necrotic energies, or fungi for that matter, but there still was a magical component to her existence, her inner elements closely bound to Ice, Blood and Darkness.


    ¡°Maybe you don¡¯t need the same potions I need, but I¡¯m confident that there are things we could prepare that help you. If only some sort of solution to keep my blood fresh and infused with Astral Power, even if I¡¯d be a little leery to prepare something like that,¡± I replied, shaking my head at the idea. I could still remember that insane pyromancer trying to cook me alive from hundreds of kilometres away, no need to prepare the perfect focus for that. Sure, nobody on Earth could use it just yet, even I wasn¡¯t confident to pull that off just yet. But eventually, there would be other Blood Mages, or even just somebody able to cast through the Astral River with a beacon like that. Better to not go there in the first place, or to make perfectly sure that such a sample would have a highly limited shelf-life of a day or something like that.


    ¡°Why is that?¡± Lia asked, her voice sounding a little like a kicked puppy. For the next half-hour, I told her about the dangers of bodily material as focus and what one could do with it. From targeting people at a distance, to bypassing their magical defences, there were so many ways your physical substance could be used and abused against you, it wasn¡¯t even funny. It got even worse if the physical was infused with the magical, at that point, the other party had your life in their hand unless you were very far away or very lucky. Or both.


    We were in the middle of discussing what it might take to make more like her, to turn somebody else into a vampire, when I noticed an unfamiliar scent in the air. We had been walking along the dirt paths between the different fields, not really going anywhere and only vaguely keeping track of our location, trusting in Silva¡¯s ability to find our way home, looking for something interesting. And maybe, I had just found that something.


    ¡°There¡¯s something,¡± I remarked, just as Lia finished an idea of hers, to use her Blood mixed with my own and our combined Blood Magic to turn another Shattered into a vampire, an idea that I didn¡¯t think promising. Shattered were just too far gone, I considered what happened to her a minor miracle. A perfect combination of luck, me recklessly channelling the Astral Power unleashed by prayer, Blood Magic and maybe some divine help, I wasn¡¯t certain in regards to the last one. Not something I would try recreating.


    Following my nose, we moved towards one of the ditches that ran through the fields, ready to carry an overflow of rainwater away. Looking down into the morass, I pushed some Astral Power into my eyes, activating my magic sight and immediately, an otherwise unremarkable flower stood out.


    ¡°Curious,¡± I crouched down, getting a better look at it. It might have been a wild strawberry before the change, small, red fruits hanging from thin stems, only now, those berries were filled with a bit of Nature Magic. Touching the ground, I noticed one that was partially eaten, the source of the scent I had caught.


    ¡°I think we¡¯ll take these, at least the fruits. I¡¯d love to be able to cultivate something like that, but I doubt we¡¯ll remain in the brewery for long enough to make replanting it worth the effort,¡± I admitted, drawing a set of Ice Runes into the air to conjure up a box to carry our loot.


    ¡°What is it?¡± Lia asked, and I began to explain to her what we had found. At least what I hoped we had found, I actually wasn¡¯t sure myself. But it was something new, something shiny and something that might allow me to stretch my magical abilities a little further. I just had to take the stuff back and get some experiments done.

 Chapter 755

    Discovering, or maybe establishing the discipline of Alchemy, or potion-crafting or whatever my current pursuit might be called in the future was a pain. The biggest problem was, I wasn¡¯t sure what I wanted to achieve, or whether my ideas were actually metaphysically feasible and I failed because I made mistakes or the ingredients were wrong, or if my ideas were impossible in the first place, making the experiments redundant. In scientific terms, I lacked a hypothesis I could test and falsify, instead, I was pretty much throwing stuff at the wall to see what stuck. So far, not a lot.


    I had been trying to extract elemental essence from the various magical plants I had gathered over the last few days, trying to increase my understanding of elements that had eluded me so far, like Nature Magic. Expanding my horizons, so to speak, but sadly, I hadn¡¯t managed anything worthwhile.


    ¡°What are we going to do tonight, Mistress?¡± Lia quietly asked me, moving into my laboratory area.


    ¡°The same thing we do every night, Carnelia,¡± I replied, suppressing the snicker at the interaction. ¡°We are trying to take over the world!¡± I paused, before shrugging, ¡°Well, not really, I think taking over the world would be incredibly stupid. Have you seen the state of the thing, it¡¯s a massive mess, I certainly don¡¯t want to be responsible for cleaning everything up.¡±


    ¡°So, what are we doing instead?¡± she prodded and I shrugged again. The problem was, I really didn¡¯t know. Maybe I needed to take a break, to simply relax, let the darkness of the night wash over me. Since the change, there hadn¡¯t really been a chance for that, I had tried to keep myself occupied, to make the most of my time. At most, I had been petting Silva, or cuddling with her, that was the closest to a hobby I could claim.


    ¡°What do you do for fun? Or what have you done before the change?¡± I asked, knowing that if I tried to answer that question myself, it wouldn¡¯t help my current situation. The only hobbies I had been involved in were Road to Purgatory and my training with Mrs Wu, neither of which worked any longer. Sure, there was still training, but it no longer served as relaxation, at least not in the sense it did before the change. Which was kind of sad. Similarly, I doubted that my capsule would bring me to Mundus any longer, though I still wanted to take a look at one at some point. But travelling to my old apartment, assuming it hadn¡¯t burned down in the meantime, would take the whole night, at least if I wanted to be careful.


    ¡°Stupid stuff, really. Social media, music, books, people at school, it¡¯s all so petty in hindsight. Why did I ever care what some band posted, why did I ever care about some guy, far away, screaming at the moon? So¡­¡± she paused, shaking her head, obviously lost for words. Sadly, I didn¡¯t have any words for her either, maybe it was just a problem of a privileged society. A safe society, a place where idling the hours of the day away wasn¡¯t an immediate threat to your continued survival. Maybe that could be called a boring society, a place where entertainment became the most important commodity. Now, the most important commodity was power, or maybe the safety that power provided.


    ¡°So, we both need new hobbies? Or at least something to do to keep us from going insane - More insane, that is?¡± I muttered, knowing that some sort of relaxation was necessary.


    ¡°I think I¡¯ll just go for a walk. Not trying to find anything, or fight anything, just to see the night,¡± I decided, only for a grin to spread across my face when I remembered something. ¡°Say, is there some high building nearby? Maybe a large wind turbine, or some sort of high chimney from a power plant? Anything?¡± I asked, hoping to find a good destination.


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    Lia simply looked at me with confusion across her face but told me about a nearby factory that had a decently high tower. It wasn¡¯t as high as I¡¯d like, at least by her description, but it should be enough.


    For once, there was nobody with me as I moved through the night. I had asked Lia and Silva to stay behind, even if that meant I had to keep track of my location as the best navigator amongst the three of us was Silva. It wouldn¡¯t be a real problem, the last few days moving around the fields had given me a good idea where what was, but still, just running blindly wouldn¡¯t work.


    It was quite liberating, to move around alone. Simply shrouding myself in the shadows of the night, turning into little more than a ghost, unseen, unheard, unnoticed, thanks to a combination of my cloak and a direct concealment spell. I could move into touching range of sleeping animals, though I never tried actually reaching out, and they failed to notice me. Just out of curiosity, I snuck up on a couple of calves, simply studying their physique and trying to see what differences the change had brought upon them. I couldn¡¯t see any obvious differences, not with the calves at least, but that might just be due to my lack of prior knowledge. I didn¡¯t know the exact anatomy of a calf from before the change, just a relatively basic image of one, so there easily could be changes just no obviously magical ones. No burning hooves, or horns crackling with lightning, as sad as that was. Maybe they needed to be agitated for something fun like that. Alas, baiting cows wasn¡¯t the plan for the night, though I might consider tipping one on the way back. I¡¯d have to see.


    Soon, I managed to get to the power plant Lia had told me about, grinning at the fencing around it. Just a simple, three-metre high fence, tipped with barbed wire, nothing that could keep me out. Even before the change, I would have been able to circumvent it, though the cameras would have been a pain, now with magic and my attribute-boosted body? It was almost trivial.


    Sadly, I didn¡¯t even need to circumvent the fence, I could simply walk through a broken gate, making me wonder what had destroyed it. It did look like something had pushed it open from the inside, something I considered investigating if it hadn¡¯t been my night of relaxation. Though, did it count as relaxation if the thing I was doing was done because it was interesting, not because it was necessary? What would that make my magic experimentation, because that was both incredibly interesting and, at least somewhat, necessary?


    Shaking off such questions of non-immediate concern, I continued my way into the facility and towards the tower, only to stop short of it. The tower itself was nicely high, maybe some thirty, forty metres, but sadly, the lower third of it was integrated into the building itself, making it impossible to climb up. At least when approaching from the outside.


    For a moment, I considered whether it would be feasible to conjure up wings, like I had during the dash towards the mountains, and try lifting them with wind magic but that idea died a swift death. While I probably was able to conjure up the wings and make them strong enough to carry my weight, it would be prohibitively large and heavy without using Hard or Eternal Ice. Normal Ice simply didn¡¯t have the strength for that. To say nothing about my lack of power in Wind Magic to carry me and said contraption.


    Instead, I used a much simpler solution and conjured myself a ladder. Sure, it took some thirty minutes to set the thing up, but I thought it was stable enough to last the night, so I wouldn¡¯t get stuck on the roof, like some cat in a tree.


    Luckily, I didn¡¯t need to prepare anything to climb the tower, there was a ladder going up. Finally, I managed to get up on the tower, allowing me to once again enjoy the night and being high up. Now, after the change, the night was much more interesting than it ever had been. Up here, I didn¡¯t need to worry about stumbling into anyone, I could simply let my gaze sweep the fields and study the distance, where the darkness of the night started to swallow the night of the stars. It was fascinating.


    Just as I was losing myself in the void, I felt a vibration pass through me, a change that started out as magical, only to turn physical, the Earth far beneath me starting to shake. With a squeak of outrage, I hung on the maintenance platform I had climbed up on, holding on for dear life. This wasn¡¯t what I had in mind for peaceful relaxation.

 Chapter 756

    Luckily, nobody was around to hear my terrified squeaks, squeals and whimpers as the world below did its best to shake me off my tower. Intellectually, I knew that the tower wasn¡¯t moving all that far or that fast but just the bit of erratic movement was enough to completely throw me out of balance, to the point that I was just hanging on to the railing for dear life, Bullet Time active as my mind tried to find a way to save me if I were to fall. All the various ways I could have done so while on Mundus flashed through my memories, from Shadow Stepping, to conjuring up a pair of wings or even creating a platform that hung onto the tower, while I considered which ways might be possible with my current magic skills.


    What would happen if I were to conjure water below me, as I was falling? Would I fall into the water and slow down, or would the conjured water match my velocity as I conjured it? I wasn¡¯t sure, nor did I know how to test it, I hadn¡¯t even tested whether the rules of magical flight and transfer of momentum were still in effect. I was relatively certain that I didn¡¯t get pushed back if I pushed my Frozen Shuttle forward, but I had never tried whether I could push myself upwards, by standing on a magically controlled shuttle. I knew it didn¡¯t work on Mundus, but what if the rules on Terra were different?


    ¡°I¡¯ve got you, love,¡± I heard Sigmir¡¯s quiet voice in my mind, felt a gentle pair of arms wrap around me and despite knowing that she couldn¡¯t be here, my mind started to relax and slow down, no longer racing at the speed of thought through countless scenarios that luckily weren¡¯t needed. As my mind relaxed, I could feel the world around me again. Without panic gripping my mind and muting my thoughts, I realised that the shakes were already fading, that it seemed like the tower would withstand the quake without problems.


    ¡°Thank you, dear,¡± I quietly thanked Sigmir, despite knowing that she wasn¡¯t actually there with me. But even just imagining her arms around me, or maybe feeling an echo of her embrace, was enough to give me comfort while the foundations of my world were crumbling. Or at least shaking.


    ¡°If only Lenore was here with me, her wings would be incredibly useful. And she¡¯d be able to give me good advice,¡± I grumbled, remembering the sensation of shifting into my Hallow and hiding there. To simply take wing and let the world tremble far beneath, allowing me to remain unburdened by it all, it would be wonderful. Alas, I no longer had my companion with me, the bond gone and merely an echo of our connection remaining.


    But if there was an echo, maybe I could still shout into the void and my friend might hear me. If the gods could hear the prayers from some distant plane and place, hear people they had never heard of or met, maybe I could reach my old friend, call out to her and at least give her my greeting.


    Feeling the shaking beneath me stop, I decided that I was in the perfect place. In addition, my legs were feeling rather wobbly, so I wouldn¡¯t be able to climb down the ladder anyway, meaning I had more than enough time to send out my mind. But first, I had to calm down a little.


    Closing my eyes, I let my mind start to drift, my focus widening as I started to delve into the Astral River. It wasn¡¯t as smooth or easy as it normally would be, my mind was far too agitated for that, but I could reach the borders of it without too much trouble.


    Only, what I normally perceived as a smooth, gentle flowing stream of various flavours of Astral Power was itself rather agitated. As I was watching, I could feel a wave ripple through the river, churning the waters further and causing the entire balance to wobble and shift. Even at my distant observation spot, I felt shaken and weakened, a headache forming from being drenched in Death. I had no idea why a wave of death had rippled through the Astral, but I doubted it was anything positive. But just because it likely wasn¡¯t positive didn¡¯t mean I wouldn¡¯t be able to learn something new about the Astral River and how the Universe was fundamentally held together.


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    And so, I started watching, observing as the strands of power kept vibrating, twisting and changing. I had no idea what prompted the ripple, if the earthquake was a symptom of the ripple, or the ripple a consequence of the earthquake or both effects caused by a third, as of yet unknown, event. Whatever the case, just watching what was happening was quite interesting, the effects so widespread and impactful that I wasn¡¯t sure where to start considering them. As I was watching, my mind began to start constructing hypotheses, especially when I realised that the ripple had subtly but likely permanently altered the Astral River. Driven it deeper into the fabric of reality, to the point that I wondered if what I was seeing at the moment was merely a temporary state, a web spread across the first of possibly many layers of reality that made up Terra. Akin to liquid getting absorbed into a sponge, the sponge getting heavier with each dose of liquid that was absorbed, each absorption sending ripples through us, who were living on top of the sponge. Or maybe I was speculating completely off-base and imagining connections where there were none. With only my own perspective, it was difficult to separate what was caused by my interpretation of reality and what were actual facts about reality.


    Finally, after about an hour of watching the strands of power vibrate and quite a few new strands carrying Death Astral Power form within the layer of reality that I could currently look at, the Astral River was quiet enough that I began considering how I could reach Lenore.


    If I used the logic I had used back on Mundus, when trying to talk to the Grandmother at a distance, I would have to travel through the Astral River in an attempt to reach her. But that didn¡¯t feel like a possible solution, at least not with my current level of power. I had barely been able to reach the Grandmother when I was half a continent away, with a much higher level than I currently had, so trying to reach Lenore when she was in an entirely different world, likely a different iteration of reality or however the separation worked? That didn¡¯t seem feasible.


    But I still had the memory of my bond, an echo that I could feel even now. Back on Mundus, we had been tightly linked to the point that, if we moved our minds together, there was little separation between them, even without shifting into our Avatar Form. In the Avatar Form, we had been one.


    Drawing from deep within me, I tried to send power, infused with a strand of my thought and memories, through the bond I remembered, the phantom sensation still present. The process was similar to the way I had communicated with her while we remained bonded, only that now, I was adding a large amount of Power, shaped with my Mind Magic, to the impulse, simply to cover the distance. I had no idea if what I was doing was feasible or if I was simply sending Astral Power, thoughts and memories into the void, to never be seen again. I was somewhat confident that I wasn¡¯t just sending them into the Astral River, the mental direction for that wasn¡¯t quite right, but I had no idea where the power actually went.


    I couldn¡¯t smell it in the air around me, so I was somewhat confident that I wasn¡¯t just sitting in a cloud of my own Astral Power but that idea only went so far. I could feel the drain on my Astral Power, so I knew I was sending it somewhere, but if things worked out as I wanted? I had simply no idea and no way to check.


    And so, after some ten minutes of shouting into the void without getting a reply, I calmed my mind once more, letting the Astral Power I had expended get restored by drinking from the Astral River. The river tasted of far more Death than it had before, and a little more than I was comfortable with, but it wasn¡¯t bad enough to harm me.


    Shaking my head, I opened my eyes once more, leaning against the tower and staring back out into the night. Somehow, it seemed the night was a little brighter than before, but I wasn¡¯t sure where that could be coming from.


    Alas, it wasn¡¯t about to become clear because I was sitting up on the maintenance platform and so, after another thirty minutes of staring into the void and letting my mind roam, I started to make my way back to the ground and towards my lair.


    It had been an interesting night. Weird and scary but interesting.

 Interlude: Exodus

    Humans could get used to anything. In this case, the people living at Wu¡¯s Gym had gotten used to the earthquakes, despite the fact that earthquakes hadn¡¯t happened where they lived. Sadly, the change, as some called it, had, well, changed that. No longer did they enjoy tectonic stability, instead the earth would start to shake at random times, or maybe mostly random. Somehow, the quakes happened disproportionally often at night, making sure that people couldn¡¯t get a good night¡¯s sleep.


    In this case, the earthquake was enough to bring down one of the nearby buildings, making an incredible amount of noise and waking everybody who had been trying to sleep up. And, for once, that was a good thing.


    Just after the quake hit, one of the spellcasters, trained by the rather creepy, yet useful, Miss Jacobs raised the alarm. Wu Chenhua, the owner of the gym, had been dreading this, ever since the possibility had been raised. Raising, that was the problem, or rather rising. The petite and pale girl she had been training for years had suggested that the dead might not rest as easily as they had before the change had hit, that they might decide to rise again if enough of them were piled together or there was a powerful source of Death Magic.


    She had talked to Cassie Grim, also known as the Denmother, a small but stout girl around the same age as Samantha, who had also played that strange game. While the Denmother had sounded far less secure in her words, she had done some strange divination ritual, asking the gods for guidance, or at least so she said. It might have been just some spiel to buy herself time to consider the options or to make herself seem more knowledgeable, either way, by the end of it, she, too, had been scared. Just as scared as Wu Chenhua, who had realised that trying to stay in the city wasn''t a viable long-term strategy, not unless they could find a way to bury or cremate the countless dead bodies.


    The death toll of the change had been astronomical, with not just countless dead people but also dead pets and dead pests. Just because a rat wasn¡¯t mourned didn¡¯t mean their body wouldn¡¯t decompose and potentially add toxins to the environment.


    And so, they had prepared to leave the town, leave behind whatever they had to and retreat out into the open. For weeks, they had been preparing, shifting supplies and people out to the farm where another group had sought shelter, dreading that they might not have enough time to shift everything. People from both groups, the one holed up at the Gym and the group that had sought shelter at the YMCA under the leadership of the Denmother, had worked together, gathering more and more supplies, as everything they couldn¡¯t take would soon be lost. And now, it seemed to be clear that their time was up. Whatever else they wanted to take, they would have to move, and move now.


    They had discussed whether it was better to move during the night or wait until morning and ultimately decided that it would be better to move quickly, hoping that moving immediately would limit the number of zombies that managed to rise. One theory had been that it would take time for the death magic to reanimate the various bodies, so with each hour that went by, more bodies would be moving about. Another had suggested that, just like the Shattered, the undead would start out weak and get stronger as time passed. Either way, the longer they waited the greater the danger to their flesh and brains would be. Sadly, there was only a single local politician at the gym, for once the brainless morons in the government could have been useful. After all, it was well known that zombies hunted for brains and they would have been perfectly invisible to them. Alas, it was not to be.


    When the alarm was raised, previously discussed plans went into action, people were roused from their beds and forced to move, instead of trying to get back to sleep. The grousing and groaning was heard throughout the neighbourhood and might possibly have delayed what came next.


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    For about half an hour, the people could move about freely, following the prepared plans to get as much of the remaining equipment out, but their grace period didn¡¯t last. As if to reply to the groaning and moaning that had been going on in the gym, a type of noise that had been quite frequent in those sweat-stained halls, the undead outside were beginning to make their way towards the building.


    The guards, situated on the rooftops in good Korean fashion, had been waiting for them. While they lacked the automatic weapons their spiritual predecessors had used, they had their bows and one of them even had some magic. Not enough to truly focus on it, but he had managed to channel a bit of it through his bow, giving his arrows just a little more oomph.


    Once fighting broke out, the plans to gather supplies were abandoned and instead everybody took up their specific loads and people started to move. It was a weird procession, the night pushed back by a few magical lights that kept floating above them, courtesy of one of their spellcasters, while the strongest fighters were on the edge of the group, ready to push back any enemies that engaged.


    And engaged, they were. As soon as they left the area previously guarded by the roof Koreans, the undead started coming for them. The only upside was that the differences between these undead and the Shattered they had been facing since the change were rather insignificant, both were similarly mindless, with tough bodies and a general lack of agility that they compensated for with their strength.


    Thanks to the training the various fighters had against Shattered, the large group could continue on their path virtually unimpeded. At least until they began running into groups of zombies. The undead had only started to get up and gather, which was drawing in Shattered that began leading those groups. The higher level of the Shattered, thanks to their weeks of prior existence, made it so that the zombies easily folded under their command, forming into mobs led by the more powerful creatures. These mobs were slowing the survivors down, but thanks to the magical support from the Denmother and quite a few other spellcasters, the leading edge of survivors could cut through the resistance and make it to the edge of town.


    Dawn was still a few hours away but now, the second obstacle on their path was before them. The fields around town had turned incredibly dangerous as the domesticated animals reared on various farms and ranches had undergone the change and returned to a more primal existence. No more pushing around a cow weighing ten times as much as the farmer, no more raising pigs to face the butcher. The beasts of the field were more numerous than the people and could use their weight and the weight of their numbers to their full advantage. Sure, pound for pound the fighters amongst the survivors were far more powerful but the problem was, the beasts had far more pounds on their side.


    Luckily, the beasts had been spooked by the shaking earth and the intense Death Magic that radiated outwards from the town. Just like the survivors inside the town, they could instinctively feel it and knew that getting some distance was only prudent.


    But that went only for the wild beasts. When the procession of about two-hundred people made it out of town, they were greeted by a group they hadn¡¯t expected. But then, nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition, or, apparently, the Army of Dog.


    Led by a large, familiar to some, canine, two dozen dogs came bounding across the fields, forming into a protective formation around the group. Said familiar canine let out a few barks and growls, trying to get the stupid two-legs to fall in with their formation, but sadly, none of the two-legs could speak their language.


    With their new canine guardians, the group made their way across the fields. Where a single person, or a small group, moving as quickly as they could, would have made it across within about thirty minutes, the large group took quite a bit more time. But they made it across and luckily, they didn¡¯t get into any beef on their way.


    As the sun was just starting to show its presence behind the distant horizon, the guards around Apple Gate Farm noticed the incoming group. And for once, they weren¡¯t surprised by someone sneaking up on them. Though, with the large, glowing orbs summoned to let the people see, that wasn¡¯t much of a surprise.


    Finally, the two groups had made it to the land that promised them shelter, the Apple Gate Farm.

 Chapter 757

    When I returned to the brewery, things were weirdly quiet. Normally, some of the dogs under Silva¡¯s leadership were in the area, making just enough noise to be audible to someone with my hearing. But now, there was nothing, just silence, eerie enough to make me wary.


    With weapon in hand and my frozen Shuttle floating above my shoulder, I made my way to the door, silently pushing it open. I heard a noise in one of the rooms and continued forward, pushing my concealment to the maximum when a figure burst from the door and my Frozen Shuttle shot forward. Just before the weapon struck true, I recognised the figure ahead and felt Bullet Time and Overflow activate, allowing me to force a tremendous amount of power into my Ice Magic, pushing it far enough to twist the shuttle aside.


    ¡°Mistress?!¡± Lia let out a terrified squeak, the near-miss of my deadly projectile enough to send her stumbling to the ground. For a moment, I felt truly bad when looking at her wide eyes, especially when tears started to form. I was pretty sure that those didn¡¯t come from physical pain, but whether they were purely manipulative or due to the shock of almost having her head taken off, I wasn¡¯t sure.


    Either way, I didn¡¯t like the heavy feeling in my gut, so I stepped forward, offering my daughter minion follower whatever a hand to stand back up. I had to brace myself a little, but it wasn¡¯t too bad.


    ¡°So, where are the dogs?¡± I asked, curious about what had happened here.


    ¡°I decided to just walk around this area a little,¡± I noticed a strange hesitation in her voice, as if she was trying to hide something, ¡°and when the earthquake hit, I came back. The dogs came running past me, but I didn¡¯t want to head out with them, simply because the sun is going to rise soon. I didn¡¯t want to get caught outside,¡± she admitted, looking down.


    ¡°Just walked around the area?¡± I prodded, causing her head to tilt forward even more, as she studied the ground.


    ¡°...the trees,¡± she muttered something, but her voice was so quiet that I only caught the last two words.


    ¡°What about the trees?¡± I refused to back down and kept prodding until she finally burst.


    ¡°I was jumping between the trees!¡± she yelled, only for her hands to shoot up and cover her mouth. For a moment, I wasn¡¯t sure how to react, but I knew, if Lia were a human, her face would be red enough that I¡¯d start to worry about the amount of blood left for the rest of her body. Her blush would likely be hot enough to cause a heat-flare detectable from outer space, but luckily, Vampires weren¡¯t as susceptible to such physical reactions. Or maybe she simply didn¡¯t have enough blood to support them, I wasn¡¯t sure.


    ¡°Did you fall?¡± I couldn¡¯t help but ask, when I realised what likely happened when a quake hits while jumping from tree to tree. She didn¡¯t answer, only shrunk in on herself, staring at her feet. I really shouldn¡¯t have laughed at that, but somehow, I just couldn¡¯t help myself and started chuckling. My mirth only caused Lia to shrink further, to the point that we were at roughly equal height, quite the feat considering that she started out over a head taller than me until I managed to get control of myself. Reaching out, I pulled her into a hug, trying to apologise for embarrassing her, while also trying to console her likely hurt feelings.


    ¡°Are you hurt, little one? Did you fall? Do you need some power?¡± I asked, gently stroking her back while she started to quietly sniffle, before returning the hug. She didn¡¯t quite start crying but simply buried her head in my shoulder, strangely hunched over as she was.


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    To a part of me, the act of hugging and trying to comfort her as her emotions boiled over felt completely right, like something I was supposed to do. To another part, the very same act felt alien and uncomfortable, as I really didn¡¯t know what I actually was doing. Was I doing the right thing or was I making matters worse?


    For a moment, an image flashed before my eyes, from decades ago. I had just started primary school and there had been some issues with my classmates. By the end of the day that shall never be spoken of again, I was screaming until the anger turned into a rather epic crying fit. Even back then, I had no idea why my body was acting as it did, my mind was struggling to constrain my body, as everything spun out of control. My mother had held me back then, trying to soothe me, sadly with limited success.


    Luckily, Lia didn¡¯t go into any sort of epic fit, she merely hugged the stuffing out of me and sniffled a little into my shoulder before calming back down. I kept a hold of her, until she straightened back out, looking at me with a strange shimmer in her eyes.


    ¡°It¡¯s okay,¡± she assured me, possibly realising that I was more than a little freaked out, ¡°And yes, I fell while jumping. Might be the first time that a tree dodged someone, instead of someone dodging a tree,¡± she grinned, causing me to snort in amusement.


    ¡°Possibly, though I wouldn¡¯t be too confident about it. There were quite a few trees on Mundus that could dodge, and many more that would simply club you out of the air. Just because we consider trees rather stationary doesn¡¯t mean that is always the case. Magic, and all that,¡± I reminded her. She only shook her head in disbelief, something I could readily understand. The only seriously weird creatures she had seen were the Undead in the Dark Slaughterhouse, and even amongst them, only the second boss, aka the Chicken Shredder, had been truly weird. The rest were relatively normal, at least for Undead.


    ¡°But in regards to falling, it happens to the best of us. Maybe not quite like that, but unforeseen circumstances can make everyone stumble or fall flat on their face. But I¡¯d still like to know why all the dogs ran off, there¡¯s got to be something important going on,¡± I grumbled, thinking the events through once more.


    ¡°During that earthquake, there was a weird wave of magic, wasn¡¯t there?¡± Lia asked, looking at me thoughtfully.


    ¡°Well, yeah,¡± I shrugged, ¡°Those waves happened before, though the ¡®flavour¡¯ varies, this time, the wave was attuned to Death.¡±


    ¡°And that means what? I mean, when I hear ¡®Wave of Death¡¯, I don¡¯t get the nicest imagery in my mind, could the dogs have tried to run away from it?


    ¡°Didn¡¯t they run towards the city? That¡¯s where I felt the wave coming from, at least locally,¡± I tried to remember that moment, there had been a lot of subtle power in the air, nothing concentrated enough to harm, but,¡± Oh¡­,¡± I felt my heart skip a beat as realisation washed over me.


    ¡°The Wave wasn¡¯t concentrated enough to harm living beings, not unless those living beings are either incredibly weak or already wounded. So the ancient, infirm or infant. And even infants might survive, I¡¯m not really sure how it works. But I think what the wave did, was wake up all those already dead. Remember what I¡¯ve warned Mrs Wu about?¡± I explained, before trying to turn it into a teaching moment.


    ¡°You mean that the dead don¡¯t necessarily stay that way?¡± Lia asked, her eyes going wide when I nodded.


    ¡°So all the people who died and weren¡¯t properly buried are now walking around as zombies?¡± she continued, looking decidedly disturbed when I nodded again.


    ¡°Scratch the ¡®properly buried¡¯, at least I think you should. I doubt that the traditional pre-change burials would be enough to truly consecrate the ground after the change hit. It might carry over, but unless the dead were burned, I wouldn¡¯t bet that they won¡¯t walk again,¡± I added, causing her to glare at me. Maybe sometimes, ignorance was truly bliss.


    ¡°The dogs probably realised that, at least Silva might have, even without her connection to Hecate. She might have led the dogs to escort the people at the Gym, Goddess knows that they might need help to get across the field,¡± I paused, realising what I had just said and let out a snort, ¡°Yeah, might even be literally, Goddess knows and Goddess sent her canine protector to make sure the people get here. Or maybe not, I¡¯m not sure,¡± I shook my head, not sure how to take that.


    ¡°We can¡¯t really help them, even if we wanted to, right?¡± Lia quietly asked, knowing that the Sun might rise before we get anyone to safety.


    ¡°Not really, no,¡± I admitted, ¡°We¡¯ve managed to work around our Curse quite well, but sometimes, it truly is a curse,¡± I complained, hoping that Silva would manage to get the people out. Hecate willing, she would manage.

 Chapter 758

    After Lia and I theorised what might have happened with the wave, we did the only intelligent thing. First, I fed Lia, then we went to bed. The feeding was still a somewhat surreal experience, somewhere between what I imagined nursing a baby would feel like, feeding a pet and caring for a child, only that there were some rather disturbing sexual undertones as well. It was something I refused to think about, especially given that Lia still wanted to kneel before me when I fed her, something I had yet to break her of. Luckily, the feeding was the only act between us that carried uncomfortable sexual undertones, when hugging her or even letting her use me as a teddy bear at night, there was nothing of that sort. Just an almost childlike dependence, a desire for comfort and protection. Otherwise, I might have already fled, taking only Silva with me.


    It felt a little weird, just going to bed while knowing there might be a crisis brewing nearby but there was really nothing we could do. With dawn almost upon us, we couldn¡¯t head out thanks to our curse so we may as well be rested for the night and get something done then.


    As I was sleeping, I could faintly hear something, it was almost akin to a song in a language I had long forgotten. And yet, despite there being no words I knew, sometimes no words at all, I was somewhat confident that there was a meaning to the sounds. Just what meaning, I wasn¡¯t sure but I had a feeling I would eventually understand it.


    Sadly, the dream didn¡¯t make much more sense upon waking. Maybe I just couldn¡¯t remember all of it, maybe there was something more hidden in the depths of my mind, but what I remembered just didn¡¯t feel like it was all there was to it. As if I was watching a movie without sound, or experiencing music by only feeling the vibrations of a speaker with my hands, without it being transmitted through the air.


    I gave myself until I was done with my breakfast to figure something out but afterwards, I wanted to do something productive. Namely, work in my ever-growing laboratory.


    There, I was soon tinkering with some of the herbs we had found, trying to figure out that whole ¡®Alchemy¡¯ business. I tried to list the different substances I detected as magical and sort them by flavour and hue, using my magical senses. The idea was that similar flavours and hues would hopefully go together to strengthen each other, ultimately giving me something that would create that effect. So if I mixed berry juice, the extract of leaves and crushed grass, all of which smelled of warm, loamy earth to me and looked a rich, golden brown, then I would get the effect corresponding to that warm, loamy sensation. Hopefully, such an effect would be something positive that I could put into a bottle for use, possibly as fertiliser if that loamy sensation corresponded to fertility or nature magic, which my gut told me it did. If so, I might have taken the first step to create a magical fertiliser. While not necessarily what I would have thought of first when considering Alchemy, that was reserved for things like healing or mana-potions, the fertiliser might be the most useful in our situation. And given that I wasn¡¯t sure Astral Power Potions, the logical equivalent to mana potions in the pre-change rpgs, were even possible, it would have to do.


    Similarly, I wasn¡¯t sure health potions would be possible, certainly not some sort of cure-all type thing that healed a body back to perfect health simply by drinking it. If there were such a thing, how would the medication know when to stop? Pure healing, pure tissue growth, could easily turn into pure, uncontrolled cancer, likely just as lethal as whatever wound the person had suffered before. Unless the potion wasn¡¯t so much a healing tonic as a potion to restore the body to a previously held state. But even that had problems, namely how to differentiate between positive and negative changes? Memories were, at least partially, created and stored in the physical brain, which in turn was part of the body-mind-soul complex.


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    Not something I wanted to mess around with. Sure, I might be able to find some test-subjects out there, human or others, but for now, I didn¡¯t want to overdo things.


    I was just contemplating how to best test my new substance, likely by simply pouring it over a potted plant or something like that, when the sounds of barking intruded on my domain. Frowning, I decided to head upstairs to find out what was going on. Normally, Silva and her pack didn¡¯t bark during the daytime, not even when there was trouble, as neither Lia nor I could really help them. At best, I could act as long-ranged support by launching magic from inside the house but even that had massive limitations. My Ice-Magic didn¡¯t like to be in sunlight, to the point that anything but tightly woven Ice, like the Frozen Shuttle, could withstand it for long. If I just casually conjured an Icicle, chances were it would dissolve before getting anywhere.


    Following the barking sounds, I moved to the backdoor and pulled it open, steadily stepping back to stay out of the light. Even the indirect sunlight was uncomfortable, making me wish for far more clouds in the sky. Alas, there were only a few, with a brilliantly blue sky everywhere else. Back before the change, I would have considered it a nearly perfect day but now, I could only hide enviously. Such was the nature of my curse.


    Outside, there wasn¡¯t just Silva, who I had expected, but she was with a few familiar faces, namely Aiko, the Flesh- and Nature-Mage and Ling, the Weather-Mage. Or whatever their classes were called now, I could easily feel that they had cracked level 10 but had yet to find out what class they had gained.


    ¡°Greetings, teacher,¡± the two greeted me, almost speaking in synch. ¡°You are looking a little pale, is everything alright?¡± Ling added, sounding concerned.


    ¡°Greetings, students,¡± I returned the greeting, before stepping back even further, ¡°Don¡¯t worry about my pallor, everything is as it should be. You are welcome to enter if you seek further instruction. Let us share knowledge, to instruct and be instructed in turn.¡±


    ¡°We would be honoured. In addition, Mrs Wu asked us to tell you about recent events. She informed us that you predicted our plight, allowing her to make preparations and plan for the worst. It turned out, your predictions were remarkably correct,¡± Aiko told me, with Ling nodding along. For a moment, I wondered about that, normally I would have expected Ling, as the elder, to speak but it wasn¡¯t truly important how the social norms were developing.


    Curious but not important.


    The two entered my domain and for a moment, I considered taking them down into the cellar but decided against it. Instead, I led them into the kitchen, quickly starting to make tea. It wasn¡¯t just a polite gesture on my part, but a demonstration. First, I conjured the water with nothing but a wave of my hand, channelling the Water-Rune internally, allowing me to conjure water using Water-Magic without it being too inefficient. It was something I had done with Ice on occasion, but here, the water was the more important.


    Next, I closed my eyes and turned my back to them, to conceal the use of Overflow, as my rudimentary fire magic heated the water to a boil. It was horribly inefficient, but it was a worthwhile use of my magic, especially when I turned around, casually stirring the boiling water with my water magic as I added the tea leaves. Those were of my personal stock, carefully liberated from a rather expensive shop after the change and not something I used casually, as I doubted that I¡¯d get more, at least not easily.


    ¡°Please, tell me about your experiences during the night,¡± I asked, setting the tea between us to let it steep. ¡°Yesterday¡¯s earthquake was strong enough to wake the dead, I presume?¡±


    ¡°That is one way to put it, yes,¡± Ling nodded, sounding a little strained, ¡°Let me tell you what happened to us, as we enjoy the tea. It already smells delicious and I certainly could use some good tea, after the night we had,¡± she admitted with a wry smile, before launching into a story of a midnight escape, guided by magical lights and fighting against ever-growing groups of undead. It was quite the tale, especially when she began to describe the combined groups of Shattered and Undead, which was something I hadn¡¯t foreseen.


    But ultimately, the dead rising only meant that there were more bodies for me to destroy, more EXP to be harvested.


    I only had to wait until the harvest was ripe, so I could gain a decent amount of EXP. And before that, I could keep training my students, it had been a good source of EXP and new ideas and skills for my magic.

 Chapter 759

    ¡°You should have the other dogs start to accompany the people at Apple Gate Farm. Getting them used to humans is the smart thing. I¡¯ve got little doubt that humans, or at least culture-making races, will regain their superiority in time. Hitching your fate to them from the start will likely benefit dogs as a whole,¡± I quietly advised Silva, as the three of us were setting out from our lair.


    The sun had recently set and we had set out to check the undead in town, to see their levels and how they moved, all those somewhat interesting things. If it proved worthwhile, we¡¯d kill a couple of them, but that was something we had to see. Silva, after listening to my advice, gave a little huff and stared at me, as if trying to tell me something.


    ¡°Eh, I don¡¯t think that joining with me will prove useful in the long run. I¡¯ve got plans to reign supreme, but my plans only call for a somewhat limited territory I totally control. A realm of Ice, snow and darkness, all for myself, but I doubt that the dogs would enjoy living in such a territory. Lia might thrive there, we¡¯ll have to see how Vampires develop, if she can even spread her gift to others, I just don¡¯t know,¡± I admitted, looking over to my other companion, wondering just how vampiric the race I had made was. Could she make more like her, if yes, what did she need? Maybe it would become obvious once she overcame the first, or maybe second, divide, maybe it relied completely on instinct or on me. Hopefully not on me, I doubted there¡¯d ever be enough vampires to make their original creation worthwhile if I had to make them, one at a time. That would be an incredibly tedious process, especially given that I had no actual control over them. Creating an army was well and good but creating and army I couldn¡¯t control? That didn¡¯t sound like a good time.


    ¡°Maybe we should experiment some more with creating more like me. It might just work out now, you¡¯ve grown stronger than when making me, haven¡¯t you? And I have grown stronger, too, so I might be able to spread the gift by myself,¡± Lia mused, looking quite interested in the idea, ¡°I mean, most groups hunt with five people, we are the only group moving with three, if we count Silva,¡± at that, Silva let out an audible growl, making her disdain at the idea that she shouldn¡¯t count as a full member of our group clearly known.


    ¡°Yes, I know, you are stronger than any human around, you¡¯re probably still stronger than me, even if I managed to catch up a great deal. But no matter how strong you are, you¡¯ll never be able to wield weapons or most equipment, so there¡¯ll always be something you can¡¯t do, simply because you lack the thumbs,¡± Lia added, managing to straddle the fine line between insulting, mocking and consoling.


    ¡°But she has the support of a Goddess, something the two of us only have indirectly,¡± I reminded Lia, ¡°Where we only have Her blessing, Lia is allowed to directly wield her power, an advantage I wouldn¡¯t discard. I might not worship the deities but even I¡¯m not foolish enough to disregard their power, at least not needlessly. And especially not the power of the being that blessed me, and you, if only by proxy. I have no idea what the Blessing of the Moon actually does, but I¡¯m not one to say no to power gifted to me. Even if there might be a price tag at some point,¡± I rambled, realising once again that I didn¡¯t actually know what my blessing did. Or whether it would cost me something, at some point. There was the saying that nothing in life was ever free, so maybe Hecate would ask for repayment at some point. But hopefully, that was something I wouldn¡¯t have to worry about, at least not immediately. For now, I had my blessing, had it shared with Lia and that was good enough.


    ¡°Think we should,¡± Lia paused, looking up into the cloudy sky, ¡°What would you do for a deity anyway? Blessing of the Moon, or Blessing of the Night, whatever, what would we do if we wanted to show our, what, gratitude?¡± she questioned, obviously as uncertain how to properly pay our respects as I was.


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    ¡°Generally, worship of the deities works by having a congregation gather and through the ceremony led by a priest, Astral Power is gathered and transferred to their deity. That deity can then, in turn, channel Divine Power back to the priest who can use it for fun stuff, at least that¡¯s how it was explained to me,¡± I told Lia, trying to remember the various conversations I had with Olivia on that topic. Hopefully, what was considered true on Mundus would be true here, too. I actually wasn¡¯t confident that the whole world would work under the same rules, so far, I had noticed that a few things hadn¡¯t quite worked the same.


    For example, it felt far too easy to gain the other magical abilities here. I had tried a few times on Mundus, mostly with Water Magic while I had been turning the Water Mirror spell into the basis I later used to scry through shadows, but I had never succeeded. But here, with much lower attributes and little more than disregard for possible failure, I had managed it. To say nothing about my success with the other types of elemental magic, even acquiring Fire Magic, something I would have considered impossible on Mundus.


    ¡°The sending of Astral Power can, as far as I know, be made even more efficient with the right rituals and sacrifices, which in turn gives more power back to the priest who can, in turn, create bigger ¡®miracles¡¯. Mostly on the important festivals of a specific deity, to further their worship,¡± I shrugged, ¡°I¡¯d basically consider it a protection racket, or at least partially mercenary. Gods get power and in turn, give some power back, but only to be doled out by their representatives. And those representatives don¡¯t even get to do with it what they will, they only get to spend it to create specific effects, defined and designed by their deity. So instead of, for example, using a spell and knowing exactly what it does, they ask their boss, ¡®Can you send down healing number fifty-five¡¯, hoping that number fifty-five works in their specific instance,¡± I realised that I was rambling, once again complaining about divine magic and how much of a cop-out it actually was. No investment on the side of the caster, just plain subservience to their patron.


    We continued moving across the fields, while I kept on talking to Silva and Lia about divine magic, its advantages and drawbacks. It was a conversation I had held in the past, only that I had been the one asking, while Olivia had given me the answers, at least the answers from her perspective. A part of me was curious about what a deity would have to say about my interpretation of the interplay between mortal and divine, but I somehow doubted I¡¯d ever get the answers I was interested in. Or maybe I would, but only from a deity as interested in knowledge, magic and exploration as I was. So, from what I understood, I¡¯d either have to ask Loki or Hecate, while every other deity would be liable to send down lightning or whatever the smiting tool of their choice was.


    By the end of my ranting and raving, Lia actually asked a rather insightful and interesting question. Namely, whether or not I¡¯d be able to, basically, empower Silva by sending my own, rather potent, magic through Silva and her ceremonies, whatever that meant in a canine, thus allowing Silva to receive more divine power from Hecate.


    At that point, I had to admit ignorance. I had never considered selling my Astral Power in that manner, even if, amusingly, I didn¡¯t really mind using it to feed Lia. That comparison got a few rather amusing barks from Silva and delighted laughter from Lia, and even I had to chuckle at the idea that deities were simply vampires who had taken out blood as the transfer medium.


    But it made me wonder, was that possible? And if yes, would Silva actually want to go down that route? She used her magic as little as possible, literally only when there was no other choice. To defend others, or when the only way to survive was calling on Hecate. Otherwise, she was quite happy to keep it to her natural weapons and abilities.


    ¡°What do you think, Silva? And how do you pray anyway? Howl to the moon? Bark as you chase after the postman? Could I even join you, what with the language barrier? I certainly won¡¯t be able to repeat some prayer after you,¡± I mused, somewhat amused at the idea.


    Maybe it even had merit, I¡¯d have to look into it at some point. But for now, there was a city filled with undead ahead, and I was curious about what differences the previous night had wrought.

 Chapter 760

    Getting to the edge of town was trivial. The beasts that had roamed the fields during prior nights were gone, they likely fled during the night and when we reached the town, I realised I really couldn¡¯t fault them for it. When we left the city, the smell had started to get truly bad. Not bad enough to cause physical pain but bad enough that staying was incredibly unpleasant. Thoughts of a sewage treatment plant in the heat of summer came to mind, or something equally disgusting, but compared to the odour we were bathed on our approach, that had been a pleasant summer breeze.


    ¡°Do we really want to head in there?¡± Lia quietly asked and for a moment, I wondered if we truly did. There were EXP to be made, sure, but what use did EXP have, when we lost our sense of smell, and, given how vile it was, likely taste as well. As if to agree with Lia, Silva started to let out pitiful whines, making her opinion on the matter clearly known.


    ¡°We should at least try to get used to it. Maybe if we climb one of the buildings, that way we can secure the high ground, make sure our enemies can¡¯t get to us, all that good stuff. Hopefully, the scent is concentrated at ground level, not up in the air,¡± I suggested, before pausing for a moment, as realisation dawned on me.


    Smells were carried through the air, carried by the wind. If so, I might be able to ward them off, by using Wind Magic, or maybe a bit of Wind Rune Mastery and a lot of focus and intent. A filter, so to speak, as simply keeping the air around us moving wouldn¡¯t help a lot, the stench was everywhere, so moving the air would only get us fresh stench from the area around us.


    Focusing on my Wind Magic, on the movement of air to get into the right mindset, I tried to fix the image in my mind that a gentle breeze constantly carried fresh, unsullied air to me. The idea was somewhat similar to my concealment spells, only that now, I was lacking a direct rune and the best I could come up with was the generic wind rune, keeping it firmly fixed within my mind.


    It took me a minute or two of mental testing, prodding and pushing, but I managed to get a gentle breeze, one that even smelled quite good. I was about to rejoice when I realised that the testing had taken quite a bit of Astral Power and keeping the breeze going took even more. I might, possibly, be able to keep it up, but it would require me to submerge my secondary thought stream into the Astral River to draw in more power, while the rest of my mind was focused on keeping the wind magic going. No fighting, not even without my magic, making the idea sadly unsustainable, at least for now. But just dipping into the experimental frame of mind had been enough to briefly activate my Titanic Ambition, the overall boost to my attributes allowing me to easily push aside the obstacle in my path. I wouldn¡¯t be hindered by something as mundane as malodour. It was merely physical discomfort, nothing that would truly harm us, at least not if we took the right precautions.


    But thanks to my experimentation, I had gained another point in my Wind Magic, bringing the skill up to a mighty eight. It still had a long, long way to go. Luckily, I didn¡¯t really need to master the different elements, certainly not in the short term, it was a long-term project if there ever was one. Just like gaining more elements, like Nature Magic I had been discussing with my students the other day, or Alchemy, where I had a few ideas that might prove useful.


    Alas, before I could continue experimenting, I wanted to find out just how many undead there were and how dangerous it all was.


    Given that none of us had any interest in getting mobbed by shambling corpses, we made sure to remain quiet, concealed by magic and ever-growing skills, as we made our way through the town. By now, the once-prosperous town looked rather demolished, with about a third of the buildings damaged or outright destroyed by the earthquakes, the many undead shambling around only adding to the atmosphere of desolation. All around us, I could feel the Astral River, the very essence of this world, get influenced, as if the world itself was getting a depression.


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    There would be long-term effects but even just trying to understand them was nearly impossible. It might cause a new dark age, with only a few clusters of light left in the world. A snort escaped me, when I realised that this might just be what the deities had intended. A few clusters of light, their light, allowing their worship to become the bedrock of a new, rising society. There would be no questioning their priests if those priests were what drove back the darkness. Make the world sick, before providing the cure.


    Shaking my head, I looked around and pointed to one of the remaining high buildings. It looked a little crumbled, some parts of the facade had crashed down, but otherwise, there didn¡¯t seem to be a problem. It stood alone, giving me confidence that only the stairs and maybe the walls would allow access to the roof, something I thought important.


    ¡°How confident are you that we¡¯ll be able to kill everything that might come at us?¡± Lia asked quietly, as we made our way up the stairs.


    ¡°Relatively confident, I don¡¯t know whether the world threw a curveball at this area, but I strongly doubt that there¡¯s anything with enough power to stand against me. Just think how difficult some of your battles were, how often you might have died if Silva and I hadn¡¯t helped you. And that was with your, frankly, insane attribute boosts for being the first of your kind,¡± I reminded her, ¡°And now, consider that even with that, I have quite a few levels on you and that I have my own attribute-boosting trait. So unless there¡¯s something out here that is strong enough to kill all the survivors with ease, I should be able to handle things, at least if you and Silva make sure I have room to work.¡±


    ¡°So, confident but not certain?¡± Lia prodded, making me nod with a frown.


    ¡°Mind if we make sure to have a second exit? I don¡¯t care if it¡¯s a slide that you conjure or a rope that we can glide down with, just something to make sure we can get off the roof before dawn. I don¡¯t quite know what sunlight would do to you, but the few tests I¡¯ve done convinced me to never chance getting roasted,¡± she implored and looking at it this way, I could only agree.


    The undead didn¡¯t have to kill us, just clogging up things to the point that the sun came out would be enough to put Lia and me out of commission. Maybe Silva would manage to protect us, but it was doubtful.


    ¡°How good are you with your hook-chain?¡± I asked, referring to the thing she had taken from the dungeon. That led into a brief discussion of potential ways to get off the roof, if we really needed to escape, the ideas ranging from the frankly hilarious, a waterslide of conjured Ice depositing us down the road, to the incredibly painful, jumping off the roof, aiming for a nearby tree, while hoping that I could heal any injuries sustained by the impact, before we decided on a reasonably workable plan.


    Namely, that I would Ice over the sides of the building, maybe a metre from the top, which was a good idea anyway to make sure no undead could bypass the stairs, and if need be, I could transform the conjured Ice into an escape ramp. It wouldn¡¯t take us all the way to the ground but it should be enough to reach the next building, a rather damaged supermarket. From there, we¡¯d be able to make our way to the ground without too much trouble.


    The preparations too more time than I would have liked, it all cut into our killing time, but if they turned out to be necessary, I knew we¡¯d be glad for them.


    Soon, the building¡¯s top was nicely iced over, I even conjured some water to make the ice extra slick, to the point that there were no handholds anywhere in sight. The only way to climb that last metre of space would be to break the ice or use claws to pierce into it or something like that.


    Hopefully, it would be enough.


    Now, we just had to draw in our first enemies and start the harvest.

 Chapter 761

    Our battle on the rooftop had started in a rather anticlimactic way, after preparing our defences, I had stood at the edge of the roof and started launching hailstones at the undead shambling around down in the streets. I even managed to get one Shattered with a nicely placed Icicle, putting just a little extra oomph into a hailstone and sharpening it with Ice Magic, so that it had the strength to rip off the Shattered¡¯s arm, leaving a gaping hole in its torso.


    That opening salvo was enough to draw the attention of everything moving down there, both Shattered and Undead alike. It was interesting to watch, the Shattered let out keening cries that seemed to carry on forever but the Undead didn¡¯t appear to communicate at all. They simply turned, the movement carrying on in an almost ripple-like wave, and started towards the building. Their movement wasn¡¯t smooth, agile or anything the like, but from above, I got the impression that they were like waves on the shore. One would break, two would break but ultimately, the waves would wash over the shore. Unless the tide ended and the flow ebbed off. But as long as the tide was coming, the shore was destined to lose. Inevitable, that was the best word to describe their advance.


    But what advantage they had in strength, resilience and mindless courage, they lacked in agility, dexterity and intelligence. A few tried to climb the side of the building, but none of the Undead managed to get higher than the first floor before falling back down, landing on their brethren and causing them to collapse in graceless heaps. A few times, I took that as an invitation to lob a specially prepared Icicle at such a heap, the projectile spearing through multiple bodies before coming to a halt. Those shots managed to cause quite a bit of damage and havoc, as the undead weren¡¯t smart enough to remove the Icicle one by one, they more or less tore each other apart to get rid of the restraint. It was in those moments, that I wished I had learned the Rune for Shatter already, as causing my Icicles to burst apart in a rain of deadly, razor-sharp fragments would make my attacks even better. Or if I somehow managed to get those coveted fireballs, I could easily see those zombies turn into wonderful human torches, their clothes and hair were covered in a mix of oily grease and dried blood.


    But that idea, the idea of using massive area attacks against them, gave me a different way to approach things. Moving over to the stairwell, where Lia and Silva had taken position to prevent the undead from reaching the roof, I started to set my idea into motion.


    Sadly, that meant I got up close and personal with my first undead. It turned out to be an even greater challenge than I had expected, though maybe I should have. The problem wasn¡¯t their prowess in physical combat, of which they had little, but their powerful innate olfactory defence. If the smell around town had been bad, getting close enough to them to strike took that up to eleven, with the potential to reach a fifteen if the undead was struck the wrong way.


    Alas, if I wanted to do more than decimate them, if I wanted to annihilate them, I had to get close. Though, when I Observe¡¯d the first of the undead I came across, learning that it was only level eight, I began to reconsider. Did I really want to kill them all, or would it be better to kill a few of them, try to go for the Shattered mixed into their number, before retreating?


    Something to consider for later, for now, killing those that attacked us would give us the best and most comfortable way off the roof and it would give us a good idea how much EXP killing a horde would give us.


    ¡°Push them back,¡± I ordered Lia and Sivla, pausing when I realised that Silva was barely effective against them. She just wasn¡¯t willing to bite into the rotting bodies, and even Lia had taken up the cleaver from the Dark Slaughterhouse, preferring to hack into the bodies and kick them back, instead of tearing into them with her claws. Given the state of decay these bodies were in, I couldn¡¯t really fault them, especially when the gunk started to splatter.


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    Staying close behind my two companions, I started to draw runes into the air, nothing really special, simply my usual mist, only that instead of confusion, I added a cold rune. I didn¡¯t want the undead confused so that they might wander off, I wanted them to be completely and utterly focused on us so that they would take the direct path up the stairs and into our waiting attacks.


    Dense, freezing cold, mist started to pour out of the runic formation and I had another interesting idea. I had never really tried to increase the distance between a runic formation that I poured power into and myself, to move away from the spot I had cast it from. So, in the spirit of experiment and finding out something new, I slowly and carefully started to move back, keeping a close watch on the stream of power between myself and the rune. I wanted to keep it going, I wanted to keep track of the efficiency so that I wasn¡¯t just pouring power into the air between myself and the rune, and I wanted to give Lia and Silva some space, so that they could remain behind the rune, forcing the Undead to wander a little further within the freezing mist.


    Curiously, I could faintly see the connection between myself and the rune as a stream of silvery power, intermixed with streaks of red and black, likely for the Devour and Blood Runes within the formation. The efficiency went down a little as I increased the distance but for now, that didn¡¯t mean much thanks to my Titanic Ambition. By experimenting, even in the middle of battle, I triggered the trait, doubling my attributes and giving me a whole lot more power to work with.


    ¡°You can step back, behind the runes,¡± I told the others, my voice tight as I tried to split my focus three ways. I wasn¡¯t quite there yet, but I soon would be. For now, I could channel power into the rune while also keep watch around the roof.


    ¡°Silva, you can help make sure nothing comes up here. If anything manages to climb, push them off,¡± Lia told our canine companion when she realised that the Undead were greatly affected by the freezing cold, making them even slower than normal, to the point that a casual swing with the cleaver finished them off with ease. Some of the Undead likely never made it up the stairs in the first place, the cold, vitality-draining, mist too much for them to bear.


    However, where the Undead were complete and utter trash, harmless if not for their noxious smell, the Shattered had become a lot more dangerous. Even with the barrier of Ice I had set up around the roof, the first of them managed to climb up a few minutes after I filled the building below with freezing mist. Silva was already on the job, while I launched my Frozen Shuttle to distract and injure the Shattered, likely a necessity given that Silva was somewhat hampered in her usual tactics.


    Normally, she would run into the Shattered, using momentum to bowl it over before using her jaw to tear off an arm, or the head if possible. On the roof, trying to bowl an enemy over could easily lead to her going off the edge of the roof, so she had to carefully control her momentum, as much as she might want to try push our enemies off the roof.


    Still, even with controlled momentum, she managed to push the second Shattered off the roof, after the first one fell to our combined assault. She simply dodged the first attack of her opponent, before jumping up on her hindlegs, looking very much like a dog that just wanted to play, only that instead of wagging her tail or trying to lick her target¡¯s face, she pushed off with her front legs, almost moving into a backflip, while the Shattered took three steps back from the push. Only, the roof ended about one and a half steps behind the Shattered, causing it to go careening off the edge, arms windmilling in a rather hilarious fashion. In that brief moment, the creature looked almost human, making me wonder just how much of the person the body used to be was still in there.


    Given Lia¡¯s existence, it wasn¡¯t a question I was willing to dwell on, I had a feeling going that way would lead many people into a place of self-destructive madness. So, better not dwell on it, better not think about it and, most certainly, never talk about the possibility. Leave Shattered as monsters in the night, and try to keep as many people alive as possible.

 Chapter 762

    We might have underestimated just how many Undead would be drawn to our little battle. Instead of maybe a dozen or three enemies, as we would have drawn while Shattered roamed the streets, there were hundreds of them, maybe even a thousand. After a little over an hour, no more enemies managed to reach the roof through the stairs, my magic formation continuously pouring freezingly cold mist down the stair while more and more enemies tried pushing into the house.


    Lia, in a bout of curiosity, made her way down the stairs, braving the cold, vitality-draining mist to find out what happened and came down with a slightly problematic report. We had managed the create a clog, the undead had started to climb across their dead as the mist killed them slowly, but as more and more piled on, they started to freeze until it turned into one big, messy pile of frozen Undead. Most of them had perished but that didn¡¯t mean their bodies disappeared, they simply piled on. Only my mist could get through the narrow gaps between them, and even that only worked in a limited fashion. The pile itself was completely frozen by it, as it started to pool in front of it.


    ¡°So, we need to use another way to get off the roof anyway?¡± I asked once Lia reported to me. She simply nodded, and I looked up, into the sky, to estimate how much of the night we had left. Unless we wanted to spend the day in the city, we would have to leave within the hour, or sunrise might catch us on the way back.


    ¡°Why don¡¯t you go to the edge of the roof, see if you can kill a few of the climbing Shattered, while I pump more magic into the spell I¡¯ve got going? Should spread the mist further, kill a few more undead, and in about thirty minutes, we¡¯ll see about getting off the roof?¡± I asked her, hoping to maximise the number of kills we could accumulate.


    ¡°I wanted to train the use of my hook anyway, maybe even a bit of magic. May I, Mistress? I¡¯d need to drink a bit of your blood, if I push myself,¡± she pleaded, looking quite adorable in her eagerness to use her magical powers on the Shattered that were trying to climb the building. Most of them had failed to get up, the Ice I had conjured a rather formidable barrier to stop them from finding purchase, leaving them in easy range of her attacks. She might even be able to reach them with her claws, but would have to lie flat on the roof and swipe down, not something anyone sane would want to try in a fight. Especially not against enemies that would gladly take the attack, grab her arm and drag her off the roof in response. Shattered didn¡¯t have any real self-preservation drive so a suicidal attack was not unlikely.


    Once the determined time came, I sent one more burst of Astral Power into the formation I had created, mist blasting out and down, spreading a little further before the formation shattered as I stepped away.


    ¡°Let¡¯s go,¡± I told Lia, ¡°Have you checked which direction has the fewest enemies?¡±


    ¡°That way,¡± she pointed and I followed her guidance, stretching my magic into the Ice I had used to stop the climbing Shattered. The Ice didn¡¯t react easily, most of the magic I had used in its creation had settled and was no longer under my control, so I had to make something new.


    It wasn¡¯t easy, trying to form a path off the roof, but we had time and it didn¡¯t look like the Shattered were smart enough to realise what I was doing. Or maybe they simply didn¡¯t care, either way, I managed to conjure a stretch of Ice across the gap between the building we were on and the next, keeping my hands on it to stabilise it.


    Lia was the first to go down the slide, looking a little insecure but she trusted in my magic, trusted me to see her off the roof. It was a rather amusing sight, the slide I had conjured looking more like it was supposed to be in some sort of amusement park, with the countless dead bodies making an eerie counterpoint.


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    Silva went after Lia, whining piteously and not liking the idea in the slightest but at the end of the day, needs must and all that. She got off the roof, though I felt the drain from keeping the slide stable, Silva was quite heavy after all.


    And then, it was my turn.


    Looking off the roof, I suddenly wondered if just hopping onto the slide was such a good idea. Sure, I loved heights, but mostly on my terms. Not when I wasn¡¯t certain I wouldn¡¯t fall to my death.


    Closing my eyes for a moment, thinking of the many times I had soared through the air with Lenore, I stepped forward, onto the ice and let myself go. My magic kept a tight hold on the Ice below me, though I could feel that things immediately went wonky, my tether to the Ice shifting too quickly to remain stable. I had a feeling it was the same effect that kept me from simply stepping onto a piece of Ice and using that to fly, while also keeping me from facing the recoil that should occur when I launched an Icicle at my enemies, only that it wasn¡¯t quite like either of those situations. Thus, the magic stabilising the slide didn¡¯t immediately fail, nor did the slide crumble, it only made me feel as if I was in a laundry machine that had its spin-cycle activated.


    By the end of my ride, I was quite glad that I had made Lia go first. I stumbled off the slide, barely able to keep myself from face-planting on the roof, trying to get the world to stop revolving around me. Or maybe it was just spinning, I wasn¡¯t quite sure.


    Either way, it wasn¡¯t really fun.


    Stepping away from the slide, I considered reaching out and dropping it to the ground but quickly decided against it. It didn¡¯t look like the Undead or Shattered had realised that we were gone, so I simply concealed myself and Silva with Darkness. Lia got the idea and followed suit, allowing our party to simply disappear.


    The building we were on didn¡¯t have a roof-access but it was low enough that we could get down relatively easy, just a bit of jumping cursing and falling, nothing we couldn¡¯t manage with our rather high attributes.


    As we were walking away from the sheer carnage we had wrought, I checked my log, grinning widely as I went over the numbers. It had been quite a successful night, and it wasn¡¯t even over yet.


    The biggest achievement I had managed was getting another level, bringing me to thirty-five. In addition, I had gained a level in my three primary rune masteries, bringing Ice to twenty-nine, while Darkness and Blood sat at a neat twenty-six. Lastly, my Ice Magic had gained a level and reached twenty-nine. Soon, I would be able to start wielding multiple frozen Shuttles, just like I had on Mundus, which would allow quite a few interesting options. I was considering whether to integrate magical runes on my shuttles, making them somewhat disposable while allowing me to channel power directly into them, creating Rune Formations at distant places with decent efficiency.


    The idea to let one of my shuttles serve as origin for things like the freezing mist or maybe even some other devastating area of effect attack was quite interesting, something I would have to look into. I would have to make sure the magic I was using was suitable to be carved into Ice, but that only required experimentation.


    With such interesting ideas on my mind, we moved out of the city, checking a couple more Undead for their levels, mentally making notes for the other people, trying to get a good idea how to fight here. For lower levelled people, the undead were both opportunity and immense danger, they wouldn¡¯t be able to fight them to the point that they couldn¡¯t get at them but at the same time, killing them would grant others a lot more EXP than me. Even Lia had gained three levels in the fighting, while Silva only gained two, though I was quite certain she had been close to her first level-up anyway.


    Meanwhile, I had barely gained a quarter level, just barely covering what I needed to gain one. The curse of power, I would have to consider where to get stronger. Maybe I would have to start wandering somewhere, though I doubted I¡¯d be able to find more powerful enemies elsewhere.


    Maybe I just had to wait, to wait, gain more skills and diversify my power-base. Wait, until worthy prey emerged, prey that I could slaughter for my own advancement.

 Chapter 763

    ¡°So, want to head back to our place or to the Farm and give the people there an idea of what the city is like right now?¡± Lia asked as we made our way across the fields away from town.


    ¡°We probably should give them a warning, just to be on the safe side. We might have to spend the day there, would that be okay for you?¡± I grumbled, not completely liking the idea. Sure, there was no real problem with staying at the farm, the underground room in which I had created Lia was perfectly suitable to spend the day but it would mean a day wasted. If we went to our place, I would be able to use the time not spent sleeping productively, experimenting with Alchemy or trying my magic without risk of collateral damage but at the farm? There, I didn¡¯t have the various precautions and notes I had from previous experiments, making everything less efficient and more risky.


    ¡°We could just tell the people at the farm to visit. If we hurry now, we should be able to get back to our lair before sunrise, even if we drop by the farm for a word,¡± Lia suggested and her idea got my immediate approval.


    It meant a higher risk, as we didn¡¯t sneak across the fields, the concealment magic around us muffling any sound and hiding any trace of our passing but we were running, pushing our bodies as much as necessary. It was quite exhilarating, something I hadn¡¯t actually done since the change. Sneaking and concealing myself had almost become second nature, simply because there could always be something dangerous lurking in a ditch or hidden behind a tree. Staying hidden had become my safety net, both in reality and within my mind. If I was hidden, nothing could hurt me. There would be no respawn if I got jumped, I lacked the physical toughness to simply endure an attack and I wasn¡¯t yet confident enough in my magic to rely on my ability to ward off attacks from parties unknown.


    Intellectual, I knew there shouldn¡¯t be any risk in running across the fields. We had moved around them more than once, the people at the farm had hunted the beasts that roamed them, though they had been incredibly careful to only go for singular cows or smaller prey, hell, even the beasts themselves would be easier prey than Silva, Lia and I, making any actual risk minuscule. And yet, my paranoid mind was conjuring visions of the strange Ankhegs, the insectoid monsters that we had seen on Mundus, and similar beasts, ready to burst from the ground. Amusingly, my paranoid imagination didn¡¯t limit itself to what I had seen on Mundus, it gleefully added everything I had seen or read about in fiction, from the Sandworms of Arrakis to the Morlocks and everything in between. Anything that might jump out of the ground and kill us in some instantaneous fashion, regardless of how impossible it was.


    That niggling, paranoid part of my mind was almost disappointed when the worst I suffered from the run across the fields was a slight shortness of breath, not that it was stopped from conjuring images of fungus-emitting spores that were tearing my lungs apart or similar airborne troubles to blame for that impairment. Sure, that I had just run a stretch longer than anything I had done in the last month didn¡¯t impact my paranoia at all. Intellectual, I knew that my reaction was perfectly normal, especially as I hadn¡¯t actually invested anything into the attributes that increased my endurance. My only gains in that came from my Dragon Touched trait, which also increased my agility and thus the speed at which I ran. That, in turn, also increased the amount of stamina I consumed while running, making it more or less a zero-sum game. Alas, paranoia wasn¡¯t reasonable. It just kept me alive, though it sometimes was a bit annoying.


    When the guards around the farm, hopefully on high alert given that the entire city had turned into Undead, didn¡¯t detect the three of us running towards their entrance gate didn¡¯t fill me with confidence. We had made no attempt to conceal our approach, no extraneous magic to muffle our footsteps, nothing. Sure, we were coming from downwind and it was quite the breeze going, so that might mask a bit of the noise we were making but really. They should be better. They had to be.


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    ¡°Yo,¡± Lia called out, maybe to avoid the tongue-lashing I was ready to unleash on the guards, ¡°Just dropping by, we checked out the Undead in the city. If anyone wants to know what we found, swing by the brewery in the afternoon.¡±


    When the guard merely let out a yelp of surprise, obviously not tracking what she was saying, I began to wonder, did I put my eggs into the wrong basket? There had to be a better place to work with, a place where the guards weren¡¯t glorified lampposts. The guy even managed to drop the torch he was holding, so he wasn¡¯t even a glorified lamppost, but a shitty one.


    ¡°Undead, in the city? You¡¯ve heard about them, right?¡± Lia asked, speaking very, very slowly as if she was talking to a rather regrettable child.


    ¡°We¡¯ve gone to see how dangerous they are.¡± she paused again as if trying to make sure that the guy was actually following. ¡°If anyone living at the farm wants to know, they can come to visit us in the afternoon. It would be wise, as there are a lot of Undead and there¡¯s no need to add any more to their number,¡± she paused once more, waiting for an acknowledgement or any reaction, really. ¡°Do you understand what I¡¯m saying, or did you decide to make yourself immune to zombies by ridding yourself of your brain?!¡± she finally snarled, much to my amusement.


    To be fair, I was relatively sure that the guy hadn¡¯t really been listening. When he dropped his torch, he had managed to set the grass at his feet on fire and had to first collect the torch and then stamp things out.


    ¡°I¡¯ve heard yah,¡± another voice called out, one that I couldn¡¯t quite place but I didn¡¯t really care. As long as the people had an idea that we had been here, they¡¯d know where to find us. Or, really, if they heard that somebody not living at the farm had gone to the city during the night and checked the undead situation, they should be able to conclude that it had to be us. There simply weren¡¯t any other groups primarily operating at night, at least not to my knowledge.


    ¡°Well, then we will be on our way. Try not to get eaten by anything, you¡¯re supposed to keep watch, are you not?¡± she called back and both of us turned around, to continue on our way. I couldn¡¯t quite hide a snort at the interaction, though I wasn¡¯t quite sure why it amused me so much. The guards were, quite frankly, a danger to the people and yet, I didn¡¯t really care. There were dangers out there, I had seen the racoons, or rather, I hadn¡¯t seen them since rescuing the army of dog. I knew they had been sneaky buggers before mounting their hogs and I had no illusions that they couldn¡¯t sneak with the best of them. If just a few of them tried to get on the farm, they would be able to cause a rather gruesome bloodbath, which would devalue my investment in the people here.


    Maybe I should look into wardings and alarm spells once more, there might be something I could set up, or at least something the spellcasters could set up under my guidance. Something that would give the people a bit of a warning, if they were under attack because the guards didn¡¯t make the cut. Not if we could sneak up on them while not even trying to sneak.


    ¡°Do you think they¡¯ll drop by?¡± Lia asked after we were easily out of earshot.


    ¡°I would believe so, yes,¡± I nodded, ¡°They¡¯d probably even drop by without our visit, simply because there¡¯ll be people who have yet to learn magic. That¡¯s how I¡¯d have done it, set up and get a bit of rest during the day, take tonight to fully recover from having to move, and tomorrow, try getting as much strength as possible. It¡¯s why I wanted to head out tonight, so we could give them some information. I don¡¯t want some weak fools to run into town and get added to the Undead. There¡¯s already too few people left, especially people not completely under the sway of some cleric,¡± I grumbled, only to realise that Mrs Wu most likely had contacted the people at the YMCA - And their cleric.


    Why did I have a feeling this was going to suck?

 Chapter 764

    As usual, the first indication Lia and I got to alert us of our visitors was a series of loud, resounding barks. Silva had her pack well trained, making sure that nobody could sneak up on the brewery during the day-time and in return, I made sure to heal any injuries the dogs incurred and let them listen in to magic training, provide cold storage for any meat they didn¡¯t immediately devour and even helped hunting. It was an excellent relationship with ample benefits on both sides, one that I nurtured carefully. I would have given them direct magic instruction but with the differences in mental architecture, I wasn¡¯t sure how useful it would be, even if we could bridge the language gap.


    Given that our visitors were mostly interested in me, I left Lia to her training, she was in the middle of revising one of the routines I had taught her, trying to adapt it to her attributes, size and claws, and went upstairs to find out who was coming for us.


    Once I was out of our comfortable lair, a hiss escaped my lips. There was no helping it, even with the curtains drawn and shutters closed, the house was somewhat bright, meaning that the day outside must be completely cloudless, sunny and bright. Utterly repugnant but unless I gained a huge amount of power, there was nothing I could do about it. Maybe a repeat of my actions on Mundus would be a good idea after all, they had to have quite a long winter, with loads of clouded skies and very little sun for years. Not quite as nice as an endless night, but one couldn¡¯t have everything.


    Laughing at the idea, knowing how ridiculous it was, I moved to the door and pulled it open while almost jumping back to avoid the light from outside. Indirect sunlight wasn¡¯t so bad, but it was still uncomfortable and I preferred to avoid it.


    Outside, I could see two of the larger dogs escort a group of five people, three of whom I knew, though realising who was visiting caused my stomach to clench in worry. There was no reason why Mrs Wu, Wong Chehai, the guy responsible for organising the groups they sent out, and Mark, his counterpart at Apple Gate Farm, would move about for no reason. My anxiety truly manifested when I realised that the figure roughly my own height wasn¡¯t just a stocky woman or anything along those lines but that she actually was a dwarf, just like I was now an elf. Where I was just as petite as I had always been, with pointy ears, pale, blue skin and long, black hair, now gleaming with power thanks to my magical hair, the dwarf was short, though still taller than me, and stocky, with wavy hair that looked almost like burnished bronze, tanned skin and an expression that screamed of vigilant caution.


    Unless there were other reasons why people had their race changed, I was looking at another player of Road to Purgatory, so somebody who likely knew of Morgana¡¯s deeds, who might hold animosity and had abilities I couldn¡¯t even try to predict.


    The last guy was cut from a similar cloth as Mark and Wong Chehai, though more on the bulky side, clearly a fighter of some sort, possibly in some sort of escort function or he was their counterpart from the YMCA, I couldn¡¯t be sure. But he didn¡¯t feel threatening, though I wasn¡¯t about to fully trust my gut feeling. Staying vigilant meant staying alive.


    Letting out a soft whistle, I called for Lia and Silva, just to make sure that they were nearby, in case this wasn¡¯t a friendly visit. I didn¡¯t think so, but I couldn¡¯t be sure so prudence was warranted.


    ¡°Good afternoon,¡± I called out in greeting, ¡°What brings you to my humble abode?¡±


    ¡°Good afternoon, Samantha,¡± Mrs Wu returned my greeting, a polite smile on her face, ¡°We¡¯d like to discuss a few things with you, ask your opinion, if that would be okay with you?¡±


    ¡°Certainly, you may enter,¡± I offered, taking a step back. However, the dwarven woman didn¡¯t immediately follow her companions, looking at me as I awaited them in the shadows of the entryway.


    ¡°They told me you are Morgana,¡± she visibly swallowed, betraying her nerves, ¡°I would like to ask you for hospitality, that we are covered under guest rights,¡± she told me, her words more a plea than a demand. But a reasonable one, especially as guest rights, at least as far as I remembered, covered them as well, giving me protection against them acting against me in my home.


    ¡°Certainly, though you have me at a disadvantage for I do not know you,¡± I nodded, raising a hand to give my promise, ¡°Enter without malice, leave without hindrance. No harm shall befall you within my domain, as long as you do no harm yourself,¡± I pledged, feeling the world listen to my pledge, if only for a moment. While I wasn¡¯t truly bound, many people had warned me of breaking my word, that things would turn out badly if you did.


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    ¡°Thank you. May Frigg bless your home and hearth,¡± the dwarf offered in response and I could smell a faint magical scent from her, a very minor blessing taking hold. I couldn¡¯t be sure of the actual effect but by the tiny amount of power I could feel, I was confident it wouldn¡¯t do much. Maybe improve the taste of food a bit, or help people get better rest, but it was the nice thing about this kind of magic, it could never be harmful. A blessing was, by its very nature, beneficial and a blessing of the Goddess of the Hearth would never, ever, harm those in the blessed home. It would be against its very nature, against the very nature of the deity and not something any sane being would want to mess around with.


    With assurances in place for both sides, I led the five people into the kitchen and went through the same tea-making spiel I had done before, quickly and efficiently preparing the brew using nothing but my magic. It was a bit of a powerplay, especially with somebody who knew about the Legacy of Morgana there, because if the former Travellers were asked what Morgana stood for, Fire and domesticity would never make the list. So, showing that I could wield fire magic, that I could use my magic in a benign setting, would hopefully unbalance her from worrying about things turning out as they had on Mundus. Or maybe it would make her more worried, at the end of the day, Fire wasn¡¯t the most benign element one could wield and the difference between a world frozen over and a world on fire was¡­ rather irrelevant for those living in that world.


    ¡°Now, why don¡¯t we get introductions out of the way? You may call me Jade, for simplicities sake. May I have your names?¡± I asked, grinning as I remembered a story about fae I had read a while ago. It was a simple, small misdirection but seeding false assumptions and misinformation into a conversation could never be done too early.


    ¡°My name is Wu Chunhua, as you know. Sam¡­ Jade, I wanted to thank you for warning us, without the preparations things would have been bad,¡± Mrs Wu took up the ball, before nodding to Wong Chehai next to her. He, too introduced himself, adding his role in their community and Mark did the same.


    ¡°You can call me Cassie, though on Mundus, I was called Cassandra Forgeheart. Some call me the Denmother, as I am a Cleric of Frigg,¡± the dwarf introduced herself, her voice betraying her nervousness. I was tempted to Observe her, though I managed to stop myself, it would be rather rude. And with a cleric, one could never know if their deity had given them some nifty trick that might allow them to notice the Observe, even if I concealed it.


    ¡°I¡¯m Arlan, it¡¯s nice to meet you in better circumstances,¡± the last guy greeted me, his words catching me off-guard.


    ¡°Excuse me?¡± I looked at him, trying to figure out what he meant.


    ¡°When we met the first time, you weren¡¯t really in the mood to chat, just took your giant hound and left. Though, thanks for letting us take shelter in the place you made secure,¡± he explained. I remembered meeting a group of people at the first shelter I had taken, so he most likely had been part of that group, but I wasn¡¯t sure. I hadn¡¯t bothered to remember their faces, or names if they ever had given them.


    Shaking my head, I waved him off, before focusing on the other people present.


    ¡°Now, what brings you by? I¡¯m sure it¡¯s not just my delicious tea, nor do I think you are here for a discussion on magic, as my usual visitors are. So, what gives?¡± I asked, briefly glancing at the tea to make sure it was coming along well.


    ¡°Oh, just your tea would make the trip worthwhile, but alas, you are correct,¡± Mrs Wu grinned, after taking a deep breath as if to sample the aroma coming from the tea. ¡°No, we are here because the five of us represent the people now all gathered at Apple Gate Farm, their leadership, if you will. We¡¯d love to count you amongst that number, but you made it obvious you aren¡¯t interested.¡±


    ¡°But your help was invaluable, so we¡¯d like to give you as much information on the goings on as possible,¡± Wong Chehai continued, leaving the implication that I might be willing to help more if I was informed of the circumstances unsaid.


    ¡°More information is always useful,¡± I nodded, ¡°And it¡¯s not so much that I don¡¯t want to be part of your community,¡± I fibbed, as I didn¡¯t have an interest, ¡°But that my nature simply makes it more comfortable for me and everyone involved if there¡¯s a certain distance. On Mundus, the homes of powerful spellcasters were always apart from the rest for a reason. If you research magic, especially powerful magic, you never know when something goes wrong. Thus, you make your home somewhere away from people you might accidentally injure, on some mountain or deep in some swamp. Makes it easier for everyone involved,¡± I assured them, the looks travelling between them highly amusing.


    ¡°I¡¯ve heard of that, yes,¡± Cassie nodded, before shaking her head, ¡°But it doesn¡¯t really matter. We¡¯re just here to talk and maybe get your opinion on the present circumstances.¡±


    Nodding, I poured everyone a cup of tea and set back, curious about what they had to say.

 Chapter 765

    Listening to them describe their retreat from the city was quite interesting. It certainly demonstrated just how carefully they had planned, for things to go off as smoothly as this, especially for a retreat in the middle of the night. I certainly wouldn¡¯t have been able to coordinate a group of that size but then, my skills weren¡¯t suited to that kind of stuff. Far too many people involved, even Silva would likely be better at that. Was better at that, as her army of dog showed, she had even ventured out and guarded the people as they left the city.


    ¡°Well, it sounds like you had an interesting night,¡± I nodded, ¡°My group ventured into town last night, just to see how things developed. I¡¯d warn against trying to go there just yet, there are some dangers you¡¯d have to be prepared to deal with.¡±


    For the next few minutes, I explained to them how Lia, Silva and I had prepared the location for our battle and how we, with those preparations in place, had been able to fight off an ever-growing horde of undead. The problem here was that it turned into a catch-22. You either had to prepare a defensible location and simply killed the Undead as they came or you fought a running battle, constantly retreating as you killed more and more undead in brief skirmishes. Problem was, both tactics could easily see you exhausted, leaving you easy prey for the undead. A running battle would cause that state faster, and it would attract far more undead but at least you had the chance to retreat if you had a well-planned route. Either way, the city was intensely dangerous, at least if you were unable to be stealthy. Lia, Silva and I were able to simply hide from the undead but I doubted many people could.


    The entire time we spoke, I tried to get a read on Cassie, to figure out where she stood. Sadly, the only thing I could see was that she seemed to be concerned about her people, whether or not she saw me as a threat to them was impossible to determine. Maybe even she wasn¡¯t sure, I certainly noticed her looking at me a few times, but I simply didn¡¯t know.


    ¡°Another thing,¡± I spoke up, as the discussion of the undead¡¯s physical abilities and strengths between Lia, Chehai and Arlan wound down. ¡°Have you begun to teach your people about magic? Other than what you can draw from your divine patron, I mean. They will need every advantage that they get and having people with an affinity for arcane magic around but not developing their abilities would be foolish. Maybe even suicidal.¡±


    ¡°Some of the people under my care have received a bit of teaching, a man named Kenji came over and spoke to them. Sadly, my own magical abilities all stem from Frigg and while I managed to induct a few people into the service, there are limits,¡± Cassie replied, looking both concerned and relieved at the same time. It was an interesting dichotomy, one that a part of me would love to prod at, trying to figure out the details but sadly, this wasn¡¯t the time for that.


    ¡°Kenji, Wind affine, but without knowledge of runes, if I recall correctly,¡± I nodded, dredging up what I had taught him, ¡°He¡¯s quite enthusiastic, but maybe not the most competent teacher. Maybe you should suggest that all those who have an interest in the Arcane visit me here, I believe I can help them a lot better than an apprentice still trying to find his own path. As Cassie can tell you, I walked quite far on one path, though I have decided to widen the path I tread now,¡± I suggested, the smile on my face widening into a grin when Cassie paled at the mention of my path on Mundus. She had been there, at the end, or at the very least she knew about it.


    ¡°We can offer, but there are a few people who are a bit¡­¡± Mrs Wu paused, clearly looking for the right words to use, ¡°They are scared of you. They see a petite woman and they feel as if they are staring at a vicious monster able to tear them limb from limb. Some have heard vague stories about you and your power, some distorted, some maybe even true, and they worry. It¡¯s all quite interesting, how people relate and talk about you,¡± she explained, looking somewhat amused at that. Maybe she simply was, there had been parts of her teaching that had focused on social manipulation, especially through rumours, and how to guide such efforts. She might even guide how people saw me, though I wasn¡¯t sure if she¡¯d try, nor did I have any idea in what direction she might want to guide their perception.


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    ¡°Understandable, I¡¯ll admit that my interest in people is limited, always has been. I offer because it will help your groups survive, which will ultimately benefit me. As for any potential worries that I might go down a path that ends with me, atop a Frozen Spire, trying to bring about the end of another world, I doubt that it will be a concern,¡± I grinned, staring at Cassie as I spoke. It was quite amusing watching her go pale, and I didn¡¯t even need to lie or obfuscate. I didn¡¯t plan to walk down that route, I wanted Sigmir back. For that, I needed something other than destruction, I needed raw power to reach into the afterlife, or wherever she was now, to pull her back into my embrace. A frozen world wouldn¡¯t give me that, though maybe the sacrifice of an entire world would. Something to consider later.


    ¡°Even if we say nothing, you¡¯ll probably get a few more visitors. The people at the farm have seen what your students can do already and they want that for themselves. Not even to fight, but because they have seen how your students have bettered the lives of us all. With the influx of people, most can see that the few you trained before won¡¯t be enough. Social pressure will have people visit you, simply because having more magic users will benefit us all,¡± Mark explained, getting nods all around. Hopefully, teaching a few more people would bring some decent EXP, otherwise, I¡¯d have to get creative. If there even was a way to be creative about this, I wasn¡¯t confident there were any monsters around that I could kill for useful amounts of EXP.


    ¡°Another thing,¡± Mark spoke up, after the conversation about training more spellcasters had ended, ¡°You told some of the guys at the farm about a dungeon filled with Undead in the Old Slaughterhouse. They decided to have a group check it out, but what they found didn¡¯t match what you described.¡±


    ¡°Curious, could you tell me what they found?¡± I asked, wondering if they had tried to enter but had been unable to, because the dungeon could only sustain so many runs over a period of time and we had used them all up. I had thought the number of runs was limited per group, with a higher overall limit, but I wasn¡¯t sure.


    ¡°They found no undead around the place and when they entered, they described a message telling them that they had entered a dungeon for the first time. Only, the dungeon they described sounded like something out of an old platformer, with conveyer belts, spike-traps, swinging obstacles, the works. They didn¡¯t dare to go far, even with the buff increasing their rewards,¡± he shrugged as if that was the obvious thing to do.


    ¡°That should be impossible¡­¡± I muttered, trying to understand how they could have entered a different dungeon than we had, ¡°Wait, at what time did they go there? Daytime, right?¡± I asked, latching onto the most obvious difference. Maybe the ¡®Dark Slaughterhouse¡¯  wasn¡¯t named such because of the gloomy atmosphere but because it was the version you entered when it was, well, dark. Night.


    ¡°Yeah, of course, they went during the day. No need to take additional risks by travelling at night,¡± Mark replied, only for his eyes to widen, ¡°And you went during the night, right? That¡¯s most likely the difference, I agree,¡± he nodded again.


    ¡°If that group is interested, we can escort them to the dungeon sometime soon. I¡¯d personally love to get a good look at another group entering, I have no idea how that magically works. The only thing I can come up with is that each group enters their own space, independent from the world around them. It sounds utterly fascinating,¡± I grinned, not even trying to hide my interest. I doubted it was possible, but I really wanted to be able to manipulate space that way, the possibilities were near infinite.


    ¡°I¡¯ll talk to them, but I doubt it¡¯s going to be soon. There¡¯s too much chaos going on at the farm right now, with the number of people going up by almost ten times,¡± he shook his head, causing me to nod in understanding and make a mental note to stay away from the place.


    With the topic of the dungeon dealt with, the conversation switched to different topics, one of which was the quality of their guards. It didn¡¯t directly concern me, but they needed to be told that the system they had in place right now was an open invitation for any stealth-focused enemy to go on a rampage. While I had my doubts that they fully believed what I told them, they accepted my words and promised to mitigate the dangers I saw.


    As our talk progressed, I noticed that I gave less and less input, making me wonder why they decided to hold their leadership meeting at my table. Maybe they considered me a neutral party, or maybe they wanted to include me in the leadership of their group, whether I wanted it or not. I wasn¡¯t sure how much input, and therefore responsibility I actually wanted, so I simply continued to prepare tea and listened. As long as they didn¡¯t ask me to make a decision, I would happily remain on the outskirts of their group.

 Interlude: Revelations

    ¡°This was¡­¡± Arlan began, only that his sentence never finished. His voice simply trailed off, unable to find the right words to describe the emotions he felt.


    ¡°Scary? Awe-inspiring? Discombobulating? Intimidating? Incongruous? Unnerving? Take your pick, I think they all fit quite well,¡± Cassie suggested in response, sounding only partially kidding. There was an undercurrent of seriousness in her voice, one that made one wonder just how unnerved she truly was from the meeting they all were walking away from.


    ¡°All of the above, yeah,¡± Mark agreed, causing Arlan to snort in amusement. All the adjectives fit, and many more would work, too. The women, the beings, they had just met, all three of them were something else. None of them had outwardly acted in any way discourteous but there had been a sensation pressing against all five of them as if they were staring a large predator in the eye. That the sensation primarily came from a woman barely chest-high to the taller of their number and one with a petite physique to go with her diminutive height didn¡¯t help, if anything the disconnect made things only worse. Being intimidated by a dragon, or when standing in front of an elephant, that was natural to them all, but being intimidated by a kitten? Not so much. And yet, they all had felt that the kitten they had talked to had claws that could easily shred them, rend the flesh from their bones and tear them to pieces.


    ¡°I¡¯ve seen some of the things she did in the game, when we thought it was a game. That¡¯s what makes it so weird, a part of me knows that people do crazy shit in video games, always have and likely will again if we ever get to have them again,¡± Cassie sighed, conflicted in her perception of the woman they had just left. ¡°But Road to Purgatory, the world it was set in, it was so real, felt so alive. It was so easy to relax into it, to the point that it didn¡¯t really feel like a game any longer but more like a vacation in a strange and wonderful place. Only, to Morgana, to Samantha or Jade or whatever her name is now, either she kept ¡®playing¡¯ the game, like it was a game or¡­¡± Cassie¡¯s voice petered off, letting out yet another sigh.


    ¡°Or she wasn¡¯t playing, she was living it as if she had gone fully native. And if that was the case, if her actions in game are a reflection of actions she would take in real life in that situation, then I¡¯m incredibly scared of her. Of what she might do.¡±


    For a few moments, silence reigned, until Mark broke it, asking what exactly Samantha had done in the game to make Cassie so scared of her. In response, Cassie began telling a story, speaking of a village raised and turned into Undead as one example. Or one about dissecting a living centaur, at least living until the centaur died from the dissection. All done by the petite woman with inhumanely pale skin.


    But it wasn¡¯t just the tales that made Cassie scared. No, just as important, maybe even more so, was her gut feeling, honed by her Intuition and improved by her connection to the divine, an instinct to determine threats to her house and under the protection of her hearth fire. To those instincts, Samantha feels like an overcast sky, a possible storm but no direct threat just yet. Only, the clouds of that overcast sky felt like a pure, inky blackness to her, infinitely threatening and, at the same time, not a threat just yet.


    For a while, silence reigned as they walked, a silence only broken when the oldest of them all, Wu Chunhua, the former proprietress of the gym many of their people had found shelter at and de-facto leader of their merry band spoke up.


    ¡°She was always a little detached, had trouble relating to people. It¡¯s one of the things that made me train her, the training I gave her hopefully helped give her a framework, though maybe not the best framework for a civilian. But a framework that would help her survive and, to a point, thrive, regardless of the situation. Much of what I told her was about fitting into a situation, into a role,¡± Mrs Wu rambled on a little, not really explaining what the training entailed, just that it would hopefully help Samantha find her own path and fit in.


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    ¡°But speaking of training, we¡¯ll have to talk to the people guarding the farm at night,¡± Mrs Wu changed the topic, shaking off the worries about her troublesome student.


    ¡°You think it¡¯s really that bad?¡± Mark asked, though he already knew the answer.


    ¡°Samantha is not one to cry wolf, not unless it¡¯s needed,¡± Mrs Wu replied, her tone one of finality. ¡°But maybe we should test them ourselves. I know that Samantha was quite skilled when it came to stealth before the change and I have no doubt that she would capitalise on it. It might just be the reason why they solely operate at night. Much easier to hide in the dark, if you can confidently operate in it.¡±


    ¡°How are they doing that anyway? Did she ever hint at some sort of night vision magic?¡± Wong Chehai asked, sounding a little exasperated. Night vision, like all scouting capabilities, was a serious force amplifier, one that he would love to have at his disposal. Knowing your enemies¡¯ location was the first step to taking that enemy out. Bonus points if you could find them without their knowledge, allowing for a wonderful final surprise. Alas, so far Samantha hadn¡¯t shared that ability with anyone, at least not to his knowledge.


    ¡°Likely an innate racial ability,¡± Cassie admitted, ¡°Arlan, you probably noticed that I¡¯ve lost a bit of height since this shitshow started, right? Gained some weight, too, though far less than I feared.¡±


    ¡°Not going to comment on that,¡± Arlan quipped, before noticing just how serious Cassie was.


    ¡°It is what it is. When the shitshow started, I was given the option to take on the legacy of Cassandra Forgeheart, as I had called my avatar on Mundus, the character I played in Road to Purgatory. At first, I thought I¡¯d get my old level back, so obviously I took it,¡± pausing, she let out an amused huff. ¡°Yeah, didn¡¯t work, but what I got was my character at level one, including the class I picked. My Cleric Class, it¡¯s the same as the one I¡¯ve had in the game, it¡¯s the reason why I¡¯ve got so those perks that the others don¡¯t have, even after dedicating themselves to the gods.¡±


    ¡°There¡¯s something else, right?¡± Wu Chenhua asked, when Cassie stopped speaking, gently prodding her to continue.


    ¡°My class wasn¡¯t the only thing I got. My race, too,¡± Cassie admitted and for a few moments, nobody spoke.


    ¡°I¡¯m no longer human and I¡¯m quite confident that the same is true for her. Not sure what she turned into, but I¡¯ve turned into a dwarf,¡± Cassie let out the last few words in a rush as if trying to get them out as quickly as possible.


    ¡°Meaning?¡± Wu Chenhua, immediately asked, knowing that a single word is hardly an explanation.


    ¡°Well, I got increased Vitality, Dexterity and a few beneficial perks, alongside a few detrimental ones. And, obviously, I have the physique of one, luckily I never was the tallest, so I didn¡¯t change all that much, just about half a head shorter and a serious upgrade to my booty,¡± Cassie laughed, obviously trying to make light of it. Not that her deflection worked on the two experienced operators, both Wu Chanhua and Wong Chehai were easily able to see through it. But, both also realised that the deflection wasn¡¯t malicious, so they let it stand. For now.


    ¡°And she turned tiny, got super fancy hair, smurfy skin and what else?¡± Mark laughed, making light of the changes, especially those the woman that scared and fascinated them to equal measure had undergone.


    ¡°She didn¡¯t really change physically, not her physique at least. Maybe a little more muscle but that might just come from our circumstances. She¡¯s always been petite,¡± Wu Chenhua told them, waving the idea away.


    ¡°It doesn¡¯t really matter, does it? She won¡¯t be able to pass her race on, at least not to others. What I¡¯m more interested in is how she managed to get Chantalle, or whatever her name is, into the state she is in. And, even more importantly, how are we going to fix the problems she mentioned in regard to our night watch?¡± Wong Chehai asked, changing the topic away from things that are interesting but ultimately useless.


    ¡°I shall test the night watch, see how aware they actually are. Don¡¯t warn them, if you do it¡¯ll render my efforts wasted. We shall address the issue once we know more,¡± Wu Chenhua decided, ending the discussion on that topic and allowing the focus to go to Chantalle and her status.


    Even by the time they reached Apple Gate Farm, their discussion was far from finished. Too many mysteries surrounded the woman known as Samantha, too many to make people comfortable. And yet, nobody dared to try wrestling those mysteries away from her.

 Chapter 766

    The night after talking with the leadership of the local survivors, Silva, Lia and I were once more heading into the city. Not to actually hunt more undead, but to see if we managed to find even more survivors. And to gather some more tea, I needed to make sure that my stock remained high. It would run out eventually, but I wanted to push that day as far back as possible, maybe I would find some sort of locally grown alternative in the meantime. It was strange, how the little things, like delicious tea, didn¡¯t seem to be so important until you had to go without. But then, that was true for nearly everything, the value of things only became apparent due to their scarcity. Even air, you only realised just how important it was when you couldn¡¯t get enough.


    Moving through the city was remarkably simple. It seemed that the presence of the Undead caused the attention of the Shattered to drop a bit, allowing Silva, Lia and me to sneak about virtually unhindered. Unless we walked within a metre of two of a Shattered, they couldn¡¯t detect us and the vast majority of Undead would only find us if they ran into us. Trying to fool the sense of touch was somewhat possible, at least if using the shadows to travel as I had on Mundus counted as such, but it just wasn¡¯t worth it. Not running into slow-moving, stinking corpses was something I was willing to focus on, if only so I wouldn¡¯t, well, run into the rotting flesh. Even without the potential for violence, that was just disgusting.


    Our hunt for tea was somewhat amusing. All the large stores had long since been broken open and looted, with what little was left behind falling to decay and getting spoiled by roaming Shattered or Undead. Just because those creatures didn¡¯t actively break into buildings unless there was something alive attracting them, didn¡¯t mean they wouldn¡¯t roam into an open door, for example, one that was left open after people looted a store.


    But the looting had, obviously, focused on stores where you could get the stuff you needed for survival. A few idiots might have broken into electronic stores during the first night or even tried to crack open an ATM, but after that night, people likely realised that money, electronic luxury goods and all those things that used to be expensive and status symbols weren¡¯t important any longer. What counted were things that could keep you alive, food, clean water, solid clothes, sturdy weapons and manual tools. Everything else was, pretty much, useless baggage to be discarded as soon as possible.


    Due to that focus, one of the most expensive, fanciest tea stores, one that was selling important teas from all around the world for a price that could almost measure up to rare metals or gems, was untouched. Sure, it was also secure enough that one had to know what it sold, otherwise one might mistake the store for a jewellery store of something similarly high-class but that was neither here nor there. It was an incredible store and one I wouldn¡¯t have shopped without some sort of highly improbable windfall. I had always been comfortable, thanks to my inheritance, but that didn¡¯t mean I was willing to pay some four-figure price for a small pack of tea.


    But now, with people removed from the city and enough time and a bit of motivation? Now, I was willing to break open that store and get to the good stuff. Just to see how much tea that had a price per kilogram that could compare to the price of a new car would taste.


    Amusingly, the first attempt to break into their store actually failed. My first idea was to try bludgeon the place open with my Ice Magic, hoping to at least make a small hole through which I could send my magic in to crack things from the inside but the glass was secure enough that I didn¡¯t manage. Not even by carefully conjuring hailstones and sharpening them with my Ice Magic before slamming them into the glass, it was simply harder than anything I could throw at it. I even tried to use my other types of magic, Water, Earth and even Fire but nothing worked. The best result I got was by heating the glass as much as possible with FIre Magic before sending blasts of freezing air against it, trying to use the rapid shift in temperature to induce cracks but nothing. The store was secure. But on a positive note, trying to crack the glass increased my Fire and Earth Magic by one each, bringing them to two and four. Progress, of a sort.


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    Amused at my failure, Lia tried herself but she, too, failed to penetrate the glass with her claws. She managed to make a few scratches and was gloating at her success, at least until she broke a nail on the glass, leaving her howling at the sky in anger. Her next attempt, the classic brick through the window, simply bounced off the window, failing to leave more than a scuff mark, where some of the rock had broken off. If we wanted to try breaking the brick, we might succeed but the window seemed to be impervious.


    If it wasn¡¯t so vexing, I would have laughed at the situation. But I wanted to get to the tea, so we had to be creative.


    And ultimately, creative we were.


    Our first bout of creativity was to try breaking down one of the doors. Alas, the lock was tight enough that I failed to get any magically conjured water in, so I couldn¡¯t even try to move the lock by turning that water to Ice. Not that I truly expected that to work, there was an electronic, now broken, keypad serving as a secondary lock and I had no idea if that had failed in a way that kept the door open. Trying to simply batter down the door failed just like trying to smash the window had failed, forcing us to look for another point of ingress.


    Next, we looked for the ventilation shafts. Crawling through them worked in movies, so it might work here, too. Sadly, unless one was a spider or something similarly small, the ventilation shafts were far too small. Even breaking them apart wouldn¡¯t help as the openings in the brickwork were smaller than my head. So, another way was needed.


    Just to make sure we didn¡¯t overlook something, we tried breaking down one of the outer walls but the only thing we managed to destroy was the fancy facade. Beneath, there was a solid layer of bricks, thick and sturdy. I tried to use my Earth Magic to induce movement into the rocks but there was just too much of it, it was simply too thick. We couldn¡¯t quite measure it, but by the looks of it, the wall was almost half a metre thick. At least the exterior wall.


    But it gave us an idea, namely to move through the side. Not an outside-side but the wall that was shared between the tea shop and the neighbouring electronics store. That store had, amusingly, been broken open at some point, exposing it to the elements and destroying what merchandise hadn¡¯t been destroyed by the change or looted. Either way, it gave us a point of ingress, one that we shamelessly abused.


    Ripping off the wallpaper, the drywall and everything covering the interior wall of the store was weirdly amusing. There was a cathartic feeling that came with pure, malicious destruction, one that I couldn¡¯t quite describe. Intellectually, I knew that nothing we did actually mattered but there was a part, buried deep within my psyche, that revelled at the destruction. What that said about me was not something I wanted to contemplate at that moment, but it was filed away for later consideration.


    Luckily, the interior wall was positively thin, just a simple, single layer of bricks with some insulation, drywall and covering. The ceiling was held up by a few pillars within the wall, nothing that I couldn¡¯t avoid, and with a combination of Earth Rune Mastery and Earth Magic to amplify my runes, I managed to make a sufficiently large hole in the wall, earning myself a point in Earth Rune Mastery, bringing it to two. And it opened the way into the store as a side benefit.


    From that point on, things became easier. We still had to contend with temperature and atmospherically controlled cases that held the tea and a vault holding the larger bags but with some more destruction of property, this time using Ice Runes alongside some Fire Magic. Stressing the metal with repeated cooling and heating worked quite well and by the time the vault broke, I had earned myself a point in Ice Rune Mastery, bringing the skill to a neat thirty and opening the way to my next rune. And we got tea. Lots and lots of stupidly expensive tea, enough that Lia went to get a shopping cart from a nearby supermarket.


    When she returned with it, she mentioned that she had noticed quite a few small creatures watching us. Clearly not undead, nor showing the faint flames of Shattered, making it likely that those creatures were alive. But it wasn¡¯t something we could investigate now, primarily because they obviously had noticed us, making it difficult to follow them unseen. But we could return another day, with more time to spare.


    For now, we simply packed as much tea into the cart as we could, without completely compromising our stealth, and made our way out of the city. It was still a frankly absurd thing we did, but with a bit of luck, and a few killed undead to help our luck along, we managed to get out, laughing all the way to our lair.

 Chapter 767

    Looting the tea store was even more worthwhile than I had ever imagined.


    As soon as we reached our lair after the successful looting, I decided to brew myself a cup of tea. I wanted to see just how good a tea needed to be to command such a, at least in my eyes, ridiculous price. Maybe it was one of those rich-people things, where they didn¡¯t buy the tea for the taste but for the price-tag, to show their rich compatriots just how much money they could waste on expensive tea. Or maybe some sort of money laundering scheme, allowing them to funnel money elsewhere while justifying it with the excuse that the tea was just that expensive.


    That might even have been the case before the change but now, after the Astral River had infused our world, the tea I had taken from the store was truly something special. Just brewing it had unleashed a faint dual fragrance, the scent of tea blending with the scent of magic, making it obvious that the change hadn¡¯t passed the leaves by. They had been changed, just as much as I had, and the scent was mouthwateringly good.


    My first sip was a cautious one, even if the scent alone made me want to gulp the tea down as quickly as possible. There was no telling just what the inclusion of magic into the blend might have done to the tea, just because the scent, and thus likely taste, was delicious didn¡¯t mean that it was healthy to drink. After thoroughly scanning it with my magic sight, I was confident that a single sip wouldn¡¯t kill me but I wasn¡¯t about to be careless. It would be the height of irony if I managed to kill myself because I was baited by a delicious tea. Amusing enough to make me laugh all the way to the afterlife but not something I was about to risk. And so, I remained vigilant and limited myself to a single small sip.


    And what a sip it was. I let it linger on my tongue for a bit, thoroughly tasting it as shivers of delight ran across my body and I only just managed to suppress a moan of pleasure at the taste. It was, without a doubt, the best tea I had ever tasted, maybe the best thing, period. Light, yet flavourful, akin to a cool breeze during a hot summer day, the first petals of spring in the air. It made me want to wax poetically or try to sing, despite an utter lack of talent for either. In regards to negative effects, no matter how I focused my senses inwards, no matter how I scanned and tried to find any, I failed. Maybe the tea really was safe, the only effect I could detect was an increase in the amount of Astral Power I was regaining. Not a tremendous increase, but it was enough to be noticeable.


    Letting my breath out slowly, it almost turned into a content sigh. The tea was incredible and I had to keep myself from immediately taking another sip. Instead, I closed my eyes and kept an eye on the processes within myself, mostly using my Blood Magic but also my ordinary magical perception. I could feel how traces of something were absorbed into my body and I was reasonably certain that they didn¡¯t harm me, but what they actually did, I had no idea.


    For some five minutes, I kept a very close eye on my internal processes, until my vigilance was satisfied. Sure, after that point I continued my watch for another five minutes, to satisfy my paranoia as well but once that, too, was satisfied I took another sip. And kept drinking it, until the entire pot was empty.


    As I slept the morning away, I had once more strange dreams, with faint sensations, almost as if something was calling me. There were some strange images, nothing but outlines, but I thought they might be a ritual circle, maybe runes or maybe I was just imagining things. I wasn¡¯t sure and I couldn¡¯t be sure, not unless I got a better view of what I had seen. Or maybe imagined, when I tried drawing the images I had seen in the morning, it might have been a Rorschach test for all I could glean from it.


    Putting those aside, I made myself another pot of tea and kept working on my magic, closing my eyes to delve into the Astral River to find myself a new Ice Rune. There were a few I really wanted to regain, Shatter, Hard Ice and Icicle, all were interesting and somewhat important. Letting myself drift in the Astral I began to consider, my mind going over the different concepts as I considered what would be best. There were other runes I remembered but I doubted I would be able to learn them just yet. Stillness had always been a rather transcendental concept, while things like Liquid Moonlight were based on experimentation, lesser runes and understanding. I could remember the feeling of it, but I lacked the power to produce the feeling, I would have to regain more of my power before I could reach for those stronger runes. Even reaching for Hard Ice would be a stretch and not necessarily a beneficial one.


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    Shatter would give me incredible damage against any fleshy targets that could be penetrated with my Ice, the explosive force of an Icicle shattering within a target was one of the deadliest weapons within my arsenal. Even just shattering Icicles in the air, turning them into razor-sharp shrapnel to rip into my foes was quite dangerous, though far less deadly.


    Hard Ice was the straight upgrade to my Ice, giving me a higher density, both magical and mundane, while opening a few interesting things up, like better weapons for myself.


    Icicle was an outlier, as it was a concept I had never finalised as a rune on Mundus. There, I had merely used Hard Ice as material for my attacks, turning the Hard Ice into frozen spears with my Ice Magic. Gaining the Rune would increase my magical efficiency by quite a bit, but would also limit my options somewhat. In addition, I would have to consider which of the Ice Runes I had learned on Mundus would be discarded, though the Torpor rune was a good contender. If I wanted to send an opponent to sleep, Mind Magic was simply the better option.


    Letting my magic flow freely, I weighed the different runes, feeling the ebb and flow within me, within the Astral and trying to let both rational thought and instinct guide me. Ultimately, I settled on the Icicle Rune.


    Within the Astral, I could feel how an Icicle slowly grew, drawn into its sharp, almost fang-like shape as time passed. Sharpened by time itself, until heaven send them plummeting to the ground, akin to a javelin piercing any target that was unlucky enough to be in the way. The rune wasn¡¯t gentle, nor complicated it was a simple concept that would serve a single purpose.


    It might not be the rune with the greatest impact or potential for direct growth but I had a good feeling about the combination of Icicle and Blizzard. It wouldn¡¯t be the Frozen Javelin I had commonly used on Mundus, it would be something bigger, something stronger. If I managed to push myself in regards to the Hard Ice Rune, maybe even managing to learn it without delving into the Astral River for it, I would likely have the strongest single-target piercing spell I would get for a while. A workhorse, something that I could take and use for a long, long time as my go-to weapon. Just what I wanted and hopefully, something that would allow me to fight to my full potential.


    Opening my eyes, I took another sip of tea, letting the pleasant taste flood through me, before I moved into the area we had designated as our training and experimentation room. Lia was hard at work, once again pushing herself physically, but when I entered she took a break, watching what I did.


    Drawing the runes with practised movements, I quickly formed a simple three-rune formation, using the freshly acquired Icicle Rune, a Blizzard Rune to give things direction before adding an Ice Rune to round things out. The three runes flashed with my power the moment they were completed and an Icicle about the size of my arm shot out, leaving a faintly glittering trace in the air before crashing into the wall with a brutal crunch. I hadn¡¯t put enough oomph into the spell to damage the wall, but just from the noise,  could tell that the spell had quite the impact.


    ¡°A new creation, Mistress?¡± Lia quietly asked, looking a little awestruck.


    ¡°Something new, yes,¡± I nodded, briefly studying her body, ¡°But it is nothing I need to experiment with at the moment, would you like me to observe your forms, give you a few hints? We have more than enough time, and I believe if I give you a bit of blood later, you should be ready to go during the night.¡±


    The only answer I got to my suggestion was a gleeful squeal, before Lia threw herself back into her training, with me sitting nearby, watching my student move. There was a strange feeling within my chest, warm, almost glowing, as I observed her growth. I wasn¡¯t sure what it was, but I knew I liked it.

 Chapter 768

    ¡°So, what do you think those creatures you¡¯ve seen yesterday might have been?¡± I asked Lia, as we took a break from training. She only shrugged in response, trying to control her breathing. After a little while, she managed to respond verbally.


    ¡°Whatever they were, there were four of them, at least four I could smell. Of those four, I could only see two, the other two remained out of my sight, no idea if it was due to stealth or cover. Either way, their scent was bestial, somewhat similar to the dogs but still different enough that I¡¯m certain they weren¡¯t dogs. Something furry, I¡¯d bet, and from the size I¡¯d say something about the size of a cat but again, I¡¯m not sure what. It was dark, they were trying to hide, the usual,¡± she explained, shrugging at the end.


    Nodding in response, I considered things for a moment before asking more questions, such as their method of locomotion, whether she had seen their tails or anything that could give us a better idea of what they might have been. My initial guess was a coin flip between feral cats, working together in a bid for survival, or the racoons we had fought before. Either species fit the rough size requirement, especially given that the change could easily have, well, changed the size of certain creatures, as it had done for Silva. Or maybe Silva had always been the size of a calf, I wasn¡¯t quite sure but I was somewhat confident that she had gone up by a few centimetres since we met. A few centimetres in height and roughly her own original body weight in muscles, if I had to guess, the latter mostly since we had gained access to the fields here and the nearly unlimited hunting she now had access to.


    We discussed what possible threats might be lurking in the city for a little longer and decided that we should head into it again. If there were still living creatures lurking in a city filled with Undead, that should be something we look into, if only to make sure the living weren¡¯t¡­ corrupted by the energies that caused the many dead bodies to rise. I had no idea what such energies would do to a living being, at least if the living being survived the infusion, but I was confident it wasn¡¯t anything good.


    My own experience with channelling the energies of Death was that doing so took a toll on your health, with prolonged exposure likely sapping your Vitality, at least eventually. But that was only for me, with my somewhat limited affinity to those energies, an alternative could be that the creatures became something akin to Lenore, after her crossing of the second Divide. A spirit creature with enough affinity to those energies to bestow it to me, thanks to our bond. But also a creature that could conjure up Undead with little more than the flap of her wings. Sure, lesser Undead, little more than shambling bodies of little value in combat, but that was mainly due to our travelling and Lenore¡¯s limited interest in creating Undead, not something innately to her. I had full confidence that Lenore, if she had decided to focus on summoning, would eventually have been able to reanimate entire fields of corpses, simply by flying over the field. Enemies with such capabilities were something I wanted to know about and, if possible, deal with before they became a threat to me and mine. If dealing with them required me to kill them, so be it, if I could win them over as allies, all the better. But I didn¡¯t want them to be a threat, simply because of their danger.


    And so, Lia, Silva and I made our way to the city once more, moving out as soon as the sun had set. Just like the night before, we eschewed stealth to cross the fields between the city and our lair, trusting in our power to overcome whatever beast might lurk nearby. Nothing bothered us, slightly diminishing a part of my vigilance, only to make my paranoia flare up with a vengeance at the question of what might have driven the beasts away, other than the Undead. There might be a different predator lurking, one that could threaten us, the thought bringing my vigilance levels back up.


    My plan was to slowly move through the city, keeping an eye out as we moved to another objective of mine. Namely, move to my original apartment and take a look at the Capsule, if it was still there. Given the circumstances, it might very well be buried in rubble, thanks to a fire or the earthquakes the city had suffered since the change, but I wanted to check it out. It had to be a rather significant object of power, or at least a focus of power, given that it had been able to give the Travellers access to Mundus and the system. At least that was my current hypothesis, one that I held onto with all my might. Because it meant that Mundus had been real, and Sigmir was somewhere out there, in whatever place souls went after they died. And if she was out there, I would get her back, whatever the cost. There were legends of people returning from the dead, so the possibility existed.


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    Examining the artefact that brought me to Mundus in the first place was a good place to start, even if I doubted I had the ability to understand it just yet. Simply seeing it, maybe using Inspect or my magical sight on it would hopefully give me something to start my work.


    And as we made our way there, we¡¯d hopefully see more of these curious creatures that lurked in the city.


    Moving through the city was just as interesting as it had been the night before. Given my plans, we had packed to spend a day or two in the city, planning to hide out in a dark cellar or something like that. It also meant that we had much more time than the night before, enough time to idle a bit and observe the Undead, both with the actual Observe ability and in a more general sense, simply watching them, taking note of their movements and patterns, those kinds of things.


    Amusingly, the patterns we discovered were quite similar to those we had observed amongst the Shattered. They seemed to move within a distinct pattern, though contained with an area. The longer we observed, the more obvious that pattern became, it was as if they were repeating the same sequence of actions again and again, each time returning to the original point.


    One of them first crossed the street and then moved through a burned-out building that used to be a bakery, even moving slowly through the building¡¯s burned-out shell as if advancing in a line, before moving across the street and stopping at the remains of a bus stop. There, the Undead waited for a few seconds, before returning to the original spot and starting the sequence again.


    As we observed similar sequences, Lia and I began to make guesses about where those might come from. What we felt to be our best guess was that it might be a sequence the body that had risen to become Undead had done in life, maybe a habit they had formed or a single sequence that had played out before their death, maybe on the day of the change.


    Trapped in a loop of actions, endlessly repeating the same sequence of events, until they would eventually be laid to rest. It was quite tragic, an eternity of taking out the trash was not something I wished on anybody. But then, the people that those bodies once had been were hopefully long gone, not trapped in some sort of dream-like hellscape in which they repeated the same action, again and again, until their bodies completely decomposed.


    Other than those repeating patterns, the Undead did very little. Just the same repetition, at least until a stimulus hit them. We did a few experiments, moving objects, creating sounds, those kinds of things, trying to figure out how far they could see and hear.


    Interestingly, it didn¡¯t seem like the Undead were actually using sight or hearing to hunt, nor scent for that matter. It was almost as if they had some sort of detection for living beings, allowing them to detect those even through solid cover.


    And even that strange detection seemed to be rather limited, maybe thirty metres in range, but as soon as one of them detected a living being, it caused a ripple-effect, as if they were soundlessly telling all the other Undead. Only, the ¡®telling¡¯ didn¡¯t only work along a distinct range, in one case, we managed to observe how one Undead was ¡®told¡¯ about our presence, while another wasn¡¯t, only the one that wasn¡¯t ¡®told¡¯ was closer to the one that spotted us.


    Clearly, more research was needed. As was more time to find the creepy critters Lia had noticed the night before, as we hadn¡¯t spotted hide or hair of them by the time we got into my old neighbourhood.

 Chapter 769

    Looking at the familiar neighbourhood, I wasn¡¯t quite sure what to think. There were parts that hadn¡¯t changed at all, they looked almost like they had before the change hit, with only minor damage from the past thirty-odd days. Other parts were simply gone, the houses nothing but blackened rubble, reminding me of images I had seen in history class, images of the World Wars and bombed-out cities. Not quite as black-and-white, but there was a bleak quality to the scenery that matched those images almost to a T.


    The building I had lived in was neither of those extremes. It looked roughed up, quite a lot of windows were burned out and parts of it had collapsed but it was still recognisable as a building.


    ¡°Let¡¯s get rid of all the Undead in the area first,¡± I told Lia, before starting to toss magic at the first one I could see. The newly formalised Frozen Javelins, created with three runes, one of Icicle, one of Blizzard and a simple Ice Rune to round things out, turned out quite impressive, allowing me to pierce the ordinary Undead with a single attack, sending them off to the afterlife. They might even be overkill, as I was somewhat confident that they were resistant to piercing damage, meaning my attacks simply took out their spines. Not the most efficient way to kill Undead, but it worked nicely.


    ¡°There are quite a few more coming,¡± Lia warned me, after checking the area around us, while I had busied myself with destroying a few more of these things. Grinning to myself, I decided to go big instead of going home.


    First, I conjured up a simple chunk of Ice, nothing but a segmented pentagonal prism, the tip and bottom formed into pyramids. It took a bit of magic, as I increased the amount of power I channelled into the Ice as much as possible to make it as close to Hard Ice as I currently could manage, before forcing runes into the sides, one per side. It turned the gem-like object I had created into an impromptu focus, a casting implement that wouldn¡¯t last long, but would hopefully last long enough. I considered adding Wind-Runes to the Runes of Hail, Blizzard and Cold I carved into the sides but decided against it. Instead of wind, I doubled up on the Blizzard and added one for Icicle, hoping to increase the size of the hailstones I would conjure. While wind would likely have added a great deal of momentum to the storm I wanted to create, I doubted that Ice was a good material to channel Wind Astral Power. That would mean I¡¯d run into efficiency loss on both sides, the material blunting my spell, in addition to my affinity not fully supporting it. Sometimes, simple was best and in this case, sticking with simple Ice Magic and adding as much as possible was best.


    Lia had destroyed a few more Undead and only now did I realise how many she meant when she spoke of a few. Apparently, I had managed to attract about five different swarms of them, making me wonder if I had been a little overconfident or simply daring. Not that it mattered, given what I was preparing, it would destroy them all, no matter how many.


    My prism completed, I pushed a bit of Ice Magic into it, taking control so I could let it float about while adding a second strand to prime the runes I had carved into it, so it was connected to me. What I was trying was, in a way, a continuation of the experiment I had done on the roof, trying to channel magic into a formation that had some distance from myself. Only instead of starting the channel and moving away myself, I used my Ice Magic to float the prism into the sky, letting it hang a few metres above the roof level. Once it was there, I moved into a somewhat covered position and took a knee, allowing me to fully focus inwards. I didn¡¯t need to fall over while forcing power through myself, I would have taken a seat but sadly, there was nothing to sit on. Maybe I should have conjured my throne.


    Slowly at first, I began channelling power into the formation I had created, trying to keep the increase even so I wouldn¡¯t crack the Ice. Above my, the prism started to glow with frozen light, mist starting to form, while I pushed the Ice magic I had inserted into it, trying to keep it together.


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    The mist started to coalesce into something of a cloud, spreading outwards and soon, hail started to fall. It took a minute or five to get to that point, time started to become a little blurry as I let power surge through me, and I could hear the ice crash into the street outside.


    More and more power was flowing out of me, to the point that I had to either activate Overflow so I could keep the demand going, or pick one of the magical processes I was channelling power into, letting the other fizzle. In a burst of inspiration, I decided to go for broke and activated Overflow, though I didn¡¯t try to keep up with the ever-increasing demands of the Ice Magic that held the prism together. Instead, I channelled as much power as I could into the runes I could still feel, trying to turn them from something carved into Ice into something I had drawn into the sky.


    For a moment, I felt resistance only for it to shatter like glass. Or maybe like Ice, immediately afterwards, I felt a wave of freezingly cold Astral Power wash over me and the cloud in the sky tripled in size, the faint, icy glow of Ice Runes shining through it, bathing the world in an eerie light. And in Ice, as the hail started to turn into a blizzard, the falling shards of Ice turned dangerous enough that Lia and Silva retreated into cover, stepping up next to me.


    All around us, the hail was crashing down, I had no idea how big the cloud above us was by now, but the longer I channelled magic into it, the bigger it became. But of course, just like the formation I used to create my deadly, frozen mist, this couldn¡¯t last forever. The larger the cloud became, the more of the magic I channelled into it was necessary to simply keep it going, forcing me to either let it remain at a certain, quite impressive, size while I got continuously more exhausted or stop channelling my magic and let it fade away.


    By the time it was its maximum size, I was already pretty exhausted, the spell took a lot out of me, so I decided to let it remain at that size for a few minutes, before letting it go. In those minutes, anything trapped within would likely get pummelled to the ground or find cover if they were intelligent enough. While it was possible that additional enemies wandered into the hail, I doubted it, even the Undead had more intelligence than that, or so I thought.


    Either way, I let the spell go and within a few minutes, the hail stopped although the cloud and the cold lingered for a lot longer. It had been a huge amount of Astral Power I pumped into that formation, it took a while to fade back into the Astral River. And just like the cold lingered, so did the hail on the ground, giving me an idea of just how much I had just done.


    The entire area looked more like it was winter than spring, with chunks of Ice covering the ground. The smallest were hailstones the size of peas, the biggest were straight-up Icicles the size of my arm.


    ¡°Wow,¡± Lia whispered, looking around wide-eyed, before staring at me with a strange gaze.


    Sadly, the calm didn¡¯t last long. I was still kneeling, trying to recover from channelling an almost absurd amount of Astral Power through my body, when Silva let out an angry growl. Lia immediately went on high alert and both of them dashed off, Silva growling, Lia with her claws ready to fight.


    Pushing myself up, I staggered a little and followed after them, forcing my body to move. There, in the middle of the ice-covered street, was another enemy, only this one was rather intimidating. It was a Scorched about two metres high, arms covered in bright, purple fire and clearly here to fight. There were a few spots that looked like they had been hit with Ice, but I couldn¡¯t be sure.


    Whatever the case, the Scorched was already throwing fiery projectiles at Lia, Silva and even me, forcing me to stagger out of the way in a rather graceless manner. Noticing how my two allies glanced back at me, I decided that for once, I wouldn¡¯t even try to help, I would take it slow and find cover. I was simply too exhausted to throw any really useful magic around, the blizzard had taken a lot out of me.


    My allies would be¡­ just fine.

 Chapter 770

    For once, there was nothing I could really do but remain hidden, watching my companions fight. It was, strangely, quite interesting, not to fight alongside them allowed me to focus on observing them. I could see a rather impressive difference in Lia¡¯s performance, compared to our usual training, a sharp, almost cruel, edge that seemed to propel her to rip into her foe. If I had to guess, it was because her foe was made of flesh, allowing her to spill the Scorched¡¯s blood, letting it paint her claws red as she savaged its body.


    Or maybe there was simply more adrenaline involved in this fight, allowing her to push herself further. Or it could be instincts or about a dozen other explanations, either way, I could see a distinct difference in her style.


    Maybe I should try finding a way to help her train like this, allowing her to wield her entire strength and skill with that glee. If she could find joy in battle, wouldn¡¯t that motivate her to perfect her ability even further? Sure, it might bring trouble one day in the future, once the need to battle for survival faded away and civilisation established itself again, but really, how long will that take? Would that even happen at all, especially considering that Lia was a vampire with an innate need to take Astral Power from somewhere? Sure, she might be able to feed on livestock and cattle, anything living really, but would she want to? Or would she seek to prey on humans, as the fictional vampires had? I knew that, if I had gained her powers before the change, I would have preyed on humans, simply for convenience. There were just so many of them, it was far easier to look for a human nobody would miss than to hunt enough cattle or worse, feed on rats and similar vermin.


    My musings were interrupted when the Scorched tossed another fireball into my general direction, almost singing my hair. Gritting my teeth, I pushed a little testing how much power I had to play with and let one of the Icicles still lying in the street crash into the Scorced from behind, hitting the knee. My attack was just in time to disrupt the thing''s balance, allowing Lia to carve deep gauges into its skin, drawing copious amounts of blood and dying the tattered rags it wore red.


    My interference meant that the Scorched tossed even more fire at me, forcing me to take full cover, something I readily did. I had no desire to get scorched by the thing, nor did I have the will to force myself to fight more, I was just too tired.


    Soon, a lot of notifications blimped through my mind and I briefly checked them, nodding to myself. Another level, bringing me to thirty-six, in addition to skill-points in Ice Rune Mastery, Ice Magic and Astral Meditation, bringing them to thirty-one, thirty and twenty-nine respectively. It was quite interesting, Astral Meditation was one of my strongest skills, despite being a skill mainly used outside of combat. But then, I had used it to drag my students into the Astral River repeatedly, gleaning insight into their magic and helping them develop so it saw a lot of use.


    Once again, I began to wonder just how the time spent working on different skills was weighed in their advancement. However, it wasn¡¯t something I could be bothered trying to figure out at the moment, maybe not ever. Instead, I pushed myself up from the place I had taken cover and moved over to Lia and Silva.


    ¡°So, everything okay?¡± I asked, looking at the two. Lia had a few holes in her clothes, showing angrily red skin beneath, while Silva had lost some fur, making her look a little pitiful. Luckily, the Scorced was the worst off, it wasn¡¯t just covered in bloody gashes from Lia¡¯s claws, it had literally lost its head, likely thanks to the cleaver she used. Or maybe she had managed to use the meat-hook, by now it was sharpened into a rather lethal edge, allowing her to cause all manner of destruction with it.


    ¡°Yeah,¡± Lia nodded, taking a deep breath, ¡°Do you want to try getting into the building now, or should we wait for tomorrow night?¡± she asked, eyeing the complex I had lived in for so long. It truly didn¡¯t look good and we had only so long until the sun would come up.


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    ¡°Eh, let¡¯s take a look, maybe see if we can find shelter in the cellar. I think there was a utility cellar, I never had to go there,¡± I shrugged, slowly making my way towards the house.


    ¡°Shouldn¡¯t we wait for you to rest a little? That blizzard was¡­¡± She just shook her head, her expression once again warring between awed, scared and exasperated, a rather amusing mix in my eyes.


    ¡°True, there might be enemies within. Though I¡¯m pretty sure the Scorched over there was the toughest foe in a wide range,¡± I nodded, walking over to a bench and taking a seat. It wasn¡¯t the most comfortable, but it was better than sitting on the cold ground.


    Replenishing my Astral Power took a little longer than Lia and I needed to catch our breaths, but not prohibitively so. Both of us agreed that heading into a potentially dangerous situation in suboptimal condition would be foolish, so we took the time before moving into the building.


    It was incredibly strange, familiar in an eerie way, to enter the lobby I had walked through for almost a decade. Little had changed in all that time, only that now, the doors were broken, every surface covered in black soot with some of the signs turned into sludge. Not molten, I was relatively sure the fire-exit signs wouldn¡¯t melt, but just¡­ dissolved in a manner that looked incredibly unnatural to me. I didn¡¯t want to think about what a human body would look like if it underwent such a process, there were things even I didn¡¯t want to imagine.


    Quietly, and very carefully just in case there was danger lurking, we moved through the lobby, towards the stairs. The door there was still intact, only completely blacked out, hiding conditions on the other side. We had to force the heavy fire door open, something that required a lot of effort from all three of us working in tandem, but with some work and leverage, we did it.


    Only to stare at a pile of rubble, where the stairwell above had collapsed, leaving me at a loss. We might be able to climb up a little way but I had no idea what was waiting for us further up. The only thing I could say for certain was that getting there wouldn¡¯t be easy.


    ¡°Let¡¯s retreat for now, we can check the fire escape on the way out,¡± I told Lia, a small part of me amused that my steps vaguely retraced the way I had taken when fleeing the building right after the change. Back then, a burning monster, what I now knew as a Scorched, had set the street out fron ablaze, forcing me and a few others to flee through the backdoor. The fire escape was also back there, secured a few metres above ground so people couldn¡¯t easily use it to enter the building, only exit it.


    The area we moved through was partially collapsed but we could just squeeze past it. We kept moving slowly, I readily remembered the one door I had slammed into a Shattered¡¯s face during the escape and a small shudder ran down my spine as we moved past it.


    Outside, the situation didn¡¯t look better than inside. The fire escape, supposedly designed to withstand any fire so that people could escape a burning building had partially failed at some point, half of it crashing onto the rest, turning the entire thing into a jungle gym of twisted metal, sharp edges and deadly points. Lia and I studied the thing for a bit, before deciding that it likely could be climbed but that it was dangerous, not something we wanted to attempt as our time was running low.


    Retreating from the partially burned building, we looked for a good spot to spend the day. We went with the easiest solution, picking the least destroyed building we could see and check it for an outside door leading into a cellar.


    When that first building didn¡¯t have one in evidence, we moved on to the next and by the third attempt, we found one.


    Cracking the door open was trivial, it only had a simple lock that I could fill with Ice, giving me a perfectly fitting key. Once inside, we quickly checked for danger, searching for possible enemies, making sure that there were no glaring holes anywhere that might expose us to the hateful sun or structural weakpoints that would bury us, if anything went wrong. Luckily, there were none of those, only a few more or less demolished washing machines and stuff like that. While it was far from our usual lair, it would have to do for the day.

 Chapter 771

    It was amazing how easy it was to turn a room full of destroyed junk, with nothing functional beyond its physical shape, into a well-equipped campsite. The only thing previously present in the room we truly used was the grate in the floor, allowing water that spilt from the laundry machines to drain. With a bit of magic, mostly water though I added an application of Fire Magic into it to make things hot, I could easily create a shower and the same magics allowed me to prepare some simple, hot food using minimal supplies. There was a reason why I had pushed myself ot learn at least a bit of Fire Magic, just for this, it had been worth it.


    I considered trying to soften the concrete floor with some Earth Magic but ultimately, that wouldn?t really work, the amount of power and skill needed was beyond me. In addition, the best I could accomplish would likely be a pile of sand, which wasn¡¯t much softer than concrete, just more shifty.


    I tried to recreate the shadowy wards I had used on Mundus for a while and I managed to expend some Astral Power. Only, I had no idea if I had actually managed to do something or if I had just wasted my efforts. There was no tangible change and even with my magic sight, I was unable to detect anything, so I was somewhat confident that I had wasted them. But then, if I wanted to place an alarm, would I want it to be readily visible to anyone capable of detecting magic, or would I want to use the concealment aspect of Darkness to hide the strands of power? I might have managed to hide the alarm, even without deliberately trying to do so, simply because of Darkness¡¯ inherent affinity to do so.


    Unless something stumbled upon us during the day, we might never know. Though, despite enjoying new discoveries, somehow, I didn¡¯t want to actually gain confirmation on this one. At least not with any sort of actual danger stumbling upon us. Some small, weak critter, sure, no problem, but getting mobbed by a horde of Shattered was not my idea of a good time. Or getting mobbed in general, not unless I prepared the battlefield and controlled it myself.


    My dreams during the day were, just like the last few days, strange. Disjointed, with shadowy figures, images and symbols floating through my mind, nothing I could actually understand making me wonder if it was a simple nightmare, playing on a primordial fear of the unknown, or if it was something else. Neither option sounded particularly fun, though I made a mental note to try meditating on the images at some point.


    Sadly, the day didn¡¯t pass quietly, even after we woke up. At some time in the afternoon, Silva¡¯s ears perked up and moments later, I heard a strange noise, distinctly different from the usual noises of the city. It sounded somewhat similar to Silva, running across concrete, only softer by an order of magnitude or two. Scratching claws, if my guess was correct, but luckily not a lot of them. One, maybe two animals, or four, if they were some sort of two-legged beast. I had no idea what was coming towards us, and I wasn¡¯t really worried, not with all three of us rested and alert.


    Waving to the others, I spun the shadows of the room around us, allowing us to blend into the environment. We all moved to different parts of the room, spreading out so we took up ambush positions. Then, it became a waiting game, the hardest part of the battle. Knowing that the enemy is coming but being unable to perfectly time things, due to echoes and a general lack of information. I had no idea where the creature might jump out from, there were a few open or broken pipes but nothing hinted at anything.


    The first to twitch was, amusingly, Lia. While she was the one with the lowest Intuition, and therefore the weakest senses between the three of us, she was also the one with the highest agility and dexterity, giving her the best reaction speed and manual acuity. While my mind was still trying to process the sounds I was hearing, Lia was already jumping forward, her hands striking as quick as snakes into one of the broken pipes.


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    The next moment, a strange, mix of squeal and screech caused me to flinch in discomfort, my ears completely focused in that direction and as sensible as possible. The noise continued for a few more seconds and soon, we could see the source. It was a racoon, but a strange one, completely unlike anything I had seen before.


    I had seen normal racoons, with small, beady dark eyes, I had seen Shattered Racoons, their eyes replaced by pits of blue fire but this? It looked like something between the states, only not. It still had eyes but there was also a greyish-green flame flickering around them, confusing me. It was almost like the thing was some sort of odd hybrid, trying to struggle free from Lia¡¯s grip until she used her second hand to force it to the ground.


    Following my nosy nature, I used Observe, only to learn that it was an ostensibly normal Racoon, with a respectable level of fourteen. Not bad for a trash panda but far below anything we would be interested in fighting.


    ¡°What are you doing?¡± I asked, when Lia didn¡¯t simply kill the thing, or drain its Blood and Astral Power.


    ¡°I¡¯ve got an idea, something I would like to try if you¡¯d allow it, Mistress,¡± Lia asked, briefly looking at me before focusing on the animal again.


    ¡°Let¡¯s hear it,¡± I nodded, curious about what she had in mind.


    ¡°This one is weird, isn¡¯t it? Smells weird, looks weird, might be special,¡± she began, studying the form that had stilled in her grasp, likely knowing that there would be no escape at this moment. Not quite sure what she meant by weird smell, I sniffed the air and noticed a peculiar scent, one that stood out even amongst the scent of beast coming from the critter. It was eerily similar to the scent around the Undead and the Slaughterhouse, the scent of Death Magic, only that the thing didn¡¯t seem to actually die, it seemed to be relatively healthy.


    Trying to find out more, I blinked to activate my magical sight and took a closer look, immediately noticing the streaks of power coming from its eyes and trying to invade the body. Or maybe from somewhere beyond its eyes, I couldn¡¯t be quite certain. But it certainly was an interesting specimen, one that I wouldn¡¯t want to kill off without getting a better idea of how it actually worked.


    ¡°I want to turn it like you turned me,¡± Lia continued, her eyes shining with a spark I hadn¡¯t seen before, glee, interest and joy. ¡°I think it could be quite useful, just like Silva is useful to you, it could be a companion for me.¡±


    ¡°So, you want your own furry critter?¡± I grinned, reaching over to stroke Silva¡¯s fur, endlessly amused that my daughter wanted to have a pet of her own. Maybe there was more of the teenager she once had been in there than I thought.


    ¡°Granted,¡± I nodded, already looking forward to the process. It was the first time for us, so no matter what, there would be some interesting discoveries about it. ¡°What do you need from me? I will help you, though I¡¯m actually not certain how I can. Your creation was almost as much happenstance, luck and maybe fate as it was my ability,¡± I admitted, trying to work out how I might be able to facilitate what she had in mind.


    ¡°The big thing is obviously power. I¡¯ll have to take in some of your blood, maybe even while I¡¯m working, to gain extra Astral Power,¡± she began and once more, I simply nodded, ¡°I think I¡¯ll try to put a circle around it, similar to those you use for your runes. Blood Runes, those should work, right?¡± she continued and I nodded, already planning to put together a circle of Blood Runes alongside a Sacrifice rune, hoping to turn the thing into its own sacrifice to make it better. The concept didn¡¯t quite fit but I had stretched the innate meaning of a rune further than that so it might just work.


    Lia and I continued to discuss our plans and after tying the little critter up, we began to draw the circle. I had to do most of the work, taking my time to instruct Lia on what I was trying to accomplish, but we had the whole day, giving us more than enough time.


    Finally, after Lia had once more knelt before me, drinking the blood from my hands, I took a step back, nodding that the preparations were complete. Now, it was Lia¡¯s show.

 Chapter 772

    Watching Lia work was quite fascinating. I could see how her magic was charging the circle she had drawn and watched as faint lines of it began to sink into the trapped racoon. Her attempt at turning it turned what was a battle between the strange influence of necrotic energy and the vital energies of the racoon into a three-way battle. Or maybe it would be better to describe it as a replacement, the necrotic energies were eroding the vitality of it, and Lia¡¯s vampiric powers started to replace what had been eroded, at least partially.


    At the same time, she tore a gash into her arm, letting blood drip out and forcing it into the racoon''s mouth. At first, it didn¡¯t look like the raccoon was taking it willingly, but soon, it was greedily lapping at the source.


    After a short while, I opened another cut in my hand, letting some more blood pool out while channelling Astral Power into it, before allowing Lia to drink some more. I could see just how hard she was working, trying to control the influx of her powers in a way that would turn the three-way struggle into a victory for her vampiric energies, and by the looks of it, it was working. Not only was the eroded vitality being replaced, but the energy was also starting to infect the vitality it racoon had left, trying to actively turn it. At the same time, with the influx of vampiric energy, the necrotic energies had to work far harder than before in their attempt to erode everything. The erosion took power, quite a lot of it by the looks of it, and Lia was providing too much power for whatever infection was trying to take hold of the racoon.


    Interestingly, the racoon seemed to be welcoming the influx of energy from Lia, despite that energy also starting to replace the vital energy that it previously had. I had felt strange energies invading my body while on Mundus, it had never been a really pleasant experience, but here, it might be different. The racoon had enough foreign energy running through its body that I began to worry it would explode if anything were to disturb the slowly shifting equilibrium.


    Twice more, I allowed Lia to drink from my hand, refilling her reserves. It might not have been strictly necessary, but I wanted to be on the safe side. She was attempting something we had never tried before and I didn¡¯t want a lack of Astral Power to be the reason that she failed. There were already far too many potential reasons why the attempt might fail, from the rather volatile conflict of energy within the creature, to the creature¡¯s nature. with a few dozen other factors thrown in for good measure. And yet, despite the many factors that might throw off the attempt, it was the first time that Lia felt the potential to try. Or maybe she had just never seen reason to before, I wasn¡¯t sure. And it didn¡¯t really matter.


    Either way, she was doing it and as I watched, I was relatively sure she was succeeding.


    Finally, the racoon stilled, Lia¡¯s energy now the dominant force within its body, the last vestiges of necrotic energy rapidly fading, alongside the dregs of vitality, mostly concentrated in what I assumed was the digestive tract.


    Another Observe, and I knew that she truly had succeeded, the creature now read as a Vampiric Racoon, the label somehow amusing me to no end.


    ¡°Can you communicate with it?¡± I asked Lia, as she pulled her hands back from the changed creature, heavily dropping on her behind as she leaned back, clearly exhausted.


    ¡°No, I don¡¯t think so,¡± she shook her head, before looking down, trying to catch her breath. Not that she really needed to, I was pretty sure she was mostly suffering from mental exhaustion but I knew that spellcasting could be hard, physical work. Though, I would have expected somebody with a fighter¡¯s resilience to be less affected, compared to me with my poor physical attributes. Well, relatively poor, I was likely within the upper percentage amongst spellcasters, thanks to being touched by a dragon but even with it, I didn¡¯t compare to Lia, not even close.


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    Interestingly, the racoon was clearly watching how Lia and I talked, its head switching back and forth as if listening to the conversation.


    ¡°Silva, do you speak trash panda?¡± I asked, a small grin on my face. Only, it wasn¡¯t Silva who reacted to my words, the little critter let out a chitter I could only describe as angry, staring at me while trying to push itself up from its prone position. At the same time, Silva let out a somewhat annoyed-sounding huff, making me think that she was feeling insulted by the insinuation. Though, to be fair, I wasn¡¯t sure if it was the insinuation that she might be able to speak to it, or that she was unable to do so. One was a potential insult to her species, as it implied sharing characteristics with the racoon, and the other to her intelligence, implying that she couldn¡¯t do so. Sometimes, it was difficult to talk with my canine companion, her answers could be a little short. Barkingly so.


    ¡°I guess that gives us something to go on,¡± Lia grinned, realising that the reaction of the racoon almost certainly meant it was about as capable of communication as Silva, we just needed more time to interpret its expressions.


    ¡°Apparently. And it tells us that the racoon doesn¡¯t like to be called a trash panda, which I find rather hilarious. That it is smart enough to interpret language that way, I would love to figure out how it works,¡± I shook my head, fascinated by the communication ability we were witnessing. ¡°The mind is such a fascinating thing. I wonder¡­¡± I mused, thinking about my Mind Magic ability. Would I be able to pull the racoon into some sort of communication space, where we could talk?


    I quickly realised that it was unlikely. I might be able to form such a space, though the closest thing I had done like that was pulling other people into the Astral River to commune, but that didn¡¯t mean we would actually understand each other. It might just be similar to the one time Silva had tried to share a notification of hers, giving me impressions that were completely foreign, rooted in a largely different mental architecture.


    In response to my musing, the racoon started to chitter again, angling towards Lia who happily started to scratch its back. Its movement was still a little stiff but it didn¡¯t appear as if there was any permanent damage.


    ¡°I don¡¯t think it wants you to figure its mind out,¡± Lia snarked and I realised that the racoon hadn¡¯t just moved towards her but looked almost as if it was trying to find shelter from me. Understandable, people considering how to figure out how somebody¡¯s mind worked was a rather scary prospect. Though, at the same time also an important thing. In hindsight, I could easily appreciate how difficult it had been for my mother to help me understand myself and how to function in a society built for the average person, something I had never been and would never be.


    ¡°I think it likes you quite a bit. Maybe it¡¯ll call you mama soon,¡± I grinned, remembering how Lia had immediately tried to call me her mother. If I had to consider her my daughter, she would have to consider her trash panda her baby.


    ¡°Mhm, maybe,¡± she looked at the furry critter but instead of revulsion, she looked almost content, causing the grin to slip off my face. That, I had not expected. Had I just managed to make myself into a grandmother? I didn¡¯t want to be a grandmother, not for a long, long while. I didn¡¯t even want to be a mother¡­ Or did I? It was an incredibly weird sensation, pressing into my chest and stomach.


    ¡°You¡¯ll need a name,¡± Lia told the critter, still gently petting its fur.


    ¡°Start with checking if it¡¯s a boy or girl. Or just suggest names and see what it likes, that¡¯s how Silva got her name,¡± I suggested, scratching my own partner behind her ears.


    Lia did as I suggested, letting the racoon hear name after name, until she got an excited response to the name ¡®Alex¡¯.


    ¡°You¡¯re Alex, then?¡± she asked and the racoon chittered again and at least to me, it sounded like a happy, affirmative chitter. I couldn¡¯t be completely confident, but Lia apparently was.


    ¡°Maybe the two of you should take a nap, I¡¯m pretty sure you are just as exhausted as your racoon,¡± I told them, glancing into the sky to estimate the time.


    ¡°I¡¯ll keep watch, maybe prepare some food for later. But you need rest, if we want to try getting into my old apartment,¡± I added, leaning against Silva in an attempt to get comfortable.

 Chapter 773

    Once again, I stood on my balcony. There was a part of me that felt amused at the familiarity of the location, the sense of belonging that welled up within me as I stepped onto it, looking into the night as I had done hundreds, maybe even a thousand times before. The odd thing was, everything had changed, the entire world was completely different from what it had been when I stood here the last time, I was fundamentally different, and yet, it felt oh-so-familiar.


    Though, the biggest upside was that I could now see all the stars in the sky, countless tiny dots of light scattered between a few hanging clouds. Without electricity, without any light pollution, the stars shone brightly once again and it was a magnificent sight. If only the price hadn¡¯t been so high.


    Helping Lia up from the frozen ladder I had conjured to let us climb up, I smashed in the already cracked window, easily stepping into my apartment. Here, the familiarity ended immediately, the place was nothing like I remembered it being. It was in ruins, the walls were blackened from fire and even one of the dividing walls between the living room and the kitchen had come down. Rubble was strewn all around the area, even the floor had partially dissolved or burned or something along those lines, it was an utter mess. Nothing of my belongings looked even remotely intact, everything had been consumed by the flames.


    I felt Lia approach and she gently placed a hand on my shoulder, offering silent support. It was weird, I had thought I had already discarded any attachment to the live I had before the change, simply because it was necessary to focus on the present and prepare for the future. Surviving in a breaking world, making sure that I had the supplies needed, those concerns had taken over everything, alongside my personal desire to learn and eventually master magic. The Arcane Path had become my life, only now, I realised that my old life had truly burned away. It was gone and would never return and for some reason, the stark reminder I was looking at hit me hard.


    Maybe it was that the apartment had been my home, the place I could always return to, and now I was looking at the irrefutable evidence that it was gone. Maybe a part of my mind had clung to the idea that it was still out there, waiting for me. But it simply was not.


    Shaking my head, I carefully moved forward, uncertain if the floor was still able to support the added weight. Cracking sounds accompanied my advance, likely from broken glass and other small parts of my old life that I was now trampling underfoot but the floor didn¡¯t falter, nothing indicated I was in danger. At least not physically.


    Moving along the wall, past the burned-out shelves where my novel collection used to be, past my television stand, past the wreckage of my old life, I made my way to the hallway. A brief look into the bathroom showed quite a bit of water damage, alongside more broken glass and destruction, but nothing too extreme. The contents of the room were broken but the room itself was intact.


    Sadly, the same didn¡¯t hold true for my office. Even before we reached the room, I could see that things were bad. The hallway had a few chunks of concrete lying around, in addition to a few bits of construction metal, bits that I planned to pick up. The metal might be basic steel but it might be possible to use it, either to advance my magic or to have somebody else craft things with it.


    ¡°Shit,¡± I softy cursed, looking into the room that used to be my office. Or what was left of the room. It was almost amusing, one quarter of the room was remarkably intact. Sadly, that quarter was what held mostly my old University supplies, textbooks and quite a bit of professional literature. They hadn¡¯t burned, they were singed and looked somewhat worse for wear but I was quite sure I would be able to read them if I so desired.


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    The rest of the room was demolished, not just destroyed. The ceiling above, and not just one floor above, had given way, creating a chimney spanning multiple stories, maybe reaching all the way to the ground floor. I wasn¡¯t about to get too close to the gaping hole in the floor, I had no desire to cause some sort of secondary collapse with my heading down a few stories and landing on broken debris. That sounded like an excellent way to get myself killed.


    ¡°What was in there?¡± Lia quietly asked as I considered how to proceed.


    ¡°You¡¯ve heard about Road to Purgatory. To reach Mundus, to connect to our Avatars, what we thought of as game characters, we used a Capsule, think high-tech coffin,¡± I explained, getting an amused snort, maybe because I had told her that already. But I was rambling, so she couldn¡¯t complain too much.


    ¡°The Capsule was an amazing piece of technology, or at least I thought it was just technology. Now, with the change, I¡¯m pretty sure it was some sort of divinely created artefact, though I¡¯m not sure created by which deity. I wanted to study it, maybe get some parts of it, trying to see what I can figure out. I doubt I¡¯d be able to actually understand it, but a few bits and pieces? Maybe;¡± I admitted, knowing that the idea was pretty arrogant. Mortal Hubris at its finest, but given that I had replaced my Hubris with Titanic Ambition, it was amusingly fitting.


    ¡°And that capsule is where?¡± she asked, looking past me into the wrecked office. In lieu of a reply, I simply pointed towards the gaping hole before me, letting out a mirthless chuckle.


    ¡°Oh,¡± Lia just replied, ¡°Want me to take a look?¡±


    ¡°No, not without taking some precautions, no idea how sturdy everything in here is. No need to get into bigger trouble,¡± I declined, already deciding on a way forward. Conjuration of Ice was such a wonderful ability. Outside, I had used it to create a simple, relatively sturdy, ladder that allowed us to make our way upwards, avoiding compromised structures in the process. Now, I could, with nothing but the wave of my hand, form a large sheet of Ice, using it to distribute whatever weight we put on the floor across a larger surface area. That way, the entire hallway would have to collapse before we fell into the hole. Not perfect but as safe as I could make it. I briefly considered raising a bannister next to the hole but decided against it, that would have just been silly.


    Stepping forward, I leaned over to peer into the hole. All the way down, for it went down to the ground floor, the damage widening and making me worry that the entire structure was compromised. My capsule, in whatever form it still remained, was lost, buried under a massive pile of rubble and debris. Maybe we could head down there and get a look at it from ground level, and possibly find some more salvageable metal, but I didn¡¯t have high hopes for anything magical.


    ¡°It¡¯s a bust,¡± I told Lia, before turning away. Looking around, I started to idly move through my apartment, still going slowly to avoid trouble. Behind me, Lia took a brief glance down the hole before coming after me, silently shadowing me.


    Luckily, my bedroom was mostly intact. There was some damage, my bedsheets had somehow managed to catch fire without causing serious damage to anything else, so I could salvage a few items. Old photographs, pictures of my family that I had hung on my wall when moving in and never bothered to replace or move. A memory of my parents, a reminder of their presence. Letting out a sigh, I took them off the wall, planning to take them with me. A reminder of who I used to be before the change had hit.


    The devastation was strange, some places seemed to be almost untouched, others completely destroyed. A small part of me was continuously looking for patterns, trying to figure out how things connected. Why did parts of that wall crumble, but others were still there? What reason did that particular material have to burst into flames, while leaving other things intact? Did that shelf burn by itself, or was it set ablaze by something else? There were countless questions that ghosted through my head, as I moved through the ruins of my old life. Looking for answers.


    But ultimately, there were none for me to find here. Nothing but old clothes, burned paper and destroyed memories, everything that had truly made this place my home was gone. Had been gone since the change hit, maybe even before then. Maybe my home had been gone, ever since Sigmir died on Mundus and I had never realised.


    Maybe home was just something I could dream about until I managed to accomplish what I had set out to do. To get my beloved Sigmir back.

 Chapter 774

    Back on the ground, we reunited with Silva and Alex, both of whom had opted to remain on the ground. Silva for purely practical reasons, a dog wasn¡¯t that good at climbing ladders, especially not steep ones, while Alex had taken up an observing position, possibly to make sure no trouble found us. From what I could tell from the racoon¡¯s behaviour, I was convinced that their primary skill was stealth, with very little offensive potential. It looked like they didn¡¯t have access to the corrosive combination of Dark, Blood and Death-Magic I had seen the other racoons use. Maybe they¡¯d learn in the future, but for now, they could serve as a scout, observer and general nuisance. Not necessarily the greatest catch but it was Lia¡¯s first conversion, so maybe allowances had to be made. Or maybe we could find some other way to make an incredibly stealthy trash panda useful, traps, poison, or something along those lines. There had to be something they could do, in order to make their existence worth our while.


    Trying to access the capsule, or rather the pile of rubble it had to be buried within, from inside the building didn¡¯t get us far either. Sure, we could reach the pile but it was composed of large chunks of concrete, steel and other junk all jumbled together, making it impossible to find anything. To make matters worse, the chaotic energies during the change seemed to have fused parts of the rubble together, creating some rather weird shapes that reminded me of modern art, only that the artist was drunk. So, modern art at its finest.


    I tried to use my Earth Magic to get a better idea of what we were looking at but that didn¡¯t get me far either, I wasn¡¯t skilled enough, nor was my affinity to the element high enough to make a difference. I could pull minor miracles from nowhere when it came to Ice Magic, likely Darkness as well, but for the rest of my magic, I had to work for it.


    Ultimately, I gave up. There was simply nothing we could realistically accomplish here, not with our current abilities. I had even tried asking Alex to scurry into the rubble in an attempt to get to the capsule, not that their success would help me, but the rubble was too tightly packed. So, we walked away, knowing that I had failed. Luckily, the trip hadn¡¯t cost us anything. Maybe I would be able to get Cassie¡¯s old address, allowing us to check there. Hopefully, her home, and the capsule within, were still there.


    On our way through town, I noticed something weird in one part of town. The Undead, previously moving in isolated groups, each led by an individual Shattered, weren¡¯t isolating any longer. They seemed to congregate, maybe even coordinate on a level we hadn¡¯t seen before. To make matters worse, I noticed that one of the Undead had a weird, green-grey glow coming from its eyes, more akin to the passive glow of a watch¡¯s numerals than the flickering, burning glow of the eyes of a Shattered.


    I had no idea what it might mean, but the irregularity was enough to make the four of us investigate. Our first experiments were to test how the Undead reacted to attacks. We started, as always, with simple, flying Icicles. No need to do anything fancy, no need to take any risks, just a simple frozen javelin that ripped into one of them. Just as always, my spell was enough to send the Undead to the ground, their chest obliterated by the impact. My Ice Magic wasn¡¯t the most effective against them, not unless I tried to freeze them, but there was always the old adage about overkill.


    Curiously, the swarm didn¡¯t react in quite the same way as they had before. They started to move but slowly, instead of simply blundering into the direction the attack came from, they started to form up in something akin to ranks, moving as a cohesive unit instead of a mob of individuals.


    The coordination wasn¡¯t great but it was enough to make me wonder just how capable they¡¯d be if they ever managed to reach us. I doubted they¡¯d manage to actually work together, not in the way that they used the openings made by another¡¯s attack, but just their number was enough to make me worry a little.


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    Fighting a hundred enemies at the same time was far harder than fighting a hundred enemies, one at a time. I had a feeling that they were getting closer to the state of fighting at the same time.


    Only, my paranoia flared when I realised that it wasn¡¯t just that one group coming for us. There were more groups, not just the one I had attacked, all slowly moving in an attempt to encircle us. That was far beyond anything the Undead had demonstrated in a tactical capacity, it was outright strategic and quite dangerous. The biggest weakness of the undead was their atrocious speed, but if their prey was surrounded and trapped, the lacking speed was almost irrelevant. If they simply tightened the noose, those trapped within would eventually get strangled.


    Not a pleasant prospect.


    Instead of trying to fight, I quickly conjured up some mist, simply because having the concealment was better than not having it, and pulled the others in an attempt to escape.


    Luckily, the Undead preferred large, open spaces, where they could move as a mob instead of squeezing through the narrow, partially blocked alleys between buildings. Those were even more perilous than they had been before the change thanks to a multitude of broken objects from the surrounding buildings, everything from potted plants to air conditioning units, balconies and rubble had crashed down at some point. Maybe during the change itself, when the fundamental properties of many things changed, or during one of the earthquakes that happened since then. Whatever the cause, it made moving through the alleys a test of agility, greatly lessening the speed of anyone not capable enough.


    Luckily for us, the least capable of us was Silva and thanks to her four-paw-drive, she could get across most obstacles, as long as they weren¡¯t too large. Alex, on the other hand, had it trivially easy, not only were they small enough to ride on Lia¡¯s shoulder if they so desired, and Lia allowed it, but their diminutive size also meant that they needed a far lower agility score to provide the same feats. I had yet to figure out how the relationship between attributes and size worked, but I was confident that a tiny bug with a theoretical strength of ten was weaker, in absolute terms than a human with a strength of ten. How the comparison worked in relative terms, I wasn¡¯t quite sure but wanted to figure it out at some point. Someday.


    We were halfway through the alleyway that would hopefully bring us out of the encirclement the Undead were trying to pull together when I noticed something. It wasn¡¯t quite audible, but it felt like it should be. Almost like one of those high-pitched dog-training whistles that people generally can¡¯t hear only that it wasn¡¯t quite that. It was a high-pitched chittering, yes, but it wasn¡¯t the pitch that was the problem but something else.


    I felt myself slow down, trying to grasp what was going on there, when a second set of those pitches came from another direction, my head swivelling around to locate the sources. It felt as if the not-noise was coming from all around us.


    Suddenly, my gaze fell on Alex and I noticed that their ears were similarly twitching, their head moving around just like mine had seconds before. Was Alex trying to locate the same not-noise or was it a coincidence?


    Shaking my head, I pushed on, ignoring the strange sensation and focusing on the Undead I could still hear all around us, still trying to close the net.


    Another chitter came to my ears and this time, I managed to catch the direction it came from, above us and from the right. Looking around, I saw a small alley heading in that direction and as we moved past it, I tried to find the source.


    Up there, hiding on another balcony, was another racoon, or something of that size and built, it was too far away to Observe, making it difficult to tell the details. But it had the right shape and size, though there was one thing that stood out.


    Just like some of the Undead we had been running from, the eyes of that racoon were alight wit the same, green-grey glow. The similarity sent shivers down my spine, reminding me of the corruption Alex had been under when we found them. It might have been a coincidence but somehow, I seriously doubted that.


    What the exact connection was, I couldn¡¯t tell. But my gut told me it was important, incredibly so. And yet, the only thing we could do in that moment, was to keep running, or we would get encircled, swarmed and, most likely, killed.

 Chapter 775

    Ultimately, escaping the Undead¡¯s encirclement wasn¡¯t a significant problem. By noticing it early enough, we had managed to avoid the original encirclement and once we were on the move, the Undead simply couldn¡¯t keep up.


    That didn¡¯t mean we had been able to simply traipse off into the night, whistling and skipping all the way, but it meant that we could slip away quietly, once we got enough distance. Though, the ¡®enough¡¯ was quite the stretch, one that was far longer than I had expected. Not because the Undead themselves were a problem but due to the chittering I had picked up, it wasn¡¯t just one racoon that chittered and, from what I could hypothesise, direct the Undead. There were dozens of them, or at least enough to coordinate pursuit and attack from multiple directions, even as we ran away.


    A part of me suspected Alex, by virtue of the shared race between her and the guiding racoons but I had never heard her use that strange not-sound chittering, so I wasn¡¯t truly confident in my suspicion. More to the point, I had noticed that the chittering racoons all had those dimly glowing eyes, a glow eerily similar to the one that had been eroding Alex when Lia had turned her into a vampire, pushing that magic back. Either way, I would keep an eye on Alex and their behaviour. It might be that they were some sort of spy, plant or other danger, maybe even an entirely unwitting one, but I doubted it. It simply didn¡¯t fit with the manner in which we had encountered the racoon, for that encounter to be anything but a coincidence would require an incredible amount of foresight to set up. It felt far more likely that it had been just that, happenstance and the other racoons had been hunting us for their own reasons.


    Or they had been hunting us because Alex was with us, in an effort to hunt down a traitor to their kind, or something along those lines. I certainly could see a group of humans trying to hunt down one of their numbers if they were turned into a vampire and would possibly give away important secrets of theirs. Or even just turn into an obstacle, Alex¡¯s behaviour had indicated that they were just as capable as I was in regards to perceiving the chittering, which I considered important. I wasn¡¯t sure yet what that not-noise actually was but when I asked Lia about it, she had no idea and similarly, Silva hadn¡¯t indicated she noticed anything either. That almost confirmed my conjunction, with only the token sliver of paranoid doubt remaining.


    Sadly, that didn¡¯t tell me what the chittering actually was. It might simply be a method to communicate amongst themselves, one that would normally remain undetected, or it might be something else.


    Possibly a method to control and coordinate the Undead, which was a rather scary idea, one that was indicated by the magical glow that was shared between the Undead and the racoons. In addition, the chittering had kept up with us for quite some time as we fled, only ceasing once we truly escaped. Or we had managed to escape the chittering, which caused the Undead to abandon their pursuit.


    In addition, I had noticed that by the time the chittering ceased to follow us, the Undead were once again led by Shattered, not the other type of Undead, with their dimly green glowing eyes.


    There certainly was a pattern there, the only problem was, I had no idea what the pattern indicated. There were quite a few possible connections but which were coincidence, which were linked by causation and which were correlation, I had no idea. And even if I began to assume causation, I wasn¡¯t sure of the link¡¯s direction. Did the green glow of the racoons cause the green glow in the Undead or did the green glow of the Undead cause the racoons to develop it? Or was it caused by a different source we had yet to encounter, one that controlled both sides? It was an interesting conundrum, one that I wanted to solve at some point.


    Either way, we had continued onwards throughout most of the night, only looking for shelter on the outskirts of town when it became clear that we wouldn¡¯t be able to get to our lair before the sun rose. With each passing day, the nights were getting shorter, something that annoyed me greatly but, sadly, there was nothing I could do about that just yet. Maybe one day, maybe I would be able to perform something similar to the conjuration of a frozen storm the Nidh?gg had performed on Mundus, an attempt to shroud the world in eternal night, bringing about an endless winter. Or maybe that was a rather bad idea, it might be easier to just get a very wide and sturdy parasol or something along those lines. Would certainly be easier to market to my fellow survivors, even if their opinions wouldn¡¯t really matter during an eternal night. They would be far too busy dying to register their displeasure with me.


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    Our new shelter was just as comfortable as one would expect. It had all the amenities of home, dirty floors, rubble, broken glass, destroyed appliances, everything one would never wish for. However, it had the one thing that truly mattered, namely, it had shelter from the sun.


    Once we were all situated and reasonably comfortable, I realised something, something that made me gag just a little.


    ¡°You know, I think we need to wash our new companion. No disrespect for racoons, but I have no idea where Alex has been, what they did there or through what sort of garbage they crawled to meet us,¡± I told Lia, looking at the trash panda that had curled up on her lap. A trash panda she was happily petting, that had ridden on her acting like a scarf around her neck and that she had cuddled for some time after turning them into a vampire. All without washing their fur.


    Lia had the grace to look disgusted at the realisation, even if Alex didn¡¯t look overly interested in the idea of a bath.


    ¡°Alex, if you know what¡¯s good for you, you¡¯ll not make a mess, nor will you struggle or act in any way opposed to getting bathed. If you do, I¡¯ll channel enough Cold into the water I conjure to turn you into a frozen ferret. If you act appropriately, allow Lia to scrub you, wash your pelt and make sure you are clean, I¡¯ll make the water comfortably warm and will dry your pelt afterwards.¡± I had to hide a grin when Alex visibly wilted from my words, cementing the fact that they understood English well enough.


    Their understanding started to make me wonder how it came about. I doubted that normal racoons had been able to understand people on an intellectual level before the change, but now, that obviously had, well, changed. But to truly understand the language, not just the concept of a language but to learn English? It was rather weird and gave rise to quite a few questions. If the racoons here had learned English, did that mean that other critters had done so, too? And why English? Was it based on location at the time of the change, with the location somehow being saturated in the voices of the English-speaking people all around the area? Or had the racoons simply heard English the most before the change and somehow learned it due to that? It was an incredibly interesting question when considering the mechanics of the system but sadly, it was also one that I doubted was answerable. At least not without a great deal of study, studying that would most likely be impossible.


    Impossible questions aside, with Alex suitably subdued, we all ventured into the laundry area of the cellar we were squatting in. There, it was decided that we shouldn¡¯t just wash Alex, but that we should also wash ourselves, our clothes and everything else that had been in contact with the Undead. There was no question that those things were disgusting, after over thirty days of decomposition that was an undeniable fact, and every remnant of their presence should be cleansed, either with fire or with flowing water.


    Given that bathing in fire was out, we had to make do with streams of conjured water, heated to the best of my ability. There was a bit of irony in the fact that it took me almost as much magic to wash the four of us, our clothes and everything in warm water as it had taken me the night before, to conjure up a good-sized cloud that rained down destruction on our foes. Just another demonstration of the difference made by affinity, and just how little of it I had in regard to Fire, and to a lesser degree Water, Magic. Maybe I should put a large amount of effort into those lesser affinities in an attempt to push them beyond certain unknown thresholds before reaching the first divide. It might give me traits or titles that improved my lacking affinity, greatly enhancing my abilities.


    Something to consider, especially with the time I was forced to take in advancing my level due to the lack of suitable enemies.

 Chapter 776

    Given that we didn¡¯t manage to get back to our lair, we were trapped near the edge of the city, hiding out in a basement to pass the day by. Without my notes on alchemy and general crafting, I couldn¡¯t really work on those, so I decided to spend the day doing something almost as interesting. I, once again, began experimenting with my magic, focusing on the elements I wasn¡¯t familiar with.


    After a brief moment of consideration, I decided to begin working with Earth-Magic first, trying to get a feeling for the rock around me. I remembered being able to feel large parts of the glacier I had visited on Mundus, in the frozen valley, even before I became its Queen. It had been a practical application of my Ice Magic and there might be an equivalent skill for Earth Magic, allowing me to get a feeling for the ground around me. Optimally, I would have wanted to try it with a patch of natural ground first, but going outside during the day was impossible, so I just had to make do with the concrete floor of the cellar.


    Sinking into a meditative trance, I tried to stretch my senses into the ground, to get a feeling for it. Back in the valley, it had mostly worked with using minute amounts of magic, almost as if I was trying to move the Ice beneath me, so I tried to accomplish the same here and projected my magic out into the area around me as if I was trying to move all the concrete at once.


    ¡°Ouch,¡± I let out a curse, my meditative trance shattered by a pain quite similar to that of a blow to the head, only that the blow had come from inside my head. I had quite literally blown my mind up, or at least that was what it felt like. A combination of an intense influx of information and an extreme outflow of Astral Power, the combination serving as a reminder that I was far weaker than I had been on Mundus, to say nothing of Lenore¡¯s presence there, likely helping in the background. Even with the traits and titles increasing my general affinity, I was relatively sure that my current affinity for Ice Magic was still lower than Morgana¡¯s, as Morgana had allowed Ice to take hold of her soul. Whatever that meant in the context, I wasn¡¯t sure, though remembering it made me want to look into it. I was relatively certain that Morgana didn¡¯t have her own soul, whatever a soul actually was, given that she was merely the Avatar I controlled.


    Maybe there was a way to regain that increased affinity, to let the Ice back into my soul, but would that push my other affinities further down? It would be incredibly annoying to lose the improvements to my affinity for Fire Magic, to say nothing of those for the other elements. It might even unbalance things to the point that I lose the Elementalist Title, reducing my other affinities even further. Maybe it was just not worth it, even if I ignored the risk of messing with my soul.


    Shaking my head again, trying to get rid of the spots swimming in my eyes, I leaned against the wall, letting my mind roam a little. My attempt to sense with my Earth Magic had improved my skill level by one, bringing it to five, but it was still far from where I wanted it to be. Not that I was about to try the same stunt again, that was just painful, but there were other things I wanted to try.


    Picking up one of the small pieces of debris that had crumbled off the wall at some point, mostly plaster but with some masonry clinging to it, I tried again. Only this time, I didn¡¯t try to figure out the ground around me, I focused only on that one, small piece. Far less information to process that way and far less Astral Power needed to infuse the rock, so I didn¡¯t keel over in pain again.


    But I also didn¡¯t manage to learn a lot. I could feel the difference in texture, even managing to gauge where the plaster ended and the masonry began but other than that, there was little I could glean. Pulling my hand away, I let the rock float before me, just as I would do when levitating Ice with my Ice Magic, but there was little more I could do. Though the realisation that I could use Earth Magic in that manner was quite startling, it meant I would be able to use the ground most battles happened upon as my weapon, just like I had used Ice and Snow to strike my foe when in the Northern Forests of Mundus, or later in the Mountains of Ice. Having control over your environment was an incredible advantage and gaining it in more locations would be invaluable.


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    Earth, Wind and Water, if I managed to master all three of those, I would never have to conjure anything to attack, the very world around us would be my weapon. Unless I went to space, but even there I could use something. Only, it would be the Darkness and Void of Space, something I could already wield to some extent.


    Not a short-term project, but something to consider for the future.


    Grinning to myself, I tried a bit of multi-tasking, letting the rock I had picked up orbit around me, joined by a conjured piece of Ice, moving in the opposite direction. I was curious how the difference in skill would impact things, to say nothing of the vastly different affinity I had for both elements.


    Closing my eyes once more, I tried to focus on the amount of Astral Power I felt flowing out of me in an attempt to compare what I needed for the Ice Magic with the amount needed for the Earth Magic.


    I immediately ran into a problem. To my senses, it felt as if there was only one river, so to speak, only one stream of power going out. To separate the two, I would have to be a little more creative, so I tried to get a measure of the amount of power I needed for both before setting the piece of rock down and letting my Earth Magic fade away.


    With the magic gone, the amount of power flowing out of me immediately lessened, dropping by almost ninety per cent. My mind boggled a little at the difference, that would mean my Ice Magic needed only a tenth of the Astral Power I needed to accomplish the same task with Earth Magic. I had known I was better with Ice Magic, obviously, but had never quite realised the magnitude of the difference.


    To confirm my findings, I picked the bit of rock back up, noting how the drain of my Astral Power returned to the original level, before setting the Ice down, watching how the drain on my power lessened.


    Lessened far further than I would have expected. Using only my Earth Magic, the amount of power I felt flowing out of me went down by about twenty per cent, meaning that something else was going on. If I needed ten per cent of the original for my Ice Magic, and eighty per cent for my Earth Magic, then that meant there was some power unaccounted for.


    Likely due to the parallel use of two magical abilities, decreasing the overall efficiency by some factor. Or it was due to that particular combination. There were countless possible options, and I wasn¡¯t about to try hunting the exact cause down, at least not at the moment.


    Instead, I kept playing around with my magic for a bit, before resting for the night. Lia and I wanted to get back to our lair but we had decided to pay Apple Gate Farm a visit on the way. Test their guards, talk to Mrs Wu and the rest of their leadership, that kind of thing. They needed to know that the raccoons were controlling the Undead if that was what was happening. I wasn¡¯t quite certain about the mechanics, who was the controller and who was being controlled, but I was confident that there would be problems in the future. Problems that people needed to be prepared for, or even more of the already limited number of people would succumb.


    Sure, I didn¡¯t like many people, and disliked people in general, but that didn¡¯t mean I wanted them all to die off. Until I managed to create some sort of animated servant, I wanted to keep people around, if only to grow my food. There was no way I would take up gardening, nor did I feel like constructs to tend the fields would be easy to make.


    No, better to keep some less odious people around, they had their uses.

 Chapter 777

    ¡°Are you being serious right now?¡± Cassie asked once I finished telling the leadership of Apple Gate Farm about the conditions in the city. I could understand her disbelief, if somebody had told me about racoons riding formerly domesticated hogs into battle against some dogs, I would have been sceptical myself. And once I added to that idea a story about necromantic racoons able to control and guide Undead while utilising some sort of mental, magical mobile communication things just turned incredible. Literally. It sounded too absurd to be true, something from a pre-change story and yet, it turned out that truth could often be stranger than fiction.


    ¡°I could make the joke that I¡¯m Jaded, not serious, but yes, I gave a factual report, at least factual to my knowledge. I can¡¯t promise that every conclusion we¡¯ve drawn from our observations is correct but the information I gave you was given in good faith, so you can prepare and plan ahead,¡± I focused on Mrs Wu, ¡°Once before, I warned you of events that I had seen precursors for and, to my understanding, that warning allowed you to escape a dire threat, one that could easily have wiped you out. Or at least done great damage to your people and severely limited the chances of your collective survival.¡±


    ¡°Yes, I remember,¡± Mrs confirmed my words, letting out a long, drawn-out sigh, ¡°She was the one who realised that the countless dead would rise as Undead at some point. She warned me, told me to prepare and get my people out, that it wasn¡¯t just disease from decomposing bodies that we had to worry about but a more personal danger. That the dead wouldn¡¯t just remain dead but would rise. We warned you about that, we had you prepare, Cassie. The warning we gave you came from her,¡± she continued and I could watch Cassie turn rather pale at the realisation.


    ¡°What do you think we should do?¡± Mark asked, looking at me with a raised eyebrow.


    ¡°I will have to admit uncertainty. The easy answer would be to ignore the situation, to hope that the racoons and the Shattered decimate each other. As I have mentioned, the Shattered seem to control the Undead just like the racoons do and I¡¯ve not seen overlap. The Undead are either controlled by Shattered or Undead with similar eyes as the racoons, making me think there¡¯s a connection between those two. Either way, with two competing factions, for lack of a better word, conflict is nearly inevitable,¡± I reasoned, already noticing the frowns on multiple faces. They could easily see where that idea would go.


    ¡°But you undoubtedly see the problem. Racoons and Shattered fight, maybe until one side is wiped out, but what then? It is not just people who gain levels, everything can. If we let the Shattered and Racoons fight it out, whichever side wins will have a massively higher level and an army of Undead, many with high levels themselves,¡± I shook my head, making it obvious what I thought of that scenario.


    ¡°Cassie, remember what I managed to do as Morgana, my level at the time was only around hundred-sixty,¡± I looked at the cleric, managing to keep my lips from curling up, ¡°Certainly, what I accomplished was only possible due to certain quite fortunate conditions, but regardless of those, I could cause massive destruction, simply due to the power of my magic. Levels matter,¡± I let that sink in for a moment, before continuing, ¡°But that¡¯s neither here nor there. It¡¯s not so much about the things a decently levelled spellcaster can do, at that level everyone has some rather insane tricks up their sleeves, but it¡¯s about the risk to let the racoons and Shattered duke it out. People need to get their levels up, at least those willing to fight. And those unwilling or unable need to contribute themselves, but I¡¯m sure you already knew that.¡± I stopped my rambling, noticing an amused expression on multiple faces.


    ¡°Just a few days ago, you warned about going into the city because we¡¯d get mobbed by the Undead. Now, you are essentially suggesting we do what you warned us away from,¡± Mr Wong asked, not so much sceptical but curious whether I had a solution for the problem.


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    ¡°The situation changed. It¡¯s one thing to let one faction keep control of an area that they don¡¯t truly exploit. It wasn¡¯t as if I had observed Shattered infighting in an attempt to make one, or a few, of them supremely powerful. No, I simply observed them wandering about, occasionally crossing paths but no aggression, no additional devastation, nothing that suggested they would become more powerful over time,¡± I paused for effect once more.


    ¡°That changed when I noticed the Undead controlled by those with green-glowing eyes. Whether the Undead control the racoons and use them as a sort of scout squad or if the racoons are controlling the Undead, it matters little. Either way, a war between Shattered and Racoons would, amusingly, be devastating for the people here, at least in the long run.¡± I finished, getting nods all around.


    ¡°I suppose that is fair. You would have people attack both sides, trying to keep them in a stalemate as long as possible, their forces grinding against each other while we can increase the level and number of our people,¡± Mr Wong reasoned, getting a nod of approval from me. It was the most obvious idea, but that didn¡¯t mean it was a bad one. Not unless our enemy was able to figure out what we did and counter it. Sadly, we didn¡¯t know just how intelligent the racoons were, how much of a strategic interest and mind they had.


    ¡°It is a possibility, but given that the racoons were actively trying to encircle us last night, I¡¯d advise caution. This is no game, mistakes cost lives,¡± I reminded them, getting an unwillingly amused snort from Cassie.


    ¡°That from Morgana? I didn¡¯t see that one coming,¡± Cassie snarked, before turning red and covering her mouth with her hand.


    ¡°Can somebody fill me in on what Morgana did? It has been hinted at but nobody ever told me,¡± Mark griped, sounding a little annoyed.


    ¡°Early during our time on Mundus, when everyone thought it was just a game, I came across an incredibly interesting item. It sent me on a quest around the world, one that I barely managed to complete due to quite a few detours. It was a massive task with appropriate results. I gained access to things that would normally be impossible to access, even for the people of Mundus. Or maybe especially for the people of Mundus, now that I think about it,¡± I shrugged, ¡°Either way, by completing that quest, I changed the global climate,¡± Mark just blinked at me, staring in disbelief.


    ¡°And that was a realistic world?¡± Arlan asked, looking a little green around the gills.


    ¡°To the best of our knowledge, yes. Moral of the story, don¡¯t let your doomsday artefacts lying around where somebody below my current level can reach and just take them,¡± I grinned, enjoying the looks of surprise I was getting.


    ¡°Second moral of the story, even the Gods can make mistakes. They left the artefact where I found it, virtually unguarded. They, too, make mistakes, just like we do. Only, their mistakes have far greater consequences,¡± I let that idea sink in, noticing a worried expression on Cassie¡¯s face. Only, I wasn¡¯t sure if she was worried that I was undermining some sort of scheme on her part or if she only now realised that divine didn¡¯t mean omniscient and certainly not omnipotent or omnibenevolent. They, too, made mistakes. And if they did, Worlds could die.


    ¡°I believe this is enough on that,¡± Mr Wong interjected, breaking the tense atmosphere apart. ¡°What happened in another world is irrelevant, especially now. We need to focus on keeping alive, on making sure that we can keep going once the things we looted in town run out Enemies might kill us, but hunger certainly will.¡±


    ¡°I agree. We will either stand together or fall divided, I believe that is the expression. Samantha has helped many of our people a great deal, both directly and indirectly,¡± Mrs Wu interjected, ¡°She has just given us a warning about a growing threat, we needed to know about, allowing us to prepare. I, for one, am grateful for what she did. She has never made a secret of her dislike of crowds, she has been that way long before this all began. I would suggest we focus on ways to combat the coming threat, instead of getting our priorities all twisted up.¡±


    Mrs Wu¡¯s words were enough to completely finish any discussion about me. Our discussion continued, making me glad that I had decided to visit Apple Gate Farm on the way back, in order to check out their new security. The only problem was, I would have to spend the day here.


    Letting out a soft sigh, I focused on the discussion at hand. There was a lot of work to be done and there were countless Undead to destroy.

 Interlude: Dont turn around...

    Just a little over a month ago, Jason would have been out partying on a Friday night. Drinking, dancing, having fun with his buddies, and doing his best to get lucky at night''s end. Just one month ago.


    But then, like they said in one of the old animes he¡¯d watched as a kid, everything changed when the Fire Nation attacked. A wave of fire covered the horizon, sweeping away everything he had ever known. Including his family, most of his friends, the grades he had worked just hard enough to get and everything else in his comfortable life. Leaving nothing but ruins, ruins, screeching monsters and a fucked-up world that he would have loved if only it was on the right side of a monitor. It would be a wonderful world if it was contained within a video game or a movie, the idea of watching the survivors of the apocalypse struggle, bond and grow as they overcame the challenges of a changed world was a wonderful one. At least it was until you had to live it.


    Watching challenges was great, having to face them? Not so much. Betrayal, drama and near-death experiences? Great to experience when they were plot lines in a story. Not so great if it was the story of your life.


    Jason was no hero, it was something he had quickly learned after everything went to shit. He didn¡¯t want to be the brave soldier, marching forward to his death, dying in a glorious last stand to keep his companions safe. He wanted to be one of those who remained safe, he didn¡¯t want to be a hero. But sadly, heroes were in short supply, everyone was trying to survive and somehow, he, too, had to do his part.


    In this case, his part was to keep watch in the night. At first, he had been one of the people holing up at the YMCA in the city, hiding, just trying to survive. He didn¡¯t want to head out during the day and gather supplies, that sounded like a surefire way to get yourself mauled or just straight-out killed, but he had to do his part. Or he wouldn¡¯t get anything of the supplies. Thus, he opted to take the night watch, first around the YMCA and now, after even more shit had hit the fan, around Apple Gate Farm.


    It sounded incredibly easy, at least in theory. He was used to staying awake all night, even with drinks and sometimes drugs involved, so it should be incredibly easy to wander the boundary for a few hours, carrying one of the weird, glowing stones the stout, never fat, denmother had somehow magicked together, and making sure that nothing wandered too close. He was no great fighter but this much, he should be able to do.


    So far, he had been lucky. Nothing had bothered him, he had even managed to kill a few of those things with the help of others, staying as far back as possible and beating on them with the longest stick he had managed to find. Had gained levels, like this was some sort of bizarre game, only a game he didn¡¯t have a choice but to play. Sometimes, when he was resting, he wondered if there was some god out there, watching their lives like it was some sort of perverse entertainment, some documentary about the poor, wretched humans, trying to survive. Maybe with David Attenborough commentating the whole thing, ¡®And here, we see the average human, trying to defend his territory from a monster¡­¡¯.


    He had never been one to ask the big questions, had never wondered about the purpose of life, it had never felt important to him. But somehow, after everything about his life had changed, maybe asking about the why was important, especially when one was standing in the dark, walking around a smelly farm with a glowing rock in one¡¯s hand. At that point, asking how the fuck one managed to get into that situation suddenly felt quite important. And if there was a way to get rid of the troubles and maybe get back into a comfortable situation.


    A snort escaped him at the idea. Comfortable, none of the people here were comfortable. The closest one got to comfortable were those weirdos who could do magic. They never had to keep watch, they got escorted out if needed, people protecting them because they needed to train. No, they didn¡¯t need to take any real risks, they had their magic and that made them valuable to the community. Sadly, the closest Jason came to conjuring water was taking a piss.


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    Shaking himself out of his thoughts, Jason continued on his way, remembering the inspection just a day before. That old witch from the gym had apparently decided that the guards weren¡¯t watchful enough during the night. Nothing had ever happened, and yet, the old witch had lit into them, verbally tearing them apart, as if it was easy to remain awake, aware and vigilant for hours on end. To stave off boredom, without letting your mind drift into flights of fancy, to keep watchful without veering into paranoia to the point that you were seeing things that weren¡¯t there. Nobody wanted to be the one who cried wolf, only to realise that they had been frightened by a cluster of leaves or some other harmless thing.


    Staring into the hedges that acted as the boundary around this part of the farm, he tried to listen for anything out of the ordinary but whether the rustling leaves came from the wind or from some nefarious creeper, he couldn¡¯t say. There was a stiff breeze, so it most likely wasn¡¯t anything troublesome.


    Continuing on his path, he looked into the sky, trying to gauge how much longer he had to keep watch. Without a clock, it was hard to keep track of time, especially in the dark, trying to track time by watching the moon was a pain.


    ¡°Good evening,¡± a soft voice spoke behind him, female and far too close for comfort. He tried to scream, only for his voice to come out as a terrified squeak, thanks to a chillingly cold sensation tracing his throat. The sensation was enough to send a shiver down his spine and caused a small accident down below.


    ¡°You should be more careful, if I wanted to hurt you, you would be nothing but a dead body, rapidly bleeding out on the ground,¡± the voice continued, still speaking in a soft voice as if they were discussing nothing of importance. Maybe the weather, but certainly not his possible demise.


    ¡°Who are you?!¡± Jason finally managed to ask, his voice far too high-pitched and frightened for his own ego. But luckily, his ego was currently on vacation, having fled the moment his bladder loosened a little.


    ¡°They call me many names,¡± the voice replied, sounding almost playful, ¡°You may call me Jade.¡±


    ¡°And you are supposed to take us to your leaders, did you not listen?¡± a second voice asked, this one just as close, also female, but speaking with a much sharper tone, prodding him into action.


    ¡°Yes!¡± he squeaked again, thanks to a sharp point digging into his side.


    Finally, the freezingly cold sensation that had been sitting on his throat and paralysing him with the fear disappeared and he could take a step forward. Turning around, pushing the drive to flee down, he could finally see those who had spoken to him. Three figures were standing in the darkness, the details almost impossible to discern. Two slender, humanoid shapes, one tall and one short, their features veiled in darkness, despite his light-crystal. Somehow, it was as if the light of his crystal was trying to avoid getting close to them, making it impossible to discern their features. The third shape was some sort of beast, four-legged and almost the size of a calf, but somehow, despite the massive form, his gut gave him the impression that the beast was the least dangerous of the three.


    ¡°I¡¯ll guide you,¡± Jason managed to tell them, his voice slowly settling back into his normal tone. And guiding them he would, wherever they wanted to go. He had no desire to mess with these three, he didn¡¯t want to be the hero. He wanted to be alive at the end of the night.


    Leading the way, he took them to the farmhouse, the original home of the owners, where the leadership had their quarters. There, the three strange figures were greeted with greater warmth than he ever had been, despite the early hour.


    ¡°I need to speak to Mrs Wu and the others. There are things afoot they need to know,¡± the voice that had spooked Jason first demanded, their voice still completely calm and casual. As if they weren¡¯t barging in in the middle of the night.


    ¡°Do they need to be woken, or would you prefer a place to rest for the night?¡± Martha, one of the inner guards asked, looking at the two people and their massive hound with unconcealed respect.


    ¡°The morrow will do. We shall rest in the cellar, I remember the place. Some food would be appreciated,¡± Jade replied, sounding completely controlled and in charge. Not like she was barging in and simply making herself at home.


    Jason could only look on in awe, as those three walked into the centre of their small community and for once, he felt the urge to get stronger. Strong and powerful enough that people would treat him like this.

 Chapter 778

    Plans had been made in the morning, plans to destroy as many Undead as possible while leaving as many Shattered as possible behind. It wasn¡¯t that we liked Shattered better but, as far as I had seen, there were two factions competing for control over the basic Undead. One faction was composed of Shattered the other was either composed of racoons or of the higher Undead I had seen, either way, it was quite likely that the second group was capable of procreation. Shattered, on the other hand, were limited in their number, each and every Shattered we destroyed was one that would never bother us again. Thus, the idea to limit the influence of that second faction became paramount Otherwise, it might devolve into a situation similar to the one I had witnessed in the Dorrian Mountains, where the Undead had literally claimed the land for themselves.


    It wasn¡¯t so much the idea that the Shattered, the enemy of our enemy, were our friends but that we would gladly let our enemy¡¯s enemy fight against said enemy, reducing the strain on our resources. As long as we could gain a large benefit from their struggles, it would be advantageous to us.


    The idea was to have the survivors focus their primary training efforts on the city, taking pot-shots at the Undead before retreating. The idea was that attacking from a distance, either by magic or using some sort of ranged weapons, would take out a few Undead, before groups could retreat, abusing the slow pace of the Undead. If the Undead moved out, into the field, the distance would hopefully work as a shield, allowing the survivors to pick their enemies off, or to lure them into prepared traps or even the beasts that roamed out there. Those beasts might be the biggest problem, as they were as much a threat to us and the traps we might prepare as they were to the Undead. Involving them was only an emergency measure, one that nobody really wanted to see in reality, which was why I had the job they asked me to accomplish.


    Namely, I had been asked to accomplish two things. The first was relatively simple, to make sure no Undead, especially not in large numbers, could cross the fields during the night. Silva, Lia, Alex and I were obviously suitable for that, as we had multiple people with highly developed perception skills and I was quite capable of laying waste to almost any number of Undead. The other task was to keep the beasts out of the combat field, if at all possible. It was less a task for me, and more for Silva and the dogs, with me only acting as additional deterrence in the night. Hopefully, it wouldn¡¯t become necessary, though I had a niggling feeling it would be.


    However, I was aware that my part of the battle would, hopefully, be in the background. Destroying Undead was, at least with their current level, useless to empower me further. I needed stronger targets, enemies like the most powerful Shattered or the greatest threats amongst the other faction, be that racoons or sapient Undead. Those would, hopefully, be left for me, or I could venture into town in the night, taking those threats down with prejudice. And in the meantime, I had magic to train with.


    While it wasn¡¯t to train the primary elements to the same level my Ice Magic already had, I wanted to get them at least into a better shape, to the point that I¡¯d hopefully get a greater class than the Lunar Sorcerer I had gained after crossing the first divide on Mundus. What that might be, I wasn¡¯t sure yet but I was reasonably confident that being well-rounded and having access to all the major, and maybe even some additional minor, elements would provide a huge pay-out.


    But even if I didn''t get any special pay-out, just having access to those types of magic gave me greatly expanded options to deal with whatever challenge might be thrown at me at any time. Ice was a wonderful element, and would likely remain my go-to response in unknown situations, but there were some situations where Ice wasn¡¯t the best response. All the elements, even the fire I hated so much, had their benefits, it came down to me to master and use them appropriately.


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    Now, after the long discussions with the leadership of Apple Gate Farm were finished, I was working on exactly that. Mastering my magic. Instead of trying to push my Earth Magic further, as I had the day before, I decided to work on my Wind Magic, just to see the difference. And maybe to incorporate some runic magic into things, as I still wanted to know whether I could increase the power of my Ice Rune Spells by incorporating wind runes.


    It was an interesting conundrum, just going by my understanding of magic when viewed without taking outside circumstances into account I was confident that the incorporation should increase the power of Ice Runes such as Blizzard or Hail. When supplementing such spells with a Wind Rune, I was convinced that the Wind Rune would increase the impact power of spells cast that way, increasing the violence of the storm and the force with which the hailstones hit.


    But that was only without taking outside circumstances into account, what happened to the efficiency if the caster of the spell didn¡¯t have equal affinities or skills, as it was the case for me? The Wind Rune gave higher impact strength but it took me more power to get the same result from a Wind Rune compared to an Ice Rune, thus, would it actually increase the amount of power or would I handicap myself?


    While I wanted to test that out, the cellar in which I had created Lia wasn¡¯t the place to experiment on that scale. I could easily test smaller spells out, simple workings with only a single Rune or just the magic manipulation, but nothing larger, there was simply no space.


    In this case, I had drawn one Wind Rune and was carefully channelling Astral Power into it, mostly focused on keeping the created wind flowing around me. It was a deceptively simple exercise, equivalent to letting a chunk of Ice or the piece of rock I had used the day before orbit around me, only that it was far harder than it looked. Where I could easily focus on those physical objects, the wind, the air around me, lacked such easily focused on parts.


    At first, the only way I could make any progress was by using my magical sight to keep track of the azure power I was channelled into the air, I could see it, even smell and taste it, making it comparatively easy to focus on. But without that trick, the crutch I was trying to drop, it was a lot harder, I kept losing track of the flow I created, forcing me to guess and oftentimes fail to keep the stream of wind steady. I kept creating turbulences, slowly but surely annoying me.


    Finally, I had enough of the annoying interference. Instead of trying to work subtly, I forced the issue, letting out a stream of power instead of the controlled drizzle I had used before. The gentle wind circling around me flared up, turning into a storm to the point that dust billowed up and everything lying nearby was blown away.


    Only, the increased power didn¡¯t really help. I was still scrabbling, only now I was trying to control a storm, instead of a gentle breeze. The greater amount of power was both helpful, as it made the effects of my working so much more obvious but also hindering, as it was far more difficult to control the storm. Maybe I just couldn¡¯t control the storm.


    But I wanted to try, to make the wind mine. And so I kept pulling, twisting, forcing the air around me into my control.


    Suddenly, a weird sensation entered my nostrils, the scents around me changed. From the freely moving wind, the airy scent of freedom I had come to associate with flying and the rushing of wind I now smelled something else. I couldn¡¯t place it, not at all, the scent was sharp, almost chemically so, but not akin to bleach.


    Blinking my magical sight into effect once more, I stared into the blurring, azure glow that was tumbling around me, the turbulence of the storm reflected in the turbulence of the magic I had poured into the air around me. But there were some parts of it, springing into existence within my magic before rapidly vanishing again, some parts that weren¡¯t wind.


    Curious, I tried to focus on them and, for some reason, the closest mental analogy I could find was a blazing fire. But why was there fire within the wind?


    Shaking my head, I gave up. This wasn¡¯t working as I had hoped and I had used up far more magic than I had planned, to say nothing of the mess I had made.


    But I had gained something and learned something. My Wind Magic and the Wind Rune Mastery had both levelled, bringing them to nine and five respectively, in addition to that curious observation. At some point, I wanted to know what that had been.

 Chapter 779

    Thinning out the ranks of the Undead was a massive undertaking. I hadn¡¯t truly conceptualised their numbers, not actually pictured what it meant that there were only about four hundred people holed up at Apple Gate Farm. There had been around half a million people living within the city limits, with a similar number in the outlying communities, depending on what distance you included them, and I would be surprised if there were more than maybe two thousand people still alive of those. Mostly, the question was how many people had holed up in different places, how many of those had managed to escape the Undead and whatever else might be haunting the city.


    I wasn¡¯t even confident that people hadn¡¯t started preying on each other, it was a common trope in most apocalyptic stories, something the people at Apple Gate Farm had luckily avoided. But I wasn¡¯t optimistic enough to believe that there were no assholes out there who decided that now, without any laws, it was their time to shine, to rape, pillage and brutalise at their leisure. There had been people like that before the change hit and there would be people like that afterwards.


    The only thing I had to make certain of was that I would be the one doing the killing if I ever came across people like that.


    But before there was any killing of people, the Undead were the target of my ire. Seemingly endless numbers of Undead. It wasn¡¯t just my group who tried to deal with them, but there were nights when it felt just like that.


    The idea sounded so incredibly simple, at least for the weaker survivors. Their job was to simply launch a few attacks at the Undead, kill a few of them with the opening volley and retreat. Given that the Undead had shitty senses, making them almost unable to perceive anything further than around thirty metres of them, it should be a piece of cake.


    Only, from what I had heard, it wasn¡¯t. During the daytime, the Undead didn¡¯t just hang out in the streets, as they did in the night. They were shaking up in various buildings, maybe avoiding the sun just like I was, or maybe they were trying to make small Undead, I wasn¡¯t really sure and I didn¡¯t really care. But with them hiding in buildings during the day, only coming out when something got too close to their hideout to the point that they could attack, made the idea of dealing with them from a distance difficult.


    There were ways around that, obviously, but it made the operation Undead killing a lot harder than I had hoped for. And it meant that the leadership, now going by the name of the Council, had asked me to speed things up a little. Or at least make sure that the balance of power within the city didn¡¯t shift too far to either of the sides we suspected.


    Or, in other words, Lia, Silva, Alex and I had been asked to go into the city and deal with the special Undead, maybe kill a few of the racoons, make sure that their number remained manageable. There was a part of me that was conflicted about the idea, simply because I wasn¡¯t sure how sapient the racoons and the Undead were, but I wasn¡¯t about to let an unknown force that had already demonstrated to be hostile towards me gain a massive army of Undead. The basic Undead were individually weak but there were simply far too many of them.


    And so, the four of us had been sneaking into the city, trying to get a better idea about how many of the green-eyed ones there were. I was somewhat amused that the expression had caught on, given my own green eyes, but I wasn¡¯t overly fussed about it. The identifying and uniting feature of the special Undead and the racoons were their dimly green glowing eyes, so green-eyes worked just fine as an identifier. Though maybe I should have suggested glowing eyes, though even using that didn¡¯t help given that my eyes glowed as well when I activated Overflow.


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    Either way, I didn¡¯t mind too much as long as people didn¡¯t try to kill me for the colour of my eyes.


    Hunting our green-eyed foes had been both frustrating and somewhat enlightening, as it allowed us to glean some more information. The most important thing we had figured out was that the Undead weren¡¯t really special, at least not individually. When killing one of the green-eyed Undead, the rest of their swarm simply reverted to what I considered a holding pattern, moving around without too much plans or effort. We had done so a few times the past couple of nights, killing enough of them to bring me to level thirty-seven, only to realise that we didn¡¯t make any progress.


    The next day, another of the Undead had green glowing eyes and was leading the swarm, the next strongest amongst their number. It was almost as if they were promoted, gaining a boost in strength somehow, and took over. My personal theory was that the racoons were somehow responsible, leading to us trying to catch the chittering monsters.


    Only to realise that they were incredibly slippery, stealthy and nearly impossible to catch or kill. Our hunt quickly turned into a bizarre game of cat and mouse, only that the mouses, or racoons in our case, had a swarm of flies under their control, allowing them to call upon the Undead in an attempt to mob us, as we were trying to catch them.


    Due to that, we couldn¡¯t actually focus on our hunt, we could launch one, maybe two concentrated strikes on an individual racoon before we had to retreat and hide again, or we would be faced with a massive number of Undead, trying to swarm and surround us. So far, we had been unable to get any of our attacks to stick, the racoons were quite perceptive to the point that they could dodge attacks from a distance and they even managed to find us. I hadn¡¯t tried to go after one on my own but it was something we might want to try at some point.


    On the other hand, I had considered trying to get the number of Undead down by using large-scale magic, maybe a conjured Blizzard or something along those lines, but those took time. Enough time for any wary racoon to either bring in numbers to kill us or to get the Undead out of reach. If I wanted to try that, we¡¯d have to prepare well in advance, to make sure we didn¡¯t get stuck and mobbed. I had no desire to join the Undead as a corpse.


    The best solution we had managed to come up with so far was to try and cut down the Undead under their control. similar to the way we tried to thin the number of Undead outside of their control.


    Which fed back into the original problem, there were so damn many of them. We could kill a dozen Undead easily, even a hundred if I conjured up something suitably impressive, the Undead didn¡¯t have the speed to readily avoid such magic, but it felt as if we were trying to empty out a desert, one grain of sand at the time.


    Lia and I had been discussing how to proceed. Whether to try killing the Undead or to go a different route, maybe try to circle around the city and look for other groups similar to the one at Apple Gate Farm. It was something I had talked to the council about and they had agreed to send a few people. It wasn¡¯t that Lia and I couldn¡¯t move around the city, it would be far easier for us to do so than for anyone else, but sadly, neither of us would inspire any trust in, well, anyone. Both of us were visibly inhuman, though my inhumanity was relatively subtly in dim light, and neither of us could move in the sunlight, it would be far too easy to mistake us for monsters.


    Because of that, the council had promised to get a few groups together and have them move into the organised suburban communities and the villages that had, over time, become urbanised. Hopefully, doing so would give us bigger numbers to deal with the sheer number of Undead we were facing.


    The other option to take on that many Undead was to rise on the power-scale. It was mostly a project I would have to face myself, to get creative with my magic and continuously raise the different magic skills and rune masteries I had acquired. If I were to get anywhere close to the power I could command on Mundus, even without the Nexus, I would have a good chance to deal with the Undaed myself. The attack I had conjured to strike Hatterion, after they had murdered Olivia, came to mind. If I could get something like that, cleansing the town would be almost trivial. The sacrifices might be problematic though, so it was unlikely that we would go down that route.


    Regardless, we needed to deal with the Undead and find a way to hunt down the racoons. Sadly, I wasn¡¯t sure how to accomplish either of those objectives.

 Chapter 780

    Letting out a sigh, I focused on my magic once more. It had been about a little over a week since the survivors at Apple Gate Farm had started to try killing off the Undead, a task they had achieved limited success with. Lia had ventured out most nights, even on those I remained behind to experiment a little more, taking Alex with her to hunt down Undead and get their levels up as much as possible. The two made a quite deadly duo, striking from the shadows before vanishing back into them. It made me consider to try getting my hands on an actual melee weapon, one that was supported by the system, so I could join them. Sure, my magic would always be my primary strength but there was no need to discard the benefits of subtly. It might even help me with my Darkness Magic, as a good part of that element was quite subtle and formed a distinct contrast to the large-scale, flashy stuff I had been doing recently.


    In the meantime, I had been trying to improve my elemental magic once more, especially that strange occurrence when a different taste had sprung up during my Wind Magic experimentation. I was somewhat convinced that I had accidentally managed to conjure up a different element in a pseudo-natural fashion and started to try replicating it, while hypothesizing what it might have been.


    My primary theory was that I had accidentally created friction within the air, the different air currents rubbing against each other and creating a charge, so to speak. It seemed the most parsimonious explanation and some experimentation had allowed me to recreate that springing up of magic. With that in mind, I had considered how to get that spark of magic without forcibly rubbing streams of air against each other, bringing me to my current hypothesis, namely that Lighting, or maybe Thunder, Magic was a combination between Wind and another element. However, I wasn¡¯t entirely certain which element. The most likely culprit was Fire, which made me a little¡­


    I wasn¡¯t too happy about the idea but it felt the most likely, as FIre would give the usually relatively soft element an edge. But mostly, it was the principle of exclusion, I was somewhat confident that Earth and Wind wouldn¡¯t result in Lightning, even if there was some connection between the Earth and magnetism that might create the link. Similarly, Water and Air could work but I felt like that combination would be more aligned with Ice, though it would need some additional element to that. Or maybe I was barking up the entirely wrong tree with my theories and there was no easy way to generate Lightning from Air, without stumbling into the appropriate skill.


    Whatever the case, the whole experimenting and training with my magic had been quite successful. Thanks to entire days, and even a few nights, spent primarily on my experiments I had managed to push my Wind Magic up to eleven, my Water Magic to ten, my Earth Magic to six and my Fire Magic to four. Furthermore, experimenting with Runes had granted me level seven with the Wind Runes, level twelve with the Water Runes, level four with the Earth Runes and a new skill, namely Fire Rune Mastery, which I had already pushed to two.


    The description of the foundational FIre Rune was quite interesting, stating that it allowed me ¡°to bring fire into existence, not limited to the process of burning¡±, whatever that truly meant. I took it to mean that I could conjure up the concept of Fire, instead of setting things alight, possibly more aligned with Heat in general than just flames. It would make sense and give context to those old fantasy staples like the Fire Ball, though I had yet to get anywhere close to creating one of those. Not that I tried too much, simply due to my dislike for the element.


    Sadly, completing the set of basic elemental Rune Masteries hadn¡¯t given me a new title, though I had received a notification that my Elementalist Title had been improved. I wasn¡¯t quite completely certain, but the description might have changed from it granting me a minor increase to all elemental affinities to granting me an increase in all elemental affinities, taking away the minor qualifier. I hadn¡¯t managed to quantify the difference, but then, affinity had never been easy to measure.


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    The last part of my magical experiments was an attempt to make sense of the dreams I had been having. Meditating, occasionally delving into the Astral in an attempt to look for inspiration, had given me a bit of an idea of what might be going on. Parts of the dreams had shown me runes, shapes I was familiar with, the Runes of Mundus. Not the minutely altered versions i was using here, but those I had used for the two years as Morgana. I wasn¡¯t quite sure what the dreams meant, but by now, after having them multiple times with only minor variations, I was confident that they had a meaning. Sadly, I had yet to figure them out, though the runes I had managed to see seemed to form a ritual circle of some sort. Not that I had been able to memorise enough of it to draw it, or get an idea what it might do, but enough to make me confident in what it was. I was considering drawing it at some point, at least the parts I had seen, but I was hesitant, it seemed to be a rather large risk to draw an unknown runic circle I had only seen in my dreams. Who knew what might be lurking within the depths of my mind?


    However, where my magical experimentation had been quite successful, everything else hadn¡¯t worked out so well. The survivors had sent people out to find out how many more had managed to escape the city and, from what I¡¯d been told, they had found a few, though far less than anyone had hoped. There was another group of similar size to the one at the Farm and a few with fewer people, ranging in size from about thirty to something in the neighbourhood of two hundred.


    A decently large city, reduced to numbers that would barely qualify as a village. If nothing else, the numbers drove home just how bad things had turned out. While I couldn¡¯t be sure how things looked elsewhere, I doubted it would be much better. Sure, at places where the change hit during the daytime, far more people would have survived the initial exposure to Shattered, simply because so many people had died because their partner, or another family member, had changed and attacked them before they realised what was going on. For people who had been awake and aware during the change, the number of deaths due to that should be far lower, though I couldn¡¯t be sure about the magnitude.


    Not that it truly mattered. It would take months, in some cases years, for communication between different communities to be re-established, and that was only when considering one landmass. I had no idea how the wider world looked now, with the repeated Earthquakes and whatever else might have changed out there.


    But whatever the case may be, the first thing we needed to accomplish for long-term survival was to keep the people around my group alive. With that in mind, I had told the people searching for other survivors that I would teach anyone with a magical affinity who ventured to my lair, an offer Mrs Wu had mirrored, only that she, alongside a few others, had offered training in the martial arts. While I hadn¡¯t heard anything, I was quite confident that Cassie would make similar offers, though I had no idea what qualities she needed for acolytes. Maybe sneakiness, at least in a social capacity. It was something she either had in spades or she truly wanted nothing more but to help people in this difficult time, to make sure everybody had a home and was as safe as she could make them. There was a cynical part of me that doubted it, but I just didn¡¯t know whether that was pure, cynical paranoia or if I was subconsciously picking something up from her.


    Whatever the case may be, we needed power in two parts. One part was the widespread, general power, many people all with at least some modicum of power, able to accomplish the countless smaller tasks that were needed to bring back a support system for humanity. It was why I freely offered my teaching, though the EXP I had previously gained, and might gain again, were a nice bonus, to say nothing about the potential to get a peek into different types of magic.


    The other part was those at the top of the pile, where I wanted to be. Strong enough to make the countless people shut up and listen, in addition to having the power to strike down some particularly nasty threats. Getting to the top of that pile was my primary motivation. Being there, staying there, could eventually give me the ability to get Sigmir back. And that was, at the end of the day, all that mattered.

 Chapter 781

    For once, I was all on my own. We had been trying to catch one of the racoons for over a week now and never managed to get close enough. Their ability to sense opponents was only second to mine, their stealth-ability better than anything Silva could manage, even if I helped her. We had yet to determine just how they managed to beat the concealment magic I was habitually casting on Silva, but they did, leaving us with relatively few options. If we wanted to catch them, we couldn¡¯t move as a group, the more people tried, the easier it would be for them to find us.


    Thus, I had decided to try by myself. I had little doubt that I could incapacitate one of them, my Mind Magic had recently risen to twenty-five, which would hopefully be sufficient. If not, we¡¯d have learned something new and I would have to run away. With my ability to conjure up mist and hide myself, that should be almost trivial, unless I was caught by the sun. To avoid such an outcome, where I was forced to choose between moving beneath the light of the sun and getting trapped in a building and swarmed by Undead, we had taken shelter as close to the territory controlled by the racoons as we could, spending the day and moving out early in the night.


    The others, alongside a pair of dogs from the Army of Dog, would move with me, until we almost reached the racoon area. Once we got close enough, they¡¯d stay behind, keeping watch and preparing some traps for any potential pursuers, while I had continued on my own.


    Now, I was just moving into the area we considered to be controlled by the racoons. It was a little difficult to decide where that actually was, it wasn¡¯t as if there were signs warning us that we were entering racoon country. The closest to a sign we had managed to find was a lack of Shattered, though the few Undead wandering the no-mans land where neither Shattered nor green-eyed Undead tread wasn¡¯t exactly demarcated either. Still, it gave me an okay idea of where to leave the others.


    The first order of business was amusingly simple. I had to make my concealment as tight as possible. I knew that creatures sensitive to magic, like myself, could sniff out the magic used to conceal somebody, making the whole thing an exercise in futility, if not actively harmful. It might be a quirk of my senses that I could smell the scent of magic further than I could scent anything but the most odious of smells, though it depended on the intensity of the magic. My concealment would have to be both powerful and, well, stealthy, tightly wrapped around me, so nobody would be able to detect me or the magic I used to hide.


    And that was the first order of business. I had considered using my cloak to create the initial layer of concealment but had decided against it, after having Lia use it while I was trying to detect her. The concealment wasn¡¯t necessarily bad but it was far from perfect. I could still detect her, at least if I knew where to look or she was moving, but far worse was that the funky, almost oily, scent of Darkness Magic was strong enough to give away her presence, if not her position. Neither was acceptable if I wanted to remain undetected in the night.


    Instead, I carefully drew five runes on myself, three of Concealment, and two of Shadow. It wasn¡¯t a real runic formation, the distances and angles didn¡¯t fit, and the connection between the runes was lacking, but it was something remarkably close to one. The runes would only last as long as I channelled some Astral Power into them, but it would hopefully be good enough. One Concealment-rune on each of my feet, intended to muffle any noise my steps made, the Shadow-runes on each of my shoulders, to blend the magic into my shadow like a cloak would flow around me, and lastly, the third Concealment-rune on my forehead, to hide my presence. I wasn¡¯t sure if it would work, but prior testing with the others had shown promise, in addition to granting me a point in Darkness Rune Mastery and Darkness Magic, bringing both of them to twenty-seven.


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    Letting out a slow breath, I carefully moved around the first group of controlled Undead, taking note of the green-eyed one in their midst. Killing it would be so incredibly easy but I wasn¡¯t here for that, I was here to look for answers and racoons, we needed more information, so we could actually make plans that were more elaborate than ¡®kill many Undead¡¯. Know the enemy, know yourself, and all that. We didn¡¯t really know our enemy, we barely knew what our enemy was and even that was mostly conjecture. It was distinctly possible that the racoons, which we considered the primary identity of our enemy, were merely another layer, a group used as field messengers and scouts, not the actual masterminds.


    Lia argued for that, that the racoons were merely used by another force, basing it on her experience in turning Alex. There was some merit to the idea, the racoon had been in the process of being corrupted by another type of energy when we caught it, but we didn¡¯t know enough to determine whether the energy was internal or if there was some sort of outside source, maybe some pool of alien goop that turned racoons into zombie-aliens or something. It wouldn¡¯t be too far-fetched, we first got the system apocalypse, then the zombie apocalypse so why not add an alien invasion or something like that? Maybe a plague, it would certainly fit the theme of the year we had so far. Luckily, War, at least between humans, was pretty much off the table and would be for some time. There simply weren¡¯t enough people to go to war, making the old hippy motto ¡®Imagine there¡¯s war and nobody shows up¡¯ rather poignant. Though, did our campaign against the Undead count as war or as pest extermination?


    Shaking my head, I forced my mind back into the game. It was one of the downsides of primarily channelling Darkness Magic, it was far too easy to get lost in thought while in the dark, the unknown invited the mind to wander, to drift through the void and latch onto anything that felt interesting.


    Maybe it was that state of drifting mind that allowed me to notice a faint chitter, similar, though not identical, to the not-sound we attributed to the racoons. It didn¡¯t sound like the signals they used on their hunt, making me curious. Finding one of them and trying to trace it back to their base was my first objective, infiltration of the base was the follow-up objective while knocking one of them out and dragging it with me a tertiary one that I hoped to accomplish on the way out.


    Following what I was relatively certain was some sort of psychic messaging, I made my way further into the area controlled by the racoons. Soon, I reached territory we had never managed to reach, simply due to the amount of Undead the racoons had always sent against us, forcing us to retreat or get swarmed.


    The amount of chittering in the air steadily increased, to the point that it started to become difficult to follow individual signals, the entire area was blanketed. Instead of continuing on my way, I snuck into a dark corner and simply settled in for a bit, watching the area and trying to figure out what was going on.


    Curiously, in this area far more of the Undead had the glowing, green eyes I was now becoming familiar with. On the outskirts of racoon city, maybe one in twenty Undead had them, each individual glow-eye leading a group of normal Undead. Here, it was more like one in five Undead, though that didn¡¯t mean that the group size was actually smaller. There were still groups of about twenty Undead, mostly with one or two green-eyes amongst their number, while individual green-eyed Undead were wandering around. I decided against watching long enough to see if these solitary green-eyes had some sort of holding pattern, like their brethren outside, or if they were moving with a purpose.


    Instead, I pushed onward, not moving deeper into the area but around it. If I could find some good path of ingress, I might be able to find more information, information that would allow me to make conclusions on what we were facing. I hated the uncertainty, I wanted to be the one keeping secrets, not the one secrets were kept from.


    But I had to be cautious, if I was caught in this area, I would have to flee and get lucky, or I would join the Undead. Sadly, sometimes risks were necessary and for now, I was the one who had to take a risk.


    Thus, onwards it was.

 Chapter 782

    A sudden shift in the psychic not-noise caught my attention. I wasn¡¯t quite sure what it meant, but the pattern I had noticed shifted, making me pause in my actions. I had been skirting around the outer area of racoon city, trying to get a better idea of the inhabitants of it, both Undead and whatever the racoons were, doing my best to remain hidden. The entire time, the chittering had been following roughly the same pattern, ebbing and swelling as if I was listening to distant conversations, too far away to make out what was said. Only now, that pattern shifted, or rather, there was something else within the pattern, a secondary one that made my gut clench in discomfort.


    Trusting my instincts, I immediately turned away from the central area and started moving. The Undead I could see didn¡¯t act any different, but I had no desire to find out what had caused the change in chittering. I was confident that the racoons used the chittering as a means of communication, though I had no idea how it worked. My best guess was that it was a somewhat specialised form of Mind Magic, a conclusion drawn from the fact that I was the only one in the party, other than Alex, who could hear it. Given that Alex was a racoon itself, I didn¡¯t factor its ability into the idea, as it could very well be an innate racial ability that could be emulated using Mind Magic. Not that it truly mattered, especially not while running away from a potential threat, but it gave me a few ideas, both to improve my own Mind Magic and to, hopefully, escape if I got spotted. If I wasn¡¯t already, the shift in noise could very well be some sort of alarm, calling for their forces to deal with an intruder.


    I felt it was unlikely that it was the case, given that the Undead didn¡¯t seem to be actively searching for me, or converging to deal with me, but continued to idle around, looking just like they had the entire time. Still, I didn¡¯t want to take a risk, and so I kept moving away. It was almost time to retreat anyway, getting away with an extra hour to spare wasn¡¯t the end of the world.


    My movements gained some more urgency when I noticed that it wasn¡¯t the Undead that were on the move, at least not those with normal eyes. The green-eyed ones, on the other hand, seemed to be quite a bit more active than they had been, though they didn¡¯t look like they were actively searching for me. But they were spreading out, so there might be something going on in which I didn¡¯t want to get caught up.


    Suddenly, I felt myself freeze, Bullet Time reflexively activating to give my mind the ability to keep my actions smooth and deliberate. My body had started to react to a threat but my mind needed more time, time I could only get that way.


    I could hear the chittering far more concentrated just a little ways ahead. Focusing my eyes and senses, I could see a racoon sitting on a windowsill above the alleyway I had been walking down. It just sat there, not obviously doing anything, just idling around, but I didn¡¯t trust the situation. The chittering I could hear hadn¡¯t changed but that didn¡¯t mean much, the undertone I had noticed previously was still there.


    I had a decision to make, did I want to try striking it down, risking discovery due to its absence or did I try to bypass it, risking that it might discover me either way? Both options held their own risks and rewards, making me hesitant about which was the better option. Knocking the racoon out, or even just killing it and taking the body, might yield valuable information, though it came with the risk of being hunted as I made my escape.


    On the other hand, just passing by had the risk of discovery and while it would allow me to continue my retreat unmolested, maybe even let me take a look at a different part of racoon city. Trying that would cut things close, but I had made sure to have enough time to spare for things going off the rails. In my original plan, I had made sure that, even moving at my slowest speed, I had an additional two hours between the time I had planned to get back to the others and Sunrise, with my retreat starting even earlier, that went up to a little over three hours.


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    After a moment of consideration, I decided to go ahead. Pushing even more power into the Concealment Rune I had previously drawn on my forehead and focused the Observe-skill through that point. I wasn¡¯t sure if there was any method to my actions, but it had worked before, both on Mundus and on Terra, so I was confident that I could gain information without giving away my presence.


    My eyes widened a little when I learned that the racoon was actually something called a Withered Skulker with a rather impressive level twenty-two. Not dangerous to me, but certainly in the upper tier of enemies I had encountered thus far. It didn¡¯t react outwardly to my Observe, giving me even more time to make my move. The name made me wonder if there were other types of ¡®Withered¡¯, that possibly anything with glowing, green eyes was one. Something to investigate.


    I decided to make a gamble, creeping ever closer to the thing, before activating Overflow and channelling a burst of power into my Mind Magic, infusing it with as much Death Magic as I could without causing myself debilitating harm. I wasn¡¯t sure if I could actually harm this creature with that attack, it had worked against Shattered and Mind Magic had worked against the Undead, but I had no idea about this one.


    Sagging a little as both my Astral Power and Health took a hit, I focused on the Withered Skulker, looking on with my magical sight active. To the naked eye, it looked like nothing happened, maybe a slight fluctuation in the air, similar to hot air rising above a parking lot, until the Withered Skulker sagged, unmoving.


    To my magical sight, it was far more impressive. The invisible stream of conjoined Death and Mind Magic was clearly visible to me, as was the effect it had on the Withered Skulker. Sadly, the effect was far less pronounced than I had hoped. Instead of knocking the thing cleanly out, sending it into a deep sleep only I could lift, the thing was merely knocked for a loop, stunned for a few seconds and even as I was watching, I could see it shake off the effect of my Mind Magic.


    Cursing a little, I channelled even more power, this time using Ice Magic and my Frozen Shuttle. My trusty blade crossed the distance in moments, leaving a glittering trail of sparkling frost in the air, before embedding itself deeply into the Withered Skulker. The deep wound was enough to send the thing on its way, my attack had penetrated both the spine and shredded the chest, so there was nothing keeping it tethered to the mortal coil.


    I had been fast enough to keep the Withered Skulker from sending out a call for help, at least I hadn¡¯t been able to detect one, which I was incredibly proud of. To do that to a psychic creature, one that probably only needed to think of screaming for help, without having to bother with any of the mechanical components, was quite impressive. And yet, I knew I couldn¡¯t just hope that my actions remained unnoticed, just because somebody didn¡¯t call for help didn¡¯t mean that a sudden silence wouldn¡¯t be noticed - Hopefully, it would take a little longer for that though.


    With a mental tug on the Frozen Shuttle still sticking in the body, I pulled it off its ledge, catching it before it could hit the ground. Pausing for a moment, I sniffed the body, frowning when I realised that the scent wasn¡¯t right, that  this thing had been neither alive nor Undead. Something else, something I couldn¡¯t quite identify. Something I didn¡¯t like at all.


    A few quick tests showed that the blood of the Withered Skulker was almost tar-like in its viscosity, far darker than it should be, and that the body was cold, though I couldn¡¯t be completely sure whether that was a side-effect of my overcharged attack with the Frozen Shuttle. It shouldn¡¯t be, but I lacked the point of comparison to be certain.


    Regardless, carrying the body with me, I briefly checked my notifications, pleased that my Mind Magic, Death Magic and Darkness Rune Mastery all had levelled by one, bringing them to twenty-six, eight and twenty-eight. Soon, I would be able to glean another Darkness Rune, though I wasn¡¯t sure what the best course of action would be. Maybe trying to get something actually offensive. There was always the temptation to reach for the Magic-Rune, but I doubted I was advanced enough to reach it. Maybe by the time I got to fifty, but I would have to think about it.


    For now, I had caught a body and needed to quietly get away.

 Chapter 783

    If only things could have been as easy as I hoped. But no, that would be utterly boring, if I could have managed to sneak out without any of the Withered realising I had ever been there. Instead, barely a minute after I killed the Withered Skulker before I even managed to freeze the body for later analysis, I noticed that the psychic chittering around me shifted once more. While I was still unable to determine what was said, it went from what felt like ordinary conversation to something more urgent, my mind conjuring up images of beating drums and screaming sirens.


    Whatever was happening, I didn¡¯t think it boded well for me.


    Despite feeling the urge to run, to escape as quickly as possible, I didn¡¯t move any faster than I had the entire time. Instead, I channelled extra power into the runes keeping me concealed, pushing deeper into the shadows. A part of me wished that I retained the ability to travel through the shadows, but it had been difficult to learn on Mundus, even after I managed it by accident the first time. Maybe the loopy, dazed state of mind I had been in back then had been the key, it had taken me a significant amount of time and experimentation to make that trick work while in a normal state of mind.


    But for now, staying concealed was my best bet to get away. The Withered clearly knew that something was going on, but I wasn¡¯t sure they knew what, nor could I tell if any specific area was their target. They might have been alerted by something entirely different, meaning it would be foolish to break cover.


    And yet, it felt incredibly strange, to keep creeping forward while the psychic chittering warbled urgently in the air. The paranoid part of me kept urging speed, suggesting that an attack was coming at any moment. I could feel myself get twitchier with every step I took, my gut starting to clench with nerves and even the hairs in my neck started to rise. Every fibre of my being began to scream at me, that I needed to run, to flee as quickly as possible.


    Shaking my head, I pushed against the sensation, it was far too intense to be natural, even if I counted my slight paranoia. Sniffing the air, I noticed a faint whiff of something unnatural, unlike any magic I had ever encountered before. My tongue flickered out, tasting the air and the magic carried by it, only to make me spit out everything in my mouth a vile taste lingering despite the act. My face twisted into a grimace, as disgust started to overwhelm me, the taste was incredibly disgusting, it was completely and utterly wrong. The closest I had ever encountered that managed to achieve a similar response were the Nethersprites with their hunger for miasma. Maybe a certain corrupted beast we had encountered on our travels in Aretia, a giant boar if my memory served me right, suffering from some strange affliction came close but I hadn¡¯t taken too close a look at that thing, the scent had been enough to drive me away. Only, I couldn¡¯t escape the odd energies these Withered put out, it was like a blanket covering the entire area. Trying to make me flee, to make me paranoid.


    To break my concealment.


    The realisation only served to send me deeper into the shadows in an attempt to utterly blend with them. If the Withered knew that something was here, that somehow the racoon I was still carrying with me had died, or had been killed, but were unable to detect the threat, they would want to flush the threat out. What better way to accomplish that than a large area of effect spell, I would have used a freezing mist or something along those lines, especially if my forces were resistant to cold. If the Withered and their Undead servants were immune to fear effect, or at least that odd effect filling the area, they could easily hunt for whatever living thing was scared up by their attack, bringing in additional forces to overwhelm whatever it might be. Just like in the past, people used hounds, horses and noise to scare up game while hunting, forcing the prey out, into the open, where it could be shot down. A classic hunting tactic, one that had been used since time immemorial. I needed to remain calm and hidden, or I could easily find myself as the prey, not the predator. At the same time, I needed to have some sort of escape, if the hounds managed to find me.


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    My breath hitched just a little when I heard something move in the distance. The hounds were coming and while there was no baying, I could feel the psychic chittering shift once more. Not in overall intensity but in direction, turning it from a general din that filled the area into distinct signals coming from multiple directions. They weren¡¯t moving directly towards me, but I could easily guess that they were coming in this direction.


    A realisation made me mutter a curse under my breath when a drop of blood from the Withered Skulker I had killed fell and landed with a soft splash. The body was still warm enough to bleed, the blood liquid enough to easily spread its scent, turning it into a liability. After a moment of consideration, I channelled Ice Magic into the body, freezing it solid, before quickly moving, hoping that the hounds didn¡¯t get too much information from my burst of magic.


    As I moved along another side street, I noticed a window about two metres above the ground. The interesting thing was, the window was open and below it was an arrangement of boxes, trashcans and even a dumpster, all conveniently arranged so one could reach the window without too much trouble.


    It was far too useful a trick to pass up on, so I easily scrambled across the barely-hidden path, even noticing a few scoff marks where somebody had pushed themselves up the wall before. With my increased attributes, I could easily make the last bit, pulling myself up and rolling through the window, landing in a low crouch.


    The room I found myself in was quite interesting, though exposure to the elements had clearly left its mark. Unless I missed my guess, I had entered a teenager¡¯s bedroom, at least the various posters, a couple of books on a nearby desk and the general disorder led me to that conclusion. Moving through the room, avoiding some trash that was piled on the ground, I made my way to the door, only to realise it was locked from the inside. A grin spread across my face, as my mind made up a hypothesis to explain the circumstances I observed. Maybe the inhabitant of the room had decided to head out for the night, locking the door to keep their parents from barging in and scrambling down the path I had taken to enter. Shaking my head, I pushed the observation away, it was meaningless at this point. Whoever lived here was either dead or long gone, just like everything else.


    Opening the door, I quietly made my way through the apartment, aiming for the other side of it. Hopefully, I¡¯d find an exit over there, something that would allow me to get out of the area I had used my magic in. If nothing else, the shortcut I was taking would hopefully shake any hound that tracked me from that position, unless they were smart enough to make their way through the apartment, too.


    Given that the climb would be trivial for the racoons, I made sure to close and lock any door I moved through, going so far as to wedge some things into the cracks to block them even further. I had no idea how strong the racoons were but I was somewhat confident that the doors would slow them down. At the end of the day, they lacked the rather important advantage that were opposable thumbs.


    The Undead, on the other hand, likely lacked the coordination to use the path I had used to enter unless they piled up and stepped on each other. But that, just like the doors, would slow their advance quite a bit, hopefully giving me the time to escape.


    After moving through a hallway, I came into another apartment and quickly made my way through. There, I easily found a suitable window and peered through, trying to make sure nothing was outside, waiting for me to leave. It would be rather annoying if I were to be spotted here, it would make the entire subterfuge useless.


    Noticing no observers, I carefully opened the window, making sure to move slowly and silently. Dropping down onto the pavement, I quickly scurried along, moving deeper into the shadows, as I continued on my way, fleeing from the psychic chittering and the agitation I could feel from multiple sources that were in the area.


    The hounds were nearby, and they were looking for my scent.

 Chapter 784

    Laying my eyes on the hounds for the first time was not a pleasant experience. After about twenty minutes of dodging them, I had become quite accustomed to their chittering and used the noise to stay away from them, but now, there was no way to circumvent this one and I found myself face-to-face with it. Given that I only had the psychic chittering to go by, I had assumed that the hounds hunting me were Withered Skulkers or maybe green-eyed Undead, but that assumption was obviously wrong. The creature I was facing was something else entirely. The only commonality between these things and the foes I had faced before was that they, too, had their eyes lit up by an eerie green glow.


    But where the Undead were, mostly, still shaped like a human, though one that had been on incredibly hard times, and the racoons retained their physique, these things most certainly did not. Or maybe they did, and I was looking at a panther that managed to escape from the zoo. The feline was almost the size of Silva, almost a metre at the shoulder, though slender where Silva was bulky. But just that didn¡¯t mean I wasn¡¯t looking at a formidable foe that prowled through the night, making strange sounds between the meowing of a house cat and the chuffing of something bigger.


    The feline I had noticed was moving in my direction, not with purpose as if it had noticed me, but simply moving along a path that would bring it far too close to my position. Glancing around, I realised that there were no paths open to me, not unless I wanted to break open a window in the building behind me and leap up.


    Shifting deeper into the shadows, I focused on hiding. No movement to draw the eye, no sound to catch their attention, and even the air around me stopped moving, containing my scent. leaving nothing to give away that I was here, making me nothing but a deep shadow in the night.


    The feline kept moving and I decided to take a risk. Knowing that it had worked before and hoping it would work again, I activated Observe, focusing on the concealment Runes still active on my body, hiding the ability to gather information. Scowling, I looked at the blue box that told me I was facing a Withered Hunter, level twenty-five. The name made a connection between them and the racoons obvious, confirming my previous assumption that the green glowing eyes symbolised some sort of connection. On the other hand, the level was somewhat worrying, not for me, I had no doubt that I could kill a creature over ten levels below me, but worrying for others. Most people would be hard-pressed to deal with such a beast on their own, and with the amount of psychic noise I could hear, I highly doubted that there was only one.


    But on a positive note, I had a feeling I now had a grind spot for my group, I only needed to find a way how to grind these Withered Hunters without getting us all swarmed and killed in the process. With their bestial traits, using ranged attacks sounded like an excellent idea, just like hunters had killed physically superior prey since time immemorial. No need to get into range of a bear¡¯s claws, if you can simply throw stones at the beast until it falls over, running away as you do.


    Though, the advantage humans used to have in that regard was that of opposable thumbs, the ability to easily craft tools and use them. Sure, some animals had started to make use of simple tools before the change hit and might have become a tool using species if humans hadn¡¯t taken up that niche and dominated it. However, tools weren¡¯t the only way to project force any longer, magic could easily fill that niche and I had no idea what these Withered could do, other than psychically chitter and communicate across long distances. If they had some sort of offensive magic, or a psychic equivalent however that worked, trying to hunt them as if they were just beasts could backfire spectacularly. And fatally.


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    More testing was required before I would dare to go after them openly, testing to ascertain their abilities and, if possible prepare a few contingencies if things didn¡¯t work out as planned.


    The Withered Hunter had almost bypassed the shadows I was hiding in, only to freeze, paw still raised in the middle of a step. Unsure of what was going on, I froze, too, trying to become one with the shadows I had wrapped around me. Maybe it was a bit of panic, maybe it was the need to truly hide, but a familiar sensation washed over me, and I could feel the eerie presence of the endless shadow swallow me.


    The shadow was everywhere and nowhere, infinite and empty, trying to stretch me to fill it in its entirety. It would tear me apart and render me into nothing but a faint trace, spread out across eternity, lost in space and time. Focusing my mind, I sought to understand and immediately, I felt the pressure around me lessen as my Titanic Ambition strengthened me. The greater power gave me room to breathe and allowed me to consider my next step. And there was really only one step I could take. Pulling my magic tightly around me, I took that single step, focusing on the shadows that had to be above me, on the roof across the street.


    I didn¡¯t want to risk stepping out where I had started, not with the creature that close and I couldn¡¯t stay in the shadows, my magic would quickly get drained away and I would be lost within them.


    Panting, I returned to reality, a good chunk of my Astral Power gone but I wasn¡¯t where I had started. A wide smile spread across my face as I controlled my breathing, I had managed to travel through the shadows once again. It wasn¡¯t easy, not yet, but a quick glance at my log told me that my move had been quite successful. Darkness Magic had gained a whopping two points, jumping up to twenty-nine and even Darkness Rune Mastery had gained another point, likely for the constant channelling of the Cloak of Shadows I had wrapped myself in, reaching twenty-nine as well.


    Looking around, I realised that while I had managed to escape notice, I now had a different problem. It didn¡¯t look like the roof I had appeared on was supposed to be reachable, at least not for ordinary people. There was no obvious access I could see, no stairwell to allow maintenance workers access, only a flat expanse with a few air-con units. Looking at those, I realised that there had to be some sort of access, if only for their maintenance.


    Quietly moving along the rooftop, I kept glancing down, trying to make sure I wasn¡¯t spotted, searching for my way out. The feline I had noticed just earlier wasn¡¯t the only one prowling the streets, they were gathering. Maybe they hadn¡¯t found me, but from the amount of chittering I could hear, I had a feeling they knew roughly where I was. The noose was tightening and I needed to get away from here. Now.


    Panic could do quite impressive things, especially when it came to magic. Instead of trying to run, I focused on another shadow, down at street level and as far away from the building as I felt comfortable with. Forcibly aligning my mindset with the spirit of discovery, I repeated my experiment and took a step forward, only this time, it was deliberate. Again, the shadows surrounded me and I felt their power start to pull me apart, the cloak of shadows wrapped around me the only thing keeping me together. Another step and the sensation vanished and I was back on the ground, the Astral Power I stored in my hair completely depleted, along with some of the power within my blood. Efficient, this form of travel was not. But it was fast and, apparently, quite stealthy, so I wouldn¡¯t complain too much.


    Instead, I kept moving as quickly as I felt confident to keep it silent. Only, it didn¡¯t seem to help. Maybe it was the amount of Astral Power I used, maybe the shadow travelling wasn¡¯t as concealed as I would like it to be, whatever the case, I could hear the felines start moving in my direction. And I couldn¡¯t keep travelling through the shadows, not in anything but a dire emergency.


    Instead, I kept moving, hoping that I could get some distance. I wasn¡¯t confident it would work, but I wanted to keep the stealth up as long as possible, as soon as they truly detected me, the hunt would be on. And I hated to be the prey, being the predator and ambushing your prey was so much more comfortable.

 Chapter 785

    Many a curse was whispered in the depth of my mind when I realised that stealth wasn¡¯t going to cut it. Not solely, at least. The Withered Hunter had managed to get a whiff of me, scent, sound, magic or something else entirely, I wasn¡¯t sure and I didn¡¯t care, at least not in the moment. They were after me and I had to escape as quickly as possible.


    Ceasing to channel magic into the runes that had kept me concealed all night, the cloak started to dissipate. Before it could fully vanish, I activated Overflow and drew a simple runic formation of Mist, Concealment and Confusion into the air, channelling a vast amount of power into it. The formation held, just barely, and a huge cloud of fog erupted from it, rapidly spreading out. I had no idea how big the thing would be but I had high hopes it would confuse my hunters. The moment the cloud started to form, I gave up any attempt at stealth and started to run, pushing my body to its physical limit. Using Blood Magic, I could break that limit but doing so had its own disadvantages, especially in the long run. In addition, stepping through the shadows twice and conjuring the massive cloud of mist had depleted my Astral Power reserves further than I would have liked, so keeping the concealment active would only hinder me. It almost nullified my Astral Power regeneration, needing almost as much power as I would normally gain. If I wanted to regain my reserves, it had to go.


    Behind me, the psychic chittering grew even further, the Hunter doubtlessly after me with a vengeance. I could easily hear them, not just in the psychic spectrum but also with my ears, and I could plan my flight to avoid their presence.


    Now that I was no longer trying to be stealthy, I could move a lot quicker and thankfully, the Withered had yet to realise that I could detect their chittering, which allowed me to avoid the positions I could hear them from.


    Running through the night, I realised that, once again, they were trying to form a net before me. My mind went back to the desperate flight in the jungles of Arbortoma, the last time I had fought by Sigmir¡¯s side. Back then, just like now, our enemies had been far more numerous than us, and then, just like now, our only hope had been superior speed.


    I was tempted to kill the Undead and Withered I could see and feel all around me, just like we had slaughtered the elves back then, killing dozens, maybe hundreds, of them as we tried to make our escape but I quickly realised that doing so would bring about the same result. Just like Sigmir and I had been surrounded at the end, I¡¯d be surrounded and I knew I didn¡¯t have the power, or Lenore by my side, to cause the same devastation I had back then.


    As I jumped across a fallen bin, I realised just how much I missed my bonded partner, just how important to my mental equilibrium her presence had been. Sigmir had been my heart and soul, but Lenore, she had been a constant presence in my mind.


    Unbidden, images from my dreams sprang to my mind, the formation I had seen, the runes and glyphs. As I kept running, I noticed a pattern in my memories, a series of images that seemed to build up to something, almost like a set of instructions. A plan, of sorts, to perform some sort of ritual, though I wasn¡¯t quite sure what it would do. But in my frantic state, I realised that one of the symbols wasn¡¯t a rune like the others, it was the same glyph I had used on Mundus, to anchor myself and my body when delving into the Astral River. It was the closest thing I had to a personal mark, something I doubted many people or beings knew. Just those who I had travelled with. It was something I had never shown in my videos, I was nearly certain of it.


    As the realisation that this had to be either a figment of my subconsciousness trying to tell me something or a message from one of my companions on Mundus sank into my mind, I also realised that it wasn¡¯t something I should think about in the middle of a frantic run.


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    Instead, I focused back into the present and realised, somewhat amused, that my brief flight of intellectual fancy had been enough to activate Titanic Ambition, pushing my attributes far beyond what they normally were. It had been only a short boost, but that brief time had been enough to almost push me out of the area of encirclement.


    Realising that I could completely leave the area the Withered were currently threatening if I managed to step through the shadows twice more, I decided to risk it. I had the Astral Power and I knew how it worked, I had done so countless times on Mundus. Sure, I lacked both the attributes and the skill-level I had back then, but I was confident I could do it.


    As I continued running, I searched for distinct shadows in the moonlight, the clear demarcation making the distinction between a shadow and the night around it easier. Noticing one, I stepped into the darkness, this time not trying to step through it immediately, but staying within the Shadows. It was incredibly cold and I could barely breathe, as if there was no air around me at all, but I could keep running. The experience was incredibly weird, as it always was, with distances stretching almost randomly, and objects turning translucent and faint, though luckily the ground below me remained mostly solid. I could see some gaps below me, likely the sewer pipes and similar buried necessities of civilisation, but nothing that I wanted to interact with. Curiously, I couldn¡¯t see any creatures, even as I moved past an area where one had to be.


    I stayed less than thirty seconds in the shadows, my Astral Power draining rapidly as I moved far further than I could outside the shadows. Twisting reality once more, I stepped back out of the cold void I had travelled through, taking a deep, shuddering breath. It was an incredible sensation to travel through the shadows but not one I wanted to experience often. Maybe the best comparison would be a roller coaster, a great trip but also a huge strain on body and mind. In this case, however, it had been well worth it, earning me yet another point in Darkness Magic, bringing it to thirty. The entire night of sneaking and testing had been incredibly beneficial for my magic, showing that danger was the best inspiration.


    Raising my hand, I quickly drew the runes I had used earlier again, concealing myself back into the cloak of shadows. I could still hear the chittering of the Withered but it was further away than it had been since I killed that Skulker, making me think that I had managed to slip the net. Now, I just needed to make sure they didn¡¯t get me back onto their radar.


    To make sure I stayed out of their sight, I kept moving, once more trying to be as fast as possible while maintaining my stealth. With my Astral Power as drained as it was, I wouldn¡¯t be able to repeat the feats of magical travel I had performed just now, so I had to rely on more mundane means of escape.


    Trying to banish and fear, all worries that might make me too nervous and cause a slip-up, I continued forward. Amusingly, it felt as if my path was almost entirely cleared out, with only a few Undead along their green-eyed minders in the way. I decided to Observe one of those, learning that the green-eyed Undead were actually called Withered Husks, a somewhat disturbing name, though a fitting one. Husks, nothing but a withered shell that had been stripped of everything that used to make it human. It was a sobering thought, but also a comforting one, that the people that these bodies used to be were gone.


    Soon, I made it back to the no-mans land between racoon city and the area filled and controlled by the Shattered. Here, there were only a few of the basic Undead wandering around, nothing even remotely threatening and finally, I could let out a sigh of relief.


    Keeping my concealment active, I soon reached my companions, noticing a well-prepared trap for any Undead that might want to follow me, anything stepping into the area would get attacked from multiple angles and would die, and die fast.


    ¡°I¡¯m back,¡± I told them, letting my concealment finally drop. My bones were aching with exhaustion and I could already feel a headache starting to form, thanks to the vigorous spellcasting and the constant danger.


    ¡°Welcome back, Mother,¡± Lia greeted me, her voice filled with relief. For once, I didn¡¯t bother correcting her on my title, I simply gave my daughter an embrace, letting the tension flow out of me.


    ¡°Good to be back,¡± I replied, ¡°There¡¯s a lot we need to cover, I saw quite a few interesting things.¡±

 Chapter 786

    Sitting in yet another dark cellar, I was looking at the body I had caught while sneaking about. After sleeping for most of the day, I had told Lia and our two four-legged friends about the discoveries I had made during the night. Lia was quite intrigued about the diversity of creatures I had discovered within the area I had dubbed Racoon City. Sure, they were all Withered, just like all those with burning eyes were Shattered, but there seemed to be a much greater connection between the different Withered compared to the Shattered. The Shattered had been mostly passive in their interactions, essentially ignoring each other''s existence if their bodies were of different species, while the Withered actively worked together. Or maybe they were all working under the same banner, possibly some sort of psychic hivemind, which would explain the constant psychic chittering I had noticed.


    My current theory was that I could hear said chittering thanks to my advancing skills in Mind Magic, that the chittering was a racial application of that skill, though I couldn¡¯t be completely certain just yet. Not until I either managed to replicate and actively understand the method employed or I was told about it by something that was already able to employ it. Basically, unless Alex managed to learn English and told me about their psychic communication method, I would have to find my own answer.


    It was an interesting idea, as it might allow me to fully communicate with Silva and Alex, not just the usual mix of twenty questions and pantomime, That alone gave it quite the potential and that was while ignoring the possibilities for silent and distant communication. Before the change, mobile phones used to be a thing but now? Now, the furthest somebody could communicate was shouting, at least until some of the older methods were put back into use.


    Something like using reflective mirrors to send out Morse code signals, or maybe something like lighting a smoking fire to use the smoke or specific drum beats. All methods that used to be employed in the past, all with their own advantages and disadvantages. It was an interesting question, which would humans rediscover first, or would people simply come up with something entirely new, like some sort of employed travel within the Astral River? Maybe something similar to the way I had communicated with the Grandmother back on Mundus, essentially projecting my mind into a familiar and known space and using that space to talk. There were countless ways I could imagine people could go about communicating, all with their own methods. It was an incredibly diverse and interesting field, something that I could see myself investing quite a bit of time in. Not for any practical application, I doubted I would ever want to talk to enough people to make the time investment worthwhile, but simply because it was fascinating.


    But before I could invest countless hours of magical tinkering and research into the myriad ways people could share information with, I had more important things to worry about. Namely, what were the Withered, where did they come from and, maybe the most important of all, how would I best go about killing them?


    To answer those questions, I had started to take the Withered Skulker I had killed apart. Sadly, I lacked a comparative sample, something to see what a healthy, or maybe even a Shattered, racoon would look like internally, I could only guess from similar creatures. Back when I had taken the Centaur apart on Mundus, I had been focused on the human half of it, as my training with Mrs Wu had given me an adequate understanding of human anatomy. Far from what I¡¯d need to be a doctor but more than enough to know where to poke to cause damage and why poking in various spots would do so.


    To further that understanding, I had looked at a few of the anatomical plans of more common creatures, especially the ways they were similar. The differences between cats and dogs were relatively minor, they had the same organs and those organs had almost the same lay-out. Sure, the heart of a dog of Silva¡¯s size was quite a bit larger than that of a common house-cat, but that was to be expected.


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    The only problem was, I had no idea how much of that would apply to a racoon. I assumed that most of the organs would be roughly in the same spot but other than that assumption, I was unsure.


    Luckily, I didn¡¯t overly care about the exact anatomy and I hoped that the differences that made a racoon into a Withered Stalker would be pronounced and, well, magical enough for me to pick them out even without a comparative sample.


    Draining the blood, what was left of it, was the first step. Using Blood Magic should have made that trivial but the tar-like substance running through the creature''s vein wasn¡¯t as cooperative as I would have liked. It still worked, but it was almost as difficult as draining the sap from a tree, making me wonder just how alive the Withered actually were.


    The blood itself didn¡¯t smell like blood either, there was a scent of decay along the stench corruption, a cloying odour that made me sick. It was plain wrong, the substance I had drawn out of the corpse didn¡¯t carry Vitality, as blood should, it was¡­ It was something that should not be. Just like the Nethersprites I had witnessed on Mundus, these creatures just should not be, they should never have been allowed to enter our plane of existence. Nothing good would ever come from them, the only thing that should be done with them was annihilation.


    Shaking my head to clear away the sheer disgust I was feeling, I made sure to store the disgusting internal tar in a prepared bottle, the stuff should not be, but was, so I wasn¡¯t about to simply discard it. I could hate it as much as I wanted, but I needed to get over myself until the Withered were all gone.


    Next, once the internal tar was dealt with, I started to carefully pick apart the organs. Again, it was mostly done with a combination of a sharp blade made from Ice, my fingers and a bit of Blood Magic to help me along. While the blood was almost entirely drained, the flesh held enough similarity to it to allow me minor mastery over it. It was that connection between flesh and blood that allowed me to heal wounds, only now, I didn¡¯t try to heal, I tried to understand.


    Interestingly, the organs were familiar enough in their position and shape to make me somewhat confident in my work. The internals of the racoon hadn¡¯t changed upon becoming a Withered if one ignored two major exceptions.


    The first exception was the heart. The racoon''s heart was, for lack of a better word, withered, roughly half the size of what I had expected it to be and shrunken, reminding me of a raisin and not something that would beat in a creature¡¯s chest. That assessment was doubly true when I noticed a weird crystal-like structure the same colour as the dark internal tar pressed into the side of the heart. It almost looked like the crystal was growing into the heart or maybe the heart was being pushed aside by the crystal, I wasn¡¯t quite sure. Either way, it didn¡¯t look like anything a living creature should have in their body, like a kidney stone only taken to a metaphorical eleven. And in their heart.


    The second exception might be even more important. It was their brain, or what was left of it. The somewhat spongy mass within the creature''s head was covered in weird, gooey strings. It wasn¡¯t the same stuff that made up the internal tar, but it looked somewhat similar, like some sort of black, molten cheese that was partially solid. The strands stretched into the primary brain, crisscrossing the entire thing as if the brain was some sort of sea creature caught in a net.


    While I wasn¡¯t sure what those strands were, or what they did, I was somewhat confident that they had a connection to their psychic chittering. Which made me wonder, how was Alex able to hear the same psychic noise I could hear? Or was the ability part of something else and it was merely a coincidence that the weird goo was within the creature¡¯s brain? Maybe some sort of control mechanism for the Withered, or something else, I couldn¡¯t be sure. I needed more samples, especially samples of Withered Husks and Hunters, so I could compare what the different types of Withered had in common.


    Something to look for in the coming days. For now, I felt that we should establish an actual, comfortable and hidden forward base from where we could head into  Racoon City to hunt Withered, grind a few more levels and get the samples I wanted.

 Chapter 787

    Sitting down in the basement of the building we had decided on, I let out a soft sigh. Finding supplies in town was getting difficult, everything seemed to have been picked clear already. Sure, we still managed to find a few things, mostly in warehouses and hidden in cellars, but overall, the pickings were getting sparse. Sure, we had stashed a lot in our lair, but it would only last for a few months, maybe throughout the year, not forever. And that was assuming we hunted and harvested meat and gathered as much as we could, to extend those rations.


    It had to be much worse for the people at Apple Gate Farm, not only were they a far greater number, but my group also had the advantage that only I had a relatively normal human diet.


    Silva was mostly a carnivore, though she happily munched on some kibble but primarily, she ate meat. A lot of it, preferably freshly hunted with the army of dog. Maybe she was undergoing some sort of throwback to an earlier state of evolution, pushing her more towards her pre-domesticated ancestors, but I wasn¡¯t sure. She didn¡¯t seem to mind her meaty diet either way.


    Similarly, Alex was quite adept at foraging for themself, happily hunting down all the insects, berries and nuts they could find. Sure, they liked to supplement by stealing small amounts of our food, but they mostly went after leftovers, so it didn¡¯t matter.


    Last, and amusingly least when it came to food, Lia. She didn¡¯t need food unless she was physically injured to the point that her body needed the building blocks to restore her flesh. Otherwise, she happily suckled on my teat, or rather forearm, and sustained herself that way. It put a somewhat higher burden on myself, but given that I could use my Blood Magic to magically enrich the blood she drank, she only needed minor amounts. Where she¡¯d have to drain a normal human completely dry to get all the magic she needed from their blood, I could simply concentrate that magic into a few drops, making it far more efficient. It was also something I had been teaching her, so she¡¯d be able to sustain herself from others, though it would be rather painful for them. Once again, I realised just how incredibly useful my Magical Hair was. Sure, it had its drawbacks, but the ability to draw out Astral Power from it and concentrate it in my Blood without feeling pain, alongside its use to make magical threads for some simple enchantments felt priceless. Likely would continue to feel priceless, until somebody managed to get some of my hair and used it against me as that one insane spellcaster had done on Mundus.


    Shaking my head, I focused on the present once again. We had managed to scrooge up enough food to last us some time without digging into the supplies we had stored in our lair, and made an abandoned cellar in the city our new home. It wouldn¡¯t be permanent, just a place where we could hang our hats, or maybe the heads of our enemies, for the next week. A place where we could rest while hunting the Withered in Racoon City.


    But before we could go hunting, I desperately wanted to figure out what that strange ritual I had seen in my dreams was. Some of the runes I could see related to darkness, others to magic, though I had been unable to figure out what kind. Central to the whole thing was my personal glyph, so I could only guess that it involved the identity of Morgana, somewhat separate from the Legacy I had taken on. But separate in what way, I had no idea.


    Mentally looking at it from every direction I could manage, I had tried to find any dangers in the ritual, if there was any way it could harm me. The problem was, I could only make vague guesses about what it would do, it seemed to draw on magic that was bound to me and if my understanding was correct, it would try to bring that magic to me.


    It might, possibly, draw in the skill-levels I had managed to gain on Mundus, something that would be incredibly beneficial and increase my power multifold. Or it might do something else, but no matter how I looked at the combination of runes and intent, there didn¡¯t seem to be a way the ritual could harm me.


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    With that in mind, I began to draw the ritual, using a bit of chalk I had liberated from a toy store. The chalk alone wouldn¡¯t do anything magical, I doubted I¡¯d even be able to channel Astral Power into it if I tried, certainly not enough to make the ritual work, but it gave me some lines to colour in later. Drawing them in chalk first also allowed me to make any corrections needed. Copying a ritual I had only seen in my dreams wasn¡¯t something I would get right on the first attempt and making corrections while it was only drawn in chalk seemed prudent.


    Especially given that my plan was to draw the actual ritual in my blood, allowing me to easily infuse magic into it, or rather, use magically infused Blood to begin with. If I did that, I had to make sure I wasted as little as possible, otherwise, I might accidentally starve poor Lia, or pass out from anaemia. Neither sounded like a good idea, so careful preparation and consideration were necessary.


    It was almost night when I finally finished the circle and I could almost feel the Sun start to set somewhere far above. Or maybe I was simply imagining things, while I had a relatively accurate internal clock, I wasn¡¯t attuned to the Sun, not like I had been attuned to the Moon while on Mundus. I knew to avoid the Sun¡¯s harsh light but without looking outside, I wouldn¡¯t be able to tell if the Sun was up or not, whether it was obscured by clouds or anything like that.


    Cutting into my arm, I drew Astral Power from my hair and pushed it into my blood, letting the crimson liquid well from the wound I had caused and taking control of it with my Blood Magic. There was a heady, coppery scent in the air, sweet and almost cloying in its intensity, the natural odour of blood only made stronger by the magic I had infused into it.


    Following the lines I had drawn earlier, I began to add the blood, using my magic for fine control. No matter what sort of brush I had, my magic would always be the more accurate tool.  And accuracy mattered a great deal in the ritual. As I drew, I could already feel the Astral Power I had infused into the blood start to follow the lines of the ritual, the sensation pushing me to make the most minor alterations. It was quite similar to the connecting patterns I had learned from the dwarves and slowly discovered for my own magic. The runes themselves guided the Astral Power, the form giving rise to meaning, but between the different runes, the meaning faded. The connecting patterns allowed the Astral Power to smoothly connect from one rune to the next, keeping and strengthening the meaning and intent within the magic.


    Soon, the entire ritual circle was filled with a lightly pulsing red light, the Astral Power within my blood radiating out into the room, still connected to me and already starting to power the ritual. Letting out a deep breath, I stood in one of the glyphs symbolising Morgana and poured my own Astral Power into the circle.


    For a minute, nothing much happened. The amount of Astral Power I pushed into the formation was large but I could sustain it for a bit. Not too long but hopefully, it would be enough. As more and more Astral Power was thrown into the void, I could feel something reaching back. A familiar presence, one I hadn¡¯t felt in far too long. Over a month, I hadn¡¯t felt my feathered friend¡¯s presence and now, I could almost feel her wings settle around my shoulders, sheltering, protecting me.


    There was no exchange of words, but I could feel sensations, exhilaration, as if we were in the middle of a daring dive, unexpected joy, as if we had discovered something nice and shiny and, finally, relief. The emotions I could feel from the other side of the connection mirrored my own almost perfectly, a joy at knowing that my friend was still out there, exhilaration at managing to contact her and relief knowing that I wouldn¡¯t be alone.


    Moments later, I could feel a rush of Astral Power push back, into the formation and towards me. Welcoming it, I didn¡¯t even try to keep it from infusing the formation, the power I could feel was that of Lenore, a power I would never mistake with anything else.


    Confident that my friend wouldn¡¯t try to screw me over, I simply waited, as the power coalesced into something within the second glyph symbolising Morgana. Finally, the power faded and I could see what I had been sent.

 Chapter 788

    In the middle of the ritual circle, right atop the second glyph symbolising myself, were two things. Neither item was terribly complex at first glance, one was a simple, black Feather, the other a book. There were no special notifications, nothing but a message that my Blood Magic had risen by one, reaching level twenty-five, nor was there any other indication that the ritual I had done had worked. Just those two items, sitting there innocently.


    Staggering back, I sat down myself, not rushing forward to inspect them just yet. Having contact, even if it was only brief, muted contact between my magic and Lenore¡¯s meant that Mundus wasn¡¯t some unbridgeable distance away, something I would never be able to overcome. Lenore, quite obviously, had managed to send me that ritual and, using the ritual, these two items. Now, I only needed to figure out if there was a way for me to reach back to her, maybe even to send me over to Mundus.


    If that was what I wanted to do. On one hand, levelling on Mundus would be far easier, both when it came to skills and normal levels. There were quite a few powerful creatures and entities on Mundus, creatures I could hunt and kill. Some of them wouldn¡¯t even be missed, if I were to focus on hunting Undead in the Dorrian Mountains or clear out similar hot spots, nobody would complain. I would just get levels, and lots of them, allowing me to get back my Sigmir.


    Or would it?


    The Grandmother, powerful as she undoubtedly was, hadn¡¯t been able to revive Callista¡¯s partner, her solution had been to allow Callista to take roots and have her wait for her partner to be reborn. When it happened, it hadn¡¯t even been her partner any longer, it had been Adra, who might have shared some of her partner¡¯s characteristics but wasn¡¯t actually her partner. Or hadn¡¯t become her partner, I wasn¡¯t quite sure how that worked. Maybe Adra would eventually become Callista¡¯s partner from the past and fall in love with Callista again, but it felt like an incredibly convoluted way of going about things. And I knew that I wouldn¡¯t be able to keep myself from claiming Sigmir for myself, the moment I got a whiff of her presence. She was mine, would be mine, no matter her form. Now and forever more. Not even Death was allowed to part us, not permanently. I would get her back.


    Pushing down the growl that escaped me at the memory of Callista asking me to watch out for Adra, and imagining how it would feel to be in Callista¡¯s shoes at that moment, I focused on the present. Namely, the book and the feather I had summoned from another world.


    Reaching out, I picked up the feather. It was the simpler item, with nothing outwardly complex to it, at least until I touched it. The moment I did, I realised just who had shed that black feather, her magic still having a vivid and obvious presence within it. It was one of Lenore¡¯s feathers, faintly humming with her magic as if waiting to be unleashed. Or maybe waiting to be used for something, I had a feeling that there was a myriad of ways in which I could use the feather, certainly more than just using it to power some spell. I could do so, the feather was highly attuned to Death Magic and filled with the stuff, but I thought it would be a waste. There were better ways to use a gift my dear partner had given me from out of this world. Just to make sure, I used Inspect on the feather in my hand, lightly giggling when it came back as Nevermore¡¯s Feather. Apparently, my dear Lenore had retained the amusement she felt about the poetry I had shared with her.


    While the feather was obvious in what it was, the book not so much. A book, outwardly, was just that, what was important about it was on the inside, literally. In this case, the outside was a tome bound in dark-brown leather, without any obvious title, author or anything giving away what it might be. Reaching out, I touched it and, just like I had with the feather, I immediately recognised it. The outside had changed, how I had no idea, but the inside was still what it used to be. The Grimnoire the Grandmother had given me, the Zevarra Agha.


    You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.


    Quickly using Inspect on the tome, I got just what I had hoped for, the same information I had received last time, at least if my memory was correct. It had been quite a while since I inspected that particular tome, even if I had read it far more recently.


    <table style="border-collapse: collapse; width: 100%" border="1">


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 49.0078%" colspan="2">Zevarra Agha</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 49.0078%">Rarity: </td>


    <td style="width: 49.0078%">Unique</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 49.0078%">Type: </td>


    <td style="width: 49.0078%">Grimoire</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 49.0078%">Special Effect: Ritual Guide</td>


    <td style="width: 49.0078%"> Allows you to cast the spells written within without separately learning them. </td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 49.0078%">Special Effect: Soul Bound</td>


    <td style="width: 49.0078%"> This Grimoire is bound to the Traveller Morgana. Only she can read it and she can store it within her soul.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 49.0078%">Special Effect: Growth</td>


    <td style="width: 49.0078%">


    This Grimoire is bound to the Traveller Morgana. It will grow alongside her, yielding more secrets with growing power.


    </td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 49.0078%" colspan="2">This Grimoire was written by the Grandmother. It was gifted to the Traveller Morgana as a token of remembrance.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    Bound to my soul. The words in the blue box brought the giggle I had suppressed earlier back with a vengeance and by the time Lia was attracted by the strange noise, I was howling with laughter. I wondered if the Grandmother had known what would happen, had understood that the whole thing with the Travellers was some sort of divine recruiting scheme, allowing them to get into the ground level of another civilisation as their world burned around them.


    ¡°Mother, are you alright?¡± Lia asked, as my laughing fit slowly started to ebb off.


    ¡°Never better, my dear,¡± I wiped off a tear, ¡°I merely received a care package from my Grandmother. How I¡¯d love to introduce you to her,¡± I replied, a chuckle escaping me at the idea. Visiting the Grandmother with Lia, it sounded like an amazing prank, visiting the lady who had essentially taken over one of her world¡¯s sources of Astral Power, made it into her domain and even, according to Callista, kept out divine politics. Visiting that woman with my vampire daughter.


    ¡°Sadly, it is quite far from here, so getting there will be rather difficult. It might take a while, a rather long while, for me to get that to work,¡± I added, just to make sure Lia wasn¡¯t getting her hopes up.


    ¡°Okay?¡± she just stood there, a look of utterly adorable confusion on her face. Obviously, she didn¡¯t get how my Grandmother could send me things, why that would require a magical formation still bleeding off a heady mix of Blood and Death Astral Power, or generally what was going on.


    ¡°Some light reading for me, or maybe I should call it Dark reading? I¡¯m sure I¡¯ll find some tremendously interesting things in here,¡± I gently stroked the book, remembering how it was growing with my power. Back on Mundus, my power had been solely focused on Ice, Darkness and Blood, with a bit of Mind and Death Magic thrown in for good measure, but now? Just how much could I gain from the book, written by what I considered a tremendously powerful witch? I couldn¡¯t wait to find out, back on Mundus, there had been spells in there that I could adjust to my own spellcasting, making them work with what I had magically. But now, with my greatly expanded foundation and the desire to expand those foundations even further?


    ¡°Do you want to stay in for the night and read? Or can we go and kill some of those Withered you told me about?¡± Lia asked, sounding amusingly eager for some bloodshed.


    ¡°I¡¯ll look through the book, but later,¡± I promised, pushing myself to my feet, ¡°Now, I just need to figure something out,¡± I admitted, before remembering that I needed to bind the book. After letting a drop of blood fall on the cover of the grimoire, I could immediately feel the difference, feel its connection to me strengthen. My soul, my body.


    A single thought and the book vanished from my hands, hidden within my Soul. I could still feel it, just hanging there somewhat similar to the way Lenore had hung around within my mind, but I couldn¡¯t do anything with it, not at the moment. Maybe once I attuned myself more to the grimoire or gained more power. Or something like that, I wasn¡¯t quite sure just yet, but I knew I didn¡¯t have to lug around the heavy tome and nobody would be able to steal it.


    ¡°Now, we can head out,¡± I grinned at Lia, managing to keep myself from giggling some more at the look on her face. It wouldn¡¯t be nice to laugh at my daughter¡¯s confusion.

 Chapter 789

    Quietly, four shadows crept through the night. Almost no noise escaped us, only the soft clicks of Silva¡¯s claws breaking the quiet night, but it wasn¡¯t enough to alarm any enemies to our presence. The idea was simple, circumvent the outer layer of Undead and Withered Husks in order to get to the inner layer, where the Withered Skulker and possibly the Withered Hunter were waiting. Kill as many of the Skulkers as we could manage, wait for the Hunter to come looking for us, kill a few of those, too, and escape before a wave of Undead and Withered Husks could sweep over us and bury us with the sheer weight of their numbers.


    The plan was as simple as possible, based on my investigation''s results the night before last, though we had a few contingencies laid out, just in case. We had prepared a few areas with simple traps, nothing overly complex, merely a few tripwires to slow enemies down, plus two points where we had stashed flammable chemicals in easily breakable containers. By running past the right spot and pulling a prepared chord, the container would crash into the alleyway, break and a small amount of Fire Magic would be enough to create a small lake of fire. Nobody knew just how flammable the Undead were, but it might just deter their pursuit. And if not, we had prepared another cask, that one filled with water, just as breakable, only there, I could rapidly freeze the water behind us, creating a slick field of Ice that would hopefully trip pursuing Undead up. Neither trap was incredibly sophisticated but then, we didn¡¯t need sophistication, we needed something that could buy us a minute or two, so we could vanish into the shadows and disappear.


    Hopefully, our preparations would go unneeded.


    Circumventing the Undead was quite a bit harder in the bigger group. Where I, alone, could make myself functionally invisible, inaudible and undetectable, turning into nothing but a shadow in the darkness, the other three were not as stealthy. Alex came the closest, simply by virtue of size and natural talent, but even they couldn¡¯t quite reach my level of stealth, just due to the difference in attributes and skills involved. Maybe if they managed to gain another fifteen levels or so, diligently putting their points into Agility, Intuition and Charisma, bumped their Stealth Skill up a dozen points or so, maybe created an item to help with concealment, if they managed all that, they¡¯d out-stealth me, but for now? I was the sneakiest of us all.


    Lia was trying, but she was still lacking in her Darkness Magic. She had been studying hard, but I had a feeling she was a little weaker than me, when it came to affinity to the Dark, the difference holding her back. She also lacked the physical training I had been given by Mrs Wu, sure, I had tried to impart Mrs Wu¡¯s lessons to her, but there was still a gap in experience that she had yet to bridge.


    Silva, on the other hand, was the worst of us three. She lacked the natural talent and inclination, her class didn¡¯t particularly lend itself to quiet pursuits and her attributes were more geared towards physical confrontation, crashing into her enemies head-on and biting their heads off, not quietly sneaking about. I had been tempted to have her remain behind but I couldn¡¯t bring myself to do that. Instead, I had stitched a few Concealment Runes into a bandana and wrapped it around her neck, letting it hang across her back like a small cape. It was powered by my own magic and skill, helping her quite a bit but there was only so much even I could do. It worked, but barely.


    Luckily, the Undead weren¡¯t the most observant of creatures, at least as long as one kept out of the range of their life-sense, or whatever it was they used. By now, I was quite familiar with that range, so I could guide the group around it.


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    Moving past the areas I wanted to avoid took a little longer than planned but we were still easily within our schedule. Unless we decided to go wild and battle within the area for hours on end, or in other words, unless we got pinned down and forced to battle it out, we would be back at our lair hours before dawn broke. The plan was a quick, surgical strike, followed by a similarly quick retreat. Possibly with a second strike, if things worked out as hoped. A prolonged battle, here, deep within our enemy''s territory, was something we had to avoid if at all possible.


    Just like before, I could use the psychic emanations of our enemies to detect their presence, even as they managed to conceal themselves from ordinary senses. I doubted it would work forever, even now I tried my best to corroborate what my Mind Magic was telling me with the help of my other senses, just to make sure I wasn¡¯t blundering into a trap. It was what I would do if I realised that an enemy was using some innate part of my Magic to hunt me, use that innate part and their confidence that they could find me against them. If an enemy thought they could hunt me by detecting the Darkness Magic I used to conceal myself, I¡¯d show them the lessons Mrs Wu had taught me. I didn¡¯t need my magic to hide myself, it merely made it a lot easier.


    With a grin on my face, I prepped the Frozen Shuttle, intending to do exactly the same thing as I had done the last time. Kill a Withered Skulker, hide in the darkness, and wait for a few Hunters to come, only this time, the plan was to kill those Hunters, too.


    My Frozen Shuttle cut through the air, trailing a line of glittering frost, and pierced deeply into the Skulker. There was a burst of psychic anguish, the Skulker managing to get a single note of pain out of its mind the moment it died, but it didn¡¯t matter. Not really, the plan was that the Hunters knew where to go, so I was quite happy for the Skulker to have signalled its demise. A quick pull with my Ice Magic dislodged the Frozen Shuttle and a bit of Blood Magic ripped the Blood from the corpse of the Skulker, scattering it all around the alleyway. The thick, cloying scent of blood would make it much harder for any investigating creature to locate the far less pungent scent of the four of us.


    With a few quick gestures, Lia, Silva, Alex and I moved into positions around the area where I had killed the Skulker, each of us hiding in a different location. Silva was between some dumpsters, below my own position so I could keep her concealed with my magic, Alex was hiding on a window sill, staying outside of any direct lines of sight, Lia was crouching in a cellar entrance while I was hiding out in the ruins of a building. None of us were easily detected, but all of us had clear lines of attack.


    We didn¡¯t need to wait for long, just seconds after the Skulker died, I could feel the Hunters closing in, their presence was easily detectable. And it would remain easily detectable for me until they found a different way to communicate, their psychic chittering was quite similar to a group of people shouting at one another, just that they used a language I didn¡¯t understand.


    They had to have been quite close to our position, it took just a few minutes for the first of them to arrive. The misshapen cat started to sniff around, trying to locate what had killed the Skulker, only to come up short. It might have managed to detect the magic in the air, I wasn¡¯t sure, but before it could do anything with the information, more Hunters arrived. Our plan was to wait until there were four of them and to strike as hard and fast as possible, which worked out quite well. There was a fifth Hunter nearby, I could feel their presence, but it wasn¡¯t on us just yet. More of their brethren would arrive at some point, but they were minutes away.


    Our first strike was a thing of beauty. Silva leapt out of her hiding place, right when one of the Hunters was in her range, drawing their attention as her fangs sunk deeply into the thing¡¯s thigh, crippling it. At the same time, Lia¡¯s hook chain was flying out, striking one of the distracted Hunters, while I managed to catch a third one with my Frozen Shuttle, adding my own damage to the mix. Alex did something rather unexpected, they demonstrated that they had picked up some interesting stuff and lobbed a small, pressurised canister in the middle of the Hunters, causing the canister to burst. I wasn¡¯t sure just what was spraying out of it, but from the looks of it, none of the Hutners was enjoying the scent.


    But they were far from done and now, the battle was on.

 Chapter 790

    It was fascinating to watch and experience the reaction of the Hunters to our attack. On one hand, there was the purely physical part, the creatures we had struck let out hisses of pain, and the others let out angry yowls, nothing that I wouldn¡¯t expect from a feline that was suddenly in pain or confronted with an enemy. On the other hand, there was the psychic side, where I could hear an explosion of activity, though all somewhat in the same tone, for a lack of better word. I would have expected that those we had attacked would have a different texture in their emanations, that it would be more akin to a scream of pain, something sharp and piercing. But no, it was all in the same tone, making me wonder just how disconnected from their physical form these creatures were.


    I was just about to throw an Icicle into the middle of the creatures when I realised what the canister Alex had thrown was. Namely, a rather flammable aerosol, likely taken from a gas station we had visited while hunting for supplies to make our traps with and punctured with a sharp stone or something along those lines. The realisation changed my plan and I channelled the hated Fire Magic, barely managing to get it to work across the distance but with a bit of extra Astral Power, I managed to get it to work. And the aerosol to ignite, creating a surprisingly large fireball.


    For a moment, I was torn between joy and disgust. Why did it have to be fire, I so hated the stuff, why couldn¡¯t it be something more pleasing? Likely because it was incredibly difficult to get a nice, large reaction out of something endothermic, these reactions were mostly confined to their medium, so unless we managed to find a supply of liquid nitrogen or similar liquid gases, it would be difficult to induce freezing, unless I directly used my magic. And yet, despite my disgust at unleashing such large-scale fires, there was a small part of me that revelled in it, the knowledge that I had created the fire, that I was its master. And maybe, there was also a tiny part of me that was happy at throwing a fireball, no matter how much I disliked fire, it was such a staple of fantasy battle magic, even if it was relatively useless.


    The fireball, as impressive as it had been, had merely singed the fur of the Hunters before burning out, Lia and Silva were completely unharmed, though Silva looked a little spooked. But other than it working as a distraction, something the others were already exploiting with brutal efficiency, the Hunters were nearly unhurt, just a bit of cosmetic damage.


    Before I could continue my spellcasting, I felt a build-up of power and reacted, almost completely instinctual. Bullet Time activated, giving me enough time to work out a response, other than throwing power into their general direction.


    ¡°Stop!¡± I yelled, my entire being focusing on that simple concept, to prevent something from happening. In this case, the thing I wanted to prevent was a psychic attack from two of the Hunters, trying to turn Silva¡¯s brain to mush, or at least stun her so another could tear out her throat. It was a near thing, amusingly, my yell had barely started by the time the magical side was already over, but I managed to interject my own power between the spear of power coming from those two creatures, feeling it crash into the shield I had formed on instinct.


    Stumbling back, I felt a bit of blood ooze from my nose, a headache starting to form as I tried to clear my mind. I needed to find better ways to utilise my Mind Magic on the defensive side, but that was something I had to consider later.


    For now, I stepped back forward to the window I was using as cover, letting out a sigh of relief when I realised that I had managed to shift the battle by blocking the attack from the Hunters. Just like I had been briefly stunned by their attack, they, too had suffered from the backlash, and Lia had ruthlessly exploited that opening. My daughter was truly coming into her own, especially when it came to her Martial Arts. If I hadn¡¯t known that she had only been training for a few weeks, I would have thought she had been doing so for at least a year. There was an incredible certainty in her movement, an assurance that her strikes would land and she would pull through. That confidence might have made her attacks a little reckless but it certainly gave her enough power to strike true.


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    And in this case, her strikes, one with her claws, the other with the cleaver we had acquired in the Dark Slaughterhouse, struck beautifully. The cleaver did what it did best, cleave something apart, in this case, it managed to cleave through the spine of a Hunter, sending the beast to the ground from where it would never rise again. Her other attack was less decisive but just as brutal, ripping a deep wound into another Hunter¡¯s side, tearing through flesh, muscle and sinews, crippling one of the Hunter¡¯s legs before she had to retreat or get wounded by another Hunter.


    The battle continued, with me mostly providing fire support alongside Alex, who kept back but added their own twist, randomly throwing rocks, debris and small amounts of psychic energy, similar to the massive blast the creatures had used only smaller by an order of magnitude. With our help, Lia and Silva were able to quickly destroy the Hunters, leaving them dead on the ground. Silva had a few scratches alongside one nasty puncture wound where the one Hunter that had joined the battle late had managed to get her but overall, we were in okay shape.


    ¡°Let¡¯s move to another location, we don¡¯t want to be here when they come with bigger numbers,¡± I told the others, already drawing the Blood Runes I used to heal on her side. They worked quickly and moments later, I could replace them with the runes I used to conceal her.


    After a quick check to make sure nobody else was injured, we moved back into the alleyways, towards one of the groups I could feel in the distance. It was a smaller group, only three Hunters moving together, so my plan was to pounce on them as we made our way out. I briefly glanced at my notifications as we moved, grinning at the point in Mind Magic I had gained, alongside the point in Fire Magic, bringing the two skills to twenty-seven and five, respectively.


    Given that the Hutners were rapidly moving towards the position we had just vacated and we were moving to intercept, it didn¡¯t take long for them to be close enough that I signalled for the others to hide. We all moved into somewhat concealed positions, though they were far less advantageous than those we had in the fight before and settled in for a brief wait.


    Not even a minute later, the Hunters came barrelling through the street, barely looking at their environment, allowing us to launch a beautiful attack from our ambush. Just like before, Lia used her chain, Silva drew their attention and Alex used their psychic powers to distract, a move I decided to copy with my Mind Magic. If we managed to keep their death quiet, we might manage to ambush yet another group, there were enough moving in the area to make that worthwhile.


    Our attacks were quite successful, especially the psychic attack. It seemed that their own abilities made them somewhat vulnerable, just like a creature with especially sensitive ears would be greatly affected by a loud sonic attack, or like I was especially vulnerable to harsh light, thanks to my excellent night vision. Without a moment of warning to shut my eyes, I would be utterly devastated by any flash of light and for these creatures, it was no different. Our attack caught them off-guard and the psychic strike sent them reeling, creating an opening that Lia and Silva happily exploited.


    By the time the last creature was half-way back to its senses, its brethren were already down for the count, one with a crushed spine, thanks to Silva, the other neatly decapitated. The last Hunter didn¡¯t even have the time to turn around and try running, it might have wanted to, or maybe it wanted to launch a desperate attack, but before it¡¯s hindlegs managed to push it into action, Silva barrelled into it, sending it sprawling while Lia struck with her cleaver, crippling one of its legs. It was a move Lia liked quite a bit, crippling an enemy''s mobility so they could be bled at her leisure but now was not the time for it, so she simply killed the Hunter.


    ¡°Perfect, now we¡¯ll leave again,¡± I ordered and moments later, we retreated back into the shadows of the night, hunting for more prey. And there were many Hunters coming for us, not knowing that they were no longer hunting. They were hunted.

 Chapter 791

    The Zevarra Agha, the book of spells, the Grimoire of the Grandmother, a wholly unique item originating from another World. There was nothing even remotely comparable to it anywhere on Terra, nothing that held as much arcane lore. Some of the other legacy holders might have read about different magical concepts in the libraries of Mundus, but I doubted anyone had managed to gain a truly comprehensive magical education, simply due to the lack of time. But here, I held an item scribed by a genuine Mistress of Magic, one who had walked further down the Arcane Path than most could manage in a lifetime. A book she had personally given to me, as a guide on my own magical path and a reminder of the lessons she had given me. Not many of them, but they had become part of the foundation upon which I had built my own knowledge of the Arcane on.


    And now, I was taking that foundation, the knowledge I had gained on Mundus, and was expanding it far beyond anything I had managed in that world. Given that the grimoire supposedly expanded as I gained power, allowing me to read and learn more as I grew, I wondered what it would show me now, with my vastly expanded foundational skills and affinities.


    With a trembling hand and no small amount of trepidation, I opened the book, glancing at the first page. Originally, there had been a foreword here, the Grandmother¡¯s musings on the elements and their connections, differences between striving for extremes and striving for the cycle, along what she considered the limits of her understanding and where her ideas about the way the World and System worked were incorrect. It had been a fascinating read, only, now, it was gone.


    Replaced with a different foreword, or maybe calling it a message would be more fitting. A message directly addressed to me, as if it had been added to the book long after I had taken possession of it, or maybe as if it was written with knowledge about the situation I was now finding myself in.


    There was still a part of it that spoke of the esoteric, of arcane topics I could only ponder and try to understand, but it wasn¡¯t so much focused on the elements but on the Astral River and the Worlds it was flowing through.


    Worlds, plural, something I considered rather important, especially now that I had as much of a confirmation of Mundus¡¯ existence as I could have without finding my way there. Only, where I knew of multiple worlds, thanks to the capsules and Pantheon Entertainment, in other words, thanks to the Gods and their efforts, the Grandmother was looking at it from the other side.


    She, as an ancient, maybe even primordial, being, she was confident that those very same Gods hadn¡¯t originated on Mundus. She wrote of a bridge between Worlds, allowing the Gods access to the World of Mundus, until that access was destroyed by an insane Arcanist, the same who had shattered the ancient Empire of the Roadbuilder. But where I could only accept that something like that might have happened in the distant past of Mundus, the Grandmother could confirm it, though she didn¡¯t go into too much detail, merely mentioning it as something that happened around the same time she created Neyto.


    However, the important part was that the Grandmother felt that, with direct access to Mundus denied to the Gods, they might seek to establish such direct access elsewhere. And what better way to eventually gain access to a world, but to give that world help in an hour of dire need. Maybe by providing that world with information, by training some of the people there and granting them access to Legacies of their own making?


    It sounded rather plausible, a very long-term plan to be sure, but one I could eventually see succeeding. If the Gods and their clerics managed to get into the foundation of the society that was starting to form after it was shattered in the change, nobody would bat an eye at it in a few hundred years. The Gods, both Olympian and Asgardian, would be a fundamental part of Terra¡¯s culture, if not the foundation of it. Ruling by Divine Right had worked for thousands of years, so why not use that wonderful idea and roll with it? If the Divine Right was actually divinely supported, things would turn even more dire.


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    Sadly, it somewhat fit with what I had assumed about the actions of the Divine myself, only that the Grandmother had included something else. Namely, her ideas about what a Divine being actually was, that what we saw as Gods were merely sapient creatures like us that had managed to gain a following that donated Astral Power to them, likely across worlds. That donated power was then refined and a part of it was, as Divine Power, used to fuel the spellcasting of their chosen, possibly in an effort to recruit more to their flock. Her writing also included the idea that the transfer of power between worlds was a necessity to allow the refinement of Astral Power into Divine Power, though she only postulated it because her own experiments to refine Divine Power had failed.


    Looking at her writing, I had to control myself so I didn¡¯t laugh, it sounded very much like a pyramid scheme, with a God on top of the pyramid, with countless people below, all recruiting and donating, while receiving a smaller amount of power, the further down the pyramid they were. Sadly, knowing what might make a God didn¡¯t help with actually combatting their influence, not unless I wanted to set up my own pyramid scheme, something I realised was suddenly quite possible.


    I had two potential targets, three if I wanted to include Hecate for the blessing she had given me, even if the Church of Hecate didn¡¯t really seem to be a thing, that Hecate wanted Arcane Spellcaster to think and learn for themself, not knock on her door for the answers. Maybe I even had four targets, though that was only if I decided that praying to an Apocalyptic Dragon was a good idea and started marketing the Nidh?gg. I wasn¡¯t quite sure how anyone would be able to make that pitch, not unless I found somebody who had lost everything and wanted the world to burn for it. Someone in the mindset I had during my last weeks on Mundus when I was happily throwing the world into the longest winter I could conjure.


    On the other hand, if I wanted to set up a Church, the Grandmother would likely make the best patron, which might be the actual reason why she included the whole thing in the grimoire. Looking over the rest of her introduction, I realised that it would be relatively easy to make contact with her, at least if I gained some additional power. It would take a ritual similar to the one I had used to contact Lenore and from that point, we could negotiate.


    The ritual to contact the Grandmother would be more difficult, simply because I knew Lenore far better than her, allowing me to zero in on her with ease, especially using the sigil Lenore and I shared, but contacting the Grandmother was feasible as a mid-term goal. Maybe a few months, at most a year, though it, as so often, depended on the number of enemies I could hunt. With the Withered apparently volunteering to serve as our enemies, the timeframe could easily be shortened quite a bit. If I wanted to go down that road.


    And that was the big question, did I want to take that route? Not necessarily the path of praying to the Grandmother, but did I want to pray to any Divine or potentially Divine being?


    There was always a price for power, the idea of the pyramid scheme didn¡¯t seem to be too far off. Sure, if I managed to form the Church of the Grandmother, or maybe something like the Church of the Forest Witch or something along those lines, I would be the senior member of the pyramid on Terra. But I would be beholden to the Grandmother, taking her as my Patron and Mistress.


    Did I want to be beholden in that way, even to someone like the Grandmother who had helped me, or even to a dear friend like Lenore? There was the joke about the easiest way to lose a friend being to lend them money, but somehow, I had a feeling starting to pray to them would make you lose one even faster.


    Shaking my head, I decided to consider the question over the next few weeks. For now, I had a book to read, a daughter to train and countless Withered to hunt. I could take my time and consider divine matters carefully.

 Interlude: Reporting 101

    Once again, the council guiding the people living at Apple Gate Farm was faced with a familiar pair of faces. Sure, the pair now had a somewhat weirdly looking racoon with them, in addition to the massive dog that had accompanied them before, but it changed little in the things they said. The racoon wasn¡¯t talking, at least not yet, and neither was the dog.


    But what the other two, mainly their diminutive leader, had to say was worrying enough, just by itself. Before, there had been tales of Undead and different inhumane factions vying for control over those Undead, alongside a plan and even some support to deal with the problem but now, the report was focused on one such faction, which they called the Withered.


    ¡°So, let me get this straight?¡± Cassie, the Cleric and advisor in all things spiritual, asked Jade, already feeling a headache forming between her eyes, ¡°You managed to get a better read on those Withered and made some deductions, mainly that they essentially are connected by psychic communion, but not a true hivemind, is that so far correct?¡±


    ¡°That is my current conclusion, yes. They need to actively report to one another in order to convey information, that report is fast but not automatic or instant. It might be limited in range, we have yet to test what happens if you remove one of their number from the rest but I doubt we ever will. They are a big enough hassle to deal with, even without trying to only incapacitate one of their number for further experiments,¡± Jade, the petite, blue-skinned elf replied, shaking her head at the idea before continuing, ¡°The biggest problem is their growth, I have yet to see anything even remotely comparable. The Withered, for whatever reason, gain power far quicker than the Shattered do, at least in the current state. We¡¯ve been hunting them for a week and in that week, the Withered gained somewhere between five and eight levels, on an individual level. That wouldn¡¯t be so bad if their original level was low, but they are starting to crack level thirty. I don¡¯t know what level your people currently are, but I doubt they are comparable, though I obviously could be wrong. I hope I am wrong, to be honest,¡± she admitted, looking at the gathered council. The expression on their face was remarkably easy to read, they were scared and likely for good reason.


    ¡°Levels between twenty and thirty, generally closer to thirty, with almost perfect communication, incredible numbers of disposable, if weak, bodies and overall superior numbers that they can readily sacrifice if needed? What else do they have that gives them an incredible advantage?¡± Mrs Wu asked, sounding almost annoyed at the idea that their foe was unbeatable, thanks to a naturally stacked deck.


    ¡°Their skulkers have adequate stealth, not quite to our level but they are competent unless you have the means to beat their tricks. The Hunters are fast and vicious, excellent trackers and, well, hunters, working to bring down any foe that trespasses into their territory. The Husks are, from what we can tell, mostly command and control beacons, passing on the orders from other Withered to the basic Undead they control,¡± the other female, Chantalle if you asked her Mother, Lia if you spoke to Jade, explained, causing the spirit of everyone in the room to drop even further, if that was at all possible. Mrs Wu could only let out a whispered curse, shaking her head at the difficulty of their task.


    ¡°Well, there¡¯s got to be something that can be done, right? I mean, you must have had some success, or you wouldn¡¯t know all those details, right?¡± Mark asked, sounding more desperate than anything else as if he wanted his idea to be true. Or maybe needed his idea to be true.


    ¡°We managed to form a set of tactics that work out reasonably well, though I doubt that our tactics will work for others. They are primarily dependent on specialist skills, mostly magic support abilities combined with brutal attacks to cripple. We never try to fight fair, hell, we mostly try to make it so there¡¯s no fight at all. Strike from ambush, attack unpredictably and disappear back into concealment, have a few traps set out to delay any pursuit,¡± Jade explained, before looking at Mrs Wu, ¡°Teacher, when you told me about jungle and guerilla warfare, I never thought I¡¯d need those lessons, but the book you gave me way back was invaluable.¡±


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    ¡°Those tactics are some of the oldest tricks in the book,¡± Mrs Wu had a wry smile on her face, while almost everyone else in the room stared at her with a mix of awe and curiosity, ¡°Make it so that your enemy cannot use their strength, while you use as much of your power as you can, before ending the engagement. It worked back when our ancestors were running across the plains of Africa with spears in their hands and it has worked in countless conflicts ever since. Avoid what is strong and strike at what is weak, know your enemy and know yourself, and you shall not be defeated in a hundred battles,¡± Her voice took on a measured cadence as she spoke at the end, Wong Chehai nodding along.


    ¡°It is paraphrased but certainly true. I believe I will impart the lessons of our ancestors to those who seek to listen. I already tried to do so, but maybe, if they hear what is out there, they finally shall listen. They need to give up that foolishness of trying to meet their enemies head-on,¡± he added, looking a lot more confident than he had just minutes before.


    ¡°On a positive note, the Withered seem to be rather slow to adjust. So far, their basic tactics have not yet changed, though I¡¯ve been expecting them to try something for days. It¡¯s making me nervous that they seem to be content to have their forces slowly bled out, while we disappear day after day. Unless there is no intelligence behind their actions, they have to react in some way, they have to adjust. I fear that their adjustment will be in some unexpected, and utterly devastating way, so we¡¯ve been changing our approach constantly,¡± Jade explained, getting nods of understanding. They all knew that their enemies only needed to get it right once, whereas they needed to make things work every time.


    ¡°However, there is one thing I need to stress, something that worries me. We don¡¯t truly know what the Withered are. I¡¯ve studied a few of them, of each type, literally taken them apart to see what makes them tick and I¡¯m spooked by what I¡¯ve found. There are two major parts that concern me, one is that the hearts of the Withered, well, they Wither. The organ itself shrinks, almost as if it is desiccated, and a strange gem starts to form, like a tumour only crystalline. I¡¯ve got no idea what that means in this context, but I doubt it¡¯s anything good. The other part is just as worrying, there is a strange lattice-like growth in their brain, I suspect it¡¯s the source of their psychic abilities, but I don¡¯t know,¡± Jade explained and now, the faces of the council start to turn pale, at the idea of somebody literally rooting through dead bodies, some of which used to be human.


    ¡°Now, I believe that those two differences are what makes a Withered what they are, but I¡¯ve got no idea where they come from. As in, what causes the growth in their heart to form, what grows the lattice in their brain. Is it some sort of spell that is cast by an outside source, is it some sort of spore, like a mushroom, that grows within them after exposure or something else entirely? Whatever the cause is, I feel that we need to know, if only to make sure that we aren¡¯t affected by it,¡± she finished, letting out a soft sigh.


    ¡°That sounds like something you should figure out before anything else, though I¡¯ve got no idea how to actually do that,¡± Mark agreed with a grin, though it was a forced one, ¡°But please, whatever you do, don¡¯t get yourself zombified, or Withered, or whatever you call it. I don¡¯t think we could deal with that.¡±


    ¡°Agreed, better retreat before you get yourself turned into one of them. You are already scary enough, no need to add some sort of zombie army to that, even if you¡¯d likely become their Queen in short order,¡± Cassie added, sounding both serious and as if she was joking at the same time.


    ¡°I have no desire to join their brain-link gang, thank you very much. If I want to be Queen of anything, I¡¯ll damn well make my own servants, wouldn¡¯t be the first time,¡± Jade replied, her words somehow managing to cause even more worry within the room.


    ¡°Anyway, back to the Withered and our continued fight against them. They¡¯re quite lucrative when it comes to EXP, so it might be something your strongest could be interested in. By now, some of the other groups should have started attacking the Undead, right? What¡¯s going on with them anyway?¡± Jade pushed the topic aside, returning to more strategic questions, even if the image of her, sitting on a throne of Ice somehow managed to hang in the room, long after their discussion had finished.

 Chapter 792

    If there was one thing I had to say about the Withered, it was that they were consistent and persistent. For almost two weeks, we had been venturing into Racoon City, killing more of them each day, gaining EXP and quite a few skill levels as we went and their response to our attacks didn¡¯t change. Sure, they increased the number of Hunters sent after us on some days but most of the time, they just sent enough to drive us away.


    It was that consistent response that had started to make me worry if our attacks actually did anything or if we were just wasting our time. Sure, we gained levels, but what if their response was designed to keep us doing as we did, occupied and not trying to figure out what was actually going on?


    It was a startling realisation that, while the Withered didn¡¯t change their way, we hadn¡¯t really changed what we were doing, either. We might mix up the details, the area we attacked, the paths we took and even the method of attack but overall, we ventured into the outskirts of their territory, killed one or two Skulkers or a few Husks, killed the Hunters coming after us in response and retreated.


    We needed to change things up on our end, we needed to find out what the Withered actually were, what they were doing and if there was a need to interfere more in their operations. If not, we could continue to grind them down, killing them night after night, and gaining EXP that way. At the end of the night, the EXP we gained were quite plentiful, far better than anything other than the Dungeon.


    In the time we had been killing them, I had levelled multiple times, and had reached level forty-three, gaining another boost from my Dragon Touched Trait. That, plus the attribute points I had saved up were enough to let me push either Intelligence or Intuition to thirty, forcing me to pick between the two. I had decided to pick Intelligence, gaining a useful special ability and another powerful trait.


    The special ability wasn¡¯t flashy, at least not when compared to some of the other abilities I had gained before The Rune Heptagon Ability did nothing but allow me to link seven runes into a formation but that simple-sounding ability opened up a host of other options. I had used it on Mundus and I would happily use it here.


    The trait, on the other hand, was one that needed a lot of explanation, or maybe exploration. On its face, the Magical Interference Trait merely told me that it allowed me to use my Astral Power to interact with all forms of magic in my vicinity. It sounded rather grand, though the only use I had managed to find for it so far was that it allowed me to use Mind Magic to scramble the communication of the Withered. Given that doing so caused a massive, and massively hostile, response from the Withered, I hadn¡¯t experimented with it. Just the one time had been enough, the sensation of feeling hundreds, maybe thousands, of psychic signatures all coming for me was not one I enjoyed.


    But the constant killing hadn¡¯t just improved my level, my other skills had gained as well, especially now that I had the Zevarra Agha at my disposal, something I could study during my downtime. Sure, casting spells directly from it didn¡¯t improve my skills, but studying those spells, experimenting with the concepts involved and trying to cast them without the book? That certainly improved my abilities.


    And the improvement showed, my skills went up across the board. What I considered my Core Skills, Ice, Blood and Darkness Magic and their respective Runic Masteries all went up by a point or three, mostly thanks to repeated usage. Experimenting with them was fun but I focused on the other skills. Ice Magic reached level thirty-three, Darkness Magic reached level thirty-one and Blood Magic got to level twenty-seven. Similarly, Ice Rune Mastery got to level thirty-two, Blood Rune Mastery to twenty-eight while Darkness Rune Mastery reached level thirty-one and I managed to learn the Curse-Rune, allowing me to weave my magic into lasting maledictions that I could set on my foes. An interesting concept, with a wide variety of use. Not only could I use it to harm my foes, I could also use the concept to dispel curses from others. The curious part was that I could stretch the meaning of a Curse quite a bit, to the point that it affected a large swathe of magical effects. Sure, the efficiency went down the further I stretched things, but that only meant I needed more power to achieve an effect, not that I couldn¡¯t do something.


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    My more obscure magical skills also benefited especially my Mind Magic. Despite being very careful not to focus on the offensive potential of the skill, just being within the area of influence of a whole host of psychic creatures, the skill had gone up by a lot, a whole six points, reaching level thirty-three. Astral Meditation didn¡¯t benefit as much, I continued to delve into the Astral but it only went up to level thirty-one. Maybe I had been reading a little too much, though, given the advances in other skills, I wouldn¡¯t complain.


    Sadly, Death Magic was not one of those skills. It remained stubborn and difficult to use, trying to channel it continued to hurt. Despite my wish to learn it, I only managed to gain a single skill point, bringing it to level nine. By this point, I decided to focus on other things, simply because it didn¡¯t feel like Death Magic was worth it. Sure, it was an incredibly powerful skill but only if one could wield it. As it was, I would most likely kill myself before I managed to master it. Maybe that would change at some point, but for now, I had better things to spend my efforts on.


    Namely, the other elements, their runic masteries and what I could do to combine them. Water Magic reached level thirteen, and its Runic Mastery got to level fourteen, possibly thanks to my attempts to recreate the Water Mirror I had based my original shadow scrying on. Sadly, I hadn¡¯t managed but it was a work in progress.


    Wind Magic got a bigger boost, reaching level fifteen, its Runic Mastery level eleven, allowing me to learn a new rune. Namely, the Sound Rune, an interesting, and weirdly fitting, one as I had primarily used Wind Magic to help with my concealment. Scent and Sound, both could be considered elements of the Wind.


    However, as much use as I got out of Wind Magic during our nightly battles, Fire and Earth Magic hadn¡¯t advanced far enough to make me use them in battle. Thus, they were relegated to experimentation, though even that showed interesting progress. Earth Magic was bumped up to level nine, its Runic Mastery advanced to level seven, which I considered good progress. My Fire Magic achieved a similar growth, despite my discomfort with the element. It got to level seven, too, while the Runic Mastery reached level five.


    But ultimately, the biggest advance wasn¡¯t in my already established skills but in my attempts to gain new ones. First, I managed to recreate the phenomenon of Wind Magic striking sparks with itself by introducing Fire Magic into the mix. I shocked myself a few times, mostly when the conjured lightning grounded itself randomly, but I managed to gain the Lightning Magic skill, not that I had managed to do a lot with it. Maybe if I combined it with Water Magic, to give it a medium to travel through, or if I could use Wind Magic to create a guiding tunnel or something along those lines. For now, it wasn¡¯t useful but I would get there. Eventually.


    The second new skill was a slightly unexpected one, gained by experimenting with Earth, Fire and Ice Magic, each bringing its own part to the table. Using Earth as the base, Fire to refine and Ice to give it structure, I managed to gain the Crystal Magic skill. It might be somewhat derivative of Ice Magic, or maybe Ice Magic was partially contained with Crystal Magic, but there were some similarities between the skills. Not enough to allow for a direct transference of ability from one to the other but enough to give me a bit of innate understanding of Crystal Magic. Curiously, it seemed that metals were considered Crystals in this paradigm, though controlling them was difficult, let alone conjuring or changing them. Metals generally weren¡¯t malleable, even when magic was introduced. Or maybe especially when magic was introduced.


    I had been trying to turn the blades I had taken from my home, right after the change, into something useful but so far, I hadn¡¯t really succeeded. I could control them with my magic, but it was sluggish, a far cry from the nimble grace I could achieve when wielding my Frozen Shuttle with my Ice Magic. But it was progress, opening up avenues I hadn¡¯t considered before. Lots of avenues, given just how important metal and metal products were, to say nothing about the potential esoteric uses of crystals. But that was something I had to explore at a later date, for now, Lia and I wanted to head deeper into Racoon City.

 Chapter 793

    The beginning of the night was as they all had been, those last two weeks. We moved across the empty zone between the Shattered territories and Racoon City before going deeper into the Withered¡¯s territory. We had to be cautious, stealthy and quiet on our way, making sure we were avoiding the Skulkers and Husks that populated the outskirts of Racoon City, otherwise, we would see ourselves in a battle we couldn¡¯t win. If that happened, our best chance would be to flee as quickly as possible, as we had in the various fights we had been in recently. There simply were too many Withered Hunters, and even Withered Skulkers and Husks could be dangerous if they came at us in large groups. My group was individually powerful, even Alex had found a rather interesting niche in combat, but there were only four of us.


    And what a surprise Alex had turned out to be. They had really come into their own during those recent days of combat, constantly improving their tricks and increasing their arsenal. At first, it had only been cans of flammable substances, relying on me to ignite them, and a simple sling made from some cloth, allowing them to launch rocks and other small projectiles at our enemies. Nothing truly impactful, but those rocks, in addition to the occasional psychic blast they could send out was enough to get started.


    And getting started, they did. They still had their cloth-sling but, with some assistance from Lia, they had managed to create a slingshot, adding quite a bit of impact to their attacks. In addition, Lia had asked me if I knew how to make an actual crossbow, something that would hopefully allow Alex to compensate for their lack of upper body strength, and lack of overall mass. Sadly, I only knew the very basics of that, forcing us to put that idea on hold. But I had been able to work with Alex to make a few rather interesting, and incredibly nasty, concoctions from simple, household chemicals. Things that would give enemies nasty, chemical burns, or allow me to light them on fire with nary a thought. While the homemade napalm was far from the real stuff, it was more than enough to burn.


    Sure, we had some small accidents, chemicals weren¡¯t quite as stable as they used to be before the change, but thanks to my magical perception and instincts, I was able to detect trouble before it could occur, allowing us to dodge the worst explosions.


    I also managed to get the Alchemy skill for myself and even levelled it to three. Mostly by blowing things up, but I didn¡¯t mind too much. Sure, I really wanted to make some healing potions or general medical supplies, but if explosives were what I was good at, eh, I could work with that.


    Or rather, have Alex work with that, while I kept using my magic to interfere with our enemies. Alchemy was useful, but for me, it was merely a secondary skill. I was a Sorceress, exploring the elemental section of the Arcane Path in all its glory.


    Though the improvements Alex made weren¡¯t limited to fighting. Maybe the biggest improvement of all came from an idea of Lia, namely an attempt to help Alex speak, or rather communicate. Her idea was, if Alex was capable of understanding the spoken word and had demonstrated enough intellectual capacity to use tools, why not try teaching them sign language? If people unable to hear could learn it, or people who had lost their voice for some reason, was there a reason a racoon would be unable to learn?


    We had to raid a bookstore for a primer, to which we added a couple more books, either for future reference or for good, old entertainment, but with the book in hand, Lia and Alex made swift progress. Not yet to the point of fluency but it was good enough that Alex could make themself understood, not that I was able to keep up with their progress, simply because I didn¡¯t invest enough time. Sadly, their work-around didn¡¯t help Silva with her inability to speak, her paws weren¡¯t quite nimble enough to sign. Maybe at some point it would work, but for now, she was limited to growls and barks. Which she used to make herself understood, without too many issues.


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    Generally, the idea to learn sign language and agree on a set of simple, obvious signals that we could easily see even in the dark, or while distracted by other things, was a good one. So far, we had used some simple pantomime in situations where speaking would be dangerous, but those could only convey so much. Holding up a hand, palm towards another, sure, that likely meant stop. Pointing at something to direct attention, also obvious. But a signal to prepare a specific type of ambush, or one to create concealment magic or other less intuitive things that came up often enough during our nightly excursions? Those we had to imagine and agree upon ourselves.


    For the first time since my original intrusion into the area, we reached the part of Racoon City where there were almost no normal Undead, just Withered Husks, with a few Skulkers thrown in for good measure. Our goal for the night was to penetrate as deeply into Racoon City as we could, trying to gather information before we retreated back out.


    Sadly, as we moved into the area I had been in before, I immediately noticed a shift in the psychic noise all around us. A part of the shift was just like it had been the last time, something I was confident was merely part of our location, like stepping out of a loud area and into a quieter one. The noise shifted but it didn¡¯t mean that one was discovered upon stepping into the quiet area. But the other part of the shifted noise, that felt more urgent to me. I couldn¡¯t understand it, but from the many times I had heard the Withered¡¯s psychic communication, I was relatively certain that something had just gone on alert. Maybe they had noticed us, maybe it was something else, the didn¡¯t really matter, what mattered was that we were in danger. Looking over to the others, I saw Alex make the agreed-upon signal for danger, though not for a specific danger. Just, danger, meaning they didn¡¯t really know what was going on either.


    And it didn¡¯t really matter where the danger came from, just that it was there and we needed to get away. Gesturing to the others, I made the signal to evacuate. Immediately, Alex tossed out a few small canisters after priming them, causing the reaction within to start. It would take a bit of time, somewhere between a minute and five minutes, for them to go off but that was just what we wanted. Once they went off, they would cause noise and release an incredibly noxious odour, hopefully distracting any Withered that were sniffing around for us.


    The canisters hadn¡¯t quite landed when we already turned around, our movement just as coordinated as it had been, only now, we were trying to get as much speed as possible while maintaining concealment.


    Tension ratcheted up in my body, though even as we moved, I tried to stretch my perception as far into the area we were moving away from as I could. There was something out there, it felt as if it was just at the cusp of my awareness but I wasn¡¯t able to grasp it. Maybe that was for the best, grasping the influence of an entity able to create and control this many servants might be detrimental to my health, mental or otherwise. Or maybe I was imagining things, but I didn¡¯t think so.


    The Withered, of all flavours, moved too coordinated to be individuals, at least that was what Lia and I were agreeing on. When fighting them, unless they were surprised, magically bound or stunned, they demonstrated a preternatural awareness of their brethren, their coordination almost at the level that Sigmir and I had achieved before our bond grew deeper. A complete trust in one another, combined with a sense of where the other was and what they were doing. They were better coordinated than any wolfpack I had seen on Mundus and just as coordinated as a swarm of Ankhegs, a species considered to be a hivemind.


    Whatever the case, we needed to get out of Racoon City before things went completely pear-shaped, I could already feel multiple psychic signatures moving in our general direction, though I couldn¡¯t feel any that seemed to come directly for us.


    Still, if we got caught here, we¡¯d be in serious trouble, this deep in their territory even I would be pressed to escape, let alone make sure all four of us could escape.


    And so, we moved, our flight mirroring my own retreat from this area two weeks prior.

 Chapter 794

    Our sneaky escape didn¡¯t get us as far as I had hoped, but further than I feared it would. Somewhere halfway to the boundary of Racoon City, roughly in the area we usually used for our attacks on the Withered, we, quite literally, stumbled upon a Withered Skulker. This one, in contrast to the majority we had seen of them, used to be a Rat before it became a Skulker, making it small enough that Lia reflexively punted it aside as it came scurrying out of a storm drain. Sadly, while it got knocked around and took some damage, it wasn¡¯t killed by her kick. Even before it landed, I could feel its psychic squeals calling out for all its brethren, drawing their attention to our location.


    Normally, that was the moment where we killed the Skulker and prepared an ambush to put down a few Hunters but with the number of enemies I could already feel heading towards us, that seemed to be a rather reckless idea. It was one thing to challenge half a dozen Hunters and a completely different beast to tackle two dozen of them. Not just due to the sheer weight of their numbers but because each individual hunter added to a greater whole. Their abilities as a group far outstripped the sum of the individuals.


    We had managed to invent a few tricks that allowed us to take groups of them, regardless of their nearly seamless coordination, but that didn¡¯t mean we could do so with groups of any size. Surprise was the major factor, reducing their number by either crippling or killing them before they had time to organise, and so was the idea to use their bond against them. Striking with Mind Magic, or inflicting horrifying pain on individuals in the group could briefly interrupt their coordination, thus giving us openings where there would be none. But in a larger group, those tricks greatly diminished in value, the larger group had more individuals to withstand the pain, and even if we managed to take out four out of twenty-four in our initial attack, there were still more than enough left to destroy us.


    So, fighting was effectively impossible.


    Thus, we ran.


    Once again, I felt my mind flash back to that last, desperate struggle with Sigmir at my side. How we had been running through the forest, repeatedly getting cut off and engaged by the elves, herded until we were trapped. In response, I felt my magic flare up, my entire being was enraged at the prospect of history repeating itself, at the idea that my path would be cut short here.


    For a second, I considered who I could sacrifice. Would sending one or more of my companions off to die mean I could save my skin? Could I send my daughter off to get torn apart by the Hunters? Or would I be able to sacrifice Silva, the dear, loyal friend who had stood with me in the beginning, saved my life more than once and made sure that I didn¡¯t spiral into complete insanity in the wake of the change? Or maybe Alex, the newest member of our group, physically even weaker than me, but there was an interesting mind lingering beneath the fur. Could I sacrifice them, in order to save myself? And would Lia even let me sacrifice them, at the end of the day, they were far more her companion than they were mine. Just like Silva had a much stronger bond with me.


    Shaking my head, I banished the idea. Together, we could stand, divided we would fall. We needed to work together to escape, as companions. As family. There was still a path for us to escape, the Hunters were primarily behind us, and only a few Husks and Skulkers were ahead. We could get past those, if only we stuck together and kept going. And even if we didn¡¯t, as a traitorous voice in the back of my head remarked, even if we didn¡¯t make it together, I could always escape into the shadows.


    ¡°Faster!¡± I commanded, my mind pushing some Astral Power into my Blood Magic, forcing my body to perform beyond what its physical attributes normally could provide. I would pay for pushing myself, but the pain was a cheap price to pay if it meant we could escape.


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    Lia and Silva luckily didn¡¯t need magic to perform at this level, their physical attributes were up to the task, but Silva wasn¡¯t content to let things slide. She must have realised how dangerous our situation was getting and let out a growl that morphed into a howl, shattering the silence around us. I could feel the sound, feel the power wash over and through me. Only, it wasn¡¯t Silva¡¯s power, it was another¡¯s power. Divine Power, Hecate¡¯s Power, pure and potent in its purpose. Unable to stop myself, I stretched out my own power, trying to feel and understand what miracle Silva had called upon, only to feel a wry feeling of amusement flash through me. As if a teacher was looking at a curious student who tried to figure out something far beyond their ability.


    But I didn¡¯t let the sensation stop me, instead, I doubled my efforts, even as I felt my own performance increase. Titanic Ambition, the ambition to never let myself be stopped from searching for knowledge. Even in the middle of a deadly chase, I would spare some effort to learn.


    And in this case, I could feel the effect, now even clearer than before. How it worked was far beyond me, but I could get a glimpse of what it did and with that glimpse, my mind was off to the races. At least the part that wasn¡¯t focused on running away. Luckily, I didn¡¯t need my magic to increase my pace, not while I was trying to figure out the divine magic, which was a somewhat amusing interaction. Who could say that letting part of one¡¯s mind drift through primarily theoretical thoughts about divine magic in the middle of a deadly chase was a good idea? I could, simply because my drifting, pondering mind was engaged in the pursuit of knowledge, and my secondary thought-stream was enough to keep my body running.


    I didn¡¯t even need my secondary thought-stream to figure out our path, a realisation I made when we reached an intersection. The magic Silva had called upon shifted and for a moment, I could almost see the different paths before us, how our journey on them would continue. It wasn¡¯t scrying magic, at least it didn¡¯t feel like it, it wasn¡¯t showing me what the conditions were now, it felt less distinct, somewhat vague. Maybe how the conditions could, or would, be by the time we got there. Divining the future, something I had read about on Mundus. Maybe the hardest magic to learn, unless one had a talent for it, a talent that was almost always combined with a curse just as powerful as the talent. Truly mastering it, conquering the curse, was considered impossible, a feat only spoken about in legends of the past, and only with Divine Intervention.


    In this case, it felt like the divination was context-bound to Hecate¡¯s domain of the crossroads, allowing us to find the safest, or maybe fastest, path out of danger. The moment the thought coalesced in my mind, the strange, amused sensation from earlier returned, almost making me stumble when it morphed into the closest thing to a mental head-pat I could imagine. Maybe the stress was getting to me and I was starting to turn insane because the alternative was that I had just received the equivalent of a gold star, or maybe a silver moon would be more appropriate, from the Goddess of Magic.


    Barely managing to stifle a rather inappropriate giggle, I forced my mind back onto the task at hand, namely, running away. I had learned something and I even put a small part of my attention to the task of figuring out how the magic affecting us actually worked, but it was of lesser importance. Figuring out how to divine the future wasn¡¯t something I could do on the fly, or rather on the run, even if it was fascinating.


    Instead, I moved in behind Silva, who had pulled ahead, driven by her magic. Another growl, and she was enveloped in a dim glow, almost like the gentle light of the full moon, the light shielding her body. A shield she desperately needed, as she didn¡¯t even try to go around the small groups of Undead and Withered ahead, instead she simply broke through.


    Watching her move, I started to wonder. Why did she rarely use her magic like this? Surely it would allow us to fight far more efficiently, wouldn¡¯t it? Unless the magic was only as potent as it was because she rarely used it.


    Maybe that was the case, that the Gods themselves would get annoyed and only do the bare minimum if the divine caster asked for help too often. Somehow, the image of an annoyed teacher on their fifth cup of coffee sprung to mind, an annoyed teacher who just couldn¡¯t be bothered to deal with some snot-nosed kid.


    I might have imagined the pearls of laughter echoing through my mind at the thought but I wasn¡¯t sure I had.

 Chapter 795

    By the time we managed to get out of Racoon City, I was thoroughly annoyed. The whole night was practically wasted, we came, saw and had to run away because our enemies would have crushed us, far from the Cesarean ideal. There was no conquering to be done, as much as I would have loved to conjure up a massive snowstorm and bury the Withered under mountains of ice.


    But the night¡¯s failure left me a little lost, we needed information on what was going on in the centre of Racoon City but trying to go there as a group was impossible. Going there alone might work, but I wasn¡¯t quite willing to risk it, not after the danger I had landed myself in last time. This left me with one option I had to explore, something I had done multiple times on Mundus. Namely, scrying.


    The problem was, I couldn¡¯t just use the same method as I had used on Mundus, even if I had the entirety of my magical abilities back to their original levels, it wouldn¡¯t work. My old method had greatly relied on Lenore, on her innate experience as an Avian, to provide the magical construct I created with their shape and abilities. Those constructs used to be, at their core, copies of her body, her physique and abilities, which we used to gather information. If I tried to use that method, I would likely just get somewhat mishappen humanoid shapes, little more than stick figures, able to walk and look around but certainly not able to fly. And flying was what made the scrying constructs so useful, their ability to avoid trouble on the ground by venturing through the sky.


    There were few enemies that constantly checked the sky, only those who were regularly attacked by flying enemies had those instincts. Given the lack of avians since the change, I wouldn¡¯t bet on the Withered ever checking more than the rooftops.


    But even if they did, there were ways to insulate the person scrying on them from any magical backlash they might experience from their scrying construct¡¯s destruction. At that point, it essentially became an arms race between the person doing the destroying and the person creating the safeguards, both trying to overcome whatever the other might throw at them. Caution was always needed because the original ways I had used would leave me vulnerable to attacks I didn¡¯t want to consider. If my mind was out there, directly linked to a scrying construct, it lacked the usual defences it had thanks to my physical body. Getting attacked in that state could easily latch onto that connection and if that happened, I¡¯d be in serious trouble.


    Which I really didn¡¯t want.


    For the rest of the night, and until I went to sleep some time in the morning, I was once more reading through the Zevarra Agha, looking at the Water Mirror spell I had originally used as inspiration for my own scrying spell, remembering my thought processes and considering how I could adapt them for my current situation. The easiest would be to use my memories of flying with Lenore and the times she had shared her memories with me to build my constructs. I wasn¡¯t sure if I could get them to work and behave as I wanted, but if I added some extra magic, I should get something serviceable, even if it wasn¡¯t perfect or the most efficient.


    Another option was quite a bit more interesting. Namely, I was relatively certain I could use the Nevermore¡¯s Feather she had sent me as a focus to reach her as if I was praying. Maybe not with anything resembling clarity, but I might be able to use it in order to conjure up a small part of here, a mere figment of her existence and abilities if I used the Feather. Nothing permanent but that would, hopefully, mean my magic wouldn¡¯t consume the feather.


    Which was the biggest hindrance to the idea, I wanted to keep the feather for a far greater project than some scrying, I wouldn¡¯t even use it to create a permanent scrying construct. At this point, using it in a manner that consumed it would be an utter waste, simply because I lacked the power to make anything truly great with it. So, for now, I was incredibly hesitant to use it, even if the idea was quite fascinating,


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    Partially because I wanted to commune with Lenore, even if I doubted I could truly contact her with my current power and partially because it was the closest to Divine Magic I could imagine myself coming. Trying to commune with a true, established Divinity, even after the faint contact with the power behind Lenore¡¯s miracles that had felt both quite amusing and incredibly disturbing, wasn¡¯t something I could imagine myself doing. The idea to send your Astral Power, your literal thoughts and prayers, as hilarious as that made the old wishes for thoughts and prayers, out there was disturbing. To let an entity you didn¡¯t trust into your mind, just opening up to the Grandmother to talk to her within the Astral had been a bit of a challenge and there, it had merely been an exchange between our minds clad in shells of Astral Power. I had a feeling that, to truly commune with the Divine, I would have to let them into my soul. That idea itself was enough to stop me from entertaining a communion with any extraplanar entity save Lenore, though if Sigmir was still alive I would certainly consider her. Mainly because the idea of worshipping my beloved brought a grin to my face.


    The third method I could envision to gather information was one I was confident in, at least theoretically, but I wasn¡¯t sure about its practical viability. Back on Mundus, I had managed to project my mind into the Astral River and traverse the streams of power, using the nearly omnipresent web of magic to traverse the realm. While the strands weren¡¯t always obvious, they were always there and while I wasn¡¯t sure I could venture into the thinnest of strands, I was curious to try. I felt it was somewhat like the circulatory system of one¡¯s body, only that the body was the entire world. There were locations in the body where major arteries were close to the surface, but even without those obvious spots, regardless of where you poked a hole into the flesh of one¡¯s body, there would be a bit of blood welling up. Similarly, regardless of where one was on the ¡®flesh¡¯ of the World, the Astral River and the power it carried was never far.


    But the problem with that idea was that the Astral River had yet to settle down. It had gotten a lot better from the raging flood that carved through the foundation of Reality right after the change but only in the sense that it had gone from the equivalent of a tidal wave to the equivalent of a waterfall, constantly cascading down. Trying to swim in either was a foolish venture that could easily see you swept away, a fate I wasn¡¯t quite willing to tempt.


    Each of the methods I could come up with had its own flaws, its own demerits and its own price that needed to be paid. I wasn¡¯t sure which I wanted to use, but I knew that I wanted, or maybe needed, to do something, that knowing what was going on with the Withered was crucial. Not only that, it also irked me that I couldn¡¯t just find out, that I was thwarted.


    Maybe I had become a little too used to being the baddest bitch in town, knowing that, other than the Sun, nothing could stand up to me. Slaughtering hundreds of mindless Undead had certainly helped to confirm that idea, as did the fearful awe with which the Survivors at Apple Gate Farm treated me. But now, I was faced with an enemy I couldn¡¯t defeat easily, maybe not at all. An enemy that had the numbers to oppose me, but also the ability to wield those numbers.


    From deep within my soul, annoyance started to well up. Suspecting that the enemies we had killed those last two weeks were basically fodder, a distraction from whatever controlled the Withered to keep us from getting too nosy, grated on me. I felt cheated, played in the worst kind of ways. I wanted to punish the entity behind the Withered, to show them that I wasn¡¯t to be trifled with, that I wouldn¡¯t allow myself to be dismissed like some toddler who was thrown a few toys to play with.


    Only, I had no idea how I could actually accomplish that. I needed information, I needed to find a weak point in the Withered, so I could slaughter them all. They had defied me, and I would not brook that defiance.


    I was the Queen of Ice and I would not be denied. Winter was coming!

 Chapter 796

    Once again, I was standing on the roof of a building in the middle of the night. There was a bit of drizzling rain, just enough to make the idea of venturing out into Racoon City an unpleasant one, even if I wasn¡¯t trying to figure out a way to gather information on the Withered without endangering my group.


    However, where the rain was unpleasant to be out physically, it had one major advantage magically. The air was completely saturated with water, both from ambient moisture and on a magical level, there was water everywhere. That meant I didn¡¯t need to be creative or smart, I merely needed to use that original Water Mirror spell I had read in my grimoire and eventually reworked into the pool of darkness I could use to scry and its final form, the scrying constructs in the form of Shadow Ravens. Now, with the amount of water in the air, I didn¡¯t need all that reworking, I could just use the original spell and project it through the air. At least I hoped that I could, I had yet to actually use the spell for more than the simple experimentation needed to understand its basics.


    There was a grin on my face when I used a combination of Water and Ice Magic to manipulate the falling rain so it would freeze in the shape I desired, forming a simple shelter to keep the Zevarra Agha dry while I worked. I wasn¡¯t sure how the book would react to water, a part of me was confident that it could just shrug off such mundane influences, but I wasn¡¯t about to try. The book was priceless and I wasn¡¯t about to take a risk here.


    Lia stepped up next to me when I took shelter under the roof I had conjured, only she looked a little confused.


    ¡°Impressive, but why?¡± she asked, clearly unsure why we needed shelter after we had been walking through the rain long enough to get annoyingly wet.


    ¡°I need to work a bit of magic from my book, no need to get it wet. But you¡¯re right, I should make sure we¡¯re dry while I work,¡± I waved a hand, incredibly happy that I had mastered Water Magic to the point that I could draw the moisture from our clothes, bodies and hair with nothing but that. A small bonus to that was the effect my drying had on Silva, she turned from a drenched, pitiful-looking doggo into something that resembled a bottlebrush, her fur poofed out to the maximum. The sheer look of canine frustration on her face was utterly adorable, to the point that I was tempted to poof her up for my own amusement. I doubted I would, tormenting my dear canine companion felt like poor sport, but the temptation was there. And it wasn¡¯t just there, It was easily doubled by the hunch that Hecate would find it just as amusing as I did, but I wasn¡¯t certain. The faint sensations I had picked up while trying to dissect the miracle Silva had created gave me some insight but I had no idea just how accurate that insight was.


    Though, regardless of the sensations, I was quite certain that trying to psychoanalyse a Diety by looking at the magic of their followers was a fool¡¯s errand. The magic was, to my understanding, based on what the followers saw the deity as, though I had no idea how that worked with different worlds worshipping the same deity. Would the worship of Hecate, or any deity, here on Terra be encouraged to form in the same lines as the church worshipping that deity on Mundus, or on any other worlds that worshipped that deity?


    It was a fascinating question, how much were the followers controlled by the deity, how much was the deity formed by the belief of their followers? Before the change, Churches and the faith they espoused, even when continually worshipping the same deity, had been in flux, slowly but constantly shifting to accommodate society, often twisting the words in their Holy Scripture to fit the reality they were worshipped in. The old scriptures couldn¡¯t change, before the change, there had been no deities intervening with the world as it used to be. At least none that were worshipped, Pantheon Entertainment and Road to Purgatory certainly counted as an intervention in my book, but the only way they had been worshipped was as some sort of technological miracle. If only we had known back then what we knew now. Well, no, nothing would have truly changed, not really. Even with a warning, people would have died, maybe fewer people, but who was to say how much Pantheon Entertainment had actually known? Almost certainly the date, maybe even the concrete time of the change hitting Terra but I lacked the information to make the deliberations. Nor did I know what truly motivated the deities, what limitations they were working under or anything beyond the knowledge of their existence.


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    Pushing away my drifting thoughts, I froze some more water, forming it into somewhat comfortable chairs for us. Sadly, I currently lacked the skill to recreate the comfortable pillow of fine diamond dust I had generally used on Mundus but that would come with time. For now, these were the best I could do, so I offered one to Lia.


    Once we were comfortable, I briefly closed my eyes, immersing myself in the Astral River to rapidly recover the Astral Power I had just used, before shifting my focus outward. A part of my mind remained in the Astral River, boosting my recovery and thus the amount of Astral Power I could use, but my focus was on the world around me.


    The next moment, the Zevarra Agha was suddenly in my hand, as if it had been there all along. it was a rather amusing trick one that I had taken the time to master so I could perform it smoothly, even if it wasn¡¯t really magic. The book was bound to my soul, less a physical object and more the magical representation of one, making me incredibly curious how that worked, how to create something similar. There were so many ways this could be useful, though sadly, I didn¡¯t even know where to start. Maybe I¡¯d be able to analyse the book in the future, but for now, it completely eluded me.


    But I could read from it, could use it to cast the spells written within, even if I normally couldn¡¯t. Reading the chant aloud, while slowly filling the dense runic formation on the page with my own Astral Power, I could feel the spell take effect. It was far easier to understand what was going on, I could even realise that the spell was a five-rune spell, with many connecting patterns linking the runes into an almost artistic-looking drawing while obscuring what exactly was part of a Rune and what was a connecting pattern. It was a fascinating way to hide the details of the spell while increasing its efficiency. Though, maybe the patterns weren¡¯t really there to obfuscate but to make it so even somebody without the affinity or ridiculous levels of Astral Power could cast the spell.


    Whatever the case, it was almost trivial to cast the spell, I couldn¡¯t completely understand what it was doing, but I was able to feel how it formed and could easily direct where I wanted the two parts to form.


    Again, I used the ambient water, forming the rain into a vertical screen hanging before Lia and me and moments later, the clear water that had been falling from the sky minutes earlier was suddenly no longer clear but reflecting from distant water. Distant rain, in this case, rain that was continually falling almost three kilometres away. It wasn¡¯t easy to hold the spell, but I had been there before, so I had been able to form the location in my mind without trouble.


    Grinning, I began shifting the view, enjoying the fact that there was water everywhere. Each drop of rain worked, one drop of water was like the other and all water was part of the same cycle. Magically, it was a fascinating concept, one that I wanted to study deeply at some point, but for now, I merely rejoiced in my ability to gather information.


    Sure, I was unable to use abilities through the mirror, but maybe that was for the best. The lack of a direct link between me and the construct was both an advantage and a hindrance. I couldn¡¯t Observe but I also couldn¡¯t be Observe¡¯d, couldn¡¯t attack but also couldn¡¯t be attacked.


    Looking at the Withered Husks I could see moving in the rain, with a few Withered Hunters lurking in the shadows, I was quite happy that they couldn¡¯t hit me. But I wasn¡¯t doing this to see those, I wanted to go deeper. To see what had been denied from me before, so instead of studying the enemies I could see, I focused on a rooftop I could see through the mirror, focused on the water falling from the sky over there.


    Focused, and shifted the spell, the reflection in the water blurring for a moment, until the spell showed us something new. And just as it showed us the new image, the spell exploded in a violent splash of water.

 Chapter 797

    For a moment, Lia and I were just sitting there drenched in the water from the exploded Water Mirror Spell, neither of us quite knowing what to think, do or say. The explosion had been incredibly violent, making me rather glad that I hadn¡¯t tried to use a more direct method to scry, like projecting my mind or traversing the Astral River to get a better look. If I had, and whatever had destroyed my spellwork had hit me, I would be in serious trouble. Or maybe I¡¯d be just dead if the spell had been a psychic equivalent to the Mind Magic attacks I occasionally used, it could easily damage my mind, the spiritual substance, or even feed back into my brain and fry that. I had done so myself, so I knew just how dangerous Mind Magic could be.


    ¡°What have you seen before the mirror exploded?¡± I asked Lia, my eyes already closed to focus on the image I had seen only so very briefly.


    ¡°Dunno, there were some weird shapes, those glowy things. They kinda looked like an Umbrella, didn¡¯t they?¡± Lia asked, sounding rather musing, as if she was trying to make sense of the surreal scene we had observed.


    ¡°Yeah, I think those were mushrooms of some kind but I¡¯m not sure. The glow might have been magical activity, or something entirely different. But did you see that one tree? I think it was moving around, not being tethered to the ground,¡± I told her, focusing on the parts of the weird image that might give me deeper insight into the Withered.


    There had been the expected parts, the damaged city, the ruined buildings, even the Withered Husks, Hunters and the odd Withered Skulker had been expected. But what I hadn¡¯t expected were giant, strange-looking mushrooms with glowing caps, mushrooms the size of a small tree, if I judged their size against one of the Withered Husks next to them. Neither had I expected a tree that was purposely moving, similar to the moving trees I had observed on Mundus, before Adra had drained that one big tree.


    Bringing that image back to the forefront of my mind, I realised that what I had briefly seen was part of a park. Not a huge one, at least if I recalled things from before the change correctly, but a nicely sized one, one where people could just relax around a small lake. A bit of greenery in the middle of the city, with some fitness equipment, a playground, the usual things people wanted to have in a park. Only now, that park seemed to be the centre of Racoon City, it had even spawned umbrella-shaped mushrooms. A part of me was amused at the irony, had been since I started calling the area infected by weird pseudo-Undead Racoon City, only now, with those mushrooms, I started to wonder if there was some higher power laughing at me, or at humanity. Maybe even at all sapient life, there were some strangely coincidental names on Mundus, too, things that I had thought were easter eggs by the developers, but how did that work without developers? I doubted that the Gods themselves had been so bored to purposely arrange things on Mundus for Travellers to run into, certainly not for mere jokes. Though maybe they did, there were Gods of Mischief after all, so I couldn¡¯t confidently say that no God would ever make some effort for a prank.


    ¡°Gah,¡± I let out a grumble of annoyance, this was one of those things that might never make sense. It might just be part of reality, or it might be some sort of mixture, partially spawned by my own mind and its constant search for patterns, as if I was seeing shapes in the cloud, only not with clouds but with names and connections.


    ¡°Mother, are you alright?¡± Lia asked, looking at me with concern at my outburst.


    ¡°Yes, just annoyed that the world sometimes makes no sense. Or rather, that it makes sense in ways it really shouldn¡¯t,¡± I shook my head, briefly focusing on my magic to get rid of the water we had been soaked in.


    ¡°What do you think? Should we continue fighting the Withered as we have, trying to get into that park we have just seen or should we try something else? The EXP we get here are good, but I¡¯m worried that the Withered profit from the constant fighting themselves. They might have a hivemind developed enough to spread the knowledge, the experience of fighting us, to others who have yet to face us. They might use us, just as we use them,¡± I looked at Lia, seeking her opinion. I simply wasn¡¯t sure, there was not enough information for me to make an informed decision and making decisions based on my gut feeling was always difficult for me. In the spur of the moment, sure, I could act on instinct but in a situation that I could think about? I would always second-guess myself, changing my opinion countless times until I either got more information or was forced into action by outside circumstances.


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    ¡°We are getting stronger, of that I¡¯m certain. Why don¡¯t we just keep doing that and if we ever realise that we can¡¯t fight the Withered any longer, we leave? It¡¯s not like they would swallow the world, would they? If they are bound to that park, we certainly are not bound to this area, even if it¡¯s the one we know. We can just go somewhere else if the worst thing happens,¡± Lia suggested and I nodded, considering her opinion.


    She was right, in a way, we could always leave. I doubted that the Withered were some sort of global phenomenon and if they tried to spread, I was confident that there were ways to defeat them, if I gained enough power. Overwhelming personal power, maybe a Nexus to tap into, with those two things there were few things I wasn¡¯t willing to challenge. Gaining control over a Nexus was something I wanted to do anyway, but sadly, it was a goal for future me. Currently, the Astral River was still too roiled up, too muddled, for me to find where the Nexuses were, maybe they had yet to fully form, so I couldn¡¯t even try to travel there. Obviously, the same went for everyone else, without established Nexuses, gaining control over them was impossible.


    ¡°We¡¯d have to prepare some contingencies,¡± I began, already trying to figure out how to make sure we¡¯d always have a way out, ¡°If we keep fighting the Withered, they¡¯ll most likely manage to trap us at some point. It¡¯s unrealistic to think we¡¯ll always manage to come out ahead, they¡¯ve got to wise up at some point,¡± I explained, getting a nod in response. Thinking that their tactics and patterns would remain static was fine in an actual video game but in reality, it would see us dead.


    ¡°And we should warn the people at Apple Gate Farm. Sure, we told them about the Withered when we visited last week but they should know what we discovered now,¡± I added. Hopefully, the people at Apple Gate Farm would continue to see me as an ally, even if I brought them even more bad news. Shooting the messenger was foolish but sadly, people could be fools.


    ¡°Say, do you think you could simply conjure up that mirror again?¡± Lia asked, gesturing to the area where the Water Mirror had exploded. ¡°It would give us another glance, maybe we¡¯d be able to see more. Or maybe you could get us another angle, so we see something else.¡±


    ¡°I should be able to, yes. At least once I¡¯ve regained my Astral Power, that spell takes quite a bit out of me,¡± I nodded, ¡°We¡¯ll have to see how quickly they can destroy it, the previous time makes me think it was almost reflexively. I¡¯ll have to figure out how far that reflex extends if it was a reflex and not a deliberate action taken after they noticed the initial attempt.¡±


    Thinking about it, Lia was right. There was, at least at the moment, nothing that could stop me from simply trying to get another angle, I had briefly seen the area so I might be able to cast the spell without having to use the area I had been in as an initial focus point. If I managed that, the Withered might fail to immediately notice me, it might give me those precious few seconds. I doubted I would be able to see a lot, but compared to the brief glimpse we had now, it would help, at least I hoped it would. Alternatively, I might be able to establish a focal point above the area, still using the rain as a medium. It was falling but there was always water in the air, similar to how I had used the rain just now. It was an interesting idea and one that had quite a bit of potential. Even a spell that wasn¡¯t really my own had so much to be discovered about it, I could only sigh at the sheer complexity and magnificence of magic. Hopefully, I¡¯d never master it all. How boring would my life be, if there was nothing new to discover? Could that even be called living, or would I merely survive?


    Taking a few minutes to regain my Astral Power and, much more important, put my mind back into a relaxed, balanced state, I used the Water Mirror spell again. More information was always useful when it came to making decisions about an enemy. And right now, I could gain that information without endangering myself.

 Chapter 798

    Two more times, I tried to scry on the park the Withered had overtaken. Both times, I immediately was smacked back, the Water Mirror not even fully forming in the area I wanted to look into. After the second time, I noticed a distinct scent in the air around it, one that made me worry.


    The moment I noticed it, and realised that the mouldy scent wasn¡¯t just carried in the moist air but was something else, something supernatural, I began to focus power into my eyes, to get a better look.


    And what I saw caused my gut to clench in disgust. There, where the Water Mirror had exploded moments before, I could see a faint trace of magic seeping into our reality as if the strike that had shattered the scrying sensor near the park had somehow fed back here, into the Mirror we used to see. And not only fed back to the point of destroying the mirror but fed back to the point that now, there was a bit of backlash reaching for us.


    ¡°Shit,¡± I muttered, already drawing on my magic to get rid of the stuff. I couldn¡¯t be sure what the magic would do, but just the scent and look of it disgusted me. There was Life Magic within it, but there were also traces of decay, rot and disease, all mixed up into a fetid compound that I wanted to have nothing to do with. For a moment, I considered the best ways to get rid of the disgusting mix and I realised that I could only imagine four ways, three of which were out of my reach.


    The most straightforward was Darkness, the all-consuming Void I theorised as one of the most powerful expressions of the element, capable of consuming everything, matter, light, energy, and even space itself. The Void could take it all and make it into nothing, into the ultimate emptiness. Sadly, I could only imagine what this expression of Darkness would look like, I was far from being able to conjure it. So, no black holes to swallow some nastiness for me.


    Both Fire and Light would also work, both could be used to purify by burning. Whether it was sunlight to disinfect, or powerful light in general, or the purifying flame, both concepts were easy to grasp, though I doubted I would be able to conjure up either with sufficient power. My loathing for the elements didn¡¯t help me much there, to say nothing of my lacking affinity.


    And lastly, the only method I could readily summon, was Death. Plan, simple Death, strong enough to overcome the life elements binding the disgusting mixture together, to bring an end to it. It was a simple solution, and with gritted teeth from the discomfort of summoning an element harmful to myself, I conjured up a swath of pale grey, life-sapping power. It seeped from my hands, spreading almost like a mist, as it followed my intent, tearing through the traces of decay that had entered the area.


    I managed to remain standing, even after summoning enough Death Magic to wash away the taint that had tried to reach the two of us, but it was a near thing. Summoning small amounts of Death Magic was one thing, but I had conjured up a lot more than I normally dared to. And it hurt, my joints started to ache, my muscles felt strained and tired, it was a pain unlike any I had felt before.


    But it was only a passing pain, as the magic I had conjured ate away the decay that had travelled through the connection I had established, the pain started to fade, allowing me to relax a little.


    ¡°I can¡¯t try again,¡± I told Lia, ¡°No idea how the Withered manage to do it, but they can easily slap aside the connection. They managed to send something through and I¡¯ve got no idea what it was supposed to do. but I¡¯m confident the answer would be, ¡®Nothing good¡¯. I think I managed to destroy what they sent, but I wouldn¡¯t want to risk that they get better at the process.¡±


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    ¡°Mother, when I changed Alex, there was something pushing back, do you remember? Could it be that the Withered spread like some sort of disease, a virus or something like that, and that something was what they send through?¡± Lia asked, looking down at Alex, still hiding beneath her chair.


    ¡°Maybe not a virus, but a fungus? Or a parasite, maybe spores, that might make sense?¡± I replied, thinking about the weird lattice-like structures in the various Withered brains I had dissected. If it was some sort of infection that established itself in the brain, it might manifest in symptoms like we had seen in the Withered. Before the Change, fungal infections, or at least infections with some sort of parasitic agent, had been a major trope in Zombie fiction, so it might make sense that reality here was trying to imitate fiction. And what a headache that would be, there was so much fiction written about horrible circumstances so people could feel good about their own mediocrity, it would fill countless libraries. If that all was miraculously coming true, reality itself might just spontaneously unravel.


    ¡°Whatever the case, we shouldn¡¯t stick around. And I¡¯ll have to carefully check, so none of us are infected,¡± I shook my head, not liking that idea at all. Sure, I had magic that would hopefully kill any infection, but that only helped on a small scale. Unless I managed to gain enough power to wipe out the source.


    ¡°Let¡¯s go, we¡¯ve got a few more hours,¡± I told Lia. We needed to get to Apple Gate Farm, hopefully, the people there had gathered enough power to be useful against the Withered. Otherwise, things might seriously go south. Or maybe there was a way to contain the Withered, until the people there had enough power or until I managed to push myself far enough so I could wipe them away.


    But the infection had to be contained, or the area would quickly turn out inhabitable. Which the people at the farm needed to know.


    ¡°What are we doing?¡± Lia asked as we moved down the stairs back into the streets. By now, the drizzling rain had turned into a downpour, already drenching our clothes. It was another thing we needed to replace, the clothes we had originally worn were rapidly outliving their usefulness, the mass-produced stuff was barely holding together, regardless of how often we tried to stitch it back together.


    ¡°The Farm,¡± I told her, before elaborating on my plans. Not that I really had any plans, at least none that would work long-term. It was an almost amusing bit of irony, that, for once, I needed other people to be strong, in order to help out with the fight against the Withered. The weight of their numbers could only be stemmed with numbers of our own, or with serious magic, that I couldn¡¯t conjure up yet. At least not unless I sacrificed a bunch of people, which I had as my Plan B. Maybe I should consider making it Plan A, especially if we managed to capture a bunch of Shattered, they had their use in Blood Magic.


    Sure, I didn¡¯t have the reserves to conjure up something akin to the destruction I had rained down on Hatterion in my bid to avenge Olivia and I certainly couldn¡¯t bring the same powers to bear that I had summoned with the help of the Nexus, but did I really need those?


    I really didn¡¯t, did I?


    ¡°Keep an eye out for powerful Shattered,¡± I told Lia, as we moved, making her stumble for a moment. We hadn¡¯t hunted Shattered for weeks, certainly not the powerful variety, not since we realised that there was competition for the mindless Undead between Withered and Shattered. But if I could catch a few powerful Shattered, I would hopefully be able to destroy the Withered once and for all.


    ¡°Let me tell you a bit about ritual magic,¡± I began, ¡°Remember how I managed to heal you? That was a simple ritual, it was essentially only me, slowly pouring out my powers so I could harness more than I normally could. But there are more complex rituals, rituals where the caster not only uses their innate Astral Power but also Astral Power from outside sources. And as you know, I¡¯m quite adept at Blood Magic,¡± I explained, Lia listening with bated breath. It was quite amusing, how interested she looked.


    Somehow, the rain felt far less annoying as we continued on our way. Not now, after I had hopefully broken my Gordian knot. I didn¡¯t need to motivate other people to become strong, I merely needed to make the right sacrifices. But maybe I should give the people at the farm a chance to do the right thing, before I started to conjure up the closest thing to Hel on Earth I could manage.

 Chapter 799

    *¡°It¡¯s a little quiet around here, isn¡¯t it, Mother?¡± Lia asked me, her voice barely above a whisper. Looking around, I realised that she was right. We had been travelling back towards Apple Gate Farm throughout the night and now, we were in the area of town closest to the farm, an area we had fought quite a few times in. It was almost time for us to look for shelter, the slowly advancing summer was shortening the nights more and more, but there was something weird about our surroundings. Or rather, there was a distinct lack of something that made our surroundings weird, namely, there were no enemies to be found. No Withered creeping around, not that I¡¯d have expected any to be in this area, but also no Shattered or even mindless Undead. Just, quiet streets, the silence so pervasive that it gave me shivers.


    ¡°Let¡¯s be cautious, there might be enemies nearby. They might be lurking, just like we are,¡± I whispered back, pulling the shadows even closer around us than normal, to the point that we turned into little more than shadows in the darkness. Without light, nothing would find us.


    Moving onwards, I noticed a strange flicker, light that didn¡¯t belong. Given that the only enemies actively using light were the few Scorched I had come across, we moved even deeper into the darkness, careful that their light couldn¡¯t dispel the shadows we used to hide in. By now, I wasn¡¯t confident that I knew what the Scorched could actually do, whether they had gained some sort of illuminating flames that might drive away the darkness inherent to my concealment, or maybe some other tricks that could uncover us. Getting caught by a sufficiently powerful Scorched could leave us singed, or worse.


    ¡°Over there,¡± Lia quietly warned me, pointing towards one of the buildings. One of the second-story windows was lit from within, the flickering light I had noticed escaping from there. Wondering why a Scorched might lurk in an abandoned, but mostly intact, building, I started to move towards it, gesturing for Lia to follow along.


    If the Withered started to form a strange society, who was to say that the Shattered and Scorched didn¡¯t do something similar, only instead of using what once was a public park, this society might use the ruins of our old world.


    As we closed in on the building, I noticed an open door at ground level, allowing us easy entry into the structure. No need to try climbing up to the window, if we could just use the stairs, like the creatures inside likely had.


    Just before we reached the door, Silva let out a growl, not one of aggression or warning, but a more friendly one. It reminded me of the greetings she exchanged with the other dogs when we came back from our excursions. In addition, her tail was slowly wagging back and forth, without any sign of aggression in sight.


    ¡°Are there people inside, instead of Scorched?¡± I asked Silva, realising that it wasn¡¯t just Scorched who might use fire, but that people could, too. It was quite possible that other survivors had taken shelter here, with the light being used to keep watch or for some other reason. When Silva continued to wag her tail, just speeding up a little, and let out a soft huff of affirmation, I called out, not loud enough to wake people but loud enough to get the attention of any guard who might be sufficiently vigilant.


    ¡°Hail the house!¡± For a few seconds, nothing happened, until I heard some shuffling inside, and moments later, a head appeared in the open window.


    ¡°Who¡¯s there?¡± came a slurred question, the person asking clearly not fully awake. Sloppy, if that was supposed to be a guard. Looking up, I tried to place the person but couldn¡¯t be sure. The backlighting didn¡¯t do my night vision any favours, but I was somewhat convinced that I had seen them before.


    ¡°Just travellers, moving through the night. You lot from the Farm?¡± I asked, trying to figure out how a social situation like this was supposed to go. What were the societal expectations, other than to remain quiet enough so nobody was unnecessarily woken up? Should I just enter, in hopes to get some pertinent information, or would it be better to wait for an invitation?


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    Now, the face was looking down, swivelling around as if looking for something. It took me a second to realise that while I had mostly broken the Wind-Aspect of my customary concealment by calling out, the four of us were still tightly wrapped in Shadows, making it nearly impossible to see us, especially without holding their light source out of the window.


    With nary a thought, I let the concealment fade away and the face snapped into our direction a few moments later, briefly focusing on Silva, then on Lia until it finally stopped on me.


    ¡°You¡¯re that Witch, aren¡¯t you? Morgana, or something like that?¡± the guy asked, sounding a little more awake and just a tad intimidated.


    ¡°Sorceress, if you want to be precise, and the name is Jade Morgana, yes,¡± I let out a soft sigh, ¡°Regardless, I wanted to know if you are from the Farm. Or rather, I¡¯m curious why you lot are camping out here, we planned to get to the farm but it looks like we won¡¯t make it till tomorrow, not with the Sun coming up soon.¡±


    ¡°Come on in, that way we can talk,¡± he invited us after a moment of hesitation. I was curious why he had but wasn¡¯t about to ask. The guy was acting weird and uncertain enough as it was.


    Together, the four of us moved in, just a little appalled at the lack of security these people had set up. There was no trap in sight, no tripwires to alarm those inside of people sneaking in, nothing. It was almost criminally negligent, especially with how easy some of the simpler solutions were, just a few shattered bottles could act as impromptu caltrops, and if one added a hand of change on top of them, it even served as a simple alarm. But no, there was nothing here that would stop a Withered Skulker from moving in on the sleeping people and turning them into Husks.


    To make matters worse, I realised that the single guard wasn¡¯t even set in a way to block the path between the stairs, the logical point of intrusion, and the people sleeping here. Nor were the sleeping people concentrated in one space, they were split up as if they were asking for some nefarious force to take advantage, at least if I judged the snoring sounds correctly. Shaking my head, I made a quick mental note to tell Mrs Wu about this, she¡¯d tan their hides. Or maybe I would demonstrate the consequences of their lax actions at some point, I might be able to put some decently dark nightmares together for them, just so they feel what a mess they made of their security.


    To find the guard we had talked to from outside, we only had to follow the light. It was roughly what I had expected, a simple torch set between a couple of bricks, making it so people could look outside without it completely blinding them but the set-up was far from perfect.


    ¡°You¡¯re in luck, Mark¡¯s got the next watch. I¡¯ll just wake him up and you can talk to him,¡± the guard told me, nodding to himself as if it was the perfect solution. Maybe it was, the guy seemed to have as much of an idea of how to proceed from here as I had, which is to say, none. ¡°Sit down, make yourself comfortable, keep an eye out for zombies, whatever floats your boat. I¡¯ll be waking the boss-man,¡± he added, before simply walking away. This truly was where operational security went to die, or maybe it had died long ago, to the point that these people had never heard of it. Or maybe I was being a little too critical, it wasn¡¯t like a Shattered would calmly walk in here, nor were their eyes easy to miss.


    Whatever the case, about five minutes after the guard, whose name I still didn¡¯t know, left, Mark, the guy who had essentially led the fighting forces of Apple Gate Farm before they joined together with the rest of the survivors came walking in, looking tired.


    ¡°Jade, good morning. Want to tell me what brings you by to our outpost? We¡¯ve managed to push the Undead back quite a bit, to the point that we can actually rest here, without them coming to wake us in the night,¡± he proudly greeted me and I had to give it to them, I hadn¡¯t expected them to manage this much. Granted, I didn¡¯t know enough about the behaviour of the Undead to make a sound judgement, but I had experienced how much effort the Undead put into killing off people.


    ¡°Good Morning Mark,¡± I returned the greeting, ¡°It¡¯s a good thing to see you, though sadly, I¡¯m afraid you won¡¯t share the sentiment. Do you remember what I told the council about the Withered?¡± For a moment, he looked taken aback before nodding, the expression on his face wondering why he likely heard the sound of a falling shoe, somewhere deep in his mind. Well, I sadly had to let the other shoe drop, so it might just be for the best.


    ¡°There¡¯s more¡­¡± I began, before letting myself fall into a description of the trouble we had uncovered.

 Interlude: Reporting 102

    ¡°So, Mark, you¡¯ve been away for a few days, what news do you bring from town? I¡¯ll just assume you guys managed to establish the bridgehead we¡¯ve been talking about or you would have been back days ago,¡± Cassie looks at the returning hero, quite proud of the achievement the fighters gathered around the farm have accomplished. Pushing back the Undead is no small feat, their mindless nature makes it easy for them to simply keep attacking like the waves breaking upon the shores. Only, the fighters aren¡¯t battle-hardened veterans yet, nor do they have the fortifications used on Mundus to combat such a threat. But they are getting there, just managing to regain a small part of town is progress, it is conclusive proof that the Undead are not endless. They can be beaten.


    Sadly, while Cassie¡¯s response to the returning hero is enthusiastic, her fellow councillors already see the unease, the hesitation and apprehension hidden beneath the facade of success. Something has gone wrong, though the lack of visible injuries only makes their worry worse. Injuries, even casualties, can be handled but this? This might be something else.


    ¡°Maybe we should continue this in a quiet environment,¡± Mrs Wu, the eldest of the Council and de-facto leader, suggests, looking at her fellows and the few people who have joined them in welcoming the group of fighters who stayed in town for multiple nights. After a round of nods, the council, with Mark returned to their number, retreat, moving into the space they habitually use as their meeting room. Before the change, it used to be a living space, though sadly, the change caused the various appliances in the room to damage the furniture, leaving it a little dilapidated.


    ¡°Now, what bad news do you bring?¡± Mrs Wu asks once everyone is situated. Cassie looks at the older lady with disbelief before her eyes flicker back to Mark, who looks rather sheepish in response.


    ¡°Noticed that, didn¡¯t you? Hopefully, nobody else did or morale will take another dip,¡± Mark just shakes his head, looking incredibly tired. ¡°Got a visitor last night. Everyone¡¯s favourite Sorceress dropped in, they¡¯ve been fighting those other zombies, these Withered or whatever. Fun fact, did you know that the military once had a dedicated action plan for Zombie Apocalypses?¡± he asks, catching a few people in the room by surprise. Amusingly, neither Mrs Wu nor Wong Chehai look in any way, shape or form surprised, making it obvious that they already knew.


    ¡°Part of that plan was the determination whether the zombies were chemically, magically or biologically created, like, was the outbreak caused by some virus, curse or some drug. Or a fungus, which is what Miss Morgana described those Withered as. She even mentioned that those are likely able to spread, you know, infect people,¡± he paused, once again, before looking at his fellow councillors with a sardonic grin. ¡°Isn¡¯t that great? We¡¯ve got two different zombie plagues, because a total societal collapse, the destruction of all our tech and ONE zombie invasion wasn¡¯t bad enough, no, it REALLY needed two of those.¡±


    His piece said, he just slumps into the couch he¡¯s sitting on, looking unwilling to move ever again.


    ¡°Well, that they are fungal doesn¡¯t change a lot. That they might spread, that¡¯s a problem but let¡¯s be real, unless it¡¯s some sort of airborne infection, it changes little. Cassie, you can deal with diseases, can¡¯t you? You said something along those lines a while back,¡± Mrs Wu simply continued on, pushing the despair she feels deep down. The people in the area, her people, need a steady leader, they need to see the people they rely on step up and keep things together. Otherwise, someone else will take up the mantle, someone who might not have the skills to lead, or much worse, have bad intentions.


    ¡°Yes, there are ceremonies that can help with disease but it¡¯s complicated. It¡¯s a lot easier to deal with something like a simple cold than it is to deal with some magical infection. But I will add a benediction against disease to the prayers I speak over the people leaving, it will hopefully give them the fortitude to withstand those Withered,¡± Cassie promises, trying to remember the various blessings benedictions and prayers she has experienced on Mundus, contrasting them against the few she has received from Frigg since the change happened.


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    ¡°There¡¯s more,¡± Mark softly speaks, sounding as if he would really like to remain quiet but can¡¯t. ¡°Miss Morgana told me that the Withered seem to be getting out of control. Their group has been trying to get into the centre of the area but they are unable to. According to her, it won¡¯t take long for the Withered to become too powerful for her group to fight, at which point they won¡¯t be able to keep them busy if that is even what they do.¡±


    For a moment, silence reigns in the meeting room. Nobody wants to accept that as reality. Morgana, for all her faults, has always been a mysterious but benevolent force to them, a monster, but a monster that¡¯s on their side. Hearing that there are monsters that Morgana and her companions can¡¯t fight against is a scary prospect.


    ¡°Did¡­¡± Wong Chehai starts, only for his voice to give out, ¡°Did they tell you about the levels involved? Levels aren¡¯t everything but they are a good indicator,¡± he asks, once he manages to get the words out.


    ¡°Thirty plus, to begin with, but quickly heading towards forty and higher,¡± Mark replies, thinking back to Morgana and the dangerous presence she gives off. Eerie, scary and it¡¯s getting worse. A monster, wrapped in pale flesh, her petite physique, making her look so innocent and harmless, nothing but a horrible misdirection. But their monster, she has to be. They need her to be their monster, or everyone at Apple Gate Farm is in horrible danger. They need her. Their Pale Lady.


    But did she need them?


    ¡°We will have to make plans,¡± Mrs Wu shakes her head, knowing that there is little her people can do against foes at that level. Those willing to fight, to step up and protect the community, have made great strides. Everyone has been working hard, both when it comes to practical battles out in the field but also in training.


    Those with prior experience in training soldiers for war have taken the old Roman maxim of training being a bloodless battle and battle merely bloody training to the heart, pushing their recruits as hard as possible. In turn, the recruits have made huge, almost impossible, strides, many going from civilian to capable combatant within a month. Progress that would have taken a year or more, achieved in a fraction of that and yet, she knows that it is far from enough. Samantha, maybe the best student she ever had the joy to guide, is far beyond what a normal person could do, not only in talent but in mentality. A ruthless monster, capable of the most horrific acts of violence without batting an eye, but also the one who told them that the Withered need to be contained.


    Looks are exchanged and for a few moments, nobody dares to speak. The obvious solution is to leave, to give up this place, just as they have given up the other spaces they have sought shelter in. But how long do they have to run? How often to they have to start anew, how long can they keep their people together? How long before things become untenable and everything breaks apart?


    Just a few days ago, they felt major success when the crops they planted breached the soil, thanks to the diligent work of a few Nature Magicians using their magic to provide a plentiful harvest. But as joyful as the celebration of that success was, as hard would it be to pack up, to leave the fields and flee once more.


    ¡°We should try setting up fortifications, more than just the fence around the property. If nothing else, a simple ditch with an earth wall should help, maybe with palisades up top. We can¡¯t leave the farm, the people are barely keeping it together as is. But we¡¯ve got time, hopefully, enough time to prepare. It¡¯s not like it was in town, where there are thousands of bodies rising from their graves, there¡¯s an enemy that might march on us,¡± Mrs Wu explains in a confident voice, sharing her vision with the rest of the council.


    ¡°We will not let ourselves be forced away, not without a fight!¡± her last exclamation is met with equal enthusiasm from the others. But even as she boosts the council¡¯s morale, she quietly makes plans in the back of her mind. Fortifications are a good first step, but she also needs to make sure that the fortifications won¡¯t be their grave. As an American general once said, it is not about dying gloriously for your country, it¡¯s about making sure the other guy dies gloriously for his.


    This is not about fighting the Withered in some glorious last stand. It¡¯s about survival. Always.

 Chapter 800

    Spending some time with people other than my daughter was strangely amusing. Lia and I had grown into a comfortable, quiet comradery, we didn¡¯t really need to talk while existing in the same space. Both of us could follow our own interests, though I often helped Lia with her training. Sure, her physical attributes were coming along nicely but there was still quite a lot I knew about physical combat that she had yet to learn, to say nothing about the magical side of things. There, I was constantly growing and experimenting myself, giving me more and more things that Lia might eventually learn. It was an endless process, which, amusingly, made Lia focus more on the physical side. I had a feeling that focus came from her desire to show me that she was growing up, that she would eventually be more capable than I was, but magically speaking, that was nearly impossible. Physically, it was a far more realistic prospect.


    But when in contact with other people, the comradery between Lia and me morphed into something else, both of us instinctively grouping together, as if making sure that nobody could take either of us by surprise. I caught myself being far more attentive and cautious than I normally was while hiding in a shelter, my mental state far more similar to the one I adopted while out and fighting. It drove home how little I trusted humans, that I was expecting them to attack us almost as much as I was expecting that of a Withered or Shattered.


    Luckily, for everyone involved, they never tried anything. Sadly, the conversation with Mark hadn¡¯t yielded the results I had hoped for, or maybe the results needed to make my previous plan a viable alternative. The people at Apple Gate Farm didn¡¯t have the strength to go against the Withered, the various fighters needed to train more, in order to get strong enough to stand against the enemies we were facing.


    Mark, with a look of grim understanding on his face, could only shake his head when faced with the current state of affairs. It was an almost impossible situation, the Withered were growing as fast, or even faster, than the human fighters, they were more numerous and they had better internal cohesion. There was no way the people could fight against them, but what was the alternative? Diplomacy, with an entity you couldn¡¯t even talk to, an entity that was so far removed from humans that I doubted there was any common ground? It sounded completely impossible, the only thin sliver of hope was that I might be able to communicate with them using Mind Magic. Might, because I certainly wasn¡¯t willing to try patching my mind into that fungal mess I had seen, I liked my brain unscrambled and without mushrooms, thank you very much.


    Which left the survivors with precious few options, or rather, a single option. Avoidance. They either had to hope that the Withered remained contained in the area they currently claimed, or they had to eventually abandon Apple Gate Farm and venture out, seeking greener pastures. As the vast majority of livestock had done, the fields that had once been overrun by cattle or pigs on a nearly daily basis were now abandoned once more, with few beasts remaining in the area. From what I had heard, it was only thanks to the Army of Dog that the people at Apple Gate Farm were able to successfully hunt, but that, too, might be on a time limit.


    They had managed to get some fields back up and growing, but it only worked thanks to the liberal use of Nature Magic supplementing their efforts. Only time would tell if the location was actually viable, though I had a feeling that adjustments would need to be made. Society would have to spread out again, going back to its more agrarian roots. Or maybe it wouldn¡¯t, it would likely depend on whether the Nature Magicians were able to compensate for the lack of fertiliser, and maybe on the way the seeds had been altered by the Change. I had once read about seeds being deliberately modified so the plants they grew into wouldn¡¯t bear viable seeds, ostensibly to prevent the crops from turning into an invasive species, but I had always thought it was to make sure the farmers kept buying fresh seeds. How such modifications, or how the various other ways in which humans had modified plants to fuel the giant cities we built, had been impacted by the system could be a fascinating question for somebody like the Grandmother, or any Nature, Life or maybe even Earth-Magician.


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    But those concerns were irrelevant for the immediate future. If the Withered started to seriously spread out the question of whether or not the crops currently growing in the fields would have viable seeds in a few months'' time wouldn¡¯t matter. It would all get withered away anyway, leaving nothing but desolation. Not quite the desolation of the Nethersprites, but a similar desolation, though I wasn¡¯t quite sure what the Withered were attracted to. Not that it truly mattered, I had no interest in trying to summon more of their ilk, at least not until I managed to get a grip on the current infection.


    Once again, there was a part of me that wished Fire wasn¡¯t as abhorrent to me as it was. While the mental image of a burning city disgusted me, just from the amount of Fire needed, the idea to watch the Withered in all their fungal glory get consumed by hellfire, or maybe Dragon¡¯s Fire, was morbidly appealing. Alas, I lacked the ability to conjure Fire on that scale and I doubted I would ever feel comfortable trying to do so, even if I could.


    But there were other things I could conjure, things that, while not as viscerally destructive, could cause just as much damage. The best course of action, now that we had confirmed that the people at Apple Gate Farm would sit this one out, was to get the last few levels on the way to fifty under our belt, with the secondary goal of pushing all my primary elemental magic abilities to ten while I did. Hopefully, getting them to that level would allow me to gain a suitable class after crossing the Divide, especially if I managed to push my primary magic abilities further up, too.


    Once I managed to get there, and crossed the Divide, Lia and I would hunt down a few suitable Shattered, so I could use them to fuel the biggest spell I could create. Maybe something simple, like the mist I was so fond of, only scaled up to eleven, or something truly grand. There was still the Nevermore¡¯s Feather I had gained thanks to the ritual Lenore had sent me, filled with her own unique blend of Death, Wind and a bit of Ice, familiar enough that I would likely be able to incorporate the Feather into a ritual, though I had no idea what effect that would have. Maybe it would allow Lenore to add her own twist to it, maybe it would simply act as fuel and increase the ritual¡¯s power by an order of magnitude or two, I simply didn¡¯t know. But I also wasn¡¯t quite willing to find out, not with such a precious and unique component.


    Another idea I considered worth my while was to mess with the Withered on a mental level. So far, any attempt to infiltrate their connection using Mind Magic had resulted in major retaliation, far beyond anything that we could fight against, but merely stunning the Withered worked. What I had yet to try was to first stun them, keep them stunned or, if possible, asleep and interfere then. If the reaction came from a disturbance in their psychic connection, it might work, if the connection was inactive while they were unconscious.


    If I could influence their minds long-term, things might get seriously interesting. What happened within a hive-mind, if parts of the hive suddenly had a different opinion? Would it be as simple that the dissident were killed outright, or would the disturbed WIthered become something new? Maybe they¡¯d even pass on whatever disturbance I could create, I knew that the Withered shared sensory information over their connection, meaning if I somehow managed to implant false sensory impressions in a Withered, the network connecting them in battle might completely shut down. If that happened, their strength would be majorly reduced, allowing Lia, Silva and me to kill far more than we normally could.


    Alas, I had yet to create any sort of sensory illusion, the best I could currently do was completely blind an enemy''s senses, using a combination of Mind Magic and Darkness. It was a rather nifty combination, at least normally, but against a creature that could simply disregard its senses and use those of its brethren, the utility was drastically reduced.


    But just because I had yet to manage something didn¡¯t mean I never would. It might be a nice project for Lia and me to work on together. Some nice Mother-Daughter bonding, by torturing our enemies.

 Chapter 801

    As so often, battle didn¡¯t start with a bang but a whimper. We had been hunting Withered for the last few days, pushing a few more levels on our way to fifty and increasing our various skills as we went, but we hadn¡¯t made it to the big five-oh yet. Soon, but not yet.


    Tonight, however, wasn¡¯t another hunt for EXP, it was time for an experiment. I had been trying to get a better read on the Withered and their psychic abilities for days but so far, the only result I had managed to achieve was driving them to attack us with overwhelming force.


    I had considered whether it would be possible to use that almost reflexive attack to our advantage, maybe fill part of the area with gasoline or something similar, lure the Withered in, and walk through the shadows to get away before setting it all ablaze. If not for the insane instability of the post-change gasoline, I would likely have tried to do so, but it was just too dangerous. Experiments between Alex and myself, using samples drained from a number of different cars abandoned in the streets, had shown that gasoline varied in flammability, going from roughly as flammable as water to volatile enough to catch flame when removed from the tank it had been in. There was even a car that exploded the moment we opened the fuel port, luckily it was only a small explosion, doing little more than lift the car a few centimetres and send a gout of flame out of the fuel port. Nothing truly dangerous, but bad enough to make me think twice whether I wanted to mess with the stuff. Amusingly, Alex felt the same, only that for them, thinking twice meant thinking twice as much about it. They loved their explosions, not that I couldn¡¯t see the effectiveness. Alas, Fire just wasn¡¯t for me.


    What was for me, was messing with my enemy''s head, just as we planned tonight. The idea was to knock one of the Withered, a Skulker if at all possible, out and carry their limb body away, to use as we saw fit. Mostly, to see what interesting things would happen if I twisted the mind within the Withered into a pretzel, breaking it to the point that the only thing remaining was pain, maybe with a little bit of violence thrown in for good measure. Once that was managed, we could knock the Withered out again, carry it back to their territory and, well, watch the fireworks from afar.


    I had no idea what the effect of a creature of pure madness linked to a hivemind would be, but I¡¯d be damned if I didn¡¯t want to watch the show.


    The first step, knocking a Withered Skulker out, was nearly trivial. We had been sneaking up on the silly buggers for over three weeks by now and it didn¡¯t look like they would wise up any time soon. Maybe the intelligence behind the Withered considered protecting them from attacks like ours to be too much of an effort when compared to the damage we managed to inflict, and wouldn¡¯t that be a kick in the teeth? That we weren¡¯t even worth the effort of protecting their minions from us, nothing more than a nuisance that could be ignored?


    But for now, it served us well, the only instances in which we were met with overwhelming force happened when we tried to push into the park I had discovered by scrying, or when I tried to magically influence the mental connection between Withered. Outside of those triggers, we could use the WIthered to gain EXP at a phenomenal rate, making it realistic that I¡¯d reach level fifty before the strongest at Apple Gate Farm reached level forty, despite their best efforts to hunt down Undead


    The Withered Skulker we had designated as our target hadn¡¯t noticed our presence, it was as oblivious as all its brethren had been. After gathering my focus for just a brief moment, Overflow activated and I channelled as much Astral Power into my Mind Magic as I could, pushing it all into a singular powerful strike. All the Astral Power, almost a quarter of my total, carried a single intent, to knock the Withered out. Nothing fancy, no fluff, no nothing, just brutal magical force.


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    And as so often, brute force worked quite well, the Withered stiffened for a moment, before going limp, its breath shallow but obvious, even from afar. There was no alarm raised, no call for help went out, nothing that gave away our attack, other than the Withered going silent.


    It would, most likely, result in the same response killing a Withered Skulker did, a couple of Hunters coming for us, trying to kill us right back. Normally, this would be the time that we ventured into the path of a few Hunters I could feel approaching, so we could kill them before they could try to kill us, but that wasn¡¯t the plan for today.


    No, today, Lia simply grabbed the limp Withered Skulker and we all began to run, not even trying to move in the direction we usually retreated into. For this, we had prepared a different lair, just in case things went south.


    Travelling through Racoon City, even while carrying a Withered Skulker, was nothing new, especially now that we didn¡¯t try to catch a few Hunters on our way, we only wanted to leave. Doing so was as routine as it could be and after a while, but still over an hour before the Sun would force us into cover to avoid the hated glare, the four of us reached our prepared lair.


    It wasn¡¯t anything fancy, just a bit of food and some blankets stashed in a solid cellar, but it would be enough. The only thing we now had to do was wait, I had considered starting the experiment early but decided against it. Sure, we were almost two hours from Racoon City, and that was using the speed we travelled when unimpeded, meaning the average Withered would need a lot more time. But I wasn¡¯t about to take any extra risks, certainly not extra risks that would see us besieged without any way to escape.


    So, instead of starting the torture early, I simply put together a simple cage from scrap metal, an easy task thanks to my slowly growing Crystal Magic, and inscribed runes of Concealment and Darkness all over the cage. It wouldn¡¯t last for long, the Astral Power running through the runes was already stressing the material, causing the runes to burn out within the day, but it was enough. The idea was that it would completely isolate the Withered Skulker from the world, the concealment directed inwards, leaving it within a perfectly black void. I had no idea if it truly worked, but it was merely a security measure in case the thing woke up early.


    Once everything was set up, I settled in to wait. Lia was resting, while I was keeping watch until it was time to change shifts. And so, I sat there, in the darkness, waiting and considering the best way to mess with a Withered¡¯s mind.


    What I knew about them, what I could infer about their behaviour and what had worked on Mundus, those were all important questions so I could break the thing¡¯s mind in the best possible way. Or maybe the worst possible way, it all depended on the perspective.


    Isolation was an obvious one, sensory deprivation drove humans mad and I had no doubt it would work for a Withered, too. I was reasonably confident that they were constantly in connection with other Withered, thanks to their psychic abilities. It was the primary way I detected them, making me somewhat confident that the connection was so deeply ingrained into their being that its absence would be rather traumatic. Adding deprivation of its normal senses to that and I had a good starting point.


    From there, pain would be a good contrast. Going from utter sensory deprivation to a state where as many senses as I could stimulate were screaming at the mind, reporting nothing but pain had to be incredibly traumatic, especially if I managed to make it go from horrible agony back to complete deprivation afterwards. Creating a state where there were only the two extremes, I had no doubt that it would cause the mind to crack within short order.


    And if not? Well, at that point I¡¯d have to start the other things, going beyond the physical and even beyond ordinary magic. Inducing Miasma into the body, by using small, controlled amounts of Blood Magic would be the next step. Not only would that be insanely painful, but the pain from Blood Magic was something that went beyond the physical, it was a deep, soul-wrenching pain. Maybe more pain was boring, but I doubted it.


    And if it was, at that point, I¡¯d have to start with more direct applications of Mind Magic. Maybe pulling the Mind into the Astral River, as I did with my students, only without the benefit of a reference frame? Throwing the Withered into the deep end, so to speak.


    So many interesting ideas, I couldn¡¯t wait to see what would happen.

 Chapter 802

    The serious work on the Withered Skulker started around two hours before nightfall. Not only did that give me more than enough time to rest but it also made sure that, if the Withered immediately noticed the thing¡¯s distress and sent our Hunters to attack us, they wouldn¡¯t reach us around nightfall, giving us the entire night to fight or evade them.


    The work itself was quite fascinating. It wasn¡¯t just torture, or rather, not just causing pain, but the majority of what I did was more in the line of sensory manipulation. There was quite a bit of Darkness Magic used in my efforts, mostly creative applications of the concept of Concealment, alongside a lot of Mind Magic in its various forms.


    Interestingly, I could feel the Withered Skulker radiate its psychic powers and Alex and I made a game of countering those emanations. Not only did we repeatedly smack them back, I also experimented with how far I could stretch them, testing how much I could do with the Astral Interference trait. It was a fascinating thing, and I truly wanted to test it on Divine Powers, but for now, the best I could do was the psychic power I had here.


    The power¡¯s texture itself was quite similar to normal Astral Power channelled through the Mind Magic skill, though it wasn¡¯t the same. There were some minute differences, enough to compare but I wasn¡¯t yet able to figure out what the differences meant. It might just be that the psychic powers were purpose-bound, but I had a feeling that there was more to it. Maybe a gut instinct but I wasn¡¯t sure.


    Interestingly, the psychic powers Alex could use, while far, far weaker than those of the Withered, had a texture that was different from both, the Mind Magic and the psychic powers, to the point that I began to wonder if it wasn¡¯t a difference in magic power I detected but a difference in the individual. I¡¯d need a few more Withered Skulker to test that theory, though given that I lacked a control sample to see if the Mind Magic texture I was currently working with wasn¡¯t just unique to me.


    Alas, while the magical side of the experiment was incredibly fascinating, the primary purpose of it was to break the Withered Skulker and by the time midnight rolled around, the thing was barely twitching any longer. It was thoroughly catatonic on a physical level, despite the care I had taken to keep the body relatively whole and healthy, but on a psychic level, it was far from inactive. There, I had to reign in my own senses a little, the only thing I could compare the thing¡¯s emanations to was loud, pained screaming. It was even worse than physical noise, there, I would be able to cover my ears or close a door, but the psychic variant managed to get through walls and breach my brain, leaving me with a headache. The thing didn¡¯t even need to breathe to scream that way, something it took full advantage of.


    Luckily, lining a cage with Concealment and Darkness Runes was enough to keep the screaming, well, concealed. Otherwise, it might have given our approach to Racoon City away, which is where we wanted to take the Skulker.


    Given that there was still enough night left for us, the four of us set out as soon as I felt the thing wouldn¡¯t stop screaming, ever. It was quite interesting what agony contamination with Miasma and Necrotic energy, the channelled essence of Death Magic, in a body could cause. It might have been what ultimately broke the Withered, though I¡¯d need to test some more, for science. Maybe I could even manage to create some mental contamination, similar to the contamination caused by Death Magic, just not physical but targeting the Mind. Or maybe even the soul, though that might require a combination of Mind, Death and Blood Magic. I could wield all three but I was far from mastering any of them, especially Death Magic would take me a whole lot more time, even with the skill points I had recently gained. By now, it was level thirteen, while Mind Magic was at thirty-six and Blood Magic at twenty-nine. Torturing the Withered Skulker had been quite beneficial to all three skills, though I had been using them in combat these last few days as well. Just not as much and certainly not in so many new and creative ways. And people said torture was pointless.


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    In this case, the torture most certainly had achieved its point, and now, that point was carried by Lia in an enchanted cage. The effect of the runes inscribed on the bars was quite interesting itself, it created a weird, somewhat swirly disturbance that I could faintly see through but not quite. If I didn¡¯t know where to look, or if the cage itself was gone, I might easily overlook the effect in the darkness, though that probably should be expected, it was a concealment field after all. Just one that focused on concealing the world from the creature within it, leaving it rather disturbed.


    Once we got to Racoon City, we moved roughly to the area where we had taken the Withered Skulker before setting the cage down. Given the state it was in, and the amount of magic I had needed to keep it stable, I could estimate that the concealment magic would fall apart within the next twenty minutes, while the cage itself would keep together longer, maybe for a few more hours. But my Crystal Magic, while growing, was far from perfect, leaving a lot of imperfections in the connections I had created between the scrap metal and those connections would easily break, especially after the Darkness Magic flowing through the runes had weakened them further.


    But it was good enough and it gave us more than enough time to put down the cage, right in the middle of an intersection, and get to a good spot to watch what happened with the Skulker.


    Our observation spot was almost a hundred metres from the intersection, on a rooftop with a direct line of sight to the cage. The great thing about the spot was that the roofs on either side of the building were almost as high as the one we were on. While it would be a little rough to jump from one roof to the next, we should be able to do so, especially if I pushed myself with magic. It would be a somewhat painful landing on the other side, but it was an excellent way out if we needed to escape.


    That there were more roofs we could escape over, all roughly the same height, was only a bonus, giving us ample ways to escape if we had to run. But maybe, we could simply watch what happened down there, before making our way out.


    The moment the concealment spells failed was bleedingly obvious, especially to Alex and me. Both of us could feel the psychic emanations and they were still as agitated as they had been the entire night. Or maybe even more so, and we could not only feel them but also the response, and what a response it was. The entire area was suddenly filled with psychic emanations, as if everyone was screaming, all at once. It was strong enough to give me a headache, even with multiple concealment spells woven around me in an attempt to blunt some of that power and while using my Mind Magic to shield myself.


    Even Lia, sitting right next to me, started to massage her temple, and she could normally only hear the faintest of buzzes if we were around multiple Withered, all using their abilities. But here, she could easily perceive them all, to the point that she was getting a headache.


    And the reaction wasn¡¯t just on the psychic spectrum, it was only that we could perceive that aspect of it far from the physical aspect. For that, we only had to follow the dozens of psychic signals, all moving towards the intersection, coming from all around us.


    Now, I was a little annoyed that I hadn¡¯t prepared some nice surprise for the Withered, something explosive of fiery, Alex would certainly have some fun ideas for something like that. Alas, not today. But maybe the next time we did something like this. The sheer amount of Withered converging on the cage we set up was quite attractive to blow up.


    Moments after the Withered arrived, I had to swallow a little, the sheer fury of the creatures we were watching was rather intimidating. The metal cage the Withered Skulker had been in was instantly destroyed by multiple Hunters pouncing on it and the Withered Skulker I had broken didn¡¯t last much longer.


    Normally, Withered Hunters were brutal and efficient but this, this went far beyond their usual behaviour. They tore the broken Skulker apart and even after it died, they continued to savage the body to the point that they hurt each other in their frenzy. It was incredibly brutal and all of them were drenched in blood, far more blood than the Withered Skulker could have in its body.


    And yet, they weren¡¯t sated and started to fan out. Looking for us¡­

 Chapter 803

    Upon realisation just how enraged the Withered were, I was stunned for a moment. That hadn¡¯t been part of the plan, not that I actually had a plan for such a massive reaction. The biggest reaction I had expected was something equivalent to the times I had tried to use Mind Magic to mess with their psychic connection, but this was bigger by an order of magnitude, with a massive amount of bloodlust added on, for good measure.


    ¡°Let¡¯s run,¡± Lia suggested, looking down at our approaching foes. They hadn¡¯t noticed us yet, but the sheer number of gathered Hunters, and the additional number that was moving towards us, meant that they would soon catch us.


    At least if they managed to flush us out.


    ¡°No, quiet,¡± I shook my head, pushing the four of us deeper into the shadows. We were above the Hunters, leaving them only a narrow staircase as primary access. Sure, they might be able to climb the facade of the building but that would require extra effort. Given that there were hundreds of buildings it was unlikely that they¡¯d pick this one. Our best bet was to stay hidden and wait for them to scatter as they searched or until their bloodlust abated somewhat, giving us more air to breathe. But if they noticed us now, it would be very much like a deer getting caught while surrounded by a pack of wolves. They¡¯d almost certainly hunt us down.


    The next ten minutes were spent in quiet, rather fearful, silence, my mind completely focused on the single, simple task of keeping us all hidden. No words were spoken, I didn¡¯t even bother paying attention to the Withered below, I merely focused on the magic I circulated around us, the inner layer of wind, keeping all scents in, muffling the faint sounds of our bodily functions, and the outer layer of darkness, hiding us from sight and concealing us from every other sense.


    The inner layer was borne from a previous experiment of mine, about the limits of my magical concealment. Namely, how far did it reach? I had already known that it would muffle my footsteps, but what about my tracks? Would it hide a footprint of mine, or worse, would it conceal the signs of my passing if I walked through the snow? What about other traces I left behind, like the tiny particles that constituted my scent?


    It turned out that the Concealment was focused on the area around me, muffling anything within it. That meant sound wouldn¡¯t easily travel through it but if I dropped something, it would simply remain behind and leave the area. Or it could get caught by the wind and get carried out of the area, meaning my scent wasn¡¯t concealed, at least not really. But the thin shell of Wind I had conjured was quite useful, keeping the tiny particles shedding from my body contained, while also adding another muffling effect to the sounds we made. It was quite useful.


    Though, the way I had used the Concealment concept the night before, applying it in reverse to conceal the world from the captured Withered was making me wonder. What else could I conceal that way? Could I, theoretically, conceal my physical presence, making me something akin to a wraith or ghost, literally untouchable? Could I conceal myself from gravity, allowing me to float? There were quite a few rather fascinating areas of inquiry to explore but at a later date. Especially as it not only applied to Concealment, but to every rune, if I was willing to push things and was willing to make my spells less efficient.


    But maybe that was the crux of the matter. If the more specific runes merely made the related magic less taxing, wouldn¡¯t that mean that I could, theoretically, achieve any effect with just the foundational rune of an element and a lot of Astral Power? Or maybe Astral Power and my will?


    A realisation washed over me, almost making me fumble the concealment spell I was still maintaining. What if it wasn¡¯t so much my will that counted, but the related skill? On Mundus, there had been instances where I had conjured up Ice with nothing but my Ice Magic and a bit of Astral Power, no need to invoke the rune of Ice. The only downside had been that I needed a little more Astral Power, just as I now postulated for the less-related aspects of an element.


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    If I took that idea and followed it to the logical conclusion, it would mean that the only thing truly needed for magic was Astral Power and the will to change the world. To alter it according to your imagination and Mind.


    Runes, or even just the basic Magic skills, might provide nothing more but a structure for the mind to apply itself, to bring the Astral Power to bear in the attempt to alter the world. Making the attempt more efficient, thus lowering the amount of Astral Power needed.


    It was a truly fascinating idea, leaving me with an incredible amount of things I wanted to try out.


    ¡°We should get going now,¡± Lia quietly prodded me, drawing me from my racing thoughts about the fundamentals of magic. Maybe I should look for a better time to enter my magical reveries, not while we were hiding from hundred-odd lion-sized monsters that were out for our blood. But then, it actually did trigger my Titanic Ambition, so maybe it wasn¡¯t so bad. Swings and roundabouts and all that.


    Looking down into the streets, I realised that Lia was right in this case. While my focus had been split between thinking about those fascinating implications for my magic and keeping us hidden, the Withered down in the streets had been hunting for us, slowly spreading out all area. Now, there were only a few remaining down there, giving us a window of opportunity to get going.


    After a nod to my companions, we moved to our originally planned escape route. Given that Silva needed to be near me so I could keep her concealed, while Lia could briefly work the concealment by herself, I had to climb onto Silva¡¯s back, riding her like some sort of canine pony just like I had occasionally mounted Ylva while we were travelling on Mundus. Just like it had been back then, it was a strange experience, though luckily, Silva¡¯s dense, somewhat poofy fur was far more comfortable than Ylva¡¯s narrow back.


    With my Cloak of Shadows spread out and draped across Silva to the best of my ability, she leapt off the roof, sailing through the air for a moment, before landing on the other side with a painful jolt. Sure, Silva did her best to absorb the impact of our landing and her high physical attributes helped with that, but she was no mount and I was served a painful reminder of that.


    But we were off the roof and could keep going, staying hidden as we moved from one rooftop to the next. The further we got, the more I realised just how extreme the reaction of the Withered had been and the more often I thanked the Astral that there were no flying Withered. Down in the streets, we¡¯d have been caught for sure, not only were there dozens of Withered Hunters, but I also noticed similar numbers of Withered Skulkers, hiding on ledges and in windows. They were looking for us and they wanted to kill us, badly.


    Sadly, we couldn¡¯t make it to the edge of Racoon City by staying on the rooftops. Eventually, we had to return to the ground and given the amount of Withered still in the area, it was nearly guaranteed that we¡¯d get noticed. For a moment, I considered Shadow Stepping somewhere else but without being in a state of Titanic Ambition it would wipe out my Astral Power, leaving me vulnerable.


    Before I could decide how we would proceed, Alex pulled out one of the ubiquitous cans they used for their more interesting concoctions and held it out to me so I could light the fuse. I had no idea how they had managed to make one but by now I refused to be surprised at Alex¡¯s inventiveness. They were incredibly clever, especially when it came to alchemically, or chemically, induced mayhem. Projectile prepared, Alex put it on their slingshot and launched it into the air, away from us.


    The moment the can was in the air, Alex started to make urgent signs, telling us to move down the stairs and into the streets.


    We hadn¡¯t quite managed to down there when a rather sizable bang echoed through the streets and I could see light reflected off a few nearby windows, making me wonder just how bright whatever Alex had cooked up was.


    But whatever the case, the loud noise and bright light created a deep shadow for us to hide in, as we moved past the many Withered that had been drawn to the explosion. They didn¡¯t even glance in our direction, allowing us to flee unhindered.

 Chapter 804

    After the extreme reaction to the catatonic Skulker, I was a little hesitant to return to Racoon City. If anything would get the Withered to alter their actions, to go from the casual swipes the Hunters took at us to a concentrated and utterly overwhelming effort to exterminate us, it might be what I had done the previous night. Was it brave to head back into an area where the creatures might suddenly be much more motivated to murder you, or was it foolishness? I wasn¡¯t quite sure on that front, nor was I certain whether the benefit of having a seemingly limitless supply of enemies outweighed the danger of getting murdered.


    And yet, I was certain that the Withered were the only area that would provide a constant challenge to my group, at least in this area. There was no other game in town, as some would say, but was it worth playing with the risks involved?


    Maybe the best play to make was to take a break, to stay away from the Withered for a night or three, get some extra rest, and maybe make up a few emergency tools that could get us out of trouble if we got caught. The flashbang Alex had used during the night was one such tool but there were many more that could be made. Maybe find some new cloth that I could embroider with Runes to make it somewhat magical or improve our equipment in some other way, there were numerous ways that could improve our chances of survival, if we only took the time to explore them.


    And if the Withered didn¡¯t continue to grow stronger at the rate they had, there had to be a limit to their growth, or at least I hoped there was. Otherwise, the entire world wasn¡¯t safe from them. If we failed to contain their spread and their individual strength kept increasing at the same rate, alongside their seemingly unlimited number, I doubted anything could contain them. No, the best chance to contain this infection was to cut it off at the source, in the park I had noticed with my scrying.


    Ultimately, I decided that rushing ahead would be foolish but waiting too long would be just as dangerous. Instead, we would wait for two days, use that time to collect some additional supplies, relax and maybe make some fun things to get us out of a bind.


    The collection of supplies was our primary purpose. By now, almost two months since the change had happened and about a month since the dead had risen in the streets, finding stores that hadn¡¯t been destroyed in some way was starting to get challenging. Our best bet was to find places that were out of the way or otherwise inaccessible, places like cellars beneath collapsed buildings that I could vaguely feel with my Earth Magic, or stores with high-end security measures like the tea store we had raided a while back. Those places were the only locations that hadn¡¯t been picked clear and it was in one of those places we came across something truly fascinating.


    Once upon a time, the store we had discovered, sheltered behind sturdy shutters and thick, locked doors, was a hunting goods store. Rifles, large pistols to defend against dangerous game, knives, bows and all such good stuff. Sadly, none of the goods were considered weapons by the system, they were just as useless as the Butterfly Blades I had taken from my own home, unable to adapt unless they were adapted in some way by a craftsperson. Which was something I should start trying out, now that I was able to perform some Crystal Magic, allowing me to manipulate metal in simple ways. If I was careful and kept my manipulations relatively simple and contained, I might be able to alter the weapons in a fundamental enough way to make the system consider them weapons and not junk.


    If that was possible, I suddenly would have a vastly increased value to everyone we came across, as it would make me not only a teacher in an incredibly valuable subject, namely the fundamentals of magic, but it would also allow me to act as a craftsperson, creating suitable weapons for others to fight with.


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    But that was something to experiment with later, though I made sure to remind Lia to grab herself some suitable blades, just in case I could alter them. Sadly, the bows were predominately made from compound materials, meaning there was no way I would be able to alter them and the same went for the crossbows.


    Though the alterations only mattered if the projectile and its impact were supposed to be the dangerous part. An explosion didn¡¯t care how it was brought to its target, it just went boom. Alex must have realised that before me, for they were quickly looking through the various tools to deliver death at a distance, checking which of them could be used by a child, or a large racoon. To my endless amusement, the one they eventually settled on was, for some unknown reason, a decidedly eye-searing shade of hot pink. Whoever had the idea that a potentially deadly weapon had to be in that shade, they were either an utter genius or utterly insane, possibly both.


    Judging by the low draw weight, the way it was designed around the lever cock and the general aesthetic, I was relatively certain it was supposed to be used by some young teenager with a princess obsession, though how such an obsession fit with deadly weaponry, I wasn¡¯t quite sure. Whatever the case, the thing would easily be able to lob some of Alex¡¯s simpler projectiles quite some distance and we might be able to modify it somewhat, so it could send them even further.


    We definitely took a ton of supplies from the store so we could tinker with the crossbow, and maybe even make a few more weapons that could be used in some indirect fashion. If we managed to figure out the rules governing the way the system calculated damage, how that whole shebang with HP and wounds worked, we might be able to circumvent some of the disadvantages we had with the pre-change gear.


    And it was a rather fascinating question. What constituted damage, according to the system? There were the obvious things, if you stabbed somebody in the heart, they died, unless they were of a species that had multiple hearts or lacked a circulatory system in the first place, but if you critically damaged a vital organ, no matter how you created that damage, they died. End of story.


    But what about lesser wounds? Why was the cut of a pre-change knife less impactful than the cut of a Frozen Shuttle, if both cuts were the same size? Why were two cuts, both the same size and location, both made by the same Frozen Shuttle, different in their impact if the wielder of the Shuttle had a different Ice Magic skill for one of them?


    It felt completely nonsensical but somehow, those were the rules we lived under, the rules the system imposed. For the big stuff, it didn¡¯t matter.


    But for the lesser wounds, it most certainly did.


    Experimentation was needed, a whole lot of careful experimentation. Maybe we should consider catching some Withered Husks and get cutting, there had to be knowledge to be won that way. We just had to keep cutting, until we got to the heart of the matter.


    Another thing we liberated from the store was gunpowder. Just holding the shells was a fascinating experience, I could feel the power contained within. The gunpowder had clearly been affected by the change and now, it was for Alex, Lia and me to figure out in what way and what could be done to avoid those regrettable scenarios Mrs Wu had described to us.


    But if we managed to make it reliably go boom, we could be onto something, especially with the way the Withered had swarmed the Withered Skulker I had rendered catatonic.


    Maybe, if I couldn¡¯t create a big-enough ritual to scour the Withered off the face of Terra with magic, we would be able to craft some bombs that could thin their numbers. We didn¡¯t have to be stronger than them, in that case, we just had to be smarter. And I was confident that we could be smarter than a bunch of fungus-infected giant cats and trash pandas.


    Walking out of the hunting store, all of us weighed down with the collected loot we had found was curiously liberating. New weapons, new ideas, the combination had somehow lifted quite a few worries of my shoulders.


    It was liberating enough that I even noticed the barred high-end jewellery store across the road, still completely shuttered and protected.


    Who knew what fun stuff could be found there, how the various precious gems and metals had reacted to the change? I couldn¡¯t wait to break in and find out.

 Chapter 805

    Working with metal was an utterly fascinating experience. Looting both the hunting store and the jeweller gave me a plethora of objects to experiment with, though I initially focused on the simple knives and plain silver hoops, not even trying to work with the gems. To make matters worse, the change had left its mark on the different objects, their physical features were altered in some minute ways, especially when it came to their durability.


    During my experiments, I came across one particular blade, outwardly it looked perfectly fine but when I used my slowly developing Crystal Magic on it. there was a distinct change in one section of the knife. Even just gently knocking against it with my hand caused that section to lightly crack and when I tried to cut something with the knife, it simply broke.


    That realisation forced me to examine the loot more closely, to figure out which items had been weakened by the change, which remained useable and which had been improved, though that greatly depended on the metric used.


    For example, was it an improvement when a knife had a greatly increased hardness but was incredibly brittle as well, making it highly likely that it would break the moment it was used to strike something? Even just dropping it could have broken it, I didn¡¯t dare test that, but at the same time, it was hard enough to etch glass without issue, while a careful treatment with my Crystal Magic turned it razor sharp.


    Was that a better knife or a worse one? For hunting, it was worse, or for any sort of violent use, but I most certainly kept the blade, though I reworked the hilt, to use for careful carving and possibly engraving.


    The right tool for the right job and all that, and in this case, I wasn¡¯t overly interested in cutting. Lia had the cleaver we had taken from the dungeon, the sheer, brute force it could apply far outstripping anything possible with pre-change weapons while I had two well-made blades myself, blades with which I had trained, which I had bled on and with which I had killed. There was no way that any of the blades from the hunting store could match them, not unless I managed to somehow enchanted or altered them so they were recognised as weapons by the system.


    And that was what I was trying to accomplish during the next few rest periods, enchanting by day, going back to hunt Withered by night. Not only was I trying to alter the weapons, so they would be recognised by the system and actually work for us, but I also wanted to enchant the rings. Enchanting gear to improve attributes, for example, could be incredibly valuable even if I only had rather vague ideas about where to start with that.


    My initial idea was to try engraving Blood Runes, mostly those focused on Vitality, maybe with some enriched blood worked into the engraving in some way. That might work to increase Vitality, thanks to the direct connection but it was only an idea that I had yet to accomplish.


    And even if I did, while additional Vitality was a nice thing to have, it was one of the less important attributes to me. If I ever got into a situation where my Vitality was the difference between living or dying, I had majorly mucked up at some point. I wasn¡¯t some sort of tank or bruiser, I didn¡¯t want to battle in the front-lines, I was primarily a spellcaster, maybe with a bit of assassin or scout mixed in. Getting hit was not for me, I wasn¡¯t supposed to be anywhere near the action.


    Though, given that things didn¡¯t always go to plan, I would happily wear some Vitality-enchanted jewellery if it was the only option I had.


    But really, I wanted more options.


    Intelligence, Intuition, those were interesting, though only because they were my primary attributes. On the other hand, Agility, Courage or Dexterity would be incredible, simply because they were useful secondary attributes but not useful enough to make me spend my hard-earned points on them. Not if I could use those points to increase my primary attributes, allowing me to gain traits and abilities associated with them.


    But points gained from items wouldn¡¯t give me any abilities or traits, they just gave me the attribute points.


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    Which left me with the obvious question, how could I imbue an item with those attributes? How could a simple ring, necklace or whatever improve the innate characteristics of my body, just by wearing it?


    The obvious answer was magic.


    The less-obvious answer turned into a slight obsession during the next few days.


    Each day, I was pouring over the different items, trying to make them into something more. The knives were, amusingly, the easiest but maybe I should have expected that.


    Runes were the answer, as expected, but the devil was, as always, in the details. Namely, the detail of how I could get the runes to be connected, not only to each other but to the body holding the blade, there needed to be a constant cycle of Astral Power, allowing the body to empower the enchantment without actually drawing power out of the body.


    Because that was the crux of the matter. People had Astral Power flowing through them at all times, especially a powerful spellcaster like me. My entire body was infused with it, so why couldn¡¯t I let some of the power that was flowing through my body at all times flow through a blade to infuse an enchantment, just like my body was infused?


    What I needed was a cycle, a highly efficient cycle that drew power from the body holding a blade on one side and infused the power back into the body on the other side, using that power to activate a runic sequence on the way.


    Once I had that thought, the rest was completely trivial¡­ Not.


    Even with the idea, it took a massive amount of effort, thanks to the corrosive effects of raw Astral Power. Within the body that wasn¡¯t a problem, my Astral Power was obviously attuned to my body, but outside of it? There, things became a lot more difficult.


    Connecting patterns were the answer, those tiny structures that fit between the runes of a formation, allowing the Astral Power to flow through it more smoothly. Normally, that merely increased a spell¡¯s efficiency, but higher efficiency meant that less power was wasted. Wasted on effects like the corrosion of the material, or other unwanted complications.


    This meant I had to figure out connecting patterns while inventing a whole new set of effects that I wanted to permanently imbue into my items.


    Without the magical Sight I had inherited from Lenore, it might be utterly impossible. But with it, I could slowly but surely detect the places where Astral Power was impacting, for a lack of a better word, the material and experiment with patterns and symbols to connect different runes. Somewhat similar to watching water flow through a structure, following the path of least resistance while splashing against the walls at other points. I needed to reduce the splash, reduce the friction and make sure that the water was moving smoothly.


    Only, each combination of runes required different connections, the Astral Power flowing through them in a different way. It wasn¡¯t just one symbol that could be used for each rune, like some sort of cursive script, they all needed their own.


    Meaning I first had to figure out what Runes I wanted to connect, though luckily, that was relatively easy for the blades. Blood, Curse, Spout, for a relatively simple effect that would hopefully make the wounds made by the blade continuously bleed. Nothing sophisticated but nicely deadly, if I could get it to work.


    And that was before taking into account differences in the physical material, that I wasn¡¯t just working with a single, uniform medium but with more or less randomly mixed metals, thanks to the change altering the properties of the material in a mostly random way, leaving me with a mix I could barely tell apart, let alone form some comprehensive theories about. At times, I was tempted to simply throw the weapons that had gone through the change away and try starting anew, only that I didn¡¯t have a blacksmith or something to pound out weapons for me to experiment on. Not yet, at least, I had noticed Lia looking into books she had looted from the library one night, one of which had an anvil with glowing metal on the cover.


    It was a serious headache and a half, though slowly but surely, I was making progress. Slow, tedious progress, but that was something I was used to anyway. It was the same with the Withered, though I had a feeling that the runes were more flexible than the Withered.


    It turned out, those had, after our days of staying away after the initial breaking of the Withered Skulker, returned to their ways and reacted in the same, predictable ways. The only upside was that their growth seemed to slow down a little, going from utterly impossible to merely ridiculous, especially considering their numbers.


    But the steady supply of magical exploration, combat and training was having a profound effect on my level and magic. Each day, more advances were made, each night, more enemies fell to our weapons, traps and magic, allowing us to continuously advance.


    Maybe the Withered had their own plan to deal with us, maybe they simply reacted to stimulus, like some sort of magical sunflower that simply followed the sun¡¯s light, regardless of circumstances.


    Whatever the case, their plan, if there was one, didn¡¯t come into effect before we reached a major milestone. Namely, level fifty and the first Divide.

 Chapter 806

    Reaching level fifty came with a whimper, not with a bang. Day after day, we were hunting Withered, always vigilant to make sure their reactions didn¡¯t change, even as we were pushing things, experimenting with ways to increase the damage we could deal to them.


    If it wasn¡¯t hunting individuals down to provoke a moderate response, it was breaking the mind of a Withered Skulker and using the broken thing as bait to lure large numbers into a trap. While setting up traps was a favourite pastime of Alex and I had some fun with it myself, we rarely used that trick. It just wasn¡¯t worth it, not only was it incredibly dangerous but it was also plainly inefficient. If we wanted to break a Skulker, we had to hunt one down, stun it, carry it out of Racoon City while making sure that we kept enough of a margin of error to keep us safe, break the thing, taking hours of work, before carrying it back, setting up the trap until we finally got the fireworks.


    It took almost two days, meaning we would have to kill some thirty, maybe forty Withered Hunters to draw even with the numbers we would put up by simply hunting them in smaller groups. As much as I enjoyed watching large numbers of enemies get torn to shreds by my magic, it just wasn¡¯t worth it. At least not yet, maybe once I crossed the Divide things would be different.


    The time spend hunting Withered was overall rather productive when it came to the acquisition of skill levels, though that might be due to my continuous efforts to study the Zevarra Agha, understand the spells within and improve my knowledge, alongside my attempts to learn proper enchanting.


    By the time I hit the big five-oh, Ice Rune Mastery had reached level thirty-four, mostly due to continued usage against the Withered, Darkness Rune Mastery got to thirty-five, as one of my favourite ways to support my allies was inflicting rather unpleasant curses on my enemies, pushing the Mastery fairly fast. Blood Rune Mastery reached level thirty-two, allowing me to learn yet another Rune. I tried to regain the Hasten-Rune I had occasionally used on Mundus but because Rune was an advanced form of the Strengthen-Rune, I failed. Instead, I gained said Strengthen-Rune, which was nice but not quite what I wanted. It didn¡¯t stop me from trying to use it in my enchanting, though sadly I wasn¡¯t met with success just yet.


    When it came to my primary non-Runic magic abilities, Darkness Magic made the greatest strides, mostly because I wanted to perfect the Shadow Stepping, putting a tremendous amount of effort into the skill. It was still incredibly difficult and draining, with severe limitations, but I was able to step most of the time, pushing the skill to level thirty-six with my attempts. Ice Magic fell a little by the wayside, only going up to thirty-four, while Blood Magic was used in conjunction with Death Magic to torture, gaining a few points and rising to thirty-three.


    Similarly, all my other skills had progressed as well. Torturing creatures with Mind Magic into a state where they couldn¡¯t do anything but scream and likely pray for their end was surprisingly good training, even if I was actively trying to limit my use of Mind Magic in that pursuit. Having it essentially lock itself into pure combat usage was not something I wanted to risk, even if the Lunar Madness had been useful on Mundus. I already had more than enough ways to end somebody, but permanently losing out on the possibly only way to heal a mind wasn¡¯t something I wanted. Death Magic, on the other hand, was similarly useful and I doubted I¡¯d ever be able to use it for anything not damaging, given that it was even damaging me, just by using it. So, I happily used it to break the Withered, though only in controlled circumstances. It was too dangerous a skill to use in combat, given how damaging it was to me.


    Thus, Mind Magic only went up by one, though given that it had already been at thirty-six, now thirty-seven, that didn¡¯t disappoint me. Death Magic, on the other hand, got up to fifteen and was progressing nicely, even with the limitations I had to put myself under.


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    But I couldn¡¯t progress all my skills, there just wasn¡¯t enough time. Neither Water Magic nor Water Rune Mastery had gained a single point, though given that they were merely used for showers and drinking water that wasn¡¯t a surprise. Similarly, Wind Magic and its Rune Mastery had languished, gaining a single point each, but only because I used it to conceal us alongside my Darkness Magic. Still, sixteen for the Magic and eleven for the Rune Mastery wasn¡¯t too bad.


    But the biggest, numerical, gain was in the magic I used in my experiments to learn enchanting. Fire Magic, despite my dislike, was instrumental in softening the metal so I had an easier time manipulating the metal with Earth and Crystal Magic. It was rather fascinating, to explore the differences between those two related magics, and to see how the manipulation of the same material differed. Earth Magic felt rougher, or maybe rawer would be a better word, easier to create a larger difference with. On the other hand, Crystal Magic had an almost refined, incredibly structured feel to it, allowing me to create tiny changes though the precision meant I needed an incredible amount of effort to make a larger change. Still, it was fascinating and ultimately allowed me to raise Fire Magic to ten, Earth Magic to eleven and the newest Crystal Magic to eight, gaining a whopping six points.


    Lastly, working with Alex had pushed Alchemy to level three while training with Li was now at the point that I was gaining skills myself, my Unarmed Combat rising to six and my Dual Blades to five. An interesting surprise but I wasn¡¯t about to focus on that style of combat. Magic all the way.


    The sensation of reaching level fifty was, however, somewhat muted. Destroying Withered Hunter number far-too-many wasn¡¯t exciting, it had grown into a routine task. I had been contemplating trying and using large-scale magic to thin their numbers, maybe even wipe them out entirely, but there was always the fear that it wouldn¡¯t work. Sure, I could harvest power with my Blood Magic but there were limits to that and limits to the amount of power I could channel, even with the help of a ritual circle.


    In addition, there was a lingering fear that I might make things worse. We had yet to see Nethersprites on Mundus, but who knew what would happen if I used seriously large-scale Blood Magic? I wanted to destroy the Withered, not create another threat or push the Withered to become something that we couldn¡¯t fight against. For now, limited fighting was the answer, repeated fights, as we gained EXP in a normally utterly impossible way, even if we had to be constantly on our guard.


    But now, with level fifty reached, I was starting to wonder, should we try continuing on, maybe until Lia, or even Alex, reached fifty as well? Silva had it easiest, she was at forty-nine, though only just, leaving us with a day or three of killing. Lia, on the other hand, was only at forty-five, meaning at least another week of grinding. Sure, her lower level meant she gained more overall EXP, as the enemies were closer to her level, and also more by percentage because she needed less EXP to reach the next level than me. That allowed her to catch up but she had been weeks behind us.


    And Alex, they were even further behind, though their progress had been rather insane, thanks to our constant battles, but it wasn¡¯t instantaneous, thankfully. I remembered the incredibly unpleasant sensation of gaining too many levels too quickly, that wasn¡¯t something I wanted to experience. Well, that wasn¡¯t true, I¡¯d love to gain the levels, just without the pain.


    Alas, I doubted there was any enemy in our world that would give me enough levels to make me sick in that way, or rather I hoped so. It would make my plans to be secure through fear a whole lot harder, though it could possibly open up an opportunity.


    Killing that enemy and making myself out to be the hero, to bathe in the adulation of the masses.


    As quickly as that idea came, it died a quick and painless death. There was no way anyone would see me as a hero, my inherited traits made sure of that, even if I ignored my personality.


    No, it was better to be seen as a monster too powerful to be attacked than trying to be the sympathetic hero. And with level fifty reached, and having retreated to our lair without trouble, I would challenge the first divide during the next Witching Hour, when the night was deepest. There was a part of me that wanted to wait for the Full Moon, or maybe a new Moon, but I wasn¡¯t sure I wanted to try binding myself to the moon again.


    There was another power, one that was far closer to me, the Touch of a Dragon, lingering on my body and soul. It would be the power I planned to seek out.

 Chapter 807

    It was finally time. I had reached the big five-oh, had gained my free points from the Dragon Touched Trait but had yet to spend the points I had received from levelling up, having collected five of them since level forty. Now, I could either push my Intelligence up to thirty-five, my Intuition to thirty or wait and see what points crossing the first divide would net me. Depending on that, I might want to spend the points somewhere else, hoping to get some useful traits. Maybe.


    But first, I had to cross the hurdle before me, the first divide.


    Without a moon to guide me, drawing me in and setting me on my path, I had to look inwards. Deep into my body, into my soul, tracing the pathways of my Astral Power as it suffused my body. Here, there be dragons.


    Closing my eyes, I let my mind wander, allowing it to flow with the power within me, searching for that spark. The spark of pure power, unrelenting force that could change the world as I saw fit. Primal, something inherent to myself but stemming from the touch of something outside of me. I was Touched by a Dragon, and that touch would remain with me, remain with my body, my soul. A touch I considered akin to the Divine, undoubtedly stemming from my interactions with the Nidh?gg.


    Little Sister, they had called me. A sibling to the winged serpent, touched by their power. The memory of their power, alongside the memories of the devastation I had wrought on Mundus, flashed through my mind and for a moment, I felt different. No longer a small, pitiful humanoid but powerful, my body covered in indestructible scales, my claws ready to rend anything in my path. All to protect my mountain. The one place I would never allow anyone to despoil, the quiet, snow-covered mountain hidden in the mist. Where I could rest my weary soul.


    Following the flow of power from outside of myself, I started to move into myself. Let my mind flow on the stream of my magic. By now, my magic was quite diverse, almost amusingly so, but the foundation remained steady, the eternal Ice, the utter void of Darkness and the pulsing of blood, they were what defined me. But those three weren¡¯t what made up the entirety of what was I. The other elements were there, too, even the scorching Fire was part of me, an unpleasant part but, from the feeling I was having, a necessary part nonetheless. As the joke went, nothing, or nobody, was useless, they could always serve as a bad example.


    Fascination was flowing through me as I tried to understand what I was seeing, as I explored the depths of myself. Somehow, I could feel power flow into myself even as power was flowing out of me, an endless cycle, though I was merely a tiny part of it. Each cell within myself took in a part of the power, altered it before letting the altered version join back into the cycle, all part of the extremity that was Eternity. Cyclic and extreme, parts of the same coin, the truth only depending on the scale one was observing.


    From deep within me, I could feel a faint rumble, shaking my body, tearing at my mind. A desire to rage, to conquer, to bring down all those who opposed me and yet, even as that desire tried to control me, I pushed it down. My mind was my own, my body was mine, no matter what shape it took. Only Lenore, my dear companion, was allowed to share my mind, to rest within the Hallow within my body. She was far from me, far away but never forgotten and I would never allow myself to let the desire to destroy control my body.


    To avenge, to bring those who wronged Sigmir, yes, for my vengeance I would be the Destroyer. But not for the sake of destruction itself, I had purpose. And purpose gave me power.


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    As I began to control the desires swelling up from deep within me, I could feel power flowing alongside them, a clear distinct stream that tried to suffuse my body. To either influence my physical form, to perfect and temper it, or to meld into my magic and change that in some way. For a moment, indecision gripped me. Changing my magic, it sounded wonderful but also scary. What if it would be something akin to the change to my Mind Magic, limiting it by driving me further to an extreme? Did I want to limit my options, even if limiting my options early would allow me to drive my powers further than I could ever hope without those limits?


    Improving my body sounded easy, a simple solution that would leave me stronger, give me security, or I could take a risk, take the plunge.


    Power, it always came back to that damned need, to the desire to change the world as I wanted it to be. And for that, I needed power, needed to reach the ultimate pinnacle. The greatest extreme.


    Gripping the power flowing alongside the raging desires to conquer and destroy, I guided it, letting it flow into the pathways within me, melding into my Astral Power. I could feel the power try to inundate only parts of my Astral Power, but I was having none of that. Even as my body started to ache, my mind started to burn, I continued to draw power from deep within myself. Now that there was only one way for it to go, I would keep drawing it out as long as I could.


    Finally, I felt strangely full, as if I had just eaten a full-course meal, only that I also felt sore as if I had been running for hours while lifting weights. The sensation of having claws from earlier returned, only more defined and I knew what those claws were. The claws of a dragon, ready to cleave through any defence, capable of shredding anything in my path.


    I was a dragon and my magic was my claws.


    It was strange, I was incredibly aware of my body, of my magic, isolated within myself. It was as if there was only I, a world of myself, my magic thrumming through me, pooling in places, ebbing and flowing within me. The different elements, they were not in balance but the basics were all there, ready to build more if needed. A thread of primordial power was woven through all of them, not quite binding them together but strengthening them all the same.


    Before, I had followed the flow of Astral Power from outside into myself, to search for¡­ to search for myself, within myself, as absurd as that idea felt. Was I not the product of my mind, my body and my soul? Only with all three, I was me.


    Which made me wonder, how could I have been on Mundus? Was that metaphysical I ever there, if only part of me made the transition? Unless something rather whacky had been going on, my body had never made the transition, certainly my mind, maybe even my soul, but not my body. So, could I even claim to have ever met Sigmir, if the I needed to be all three?


    Shaking off the strange sensation, I followed to flow of power outside, to rejoin the world. The strange acute awareness of my body started to fade from focus and instead, I began to perceive the world again. First, I started to feel a faint chill on my skin, where a bit of sweat was slowly evaporating, cooling my body down. Next, I became aware of my limbs, the way my legs were folded beneath me, providing balance, how my hands were resting on my knees, even how my hair was falling down my back. There was something strange about my limbs, but I couldn¡¯t quite figure out what.


    Focusing past the barriers of my body, I focused on my environment. Smelling the air around me I found a potpourri of scents and instinctively started to catalogue them, even as my tongue flicked out, tasting the air to add some more information about my surroundings. The familiar scents of my companions were in the air, alongside the scent of dust, dirt and a bit of blood. That scent somehow always managed to cling to us, regardless of our showers.


    My ears started to add their own information to the picture, the soft rustling of cloth from the next room, the faint sounds of breathing from nearby, different sensations all allowing me to know the world without seeing it.


    Finally, my eyes blinked open once more, the darkness of the cellar we were occupying no barrier for my sight. I could feel blue boxes in the corner of my vision, waiting for my mind to acknowledge them. Letting out a soft breath, I knew I had succeeded.


    The first Divide, shattered before me.


    I am Dragon, hear me roar!

 Chapter 808

    Letting my eyes flicker down, I started to take in the notifications I had received for crossing the first Divide.


    <table style="border-collapse: collapse; width: 100%" border="1">


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 98.9983%">You have crossed the First Divide.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 98.9983%">By crossing the first Divide, your body was strengthened by the Astral River and the draconic Power flowing within you. You gain +10 to all Attributes.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table style="border-collapse: collapse; width: 100%" border="1">


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 98.9983%">


    Class Change


    </td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 98.9983%">By crossing the first Divide, your class has changed. You are now a Draconic Sorceress.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 98.9983%">You are no longer merely Touched by a Dragon, you have found the dragon within yourself and accessed a part of its power. You have chosen the Dragon¡¯s Claws and aligned them with your magic, greatly increasing its force.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 98.9983%">Your new class grants you an Attribute-Bonus of two Intelligence and one Intuition every five levels.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 98.9983%">Your new class grants you the trait: Draconic Magic</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table style="border-collapse: collapse; width: 100%" border="1">


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 98.9983%">Trait gained</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 98.9983%">You gained the trait: Draconic Magic</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 98.9983%">Draconic Might sings in your veins, turning any resistance against your powers into a futile struggle.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table style="border-collapse: collapse; width: 100%" border="1">


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 98.9983%">Trait strengthened</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 98.9983%">Your Dragon-Touched Trait has been strengthened.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 98.9983%">You have found and accepted the Dragon within yourself, accepting the Touch of your Elder Brother. The change within your body has been accelerated.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table style="border-collapse: collapse; width: 100%" border="1">


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 98.9983%">Title gained</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 98.9983%">You gained the title: Trailblazer.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 98.9983%">You are first on Terra to cross the first Divide. For that, you gain the title Trailblazer The Trailblazer-Title increases Courage when dealing with the unknown by 100%.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table style="border-collapse: collapse; width: 100%" border="1">


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 98.9983%">Special Ability gained</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 98.9983%">You gained the Special Ability: Draconic Leap</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 98.9983%">


    For having 25 Strength at your level you gained a fitting Special Ability. The Special Ability Draconic Leap allows you to bolster the power of your leaps, allowing the Dragon within you to take flight early.


    </td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table style="border-collapse: collapse; width: 100%" border="1">


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 98.9983%">Trait gained</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 98.9983%">You gained the trait: Quiet Steps</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 98.9983%">For having 25 Agility at your level, you gained a fitting Trait. The Trait Quiet Steps decreases the sound of your footfalls by 25%.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table style="border-collapse: collapse; width: 100%" border="1">


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 98.9983%">Trait gained</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 98.9983%">You gained the trait: Dexterous Enchanter</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 98.9983%">For having 25 Dexterity at your level, you gained a fitting Trait. The Trait Dexterous Enchanter increases your manual acuity while Enchanting by 50%.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table style="border-collapse: collapse; width: 100%" border="1">


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 98.9983%">Trait gained</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 98.9983%">You gained the trait: Astral Potency</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 98.9983%">For having 40 Intelligence at your level, you gained a fitting Trait. The Trait Astral Potency increases all effects of your Astral Power by 10%.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table style="border-collapse: collapse; width: 100%" border="1">


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 98.9983%">Trait gained</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 98.9983%">You gained the trait: Extra-Sensory Perception: Mind</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 98.9983%">For having 35 Intuition at your level you gained a fitting Trait. The Trait Extra-Sensory Perception: Mind greatly increases your ability to detect and understand all mental communication.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table style="border-collapse: collapse; width: 100%" border="1">


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 98.9983%">Trait gained</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 98.9983%">You gained the trait: Against all odds</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 98.9983%">For having 25 Courage at your level you gained a fitting Trait. The Trait Against all odds increases the effects of your Courage by 10% when outnumbered.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table style="border-collapse: collapse; width: 100%" border="1">


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 98.9983%">Trait gained</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 98.9983%">You gained the trait: Elemental Resilience</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 98.9983%">For having 25 Endurance at your level you gained a fitting Trait. The Trait Elemental Resilience increases the resistance you gain from your elemental affinities by 20%.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.


    <table style="border-collapse: collapse; width: 100%" border="1">


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 98.9983%">Trait gained.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 98.9983%">You gained the trait: Vital Resistance</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 98.9983%">For having 25 Vitality at your level you gained a fitting Trait. The Trait Vital Resistance increases your resistance to necrotic energy by 5%.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    For a moment, I could only stare at the long, long list before me. The traits themselves were a mixed bag, most of them minor in the greater picture but useful nonetheless. Though, some might be far more important than others, especially the Elemental Resilience Trait, simply because it scaled off my Elemental Affinities, something I had been increasing as much as possible. If I had gained such a trait on Mundus, it would have been nice, increasing my resistance to Ice, Darkness and Blood Magic, but now? Now, it increased my resistance to all magic, thanks to those nifty traits granting me affinities to all types of magic. It might be only a small amount of resistance in many cases, but getting it without any effort on my part was definitely worth it.


    The supposedly big traits were, amusingly, just as mixed a bag as the rest. Astral Potency sounded powerful but unless there was something I was missing, it merely increased my effective Astral Power by ten per cent. Powerful, yes, but at the same time not terribly interesting. The Extra-Sensory Perception, on the other hand, could either be incredibly powerful or just meh. If it was merely the perception to detect the communication of the Wiehtered, it would hopefully soon be useless, once I wiped them out. But if there was more, if it might even stretch to mental activity in general, it might be one of the most powerful traits I could gain. Time, and experimentation, would tell.


    But the big thing was definitely the increase of ten to every attribute. It was, frankly, insane, especially when combining it with the previous gains from Dragon-Touched, bringing the total up to fifteen in every attribute. Granted, five of those fifteen everyone would get upon crossing the first Divide, at least if my experience on Mundus could serve as an example of what was normal, but still, that left ten free points per attribute. Where everyone else had twenty points to distribute freely, I had half that as extra, in every attribute.


    And even my new class was quite insane, giving me another three points every five levels, to say nothing of what might come from the strengthened Dragon-Touched Trait.


    By now, my attributes other than Intelligence and Intuition rivalled those I had on Mundus, only that I had a much higher level there. Somehow, it was both intoxicating and rather scary. On Mundus, I had managed to amass enough power to destroy the world within two years and now, I was on course to become even more powerful. Luckily, I didn¡¯t seek to destroy another world, I just wanted my Sigmir back.


    A small part of me was curious about how attributes influenced reality. What could I do with that twenty-five strength, how strong was I actually, compared to other people? I had never really tried those things out, had never wanted to experience the physical side of things. But now, I started to become curious.


    Before focusing on the world around me, I realised something else, namely, I had still five points to spend. Intuition or Intelligence, the eternal question. If I judged things by the Attribute Gains I would receive from my class, Intelligence was more important, so maybe I should just push that. Either way, I could push the other at level fifty-five, though I had an inclining that getting there might take a bit.


    Amusingly, the deciding factor was a different one. If I wanted to use all five of my free attribute points to get the best possible traits, I¡¯d have to push another Attribute to thirty. Given that I could either push Courage or Agility, Courage sitting at twenty-eight, Agility at twenty-nine, it would fit if I pushed Intelligence from forty-one to forty-five, leaving one for Agility or Intuition from thirty-seven to forty, leaving two for Courage.


    So, unless I wanted to push Charisma to twenty-five, getting a possibly useless trait, taking Intelligence and Agility was the way to go.


    Which is what I did, netting me another pair of traits and bringing a grin to my face.


    <table style="border-collapse: collapse; width: 100%" border="1">


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 98.9983%">Trait gained</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 98.9983%">You gained the trait: Fluid Grace</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 98.9983%">For having 30 Agility at your level, you gained a fitting Trait. The Trait Fluid Grace greatly improves your ability to flow from one movement to the next, increasing your economy of movement.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table style="border-collapse: collapse; width: 100%" border="1">


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 98.9983%">Trait gained</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 98.9983%">You gained the trait: Astral Impression</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 98.9983%">For having 45 Intelligence at your level, you gained a fitting Trait. The Trait Astral Impression allows your Astral Power to engrave itself onto reality, leaving a lasting impression.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    The first trait sounded useful, improving my physical combat skills, especially when it came to dodging and, most likely, complex chains of movement. Things like leaping across obstacles while running without losing speed or even some more complex parkour manoeuvres.


    Astral Impression on the other hand could be fairly interesting, depending how it actually worked. Leaving a lasting impression might mean something akin to Wild Magic but it might also mean something far simpler, that I could now impress my magic directly into the items I wanted to craft, without having to try carving them manually or use Crystal or Earth Magic to shift the material.


    I would have to test those out, too, just like I had to test so many things. Like the Draconic Magic now flowing within me, what did the increased Force mean? Would I continue to be able to heal or would my magic do more harm than good?


    Shaking my head, I focused on my surroundings once more, knowing that only time would give me the answers I needed. Uncurling my legs, I pushed myself to rise, only to stumble, unsure what had happened. Letting out a curse as I gracelessly crashed to the ground, I realised that I was feeling constricted as if I was tied up. Only, there were no ropes, nothing to bind me but my clothes.


    Clothes that looked as if they were multiple sizes too small.

 Chapter 809

    The sounds of rushing footsteps caught up to me before I managed to do more than get to my knees. Instead of continuing to struggle, I looked only to see a flabbergasted Lia, staring at me in utter confusion.


    ¡°Mother?!¡± she asked, her eyes flickering around the room as if she was looking for something, ¡°Is this some joke?¡±


    ¡°No,¡± I replied, finally managing to get to my feet due to the tight clothes hindering me. I could barely move my arms and legs until I pushed a little too hard and a suspicious ripping sound set me reasonably free, something I immediately used to straighten myself. Now that I was standing tall, I realised why my clothes had been so tight. Either Lia had shrunk in the wash or I had, somehow, gained some ten centimetres in height. Stretching my arm out, to see just what had happened, I could see little difference, it was still my arm, still slender with pale, blue skin but at the same time, it wasn¡¯t. The arm felt too long, the joints out of sync with the rest of me, even if the proportions were mostly unchanged.


    ¡°I told you about the Divides, didn¡¯t I? And that I was planning to cross the first,¡± I asked, in lieu of an explanation and Lia¡¯s eyes visibly widened.


    ¡°They come with growth spurts?¡± she asked, amusement quickly replacing the confusion on her face.


    ¡°Apparently, you can¡¯t be a Dragon and wear size extra-extra-small, or something like that. I don¡¯t quite understand why it happened, only that it happened to me but I doubt it¡¯ll happen to you. It might, but I don¡¯t think so, Vampires aren¡¯t supposed to be giant-sized, are they?¡± I grinned, now finding quite a bit of amusement in the situation myself.


    Getting larger, taller, was an unexpected result of crossing the first Divide but it wasn¡¯t really an unpleasant one. There had always been a part of me that had been annoyed at my diminutive size, even if another, contradictory part had been gleeful, had gloried being petite but being able to kick people twice my size in the face. Now, my size was just on the smaller side of average giving me a few advantages but also disadvantages.


    ¡°So, how does this work anyway? You explained a little, but I still have no idea what to expect when it¡¯s time for me to cross the divide,¡± Lia pushed and I stepped forward with purpose, only for the sound of ripping fabric to tear through my intent of explaining to her what I knew. My movement had been enough to destroy my clothes to the point that fabric was falling, leaving me a little exposed.


    ¡°Give me a moment, and maybe some of your clothes, if you don¡¯t mind,¡± I asked, desperately trying to keep any mortification from showing on my face. It wasn¡¯t as if we hadn¡¯t seen each other naked, Lia was usually washing up while I conjured water for her and generally living in tight quarters wasn¡¯t conducive to modesty but nonetheless, I felt mortified at having literally burst through my clothes.


    ¡°Of course, Mother,¡± she nodded, walking back into the room she had set her stuff in, quickly coming back and handing me a shirt and some soft pants. Nothing great, and certainly no underwear, but it was good enough. In the meantime, I stripped off, a part of me remaining amused that being naked was less embarrassing than having the ripped remains of my previous clothes hanging off me, but I chalked it up to the loss of control. Being naked was a choice, having ripped through my clothes was not.


    Or something like that.


    Either way, once I had fresh clothes, we walked back into the other room and I realised that crossing the divide had taken far longer than I had anticipated, leaving us with no time to get anything else done during the night. Like, look for new clothes.


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    Instead, I settled in and tried my best to explain to the others what the first Divide entailed, contrasting my own experience now with what I knew about the experience on Mundus, what I had researched there and my own conclusions. I had told them most of the things I knew before, but now, I tried to form my knowledge into a concise and accurate lesson as I could. They all would soon face their own Divide and I wanted them to find the best way to cross theirs. Mine had given me immense benefits, I wanted my companions to have similar gains, even if I doubted the possibility.


    Dragon-Touched had been the primary reason for my success, of that I had no doubt. Hell, some of the notifications implied that there was a great deal more to the trait and to my connection to Dragons in general and the Nidh?gg in particular than I knew. The notification telling me that I had accepted my Elder Brother¡¯s Touch, it directly referenced the Nidh?gg calling me little sister and wasn¡¯t that a whole new can of worms?


    Little Sister of a being literally able to destroy the world? Maybe I just needed to grow up some more and I could destroy the world myself.


    The thought flickered through my mind, only to cause my brain to grind to an almost painful stop, my racing thoughts stopping so fast that they gave me whiplash. Growing up, just like the Dragon-Touched Trait said I was, growing up, maybe even in a literal fashion, as in, growing taller? Just like I had upon crossing the first Divide?


    I had no idea what to make of that idea, was I turning into a dragon? Or had I simply accepted something that had been within me all along?


    The memory of a large, snow-covered mountain, hidden in the clouds welled up from deep within my mind. I remembered slowly flying around that mountain, I remembered resting on its slopes, I even remembered tearing at a cursed injury within that mountain, the mountain that had always represented my Sigmir. And the cursed injury I had burned away from her very soul, using nothing but a breath of frozen, blue fire.


    Was I turning into a dragon? Or had I been one all along?


    But if that was true, why was it my class that was changing, not my race? I just didn¡¯t know, nor had I any idea how to find out, without simply continuing on my path. If that even was my path or maybe the question was, did I want it to be my path? Did I want to become a dragon?


    Reaching for the trace of draconic power within me had been a conscious choice when trying to cross the first divide. I could have tried reaching for other sources of power, maybe Hecate¡¯s blessing could have worked, or maybe the diverse elemental affinities and magics I had worked so hard to learn. Even the primal power of the moon would have been an option, it had been what I had used on Mundus.


    Each option would have led me to a different outcome, maybe a better one, maybe a worse one, if that was even applicable in this case. Was it better to have your power wax and wane with the Lunar Cycle, until one finally fell into the Madness of the Dark Moon, or was it better to take on Draconic Power, allowing your magic to become more forceful? Though even that had been a choice, I could have tried channelling the Draconic Power completely into my body, which would have yielded a different result yet again.


    Back when Road to Purgatory had been thought of as a game, there had been people searching for the perfect build. But there never was a consensus, what was the strongest? Was it to be unrivalled in a small area of expertise or was it to be capable in every way but not exceptional in any? Jack of all trades or Master of one?


    What would I want to be? I had actively and with great effort expanded the amount of Trades I was a Jack in, but had that set my mastery of others back? How strong would my Ice Magic be, if I had focused on it, to the exclusion of everything else?


    Every decision had consequences, every step in one direction was one I couldn¡¯t take in another, unless I wanted to start walking in circles, never getting anywhere.


    There were no right answers, only actions and their consequences. Right or Wrong was determined by those consequences and your own perception of them.


    A small part of me started to wonder, when did Magic and my progression on the Arcane Path become so similar to people? Without any definitive answers, without any straightforward and obvious solutions to pursue?


    By the time my lesson with my companions was over, exhaustion had me fully in its grasp, pushing me to do nothing but go to sleep. Hopefully, sleep would grant me some clarity, remove some of the questions dragged into my consciousness by the notifications and maybe even give me an idea of the best way forward.

 Chapter 810

    Getting used to the changes in my body was a weird experience. My instincts, the intuition and senses that were governing my body, were sharper than they had ever been, allowing me to move in a precise and determined fashion, only that my mind wasn¡¯t quite up to the task. If I simply moved, without actively thinking how I was moving, everything was fine but if I tried to think how I was moving, to consider distances and try judging them, things went wonky, fast. My arms were too long, my steps reached further than I anticipated and I managed to bang my head against various low obstacles more times than I was comfortable admitting.


    And it wasn¡¯t just a change in height. I had spent some time gazing into a mirror formed out of a combination of Water and Ice Magic, studying my features. It was odd, I still looked like myself, I could easily recognise the features I was used to seeing in my face but at the same time, I looked differently. As if the features I always had were now more obvious, the contours of my face sharper. A lot of the annoying soft roundness that had always given my face an air of childish immaturity was gone, leaving behind sharper edges and clear lines. I quite liked it, though the best feature, in my opinion, was the contrast between the deep, inky blackness of my hair and my pale, blue skin. I had always loved my hair but now, with the various elements I was gaining mastery over giving it a glittering shimmer and the contrast to my skin? For once, I enjoyed seeing my own reflection, a part of my mind wondering how Sigmir would react to the changes my body had undergone.


    Shopping, or rather looting, was similarly weird. Before, my first need when looking for clothes had been to ascertain that the clothes I might be interested in were available in my size, even before I could consider what I wanted to look like. Far too often, I had been left with fewer, or unappealing, options, simply because my body was too diminutive to fit into the normal-sized clothes. I had just been too far on the edge of the bell curve.


    But now, after my body had grown by crossing the First Divide, that problem was much attenuated. While I was still a little on the small side, still blessed with a slender body, I was close enough that the vast majority of clothes existed in sizes fitting for me. Looting around, the likelihood of failing to find clothes due to prior looting was far higher than the likelihood of failing to find clothes due to mismatched sizes.


    It was downright enjoyable to find clothes that truly fit me, to have the choice, especially once we broke into one of the high-end boutiques, a store with rather sturdy shutters that had sealed the place when the change happened. Nobody had managed to break into the place before we arrived but with the increases I had gained after crossing the divide, it was trivial. Inside, I had been able to find clothes that felt wonderful on my skin and it was there that I carefully chose my future outfits.


    I might have overdone it a little, putting quite a bit of focus on form while ignoring function but there was a part of me that wanted to have the wonderful clothes. The silk underwear, the garments that cost multiple times more than my monthly rent had been before the change, the indulgences that told the world you had too much money. Some of those felt like the comfortable embrace of an icy storm to me, cool and pleasant, almost akin to my own magic wrapping around me. Sure, others I happily tossed into the nearest corner, but some of the clothes were just divine, to the point that I was planning to enchant some of them, likely by embroidering them with my hair. The cloak I had made before was slowly unravelling, but it had served me quite well, making me think that I could replicate something, or maybe create something similar.


    But it wasn¡¯t just the high-end boutique that yielded some useful loot, we also broke into a few other stores, gathering clothes for me, with a few for Lia thrown in, making sure that we had things to wear. The constant battles were quite hard on our wardrobe, but by the end of our looting trip, all of us were weighed down with bags. Even Silva didn¡¯t escape, she, too, was forced to carry some of the clothes we found. As we moved, Lia kept making jokes about mother-daughter bonding by going shopping together, jokes that somehow only got more amusing when a few Undead tried to kill us, it added a wonderfully surreal element to the experience.


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    It also drove home again just how much crossing the divide had changed me. Not just on the physical side, which was easy to feel and see, but on the magical side. I had noticed before when breaking into the boutique, but in a fight, things became far more obvious.


    The fight against the undead, brief as it was, made it clear that I needed to put extra effort into mastering the difference crossing the divide had made in my magic. My power had increased, far beyond what the change in attribute points should have done, making me realise that there were multiple traits playing off each other to increase my power. I needed to learn just how my magic had been empowered, especially by the draconic magic trait. It was my primary class trait after all, and from what I could feel, it was a massive change.


    Back at our temporary base, we started to experiment, only to stumble across the first change almost immediately.


    Namely, when Lia asked to be fed after our excursion. Before I had crossed the divide, she had insisted on having a had a small ritual for her feeding. It was a simple, brief process where I cut my hand and let some blood infused with Astral power pool in my palm before allowing her to drink. Lia always reacted to drinking my blood, but it had been a mild one, like somebody taking a cool drink on a hot day. Pleasure, relief, comfort, those were the sensations Lia had described before.


    Not any longer, now, with the different changes to my Astral Power, drinking my blood had sent Lia to the ground, shaking as if she was being electrocuted. It took almost a minute for her to restrain her shaking body, making me realise just how potent a sensation it must have been.


    Her description was fairly intense, to the point that she considered trying to draw Astral Power from Withered in the future, simply because mine had become too overwhelming. When I listened to her, she sounded more scared than excited, making me wonder just what she had felt in that moment. But given that she didn¡¯t go into details, I wasn¡¯t comfortable pushing my daughter on them. Either way, we now knew that she should try getting her power elsewhere unless she liked doing the safety dance.


    But there were other changes to my magic, changes that only started to manifest as I used my spells. The force, the impact and penetration of all my spells had increased. For offensive spells, that was a wonderful boon, allowing my workings to easily pierce through flesh, bone or stone, to the point that I thought I might be able to bring down buildings with my Ice Magic, while being confident that I could start breaking through solid walls with my Earth Magic.


    Sadly, that made the subtler magic arts more difficult. Healing, for one, was challenging, trying to keep my Astral Power contained enough to stop it from wreaking havoc within the target¡¯s body was almost as difficult as healing wounds in the first place. No matter what I tried, my healing spells would take more out of the body of the people I healed, though I had a feeling that the spells would make a greater difference in turn.


    There was, as always, an equilibrium between power and control, the power of my spells had gone up, disturbing the equilibrium until I managed to bring my control up to the same level. Sadly, I couldn¡¯t just reduce the power I used, the efficiency wouldn¡¯t change, I would get the same effect as I would before the change, but I would retain the proportional side-effects.


    Maybe healing was just not for me, certainly not the healing of weaker people. Healing my companions wasn¡¯t a problem, not unless they were gravely wounded and exhausted, in such circumstances my healing might do more harm than good but for the usual cuts and scrapes I was sufficient.


    Maybe the biggest change I experienced was in my ability to enchant items. Where before, it had been a slow, ponderous process to gauge the lines needed for magic to flow through an enchanted item, the increased force, and possibly the Astral Impression trait, made it far easier. By simply forcing the runes into the metal of a blade, I could get the initial form, before slowly letting a slow wedge of Crystal Astral Power flow into the runes, carving the needed channels. It might not be the perfect technique, I noticed there was a bit of damage to the items I enchanted, likely reducing their durability, but it was far better than anything I had been able to do before.


    But with a first, successful experiment completed, I now could begin to refine the process. I was curious about where that particular path might lead me in the future.

 Chapter 811

    Slowly pushing my Astral Power into a ring I was enchanting, I felt the small ripples and flares as my magic tried to make contact, to complete the cycle. Minute changes allowed me to track where I needed to push a little harder, and where I needed to force the issue to make it so the enchantment would work out.


    It was the first actual ring I was enchanting, as opposed to a few more or less suitable knives. Those had worked out pretty well, to the point that the system recognised them as uncommon and had bestowed the Enchanting skill upon me. As I continued working on them, I even gained a few points in the skill, making me think that it was time to try something new. Similarly, working with the Enchanting Skill had increased my Crystal Magic by yet another point, bringing it to nine.


    Namely, rings. This ring wasn¡¯t just supposed to make wounds cut by the blades I was enchanting worse, turning them into cursed wounds that kept bleeding, the ring I was enchanting was supposed to increase an attribute while it was worn. Only strength, so the items weren¡¯t truly suitable for me, but even if an extra point or two of Strength didn¡¯t make a difference to me, it made a difference to Lia or Silva. Or to Alex, who might be the one who¡¯d benefit the most from such a ring, simply because their combat style needed a certain level of strength to get their tinker-toys into the right area. Sure, the sling and slingshot they were using helped, giving them extra range and accuracy, or allowing them to send multiple projectiles in quick succession, but slinging an item, or drawing back the slingshot required strength. And strength was, most likely, their weakest attribute. Having a few extra points might be incredibly worthwhile for them, allowing them to focus their free points, if they received something like that, on different areas.


    Just as I thought I found the right way with the ring, a noise disturbed my concentration, causing me to flinch and my Astral Power to push in a slightly wrong direction, messing up the channel I had been carving. Letting out a soft curse when I realised the ring might be spoiled beyond my ability to fix, I closed my eyes, trying to keep frustration from making me toss it against the wall. It wouldn¡¯t help, not in the slightest, and it would only mean I needed to pick it up again.


    Instead, after acknowledging that the failure had pushed my Enchanting skill to level four, I opened my eyes and checked where the noise had come from.


    Standing in the door, was Lia, looking at me with a bit of concern in her eyes.


    ¡°Mother, we are almost out of food for you,¡± she told me, causing me to frown. I hadn¡¯t really been paying attention to our supplies, a foolish mistake if there ever was one, though when thinking about it, I realised we had hung around this area far longer than I had originally planned.


    ¡°Also, it¡¯s almost night, you told me to remind you. If you don¡¯t eat soon, we¡¯ll be wasting darkness, I know how much you loathe that,¡± she added, a cheeky grin on her face. Letting out a snort, I pushed myself out of my lotus position, having noticed that the traditional way of sitting helped me concentrate and even focused my magic, though only to a minor degree. When experimenting with the complex enchantments, I could use any help I could get, even if I needed to stretch afterwards for a bit.


    ¡°Thank you, we might need to take a night or two to get some fresh supplies. Hopefully, the city hasn¡¯t been completely looted clean of non-perishable goods, I fear that everything that could perish already has,¡± I nodded, shaking off the annoyance I had felt when she interrupted me. I had asked her earlier, but time had run away from me. With the quickly advancing spring, the days were getting far too long for my taste, leaving us far fewer hours of blessed night to work with. Soon, we¡¯d be limited to a scant couple of hours every night, greatly limiting my options for outside work. I would have to make sure to have something prepared for those long, boring days, I certainly wasn¡¯t looking forward to them.


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    I was incredibly glad that my affinities had expanded, decreasing the suffering I would be under from the heat, or I might just melt into a puddle of highly annoyed elven goo. Firn Elves, even those with some draconic tendencies, weren¡¯t made for the heat, I wanted some frozen tundra with blizzards and bitingly cold wind, not the muggy heat we¡¯d be exposed to soon. Hopefully, I¡¯d manage to get enough power by that point to turn part of our cellar into a permanent winter wonderland for me to relax in, regardless of how hot it got outside. I probably was already there, but it depended on the temperature, the size and the insulation of the area I picked. I mean, how big was the difference between a nice winter wonderland and a fridge, there couldn¡¯t be that much of one, right?


    ¡°Do you think we can head towards the outskirts? Maybe not necessarily to the farm, but at least to the fields, I¡¯d like to have some Blood that isn¡¯t either potent enough to knock me for a loop or tasting of rancid grease. Hunting down a few animals might just be what the doctor ordered,¡± Lia asked, giving me her best attempt at puppy-dog eyes. Given that I had caught her training those with the help of a few of the dogs from our Army of Dogs, her approximation was quite accurate by now. I was still able to resist, even if it took me a lot of effort and made me wonder when I¡¯d get the notification that I gained some sort of title as a heartless monster or something along those lines.


    I could understand her desire to have some normal blood. The few times she had taken in mine, since I had crossed the Divide had left her out of it for hours, to the point that she had complained about a splitting headache for the rest of the night. While there might be a beneficial effect, simply from the too-potent power within, I could see why she didn¡¯t want to suffer from the side-effects while in hostile territory.


    ¡°Certainly, I¡¯m sure Silva would enjoy some fresh meat and I wouldn¡¯t be against it, either. This change I have undergone left me a little famished,¡± I admitted, knowing that my body was trying to compensate for the rather major shift I had undergone, leaving me starved for the actual building blocks I was composed of. Sure, I had eaten extra rations but the canned goods and non-perishable foods we had didn¡¯t exactly provide a balanced diet. It also wouldn¡¯t surprise me if a dragon¡¯s diet was more directed towards the carnivore side, as opposed to the mostly vegetarian, at times even vegan, diet I previously had preferred.


    It didn¡¯t take us long to pack what little we needed to get going. Just a spare set of clothes, our weapons and some food, nothing heavy, nothing cumbersome, just enough to make it through a day or two, more if I bothered to carefully launder the clothes with my magic. By now, magical laundry had been something I could almost do in my sleep, Water Magic coming in clutch once more, but it wasn¡¯t something I enjoyed. But it was better than stinking to the high heavens. It was quite amusing how simple some parts of life became with broad magical abilities, something I realised every time we visited the farm. Compared to the general state of people there, Lia and I were living the high life, especially now that I had gained the Zevarra Agha.


    Some of the spells the Grandmother had included within were household spells, something I had found quite amusing back on Mundus. Why would I truly care for my ripped clothes in a game, so how useful was the strange non-elemental spell to mend clothes actually? Incredibly useful when living in a broken society where few people have the skill to actually stitch clothes back together, let alone smoothly mend them together. Sure, I could only cast that particular spell while holding my book and I had no idea how it actually worked but it did, so I wasn¡¯t overly bothered. The only downside was, I couldn¡¯t teach the spell to anyone, given that I had no idea how it worked. Other than, follow the damn instructions, channel magic into the formations on the page and wave your glowing hand over the tears you want to fix.


    Maybe it was something I should put some extra effort into, so I could teach it, even if a part of me wondered if keeping the spell to myself wasn¡¯t worth it, simply to retain a certain mystery and prestige. A subtle showing of my power, demonstrating that I was better than them. At least better dressed.


    But that was a consideration for later. Now, Lia and I were travelling through the city, happy to let the Withered remain where they were for a few days, glad that we didn¡¯t have to fight for our lives as we did every night. Even slightly insane elves and literally blood-thirsty vampires needed a bit of relaxation every now and then, even if relaxing for us was to acquire the supplies we needed for more killing.


    Acquiring supplies, most likely by killing things.


    I really needed a better hobby, maybe a vacation. Somewhere cold and dark.

 Chapter 812

    Hunting down something suitable for Lia to snack on had taken quite a bit longer than I originally had thought. We had ventured into the fields around the city, checking out a different part of the area instead of heading back towards the farm, but the fields there were just as deserted as the rest.


    Maybe it was due to prior urbanisation, large swathes of land in the area had been turned into suburban developments, replacing the golden fields of wheat and corn with white picket fences, white-washed homes and a disturbingly uniform assortment of lawns and hedges. Either way, it took us a bit of time but Silva managed to pick up a scent, allowing us to follow after what I was reasonably certain was a hog of some sort. I wasn¡¯t quite sure how wild the previously domesticated pigs had become over the last two months, but it was an interesting thing to watch. It was almost like domestication happened in reverse, just instead of it happening over the course of many generations, the change had made it happen in a few months. It made me wonder if my transformation into a Firn Elf was something similar, that maybe there was some sort of evolutionary connection. The idea somehow disturbed me, with it being in such a direct contradiction to the information I had received in the capsule when making my Avatar and later on Mundus. Maybe I didn¡¯t want there to be a connection, maybe I truly wanted to believe that I was something other than human. That I was supposed to be something else?


    Sometimes, I didn¡¯t understand my own mind, let alone the strange twinges, shivers and bubbling sensations I occasionally felt since the change. At times, I felt as if something was pulling at me, altering my thoughts and pulling at my reason. There was a part of me that felt confident in what it might be, reminded me that I had felt the same sensations on Mundus, making me wonder if it was somehow related to the Legacy of Morgana, or maybe to my blessing.


    Whatever the case may be, it was something I had been trying to keep an eye on, simply because I didn¡¯t relish the idea that there was something other than my mind controlling my body. Something¡­ irrational.


    The only relief I felt about the situation was that the sensations were, almost certainly, not bestowed upon me from outside of myself. They were too fluid, too chaotic for that while, at the same time, too consistent. In addition, there was no sensation of magic around me, no unfamiliar scents or anything that I could detect. If anyone were to try influencing me from the outside, while having enough skill and power to prevent me from detecting the attempt, they¡¯d do something more useful than put a strange, fluttering sensation into my gut when thinking about Sigmir, right?


    Even right now, as we were tracking the hog, there were some shivers running down my spine, pushing my body into a state of alert. Vigilant, paranoid, cautious, a mix of battle-ready and anticipating the coming action, knowing that we would fight soon.


    It didn¡¯t take long for us to find the pig, as it was resting between some shrubs. Thanks to Silva, we were forewarned, allowing me to move quietly into position and strike with my Mind Magic. It was my old staple, a simple, almost crude, blast with my Mind Magic that stunned the pig, giving me enough time to push it into unconsciousness. There was little to no damage to it, not even any real harm, it was merely asleep. For now.


    Lia quickly moved in after my attack struck, while I started to move the earth with my magic, carefully creating holes right under the pig¡¯s legs. Pushing the earth aside like I did compressed it into the surroundings, hardening the walls of my little pitfalls as the pig¡¯s legs slid in with a bit of guidance from Lia. Once the legs were buried in the ground, the pig was completely immobilised, simply because it couldn¡¯t get any traction. It¡¯s legs couldn¡¯t bend, and its feet didn¡¯t touch anything, making it impossible to do more than wiggle around. Even if it did manage to somehow roll over, doing so would almost certainly break its legs, unless it was resilient enough to dig them out with the movement. Incredibly unlikely, but given what attribute points and skills could do, I wasn¡¯t completely certain.


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    But the plan worked out perfectly. There was no resistance as I walked up, drawing one of the blades I had enchanted as I did. It wasn¡¯t a real athame, the only enchantment the blade had was one that would make the wound difficult to close, but it was better than nothing.


    A swift cut and blood started to quickly flow from the pig¡¯s neck, the pain enough to break through the Mind Magic I had put on it, causing it to frantically wiggle around as it made a racket to the best of its ability. Not that it had a lot of ability in that regard, immobilised as it was, but it certainly tried.


    But it couldn¡¯t stop me from placing a hand over the bleeding wound, using my Blood Magic to draw out its magical essence. Maybe it was thanks to my additional ability in Water Magic, maybe I simply had never actively tried to do anything fancy with Blood once it was out of the body but I was now able to magically move the liquid around without touching it. Not a terribly useful skill most of the time, but it certainly kept my hands clean in the literal sense. Amusingly, Lia wasn¡¯t a huge fan of it, she apparently liked to be fed from my hand, even if my blood was a little too hot for her, after I had crossed the divide. Maybe if she crossed it herself in a week or so, but for now, it would overwhelm her.


    As Lia sated herself, refilling her reserves, I began to wonder. On Mundus, there had been Blood Crystals, somewhat useful orbs made from magically enriched Blood, allowing the storage of Astral Power for later use. They had serious drawbacks, mostly in their highly limited shelf-life and the fact that they had a minute aura of Miasma, attracting Nethersprites, but they had their uses. While the aura had been an annoyance on Mundus, especially after I had gained multiple Deflier-Traits, I had yet to come across a Nethersprite on Terra. Without that trait increasing the amount of Miasma my Blood Magic created, though it also increased the amount of Power I could draw, it might be a serviceable idea to create a few Blood Crystals. It certainly would give me that extra punch when the time came to attack the Withered seriously. Rituals were about power, it didn¡¯t matter where that power came from.


    Carrying a few marble-sized crystals around was far preferable to lugging around life sacrifices, especially given that the sacrifices couldn¡¯t be too damaged in transport or they¡¯d lose their value. Something to look into, once Lia was happy.


    Sadly, the pig was just too weak to have more than a few dregs left over after Lia had sated her thirst. Certainly not enough to create anything useful. Once it expired, we proceeded to the next step of our supply run, namely butchering the pig. We weren¡¯t completely efficient, we didn¡¯t bother taking some of the more annoying, and less desirable, parts of the pig, instead taking only the good parts for ourselves while allowing Silva to gnaw on the rest.


    Suddenly, as Silva was going to town on her feast, her head shot up and she let out a soft growl, the noise she used to warn us of unseen enemies. My own reaction was to let my tongue flick out, trying to scent if there was magic in the air, as my eyes darted around, looking for what Silva had noticed.


    Finding nothing, I realised that the wind had shifted a little, carrying scents from elsewhere to Silva¡¯s nose. So, we couldn¡¯t really know how far away the enemies were, only in which direction they were.


    ¡°Engage or leave?¡± I quietly asked Silva, knowing that she was the best to make an informed decision, given that she had all the information we had.


    She let out another growl, licking up what little blood had stained her snout and started to move forward. It was clear that she wanted to hunt down whatever she had noticed, her intent almost as strong as back when we had first met the army of dog.


    Quietly, like ghosts in the night, Lia and I started after Silva, Alex keeping hold of Lia¡¯s cowl. They liked riding on her shoulder until it was time to engage or there was a need to split up. But now, we just needed to go somewhere, to do something only Silva knew about. But she was determined to see whatever it was done.

 Interlude: Survivors 401

    ¡°They¡¯re still out there,¡± a quiet voice whispered in the night, after taking a quick glance through a dirty, cracked window. Outside, he had seen a group of maybe twenty of the shambling bodies, led by one with eyes of blue fire, a Shattered as they were called.


    They were out there and had been for two days. And they weren¡¯t leaving.


    So far, things had worked out for their small group, they had managed to hole up in the community centre of the suburban development they all had been living in, the location helping with their needs. There were multiple supermarkets nearby, something the developers of the area had used as advertising for the area, though they mainly had considered it as good for shopping, not as advantageous to gather supplies during an apocalypse. But at the end of the day, shopping was just looting you had to pay for, so it worked out just fine. At times, some of their group had even dropped some cash in the stores, to pay for the items taken and as an ironic gesture, knowing that the money was only worth the paper it was printed on. Others had taken to using money as toilet paper or trying to use it to light fires, only to realise that money didn¡¯t burn easily.


    Sadly, the same was true for the zombies. Sure, their clothes could be lit on fire but the flesh beneath wasn¡¯t too bothered by that. Some of their group had tried, mostly by using traps and everything from barbecue-lighter to deodorant, with gasoline and propane in between, but their efforts had only been met with limited success. What worked in the video-games of days long gone didn¡¯t work in the reality they found themselves in, not even filling gas into red barrels and shooting the barrels with arrows made them explode. Somebody had tried.


    That might be the best description possible for their collective attempts to fight the Undead. They tried. But most of the time, things didn¡¯t work and those who decided to fight had to run, capitalising on the fact that neither Shattered nor the Undead which had risen after the first month were actually fast. Nor were they actively trying to hunt down the survivors, they would happily attack if you moved into their territory, they would pursue for a bit but if you managed to get far enough from them, they¡¯d just wander off, back to where they came from. And yet, despite that lack of active pursuit, a few of those who had gone out never returned to the group. Some died, others simply vanished, never to be seen again.


    That had been the pattern for over two months, head out, gather supplies, get chased by monsters and escape from them. It had been, until two days ago. That night, when one of the groups out, gathering, had returned late in the evening, the pattern changed and the pack of Undead following after them made the change obvious.


    What they expected to happen was that the Undead wander around, maybe try to breach the heavy fire-safety doors of the community centre, only to wander off after they failed in doing so.


    Only, that wasn¡¯t what had happened.


    The Undead had started to wander around and had banged a few times on the doors, before returning to their wanderings, never leaving the immediate area. Leaving the survivors trapped inside, with continuously diminishing supplies and little hope to get away without a fight. There were too many Undead, they didn¡¯t have any useful traps, leaving them without a way to fight the Undead off.


    Fleeing was an option but it would force them to leave some of their useful supplies behind and, much worse, leave some of their members. As two of their number were watching the Undead shuffle around outside, in the dim light of the moon, the wail of a baby cut through the night, reminding them of the precious cargo their group was protecting.


    There were five children with them, two actual babies within the first months of their precious lives and three slightly older children, though none of them were older than six. They were, maybe ironically, what held the group together, all the adults were parents, or they used to be. Their children lost in the change, but their memory was still living on. Still driving them to protect these other children.


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    Until now, that is. With the Undead literally at the door, some of those who had lost their children were beginning to wonder. Would they sacrifice themselves to protect the children of others or would they try and make a break, either alone or with a few others, leaving the children and those who sought to protect them on their own?


    Callous, maybe even cruel, but at the end of the day, they wanted to survive. Survive, to live another day.


    Deep in the night, a different noise than the usual cry of a baby disrupted the night, waking those who had managed to catch some sleep. It took those on watch a few seconds to place the noise, the howl that seemed to echo in the quiet night. There were no answering howls, nothing that indicated what was going on, just the loud, disquieting noise.


    One of them glanced through the narrow gaps in the window, the moon giving just enough light to see the shuffling Undead, only for one of the shapes he could see to suddenly disappear. As if it had been swallowed by the night, the darkness rising up to devour the shuffling body.


    Frowning, the guard tried to get a better look, almost putting his head against the glace, when a cold wind caught him off-guard, far too cold for the middle of spring. For a moment, he could almost see snowflakes fluttering from the sky and hear the howling of a winter storm before he shook the sensation off and looked outside again. Only to be completely confused once again.


    The Undead were gone, not even the bright blue flames of that Shattered were visible, just a few lumpy shapes on the ground, unmoving and quiet.


    ¡°There¡¯s something out there,¡± the guard called out, getting the attention of everyone in the area. There was an immediate stampede to the windows, as people tried to see what that ¡®something¡¯ was.


    The first to see anything but dim shadows was one of the children, the oldest, a girl of just six years. She noticed a faint shimmer of light, trailing some shiny sparkles, almost akin to a fairy. Her call made people pay even more attention, trying to figure out what was going on, even as they noticed that the shapes of the Undead were rapidly vanishing.


    ¡°There,¡± another called out, pointing towards one shape in particular. That one shape was different from the others, not only was it moving slowly, almost deliberately, but there was also a faint shimmer to it as if they were coated in sparkling dust. As the people inside watched spellbound, they noticed the occasional explosion of light as the figure moved their hands, the sparkles just enough to give them a faint glimpse of that approaching being.


    ¡°A fairy,¡± the young girl whispered, as she was watching the figure come closer.


    Finally, the figure reached the doors of their shelter and as they came closer, the moonlight was enough to make out a few more features. Clearly female, pale with long, black hair that sparkled in a myriad of colours, as if there were tiny flecks of glitter strewn about it. Next to her, padding along at the same pace, was a massive dog, almost reaching the woman¡¯s hip, with thick, fluffy fur but also sharp teeth that seemed to glow in the moonlight.


    ¡°What is about these people that interests you so?¡± the figure mused as the pair reached the door, raising her hand to knock, as if nothing was going on. As if it wasn¡¯t the middle of the night, as if there hadn¡¯t been undead roaming around the area. As if it was merely a neighbour visiting, maybe to ask for some sugar.


    None of the survivors dared to move, so stunned by the situation that they didn¡¯t even notice that the young girl who had seen the glittering lights outside simply walked to open the door.


    ¡°Are you a fairy?¡± the girl asked, looking at the woman before her with wide eyes. Soft laughter answered her for a moment, accompanied by a chuffing noise from the dog that echoed the amusement.


    ¡°No, little one,¡± the woman gently replied, only to realise that the girl could barely see her. With another amused chuckle, the woman raised her hand, cupping it as if she was trying to hold something inside, when she suddenly did and a flame floated in her cupped hand, letting everyone see the woman clearly. A lean physique, with a finely chiselled face, long limbs and that deep black hair, almost as if somebody had spilt ink down her back. The hair made the strange, pale blue skin stand out even more, making the people inside wonder just what was visiting them. If it was better to start running.


    ¡°Samantha?!¡± one of the mothers squeaked out, clearly not expecting to see a familiar face come knocking in the night.

 Chapter 813

    Moving alongside Silva, it didn¡¯t take us long to find what she had sniffed out. There were quite a few Undead, led by a single Shattered, scattered around a large building, similar to the YMCA the other group of survivors had occupied all those weeks ago. Only, the Undead didn¡¯t appear to be in their usual holding pattern, wandering around as they repeated whatever their body had done habitually in the area they were in. Instead, they were moving in what I could only identify as a loop, walking in circles around the area, as if there was something keeping them here.


    Curious about what was going on, I decided to do a few tests, partially because there were still quite a few things I wanted to test after crossing the divide and partially because I wanted to know what made these Undead different from their brethren. Or maybe why they acted differently, there might not be an actual difference.


    But whatever the case, the first thing I did was target the Shattered and launch my Frozen Shuttle at it. Immediately, I realised that the shuttle needed some tuning, my power was a little too much for it, judging by the glittering sparks it trailed on its way to the Shattered. That normally only happened when I used Overflow to push as much Astral Power as possible in an attack with it, only that I wasn¡¯t doing that. Apparently, my power had increased to the point that a usual attack with it had the same effect as an overpowered one had before I crossed the divide, with the same side-effects, namely the shedding of excess Astral Power as sparkling glitter. Maybe there was a way to turn that excess into something useful, like a temporary increase of the Shuttle¡¯s durability, or its velocity or something along those lines, but that was for later research. For now, the shuttle worked as intended, only it didn¡¯t work as well as intended. Runes, inscribed into the shuttle, might be the way to go. But later.


    My attack struck the Shattered in the torso, easily piercing through its chest and spine, sending it to the ground. It had been incredibly low-levelled, barely level twenty, making me wonder how it had survived. There had to be people out here who hunted them, right? But maybe that was the reason why the Shattered and its Undead were in this area, they might have fled from the Withered or even from survivors hunting them. The idea brought a grin to my face, the image of a bunch of ragged survivors running after the Shattered and its herd of Undead like some sort of primitive hunters running after their prey was just amusing. A much better image than that of a bunch of Undead shambling after a group of desperate survivors who wanted to do nothing but escape. Luckily, the Undead were rather slow and while Shattered had okay explosive strength, to lunge or strike, their actual, sustained footspeed was pathetic.


    Softly whistling to myself, I decided that the Shuttle didn¡¯t really need more testing. As I pulled it back, I let it causally swipe a few of the Undead, just to see how they¡¯d react and was a little surprised when two of the three I struck simply fell over. Sure, their level was far beneath mine but I hadn¡¯t even tried.


    But with their level this low, and Silva insisting that we took them down, I decided to get a little more creative. For example, how far could I push the Devour-Rune?


    Flicking my fingers, I quickly drew a simple runic formation of Devour, Curse and Darkness into the air, focusing on one of the nearby Undead before channelling power into it. I could faintly feel Titanic Ambition supercharging me, my thoughts becoming incredibly clear and my magic brimming with power, as I watched the Shadows rise around the Undead I had targetted. Astral Power was flowing out of me, far more than reasonable for an enemy at this level, but moments later, the flow stopped and the shadows I had conjured disappeared. Blinking in disbelief, I looked at the spot the shadows had been moments earlier, trying to find any remnants of the Undead, only to come up empty. There was nothing left of a human-sized body. Sure, it had taken a good chunk of Astral Power but to simply destroy that much matter was a surprise. One that I wanted to study, I wanted to know where the matter had gone to. Was it truly gone or was it hidden in the shadows somewhere? If it was hidden, could I retrieve the body at a later point? If yes, what state would the body be in, and how much effort was required to retrieve it? Those, alongside a few other questions, might answer whether it was possible to use this idea to create some sort of shadow storage.


    This story originates from a different website. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.


    The magic bags on Mundus had been rather ubiquitous, but I had never learned how to make one, that knowledge had been monopolised by the Mages¡¯ Guild and hadn¡¯t been easily shared. The Guild had made sure that the bags were cheap, likely to ascertain nobody tried to force them to share the knowledge, but that didn¡¯t help me here. The closest thing I had to that was my book, stored in my soul, and I doubted that was something I could replicate easily. But this, the devouring of a body, might be something I could start working with.


    Shaking my head once more, I filed the idea away for later and continued moving towards the building Silva was so focused on. There were a few more Undead and I kept testing things, at times combining runes into new spells, as I made my way forward. One such spell used a combination of cold, wind and blood in an attempt to literally freeze the blood of the Undead in a wide area, though that one wasn¡¯t as efficient as I had hoped. Sure, it worked, but at the end of the day, I could make a lot of things work, if I only threw enough Astral Power into the mix. But just because a spell produced an effect, even if that effect was enough to destroy one of the Undead, didn¡¯t mean it was a useful spell if it took a hundred times the Astral Power I¡¯d normally need. And given how I had dispatched a few of these Undead with just a few points of Astral Power and the frozen shuttle, that was saying something.


    As I got close to the building, the scents and noises clued me in to why Silva had guided us here. There were people inside, though they seemed to be rather incompetent, given that they had been surrounded and that there had been no guards in sight. Nor had they challenged me, or destroyed any of the Undead, at least I couldn¡¯t see any bodies.


    Whatever the case, it was rather interesting, why were they here and why in this condition? Surely, a group of survivors had the ability to deal with a single Shattered and two dozen of these Undead, they weren¡¯t even high-level.


    Wondering about the circumstances, I kept dispatching the Undead, noticing how Lia was moving to the other side of the building, likely to make sure there were no extra Undead over there. More experiments yielded a few more interesting results, showing me once again just how much my power had grown after crossing the Divide, but maybe that was a given. With the points I had spent, I had increased my Intelligence by almost fifty per cent, to say nothing about the increases in my other attributes.


    By the time I reached the, admittedly, incredibly heavy door of the building, a community centre as the sign out front told me, my earlier amusement was replaced with a faint annoyance. Even now, there had been no challenge and judging by the dents and scratches in the door, these people were completely content to sit in their hidey-hole and play turtle.


    ¡°What is about these people that interests you so?¡± I asked Silva, wondering why she was so insistent that we had come here. There had to be other human groups out there, but Silva had only been interested in the Army of Dog, never in humans.


    Whatever the case, I decided to act completely casual and simply walked up to their door, knocking on it as if there was nothing going on here. As if this was just a normal day and I was a simple visitor, though in that case, I might have simply pushed the door open, or at least tried to.


    For a few seconds, nothing happened and I could almost feel the confusion on the other side of the wall, the sensation bringing a grin to my face. Maybe it was part of my newly acquired extra-sensory perception of minds, or maybe the confusion was thick enough to permeate through walls, either way, I had to stifle a giggle.


    Just before I could knock again, the door was opened from the inside and I looked at a little girl. Not a petite woman, even if the girl was far too close to my old height to make me comfortable, but a little girl, just a child. Before I could get angry at the adults for sending a child into possible danger, the girl looked at me with wide eyes and asked whether I was a fairy.


    For a moment, I couldn¡¯t answer before a soft chuckle escaped me at the absurdity of it all.


    ¡°No, little one,¡± I replied, still chuckling while Silva let out an amused chuff next to me. Realising that these were humans and the night was dark, I decided to show off a bit, reaching out and conjuring a flame in my hand to have some light.


    In the short time before my eyes could adjust to the sudden brightness, a voice inside let out a surprised gasp. And called me by my name.


    Curious, indeed.

 Chapter 814

    For a moment, I was rather flabbergasted at hearing my old name. Sure, it was still mine and I still responded to it, but I hadn¡¯t been called Samantha for quite some time. Mrs Wu was the only one who knew to use it but she rarely did, mainly using Jade, though she occasionally slipped up. Getting addressed as such, in a place like this, was quite a surprise, though when I looked into the room, I realised it shouldn¡¯t be.


    ¡°Jenn,¡± I nodded, studying my old acquaintance. She didn¡¯t look good, there were deep bags under her eyes, exhaustion etching deep lines into her face. There was a faint scent of despair in the air, tickling my nose and making me itch a little. ¡°How are you?¡±


    My question confused her, she just blinked at me, while gaping like a landed fish. Maybe it was the causal manner in which I asked, maybe it was the absurdity of the situation, but I realised that, if these people were truly as pathetic as they looked like, my question might have been odd.


    ¡°We¡¯re fucked,¡± one of the others exclaimed, ignoring that there were multiple small children, and a few older kids, present.


    ¡°How did you get here?¡± another asked, making me wonder if these people were all idiots. Maybe they had been tainted with some fungal infection, something similar to the Withered, that made them stupid. It might explain why they had been hanging out in the dark, waiting for the Undead outside to get them.


    ¡°I walked through the door, after destroying the trash outside,¡± I replied, before shaking my head and focusing on the young girl who had originally opened the door. At least she had the excuse of being a literal child, making me give her the benefit of the doubt when it came to stupidity. Children were supposed to be stupid after all. Stupid and cruel.


    ¡°Little one, why did you think I¡¯m a fairy?¡± I asked the child, studying her face. She didn¡¯t look like much, rather thin, though not in the petite way I had been thin but in the way a starved child was thin, with large, blue eyes and thin blonde hair that was cut short haphazardly.


    ¡°Cause you are pretty and you glitter,¡± the girl responded, a wide smile on her face. Somehow, that only made me chuckle a little more, there was an innocence about her that I couldn¡¯t seem to hate.


    ¡°Samantha, what are you¡­ How are you here?¡± Chris asked, making me realise that one of the thin and dirty guys that stank up the space was my old friend, having apparently gathered some of the wits he once had.


    ¡°I have been roaming the area when my dear Silva here,¡± I gently petted the massive canine head next to me, ¡°caught your scent and indicated that there was something to investigate here. She was quite insistent, so we showed up, saw the Undead and dealt with them. Trash that they were,¡± I explained, knowing that it likely wasn¡¯t the answer they were looking for. They seemed to think that they just had to wait long enough for help to arrive, maybe thinking the government or something would rescue them. Learning that we weren¡¯t really here for them, nor actually interested, wasn¡¯t what they had hoped for.


    ¡°Anyway, why are you smelling like you haven''t washed in months, don¡¯t you know that basic sanitation is important to ward off disease?¡± I asked, shaking my head as I simply walked into their space, confident that nobody here was a threat to me, not as long as I remained somewhat vigilant. Amusingly, the looks I was getting in response to my question were a strange mix of confusion and anger, making me wonder if they had formed some sort of cult to bad hygiene.


    ¡°With what water?¡± one of the women growled out, while others voiced similar questions.


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    Rubbing my temple, I realised that these people hadn¡¯t figured out basic water magic, maybe hadn¡¯t even realised that magic was a thing.


    ¡°I guess I¡¯ll have to give you people a small how-to survive in this horrible new world of ours,¡± I looked over to Jenn and Chris, noticing the baby boy she was holding. A toddler, nothing but a burden in this situation, and yet, they had managed to keep their child safe. If nothing else, that was something I felt should be respected, even if I knew I would never manage to do so myself. I could barely accept Lia as my daughter and she was at least useful enough to take care of herself.


    ¡°I believe my companions and I will remain here for the rest of the night, likely for the day as well, and answer your questions. At least some of them, I¡¯m certain there will be questions that I won¡¯t deign to answer, simply because it¡¯s none of your business,¡± I told the people here, noticing that even more of them looked out of their depth, while a few looked angry but restrained themselves. Maybe out of fear, their instincts telling them that any aggression against me would be a foolish idea. They might even feel the difference crossing the first Divide made, I suppressed the aura of power to the best of my ability but given my comparatively low Charisma, that wasn¡¯t a perfect solution. Maybe there was a way to magically conceal only that part of myself, without completely hiding my person. Something to look into at a later date, for now, I had people to talk to. Primarily Chris and Jenn.


    But before that, I stepped back out, calling for Lia. It took only a few moments before she came running, moving as quickly as she could. The people inside looked at her approach with a bit of subdued fear, making me wonder if they could feel that she was a predator that preyed on people like them, but I wasn¡¯t sure.


    Either way, I introduced her, before moving back into the community centre, intend on speaking to my old friends. Amusingly, the little fairy girl was sticking right next to me, making me wonder if she knew something the rest of the people here did not.


    Looking around, I realised that the place was completely gloomy. They had turned the community centre into a shelter, using whatever materials they could find, though it was obvious that they hadn¡¯t been out much. Likely just as much as absolutely necessary, hiding the rest of the time. I wondered how they imagined things to go long-term, as this was certainly not a sustainable situation.


    Raising my hand once more, I send a few orbs of fire into the corners of the room, carefully controlling the flames to bring light to the area without setting things on fire. Doing so made me realise that it was a useful exercise to train my concentration, to see how much attention I needed to pay to a spell before it dissipated. For a spell like this, which wasn¡¯t dynamic in any way, I barely needed any, allowing me to pay full attention to Chris and Jenn.


    Not that I really needed to pay attention to them, but after getting them to talk, as awkward as that was, I realised that they had been living day to day, not even trying to plan ahead. Their existence had been not more organised or planned than that of the child who had, for some strange reason, curled up on the couch next to me and was sleeping with her head in my lap. Like some strange sort of kitten that wanted to be petted.


    Why had the two adults done little more than the child? They had simply stuck to this area, only about two streets over from their house as I now realised, and tried to sit things out. Day after day, just existing, surviving, without even trying to accomplish anything.


    A feeling of deep disappointment in regard to my old friend welled up within me. Where was the ambition that had led the two of us to make something great, where was the drive he had back when we were kids?


    I could understand why Jenn hadn¡¯t acted in a decisive manner, she had a toddler to take care of, but Chris? He had done the bare minimum, all of the people in here had. They had snuck around, set traps to escape pursuit and looted what they could. They hadn¡¯t even been active enough to get the attention of the groups from Apple Gate Farm, my guess was that those groups had been looking for signs of battle, something this group rarely left behind. Instead, they had been hiding, to the point that the groups had missed them. Amusingly, that likely made the situation in this community centre into the mess it now was.


    Maybe I should try helping them if only a little. Get them cleaned up, maybe get them into contact with the guys at Apple Gate Farm. It might help them, to the point that they could help themselves.

 Chapter 815

    Ambition, such a curious concept. Talking to Chris, knowing what he had achieved in life before the change had happened, remembering how he had taken a few of his friends, one of whom had been me to form the core of what would eventually become a world-famous eSports team, I could only wonder where his drive had gone.


    During one of our talks before the change, he had confidently talked about moving vast amounts of money, trying to get the largest profit without losing the capital, which was always a risk. And yet, he had dared to act, had the ambition to see things done.


    Now, he didn¡¯t even dare to venture outside and take the power that was offered to us all, he didn¡¯t dare to reach for the strength needed to protect his family. None of the people here did, they all preferred to wait and pray for help.


    Was it only because before the change, the biggest risk had been financial? Or did they simply ignore the risks they took with other peoples¡¯ money, knowing that they had some personal insurance, that it wasn¡¯t truly a risk for their lives and livelihood? Now, the risks were obvious, nobody could ignore the risk of fighting the Undead, especially not with the occasional casualty of their expeditions to gather supplies.


    One such casualty, as I learned from the sleepy little girl still resting her head in my lap for some reason, had been the girl¡¯s father. It might explain why nobody had dragged her away from the dangerous predator that had invaded their space. Now that I wasn¡¯t standing in their door, but talking to Chris and Jenn, there were quite a few hostile glances, though the people doing the glancing did their best to be covert. The air inside the shelter stank, not just of unwashed humans but also of fear. It was bad enough that Lia had quickly taken her leave after I introduced her, she simply didn¡¯t want to endure the scent. Silva, on the other hand, remained with me, or maybe she remained with the little girl on my lap, Silva had certainly been interested in her, burying her nose in the girl¡¯s stomach and snuffling her within an inch of her life. Even now she was stretched out in front of the couch I was sitting on, though more in front of the sleepy girl.


    Jenn bowed out of our talk first, having to take care of their child, leaving me with Chris. Her absence changed little about the conversation, I remained curious about their experience while he had some interest in my abilities but it was far less than I would have thought. His interest was more focused on Apple Gate Farm and the people there, how they had set up, how they organised themselves and who was in charge than it was in gaining the power to defend his family.


    Our conversation didn¡¯t last too long after Jenn left, mostly because I knew little about the details Chris was interested in. I knew that Mrs Wu with that council they had set up was leading the Farm but beyond that, I had no idea. There might be some chain of command set up, I was almost certain that there was because I knew Mrs Wu, but who held which position, I didn¡¯t know. Nor did I know how chores and supplies were distributed, not beyond my knowledge of their cold storage and I only knew about that because I had set it up originally and helped one of their spell casters to get the Ice Magic to keep it going.


    ¡°Neh, Miss Fairy,¡± the child still resting her head on my lap tugged at my shirt, pulling me from my thoughts, ¡°What did you mean about washing earlier? Do you have a way to get us clean without using our water? They said we have to ration it;¡± she asked, her speech surprisingly clear for her age. Or at least I thought it was, I had little knowledge about the speaking ability of children, hell, I had little knowledge about children, period.


    ¡°Yes, little one, I have a way,¡± I couldn¡¯t help but grin at her interest, ¡°If you like, we can go into the old showers, I hope the drains still work, and I¡¯ll help you,¡± I offered.


    Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.


    ¡°And call me Jade, or Miss Morgana, if you have to,¡± I added, not quite sure I wanted to be called a fairy. It didn¡¯t sit right with me, maybe due to meeting the weird fairy-like Sprites on Mundus. Those had been the closest thing to the description of a fairy I had ever seen and I wanted nothing to do with those things.


    ¡°What should I call you?¡± I asked, needing something to call her, other than girl, or fairy child.


    ¡°Sure, Miss Morgana,¡± the girl grinned, ¡°I¡¯m Sabrina,¡± she introduced herself. Looking down at her, I noticed something crawling around in the child¡¯s thin hair, some sort of bug or something like that. Nothing that should be on a human, certainly not a child, and as a shiver of disgust ran down my spine, I decided to do something about it. Namely, gently pushing the child off my lap, covertly brushing away any bugs that might have crawled on my clothes, and standing up to pull her towards the shower room, Silva following closely, making me wonder if she was keeping an eye on me or the child. Maybe both, I certainly didn¡¯t think I should be trusted with the care of a child younger than Lia.


    There was some muttering as we were moving, but nobody had the temerity to actually say something, not that I knew what they would want to say.


    ¡°Now, let¡¯s get you out of that dress, I¡¯ll make sure it¡¯s clean after, okay, little one?¡± I asked, not that I was going to take no for an answer. Instead, I simply pulled the clothes off the child, noticing as I did that she was far too thin for comfort, with a few bruises that made me frown. Next to me, Silva let out a quiet whuff, likely just as appaled as I felt.


    Luckily, the bruises weren¡¯t anything a little magic couldn¡¯t deal with. Healing required a massive amount of focus, thanks to my draconic magic trait, but it could be done, though it might have caused the lights I had left in the other room to fade away, simply because I couldn¡¯t be bothered to maintain them.


    ¡°That tickles,¡± Sabrina giggled, as I carefully healed one of the bruises, squirming under my touch.


    ¡°Just trying to make sure you are unharmed, little one,¡± I told her, as the last of her bruises faded away, ¡°And now, you get to have a shower. Do you know how to wash yourself?¡± I asked, carefully pushing her towards the area with drains installed. When she nodded, I raised my hand, quickly drawing the runic formation I used to conjure a shower, making sure that the temperature was as it should be.


    The look of glee on Sabrina¡¯s face managed to make me grin, she looked so incredibly happy that I just couldn¡¯t help it. She even started to dance around under the spray, giggling all the way, as if all the world¡¯s ails had been healed. But sadly, dancing around in the spray didn¡¯t make for a good cleaning and given that the child didn¡¯t look like she was going to do anything but, I let out a sigh and stepped up. Magic was an incredibly useful tool, especially in this case. I didn¡¯t need to make sure that I stayed dry, which would have been an impossibility with the squirming child, nor did I have to strip myself, which would have been uncomfortable with untrusted humans in the other room, I could simply draw the water out of my clothes with little trouble. That control over the water, alongside some soap to get rid of the dirt and some Death Magic to kill off any bugs that tried hiding in her hair, meant that she soon lost all the sweat, grime and dirt that had been clinging to her.


    ¡°Neh, Miss Morgana, why are there all these strange sounds around you?¡± Sabrina asked me, when I used my Water Magic to pull away the water from her hair, making sure that she was nicely dry.


    ¡°What strange sounds?¡± I couldn¡¯t help but ask, before focusing on the dress she had worn. It looked rather damaged, little more than a rag, but I didn¡¯t have anything better. Maybe we could find something later, but for now, it would have to do. Letting out a sigh, I once again summoned some water, only for Sabrina to react to the summoning.


    ¡°This, it sounds bubbly and splashing,¡± she told me, making me raise an eyebrow in surprise. She had been strangely attentive the whole time, twitching whenever I used my magic, but I had thought she had reacted to the effects, not the magic itself. But describing it as sound, that didn¡¯t seem to correlate to the effects, but to something else.


    ¡°Looks like you truly are a special young lady,¡± I grinned, almost forgetting to continue cleaning the dress, ¡°Why don¡¯t we play a game, to try out just how special you are?¡± I asked, already planning to see how talented this child was.

 Chapter 816

    When Sabrina, Silva and I walked back into the primary area of the community centre, I had to keep my face controlled so I wouldn¡¯t break into laughter. The few people still awake looked at us, though now mainly at Sabrina, with an expression of confusion, likely wondering why the girl was suddenly clean and dressed in freshly-laundered clothes.


    Ignoring the looks we were getting, I walked over to my bag, pulling out some of the supplies I had been carrying. It was mostly the meat we had harvested earlier, and given the situation, it was what I was planning to use. These people needed some nice fresh food, something hot to lift their spirits and remind them that they were people, not fungi that thrived on staying in the dark. Sizzling hot steaks might just be what the doctor ordered to get them into a mindset of progression, instead of the mindless stagnation they were trapped in.


    In the meantime, I began quizzing Sabrina about her attributes and traits. It was a bit challenging, the little girl wasn¡¯t the most competent reader, but by comparing my own status sheet to what she was supposed to see, I was able to get a good idea of her potential. And it wasn¡¯t bad, even with an active starvation effect reducing her attributes by a great deal, there was definite potential there. It was enough to make me wonder if Silva had actually known that my old acquaintances were here or if she had guided me to this little girl, for some reason or another.


    From the attribute spread Sabrina had, I was partially convinced that Silva had actually guided us here for her, as it read quite suitable for a spellcaster, especially one with a divine connection. When we got to the traits, that idea was only solidified. There were none of the affinity traits needed to become an arcane caster like myself but there were a few that improved her Astral Power, similar to the ones I had, alongside some that sounded like they would make it easier for her to get into contact with other planes.


    The scent of food interrupted our conversation, forcing me to prioritise. It was a little challenging to feed the girl, I didn¡¯t quite know how to handle children, but cutting the meat into small pieces and slowly feeding them to her seemed to work. Maybe it was the sheer hunger she had been suffering from, but she happily ate, to the point that I had to keep her from stuffing herself. Though, by the time I realised that, I also noticed that her stomach was bulging a little, making me think I had been too late.


    Looking around, I noticed a lot of greedy looks directed at the grilled meat and simply set it on a nearby table, gesturing for the hungry souls to descend upon it. They looked a little feral, making me question my own intimidation value, as they hadn¡¯t dared to intrude upon Sabrina and me. When I made it back to the couch I had taken over, Sabrina already looked ready to go back to sleep, the expression on her face somehow curling my mouth into a smile.


    ¡°Silva, you were guided here for her, weren¡¯t you?¡± I quietly asked my canine companion, after the little girl crawled onto my lap once more. Sabrina looked so adorably out of it, making me think that she didn¡¯t even notice me speaking, her eyes already shut and her breathing evening out. When Silva simply let out an affirmative bark, I started to wonder, what was I supposed to do with a child? She had the potential to become a great cleric of some sort, but did I really want to act as some sort of divine pimp and have her prostitute herself for power? Gently stroking her head, I asked myself, what was best for her? I doubted she¡¯d be able to harness arcane magic, so what was left for her? What path to power could she take, how could she make sure that she wasn¡¯t exploited by those in this world? There was no real society to protect the vulnerable and by the way she had attached herself to me, I doubted there was anyone left to take care of her. So, she only had herself, unless I decided that I wanted to settle down and take care of a vulnerable child.


    The martial path was out, at least for the next few years. She might become a great fighter, but until she managed to grow up, her martial path would always be limited by her body.


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    Similarly, the societal or mercantile path was out. There was no real society, no way to distinguish herself unless I managed to teach her one of the crafts I had managed to learn. Either by learning alchemy or enchanting, she could become a valuable commodity but it would leave her just as vulnerable as she was now, only with a far higher value, making her even more of a target.


    Leaving the divine or the arcane path. And by my previous logic, leaving only the divine path.


    And that left the question, which entity should I have her sell herself to? At her age, she was probably malleable enough to enter the service of any, if she was indoctrinated properly. The easy choice, possibly the intended choice, would be Hecate, she was Silva¡¯s patron after all, but was it the right choice for the child? Did Hecate even want clerics that needed Her power, I vaguely remembered the Daimon during the creation of my Avatar mock such clerics, calling them beggars who only knew how to knock on divine doors or something along those lines.


    Other choices I could see were Lenore, though she wasn¡¯t a divine entity just yet, nor did I think she was truly interested in becoming one, or the Grandmother. One a being of pure Death, possibly one that could rise to carry the souls of the Dead to the afterlife, the other a duality of life and death, a healer caring for her offspring, until it was time for them to pass into the next part of their lives.


    Noticing Sabrina squirm on my lap, apparently in discomfort, I started to gently rub her tummy, using a bit of Blood Magic to smoothen the digestive process going on in there. By now, it was obvious that I had fed her too much, that her stomach wasn¡¯t used to digesting large qualities of meat after weeks of a highly restricted diet. Without help, she¡¯d be in quite a bit of pain, and would likely throw up the meat her body needed, simply because it was unable to digest it fully.


    Softly humming to myself, I continued to use a bit of magic to make sure her body was working at its best, lending her some of my own power to regenerate what had been lost since the change. She needed a bit of meat on her bones, to regain some muscle but most of that would take some time and proper nutrition. There was only so much the meat I had fed her could do, even if I did my best to help the process along but I had a feeling that the foundation I was now laying would help a great deal.


    And it gave me something to do, while a bigger part of my mind started to wonder once more. What did I actually want to do in this place? When I first entered, it had been because of Jenn and Chris but after talking to them, I wasn¡¯t quite sure what to do. While both had listened, neither sounded as if they were interested in gaining strength for themselves. Maybe if I brought Chris to Mrs Wu, he might get started on some training but I wasn¡¯t sure. He seemed to think that he¡¯d find some sort of safe, managerial role to slip into, something I doubted. People would want their managers to have some competency, to be able to walk the walk, so to speak, not only talk the talk.


    And that, in this new world, meant higher levels. Sure, prior training meant something, it was how Mrs Wu and Mr Wong had gained their original status as leaders and trainers but I was relatively certain that both of them had managed to leverage their training into levels. Either by going out and fighting or maybe in a way similar to a few of my own levels, gained by training others to fight, or to cast spells in my case. But Chris lacked any leverageable skill, he was a competent financial analyst, at least as far as I knew, but that didn¡¯t mean jack. There were no stocks to trade, no bonds to sell, there wasn¡¯t even cash at the moment. What counted was the food you could put on the table, the protection you could offer the community and what special skills you had to offer. Chris had none of those and unless I put in the effort to teach him magic, I doubted he¡¯d gain them.


    Maybe I should find out how the attributes of Chris and Jenn looked, it might be useful to have them listen in to any lessons I¡¯d bestow upon Sabrina. And giving her those lessons was almost certain at this point, simply because I doubted that Hecate had Silva guide us here on a lark, even if it might be an amusing prank.


    No, Sabrina had somehow roused the interest of the divine and for some odd reason, I had been chosen to guide her, likely because Silva lacked the necessary vocal cords. But how she was chosen, I had no idea. Maybe only the gods could figure that one out.

 Chapter 817

    My hand was idly stroking Sabrina¡¯s head, while my mind was going a mile a minute, considering the best options for me, for Sabrina but also for Chris and Jenn. I didn¡¯t really want to abandon either of them, but if Chris wasn¡¯t willing to step up, there was little I could do. Training Jenn might be possible but given that she was the primary caregiver, and food provider, for an infant, I was doubtful about that option.


    Sabrina, on the other hand, had that obvious potential and given that Silva had received divine guidance to get us here, the potential already had a claimant. Which left me wondering how I¡¯d best go about introducing the claimant and the prospective follower. If Mundus had some sort of ceremony to introduce a mortal to their god for the first time, I had no idea how to perform it, nor did I think I¡¯d be the best candidate for such a ceremony. Simply because I wasn¡¯t already in the service of Hecate, which would mean Silva would be the obvious choice to lead such a ceremony, given that she was the senior follower of Hecate in the group, likely in the area as well.


    Just the idea made me snort in amusement, thinking that the worship of Hecate truly went to the dogs¡­ Maybe they could introduce howl-alongs, or a bark-circle or something along those lines, I was certain Silva could come up with something. But sadly, as amusing as those ideas were, they didn¡¯t help me get little Sabrina in contact with Hecate, assuming that getting into contact was what Hecate actually wanted. It didn¡¯t quite feel on-brand for Hecate to seek out a follower, but Silva had guided us here and the connection between Hecate and Silva was already confirmed. It would be so much easier if the Gods could simply give out a quest for their follower, something along the lines of ¡®recruit the little girl¡¯ or maybe to recruit a dozen people. Though, I had a feeling that such quests would only go to their actual follower, so not to a free and unbound agent like myself, not without having some sort of sting attached to the quest. Something to bind me to the church, not that there currently was a Church of Hecate in the area. As things currently were, the congregation would likely set up shop in the local dog-park.


    But in regards to connecting the two, I did carry the Blessing of the Moon, given to me by Hecate. Maybe that could be leveraged into a ritual to contact the deity and through that forge the connection between Sabrina and Hecate. If that actually was what the Goddess wanted.


    Alternatively, I was quite certain that I could use the Zevarra Agha to create a connection between Sabrina and the Grandmother. I knew the Grandmother, I had conversed with her in the past using the Astral River as the medium to connect us, and I had an item she had gifted to me. If we were on the same plane of existence, I would be completely confident to contact her, even with my somewhat lower attributes, but to call Mundus from Terra was a bit of a different problem.


    Connecting Sabrina to Lenore would be even easier if I used the feather she had sent through, but that was a unique object of great power, not something I wanted to use casually. To say nothing about Lenore¡¯s affinity, I didn¡¯t really want Sabrina to be purely connected to a creature of Death, nor did I think that Lenore actually wanted to gather followers. Knowing her, she would happily gather a few chosen followers, all of them powerful in their own right, and engage in a direct exchange of favours with them, not the much more involved bond between a god and their followers.


    Thinking about the Grandmother and Hecate brought with it another startling realisation. Hecate was known as a three-formed deity, one being with three bodies or forms. Sometimes those three forms were described as Maiden, Mother and Crone, each representing different concepts and attitudes. The jump from a Crone to the Grandmother wasn¡¯t terribly far, making me wonder how that would work. How similar could deities be, before things became wonky? It was a question I had already wondered about, namely when looking at the different Asgardian and Olympian deities, there were quite a few that shared aspects, to the point that scholars had studied how the names and images had shifted as people migrated.


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    But how did that work with distinct entities, beings with their own egos, not just images and rituals made by humans? Would the Grandmother lose her identity if she managed to become a deity, subsumed by the greater deity that was Hecate? Or would the Grandmother form some sort of conflicting image, trying to usurp parts of Hecate¡¯s domain?


    Getting caught up in a conflict between two deities sounded like something I would rather avoid until I had a lot more power. Once I had enough power to assert myself, I¡¯d happily get involved but until then, I wanted nothing to do with that level of conflict.


    Though, thinking about it, was a conflict truly necessary? My understanding of Hecate was that she wasn¡¯t too interested in mortal followers, she was interested in the mortal mastery of the Arcane. Similarly, the Grandmother had never come across somebody who needed to assert her dominance. Sure, after that insane fire-mage had attacked me from afar, she had gone out and smacked the guy around but otherwise, she had been holed up in Neyto for what I thought had been centuries, never even trying to build herself a kingdom of her own. Even when the Dryads of Tegi started to mess around with things better left untouched, she had only sent what could be considered a token-adventurer, namely me, to check things out, she hadn¡¯t gone and taken them out herself. And there was no doubt that she could have done so, most likely far quicker than I could ever manage. But no, despite the rather massive mess the entire situation could have, and partially had, devolved into, she had stood by and observed. That didn¡¯t indicate that she was terribly territorial, though it might simply be a matter of interest. She might simply not have cared about the dryads, similar to how, before the change, I might not have cared if a bunch of racoons had been going through the trash in the backyard. Some things, while in your area of interest, simply didn¡¯t rise to the level of annoyance that made dealing with them a priority.


    But regardless of their motivations, I wouldn¡¯t try to involve myself, certainly not on the Grandmother¡¯s side. As much as I liked her, I wasn¡¯t willing to defy an active deity, especially not one who gave me a blessing that was possibly lessening the influence of the Curse of the Sun.


    Before I could formulate a real plan of action, Lia came back into the shelter, easily ignoring the few hostile and many more fearful glances directed her way. Nobody dared stand in her way, likely due to the hook-chain she had casually wrapped around her body, letting the bloody hook dangle at her side, or maybe due to the equally bloody cleaver she had on her other side. Either way, she came over and the small grin she had on her face bloomed into a full-fledged smile when she spotted Sabrina sleeping on my lap.


    ¡°Mother, have you found a little sister for me?¡± Lia asked, her voice easily loud enough to carry in the quiet room, maybe even wake a few of the sleeping people next door. It certainly was loud enough to disturb Sabrina, who tried to burrow deeper into my lap.


    ¡°Quiet, Lia, the little one is trying to sleep,¡± I chastised her, trying to maintain a stern demeanour while Sabrina¡¯s burrowing was tickling me.


    ¡°Muh, okay,¡± she nodded, before sniffing the air, her head focusing on the plate I had used for the grilled meat earlier, ¡°You made food? Where is it?¡± she asked, looking incredibly eager.


    ¡°Sadly, it¡¯s all gone,¡± I shook my head, ¡°The little one had her fill, and the rest was demolished by the locals. They¡¯ve been subsiding on canned goods and stuff since the change, no fresh meat at all,¡± I added, amused at the look of horror on her face. The only time she had really been left without fresh meat to hunt was while she had been Shattered, a time she barely remembered.


    ¡°We¡¯ll have to go hunting again,¡± Lia decided, before briefly looking around the room. ¡°Where are your friends? And did you figure out why Silva wanted us to come here?¡±


    ¡°Jenn and Chris went back to bed, they¡¯ve got to deal with a baby, I think they get their sleep whenever they can,¡± I explained, before gently poking the sleeping child on my lap, ¡°And in regards to the other question, this is Sabrina, Silva brought us here for her. I¡¯ve got some ideas about the significance but whether they are true, I¡¯ve got no idea,¡± I admitted, before nodding for Lia to take the other side of the couch. I had some thinking and planning to do.

 Chapter 818

    ¡°Good morning, Mum,¡± my musings were interrupted by a soft voice, one that came from my lap. For a moment, the voice threw me for a loop, the words just too alien for me to process. Or rather, that last word, that was far too alien for me, alien enough to stun me for a moment. I had managed to accept Lia calling me her Mother, though only in the sense that I was the Mother of her entire species, not in an individually responsible way. That Lia was mature enough to handle herself, in addition to being strong enough to fight for herself and not require a great deal of protection helped, as did the fact that she could, in theory, hunt to sustain herself. She didn¡¯t truly need me, didn¡¯t require my aid at all costs.


    But Sabrina, the owner of that soft voice, was different. Right now, she was sleepily pushing herself up a little, shifting from lying on the couch with her head on my lap to having her head rest on my chest while her body was cuddled up against me, in a position uncomfortably close to one I had often taken with Sigmir. Only, both of us had been naked and the nuzzling involved was intimate in a fundamentally different manner. And yet, despite the discombobulation I was experiencing, I wasn¡¯t truly repulsed by Sabrina, I wasn¡¯t tempted to toss her off my lap and away from me, as I would have expected. She, somehow, had managed to burrow into my defences with startling ease, making me comfortable with her presence despite the problems her presence would bring. I didn¡¯t have to truly think about the disadvantages that bringing a child with us had, nor did I have to imagine what people, both those here and those at Apple Gate Farm, would say.


    ¡°Good morning, Sabrina,¡± I replied, gently petting her head, desperately trying to figure out what to say. With a more mature person, I would have rebuffed them, but doing so to the child who desperately clung to the possibly first source of security since her father died felt utterly wrong. But why did I have to be that source of security? What did I know about children?


    ¡°Who¡¯s that?¡± Sabrina asked, her eyes drooping a little as she looked over to Lia, as if she was about to go right back to sleep.


    ¡°That¡¯s Lia,¡± I replied, speaking quietly to keep my¡­ daughter from waking up, ¡°She¡¯s travelling with me, we work together to keep each other safe,¡± I explained, getting a nod and soft hum in response.


    Maybe it was our voices, or maybe it simply was time for her to wake, either way, Lia started to stir and moments later, she looked up herself, her eyes flickering between Sabrina and me.


    ¡°Oh, the little sister is awake,¡± Lia cooed with a wide grin on her face, ¡°Hi, little sister, I¡¯m Carnelia. You can call me big sis,¡± she introduced herself, the glee in her voice making me wince just a little, especially when it was answered with an equally cheerful reply from my chest.


    ¡°That¡¯s so cool, I never had a big sister. I¡¯m Sabrina, what have you been doing the whole time?¡± she asked, and immediately, the two started to chatter at each other. Lia happily explained how she had been out all night, hunting the monsters in the area while Sabrina giggled at some of the descriptions, without any signs of distress. I had no idea whether that was normal, or how children were supposed to react to scary details, though even if I had known what was normal, I doubted it would apply here. Sabrina, or really all surviving children, had been through a difficult time, no matter how their parents tried to shield them, they¡¯d have learned something about the harsh world out there. Those without parents, like Sabrina, could only thank their lucky stars to remain alive, the realisation reminding me that I shouldn¡¯t judge the people here too harshly. They had dropped the ball in one sense but in another, they had stepped up admirably, allowing even an orphan like Sabrina to survive. Such care wasn¡¯t a given and it likely should be something to be emulated by others.


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    Not quite sure how to proceed in the situation I found myself in, I decided to go with the simple solution. I didn¡¯t want to kick Sabrina off my chest, she seemed to be quite comfortable, nor did I want to stop her from bonding with Lia, the two fit together surprisingly well. So, I simply leaned back, resting my head against the couch and closing my eyes. I didn¡¯t try to truly sleep, I just let my mind drift while my eyes were closed.


    It didn¡¯t take too long for the noise in the room to pick up, as people were waking up and moving about. After ignoring the obvious attention paid to Lia, Sabrina and me for a while, I decided that I apparently needed to get involved.


    For some reason, the people seemed to think that Lia was some sort of pushover and had started to mutter about us, making the tension in the room rise to the point that it felt palpable. What they had in mind, I had no idea, nor did I know why they thought that just because I appeared to be sleeping I wouldn¡¯t react to any hostility, especially hostility directed at the person right next to me, or the child resting on my chest.


    Why they looked at Sabrina with hostility threw me for a loop, at least until I actually thought about it. To the people here, I must look like some dangerous force of nature, something akin to a dragon able to swoop in and casually wipe out the threat around them before making myself comfortable in their space. To them, it must look like I¡¯m capable of taking away what little control over their lives they managed to retain.


    And now, that threatening force of nature decided to play pillow for one of their most vulnerable, feeding and bathing the child while they had to languish in uncertainty, not knowing what would happen to them. Fear was to be expected, but fearing a child would be foolish, so the fear morphed into anger. Or something like that, I wasn¡¯t quite sure but it seemed to make sense, at least in my mind.


    Regardless, maybe I should drive the point home that they only needed to fear me if they annoyed me, something they were slowly starting to accomplish.


    Letting out a loud sigh, I straightened up, looking around the room. The people nearby didn¡¯t quite seem to know what to do with themselves, their situation having shifted massively the night before. Some were talking quietly amongst themselves, either in pairs or in small groups, others were simply sitting around, peering out of the window as if looking for Undead. They wouldn¡¯t find any, not after Lia had promised there were no more undead in the area, but the locals didn¡¯t really know that.


    ¡°The offer of a warm shower for those who want one is still open,¡± I called out, my voice managing to quiet the room immediately, only for noise to pick right back up when the people tried to figure out how that would work. They weren¡¯t used to magic yet, though even if they had been, none of the people here were beyond level five, once again driving home just how passive they had been.


    For a moment, I considered to try explaining what I had in mind but looking at the people who seemed to be far more interested in discussing how I couldn¡¯t possibly provide what I offered, I decided against it. Instead, I simply stood, making sure that Sabrina didn¡¯t take a tumble, and walked over into the shower-room. The drains still worked, at least for now, and with a bit of conjuring, I had my very own indoor rain-shower. It took a bit of focus to maintain, but with the attributes I had received from crossing the divide, it was quite trivial, even adding that bit of Fire Magic for warmth wasn¡¯t taxing me much.


    ¡°There¡¯s going to be water for the next two hours. If you need drinking water, we can deal with that afterwards, for now, those who want to can get clean,¡± I called out, before moving back to the door, so I could look outside.


    My call was enough to draw in a few people, or maybe it was the sound of falling rain. Eihter way, they came wandering in, looked around and walked back out, likely to strip or something. I didn¡¯t really care about organising logistics for them, they could manage that for themselves. Hell, if I could, I would set myself up somewhere completely separate from the, just to make sure I was spared the vision of naked flesh that was communal showering. I had no desire to see anything like that, not now, not ever.


    But the people could get clean and the smell would hopefully lessen, making accommodations here far more acceptable. I wasn¡¯t planning to stay here for long, I still wanted to destroy the Withered, but helping the people here was time-sensitive. Waiting to kill the Withered mainly meant they would get stronger, and thus give me more EXP, making it a fair deal.

 Chapter 819

    Maybe Chris had to be seriously smacked in the face to accept reality as it was. Talking to him, trying to get him to accept that he would need to step up and, literally, fight for his family didn¡¯t seem to work. He seemed to listen to my explanations, before moving past them, trying to get more information about the organisational and social structure built around Apple Gate Farm. Jenn seemed to follow a similar mindset, one that was focused on physical security while ignoring that the world literally wasn¡¯t as it had been before the change. They seemed to almost believe that they could continue to muddle along, that things would, somehow, work out for them. It felt like a procrastinator¡¯s mindset, one I felt would see them smacked in the face by reality.


    But while I could try to guide them, could tell them what was out there, I couldn¡¯t make them listen. I couldn¡¯t force them to fight for themselves, as much as I wanted to give my friends the tools to survive in the changed world. But I just didn¡¯t know what more I could do, what else I should try.


    Their attitude was made worse by the interest and eagerness Sabrina had when listening to me. The munchkin seemed to hang on my lips as I talked, her attention fixed on me with an almost scary focus. Children weren¡¯t known for their ability to concentrate over long periods and yet, she was one of the most attentive during my impromptu lessons. Some of the adults, mostly those who just kept close and listened, were similarly focused but they were mature, not children at an age where they would just start school, maybe already able to read, learning to write and learn their numbers. Everything I had heard about children was disproven by my munchkin, the combination of her curiosity and fearlessness delighting me to no end. She was willing to learn and put in the necessary efforts, though her fearless attitude was something I might have to break her of. It was remarkably similar to the attitude I had on Mundus, only that I had effectively been immortal over there, my body safe in the capsule. If Sabrina acted as I had, there would be no respawn for her and I didn¡¯t want to see my munchkin¡¯s path cut short. Teaching her the prudence that such an event didn¡¯t happen might be part of the reason why Silva had guided us here.


    With one listener incredibly attentive and interested, and the other pair I was intending to teach not really caring, it was obvious where my attention went. The longer I talked, and the more questions Sabrina asked, the more my explanations shifted to focus on her situation and the potential path she could take, regardless of how difficult that sometimes was.


    Trying to explain the concepts of deities, faith and the exchange of allegiance in terms a child could understand was challenging. To make matters worse, there were parts of the interplay where I didn¡¯t have the answers and while the temptation to simply make something up was there, I decided against it. If I introduced Sabrina in the service of a deity, be it Hecate or the Grandmother, I wanted her to go into the deal with the best information I could provide. Not with a mixture of guesses and ideas, but with the facts as I knew them.


    Though those facts were problematic. Information was only worth as much as the sources it came from, and when it came to divine knowledge, those sources were suspect. All information I had on matters divine came from agents of the divine or from the Grandmother who wanted to gain followers of her own. With that in mind, I wasn¡¯t sure that I could trust the information she had given me.


    And taking that idea to the extreme conclusion, all information I had received was delivered through a medium controlled by the divine. The capsules might have some sort of active filter in them, some way to ascertain that the Travellers would never become a threat to the Gods. That one was doubtful, simply because of the events I had kicked off on Mundus, the Feather I had been sent and the traits from the system more or less confirming that things had been real. But that, too, was a conclusion based on possibly faulty information, bringing things back to the initial problem. How could I trust information I couldn¡¯t possibly verify, information that no mortal could truly verify or understand?


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    Thus, I could only do my best. Present what information I had, explain what I could and hope that things worked out. I hated the uncertainty with a burning passion, once Sabrina started on that path, once the initial bargain was struck, the path would be completely out of my control. I could teach her some control, possibly how to fight without magic, but everything else would be between her and the deity she ended up serving. Well, I¡¯d also be able to teach her reading, math and things like that, with other subjects to be added on later.


    It was early afternoon when I realised how much Sabrina had truly managed to attach herself to me. Within roughly twelve hours she had gone from a completely unknown to someone I made lesson plans for, plans that would require multiple years to complete. It was an odd sensation to care for another in the way I had started to care for Sabrina, though it reminded me a little of one experience I had on Mundus.


    Namely, the visit to the Winter Wolves and cuddling with their young. They had been so exuberant and full of energy that it had been impossible not to care for them, only that I hadn¡¯t been able to help them in the long run. They had turned their den into a dungeon, sealing their entire pack into the frozen steppe that was their home. To endure, to last but maybe to never live again. I wasn¡¯t certain about the details that had brought them to their decision, but I was relatively confident that it had been a decision made under duress. They had been forced into it, just like Sabrina was forced to step onto the Path to Power. She needed power to protect herself, it was something I felt everyone would need in the long run. Sure, I could protect her for a time, but it wouldn¡¯t be possible forever, at some point, she¡¯d need to stand on her own two feet. Otherwise, she would cease to be a person and turn into a puppet, only able to exist as a toy of some sort. It wasn¡¯t a fate I wished on anyone, certainly not on my munchkin.


    Later, during dinner, I decided to get the people here to take responsibility for themselves. It wasn¡¯t just that they should get to Apple Gate Farm and start integrating with the people there, they also needed to make themselves into something useful.


    I had noticed that it wasn¡¯t just the three people I wanted to teach who had listened but almost everyone present had, at least for some time. With the active lessons for Sabrina finished for the day, the munchkin needed some free time, I began to answer the questions of others. Amusingly, my munchkin wasn¡¯t interested in that free time, nor was she interested in playing around. She simply stuck at my side, clearly trying her best to understand what I was explaining to the other survivors.


    About half of their questions were unrelated to the topics I had told Sabrina about, those focused on their individual traits, while the rest were more or less the standard fare. When I was asked a question in regards to gaining initial classes for the third time, Sabrina piped up from next to me and actually gave an answer quite similar to the one I would have given. It wasn¡¯t a complex question but just the fact that Sabrina had listened closely enough to know the answer and formulate it into an explanation that wasn¡¯t worded the way I would have was impressive. She listened to me the entire day, but she hadn¡¯t just listened. She had taken in my teachings, doing her best to understand their meaning and not only the words. The realisation brought a wide grin to my face and I happily ruffled her hair, feeling a warm feeling swell up in my chest.


    The feeling made one thing startlingly clear in my mind. I would teach Sabrina to the best of my ability, even if I wasn¡¯t quite certain how I could combine my own path, the path of the arcane and of near-endless battles and struggles until I had enough power to challenge Death itself and wrestle my Sigmir from its grasp with the path of the teacher.


    But I wanted to do it. Not just try, but I wanted to succeed, I wanted to have Sabrina meet Sigmir, the image turning my eyes misty.

 Interlude: Good dogs get sent to the farm...

    Guard duty was important. Guard duty meant making sure none of the nasties that occasionally wandered the fields near Apple Gate Farm, a slight misnomer for a place housing hundreds of people, broke in and decided to turn some of those people into a late-night snack. Thus guard duty was necessary.


    However, guard duty was also terribly boring, simply because nothing bigger than a rabbit with antlers and an attitude problem had tried to attack the farm thus far. Maybe the sheer number of people frightened critters off, or maybe it was the constant efforts during the day to kill off anything that might threaten the farm and its people, either way, nothing had tested the guards. Nothing but the efforts of a cranky old lady and the biggest monster in the vicinity, hiding in a diminutive package. Quiet consent was that if that monster decided to turn against the farm, the value of guards would be similar to the value of mosquito nets during a hurricane, which is to say virtually nill, though they might be turned into projectiles.


    No, if the Pale Lady decided to attack the farm, nothing would stop her. The first of her students, the few spellcasters who had received her teachings back in the city, had spoken about her power. The power to reshape the world as she liked, to summon mist that would choke the life out of everything caught within. And they spoke of her ever-growing skills and power, growing faster than those of everyone else, despite her power already eclipsing their best fighters. Her name was never spoken outside of her hearing for fear of gaining her attention. She was only called the Pale Lady, unless somebody needed to speak with her, something only the bravest of spellcasters dared to do and only if they couldn¡¯t continue on their path any other way. Inviting her attention might be akin to inviting Death and nobody felt like they wanted to die just yet.


    Others whispered of her taller companion, with pale skin and blood-red eyes, rumours claimed that she used to be the daughter of the farm, only that she had been Shattered in the change, a fate thought to be irreversible. Nobody truly believed that tale, but it was there, only mentioned when nobody could hear, for fear of evoking the ire of those involved. Like the Pale Lady. And like the Pale Lady, nobody dared use the Observe-skill on them, not after it became common knowledge that the Pale Lady could feel the use, avert the use and easily punish the one using it. Nobody wanted to be made an example of.


    And then there was the hound wandering with them. Big as a calf and twice as strong, leading a pack of dogs that could tear through anything. Some had seen them, when they had to flee the city, the vicious hounds happily hunting game many times larger than them individually and bringing that game down with apparent ease, using a mixture of brutal, physical assault and strange magical abilities.


    But while the sheer mass of canine aggression that was the pack was a danger in and of itself, the hound was said to match that danger just by itself, using nothing but its physical bulk and power, allowing it to bowl over any foe and tear them apart. Some who had been out at night claimed that the hound had its own magic, a strange magic of the moon, allowing it to walk on two legs, prowling through the night in search of prey. Some claimed the hound was actually a strange sort of werewolf, though nobody truly dared to investigate and it was certainly a coincidence that the guards, and everyone else, stuck very, very close to the buildings when the Moon was full in the sky. Nothing to do with the rumours.


    Staring at that massive hound, even in the sunlight, was enough to send a shiver down the bravest man¡¯s back, those large amber eyes that seemed to glint with far too much intelligence for a beast, those paws that looked large enough to casually cave in a chest and those teeth. Oh, those teeth, set in a maw powerful enough to engulf a head and crush it like a grape, sharp enough to tear flesh from bone, or simply tear off flesh, bone and limbs altogether. It was a monster in its own right and only the presence of its mistress overshadowed it, at least normally.


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    But not on this day, now, in the light of the sun, it was only the massive dog, staring at the gate of Apple Gate Farm and looking as if it was judging which of the guards would make for a better afternoon snack.


    Neither guard knew how to react, both knew better than to attack the hound, even challenging it sounded like a stupid idea, but what else to do? Wait for it to decide on whom to snack, or simply pray that it decided to go hunt for some other beast? With those options, praying sounded like an excellent idea, praying and trying to look smaller, less of a snack.


    Watching the hound slowly approach the gate, neither guard stepped up, they simply watched the leisurely strolling canine, not daring to move. Not even when the canine casually leapt across the gate, barely missing a beat on its slow steps, only to stop next to the guards and let out a few chuffing noises, terrifying both of them. What if the beast called for its army, to tear them apart? A vanguard, capable to overcome their outer defence with chilling ease.


    But no dogs came to assault the gate, the hound didn¡¯t even care that one of the guards had levelled his spear in its general direction, it simply moved on. Towards the main buildings, disregarding the calls of a braver, or maybe more foolish, guard. Though, challenging a dog to state its intent might be the ultimate evidence of foolishness. Even if the dog wanted to comply, it would be impossible, unless the statement was delivered by pointy teeth, tearing somebody to pieces.


    After briefly sniffing the air, the hound continued on its way, ignoring the guards, and all humans for that matter, slowly padding towards the primary building. Somehow, nobody felt obligated to be the first idiot to step in the way of some hundred kilograms of determined hound and it managed to get to the door. With almost dainty care, the hound took the handle between its teeth and instead of crushing it, as it had undoubtedly done to countless bones, it simply pulled down, opening the doors with ease, proving that the beast wasn¡¯t just powerful but also far too clever. First, the raptors had learned to open doors, now the hound could, too.


    Inside, the hound simply continued on its path, either unaware or uncaring of the disturbance its progress caused. Or maybe it was aware and utterly amused by it, whatever the case, it wasn¡¯t sharing, or stopping for that matter.


    Instead, it made its way to the primary meeting room, where the leadership council of the greatly expanded Apple Gate Farm was discussing what needed to be done to keep their quickly growing community safe, fed and content, to the best of their abilities.


    Upon the hound¡¯s entrance, silence fell over the gathered councillors, none of them not even the usually unflappable Wu Chunhua, knowing how to react. They could talk to a person and find out why their meeting was interrupted but it the interruption came from an animal? None of them spoke dog, if there was such a skill, just like nobody wanted to be the one to rouse the beast¡¯s ire.


    Luckily, the hound didn¡¯t need to be addressed, it knew where it was going. Namely, directly to one of their military leaders, if such a term could be used. A commander and guide of their fighting forces, somebody trying to keep their people safe. A courageous warrior and yet, under the gaze of those ember eyes, that courage seemed to flee like mist under the sun.


    With a soft growl, the hound made sure that everyone¡¯s attention was focused on it, before putting her mouth under one of the bags it was wearing, carefully pulling out a folded piece of paper and presenting it to Mark.


    Despite a brief moment of disbelief, Mark easily accepted the latter, quickly reading the incredibly short and blunt missive, telling him little more than that Jade Morgana, the Pale Lady, the most fearsome monster any of them had seen despite the petite package and the Mistress of the hound sitting in front of him, had found another group of survivors.


    A simple, casual message and yet, it was the first message the monster had sent to them, making it a priority. That the hound had taken a seat and was staring at Mark, as if looking for dinner, made it clear that it was expecting something.


    Hopefully, a reply would do, otherwise, somebody might have to be sacrificed to appease the beast¡¯s hunger.

 Chapter 820

    For two days, Alex, Lia and I had stayed with the people in the community centre, teaching them about the system, the world after the change and this new reality we found ourselves in. In the meantime, I had written a short letter to mark, entrusting it to Silva so she could deliver it. I would have preferred to give it to Alex but Silva was the better choice, bigger, stronger and certainly more durable. Alex was sneaky but if I wanted to see something done, I knew I could rely on Silva. Both of them shared the advantage that they could travel during daytime, without the harm brought to Lia and me by the sun, allowing them to approach the Farm openly, without having to worry the locals. Another advantage of Silva was that she was more distinguishable, there simply weren¡¯t many calf-sized canines around, making it less likely that she was mistaken for an attacking enemy.


    Sending her also gave me a bit of time without the Paladin of Hecate, allowing me to discuss the potential patrons Sabrina could choose to follow without a follower of either overhearing what I was telling her. It gave me a bit more leeway to explain my understanding of them, though I was trying my best to be as objective as possible, simply because both had been good to me. I didn¡¯t really want to favour either of them but there was only one Sabrina and I doubted that the two would accept sharing her. Sabrina didn¡¯t feel important enough. They might consider her an interesting mortal, getting led to her by Silva indicated such, but I didn¡¯t think it was to the level of making deities compromise over her service.


    Now, two days later, Silva had returned, bringing with her a letter from Mark, promising that one of their group would come by and help bring the people here into the fold if they were interested. It was quite promising, at least in my opinion, offering to send help without issue, but maybe they hoped to find some useful human resources here. I wasn¡¯t convinced that any of these people were useful, other than Sabrina, but I generally wasn¡¯t a people-person, not beyond their use in Blood Magic. And even in Blood Magic, a person wasn¡¯t that much more useful than a pig, the difference primarily was in the amount of Astral Power the resource had.


    Still, the two days had been enough to give these people here a decent idea of their possibilities while allowing me to give some light training to Sabrina. I wasn¡¯t about to actually push her physically, not beyond what I vaguely remembered from games in kindergarten and elementary school, but dodgeball and dodge training weren¡¯t that far apart.


    In addition to the light training, making sure that she was eating as much as possible and magically helping her to digest the food made it so that her body had all the energy and building blocks needed to restore itself to prime condition.


    Bruises had faded on that first day, her skin cleared up a little but surprisingly even her hair had gained some glossiness, though that might have come from the conditioner I had picked up. But the greatest difference was in her eyes, they had gained an almost visible glow, her curiosity strong enough to express itself in a physical way.


    And with that glow, determination had appeared. She, just like I had, wanted to become something. Maybe her determination was born from a desire to never be weak again, dependent on those around her or it was from a desire to see the world, similar to what I had experienced on Mundus. Chasing the horizon, to see what is behind the next hill and deep within the mountains. To know the unknown and chase the moon, those desires formed a most wonderous beginning to her path, as any path was a journey of its own.


    Or maybe she simply was determined to remain at my side, though I wasn¡¯t sure any attachment could form that quickly, even if the idea to leave her sat in my gut like a stone, rolling around and making my stomach clench in discomfort.


    Either way, regardless of what the initial impetuous had been, her determination was fierce and ferocious, ignoring future hardship and danger with a disregard born from a childish sense of invincibility. Knowing that I could only do so much to shield her from future hardship, I tried to inure her from it, mostly by increasing my plans for physical training, though never to the point that it would physically damage her. There were things beyond my ability to heal and I would make sure to err on the side of caution.


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    Maybe two days of lessons and tales weren¡¯t enough to give a person a good idea about their future patron but the sad thing was, I lacked the information to tell her much more. I knew some tales about the Grandmother and could tell Sabrina what I had personally experienced on Mundus, but that only went so far. Similarly, I could tell her about the things I had heard and read on Mundus and in the capsule, even adding a few vaguely remembered myths and tales from Greek mythology but that was it. I didn¡¯t have more to give her, leaving her with a decision to make.


    Once she told me her decision, I had to bite my tongue to keep myself from questioning her reasoning. I had given her the information I had and she had, hopefully, made the decision to the best of her ability, an intensely personal decision with wide-reaching consequences. There was, at least in my eyes, no wrong answer, but the answer needed to be one she was comfortable with. Questioning her answer might make her question herself, ultimately resulting in problems later down the road.


    Privately, I had a sneaking suspicion that Sabrina made her decision based on the existence of her loyal fluffiness Silva and Sabrina¡¯s hopes to eventually get a canine companion of her own. I couldn¡¯t promise anything along those lines but at the same time, I wouldn¡¯t be surprised if she got one at some point. The meeting between Silva and me might have been a coincidence or maybe Silva had gained her blessing after me, I wasn¡¯t sure. But either way, Silva had received divine guidance to find Sabrina for a reason and that reason, whatever it might be, could easily result in a personal guardian for her at some point in the future.


    With her decision made, it was now up to me to enable her choice. Meaning, I had to somehow get into contact with Hecate in a way that would allow Sabrina to negotiate their contract or however that would work. Everything I had heard about such ceremonies came from established churches, where a senior cleric would lead the neophytes in the ritual, with the conditions and everything laid out by generations of worshippers. But here, we wanted to establish a new church, though one following an already established deity without any real clue what that deity¡¯s church actually did, mainly because there had been no Church of Hecate on Mundus. There had been a bit of worship, primarily by Arcane Spellcasters of some flavour, the closest that came to forming an organisation was the Mages¡¯ Guild.


    Which had been a thoroughly arcane institution, not a religious one, it was just the place where Arcane Spellcasters, and thus potential worshippers of Hecate, met.


    Making it not an option here, I would have to come up with something of my own. The best idea I had so far was to use a combination of the Ritual I had used to get the Zevarra Agha and the feather from Lenore, mostly because it already involved cross-realm communication, and work from there. My best bet to get the right address, so to speak, was using my Blessing of the Moon as it would hopefully connect us to Hecate. Another connection to Hecate would be Silva¡¯s presence, sadly she couldn¡¯t really lead the ritual, that task needed somebody who could communicate with Sabrina, at least in my opinion it did. I wasn¡¯t about to let my daughter, newly acquired or not, negotiate with a deity without at least some backup.


    Those were the basic building blocks I planned to work with. I had a few other ideas that I might be able to incorporate, things that had worked on Mundus, elements of the scrying spell I had used here and finally, to round things out nicely, a couple of wild guesses that might or might not work.


    All in all, the ritual was only partially based on guesswork nor was I truly confident that it would work but there had to be a way to commune with the divine without them directing you. There had to be some way for the initial Deities to come into being, so I had high hopes that what I had cludged together would work as intended, at least roughly.


    Now, with plans all made and ideas thrown together, we just had to wait, either for a new moon, focusing the ritual on the aspect of Darkness or for a full moon, focusing one Hecate¡¯s Lunar Aspect. Then, we would hopefully be able to make introductions.

 Chapter 821

    Training Sabrina was made a little more difficult, thanks to the inability of Lia and me to be out in the sun. If not for the dense clouds covering the sky the days after meeting her, things might have turned out a lot differently than they had but luckily, a few kilometres of thick, watery fog hanging above our head filtered enough of the harsh light to let me move about outside. It still weakened me, making combat highly inadvisable, and the brief attempt Lia made was enough to give her a rather brutal sunburn but it wasn¡¯t fatal. If necessary, we could both travel though Lia would have to completely cover up and I didn¡¯t want to know what would happen to her if the cloud cover broke. I was confident that I¡¯d be able to escape before the sun weakened me too much, but it was difficult to estimate how Lia would fare. Neither of us was really willing to try, nor had we really experimented with her weakness before, we merely knew it was there and that sunlight was incredibly painful for her. Longer exposure was something we simply avoided, negating the risks by turning nocturnal.


    But with Sabrina, that wasn¡¯t something we could continue. A child needed the light, at least until we completed the compact with Hecate. Afterwards, we would have to reassess and decide on how we wanted to proceed, depending on the details of that compact. Could we keep her with us, during the bloody fights we would undoubtedly be involved in, could we take her with us into the night or would it be better to try putting her somewhere safe and hope that she could have something of a childhood? As much of a childhood as one could have in these times, though even that idea was questionable.


    Trying to grant her the power to protect herself or hope that she was protected, as a child should be? The only good solution for her would be for Lia and myself to give up on our path to power, or at least interrupt it for almost a decade but that wasn¡¯t a solution I was willing to take. I liked Sabrina but my desire to reunite with Sigmir trumped the relationship with Sabrina. So, we had to decide on a bad solution for her. Neither truly appealed to me, but maybe the results of her gaining the compact with Hecate would give us an idea. Another important question was, could she already get her class?


    I remembered that Rai, despite being about fourteen at the time of our meeting, had just managed to get his class and gained a few levels in it. But was that because his people wanted to make sure he was trained in the skills needed to get the right class or was it because people needed to attain a certain age before they could even start to really gain levels? I wasn¡¯t sure, so far the youngest I had met who had a class was Kevin, roughly the same age as Rai had been, so that didn¡¯t tell me much.


    None of the stories I had heard on Mundus really got into the age of the people involved, not that I had heard that many of those. The best I could come up with were tales of child-like oracles with divinely bestowed gifts but that didn¡¯t help. It might mean that people could gain classes beforehand, it might be a metaphor for certain innocent traits that those specific gods wanted in their oracles or it might be something else, possibly some sort of divine shenanigans to get around a normally iron-clad rule. That the gods could bend the rules was evident by the fact that the capsules had immediately granted us access to a class, a class of our choice, not assigned us something based on the skills we already possessed, as it was for normal people. What¡¯s more, we even gained that class through our legacy, even if I had a feeling that many of those classes wouldn¡¯t be attainable here.


    For example, a Guild Mage was supposed to learn their magic in the Mages¡¯ Guild. There was no such thing here, so how would somebody who gained it after learning a bit of magic in their first few levels continue onwards? No, from what I had heard, you could only get basic classes, something like my Sorceress, that didn¡¯t need any real outside training but were based on finding your own path.


    But even in that regard, there might be exceptions. I could easily see Mrs Wu teach somebody how to fight, regardless of how that training played into the advancement of their class. She might even gain some sort of specialised trainer class, I had no real idea, nor had I ever wanted to intrude on her privacy and use Observe on her, so I had no idea about her level. Weaker than me, but at this point everybody was, at least everybody I had interacted with. Maybe the core of the Withered could compete, though I doubted it. And even if they were, I was looking forward to turning that core-entity into EXP for myself. I had destroyed bigger things, it was only a question of collateral damage and effort involved.


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    Two days after Silva came back from visiting Apple Gate Farm, another group turned up, this one made up of five battle-ready fighters. Well, three pure fighters, Kenji the wind-mage who had added a bow to his arsenal and a fifth person that I didn¡¯t recognise. The moment Kenji noticed me, his eyes widened for a moment but the majority of my focus was on that fifth person. He was obviously no fighter, he didn¡¯t have the physique or equipment for it, and seeing him was enough to send an odd sensation down my spine. Magical, but not in the arcane way I was used to, making me strongly suspect it was some sort of divine spellcaster. And given that there was only Connie, the cleric of Frigg, at Apple Gate Farm who might be able to introduce somebody to divine spellcasting, I had a good idea whom they served.


    But even with that idea, the sensation I got from the guy was odd, not quite what I would have expected from a Cleric of Frigg or any of the Asgardian deities. Though, it also didn¡¯t match what I had felt from Olivia on Mundus, making me wonder what was going on. The taste, for lack of a better word, I smelled in the air was wrong, it was different in a way I couldn¡¯t quite pin down. A serious and strange mystery, but not one I thought I¡¯d be able to solve easily. Something to look into, though I wasn¡¯t quite sure how to start. Before the change, there was the joke that the best way to lose a friend was to talk about money, religion or politics, but I had never seen the guy, so I obviously couldn¡¯t lose a friend. But I certainly wouldn¡¯t make one, nor would I find out a lot, especially given my slightly troubled social skills.


    Instead, I focused on Kenji, at least I knew and had trained him.


    ¡°Good afternoon, student,¡± I greeted him with a smile, getting a surprisingly deep bow in return.


    ¡°Greetings, Teacher,¡± he replied, his head still lowered, ¡°I¡¯m deeply grateful for your previous guidance and would like to ask for a lesson.¡±


    Wondering what the story behind his behaviour was, I decided to agree. Teaching magic was an interesting pastime, one I couldn¡¯t indulge in often enough. It was wonderful to learn magic for myself, but there was something special about seeing the amazement and excitement in a student''s eye as they delved into the Arcane. In addition, there were the EXP I gained when a student truly learned something new, when they reached a milestone of some sort, under my direct guidance. I wasn¡¯t quite sure how that part of the system worked, but I acknowledged that it did, so teaching didn¡¯t just benefit my students, it was highly beneficial to me, too.


    As we moved to one of the corners where we could be relatively undisturbed, Kenji must have noticed my rather corporeal shadow, also known as Sabrina.


    ¡°Say, Teacher, who is that?¡± he asked, causing Sabrina to hide behind me.


    ¡°This is Sabrina. I seem to have adopted her during these last few days,¡± I told him, without going into details. Instead, I asked him about his recent experiences and what direction he had developed his magic in, mostly listening as we sat down. Amusingly, he didn¡¯t seem to be interested in the incredibly obvious physical and magical changes I had undergone by crossing the first divide, I knew he had to have noticed them, but other than a slight widening of his eyes and that overly formal introduction in the beginning, there had been neither acknowledgement nor question about it.


    Instead, the focus remained on the topic I had picked, with him talking until I either asked a question or tried to clarify something, while Sabrina was listening closely to both of us. Her curiosity was on full display, bringing a grin to my face that just wouldn¡¯t fade.

 Chapter 822

    While discussing magic with Kenji and teaching him a few more tricks, I was once more reminded just how insightful and intelligent Sabrina really was. We were discussing tricks to improve his archery using Wind Magic, with me giving him a few ideas based on the way I had seen Adra use her magic archery when Sabrina started to add her own two cents. Normally, I wouldn¡¯t have expected a child to have any idea about that topic, even my prior teachings had never gone into the direct combination of magic and weapon usage as I considered it to be rather specialised, and yet, Sabrina had good ideas.


    Mostly, her ideas were focused on the basic theory I had gone over with her, but she had figured out a few quite insightful ideas. Her primary suggestion, one that would either turn out to be useless or genius, was that Kenji should try to learn how to channel Lightning Magic. There was some truth to it, the primary association with Lightning would always be a bolt, a near-instantaneous strike between two points. While combining it with Archery would be a challenge, simply channelling Lightning into an arrow wouldn¡¯t do much, it had a lot of potential. Enough potential that Kenji happily perked up at the idea, clearly intrigued.


    However, getting him into Lightning Magic was a bit of a challenge. My own skill came from a combination of Fire and Wind Magic, but I had never done a lot with it. It just didn¡¯t mesh well with the rest of my abilities, especially with my recent focus on Enchanting. That just needed different Rune Masteries, creativity and Crystal Magic, allowing me to directly engrave runes into metallic, or rather crystalline, materials using my magic. Otherwise, I¡¯d never have invested the time to push the Magic, even if I felt a certain affinity for it, as Ice was also made up of crystals, just like the Astral Power storing Blood Spheres I had seen on Mundus.


    But Lightning, Lightning was loud, bright and the exact opposite of subtle, the only things worse would be Light, even Fire was preferable to Lightning. It burned, but that was it, as long as I managed to keep the fire concealed in Darkness, I didn¡¯t need to bother, but with Lightning, I needed to conceal the flash and hide the noise. Even the pure static charge I assumed would be left in the air after powerful Lightning Magic was used would be a give-away, just like the ozone-scent it produced. If not for my racial dislike for Light Magic, Lightning Magic might beat even that one out as my least favourite and least affine type of Magic. But I still managed to give Kenji a few ideas on where to start working.


    I didn¡¯t think he had the potential to get into Fire Magic, we tried a few small experiments using conjured Fire and a bit of channelled Fire Astral Power but he was unable to manipulate either. Instead, we went directly for the Lightning, using pieces of wire, one of which we grounded while I let short zaps jump from another piece I was holding in my hand to focus the stuff. It worked reasonably well, Kenji quickly managed to sense the zaps and by the end of our practice he managed to direct the zaps away from one wire and towards, though the distance wasn¡¯t that big. But still, he managed the redirection as long as I didn¡¯t resist his attempts. At the end of the day, I was far more powerful and it was my Astral Power. It worked for training, but in a real battle, there¡¯d be no way for him to fully redirect my lightning. Mostly because I¡¯d never use it, but that was a wholly different problem.


    By the time Kenji was completely exhausted, the rest of his group and the local survivors had finished their discussions about future plans. Just as expected, the group would escort the survivors to Apple Gate Farm, taking the gathered supplies with them. There, the survivors would be integrated into the ongoing efforts, which should help a great deal, especially with child care. There were already too few children for anyone to be really comfortable with the situation, so protecting the few children who had managed to survive thus far was high on many people¡¯s priority lists.


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    A contributing factor was that pregnancy, or rather the birthing process, would return to a fairly dangerous proposition, without good equipment and doctors. Reasonably advanced magic could replace the equipment but that solution needed talented and trained healers, merely changing the problem. Luckily for those at the Farm, motherhood, and thus the birthing process, was part of Frigg¡¯s portfolio, so the Goddess should have some adequate prayers to speak and miracles for her clerics to call upon.


    But the coming exodus of the survivors left me with a decision to make. Either we could stay nearby, remain in the vacation-mode we had drifted into since meeting Sabrina, or the vacation could end. At that point, the decision on how to proceed with Sabrina would go from pending to necessary, I would have to make one. I still wasn¡¯t sure I wanted to expose her to combat, all lessons and rules about correct behaviour I had learned told me taking a child into a bloody battlefield was wrong.


    But those lessons and rules had been based on the world before the change. A world where, at least in Western countries, children were allowed to just be children, an idea people wanted to impress on the rest of the world. However, if a family didn¡¯t have the resources, the money and food, to sustain their children, was having those children work the wrong choice? If the alternative was starvation, was child labour wrong? Similarly, in a society that lacked the depth to reliably protect children, was it wrong to teach a child to fight? Or was it the right thing to do, giving her the tools to protect herself?


    I had a feeling that there was no right answer. Both answers could go horribly wrong oh-so-easily but I knew I couldn¡¯t simply leave the decision to Sabrina. She would never think that she could die out there, she had been utterly fearless when it came to magic and I had no doubt that she¡¯d elect to stick with me if given the choice.


    And maybe that was the answer. She could get into trouble with either choice. Apple Gate Farm, as much as it was the best location I currently knew about, was not guaranteed to survive, especially if I failed to exterminate the Withered. Those pests could destroy the farm if given a few months, of that I had little doubt. Even now, they had the numbers and levels, it was only their unwillingness or inability to move too far from the park they were centred in that kept the rest of the city safe. They didn¡¯t spread, but that could change at some point. Even now, their numbers didn¡¯t seem to wane, while their levels kept rising, regardless of how many we destroyed.


    ¡°Do you want to tell anybody goodbye?¡± I asked Sabrina in the evening, knowing that the survivors would leave the next morning. I felt an odd, clenching sensation in my gut when my munchkin simply grabbed hold of my sleeve, holding tight as if making sure I didn¡¯t run away. Maybe that was all the answer I needed, the answer I knew I¡¯d arrive at all along. That I¡¯d take Sabrina with me, doing my best to keep her safe and to train her so she could keep herself safe.


    But that also meant I¡¯d have to give my own goodbyes and say farewell to Chris, Jenn and their baby Sebastian. I hadn¡¯t interacted much with the baby, nor did I really want to, and while I had wanted to teach the two adults, they had been resistant to my instruction. Mother had always told me to keep in touch with my friends and help them if I could, but how did this situation fit with her teachings? I couldn¡¯t force my friends to listen or to adapt to the situation we found ourselves in. They had to get their act together and that was something they had to accomplish.


    And yet, I had a feeling my mother would want me to help them. She had told me helping friends wasn¡¯t just for when it was convenient. That looking away could be just as bad as hurting them and that sometimes friends didn¡¯t know they needed help. That they thought they could deal with a problem themselves, only for their problem to slowly devour them, until there was nothing left.


    Sadly, while I felt like I should help them somehow, that somehow was the problem. I had no idea, I had tried to teach them but maybe it was a situation where you could lead a horse to water but you couldn¡¯t make it drink.


    Luckily, Sabrina was happily drinking in all the teachings I could give her. Though, if she didn¡¯t, she wouldn¡¯t be my munchkin.

 Chapter 823

    The next morning, Sabrina, Lia and I were watching the survivors that had occupied the community centre start their trip to the farm. A part of me wanted to laugh at the awkwardness of it all but I managed to stop myself. It would have been unkind. A few of these people had barely left the building for two months and it showed, there were moments when they stopped in their tracks, looking around and blinking, like some sort of marmot or groundhog, peeking out of their burrow and looking for threats.


    Not all of them were like that, a few seemed to be accustomed to the outdoors, but none of them would be able to protect their group. Luckily, the group Mark had sent was prepared for that, having taken up positions around the area to make sure nothing would get to the survivors. Hopefully, at least.


    Sadly, while that group was necessary to protect the people, their presence wasn¡¯t without its troubles. The strange magical guy I had noticed the day before had, upon realising that Sabrina wasn¡¯t planning to join the group heading to Apple Gate Farm, protested that she¡¯d be staying around. His companions, especially Kenji, had quickly reacted and I had tasted the distinct scent of Wind Magic in the air just after the guy¡¯s voice wasn¡¯t audible any longer, so I wasn¡¯t sure what had been said. A part of me had been curious but my interest was more towards ways of disabling or circumventing the magical silence Kenji set up than it was in the guy¡¯s protests. I had, covertly, checked his level and he wouldn¡¯t be a threat for a long time, his level barely above twenty. It wasn¡¯t bad, one might even call it excellent when compared to the survivors they were rescuing, but it was far from my own power.


    Their intervention made sure I didn¡¯t have to listen to some sort of rant and while I didn¡¯t like the look he gave me, that was true for a lot of looks I got. Almost everyone I met had either some sort of negative emotion visible in their eyes or their eyes gave away nothing, hiding their feelings inside. I wasn¡¯t about to judge somebody by their initial reactions, I was self-aware enough to know people felt intimidated by my power and were fearful of the unknown, as represented by my inhumane skin colour and magical hair. I was clearly something other than human, the differences much more distinct than those of Cassie.


    ¡°What are we going to do now?¡± Lia quietly asked as the people started moving away from the building. She was a little behind Sabrina and me, making sure to stay out of any stray sun rays that might make it through the relatively thin cloud cover, but watching their exodus just the same.


    ¡°Some more training, I¡¯ve got a few ideas for some experiments and things I want to try out,¡± I admitted, looking between the other two. ¡°In addition, we might have to start Sabrina with a more direct training regime, have her take down a few Undead or something like that. We don¡¯t want to have her harmed by gaining too many levels too fast. I have no idea if it can harm her permanently, beyond the possibility of a worse class, but I¡¯m not too keen to test it out,¡± I added, getting a brave nod from Sabrina. We had talked about the need to hunt and kill before, though I wasn¡¯t sure whether she truly understood. I doubted it, which made a careful program of desensitization a necessity, even beyond the need to keep her experience intake low.


    ¡°Why don¡¯t we try to see if you can get any element for you to work? We¡¯ve only checked whether you¡¯ve got any affinity traits but we never tried to have you manipulate Astral Power. It might help you a little, maybe you even get some real magic out of it, we¡¯ll have to see,¡± I asked Sabrina. She immediately nodded along happily, remembering the lessons I had given her on elemental theory. I hadn¡¯t done this before, simply because I didn¡¯t want people to think I could easily help them gain any elemental magic they wanted, but I wanted to make the effort for my munchkin.


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    ¡°And for you, Lia, I¡¯ve got an idea for a challenge,¡± I grinned, ¡°You remember how I managed to travel through the shadows, how I can merge myself into the Darkness and hide that way?¡±


    ¡°Yes, Mother, I know what you mean?¡± Lia replied, though her uncertainty was clearly audible. She didn¡¯t know what I had in mind, which wasn¡¯t a real surprise.


    ¡°Well, Daughter, the challenge is that I want you to accomplish the same, at least on a small scale. Take a small, contained shadow, let¡¯s say the darkness within a bag, and put your hand inside, hide it inside. If you make progress, I¡¯ll have a special snack for you later,¡± I explained, getting a thoughtful nod. I doubted she was already able to fully merge herself with the shadows, to say nothing about travelling through them but reaching into the shadows might be possible.


    It was also part of another idea I had, using the shadows to store things. I wasn¡¯t sure how I could do it, if it was even possible, but I thought that it might be. I already knew that things could be taken in the shadows, otherwise, I¡¯d be naked every time I travelled through them, naked and without all my gear, but I wasn¡¯t. So, there had to be a way for things, non-living physical objects, to be put into the shadows and taken back out. Now, the question was, could I let go of items within the shadows? If yes, could I take them back out? And what were the rules for that? Did I have to be in the same position, or did I only need access to the shadow I had put something in? Did I even need any sort of physical relation to the place I had put something in from, or could I theoretically take anything I knew to be in the shadows back out of them, at any distance? As long as I could magically find it within the realm?


    The place was a realm of willpower and magic, not a real, physical place, so the rules might be completely different than I imagined and having Lia as a research partner would be invaluable. Because this idea might be the most valuable and important just yet, at least in the context of humanity as a whole. If my idea was even remotely possible, I might be able to create an approximation of the magic bags used on Mundus, by making sure that there was a light-less area at the bottom of a bag and using that lightless, darkness, as a storage space. There would certainly be challenges, even now I could imagine countless problems that could pop up, but just the possibility was enough to warrant thorough investigation.


    But now, I had to get some work done with Sabrina. Similarly to the way I had introduced lightning magic to Kenji, I started by conjuring small amounts of the respective elements into my palm, carefully controlling them. Once they were there, Sabrina, and Lia for that matter, got to try manipulating them on their own, simply to see which they got along with best.


    It was quite fascinating to experience, to see the looks of concentration and feel their Astral Power reach for mine. Looking at it with my magical sight, I realised that I needed an incredibly light touch to help Sabrina, simply because she was so weak in comparison to me. Granted, that was mainly because she was only level two, having gained a level during my lessons to my surprise, but that didn¡¯t change the contrast. My Astral Power could easily swallow up the probes she sent, leaving her with nothing, which obviously wasn¡¯t the idea behind the exercise.


    With a lot of patience and care on my part, we managed to cycle through the elements I had control over. The results we got were fairly unspectacular but not unexpected. Sabrina¡¯s best element was water, though it was only a minor affinity, with a smattering of Darkness thrown in. She lacked the affinity to specialise in magic, but I felt that just having the skills and a bit of training would help a great deal. If only to make sure she always had something to drink, while Darkness Magic would hopefully help her with concealment in the future.


    Lia, on the other hand, only had the elements we already knew before.  With a bit of training, she might gain more Elemental Magic skills but I doubted it and she had declared that she¡¯d continue to focus on what she already could do magically, plus her physical skills. Those were her primary focus, a focus she intended to keep.


    Finally, Sabrina was finished with this part of her training and I sent off my two children, so they could get some physical work done. In the meantime, I wanted to experiment with Darkness Magic.

 Chapter 824

    It was a little odd, reaching into an empty bag was such an ordinary thing to do, and yet, it was also the first step to trying something rather extraordinary. Once my hand was touching the bottom of the bag, I closed my eyes, blocking out everything but the sensations coming from that hand, pulling it back a little so I wasn¡¯t touching any part of the bag, letting it just sit there, in the emptiness. In the darkness, as the bag was made from thick, dark cloth, blocking what little light could get into the building we were in. Shadows, that I was accustomed to, that I could step into.


    Remembering those sensations I let a bit of Astral Power seep out, infusing the darkness within the bag with my own power, making it something more. Something deeper.


    There was a slightly chill sensation around my fingers and with a grin on my face, I pushed my hand in further, feeling for the bottom of the bag. Only to come up empty, my arm going in deeper and deeper until my arm was almost completely in the bag that would normally barely get to my elbow. Looking down, my grin became even wider, if that was possible.


    I had my first proof of concept, the most trivial but also the most important one. My idea had basic merit, I could reach into the shadows, just like I could step into the shadows. But now, the more difficult things had to be tested. What could I do with the shadows I reached into, what happened to stuff I put inside them and so on? Were the shadows within the bag connected to all the other shadows, so would I have to make sure that things didn¡¯t get lost? Did I need to anchor the shadow space within the bag to the bag, so I didn¡¯t lose track of it? There were many, many experiments I had to perform before I could do anything productive with my idea and yet, I didn¡¯t care in the least. I was already ecstatic that my idea seemed to be panning out, to say nothing about a few interesting traps I could imagine.


    ¡°Mum, your arm?!¡± Sabrina must have seen that my arm was somehow vanishing in a bag, while I was grinning like a loon.


    ¡°Everything¡¯s fine, just trying a few things out,¡± I told her, pulling most of my arm back out, before gently pushing and prodding against the bag in an attempt to get a better idea of how the separation between normal space and shadow space worked. It was fairly fascinating, to feel the shift between having the fabric push against my arm only for the sensation to be replaced by the strangely cool smoothness of the shadows. It was somewhat similar to feeling the empty air but at the same time, the difference was distinct, the shadows felt thinner, for lack of a better word, as if moving in air was like moving in water, while the shadows were normal air. It was both fascinating but also a little discombobulation, sensations I was accustomed to feeling were suddenly cut off.


    Having attracted the notice of Sabrina and Lia, I explained to my daughter what I was doing and what the idea behind it was, causing both to look at me with wide eyes. When I began to elaborate on what could be done if the experiments panned out like I wanted them to, they started to stare at me in wonder, especially when I began to theorise that it might be possible to put an entire habitat into the shadows, allowing us to play snail and carry our homes with us, wherever we went. I doubted pushing things that far would work but it was a fairly amusing idea.


    Shaking off the idea, I decided to start with the simplest experiment, putting something simple into the shadows. Picking up a piece of trash left behind by the survivors, I reached back into the bag, holding the piece while pushing my hand into the Shadows. The piece went with my hand, I remained able to feel it and it was clearly no longer within the bag, when I let go and pulled my hand back out. The piece of trash didn¡¯t come with my hand, it stayed gone, while I made sure to keep the bag in the same place it had been before.


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    After waiting for a few seconds, I reached back into the bag, feeling around for the piece I had put into the shadows just moments before, only to come up empty. The thing was gone, making me wonder if it was destroyed or somehow lost in the shadows.


    My next test was to repeat the previous one, only this time I conjured a piece of Ice to use. It was still made up from my Astral Power, so I¡¯d hopefully be able to feel its existence, even if it drifted off or something like that.


    Just like the trash, it easily vanished into the bag and when I put my hand back in, just a few seconds later, I could faintly feel it in the distance. It was utterly mindbending, to feel the item in the distance, while, at the same time, knowing that it was nearby. My mind tried to process two different spaces at the same time, spaces that only partially overlapped, and it was not made for the task. Only by pushing the magical perception I received from inside the Shadows into my secondary thought-stream, I could prevent what could rapidly become a killer headache, but once I did that, things were a lot easier.


    Reaching out with my Magic, I pulled the shard of Ice I had conjured back, easily catching it with my hand and pulling it back out. A cursory inspection didn¡¯t show any damage, giving me hope that the Shadows weren¡¯t inherently destructive to material objects but that piece of trash had simply drifted off, just like my Ice had. Only, without a connection to the trash, I couldn¡¯t call it back to my hand, not that I really wanted to.


    But it gave me something to work with, an initial problem I had to overcome before I could make the bags I wanted to have. Namely, how could I fix something in a space that seemed to be shifting at a fast pace, if the distance my Ice had to travel back to my hand was any indication?


    Before trying to fix anything in the Shadows, I decided to test something else. After putting the Ice back into the shadows and letting go, I let my hand drift to the side without leaving the Shadows, while I kept a close, mental lock on my Ice, trying to get a feel of the shifting within the Shadows. Only, there wasn¡¯t any movement. The Ice just hung there, without any movement I could detect until I gave it a small push with my magic, making it drift away.


    Even with my push, it didn¡¯t speed up, nor did it slow down, it just kept moving at an even speed for a few seconds until suddenly, it moved with a far greater speed as if it had moved past some barrier. Or maybe as if there were currents within the shadows and the Ice had moved from the tranquillity around my hand into a quickly moving current, getting pushed away from my hand. It felt somewhat right, though when I tried to pull the Ice back, it worked without issue, with nothing indicating that there was something trying to move it in the other direction. It didn¡¯t make a lot of sense but it gave me some more data in regards to the strange space within the shadows.


    Whistling to myself, I came up with a simple solution. Pulling out a piece of string, I wrapped it around the Ice, manipulating the Ice a little to encompass the string so it couldn¡¯t unravel, no matter what, before putting the Ice back into the Shadows, the string trailing behind it. Only that the string didn¡¯t enter the shadows completely, part of it remained outside, even outside the bag.


    Pulling my hand back out, I waited for a couple of seconds again, before reaching back into the shadows, curious what I¡¯d find. To my gleeful joy, I found the Ice pretty much in the same spot I had previously put it in, making me think that my idea had merit. But more experiments were needed.


    Next, I pulled my hand back out, leaving the Ice and the string as they were, only now I deliberately moved the bag around, taking it into the next room, before reaching back in. I wasn¡¯t sure if the string had been stressed but I thought that the Ice might have moved a little, I wasn¡¯t sure. But it was still there, still hanging on the string, without any observable issues.


    This meant my idea had merit. Weight wasn¡¯t a problem, the bag hadn¡¯t weighed anymore with the Ice and the string than it had without them, meaning the weight within the shadows wasn¡¯t transmitted to the bag itself, which was a good thing.


    Struck by a moment of curiosity, I looked into the bag, interested in how the string¡¯s transition between shadow-space and normal-space and normal space would look. Only, the moment I opened the bag wide, letting a little too much light into the opening, the string was suddenly loose, flopping around as if cut off.


    Obviously, even more experiments were needed.

 Chapter 825

    Grinning to myself, I reached into my newly christened Magic Bag, pulling out one of the many artfully decorated rocks I had stored within. The bag wasn¡¯t yet acknowledged by the system as a magical item, but it allowed me to put things in that were larger than the bag, as long as I could hold them while pushing my hand into it without damaging the bag itself. According to Lia and Sabrina, it looked utterly hilarious watching me push long objects into the far-too-small-looking bag, or push my entire arm into it.


    The bag itself was fairly simple in its design, there was an inner pouch, holding nothing but darkness and some of my hairs acting as threads, made in such a way that the pouch would never open but remain in perpetual darkness, making sure that the hairs were never exposed to enough light to sever their connection into the shadows. Those hair were connecting the physical bag to a second, larger, bag that I had folded up and put into the shadows. The hairs were all around the opening of that larger bag, acting as a connection between the smaller bag I was planning to carry and the larger bag hidden inside the shadows. Putting items into the shadows within the smaller bag deposited them into the larger bag, allowing me to carry them without feeling the weight.


    At least that was the idea. I would need some more testing to make sure the idea worked, which was why I had only placed unimportant items into the shadows. My current test objects were simple rocks I had picked up, decorated in such a way that I could identify individual rocks and have a good measure if the shadows were damaging the physical items in any way. I had no idea what prolonged exposure might do to them, even using my hair, and thus a connection to my physical and spiritual self, was something I worried about. But I felt that using them gave me the best chance of success, especially as I had made sure to fill the individual hairs with as much Darkness Astral Power as I could, before plucking them from my head. It was the same process I had used to make my concealment cloak, which still worked quite well, despite constant usage for over two months. Hopefully, things worked out similarly with the bag, though I had a feeling I was missing something. Otherwise, it would hopefully be recognised as a magical item by the system, allowing the use of Identity to give an idea of what it was. For now, it merely came back as a normal item, nothing more than a bag. Boring, mundane trash.


    Though, maybe that was for the best. In the current iteration of the bag, one had to be able to reach into the shadows to access what I was carrying, making the thing quite secure, at least if it remained stable. And unless people saw me reach into it, why would anyone think it was more than what it looked like? Even assuming we came across people able to reach into the shadows, I wasn¡¯t in the habit to put my hand into any patch of darkness I could find, certainly not into every pocket or bag. Far too much work, though now I might want to consider it.


    Even looking at the bag with my magical sight gave only very, very vague results, I was able to detect the hairs but I was unable to recognise the opening into the shadows, as it should be. Darkness was wonderful to obscure things, it even obscured itself, at least it seemed to me that way. Or maybe there simply wasn¡¯t any innate magic and the whole thing would fall apart as soon as the magic within the hairs was depleted, though if that was the case, the thread I had used previously would have fallen apart immediately.


    Time would tell how successful my first serious attempt at creating a magic bag would be.


    But before that time could come to pass, there were other things to do. Namely, check over my newly acquired munchkin and head out, to go back into the city and find a few monsters to hunt down. Sabrina wouldn¡¯t be able to participate, she simply didn¡¯t have a way to stay safe while striking our foes, nor was she able to remain stealthy enough, so we¡¯d have to be rather careful.


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    ¡°Mom, can you tell me why big sis only goes out at night?¡± Sabrina quietly asked, as I was finishing up my experiment with the magic bag, looking over my stuff to make sure I hadn¡¯t missed anything. Lia was in the next room, still training, and my munchkin had tried to sneak over to me, though I had no doubt that Lia had heard her, I certainly had.


    Reaching out and pulling her onto my lap, I considered how much to tell her.


    ¡°Well, it¡¯s a little complicated,¡± I admitted, trying to find a good way to explain Lia¡¯s state without frightening Sabrina. Though, did I really have to be delicate, couldn¡¯t I simply use my own condition to explain? Or would that frighten her even more, if I explained it as a condition Lia had gained because I adopted her, mirrored from my own condition, gained because of a jealous old busy-body?


    ¡°You see, during that horrible night two months back, when everything changed, Lia was terribly hurt. Before that night, her name used to be Chantalle and she wasn¡¯t my daughter, she had other parents,¡± I explained, getting a nod of understanding, ¡°Her parents had almost given up hope, she was that badly hurt, but I managed to help her. Only, I couldn¡¯t restore who she used to be, I could only help her move forward, that is how she turned from Chantalle into Lia.¡±


    I paused for a moment, trying to find the right words, ¡°Sadly, when I gave her a path forward, we broke a few rules, I shouldn¡¯t have been able to do what I did. Regardless of those rules, I managed, at least to a point, but by breaking those rules I also changed something within Lia, she lost the ability to move under the sun.¡±


    ¡°Oh,¡± Sabrina nodded, obviously not fully understanding what I had told her. But then, she was only six, so maybe that was normal.


    ¡°You just need to know that it¡¯s part of who Lia is, just like I can¡¯t stand direct sunlight but instead both of us can easily move around in the darkness. All people are a little different from each other, just some of them have greater differences than others. It¡¯s like the colour of my skin, the specks of light in my hair or my pointy ears. Those are all things that make me different, but none of them makes me better or worse than other people,¡± I tried to explain it with other words, floundering around to find the right ones. It was similar to the talk my parents had given me back in grade school about tolerance, that all people were unique and special in their own right. Their talk had helped me a little, but the lessons of adults had only provided sparse comfort when confronted with cruel children. If anything, my mother¡¯s lessons had made me closer to her, providing the comfort I was missing in relationships with my supposed peers.


    Maybe it was for the best that Sabrina wouldn¡¯t have to deal with that. I certainly had no idea how to best prepare a child for the cruelty of other children, nor for the apathy of their educators.


    Shaking away those old, morose thoughts, I focused on the munchkin before me, realising that she simply accepted my words. Her easy trust brought a grin to my face, making me wonder if I had been that easy to convince.


    ¡°Now, munchkin, that¡¯s a bit of a secret, you know? You shouldn¡¯t talk to others about the things you see Lia or me doing, they are only for our family,¡± I added, trying to impress on her the need for secrecy.


    ¡°Mhm, okay,¡± she nodded again, looking eager, ¡°You said that big sis wasn¡¯t always called Lia, right? Or Carlia, right?¡± she asked, her mispronunciation of Carnelia¡¯s full name making me chuckle a little.


    ¡°Her name is Carnelia, it¡¯s for a beautiful red gem, one that can have the same colour as her eyes. Just like I¡¯m Jade, named for my green eyes,¡± I explained, carefully enunciating my older daughter¡¯s name. Luckily, Jade was quite simple to pronounce, even if I had yet to hear Sabrina call me that.


    ¡°Carnelia,¡± she carefully repeated after me, taking a few tries to get it right with a bit of help from me. When I finally nodded, she gave me a wide smile of triumph, before speaking again.


    ¡°You said that Carnelia had a different name before she became your daughter, right?¡± she asked, continuing on when I nodded, ¡°Will I get a new name, too? So I can be your daughter?¡±

 Chapter 826

    ¡°Will I get a new name, too? So I can be your daughter?¡± Sabrina¡¯s words stumped me for a moment. Did she need a new name? A part of me wanted to deny, even if only to keep the people who knew her as Sabrina from coming after me. It was one thing to change the name of Chantalle, she was older, almost an adult, and had been considered lost to the world. And yet, I took great care to never use the name Carnelia or Lia at Apple Gate Farm. If others heard me and later talked about it, they¡¯d likely think it was a nickname, making it of lesser importance. But if I took in a child, changed her name and maybe even her looks, depending on the results of the ritual I was planning? How would people react and did I care about their reaction?


    It was difficult to guess the reactions, people weren¡¯t rational when it came to children. I noticed it within myself, taking Sabrina in was a burden and while I had some confidence in her later value because we were divinely guided here, I couldn¡¯t be certain whether the value was enough to make up for the hardship. But something about her made me look past the uncertainty of her future value and ignore the hardships taking her in brought with it. Instead, I simply embraced the munchkin and felt good about it. Irrationally good, and yet, I wasn¡¯t quite willing to simply ignore the comfortable sensation welling up within myself.


    ¡°You are my daughter and Lia¡¯s sister, even if you keep the name Sabrina,¡± I assured her, cuddling her in an attempt to show her I wouldn¡¯t go away, ¡°But if you feel that a new name would be good for you, we can think of one. Or we could wait for a few more days, until the New Moon or right after it, when the moon starts waxing again, and hold the ritual I was planning for you. It will hopefully allow you to commune with Hecate, remember what I told you about her?¡± I asked, getting an immediate nod in response. Sabrina knew that we had been led to her by Silva, who knew about her presence due to Hecate, giving her some familiarity with the deity.


    ¡°Well, it would be akin to a baptism. Nowadays, people have their names before their baptism but that wasn¡¯t always the case. Back in the day, people decided to be baptised, shedding their old life and starting a new one, taking on a new name and role. Doesn¡¯t that sound right to you?¡± I explained, having to hide a grin when Sabrina started to quickly nod, making me worry that she might become dizzy. Lia had been given her new name when she stepped out of the cage the Shattered had been in, so maybe it was a good parallel that Sabrina would be given a new name when she stepped away from the weakness of her body and gained the seed of power she needed to protect herself.


    Growing that seed would take time, but it had to be done. The gods might be able to give somebody enough power to change the world at the drop of a head but I didn¡¯t think that the person getting the power could wield it. Going by my experience, it would be more likely that they¡¯d react akin to an incandescent lamp that was connected to a high-power grid, giving off a brief, bright spark before burning out forever.


    Yeah, I didn¡¯t want that, not for me, Sabrina, or anyone I considered a companion. Hel, I didn¡¯t even want it for my enemies, but that was mostly because they might cause me incredible damage in that brief moment of brightness. I had no delusions that I could stand up to a God, not without a Nexus, a tower to channel and control the power from it and, if at all possible, a helper as strong as the Nidh?gg. With those, I would be able to ward off any attack of a Deity channelled through a weak mortal but I doubted that I¡¯d be attacked by weak mortals if I had access to that kind of power. No, they¡¯d send their strongest or maybe use some divine shenanigans, like that bright light that burned me away on Mundus.


    ¡°I can wait, mum,¡± she assured me, though I thought there was a bit of vulnerability in her voice. Unsure how to comfort her, I simply kept holding her, my hand idly tracing circles on her back, while my mind was busy. Namely, trying to figure out what to name her. For now, I had bought myself a bit of time but unless Hecate had some awesome ideas on what to name a young girl coming into Her service, it would be up to me. I wasn¡¯t even sure how close the communication during the baptism would be, or communion or whatever the ritual I was trying to work out would be called, whether Hecate would verbally talk to us or if it would be limited to impressions and ideas. It might even be limited to a mere notification, telling Sabrina that she received the blessing or something along those lines, giving her the ability to get some special class upon reaching level ten.


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    So, I¡¯d better have a good name ready, a name that would make the munchkin happy, make her feel like she was part of the family and my daughter.


    Meaning, giving her some random, if pretty, name was out. Given that both Carnelia and my currently used name were based on gems matching the colour of our eyes, using that concept would be easy and fitting. But what sort of gem had that fairly average brown colour, too dark to be called amber but also not hazel? Sabrina¡¯s eyes were just, well, brown, middle of the colour range with a few tiny specks of green and blue, depending on how the light hit them. They were, sadly, fairly unremarkable, if not for that sparkle of curiosity, that inner light shining from them.


    But how could I put that into a good, fitting name that she¡¯d feel happy about? Maybe a visit to the Jeweler would be necessary, not to get additional metal or gems but to find a book in order to give Sabrina a good name.


    Nodding to myself, I decided that we¡¯d visit, it would also allow us to visit a few more stores and get some new clothes for the munchkin. Her supplies were rather sparse and with my newly developed bags, I could easily carry as much as we needed. Those bags truly called for another looting trip, I had never been an avid shopper but there was something about the idea to take whatever we wanted that spoke to me. Plus, there wouldn¡¯t be any other people around the stores to annoy me, no noise, no bustle, nothing but the stuff I wanted to take, Sabrina and Lia.


    That would work.


    ¡°Lia, I¡¯ll need to work on your bags. Sabrina, do you know if there are a couple of bags around here? I¡¯ll be able to magic them so we can carry more stuff with us,¡± I told my daughters, happy that I didn¡¯t need to shout at Lia, thanks to her relatively sharp senses. Otherwise, I might have hurt the munchkin¡¯s ears, she was still sitting on my lap, her head resting against my chest. Luckily, I had grown after crossing the divide, or this wouldn¡¯t work as well as it did.


    Sabrina and Lia followed my request, Lia simply dropping the bag off before going back to her training while Sabrina hopped off my lap, rummaging around the area, looking for bags. Most of the useful things had been taken by the leaving survivors but not everything, so I soon had multiple bags to work with.


    After making the first, it was fairly simple to make more, using the same design. It wasn¡¯t complex, which might be why it wasn¡¯t recognised by the system, nor could anybody use it. The bags needed relatively good skill in Darkness Magic, in addition to knowing how to step into the shadows, a skill I doubted anyone could just stumble across. Or maybe it was a skill people could only stumble across, I remembered that my initial forays on Mundus had been just that. Stumbling around in a daze, my mind not working due to exhaustion and stress, only to find myself in that strange place. Those had been the initial steps to find the shadows, so it might just be that random. Or something else, with only my own experience and a bit of lore from Mundus, I couldn¡¯t be confident one way or the other.


    Maybe it was akin to that amusing idea from an old novel, in order to fly, you needed to fall and miss the ground. Until Lia managed to reach into the shadows without my help, I wouldn¡¯t know. But it also didn¡¯t really matter. As long as I could use the bags, my group could use the convenience while I tried to perfect them. For now, they were prototypes, in which I wouldn¡¯t dare store our truly valuable stuff, not unless I was convinced they were safe.

 Chapter 827

    Moving through the night with Sabrina by my side was an interesting experience. We had travelled with diurnal people before but never with any who I cared enough about to light the way for them. For my munchkin, I was happily making an exception to our normally stealthy modus operandi and used my Fire Magic to produce a happily dancing flame that I kept floating above our heads. It wasn¡¯t overly bright but it was enough to let her see, making things less disturbing for her. Even with the fire, she was rather scared and had started to clutch my clothes until I held out my hand, giving her something else to hold.


    When the first Undead came to investigate the light, Sabrina reacted with the expected horror, it was one thing to watch Undead from within a shelter but an entirely different experience to have them shamble in your direction, only to be taken down by swift attacks from Lia or me. Thanks to an earlier declaration of fellowship, Sabrina was starting to get some EXP, slowly increasing her level with every fallen Undead. We¡¯d have to find some way to get her some skills, and have those increase as well, or the whole class-thing might be difficult. Sadly, I wasn¡¯t sure what the best skills would be, we had been training her to control and release her magic at will but that wasn¡¯t really something she could use in combat. It helped her, and she had gained the Astral Meditation skill a while back, but it wasn¡¯t true magic. No, her trouble showed me just how little I knew about non-elemental magic, there had to be some sort of generalist skill, though I wasn¡¯t quite sure what it might be.


    I remembered posts from Travellers who were playing as Guild Mages and the descriptions of their magical training. They had described learning defined spells from their mentors, allowing them to easily cast rather powerful magic but there hadn¡¯t been a skill component to it. Not according to the system at least, or maybe it was a skill they simply hadn¡¯t shared. Possibly something along the lines of chanting or spell-channelling or something along those lines, a skill they gained as part of their class.


    Hopefully, Sabrina would get the right tools for her path when gaining a class, or maybe after we communicated with Hecate. Unless something went seriously weird, Sabrina wouldn¡¯t be much higher than level five by the time the new moon would roll around, so she wouldn¡¯t get her class for a little longer. Maybe we could even ask Hecate about the skills, but that would depend on the mode of communication and how accommodating the Deity would be. I wasn¡¯t about to annoy Her, partially because of the blessing She had given me but also out of respect. As a Deity of Magic, She had to have walked the Arcane Path for a long time, had explored things I could only dream about and might have forgotten more about magic than I had ever known. Who knew how good divine memories were, She might not have forgotten anything about magic, with it being part of Her domain.


    Regardless, training Sabrina was a challenge, especially as I didn¡¯t want to traumatise her, at least not more than necessary. She already had some trauma from the loss of her parents and the whole apocalypse but how that would interact with future trauma from battling Undead and possibly getting wounded, I had no idea. Hel, even interacting with Hecate might cause further trauma, simply because a deity was far beyond mortals, the brief interaction I had with Fenris had most certainly been traumatising, to the point that I had died from it. The only reason I considered my idea safe, if not entirely sane, was that Silva had led us to Sabrina, making me think that the Goddess had plans for my munchkin.


    But that was a problem for the future. For now, we had to loot some new clothes, a task that turned out to be a little more difficult than I had thought. Since the apocalypse, things had started to decay and get destroyed. Quite a few stores were exposed to the elements in a variety of ways, in some cases the destruction had been in the initial change, and in many other cases, it was due to random accidents. Something as simple as a broken window could cause wind and rain to destroy the remaining stock, or people looted what they needed. Even the Undead and Shattered might break some doors open, simply because their routine required them to, leaving destruction in their wake.


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    Soon, the people at Apple Gate Farm would have to come up with other ways to get clothes, though I wasn¡¯t quite sure what could be done. Leather might work, but I doubted anyone had the skills to tan it and even if there was somebody, I wouldn¡¯t want to wear leather underclothes, that sounded like a great way to get chafing. Synthetic fibres were obviously out, unless somebody had some mad ideas about alchemy, while woollen fabric would require sheep to be re-domesticated. I had no idea how that might work, though I had a feeling it might be the easiest way to get some cloth. Cotton and linen were both plant products though I had no idea how easy it would be to get the seeds, to say nothing about the labour requirements. There had been a reason why the cotton farmers of the American South fought for their slave labour and it wasn¡¯t because growing and picking cotton was effortless. Even with the system, I doubted that the labour requirements would go down, so I doubted cotton would be the fabric of choice. There were other fabrics, though I knew even less about their production, sure I had heard of silkworms but other than that? I was utterly clueless and could only hope to loot enough stuff to keep me situated until somebody else figured all that stuff out.


    It would be even worse for Sabrina. I was fully grown, supernatural growth-spurts from crossing the first Divide aside, so unless my clothes were destroyed beyond any possible way of fixing them, be that way magical or mundane, I could wear them for years. Sabrina would, hopefully, be able to grow up with enough nutrition to keep her growth from getting stunted, so she would regularly need new clothes. Maybe it would be a good idea to take that need into account when looting now, my newly designed magical bags would let us carry away what we needed and would hopefully keep the stuff safe.


    That could even serve as a long-term test for things left in the shadows. So far, the test I had done with the marked rocks hadn¡¯t shown any wear, but it had only been ongoing for a short time. Tinkering with the bags had made me realise one rather major disadvantage of them, an issue I¡¯d have to either fix or avoid if at all possible.


    Namely, the bags were based on my ability to reach into the shadows, allowing me to store stuff there. But what if I stepped into the shadows, either to escape by stepping from one to the next or simply wanted to hide? If I took the bag with me, the stuff that was stored inside the shadows would weigh me down, it might even destroy the connection I used to bind the outside bag to the bag kept in the shadows, making the bag unusable. Worse, if I stepped back out of the shadows, the entire bag would come with me, likely breaking in the process and leaving me with a mess. For now, I¡¯d have to avoid it, or I¡¯d suffer some serious malfunctions and would likely lose everything I stored.


    Maybe giving most of the bags to Silva and Lia would be wise, at least until I could fix that issue, not that I had an idea how I might be able to fix it. Unless I found a wholly different way to make magical bags, I doubted there was one.


    For now, I had a solution to the weight issue, so I was happy but I would have to continue that line of study. I wanted to have my magical bags recognised by the system and I wanted the skill gains I felt I was due for making them. So far, I had only gained a single, measly point in Darkness Magic and that point was likely for the numerous times I had reached into the shadows to make my bags not for the actual achievement of making them. Sure, it brought me to thirty-seven, but that was far from what I felt appropriate for making the game-changer that were magical bags.


    Alas, for now, I had to keep experimenting. And take my daughters shopping, an experience I had never thought I would have. Strangely, while I had never wanted to have kids, I enjoyed having my daughters with me.

 Chapter 828

    After the long, exhausting shopping trip with my girls, we set up a new lair and settled into a somewhat weird routine. I was mostly playing the stay-at-home-mum, making sure that Sabrina had what she needed and gave her some lessons. Helping my daughter with her words and numbers was another thing I had never expected to do, though by now, I was getting somewhat numb to that sensation. There were far too many instances of things I would never have expected to do, from helping with nightmares to braiding her hair or making sure she was actually washing herself and not just playing under the spray. It was so incredibly weird and yet it didn¡¯t feel wrong. It just felt¡­


    Teaching my students about magic had been one thing. While I didn¡¯t truly care for the people, though some had grown on me, the subject was one I loved. Teaching my munchkin her letters, however, was the opposite. I couldn¡¯t care less to slowly sound out words, helping her to write, to slowly sound out words and connect them to ideas was nothing for me to be excited about. But knowing that it was my munchkin made it feel worthwhile, making me wonder how it would feel to teach her magic. Real magic, not just the simple, surface-level stuff I had been teaching her but the true, deeper levels, the intricacies of Ice or the obscurity of Darkness. Sadly, I¡¯d likely never be able to find out, not without some serious investment and interest on her part, making me a little sad that I wouldn¡¯t be able to share that part of me with her. Maybe the communion with Hecate would open up some interesting avenues, otherwise, I¡¯d have to focus my teaching on Lia, though she lacked the interest, even if she had the affinity.


    And it was a good thing that Lia had her affinities, otherwise teaching her how to reach into the shadows would have been a massive pain. She had managed with some instruction, allowing her to use the magical bags I had created but she hadn¡¯t mastered it. She needed quite a bit of Astral Power for it, meaning she had to use them sparsely, simply because she couldn¡¯t regenerate that power on her own.


    Still, it was a huge advantage, allowing Lia, Alex and Silva to move around the area quite a bit during the nights, gathering supplies, while I stayed home with the munchkin. They also did some fighting but didn¡¯t actively engage the Withered in their territory, instead focusing on Undead and Shattered. Lesser targets but also lesser risks. There hadn¡¯t been any great moves, no great upheavals, but I had a feeling that Silva was quietly angling for something. The timing was just too good for her not to, I certainly would try to make sure that I had the level fifty to cross the first Divide before meeting with my deity. Who knew what such a meeting might entail in that regard, after all, she got the mystical part of her powers from Hecate, so the direct contact could easily propel her to greater heights than anything else.


    If she wanted to go down that route, I wasn¡¯t sure about her plans. She rarely used her divinely granted powers, so I could only guess whether she actually wanted to focus on that part of her abilities. Otherwise, she might just focus on the physical side of things, though I wasn¡¯t sure on what concept she would want to centre herself. Something for her to figure out, I wouldn¡¯t know where to begin with something like that. Likely why I was walking down the Arcane Path, magic just spoke to me in a way that physical skills just didn¡¯t. I could see their use, I knew about the value of training and how often the tricks I had learned from Mrs Wu before the change had helped me, had even saved my life a few times, but it wasn¡¯t me. There was no joy in slipping a knife into a foe¡¯s back, sure, it worked, it killed, but it lacked the sheer enjoyment I gained from wielding my magic.


    Sure, there was joy in movement, in running and jumping, especially now with the Draconic Leap special ability allowing me to move in ways no normal human could, but that joy was fleeting. Directly linked to the adrenaline and excitement, once the rush died down, it was over. With my magic, I was far more engaged and while there could be a rush, especially after I channelled vast amounts of Astral Power to shape the world according to my will, the true enjoyment was deeper. It was in figuring out the connections between different ideas, in finding links between the elements and learning more about the fundamental nature of magic and its place in reality. There was something transcendental about it, a sublime experience that was simply beyond words.


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    It made me wonder how interacting with the divine would feel like. Just seeing the Bound Titan from afar had been incredible, both incredibly scary but also incredibly inspiring, making me yearn for that greatness, to make it my own. Later, when shattering the Nidh?gg¡¯s prison, I had felt the rush of power, knowing that I had literally changed the world. And not in some small, minor way that only those looking for it would know about but truly altered the world¡¯s fate, making my influence felt by all but the most primitive forms of life on the face of Mundus.


    How would interacting with a being able to do the same feel? And what truly were the limits of the divine, what could they do? Reading about the interaction between mortal follower and patron deity as described by the Grandmother in the Zevarra Agha was one thing, but I couldn¡¯t confirm her writings as fact. There might be research backing her conclusions and I was aware that the Grandmother had immense power, but that didn¡¯t make her infallible, especially when it came to matters beyond the power of mortals, to say nothing of the fact that the writings were at least partially designed to make me help the Grandmother on her quest to Divinity.


    Sure, the book was an immensely useful resource but I should never delude myself that the Grandmother had given it to me purely out of goodwill, or as a reward. Making sure I had access to it, binding it to my soul, allowed the Grandmother to influence another world in ways no other mortal on Mundus could. If the Grandmother¡¯s conclusions about divinity held true, and there wasn¡¯t the influence of the Deities behind Pantheon Entertainment, the Grandmother might become the sole deity of Terra. As it was, she might become the only new deity.


    Though, that made me wonder. Before the change, there had been billions of believers around the world and only a tiny minority believed in the Asgardian or Olympian Gods. What happened to all those who prayed to the Abrahamic God? There was power in prayer, I had used that very fact when saving Lia and creating the Vampires, but that was only one instance of countless prayers. I had no doubt that some people had fervently prayed to their God, pleading for salvation or something along those lines and all those people, all those prayers, had power.


    Only, I had no idea where that power went. Did it simply fade back into the Astral River, as if it was simply a magical effect that ran its course, or had it some other effect? It was a fascinating question, though one I wouldn¡¯t be able to answer, so I simply made a brief note in the book I was using to write down ideas I wanted to investigate in the future, adding it to the ever-growing list. Some of the items on that list were old enough that I had the ideas while travelling Mundus, only that I never had the time to check them out back then, making the whole thing a little frustrating. It felt as if each step I took on the Arcane Path, each question I found an answer to, only allowed me to see more of the unknown.


    Truly, I had to learn that I knew nothing. As of yet, I wasn¡¯t even aware of the extent of my ignorance. And maybe I could never truly learn, it might be similar to science. There was no end, there would always be the unknown, there would always be another question to explore. It was both comforting but also a little frustrating. Luckily, I truly enjoyed my walk on the Arcane Path, so imagining that the Path might be endless wasn¡¯t some great, world-shattering idea. It merely meant I would never be bored, even if I lived out the full lifespan of an elf. However long that might be, especially for an elf like me, without a bond to the forest. Maybe I could bind myself to a Nexus, if I ever managed to gain control. Immortality, if I got things right, it wouldn¡¯t just be a dream but a reality.

 Chapter 829

    Pushing myself up from the crouching position I had been in, I looked across the ritual circle I had laid out one more time. Drawing it had been exhausting, quite a few of the details were fiddly, while others were supposed to be placed in such a way that I had to carefully move across the previously drawn lines to get to them. To make matters worse, I had decided to use a combination of bone dust and blood to make the lines, a combination that was rather prone to disturbance, forcing me to be extra cautious.


    But with a few days of effort, I had managed to complete the circle and, hopefully, the ritual would allow Sabrina, Silva and me to contact Hecate and baptise Sabrina in Her name. From what I understood thus far, the ritual would normally call for a devout of the deity to perform the baptism but there wasn¡¯t really one. The closest thing to one we had was Silva and while I well and truly loved my canine companion, she lacked certain necessary abilities to perform in this manner. Mostly, the ability to speak in a language Sabrina could understand, making any communication between the two of them rudimentary. I had little doubt that both would be able to communicate with Hecate, simply because deities had to be able to communicate with their followers, regardless of the form they took, but I wasn¡¯t sure if a deity would want to play translator while inducting a follower.


    Thus, I had altered parts of the ritual, not that there was a lot of the original left anyway, in an attempt to include me, as one Blessed by Hecate, in addition to the Silva, who I considered a follower of Hecate. The ritual itself was a bit of a mess, simply because I had taken a large part of a baptism ritual from the Grandmother¡¯s book, added parts of the communication ritual I had used to get the book in the first place and rounded things out with a few patterns I had come across on Mundus before following my instincts to connect it all together.


    The only reason I was somewhat confident that it would work was quite simple. Namely, I doubted the ritual was truly necessary to connect us. There had to be a relatively simple way for deities, or even beings who wanted to ascend to godhood, to get into contact with new followers, in order to get a new congregation started. If new congregations could only form due to missionary work, the spread of a deity¡¯s following would be fairly difficult, to say nothing about the initial following. Unless Road to Purgatory, and the way it had introduced people to the system and the Asgardian and Olympian deities, was the norm, there had to be some way for new followers to contact them.


    Sadly, I had come across nothing that would tell me either way during my journey on Mundus, but I had a feeling that was to be expected. I doubted any religion would want such information lying around, partially to keep people awed by the power of their deity and partially to keep the mystery going. Why worship a God if you know that the God simply had a lot more time to walk down their Path and thus knows more? You might look to them as an example to emulate, you might see them as a teacher to learn from but to worship them? Some people might do so, but I doubted it. Most would simply turn away, maybe look for a ¡®real¡¯ God to worship. Something unexplained and unexplainable, allowing the people to push responsibility for things outside their control onto that God. Thus, giving them an agent to appease if things went wrong in their lives, allowing them the illusion of control.


    ¡°Silva, Sabrina, it¡¯s time,¡± I called out, after going over the ritual circle one more time. Soon, the first waning moon would rise, a time of new beginnings, with the darkness still holding prevalence but the moon and its light gaining prominence. It was, to my reckoning, the best time to hold the ritual, uniting both major components of the lunar that were important to Hecate.


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    Both my companions appeared, Sabrina looking a little tired while Silva briefly sniffed the ritual circle before carefully stepping into her position. Given that I hadn¡¯t actually told her where to go, nor completely explained how I had set the ritual up, I felt that her understanding was a good sign. If my ritual was coherent enough for her to decipher, it might just work as I intended it to, even without the need to brute-force things.


    All three of us sat down in the circle centred around an image of Hecate I had made. Given that she was the Goddess of Magic, I had formed the statue out of conjured Ice, trying to make it as dense and hard as possible. Doing so had been a rather curious experience, while I had an image in my mind when I began, the final result didn¡¯t quite match the image. It wasn¡¯t so much that I hadn¡¯t been able to form the Ice according to my will but that it had felt as if the image I had in mind didn¡¯t quite fit. I had felt similar sensations of rightness before, but only when it came to magic. There were ideas and images that just seemed to click, mostly when trying to create runic formations or manipulating my magic directly to do something. Never when it came to the image of something external or something as complex as a three-faced statue. Sure, a runic formation could be highly complex but it was a different sort of complexity. No, there had been something odd going on when I created the statue, something I couldn¡¯t explain rationally but I had a suspicion what it might have been.


    Divine Inspiration, quite literally, which made me both intrigued and somewhat scared.


    If a deity could nudge me into producing a more fitting image of Her, what else could She do to me? I didn¡¯t like the loss of control, minor as it had been, but at the same time, I was fascinated by the potential there. Hopefully, the inspiration I had received would mean the statue would allow the ritual circle to work as intended.


    One after the other, the three of us took our positions with only minimal fidgeting on Sabrina¡¯s part. Each of the small circles we were in was set between two faces of Hecate, mine was between the face of the Mother and the Crone, Sabrina was situated between Maiden and Mother and lastly, Silva sat between the Crone and the Maiden.


    On my signal, all three of us started to channel Astral Power into the circle, working steadily in an attempt to have our power mingle together, so the circle¡¯s power would be made up of all three of us. At the same time, I reached into myself and searched that faint sensation I had experienced when feeling Silva¡¯s power, the divine power she borrowed from Hecate. The same power that had given me my blessing of the Moon, allowing me to withstand some of the Sun¡¯s cursed light.


    Finding that power, I gently nudged at it, trying to form some of my Astral Power into that same pattern, just like I knew Silva was channelling some of the Divine Power she borrowed from Hecate into the circle. The idea was that the power would serve as a beacon, allowing us to connect with Her, or maybe to connect Her to the image I had created.


    Feeling for the power within the ritual circle, I waited until it reached the point of saturation, allowing the circle to activate and hopefully to work as intended.


    Around us, the air seemed to freeze as the power we had channelled into the circle reached out, infusing the idol I had created. Chanting in as steady a voice as I could, I called upon Hecate, beseeching Her to speak to us.


    For a long, seemingly endless, moment nothing happened.


    And then, it was as if the world blinked, suddenly, the idol in the middle of our circle wasn¡¯t just Ice any longer. I could still faintly feel the Astral Power I had used to create it, but it was no longer my Astral Power.


    No, it was something more, something far beyond anything I could create, something easily equal in power to the greatest and most terrifying things I had ever experienced on Mundus. A being that, despite lacking any physically intimidating features, was easily as scary as the Bound Titan or the gigantic form of the Nidh?gg.


    Before us, clad in impenetrable shadows of the endless void, glowing with the faint light of the waning moon, stood a Goddess. Looking at me with a mischievous gaze, eyes shining with the mysteries of untold ages, lips curled into an amused smile, stood Hecate.

 Chapter 830

    For a moment, the information pouring into my mind was too much. My eyes were picking up details that couldn¡¯t be, getting lost in the strange eddies of magic swirling around the Being before me, my ears tried to parse the ephemeral sounds filling the air and my nose and tongue were utterly overwhelmed by the sheer intensity of scents and tastes, mundane and magical, that suddenly filled the air. It was as if I was a leaf in a tornado, getting twisted hither and tither, my mind unable to follow everything that was going on. It was just far too much, forcing me to briefly close my mind, narrowing my focus until I could handle the sensory input. Blinking my eyes back open, I made the mistake of looking into the Being¡¯s eyes, only to fall into the swirl of magic, unable to break the connection as my mind was adrift once more. Luckily, the Being reached out with one of her hands, shielding my eyes and breaking the connection, allowing me to rally one more time, while I could hear a strange, multitonal laughter echoing in the emptiness around me.


    Once my eyes were open once more, I carefully controlled them, trying to take in the area around us, only to realise that there was none. It was as if we were in some strange, empty place, with only darkness overhead and an endless, silver-grey expanse stretching out in all directions around us. There seemed to be some mountains and craters, but I couldn¡¯t really see them, as they simply vanished in the monotone of the place. Only the horizon, a stark divide between silver-grey and deep, empty blackness was clear, everything else was fuzzy.


    Even the Being before me was somewhat fuzzy, but maybe that was for the best. By carefully letting my eyes drift, never quite focusing on the being, I was able to get a bit of an idea of what she looked like, only that I could feel it wasn¡¯t her true face. It was still the statue I had carved, the features hadn¡¯t changed, and yet, it was so much more. The Being had an inner glow, an aura of power, that just blew me away and a part of me wanted to simply marvel at the power before me, abase myself and simply bask in Her glory.


    Steeling my mind, I pushed that impulse away, I had a purpose and my purpose was not to worship Hecate. She was to be admired, no doubt, but I wasn¡¯t about to throw away what I was, just to kneel before this power.


    ¡°Greetings, young ones,¡± the Being spoke, Her voice having a strange, echoing quality to it, alongside an odd tritonal sound, as if there were three people speaking at the same time, but not with exactly the same cadence. One a young woman, the second an older woman, one who was confident with her position in the world and the last one the carefully measured, somewhat slower voice of an elderly lady. Somebody who had seen it all, had experienced everything there was an didn¡¯t feel the need to make a huge fuss about things. Aloof, maybe a little disconnected, but still filled with experience and wisdom.


    ¡°Greetings, Lady Hecate. If my actions cause any offence, I assure you that the offence was caused by ignorance, not malice or arrogance,¡± I immediately returned the salutations, hoping to smooth the way with a preemptive apology.


    ¡°And is ignorance not something I should take offence to, just the same?¡± the Beign asked, not in an angry or sharp voice, but more in the voice of a teacher, curious what the pupil might respond with.


    ¡°Ignorance can be corrected by education, education requires resources and information, both of which I lack access to,¡± I replied, though I had to swallow in order to get my words out properly. Otherwise, they might have choked me up, simply due to the amount of power swirling around us. I couldn¡¯t even feel Sabrina or Silva, it was as if I was all alone before the Lady Hecate. Luckily, my response seemed to have been the correct one, or at least one the Goddess before me didn¡¯t take offence with, for the only reply I received was the same, amused laughter I had heard before. Once the laughter faded, the Goddess spoke again.


    ¡°Now, you created this circle, a quite curious design to be sure, and the Idol in its middle for a certain purpose. I want you to explain to me your purpose and why I should grant you the boon you desired,¡± She challenged, still using the same tritonal voice and sounding like a teacher who tried to get Her students to explain a problem to them.


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    ¡°The circle was altered from a design I received during my travels on Mundus, the idol crafted by my magic, though I believe that there was some outside inspiration as well. We asked for Your presence because Silva, the hound You have been granting powers to, led my companions and me to a young girl. Given the traits this young girl showed, I came to the conclusion that You wanted to communicate with her, and possibly take her into Your service,¡± I explained, my voice a little steadier than it had been before.


    ¡°Yes, young Sabrina. A maiden if there ever was one. And the design, it is quite amusing, you know? Some of its parts were made to connect you to another, a Crone you know as the Grandmother. Leading us to our current situation,¡± the voice explained, making me wonder what parts I had overlooked, I thought I had removed any direct connections to the Grandmother. But apparently, I had failed.


    ¡°Now, you need to make a decision, young one. Will you be the Mother to the young Maiden, to guide her, teach her and help her flourish?¡± Lady Hecate asked, the question deceptively simple and yet, I got the feeling that there was far more to it than immediately obvious. But regardless of what more the question might imply, I could easily answer the surface meaning of it. Even if Hecate wasn¡¯t about to take Sabrina into Her service, I would remain her mother, simply because she needed one. I wasn¡¯t sure how I could do it, there would be numerous difficulties and problems, and yet, the response was never in question, not after those last couple of days we had spent together.


    ¡°I will. She is my daughter and I would be honoured if You would give us your blessing,¡± I replied, the words feeling right to my mind while they made a strangely warm feeling fill up my chest, almost to the point of bursting.


    ¡°So it is said, so mote it be, young Mother. Quite impressive, I have to say, two daughters, one the first of her entire kind, and not a father in sight. You will have to work extra hard, to provide for your daughters, to guide them and be an example for them to look up to. It can be a difficult task, one that undoubtedly will challenge you many times but I believe you will be a good Mother,¡± the Goddess told me, the earlier amused, almost teasing, tone gone from her voice. Instead, it was now filled with an encouraging warmth that brought a soft smile to my face.


    ¡°Your daughter, the young Maiden, will have my blessing, just like you have, young Mother. Even the Crone, far away from the two of you, has my blessing, it will be interesting where she goes from here. Once you are able, speak to her, I believe it will be a fascinating conversation for both of you,¡± She continued, making me wonder just how much more meaning than the obvious was behind Her words.


    Maiden, Mother Crone, the three facets of Her, and now She connected them with Sabrina, the Grandmother and myself. Countless questions sprung forth in my mind, far too many to easily make sense of, or even fully formulate as my mind tried to make sense of the information I was given.


    ¡°You have brought a new Maiden to me, so I shall answer a single question of yours. Chose wisely, for it is a boon I rarely give,¡± the Goddess spoke up before I managed to reign in my whirling mind. Mentally cursing, I tried to distil the multitude of questions swirling around within me to a single one, to find the most important one I wanted to have answered. Who knew if I would ever get to talk to a Goddess again, let alone one who offered me a boon like this?


    ¡°You know of my love, Sigmir of Mundus, who died to save me. My question is, what power do I need to return her to me, hale in body, mind and soul?¡± I asked, ignoring anything that might have to do with Sabrina, Silva or the situation Terra was currently in. Those, I could find an answer for myself, but this question was one I might not be able to answer, regardless of how long I searched.


    ¡°My, what an interesting question. You would need Mastery over Life, Dominion over Souls and deep insight into the mysteries of the Mind,¡± the tritonal voice mused, the primary voice now that slow, measured one, ¡°You, by yourself, won¡¯t be able to attain them all, unless you shatter the Path you walk on. But that doesn¡¯t mean your desire is an impossible one, you merely need to think outside the box. What can you do, if you can¡¯t do something by yourself?¡± She explained. The answer wasn¡¯t the one I had hoped for but maybe I should have expected that my desire wasn¡¯t one easily achieved.


    Shattering my Path was unthinkable. It had become part of who I was, Magic and the Arcane Path were not something I was willing to give up, not without a fight. I would have to consider why my path made the three things she mentioned impossible to attain and find a way to gain access to them anyway. Maybe it was simply a question of needing the right help, to borrow an ability I couldn¡¯t have.

 Interlude: Survivors 402

    After two months of hiding in the community centre, wandering across the fields around town was a strange experience. The paths hadn¡¯t changed all that much, sure, there were far more cracks in the asphalt than before and the vegetation around the roads was trying to reclaim what humans had paved across, but otherwise, it was the same. Only, it didn¡¯t feel like it. The paths had once been safe, allowing people to wander around the area or push their babe around in a stroller, simply getting some fresh air. All those wonderful activities had been possible and safe, with the greatest danger coming from inattentive motorists.


    No longer. They could only make their way from the community centre to that promised safety at a farm on the other side of town because they had a group of armed guards, making sure that nothing could kill them. On the way around town!


    It was madness and yet, it was reality. A reality they had to adapt to, a lesson that their old friend, Samantha, had tried to teach Chris and Jenn. Neither of them had managed to make a plan for the future, for Jenn, taking care of Sebastian and herself had been the primary responsibility. Similarly, Chris had done his best to gather up enough food for the three of them, and the rest of the people in the centre if possible, but he wasn¡¯t a fighter, something he readily admitted.


    Listening to Sam¡¯s lessons hadn¡¯t been easy for him. His former teammate, and youthful crush, had never been quite normal but taking to this insanity they were now inhabiting with the relaxed glee Samantha had shown wasn¡¯t something he could do. Attributes, numerated skills, traits and whatnot were things he knew well, but they were supposed to stay in video games. Not invade their reality, not set things alight in blue fire and certainly not bring the dead back to life as some strange monsters. This wasn¡¯t how life was supposed to go, but sadly, reality wasn¡¯t listening to the wails of a single man. No matter how loud Chris screamed, reality did not change.


    Though, even just looking at Sam had been weird. His friend used to be petite, waifish, with a fairly round baby face. None of that was true any longer, while recognising her was still easily possible, she had grown far more than any adult had any right to, her facial features had sharpened as if somebody had taken a chisel to them and her whole demeanour had changed. She always had a quiet competence but now, she was oozing confidence, as if every step was a declaration of dominance. Maybe, once they reached that farm, he could learn what had happened to her, the people guarding them seemed to be a little divided when it came to his friend.


    ¡°How could we leave the child with those monsters? And what were those monsters anyway?!¡± an angry voice demanded to know, as the group moves across a wide-open area. The lack of obstacles allowed the guards to see approaching threats from a distance, giving them some leisure to chat amongst themselves. Or get yelled at, in this case.


    ¡°One, none of the people here claim the child, if you noticed. Her father apparently died a few weeks ago, on a supply run. The Pale Lady took the kid in and that¡¯s good enough for me,¡± another guy, this one carrying a bow, replied, angrily glaring at the partner who asked the question. Not that the question wasn¡¯t partially warranted, but because of the question¡¯s target. Nobody in the know wanted to mess with the Pale Lady, certainly not Kenji who had seen her in action. Not without many more levels under his belt, a prepared escape route and, if things went predictably wrong, an up-to-date will. No, going against the Pale Lady was a foolish idea and provoking her wholly unnecessary. Certainly not because of some orphan kid that the Lady decided to adopt. Hell, even if she decided to eat the damn kid, most people at the farm would look away if at all possible.


    The Pale Lady had been scary before she magically grew almost a foot, but somehow, the growth spurt made her feel even more dangerous. Nobody had wanted to mess with her before and that wouldn¡¯t change any time soon.


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    ¡°And two, what do you suggest to do? You call them monsters and you¡¯ve got no idea how right you are. The one with the blue skin, you know about the wonderful magic that lets people at the farm drink, wash and grow plants? All those things we desperately need to survive?¡± the archer asked, seemingly in a nonsequitur, ¡°She taught us, gave us lessons and helped us find our potential. Even with just that brief visit we had here, I gained something incredibly valuable, simply because I managed to earn a lesson from her. That¡¯s how important she is, we owe her,¡± the archer shook his head, before letting out a sigh.


    ¡°You¡¯re new, I know. You haven¡¯t seen the things the Pale Lady can do, maybe you didn¡¯t even hear the stories. Believe me, you don¡¯t want to get on her bad side. You call her a monster and quite frankly, you are right. But as long as the monster doesn¡¯t turn her hunger on the farm, nobody will try to fight it, and even if she did, I doubt many would dare, not unless she targets them directly.¡±


    ¡°Think of her as a dragon, living near our town, and we occasionally need to sacrifice a virgin to keep us from getting burned. But at the same time, her presence means that we have a large measure of protection from other monsters, simply because she protects her territory,¡± the archer was obviously done with his explanation, especially because quite a few people had paid a little too much attention for his peace of mind.


    Sadly, his supposed companion wasn¡¯t quite done. Kenji wasn¡¯t certain about that guy¡¯s abilities, he was a magic user of some kind, but not the Arcane magic Jade had taught him and his fellow. But he also hadn¡¯t heard him pray in the morning, as Cassie, still nicknamed Denmother, did. No, the guy just called out some prayers, invoking the name of the Lord and stuff happened, not terribly consistent stuff either. But he had managed to help a group of people survive after things had gone to shit and later joined under the banner of Apple Gate Farm, similarly to the people they were now escorting. Only that these people had made their living with traps, stealth and avoidance, instead of strange magical prayers.


    Trying to tune out the incessant complaints, Kenji focused on his job, keeping an eye on the surrounding area, making sure that no creepy critter managed to sneak up on them. He wasn¡¯t scared of the larger beasties, he had gotten quite good with his bow, especially out here, in the open fields.


    Luckily, another of his comrades had been attracted by the noise and started talking to Josh, the weird, religious spellcaster. There was a part within Kenji that wondered how the guy¡¯s magic worked, just enough of the curiosity the Pale Lady had spoken about. Sadly, when asking about it on the way to the community centre, Josh hadn¡¯t been the most responsive, only claiming that the Lord provided, without giving any details. How did the Lord provide, what did he provide, all that good stuff? How did the magic work, other than yelling something vaguely biblical and having something happen?


    Still, it was fairly amusing to hear the exploits, or in some cases alleged exploits, of the Pale Lady described. Some of the tales were just too fantastical, like the one where she had, somehow, raised a massive Tower from the eternal Ice of a glacier, before unleashing some sort of Ice Dragon? It was an incredible story, one that his fellow magician Kevin had told, but it was just that, a story. Or so Kenji hoped, if only because it would mean that such insanity was possible and if the Pale Lady could do it, who said that others couldn¡¯t do similar things?


    At least the Pale Lady hadn¡¯t shown any serious malicious intent towards the people at the Farm, at worst, she was indifferent and most of the time she was actively helping them. Be it by training more spellcasters, or by going out and killing things that nobody else could deal with, before those things started to nibble on the people at the farm. The Pale Lady had done both, and more.


    And yet, there were people who disliked her for a variety of reasons. Be it her pale, blue skin, marking her as something other than human, or be it her power, making others look at her with envy. To Kenji, keeping those negative people under control was an incredibly important objective, simply because having a monster on your side was better than having it against you. And there was no doubt in Kenji¡¯s mind that Jade was a monster, even if he wasn¡¯t certain what kind of monster.


    Amusingly, the obvious physical alterations she had undergone were the least important changes about her. The council would want to hear about this, though he had no idea what they might do with the knowledge. Hopefully nothing bad, or things might take a sudden turn for the worst.

 Chapter 831

    While my mind was briefly occupied with the answer Lady Hecate had given me, the odd, monotone world in which we had talked dissolved, leaving me with a lot more questions and far too few actual answers for my taste. I had no real idea what had happened, just that I had briefly spoken to a Goddess, but what She had told me didn¡¯t help me too much. Sure, I had a few answers I hadn¡¯t had before but those answers only opened up more questions that needed answers of their own.


    There were new notifications floating in the corner of my eye and when I focused on them, I was informed that I had gained a new trait, the Blessing of Mother Moon. Just like the Blessing of the Moon, the description of this one was rather brief and cryptic, only telling me that I had been blessed by Hecate and that the Light of the Moon would shield me and my children. The second notification was related to the Blessing, telling me that my children, without actually specifying what that meant, could travel with me as they wished, without causing me to suffer from the Lone Traveller Trait.


    It was a wonderful boon, though I was wondering how the system defined children in that case. Making the case for Lia was pretty obvious, she had been reborn through my magic and blood. That, in addition to the new name, made it pretty obvious but Sabrina¡¯s case was less obvious. I cared for her, had called upon a deity for her, but was that enough to make the system see her as my daughter? I had no idea, though I wasn¡¯t overly bothered by it. If nothing else, I could bind her to me, using the Lone Traveller Perk itself.


    Shaking off the fog still wafting around my mind, I looked around, immediately noticing that the statue I had created was gone and the ritual circle looked a little worse for wear, with some of the glyphs blackened, as if they had been consumed by some sort of fire. Those glyphs might be the ones that would have connected the ritual to the Grandmother, only to be overpowered by the intent of the ritual users, the power of Hecate poured into the ritual by Silva and me and, finally, the statue of Hecate I had created myself. Those had obviously been enough to redirect the ritual or my conversation with Hecate would never have happened, but the contradiction in the ritual caused one set of instructions to be destroyed. At least that was my conclusion and I was planning to note down those glyphs as soon as possible.


    But first, I had to take care of my two companions, Sabrina was curled into a fetal position, looking completely out of it, and Silva didn¡¯t look much better, panting with her tongue hanging out of her maw.


    Looking more closely at Silva, I noticed that her aura had grown quite substantially. It was almost as if there was a dim, silvery light surrounding her, only that it wasn¡¯t a physical light but simply an expression of her power. It took a moment for my tired mind to make the connection, allowing me to realise that my companion seemed to have crossed the first Divide, possibly because of Hecate¡¯s Blessing. Given that Silva was one of Her hounds, that made some sense to me and I was curious what new abilities my companion had gained. If only one of them was the ability to speak our language, or maybe one that allowed her to communicate telepathically. Maybe that was something I should actively investigate, it might just work out, given that Mind Magic was one of my strongest abilities and I had recently gained the Extra-Sensory Perception: Mind.


    It only took me a moment to make sure that Silva wasn¡¯t actually harmed in any way, she was just exhausted, just like I was. That certainty allowed me to focus my attention on Sabrina, moving over to her and gently checking her over, making sure that there was no physical damage that might worsen if I moved her.


    Luckily, there wasn¡¯t any that I could detect, she was, like Silva and me, completely drained but there was more to her change. I wasn¡¯t able to completely pin down the change, but it was less a physical one and more one in her aura, the magic that gently emanated from her body and made up that unique signature scent I could detect if I really tried.


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    Knowing that I wouldn¡¯t harm her by shifting her body, I gently pulled her onto a blanket before resting her head in my lap, stroking her hair while I waited for her to move. She was out of it, and I wanted to be there when she awoke.


    In the meantime, I continued to study the ritual circle, noting down the changes it had undergone and wondering what the slight alterations meant. I was pretty sure about those burned-out glyphs, but there were other changes, most of them subtle and slight, but enough to make me wonder just how far off my ritual had been. Rituals were fairly interesting pieces of magic, incredibly versatile in effect but just as far-ranging in the requirements.


    Some needed absolute precision, down to the composition of the chalk, with tolerances almost as tight as modern electronic equipment, to the point that they would fail if a single line was just a fraction of a millimetre out of place. Other rituals were far more forgiving, they only needed the caster¡¯s intent and passion to guide them. A dance, guided by the ebb and flow of an unseen wind was an excellent example, the exact movements within the dance didn¡¯t matter, the caster only had to sense and follow the streams of magic the ritual was invoking, or a song, driven by the passion of a hundred voices. Those means could evoke power, too, just as much, if not more, as a minutely prepared and utterly complex circle. Different means, different purposes and measures, it all depended on the purpose of the ritual and the abilities of the caster.


    In this case, the ritual had been mostly done by preparation, even if it was now quite obvious that I had made a few mistakes. Luckily, it didn¡¯t seem like Lady Hecate had deemed my mistakes worthy of punishment, though I made a mental note to be more careful in the future. Dealing with Powers far beyond my reach was fraught with dangers and I couldn¡¯t constantly rely on the Lady¡¯s goodwill. She had demonstrated it in the past and had done so again in this case, but at some point she might just decide that I hadn¡¯t learned from past mistakes and let me suffer. Not something I wanted to experience, if I could help it.


    Hearing Sabrina groan in my lap, I put away the notepad I had used to study the alterations to the circle and focused on my daughter. It took her a few moments to fully come back to consciousness and her first action was to try burrowing deeper into my lap, making me squirm a little from the ticklish sensation.


    ¡°Now, little one, we¡¯ve got a few things to talk about, don¡¯t we?¡± I gently asked, threading my hand through her hair. The texture of her hair had changed a little, it had some added volume that made me wonder whether she had gained a boost to her charisma or something along those lines, but I wasn¡¯t about to ask. We had more important things to talk about and slight alterations to her attributes didn¡¯t matter in the grand scheme of things.


    ¡°Five more minutes, Mum,¡± she pleaded, making me laugh just a little. From what little I had heard, it was teenagers who didn¡¯t want to get up in the morning but maybe the munchkin was starting with that early.


    ¡°You can rest but I think we should talk about the things that happened, shouldn¡¯t we?¡± I prodded and she started to move, pushing herself into a sitting position next to me.


    Looking at her like this, I could see that there were a few more minor changes to her body but only one change that I considered major. When she looked at me, and I saw her eyes directly after the ritual, I had to blink for a moment, noticing the somewhat unexpected change. Before, her eyes had been fairly expressive but otherwise ordinary. Now, her eyes were the opposite of ordinary, they easily rivalled Lia¡¯s eyes in exoticness and it only took me a moment to realise what I was looking at. The sclera, the white parts of her eyes, had darkened considerably, turning into a dark grey, almost black, that made me think of the night sky, while the iris was interesting in its own right, the colour immediately reminded me of the silvery-grey expanse I had just stood on, while the shape brought a connection I hadn¡¯t realised until just now. Her eyes had the exact colour and shape of the full moon, making me wonder if that was a not-so-subtle nudge from Lady Hecate.


    ¡°It looks like the Lady Hecate gave you a new name,¡± I gently told my munchkin, knowing how much she had looked forward to this, ¡°From now on, you will be known as Luna Morgana, daughter of Jade Morgana and little sister of Carnelia Morgana,¡± I solemnly intoned, before pulling her into a hug.


    ¡°Welcome to the family, little Luna.¡±

 Chapter 832

    ¡°Luna Morgana¡­¡± my munchkin let the names slowly roll over her tongue, repeating them a few times, likely to get used to them. Given that she couldn¡¯t see her own eyes without a mirror, I conjured up a polished shard of Ice, allowing her to see the obvious inspiration for the name. The smile spreading across her face told me that the choice had been a good one, following the method my own mother had used for my name, though only the middle name, and I had used for Lia. That, alongside the last name, made it obvious that she belonged to the family, that she was my daughter.


    ¡°Now, little Luna, we also need to talk about your conversation with the Lady Hecate. I¡¯d like to know what she told you, and we should go over the notifications you got after your talk,¡± I jolted my munchkin out of her thoughts, making her focus back on me.


    ¡°Mhm, the Lady was a little scary. Nice, but scary,¡± Luna admitted, shivering a little. Not certain what exactly she had gone through, I hugged her, trying to give her some support. Just remembering the effect Lady Hecate¡¯s presence had on me was enough to make me worry about Luna. I had a variety of effects that increased my, already relatively decent, courage, allowing me to withstand the effect of fear- or awe-inducing effects far better than Luna could. But maybe that idea was born of hubris, did my attributes, even under the effects of my various traits, have any hope to match up against the influence of a deity, especially a deity that pulled our minds into her domain? Thinking about it rationally, that was highly unlikely, meaning that Lady Hecate had been in full control over the effect her aura had on me, and similarly on Luna. Maybe that was for the best, as it seemed that Luna was a little frightened but not really traumatised, at least if her quiet giggles were any indication.


    ¡°Now, what did the Lady say? Or did she ask you to keep things quiet?¡± I prodded, trying to find a good mental comparison. I remembered my mother telling me that no authority figure would ever ask me to keep secrets from my parents and that if one did, it was a good indication that there was something wonky going on, something I should talk about with an adult I trusted. But that didn¡¯t quite correlate to the interaction between a deity and their follower, did it? Did I have any right to interfere in such a relationship, even if Luna was my daughter?


    For a moment, I was lost in my mind, mentally going through the two parenting books I had recently acquired and read through. Sadly, they weren¡¯t too useful, as they were written with a stable society in mind, a society in which one could bring up a child in safety and relative comfort. Not for a world in which society had crumbled and the question of where the next meal came from was one that could easily involve bloodshed, where the threat of bodily harm was nearly ever-present and one you had to defend yourself against.


    ¡°I don¡¯t think the Lady would mind, she called you my mother, you know?¡± Luna asked, before adding, ¡°Oh, and she talked about my Grandmother, that you need to talk to her soon. Who¡¯s that?¡±


    ¡°The Grandmother, that¡¯s what I know her as. She might be everyone¡¯s Grandmother, these are her sigils,¡± I explained, showing Luna the symbols the ritual had destroyed. By now, I had a relatively good idea of what they might mean, though they didn¡¯t quite form a name, they were something remarkably similar. There were references to birth, life, healing and death there, forming a logical cycle, almost like an ouroboros, but not quite. Not a name, but it might be the written version of one, using a symbolic alphabet. I would have to ask the Grandmother about a spoken, or transliterated, version of her name at some point. If I was supposed to be the Mother, I could hardly keep calling her Grandmother, not if Luna already did.


    ¡°Anyway, the Grandmother is somebody who has taught me for a time and I respect her abilities when it comes to some types of magic. What else did Lady Hecate tell you about her?¡± I asked, trying to get back to the topic we needed to talk about.


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    ¡°She told me that the Grandmother would give me a gift, and that you would give me guidance,¡± Luna replied, ¡°And that she gave me the blessing to be her Chosen Maiden, what does that mean?¡± she asked, posing a fairly important question that I couldn¡¯t easily answer. Chosen Maiden could be some sort of special trait or even a class that Luna could gain upon reaching level ten, but given that one aspect of Hecate was the Maiden, I had a feeling that it was important. Just as important as the appellation of Mother the Lady had used for me, and the title of Crone She had called the Grandmother by. If only She could have given me more answers and left me with fewer open questions. But maybe that was just part of what a Deity of Magic wanted, or She might have an additional domain of annoying riddles or secrets or something like that.


    ¡°Can you tell me what the notifications you received say?¡± I suggested, hoping that the system was less cryptic than Lady Hecate. Luckily, it seemed to be the case, though it was a little challenging to have Luna read the notifications to me, given that she was still learning to read. We had to sound a few of the more complicated words out letter by letter but it was manageable. I even turned it into a small lesson, doing my best to teach Luna as we went through the few traits and notifications she had.


    The three that I considered the most important were quite interesting. One was called Crone¡¯s Gift, allowing Luna to, for lack of a better word, borrow the affinity of her Grandmother. Or maybe inherit would be a better one, though that would imply the Grandmother no longer had the affinity, which I doubted, given that the borrowed affinity was with Life Magic. We would have to look into what Luna could do with that, sadly I was pretty clueless and had only very few experiences to go by.


    The second was a trait called Mother¡¯s Guidance, giving Luna a fairly massive boost, namely doubling the amount of EXP she gained while under her Mother¡¯s Guidance, sadly there was no explanation for what that meant. Did I have to actively direct her, or was it enough to be with her, to teach and train her? I wasn¡¯t sure but given that the second part of the trait said it greatly reduced the strain of growing up on her body, I had hopes that Luna would be able to catch up to the rest of us relatively quickly.


    The third, and possibly most important, trait was called Blessing of the Chosen Maiden. The only problem with that trait was that, just like my own blessings, the description was fairly uninformative. It only said that Luna was the chosen maiden of Hecate, without any additional descriptions or explanations.


    Other than those three major traits, there were a few I considered minor, mostly because their effects sounded fairly straightforward. One was called Eyes of the Lunar Maiden, granting Luna a curious form of night vision, allowing her to see everything as if the light of a full moon was shining down on it. I briefly wondered what that would mean for other effects that were triggered by the light of a full moon, but pushed the question back, as it didn¡¯t matter at the moment. I was no longer a Lunar Sorceress, so I wouldn¡¯t be able to play around with the combination of Luna¡¯s traits and my own.


    In addition to the traits, there was a notification telling her she had received Life Magic Mastery and a few minor attribute gains, mostly a continuation of the clean-up for malnutrition I had already been doing. From the sounds of it, she was now in as good a physical condition as she could be, given her age and exercise. Or in other words, she was incredibly fit for a six-year-old but once she was compared to a teenager, let alone an adult, the differences in physique were simply too much to overcome.


    Still, she now had magic of her own to call upon, in addition to the strange connection Hecate had woven between Luna, the Grandmother and myself. I¡¯d have to look into that further, maybe as soon as Luna knew what to do with her Life Magic and had some experience to fall back on. If nothing else, she should level fairly fast, though I wondered what effects that might have in the long run. She was a child but would likely gain the power of an adult, hel, power beyond most adults, within short order. What did that do to the development of her mind, her personality? I had no idea but made a note to keep an eye on it. She was my daughter and if there was trouble, I¡¯d have to help her overcome it to the best of my ability. Hopefully, that ¡®best¡¯ would be good enough.

 Chapter 833

    ¡°So, what¡¯s new with you?¡± I quietly asked Silva, once my conversation with Luna was finished and she was drifting off to sleep. Given that I was playing pillow for my little moon, I had to be still and quiet, so I wouldn¡¯t disturb her, but I still wanted to know what my canine companion had gained from crossing the first Divide. She had done so in the presence of her deity, so I had high hopes that she got something good, even if I had no idea how that actually worked for those on the Divine Path.


    After all, it wasn¡¯t like she was looking for a new focus of her powers, the core of it would always be the connection to Hecate, at least by my understanding, possibly combined with a measure of physical ability. And with that connection in mind, wouldn¡¯t Lady Hecate want Her followers to have the best and greatest powers possible? Wouldn¡¯t that mean that all who walked the Divine Path gained whatever their deity could give them, or was there some sort of limit involved? It was one of those moments when I realised just how much I didn¡¯t know, especially about all matters Divine.


    In response to my question, Silva let out a soft growl, before rising from her prone position. Once standing, she let out a deeper, harsh growl and I felt the hairs on my neck rise from the amount of power enveloping her. Clad in a visible aura of pale, silvery light, she started to shift, her bones changing with soft cracks before she rose.


    For a moment, I found myself just staring at her, not quite sure what to say, or even think. No longer was Silva on all fours, instead her hindlegs had elongated, bringing them closer to human proportions, her hind paws had grown, giving her stable footing even with only two legs. Her entire torso had changed, too, giving her the hips and shoulders to accommodate the two-legged gait, while also enabling her arms to move much more flexibly than her legs had to. And those arms looked fairly human, if covered in fur and ending in claws that looked far from anything a canine should have. More like hands, only that instead of fingers, she had claws, each almost a foot long and looking wickedly sharp. Amusingly, her head might have changed the least, her maw might have grown a little, getting even larger teeth and a stronger jaw to crush bones and rend flesh, but the changes had clearly been focused on the rest of her body.


    ¡°Did you get bitten by a hucanthrope?¡± I asked, only half joking. If not for the slight wave of her hair, she could easily get a role as a werewolf in some movie, if there were any people left to make those, and that was despite the difference in head shape between wolf and dog.


    Looking at her, I realised something else. She wasn¡¯t just standing on two legs, she was standing tall, making me briefly wonder if she was taller of if my Sigmer was. From my position sitting on the ground, I couldn¡¯t easily tell but when I compared her height to the room around her, the distance between the ceiling and her head, and even the nearby doorframe, I had a feeling that Silva was taller, to the point that she might bump her nose at the top of the door if she didn¡¯t watch out.


    And she was no slender flower, standing tall made her muscles and mass fairly obvious, adding a certain physicality to the intimidation factor she already rocked, just from her height, maw and claws.


    Silva simply let out another wuff, moving about a little, probably to get used to her new form. I simply kept watching, fairly awed by the sheer physical presence of it, while wondering about the conditions and limitations of it. It looked fairly similar to the Avatar state Lenore and I had been able to enter, but that one had been based on adding our powers together, allowing us to reach far higher than we could individually, though there had been a bit of a cost involved. Before long, Silva was shrouded in that same silvery glow again, before landing on her restored paws once more.


    ¡°Looking good, Silva. Those claws are wicked, maybe you can get with Lia so both of you can train. I know I¡¯ve been struggling with the physical side of things since getting my height boost after crossing the divide, I¡¯ve got no idea how you deal with walking on two legs all of a sudden, let alone fight in a state you¡¯ve never been in before,¡± I told Silva, wondering how I would deal with such a change. Likely not as well, even if the transformation likely came with some instincts. But those were only that, instincts, not experience or habit. Those, she would likely have to form anew and by herself, which meant she needed training. Either training from me, or from Lia, or maybe even Mrs Wu, once we were back at the Farm.


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    To my amusement, Silva let out another, almost annoyed, chuffing noise, making me wonder just how comfortable she currently was in her new form and how much training she¡¯d need to make the form actually useful. And I had no doubt that it would be incredibly useful, once she mastered it. Maybe I could even create something fancy for her, some sort of shifting or transforming armour, but that would require me to get a great deal more capable at enchanting.


    So far, I had only managed to make a few rings that increased Strength by one and a necklace that gave a slight increase in health regeneration, nothing major but still useful. Of those, I had made a necklace and a pair of rings for each of us, as free attribute points were always useful. Sadly, I hadn¡¯t been able to make them for Silva and Alex, which was next on my docket but I wasn¡¯t too hopeful. The enchantment required the ring shape and constant skin contact along the ring, meaning I¡¯d have to either create something entirely new or find a way to wrap a metal band around a part of their body that was only skin, something neither of them had. There was always fur in the way, so I¡¯d either have to find out how that influenced things or shave the two of them. I was tempted to suggest the shaving idea to Silva, simply to see how she reacted but hadn¡¯t been willing, for fear of getting bitten.


    On the positive side, while the enchanted rings weren¡¯t too useful for me, making them had increased my Enchanting skill to six, and my Crystal Magic to ten. In addition, Lia got a fair amount of value out of them, while the effect they had on Luna was¡­ comical.


    Due to her immature body, the value of her Strength-attribute was limited. One point of strength for her meant a lot less than it meant for me and I had a feeling that, if we had the same strength, Silva would be able to move a lot more mass than I would, simply because of her size. I occasionally wondered just how that worked, how objective the attributes were, but without a great deal of data collection and some maths, I wouldn¡¯t be able to figure anything out. There had been a few traits on the Road to Purgatory Forum, mostly in regards to the extremes of the spectrum, meaning races like Centaurs compared to those with a physique similar to mine, but I hadn¡¯t been too interested, simply because it hadn¡¯t related to me. Even back then, I hadn¡¯t really cared whether a Centaur with my attributes could pick something up I couldn¡¯t or if they could push loads far heavier than I could, because my strength was my magic.


    However, I was wondering how that worked with the attribute points people gained while levelling up. If there was an innate component to strength, what did that mean to the balance of the system? If somebody with my innate physique put all their efforts into strength, would they be successful? Or was it just part of life, that the body you were born with determined what you could do in the long run?


    It certainly was the case with magic, due to the differences in affinities. I had no idea how those were determined, but they certainly decided whether or not somebody had an easy time walking down the Arcane Path or if they would be doomed to struggle on it.


    My affinities, even before gaining the various traits that increased them, both the racial traits and the general ones I had gained recently, played a huge role in my powers and progress. So, wasn¡¯t it fair that somebody without those affinities had an affinity for the physical side of things?


    Maybe, once the world had settled down, I could go around and look into that, it certainly was a fascinating question, how did innate characteristics influence somebody¡¯s path and where did those characteristics come from in the first place?


    But for now, I would have to simply accept things as they were, and focus on training my companions and myself. There were Withered to kill, something I had procrastinated on for far too long.

 Chapter 834

    Maybe I was just evil, but watching my munchkin flounder around with her newly acquired Life Magic was incredibly amusing. Luna might have borrowed the Grandmother¡¯s affinity but it seemed that the instincts for that sort of magic hadn¡¯t been transferred over, or maybe little Luna was simply clumsy, possibly due to her age. Either way, she had a reasonable amount of power, given that she was merely level six, without any truly extraordinary traits like Lia¡¯s First of her Kind Trait or my own Dragon-Touched Trait, but the way she wielded that power left quite a bit to be desired. We were working on it, slowly, and until she managed to control the power she held, my entertainment would continue.


    The first field we had investigated after she gained the skill was healing. It sounded like such an obvious connection, Life Magic, Healing Magic, it was almost the same, or so we thought. Alas, it was not to be and we were damned lucky that Luna¡¯s first attempt to heal something had been on an animal test subject we had acquired. Because while she had managed to close the shallow cut I had caused the cat we had caught, her healing wasn¡¯t really healing but more a rapid increase of the innate regeneration of its body.


    In other words, the rate at which the blood clotted, before the flesh knit and new skin was grown, all were increased by more than an order of magnitude. Sadly, the effect wasn¡¯t contained, nor was it selective, meaning that not only did the blood oozing out of the wound clot, but clots also formed all over the cat¡¯s circulatory system. It was quite fascinating to observe the effect using my own Blood Magic. While I had caused thrombosis with my Blood Magic before, I had never managed to bring about that many events spread across such a large part of the circulatory system. I wasn¡¯t quite sure what the actual cause of death was, but given that I observed a massive heart attack, multiple strokes and a lung embolism, each of which had the potential to be fatal, though the heart attack and the strokes were the most immediate. Given that she had also managed to give the poor creature aggressively spreading growths that started to overtake the surrounding flesh before its death put an end to it only added to the lethality of her healing.


    Just looking at the state her healing had put the body in, I doubted I¡¯d be able to heal the damage caused by her healing, making me incredibly glad that we had used an experimental subject for our testing. I was somewhat confident that my Blood Magic could clean up the clotting before it destroyed the circulatory system, but the growths were pretty much the equivalent of cancer, only magically overcharged. I might be able to selectively destroy them with my Death Magic, but I wasn¡¯t confident in that. No, for now, Luna would be restricted to heal our enemies, even if I didn¡¯t really feel good about having her kill small animals. Maybe using her Life Magic on the Undead would have¡­ interesting effects. Something to test.


    But before we went and started to test the effects of Life Magic on the Undead, Lia had a fairly good idea, namely to see what happened when Luna used her magic on less complex life forms. Animals were clearly too much for her, especially those with complex anatomy, if we had something like tapeworms it might be easier, but what about plants?


    I could remember the video of the Grandmother and that insane fire mage who attacked Koylug. The Grandmother had simply chucked some sort of nut, no bigger than a peanut, into the massive blast of magic that guy had launched at her and the nut had somehow neutralised the entire attack. Moments later, the Grandmother had tossed another similarly sized nut at the guy with lethal results. Maybe that was the way of Life Magic, to enhance and grow plants at insane rates, so they could do what you couldn¡¯t.


    That idea caused us to visit a garden store, only to realise that it had been looted at some point in the past. There were no tools left and the area with plant seeds was thoroughly rummaged through, with all seeds that might sprout into something edible gone.


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    Leaving us with a wonderful variety of flower- and garden-seeds, things that would look pretty but had no practical use. Those had largely been left behind and we managed to find a couple of bags that seemed to be intact.


    And with those in hand, Luna¡¯s training took a step forward. Not a massive leap, there was only so much she could do with her limited magical reserves but she could do something. Mainly make flowers bloom rapidly, meaning it only took her a few minutes to turn a seed into a fully grown flower, though the flowers only lasted about the same duration before rapidly withering and turning to dust.


    It was fairly similar to the way I conjured up Ice, not real frozen water but a physical manifestation of Astral Power. Sure, some of the Ice could turn into real frozen water, but that took a lot more Astral Power than I normally used. The more power imbued into the physical substance, the longer it took for it to fade and more of it remained real. The same applied to her flowers, it wasn¡¯t that she made the seed mature, but that she imbued the seed with the power to produce a physical manifestation of itself, using her Astral Power. Otherwise, she¡¯d need to add the nutrients and everything to grow the flower, the physical building blocks that eventually became the flower.


    Once we had that understanding, we began to experiment with planted seeds, still using flowers and some nutrient-rich soil for potted plants. The process was quite fascinating to observe, both with my magical Sight and by tasting the air as Luna worked. I even tried to get an idea of what was going on with my Death Magic, but that backfired pretty spectacularly, leaving a horribly wilted flower that just wouldn¡¯t die. To my magical senses, it looked almost like one of the Undead outside, only that it was a potted plant.


    That was the last time I tried that, simply because the result looked incredibly wrong to me and Luna had nightmares of it afterwards. This just wouldn¡¯t do.


    Ultimately, we managed to find something Luna could work with, something that wasn¡¯t flowers, even if a part of me was highly amused by the idea of Luna going into combat with an army of flowers at her beck and call. Nothing but the best for my little princess, though I would need to set up my throne for that to work. Maybe I could do so in the future and have her conquer the Lands in the name of the Ice Queen. Though I might have to work on the image, having a flower-child spread the name of the Ice Queen with an army of flowers, that didn¡¯t quite fit. Something to ponder in the future, for now, Luna had a weapon to use and that weapon was ivy. Not the poison variant but simple ivy, the stuff that readily crept up walls and climbed other plants.


    Under her direction, she could spin up a strand quite quickly, though she was fairly limited when it came to the speed of growth and the strength of her creation. But she was working on it, for now, she could restrain one of the weaker Undead, or a lesser animal, though it took time and effort on her part. She still had ways to go, but she might have found a path she could walk upon. At least until Lady Hecate added her own part to Luna¡¯s path, I highly doubted that there would be no paying back the power invested into Luna by the Lady. I could only hope that the price wouldn¡¯t be too high. I didn¡¯t think Lady Hecate would exploit my munchkin, but I didn¡¯t know, couldn¡¯t know, until the Lady made her price known.


    Silva, just like Luna, had used the last few days to train her alternate form with Lia, getting some fairly impressive results. The two had gone from Lia easily taking Silva down in her new form to much more balanced sparring matches over the course of a few days. Now, Lia had to burn quite a bit of Astral Power in order to stay ahead, meaning Silva was getting quite good at fighting on two legs.


    The undercurrent to all these developments was the continued presence of the Withered. Interestingly they hadn¡¯t spread in the time we had been absent, not in a meaningful way. Maybe a few dozen metres, nothing compared to the size of their territory, and even their levels had stagnated, making me wonder if the continued combat against us had helped them, just like it had helped us. If so, I would have to make sure that the next attack, the first real attack I was planning to mount, would be as crippling and deadly as possible.


    Or they might just come back from it, even stronger than before.

 Chapter 835

    Getting Luna to level ten was fairly trivial in the grand scheme of things. Just hunting down a bunch of Undead, letting her help by using her ivy vines to restrain them, before either Lia, Silva or I finished them off. She didn¡¯t get the full amount of EXP, something we expected given that she wasn¡¯t in any danger at all, but with the Mother¡¯s Guidance Trait she had received from Lady Hecate, she gained levels fairly quickly.


    Once she reached level ten, she spoke a prayer to Lady Hecate and gained her first real class, starting her journey on the Divine Path as an Acolyte of the Maiden. From what she described, she could have picked a class that would be part of the Arcane Path, but doing so would cause problems, likely the loss of the blessings she had been given, maybe even the loss of the blessings I had been given by Hecate. In addition, the class on the Divine Path was, from what she described, the better option anyway, giving her a few fairly interesting abilities.


    Amusingly, those abilities focused on the teaching of magic and supporting those wandering the Arcane Path, skills that allowed her to perform a small ceremony that allowed people to delve into the Astral River, similar to the way I had helped a few people delve into it with a combination of Astral Meditation and Mind Magic. All of her abilities worked in a similar vein, not really suited for combat, nor for general living, they were all designed to support Arcane Casters. Sure, some had combat applications, like one that transferred some Astral Power, or even Divine Power, to another, though for a transfer of Divine Power the other had to be at least blessed by Hecate, but there was nothing that was pure combat on that list. Not even Healing Magic, which was normally a staple of Divine Spellcasting, simply because there were few things people prayed for more often than help for the ailing.


    In addition, it was a nearly universal plea, used by everyone from the youngest, who might pray that their elders were healed from some sickness, to those very elders who might pray that their descendants remained healthy. Similarly, soldiers, midwives, everyone and, literally, their grandmother had reason to pray for healing and health, while other common prayers, such as fertility, both personal and agricultural, fortune in battle or success in an endeavour, had a lesser spread across the population. Soldiers, those who needed fortune in battle, might dedicate themselves to a War God, while farmers would likely have a shrine of some sort for a deity of fertility, as they¡¯d need the blessing repeatedly. Healing, on the other hand, was needed irregularly enough that a shrine or dedication to a specific deity wouldn¡¯t really work but important enough to be prayed or sacrificed for anyway. Thus, almost all deities offered it as part of the divine kit, so to speak, simply to keep their flock following them. At least that had been the case on Mundus and I doubted things would turn out too differently on Terra, not with the same players organising the game. Though, the lack of Healing Magic might be why there hadn¡¯t been a real church of Hecate, that, and possibly apathy on the part of the patron.


    Not that it truly mattered. Luna had the affinity to Life Magic she gained thanks to the Grandmother¡¯s gift and we had been working together to improve her control so that her healing wouldn¡¯t be a literal touch of death. For now, she could grow plants and I had high hopes for her divinely granted abilities. When she applied them to me, the effect was relatively minor but given the sheer difference in attribute points and levels between us, everything else would have massively shocked me. In time, she would undoubtedly grow into a formidable ally, especially if I kept guiding her growth and directing her efforts.


    For now, I had a ritual to prepare. The plan was to set up on top of a relatively large building with decent escape routes during the night, retreat for the day before returning as early in the next night as possible, making as much of the darkness as we could. Once the ritual was fully set up, and I started to channel power into it, Lia, Silva and Alex, would defend the rooftop from all attackers, most likely Withered hoping to stop the ritual, while I would solely focus on performing my ritual. Luna¡¯s job would be to mostly use her divine abilities to support me in my endeavour, though she might be needed in the defence, even if her vines were somewhat limited.


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    During these last few days, I had done my best to store as much magically infused blood as possible, draining as many enemies as I could and even creating a few small marbles filled with blood myself. While I could use the Astral Power stored in my hair to make the process relatively painless, there was a sense of discomfort when doing so. I didn¡¯t enjoy shedding parts of myself, the lack of pain almost made it worse. As if I could see a knife going into my arm, but was numb to it, the lack of sensation wasn¡¯t a pleasant experience. But I knew that I could use every drop of Astral Power to smack the Withered around, especially given that the attack targeted their primary location, a place they undoubtedly fortified and defended to the best of their ability. With the distances involved, getting enough of my power into the air to rain down havoc was difficult enough, limiting myself would only make it worse.


    And thus, I bled, filling my blood into small orbs of Ice before sealing them to the best of my ability. They wouldn¡¯t last long, just a few days before the power infused into the blood drained back into the Astral River, but it didn¡¯t have to last long. Just until I unleashed Hel upon the Withered.


    Knowing what we had learned about the Withered, I had no doubt that any large ritual near their territory would garner their attention and that the reaction to the amount of power I was planning to unleash would be either proportional or an overreaction. In either case, I had no doubt that the numbers they¡¯d send against us would be enough to overpower the defenders we had, unless we made damn sure that their numbers didn¡¯t really mean anything.


    In other words, we had to set the battlefield up in such a way that made sure they only had a single avenue of attack, an avenue we had to tighten to the point that they could only come at us individually, maybe in pairs.


    Everything else would see us overwhelmed in short order and, unless there was some sort of miracle involved, dead shortly after. The Withered didn¡¯t appear to be the type to take prisoners, not that I would want to be the prisoner of some fungoid hivemind.


    One of the first things to make their access to the roof as difficult as possible was, amusingly, maintenance of the building. It took quite a bit of effort, and a lot of Earth Magic, to smooth out the wall about two metres below the roof, breaking off all soft material that the Withered might sink their claws into so they had temporary support and fixing all the cracks that time and the change had caused. By the end of it, the only entire strip of wall was a smooth and drab expanse of grey rock, with nothing to latch onto. Afterwards, I let some Ice flow down those walls, making them slick and perfectly even, with the added bonus that the Ice was incredibly thin and brittle. Trying to use it to climb would see a Withered tumble down as soon as they tried to push against it with any real force.


    Above that smooth expanse, I added a few spikes, some of them made from thin, spiky metal, others from Ice. Both sets shared their sharpness, but the Ice variant was fairly long, providing an initial deterrence while the metal spikes were shorter, with the idea that they¡¯d make it impossible to drag yourself up that last bit of wall. Unless you wanted to disembowel yourself on the spikes, that was what they were there for.


    While I made it difficult, if not impossible, to climb the walls, Alex and Lia did their best to turn the only stairwell into a deadly gauntlet. They tried to incorporate as many lasting traps, things that would create a hazard instead of one-shot things that shot their load, killing a few Withered before turning useless. The primary idea behind their traps was to weaken, to hinder and slow down, not necessarily to kill outright. Every weakened body that made it up to the position they¡¯d take up was one they could use to create a wall of bodies the Withered had to wade through, while a dead body in the stairwell could simply be ignored and climbed over.


    Lastly, Luna did her best in a different manner. She worked on the lower parts of the facade, using her vines to make climbing the wall harder, adding weak spots that would crumble and creepers that looked sturdy and invited a climber to try using them, only for them to break immediately. She lacked both power and variety but she did her best and that was all that counted.


    Finally, the preparation was complete and I could bring the pain to the Withered. Even as summer was starting all around us, Winter was coming for them.

 Chapter 836

    Breathe in¡­ Hold¡­ Breathe out¡­


    Slowly but surely, I let more and more Astral Power flow into the ritual circle around me. For once, I had forgone the throne I had commonly used for rituals on Mundus, simply because I had something else in mind. When I first used ritual magic on Mundus, I had enjoyed bringing a dynamic component into it, letting the magic guide my movements, as my movements guided the magic. A dance, to direct immense amounts of power, to shape them according to my purpose and command them to do my bidding. Now, I was doing the same, the dynamic nature of the ritual adding to the dynamic nature of the magic I was performing. Dancing with the wind, dancing up a storm, bringing down a storm of Ice and Snow upon my foe. Even if it was early summer, the Withered would feel winter''s wrath. My wrath.


    Breathe in¡­ Hold¡­ Breathe out¡­


    My breathing was going in deep and slow, steady breaths, the focused, conscious action of breathing helping me to focus my magic. Magic was flowing into me from the Astral River as I breathed in, was shaped as I held my breath for a few heartbeats, before flowing back out of me, into the ritual circle, as I breathed out. Slowly, but surely, the ritual and the air around me were suffused with immense amounts of power. When I first started, right after nightfall, there was only a faint shimmer coming from the runes but as the first hour, the time I had decided to infuse the ritual, was slowly passing by, the shimmer started to brighten, a mix of azure and silver lighting up the night around me.


    Breathe in¡­ Hold¡­ Breathe out¡­


    Feeling that the time was right, I started to move, slowly at first, and as I moved, the magic in the ritual circle started to move as well. A soft breeze started to whirl around me, cold air was seeping out of the circle and chilled the night around me. My breathing remained steady, despite the initial dance I was performing, only now, my warm breath was creating small, misty clouds in the cold air around me. With each step I took, more power was directed into the swirling winds around me, with each breath I took, more power was flowing back into the ritual from the Astral.


    Breathe in¡­ Hold¡­ Breathe out¡­


    There was a faint noise in the distance, half heard as sound, half heard as psychic noise, the Withered must have noticed the build-up of power and were investigating. Or maybe they already considered the build-up a threat and were attacking, I didn¡¯t know and couldn¡¯t spare the mental capacity to think about it, let alone investigate. No, I had a ritual to perform and had to keep my efforts concentrated and yet contained. The sheer amount of power I was surrounded by was more than enough to shred my body and kill everyone around me, I needed to remain in control and direct the power where I wanted it to go. There was havoc to be wrought, but the hounds of war would obey my command.


    Breathe in¡­ Hold¡­ Breathe out¡­


    A trickle of power was flowing into me from outside, just a small bit of help, and yet, even that small bit of support was an immense relief. Not just from the actual magic I gained thanks to Luna¡¯s aid, but because it gave me a deep certainty that I wasn¡¯t alone. Intellectual, I knew that my companions were guarding my back, were making sure that no Withered or other nasty could get to me. Now, I could feel Luna¡¯s support, like a tiny hand that was placed on my back, reminding me that I wasn¡¯t alone. That my daughter, my family, was with me, and they were all helping me.


    Breathe in¡­ Hold¡­ Breathe out¡­


    The wind around me swirled into a storm, freezing air spiralling into the night, some low-hanging clouds getting caught up in the winds and twisting along, pushed towards the small park the Withered were existing in. The mundane clouds of water-vapor were infused with my power, even as more clouds formed around them, there purely born from my Astral Power. And all those clouds were drifting with the wind I had conjured, racing across the sky to bring devastation to my foes. Attacking a distant foe was quite easy if you knew where to strike. You merely had to set a direction, a speed and a time, and once that was done, all you had to do was wait. Wait, and add more and more power to the attack.


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    Breathe in¡­ Hold¡­ Breathe out¡­


    Now, the ritual was no longer about concentrating power into the circle or directing it out of the circle, instead, I had to keep track of the vast amounts of Astral Power I had channelled into the air above. And it was a huge amount, I had been constantly channelling power for almost three hours at this point, constantly breathing in power from the Astral River, before breathing it back out into the ritual. It took me about ten minutes to fully regenerate my Astral Power if I was using my Astral Meditation, as I was doing now. Amusingly, that number didn¡¯t change much whether I was under the influence of Titanic Ambition, as I was now, simply because both my maximum capacity and my regeneration were increased. Now that I had constantly channelled power into the ritual for this long, the circle held almost twenty times my already vast capacity, the magically infused blood mostly acting as a catalyst to keep things together so the circle didn¡¯t burn out.


    And all that power had formed into clouds, clouds that I still partially controlled and that filled the air above the park the Withered had infected. Waiting, ready to hail down on them like a blizzard.


    Breathe in¡­ Hold¡­


    Breathe out¡­


    My movements, after almost two hours of fluidly dancing, stopped, my eyes flying open, glowing with a silvery light as Overflow was active. I needed every bit of power within myself, every bit of power in the circle to create the effect I wanted to achieve. Runes all around me flared with light, the air was freezing with power and the wind was whipped into a frenzy as my sudden stop completed the ritual. Now, all that was left was an incredible amount of power, power I was still connected to.


    With an effort of supreme will, I controlled all that power, triggered the effect I had imbued into it during the ritual. Despite the distance between us and the park I was targeting, I could easily feel the effect, feel the sky crashing down on the Withered. High in the sky above them, countless hail stones, icicles and snowflakes were forming, the wind turning into a sudden downburst, carrying tons of Ice with it.


    A storm raced the ice to the ground, a localised blizzard of titanic ferocity, strong enough to push over trees, the icicles easily fast enough to pierce metal and hard enough to crush stone, all crashing down on my target. I could feel my Astral Power intrude into a miasma of power, vile, rotting power that would likely infect any living thing it came into contact with. But there was no life coming into their den, there was nothing moving, nothing to infect. Nothing, but a frozen grave.


    I could hear the psychic screams, despite the distance and now that my mind wasn¡¯t utterly focused on the ritual, I could hear the screams all around us, as countless Withered, all connected by their strange fungoid hivemind were screaming at the death of their collective. The sheer amount of noise these countless beings put out was enough to stagger me, the physic noise echoing in my mind as the connection they all needed was brutally severed. No longer were they bound by a common will, no longer were they united in a common goal. Only instinct remained and the instinct wasn¡¯t kind. It was to slaughter.


    In the distance, only the freezing, silent stillness of a frozen grave remained, the air filled with enough of my lingering Astral Power to give me a faint idea of what was happening there. On a whim, I tried pushing a little, using the Astral Power that was out there and twisted it together with the energies unleashed by the countless beings that had died there. I could feel some fait change, though I wasn¡¯t sure what exactly was happening, the connection I held to my power was fading, either due to distance or because it wasn¡¯t just my power any longer, because I was mixing it with the energies of Death. As long as I held the power, I tried to push it into the unravelling strands of psychic communication that still originated from the park. I had no idea if what I had tried to do worked out, but soon, I couldn¡¯t feel the Astral Power I had used to destroy the park any longer.


    With that, my ritual was done and I let out a breath I hadn¡¯t noticed I was holding. My tension, concentration and adrenaline were fading and the world started to fade with them.

 Chapter 837

    Feeling the world fade around me, I bit my tongue, using the pain to focus my mind. It helped, though I was still wobbly, sinking to my knees instead of completely keeling over. I needed to remain active, simply because I had no idea what was going on around me, the battle might still be ongoing, even after I struck the primary nexus of the Withered.


    Slowly, my senses came back to me, reporting reality as it was, instead of being blocked out in favour of the magical sensations coming from the ritual. When focusing completely, it was incredibly easy to lose track of everything else, in this case, my mind had been fully focused on the sensations feeding back from my Astral Power, ignoring what happened here. Now, that awareness was returning, but slowly.


    The first sense to come back was, amusingly, my sense of magical perception, riding on my sense of smell. There was a scent of death in the air, both physical and magical, the cloying scent of blood mixing with the cold, desolate scent of the grave. It wasn¡¯t the sweet, sickly scent of rot that came with a decaying corpse, but that of ending, a colder, much more final death.


    Next, noise began to filter into my mind, the snarling of some creature of another, the slick sound of a weapon or claw penetrating into flesh and ripping out blood, and the laboured breathing of my companions, mixed with a few other noises told me that battle was still ongoing. Knowing that added a sense of urgency but given my exhausted state, hurrying would only see me keel over, I needed that bit of time to rally myself, to catch my second wind so I could keep going.


    Blinking, I managed to get my eyes back open, allowing them to adjust to the faint light coming from the stars above. If not for my ability to see in the dark, there would have been little to see but for me, there was enough. Only, without raising my head, I was limited to inspecting the remains of my ritual circle. It looked a little worse for wear, the sheer amount of power had destroyed the substances I had used to draw it, turning them into dark, sparkling dust. The stuff wouldn¡¯t last long, it was composed of unstable Astral Power that would soon escape into the Astral River, but for the next hour or so, it looked fairly pretty. Sadly, it was also mostly useless, at least to my knowledge. There might be some alchemical way to use it, but if I wanted to use it to cast spells, I¡¯d need to unbind the power first, requiring far more input than I¡¯d get out, due to the tiny size of each grain.


    For a minute or so, I simply rested on my knees, doing nothing more difficult than drawing in my breaths, hold them before expelling them back out. Conscious breathing was the easiest form of meditation and now that I wasn¡¯t mentally fit enough to have part of my mind delve into the Astral River, it was the best way to replenish some of my magical and physical reserves. Neither were in great shape, though amusingly, the magical reserves were recovering far easier.


    There were notifications calling for my attention, sitting in the corner of my eye until I focused on them, but for now, I needed to concentrate on bigger things, like getting my body back into fighting shape, one breath at a time.


    It took far longer than I was comfortable with, but in reality, it had only been a minute or five since I finished the ritual. The noises had change a little, but not too much, nothing that made me thing something had gone seriously wrong. Just the usual barks from Silva, the slick sound of Lia¡¯s claws rending flesh and the noises I attributed to various Withered.


    Pushing myself to my feet, I slowly turned, making sure to keep my legs steady, even as they wanted to escape from under me. They were trying to overthrow me, to throw down the reign of my mind, but I wouldn¡¯t let my revolting feet win. They would stay down where they belonged, holding up the rest of my body.


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    Letting my gaze sweep across the rooftop, I could see that our preparations had held, there was a lot of blood near the stairwell, where Silva and Lia held the line, but no damage anywhere else. Luna was lying near the ritual circle, looking like she had been knocked out, likely by the amount of levels she had gained at once, while Alex was behind the other two, in a similar state.


    Past the door held by Silva, who was walking on two legs, and Lia, I could see the top landing. Standing there, trying to get through the door, were two Withered Hunters, only to be rebuffed by my two companions. From the looks of it, the two Hunters tried to work together to get past my two companions, but without taking any major wounds. Teamwork, but not the suicidal teamwork they had shown in the past, where one would happily die to give another an opening to wound or kill their prey Past them, I could see the stairs going down and that area had quite a few bodies, though none seemed to be moving.


    With a grin, I send out my frozen shuttle, watching as it soared past Silva and struck the first Hunter in the head. my companions hadn¡¯t been trying to get into the room with the two Hunters, they had merely made sure that neither Hunter could get onto the roof with them, creating a weird stalemate, a stalemate I had broken by striking past them.


    My attack struck true, but with far less power than I would normally have used, my mind was still reeling from exhaustion after all. But even a soft strike could be quite impactful, especially if it was made with a sharp, pointy blade and hit the sensitive nose of an enemy. It immediately caused a rather interesting effect, namely the Withered Hunter letting out a psychic howl of pain, making the one next to it wince, as if it had been struck, too.


    A most curious effect. Before, when attacking one Withered, the rest had barely reacted. It had been obvious that information was passed on, but not pain, making me wonder if there had been some sort of filter involved. Now, that filter, if there ever had been one, was gone, but the coordination, at least between these two was still going strong, proving that the bond still existed, at least in some form.


    My attack had disrupted their patterns, a disruption that Lia had capitalised on by striking out with her chain hook, scoring a deep wound in one of the Hunter''s legs. Not enough to completely disable it, but the thing was clearly crippled, allowing Silva to push in, forcing it to dodge back and opening the other up for an attack from me. It wasn¡¯t a killing blow, but to my surprise, it was enough to do something that hadn¡¯t happened before.


    It was enough to drive the Hunter to flee, the action catching me off-guard as they quickly moved down the stairs. When no new attackers joined them, I moved up to the edge of the roof, peering down so I could see what was going on there.


    To my surprise, I could see what I could only describe as packs of Withered, mostly Withered Hunters but also a few Withered Husks with their Undead thralls, move about, not attacking each other but also not moving in the same, coordinated way they always had. It was as if there were different groups of Withered now, all of them far smaller than the singular hive but equally coordinated amongst their numbers.


    Looking down, I started to seriously worry, wondering if I had just doomed all survivors in the area. If the Withered before had been limited by the reach of those stationary fungi in the park, these might lack that limit and I had accidentally set loose a few dozen packs of psychically connected predators. They might lack the overmind that had connected them all together, but by the looks of it, that merely meant that individual packs moved as units, making them less of a threat to me and mine, but a far greater threat to the people at the farm.


    Looking at things long-term, the destruction here was undoubtedly vital, as it stopped the Withered before they became a threat nobody could deal with, but in the short term?


    Things might get seriously hairy for a while until the packs were hunted down and dealt with.


    Before I could consider attacking them from our elevated position, the various Withered started to move, some groups scattering into all four winds, others attacking other groups, without any discernable pattern.


    Shaking my head, I stepped back away from the edge, planning to check on Luna, Alex and lastly, my notifications. For now, the battle was over.

 Interlude: Frozen Summer Rain

    In the beginning, there was a cold, damp mist. It came and when it went, it left behind hundreds of bodies, providing ample nutrients for the colony. With that near-limitless amount of fuel, the mycelium could spread far and wide, bringing in ever more nutrients. The further the hypha spread, the more could be taken in, but there was a limit to their reach. A way to stretch the hyphae further than physically possible was needed, a way for the mycelium to spread further than it otherwise could.


    And a solution was found. Not all hyphae needed to be physical, the connection could be formed in other ways, ways that kept the different parts of the colony connected, without limiting their mobility. Their reach was still limited, but the limits were far less constraining compared to the previous need to retain physical contact at all times. Like tiny blimps in the night, sparks were shooting forth, forming a connection beyond the physical. There was something in the air, almost like an echo of ideas long gone, whispering into the ether about an endless ocean of information. The colony was going wireless.


    With that new connection, the colony formed new structures, focusing on the bodies that would previously have simply been turned into nutrients. Instead of letting them just decompose, the colony could use them, grow into them and use their traits to the colony¡¯s advantage. Bodies could carry a small part of the colony, keeping connected with the new way and bringing in fresh nutrients, to keep the colony growing, always and forever.


    Soon, the colony had those useful bodies, organised by type, giving them roles suitable for their physique. Those that could bring down prey were tasked to go out and drag more bodies back to the colony, so the spread could continue. Those that were small, stealthy and unobtrusive were tasked to venture forth and spread the web further, act as nodes in the new hyphae and keep those going even further connected to the colony. Finally, those that couldn¡¯t bring down prey or keep unnoticed while spreading the influence of the colony were tasked with marshalling those under the colony¡¯s web, to keep the bodies fresh and filled with as many nutrients as possible. All so that the colony could grow and become even stronger.


    And stronger the colony became. Slowly, but surely, the various bodies were strengthened to better accomplish their task, the primary colony, still in the tunnels the cold, damp mist had filled with those delicious nutrients in the beginning, was growing. Ever larger, ever stronger, to take in as much nutrients as possible. To feed on the light from above, to feed on the energies in the soil, even the power coursing through the air, the colony feeds on it all. It feeds, and it grows.


    As it spread, the mobile bodies encounter some strange things. Nutrients but also not, filled with hunger like the colony but not hunger for the same thing. The colony could ignore them but these things didn¡¯t ignore the colony, they sought to feed on the colony, to feed directly on the connection between the mobile bodies. That could not be, especially as these things had some of these delicious nutrient bags with them, even more numerous than their own number. Whenever they came into the range of the mobile bodies, these strange hungering bodies were brought back to the colony. Despite their hunger, they could provide excellent nutrients for the colony, even if turning them into mobile bodies proved to be impossible. Something within them ate the hyphae, gnawing on the very foundation of the colony. These things had to be destroyed!


    Some of the mobile bodies, those that ventured out furthest to bring back more nutrients for the colony, started to have their connection disrupted. Not by the hungry things, but by something else, something with an oddly familiar presence. A different kind of presence, one that was somehow both comforting but also threatening. Not threatening like the hungry things but the presence was getting in the way of more nutrients, so the presence had to be destroyed, familiar or not.


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    It mattered not for the colony, if the presence wasn¡¯t willing to allow the colony to grow, it had to be turned into nutrients. And what delicious nutrients these would be, so filled with power. The mobile bodies repeatedly engaged with that strange, delicious presence, never managing to bring it down but always gaining something new. The colony could constantly improve the mobile bodies, making them stronger, faster, more agile or more perceptive. So many ways to improve the bodies, it was as if there was no limit, not while that presence was there and challenged the colony. Soon, the colony would devour that presence, find what made it so much brighter than everything else, and take that brightness into itself to grow.


    Some days, there were disruptions, a strange cancer within the mycelium, something that needed to be destroyed as quickly as possible, before it could take hold. The colony needed the connections to be pristine, so these tumours were a threat, one far greater than any attacks on the mobile bodies. The bodies could be replaced, their nutrients were seldom lost, but the connection itself was vital to the colony¡¯s longevity. It couldn¡¯t be compromised, so the colony reacted to the tumours and ascertained that they could never spread. Whatever it took.


    One day, the strange presence was suddenly gone. The colony continued to improve its mobile bodies but without the strange presence to test them against, the growth slowed down markedly. The hyphae continued to stretch further and further, though mostly in a direction that presence wasn¡¯t in, but there was something missing. It was growth but of a different kind. The colony lacked the effect of that presence as if there were some nutrients only it could provide. Maybe once the presence returned, the colony could acquire it for itself, and take in those precious nutrients.


    During one dark phase, one of the mobile bodies felt the familiar presence, it filled the air, almost like it had at the beginning. Maybe there would be another endless feast, though it was questionable where the nutrients for it would come from. The colony had spread far, but never had they encountered such a bounty.


    Mobile bodies moved towards the area where the presence was felt, only for the small, skulking bodies to notice that the presence was far more than it normally was, and it kept growing. More nutrients, if the presence wanted to make itself that big, it would hopefully assuage the lack of these odd nutrients its absence had caused.


    Only, the presence didn¡¯t remain where it was, more and more if it started to drift outside of the range of the skulking scouts, vanishing up into the sky. The mobile bodies that tried to get at it were forced back, but unlike all the other times, the presence didn¡¯t fade away, it remained in place and grew even more pronounced.


    Suddenly, a shudder went through the mycelium, the familiar presence was within the heart of the colony, threatening the very nucleus of it all. Reflexively, the colony struck against the presence, trying to disperse it, to devour it, anything to make sure it wasn¡¯t a threat. But more and more of it came raining down from the sky, not like the cold mist that came and left behind countless bodies but a sharp, freezing rain, tearing into the numerous growth the colony had formed above ground to absorb the light from above. Some of that freezing rain even pierced into the ground, churning it up and destroying the roots, as more and more of it kept falling.


    All of that rain was tinged with the essence of that familiar presence but for once, the presence wasn¡¯t comforting to the colony. For once, the hyphae were severed, the mycelium was rapidly shrinking, as the connections were torn apart by the unforgiving rain from above.


    Awareness faded away with each body that was severed from the colony, its capacity diminished until there was nothing left. Even the strands that had been digging deeply underground weren¡¯t spared, they, too, faded when the presence changed, energised as if it had devoured all the nutrients the colony had harvested ever since the cold mist provided the initial harvest. Maybe that was what the presence had wanted all along.


    Soon, there was no more awareness. No more connection, the mycelium had been thoroughly shattered by the invading presence.

 Chapter 838

    Given how exhausted all of us were, with Luna and Alex still out cold, the three of us who were still standing decided that moving any sort of distance would be foolish. The streets were quite dangerous right now, thanks to the Withered that were now running wild and I wanted to check out the park as soon as possible, so we¡¯d have to return anyway. Though, as soon as possible meant it would be the next night, maybe if the weather was exceptionally cloudy the next day. For now, my only plans were to check out the notifications and make sure that Luna came through alright.


    Just a quick glance at her, using Observe, was enough to drive home just how big of a boost she had received. Before the ritual, she had been at level eleven and even that only barely. Now, after the ritual and the destruction of the Withered, she had jumped to level thirty-one, a jump just as extreme as the one I had when wiping out the Snowbolds on Mundus, though I had done that by myself. Granted, she had that Mother¡¯s Guidance trait, obviously making up for that, but it also made me realise something.


    Little Luna needed to put some serious, serious work into her skills, or she¡¯d be utterly behind by the time she reached the first divide. And while she¡¯d get across the divide, Lady Hecate willing, I had no doubt that letting one¡¯s skills lag behind would be costly in the long run. A weaker future class, with lesser attribute gains and weaker skills, was the least I¡¯d expect and with a deity like Hecate, who had at least some focus on learning, especially magic, neglecting that focus might see one punished. Not something I wanted for my daughter, so once we were certain the primary group of Withered had been dealt with, we might want to take a step back from gaining levels and have Luna work on her skills first.


    Maybe moving to the farm, or returning to the brewery we had used as a lair for a while, a place where we can completely focus on our abilities while waiting out the long days of summer. Even now, just a few hours after the sun had set, I could feel it beginning to rise across the horizon. We hadn¡¯t even reached the longest days of the year and yet, there were only a few sparse hours of blessed darkness each night. No, waiting for the summer to pass, waiting for the long, dark nights of winter, and using those long nights to move north or something like that.


    Moving north had two major advantages for me, the almost limitless availability of Ice and Snow in the far north was a massive boost to my Ice Magic, and the high latitude came with long nights in winter but also long days in the summer, to the point that there were places with only one night and one day per year. Maybe I could, at some point, make like the Arctic Tern, wintering in the far north before spending the summer in the extreme south, catching two endless nights each year. Sure, the birds did the opposite, but they were living, flying proof that it was possible. It might take a lot of effort but perpetual night sounded like such a wonderful world. Might be hard on the farmers I needed for my food, but there was always some sort of drawback.


    Letting out a sigh, I pushed the idyllic images of a world covered in endless darkness away from me and focused on my munchkin. We had moved two stories down from the roof, taking over one of the many apartments in the building and making ourselves comfortable but the munchkin had yet to wake up again. But that gave me time to take a look at my own notifications, there were quite a few of them.


    The first notifications I came across were an insanely long list of kills, telling me that I had taken out this Withered or that Withering Fungus. Those Withering Fungi were fairly interesting, the levels were all incredibly high, multiple getting into the sixties and the highest reaching the low seventies. Luckily, those were the only really impressive enemies, the rest of the Withered were troublesome, but nothing beyond the high thirties and mid-forties, as if they hadn¡¯t progressed at all while Lia, Silva and I had been busy training up Luna.


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    After the fairly interesting kill-notifications came the real meat of the meal I just had. Namely, the level-up notifications, of which there were multiple. It wasn¡¯t as extreme as some of the mass killings I had managed on Mundus, but getting a whole eight level as once was quite the achievement, bringing me to fifty-eight. To make things even better, it looked like the improvement of my Dragon¡¯s Touched Trait meant that I didn¡¯t get it every ten levels but that I got it every five. Either that or level fifty-five was some sort of anomaly, because I received the plus one to every attribute in addition to the two Intelligence and one Intuition I got from my class. And that was on top of the two freely assignable attribute points, driving home just how incredibly powerful that trait actually was.


    A quick glance at my attributes caused an involuntary grumble to escape my throat. I had to make a decision, I could either push my Intelligence to fifty or I could push my Intuition to forty but I couldn¡¯t get both. If I got the Intuition, I could also push my courage to thirty, likely getting another trait but if I got the Intelligence, I could push it to fifty-five when I reached level sixty while gaining the Intuition forty at the same time. Hel, if I solely focused on Intelligence, I¡¯d get five Intelligence every five levels which was an incredibly insane notion, though also a dangerous one. Sure, I¡¯d have massive magical power but Intuition was quite important to control that power, to feel and direct it.


    For now, I decided against taking either advance, I¡¯d think about it for a bit and make the decision before reaching level sixty.


    In addition to the straight levels, I also got a few points in my magical abilities, bringing Ice Rune Mastery to level thirty-seven, Wind Rune Mastery to fifteen, Ice Magic to thirty-six, Blood Magic to thirty-five, Death Magic to seventeen and, finally, Astral Meditation jumped to thirty-four. Overall, those were wonderful gains and I even got a new title and a trait to round things out. Both were old favourites of mine, a combination I had received on Mundus when wiping out the Snowbolds.


    The title, Magician of Annihilation, marked me as somebody who had come up with a new way to wipe out large groups of enemies. I wasn¡¯t sure if it was simply because I was the first to conjure up a snowstorm or if it was the attempt to twist the destruction I had wrought to cause even more damage. Either way, I had gained it and from now on, I¡¯d get extra EXP when magically destroying large groups of enemies.


    However, I was fairly certain it would also add another of those little black marks to my aura, warning people that I wasn¡¯t somebody to be trifled with. Not that I was completely unhappy with that perception but my inability to control it didn¡¯t make me happy. The only measure I had to contain it was to completely hide myself, at least for now. Maybe I should try looking into something similar to the Twilight Cloak I had constantly worn on Mundus, after gaining the Mortal Hubris trait. It had been good enough to keep me from standing out, so I¡¯d think it would work here, too. But getting to that point would require a lot of training in Darkness Magic and Rune Mastery, making it more of a long-term project.


    The only alternative would be to push my Charisma high enough to control my aura, so I could conceal it that way. Sadly, that wasn¡¯t really feasible, sure, I had a higher Charisma now than I ever had on Mundus, but it was still fairly low in comparison to my level. No, unless I invested a serious amount of attribute points into an attribute that I had little use for, I¡¯d have to find another way.


    The trait, almost like a companion to the Magician of Annihilation, was called Magician of Massacre, sounding just as cheerful. It was, unsurprisingly, given to those who could magically massacre large groups and increased both the damage such magic dealt and the skill gains one received from doing so. Useful, but nothing one wanted to be well known, simply because it sounded rather murderous.


    Maybe it was a good thing that the people at Apple Gate Farm were already cautious and somewhat scared of me, going from ¡®scary¡¯ to ¡®a little scarier¡¯ wouldn¡¯t raise too many eyebrows but going from ¡®normal person¡¯ to ¡®my instincts scream that I¡¯m faced with a predator¡¯ would force a lot of people into action.


    As the saying went, you boil frogs by slowly raising the temperature, or in this case, you avoid scaring people too badly by being scary from the start. Or maybe I should just train my munchkin to act as Voice for the group, she was far too adorable to be scary¡­ Right?

 Chapter 839

    A tiny part of me was incredibly amused at the situation. Before the change, I had occasionally consumed amusing stories about parents and the troubles they had with their children. Even now, I wasn¡¯t quite sure why I had liked those stories, maybe it was some sort of subconscious attempt to make myself feel good, or right, about my previously childless status or maybe I wanted to vicariously enjoy reading what I didn¡¯t think I¡¯d ever have. Either way, one of the threads that many of those stories had in common was that children didn¡¯t respect their parents¡¯ sleep, be it as toddlers with incessant crying in the middle of the night, as children, bringing excitement at wholly unpleasant hours of the morning or as teenagers, coming home from parties they should never go to far too late in the evening. Whatever the case, it seemed to be some sort of universal law, if children are involved, the parents¡¯ sleep suffers.


    Now, after I had acquired a teenage vampire and a munchkin of my own, that universal law seemed to apply to me, too. Lia, Silva and I had kept watch throughout the night, mostly Lia and me so that Silva could sleep and keep watch during the day, but now, far too early for my tastes. Luna was tugging at my arm and no matter what I tried, I didn¡¯t manage to get back to sleep. Not even grabbing the munchkin and pulling her into bed with me in hopes that she¡¯d get some more sleep had helped, it had only shifted her attempts from tugging at my arm to trying to tickle me.


    ¡°Stop that,¡± I grumbled, only for her to giggle and cuddle into me. Hoping that she might have given up and I could get some more sleep, I tried to close my eyes, only for the little monster in my arms to speak up.


    ¡°Neh, mum, can you help me with the notifications I got? And those attribute points, you told me they are important and I¡¯ll have to be cautious where to put them,¡± Luna asked, her voice between prodding and pleading. Letting out a sigh, I quickly realised that there would be no more sleep for me, not until the little monster needed some sleep of her own, likely right when it would be my turn to stand guard. For a moment, I considered to push her off, to try teaching her that uninterrupted sleep was quite vital but looking at her, I knew I couldn¡¯t be as rough as I would be with somebody older.


    Instead, I first helped her with the notifications, making her slowly sound out the letters before explaining to her what the words she read meant. Doing so had the advantage that I learned what traits and skills she had received, though I quickly realised that her skills were lagging horribly behind. Two of her divinely granted support skills had gained levels, but the rest was just as low as it had been when she was level ten, only that she was now at a much higher level.


    ¡°Okay, little one;¡± I began, once we had read through all notifications, ¡°First, the attributes. It¡¯s an important decision, one that we both have to think about. From what you told me, your class needs an almost even spread between Intelligence, Intuition, Charisma and Courage, each interacting with different aspects of it,¡± I began, before having to make a mental detour and go over the different attributes with Luna once again. She was just a child, still learning her way, and that showed, making teaching her a bit more exhausting than teaching adults would be. But at the same time, I had noticed that Luna was far more invested, for lack of a better word, she tried her best at all times, acting like a little sponge that just absorbed my words. It was¡­ pleasant? There was a warm, strangely soft feeling filling my chest, almost as if I had too much caffeine, but with fewer heart palpitations. Somehow, I didn¡¯t want to lose that feeling.


    To my endless amusement, Luna started to nod off by the end of the lesson, her excitement having burned out what little energy she had recovered after fainting from level-up stress. Now, she was simply sleeping, just like I had hoped earlier. Holding her close to me, I closed my own eyes, quickly dropping off into unconsciousness.


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    ¡°You are a good mother, my dear,¡± a familiar, tritonal voice quietly told me and when I looked around, I realised I was on that strange, drab-grey surface under an ocean of blackness.


    ¡°Lady Hecate,¡± I tried bowing to the presence I felt, only to realise that the presence was all around me. Turning, I tried to see if there was anything to focus on, only to come up empty, the entire vast grey desert I found myself in was empty. So, realising that it didn¡¯t really after, I briefly focused, gleefully noticing how responsive the Astral here was and easily conjured up a chair for myself.


    Sitting in the presence of a Deity might be considered irreverent but I had no doubt that I wouldn¡¯t have been able to create the chair out of Ice. She was a deity of magic after all, and this was Her domain, I might have some titanic ambition, even some vestiges of mortal hubris, but I wasn¡¯t arrogant enough to delude myself that I¡¯d be able to forcibly use magic against the will of a Deity of magic, in that deity¡¯s domain.


    ¡°It is a pleasure to converse with you,¡± I added, trying to find the right words to ask what the Hel was going on, without being rude to Her. A part of me wanted to start asking questions, not just about what was going on right now but also about magic in general. If there was one thing I had always lacked on my journey through Mundus, it was somebody to answer the wide variety of questions I came across. Why did certain magic effects work the way they did, how did a certain spell actually work, why were runes the way they were, there were so many questions I wanted to ask, but couldn¡¯t, simply for lack of an authority on the subject. I had found some answers in the Mages¡¯ Guild, but my time there had been incredibly limited, just a few days over the course of two years, just too little time and too many questions.


    ¡°I can feel your confusion, my dear,¡± the voice told me, amusement thick in Her tone. ¡°While your fascination with magic is admirable, I¡¯m afraid I won¡¯t simply hand you the answers you seek. It would cheapen your path and even if you were to walk it till the end, it wouldn¡¯t truly be your path any longer. No, giving you the answers you seek would be regrettable, I want you to find your own answers, to make your own path,¡± the voice explained, sounding strangely eager at the prospect.


    ¡°As you say, Lady Hecate,¡± I allowed, knowing that there was nothing else I could do. ¡°But maybe you could grant me some guidance in regards to the maiden, the one I call my child and you call your Acolyte. I¡¯m afraid I know little about child rearing, have never aspired to become a mother. And yet, I¡¯ve got two young lives in my care, lives I want to see thrive,¡± I admitted, knowing that some answers would be incredibly useful. I was trying to chart a course of Lia and Luna, only that I was doing so blindfolded, without a compass or map, simply with guesswork and hope, trying to make sure that none of us ended up dead.


    ¡°An important admission, young Mother. One that not many mothers dare, especially those who, like you, find themselves in the situation by accident. Granted, many of those accidents are of a different variety than yours, but that changes surprisingly little. Maybe you should try doing what so many mothers in history have done before and seek the guidance of your elders. Maybe a certain crone, a Grandmother, could help you,¡± She suggested, making me wince at the idea. She had told me the same, after the original ritual, only that I wasn¡¯t sure how to contact the Grandmother. It was a rather intimidating prospect, to try reaching through the Astral and using it to bridge the void between Terra and Mundus.


    It was possible, that much I knew due to the ritual to get the Book and the feather but that had been to receive something sent to me from Lenore. Now, I¡¯d have to rework the entire ritual to contact the Grandmother, without even knowing if the Grandmother would speak to me.


    ¡°Ah, yes, just like so many mothers before you, you are afraid that the one you call Grandmother would reject you. For now, I shall help you with your two daughters and give you a few words of advice. And maybe, if you are a perceptive student, I¡¯ll give you an answer,¡± for a moment the voice paused, before letting out a giggle and adding, ¡°Maybe:¡±

 Chapter 840

    By the time I woke from my strange dream, I felt a headache creeping up on me. It was one thing to get some information in regards to childcare, something I was incredibly grateful for, and getting information on Luna¡¯s class, possible future path and what to look out for was valuable, too. All that was great but sadly, Lady Hecate had apparently decided to either test or push me, I wasn¡¯t sure which. Or maybe she simply didn¡¯t care, either way, the sensation was fairly similar to that of the capsule going into a floating time compression and pushing my brain to keep up. For hours.


    Judging by the light filtering through drawn curtains, my dream had lasted about four hours and in those four hours, I had roughly forty hours of lessons, though it was hard to judge without any sort of external comparison. In the eerie space I had been pulled in, a space I had come to realise might just symbolise the moon, there was nothing to keep track of. It was perfectly drab as if frozen in time, with nothing but the voice of Lady Hecate to keep me company. Even the sensation of my body had soon faded away, forcing me to use my magic to create a shell for my mind, or I might have been driven insane. The space was similar enough to the Astral River to make me wonder about the connection but, so far, I had no idea what it might mean or how I might be able to make use of it. Luckily, the Lady Hecate didn¡¯t seem to be a deity to begrudge me my efforts, if I managed to use what she had shown me, even if that something was part of Her domain. No, She was more likely to congratulate me, especially if I managed to surprise Her in some way, She seemed to thrive on novelty and interesting fresh concepts.


    Simply looking at the amount of information I had been given, forty hours sounded roughly right. There were lessons on motivation, lessons on punishments, lessons on bonding and guidance when it came to childcare, while I now, amusingly, knew more about Luna¡¯s Acolyte Class than I knew about my own. When I had asked Lady Hecate about the progression for a Sorceress, or more precisely a Draconic Sorceress, the only answer I had received was amused laughter in three distinct tones. It seemed like the Mother guided the Maiden but had to make her own path, possibly with some guidance from the Crone, or Grandmother. Or maybe my efforts during her lessons simply hadn¡¯t been worth an answer and I needed to do better next time if there was another lesson.


    I really needed to find some way to contact her, or maybe get in contact with Lenore. Both might have interesting things they could tell me, or be able to help me out some. Just knowing I had access to the vastly superior magical knowledge of Mundus would be a terrifying boon. Though, judging by Lady Hecate¡¯s words, creating my own path and finding my own solutions for the myriad of problems out there would be beneficial in the long run.


    And I could see that. Magic was, at its core, an intensely personal force. Even runes, as objective as magic could get in my opinion, had nuances to them, subtle changes in their structure and expression depending on the person casting them, to say nothing about the even more obscure patterns to connect those runes. Sure, there was a general form to each rune but just how exactly the rune was cast was as personally distinctive as handwriting. Everyone used the same set of letters, but the subtle nuances changed greatly depending on the person and a myriad of other factors.


    And that was just for runes, when it came to the purely magical disciplines, the differences between two people were even greater. Hel, if I looked at the way I used my Mind Magic now and the way I had used it on Mundus, there was a huge divergence. Part of that was deliberate on my part, I wanted to steer clear of the change to my Mind Magic that had turned it into a pure weapon, but even without that, I used it in different ways. Ice- and Darkness Magic hadn¡¯t changed all that much, simply because I had come across ways to efficiently wield them and didn¡¯t want to mess with what worked. Otherwise, I might have pushed myself deeper into a combination of Water and Ice Magic, now aht I had access to both, using Cold as a weapon instead of the sharp Icicles or multi-elemental attacks I favoured now. Generally, Ice was the medium, but I could just as well go into using Water as a medium and Cold as the blade. I had done so in the nearby Dungeon, gaining a few skill points for it, so maybe I should test things and see how far I could push that idea.


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    Maybe I could try a few things out during the next rain, using the natural water in the air as an amplifying medium to spread my attack further than I could naturally, that sounded like something I could work with.


    But later, for now, I had to prepare some food for myself and the munchkin, before starting the little one on her lessons. Taking care of a child was truly a full-time job, especially in the situation we were in now. And for that, I had to get away from the munchkin who tried to impersonate an octopus. Or I could wake her, but that would leave me with a likely grumpy and hungry munchkin, an unfortunate combination that would make the work more difficult.


    Luckily, preparing breakfast was a simple thing, just some dried raisins and nuts, some oatmeal with water and honey, supplies that would last for a long, long time, even without refrigeration. It was what we ate most of the time, not the most savoury food, but filling and nutritious, so we made do. After clearing out the park, and checking the danger level of the area, we¡¯d head back to the farm and get some fresh meat on the way.


    I almost felt myself drooling at the thought, hunting down one of the stupendously large boars or maybe a cow, sounded like a delicious idea. Somehow, the change had altered their physique, making them more adapted to combat, but it hadn¡¯t negatively impacted their taste. Even the best meat I had eaten before the change, dining at a fancy restaurant with my parents, wasn¡¯t as good as a simple, grilled cut of beef from one of the altered cows.


    It made me wonder how smoked bacon from the boars would taste, it might be something we could trade at the farm for. There were a few things stashed away at the lair that we might be able to trade, or we could go out and find something worth their while. Hel, we¡¯d likely get something simply by asking, if only because people were too afraid of me to refuse.


    Not something I wanted to make a habit of, but if I was smart about it, I¡¯d likely be able to leverage my aura quite a bit.


    Or I could simply offer to dole out destruction in a direction of their choosing. If there was one thing I was confident of, it was that nobody in a fairly wide area was as magically powerful as I. It would take a large community, united in the worship of a more martial god to gather enough faith to have them empower one of their own to match me, if that was even possible. It likely was, simply because I doubted the Divine wanted to play by anybody¡¯s rules but their own, but even Gods needed something to work with.


    Which likely was the reason why Hecate had guided Silva to find Luna, so that She had something to work with, maybe even to form a more direct link between Herself and me. It might be an idea born of hubris, but I considered it more one born of self-awareness. There might be hundreds, if not thousands, of children with a similar base as Luna, but I highly doubted that anybody had a trait as stupendously powerful as Dragon Touched. It was, after all, the gift of a Titan for freeing them from a prison that was about to extinguish their essence and help them on the path to fulfil their Destiny.


    Focusing on the present, I moved to wake up Luna. We had quite a bit to discuss, mainly about the Acolyte class she was saddled with. One, surprisingly large, aspect of her power was to interact with others, to push them on the ¡®right¡¯ path. Amusingly, where that ¡®right¡¯ path for most deities meant a path that included worship of that deity, that wasn¡¯t the case for Hecate.


    No, instead, Luna¡¯s power revolved around helping others on the Arcane path, giving them guidance and furthering their powers. Logical, in a way, if one considered that Hecate wasn¡¯t after worshipers but wanted more arcane magic in the world.


    Which neatly fit with the role of teacher I had started, guiding people on that very path. There was a part of me that felt manipulated, as if I had simply been dancing on somebody¡¯s strings but at the same time, I doubted that it was manipulation. It was the other way around, my actions and power were likely the reason why Luna had been chosen.


    At least I hoped so, I hated being manipulated. Allies, mutually beneficial relationships, those I could happily do, but being played the fool was anathema to me.

 Chapter 841

    Somehow, when people talked about something being a walk in the park, I had a feeling that they weren¡¯t referring to what we experienced the night after the ritually boosted attack on the Withered.


    Walking into the area they had previously occupied was a fascinating experience. Maybe it was thanks to my extrasensory perception trait, maybe it was due to my high intuition, either way, I could feel the remains of their psychic web all over the place. It was utterly ripped apart, with only traces of pain, agony and incomprehension remaining, and those traces were enough to send shivers down my spine. There was nothing to be scared off, and yet, I couldn¡¯t help but feel spooked by the atmosphere around us.


    Luna might have felt something similar, or maybe she simply noticed my discomfort and reacted to that, I wasn¡¯t sure. But I knew that she clung to my hand, occasionally shivering just a little, as we made our way through the area, towards the devastation I had wrought.


    When we got closer to the park, I could feel the lingering power in the air, the cold hadn¡¯t dissipated despite it having been an entire day, even if not a sunny day, and I had a feeling that the death I had caused here would leave an imprint, one that wouldn¡¯t fade for quite some time.


    Stepping out from between the buildings, moving onto the road from which I could see the park, or what remained of it, I froze, stopping dead in my tracks. I had been somewhat prepared for the results of my ritual, I had expected it to look like a combination between an avalanche and a hailstorm had gone through but the reality was even more impactful than I had ever imagined. There were still massive spears of Ice sticking from the frozen earth, almost like the white crosses marking the graves of unknown soldiers.


    In addition, I could see the fungi I considered to be the primary bodies of the Withered, they came in countless different shapes and sizes, a few looked like the classical mushroom, but many more were simple sponges, covering the ground. Maybe they were that way to maximise the area they could cover, I had no idea and I didn¡¯t care too much. Now, whatever their purpose had been, it was gone, simply because the incredibly violent storm I had conjured had raged through the area, piercing, shattering and ripping apart everything in the area.


    The image of devastation was made even more solemn by the complete absence of movement. Everything in the park was still, it felt as if even the wind was too scared to move, or maybe it was just frozen, like everything else. Closing my eyes for a moment, I tried to focus on my magical senses, my tongue briefly flickering out to taste the air. The explosion of taste in my mouth made me almost gag, there was the familiar, comforting taste of my own, frozen power, intermixed with a bit of Wind from the ritual that had created the storm I had thrown at the Withered. To my surprise, that taste wasn¡¯t the strongest, despite the sheer amount of power I had unleashed. No, the taste of death, both the energies unleashed by the dying Withered and by the magical transmutation I had attempted at the end of my ritual, was incredibly thick in the air.


    Opening my eyes, letting some Astral Power flow into my magical sight, allowed me to get a better look at the situation. Sight allowed me to see the bigger contrasts easier, but taste made it easier to trace the nuances. Both were incredibly useful and now that I had some idea what I was dealing with, I could see the bigger picture more clearly.


    And that clear image made me shiver for a moment. The sheer devastation was quite striking, the physical sight was bad enough, with the utterly ruined plants and the Icicles still sticking out the ground everywhere, even some parts of the pavement had been shattered by my relentless attack but what truly struck me was the magical devastation. That what went unseen, the imbalance of energy in the soil, would last far longer than any physical damage.


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    The very earth of the park was completely suffused with the necrotic energies of death, making it obvious that nothing would grow there for a long time. There was a bit of grass, still clinging to the soil between the destroyed patches of fungus, some of the grass was squished, with large hailstones still lying next to it, but it hadn¡¯t succumbed just yet. It would, simply because there was nothing to support life in the soil beneath, likely a result of my last-ditch strike. The fungi must have had roots, or whatever they were called for mushrooms, reaching into the ground and those roots were what I had sensed and attacked.


    Once in the soil, the necrotic energies had to have spread around, bringing devastation to everything. The park, once a small oasis of life in the concrete jungle of a human city, was now utterly devoid of it, to the point that the roads around the park were more welcoming to life. It was almost ironic, but somehow, I couldn¡¯t laugh about it.


    ¡°Wow,¡± Luna quietly muttered and when I looked down at her, I noticed that her eyes were glowing with a soft, silvery light. ¡°You sure smashed them good, didn¡¯t you, mum?¡± she mused, her gaze sweeping the devastation.


    ¡°That, I did,¡± I gave her a grin, taking solace in the fact that the destruction had been necessary. ¡°You saw the different Withered yesterday, the Hunters, Skulkers and Husks. They were all, at least to my understanding, nothing more than toys for the entity dwelling here. It dug deep into the soil, growing and turning into a menace that might have killed everyone it could reach. Or worse, it might have grown into their brains, turning them into puppets. Alex almost fell victim to its infection, it was only a great deal of luck, or maybe fate, that saved them,¡± I explained. Destruction on the scale I had doled out wasn¡¯t something pretty to look at, especially not when done in such a violent way. But Luna needed to learn that sometimes, destruction was necessary, that only by destroying your enemies, you could protect your way of life. Or in this case, only by destroying your enemies, you could gain the power to make your own path in life.


    ¡°Let¡¯s look around,¡± I suggested, ¡°We might find something interesting in the devastation. I know that the powers unleashed here were quite potent, there might be some remnants I can use in my craft. But don¡¯t touch anything, until I had a good look and Silva, Alex, don¡¯t even think about eating anything, I don¡¯t care how tasty it might look,¡± I reminded my companions, getting a highly amused chuff from Silva.


    Moving slowly, we made our way into the park proper, taking care not to step on any of the fungus, while I continuously kept my Magical Sight active to make sure there was nothing able to infect us any longer. I had no idea how resistant to the necrotic energies I had unleashed the smallest spores might be, but I wasn¡¯t about to take any chances. The large clusters had been thoroughly smashed or pierced, to the point that I thought they had been destroyed, but fungi weren¡¯t really something one could kill by targeting some vital organ. Not like they had a heart, brain or spinal column, at least not to my understanding, making it difficult to confidently claim that a fungus was dead.


    My original training had been assuming human enemies and I had expanded upon that by reading up and studying the anatomy of different animals, making inferences from shared traits to understand more monstrous creatures. But there was nothing to prepare me for combat against fungi, so I could only use the basics and my magical detection, hoping that even fungi had a connection to the Astral while alive.


    It worked for all plants I had noticed thus far, but given that a large part of my perception was centred on my ability to detect and sense connections to the Astral that didn¡¯t mean much.


    Luckily, with the entire area completely saturated in magic rather inimical to pretty much everything living, namely my own flavour of Ice Astral Power and the potent necrotic energies unleashed by the death of countless beings, anything with a connection to Life energies would stand out to my sight like a sore thumb.


    Still, I made a note to be careful and later, after we left the area, disinfect us all with some Death Magic, in addition to checking everyone with my Blood Magic later, just to make sure nothing was growing on us. Or rather, in us, I had no desire to have one of us fuel the next iteration of Withered. But there might be something worthwhile to find here, something worth taking the risk.


    We just had to find it.

 Chapter 842

    Walking around the park, I was hit with some strange, mixed feelings. Here, at ground zero of my attack, I was both a little amazed at what I had accomplished but also scared of the devastation I had caused. Knowing that I could snuff out many lives with the equivalent of a gas attack, using my tried and true Devouring Mist, was one thing, but here, I could see that I could also accomplish the equivalent of an artillery barrage. In addition, as we were looking around, I noticed another strange feeling of disappointment creeping up within me. It took me a few moments to figure out where that was coming from, as the attack had almost been as successful as I could have ever hoped, so why was I feeling disappointed? It was an amusing realisation that it came from my gamer instincts. They still demanded that a large, opposing force should have some sort of boss, a creature of greater power than the mob of lesser beings around it, a threat that the heroes, had to defeat in a direct, brutal confrontation. Only, there was no boss here, and there also would be no loot, other than maybe the Ice I had conjured, or some destroyed mushroom spores. Not that I was about to take anything with me, not when said spores could still be viable. I didn¡¯t want the Withered to return but even more than that, I wanted to make sure that we weren¡¯t the ones who were withered first.


    We didn¡¯t stay long in the area around the park, simply because there was nothing left. Just the devastation and somehow, I didn¡¯t want to dwell on it too much. Especially not on the fact that I wasn¡¯t sure the entire amount of power I had unleashed would dissipate, or rather, that the power in the soil would remain there and cause some troubles in the future.


    Luckily, neither Ice nor Death were terribly dynamic powers, though I was a little worried about the combination. The only dynamic part within the element of Death I could see were Undeads, maybe some sort of revenant, and given that bodies could be conserved within Ice for millennia, it could become a problem in the indeterminate future, depending how the powers interacted. Or it might just do nothing, other than blight the area, turning it into an utterly sterile field, until wind and rain had carried away the affected soil. Once the dusty soil was spread out enough, the energies would cease to be a problem, simply because they were too thinly spread.


    Though maybe I should pick up some of the dust, simply because it was perfectly sterile, with quite a bit of Death energy mixed it, it might be useful for some funky attempts at gardening, trying to grow something within an element completely antithetical to life could give some interesting results. But no, I had bigger things to worry about, one of which was trying to help Lia to cross the first Divide. While her level boost hadn¡¯t been as extreme as that of Luna, she had gained quite a few levels during the ritual, enough to push her beyond level fifty, meaning she had a decision to make.


    Amusingly, that decision was one she wanted me to be involved in, both as her Mother and the Creator of her Race. Neither of us was certain what would happen to her, nor did we have an idea of what possibilities were even on the table, but she wanted to make a decision based on as much information as possible.


    It was something we discussed as we moved back towards our old hideout, outside of town, in the brewery. There was nothing more in town for us to do, the threat of the Withered was, at least for now, dealt with, though the remaining creatures might be a problem in the short-term, something we should warn the people at the farm about. They might get in trouble otherwise, and while the individual Withered groups were far from the same danger-level the entire host was, a single group of Withered would likely be able to overcome a group of survivors, unless the people at the farm had made tremendous progress.


    No, I would feel much better if the people would back to the farm, at least for a bit, while waiting for the situation to calm down, maybe they could perfect their training. Or do something else entirely, I didn¡¯t care too much, I just didn¡¯t want them to perish by accident. So, a warning was needed.


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    But the bigger, more important, question was that of Lia and her crossing of the divide. Our discussion centred on that what I knew about the divides, that crossing them was focused on self-discovery, on your place in the world and the nature of your powers. For me, crossing the first divide could have focused on elemental magic, trying to draw more power into a broader range of elements, or I could have focused on the shadows, trying to draw out more power from them. Both could have given me an increase in powers, but in both cases, that increase would have also been limiting me.


    If I had gone with the elemental option, the limit would have been lesser but I had no doubt that doing so wouldn¡¯t have benefitted my Blood Magic, as it was part of the Living Cycle, just as Death was. If I had gone into the Shadows, I had no doubt that my abilities in Darkness Magic would have skyrocketed, but at the same time, all my other magical abilities, maybe safe Mind Magic, wouldn¡¯t have gained, making it a bit of a balance. Ultimately, I had gone for the Dragon Within, as it was both interesting and universal, the result pleasing me greatly.


    Now, for Lia, one possible route was to focus on her physical body, essentially going a pure warrior route, though I was a little leery at that idea. She wasn¡¯t a purely physical entity, her state necessitated the use of magic, simply because her feeding was magical in nature. I doubted she¡¯d ever be unable to feed, she might even change to make her feeding a purely physical process, where she had to bite people for their blood, not just the Astral Power within that blood, but I wasn¡¯t sure about that.


    The opposite of that would be trying to focus on the magical aspects of her existence, the feeding, the Darkness Magic I had taught her, and maybe even the manifestation of her claws, which I considered to be part of her Blood Magic. I doubted going that route would make her an actual spellcaster similar to me, my theory was that she¡¯d be more akin to an assassin, moving about unseen and striking with devastating, magically enhanced force. Or maybe she would be able to feed from the distance, something that sounded insanely dangerous for everyone involved, but either way, Lia wasn¡¯t interested in that route. While she could use magic, it wasn¡¯t her focus, part of her interests was the physical side of things, so going purely magical was out.


    Lastly, the option that might be the most intriguing but also the scariest one of them all, one that Lia had brought up much to my surprise. Thanks to Luna, Lia was aware of the connection between Luna, me and the Grandmother, though none of us knew what was actually going on with that, only that Hecate had created it while blessing Luna, naming us Maiden, Mother and, most likely, Crone in the process, just like her three aspects were named. Lia¡¯s, possibly insane, idea was to focus on her status as the First of her Kind, and the implied connection to the Mother to empower herself even further.


    There was so much weird with that idea, I wasn¡¯t quite sure where to even start considering what it might do. I was the ¡®Mother¡¯ of her race, that much was certain, and I had been given the appellation of ¡®Mother¡¯ from a deity connected to the idea, a deity of magic at that, something necessary for Lia and the Vampires to exist.


    It was, quite frankly, an intriguing idea and if this was still a game if we were playing Road to Purgatory and one of my companions had asked me if I was okay with it, I would immediately have accepted, because it sounded fascinating. To make matters worse, none of us had an idea what it might do. Sure, the First of her Kind trait was increasing her attributes quite a bit, especially her physical ones, but that didn¡¯t mean it would carry over. It might just give her the ability to turn others into vampires with ease or spread her own status like some sort of virus. To say nothing of the other ways this could go horribly wrong.


    But this wasn¡¯t a game and while I would dearly love to learn more, I wasn¡¯t willing to risk Lia¡¯s future on an idea that could easily break her entire being. There was no reset, if she was stuck with a useless class, there was no whining and the only way to quit was fairly permanent.


    No, I wanted her to take another, less risky, path. But at the end of the day, it was her path and she had to decide what steps to take by herself.

 Chapter 843

    After another day of discussions and deliberations, Lia made the decision to challenge the first divide, using the middle of the night, or witching hour, to make her attempt. I was a little torn over it, mostly because she hadn¡¯t shared her actual plan but given that there was nothing I could actually do to help her, I could do nothing but wait. Wait, guard her body, and hope that everything worked out okay.


    It was a sensation I well and truly hated. Here was my daughter, sitting in a meditative pose, her mind turned inwards, exposed to a danger that I couldn¡¯t protect her from. Nor could I help her, other than the information and the advice I had given her, it was a challenge she had to overcome on her own. A hurdle on her own path.


    Maybe that was part of being a mother, or a parent, knowing that your child was being challenged but being unable to help them, that they had to make their own way, regardless of your desires. I couldn¡¯t help her and even if I could, I probably shouldn¡¯t, or it might cripple her future path. I had to find a middle path, between coddling my daughters until their wings clipped and atrophied or pushing them out of the nest, forcing them to fly or break on the ground below.


    Shaking my head, I decided to look into my own mental state. I was still struggling with understanding my own emotions and had made a habit of trying to name them, hoping that doing so might help me with relating them to my experiences. Some were fairly easy, that buzzing, bubbling feeling when one of my daughters managed a complex exercise was happiness, mixed with some pride at my daughters¡¯ accomplishments


    Others were less clear-cut, for example, there were moments of a heavy sensation in my stomach, weighing me down when I looked at my little group and realised how well we were doing. I had no idea where that heavy feeling came from and I didn¡¯t like it one bit, neither feeling it in the moment nor my failure to conceptualise it. There was no reason for me to feel something bad, and I considered that unpleasant feeling a bad one, even if I lacked a name for it at the moment.


    Now, looking inward, I could easily find the source of my current negative mood, I disliked feeling helpless, especially when it came to those I cared about being in trouble. It was easy to find the source of that sensation, and even realise where that dislike originated. I still associated being unable to help those dear to me with the battle that cost me Sigmir, the awareness that I had been unable to save her was cutting into me even now. Survivor¡¯s guilt, at least I thought that was what it was called and I really didn¡¯t like it.


    Amusingly, there was the intellectual question, what would I do if Sigmir had never died? Would I have been able to push as hard as I had, could I have accomplished the same feats of magical power without the utter disregard for Mundus and every living thing on it? Those feats had, ultimately, earned me the Dragon-Touched title, which I considered a major part of my strength right now, allowing me to grow far beyond what I had accomplished on Mundus, gaining power that would eventually reunite me with Sigmir. Without that trait, I would be far weaker, I might even be dead already. I certainly wouldn¡¯t have the Titanic Ambition trait, nor would I have been able to save Lia.


    It was an interesting question, though I quickly realised that I was merely trying to distract myself from the other sinking sensation in my gut, the worry about Lia. Emotions were such a double-edged blade, there had been a phase during my childhood in which I wanted nothing more than to have them, to fit in. Not that it would have been that easy, I could see it in hindsight, but despite that, the dream had been there. And now, feeling the emotions ever since the change had happened, and even before while on Mundus, it was both everything I wished for but also a horrible burden. The sweet with the sour, or something to that effect, maybe it was only thanks to the low, negative emotions that the positive ones actually made sense. Otherwise, it might be akin to a drug, one that required the user to take an ever-increasing dosage to get that high they were chasing.


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    ¡°Is Big Sis all right?¡± Luna quietly asked, her arms going around my neck as she plopped herself on my lap.


    ¡°Hopefully, yes,¡± I assured my daughter, one arm automatically steadying her in a gentle hug. ¡°But shouldn¡¯t you be in bed, little one?¡± I bopped her nose, one eyebrow raised. While we were primarily moving at night, if at all possible, I also tried to have Luna follow a somewhat constant sleep schedule, as difficult as that often was.


    ¡°I had a weird dream,¡± Luna burrowed a little deeper into my embrace, ¡°At first, I was wandering in the snow, but somehow, it wasn¡¯t cold. There were a few trees, they looked like they were made of glass, all shiny and sparkling, until I got to a pond filled with glowing water. When I sat down, I heard a voice, it sounded really, really old, telling me that I should go to my Mother. That¡¯s when I woke up,¡± she relayed, before yawning loudly.


    It took me only a moment to realise what she described may as well have been the area around Neyto, the snowy forest of crystal trees, with the Nexus in the middle of it. This could mean that the ancient voice was the Grandmother, though I was drawing a blank as to why the Grandmother would have sent Luna to me, or why she would have pulled Luna into a dream in the first place. For the opposite to occur, that Luna had somehow reached out to the Grandmother was more likely on a personal level but felt just as unlikely on a power-level. Luna had made some incredible jumps in personal power but she was far from strong enough to traverse worlds, even I couldn¡¯t do so. Though, there was always her connection to Hecate, acting as a wildcard, so I couldn¡¯t actually rule out some sort of divine shenanigans. Those could always be involved, especially given that Hecate had named the Grandmother the Crone. Why couldn¡¯t there be some sort of handbook for divine shenanigans, connections and whatever else was involved here?


    I chuckled softly at the thought, the absurdity of it was too amusing, maybe that handbook should come with a bright, orange cover and the words ¡®Don¡¯t Panic!¡¯ on the label? For a moment, one of the easter eggs, or what I had thought of as an easter egg in Road to Purgatory sprung to mind, only for me to push that idea away ruthlessly. I didn¡¯t want to begin considering what that might mean for reality and my place within it. That way lay insanity and just thinking about it was hazardous for my peace of mind.


    Instead, I made sure that little Luna was slowly slipping back to sleep, wondering what her dream might have meant. If it even meant anything, the message, if one could call it that, was far too vague.


    Before I could reach any conclusion, I felt a brief moment of connection, the Astral River surging all around me and in that moment, I could feel the Grandmother, and I could feel Luna in my arms, not physically but more along the lines of the sensation I experienced on Mundus when using the Astral River to communicate with the Grandmother. In that moment, I could feel the ancient, timeless nature of the Grandmother, akin to an ancient forest, a constant cycle of growth and decay, completely different from the timelessness of a glacier, still and eternally unchanging. But I could also feel Luna, the different extreme, there was nothing timeless about her, it was the opposite. She was growth, change and impermanence, her mind and body changing quite literally from one day to the next, never remaining as she was.


    It was exhilarating, feeling these two extremes around me, in opposite and yet in harmony, it made me feel both comfortable and settled but also a little restless, the drive to explore pushing me to strive further.


    Sadly, it was only a transcendent moment, a moment that lasted a lifetime but also just the blink of an eye. The instant it was gone, a subtle change caught my attention, a notification from the system popping open before me, while my mind also registered that Lia¡¯s eyes were fluttering open.


    <table style="border-collapse: collapse" border="1">


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 98.9983%">Title gained</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 98.9983%">You gained a title: The Pale Lady</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 98.9983%">You have taken the first step on your path. Time will tell if you continue to move on it, or if you walk a different one.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    What?!

 Chapter 844

    It took us two more nights to reach Apple Gate Farm after Lia crossed the first divide. During those two days, Lia and I discussed what had happened during her crossing of the Divide and tried to understand how that might have fed back to me. Or if the title I had gained the moment she did had any actual relation to her success, there was always the possibility that it had been an unlikely coincidence.


    It turned out, she had listened to me and didn¡¯t focus on her connection to me, as her Mother with her as the First of her Kind, instead she had focused on the blessing I had shared with her upon her inception. Amusingly, I had a feeling that doing so had inadvertently led to a similar outcome, namely that Luna, the Grandmother and myself had taken the spot of the divine within that Blessing, or something along those lines. There wasn¡¯t any draw on our powers, at least not on Luna or me, but the title I had gained and the even greater connection I felt to Luna seemed to indicate such.


    What the title did, was a complete mystery to me, I had tried to meditate, tried to see if I could discern anything about what it might do, where it might come from, but nothing. It just sat there, in the list of my titles and I had no idea what to do about it. Or if I even could do anything about it.


    On the bright side, the way Lia had crossed the divide had been a success, not a perfect one, her new class was below my own Draconic Sorceress when it came to attribute increases, but it was equal to the gains of the Lunar Sorceress Class I had on Mundus. In addition, her Blessing was strengthened, increasing her power during the night, while somewhat lessening the damage she took from the sun. Not enough to allow us to be active during the day, but enough to let us move about in the twilight or during cloudy days. Fighting would be risky, sunlight still weakened her a great deal, but, as we tested during the second day, it no longer gave her instant sunburn.


    Still, the ever-shortening nights limited us a great deal. With almost fifteen hours of sunlight, not counting the twilight hours, there was only so much darkness for us to work with. In addition, the weather had been what others would call wonderful, with pure, blue skies and only a few clouds in sight, or in other words, utterly horrible for us. Without any clouds to borrow shade from, we could only hide for hours upon hours each day, using what little darkness we could to move about.


    And it was getting worse, the days would continue to lengthen for almost two more months until they finally reached the longest day and from then on, darkness would begin its slow crusade for supremacy. I could hardly wait for the winter and was even considering to hunker down for a while, not even trying to get anything done on a large scale. It would give all of us, especially Luna, some time to work on our skills. Luna had gained many levels in an instant but that wasn¡¯t good in the long run, for one she lacked the skills to go with them and she also might have missed out on a useful trait or two, depending on how she distributed her points. Her class required a wide spread of attributes, so the problem was lessened, but the skill portion, not so much.


    When we closed in on Apple Gate Farm, I was met with a fairly large surprise. I was used to the Army of Dog moving about as they wished but now, the entire pack was coming towards us with lolling tongues. Not even Silva had received such a welcome in the past and yet, when they came close, it wasn¡¯t Silva they focused on, nor was it Lia or me. No, the dogs were clearly here for Luna and while there was a moment of apprehension, it looked like my munchkin was sharing the sentiment coming from the dogs.


    She fearlessly hopped off Silva, who had been carrying her so her shorter legs could rest, and stepped towards them, quietly talking. For a moment, I thought she was just talking at them, as one might do with a beloved pet, but then I realised that no, she wasn¡¯t talking at them. She was talking with them and unless she was making up their part in the conversation, she was able to understand them.


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    Looking at Silva, I couldn¡¯t help but ask about it, whether Luna was able to understand canine, or whatever their language was called. In response, Silva simply let her tongue loll out before pulling it back in and giving me the most obvious nod, before her tongue lolled back out, making me grumble.


    ¡°So, she could have translated for you the entire time?¡± I grumbled, only for Silva¡¯s tongue to vanish back into her mouth and some of that chuffing sound I considered her laughter to come out. ¡°Or do you prefer if I have to guess what you want to say?¡± I asked, only for Silva to nod again, clearly amused at the charades I had to undergo to communicate with her.


    For a moment, I considered asking Luna to translate but the idea only lasted a moment. If the fleabag thought it was fun to mock me for my inability to understand her language, then I would learn it, just so I could mock her back. Maybe I could also teach Luna some other language at the same time, Luna and Lia, so we had a language we could talk in that excluded Silva.


    Or maybe I was just being petty, because my daughter had never told me that she could understand Silva, though it might be because Luna thought I could, too. And it wasn¡¯t like I was completely unable to understand her, by now I was able to read her quite easily but there was the principle involved. If Luna could understand their language in a way I could not, then I wanted to learn. Silva was, after all, my oldest friend in this changed world.


    But that had time until later. For now, we had a farm to reach and the sun would soon come up, harassing us with its hated rays. It took fairly little effort to corral Luna and the dogs back into organised movement. Luckily they were dogs, if we had an army of cats it would be much harder.


    When we reached the farm itself, I realised that the guards were still a disappointment. Sure, they had improved some of their security features, trimmed back the hedges at the edge, and built a small trench, with earthworks on the other side, there were even a few spears stuck in the earthwork and torches on top. At the moment, the torches were unlit, making them fairly pointless, but they could be easily lit by the guards moving around the area.


    Which left the question, how good were the guards? Would they notice my approach or would I remain disappointed, giving Mrs Wu once again the bad news that their community was undefended? Or maybe calling it a community wasn¡¯t sufficient any longer, the amount of construction they had accomplished, the fields I could faintly see in the dark, it wasn¡¯t just a small community any longer, this was starting to become an actual town.


    Hopefully, the growth, this renewal of civilisation, could continue. But for civilisation to flourish, they needed protection from those who would prey on them, the things that went bump in the night, the beasts and nasties that crawled around out here in the darkness.


    There might have been a small smirk on my face when I disappeared into the shadows, moving forward unseen while the rest of my group continued onwards slowly. Alone, clad in shadows and hurrying, I could cross hundreds of metres in a dozen-odd seconds, even without stepping through the shadows I was like the wind. Unseen, scarcely heard and impossible to detect until I was felt and in this case, I didn¡¯t want to be felt.


    It might have been a little unfair, but I wanted to know when exactly the guard would notice the army of dog, they weren¡¯t exactly stealthy in their approach and with me standing behind him, I would certainly notice.


    The result of my little test was far from encouraging. The guard noticed the dogs but by the time he did, they were close enough that he couldn¡¯t have done more than raise the alarm and maybe light a single torch before they reached the earthworks and there were simply not enough spears stuck in them to stop a deliberate charge.


    But at least they had made progress, even if the guard still squeaked and jumped like a little girl, not my munchkin, a normal girl, when I spoke up behind him, telling him that there was no need to raise the alarm.


    His squeak of fear managed to draw the attention of another guard, one who apparently remembered me, though I could see a bit of apprehension on her face when addressing me. Alas, that might just be the price I had to pay for my power, at least they didn¡¯t just fear me, they feared and respected me. I might be a monster, but, luckily, they considered me their monster. Otherwise, the welcome would have been far more pointed, namely the tip of a spear.

 Interlude: Survivors 403

    With the rising Sun, the people of Apple Gate Farm got up to work. There was always more than enough work for everyone and while the community had grown from a few survivors driven from their homes and banded together for shelter, the growth hadn¡¯t been without its costs. Long gone were the days when everyone could fit in the farmhouse and the barn, instead multiple large shelters had been constructed, using supplies raided from the nearest do-it-yourself store. There had been some problems with the goods, the change had affected more than just people, but a nail was a nail, even if that nail was sometimes almost as brittle as a dry noodle. Still, they had managed to set up their shelters, even if the roofs had the occasional leak and nobody wanted to bet whether the simple buildings would survive the winter. For now, they gave the numerous survivors the shelter they needed and that was good enough.


    Similarly, the need to grow food was just as great as the need for shelter, even if multiple groups of combat-ready survivors had been scouring the countryside for supplies. Those supplies wouldn¡¯t last, that was a simple fact of life, and while some people held out the vague, increasingly delusional, hope that help would arrive, those few fools were in the minority. And even if they believed that help would come, nobody was allowed to slack and so they, too, were put to work.


    Luckily, quite a few of the survivors had magic, as amusing as that concept would have been just a few months ago, and that magic allowed them to work the fields in fairly improbable ways. Instead of having to pump water from some, hopefully nearby, well, the mages had, under the lead of a young man, set up some strange ritual, allowing them to conjure up rain right above the field. It looked incredibly strange from a distance, a single cloud hanging just a few dozen metres above the ground and only raining down on the fields, but it worked. And just like the rain-on-demand worked, so did the weird mambo-jumbo done by other spellcasters who walked across the fields, shrouded in some faint, green glow. Nature Magic, they called it, claiming that it helped the crops to grow faster and stronger.


    And as outlandish as that sounded, after just a few days of work, their claims were proven true when the first plants sprouted from the ground and within a week, everyone had become a believer, simply because it was impossible to argue with the rows of grain that seemed to visibly grow from day to day, as if somebody had set the world on fast-forward.


    But nobody had more work, or rather, more responsibility than the Council. Assigning guards, training those who needed it, scheduling people for work, and keeping inventory of the vital supplies, the Council ran the Farm much like one might run a small army. Strictly organised, as fair as they could make it, and with high regard for security. It was an incredibly small minority who hadn¡¯t lost a loved one since the World had Changed, or had gone to shit as some called it, and nobody wanted that minority to shrink even further.


    People realised that, of the roughly two hundred fifty thousand people living in and near their City, the roughly thousand people now living at the farm were the vast majority of the survivors. There were other groups out there, the parties looking for supplies had come across both the groups themselves and also across clear signs of intelligent life gathering the same supplies they did, but none of those groups had come even close to the size of their community. And that survival rate alone scared people deeply, driving home that humans had gone from a severe problem with overpopulation to the verge of extinction, though they weren¡¯t the only species going that way. It was just, for the people, the possible extinction of humanity hit far, far closer to home than the possible extinction of the splendid poison frog, or some other critter.


    That there were a few people who weren¡¯t quite human any longer didn¡¯t help matters much, some people even saw the few who had visibly changed as a threat. Not that those few were really vocal about it, not with the fear of the one only called Pale Lady lingering in the back of their minds, but even low whispers could spread rapidly.


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    And it was a report about that Pale Lady, delivered to Councilor Mark early in the morning, that managed to spoil the Councilor¡¯s day, just minutes after the day had really started. He hadn¡¯t even had breakfast at that point, and yet, the day already sucked.


    ¡°Could you repeat that, Jenny?¡± The Councilor asked the woman in charge of the night watch, looking at her as if he couldn¡¯t quite believe what she had told him.


    ¡°Certainly,¡± the woman nodded, looking fairly unconcerned with the havoc she wrought on the Councilor¡¯s mood, ¡°During the last segment of the night watch, the Pale Lady, her Hound, her partner and a large group of dogs came to visit. They had with them a small female, a child in appearance, if not for a set of rather inhumane eyes and her high level,¡± pausing for a moment, Jenny considered whether to add that the child, or whatever that monster was, had a level roughly equal to herself, one of the more capable fighters living at the Farm but decided to simply continue.


    ¡°The Pale Lady did most of the talking and after scaring one of the guards, she warned me that they had recently dealt with a nest of monsters, destroying the majority, but that multiple smaller groups had managed to flee. She warned that those smaller packs were composed of three to eight large, feline monsters around level forty for the most part, but that there were also other types, one humanoid and similar to Shattered, the other type similar to that racoon of theirs. She considered the felines the largest threat to us, though given that she described the racoons as incredibly sneaky, I would consider them an equally large threat, just a different sort of threat,¡± she finished her report, bravely ignoring the quickly-increasing frown on the Councilor¡¯s face.


    ¡°Did she say anything else? For example, any indication that those beasts might be coming here? Or where she is headed next?¡± the Councilor asked, hoping that maybe, just maybe, the Pale Lady might have decided to stick around and was currently sleeping in some dark room. The Lady¡¯s preference for the night was well-known and much whispered about, even if those whispering were trying to be discrete. Not that it really worked, given that everyone had their own theory, but nobody dared to speak loudly about it, let alone when the Lady might be anywhere near. Or one of the spellcasters whom she had given special training to, or any of the spellcasters, really, simply because they might share the gossip with the Lady. And nobody wanted to find out if the Lady would be amused or angered by it, not after some people had overheard conversations about the Lady¡¯s abilities. As much as some wanted to believe that the tales were exaggerated, nobody was willing to put that belief to the test. Not after tales of a different world emerged, a world driven into eternal Winter by the Pale Lady.


    ¡°It didn¡¯t sound like she considers them a threat, nor did she give any indication they¡¯d come here, no. And she said she was going home, whatever that means to her,¡± After thinking for a moment, Jenny decided to add what might be the most important information of it all, ¡°She called the child her Daughter, you know? I¡¯m not sure where she got the kid, looked to be primary-school age, but Lady Morgana introduced her as her daughter.¡±


    What had been a small twinge of annoyance was replaced with a mountain of worry. As the saying went, there was no place more dangerous than between a mother and their child and somehow, Mark could easily see that to be a truism here. That anyone getting between that Lady and the one she called her daughter wouldn¡¯t need to worry. They¡¯d just be dead.


    ¡°I think I¡¯ve got an idea where home is to them, I¡¯ll have to talk to a few of the spellcasters, they might want to visit and get a few lessons. How did the child look, other than the eyes you mentioned?¡± Mark asked, just hoping nobody would do anything dumb in regards to that child, people could get incredibly reckless when it came to the perceived welfare of children. Hopefully, nobody would get the bright idea that the Pale Lady wasn¡¯t the right sort, whatever that meant, to raise a child. Otherwise, things might get incredibly ugly, incredibly fast.

 Chapter 845

    Maybe I had underestimated the effect of levels, just a little bit. To me, Luna was just a cute kid, not scary in any way, shape or form. For the people at Apple Gate Farm, Luna was a cute kid, with the aura of a being able to squish most of them with ease, giving an impression almost on par with their strongest fighters. Only, she was also that cute kid, the dichotomy playing happy havoc on their impressions.


    It got to the point that Luna was so scared and creeped out by the initial reaction that she started to hide behind me, making me consider the best way to protect my munchkin. To either blur out Luna¡¯s presence by projecting my own aura as much as possible or to physically hide her in the shadows, similar to the way I had done on Mundus. Sure, I had yet to gain the Twilight-Rune, meaning my only option would be to use actual shadows and turn her into a small blob of shadows, but it might be better than the looks she was getting right now.


    ¡°Well met, Lady Morgana. Who is your new companion?¡± one of the female guards asked me, the tone respectful, maybe even a little reverent. Sadly, I had no idea who this guard was, so I could hardly greet her by name as she had done. I might have seen her in the past, but I simply couldn¡¯t place her, nor did her weapons ring a bell. She had a staff in one hand, though she didn¡¯t look like somebody hitting things with a stick, and was clad in a relatively heavy coat, though nothing I would classify as armour. Simple survivor-garb, though my instinct told me that this wasn¡¯t just a weakling, not strong but also not weak, possibly in a level range similar to Luna. This might be why she treated Luna like a child, not like some sort of shape-shifting monster. Or her instincts sucked, which was also a possibility.


    ¡°Well met?¡± I replied, hoping that it was the right response. It was a greeting I hadn¡¯t heard before, at least not in the real world. There had been some jokers in games using something along those lines, but I could hardly recall the context or anything but the simple words.


    ¡°This is my daughter, Luna,¡± I placed a hand on my charge¡¯s shoulder, gently moving her next to me, ¡°I¡¯m afraid I do not recall your name, you will have to make your own introductions,¡± I added, raising an eyebrow in question.


    ¡°It is Jenny, Lady Morgana,¡± the woman gave a bow, her demeanour confusing me just a little, as was the title I was given. Sure, I had gained the Pale Lady title, but these people couldn¡¯t know that could they? I would have noticed if they had used an Observe-variant strong enough to find out titles, of that I was almost certain. Unless they had somebody with fairly advanced abilities, both in information gathering and concealment. A fairly creepy thought, somebody like that could quite easily find out everything about a person, in far greater detail than anyone sane would be comfortable with.


    ¡°I¡¯m afraid I¡¯ve been away from this area for quite some time. Could you tell me the best way to contact Mark, is there some sort of chain of command or messages installed or should I just shout and hope for the best?¡± I asked, realising that the farm had really changed these last few weeks. A town, indeed, with multiple relatively simple buildings centred around the original farm. Large, almost barn-like buildings, though I was relatively certain by the size of the doors that they were some sort of bunk-houses, providing living space for the hundreds of people now inhabiting this place.


    ¡°We have a desk where reports are gathered and compiled, so that information can be distributed to the various groups hunting out there. But if you want, I¡¯m sure Mark will receive you now, it depends on your needs. Can whatever it is wait until morning?¡± Jenny suggested, the previous deference even stronger now. It was starting to worry me just a little before I realised that I had subconsciously pushed out a little more of my presence than I normally would while trying to shield Luna. Maybe this woman simply used deference and decorum to handle a stressful situation.


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    ¡°It is not immediately important, though it should be handled in relatively short order. It all depends on the people here, we came across a few packs of enemies around level forty, they fled after we destroyed their primary hub, now we have little idea, or interest, where they might roam and what they might do,¡± I admitted, noticing how her eyes widened when I mentioned the levels involved.


    ¡°A few packs¡­ around level forty?!¡± Jenny asked, her voice stumbling as she tried to get the words out, ¡°Could they have followed you here?!¡± she started to frantically look around as if the monsters would jump out any moment.


    ¡°As I said, they fled after we destroyed their primary location. On our way back, they haven¡¯t even tried to engage us, the few times I noticed them in the distance, they immediately fled. It¡¯s possible we caused them a bit of mental trauma, conditioning them that challenging us is a swift way to the grave, even if we rarely bother burying them,¡± I shook off her concern, relatively certain that the Withered wouldn¡¯t try going after us. At least us, the group that had smashed the park and decimated their forces beforehand, now that the guiding force behind them was gone, their behaviour had markedly changed, especially when it came to their combat tactics.


    ¡°Would you like to stay? I¡¯m sure Mark would love to hear what you have to say, the entire council would want you to stay,¡± Jenny quickly suggested, sounding just a little bit desperate. Looking up to the sky, I estimated how long it would take for the sun to come up, comparing that with the time we¡¯d need to reach the nearby brewery, even if we remained cautious and careful.


    ¡°I¡¯m afraid that we¡¯ll be returning home. It¡¯s been quite a while since we¡¯ve been there, though I¡¯m sure the dogs will have made sure nothing untoward happened to our place,¡± I grinned, only for Luna to pipe up.


    ¡°Mhm, Mum, the dogs assured me they¡¯ve guarded the den well,¡± she added, shyly looking around the area and at Jenny.


    ¡°And yet, the dogs only kept an eye on the outside, I doubt they tried to unlock the doors to get inside. So, we should head home, especially given that I¡¯ve got to set up a room for you, Luna,¡± I ruffled her hair, drawing a small squawk of protest.


    ¡°If you could write down what you know about those packs, I¡¯m sure Mark will be grateful, we all will be,¡± Jenny asked, moving towards a desk placed under an overhanging roof, with a single lamp sitting on top of it. There were quite a few papers, pens and pencils, some of which she immediately pushed towards me.


    Writing felt a little weird, it had been quite some time since I had actually done so. Mostly, I had used Runes, or given lessons while my pupils had written down what they felt was important. Still, while my handwriting had definitely suffered, I was able to quickly pen a legible summary of the different forms of Withered, even including the size of different packs we had noticed. While I had no idea if the Husks would be able to command the normal Undead, I had a feeling they could, though I had no idea about the possible radius.


    Either way, with the information I had given them, the farm should be able to ward off a pack of Withered Hunters, if those even tried to come here. It would be interesting to see how they would develop from here, as a created existence that had lost its original purpose. It made me wonder what would happen if Lia started to create Vampires willy-nilly, before letting them loose upon the world, how would they spread?


    Maybe I should talk to Lia about her own instincts. Humans were, at their core, biological machines evolved to multiply and from that biological core-imperative sprung humanity and everything that entailed. Too little fur to withstand harsh climate? Start developing clothing. Bad insulation in the caves, or too few caves to go around? Start building houses. Hands too weak to kill your prey, or to break some shell? Use some rocks, or sticks, and start making tools, all for the survival of the family. Family-units unable to cope with the predators, or maybe unable to bring down prey? Start forming larger communities and give people specialised roles in them, starting civilisation.


    All for the continued survival, but what about Vampires or Withered? They didn¡¯t multiply like humans did, though the argument could be made about Vampires. How would that lack of a fundamental, biological imperative change their development?


    Sadly, I doubted I¡¯d be able to study them, there just wasn¡¯t enough time.

 Chapter 846

    When we reached the brewery, I stopped for a moment, simply looking at the building in amusement. There was the grave we had dug for the people previously living here, still faintly smelling of Hecate¡¯s magic from the benediction Silva had placed upon it, and all around the building were traces of canine activity. Only pawprints, nothing more, but when I flicked out my tongue to taste the air, I could easily detect traces of their mundane scent alongside their distinctly flavoured magic. Part of that magic was divine in origin, coming from Hecate, and part of it was elemental, or rather primal, coming from a direct connection to Nature, quite similar to that of Adra. It would be amusing if the dogs eventually managed to gain secondary animal forms, maybe even one that could talk to humans, though I had no idea how that might work. The transformation aspect would be relatively easy, humans didn¡¯t have all that many extraordinary physical traits other than the ability to shed heat through our skin, so there was nothing difficult in that regard but learning a language, or rather, learning to speak? That sounded easily as difficult as learning to fly using wings, with numerous complex muscle interactions.


    If nothing else, the dogs might be able to mimic Silva¡¯s recently acquired bipedal form, if only because it greatly increased the power of their claws from something mostly used to hold prey down while biting to something capable of swiping at enemies and ripping them to shreds. I wanted my canine friends to be as strong as possible, given that this was an unforgiving world, one that could easily turn them from predator into prey.


    ¡°This will be our home, at least for the next few months,¡± I told Luna, putting a hand on her shoulder. She looked around, her eyes shining with that divine light she got when observing magic, before nodding.


    ¡°Mhm, it is welcoming,¡± she declared, ¡°Lady Hecate makes sure nobody can take it from us and the dogs help.¡±


    ¡°Oh?¡± I asked, trying to read the flow of magic I had noticed, just a little jealous that Luna could ascertain this much with a single look. But maybe it was because Luna¡¯s ability to discern magic came from Hecate Herself, so reading the Divine magic of Hecate would be trivial for her. And I had to agree, the magic around the area was quite interesting, some of it was aversion, keeping out those hostile to us, however the wards could discern that. In addition to the aversion, there were preservative and truly defensive wards on the building, keeping it intact and making sure nobody could harm those under Hecate¡¯s aegis within the confines of the house.


    ¡°Silva, you did good work here,¡± Luna added, gently petting her massive head. It looked quite amusing, given that Silva¡¯s head was at the same height as Luna¡¯s.


    ¡°Silva did this?¡± I had to ask, as I hadn¡¯t noticed the amount of magic in the air before we left. Silva let out a quiet huff, before adding a chuff and a few more noises came from the dogs all around us. Looking at Luna, I waited for her to translate, to make sure I was right in the interpretation that Silva had laid the foundations and the dogs and their constant influence had turned those foundations into the fortifications we could see now.


    ¡°Mhm, Silva alone could only get things started, the others continued her work. Isn¡¯t it great?¡± Luna confirmed my words, bringing a grin to my face.


    ¡°We¡¯ll have to find them something nice, something tasty. Maybe some sort of fowl, something they can¡¯t easily hunt for themselves,¡± I suggested, getting a happy nod from Luna. There were moments in which I worried a little about the Munchkin and how easy she had taken to fighting for her life, to hunting and killing. From hiding behind me, clutching at my hand, to using her magic in combat without hesitation. The change made it necessary, but I still worried for her.


    Maybe I should try having her visit the farm occasionally, simply so she could get together with children her age. Though I¡¯d have to find out what the few children at the farm actually did with their days, I doubted that anybody had the leisure to, well, be a child at the moment. Unless the situation at the farm was a lot better than I imagined, they¡¯d most likely be drafted to do some of the light work, helping to sustain the community as children had done for millennia before the modern era and universal schooling became prevalent in the West.


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    ¡°Now, where do you want to sleep?¡± I asked Luna, once we were inside our house, ¡°Lia and I stay downstairs, in the cellar. It¡¯s huge, the previous owners used it to make cider, and we both have our personal areas set up, far from the hateful rays of the Sun. Or do you want to stay up here, closer to the dogs? They stay outside, but I¡¯m sure a few of them would room with you if that¡¯s what you prefer. Just because Lia and I have to stay out of the Sun doesn¡¯t mean you have to hide with us,¡± I explained, wanting to make sure Luna knew all her options.


    ¡°I¡¯ll stay with you,¡± she immediately replied, a look of disbelief on her face.


    ¡°We can set up a second bed in my space but we¡¯ll have to make sure you get enough sleep. Growing children need their sleep, both for their physical and mental well-being,¡± I told her, thinking of the children¡¯s bed in one of the rooms. Though, given that the previous occupant had died in that bed, I wouldn¡¯t want to use it, as useful as it might be.


    Luna didn¡¯t reply to my suggestion, merely reached out and grabbed my sleeve, her knuckles turning white from the strength of her grip.


    ¡°What¡¯s wrong, little one?¡± I quietly asked, kneeling so I could look her in the eye.


    ¡°Can I sleep in your bed?¡± she asked, her voice little more than a whisper.


    ¡°If that¡¯s what you want, yes,¡± I nodded after a second, ¡°But you¡¯ll have to take extra naps. I wasn¡¯t joking when I said that children need their sleep, you know?¡±


    ¡°Okay, Mum,¡± she stepped a little closer to me as if seeking proximity. In return, I pulled her into a hug, hoping that I was making the right decision. Some of Lady Hecate¡¯s lessons had been on setting boundaries and expectations for a child, but she had also talked about the necessity for physical warmth and affection. A balance, of sorts, was needed, though I had no idea how to set that balance. I could only give little Luna the affection she so obviously craved while making sure her physical needs were met. And lessons, she also needed lessons, no daughter of mine would be useless. I didn¡¯t care what she wanted to do, but I wanted her to be able to be the best she could be at whatever it was she wanted to do. In this case, I needed to plan her magic lessons, if only because Lady Hecate had a claim on my munchkin, too.


    Downstairs, I had to use quite a bit of Wind Magic to air out the space, pushing the air through the door next to the loading dock. In the meantime, Lia helped Luna to get set up in the space I had claimed. Going by the giggles I could hear, the two of them were bonding nicely, their sisterly relationship bringing a grin to my face.


    ¡°I miss you, love,¡± I quietly whispered, letting the wind carry my voice to my beloved Sigmir. If only she was here, part of this little family I was growing. I had no doubt she¡¯d love my two daughters, both of them were adorable in their own right, but I wanted the two of them to not only be my daughters but be our daughters. Just as much Sigmir¡¯s as mine, even if Luna clearly took more after me, while Lia had quite a bit of Sigmir¡¯s physically active and combative nature. I could almost see it before my mind¡¯s eye, Sigmir with her axe, training Lia on the correct way to fight with whatever weapon she needed, be it a cleaver, the chain-hook or anything else.


    Just as I was about to close the door and check on the two, I heard a faint whisper in the wind, almost like an answer to my own.


    ¡°I¡¯m waiting for you, love. Soon, we shall be together again.¡±


    For a second, I was completely and utterly stunned, unable to move, speak or even think. The voice had been the one of my Sigmir, only I wasn¡¯t sure if I had imagined it. My tongue instantly flickered out, looking for something, anything, that might tell me the reality of it. There was a faint trace, one that I hadn¡¯t tasted for far too long, not since that fateful day in the jungle, when Sigmir had sacrificed herself. But just as I was convinced it was her magic, the scent faded, leaving me with few answers and many, many questions.

 Chapter 847

    Taking a deep breath and letting it slowly flow out of me again, I looked outside, hoping against hope to spot some thick clouds anywhere nearby. Sadly, the weather wasn¡¯t cooperating, the day outside was picture-perfect, with a deep, blue sky stretching as far as the eye could see, the temperature just shy of being too hot with a gentle breeze keeping things from being stifling. Or in other words, it was just about the worst possible weather for me, meaning I had to consider my options in regard to a promise I had given Luna, namely that we¡¯d visit Apple Gate Farm so she could meet a few people her age, maybe play with them or something along those lines.


    On one hand, taking her there would be a pain, quite literally. The Sun outside was strong enough to burn through my Astral Power, even with my considerable reserves and ability to regenerate it, and scorch my pale skin, turning it into a scalded mess within a short time. If I had some suncreme with a protection factor in the millions, I might consider it but there was no such thing, nor did I have an alchemical alternative.


    On the other hand, I had promised to take her and I didn¡¯t want to break my promises, certainly not those I made to my daughter, leaving me with a bit of a problem. If there had been a nice thunderstorm rolling in, blocking out the sun, I could have waited for it but by the looks of it, the sun would continue to reign supreme in the sky until it finally disappeared behind the horizon in a few hours.


    Stretching my hand forward, I let some of its rays hit my skin and immediately felt my Astral Power draining away. With just that small amount of skin under its rays, the drain wasn¡¯t enough to overcome my regeneration, but it was a little uncomfortable nonetheless.


    Watching for a moment, I pushed a bit of Astral Power into a different application, altering the cloak of Shadows I usually wrapped myself in for concealment and made it into just that, a cloak of shadows without any additional properties. It easily covered my exposed hand, my skin becoming obscured by a layer of darkness I could only see though thanks to my affinity, and the drain from the sun faded, though the spell used up just as much Astral Power, or maybe even more.


    But it was a workable solution, at least I hoped so.


    Just as I was about to call for Luna, so we could go to the farm, my eyes tracked across a large, black family umbrella standing in one of the corners. It was one of those massive things that could easily double as a tent if needed, sheltering an entire family under its expanse, though in this case, it didn¡¯t really need that, did it? I had been so focused on using magic to ward off the sun that I completely failed to keep such an incredibly simple solution in mind. There was no need for magic, at least not to constantly use it, if I could carry my own shade with me and while it wasn¡¯t a parasol, the difference was so minor that I didn¡¯t really know it, other than that parasols had gone out of fashion a long time ago.


    Picking the massive thing up, I wondered if I could only lift it thanks to my increased attributes, before walking to the door, opening it and pushing the umbrella outside before letting it unfold. The thing was as large as I had expected, the fabric keeping people dry maybe a little thicker than normal, but for me, that was perfect. It warded off the sun, keeping me nicely shaded and while the shade wasn¡¯t dark enough to completely suppress my weakness brought about by my curse, it was enough to reduce the drain significantly.


    Walking outside during a sunny day for the first time since the change, I took a few moments to make sure I didn¡¯t accidentally expose any part of myself, before allowing me to really experience the day.


    My curse had forced me to adjust to a nocturnal schedule, with only a few clouded days with Luna breaking that pattern, but now, standing in the Sun, I felt weird. There was a part of me that had missed the light, missed the sun, the warmth and what should be a nearly perfect day, at least by any normal reckoning, and yet, I couldn¡¯t relax. There was a part of me that was discomforted, knowing that I shouldn¡¯t be out in the Sun. For a moment, I wondered if this sensation was part of the curse, that it made me crave the night for some reason, that it was messing with my mind, but I couldn¡¯t really pin down any foreign influence on my thoughts. They were just weirdly contradictory.


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    Instead of continuing to let my mind twirl in circles, I called for Luna, while making the umbrella a little more comfortable, using some Astral Power to darken the shadows around me even further while adding a minor bit of Ice Magic, making them feel cooler than they had any right to.


    Luna happily skipped out of the house, taking one glance at me, standing there with my portable shade, and came over grabbing my free hand with a wide grin.


    ¡°Now, little one, we¡¯ll be going over to the farm,¡± I told her as we started walking, ¡°Keep in mind that you have to keep your aura reigned in, or the people there are going to feel it, and it¡¯s not a nice feeling for them. They¡¯d feel uncomfortable and if people feel uncomfortable, they are liable to lash out, okay?¡± I reminded Luna, knowing that her Charisma, now that she had invested her attribute points, was high enough to keep others from feeling the sheer difference in level, though they¡¯d still feel something. Maybe a bit of awe, which was a lot better than the sheer intimidation I was radiating, at least in my book.


    ¡°Mhm, you told me and I trained with the dogs to keep myself reigned in, just like you showed me,¡± she nodded, skipping along before dropping my hand and running over to check out some plant that caught her eye. I could only smile at her exuberance while making sure that what she had found wasn¡¯t about to react aggressively to her approach. But no, it was just a flower and even focusing on it, I was unable to detect anything but the most basic signs of life from it. No Astral Power coursing through the soil indicating that it was a lure, nothing in the air, no strange smells or tastes, nothing. Nothing, but a harmless flower. But I could never be too vigilant, not when it came to my daughter¡¯s well-being.


    A few of the dogs that had been hanging around our lair joined us, happily running along, sometimes playing with Luna as we walked. It didn¡¯t take us long to get to the farm, even with the way my munchkin was playing along the way, and for once, we were noticed on our approach.


    I almost wanted to applaud the guard, though given that I was carrying a massive black umbrella, had a few barking dogs and a happily giggling child with me, they would have had to be asleep to not notice our approach. And even if they¡¯d been asleep, they might have woken up from the ruckus Luna and the dogs were making.


    Given our open approach, they did little to challenge us, though that might be connected to the fact that there was likely only one person walking around with a bunch of dogs and a child. Or they simply kept an eye out for trouble, and my approach didn¡¯t qualify, I didn¡¯t know and didn¡¯t really care.


    Either way, Luna, the dogs and I made our way onto the farm proper, and for once, I could take a look at the place by daylight. While my night vision was excellent, there was something to be said about proper lighting, it revealed some nuances I had previously missed. Plus, people were out and about now, instead of sleeping like they did at night, giving me a much better idea about the numbers here at the farm.


    There were a lot more people than I had previously considered, literally hundreds of people were walking around, though most of them outside the simple palisade, tending to the fields. Some were also working, building further structures, it was all quite interesting.


    Sadly, the instant I was noticed my quiet observation came to an end, when quite a few people interested in magic lessons came over, not quite acting aggressively but certainly with a pressing interest. Similarly, a few younger children noticed Luna and her pack of dogs, immediately taking an interest as well.


    Letting out a sigh, I kissed Luna¡¯s hair and told her to have fun but keep in sight, before casually conjuring a stool out of Ice, making myself comfortable under the thick canopy of a tree, using what natural shadow I could find to lessen the amount of Sun hitting me.


    ¡°Now, let¡¯s talk about magic,¡± I started my lecture, my audience quickly gathering.

 Chapter 848

    Teaching people about magic was incredibly interesting. Even speaking to somebody of the same affinity but with different experiences revealed an entirely different approach, not only to the intuitive parts of elemental manipulation but even the relatively consistent Rune Masteries were individually different. Just like handwriting, only that the differences in form caused a slight difference in function and emphasis, altering the efficiency and power of different Runes. If two people used the same Mist-rune, one person might have an individual focus on concealment, the other on the widespread insidiousness of the mist, giving them somewhat different effects when used. I doubted the differences when comparing the same Rune would ever amount to much, but multiple small differences could eventually cause a larger one, especially when considering that not everyone used the same Rune-system as I had come to realise.


    The Runes for my main affinities, Ice, Darkness and Blood, were fundamentally different in shape than the runes for my secondary affinities, those that I had only gained from observing my students. Similarly, all my students, even those using Ice or Blood Runes, knew that second style, though they could use the runes I knew after I taught my runes to them. It was fairly interesting, though I could see that using the runes I was used to came at a cost for them, the runes were a lot less efficient for them. I had a few ideas why that might be the case, though I wasn¡¯t willing to invest too much time to investigate, I didn¡¯t care enough for that. It was something I had noticed when working with my original students and even back then, I hadn¡¯t cared.


    Either way, talking with others about magic, as rudimentary as their understanding might be, was always interesting. Sadly, my lesson was cut short when the familiar face of Mark approached, looking both resigned and relieved at the same time. It was a fairly interesting expression on his face, one that made me wonder what was going on.


    ¡°Well met, Lady Morgana,¡± he greeted me, using that same, strange formula I had been greeted with multiple times already. Similarly, the title of Lady had somehow been attached to me, either as Lady Jade, Lady Morgana or, to my consternation, Pale Lady. That last one left me at a loss, making me wonder if it was the chicken or the egg. Had I gained the title from the system and the locals had, somehow, picked up on that or been subconsciously informed of it, or had the locals given me the title and the system made it official? I was tempted to ask about their use but wasn¡¯t about to reveal my lack of knowledge.


    ¡°Good afternoon,¡± I returned the greeting, using what I was used to. ¡°What brings you by? Are you interested in learning to use Magic, or will you continue hitting things with a stick, or whatever your style of combat was?¡± I asked, more interested to continue the lesson he had interrupted. But given that my students had immediately fallen silent when he made his way past them, the interruption was already there so dealing with him would hopefully clear it the quickest.


    ¡°I¡¯m afraid I don¡¯t have the ability to wield magic,¡± he shrugged, ¡°No, my path is the martial one, though I¡¯ve been putting quite a bit of focus in the direction of leadership and tactics, helping those under my command. It¡¯s interesting and multiple of the elders in our community have been able to give me a lot of guidance, they even found me annotated copies of The Art of War by Sun Tzu and On War by Clausewitz,¡± he shook his head, an amused grin on his face, ¡°Heavy reading, but I¡¯ve been making my way through the books. On War might eventually become my favourite blunt weapon.¡±


    ¡°I see,¡± I nodded, not quite sure what I was seeing. ¡°Well, that still doesn¡¯t answer my first question. What brings you by?¡± I repeated myself, not interested in small talk.


    ¡°Ah, yes,¡± he shook his head again, ¡°Well, I was interested in those Withered creatures you mentioned multiple times now. What can you tell me about the threat they pose, what do you think should be done about them?¡± he asked, finally giving me a question I could answer.


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    ¡°The Withered, well, I don¡¯t think they remain an active threat. Going by the information I have come across, they used to be a fungoid-based collective, maybe even an actual hive-mind, connected via a psychic link created by fungal filigree growing in their brains,¡± I explained, getting a lot of shivers from my audience and quite a few queasy looks. ¡°Their primary colony was situated in a small park, surrounded by a few hundred of their husks, hunters and skulkers, alongside hundreds, maybe thousands, of basic Undead,¡± I continued, the queasy looks gaining a bit of fear at the numbers mentioned.


    ¡°Their Hunters were growing quite rapidly, especially because they had some odd sort of experience-share going on, I¡¯m not certain how it worked but the more their Hunters, regardless of which Hunters, were fighting, the faster they levelled. They didn¡¯t even have to win their fights, the Hunters could fight and die in battle and the next day, other Hunters had used the experience of their death to gain a level. At the same time, the primary collective gained experience as well, adding even more levels and increasing their power. By the end, the primary collective was beyond level sixty, parts of it reaching for level seventy,¡± I finished my explanation and now, I could see the fear clearly visible on their faces.


    ¡°But they¡¯re not an active threat any longer?¡± Mark asked, sounding both relieved and disbelieving, his eyes fairly wide.


    ¡°Given that I learned their levels from the notifications I received as they died, no, they aren¡¯t a threat any longer. The collective is, to the best of my knowledge, a thing of the past, the few remaining Withered no longer connected on that deep, instinctual level. They are just monsters, fairly powerful individually, but far less of a threat than they have been before. So, no, not really a threat to me, and not a serious threat to the Farm, unless they attack in large numbers. Which they likely won¡¯t without said connection,¡± I told him, a little amused as I studied the way expressions changed all around me. Disbelief, fear, awe, it made me wonder what these people experienced, how their emotions shifted so rapidly.


    ¡°You¡­ killed them?!¡± Mark couldn¡¯t help but stutter a little, clearly taken aback. Apparently, nobody was really aware of my power but given that I did my very best to contain as much of my aura as possible, maybe that wasn¡¯t a complete surprise. Thanks to the repeated gains from my Dragon¡¯s Touched Trait, I had now, at level fifty-eight, almost the same Charisma as I had at level hundred-sixty on Mundus, meaning I had far greater control over my aura than I had there. Or, more likely, they lacked the experience to interpret the sensations they were getting, unless you knew the difference in intensity, you would only know that someone was more powerful than you, not necessarily how big the difference was.


    Just as I was about to reply, my eyes snapped over to Luna, who had been playing with a few other children and the dogs we had brought with us. Now, she looked like she was about to cry, while the dogs looked like they were about to tear one of the older children to pieces.


    Ignoring Mark, I walked over, feeling the heat of the sun start to scorch me as soon as I left the shadows. Instead of cloaking myself in shadows, I conjured a sparkling mist, keeping myself cool while warding off some of the sun¡¯s harmful rays, without turning myself into a shadowy monster. Instead, I became a sparkling monster, hopefully a better alternative.


    ¡°Now, what¡¯s going on here?¡± I asked, keeping my voice as pleasant as I could while my munchkin looked like she was about to cry.


    None of the brats dared to answer, they had taken a few steps back when I approached. I could hear some noise behind me, from the gathered students, but it was Luna who spoke up.


    ¡°They said I have weird eyes,¡± she complained, retreating into the cool, sparkling mist around me.


    ¡°You have unique eyes, just like me and just like your sister Lia,¡± I assured her, using Overflow to make my own eyes glow brightly in the mist. ¡°Now, little one, why don¡¯t you come and sit in on the lesson, you¡¯ll learn something, too,¡± I promised, not sure how else to deal with the brats without bodily harm. Children had never been my strong suit and my own experiences at school hadn¡¯t been the most pleasant.


    Thanks to some rudimentary survival trait, the brats didn¡¯t speak and we made our way back to the group, noticing some quiet whispers when I sat back down, now with Luna on my lap.


    ¡°I will continue the lesson now,¡± I told them, completely ignoring Mark who as still looking at me with an odd expression on his face, ¡°This is my daughter, I expect her to be treated with courtesy,¡± I added, before delving back into the lesson. It wasn¡¯t a great start to the summer, but it was a start.

 Chapter 849

    With no pressing matter to attend to, we settled in for the summer. The long, hot days meant that Lia was near-permanently confined to our underground shelter while it was hit or miss for me. I could be out in the Sun but it was uncomfortable, even if I could sustain the constant drain on my Astral Power for quite some time. Luckily, the umbrella I noticed served me well, to the point that I even stitched runes into it using my hair, turning it into a magical item.


    It never became anything major, but it became a sturdy shield against the hateful rays of the sun, giving me a cool, dark place to hide. Once it was enchanted, it even allowed Lia to move around outside, though she didn¡¯t enjoy it, partially because she was completely dependent on the umbrella, partially due to psychological reasons. To her, the umbrella was almost like a cage, forcing her to remain within a certain area, even if she carried that area with her. She wanted to run freely, jump through the air if she could, or even learn to fly, though that last desire wasn¡¯t one she could accomplish just yet. The placid pace I used while carrying my umbrella wasn¡¯t for her. Regardless of Lia¡¯s troubles, my magical umbrella served me well and I considered adding some extra enchantments to it. There was that old story about a woman using an umbrella to fly, though I doubted getting an enchantment like that would be easy. Or even possible.


    During the respite granted by the darkness of the night, the five of us roamed around the area, sometimes hunting for food, sometimes making sure no Undead, Withered or Shattered was attacking the brewery or the farm and sometimes just gathering interesting stuff, be it plant-life, strange critters or even the odd mineral.


    Some of the stuff altered by the change was truly fascinating, oftentimes lacking any real connection to what it was before. On one occasion, we literally stumbled across an odd rock, just lying in the middle of a gravel path, partially concealed in the dirt. If not for the Astral Power radiating out from it, I doubted I¡¯d have taken a closer look at the stone but when I did, I noticed that there was something radiating out from within. It took some careful application of Earth Magic to crack it open, but when I did, the effort was well worth it. Within that simple, unassuming rock, I found a gemstone, one that Inspect identified as a Blood Agathe. There was some interaction with my Blood Magic, but I hadn¡¯t found a way to harness its properties just yet, maybe some sort of enchantment would work. For now, it joined the assortment of odd items we had found in the Dungeon.


    But it wasn¡¯t all skulking and stalking through the nights. Not with Luna, my munchkin needed socialisation with other people, she needed children and the Sun, as much as I disliked that. Every other day, we made our way over to Apple Gate Farm, allowing Luna to socialise with people her age, even if she ended up on my lap more often than not, listening in while I was teaching other people magic.


    Or speaking up herself, it didn¡¯t take long for her connection to Lady Hecate to make itself known, adding her own two cents to my instruction and even using her abilities to help our students learn. It was fairly amusing, watching grown people get lectured by a six-year-old and the adults having to listen seriously, instead of merely humouring the child. While I had a lot more practical knowledge than Luna, my munchkin had the advantage of her divine connection adding to her instincts, giving her a somewhat different perspective. In addition, her skills allowed her to demonstrate on a whole different level, especially when it came to immersion in the Astral River. I needed to use a combination of Mind Magic and Astral Meditation while being incredibly careful, while Luna could simply utter a soft prayer to Hecate and get a similar or even better effect. It wasn¡¯t that I was jealous, but there were times I considered divine abilities utter bogus.


    All in all, watching Luna interact with other people was both, amusing and tragic. Amusing, because the adults could feel the power swirling around my daughter, even after she put some points into Charisma, giving her more control over her aura. The adults knew that Luna was powerful and dangerous, making them wary, and watching my daughter casually and, more importantly, unintentionally, intimidate adults was fairly hilarious.


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    Sadly, the caution and fear of the adults were reflected down onto the children and while the kids weren¡¯t deliberately cruel, they were¡­ distant. I saw a reflection of my own childhood, my difficulties with emotions and empathy had made me just as much an outcast as Luna was and far too often, my little munchkin ended up in my lap, not because it was more interesting but because she wanted to feel accepted.


    One thing I was incredibly careful with was Luna¡¯s attribute distribution. We had discussed it for a bit, before I made her promise me to stay away from the physical attributes, at least for now. She¡¯d get an increase, simply because she would eventually cross the divides but i had no idea how increased attributes would interact with a growing body. How would her body be changed by the system if she increased her Strength by a few points? I knew Strength wasn¡¯t just how, well, physically strong one was, but also the mental component of actively using that strength, but I didn¡¯t want to take the risk and mess with such a fundamental process.


    Maybe there had been a reason why Rai had only been allowed to increase his level after he reached a certain age and I remembered Sigmir telling me that her father had trained her as a child but never taken her to gain levels until shortly before she became of age.


    Instead, Luna¡¯s attribute points were focused on her mental attributes, as befitting her class. While I wondered if that would mess with her in the long run, only mentally instead of physically, I felt that she needed those levels for the long run to matter. I had no idea if Lady Hecate had been the only deity interested in her, nor did I trust others to keep her safe, maybe because she was almost starved when we met that group of survivors.


    Either way, Luna had the levels, she had the attribute points and we were making the best of it. Which also meant training her, especially in regard to Healing. Her affinity to Life Magic was incredibly useful and I did my best to help her with it. It could be used to influence anything living, from seeds in the ground to the living tissue of a wound, making it incredibly versatile as support with a few seriously nasty offensive applications. So far, we hadn¡¯t managed to make it truly long-ranged, beyond using seeds to create short-lived vines but maybe that was for the best. I had no desire to watch my daughter give people literal heart attacks or strokes from a distance, people were already intimidated enough as it was.


    Instead, we focused on walking the fields while she did her best to radiate her power outwards, helping the plants grow, something we had copied from one of the Nature Mages living at the farm. We also trained her in healing, but given her initial troubles, the training was mostly done far from the farm, using animals we were hunting. It wasn¡¯t the perfect solution but it was one that worked for all of us, and if the rabbit had a stroke before becoming dinner, that was just too bad. It might have been different if I lacked the ability to make sure the meat was safe despite the exposure to magic, but my Magical Sight and scent were up to the task.


    Lastly, there were her interactions with the dogs. Nothing I could have imagined came even close to the reality of their relationship. They shared a faith, that much was obvious, and while it looked incredibly strange to me, they practised said faith. While it didn¡¯t look like some sort of canine mass, there was an obvious structure to their practise, and even the barks from the various dogs had a clear pattern. It wasn¡¯t music, at least not as I understood it, but it worked for them and I could easily feel the Astral Power unleashed in their service.


    There were times I was tempted to siphon it off, similar to the way I had used the Astral Power unleashed in prayer when healing Lia, but I didn¡¯t want to mess with Lady Hecate that way. I considered asking for permission the next time we communicated, simply because I thought it would be fascinating to wield magic that way, but I wasn¡¯t about to just steal from Her. Not while She was blessing me and certainly not while my daughter was in Her service.


    All in all, the summer was surprisingly relaxing, but maybe that was simply because I couldn¡¯t really do a lot with the amount of sunshine we were getting.

 Chapter 850

    Rebuilding my throne might have been premature, but it most certainly was comfortable. Just sitting on the sturdy edifice of Ice made me feel calm and empowered, the runes I had engraved into the back and the armrests helping me to connect to the circle around me, letting my mind slip into the Astral River with ease.


    The ritual circle I was using was pretty simple in its design, mostly taken from my grimoire and one I had used on Mundus, but the purpose needed to be simplified. While the summer, with its long days, meant that travelling was difficult for my group, it gave me a lot of free time to figure out where to go next. What was the next step on my path, how could I get my Sigmir back to me. To pull a soul from the void, to create a body for her and to fill her mind with the memories she needed to be my Sigmir, all of those were incredibly difficult challenges individually, to say nothing of the combination.


    And yet, all three parts were necessary and building upon each other. Without Sigmir¡¯s soul, nothing could be done. It was the foundation of a person, the filter through which reality was experienced and the impetus shaping the body. Without my beloved¡¯s soul, I couldn¡¯t even begin to bring her back. Sadly, it was also an incredibly difficult thing to grasp, as Souls seemed to be almost indestructible, returning to the River of Souls after the body died to be washed clean and returned to the cycle. Unless somebody imprisoned a soul to weaken it to the point of fading, they would always be part of the cycle, which made finding the right soul nearly impossible, at least that was my understanding. Sigmir and I had discussed parts of it, though given that Sigmir had acquired her knowledge within a relatively primitive culture I couldn¡¯t be completely certain about the information presented, though what she had told me was somewhat corroborated by the Grandmother, lending it quite a bit of credence. Though, how much even the Grandmother knew about these kinds of things was a little questionable. Hel, what any mortal knew about these kinds of things was questionable, but I had to start somewhere.


    And when one wanted to start something, the easiest was to start with the simplest part of the whole. In this case, that meant the body, as bodies were made every day, or at least they had been before the change. In our current situation, I wouldn¡¯t bet on a human birth every day, certainly not a survivable one. But who knew, I might be wrong. Either way, Sigmir¡¯s soul needed a body unless I wanted her to be my hot ghost lover and as amusing as spirit sex sounded, I wanted her to have a body, if only because cuddling without bodies sounded a lot less fun. So, creating a body was simple, creating Sigmir¡¯s body? Not so much, mostly because my beloved had been a Giant Blood, literally carrying the bloodline of a divine Frost Giant, something the two of us shared.


    Which sounded a whole lot creepier than I was comfortable with. Intellectually, I was well aware that the blood relation between Sigmir was so distant as to be utterly irrelevant, even further back than the joke about ten per cent of Asians descending from Ghengis Khan, making a lot of people relatives that way.


    Still, I needed to get Loki¡¯s Divine Blood for my beloved¡¯s body and I had a somewhat weird feeling that I was the only one with that distinct Blood Line within my body. Which was¡­ something, I would have to deal with, at some point. But not now, the question of whether using my own blood to recreate Sigmir¡¯s body would make her some sort of sister and what to think or do about that wasn¡¯t one I wanted to consider. Not until I was a whole lot further on that path and had more information.


    Lastly, and maybe the most complex problem, were the memories. What was a person, but the product of their experience? One¡¯s identity was in many ways tied to them, the path they took through life shaping and changing them. Sure, the memories were filtered through the soul, interpreted and, curiously, coloured by later experiences as the original was recalled, but without the memories to be interpreted in the first place, the being would be a blank slate. Even if I had Sigmir¡¯s soul and a fitting body, if I couldn¡¯t add the memories that made her who she was, it wouldn¡¯t be Sigmir.


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    The body might grow into a person similar to her, but without the experiences that shaped my Sigmir into who she was, it wouldn¡¯t be her. It would be akin to Callisto and Adra, two lovers separated by death, with Adra being reborn after centuries, maybe even millennia, I had never asked about the exact time-frame. Either way, Callisto and the Grandmother had recognised Adra¡¯s soul, had asked me to keep an eye on her, but even by the end of our shared travels, Adra had never regained the memories of her previous life. She had even started a fairly intimate relationship with Rai, starting as friends but eventually becoming lovers. Just the idea that Sigmir might end up with somebody else flooded my body with anger, the air around me misting up and chilling, as my Astral Power started to flare with hate. Sigmir was mine, just like I was hers, nobody was allowed to come between us, not even Death.


    Which meant I needed to figure out how to recover those memories. Mastery over Mind Magic, Lady Hecate had said, meaning I had to learn a lot about that complicated branch of magic. Experimentation was needed, and not just of the calm, gentle methods I had been using while teaching, nor the brutal, combative approach I was using against my enemies. I needed to study the intricacies of the Mind, until I could draw out memories from the Soul.


    Sadly, if I managed to do so, it would permanently alter the person I was working on, meaning I had to find people nobody would miss. While I might be able to use animals for my testing, the mind of an animal was likely structured differently compared to that of a human, or humanoid. And for that testing, I needed a real base, not just the simple cellar I had here. Something like my tower in the frozen valley would be perfect and that thought had led to me setting up the circle I was sitting in.


    Terra¡¯s Astral River would eventually settle down. Its ebb and flow had calmed greatly, compared to the surging rapids I had felt when the river originally buried its way into the foundation of our reality, but it wasn¡¯t finished just yet. But once it was, Nexuses would be forming, conduits through which the Astral Power from beyond surged through our world, before flowing back into the beyond again.


    Figuring out where the Nexuses would be before they formed would likely be difficult, but even if I was unable to do so, just finding a Nexus would be a major boon. Well, finding and taking the right Nexus would be, having a Nexus aligned to Ice or Darkness would grant me dominion over the area, making me the unassailable Queen as long as I remained within my domain.


    And for that, I had to study the Astral. Letting out a deep breath, I let my mind surge forth, delving into the Astral, keeping myself tethered to my body and Throne. Just like I had discovered on Mundus, I could feel the minute strands of the Astral River flow through reality, just like veins and arteries within a body. Not every blood vessel was a major one, most of them were minor capillaries, but they were all connected to the heart, it only depended on the directness of that connection.


    Through the thin strands around me, I let myself get carried along the stream, trying to get a feel for the energies around me. Fire was dominant, as one might expect during a hot summer day, but there were other energies around as well. Wind, Water, joined together in a fairly intricate balance, rubbing together to give birth to lightning, it was a fascinating mixture running across the deep, almost imperceptible current of Earth. The Earth Magic wasn¡¯t doing a whole lot, but it was there, incredibly powerful in its potential but ultimately untapped. Where the mixture of Water and Wind promised an explosive release of power, maybe a lightning storm, the Earth was bound, but far more powerful. Maybe the potential for an Earthquake, or a volcanic eruption? I wasn¡¯t sure, but it was fascinating.


    Sadly, I was unable to figure out a way to find the Nexus I was looking for, if it even existed at this point. But I had the whole summer, I only needed to be patient. Eventually, I would claim my Nexus, setting up my domain. And once that happened, I could start mastering Mind Magic, with nobody able to stop me.


    One step at a time, and after many steps, I would have Sigmir back in my arms.

 Chapter 851

    With a twirl of my hand, the snow swirling around me took on another shape, forming into a javelin. It wasn¡¯t quite as hard as Ice, but closing my hand and focusing my magic changed that, right before the Javelin was launched forward, piercing into my target before shattering, tearing it apart.


    Training my Ice Magic had changed just a little over the summer. Instead of focusing on using my Frozen Shuttle, or waiting until I had enough snow on the ground to use as a natural resource, I went a different path. Conjuring a block of Ice was fairly difficult, but conjuring Snow, simply letting my Ice Magic manifest like that, was fairly simple. With a bit of training, it took just a few moments of concentration before I had a cloud swirling around me, useable in both defence and, as I was now training, offence. Defensively, the snow mainly helped by obfuscating my body from visual sight, but it could also act as a fluid defence, deflecting attacks by pushing them away from my body.


    Using snow like that had the added benefit that it cooled the air around me down, keeping it nice and cool, even if the air everywhere else was far too hot for my tastes. While I hadn¡¯t altered my Astral Power by bringing Ice into my soul, pushing the comfortable temperature of my body down by quite a few degrees, I was still heavily Ice aligned, greatly preferring the cold. With the snow swirling around me, I got the cold and, amusingly, it even helped with other Ice-spells, reducing their cost just a little bit. Not enough to make for manifesting the snow in the first place but almost.


    In addition, training like this increased my Ice Magic skill by a considerable margin, pushing me to level fifty-three about a month after the summer solstice. Similarly, my Ice Rune Mastery gained quite a few levels, too, pushing it from level thirty-seven to fifty-one, as I had put quite a bit of effort into gaining the next Rune. When it got to level forty, I had decided to glean the Snow-Rune, as I had been using it quite a bit and learning the rune allowed me to conjure it far more efficiently, even if I only used the Rune within my mind, while the Rune I learned at level fifty was an important one. The Rune of Hard Ice, allowing me to craft a new flight of Frozen Shuttles. Now, instead of having only a pair of them, I had crafted two flights of three, though it took my entire focus to employ them efficiently.


    Similarly to my Ice Magic, my Darkness Magic had made some strides, too. My focus remained on concealment and obfuscation, it was simply too useful to shift away from, but I didn¡¯t want to limit myself. Curses were useful, too, though I was considering other ways to employ that particular rune. In the end, I decided to go into something similar to concealment, pushing myself in regard to illusions and misdirection, muddling the senses and the mind. Working in that direction allowed me to combine Darkness Runes with a bit of Mind Magic, especially the new Rune I gained when reaching level forty, aptly named Fear. It was fairly similar to the confusion Rune I had previously learned, only instead of making people lose their way in the dark, it made people fear the darkness, making them more vulnerable to mental intrusion.


    Combining the two gave quite interesting results, though the lack of serious opposition in the region limited me quite a bit. There simply weren¡¯t any enemies worth fighting, even the few remaining Withered hadn¡¯t posed a challenge, their lack of wide-scale coordination limiting the threat they could pose severely. We still hunted them, if only for the EXP, but that gave limited results. Still, I had managed to push my Darkness Magic to level forty-five and my Darkness Rune Mastery to level forty-seven.


    The limited amount of combat also limited the amount of EXP I could get. Sure, teaching was useful and together with what little combat we could get, I managed to gain a few levels but spending over two months to gain only four levels was fairly disappointing. Still, those four levels brought me to sixty-two, giving me another boost from my Dragon Touched Trait, increasing all attributes by one and before getting there, I had put the two points I gained at level fifty-five into Intelligence, bringing it to fifty. That, in turn, granted me another trait, reflecting what I had been getting up to. In this case, it had been teaching and the trait reflected that, increasing what I could learn from observing others work their magic while I was teaching them. It wasn¡¯t ground-breaking, not at this point, but it gave me quite a bit of interesting insight into elements other than my primary three. While I wasn¡¯t trying to work with Weather or Nature Magic, I now had an idea where to start. I didn¡¯t think I¡¯d get far, even with my increased affinities I wasn¡¯t a Nature Mage, but Weahter had some potential, especially with my considerable attributes.


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    Getting to sixty, and getting the attribute points from my trait and class, also pushed my Intuition above forty, giving me yet another trait. Again, the trait focused on my recent activities, which meant teaching, the trait giving me the ability to, quite literally, sniff out the affinities somebody had, even if they lacked the trait or didn¡¯t want to share for some reason. It wasn¡¯t just useful in teaching, I could easily see the use of it in combat, but for now, I was using it to teach. Given that the trait improved my magical senses, it meant I could also use my Magical Sight to see the affinities of somebody, but that was far less amusing than sniffing them, or tasting the air with my tongue, to learn them.


    The least amount of progress I made over the summer was with my Blood Magic. Using it to push my body was one thing, or to work with Luna on her healing, but there wasn¡¯t any great stimulus, no interesting project. I managed to gain a few points, bringing Blood Magic to level thirty-nine and Blood Rune Mastery to thirty-seven but that was it, nothing more.


    Similarly, my Death Magic languished, gaining only a single, measly level, bringing the skill to eighteen and while I tried to gain Death Rune Mastery once again, the only thing I got from the attempt was a headache.


    Mind Magic, as I had trained it in conjunction with my Darkness Magic and used it fairly regularly to help with the teaching of people at the farm got quite a few more points, pushing the skill to forty-nine, though I had no success in finding out if there even was such a thing as Mind Runes. I hadn¡¯t come across anything indicating it, but I was still looking.


    The various elemental magic skills all made a bit of progress. Nothing major, but a few points in each, as I tried to improve my ability with them occasionally, or tried to work them into my other magical skills in an attempt to find useful synergies. Water Magic and Rune Mastery got to eighteen and twenty, respectively, allowing me to learn the Rain Rune in an attempt to improve on the idea of Blizzard, Hail and Snow, adding Rain to that repertoire. It was somewhat useful, but far from the success I had hoped for.


    Wind Magic and Rune Mastery made similar progress, getting to twenty-one for the Magic and nineteen for the Rune Mastery, partially because I wasn¡¯t sure where to take the skills. Using it to improve my concealment was well and good, but there was so much more I might be able to, if I could invest the time. Sadly, there were other, more interesting, things I focused my work on.


    Fire Magic remained my black sheep, so to speak. It wasn¡¯t as bad as Death Magic, I gained two points in it, but I wasn¡¯t overly enthused with the skill. Still, those two points brought it to ten, while the Rune Mastery got to eight, showing my lack of interest.


    Earth Magic was something I invested a little more time into, as it could be used to provide shelter while out and about. If we ever got caught, I wanted to be able to excavate a cave for us to hide in, thus I pushed the skill to fifteen, while the Rune Mastery got to level thirteen, allowing me to learn the Compress Rune, increasing the density of earth I was working it. More a supportive rune, but I was using Earth Magic to support myself, so it was okay.


    Lightning Magic got to three, mainly because I didn¡¯t want to let it linger at one, but I wasn¡¯t about to invest the time and effort to make the skill useful. I lacked the affinity and the interest, similar to my stance toward Fire Magic.


    Meanwhile, Crystal Magic was a lot more interesting and useful, as I was using it a lot while Enchanting. As such, both skills gained quite a few points, Crystal Magic reaching a respectable level twenty-two, while Enchanting got to level eighteen, making the people at Apple Gate Farm appreciate me even more. While they had been trying to work with metal without magic, there had been quite a few problems, reducing them to what they could loot and those items weren¡¯t changed, marking them as trash in the system, greatly limiting their efficiency. Once I was done with a weapon, it was a weapon, though the quantity was fairly limited.


    Sadly, that focus on Enchanting meant my Alchemy was left to languish, to the point that Alex and Lia were working far more on it than I was. Thus, Lia took over that part of my work-area, including the various items we had gathered that might be alchemical in nature.


    All in all, the summer had been quite successful, even if I was greatly looking forward to the coming winter.

 Chapter 852

    ¡°Now, what do we have here?¡± I mused out loud, looking at my latest magical experiment. It was one of the few things I wasn¡¯t willing to share with Luna and took quite a bit of effort to hide from her, simply because I wasn¡¯t willing to let her see this.


    In one of the basements we had used as a lair during the campaign against the Withered, I had set up what could either be described as a laboratory or a prison, though some might draw rather uncomfortable comparisons to the most horrifying crimes of the twentieth century. Uncomfortable, but sadly apt.


    Here, in my basement of horrors, I was holding multiple Shattered and even a pair of Withered Husks, hoping to gain some insight into their existence using Mind Magic, while also trying to understand what the connection between the Mind and the Soul was and how the body, the physical brain, played into this.


    Research from before the change had only been able to determine that memories were stored in the brain but essentially overwritten each time they were recalled, subtly altering the memory as it was viewed through a new lens. Thus, I could fairly confidently say that the brain was vital, though at the same time, I had to question just how vital. If it was all just the brain, what would happen if I gained the ability to move into something akin to Lenore¡¯s Hallow, where I temporarily lacked a physical body, what would happen if I learned how to transform myself in the way Adra had been able to? I was certain that not having a physical brain meant the non-existent brain couldn¡¯t store anything, just like I was fairly certain that there was no way to stuff the brain of an adult into the skull of a springbok or a crow, it simply wouldn¡¯t fit, but given that magic had its ways to bend, or even outright break, what used to be considered inviolable rules, I was only speculating.


    Just as I was speculating about the nature of souls and the mind. I was hoping that my experiments on Withered, Shattered and, if possible in any way, even Scorched would give me some additional insight. And if not, it wasn¡¯t as if anybody would miss a few extra Withered, not like I was taking people out of their beds to tear their minds to pieces or steal their souls. Just some monsters, held in captivity for my experiments. And if a nagging, little voice reminded me that I might be employing the same line of thought that had led to the most horrifying crimes in the past, I managed to ignore it. Or rather, I managed to push it aside, though I kept note of it. How far was I willing to push my experiments, how deep was I willing to sink?


    What would I do to get Sigmir back? Or, maybe more importantly, were there any lines I wasn¡¯t willing to cross? And why was there a part of me that was scared of the answer?


    But boundaries on possible future research weren¡¯t that important, I now had my current research to deal with. Namely, trying to figure out how much of the brain within a Shattered was still there, or how much of it was used.


    Given the previous case of Lia, I could say that the memories should still be there, at least the physical medium, though I had to do some tests to confirm. Lia might have been a special case, either due to luck or due to time. Either way, the first experiment wasn¡¯t one of Mind Magic but one of Blood Magic, trying to figure out how damaged the insides of the Shattered¡¯s skull were.


    Stretching my Blood Magic into the Shattered, I immediately noticed the incredibly obvious damage to the skeletal structure, especially the spine. Given that I had been the one to sever the spinal cord and render the test-subject paralysed, while also destroying some of its major bones to make sure it was unable to attack me, there was no surprise about its condition, if anything I was a little surprised at how much of the damage seemed to have been regenerated and how cleanly that regeneration had been.


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    If left unharmed, the Shattered might regain use of its limbs in about a week, which was incredible and made me wonder just how far that regeneration could go. Could a Shattered regenerate a limb if I chopped one off? And if yes, where did the materials to form said limb come from, the various carbs, proteins and so on, that actually constituted the flesh? Because I certainly wasn¡¯t feeding the Shattered, nor had I ever seen a Shattered eat.


    But Shattered regeneration and the insanity that could come with a creature capable of constantly generating flesh wasn¡¯t what I was interested in. No, I wanted to figure out the brain of a Shattered, and the memories within.


    Before even trying to deal with the Shattered¡¯s Mind, I focused back on the physical side. The injuries I had dealt to the Shattered weren¡¯t my concern, but the state of its brain was. Just from feeling the feedback I received from my Blood Magic, it was fairly obvious that the brain wasn¡¯t in a good state. I might have used my Blood Magic to get an idea of what a human brain was supposed to feel like while healing a few patients, and what I felt from the Shattered was different. There were some similarities, but they were fairly vague, the closest comparison my mind could come up with was that of a painting and a photograph. And not a terribly good painting either, it was more as if the painter had carefully painted some parts of the image, the brain, before haphazardly filling in the rest so the skull wouldn¡¯t be too empty.


    Sadly, I wasn¡¯t knowledgeable enough to know what the carefully painted parts were supposed to do, nor did I have the means to stimulate them in order to garner a response. It might be possible if I could combine Mind and Blood Magic, but for now, I had to pursue other avenues, namely, I wanted to see what I could figure out about the Shattered¡¯s Mind.


    Looking into the Shattered¡¯s eyes, or rather the fire that filled its eye-sockets, I used my Mind Magic, combining it with my extrasensory perception of the mind and tried to push into its mind. I had done similar things before, trying to listen, for lack of a better word, to the thoughts and instincts of enemies in an attempt to figure out their plans and intentions, but this was something else.


    The moment my mind made contact, I felt myself flinch back, both physically and magically, to the point that I stumbled and landed on my bum. Just getting into contact with the mind was enough to give me an incredibly painful, burning sensation, somewhat similar to the one I had felt just as the Change occurred. Back then, I hadn¡¯t been able to avoid it and now that I could, I wasn¡¯t about to plunge into the flames, at least not more than I needed to.


    Shaking my head to get rid of the phantom pain, I decided on another avenue, going back to my original approach, using Blood Magic to get a better understanding of the actual grey matter within the skull.


    Just studying the flow of Blood while trying to understand what was going on in there was both incredibly difficult and boring at the same time. It was highly complex and I soon realised that what I was doing was nearly impossible, it was akin to looking at the traffic flow of a city in an effort to figure out what the various buildings did. Or maybe to look at the roadmap, as the various blood vessels were at their distinct size, so I could get a feel for which area got how much blood, but that didn¡¯t actually tell me what they did.


    Did an area get extra blood because it governed some sort of predatory drive and might be increased due to that, or was it for another reason? I simply didn¡¯t know and I doubted that I could easily figure it out.


    Starting to get bored, I decided to try poking around a little, just to get a better idea. Increasing the flow of Blood carefully, I tried to see what would happen. For a few moments, nothing happened, until I prodded a little harder, until suddenly, the Shattered started convulsing and I realised I had accidentally pushed too hard and given it the equivalent of a stroke.


    Letting out a sigh, I stopped prodding and settled in to watch, curious if the impressive regeneration of a Shattered was capable of regenerating the damage I had just done to the thing¡¯s brain. Maybe if it was, I could get some idea about the different functions that way, by destroying parts of it and checking how the Shattered¡¯s behaviour changed.


    Clearly, more experimentation was needed.

 Chapter 853

    Looking at Luna, I could only shake my head. During the last two months, she had grown over ten centimetres, her body maturing at a rate I couldn¡¯t quite believe. A part of me suspected that the change was driven by the levels she had gained, but I couldn¡¯t be certain and wasn¡¯t about to use other children for experiments. Whatever the reason, she was growing at an insane rate, to the point that she had regularly complained about pain and eaten enough for two, maybe three, adults, simply to keep up with her body¡¯s needs. It was, quite frankly, insane, and if she continued to grow like this, it would take her only a few months to reach my old height, and about two months later my current height. Though hopefully, the change within her body would slow down beforehand, or things might get a little strange. Simply because her mind wasn¡¯t keeping up with her body, her increased attributes were helping her mind along, but it wasn¡¯t enough. Still, I was of two minds regarding her insane rate of growth, on one hand, she was racing to an adult body, giving her much better chances to survive out there, on the other hand, she was racing to an adult body, taking away what little childhood she could have after the change.


    Either way, my sweet, little munchkin might only be a munchkin for a few more months, and the change was making me worry. To say nothing about the effect her rapid growth had when we visited the Farm, the people there had been giving her uncomfortable glances, at least when they thought I wasn¡¯t looking. But what to do about those looks, those hostile and suspicious glances, I wasn¡¯t sure. It wasn¡¯t as if I could tear out the eyes of everyone giving my daughter the stinkeye, well, I could, but doing so wouldn¡¯t solve the issue, only exacerbate it.


    No, our dealings with Apple Gate Farm were slowly getting more and more tedious, from the way the children were playing with Luna to the attendance of my lessons. There was a growing chasm between those willing to learn from me and those who preferred to look elsewhere. Elsewhere mostly meant to those able to cast divine spells, an ability that had grown quite prevalent over the last two months, and not only in connection with Frigg, as Cassie had been. No, a growing number was somehow able to channel divine power from another deity, one that I didn¡¯t know the name of. They weren¡¯t speaking it, and the power they gained was making me fairly uncomfortable, even if I was only close to the acolytes.


    To make matters worse, their power smelled strange to me, not quite like the power I had smelled from divine spellcasters on Mundus, but different in a way I couldn¡¯t quite describe. The best I could come up with was that one was smelling like apple-scented detergent and the other simply smelled like apple. One a fabricated copy, the other the original, only that there were countless olfactory undertones that I couldn¡¯t put a finger on, while trying to use my magical sight was useless, the contrast was too faint for me to see.


    And what truly made me uncomfortable was the way these divine spellcasters were looking at my students. Not so much those tending the fields and making sure that the infrastructure the people had put into place was running smoothly, but those I had been training in combat magic. I had even heard some subtle whispers that some arcane spellcasters shouldn¡¯t be trained in combat, as their magic was too important to the settlement, especially those who could conjure water or improve the growth of crops.


    So far, the only things I had managed to hear were whispers and even those I could only hear thanks to my fairly powerful senses. What people spoke in the privacy of their rooms, or in the small homes that had been built over the summer, I had no idea. But I wasn¡¯t sure I liked the way the looks I was getting had shifted, the awed respect fading more and more, leaving only unease and fear.


    No, I didn¡¯t like the development of Apple Gate Farm but there was not a damned thing I could actually do, or rather, not a thing I could do that would improve the situation. Sure, I was powerful enough to slaughter them all, but that wouldn¡¯t really help me, it would only turn a bad situation into one that was bad in a different way. No, to change the minds conversation was needed and I wasn¡¯t the person to speak, nor were Lia or Luna.


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    Somehow, within these few months, politics had started to form within the small town I still called a farm in my mind. As people had calmed down from the change the world had suffered, things had become more and more routine and a semblance of order had formed. People started to form into cliques once more, some by common interests, others by profession as those started to emerge.


    The Fighters, those venturing out to hunt, those guarding the settlement, they were the first to incorporate into something they amusingly called the Adventurers¡¯ Guild, using the well-used fictional idea. Mark remained their leader and that small desk where I had written down my findings in regards to the Withered had gained its own roof and was permanently manned. For now, it seemed that the purpose of the Guild was to share information, but I had a feeling that wouldn¡¯t last forever, somebody would want to start profiting off that information, it was simply human nature.


    Once the Guild was established, the farmers soon followed suit, though I only heard about it second-hand, during one of my talks with Kevin, the teenage Water Mage. He was one of my most attentive students and while his level was fairly lacking, he had made great strides with his Water Magic, to the point that his skill-level with water rivalled mine with Ice. Sure, he only commanded one element, but I was quite impressed by the effort he invested, to the point that he joined us one night on a hunt.


    What he told me about the Farmers¡¯ Market, as they had decided to call their collective, was that they mainly focused on planning and logistics. Which fields needed how much water, what feedback did the Nature-mages get from the soil and what was needed to make sure that the crops they grew remained viable without depleting the soil, those were the considerations they primarily considered. But there was another undertone, one that made me wonder how long the farm would remain as it was now, a cashless commune where everyone did what was needed, simply because everyone needed to survive. Food was always a necessity, and the farmers had what was almost a monopoly on fresh food, the crops they grew vital to the community, just as vital as the protection provided by the fighters.


    And lastly, there were the crafters, maybe the least important group for now, though that was a matter of opinion. Outside of my students, these were the ones I had the most contact with, as my ability to enchant items was slowly growing and I exchanged crafted goods with them. It was fairly impressive how far they had come in such a short time, at least those who focused on specialised crafting.


    There were the masons, the woodcarvers and carpenters, who primarily focused on building more shelter for the farm and frankly, I barely cared about them or their craft. But some were fairly interesting, there were a few trailers, working hard to recreate methods of old from books, spinning yarn and creating cloth. For now, they worked with old fabrics but I had been told that they were looking to expand and create things entirely from freshly harvested materials, as they were interested in what that would change in regards to their product. Similarly, there was a group of metal crafters, experimenting with gathered scrap metal, trying to purify it into something the system recognised and work from there. They wanted to truly forge, not only learning how to make nails and maybe screws. They wanted to replenish what stock was left from before the change, before it ran out but they also wanted to make¡­ interesting tools and weapons. As one might expect from a group who had grown up with anime, some of them wanted to craft swords, while others had a fascination with medieval warfare and were interested in spears and polearms. Weapons, as always, were a fascinating topic and even I was curious what they¡¯d come up with.


    All in all, Apple Gate Farm had turned into a true settlement, one that was on its way to becoming a town or maybe even a city, a fairly amusing idea when considering that the city we had all called our home was still there, it was just¡­ broken. The Farm had become a symbol of a new start and, to my knowledge, nobody wanted to permanently return to the city, it was considered almost like a graveyard.


    Still, I had no idea what the future would bring or how the farm would continue to grow. Time would tell, even if I was a little uncomfortable with their current direction. As I had learned before the change, I didn¡¯t like people, especially when they gathered in large groups.

 Chapter 854

    ¡°Mother, I stumbled across something we should check out,¡± Lia told me, as she returned from one of her nightly wanderings. Over the last few months, she had started to habitually roam the land during the night, simply exulting in her physical strength and speed. Running, jumping, exploring, those had become her primary outlet while she was looking for interesting prey. Sadly, there was no such prey to be found, nothing strong enough to make our blood sing, nothing to push us so we could increase our powers. By now, I had pretty much given up on this area and was planning to travel north some time around the equinox, maybe even before then. For now, the nights were simply too short for my liking, greatly limiting the distance we could cover, while we¡¯d also give up the advantages of living near Apple Gate Farm, something I wasn¡¯t quite willing. Not just yet, not for such a slim advantage.


    ¡°What did you find?¡± I asked, quite curious about her discovery. For her to be excited about it, to the point that she wanted to bring Silva, me and possibly even Luna in was something new.


    ¡°I moved east, away from the city, and came across an area that I don¡¯t think should be there. It¡¯s relatively far, so we have to find shelter there but I think it¡¯s worth it,¡± she paused for a second, gathering her thoughts, ¡°The area is filled with Astral Power, though I¡¯m not able to detect a lot about it. It¡¯s a lake, or a very wide river, depending on how you want to look at it. Given that there¡¯s an old, destroyed bridge halfway in the water, I¡¯m pretty sure it used to be a river but somehow the area was flooded after the change, turning it into a lake. But more importantly, I saw quite a few creatures, not the usual Undead or something, but magical beasts that I doubt roamed the Earth before the change.¡±


    ¡°I¡¯m talking about fireflies the size of my arm, huge frogs and who-knows-what, the entire area could be a death-trap or a treasure-trove and I¡¯ve got a feeling it¡¯s both,¡± she finished a wide grin on her face. She, just like I, had started to associate danger with opportunity, for only dangerous areas could give us the EXP we both craved, allowing us to continue increasing our power. Finding an area that was so obviously altered by the change was a huge opportunity, one that I wanted to grip with both hands.


    ¡°That sounds fascinating, indeed,¡± I nodded, ¡°Sleep, rest for the day, I¡¯ll prepare some supplies and we can head out as soon as night falls.¡± Lia nodded at my suggestion and I turned to Silva, knowing that Luna would need quite a bit of help to move at even half the speed Lia could move at.


    ¡°Silva, would you mind carrying Luna? The munchkin is growing like a weed but she¡¯s still lacking in the physique department,¡± I asked my canine companion, getting an amused whuff of agreement. Having Silva carry Luna was a fairly standard arrangement, to the point that the bags Silva was usually carrying had been modified to double as a simple saddle. While I had been trying to perfect the magical bags I created before, I wasn¡¯t willing to risk a significant portion of our loot, preferring to store things in reality, at least until I felt confident that we wouldn¡¯t accidentally lose what I put away. And given that one of my magical bags had lost half of the loot I stored in one of them when part of the strands connecting the shadows within and the realm of shadows broke, I wasn¡¯t about to take more risks. No, the magical bags contained what we could easily afford to lose, even if losing some of the things would be a hassle.


    Given that I wasn¡¯t sure what was waiting for us in the magical lake, or maybe calling it marsh would be more fitting, I decided to grab a wide array of supplies. Staples like food were obvious, but I also grabbed a few more specialised things, things like thick canvas, a few tools and so on. A wide selection, so we¡¯d hopefully have what was needed to overcome any possible challenge. In addition, I made sure to have more than enough supplies to set up a sturdy tent, just in case my previous idea to simply dig a cave using my Earth Magic was impossible, due to muddy ground.


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    When Luna learned that we¡¯d be out all night, investigating an interesting location, the results were sadly the exact opposite of what I had hoped for. Instead of getting the sleep she needed, she became fairly hyper and was trying to help me with the preparation, only that her help meant I needed quite a bit of extra time. It was bad enough that a little after noon, I decided that what I had prepared was good enough and grabbed her for an afternoon nap. Amusingly, once I was getting into bed for some rest, she happily snuggled up to me and was out like a light. Sometimes, I couldn¡¯t understand my munchkin, or maybe I simply didn¡¯t understand children. Both were distinct possibilities.


    Waking up just before sunset, we soon set out, all of us somewhat weighed down by our equipment. Luna and Alex had it the easiest, neither of them had to walk on their own, with Luna riding on Silva¡¯s back and Alex lounging around Lia¡¯s neck, like a furry scarf. It wasn¡¯t the best position to be in if a fight started but by now, the two of them were quite adept, as they were constantly working together, both when roaming the land and when working in their lab.


    Even I didn¡¯t know what insanity they had mixed together using Alex¡¯s growing alchemical abilities and I wasn¡¯t sure I even wanted to know. What little I had seen made me worry that they¡¯d soon start some sort of retribution campaign against humans, for the countless rodents that had been killed with poison over the course of human history. While the mist I could conjure was lethal, the mixtures held in their various cans were just as dangerous, only that they could theoretically set off their entire stash at the same time, poisoning a wide area. I¡¯d need a ritual for that, taking a lot of time and giving potential enemies that time to escape while they only needed to set off their charges. Sure, they had been working on their bombs for weeks but that didn¡¯t allow an enemy to spot them any easier, if anything, their stealth meant that they could take out anyone that they wanted, whenever they wanted. It was one of those things that pushed me to remind the people at Apple Gate Farm that they needed to get better when it came to stealth detection, even if it felt like talking to a wall. I could sneak up on the guards as often as I wanted but the lesson didn¡¯t stick. Maybe I¡¯d have to do something worse than tell Mrs Wu about the problem, as Mrs Wu had told me, a drop of blood makes a lesson stick. Maybe I¡¯d have to use some of their blood to make the lesson stick.


    But that was a problem for another night, now, I had to focus on putting one foot before the other, as Lia, Silva and I were running across the land. My two companions had superior attributes to me, allowing them to outpace me despite their burdens, meaning I had to either focus on running and push myself with Blood Magic or I had to get creative and abuse my Titanic Ambition. It was a fairly amusing trick I had trained myself to do, using the fact that I had enough Intuition to flawlessly split my mind to have one part of my mind focus on some fairly deep, convoluted magical question, one that stretched my knowledge and understanding, thus triggering the Titanic Ambition trait while a far lesser portion of my mind was focused on running.


    The lesser portion was only able to do simple tasks, nothing more complex than running about somewhat even ground, but the other part could delve deeply into some of the mysteries of magic. And thanks to Titanic Ambition being an increase to all attributes, having it active increased my physical attributes to the point that I could keep up with Lia, though I¡¯d be fairly sore the next day. Apparently, the recovery from strain came later, after we stopped, and at that point, I wouldn¡¯t have the increased attributes any longer.


    But for now, I could relax into the depths of my mind and once more try to figure out how the connection between Luna, myself and the Grandmother worked. It was an incredibly fascinating piece of magic, connecting us between different worlds, only that I hadn¡¯t been able to do anything with the connection to the Grandmother, it simply led into the Astral River and faded into the distance. Still, the mental effort kept me highly engaged while my legs kept pumping, long strides eating up the distance.

 Chapter 855

    Realising that we were about to reach the area Lia had mentioned, I shook myself out of my thoughts. It was incredibly difficult to ascertain anything about the connection between Luna and myself, to say nothing about the strand that connected us to the Grandmother. For now, I could only say that there was a distinct connection, that it wasn¡¯t one-sided and that I¡¯d be able to follow it in the physical plane if I ever needed to find Luna, but otherwise, I had no idea. Not what it might do, not how it might be used and certainly not how it had been created, though I suspected divine shenanigans having a hand in that, though whether the divine shenanigans had spun it from whole cloth or if they had merely expanded what had already been there, I had no idea. Either way, I had a strong impression that the question would keep me mentally occupied for many more hours if I ever managed to figure it out.


    But for now, I had something else to explore, both physically and mentally. The area before us was interesting because it was an impossibility, at least it had been before the Astral River was introduced to Earth. Looking around, I could see what used to be a major road, only that it was now broken and leading into the lake ahead, before emerging again to form the ruins of a bridge covering what used to be a river. I could faintly remember the area from before the change and the river that used to be here hadn¡¯t been anything special. Just a small, maybe ten metres in width, river with a bit of earthwork on the sides to make sure it didn¡¯t flood the road. There used to be a few trees in the fields around it, alongside some hedges to dampen the noise from the road, but again, nothing outlandish.


    Now, what used to be a small river was a fairly sizable lake, stretching as wide as my eyes could see in the dark along the course of the river and maybe two-, three hundred metres across. Near the banks of the river, I could see the actual impossibility, trees that were far too large to have grown since the change, in addition to looking far too odd to be wholly natural. The entire area looked almost tropical, making me think of some images I had seen of the mangroves in Florida, only that such flora wasn¡¯t native to this region. And they most certainly weren¡¯t supposed to glow with an odd, eerie light that made me think of flickering torches.


    ¡°Those look like I¡¯d expect will-o-wisps to look like, trying to lure travellers into their doom,¡± I remarked, looking at the flickering light in the area ahead. The entire area faintly reminded me of the swamp near Ashenforge Keep, where we had fought hundreds of Undead for the dwarves. Somehow, I wasn¡¯t sure if I was supposed to hope that this area here was similar, or if I would prefer it to have something other than Undead. There had been far too many of those for my tastes, maybe we¡¯d get something less gross.


    ¡°Look over there,¡± Lia directed my attention towards one specific tree and after a second of observing, I realised what she was pointing out. There, lounging on one of the higher branches, was a fairly large cat, not quite the size of Silva but big enough that it would consider any of us, especially Luna, a welcome midnight snack if we were careless.


    ¡°Mhm, I see the cat,¡± I nodded, my eyes scanning the area ahead again, curious about what such a large critter would feed on. ¡°But we shouldn¡¯t get too invested in exploring, at least not tonight. We should make sure we have shelter, we only have about two hours before the Sun makes things uncomfortable for you, Lia,¡± I added, turning my attention to the area behind us.


    There were no houses anywhere nearby, nor could I see any sheds or similar buildings, nothing that could provide shelter. The area was filled with what used to be fields and was now rapidly turning into a mixture of shrubs, grass and swamp before things became really wet near the river. I had no idea where the water came from, but it was something we might want to investigate, it hadn¡¯t rained this much lately. But whatever the case may be, there was no shelter to be found, unless we wanted to try making a nest under a few shrubs, like some animal. But no, I wanted to make things a little more impressive and, maybe more importantly, defensible. I had no idea what might lurk in this area, other than weird glowing things and large cats, both of which were enough to warrant some caution.


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    Without any real plan, I started to walk around and try to stretch my Earth Magic into the soil all around me. It was a fairly crude method, and one that could easily exhaust me if I kept doing it for too long but by pushing out an exceedingly thin layer of Astral Power I could get a good idea what sort of conditions I was working with. Earth Magic had a much easier time penetrating dry soil, while wet soil and rock each produced a different feedback. Thanks to that feedback, I could feel that the entire area below was fairly marshy, to the point that digging a hole would create something akin to a well, no matter what I did with the soil. The only way to dig anything here would be to completely reinforce the structure while making it waterproof. Unless I wanted to sleep in a completely frozen tunnel that would likely melt due to the amount of warm water in the area, we needed to move somewhere else.


    Looking around, I tried to see if there was anything standing out to me above ground, anything that made me confident I could dig into the area. I considered the road for a moment, there should still be some drainage installed below the asphalt, but I doubted it went deep enough. Still, I slowly made my way over, occasionally extending my Astral Power, but getting there confirmed my initial idea. While the asphalt up top was still completely intact if anything heavier than a cow were to move across the road, the entire thing would most likely crumble and collapse into pothole hell. The lower layer was completely drenched in water, to the point that I could feel some plants growing in the gravel bed.


    Noticing a small hill, I changed direction once more, hoping that it might be enough, that I could get some digging done there. It was just a light increase in elevation, a metre or two, nothing more, but it was my best bet.


    With the others in tow, I made my way over, quite happy at what I could feel below. There was still water, but it was mainly deeper, meaning I wouldn¡¯t have to completely insulate us. Just setting up a solid flooring, maybe with a sub-layer, should work, though it would need some effort.


    After deciding on a spot, I started to draw runes into the Soil, using pure Earth Runes for once, a combination of Earth and Compress runes before slowly channelling power into the formation. It was hard work, especially because my affinity was so much lower when it came to working with soil than it was when working with Ice, but I could push the soil around, allowing me to open up a shallow cave by pushing the soil to the sides and down, compressing it into dense walls and a solid floor and ceiling. It wasn¡¯t as hard as I would normally like, just heavily packed dirt, but it was strong enough to hold its form and I hadn¡¯t dug deep enough to get into the water below. Some water would likely press up, but I was hoping that I could get enough work done before going to sleep to keep us comfortable.


    The hole I¡¯d dug wasn¡¯t really large, just a two-by-two opening, stretching about eight metres into the ground. It didn¡¯t lead straight down, first going sideways for a few metres before straightening so I wouldn¡¯t hit the groundwater. It wasn¡¯t anything to write home about, but installing the thick canvas we had with us made it good enough to keep us out of the sun and somewhat protected.


    Ducking down, I went into the hole, pushing even more magic around to stabilise things. I had no desire to have this collapse on me, nor was I completely confident in my work. But for now, it held. Lia and Luna had already taken the canvas out, spanning it over the hole before joining me, looking around the fairly crude accommodations before trying to make it as comfortable as possible. Silva, on the other hand, merely took a glance at it before making herself comfortable outside, acting as a guard dog, or maybe she simply wasn¡¯t about to play groundhog. Either way, we had our shelter for the day and given that the Sun was about to rise, it had to do.

 Chapter 856

    I was no dwarf, but damn, could I dig a hole.


    After sleeping for a few hours, curled up next to Lia and Luna, I had concentrated on doing just that, taking the relatively small hole I had initially created and enlarging it. It was partially to continue training my Earth-Magic, partially because I was bored and finally because the increase in living space was useful.


    It was a curious exercise in control and power, forcing me to constantly adapt and adjust, so I wouldn¡¯t accidentally collapse what I had already dug, to say nothing about bringing the small hill above us down or digging too deep. While I doubted there was a Balrog down below, just getting into the water I knew was there would be an annoyance, swelling the compacted earth I was using and turning it to mud. Sure, that would stop any Balrog I might accidentally dig up, but it would also make an utter mess.


    The whole process reminded me a little of an old game, digging up blocks of dirt in an effort to make a safe base, only that I couldn¡¯t simply punch the ground or a nearby tree, at least not if I wanted to achieve anything. But thanks to my magic and the efforts I had taken to make it incredibly versatile, I could dig with nothing but my mind.


    And now, a few hours before nightfall, the cave was suitable, with one wing having a tarp, a few soft pads and our sleeping bags, one wing holding a curved chimney and even a simple table and lastly, the tunnel out to the surface.


    The construction part done, I began to do nothing but channel vast amounts of Astral Power into the walls around me. While I wasn¡¯t able to simply turn the dirt to stone, I could get quite close, simply by exposing it to insane amounts of Earth- and Crystal Astral Power. It wasn¡¯t the same process that would happen naturally, far from it, but it was good enough to get a fairly close approximation. And make sure we would be comfortable underground, something that felt amusingly natural to me. But then, the original lore about Firn Elves had been that the race was based on a combination of swartalfar, a subterranean elven subrace, and Frost Giants, so maybe digging holes and tunnels truly was for me. Only that maybe, I should have been digging in some glacier somewhere. Alas, maybe I could do so someday, but sadly, not today.


    When night finally fell, I was ready to go. The nights were currently short enough that we really had to make the most of what little time we had, so all of us happily moved out, towards the curious marsh Lia had discovered.


    I was so interested in this area because I considered it a magically altered, or maybe even created, biome, an area that had no business being as it was. And yet, I couldn¡¯t really argue that it existed, not unless I wanted to expend excessive amounts of magic in an attempt to deny reality. So, I wanted to figure out why the area that shouldn¡¯t be as it was, was that way. Outside influence was the obvious answer, but who had influenced it, and how? Or, more likely, what had influenced it, as I highly doubted there were any powers strong enough to cause such change, not unless one of the Gods had taken a favoured similar to Luna and pumped them full with power to the point that the servant became something wonky.


    No, it was far more likely that there was some environmental factor, some curiosity that had turned this area into what it was. There was far more Astral Power in the air, or rather the water, than anywhere else, the closest effects to this I had experienced were areas of Wild Magic, so maybe this was what happened here. It wasn¡¯t a Nexus, but it might become one, a Nexus attuned to water. I wasn¡¯t sure that this was the case, but it was a realistic scenario and studying the formation of a Nexus, or generally studying what was happening here sounded like an excellent idea, as this was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, or close enough to that.


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    With Lia and Silva keeping an eye out, we moved towards the marsh, moving slowly and carefully as we had no idea what might lurk in the area. Alex had abandoned their usual perch on Lia and moved over to Luna, the two acting as secondary eyes, not that either had senses acute enough to detect incoming danger. No, Silva was second best at this, thanks to her canine traits increasing her hearing and olfactory senses by quite a bit, though not enough to keep up with my intuition. And given that my attention was focused on possible magical threats, it left them.


    Given the possibility that this was an area of Wild Magic, I wasn¡¯t about to discard a magical threat, simply because there were no sapient spellcasters that I knew of. Wild Magic was utterly unpredictable, it could easily turn an area into an aquatic minefield filled with deadly trap-like effects. An area like this could easily hold spots where the ground was so inundated with Water Astral Power that the ground was more liquid than solid, at least in one direction. It would make quicksand, the movie idea, seem unspectacular, before literally dragging a person down into the muck so that they would never emerge again. With the possibility of such threats taking us by surprise, I had to keep my focus on the magical side, leaving the others to take care of the physical side.


    As we got closer to the water, I realised that my worries were reasonable. There was something in the water, not necessarily something physical but a diffuse magic that was far beyond normal. While it wasn¡¯t as magical as conjured water, it came close, making me wonder why the water didn¡¯t just diffuse back into the Astral River. Sure, it would take a few weeks, maybe even a month, but by the looks of it, the water here wasn¡¯t diffusing. If anything, the amount of water was increasing, which I considered impossible, unless something or someone was feeding more power into a conjuration.


    ¡°Don¡¯t get closer,¡± I warned the others, before quickly creating an Icicle and floating towards the water, trying to draw out potential attacks. Nothing happened, but that could just as well be because whatever was in there wasn¡¯t interested in Ice.


    Changing my plan, I tossed the Icicle towards the area where we had seen the massive cat the day before, hoping that I could spook something into revealing more about the area but the only thing I managed to get was a splash when the Icicle hit the water near the tree. Nothing else, other than a rapid dissolution of the Icicle, the conjured Ice melting far quicker than it should and the Astral Power I had used to conjure it fading from my control.


    ¡°Curious,¡± I muttered, before deciding on the next course of action, namely cutting into my finger, infusing a bit of blood with my Astral Power and smearing that blood onto another conjured Icicle. It was still brimming with vitality and Astral Power, so if there was something attracted to those, this might cause a reaction.


    And it did, as soon as the Icicle was floating above the water, a sudden surge of power within the water caused me to try jerking it back, only for the floating Icicle to get smacked from the air by strange, stringy algae, wrapped up and dragged into the water and out of my control. I barely managed to send out a surge of Death Magic to sterilise the Blood I had put onto the Icicle, destroying its magical connection to me, but the uncontrolled burst also made me completely lose control over the Ice, while making me hiss in pain.


    ¡°Well, there¡¯s something in the water alright,¡± I mused, not quite sure what to make of this.


    ¡°Not sure why we didn¡¯t notice anything off yesterday, maybe it¡¯s only active during the day and will soon fade, night has just fallen after all, or there¡¯s something else in play. No idea, really. Lia, Silva, can you track down something living that we can use as bait? I¡¯d like to understand why that plant reacted as it did and how there could be some cat lounging on a tree if the algae drag things into the water to feed on or whatever happened there,¡± I told my companions, before looking at the placid lake once more.


    My original suspicion was definitely confirmed, there was something weird going on here, something beyond simple background magic. But it didn¡¯t look like Wild Magic, though there were some influences of it, nor did it give me feelings similar to the hive mind of Withered.


    This was something new and I was quite curious what Lia had dug up for us.

 Chapter 857

    While I remained near the water, Lia and Silva went and tried to hunt something that I could use as a test subject. Since I had no desire to personally meet whatever was in the water, or whatever had struck before, I kept a distance and started to experiment. Luna stayed with me, using her eyes to study the effect just like I did, only from a different angle. Her eyes worked in a different fashion from mine and while we had discussed the differences, I wasn¡¯t really able to make sense of her description. It was, quite frankly, weird but then, I had no idea how to describe the scent of magic either, nor how I subconsciously knew what the different colours represented. There were cases where I could recognise the colour but was able to see quite a bit more, with minute differences that I doubted I could see if it was a regular colour.


    In this case, neither of us was really able to make out anything, even as we both carefully performed some experiments. One of mine, using a tendril of conjured water in an attempt to get a remote connection to the water in the lake, demonstrated that the water itself was mostly harmless, though the experiment also demonstrated that there was something in there. I could feel some Astral Power within the water, but diluted, at least until I noticed movement in the water and suddenly, the sensation of power grew by orders of magnitude and I felt my own power getting drained from the conjured Water. Looking closely, I could see a weird tendril snake its way into the tendril I had conjured, making me immediately drop it. I had no desire to get up close and personal with some weird tendril coming from the water, certainly not with one that drained Astral Power.


    Further experimentation was done with my blood, either infused with Astral Power or plain, before I started to include Concealment effects in an attempt to suss out what was going on. It would have been far easier if the results were consistent but sadly, they weren¡¯t. Multiple times, the exact repeat of an experiment yielded a completely different result, making it impossible to try predicting what would happen next, to say nothing of safely investigating closer. While the existence in the water never struck a chunk of Ice with my Blood on it if I concealed it in shadow, the creature didn¡¯t have a consistent attack pattern. It might be unable to see through my concealment or it might simply have given up on striking the Ice I floated over, I simply didn¡¯t know. Thus, I had no desire to test out my concealment directly.


    Interestingly, the creature seemed to be somewhat attracted to fire, as Alex figured out by tossing one of their flaming concoctions into the water, causing a merrily burning fire on the water. Moments later, the water started to churn rapidly, with more of these strange tendrils swirling around, but it didn¡¯t look like they were trying to extinguish the fire, more like they were trying to spread it. Or maybe it had been my imagination, I wasn¡¯t sure and couldn¡¯t really try.


    But it made me think of the will-o-wisps we had seen the previous night and I realised that there were none of those now. It was either a curious coincidence or there was something fairly interesting going on. Either way, more experiments and study was needed.


    Luckily, before we ran out of things to test, Lia and Silva returned with my test-subjects. Or maybe calling the pair of rabbits ¡®Bait¡¯ would be more appropriate, after all, I was about to go fishing with them. However, I quickly realised that even the pair of rabbits was most likely not sufficient to get a better idea of what was going on, let alone start doing something about it.


    There was almost certainly an entity in the water, some sort of monster, be it animal- or plant-based, I wasn¡¯t sure. The reaction-speed I was observing made me think it was an animal, plants normally didn¡¯t react this way, but given that magic was involved, I wasn¡¯t about to discard any possible option. Not after witnessing mind-controlling fungi and walking trees, though the latter only on Mundus.


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    No, just because something felt wrong to my pre-change instincts didn¡¯t mean those instincts were correct. They had, after all, evolved and formed in a different world and I needed some time to truly incorporate the truth of magic into my instinctive reactions. I was getting there, at least in combat, but when it came to my mental instincts, that wasn¡¯t the case. My mental threat assessment was still largely based on instincts that evolved in the ancient past and had been passed down through successive surviving generations. But the threats had greatly changed, it wasn¡¯t the stalking lion, the poisonous spider or the charging bull that was a physical threat, now even something as innocuous as a simple vine might want to strangle you. Or, as I thought was the case here, drag you into the water and drain your Astral Power.


    The realisation that the creature before us might be a distant relative of Lia, one that decided to take a very long bath, almost made me snort but I managed to keep the thought to myself. I somehow doubted that Lia would be happy to be compared to a tentacle-monster, she might just bite me for that. Though I doubted it.


    Shaking off the weird thoughts, I decided to start my next experiment, namely a live-testing of my trusty concealment magic using a living entity. For that, I first put a cage of Ice around one of the rabbits, carefully casting my cloak of Shadows around both afterwards. I even added some appropriate Runes to the cage, hoping that it would remain concealed before decided it was ready.


    Looking at my concealment from the outside was a little weird, I could see the Astral Power that made up the concealment and my mind knew that the concealment was there but my eyes could easily pierce it, to the point that the concealed area was more visible to me than the rest. My magic was there, draped around the entire thing, giving me far more information than my eyes normally would and my mind was able to incorporate that information into the image displayed by my eyes. Or at least I was relatively certain that this was what was happening, I would have to do some more testing, especially with somebody else casting concealment magic of their own, to be certain.


    Either way, floating the Ice-cage forward was surprisingly difficult, it felt as if the rabbit was weighing far more than it should. A curious effect but not one I could care about at the moment, it was something to add to my ever-increasing list of things I wanted to look at. Someday.


    To my annoyance, the experiment was utterly inconclusive. Floating the cage over water was easy and nothing happened, even after it reached the point where previous experiments had been interrupted. Deciding to keep it there for a bit, I simply waited and then, my experiment ended when another of those stupid tentacles shot out of the water, snagging the cage despite my best efforts to pull it back in time. Curiously, I noticed that the tendril didn¡¯t really go for the cage but easily speared through the bars, hitting the rabbit within. The rabbit was instantly dead and only then did the tendril wrap around the cage.


    Using Overflow, I tried to rip the cage out of the tendril¡¯s grasp, but to my surprise, I failed. The tendril was strong enough to withstand my Ice Magic and I even had to stop when I noticed that I had made a stupid mistake. I was pumping Astral Power into an effect that drained Astral Power, meaning I was effectively feeding whatever was in there. Immediately after I cut off my efforts, the cage was dragged into the water and lost to me, the Astral Power fading from my grasp.


    ¡°It was as if that thing was drinking your magic,¡± Luna muttered, ¡°But it didn¡¯t really seem to care for the bunny.¡±


    ¡°Maybe that was the case but I think it targeted the rabbit first. Maybe we should see what would happen if the rabbit gets close without any active magic in the area,¡± I suggested, before asking Lia to find us some sort of long rod, something that we could use to fish.


    She managed to drag a long, branch back, one that was too heavy for me to easily lift, but working together allowed us to put the stunned rabbit over the water, without any magic working on it.


    Sadly, that didn¡¯t seem to change a damned thing, the weird tendril shot out just as it had before, maybe even a little faster, and tore the rabbit apart, forcing Lia and me to let go of our branch.


    Failure, more experiments were needed, if I wanted to figure out what was living in that lake.

 Interlude: Resident Evil

    ¡°What in all hells is this?!¡± Mark couldn¡¯t help but curse, looking at the basement the group had led him to. It was one thing to be told, ¡®Boss, there¡¯s something you need to see for yourself,¡¯ but an entirely different thing to actually see what they had reported and still try to discard what your senses are telling you, simply because it was too bizarre.


    Or maybe it was simply time for Fate to give the people another kick to the groin, after all, they had managed to settle and create a somewhat functioning society, even after the original shitshow and the later rising of the dead. Now, it seemed that their diet lacked the necessary horror for whatever force was responsible for this shit and had decided to up the dosage. People not living in constant terror and anxiety? That couldn¡¯t be tolerated, huh?


    No, the basement the group had discovered was yet another kind of horror, one that was more at home in some sort of suspense or maybe slasher story, not the zombie story their life had been. It was in surprisingly good condition, to the point that Mark suspected magic had been used to repair the various cracks and damages that almost had to have occurred during the last months, but he couldn¡¯t be certain. No, certainty came later, once they went into the rooms and found the cells, some of which were filled with runes drawn in blood. The runes looked completely different from those used by the Spellcasters around the farm, almost as if they were written in an entirely different language. According to the Witch of the group that had found the basement, the runes were identical to those used by the Pale Lady and that was when Mark realised just how big of an issue this was.


    Because the basement was filled with bodies, bodies that looked like they had been deliberately crippled, placed on rudimentary tables as if it was some sort of macabre ritual before they died. Luckily, all the bodies showed the obvious signs of being Shattered or Withered but that was only of limited relief. If somebody was willing to cripple and do¡­ whatever this was with something that looked like a human, how long would it take for the Pale Lady to start using humans? A part of Mark¡¯s mind could easily imagine the inhumanely pale being stalk across the farm, happily tearing into adults and children alike. There was something that made him uneasy, even if he only thought about the powerful woman.


    So far, she hadn¡¯t attacked people, but who was to say that would remain true? Many of the people at the farm considered her a monster, a beast far worse than anything roaming the land, worse because the monster could think. Was intelligent enough to make plans and find allies, allies that the monster could make powerful with apparent ease.


    An ease that the Pale Lady had shown off by taking an ordinary child, barely old enough to start school when the world was still sane, and turn that child into a figure powerful enough to give many adults at the farm pause. Nobody knew just how strong the child was but fact was, the Pale Lady had made her what she was now. And nobody knew how, what had to be sacrificed to accomplish in days what others could only accomplish in months of constant struggle.


    There were those who muttered about vile rituals, about demons, monsters and other macabre things, uttering that Mark had never really considered anything but stories but now? Standing in a basement filled with bodies that looked like they had been used in some sort of vile ritual, or maybe in a dissection?


    There were countless rumours about Lia, how she had been a Shattered but the Pale Lady had done something to bind her, turned her into something different, into a monster bound to her alone, so was his hesitation to even consider that some vile ritual might have turned a child into an actual monster? A ritual, possibly performed in this very chamber?


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    ¡°What can you tell me about all this?¡± Mark asked Mari, the Spellcaster who had been with the original group to find this place.


    ¡°Only that it was the Pale Lady¡¯s work, those runes are hers. For some reason, the runes she primarily uses look completely different, to the point that we can barely use them, to say nothing about learning them,¡± Mari admitted, looking at the dark maroon lines on the floor. She knelt down after briefly moistening her finger, rubbing across one of the runes before rising again.


    ¡°Most of the runes here are drawn in Blood, though some are done in chalk, I¡¯m not sure what the significance is, but it gives me the willies,¡± she explained, looking around again, ¡°And these few here are some I recognised, they are done in the normal style and I think this one represents Water, I¡¯ve seen Kevin use it. Can¡¯t really say more, other than that this place really gives me the creeps, though it¡¯s not as bad as that frozen sandbox Ralph¡¯s group found.¡±


    ¡°Sandbox?¡± Mark asked, frowning as he tried to remember what this might be about.


    ¡°There¡¯s a massive sandbox a few kilometres that way, it¡¯s completely bizarre. I think there used to be a park there but now, it¡¯s just gone, the entire area nothing more than a dirt lot filled with some insanely big icicles lying around,¡± Mari shook her head, as if unable to believe her memories, ¡°Shit, I really don¡¯t know how those Icicles can last, it¡¯s impossible, they should melt in a few hours, not stick around for weeks or however long that shit has been,¡± she let out a few curses, the creepy sensation she had felt in the area still irritating her. She enjoyed magic, especially the flames she could command, and that area had felt so utterly wrong, it couldn¡¯t really be put into words. There was something about it that just sent shivers down her spine and not the good kind of shivers.


    Orienting himself for a moment, Mark quickly went over things he had heard, soon remembering something that might be significant. ¡°If I don¡¯t get directions wrong, this might be where the Pale Lady destroyed the Withered. You remember the warnings about those, right? Pack-hunting creatures that should be avoided at all cost cause they had overwhelming numbers and levels?¡± Mark asked, knowing that he had given out those warnings for a reason.


    ¡°Yeah, I remember. Though, the warnings were taken down, right?¡± Cliff joined in, having listened to the conversation the whole time. As the leader of their small group, he had been the one to call in Mark, given the oddity of the cellar. Monsters were one thing, but this was clearly something more, so the council had to be informed.


    ¡°The Pale Lady claimed she destroyed the whole lot of them,¡± Mark explained, getting a few surprised looks. The warning had been dire enough to keep people away from this area for weeks and even after the warnings had been taken down, people continued to avoid it for a while. Until Ralph and his group decided to check things out and came back with tales of creepy Icicles that didn¡¯t want to melt.


    ¡°Wait, so it wasn¡¯t weeks that the Ice didn¡¯t melt, it might have been months?¡± Mari interjected and somehow, her complexion was even worse than before, which was quite the achievement given that they were in a basement filled with creepy ritual circles and dead bodies. Killing a foe in combat was one thing but crippling them and doing some weird, messed-up ritual shit was a completely different thing. And the drag marks spoke of a lot of weird shit going on in this cellar.


    ¡°This is so messed up, how is that possible? It¡¯s the middle of summer and that monster just makes Ice stick? What the¡­? How?!¡± Mari started to rant, clearly unsettled by the realisation about the Pale Lady. It was unsettling to know that somebody else was able to alter the world in such a fundamental manner, especially standing between the bodies used by that someone.


    ¡°It¡¯s worse,¡± Cliff said, sounding far too casual for comfort, ¡°I¡¯ve talked to Ralph and guess what? The Ice doesn¡¯t fade, it doesn¡¯t melt, it¡¯s just there. And it¡¯s creepy as fuck.¡±


    ¡°Wonderful,¡± Mark shook his head, sounding defeated, ¡°So now you are telling me that the Pale Lady is not only able to permanently alter reality, she is also experimenting on Shattered,¡± he summarised, letting out a resigned sigh, ¡°Why didn¡¯t I stay in bed today? I was so comfortable without knowing all this, ignorance can truly be bliss.¡±


    Nobody in the basement has an answer to that, and yet, all of them feel the same. Why did they have to find this basement? And now that they found it, what did they dare to do about it?

 Chapter 858

    It took us a few more inconclusive tests before we gave up. The stupid plant in the lake, or whatever it was, didn¡¯t react in a predictable manner, making the entire process pretty much a waste of time. Or maybe there was a pattern but I hadn¡¯t been able to isolate it, or there were specific conditions we had failed to take into account. Whatever the case, our tests had given us such a wide and conflicting array of results that there simply wasn¡¯t anything we could draw from them, no useable predictions that might allow us to approach the water safely.


    To make matters worse, for the last thirty minutes, the plant hadn¡¯t reacted at all and now, the will-o-wisps we had noticed the night before were out and floating above the water as if there was nothing wrong at all.


    ¡°Look over there,¡± Luna quietly prodded me, pointing to the far side of the lake. Looking in the direction she indicated, I could see some sort of animal near the water, happily drinking from the lake we were so incredibly wary of.


    ¡°Maybe it was time for the plant to go to sleep, or something like that,¡± I grumbled, not quite happy with the situation. While I was almost certain that the plant wouldn¡¯t attack, I wasn¡¯t happy with the qualifier but maybe this was a case where I had to take a bit of a risk.


    ¡°Luna, stay back with Silva. Lia and I will carefully approach. Lia, cover me but keep a bit of distance anyway, worst case, I simply shadow-step away, you can¡¯t do that yet,¡± I told my companions, getting some nods in response.


    Moving forward, I felt a little foolish, as I kept all precautions, my mind tense and ready to drop into Bullet Time at a moment¡¯s notice, only for nothing to happen. From close-up, I could smell something in the water, a fairly powerful vitality that made me wonder if the lake was enriched enough to serve as a drink for Lia, simply by virtue of the amount of Astral Power within. It was an interesting idea, but one that brought up so many questions, for example, the question of where the power came from. This much Astral Power had to have some anchor to reality unless there was a Nexus about to form here and the area was inundated with Astral Power directly from the Astral River but nothing seemed to indicate such. Though, given that I had only been close to two Nexuses before, one tamed and one wild, I couldn¡¯t confidently say how a forming Nexus would feel.


    But whatever was going on here, I wanted to figure it out, even if the only thing I learned was that there was some sort of super-powerful algae in the water, one similar to the Withering Fungus or something along those lines.


    Slowly breathing out, I let go of my concealment magic, ready to leap aside at any moment, just in case the creature within the water wasn¡¯t as inactive as I hoped. When nothing happened for a minute, I decided that I was safe enough, at least for now, and could perform a few tests on the water. Though I wasn¡¯t about to touch it directly, not until I knew what was going on here.


    Using a conjured vial of Ice, I extracted some water, studying it as closely as the limited lighting allowed me to. While I could see almost as well in the dark as in daylight, there were some things that were made easier to see in the light, thanks to contrasts and shadows. And that seemed to be the case here, I could feel some things in the water, something tiny and living, but I wasn¡¯t able to see whatever it was, only faintly feel its presence. Similarly, as I held the vial, I could feel that the Ice I had conjured to make it was already under attack from within, the sensation similar to tiny insects nibbling at some larger object, slowly but surely taking it apart. The vial would last for a while, an hour or so, but compared to the twelve or more hours it would normally retain its shape, that was nothing.


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    To make matters worse, the creatures were too small to be Observe¡¯d, leaving me with few options to identify them. Out of curiosity, I tried using Water Magic to move the water in the lake, but I could feel that the creatures within were rapidly absorbing my power, making it incredibly inefficient to the point that I¡¯d need ten, maybe a hundred times the Astral Power I would normally need, depending on the volume of water I wanted to affect.


    Thinking that the creatures within were actually alive, I decided to channel a bit of my Death Magic into the water, just enough to hurt myself and sterilise the water from all normal bacteria. I could feel the change instantly, the walls of my vial stopped decaying, making me think that the creatures were either stunned or dead. Carefully sniffing the air above the vial, even tasting a little to check the scent, I tried to determine whether the Water Astral Power in the water was gone or remained, but the only thing I could detect was Death. Well, and the Ice Magic I had used to create the vial but that didn¡¯t really matter.


    Now, I only had to figure out whether I couldn¡¯t detect the Water Astral Power because it had faded when the tiny creatures died or if the Death Magic simply overshadowed it to my senses. The only way I could think of to do so was taking the stuff into my mouth, directly using my tongue to taste the water but I wasn¡¯t really happy with that idea.


    Instead, I used my Water Magic on it, trying to get a feel for the resistance before deciding to simply wait for a while, allowing the Death Magic I had used to dissipate, that way I¡¯d find out if Water Astral Power remained or not.


    ¡°Watch out,¡± Lia¡¯s warning caught me by surprise, making me drop into Bullet Time as my senses flared and immediately detected the approaching creature. It was a fairly large cat, in motion to pounce on me from one of the trees, and I could already see that it would be struck in the air by Lia¡¯s chain-hook long before reaching me.


    Letting Bullet Time fade, I started to move back, striking out with my Frozen Shuttle while idly using Observe to learn that I was being attacked by a level thirty marsh-cat, not that it really mattered. The creature didn¡¯t make it far, Lia¡¯s attack was as brutal as it was swift. The hook dug into the cat, piercing a sizable hole into its flank before Lia ripped it back out, sending the bleeding creature into a spin. My own attack struck just a little later, hitting the head straight on, and while it didn¡¯t penetrate too deeply, I shredded an ear and tore a sizable gouge into the cat¡¯s flesh, sending it down into the water.


    Given what we had seen from the water, Lia and I moved further back, almost as far back as we had been earlier, just in case the bleeding body dropping into the lake caused something to happen.


    For a moment, nothing happened but a notification popping up that we had killed the cat but received no EXP because it was too low in level but then, something fascinating happened. I could feel a surge of power within the water, though it wasn¡¯t quite what I had expected, there was no water magic involved but something else. It smelled like decay, or maybe rot, and the cat¡¯s body decomposed almost immediately, to the point that nothing remained. At least nothing that we could see, there might have been a bit that sunk, bones or something like that. I wasn¡¯t sure and I wasn¡¯t about to go into the water to find out, this lake was incredibly fascinating but equally dangerous.


    ¡°So¡­¡± I began, exchanging a glance with Lia, ¡°what do you think?¡±


    ¡°It might be useful, you know?¡± she gave me a grin, ¡°Think about it, if the water only destroys flesh and blood, it might be useful to make leather, allowing us to get rid of all the fat and tissue after skinning,¡± she explained and I could see the use of that.


    ¡°Yeah, that might work, but I¡¯m not sure I want to take that much of a risk. If my guess is correct, the large creature is active during the day and for some time after sunset, but the tiny creatures are active all the time. This might look like water but it¡¯s more like a lake filled with incredibly deadly acid or something,¡± I shook my head, thinking of the creature we had seen drink earlier.


    As we were watching the lake, the water started frothing around the area where the cat had disappeared and moments later, another of those ghostly flames emerged from the water. With us cautiously watching, just in case the flame was some sort of monster, it just floated there before wafting away, as if carried by an unfelt breeze, leaving us with a few more questions and no more answers.

 Chapter 859

    Sitting in our nicely enlarged cave, I was trying to figure out how to proceed. The marsh and its inhabitants weren¡¯t at a level that would grant me a lot of EXP, only Luna stood to gain any if we hunted in the area, but that was only for the creatures we had actually seen. The larger plant-creature in the water might have a higher level or it might have some special circumstances that granted it powers far above what its level would suggest. Either way, that particular creature was the only one I¡¯d consider worthy prey, mostly because I had no idea how strong it actually was. But its ability to ignore my concealment was enough to make me wary, an ability it had demonstrated during our testing. Or maybe it was simply immune to it in the first place, which was quite possible as my concealment was focused on the senses I had, so the normal human senses plus the more exotic senses I had gained thanks to traits, like my ability to see magic and my extra-sensory perception for minds. If the plant was using some other method to detect its prey, it could largely ignore my magic and strike what I tried to hide with impunity.


    Either way, I wasn¡¯t sure how to continue forward, whether to simply ignore the area and travel back to the farm, giving it up as an area we had bad compatibility with or we could try to destroy as much as possible and leave then.


    Only, I wasn¡¯t sure just how much we could actually destroy. Most of my large-scale magical attacks didn¡¯t really work against mobile targets in the open, the mist moved too slowly and the conjured blizzard wasn¡¯t accurate enough, to say nothing about the insane amount of time I needed to conjure one up. So the only target I could strike efficiently was the plant, but it was hidden within the lake and given the algae, or whatever the Astral Power devouring creatures were, also inhabited the lake, I couldn¡¯t really get at it either.


    My best bet would be to freeze the lake, a fool¡¯s errand if there ever was one. The last few days had been fairly hot and sunny, making the lake¡¯s water fairly warm. While I might be able to muster the needed Astral Power to freeze the sheer amount of water, the algae in the water made that impossible. I¡¯d only be feeding them unless I used an indirect attack but trying that route came with its own difficulties, mostly that it was summer and dry. If there were a lot of clouds, or if the weather was rainy, I might be able to channel my magic into the clouds, turning the rain to natural snow and hail, lowering the temperature in the lake that way, but it would need even more Astral Power than freezing the lake directly. Sure, the algae wouldn¡¯t be able to feed on my Astral Power but I¡¯d have to alter the weather in a fairly large area to accomplish anything. Something I¡¯d need a Nexus for, leaving me back at step one.


    Or rather, leaving me before taking step one, as I could see that step two was blocked off by a sturdy wall, thanks to the water and the algae inhabiting it. Hel, the algae were the real enemy here, they stopped me from using any magic to alter the water. My best bet would be to use Death Magic to kill them off, but sadly, I didn¡¯t have the ability to channel large quantities of that particular magic, I¡¯d be more likely to kill myself than to sterilise the entire lake.


    And even if I managed to do so, it might destroy what made this area special. The water sample I had taken earlier and sterilised with Death Magic was now completely inert, with nothing to distinguish it from ordinary water. Either the exposure to Death Magic had neutralised the Water Astral Power within the water or the Astral Power came from the algae in the water and was only present as long as they were. By killing them, which I seemed to have accomplished with my Death Magic, the power they had emitted was gone, too. Leaving me with a few ideas but nothing to actually work with, nothing useable.


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    Letting out a huff, I decided to try going at the problem from a different direction. Namely, to study the local Astral River in an attempt to get a better idea of what was going on with the water. It might give me some insight into the situation, especially whether it was caused by the algae or if the algae were the product of a particularity within the Astral River, like a forming Nexus.


    Opening up a small area underground, I conjured my throne. For once, I didn¡¯t just use Ice to create the throne and the runic formation around it, instead, I decided to integrate the local geography, in this case, the plentiful water. Usually, I used Ice or Blood to form the circle, but this time, I pulled up water from the ground, creating a slow but steady flow through the runes, like a small river. It took me a bit of effort to make sure the water didn¡¯t just overflow at the end, but it worked out. And interestingly, while the water didn¡¯t feel like the lake water, there was some power within. But no algae, at least I was unable to detect any, and when I used my Water Magic to influence the water, it worked just fine. Forcing me to discard an earlier observation and leaving me with more questions. As if I hadn¡¯t had enough of those already.


    But there was nothing to it, so I sat down on my throne, letting my mind calm and settle into the meditative trance that allowed me to shift into the Astral River. I could immediately feel the difference to my normal method, the water gave an impulse, a flowing direction that tried to pull me along and into the stream of power within reality. It was an interesting experience, a seemingly physical dimension to the usually purely mental existence of the Astral River, but nothing I couldn¡¯t withstand.


    Feeling the Astral around me, I quickly realised that this wasn¡¯t a nexus but it was fairly similar. Instead of multiple primary strands of the Astral River converging and spilling into physical reality, this was just a single strand, one dominated by Water Astral Power, that came close to the boundary of the physical plane, its proximity causing some spill. If there was another strand of the Astral River here, it would undoubtedly form a Nexus but a singular strand didn¡¯t carry enough power. The effect was somewhat similar, due to the size of this strand and the proximity to reality, but it was far more limited. Wielding Water Magic here was easier than elsewhere, but the area lacked the sheer breadth of power I could draw from, compared to a true Nexus.


    Still, it might be useful to create some sort of lair here, if only to train myself with Water Magic for some time, maybe invite Kevin to give him some field experience and specialised training, it might do him some good to do something other than watering flowers. I¡¯d have to ask him, he might enjoy this area, at least if he managed to stay safe from the annoying plant life.


    Sadly, this also meant that the area was fairly useless to me. We should find out how big the area affected by the Astral River was, what the plant creature in the lake actually was and how far the power-absorbing algae had spread but other than that, there didn¡¯t seem to be anything of use. Maybe determine what the will-o-wisps were and where they came from. They seemed to be distinct from the Water Magic and more aligned to Death, but the primary cause that changed the area was the overflowing Water Astral Power from the Astral River.


    Humming to myself, I slowly drew my mind back into my body, feeling the sensation of the Astral River fade around me as I went. There was a faint, creeping influence of Death, coming from upriver, but it was incredibly subtle, to the point that I had almost missed it. But luckily only almost and now, I had an area to investigate, one that might actually yield something.


    Death Magic was always curious, especially as this didn¡¯t feel like the static, sombre Death Magic of the grave but more akin to the more volatile Death Magic of a fresh carcass, not fully decayed but with some power to alter the world of the living still left.


    There was a grin on my face when my eyes opened again, an eager smile of anticipation. I was looking forward to finding what caused that creeping influence, hopefully, it could make this whole trip worthwhile.

 Chapter 860

    As we made our way upriver, I realised just how fascinating the area we were in truly was. Not only did the lake provide ample water, but the water also had a fairly interesting effect on the local wildlife, something I hadn¡¯t noticed before due to their relative weakness. A beast around level thirty, unable to detect us before Lia or Silva could strike, wasn¡¯t even a minor threat, even if it was comparatively resistant to magic, or able to use some magical abilities itself. It turned out, that was why those cats we had seen before enjoyed the trees growing in the recently flooded area so much. They were able to walk on water, much to my surprise, allowing them to pounce from above before retreating across the water and back into the trees. If their prey tried to pursue, they¡¯d have to enter the water and from what we had seen that was highly hazardous to one¡¯s health, leaving the felines scot-free.


    Unless, of course, they tried to pounce on somebody with a long-raged weapon or maybe some animal with needles, spikes or something along those lines. In that case, the cat would likely be left with bleeding paws and a small, somewhat sadistic, part of me was curious what would happen then. Did the cats actually touch the water or was there some thin layer of air between, would the blood disrupt their ability and if yes, would the water start to destroy them from the foot up? How long would it take for their ability to disappear, was it tied to their paws? The pads of their paws? So many questions, but alas, I didn¡¯t think I¡¯d have a chance to investigate. After we were attacked by another cat, after the first pounced on me during the night and we dispatched that cat, too, no additional felines tried to test their luck.


    Similarly, we noticed a few deer, drinking from the water, and when I tried to hit one with an Icicle so we could have venison for dinner, I could feel the icicle weaken a great deal when it was about to hit, similar to the effect of my Ice entering the water here. Only that the effect was in the air around the deer, making me wonder how that particular effect worked. Sadly, the deer didn¡¯t stick around to let me study them, they ran off immediately, leaving us with no dinner and me with even more questions about this area. It was quite obvious that the water didn¡¯t destroy creatures that drank it but changed them. A part of me was curious about what would happen if I drank it, but I wasn¡¯t about to test it. Maybe we could catch some animals to experiment on, to see how their physique and abilities would change but it might take too long, or too large doses of water.


    Similarly fascinating, and just as inexplicable, was the existence of the will-o-wisps. As of yet, none of us had managed to Observe one of them, but after watching one of them come into existence, I was fairly certain they weren¡¯t a threat, somewhere around level twenty if I had to guess. Their only real strength, from what we had seen so far, was their ability to move at incredible speed and with unmatched agility, making me think that they either had some way to counter inertia or they had almost no weight, or maybe both. Whatever the case, when we tried to close in on one that was wafting around near the shore, it had demonstrated speed far beyond even a magically launched Icicle, making attacking them a fool¡¯s errand. While they might not be able to outspeed a bullet, they could do so with arrows and magical attacks, leaving us with no recourse. Luckily, no real recourse was needed, the things seemed to be content to waft around the lake, floating above the water and possibly trying to lure unsuspecting people into the water where they would be dissolved.


    Learning about the origin of the strange, necrotic energies I had noticed in the water turned out easier than I thought after we moved upriver for a bit. After the lake narrowed back into a normal river, I could feel the influence far stronger than before, partially because the saturation with Water Astral Power fell rapidly, and partially because the necrotic energies grew stronger, making them easier to detect.


    Either way, when we rounded a bend in the river, the reason became obvious when we saw a small rise that had partially collapsed into the river, a rise decorated with numerous stone crosses and headstones. It was, or used to be, a graveyard above the river but one of the earthquakes after the change seemed to have destabilised the ground, dumping a good chunk of it into the water. And with that earth came the buried bodies. It was fairly simple to see the debris, the broken coffins partially sticking out of the ground and even a few partially buried bones were there. Given the situation, it was almost certain that more of it had ended up in the water, some of it getting carried with the flow but all of it rotting and slowly seeping into the stream. I wasn¡¯t sure just how much water a single body could poison, but it was fairly obvious that the influence I had felt came from here.


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    ¡°Let¡¯s check the graveyard out,¡± I suggested, curious what a place once consecrated might feel like, if there was an appreciable effect. Had the fact that the graveyard used to be hallowed ground before such terms had meaning gained some magical meaning after the change, even if there was no actual cleric to perform the service? Did that ¡®God¡¯ have influence or were the gods, for some unknown reason, limited to the Norse and Greek Pantheons? It was an odd idea, that somehow only those Gods were supposed to be real, what about the rest?


    Humans had imagined thousands, or even millions depending on the exact definition of a God, of Gods but somehow I was supposed to believe only the limited number existed? That didn¡¯t really track, making me fairly suspicious. Especially if what the Grandmother had written about apotheosis was true, if the ¡®only¡¯ thing needed to become a God were followers on a different plane of existence willing to offer up Astral Power.


    Hel, it was suspicious that the Gods imagined on Earth somehow matched the Gods existing elsewhere, making me wonder if that was a coincidence or if the Gods simply had certain inherent aspects and took on a fitting form to be worshipped. Having a God of Lightning or Thunder was fairly obvious, before people understood what lightning was, it was an incomprehensible and impressive occurrence. Even knowing what lightning was, it was hard not to feel a certain awe when watching a thunderstorm. It made a person feel small, and attributing that sensation to a God diminished that sensation.


    Similarly, people wanted certain things, it didn¡¯t matter if those people were human or not. A mate to procreate, giving you Gods of Love and Family, food, giving you Gods of Hunting, Agriculture and possibly Fertility, protection, giving you Gods of War and such, people weren¡¯t terribly complicated. So, maybe the existing Gods holding those domains simply took on a fitting shape to influence a new world?


    But if so, why take on the guise of Gods that were almost solely used in entertainment, in fantasy and such? Why not use the guise of Gods still worshipped around the world? Sure, the majority of people worshipped one of the monotheistic Abrahamic religions, so having multiple Gods take on that guise wouldn¡¯t work, but why not the Hindu deities? There were enough of them and they were already worshipped by many people, even if the Norse and Greek deities might be better known.


    Maybe that was the reason, the Norse and Greek Gods were known due to their role in Western media while the Hindu deities were worshipped and known primarily in Asian countries. Did the average Westerner know about Brahma? I wasn¡¯t sure, but I was fairly certain that most people in India had at least heard the name Thor or Zeus.


    Though, if I went with the idea that the Gods only took on a certain role, why would there be two Gods of Thunder, wouldn¡¯t that make things less efficient? Conflict felt inevitable in that case, Just like it had happened on Mundus.


    Which was a whole different thing to wonder about, why did Mundus have so many similarities with Earth? It was too much of a coincidence to believe that the continents had just happened to form in a similar shape, even if some of their positions had shifted, with cities and rivers roughly in the same position.


    So, there had to be some connection, but how that might work, I had no idea.


    Shaking my head, I focused back on Lia, who looked at me with a raised eyebrow, as I had obviously failed to hear her answer to my question.


    ¡°I said, Sure, let¡¯s go,¡± she repeated, a grin on her face, ¡°But if you¡¯re already dreaming, maybe we should head back and you can get some sleep. Wouldn¡¯t want you to be injured because you were lost in your mind, Mother.¡±

 Chapter 861

    There was something weird about the graveyard. It wasn¡¯t just that a good portion of it had gone into the river thanks to a landslide, though that was part of it, no, there was something else at work. Some of me was convinced that it was magical, to the point that I had to constantly taste the air and my eyes started to glow a little from the amount of focus I put on my magical sight, but there was nothing I could see. And yet, that weird sensation in my stomach never left, it remained there like a rock, weighing me down and making me queasy.


    ¡°Lia, Luna can you feel this?¡± I asked my daughters, noticing that Lia¡¯s head was on a swivel, constantly checking everything around us, making me think that she was just as nervous as me.


    ¡°There¡¯s something here, something that tells me I¡¯m not welcome here,¡± Lia admitted, her constant search for an unseen threat stopping for a moment, only to resume the next.


    ¡°Mhm, I¡¯m not sure, but there¡¯s something,¡± Luna agreed, her eyes starting to glow as well and her hands were gesticulating around as if following some unseen pattern. Instead of trying to get her to say more, I left her alone and focused on my own instincts. If it wasn¡¯t magic that I was feeling, it might be something else, though I wasn¡¯t sure what.


    Slowly looking around, I tried to ascertain where the sensation came from and noticed that there was some pattern to it. Patterns, I could work with, even if I only had the vaguest idea of what I was sensing or how to quantify the sensation. A part of me was tempted to close my eyes so that I could concentrate on the odd sensation in my gut but closing my eyes in a possibly hostile situation wasn¡¯t the smartest play I could make.


    ¡°There¡¯s something over there,¡± Luna called out, pointing towards what might have been the centre of the graveyard. Following her outstretched arm, I noticed a few small buildings, clustered around that area and mostly hidden behind shrubs and a few trees. It took me a second to realise that these weren¡¯t buildings but crypts, likely for some of the older families or something along those lines.


    ¡°Let¡¯s check it out,¡± I decided, starting to move towards the shrubs. It was fairly interesting, for once I couldn¡¯t simply use my magical senses to detect what was going on. Instead, I had to rely on my instincts, as all my senses were unable to help. At least that was the case until I got close enough and heard a strange noise within one of the crypts, one that I couldn¡¯t immediately place. But I could make an educated guess that it was some sort of Undead, given that we were in a creepy graveyard.


    Gesturing to the others, I let Lia and Silva take the lead, while Luna and I stayed behind a little, Alex sitting on Luna¡¯s shoulder once again. For once, I remained behind Luna, just in case we were attacked from behind. Not only did I have better senses than her, allowing me to detect potential attacks earlier, I also had a much better chance to defeat attackers, if they ever got to us.


    Up front, Lia raised a hand in warning, while Silva moved to the side a little, ready to flank any attacker that engaged Lia. Luna stopped, while I did the same, quickly looking around again, only to notice movement out of the corner of my eye.


    Not sure what I had seen, I called out a warning anyway, just in case, while sending my frozen Shuttles. While I was busy in the back, Lia was also attacked and to my surprise, her attacker wasn¡¯t an Undead, at least not of any sort I had seen before. The thing was some sort of shadow creature, nothing I had ever seen before, and took the shape of a canine, either wolf or dog, it wasn¡¯t easy to tell with it being entirely made out of shadow.


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    For a moment, I paused, feeling fascination as I looked at the creature, but I instantly tightened my focus again, I could be fascinated after we dealt with them. And it was ¡®them¡¯, what I had seen and attacked with my shuttles was a similar creature, one that seemed to easily avoid my attack, or rather ignore the attack. I was nearly certain that I had seen one of my blades pierce through the darkness it was composed of, without slowing or showing any indication of being hit, making me worry a little. If these things were immune to physical attacks, we might be in a pickle, especially if the only thing working against shadows was Light. We certainly couldn¡¯t use any of that, none of us could.


    Given that it looked like using Ice was impossible, i instead decided to fight fire with fire, or rather, to fight shadows with shadows. Taking control of the Darkness around me, I formed it into tendrils, letting them lash out against the creature. At the same time, I used Observe and felt quite relieved when I realised that it was called a Gravehound and only level twenty-five.


    The tendrils latched onto the creature in a way it wouldn¡¯t work on anything corporeal and for a moment, I wasn¡¯t quite sure how to proceed. I now had shadows wrapped around darkness, keeping hold of the beast with nothing but force of will. For a moment, I considered trying to tame the beastie, or maybe bind it in some way, but I couldn¡¯t really figure out how, so I decided to go with the old maxime of KISS. Keep it simple, stupid.


    And simply pulled the shadows I was using to bind it into two directions, one latched around the front of the hound, the other wrapped around its hips.


    The effect was¡­ fascinating. I could feel the shadows strain against my will and see the creature stretch in a way only shadows could until something gave. There was a discharge of something, I could feel the sensation but it wasn¡¯t Astral Power, and for a moment, I could see the two parts of the hound writhe, as if in agony, before they faded into the darkness of the night.


    My enemy dealt with, I looked over to Lia and saw that she had managed to wound the thing, mostly by fighting defensively by the looks of it. Striking so that her attack connected just as the thing attacked her, forcing it to either become corporeal enough to hurt her, and get hurt in turn, or remain incorporeal and have nothing happen to either party.


    Similarly, Silva was blocking another two Gravehounds, her paws glowing with soft, silver light and the hounds were completely on the defensive, despite their numbers advantage. Focusing again, I sent out more tendrils, catching one of the hounds as it was just dodging Silva¡¯s attack and tearing that one apart, too. It gave Silva the opportunity to attack her remaining foe with abandon, no longer forced to keep them from going after Luna, who sadly lacked the ability to easily deal with them.


    By the time Silva was done with her hound, Lia had managed to whittle down her foe, giving it death by a thousand cuts, and reducing it to nothingness that way. Again, I could feel a bit of something in the air, something that wasn¡¯t Astral Power as I knew it but something remarkably similar.


    On a whim, I decided to step into the shadows and when I did, I felt my eyes open in shock. The hounds, destroyed in the real world, were lying in the shadows, obviously dead. Here, they looked far more like real creatures, not just the strange shades they had been in the real world, making me wonder how they could remain in both worlds at the same time. And how they could shift so seamlessly that they could dodge attacks and only be corporeal when they wanted to.


    It was certainly a trick I would like to pick up, simply because it was incredibly useful, but for now, I was more interested in the creatures themselves. Moving over to the one in the best shape, the one Silva had killed, I picked it up and stepped out of the shadows again, dragging it with me.


    Just before I left the shadows, something new occurred. I heard noise in the shadows before the place had always been utterly, eerily quiet. But now, there was a loud howl, not quite like the howling of a wolf, not like that of a dog. But something else, something that sent a shiver down my spine.


    ¡°We should leave, children,¡± I said, the moment I was out of the shadows. I had no desire to find out what had been howling in the darkness, even if their levels were low, these creatures were dangerous.


    Without any discussion, we started to move quickly, Luna on Silva¡¯s back, while Alex was once again on Lia¡¯s. And then we ran as if the hounds of Hell were nipping at our heels. It wasn¡¯t that far from the truth.

 Chapter 862

    Knowing that there might be beasts behind us, or at least that there were beasts out there, baying for somebody¡¯s blood after we killed a few of their number, was enough to motivate us to leave with haste. It wasn¡¯t that the Gravehounds were dangerous in open combat, but their ability to avoid attacks and who knew what else by partially phasing into the shadows made them far more dangerous than their level suggested. It was a similar ability I had used back on Mundus to kill enemies dozens of levels above me, sneaking into their dwelling and striking in the dead of night. I had no desire to see that ability used against me or mine and all my current protections focused on securing entry points, something that didn¡¯t work against an enemy able to simply phase through the wall. And I had no reason to believe they couldn¡¯t do so, not after watching one phase through an attack of mine, or Lia¡¯s blade.


    Given how late, or rather early, it already was, we still decided to move back to the cave I dug, to wait out the day there. Judging by their abilities, I doubted the Gravehounds would be able to move during the day, needing similar shelter as we did, or maybe they turned into normal hounds during the day, I wasn¡¯t sure. Either way, if we managed to get back to our shelter, I doubted they¡¯d be able to attack us for now.


    As we ran, I occasionally moved back into the shadows for a few steps, making sure that nothing was sneaking up on us. Once, during those moments, I heard another howl behind us, but couldn¡¯t tell if something was chasing us or if they simply protected their territory. Either way, it cemented my decision that I had no desire to tangle with incredibly stealthy pack creatures that I knew little about, and certainly not on their terrain. It was one thing to hunt enemies that you could see coming, it was an entirely different beast to go up against something that could realistically surprise you and tear out your throat before you really knew what was going on. After all, I was the poster child for sneaking up on enemies and killing them before they knew what was going on, I had no desire to have my own tactics used against me, no thanks.


    Though a part of me was fairly curious about what the strange sensation had been and I had plans to carefully investigate the corpse I had pulled from the shadows and put on Silva¡¯s back, hopefully it would, well, shed some light on these shadowy hounds. Or at least give me something to start with, once I had a better idea about their capabilities I was far more inclined to challenge and study them. Hel, I might even try going after them in the shadows by myself, if that would allow me to circumvent their biggest advantage. From what I had seen thus far, they were hyperfocused creatures, incredibly good at stealth and avoidance but not terribly strong offensively and easily dispatched if you could get a solid hit on them. Amusingly, it was fairly similar to my own skillset, only that I had far better offence, partially thanks to my level, partially because it was my focus, as opposed to their avoidance. Something I would have to change at some point, or I might find myself in a bad spot.


    Yeah, perfecting how to shadow-step and how to dodge into the shadows as these hounds had done sounded like something I should prioritise, even above improving my offensive capabilities. As the old maxim went, dead DPS don¡¯t DPS.


    Luckily, nothing happened on our way to the cave and we all moved in, after another glance out over the water. There were a few more of the strange will-o-wisps floating around, but all of them were on the other side of the lake, or somewhere near its middle. Once again, I started to wonder just what was going on here, but realistically, I wasn¡¯t sure I could figure this one out. The water was such an incredibly potent deterrent, thanks to the tiny algae, and I had no desire to experience what they might do to my body.


    It was enough that the animals were drinking it, either lacking in self-preservation or knowing something I did not. Or maybe both.


    Either way, it was something we could tell the people at the farm about, maybe Kevin was interested in investigating this, or maybe not. For now, I had something else to check out, namely that weird corpse we had brought back.


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    Out of respect for my companions, I used the cave I had set up my throne in to dissect the corpse, though Lia happily stuck with me, just as Alex did. So, it was only Luna who was sent to bed, with Silva following her, acting as a neat combination of teddy bear and guard dog. If anything tried to attack my munchkin during the day, Silva would happily deal with it, even if the attacker came through the walls.


    Now, having the time to calmly check out the body I had recovered, I realised just how weird that thing was. It wasn¡¯t an animal, that much I could say for certain, it was utterly unnatural. The limbs of the hound were limber and stretched far beyond the stilts of a greyhound, looking almost more like needles the further from the main body you got, similar to the way shadows narrowed and stretched. To see such an effect in a creature was incredibly strange, but even stranger was the way the thing was dissolving. I only realised it now, but looking closely, I could see that it was fading away, somewhat similar to the way something I conjured faded back into the Astral River.


    Sadly, I had no idea what that might mean in this particular instance, only that these things were far different from anything I had ever encountered, something that was only confirmed when I started to dissect it.


    First, the thing was almost uniformly made from the same dark and tarry substance, without any visible texture. Touching it felt somewhat oily and a little uncomfortable, to the point that I used Darkness Magic to vanish it, something that was incredibly easy. Almost as if the Darkness wanted to destroy these creatures, or maybe just their bodies. Either way, it was something I could test out at some point, but not now.


    Instead, I continued to carefully take the thing apart, only to get confirmation of what I already knew. The thing was weird, incredibly so. There was nothing to it that I could really identify, some parts of it were a different black than others, and some had a slightly different texture but all in all, it was just weird.


    No organs, not even sensory ones that I could identify, no brain, no circulatory, respiratory or even nervous system I could find, the closest comparison I could come up with were the scrying constructs I had employed before. But those didn¡¯t register as living creatures to the system, at least to the best of my knowledge, making me wonder what these things were. And where they came from, how I could tame them or at least use them.


    They might be some sort of shadow-elemental, similar to the Ice-creatures I had seen on Mundus or the strange forest sprites, maybe even somewhat related to Nethersprites, I wasn¡¯t sure. But in any way, they weren¡¯t classically magical, in the sense that they used Astral Power, making me wonder what they used.


    Thinking that the source of their powers might be the best thing to investigate, I decided to plop myself down before the slab of Ice I had placed the creature on and tried to do just that. Figure out where the power came from, or in this case, figure out where the remains went. If this process was similar to the way magically conjured things faded into the Astral River, I might be able to follow the fading here and track it to its source. I just had to be incredibly careful that I wasn¡¯t pulled along, I had no desire to get a close look at whatever had spawned these creatures. Not until I knew more, especially a comfortable way to kill them.


    Realising just how useless my magical senses were, I tried something else, conjuring a mask of shadows to cover half of my face and trying to shift that half into the shadows while the rest of me remained outside.


    It took a while to make the trick work, I might not even have attempted to do so if I hadn¡¯t seen the hounds do something similar, but I managed. And managing gave me an interesting insight. Cloaked in shadows, I could see the remains of the creature look almost as if they were boiling, small bubbles of darkness rising from it, floating into a random direction within the shadows before popping and vanishing.


    It looked incredibly weird, but also fairly fascinating. And it added another interesting thing to study to my list, if things continued like this, my list would never be empty. Even after staying relatively put for a while, I hadn¡¯t managed to make a dent in it.


    Alas, the woes and wonder of an arcane researcher. There was no better path for me.

 Chapter 863

    Looking around the area we had been in for the last few days, I decided there currently wasn¡¯t anything else to do. The lake, while interesting, was currently beyond my capabilities to explore. I had bottled some of the water in a glass bottle, hoping that I could perform some experiments on the algae later, but that wasn¡¯t a real priority. Similarly, the large creature in the lake wasn¡¯t something I was able to tackle for now.


    As I had realised during the day when Luna and I had gone on a walk, the creature was diurnal and by the looks of it, the best way to fight it was while it was active. During the day, I could see the strange, string-like tendrils whip out of the water occasionally and had even started to bait the creature by launching conjured Icicles across the water. Thanks to that, I had been able to learn that it was called a Swamp Lurker and level fifty, not a real threat in terms of plain numbers but it was one of those cases where numbers only told half of the story. The real problem was still the water shielding it and its Astral Power absorbing properties that made attacking the Lurker impossible. In addition, I wasn¡¯t sure if there really was only one Lurker and not a few dozen Lurkers lurkering in the water, just waiting for a fool to challenge them.


    Fighting them would require us to drag them from the water during the day, essentially using brute force, but given that Lia was completely incapacitated during the day and I could only muster a fraction of my power, that was out for us. The other option was to drain the lake, leaving the Lurker without the environmental protections that made fighting it impossible but alas, that would take even more effort for very limited return.


    All in all, the Lurker was one of those things that wasn¡¯t really worth the effort destroying it would take, neither in terms of EXP nor in terms of reward. If we needed to clear the lake for other purposes, for example, because we wanted to fish or to access it as a convenient water source, I could easily see some sort of large quest being offered, with dozens of people working together to take it down, but that wasn¡¯t really the case here. And just to go after it because we could didn¡¯t really appeal to me. Not when it was neither a danger to us nor had a significant reward in terms of EXP attached to it. Hel, with its level I would barely get any EXP, certainly not enough to make a significant investment in terms of time and effort.


    However, one positive thing came from the whole expedition to the lake. During our downtime, it occurred to me that the strong influence on reality the Astral River asserted here meant it was close to the surface, so to speak. Or that it was exceptionally powerful in this area, or possibly both, I wasn¡¯t completely certain about that. But either way, it meant that I could get a much better idea about the Astral River and its structure by delving into it here. With that idea, I might be able to find the different elemental Nexuses and their affinities, possibly allowing me to lay claim to the area the Nexus of Ice would eventually form. Or had formed, or was forming, I wasn¡¯t sure about the state of affairs at the moment. Either way, I knew I wanted control over that Nexus, partially because of the power it promised but primarily because I didn¡¯t want anyone else to have it.


    The power promised by the Nexus was incredibly potent, that much I knew, to the point that the Grandmother had alluded that her ability to protect Neyto from threats Divine and Mundane came from control over the Nexus. And that was while also sustaining the Barrow Den, the dungeon that allowed her to both, keep prisoners and test travelling adventurers. Going by our experience within its walls, the dungeon had been created by the Grandmother, likely including its creatures. Her own little slice of Hel, so to speak, which just showed how insanely powerful the Nexuses were. But I already knew that, after all, using one had allowed me to bring the Nidh?gg back into the world from its nearly destroyed state and afterwards, we had been able to use it to destroy the elven Empire and the Nidh?gg had cast the world into a small Ice Age.


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    Sure, a big part of that was likely because the Nidh?gg was an immensely powerful being before it had been locked away but that didn¡¯t change what I had been able to do with it. And just for that, I wanted to control one again, the security granted by that kind of power was simply too valuable not to.


    With that in mind, I looked through the Astral River, searching for a strand of Ice, something fairly illusive given that it was almost the height of summer and my beloved element was greatly suppressed due to that, but with a lot of perseverance and patience, and maybe a little luck, I managed. As had been the case on Mundus, I could vaguely feel that the power within that strand had a certain flavour to it, giving me a faint idea of where to search.


    By now, I had something of an idea of how the Astral River worked, at least on a planetary scale, thanks to my experiences on Mundus. Astral Power was, to the best of my understanding, a cosmic force. It wasn¡¯t constrained to a single Universe but was moving between physical dimensions, as indicated by the separation between Mundus and Terra. If my guess was correct, then Mundus was a version of Terra or the other way around, one that had been exposed to the Astral River earlier than Terra, and now, Terra had been exposed, too. How the Gods had managed to establish Pantheon Entertainment before that connection came into existence, I had no idea, nor did I have anything but some vague speculation about their motives but that didn¡¯t really matter.


    It just meant that the Astral River came from outside Terra, and was flowing into the planetary Astral River at different points separated by elements, the Nexuses, before spreading through the whole of Terra, until the different strands of power were flowing back out, into the cosmos or wherever they went. Within Terra, the Astral River wasn¡¯t so much a River, or a circulatory system, as it was a web, with countless major and minor nodes between different strands, all suffused by Astral Power.


    Now, I had one of those strands and wanted to figure out where they all came from. It wasn¡¯t easy, far from it, especially as I lacked the magical fortitude to send my mind through the entire Astral River either back to the origin or forward, to the exit. Thus, I needed to go with vague sensations, carried by the Astral Power within the river.


    The primary sensation I received, was, unsurprisingly, that of unrelenting cold. But it wasn¡¯t only cold, there was more to it. There was a small trace of unrelenting, eternal wind, constantly grinding against snow-covered peaks, and that wind carried a hint of pine, faint, but clearly there. From the sensations, I could guess at a clear north-south divide, making me think that one Nexus was located in the Arctic north, the other in the Antarctic south. Sadly, that was all I could discern, leaving me with relatively little information, though there were some things I realised I had ignored previously.


    Namely, the sheer amount of power flowing through our world and what it might do to the landscape. I doubted that the changes would be immediate, though there had been multiple earthquakes in a region that was supposed to be completely tectonically stable, but there would be changes. Likely major changes to the landscape and geography.


    In other words, trying to use the old maps would work, to a point. I doubted that mountains would rise in a week, but a coastline could shift rapidly, depending on where you were. I could easily see a place like the Netherlands undergo a fairly drastic change, to the point that the people there might actually have transformed into Naga, since many of them had been living below sea level.


    While making new maps would take time, especially as the changes had yet to settle, there was a part of me that wanted to explore already. The drive I had felt on Mundus, to see what was beyond the bend in the road or at the edge of the horizon, it was still within me. Still strong, and driving me forward.


    Knowing that I could easily prepare a temporary shelter, maybe we should start travelling again. There was so much to see in this new world of ours, so much more than just the ruins of the Old World. Wonders and miracles, some curious, some macabre, just like the lake we had visited now. I wanted to see as much of it as possible.


    And if our path mostly led North, until I managed to get a better idea where to go, then so be it.

 Chapter 864

    After returning to our lair, I started to, once again, consider the current state of affairs. What were we really doing here, near the farm? How useful and practical was it to stay, compared to going out and exploring? My biggest concern in that regard was Luna. If we started to travel, she¡¯d lose the friends she had made, few as they were. Making friends was difficult for her, something I could greatly empathise with. Where my problem had always been the realm of emotions and how to relate to other people, something I still struggled with, hers was different. It was one of our own making, it came from the power she had gained due to her connection with me and the changes that power had made to her body.


    From mostly average, if somewhat malnourished due to the change, child, she was now looking more like a slightly undersized teenager, her features clearly on the way to adulthood with the rest of her body playing catch-up. Similarly, her mind had matured at an insane rate, one that worried me and if the situation was different, one that I would never have promoted. Gaining the levels she now had cost Luna her childhood, making me worry about what it would mean for her development. Could one become an adult, simply because one gained levels and the system deemed it so? What would that do to one¡¯s personality and mind, let alone their socialisation? We were what our experiences made us to be, but if Luna didn¡¯t have those experiences, only the experience of violence and slaughter, what would she become? It worried me, and worried me greatly, but what were the alternatives?


    Could I leave my daughter behind, hoping that the levels she had already gained wouldn¡¯t push her further? Or would doing so merely strip her of the support Lia and I had been giving her, leaving her all alone in a dangerous world? What would happen if her body continued to mature at the current rate, giving her a physically adult body before she even reached double digits in age? Especially if she didn¡¯t have protectors around, to keep her safe?


    Shaking my head, I didn¡¯t even want to consider such an event. Idly dispelling the incredibly sharp blade of Ice that had somehow materialised in my hand at the mere idea, I decided that plans had to be made.


    Trying to stay near the farm could work in the short term, but I didn¡¯t think it would work long term. I wanted, needed, to travel, partially due to my wanderlust, and partially because I wanted and needed more power. I still remembered what Hecate had told me, ¡®Mastery over Life, Dominion over Souls and deep insight into the mysteries of the Mind¡¯, those were the three things I needed to get back my Sigmir. Even accomplishing just one of the three was incredibly difficult, especially as my current path didn¡¯t lend itself to some of them.


    The mysteries of the Mind were something I could see myself gaining and dominion over souls might be plausible but I wasn¡¯t sure. The closest link I had to that was Death Magic, but I had major problems with that ability, mostly because I was a living being and without any deep connection to the domain of Death. And Mastery over Life, I doubted I could gain that any time soon. My only hope was for somebody else to accomplish such mastery and work with them, maybe an exchange of favours or something along those lines, or maybe I could have the Grandmother help me. She was a greatly accomplished spellcaster and I knew from her link to Luna that she was linked to the domain of Life, though whether she had achieved mastery I wasn¡¯t sure. I thought so, but I would have to ask her.


    For that, I¡¯d need power, so I could contact her. It always came down to power, without power, none of my plans could be achieved. And gaining true power wasn¡¯t something I could achieve by hanging around the Farm. Sure, I gained some scant EXP from teaching people magic but real growth could only happen in the flames of conflict. My skills had been growing nicely these last few weeks, but the growth was slowing down, making me wonder if I had merely needed to catch up to the amount of conflict, or maybe there was some other reason.


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    Either way, if I wanted to continue to grow my power at a good rate, I¡¯d need to keep moving and find things to challenge me, I would need conflict, worthy enemies and such. Something like the Withered, or maybe the big brother of the algae in the lake, something that forced me to push myself and my companions.


    Realising that this wasn¡¯t a decision I should make without anyone¡¯s input, I called out for the others. At first, I thought that just calling Lia and Luna would suffice, but it really wouldn¡¯t. Silva, as amusing as it sounded, was likely the one who should have the biggest voice, simply due to her connection to the Army of Dog. Whether the dogs would join us or not was a fairly important question, though I wasn¡¯t really sure what the pack currently did. I knew they kept the area around our lair clear and defended, but other than that, I had no idea. For all I knew, they were planning world domination under the order of their gloriously barking leader. Or, more likely, they didn¡¯t care for world domination and had better plans, plans involving the few remaining fire hydrants, maybe a few sticks and afternoon naps. Far more important, obviously.


    Once the others joined me, I began to explain what question I was considering and the implications of it. Afterwards, I suggested that they take their time to consider and get back to me, only for Lia to shake her head.


    ¡°I don¡¯t really need to consider,¡± she said, her voice bland, almost bored, ¡°I don¡¯t care where we are. I need you, Mother, for your blood gives me strength. I¡¯d like to explore, by now I knew the area around here quite well, making it a little boring, but otherwise, I really don¡¯t care. Maybe if we stay something interesting will happen here, though I doubt it. So, there you have it, I don¡¯t have reasons to stay but I also lack compelling reasons to leave,¡± she shrugged, her focus completely on me. It was almost a little worrying, but there was little I could do about it. She had bonded with Alex, and by the looks of it the critter was agreeing with Lia¡¯s reasoning, so there was that.


    Returning her shrug, I shifted my focus to Luna and Silva. Luna looked a little insecure, shifting around as she sat there, making me think that there was something going on. Maybe something she wanted to keep private or was embarrassed by, so I focused on Silva, leaving my munchkin be.


    ¡°You, Silva? And how would we go about asking the other dogs?¡± I addressed Silva, curious how she would respond. Sure, I needed Luna to translate, at least for more complicated concepts, but given that she was sitting right next to me, that wasn¡¯t really a problem.


    The soft, somewhat warbling growl I got in response was about as close to a canine shrug as possible, clearly signifying that she wasn¡¯t sure herself. When she continued to let out a few growls, I had to look at Luna, to get a translation.


    ¡°Silva herself is with you, that I can promise. Or maybe Hecate would make the promise, I¡¯m not sure. In regards to the rest of the dogs, she¡¯ll have to ask them. I think most of them will come with us,¡± Luna explained, a small grin on her face, ¡°They don¡¯t really care, as long as there¡¯s game to hunt, they are happy. And I¡¯m pretty sure the Guides would be interested in seeing more of the world. She¡¯ll get back to you, once a decision is made.¡±


    For a moment, I simply looked at Luna, waiting for her to speak of her own feelings but when she didn¡¯t, I simply told the others to get back to me, gently placing a hand on her shoulder to keep her while they left.


    ¡°Now, sweetie, what¡¯s on your mind?¡± I asked, a bit of concern flowing into my voice, ¡°You¡¯re worried about something and I can only help you if I know what it is,¡± I reminded her, before sitting back, allowing her space to speak, or to remain quiet if she really needed to.


    ¡°I¡¯m not sure,¡± she admitted, ¡°It¡¯s just that I¡¯ve got a weird, grumbling in my tummy, it¡¯s making me worry. There¡¯s something wrong and I don¡¯t know what,¡± she admitted, looking at me with trepidation in her eyes. Not sure what to say to that, I simply pulled her into a hug, trying to project comfort to the munchkin.


    ¡°I don¡¯t know either, but I¡¯ve learned to listen to my gut, it¡¯s often warning me before I even know what¡¯s going on. We should all keep an eye out and if nothing happens, it¡¯s for the best. But if something bad happens, we are warned and aren¡¯t surprised,¡± I told her, gently rubbing circles on her back while trying to figure out what might be the trigger, if her instincts were warning her of real danger.

 Chapter 865

    My conversation with Luna continued for a little longer, the focus of it shifting from her worries to a more practical thing, namely the question I had been pondering before. What did she want to do and how sad would she be if we left this area behind?


    Maybe I shouldn¡¯t have been surprised to learn that she didn¡¯t really mind leaving. If anything, she welcomed it, as she felt like an outsider amongst the kids at the farm. And, to be fair, she was an outsider, not only did she live somewhere else, namely with me, she was also set apart from them by her power and the power she gained from her position as my daughter. The people at the farm spoke of the Pale Lady, making me wonder if I had gained the title because a certain number of sapient beings named me such, and they spoke the name with fear. They knew I was beyond them, and through me, Luna was, too. While I doubted they knew just how powerful I was, I had a feeling that it didn¡¯t really matter, the stories would only be accurate by accident. The old joke about a broken clock being right twice a day applied here, too.


    Sadly, the only way to get rid of gossip was to wipe out everyone who could gossip and even then, there likely would be some strange spirit remaining, quietly whispering tall tales to anyone willing to listen. No, rumours, lies and gossip could never be destroyed, they¡¯d never fully die, they would evolve. And eventually, they would return.


    Either way, thanks to the tales about my exploits and her own powers, Luna was treated with a mix of awe and fear, making it almost impossible for her to make friends. That she wasn¡¯t able to actively use her powers to help, she was still struggling with the more precise uses of magic, like healing, made matters a little worse, making her appear indifferent to their struggles. We had considered having her walk the fields, radiating Life-Magic, but decided against it. Sure, it would help the crops grow but it would do the same for weeds, insects, fungi and everything else in the field, lessening the assistance. Life-Magic, as a domain, was simply too wide a field to apply narrowly, just like I was struggling with my Death-Magic. Both were sledgehammers, and we had to try to sculpt with them. It wasn¡¯t impossible, per se, but it required a huge amount of practice and experience, neither of which we had. Eventually, yes, but for now, the two of us could only wield those powers in a fairly crude manner.


    Our conversation was interrupted by barking noises from outside, indicating that somebody was approaching. Judging by the noise level, I was quite confident it was one of my students, but what they were doing here this early in the day, I wasn¡¯t sure.


    Luna and I went to the door, opening it to see a surprisingly haggard-looking Kevin enter. He, just like Luna, had grown a great deal in these last few months, turning from an awkward teenager into a somewhat lanky young adult.


    ¡°Hiya, Kev,¡± Luna greeted him with a chirp, making him grin at her for a moment before he focused on me.


    ¡°Greetings, Luna, Greetings Teacher Morgana,¡± he greeted the two of us with a grin, only for a sombre mood to overtake him moments later.


    ¡°I¡¯ve got some troublesome news for you, hopefully you¡¯ll have an idea what to do about it, Teacher,¡± she continued, as I waved him inside.


    ¡°What is it that has you this worried?¡± I asked, my voice carrying both excitement and apprehension. If it was trouble, it might be a worthy challenge.


    ¡°There¡¯s always been a few people who called you a monster, teacher,¡± he began, the earlier amusement long gone, ¡°But these last few days, the number of people doing so has gone up dramatically. I worry that they¡¯ll soon go from talking about doing something to actually doing something, and if that happens, things will be bad,¡± he frowned, shaking his head as if to get rid of images in his head.


    ¡°I¡¯ve got no doubt that you¡¯d be able to either kill everyone at the farm or at the very least deal tremendous damage to people and, more importantly, to the fields and our supplies. You might not be able to win, I don¡¯t really know how powerful you are, teacher, but I¡¯ve got no doubt that you can make anyone acting against you pay dearly,¡± he explained, getting a nod from me in return. I was more confident in my ability to devastate anyone attacking me, but I could see that Kevin lacked the information needed for an educated judgment.


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    Sadly. I could understand his predicament. He¡¯d have to pick a side, only that there was only one side for him to pick. He had to know that joining me was impossible, I hadn¡¯t allowed anyone to join, with the exception of my daughters. And they hadn¡¯t really joined, they had been adopted, something he couldn¡¯t rely on, something I couldn¡¯t even really offer him. Lia and Luna were special cases, cases I wasn¡¯t willing to casually repeat.


    ¡°And what is it that you seek of me?¡± I asked, curious if he had a solution. I had one, it was what I had been considering the entire time, but that might just be a fruitful coincidence.


    ¡°I don¡¯t know,¡± he admitted, the words almost coming out as a sob, ¡°I just know that Mrs Wu has been doing her best to keep people moving, to keep them moving forward and constantly set new and important goals, but that¡¯ll only work for so long. At some point, there¡¯s going to be trouble and with the way things have been going these last few days, that day is going to come soon,¡± he finished, before repeating his earlier sob, ¡°I just don¡¯t know.¡±


    ¡°I see your problem,¡± I admitted, ¡°What else has Mrs Wu done? I doubt the old lady would simply accept that there¡¯s going to be trouble, she¡¯d make some plan to keep her people safe. I just don¡¯t know if she considers me to be one of those,¡± I admitted, thinking about my teacher. There was no doubt in my mind that Mrs Wu had some plan, but I realised that she wouldn¡¯t share, certainly not with somebody who had divided loyalties like Kevin. At least not unless sharing her plan gave her some advantage, and made her plans more likely to succeed.


    ¡°She hasn¡¯t said anything,¡± his words almost confirmed my thoughts, the old lady had something in mind and, unless I missed my next guess, it wouldn¡¯t be beneficial to me. The old lady liked me, but she undoubtedly felt a responsibility for those living under her leadership, meaning the people at the farm.


    Letting out a soft, almost inaudible curse, I realised things on my end had to be accelerated. I didn¡¯t want to find out first-hand what devilry Mrs Wu would come up with to make sure I wasn¡¯t a threat to her people.


    ¡°Can you tell me what happened these last few days to make people mad at me?¡± I came at the problem from another direction. Having been away for a week, there had to be some other trigger for sudden animosity. Either somebody had decided to use me as a scapegoat, to give the people an enemy to rally against, or there was something else. But sudden, random, surges in animosity were rarely that, there was always a trigger.


    ¡°There wasn¡¯t anything I saw, I just heard some new rumours,¡± he admitted, looking a little uncomfortable, ¡°You know how some of your runes are inherently different than those the rest of us use?¡± he asked, continuing when I nodded, ¡°One of the groups found a basement, filled with broken bodies and those runes, at least that¡¯s what I¡¯ve heard. That somebody using those runes murdered a bunch of people and left their bodies to rot.¡±


    ¡°Well, I can promise you that I¡¯ve not consciously killed any human on Earth;¡± I replied, ¡°Unless we are counting former humans, like WIthered, Scorched or Shattered. In addition, I can¡¯t positively exclude that one of my large-scale attacks hasn¡¯t accidentally hit somebody hiding out somewhere, but that¡¯s neither here nor there,¡± I replied, not addressing the fact that a basement filled with bodies and runes was most likely my small laboratory, where I had been experimenting with Mind and Blood Magic.


    ¡°That said, I doubt that any promise from me would convince anybody but those already inclined to believe me. A few of my traits are also liable to disrupt any effort from me to keep things civil, leaving me with few options,¡± I admitted, thinking of the traits I had chosen all those months ago. Lone Traveller, The Road is my Teacher, Unbound, Child of the Wild and, maybe the most impactful of them all, Outsider.


    I wasn¡¯t meant to be sedentary and trying to be connected to a community might just be impossible. It was time for me to accept that and, literally, move on.


    ¡°Thank you for warning us,¡± I told Kevin, standing to shake his hand, ¡°I might visit the farm one last time, to get some supplies and say my farewell. If we don¡¯t meet then, Farewell, and keep moving on the Arcane Path. It¡¯s endless and if you persist, we will meet again. Someday, somewhere,¡± I told Kevin, wishing him the best on his own path.


    We all had our own paths to walk.

 Chapter 866

    Maybe it was for the best that things worked out as they did. There was no real need for us to stick around, especially not if the people at the farm didn¡¯t want us nearby. No need to make things difficult for them, at least as long as they honoured their debts towards me and gave us some additional supplies. We might not strictly need them, we had looted plenty, especially considering our relatively low consumption, but there were principles involved. I had done the people there multiple favours, from teaching to enchanting, and I¡¯d be damned if I simply abandoned that investment.


    I only had to figure out how to extract the appropriate payment without undue effort.


    My best bet might be to work with Mrs Wu, she should understand that paying their debts is the most efficient and least painful way for us to part ways, something that seemed to be necessary given what Kevin told me. If the people start considering me an enemy, they wouldn¡¯t want to pay their debts and if I¡¯d be forced to collect them, it¡¯s incredibly likely that the damage I¡¯d deal on the way was more significant than what they actually owed me. At least if I decided to go at things violently, instead of simply sneaking in, taking what I wanted and sneaking back out. The guards hadn¡¯t been able to stop me before and I doubted they¡¯d manage if I decided to simply move through the shadows. For that, they¡¯d need massive magical support or fairly specialised skills, neither of which they were liable to have.


    The easiest way to drive that point home would likely be a covert home visit with Mrs Wu, by stealthily intruding into her personal space she should immediately realise that working with me was a much better idea than trying to work against me. She knew me, had trained me, but with magic in the mix, I had no doubt that I could overcome her and her defences.


    After explaining my plan to the others, we started to prepare. The easiest way to avoid a confrontation that would help nobody but would be detrimental to everyone involved was for us to leave. If we weren¡¯t here, nobody could confront us and thus, there would be no need for us to defend ourselves, undoubtedly leaving many of the attackers injured or dead.


    While my plan was that I was the only one to enter the farm in the evening, the others would wait nearby for my return, before all of us set off, travelling north. Lia had previously scouted in that direction and according to her, there was nothing significant to see until you reached a nearby forest. Just more fields, a few relatively small villages and farmsteads, nothing tremendously interesting. We should be able to get to the forest in an hour or three, depending on how careful we were and how quickly we decided to move.


    For that, I was somewhat disappointed that the Army of Dog had decided that they didn¡¯t want to continue onwards with us. To them, travelling long distances held little interest, not even with Silva as their leader. Instead, they wanted to make the fields their home, mark parts of it as their territory and feast on the abundant game roaming the area. Maybe I should have expected it, dogs, like wolves, were territorial at their core, but I had been hoping for their support. Alas, they¡¯d remain behind, while it might be my destiny to keep travelling. There were worse things to do.


    My plan was to prepare a simple hideout once we were under the cover of the trees. That would allow us to explore deeper into the forest and once we had more information, we could decide whether or not we should stay there for a time. I was quite curious how much the forest had changed, I doubted it still had endless rows of cultivated trees with very little shrubbery. No, the change would have struck the forest, too, most likely turning it into something more interesting, maybe a place with dangerous, magical beasts roaming around, maybe even something that could challenge us. Lia had never entered, as I had asked her to avoid potentially dangerous places when she was out on her own, leaving us with little information.


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    But first, I had to collect the debts the people at the farm owed me.


    Once the sun set, I quickly moved, not yet stepping into the shadows but simply jogging across the dirt track we usually took towards the farm. There were a few clouds in the sky, making the night exceptionally dark and great for sneaking around. With nothing impeding my progress, it didn¡¯t take long to reach the farm and once I could see the guards and their torches, I decided to give them a lesson and slipped into the shadows.


    By now, I was able to remain hidden for quite some time, especially if I didn¡¯t teleport through the shadows but simply concealed myself. Concealing myself wasn¡¯t without danger, as I had learned when we encountered the Gravehounds, but for now, those were the only enemies I had to fear while hidden this way. The guards, on the other hand, didn¡¯t have the ability to detect me, let alone harm me.


    Like a wraith in the night, I slipped through the guards, their rotation had tightened but I thought I¡¯d still be able to evade them, even if I didn¡¯t move through the shadows, though I didn¡¯t want to test it right now. This was a demonstration of superiority, a message I wanted to send.


    As such, I made my way to Mrs Wu¡¯s office with nobody the wiser, slipping into the somewhat dimply lit room by squeezing through the dark gap beneath her door. The shadows were truly everywhere, and all shadows were connected.


    ¡°Good evening, Mrs Wu,¡± I greeted her, stepping out of the shadows in one of the corners of her office. Demonstrating just why I respected her, she didn¡¯t flinch, or react at all to my intrusion, she merely finished writing some document before turning to me.


    ¡°Good Evening, Samantha,¡± she returned my greeting, her voice the polite mask of a consummate professional.


    ¡°My companions and I have decided that staying in this area would be detrimental for everyone involved. As such, I would like to cash in on the many favours I have done for the people here and have those favours paid out in food and similar supplies,¡± I told her, noticing a brief look of relief on her face before the emotion was hidden behind her polite mask.


    ¡°Yes, I can see what you mean, there are a few troublesome rumours. I have been doing my best to keep things civil, but you know how people can be. Do you trust me to get a fair share of supplies? I believe it would be best for everyone involved if nobody sees you here,¡± she asked, getting a nod in return.


    Dealing with professionals was wonderful. It took Mrs Wu a bit of time, but within half an hour, she returned to the office with a nice selection of produce, mostly from the recent harvest but also some packed supplies from before the change. It wasn¡¯t as much as I had hoped for, but a quick check showed me that the amount she had taken was large enough to be considered fair.


    ¡°Thank you,¡± I nodded to her, ¡°Maybe we will meet again, it was an honour to receive your training, Teacher,¡± I gave her a respectful bow, wishing my former teacher farewell.


    ¡°It was an honour to train you, Samantha. Use my teachings wisely and take care of your little family.¡± Mrs Wu returned the farewell and my bow, while I quickly packed the supplies she had given me away. Given that I was planning to travel through the shadows, I couldn¡¯t use my magical bags but I had prepared enough to carry everything. Maybe I should revisit the magical bags, what I had at the moment worked but it wasn¡¯t perfect, or even adequate, not with the drawbacks involved. Shaking my head and pushing the thought away, I once again bowed to my teacher and disappeared into the shadows, amused that not even vanishing right before her eyes could get a real reaction out of my teacher. I noticed a brief widening of her eyes and nothing more.


    Slipping back out of the guarded area was a little more difficult, mostly because I was laden down with supplies, but I managed without running into trouble, confirming my notion that Mrs Wu hadn¡¯t mentioned my visit to anyone. Maybe she would at some point, possibly to suggest that I had taken the supplies, but I wasn¡¯t sure. And didn¡¯t really care, I had no plans to return in the short- or mid-term, so if the people didn¡¯t like me, I didn¡¯t care.


    Not that plans for the future were my main concern, not when moments before I slipped out of the shadows to join my friends, I could hear a disturbing howl in the distance. There were Gravehounds abound and maybe it was for the best that my party was planning to leave. Those things were a pain.

 Chapter 867

    After hearing the howls of Gravehounds while in the shadows, we moved as quickly as possible without completely abandoning our vigilance. If the hounds were after us, we didn¡¯t want them to happen upon us while we were in battle, that might be the one case where they could cause us serious harm. Otherwise, they were simply too fragile to withstand concentrated strikes from my Darkness Magic but if I didn¡¯t notice them coming, they might get us.


    Luckily, the few beasts roaming the field at night kept well away from us, not even trying to challenge our group. Granted, Lia, Silva and I all let our auras radiate out unrestrained, making it so that everything knew there was danger coming, and that had the effect we hoped for. Everything avoided us, as no enemies were willing to challenge groups of people who had crossed the first divide just yet. Maybe in the future doing as we did now would turn into a death sentence if everything capable of challenging somebody at our level prepared ambushes to harvest some tasty EXP, but for now, it worked just fine.


    What was somewhat fascinating, and almost made me slow down, were the fields. Just after the change, the fields had been pretty boring, just the recently tilled earth as far as the eye could see but over the last few months, that had changed. The farmers must have planted just before the change hit, or maybe there were some seeds still in the ground from the previous year, I wasn¡¯t sure, but either way, the fields had certainly proven fertile. Only, instead of the usual endless golden rows of wheat and other grains, there was now what I could only call a mess. Sure, the majority of the plants were still grain, but there were all sorts of other plants sprouting in the fields, from small trees to shrubs to grass, Nature was swiftly taking back what farmers had cultivated before. I wasn¡¯t sure how long it would take, but I had a feeling that in a few months, maybe during the next year, the fields here would turn into something of a savannah, a mix of shrublands with a few trees thrown in. Or maybe it would turn into a forest, I wasn¡¯t sure, but what I could see was that the plants grew far quicker than I thought possible.


    After briefly stepping into the shadows to make sure there were no Gravehounds closing in on us, I took a moment to inspect the plants a little closer. I was curious how much of the crops were unchanged, still producing the grain humans had bred them to grow, or if they had been changed like everything.


    The result was, amusingly, that both had happened. The few stalks of grain I snapped off still had the ears filled with grains but when I looked at the plants using my Magic Sight, I recognised that the grains weren¡¯t just nutritious, there was something else within. It wasn¡¯t quite like the tiny organisms I had seen in the water but it was close enough to remind me of them, only not as active. It made me wonder if the wild grains would somehow infect people, or if there was something else, maybe something more along the lines of propagating the species by attracting creatures to eat the grains, carry some small part of the seed forward and sprout after¡­ evacuating at the end of the digestive process. That had been the original evolutionary advantage of fruits, so why wouldn¡¯t it make a magically charged comeback? Though, I wasn¡¯t sure I wanted to experiment with this, not as long as i wasn¡¯t sure whether the magically changed grain was similar to the Withered, only waiting for some unsuspecting soul to eat their grains.


    It would be interesting to observe just how the world had changed and would continue to change. Not only the large changes, those were fascinating but fairly obvious, but the small ones. Those could be just as important, only that they couldn¡¯t be observed as easily. Something to keep an eye out for and learn more about during our travels.


    We reached the forest with a lot of time to spare, enough to make me comfortable and look for the best possible spot. While we didn¡¯t need a freshwater source, I wanted to have a somewhat defensible position, if possible dug into a small hill or under a large tree.


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    Just looking at the forest, I had a feeling we would be spoiled for choice. The forest, just like the fields, had undergone a major change since the, well, change, had hit, turning from the cultivated rows of trees into something more primal. The rows were still there, the pattern only broken where quite a few of the trees had been knocked over by something, but between the trees were now rapidly growing vines, shrubs and grasses. It was an utterly wild mess, making me think that travelling through that mess would be a challenge in and of itself. Not even Silva, with her four-paws-drive, could readily make her way through it, there was simply too much stuff in the way.


    Amusingly, it was Lia who demonstrated the obvious trick to it, happily running up a tree with inhuman grace and agility, before pushing off and landing against another tree, making her way through the forest like a giant, flying squirrel. Granted, she caused a lot more disturbance, some of the trees bending or swaying under the impact of her weight, but she didn¡¯t let herself get slowed down by that. She was fully in her element and enjoying herself greatly.


    Sadly, I was the only one who had a chance to copy her, and even I had to cheat with my magic. Wind Magic helped with the jumps, while Blood Magic allowed me to momentarily push my muscles further than normally possible, granting me strength and speed beyond what my already high attributes could do. It was a wonderful experience, one that made me yearn for Lenore, the memories of flying with my dear friends bringing with it bittersweet memories of Sigmir. One day, we would be together again, that I swore to myself.


    But for now, I needed to prepare shelter for the night. By leaping between the trees, I quickly found a good spot, a small hill I wasn¡¯t sure had been there before the change, with a single massive tree up top. I highly doubted that it had been there before the change, certainly not in its current form. Its size was more reminiscent of the redwoods I had seen in some documentary but the shape was completely wrong and its short, thin needles didn¡¯t fit either. Feeling the world around me, I made sure that no troublesome magic was originating from it and was relieved to find nothing bad. Just a somewhat higher concentration of Life, Water, Earth and Nature, making me feel unexpectedly comfortable. Maybe the tree could be used to guard our shelter in some way, though I wasn¡¯t sure what was possible in that regard. There were some ideas in the Zevarrah Agha, but I hadn¡¯t looked at them too closely just yet. The book was filled with knowledge, containing far more than I had thought possible, something I was grateful for.


    After sending Lia back to collect the others and guide them here, I began to work, slowly opening up a small cave beneath the hill, making sure I didn¡¯t accidentally damage the roots. It was fascinating how different working with the Earth here was compared to working with the Earth in the city or near the marshy lake. In the city, the Earth had felt somewhat cold, almost similar to the Ice I usually used, while the Earth near the lake had an almost fluid feel to it as if it was about to run through my hands like water or sand.


    Here, in these almost primal feeling woods, there was a different sort of solidity, not the sterile strength of concrete but a warmer sensation, one that drew my eyes to the tree towering above me. The sensation wasn¡¯t quite like wood but there was a certain connotation to the feeling I got from the Earth, one that was only reinforced when I paused, closing my eyes to focus on tasting the air.


    The sensation made me realise just how much I didn¡¯t know about magic and the different elements, or domains as I had begun to think of them. There were nuances everywhere, small differences in sensation and most likely in application that turned out to be deeper than I thought possible, opening up avenues I hadn¡¯t even considered before.


    It would be up to me, and all the other spellcasters coming after me, to plunge into those depths, to explore the nuances and make our own path.


    As I continued opening up the small cave I wanted to make our temporary home, I noticed that my lips had curled into a smile. Just knowing that I was back to exploring brought me more joy than I had anticipated, maybe becoming sedentary truly wasn¡¯t for me. Maybe I would have to explore myself, too, not just the magic around me.


    What did Sun Tsu say about that, ¡®Know yourself, and know your enemy and you must not fear the result of a hundred battles¡¯? Maybe I should get to know myself, as well as the world around me.

 Interlude: Survivors 404 - Not Found

    Sometimes, important events don¡¯t start with a bang. There was no announcement, no explosive incident, nothing to indicate that something fundamental was changing, just a single whisper, passed from one person to another.


    In this case, the single whisper went something along the lines of, ¡®Have you heard what that insane witch living in the old brewery did?¡¯ and continued from there, either describing how that witch had abducted a young, innocent maiden to corrupt, sometimes speaking of inexplicable horrors perpetrated on the bodies of their fellow men. Not even death meant you were safe from the witch¡¯s perversions, or at least that was what some of those whispering claimed.


    Of course, not everyone agreed with those whispers. Some of those taught by the witch spoke of their teacher¡¯s benevolence, about her great deeds and the things she had done to protect them and help everyone on the farm set up their current way of life. It was only thanks to their teacher¡¯s guidance that they had people able to conjure water at a moment¡¯s notice. Those conjurers gave everyone who needed it fresh to drink, greatly improved sanitation and irrigated the fields. What¡¯s more, it was only thanks to the nature magic some had learned from her that the crops were ripening quickly and yielding enough grain to keep everyone fed, despite the lack of modern equipment and fertiliser.


    Sadly, despite the voices speaking of the witch¡¯s, or the Pale Lady¡¯s as many called her, deeds, the horrifying stories were repeated far more often. Maybe it was a natural fascination with the macabre, maybe a drive to tear down those greater than oneself, or maybe there were other reasons, at the end of the day, it mattered little. The whispers became more and more numerous, and those whispering started to increase their volume until they weren¡¯t whispering any longer but shouting at the top of their lungs.


    And once they shouted their vile words, it didn¡¯t take long for them to shout other things. To call for action. Not that those loudly shouting were the ones who wanted to take that action, no, they wanted to be heard and obeyed, even if that desire was only subconscious. And maybe, just maybe, they were a little afraid that those taking action would be met with resistance, with retribution and horrifying fates, for they had heard the whispers of the witch¡¯s power. No, those shouting loudly didn¡¯t want to suffer for their shouting.


    To Wu Chunhua, the shouting mattered little. There was no real structure in the leadership of the farm. They had formed a council, allowing those who could lead to do so, to debate their decisions and provide some guidance for the people living in their community, but that was it. There was no voting, they didn¡¯t have any kind of mandate, beyond the simple mandate of stepping up when leadership was needed. It was the best and worst kind of mandate, they didn¡¯t have any formal responsibility, no oath, no structure, nothing to guide them but their own conscience and experience, and no duty but to keep their people alive.


    It was with that duty in mind that Mrs Wu had decided to give her student, the one mostly called the Pale Lady now, what she had asked for. If giving Samantha some supplies meant she, alongside her companions, would leave the area as she had implied, there would be no way for those shouting loudly around the farm to vent their ire. They could shout as long and as loudly as they wanted, they might even set fire to the brewery or something along those lines, but it would all amount to nothing. Nobody would get killed in that mess unless those shouting were exceptionally stupid, and hopefully, it would all blow over eventually, once their target was gone.


    The alternative was incredibly dangerous, namely that those shouting continued to shout, that they turned their ire away from the somewhat distant and remote Pale Lady to the local spellcasters. Because if that happened, things would get seriously troublesome. The Farm and its people needed the spellcasters, just like the spellcasters needed the raw manpower symbolised by the people living on the farm. Even with their impressive powers, the few people walking the Arcane Path lacked the ability to do everything, to say nothing about those important, yet mundane, tasks like standing guard or the various tasks needed to turn the produce into food. All those were done by ordinary people, most of whom weren¡¯t really interested in the paths to power at all, or were walking the martial or the civilised path.


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    Maybe that was a problem to be dealt with in time. Only about a quarter, perhaps a little more, of the people at the farm had developed an interest in gaining personal power. The rest were all too willing to go back to a peaceful life, as they had enjoyed before the world had changed. A life without the need to defend themselves, allowing them to sleep peacefully thanks to soldiers, police officers and various other rough men standing ready to do violence on their behalf. Only, how long would that work as it did currently? And how long would the rough man be willing to do that violence, unless there was some serious reciprocity?


    And the existence of attributes didn¡¯t help matters, as gaining the benefits of levels came with combat and danger. How long would it take until people started to require certain attributes for certain jobs? A certain segregation was almost unavoidable, though exactly on what lines was, luckily, a question that would only be answered in the future.


    For now, there were far more important questions that needed to be addressed. Maybe an inspection of the guards and their duties was once more a necessity. Once the disappearance of supplies from the communal stores was discovered, the guards would be scorned for a time and maybe that scorn would finally get them to do their job properly.


    To Wu Chenhua¡¯s surprise, the guards weren¡¯t slacking like they usually did. Instead, they appeared to be attentive, almost to the point of being scared. Upon questioning, they all admitted that they had a strange feeling in their gut, a primal sense of unease that sharpened their senses. Something was out there and none of them liked it.


    It didn¡¯t take long for the question of what was out there to be answered. Sadly, the answer came as a loud scream of pain, clearly human in origin, and when they all investigated, they came across one of their guards, dead. Dead and torn apart, as if she had been mauled by some sort of beast. Only, if a beast had done the attacking, there would be something missing, animals didn¡¯t attack out of spite, they attacked when they were desperate for food or to defend their young. Or, rarely, if they had some sort of disease, which might be the case here.


    Nobody could really tell, only that something had come for the young woman, something that managed to strike her down without giving her time to do more than scream in pain. And by the complete lack of any indication of a battle, it didn¡¯t seem like she had a chance to fight back.


    Suddenly, the remaining guards were far more attentive, even beyond their earlier improved performance. Something out there had struck at the farm, struck in a way none of them could explain.


    Only Wu Chenhua had a theory. She doubted that it had been Samantha¡¯s doing, her old pupil wouldn¡¯t attack somebody out of spite, not without a motive. Simply killing a guard, especially after all debts had been cleared, didn¡¯t feel like something her student would do. No, Wu Chenhua thought it was far more likely that her former student, with the considerable power she had at her disposal, had served as a deterrent, her mere presence enough to keep some of the more mystical creatures from attacking.


    Samantha was a monster but maybe the presence of that monster had kept all the other monsters out of her territory. Now, the monster had moved on and left the territory she had claimed behind. And the people needed to deal with the other monsters out there, needed to prepare a defence. For they were coming, as the dead guard proved.


    The alarm was raised and the more experienced fighters were roused from their sleep. The farm was under attack for the first time, under attack by an enemy they knew nothing about, other than that they had slaughtered one of their guards out of hand.


    And just as Wu Chenhua thought things couldn¡¯t get worse, a strange howl filled the air, echoing in an impossible way as if it was bouncing off something nobody could see or feel. It was impossible and all the more eerie for it, though it made sure everyone was on high alert.


    They only had to survive the rest of the night. And the next day, and every other day, now that they no longer enjoyed the protection bestowed upon them by the benevolent monster next door.

 Chapter 868

    Softly whistling to myself, I opened up the space beneath the giant tree. There was an almost impossible warmth to the earth here, it was teeming with vitality and power, making me wonder if I could use some of that power for my own purposes. Images painted by the words of a brilliant writer, later adapted into excellent movies, flittered through my mind, describing a wonderful hole in the ground, filled with warmth, excellent food and laughter, a hobbit hole. While I doubted I could get the same effect, my current magic was a little too limited for that, I could get the next best thing. I could make this hole of ours comfortable, the earth was already filled with warmth and hopefully, Luna could provide the laughter. Maybe that would be enough to give us a comfortable home for the time we spent exploring the forest, before moving on once more, letting the road teach us the ways of the world.


    Changing the ground before me was a fascinating experience. The more earth I moved, the more I felt the stress coming from above shift, making me realise that I couldn¡¯t just continue on willy-nilly. Instead, I needed to focus on those stresses caused by the weight above and make sure that they were transmitted down, deeper into the earth, otherwise, the tree above would fall and destroy the wonderful hole I was digging. That alone would be annoying, but if it happened while I, or anyone in my group, was inside the hole, it would be outright bad.


    But there was a certain feel to it, making me think that the ground wanted to move in certain directions and I had to make sure those vectors were shored up and supported so that the load could easily traverse them without hindrance. What¡¯s more, I could faintly feel the strong roots spread throughout the hill I was digging into and those roots offered some interesting options, mostly by keeping the earth clumped together and distributing the load from above in ways the ground normally couldn¡¯t.


    Thus, arches formed and were, at first, supported by magic until the continued application of Earth Magic turned the compressed dirt into something else, it wasn¡¯t quite rock but it wasn¡¯t far from it. Following my instincts and searching for stability, I started to include some Crystal Magic and even drew on my experience with Ice Magic to guide me. While I wasn¡¯t about to freeze parts of the soil, working with Ice was incredibly similar to working with other crystals, to the point that I started to wonder if I could somehow combine the two different types of magic. Or that maybe Ice Magic was a unique sub-type of Crystal Magic, I couldn¡¯t be sure about that but it was a fascinating idea. Either way, I could soon see thin lattices of crystals form within the compressed earth, taking the load from above and even integrating into the tree roots, stabilising things even further.


    It was an utterly fascinating sensation, both from a visual standpoint, the tiny, glimmering lattices almost looked like a starry sky, and from a structural standpoint. The sensation of interconnected stability gave me something new to think about, especially when I noticed that there was a tiny bit of magical feedback flowing within the roots of the giant trees above as if the trees were making sure that their foundation wouldn¡¯t crumble. It made me wonder if I could actively provoke certain types of feedback in an attempt to make our hole more comfortable. Maybe induce the tree roots to release some energy as light or warmth, in exchange for nourishment that the tree normally wouldn¡¯t get? Could something like this work, or was I trying to assign too much agency to a block of wood? I wasn¡¯t sure, but given that the tree had its own magic, I wasn¡¯t about to discard any ideas, magic made far too many wild ideas completely plausible.


    My thoughts were interrupted by noise approaching my position. After quickly making sure that the hole wouldn¡¯t collapse the moment I stopped channelling my magic, I jumped up, running up the tree with ease that made me want to chuckle. Disappearing into the crown was a trifle and a bit of Darkness magic turned me into a shadow between the thin needles.


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    Only to realise that the whole thing hadn¡¯t been necessary. The noise was made by a large canine, with a smaller humanoid riding on its back, while a second humanoid with a racoon playing shawl around her neck followed behind. In other words, it was the rest of my group, not some dangerous predator, but maybe that was for the best.


    With a grin on my face, I let myself fall into the shadows behind me, only to reappear in the shadows behind Lia, causing her to squeak in surprise and jump aside, only to scowl at me when she recognised me. Amusingly, Luna seemed to have noticed my teleport and it looked like Silva had noticed me even before I had teleported, but then, I had only cloaked myself from vision, not from scent or sound, so she could easily find me. Her senses were only second to mine, thanks to some canine traits that greatly boosted her olfactory and auditory senses.


    ¡°I¡¯ve started to make us our new home. We didn¡¯t go far but this forest is interesting enough to take a few days to explore, so having a nice place to stay is useful,¡± I explained, gesturing towards the narrow opening between some of the thicker tree roots. It didn¡¯t look like much, just a narrow crevice that went nowhere, but that was exactly what I had intended, it wasn¡¯t supposed to look inviting. I didn¡¯t want some random critter to decide that it was a nice place to make a burrow, it was just for us. If I had been able to, I would have created some sort of door but the best I could do in that regard would be a door of Ice and that wouldn¡¯t really work with the summer temperatures. I already had to maintain my Ice weapons twice daily, to make sure they didn¡¯t melt away from the heat and I didn¡¯t think a door open to the heat would fare any better.


    ¡°Mum, would you mind if I set up a small shrine for the Lady?¡± Luna asked, her voice somewhere between hesitant and excited as if she was scared to show her desire.


    ¡°Of course not, I¡¯d be happy to help if I can. I¡¯m supposed to be the Mother, in addition to your Mother, or have you forgotten that already? Just because I¡¯ve been a little busy doesn¡¯t mean I don¡¯t support your bond the the Lady,¡± I assured her, giving her a quick hug to make sure she not only heard but felt my support.


    ¡°Ok, it¡¯s just that you never went with me when the dogs and I sent our thoughts to her, so¡­¡± she shrugged, obviously not sure how to continue. And there wasn¡¯t really a need, I hadn¡¯t gone with her because I thought it was between her and the dogs, that I¡¯d intrude somewhere I wasn¡¯t wanted. Apparently, she had thought I didn¡¯t join them because I had misgivings, and a lack of communication had caused things to fester. Had maybe even been the cause for the dogs to remain behind, instead of joining us, I wasn¡¯t sure.


    ¡°No, never. I just thought one thing, you thought another thing and because neither of us explained what we thought to the other, things got confused,¡± I admitted, promising myself that I¡¯d get better at communicating things to my daughters.


    ¡°But that¡¯s for later. Munchkin, why don¡¯t you sit with me and try joining me while I continue preparing our home? It¡¯s fairly fascinating Earth Magic and I think you might be able to get a bit of Life Magic going with the tree you see above our home. The tree has its own powers, subtle and completely different from what I¡¯ve been used to, so you should be able to learn something. Just be careful not to overdo it with your magic, you know that wild growth can cause more harm than anything else,¡± I suggested to Luna while asking Silva, Lia and Alex to do some scouting of our surroundings, maybe catch some food for our pantry. Before we filled that, I¡¯d have to make sure that the supplies I got from the farm didn¡¯t have any problems, just as a precaution. I doubted Mrs Wu would do that to me, it wouldn¡¯t serve any purpose beyond turning me into a definitive enemy, but a bit of paranoid vigilance hadn¡¯t hurt me yet.


    Luna happily complied, sitting down next to me and I could feel her ability to merge her magic with mine reach out, allowing us to work seamlessly together. For now, she couldn¡¯t contribute much but she was learning and getting better all the time. And in turn, I was getting more and more out of it, having Hecate¡¯s chosen Maiden help with spellcasting was truly a blessing.

 Chapter 869

    Having the munchkin by my side made things far easier than it should have by any measure known to me. There was something about her presence, something beyond the skills and affinities she had been blessed with that made working magic flow smoother, as if an unknown obstacle was removed. The change wasn¡¯t truly major but it was noticeable, her presence adding just that little extra to make me feel content. I wasn¡¯t about to question the effect her presence had on me, but I certainly took note.


    In addition, there was the very direct effect her skills had on me, especially now that we were working in close contact with another magical entity, even if that entity was a large tree. The tree had enough power to have gained a level, something I was made aware of by Luna. Otherwise, I¡¯d never have thought to Observe a mostly ordinary tree, certainly not unless it started to move. But when I did on her suggestion, I became aware that the tree was actually level eight, which I considered fairly impressive for, well, a completely immobile tree. It wasn¡¯t as if it could go out and hunt some rabbits or something like that, it hadn¡¯t even shown the mobility to hit something that came into its range. The only plausible way I could currently imagine for it to gain those levels was a mechanic similar to the one giving me EXP when I taught people about magic, though given that I had no idea how that actually worked, it didn¡¯t help much.


    However, Luna, and possibly her affinity for Life-Magic, made working in close proximity to the tree even easier as if the tree was actively trying to support our work. In turn, I noticed that the air was filled with a distinct and fairly pleasant scent, making me think of spring and renewal, the scent of Life-Magic. Studying the air around me, I realised that Luna was, maybe subconsciously, letting her Astral Power fill the air and some of it was absorbed by the tree. If I had to guess, I¡¯d think that the flow of Life-Magic was beneficial for the tree and in response to that gift, it was releasing some of its own powers over the Earth to help us.


    The whole exchange made me wonder how far Luna might be able to push that connection. So far, she had only worked successfully with plants and their seeds, animals had demonstrated the need for a delicacy she had yet to achieve. That inability also proved that attributes were only a part of the equation, or that maybe her attributes were suppressed, for lack of a better word, by her immature physical body and mind. It would certainly go a long way to explain some of her troubles, she simply wasn¡¯t mature enough to handle the powers pushed upon her by the system and me.


    But what was done in the past couldn¡¯t be changed and even if I could change it, I still wasn¡¯t sure if I should. I doubted there was a good answer out there, only varying shades of bad and I doubted anyone but a Deity of the appropriate domain could give an educated answer of which was the least bad option. We¡¯d have to live with what had happened and try to make things go as smoothly as possible, to give the munchkin a decent childhood.


    And in this case, that meant giving her a nice shrine to Hecate, maybe her own room for a bit of privacy, even if our new home was anything but normal. Unless one was a hobbit, in that case, our holey home would likely be seen as normal, at least once we had done some work to make it nice.


    Opening up more space by compressing the ground was exhausting work, even with Luna and the tree above helping me, it took time. Not endless amounts but to open up more than a simple cavern took hours, especially due to the ever-increasing need to keep things stable, to make sure that the stress from above didn¡¯t make everything collapse. With that in mind, I didn¡¯t try to push things just yet and kept things to a pair of chambers, one for Lia and one for Luna while I¡¯d simply take up what would eventually become a hallway. There was still a lot of work to be done, but for now, it was enough.


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    Creating the shrine to Hecate was a similarly fascinating work, only this time, I was the one taking the backseat, while Luna was doing most of the work. Watching her move slowly and deliberately, as if guided by some unheard melody and unseen instructions was fascinating, especially when I noticed the glow from her eyes, strong enough to be visible through her closed eyelids. Unless I was completely off-base, she was strongly communing with Lady Hecate, getting the instructions on how to make the shrine just right directly from the source. It was the only plausible explanation I could come up with as I watched her start to sing in an unknown language, causing the air to be filled with Divine Power and making the tree react far too fluidly for any plant.


    A single root grew from one of the walls, before thickening and hardening into a woody structure. Under Luna¡¯s ministrations, the treetrunk-like root changed, turning into an idol of Hecate, one that greatly resembled the one I had made from Ice, back before Luna gained her class. There were some distinct differences, for one the face of the Mother looked suspiciously like me, the face of the Maiden like Luna and, to my surprise, the face of the Crone was that of the Grandmother. Given that it was impossible for Luna to know that face, I could put down another mark for divine inspiration, though I wasn¡¯t sure what to make of the whole thing.


    But what definitely caught my interest was the way the power filling the space just moments before was suddenly sucked into the idol, only to billow out seconds later, not loose like it had been, but clearly structured. Letting my senses spread, I realised that the power had turned into a ward of some sort, radiating out from the idol and encompassing the entire hill and a few metres beyond that. What the ward did, I had no idea but there was a definitive feeling of welcome, coupled with a serene peace. A sanctuary, a space where violence had no place, at least that was my best guess of what happened.


    ¡°That was something,¡± I grinned, my arms steadying the exhausted Luna. Noticing a change in the corner of my eyes, I realised that I had received a notification.


    ¡°Mhm, we now got the Lady watching over us,¡± Luna grinned as she replied, ¡°We won¡¯t stay forever, but for now, we¡¯ve got a home,¡± she declared, before leaning back into my embrace and seemingly nodding off.


    Shaking my head, I glanced at the notification, learning that we had established a sanctuary of Hecate, though the notification didn¡¯t give any additional details. I¡¯d have to guess what it meant, but it was something I¡¯d have to explore later, as so many things.


    For now, I had to take care of my exhausted munchkin, make up a bed and get her to rest. By the looks of it, she really needed it, maybe her dreams, or later mine, would give some insight into the whole situation.


    Once Luna was put to bed and deeply asleep, I moved back out of the shelter we had created. Looking at the tree above it, I realised that it, too, had changed massively. Not so much physically, it was still the same size and species, a yew tree if I was correct, but the feeling I got from it was completely different. Using Observe again told me that the tree had gained multiple levels, bringing it to level fourteen, and in addition to the levels, there was something else, a distinct connection I recognised from my contact with Luna and Silva.


    For a moment, the image of the tree, dressed in its Sunday¡¯s finest, knocking on some doors to spread the message of Lady Hecate flickered through my mind, making me giggle just a little. I had no idea how that was supposed to work, but apparently, the Gods didn¡¯t really need their followers, or their Blessed because that tree wasn¡¯t moving anywhere, to be sapient, or sentient for that matter. Shaking my head, I decided that I shouldn¡¯t even try to concern myself with who the Gods wanted to bless, if Hecate felt the tree made a good addition to her congregation, who was I to question that decision?


    It certainly would give us shade and shelter, so maybe it wasn¡¯t even a bad decision, just an odd one. At least to my sensibilities, but given that I had no idea how a deity thought or related to the world, maybe there was little difference between the tree and humanoids in their eyes.


    Either way, we now had a new home and I¡¯d soon be able to explore the forest around us. I could hardly wait, new things to explore were always welcome.

 Chapter 870

    With a wide grin on my face, I pushed off the branch I had taken a short break on, flying through the air to reach the next. There was a lot of forest to explore, far more than I had thought possible. It would take us days, maybe even weeks, to explore it all, and that was with the fairly insane speed Lia and I could use to traverse it. It was something I had done on Mundus, though with quite a bit of help from Lenore, and now I was doing it on Terra, too.


    My attributes were high enough to perform some frankly inhumane feats of athleticism, especially if I augmented them with some Blood Magic. My favourite amongst those feats, by far, was to leap from tree to tree, like some sort of squirrel, avoiding the thick underbrush near the ground level thanks to the height I was travelling at. It didn¡¯t work everywhere, the trees had to be strong and close enough for it, but it worked well enough that I had decided to go exploring on my own, at least for some time. Given that I always could slip into the shadows and get myself out of sticky situations, I wasn¡¯t really worried about enemies, though I remained vigilant. There was no need to blunder into Gravehounds or something similar and get myself bitten in the behind for my troubles.


    Thanks to my way of avoiding the ground level of the forest, I could rapidly traverse it, though I obviously missed out on quite a bit by doing so. Looking for tracks when walking on the ground was easy, looking for tracks while leaping from tree to tree some five to ten metres above the ground was decidedly difficult, if not impossible. To make matters worse, it didn¡¯t look like the forest had gained the predator-prey equilibrium it eventually would, there were far too many prey animals and too few predators, at least from what I could tell. There seemed to be near-infinite numbers of squirrels sharing the treetops with me and the number of various birds was similarly off the charts and near the edge of the forest, where it met the fields, I had come across a large number of burrows, mostly rabbits. Those rabbits had been what Lia and Silva usually turned into our dinner, a resource we only had to share with some weasels, foxes, dogs and several formerly domesticated cats. The last ones were the primary predators in the forest, the dogs stuck to the fields and the others didn¡¯t have the numbers.


    It made me wonder how long it would take for the current cats and dogs to turn back into a more primal form, something less adapted to human cohabitation and more to the wilderness. Or, alternatively, how long would it take for those not easily adaptable to die off if they hadn¡¯t already? It was a fascinating question. especially as the system made adaption a whole different game than it had been before the change. Instead of having to adapt over successive generations, with the traits best suited to reproduce passing down, the system allowed for a far more individual change.


    It was especially obvious with those small purse dogs, the chihuahuas and what-not. Their only purpose had been to look cute, or at least what some considered cute, and not take up a lot of space, leaving them completely unsuited to survive without a somewhat caring owner. And yet, it seemed that those very purse dogs were somehow able to wield magic the easiest, as my experiences with the Army of Dog had shown, giving them the skill to survive and thrive. I was fairly certain that similar adaptions of individual beasts would in some way be passed down to their eventual offspring, essentially causing new branches to emerge. Maybe in a few decades, there would be various flavours of small, magical canine, to mix and match against their larger, physically adjusted counterparts.


    It would be fascinating to observe and my greatest regret was that I couldn¡¯t observe everything at once. Maybe I¡¯d have to do a little begging with the Lady Hecate, there might be some way to gain access to the stores of knowledge and observations She likely had. Or, if I was a good Mother to Luna, I might eventually gain access to the library She had to have.


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    Though, to be fair, the primary danger for critters in the forest didn¡¯t come from some predating animal, it was far more interesting. It came from an impossibly large variety of carnivorous plants, none of which had existed before the change happened. There were numerous vines, shrubs and grasses around that all seemed to have developed a taste for flesh and blood, though a few also targeted insects. However the vast majority was after meat, not just protein, and the ways the plants were waging war on their supposed predators were immensely varied and fascinating.


    The most numerous were the vines and I almost got tangled up in a few before I easily recognised the signs and learned to avoid them. They were somewhat similar to ivy, wrapping around trees but the biggest difference was that these vines didn¡¯t cling, they merely used the trees to climb, laying in wait for some unsuspecting critter to fly or run by. Once that happened, the vines whipped out with surprising speed and force, wrapping the critter up in a ball and crushing it. The behaviour was somewhat similar to constricting snakes, though the plants didn¡¯t swallow their prey, they simply wrapped themself around it and digested it within that ball. I wasn¡¯t sure if they had some specialised fluids to help, some sort of acid or something that they exuded after catching something, but it was something Alex was investigating. While making sure to stay as far away from them as possible, while I was far too large to be a viable target for them, Alex was completely in their range.


    In addition to the vines, some shrubs might have spawned from some horror movie. My first encounter with them was when I noticed some tasty-looking berries, just sitting there between the leaves and decided to investigate. It was only thanks to my nose warning me that there was a distinct scent of poison and death in the air that I looked more closely and noticed the wicked thorns on the plant and when I used a bit of Ice to poke the plant in an attempt to harvest the berries, the result was explosive. The plant shot numerous of its thorns into the direction of the offending appendage, with enough force to break my conjured Ice. When I carefully picked up the thorns, they all had a distinct coating of fluid, one that was poisonous enough to rapidly paralyse a few critters, killing them shortly after. I had no idea what sort of defensive mechanism that was supposed to be, but when I investigated the plant a little more, I noticed multiple small bones nestled between its roots, making me wonder if it was defensive or if the berries were bait. Either way, I took notes and decided to investigate the poison at some point, maybe in another joint project with Alex. They would certainly love the stuff.


    Lastly, there were the grasses, growing between the trees and maybe the most, or least, dangerous plant in the forest. They were completely harmless to everything standing about a metre in height, or able to keep their head above that level, but the grass was deadly for the rest. Similarly to the poison-thorn brush, the grass was poisonous, but instead of killing violently and nearly instantly, it was sweet-smelling, inviting a critter to nom on a bit of grass before the soporific effect kicked in. Once the critter was asleep, it would never wake again, its flesh, blood and bones turned into nutrients for the grass. The whole carpet of grass might be a single organism, I had yet to investigate. There might be some way to domesticate the grass, as amusing that idea sounded, but I wasn¡¯t sure we¡¯d remain in the area long enough for it to be viable. Either way, my focus was on other things, leaving the plants for Alex to study, with a bit of help from Lia.


    Curiously, while the sheer number of critters in the forest should have stripped it bare of everything even remotely edible, that wasn¡¯t the case. I guessed that the carnivorous plants caused something of an equilibrium of their own, killing enough critters to keep the rest from certain parts of the forest, but I wasn¡¯t sure.


    What I knew was that there were quite a few berries of various unknown types and even some larger fruits, something that might have been apples in a previous life, or maybe pears or something along those lines. It was fascinating to look at fruits I had never seen before and wonder what had brought them into existence, though given the sheer lethality of the other plants I was somewhat hesitant when it came to tasting them. There was no way that I¡¯d get myself killed because I thought some fruit looked like an apple, so it should taste like one, too, and not try to kill me. In that regard, caution was the buzzword of every day we remained in the forest, caution, vigilance and paranoia, the holy trinity of staying alive.

 Chapter 871

    The last few days had been quite interesting. Exploring the forest and its¡­ fascinating flora was something else, making me wonder about the speed of adaption in regards to the system. It seemed to me that some of the simpler organisms had rapidly adapted and became something wholly new, as the Withering Fungus and the magic algae in the lake had done. Similarly, the carnivorous plants here in the forest weren¡¯t something I¡¯d have considered possible, while most animals lagged behind by quite a bit. Even for humans, the adaptions were relatively minor, with the exceptions of magical powers, though there was one major exception to that idea, namely Lia.


    But she might just be an exception, as she hadn¡¯t really been living before the change, certainly not in her current form. The Carnelia who lived now shared some memories with the Chantalle before the change but that was it, her perspective had shifted, and the lens through which she interpreted those memories was different. Furthermore, her body had been changed by a major influx of Astral Power, turning her from the Shattered she had been into something new. So, had the human Chantalle adapted? Not really, it was more that I had taken some parts of that human and built something new with them, just like the Withered Fungus had taken parts of different creatures and made its Hunters, Skulkers and Husks with them, the original creature was present but only in parts and the operating was left to the fungus.


    The only real exceptions in that regard were those who had accepted a Legacy if their legacy was one of a greatly different race. For example, the difference between a human and a Firn Elf was relatively minor, to the point that a Firn Elf could pass as a human in the right lighting, or maybe with some make-up. But compared to a centaur, a naga or something equally alien, the differences were minimal.


    Another unexpected aspect of the forest and its critters was that some of those critters were actively adapting to the changes in the environment. Again, evolution in action, only that it didn¡¯t take successive generations of natural selection for large changes to emerge. It only took a few encounters with danger, maybe a couple of levels and some luck on the side of the critter for them to gain an adaption that would take dozens of generations.


    Maybe the most fascinating I came across was something I dubbed a Lightning Squirrel, and if it had been yellow, or maybe white-blue, it could have easily starred in an anime during my childhood. Instead, it retained its boring brown colour, allowing it to blend in with the forest until it needed to move to evade one of the many carnivorous plants. At that moment, it used some sort of ability I assumed was similar to my own Draconic Leap to explode forward with lightning speed, leaving behind a crackling afterimage and causing a clap of thunder. I doubted there was any real offensive utility of the move, the squirrels just didn¡¯t have enough mass for their impact to count, but it was most certainly impressive.


    Until I managed to hit one of them with a confusion curse mid-leap. The result remained impressive, but a much more gory impression as the squirrel impressed itself so hard on the tree it had been aiming for that it¡­ squished. Somewhat similar to the effect an egg would have if it was thrown against a rock with great force, it was messy.


    After stalking the squirrels for a bit, neither Lia nor I discovered anything exceptional about them, other than their mad dashes to escape danger. It made them somewhat interesting, but it wasn¡¯t enough for us to seriously investigate them.


    Instead, we went looking for other things, something that wasn¡¯t a murderous plant or a small rodent, something that might challenge us in the massive forest. For that was what the forest turned out to be, massive. Far bigger than it had any real right to be, and when I investigated a road that had once led into the forest I came up with nothing. The road was still there, happily going through the fields, even if the lack of maintenance and repeated earthquakes had taken a toll on it, the asphalt hadn¡¯t gone anywhere. Until it hit the forest and within a few metres, it went from rough and in dire need of some serious work to broken until it simply vanished, as if the very forest had consumed the thing. In my search, I had started looking for any indication of where it had been, something like signs, broken cars or anything like that, but there was nothing. It was utterly bizarre, to the point that I had been running around, carefully sniffing the air to search for trace magic.


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    I even brought in Luna, who had a clear and incredibly pronounced dislike for the forest as it hindered her trusty canine steed, while Lia and I moved through the trees. That meant during most nights, Silva and Luna were left in our shelter, while Lia, Alex and I explored, though I took some time during the day to take care of my munchkin. if nothing else, it brought her sleeping schedule back to something adequate for a human child, hopefully helping her body and mind to develop.


    Sure, I was forced to sleep fairly little, as I didn¡¯t want to leave Luna alone until the afternoon, but I could cope. And if not, I could simply grab Luna for an afternoon nap, amusingly, that was one of her favourite things to do, let herself get carried into a tree, nestle in somewhere near the crown and still in its shade, and nap for an hour or two, cuddled up to me. While it wasn¡¯t real sleep, it certainly was restful, even if the odd sunbeam broke through the canopy above and irritated me.


    Sleeping high up in the canopy also made me think of my dear friend Lenore. Missing her was different compared to missing Sigmir, one had been a constant companion and friend but Sigmir had been so much more. Taking out the feather she had sent me via the ritual didn¡¯t help matters much. Holding it brought me a sense of calm, even as I wondered what I might be able to do with it. The feather held her presence, maybe even part of her essence as Lenore was primarily a creature of spirit, malleable in ways a normal being just wasn¡¯t, and it made me wonder. Could I use the feather in some way to regain a shape similar to hers, maybe some sort of shape-shifting? I¡¯d love to fly once more, just the second-hand experience I had gotten with Lenore had been glorious, but learning to do it on my own? It would be an incredible gift.


    Alas, for now, I could only look at the feather and tell Luna about my avian friend. Talking to her helped, though I had yet to breach the topic of my lost love. How could I speak to Luna, who had lost both her parents, about my lost love and my desire to bring Sigmir back into this world without tearing open those barely healed wounds? I just didn¡¯t know.


    In regards to the mystery road, Luna¡¯s presence changed nothing. Even with her help, we didn¡¯t manage to find any clues which started to seriously intrigue me. It wasn¡¯t as if there was a way to get rid of the entire structure and have grass, trees and shrubs grow over it, at least not without some major magic being involved. And yet, that was what seemingly had happened, as impossible as my mind insisted that was, especially without lingering traces of magic.


    I even considered going back to town and looking for an old road map so I could try following the path it had to have gone once, but given that I couldn¡¯t even follow it with its starting point easily accessible, I discarded the idea. There was something going on with the forest, that much was certain, but I had yet to find out what.


    That¡¯s how we decided to go about things, getting a map and comparing what was here now to what used to be here before the change. However, instead of going back to town myself, I asked Lia, simply because she had better physical attributes and a greater speed.


    When she got back from town, a relatively high-resolution map in hand, we started to compare and even at first glance, I could only shake my head in disbelief. While I had known that the forest had changed, the sheer scope had been outside my imagination. Instead of a stretch maybe two kilometres wide and four kilometres long, the forest now was far, far larger, possibly ten times the size, or even more. We had yet to find its boundaries and I had to wonder, just how widespread was this sort of change. What had happened to the places that used to be within the forest, the buildings and so on?


    I had no idea but I wanted to find out, as this was completely outside of anything I had considered possible.

 Chapter 872

    ¡°It should be somewhere nearby,¡± Lia grumbled, looking around once more. As so often these last few nights, it was only Lia and myself out here. Alex had decided to remain behind and perform some experiments on the somnus grass, as we had dubbed the grass that constantly spread magical sleeping gas, in an attempt to harness its effect, while Luna and Silva simply couldn¡¯t keep up with us. It was a major cause of annoyance for my canine companion and I did not doubt that she¡¯d repay that annoyance by running Lia and me to the ground once we were back out in the open but for now, she was sulking. Sulking and praying, as she worked with Luna to improve their divinely granted abilities. How exactly that worked, I had no idea but it involved a whole lot of kneeling in front of the statue Luna had created while releasing copious amounts of Astral Power. Doing so was fairly exhausting, causing the two of them to sleep through the night and nap for large portions of the day.


    ¡°Agreed, we have a fair idea how quickly we were moving and kept the direction constant, so we know where we are. Now, if only the world could agree with what should be here,¡± I snarked back, knowing that Lia was just as annoyed with our circumstances as I was. To be fair, I was more intrigued than annoyed, though that was slowly shifting as the many questions the forest¡¯s state posed couldn¡¯t be answered. It was incredibly dissatisfying to search for answers and come up without any, or rather, with answers that made no sense.


    We had done pretty much anything we could come up with, we had circled the forest and learned that it was almost ten times the size it used to be before the change, which was fascinating in and of itself, but nothing impossible. Greatly increased maturation for plants, why not, we had seen it before, even if none of the Nature Mages we had seen could get anywhere near the magnitude needed to grow the forest.


    No, the impossibility came when we compared what was around the forest, especially the road. It went into the forest and vanished without a trace, so far, so good, but when travelling to the other side of the forest, it emerged back out of it, just as broken as its counterpart.


    The only problem? When comparing the kilometre markers, the distance covered before the change and after the change hadn¡¯t changed. What was a distance of three kilometres before the change had somehow, impossibly, turned into a distance of roughly twenty kilometres.


    That was the point where I began to get a headache. To make matters worse, when we compared the features around the forest in the other directions, the effect was identical, at least by our reckoning. The various farms and towns in the distance were where they should be in relation to the forest, but the forest was larger, which just couldn¡¯t work, not unless somehow the world had been enlarged. Even imagining the effect and trying to come up with reasonable explanations made me wish for something alcoholic and I hated anything that impaired my mind.


    Maybe I was at fault. There had been moments during which I complained that living near the farm was getting a little mundane, now, I couldn¡¯t do so any longer. A forest that was larger than it could be, without any detectable magic involved was a mystery to be solved, even if we had so far no idea where to even start.


    Which was the cause of our current expedition, looking for a place to start. There used to be a few buildings and businesses within the boundaries of the effect and we were trying to find one of them. The restaurant ¡®Waldhof¡¯ to be precise. It was founded by German immigrants a few decades prior and gained enough fame to be marked down on the map thanks to its traditional German cuisine, or so they claimed.


    The important part was that the restaurant was also a hotel and the proprietors lived there, hopefully giving us another data point, namely what had happened with people within the scope of the effect that changed the forest. Had their presence changed anything, was there any clue as to what had happened, anything that might give us an idea of how the increase in area had been accomplished?


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    Which brought us to our current problem, we couldn¡¯t find the damn place. Nor had we found anything hinting at human habitation in the area, it was as if the entire forest had been replaced with something more primal.


    ¡°Want to try a search pattern? Concentric circles, that kind of deal, trying to find anything that looks crafted?¡± Lia asked, crouching a little as she studied the ground far beneath the branch she was on.


    ¡°We could, but I doubt it¡¯ll help. Haven¡¯t you noticed, there¡¯s nothing in the entire forest? No roads, no paths, no garbage, and nothing from before the change. Ignore the roads and paths for now and even the buildings. There¡¯d be garbage. No matter how well-meaning people are, no matter how many signs are posted and how much clean-up is done, there¡¯d be some littering, some plastic wrappers or aluminium cans lying somewhere, no, it¡¯s all pristine wilderness,¡± I could only shake my head, the conclusions my mind was drawing getting progressively more outlandish.


    ¡°So, what will we do now?¡± Lia pushed and I decided that her idea might have some merit. If nothing else, it would give us a good idea about this area of the forest and allow us to draw some sort of conclusion from it.


    ¡°Look around, I guess,¡± I admitted with a grin, ¡°We¡¯ll use your idea, we might stumble across something useful. I doubt it¡¯ll be what we¡¯re here for, but who knows, I might be surprised.¡±


    Lia chuckled at my words before her legs coiled beneath her and she launched herself forward, showing just how physically powerful she was. Where I needed magic to accomplish something similar, she could brute-force the movement and leap from tree to tree.


    Focusing, I activated Draconic Leap, pushing the muscles in my legs to their limits, before pushing off myself. For a moment, there was the weightless sensation I loved so much but from prior experience, I knew I¡¯d fall short of the distance needed. Reaching out with my magic, I gripped the wind, pushing myself up while drawing the air above me to the sides, decreasing the pressure above me while giving myself some extra lift. My technique was very much a work in progress, and I was slowly progressing with it. My Wind Magic had gained a few levels during our exploration of the forest and was now level twenty-four. Similarly, constantly improving the temple cum shelter with Luna had increased my Earth Magic to seventeen and my Crystal Magic to twelve.


    Repeatedly using my special ability and Wind Magic was a little exhausting but it was the only way for me to keep up with Lia. Or rather, I was moving as quickly as I could without exhausting myself, while Lia was moving along. Going by prior experience, I knew that she could move even faster, to the point that I¡¯d need repeated shadow steps to keep up and at that point, I¡¯d soon keel over. While I could emulate a lot of her physical skills with my magic, I was far less efficient. Or maybe it was more a case of me doing something far more exhausting by repeatedly teleporting while she was simply jumping, even if she was jumping at insane speeds.


    Either way, in our current situation I was forced to focus on moving and tasting the air as I was looking for magical traces, while Lia focused on the physical world and keeping us safe. Sharing responsibilities was quite useful, both of us using our specialities and after a while of moving, I noticed a change in the air, an incredibly faint scent that might be magical or not. I couldn¡¯t tell but I was able to get a rough direction.


    Calling out to Lia, we followed the scent and after a few more minutes, the two of us stopped and I almost tumbled from the tree I had landed in.


    Before us, sitting in the middle of a clearing, was something I hadn¡¯t expected at all. Namely, a homely building, looking fairly undamaged if a little overgrown. A bush partially covered the door but the sign sitting above it was still easily visible between some vines. The Waldhof, the hotel we had been looking for.


    ¡°Well, looks like you were right,¡± I admitted with a huff. My earlier headache was back and it had brought reinforcements. How in Hecate¡¯s name did this accursed forest work? The building was here, but there was no road, nothing but a building sitting in the middle of a clearing.


    ¡°At least we¡¯ve got something interesting,¡± Lia snarked back and I could only huff again. Interesting, yes, but also impossible, incomprehensible and utterly frustrating.

 Chapter 873

    After circling the clearing the impossible hotel was on once we returned to the spot we had started from. The clearing was just that, a wide area of grass with the hotel sitting smack-dab in the middle. The building itself was overgrown with various vines and some strange plants were peeking out from multiple windows, but curiously I couldn¡¯t make out anything else through those windows, the gloomy interior was impenetrable to my eyes, giving me a reasonably large clue that there was something else going on here. This wasn¡¯t just the creepiness of the forest, that could explain away the lack of everything that should have surrounded the hotel, like the access road, various hiking trails, a car park, a few trash cans, maybe a few outbuildings for utilities and similar stuff, signs of civilisation. Given that none of those signs had been present in the forest, their absence wasn¡¯t anything out of the ordinary for this place. But that the hotel wasn¡¯t gone, that was out of the ordinary, the impenetrable darkness within only adding to the creep factor.


    ¡°We should keep a bit of distance,¡± Lia suggested and I could only look at her with a bit of disbelief, I had no intention of just blundering closer, not without getting a good idea of what was going on here. Or at least do some testing, hopefully avoiding any death traps. I had no desire to become the latest victim of the plant-based insanity growing rampant in this place.


    ¡°Let¡¯s try something simple first,¡± I grinned, conjuring up an Icicle before launching it at one of the dark windows. The result was frustrating to the extreme, my attack never reached the building, instead, it was smacked aside by one of the vines growing on it, similar to the way the vines of the forest struck their prey.


    ¡°Guess that is something,¡± I frowned, wondering just how many of those vines were the deadly variant. Getting closer to Observe any of them sounded like a bad idea, not that I was good enough at the skill to keep track of the individual vines. ¡°Let¡¯s make sure that those vines are gone first, before getting closer.¡±


    With that idea in mind, I rapidly drew the runes for my favourite destructive mist, only with a little more destructive potential thanks to some of my recently learned Darkness Runes. There was little better to imbue an effect with destructive potential than the Curse Rune. Maybe if I ever managed to figure out Death Runes, those might do it, but for now, the Curse Rune within Darkness Rune Mastery was my best bet.


    It took a few long minutes for the mist to surround the place and once it did, I kept it there even longer, a little confused at the lack of reaction. Normally, I could sense a certain feedback as I destroyed my enemies with this magic but here, there was nothing, as if there were no enemies within the area of effect. Which should be impossible, unless the building was an illusion of some sort, but how could an illusion destroy an icicle?


    After trying a few more minutes, even after I was convinced that my magic wasn¡¯t working, I gave up and let the effect fade. It did so quite quickly, maybe a little faster than I had expected, but I wasn¡¯t sure, it didn¡¯t feel like the effect had been actively dispersed, more that it had spread out further than expected in some way. Once it was gone, the hotel was still there, looking exactly as it had just thirty minutes prior.


    ¡°Well, that didn¡¯t work,¡± I admitted with a shrug, looking over at Lia who looked just as confused. Some of the grass looked a little wilted, but given the amount of Astral Power and the distinct lack of vitality I could feel from the grass, this should be impossible. And I was really beginning to hate that concept, this entire place broke reality in a way I didn¡¯t particularly enjoy.


    Thinking that maybe the plants were simply immune to the mist for some unknown reason, I decided to try something else. Namely, throw Icicles at them, hoping that something as simple as sharp objects hitting them would work.


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    Knowing that the plants had intercepted an Icicle earlier, I went with a numbers approach, simply throwing a lot of Icicles at the same time. It took a bit of effort to conjure up enough for a volley and there was no such thing as aiming in this case, but I managed to lob some thirty Icicles at the house in a single burst of Ice Magic.


    The result was both disappointing and disheartening at the same time. I had expected a couple of the many vines on the house to be carnivorous but when the volley came close, just about all of the vines on the house started to move and smash the Icicles, leaving their scattered remains all around the place. There might be some minor damage from shards hitting the vines but I had a feeling I could sit on my branch all night and lob Ice at the building without having any effect at all.


    With that in mind, I began to stretch my efforts out and use every type of magic I had access to. From chunks of earth, some rocks, and even a bit of metal on the physical side to tendrils of darkness imbued with devouring force, I tried everything. Lightning, Fire even warm and cold Water, for over an hour I sat on the branch and went through my magical arsenal.


    By the end of my attempts, I had a headache, was running low on Astral Power and felt the aftereffects of pushing my Death Magic a little too far for comfort and what did I have to show for?


    Nothing!


    I barely managed to singe some of the grass on the clearing when one of my attempts with Fire Magic fell short, literally. It was as if there was some force I couldn¡¯t detect keeping me from damaging the hotel and the vines on it, while also keeping the grass on the clearing in good condition but that part was somewhat weaker.


    ¡°It might be similar to the slaughterhouse,¡± I muttered, looking over to Lia who was both impressed and a little amused at the way the stupid house had stymied me.


    ¡°You mean a dungeon?¡± she asked, getting a nod in return.


    ¡°Yes, to the best of my knowledge, they are somehow shielded from the outside by the system using forces I don¡¯t understand, something beyond Astral Power based or Divinely granted magic. If the primary entrance is the door, the vines might be a challenge to keep people from moving in through the window or something like that. It would also explain why we can¡¯t see through the darkness inside, the insides are isolated from the outside because they are part of the dungeon,¡± I explained, getting a thoughtful look in return.


    ¡°Sounds plausible, but what are we going to do with that idea?¡± she prodded, knowing that I wouldn¡¯t want to ignore a find like this. The last dungeon had been quite useful for us, even if I hadn¡¯t been able to make use of most of the strange items found within.


    ¡°I mean, how do we make sure that going in doesn¡¯t mean we¡¯ll never get back out? Can you tell if the grass around here is more of that sleep grass and will try to kill us as we approach?¡± she elaborated and I began to wonder about that as well.


    ¡°I¡¯m pretty sure that if there¡¯s a trap out here, there¡¯d also be a way to avoid it, or at least retreat if the danger is too potent. Dungeons, at least on Mundus, weren¡¯t really death traps, they were challenges and people actively looked for them. I hope that the dungeons on Terra share those traits, though I have no real idea how they came into existence,¡± I admitted, pausing for a moment to think.


    ¡°But think of the slaughterhouse dungeon, there, the challenge to enter was overcoming the Undead outside. It¡¯s likely that, if the grass is some sort of trap, the difficulty we have with overcoming that trap is reflective of our chances inside,¡± I reasoned, hoping that I wasn¡¯t too used to treating this as a video game. In video games, the developers wanted their challenges to be overcome, if the game simply killed you without giving you a chance to play then nobody would. I had no idea if the system and whatever forces were at work here followed similar principles.


    ¡°Sounds reasonable, I guess,¡± Lia shrugged, not sounding terribly convinced. ¡°We should get back to the sanctuary and mark our path. That way, we can get back here tomorrow night and take our time figuring things out, right?¡± she continued, making a good argument. With no further disagreement from me, we turned our back on the creepy clearing and the hotel and left. At first, we moved between the high branches before descending and continuing on the ground, regularly placing markers on the trees as we went.


    Tomorrow, we could get back here as a group and get a better idea of what was going on.

 Chapter 874

    If anybody had been watching while we performed our next set of tests, they¡¯d have thought us monsters. Given that we had no idea what the grass around the hotel might be, the first thing we needed to do was make sure the area was safe to approach and we wouldn¡¯t die outright, simply for stepping into it.


    Catching a squirrel without damaging it was surprisingly easy. a simple blast of my Mind Magic knocked it out and once we had it, we only had to wait a little for it to wake up. Its chittering was a little annoying but given that we wanted it active, we couldn¡¯t do much about it, well, other than have Lia toss it into the grassy area around the hotel and wait. The squirrel demonstrated remarkable aerobatics, righting its flight by using its bushy tail but without anything to push against other than air, there was little it could do to keep itself from landing in the grass.


    Moments after its landing, the thing shot off, fleeing the area as quickly as its short legs could carry it. Interestingly, it stayed well away from the hotel, taking a course that wouldn¡¯t bring it closer to us or it during its escape. Maybe the little critter had some idea that the hotel was dangerous, though neither Silva nor Alex indicated that they could feel anything from it. Even Luna and her divinely granted eyes couldn¡¯t detect anything useful, she only reported a weird sensation in her gut when looking at it. Sadly, we couldn¡¯t be sure whether that sensation came from worrying about it beforehand and her body or mind now reacting to her worries or if she sensed something disturbing about the building.


    Either way, the squirrel got away easily, not showing any troubles on its way back into the trees and didn¡¯t appear to be harmed so we decided that we could move into the area without succumbing instantly. Unless the grass was somehow restricted to targeting humanoids or something, but in that case, Silva could easily drag us out, hell, with enough time and a lot of effort even Alex could manage. It would be fairly painful for us, but they had the strength, even if their mass was a little lacking when it came to providing adequate traction.


    Regardless of our first experiment, we proceeded with caution. The first of us to jump down was Lia, to make sure there was no trouble, she wrapped a rope around herself beforehand, just in case. While she landed without trouble, she immediately called back that the hotel¡¯s creepy aura was a lot more pronounced on the grass, making me wonder if there was some actual magical effect. After waiting a few minutes to make sure there were no additional problems, Luna followed after Lia, leaving me as our best healer behind.


    While I wasn¡¯t overly happy that Luna might be walking into danger, our experiment with Lia demonstrated that Lia was safe, and if it turned out that her safety was due to some vampiric trait, Lia could easily get Luna out, allowing me to heal her in safety. Alex and Silva also came trotting out from between the trees, Alex riding on Silva¡¯s back for once.


    Again, the only detrimental effect reported was the creepy aura, meaning it was almost certainly safe for me to join them and for us to continue towards the suspected dungeon. Jumping down from the branch I had been on, I did just that, easily landing in the soft grass before focusing on the hotel.


    The difference in sensation was incredible. Up, on the branch, the hotel had looked somewhat creepy, the vines and shrubs growing on and around it a little threatening, but from my new vantage point, the darkness around the building seemed deeper, almost as if it was about to devour me. And for me, who frequently ventured into the shadows, to consider darkness as creepy meant there was some sort of fear or mind-altering effect involved, I didn¡¯t fear the dark, I revelled within the shadows.


    Closing my eyes for a moment, I started to focus on my own mind. Mind Magic was incredibly useful when working with other minds, but I could also direct it towards my own. It was something I was incredibly careful with, simply because messing with my own mind using magic could have all sorts of unintended consequences, but simply looking shouldn¡¯t be too dangerous. Using the lens of my Mind Magic to observe what was going on, I could easily detect a pressure, for lack of a better word, pushing against my mind. It was difficult to interpret what it was pushing on, but my best guess was that it increased primal fears. Fear of the dark, in this case, perhaps fear of the unknown as well. Not terribly dangerous, but it certainly increased the trepidation felt when looking at the creepy hotel.


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    Armed with the new information, I carefully used a bit of magic to neutralise the pressure, very careful to keep my Mind Magic well away from what I perceived as my mind. I had no desire to accidentally reduce my own sense of caution by decreasing the threshold at which I considered something dangerous or something along those lines.


    That done, the sensation faded and the building looked just like it had before jumping down into the grass. A little creepy but it was far from enough to make me uncomfortable. Replicating the same action with my companions was simple for Lia and Luna but a little more difficult when it came to Silva and Alex, simply because their mental structures were so different from mine. Still, once I had found the magical effect, neutralising it worked just as it had within my own mind. On the plus side, I got a point in my Mind Magic when working on my own mind and another when I finished with the minds of my companions, pushing the skill to a respectable fifty-one.


    With the initial obstacle dealt with, Lia continued forward, the rest of us following behind at a distance. At the same time, Luna began channelling a bit of Life Magic into one of the seeds she usually used, ready to deploy it in an instant. She had yet to really find her niche, but maybe the forest of creepy plants would help her with that. My own contribution to our security was a conjured shield of Ice that I wielded with my Ice Magic, ready to cover Lia at a moment¡¯s notice. Hopefully, our precautions would prove needless but it was better to prepare and not need the caution than to blunder forward and get a deadly surprise.


    As we got close to the building, the vines near the various windows seemed to tense, or maybe that was just my imagination. They didn¡¯t react when Lia kept moving towards the door, but when she stepped too close to one of the windows, she had to dodge a strike.


    ¡°Do we want to try destroying them from up close?¡± she asked her cleaver at the ready.


    After a moment of consideration, I decided that we should at least make an attempt. It was a little dangerous, especially if the trap vines were somehow linked to other traps that might trigger when we attacked the vines but it was worth testing.


    ¡°Go ahead but all of us should be ready to flee it things turn sour,¡± I replied. Given my previous attempts, I knew that trying to destroy the vines with magic wouldn¡¯t work, so I conjured another shield, ready to defend Lia if something unexpected happened.


    Lia stepped closer to the window again and, just as before, the vine struck out, only this time Lia didn¡¯t simply leap back, she merely side-stepped the strike while her cleaver flashed out, striking the vine with impressive strength. Sadly, the result was a little underwhelming, there might have been a bit of damage to it, but nothing that made me think Lia could get through it. Out of curiosity, I used Observe on the vine, now that we were close up I was confident that I¡¯d get a proper reading, only for the ability to do nothing. It was as if there was no creature there for me to observe, nothing that I could get a read on.


    ¡°Guess that didn¡¯t work,¡± Lia admitted, stepping further back.


    ¡°Only way in is the door, unless we want to play hardcore dodgeball. Maybe that¡¯s the intention, you can enter through the windows but it¡¯d be incredibly difficult,¡± I mused, before deciding to try something. If the vines couldn¡¯t be damaged, maybe it was possible to work around them.


    Using the two shields as a beginning, I started to conjure a frame of Ice, hoping that I could create a short tunnel for us to enter through the window, without the vines smacking us. Sadly, the attempt failed just as everything else had failed, the vines simply destroyed the tunnel before Ii could even get it to connect with the window.


    Leaving us with the door and no other option to enter.

 Chapter 875

    After circling the building once, just to make sure there was no backdoor or anything else we had missed, we stood back at the front entrance. The brush growing out of the interior was still there and now, from up close, I could see that it was a thorny mess that one didn¡¯t want to tangle with. Not unless one was forced to or had some incredibly sturdy equipment, anything else would get torn to shreds unless one was very cautious.


    Letting out a huff, I looked at the others for a moment before we decided on our approach. The more I looked at this supposed dungeon, the less comfortable I felt. This one wasn¡¯t like the other dungeons I had experienced so far, it was almost as if the building itself was trying to keep us out and had been magically reinforced to do just that. It went against all my understanding of the workings of reality, but for all intents and purposes, the building seemed to be impenetrable to everything I could throw at it. For a moment, I considered conjuring up a massive crash of Icicles, similar to the one I had used to wipe out the Withered, but I wasn¡¯t sure if I should. Even if it worked, the only thing achieved would be the destruction of the building, though maybe I should try something in between the volley I had used the day before and what I considered my nuclear option.


    ¡°Anyone got any bright ideas?¡± I asked, hoping that one of them had noticed something. When I only got shrugs from Lia and Alex and outright negative responses from Luna and Silva, I raised an eyebrow, looking at the two.


    ¡°There might be a way up on the roof and maybe we can get in that way,¡± Lia explained, while Alex chittered a little at her, maybe explaining what they had in mind. Once Alex was done chittering, Lia spoke again.


    ¡°And Alex suggests they¡¯d be able to get in through the windows, especially if you can give them some covering fire. Also, have you tried to use the shadows to get in?¡± she asked, making me pause for a moment. There were shadows inside the building, of that I was certain, but stepping into them? I wasn¡¯t sure that was a good idea, especially with the creepy sensation I had experienced earlier. Out of curiosity, I decided to take a peek under the hood, so to speak, only to recoil in shock and land on my behind.


    ¡°Okay, nix that idea,¡± I shook my head, feeling my pale complexion fade even further as I considered what I had just seen. The shadows were thin here, and by the looks of it, the vines all around us were partially within them. And in there, they were joined by many other tentacles and it even felt as if there were eyes watching from within the house. I wasn¡¯t sure if the sensation came from the fear effect I had suppressed earlier and had taken the full brunt of when looking into the shadows or if there really were beings here, maybe something similar to the Gravehounds, but I was certain that I would only enter the shadows here as a method of last resort. And not as last resort for entering, if it came to that, I¡¯d rather just leave this place be and go look for something interesting elsewhere. There might be things inside the hotel that were too much for even my curiosity.


    The others observed me with a bit of amusement but mainly fear. They knew few things could shake me, so I had a feeling that seeing me in my current state told them quite a bit about what I had seen.


    ¡°How do you think you can get to the roof? Not like either of us can fly, my own method to achieve flight is currently beyond my powers,¡± I asked, looking at Lia.


    ¡°No need to fly, remember how you conjured the bridge between buildings a while back? Couldn¡¯t you make an arch, one that ends atop the roof, and add some stairs to it? That way, it wouldn¡¯t get too close to the walls and the vines,¡± Lia explained her idea and I looked back and forth, thinking whether that could work. It would take a while, but it might be possible unless the stupid vines could extend or something. Or there was some additional defence atop the roof, maybe we should test for that first.


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    With that idea in mind, I began to lob a few Icicles at the roof, trying to figure out if there was a way up there. Or, maybe, if it wouldn¡¯t be easier to simply use the front door, as my current ideas were all fairly wild and out there. Sure, I could conjure enough Ice to create the equivalent of a siege tower but it would take a lot of time and effort for possibly very little reward. Still, it was a fairly amusing idea, but maybe not a very practical one.


    ¡°You know, let me try something else first,¡± I looked at Lia before pushing a little extra Ice Magic into the shield I had conjured earlier, sending it flying into the shrub that grew out of the main door. The result was almost disappointing in its simplicity, the shrub was struck by the flying shield and pushed back, allowing the door to swing open easily. There was still a faint haze blocking my sight from the interior, confirming my idea that this was almost certainly a dungeon, but there didn¡¯t appear to be any additional obstacles.


    ¡°Door¡¯s open? We could just go at it the usual way,¡± I grinned, not quite sure if we had been making a mountain out of a molehill or if we had been smart to explore paths less travelled.


    Silva, on the other hand, let out a bark that could almost pass as a laugh, before making her way to the door. Sniffing the air in front of it, she hesitated only for a moment before padding inside.


    With her leading the way, the rest of us soon followed, entering the decrepit hotel and immediately the box I had expected popped up, informing us that we had entered a dungeon called the Waldhof, that we were the first to enter and that for the next six hours, our rewards would be increased. The usual stuff.


    Looking around, I could only shake my head at the incongruity of it all. The lobby we were in looked fairly normal, a little dusty and in dire need of a lot of tender loving care but it was in far better shape than the outside of the building suggested. There was a counter, with a few keys hanging on hooks behind it, the destroyed remains of a computer and a door marked employees only. In addition, a stairwell led upstairs in one corner of the room while another door and a long hallway led deeper into the building.


    Gesturing to the others, we moved into our usual formation, with me in the back, Silva in the front and the others between us. Normally, I¡¯d have preferred to have Lia guard my back but given that we¡¯d be fighting in narrow passages, forcing her to push past us all would be detrimental. If there even was a fight, so far, the entire place was eerily quiet, even more so than the graveyard we had visited not too long ago.


    Cautiously, Silva advanced further in, constantly sniffing the air to make sure nothing was nearby. In addition, her ears were flapping almost like a pair of tiny wings as she tried to get the best reception possible. If not for the sombre mood and the need to remain quiet, I might have giggled, something Luna only prevented by biting into her fist.


    When Silva approached the counter, some strange, elongated appendage, either a tentacle or vine or something along those lines, shot out from a small hole near the ceiling, something so unremarkable we all had missed it. Silva managed to jump aside, while the tendril slammed in the floor before vanishing almost as quickly as it had appeared.


    For a second, none of us dared to move, wondering just what the best way to proceed might be. Silva let out an annoyed growl and Lia, in response, used her hook chain to try to open the door behind the counter, so we might be able to bypass the endangered spot. Sadly, the door appeared to be locked and even with Lia¡¯s quite prodigious strength, she was unable to force it, at least from a distance. She briefly glanced behind the counter and at the keys hanging there, before shaking her head, these were not the keys we were looking for.


    Deciding to test the door myself, I conjured a bit of Ice, slamming it against it in an attempt to get an idea of its stability. The feedback I received made me shake my head, the door was just as impossibly sturdy as the rest of the place.


    We¡¯d need the key to open the door and somehow, I doubted that simply conjuring a bit of Ice and fitting it into the lock would do the trick. But I was willing to try.

 Chapter 876

    Repeated attempts on the door yielded no result. After almost ten minutes of fruitless work, and trying to keep the strange slapping vine from causing us bodily harm, we gave up and decided to check out the rest of the place. Maybe we¡¯d find the bloody key somewhere and could open the door that way.


    After a moment of consideration, we moved to the singular open door first, looking into the hotel''s dining room. The place was sadly completely wrecked, making me wonder what might have caused that much damage to the furniture but left the walls, windows and floor untouched, though I doubted I¡¯d get an answer easily. After encountering the fairly dangerous slapping vine near the counter, we moved slowly and methodically, our eyes constantly swivelling to ensure we didn¡¯t miss another hole or any other kind of trap.


    Given the open nature of the room we found ourselves in, with nothing to provide cover other than the piles of destroyed furniture, we remained incredibly cautious. Every instinct in my body was screaming at me that there were enemies beneath the rubble, to the point that I conjured a cloud of deadly mist, just to keep us from being surprised. And yet, surprised we were.


    When nothing happened.


    Despite engulfing the entire room in a cloud deadly enough to even damage Undead, nothing reacted to it, the piles of rubble didn¡¯t even twitch. In some ways, that result should have calmed me down, knowing that there were no enemies was normally a good thing but in this case, I only felt more unnerved, unable to shake the sensation of caution.


    It took a bit more effort to coalesce the mist I had conjured down into orbs but the advantage to the dense orbs was that it took only minimal effort on my part to unleash them once again, though they wouldn¡¯t regain their full volume. It was enough to flood a medium-sized room and cover our escape, especially with the confounding effects of it. In addition, I conjured another shield from Ice, letting it float above Silva, ready to tank any attack that might otherwise strike my canine companion.


    And onwards we went, past the piles of rubble towards a sliding door into what I suspected to be the kitchen. After our encounters in the Dark Slaughterhouse, I had no illusions about the dangers of kitchen tools wielded by magically enhanced enemies, even Lia was happily lugging around a meat-cleaver and the hook-chain she had found in that dungeon, meaning we were all primed and ready for a fight when Lia pushed the door open, something Silva couldn¡¯t really do due to the lack of hands.


    Looking at the kitchen only increased the tension I felt. The place was, compared to the dining room, pristine, without any damage or dirt, it was as if somebody had cleaned here just moments ago. My eyes were immediately drawn to the cupboards and closets, fearing that enemies might pour out of them at any moment. Maybe some sort of insane maid or the Roomba of doom, I wasn¡¯t sure what might wait for us here but I wasn¡¯t about to be surprised by it.


    As my eyes roamed the room, I realised that the frozen shuttles I used to fight were hovering above my shoulder, my subconscious mind readying itself for a fight. Keeping them aloft with a sliver of my attention, I tensed even further, while Silva, Alex and Lia were moving through the room, checking everything. Luna and I remained near the door, covering their back and making sure nothing could come at them from the sides, but again, the only sound we could hear was made by us. There seemed to be nothing here, at least nothing we could see.


    Suddenly, I noticed movement from the corner of my eyes and instantly, Astral Power burst out of me as Overflow activated and launched the frozen shuttles with deadly force and intent. Only for them to crash into one of the closets, destroying the door and piercing the mob sitting inside. Alarmed by my attack, Lia had launched herself across the divider in the middle of the kitchen, her cleaver out and ready to strike while Silva bounded back, covering Luna and myself.


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    ¡°What was that?!¡± Lia asked, staring at the area I had just attacked, unable to see any enemies. Now, looking at the area directly, I couldn¡¯t see anything either, making me wonder if the movement I had seen had been there or if I had imagined it.


    ¡°I thought I saw movement,¡± I admitted, my mind drawing the frozen shuttles back to me, the closet now a ruined mess. Silva moved next to it, sniffing the air, before letting out an annoyed growl, one that was decidedly negative. There was nothing to smell there, nothing but the bottle of bleach I had accidentally destroyed.


    While the rest of us were still preparing to fight a foe that didn¡¯t seem to be there, Alex continued to explore the kitchen, sniffing the air and even opening a few cupboards on their way. Releasing some of the tension we felt allowed us to return our focus on searching through the room and interestingly, Alex was the one finding the most interesting items, namely bottles filled with different chemicals. Strangely, there were no labels on the bottles, nothing to mark out what they contained, only opaque canisters that didn¡¯t quite look like plastic. For a moment, I considered taking a closer look but given that Alex was the one of us best at Alchemy, I left it to their expertise and focused on remaining vigilant.


    Not long after, Alex let out a few soft chitters and placed the various bottles on the counter, obviously leaving them behind. While I wasn¡¯t quite sure why they did it, I trusted that there was a good reason for it and didn¡¯t question them, at least for now. Sadly, the second door out of the kitchen was just as closed as the door behind the reception counter, only that there was no smacking vine near this one. That allowed us to throw everything, including the kitchen sink Lia ripped from one counter, at the door at our leisure but to my surprise, we didn¡¯t even leave a mark. That durability was clearly granted by the dungeon, making me wonder if there was a way to open it. A key, most likely, but we¡¯d have to find it.


    With the kitchen a dead end, we returned to the reception area, making sure to stay away from the hole containing the smacking vine and continued down the hallway. There were quite a few doors here, and as we opened one after the other, we came across guestrooms in strangely different conditions. Some of them were pristine, similar to the kitchen, while others were completely demolished, like the eating area, there was no rhyme or reason the the differences, at least none that I could make out just yet.


    The only thing truly constant about it all were a few small holes near the ceiling and floor, which we avoided as much as possible and if it wasn¡¯t we were ready to dodge any surprise attacks. Sadly, blocking the holes with conjured Ice, something I had tried with the first hole we came across, was impossible, the vines had enough power to simply crush my Ice. When I tried to push in more right after the vine disappeared back into the hole, I encountered an incredibly weird resistance, as if I was trying to push my Ice through the wall. After a few tries, I was forced to put it down as another sort of dungeon weirdness, forcing us to remain on our guard, not that we¡¯d have dropped it. This place was creepy enough to make the hair on my neck stand straight, there was no way I¡¯d ever relax in here.


    Soon, we reached the end of the hallway and yet another door. There was something a little different about this one, mainly the sign reading emergency exit but it was also far less welcoming, more a fire security door than the flimsy doors to the guest rooms.


    For a moment, I was almost certain it would turn out as another bust, another locked door, only for Silva to carefully sniff it and allow me to use my Ice Magic to push down the bar holding it closed.


    With a push of the shield I used to keep Silva safe, the door swung open inwards, revealing a short hallway, lined with various shelves and linen closets. With that many ways for an enemy to remain hidden between the linen, I decided to take no risks and threw in the small orbs I had condensed the mist into earlier, letting them burst to their full volume, instantly filling the room.


    Sadly, the reaction to my preemptive attack was just like earlier.


    The silence of the grave continued to reign as nothing happened.

 Chapter 877

    Looking into the laundry room, we still couldn¡¯t see any danger. That might be because there was none, or because the danger came from traps or similar hazards we had yet to detect. It was just like this entire place, eerily quiet and filled with an, now moist, air of foreboding. Even without the mist I had just conjured, there would be a chill in the air, one strong enough to send shivers down the spine of even the most valiant soul and yet, we had to prevail.


    Once again, Silva took the lead, sniffing the air and likely relishing the fact that the moisture made all the scents even more pronounced, allowing her to detect even the most minute traces of danger. From her growls, I could tell that the only danger she could detect came from some laundry detergent that might be caustic enough to harm somebody¡¯s skin. Again, there didn¡¯t seem to be any enemies present and when  I scanned the floor and ceiling, I had to conclude that there were no visible traps. Stomping on the ground for a moment, I sent out a pulse of Earth Magic, trying to determine whether there were any pitfalls or false walls, ready to unleash hell on us but the pulse petered out almost instantly, the magic devoured by the environment.


    Letting out a sigh, I remained at the door, my eyes scanning the room while I protected Luna, allowing Lia, Silva and Alex to search the room in peace. On one pass of my eyes, I noticed something strange on the wall above the washing machines, some marking that just caught my attention.


    After the first search through the room was done, I called out to the others and we shifted our formation, allowing me to move freely while the others guarded my back. That way, I could fully focus on the odd markings and study them at my leisure.


    And odd, they were. The more I looked at them, the more I became convinced that there was a pattern to them, almost like one of those puzzles where you had to shift one tile around in order to complete a picture. Only that the tiles weren¡¯t really moveable, at least not on any sort of mechanism, nor was I able to determine what sort of image it might become.


    Reaching out, I gently touched one of the markings, after doing a few tests to make sure there was no danger involved. Feeling it, I realised that just touching it let a tiny amount of my Astral Power flow into the marking, accepting it with incredible ease. With my Astral Power within the marking, I could feel a little more about it, to the point that I quickly became convinced I could move and even subtly alter it.


    Before even trying to move it, or alter it in any way, I stepped back and took another look at the entire thing. There was a pattern there, I could tell now, a sequence of numbers of shapes that screamed of disorder to me. Looking at the shapes and the numbers my mind began to connect to them, and I recognised a possible pattern. If arranged correctly, the numbers would form a sequence where two were the sum of the following number, until they reached the last. Only, the last shape of the marking wasn¡¯t quite right, it didn¡¯t fit with the rest but the difference was minute.


    Stepping forward once more, I infused my Astral Power into each of the markings, feeling them come alive under my hands, and began to shift them around. It was incredibly weird, the markings moved along the wall without disturbing the material in any way, flowing smoother than sand but as they moved they didn¡¯t shift at all, as if cast in concrete. Things worked out perfectly until I reached the last marking, the wrong marking, and at that point, I had to suddenly push in a lot more Astral Power, almost as if the marking didn¡¯t want to cooperate. With additional power, still only a smidgen of what I could accomplish, it worked but now I had to keep the marking from changing until I had moved it into position and could shift it into what I considered to be the right shape, the one fitting with all the rest.


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    Once that was accomplished, I felt the Astral Power I had channelled into the markings coalesce, glowing almost as if I had completed a Runic Circle, before fading away. The moment the glow was gone, the wall where the last marking was crumbled away, leaving a smooth opening that revealed a space roughly the size of two shoeboxes.


    Looking inside from a few metres distance, I saw multiple items and after making sure nothing was about to jump at me I plucked them out.


    The first was, to my amusement, a towel. Or at least it looked like one, when I used Inspect on it, it was labelled as the Towel of the Traveller, a cloak that increased the Resilience of the wearer by two points. Just looking at it, felt a little flabbergasted, it was nothing but a towel with a pair of clothespins attached, and yet, it was also a magical item of relative remarkable quality.


    ¡°Lia, that towel might be best for you or Silva,¡± I lobbed it over, still not quite sure what to make of it, so I pulled out the second item, hoping that it wasn¡¯t as ludicrous.


    Luckily, it wasn¡¯t, it was outright normal. Well, normal for a world that wasn¡¯t insane, in our current world, it couldn¡¯t consider it that. It was a nice, black leather coat, a little too large for me but if I wanted to wear it, I definitely could. Inspecting it revealed it as the Imperial Trenchcoat, giving some protection against weapons while also increasing the wearer¡¯s Charisma and Strength by one point each. Handing it over to Lia, who promptly donned it, I had to facepalm, just a little when I realised that the coat had eagle insignia on both shoulders, in matte gold. The German Imperial Eagle. I wasn¡¯t quite firm on heraldry, but I was relatively certain that it was its name. At least it wasn¡¯t carrying a swastika or lighting bolts or anything along those lines. Still, the coat perfectly fit Lia and it was a lot better than anything we had access to, so needs must and all that.


    Lastly, the third item was a key. An incredibly dirty one but when I touched it to take it out, I felt a weird sensation flow through me and realised that I had just gained a fairly large amount of EXP. Not quite enough to give me a level up but going by the surprised looks on Luna¡¯s face, it was enough for her. The noises made by Lia and Alex indicated something similar, bringing a grin to my face. This might have been the equivalent of a boss fight, though I wasn¡¯t sure. Maybe there were some hints in the room that would have helped to find the solution or there was something else we didn¡¯t know, maybe in the rooms we had bypassed.


    Either way, after solving the riddle we continued our search of the room and came up empty. But we now had a key that might fit into the lock of one of the closed doors we had encountered, hopefully allowing us to continue on our path through the eerie hotel.


    We quickly tested whether the key might open the door in the back of the laundry room but it didn¡¯t fit. Maybe once the thick layer of grime was removed, something we unsuccessfully tried, so for now, the door remained closed and back into the hallway we went.


    Keeping cautious, Silva took the lead again with a shield of Ice hovering above her, something that proved a good idea the moment she came close to the first door. Just a few minutes ago, the room had been perfectly calm and empty but now, a length of cloth shot out of it, trying to strike Silva. I managed to block it with the shield but I could feel the impact. It wouldn¡¯t have broken Silva, she was tough like that, but it would have seriously hurt.


    Taking up positions around the door, we burst into the room, my Ice Shield leading the way but there was no active danger inside. The length of cloth, a bedsheet, that had tried to strike Silva just moments ago was on the floor, lying limply as if it couldn¡¯t harm a fly, it didn¡¯t even twitch when Silva sunk her teeth into it and viciously shook it with an angry growl.


    Just another trap and despite going over everything in the room once again, we didn¡¯t come across anything that indicated something was amiss. Just the murder bedsheet, now no longer as murderous.


    Carefully and prepared to dodge any and all murderous laundry, we made our way back to the reception, ready to continue our exploration.

 Chapter 878

    As we continued through the Waldhof Dungeon, it kept its theme constant. From the laundry room with its shifting tiles, we moved back to the kitchen at Alex¡¯ urging, where they used some of the chemicals and kitchen appliances to remove the stupidly sticky grime from the key we had found. Cleaning it gave us another portion of EXP, enough to push me to a level up and level sixty-three, bringing a grin to my face. It also made me realise that I needed to spend the points I had gained upon reaching level sixty, either increasing my Intelligence or my Intuition, unless I wanted to risk reaching level sixty-five without spending them and losing out on another trait.


    Instead of letting myself get struck by decision paralysis, I simply put them into Intelligence, pushing me to fifty-five in the attribute and giving me the Astral Capacity trait, increasing the Astral Power I could hold by five per cent, similar to the Astral Power trait I had chosen when picking my initial traits. Neat, but not terribly exciting.


    With the now-clean key in hand, we could enter the backroom and solve yet another puzzle, that one centred around connecting cables and directing electricity of all things. At that point, I stopped questioning how things were working in this place and simply accepted that some underlying Power made them work. Thus, instead of trying to understand the various expressions of its power, I focused my curiosity on that underlying Power. Not that trying to understand either the expressions or the power itself yielded results, but I wasn¡¯t about to give up.


    Either way, after solving the puzzle of connect-the-wires we found another set of items that made me question the sanity of this place, namely a Pickelhaube, an eagle necklace and a strange bar that reminded me of the bar needed to operate the fire door to the laundry room. The Pickelhaube was a fairly interesting item, increasing strength and resilience in addition to the protection it offered. What¡¯s more, it served as a weapon if struck on the head and with a bit of experimentation we realised that it, somehow, fit neatly on Silva¡¯s head. She looked fairly funny wearing it, but needs must and all that. One of her preferred moves had always been to ram into enemies and bowl them over, now she could simply put her head down as she rammed and not only bowl them over but disembowel them at the same time. A win if there ever was one, regardless of aesthetics.


    The eagle necklace was luckily more tasteful and, maybe more importantly, a lot easier to conceal. It also wasn¡¯t as useful, increasing the wearer¡¯s Charisma and Intuition by one each, meaning it ended up around Luna¡¯s neck. She primarily used those attributes and while I¡¯d happily take extra Intuition, the extra point brought a bigger advantage to her. I¡¯d be able to study the necklace, as I had hopes that it might allow me to learn how to create similar enchantments myself, but for now it was hers to wear.


    Lastly, the bar wasn¡¯t an item to wear or use, at least not that we could tell. On the plus side, just like the key downstairs, taking it yielded a large amount of EXP, making me think that the puzzles were the encounters of this place and solving them was akin to fighting the usual enemies within a dungeon. Sadly, the bar didn¡¯t immediately give us an idea of its use and went up the stairs.


    There, we immediately found the use of the bar, as another of the thick fire security doors barred our path, a door missing the bar needed to open it. If we¡¯d been on the other side, we could have pushed it open but from our current position, the bar was needed. Luckily, we already had that item and, much akin to a certain blonde and mighty pirate, we could fit it in place and open the door.


    Allowing us to see yet another hallway.


    Given that, so far, the only danger in this place had come from traps, we were incredibly cautious. Knowing that the normal rules of physics had been suborned, we couldn¡¯t even be certain that traps had to come from locations where they could fit, they could come from anywhere and anything could be one. The bedsheets-turned-whip that tried to strike Silva downstairs had been an excellent example, as had the bolts of lightning unleashed by the television. Just because the world should work a certain way didn¡¯t mean it did in this place, leaving us all on edge.


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    My vigilance was proven right yet again when Silva moved past the second of the closed doors. We had opened the first set of rooms, one completely trashed, the other in pristine condition, and done a cursory search, trying to make sure there was nothing that could attack us from behind, before moving on. When moving past the second door, there was a click and Silva immediately jumped back while I tried to position the shield I was using to cover her to block a possible attack.


    Maybe it was bad luck, maybe it was something else but the action of jumping back was exactly the wrong one. Just as she did, I could see a fast projectile shooting out from the door, or, to be precise, the keyhole, and while I tried to block it with the shield, it was simply too fast. By jumping back, Silva had put herself exactly in the trajectory of the trap, but luckily, she managed to tuck her head in. The projectile still hit, but it only produced a gong-like sound as it bounced off her newly acquired helmet, making her stumble a little.


    Lia pulled her back further and we took up position between the doors, hoping that we were in a safe zone, though we kept vigilant. In the meantime, I took a look at the projectile that had impacted the ceiling after bouncing off Silva¡¯s head and, once again, I could only shake my head. The projectile was shaped very much like a key and as I was watching, it crumbled to dust, as if it was made from some sort of chalk or something like that. To make matters worse, there was no visible mechanism, not even when we opened the door after making sure that Silva was alright, there was nothing to launch the stupid key, or even allow a key to pass through the lock. It was as if the entire place was haunted or something, but despite the best efforts made by Luna, Silva and myself, none of us were able to detect any foreign presence, no ghosts or the like. We could only study the effects, which felt incredibly futile, or simply carry on through the dungeon, hoping that we¡¯d make it out the other side.


    And so, onwards we went, down the hallway, caution and paranoia reigning supreme. There were more traps, and it seemed like none of them were the same. They came in all shapes and sizes, from cables shooting out of an electric outlet, crackling with energy, to those dratted darts being shot from keyholes or light fixtures. There was even one spot where the floor suddenly, for just a few moments, turned into lava, burning Silva¡¯s paws before she could jump away. The entire experience was utterly bizarre, especially as we failed to find anything else on our way through the upstairs hallway. Just half the rooms thrashed, the other half in pristine condition, with no rhyme or reason why things were that way.


    Finally, we reached the end of the hallway, where yet another door waited for us. Cautiously, ready for pretty much everything the dungeon might throw at us, we pushed it open, revealing a nursery of all things. Complete with a crib, a changing table that still had a diaper on it, a few bottles of white liquid and a wide variety of plush toys. Unsure of what was going on, we slowly and carefully made our way inside, eyes scanning everything for danger, another puzzle or anything that might give away what we were supposed to do here. Or what might try to kill us, both were entirely plausible occurences.


    Noticing a strange shift in the darkness around us, I peered into the shadows and recoiled in horror. There, hovering above the crib, was a strange monster, shaped roughly like a baby only that it was the size of an adult, its chubby arms ending in tendrils similar to the one that had tried to strike down Silva downstairs and its face was mostly absent. There were no eyes, no nose, just a mouth that was far too large, taking up almost half of its face. A mouth that was open and filled with teeth more fitting for a crocodile or a shark but certainly not for a human regardless of age.


    A noise brought my attention back to the world around me, though I noticed that one of the tentacles of the baby moved and in turn, the door behind me slammed shut, sealing us inside. Moments later, the entire place seemed to come alive, the stuffed toys started to move, tendrils struck out of various openings, even those that should be far too small and, for some god-forsaken reason, a soft lullaby started to play while the mobile above the crib started to slowly spin.


    Up front, Lia let out a soft curse while Silva growled loudly, her body shifting as she activated the special ability that allowed her to walk on two legs, greatly increasing her fighting strength in the process.


    All of us were ready for a fight.

 Chapter 879

    As I hesitated over my own actions for a moment, Lia and Silva tore into the moving plushies, likely happy to have something to tear apart after hours of cautious trudging and avoiding traps. Both of them were beings of action and being subject to repeated attacks that they couldn¡¯t fight back against couldn¡¯t sit well with them, but now, they had something to take their frustrations out on¡ªnamely, the plushies.


    Next to me, Luna was using her own, slowly growing, divine abilities, doing her best to support the other two by ensnaring the plushies with her conjured plants. Similarly, Alex was doing their best to hinder our foes, only instead of plants their weapon of choice was a strange contraption that delivered something similar to silly string. Their efforts had some effect but the plushies turned out to be surprisingly unimpressed, eagerly tearing themselves apart to get rid of the bindings. Tying down an arm or leg was normally enough to take an enemy out of a fight but these things simply tore out their own arm, before throwing themself at Lia and Silva.


    As for me, after watching for a few moments, I decided that they could deal with the plushies without needing my help, allowing me to focus on the thing I had seen in the shadows. If my guess was correct, that thing was responsible for the situation in the first place, so why shouldn¡¯t I do battle against it where it resided? The Shadows were my realm and I wouldn¡¯t let myself be denied by some toddling pretender.


    Delving into the shadows, I took a moment to consider how to attack the being. A quick Observe told me something strange: the creature before me was named Anomaly, and had a level of ??. I could hardly ask for more detailed information, I was almost suffering from information overload just knowing that bit of highly useful data. But, as the joke went, when violence doesn¡¯t solve a problem, you are not using enough of it. So, in this case, there was no such thing as Overkill, only not killed enough.


    Without hesitating any further, I activated Overflow, channelling a massive amount of Astral Power into Darkness Magic and letting that power surge into the Shadows. If it was trying to hide within the Darkness, I would simply take the Darkness and let the thing be devoured. Immediately, I felt a force trying to absorb the power I asserted and switched tactics, feeding a creature like that would only make it stronger but if I could take the power from it, just as it tried to take my power, it would suffer for it.


    With that idea, things turned into a strange sort of tug-of-war, with the anomaly and me both trying to wrestle control of the shadows from the other while harnessing the power we both had channelled into them. To my surprise, I soon realised that the creature had contributed far more power than I had, though maybe it shouldn¡¯t have been one, the anomaly was here the entire time, a permanent resident of the shadows, allowing it to constantly channel power into them while I had only seconds to match its output. Even with my fairly prodigal powers, there was only so much I could do without time to apply my power.


    But where the anomaly was stronger in the quantity of power, I enjoyed greater control over my powers and thus over the shadows in general. Amusingly, a part of my mind was greatly reminded of my training before being directly taught by Mrs Wu, when fighting other people, all of whom were larger and stronger than myself. Avoiding to meet the enemy head-on, applying leverage and using their own strength against them had been some of the most important tools in such confrontations and while I couldn¡¯t use the same techniques, the principle still applied.


    For a bit, I was making progress, not quickly but steadily. The way things were going, it wouldn¡¯t take too long for me to overcome the anomaly and defeat it, here, where its powers were greatest, at least that was what I thought until the entire battle suddenly changed and the anomaly disappeared from the darkness.


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    For a moment, I was completely flabbergasted, straining to keep the suddenly completely unbound power from flaring out of control and destroying me. I was even tempted to leave the shadows myself but only took a glance into reality where I could see the anomaly flailing around, still floating above the crib while it kept my companions away from it. Bearing down on the power around me, I started to make rapid progress, taking control of the unleashed energies in the shadows while I tried to decide what to actually do with them. The easiest would be to disperse the power here, to funnel it back into the Astral River, as there was no way I¡¯d be able to contain even a fraction of the roiling power the anomaly had channelled into the shadows prior to our arrival. That way, I should be able to return the area around us to a normal state, maybe even remove the dimensional weirdness, though I couldn¡¯t be certain. Either way, taking that much energy out of the equation sounded like a good idea, as that much power just floating around would be incredibly dangerous.


    My efforts were interrupted when the anomaly returned, only now it wasn¡¯t able to use the darkness around us any longer. Instead, it lashed out directly, forcing me to choose between controlling the darkness and defending myself. However, instead of doing either, I decided to use a third option and used the Darkness I was controlling to strike the anomaly. It wasn¡¯t an elegant attack, nor was it even remotely efficient, but I had a massive hammer of Darkness and I was using that hammer in the most obvious and blunt way, smashing the anomaly with all the power I could control and direct.


    For a moment, the shadows turned weird, reality started to ripple and waver as if a stone was dropped into a still pond, the power I had unleashed was that potent. Holding on to my shape was difficult, to say nothing of keeping the powers filling the shadows under my control. Instead of trying to keep control, I decided to retreat, letting myself drop out of the shadows as the anomaly was torn apart by the rippling reality, its innate magical strength far from sufficient to protect itself.


    Looking around the nursery, I could see that it wasn¡¯t just the shadows that had been affected by the strike I had unleashed, even the physical world was rippling and changing from the blow. Noticing a few items that seemed to be strangely solid in a fluctuating room, I quickly grabbed them before calling out to my companions, trying to get them to move. Silva and Luna were both using their divine powers to keep a bubble of space around them from the distortion, a bubble just large enough for the five of us, but that didn¡¯t help too much. Sure, we had a small area where we were safe but given that it seemed as if the entire hotel was breaking apart around us, we couldn¡¯t just stay here and wait out the devastation.


    Feeling the maelstrom of powers rippling around us, I took a risk and channelled some extra power into the world, not to contain the destruction, that would be impossible, but to give direction to a part of it. Instead of letting the forces around us continue on randomly, I managed to direct a sizeable portion of it towards one of the walls. As it impacted, I could only stare with wide eyes, the wall turned dark for a moment, before falling apart, parts of it melting away into strange, dark slime, other parts turning to dust and getting carried away by the wind that was blowing out from inside the hotel.


    With the wall removed, there was nothing keeping us inside. Sure, there was a bit of a drop but given that the world was seemingly falling apart around us, getting out and falling a few metres was far preferable to being inside a building as everything went wonky. A quick exchange saw Luna sitting on Silva, holding on to the newly acquired cape, while Alex took their place on Lia¡¯s shoulder, the two physically weaker people trusting their physically more capable companions to keep them safe. Then, we took a few quick steps and leapt through the hole in the wall, getting smacked by the tendrils as we exited. Luckily, the tendrils seemed to be just as wonky as the rest of reality, leaving them with only a fraction of their strength. The hits I took weren¡¯t pleasant but they lacked the bone-crushing force the things had displayed earlier, leaving me battered and bruised but the worst damage I took came from the fall.


    Lying there, in the high grass around the hotel, I rolled on my back, letting my head loll to the side as I watched the hotel. For a minute, it kept shifting and flexing in a manner no solid object could until suddenly, the entire thing started to fall apart, quite similar to the way the wall had disappeared. And then, with one final blast of wind, strong enough to rustle the leaves some hundred metres away, the hotel disappeared. Leaving me with so, so many questions and only a few notifications to grant me answers.

 Chapter 880

    Looking at the notifications, I got some answers though they weren¡¯t terribly informative. The obvious ones were a pair of level-up notifications, bringing me to sixty-five, one that told me that my Darkness Magic had risen to fifty. Additionally, there was one telling me that the Dungeon Explorer Title had been ungraded because we earned it again, increasing the amount of EXP we gained when completing a dungeon for the first time even further.


    The level-ups spiralled into additional notifications, especially the ones that displayed my increased attributes, those coming from my class, two Intelligence and one Intuition, alongside those coming from the Dragon-Touched Trait, one in each attribute, and the two unassigned ones.


    Those points brought two attributes to relevant levels, namely my Dexterity and Vitality to thirty each, both granting minor traits for that achievement. Dexterous Shaper slightly improved my accuracy when shaping things with my hands, while the Sunlight Resistance trait greatly decreased the harmful effects of Sunlight on my body. It took me a moment to realise why the second trait sounded so much more useful, before realising that it was because of my special circumstances. For a normal person, the Sunlight Resistance Trait would be almost useless, unless they were living in a desert or something like that. Sunscreen could most likely accomplish similar effects, so having a trait for something that could be accomplished with something that simple would be a disappointment to many. In opposition to that, the Dexterous Shaper trait was fairly useless to me, it might help a bit with my Runes and casting them, but ultimately, I mostly did my shaping with magic, not with my hands. Still, having the traits, and being able to pick whether I wanted one for Intelligence or Intuition next was quite neat. However, it did bring back the decision paralysis that had plagued me for the last few weeks until I had made the snap decision in the Dungeon.


    Something to think about later.


    In addition to these fairly obvious notifications, there were some that shed a little light on the situation. One was quite interesting, telling me that we had defeated the Anomaly, still indicating its level as ??, gaining a massive chunk of EXP in the process. It was almost en-par with what we, according to the next message, had gained for defeating the Dungeon, and together it answered the question of how I had gained two levels. The notification about defeating the Dungeon also indicated that we had pushed the Disturbance at the Waldhof back into the Dark, making me wonder if there was another way to complete it, but given that we couldn¡¯t even see the hotel any longer, I doubted we¡¯d be able to enter it again. If the dungeon was still there at all, we wouldn¡¯t be able to enter it again. Maybe another group could, at some point, enter and force the anomaly into the light, or whatever the opposite to pushing it into the dark was.


    ¡°Everyone alright?¡± I quietly called out, still a little too exhausted to push myself up from where I was lying.


    ¡°We¡¯re fine,¡± Lia replied, while Silva let out an affirmative huff, to which Luna added a soft, but somewhat positive groan. ¡°Any idea what exactly happened there?¡± Lia asked and going by the tone of her voice, she was as confused as I was, maybe even more so.


    ¡°We killed it? The anomaly and the dungeon, I mean,¡± I replied, trying to sound more convincing than I felt.


    ¡°But how? We were just fighting those creepy plushes, once they were destroyed the baby-mouth-tentacle thing showed up, wailing and flailing, before it vanished again. And then the world went wonky, what was that?¡± Lia prodded, making me wonder how the fight was supposed to play out if you didn¡¯t have a powerful Darkness Spellcaster on your side. I doubted fighting the anomaly in the shadows was the only way, it was too specialised an ability for that to make sense.


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    ¡°Did you notice I vanished at the beginning of the fight?¡± I asked, pausing for a moment before continuing, ¡°I stepped into the shadows and tried to wrestle control from that thing, it was stupidly powerful. Until it disappeared, likely because it appeared in the normal world. At that moment, I had all the power channelled into the Darkness by that thing and myself at my disposal, but it was too much for me to really control. I tried to funnel it back into the Astral River but then, the thing was back and I did the simplest thing I could, I used all that power I had to strike at it. We all saw the results, that¡¯s what happens when too much reality-warping power is unleashed all at once,¡± I felt my lips curl into a grin, knowing just how insane the effect had been. Darkness existed everywhere in the physical world, sitting in the gaps and cracks of reality so that much Darkness had some incredibly interesting effects. Sadly, I doubted I¡¯d be able to play with such effects for quite some time unless I could accomplish an effect similar to the one created by the anomaly.


    ¡°Oh, I also managed to grab these before we jumped out,¡± I told them, picking up the items I had grabbed on the way out. Now, with more than a few split seconds to look at them, I could see that one of them was a fairly ornate dagger with its sheath, again decorated with an eagle motive, one was a large glass stein and the last one was a pair of leather combat boots, I had just grabbed the shoestrings when leaving.


    There was something drawing my attention to the dagger and when I used Inspect on it, I realised that it was similar enough to the one I had on Mundus, including some runes that improved the flow of magic through it. There was another eagle set into the pommel and one again, I was quite glad that the eagle wasn¡¯t carrying a swastika. Having to decide whether the discomfort of carrying that symbol around with me was worth the benefit was not a decision I wanted to make. The item itself was a dedicated Athame, crafted to improve the effects of Blood Magic when using it to draw the blood while increasing the user¡¯s Dexterity and Intelligence while holding it. It wouldn¡¯t be terribly useful most of the time, I usually didn¡¯t hold a weapon in hand while fighting, but I¡¯d certainly be able to make use of it. I wasn¡¯t sure whether I liked the name, Blutklinge, but wasn¡¯t about to throw away a useful weapon simply because the name and decorations didn¡¯t sit well with me.


    Looking at the boots, and Inspecting them at the same time, I quickly realised these weren¡¯t for me. They increased Strength and Endurance, while increasing the damage dealt by kicks, making them a neat fit for Lia, if they actually fit her feet. But given that the Pickelhaube we had put on Silva earlier had moved into something perfectly fitting on her canine head, I had little doubt that the boots would fit Lia. Moments after handing them over, my thoughts were confirmed when the boots shrunk just a little bit, moulding themselves to Lia¡¯s feet, including the thick, nailed soles and the steel caps protecting her toes. After the earlier experience, I was just numb to the magic going on, though I did make a note to take a look at them later. If I wanted to learn how to enchant items, taking good looks at those we discovered was necessary.


    Lastly, the Stein I had taken. There was magic about it, that much was obvious, and I wasn¡¯t disappointed when I inspected it. It had two primary effects, one was that harmful effects caused by anything drunk from it were reduced, and the other was that drinking from it increased the drinker¡¯s vitality by one for a day., with a maximum of five people having the effect at the same time. An interesting item for sure, especially that first effect, how could a stein determine what was harmful and what was not? As the old saying goes, the dosage made the poison, if consumed in large enough quantities anything could be harmful, and a lot of normally poisonous substances were incredibly potent and beneficial drugs when used in the correct dosage.


    Adding another item to my list of things I wanted to figure out, I put the mug into my backpack and the five of us got ready to depart. The dungeon was, according to the best of our knowledge, dealt with, though I would come back during the next night, trying to figure out a little more. But for now, I was simply too tired and exhausted to try wrestling with things that couldn¡¯t be, or understanding how and why the world had come apart at the seams. Those were questions best dealt with while having a rested mind, or while completely and utterly drunk. Currently, I was neither so dealing with them had to wait.

 Chapter 881

    Sadly, even a full day of rest didn¡¯t make matters more obvious. When I returned to the clearing the night after we defeated the dungeon, the hotel remained gone. I had no idea if that was a function of us defeating it, something akin to the lock-out we had experienced after repeatedly clearing the other dungeon, or if it was something else. Given that the entire clearing was covered in grass, with no indication of where the hotel used to be, I was tempted to simply treat the entire experience as a figment of my imagination but I wasn¡¯t quite so far gone. There was knowledge to be gained here, I just needed to experiment a little.


    A part of me was tempted to kidnap somebody from the farm, or anyone, really, so I could use their eyes to get a second look but decided against it. There was such a thing as inviting needless troubles and we had only recently gotten rid of the potential troubles that came with closely associating with people. No need to invite them in again, instead I decided on a few simple tests. There was no need that I needed people to test the dungeon, nothing said animals couldn¡¯t enter one. Alex and Silva had proven that even if the two of them weren¡¯t quite normal animals.


    And so, just like we had done the night before, I caught a squirrel, maybe even the same one as before, and lobbed it into the clearing, keeping the location of the dungeon in mind. To my surprise, the squirrel either moved through the area the dungeon had been in or right past it. It was a little difficult to tell, with nothing but a sea of grass filling the clearing. But one thing was fairly certain now, the dungeon was, at least at the moment, not accessible to anyone. Otherwise, the squirrel would have reacted similarly to the one we used the other night and kept away from us and the hotel.


    But that only opened up more questions. How did the entire thing with the vanishing dungeon work, had it happened because I used Darkness Magic to defeat the anomaly or because of the devastation? Was there something left to investigate, other than the grass?


    Curious, and maybe a little reckless, I moved into the grassy area, slowly spreading out my senses as I searched for anything that might explain the events of the night. And the existence of that dungeon, though I wasn¡¯t confident I¡¯d understand anything that might explain those.


    Dungeons had been studied extensively on Mundus but during my visits to the Mages¡¯ Guild, I hadn¡¯t been able to find a lot of conclusive information. Maybe because it was made secret by the powers that be, maybe because the spellcasters with enough insight into them kept their findings to themself, maybe because there was no information to be found. The only thing I could say conclusively was that the Grandmother had been able to take partial or complete control over a dungeon, namely the Barrow Den, and made use of it to imprison the souls of her enemies there. But the method, or anything beyond that fairly simple conclusion was unknown. Maybe if I managed to contact her, possibly using an improved or altered version of the ritual in the Grimoire or possibly some sort of adaption to the one used to speak with Hecate I could ask but so far, I hadn¡¯t been able to make progress in that regard. Communicating across planar and dimensional boundaries was hard.


    For now, I had to be content with what I might be able to find here. First, I¡¯d need to find the exact location the dungeon had been located at. Sure, knowing that it was roughly the middle of the clearing was one thing but it wasn¡¯t precise enough. Not if I wanted to find out everything, for that I¡¯d have to push my focus to the extreme, thus narrowing the reach of my perception to avoid being overwhelmed.


    Walking across the clearing, I decided to look for differences in the shadows, in the darkness all around me first. Given the sheer amount of power unleashed in the dungeon¡¯s destruction, I was convinced that the event left some sort of trace. A scar of some sort, maybe an echo or something along those lines, especially as I had used Darkness Magic based on Astral Power to accomplish the destruction. If it had been caused by the same weird power governing the dungeon originally, I might be unable to detect anything, just like I had been unable to detect a lot about the dungeon in the first place, but with magic, I was somewhat confident. Sure, it was Darkness Magic and thus might have a concealment aspect, but even with that, I doubted everything could be hidden. The devastation had been on too large a scale, and too much power had been unleashed.


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    And yet, despite the events of the previous night, the grass was perfectly undisturbed. It was impossible, at least if the hotel had truly been here and not some sort of illusion or maybe hidden in some subspace pocket if there was such a thing.


    Not convinced by what my senses told me, I started to slowly canvass the area, moving back and forth in a grid as I tried to find any clues in regard to the hotel. There had to be something but even when I glanced into the Shadows, there was nothing out of the ordinary.


    My search continued fruitlessly, until I finally stumbled across something, quite literally. If I hadn¡¯t been shifting my sight between the shadows and the world around me, I could easily have fallen but luckily, I noticed the thing before that happened.


    It wasn¡¯t anything huge, just a fairly small piece of deep purple crystal, maybe ten centimetres in length and four in diameter, and nicely smooth, as if it had been polished. Given the strange sensation I was feeling from it, I wasn¡¯t about to just touch it, instead, I first used Inspect, hoping that I¡¯d learn something of use.


    Void Crystal


    That was all the blue window told me, it was called a void crystal but what a void crystal was, I wasn¡¯t sure. Maybe something similar to the Eternal Ice I had been exposed to before, only Darkness flavoured, or something else. Either way, the more I concentrated on it, the more I felt my focus slip away, the sensation giving me a bit of a headache.


    But I had found something, just as I had hoped for, even if that something only opened up even more questions. Instead of trying to interact with the crystal using my magic, I used a bit of closh and completely mundane methods to pick it up, hoping that I wouldn¡¯t accidentally trigger some sort of disaster.


    Just remembering how volatile and dangerous the Eternal Ice had been was enough to make me incredibly wary of a possible Darkness equivalent, simply because the Darkness was far more unstable than Ice. Ice was all about stillness, eternity and preservation. I could easily imagine a glacier that looked exactly the same, even after a thousand years had passed, its foundation having only moved as much as the continent the glacier rested on. On the other hand, Darkness was almost the opposite, always changing, always in flux and always hungry to devour more light. If I accidentally unleashed the Void Crystal, and it was what I suspected, I might see myself turned into dust moments later, the energy holding my material form together devoured by the Darkness. Like the hotel had been, only that there, the Darkness might have done even more, devoured its entire existence, past, present and future.


    Time Magic was the only thing that might explain why the grass in the clearing was the way it was now unless there was someone out there who had purposefully grown the grass and erased the traces the magic needed to do so left. While that wasn¡¯t impossible, I felt it was a lot less likely than some sort of unknown time alteration, simply because I was well aware of just how powerful I was.


    Or the reason for the grass might be something completely different, something not based on Astral Power. Given the forest we were in and its¡­ peculiarities, I wasn¡¯t about to latch onto a possible magical explanation simply because it more or less fit the facts I could observe. There was a lot more out there that I couldn¡¯t observe than things that I could, to say nothing of the sheer, concentrated weirdness the dungeon had exhibited the entire time.


    No, I¡¯d need to keep an open mind and not discard any potential answers, simply because I felt another was more plausible.


    For now, I could only continue my investigation, the Void Crystal securely tucked into my pack and as far from anything magical as possible. This was something I wanted to investigate slowly and carefully, it might be a huge boon or it might kill me. Either way, I was excited to find out.

 Chapter 882

    Maybe letting Luna play in the forest of murderous plants hadn¡¯t been the best idea I¡¯ve ever had. On the one hand, her life magic went through the roof from what she told me, gaining quite a few skill points and even adding an interesting special ability to her repertoire after communing with Hecate. It allowed her to control the plants she grew with her magic to a far greater extent. Now, instead of simply wrapping an enemy up with rapidly grown ivy vines, she had something¡­ bigger.


    On the other hand, knowing that she could conjure these spiky thorn bushes or the smashing vines growing in many areas of the forest was somewhat calming to me, it told me that my munchkin could take care of herself. On the other hand, I started to worry a little when I realised that she, somehow, had managed to splice the two plants together into what I could only describe as an unholy abomination, even if I had a feeling Lady Hecate had ordered a few of them for her garden or something along those lines.


    The result of her splicing was a vine, roughly as thick as my thumb and as agile as a whip, ending in a spiked pod that looked fairly similar to a morning star, only that the spikes on the pod could be launched with enough force to penetrate solid wood about ten centimetres. In addition, the vine could generate enough force to strike mid-sized trees with enough to make them sway from the blow. Sure, if Luna did that, she also toppled from the recoiling force but that didn¡¯t make the sound any more comforting. If these things became wild, the forest would turn into a serious death zone, one that none of us would want to visit.


    We had yet to come across any enemies worthy of being made test subjects of her inventions but the grin on her face when she demonstrated her newly designed plants was enough to drive home the fact that she truly was my daughter. Now, I only needed to figure out how to keep her from creating her own apocalypse, especially accidentally. If a world was destroyed, it should at least be done on purpose.


    Sadly, where Luna had made incredible strides with her powers and Lia was enjoying the forest to the fullest, the many trees branches and insane flora allowing her to train her physicality in ways she hadn¡¯t been able to around the city, I was at a bit of a loss.


    Understanding the Void Crystal was challenging, especially as I wasn¡¯t about to start prodding it with my magic. Not after what happened when I prodded the Eternal Ice I found in the dungeon under the glacier, I had no temptation to find out what would happen if the Darkness took over part of my soul. Sure, having it happen with Ice had turned out to be beneficial in the short term, but in the long term? I had no idea how much the change to my magical markup would have hindered my growth in different magical aspects. Here, on Terra, I wasn¡¯t just focusing on Ice or Darkness, i was trying to learn as much as possible about all the elements, about every type of magic I possibly could. So, limiting myself to one element, even if I increased my ability in that one element greatly, wasn¡¯t something I had any interest in.


    Due to that, I was using a more circumspect route, trying to figure out possible rituals that might imbue the power of the Void Crystal into another object, either in some form of enchantment or some other permanent effect, maybe an alchemical one. Though, given my limited experience in that discipline, I focused on the enchantments.


    Curiously, my current best option, at least in my opinion, was to use Lenore¡¯s Feather I had been granted a while back when I summoned the Zevarra Agha into this world. I wasn¡¯t quite sure how I could combine the two, but I felt a certain compatibility between the two objects, similar energies, or rather the drawing in of energy, that made me think they would work well together.


    But there was also a need for a stabiliser. Something to tie the two powerful objects together, something to give the whole form and function. For now, I had power in spades, from both the Void Crystal and the feather, but power alone wasn¡¯t going to cut it.


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    I¡¯d have to keep an eye out for something suitable, or maybe I could manage to make something, I wasn¡¯t certain.


    Another ongoing project of mine was proving similarly difficult. Namely, contacting the Grandmother. For now, I was pursuing a different idea, something other than trying to project myself through the Astral River, as there were some major difficulties I¡¯d have to fix first. The biggest being that I had no idea how I¡¯d even begin to target something like that, the ritual I had used to gain the Zevarra Agha and the feather used different principles, so it was only partially useful.


    If I wanted to follow the Astral River, I¡¯d need to find a path that guided me not only through the endless void of the physical but also through the boundaries between dimensions. And I had no idea where to even start something like that. If I had access to a capsule, I might be able to use the mechanism used by the Pantheon to project the minds, or maybe the souls, of the users to Mundus, but given that I hadn¡¯t been able to acquire a capsule, that just wasn¡¯t possible.


    But Lady Hecate had named the Grandmother as the Crone, with me acting as Mother and Luna as the Maiden, so there was a connection there. The shelter Luna and I had created was infused with Hecate¡¯s power, thanks to the repeated prayers Luna and Silva performed before Her idol, making me think that I might be able to use the presence and power of Hecate to create a link between the three parts of our triad.


    Working out the details for the ritual was fairly interesting in its own right. I had little to no ability when it came to divine magic but the ritual we used to contact Hecate for Luna¡¯s dedication and the ritual used to summon the Zevarra Agha were both on the border to divine magic, so I had a starting point. With that starting point, and quite a few conversations with Luna and even a few exchanges with Silva, we managed to cludge something together.


    Whether it would work, only using the ritual would tell and so, during a night with a strong, waning moon, hoping that the waning aspect of the moon would correlate with the waning aspect of the Crone, Luna and I were in the room holding Hecate¡¯s idol.


    There, we had prepared our ritual, the circle amusingly similar to that of a runic formation using three runes. Three focal points, one for Luna, as the Maiden, one for me, as the Mother and the last one for the Crone, currently holding an Ice sculpture, depicting the Grandmother. It was amusing, given that the Icon of Hecate Luna had sculpted from the root was using the Grandmother to symbolise the Crone, we now had two sculptures of the Grandmother, one of me and one of Luna, in addition to Luna and myself in the room. I had a feeling there was a joke in this set-up, but I hadn¡¯t managed to find it just yet. We just managed to set up the ritual and could only hope that chance wouldn¡¯t make us the butt of the joke.


    The three points were connected by simple symbols, all of them added by Luna. Their forms were quite fascinating and I could see distinct patterns that made me think of writing, but it wasn¡¯t in any language I had ever seen. It was a runic language, that much was obvious, but I didn¡¯t have a chance to understand it, just as I doubted anyone could easily read the runes I was using unless they had a high level of the appropriate Runic Mastery. But that lack of understanding hadn¡¯t kept me from studying them and committing them to memory.


    When the ritual began, Luna and I were chanting softly, intoning an invocation, almost a prayer only that we weren¡¯t supplicating, we were invoking the presence of the triad. With Hecate as the example, we were trying to invoke the Triad of Maiden, Mother and Crone. Both of us were unleashing quite a bit of power, Luna using the Divine Power of Hecate while I contributed my own Astral Power, the two differing energies combining surprisingly well.


    It wasn¡¯t quite a summoning, dragging the Grandmother¡¯s mind to this plane without her consent would be beyond rude, but it was a firm and direct invitation. One that could be declined but hopefully, the Grandmother wouldn¡¯t do so.


    A minute passed as we chanted, then another as we kept going, hoping for some sort of response. Finally, after ten minutes passed, the energy we had been channelling the whole time suddenly flared and surged into the statue of the Grandmother I had created. For a moment, I felt my breath catch, only to feel it whoosh from my breath in a giant sigh when the statue shattered into fine Diamond Dust.


    The ritual had, quite obviously, failed. Luckily, the failure hadn¡¯t been explosive.

 Chapter 883

    ¡°So, does anyone think they can accomplish something more in this forest?¡± I asked once everyone had sat down for our evening meal. It was something akin to breakfast for Lia, though she primarily ate for the taste, taking her nourishment from my blood, dinner for Luna and something in between for me. It was also the one meal we all shared as a family, and thus the best time to discuss things as a group. In this case, the discussion was whether to remain in the forest or move on, as the past few days had shown me that there was little I could gain here. I had been trying to make sense of the area around the Waldhof, I had tried to investigate how the forest had expanded and why the world around it didn¡¯t seem to be affected but I hadn¡¯t made any progress with either problem.


    There were no more avenues for me to explore and for the last two days, I had done nothing but bang my head against the brick walls of ignorance, trying to brute force my way to an answer. The result was nothing but a severe headache and the conviction that I¡¯d need to change something to make progress. But given that I had no idea what I could change, I was willing to give up, to continue our travels in the hope that I¡¯d find some answers further afield. Maybe travelling towards the ocean, hoping that the coastline would give me an idea of how the terrain here had expanded and whether the change had propagated throughout the land. Another option would be to look for a nearby road, there had to be a traceable change somewhere, and the expansion of this area couldn¡¯t be limited to just this. Well, at least not if the usual rules of physics and maths still applied, but given that magic shenanigans were always a possible, if incredibly unsatisfying, explanation, I wasn¡¯t about to hold my breath.


    ¡°I don¡¯t think I¡¯ll manage to get better results with the plants, at least not for a fairly long time. What I can do with them at the moment is about the limit,¡± Luna admitted, while I noticed Lia shrug in indifference, making me think that she enjoyed this forest but wasn¡¯t really interested in this specific area, that she¡¯d be able to have just as much fun elsewhere.


    ¡°But there¡¯s something we should do before moving on,¡± Luna continued, drawing my focus back to her. ¡°We need to write down our findings, the Lady asked me to leave them here in the sanctuary so that future seekers of knowledge can build upon what we¡¯ve learned,¡± she explained, making me frown. We had worked hard to gather the knowledge we had learned here, simply giving it away to anyone walking into our shelter didn¡¯t quite sit right with me. But then I noticed Luna¡¯s phrasing, that the Lady had asked her to, making me think that there might be a quest involved, a quest from her Deity. Those weren¡¯t something a devout should ignore, ever, and even for those not directly bound to a Deity, ignoring their quests was a bad idea.


    ¡°Did she give you a quest to do so?¡± I asked, just making sure that my conclusions were correct. When Luna nodded, the idea of leaving the area was tabled for now, with the task of writing down our findings taking priority.


    Now we only had to figure out the best way to do so. Given that we had no ready supply of paper, and keeping in mind that paper wouldn¡¯t last very long in the somewhat moist environment in the burrow under the blessed tree, we needed something different. The classic possibilities would be to either use vellum, animal hide, leather or something along those lines or to go positively stone-aged and carve the words into stone.


    Amusingly, the usually least convenient method, namely carving the words into stone, was the easiest for us. If we wanted to use some processed animal product, we¡¯d have to hunt down the appropriate animals and process their hides, something I theoretically knew how to do, thanks to the education given to me by Sigmir, Adra and Rai on Mundus, but practically, I lacked some key components to do so. On Mundus, we had used a combination of lime and a mixture of various minerals to tan the hides, and while I thought finding lime wasn¡¯t impossible, the rest of the mixture wasn¡¯t something I knew how to make, I didn¡¯t even know what exactly was in it. All in all, trying to invent the entire process would be exhausting and messy, while, most likely, failing to produce anything satisfactory. Maybe I¡¯d put Lia and Alex on the idea for the future, having the ability to produce our own leather was useful even when we didn¡¯t want to have something to write on, and it would give them a worthwhile project to work on.


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    No, stone was a better writing material for a simple reason: Magic. I could use my Earth Magic, or Crystal Magic depending on the exact type of stone, to carve the words into the surface with nothing but a bit of concentration, no need for a chisel, hammer or any sort of muscle power. Just my mind, a bit of focus and Astral Power, all of which I had in large supply.


    Finding the right sort of rock was a little difficult. While I could conjure rock, just like I could conjure Ice, neither would stick around indefinitely. Rock faded slower than Ice did, but it would eventually fade, making conjured rock the wrong substance to preserve something within. And so, while Luna was putting a bit of extra work into her skills and putting an outline together with some help from Lia, I was roaming the forest looking for some nice, grey rock.


    It didn¡¯t take too long to find some, just a few rocks roughly the size of my torso, and while getting them back to the shelter wasn¡¯t easy it also didn¡¯t pose a significant problem. Just tedious work, something that had to be endured but could be accomplished with a bit of time.


    Once we had the rocks, it was time to turn them from roughly round chunks into something that could be handled without it being seriously exhausting, without cutting the rock thin enough that a single, stupid mistake would shatter the work Luna and I would put into preparing them.


    It was quite fascinating, when I focused my magic, both Earth and Crystal, into the rock, I could easily find a structured pattern, one that was quite similar to the one within Ice, only that the one in rock was broken up in distinct groups. In one group, the pattern was subtly different from the pattern in another, and these groups were generally distinct to a specific part of the rock. It didn¡¯t take me long to realise that the rock, even if I thought of it as a uniform entity I called rock, wasn¡¯t truly that. There were minute differences in the formation process that caused different parts of the rock to be structured slightly differently, quite similar to the differences I found in some metal objects.


    Following the differences in structure to separate the larger rock into smaller bits made sense to me and it was relatively easy to accomplish with magic. It still took a decent bit of time and effort but it also served as excellent training for my Earth and Crystal Magic, giving me a few points in both and bringing them to nineteen for Earth and fifteen for Crystal. It was fairly amusing just how high those two were, especially considering how relatively low my affinity for them was. The sheer amount of work both types of magic accomplished, either to create shelter or to prepare and enchant magical objects, was significant and so were my gains. And now, I was even using them to prepare a library of sorts of Lady Hecate.


    And that was exactly what Luna and I did next. Once we had the larger rocks I had found cut into something relatively easy to work with, the actual work began. Sometimes, it was Luna, dictating to me what she had found out about the different plants in the area, or what Lady Hecate had communicated to her during her prayers, other times I was on my own, carving my findings and observations regarding the strange expansion of this area or our experiences in the Waldhof Dungeon into the rock.


    It was quite an interesting experience, to write down my thoughts in such a permanent fashion, knowing that future visitors to this place would hopefully find them and be able to use and even expand on our work here. A part of me was reminded of writing guides and such during the time I was playing Craft of War, all these years ago. This felt similar, a sharing of information for the good of all, or something along those lines.


    Ultimately, it took Luna and me almost a week to prepare the different tablets of stone, to carve our findings into the rock and set up the area around the Idol of Hecate to hold the tablets. Once we were done, and just about ready to leave, Luna stood at the entrance to that room, the sanctum if you will, and spoke a prayer to Hecate, dedicating the room and the knowledge within to the Goddess.


    The result was quite interesting, the power of Hecate was almost palpable in the area and I had no doubt that anyone trying to cause mischief here would be dealt with harshly. Our work was, quite obviously, protected by the Goddess and I could feel that Luna had gained at least a level for her work, while I had gained some EXP as thanks. Not enough to fill up another level but it was a nice gesture.


    And now, we could continue on our journey and leave this shelter behind. Leave it, leave the knowledge and eventually, the sharing of knowledge under Hecate¡¯s name would spread throughout the land.

 Interlude: Welcome to the Jungle

    If an environment was to be judged by the number and vociferousness of the curses uttered while traversing said environment, the jungle that had sprung up near a certain city would rank near the top of the list. Or the bottom, depending on whether more and louder curses were deemed good or bad.


    Either way, as a small group of five people was moving through the dense underbrush, the entire forest knew of their passage. Not only were they cursing the entire time, but the strongest and bulkiest of their number was leading the way and had to repeatedly use a heavy blade to cleave through the obstacles. On the positive side, no critters would ever make the mistake of getting caught up in their path and attacking them due to surprise but on the negative side, every beast in a few miles'' radius knew their location and if one of them was interesting in an afternoon snack, they only had to lay in wait.


    Tank, as the group had nicknamed the sturdy bruiser who protected them with his sturdy shield and heavy blade, only just noticed the movement out of the corner of his eyes. He managed to get his shield up but the impact was heavy enough to stagger him, as he hadn¡¯t braced himself properly. After catching himself, he rallied and was ready to block any follow-up attacks while his friends had taken up position behind him, ready to fight.


    Only, there was nothing to fight. Next to Tank, a long vine was hanging from an overhead branch, the end curled together around nothing while it was slowly moving back towards the tree, almost as if it was gathering tension.


    ¡°The heck?!¡± Tank muttered, realising that it was the vine that had hit his shield that hard.


    ¡°I¡¯ve seen enough hentai to know where this is going,¡± Sue, one of their spellcasters muttered, before blushing scarlet when she realised just what she had admitted.


    ¡°Kinky,¡± another of their number chuckled, before poking the vine with his spear, as if trying to ascertain its threat level, ¡°I don¡¯t think we¡¯ll have to be careful of this vine for a bit, it looks like they can only strike once before having to prepare anew. But there might be other vines, just like this one, I don¡¯t think any of us want to get hit by them, it looked like it¡¯s going to bruise, Tank.¡±


    ¡°Yeah, that thing packed quite the punch for some discount ivy,¡± Tank grumbled, his eyes already scanning the nearby trees for similar vines. There were a few visible but none were close to the path he intended to take.


    ¡°You know, the vines might not be the only dangerous plants here,¡± Mirko, their other spellcaster and the closest thing they had to a healer reminded them and suddenly, the entire forest looked a lot more dangerous than it had moments before. If one vine was this dangerous, what else could lurk in the area?


    But their plan was to explore, and that could only be done if they continued onwards. It didn¡¯t take long for them, now that they knew to avoid the vines, to spot another potentially dangerous spot. This time, Tank didn¡¯t need to use his shield to avoid the danger, he actually noticed it before getting too close, though given that the danger was marked by a few bones sticking out of the ground, it wasn¡¯t too hard to see.


    The only difficult thing was to figure out just what the danger was. The group could easily see the area, a small clearing covered in relatively short grass without any shrubs or anything in sight, but the bones made it obvious that there was something dangerous here. Or it might simply be the preferred spot for some predator to feed, leaving the bones of their prey behind.


    Nobody really wanted to move into the area and find out what the danger was using their body, so they moved around it, carefully avoiding anything that might cause them harm. As they circled, Tank accidentally spooked a squirrel and the critter bolted, running headlong into the area. As the group watched, they could see it slow down and before it reached the other side of the small clearing, the squirrel was down, sinking into the apparently soft grass. Nobody could tell whether it was dead or asleep, they were too far away from it, but watching the small squirrel suddenly get moved by the seemingly soft grass until it was in the middle of the clearing where it was covered in a green cocoon sent shivers down everybody¡¯s spine.


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    ¡°What the heck?!¡± Tank asked, repeating his earlier reaction. Only this time, the others clearly shared the sentiment, none of them knew how to deal with an area where even the grass was trying to kill them.


    Now, with their senses dialled up to paranoia levels of vigilance, they continued on and as they moved, they managed to add strange thorny bushes to the plants they wanted to avoid. A bush that was powerful enough to send a thorn through Tank¡¯s shield was nothing anyone in their right mind wanted to mess with, even if Josh considered poking the bush with his spear from behind an obstacle. Once the thorns were gone, the berries might be good for human consumption but for now, they didn¡¯t dare poke the murder bush.


    Instead, they continued on until Sue noticed something weird, as she put it. A magical presence, not hostile or threatening, simply a gentle and quiet presence, one quite in tune with the forest around them. If they hadn¡¯t stumbled quite close to it, she might not have noticed it at all and continued onwards but now that she felt it, her curiosity was roused.


    However, given that the forest had, so far, been filled with lethal dangers masquerading as simple plants, Tank remained in the lead, his shield ready to block and his eyes constantly swivelling.


    Finally, they reached a small hill upon which a massive tree stood and going by everything Sue could feel, the tree was the source of the presence. Stepping into the empty area around the tree, Tank could instantly feel a strangely solemn sensation, one that forbade any kind of violence. Deep within himself, he knew that this was a place of peace, one where no voices should be raised and communication be done with quiet, respectful words.


    ¡°Wow,¡± Sue whispered, staring at the tree before her eyes were drawn to an opening between the tree¡¯s roots, narrow but somewhat inviting.


    Drawn in by the peaceful presence, Sue simply walked towards the opening, ducking inside to get a better look, only for her eyes to widen. There, hidden beneath the roots of the tree was a small cave, not just a simple hole in the ground. Just looking at the structure around her made it obvious that this was deliberately made, not caused by chance and nature, an intelligent mind had formed the structure. Almost certainly using magic, unless the tree roots and the strange, crystalline formations had just happened to form arches and pillars. But that was just impossible.


    Calling out to her companions, she continued onwards, wondering just how big a cave she was in now. And who could make a comfortable place like this beneath a tree, it was surprisingly temperate and dry, with no musty smells or moisture in the air. Walking through the cave, Sue found multiple rooms, all nicely appointed and comfortable, far beyond anything that should be possible at least in an earthen cave.


    Deeper inside, Sue could only stop and gape in shock at what she found. Enshrined between the roots of the tree above was a statue, a divine idol unless she missed her guess, depicting three females, each different but all three with a common thread connecting them. An enigmatic little smile, a quiet whisper of secrets and arcane knowledge graced their faces, alongside subtle similarities. One was young, one was mature and the last one was old. Maiden, Mother, Crone, the words came unbidden to Sue¡¯s mind but just thinking it was enough. All around the statue were openings, holding stone tablets, with one tablet resting near the foot of the statue.


    Curious, Sue stepped forward, only to pause, as she felt herself judged. Judged by something inhumane, as if she had just stepped in the weighing pan of a scale and had to hope that her heart was lighter than a feather or something along those lines. But the feeling didn¡¯t last long, and soon, she could step forward and read the first tablet near the statue.


    ¡®Welcome, stranger, to the Burrowed Library, Sanctuary of Hecate. Be welcomed in this shelter, be respectful of the knowledge held within and, before you leave, add your own observations,¡¯ the tablet read and moments later, a familiar blue window popped open, tasking her to add to the knowledge contained in the library.


    Maybe there was a lot more to this forest than they had originally thought.

 Interlude: Weve got fun and... books?

    ¡°What is all this?¡± Tank asked, after squeezing himself after their wayward witch. The entire place looked like something right out of a fantasy novel, or maybe a movie about rings, kings and small people living underground in very nice holes. This might just be one of those comfortable holes, made to be lived in and enjoyed, even if it currently lacked the furnishing and, maybe most importantly for those small people, the well-stocked pantry. It had to have formed somehow, either by some strange twist of fate that turned stories into reality or by a person, using great effort and formidable magic.


    And that was just the physical structure. Even Tank and Josh, neither of whom were terribly perceptive when it came to things beyond the physical, could feel the change in the air, the difference between the dangerous forest where anything might try to kill you in some horrifying fashion, and this area. Here, there was an aura of peaceful quiet and tranquillity, making Tank think of ancient churches or large libraries from before the change. Places where even a whisper felt too loud and only sombre silence was appropriate.


    ¡°It¡¯s certainly cosy, think we should stay here for a bit? If we want to explore the forest, that is?¡± Josh asked, looking just as amazed by the structure as Tank was. Not that the burrow was really large, just a short access tunnel leading to multiple smaller rooms dug into the hill below the tree, but there was something cosy about it. That perception was strengthened by the aura of tranquillity, giving off the sensation that you could rest here, without having to fear your enemies.


    Just as the two were about to enter the room Sue had vanished in just a little earlier, a blue box popped up, charging them to add to the knowledge in the Burrowed Library. Not really knowing what that was supposed to mean, they looked into the opening, thinking that Sue might have triggered something, to see their companion crouch before a statue, reading off a large stone tablet.


    The statue, and the entire room it was in, was the only room they had seen thus far with any furnishing. It wasn¡¯t a lot, just the statue, a few stone benches and earthen shelves, not a whole lot of comfort. But there, sitting on the earthen shelves were numerous slates carved from some grey stone, looking quite similar to the one Sue was reading.


    ¡°So, what¡¯s you¡¯ve got there?¡± Tank asked, now directly addressing his companion, hoping that the tablet might give them some answers.


    ¡°This is a Sanctuary of Hecate,¡± Sue explained, remembering something about Hecate being a triad deity, composed of a young girl, a woman and a grandmother, or something along those lines, just like the statue was. Or as the magic of this room had impressed upon her just earlier, composed of Maiden, Mother and Crone. With that realisation, she gestured towards the statue as she mentioned the name Hecate, getting nods from her companions. By now, the rest of their group had entered and were listening, though none of them really knew anything about Hecate, other than that she was a Goddess of Magic or something like that.


    ¡°And what¡¯s the quest all about?¡± Mirko asked, only for Sue to gesture towards the tablet she had been reading.


    ¡°I think that the acolytes of Hecate who made this place wrote down what they found out about this forest. We can read at our leisure but we are asked to add our own observations to this library, so future travellers can do so, too,¡± Sue explained, getting a nod of understanding.


    ¡°Like some sort of periodical?¡± Bea, the fifth member of their group, asked, thinking of the articles she had published before the world went to shit, about her own experiments while reading the articles of others, incorporating their findings and understanding into her own while they were trying to figure out how a tiny slice of the world worked. This might be something similar, only that instead of the metabolism of certain microorganisms, it dealt with the area right around them. Meaning, fewer people would be able to contribute, and those people would generally have less specialised skills but at least all of them were working in the same area, literally.


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    ¡°Divine review instead of peer review?¡± Mirko laughed, imagining for a moment some golden light from above, or maybe a metal paperclip, making corrections to a paper instead of sending the paper in and having one¡¯s peers review it.


    ¡°Who knows, but I think the idea is similar. If there are more of these sanctuaries, it could work, especially if there is an exchange of information. You know, so somebody coming across murderous plants like those here can cross-reference and maybe understand the mechanisms of the smacking vine or something like that,¡± Bea nodded, the idea making sense to a part of her that had been buried by the need to survive.


    ¡°Let¡¯s get to reading?¡± Sue added, looking at the many, many tablets, wondering just how long somebody had been swinging a hammer and chiselling away at this much stone. It seemed almost a ludicrous way to record knowledge, outright biblical, and even in that story some of the tablets had been broken. ¡°We better be careful, I¡¯ve got no idea what might happen if we break anything here,¡± she added, not wanting to find out what the fine for the destruction of ¡®books¡¯ in a divinely protected library might be. Because that was most certainly what this was, at least the beginning of one.


    Neither Tank nor Josh were terribly interested in the tablets, they had both taken one and read through it, amazed at the even calligraphy and size of the writing, but given that the tablet Tank had grabbed was utterly incomprehensible, talking about potential dimensional stretching and meeting of parallel lines, he soon gave up. Josh¡¯s luck wasn¡¯t much better, his tablet was about the manipulation and combination of crushing vines and needle bushes, with descriptions that made absolutely no sense to him, to the point that it might as well have been written in a different language.


    Moving back out of the inner sanctuary and leaving their companions to read, they started to explore the rest of the small but homely hole they had found here. And what they found convinced them that staying here for a bit might just be the thing to do. It was just as comfortable as the shelter they had been living in since the change, even if there were a few oddities. A fireplace with a strange, closed chimney, a toilet without a tank to flush it, everyday objects that hadn¡¯t worked since the change but gave the impression that they had been added purposefully but without a way to make them work. Unless there was a way they didn¡¯t know about, maybe some sort of magic. It wasn¡¯t the most outlandish idea, even if neither Tank nor Josh could really see their companions use their magic this frivolously, they usually kept their abilities close to the chest. Setting an entire dwelling up to work with magic didn¡¯t really fit with that idea.


    Walking back to the inner sanctum, they were greeted with a fairly unexpected image. Sue was drawing some odd symbols into the air, looking at them with expectation, only for a splash of water to materialise in the middle of the symbols, hitting her hand and soaking her arm and part of her torso. However, instead of indignation or anger, Sue only let out a happy squeal before going back to the tablet she had been reading.


    ¡°Thank Hecate, this library is amazing,¡± Sue muttered, completely unphased by her troubles. Just a few minutes of reading and she had managed to conjure a bit of water, not a lot but compared to having to wander around and look for bottled water or some more or less dodgy spring? She was happily getting soaked and giving thanks to the Goddess and her acolytes. Without them, this wonderful place wouldn¡¯t exist.


    Next to her, Bea and Mirko were doing their own reading, though by the looks of it, they hadn¡¯t picked an introductory text, or maybe theirs wasn¡¯t about something as useful as Water Rune Mastery.


    Shaking her head, Sue went back to reading, fascinated at the descriptions and practical value written in stone with carefully chiselled words. They might be here for a while, and they¡¯d certainly give their thanks to Hecate every day they were here. And maybe even beyond that.


    Now, she only has to find out what to add to the library. And, maybe more importantly, how to get it chiselled into stone, she had barely used pen and paper for a few years, certainly not for any serious writing. But unless there is some sort of magical laptop hidden somewhere in the burrowed library, stone it is.

 Chapter 884

    Travelling northwards from the forest of wonky dimensions, as I had taken to calling the damned place that messed with my mind in ways I didn¡¯t appreciate, was strangely boring. On one hand, there wasn¡¯t anything really new, just open fields, a few small- and medium-sized towns and a few forests. Those, luckily, hadn¡¯t been messing with their dimensions to become larger than they had any right to be, at least not in ways I could detect, but it also meant they were fairly boring. A few squirrels, some wild cats, various birds, rabbits, weasels and foxes, nothing that was willing to do anything but flee when noticing us. We occasionally harvested some of them for food, just like we did with the various produce now growing in the wild, but that wasn¡¯t interesting, either.


    On the other hand, there was the sheer impossibility of the forest we had left. By getting larger, it should have shifted roads and everything, given that it hadn¡¯t taken over space that had been there before, and thus there should have been some evidence of that. But there wasn¡¯t, it was as if the forest had always been its current size as if the land hadn¡¯t changed at all. Which was impossible and my inability to figure out how that could work, even on a simple, geometric level, annoyed me greatly. I wasn¡¯t even trying to understand how the expansion could be done magically or physically; just understanding its geometry would be enough to assuage my curiosity, but I wasn¡¯t able to get that, either. It was an enigma and one that I hated with a burning passion, to the point that I considered going back and setting the entire area ablaze or something, maybe freezing it and turning it into a glacier or letting the shadows swallow it all up.


    Alas, as amusing as thoughts of retribution against enigmatic areas were, I wasn¡¯t about to invest days, maybe weeks, of time and untold amounts of effort into senseless destruction. There were better ways to use my time and more important things I wanted to destroy or needed to achieve. We might manage to solve the enigma at some point, but for now, I was content to leave it as an inexplicable phenomenon and move past, and away, from it.


    We saw a few smaller communities on our journey north but none were as developed as the people around Apple Gate Farm had been. I considered approaching them but even from a distance, I could see that these people had nothing of interest to us, at best they¡¯d need our help and at worst they¡¯d attack us because we were different or some stupidity like that. I didn¡¯t want my daughters, well, I didn¡¯t want Luna, to see us kill humans, people, at least not until she had a bit more time to mature. So, until we encountered a community with some magical and racial diversity, I wasn¡¯t about to approach anyone, not unless I felt they could give us something.


    And so we kept moving north, away from the forest we had left. For a little over two weeks, we simply kept moving, travelling during the night and spending our days in some sort of shelter. Either taking over a somewhat intact building and using that as shelter or by swiftly digging a hole into the ground. By now, I was quick enough with my Earth Magic that I could dig a shelter in some twenty, maybe thirty minutes. Those weren¡¯t the most comfortable places to spend our time but it worked, the Sun couldn¡¯t get to us and Silva and Luna could take a bit of time to enjoy outside.


    That much time spent walking gave me ample opportunity to lose myself in arcane considerations, especially in regard to the Void Crystal. The more I thought about it, the more I wanted to make something similar to Lenore using the two items, though I doubted I¡¯d manage to actually make life with them. But a permanent scrying construct, that I might be able to accomplish, maybe even a way to grant me the ability to fly but I was much more doubtful about that one. Creating a specialised construct that I could shift my mind into and go exploring was fairly simple, especially with the materials I had on hand. But to make one that I could shift my entire body into, that was much, much more difficult.


    To accomplish either, I needed a medium, though not necessarily a physical one. Instead, I spent quite a bit of time each day, as we were running, with my hands hidden in my sleeves. That way, I could focus on weaving the shadows within my sleeves together, knitting them tightly into something resembling a fabric. It wasn¡¯t really one, nor did it have any physical substance, it was less and yet so much more. As long as it was handled with Darkness Magic, and later wrapped around the Void Crystal, it was able to block everything, be it a physical object or magical energy. Sure, if it was pushed with a physical object it reacted like any other unattached cloth-like substance and wrapped itself around the object, but penetrating it? That¡¯d need some serious magical oompf, we tested it against my Icicles and even Lia¡¯s cleaver and the results were quite interesting. It took Astral Power, quite a bit of it actually, but the shadowy Cloth I had woven was able to withstand either, making me think that it wasn¡¯t really cloth but that it absorbed energy in all forms, as long as I provided the Astral Power needed to neutralise the energy. Thus, an object hitting the cloth caused the kinetic energy of that object to be absorbed, effectively neutralising the impact. Magical attacks hitting the cloth, same difference, it was energy and could be neutralised.


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    This made me think that wrapping the cloth around the Void Crystal worked to preserve it while I wasn¡¯t working with the cloth. The crystal was concentrated Darkness Astral Power, allowing the cloth to leach just a little of that power into itself to resist the continued influx of energy from outside of it, be that heat, what little light could get through the fabric of my pack, and so on.


    Amusingly, the more I learned about the strange non-physical cloth I was making, the further away I got from using the Void Crystal and Lenore¡¯s Feather to create something interesting. The fabric took up too much of my time and effort, to say nothing of the fact that I needed the Void Crystal to keep it stable while I wasn¡¯t actively using my magic to keep it stable.


    The idea of stability was what gave me the next direction when it came to the Shadow Cloth, I had creatively named the fabric that the system couldn¡¯t recognise just yet. If I tried to Inspect the fabric, I didn¡¯t get any results, making me think that it was not permanent enough just yet, similar to the way the system wouldn¡¯t give results when trying to Inspect conjured Ice. Unless I put enough power into the Ice to make it last for a while, as I had with the Frozen Shuttle and a few of the frozen blades I carried around with me, just in case I needed a sharp weapon.


    Now, my idea was to combine Ice Magic, especially in regards to the concepts of permanence, eternity and stillness, all of which I couldn¡¯t access with my Rune Magic as they were high-level concepts, with the Cloth I had created. I wasn¡¯t sure what I might create by doing so, but I hoped that I¡¯d either get something similar to the Void Crystal or a permanent non-physical fabric. The fabric would likely open up some very interesting avenues, especially when it came to magical bags and concealment cloaks, but that was all theoretical for now. And would remain that way until I managed to create the stuff I could only imagine at the moment.


    My work on the cloth and trying to combine it with my Ice Magic had some measurable benefits, as had the repeated creation of underground shelters. The shelters brought my Earth Magic up by another point but as I worked I continued to use my Earth Rune Mastery in the work, increasing it by another two points, bringing the skills to twenty and fifteen respectively.


    But those gains were relatively minor in comparison to the gains I made with Darkness Magic, Darkness Rune Mastery and Ice Magic. Darkness Magic went up by only two points, nothing too major but considering that it was now at fifty-two I wasn¡¯t complaining. Similarly, the Rune Mastery gained two points, reaching level forty-nine and I had a feeling it would soon reach fifty, allowing me to learn yet another Rune. Ice Magic only got a single point, bringing it to fifty-four, but that was okay, if I managed to actually use the concepts I couldn¡¯t express with runes just yet, I¡¯d get a huge boost.


    Lastly, trying to create a purely magical fabric seemed to work wonders for my Enchanting Skill, maybe because the fabric would be magical in its own right or something like that, I wasn¡¯t sure. Whatever the case, my attempts brought my Enchanting Skill to ten, giving me some extra confidence when it came to unravelling and understanding the enchantments on items we had found in Dungeons. Sadly, so far that project hadn¡¯t borne any tangible results, though I had high hopes for it. Someday, I¡¯d get it right.

 Chapter 885

    The monotony of our journey was interrupted when we came across the next major city. Or rather, another major city, if we had tried we¡¯d have been able to visit other cities with only a day or three of detour, but neither my children nor I had been terribly interested. But now, with the dark remains of a skyline stretching across the gloomy night sky ahead, we¡¯d have to detour if we wanted to avoid coming across it.


    Something none of us was interested in, either. I was daily confident to see what had happened to this place, if memory served it used to be roughly the same size as my hometown, only with a different industrial base, or something along those lines. I might have read about it at some point, I think this place had done something with chemical manufacture, but I wasn¡¯t sure. It was one of those trivia facts you stumbled across, acknowledged as interesting and tossed to the back of your mind, only for it to surface randomly.


    If that was indeed the case, it might be interesting to see if the presence of the chemical plant caused some changes to the Undead and Shattered, or if we¡¯d only encounter the same creatures we had witnessed at home. Either way, it was something to investigate and might yield some interesting results and if nothing else, the Shattered and random Undead might have used the time to gain enough power to become something of a challenge. That alone was worth checking out, even if I doubted it.


    And so, after spending a night in one of the least damaged houses on the outskirts of town, we moved in. There was a strange sense of nostalgia, the Undead and Shattered were a lot more numerous than they had been in our hometown, but their levels were a little lacking. At best, they¡¯d serve Luna as enemies but I wasn¡¯t all that comfortable leaving my munchkin to fight them on their own. Instead, we decided to step out of our usual roles in combat, with me acting as frontline, Alex as skirmisher while using some of their psychic powers, Lia and Silva as spellcasters and, finally, Luna with her usual bag of tricks.


    It wouldn¡¯t do a lot for Luna¡¯s EXP, we were still in combat with her, but given that gaining EXP was incredibly easy for her thanks to the Mother¡¯s Guidance trait she had gained from the connection to me, that wasn¡¯t much of an issue. Her skills needed a lot more work, and cross-training was something useful for the rest of us, so we went with it.


    Fighting in close combat was something I had been trained in but also something I lacked practical experience in. Fighting with Mrs Wu, even if she had occasionally pushed me beyond my limits, or striking against training dummies was one thing, or using my blades as measures of last resort when fighting on Mundus, but acting as front line and actively keeping enemies from disrupting Luna and the others? That was an entirely different ballgame, something I wasn¡¯t adapting easily to.


    My biggest problem was that my preferred fighting style was conceptualised after the wind, using speed and distance to my advantage, but that also meant I wasn¡¯t a really solid defence. Movement was my ally, but moving away meant that the enemies I was supposed to keep engaged could easily move past me and attack the others. What¡¯s more, the Undead and Shattered had an advantage in mass and readily committed to suicidal attacks if that meant they could tie me down, forcing me to dodge and weave in close quarters without letting them tackle me.


    During our first encounter, I failed horribly, allowing our enemies to move past me and while I managed to cut multiple of them down from behind, it came down to Lia and Sivla to use their usual weapons to take up the slack. From there, things slowly became easier and I gained a few points in Unarmed Combat and with my Dual Blades, bringing them to ten and nine respectively, but I was already looking forward to moving back into my usual caster role.


    Watching Lia use Darkness Magic as her primary weapon was fairly amusing, though I made sure to keep that amusement under wraps. All her training had been focused on using magic to supplement her physical prowess, be it to distract or disrupt an enemy or to move into or out of their range, be that by shadow stepping or by concealing herself. Now, she was tasked with actually using the Darkness to harm them, which wasn¡¯t an easy task in the first place, and she was struggling. She achieved the best results by using it similarly to the way she always had, by disrupting their movements and confusing their senses, giving Luna and me ample time to dispatch them. But when she tried to copy some of the more adventurous things she had seen me do, things didn¡¯t go so well.


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    She had seen me use Darkness Magic to tear enemies limb from limb, though even I could only do that against incredibly weak enemies or enemies that were in the shadows where Darkness ruled supreme. Lia tried to accomplish it outside the shadows against a normal Shattered. It didn¡¯t go well, to the point that I had to feed her some of my blood as she had put a bit too much effort into their attempts, only for them to fall tragically short.


    Similarly, she decided to try emulating a few of the traps in the dungeon, possibly because I had hypothesised that the anomaly had created them all from Darkness Magic, but that hadn¡¯t worked out too well for Lia, either. She tried to create tendrils out of the shadows, thick tentacles to strike her enemies similar to those of the anomaly, but sadly, Lia lacked the magical power and the raw affinity to make those tendrils truly physical. She managed to stagger a few Undead before having to bow out once more, due to a lack of Astral Power. Turning her into a true spellcaster was, and likely would always be, a work in progress, though not one we put a lot of focus on. Ultimately, she brought her focus back into a direction she¡¯d use in normal combat, though I insisted that we¡¯d try to come up with some form of ranged attack for her. Simply because having one, especially if we happened to encounter flying enemies, could be crucial.


    Maybe even more amusing were Silva¡¯s efforts. She had always used her divinely granted powers as a method of last resort, one that could turn the tide of battle with the use of a single, massively powerful ability. Now, she was trying to conserve as much power as possible, using small encouraging barks charged with her magic or growling at enemies to temporarily disrupt their movement. The second method didn¡¯t work too well on the Undead, but it worked a little, demonstrating that there was some divine punch to her powers. But all in all, she couldn¡¯t do too much, simply because it wasn¡¯t what she had been training for. Nor was it something her class supported, leaving her fairly useless. It pained me a little and, just like I would with Lia, I wanted to find some way to give her ranged capabilities, though I had no idea just how that would work.


    With Lia, there were always ranged weapons, if the whole spellcasting thing didn¡¯t work out, but Silva didn¡¯t have the hands for those. Even if she went into her werehound form, as I had dubbed the two-legged transformation, she wouldn¡¯t be able to use delicate weapons like a bow or crossbow. Javelins might work, or other simpler thrown weapons, or maybe a sling, but I wasn¡¯t too sure there. A simple sling might be the best, something that could act as a bandana while on four legs, with a small pouch of ammunition, if there were no suitable stones around.


    Alex also had their own troubles, though part of that was because our enemies weren¡¯t really fazed by their psychic abilities. Thus, they had to move in and use their sharp claws to hamstring our foes but given that the majority of their movement wasn¡¯t directed by physical structures like sinews and muscles but magically, that didn¡¯t do too much. They managed to somehow channel some of their psychic power into their claws and it worked, but they would never be a melee combatant. Maybe we¡¯d find some enhancement for their claws, some sheaths I could enchant or something, but it wasn¡¯t high on our list of priorities.


    And lastly, there was Luna. And damn, did she have a good time. I wasn¡¯t sure if it was due to the rapid maturing she had been forced to endure or because the Undead and Shattered had decayed to the point that they barely looked human, but either way, she was going to town on them. The seeds she had spliced together, in combination with her ability to direct the plants she grew with her Life Magic, turned her into something fearsome. Her style was as insane as it was effective, using two normal vines to anchor herself and two spliced vines that ended in brutal, spiked pods to bludgeon our foes. It was vicious, it was effective and if I had been an Undead, I¡¯d have shambled in the other direction as quickly as I could.


    All in all, cross-training was quite fun and gave all of us something to think about.

 Chapter 886

    We were in the middle of smashing through another small group of Undead and Shattered, with Luna doing most of the smashing when I noticed movement up ahead. Deliberate, fairly swift movement, not the slow plodding of Undead just ambling around, repeating those strange patterns ingrained in them. No, this was something else, something a lot more interesting.


    ¡°Break,¡± I muttered under my breath, channelling a combination of Mind and Death Magic to strike at the enemies all around me. The pain from channelling Death in its purest form was enough to stagger me for a moment but that hardly mattered as the attack had been enough to send all the enemies around me to the ground, their simple minds shattered.


    ¡°Mum, what¡¯s going on?¡± Luna asked, looking a little confused at the sudden end of combat.


    ¡°There¡¯s something ahead, I think it¡¯s a person on the run,¡± I explained, shaking off the tremors I got from the Death Magic. They only lasted a short time, but that didn¡¯t make them less annoying or painful.


    ¡°Let¡¯s go help, there might be a community around,¡± Lia grinned, knowing that there might be something interesting to find. And if nothing else, she might hope to find somebody worth turning into a vampire, so far, she had no luck in that regard.


    There were nods all around and suddenly, we all moved back into our usual roles. Lia and Silva bounced forward, tearing into the few Undead between us and the movement I had seen, while I started to conjure up some Ice, just in case I needed the additional attack power. By now, I was relatively comfortable with keeping a slew of Icicels in an orbit around me, somewhat similar to the way I had experimented with snow as a defensive and offensive tool, only instead of a mass of snow I was controlling a number of Icicles. Similar in mental application, though it needed a bit of focus while providing far superior attack power.


    With all of us in our usual roles, we made swift progress and could soon see the tail of a group of Undead that moved with purpose. Normally, they simply shambled around, without any direction or drive but these were clearly chasing something or someone.


    With little hesitation, I started to send out Icicels, keeping the volume of my attack down by focusing on precision. Acting more like a sharpshooter than a machine gunner, sending only as many Icicles as I could conjure, so I could keep the number of Icicels I had under my control up.


    The Undead demonstrated that they were lacking, both in the survival instincts department and in the general intelligence department, as none of them seemed to notice that their number was dwindling, though not really fast. They were moving away from us and it would take us a bit of time to catch up, as they were moving as quickly as their strange, shambling motion could carry them.


    Finally, I could see the person fleeing from the Undead, though there were still a bunch of them between us. It was a female, fairly slender and maybe my own age, looking rough and exhausted, with dirty clothes and no visible weapon. For a moment, I considered calling out but decided against it, not while in the city with an unknown number of Undead all around us that a shout might attract. It wouldn¡¯t do to call out to her in an attempt to help, only to attract the notice of some Shattered in one of the nearby buildings and have that enemy pounce on her while she was distracted. No, better to keep taking out the Undead chasing her until things were safe.


    Continuing forward, I realised that the fleeing figure had almost managed to get clear of the buildings, making me think they were safe now. From what I had experienced on the way here, neither Undead nor Shattered travelled far from their place of change or death, so the chances that one of them was tethered out here was fairly small. The change had happened in the middle of the night and very few people were moving across the fields during that time. Hel, just the fact that there were barely a handful of wrecked cars visible on the roads outside of town was a good indicator of those small numbers and people without cars? That was even less likely.


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    Before we managed to catch up further, we were still demolishing the chasing Undead, movement up ahead caught my eyes. Not from the fleeing person but in a semi-circle in the fields, my instincts immediately putting me on the defensive. This was a near-perfect ambush formation and while I logically could see that we had yet to enter their kill zone, I wasn¡¯t too happy with being this close to any ambush, even if it wasn¡¯t aimed at us.


    Moments later, two of the people who had waited in the ambush raised their hands, creating bright orbs of light that illuminated the few Undead still pursuing their original target, while the rest of the ambush started to rain down projectiles on them. I had to suppress a chuckle, as these people were throwing everything at the Undead, but the kitchen sink. I could see arrows whistling through the air, stones getting launched from crude slings, fairly well-crafted spears, and even a few stones simply thrown by hand. It was an incredibly simple but also fairly effective ambush, if only because of the sheer number of projectiles. There had to be a dozen attackers in that circle, plus the bait and the two illuminators, making short work of the few remaining Undead.


    As they did, it occurred to me that we had thoroughly spoiled their plan. The earlier runner hadn¡¯t been fleeing, not in the traditional sense, that had been bait, and we had cut quite a few of the lured Undead down before they could get into their kill zone.


    ¡°Should we go and introduce ourselves?¡± I quietly asked Lia, not sure if we should openly show up after messing up their ambush and effort, or if we should retreat and just happen to bump into them at some point.


    ¡°They¡¯ve seen us already,¡± Lia opined, her eyes focused on two of the people ahead. Sadly, that didn¡¯t tell me much, I was fairly certain that given the distance and bad lighting involved, they couldn¡¯t have managed to get a good look at our features, but they¡¯d likely be able to get our number and rough outline. How likely was it that two groups with two normal-sized people, one small person, a dog and, if they had fairly good eyes, a cat-sized critter, were moving in these parts?


    I didn¡¯t even need to think about that, I doubted there was another group with a make-up similar to ours, simply because our numbers were so limited. Only Lia and I would be seen as real combatants by most people, they¡¯d disregard Silva simply because she was a dog. Never mind that she was level sixty-one and incredibly powerful in her own right, they¡¯d see the lack of opposable thumbs and decide she wasn¡¯t to be taken seriously, at least not on an intellectual level. Similarly, people would disregard Alex, if they even noticed them in the first place, and Luna for her immature body, thinking that no child could gain any power. A statement I¡¯d subscribe to, if ¡®could¡¯ was replaced with ¡®should¡¯, and a few caveats added as I still doubted that the rapid maturation Luna was undergoing would be good for her in the long term. But to have that long-term, she needed power, so things were moot in that regard. No crying over spilt blood and all that. Milk, on the other hand, that you could cry about if it was spilt, getting it from cows or goats was a pain. Spilling the blood of others, not so much.


    ¡°Let¡¯s meet them, it would only be polite, right?¡± Luna suggested, looking at the people ahead.


    Shrugging, I decided to go along with it. These might be intelligent people and maybe we could trade for some supplies or something. If nothing else, the lack of magical attacks in their ambush spoke of ignorance in regard to Magic that a part of me, likely the part of me that emulated Hecate, wanted to correct as quickly as possible. The Mother wanted to teach and guide, and if I had to correct a few naughty children who didn¡¯t want to learn, so be it.


    For now, we needed to make contact and we needed to make contact in the right way. With a show of force, our entrance needed a bang, not a whimper.


    And I had just the recipe for that, even if I didn¡¯t really like reaching into that particular bag of tricks. Raising my hand, I activated Overflow as that was the only way I could channel enough Fire Magic to get what I wanted. And then, despite wanting to cringe at the strange, fiery sensation flowing through my body, I conjured up a sizable fireball, letting it float above us, as I turned the Ice I had conjured earlier into snow, letting it flurry around us, the fire above us refracting of it and creating a glittering cloud around us.


    Once again, it was snowtime.

 Chapter 887

    Pacing, as so often, was quite important. We didn¡¯t want to move quickly, didn¡¯t want to suggest we were in a hurry or truly cared about meeting these people. But at the same time, we needed to cross the distance and I didn¡¯t want to give them too much time to think about the circumstances, an unprepared enemy was generally a less dangerous one, so a bit of speed was necessary. Just not the appearance of haste or excitement.


    Still, the time it took us to cover the distance between us and their group allowed them to converge under one of the lights, waiting for us and looking visibly confused. It was fairly obvious that these people had no idea what to make of us, either due to the simple fact that an unknown group of survivors was approaching them at all, or the magic I was displaying or maybe even that we were moving at night. Any of those could be the reason for their confusion or it might be something else entirely, I wasn¡¯t sure but was curious enough to try finding out.


    The group itself didn¡¯t look like much. Threadbare, dirty clothes, worn by dirty people with makeshift, and also fairly dirty, weapons in hand, they didn¡¯t look like they had been able to wash up in a while, to say nothing of the stench assaulting my nose. Maybe that was their tactic to defend against people relying on their sense of smell, I was fairly certain that I wouldn¡¯t be able to detect any magical leanings they might have, simply because the olfactory assault was too strong.


    ¡°Greetings,¡± I spoke up, as we entered into a somewhat comfortable distance for conversations. Close enough that there was no need to shout but also distant enough that they couldn¡¯t just smack us if they so desired. Moments later, I felt the use of Observe and reflexively parried it, letting them receive only a hint of who and what I was. Namely, I allowed them to see one of my titles, allowing Observe to read me as The Pale Lady, level ??, a fairly amusing trick that I had worked on with Lia.


    ¡°Don¡¯t you know it is impolite to try peeping at a Lady¡¯s intimate details?¡± I asked, my tone deliberately chiding as if I was scolding a child for being naughty. In addition, I let some of my aura billow out, though I made sure to retain control over the volume as much as possible. I wasn¡¯t really good at controlling the impression my aura made, at most I could hide it from casual observers, but it would have to do. My Charisma was sadly too limited to allow for more.


    ¡°Er, what?¡± one of them muttered, clearly feeling out of their depth. They were geared and mentally prepared for combat and had only a few minutes to shift from attacking Undead to suddenly talking with a powerful, unknown presence and that lack of mental preparation showed.


    ¡°I gave my greetings before one of your number rudely tried to peep and observe my intimate details, something I consider fairly rude. But maybe that is a cultural thing, do you walk around simply stripping people of their clothes if you wonder what they look like beneath them?¡± I prodded, keeping control of the conversation and them off-balance.


    ¡°Maybe it is, Mother. I wonder what that one looks like,¡± Lia grinned, staring at one of their spellcasters, a woman maybe a little older than Lia, who had been partly hidden beneath one of their fighters, though neither the one who had spoken nor the one who had used Observe.


    ¡°What?¡± now it was the turn of the woman Lia was looking at to be scandalised, while the guy she was standing, and now hiding, behind looked both confused and somewhat angry.


    ¡°My, I¡¯m certainly neither tall nor black enough to pull off the Pulp Fiction, am I?¡± I mused for a moment, before shaking the amusing thought off. There were some things my physique simply prevented me from doing and impersonating Samuel L Jackson was one of them.


    ¡°Anyway, what I was referring to is that it feels incredibly intrusive to have somebody use the Identify-skill on you, as that one just did to me,¡± I nodded towards the offender, an archer in the middle of their group. ¡°Maybe it would be easiest to return to the beginning of this conversation and leave your rudeness behind, it wouldn¡¯t serve anyone to harp on about it,¡± I suggested, showing a bit of largesse.


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    ¡°Thus, I repeat myself and give my greetings,¡± I continued, hoping that they were now in a state where they¡¯d simply go along with what I wanted, not that I had an actual plan for where I wanted this conversation to go.


    ¡°Ah, yes, greetings,¡± the woman who had been running earlier replied, stepping forward and a little closer to us.


    ¡°As you can see, we are a small group of travellers, exploring the world after it has shifted underneath us all. Could you tell us about your community, and maybe this area, too?¡± I asked, curious what they¡¯d make of my request. For a moment, the woman simply looked at us, her eyes flickering from Luna to me almost as soon as the woman realised that Luna wasn¡¯t just a petite adult but an actual child, though I couldn¡¯t see anything but confusion in her eyes.


    ¡°Er, sure, I don¡¯t think we¡¯ll manage to gather another group of monsters anyway. It takes time to set up, you know?¡± she asked, after glancing at the rest of her group, making me wonder if they had some sort of leadership or how they were organised in the first place.


    ¡°If you say so,¡± I shrugged, before nodding towards my two daughters, ¡°You may call me Jade, and these are my daughters, Carnelia and Luna,¡± I introduced us, not quite ready to explain Silva and Alex just yet.


    The woman, Sian as she introduced herself, gave us the names of her companions, all fourteen of them, and while I listened to their names and connected them to their faces, I didn¡¯t really care about them. Some of them, like the two spellcasters, divinely granted by the feel of it, were easy, their names were Sarah and Kyle, as was the rude guy who had tried to Observe me, Riko, but the rest of them? I simply didn¡¯t care.


    We walked as we talked, though to my surprise, we didn¡¯t move into the fields around the city but alongside the edge of the city, not entering but also not moving away from it. When asked, Sian explained that their group was based in an apartment block at the edge of town, the building being in decent condition and allowing them to house their people in relative safety. It was obvious that they didn¡¯t have all that many people, making me wonder why they acted at night instead of hunting during the day.


    When asked, Sian explained that during the day, most of the Undead and Wihtered were holed up in buildings, making it incredibly difficult to draw a group of them out, into prepared ambushes. The shamblers, as she called them, simply didn¡¯t want to move during the day and the survivors here had no desire, and no ability, to flush them out of buildings in some sort of city-warfare. Instead, they made slow and steady progress, killing a few dozen shamblers each night in an attempt to take back their home.


    Brave words, but when I considered the numbers for a moment, I didn¡¯t see too much hope for them. This city, at best guess, used to house about half a million people, if they destroyed a hundred Undead or Shattered each night, it would take them over a decade to lay all of those bodies to rest. Even if they had ten groups like this one, it would take them over a year, assuming they could stomach destroying a hundred formerly human beings each night, without turning completely mad. I wasn¡¯t sure that¡¯d work, but I wasn¡¯t about to voice that concern, not until I knew these people better and had an idea about their number. And their levels, from what I could tell, the people around me were in their thirties and forties, level-wise, so not all that impressive, especially as it didn¡¯t feel like they had any real spellcasters amongst their number.


    Which is what I began to focus on instead, their magical abilities. Sarah and Kyla had banished their lights as we started to move, an action I mirrored, though I kept the glittering snow floating around me, both as a potential weapon and as a demonstration. Drawing the two divine spellcasters into the conversation was fairly simple and I soon learned that Hestia had come to both of them in their dreams, offering them power to defend their families. They had accepted and gained a modicum of divine spellcasting ability, in addition to an understanding of farming and agriculture. I had a feeling that there was more to it, but I wasn¡¯t about to press them, especially when Luna spoke up at that point, taking over part of the conversation.


    If nothing else, Luna¡¯s obvious youth allowed her to speak in a far blunter manner without having to worry about offending people. Not that it was really needed in this case, Luna could speak about Lady Hecate with ease and confidence, making me wonder just how much information my munchkin had been given by her divine Patreon.


    Either way, Luna¡¯s clear conviction and understanding allowed her to take the two acolytes in hand, giving them a better understanding of their own place in the world. It also made Luna the clear leader amongst the three, an effect I found both fascinating and highly amusing.


    Other than that, the conversation didn¡¯t get too detailed, certainly not until we reached the building these people had holed up in. Now, we could start getting to know them better.

 Interlude: Survivors 501

    It sounded so easy when said in the light of the sun or while far away from the horrors of the night. Just sneak in, throw a few rocks at different zombie groups and run, not too fast, not too slow, just keeping them interested and throwing more rocks, if necessary. As they chase you, stay clear of any building that might disgorge more of them and run to the prepared ambush spot, where the rest of the group is waiting, ready to rain down hell on the shamblers. Easy, without danger and an excellent way to gain EXP for everyone involved. Far better than trying to go in during the day and fighting the shamblers in the close quarters of the buildings they retreat into during the day, where death could lurk behind every corner or door.


    It sounded so incredibly easy, but now, just after Sian had thrown the first rock, hit the first shambler that immediately stopped whatever it was that the shambling Undead did while not trying to murder the few surviving humans, and went back to that. Trying to reach and kill her. Alongside its closest five or ten friends, she wasn¡¯t sure in the darkness of the night. And didn¡¯t really care, as long as she could stay ahead of them during her flight through the dark and devastated city.


    As she ran, she heard something strange behind her, crashes and moans that felt far too close for comfort, prompting her to run as fast as she could. If the shamblers were close enough for her to easily hear the noises they made, they were too close for comfort. Faster, while making sure she didn¡¯t slip or stumble as she ran, she continued, throwing one last rock at a distant target as she moved. Maybe that was overkill, but she wanted to do the group proud and clear up her home.


    Soon, breathing laboured but still controlled, Sian reached the home stretch, the wide open road leading out of the city and into the area where her companions were waiting. Waiting, armed and ready to rein down hell on her pursuers.


    Her companions were only visible as vague shapes in the darkness, barely lit up by the faint light of the moon and stars, just bright enough for them to navigate and see the shambling shapes. Until, after a pair of soft. whispered prayers broke the silence of the night, bright lights rose above two of her companions, bathing the entire area in golden light. And not just any golden light, the bright, golden light came from the blessing of Hestia and, according to the companions who summoned it, it was anathema to the Undead. Not strong enough to destroy them by itself, Sarah and Kyle lacked the sheer power for that, but strong enough to weaken the shamblers, making it far easier for her companions to strike them down.


    The moment the lights went up, the whistling sound of arrows, interspersed with the twirling of slings and the meaty chunks of stones hitting flesh filled the air, as each and every one of her companions attacked the shamblers at the same time. The shamblers would fall, but they would try to take them down, even if it cost all shamblers their life to kill a single survivor. Unless one managed to completely break contact with the shamblers, they were implacable, untiring and utterly deadly, despite their lack of foot speed.


    Turning, she grabbed a rock from the ground, prepared so she had something to strike the shamblers with, and threw it with what strength she had remaining. Only, there were far fewer shamblers than she had anticipated, far fewer than she had attacked. Sian was confident she hadn¡¯t been too fast, not over that little distance, so there should be more. But there weren¡¯t, making her frown in confusion, even as she picked up another rock.


    ¡°What¡¯s going on?¡± Riko, one of the most experienced fighters in their little group asked, looking at Sian with a mix of disappointment and confusion. Their ambush had worked, but it had netted them far fewer enemies than they had planned.


    ¡°No idea,¡± Sian admitted, when Josh, one of the archers, spoke up.


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    ¡°Look, what¡¯s that back there?¡± he asked, pointing into the city from where Sian had emerged just a minute earlier. There, far back in the inky darkness, barely visible thanks to the Lights of Hestia, were a few figures. Nothing more than faint outlines, but something was there. And nobody had an idea what it was.


    Tension ratcheted back up, and weapons were readied again when suddenly the night was banished as if dawn had come early. Where the lights of Hestia were bright, the light soft and comfortable, the light that shattered the night before them was anything but. It was a burning fire, orange and red flames forming into a massive ball of pure, burning fury, hovering above the group they had faintly seen and bathing those formerly faint outlines in sharp light, making them easily visible. And all around them, some between them and the group, some behind them, they could see the shapes of destroyed shamblers, some nothing but smears on the road or a wall, crushed by insane force, others simply destroyed by some unseen power.


    ¡°What in the¡­?¡± Kevin whispered, staring at the group that was slowly marching towards them, completely unhurried and imperious, as if they owned the night. And maybe they did.


    All three were female, that much was readily obvious despite the distance, as was their massive canine companion. Two of the shapes were of average size, though what they might lack in physical size, they made up with the light show. One seemed to control the massive fireball floating overhead, her hand held open as if cupping something unseen, while the other showed no movement, though the flurry of swirling blades that accompanied them like their own personal blizzard made up for that lack of posture. Last, but certainly not least, the third one was just weird. She was barely the size of a child, looking oddly immature, but the four strange, tentacle-like limbs stretching out from behind her back made it obvious that this was no child, even if her face and physique suggested just that.


    Their entire group coalesced around the central few, milling around a little confused and unsure of what to do. These people walking slowly towards them were dangerous, they all could feel that despite the distance between them, but it was also obvious that they weren¡¯t looking for a fight. Otherwise, they wouldn¡¯t move this slowly, nor would they act out in the open.


    And yet, with each step they took, a small seed of unease grew within Sian¡¯s body, a worry that asked, what were those people? Why were they here, she had never seen them before and she was confident if she had seen them, even from a distance, she would remember. That confidence only grew as they got close enough to fully evaluate their looks, confirming that the smallest of them had an extreme babyface, though her eyes, strangely black with white, almost glowing irises in the middle took away a lot of the cuteness factor from her face. Sure, she felt the least dangerous but the taller two easily made up for that, giving Sian the impression she was looking at two utter monsters.


    They were more dangerous than anything she had ever encountered, be that before or after the world had gone to shit. These two were monsters, nothing else to say about it, and they looked the part. One had pale, almost blue skin, making Sian wonder whether this person had any blood in her body at all, the other was almost the complete opposite, the skin looked leathery and tough, while her eyes were orbs of purest crimson, gem-like and glittering in the light of the burning fire overhead.


    Lastly, the dog. From afar, it had looked like an ordinary dog but now, up close and personal? It was so much more, it felt like so much more. The beast wasn¡¯t just massive, easily large enough to look a normal human in the eye without rearing up, it also was armoured and radiated both danger and power. It felt just as dangerous as the two women, maybe even more so thanks to the sheer bulk of its body.


    ¡°Greetings,¡± the woman in the middle spoke up, her voice cold and chilling as ice, in complete opposite to the ball of fire floating overhead. The strange, glittering blades around her swirled in synch with her voice, sending a chill across the open space between them, only adding to the intimidation she radiated without even trying. Moments later, as if to prove them all wrong, the intimidation increased by an order of magnitude, as she woman stared past Sian, at one of the people behind her, the woman¡¯s eyes turning hard and cold.


    ¡°Don¡¯t you know it is impolite to try peeping at a Lady¡¯s intimate details?¡± the woman asked, the voice now cold enough to send shivers down Sian¡¯s spine and cause every hair on her arm to rise. But, as cold and intimidating the voice was, as confusing were the words, breaking the spell Sian had been under, and finally, allowing her to speak. Though, not in an intelligent manner.


    ¡°Er, what?¡±

 Chapter 888

    Right after entering the living area of these people, I made a mental, executive decision and spoke up.


    ¡°Before we start speaking, I would make you an offer and hope that you do not refuse,¡± I began, the confined space of the building concentrating the scent of unwashed humans to the point that only iron self-control kept me from gagging, ¡°Do you have bathing facilities of some kind or a tiled area that you can use? I can easily conjure up the water and, with all due respect, you people are in desperate need of a bath.¡±


    My words had an amusing effect. These people had been forced to live in their own filth, water was a too precious resource to waste on things like washing and no naturally flowing water nearby meant that being dirty had become unavoidable. But they remembered what it felt like to be clean, they remembered times when they had a shower after exercising and maybe another one in the evening if the days were hot. They remembered being clean and smelling of roses or whatever scent floated their boats, they remembered and they yearned for those times. Not only had they been clean, they had been safe, comfortable, the world, or at least their small slice of it, had been a heavenly place compared to this. They yearned and here I was, offering them a small piece of that heavenly place back.


    The results couldn¡¯t have been more obvious. Each and every one of the adults around me gained a look of yearning and glee, to the point that I worried they¡¯d set up a shrine or something along those lines. A shrine to Hygieia, maybe, it certainly would fit.


    But before any prayers to cleanliness could be made, I was guided into the cellar where a few old washing machines remained hooked up to waterlines that no longer carried pressure, a dark, slightly damp place but one that was made to withstand large amounts of water being spilt, allowing it to drain away naturally.


    The locals didn¡¯t even bother to split off by sex as they shed their clothes, leaving piles of stinking laundry just lying around. Their actions forced me to cover Luna¡¯s eyes, there were some things I didn¡¯t want my munchkin to be exposed to just yet, Maybe I should have left her outside or somewhere else, just away from this¡­ exposition.


    To make those kind of matters worse, the people audible enjoyed the first warm shower they had in months, groaning and moaning in ways that brought a blush to my own cheeks and forced me to use an extra bit of magic to cut off the sound from reaching Luna¡¯s ears. Some things my munchkin shouldn¡¯t even think about before she was twenty.


    But other than that, the operation ¡®wash away the stench¡¯ was a full success, giving my nose a much-needed respite. It also gave me an absolutely inordinate amount of goodwill amongst these people, especially once the freshly showered people moved back up, waking up their fellows and sending them down. It took a few hours, but by the end of them, I had not only seen all the people living here in a natural state, all two hundred of them, I also knew that they had no legacy of Mundus amongst them. I was fairly certain that I¡¯d have felt that, or seen if their avatar had been anything but a human.


    In turn, the people here had seen my group, causing a fairly interesting effect. They could easily see that none of us was really human, with Luna being the closest physically but her eyes told a very different story, to say nothing of Lia and myself. While I could pass as human if somebody squinted, was colourblind, ignored my ears and regarded the strange glimmer within my hair as some kind of cosmetic glitter, Lia on the other hand was clearly inhuman. Her solidly red eyes, coarse and pale skin, and almost claw-like hands made that obvious to the point it almost couldn¡¯t be ignored.


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    But on the other hand, they could just as easily see how we acted. How I kept Luna from being exposed to things I didn¡¯t want her to see, or how Lia deferred to me. These were behavioural patterns they recognised and understood, something familiar they could relate to. It gave them a commonality they happily clung to and opened up avenues of conversation, especially between a few of the local mothers and me, while Luna was regarded with great interest by the few children amongst these survivors.


    These talks led to more conversations, especially about their community. It was fairly obvious from the start that they¡¯d love to have us as part of their group, at least that was the vibe I got from them, though that might have been the showers talking. Or maybe they wanted what we could do, the ability to conjure water as I had would be invaluable to anyone, to say nothing of the sheer power I commanded. Even while keeping my aura as contained as possible, the people here could feel the difference in scale.


    As I talked with different people, mostly during or right after their showers, I got a bit of understanding about their community. Sadly, it was fairly divided, something that became obvious once the group I had first met went to sleep and I found myself with a group of elderly people. They were something of a planning group, and by the sound of it, they were trying to organise everyone. Only, they lacked the persuasive power to actually lead people, the feeling I got from them was more akin to an advisory council, only one that lacked anyone to make their advice a reality.


    Similarly, there were a few people with a slightly higher level who had gone onto the ¡®reclaim our homes¡¯ bandwagon and were organising the destruction of Undead as much as possible, but those people didn¡¯t really care about anything but their cause. They had the tactical leadership and a cause to cling to, but strategically, they were lost. They didn¡¯t really care for logistics beyond gathering and looting as many supplies as possible, but that wasn¡¯t a long-term plan, as anyone should have quickly realised. There was a limited amount of supplies and eventually, they¡¯d run out, no matter what.


    The best chance these people had when it came to providing for the future, at least from what I could tell, lay with Sarah and Kyle, the acolytes of Hestia. There might be additional divine acolytes, but these two had given me a caring vibe, making me think that they were truly trying their best. What they had told me, and what I had seen on the way here, of their agricultural efforts was admirable but I wasn¡¯t sure it would save all these people long-term. They were growing some of the food they needed but it was only to supplement the stores they had looted, stores that would run out eventually. Sure, they had been fairly lucky and looted multiple tons of easily storable food, noodles, rice, staples like that, but if they didn¡¯t get things up and running, it would eventually get dicey.


    Ultimately, the community lacked a leader, either a small group of people like it had been at the farm, who gave direction and made things happen. Without that, people would dither, would discuss, would piss and moan but at the end of the day, nothing would get done. Sadly, I was uniquely unqualified to act as the leader to anyone but my small family, both due to personal inclination and due to the various traits I was settled with. To say nothing of my complete and utter lack of interest, which would make it even more difficult, and my personal mission to continue travelling. No, I wasn¡¯t a leader and I would never be, not unless I had conjured the beings I was leading myself, as I had near the Nexus on Mundus. And even with those, I hadn¡¯t really been interested in leading.


    But what I could do, and what I offered, was teaching. I had a feeling that it was something they¡¯d have wanted to demand and only the difference in power had kept them from getting silly ideas, but when I offered to teach them magic, everyone in earshot perked up, bringing a grin to my face. It wasn¡¯t really unexpected, they had seen me conjure fire, they had seen me conjure water and especially the second was something anyone would want to learn. It was simply too important and convenient to ignore, especially after I had demonstrated what it could be used for earlier.


    Lady Hecate would have been proud of the way I was encouraging more arcane spellcasting in this world. She might even have said something to my munchkin, with the way Luna suddenly sat up and paid attention when I mentioned teaching, despite being almost asleep after a long night of fighting and talking. So, we were offered a place to rest and headed off to bed, with a few plans made and a few ideas forming in the back of my mind.

 Chapter 889

    For some people, sleeping until noon was supposed to be the height of decadence, a lifestyle only the idle or seriously wealthy could afford. For others, it was simply the norm, brought about by the rigours of working shifts and scheduling, forcing them to be awake, and hopefully aware, while others could rest. And yet, when it came to people wanting to contact one another, the assumption was automatically a roughly normal schedule, regardless of circumstances. Or, in this case, just a few hours after my companions and I had been given the room to prepare our bedding, a gentle but fairly insistent knock was disturbing our sleep. For a moment, I considered whether the appropriate answer to that disruption was a Mind Magic blast, nothing deadly only debilitating, but somewhere deep within me, I knew better. Even if I wanted to blast whatever fool dared disturb me, I had to be an adult about this.


    Growling under my breath, I pushed myself from the comfortable nest made of pillows, Luna and a pair of sleeping bags and, after making sure that I was adequately covered, opened the door.


    ¡°What?!¡± I growled out, before even taking in just who had been trying to knock in the door. It was teenagers, I really should have known. A tag-team of boy and girl, maybe fifteen or somewhere thereabout, I wasn¡¯t sure and, frankly, didn¡¯t care too much. They looked a little too puny and soft to become melee fighters or archers or something along those lines, and the shirt worn by the boy, saying ¡®Roll Initiative¡¯ with a many-sided die on it spoke of certain geek-creds. Most likely, they had heard that the mysterious Traveller offered magic training, or something along those lines, and their enthusiasm had overcome all common sense. Which, in turn, caused them to try knowing in my door at this sun-cursed hour of the day. It was cursed noon, why would I ever want to be awake at this time?


    Something about my posture, or maybe my tone, must have quenched some of their enthusiasm, But only some, not all of it. Rallying, the girl spoke, her voice filled with excitement.


    ¡°I¡­, We¡­, They said that you¡¯d be able to teach magic? Like the thing where you made it so we could shower?¡± she babbled, quickly rallying after a bit of a false start. Still not fully coherent and fairly grumpy, I only grumbled, wondering for a split second just how well these two would go with ketchup.


    ¡°Can you teach us?¡± the boy now asked, his own excitement getting resurrected by his partner-in-annoyance.


    ¡°I can do many things, boy,¡± I replied, feeling a small spark of sadistic amusement when I took his question literally, just to be annoying.


    ¡°Would you please teach us magic, Oh Pale Lady?¡± the girl asked, trying her best to speak formally, and with as much respect in her voice as she could. In contrast, the boy simply repeated his earlier query, only with a little whine in his voice.


    By now, I was feeling fairly annoyed and decided to see just how well the boy could swim. Or if he¡¯d sink in the tides of the Astral River.


    ¡°Well, lesson one, boy,¡± I felt a vicious grin split my face, ¡°Don¡¯t drown,¡± I ordered him, before flicking my finger against his forehead while launching a powerful Mind Magic strike at him, dragging his mind into the Astral River with only a sliver of my attention to make sure he wouldn¡¯t perish. Hopefully.


    His body, unable to remain upright without his mind and instinct to perform the many subtle adjustments needed to stand simply crumbled like a puppet with his strings cut. There was a reason I usually had the people who got this sort of lesson sit comfortably, his body would be quite sore given the way he had crumbled against the wall until he was mushed against it.


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    ¡°What did you do?¡± the girl now looked at me with fear in her eyes, she obviously hadn¡¯t expected this. If not for the visible breathing of the boy and a few involuntary muscle twitches in his body, she¡¯d be a lot more agitated, maybe thinking I had casually killed him.


    ¡°I¡¯m teaching him a lesson,¡± I grinned, amusement radiating from the part of my mind that was watching the boy¡¯s mind struggle with the Astral River. Without knowing what was going on, without having anything to give you perspective and a point to start, it was incredibly difficult to keep yourself from getting lost. And yet, this silly boy actually started to make progress, making me wonder if he had managed to find a stable stream he had an affinity with and used that to centre himself.


    ¡°You could even say, I¡¯m teaching him two lessons for the price of one, aren¡¯t I generous? He¡¯s getting a chance to earn his magic, though he¡¯s taking the hard way, and he learns that you don¡¯t disturb people who fought all night before they get up voluntarily. Normally, I¡¯d say until the second cup of tea but I have no idea if you people have that divine drink,¡± I felt my smile soften, thinking of the stupidly expensive and incredibly delicious tea I had in my backpack. No way was I risking that stuff in the beta-version of my magical bags, not while I wasn¡¯t certain they wouldn¡¯t accidentally unravel and dump all the stuff stored within into the shadows, never to be seen again.


    Realising that the boy was quickly reaching his limits and would drown without help, I activated Overflow to make sure I had enough power for what I had in mind, before dragging him out of the Astral River with my Mind Magic. The small, blue box informing me that I had gained a level in the skill, bringing it to fifty-two, only added to the size of my grin, making me think that maybe this was a good way to train students and idiots. Maybe especially for idiotic students, quite literally a sink or swim moment.


    ¡°What was that?¡± the boy groaned, holding his head as he flopped around like a landed fish.


    ¡°That was your first lesson, boy,¡± I grinned, my eyes flickering to the girl who was crouching down next to the boy, helping him right himself and get his limbs back under control. It was fairly difficult to get up when on arm was behind your back and squeezed against a wall, especially when every part of your body hurt.


    ¡°You could also say it was a dual lesson, magic and decorum,¡± I added, now feeling a little curious about what the boy had achieved in the Astral River. ¡°If you want, I can explain to you what the notifications you most likely received just now mean, I might even give you a few ideas to work with,¡± I offered, hoping that the young fool would simply tell me.


    ¡°Earth Magic and Earth Rune Mastery, both level one, and also a trait, Natural Mage,¡± he added, looking fairly confused. Now, it was my turn to struggle to keep my face placid, the Natural Mage trait was a stupidly powerful one, one I had gained during the creation of my Avatar in the capsule.


    ¡°Oh, my, impressive, boy. The magic is useful, but the trait is the real kicker. There should be a few sub-traits and such, you can look at those later. But the more important part would be to know whether you have more than just an affinity to Earth Magic. More affinities mean you have a bigger bag of tricks and for spellcasters, the size of your bag of tricks is directly linked to your power and thus how long you will survive,¡± I explained, wondering if my somewhat callous method of simply throwing the boy into the Astral River and having him struggle had helped him to get that trait. When I eyed the girl, wondering if it would work with her, too, she suddenly shrunk back, clearly wondering just how bad of an idea waking me up had been.


    ¡°Do you want to try what I did to him, hoping for some massive rewards or do you want the soft, tried and gentle method?¡± I asked the girl, hoping that she had some balls, even if that was a fairly disturbing image. Sadly, she only shook her head, clearly uncomfortable with the idea of getting knocked out and flopping about the hallway. Oh, well.


    ¡°You know, maybe you should get all who want to learn magic together, that way I only have to explain some things once. Would make it easier on me and give me more time with my students. Why don¡¯t you set that up, and I make sure that my kids are awake, fed and watered?¡± I asked, giving them their marching orders. Amusingly, the two complied immediately, leaving me to retreat back into the room, where my comfortable bed was trying to seduce me.


    Alas, there was only one pair of true pillows for me and those were sadly out of reach. Someday, I would have my beloved Sigmir and her heavenly pillows back.

 Chapter 890

    If I was to be honest with myself, I could have left Lia to catch some more sleep. But, sadly for her, I was not that nice, not today, not after getting woken up far too early. Instead, I made sure to wake Lia just as I woke Luna, who I wanted to have with me while teaching these people the foundational parts of magic. Thanks to her connection to Lady Hecate and the lessons she had previously listened to, she was quite competent when it came to them and had a few abilities that amplified that even further.


    Lia, on the other hand, had little actual magical knowledge, she could use what I had taught her but when it came to the more esoteric and theoretical parts, she was a bit of a dunce. Or maybe simply not interested, instead preferring to hit things with her hands, claws, cleaver or anything else, as long as it hurt. She was passionate like that.


    Either way, it didn¡¯t take long for the three of us to get ready, all the while I noticed Silva look at us with that canine grin of amusement I knew so well. She was awake right now, but given that she hadn¡¯t moved beyond raising her head for a moment, I was fairly certain that she¡¯d get back to sleep as soon as we left. Or maybe she¡¯d follow us, but only to look for some nice spot of sunshine to continue sleeping. Sadly, I couldn¡¯t go napping in the sun, mostly because I hated the sun, but also because I had to teach these people magic.


    And so, I took both of my daughters along after we finished breakfast. Luna, obviously, to help with the lessons I had in mind, Lia, on the other hand, might find someone she could teach how to fight. From what I had seen last night, the locals relied on ambush tactics and ranged attacks, not bad from a tactical point but strategically, it was suicide. If they only had ranged attackers used to and skilled in working from ambushes, they¡¯d get utterly annihilated if their base was ever attacked, or worse, breached.


    There was a reason why almost all groups travelling on Mundus had some sort of melee attackers, some people to get up with the enemy and force them into a fight, even if in many cases the killing could be done easier from a distance. Mostly, because it was only in ¡®many¡¯ cases, not always and in the cases where it couldn¡¯t be done, a group that completely relied on ranged attacks could be utterly destroyed without a chance to fight back. There was a reason why I tried to give all my companions the skills to work up close or from a distance, though Luna was currently exempt from that. No matter what her attributes said, or how her high level forced her to mature artificially fast, she was only a child, I didn¡¯t need to add that to the things I felt guilty about. And forcing her to fight in melee without her magic was just not necessary. Or so I hoped.


    But these people here didn¡¯t have a powerful mother who was willing to keep them safe, while they had some basic protection from their location and a guard at the entrance, that wouldn¡¯t keep them safe. It was only luck that had made it so they hadn¡¯t been attacked already, luck or maybe providence, I wasn¡¯t sure. Either way, it wasn¡¯t something that could be relied upon, at some point, they¡¯d get attacked and that day would mark the loss of yet another pocket of humanity. There weren¡¯t enough of those left for my taste, I didn¡¯t want to imagine a world where my group were the only thinking people left. Even with the four of them for company, that¡¯d get lonely, to say nothing of the hassle that would come with growing our own food. If there was one area I wasn¡¯t interested in, agriculture would be it. No, that kind of hard labour was not for me, nor could I see a simple work-around with my magic, be it current or future.


    And so, it was a group of three that addressed the gathered people, of which there were surprisingly many. Not everyone was in attendance, though that might have had to do with the size of the room, but a lot more than back when I had given this very lecture at Mrs Wu¡¯s gym. The lecture about the system, about Astral Power and the Astral River, about elements and what magic could do. The rules about conjuring, about meditating and warnings about the dangers of the Astral River, interspersed with examples and demonstrations. All the while, Luna was sitting nearby, quietly using her divinely granted abilities to bolster the understanding of the people before me, hoping to draw them onto the Arcane Path.


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    The reasons why Luna¡¯s divine powers worked as they did were something I was only beginning to understand, or at least I thought I understood. It was fairly simple, one of the first things I had learned about Lady Hecate, back when I was creating my Avatar in the capsule, was that the Lady wasn¡¯t interested in blind, sheep-like followers. She, to my understanding, wanted people capable of reaching the end of the Arcane Path and pushing it further. Like any good scientist, she understood that progress wasn¡¯t made by a lone genius, but by the work of countless people, all creating their own small bricks that constructed the Tower of Knowledge. These small bricks could then be replicated and fill in gaps of another project, sometimes in ways the original creator of the brick hadn¡¯t even imagined, and all the while, the tower was growing. And it was that tower that gave Lady Hecate her power. She wasn¡¯t just a goddess, she was the Goddess of Magic, or at least of a part of magic, so I¡¯d take almost any bet that she was an accomplished Arcanist herself.


    To put it in the simplest words, she didn¡¯t need believers to fuel her power, she simply needed people who pushed the boundaries of the Arcane and took inspiration from them to grow her own abilities. Those she deemed talented, or maybe simply those who did something insane or brilliant, not that there was a big difference when it came to magic, she probably blessed, lending them a bit of her power in order to get a direct channel to them. Maybe to give them a bit of guidance, maybe to simply observe, I wasn¡¯t sure and it didn¡¯t really matter, she gave power and I was quite grateful.


    Maybe that was the reason why I gained EXP when teaching people magic lessons, she added it to her blessing to incentivise the teaching of arcane magic, thus spreading the skills she thrived on even further, hopefully reaching all those who had the potential to push the boundaries. It sounded fairly rational to me, though what sounded rational to me might be utter insanity to a deity, I wasn¡¯t sure. And it didn¡¯t really matter, so far, it felt as if she was thoroughly benevolent, though her benevolence brought massive future benefits to her if my theory was correct.


    By the end of my lesson, we got to the point where I invited the people here to ask questions. I had to thoroughly smother my amusement when the first, and loudest, question asked was about the conjuration of water, especially warm water. It sounded as if the shower I had conjured for them earlier was the biggest incentive to learn magic anyone could offer, to the point that the one person who had an affinity for Water and Fire Magic was elected to be the first I would help gain his magic within the Astral River. They wanted her to be taught as much as possible, though the same was true for anyone who could conjure water, followed by those who could interact with Nature.


    Fairly rational, in my opinion, to focus on the skills that would benefit the community the most. They had shelter, if they got water and a secure source of food, things would get better for them. Fighting was, to them, currently of secondary importance, I think they believed that their base was secure, a belief I would have to correct at some point, but that would come, soon. Well, maybe I would, I wasn¡¯t sure how long I really wanted to stay here. The people were fairly interesting but the lack of leadership was annoying, as was the lack of opportunity. Maybe I should stay until the people here had a good understanding of magic, I might even push Lia to help them get a functioning leadership if they couldn¡¯t get it done by themself.


    That sounded like a fairly reasonable plan, stay until those interested and talented had unlocked their magic, maybe watch as they gained classes if they hadn¡¯t already, work with Luna to set up the beginning of a shrine to Hecate and explore the area.


    There had been two dungeons near my hometown, maybe there was one here, too. Maybe even one that would give me a bit of a challenge, as long as it wasn¡¯t a puzzle-challenge.

 Chapter 891

    Maybe there was something to be said about brute force. For some reason, maybe because it had been a bit of a sink-or-swim situation, the boy I had originally thrown into the Astral River had attained the best connection with his element. The difference wasn¡¯t major, nothing that was overly obvious, but it was there, a confidence or maybe calling it a certainty would be better. As if he knew his magic would see him through, allowing him to wield it with far greater ease than those I had shepherded into the Astral River, giving them a mental reference frame so they could find their element before helping them back out. While I didn¡¯t think it would grant him a huge advantage in the short term, I could see him reach greater heights than the rest. Or maybe he¡¯d get himself killed, that was always an option, both on the Arcane Path and in general. The Arcane Path just had a few extra pitfalls, moments where you could kill yourself if you weren¡¯t careful.


    After all, there had been more than one moment on Mundus when my own arcane powers had almost managed to kill me, and they even succeeded once, though indirectly. It was a good thing that Lady Hecate was incredibly patient when it came to experimenting with Her power and the connection I felt to Her and to Luna. Otherwise, she might have struck me down, just as Fenris had when I intruded into His realm. It made me wonder if, back then, Lady Hecate had been the one to keep me from suffering the penalties normally associated with dying while using the Avatar.


    Which made me wonder, had those penalties carried over to the legacies? And why had they been part of the capsule-system in the first place, was it only to discourage the Travellers from going wild and wilfully destroying Mundus? To give death consequences without preventing us Travellers from being reckless while learning our powers?


    I wasn¡¯t sure, but it was an interesting question. I highly doubted the Gods had added the feature to their capsules simply for the fun of it, so there had to be a reason. Granted, the reason might be something arcane, some tithe of power needed to keep things running smoothly, but I wasn¡¯t sure. Maybe I should have tried harder to find the second capsule in our hometown, the one used by Connie, as mine had been buried under rubble. While I had considered trying to dig it up, remembering the fairly flimsy construction of it made me doubt that it would have been worth the time and effort.


    Something to keep in mind for the future, find a capsule and study it. It might reveal some of the system¡¯s secrets, though somehow I doubted it would be that easy. If nothing else, these capsules had to be incredible works of either Arcane or Divine artifice, likely a combination.


    Shaking off these thoughts, I focused on my latest student, yet another teenager. Somehow, the concentration of prospective spellcasters was the highest for people between twelve and twenty years old, at least in this place. Maybe that shouldn¡¯t be too much of a surprise, during those years the mind was mature enough to handle the power but flexible enough to grow into a completely new direction, so gaining magical powers would be the easiest. Or, maybe, it was merely a coincidence, I still didn¡¯t have an idea how the system defined the arcane traits people gained, were they something inherent to the person, even before the change or was it something else?


    And if so, did I change something about myself when creating my Avatar in the capsule or did the capsule somehow manage to read what I was always supposed to be? Thinking back, I always preferred the cold, at least moderate cold, to the heat of summer and was never one to enjoy the sunlight too much. But I also loved heights, but that wasn¡¯t really reflected in my magical make-up, nor could I imagine anything about who I used to be that would indicate an affinity for Blood Magic.


    And yet, I gained all those traits during the creation of my Avatar, to say nothing of traits like the one that increased my inherent Astral Power, the one that increased my regeneration or the magical hair trait that granted me an additional storage of Astral Power in my hair. All those were arcane in nature, but I couldn¡¯t really imagine that they had been part of who I was before. Maybe the hair, as I had always been quite proud of that, but otherwise? I couldn¡¯t really see it.


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    Maybe I should invest some time to investigate and study the traits different people have been assigned. Or granted, however that might work. Maybe interview the people about their character and patterns prior to the change, try correlating the findings with the list of traits. The problem there would, obviously, be one of objectivity, I couldn¡¯t really claim that I could view my own personality objectively, I had no doubt that other people would describe the fundamental parts of my character differently from the way I would describe them, so how could I know what the system deemed ¡®true¡¯? It likely used far different metrics from those of us subjective humans, metrics I doubted anyone could readily understand.


    The biggest problem with that idea was quite an obvious one. I didn¡¯t like interacting with people in the first place, why would I want to start a project that was nothing but interacting with them, for hours on end, getting to know them, listening to them and trying to understand them by only using their own descriptions? Given how few people remained, I doubted there were many who had enough close friends remaining to amalgamate a variety of subjective opinions into an objective image of their personality. That could only work by gathering the testimony of dozens, from different social strata and in different relation to the person in question, because, as the saying goes, if you want to learn about someone¡¯s character, find out how they treat those underneath them.


    I didn¡¯t even need to consider whether I wanted to do that. Sure, I¡¯d love the information but actually going out and getting it? Not in this life, nor in the next.


    Opening my eyes, I looked at the girl who had been with the boy earlier in the day. Sonja, her name was, if I recalled correctly from the introductions at the start of my lessons, she might be the solution to my problem. I was self-aware enough that trying to perform such a study myself was far outside my wheelhouse, but having somebody else conduct it? That, I could do and maybe Sonja was exactly the person I could use for this. She had shown initiative earlier, had demonstrated an assured lack of tact or maybe had simply gone with the flow of her companion, either way, she had been reckless enough to disturb my sleep. That alone showed she had enough courage to ask people about their most intimate and important information, even if some of those people might just kill her for it.


    ¡°Sonja, I have a task for you,¡± I told her, ¡°In exchange for performing that task, I will teach you as much about magic in general and your specific elements as I can while we are here. That might not be enough to turn you into an archmage of any kind, but it would turn your Wind Magic into a potent weapon, especially if I help you gain Fire as a complementary element, or maybe water. Either would likely increase your versatility or power by a good margin. Or I could give you some basic instruction when it comes to using the bow, a weapon that has incredible synergy with Wind Magic, adding weight to it the magic normally lacks.¡± I paused, letting her consider my offer. ¡°What do you say?¡± I prodded when she didn¡¯t answer fast enough for my liking.


    ¡°It sounds great, but what is that task?¡± she asked, making me blink for a second before mentally going over my words, realising that I had forgotten to tell her.


    Shaking my head, I explained to her what I had in mind, how I wanted to learn about people, their character and behavioural pattern prior to the change, if possible also as seen by outside observers, and what traits the system had ultimately assigned to them.


    Now, it was Sonja¡¯s turn to frown as she thought about my request and after a few moments, she asked for clarification.


    ¡°Why do you need to know all that?¡± she asked, with a bit of suspicion in her voice.


    ¡°Understanding, child. I seek to understand the world, there is a reason why I have invested a lot of effort to learn the magic of different elements, it¡¯s not because I have talent in all of them. It¡¯s because I want to understand this new reality we found ourselves in, I want to understand the system and how it interprets things. To lay bare the inner workings of this world, so I can pluck the strings and twist the cogs,¡± I grinned at that idea, my smile maybe a little manic, but it was a dream.


    ¡°That¡¯s a long-term goal, but what better way to understand something than to gather information when that ¡®something¡¯ is at its most volatile?¡± I asked rhetorically, allowing her the time to think about my task. If she wouldn¡¯t help me, somebody else would. There was always somebody wanting to make a deal for power.

 Chapter 892

    It didn¡¯t take long for Sonja to make her decision. In fact, after I made the offer, she didn¡¯t even leave the room, she only talked for a few moments with the boy I had thrown into the Astral River earlier before sitting in the corner, thinking for a few minutes before returning to me with a counteroffer. Or maybe calling it an expanded suggestion would be more fitting.


    She wanted to take the deal, but to open the deal to the boy, Lars, as well. I wasn¡¯t sure if it was because he was her brother, boyfriend or whatever, but she wanted to have him work with her on the project and, in turn, get the same benefits I had offered earlier.


    It wasn¡¯t a bad deal and, quite frankly, I was somewhat curious what the difference in regards to their connection to the Astral River I had noticed before would amount to, so I didn¡¯t really mind. It would make the deal more favourable to them, as I wouldn¡¯t get any additional information, I¡¯d only get the information I was interested in faster while having to teach two pupils instead of one, but given that teaching literally had its own benefits, it wasn¡¯t all that bad.


    Now, I only needed to turn my own knowledge into a lesson digestible by these teenagers, something they could understand without the instincts gained from higher attributes, affinities and abilities I had. I had a feeling it wouldn¡¯t be an easy task, but nothing ever was. Maybe I should take the time and start writing those lessons down as I prepared them, I had a feeling this wouldn¡¯t be the last time I¡¯d teach somebody about the fundamental parts of magic.


    As soon as I had that thought, I realised just how important this kind of writing might be. Back, before we left the forest, Luna had suggested that we write down our findings to share with others as an act the Lady Hecate would strongly approve of, to the point that Luna got a divine quest to do just that. And that was only writing down our findings in regards to that particular, if particularly weird, forest, not the entire body of magic and our knowledge about it.


    With that determination in mind, I got myself a notebook and started writing. It wasn¡¯t anything coherent, merely getting the initial thoughts out of my mind and onto the paper, so I could start formulating them into an understandable text in the future. For example, I wasn¡¯t sure where to begin my introduction to magic. Should I begin with the Astral River, as I considered it the source of all magic as it had brought that power to our reality and was still embedding itself deeper in it? Or should I start with the system, my findings in regard to it and how it related to and qualified affinities? Both were integral parts of the field of magic, with deep and far-reaching consequences, so with which should I start? Or should I start with the Lady Hecate, as She was part of the reason why I was writing this in the first place and held dominion about magic?


    I wasn¡¯t sure, but once the mess of thoughts within my mind had finished flowing onto the pages of my notebook, I might find a good place to start. Or maybe it would be a bad place, I wasn¡¯t sure but at the end of the day, I didn¡¯t need certainty. I had a feeling this project would be one for a lifetime, an endless labour that I might come to love, or maybe I would abandon it. Either way, having a written compilation of my understanding of the foundations and intricacies of magic would be useful. If only to give myself a way to keep track of my thoughts, sometimes there were simply too many of them and they could get away from me, even with my fairly high Intelligence.


    This thought made me wonder, how exactly did the Intelligence attribute correlate with the quality of one¡¯s memory? It supposedly made the memory work better, but how exactly? Could I recall details in greater fidelity or did I simply forget less of the trivial details? But if so, what was a trivial detail? For example, the names of the people introduced only this morning, I could remember a few of them but not all. Just as I couldn¡¯t exactly remember how many weapons of which type they had used, or their clothes. I had something of a general idea but the details were lacking, maybe because I didn¡¯t care about them.


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    As I thought back to the introduction, my mind started to fill in the blanks of the image, only I wasn¡¯t sure if it was filling them in correctly. Did I truly remember the slogans of that one guy¡¯s t-shirt correctly or had I only registered that it was something humorous and was now imagining something that would fit with that recollection? Did I recall correctly that four of the locals had used bows, three had used simple javelins, three more had slings while two had no real ranged weapons at all, only their arms to throw rocks with, and a sharpened stick lying near their feet? In a way, those were some fairly insignificant details but in another way, it was incredibly important tactical information that could make the difference between life or death. But how did my mind, my subconscious, filter what was important and what wasn¡¯t, if the definition of important changed over time and due to different circumstances?


    Shaking my head, I made sure to note down to have my minions ask the people about their intelligence attribute and whether they felt an impact of their ability to remember things. It most likely would amount to nothing, simply because memories and the quality of them were completely subjective, but it was interesting. And even the smallest chance of success was worthy of being investigated.


    However, in regards to the unreliability of the information gained, maybe there was a way to make things more reliable. I was, after all, somewhat adept at Mind Magic, meaning there was no reason why I couldn¡¯t employ magic in an attempt to learn more about the way the mind worked, or in this case, memory worked.


    Closing my eyes once again, I focused inwards. Not trying to delve into the intricacies of Astral Power flowing through my body, not trying to sense anything using my Blood Magic, no, for once, I was seeking to understand my mind. Carefully, oh-so-carefully, I channelled a smidgen of Astral Power, barely enough to count, in an attempt to read my own memories.


    I had to be incredibly careful because if there was one place I didn¡¯t want to be careless, it was my own mind, or my own brain. I had no idea how this would work, so acting with the utmost caution was not only prudent, it was imperative. Just a bit too much power and I might end up crippling myself, thus, I was prepared to withdraw at even the smallest bit of pain or discomfort.


    Thinking back to the ways I had previously used Mind Magic in failed attempts to delve into the memory of other people, I sought out the boundaries of my mind, looking for the right place to start. The biggest problem was the lack of simple visualisation. an image that allowed me to make sense of the sensations I received. I could sense other minds and visualised them as burning candles, the mental image too useful to discard because of my dislike of fire, but when it came to my own mind, I couldn¡¯t really do that. I wasn¡¯t fire, I would never be fire, I might use fire, but I wasn¡¯t fire. It might be a mental block, but I simply couldn¡¯t visualise myself as fire, there was a fundamental incompatibility. As if I was trying to lie to myself while knowing I was lying to myself at the same time as trying to convince myself I wasn¡¯t lying. It simply couldn¡¯t work.


    Leaving me, once again, at a loss as the usual image didn¡¯t work. I¡¯d either need to form an entirely new image or I¡¯d have to find a way to make myself comfortable as fire. A flame, only for myself.


    Almost unbidden, a memory intruded into the serenity of my thoughts, one triggered by that very idea. A flame for myself, my own flame¡­


    My own Flame. Like the freezingly cold flames, I had conjured when Sigmir died. It had been my own flame, a flame I was fully comfortable with as it was, one that was so much part of myself I had conjured it without thought, without any concept but the need to overcome impossible odds. A flame that wasn¡¯t Fire.


    Maybe I should try to find that impossibly cold flame, if only because it was a deeply ingrained part of myself. And, if there was one thing a dragon truly needed to grow up, it was their own flame. Given that I had a trait called Dragon-Touched, one had become part of my own class, finding that flame might be more important than just having something I could visualise my own mind as.


    Shaking my head once again, I opened my eyes, found a new page in the notebook I had been using and started to write. There was much to do, and the list of it only became longer each day.

 Chapter 893

    It was fascinating just how invested people could become if they saw what was possible. It only took a few days to have Sonja and Lars show fairly impressive results, with Sonja almost naturally falling into an archer or scout role, and Lars easily acting as a tank and frontline, utilising his newly acquired Earth Magic to impressive effect. His approach to earth magic was radically different from mine, where I used Earth Magic mainly to, well, shape Earth on a larger scale and reinforce existing structures, his approach was to clad himself in Earth and Stone, forming it into a fairly sturdy armour and go to town. He wasn¡¯t so much a Spellcaster as he was a force of nature, crashing into his foes and bowling them over. Well, he would be once he had a few more levels under his belt and could do more than reinforce his arms and hands, with the rest of him remaining squishy.


    Similarly, Sonja was making progress but it would take her time to truly grow into her powers. Amusingly, her biggest problem wasn¡¯t the magical part, she was fairly talented when it came to Wind Magic, especially when used in conjunction with a bow, but the archery. Or, more precisely, the lack of strength in her arms that brought her trouble. She could use a fairly soft bow with a small draw weight to great effect, especially when combining the arrow with her Wind Magic to increase penetration and accuracy, but that only went so far. It was a force multiplier and if she had a bigger bow, the impact would go up, too.


    Lia tried to have her use a larger bow we acquired in a hunting store, and that was where things started to go sideways. The bow wouldn¡¯t really work in combat, due to the fact that it was made before the change, but it would have been fine for training, or it should have been. Part of that trouble might have come from the effects the system had on pre-change weapons but a far larger part came from the simple fact that Sonja was a fairly average teenage girl and had highly limited strength in her arms. And bows, especially those with enough power to be considered worthwhile, required quite a bit of that.


    Even the system couldn¡¯t do much about that, well, it could, but only with a fairly large investment of attribute points. But it made me wonder how the interaction between trained musculature and attributes worked, the sheer, physical bulk and how it related to the effect of your strength attribute. I knew it couldn¡¯t be as simple as ¡®the more muscles you have, the higher your strength attribute¡¯, simply because I could look at my own body. While my strength attribute had almost tripled since the change, going from a fairly impressive ten, impressive for a female of my diminutive size, to a twenty-eight, the changes to my muscle mass had been negligible I was stronger, by a decent margin, and felt as if I could direct my strength far better than before, but muscle-wise, little had changed.


    This brought up the question, what would happen if someone like Sonja, with her low strength attribute of eight, started to deliberately train her strength, get some protein-rich food and pack on some bulk? How much of those muscles would increase the numerical value of her strength attribute and how much would influence some hidden stat and increase the effect of the attribute? Sadly, I had a feeling I wouldn¡¯t be able to study this particular case, not unless we managed to find something truly interesting to do in this city.


    So far, the city here had been quite boring, with only the usual Undead and Shattered shambling through the streets. We had seen some signs hinting at animals forming their own societies with a few beasts gaining power beyond the ability of the locals to deal with, but so far, those beasts hadn¡¯t made a move towards the locals. So far, we had seen a sizable pack of wild dogs, led by a beast that could easily be Silva¡¯s understudy, a murder of crows that could star in a Hitchcock film and signs that hinted at multiple felines and some other critters.


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    By my estimation, the crows were the biggest danger, simply due to their advanced mobility, while the dogs had the greatest power but I doubted they¡¯d go after the people here, not unless they had a good reason. Or were really, really hungry and the meat on the Undead and Shattered had decayed too much for their tastes. The beasts had been feeding off them, we had seen evidence of that, but I wasn¡¯t sure how long that situation would last if it still occurred. Once the ready supply of shambling food wasn¡¯t accessible, things might get seriously dicy, as the beasts could deal massive damage to the locals, simply due to their numbers.


    Hel, with the lack of strength the locals displayed, even a determined assault by a medium-sized group of Undead could be a serious danger for these people, but that was luckily neither here nor there. Undead didn¡¯t gather, unless there was a force making them, something like the Withered or maybe some sort of evolved Shattered, nothing I had seen here indicated that something like that was present.


    There was a part of me that considered whether I should actively start hunting those beasts down, or even try to cull as many Undead and Shattered as I could. But the more I thought about it, the more i came to realise it would be foolish. Sure, I could kill any current threat, it would take me a month or three of continuous work, but I had enough power to conjure mist capable of killing the Undead while covering a decently sized area, I only had to repeat that every night and sooner or later the streets would be cleared. But that would only leave the people as they were now, weak and vulnerable, unless I wanted to hang around and keep defending them against any threat that wanted to make a meal out of them. Something I simply wasn¡¯t willing to do.


    Now, if they had leadership worth the name, I might have worked with them to cull some of the greatest threats, while letting their people take down the rest, or maybe even provided some passive overwatch, simply making sure that they weren¡¯t biting off more than they could chew, or intervene if they were about to get themselves killed. But there was no leadership, at least nothing worth the name.


    And my efforts to create something worthy of being called leadership hadn¡¯t really worked out. Sure, some people listened to me simply by virtue of my power but that wasn¡¯t enough to make people organise. To say nothing of my people skills, or rather the lack thereof. I wasn¡¯t someone who could organise people to work together, at best I could lead them in a tactical situation but for anything long-term? I wasn¡¯t the right person, far from it.


    That I wasn¡¯t willing to actually live within the apartment building they were using as their living space didn¡¯t help matters but I simply couldn¡¯t stand the smell. Even with the occasional shower I was willing the conjure for them and the constant increase in Water Magic, both in the number of practitioners and in the skill of the individual users, the sheer number of people was enough to give the building a certain stench. One that I didn¡¯t like and the protection provided by their number wasn¡¯t enough to make me put up with it. Doubly so, because it wasn¡¯t so much that their numbers provided me protection but that I¡¯d be providing punch to any defensive effort they¡¯d put up.


    In addition, their numbers slightly increased the chance of getting attacked, as most enemies were a lot more interested in attacking two hundred weak but filling meals compared to trying to tangle with a group of five fairly powerful enemies, for nothing but those five bodies. Even now, predators picked their targets by nutrition, though I had a feeling sooner or later the nutrition most enemies were interested in would shift from calories to EXP.


    Overall, I felt a little like I was shouting in the void. I could talk to them, but to make lasting change, my efforts simply weren¡¯t enough. The best bet I saw when it came to strengthening the people here and giving them leadership was to create that leadership, something that seemed to work out amusingly well. Simply because Sonja and Lars were gaining strength, and with strength came respect. With that respect came people listening to them and hopefully, they would continue to remember my lessons in the future and turn the people from their current, frankly pathetic, state into something capable of surviving. In the long-term, it would be up to them to keep this community going, I certainly wasn¡¯t willing to hang around.

 Chapter 894

    It was with a savage grin that I watched Sonja send yet another arrow into the distance, striking down one of the Undead in the city. Her bow remained crap, nothing more than a branch, slightly bent and strung with a bit of simple string, but the combination of archery and magic made it work. And gravity, our perch on the roof added quite a bit of height to her shots, drastically increasing her range and, amusingly, the impact of her attacks.


    Amusingly, creating a better bow would be both simple and difficult, it depended on the scope of improvement desired, a slight improvement was fairly trivial, a large improvement, not so much. The biggest problem was the body of the bow, making the wooden parts, or horn, metal or whatever material was desired, required quite a bit of tech and skill, neither of which was readily available. We had visited the local library and found a few books, though it was a case of needing the right tools and a lack of resources in general, to proceed with the described steps, to say nothing of the know-how. It was one thing to read about carving a bow and a whole different story to put the knife to the wood.


    Alas, I doubted I¡¯d remain in the area long enough for anyone to learn how to make bows. A few of the locals had started to experiment, but it would take time, at least for the wooden part.


    The easier part was the string. Interestingly, here I could leverage some of my personal advantages, namely my Magical Hair trait. I wasn¡¯t about to use my hair to craft a bowstring for anyone, but with a bit of experimentation, I was able to work something out for Sonja. It took multiple long strands of her hair, twisted together to make one solid string, quite a bit of blood and similar amounts of her magic, all brought together by my Blood Magic.


    Using Blood Magic to infuse Sonja¡¯s own magic into her hair wasn¡¯t easy but by comparing it to the way my own hair stored my magic, I was able to make do. I doubted it would last forever, but it would last for a while, especially if she repeatedly channelled magic into the string. If things worked as I thought they would, it should raise the initial speed of her arrows, without increasing the amount of physical force needed to launch them. Instead, Wind Magic would be used, adding a small Astral Power cost to each shot but I thought it would be worth it. And if not, she¡¯d be able to shoot normally, too, the magically infused hair served just fine as a string.


    ¡°This is just bullshit,¡± a voice behind me stated, making me turn around to inspect the new arrival. I had to close my eyes for a moment and think back to our arrival, trying to dredge up the name from memory.


    ¡°What do you mean, Paul?¡± I asked in response, once the name came to me.


    ¡°She¡¯s been doing this for a little over a week and is steadily working towards level twenty, same for Lars over there,¡± he nodded towards the area where Lia was helping Lars with his curious application of Earth Magic. While the two had vastly different fighting styles, one well on his way to becoming a regenerating force of nature, unstoppable but cumbersome, the other an agile slasher, moving in and out of combat at will, there were some things Lia could impart on the teen.


    ¡°Well, I¡¯d say it¡¯s magic, but I get your point,¡± I nodded a grin on my face, ¡°You¡¯ve essentially been swinging in the dark, trying to get somewhere without a real plan of action or understanding. Without a tutorial, so to speak, wasting a great deal of time and effort in the process,¡± I explained, thinking back on the lessons Lia had started to teach these people. Lessons, like the one around companionships and the limited numbers the system supported. For some reason, if more than five people worked together, things got a little dicey with EXP, which is to say, if more than five worked together on anything other than larger-scale conflicts, the individual EXP was drastically reduced. There were some curious exceptions to that, Spirit Companions like Lenore and Ylva for example, but generally, five was the number. And by having fifteen people hunt Shattered and Undead, the EXP they managed to generate was pitiful, reduced to the point that they barely levelled at all.


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    On the other hand, Sonja and Lars were mostly working as a team, maybe with either Lia or myself counted as overwatch while the other was working with Luna, allowing them to get a fairly decent amount of EXP, especially since we were capable enough to hide from them. Thus, they knew we were out there, somewhere, but outside of the direct lessons like the one I was giving Sonja right now, the one about night warfare and how to find targets in the dark, they didn¡¯t know we actively watched over them. Thus, they felt like they were in actual danger, even if they weren¡¯t. I had no idea whether that worked to convince the system or if penalties applied, it wasn¡¯t something I had studied on Mundus, but judging by the way they gained levels the penalties weren¡¯t too onerous.


    ¡°There is a reason why I had Lia give some lessons to you, those lessons weren¡¯t just learned here, not just in the last few months,¡± I shook my head, trying to find the right words to explain Road to Purgatory and what it had been. It just sounded so insane, that a video game, even one that was revolutionary to the point that people had initially been sceptical if it was real or not, could transfer the souls of people into another world to prepare them for the apocalypse. ¡°A group of people, a fairly large one distributed across the globe, was given access to a different world for two years. While they didn¡¯t know what was going on, their actions in that other world allowed them to learn and forge a legacy, and what Lia told you is informed by that experience,¡± I shrugged once more, somewhat amused by the look of utter confusion on his face. Even now, and with so many of the impossible parts removed, it sounded insane.


    ¡°Why didn¡¯t they tell anyone what was coming?¡± he asked, now a little angry. I could only raise an eyebrow, realising that he was speaking driven by emotion, not rational thought.


    ¡°If, two years ago, somebody had told you ¡®The end is nigh, civilisation is coming to an end in blue fire as the space-gods approach¡¯, would you have believed them?¡± I asked in response, chuckling to myself. It was utterly implausible but, sadly, the implausible wasn¡¯t impossible.


    His only response to my question was a nod, realising that without utterly undeniable proof, nobody would have believed the claim. And even with proof, a lot of people would have rejected it, simply because such proof would instantly be suspect. It was just too implausible.


    Mentally dismissing Paul, I focused on my students once more. The way Lars used his earthen armour, or gauntlets at the moment, reminded me of the Ice Armour I had used in the battle on my tower. Sure, there I had mostly used it as a perfectly regenerating shield, but there was no reason why I couldn¡¯t try something similar to what he was doing. I¡¯d have to be somewhat more careful, and it would take a lot of effort to shift my fighting instincts in close combat from a physical response to a magical one, but if I managed, the upside was undeniable.


    Cladding myself in ice would allow me to use my magical attributes, my Intelligence and Intuition, instead of my physical ones. While I wasn¡¯t as unbalanced in that regard as I had been on Mundus, my Intelligence would always be a lot higher than my strength, just as a matter of fact. Using it would give me advantages, and it would even provide me with defensive advantages. The only downside was that it would constantly drain Astral Power, something I could hopefully afford. Maybe not as well as Lars could, I was fairly certain that his class was directly linked with his fighting style and gave him a sizable boost in that regard, but I was magically a lot more powerful.


    With Paul still watching, I stretched my hand and casually conjured some Ice, keeping it directly linked with my power while letting it flow over my hand. It wasn¡¯t cold, at least not unpleasantly so, but there was a degree of inflexibility, reminding me that Ice wasn¡¯t a dynamic element. It sought to stagnate, to freeze the world in stillness, especially the extremities of Ice I was chasing.


    Flexing my hand, using my strength and magical control in conjunction, worked, but I would have to use a lot of time to train this, especially if I wanted to make it useful in battle.


    Noticing that Sonja needed some extra instruction, I shook off the Ice around my hand and walked over, making a note in the back of my mind to investigate this idea in the future. Maybe I could make actual armour, with multiple solid, interlocking pieces, instead of keeping the entire thing in a flexible state using magic. For now, I had a student to torture.

 Chapter 895

    Once again, I sat quietly on my throne, the familiar setting helping a great deal with my mentality. There had to be a way to communicate with the Grandmother directly, allowing us to exchange words and concepts, not just the brief moment during which I managed to pull the Zevarra Agha into this world.


    How that had worked was something I kept questioning anyway. I was certain that it had to do with the fact that the grimoire was soulbound to me, but what that meant, I wasn¡¯t quite sure. Trying to ascertain the effect, or figure out what it could actually do, was a slow-going project that had yielded minimal results thus far. I could always find the book, somewhat similar to the way my Sigmir-sense had functioned on Mundus, allowing me to feel the direction in which Sigmir was, pulling me towards her like Iron was pulled towards a magnet, but other than that? There didn¡¯t seem to be anything else, though I was convinced there was. Soulbound, just the word felt like there should be more to it.


    The Soul, and anything to do with it, had always been one of the most arcane topics in my research on Mundus, especially that soul bond I shared with Sigmir. Something completely outside of any reasonable explanation, with us sharing sensations, dreams, powers and thoughts, simply due to our connection. But having an item soulbound to me was nothing but a way to locate that item. It didn¡¯t track, at all, so there had to be more to it.


    Regardless of that, there was something to explore here. There had to be a way for the deities to comune with Terra, even before the Astral River had arrived. Some alternative way, independent of it, simply because they had been able to create, or inspire, Pantheon Entertainment and have them create the capsules. So, a connection was needed, unless deities could perform some sort of temporal shenanigans, influencing people in the present to make it so they had done something in the past. A reversal of cause and effect, though I hoped that was impossible. Simply due to the amount of headaches it would bring, I didn¡¯t even want to think about the implications of that.


    And so, I didn¡¯t and instead focused on the known routes divine influence could take. I knew that there were links in their blood, I knew that I should have some sort of link to Loki in my blood, simply because I was a Firnelf and Firnelves were born from his experiments, using his own blood. It said so in the description, even if I had no idea how that¡¯d work logistically.


    Given the last time I had used a blood-link to intrude on a divine Domain I had been slain on Mundus, I wasn¡¯t about to try that again. Not when I only had one life to work with, not unless I was a lot more confident, or desperate.


    Instead, I wanted to focus on other options, especially the Blessing bestowed upon me. When I had experienced with Her powers in the past, She had always demonstrated remarkable tolerance, coupled with amusement, so I was hoping that She wouldn¡¯t simply smite me.


    Finding where the blessing connected to the rest of me, the boundary between the two sounded like it should be simple. I knew what divine magic felt like, I knew what my own arcane body felt like and I should be able to determine where one was flowing into the other. Once I had that, I could parse out benevolent and malevolent connections, until I could determine which was of Hecate. In theory, it was simple.


    In practice, not so much. The biggest problem was that I couldn¡¯t readily identify my Soul, not unless I wanted to start channelling Death Magic into myself in an attempt to light that up. Yeah, no.


    Shaking my head, I dismissed this line of inquiry and focused on something else. Namely, projecting my mind into the Astral River. and gleaning some more information The streams of power within had calmed down quite a bit since they had arrived but they had yet to reach the same primarily calm and orderly state the Astral River of Mundus had been. If the Astral River directly after the change had been akin to a water-cutter, able to slice through metal easily, or the bedrock of reality, the Astral River as it was now was more akin to a waterfall, or maybe a whitewater river, unruly and chaotic but not inherently violent.


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    Now, I could dare to let myself drift in the current, trying to get a better idea about the eddies and flows in the reality around me. There was a lot of knowledge to be gained by learning how the Astral River was behaving, the state of reality imprinted itself onto the river, though reading those imprints was not an easy feat.


    There was an incredible amount of Death, Darkness and Decay filling the city, that much was easy to see. The remaining buildings, and the many crumbled ruins, also added rock-solid streams of Earth into the mix, while the Sun was baking down each day, adding streams of Fire and Light. Occasionally, rain fell from the sky, adding Water and there were a few small patches of Life, coming from the few parks and plants, but the stream was so minor, that it almost didn¡¯t register. Similarly minor was the stream of Air, there was no wind in this town, not at ground level where I focused.


    It might be interesting to see how the mixture changed as the altitude increased, how Earth and everything would fade to be replaced with Air. Maybe I should experiment with that at some point, trying to get a feeling of how the powers in the Astral River changed as one rose into the sky but for now, that would be a fairly difficult proposition. Maybe if I ever learned to fly under my own power, or at least to glide similar to the way I had been able to on Mundus, I might be able to stay up there long enough to get a feel for it.


    Letting my mind merge into the stream and get carried by the flow, I started to drift off a little, the mesmerising visuals of the myriad powers around me dazing me just a little. There was so much to learn, each drop of water within the Astral River was subtly different and each moment changed it, as if the totality of reality was reflected in the waters.


    Realising that I was getting drawn in too deep, mostly thanks to a stinging headache, I pulled back and started looking at things at a macro-level again. There was too much information within the Astral River for me to look into it in detail, it would be akin to trying to look at some item while trying to understand the molecules directly. Sure, that way one would learn everything there is about the item but it would be far too much information for anyone to truly process. Well, anyone not divine or primordial, someone without the necessary power. Someone like me, as I had to admit to myself. I wasn¡¯t ready to delve too deeply into these mysteries just yet, I had to pace myself.


    But I could feel a particularly dense concentration of Death and Decay in a part of the river near me and with a bit of focus, I could even map the direction I sensed in the Astral River to a corresponding direction in reality. It wasn¡¯t easy, merging my mind with the flow didn¡¯t really give me directions that mapped directly, only upstream, downstream and sensations of flowing through a multitude of currents and branches but that didn¡¯t really track to north, south and so on. I had to deliberately pull myself from the river and in that time of change, I could get a better idea, but it also gave me a bit of a headache, not really pleasant after I had already taxed myself earlier when I looked too deeply into things.


    Thanks to that sacrifice, I now knew that there was something potentially interesting in another part of the city, maybe not as interesting as the Withered had been, but interesting enough to catch my attention.


    Either way, it was something to hunt down, maybe something to challenge us. It might even be an actual Dungeon and we could get a level or two that way. Even if it wasn¡¯t a challenge in combat, the sheer concentration of magic was enough to make it interesting in and of itself, even if I wasn¡¯t overly interested in delving deeply into Death and Decay. Sure, I worked Death Magic, but Decay was just disgusting. Necessary in the grand scheme of things but disgusting nonetheless.


    Pulling myself completely out of my trance, I checked the time and determined that we couldn¡¯t head out yet. But I could take a nap, which sounded incredibly good at this time. Tonight, we could find out what was rotten in the state of Denmark, or something like that.

 Interlude 405: Stayin Alive

    It was a fucking mess. While his mother would cuff him over the head for swearing, there was simply no other way to describe it than with a healthy amount of f-bombs and related swear words. It had only been two weeks, and life at the farm had taken a serious turn for the worse. Who would have thought that chasing away the most powerful being in the area would come back to haunt them, not like having a massively powerful, if petite, predator living next to you wasn¡¯t acting as a serious deterrent for anything planning to move into the area?


    First, there had been these dog-thingies, not the usual barking mob of dogs that happily hunted around town and the farm, taking down beasts and keeping the area clear, but some monsters that might as well have escaped some horror movie, large canine creatures of shadow and darkness, melting out of the very night to tear into some unsuspecting soul before retreating with a literal pound of flesh. They were difficult to deal with, as they could seemingly phase in and out of reality at will, preventing anyone from fighting them effectively. team attacks worked out, but the beasts were smart enough to simply disengage and come back later. Their mere presence was enough to turn the night watch from a relatively cushy gig into a horror show that left multiple people scarred, both mentally and physically. Well, a cushy gig, if the Pale Lady wasn¡¯t around to test their attentiveness.


    Additionally, people didn¡¯t just let things be. No, now that the Pale Lady was gone, those who had hated her were starting to target those who had learned from her, had studied under her and continued to spread what she had taught. Magic, the arcane variant, mixed with a few teachings about the divine. Teachings that focused on self-reliance, on mastering your own abilities instead of praying to the heavens for help. It was, in some ways, the perfect target for religious or spiritual believers, the great deceiver or whatever they wanted to call her. Even now, after she had gone, they were continuing to discredit her, ignoring the insane amount of good she had done, to say nothing of the continued efforts made by the arcane casters.


    No, if these religious nuts were honest, they¡¯d have to talk about the fact that a sizeable number had been saved directly thanks to her actions. And that¡¯s only for those she had directly rescued in some way, if the idea was expanded to all those saved by those the Pale Lady had taught then the number of saved people would jump up to a much higher number. Maybe a few could have survived on rations and bottled water, but not many. Nor was that including threats they might not even have heard about, threats taken out by the Pale Lady as she was living nearby.


    The Withered made for an excellent example, Kevin had seen a few of their broken remains and he had no real desire to go against them, even after he was capable of turning the water he conjured into a cutting tool strong enough to rend steel or break rocks with a bit of time. No, fighting swarms of mentally connected enemies, all trying to tear you and your friends to pieces was not his idea of fun. That it seemed to have been the Pale Lady¡¯s idea of fun was something he didn¡¯t really want to think about, simply for his own peace of mind. The Lady had been incredibly scary early on, with her deadly mist capable of choking hundreds of creatures to death at the same time, he had no desire to extrapolate what would happen now, with many more levels and skill-points under her belt.


    Maybe it was for the best that she had decided to leave, Kevin had no desire to be on the receiving end of her mist. Nor did he have any illusions about the whole strength-in-numbers thing or that it would grant him victory. No, numbers had their advantage but only if you could bring them to bear. And against somebody who could use devastating area-of-effect attacks and was, according to everything the guards had said about her surprise inspections, incredibly good at staying unnoticed? There were easier ways to commit suicide than by pissing off someone able to kill many people at once while remaining completely unseen. Sadly, nobody had been able to get that idea into the heads of these fools, one of them was even carrying around a firearm as if that was some sort of force equaliser. Ignoring that the thing would most likely blow up in his hand, ignoring that it might not even work against somebody with a level as high as that of the Pale Lady, ignoring everything and yet continuing forward with an air of smug confidence that was almost amusing to observe.


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    Almost, sadly the entire amusement went away when the confidence was enough to draw in followers who listened to the idiot, followers who spread the idiocy and made others believe in it.


    They offered simple solutions that sounded great, at least as long as everyone ignored what would be required to make them work. Sure, building a wall around the farm would be great, having gun-posts and watchtowers even better but the logistics? Those were entirely ignored, to say nothing about the idiotic idea that the magicians, as he called them, were unnecessary and promoted faith in the Pale Lady. They didn¡¯t say who should be believed in, but there was a constant, if somewhat quiet, suggestion to return to the ¡®real¡¯ faith, a fairly banal understanding of Christianity.


    Sure, promoting that idea ignored the entirely changed world around them, but maybe that was why so many found it comforting. If their faith returned to the somewhat lazy and casual way it had been before everything went to shit, maybe the world would follow, or so they might believe.


    There were even demands that the council who had pulled the different groups together in the first place, building up the farm into the village it was now, should be replaced with some sort of democratically elected government, obviously modelled after the old system. Not that the old system had been bad, but whether it still fit the new reality was a difficult question. And one that would better be addressed once things had settled to the point that it wasn¡¯t questionable if everyone would survive the winter. They had planted a variety of crops, Nature Mages had managed to help them grow and soon it would be time to harvest, but that might not be enough. And yet, there were people already claiming that they could do better, that these problems would go away if only they were put in charge. Oh, and of course, everyone should only listen to them, as they could make plans, and they could direct the different powers and abilities far better than anyone else.


    Amusingly, the people proposing those ideas were generally those who didn¡¯t really take on dangerous jobs or trained for combat. Instead, they were trying to make do, to organise and impose their vision, acting as managers. Only, what would happen if the people they wanted to manage didn¡¯t agree with their vision?


    Kevin had already given up trying to understand their beliefs, instead focusing on two things. One, keeping the Farm going and supplied with water as long as he could and two, making sure that, once things couldn¡¯t go on as they did, he had a solid exit strategy in place.


    Sadly, he wasn¡¯t the only one thinking that way. There were multiple people who had either studied under the Pale Lady directly or learned from those who had, and they all heard the sentiment. The more Kevin thought about it, the more it became clear that if they all left, or at least the majority of them, the entire community might collapse. There were others who could conjure water, but when it came to volume, he was the one who could do the most, maybe second to the Pale Lady, because the Lady didn¡¯t focus on a single element, which only made her more impressive.


    He had tried to make other elements work, but it was hard work and slow going. Getting the water he conjured to warm up had taken him weeks of work, as had turning it into a sandy slurry, but both had been worth it. Warm showers were great and the added sand turned the power of his water cutter up to eleven.


    Maybe he should prepare to leave sooner rather than later. There was a reason the Pale Lady was so far beyond him and everyone else when it came to magic. Well, there were multiple reasons but one of those reasons was undoubtedly that she continuously tried to push the boundaries of what she could do, that she didn¡¯t fulfill the rote task of conjuring multiple cubic metres of water every day to supply a village.


    Did great responsibility come with great power or did great power come from avoiding great responsibilities? Kevin wasn¡¯t sure, but maybe he should find out.

 Chapter 896

    Somehow, I should have seen this coming.


    Just getting a direction, alongside a rough estimation of distance was far too easy. No, instead of venturing into the city, or at least along its border, the vector we were following only cut through part of the outer city before sending us off, into the fields beyond.


    Luckily, there was a fairly well-maintained road, alongside a few signs that gave me a good idea of where we were headed, though the knowledge was not something I relished. This plan of mine was a true stinker unless the mercy of some Deity of Chance was with us and made it a cruel and unusual joke that the vector leading us towards a particularly dense cloud of Death and Decay Magic was sending us past the sewage treatment plant the signs around us indicated. It was possible, but more in a vague hope for a better world instead of it being a realistic proposition. No, we were headed towards the plant and unless I decided that I didn¡¯t want to know, we¡¯d be stuck with the stink. Or maybe the entire sewage had already decomposed, the change was months ago, so there shouldn¡¯t be any fresh sewage coming in.


    Amusingly, the way towards the plant was quite nice. There were mostly fields, a, luckily intact, bridge over a defunct highway and more fields alongside a small irrigation ditch until we came close. It wasn¡¯t hard to detect the place once we were close enough, it quite literally stunk to the high heavens. I had no idea how that worked, I had assumed that after months of a broken sewage system, the sewage would have decomposed to the point that it didn¡¯t stink any longer, alas, it seemed like I thought wrong. Or maybe the stench of decay had simply seeped into the soil in some arcane manner, desecrating, or maybe defecating, the ground forever more.


    Maybe I should have expected that there was no wildlife anywhere near the area, nothing I could detect anyway. It was eerily quiet as if even the wind was unwilling to come here and pick up the stench, only the dark, somewhat mouldy, buildings of the facility, surrounded by a partially corroded chainlink fence. Nothing that would keep us out, if we wanted to leave by any other way than the road, nothing that looked like trouble, at least from a distance.


    Moving into a fairly secure formation, with Lia and Silva in the lead, Luna with Alex on her shoulder in the middle and me in the back, we continued past the gates and into the facility itself.


    When I walked past the gate, I glanced at it and immediately called a halt, noting a strange sheen on the metal, accompanied by a slightly sharper scent in the air. It was incredibly difficult to differentiate the strange scent from the stench we were surrounded by, but when I took a moment, I managed to isolate it. The entire fence was infused with the energy of Decay, not strong enough to destroy it but strong enough to weaken it, to the point that I could bend a sizable piece of metal with about the same amount of force I¡¯d have needed to bend a bit of cardboard before the change.


    To get a better idea of what that meant for the fence, I quickly conjured up an Icicle, giving it a sharp edge akin to a knife, and tried slicing through the chainlink fence, thinking it would simply part. Instead, it stretched as if the fence wasn¡¯t made from metal but from rubber. Now, my interest was thoroughly roused and I tried to cut it with all my strength, only that my strength wasn¡¯t enough to make the sharp edge go through the rubbery metal, it simply stretched, pulling the rest of the fence with it in an incredibly weird display of mangled physics. The upper part of the fence shouldn¡¯t have stayed where it was, but for some reason, it did just that, as if the razorwire up top was somehow glued to thin air.


    ¡°Huh,¡± I muttered, staring at the stuff after taking a step back, slowly letting the force I had put onto the fence dissipate. ¡°Let¡¯s see what that thing can do.¡±


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    With a grin, I used my Ice Magic to push the bladicle against the fence again, after we all moved quite a bit away from it. There was no need to take a risk if something weird happened, though compared to the physics-bending the upper part of the fence had done, I wasn¡¯t sure what counted as ¡®weird¡¯ and what I should count as expected.


    Again, the fence stretched to comical proportions, looking very much like some sort of massive slingshot, as I kept pushing more and more Ice Magic into the Icicel I had conjured. It took a bit, and by that time the metal fence had stretched over two metres out of its original pane, but then the grip of my Ice Magic snapped and I was treated to a fairly amazing display of physics in action. The fence gave off a twang that reminded me of a bow, only far more powerful, the air vibrating with the force of it, and the icicle turned into a highspeed projectile, moving fast enough to part the air with an audible crack. Sadly, the thing wasn¡¯t made to withstand that amount of force without some serious magical reinforcement, causing the Ice to disintegrate from the air resistance. This meant that the magical energy I had poured into it the whole time had to go somewhere, and as it was Ice, it discharged in a cone of freezing energy, looking somewhat like a shotgun, or the massive cone of cold I had conjured way back, beneath the glacier.


    There were a few noises of shock from Lia and Luna, accompanied by excited chittering from Alex, who looked like they were about to hop off Luna¡¯s shoulder to grab the fence, right here, right now.


    ¡°We should explore further before we consider harvesting the stuff,¡± I told the others, my ears already perking up to hear if anything was making its way towards the commotion. Whatever else I had done, our chances to stealthily explore the facility were, quite literally, shot, thanks to the noise and the magical burst accompanying it.


    After briefly checking out the area affected by the blast of freezing energy, and a quick look at the fence that had returned to its original condition, we continued further into the facility. There were multiple buildings, one large administrative building, one that looked a little like an indoor swimming pool and multiple that were the size of large or medium sheds. Those shed-like buildings most likely housed some sort of machinery, as they were located next to the various open filtration pools, but I¡¯d have to get closer to check.


    From afar, there was no movement to see in any of the buildings, nor in the open areas between them.


    Our first stop was the largest building, as it was closest to the gate. The parking lot was completely empty, showing that during the change nobody had been there as one might expect, and the door remained locked and the windows unbroken. Not that anyone would really care for a sewage plant, well, nobody but Alex. I had a feeling they¡¯d be highly interested in what chemicals remained, either to experiment or to use as weapons.


    Getting the door open was fairly simple, a quick conjuration of water, moving it into the lock to feel out the mechanism, freeze it into Ice and I had a simple key and could turn it. Amusingly, that was the hardest part, actually turning the key, the time the door hadn¡¯t been touched had caused some corrosion to make things a little more difficult. Oil would help, but given that I didn¡¯t really care about the door, a bit of brute force did the trick.


    Inside, there was more dust, a few offices with paperwork and a small laboratory. There, we lost Alex for a bit as they excitedly chittered, hopping off Luna¡¯s shoulder to Lia and urging her into the lab. Luna and I checked through the rest of the building while the two of them were gathering as much of the equipment from the lab as they could, including the chemicals.


    The most exciting thing Luna and I managed to scrooge up was a box of milk that seemed to have developed a life of its own, though not quite in the classical way milk normally did. Instead of turning sour, the milk had turned into a strange slime-like creature, partially devoured the box it used to come in and tried to do the same to us. Luckily, its diminutive size prevented it from being a fast-moving danger, giving me more than enough time to dispatch it with a blast of freezing energy.


    Somehow, I wasn¡¯t sure I was excited about this any longer, if a carton of milk could turn into a slime creature, what about everything else in this place?

 Chapter 897

    Some questions simply shouldn¡¯t be asked, just because they dared the multiverse to answer them. Sadly, I doubted I¡¯d ever internalise that message, I¡¯d always ask the question and search for the answer, even if that resulted in less-than-optimal situations.


    Like the one we found us in now, after leaving the primary office building of the treatment plant behind and moving towards the other building, the one that looked a little like a pool hall, wide and squat, though without any windows.


    Before we managed to get there, we moved too close to one of the open treatment pools, or whatever they were called and that was when the multiverse decided to answer the question, what other than spoiled milk could be turned into a horrific slime monster.


    Namely, a decently sized, maybe five metres in diameter, pool filled with sewage. I had no idea how it worked and really didn¡¯t want to know, but the monster filled to the brim with the energies of Death and Decay started moving. Its bulk prevented high overland speed but its pseudopods were not as limited and one of them instantly tried to strike Luna.


    All five of us immediately sprung into action, Luna dodging back, Lia striking out with her chain hook, trying to sever the pseudopod, Silva moving to intercept the attack if necessary and Alex tossing one of their myriad goodies into the pool the thing had come from. In the meantime, I tried to assist Lia by conjuring a blast of freezing air, hoping that the cold would hamper the pseudopod. Given that it looked to be mostly composed of some liquid or something along those lines, I hoped that freezing it would slow it down, maybe even prevent the attack in the first place.


    Sadly, even I couldn¡¯t channel enough power in an instant to accomplish that, not without activating Overflow and blasting a massive chunk of Astral Power out in an attack that might not accomplish anything. Thus, my own contributions only achieved limited results but combined with the others, it was enough. I had no idea if the grenade Alex had thrown actually dealt any damage, there was quite a bit of fire lighting up the pool now but whether it did more than cause the stench to intensify, I didn¡¯t know. I only knew, burning shit smelled even worse than its normal counterpart.


    ¡°Yuck,¡± was Lia¡¯s only comment, after she drew back her weapon, looking at the fluids coating it.


    ¡°Agreed, we should keep some distance, I doubt these things can easily climb out of their pools if there are more than this one,¡± I suggested, already moving back towards the building we had exited, a grin forming on my face. Slow enemies that might be vulnerable to cold? There were few things I could deal with easier, especially as they seemed to be some sort of ambush predator, somewhat similar to sea anemones, waiting for prey to drift into their reach before disposing and devouring said prey. Bottomfeeders, quite literally, and about as mobile as a rock.


    After using Draconic Leap to get onto the roof of the building, I settled down for a moment, looking into the pools. I couldn¡¯t see any evidence of the slime being there, but that didn¡¯t matter too much, I knew it had been there, I wasn¡¯t sure it could leave but I was fairly certain I could make it so that it couldn¡¯t attack again. Slowly and carefully, I drew a magical circle, putting quite a bit of focus on my work. The more care I took, the longer I needed but the fewer mistakes and imprecisions snuck into my casting, improving the efficiency by a great deal. Instead of some Astral Power leaking out without accomplishing anything, more went into the actual effect, increasing what I could do.


    In this case, the effect was fairly simple, I wanted to send freezing energy into the pools, with as little physical interaction as possible. Water was a great carrier, especially given that I didn¡¯t want to simply throw chunks of Ice into the pool, that sounded like a bit of a bother. But water, supersaturated with freezing energy to the point that it would freeze the moment it gained a nucleation point? The moment it impacted the pool, all that freezingly cold water would leach the heat right out of the area, freezing everything solid. Maybe I would be able to apply the effect of the Shatter Rune I had on Mundus on the Ice afterwards, destroying everything frozen, but that might be a challenge. I hadn¡¯t actually learned the Rune, I only knew how the concept worked and would have to brute force it using Ice Magic. Not impossible, but maybe not the most effective way to go about things.


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    To my amusement, the Liquid I conjured using my combined Water and Ice Rune formation was almost a perfect mimicry of the Liquid Moonlight I had thrown around on Mundus, cold enough to cause clouds of frozen gas to shroud the stream of water I conjured. Upon hitting the pool, there was a bit of a splash before the entire thing froze solid far faster than normally possible, looking almost as if somebody had put the entire thing on fast-forward.


    Watching the now-frozen pool, I considered waiting until the system deigned combat over and awarded the EXP to see whether the thing in the pool had died but decided against it. There were more pools around and I already had my formation active, so I simply shifted the aim, spraying water across the dirty concrete below and instantly creating patches of ice when the water froze on contact until I hit the next pool. The same fast-forward freezing occurred and I continued spraying water into the different pools, until they were all frozen, with thin mist rising above them.


    Nodding to myself, I hopped off the building, absorbing the shock of the landing with my knees and walking towards the original pool. Given that I hadn¡¯t received a message that I gained EXP but one that told me I had gained a level each in Ice and Water Rune Mastery, I was fairly certain that the slimes hadn¡¯t actually died, but given that I could feel the pools remaining frozen, I was confident that we were safe.


    We all grouped up again and trooped over towards the large building we had been aiming for in the first place. When we walked past the first pool again, I sent some Astral Power into the Ice, forcing it to shatter into hundreds of shards. If there was an organism within, it should instantly die but again, there was no notification that I gained EXP. Luckily, there also wasn¡¯t another attack, not that I had expected one, maybe the Slime had some sort of core in there, waiting for the rest of its mass to thaw or something. I had no idea and given what the slime was originally made of, I had no desire to deeply investigate the frozen sludge. I was just happy that it was Ice enough for me to manipulate and thanked my good fortune as we continued towards the large hall.


    When we tried to open the door, it was locked just like the one in the office building had been but just like that one, magic was incredible when it came to picking old locks. It was something I should keep in mind if we ever made another base for us. If I wanted something to stay locked, a normal lock wouldn¡¯t keep out most people, not with the rising levels of strength and the various other ways people could cheat reality these days.


    This was no video game where locks could only be picked with a lockpick or opened with their respective key, brute force was always an option, especially when it came to padlocks or something similar. Those could easily be breached with a hammer or crowbar even before the change, now it would only be easier. Not something to be relied upon, even if there was a small part deep in my hindbrain that might think so.


    Once inside, we stood in a small office, or maybe reception area, with some additional chemicals and reams of paperwork. Just like before, Alex happily went for the chemicals with Lia, while I briefly glanced at the papers, before raiding the office for supplies. There was no way I¡¯d ever pass up clean paper, it might take years until people started making any new paper, to say nothing of paper as clean and nice as what we had now. I¡¯d happily store the stuff in my magical bag for a year or five, I had a feeling it would only go up in value. Or it might get lost in the shadow realm, either way, I was fine with it.


    Once we were all done, we continued deeper into the building, moving through a changing room with a few adjacent showers before we could go into the primary chamber, the one that made me think of the building as a swimming pool. The comparison was fairly apt, a normal swimming pool was filled with a mix of chlorinated water and urine, while this one was filled with a mixture of sewage and chemicals. Different concentrations, but overall, not too different.


    Sadly, as we realised once Lia pushed the door open, the slime, or maybe slimes, I had driven out of the pools outside, had moved inside to escape the sudden cold snap and were now waiting for us, with dozens of pseudopods rising from the liquid.


    Time for round two?

 Chapter 898

    For a moment, I considered charging into the pool room. There were easily a dozen pseudopods coming out of the treatment pool, all of them long enough to reach every corner, nook and cranny of the room, they could even get to the struts directly under the roof, making it so nothing could escape their grasp. If we actually went it, we¡¯d get struck, it was almost inevitable. And something I wanted to avoid, both due to the material the pseudopods were made of and because they were able to cause serious injury, simply due to their weight.


    So, instead of charging in, I called for a retreat, pulling Lia back into the changing room and allowing the door to swing closed, right before it got splintered by the strike of a pseudopod. We all managed to get out of the way, though Luna and I got a few small cuts from splinters. Luckily, it wasn¡¯t anything serious, though it stung a bit, making Luna curse softly. Neither of us would be hindered and I could already see that Luna was channelling a bit of Life Magic, healing herself, while I did the same with Blood Magic. No need to leave wounds open in an area filled with disease and decay, that was just asking for an infection to set it.


    Once we were decently far from the door, far enough that the pseudopods would have to stretch quite far to reach us, I decided that what had worked outside could work here, too, and conjured freezingly cold water again. I didn¡¯t pay half as much attention to the details of the formation and despite the far quicker creation, the slime was visibly creeping out of the pool by the time I managed to set it up.


    The conjured water splashed against the monster, not carrying enough force to act as a water-cutter, but enough cold to freeze on impact, immobilising the area around the impact point. It didn¡¯t do much, not with a patch maybe a square metre in size on an enemy that was about fifty times that, but it was a start. Not a big one, as the slime demonstrated a moment later, but a start nonetheless.


    When the slime pushed itself forward, moving with surprising speed, we were forced to retreat further and while I managed to channel yet another blast of freezing water into the bulky creature, I only slowed it down by a fraction, the attack far from sufficient to deter the creature.


    We ran out of the building with the sounds of crumbling masonry or something like that following behind us, the slime clearly demolishing the building in its attempts to chase after us. Once we had a bit of distance, I reached out to as much of the tainted Ice in the one pool I had cracked, spending a surprising amount of Astral Power to take control of it. Once the Ice floated from the pool, I started to launch the largest chunks at the front of the building we had just exited, trying to destroy as much of it as possible so it would collapse on the slime. The slime¡¯s manner of exiting helped a great deal, the front might have caved in even without my help, but with a few car-sized chunks of Ice crashing into it, the question was moot. Sadly, the slime wasn¡¯t too impressed with the roof collapsing above it and while the mass slowed the thing down, it wasn¡¯t pinned or anything. We gained a bit of time, but not endless amounts of it.


    ¡°Plans?¡± I asked, trying to come up with a good way to destroy it myself. Ice was my first instinct, maybe something similar to the move I had used to freeze the pools out here, but the volume of the slime made that difficult. It would take a long time for me to freeze to body, simply due to its large mass compared to the limited point of impact. Maybe if I started to shift the spray, trying to coat its outside in a block of Ice, but the thing''s strength made that difficult. If nothing else, the slime was incredibly strong, that much I could easily see from its casual dismantling of the building.


    Moments later, just as Alex was holding a few of their bombs up, I was further treated to a demonstration of the thing''s strength, when a sizeable chunk of the destroyed roof was launched towards us with bone-breaking force. Just a glancing blow from the thing would have broken bones and a direct hit could easily kill. Once again, we all dodged but the slime was smart enough to continue a barrage with half of its pseudopods, more debris flying in our direction while its main body was creeping towards us.


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    ¡°We can try to cut the pods, especially if you manage to freeze the connections,¡± Lia suggested, while Luna looked around, likely trying to find anything alive that she could manipulate with her magic. Sadly, the entire area was fairly dead, with only a few desolate patches of grass, moss and lichen clinging to life.


    ¡°The fence would slow it down,¡± she suggested when her search came up empty and I had to consider for a second while dodging out of the way of yet another projectile from the slime. It might work, especially if the thing had some sort of core in there, but it also might split the slime into a few dozen smaller enemies, which might be faster. Easier to freeze, too, but I wasn¡¯t too enthused with the idea. Still, it had enough potential to retreat towards the gate.


    ¡°Move towards the gate, try slowing it down from afar,¡± I told the others, shouting to cover the distance our different dodges had opened up between us. No need to cluster against an enemy with ranged attacks that covered large volumes of space, it would make things only easier for the slime.


    Alex launched a pair of vials at the slime using their sling, the vials crashing on impact and spreading their payloads. One instantly caught on fire, burning a bright white for a few moments before the flames consumed the original fuel and petered out. If nothing else, the slime was clearly inflammable, and despite the visible distortion in the air caused by the heat, it didn¡¯t look like the attack had made much of an impact.


    The other vial hissed and a few small puffs of smoke were rising from the impact area but again, I couldn¡¯t see any huge effect, making me think that this, too, had been a bit of a dud. Still, it was a hit and that, in combination with a few attempts to use Darkness Magic to confuse the creature, was enough to catch the thing''s attention. Maybe the Darkness Magic had done something, maybe the slime was too simple in the first place, I wasn¡¯t sure bit it was now moving towards Lia and her passenger, giving Luna and me some extra room.


    Nearby, I noticed that the silvery parts of Luna¡¯s eyes had lit up brightly and moments later, I could feel a faint connection, one familiar enough for me to accept it. An application of Hecate¡¯s divine magic and thanks to it, I could now see a little more, recognising areas where the power within the creature was concentrated, allowing me to make educated guesses about the thing''s weak points. Sadly, it didn¡¯t look like Luna would be able to do much more, not without using vines or something similar, opening herself up to retaliation if the thing could grip them. Most likely, Lia¡¯s reluctance to use her chain hook came from a similar place, no need to give the monster more ways of dragging you into its deadly embrace.


    Lastly, Silva had shifted into her humanoid form and was lobbing more rocks, though she stayed between the thing and Luna, ready to deflect any missile my munchkin might not be able to dodge. A good idea, one that I fully supported, even as I made another note to find some sort of useful ranged option for her.


    The information from Luna helped me a great deal and I was taking full advantage of it. Where I would have had to try and freeze the thing in its entirety, I could now see where surgical blasts of power would weaken it, especially if I managed to match the right elements to its weak points. I needed Overflow to channel enough Astral Power to produce ranged blasts from some of my lesser-used elements, twisting wind into blades was easy but turning a combination of Water and Earth, both in their purely Astral forms, into a beam of desiccation? That was almost enough to send me to my knees with effort, channelling that much Astral Power was physically challenging and I¡¯d get a headache soon. But the effect was well worth it, causing the front part of the slime to dry out and start cracking from the force produced by the hind portion, allowing us to get even more distance. Progress, of a sort. It might take a bit, both of time and space, but I now felt fairly confident that we could destroy the thing.

 Chapter 899

    My attacks on the massive slime were enough to get its attention, and not in a good way. Where before, I had been forced to dodge a missile every so often, now almost a dozen pseudopods were throwing shit at me, some of them literally flinging parts of the slime in my direction. Those parts didn¡¯t possess any life of their own, but from the way they impacted the asphalt around me, I could see that they were highly corrosive and possibly toxic. Their scent certainly indicated that I wanted nothing to do with them, for more than one reason.


    The constant barrage was enough to pressure me into conjuring shields of Ice the hard way, wasting large amounts of Astral Power by using Ice Magic to manifest them, instead of conjuring them via rune mastery but I simply didn¡¯t have the time. Even with the shields, I was feeling the pressure, especially when I noticed that the slime projectiles were destructive enough to corrode my Ice.


    With the brutal onslaught, I decided that discretion was the better part of valour and used Draconic Leap once more, taking to the air to dodge the latest attacks before landing on the roof of the office building and taking cover. Not a moment too soon, I could already hear the sounds of destruction as multiple missiles aimed in my general direction crashed into the building, though it wasn¡¯t enough to bring the house down just yet. The slime was trying but I had a bit of time.


    Time I used wisely, conjuring up a pair of shields made from Hard Ice, strong enough to withstand quite a bit of punishment, before recreating the same formation I had used earlier, the one for freezingly cold water. With the way the pseudopods were waving about, I could estimate the position of the slime, even without seeing it, allowing me to launch cold water in an arc, hopefully impacting the slime on the other side. Some of the water ended up as spray, turning to snow if it hit some of the dust in the air, but hopefully, the slime took the majority of the damage. The frantic waving of the pseudopods certainly indicated success.


    ¡°Watch out, mum!¡± Luna¡¯s frantic shout of warning was enough to get me moving, I was not about to my daughter''s words in the slightest and instead, I stopped channelling magic into the formation and leapt off the building. Not a moment too soon, I hadn¡¯t landed on the ground just yet when the slime demonstrated that it, too, could estimate positions based on gathered data, tracing the arc of water back to the formation and launching a barrage of attacks at that position.


    Its attacks were enough to make the roof cave in, multiple parts of the other building had hit where I had been moments earlier, alongside some larger pieces of slime, making it quite obvious that it wanted me dead. A feeling I thoroughly reciprocated, this thing shouldn¡¯t be allowed to exist, let alone continue to grow.


    Regardless, trying to make a stand in the limited area of the treatment plant would be stupid, there was more than enough open space in the fields around it, giving us freedom to move and avoid the thing as much as possible. Trying to fight such a monster up close was nothing short of suicide, it was simply too specialised to compete in its area of specialisation. Granted, it had some moves I wouldn¡¯t have expected from a slime, regardless of size, but now that we had seen its ability to attack from a distance, we could take measures to avoid them.


    By the time I reached the gate, Luna was already there with Silva, both of them waiting for me, while Lia with Alex on her shoulder was quickly approaching. The slime was further away, its attempts to kill me by throwing rubble meant it hadn¡¯t been able to move from its position next to the rubble, so we had some time.


    Again, I started to form a runic formation, this time going for pure Ice Magic, hoping that my greater ability with it would make up for possibly lesser effectiveness on my target. The intent behind the attack was still the same, freezing the slime, taking away its mobility and ultimately destroying it. If Water was too concentrated to affect something of its size, I needed to make the attack more diffuse, widening the area I was freezing so it would be affected all at once.


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    The obvious solution was one of my favourite runes, the rune of Mist. For once, I didn¡¯t even try to include a Blood or Darkness component in the magic, merely a combination of Mist and Chill Runes, maximising the amount of Astral Power that went into the two concepts, with a particular focus on the second.


    The effect was quite fascinating and physically completely impossible. The mist billowing from my formation wasn¡¯t just cold, it was so cold that the air around it started to freeze from the contact, creating strange snow-like flakes that fell into the grass, only to melt away into steam soon after. The temperature difference between the conjured mist and the air around it was insane and only the control I held over my mist prevented it from immediately mixing with the air around to reach thermal equilibrium.


    As I conjured more and more mist while keeping what I had contained, I waited for the slime to show its pseudopods and luckily, I didn¡¯t have to wait for long. Otherwise, I might have lost concentration and the mist would have disappeared into the warm summer night, chilling a large volume by a degree or two, instead of creating a super-cooled volume where I wanted it to be. The moment I saw the office building break as the slime broke through it, I sent the mist billowing forward, even as the slime started to throw stuff at us again. But by now, I didn¡¯t need to conjure more mist, so I could easily abandon the formation and use what I had conjured before while we retreated further, Lia quickly closing the gate behind us.


    The thrown rubble had some fairly peculiar effects on the gate. It wasn¡¯t as strangely elastic as the rest of the fence, but it was solid enough to block the projectiles, causing some fairly serious noise as they crashed. My own attack seemed to have quite a bit more success, causing multiple pseudopods to freeze solid and even break when the slime tried to move them, the Ice not budging to its manipulations. For a moment, I considered using my own Ice Magic on them, but given the distance involved, and the fact that the pseudopods used to be part of the slime, I doubted I¡¯d get any sort of efficiency out of such a move.


    Instead, I prepared for the next round, from what I could tell the mist had wounded the think quite severely, though I doubted it was about to die, the attack hadn¡¯t been strong enough to kill something of its size.


    We all moved away from the gate, Lia and Alex launching a few more of their harassing attacks to keep the slime interested. It briefly tried to retaliate with thrown rubble, but we could move closer to the fence and take cover behind it. When the rubble hit the fence, the effect was just like earlier, when I had tested it and discovered the ridiculous elasticity. It was a sight to see a piece of brick wall, multiple metres in size, crash into the fence, stretching it for over almost two metres before bouncing back, the wall mostly disintegrating from the conflicting forces. I was surprised the thing had managed to throw it in as intact a form as it had, but the destruction on the bounce made up for that.


    Now, with its primary ranged attack out of commission, the slime started to move in our direction, picking up a surprising amount of speed by pushing itself with its pseudopods. I decided to conjure more mist, letting it build up as much as possible before sending it against the slime. Luna was a little behind me, taking shelter with Silva protecting her, while she empowered me with her Divine abilities. It was an interesting effect, one that I¡¯d love to study at some point, but Hecate was fairly stingy in that regard. She helped, but only if Her help was needed, not because we wanted it.


    I felt a wide grin stretch my lips when the slime crashed into the fence, trying and failing to destroy the fence, before simply wiggling through it. The slime was easily capable of fitting itself through the gaps but to do so, it had to divide itself up into smaller parts and that was the very moment I struck. By dividing itself so it could fit through the fence, it greatly increased its surface area, making itself far more vulnerable to freezing attacks.


    Once it was as divided as I thought it would be, I struck, sending the freezing mist into the area and causing a sudden cold snap.

 Interlude: Holiday Chapter 2023

    Douse the flame, children, this is the Pale Lady¡¯s night. No fire shall burn tonight, nothing to disturb Her, nothing but memories and tales of magic. Tonight, we honour Her, as she watches over us from the dark, standing between us and the things out there. She is a denizen of the night, shunning the Sun so she can do Her grim duty.


    Back, when the world was young, countless monsters were wandering through the night. Vicious and hungry, they hunted our ancestors, tearing apart anyone venturing out of the camp at night and sometimes they even attacked the camps, killing everyone they could get their hands on. They despised the light and hid from it, burying into the Earth or vanishing into the shadows, making it impossible for our ancestors to hunt them in the light of day. They were vicious monsters and they knew how to make the best of their situation and play to their strengths. Given enough time, they would have killed all of our ancestors and none of us would be here if that had happened.


    Something needed to change, our ancestors needed to take the initiative, but how? They couldn¡¯t see in the dark and the monsters knew how to avoid the light of a fire. They needed something else, something that would allow them to hunt the monsters in the dark, in their element.


    It was the Pale Lady who made that change. She stepped away from the light, embracing the darkness and making Her home in the shadows, in the deep places where no light could ever reach. She protected our ancestors in the Darkness and taught them how to fight, how to fight and survive, regardless of circumstances.


    Some claim She was the first Daughter of the Night, one of the crimson-eyed travellers, but no, She was not. She is no mere Daughter, She is the Pale Lady, the Mother of the Night, Guardian in the Darkness and Bringer of the Arcane. It is to Her that we give our thanks this night, to the Mother who guides us in the Night, to the Crone, who taught us to stand on our own and to the Maiden, encouraging us all to stand together. For the three are one, and it was only by standing as one that our ancestors could survive the dark days after the world had Shattered.


    Tonight, we remember Her and honour Her by embracing the darkness, just like She has embraced the darkness. Thanks to Her, we can protect us in the night. To this day, the first lessons on the Arcane Path have been scribed by Her hand, it is Her words that guide those precious first steps. You all have seen Her working, the guiding tablets and some of you have read them, allowing them to take the first steps and learn arcane magic.


    Or maybe you have taken a different path. Maybe you have been chosen to work with the guarding hounds, protecting our people with your own canine companion. She brought the first hound in from the night, travelled with the hound and taught it to help our people. After the first hound, there were many more, taught by Her and those following in her footsteps. Remember them, the first pack that She protected, joining their strength to that of humanity and giving us our loyal friends. They track for us, they help us to hunt and they listen for trouble as you guard our communities. Tonight, we thank them for their tireless efforts and, if you can, reward them with some extra treats and cuddles. Remember, they are our best friends, our loyal companions and they should be treated with all the dignity they deserve.


    We remember the Hound, for she watches over our camp in the night.


    Tonight, we remember Her, we honour Her sacrifice, for She has forsaken the light of the day to watch over us during the darkness of the night. Tonight, we honour Her and Her daughters, who still watch over us. They are out there, hunting the monsters of the night and making sure that they don¡¯t make sport of us.


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    She is the Mother and the Daughters of the Night are born from Her magic, tirelessly stalking through the night, so we can peacefully sleep in our beds. Some of you might have seen them. To this day, the crimson-eyed Daughters stalk the night, only venturing into our cities when the need is great or when their prey is hiding amongst us. There are horrors out there, monsters that seek to feast on our flesh and it was from those monsters that the Pale Lady took the first of Her Daughters. She took the monster and remade it, taking the shell but discarding the mind, forging the body into something new. The monster died that night and from the ashes, the first of the Daughters rose. Shunning the day, just like her Mother, she was tasked to travel through the night, to seek out the shadows and the many things that hide within them. To seek them out, to find them and in the darkness bind them. So they may never venture out again and make sport of the good people that live during the day.


    That was the First Daughter of the Night, the first of the Crimson Eyed Stalkers. And to this day, she is doing her duty and during this night, we thank her for her vigil, just like we thank her Mother.


    We remember the Stalker, for she hunts those that prey on us in the night.


    Tonight, we remember Her as we read the lessons Her second daughter has left for us in the Shrine. Her lessons help us when the Mother¡¯s lessons are too complex, when a gentle touch is needed. Where the Crone can be uncaring, almost cruel, and the Mother a hard taskmistress to prepare us for a difficult world beyond our fires, the Maiden listens with a kind ear and guides with a gentle hand. But that¡¯s not all she does.


    Each night, the Maiden of the Moon watches over us in the darkness, doing her best to give us just that little extra light. Hers is a gentle light and without her, we would only have the distant stars. Month after month, she travels across the sky, labouring to give us as much light in the dark as she can, only resting for three nights each month. Hers is a tiring task, an endless labour, but she performs it without complaint.


    We remember the Maiden, for she gives us light in the dark.


    Tonight, we remember Her and honour those who follow after her. We spoke of the Hound, we spoke of the Crimson-Eyed Stalker, we spoke of the Maiden of the Moon. And now, we speak of the unseen one, the one we rarely notice, the one many see as the least of them. The clever racoon, setting their traps in the night, warning us from approaching danger and often impairing them before they can ever get to us and do us harm. Their traps are never seen, cleverly hidden in the shadows or only visible in the minds of their targets and yet, they are always there. Helping the Crimson-Eyed Stalker as she hunts her prey, making it so the prey cannot escape her tireless hunt.


    We remember the clever racoon, and thank them for the traps they lay for those who would do us mischief.


    Tonight, we remember Her and honour Her sacrifice. A long time ago, the dragon started to stir. Burrowing up from underground, it tried to bury the world in frozen fire. Fearlessly, the Pale Lady stepped into the darkness and there, deep in the shadows, deep in the freezing, eternal cold, she faced off with the Dragon. There, in the deep darkness, where no light will ever reach, she bound the dragon with chains of Ice. As the Dragon strains against the chains, She reinforces them, tirelessly toiling away in Her fight against the beast.


    We remember Her and thank her, for it is only thanks to Her strength and the strength of Her continued sacrifice that we can live here. For without Her, the dragon would undoubtedly rage across the world, bringing with it death and corruption, taking back the night and making us fear it once more. Just like we did before She came along, giving us the strength and tools to face the night. Dauntless, just like she faced the night, with hope in our hearts and magic in our souls. Just like she taught us.


    Never forget the Pale Lady, never forget the Maiden, the Mother and the Crone.

 Chapter 900

    Something had to be wrong with the world, there was no other explanation for the strongest individual enemy we faced thus far to be a literal pile of shit. Once the slime was completely frozen, thanks to the expanded surface area it had gained by trying to squeeze through the fence, it could be shattered with a simple, if not easy, application of my Ice Magic. Apparently frozen sewage slime was close enough to Ice to fall under my magic and Overflow allowed me to channel enough Astral Power to accomplish the effect. And learn that the slime was a stupidly high level eighty, making me wonder just how that worked out. It certainly hadn¡¯t moved around to destroy scores of enemies or something along those lines, it had, at least according to every bit of evidence we could find, done nothing but sit in the treatment pools and decompose.


    This suggested that the slime had been able to gain levels by decomposing in an area filled with Decay Astral Power, making me wonder if I might be able to accomplish something similar. Although, had the slime formed due to the Decay Astral Power, or had the Decay Astral Power gathered because of the slime? I wasn¡¯t sure, nor could I really tell. I had a feeling it was a bit of a synergistic effect, the slime decaying and decomposing, increasing the amount of Astral Power in the air, making it easier for it to continue. Whatever the case, was it possible to gain power by existing in the appropriate state while immersed in the correct Astral Power climate? If so, the right state for me might be existing while being frozen in a climate filled with Ice Astral Power. Like the Nexus I was aiming for anyway? If so, that might be a way to gain stupidly large amounts of EXP, though it would severely limit the amount of skills I¡¯d gain on the way, to say nothing of other potential troubles. It might not be worth it for me, though I¡¯d certainly look into the idea.


    Either way, it was something to look into in the future, while we had things to do in the present. Namely, I had notifications to check and afterwards, we should check out the slime¡¯s remains and the building it had been in. There might be parts of the slime that could become useful in the future, and a building filled with enough Astral Power to create a creature this powerful should also cause some interesting effects on the stored chemicals. Given that the primary Astral Power seemed to be Decay, corrosive and similar effects should be imbued into the chemicals here, so acids or bases would be magically amplified to stupid degrees. Maybe, if I understood the interaction correctly. I wasn¡¯t an alchemist, so my knowledge in that regard was severely limited.


    In regards to the notifications, I was now level sixty-seven, after previously gaining a level while teaching some of the locals a few days back, and had received skill increases in Ice Rune Mastery, now fifty-four, Ice Magic, also fifty-four, Water Magic, now nineteen, Water Rune Mastery, now twenty-three, Wind Magic, now twenty-five and, lastly, Earth Magic, now twenty-one. All in all, quite impressive gains for a single fight, though it had been an interesting one. It made me wonder if I could combine elements in a similar fashion to the way I had twisted Earth and Water together earlier when I tried to desiccate the slime, it had been a spur-of-the-moment idea, trying to get something that matched the weakness Luna¡¯s strange divine ability had revealed to me. Not something I¡¯d test normally, it was quite out there as an idea, but hey, it had worked. So, who knew what else could work?


    Maybe I¡¯d be able to twist Crystal Magic and Blood Magic together, giving people instant strokes. Hel, anything twisted together with Blood Magic would be a supremely nasty move against a living target, from Wind Magic to give people embolisms, to Fire Magic, giving them a serious fever. Any effect I could imbue into somebody¡¯s Blood could instantly be elevated from unpleasant to fatal if used in the right conditions.


    Just thinking back, there was a reason why Blood Magic was feared on Mundus, and it wasn¡¯t just because its users could use others as magical batteries. That played into the fear, but it wasn¡¯t the root cause, there was so much you could do with access to a person¡¯s blood, it wasn¡¯t funny, though the same went for other bodily links. Blood was merely one of the strongest while being fairly easy to draw at the same time. Sure, people could cause massive havoc if they had the bones of somebody, but once an enemy got their hands on your bones, you had other problems anyway. Granted, the bones, or flesh, of relatives could be used, too, and provide a link to a person. That was what the tribal shaman had originally used to curse Sigmir before we ever met, but neither Flesh Magic nor Bone Magic had a really good reputation. For just the same reason Blood Magic was spurred, it was incredibly easy to abuse and incredibly lethal. That it could also heal, and thus infringe on what some saw as divine privilege, only added insult to injury, giving various divine servants a good reason to dislike it even further, adding to the persecution.


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    Alas, I had a feeling it was only a matter of time until such persecution would start up here, too, regardless of the efforts I made to educate people. I¡¯d continue to try but a single person couldn¡¯t hold back the flood. For everyone I could educate, the various clerics and priests already out there could educate one each, ultimately dooming me to failure, something even Hecate¡¯s blessing couldn¡¯t really stop. Shaking off these morose thoughts, I focused on the present and things I could actually change.


    We all moved back into the treatment plant and split up once again. Lia and Alex were tasked with investigating the pool building, while Luna, Silva and I were assigned to check the slime¡¯s body out from up close. I wasn¡¯t sure which job was worse, the pool building stunk to the high heavens and the slime was even worse, though the slime was out in the open, so the stench could dissipate a little.


    Looking at the slime¡¯s shattered body with my magical sight, I could see some lingering Astral Power, diffuse and quickly dissipating, but it demonstrated just how magically powerful the thing had been. Essentially, a large pile of magically related material, animated by nothing but Astral Power. It made me wonder if I¡¯d be able to create something similar by channelling Astral Power into an appropriately prepared solution, though I had no idea if I¡¯d be able to control the result.


    Thinking back, the constructs I had created for the lost spirits in the Nexus Valley had been working under similar principles. Sculpted, instead of a simple pile, but otherwise, it was nothing but magically appropriate material, animated solely by Astral Power. There, the spirits had provided the guidance, while here the guidance had given it nothing but a desire to feed? Maybe with some emergent intelligence as enough material and power was present, which would explain its ability to use ranged attacks, both with outside projectiles and by using its own material as a projectile. Neither was directly conducive to feeding, but it could ultimately enable more feeding by being combat-efficient.


    Something to study in the future, for now, Luna and I managed to find something interesting, a crystallised core of some sort. Maybe crystallised Astral Power, maybe an actual slime core, maybe something that had crystallised due to my Ice Magic but hadn¡¯t shattered, I wasn¡¯t sure and I couldn¡¯t tell. The crystal was composed out of Astral Power, that much was obvious, but the mixture was primarily Decay, with quite a bit of Ice seeping in. Uncertain what it meant in the long term, we stored it as securely as we could, making sure it had its own container far from everything else, just in case things went bad. Decay was one of those elements, just like Death or Fire, that one couldn¡¯t be paranoid enough about, simply because it represented destruction over time, or destruction caused by time in some ways.


    Almost nothing was truly safe from that effect, not unless I managed to imbue something with Stillness or Eternity, both concepts should provide resistance or immunity to this kind of effect. Sadly, both were high level, though I might be able to brute-force the Stillness concept with my Ice Magic, I was slowly getting there.


    For now, Luna and I kept poking around the destroyed slime until Lia and Alex returned to us. Both were quite happy, Alex chittering excitedly about the chemicals they had found, making me think that this whole excursion had been a lot more successful than I thought at first. They¡¯d be able to make something interesting with it, and I had the crystal to poke around with, matching the Void Crystal I already had. And hadn¡¯t made any real progress with, too many things to experiment with, too many elements to explore. It was a good problem to have, but a problem nonetheless.

 Chapter 901

    After experiencing the sewage treatment plant and its slimy inhabitant, we focused on less exciting things. Mainly, training the two students I had promised to help while studying the findings of their research. Sadly, we either had a lacking sample size in regards to the research or there simply wasn¡¯t anything useful to find, I wasn¡¯t sure which was the case. Maybe it was both, but only time would tell. I¡¯d certainly continue to have people research how traits were assigned, though ultimately it was only a side amusement. I highly doubted that the data would come in handy anytime soon, the change had happened and from now on, traits and attributes would grow organically as people aged, not be assigned due to prior life experience.


    Another project I was working, and making significant progress, on was the actual cloak of Shadows. Weaving Shadows into a near-corporeal form and using the Void Crystal to stabilise them without a constant application of Darkness Magic was one thing, but I had yet to truly decide what to do with the cloth. A cloak was the obvious answer, but what exactly I could do with it, I had no idea. The best case scenario was to use the Feather from Lenore, the Crystal and the cloth together and create some sort of artefact that might allow me to fly. Wings, along the lines of what I had when Lenore and I used the Raven¡¯s Shadow, allowing me to fly at least temporarily. I doubted I¡¯d be able to make something that¡¯d work for unlimited flight, but something that used my Astral Power? That sounded somewhat feasible.


    I had made quite a few concept drawings for that item, though I was having trouble with the Wind-Magic aspect. It needed one to fly but all I had used Wind Magic for thus far was to conceal myself, be it sound or scent. Neither really mapped to flying, nor did the few times I had tried to use Wind Magic to attack or what I had taught Sonja about the use of Wind Magic to enhance her archery. No, if I wanted an artefact that allowed me to fly, I¡¯d have to push my Wind Magic in other ways.


    For that, I was now out and about, with Luna and Sonja watching nearby. Luna wanted to see what I could do, while trying to help Sonja get some insights into my experimentation and Sonja, obviously, wanted to learn herself. She still didn¡¯t have the strength to be a true archer, At the moment, she could either use an elevated location, using gravity to give the arrow additional power and her Wind Magic to improve accuracy, If she wanted to remain on that route, she¡¯d have to get a lot stronger, so she could use a proper bow with enough power to deliver dearly arrows from afar. She might also want to look into ways to improve her eyesight, so she could actually find her targets to take aim, but that was to be considered later. The other option she had was to use a light, short bow and remain at street level, using her Wind Magic to improve the low power of her bow. In that case, she¡¯d have to be mobile and flee, using agility and speed to stay away from Shattered and Undead, essentially employing tactics similar to those we used against the slime. For this, Strength wouldn¡¯t be as vital as for the first option but she¡¯d need more than she currently had.


    Both options were interesting in their own right, with completely different applications of Wind Magic, especially if she could make use of what I had in mind myself, using Wind Magic to lighten my steps and speed myself up. Which is why she was watching me now, trying to see what I could do. Though so far, that wasn¡¯t all that much.


    Mainly because I hadn¡¯t actually found the right way to go about things. WIth Blood Magic, my primary enhancement magic, I could use my muscles as targets and empower them but with Wind? That wouldn¡¯t really work, especially as I wanted to use Wind Magic to move in ways I normally couldn¡¯t. There were no muscles that allowed me to fly, I¡¯d either need magic or that old joke about trying to hit the ground but missing. Not something I could use, not unless I was desperate and in need of a gamble.


    What I could consider were ways to push myself forward with the wind, similar to the wind pushing leaves ahead of itself. I doubted I¡¯d be able to actually use Wind Magic to fly directly, not without massive galeforce winds, but giving myself a push? That should work. Maybe I could even use magic to reduce air resistance, though I had a feeling that wouldn¡¯t be too important at slow speeds but if I managed to hit higher speeds it might become vital.


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    My first problem was how to implement the effect. I could use Wind Magic to send out a breeze, pushing air away from me, but that was always that, away from me. The origin of the moving air was generally my hand, as I habitually used gestures to give myself a mental framework, but that didn¡¯t really work when I wanted to run. I could hardly push behind me to try to conjure the wind that hit me in the back. So, the first step would be to get the wind moving as I wanted it to move.


    That alone was significantly harder than I had expected. I had never really thought about how much I used my hands to gesture as I used my magic, from a simple swipe to conjure wind, to slow, almost hypnotic hand motions when conjuring water, my hands were almost always involved in the initial phase of my magic. It wasn¡¯t as bad when it came to Darkness Magic, but even there I noticed my fingers twitching and flexing.


    Amusingly, the easiest way to circumvent this problem was to use a spell lasting for a longer time. When I conjured my current concealment cloak, I only twitched my fingers in the beginning, the movement curiously close to the motions I¡¯d use to draw the Runes of Shadow and Concealment, and once the spell was running, I could simply keep it going.


    With that in mind, how could i go about creating a similar spell, one that allowed me to move faster than normal? Pushing my own movement was the idea, so maybe the answer was to use something similar to the Cloak of Shadows, only that I had to take control of the air around me, pulling it towards my front, only to force an opening in the middle, letting the air flow past my body on both sides before coming together in the middle, giving me a further push? That sort of circular airflow sounded like something that might work, at least I could imagine it fairly well in my mind. Amusingly, I was fairly certain that this was essentially the way to remove air resistance, which I had originally discarded as a later project. But it sounded like it was a good first step if only to see if I could control the air around me and use it to push myself.


    Air pushing against my front was trivially easy to accomplish, I only needed to move and the air would push against me, or rather, I¡¯d push against the air, simply because the air was generally stationary and when running, I was not. Magical research and some simple physical training, not that it really did anything for me, what more could I want?


    Starting to jog, I focused on my Wind Magic, amusement bubbling up in me when I felt Titanic Ambition kick in, boosting my attributes quite a bit. I could feel myself pushing against the air and while the resistance wasn¡¯t major, it was there. Easily perceivable and, thanks to my Wind Magic, easily manipulated. Creating magical effects was a lot easier when they originated close to your body, so my first step was to essentially create a plough of air, parting the air before me as I passed. It took a few tries, but it wasn¡¯t anything seriously complicated, if anything it was amusingly similar to a few of my attempts to attack using Wind Magic. Only, instead of trying to use wind to slice through a target, I was using Wind to slice through the air. A lot easier, even if it was a little challenging to keep it synched with my body.


    The next step was to keep the air I was pushing aside moving around me, so it wouldn¡¯t simply dissipate into my surroundings but instead meet up again, behind me. If I could make things work, the two air currents would clash and at that point, I¡¯d have an overpressure behind me, one that had to try and escape into all directions. If it moved in one of those directions, namely in my direction, it would push me forward, hopefully increasing my speed as I kept running.


    Amusingly, that worked out a little better than expected, especially when I realised that quite a bit of the concepts I was using were the same ideas I had taught to Sonja in an effort to improve the power of her arrows. Only, instead of launching a projectile, I was the projectile.


    Once that idea settled into my mind, things sped up a great deal, allowing me to get the basic version down and gain two points in Wind Magic for my efforts, bringing the skill to twenty-seven. It was coming along nicely.

 Chapter 902

    There was something deeply amusing about the expressions some people made when they stumbled across my lessons for Luna. At least some of the lessons, somehow the magical lessons barely drew a raised eyebrow, nor did the martial arts training Lia or I occasionally put her through. Those were things people seemed to expect after the change, but the simple, classical school lessons for subjects like reading, writing, maths and simple science? Those threw people for a loop, especially when I used school books we had pilfered from the library to give my lessons some structure.


    It was so perfectly mundane, to the point that the lessons could have happened before the change just as well as now, people didn¡¯t really know how to react. Here, they hadn¡¯t fully adjusted to this new reality, despite it being a few months old. They had managed to give themself a bit of purpose in their described mission to take back their city from the Undead and Shattered but there was a lack of true, long-term planning. The people living here had formed a group out of necessity, but they had yet to turn that group into a community.


    Sadly, I was still at a loss for what to do about that. The best case scenario was that some of the locals finally figured out that power was a means to an end, that clearing their city would only happen if they formed a larger group, maybe started to explore the surrounding area to find more people and make sure that as many as possible would survive the coming winter. If they didn¡¯t manage to do that, they¡¯d have to hope that some other community stumbled across them and decided to integrate them. Otherwise, the two-hundred-odd people living here would likely get decimated or worse, with only a fraction of their number surviving long-term.


    There was a tiny part of me that wondered if I could actively intervene. A small spark, maybe a leftover instinct binding me to my former race, but a far larger part, the part of me that actively considered the future and tried to plan for it, could easily see why that idea was a foolish one. Not only did I lack the managerial skills to direct such a group, the only thing I had going for me in regards to leadership was my overwhelming power. I could rule by might, and I could likely force people to obey me, even if I had to rend their minds to do so, but I couldn¡¯t rule. And, really, I didn¡¯t want to.


    There was a reason I had picked the traits I had chosen, even if those traits had been planned for a game and not to remain with me all my life. I didn¡¯t enjoy large groups, I preferred my solitude or acting with a few, deeply trusted companions. Numbers, and to a lesser point documentation, had been an interest of mine, but people? Those I wasn¡¯t good with and I was conscious of that.


    No, trying to set myself up as ruler of anything but a kingdom of magical constructs was a horrible idea. And yet, I didn¡¯t want to see large groups of humans vanish, if only because I knew that growing food would be a massive hassle. A conundrum that had plagued me quite a while and I had yet to find a solution. Maybe some subtle help, as I was providing here, would do the trick. And if not, I¡¯d have to find another way.


    Could Luna and I work together to create some agricultural constructs? Her Life Magic might be a good first step and I might be able to create a semblance of intelligence by programming them using my Mind Magic.


    But before I started to make a plan to replace humans, I focused on trying to keep as many of them alive as I reasonably could. Here, that meant I worked with them when it came to martial combat, always a good first step, while hinting at the long-term problems they¡¯d run into. Providing some magical solutions for a few of their troubles, mainly the lack of water, also helped a great deal and created momentum in the right direction but I felt there needed to be some sort of catalyst, some moment that welded the people here together and turned them from a group united in necessity to a community working for their future. A subtle difference but I felt it was an important one.


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    The easiest way to unite people was, classically, an outside enemy. One that could be rallied against, especially if that enemy was already disliked, would forge people into a singular force capable of great, or terrible, things. Only, what group could I turn into a threat?


    The Undead and Shattered were the obvious answer but also an answer that didn¡¯t really work as things were. They didn¡¯t truly threaten the people here, thus the locals had gotten used to them, likely considering them as a fact of nature to some extent. Something akin to the weather, you could get annoyed about it, you could take a few measures but bad weather wasn¡¯t really a threat you could unite against. Not unless you managed to get some really good arguments and incredible amounts of public relations going, in that case, you could, but only just. And not widespread enough to actually achieve anything.


    No, if I wanted the Undead to be the threat the locals united against, I¡¯d have to show them just how much of a threat they were, which could backfire spectacularly. The easiest way to do so would be to get a large group of them to move into this area, or at least one led by a singularly powerful Shattered to attack their apartment building. Show them just how fragile their current existence is and they would hopefully get things started to change that fragility.


    Another alternative would be to draw one of the animal collectives into this area, the easiest would be a pack of dogs but it wouldn¡¯t really work with Silva¡¯s presence. I was fairly certain that my canine companion had made contact already but hadn¡¯t felt the need to actively bring these dogs into the fold, so to speak. Here, the dogs were well-represented, not at the top but not far from it. Not like back home, where the racoons and their hogs had been pressing the original pack she took in, giving them a path to power and a bit of guidance to walk that path. Or maybe she had given them the same guidance, but they didn¡¯t need our protection. I wasn¡¯t sure and there was little I would be willing to do about it either way, it was her project, just like the humans were mine.


    The felines were completely out of the question, simply because I didn¡¯t think there was an actual group of them. There were various individuals, all with their own powers, most of them focused on stealth and the silent takedown, making them highly unsuited to act as a visible threat. The best they could do was kill a human or two before retreating back into the shadows. Great to sow terror and fear but horrible to galvanise people into a single cohesive block.


    No, beasts weren¡¯t the answer, they were simply unsuited. As I shook my head, my mind went back to the Undead and I considered their potential once again. If the Undead attacked the apartment building in mass, without it looking like anything but an organic process, the people would most likely wake up.


    Thinking back, I considered the one time Lenore and I had seriously used Undead, right after Lenore had almost died. That stupid village, with their idiotic youths who thought robbing people was a good idea. Bad information, bad weapons and no real plan other than a serviceable ambush, wiping them all out had been a good thing. At least in my eyes, travelling Mundus had taught me a certain disdain for bandits, something I would no doubt feel here, too.


    Turning their village into Undead had been almost entirely Lenore¡¯s work, with very little input from my side, just like everything else we had done with Undead had been. She had used Death Magic, using the necrotic energies within a body to take control and turn them into a puppet. I could conjure necrotic energy, too, I had some control, just like I could control vital energies with my Blood Magic.


    Controlling numerous Undead would be nearly impossible, mainly because I couldn¡¯t channel a large amount of necrotic energy without suffering for it. But if I could find a suitable, high-level Shattered, Scorched or something similar, I might be able to take control of that single being, using it as a leader of the Undead and drawing a large group behind it. Forcing the locals to take a stand and even if they failed, I could step in and keep things from getting out of hand. Or maybe I could turn Sonja and Lars into some sort of heroes, having them kill whatever Shattered I could control in an effort to get things going here.


    Things to consider¡­

 Chapter 903

    With an idea of how to motivate the people here, I now had to turn that idea into a workable plan, before turning that plan into reality. Given that my idea was fairly simple, the plan was similarly simple, I only needed to make sure the tools I had at hand could do what I needed.


    The first step was to make sure that I could control Shattered, or at least direct them to my will. The least palatable option would be to use Blood Magic to create some sort of bait, maybe something akin to a scent trail that ultimately led to the apartment building, but given the uncontrollable variables of that idea, I wasn¡¯t a real fan of it.


    No, learning how to control Shattered before turning one of them into my sockpuppet was the best option, at least in my mind. Turning a single enemy into a symbol for the locals would allow the one to ultimately slay that single enemy to easily take control over these people, a role I intended for one of my students. With them at the helm, I was fairly confident that things would change around here, maybe not for the better, but their recklessness in approaching me gave me the impression that they wouldn¡¯t be satisfied with the status quo. At the same time, I was also confident that they wouldn¡¯t turn against Arcane Magic, or Hecate for that matter. I was still a bit of a worry for me, I had no desire to live in a world where religious doctrine controlled society, something akin to Europe during the Middle Ages, where clergy could make and break society on a fundamental level.


    My personal preference was more in the line of a world like Mundus, where religion had its place but was ultimately secondary. However, that perception might stem from my continuous travels and the fact that I spent the majority of my time travelling Aretia. If I had started on Arbortoma, my view of Mundian religions would likely be different. But ultimately, it didn¡¯t really matter, I would fight against what I considered religious nutjobs, but that was just personal preference, taste and opinion. Realistically, I highly doubted my students held the same views in that regard but by having Arcane Magic as the core of their power, persecuting those travelling on the Arcane Path became detrimental to their own growth and thus a lot less likely in the long run.


    But before that came into play, I needed to learn how to control Shattered. For this, I had decided to travel alone, partially because I was the stealthiest of us all, and partially because I wanted to avoid letting the others know about my plans. Not that I feared they¡¯d turn against me, but because I wasn¡¯t confident Lia had the acting ability to pull off a convincingly surprised reaction and because I didn¡¯t want to taint Luna¡¯s innocence with my schemes. She was my cute munchkin and didn¡¯t need to get dragged into plans that would hurt, maybe even kill, a few of the locals.


    Another advantage of moving alone was that I could have fun with my new trick, using Wind Magic to improve my movement. I couldn¡¯t do it while sneaking, but for now, I wasn¡¯t interested in stealth, merely in travelling across the city as quickly as possible.


    Though, if I wanted that, Wind Magic wasn¡¯t the answer, at least not in my current state. Using Blood Magic to empower my muscles gave me a greater boost than using Wind Magic, likely due to my greater ability and affinity with Blood Magic. Now, combining the two was truly interesting, even if it drained a lot of Astral Power. The combination allowed me to move at significant speeds, to the point that I was fairly confident I could have outrun a car within the city, without needing heavy traffic to slow the car down. Similarly, my ability to jump, especially with Draconic Leap, was just unreal, allowing me to leap across tall buildings without issues. Amusingly, testing the two ways to empower my body gave me yet another point in Wind Magic, making me wonder if this was a more suitable application of the skill, and two points in Blood Magic, bringing the skill to forty-one.


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    Once I was on the other side of the city, far from anything I had investigated previously, I stopped running and disappeared into the shadows of the building I had ended up on. There were Shattered and Undead in the streets below, but nothing that gave me the impression of suitable power. In a way, these generic Shattered were perfect to test things out, just like I had in mind.


    Stepping from one shadow to the next, I dropped down from the roof, remaining hidden behind a large dumpster. By now, whatever had been in the thing had decomposed to the point that it barely stunk any longer, or maybe it had been empty when the change hit, I wasn¡¯t sure. Either way, it provided me a good spot to study one of the Shattered, the creature a paltry level thirty according to a concealed Observe. One of the weakest of its kind, to the point that even the Undead around it had a similar or even higher level, despite their levels normally lagging behind the levels of the Shattered by quite a bit. An underachiever but, as the saying goes, no body was truly useless, they could always serve as a bad example. Or test subject, as was the case here.


    My first attempt was to gently reach out with Mind Magic, not even trying to incorporate Death Magic into the mix, in an attempt to achieve some kind of connection. Maybe it would allow me to interpret the things emotions, if it had any, or assert some base influence, as I could with animals. Subtly and stealth were the names of the game, trying to achieve something without the Shattered noticing my influence or presence.


    Pushing and prodding a little, I failed to garner any real results and I had a feeling that the only way I¡¯d achieve anything would be to overcharge my Mind Magic to the point that it would knock the thing out. It was the simplest of brute force approaches, one that I wasn¡¯t really interested in as it wasn¡¯t the right direction. No, I needed to accomplish something more in line with the way I had pulled people into the Astral River while teaching, only that I didn¡¯t want to pull them into the Astral River but push myself into their mind or something along those lines.


    Thinking back to the way I had pulled people into the Astral, I reached out to the Shattereed, only to feel my attempts glide off, for lack of a better word. There was obviously something missing, something that Lenore had been able to do and make it look easy. The obvious answer was that at least a bit of Death Magic was needed, or maybe even pure Death Magic, though I hoped not.


    Closing my eyes, I thought back, trying to remember the sensations, especially those during our Avatar State as we destroyed that bandit village, using a cursed mist to turn them all into Undead. Back then, we had instilled some sort of instinct into the Undead, but it had been almost entirely Lenore¡¯s work, making me a bystander at best, a bystander who now tried to repeat something similar.


    Shaking my head and opening my eyes, I tried to weave a thread of Death Magic into the Mind Magic I was using, conjuring it in a fashion similar to the way Lenore had used her magic. It wasn¡¯t easy and I could already feel a headache form, but I had a feeling i was onto something, that there was a merging going on between the two distinct types of magic.


    Again, I reached out with the combination, trying to push a simple command into the Shattered, a desire to take down a nearby Undead. It was a simple test, maybe the simplest I could come up with, giving the Shattered an order to do something it might have done eventually anyway. Sure, Shattered and Undead generally got along, but I had seen Shattered destroy Undead before, and Withered-controlled Undead destroy Shattered. Normal Undead attacking Shattered were something I hadn¡¯t seen, though that might be because Undead lacked the power.


    Not that it truly mattered, as I pushed the command into the Shattered, I felt a moment of resistance before something happened. I wasn¡¯t quite sure what, but I felt a surge of Astral Power leave my body, the Death Magic sapping my vitality and then, something happened.


    Something interesting¡­


    For a moment, the pale, blue flames in the Shattered¡¯s eyes flared green, a distinct shade of green I knew quite well, before returning to their original flame. And then, the Shattered suddenly lunged at the Undead I had intended as its target, tearing into the creature with surprising strength and fury.


    Maybe I was onto something here.

 Chapter 904

    Watching the Shattered tear into the Undead was quite interesting. I hadn¡¯t really considered how two serious brutes would fight, neither of them showed any obvious pain, nor did it look like their rapidly accumulating injuries were slowing them down, beyond the purely physical stuff. Once the Shattered managed to tear off the Undead¡¯s arm, the Undead wasn¡¯t swinging it around but even when the Undead managed to break the Shattered¡¯s leg to the point that it was visibly deformed, the Shattered could continue to fight without issue. Clearly, their physical bodies, including bones and such, were just tools, puppeted by the magical energies flowing through them.


    Somehow, that made me feel a little better about my actions. If the Shattered were nothing but puppets, controlling them with magic didn¡¯t feel wrong. They were, after all, already controlled by magical means, so I only exchanged the controller from whatever force had originally animated them to myself. It made me wonder if Lia had been some sort of special case, if I had merely been in time before the remnants of the person she used to be had left or if every Shattered held the remains of a deeply buried person within. It wasn¡¯t something I enjoyed considering, if only because I had killed hundreds of Shattered by now, but it was something I wondered about. As did Lia, for obvious reasons.


    She, together with Alex, had done some quiet and very private experiments with Shattered, experiments I wasn¡¯t really supposed to know about, trying to create more vampires. So far, she hadn¡¯t asked me for my advice, which is why I respected her privacy, even as I wondered why my daughter was so stubborn. Not that I truly knew a way to help her, but I had managed to create her, possibly by a stroke of cosmic luck, so shouldn¡¯t I be considered the authority in that regard? Similarly, I had managed to help with Alex, at least to a point, and we had created a companion for her. Maybe that was just part of growing up, that she was trying to find her own path and make her own friends. Only, she went about it a lot more literal than it was usually the case.


    My musings were interrupted by the destruction of the Undead, the Shattered ripping off its head with a fairly sickening sound, before dropping the mess in the street. Moments later, the Shattered stilled, freezing completely to an unnatural degree, before it started to sniff the air, carefully searching the area. I had a feeling it was trying to find me and tightened down the concealment magic hiding me, pulling Shadows and Wind tightly around me so no hint of my presence could escape.


    The Shattered¡¯s strange behaviour didn¡¯t last long, just a few minutes, before it moved back to its original position, acting as if nothing had happened. In the meantime, I had checked my log and found that I would have gained EXP for the destruction of the Undead but the level difference was simply too big, making the fight trivial. At the same time, I began to wonder if the Shattered had gained any EXP, or if it merely counted as a weapon I wielded, and thus not worthy of EXP, just like my frozen Shuttles didn¡¯t gain their own share of EXP.


    Sadly, I couldn¡¯t walk up and ask the Shattered, well, I could but I doubted I¡¯d get an answer I could understand. However, regardless of the EXP situation, the test was quite a successful one. I now knew that I could imbue commands into a Shattered and the Shattered would follow them, though there were a lot of details I needed to work out. Details, like the possible complexity of the commands, how long they could last, if there was a way for others to realise that the Shattered wasn¡¯t acting by its own will, whatever that might mean, and a host of others. Just knowing that the Shattered¡¯s eye flames took on the colour of my eyes for a moment when I gave a command was worthy of notice, as it might give away the game if I had to command a Shattered when others were watching. My eyes were fairly distinctive, so I couldn¡¯t be confident nobody would notice if a Shattered suddenly matched my eye colour. Especially given that Luna, Lia and I all had something going on with our eyes, adding another point to a forming pattern.


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    No, any commanding I wanted to remain unnoticed needed to be done beforehand, out of sight, and, if at all possible, long-term. Some sort of plan or scenario for the Shattered to act out, but there, I ran into the previous question, how detailed could I make my orders and how long would they last?


    Did the Shattered continue fighting against the Undead because they were simple creatures and would continue a fight until one of them was dead or the enemy had fled or did they continue their battle because the command remained?


    Clearly, more investigation was needed. So, for science, I repeated my earlier actions, weaving together Mind and Death Magic, trying to insert a command into the Shattered. This time, I didn¡¯t command it to fight, instead I commanded it to climb, focusing on a nearby building. It wasn¡¯t a high one, nor were the walls terribly sturdy, meaning the Shattered should be able to climb it if it was motivated.


    Again, just like before, I could feel resistance from the Shattered, but a stronger resistance than before. I had to push myself a bit, channelling extra Astral Power as the Death Magic consumed some of my vitality, but I managed to force the command into the Shattered without exhausting myself. Hopefully, this would get easier with practice, or maybe it was easier to command a Shattered that hadn¡¯t been commanded recently, or ever. Maybe they were building up some sort of immunity with repeated exposure or something like that.


    But for now, the Shattered had to climb the building, while I was watching from my hideout. There was no skill involved as the Shattered climbed, it was quite similar to its fighting style. Strength, used with reckless abandon, allowed it to claw its way up the building, leaving a trace of old blood and damaged masonry. Curiously, once it was on top of the building, it froze once more, its body a little more damaged than it had been after the fight, and again, it seemed like it was trying to find something. Most likely me, if there was any sort of intelligence or instinct involved it had to realise that its actions had been influenced, though I couldn¡¯t really tell just how intelligent it was.


    To my surprise, the thing managed to focus on my position, though I had no idea how it managed to do. I should have been all but invisible, thanks to the dense shadows around me and trying to hear or smell me was similarly impossible, thanks to my Wind Magic. And yet, the thing focused on me and, with a suicidal leap, jumped off the building I had made it climb, trying to land on me. And, most likely, do horrible things.


    I had no desire to have horrible things done to me, so I struck first, using Wind Magic to push it off course and have it smack into the ground instead of into me. Before it could ever get up, I launched my next attack, using Mind and Death Magic, just like I had earlier. Only, I wasn¡¯t trying to push in a command, I simply overpowered a blast of Mind Magic, obliterating the thing¡¯s mind with overwhelming force. The Death Magic was mainly along for flavour, adding that little bit of ending to the usually less-than-lethal Mind Magic. I had used the combination before and knew that it was potent, silent and quite subtle, meaning none of the Undead around had truly realised what was going on.


    Their existence was a peculiar one and a part of me wished there were more people around with the time and interest to study these creatures, there was something about them, the way they repeated actions that most likely used to be part of their bodies¡¯ routines, it was fascinating and unsettling at the same time. Sadly, I doubted there were many who saw them as anything but the desecrated bodies of former humans, something that needed to be laid to rest so the world could heal.


    Either way, I now had a few fairly interesting data points for my plan, though many more needed to be established for it to work out. That meant, more experimentation was needed, carefully, spread out amongst different Shattered as it seemed that commanding allowed them to find me, even with my excellent stealth. Luckily, there were more than enough Shattered around and if nothing else, I could, and probably should, repeat my experiments on the Undead, too. Just to make sure. And for science.

 Chapter 905

    With more experimentation came more data, allowing me to rapidly advance my understanding of this particular subdiscipline of Mind Magic. It also granted me multiple skill points, namely five in Mind Magic, surprising me greatly as the skill reached fifty-seven, making it my highest skill, while Death Magic also gained three, bringing it to twenty-one. Wind Magic, which I extensively used to enhance my speed, also gained another point, bringing it to twenty-nine during the time I spent experimenting. Similarly, my Blood Magic had gained two points, bringing it to forty-three.


    The massive gain in Mind Magic made me wonder about the mechanics once more. It was my strongest skill now, even though I had used other magical disciplines more and had higher affinities for them. So, why did Mind Magic gain so many points, compared to something like Ice Magic? I used Ice Magic more, a lot more, but, as I started to realise, I used Ice Magic in a fairly singular fashion. On the other hand, there were at least three different skills I practised with my Mind Magic, I used it to control enemies, I used it to directly attack the Mind of my enemies and I used it to guide allies. All three were distinctly different, forcing me to wield the skill in different ways.


    In the meantime, eight times out of ten, I used my Ice Magic to control macro objects made from Ice, mostly my shuttles. Sure, I was quite good with them, but the discipline itself was likely much more than just throwing around large pieces of Ice. If I started to focus on other subsets of the skill, maybe something like direct temperature manipulation, microscopic shards of Ice or even something more esoteric like temporal stasis, I¡¯d likely gain points fairly quickly. It was something I¡¯d have to look into, especially the part about direct temperature manipulation, it was something I occasionally did with my Fire Magic, weaving it into Water Magic, but maybe there was a way to heat things up using Ice Magic? It sounded like such a wonderfully illogical idea, I wanted to try it, if only to see if I could.


    But before I could throw myself into yet another large project, I had to finish my current one. For once, I didn¡¯t want to start something new and get dragged into a totally different direction, leaving the old project abandoned. No, I wanted to truly learn how to control Shattered, or maybe Scorched would work, too, find a suitable one and set it on course to show the locals why they needed to unite and start planning for the future. What they were doing right now wasn¡¯t enough, they were too complacent, too reliant on a few divine miracles for things to work in the long run. Even adding what I taught them about magic wasn¡¯t enough, if they didn¡¯t have a fire lit under their lazy behinds and started to seriously train and push themselves. They didn¡¯t have the numbers to fall back on, so they couldn¡¯t rely on having a few people with high affinities make a measurable difference.


    It was somewhat amusing that large numbers could be both a curse and a blessing, completely depending on circumstances. But maybe it shouldn¡¯t be, there was a reason why large cities had sprung up, but there was also a reason why large cities had been hotbeds of crime. Luckily, great power allowed for an unprecedented degree of freedom, meaning I only had to remain more powerful than the vast majority, if not everyone, and I would be able to make my own rules.


    Though there¡¯d always be some compromise, power only changed the things you had to compromise on. If I was powerful enough, the compromise might be that I didn¡¯t turn their kingdom into a frozen wasteland and they didn¡¯t bother me while allowing me to trade at my leisure. Or having people pay tribute and in exchange, I would provide some form of protection against certain threats. With enough caveats, that could be an incredibly cushy gig, acting like the dragon protecting their lair while a village at the foot of the mountain I lived on reaped the benefits of my protection while paying for the privilege. It was an interesting concept, one that might be quite feasible, but I¡¯d have to see.


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    For now, I had to finish my plan and set it into motion.


    I was quite confident in my plan, as my experiments on the Shattered were promising. I could only provide a single order for a Shattered at a time before they¡¯d return to their original programming, so to speak, but the orders could be incredibly detailed. Or maybe calling them impossibly detailed would be a better description. One of the tests I had come up with was to have a Shattered gather small stones, nothing bigger than a pebble, and place them in distinct, fairly large, forms, namely the alphabet in a two-metres large font. It took thousands of pebbles to create the letters but it had worked out, to my complete surprise.


    That order had almost been a joke, a test to see what would happen if the order was impossible, but the stupid Shattered had completed it, taking multiple days of continuous work, but the thing had done it. Each letter, in fairly neat script, laid out on the road, the different lines all incredibly even for the material it had to work with. It was insane, it should have been impossible but I had seen it with my own eyes.


    At that point, I was beginning to wonder about the Shattered. It was obvious that they weren¡¯t living beings, that they didn¡¯t think, certainly not like a human did. They were, for lack of a better word, biological robots with some strange, magical programming, nothing more. There were some parts within their programming that came from their original human bodies, of that I was fairly confident, but they weren¡¯t living beings any more. No living being would have followed my command in such a robotic and idiotic fashion. The closest mental analogue I could come up with was that of a computer, capable of performing incredibly complex calculations, but not actually intelligent, just something that was incredibly good at counting incredibly large numbers.


    Sadly, with my realisation about the strangeness of the Shattered¡¯s mental processes, I had to be incredibly careful with the final wording of my command for the prime Shattered I wanted to lead the attack on the locals. There¡¯d have to be some contingencies and incredibly detailed and careful directions in there, almost to the point of programming a robot to accomplish something.


    The problem here was, I wasn¡¯t a programmer. I had learned some simple programming during high school, there had been a single University module that taught a little more, but it had been years ago and not really something I had focused on. Now, I was supposed to program an incredibly complex task, using ordinary language. There were so many variables, it sounded impossible but unless I could come up with something else, I had to make do. To make matters worse, the task I wanted to set was one that required a certain amount of interaction, of dealing with other Shattered and putting Undead under my prime Shattered¡¯s command so they would follow the attack. All that without accidentally triggering a tide of Undead and Shattered large enough to wipe out the locals, because I wasn¡¯t sure if I could defend them once the numbers got large enough. Sure, I could conjure deadly mist at will, but could I cover the entire area without accidentally getting them caught up in my magic? I wasn¡¯t sure, nor was I confident that the amount of magic necessary to perform such a feat wouldn¡¯t permanently warp the local Astral River, causing Wild Magic phenomena in the world around the area.


    In that case, the cure might be worse than the disease I was trying to fight. The people here would lose their current home, be driven from it or die due to the chaos left in the magic¡¯s wake, meaning what little community they had would shatter. No, I needed the attack to be threatening but I needed it to be weak enough for the locals to fight off with nothing but reasonable assistance from me.


    For that to work out, I had to be incredibly careful with my command to the Shattered, define it in such a way that the strange programming they worked on interpreted in the way I wanted it to and I¡¯d most likely have to observe the entire operation as it progressed. Maybe I should look into a better way to accomplish my goal, but outside of finding another enemy that could act as the threat all on its own, I needed a decently sized group of Undead under the leadership of a singular, powerful Shattered or Scorched.


    Amusingly, as annoying as the entire thing was, it was also quite fascinating and challenging, making me wonder just how far I would be able to push this particular part of the Mind Magic skill. Maybe I¡¯d have to do some life testing at some point in the future.

 Chapter 906

    Working on my program to control a Shattered over a fairly long time took more effort than I had initially anticipated. It wasn¡¯t just a question of putting down tasks, one after the other, I also had to anticipate circumstances and estimate distances, numbers and everything. It was quite akin to a computer script, only that I had to plan for a wide variety of circumstances and prepare contingencies. That made it a huge task, one that I couldn¡¯t permanently work on, or I¡¯d drive myself completely around the bend.


    So, instead of continuously bashing my head against that particular wall, I started to add a bit of variety to my mental diet. One part of my efforts was obviously the continued teaching of Sonja and Lars, their progress was quite impressive for the time they had been learning magic, but the bigger part was my own training.


    With the realisation about the best way to increase my skills, I now started to consciously branch out what I could do. Lowering the temperature around my hand with Ice Magic was nothing but a joke, to the point that I¡¯d probably done something similar out of instinct at some point, but projecting that lowering of temperature outwards, so it either affected a defined volume of space or into a literal beam of freezing energy? That was a lot more difficult, but managing to do either was well worth it, awarding four skill points in Ice Magic, bringing the skill to fifty-eight.


    Similarly, my work with Darkness was branching out greatly, returning to paths I had trodden on while I was on Mundus. The Void was everpresent, one only had to learn where to look. Namely, one had to seek out the space within reality, to look between the ups and downs in the minuscule world. It was a scale my mind could only comprehend in magical metaphor, it was so far beyond the scale my eyes could perceive, that I generally left them shut and simply felt the world around me.


    To recognise the difference between the solid concrete, a sample of fluid water and the, obviously, gaseous air all around me was fairly simple, once I managed to recapture that peculiar way of feeling out the world around me. Or rather, to feel out the void within the world around me, to map and track it and its concentration in everything. It was strangely counterintuitive that within my perception, feeling more Void meant that there was less matter there, that an area my Void-sense told me was densely filled was actually nothing but air, while an area my Void-sense considered to be fairly empty was the dense concrete. Intellectually, I could easily understand the reason, I literally perceived where there was no matter, so more area that wasn¡¯t filled with matter meant that there was obviously less matter there. That, in turn, meant either higher pressure involved if it was gas, not that that had happened so far, or that something was a liquid or solid. Amusingly despite knowing all that, my senses remained convinced that no void meant empty, giving me a bit of cognitive dissonance but it wasn¡¯t too bad. I would eventually get used to it. Hopefully.


    The next step, after learning to sense the Void, and earn three skill points for Darkness Magic in the process, was to learn how to manipulate it. That was incredibly strange, as I had to learn to manipulate it by volume, otherwise, there simply wasn¡¯t anything there for my mind to latch on to. It was another of those things my mind was struggling with, simply because it was something no human could ever have begun to perceive without the help of sophisticated equipment. It worked, at least to a point, but it wasn¡¯t anything I could use in a useful fashion. At least for now, if I got better with it, this would be the literal universal cutter, combined with simple micro and macro-kinesis, even if I doubted I¡¯d learn to use it in combat. But just knowing that I could make the equivalent of a molecule precise cut was fairly impressive, even if that cut was currently limited to working between distinctly different materials while eating up a stupidly large amount of Astral Power. Or, in other words, I could briefly enlarge the void between a sheet of paper and the concrete the paper was lying on, causing the paper to float up for a moment, held on nothing but Darkness. Doing so used up a significant amount of Astral Power, but it was possible and while the feat had given me a headache, it had also pushed Darkness Magic up yet another point, bringing it to fifty-six. Maybe that was because I was bending reality to a significant degree, even with magic involved, but hey, I could make things float on literal nothingness. And it made me wonder just what would happen if I started to exert that sort of force in space, where there was a lot more ¡®nothing¡¯ to work with.


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    That idea, in turn, spawned yet another new project to work on. Namely, regaining my abilities with Astral Meditation, not only when it came to remote sensing but also the creating and control of scrying constructs and Astral Projection. I wanted to be able to feel where powerful creatures asserted influence over the Astral by virtue of their existence and learn how to map that output into reality. The second part was a lot easier than the first, especially when considering how many ways there had to be to conceal that impact, but those also had to be learned. Unless they were innate, but I doubted that truly powerful creatures would have innate hiding abilities. Maybe if they were ambush predators.


    That the Astral remained unsettled made those ideas a lot more complicated than they¡¯d have been while on Mundus, but knowing what was possible helped a great deal. I knew that I could project parts of myself through the Astral and use them to communicate across vast distances. The talk I had with the Grandmother while half a continent away, done without having divine assistance, was evidence of that. Similarly, I¡¯d eventually manage to talk with her while both of us were on different worlds, though that was still very much a work in progress, with no progress made thus far. I had ideas about what might work, but so far, reality had rejected all my ideas, unless Hecate Herself was involved and willing to help. But that would require me to ask for that help, to grovel and beg, something I was unwilling to do. Not for something as insignificant as talking to the Grandmother,


    One part of that training, of delving into the local Astral and exploring it further, was to try to find the subject I wanted to command. It had to be either a Scorched or Shattered with considerable individual power, so it could draw enough Undead under its command to make the attack feel threatening but I also needed it to be defeatable by the locals. The second part would most likely be impossible, meaning it would need to be defeated by Lia or myself, with Lia being the better option.


    As it turned out, what I was trying to do might be simply impossible. Maybe completely, maybe only at my current skill level, the problem I ran across was one of resolution. Just like I was unable to differentiate between different materials with similar density, to say nothing of differentiating between different molecules within the same material, I was unable to differentiate between Shattered, Scorched and everything else. The entire city was far too steeped in Death, tainting the Astral River considerably. I was able to detect parks and such, spaces where Life was clinging on by a threat, but ferreting out the differences within the Death Astral Power? That was impossible, it all blurred into a singular, swirling mess if I tried to focus on it. Granted, I gained a point in Astral Meditation in my attempts, but ultimately, I failed.


    Just like I failed in my experiment when it came to sensing the Void of Space. I tried to project myself along the lines of the Astral River but long before I reached anywhere close to the Void, I had to abort and retreat into my body, feeling battered and beaten by the forces flowing through the Astral River in the sky. It was as if the area up there was an even bigger mess than what was going on down here, making me wonder if the integration was starting at the core and moving outwards. Or maybe solid matter made it easier for the Astral River to establish sturdy channels, I had no idea.


    But for now, trying to interact with the Void was impossible.


    All in all, the time I spent working on my program was well spent, giving me a few more skill points, and a lot of ideas and making me realise just how much there was still to learn. Most likely, I was only seeing a tiny amount and I¡¯d understand just how much I didn¡¯t know as I learned more.

 Chapter 907

    Having a plan come together was deeply satisfying. It wasn¡¯t just the satisfaction of solving a problem, there was a sense of achievement that went deeper. I was changing things in the world, I was altering the course of history, if only in a fairly minor sense, and knowing that made me proud. Now, I only needed to make sure that the alteration I was performing improved the course of history, not made it worse.


    The people here needed the wake-up call, or they would hit a wall and hit that wall hard. Likely hard enough to shatter their group and kill most, if not all, of them once winter hit. Unless they started to draconically ration their supplies, watching some of their people starve while hoarding enough to keep a few of them alive, they would run out as things were right now. At that point, their only chance of survival was based on fortuitous fate, that some other group just happened to stumble across them with enough supplies to keep them going. The chances of that were minuscule at best, to the point that I was almost willing to call it impossible. I had heard it said that sometimes, people needed to be cruel in order to be kind. Hopefully, this was one such time, as I didn¡¯t want to harm the people who had hosted us for almost a month, even if we had only used our own supplies and the magic Luna and I had woven over their fields made up for what little we took.


    Finding the right Shattered for my plan had been a stroke of luck. The thing was just above level fifty, one of the most powerful of them all, and fairly isolated near the outskirts of town. Not in an area with a lot of Undead, giving me more than enough time and privacy to slowly layer the command program I had come up with into its mind until I was finally done.


    The program itself was a thing of beauty, incredibly complex with multiple stages that were supposed to follow one after the other, once certain conditions were met. Testing the individual parts had been a massive pain, but a necessary one, hoping that a highly complex program such as this worked without extensive testing was foolish, let alone trust it to work perfectly as planned. To make sure things went within the necessary parameters, I added multiple checks that would only allow the program to continue if they were met.


    As contraditionary as it sounded, I had taken great care to make sure the assault on the locals I had kicked off wouldn¡¯t harm them. Only wake them up and force them to take charge of their own fate. Painful, maybe, but ultimately not harmful, or so I hoped.


    Watching the program start was interesting in and of itself. It was strange to watch the Shattered move with a sense of purpose it normally lacked and even stranger to know that I had given it that purpose. Normally, these creatures were simple, locked in fairly straight-forward operations with only minimal deviation until disturbed in their routine. But now, with me adding commands into their minds, or maybe calling it a processor or programming would be more apt, they regained something beyond that simplemindedness. Once again, I began to wonder if there was a way to rebuild them. If the memories of who they used to be were contained somewhere within their bodies, stored in their brains in some inactive fashion, would it be possible to use those memories as the core for a program, one much more complex than what I had cludged together?


    Or would it be possible to at least get to the point where I could create a program that would make them into permanently beneficial creatures, helping humanity in some strange, domesticated way? A part of me shuddered at the mere thought, images of Shattered pulling plows or picking cotton were far too visceral to be considered palatable, but the idea was there, somewhere in my mind. It felt wrong, but at the same time, the possibilities were endlessly fascinating. It made me wonder what was a mind, where was the boundary between the purely physical mind, what was stored in the skull and spine of a person, and the emergent property of it, the spiritual component. To say nothing of the soul, as that was yet another part of the conglomerate that made a person into who they were.


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    It was a difficult question but also one I needed to solve. What made a person into who they were? It couldn¡¯t be purely physical, or my whole quest to revive Sigmir would be impossible, something I wasn¡¯t willing to consider but also something that wasn¡¯t indicated by what I knew at this point. No, there had to be a way to bring Sigmir, my Sigmir, back to me, even without having her body, and thus the physical parts of who she used to be, available. This meant, logically, that there were non-physical parts that could be regained in some way, something that should be possible for the Shattered, too. And yet, I was uncertain whether there was a way to bring these people back. Maybe there was, but I doubted I¡¯d find it before things were too far gone. I couldn¡¯t let myself get dragged into speculation about possibilities, what might be was only important if you worked to get to the point where the possibility became reality. As I was doing for Sigmir, if others wanted to get to the point where they could bring their loved ones back, more power to them, at least once I had the power I needed.


    And I was well on my way to gain that power. Creating the program for the Shattered had been a fascinating experience in and of itself, giving me quite a few insights about those mysteries about the mind, though I doubted I reached any truly deep secrets just yet. I was getting closer and studying how the program played out was a step on that path, which is why I sneakily watched my chosen Shattered, just as I had observed the countless tests I had performed to get to this point.


    To see how the different conditions activated, to keep count of the Undead it brought under its control in a fashion I still didn¡¯t fully understand, I learned a lot even if I didn¡¯t gain a single skill point by observing. Maybe if I started to use my observation but for now, as I remained passive, I didn¡¯t get anything.


    Well, nothing but a lot of ideas. Some of which I even started putting into practise, especially one I hadn¡¯t really considered yet. I had always thought of Concealment as something I did to myself, I made myself harder to see, prevented scents and sounds from escaping my vicinity and so on. It was always based on my own location and the physical world around me.


    The idea, as I had been studying a Shattered moving according to my program, was to take the fight to the enemy, so to speak. If I could prevent an enemy from noticing what little evidence of my presence remained in the physical world, thanks to my current concealment, I would be even harder to find. I remembered the idea of the SEP Field in the old Hitchhiker novel, or the Notice-me-not in that wizard series, if I could make either of them into a reality, even if only targeted at distinct targets, it would be quite interesting.


    I did a few experiments with the idea, though a modified version of it. When I noticed that there were a few Shattered near the programmed Shattered, I decided to experiment on them and gave them each a command to pay no attention to the man behind the curtain, or in this case, the Shattered prowling through their area. I had no idea if they would have paid attention, their behaviour in groups remained somewhat unpredictable to me, but from what I could observe, they didn¡¯t even notice my Shattered.


    It gave me some extra breathing room, allowing me to push the locals into extra training as the challenge I had organised for them started to move towards them. Luna helped a great deal with that, even if she didn¡¯t know why I was pushing her to help the locals with some extra magic lessons and some minor blessings from Hecate to help them understand. She didn¡¯t ask and I didn¡¯t tell, just like Lia didn¡¯t ask why I was having her go over the lessons she had given the locals again, or why I was explaining to them the best ways to set up guard posts, how to patrol and make sure nobody snuck up on your camp. Again. They were learning, but I could feel that they didn¡¯t take things as seriously as they should.


    That is, until one of the patrols I had convinced them to make came back with results. Suddenly, everyone was a lot more¡­ motivated. Or maybe agitated. Or both.

 Interlude: Survivors 502

    Movement, and lots of it. Movement, where there should be no movement, enough to be easily visible in the dim light of the full moon. There was no question about it, nor did any of the five people out for patrol truly wonder about what they were seeing. There, in the darkness, were humanoid figures, slowly moving towards them. Towards them, and their home further down the street.


    ¡°We need to report in,¡± Sian immediately pressed, dread pooling in her stomach. There were so many moving forms in the dark, too many for comfort, maybe even too many to fight. She didn¡¯t want to imagine the outcome of a fight, nor did she want to consider what would happen if they didn¡¯t fight. Neither idea was palatable to her, but she couldn¡¯t see a third option. Not unless Jade with her companions pulled a miracle out of a pocket, or whatever orifice she could pull miracles from.


    None of her companions disagreed with her assessment, they could all see the shapes, get some idea about the number coming towards them and add things up. Only to come to a conclusion that wasn¡¯t indicative of their continued survival, be that as individuals or as a group. Fight or flight, what could you do if either option ended in a shallow grave? Fight and die with a weapon in hand, or flee, and most likely die exhausted far from where you started?


    With quick steps, the entire group returned to the apartment building they had started to call home, their little community in the face of the apocalypse, a community that was now being threatened by the dead roaming the city they all called home. What a home it was, their former neighbours, in some cases their friends, their bodies were roaming the streets but the lights had long gone out, leaving nothing but shells behind. Shells that now threatened what little remained of their once-beloved home.


    As soon as they were back, they started to wake people up. Everyone was needed, even the youngest could perform some small, but valuable action, fetch or carry some things, allowing their elders to focus on the incoming threat. It didn¡¯t take long for the people to gather, the urgency with which they were called made certain of that.


    At first, there was a lot of shouting. Shouting, gnashing of teeth and denials. People wanting to fight, people wanting to flee, people wanting to do this or that, without rhyme or reason. Until it was Lars, one of Jade¡¯s students, stepped up, a heavy stomp on the ground shaking the earth and silencing everyone. His words, while simple in essence, echoed through everyone¡¯s mind. They needed to fight if they wanted to live. It was that simple, they didn¡¯t have a choice, they had to fight and they had to win. Even if Jade wasn¡¯t with them, even if Lia, her pale and tall companion wasn¡¯t with them. Both had gone out as they did most nights. They had to fight and they had to do it together. Or they would all die, maybe together, maybe separated. But dying, they would.


    Luna, together with that strange, massive dog, stepped up, calling on everyone to join together, knowing that she could help. Her mother and sister weren¡¯t here with her, but she could help and she wouldn¡¯t let the others down. She wouldn¡¯t let her Mother¡¯s efforts go to waste!


    ¡°Gather around me, Silva and I will call upon the blessing of the Mother, it will help you persevere in the face of hardships,¡± the child called out, her courage belying her young age. Or maybe it showed that age was rapidly becoming nothing but a number, the hardship of their situation forcing everyone to mature rapidly, a process this child had obviously started quite some time ago and taken great strides in the maturity department.


    A few people wanted the child to fight, but nobody truly dared to demand it. They weren¡¯t that far gone, not yet, they still retained a certain sense of decency and, maybe, fear that forcing this particular child to fight would backfire on them when the mother returned. Still, having a blessing would help them, so everyone happily gathered around the girl and her dog.


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    Together, dog and child performed a strange ceremony, the dog letting out an eerie song of barks, growls and howls, while the child softly accompanied the dog, only instead of howling and growling, she was singing in a quiet, yet hopeful, tone, using words nobody could understand as it was sung in a foreign, alien, language. And yet, despite all that, everyone hearing the song felt uplifted, as if they could see a faint light in the distance, the light that signified the end of their hardship.


    Emboldened, the entire community moved out, everyone who could hold a weapon was on the move, even if the best thing they had to fight with was a simple stick. Nobody wanted to die a coward, they all wanted to survive. And if they wanted to survive, they needed to overcome this challenge, or they¡¯d lose their supplies and soon starve in the streets. There was nobody left to help them, so they had to help themselves.


    Three figures were near the front, two teenagers and the strange child they had befriended, the daughter of their magic tutor who had added quite a bit to their lessons. And yet, despite the amount of information the child had contributed, they had barely seen her use magic, making the two teens wonder why that was.


    ¡°They are coming down this road. I shall prepare some obstacles for them, stay behind them, use your bows, use everything you have, and use the time my obstacles buy for you,¡± Luna commanded, trying to channel as much of her mother¡¯s attitude and language as she could. There was a small clump of fear in her chest, neither Mother nor Sister were here, making things extra scary. Luckily, Big Sis Silva was here, making sure that Luna wasn¡¯t alone. And promising that she¡¯d protect Luna, giving the young child some peace of mind. Silva was just as scary as Mother, only scary in a very different way.


    Drawing deeply from the pool within herself while also reaching out to pull in power from the environment and the Astral River, Luna took out a few small seeds she had prepared some time ago. Nothing special, just harvested from a few especially tough brambles in the forest and infused with a bit of blood and, much more importantly, Life. Filling the seeds with even more power, she cast them out, as if planting crops in a field. Only that this field was the road the Undead were marching down, a pair of Shattered visible further in the back.


    Why the Shattered were here now, or why they had dozens of Undead with them, Luna didn¡¯t know, nor did anyone else. They only knew that the Undead were here and that they needed to take care of them.


    The seeds thrown by Luna hit the concrete without a sound but the silence didn¡¯t last. Moments after the impact, there was a strange, crunching sound and vines shot out from the concrete, some anchoring into nearby walls, others simply tangling into a dense thicket, filled with sharp thorns. It was an instant and incredibly deadly barricade, or it would be for anyone feeling pain or suffering from blood loss. Against the Undead, it would be a suitable barricade to slow them down, but they¡¯d be able to push through it eventually. Still, the defenders had gained some time, time they¡¯d hopefully be able to use productively.


    Next to Luna, Sonja, the student of Jade, stepped up, raising her small, somewhat crude bow. Exhaling slowly, she drew the string back, nocked an arrow and stilled for a moment, a strange glow gathering around her before being transferred to the arrow. When she let go, there was an odd sound, somewhat like tearing paper, and the arrow shot forward, trailing azure light and moving far faster than the simple bow should be able to propel it. And yet, the arrow didn¡¯t care, it moved rapidly and accurately struck the lead Undead in the head, sending it to the ground without fanfare. The Undead, despite its sturdy constitution, didn¡¯t get back up.


    Neither did the next, struck down in the same way.


    Or any of the others, as Sonja kept shooting, calmly nocking one arrow after the other and sending it towards the gathered Undead. Even as her breathing started to turn laboured, her brow was coated in sweat and her arms started to shake. Breathe in, exhale slowly, and send another Undead to the ground. Constantly, unerringly and yet, it wasn¡¯t enough.


    Despite her best efforts, despite countless other projectiles sent against the Undead by other defenders, despite the dense thicket of vines created by Luna¡¯s magic. Despite all that, it wasn¡¯t enough and the Undead simply kept coming.

 Interlude: Survivors 503

    When the first of the Undead managed to push itself far enough through the thorny brambles Luna had conjured, there was a moment of hesitation. It was one thing to throw stones at the Undead or launch arrows their way, it was a completely different thing to step up and bodily bash an opponent that used to be human in the head. The degree of separation was lessened, making it far easier to see these monsters as broken humans, something that lingered deep in the back of some minds. To make oneself step up and strike to kill against a human target, especially one that was struggling and restrained as the Undaed was, it took deep conviction. Or fear, anger, or any of these emotions would do, too, the fight or flight reflex was a powerful thing, only that against these foes, it seemed to be much more weighted towards the ¡®flight¡¯ side of things.


    Luckily, the moment of hesitation didn¡¯t last too long and with a soft growl, maybe to push away the last remaining doubts, Sian stepped up, a staff raised above her head. Twisting her body in the blow, she brought down the staff, the force of the attack causing a whistling sound, only for the sound to cut off with a meaty chunk and a crunching sound. The Undead crumbled, still help in the vines, and stilled its movement, no longer a threat.


    But it was only the first of many, maybe too many, even with the continued rain of projectiles from the archers and rock-throwers. Others stepped forward, too, taking the lives of a few more Undead, but the strain these bodies put on the conjured vines was not to be underestimated. Even with the Life Magic Luna was putting out, creating something akin to a zone of Rejuvenation around herself, the vines couldn¡¯t last forever.


    Soon, far too soon for the defenders¡¯ taste, the vines crumbled, pressed to the ground by the weight of multiple Undead bodies and with that, the Undead could move past the blockade and actually start fighting back, instead of being forced to endure a rain of projectiles or being bound by the conjured vines. While the dead faces couldn¡¯t show any emotions, the defenders could almost feel the bloodlust in the air, the dead wanted the pound of flesh they had been denied so far.


    This time, they weren¡¯t met by brave people, willing to take a stand for their homes. Instead, they were met with claw and fury, as the strongest of the defenders was no longer hampered by the same vines that held back the Undead. Instead, Silva, the powerful hound of Jade, left behind to protect her daughter, stepped forward. With a powerful growl, she rose from her usual four-legged gait, standing on two legs and towering above all, her front legs now turned into arms and tipped with vicious claws. A single swipe, and the first Undead was tossed back, towards its kin, as the hound stepped into the fray.


    But a single powerful combatant, even one that can stand in the midst of battle like a rock in the sea, cannot hold back the tide. The tide will flow around the rock, and batter the shore until eventually the rock is washed away or the tide retreats, to try again another day. In this case, the Undead kept moving, despite the circle of blood, limbs and bodies strewn around Silva. They couldn¡¯t defeat her, but they could bog her down, the Undead cared little for their continued existence and the Shattered commanding them even less.


    Luckily, it wasn¡¯t just Silva that was willing to step up. Using the cover the powerful hound provided, Sian stepped forward and expanded it. While she lacked the sheer power to carve through the Undead as Silva did, she had enough strength to push the Undead aside, allowing Silva to easily tear into them. That is not to say Sian didn¡¯t destroy any Undead of her own, but she was smart enough to marshal her stamina, supporting the stronger fighter to allow her to bring even more of her strength to bear.


    On the other side of the road, Lars stepped up. With a bellowing roar, he pulled up the road beneath, wrapping the asphalt around his arms, his torso and even his upper legs, giving himself a sturdy armour that added even more to his strength. Just the act alone was enough to send rivulets of sweat streaming down his face, but after the initial exertion, he seemed to settle down, using the armour economically instead of trying to throw around tons of rock and dirt. His armour did the fighting, allowing him to regain some of his strength even in the middle of combat.


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    Similarly, the rest of their people stepped forward, too. Those who lacked a good ranged weapon, those who hadn¡¯t been able to bring down Undead from afar, they moved forward and followed Sian¡¯s lead. Supporting the stronger fighters while making sure that the Undead couldn¡¯t swarm them, or flow around them while staying out of their range to attack the ranged attackers further back.


    Alas, when fighting in melee, especially in the chaotic conditions of the dark road with seemingly endless waves of enemies attacking, injuries were nearly unavoidable, even for seasoned fighters. Something the locals most definitely were not, they had the motivation, especially thanks to the blessing of Hecate that sheltered them from the worst of their fears and allowed them to stand up to their foes, but they simply didn¡¯t have the experience. They took wounds, some deep scratches from the dirty claws of the Undead, others were struck with bone-rattling force or even bit.


    Each scratch would slowly sap their strength, each wound take away a bit of their will, the pain clouding their minds and pushing their fears back to the forefront of their minds. But, even as they took their wounds, they could feel a pleasant sensation pushing into them from behind, akin to the gentle, soft rain of spring, or maybe a soothing song. The sensation came from Luna, who had called upon Hecate, combining the support from the Goddess with her own Life Magic to modulate the output and keep herself from harming anyone with her immature healing magic. What she was doing was neither true divine magic, nor was it normal arcane magic. It was a mixture of both, and all the more powerful for it. Where a wound would have lasted for weeks, it was gone in minutes, where fatigue would have built, it faded instead. All that, in exchange for Luna¡¯s rapidly diminishing reserves of Astral Power and the Divine Power granted to her by the Lady Hecate.


    Wave after wave of Undead fell upon the defenders, breaking against their stout defence. Some of the defenders were wounded beyond what Luna¡¯s aura could easily replenish and had to be replaced but together, they held. They stood, strong and defiant, repelling the attackers as they came.


    Until finally, the last Undead fell. But even with that, the battle wasn¡¯t over. Instead, it entered its final phase, as the two Shattered, their eyes ablaze with blue fire, entered the fray. With strange, shambling strides, the two monsters covered far more distance than they should be able to, one aiming for Silva, the other aiming for Lars. In turn, both defenders stepped forward, shielding their comrades behind them. Silva let out one more howl, bolstering the spirits of the defenders for this final stand, spending the power she had accumulated over days and weeks of worship.


    The four combatants met, snarling noises from Silva were countered with raspy growls from the Shattered. Silva and her foe clashed first, exchanging swipes with their claws and avoiding lunges that would have brought the battle to the ground. In comparison, Lars and his foe simply traded blows, the rocky shell around Lars absorbing the damage and even restructuring with asphalt and stone from the ground below when needed. Against most foes, the open parts of his armour would have spelled doom but against a mindless Shattered, what armour he had was sufficient.


    Right after those first clashes, the rest of the defenders cautiously added their own attacks, the ranged attackers moving in an attempt to get clear lines of fire, so they wouldn¡¯t, or couldn¡¯t, hit their allies if they missed, the other melees trying to provide openings for those who could truly hurt these monsters.


    The one fighting Lars was the first to fall, crumbling under repeated blows and with multiple arrows sticking from its body, falling just as Lars¡¯ armour crumbled from his body, his Astral Power depleted. That victory opened up the field, allowing everyone to focus on that last Shattered, pushing the creature to its maximum until it, too, was felled, right as it lunged one more time to sink its teeth into Silva. The blow, unlikely as it might be, came from Sian, her simple staff cracking from the force, only for her to break it and jam the splintered end into the Shattered, sending it to its final rest.


    The battle was over.

 Chapter 908

    Watching the patrol spot the incoming Undead and start to panic was strangely disconcerting. I had set this in motion, knowing full well that they would get into trouble and likely panic but watching it happen didn¡¯t feel right. A part of me wanted to immediately jump in and help, while another part wanted to wait to let them grow on their own while ensuring their growth was reasonably safe. Not completely, there would be wounds that Luna or I could cure, but they would experience battle and hopefully, it would make them realise that their current behaviour couldn¡¯t continue. With a little luck, the people I considered to be capable of taking charge would do just that and I¡¯d be able to manoeuvre things in such a way that they would be seen as heroes. People thinking that you saved their lives and the lives of their children was usually a good foundation for trust and leadership, so it would give Sian, Lars and Sonja something to build their platform.


    ¡°What¡¯s the plan, Mother?¡± Lia asked, remaining next to me so my magic would keep her just as concealed as I was. If we didn¡¯t attack, nobody would notice us, not even Silva unless we made deliberate noise.


    ¡°We remain hidden,¡± I replied, while the people below had retreated to the apartments, likely to ready the defenders. ¡°If necessary, I¡¯d like you to intervene, but the people here need to stand on their own. I¡¯ve got no doubt that Silva and Luna will help but neither of them is terribly offensively minded, they can support, they can protect, but they won¡¯t simply make the enemies disappear with the wave of their hand.¡±


    ¡°As you say,¡± she nodded, accepting my reasoning and settled in next to me, watching the slow approach of the Undead. The defenders had some time, but not a lot of it, especially if they wanted to fight with the Undead in a chokepoint, preventing them from using their biggest advantage, that of numbers, to their advantage.


    Just as I had expected, the people didn¡¯t dawdle. The speed at which they had gathered, and just how many of them were taking the field, was quite surprising. I would have thought that the locals would dither, that some would suggest running or something like that, but it didn¡¯t look like that was what was happening here. Instead, the entire community, other than children younger than Luna and likely some sort of minder, were moving towards the approaching Undead.


    Looking closely, I could see a faint sheen of divine magic around all of them, some sort of buff and unless Lady Hecate had chosen another cleric quite recently, it had been cast by Luna. I couldn¡¯t read the effects, not without a better and somewhat invasive look, but given that the entire group was marching and working together, I had a feeling it was something supporting that.


    I continued to watch, as the locals prepared, with Luna acting yet again, using a few of the seeds she carried around to summon a thick and thorny hedge to slow the Undead down. Intelligent foes would simply avoid the obstacle, but if Undead were one thing, it was persistent. To make matters worse, the Shattered commanding this whole thing was acting according to my program and that had nothing about evading traps. Just to push the attack until the morning came, at which point the programming would and the thing would likely start hunting for me. It wouldn¡¯t succeed, of that I was confident, but the sheer amount of commands I had stuffed into its skull made it hate me. It just couldn¡¯t act on that emotion, it could only stew until the programming ended, or the thing died. At least that was what I had concluded after quite a few tests, but given that the Shattered I had tested this on all tried to kill me, I only had sparse observations.


    Nodding along, I watched as Sonja took aim and confidently launched her first arrow into the approaching Undead, she had come a long way. Though, maybe I should add some extra training in tactics. Sure, she could shoot down the initial wave of basic Undead like nobody¡¯s business but she wouldn¡¯t be able to last. Once the serious enemies came, she¡¯d be quite tired, with both her stamina and Astral Power low to the point that she couldn¡¯t continue fighting. That was far from ideal, her arrow could quite literally make the difference against the Shattered. Well, unless Silva decided to simply take that thing down, maybe with some of her divine abilities. Those should be easily strong enough and she was actively using them, as I could observe down below as she let out a growl that made all the humans stand a little straighter, giving them some extra confidence. Not a terribly powerful effect but an excellent force multiplier in this situation.


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    Bolstered by divine magic, the defensive battle continued, projectiles keeping the Undead at bay, preventing them from even hitting the conjured obstacle, but it wouldn¡¯t last forever. Soon, the first Undead got to it, only to be slowed down and smashed with stones and similar short-ranged projectiles, allowing those with a longer range to take care of those still further away. By now, I was quite impressed, they were managing to leverage their strengths quite well, but, at least to me, the star of the show was my little Luna. Her obstacle kept the Undead at bay and I could see her radiate some Life Magic, keeping it strong despite the Undead¡¯s best attempts to push through.


    That became doubly true when the Undead started to actually get through, only for the locals to bash them while still restrained, using the obstacle to its full tactical advantage. It wasn¡¯t as easy as it had been while at a distance, the Undead were perfectly happy to take a destructive hit if it meant they could harm one of the defenders. Again, Luna and her aura demonstrated their worth, the healing was quite impressive, far beyond what I had thought her capable of.


    It was here that I started to observe carefully and even intervene when needed. Not openly, merely with simple, invisible blasts of Mind Magic, nothing that would be noticed. But if an Undead was stunned for just a second, right before it could get a deadly strike in, the deadly strike would be averted, or at least changed into something that wouldn¡¯t do more than injure. I didn¡¯t want to openly intervene, but I also didn¡¯t want anyone to suffer a wound that neither Luna nor I could cure. It was a delicate balance, and I realised that balancing those scales was becoming even harder when the obstacle Luna had conjured came crashing down. Too many Undead bodies had died within, adding their weight and ultimately bringing it down.


    Watching Silva step up on one side of the road, with Sian supporting her was quite impressive, though I had a feeling Silva was pacing herself. I was quite confident that my companion could have torn through them a lot faster, but kept holding back. Maybe to make sure she remained close to Luna, I wasn¡¯t sure but it played well into my plan.


    The other defender was Lars, coated in his rocky armour he was quite useful against the mindless Undead. They didn¡¯t try to strike at open areas, they were happily battering their hands and claws against the unforgiving stone of his arms, only to get crushed by his brutal counterstrikes. It was an incredibly simple tactic, but one that worked perfectly against these kinds of enemies.


    The two of them were anchoring the line of defence, while the rest of the locals were plugging the gaps. Occasionally, I had to help out, either by adding Mind Magic to keep an attack from causing serious damage or by using a nicely invisible combination of Mind and Death Magic to strike down individual Undead that would have broken through otherwise. Luckily, I doubted anyone could actually keep an eye out for every combatant, so my contribution remained undetected. Maybe Silva, but she seemed more focused on the enemies ahead than those that bypassed her.


    Finally, the last Undead fell and the Shattered took the field. A part of me wondered what had gone wrong with the programming, I had only intended for a single Shattered to be present but there were two. Maybe the second one had simply followed along, I wasn¡¯t sure and it didn¡¯t really matter. They were in the endgame, Silva looked fresh enough to take down one and if the defenders couldn¡¯t cope, Lia could take the other.


    But no, the defenders managed to rally for that last battle, mostly thanks to Silva¡¯s divine magic, though I also added my own, still carefully hidden, effort to the fight. The end result was exactly what I had been aiming for, Lars took down one Shattered, while Sonja took the other, likely cementing their positions of influence. Hopefully, they would see this attack and realise the danger their community was in. They needed to shore up and start to seriously prepare for the future, or they wouldn¡¯t have one. But for now, they had won and looked incredibly relieved and proud. As they should.

 Chapter 909

    After the battle, I pointedly waited a few more hours, so I returned at just the same time as usual. There wasn¡¯t any real reaction to my return, everyone was far too focused on the joy of having survived battle or they had already crashed and gone to sleep and thus unable to react either. Granted, they also hadn¡¯t posted guards but after the fight, they might simply have been unable to. Without reserves, things could get quite hairy.


    Something to discuss with them at a later time, for now, I just checked in on Luna, making sure that she was alright and her sleep wasn¡¯t disturbed before I went to bed myself. Playing overwatch for their battle had been fairly exhausting in its own right, especially when combining it with the need to conceal myself from even Silva¡¯s senses. I wasn¡¯t sure if that had worked, she had given me a strange look when I checked on Luna, but she had yet to comment on my behaviour.


    Moments after falling asleep, I found myself in a very different place, one I recognised. It was the endless grey expanse Lady Hecate used to communicate with me and the sudden, quite forceful, shift made my gut clench with anxiety. It wasn¡¯t every day that a deity insisted on talking to you and somehow, I had a feeling it wasn¡¯t to offer me kudos for my actions.


    Nothing happened the moment I arrived, nor soon after. Instead, I was left there, unattended and uninformed of my circumstances, stewing in uncertainty. I had no idea why I was here, nor any information about what I was supposed to do, see or feel. Nothing but my own thoughts and considerations to go by and in this case, I decided to consider my recent actions once again.


    For once, I decided to try looking at my actions and intentions from an outside perspective. What had I done recently and for what reasons? The big one, the obvious one, was that I had caused an attack on the place I was staying at.


    The moment those words went through my mind, another conversation bubbled up from deep within my memories, a conversation with Adra about Guest rights and their importance. If you had eaten somebody¡¯s food, if they had given you shelter under their roof, you did not harm them. On Mundus, that had been an almost culturally universal tradition, rooted deeply into the natives of the place, to the point that groups usually completely hostile to one another would ignore those grudges and get on with it. Or rather, they would ignore the presence of those they had a grudge with and stay peaceful.


    If you broke the peace of the hearth, you could see yourself banished from all accommodations and while my intentions had been beneficial for the locals, wasn¡¯t that what I had done here? Breaking the peace of their home, even if it was done in an effort to keep them from losing that home to the winter?


    ¡°I see you have realised the problem?¡± a hoarse voice asked from behind me, not the usually tritonal voice of Hecate but a different one, unknown to me. Turning around, I found myself confronted by a slightly unusual sight. It was an elderly woman, radiating age and gravitas, but the unusual part was that I recognised Her. She had the same face as Hecate¡¯s aspect of the Crone, at least if that aspect wasn¡¯t shaped into the image of the Grandmother. Normally, there¡¯d be two more faces on Her, the aspect of the Mother and the aspect of the Maiden but both were missing.


    ¡°I believe so,¡± I nodded, not quite sure what to do. Depending on how deeply the idea of the Guest right was woven into the Astral River, or if it was carried by the deities I had experienced on Mundus, I could be in fairly deep trouble. it was difficult enough to interact with people thanks to me being, well, me, and all the problematic social traits that came with being me and Morgana¡¯s Legacy but if another was added onto that, especially one that sounded fairly powerful? I might be back to the point where I couldn¡¯t enter civilisation at all without serious aural concealment going on. Even now, I likely would have to start concealing myself around people sensitive to divine disapproval thanks to the divine Curse I was under and the Titanic Ambition Trait. Maybe even the Dragon-Touched one, I wasn¡¯t sure how that would register. Likely similar to the Titanic one, dragons were generally not seen as allies of the divine unless they were subjugated.


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    ¡°And what is to be done about it?¡± the voice asked and I had no idea how to answer. From a certain point of view, I had acted horribly. On the other hand, my intentions had been good and my plans were made in such a manner as to reduce suffering as much as possible.


    ¡°I do not know,¡± I admitted, ¡°It depends on who judges my actions and my intentions, especially whether the ultimate outcome can be determined. It is my belief that the community housing us would not have survived the winter. It is on that belief that I have acted and while there are different ways one could have used to achieve the result I hope to have achieved, those ways are closed to me, simply because I lack the ability to walk those paths,¡± I explained, almost certain that the figure before me already knew all that but needed me to state my thoughts, maybe only to myself.


    ¡°Judgement can be a difficult thing,¡± another voice, this one just as familiarly unfamiliar as the first, interceded and when I looked into the direction the voice was coming from, I could see the face of Hecate¡¯s Mother aspect there, looking at me with a mixture of compassion and pride. ¡°Your intentions were honourable and sometimes, the ends justify the means. But was this one of those cases?¡±


    ¡°Especially given that there were other options for her. She could have taken over the community, even with her social troubles. She could have planned to hang around, to help them cultivate fields and easily bring them through the winter while making sure that they were safe and sound. But she chose a different path, one that minimised the time she¡¯d have to invest,¡± the Crone¡¯s voice judged, making me wince just a little.


    ¡°But why would she? They are not her responsibility, they are not her people. Not even her race, at this point. And yet, she decided to help them, only the means she chose were a little¡­ problematic?¡± a third voice, this one almost an expected one, piped up as the Maiden gave her own opinion, though, from the way her voice rose at the end, she wasn¡¯t quite sure what to think about this situation. Granted, neither was I, but I wasn¡¯t about to question the deity in her three aspects standing around me.


    ¡°Maybe a small act of penance would be appropriate,¡± a fourth, and at least to me completely unexpected, voice called out, making me turn yet again as it had come from behind me. Now, I was right in the middle of four figures and from the sensation I got, all four were some sort of divine figures or aspects. The fourth one, the unknown one, was most similar to the Aspect of the Mother, only very voluptuous, giving the impression of fertility, home but also a burning passion to defend that home.


    ¡°It would be appropriate. She is only spared the status of a homewrecker by your grace, so if you want her to perform some task, I don¡¯t think she would reject your suggestion,¡± the Crone suggested, sounding almost amused by it all. I wasn¡¯t sure I liked the idea but I had a feeling I had little choice here.


    ¡°It¡¯s not some huge task anyway and knowing You, you¡¯d have given her daughter a similar task anyway. So why not combine the two, have her serve a penance while helping her daughter before they can carry on with their journey?¡± the fourth figure who I still didn¡¯t know the name of suggested and somehow, I had the feeling that it wasn¡¯t really a suggestion. I would do whatever she told me, or else, and I had no desire to find out what ¡®or else¡¯ meant in this context.


    ¡°And what is that task you have in mind?¡± I asked, bending to the knowledge that these figures around me were beyond me. And, maybe, accepting that my actions, while well-intentioned, hadn¡¯t been the best for the people involved. Maybe I should have tried finding another way, or even just shown them that such a way existed. Or, alternatively, I might have been better of to let them choose their own path, without forcing my conclusions on them, humans were nothing if not inventive under pressure.


    ¡°Your daughter will be tasked with setting up a shrine to us, a library just as she did in the Tree¡¯s burrow,¡± now, all three aspects of Hecate spoke in one voice, the strange tritonal quality coming from all three aspects at the same time.


    ¡°And you will help her, while also helping my clerics set up a shrine to me,¡± the fourth figure added and now, I knew who she was. Hestia, Goddess of the Hearthfire and a few more things, most likely the one overseeing guest rights. Also, the patron of the clerics in the small community I had been visiting.


    There was nothing I could do but nod and accept the task assigned to me. Well, there were, but the things I might be able to do would come at a high price. Luckily, there were worse things to do than help my daughter.

 Chapter 910

    Waking up was not a fun experience. After the declaration of Hestia, Lady Hecate kept me in Her realm for an undefined amount of time, it had felt like days, talking to me. Most of the talks were fascinating, debating possible uses of Mind Magic with a strangely mixed focus on possibility and ethics. Looking back, it was fairly obvious that She wanted me to consider if something was right, not just if something was possible. The ethics of the question became fairly murky, debating who had a right to a Shattered¡¯s body, using them as an example, and what steps ought to be taken. The purely mechanical aspects were incredibly fascinating, especially once I started to consider larger, longer-lasting applications of the untiring labour of Shattered and Undead, but the rest was a mess.


    How was I supposed to know how somebody would feel if they had to discover that their mother, lover or similarly close relation was gone and their body used as an automaton for manual labour? When trying to imagine my reaction if it was my mother, I was strangely ambivalent. She had died years ago and while I remembered discomfort and a strange, pressing sensation on my chest and head, I couldn¡¯t really place those sensations. Similarly, would I be joyful that my mother, or at least something of her, remained or would that strange discomfort return?


    It was a lot easier when I tried to imagine the same situation with Luna or Sigmir. Just imagining Sigmir¡¯s body being used made me contemplate murder and the idea of my little Luna being Shattered and controlled was not pleasant either. Amusingly, imagining Lia in that sort of situation was a lot less impactful, possibly because she was Shattered but her mind was her own, so part of the process didn¡¯t really apply. But what would I feel like if somebody were to control my mind or the minds of my companions? Again, the idea was not a pleasant one.


    From the discussion about ethics and their place in magical education, Lady Hecate turned the discussion, or rather the lesson, to interpersonal relations. How to talk to, with and about people, how to guide them and how or when to teach them. That part took even longer and by the end, I had a serious headache, why did people have to be so incredibly complicated? Couldn¡¯t they simply act rationally and act as needed? A small voice, somewhere in the back of my mind, reminded me that ¡®rational¡¯ often meant different things to different people and that what was needed was highly dependent on personal priorities and agendas, meaning there were no objective answers.


    The world would be so much easier if that was the case, something that could be reduced to numbers and an answer deduced. The system made the reduction to numbers easier than it had ever been, with people having distinct levels and attributes, giving them inherent objective values and allowing priorities to be adjusted. But even those inherent objective values were quite complicated, especially because the worth of a person would have to take into account their potential. Luna, for example, was objectively more valuable than most people at her level, thanks to her connection to Lady Hecate. Yet, despite knowing that, I was uncomfortable with the consideration and somehow, I could almost feel Lady Hecate¡¯s grin in the back of my mind when I considered that. Obviously, I wasn¡¯t thinking rationally about this, or rather, there was an inherent value I placed on my relationship with Luna. Something I also did to my relationship with the companions I had travelled with on Mundus, the Grandmother and, most important of all, Sigmir. The value of those relationships was apparently something I couldn¡¯t quantify, I hadn¡¯t even put that idea into my mind, it was a strange realisation and one that made me feel all fuzzy as if I was wrapped in a comfortable sweater or something like that. It felt almost as good as Sigmir¡¯s hugs but as good as it felt, it only made me yearn for my love.


    Maybe it was that yearning that made waking up so incredibly unpleasant. Having to face the world, knowing that my love wasn¡¯t in it, that I had yet to make any real strides towards getting her into this world. Sure, I had gained some power but it was only a smidgen, even the Grandmother hadn¡¯t been able, or maybe willing, to resurrect Callisto¡¯s partner and she was more powerful than I had been at my best. Likely not only more powerful in level but also more powerful in understanding, in the ability to wield her magic and make the world obey her whim. I still had a long way to go until I reached that level and had a chance to bring Sigmir back. For now, I could only yearn for my love, think of her and maybe, if Lady Hecate didn¡¯t teach me, dream of her.


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    Looking back, I realised that the outcome of my previous plan was just about the best I could have hoped for. The punishment I was given by Hestia, who could have put a much higher price on things if I understood the custom of guest rights correctly, was a mere slap on my wrist, a little extra to something I¡¯d have done anyway. It was likely a lesson given out of grace and one I should consider paying forward. A lesson about the importance of guest rights, of knowing that you can trust those you let into your home, it was something I should put into the Shrines to Hecate I was certain Luna would continue to set up. Maybe even add something to them, some formulaic invitation to enter without malice and leave without hindrance, a greeting I had read in some novel. It might be possible to add some sort of blessing or curse to that greeting, to give guest rights some teeth, though I wasn¡¯t certain it would be wise to put the teeth into an automatic system. Better to teach people that they could appeal to the Gods if the guest right was broken so the Gods could dole out punishment. This, in turn, opened up the possibility for people to simply kill anyone who knew about breaking the guest right, thus preventing punishment from being levied. There didn¡¯t seem to be a simple answer, as was often the case.


    Luckily, it was not on me to find the right answer to this problem, that was on the Gods interested in upholding the guest right and their actual followers. I would happily help them, it sounded like a generally good idea that people would be punished if they attacked those hosting them or lured people in under false pretences to harm them. Not that I was about to completely rely on something like that but it was a comforting idea. An ideal, even if I would continue to trust but verify because even those who are paranoid have enemies. Maybe especially those who are paranoid, at least if their paranoia is born from exposure to danger.


    A soft growl pulled me from my contemplations and I was faced with Silva and a rather displeased expression on her face. I didn¡¯t have to think hard about its meaning, she either had smelled Lia and me the previous night or Lady Hecate had informed her of the events in a dream, something similar to what I had undergone. Either way, she was unhappy with me and I didn¡¯t have to think hard about the reasons for her unhappiness.


    ¡°I should have told you,¡± I admitted, my voice nary a whisper. Nobody but Silva would be able to hear and she seemed to be content to listen to me. ¡°Having you with Luna was the best option, I needed my munchkin protected. But I was worried that Luna would know if I told you and I wanted to keep her out of this.¡±


    The look with which Silva judged me was not a kind one but there was understanding in those large, brown eyes. She wasn¡¯t angry, but maybe disappointed? I wasn¡¯t sure but I knew we would be okay when she pushed her head into my stomach like an overgrown cat and got some cuddles. Maybe Lady Hecate had told her that She had already scolded me enough, or maybe Silva simply accepted that I had messed up and was willing to move on from it.


    When she let out a quiet huff, I realised that there was someone else I had to talk to. My munchkin, who I had left alone in a possibly dangerous situation. Or at least a dangerous situation according to her perception, which could easily damage her trust in me. I would have to talk with her, explain to her what I had done and assure her that I wouldn¡¯t let her be in danger. But could I really claim that? Didn¡¯t I repeatedly leave her alone during the last two weeks while I was working on my Mind Magic, open to attack if there had been an attack like the one I caused?


    More amends that needed to be made.

 Chapter 911

    Listening to Luna proudly tell me about her exploits during the night felt like a knife, stabbing deeply into my gut. How could I tell her that I had watched the whole thing and had done nothing, how could I tell her that I had set it all up in the first place? Wouldn¡¯t that shatter her pride, pride she richly deserved in my eyes, as she had been instrumental in turning back the attack? But I had to tell her, partially because it was the right thing to do, partially because I had a feeling that Lady Hecate would tell her if I did not. That would be even worse, it was bad that I had to but being told about it from another source? No, I couldn¡¯t do that to my munchkin.


    Sadly, there was no emergency service I could call to handle unwelcome, emotional situations, no matter how much I wished there was. Simply some number to call and have them, well, handle the whole emotional ordeal, maybe with an extra service to provide therapy afterwards. All the therapy, because I had a feeling it would help a great many people. Alas, there was no such service, so I just had to push on regardless, clumsily and without knowing what lay ahead.


    Knowing that the conversation ahead had to be private, I remained fairly quiet during breakfast, trying to encourage and praise my munchkin for her actions during the battle as much as possible, while attempting to give some guidance regarding future battles. It wouldn¡¯t do for her to become careless out of arrogance, even if she had done great things during the night. Here, some of the books I had acquired about child rearing came in useful, at least those that agreed with my intent. There seemed to be childrearing books advising just about everything one could imagine and a few things that I couldn¡¯t have before reading them, all couched in flowery language and nice imagery. It would be a lot easier if the books didn¡¯t routinely disagree with at least one other book, making it incredibly difficult to get to the right answer. But then, there likely wasn¡¯t one, there were only answers that worked for a particular child, or set of children, and from those people had extrapolated. Only, limited datasets meant that extrapolation was fraught with errors, just as the wedding cake joke suggested.


    Shaking my mind out of my rambling, I focused on the present and on subtly guiding Luna to ask me if she could join me on my nightly excursion. The last few nights I had gently rejected her, mostly because I had extensively used Wind Magic to move about the place, but today I happily invited her along. It would give us all the privacy I wanted and needed for the dreaded conversation ahead.


    ¡°So, sweetie, I¡¯ll have to explain something to you,¡± I began, once we were in one of the older parks of the area. The park used to be quite nice from what I could tell but multiple months of Astral Power influx without any maintenance had destroyed the organisation and turned it into something akin to a tiny jungle. Still, there were a few benches around, even if the vast majority had fallen apart.


    Luna looked a little uneasy at my words, making me wonder what difficulties her mind conjured up, so I quickly continued, ¡°It¡¯s nothing bad, certainly not anything bad that you¡¯ve done or been involved in. If anything, it¡¯s the opposite, it¡¯s something I have done that some people would consider bad.¡±


    When she relaxed a little and nodded, I gave her a quick hug and spoke again.


    ¡°You have heard me talk to the locals, about the need to organise, to plan things out and focus on certain necessary areas, especially when it comes to food, right? Food, defense, supplies, all those key aspects, you¡¯ve heard me talk about, remember?¡± I prodded, getting another nod.


    ¡°They didn¡¯t listen, or rather, they listened but didn¡¯t act on things. Maybe they didn¡¯t believe me, maybe they convinced themself that they know better than me, or maybe they simply didn¡¯t care or some other reason, I do not know and honestly, I do not care for their reasons, their excuses,¡± I grimly shook my head, still annoyed at the behaviour I had been faced with.


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    ¡°Maybe they do know better?¡± Luna suggested, before ducking her head with a quickly hidden grin when I lightly glared at her.


    ¡°You can count, just like I can. You have a fair idea of how much an adult needs to eat, we¡¯ve gone over that before and estimated how much you need, especially while you are growing like a weed. Either of us could have counted what food they had stocked, what crops they had in the ground and what they could have grown in time and believe me, I¡¯ve done it to the best of my ability. They wouldn¡¯t have lasted through March, and that is with my most generous estimations,¡± I chided her, before shaking my head again, this time to push away the interruption by my mischievous munchkin.


    ¡°Anyway, I decided that the lack of leadership could not continue, not if the community here wants to have any chance to live through the year. So, I used the possibly oldest trick in the book, one that likely existed before the book was ever written, to give them a ¡®hero¡¯, somebody to make their leader,¡± I explained, noticing how Luna¡¯s eyes widened at the explanation.


    ¡°The Shattered, the Undead, last night, that was all you?¡± she asked, sounding a little bit disturbed at the realisation. Or maybe she simply didn¡¯t know how I had done what I did, I wasn¡¯t certain. Instead of immediately trying to continue talking, I first pulled her into a hug, trying to project as much care and comfort as I could, hoping to calm her down and get her into a better mental space. It took a minute or five, but by the end of it, she looked a lot more comfortable than before and I continued speaking.


    ¡°Indeed, the people needed an enemy, something one of them could defeat so they would be seen as a hero. I remained nearby, making sure that no permanent physical damage was inflicted on anyone, especially you. If things had looked like they were about to go south, Lia and I could, and would, have intervened, ending the battle. But, thanks to your impressive work and Silva¡¯s assistance, they got through it just fine, maybe a little shaken. As intended.¡±


    By the time I was done with my explanation, Luna was looking conflicted again, a frown deeply etched on her face.


    ¡°Wasn¡¯t there a better way? I don¡¯t know, it feels wrong to manipulate them like this, to have enemies attack them, simply to make people do what you want?¡± she asked, sounding uncomfortable with the idea. Now, after the long talk with Hecate, I had to agree with my munchkin. There might have been better ways to accomplish what I wanted and if not, it might have been better to walk away, to leave the people to decide their own fate. I was not, and hopefully never would be, a God. I had titanic ambitions, not divine ambitions, even if there was that silly title about the Pale Lady.


    ¡°There was but you know about my people problems. Both when it comes to understanding them, relating to them and convincing them with gentle methods. It is something the Lady Hecate has counselled me during the night because She, just like you, feels that there are better ways I could have gone about the issue,¡± I admitted, shrugging a little because I knew I wasn¡¯t good with people, Luna knew it, Hel, the locals likely had picked up on my discomfort.


    ¡°So, what do we do now?¡± she asked, obviously uncertain about the future.


    ¡°Well, I believe Lady Hecate has given you a quest, something along the lines of making a Shrine for her, filling it with a couple of books, or rather stone tablets, and then, we continue on our way. We keep quiet about my involvement with the attack last night, I will try to push Sian into a leadership role because I doubt that Lars or Sonja are acceptable to the people here, due to their age. People aren¡¯t used to children and teenagers acting with authority because before the change authority came with age, education or due to public delegation. Or due to money, but that¡¯s an entirely different beast. I¡¯ve got a feeling that at some point in the near future, personal power will take that spot. But we will see,¡± I shrugged again, hoping that it wouldn¡¯t get too extreme. A world where only the biggest fist mattered didn¡¯t sound like a nice place, even if I might end up being the one with the biggest fist. With authority came responsibility, something I had no desire for.

 Chapter 912

    My conversation with Luna continued for quite a while after the initial part about my previous actions. Mostly, I explained to her the importance of guest rights and why the Gods themself had decided to step into the matter before we ventured further afield. Still, magic remained the centre of our talks, as it was something that fascinated both of us, even if our viewpoints were somewhat different.


    To me, magic was simply a tool and fascination, something always around us that I could wield as I wished. Her idea of magic was something less immediate, more in line with a gift from Lady Hecate and tightly bound to her connection with her Goddess. It made for interesting discussions and showed me that Lady Hecate was quite involved with her young Cleric, sending dreams to teach and guide her with quite a high frequency. At least from what I could tell when comparing her abilities and knowledge to that of other clerics. Not only were her skills towering above them as they physically towered above her but her magical insights were advanced enough that I could only relate to them thanks to my reading on Mundus. If a local arcane caster were confronted with her knowledge, they¡¯d only be able to nod in amazement and praise Hecate. This might just be the point of the exercise, allowing her young, prodigious disciple to awe the aspiring arcanists and make them worship Hecate. Not a bad plan and one I could see succeed easily if we set up the shrine Hecate had talked about.


    And there was no question that we would do so. Not only did Luna already have the quest, she had confirmed that earlier, but I would never chance to take yet another detrimental trait, not for something this simple. So, the two deities would get their shrines and I had to decide what books to place into the shrine to Hecate. Because if we would set up those shrines, I would do things right and place something suitable in the library.


    The library under the tree was fairly simple, books about the local, incredibly strange, environment, what plants to find, the spatial weirdness and a part about a necessary magical education. Nothing beyond novice level, but it would teach people learning in that library the basics, allow them to start the Arcane Path if they hadn¡¯t chosen a path, and so on. I doubted many could learn there to take that path, but the option was there.


    Maybe that was the right answer there already. Books to guide people on the path of Magic, the Arcane Path, my path. The library under the tree was, obviously, in the middle of a fairly dangerous forest. That might change in time, if the forest was at least partially cleared and a village or something set up around the library, I could see people learn there.The blessed sanctuary around the tree would be useful as a refuge for people living there, so I could easily see small groups set up and grow into something larger. It would take years, maybe decades, but that small sanctuary could become something more.


    The need to become something more was absent here. Here, we already had a community living nearby, a group in dire need of education and one that would hopefully grow and flourish. A sanctuary, especially if I made the effort to create a large space accessed through the sanctuary, would give them shelter if there ever was another attack. Looking back, that might be yet another answer for the people here, at least when it comes to protection from attacks. It wouldn¡¯t solve their food shortage, but maybe the blessing of Hestia could put in some work on that front, She had agriculture in Her portfolio after all.


    But it was a lazy answer. Did I want to be part of a culture that placed responsibility for personal and societal safety on the Gods or did I want to promote personal responsibility, even if it might be a harsh path? For me, the answer was obvious but was I the right person to make that decision for others? Or would it be better to simply create a small shrine and add a litany of books that gave people the tools to defend themself, especially after I had already given the previous push?


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    Thinking about it, that might be the best of both worlds. A small sanctuary, something that could protect the most vulnerable, in addition to lengthy texts about magic, with a particular focus on sorcery and the development of battle magic. It would give those who wanted it the tools to defend themself and their allies, while also allowing their children to be secure while they were out, hunting Undead or whatever else might crop up and needed killing.


    With a firm nod to myself, I suggested this course of action to Luna and she happily agreed. She also added that I should make sure to keep any mention of Mind Magic to the type that I used when placing people in the Astral River while teaching them, with no mention of the control type I had used against that Shattered, causing the attack. While it wasn¡¯t likely that people would make the connection, keeping the idea out of it was good in general as that particular type of magic was about the most abusable I could imagine.


    It had a few benevolent applications but they were far and few between. At best, it could be used in combat to produce temporary allies, though I wasn¡¯t sure whether it would work on sapient targets as easily as it did on the Shattered. The Undead, for example, were different when it came to that spell, the instructions needed to be even more precise or things got strange. Shattered knew some basic concepts, Undead lacked most of those, too. They might be able to walk a few steps, or strike somebody but even something as simple as a command to fight wouldn¡¯t work. Maybe I¡¯d get a single strike, but nothing more, making me wonder just how that particular magical application worked. More testing would be required, though most tests on something that wasn¡¯t a Shattered or Scorched. I¡¯d either need more complex targets, something truly alive and thinking, though maybe not something as mentally complex as a human, or I¡¯d have to change my approach from the ground up and work on Undead.


    Either way, it would be a massive undertaking and I doubted I¡¯d put in the effort when it came to Undead but finding the limits in regards to intelligent beings would be a worthwhile pursuit. Not one that needed to be completed just yet, I had better things to do with my time, but at some point.


    Better things, like starting work on the sanctuary. The first step was obvious, the ancient question of location, location, location. Close to the apartment building that served the locals as shelter or further away? Distance would give them space to expand, maybe even push them to move their primary shelter and set up shop near the shrine, though it would also depend on the effects of Hestia¡¯s shrine. If that manifested as a blessing of fertility or something along those lines, something that gave their fields the yield to feed their people. In that case, setting it away from town would be best, away from the concrete and decaying buildings. Sure, they could be cleared away but it would take a lot of time and effort the people here just couldn¡¯t spare.


    The exact shape of the sanctuary was another question. Underground, similar to the one beneath the tree, might be easiest, but I wasn¡¯t sure it felt right. Creating the sanctuary beneath the tree was due to the tree already being there and loosely connected to Hecate. Here, there was no tree, nor any previous connection to Hecate, unless we decided to seek out a park and hope to find something suitable. Or go into the fields, searching for a connection to Hestia that would also serve as an anchor to Hecate, as difficult as that might be,


    Maybe Luna and I should pray to Hecate, and ask for Her advice, as the shrine would dedicated to Her. Or we could walk together, simply stroll through the area and hope for some inspiration to strike. It felt so silly and yet, it might be the right answer to this question. Simply find the place and see what shape would fit best.


    So many details, and yet nearly no information that we could actually use to plan. I didn¡¯t like that part of this process, but I was determined to make the best of it. At some point, I wanted to look back at these shrines and feel pride, not annoyance and embarrassment at what I had wrought, I wanted them to be more than the crayon painting of a child their mother placed on the fridge. Something inspiring that would guide people on the Arcane Path.


    At a crossroads in their lives, I wanted the shrine to be the guidepost to send them down the right path...


    Maybe that was a concept I could use, the Crossroads.

 Chapter 913

    Finding the right spot for the shrine turned out to be surprisingly simple. Luna and I wandered around the area for a bit, discussing what we both were looking for and contrasting it with what we knew about the two deities the shrine was supposed to serve. During that time, we decided that the shrine should be outside the previous town limits, the change demanded a new start of some sort, a move away from the ruins of civilisation and its decay. Otherwise, the blessing might become corrupted, the energies of decay still filling the town as it fell into ruin seeping into the newly created structure¡ªa stillborn shrine, so to speak, a place not suitable for a new beginning.


    No, until the town had completely fallen to ruin, it would not do to start something here. Well, unless someone was powerful enough to completely overpower the decaying energy of the entire town, neutralising it and turning it into something new. Or tore it all down, but it would be problematic as long as the process was ongoing and the energy lingered. One day, it could be reclaimed but that day was in the far future. Years, maybe decades, and that was without taking the hordes of Undead and Shattered into account.


    No, the shrine needed to be outside of town and once that decision was made, a quick look at the map made me facepalm at the obvious choice of location. Before the change, there had been an interstate exchange nearby, two massive bands of asphalt, concrete and steel stretching through the land for endless miles. Just a few hundred metres from town, barely far enough to prevent noise pollution, the two massive roads had crossed paths, a large bridge and a complex system of ramps allowing cars to change their path. Now, that bridge and the ramps had largely collapsed, forming a mountain of concrete, earth and rubble. In a way, it was a monument, a gravestone to our old civilisation, a memorial of days gone by.


    And what better way to step away from the past than by taking these ruins and making something new with them? They were small enough that I could completely convert them, overwhelming the lingering energy unleashed by their destruction. What remained were resources, an artificial mountain in which I could carve my shrine.


    It took effort. A lot of effort, the material was designed to last decades without issues and centuries with regular maintenance, so the few months since the change would normally have done nothing to it but the influx of Astral Power and the resulting changes reduced the durability to the point that things simply broke.


    Even cleaning up the broken pillars that used to hold up the bridge, to say nothing of the bridge itself, was a herculean task, requiring me to constantly use Earth Magic to move the rubble or to break up pieces that were too big for me to move. Nights were spent simply shifting tons of stone a few metres, giving me access to the wall I had assigned as the facade of the temple. A slanted grey, slightly mossy, wall, previously hidden under the bridge, it was far from the splendour the shrines and churches of old displayed but maybe that was for the best. I had no interest in wasting time to make things grand, even if a small part of me wondered just how much I could do.


    Remembering the temple I had created in my capsule made me want to repeat that feat, only now in reality. Take over some rocky monolith and set up a lair on top, a place only I could reach. It was possible, I¡¯d only need quite a bit of magic to make sure nobody else could fly up there. I was fairly certain that Wind Magic, or Wind Rune Mastery, had the tools for it, maybe by combining it with Earth Magic or its Runic Mastery. It would take a ton of effort but it was most certainly a ¡®someday¡¯ project.


    For now, I had to be content with the artificial mountain and the cave I was carving into it. That part of my work was somewhat similar to moving the rubble, only that I now needed to make sure I didn¡¯t take away too much or the wrong parts. With the alterations from the change, I couldn¡¯t assume that things would remain stable from the old engineering, I needed to constantly assess the load of the artificial mountain above and feel the stability of the stone around me.


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    At first, that was simplicity and I could work with little concern. If the worst happened, I could simply move backwards and watch as things crumbled before me, but soon, I wasn¡¯t simply carving away the surface layer, I was moving into the tunnel I was digging. Distance made it harder to control my magic, to say nothing assessing the stone and earth in the surrounding area. No, for that I needed to be within the tunnels I was digging and that meant if something collapsed, I¡¯d be in serious trouble. I might be able to shadow step away and escape but I had no idea how that would work out. So far, my shadow stepping had focused on moving across open space, not through solid material and I was a little leery of trying to do so. It might work, or I might get my body torn apart by some interaction I didn¡¯t know about. I¡¯d be a lot more confident if I had some simple way to test that part, but I hadn¡¯t figured out a good way for that. Maybe I would at some point, but for now, that remained as an emergency measure. For serious, do-or-die-emergencies, not something I hoped to experience any time soon.


    It was quite amusing where my mind drifted as I methodically carved away concrete and steel, sometimes transmuting parts of the rock above into sturdier stuff. Crystal and Earth Magic were quite good at that part but regardless of the suitability, it was a massive effort, one that wasn¡¯t helped by my lacking affinity. And just how lacking my affinity was, was driven home by the lack of skill points gained. In over a week of near-constant use of Earth Magic, with quite a few instances of Crystal Magic interspersed in the work, I only gained three points in Earth Magic and Earth Rune Mastery, bringing the skills to twenty-four and eighteen each. Crystal Magic was even worse off, gaining only a single point and reaching level sixteen, but I had a feeling it would go further as my tunnels went deeper. At that point, I couldn¡¯t just put in some small reinforcements of hardened stone, I¡¯d have to alter the Earth wholesale, turning it into stone and crystal. Not a simple task and not one I was looking forward to, it would take a massive effort, one that made what I had accomplished thus far seem trivial.


    Luckily, the work was mostly monotonous enough that I could let my mind focus on something else, letting a secondary part of my mind run it in something akin to auto-pilot. The only really important parts were the safety checks and those were only every few minutes or whenever I altered a stressed part of the wall. On those, I was incredibly cautious, checking every bit of information I could get my mind on, cautiously tugging and prodding everything to make sure I wasn¡¯t digging my own grave, literally.


    Otherwise, I let my mind drift, theorising magical effects or even pulling and prodding at my own traits, trying to sense where they influenced my body and what might be possible to be done about them. Not that I was about to push anything along those lines, while I¡¯d love to somehow get rid of my negative social traits, or even the Curse of the Sun, I didn¡¯t think it would be this easy. Especially the Curse, while it was the easiest to analyse as Curses were nominally under the auspices of Darkness Magic, I wasn¡¯t about to challenge the working of a deity, especially not if it was something applied by, through or with the system.


    I had a feeling that the Gods could influence the system but were ultimately bound by it, just like regular people. Only their restrictions were likely quite different, to say nothing of their ample experience of working with it. Or around it, I doubted that anyone who had the ability to become a God was inexperienced in using systems to their advantage, be it a social system, a magical one or the actual System that seemed to govern our new reality.


    Or maybe not govern but certainly record, analyse and assess. It was yet another thing I wanted to look into, as I was fairly confident that the System wasn¡¯t natural, not organically grown, which suggested intelligent design. And that required a designer, which opened up a whole host of questions and related headaches.


    Luckily, those were not something I had to deal with now, I could simply focus on carving out the next few cubic metres of earth and concrete. There were more than enough of those.

 Chapter 914

    It was fascinating, how two places with such huge differences could end up feeling so similar. Part of it was undoubtedly the blessing of Hecate Luna had called upon but a far larger part came from some innate quality of the space. Some time during the creation, as I had dug the few rooms of the shrine and the ventilation shafts into the artificial mountain, my actions had left a metaphysical mark on the space I created. It wasn¡¯t as chaotic as Wild Magic that came from overloading an area with Astral Power but it might be some tamed version of that effect. Tame Wild Magic, as contradictory as that sounded, might be the best description, though I made a mental note to come up with something better at some point.


    The biggest difference was that Wild Magic lacked purpose and direction, it was akin to a child with far too much energy, running around, screaming and breaking everything as it was bleeding off energy. The effect within the shrine was directed, imbued with the purpose I had felt during the creation of the space, seeking to stabilise the rooms I had dug and, to a lesser degree, keep the atmosphere inside comfortable. It was an effect I wanted to keep an eye on, especially if I could replicate it. I had a feeling that the shrine under the tree had a similar effect, though there it was focused on the tree itself, not the space beneath, formed as I had worked with Luna and the tree to create the space. Here, there was no tree to anchor an effect to, so it latched onto the space itself.


    Looking back, the ancient, imperial roads on Mundus might rely on a similar effect, allowing them to influence the world above by granting those travelling them enhanced endurance and speed. If I was right about that, it was truly fascinating as it would mean that the builders hadn¡¯t just created a continent-spanning network of self-maintaining roads, they had managed to warp parts of the lingering magic into something else, making the roads even better. I could see self-maintenance as something coming out of the purpose lingering within a creation after it was completed, even without having to add anything to it. The effect that regulated the climate within the shrine was one such, if on a far lower scale, but adding an additional effect, one completely unrelated to the creation? That sounded incredibly difficult, even beyond just having to work on the project with a fairly single-minded purpose. Having an entire corps of magical engineers all work like that? It started to stretch the realm of possibility but looking at the remaining evidence, it was possible. Or there was another method, one that I couldn¡¯t understand just yet, which I considered more likely. Or mind control, that could be a reason for the unified purpose. If everyone is mind-controlled, they all get along swimmingly.


    The other option I could imagine as the cause for such an effect was divine intervention, likely via a cleric. Similar to the blessing Luna had placed upon the shrine under the tree and was currently creating around the newly built shrine. I wasn¡¯t sure how it worked but I remembered the zone of sanctuary around the shrine, though the tree originally had an aura of tranquillity of some sort. Maybe the blessing had only built upon that, increasing and infusing it, I wasn¡¯t sure but I had decided to closely monitor Luna¡¯s progress here, to see if the lack of hat aura changed anything.


    Similarly, I was planning to keep an even closer eye on the clerics of Hestia I would invite soon, mostly to have them bless the shrine but also because I needed their presence to truly make the shrine of Hestia. When working on Hecate¡¯s shrine, I could faintly feel the blessing she had given me guide my imagination. It wasn¡¯t forceful guidance but inspiration, if I had a different image in mind, I was fairly certain I could have used it but given that I had no real idea what a suitable shrine would look like, I took the easy way out and used what the Lady gave me.


    But I couldn¡¯t do that for the Shrine of Hestia. I didn¡¯t have the connection, the blessing, of her and frankly, I didn¡¯t want it. She didn¡¯t offer anything I truly wanted, at least as far as I understood things. Power, sure, but just having another avenue to gain power didn¡¯t appeal to me, not if I had to pay for it in some metaphysical way. The power I got from Hecate, especially the indirect support I received from Her, made me put up with quite a bit and that was ignoring the simple fact that She was my munchkin¡¯s patron.


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    Their reaction to the statue in Hecate¡¯s shrine would be quite interesting. The statue, like the rest of the building, was inspired by Her but the image was a familiar one. The maiden was shaped like a slightly more mature version of Luna, teenaged and fairly recognisable, at least if you knew her or she was present. The crone was shaped like the Grandmother, the same mixture of agelessness and ancient presence while the mother was, again, shaped like me. Mostly, at least, there were some changes, somewhat wider hips and a larger chest but it was obvious that the face was mine, even without the elongated ears.


    While making it, I had wondered if I should push against the inspiration and change the image into a different one. And I had a lot of time to wonder, where the statue under the tree had been crafted from a single root, requiring a lot of support from Luna and even the tree itself, the statue here was made solely by me. Without a suitable root, I had used metal, the construction steel I had unearthed while digging the shrine and some I had gathered outside, and shaped it into a suitable form. Crystal Magic at its finest, it had taken days and given me a headache but it had also been a proof of concept. I could magically shape metal and the work had given me a whopping four points in Crystal Magic, pushing it to twenty, and a single point in Enchanting, bringing it to eleven. Not terribly impressive but given that I hadn¡¯t really enchanted anything beyond purely pushing power into a solid construct, I wasn¡¯t about to complain.


    The end product was certainly worth the effort I had invested. The previously dull, somewhat rusty steel had turned into a gleaming, almost glowing metal, unlike anything I had ever seen before. Its colour was faintly reminiscent of Luna¡¯s eyes or the endless plane Hecate used to commune with me, only a lot more polished. The most impressive part of it was that it almost shone with internal light, not bright but unmistakable in the darkness of the underground shrine. I had no idea how that worked, where the Astral Power to create the effect came from, but I chalked it up to some sort of divine shenanigans, or maybe the reason for the point I had gained in enchanting. Sadly, it wasn¡¯t enough to illuminate the room, so I would have to think of something, even if it was only adding a few additional ventilation shafts so torches could be used.


    Because the room needed light, quite a bit of it. The statue was only one part of its contents, the other, more important in my eyes, part was the library. Just like beneath the tree, there would be a library here, holding multiple stone tablets filled with knowledge. Creating them was simple, at least when comparing it to the effort of carving out multiple rooms from concrete and earth, but that didn¡¯t change that space on them was limited. I had to prioritise what I wanted to convey to those following after me, what I wanted them to know. What was most important to me, to Hecate and to them? It wouldn¡¯t do to add tablets that wouldn¡¯t get used because the information contained was useless, either because it was too basic or too complex. I had to hit the sweet spot to draw people in and engage them, to teach them without boring them and I had to do it without actually being present. A textbook, a magical primer, guiding people onto the Arcane Path and their subsequent journey.


    Luckily, I didn¡¯t need to bother with trying to make it impossible to remove the tablets. That part was for Hecate to deal with, otherwise, the tablets would most likely disappear from the temple with the first visiting group. Or even before then, when some of the locals decided that venturing into the shrine was too much work and that they wanted to read what I had written in the comfort of their homes. Maybe I should take a look at the security, once everything was done and we were about to leave. Luckily, that wouldn¡¯t take much longer.

 Chapter 915

    There were few words I could use to describe the way Sarah and Kyle went about claiming the shrine of Hestia for their god. Few of those I could use were words I actually wanted to use, mostly because a primary emotion within me while watching was envy. I was extremely doubtful that the two clerics knew what they were doing, or rather, what effect their performance caused. The two of them were basically just performing an interpretive song and dance and somehow turning the dance into high-level engineering. Hestia could use them to essentially do what she wanted and the clerics wouldn¡¯t know what was going on until their ritual had run its course and the effects became apparent.


    Curse a city, blight some crops, give someone a blessing or turn them into a slave, I could easily imagine any of those effects being channelled through such a ritual, what little I could detect of the magical working was open enough to let basically anything get shoved through from the other side.


    And yet, despite the incredible ignorance of those performing the ritual, the magical effects, again, what little i could detect of them, were staggeringly beautiful. Maybe I should have expected it, what I had seen from Hecate had been similarly impressive if in a different way, making me think that impressive magical acts were part and parcel of being a Goddess. Or maybe they simply had spent more than enough time on mortal relations to know what was expected and how to impress people. From what I could gather they had been at this longer than humanity had been wearing clothes, likely a lot longer. Mundus itself had multiple millennia of history involving these Gods, but how long they had existed before Mundus, I didn¡¯t know.


    And, really, it didn¡¯t matter, whether it was four thousand years or fifty thousand, the difference in experience between them and me would remain insurmountable for a while. Maybe I could catch up someday, but only if they were stagnating and not pushing their power even further, something I doubted. Thus, unless there was some sort of divine lifespan, I¡¯d just have to live with the fact that they had more experience and, unless there was some sort of cap, more power.


    My focus was drawn back to the ritual I was observing when the interpretive dance changed. From something that might be a mix between ballroom dancing and kindergartners playing around, it became something very¡­ different. It shifted in the horizontal, so to say, and while a part of me wanted to look away and have nothing to do with this, there was something fascinating about it. Sure, I had a feeling I¡¯d need to cleanse my eyes and, after sniffing the air for a moment, my nostrils later, but the magical interactions were something else.


    Using the magical sight I had inherited from Lenore, I could see a magical build-up, Life Magic coiling around the two clerics as it built and built, rising ever higher and radiating out from both of them. Without thinking about it, my tongue darted out to taste the air, getting both the pungent, and very much mundane, scent of sex but also a complex blend of magical signatures. Life was predominant but there was so much more, some parts were Mind Magic, some elemental, it was a powerful, primal mix that almost made me sway.


    Sway and wish that Sigmir was here.


    Maybe this part was the reason that they had asked Luna to remain in Hecate¡¯s shrine, though I would have been grateful for a warning in advance. I wasn¡¯t sure what to think or feel, other than longing for Sigmir. The act itself didn¡¯t intrigue me, if anything it looked weird and I wanted to get away but at the same time, the magic around them was too fascinating and I didn¡¯t want to look away.


    Thankfully, at least for me, it didn¡¯t last too long. Just about ten minutes after they had started, the magic around them reached a climax, surging towards Sarah¡¯s abdomen, concentrating there for a brief moment only to burst outwards once more, completely saturating the shrine. The power was changed, that much I could tell, but I couldn¡¯t quite nail down how. I could detect faint traces of divine magic, but I had a feeling that the faintess should be attributed to my lacking perception, not the strength of the effect.


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    ¡°Impressive effect,¡± I remarked, studying the power seeping into the walls of the structure. Interestingly, parts of the wall were reshaping themself, forming a mural of some sort. Not the same, impressive statue I had created for Hecate, but a powerful image of a female mother figure watching over her community, the people surrounded by fertile fields, and a few ewes and lambs, all sheltered in her embrace. It was quite the idyllic picture but one that I couldn¡¯t feel more but academic interest in. The vision itself wasn¡¯t one that spoke to me, far too boring and confining. No, I wanted something more, something I could feel a lot easier when in Hecate¡¯s temple.


    Some fairly amusing noises from Sarah and Kyle, both of whom looked a lot more flushed than the brief exertion accounted for, caught my attention. It looked like neither of them were willing to look at me or each other, which, given their tangled and naked states, meant they were staring at the wall, panting for breath.


    ¡°Do you mind?¡± Kyle asked me, sounding somewhat strange. It took me a moment to realise that he wanted some privacy to get back into his clothes, not that he had minded stripped and¡­ dancing in front of me. While I had no interest in watching him naked, or Sarah for that matter, I felt fairly amused by the situation, making me take a few extra moments to consider his desperate plea before I turned around, my mind focusing on different aspects of their working.


    ¡°So, did you consciously channel that much Life Magic to your womb or is that some sort of automatic effect?¡± I asked, once both of them were dressed.


    ¡°What do you mean?¡± Now it was Sarah¡¯s turn to ask, and just like Kyle earlier, she sounded so very panicked. Proof she didn¡¯t know, or understand, the effects of the ritual. If I understood things correctly, the two of them had basically taken the moment that would facilitate conception and spread the energy that could make a new human into the temple. Maybe the least offensive form of child sacrifice as it only took the potential of forming new life and nothing that could be considered an independent, living being.


    ¡°Well, the ritual you did, it channelled a lot of Life Magic and by the end, it all was concentrated here,¡± I poked her abdomen, noticing the colour fleeing her face. ¡°Was that on purpose, a part of the ritual or is that something that always happens when people fornicate?¡±


    ¡°I.. I don¡¯t know? What does that mean?¡± Sarah started babbling, possibly adding two plus two and getting twenty-two. Kyle looked similarly worried, but there was something else about him, some strange emanation that I couldn¡¯t, and didn¡¯t want to, understand.


    ¡°The blessing here needed fuel, magical fuel. I doubt the two of you could generate enough independently and you don¡¯t have a full, sanctified congregation to add their power to yours. There might be some reason why Hestia didn¡¯t simply push her power here, or maybe it¡¯s just not possible, I¡¯m not certain, and it doesn¡¯t really matter. The ritual you did raised the power, first using the dance, then using, well, that,¡± I nodded towards the area the two had¡­ danced in. ¡°Now, I want to understand if the extra power can only be generated if the fornication is part of a ritual or if it is generated independently and the ritual simply used what was there. Got it?¡± I asked, feeling slightly annoyed. But then, I already had been annoyed earlier at the sheer complexity of divine magic invoked, getting confirmation that they had no idea what was going on only irked me further.


    ¡°Did I get pregnant?!¡± Sarah finally screamed, now both angry and panicked, making me raise an eyebrow. Should I, or should I not, there was a part of me that wanted to mess with her. Simply because she, just like Kyle, were playing with forces they didn¡¯t understand. But no, while messing with her would be amusing, it also would be needlessly cruel, there would be no purpose but amusement.


    ¡°No, you did not,¡± I shook my head, before elaborating, ¡°The way I understand the effect, the entire potential fueled the ritual¡¯s effect, leaving nothing for the normal purpose. I might be wrong, I would have to take a closer look at you, but I do not think that you could get pregant in a ritual like this. There likely are others that would facilitate reproduction, but this did not appear to be such a ritual,¡± I explained, thinking about the effect and wondering what I could do with it. That much life energy, released without any drawbacks, maybe I could find a way to siphon it off. Something to consider at some point and look into, later.


    ¡°Check, please!¡± she demanded, her agitation not gone. Rolling my eyes, I placed my hand on her abdomen once more, using my Blood Magic to check.


    ¡°You are not pregnant,¡± I shook my head, getting a little annoyed by this all, so I simply turned and moved to Luna into Hecate¡¯s shrine. Hopefully, she didn¡¯t hear anything she shouldn¡¯t have.

 Chapter 916

    Watching the locals walk through the completed shrine was fascinating. Luna, Kyle, Sarah and I were officially, whatever that meant if there was no real society, turning over the shrine to the people. They had seen a bit of my work from afar but as I had requested, nobody had ventured inside while I was working. Now, the shrine was completed and people were observing it for the first time, while I was observing them in turn. And it was fascinating. They were fascinating and fascinated in turn.


    Undisguised awe, mixed with trepidation and a whole host of other emotions were easily visible on the various faces and I couldn¡¯t help but feel proud at what I had wrought here. Luna had provided some support, mostly by boosting my own magical ability, while Kyle and Sarah had added the blessing of Hestia to her shrine, but otherwise, this had all been me. Even the Blessing of Hecate was something I had been involved in, adding my own Astral Power to Luna¡¯s working while studying the effect.


    If nothing else, I came away with a profound sense of awe regarding the magical processes I could see, even if I barely understood them. Divine Energy was different from Astral Power in a fundamental way, that much I could feel, but the difference was somewhat like that of alcohol and water. Both generally clear, both liquid at room temperature and with a similar density but where one would burn, the other would not.


    I could see, and feel, the Divine Power pour into the formation and sense just how little was lost in the process, allowing Luna to achieve a far greater effect with the power filtered through Lady Hecate than I could if the two of us had channelled our Astral Power directly. And that was ignoring the question of whether Lady Hecate had simply transmuted the Astral Power into Divine Power or if there were some sort of inefficiencies in the process. It was a little frustrating that I couldn¡¯t get any adequate readings on the other side of the effect or any real understanding of it but I had a feeling no Deity would share those details.


    Hel, most would likely slay me for the attempt, just like the Wolf had destroyed my Avatar when I poked around the Divine Blood within Ylva and stumbled into his domain. No questions, no warning or anything, just a smack and I was done for. It made me wonder why all my attempts to explore and understand Lady Hecate and Her power had been met with amusement and even quiet encouragement, to the point that a few of the dream lectures might have been rewards for my own experiments. It felt like such a strange departure from the whole ¡®divine awe¡¯ thing I had experienced, and was expecting, from other deities, it left me a little confused.


    Maybe one day I would understand, both the magic wilded through the Divine power and the deities behind that power but I had some doubts. Did I even want to understand them, especially if it relied on the admiration and willing support of others? Knowing myself, knowing my problems with communication and people in general, could I ever get that needed support? Or would I, at best, turn into some sort of figurehead, a power supporting a message I didn¡¯t care about?


    It might be that this sort of question was best ignored, at least until I reached a far higher level of power and understanding, where I could start to grasp the concepts behind the powers involved, not while I could merely stare like some sort of rube visiting the big city for the first time. No, I¡¯d have to wait until I could understand the magical pyramid schemes involved in building a Faith before I could even consider if I wanted to go down that path.


    The more I watched the people, the more I began to wonder. What did they take away from the shrine, what did they understand? Were they merely seeing the physical, the crystalline structures I had used to stabilise the construction or could they see something deeper? Could they feel the magic woven into each and every stone, reverberating through the structure and changing depending on whether they were closer to the shrine of Hecate or the shrine of Hestia?


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    How much of what they saw could they understand? Would they try to learn, watching and studying the magic that would undoubtedly linger here for years, maybe even longer? I didn¡¯t know but I was curious. Sadly, I doubted I¡¯d ever find out, unless I decided to visit this area again, someday in the future. Maybe in the far future.


    Smiling to myself, I realised that the last two weeks of strenuous spellcasting might be the perfect opportunity to use the two free attribute points I had saved up. They¡¯d either grant me an Intelligence trait or an Intuition trait and either way, it would be based on my recent activities. I had no idea how the system defined recent in that context but I felt that the last two weeks might be the best I could hope for. A long stretch of research and constructive spellcasting, with a bit of hunting thrown in right before. Far better than the fairly mundane travelling experience I could expect for the immediate future, as I didn¡¯t plan to linger much longer. The shrine was completed and, maybe thanks to the attack I had created, the locals had managed to pull their collective heads out of their backsides and get organised.


    Well, more organised, they still lacked the strict and structured organisation the community at Apple Gate Farm had created, but it was progress. Progress that made me feel they would make it through the winter, especially with the blessing of Hestia radiating out from the shrine here. Lady Hecate¡¯s was much more focused on the library Luna and I had created, both deities putting their own spin on their shrines.


    Nodding to myself, I opened my character-sheet and put the saved points into Intelligence. It was my primary attribute and pushing it to sixty felt like a fairly impressive milestone, at least given that I had achieved it at level sixty-five. Well, sixty-seven but that was only because I had kept the points in reserve while considering my options.


    Moments after the points were assigned, a blue window opened and informed me of the trait I had gained. It sounded like another fairly interesting one, named Astral Infusion. It allowed me to infuse my Astral Power into objects, though what effects, other than lasting ones, doing so had wasn¡¯t explained. It sounded incredibly similar to enchanting, but I doubted it would be that easy, though it also sounded similar to the Astral Impression trait I had gained some time ago, one creating a lasting impression on reality, the other infusing an object, whatever that meant.


    Something to test later, for now, I wanted to focus on the ceremony Luna performed for Hecate and afterwards I would do the same for Sarah and Kyle. A part of me wondered if I had to make sure Luna stayed away from that one, I didn¡¯t want her to witness something like their ritual to establish the blessing, but I didn¡¯t know their plans. Hopefully, the family-focused part of Hestia¡¯s domain would keep the whole thing family-friendly. Whatever that meant to a deity divorced from the pre-change culture I was still partially conditioned by.


    At least Luna¡¯s ritual was both impressive and aesthetically pleasing if one had the senses to enjoy it. I doubted most people here had, they would be able to hear her song, alongside the slow, deliberate motions of ritual dancing, but of the jumble of Astral and Divine Power flowing freely from her body and infusing the entire shrine, they could feel nought but faint echos.


    Maybe even I could only feel parts of what was going on, divine magic being what it was, I couldn¡¯t be certain I got it all. Maybe it didn¡¯t really matter whether I could sense everything, maybe the real importance was that I could see, feel and experience my dear daughter doing her best. That should be more than enough to make me proud and it was.


    And yet, the curious part of me wanted to see it all. To experience it all, to peer behind the curtain of divinity and learn all their secrets. Maybe even share them with some students, that way, I would have more people to explore the Arcane Path with.


    But that, as with so many things, would have to wait for later. Much, much later, for now, I had a ritual to enjoy and given just how grande the working of my daughter was, it was an impressive spectacle.


    Finally, the ritual wound down, the magic infusing the area swelled one last time and just as it reached its crescendo, I felt some power flow into me. An EXP award, not a tremendous amount but it was enough to bump me up two levels, though only because I had almost been at level sixty-eight already. Still, I was now level sixty-nine, a brief giggle escaping me at the realisation, only for the giggle to be washed away by longing for my Sigmir.

 Chapter 917

    ¡°Mother, I would like to ask you for help,¡± Lia¡¯s request, right after the shrine''s completion, was a bit of a surprise. While Luna and I had been busy building it, Lia had roamed around town with Alex and I had no idea what they had done. Some combat, that much I knew and Lia had asked me a few questions about magic during our downtime, but other than that, I simply did not know. So, the request for help was a curious one.


    ¡°Certainly my dear. What do you need?¡± I asked, wondering what sort of situation had stumped her. Or if she simply wanted to work on some project together with me, I had spent the last two weeks mostly working with Luna, so maybe my first daughter wanted some attention, too.


    ¡°I¡­¡± she paused, taking a deep breath, ¡°I tried to do a thing, but it didn¡¯t quite work. Maybe you can help me make it right,¡± she admitted and I could see the blush she was no longer able to generate, even without any visual indicator.


    ¡°A ¡®Thing¡¯, you say?¡± I prodded, a small grin appearing on my face. Now, I really wanted to know what she had done, especially as she started to squirm around a little.


    ¡°You know how we made Alex?¡± she began, getting a nod from me in return and I realised where this might go, ¡°I know that you somehow made me from a Shattered, we talked about it, I remember fragments of that time. I tried to make another vampire, just like we made Alex, only this time I tried using one of those Shadow Cats that run around the area,¡± she explained.


    It was an interesting idea, Shadow Cats were an evolution, adaption or whatever you wanted to call it, from normal, domestic cats, formed either by exposure to Astral Power or because they reached a certain level and consciously chose. I had no idea how that exactly worked and Silva, the one who might know, hadn¡¯t deigned to explain the process to me. They were somewhat larger than normal, the size of a medium-sized dog, had excellent stealth and acted like ambush predators. No danger to me, at least not those I had seen thus far, but they had some moxie but not enough to engage in suicidal battles. Not quite the creature I would have chosen to experiment on, but maybe it was a good idea nonetheless. They were primarily nocturnal, their stealth greatly enhanced by some innate shadow magic similar to my cloak of shadows and I had a feeling they¡¯d also have some sort of enhancement to their physical attacks but I didn¡¯t have confirmation for that.


    Either way, they were solitary, so if Lia had captured one, there shouldn¡¯t be a pride of them trying to get their lost member back.


    ¡°As I said, I will help you, so why don¡¯t you show me where your experiment is and explain what you tried so far, maybe I can figure out something. Otherwise, it¡¯ll be experimenting until we get it right or we decide to give up on this experiment and move on. Or something else happens, you never know when Murphy shows his troublesome mug,¡± I grinned, gesturing for her to take the lead into the twilight of the evening. It was dark enough to be harmless to her, likely why she had asked me at this time.


    She easily sped out of our shelter and I followed, having to use a bit of Blood Magic to push myself to her level. She wasn¡¯t going all out, I¡¯d have to either push my Blood Magic to the limit or use Wind Magic if she had, but she put on a good pace. Maybe we should try to find some way that she could magically speed herself up, too, it would be a valuable tool in her arsenal. Though, how well that¡¯d work with her inability to regain Astral Power passively, I wasn¡¯t sure, experiments would be needed. But those were ideas to consider at a later point, for now, I simply followed after her as she moved along the still mostly empty streets, ignoring the Shattered and Undead that were just getting out of their daytime-stupor and moving out of the houses they were occupying.


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    Noticing them made me wonder, were the houses they used their original houses or how did that work? Did they simply move into the nearest, convenient patch of darkness or did they have some sort of rudimentary memory? I doubted anyone had really looked into the question, simply because there was an almost universal and incredibly strong desire to forget that Undead and Shattered used to be human, let alone trying to find out who they used to be. Treating them as monsters made fighting them a lot easier, nobody wanted to fight their loved ones, at least as far as I understood things.


    Though, it made me wonder. If it was one of my loved ones, their body desecrated after their passing, would I want to simply forget about the body or would I want to lay the body to rest, seal it in eternal ice so their body would have an eternity of peace, or maybe turn it to dust with my power and scatter it in the wind, letting them become one with the earth once more? Granted, if the loved one was Sigmir, the answer would be that I¡¯d try to pull her back into this world, no matter the cost or sacrifice, but that wasn¡¯t really an option for other people. But even so, I wouldn¡¯t want my beloved¡¯s body to wander around, not where anyone could gawp at it, not that I had seen anyone do so. The Shattered and Undead weren¡¯t seen as human, so I doubted anyone considered them ¡®naked¡¯ even if their clothes had ripped to shreds. Just like people didn¡¯t think a dog or cat, even one without fur, was naked and in need of clothes, clothes were for people, not monsters.


    It was curious how easy it was to disassociate the body from the person, making me wonder how people would react if more non-humans started to walk around. Would they see us as something other than human and hunt us with the same tenacity as they hunted Undead and Shattered or would we find acceptance? The answer, as so often, was likely neither black nor white. In some places, we¡¯d be welcomed, in others shunned or only welcomed as second-class citizens, to be used and discarded at leisure. Not a terribly pleasant prospect but unless I managed to overcome all my detrimental social traits and settled down somewhere to guide the place¡¯s development, there was little I could do.


    It made me wonder how things had turned out at Apple Gate Farm, with Cassie, the dwarven cleric, in their ruling council. Would that single, non-human voice be enough to guide the rest or would some sort of prejudice force her out? Knowing Mrs Wu, I doubted it would easily come to that, but I couldn¡¯t be certain. No matter how skilled Mrs Wu was, she couldn¡¯t sway everyone, she was an excellent teacher but if people didn¡¯t want to be taught, they would just ignore her. Time would tell, but I doubted I¡¯d find out as I didn¡¯t really plan to return there any time soon. Maybe if I learned to fly swiftly, so I could cross hundreds of kilometres in a day, but that was purely a dream.


    For now, my focus was back on our surroundings, mostly because Lia had started to slow down. We were in just another residential area, one that had been hit pretty hard by the earthquakes after the change, turning it into a devastated mess of concrete, rubble, wood and metal, all now starting to grow over. The plentiful growth made me wonder for a moment until I sniffed the air and realised that the miasma of death was a lot thinner here than in the rest of town. No Shattered hanging around due to the lack of easy shelter, the remaining bodies likely too broken by collapsing buildings to rise as Undead, leaving large amounts of nutrition for enterprising plants. No wonder that plants were thriving here, though I doubted anyone would want to actually use that fact, simply because it was born from human corpses.


    ¡°This way,¡± Lia gestured, guiding me towards yet another broken building. Moving around and over the rubble, she showed me a recently cleared stairwell granting direct access to the cellar and unlocked the door. It was a solid set-up, whoever had lived here had invested some time and effort to make their home secure from burglary but given that Lia had used a key it didn¡¯t really matter.


    Even before I could look around, an angry hiss caught my attention. There, sitting in a makeshift cell made from repurposed metal, wood and some wire, sat one of the Shadow Cats, only this one was larger and angrier than any I had seen, its eyes alight with a faint, crimson glow.


    What a curious experiment my daughter had produced. Now, I just had to figure out what had happened and what I could do to make things work.

 Chapter 918

    The hissing and pacing of the caged cat continued for a little longer, it even tried scratching the bars of its cage, confirming my suspicion that Shadow Cats had some way to magically augment their physical attacks. The faint, dark energy around its claws didn¡¯t do anything to the solid steel but it was a good datapoint to have if these things ever tried to come after us.


    ¡°Are you certain that this is a good subject to convert?¡± I asked, wondering if turning the aggressive and hostile cat into a Vampire was really a good idea.


    ¡°It worked with Alex, didn¡¯t it? A fungus controlled them at the time of the conversion but it still turned out well, so why wouldn¡¯t it with the cat?¡± Lia nodded to herself, apparently convinced of her idea. I wasn¡¯t as certain as she was but it sounded like an interesting experiment, especially in regards to the actual control we had over the created vampires. Testing it on a creature neither of us would mind disposing of was a better idea than using some random human, there were too few of those for me to be comfortable. I didn¡¯t want humans to die out, who would do my chores in the future, who would tend the crops and all that annoying labour? No, until I was certain that humans weren¡¯t in danger of going extinct, I wouldn¡¯t casually kill one of them. Not unless it was truly necessary, either to preserve the life of one of my party or to avoid some serious hassle. Maybe if there was some unique opportunity to gain a major boost in power but that¡¯d have to be considered.


    Catching my train of thought, I focused on the hissing cat and started with the simple things, namely Observing it. If the level was too high, I¡¯d reconsider but given that it was only a level thirty Shadow Cat, I doubted it could get enough power to become a challenge, even if it gained some vampiric traits.


    Looking past the simple Observe, I started to carefully parse out the magical emanations of its body, studying the roiling shadows around the creature while looking for other possible elements. Only, there were none, it could only use Darkness Magic, granted fairly powerful Darkness Magic for its level, but that was it. Darkness Magic and the physical prowess of a fairly large cat, though far from any real ¡®big cat¡¯. Without magic, I doubted it¡¯d be able to take down prey the size of a human, unless it managed to come across somebody deeply asleep, though magic was the great equalizer in that regard. I wasn¡¯t sure what the creature could do with its skills, I¡¯d have to study a lot more, but I had some measure of magnitude.


    To gather more information, I started to magically prod the thing, mostly using Water and a bit of Lightning, nothing that would cause permanent harm. Amusingly, it avoided the water with far more alacrity than its reactions to the lightning would suggest, making me wonder just how much it disliked water. And then, it seemed to almost disappear into the darkness of its cage, turning almost invisible. I could still sense it in there, it couldn¡¯t walk the shadows just yet, but it had impressive stealth, not just for its level but in general. If I wasn¡¯t a lot more powerful and adept with Darkness Magic myself, it might have managed to evade me, depending on the way its skill might grow with level. A demonstration that specialisation, especially hyper-specialisation into one or two skills, made those skills truly remarkable, instead of following my very generalist approach.


    ¡°Impressive,¡± I mumbled, before using a bit of Darkness Magic to strip away the concealment, taking note of its quality and power as I did. From the way the concealment faded, I could tell that it was a lot less substantive than what I¡¯d use, making it easier to break but also cost less Astral Power. A trade-off, maybe one the cat had to make, but not something I¡¯d want to incorporate into my own spellwork.


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    Continuing with my testing, I conjured a bit of Ice into the cage, trying to make the cat attack it with its magically augmented claws. After the previous prodding, it didn¡¯t take a lot of provocation for it to fly into a snarling furball of rage and claws, trying to tear the innocent bit of Ice apart. From the feedback, I could glean some measure of its augmentation and, again, had to nod. It wasn¡¯t bad, a lingering curse that would act almost like poison, causing wounds to bleed a lot longer than normal. Even small wounds, if there were enough of them, could become fatal with that kind of curse in them. Death by a Thousand Papercuts, it made me wonder if I could do something similar if I combined a Darkness Curse with my Ice Magic Snow and a Spout Blood Rune. The Snow shaped into hundreds, if not thousands of tiny Icicles, too small to cause real, lasting damage but big enough to make someone bleed and bring the curse into their system. Not my usual style of combat using overwhelming power but something slower, more insidious. Not as outright deadly but just as ultimately fatal, with the added bonus that it would work against those I couldn¡¯t just smash with power. Bleeding from countless wounds would slow an enemy down, even if they had enough strength to smash my normal attacks aside. It only wouldn¡¯t work if the opponent had thick enough skin and Endurance to simply ignore my attack or enough Vitality to overcome the curse.


    Given how strong I currently was in comparison to the enemies I had faced thus far, I doubted that there were many foes I had to fight that way but having a tool and not needing it was a lot better than needing a tool and not having it.


    How much more could the cat do? Did I have any ways to tease additional skills out of it or should I just continue with my examination and try finding out what went wrong with Lia¡¯s previous attempts to give it vampiric traits?


    After a moment of consideration, I decided to start testing, as I simply didn¡¯t know if there was more to find. I doubted it, the two skills the cat had shown thus far were potent enough for its level, but I would remain cautious.


    Using a frozen blade, I drew a little blood from the cat before extracting it from the cage. I had no desire to put anything scratchable into the reach of those claws, even if I had no doubt that I could dispel the curse by virtue of superior skill and power. Still, I¡¯d rather not get cursed in the first place.


    Smelling the blood gave me an even better idea of the cat''s abilities. There was the obvious Darkness Astral Power I had noticed but alongside it was some Blood Magic of a familiar type. Lia had obviously given the creature some of her blood, likely magically charged, and the blood was influencing it. I started to wonder if Lia¡¯s blood had made the skill to augment its claws even stronger, as I would base my version at least partially on Blood Magic. There might be a connection but without a control group, I couldn¡¯t find out.


    Not that it truly mattered, it was merely a consideration, so I focused back on my examination. The blood drawn from the cat wasn¡¯t magically imbued, I¡¯d have to use Blood Magic for that, so I couldn¡¯t tell as much as I¡¯d have liked but what I could find didn¡¯t fill me with hope.


    Letting my tongue flicker out of my mouth, I got a small taste of blood, allowing me to parse its qualities even better, though still not good enough. From what little I could tell, I could only be confident that the cat was fighting against Lia¡¯s strain of vampiric blood, though I couldn¡¯t tel the ultimate outcome. Maybe an even further evolved cat, maybe an actual vampire or some sort of hybrid, it was too early to tell, but I doubted it would be the vampire, not without further action on our part.


    Good thing that we were here and ready to take action, otherwise, we might simply make a hostile and aggressive creature more powerful. I doubted it would start hunting us down but one could never know, nor be too cautious.


    ¡°So, we¡¯ll have to increase the amount of vampiric blood in the cat, or the cat will simply subdue the virus. At best, we¡¯d get some sort of hybrid and I have no idea what form that might take. We can experiment with that sort of thing further when we have an actual place to stay, but for now, let¡¯s try and make this kitty into a real vampire. We can see where we¡¯ll take it from there,¡± I explained, before using some mild Mind Magic to render the cat unconscious. Now, we could really start to work.

 Chapter 919

    Studying the unconscious cat up close didn¡¯t reveal anything new. It was still a mangy thing that desperately needed to be washed but other than that but other than that, it was nothing special. Feeling the thing with my Blood Magic, I could detect some damage, mostly from Lia¡¯s capture of it, I could feel the remnants of my Mind Magic attack to knock it out, overshadowing possible subtler parts of its innate magic and realised that I wouldn¡¯t be able to find out a lot more while it was in this state. Restraints might allow me to glean some additional information but I wasn¡¯t totally convinced. Still, it was worth a shot, so I gently, I didn¡¯t want to wake the beast before it was bound, stretched the cat out across the table and quickly conjured some bindings. Nothing fancy, just bands of solidly conjured Ice going around the metal structure and encasing the cat¡¯s legs, immobilising its joints. It wouldn¡¯t go anywhere, not unless it broke my Ice or I released it. Neither was likely, but either were possible, so I took a pair of bicycle locks, placed them across its back and used Crystal Magic to fuse them to the table, too. Now, the thing would have to break the Ice and the metal, both of which were likely complete and utter overkill. But better safe than sorry.


    With the cat now completely restrained, I purged my Mind Magic from its system as much as possible, waking it in the process and, just like earlier, it was spitting mad. Hissing, snarling and writhing to the best of its limited ability in a fairly impressive threat display, though not impressive enough to threaten me. No, it made a lot of aggressive noise, but nothing could come from it.


    Nodding to myself, I did another check while Lia used her own magic to try something. I wasn¡¯t quite sure what exactly she wanted to accomplish, but it used a small amount of her Blood, some Astral Power and, from the scent of it, Blood Magic. I could feel the magically infused blood enter the Cat¡¯s mouth and its system, making me wonder what exactly the mechanism was. Most of the blood never made it to the cat¡¯s stomach, it all diffused into its blood and flesh in some strange, oozing way. It was a fairly interesting effect, one that made me wonder if it could be replicated to introduce poisons into our opponents with greater effect, turning something that would normally need a wound or to be ingested into a topical effect could be huge. Something to consider, but not now, now I had to figure out what exactly Lia¡¯s blood did to the beast.


    Other than making it just a little stronger, that effect was fairly apparent, at least for someone who studied the cat¡¯s internal structure as the blood was introduced. The effect wasn¡¯t huge but unless I missed my guess, it would likely be cumulative in some way, the more blood introduced, the stronger the thing gets.


    ¡°You are trying to turn it again, aren¡¯t you?¡± I was making an educated guess after looking at the way Lia¡¯s blood had propagated through the cat and was now adding to the current effect. From the looks of it, my guess was correct, as Lia nodded before speaking.


    ¡°Yes, did you notice anything interesting, Mother?¡± Lia replied with some hope in her eyes alongside the usual formality.


    ¡°Mhm, could you tell me how much strength you currently get from your Vampirism traits and how much you originally received?¡± I prodded, getting an answer after a brief frown. The list of attributes, not just strength, was quite impressive, though not as insane as my own Dragon-Touched trait.


    ¡°From what I can tell, the cat gets more powerful, likely by gaining attributes, as you feed it your blood. Maybe, you¡¯ll have to feed it until the attributes it gains from your blood equal those it would gain from vampirism. However, I have no idea where to go from there, how to bind the effect into the creature and maybe bind it to your will. Given just how angry the thing currently is, I don¡¯t think I¡¯d want to have it with us while this aggressive, especially not with a powerful boost in attributes,¡± I explained, getting a quick nod in response. Neither of us wanted to have an aggressive stalker after us, even if it wasn¡¯t an actually powerful one. Things like that could crop up at the worst time, giving them far more impact than their power would suggest.


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    ¡°That might be the key. And with Alex, the Withering had already replaced some of their system, adding its own attributes to them. Then, when you destroyed the fungus and I replaced it with my blood, those attributes were incorporated or something like that?¡± Lia mused, giving a possible explanation for the mechanism but I doubted it was only that. There had to be something more than just drinking blood from a vampire, at least I felt like there should be more. But what, that I wasn¡¯t sure. Some sort of sacrifice, something that ended the previous existence and introduced the new one, it would fit with the old vampire legends.


    While I wasn¡¯t sure if they would actually apply, there had to be a reason why the system had assigned Lia the race Vampire, some connection to similar beings, or to those described as such. So, either vampires from local, terran legends or vampires from the system itself, from some other world like Mundus or even further afield.


    ¡°What does the ritual you used last time actually accomplish? It was some sort of magic circle, but it was odd, unlike my own magic, as if it was translated or something like that?¡± I prodded her a little, remembering Alex¡¯s turning.


    ¡°It made the blood more efficient, I tried using it yesterday but it wasn¡¯t enough,¡± Lia admitted, channelling some extra magic to manifest the circle. I could feel power oozing out of it, but the exact details remained unclear. It seeped into the cat and I thought there was a faint connection between the circle, the cat and Lia, but it was incredibly weak. Barely there, barely able to let any real volume of power flow through it.


    But now, we had a place to start, or rather, we had two of them. The first place was to see whether we could improve the connection between them, hopefully also adding a control component on Lia¡¯s side of the equation. Or on my side, I wouldn¡¯t mind acting as leash and controller for some vampire cat but it ultimately was Lia¡¯s creature and experiment. So, she should take control and responsibility.


    Sadly, even with some of my power donated to Lia, via infused blood, she remained unable to increase the link between her own power and the at. When I tried to add myself into the mix, either by directly manipulating Astral Power or with my Mind Magic, failed fairly spectacularly. The magic circle created by Lia simply shattered, breaking into countless motes of crimson Astral Power that spread the scent of blood in the damp cellar we used to experiment in.


    With that small setback out of the way, we continued our experiment after a quick break to regenerate our power and refresh the air a little. The scent didn¡¯t help Lia, making her hungry, while I was a little distracted by it. Normally, Blood was a scent I recognised as the scent of danger and battle, bringing with it a mindset not suitable for proper experimentation.


    Once that was done, we tried the other way, at least after Lia reestablished the circle. Sadly, the connection was even weaker, making me wonder if there was a connection between the breaking of the circle and the weakened connection. Something to investigate, but for now, I watched as Lia poured blood and power into the feline.


    I could feel it working and, remembering what I had done when Alex was turned, I added my own efforts into the mix. Not so much replacing what Lia¡¯s power did but improving it, giving guidance where I could and helping to spread her influence further around the cat¡¯s body.


    It wasn¡¯t easy work, but I could feel the cat¡¯s existence fade away as it was replaced with Lia¡¯s power, the cat quite literally dying from the changes happening to her body and, most importantly, within her mind and possibly even soul. While I was still unable to truly sense souls, I was slowly touching upon their domain, but it was still a long way off. For now, I could get a faint impression, one that was changing little by little.


    After a while, I could feel a qualitative shift and the magical formation surged with crimson light. For a moment Lia and I were bathed in it, only for the light and formation to shatter, sending Lia to the ground with a moan of pain.


    In that moment of distraction, I wasn¡¯t looking at the cat and suddenly, I felt a surge of Astral Power enveloping it, taking it away. A teleport, quite similar to the way I stepped through shadows. Reacting, I activated Overflow and struck with a blast of Mind Magic, using the fastest attack I could.


    Moments later, a notification popped up, telling me that I had killed the cat but the body was gone, already teleported away. It had been insanely close but it hadn¡¯t managed to get away.


    Now, I only had to take care of Lia.

 Chapter 920

    Luckily, Lia turned out just fine after her experiment backfired on her. A little exhausted and complaining about a brutal headache, but compared to the vampire cat, she was in perfect condition. Sadly, neither of us really knew how we might be able to improve the process of creating new vampires, though we both had ideas. Ideas we planned to test at some point, but before we would go there, we decided that this city didn¡¯t hold any further interest for us. Lia was done with her projects, Luna had completed her shrine and gained the appropriate divine reward and neither Alex nor Silva had started anything nearby.


    For me, the sole remaining project was the ongoing effort of teaching Sonja and Lars in exchange for their collecting of information in regard to some of the system¡¯s effects. I had seen some of their results and while there was nothing conclusive so far, the sample was a little too thin to extract truly relevant statistical data, there were some interesting patterns that might be confirmed in the future. Similarly, I felt that my lessons to them had given the pair enough of a foundation to continue their journey. From now on, it would be on them to forge their path, especially with the books I had stored in the shrine it should be relatively easy.


    Now, the only thing to consider was how to make our exit. Should we simply slip away, maybe into the night, or should we try to make some great gesture, showing the people how we were leaving? Both had interesting implications, though I was fairly certain which I¡¯d prefer, namely to simply slip away. The opening of the shrine had been enough of a ceremony for me, I didn¡¯t need or want another so soon after.


    With my own dislike about any ceremonies, I pitched the idea of simply disappearing into the night to Lia, Silva and Luna, with Lia and Luna not caring one way or another but Silva gently reminding me that we should tell at least the leaders we had installed. They might want to give us gifts or something but even if they did not, telling them would prevent any miscommunications or future trouble. It also would be the polite thing to do, which was the argument that ultimately sold me, my mother had always told me to be polite and I saw no real reason to disregard that particular lesson for this case. In others, I might, but here and now, polite behaviour didn¡¯t cost me anything but a little time.


    Taking Luna with me, I walked from our temporary home to the apartment complex the locals were using as shelter, looking at the changes the area had undergone since my appearance. It had only been a little over a month, but I could feel the difference quite easily. It wasn¡¯t just the visible side that had changed, the entire area had undergone a fundamental change, the Astral Power was subtly different, in a way that was hard to put into words. It was similar to the effect of the shrine, only less directed, less cleanly flavoured. The efforts of everyone here had seeped into the Astral River and if I hadn¡¯t been so focused on the shrine, I might not have noticed at all. Just like a frog could be easily boiled by slowly raising the temperature, I wouldn¡¯t have realised that something was different if I had been immersed in the area as it changed.


    And it wasn¡¯t just the Astral River that had changed. Far easier to recognise was the change to their farming efforts, they had greatly expanded and I could see a clear pattern where people had taken charge and given direction to their efforts. They had gone from a few small patches of crops to fairly sizeable fields, though they were still a little limited by the seeds they had access to and the tools. I could see some fairly rough tools, made from cold-formed metal and wood, but it was a lot more than they had when we came here.


    The people, too, I realised. They were moving with purpose and direction, making me wonder just how little of a shove they had needed to get from their old lethargy to this far more involved state. How had none of them realised that just a little bit of force was needed, why hadn¡¯t they been able to make their own fate? Why had it taken my involvement to get them going, or had they been drifting towards this change all on their own and my appearance had only been a coincidence and this change would have happened anyway? I didn¡¯t know, nor could I see a way to reliably find out, but it was an interesting question. How much did I influence on a larger scale, beyond the direct impact of my magic?


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    How much had my teaching influenced the people at Apple Gate Farm, had they managed to put their differences aside after I was gone or had the disagreements I had noticed before spiralled into real conflict, the seams between different people and their beliefs widened into chasms that couldn¡¯t be easily overcome?


    A part of me wanted to look in on Kevin and the others I had taught, simply to see how their lives had continued after I moved on but I wasn¡¯t sure I could scry them that easy. Something to try later, some of them I should be able to recognise by their impact on the Astral River, if only because I had introduced them to that space. That introduction provided a connection between me and them, something I might be able to make use of. I doubted anyone else could, a teacher looking in on their student was permissible, a student using the act of being taught to strike at their teacher, not so much. Sometimes, magic was tightly linked to such concepts, at least the magic on Mundus had been, and from what I could read in my grimoire, things shouldn¡¯t be too different here.


    A part of me was tempted to experiment using my own connection to the Grandmother, but I had a feeling that it wouldn¡¯t work. Observer effect and all that, I couldn¡¯t perform an experiment while knowing it was an experiment without impacting its results. In this case, I would have to commit to attacking the Grandmother, hoping that it would turn out well and I could gather valuable data. Sadly, that would mean that, if it worked, the Grandmother would know I attacked her, with the obvious results, to say nothing of potential magical consequences. Just a few weeks ago, the Gods had scolded me for breaking guest rights, while acting beneficially, I did not doubt that if I turned on my teacher, Hecate would have something to say about it. If only because it would mean less magical teaching was possible. No, I couldn¡¯t experiment with that, even if a part of me was curious about the possibilities.


    ¡°Good evening,¡± I greeted Sian, after reaching the apartment she was using as her office. I could feel my two students nearby, they would be the next I was planning to talk to. ¡°It is time that me and mine will move on. You are welcome to use the dwelling Luna and I cleaned up if you like, the protections placed upon it will last a week or two unless somebody maintains them. Similarly, the shrine is obviously yours, as much as a shrine can belong to anybody but the Gods enshrined there.¡±


    ¡°Good evening¡­¡± she returned the greeting, confusion written clearly on her face. Most likely, she wasn¡¯t quite sure how to respond to my declaration but after a few moments, she rallied and thanked me for my efforts in the area. I had a feeling she had never really found a good way to handle my presence which was just fine with me and in this case, her confusion had added a bit of amusement to my evening.


    ¡°Go, bid farewell to your students Mom, I¡¯ll talk to Miss Sian a little longer,¡± Luna shooed me off and I obliged her with a grin on my face. I wasn¡¯t sure what the munchkin wanted to tell her, but apparently, I wasn¡¯t supposed to know.


    Shrugging, I went and hunted down the aura of Sonja and Lars I had been able to feel. Luckily, they were sitting at a table together, hunched over a sheet of paper and occasionally scribbling something on it. A small, experiment in runic magic, as it turned out when Sonja channelled a little Astral Power into it, causing the paper to crumble and a small flash of energy to escape the formation.


    Nothing too interesting and my conversation with them didn¡¯t yield any additional information, nothing but simple farewells.


    Before too long, Luna found me and, after picking up Lia, Alex and Silva, we continued on our journey, once again heading north, where I hoped to find a Nexus of Ice that I could take control of.

 Chapter 921

    Once again, we continued on our travels. Still moving further away from the town I once called home, still heading northwest following that siren¡¯s song of a possible distant Nexus. I wasn¡¯t quite confident of its location, it might be on a different continent and I¡¯d have to cross the ocean but time would tell. Hopefully, the Nexus was simply across the continent, somewhere in northern Canada or Alaska or somewhere up north. Trying to estimate locations based on a vague directional vector was nearly impossible, I had tried to use a world map but the vagueness of the direction I could feel meant it might terminate anywhere from Eastern Siberia to Central Canada or pretty much anywhere in between. I was too far away to get a better idea of the distances involved, other than it was currently far away from me. How far? That, I couldn¡¯t tell until I was a lot closer.


    Not that it currently really mattered. The Nexus hadn¡¯t fully formed, at least judging by the still lingering turmoil in the Astral River and even if it had, I wasn¡¯t strong enough to control a Nexus just yet, especially not one still settling down. I¡¯d need time and power to achieve that, both things I could only acquire by travelling and searching for adventure and challenges.


    Sadly, I had no idea if there were any challenges to be had, or if there were whether I should take them. The biggest potential problem I could see was that I didn¡¯t want to accidentally wipe out the remaining humans. Not until I knew there was another option for labour and civilisation, there were some things I couldn¡¯t easily make myself, regardless of my power. Thus, I had to remain cautious with other humans, especially those who might successfully recreate civilization. Preferably one friendly to magic users but I had a feeling that wouldn¡¯t be in the cards, not with the Gods having their own plans. I couldn¡¯t believe that deities like Zeus or Odin didn¡¯t have plans prepared to induct people into their worship and have them spread things out, taking over smaller communities as they went.


    If not for my lack of social graces, combined with the negative social traits I had picked up, I might have tried to establish myself in a permanent fashion, using Luna and her connection to Hecate to set up a social organisation of magic users, a Mages¡¯ Guild or something along those lines. But I simply wouldn¡¯t be the right person to head such an endeavour, of that I was well aware. I was more likely to cause persecution than I was to head it off, the events at Apple Gate Farm had shown that. Instead, I hoped that by travelling and teaching those I met, I could create a social acceptance of the Arcane at the grass-roots level, providing alternatives to the Divine Magic I could easily see spreading.


    Hel, it already had, thanks to the Gods somehow empowering Clerics and teaching them without having mortal agents in play. Unless I was completely wrong, there hadn¡¯t been a former Traveller in the community we just left and yet, Sarah and Kyle had established a connection to Hestia. In their dreams, as they claimed, though I had no way to verify that statement, they claimed they had gone to bed one night and woke as Clerics of Hestia. How I was supposed to compete with such efficiency, I had no idea and could only hope that I wasn¡¯t the only one providing Arcane instruction. Or that people learned by themself and established their own path, apart from the Divine. Sadly, I had a feeling that few would, it was simply a lot more convenient to follow a Deity, at least from what I had heard. Not that Luna would agree, her own abilities required plenty of study and experimentation but I wasn¡¯t sure if that was specific to Hecate or if other users of Divine Magic played that part down in order to proselytise.


    A part of me was tempted to simply kill off all clerics I could find, or at least all of the Gods I considered troublesome. While I had no list of those, almost all Gods could be troublesome, there were a few I had my eyes on, chief amongst them Sunna. Sadly, if Gods could empower Clerics in their dreams, it would become an endless game of whack-a-priest, where I travelled around and murdered people for nothing but falling for a divine con and the Gods replaced the murdered clerics as soon as I was out of the area.


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    Unless there was some sort of cost involved in that dream empowerment, or if there was some condition that needed to be completed, I could kill as many clerics as I wanted and achieve nothing. Nothing, but the constant disruption of communities, all of which would remember Arcane Magic as something to be feared, allowing the Gods even greater influence. No, trying to go that route would be foolish long-term. And I needed to play the long game, as I had no doubt the Gods did.


    That idea drove home just how enormous the task I had set myself was. If I wanted to revive Sigmir, I needed enough power to break the natural cycle in a massive way. Doing something not even the Grandmother dared to do, though I wasn¡¯t sure if it was because she simply didn¡¯t want to invest the massive effort for fairly little return or if the Gods themself had forbidden it. Or if she simply was unable to in the first place, any of those was a plausible answer and I had no way to know which was the right one or if they were all correct in their own way.


    Whatever the case, if the Gods wanted to block me, I would go against them, as insane as that sounded. I had my path and eventually, I¡¯d reach its end, my Titanic Ambition demanded nothing less. Or I might die, in which case I could only hope that I¡¯d meet Sigmir again in whatever afterlife there might be.


    However, considering the Titanic Ambition trait in contrast with the Pale Lady title made me wonder. Were they the initial steps on two different paths? One, the title, leading down the Path of Gods, where I might eventually establish my own divinity and become some sort of Goddess, with my own flock and countless worshippers. The other, the Path of Titans, granting massive power but concentrating all that power into a single entity, namely myself.


    I had no idea how exactly that might work, but just from the way I thought about deities, I had a feeling that the Divine Path would likely give me more overall power, at least if I was diligent in gathering followers. If enough people prayed to me, all offering their Astral Power, the sheer quantity would become a quality of its own. On the other hand, Titanic Ambition, as it currently was, greatly increased my own attributes but that was ultimately dependent on me, not on outside power.


    Thinking about it, that might be the primary draw of the Path of Gods, that the power one could gain was unlimited. As long as one could gather more followers, the overall power would increase, the only real limit was how many potential followers there were. And with multiple worlds involved, or multiple Universes or something along those lines, that number was¡­ well, it was big.


    Whereas advancing on the Path of Titans would be limited by diminishing returns, gaining levels would become more and more difficult, skills would max out and so on. Though I had no idea what actually happened to a maxed skill, nobody had managed to do so in the Beta, nor had I heard anything about that on the forum. A few people might know, but if they did, they hadn¡¯t shared.


    Yet another item to be put on the list of things to find out. That list was growing by the day and while I was working on solving one of those items, I doubted I¡¯d ever manage to truly empty it. But maybe that was for the best, the world would be an incredibly boring place if everything was known and nothing left to find out.


    Either way, while a part of me was considering the far future, there were far more immediate concerns. Mainly, the next destination on our path and what to do once we got there, wherever there might be.


    Visit another town or the next big city where we¡¯d most likely find another group of survivors or should we search for points of interest, places where the change had warped reality in some fascinating way, like the strange stretched forest with its insane flora?


    Both options presented their own challenges and with them, their own opportunities.


    For now, I had simply decided to follow the interstate, mostly because doing so gave us a fairly even and smooth surface to travel on, along with the occasional Shattered or Scorched, lingering since the change had it. Maybe Lia and I could use one of those as a test subject to spread vampirism.

 Interlude: Survivors 406

    Some people could be utter fools. It was a truism Wu Chunhua, also known as Mrs Wu, had learned to accept a long time ago. That there was nothing a sufficiently confident fool couldn¡¯t make themselves believe if only it fit with their idea of how the world should work. It shouldn¡¯t surprise her that it held true even after the world went mad, or maybe she should have expected that it especially held true in that situation.


    Having young Samantha get annoyed by the foolishness going on was one thing, while her young student had taken to the changed world like a duck to water and even taught others to swim, she had been only one person. Well, one person leading a small group. Still, she was the only adult in her group, unless one wanted to count that giant hound that accompanied her. Or maybe the small, strangely red-eyed racoon. Other than those two beasts, it was only a child and one teenager she had somehow turned back from a Shattered. However that had worked, nobody knew the details, and few people knew that there were any details to know about judging from the fact that there had been only that one person turned back, Wu Chunhua considered it nothing but a fluke. Some random event, a miracle for those who wanted to believe in such, nothing that could be relied upon. And thus, irrelevant in the long run.


    Similarly, the child wasn¡¯t a huge factor by herself. She had somehow gained levels far beyond her age and with those levels, she had started to undergo a strange metamorphosis. Growing up too fast was something she had heard about, in the eyes of many she, herself, had undergone that very process thanks to a childhood filled with harsh training, but it had always been a metaphor, not something you could literally watch. And yet, in those few weeks, the child had visually matured almost two years, with no signs of stopping. Not something to be desired in most situations but after the world had gone mad? Maybe it was a good thing, though only time would tell the long-term effects. But given that to suffer long-term effects required you to survive, the alternative might have been worse.


    Only five people, for a given value of people, and yet, with a little extra hindsight on her side, Wu Chunhua wondered if watching them leave had been the right call. Not that she was certain of her ability to change young Samantha¡¯s mind but she could have tried.


    Especially now that she realised that the people pushing the change that drove Samantha and her small, strange family out hadn¡¯t been satisfied with that. She really should have seen that coming, confident fools, used to getting their way and working in high-powered, ¡®important¡¯ jobs, able to change the world with a stroke of a pen or a few lines typed on a keyboard. How their old attitude had survived the changing world was a complete mystery to her, but somehow, it had and once a modicum of civilisation was restored, so had their attitude. And, in an almost bitter twist of irony, with their attitude restored, people began to listen, simply because they were used to obeying a certain demeanour, the demeanour powerful people had portrayed before the world changed.


    That their old power was as broken as the city they all had lived in was ignored, people perceived them as strong and in charge, so they followed their orders, even if they didn¡¯t make sense. So many were used to following orders, to never questioning, thanks to an education system that pushed obedience and, in many cases, thanks to a military that trained people to follow orders, sometimes even over their own conscience. It wasn¡¯t just a German, Russian or Chinese mindset, it could be found everywhere.


    If it wasn¡¯t so disappointing, it would be incredibly amusing. In the two months after the survivors from her gym had joined up with those at the Apple Gate Farm, they had achieved something incredible. With a great deal of effort and similar amounts of luck, they had managed to build a community, an actual village with numerous buildings and enough food production to store sufficient supplies for the winter. The efforts taken had only been possible thanks to excellent teamwork, a willingness to learn and experiment and, not least of all, to embrace the strange changes everyone had undergone. To learn from people like Samantha, or Jade as she liked to be called now, and from Carrie, the so-called Denmother. Embracing their teachings and working in the strange system that engulfed their reality worked and gave them the meagre comforts they now enjoyed.


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    Only, the days that endless food could be acquired at the local grocer or be ordered with a simple phone call, the days that fresh, clean and warm water was only a twist of a tap away, they strongly remained in the memories of everyone. And, when the confident fools started to speak, memories of those days managed to overwhelm the lessons learned since the world had changed. Not in everyone but in enough people to make things¡­ difficult.


    ¡°Kevin, what are your next plans?¡± Wu Chunhua quietly asked one of the most promising disciples of Samantha, the young water mage Kevin. Just a teenager, not somebody people would easily listen to unless there was some major event propelling them to the fore. A Jean-d¡¯Arc moment, where the teenager could grab fate by the horns, at least until they managed to get themself impaled. Kevin hadn¡¯t experienced such a moment, he had acted responsibly and worked hard to supply the small village with water, but as things became more difficult, who knew how long he would be content to act so benevolently?


    ¡°I¡¯m uncertain,¡± he admitted, his gaze not meeting the old woman¡¯s eyes, ¡°There are so many who think that we can simply keep going as we have been, that the village is, well, done,¡± he shrugged, closing his eyes for a moment as if looking for words.


    ¡°As if we kids can simply go back to school and the adults back to their old jobs, with some manager directing people or something. But it doesn¡¯t sound like they are actually planning to work, at least to me. Unified efforts, joined potential, they sure like to hear their voices, but I haven¡¯t heard any plans, at least none that don¡¯t rely on those who have been working to continue exactly as we have,¡± another shrug, alongside a sigh. Something in Wu Chunhua¡¯s eyes pushed him to continue, knowing that somebody was interested in his opinion and plans, drove him to keep talking.


    ¡°Honestly, I don¡¯t plan to keep making hundreds of gallons of water every day, it gets tiresome. It¡¯s not a matter of power, I¡¯m able to keep going at this level, but there¡¯s no tolerance for error or problems, let alone something as decadent as time off or a vacation. It¡¯s eventually going to drive me spare,¡± he admitted, getting his shoulder squeezed in a comforting manner.


    ¡°Yes, I noticed that some of these managers do not really manage, they retain their belief that people and talent are at a surplus, that there is always going to be another University graduate ready to take their first steps in the market. I do not know how long that belief will hold or what will happen when it breaks. Will they try to force those who can perform extraordinary tasks to keep up their performance or will they simply call for others, without specifying who those others are, to deal with the problem?¡± now, it was Wu Chunhua¡¯s turn to sigh, as she was forced to voice a fear that had been growing in her gut.


    ¡°So, what are you doing about it?¡± Kevin asked, only to realise that his question was fairly disrespectful after it was out of his mouth. In return, Wu Chunhua could only give him a wan smile, admitting that she couldn¡¯t do much as people weren¡¯t as willing to listen to her and the other councillors as they had been a month ago.


    ¡°I simply do not know. A part of me wants to try knocking heads together, to shout at these people until they listen but I¡¯m old. I¡¯m afraid I¡¯ll run out of strength before I run out of idiots. Another part of me wants to embrace this new world, to go on one last, great adventure and see what has changed. From what I¡¯ve heard, there¡¯s a whole new world out there and, honestly, I¡¯d like to see it before I move on to that next great adventure,¡± she admitted, her smile turning into a bit of a grin.


    ¡°I know the feeling,¡± Kevin admitted, now grinning himself, ¡°And you are not the only one curious about everything else. Ranging within a day¡¯s march of the farm is one thing and just enough to whet your appetite. In some ways, the world has become so much bigger now that we simply don¡¯t know what¡¯s behind the horizon. But it has also become a lot more dangerous.¡±


    ¡°No, the danger has only shifted,¡± the old woman shook her head, thinking of the many dangers that had lurked in the world before the change, ¡°Now, we can see the danger coming, it won¡¯t just end in a flash of light and a burst of radiation,¡± she paused herself once more, taking a deep breath.


    ¡°If you and those, others, you speak of, decide to venture forth, I think I¡¯d like to join you,¡± she admitted, putting her marker down and admitting, at least to herself, that the rabble had won at Apple Gate Farm. Hopefully, they wouldn¡¯t burn it to the ground.

 Chapter 922

    Nodding to myself, I ran through one last check. The ritual I had been thinking about for over a month now was as prepared as it could be and the only thing stopping me from actually going through with it was the risk to unique and priceless materials if things went wrong. Chances to get another Void Crystal were low while getting another feather from Lenore was almost impossible but if I didn¡¯t use the resources I had, wouldn¡¯t that be just as much of a waste? The ritual I had designed would, hopefully, use the crystal and the physically manifested shadow I had been wrapping around it since getting the crystal in conjunction with the feather to create a physical Cloak of Shadows, the feather acting as a catalyst to add Wind Magic into the object.


    If things worked out as I hoped, the addition would allow me to fly, at least in a limited fashion, and boost the cloak¡¯s innate concealment even further. Wind was excellent in concealing scent and sound while Shadow was best at concealing sight, though the general concealment aspect was strong in its own right. Not as strong as the specialised effects of Wind, but almost. Combining the two would hopefully be enough to render me as good as traceless, at least during the night. For daytime usage, I¡¯d have to figure out some sort of invisibility. Sadly, I had a feeling that would require me to work with Light, or at least with a less extreme version of Darkness, something that accepted that the darkness would eventually pass and give way to the light.


    A part of me was tempted to ask Lady Hecate for advice, or maybe try to contact the Grandmother and have her check my work but another part of me was hesitant. Would I be any better than the clerics I had mocked on Mundus if I immediately ran to Lady Hecate if I had questions or would I merely be a hypocrite unable to properly bow but willing to take any advantage I could?


    Shaking my head, I dismissed my fears, pushed away the concerns and checked my notes one more time. One last time. The Zevarra Agha was already an incredibly valuable resource, to say nothing of the limited advice I had received from Luna, who had happily given me her impression of my notes, though she had admitted that she didn¡¯t fully understand my notation. Not necessarily a problem, I had invented it after all and the lessons I had given Luna had focused on less arcane topics, but it meant I lacked that additional bit of confidence. Though, even if she could read my notations, I doubted she¡¯d be able to pick out any mistakes without asking Lady Hecate, which would be the same as me asking Her. And make me just as much of a hypocrite, if not more of one, as I would have taken the advantage but let my daughter handle the payment. No, that wasn¡¯t a path I was willing to go down, I would pay my own debts if I incurred them.


    Taking a knee in the middle of my prepared ritual circle, I placed the two primary materials, the wrapped Void Crystal and Lenore¡¯s feather in two circles of their own before adding multiple supporting materials into the ritual. Mundane feathers, crystals I had acquired while raiding different jeweller¡¯s stores, selected for their affinity with Darkness and Wind and a few other essences that I had incorporated into the ritual. Getting those essences was only possible thanks to Lia and Alex, the two had greatly improved their alchemical practice to the point that they could extract the magical essence of materials, a process I considered a precursor to the creation of crystallised elemental energy, like Void Crystals or Eternal Ice.


    However, getting from one step to the other would require quite a bit more training, mostly because we lacked other ways to crystallise magical essences so they didn¡¯t have anything to compare their methods to. For the simple extraction, Blood Magic was a good enough comparison and Lia was adept enough in that skill, though I had demonstrated my own version multiple times. Not that the versions differed, Lia had learned from me after all, but she had put her own flavour to the skill by now. More data was almost always useful, as long as the additional data didn¡¯t overwhelm the processing methods.


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    Standing straight, I let the air slowly flow out of my lungs, before taking another deep breath. The ritual was as prepared as it could be, lacking nothing but the Astral Power to get things started.


    My eyes fluttered shut and I started to carefully channel Astral Power into the prepared lines, radiating outwards from the centre I occupied. With another deep breath, I started to quietly sing, weaving the sound into the magic I was invoking. The sounds didn¡¯t really matter, the mindset and the conviction invoked were the important part.


    Taking a half-step forward, as my voice started to surge in strength just as the Astral Power I had to channel surged upwards allowed me to cleanly channel the powers invoked, just as the twist and half-step in the other direction allowed me to regulate the flow of power. It was a dance, in a way, bringing my physical parts into alignment with the ritual around me, as the powers I invoked were growing and weaving together in an intricate web.


    The various essences I had placed around the circle started to disintegrate, the Astral Power they were composed of flowing into the ritual just as planned, leaving nothing but strange, chalky dust behind, the medium used by Lia and Alex to bind the stuff to begin with.


    Curiously, the physical materials didn¡¯t get destroyed, they started to fly on an invisible wind and orbit around me, joining the intricate dance of power as things slowly started to come together.


    Sweat was beading on my brow, the strain of the ritual slowly mounting but I kept pressing on, knowing that I couldn¡¯t stop now, I wouldn¡¯t stop now. The power I had invoked was beyond what I could contain and safely grounding it was nearly impossible, even with the prepared circle. That became doubly true when the corporeal shadow wrapped around the Void Crystal joined the dance, blanketing the entire area in darkness, blacker than the deepest night. And yet, even in that complete and perfect darkness, I could feel the ritual around me and knew how to perform the next steps. The darkness was mine, and everything it touched was as good as my own body. It was a somewhat strange sensation but not an unpleasant one. More information than I had ever held surged into my brain and without my high Intelligence and Intuition, boosted further by Titanic Ambition, I would have suffered greatly, maybe even died from the overload. As it was, I could contain it, but I had a feeling I¡¯d suffer a headache once everything was said and done. Still, the sheer rapture of knowledge was well worth it.


    That rapture doubled, almost making me miss a step when the Void Crystal disintegrated at the same time as the feather did. The density of Astral Power shot through the roof and the laws of reality took a single look at the ritual circle and decided that they didn¡¯t want anything to do with me. I could feel myself rise into the air, as the wind was raging around me, still contained in complete and utter darkness. And yet, despite the lack of solid ground beneath me, I could still continue my dance, moving slowly as I started to weave the complex web of power around me into a single, physical structure.


    Time started to lose meaning, as I slowly compressed the incredible amount of power into its smaller form. The primary medium was still shadow, but the feather had held just as much Wind and even a somewhat uncomfortable amount of Death I had to incorporate. My plans for the Death Energy inherent to Lenore¡¯s feather were fairly simple. Death was unseen, hidden, and so, its energy could be used to hide me from magic searching out life. It was another aspect of Concealment, something I was good at and the way things came together was even better than I had planned.


    Slowly, as the physical construct started to take form, the energy around me was ebbing, bound into the physical form I had been working on.


    Finally, after what felt like hours of strenuous casting, my feet touched the ground again, the power around me no longer capable of holding me aloft. Still, I continued with my work, moving with determined precision until the entire ritual was drained of Astral Power to the point that my own reserves were nearly empty. I had given the ritual my all but the result, settling in my hands, looked damn well worth it.


    Black as the darkest night, smooth and cool like silk and lined with feathers, I held my new Cloak.


    The ritual had been successful.

 Chapter 923

    After feeling the cool silky-smooth fabric a little longer, I wrapped the cloak around my shoulder, replacing my old one. A part of me considered whether I might be able to enchant the new piece as I had done with my old cloak but I doubted it would work. Just from feeling the cloak, I knew it was highly magical, though a quick Identify told me just how magical.


    <table style="border-collapse: collapse" border="1">


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td colspan="2">Raven¡¯s Shadow</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 50.0363%">Rarity</td>


    <td style="width: 50.0363%">Epic</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 50.0363%">Base Protection</td>


    <td style="width: 50.0363%">3 against Piercing Damage</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 50.0363%">Base Protection</td>


    <td style="width: 50.0363%">3 against Slashing Damage</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 50.0363%">Base Protection</td>


    <td style="width: 50.0363%">1 against Blunt Damage</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 50.0363%">Special Effect</td>


    <td style="width: 50.0363%">Enveloping Shadow: While surrounded by Darkness, you are invisible.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 50.0363%">Special Effect</td>


    <td style="width: 50.0363%">Traceless Shadow: While surrounded by Darkness, you don¡¯t emit a scent and can only be heard when the noise is carried by Astral Power.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 50.0363%">Special Effect</td>


    <td style="width: 50.0363%">Dark Void: While surrounded by Darkness, Concealment Magic can hide your soul.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 50.0363%">Special Effect</td>


    <td style="width: 50.0363%">Raven¡¯s Wing: You can fly by channelling Astral Power into the Raven¡¯s Shadow.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    For a moment, I was completely and utterly flabbergasted. Just the rarity was¡­ daunting. Beyond that, the defensive attributes were complete and utter crap but that was to be expected. The cloak simply lacked the substance to be truly protective but it made up for that with its supporting effects. All four of them sounded potent, especially the two completely passive ones.


    Some testing would be required to see what exactly constituted ¡®Darkness¡¯ for the effect, it might be that I still needed a magical shadow during the night because Moon- or starlight was enough to illuminate me in regards to the effect but if not, this might be a complete gamechanger. I could imagine a few ways to detect me while I was concealed. The obvious ways, sight, scent and sound were negated while I was in Darkness, leaving magical detection that likely targeted the Soul in some way and ways to detect magical usage, similar to the way I had detected some of the Shadow Cats back home. Their concealment magic had stood out to me, simply because I was so attuned to Darkness Magic but with this cloak, that danger was gone. There was no active magic involved, unless I had to hide from things searching for my soul, something I estimated was a difficult and high-level endeavour.


    That only left the Raven¡¯s Wing effect, something I wanted to try out immediately. Sadly, even as I started to move towards the door, I realised just how incredibly tired and exhausted I was after all that spellcasting. My Astral Power was nearly depleted, my stamina was almost gone and my mental fatigue was through the roof, even if I really, really wanted to try flying. Even my health had taken a solid hit, though nothing that couldn¡¯t be regenerated with a good day¡¯s sleep.


    Shaking off the desire, I quickly checked my log, curious if there were any additional notifications. And, indeed, there were multiple notifications. The skill-ups were the easiest and most obvious, though impressive nonetheless. Two points to Darkness Magic, bumping it to fifty-eight, one point to Wind Magic, bringing it to thirty and two points to Death Magic, now at level twenty-three. Similarly, Darkness Rune Mastery and Wind Rune Mastery had both gone up by two, ending up at fifty-one and twenty-one, respectively. That meant I could delve into the Astral River for new Runes for both, the prospect bringing a wide smile to my face. Last, but certainly not least, I gained an insane five points in my Enchanting Skill, bringing it to sixteen, in addition to another title.


    <table style="border-collapse: collapse" border="1">


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 98.9983%">Title Gained</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 98.9983%">You gained a new title: Epic Magical Creator</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 98.9983%">You are the first to create an Epic magical Item in your world. That act of creation will forever strengthen magical items you create, as you forge the path for your entire world.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


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    It was quite obviously a variation of the Magical Creator I had gained shortly after the change, though learning that I was the actual ¡®first¡¯ to create an epic item was a surprise, at least in that first moment. Then, I realised that I had used some fairly outrageous materials, parts of an insanely powerful spirit from another world, namely Lenore, willingly given, the Void Crystal that used to be part of a dungeon and the gathered Shadow, something difficult to create and even harder to store, all coming together in a quite complicated ritual performed by a powerful spellcaster pushing the boundaries of their ability. And with Titanic Ambition and Dragon-Touched in the mix, I was fairly confident that I was the most powerful spellcaster around unless there was some massive divine chicanery going on. And even if the Gods cheated, I doubted they¡¯d invest too much power in a single individual, simply because people were squishy.


    Back on Mundus, Sigmir and I had managed to kill the leader of her Clan, despite being almost a hundred levels below him, by exploiting shitty security, attacking while he was vulnerable and abusing my magic to keep him from acting in those few, incredibly important seconds. Sure, that mostly worked because there were very few people living in the area due to the troublesome climate but even so, a good plan didn¡¯t put all the eggs into one basket. Or too many eggs, I already had trouble gaining EXP due to my high level, so for a deity to push one of their servants this hard would be counterproductive.


    Still, I had to make sure I wasn¡¯t getting too confident. The same logic that demanded that the Gods didn¡¯t overpower a single servant, namely that people were squishy, meant that I, too, was squishy and would likely remain so.


    Sure, my physical attributes approached those I had on Mundus with nearly a hundred additional levels but that was mostly because my physical attributes had been trash, leaving me fairly vulnerable. No, even with the additional attribute points, my focus had to be concealment and attacking from afar, the classical mage, even if I was a Sorceress. Which was okay, I didn¡¯t want to mix it up in close combat, even if I could hold my own. Mostly.


    Grinning, I focused on putting one foot in front of the other, slowly making my way through the damaged house and into the basement where we had set up camp. The area we were currently in had been hit hard, leaving only a few houses intact, this being one of the best, especially with the basement providing shelter.


    Opening the door, I stepped in, only to be met with an incredibly agitated Silva, who growled and snarled at nothing, while Luna was behind her, ready for combat. Neither of them relaxed when I entered, causing me to frown, uncertain of what was going on.


    Suddenly, a powerful, silvery glow surrounded Luna and she stared in my direction but not quite focused on me, her eyes glowing with bright, silvery light.


    ¡°Mom?¡± she called out, clearly confused while Silva let out a low, somewhat threatening growl.


    ¡°Of course, who else?¡± I replied, only to be ignored by them. It took me a moment to realise that I was still in darkness, wearing my new cloak, so they couldn¡¯t see me, smell me or, apparently, hear me. Even when I talked, unless I channelled Astral Power into my voice in some way. How, I had no idea but for now, it didn¡¯t matter.


    Pulling aside my cloak, I experimented a little with how much of it had to cover me, until the eyes of my daughter and hound finally focused on me, once most of the cloak didn¡¯t cover me any longer. It looked like I didn¡¯t have to worry about rolling around while wearing it, or making sure my feet remained covered at all times, just about a quarter of it had to be around me to trigger its effects, bringing a wide smile to my face, even while Luna looked at me with suspicion and confusion.


    ¡°It¡¯s me, munchkin,¡± I assured her, watching how Silva sniffed the air, deciding that I truly was who I claimed to be and letting out an annoyed huff.


    ¡°I made a new cloak for me, it allows me to remain hidden a lot easier than before. Though; I might have to figure out some way for all of you to keep track of me, or it might be dangerous in combat,¡± I admitted, realising that complete and permanent concealment could be quite dangerous. I had no desire to remain invisible while bleeding out because some attacker had gotten lucky. Being unable to receive support because I was too well hidden sounded like a bad day.


    ¡°Mhm, it was weird, I could still see your presence with my Eyes, but I couldn¡¯t see your body, not really,¡± Luna explained, only to shrug at her limited vocabulary.


    ¡°Let me think about it, I¡¯m sure there¡¯s going to be some way. But tomorrow, for now, I want to get some sleep, I¡¯m incredibly exhausted, this was hard work,¡± I added, lying down on my mat after undressing, only for Luna to snuggle up to me.


    Moments later, I was out like a light, dreaming of nights to come.

 Chapter 924

    Flying. Ever since I had gained the ability to experience Lenore¡¯s memories and feel the sensation of flight within them, I had been hooked. I had flown within my dreams, eventually, I had flown by hitching a ride in my Hallow and, near the end of my journey, I had been able to glide using a wing of Ice and repeated teleports. So far, I had never been able to truly fly under my own power and agency, even if the gliding had been quite close.


    And now, that changed, now, with the Raven¡¯s Shadow covering my back, I would be able to fly. I could hardly wait and despite my incredible exhaustion, I couldn¡¯t sleep all afternoon, waiting for the Sun to go down. While some of my traits had reduced the effect of the Sun¡¯s Curse on me by a huge margin, I wasn¡¯t about to experiment with flight while being drained. I had no desire to find out that there was some sort of destructive component to the curse that kicked in when somebody was a certain distance from the ground or possible shelter, it was a risk I was simply unwilling to take, no matter how excited I was.


    Luckily, I had another fairly exciting thing to consider, namely what Runes I wanted to scry for in the Astral River. Wind Rune Mastery and Darkness Rune Mastery were both eligible for a new rune, though I wasn¡¯t quite sure what I wanted. A part of me wanted to search the Wind Magic for a Flight rune, but I doubted I could get that yet. Maybe pressure, as an integral part of flight would work and the concept was part of my recently developed wind-based acceleration spell, so I should be able to get it.


    As for Darkness, I truly wanted the ¡®Magic¡¯ rune, simply because it was stupidly versatile, fitting into essentially any runic formation. It wasn¡¯t as efficient as some more specialised Rune, but it was a Darkness Rune, so I could slot it in for other elements that I had less affinity with and the efficiency would even out.


    Shifting into the Astral River was easy, as was looking for the different elemental streams. Wind was quite faint, as I was in our underground shelter but there was Darkness, both from the darkness underground and because the Sun above was going down for the day and the summer was rapidly fading into autumn, bringing Darkness into ascendance.


    Delving into the playful stream of Wind Magic, I found what I was looking for almost instantly. It wasn¡¯t flight, even trying for that gave me a headache, but it turned out my second choice, Pressure, was a fragment of it.


    With Darkness, things were a little more complicated. I remembered that the Curse Rune was part of the Magic Rune and by using it as a foundation, I could reach for Magic. It wasn¡¯t easy, I could feel parts of the Astral River ebb and flow around me, almost as if I was trying to put a square peg into a round hole, but it worked. Not smoothly, but it worked and I could feel the Rune coalesce in my mind, while the Astral River around me shuddered just a little bit.


    Relaxing my mind, I returned to reality, leaving the Astral River behind. It had taken more time than expected but maybe that was for the best. Now, the Sun had vanished behind the horizon and twilight was taking over the world, so I could finally fly. Not too high just yet, there was that tale of Icarus and while I doubted my wings could melt, I was not about to chance it.


    Stepping out of our temporary shelter and into the gloom of dusk, I took a long, deep breath, pushing away all the worry, anxiety and excitement that had been fermenting in my gut today. I knew there were things that could go wrong with the wings but I had a literally epic item and I would be a fool to ignore the options it provided.


    Feeling the faint connection between me and the cloak, I carefully channelled Astral Power into it, happy that the gloomy light around me meant I didn¡¯t have to worry about channelling Astral Power into them the right way to activate the flight instead of concealing my soul.


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    The moment my Astral Power went into the silky fabric, I realised that it was only taking a small part of my power, namely the Wind Magic Power within it, the rest was wasted. Luckily, I had enough control to only channel that element, essentially using Wind Magic on the cloak, to keep the waste down and my efficiency high, but that was for later. For now, I could feel the cloak on my back ripple and split, the shadowy fabric flowing upwards and spreading across my upper arms and shoulders.


    Turning my head, I had to blink for a moment when I realised that the cloak didn¡¯t just give me the ability to fly, it literally gave me a pair of wings, each about a metre and a half in length, like the cloak was, and coated in black raven feathers. The wings didn¡¯t quite look corporeal, there was a strange, wispy quality to them, with shadowy feathers dropping from them every few seconds, only to crumble into black dust that vanished in the wind moments later. Simply by stretching my mental muscles into them, I realised that these wings weren¡¯t there to flap, they were a mix between a symbol and a focus, allowing me to magically lift myself in the air, no muscle strength required. Just magical strength, and quite a bit of that.


    Flexing the Wind Magic I was now channelling into the wings, I felt my feet leave the ground as I slowly floated, the entire experience strangely surreal. There wasn¡¯t any identifiable pressure, nothing that indicated how I was moving upwards, I could only see that I was. Maybe if I was going faster, I might feel the acceleration but the way things were now, it was the smoothest elevator ride I had ever been on, only without the sensation of standing on the floor.


    That part was a little disorienting, a part of my mind was insisting I was falling, while another was just as convinced that I was rising, both parts warring for dominance while the majority was focusing on controlling the magic. Maybe that was the easiest way to learn, let the instinctive parts of my mind scream in the back of one of my additional mental processes, where they didn¡¯t influence my active mind too much, while that active mind figured out how exactly these wings worked. Or how the magic I was channelling through them worked, the wings didn¡¯t really have an active component. Just magic, flowing through them and then outwards, doing something I couldn¡¯t have done before, namely lifting me into the sky. Wondering just how the normal disconnect between magical movement and physical movement was solved, I focused on the magic billowing outwards, trying my best to understand what was going on there.


    Sadly, trying to look over my shoulder to see magical processes going on behind my back was difficult, so I closed my eyes instead and completely focused on the magic I was channelling. Even after the Raven¡¯s Shadow changed it, it was my magic and the Raven¡¯s Shadow was my item, created by me and at least partially made from my power. It was mine, in all the senses that mattered, so I felt that I should be able to feel it out like I could feel out my own arms and legs.


    Not that it truly worked, the way the magic was moving through the item was incredibly complex, there were some structures within them that I faintly recognised as runes. Not that my Wind Rune Mastery was good enough to understand them, not even close, but they were runes. Just, from what little I could tell, the style was more akin to my own Ice, Darkness and Blood Runes than it was to the other styles of Runic Magic, making me wonder where the difference came from. Maybe because I had picked up my original magical styles on Mundus and these new ones when looking over the shoulder of my students here on Earth, Terra now. I wasn¡¯t sure, but it might become important at some point.


    But not now, now, I just wanted to understand how the magic worked.


    My musings were interrupted by a sharp gust of wind and when my eyes flickered back open, I realised that I had ascended a lot further than planned, putting me above the ruined houses in the area but also above all the trees and everything. Now, I was looking at the world from a vantage that would put me level with the roofs of some of the larger buildings before they had collapsed.


    And, maybe more importantly, I could see a lot further than normal and there, quite some distance away, I could see what might be smoke rising into the dusky sky. It might be something we¡¯d want to check out soon.

 Chapter 925

    Getting back down to the ground was a bit of a challenge. The Raven¡¯s Shadow didn¡¯t come with an instruction manual, so I had to make things up as I went, adapting the input of Astral Power in an effort to get the right output of lift. Floating up had been incredibly easy, nothing but applying a constant stream of Astral Power and getting back down was logically the same. Only hitting that sweet spot between cutting off enough lift to simply plummet and pushing in too much Astral Power and rising back up was difficult. Mostly, because there was a fairly abrupt drop-off point, barely below the power needed to make me hover when I started to fall, making me wonder what that was about. I had heard about planes stalling but my wings didn¡¯t use a constant airflow to provide the required lift, they were magical. And yet, they didn¡¯t care and caused me to plummet multiple times, each time with its own squeal of fear. Not that anybody had heard anything, or so I hoped.


    By the end of my attempts, I decided to simply cut off my lift, let myself drop a metre, provide new lift to stop my fall and repeat. It was about as graceless as can be, but it worked well enough and I wanted to find out what had caused the smoke. Learning to fly was, quite obviously, a long-term project, especially that part about learning how to land. Which was just about my biggest concern, my current work-around of mostly controlled falling worked well enough but I wanted the real deal. I wanted to soar up, up the long, delirious burning blue, to top the wind-swept heights with easy grace, where never lark or even eagle flew, as the poem went.


    Alas, while learning how to fly was definitely on my list of things to do, there were other matters to attend to. I wasn¡¯t about to have my companions wait for me any longer, certainly not here in this incredibly boring and destroyed area where they had pretty much nothing to do. Unless one of them came across something interesting while I had been busy these last two days, I wanted to continue onwards. That I had seen smoke, and thus most likely fire and a possible group of survivors only increased that desire.


    Survivors, or rather teaching them, had some significant advantages, especially when it came to gaining EXP. Otherwise, I had to track down ever-stronger enemies and while I relished the challenge of combat, finding those enemies was getting difficult. Sure, searching for new and interesting resources to gather was something that went hand-in-hand with searching for enemies and it had its own advantages, to the point that I had gained a level on our way here, bringing me to seventy, but I noticed just how much my levelling had slowed down.


    Mostly because I was now level seventy, while the usual Undead had pretty much stalled their level around level fifty. Shattered got a little higher but as they levelled, they gained an animal cunning that allowed them to hide fairly well, to the point that I needed direct observation to detect them. A casual glance was simply not enough, while Lia and Luna couldn¡¯t detect them at all unless the Shattered was engaged in combat.


    Nonetheless, level seventy had been a nice milestone for me. Getting the spread attribute bonus from Dragon Touched meant my Endurance went to thirty, bringing with it a fairly minor, but quite useful, trait named Infused Body, reducing the strain my magic put on my body when subject to it by a small amount. I had a feeling it would primarily help with the strain from using Blood Magic to enhance myself but it might also work for the physical strain from casting too much magic at once, something that was hard work. I hadn¡¯t been able to really test that part, simply because it was difficult to observe something that only made a small difference, but I wasn¡¯t about to complain.


    On the other hand, the Trait I got for having forty-five Intuition was something else. It was called Perceptive Infusion and likely a fruit of the many, many hours I had used Earth- and Crystal Magic to shape Hecate¡¯s shrine. It allowed me to use the Astral Power I infused into objects to perceive them in great detail, making it far, far easier to detect different layers in a substance, to find impurities, weaknesses and so on. Or even figure out what affinities something had, I had used the trait quite a bit when preparing the ritual that ended up with the creation of Raven¡¯s Shadow. Without it, figuring out which materials carried what elemental affinity would have been a lot harder. Sure, I had Affine Insight but that worked off my magical senses, so my sight, my smell and taste, making it a lot harder to detect whether some internal part of an object had the required attributes.


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    Now, as always after gaining new attributes, I had to decide whether I wanted to put my two free points into Intelligence or not. There were arguments for it, there were arguments against specialising and, knowing myself, I would roll those arguments through my mind for a few days before coming to a decision. Judging by past performance, I¡¯d put the points into Intelligence, just as I had before, but I didn¡¯t want to simply default there, using them somewhere else might be prudent. Maybe getting traits for Agility, at thirty-five, and Strength, at thirty, or making sure I could get a trait in Intuition when reaching level seventy-five. Arguments would be made, even if only in the depths of my mind, but that was for future-me to consider.


    For present-me, I had to collect my daughters, in addition to Silva and Alex, so we could find out what was cooking in the West. Or if there was somebody cooking, the smoke might come from something other than fire, or from fire that wasn¡¯t attended. Prudence would be our best friend during the approach, prudence, caution and a whole lot of stealth.


    A part of me was tempted to wait until it was fully dark and experiment with the cloak some more. Using it to sneak up on whoever made that fire, simply to see how well it worked sounded like such a fun idea but I wasn¡¯t certain if it would work out well. I wasn¡¯t worried about giving myself away, the cloak was that good and it was made only better by my magical abilities but I wasn¡¯t confident I could make use of the information gathered. Maybe I could sneak in to make sure that the people weren¡¯t some cannibal cult or something along those lines, but personal information? No, I wasn¡¯t confident I wouldn¡¯t accidentally give away that I had spied on them, not with people like Mrs Wu who might be out here.


    But, before I considered what to do about people, I should find out if there were any. The fire might be from something else, there were Scorched out there, to say nothing of possible other creatures aligned to fire.


    We wouldn¡¯t find out until we actually got there. Getting the others moving was fairly simple, they had all been fairly bored, to the point that Lia and Luna had worked together on some schoolwork. Or rather, Lia had helped Luna with her spelling and writing, while making sure that her own skills, inherited from Chantalle as they were, remained in working condition. So far, neither Lia nor I had noticed that we started to lose our old language abilities, despite the fact that I had a feeling neither Vampires nor Firn Elves would naturally speak English.


    Luckily, that part of the traits hadn¡¯t carried over, at least for me. Otherwise, given that my traits literally took away my country of origin and all connections to social groups, I would either be limited to some ancient elven dialect only understandable to those with Loki¡¯s blood or some other trouble. It certainly wouldn¡¯t allow me to communicate with other people, maybe not even with Lia, despite her sharing my blood.


    Once we were moving, we made good time. Moving through the night was something we all were well accustomed to, to the point that I wasn¡¯t certain we would move faster during the daytime, even if we ignored the debilitating effect the Sun had on Lia, Alex and myself. The night gave us a great deal of visual cover, sheltering us from potentially hostile eyes while we had adapted.


    However, our adaptation to the night didn¡¯t prepare us for what we found when we reached the area I had seen the smoke coming from. Instead of some community filled with survivors, we came across a massive, sprawling ruin, still burning and filled with smoke and noxious fumes. Astral Power thrummed in the area, strong and persistent, the source natural and quite obvious, this place had once been a place of Fire and now, after the change had come, it was no longer chained.


    I wasn¡¯t sure what the industrial park used to be, maybe some large-scale powerplant, maybe some sort of factory working with hot metal, whatever the case may be, it was now all gone. Gone and replaced with the closest representation of a fiery hell I could imagine.

 Chapter 926

    The industrial complex we had come across was massive. A part of my mind was rapidly parsing through my memories, trying to figure out what exactly this place used to be. Sadly, it was fairly difficult to estimate where we were, as the change had shifted things more than readily apparent, to the point that old maps were more suggestions than accurate representations of reality. Furthermore, even if I had a good idea of where we were, it would take a major coincidence to know what industry used to be in that area, though given the sheer size of the industrial area, I might have known.


    Not that the question really mattered. The change had clearly messed this area up beyond all recognition, to the point that no written signs had survived, nothing to give us a hint of what might be waiting for us. Well, nothing physical from before the change at least, my senses could tell me quite a bit about the area otherwise. Fire was thick in the air, a stench of ash, heat and charred rocks, strangely distinct and incredibly pervasive, it was about as strong a warning as I could imagine. Sadly, that didn¡¯t mean I knew what the fire might do, what forms our enemies might take, at best I could compare it to the frozen swamp I had encountered near Ashenforge Hold on Mundus. There, the air had been filled with a chilling stench of decay, while here, it was the scent of blistering heat.


    Another good thing about our approach during the night was that the fires stood out brightly, making it easy to see them. Not that I was really happy about knowing that there were hundreds of individual fires burning within the complex, all dancing and flickering, maybe moving given the way the light was shifting around, but it was good information to have. Not welcome, but better to know about it and make plans than to be ignorant had get a burning surprise.


    For a moment, I looked at the others, uncertain if I even wanted to explore. On one hand, EXP, worthwhile enemies and opportunities to raise skills that were all hard to come by. On the other hand, there was far too much fire involved for me to be comfortable, quite literally given the warmth I could feel from hundreds of metres away. The place had to be as hot as the warmest summer day, while exposed to the burning sun, and that was in the middle of the night, though without any perceivable wind. Maybe that was something I should look into, conjuring up a good bit of wind in hopes of replacing the air currently heated by the numerous fires with something fresh and new. It wouldn¡¯t last long, there was far too much stone in there, all heated and sometimes burning, to easily cool it with air but it might help for a bit.


    Or, if I really wanted to cool the area down, I could take my time and slowly bury it all in snow and Ice, I could violate the fire so badly it would never again dare to rear its ugly head. The thought brought a smile to my face, even as I realised that my wish to annihilate the heat here was born from my still lingering distaste for Fire magic, something I hadn¡¯t shed even after I gained the Fire Magic skill. Maybe admitting that something could be useful while disliking the very thought made me a hypocrite but I had a feeling it was true for many sapients, especially humans. There were things we all found useful but preferred to feign ignorance about, simply for our own peace of mind and conscience.


    However, given the sheer amount of natural Fire Astral Power in the air, I wasn¡¯t sure I would be able to cool it down. It would be like trying to drain a river, or maybe a spring would be a more appropriate comparison. Unless I managed to fundamentally change the environment, the fire would reassert itself and while it would be an interesting challenge to try overpowering the fundamental change this area had undergone, I wasn¡¯t sure it was the most suitable use of my time. To say nothing about the question of possibility and the lasting effects if I were to succeed. I might just throw the entire Astral River out of its current bed, returning it to the frothing, violent state it had been in right after the change. That, in turn, would extend the time needed for Nexuses to form, setting back my plans to gain power even more. This might, eventually, become a minor node of Fire of some kind, an area of wild Fire Magic, so not something I¡¯d ever enjoy. But, on the other hand, its existence almost demanded that there was an equivalent for Water or Ice out there, and that was something I was greatly interested in.


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    ¡°This is a fascinating place,¡± Luna quietly admitted, likely feeling the same, thick Astral Power I was feeling though her thoughts were likely going in a different direction.


    ¡°It might be another dungeon, the open variety,¡± I explained, carefully feeling out the area. If that was the case, I wondered where the enemies were, back on Mundus they hadn¡¯t been content to tightly stick to the area of an open dungeon. Or maybe what we were looking at were the surroundings of a contained dungeon, partially leaking out in some way and once we ventured deeper into the area, we would encounter its defenders.


    Next to us, Alex was quietly chittering, excitement incredibly obvious. Similarly, Lia looked quite interested, though I could see that her interest in possible alchemical acquisitions was tempered with a dislike for Fire that mirrored my own. Still, I could see that going in there was too useful for the group to allow my own distaste to control me, especially as I knew I should go in. Necessity ruled us all, though I didn¡¯t have to like that fact.


    ¡°Let¡¯s see if I can get a better idea of what awaits us in there,¡± I decided, trying to weave a bit of Darkness Magic into a scrying construct. While I was far from my scrying abilities on Mundus, I was slowly getting them back, especially as I now had access to the Magic Rune. It was an incredibly useful tool to create all sorts of lasting constructs and through them, effects, the scrying just one of them.


    Soon, I had a fairly featureless blob of shadow, linked to a second patch I controlled in the middle of the magical formation I had created. It took a little more power than I really wanted it to take, but efficiency was something that could be improved upon later, for now, I was just happy that it worked. At least mostly.


    Moving the dark blob was fairly simple as well, it didn¡¯t require any understanding of flight, like Lenore¡¯s raven constructs had, but it needed a lot more power and was incredibly obvious. A floating blob of complete darkness was only subtle in the middle of the night and with the light coming from the fires in the area ahead, it was completely obvious. Any intelligence would know something was wrong and many things would be able to strike at it. As of yet, the construct had enough physical presence to be disrupted by almost any attack, making it less useful than I¡¯d like. But at least I had been able to tie the feedback to a secondary construct, constraining my window of observation but insulating me from any retribution for my actions.


    Sadly, while I could move the construct, I could immediately feel that it wouldn¡¯t last long. It was too fragile and not woven tightly enough to withstand the disruptive effects of the wild Astral Power all around the area. Even worse, the Astral Power was almost entirely composed of Fire, with some derivative light added into it, making it anathema to my dark construct. If I had tried to add some mist into my construction, as I had briefly contemplated, the effect would be even worse, so at least there was that.


    But it worked as an experimental measure and I could begin to get a somewhat better idea of the area. Sadly, that idea was mostly just how broken everything was, walls, ceilings, the entire area looked like some of the photographs I had seen in history class dealing with the Second World War and completely bombed-out cities. Only, here the fires were still there, only they didn¡¯t appear to be tied to anything physical.


    The first fire I could observe with my scrying construct was burning merrily on a broken wall, with no fuel in sight. It appeared to be an entirely magical effect though without looking at it directly, I wouldn¡¯t be able to understand any details.


    So, I continued on, searching around for a few more minutes until I had to let the construct dissipate as the drain on my Astral Power mounted.


    All in all, I had been unable to find any really useful information but at least I had gained another point in Darkness Rune Mastery, bringing the skill to fifty-two.


    If I wanted to know more, we¡¯d have to head into the fire.

 Chapter 927

    Given that I felt it was likely for this area to be another dungeon, there was ultimately no other choice but to head in. The ever-growing trait for exploring new dungeons was precious, to say nothing of the EXP and loot we could find within. Every magical item I came across was valuable, even if it was one none of us would use. In that case, it gave me something to analyse, even if it potentially meant the destruction of the item, allowing me to learn more about permanent enchantments. While I doubted I¡¯d come close to replicating my cloak, there were lesser items that I could create.


    With the Magic-rune, I had made a few more enchanted rings, increasing my skill in Enchanting by another two points. Only small increases in new attributes, nothing game-changing, but valuable and interesting nonetheless. Sure, an extra point of Intelligence was awesome, as was the slight increase in my Astral Power regeneration, but it wasn¡¯t giving me anything new. Just a small increase but if I could add multiple minor improvements together, it would become a major one. Maybe I¡¯d be able to recreate the enchantment and weave it into my actual clothing, the greater surface area would hopefully improve the effect even further. But that was something I had to work on a lot more before I could make it a reality. Now, we had an industrial park to explore.


    Just walking across the strangely distinct boundary reinforced my suspicion that we were dealing with a dungeon. While there was no notification about us entering one, that only meant the dungeon wasn¡¯t contained. Or it might just be an area of Wild Magic around a contained dungeon, or just a random one, there were multiple ways such things could come into existence. But whatever the case may be, I could feel the heat in the air, both as a physical presence and as a magical taint. This place wasn¡¯t welcoming, especially not to me.


    It wouldn¡¯t kill me, at least not within a day or five, but I knew I wasn¡¯t at my best, my efficiency reduced by a not insignificant margin. Not a large one, sure, but a measurable on that I didn¡¯t appreciate in the slightest. Which, most likely, made matters only worse, as knowing I was weakened made me irritable, further distracting me.


    Forcing my thoughts aside, I focused on the environment. There was danger here, of that I was fairly certain, but I wasn¡¯t sure what sort of danger it might be Maybe some sort of fire elemental or animated slag piles, everything was possible. Or maybe some sort of animal, adjusted by the fiery environment to become some sort of proto-dragon, a salamander or something along those lines that eventually if a few hundred years passed, might become something more.


    Amusingly, that thought only made me want to find such a being and ensure that it died a quiet, cold and very final death, the desire surprising me with its viciousness. Though, maybe I shouldn¡¯t be, I was well aware of my dislike for fire and given that dragons were supposedly territorial creatures, it made sense that I wouldn¡¯t want there to be another being that would eventually become a dragon. Not if the Dragon-Touched trait and my Draconic Sorceress class were to be taken seriously, as both indicated I might, or maybe would, become one. I wasn¡¯t sure of the mechanics but some of the notifications had strongly implied it.


    But the future would be dealt with once it arrived, for now, I had other things to worry about. Mainly, what might lurk behind the corners and whether or not I should try to remain invisible, leaving Luna open to potential attacks, or show myself and be prepared.


    The biggest problem was that I could already tell that the lighting in this area was too inconsistent to provide me with sufficient shadows to comfortably remain invisible. There were many flickering flames all around us, more than I had thought when looking in from outside or scrying through the construct, meaning I¡¯d have to be careful or make my own Darkness. The second would always work, but the advantage of invisibility was that nobody knew you were there, nobody would even know to actively search for you. If I conjured up Darkness, that advantage would go away, even if I had a somewhat sizable patch of Darkness to hide in.


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    In this case, I decided to openly hold down the rear, with Silva taking up the front, Lia covering for her and Alex and Luna staying in the middle, somewhat protected. Our usual formation, though I added a shroud of fluttering snow around me, exchanging Astral Power for comfort and additional versatility. Whatever enemies might be waiting here for us, I doubted they¡¯d be accustomed to freezing cold and a slurry of snowflakes would rapidly chill down anything, especially if I channelled some additional Ice Magic into it.


    It didn¡¯t take long for the first opponent to arrive, a skittering noise warning us just in time to get ready. Moments later, multiple rodents of unusual size, rats that could have cosplayed as cats, came scurrying towards us. That alone, a group of eight huge rats, would be uncomfortable but given that the things were also on fire, things were worse.


    Reflexively, I channelled a burst of Ice Magic into my shroud, striking the small swarm with it. I could see tiny amounts of vapour condense in the air around my attack, making me wonder how close to Liquid Moonlight I currently was before the snowy attack struck the rats. The effect was surprisingly effective, the first snowflakes that made contact were explosively vaporised, the expanding steam battering the struck rat aside, allowing my attack to hit them all with similar effects. None were dead but neither were any of them unscathed. And, as a bonus, their fires were greatly doused, steam rising from their fur as they tried to get rid of the water the snow had melted into.


    As Lia and Silva made their own attacks, I realised that the water was still made from my Astral Power and, thanks to some of my traits, still connected to me. With a grin on my face, I channelled another burst of Ice Magic into the water, right as my two companions struck. The effect was quite impressive, the conflict between my Ice Magic trying to freeze the water clinging to the rats and their own internal Fire Magic was violent enough to cause some strange, eldritch sparks to light up the air around them but at the same time, it was also powerful enough to paralyse the rats for a few seconds. Making it impossible for them to dodge the attacks coming at them and reducing their numbers from eight to four and, moments later, down to two.


    Even if I had wanted to try, I doubted I could have kept my smile concealed at that moment. The hateful fire wasn¡¯t able to overcome the cold and thanks to my companions, it would never flare up again. Even better, the two rats decided that my existence was the worst thing possible and tried to move around Lia and Silva who were having none of that and easily tore the remaining two apart.


    With combat over, notifications came flooding in and now I was starting to be positively gleeful. The rats had the highest level I had seen thus far in mass enemies, ranging from sixty-one at the low end to sixty-four at the high end. They were like manna for my poor soul, precious sources of EXP, just waiting for us to harvest them. Even better were the levels I got in Ice and Water Magic, bringing the two skills to fifty-nine and twenty. Less pleasant was the fact that the rats had burned away the moment they died, leaving nothing but ashes and a few strangely glinting bones and some teeth behind. When Alex checked the bones turned out to be some strange, unknown metal while the teeth were fairly ordinary.


    ¡°Okay, keep an eye out, we don¡¯t want to get caught in a swarm if there are any. These things are bound to have some nasty surprise if they have such a high level and go down that easily,¡± I warned the others, getting a nod from Lia.


    ¡°Maybe they¡¯ll explode,¡± she suggested, the idea sounding far too realistic to make me comfortable, given the way they burned away after their death. If they did, it would mean this was a dungeon, as normal monsters couldn¡¯t really rely on suicide attacks unless it was some sort of swarm or hive species, as they would die in their first combat, making it impossible to gain levels..


    With the first encounter out of the way, we had a slightly better idea of what we were dealing with, giving us a bit more confidence as we continued forward. Still, careful was the watchword. These things might not have been stealthy but they might be able to set ambushes and those could always be devastating. We should know, after all, we had used those tactics to great effect against the Withered.

 Chapter 928

    Moving deeper into the industrial complex came with more enemy critters. Rats, some small birds and sizable insects were our primary enemies, all of them fairly easy to detect thanks to their obvious fire attributes. Some were burning outright, like the rats, while the birds had bright colours, their feathers vividly red or orange, making them look quite exotic and impressive. Certainly nice to look at. Less nice was their habit of launching those feathers as deadly projectiles, hot enough to make the air around them distort or scorch the flesh of anyone unlucky enough to get hit. The insects, shaped quite similar to ants, were equally nasty. What they lacked in speed, they made up for with their tunnelling and ambush tactics, coming up from underground or burrowing through walls to launch sudden attacks with a highly flammable liquid they immediately set ablaze. Just from the looks of it, I was reminded of Mrs Wu¡¯s field manual for asymmetric warfare and the homemade napalm described within.


    All three types of enemies were incredibly numerous, attacking in groups of five to fifteen, with levels between sixty and sixty-five. Luckily they all lacked the durability to become serious problems. Their weakness to Ice and Water meant I could directly counter their attacks, opening them up to brutal reprisals from Lia and Silva, while Luna and Alex focused on supporting me. It worked out incredibly well, to the point that we stopped trying to find the centre of the area and simply started to kill anything that moved, gaining a tremendous amount of EXP, while my own Ice and Water Magic went up by a fair margin. By the end of the night, I had gained enough EXP to level twice, the first time fairly early in our grind, the second just before we left the area, thanks to a special encounter. That second level brought me to level seventy-two, rounding things out nicely. In the time we spent fighting, my Ice Rune Mastery went up by one, reaching level fifty-five, my Ice Magic, mainly used to directly manipulate temperature and control my conjured snow, went up by two-reaching level sixty-one and my Water Magic reached twenty-two.


    Just before we got out of the area, I felt myself freeze when I noticed a particularly powerful aura of fire. Unlike the somewhat diffuse auras of the swarms of smaller creatures we had encountered thus far, this was a singular, comparatively powerful enemy, maybe even strong enough to match me in level. Just like everything in here, it radiated fire magic, though there was another element mixed in.


    ¡°Incoming, not sure what,¡± I warned the others, gesturing to the rubble-covered street I felt the thing coming from. For a moment, I considered retreating with the others as the night had been long and productive, meaning there was no real need to face some seriously powerful enemy right now. It would still be there when we returned the next night, at least I hoped so, but would we find it? This industrial park was either stupidly large or it was similar to the forest near my home, dimensionally expanded in impossible ways. But no, at the very least, I wanted to see what our enemy was, maybe test it a little. Worst case scenario, we could always retreat, there was nothing in this place that could realistically trap us.


    When I finally saw the approaching enemy, I had to pause for a moment, making sure my eyes weren¡¯t fooled by some sort of magical illusion or heat haze. Prodding towards us on fairly short, stubby legs was a tortoise, only it was a tortoise the size of a tank with a shell that looked like it was made of glass or crystal and had fires burning all over it. Its head seemed to be on a long neck, sticking out quite a bit from its shell, and had an intimidating beak, likely strong enough to crunch stone if that thing wanted to.


    ¡°Don¡¯t get close, that beak looks nasty,¡± Lia called out, mirroring my thoughts.


    ¡°And it''s most likely a lot quicker than you¡¯d think,¡± I chimed in, already considering the best way to fight that thing, namely, to stay away and slowly freeze it to death. Or at least freeze it to the point of immobility, allowing me to take my time with its destruction.


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    Even from afar, I could see the moment the tortoise noticed us, thanks to the sudden burst of speed it put on, going from its slow, prodding movement to a pace matching a runner with ease, but even more obvious were the two gleaming eyes alight with malice, completely fixated on me. As it charged at us, I realised it would cross the roughly two hundred metres between us in a few dozen seconds instead of the multiple minutes I thought it would need. So, I suddenly had to act a lot quicker than planned, with simple magic instead of the complicated and fancy formation incorporating multiple different runes I had been thinking about.


    If the thing was this big and that fast, it couldn¡¯t be agile, simply from the amount of mass it had. It had to weigh a literal ton, or rather multiple tons, and even if it could transfer its momentum into the ground, the ground wouldn¡¯t be able to absorb it. My mouth curled into a grin as I rapidly conjured Ice, not even trying to hit the tortoise but simply coating the ground in a smooth sheet, taking away any friction the thing might want to use.


    The others noticed what I was doing and immediately moved to what little walls remained nearby, likely planning to use them to gain elevation and avoid the thing if it tried to run them over. Once I felt there was enough Ice before us, I followed suit, only that I moved back a little, spreading the Ice further and taking what I felt was a strategically useful position.


    Whatever I had done to earn that thing¡¯s ire, it was completely focused on me, not even slowing down as it barreled onto the frozen ground, causing some of the Ice to crack but not completely shatter. The effect was almost comical, especially when the tortoise let out a strange bellowing cry when it went sliding completely out of control. All four legs had lost traction and were stretched almost perfectly straight, scrabbling across the ice while the tortoise''s bulk meant it continued moving on its previous path, sliding across the ice.


    A part of me was reminded of the fun cart game I played as a child, with tortoise shells acting as projectiles, the idea making me smile until I realised that it might actually be useful here. The thing was out of control, so why not try to mess with its equilibrium? If a person could get completely dizzy because they spun around on a desk chair, what would happen if I caused the tortoise to spin around its axis on the smooth Ice?


    Sadly, before I could even try to make it spin, I realised that I¡¯d need a lot of energy to cause the spin, due to the thing¡¯s weight. I¡¯d have to strike the shell with multiple, powerful attacks, all of which would reduce its speed and lessen the impact it would have when it hit the wall, an event only seconds away.


    So, instead of trying to accomplish something amusing and effective, I went with something simply effective. There was no doubt in my mind that the tortoise had an incredible defence, likely enhanced by orders of magnitude by the shell on its back, so the obvious solution was to circumvent the shell. To me, that meant using a medium that could bypass it to carry my attack and here, given the obvious elemental bias everything in the area had, it meant water.


    Standing atop one of the few remaining walls, easily out of reach from the tortoise, I began to cast. My fingers flashed through the appropriate runes to conjure a stream of water when the tortoise crashed into the wall it had been sliding towards and, for the second time in this fight, my eyes widened in surprise. Sure, the wall it had crashed into was crumbling down but instead of having come to a stop, the tortoise had kicked out just before crashing, hitting the wall with an insane amount of force and reversing course. Everything within my mind screamed this should be impossible and yet, my eyes were telling me that, yes, it actually was possible and happening right before me.


    Still, the way it had redirected its movement meant it was still sliding and moving out of control, though luckily not towards the wall I was perching on. Instead, it was sliding towards Silva who had taken cover between the rubble but luckily, the entire redirection had given me the time to complete the magic I was conjuring. A stream of water hit one of the leg-openings of the shell, some of the water splashing inside, some landing on the ground, reinforcing the Ice I had left there. Sadly, compared to our previous enemies that I could easily paralyse by abusing their elemental bias, the tortoise had too much fire to simply fizzle, instead, the water I had conjured exploded into steam and now, with the steam shooting out of the leg-hole, I had my wish.


    The tortoise was rapidly spinning, completely out of control. That much was good. Only, how was I supposed to actually damage that thing now?

 Chapter 929

    For a few moments, I could only stare at the rapidly spinning shell, especially when it got too close to a pile of rubble and a leg shot out, sending it careening away with renewed power. In turn, the pile of rubble was completely demolished, with small rocks and debris shooting away as if shot by a gun, making me think it might actually be a viable method to attack. The tortoise itself had at least temporarily given up on actively attacking, instead, it had completely retreated into its shell and kept spinning, bouncing off whatever obstacles it could find in an attempt to level the area and force us into a direct fight. At least I thought that it was its intention, it certainly looked like it.


    Or maybe it had simply decided that if I gave it Ice, it would make like a pinball or something like that. I¡¯d have preferred lemonade, but you can¡¯t always get what you want.


    Trying to get more attacks past its defence turned out to be difficult, the spinning made it nearly impossible for any liquid attacks to get past its shell while it also created enough wind to prevent gas or mist from getting near it. When I launched an Icicle out of curiosity, it completely bounced, leaving no mark or any indication I had hit at all. When I had a moment after my previous perch was demolished by the spinning tortoise and I had found a new one, I took it to use Observe on it, curious about what I¡¯d find.


    <table border="1">


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td>Fireshield Tortoise, level 75</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    Looking at the blue window brought a wide grin to my face, an enemy that was actually at a higher level than I was. Finally a worthy opponent, though one that had evolved in an incredibly annoying direction with high Endurance, some Strength and likely a few additional Traits that nicely countered me. Or countered everyone, I doubted many foes could casually ignore the tortoise¡¯s shell, though the Ice gave it a different mode of movement than running. But whether rapidly spinning and crashing or controlled running and biting was the better option, I wasn¡¯t sure yet. The spinning had to take its toll on the tortoise, so if we simply kept out of its range, with me occasionally attacking it to keep the spin going, it should eventually be completely disoriented and dizzy, making it easy prey. At least I hoped so.


    Now, we just had to keep dodging while it moved around, crashing and further demolishing the rubble around the area, showing just how much the world had changed. What had been a warehouse or some other large, fairly empty building near one of the roads through the industrial park was rapidly reduced to, well, an empty lot with a few remaining bits and pieces lying around. Granted, I had to help by adding new Ice whenever necessary but the tortoise alone was acting like some sort of giant Roomba. In addition, I used my Mind Magic, combined with my Darkness Magic, trying to increase its disorientation and confuse it. That way, it should hopefully be completely out of it by the time it came to a stop and Lia could easily bypass its shell and cut into the soft and squishy innards.


    Finally, after the tortoise had been rapidly spinning around for almost fifteen minutes, lasting far, far longer than I had thought possible, it started to slow down. Not only was it running out of obstacles to kick off to gain fresh speed but it was also starting to miss its kicks. The second was the more important part, there were more than enough other areas where we could find rubble, but if it started to miss, it meant it was getting disoriented.


    With the lower speed came nice physical openings, which I happily took and launched more attacks against the tortoise. Now, in addition to the previous Mind and Darkness attacks, I added freezing mist, especially focused on the front opening, where its head would be. I wasn¡¯t sure if the cold would decrease its mental abilities but given its fiery nature, I had high hopes for it. Additionally, I could feel the other attacks take greater effect, making me think that we almost had it where we wanted it.


    Given its previous fixation on me, I decided to act as bait, hopefully getting it into one final spinning charge, ending with its immobilisation. So far, I had almost exclusively moved from perch to perch, never staying on the ground longer than strictly necessary. Meanwhile, the others had taken cover nearby, likely making sure that the noise didn¡¯t attract any additional enemies. Or if any showed up, they¡¯d have taken care of them without letting them get to me. I certainly would have been in a pickle if a few of the fiery birds had shown up to strafe me as I hid on the few remaining structures in the area.


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    Landing on the ground once more, I moved over to the biggest remaining wall, a brick-and-mortar construction I had avoided for a good reason. It stood almost two stories high and the five-metre stretch I was standing before was the only part that remained of the building it used to be. Staring at the still-spinning tortoise, I waited for it to come for me and didn¡¯t have to wait long. While its next kick was fairly clumsy, it managed another burst of speed, maybe motivated by the fact that I was within its reach for once, and came spinning towards me, the whistling of wind quite intimidating.


    Just before it could get to me, I activated Overflow and launched a combined attack of Mind and Darkness Magic, trying to completely disorient it, even as I physically jumped aside, using Darconic Leap to get additional distance. In an attempt to make matters worse, I tried to dispel the Ice beneath the tortoise a split-second before it crashed into the wall, hoping that even if the tortoise managed the kick, the sudden increase in friction would be enough to muck things up.


    The result was a thundering crash as a few tons of tortoise hit the wall and caused it to collapse, partially landing on top of the tortoise¡¯s shell. Without the Ice I had conjured, the spinning was nearly impossible and now, the tortoise was confused and partially buried in rubble, effectively immobilising it. Adding to that, I quickly started to conjure Water once I landed, using a runic formation to get it efficiently and supercooled, thanks to the added Ice Runes. That way, the water didn¡¯t just splash against the rocks, it acted as mortar and bound the rubble into a fairly solid whole, further containing the tortoise.


    Lia, having noticed my actions, came dashing over, her blade already in hand and a wide grin on her face. She didn¡¯t need any additional instruction, she instantly moved towards the rubble, carefully avoiding the area I was coating while searching for an opening to stab into. It didn¡¯t take her long to find one of the legs and start cutting, causing the previously somewhat lethargic tortoise to suddenly go wild, trying to free itself.


    While its physical actions were greatly restrained thanks to the frozen rubble piled on top of it, I could feel a burst of Astral Power from it, making the rubble glow with heat and crack from the temperature differential between the tortoise¡¯s Fire Magic and the Ice I had used.


    But, when it tried to move, it became obvious that it was flagging and rapidly nearing exhaustion. The burst of heat must have taken a lot of its remaining power and while it managed to drag itself out of the rubble, leaving large, bright red streams of blood, the fires that had previously glowed all over its body and shell were now nothing but dim embers, its fierce power completely gone. It tried to lunge for me, but I was just too far away and when it opened its beak as if to breathe fire or something along those lines, nothing but a few small flecks of dimly glowing material came out, landing on the ground between us. Then, the tortoise stopped moving, its stamina completely spent.


    A part of me felt almost bad for the tortoise, now that it couldn¡¯t move any longer. The best it could do was retract its legs and head to hide in its shell but that didn¡¯t save it. Both Lia and I could easily strike the openings, causing hot, red blood to run down its shell and pool on the ground beneath. Its impressive Vitality only prolonged its suffering, though not for long.


    I briefly considered using Blood Magic but I didn¡¯t want to get too close, just in case the thing might get one last twitch or something and catch me off guard. Instead, Lia and I simply kept attacking until the blood stopped flowing and a notification told me we had killed the tortoise, getting a huge chunk of EXP in the process, bringing me to level seventy-two.


    Additionally, I gained several skill levels, Water Magic going to twenty-three, Ice Magic going to sixty-two and Mind Magic going to fifty-eight. All in all, an excellent result, though sadly, the tortoise¡¯s body burned away, leaving nothing but a few bones behind and its shell shattered, leaving a large collection of broken bits and pieces. Some of those would likely be useful, Lia found one that she considered turning into a shield, but that was something to investigate once we were out of the area. For now, we had to hurry up a bit, the Sun would soon rise and I wanted to get under cover.

 Chapter 930

    The more I learned about the burned industrial area, the more fascinated I became. After the Fireshell Tortoise died, we left the area to take shelter and during the day, with a nicely cool parasol made from Ice and Darkness, Luna, Silva and I explored the surrounding area a little more. Lia, in the meantime, had to stay in the shelter I dug, Alex staying with her as company and because the two of them wanted to experiment with the materials we had found.


    Keeping our distance from the charred area, the three of us started to walk, occasionally looking into the area to see if there was anything interesting. When we didn¡¯t see anything by the time we had to turn to follow the outer fence, I was a little disappointed but we continued. The disappointment continued, there simply was nothing to see but burned-out buildings and broken equipment, until we reached the next corner of the complex. And that was when I began to realise that something strange was going on here, namely, the dimensions didn¡¯t seem to fit. Unless my sense of orientation inside the area had been completely shot, we had moved further through the area than its outer circumference should allow. It should be impossible unless something was strange with the spatial dimensions inside the area. Or maybe outside the area, by now I wasn¡¯t convinced that simply because the internal dimensions didn¡¯t match the external it was the internal part that was wrong. It might be something else entirely, but my previous idea about it being a dungeon sounded more likely now. Only, there hadn¡¯t been any indication of one while we were inside, no notification nor any additional EXP from killing enemies. At most, the enemies had given a large amount of EXP but nothing too out of the ordinary, nothing that proved it was a dungeon.


    ¡°Can you check if there¡¯s anything strange about this area?¡± I asked Luna, though I had a feeling that the answer would be negative. When she nodded, I tried a few more tests myself, first I simply studied the boundary between the outside and the charred area, and then I began to observe while moving objects across it. Sadly, all my tests came back negative, I was unable to observe any real effect. The best observation I had was that plucked leaves, thrown over the boundary, seemed to lose their lingering vitality a little faster than they normally would. The difference was minute, just a matter of seconds, but I thought it was there. To get better data, I¡¯d have to repeat the test with multiple, identical leaves but after a moment of consideration, I decided against it. Simply not worth the time or effort, not if the observed difference was so insignificant.


    By the time I came to that conclusion, Luna had finished her own tests and observation, looking a little perturbed.


    ¡°There¡¯s something there, that much is obvious,¡± she explained, trying very had to talk maturely. I had to hide a grin at her efforts, my munchkin looked incredibly adorable when she tried to be all serious about something, but I wasn¡¯t about to destroy her efforts. Especially as her observations were quite good, mostly focused on what we could actually observe, like the increased temperature inside, the difference between internal and external dimensions and the incredible monster density inside compared to the completely peaceful outside area. All those should be impossible unless there was a reason for the monsters to remain within the area, a reason other than the increased temperature.


    Or maybe the temperature was all there was to the area, I doubted it, not with the amount of critters running around without attacking one another, but I couldn¡¯t really know. More observation and exploration was required, if only to harvest the insane amounts of EXP we could get. This was, so far, the best spot to quickly gain levels since I had out-levelled the Shattered a few days after the change happened. Here, I could push my advantage and I¡¯d do so as long as I could before seriously searching for similar areas.


    ¡°Say, Mom, wouldn¡¯t the access road normally have signs out front?¡± Luna asked, making me facepalm at my own inattentiveness. If we wanted to find out what this area used to be, checking the sign was such an obvious action, I couldn¡¯t believe I had missed it.


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    After petting Luna¡¯s head for a moment, we moved back to the access road, only to come across another strangeness. The signs near the industrial area were completely destroyed. Not only were they defaced by heat, but they also looked as if they had been ground away by sand or some other mechanical tool. That effect was even visible outside of the charred area, though only for the closest signs. When we followed the broken road to the next crossroad, we came across another shield, telling us that the industrial area used to be a foundry and machine parts manufacturer.


    Sadly, the information didn¡¯t really tell me a whole lot, sure, it made sense that there were warehouses and machine shops in an industrial area focused on metal but other than that? The foundry also might be the focus of the Fire energy that had led us here but without a plan of the area, there was little I could do with that information. From outside, I hadn¡¯t been able to identify anything that told me it might be the foundry, no large chimneys or cooling towers or anything of that sort. Maybe because they had been destroyed at some point or because the dimensional shenanigans going on made them impossible to see.


    Either way, while we had new information, it didn¡¯t actually help us out. Nonetheless, knowledge was better than ignorance, even if the knowledge didn¡¯t have an immediate effect.


    Thinking of the coming grind, I decided to invest my remaining free points and get another Trait for my Intelligence. Those were always useful, especially as I continued to have an almost impossible growth rate of essentially one Intelligence per level.


    Trait gained


    You gained the Trait: Increased Astral Density


    For having 65 Intelligence at your level, you gain a fitting Trait. The Increased Astral Density Trait slightly increases the amount of power each point of your Astral Power has, increasing the impact of all magic with a proportionally increased need for control.


    For a moment, I found myself confused as to why I had an increased destiny until I realised my mind had switched letters up and I had an increased density. Getting dense, heh. The realisation made things clearer, though I wasn¡¯t sure how it would work in practice. If each point held more power, I¡¯d have to use less Astral Power to get the same effect but at the same time, I wouldn¡¯t be able to use the same precision as before, simply because I couldn¡¯t ¡®count¡¯ as precisely as before. Though I never really had tried to feel out the individual points of Astral Power, instead, I had simply pushed power into my spells and made them work, the superfluous energy being just that, superfluous and thus wasted.


    Maybe I should try to improve my precision and make the most out of the power I had, while I was currently able to simply wing things and make them work, I doubted it would last forever, especially once my power was great enough that I couldn¡¯t easily interact with weaker beings. I didn¡¯t want to let things get to the point where I began to hurt people simply because my control over my magic was lacking. If I hurt people, I wanted it to be because of my intent, not because I was sloppy.


    With that determination made, Luna and I continued on our path around the charred area, mostly to make sure we hadn¡¯t missed anything. It didn¡¯t take long to walk around it, making it completely obvious that it was larger on the inside and I, once more, began to wonder how that worked. I now had seen two places that were dimensionally expanded, one where the outside had grown larger but without changing its physical relation to the rest of the world, as impossible as that should be and here one that seemed to have kept its outside dimensions but was larger on the inside.


    Neither effect should really be possible, though the second one felt more reasonable, though that might simply be my brain conceptualising things using video-game concepts. An instanced dungeon was a known concept, though none of the ones I had visited had been as blatant in their incongruence as it was the case here. Only, it wasn¡¯t an instanced dungeon, nor was there any indication of how this area worked.


    Somehow, I already knew I¡¯d get a headache or five out of my attempts trying to understand this area. And yet, despite that conviction, I also knew that it wouldn¡¯t stop me in the slightest. Maybe I should ask Alex to prepare some headache medicine or something like that.

 Chapter 931

    The Charland, as I had begun to refer to the burned industrial park, was fascinating. A part of me, the rational part of my mind, was insisting it was completely impossible. Too large, too many enemies and far too much energy, all packed into a slice of reality that shouldn¡¯t be able to contain it all. And yet, despite the misgivings of my rational, scientific part, reality obviously didn¡¯t agree with me, nor did the system, or so it seemed. There was no indication the system considered the area anything but ordinary and after repeatedly bashing my head against the cognitive wall of things I considered possible, I had decided to spare myself the headache and go with the flow. Or rather, go with the copious amount of EXP we could harvest in the Charland, alongside the materials that made a crafter¡¯s heart pound with excitement. At least it did so for Alex, Lia and myself.


    Sure, the only way we had to manipulate metal was my Crystal Magic and that took a fair amount of Astral Power while being limited to essentially cold forming which greatly limited what I could do in terms of precision and sharpness but that was only part of the problem. The bigger problem was that Alex and Lia needed to work with the metal in a malleable state without involving magic, and that was where I had to completely tap out. For that, they¡¯d need a crucible or forge or something along those lines, a place that could produce intense heat without direct magical induction. Or, in other words, it needed something possibly hidden in the Charland, which meant we had to be somewhat careful while exploring, as the destruction of such an appliance would be incredibly annoying.


    Luckily, I wasn¡¯t as limited when it came to my enchanting. I only had to find the right sort of metal, with the correct inherent magical biases, form it into a suitable shape and start enchanting. Of course, it sounded far easier than it practically was, meaning I had to sift through the various bits and pieces of metal, bone and tooth we looted, looking for something that wasn¡¯t inherently a mess of Fire and Poison. Not that those two elements were evil or anything the like, but I had a feeling they¡¯d be perfect if I wanted to make some sort of enchanted ammunition or maybe even for blades that were enchanted later. Essentially, they were great for items that did bad things to enemies, less so for items that enhanced your allies.


    It was a good thing that the Charland seemed to have an inexhaustible supply of both enemies and metal, so we only had to kill enough of the first to get the right kind of metal, which, thanks to their suitably high level meant we just had to farm the area. Killing dozens, if not hundreds, of the critters was an exciting prospect, knowing that we had come across a possibly unique area that could increase our powers would always bring a smile to my face.


    For about a week, we had ventured into the Charlands each night, making sure we didn¡¯t venture in too far, instead trying to figure out how big they actually were by staying near the edge and killing everything that was attacking us. The EXP were good, giving me multiple levels though the progress was already slowing down now that I was level seventy-six but four levels in a week were incredible progress, six if I counted that first day.


    My skills didn¡¯t go up as much, though I did get a few points in Ice, Water and Wind Magic, mostly because I used Wind and Water to carry the chill from my Ice, trying to circumvent some of the defences the local creatures had. Similarly, my Mind Magic nicely combined with my Darkness Magic, allowing me to bring confusion to my enemies, making them easy prey for the others. All those skills, and their respective Rune Masteries, gained a few levels, though none had any real, quantitive changes.


    The only somewhat significant change came from having my Agility reach thirty-five, thanks to Dragon-Touched, which, in turn, came with a Trait called Balanced that increased my, well, balance by a small amount. Not enough to be readily but it was nice to have and given that I had been perching on unstable structures quite a lot, the trait was very welcome.


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    Sadly, while gaining skills and levels was great, I also wanted to get information, mainly information on how the Charlands worked and what they were. In that regard, the only real progress we managed to make was to increase our confusion as things didn¡¯t work out as we wanted, though we did note down a few interesting observations. None that made sense but they were interesting nonetheless. Or maybe especially because they didn¡¯t make a whole lot of sense.


    The first experiment was to have Luna, Silva and Alex wait outside, while Lia and I moved into the Charlands to see what they¡¯d see as we entered. It turned out that our forms rapidly became blurry before vanishing. Not even Luna¡¯s divinely granted sight could pierce through the effect and when we changed the pairing, with Alex and myself waiting outside while Lia, Silva and Luna moved inside, I could only watch them disappear in a heat haze. No magical effects were visible, nothing that hinted anything was going on. Well, nothing but the obvious things we could observe but not figure out how it worked.


    Another experiment we tried, once it became obvious that the Charlands were bigger on the inside with a fairly unrestricted transference from inside to outside, was having me move a certain distance within the Charlands but along the edge before leaving it again, trying to get an idea of the relationship between inside dimensions and outside dimensions. It turned out, that moving five or ten metres inside brought me to roughly the same spot outside, though when Lia and I moved together inside, before splitting to get a direct comparison, it turned out that there was a difference but not a large one. When I moved a longer distance inside the Charlands, easily crossing a kilometre, my exit point only moved around fifteen metres.


    From that, we began to presume that the inside dimensions were simply so much larger than the outside, so the previous small measurement was just too small to register without a direct comparison and better tools.


    So, we tried to have Lia move in one direction while I took the other direction, hoping that we¡¯d get a better idea of the factor between inside and outside dimensions. We both tried to move the same distance within the Charlands, both shooting for a thousand steps of comparable length, but when we stepped outside, it turned out that I had moved fifteen metres while Lia had only moved five. When comparing the length of the used steps, we could only agree that the difference in length was minor, so to have such a big difference in the factor meant it wasn¡¯t linear, setting our observations back once more.


    Another thing we tried was having me carry a length of rope, well a vine conjured by Luna, into the Charland, while Luna held on to the other end, hoping that we¡¯d be able to get an idea about the difference between the inside and the outside. Again, we were met with failure, there was a roughly five-metre-wide zone that marked the boundary between the inside and the outside. When I carried the vine across the zone, it first stretched before tearing apart quite violently, snapping in ways that a normal vine couldn¡¯t.


    Luna, when asked afterwards, reported a strange, stinging pain that came as feedback from her Astral Power, something I could confirm when I tried something similar with a conjured Icicle. Physically connecting the inside and the outside seemed to be impossible, at least with our current means.


    Similarly, trying to observe the exact boundary was impossible. We tried to repeat our previous experiments and have Lia move on the boundary, with Luna observing from the outside and me observing from the inside. It didn¡¯t work out, the idea was that Lia would stop as soon as she saw me inside, before turning back to check if she could see Luna outside but there was no point at which both was possible. Just the act of turning around seemed to shift whether she was considered inside the effect or outside, an observation that only added to our collective headache.


    At that point, Lia suggested we focus on killing more enemies within the Charland and increase our skills instead of spending hours testing things only to get more confused with every experiment that failed to yield the predicted results. I wasn¡¯t quite ready to throw in the towel but even I had to admit that a part of me wanted to stop trying and simply kill everything that moved, hoping that the Charland would eventually start to make sense.

 Interlude: Survivors 601

    ¡°What are the odds that this is a natural hole?¡± Kevin asked, his voice filled with amusement. The rest of the small group that had decided to leave the farm together could only nod in agreement, knowing just as well that the highly symmetrical hole that just happened to be nicely sized for the smaller members of their group wasn¡¯t natural. For one, it was dug into simple earth, the dirt compressed to form sturdy walls, meaning there was no way for such a hole to form naturally, it simply wouldn¡¯t happen. Similarly, there were no indications of modern technology, no concrete reinforcements or anything that hinted the hole had been dug before the change, not that anyone would have an actual reason to dig a small shelter into their fields.


    ¡°You believe it was Jade and her group?¡± Wu Chunhua asked in return, looking around the area for a bit. There was a massive lake nearby, one that had only formed after the change thanks to a small river flooding and overflowing its original bed. If her former student had dug this hole, there had to be a reason for it. Maybe just because her group sought shelter for the day, she had picked up on their nocturnal habits, but there was more likely another reason. A reason that might warrant investigation, if it really was them.


    ¡°Yeah, probably,¡± Kevin nodded, after gently prodding the strange construction. There was something in the air that made him think of his teacher, a noise that wasn¡¯t physical, a vibration that he couldn¡¯t really hear in his ears or feel on his skin but he could sense it nonetheless. Thinking back, there had always been a certain melody in the air when she had been working her magic, a subtle song played by different instruments, though none he could recognise. Here, the same song was echoing noiselessly, but the instruments were once again different. The song, too, had subtly changed but it was still the same, at least fundamentally.


    Shaking his thoughts off, he decided to meditate on this particular song and sensation later, trying to get a better interpretation of his magical senses. The Pale Lady, his Teacher, had told him about sensing magic and how different people would interpret the information in different ways, some visually, as if they were seeing something only they could see, identify different elements as colours and hues, while others might hear, smell or taste it. There might even be some that could identify magic by touch, though there would be some difficulties with that sort of perception, especially when it came to hostile offensive magic. It would be quite useless to only be able to identify the deadly magic launched at you by touching it and having your finger or hand blown up.


    ¡°I doubt Samantha would mind if we use this place. Most likely, there¡¯s something they found interesting in the area, we might want to look around and investigate,¡± Wu Chunhua suggested, getting nods in turn. Exploring, finding interesting things and gaining EXP and levels according to the system, that had been their plan when setting out as a group. Not a really good long-term plan, but given the trouble brewing in their old home, it was good for the short- term.


    Hopefully, it would allow them to find a place where they weren¡¯t pressured by a rapidly growing group of people led by fools thinking they, and only they, could make decisions for the community. That everyone should follow their council because they used to be managers and business leaders before the world came apart. As if that experience gave them meaningful skills when it came to the establishment of a community in a broken world, a world now filled with strange monsters, magic and a system that summarised people in numbers, traits and skills while giving direct and fairly meaningful feedback of their personal development.


    And yet, despite that system giving people all the information and that incredibly encouraging feedback, to say nothing of the greatly increased speed of advancement if one was willing to take risks, there were some who just weren¡¯t interested. They just wanted the world to go back to the way it used to be, ignoring just how impossible that idea was. The world had changed, fundamentally so, and they clung to anything and everyone that might revert that change. Regardless of how empty the promises were, if the promises controlled the mob, they controlled society, that remained as true as it always had been. And controlling the mob, the promises did, though each member of their small group wondered just how the mob would fare, now that they, and quite a few in similar situations as theirs, had left.


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    Those who had embraced the change and the system that came with it, those people had planned to leave or had already left before their group. Just as those who wanted the world to go back to the way it used to be wanted them to, though even now, she wondered how the community would survive. Sometimes, you had to accept that the world had changed change with it. Or circumstances might force you and change you in ways you didn¡¯t appreciate.


    Later, after they had made themself at home in the small but surprisingly comfortable hole in the ground, they started to explore the area. Taking the lead, Wu Chunhua had to hide a grin at her recently discovered exuberance. Before the world had changed, she had been an old woman. Fit, incredibly so for a woman her age, but even with every trick, every exercise and careful diet, the slow decline of age had brought with it a variety of twinges, aches and weaknesses. Now, after the world had changed, so had her body though it had taken quite a while for her to really push what she could do now.


    Before leaving the people she had formed into a coherent community, she had been focused on just that, leading people and keeping them together. Even the training she had given them had been a natural extension of the work she had done at the gym she used to own with her husband. Nothing really new, nothing that she hadn¡¯t done before the world changed, the training had simply had a lot more practical applications than it had before. Or maybe it was better to call the applications societally accepted, even before the world had changed, the application of physical violence was practical. One just had to get away with it.


    Now, out here in the wild, carefully scouting the way for her small group, she felt like in the bad, old times, when she served her home country in a variety of ways nobody would ever talk about. Even now, with the world in shambles, there was a deep sense of unease when it came to sharing tales of her old work, but that might have to do with that one trait called ¡®Secretive¡¯ she had. Not that it was a wrong assessment, it merely felt strange to have parts of her innate characteristics spelt out like that. Self-recognition was supposed to come with meditation and wisdom, not with the act of opening your status.


    Now, feeling young again and no longer acting as just one of the countless cogs in a machine far larger than her own existence, Wu Chunhua felt nothing but joy in using her skills, joy and a lot of amusement whenever the system deigned to inform her that one of her skills had improved. They really didn¡¯t improve, maybe they became more natural or she got used to employing them with her improved physical condition but her skills only regained their original lustre. Maybe it was something about the system¡¯s way of categorising, that it needed her to display her skills in some quantifiable way, she wasn¡¯t sure but it sounded like something little Samantha would suggest about it.


    Hopefully, her young student was alright, her departure, the departure of that first group, had been a sign of trouble. Looking back, it might have been better to get Samantha, or Jade as she was now called, to stay and push out the contrarian influences. But then, if they had, she¡¯d still be behind a desk and occasionally work with fresh recruits, not quietly move across an open field, looking for unseen dangers. Unseen dangers that made her wish she had picked up more of the Darkness Magic her student had shown her. She could use Darkness Magic to hide decently well in the dark but compared to what she had seen Samantha do, it was nothing. Outright vanishing, getting into closed rooms unseen, moving about silently and without a trace, she really, really wanted to learn how to do that. Alas, her student wasn¡¯t here to answer her questions so she¡¯d have to figure it out herself. It was possible, she had seen that much, she only needed to figure out how.


    And figure out what was going on with that lake ahead, somewhere deep in her gut was a twinge she had felt in the past, right before one of her missions went¡­ bad. Maybe there was a reason why one of her traits was called ¡®Danger Sense¡¯...

 Chapter 932

    It was a strange and deep irony that the first magical node I discovered on Terra was one of Fire, a location that poured out a constant, though not terribly potent, stream of Fire Astral Power. Why couldn¡¯t it have been anything but Fire, I¡¯d have much preferred Ice, Darkness, Water or Air, almost anything but Fire, really. The only thing worse would have been light, though the strongest and purest light would cast some deep shadows, giving me a fascinating contrast to investigate.


    But no, as we started to venture deeper into the Charland, the industrial park of impossibly expanded size, I realised that the power to create the Charland, to fuel its numerous monsters, all that had to come from somewhere. Power, even magical power, didn¡¯t spontaneously come into existence, it was flowing through the world and sometimes it came pouring forth from nodes, the most powerful of which were called a Nexus. So, given that I was still quite convinced that it would take more time for any Nexus to fully develop, the Charland had to contain nodes of elemental Fire, though there should also be some of Earth, maybe Metal or Crystal, and undoubtedly Poison. All those elements had some influence on the area and that influence had to have a source.


    This got me started on searching for those nodes, partially because I wanted to study them, partially because I had hopes of harnessing them and, maybe most important of all, I had no doubts that there would be some sort of guardian, a powerful being siphoning power from the node to strengthen itself. A boss, as some would call it, and as such the perfect target to hunt and devour so we¡¯d grow stronger.


    Given the prevalence of Fire in the area, finding the Fire node shouldn¡¯t have been a surprise. Once we started looking, finding it was surprisingly easy. My high intuition, though I¡¯d have to start investing some of my unassigned points into the attribute soon, was enough to let me sense the ratio of elements in our surroundings with some precision and with that information, I could start looking for areas where the ratio shifted and follow those. The greater the ratio favoured a particular element, especially if there was no drop in overall power density, the greater the likelihood of coming across a node for that element. Once I started to pay attention, I couldn¡¯t help but notice that the ratio began to favour Fire more and more when we moved in a particular direction and given that Alex wanted to find a way to melt the materials we had acquired, we began to search for the source.


    Actually finding the source turned out to be surprisingly easy, while there were some creatures capable of giving us pause, our group had enough power to overcome all challengers, especially if we weren¡¯t stubborn about it. All of us had a modicum of stealth, especially when I began to add my Darkness and Wind Magic into the mix, allowing the others to move about like shadows in the night. I doubted we¡¯d be able to move about as easily if we tried it during daytime but I had no desire to try staying for too long in the Charlands, not with its unknown dimensional properties. No, we moved around during the night, scouting, finding paths and hunting enemies but before the Sun could show itself we made like shadows and disappeared before the coming dawn.


    It took extra time, but it wasn¡¯t as if there was a deadline to be met, the only one we had waiting for us was Sigmir and, well, I doubted that the dead were subject to mortal ideas of time.


    And so, we slowly crept closer to the source, avoiding battles when it suited us, crushing our enemies when we could and happily using our collective Agility to move across obstacles we¡¯d have to circumvent otherwise. Maybe I¡¯d even learn how to fly across them, a project I occasionally worked on outside, as I had no desire to fly around the Charlands. Who knew if they had some sort of strange, distorted spatial ceiling, booting me outside of their boundaries if I crossed it? Or worse, what would happen if I got attacked by a swarm of burning Sparrows, while the critters were unpleasant to face while on even ground, I had no desire to get strafed by them while I had to focus on flying. While the Raven¡¯s Shadow could give me wings, it didn¡¯t come with a convenient Lenore who actually knew how to use them. It would take some time to learn, maybe a lot of it, as I slowly learned and accumulated experience. Sadly, there was no Flying-skill, at least I hadn¡¯t gotten one just yet.


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    Once we found the node, things started to get a little strange. Or, given that we had been in an area that should rightfully be called strange without any modifier, maybe things got a lot strange. While looking for the node, I had imagined a few scenarios, trying to prepare and make plans for different eventualities, but none of those ideas and scenarios came even close to the actual thing.


    I had imagined broken metal, burned rubble and destruction, maybe a small crater similar to a volcano or maybe a meteorite impact. Something that spoke of destruction and the violent potential of Fire but instead, we came across one of the few buildings that wasn¡¯t a ruin, instead it was a fairly intact warehouse, though it had suffered some damage. A place that looked like it was in need of renovation and not in need of a large bulldozer to tear it down so people could rebuild.


    Getting inside was a little more difficult, as I could feel the temperature rising as we closed in, going from unpleasant to actual discomfort though it didn¡¯t rise to become actually painful. At least not while we were outside of the building with a closed door.


    The door we found was a large sliding door, a place to receive deliveries or something along those lines and, no matter how we checked, it seemed that it was the only entrance to the building. I even conjured a ladder to check the roof, an idea that took far more Astral Power than I¡¯d have liked thanks to the magical imbalance in the area making Ice Magic take a lot more effort than usual. Still, knowing there was no other way into the area than the door was useful, if annoying.


    Remaining cautious, we used Lia¡¯s chain hook to pull the door open from the side and it was a good thing we did. The moment a crack opened, a gout of heat blasted out, scorching the ground and making me sweat despite the distance. Anything opening the door normally would have been in serious pain, if not incinerated outright.


    At my insistence, Lia pulled the door completely open, preventing whatever was in there from using a narrow opening to build pressure. Instead, a lot of heat came billowing out, raising the temperature even further but that only meant there was less heat concentrated inside. An exchange, of sorts, and by conjuring cold water and allowing it to evaporate from the heat coming out of the building, I was hoping to reduce that heat even further.


    Though, maybe I should have realised I was engaging in a fool¡¯s errand. All data pointed to the presence of a Fire Node within the building and there was no way I¡¯d be able to overcome the constant pressure such a node could emit, not in the long run. Especially not in an area already biased towards Fire, reducing my efficiency even further.


    So, ultimately, the only thing my attempt to lower the temperature did was increase the humidity, as steam started to billow out and up, though even my prodigious power couldn¡¯t form an actual layer of clouds. A large bank of mist, sure, but it drifted upwards and diffused in the area. Maybe if I had kept at it, I¡¯d eventually have generated a cloud and even rain at some point, but no matter what, the Charlands wouldn¡¯t have cooled. I couldn¡¯t fight the natural processes of the world, not without a great deal more power. Maybe more power than the gods had, I wasn¡¯t sure but it was so far beyond me that I couldn¡¯t even begin to fathom the differences.


    No, trying to overpower the node wasn¡¯t the way to go, if we wanted to claim it, we¡¯d have to be cautious and defeat the Guardian, if there was one. Otherwise, we¡¯d have to somehow channel the heat into a workable form and use that to our advantage. Sadly, with circumstances as they were, I wasn¡¯t sure where to begin such an undertaking. Well, other than to take the obvious measure of gathering more data. Additional information would always be useful, as long as it didn¡¯t cause information overload. So, back to investigating we went.

 Chapter 933

    Staying well away from the building, we moved so we could look into the now-open door. For once, Lia was taking the lead, with both Luna and myself ready to deploy magical protections at a moment''s notice. There was a thin length of Hard Ice, with a few runes engraved, floating between Lia and the door, kept aloft by my Ice Magic and acting as the core of my defence. If things got suddenly hot, I could use Overflow and a burst of Ice Magic to turn the slim piece of Hard Ice into a sturdy wall, allowing it to take a surprising amount of punishment. I doubted a rapid channelling would allow me to conjure all of the planned wall out of Hard Ice but with Hard Ice as a basis, the wall should gain some additional durability as opposed to using normal Ice.


    Similarly, Luna¡¯s defence was primed and ready, though where mine was set to create a physical wall, Luna could accomplish something similar to the boost I could give myself using my Blood Magic, only that Luna could readily do it for somebody else. Sadly, her Life magic boosting came with some severe drawbacks, just like my Blood Magic boost did, which is why I didn¡¯t use my boost on others, just myself. Simply because I could readily recognise the damage I caused within my own body and use the very magic causing the damage to repair it. Luna, on the other hand, was still learning how to heal, her Life Magic having a greater range of applications but, consequently, having a steeper learning curve. But she was getting better each day and soon, she¡¯d be able to graduate to bodies we cared about. For now, her healing was potent but, well, there had been more than one occasion where she was regrowing some bodily tissue only to have it end up as supercancer that tried to cannibalise and devour the rest of the ¡®healed¡¯ organism. Nobody had ever claimed that Life was a nice element or that it was anything but ¡®Survival¡¯ in the most primal sense. Death Magic was, in many ways, a far gentler element, though in others Death was just as primally brutal as Life was. It all came down to the user, the application and the intent guiding the entire process.


    In this case, it didn¡¯t matter in the slightest. As Lia carefully and slowly made her way across the open space so she could look into the hall, nothing happened. It seemed that whatever was in there wasn¡¯t so aggressive that it tried to scorch every living thing moving around its domain. Or maybe it simply didn¡¯t see as people did but sensed its surroundings in some other manner, or it might just be very short-sighted. There were countless possible explanations and, sadly, a lack of reaction didn¡¯t automatically mean a lack of recognition. It might have noticed her and was waiting, ready to strike at a moment¡¯s notice if some other condition was met.


    ¡°I can only see some strange fire, not if there¡¯s anything else in there,¡± Lia reported, her voice carefully pitched to carry no further than our position. Nodding to my companion, I decided that I wanted to get a look as well, but I wasn¡¯t about to trust that my approach would be ignored like hers.


    So, remaining cautious and paranoid as I was wont to do, I grounded the length of Hard Ice and slowly started to channel Astral Power into it, not aiming for instant speed but trying to get a solid and sturdy wall to give me cover for my approach.


    Once the wall was up, I moved behind it, barely peeking out to glance into the wall. As Lia had said, the only thing I could see at first glance in there was fire and a lot of it. The space was roughly thirty on fifty metres, the gate an opening in the middle of the short side and, from my perspective, the entire centre of the hall was completely consumed by flames, a bonfire some twenty metres in diameter though I couldn¡¯t be quite confident in regards to the measurement, thanks to the shifting heat-haze in the wall and the general dimensional weirdness in this place. It might be that the hall was, in actual fact, hundreds of metres in size, with the fire covering dozens of metres or it might be the other way, that the image of the hall we saw was scaled to the dimensions of the Charland while its interior was scaled to the outside world. We didn¡¯t know and, as far as I could tell, we couldn¡¯t tell without actually heading in there. Something I was a little weary of, if only because of the blast of flame that had shot out of the hall when we originally opened the door.


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    Still on the hunt for more information, I decided to poke the fire, at least after I made sure that the wall I was hiding behind was sturdy. Raising the concrete beneath us into a wall was a somewhat time-consuming and exhausting process but we had time and I wanted to have the best protection I could get between me and whatever fiery monster had claimed the node. To that effect, I even conjured a layer of liquid water and placed it between the original sheet of Ice and the concrete, making sure that any incoming energy would have to go through the concrete, then vaporise the layer of water and then burn through my Ice. Possible, certainly, but I doubted it was possible to do so in the short time I¡¯d need to escape by either shadow-stepping in the shadow of my wall or simply running away.


    With my paranoia temporarily satisfied, I decided to start with simple, gentle pokes. In this case, that meant pulling a shard of concrete from the ground behind me and launching it into the hall with my Earth Magic. If possible, I would have preferred to use Wind Magic but with the distances involved, I¡¯d have to use a massive amount of effort to get a focused blast of wind into the doors, to say nothing of keeping that wind together long enough to have an obvious effect on the fire inside. Wind was a lot of things, but it dissipated fairly easily in calm air, making it a relatively bad conduit for physical effects. Sound, on the other hand, was also part of Wind Magic and an excellent conduit for mental effects but those were for later. If it came to that.


    So, a piece of rubble was sent flying into the hall, moving through the flame before the flame surged for a moment and, well, nothing further happened. There was no further sound, other than that brief roar of flame, no indication that the concrete had impacted the floor inside, no strike against the position the concrete came from, nothing. My poke had been completely ignored unless the surge of flame had been the fire eating the concrete, something I wasn¡¯t quite sure about. But given that I didn¡¯t have an alternative explanation for its lack of impact, I decided to remain very, very careful. And double my protections before I continued poking, just in case.


    So, after reinforcing my protections and adding a hole for me to hide in and teleport away, I decided on the next poke. If Earth didn¡¯t cause an actual reaction, maybe Water would get one. However, given that the concrete had evaporated and I had no desire to be in the open and channel a continuous stream of water into the fire, I first conjured a ball of Hard Ice the size of a beachball before filling it with water. That way, I could throw the ball and get into cover while it travelled, just in case something bad happened. A part of me was tempted to try forcing more water into the shell than normally possible, experimenting with changing densities and the phases of magical water but those experiments were for another time. For now, I simply had a ball filled with water and sent it flying into the hall.


    Compared to the chunk of rock I had thrown before, throwing the Ice Ball was simplicity itself, allowing me to precisely aim it so it would impact the middle of the fire. To make things even better, I decided to channel a mote of Astral Power into the Ice right before it reached the fire, causing the ball to shatter so the water turned into an open wave, flowing towards the fire.


    The result was quite fascinating. For a moment, the fire receded, allowing me to get a glimpse of the entity hiding within but it was only a moment before the fire rallied and caused the water I had conjured to burst into steam, obscuring the hall again. And, the next second, a blast of fire came roaring out of the hall, blackening the space between the entrance and us even further, though the fire didn¡¯t reach my makeshift position.


    Now, I only had to figure out how to defeat a guardian made of living flame, an entity that looked eerily like the guardian that had protected the Soul Prison on Mundus. Granted, if it was only that, it would be easy, the guardian on Mundus had proven that, though mostly because it was bound to the fire of its brazier. Here, the creature was sitting on an effectively endless supply of Fire, making it just about impossible to extinguish.


    This was going to be difficult.

 Chapter 934

    Realising that the creature that had settled in the fire node was incredibly similar to the fiery guardian Sunna had set to protect the Soul Prison caused me to grind my teeth in cold fury. I wanted to tear the thing apart, to rip out its soul if I could and fill it with Ice and Darkness until it was nothing but a shadow of its former self, or maybe just a Shadow and nothing more. Without really thinking about it, I launched a barrage of Icicles through the door, though it took me only an instant to realise just how futile the attack was. Sure, the Icicles struck the fire and made it flare for a few moments, but given that the elemental was sitting on a fire node, I¡¯d have to be far, far more powerful to extinguish it without a lot of preparation.


    No, a direct attack was quite futile. If I wanted to destroy the elemental, I had two options, either strike some sort of weak point and end it with a single, devastating attack or limit the amount of power it can drain from the node and starve it out. Or a combination of the two, something similar to the way I had destroyed the Yeti sitting on the Ice Node in the frozen valley. Maybe I¡¯d be able to use the node¡¯s power against it but I doubted it. An attack like that would come down to competing against it using our respective mastery over fire and, well, the thing was quite literally made of fire. There was no way I¡¯d be able to overcome it in that discipline, not for a long, long time if ever.


    If only there was a way to cut off its access to fuel, like I had with the elemental that guarded the Soul Prison, taking away the flame powering it had allowed me to overcome an enemy far beyond me. But here, that flame was quite literally part of the Astral River, gushing into the physical realm. Maybe that had been the problem on Mundus, the reason why I, despite my incredibly low level, had been able to defeat that guardian. It might have originally sat on a Fire Node, maybe a minor one that balanced the scale with the Ice Nexus in Neyto but the node shifted for some reason. Maybe due to seasonal changes, maybe due to continental drift or something like that or maybe due to the Grandmother taking action, any of those options sounded reasonable. With a Fire Node, the guardian would have been a formidable challenge, one that I doubted anyone could casually face. It would also explain why the area around the den was filled with low-level enemies. If the concentration of Fire Astral Power there was higher than it was elsewhere, the creatures of the frozen north might have preferred to stay away, leaving only those too weak to set up shop elsewhere in the area.


    But that was all supposition and by now, it didn¡¯t really matter. What had come to pass was in the past, now I needed to deal with this critter. Or rather, I wanted to deal with it and take possession of the Fire Node, if only to let Alex use it for their smithing work. And maybe to get some experimentation done, I had a few ideas I wanted to test but couldn¡¯t, not without access to a strong enough flame. The node would certainly do, but first, I had to get it.


    Only, how could I get to it? A direct attack was almost impossible. It was hidden in the fires, I¡¯d first have to get rid of the fire, at least for a moment, before I could take aim and strike but that was easier said than done. And even if I could strike, trying to destroy a creature of fire was fairly difficult in and of itself, there were no weak points, nothing that I¡¯d consider a vital area I could target. Just a whole lot of power, all packed in a volatile medium and given sentience, maybe even sapience, and license to burn.


    Water was the obvious answer when it came to putting out fires, water or earth. Maybe even Wind, depending on whether the creature needed oxygen to exist or not but I wasn¡¯t confident I¡¯d be able to either pull out all the air from an area or isolate the oxygen and pull that away. Either would be an incredibly useful way to strike and something I should look into at some point, but for now, it wasn¡¯t something I could do.


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    So, Water and Earth. Though, if I wanted to use Earth, it would essentially try to do the same as Wind would, push away all the air and take away the oxygen a fire would use but then, Water did the same, just with a different medium. At what point would I have to start ignoring the laws of physics as I understood them and start thinking about reality with a magical focus, as opposed to a physics one? What was the fundamental difference between elemental Fire or generally magical Fire and physical one? Or rather, between anything magical and its purely physical equivalent?


    An excellent example, and likely the one I could wrap my head around the easiest, was to think about my Frozen Shuttles and normal, ordinary water, poured into a mould and left to freeze. The results might look quite similar, depending on the clarity of the ordinary water, but I was quite certain that they¡¯d have some major differences when it came to their physical behaviour. My Shuttles, even before I had recreated them from Hard Ice, were a lot harder than ordinary ice and could easily hold an edge, behaving more akin to some sort of cold, brittle Iron. Maybe not quite as hard, at least for normal Ice, but certainly not as unstable as frozen water. Similarly, where normal ice would melt quite rapidly, my Ice could take some heat, though it would eventually melt. Just not as fast as normal ice and that was taking into account that some of the conjured Ice would fade back into the Astral River.


    So, what did that mean for magical Fire? It certainly didn¡¯t need the usual triangle of fuel, heat and oxygen. It needed Astral Power but I had a feeling that the other three made it easier to conjure Fire. To liken it to my Ice again, it had been a lot easier to conjure Ice while in the frozen North, even if I didn¡¯t use the snow and ice around me. The low temperature increased my efficiency and maybe the general presence of ice had increased it even further. Maybe some sort of ¡®like-calls-to-like¡¯ effect, I wasn¡¯t sure. I¡¯d test if we came across an area with low temperatures but no ice at all.


    But if I were to assume that the idea held merit, the solution might be to decrease the Fire Elemental¡¯s efficiency by denying it what it normally needed. It was already operating without fuel, at least without any I could see, meaning if I could cut it off from heat and oxygen, it would have to provide the power for all three. Cutting it off from heat meant, obviously, Ice, while cutting it off from oxygen was a lot more complicated. Water or Earth were the obvious answer but where would I have to put it? The Fire Elemental was mobile, I doubted it would just sit there and let me shovel dirt on it until the elemental was covered. It certainly would try to burn me and my shovel if I tried, so maybe the not-so-obvious answer was the right one. In other words, maybe the right answer was Wind. The warehouse looked fairly solid and contained, meaning if I could somehow keep fresh oxygen from going in through the door, I might be able to limit how much oxygen was in there. I doubted I¡¯d be able to evacuate the entire thing, vacuum chambers of that size were incredibly complicated and expensive, but keeping the oxygen out? That might just work.


    Sadly, closing the door was out. I needed the open door to reduce the temperature inside and given that the door used to be shut, closing it wouldn¡¯t destroy the elemental, that would be too easy. No, the door needed to stay open and I¡¯d have to figure out some way to stop oxygen from flowing through it while allowing a continued temperature exchange.


    If I could weaken the elemental like that, I might just be able to draw away the power from the node, eventually taking it out. But it would partially come down to distance, I needed to get close enough to work, especially for the finicky work the oxygen barrier would doubtlessly be.


    Given that I had no desire to get incinerated, the best way to get close was to move along the wall and raise a new concrete barrier next to the door. That way, I¡¯d be able to work on both sides of the door, I just had to take the long way around, or maybe I could use my cloak to fly across, though I¡¯d have to be careful. And in the meantime, I might be able to set something up for Alex some sort of simple energy tap that allowed them to drain a bit of power from the node, allowing them to do some work of their own.


    It wouldn¡¯t weaken the elemental, I¡¯d only be able to drain what it didn¡¯t use and radiate out into the environment but it would give my companions something to do.

 Chapter 935

    Creating a way to prevent oxygen from entering the warehouse holding the node and its fiery owner turned out harder than I initially imagined. The biggest problem was that I had no way of identifying oxygen magically, nor any idea how to refer to it within a runic formation. Hel, I had no idea how to imagine the physical structure, the closest I could get was remembering a model used during chemistry class, with two red balls connected by a pair of thin tubes, representing molecular oxygen. The models had been fairly amusing, allowing the teacher to plug together different molecules but at the end of the day it was nothing but an image to help us understand the concepts. In reality, it wasn¡¯t as straight forward but reality was what I wanted to manipulate. And that was where I was drawing a blank.


    I could get an idea of the emptiness between matter. While that gave me an idea of where matter was and how dense the material was, I was far from capable enough to differentiate between the different gasses that made up our air. Hel, I could barely feel the difference between air and water, making it obvious I had a long way to go.


    Without a way to identify oxygen, the idea of filtering out the oxygen while leaving the pressure inside the warehouse untouched was impossible and I needed another plan. While thinking, I decided to give Alex a way to drain some energy from the area by carving a rune formation on the outside wall, composed of Darkness and Fire runes. Thanks to the Magic rune I had recently comprehended, I could set up the formation in such a way that the energy input came from a combination of Devour, Magic and Fire while using that single Fire Rune as the centre of the output, which was a triangle of pure Fire. The formation was a little clunky, I had decided to double up on the Devour and Magic runes on the input side, making it an asymmetric seven-rune formation but, all in all, it worked quite well.


    The produced flame wasn¡¯t as hot as Alex would have liked but there were ways around that. While I doubted I could directly link multiple formations together, I could place them close to one another. With multiple formations placed together but not connected, the output could be concentrated in a single area and that was where Alex had to place the material to be heated. At that point, normal physics began to take over, the additional formations raising the temperature further than the single formation ever could, allowing them to start working with hot metal. Additionally, I gained two points in Darkness Runes, bringing the skill to fifty-six and a whopping five points in Fire Rune Mastery, bringing the skill to fourteen. Now, I could learn another Fire rune but given the area we were in, I wasn¡¯t about to immerse myself in the Astral Stream of Fire, that sounded like a good way to get burned. That would have to wait until we were back outside, maybe even until we took some distance from the Charland.


    I had no idea how long it would take Lia and Alex to start producing useful things from the metal we had found thus far but they had their endless fire while I could start working on the runic formation to get rid of the oxygen supporting the elemental inside. Or consider whether I really wanted to invest hours upon hours into a task of questionable use.


    Ultimately, the elemental didn¡¯t disturb us at the moment, it simply sat there and occasionally sent out blasts of fire through the open door. As long as we kept away from the door, we were completely fine, leaving my intense dislike for Fire in general and the elemental¡¯s form in particular as the only reasons to kill it. Well, and because it was an incredibly powerful foe, though that had just as much to do with the node as it had with the elemental itself.


    During my considerations, I thought about a formation of Air and Water, using a combination of the Water rune Flow and the Air rune Pressure to reduce the pressure inside by having it flow to the outside but the problem was, that I didn¡¯t have a good way to produce an insubstantial barrier that could withstand the fire it occasionally sent out. During my experimentation, I tried to use Darkness, only for the formation to get completely overloaded and crumble the next time the elemental sent out a blast of fire, burning away the Darkness. When I tried to use Mist as a medium, a similar effect occurred and the same happened when I tried to use a pure Wind Rune and a pure Water Rune. Neither had the durability to withstand the blasts of elemental fire our foe sent out.


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    Thinking that I might have to use Fire to fight Fire, I tried to set up a fairly large formation to create a wall of Fire across the door, using formations similar to the one I had used to create Alex¡¯s forge, only for another blast of fire to impact my wall, completely overloading it. The Devour runes I had used were simply gone, leaving nothing but molten and rapidly cooling rock, the shapes simply erased. This, clearly, wasn¡¯t the way to go.


    That part of my research went on for a few days. During the days Luna and I regularly debated what runes could work and what likely wouldn¡¯t while our nights were spent either testing what worked on the door itself or hunting for more enemies in the seemingly endless Charlands. The experimentation got me points across the board in my less-developed Rune Magics, bringing Water to twenty-five, Wind to twenty-four, Earth to twenty and Fire, despite my recent success, to fifteen. Maybe the Rune Mastery got extra growth for working in an area clearly aligned to Fire, but I wasn¡¯t sure and didn¡¯t have a good way of testing it. Hunting also had some success, giving me yet another level and bringing me to seventy-seven but the growth there was slowing down as I, once again, outstripped the local enemies.


    During the time outside the Charland, I delved into the Astral River and tried finding my next Fire rune, only to get scorched by the intensity of the Astral here. I would have to try again later, with less interference, leaving me with only the Earth Rune to find. That, I did, granting me the Stone rune, improving my control over, well, stones as opposed to normal dirt. I wasn¡¯t sure what I¡¯d be able to do with the rune, I seldomly conjured earth as opposed to using what was around me, but I had a feeling it would come in useful later. Conjuring shelter came to mind, Stone was the superior material compared to Ice, though I wasn¡¯t sure where it stacked up compared to Hard Ice. Something to investigate later, and likely a question without a real answer as both materials were dependent on my own skills and magical affinities.


    To continue growing, we might be forced to venture even deeper into the Charland. So far, we had focused on moving around the perimeter without entering, before moving in and staying somewhat close to the boundary, if we weren¡¯t heading for the Fire Node. That way, we could cover a lot of ground without heading too deep into the dimensional weirdness that was the Charland, something I was still greatly hesitant about. I wanted to wait for a very clouded day, so I could use the shadows of the clouds to try moving scrying constructs into the Charlands during the day, so we were forewarned if the area became a lot more dangerous, as I feared.


    The elemental bias of it was already obvious and if the Sun supercharged the Fire element within, it would get incredibly dangerous, especially given that Lia and I would be greatly weakened. That could be an absolutely lethal combination, which is why there hadn¡¯t been any tests.


    I had considered asking Silva to poke her head in during the day, she was the most durable of us and the one least affected by the Sun but so far, I wasn¡¯t desperate enough. The monsters we could fight on the outskirts were still giving EXP, Lia and Alex had something interesting to work on while I had my own project. There simply was no urgency to take risks and get ourselves hurt, not while we could continue to grow, albeit slowly.


    Maybe once we figured out the size of the Charlands, we could start exploring the entirety of it, or we might look for other nodes, as there had to be more than the single node relatively near the outer boundary. Those nodes might have different guardians, enemies we could hurt without what amounted to perfect and near-instant regeneration. Enemies we could force out of their comfort zone and kill or at least fight with, or maybe foes that I could weaken with some clever trickery. The guardian fire elemental was none of those things, so maybe we should look for another foe.

 Chapter 936

    After making one last attempt at overcoming the Fire Elemental that was nourished by the Fire Node, I decided to give up. Unless I had some sort of incredibly useful idea, I just didn¡¯t have the power to overcome its regeneration, especially with the environmental effects of the Charland helping it.


    My latest idea had been to conjure vast amounts of Water, store them around the node and flood the area, trying to drown it. Sadly, the idea was completely crushed by the Charland itself, the conjured Water disappeared at a greatly accelerated rate, instead of lasting for a day or more, giving me ample time to conjure large quantities and store them for my attack, Water I conjured lasted only for an hour, unless it was removed from the environment, either by being carried outside or by being consumed. Meaning, I couldn¡¯t keep conjuring and constantly regenerating my Astral Power, leaving me with just what I could create within an hour. And that was far from the quantity needed to extinguish its flame, leaving me at a loss.


    Similarly, when I tried to use Earth Magic to fill the warehouse, either using conjured dirt and rocks or by simply moving material from elsewhere, I couldn¡¯t overcome the elemental and the node it could draw power from. It simply outlasted me, either burning away the material if it was conjured or heating it to the point that it started to count as magically aligned to Fire and thus subject to its control. Once things were at that point, it became a struggle for control, a struggle the elemental could easily win thanks to its greater affinity to Fire.


    Realising that this wasn¡¯t a productive path, I decided to try something else and fell back on familiar territory, conjuring up Mist. Only for once, I didn¡¯t try to conjure mist that devoured Life through its innate connection to Blood, I tried to conjure mist that devoured Heat. It was quite similar to my usual cold mist, only that I put the focus on the temperature part, trying to strengthen the Devour and Cold aspects of my mist to the maximum.


    That worked, but only to a point. Again, the elemental demonstrated it had deep reserves to draw from, letting it bull through my magic even when I tried to imbue the mist with the ability to Devour the power of Fire by using the appropriate runes and adding them on the other side of the Cold parts of my formation. It simply didn¡¯t work, the elemental could withstand my attack long enough to leave me drained of my Astral Power, pushing me to the point that I couldn¡¯t continue without drawing on resources I kept reserved for emergencies.


    When I realised that my reserves simply couldn¡¯t match the elemental, I tried to drain Blood from the creatures of the area, using their power against the elemental, something that was far harder than I had hoped. All the creatures of the Charland had their innate bias toward Fire, leaving me with horrible mileage when it came to using their blood for anything other than Fire Magic. To make matters worse, their blood rapidly lost potency in the Charland, the power imbued in it simply spreading into the environment. I tried to combat that by pushing the Blood into the Shadows but my success was, well, greatly limited.


    My final attempt at overcoming the elemental was a mix of learned lessons and sheer bloody stubbornness, an unwillingness to admit defeat and continue exploring other parts of the Charland. It was, in many ways, similar to my previous attempts, trying to limit the amount of power the elemental could use while attacking with my own magic, only here, I was using a variation of the forge formation I had created for Alex. Like the forge formation, it was drawing Fire Astral Power from the environment, though I still wasn¡¯t sure if it actually drew from the node or if the elemental was unable to contain all the power it had and was leaking, thus supplying the formation, but unlike the forge formation, this formation didn¡¯t simply focus the drawn Astral Power, it altered the power, turning it into pure Magic using the appropriate Darkness Rune.


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    My idea was that I was capable of using Blood Magic to draw power from other sources, largely irrespective of their elemental bias, so if I could draw Fire Astral Power from the node, and strip it of the Fire aspect, I would get extra Astral Power to fight with. In addition, the taken Astral Power couldn¡¯t be used by the elemental, if the power actually came from the node, weakening it further.


    At least that was the theory. Sadly, the idea was far less practical than I had hoped. The altered formation could draw power but even making one demonstrated the biggest problem. Efficiency was, as so often, its downfall, it drew Fire Astral Power without problems but altering the power caused the stone I carved it in to heat up as the elemental parts of the Astral Power were expelled. In this case, it meant that of every hundred points Astral Power the formation could draw, some eighty or ninety points blasted into the stone, eroding the formation I had carved into it. That, in turn, meant the formation could only last for a very limited time and even when I tried to use the power it generated, the amount it provided was far from sufficient to let me overcome my adversary.


    The elemental, despite being a level below me, had just too big an advantage for me to overcome, unless I found something that could level the field.


    So, we decided to search for other nodes, hoping that there would be better opponents to fight. Maybe one of those would give me an idea, allowing me to defeat the elemental, as its node remained a frequent destination of ours, as the forge formation was a useful tool for Alex and their updated equipment demonstrated that clearly.


    One of the items they managed to create was a surprisingly complex crossbow made from metal, with a fairly advanced system of levers and pulleys allowing even the tine racoon to operate a crossbow with insane power. It was difficult to estimate just how hard the metallic bolts they had forged were going but given that one of their test shots managed to penetrate a concrete wall, I wasn¡¯t about to question the crossbow''s power.


    Another item they, this time with a lot of help from Luna, made was specifically for me. Interestingly, I had a feeling that the creation was just as complicated as the crossbow, only where the crossbow was a marvel of engineering and technology, the knife they made for me was just that, a knife. But a highly ornate knife, with small runes engraved into the blade and handle, subtly different from the way I was enchanting items. When I Identify¡¯ed the knife, it was labelled as a Blessed Athame, with bonuses to rituals it was used in and to Blood Magic. I didn¡¯t need to see the lunar motive of the knife to know it was made with Hecate¡¯s power, a gift I felt a little conflicted over. Sure, it was an awesome tool and I could get a lot of mileage out of it, but I wasn¡¯t too happy with it being given to me. I wanted to learn the enchantments myself, not have them bestowed upon me by a su¨¹¨¹psedly benevolent goddess, even if Hecate had demonstrated that she was, in fact, benevolent. At least benevolent to Luna, Silva and me, in that order.


    Still, it didn¡¯t sit right with me but on the other hand, there was nothing I could realistically do about it. Throwing away the blessed gift made by my companions with the help of my adopted daughter would alienate all the people I cared about and for what? To spite a being far older than me that was almost certainly completely jaded and cynical? At best, Hecate simply wouldn¡¯t care and write me off as another idiotic mortal, at worst she might withdraw Her blessing or actually do something about me. And rejecting their gift would hurt my friends for no actual gain.


    No, I had to take the gift and honour it, even if that small, spiteful piece of me grumbled about receiving divine gifts. Hopefully, Hecate was different from the divinities I had heard about on Mundus, mostly from Olivia. Not as exploitative but actually interested in the actions of mortals, not just trying to gain as many devoted followers as possible. Given that Hecate didn¡¯t have an actual church on Mundus, I didn¡¯t think she was collecting them, especially with a few comments I still remembered from my own character creation. The closest thing to a church of Hecate had been the Mages¡¯ Guild and the worship there had been completely voluntary and mostly private. No proselytizing, at least nowhere I had seen any during my short visits.


    Not that it ultimately mattered. This was a new world and only time would tell how it would develop. Now, we had some other nodes to explore and hopefully a few bosses to find and fight.

 Chapter 937

    Sometimes, it was mindboggling just how much the world had changed. The system, strange monsters and general societal collapse, those were things I could somewhat comprehend and wrap my head around, even the magic I commanded was something I was learning more and more about each day. But then something came out of the left field and smacked me in the head, giving me a headache with the enormity of it while making me question if the world continued to make sense. Or functioned according to the laws of physics as I understood them, at least to a point. But, given the whole ¡®magic¡¯ thing, it was obvious that my understanding, or rather the understanding of the entire world before the change, had been seriously limited. Parts had been missing and maybe this particular bit was another of those missing bits. Or it was just plain madness and the world didn¡¯t even try to make sense and work according to consistent laws.


    In this case, the headache-inducing realisation was comprehension of the Charland¡¯s scale and what it meant, or maybe would mean, for the rest of the world. Walking around the industrial park, without getting into the Charland¡¯s proper, gave us a rectangle of roughly fourteen hundred metres on one side and about eight hundred on the other. Quite big but nothing completely out of this world, walking around it took about an hour if one wasn¡¯t in a hurry or slowed down by terrain. Normal, reasonable, something I could wrap my head around without getting a serious headache.


    That changed when we finished measuring, or rather estimating, the inside dimensions of the Charlands. The space was enlarged by roughly a factor of a hundred, instead of fourteen hundred metres, the length of the Charlands was somewhere in the neighbourhood of a hundred and forty kilometres with a width to match. That wasn¡¯t the size of an industrial park, that was the size of a small country, and it was largely filled with ruined buildings. Where they came from, I had no idea, nor did the designations we found inside make sense. There were places where it looked almost as if someone had simply taken parts from elsewhere in the Charlands and copy-pasted them into existence without any rhyme or reason.


    On more than one occasion I had tried to figure out if I was dreaming, trapped in an illusion or afflicted by some other mental manipulation and the whole thing wasn¡¯t real but no such luck. According to everything I tried, everything Luna could do, the entire thing was real. It made no sense, not by any metric I could come up with, and yet, it seemed to be part of our reality, leaving me with that aforementioned headache and many, many more questions.


    For example, how deep into the ground did the stretching go? What about gravity? The additional amount of material might be minuscule on a global scale but I doubted this was the only strange area, conveniently near my home. Sure, one strangely warped area would not affect the planet¡¯s mass, and thus gravity, but if there were hundreds, or maybe thousands such areas? Suddenly, the additional area would start to add up and things might get weird.


    Where did the material come from, where did anything come from? We had checked some of the buildings, both those that looked like they fit into what I¡¯d expect from an industrial park, following roads, the numbers on buildings following a predictable pattern, things like that, and those that didn¡¯t. Those that looked like they had been haphazardly thrown into the area by some teenager playing some city-design game and was getting bored, filling the map to make it look less empty. And yet, we had found a few surviving papers and forms in both sorts of buildings, though the vast majority of documents had been burned as one would expect.


    The entire thing made so little sense, I was tempted to throw reason out of the window and decide the world had become a video game instead of it being a real world with strange elements thrown in.


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    Once we had an idea of the size of the Charland, and still no better way to handle the fire elemental sitting on its Fire Node, I wanted to learn more. One night was spent sending a scrying construct as deeply into the Charland as I could get it, only to learn that the Fire Astral Power, or something else, was getting stronger as the construct got deeper into the area, causing my construct to dissipate roughly twenty kilometres from the centre. At least where the centre would be, if our previous estimations and measurements were correct, the Charlands and the strange spatial warping within them weren¡¯t consistent, making accurate calculations impossible.


    Finally, we got a cloudy day and I was able to send scrying constructs into the park during the day. My plans were twofold. One part was to find out if the Charlands became tremendously more dangerous during the day if we wanted to venture deeper into the area, we needed to know what we were getting into. The Charlands might turn into an ocean of fire while the sun was high in the sky, or become deadly in some other manner, maybe due to a greatly increased amount of enemies. Another thing I wanted to find out was whether the expansion remained or changed, as that, too, might become an unforeseen danger. In essence, I wanted to have more information so I could make a properly informed decision about future endeavours.


    Well, exploring the Charlands like that, letting a construct made out of darkness flit from shadow to shadow had its own charm. There was no need to be constantly on my guard, the worst thing that could happen to me while exploring like that was that I had to start anew, annoying but ultimately harmless. No risk of death or injury but, obviously, no chance to gain anything other than information.


    In that manner, I learned that there were a few additional enemies around during the daytime but I couldn¡¯t tell whether they were particularly powerful or vicious, merely that there were more of them. The flames I could see on the different beasts might be a little larger and i did notice that there were some much bigger creatures, beasts the size of the Fireshield Tortoise we killed during the first night, that roamed during the day, making me a little leery of exploring the Charlands for extended periods of time. If one of those beasts came across us during the day, it might not matter how well we were holed up, with limited space we could easily get roasted. Hel, even just the sheer weight of numbers might be enough to overwhelm us, if the monsters roaming the area focused on us, the light allowing them to coordinate in ways they couldn¡¯t during the night.


    It sounded incredibly risky, though whether the risk was worth it, I wasn¡¯t sure. The EXP and levels I had gained in this area were incredible but that well was mostly dry unless the monsters got extra levels during the day. Or we could start hunting the bigger beasts, those like the Fireshield Tortoise, that way I¡¯d get a few more levels, though it might be hard, depending on their individual abilities.


    With that in mind, and knowing that trying to hunt those beasts during the day would be insane, I tried to find out where they holed up for the night, so we could disturb their slumber. Hel, I even tried to find out what they were eating, one of the monsters I noticed was some sort of giant lizard that made me think of a wingless dragon the size of a car. A beast that big had to devour tons of food just to sustain itself but I never saw it eat anything. Nor did I notice any, well, droppings, making the whole situation even weirder than it used to be.


    Finally, during one of the rare rainy days, I came across what I considered the epitome of weirdness. Just as I had during all the other cloudy days, I had used the shadows cast by the clouds to explore deeper into the Charlands. Only this time, maybe due to the rain dampening the fires, I managed to get deeper than ever before and there, roughly where I thought the centre of the Charlands would be, I saw a giant crater. It was hundreds of metres across and, even after increasing the altitude of my construct, I couldn¡¯t see its bottom, just a strange, ominous glow radiating out from it, just before the construct dissipated.


    I had been after additional information and now, I knew just about everything I could hope for and we needed to make a decision. Hopefully, whatever decision we made would be the right one, as that glow deeply disturbed me.

 Chapter 938

    There were times at which I hated my inquisitive nature. After discovering that ominous glow in the crater deep within the Charland, my first impulse was to investigate and find out what the glow was and where it came from. To figure it out, to learn and maybe get a little more powerful in the process and it was a strong impulse, one that was only tempered by the realisation that we simply couldn¡¯t charge in without proper planning. Anything else would result in a piss poor performance, one that might just doom the entire group.


    Only, every investigation into the area we had managed thus far had only shown that intruding into it during the day was even more dangerous than venturing in at night was, simply due to the increased amounts of enemies and the limited mobility we suffered under. At night, we could evade enemies and keep moving to prevent them from swarming us but during the day, we could only hole up somewhere, hoping to last till the night fell. That wasn¡¯t a winning formula, especially not in an area where the enemies were almost certainly stronger during the day, stronger and more numerous. No, we couldn¡¯t spend the day within the Charland and the distance between the crater and the outside meant it would be nearly impossible to traverse it in a single night. It might be possible, if I pushed myself to the limit, exploiting Blood and Wind magic to speed myself up while also using my cloak to evade enemies, either by turning invisible or by flying to stay out of their reach. Sure, my flying was more an extended jumping with some gliding thrown in, but it should be enough. Still, I¡¯d have to cross about forty kilometres one way, a daunting distance that¡¯d leave me very little time to actually investigate.


    And yet, despite knowing that these troubles and dangers existed, I still wanted to try. To test myself, knowing there were some dangers involved but when I started to seriously consider my options, I was fairly confident I could pull it off. The crux of the matter was that my concealment, while alone, was incredibly good. If the worst happened and I was delayed, I could bury myself if needed, using my magic to conceal my burrow, especially when adding the cloak on top of my already excellent abilities. In addition to that, I could teleport from shadow to shadow, making it almost impossible to pin me down, plus the flying thing. It would work, especially if I maintained caution, just in case the central area was even more dangerous than I could currently fathom.


    When I told the others about my plan, the reaction was mixed. None of them liked it, that much was obvious, but they could see my reasoning. It was a simple fact that I had the best chances to keep myself concealed if I operated alone, just as it was a simple fact that Silva could take the most punishment if she augmented herself with Divine Power and that Lia was the physically most powerful of us.


    So, the decision was made that I¡¯d head into the depths of the Charland the next night, while the others would visit the fire node once more, allowing Alex and Lia to get some extra work done. They apparently had a few more ideas they wanted to try before we continued onward. Judging by the ever-increasing amount of equipment we all had access to, their current ideas were panning out nicely, though some of the things they made were a little unrefined. Still, the simple fact that Alex seemed to rapidly learn the trade of a black, or armour, smith was quite impressive, especially knowing about their already prodigious skill as an alchemist.


    When we set out the next day, I realised that I was quite lucky. There were quite a few clouds in the sky, blocking most of the harmful rays of the sun, allowing me to advance quickly through the now-familiar outer parts of the Charland. While the shadows cast by the clouds weren¡¯t thick enough to let me become invisible, I tried to keep my cloak wrapped around me, even as I was running. At the same time, I channelled a small amount of Blood Magic through my body, not trying to push myself beyond what I was physically capable of but instead preventing my body from tiring as I was moving at a fast jog. I was running a marathon, almost literally, not a sprint, if I tried to run as fast as possible, I¡¯d just get tired and exhaust both my body and magic long before getting to the centre I wanted to investigate.


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    Moving through the area at high speed made it a lot harder to remain unnoticed and more often than not, the enemies in the area got a glimpse of me. The cloak was good but unless I covered myself completely there were gaps and while running, the coverage varied despite my best efforts. Most of the time, I simply ignored their efforts, dodging around the few projectile attacks they sent my way while continuing to move. None of them tried to chase me for long, the longest a particular group of fiery rats chased after me was for about a minute until I decided to leap across a nearby wall, using my cloak to get the extra altitude I needed.


    There was one tense moment after I stumbled across a giant, fiery lizard and the thing decided I¡¯d make an excellent snack or something like that. Where I had been able to evade all enemies that had tried to pursue me to this point by leaping across buildings or using walls as cover, but that didn¡¯t work with the lizard. It had enough bulk to smash through smaller walls and it was agile enough to leap up a building and climb it. My surprise at watching a lizard about a metre tall at the shoulders and three metres long without counting the four-metre-long tail scramble up a building just as quickly as it had been running after me on the ground almost made me stumble which would have been bad. To make matters worse, the thing demonstrated that it wasn¡¯t just a giant lizard, it was an actual discount dragon, complete with knock-off Dragon Breath.


    Luckily, it was just a cheap copy, far from the lethality a true dragon would have but still, the white-hot embers it sprayed in my general direction were something I¡¯d rather not get hit by. They looked like they¡¯d be quite painful, a thought handily confirmed when the roof I had been running on started to blacken from the heat. For a moment, I wanted to turn around and show this stupid lizard it shouldn¡¯t mess with me but that would take valuable time and power. Instead, I kept going, a plan quickly forming in my head.


    The roof we were on didn¡¯t go on forever, it was a strangely intact warehouse about two hundred metres in length and high enough to make me wonder what used to be stored here or if it was a product of the strange expansion. Either way, as I was approaching the edge, I briefly focused on conjuring Ice right below me, covering the area in a thin, perfectly smooth and somewhat slick, layer. Even I wouldn¡¯t have been able to run on it, not without slipping and sliding around everywhere, but I didn¡¯t need to. I could simply push off, using my cloak to glide along for a little longer.


    Behind me, the lizard wasn¡¯t as lucky and I could hear an incredibly amusing sound that I could only describe as a squawk. Somehow, I managed to twist in the air without changing my momentum or sending myself in some strange spin and could watch the lizard slip off the roof and sail through the air, completely unable to control its descent. It might have been agile for its size but it was bulky enough to make the normal ways a lizard would deal with such a fall impossible.


    To make matters worse, I decided to toss out one of the Icicles I carried with me to the ground, keeping my Astral Power connected to it until I could place it right at the lizard¡¯s landing point. Then, I activated Overflow and pushed Astral Power into the Icicle, turning it from something I could readily carry on my hip into a deadly spear. Moments later, the bulk of the lizard made sure that the spear pierced through its chest and out of its back. Another surge of Astral Power and the spear splintered, sending sharp shards into the lizard''s innards while allowing all the severed blood vessels to liberally bleed.


    Before I hit the ground one street over, I received a notification, telling me the lizard had died and I received EXP. A grin appeared on my face, wondering if I should hope for more enemies or worry about the expenditure of Astral Power.


    I still had a long way to go and every bit of power and time might be the difference between getting to the crater or having to turn around in failure.

 Chapter 939

    The rest of my marathon through the night was fairly uneventful. A few more monsters tried to get their pound of flesh from me but I managed to evade them all with a combination of speed, stealth and superior mobility. Occasionally, I had to block the odd attack with a bit of conjured Ice but I had prepared a few shards of Ice I could use to anchor conjurations at a distance, letting me create shields with ease.


    But while the monsters weren¡¯t a problem, one arose on the last stretch. As I got closer to the crater, I noticed a strange scent in the air, it was oddly prickly and stung my nose. When I flicked my tongue out to get a better read, I almost gagged from the burning sensation, it reminded me of chemistry class and the odour of some of the more caustic acids we had been shown. Nothing you wanted anywhere near your body and when I translated the sensation into an Astral equivalent, I realised it was some sort of Poison with some Fire, Death, Decay and general disease mixed in. Something that would kill somebody incredibly fast, almost as fast as pure Death Magic, but with a few extras mixed in that allowed this particular combination to spread further and, for lack of a better word, act more pervasive. Death just was, it didn¡¯t feel malicious or hungry in any way, it was a simple ending, without emotion or desire. This combination of energies felt strangely hungry in a way that made me a little uncomfortable.


    Still, I continued on, driven by my curiosity. The scent in the air got slowly stronger, allowing me to get used to it, otherwise, I¡¯d likely have puked out what little I had in my stomach, slowly me down further and using up valuable time. When I reached the general area where my scrying constructs had generally failed, the odour got palpably worse and even stronger than it had before. Now, I was no longer limited to smelling the disturbing scent, I could feel my skin prickle from the power in the air, a part of me instantly pushing to turn around and get the Hel out of this area. Similarly, I noticed that the number of monsters had gone down and in turn, they had gotten a lot stranger than before.


    Where near the outskirts, the monsters had mostly been shaped like animals, just with a clear elemental bias and influence, that was no longer the case near the centre. Instead, the monsters were just disturbing, malformed things with some remaining animal features but the rest was purely alien. Some of it made me think of strange, modern arts, caricatures of living beings thrown together haphazardly, somewhat reminiscent of the way the outer parts of the Charland seemed to have been put together by pressing ¡®random¡¯ while duplicating what buildings had been in the area before. Other parts were even weirder, where the modern arts parts at least appeared to be organic, those bits were clearly not. Some of them looked crystalline, others metallic and some even had a glossy sheen that made me think of plastic. Almost like somebody had gone diving in a landfill and collected whatever came to mind before sprinkling it into the creature template. The poor monsters didn¡¯t look like there was any rhyme or reason to their existence, only pain.


    Granted, it might be that I projected my own expectations onto the malformed beings, trying to imagine how I¡¯d feel with a body like theirs, coming away with the realisation that even imagining was painful. These poor beasts were simply wrong and the only reason I didn¡¯t stop to put as many down as I could was that I was already pressed for time. Still, I made the effort to put a few out of their misery, even if it cost me a little more Astral Power than I¡¯d have liked. I was pleasantly surprised when the EXP they provided was accumulating quickly, pushing me to level seventy-eight before I reached the centre and the strange, glowing crater I wanted to inspect.


    Just before I reached that crater, the air changed once more. The stinging sensation I had experienced for the last bit intensified even further and now, it was getting painful. Painful enough that a quick glance at my health bar told me I was actually losing HP, my condition slowly deteriorating despite my passive regeneration and, at least for a spellcaster, excellent endurance and vitality. If I brought Luna here, she¡¯d be in grave danger of dying from nothing but the magic in the air, a realisation that sent a shiver down my spine despite the blistering heat in the air around me. This was getting worse and worse, the sensation almost bad enough to push me back.


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    Instead, I decided to try something else and paused, quickly drawing a runic formation in the air before me. It was something amusingly familiar, conjured mist with a little extra, my favourite weapon of mass destruction. Only, instead of the mist being imbued with the power to devour the vitality of my foes, I imbued it with the power to devour magic, trying to make something to absorb as much of the power in the air as possible, turning it into something less hazardous to my health. Simple Cold would be wonderful but even pure magic, Hel, even harmless heat would be preferable.


    And it worked, at least to the point that I no longer lost health. Instead, I had to keep a bit of focus on the magic I was channelling, slowing me down a little, but I felt it was worth it. I only had a few hundred metres to go, maybe a kilometre, but that was okay. Slow and steady would win me this race, to say nothing of the comfort that came with resting my exhausted legs. Running for hours was not quite what I considered enjoyable, even with my excellent attributes.


    It didn¡¯t take me long to cover the last stretch, the mist and my cloak meant I was comfortable and well-hidden until I stepped out of the industrial devastation I had travelled through the last few hours and onto a short stretch of empty land. Ahead, I could see the hole and the opposite side, the strangely steep slopes and even the odd, almost vertical cut-off. As if the hole ahead was half of a sphere where the matter had been removed and the Earth had yet to compensate and form the usual slopes and angles. It was, almost certainly, unnatural formed though I wasn¡¯t sure if I wanted to know what could carve a hole hundreds of metres across into the earth as if they were scoping out ice cream.


    Carefully making my way forward, I finally got to the edge, noticing that I needed more and more power to keep the misty shroud around me going. Looking down, I felt almost disappointed for a moment, only for the disappointment to vanish and be replaced with worried wonder.


    Looking down into the crater revealed an incredibly odd sight. There was water gathering at the bottom of the bowl-shaped hole, something to be expected given that there had been some rain the last few days, but what was not expected was that the water was boiling. Boiling, without steam rising from it. The only reasons I thought it was boiling were the constantly rising bubbles and the visible heat haze I could see even from a distance.


    In the middle of the strangely boiling pool was the source of my worry. A large, crystalline formation, jagged shards of multicoloured crystal sticking out of the water like some gigantic gemstone, each shard multiple metres in length and ranging in thickness from a few centimetres to a diameter similar to my torso. Even from afar, without engaging my magical sight, I could see the air distorting around those crystals, they were radiating magic with an intensity I could barely imagine. I could command great power but this, this was nature¡¯s fury, condensed into a space just a few metres across. I had no delusions about my ability to contest with that kind of power, even from afar I had to struggle to hold onto the shroud protecting me from the passive effect of those crystals.


    I briefly considered trying to launch a few projectiles at them, just to see what might happen but I quickly decided against it. At best, I would get no reaction, other than maybe the projectiles breaking apart in some interesting way. Sure, I might learn something but given that the worst case was something I didn¡¯t really want to contemplate, I knew better than to try. At least for now, I might come back in the future, do a few tests, find out more, that kind of thing, but I¡¯d need more power for that.


    A lot more power, enough to control that kind of energy if the worst case occurred and my experiments turned the crystals unstable and unleashed the entire power contained within them. Just thinking about it was enough to make me shiver as I retreated from the crater.


    Maybe, I would be back. Eventually.

 Chapter 940

    After stepping back from the crater, I explored the area a little further but not for too long. Not only did I need to watch the time I spent before heading back, I also needed to conserve my Astral Power, a difficult task with the strange Astral Power in the air constantly damaging me if I stopped protecting myself. Not that there was a lot to explore, it seemed that even the malformed monstrosities I had seen a little further away didn¡¯t dare to get too close to the crater, so the only living things I saw were some strange moss-like growths. Maybe fungi, maybe lichen, I had no idea and my desire to investigate the spongy black stuff was fairly limited. I briefly considered trying to destroy it, there was a passing resemblance to the Withering Fungus, but given the situation, I wasn¡¯t sure I¡¯d be able to.


    A quick series of experiments showed that I couldn¡¯t just blast the stuff out of existence, none of my primary elements showed any real effect, and to make matters worse, the stuff had spread all around the crater. I couldn''t remain in the area for long, nor could I destroy the stuff quickly, so, quite frankly, there was little I could do about it. My best bet would be to hope that the stuff was similar to some of the extremely specialised organisms from before the change, like bacteria that could live in geothermal vents deep in the ocean, a biome that¡¯d kill just about everything else. But not those microbes, they thrived in the deadly conditions but only in those deadly conditions. Put them into any other environment and they¡¯d die off just as fast as anyone else would die in their preferred environment.


    If that stuff was the same, my only fear was that they decided to turn the rest of the planet into their preferred biome, if they tried that, we¡¯d all be in some serious trouble. The Astral Power in the air was hazardous, not just to my general health but also to my nose. I did not want to become Jade the noseless Wonder, thank you very much.


    Once I felt that my time in this area was up, I started to retreat. Just like I had on the way in, I was carefully monitoring my power expenditure, knowing that I was running just the same marathon as I was moving in. Well, the same distance but a different track. I had moved around the crater and was running in the same direction I had run on the way in, meaning I was moving to the other side of the Charland. Thanks to the strange spatial warping inside, I¡¯d only have to walk about two kilometres to get back to where I started once I left the effect and I wanted to see if there was anything I¡¯d want to take an interest in on this side.


    Maybe another node or some other magically significant location I could study and abate the disappointment about the central crater. Such an interesting location and I couldn¡¯t even try to study it, not with images from the glacial moraine lingering in my head and the way a small crystal of Eternal Ice had destabilised when prodded a little too hard. If this crystal destabilised in a similar way, only adjusted to fit its massive scale, the result would be¡­ bad. As in, apocalyptically bad, with fire, poison and death racing across a whole lot of real estate. Considering it a magical nuke might be the best analogy, especially given that it gave off deadly radiation just sitting there.


    That thought was almost enough to bring me to a halt as I considered whether I needed to decontaminate in some way to make sure none of my companions was affected by some sort of lingering contamination, especially not Luna. She, or Alex, would likely be those affected the easiest, their lower levels and Endurance almost demanded so. Not something I wanted to risk, meaning I¡¯d have to come up with something.


    Darkness Magic, most likely, it gave the broadest options to decontaminate, maybe with some Water mixed in as Water was a cleansing element, with only Fire being able to compare to it. And I wasn¡¯t about to set myself alight, even if it meant my ashes would be free of contaminant. Hel, I couldn¡¯t even be confident that cleansing with Fire would work, given that part of the contamination came from Fire Astral Power.


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    So, Water and Darkness, with a focus on Darkness, thanks to the runes of Devour and Magic. Maybe something similar to the trick I had used to wash myself before learning how to conjure water. Back then, one of the problems I had run into was that I could cleanse my body of everything that wasn¡¯t part of it, but my clothes, not so much. Those would be cleansed away just like the dirt, not something I was willing to risk out here. Or with my Cloak, that thing was rather important to me. But something to do later, once I had left the area crawling with monsters behind.


    As I continued on my way, my mind flickered once again to the crystal, wondering what it was. Or should have become? The closest thing to that sort of power density I could imagine was a Nexus but it wasn¡¯t one. Or at least it didn¡¯t feel like one, it felt less natural, like the difference between smelling a flower directly, enjoying the subtle fragrance, and getting a nose full of the cheapest deodorant that tried to mimic the same effect. There were similarities, but one was a lot more pleasant and smooth than the other.


    Here, the crystals in the crater were akin to that harsh, chemical scent that tried to be something fruity or flowery but didn¡¯t manage. Which left me with the question, where did the power come from? Magic, to my understanding, worked according to the laws of thermodynamics and didn¡¯t create or destroy energy, it merely shifted it from the Astral River into physical reality and back. Which, in turn, would mean that for some reason, the giant lump of crystal that was boiling away the water in that crater like some overengineered teapot was drawing energy out of the Astral River and into reality. Only that it wasn¡¯t doing so like the Nexuses did, it was far more haphazardly than the balanced and controlled Nexuses I had seen on Mundus.


    Maybe that lack of balance and control was because the world was still settling. That might make sense, though it wouldn¡¯t explain why I was unable to feel the Nexus unless it was some sort of Poison Nexus I was lacking the affinity for. Which, while possible, didn¡¯t feel quite right, leaving me almost as clueless as I had been before, wondering just what the hel that thing was, where it came from and, maybe most importantly, where it was drawing its power from. And that power might just be the crux of everything in this area. Why, or rather how, the strange spatial warping existed, stretching space within this small area to an incredible degree, maybe even where the weird architecture came from, though I wasn¡¯t willing to just explain that part away with ¡®power¡¯. No, I felt as if there had to be some sort of organising tool involved, even if it was one that only copied and pasted.


    The area felt random but it also was sufficiently organised to look like an industrial area, which made little sense. But, just like everything here, it might be something I¡¯d have to file away and investigate at some later point, with better tools and maybe even some interested allies.


    And enough power to make the various critters calling this place home irrelevant. They continued to try catching me as I was running past and, curiously, it looked like the critters were similarly distributed like they were on the other side. First the malformed monstrosities of flesh and other material and as I made my way outwards, the malformation got less, with some giant monsters thrown in to keep things interesting.


    Or maybe the giant monsters were simply those hopped up on Node power, allowing them to get to their larger size and greater power but costing them their allies in the process. It wasn¡¯t a fully logical explanation, most beings would keep at least some of their kind with them, if only to breed, but it was one that might fit. Granted, it also might be wildly off-base, but that came with the territory of incredibly sparse information.


    Luckily, it didn¡¯t matter and my run back out went fairly smoothly, allowing me to make good time and reach the outer edge of the Charland without getting charred in the process. Exhausted and fairly filthy, yes, but I remained uncharred and the Sun was only just rising above the horizon, annoying me with its hateful light.


    Now, I only had to find the others, decontaminate and then, I could fall into my bed and sleep for a day or five.

 Interlude: Survivors 407

    To some, the gathering might have looked strange. There was no board room, no grand and elaborate table, no pomp or circumstances. It was just a simple, yet sturdy, wooden table, that had served as the dining table for a simple farming family. Now, it was the seat of the Six, the recently elected leader of their community. Despite the simple setting, the meeting taking place was important, each of the participants a pillar that held up the rights of the silent majority. They had worked together to oust those few who had initially shaped the group that had escaped the ruined city but after that escape, the previous leadership hadn¡¯t been willing to rebuild civilisation, instead, they had focused on establishing their own, personal power. No elections, no structured governance, just a few people making decisions and expecting the rest to fall in line, just because those making the decisions had high numbers in that strange system.


    Utter foolishness, there was no sensible way to reduce somebody as complex as a person to simple numbers. Granted, one could track physical performance, things like a person¡¯s ability to lift or how fast they could run, those could be measured. But the mental make-up of somebody, their intelligence, charisma and courage? No, such markers couldn¡¯t be measured without comparative tests, weighted for previous education, age and experience. And what was a level supposed to be anyway? This wasn¡¯t some inane game, this was the real world, where real people needed to make real decisions. Not play along to a shared delusion and certainly not to follow some strange, new gods.


    They, as a group, might not be terribly religious but they collectively believed in the foundations of Western civilisation and that included One Nation under One God. Not some glowing, finger-waggling insanity, no matter what some of the fools claimed. They might be the last Americans, but they would make sure their way of life wouldn¡¯t die out, they would build their lives back, maybe even better than before, and make America great again.


    Together, the Six that now made up the council had talked to the people in the community, listened to their concerns and realised that something needed to be done. Why should those with a higher level get better treatment, everyone was important and should be listened to. As the Six listened, more and more people expressed concerns about the strange things some could do, the unnatural actions and their unease with this strange, new magic. Their world had been destroyed by some unknown, unseen force, burned with a terrible fire, and now, some fools deluded themself in thinking they could wield ¡®magic¡¯ without consequence. It was madness and the more the Six listened, the more they had to agree. It was insane, calling upon the same force that had destroyed the world without considering the implications. No, if they wanted to rebuild their world, they needed to do it the right way.


    That decision marked a change, a point where they went from passively listening to the people in their community to trying to actively make change, to take control so a fair and just system could be established, not some tyranny brought about by the assessment of an insane system that had come to tear their world apart and succeeded far too well for everybody¡¯s comfort.


    ¡°Okay guys, we need to go over the latest reports,¡± their leader, Jacob Walters, began their routine Friday meeting, where the group gathered to go over the state their community was in, exchange information and make decisions for the future. It was routine but it was also important, especially as they made sure to inform their constituents of the community¡¯s state every Sunday, during service.


    ¡°Ms Torres, why don¡¯t you start us off with our food situation and prognosis?¡± he suggested, looking at the sole female in their group.


    ¡°Certainly,¡± the well-dressed woman in her mid-thirties who had been a regional manager for a supermarket chain before the end of the world, stood, briefly looking at a few notes before her. ¡°The second harvest has been brought in, sadly I have to report that the total amount is about twenty-five per cent lower than the first harvest, despite using the same amount of acreage. Furthermore, it looks like some of our food stores have walked off, I¡¯ve been trying to find out where but our predecessors have left little in the way of files. Despite that, our overall food stores are in good shape and as long as the planned third harvest turns out as estimated we can easily supply ourselves through the winter,¡± she explained, before adding some more details so everyone could track her progress. Those numbers, especially the prognosis for the winter, would be important to share with their community.


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    ¡°Excellent, thank you, Kelly. Please make sure that nothing ¡®walks off¡¯ anymore, it sets a bad precedent. Maybe we should tell the people about the thefts, there might be a few who have seen something. In addition, I feel it is a little worrying that the yield went down, can you look into the reason for that, was there some sort of pest infection, bad weather or something like that? Hopefully, we can find out what went wrong and take steps to correct the problem,¡± Jacob instructed, before turning to the next member of their little group. ¡°Mr Wolf, please report on the current workforce. If the problem with the harvest came from a labour shortage, we should correct that as soon as possible.¡±


    ¡°We have more people available than before, especially to guard the town. It should be no problem to send a few of them to the fields and help with the harvest or to continue the building of individual houses. Overall, we have more people staying in town constantly, while a number of those who had been drifting in and out of town seem to have packed their things and left for good. No idea where they went, but they aren¡¯t our problem any longer. Though, they might be responsible for stealing from the food stores, if they were planning to leave, why not take as much food as they can carry?¡± Michael, the one responsible for the farm¡¯s labour force reported, getting nods all around.


    ¡°Additionally, I have directed people to start harvesting firewood, winter will be here sooner than later and things will likely get cold, especially in the initial barracks, their construction is sturdy but not really solid,¡± he explained, before stressing that the building project for individual homes wouldn¡¯t be able to provide one for every family before the winter.


    ¡°Makes sense. Maybe we should instruct the guards to keep an eye out, no need to lose more food to thieves,¡± Jacob suggested, before picking the suggestion about the ongoing construction and requesting a report on that.


    ¡°Sure, things are looking¡­¡± David Morgan, the councillor responsible for those projects shrugged, ¡°Well, I was told that the guy who planned out that stuff has packed his stuff and left, no real idea why. I¡¯ve been looking for somebody to pick up the slack, maybe you can help with that Michael? We¡¯ve been re-using the previous plans but there are limits to that, we need somebody who knows what they are doing with individual homes made from wood, I¡¯m more a roads and concrete guy, but it¡¯s difficult to get that stuff now,¡± the engineer shrugged, knowing that his area of expertise was similar but not quite what was needed here.


    ¡°Problematic but nothing insurmountable. Michael, David, work together on that, we need to get our people ready for the winter,¡± Jacob ordered, before focusing on the youngest member of their little group, Councilor Chris Adams, responsible for the various people who crafted different goods.


    ¡°Well, our stockpiles of weapons and ammunition have increased, so I have directed the crafters to put more focus on tools and clothes, especially in preparation for the winter,¡± he quickly summarised, indicating there was little change in his area of responsibility. Accepting that things were well in hand, the meeting focused on the most important aspect of their job, communicating things to the people making up their community.


    They needed to make sure that the people got the right message and were motivated by it. Things were already bad enough after the world had broken, they needed to get back to a normal and structured life, a routine that allowed them to heal. Not the constant battles and reminders of the broken world, a slice of normalcy would give them something to identify with. The regular Sunday service was part of that, a routine that united the people, forming them from a disparate group of individuals into a true community with a shared foundation of trust. Again and again, the message they were planning to share during the service was refined, until everyone agreed it would give the right impression and motivate people to do their best.

 Chapter 941

    By the time I got back to the others, the Sun was already high in the sky. Without my conjured parasol, I¡¯d be in for a bad time, though my various traits were helping with that particular vulnerability. Direct Sunlight would still make me suffer, especially as the clouds I had used the previous day had vanished, leaving what others would call a beautiful day. To me, it was plain annoying, but there was nothing I could do about it, at least for now.


    Sure, I could gather enough power to conjure a cloud of mist to surround myself with but ultimately, it would be just like the parasol, only on a far larger scale. But not on a really large scale, where I could begin to alter the weather permanently. So, I kept my parasol, especially as I could make the air beneath it extra cold with just a bit of Astral Power.


    The big reason for the delay I had suffered was that I had taken shelter for a bit and made sure that all traces from the central area were gone. Not only had I washed myself with conjured water, I had used different runic formations to conjure a variety of effects that should remove all magic from an area, before washing myself again. Additionally, I had discarded the clothes I had been wearing, leaving me in a fairly interesting state. My cloak remained, as did the enchanted ritual knife I had been given by Alex, rings on both hands, a necklace and an enchanted needle sitting in my hair but no actual clothes. A part of me imagined Sigmir seeing me just like this and what fun things me could get up to, only for a sharp burst of grief and uncertainty to disrupt the vision. While I had a few ideas on how I might get Sigmir back, I was far from able to act on them, at least for now. Someday, I would get her back, no matter who tried to bar my path or what unspeakable horrors I had to perpetuate to accomplish my goal.


    Worryingly, the decontamination wasn¡¯t limited to the surface of my body. When I used Blood Magic to scan deeper into myself, I noticed that there was some strange, magical intrusion going on, not something I had seen before. The amount of power seeping into my body hadn¡¯t been very large but it was there and I wasn¡¯t sure what it did. It was almost as if a small part of my body wasn¡¯t part of myself any longer, at least magically. Not a large part, just a few tiny spots not too far beneath my skin, but that the spots were there, and seemingly sustained by leaching my own Astral Power, was worrying.


    Still, I managed to cleanse them, even if I had to take drastic measures to do so. Cutting out the affected area physically before flooding the area with Darkness Magic was enough to get rid of the infestation. Not pleasant but compared to some unknown magical effect growing within me it was much prepared.


    Shaking off those thoughts with a shiver, I returned my focus to the present and my state of dress, or rather undress. I hadn¡¯t taken anything with me into the Charland, so I had no additional clothes and even if I had, I¡¯d have to discard them as possibly contaminated. But I could conjure Ice and while creating actual armour was fairly difficult, I either had to create solid pieces with complicated joints to they didn¡¯t hinder my movement or compromise protection or keep things fairly fluid, taking up incredible amounts of focus, creating clothes was relatively easy. Simple clothes, at least, in this case, that meant something modelled after a chain shirt, multiple interlocking pieces of Ice, hanging off my shoulders before tightening around my waist and turning into something resembling a skirt. My feet were protected by simple sandals, the solid soles fairly uncomfortable but it was better than nothing.


    Not something I¡¯d want to wear into combat, even with it being created from my own Astral Power, there¡¯d be some chafing and any blunt impact would cause the individual pieces to painfully dig into my skin, but it was enough to keep me from feeling exposed. Even if I doubted there was anyone other than my family in the area, it didn¡¯t feel right. Maybe a part of me was simply leery of exposing more of me to the Sun, I wasn¡¯t sure and not about to experiment to find out.


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    Either way, I looked vastly different from the look I had when leaving the others last night and they immediately noticed the change and asked about it. That, in turn, led to me explaining what I had run into deeper in the Charland, especially focusing on the central crater and its content. Amusingly, neither Lia nor Luna reacted in a way I had anticipated, which is that they¡¯d react in a way somewhat similar to me. With shock, maybe a little fear, but also some interest.


    As it was, Lia simply accepted that the area was troublesome and not something we could actually do anything about right now, though she expressed some interest in the mishappen creatures I had discovered around the crater. Those, she sounded intrigued by, likely due to their strange combination of being a normal, animal-like monster and some sort of crystalline abomination. Magically modified, in a way we couldn¡¯t understand, just like Lia herself was magically modified in a way we didn¡¯t fully understand. Maybe she thought that studying these creatures would give us a better idea of how to create more Vampires, which was a deep desire within Lia. Sadly, we only had very limited success with that project but I had a feeling we¡¯d get there eventually. Maybe not in the fully controlled tests we had performed so far, but we¡¯d be able to get Lia some ¡®children¡¯ of her own.


    Would that make me a Grandmother? An amusing thought if there ever was one.


    Luna, on the other hand, was initially confused by my report regarding the central crater. Normally, she always had at least some idea of what was going on with magical phenomena, likely a result of her connection to Hecate, but with this, she was lost. It was quite interesting to watch her reactions shift from mild comprehension when I was speaking about the strange creatures I had seen, to complete unfamiliarity afterwards. Especially when that unfamiliarity coupled with a look of annoyance that turned her still immature face even more childish, making her look her age, even with the last months of rapid maturation. Normally, she looked like somebody just starting her teenage years, almost twice her age, but with that expression on her face, she regained some of the innocence and childishness she should have.


    However, as I explained what I had seen, the look of incomprehension quickly morphed into one of eager curiosity, making me wonder if she¡¯d try to get to the centre herself or if she would be content with my reports. I hoped she would be able to be content, as I had every intention of keeping her away from the central area, simply due to the dangers involved. I could get there, sure, but with the strange Astral Power in the air, I was not certain how safe I actually had been. Keeping me safe out there could be hit or miss and in an unknown area where even the air wanted to kill me, I wasn¡¯t about to add any additional uncertainties.


    When my report on the night¡¯s events was finished, I leaned back and let Lia and Luna talk, with Alex and Silva adding their thoughts in their own fashion. Alex, amusingly, was the most invested in exploring the central area. The crystalline material I had described seemed to be incredibly fascinating to them, even with the incredible, and unknown, risks involved. They wanted to know more and I had a feeling the risks were the very reason for their interest. They wanted to learn how to harness it, to create more of it, or something similar, if I had to guess. Maybe it was for the best of everyone, not only those involved, if Alex never got their paws on the crystals or the secrets of their generation.


    Silva, on the other hand, looked torn between wanting to facilitate our interest and being cautious, her usual mode of operation. More often than not, she acted as our guard, ever-vigilant and making sure we didn¡¯t get into situations where we couldn¡¯t get ourselves back out.


    I would have to make sure to help her with that, in this case, the danger was something beyond us.


    After my parts of the discussion were finished, I soon started to flag. It had been a long night and I wanted nothing but to get some rest. Thus, I told the others that they could brainstorm but any further exploration would be performed with utmost caution. That much, they luckily all readily agreed with.


    Moments after my head hit my pillow, I was out like a light. And found myself in a familiar endless, grey expanse.

 Chapter 942

    ¡°Greetings, Jade,¡± the familiar, tritonal voice of Hecate addressed me before I had that important moment to gather my bearings. Before, the Goddess had always given me that moment but now, I felt like there was something different in Her voice. An impatience, or maybe eagerness, I wasn¡¯t quite sure, but it certainly spurred me to pull myself together in the endless expanse of Her realm.


    ¡°Greetings, Lady Hecate,¡± I returned the salutation, turning around to see Her three aspects standing together, but not joined as one figure, all three faces studying me intently. A part of me wanted to ask why She had brought me here but knowing that I couldn¡¯t really demand answers from a Goddess, certainly not while in Her realm, I kept my peace. She¡¯d tell me Her reasons, or She¡¯d ask Her questions and I¡¯d only have to consider how to answer them. Our different statuses demanded such, at least for now. Maybe someday, I¡¯d get away with acting how I liked in the presence of the Divine but that time was not yet.


    ¡°Have a seat,¡± the Mother-aspect of Hecate invited me, a lazy wave of Her hand creating a comfortable armchair behind me, while a second wave created identical ones behind the three divine aspects. Or at least identical to my senses, I had no idea about the details, nor had I been able to sense anything about the process. It was as if She had simply changed reality as She liked, without having to use Astral Power or any process I could discern. What¡¯s more, in the brief moment I took to study the armchair, I could not sense anything unusual about it, it was as if the chair had always been the way it was now, highly comfortable to sit in, without the slightest traces of prior usage.


    The three divine aspects sat down just as I did, all three of them back to studying me intently, making me feel more than a little exposed in ways that had nothing to do with the clothes I was wearing. Not that there was anything wrong with them. While I had never seen the simple, slate-grey tunic or the soft pants before, they felt comfortable on my skin, though I would have preferred some undergarments. Or my own clothes, though I hadn¡¯t worn anything to bed that night, and a small part of me was wondering where the clothes came from. Only for that part to be shouted down post-haste, the question, and its likely answer, discarded for its uncomfortable nature.


    ¡°Please, tell me about your excursion during the night,¡± the Maiden invited me, her voice highly polite but there was an underlying hunger that betrayed that She wasn¡¯t really asking. That the request was about the most polite a Deity would be when conversing with a mortal.


    The request was enough to throw me for a momentary loop if the tone in Her voice hadn¡¯t already accomplished that. ¡°How?¡± I whispered before my mind caught up to my mouth and my mouth snapped shut. But it had been enough for the deity across to understand my question and She even deigned to reply.


    ¡°Normally, We do not process the individual connections linking us to Our devout. Instead, it is simply an aspect of Our existence, just as you don¡¯t communicate with every individual part of your body. Just like you wouldn¡¯t think about the mechanism needed to process the specific nutrients you need, We don¡¯t pay individual attention. But, just like you would notice the sharp tang of your favourite spice, We can notice if something extraordinary is happening,¡± the Crone-aspect explained, causing me to blink at the casual, if slightly strange explanation. If there was one thing I had yet to see, it was a deity that freely gave information away. Even if I lacked the context to fully understand what she was telling me, it was fascinating.


    ¡°I see,¡± I replied, though I wasn¡¯t quite sure I really did. It sounded as if something I had done, or rather, something Luna had done while I had told her about my actions had been enough to get Hecate¡¯s attention. Which was fairly interesting in and of itself, making me wonder just how close attention She was paying to my small group or if the particular ¡®taste¡¯ had been impactful enough to get Her attention nonetheless.


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    Curious about what a being with a literally divine amount of knowledge on the subject would say about my observations during the previous night, I happily relayed them to Her. My initial retelling took about as long as it had taken with Lia and Luna, and then the questions began. Inquisitive, careful and possessing incredible attention to detail, all those words would be perfectly suited to describe Hecate in Her current state. It took hours and never once did She repeat herself, constantly and carefully teasing out the slightest bit of information from my observations. Nothing seemed to escape Her interest and for some reason, maybe because I was in Her realm and She wanted me to be able to recall what I had seen, my recollections were especially vivid.


    Details I would have missed if not for Her questions drawing attention to them, like the way the crystal I had seen in the crater wasn¡¯t just boiling the water around it, but also somehow sublimating water from the air, turning moist before the energy it radiated boiled off that very moisture in a constant cycle, or how the crystalline substances the monsters were partially made of had some similar reflective properties to both Blood Crystals and the condensed elemental essences I had seen in the past. There were hundreds of different tiny details the Goddess asked about, sometimes explaining why they might be important, other times only giving off quiet mumbles or humming sounds.


    By the time there was no more new knowledge to be gleaned from my memories, I felt like a wrung-out dishrag but at the same time, I was oddly satisfied. Just from the relentless questioning I had learned a lot, not just when it came to recollection techniques and ways to enhance my memory but also about the subject matter, meaning the central area.


    ¡°Thank you for your cooperation,¡± the mother told me, taking the lead once more, ¡°As you might expect, expansions like the one that brought your world into the system are rare. Well, not quite, the expansion is a constant process but worlds like yours are rare, so the expansion only envelops one like it every so often, and there are other factors in play that mean I only get a limited amount of information from the majority of new worlds.¡±


    ¡°And the Charlands are something especially rare or unique?¡± I asked, curious about the ways Terra was special.


    ¡°Indeed,¡± the Crone nodded, before explaining further, ¡°When the system enveloped your world, it changed, obviously. Not only the living things but also all physical matter, as you have noticed. The changes might be minor in some instances but in others, they are major. We are talking about changes in the material makeup of your world that would normally occur over millions, in some cases billions, of years, if they can happen naturally in the first place.¡± she paused for a second, letting the revelation sink in, and sinking in, it did. Before I could voice my worries, she continued to speak.


    ¡°Those major changes would normally add up, well, their results would. Earthquakes, tidal waves, immense storms and the like, those you already saw but they are minor in comparison. The alterations could release enough energy into the atmosphere to destroy everything, the entire planet and maybe even the moon orbiting it. Not that it would continue to orbit if the planet is gone, but you get my drift.¡± another pause and by now, I felt a little sick to my stomach.


    ¡°To prevent that kind of destruction, some of that energy is contained, restrained you might say, and can only gradually seep into the physical world. The Charland you came across is one area where that energy is contained, causing the world to stretch as the power is slowly released. In a few years, the warped space you noticed will be completely gone, as will that crystal you saw in the centre.¡±


    It took me a few moments to go over the explanation, as I was carefully storing away each word to consider later. She had told me a lot, and I had no doubt it was all valuable intelligence, but sadly, I lacked the context to understand it all. Not for the first time during the conversation I wished I had some sort of search engine, some way to use keywords to search for their meaning and the way they were used. Maybe in time, the explanation would make sense but for now, I had more pressing matters to ask about.


    ¡°You wish me, or maybe Luna, to study the process? It sounds like it will take a long time,¡± I asked, not overly enthused with the idea we were supposed to stay here for that long. I wanted to continue my path and find out where the Ice Nexus was.


    ¡°No, it would be a waste. But as you likely realise, there is something I want you to do. Actually, there are two different tasks I have in mind, both should be well within the ability of you and your group. Of course, if you accomplish my tasks, you will gain appropriate rewards,¡± the Maiden added, after waiving away my apprehension.

 Chapter 943

    Two tasks, so simple and harmless when described. Well, one of them actually was fairly simple and harmless, it was just a repeat of previous actions, namely to establish yet another shrine with an attached library. Nothing we hadn¡¯t done yet, just this time, I¡¯d also get a direct reward for it. Somehow, I had a feeling that the reward was primarily to get me into a good mood, to entice me for the other task the Goddess asked of my group. That the shrine was supposed to be done after the second quest was completed, making the other quest technically the first one, was only adding to that impression.


    And that task was a doozy, there were no other words for it. She wanted us, or rather, She wanted Luna, to head to the central crater I had discovered and perform some sort of ritual there. In theory, it was incredibly simple, an escort quest, to use the gaming parlance of old, exactly the type of quest most players, back when the real world wasn¡¯t just as insane as anything some video game developer could imagine, had hated the most. Sure, I doubted Luna would become retarded just because she was the target of an escort quest, or start running into walls or something like that, but still, knowing that we had to move into an incredibly dangerous area made me apprehensive.


    Before, I had weighed the dangers and decided to move alone for a reason. Alone, I could move both quickly and stealthily, an advantage that went away when we moved as a group. I wasn¡¯t powerful enough, at least not yet, to conceal the entire group, like I had done in the White Mountains when concealing the others along with me. And even back then, it had taken most of my attention, forcing me to ride on Ylva, or I would have stumbled around like some drunk, a status highly problematic in rough, mountainous terrain.


    No, if we moved to the centre as a group, we¡¯d have to fight through the various enemies I had mostly ignored with a combination of mobility and stealth, meaning it would take us far longer than it had taken me. That, in turn, meant we wouldn¡¯t be able to make the trek in a single night, we¡¯d have to spend the day within the dimensional weirdness that was the Charland. Sure, Lady Hecate had assured me that the dimensional warping wouldn¡¯t be dangerous to us, but that only went so far when considering the various monsters within the area. My scouting before indicated that the monsters were more active during the daytime, meaning we¡¯d have to hole up somewhere, likely literally, and hope for the best.


    Quite literally, all the reasons that made me go alone before still applied. And yet, the quest, or rather, the offered rewards, were enough to tempt me. Hel, they were enough to do more than that, I was having a hard time arguing that the risk wasn¡¯t worth the reward, simply because that reward was just too good. Hecate likely understood just how incredible a reward She had offered, making us an offer too good to refuse.


    According to what She had described, each of us would get an individual boon and while She had only described mine and hinted at the one for Luna, I couldn¡¯t reject the quest. The boon she promised for me was deceptively simple but the implications were incredible. She offered to grant me a trait that sounded like a cross between my magical sight and my extra-sensory perception of minds, only that it would apply to souls. Meaning, it would allow me to perceive souls, which, in turn, was the first, and possibly most difficult, step to manipulating souls, at least at a delicate level. Currently, the only thing I could do with souls was forcibly evict them using Death Magic but if I wanted to learn Soul Magic, that obviously wasn¡¯t the right way to go.


    And Soul Magic was the first step to decipher the mysteries of the Soul, one of the three requirements I had to achieve to bring Sigmir back. It was the perfect reward, simply too tempting to ignore.


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    Plus, from the thinly veiled hints she had been dropping, Luna would receive an upgrade to the class she¡¯d gain upon crossing the first Divide, something she already could barely do when going by level but Hecate had deliberately held Luna back a little so she could earn a better reward.


    So, at the end of the day, even if I had been comfortable with insulting Hecate by rejecting Her quests, the rewards were simply too good to give up on. We¡¯d just have to be incredibly careful on our way in, I¡¯d likely have to do quite a bit of digging to make sure we didn¡¯t get stuck in some sort of hideyhole, but that shouldn¡¯t be a problem. In the worst-case scenario, I should be able to keep us completely underground, though doing so might cause other problems, forcing us to flee. For that case, I was considering whether I could create something similar to my shadow bag, only that it would allow Lia to hide within, so Silva could carry Luna while we ran through the day. With only Silva and me, we should be able to escape, even with the sun in the sky. Preparations would be needed but for the rewards offered, I was willing to spend extra time preparing.


    After asking a few more clarifying questions, I accepted the quests, before leaving the Lady Hecate¡¯s presence.


    Looking back, it was interesting, the way Hecate had described the situation with Luna¡¯s crossing of the first divide. It sounded as if it wasn¡¯t Hecate who actually decided what classes Luna could gain when crossing the first divide. The hints She had given left me with the impression that the class Luna would be offered was dependent on some sort of milestones Luna had to cross in the service of her Deity, with a degree of normalisation between the different divine factions.


    That, in turn, strongly implied that the Gods had fairly little direct influence over the classes their followers gained, outside of things like this, where the Deity offered a dangerous quest in their name that would allow a follower to earn a greater reward. There might even be a limit to the amount of power a Deity could directly bestow upon an individual follower, that the parity of power wasn¡¯t due to the previously assumed situation of too many eggs in one basket but because the Gods were simply unable to create an overpowered servant due to some rules enforced by the system.


    The hypothesis made me wonder. If the system was powerful enough to enforce rules upon the Gods, even rules in regard to what I¡¯d consider one of their most important and intimate aspects, the connection between them and their followers, who had created the system. Or maybe should that be, what had created the system, as it was fairly obvious by now that it wasn¡¯t some sort of divine creation but nobody would argue that it wasn¡¯t an intelligent design. Something like the system couldn¡¯t be created by evolution or a similar process, at least I couldn¡¯t imagine a way for it to come into existence, nor a reason why it would evolve.


    Unless the multiverse itself was an analogue to a living being and the system was an analogue to the immune system or something along those lines, something that helped the inhabitants, or cells, within the body to survive. It sounded¡­ not impossible, but it was also incredibly farfetched, if only because it assumed that the multiverse itself was a slowly evolving being, an idea I couldn¡¯t even begin to wrap my head around. To say nothing of the somewhat discomforting sensation of personal insignificance I suffered when thinking about it, it was one thing to realise that the world you were living on was just a tiny speck of dust in the vastness of the cosmos but to consider that that vastness itself could be just a slowly evolving element of something even greater?


    The idea was on another level of scale, sending shivers down my spine. And not the good kind of shivers, though there was another sensation accompanying the idea. One of greed, or maybe ambition. If the system was merely part of an even greater being, that being the cosmos itself, I wanted to reach a scale where I could comprehend that greater being.


    The idea was grandiose, insanely so, and yet, it was enough to bring a wide grin to my face, one that might have been discomforting for anyone seeing it. Luckily, I was nicely alone, drifting within the darkness of my mind after I had accepted the quotes given by Lady Hecate. Drifting, dreaming, thinking.


    Wishing I could get some rest on the slopes of my beloved mountain.

 Chapter 944

    ¡°Mom, come on, wake up!¡± normally, I would have been quietly amused at Luna¡¯s childish exuberance. Far too often, she tried to project a mature facade, far beyond anything a child of her age should have. The facade had its uses, especially when it came to dealing with the realities of our changed, new world but at the same time, I always felt guilty knowing that I had taken Luna¡¯s childhood from her. No matter that, realistically, it hadn¡¯t been me that took her childhood but the change and the resulting alterations to our world. It wasn¡¯t a logical sensation, but one that kept bubbling up, no matter what I tried.


    Forcing myself to crack open an eyelid, despite the exhaustion from the previous night still lingering, I glanced over to Luna. If Luna had been in possession of a tail, she would have happily wagged it, an assumption that was only confirmed by the fact that Silva was actually standing behind Luna and her tail was slowly wagging back and forth, signalling what I could only describe as tolerant amusement.


    ¡°Good morning, Luna,¡± I tried to keep the grouchiness I was feeling out of my voice but I doubted I was completely successful. ¡°Why do you need me to be awake?¡± I asked, briefly trying to judge the time of the day and coming up with ¡®too damn early¡¯.


    ¡°Good morning, Mom,¡± she rallied, returning my greeting and snuggling up against my side, something made easier by the thin sheet I was using as a blanket given the fairly warm temperatures. ¡°Lady Hecate told me that we¡¯d have an adventure in the Charland, she wants me to perform a small ritual in the centre,¡± Luna explained, making me realise that I wasn¡¯t the only one who had been given a divine visitation during the night.


    ¡°Ah, yes, I did agree that we¡¯d bring you to the centre. The rewards Lady Hecate offered were simply too good to pass up, though I still have some worries. The central area is dangerous and you know that I don¡¯t want you to be hurt, right?¡± I placed an arm around her, trying to project the warm, caring sensation I was feeling in my chest.


    Nearby, Silva let out a quiet bark of approval, giving me some additional confidence. Our canine companion was just as protective of Luna as I was, only in a different way. Hopefully, that protectiveness was strong enough to prioritise Luna¡¯s protection, even if Lady Hecate might want my munchkin to take some extra chances. That worry might be the biggest when it came to working with the servants of the divine, that they were always influenced by the priorities of their patron, potentially even overriding such fundamental desires like one¡¯s drive to survive.


    As I was considering that idea, I realised it might have been what happened with Olivia, back on Mundus. That she might have become a willing martyr, instead of using the powers of Eleutheria to fight back and survive, because Eleutheria needed Olivia to die as a message to the people. It was a worrying thought, one that only cemented my desire to retain control over my own power-base, even if I was willing to accept some divine support like the blessing I had been given.


    Things that improved my own abilities were okay in my book but only if I could use my abilities without those improvements. Luckily, my magical abilities were now varied enough to give me some confidence that I wouldn¡¯t be crippled, even if Lady Hecate withdrew all her support, maybe even added a curse or two. Not that I could actually be confident when it came to curses, especially not divine ones, but if the Gods could cripple somebody just because they felt like it, my Mortal Ambition was doomed anyway.


    Hopefully, the system was enforcing some rules protecting mortals from the divine, keeping the Gods from utterly dominating the mortal plane or something like that. Somehow, that thought was thoroughly amusing to me. Systems designed to keep ¡®Gods¡¯ from dominating ¡®Mortals¡¯, as if the terms didn¡¯t imply a power imbalance in the first place. Though considering what I knew and suspected about the gods, the imbalance was quite different from what the words usually implied. After all, as I currently understood things, it wasn¡¯t that mortals needed gods but that gods needed mortals to keep their pyramid scheme running.


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    That particular image never failed to make me smile, even if Luna was part of one such scheme, with me partially profiting off it. Luckily, if there was one good place to be in a pyramid scheme, it was at, or near, the top of it, raking in the profits from those below you. Or, if one was talking about religion, maybe it should be that the one at the top was raking in the prophets.


    A soft, snoring noise coming from Luna caught my attention, morphing my previously somewhat savage smile into a much more content one. Somehow, my munchkin had burned through the excitement at getting yet another quest from Hecate and fell asleep, looking quite adorable in her completely relaxed state.


    ¡°Silva, we¡¯ll have to be careful when heading into the Charland,¡± I quietly told my original companion in this world, making her look at me with those large, thoughtful eyes. Just from that gaze, there was no way for me to see her as an animal, Silva was just as intelligent as many people, even if that intelligence expressed itself somewhat differently.


    In response to my words, she let out yet another quiet huff, glowing with a smidge of divine power for just a moment, as if to remind me that ninety, maybe even ninety-nine per cent of the time, Silva was holding back a great deal of power for emergencies. Or rather, holding back a great deal of power unless it was truly needed because she felt that using divine power in anything but the direst of circumstances was a waste or something along those lines. Most of the time, Silva used nothing but fang, claw and her admittedly powerful body to see things through but it seemed that for the expedition into the centre of the Charland, she would be bringing her full power.


    My mind started planning eventualities, trying to map out the various threats I had seen while travelling towards the centre and comparing what the best ways to deal with them would be. The biggest issue appeared to be numbers and that was something nobody could really help with. It would come down to my own area of effect spells, limited as they were in the environment of the Charland. Thinking back to Mundus and the ways I had come up with to enhance my powers there, I began trying to find a way to do something similar here.


    At first glance, the most suitable way might be to conjure Devouring Mist out here and compress it, encasing it into orbs of Hard Ice that I could shatter to create instant clouds. They would contain a lot less power compared to normally conjured mist but I should be able to reconnect with the Astral Power I channelled into them, especially if I prepared a blood link of some sort, likely by adding blood infused with my Astral Power into the condensed mist.


    Another thing I should prepare were frozen anchors, pieces of Hard Ice with a few engraved Runes that allowed me to quickly conjure up a wall at a distance. Maybe add in some spikes, have Alex create caltrops of some sort, things to keep large groups of enemies from surrounding us and crushing us with the weight of their number.


    Also, I should try to find some way to keep Lia safe during the day, if the environment didn¡¯t allow us to hole up somewhere. There were so many things to consider and eventualities to plan for, I had a feeling this would be a lot harder than just running in as I had. Granted, those difficulties had been the reason for my solo trip, but now we needed to go in together.


    ¡°It¡¯s funny, even if you are willing to use everything, I¡¯ll have to ask you to keep it in reserve as usual. There are many beasts in there, some far bigger threats than others, with their number acting as the biggest threat of them all. If we get surrounded, we might need your strength to buy me the time to dig us a hole to escape, even if I¡¯m not sure trying to dig into the earth too close to the centre would be a wise idea,¡± I admitted, getting yet another thoughtful look from Silva, before she started gently poking me with her nose until she decided to join Luna and me and lying down on my other side.


    Shaking my head at the realisation that I was pretty much trapped by the two bodies, I decided to simply accept things as they were and let myself fall asleep, drifting off to dreamland once more. Dreaming of my mountain.

 Chapter 945

    There was a certain irony in the fact that I had taken the longest to prepare for our group excursion into the depths of the Charland, even compared to Alex. Granted, most of that came from the fact that I didn¡¯t habitually prepare large amounts of supplies that I might need, instead relying almost entirely on my directly usable magic and physical abilities but still. They were supposedly the specialist when it came to preparing and using disposable equipment but they managed to finish their preparations before I did.


    Well, for a given value of ¡®finish¡¯ but that given value applied to me, too. Neither of us could actually claim to be finished, just prepared to the point that diminishing returns would quickly kick in and additional time spent preparing wouldn¡¯t translate into a better ability to cope with the expected and reasonably unexpected circumstances. There would always be things we might be able to do, and ideas we could experiment with and some of those ideas would eventually turn into something usable. Not the majority of them, not even a sizable minority but progress was made by failing and correcting until a functioning result was achieved.


    My own preparations had been focused on cutting time when it came to conjuring obstacles and obfuscation, mainly walls and mist. The idea I had considered in regards to compressing mist had worked out fairly well, allowing me to magically compress enough mist to fill a space roughly twenty metres in radius up to a height of two metres into an orb the size of an orange. I had ten of those orbs, with an additional ten being carried by Luna to save some space. Sadly, I couldn¡¯t carry those orbs in the shadows, something about the dark realm being corrosive to the Ice Magic I created the orbs from. Another fairly serious disadvantage was that the orbs didn¡¯t last forever, not even for very long, the one test-orb I had stored right in the beginning of my preparations had disintegrated after five days, despite my regular attempts to keep it stable. To make matters a little confusing, the disintegrated left me with a few shards of Ice, tinged with blood red, likely from the infused Blood I had used to connect the mist to myself, and nothing else. The mist had, somehow, vanished without leaving a trace but testing with other orbs I had prepared the day after the disintegrated one had worked reasonably well. I had no idea how that mechanism worked, but I was somewhat fascinated by the process and was planning to study it in the future.


    The second group of items I had prepared were similar in nature, prepared Ice Magic linked to myself with Blood Magic, but different in practice. Where the orbs were compressed Mist, the other set of items was made from Hard Ice initially, filled with as much Astral Power as I could manage, as if I was trying to make Eternal Ice, before adding a runic formation, focused on creating more Ice and filling the lines with my Blood, infused with even more Astral Power. With nary a thought, I could let these tokens snap into far bigger objects, most of them were prepared to form solid walls, and the rest would expand into spiky constructs, hopefully big and sturdy enough to block a passageway and sharp enough to make chasing us through such a passage to be fairly hazardous. And if nothing else, the Ice remained mine, thanks to the blood I included, allowing me to turn these constructs into impressively destructive Ice Bombs, scattering razor-sharp shards everywhere.


    While those two ideas had worked out quite well, especially if one ignored the limited time either tool would work as intended, other ideas hadn¡¯t worked out nearly as well. My idea to prepare caltrops that we could use to cut off pursuit didn¡¯t work nearly as well as I would have liked. Sure, I could conjure caltrops from Ice but it turned out that the large surface area compared to their overall volume meant they evaporated faster, too. Meaning, instead of lasting days as my normal Hard Ice objects did, these lasted for a few hours, maybe a day, and even in that time, they started to melt and sometimes stick together. The failure of that idea eventually led me to the spiky Ice obstacles, so not all was lost there.


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    In comparison, trying to come up with a way to create instant caves or something along those lines hadn¡¯t advanced beyond the initial idea. I had tried to create objects holding a runic formation that could dig one upon activation of the sequence but material limits, and possibly limits of my Earth Rune Mastery, had prevented those ideas from working. Instead, I had multiple broken rocks and a lot of dust to show for my efforts. It would have been even more dust but some of my experiments had used conjured stone, similar to the Hard Ice I used for my instant Ice Walls, and the conjured stone faded back into the Astral River after the object cracked, leaving me with nothing but failure.


    Similarly, attempts to get some sort of delayed healing had failed miserably, something I probably should have expected. And, in a way, I had and had limited my attempts to objects that would simply release a burst of Blood Magic that I¡¯d have to control directly instead of some sort of actual healing item. Those came with far too many problems, from the various deadly side-effects improperly applied ¡®healing¡¯ magic could have seen while training Luna to other problems with a greater link to Blood Magic, namely the possibility of calling Nethersprites to this world. So far, I either had been lucky or the Nethersprites were currently unable to get to this world but I wasn¡¯t sure. I knew that using Blood Magic released the vital essence that rapidly decayed into miasma Nethersprites fed on but I had no idea why they didn¡¯t show up. Was it a problem with the still-churning Astral River, was it a problem with the concentration of miasma or maybe the Nethersprites didn¡¯t know that Terra existed, so couldn¡¯t detect the miasma in the first place? I had no idea, there likely were other options I was completely ignorant of, leaving me with little to go on.


    Similar to the idea of healing aids were power batteries, orbs filled with infused Blood that I could either have Lia snack on or use to power my spell casting. Sadly, the idea didn¡¯t work as well as I¡¯d have liked, unless the Blood was already bound into an object, like the instant Ice Walls, the infused Astral Power faded away rapidly, giving such objects a lifespan measured in minutes and not a lot of minutes either. It roughly took the Astral Power only a little longer to fade than it took my body to recover it from the Astral River, and that was with my fairly insane recovery rate. Thus, it sadly was no valid option, though we had recently discovered that Lia could store some infused Blood internally, increasing the time she could go between feedings. It wasn¡¯t as efficient as directly digesting the blood and the Astral Power but it was a step in the right direction.


    Ultimately, the biggest failure I had when it came to preparing was that I utterly failed to create anything that could keep Lia safe during the day without rendering us immobile. The best I could come up with were thick cloaks alongside a sturdy parasol but that only helped so much. Even with that kind of protection, she¡¯d be highly limited with her mobility and the indirect sunlight was enough to reduce her attributes considerably, leaving her little more than an ordinary human without any levels to speak of. Still better than the slow decay she¡¯d suffer without the protective equipment but only marginally so while we were in a dangerous environment.


    Trying to teach her how to enter the Shadowrealm, hoping that she could hitch a ride in my shadow or something along those lines hadn¡¯t worked out so well. She could get into the shadows but only for short times before the environment started to drain her Astral Power and moving from shadow to shadow had its own problems. And the less said about the one test we did with her hiding in my shadow before I moved into the sunlight, the better. It seemed that sunlight remained her weakness, despite the shadow still being there, even being deeper than it had been in the dim environment of our shelter. I wasn¡¯t sure how that particular interaction worked, but it felt almost as if her body remained in the location it had been relative to my shadow but intangible to the world until it got hit by the sunlight. Then, things got wonky and we ended up with a somewhat scorched Lia. Nothing that couldn¡¯t be healed but unpleasant.


    Ultimately, the time used was, in my opinion, wisely spent and we were ready to venture into the Charland as a group. Hopefully, nothing would go too wrong.

 Chapter 946

    The initial parts of our incursion into the central area went remarkably similar to previous trips into the Charland. Sure, we tried to speed things up but ultimately, there was only so much we could do to hurry without taking undue risks. Alone, I had been able to ignore most enemies, simply because I didn¡¯t have to worry about leaving anyone behind. I only had to worry about keeping myself safe, something a lot easier when you could become nearly untraceable, thanks to my cloak rendering me invisible, inaudible and scentless. That concealment also meant that I had attracted far fewer enemies compared to the sizeable number our group pulled as we proceeded deeper into the Charland than ever before.


    Where we had to fight groups composed of five, maybe ten, enemies on the outskirts, after about three hours, we had to contend with groups that maxed out at around twenty enemies. Granted, those enemies were amusingly less annoying individually, as the enemies in the outer area had been fast and nimble types more often than not, but that was cold comfort. Or maybe calling it hot comfort would be more appropriate, as the enemies we had to face were generally using a lot more fire. Not enough to overcome the freezing energies I harnessed to deal with them, but hot enough to make things uncomfortable.


    On another level, dealing with them was an interesting experience. While trying to overcome the fire elemental sitting in its node, I had begun to work on precise control and was now trying to combine better control with higher power density in a process remarkably similar to the change that Ice underwent as it became Hard Ice. Generally, it seemed to retain its chemical structure, it was still Ice as I understood it and when melting it, Hard Ice became water, just like normal Ice but its physical properties were distinctly different.


    Studying the mechanism Hard Ice underwent as it faded back into the Astral River showed even more similarities and differences, one of which was turned out to be quite amusing. Curiously, it was easier to melt Hard Ice into water compared to normal Ice, as the time needed for Hard Ice to fade away was longer than it was for Ice, due to a higher density of Astral Power within the Hard Ice. That, in turn, meant that if enough heat was directed at Hard Ice, especially if that heat was light on the Fire or Light elements, Hard Ice would melt into water, or rather, something that looked similar to water and was chemically water but magically was not. At least not only Water, as I noticed when trying to control it with my magic, the liquid had just as much in common with Liquid Moonlight as it had with Water, giving me quite a few interesting ideas.


    One of those ideas was to imbue conjured Water with Ice Magic, mixing their essences in a way that bound the Ice Magic into the Water instead of merely making the water cold. It was a somewhat adventurous process of magical mixing, a little counterintuitive until I managed to wrap my head around it, but it worked remarkably well against the fiery enemies of the deeper Charland. The different types of fiery lizards, with some canines, felines and other assorted critters thrown in for good measure all shared similar weaknesses. Namely, they were creatures of Fire and by now, I was fairly well-versed in what magical fire needed to exist. Instead of the usual fire triad of oxygen, fuel and heat, any of the three could be replaced by adding additional magic, or Fire Astral Power. But, in turn, adding Water or Ice caused the opposite effect, dampening even a fire with plenty of oxygen, fuel and heat. By using conjured Water, I automatically added Water Astral Power, by imbuing the Water with Ice, I further strengthened the effect and by dousing the creatures in what was essentially impossibly cold water, I put out their flames, causing them to take serious damage in the process.


    I wasn¡¯t quite sure if these critters would generally die after losing their flames but it certainly seemed that way. So far, none of them had survived long enough after the loss, but their death generally came from a swift strike from Lia or Silva, who used their usual weapons to great effect against immobile targets. Alex, on the other hand, demonstrated that they, too, had learned quite a bit during their time working with the forge formation I had set up, demonstrating remarkable abilities in blocking the initial attacks with some fairly interesting gadgets. It didn¡¯t seem to matter whether the attack was some sort of solid projectile imbued with fiery energies, a napalm-like liquid that allowed different creatures to literally breathe fire or even the odd gaseous attack that exploded moments later, as long as there was fire involved, Alex had some way to either redirect or outright neutralise it. Some of those measures came in prepared orbs that shattered and released some strange stuff, in other cases it looked more like enchanted objects were used, only that I was unable to detect any overt magic from them. It was weird and I made a mental note to investigate at a later point. If Alex could do it to the fire these creatures used, who knew if there was something out there that could do the same to me and the freezing energies I liked to use? Granted, the wide variety of elemental energies I could use would make such attempts difficult but not impossible.


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    We managed to progress variably smoothly for a little over four hours and, by my estimation, roughly two-thirds of the way to the centre and I even managed to get a level and some skill points out of the trip. Level seventy-nine, to be precise, and a skill point in Ice Magic, bringing it to sixty-four and two in Water Magic, bringing it to twenty-six. The level reminded me that I needed to allocate my unspent points if I wanted to do so before hitting eighty, which I did, deciding to take the bonus trait I¡¯d gain upon hitting seventy Intelligence instead of putting them into Intuition so I¡¯d hit fifty as soon as I reached level eighty.


    The trait was fairly interesting and it sounded like it was greatly influenced by my actions in the Charland. It was called Astral Suppression and, as the description put it, allowed my Astral Power to lose less potency when overpowering other magical effects.¡¯. I took that to mean that I now needed less Astral Power to do things like extinguish the flames on these monsters here but I hoped it also meant I¡¯d need less power to pierce shields or something like that. For now, I would have to keep an eye out but I had a feeling it was ultimately just another overall increase in my magical power, just a slightly different flavour, making it more effective in some special cases. Not groundbreaking but certainly useful in situations when it came up.


    Sadly, while the notifications had caused me to occasionally slow down a little, the thing that brought us to a halt was far less pleasant. Or maybe more pleasant in its own way, compared to the numerous small- and medium-sized foes we had been fighting the entire time. Instead of a group like that, we were faced with a pair of massive centipede-like creatures, long bodies, easily twenty metres, bright red in colour and with countless small legs that allowed them to move across the rubble around us rapidly. Well, small legs for their overall size, the legs were almost the same length as Silva¡¯s, and their body was almost a metre in diameter, making them quite imposing. Also disgusting, but mostly imposing, to say nothing of the shrill screech one of them let out right after encountering us, the noise loud and grating enough to make me flinch away in pain, while Silva and Alex let out pitiful whines of their own.


    A quick Observe told me that we were facing Scorchipedes, with one of them clocking in at level seventy-three, the other at a quite respectable level seventy-six. Not the strongest foes I had faced thus far, but a pair of them working together could be a threat.


    As if to drive home their state as a threat, the weaker Scorchipede sent out a belch of a strange, reddish-yellow gas that gave me some seriously uncomfortable vibes, even without smelling it. Blinking my magical sight on for just a moment, I could see that the cloud was composed of a lot of Poison with some FIre mixed in, almost as if it was an afterthought. Wanting nothing to do with it, I quickly pulled out one of my Mist Marbles and tossed it in, setting off a burst of Astral Power to shatter the Ice. The visual effect of the dark grey mist and the yellow-red gas interacting was quite spectacular, the two distinctly different clouds were vying for supremacy for a few moments, with flares of eldrich energy wreathing through the air as the powers collided, before the entire cloud exploded outwards with an incredibly loud bang and a flash of strange colours and even stranger tastes.


    Sadly, that was only the first move of combat and moments later, the other Scorchipede started its own attack, trying to run Silva over with its many, many legs. All of which came with some wicked-looking barbs that I wanted nothing to do with.

 Chapter 947

    As Silva bounded to the side, avoiding the skittering legs of the Scorchipede, its companion wasn¡¯t idle and was already moving to engage. In an attempt to box us in between them and thus limit our mobility, it was moving towards Luna and me, lunging forward with a wide-open maw. For a brief moment, my mind flashed back to the Querder beneath the glacier on Mundus and the rings of countless sharp teeth that ringed their maws, ready to draw in prey and shred it apart. The Scorchipede looked awfully similar to that, its teeth not so much designed to bite and rip but to draw prey in and grind it down.


    Without thinking much, I quickly drew one of my spiky Ice Balls from the pocket I stored them in, taking a moment to make sure it was connected to my Astral Power and gently lobbed it at the gaping maw. The throw was simple, even without Ice Magic I would have been able to easily hit the massive target and with a brief surge of Overflow, the spiky ball exploded outwards, taking but an instant to massively increase its size. Right in the middle of the Scorchipede¡¯s maw, driving sharp spikes into the flesh beneath the rows of teeth and even cracking a few of the teeth, though far too few for comfort. I couldn¡¯t keep the grin off my face when the Scorchipede reared back in pain, letting out a sound that was far too painful to be called musically but given that it was caused by the pain of my enemy, I wasn¡¯t going to complain.


    Sadly, It looked like the teeth were incredibly hard and solidly anchored in the thing¡¯s flesh, a thought that was confirmed moments later when it tried to grind the Ice apart. What¡¯s more, even from the newly opened distance between me and it, I could see steam rising from its gullet, making me think that there might be some sort of acid involved, in addition to the heat it undoubtedly produced. After all, everything it the Charland did, so why would a massive centipede be any different?


    As I was gathering a bit of power for my follow-up attack, Alex lobbed some object into the thing¡¯s maw, the throw hitting despite its pained flailing but before the payload could do anything, I caused the spikes I had delivered into its maw to burst apart in an explosion of razor-sharp Icicles. While I doubted they¡¯d do much more to the teeth in the thing¡¯s maw, I had no doubt that its insides were a lot less sturdy than the thick, chitinous plates its body was armoured with, so taking a moment to harm it where it counted sounded like a good idea. And a working one, too, judging by the continued shrieking and the burning mix of spittle and blood it was flinging everywhere. Given the way the liquid hissed, bubbled and smoked as it hit the ground, I had no interest in getting any on myself, so I took a few steps back, keeping both Scorchipedes and their prodigious bulk in my sight. I had no interest in getting blindsided by one of their rear ends, or any of their far-too-many legs.


    With the obvious pain the thing was in, and the hopefully grievous wounds my attack had left, I shouldn¡¯t have been surprised that it tried to protect its innards and vital organs by closing its maw tightly. Sadly, at least for the thing, it wasn¡¯t aware of what significance the small object Alex had thrown had, maybe thinking it harmless given its size but before it could do much more than skitter to the side a little, the object made its presence known.


    I had no idea what Alex had done to create it, nor was I certain I wanted to know, but despite the thing being deep within a massive creature¡¯s body, I could hear the thump and see the Scorchipede¡¯s body shudder, before blood started to rush out from the gaps in its armoured carapace. What¡¯s more, it looked like its entire back section was suddenly out of order, the legs twitching for a few moments before folding apart, leaving the Scorchipede stranded and screeching in pain once more. By now, that sound started to become a lot more grating and less enjoyable, even if a part of me wanted to enjoy knowing the thing was dying. Maybe not fast but given the already grievous wounds we had made, it was certainly dying.


    ¡°Watch out!¡± Lia¡¯s shout instantly focused my attention on the other Scorchipede, which was currently in the process of rearing back in a manner similar to the one used right before its companion had spit out the strange toxic cloud earlier. Given that neither Lia nor Silva had any way to really deal with something like that, or with heavily armoured monsters of this size in general, I took out another of the mist orbs, ready to throw it if necessary to protect my companions.


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    To my surprise, what came out of the thing''s maw wasn¡¯t a cloud but looked more like a stream of burning liquid, forcing Luna and me to dodge aside while Alex was desperately clinging to Luna¡¯s collar. I could see that Alex tried to use one of the strange objects they had used before to defend against fire, only this time, it didn¡¯t seem to work. Instead, the burning stream hit the ground near us, throwing burning, boiling liquid everywhere with far too many splashes hitting Luna and me. Despite my relatively thick and sturdy clothes, I could instantly feel the stuff eat my flesh, with some power burning into my body but far worse was the scream of pain I heard from Luna. She, just like me, had been hit, causing anger to flare within me. My munchkin was hurt by that thing, and I wanted to hurt it back.


    My fastest way to cause it pain was to launch my frozen Shuttles, trying to gore its flesh and rend apart its body, which is why I did exactly that. Sadly, I could only do so much against its thick carapace, I managed to score some hits, striking gouges made by Lia and Silva, but the strikes were far from the decisive blows I wanted to cause. Nearby, I could feel Luna¡¯s power flare, though I didn¡¯t focus on what my munchkin was doing, instead, I kept an eye on both Scorchipedes.


    With Lia, Silva and I all focusing on one Scorchipede, the thing hunkered down, protecting its vital points carefully, not letting us get any real hits in. Sure, that also meant it wasn¡¯t doing a whole lot to Lia and Silva, let alone to me, but it was an annoying stalemate. One that was broken from an unexpected direction, namely when the other Scorchipede started to flail around, surrounded by a faint halo of minty green intermixed with pale silver-white, an echo of Luna¡¯s power. For a moment, I wasn¡¯t quite sure what to think but given the increasingly desperate movement of the Scorchipede, I had a feeling whatever Luna was doing, it wasn¡¯t good for it. And the first Scorchipede could tell that its companion was in serious trouble, giving up its attempts at playing defence to strike at Luna.


    Only, in doing so, it opened itself up to our attacks, a fact Lia and I instantly took advantage of. While my shuttles didn¡¯t have the precision to perfectly strike weak points, I managed to score some nicely bleeding wounds near the thing¡¯s maw when it opened up but Lia did even better, wrapping her chain around some segments of its body and slamming the hook into its head, just as it was rearing back in pain from my attack. That, in turn, meant that its tremendous bodily strength was trying to rip apart a heavy-duty chain and something had to give. In this case, it was the carapace the hook was set it that gave, cracking apart and allowing Lia to drive her blade deeply into the thing¡¯s head and whatever passed for a spine there.


    The result was pretty much instantaneous. Where the Scorchipede Alex¡¯s grenade had crippled was crippled somewhere around the middle of its body, this one was limp from just a few centimetres below its head. The head continued to twitch a little, the teeth moving about, it the rest of its body was just lying there, no longer a threat.


    To my surprise, the other Scorchipede was in a fairly similar state and I had to blink for a moment when I realised what had happened. With its backside taken out, Luna had closed in and exploited that weakness in what was either bravery or foolishness or maybe both. Once she had managed to put her hands on it, she likely had used her Life Magic to influence the creature but instead of trying to heal it while keeping things like clotting and tumour down, she had done the opposite.


    There was a reason why I had been training her to wield her magic in a precise fashion, namely because wildly growing and regenerating things within a body could be just as harmful as the original injury. Case in point, she had managed to take out the Scorchipede by, well, healing it to death.


    ¡°Well done,¡± I complimented her, walking over as I used my Blood Magic to take care of the wounds caused by the burning acid spit. When placing my hands on her, I realised that she hadn¡¯t just taken out the Scorchipede, she had also healed her own wounds, making me nod in approval. My munchkin was beginning to master her magic and nothing could make me prouder.


    ¡°Think there¡¯s anything worth harvesting? Or should we just move on?¡± I asked, looking at the others, before looking at the massive bodies once again. Either way, a quick glance at the sky ascertained that no matter what we did, we wouldn¡¯t be able to get out of the Charland before dawn. Just as expected.

 Chapter 948

    Unfortunately, or maybe fortunately, depending on your priorities, the two Scorchipedes turned out to be sources of remarkably good resources, meaning we had to take the time to harvest them. Not doing so would have been a complete and utter waste, tough, on the bright side, it also meant I had more than enough time to do some digging nearby. Not directly in the area, just in case the scent of the Scorchipedes¡¯ various bodily fluids attracted scavengers or something like that, but close enough to be heard if I shouted.


    Given that we were still in a hostile environment, in more than one sense, Luna stuck with Alex and Lia, who focused on harvesting materials from the Scorchipedes, while Silva remained with me as I was working on the shelter. Hopefully, with two people keeping an eye out, we wouldn¡¯t get caught by surprise by anything.


    For our shelter, I had to be somewhat creative. Normally, I would have dug a simple hole and called it good, with a somewhat narrow, and thus easily defendable, entrance and a few reasonably comfortable rooms. Maybe a few openings for extra air or to vent smoke if we made a fire but ultimately a simple construction. Here, I wasn¡¯t willing to make something that basic, as I didn¡¯t want to get caught out if groups of monsters decided to swarm our base, hemming us in until the weight of their numbers crushed us. Sure, we would be able to kill hundreds, maybe thousands of foes with a narrow chokepoint but if we didn¡¯t have a way out, it wouldn¡¯t matter how many we could kill. At some point, the endless numbers of the Charland would grind us down.


    So, to make sure we wouldn¡¯t get caught like a rat in our hole, the solution was the most important feature of any property, namely its location. In this case, that meant I made sure to pick one side of a reasonably intact warehouse to dig under, planning to stretch things out so I could easily expand the structure to either open into the warehouse, giving us cover as we made our exit, or to the other side of it, allowing a secondary escape route.


    I considered trying to set the shelter up close to one of the ends of the warehouse, where a narrow alley connected the two sides and thus the two potential exits on either side, giving us yet another possible way out but decided against it. Sure, we¡¯d have another exit but it would also give our attackers an easy way to move from one exit to the second, possibly allowing them to cut us off. No, three exits had to be enough and if they weren¡¯t, I might have to keep tunnelling, digging us a hole as we made our escape. Similarly, I tried to see if there were any sewers or large pipes in the area, thinking that we might be able to use something like that to escape, only to get an interesting surprise.


    Namely, while there were the usual manhole covers and rainwater grates set into the road, they were only for show, when I checked them directly, I could see that they were only skin deep. Maybe half a metre below the surface, just deep enough that a causal observation wouldn¡¯t show it, the tunnels ended in rocky soil, making me wonder just what their point was. Well, other than to give the area the look of normality, making me wonder just what was going on with it. But given that I had been wondering that for quite some time, it was easy to accept the manhole covers that didn¡¯t actually cover any manholes as just that, another oddity in an odd area. Sadly, that meant there would be no escape tunnel for me to discover but hopefully it also meant there would be no hidden access tunnel for monsters to dig through a thin layer of soil if we were unlucky.


    Luckily, my way of tunnelling worked by compressing the earth into the sides of the tunnel I was digging, meaning I didn¡¯t have to worry about removing material as I was working. At least I hadn¡¯t been forced to do so yet, hopefully, that wouldn¡¯t change when I was working with different materials like actual rock instead of the usual mixture of earth, gravel and a few small rocks.


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    The instant I started working, I realised that digging into the soil here was more difficult than it normally was. Not only did I have to crack the top layer of asphalt before I could get into softer parts but the entire area wasn¡¯t just normal, boring dirt, infused with a small amount of Earth Astral Power, it was much more than that. Fire and Poison, with some decay and disease mixed in, the mix I could feel everywhere in the air around us was also present in the Earth. Maybe I shouldn¡¯t be surprised by that but it was annoying and made working with the dirt here so much harder. It was, in a way, similar to what I had done earlier, when I infused Ice into my Water to make the result more than ¡®Cold Water¡¯ but a precursor to Liquid Moonlight. Here, the dirt was still primarily that, Earth, but with the additives mixed in, it was also pricklingly hot.


    Still, I could do my thing, it only took more time and a lot more effort. Things got a little easier, or at least faster, when I started to infuse the Earth I was working on with some of my own energy, spraying that same mix of Water and Ice into the ground as I shifted the Earth. It was fascinating to watch, the reaction was almost akin to chemistry when mixing acids with bases, there were some strange, arcane discharges, popping in a myriad of ways that made me smell colours and see sparks but the ground didn¡¯t physically change. It didn¡¯t get wet or muddy, despite the thin, misting spray of water I sent into it, showing me once more that magic could be incredibly weird. But maybe it was for the best that the ground didn¡¯t turn into a muddy mess as I was digging, that would have made things a lot harder.


    To my annoyance, even with that trick the work was slow-going and difficult. It took almost three times as long to dig a simple hole, though when it was done the whole felt a lot sturdier than normal, as if the Fire energy in the soil made the whole crystalline compression into a harder substance a lot more effective. Sadly, I also noticed that the soil still gave off the same prickling sensation of Fire and Poison, making it obvious that we wouldn¡¯t really be comfortable in our new abode, simply because none of us was comfortable with those elements. To me, it would be akin to sleeping in a room filled with the scent of raw sewage, unless I used some more of my personal power to fill the area. Not the most economical use of energy but compared to suffering that stench for the entire day, I was very willing to put forth some effort.


    By the time Lia, Luna and Alex came over with their loot, I had something somewhat suitable but far from the usual shelter I could dig out. Still, it would get us through the day, which had to be enough and it wasn¡¯t like I couldn¡¯t continue to work on it, even as we were hiding.


    But where my efforts had been largely fruitless, their efforts showed some nice results. A few of the chitinous plates on the Scorchipedes¡¯ bodies could be fashioned into armour for Silva, giving her some valuable extra protection while the teeth could be turned into simple knives and there were a lot of teeth. Maybe I would take a stab at using my Crystal Magic on them, trying to shape the hard substance, though I had no idea if it would work.


    And then there were the softer materials, multiple skin pouches and glands filled with various bodily fluids that Alex had harvested, all of which gave me some uncomfortable sensations from the powers contained within. Poison, Fire, Acid, the exact mixture of elements varied depending on the substance but all of them were dangerous in some way. Sadly, the same was true for the strange flesh of the beasts, making it largely unpalatable, especially to somebody like me. I didn¡¯t even want to imagine how it would taste and, luckily, I didn¡¯t need to find out, we still had enough supplies to last us a few more weeks, longer if we found or foraged for additional resources.


    After checking what they had found, I continued my work on the shelter. The upside of everyone being here was that I could get some support from Luna, as we had additional eyes watching our surroundings. With the blessing of Hecate granting me some extra Astral Power, I could work a little faster and had an easier time pushing the contaminated soil away, allowing me to finish a somewhat comfortable shelter by the time we would normally start our rest.


    To my surprise, Silva and Luna worked together once I was done, putting some sort of temporary blessing over the shelter, negating most of the uncomfortable Astral Power leeching from the soil around us. Once again, I could only observe the effect with fascination, wondering just how divine magic worked. Well, other than magically.

 Chapter 949

    Dealing with the poisoned ground was a chore and a half but it was also fairly interesting. It gave me some fairly interesting insights into the behaviour of mixed Astral Power, something I hadn¡¯t really dealt with in the physical plane, only within the Astral River where I wasn¡¯t bound by my physical body and senses. In addition, spending multiple hours during the day, trying to deal with the power seeping out of the earth and through the benediction Luna and Silva had set up let me observe divine magic a little more, though I wasn¡¯t able to understand what I could see. Not that it really mattered, my efforts gave me two points in Crystal Magic, bringing the skill to twenty-three and a point in Fire and Earth Magic each, bringing them to fourteen and twenty-six respectively.


    What made the situation even better was that nothing disturbed us during the day. I had made sure to close the opening to our temporary shelter, with multiple thin openings to facilitate gas exchange but even so, I had been worried that something might try burying in. But maybe thanks to the benediction or simply out of luck, nothing had tried to attack, nothing had even detected us as far as I could tell.


    As the saying goes, sometimes, being lucky is more important than being good. In this case, we might have been both, or either and I didn¡¯t really care which, we had managed to get through the night and recovered as much as possible in an area that was elementally biased against us, something even the benediction couldn¡¯t really help with.


    Now, with a new night falling, I carefully opened up a small hole in the shelter, just enough to let me see out to make sure it was dark out there. Once I could see, I could step through the shadows, move through an opening that was far too narrow for anything larger than an emaciated rat, and manifest in the darkness outside, concealed by my wonderful cloak. Invisible and largely undetectable, I could then look around, making sure that nothing was waiting for us to crawl out of the hole I had dug for us, ready to turn us into a late-night snack. When no such threat manifested, I finished opening up the hole, so the rest could join me. Still cautious, just in case I had missed something watching from an extreme range that might attack once the watcher detected my companions but again, nothing happened.


    Nothing, but the continuation of our journey, hopefully without running into any additional Scorchipedes, giant burning lizards or other fiery menaces. Hel, by now I wouldn¡¯t be too surprised if there was some sort of giant lizard with draconic pretentious in residence but if there was, I would have words with it. Pretending to be a dragon was a no-go, so unless the being could defend its claim, those words I was having would be returned with screams of pain and ultimately gurgles of blood followed by the sweet release of death for the pretender.


    Alas, if there was such a draconic pretender, it would most likely reside in one of the other Astral Nodes within the area, of which we had only investigated one, as the others were deeper within the Charland. As in, roughly as deep as we were now, meaning I would have had to go alone, without any support or cover while looking for potentially serious trouble. Given how foolish that would have been, I had never even considered investigating those nodes, only the one with the fire elemental on the outskirts and I already knew how that had gone. Not well.


    Maybe I should consider looking into the other nodes, at least those I could detect, at some point after we finished the investigation into the central crater. Which curiously wasn¡¯t a node nor had there been a draconic pretender in evidence but given how¡­ mishappen the creatures in the area had been, maybe that was for the best. A true dragon would hopefully have been able to overcome the troublesome power in the air but if not, they¡¯d be smart enough to leave before getting mutated and mutilated. If not, they most certainly weren¡¯t a true dragon, for no true dragon would be that stupid. Just like no true Scotsman would put sugar on their porridge.


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    But first, we had to get to the central crater, so Luna could investigate and perform that ritual. Which would take some time itself, though we should be there within an hour, maybe two if the combat was heavy. For a moment, the image of a navigation system flashed through my mind, giving directions and estimated time of arrival based on the number of enemies one had to fight through to get to your target and a soft chuckle escaped me. ¡®Turn right at the next corner and destroy the fifteen Embugs before going straight for two hundred metres. Your destination is on the left and covered in Fireflies.¡¯ Or something like that.


    Granted, such a system would be quite useful, though it obviously needed some way to detect foes. Which, with stealth and concealment what they were, meant that only a minority of enemies would be detected, making the whole idea sadly moot. As amusing as it would be.


    For now, we had to continue with nothing but my memories to direct us, alongside the sensation I got from the central area and its unpleasant radiation. As long as that sensation remained, I¡¯d be able to find the central crater with ease and according to Lady Hecate, the sensation would remain with us for quite some time. Decades, maybe even centuries.


    Sadly, I didn¡¯t have the time to study the effect of the Charlands fading and blending into the normal world would have. Well, I might be able to take the time but I had other priorities than to stick around here for that long, priorities calling me north. Maybe I should return at some point in the future, though there were some troublesome possibilities I¡¯d have to take into account. One of which was that I had no idea just how the fading of the Charland would happen, would the Charland push aside the real space all around, essentially enlarging the continent beneath? If so, what about faultlines, tectonic activities and all that? I didn¡¯t even want to consider the amount of energy that involved, to say nothing of all the matter that was essentially energy frozen into a physical form. Or would the Charland replace normal space all around, slowly overwrite was what there, or maybe simply burn it to ash and cover it with the detritus of broken industrial buildings, as the interior of the Charland was?


    There were so many questions and if it wouldn¡¯t mean I¡¯d have to remain for a long, long time, I would happily try to find out.


    Luckily, there were other things that could keep my attention on our way towards the central crater. Namely, a fairly large amount of enemies, mostly fiery insects but also a couple of reptiles thrown in for good measure. To make these enemies even more interesting, they started to show evidence of the strange mutations I had seen deeper, the replacement of normal, organic-looking parts with these strange, crystalline growths or even just crystals or other normally non-organic parts growing from their bodies.


    What was even more interesting was that these crystalline growths seemed to have fairly profound applications, allowing these critters to use exotic attacks and abilities that made no sense. Beams of poisonous, purple light, rays of fire and even blasts of slow, acidic-green lightning that dissolved the areas it hit were the least of the attacks I saw though luckily, they weren¡¯t as powerful as their appearance indicated. Sure, they were strong enough that you didn¡¯t want to get hit by them but at the same time, if you actually were hit, it only hurt like hell and affected the flesh around the impact, it wasn¡¯t immediately fatal. In addition, the tricks Alex had used to prevent a wide variety of fiery attacks worked against about half of these exotic attacks and my conjured Ice worked fairly well, too.


    Still, it was fascinating to watch the effects and wonder just how they were accomplished. I was fairly certain that I was seeing some sort of eldritch projection of the elements I already knew, not modelled after naturally occurring evocations of them but after something else. What, I had no idea but I would investigate in the future, maybe I could manage something similar with my own elements.


    Ultimately, while the attacks looked impressive, the monsters couldn¡¯t stop us and, maybe three hours after we originally set out at the shelter, we reached the central area and the large, glowing crystal in the middle, the last stretch travelled in a cloud of cool, conjured mist.


    Now, it was up to Luna to do her thing.

 Aprils Fools Chapter 2024

    As I opened my eyes, I felt incredibly strange. There was something off but I just couldn¡¯t tell what that ¡®something¡¯ was. Opening my eyes, I noticed the humid, loamy earth all around me, joined by an almost oppressive weight coming from above, pushing me down as if the weight was trying to bury me. Blinking away the cobwebs, I looked around, wondering why I was resting in a burrow with roots all around me while using a warm, furry shape as a pillow.


    ¡°Finally awake?¡± a very canine growl asked, coming from right behind me.


    Looking over my shoulder, my gaze was met by Ylva¡¯s amber eyes staring right back at me, quietly challenging me to get moving.


    ¡°What¡¯s going on?¡± I asked, trying to get my mind to work as it should, only to be trapped in strange, fuzzy memories that didn¡¯t want to cooperate with me. I had no idea where I was, nor how I had arrived here. I could feel Ylva, but for a moment, I thought there was something missing, S¡­ my mind couldn¡¯t complete the thought, it just slipped away.


    Before Ylva could respond, I heard a knocking sound coming from above me, transmitted through the roots all around me. The knocking had an effect not unlike a bell being rung, intensifying the pain in my head for a moment.


    ¡°Who¡¯s there?¡± I groaned, trying to push the pain away but failing, it just didn¡¯t want to go away, the rapping sound becoming a spike of agony that was driven into my skull with each repetition. At my words, the sound stilled, but only for a moment before the rapping returned, now accompanied by a strange, almost musical, whisper carried by a strange breeze that intruded upon the small chamber I had been resting in. Trying to make sense of the whisper, I focused on it, letting it fill my mind until it drowned out the rapping sounds.


    ¡°Lenore,¡± I voiced the whisper, letting it become a wish, a prayer and incantation, calling my dear friend to me, hoping that she¡¯d be able to help me, to keep my mind from snapping as the ceaseless tapping haunted me. ¡°Lenore,¡± I repeated, just a little stronger now but still a whisper, a desperate call for help as I tried to make sense of the reality around me.


    Only, there was no winged helper, no feathered friend that came swooping in to rescue me, only rapping, tapping, no more whispers, only wind and nothing more.


    Pushing myself up, I felt the wind swirl around me, the whispers changing, becoming unintelligible, present but strangely muted. Shaking my head, I drew upon the wind, letting it carry me into the air, out from the roots trying to grasp me and tie me up, burry me beneath the earth forevermore. No, nevermore.


    Rising upwards, I could see the massive trunk of the tree next to me, and could smell the ancient forest and its numerous inhabitants. There were countless different scents in the breeze, magical, mundane and everything in between, all intermixed and intermingled, speaking of a harmony of predator and prey, of hunter and hunted, all intertwined in an endless dance of life and death.


    The ground started to fall away beneath me and soon, I reached the first branches, high above the forest floor where there was nothing to tear off the shoots and devour the leaves. Even here, the branches were completely bare, just stretching away from the trunk until they reached the few patches of light that managed to break through the dense canopy above. There, in those sparse patches, the branches had leaves, catching what little light they could in the endless competition for resources.


    On one of those branches, I could see yet another familiar figure, small, barely the length of my arm, with much of that length taken up by a furry tail. The fur on its face gave them a perpetually shifty appearance, the look not lightened by their habit of rubbing their paws together and generally looking like they were up to something. And, to make matters worse, experience had shown that just about a hundred per cent of the time, they were up to something, so maybe the white fur that gave the racoon its masked appearance was a perfect fit for Alex, warning those few who actually could notice the shifty racoon of its¡­ creative endeavours.


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    ¡°Why, good evening dear Lady,¡± Alex greeted me, their chittering somehow forming into comprehensible, if strangely accented words. ¡°It is so nice of you to drop by, those on the ground made a terrible mess of things,¡± they continued and I felt my gaze drop, peering into the dusky twilight of the deep forest. Down there, impossibly far below, I could see some torches, flaming with light, carried by hundreds, maybe thousands of bodies. For a moment, I felt my breath catch, realising that there was an army down there, an army that was hunting for me. I wasn¡¯t sure how I knew that they were after me, I only knew that they were hunting me. Blinking, I could see their movement flash before my eyes and could hear the twanging of bows, the whistling of flying arrows and the sharp sounds of swords, tearing through the air. For a moment, I could smell her blood, could feel hot tears running down my face, before they were turned into Ice, drifting away on the warm wind.


    ¡°No, this can¡¯t be,¡± I denied, trying to force my magic to move, to call upon the endless Ice or the darkest night, to call something to smite those who had wronged me, who would wrong me. But nothing came, my magic gone, forever more.


    ¡°No!¡± my scream tore through the darkness of the forest and all around me, I could see the trees sway and bend, some of them even starting to move away from me, pushed by the force of my magic. They bent and they groaned and then, they started to walk, with Alex waving to me and calling out their farewell.


    As the trees moved away, the army below started to change, the sharp features of the elves disappearing, replaced by more familiar visages. Rounded ears replaced the sharp ones, and some facial hair grew as the army below disappeared. Now, I could see people I knew looking up at me, friends and students, people I had met. Only, while their features had changed, the hatred on the faces I could see had not.


    ¡°Why did you leave us behind?¡± Kevin asked, his eyes replaced by strangely swirling water, so painfully similar to the look of a Shattered but fundamentally different. Elementally, maybe.


    ¡°Why did you condemn my child? Sebastian was only a babe!¡± Jenn accused me, the young mother cradling her child as she wept tears of blood from empty eyes. The babe, still held against the mother¡¯s chest, was equally empty-eyed but instead of dripping blood, his eyes were voids of endless shadow, staring back at me.


    ¡°Why did you take my child? Why did you turn my Chantalle into an abomination?¡± Kira asked and I needed a moment to realise that she was talking about Carnelia, my dear elder daughter.


    Countless voices reached me from below, their numerous calls all joining together into an endless din of ¡°Nevermore!¡±


    ¡°No!¡± I could only shout, trying to drown out their voices as power rushed out of me. The wind, still holding me aloft, surged, swirling into a tornado of Ice and Snow, turning the entire world around me white as it buried the screaming figures below, leaving behind nothing but a strangely familiar, silvery-white world filled with power.


    ¡°Hunted and haunted, caught by fear, carried by yearning, calling for the one you lost,¡± a tritonal voice filled the empty world around me and I could feel the wind that carried me fade away and yet, I didn¡¯t fall. Instead, I gently floated down, towards the endless, empty expanse, the wind once again whispering in my ears, ¡°Together, forevermore!¡±


    My eyes flickered upwards, away from the endless expanse, and there far¡­ above? Or maybe below, me I could see an oh-so-familiar round shape, a familiar blue marble. Only, the marble wasn¡¯t blue due to the oceans but because it was burning in blue fire, a fire I felt burn through me, scour away my eyes and ignite the empty pits left behind.


    ¡°Alone, forevermore,¡± an eerie voice spoke as if passing judgment on me, sentencing me for eternity.


    ¡°Mom?¡± yet another voice broke into my senses, calling for me, calling me to the voice. ¡°Mom, wake up,¡± the voice repeated and suddenly, the world around me was swallowed by darkness, only to be replaced with dim, flickering light as my eyes started to flutter open and shut. Finally, after a few, far-too-long moments, I could see my dear daughter Luna in the dim light, kneeling next to my head and looking at me with concern.


    ¡°Are you awake now?¡± she asked, making me realise I had only been dreaming. But what a nightmare it had been.

 Chapter 950

    If there was one thing that was absolute proof of the importance Lady Hecate attached to the analysis of the central crater, it was the zone of protection Luna and Silva laid down before Luna started to try to understand the crystal growth in the crater. And the crater itself, the strange Astral Power in the air and everything else that made this region so peculiar. The power the two of them invoked was strong enough to be palpable without concentrating on them, which was quite impressive for divine magic, there was fairly little subtly involved, just power. A whole lot of power. Normally, Divine Magic was all about efficiency, and I had a feeling that the refined nature of Divine Power, compared to Astral Power, made that even more so. The Gods, with who knew how many years, decades, centuries or even millennia under their belt knew how to produce the desired effect with the least amount of power, in addition to having a domain that most likely helped it along. When their followers then invoked the spells granted to them by their god, they would essentially get these highly refined and efficient spells, spells that were also optimised to accept the specific blend of power inherent to their particular Divine Power.


    In other words, there was no way for a mortal spellcaster to reach similar levels of refinement, not without having spent untold years to get the effect just right. But, in turn, the mortal had direct influence over the effect a spell would take, making them more flexible and a Sorcerer who made their own spells from their raw Astral Power with maybe a few runes to guide the process had the most flexibility but, in turn, had to do the most work to make things efficient.


    At least that was the usual case, as I currently understood these things. Granted, I might be wrong somewhere but I doubted it, it fit with what I had seen and learned on Mundus while also being internally consistent, adding to my confidence. This case, however, was anything but usual, the protection invoked by Luna and Silva didn¡¯t have that refined feeling and it also leaked power into its surroundings, power I recognised as the Divine Power of Lady Hecate. By now, I knew the incredibly complex blend, mostly from the conversations I had with Her in my dreams but also from my investigation into the blessing placed upon me, it was Her power.


    And there was a lot of it, not only contained in the silvery light that had sprung up all around Luna, who was staring at the crystal in the crater, occasionally drawing unknown symbols into the air but everywhere around us. And that wasn¡¯t all, the air was filled with power, making things even more interesting. It was interesting enough to draw my attention, which was quite the feat given that Luna was using unknown symbols, their style completely different from the Runes I had originally learned on Mundus and the style of the runes I had newly learned here on Terra. And sure, the symbols were fascinating but I had a feeling I wouldn¡¯t be able to understand them anyway, given that I suspected they were some sort of Divine Language, maybe even unique to Hecate, and likely only usable by Gods and those who had direct permission from the Gods. Not something I could reasonably expect to employ anytime soon.


    On the other hand, the Divine Power saturating the area and somehow overpowering the constant influx of power radiating from the central crystal was something new and different. It was somewhat similar to the way my mix of Water and Ice had neutralised the power in the ground the previous night but at the same time, it was different. The result was similar but the mechanism didn¡¯t feel like it was the same. To use my previous metaphor, my method had neutralised acid with a base leaving something roughly neutral and this method was more akin to using a beaker or filter to keep the acid away from the area you wanted to work in. Not that the metaphor was completely coherent but it worked well enough for me to understand and make a bit of sense of the situation.


    Sadly, the method, as far as I understood it, meant that the corrosive power from the crystal was increased away from Luna, making it a little difficult to explore on my own. And, to make matters worse, the increase in power attracted some of the weirder creatures, drawing them like moths to the flame, until they got in range of the protective magic Luna was employing. Then, they became feral and berserk, trying to charge at my munchkin and tear her apart.


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    Which, in a way, solved the problem of boredom, it was hard to be bored when a critter or five tried to devour your daughter every few minutes, forcing Lia, Silva, Alex and me to kill every critter that came too close. And they all came to close, apparently following the gradient of power, trying to get to the source of the effect, only to realise that the source wasn¡¯t what they were looking for. Or die long before they got too close.


    The constant attacks were both incredibly annoying and fascinating in their own right, mainly because the power saturating the air made magic work in¡­ interesting ways. Or incredibly wonky ways, to use a more colloquial expression, it certainly didn¡¯t function like it normally did. Hecate¡¯s power was one thing, it made things work a little more smoothly, as if the different types of Astral Power were easier to combine under the influence of Her power.


    But the power radiating from the crystal was different. It was corrosive and annoying, changing every spell I used by altering the effects of my Astral Power in subtle or incredibly obvious ways. In some cases, that meant the Ice I conjured to launch at my foes suddenly started to burn, but burn without melting, at least until it struck. On impact, the shards either burst into flames that rapidly froze the target or they might suddenly sputter out, leaving a puddle of acid or some other effect. It wasn¡¯t consistent and it seemed to be almost random, making it incredibly difficult to adapt my spells or estimate their effect. Things simply seemed to happen in an annoyingly chaotic manner.


    Luckily, studying these interactions was fascinating in its own right. Sure, I had no idea how they actually worked but they clearly did and some of them increased the effect of my spells, though I couldn¡¯t account for the amount of power it took to create that increase. That, and knowing that I certainly was capable of using Fire Magic and would likely be able to learn to wield the other elements that made up the power radiating from the central crystal, meant I might be able to create spells that used these interactions in a controlled fashion.


    Ice that melted into acid sounded like something quite interesting, giving my attacks a completely different damage mechanism, one that would bypass quite a few defences I¡¯d normally struggle with. So, while I still made sure to kill the annoying critters that tried to get a bite of Luna, I also made sure to study just how the power in the environment latched onto my spells. Just seeing the process was sadly not tremendously informative, to my sight it looked simply like a different substance was coating my pristine projectiles, occasionally seeping into them, too.


    I even started to use Bullet Time, giving me a lot more, well, time to study the mechanism, to the point that I conjured Ice and stuck it outside of the shelter created by the divine magic all around us, hoping that the contamination would occur, even if I wasn¡¯t actively attacking.


    And it did, the floating bit of Ice getting slowly infused with the corrosive influence, just like my projectiles did. Repeated testing showed that it also wasn¡¯t infused uniformly, making me think that the energy radiating from the crystal wasn¡¯t uniform but fluctuated quite a bit and what I had previously sensed was only the generalisation. It wasn¡¯t just Fire, Poison, Decay and Disease, it was all of that and a whole slew of mixtures, not necessarily made up of those four. It was chaos and incredibly fascinating as not even the location of these different effects was static, even that changed constantly.


    I kept continuing my experiments, trying to understand what was going on and how the power from the crystal altered the effects of my magic. That is, until loud noises in the distance caught my attention, forcing me to abandon my experiments. Something was heading for us, something big and, by the roaring sounds it was making, something angry.


    Maybe I would meet the draconic pretender after all. I wasn¡¯t sure if I was looking forward to it or not.

 Chapter 951

    It did not take long for the source of the roaring to become visible as it was moving out into the open around the crater. That first glance made me blink in confusion for a moment, uncertain of what I should call the roaring creature. It had three heads, all somewhat different in colour, making me think of a hydra, but its lower body was that of a serpent, not the more reptilian, or draconic, body I remembered the famed monsters of Greek myth having. Not that the name really mattered, its abilities did. I was far more concerned whether it had the regeneration of a hydra or if we had to be prepared for something else. What¡¯s more, each of its heads had a distinct colour, one was covered in orange-red scales, another in acidic green scales and the last had a purple shade that made me think of certain highly poisonous frogs. These distinct colours continued down the creature¡¯s body, turning into stripes of colour that wrapped around the serpentine length, giving it a quite interesting appearance and making me wonder whether that sort of skin would make for good armour. The pattern was certainly unique.


    But before we could skin the beast, we had to slay it. Luckily, it wasn¡¯t approaching from right behind us but it came from the side, almost a quarter of the way around the crater, giving us about twice the time we would have had if it had masked its approach. Not that the creature was terribly sneaky thanks to its size or maybe it simply didn¡¯t care for stealth. Whatever the case, its open and direct approach gave me a lot of space to harass it.


    My opening gambit was straightforward and simple, using Icicles as it gave me a good baseline to test the monster¡¯s defences when it came to the Cold. Taking a moment, I drew up a runic formation before channelling a constant flow of Astral Power into it, causing a hail of Icicles to fly forward, none of them terribly large but nicely hard and sharp either way, all of them raining down on the creature attacking us.


    Sadly, the only thing the attack really accomplished was to show us that the thing had the regeneration befitting its three serpentine heads that marked it as a hydra. My Icicles ripped multiple bloody gashes into its large body, partially thanks to the strange influence of the locally radiating Astral Power, but these wounds closed at a speed visible to the naked eye. Not quite in moments but I estimated that a wound the length of my arm and multiple fingers deep, originally oozing copious amounts of blood would close in about two minutes, making a drawn-out fight a losing proposition.


    Nodding to myself, I channelled another singular burst of power into the formation before me, causing the Icicles to fly a little faster as the formation was overloaded, the power of my attack strong enough to stagger the beast, if only for a few moments.


    Judging by its speed and the distance between us, I felt that I had two, maybe three, more casts before Lia and Silva would engage the beast to keep it from disturbing Luna. Given how little my Icicles had done, I decided to go try something else and quickly drew a formation of Ice and Water, mixing the two elements as I had done before in order to create the pseudo Liquid Moonlight. It was far from the real deal but it packed a surprising amount of freezing energy, something the creatures of the area had been allergic to, so I hoped it would prove to be a good way to deal with this beast.


    The stream of liquid didn¡¯t quite stick together over the distance, turning into a bit of a spray but from the clouds of freezing steam all around it, I had no doubts that it remained cold. The beast seemed to have a similar opinion and didn¡¯t want to get sprayed with supercooled liquid and responded by breathing out a stream of fire from the red head and a stream of strange, dark-green mist from the green head, the two attacks mixing and turning into a cone of eldritch green flames that hurt my eyes just from looking at them. The green fire met my spray of freezing water, causing streamers of energy to erupt from the collision side, alongside a tiny amount of steam. Neither attack managed to gain full primacy and the beast was slowed once more. I kept the attack going but by the time the beast ran out of steam, it was easily dodging out of the way of my attack. In a burst of stubbornness, I decreased the cohesion of my attack even further, turning it into a hose that sprayed the freezing liquid all over a large area but with the decrease in cohesion the local Astral Power was able to take a much larger influence, turning the effect chaotic. Some of the drops hitting the monster caused it to shudder in pain, others in what looked a little like pleasure, as if the strange combination of burning from the local aura and the cold from my attack made for a nice sensation. Not something I wanted to consider further, so I stopped my attack and considered my next move.


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    Given that Ice hadn¡¯t seemed to work that well, I decided to try Darkness and quickly drew a curse into existence, trying to disorient and confuse the beast, with a bit of extra Fear added to the attack. I considered to try reducing its strength and vitality but given its massive bulk and incredible regeneration, I decided to target its mind, hoping that it would be a weakness.


    The result looked quite promising from the distance, the three heads were all surrounded by a thin cloud of darkness, not enough to block the beast¡¯s sight but easily enough to disorient it. The added effects of confusion and fear seemed to have taken effect, too, at least I thought so from its reduced coordination.


    My Curse gave my two companions the opening they had desired and both of them took it without hesitation. Silva moved first but Lia was the first to reach the creature, which I had Observe¡¯d by now and learned that it was called a Serpentis Triad and level eighty-three, the level making my eyes go a little wide in surprise. It had been a while since we had faced an enemy of a higher level than I was.


    Lia¡¯s attack was quite simple, she used her chain-hook in an attempt to probe the creature¡¯s toughness and reflexes, keeping her distance in case she was outmatched. Meanwhile, Silva was demonstrating that she wasn¡¯t just a large dog and had gone into her two-legged form, her paws turning into large, wicked claws and her maw getting a little larger and more intimidating. Then, as if that secondary form wasn¡¯t intimidating enough, she let out a loud, drawn-out howl that shifted in tone a few times and was surrounded by the silvery-white glow I recognised as Lady Hecate¡¯s magic and started to grow even further. By the time the glow disappeared a few seconds later, she had gone from the already intimidating two metres to almost twice that size, getting large enough to dwarf the Serpentis Triad. At least in height, it still had the edge in length.


    By now, Lia had struck the Triad multiple times, causing some more blood to ooze out from its massive body but again, it wasn¡¯t anything decisive. Progress, yes, but we¡¯d have to tear the thing up a lot more if we wanted to win the battle of attrition.


    And then, Silva hit the Triad with a low growl, loud enough to be felt deep in my gut. If I had been an enemy, it might have acted as the myth of the brown note, not due to any acoustic mechanism but simply because a hound that large coming at you with that type of growl was¡­ intimidating, no matter what you were.


    Watching Silva literally tear out strips from the beast only added to that and the distraction she provided meant I didn¡¯t need as much focus to keep the curse I had placed on it going. That, in turn, allowed me to call up a bit of Blood Magic, further enhancing Silva as I was fairly confident that she was the best bet we had to win this fight. Her performance also reminded me that Silva held back a lot of her strength in our day-to-day fights, keeping it in reserve for emergencies. Or moments during which the Lady Hecate wanted Silva to kick ass without reservation like this one.


    And kick ass, she did. Not that the Serpentis Triad had something I¡¯d recognise as an ass, but that didn¡¯t dissuade Silva in the slightest. With the support from my Blood Magic on her and the Darkness Curse on the Triad, she was stronger and a lot more coordinated, while Lia made sure to strike out whenever the Triad tried to distract Silva with two of its heads so the third could do something nasty. Those attempts at nastiness were neatly answered with a blade to the mouth, courtesy of Lia, making sure that Silva could continue with her onslaught.


    Alex, too, added their own brand of chaos, but regardless of our help, it was clearly Silva who carried the battle, viscerally tearing out bloody chunks of flesh from the Triad and scattering it across the open space. No matter how much the monster regenerated, Silva simply continued to tear it apart until even the prodigious regeneration of the Triad couldn¡¯t keep up with the accumulating damage.


    A part of me was amused at the fight, as Silva never even tried to decapitate the not-quite-hydra so we had no idea if it would grow back more heads. But we did know that tearing off its body didn¡¯t cause a new body to form, the Triad Serpent simply died. In many, many pieces.

 Chapter 952

    The death of the Serpentia Triad coincided with the completion of Luna¡¯s ritual, possibly adding some EXP to the total I gained, and propelling me to reach level eighty. Nearby, I could see Silva relax and dissipate the powers she had called upon to utterly devastate the Triad, shrinking back to her normal size and settling on four paws, looking quite exhausted. After shaking herself for a moment, she padded back into the slowly dissipating shield they had conjured up earlier, using the remaining energies of her Goddess to rejuvenate herself at least a little.


    In the meantime, I quickly checked my notifications, nodding at the one for my level before looking over the various skill gains. Blood Rune Mastery reached forty, giving me a new Rune once I could delve for it, Darkness Rune Mastery got to level fifty-seven, as did Ice Rune Mastery, while Water Rune Mastery got to twenty-seven, going up two points, likely due to the combination with Ice Magic I had used repeatedly over the last two days. Only two of my pure Magic Skills had levelled, namely, Ice and Water Magic, going up by one each, reaching sixty-six and twenty-seven each.


    All in all, fairly good advances, good enough that a part of me wanted to look for more enemies like the Serpentia Triad, or even the Scorchipedes we had fought the day before. Fighting powerful enemies was a lot more effective than normal training when it came to increasing skills, likely due to the threat of death forcing your mind to perform at a higher level, the experience improving your general work with these skills. Or something like that, I wasn¡¯t quite sure. It might be simply a quirk of the System and not something innate to people.


    Either way, with the Serpentia Triad dealt with, we could now focus on the more important things, namely the results of Luna¡¯s ritual if she could communicate them, and the harvesting of one giant monster. Even in the privacy of my mind, I wasn¡¯t sure which I was more interested in, the knowledge or the interesting things this giant serpent might have in its body, both options had their own draw. Luckily, I didn¡¯t have to pick, the knowledge in Luna¡¯s head would hopefully stay there and she¡¯d be able to add it to the shrine of Hecate we had been charged with building, while the Serpentia Triad would have to be harvested here, hopefully without having our loot degraded by the Astral Power radiating from the central crystal.


    Glancing at Luna, I realised that my munchkin was kneeling in a comfortable position I had seen her take before, when she was praying to Lady Hecate, making me think that she was currently busy, discussing the ritual and its effect with the management upstairs. Or wherever Lady Hecate¡¯s realm was located in relation to ours, not that it really mattered. However, it meant that talking to Luna would have to wait, so I could focus on the harvest without worrying, especially given that Silva had placed herself near Luna, keeping an eye on things while resting. Nothing would happen there, of that I was fairly certain.


    And if it did, we were all only a few dozen metres away, close enough to intercede with any potential trouble.


    Stepping up next to Lia, I looked at the shredded remains of the Triad, trying to pick out a plan of attack when it came to harvesting it. Sadly, from the way Silva had torn into the thing, most of its organs, and thus a majority of the interesting parts, were utterly destroyed. Its skin, too, was left hanging on the many, many bloody chunks Silva had ripped from its body and strewn around the field of battle, making me wonder if there was any part large enough to make skinning it worthwhile, though I didn¡¯t think so. At best, the heads were relatively intact, Silva had focused on the conjoined body of the Triad but sadly that meant the fascinating pattern of its body was lost.


    Alas, maybe I shouldn¡¯t complain too much, I had a feeling that Silva¡¯s way of destroying it had spared us a variety of troubles, though I couldn¡¯t be certain. Either way, the battle was done and its results couldn¡¯t be changed.


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    So, instead of focusing on things we wouldn¡¯t be able to harvest, I began to search for things that we could get. Thinks like the somewhat small, but quite magically powerful, crystalline growths the Triad had on each of its heads. These growths almost looked like horns, sharing the colour and magical bias of their respective heads and would hopefully be useful for some future projects. Whether one of mine or one of Alex¡¯s, I wasn¡¯t sure but I was certain one of us would be able to use them. Somehow.


    Next to me, Alex was doing something similar, slowly checking over the various bits and pieces, carefully separating the pieces by criteria I couldn¡¯t immediately tell. It wasn¡¯t just along the lines of magical bias, there were additional criteria, that much I could tell, but what they were? I would have to take a closer look at some point, maybe have our alchemically aligned pair teach me some of their craft. By now, they had pushed that particular discipline in ways I just couldn¡¯t follow, creating effects I would consider magical but using different means that made them incredibly effective. It was almost like employing a lever or maybe springs to store physical force, only magical in nature. Or pseudo-magical, I was fairly certain that their art was more focused on the materials used and the reactions between those materials. But that was something to look into later.


    For now, I focused on helping Alex to take out the teeth from the different heads, fascinated that the Triad had specialised teeth to inject different liquids, I had a feeling all of them poisonous, into its prey. These teeth were retractable, hidden behind massively powerful teeth, some of them large enough to be used as daggers. Teeth to grip prey and keep it still, maybe so that the other heads could tear it apart or use the Triad¡¯s more esoteric skills, or its poison, on them. Some of those teeth, Alex had already removed in their quest to get the poisoned teeth, removed and carefully stacked, most likely for a later project.


    Looking at them, I considered whether I could do something interesting with them, too, and when I touched one, carefully sending my senses out to get a better idea, I had to nod to myself, these would be quite useful for some Fire-based enchantments. What type of enchantments, I wasn¡¯t quite certain just yet, but at least the teeth from the red head would work great for that.


    Similarly, the other teeth had their own elemental biases, as one would expect, though I wasn¡¯t sure I could do anything useful with them. Maybe turn them into simple, enchanted weapons but that would be it. Daggers to poison and bleed your enemy for the poisoned ones and maybe use the corrosive aspect of the other head to make something nasty. Nothing I could use to help my allies, which was where I put my focus currently.


    As we continued to take the Serpentia Triad apart for its parts, I began to mentally put together a picture of the creature and how it might have worked. It was an incredibly fascinating mechanism, reminding me of the Centaurs on Mundus a little, with one apparent primary head, at least that¡¯s what I got from the way the spinal cords merged together, and two secondary heads. The central head seemed to have been at least somewhat in charge, though I couldn¡¯t tell whether that was merely in an anatomical sense or if the creature truly had three different minds, one for each of its brains.


    Looking back at the fight, I doubted it, as my Curse had afflicted each of its heads without any problem, normally, I¡¯d have to focus on spreading it to more than one target but here, it simply worked out. So, maybe it was more like the different hemispheres in a human brain, with each part of it responsible for different things. Following that train of thought, I began to dig into the area where the different spinal cords merged into one and found yet another interesting structure. It looked very similar to a brain, only that it wasn¡¯t just made of the soft, spongy brain matter I was used to, there were some fairly solid, almost crystalline strands growing throughout the structure, all of them based around a single, multi-hued crystal. Checking that crystal closer, I realised that it held all three elemental biases in equal measure, making it quite an interesting, and valuable, find.


    Grinning to myself, I began to carefully extract that small, but incredibly fascinating, part of the creature, with Alex watching closely, likely curious about my findings. After showing them what I found, we continued our slow and bloody work, a task not made easier by the fact that the blood was mildly corrosive and soon started to hurt our skin. Alas, some pain had to be suffered in the pursuit of knowledge and loot.

 Interlude: Survivors 602

    If one could say one thing about the group of five that had taken over the cave near the lake, it was that they all were incredibly stubborn. Finding out that some strange creature made up of tentacle-like vines was living in the lake had only been the first step. The next was, obviously, to deal with the massive monster, regardless of the excellent protection it enjoyed thanks to many, many cubic metres of water to hide beneath and its innate power and vitality. They didn¡¯t care that they couldn¡¯t even tell what it was and even Wu Chenhua, the normally realistic and collected leader of their group was carried along by the enthusiasm, especially that of Kevin, their Water Mage.


    To him, the creature was almost a personal insult, a monster that was using HIS element to hide within, befouling the waters and exploiting their life-giving nature to set up ambushes. He would not stand for this and he would see the creature brought low, even if he had to get creative with his methods.


    And so, his daily battles with the vines began, only interrupted when the elderly Mrs Wu, or one of the others, managed to find enemies that could serve as a challenge for their group and they fought together.


    Sadly, no matter how stubborn he was, no matter what he tried and how many individual tentacles he ripped from the water and shredded into mulch, he wasn¡¯t making progress. It was almost as if there would always be another tentacle unless he somehow managed to rip out the entire thing or destroy whatever core the creature or plant might have. A core that was nearly hidden deep within the lake or maybe even below, dug into the ground like roots.


    For the first time, he realised that he couldn¡¯t overcome this foe with Water Magic, as much as that admittance hurt him. Sadly, he wasn¡¯t sure if there was another way to destroy it, certainly not an easy way. To make matters worse, he had stopped gaining points in his Water Magic skill a few days before, forcing him to accept that he wasn¡¯t making progress, merely slamming his head against a wall, hoping to break through the wall.


    Sitting on the small hill the cave they had been using as a base was dug into, he began to relax, letting his mind drift into the Astral River, as the Pale Lady had taught him. If Water wasn¡¯t the answer, what could be the answer? What else had he learned, what else had he seen?


    His mind drifted back to those first lessons, to watching how the Pale Lady had demonstrated different elements to help guide Sandy and himself. To him, Water Magic had clicked easily and fairly quickly, especially with the help of his Teacher. Just being able to ask questions and watch the Pale Lady work Her magic had inspired him and allowed him to warp reality to his will, a feat only possible in works of fiction before. Sure, it was thanks to the Change that it worked at all, and it galled him to admit that the complete and utter destruction of his entire life had come with something good, but it was a fact and he couldn¡¯t be wilfully ignorant. He didn¡¯t even want to imagine what the Pale Lady would do to a student of Hers that was that stupid.


    Opening his eyes, he looked over to the lake and began to wonder. What other element might allow him to do as he needed to? Feeling the Astral River flow around him, he focused his mind towards the water, not delving into the stream of power all around him, but simply following along, carefully listening for the strange, ethereal noises he perceived magic as. He wasn¡¯t able to sense as much as some of the others he had trained with, certainly not as much as his Teacher, but he could feel something. Especially if it was connected to water.


    Any water and the more he immersed himself in the sensation of sensing both, the physical water and the flowing power of the Astral River, the more he realised that they were connected. Not quite one and the same, but it was similar, there was a distortion, almost like a mirror but not really. Maybe like one of those funhouse mirrors, twisting and warping what it reflected, not only in two dimensions but in more. Many, many more.


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    Feeling the water in the drenched Earth around him, he began to realise that it wasn¡¯t just water he could feel but that there was a lot more to it. There was a resonance, all throughout the Astral River with far more elements involved than he had noticed before. For a moment, he was trying to understand, to grasp what he was sensing but before he could make any sense of what he was feeling, a sharp spike of pain shot through his head, causing him to lose his focus and almost black out as tears were driven into his eyes and a scream ripped from his lungs.


    Lying on the ground, he could barely move, trying his best to keep from being sick and some time later, how long he couldn¡¯t tell, he heard steps approaching him.


    ¡°Kevin, you alright?¡± the painfully loud voice of Wendy asked, as she stepped up to the prone form. She had been nearby, keeping an eye on the younger Mage and making sure that no hungry critter decided to make a meal of him while his mind was focused elsewhere. The rest of their group had ventured out, scouting and looking for interesting things while the two of them had remained behind. The pained scream of her companion had caught her off guard, she had been confident that there were no enemies nearby but something had obviously hurt the teen, as his shivering form showed.


    Uncertain what she could do to help and not wanting to make things worse, she only checked his pulse and breathing, not that either was difficult and kept watch over him, waiting for him to recover. For a brief moment, she cursed that this, whatever this was, had happened on her shift, if it had been Oliver, he might have been able to do more, after all, he was a trained medic, something he had continued since the change hit. But no, the decision was to keep one of their fighters with the vulnerable spellcaster. And now, she was standing here, with the heavy staff she used in battle in her hands and nothing she could do but watch and wait.


    Luckily for everyone involved, especially Kevin, his pain didn¡¯t last too long and he managed to get his laboured breathing under control to the point that he noticed the taste of blood in his mouth. Pushing himself up, he spat the blood out, realising that he had bitten his tongue and had a nosebleed.


    ¡°That wasn¡¯t fun,¡± he whispered, grateful for the support Wendy gave him.


    ¡°What happened?¡± the older woman asked, her voice still too loud in his ears but no longer as painful.


    ¡°Pushed too far, I think,¡± he confessed, thinking back to that moment of epiphany, that moment of clarity in which he had seen so much. Too much. Even the memory was taxing his mind, bringing back the headache and he immediately shook his head, pushing the images from his mind.


    ¡°The Lady warned me, sometimes you take things too far, too soon. I¡¯ll have to consider what happened and take things slower,¡± he continued.


    ¡°Huh, looks like you managed to do something,¡± Wendy chuckled, her staff gesturing to the ground around him and the grass that had somehow grown to almost twice its height right around him, with a circle of taller grass stretching about a metre.


    ¡°Um, maybe? Not quite what I tried to do but I might have,¡± Kevin admitted, quickly checking his Astral Power and Health reserves, noticing that both had taken a significant dip.


    ¡°This is a thing,¡± he muttered, reaching out to touch the grass and feeling his own power infused into it, seeping into the living organism and vitalising it. When he closed his eyes, trying to delve back into the Astral, he got a soft slap to the back of his head and his eyes flew back open.


    ¡°Don¡¯t, give yourself time, silly,¡± Wendy admonished him, ¡°You pushed too far already, relax, recover and maybe try to figure out what went wrong and what went right tomorrow,¡± she added, privately hoping that tomorrow, it wouldn¡¯t be her problem if the teen did something stupid. It likely would be, their group of five was too small for anything else to happen, but it was a nice thought. And a valid one, even with her slightly ulterior motives.


    ¡°You¡¯re right, my mind is feeling woozy already. You know, I might just take a nap right here, right now,¡± Kevin accepted his fate, stretching back out in the freshly grown gras and closing his eyes once more. Not trying to do anything, but simply floating there, on the edge of sleep, drifting between reality and the Astral River.

 Chapter 953

    ¡°So, what did you find?¡± I asked Luna, once she was done with her meditation, or maybe calling it a prayer would be more fitting, given that I was fairly certain she had communed with her Goddess while meditating. Now that she was done with it and we were moving out of the area sound the inner crater, I wanted to know what she had divined and what Hecate had made of the investigation.


    ¡°It¡¯s hard to say,¡± she admitted and I realised that she was struggling to find the right words, just like I had been struggling occasionally. With Lenore, I had been able to transmit impressions and concepts without trying to find fitting words in a language that lacked such words. Hel, I wasn¡¯t sure any mundane language had the words to express certain magical concepts, simply because those concepts were so far removed from the usual usage that created the expressions needed that there were none.


    Eventually, either the words would be coined and accepted as part of the usual language or the specialists who¡¯d need these expressions would find a way around the need for words, like using formulas or specific and agreed notations that those in the know could understand. But for now, only Luna and I wanted to converse on these topics, meaning Luna would have to find a way to express herself, or maybe have Hecate help her.


    ¡°Why don¡¯t you try and begin with what you felt near the crater? And what your spellwork told you. I believe your Eyes of the Lunar Maiden allow you to see magic like the way I experience it through my magical sight, though I¡¯m not certain. Maybe we can start with that?¡± I prodded, curious about what my munchkin would make of the idea.


    As it turned out, she began to make quite a bit of it, slowly at first, stumbling over words and occasionally having to resort to gestures, comparisons and a slightly strange game of magical pantomime but it worked astonishingly well. The more she talked and explained, the more I began to understand, allowing me to circle back and have her clarify previous points according to my new understanding and her newly advanced linguistic skills.


    A part of me wondered if the process of acclimatising to completely new words was a little too swift or if the system helped us, maybe according to our advanced intelligence or maybe by simply beaming information into our brain, I wasn¡¯t sure and had no idea how to put the idea to the test. Not that it truly mattered but it was a fascinating thought, fascinating and horrifying.


    However, I wasn¡¯t able to dwell on the question of our advancing vocabulary for too long, instead, I was too fascinated with the topic itself as I began to understand what the Charland was. It wasn¡¯t just a manifestation of the outside energy from the Astral River, it was composed of more than that. In a way, it could be called a manifestation of humanity¡¯s sins, or at least part of those sins. The central crystal was composed of radioactive elements, ripped from the Earth and refined by humans to be used before the magical enhancement of the system struck, altering what humans had made.


    While the world hadn¡¯t held as many nuclear weapons as it had some thirty or forty years earlier, there had still been more than enough firepower to devastate it multiple times, depending on the spread and efficiency employed in the usage. And it wasn¡¯t just the weapons that were problematic, the numerous nuclear power plants would bring similar problems once the humans maintaining them were gone, alongside the various machines needed to keep things controlled.


    Even without the Change acting on the material, the powerplants would have caused massive devastation as the cooling needed broke down but with the Change altering the properties of the nuclear material inside? Some power plants might become harmless, the material in their cores stabilised by the change to the point that nothing bad would happen but for the majority of the power plants, the change would make things¡­ interesting. In an explosive manner.


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    Thinking about all those potentially devastating weapons and power plants was enough to make me shiver in a way that had nothing to do with the temperature. There was simply too much power contained in all those devices, especially with magic added into the mix, so something would have happened. Something bad, potentially world-ending bad, not that it would need much more to end the world of Humanity. The change had seen to that.


    But somehow, the system had some sort of mechanism in place to prevent such devastation, concentrating the problematic parts into crystals like the one in the centre, surrounding it by devastated land. The land itself was made manifest in a strange, cosmic exchange, or so Lady Hecate had told Luna. It hadn¡¯t existed before the change and now, it had been formed and would slowly become part of the world while in exchange other parts of the world would flourish. It didn¡¯t make a whole lot of sense to me, it felt like the exchange described here would require energy to be expended on both sides, even if one side was restored and the other devastated, both would require tremendous amounts of energy. Just like an air conditioning unit wasn¡¯t pulling out heat, it was using energy to fuel a heat exchange, making one side a lot warmer while the other was made a little colder.


    However, as I considered the comparison, I realised that I wasn¡¯t necessarily bound by those laws of thermodynamics, the whole of Ice Magic was laughing in the face of it. I wasn¡¯t making anything warmer if I conjured Ice, unless I somehow managed to make the realm of Ice, if there was such a thing, warmer. I used Astral Power to manifest Ice, as an independent elemental concept. There was no real thermodynamics involved, at least not in a way that could have been understood before the change. It was, fundamentally, magical in a way that physics hadn¡¯t been prepared to explain.


    So, maybe the idea that there was a realm of Life of some kind that could exchange ¡®whole¡¯ land for devastated land could be plausible, at least in a magical sense. Just like earlier with Luna, I was missing the words and concepts, preventing me from considering the idea immediately. It also made me wonder about the world in general, or rather, about reality in general.


    I was somewhat familiar with the realm of Shadows, familiar enough to move within it for a short amount of time, though I wasn¡¯t exactly comfortable doing so. I remembered the strange feeling of being watched I had when I ventured into that space while on Mundus and while I hadn¡¯t felt it here on Terra, I wasn¡¯t sure the Shadows were as quiescent as they appeared. But if there was such a realm of Shadows, was it the only elemental realm?


    While on Mundus, I had originally used a Water Mirror spell as a foundation for my own shadow-scrying spell that later evolved into the shadowy constructs I had used there and was now using here. Given that my scrying constructs remained connected to me thanks to the realm of Shadows it implied that Water had a similar realm, one that likely could be accessed via bodies of Water. Additionally, I remembered that the Naga on Mundus used some sort of aquatic spellwork to communicate across vast distances, maybe even to travel on a personal level. That added another point towards there being a realm of Water, which, in turn, suggested there were more.


    How many was a curious question. One for each element seemed to be the obvious answer but given that the same element could come in vastly different shapes and biases, I wasn¡¯t so sure any longer. I could see the Light element, for example, be separated into one for the usually benevolent, vital element of Sunlight with a much more destructive, scorching element of Radiance being left over. Both might be expansive enough to be considered elements in their own right, though I wasn¡¯t sure. Both were light but both were vastly different.


    Similarly, I could see a case being made for differentiation between smaller manifestations of Water, like Rain, and the pure, elemental dominance that was an ocean with its currents and tides. Both Water but utterly unlike one another.


    And yet, both seemed to be part of the same element under the system. Where did the system draw its artificial lines and just how permeable were they? Trying to understand the strange, central crystal and its fairly unique elements might give me a few answers. However, studying the crystal wasn¡¯t something I could do at this time.


    Simply because I lacked the strength to survive its presence, in addition to lacking the foundational knowledge. Luckily, it would take years for it to dissipate, so I had some time to expand my knowledge, maybe find other crystals like it and draw some inferences from them, compare what I could find. It sounded like an excellent secondary goal, alongside my plan to reach the Nexus of Ice and take possession of it.


    All for the sake of power. All for the sake of Sigmir.

 Chapter 954

    The way out of the Charland was comparatively simple, compared to the way in. We didn¡¯t run into any additional large monsters and even the number of smaller critters we had to face seemed to be a little diminished. I wasn¡¯t sure what that might mean. Had we managed to cut down their numbers by an appreciable amount or had something else happened for them to wizen up? Either option was possible, as were numerous otters, and without further information, there was little we could actually find out.


    For now, I simply accepted it as a lucky break. Thanks to the circumstances, we made good speed and only had to camp out a second night in the Charland, though we barely managed to get to our shelter in time. Nothing had moved into the area, maybe due to the lingering effects of the blessing Silva had used to make us comfortable, so we didn¡¯t have to worry too much. Additionally, the break allowed me to discuss the readings and impressions Luna had taken from the central crystal with her, though neither of us really knew what to make of it, other than what Hecate had told Luna. It was, quite frankly, too far out of our current understanding and without a basis for comparison, there was little we could actually do.


    It was a little like staring at the Sun, high in the sky, or looking at the ground and trying to estimate the size and shape of the Earth from it. Without some sort of comparison, without measurements and quite a bit of creativity, it was doomed to fail. We didn¡¯t have objective measurements, we didn¡¯t have a basis for comparison and we didn¡¯t even know what we were looking for. Thus, trying to glean demonstrable facts from Luna¡¯s magical exploration was sadly doomed to fail, at least until we could research those necessary foundational facts and use them as a basis for comparison.


    During the day, I hoped for a visitation from Lady Hecate but sadly, it was not to be. Instead, we were harassed by a sizable swarm of Embercreepers, a strange, beetle-like creature that looked like it was made of glowing embers, hot to the touch and equipped with fairly large pincers. Luckily, the individual bugs were only the size of a finger but what they lacked in size, they made up for in sheer numbers.


    For our group, that meant only I was capable of handling them with any ease. Alex had some of their expendable equipment remaining, a few of these freeze bombs and a simple, hand-made flamethrower but neither of these tools was suitable to combat swarms. Sure, they¡¯d be able to destroy all Embercreepers in a sphere about a metre in radius but given that the swarm travelled in a long, drawn-out line, that didn¡¯t mean too much. A few dozen would perish, with a few hundred more to come after them.


    However, I could conjure freezing water, dousing the creepers and extinguishing their ember-like shells, causing them to expire almost instantly. It was almost sad to watch them die and I wasn¡¯t sure if they were dying because of the cold if they were drowning or due to some other reason. And, really, it didn¡¯t matter what killed them, just that they died. Sadly, their constant presence meant I wasn¡¯t able to rest for most of the day, to say nothing of sleeping. That alone made them an incredible nuisance and to make matters worse, they didn¡¯t even give any EXP. Not even Luna got anything from them, making me once again wonder how the system measured EXP in cases like that.


    Later, I was treated to the sight of Alex happily shovelling the dead Embercreepers into one of their bags and wondered not for the first time if they had managed to make something similar to my own magical shadow bags. When asked, they had only chittered with amusement but refused to elaborate, annoying me just a little, though given that both Alex and Lia looked to be laden down with various ingredient and resource bags, maybe they were just a very efficient pack-racoon. Or it was something akin to magic, that could be possible, too. Their various tools certainly broke what I¡¯d consider possible with normal, physical means and ventured into territory I¡¯d consider magical and that all without the obvious usage of Astral Power. Outside usage, that is. I already knew that some materials had magical components and from that, I could reason that these components could interact and cause a magical effect, even without Alex using overt magic.


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    Though, how that would come out as a magical bag, I had no idea. But it certainly was possible that it worked with some materials, though looking at the bags again, I doubted it. Especially as I was confident that Lia and Alex would share such interesting equipment with the rest of us, even if my shadow-magic bags worked reasonably fine. They had massive drawbacks and as of yet, I wasn¡¯t able to overcome those drawbacks.


    Luckily, the only opponents we faced during the day were these Embercreepers and once night fell, we could continue on our path and make it out of the Charland. At that point, I was done with the world and wanted nothing but to sleep, so once we got to our shelter, I fell into bed immediately.


    Sleep came quickly and with sleep came dreams. Or maybe calling it a dream would be wrong, it was one of the usual communications with Lady Hecate who proudly told me that we had completed Her quest and it was now time to reap the rewards. It was a little weird not to get the usual notifications but I could feel a brief moment of an outside force flowing into me, causing a feeling of swelling, as if I had just eaten a particularly satisfying meal.


    ¡°Excellent, Jade. Now, I promised you that you would learn how to sense souls. Given that it is normally an innate trait, I cannot simply flip a switch and have you see them, not unless I would also change your entire being into one that possesses that fundamental trait, which would be a major alteration to your existence. I hope it meets with your approval that we will take the hard road, allowing you to learn it properly which will have some advantages for you at the end,¡± Lady Hecate explained, making me frown for just a moment.


    Getting transformed into some other creature didn¡¯t sound too appealing, I liked who I was and getting changed, well, it would change that. I liked being a Firn Elf but, looking back, I wasn¡¯t certain I would have chosen to accept the Change as it came. Had I liked being human? I couldn¡¯t really remember which was a weird sensation, causing my frown to deepen. Ultimately, it didn¡¯t matter, if Lady Hecate was offering to teach me something normally innate to specific creatures, I wanted to learn it.


    ¡°Certainly, Lady Hecate,¡± I accepted, waiting for her to continue.


    ¡°I need you to look around, not with your eyes but by projecting yourself outward. Not your magic, but something deeper, more fundamental to you. Doing so will allow me to sense where you¡¯d project your soul out naturally and I can gently nudge that projection towards your eyes, letting you take the first step to sense souls,¡± she instructed and I did as She asked, or rather, I tried.


    For how long I was in Her realm, trying to project my soul outwards, I wasn¡¯t sure. It felt like it had taken weeks, maybe months, of repeated exercises, exercises occasionally interrupted by instruction on the nature of the soul. The only problem with the instruction was that it sometimes felt contradictory and when I asked about those contradictions, Lady Hecate explained that not only was the language I was using to think and function lacking in the relevant concepts but that I was trying to understand something that I had yet to experience. That I lacked a frame of reference, pointing me to my initial exploration of magic.


    How could I have told somebody without any understanding of Astral Power about some of the deeper aspects of Darkness Magic, especially the Realm of Shadows? I realised that I could tell somebody about the strange, non-physical sensation but if I tried to put it into words, the words started to contradict each other. Speaking of a space that was no space, of shadows that stretched and warped, words quickly began to lose meaning and I had to resort to metaphor and comparisons. Both of which would start to contradict each other, if I only kept talking long enough.


    The realisation, and admittance of it, brought a wide grin to the Maiden¡¯s mouth, one that stayed there for the rest of the lecture. Regardless, the longer I worked and the longer Lady Hecate instructed me, the more I learned. And what I learned was utterly fascinating.

 Chapter 955

    Projecting my soul outwards was only the first step when it came to perceiving souls. Once I managed that first step, the next was to change the path I naturally channelled it through to the one desired, in my case that meant I had to channel it through my eyes instead of my throat, so I would be able to see souls instead of being able to smell and taste them. It was a little amusing to me that apparently my natural inclination when it came to perception was olfactory and gustatory, making me wonder what a soul would taste like. Maybe cotton candy if it was a nice and sweet person, or maybe akin to hot sauce if the person was particularly aggressive. Sadly, these two senses were fairly unsuitable for the perception of souls, simply because of the direct involvement needed for them to work. Sight worked indirectly, off reflections from the perceived subject while scent and taste required direct exposure. Or, in other words, it would be fairly useless to be able to tell that there was a soul present after I had bitten into something because, at that point, I¡¯d have other problems. Granted, it might work by licking some substance but, again, not the most practical way of searching for souls. Unless I wanted to find out if Icecream had a soul, in that case, I might be golden.


    Luckily, I had Lady Hecate with me and under her guidance, I slowly changed the channel my soul would naturally take towards a more suitable one. Namely, towards my sight. Amusingly, her lessons expanded a little when she realised that my natural sensory inclination for magic was the same as it was for souls, something apparently fairly common, but that I had inherited the magical sight from Lenore, allowing me to perceive magic through my eyes as a secondary sense. Given the similarities in the process, she pushed me towards learning how to switch my perception naturally instead of relying on the inherited skill, which was a fascinating process.


    And, to make things even better, she gave me lessons towards parsing the magic I was seeing, similar to the way I could already parse the magic I was smelling and tasting. My eyes were still not as accurate when it came to the different subtexts but I was getting there and beginning to learn how to unravel magical processes by sight alone. To help me develop that ability, Lady Hecate had created a wide, wide variety of magical effects, just hanging in the endless grey expanse around us, allowing me to study them at my leisure.


    It was an impossible, maddening challenge, like putting me into a huge library but one where I couldn¡¯t read the languages used, at least not fully. Instead, I had to study effects I could somewhat understand, mostly Ice, Darkness or even Blood magical effects She had created, and from there, I could somewhat draw inferences in regards to the other effects. At least to a point, some processes looked similar, regardless of the magic they were created with but given the limited options, it was slow going. To make matters even more difficult, Lady Hecate wasn¡¯t showing me the results of the magical effects, only a snapshot of the process at one of its points. It could be an explosive fireball as it would look while it was flying towards somebody or it might be a Blood Curse as it would look like the moment it entered the target¡¯s system. How she had done that last image, I had no idea, given that there was nothing for the curse to work on and yet, it appeared to my senses as if the curse would take effect the next moment, spreading through something that just wasn¡¯t there. At least nothing I could detect but given that we were in the realm of Hecate, I probably shouldn¡¯t be surprised that she could do whatever She wanted in regards to her Domain.


    Sadly, even with all that help She was giving me, it would take some time to get used to this new way of studying magic. A lot of time, most likely, but Lady Hecate assured me I¡¯d eventually learn how to understand any magic I saw if I only kept working on the skill. And working on it, I would, even as Her assurance brought a wide grin to my face. Maybe I had neglected my Insight a little too much due to my focus on improving my Intelligence, something I might want to correct sometime in the future.


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    Once I was able to push my soul towards my eyes, Lady Hecate gave me something to look for, creating dozens of animated constructs, all looking identical, but with a single soul hiding amongst them. My task was to find the soul, which was harder than I would have imagined, but slowly, and with a lot of effort, I was getting there.


    By the time I got to that point, I no longer had any idea how long I had been in Her realm, though I honestly didn¡¯t mind too much. I was fairly certain that, no matter how long I was with Her, I would wake up during the evening of the same day I had gone to sleep, as I had before, so I was taking the time She was granting me as a reward and trying to make the most of it. For some reason, She had decided to give me this fairly major boon and I was nothing but grateful.


    Alas, all things had to come to an end. In this case, the end came when I was able to successfully spot the soul seven times out of ten, which I considered an acceptable feat. To make things even better, I had managed to decipher a few of the magical processes she had left in the air around me, taking inspiration from the way She used Her magic and planning to work some of these ideas into my own spellcasting. After all, if there was one being who knew a lot about magic, it would be the literal Goddess of Magic, meaning I would be a fool of the highest calibre if I didn¡¯t take advantage of her reward. And I didn¡¯t think I was a fool.


    Sadly, taking what I had learned and applying it to what I could do would, as so many things, take time. Time outside of Lady Hecate¡¯s realm, time to test and experiment. But I would make the time, hopefully allowing me to perform some amazing feats of magic.


    With the lessons over, Lady Hecate bid me farewell and for a moment, I was surrounded by darkness before realising that the darkness wasn¡¯t actually that but that my eyes were shut. It took a few more moments for my mind, or maybe my soul, to fully control my body once more, the sensation eerily similar to that of the capsule and Road to Purgatory, so I could open my eyes.


    Looking around, I quickly confirmed that, yes, it had only been about eight hours since I went to sleep and somehow, despite having spent countless hours working with Lady Hecate I felt fully rested as if I had simply slept the hours away. For a brief moment, I was utterly jealous of the Goddess, only to realise how silly that emotion was. She was simply far more powerful and knowledgeable about magic, it was a simple fact I had to accept. She could do things I could only wish for, had literally the ability to create Divine Miracles, so jealousy was a little¡­ silly. Some day, I might be able to do the same. Manipulating time, maybe using Darkness and what I thought might be its ultimate concept, the Void. Black Holes sprung to mind, gravity strong enough that even the light couldn¡¯t escape. If I remember correctly, they could distort time, even if I wasn¡¯t sure if that idea only came from science fiction or if there was fact behind it, too. And even if there was, I wasn¡¯t quite powerful enough to create something that dense, nor would I be able to control the resulting forces.


    With my eyes now open, they flickered to the notifications I had received in Lady Hecate¡¯s realm and was happy to see that I hadn¡¯t just received the EXP from the quest she had sent us on, just barely enough to bring me to level eighty-one, but I had also gained a single point in Intuition, bringing the attribute to fifty and granting me a trait.


    Though, what I was supposed to think about the fact that the trait I had gained was called Soul Perception, improving my ability to see souls, to go with the Special Ability I had gained in Lady Hecate¡¯s realm called Soul Sight, I wasn¡¯t quite sure.


    It made me wonder if that was a coincidence or if a certain Goddess of Magic, Crossroads and quite a few other things had slightly put her finger on the scale or weighted down the dice.


    Just a little amused, I pushed myself up, curious how the others had fared and what they had received as their just rewards.

 Chapter 956

    Walking around our shelter, I realised that only Silva was currently awake, keeping guard. A quick, somewhat onesided conversation between us told me that she had received her rewards but when I tried to find out, she only gave me a wide, canine grin and refused to even hint at them. It was just a little annoying but then, I was fairly used to Silva having fun at my expense, especially when it came to my unbridled curiosity.


    Shaking my head, I decided to test my new sense in the real world, after I had been working on it in Lady Hecate¡¯s realm for an untold amount of time. Focusing in that strange, somewhat uncomfortable way, I opened my eyes and suffered a brief moment of headache as a little too much information was flowing into my mind. Almost as if there were souls everywhere, in every stone, in every blade of grass and diffused everywhere within the Earth. Even the air had some strange hues that I could detect, less intense than what I could see in the Earth but definitely present. Focusing on the spark I could see within Silva, I managed to focus my sight to the point that I could only see that spark, and the spark of my other companions, but it took me a bit of work. Not as much as I had needed before, but this new sense was not one I could use with impunity.


    Wondering what I might be able to do with that new way of looking at the world, I checked the sky outside, making sure that I wasn¡¯t running into the bright light of the sun, before deciding that I¡¯d have to wait a little longer, it was still too bright outside.


    Instead, I took inventory of our supplies, realising with a bit of annoyance that we would be running out soon, despite our attempts to loot as much as possible, the shadow bags that allowed us to carry surreal amounts of resources and constant foraging. Spending time in the Charland, with its inedible fauna and non-existent flora meant we had been unable to gather anything, causing us to deplete our stores far more than I¡¯d have liked. We had maybe a week of our usual, fairly balanced and tasty diet and about two months of the essential staples like rice, grain, oatmeal and salt.


    During our looting, I had made sure to take as much of those staples as possible, as they would sustain us, it wouldn¡¯t be good eating, it wouldn¡¯t really be healthy but we would endure. Additionally, it was a lot easier to find some somewhat edible green in the wild and turn it into salad, it might not taste well but it was possible and a similar case could be made for meat. If taste wasn¡¯t taken into account, it was fairly easy to acquire, especially with my own magical abilities that allowed me to make sure the meat was safe.


    Still, if we didn¡¯t want to start hunting squirrels, rats or similar critters that likely were reproducing in droves on the ruins of human civilisation, we would have to start looking into the situation carefully. Annoying as it was, there was no way around it, at least until we managed to find some way to magically conjure food if that was even possible. It worked with Water but I doubted there was a realm of Food out there, though a realm of beasts might be plausible. Maybe I¡¯d be able to conjure blood, though I hadn¡¯t been able to with my Blood Magic, at least so far. If I could, there might be a way to turn the conjured blood into sausage or black pudding or something like that, I might have to look into the possibility. As weird as it was to imagine eating something I had literally pulled from thin air, I was already doing that when drinking conjured water. It was merely a question of getting used to the strange new world we were living in. Possible, and likely worth the effort, if the initial idea was possible.


    Something to look into.


    By the time I was done checking the food and planning, Lia had woken up and was looking at me with excitement in her eyes.


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    ¡°And, what did the Lady Hecate grant you?¡± I asked, curious about the answer.


    ¡°I know where I went wrong now. I¡¯m pretty sure I¡¯ll be able to make new Vampires, though I might need your help if the convert is seriously powerful,¡± she gushed, looking incredibly proud and happy at the idea.


    ¡°Oh?¡± I raised an eyebrow, asking for elaboration which Lia happily provided. It turned out, that neither of us had realised that there was a specific and fairly elaborate combination of magical elements that needed to be infused into the blood, alongside a dash of vital energy from the one doing the raising. A fairly interesting idea, though it made me wonder how we had managed with Alex. Maybe part of the infusion had come from the Withered elements in their body, or the colonel fungus itself, inadvertently transmitted to these elements in an attempt to fight back against our infusion, only to fail and make us succeed.


    A definite possibility and something I might have to look into at some point, meaning I put it on the endlessly growing list.


    Shaking my head, I decided to study Lia, looking at her through my newly developed sight. The result was fairly fascinating, especially when I compared it to the way Silva looked. Where Silva was bright with vital energies and had a spark glowing at the centre of her metaphysical being, Lia was almost the exact opposite. Oh, she had vital energies within her body but it looked almost as if they were slowly drawn in while mixing with a different type of energy, one that was most definitely not vital. Or conducive to living things, the closest energy I had seen to it was the necrotic energy I could conjure with my Death Magic and about the deadliest thing I had access to. And it was animating my daughter, at least partially. To make matters worse, where Silva had the glowing spark, Lia had a slightly disturbing void, almost like a tiny, black sun that radiated emptiness. It wasn¡¯t just Darkness that spread from that Void, it was something deeper, darker, both fascinating in its implications but also just a little scary. Or maybe a lot scary, I wasn¡¯t quite sure how to take it.


    Trying to look deeper was sadly impossible but I had a feeling I was missing something there, as if the void in the centre of her being was more than just emptiness. A hole in existence but one that either led elsewhere or had a definite and distinct bottom, I wasn¡¯t quite sure how to interpret what my new sense was telling me. Or I might simply imagine things, it wasn¡¯t as if I had a lot of experience with strangely empty souls, or souls in general.


    Either way, I was both fascinated and a little horrified by my daughter, making me wonder what my own soul and existence would look like. Sadly, I was unable to study that, due to the way this particular sight worked.


    Taking another look at my older daughter, I watched in fascination how the energies in her body moved. the necrotic energies interacting with the vital energies in a process that was almost reminiscent of digestion, just a lot stranger. There was no real physical process involved, at least I couldn¡¯t detect anything that indicated one, just a metaphysical exchange of energies I couldn¡¯t really describe. The only thing I could say conclusively was that she was far from a living being, while also not being Undead, at least from what I could tell. Maybe I would have to take another look at the Undead in the cities and the Shattered, too. It would be interesting to see how they looked with my new sight, though other things took priority for now.


    Just a little after Lia woke, Alex joined us, too, and when I looked at them, I realised a startling similarity. Where Lia had that disturbing void in the centre of her being, Alex had a similar one, only when I focused on theirs, I was able to detect a faint but familiar echo, that of Lia. Not a real connection, at least from what I could tell, but more an imprint, making me wonder why Lia was different in that regard. Or maybe the difference was that I couldn¡¯t detect myself with that sight, as I already knew, and where Alex had an imprint of Lia, Lia would have one of me, something that wasn¡¯t visible to my new sight.


    Shaking my head, I checked the situation outside once more before stepping out while asking Lia and Alex if they could go hunting during the night, informing them of our incoming food shortage. Not that either of them needed normal food, but if I couldn¡¯t get decent food, they, too, would suffer with me.

 Chapter 957

    Outside, I could finally focus on actively testing my new ability. While it was fascinating to study my companions with it and draw conclusions from the way the animating power of their bodies moved through them, I wasn¡¯t about to try doing anything with those powers. That sounded like an incredibly reckless and fairly stupid thing to do, something that could easily end up changing them on a fundamental level I couldn¡¯t even begin to understand at the moment.


    Instead, I decided to start with something simple and fairly contained. Amusingly, simple in this case didn¡¯t mean something like a rock or pebble, those seemed to be connected on a fairly deep level, one that was highly reminiscent of the faint echoes of power I could detect in the shadows. Not quite as if all rocks shared the same soul but it made me think that all rocks had a shadow of something greater within them. Or, given that they had nothing to do with the Shadows, calling it an echo might be a better word, a remnant of past connections that echoed through the present into the future. Just what exactly that connection entailed, how deep it went and what one might be able to accomplish with it, I had no idea and couldn¡¯t even begin to guess but with it present, I wasn¡¯t about to experiment with it. If nothing else, there¡¯d likely be some sort of experimental echo.


    No, it was a lot better to take something contained within itself, at least contained at the level I could detect. A living thing, in other words. My first instinct was to reach for plants, they didn¡¯t seem to have any connection beyond their physical roots, nothing reaching out and connecting them into some sort of giant collective mind. At least not the simple grass I could find near the hole we were currently sheltering in, it would be interesting to see if other places had a stronger interconnectivity, maybe if we were in a forest, I could see something like that, or by studying colonel fungi. I had little doubt that the Withering Fungi had a connection beyond the psychic one, though where to draw boundaries between a psychic connection and one of the soul, I didn¡¯t know.


    Just looking at the grass, I could see traces of vitality but little else, no animus, nothing that came even close to the complexity of my companions. Maybe it shouldn¡¯t come as a surprise, but the grass was just that, a little, stubborn weed, clinging to life as it slowly drew nutrients from the soil and the air, transforming them with energy from the Sun. Now, with night falling, the grass was going dormant, its processes slowing down as it waited for the dawn and new energy from above.


    Curious, I started to try reaching for the energy, at first by simply sending out probes of Astral Power. Sadly, I quickly realised that just using Astral Power wasn¡¯t the right thing to do, my Astral Power didn¡¯t interact with the essence of the weed at all, at least not directly. Sure, if I used too much power or didn¡¯t control the power I was using tightly enough the physical structure of the grass was crushed with the expected negative consequences for the vital energy within but that wasn¡¯t really the manipulation I was looking for. That was more akin to trying to draw water from a container and smashing the container in the process. Sure, you might catch a little water if you were lucky but it really wasn¡¯t the point of the exercise.


    With that realisation, I began to try influencing the vital essence without destroying the physical structure of the grass I was working on. By now, I had already destroyed a number of plants but given that I only targeted individual plants, it wasn¡¯t too much.


    Sadly, I wasn¡¯t making much progress. Or rather, I wasn¡¯t making any progress, as I had yet to find the right way to interact with the essence of the grass in the first place. I was trying to use different combinations of Astral Power but it looked like Astral Power wasn¡¯t the answer here. Nor was trying to focus on the grass with my will, without employing any Astral Power, merely attempting to bring my extra-sensory perception to the forefront of my mind. Without Mind Magic, I wasn¡¯t sure I was actually doing anything, I certainly couldn¡¯t detect any alteration to either myself or the grass. Well, unless I counted that I began to feel silly, though I doubted that was a direct result of something happening with my extra-sensory perception unless I counted feeling self-conscious.


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    Well, there was one way I could use to influence the vital essence, it was an incredibly simple way but not a terribly useful one. Death Magic could easily destroy the essence, causing the grass to wither nearly instantly before falling to dust moments later. But that wasn¡¯t really influencing it, merely destroying it, which wasn¡¯t quite what I had in mind. I needed the opposite, but sadly, I couldn¡¯t access Life Magic. Blood Magic, which I tried using, only influenced the physical structure and while that had a slight knock-on effect, it wasn¡¯t what I was looking for.


    As I was considering ways to somehow turn my Blood Magic into the conceptually different Life Magic, a type of magic I had a decent amount of exposure to thanks to training Luna, I felt a wave of power emanating from the shelter behind me. Luckily, I instantly recognised the flavour of the power surging into the world as coming from Lady Hecate, allowing me to remain fairly calm. Most likely, it had something to do with either Luna or Silva, the former a lot more likely than the latter, as Luna hadn¡¯t received her reward just yet.


    And her reward would be to cross the first divide, though I hadn¡¯t expected it would have such an impact. My own crossing had been a lot more low-key, as had those of Silva, Lia and even Alex. Alex had actually left the smallest impact, to the point that I hadn¡¯t even realised that they had crossed for a few days, only when they began to produce some truly strange equipment with Lia¡¯s help I noticed that something odd was going on.


    My munchkin apparently couldn¡¯t help but shout out into the world that she had changed. Or maybe Lady Hecate felt that having Her favourite child reach a new milestone had to be celebrated, like a birthday or something.


    Grinning to myself, I rose and walked back inside, the power in the air feeling quite comfortable, a far cry from the irritating influence of the Charland. Sure, it wasn¡¯t as comfortable as a glacier or something like that but it was progress.


    Inside, I was met by Silva who happily wagged her tail, obviously pleased with the result of Luna¡¯s advancement. When I stepped into the small cave that acted as Luna¡¯s ¡®bedroom¡¯ I was assaulted by a small munchkin who wrapped her arms around my waist, her head burying into my chest.


    ¡°Missed you, mum,¡± she muttered, her voice sounding strangely relived. It took me a moment to realise that she might have spent a similar time in Hecate¡¯s realm as I had and was feeling like she hadn¡¯t seen me in quite some time, so I reached up, gently stroking her hair.


    ¡°Did you learn something in Lady Hecate¡¯s realm?¡± I softly asked, feeling her head move against my chest in a nod moments later.


    ¡°Mhm, I did. The Maiden played with me, the Mother was teaching me and the Crone watched me as I ran around. It was fun but I missed you loads,¡± she explained, her voice muffled by my clothes.


    ¡°And did you have fun?¡± I prodded, faintly amused by the whole thing. Again, there was a nod before she replied verbally.


    ¡°Yeah, loads,¡± she admitted, ¡°Lady Hecate told me that she felt a little bad that I was growing up so fast, so she wanted me to enjoy myself, at least for a while. It sounded like my growth will take another jump forward now.¡±


    Now, my amusement vanished quite rapidly, a familiar guilty feeling welling up in my gut once more. It was annoyingly irrational, intellectually, I was fully aware that Luna would have been forced to grow up by the Change and the utter chaos it left in its wake, there simply were no resources to allow a child to enjoy their childhood. And yet, hearing her talk almost like a small adult instead of the six-year-old she actually was didn¡¯t feel right.


    ¡°Why don¡¯t you tell me about it, little one? Lia and Alex are out hunting, so we¡¯ve got time. And if you want to test around with the new tricks you undoubtedly learned from the Lady, we can do that, too,¡± I offered, grinning when Luna nodded once more, only to remain stationary afterwards, snuggled up to my body. Apparently, testing and speaking would have to wait. For now, the munchkin wanted cuddles.

 Chapter 958

    It took almost an hour of snuggling for Luna to have her fill of physical affection. During that time, she told me in fairly general terms how her time in Lady Hecate¡¯s realm had been, making me realise just how long that had been for her. It sounded like she had experienced at least a year, maybe even two, in the span of a night, an idea that felt incredibly strange. Doubly so when considering that Luna was just a little over six years old and had already experienced multiple sessions in Lady Hecate¡¯s realm, though only this last one had been that long from what I could tell. Still, if I had to guess, I¡¯d estimate that she had spent about three years total in the grey expanse that was her patron¡¯s realm, compared to the six on Earth. Briefly, I wondered how it altered her development compared to that of others, though given that her ever-growing levels added an unnatural amount of physical maturity to her body, the added years of pseudo-time likely kept things fairly balanced. Additionally, she also gained mental attributes that changed the equation even further, meaning there was little point in speculating.


    When she told me about the lessons, I felt quite pleased, it sounded as if Lady Hecate had focused on the basics, meaning simple maths, reading and writing, with an interesting bias towards somewhat Arcane texts. Simplified stories of clever witches and sorcerers who used their guile, intelligence and magical power to change the world as they desired, with some moral tales thrown in to teach the responsible use of such powers. It wasn¡¯t indoctrination into the Cult of Hecate, though she had been given lessons on that, too, but remarkably balanced lessons from what I could tell.


    Amusingly, she groused a little about the lack of practical magic lessons, it sounded like Lady Hecate¡¯s teachings had been focused on helping Luna establish firm foundations that she now could use to build her own magical style. If anything, it made me think of the way she had given me magical processes to study, allowing me to make my own observations and craft practical applications from those observations instead of simply giving me a bunch of spells to practise. Sure, I¡¯d be able to eventually reverse-engineer those spells, likely after a long, long time of trying and failing, but by making me do my own work, I would find different ways to make things happen. Likely worse ways, simply due to the amount of experience and knowledge a literal deity of magic had to have on the subject of magic, but maybe I would find something interesting in the process. One never knew, but I was willing to find out.


    Finally, with Luna¡¯s craving for physical contact sated, I suggested that we move outside and begin discussing the shrine we had been asked to build here. It would take some effort, and I was wondering how to make it so the Charland wouldn¡¯t swallow the shrine up whole, but I could see a few places where construction could take place.


    As we walked, we began talking, especially about the possibilities of using Life Magic to influence souls. The way Luna perked up at the idea, I had a feeling she¡¯d be happy to help me test things, a feeling that was confirmed moments later when she stopped to stare at a small bush.


    ¡°Can you check if I¡¯m doing it right?¡± she asked, her eyes sparkling with glee that made me wonder if she had been allowed to use any magic in Lady Hecate¡¯s realm. When I nodded and activated my Soul Sight, she used her own ocular ability and made her eyes glow with the faint, silver sheen I already knew before she started to channel her magic into the plant.


    For once, she wasn¡¯t trying to physically alter the plant but was aiming for its essence and the result was not quite what I had expected. Granted, I wasn¡¯t sure what I was supposed to expect but certainly not that the plant would reach up and try grabbing Luna.


    At least that was what it looked like, the movement was far faster than any mundane shrub had any business to move and its attempt at engulfing Luna was surprisingly coordinated for something that was supposed to subsist of air, light and soil. Sure, Luna had overdone it and channelled far too much Life Magic into the plant, likely enough to sprout an entire new shrub, but from what I could see, the magic wasn¡¯t really moving into the physical plant. Instead, it looked like the Life Magic was doing something fairly similar to the mix of Dark and Death Magic that animated Lia, only with a lot less purpose involved.


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    As the plant tried to grab Luna, my munchkin dodged aside while I started pulling on my Death Magic, curious about what would happen if Life and Death started to mix within the plant. When I channelled the magic into its structure, taking care to keep it beyond the physical realm and fairly low-powered, things became interesting. Even more interesting than an animated shrub.


    For a moment, I was reminded of the ritual that had brought Alex into existence, the way the energies of the Withering Fungus had clashed and competed with the energy of Lia¡¯s ritual until Lia¡¯s energy had finally managed to overcome the energy that the Withering Fungus had used to control its victims.


    Back then, Lia¡¯s ritual had allowed Alex to become a lot more than a simple vampiric racoon if such a thing could ever be called simple. No, Alex was likely a unique fluke, as the energy from the Withering Fungus had provided some vitally important intelligence to the animating force from Lia. I wasn¡¯t sure just how much that influence was lingering, though I was confident that Alex wasn¡¯t a threat, nor did they carry any leftover spores or influence from the fungus.


    Now, I could see two completely opposing energies battling for dominance within the plant, the physical structure changing rapidly under the influence of the energy that ravaged its metaphysical existence. Parts under the direct influence of my Death Magic started to turn thin, dried up and almost skeletal, while those under the lingering influence of Luna¡¯s Life Magic, now apparently under the control of the plant, were a little thicker, radiating strength and almost endless vitality. When I studied the plant for another moment, I realised that I had been wrong, it wasn¡¯t that Luna¡¯s Life Magic was under the control of the plant, the energy of the plant had merged with the Life Magic and, for lack of a better expression, taken on a life of its own. The plant was, thanks to Luna¡¯s influence, now almost as animated as an animal of similar size and thanks to the magic changing its essence equipped with similar drives. Chief amongst those drives, the drive to survive, something it desperately tried, despite the deadly energy I had channelled into its structure.


    The stalemate lasted for a few seconds, seconds during which the essence of the plant was in extreme turmoil, with its physical structure changing rapidly. Then, the necrotic energy I had channelled into it managed to overcome the vital energy of the plant and Luna¡¯s Life Magic, likely because I kept supplying fresh necrotic energy while the vital energy was limited. In that brief moment of change, the necrotic energy surged into the almost imperceivably tiny spark, the core of the plant¡¯s vital essence, changing its very nature. Its foundation, the core of its soul, whatever one wanted to call it, it was utterly changed, turned into something that bore little resemblance to its previous form.


    Instead of a tiny spark that radiated vital essence, similar to the spark I had observed in Silva, though this one on a far smaller scale, there was now a void, somewhat similar to that within Lia and Alex, but not quite the same. Where their void was at least partially composed of Darkness, this one was pure Death and it was rapidly drawing energy in from everywhere around it.


    It even tried to rip out my own vitality but where Luna and I had decent resistance to such effects, the plants in the surrounding area lacked such resistance and in mere moments, the effect had turned a few square metres of grass and shrubbery into an empty expanse of chalky, grey dust.


    Blinking with a mix of disbelief and surprise, I quickly lashed out, using nothing but pure Ice Magic, aiming for the physical structure of the plant. I wasn¡¯t sure what would happen if I were to use Death or Darkness, let alone Blood, and I didn¡¯t really want to find out, not while the plant tried to drain the life of my Munchkin and me.


    Luckily, the blast of freezing cold energy was enough to freeze the plant solid, leaving a brittle and incredibly strange structure for a few moments before yet another exertion of my magic shattered the plant into small shards of Ice, unleashing an unpleasant surge of necrotic energy into the environment.


    ¡°That happened,¡± I muttered, breathing a sigh of relief and wondering what the Hel had just happened.

 Chapter 959

    Studying the scattered dust didn¡¯t get me very far. There wasn¡¯t anything special about it, at least as far as I could tell, other than its exposure to a lot of Ice Astral Power, something fairly obvious. However, what I considered interesting, was that I couldn¡¯t detect any Life or Death Magic in the residue, making me wonder if the powers Luna and I had both invoked had somehow disappeared without a trace. Maybe because we both had focused our efforts on the essence, the soul, of the plant and not its physical form so when the soul was forced out of the plant and onwards, it had taken the power we had invoked with it.


    At least that was the most plausible conclusion I could come up with, though I was fascinated by the fact that despite the physical changes I had observed, there was no magic remaining. How that could be, I had no idea, somehow, the soul, infused with our magic, had changed the plant without the magic leaking out, or something like that. For a moment, I wondered if it was somehow similar to the system, where a magical, for lack of a better word, change was imposed upon the soul and expressed in physical changes without a direct, physical connection to the source of the change but I was speculating wildly in that regard. The system was, without a doubt, multiple levels above anything I could begin to understand, so maybe I should push any speculation regarding it back, far back. If I ever got to the point where I could say I fully understood the divine, I¡¯d start putting my attention on the system but for now, the system simply was. I could use it, could even try to exploit certain traits it had, but I had to accept it as a part of reality.


    Thinking of the system I briefly glanced at my notifications, seeing one that told me my Death Magic had gone up by one, reaching level twenty-four and, to my absolute surprise, my Enchanting had gone up by one, too, reaching level nineteen. For a moment, I wondered how that had happened, only to come to the conclusion that the manipulation of the plant must have counted as Enchanting, according to the system. A fascinating realisation that made me wonder just how expansive the skill actually was if both the runic engraving of metallic objects and the direct magical manipulation of Souls were part of it. There wasn¡¯t a lot of overlap between the two skills, only that both attempted to permanently alter the nature of something else. If that was all the commonality needed to be part of the Enchanting skill, I could see a lot of things fall under it.


    ¡°Can you see anything special about the dust?¡± I asked Luna, curious if her way of seeing the world allowed her to see something I couldn¡¯t.


    ¡°There¡¯s something,¡± she muttered, kneeling next to me and letting some dust run through her fingers, watching it glitter as it fell to the ground, joining the rest of the dust the vegetation had turned into.


    As she was studying, or maybe just playing, with the dust, I looked a little further, into the area destroyed by the leaching effect of the plant, noticing that there, the dust was slightly contaminated with the deadly necrotic energy of Death Magic. Stepping over, I carefully studied the remains, even lowering my head close to the ground so I could sniff the air directly above the dust without touching it. That way, I could be fairly sure that the magic of my body wasn¡¯t influencing the result while also making sure I didn¡¯t accidentally inhale any of the dust, something I was quite keen to avoid.


    To my surprise, the Death Magic I could detect wasn¡¯t my own. There were some similarities but also clear differences, something I hadn¡¯t expected. If the plant had simply radiated my own Death Magic into the environment, it wouldn¡¯t have changed this much, I¡¯d still be able to recognise it. But like this, I had to conclude that the plant had, somehow, wielded Death Magic reflexively, maybe in an attempt to draw in power to stabilise itself after the alterations it had undergone due to the clash of the contraditionary magics channelled by Luna and myself.


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    At the original position, Luna had now thrown a few seeds from her pouch to the ground and was carefully channelling Life Magic into them, making me raise an eyebrow, curious about what she was trying to do. For a few seconds, nothing happened and I realised just how careful and slow Luna was working. Normally, she could grow something like a vine to full size in just a few seconds but here, she was taking almost a minute to grow a simple, small flower, a daisy or something like that.


    My surprise was even greater when the plant didn¡¯t grow the expected white and yellow blossom but an utterly unique blossom, with one-half of the outer blossom dark grey, with tiny particles drifting away from the plant and vanishing into the air, while the other side was greenish-blue, with a similar effect, only that the particles from that side were drifting upwards before fading from my senses. The centre of the blossom, what would normally be bright yellow, was a beautiful, silvery-blue, a colour I instantly recognised as the colour of Ice Magic.


    ¡°Fascinating,¡± I couldn¡¯t help but mutter, realising that the blossom wasn¡¯t just coloured in this particular way but had taken on a small bias according to the elements present in the dust, with one part attuned to Death Magic, one to Life Magic and the centre attuned to Ice Magic. ¡°Do you think Alex would be able to use a plant like this?¡± I couldn¡¯t help but ask, wondering just how much we could accomplish with elementally biased plants grown to order.


    ¡°I don¡¯t think so,¡± Luna shook her head, ¡°Lady Hecate taught me how to grow these daisies, they take on foreign magic incredibly easily but they are unable to contain any real power, it¡¯s just a tiny echo. Just enough for us to see but not enough to be of any use.¡±


    ¡°Too bad,¡± I readily accepted her words, studying the plants a little more, when I realised just how difficult it must be to grow such plants without accidentally pushing the magical bias of the magic used to grow them into the plants. ¡°But very well done,¡± I praised my munchkin, giving her shoulder a quick squeeze.


    ¡°What do you think this means? Neither of us could detect the magical traces, not really, but they are clearly there. Faint, but there,¡± she asked, looking at the dust before her eyes swept across the outer ring, where the plant had devastated the area.


    ¡°I think we accidentally gave the plant a little too much magic, allowing it to become something more, a magical plant, if you will. But because we both used diametrically opposed magical elements, things got weird until the Death Magic I kept channelling overwhelmed what Life Magic you had channelled into it at the beginning. At that moment, the plant became something just a little reminiscent of Lia and Alex, trying to draw in vitality from the environment, like those two take Astral Power from my blood to sustain themself. Well, more Lia than Alex, but Lia actively uses her magic and physical powers while Alex is much more cerebral, using their brain and Alchemy to get things done,¡± I explained, though while I had a hypothesis, I wasn¡¯t confident in it. Mostly, I was trying to make sense of a fairly insane moment, while wondering if we could make use of the phenomenon.


    ¡°So, if we did something similar but not with diametrically opposed elements, we might be able to make something permanent?¡± Luna asked, making me realise just how much she had learned and mentally matured in her time with Lady Hecate.


    ¡°We could try but I think we should be careful. I have no idea what it might do, so maybe we should stick with small plants, maybe a small, harmless critter like a rabbit, mouse or rat, or something like that. Nothing that can easily escape or turn into something dangerous that we immediately have to put down,¡± I reasoned, taking yet another look at the dust-filled area that had been relatively vibrant with vegetation just a few minutes ago.


    ¡°Sounds fun, we definitely should. But maybe after we found a good spot for the Lady¡¯s Shrine,¡± she gave me a mischievous grin, one that made me ruffle her hair affectionately.


    ¡°Wouldn¡¯t want your boss lady to get annoyed with us, would we? We should also try to make contact with our Crone-aspect, it has been a while since we reached out to the Grandmother and now that you¡¯ve crossed the first divide, we might be able to get some real communication going.¡± I suggested, turning her mischievous grin into a happy one as she quickly nodded.


    Together, we continued on our way, looking for a suitable spot to build a shrine once again.

 Chapter 960

    Luna and I had taken a bit of time to find a good place for the shrine we had been asked to build. The biggest problem was that the area was fairly flat, with rather sandy and unstable soil, meaning we could hardly dig down, as we had done before. There was no useful tree I could use to fortify the construction, nor did we come across a suitable large pre-change construction I could use as a base. The best place we could find was yet another crossroad, fairly close to a river, where the Astral River was close to the surface and powerful, the contrast between the power flowing through the land and the power flowing through the river contrasting. There was also some influence from the Charland nearby, making the place magically quite potent and significant, while giving it a fair amount of stability between the three clashing forces. All that meant it would hopefully last for a long time, which was quite important for a shrine and without alternatives, it was where we would build.


    Sadly, digging a real, permanent structure into the soil would be incredibly difficult, maybe even impossible, as it would have to be wholly carried by my Crystal or Earth Magic, and with the soil on top, I wasn¡¯t sure it would work. Instead, I decided to go for something new and attempt to actually construct a real building instead of only digging holes.


    Part of that decision came from the inherent problems of digging down but the bigger reason was that I wanted to try something new. Digging would mean I¡¯d use nothing but the same techniques I had employed in previous constructions. With the soil, I¡¯d have to transform almost every surface into the crystalline substance I had used to reinforce certain parts before, making the whole thing a massive and massively boring project.


    Finding the right material was an interesting side-project, one that allowed me to flex my Earth Magic to its limits, as I tested a huge amount of rubble and partially destroyed buildings for suitable materials before moving them to the shrine and reshaping them. It was incredibly interesting to explore the boundary between Earth- and Crystal Magic and to watch how the two different magical elements interacted with the same material and transformed it in different ways. I learned a huge amount with those experiments and the massive skill gains I received showed that progress clearly. Earth Magic went up by six, reaching level thirty-two, Earth Rune Mastery up by five, getting to level twenty-five and Crystal Magic went up by five, too, so it reached level twenty-eight. Interestingly, my experiments also granted me two points in Alchemy, raising the neglected skill to five and making me wonder what it actually entailed.


    During the breaks, Luna and I continued to experiment with the strange merging technique we had stumbled upon, carefully adding Life Magic and other magical elements into different small plants and eventually we managed to find the right way to do it. The results were incredibly interesting plants, all with their own magical biases and, to my surprise, all species recognised by the system. Small amounts of Life Magic combined with Darkness Magic in one of the ubiquitous tufts of grass resulted in a Shade Leaf, granting me a point in Darkness Magic the first time we did it, with similar results for Luna.


    From there, we continued to experiment and eventually managed to get the right combination for each of the magical elements I had access to, other than Mind Magic, Blood Magic and, obviously, Death Magic. That resulted in a bunch of points all across the board, with all my Magic Skills but those three getting a point, while Enchanting gained three, bringing it to twenty-two.


    It also left us wondering what we should do with the plants we had managed to create until we decided that the plants should have their chance in the wild and simply let them be. They weren¡¯t immediately destructive like the first experiment had been but they also didn¡¯t have an obvious survival advantage compared to regular grass. Altogether, they didn¡¯t show obvious magical abilities, other than their sometimes peculiar looks and the ability of the Lightning Leaf to give anyone trying to pick it up a small shock, much akin to what one would get from a static charge on clothing. Either they would spread or they wouldn¡¯t. One fascinating observation was that Fire Leaf, the combination of Life and Fire, was thriving in the Charland, the odd-looking red plant growing like a, well, weed, making me wonder just how much of its success came down to the environment.


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    Looking at that success, I had a feeling that Luna and I would keep creating these plants and seed them as we travelled, simply because they were incredibly interesting and useful for us and other spellcasters. Interestingly, we also gained EXP for each of the new plants, and a fairly good amount at that, allowing me to gain an entire level, letting me reach level eighty-two. Sadly, we didn¡¯t have any success with anything more complicated than grass, all our experiments had fatal consequences, either because the test subjects died or because I had to put them down due to complications. Still, the project was fascinating even if I hadn¡¯t received a skill for the work just yet.


    While Luna and I were busy with that project, Lia, Alex and Silva luckily managed to alleviate our food situation by finding a small supermarket that hadn¡¯t been looted yet. While the majority of goods in the place were spoiled, either due to time or thanks to a wide variety of insects, rats and other critters getting into it, they managed to find a few salvageable items, in addition to the critters they managed to hunt down. Amusingly, the rabbit population in the area seemed to have exploded, though there were also wild dogs and other animals that used to be pets running around the fields, creating a new and somewhat thriving ecosystem. Strangely, there were no humans to be found, making me wonder if they had gathered and wandered off or if they had simply been unlucky and died during the change. The number of bodies, or things that used to be bodies, implied the second but as I had no idea how many people used to live in the area, it was hard to tell.


    And, in a way, it didn¡¯t really matter, the people were gone now, and people would return someday unless the Charland made things exceptionally weird. The cycle of life would continue, until there was another major change, bringing about the extreme conclusion to the cycle while being part of yet another, larger cycle. Maybe that was the answer to the question of cycles and extremes, both, depending on the magnitude. Not satisfying but with my limited perception it likely was the best I could do for now.


    In addition to foraging, Alex and Lia continued with their alchemical work, turning some of the materials we found in the Charland into marvellous inventions. There were actual grenades that exploded into sharp shrapnel without any obvious magic involved, made from ground-up Embercreeper with some other stuff mixed in. Meanwhile, the Scorchipede shells and the hide of the Serpentia Triad were turned into armour, giving all of us some fairly good protection. Amusingly, the armour made from fiery creatures was especially good at protecting from Fire, an effect I managed to enhance even further by adding some runic enchantments centred around Ice and Cold. That it made the wearer feel pleasantly cool even during the hottest times was a welcome side-effect, though one that struggled while exploring the Charland. But it helped, it helped a lot.


    In a project that took cooperation between Alex, Lia and myself, we managed to use a combination of Earth, Crystal and Fire Magic to refine metal and turn it into something new. It only worked thanks to the Fire Node we still managed to tap, despite the Fire Elemental guarding it, and with the heat the node provided, a huge amount of detailed work from Alex and Lia in combination with my own efforts, we managed to get something.


    We started with some gathered construction steel, all of it randomly influenced by the change and partially transformed, melted it down so we could scoop off some impurities before we separated the material into badges to which Alex and Lia added different materials. The end results weren¡¯t as interesting as the magical plants Luna and I had managed to create but the two Alchemists were quite happy and Lia was happily banging away on what the system referred to as Steel, turning it into simple weapons and expanding our equipment that way. For now, the only thing we couldn¡¯t reliably produce was food, mostly because none of us was interested in hanging around an area long-term, otherwise, I did not doubt that Luna and I would manage to crack that problem eventually.


    But the bigger project I now had to accomplish was building Hecate¡¯s Shrine, a project for which the Goddess had given me plans during a dream. It was a daunting challenge but somehow, I couldn¡¯t help but be fascinated by the structure she had shown me and the magic I would have to infuse into it. It looked like the Goddess truly knew my heart, as it seemed to be right at the edge of my ability, incredibly challenging but not impossible. And, knowing the Goddess, the reward for a job well done would be worth it. She certainly had come through for me after the trip into the Charland.

 Chapter 961

    Even for a relative novice, the design imparted to me by Lady Hecate had obvious Greek influence. A geometric arrangement of narrow columns to carry the roof, the walls more to protect from the wind and weather than to bear loads, the design was both graceful and somewhat mysterious, greatly arousing my desire to see it complete. That was beyond the challenge it posed to arrange, especially as I was working alone, with only my magic to assist me in this endeavour. Sure, the magic I wielded was more powerful than anything the ancient Greeks had at their disposal but still, the challenge felt somewhat daunting. Construction times in the ancient world had been measured in years, or even centuries for some of the mega projects, so to create something in the time I could afford to spend? Truly, it was a daunting prospect.


    And despite that, I wasn¡¯t about to accept defeat or lose heart, instead, I simply pushed onwards. Levelling the land with Earth Magic and pushing foundations into the ground to accept greater loads soon after, before laying down a layer of concrete and gravel. That layer was fused together with my Earth Magic, using a few of the tricks Hecate had shown me in her Realm, creating the ground level of the Shrine. There were some prepared holes in the layer, allowing me to fuse the columns that would bear the loads directly with the prepared foundations below, decoupling the floor from the ceiling and allowing me some greater freedom. It took a few days, and gave me an additional three points in Earth Magic, alongside three in Earth Rune Mastery and one in Crystal Magic, but it worked out fairly well.


    With the ground layer established, I started to build the columns and there, I was cheating a little. The columns weren¡¯t just made from simple stone, not even stone compressed or fused together with my crystal magic, instead, I had Alex make me metal spirals, before filling them with rock and fusing the stone together and with the spiral. That way, the compressive forces would completely rest on the stone but any lateral forces would be carried by the metal inside, greatly increasing the carrying capacity of my columns.


    I only could put up two of these columns a day and by the end of the process, I had gained even more points in Crystal and Earth Magic, bringing Crystal Magic to thirty-one and Earth Magic to thirty-six. It was, quite frankly, insane how quickly the skills were growing but I had a sneaking suspicion that Lady Hecate was putting a finger on the scale, as I was working on a project for her.


    Filling in the walls was fairly simple, they didn¡¯t have to bear any loads or withstand serious forces but I wanted to make them look exceptionally smooth, with some nice relief work to make the shrine even more impressive. For that, I first conjured a pair of perfectly smooth Ice Walls next to each other, making it extra slick and smooth by adding a bit of Water Magic and freezing it afterwards. The walls were framing the space I wanted to use for the actual wall, and once they were done, I could fill in the space between the Ice Wall and slowly fuse the stone into one perfectly smooth whole. That, too, took some time but at that point, I was quite good at the process, especially as I had put my remaining points into Intelligence, getting a suitable trait for my troubles.


    The trait was a bit of a surprise, as it was an almost direct upgrade, or maybe a successor trait of one I already had. Quite a while ago, I received the Arcane Adept trait, increasing my affinity to every element and now, I got the Arcane Expert trait. It did the same as the Arcane Adept, only that it added the words ¡®even further¡¯ at the end, making me grin just a little. It was, without a doubt, an incredibly powerful trait but that the wording hadn¡¯t really changed felt fairly amusing to me.


    The result was that my magic felt just a little more responsive with everything I tried to do and I noticed that delving into the Astral River was more enjoyable, too. I still didn¡¯t know how long we¡¯d have to travel to reach the Nexus, but I felt as if the heading was narrowing down just a little. My repeated delves also resulted in two points in my slightly neglected Astral Meditation Trait, bringing it to thirty-eight. I also delved for the new Blood Rune I could learn and came up with the Infuse Rune, allowing me to infuse Astral Power into the blood more easily. It worked especially well in conjunction with the Sacrifice Rune when I drained the blood from other creatures and once I managed to teach it to Lia, she could actually sustain herself without my help, if she needed to. Sure, she preferred to be fed from my hand but opening up the possibility was a good thing in my eyes. It gave us more options and that was never a bad thing.


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    The Shrine¡¯s construction continued at a steady pace and once the columns were placed, it was time to raise the roof. Here, too, I used my Ice Magic to provide the scaffolding and framing, simply because I was so much more adept in its use. I¡¯d have been able to use Earth Magic but, quite frankly, I preferred to work in Ice. And given the amount of Earth Magic I had utilised in the construction, it wasn¡¯t as if I was neglecting the other skill, it had grown by leaps and bounds these days and I had a feeling it would continue to grow.


    The roof was, amusingly, fairly simple, though that was mostly because the plans Lady Hecate had provided made it so. With my Ice Magic to provide framing, it wasn¡¯t any harder than the walls had been, maybe even easier. Ultimately, it only took me two days to put the roof up and resulted in a single point of Earth Magic alongside a single point in Earth Rune Mastery, bringing the skills to thirty-seven and twenty-nine respectively, showing just how immense the work on the shrine had paid off. Sure, a month of labour was quite the time investment but some twenty points across three skills was nothing to scoff at.


    During the latter part of the construction, Luna had been hard at work, too. Her work was invisible to the naked eye but to my arcane senses, it shone like a beacon. She had placed multiple protections around the construction and was adding benedictions, blessings and various wards to it, likely under the guidance of Lady Hecate.


    My own work wasn¡¯t done either, even if the building itself was complete. The shrine was too plain and bare, something I wanted to correct as I felt quite proud of my work and wanted it to be decorated and awe-inspiring. Thus, I added reliefs around the building, my mind and magic inspired by Lady Hecate. Otherwise, I wouldn¡¯t have added images of myself but as the work progressed, I noticed that my own image, alongside that of Luna and the Grandmother, was present at multiple points. Curiously, the two primary statues in the temple, those that framed and guarded the altar, were visibly distinct from each other.


    One of them had the three of us, Luna, the Grandmother and myself, while the other had a different image, one I only knew from Lady Hecate¡¯s grey realm. It felt a little strange, to know that my own image stood in the same position as that of a literal deity and the oddity was even more pronounced when I considered that it was that same deity who had guided the construction. Odd, maybe a little bit daunting and highly confusing. Lady Hecate had an agenda but I couldn¡¯t find a reason why a deity would want to lift mortals to her level, or her station.


    Unless she was lonely or something like that but it wasn¡¯t the vibe I got from her. Curiosity, maybe a bit of pride during the training she had given me but nothing else. A teacher, maybe a researcher, but no bigger personal connection.


    After the decorations were done, the shrine needed the information we wanted it to contain. Here, Lady Hecate helped out once more, making it so we didn¡¯t need to engrave the information into slabs of stone. Instead, Luna performed one of Lady Hecate¡¯s rituals and a slivery-grey crystal appeared and was set into the altar, providing an interface that looked almost identical to the system interface, if one ignored the fact that it was visible to others without problems. With a simple gesture and a short prayer to Lady Hecate, one could make it appear within the confines of the temple and it acted like a simple computer system, allowing us to input text and images without problems. A part of me wanted to study the magic but when I tried, I didn¡¯t get anything but a headache. Maybe there was some magical copyright protection, maybe it was far beyond my current abilities, I wasn¡¯t sure. But I was impressed and just a little bit envious.


    Finally, after a little over a month of work, the shrine was done, the last blessing in place and a vast amount of information was added to the magical archive. The quest was complete, now, it was time for us to receive our rewards.

 Chapter 962

    Amusingly, there were no dreams that night. I had expected a visitation from Hecate but unless I had managed to forget my experiences in Her strange dreamscape, there hadn¡¯t been one. Instead, I was greeted with a notification that I had completed the quest to build Her shrine, with an added modification that the Goddess was highly pleased with my efforts and thus increased my rewards.


    Those rewards were given to me in the next few notifications and they were a doozy. The first reward was an almost insane amount of EXP, though given that we were talking about the rewards for over a month of concentrated efforts it might not be that insane, letting me level up twice and reach level eighty-four. The next reward was just as good, maybe even better, though it sadly came with a time limit. It was called a temporary boon called Blessing of the Apprentice and it increased the speed with which my Arcane skills gained levels by thirty per cent, though only for a year and a day. So, a massive benefit was balanced out by only lasting for a year. Sure, having some boon that would last for the rest of my life would be nice, but a permanent boon would be far less powerful. Hopefully, this meant I¡¯d be able to use this boon to resurrect Sigmir but even if I didn¡¯t manage to get there in a year, it would accelerate my progress.


    Additionally, just as I was reading the notification, a message appeared before me, not a system notification but a message, written into the air with silvery letters. It only took a moment to recognise the power doing the writing, by now I was fairly familiar with Lady Hecate¡¯s magic, and that the message told me that ¡®she¡¯ had added something to the Shrine¡¯s library only confirmed my recognition. There might be deities out there who could fake the message and my recognition of it, but to alter something within another deity¡¯s Shrine without a mortal agent in play sounded like something impossible. It might not be, I had little knowledge of the capabilities and limits of the Gods but it felt like it.


    Ginning to myself, I moved out of our underground shelter, briefly checking in on the others on my way, asking about their own rewards. What Lia, Silva and Alex received was fairly simple, to be expected given that they had only made sure to protect the area and gather additional supplies, and the reward was fairly amusing in its own right. It was a necklace, or maybe calling it a neck adornment would be more suitable, holding a moon-sickle pendant made of a gleaming silver material. I doubted it was ordinary silver but I didn¡¯t know. The amusing part came with the form the adornment took for Silva and Alex, their necks didn¡¯t support necklaces, so the magic of the items turned them into chokers. Or collars, depending on how you looked at things, which made it amusingly fitting on Silva. It didn¡¯t look as good on Alex, but it worked surprisingly well with their long and slender body.


    To make things even funnier, Lia looked at the necklace with faint disdain, pulling at the chain with an expression that made me wonder what she had in mind. I doubted she¡¯d discard the pendant, I could feel some protective magic emanating from it, but I had a feeling she was trying to find a better way to wear it.


    After watching her move it around her neck for a bit, as if considering to loop it twice and make the chain shorter, the necklace suddenly changed from the fairly long chain of fine silver loops into a black band of an unknown cloth, embroidered with beautiful silver motives of the moon¡¯s phases. The pendant remained unchanged if one ignored the change in position, and suddenly, Lia looked a great deal happier.


    When I asked them about the pendants¡¯ abilities, I was informed that it granted them an increase of +1 Endurance, tripled while in direct Moonlight. Wonderfully useful but, as I had expected, nothing overwhelming.


    Luna, on the other hand, had received something more interesting. Sadly, it was nothing I could make use of, as it was a crystal similar to the one she had installed in the shrine¡¯s altar, only that this one only worked for her and it apparently functioned as an instruction manual of sorts for the abilities she had gained after crossing the first divide. I wasn¡¯t sure why she needed it, given that she had successfully blessed the Shrine and invoked all sorts of protections and benedictions over it, but I wasn¡¯t about to second-guess how a Deity interacted with Her followers on the topic of their worship of Her.


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    That sounded like a good way to get cursed with something unpleasant, an act made even easier if one was near these followers. Not that I thought Luna would curse me, at least not until she entered her teenage years, but I also didn¡¯t want to get between her and Lady Hecate. Bad place to be and I didn¡¯t want my daughter to resent me.


    It was strange, I had never wanted children, had considered every part of that experience to be something to be avoided at all costs, and yet, now that I had my two daughters, I wasn¡¯t willing to give them up. They had, despite all my old convictions, created a space within my heart and moved in, both in their own, unique ways. Lia was a lot more independent in general behaviour, and yet, she remained unwilling to seek out alternative sources of sustenance for herself or Alex. They both preferred to get their Astral Power and vitality from the blood I donated and especially Lia made a bit of a ritual of it, approaching me, and telling me about her day before taking a knee and drinking that bit of blood she needed. A little strange, or maybe a lot given the clear demonstration of submission she included in a family ritual, but there was something domestic about it, no matter where we were or what we were doing.


    Alex was less ritualistic about it but they, too, preferred my blood compared to anything else. They occasionally used other sources but seldomly, mostly when they were deep in a project and trying to save as much time as possible.


    Luna, on the other hand, was a lot more physically dependent on me, relying on me to provide everything from food to hugs and comfort. On the other hand, she was working closely with Lady Hecate, spending a lot of time in Her realm for lessons. By now, I was noticing the strides she made in the lessons I was giving her during the time we had to hide from the Sun and could guess that she wasn¡¯t some prodigy but that Lady Hecate was visiting her every other night.


    Whether I should worry about her mental stability or the odd effects the distorted flow of personal time would have on her maturation, I wasn¡¯t sure but I could only hope that the Goddess wasn¡¯t mucking things up even further than the increased attributes from the system already did. She already looked almost twice her age, making me wonder how far she would continue to mature at an accelerated pace and if there was anything I could do to help. Sadly, neither the system nor my munchkin came with an instruction manual, so I had to make things up as I went along.


    When I reached the shrine, I spoke a brief prayer to Hecate, activating the library crystal and checking the index. For a moment, I felt as if there was something, or maybe someone, watching me but looking around, I couldn¡¯t see anyone. When I tried to search for souls in the vicinity, or sources of magic, I could only detect the Shrine, causing me to shrug and focus on the index I was working with. My own observations regarding the Charland were there, as were Luna¡¯s findings and even some portions written by Alex, Lia and Silva. Their parts focused on different aspects of the area and made for interesting reading, at least from what I had seen. What I hadn¡¯t seen just yet was an entry called Map of the Charland and its surroundings, so I opened it, curious what I would find.


    Maybe I shouldn¡¯t have been surprised but what I found was what it said on the tin, a map of the Charland. Only, the map was incredibly detailed, with coordinates in a format I hadn¡¯t seen before and readings I recognised from Luna¡¯s articles to describe the effects the Charland¡¯s integration had on the environment.


    By the looks of it, Lady Hecate was actively monitoring things in this area and sharing Her observations with the mortals who would visit this shrine. It was at times like this that I had to ask myself if Lady Hecate was an outlier among the gods or if they¡¯d all share things as She did. Somehow, I had a feeling that it was the former, as she was treating us not like lesser beings that should worship at Her feet but as, well, not equals but as promising students. Maybe it was due to that treatment that I was happily building Her shrines and spreading Her teachings.

 Interlude: Divine Insight

    In a seemingly endless, silvery-grey expanse, three figures sat and stared into the void, their eyes easily piercing through layers of reality and allowing them to observe. Far away, their power was channelled by one of their mortal servants, a young child slowly growing into her power and still relying on strength granted to them by others, but for once, the power wasn¡¯t used for the child or for their caretaker. No, the power was purely used for the purpose of the three figures, for they had come across something interesting, something rarely seen.


    Sure, the expansion, the Change as the child¡¯s caretaker called it, had altered countless worlds before and would alter many more but this had been a rare occasion where the three figures had been able to get some information on and to the world before it had changed. It hadn¡¯t been easy, there was a reason why the three had actively worked with beings they normally wouldn¡¯t work with, but it had been done. Their plan had, for all intents and purposes, worked quite well, numerous beings had been introduced to the System in a world they had deeply entrenched themself in and thus lost most of their interest in. And lost easy access but that hadn¡¯t been part of their plans but an annoying accident. Those happened, even to the greatest entities, as the joke went, no system was foolproof, it simply hadn¡¯t encountered a sufficiently talented fool.


    There had been some complications on that world and suddenly, things weren¡¯t as routine there but given that they had observed a fascinating mortal, one who had accomplished enough to make blessing them trivially easy, the three were happily counting it all as a great success. The mortal¡¯s actions had added grains of knowledge to her endless expanse, increasing her power just a tiny bit and the blessing they had given to the mortal was a just reward for their unknowing assistance. There just weren¡¯t enough mortals willing to push the boundaries of reality, their minds stopping them with their amusing concept of sanity. As if a sane being could expand the limits of what was known, to see the unknown and remain hale. No, only a special mind could add grains to her endless desert of knowledge and those minds were the most valuable, as they so often snuffed out before being able to reach their full potential. Normalcy, such an overrated idea, didn¡¯t these fools know that to be normal was to be average? Who would want to be average, if they could be special?


    As the Crone pondered for a few moments, the other two kept careful watch, the Mother making sure that their precious mortal servant, adopted child of her equally precious mortal student, wasn¡¯t harmed. It just wouldn¡¯t do to injure such a useful vessel, especially as it would greatly diminish her ability to interact with her student. At the same time, the Maiden, curious child that she was, slowly modified the magical structures channelled through their servant, allowing them to see just a little more of the reality around them, fascinating as it was.


    There were so few forces that radically altered reality on that fundamental level, they only knew of the system that could accomplish it. Or the Astral River, as some called it, or the Ether, Warp, Weave or so many other names used to refer to the intricate and infinite construct that was underpinning so much of reality by adding its own fundamental force to its structure. Without it, there was no magic, nor the system so many beings took for granted, using it to enhance themself, their knowledge and magic. Where it came from, how it worked, nobody truly knew, at least nobody they had ever heard about. And given their domain, that said quite a lot.


    Thus, anything that might shed light on the mysterious workings of the Astral and the System was something they greatly desired, which was what ultimately caused them to join the others and assist the mortals on that distant planet, even before it was reached by the Astral. An incredible feat, one that had only been possible thanks to their help, alongside that of many others. Some might even claim it was an impossible feat, but the impossible was only that as long as nobody overcame the challenge it posed.


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    For that, even the chaos and destruction still ravaging the world they had used to train the Travellers was well worth it, as strange it sounded to exchange a mature and stably developed world with one that went through great turmoil. But with turmoil and chaos came opportunities and with opportunities came new knowledge, usually it came slowly but in this case, interesting discoveries were remarkably frequent.


    Like the incredibly potent crystal conglomeration of radiation and magic, only kept in balance by the system as it slowly expended the energy trapped within that matrix to expand reality in an impossible way. Space, even time to a small extent, were warped in the area, the runes drawn by their young servant allowed them to perceive that slice of reality with a wide array of their senses, letting them see so much more than they normally could.


    Truly, a fascinating experience, one that could only be topped by being there in person but their very presence would be too much for the developing Astral in the area. While it might be fascinating to see reality crumble around them, if only to see what it was replaced by, the experiment would be too costly. They would have to find a better place for it, one that they, and their compatriots, hadn¡¯t invested immeasurable efforts into. Otherwise, those compatriots would likely register their displeasure, they had even complained about the acts of that interesting mortal who had managed to cause such devastation in that settled and boring world. Didn¡¯t those fools know that change meant opportunity and stability was only a different word for the slow death by stagnation?


    Soon, the ritual performed by their servant in that distant world ended, gifting the three a treasure trove of raw information that would have to be carefully distilled into knowledge before it could be tested and understood.


    Around them, time was slowly flowing forward, while a small part of the three was dealing with their servant and their student, repaying them for the treasure of information they had received. A paltry reward on their level but a treasure of equal worth to the information they had gained to those who received the reward. They were still deep in their quest to understand the raw data when they felt their servant complete yet another task and doing yet another impressive job of it.


    The Shrine they had built had been designed by the same, small aspect of the Maiden that taught their servant, making sure that the servant was educated to their standard, despite the turmoil in their world. It just wouldn¡¯t do to have their servant ignorant or incompetent, and if the lessons allowed them to shape their servant''s worldview into something that encouraged others to explore the unknown and broaden the scope of knowledge in the world, all the better. Teaching one, who would hopefully become a teacher of others, starting exponential growth if things worked out as they planned. And things would, if only because they were not shy about putting some weight on the scales to make things work out according to their plans.


    It was with wide smiles that they gave out yet another reward, hoping that it would propel their student to new heights, adding just a few final touches to the Shrine. Using the Shrine¡¯s presence, they could stretch their senses into that world without putting undue pressure on the Astral, allowing them to add just a little more to the treasure they had already gathered.


    Noticing how reality slowly changed in the environment of the temple, they engraved what they could perceive on the crystal their servant had prepared, all three faces stretching into grins as they did. Recorded information could be used by comparing later data to the record, allowing them to observe the effect the change they had noticed in the present had over time. Sadly, it was doubtful that they would be able to constantly observe the centre and the crystal there, but they could observe the Charland itself. And how it slowly seeped into the ordinary reality around it, changing not just the direct environment but also the Astral River and thus everything in that world to a lesser degree. A small part of them would be hidden in the Shrine, taking note of the environment and maybe of a few interesting mortals.


    Maybe the next group of Adventurers could be motivated to go into the centre again and take another reading. It would be another data point and if there was one thing they could never get enough of, it was new data. They had an entire hidden dimension to fill with knowledge and that was a task that might be as endless as the expanding dimension they used as their library.

 Chapter 963

    With the Shrine done, there wasn¡¯t all that much we could do in this area. Sure, the Charland hadn¡¯t given up all its mysteries but I doubted we¡¯d be able to probe them, simply because of their complexity. It was a piece of bloody complicated magic, far beyond my current level, and what little I could understand from the readings Luna had put into the library, that wasn¡¯t about to change. The Charland and its genesis felt as if it was just below the Astral River and the way it had burrowed into the foundations of our reality, meaning it would likely be a lot easier to understand a complete subset of magic compared to the Charland. Hel, it might be easier to understand how a Dungeon was generated and sustained, which was an equally elusive topic. Furthermore, it was only thanks to the Divine Magic wielded by Luna that we had access to the information in the library, not that I could understand the data scribed into the magical crystal. Not only was it written in a dense, almost mathematical notation composed of runes, numbers and unknown symbols that I had no reference for, but even if I had an idea what the different symbols stood for, I doubted I could make anything of them.


    When I asked Luna about it, she explained to me that she knew some of these symbols. According to her, they were referencing ways magical elements interacted with each other, while other symbols stood for ways her sight perceived magic, somewhat similar to the way I could see magic as colours. In this case, a specific rune stood for a specific hue of colour, allowing for a clearer demarcation of different elements and effects. Where I might consider a magical effect a combination of Poison, Fire and Earth or something along those lines, Luna was slowly learning to describe that combination with a formula, allowing her to get a better idea of what the effect would actually do. Given the almost infinite number of potential combinations and the ways they could interact depending on the exact starting conditions, the need for a specific and somewhat complex notation made sense. Sadly, I had a feeling it was akin to something like calculus and I was only now starting to realise that I could do more than count on my fingers. Learning what the different symbols meant would only be the first step, afterwards I¡¯d likely have to find ways to transpose what my senses told me onto the symbols before learning how to actually use the notation to any sort of effect.


    Or, in other words, I had a lot of learning to do and, sadly, I didn¡¯t have a real teacher who knew what they were doing. Luna herself only could manage what she had done thanks to it being divine Magic, in other words, she was only providing a beacon while Lady Hecate did the heavy lifting. If anything, I was a little amazed that Luna had been able to add the raw data to the library, as I doubted the average deity would give their faithful access to that kind of information. Granted, I also doubted that most deities had any interest in that kind of data unless they were trying to unravel the way the system and Astral River interacted with reality instead of simply accepting it. But even if they did, it would be something they kept to themself, not shared with their servants.


    There was a part of me, likely the voice of my ego, that wanted to create my own notation, my own system, so I didn¡¯t have to rely on something borrowed from the Gods but, realistically, it would be a stupid idea. While it was possible to derive all of calculus from first principles, it was the work of a lifetime, unless one was an extreme prodigy, and calculus was something humans had been able to come up with. Sure, it took a long time and successive iterations as different brilliant people added their own small nuggets of genius to the tower that was human knowledge but it had been done. I had no idea if any mortal race could come up with a system to classify magic in the way Lady Hecate had done or if that was a purely divine claim to fame. Furthermore, even if I managed to create my own notation and system, I¡¯d also have to come up with a way to transfer information from one system into the other, meaning I¡¯d have to learn Lady Hecate¡¯s notation either way.


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    With that in mind, I made a mental note to have Luna explain to me as much as possible as we continued to travel. Or maybe I could ask Lady Hecate to get a primer for Her system as a reward the next time we did an important quest for Her. It certainly would make things easier.


    But before we could consider that, I wanted to make one last round through the Charland. There were other nodes I wanted to at least take a look at, I wanted to spread some Fireleaf seeds in the area and I wanted to deal with as many of the greater monsters as we could find in a few days. Maybe I¡¯d even have Luna whip up some generic magical seeds, simply grass seeds imbued with Life Magic, hoping they would germinate into something interesting when exposed to the fascinating mix of powers within the Charland. There might even be something in the air responsible for stretching reality and if that somehow became a grass, it would be quite interesting. Magic Space Grass, it almost sounded like some sort of drug, akin to magic mushrooms.


    Given our limited supplies, I wasn¡¯t planning to explore too much more of the Charland, but just a little bit more. There was a part of me that was irked about leaving the task unfinished, even if I intellectually knew that the task might be endless, as the Charland was likely generating the monsters inhabiting it, like an actual computer game.


    If it wasn¡¯t for the fact that I had out-levelled almost every enemy within the Charland, I would have pushed to keep hunting within, and I might even do so, simply to help Luna and Alex catch up some more. Silva and I remained some twenty levels above them, while Lia was slowly catching up to us, as they received more EXP per enemy, being closer to the enemies¡¯ level, or even below the levels of most enemies we were fighting. Additionally, we needed more EXP per level, so even if we would all get the same EXP, which we didn¡¯t, the gap in pure levels would shrink.


    After one more check of our supplies, the five of us set out once again. The outer area remained the same and as we travelled through the areas we had already seen, nothing interesting jumped out at us. We gathered a wide variety of strange substances for Alex and Lia, they planned to turn them into their usual brand of insanity before we started to check out the different nodes on the second day.


    Sadly, it turned out that the Fire Node we came across initially was the only node we could easily approach. There was one Poison Node deep underground from the way the Astral River was distorted. Sadly, the poison seeping out of it wasn¡¯t staying underground, turning the area above the node into a death trap, at least death to everything not completely anorganic or immune to poison. There were a few strange crystalline creatures in the area and I thought I saw some sort of slime in the distance, but when we tried to move into it, we quickly turned around, all of us worse for wear and Luna coughing up drops of bright, red blood.


    Other nodes turned out in similar ways, they were all inaccessible, either due to their location, environmental effects or both. Luckily, there were a few large monsters we could hunt as compensation, the EXP we made over a week of hunting was enough to push me to yet another level-up and level eighty-five. That, in turn, meant that Dragon-Touched boosted my Courage to thirty-five, bringing a new trait with it. Not an amazing trait, but a neat one. The Tenacious Courage trait increased the effect of my courage while under the effect of negative environmental effects, or so it said. To me, that meant I wouldn¡¯t panic as easily while in the dark, or while being exposed to things like the poisoned atmosphere above the Poison Node and similar effects. In other words, it would help me to remain calm when the danger didn¡¯t come from enemies, or at least if the danger didn¡¯t just come from enemies.


    Magically, I had mostly used Ice and Water Magic during the trip into the Charland, the combat enough to push both Magic Skills and Rune Masteries up by on point each, though that only reduced the points I needed for the next milestones.


    Once everything was done, we said our goodbye to the Charland and set out, travelling further North-West.

 Chapter 964

    The Charland should have ended my ability to be surprised by the changes brought about by the coming of the Astral River. And yet, despite knowing that the system had somehow brought an entire industrial area into existence before spatially compressing it so it fit in an area far smaller externally than internally, I had expected that the landscape would remain roughly the way it had been before the change.


    Last year, this area had been filled with endless fields of grain, corn and other crops, I wasn¡¯t quite sure what. We had only travelled about a week since encountering the Charland and while the environment was a little broken and completely abandoned, it had been fairly normal. At least, it had been until we came into this area, that things had obviously changed.


    The fields were largely gone, we still managed to find the occasional road or path but the vegetation had taken over. And taken over in a big way, with impossibly large bushes and trees, interspersed with grass and, strangely, plants that looked like the crops of yesteryear, only enlarged to eleven and given malevolent instincts. The world had gone mad, it should have sunk in by now, but somehow, the insanity just kept coming.


    A part of me had been tempted to try going around this area, simply because it was utterly insane. The problem with that idea came when I decided to find out how big it was by moving away from the oversized vegetation and using my fancy cloak to fly up into the sky. While I wasn¡¯t able to fly with any real precision or fine control, getting up and around trees at slow speed was easy, especially if I used my hands to guide my ascent around branches and trunks. Once I was past the treetops, the only dangers were running out of Astral Power, getting surprised by some sort of rogue gust or getting ambushed by an avian predator.


    So far, I hadn¡¯t come across any avian predators large enough to attack a floating human, nor had anyone tried to take pot-shots at me with kryptonite or something along those lines and while the wind could be a fairly large annoyance and push me around up there, I had always managed to find the others after descending. Granted, part of that was due to my bond with Luna and Lia, alongside the fact that Silva and I had ridiculously good senses, but outside of emergencies, it didn¡¯t really matter that we occasionally needed some thirty minutes to meet up after I was flying, because I had been blown off-course. This left only the danger of running out of Astral Power and while I could run myself dry by flying, it took quite a lot of time and I could easily avoid dropping. Unless there was something down on the ground that could threaten me, like the mega-flora we had encountered. Trying to fly across that area could easily see me drop from the sky and into trouble, not that I would be willing to leave the others behind and cross alone.


    But back to the idea of circumventing the hazardous area, made even more appealing by the fact that the enemies we had encountered so far were fairly low-levelled but incredibly strong for their levels, likely due to their immobility. A tree, unless equipped with incredible magic powers, would never be a truly dangerous enemy, simply because it lacked the mobility to chase enemies down or avoid ranged attacks. Otherwise, it would never be more than a matter of time to bring them down, even if the one trying to do so had to resort to building catapults or similarly oversized equipment. No, an immobile for would always have a low level compared to their power if you were in range of them.


    Sadly, when I reached the altitude needed to get an idea of the size we were looking at, I almost dropped from the sky in despair. While the demarcation wasn¡¯t sharp, I could see a clear trend when I looked in the distance, regardless of direction. When I looked back, in the direction we had come from, I could see a few of the impossibly large plants, just the occasional giant sticking out of the normal-sized vegetation, demonstrating that we had been fairly lucky to encounter these giant plants only now. But when looking ahead, I could see that the frequency of these plants was increasing rapidly, the plants growing ever closer to each other. And further in the distance, I couldn¡¯t see any giant plants sticking out but from the looks of it, I was fairly certain that wasn¡¯t because there were none of them but because they didn¡¯t stick out as the entire forest was composed of them. When looking in either direction, I could see that giant plants were growing in either direction, even at the edge of my vision, meaning I had no idea how far these massive plants had spread. Or, in other words, our best bet would be to head west, hoping that we¡¯d eventually get to a point where we wouldn¡¯t be moving into the forest of giant murder-plants.


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    After descending, I needed a few minutes of sniffing the air to detect the scent of my companions. Maybe it was because I was using scent as my primary sense to detect magic, well, scent and taste, or maybe it was simply an outcropping of my fairly high Intuition, I wasn¡¯t sure but somehow, my sense of smell was incredibly sensitive. While I had no idea how I¡¯d stack up against something like a trained tracking dog, especially as they¡¯d likely have high Intuition, too, alongside specialised traits to improve their tracking, I was good enough to discover their familiar scents in the air and follow them to the source.


    ¡°We might have to make a detour,¡± I told the others, before explaining what I had seen. Amusingly, their reaction was decidedly mixed. Silva didn¡¯t seem to care all that much, while Alex and Lia looked somewhat relieved at the idea of avoiding most of the giant plants. They¡¯d likely try to get some raw materials from them as we travelled, they tried to get a little bit of everything, but the prospect of heading head-on into a massive forest of these things wasn¡¯t appealing to them.


    Luna, on the other hand, looked like I had just declared Christmas and her Birthday cancelled for the year, maybe with a side-order of homework and no cuddles thrown in, some sort of cruel and unusual punishment. Granted, I could understand why she¡¯d be interested in exploring such an area, she was trying to learn Nature Magic as a derivative skill of her Life Magic, with plans to get the additional specialisation of Plant Magic once she got the first. Trading some of her overall slow growth in versatility and power for a period of rapid growth in a limited fashion before returning to the original path, it was a fairly sound idea, likely inspired by Lady Hecate.


    But to walk that path, she needed to explore and understand Nature and Plants, manipulate them magically and increase her abilities until she unlocked the skill. It was similar to the process I had used to get my Crystal and Lightning Magic, only that I had the advantage of fairly ridiculous traits that granted me an affinity to all types of magic, allowing me to learn those with impossible ease.


    Luna didn¡¯t have those affinities, and even her Life Magic came from a connection to the Grandmother, through Lady Hecate. So, exploring a massive forest filled with impossibly large plants that could only exist thanks to magic would be like travelling on a large glacier or through an area filled with twisting and warping shadows, fascinating and challenging at the same time, allowing me to learn a lot about my magic and massively improve my powers on the way.


    ¡°Do we really have to avoid it?¡± Luna asked, a soft whine entering her voice as she asked, the plea completely obvious. Next to her, Silva started to wag her tail, quickly coming around to the idea of letting Luna get some additional training and improve her magic, though I also noticed that there wasn¡¯t any real urgency coming from our canine companion. Maybe this area wasn¡¯t interesting enough to Lady Hecate to warrant a thorough investigation, or maybe Silva knew that I was unlikely to reject Luna¡¯s plea because I fully understood the desire to explore one¡¯s element.


    ¡°We don¡¯t have to,¡± I admitted, letting out a soft sigh, already having a feeling that this area would be highly annoying to traverse. But maybe we¡¯d be able to create some new and exciting magical plants and have them spread through the forest, which might yield some¡­ interesting results.


    ¡°I guess we can go and explore the area, who knows what we¡¯ll find further north?¡± I decided, a part of me wondering what had triggered the plants to grow the way they had. A mystery, though one of Life, maybe it would let me learn something useful.

 Chapter 965

    Wandering into the primal forest that had taken over what should have been fields was a fascinating experience. Some of the plants were reasonably similar to those we had encountered in the forest near our home while others were, well, they were neither reasonable nor similar to anything I had ever seen.


    The strangling vines that acted far too much like snakes for my comfort were one thing, the noxious grass that constantly emitted some sort of haemorrhaging poison, trying to get people to pass out and rapidly bleed out was another, as were the shrubs that shot nail-thick spikes at anything approaching too close. But all these were, for lack of a better word, just a magically enhanced version of things plants could already do. Needles and thorns were common floral defences, as was poison. Strangling vines had usually strangled trees but with magic in the mix they didn¡¯t need to limit themself.


    On the other hand, there were strange stalks, with the fairly appropriate name Stalking Stalks, that could launch grain-like corns the size of a football at people. If it was only that, it wouldn¡¯t be too bad but the grains could extrude tendril-like legs and acted like a dangerous cross between crab and spider, only instead of trying to bite or claw you, the grains tried to burrow their tendrils into your body and, from what I had seen when one hit a deer, use your body to germinate. There were things that just shouldn¡¯t be.


    Similar to the Stalking Stalks were the Parasitic Pollen, I had yet to see their origin but the pollen themself were bouncing balls the size of my fist that, well, bounced through the forest, recoiling off anything they hit with substantial force. We found out why they were named as they were when cutting one apart and finding a lamprey-like creature inside, only to have the creature try to take a bite out of Lia, who happily tore it apart. We had yet to find out what these Pollen were looking for but the way they bounced and actively tried to strike people wasn¡¯t comforting. To make matters worse, their bouncing was obviously beyond a mere physical effect as they could use the contact to push off, either by having the creature inside use some sort of magic to directly accelerate or maybe by changing the properties of the outer shell. Whichever way they did it, they could bounce with enough force to break bones or tear flesh, making me quite wary of their existence.


    The third new annoyance in the wonderful murder forest was something somewhat reasonable, at least compared to the other dangers. Having a pitcher plant that could emit a semi-magical scent to lure prey into its pitcher wasn¡¯t too insane, such plants had existed before the change. Granted, that the pitcher was large enough to engulf deer or people was new, but it wasn¡¯t as insane as minion-spawning plants that tried to burrow into your flesh.


    I doubted I¡¯d be able to forget the sight of a tendrilled grain digging into the squirming carcass of a deer any time soon, especially while knowing that the deer was already dead. And despite being dead, it was still squirming, making me wonder if the Withering Fungus and the Stalking Stalk had some sort of common ancestor, with one turning things into puppets with a fungal hivemind, the other by way of parasitic grains. Not a pleasant thought and a part of me was tempted to start hunting the stalks down but that would mean a lot of time spent in the forest. Maybe leaving it to others would be the thing to do.


    Studying the forest with Luna was both amusing and horrifying. The amusing part came as we were observing the essence of these obviously magical plants and trying to figure out how the different elements we could see within them interacted. What made things a little bit difficult was that some plants contained elements that neither Luna nor I could fully figure out, they weren¡¯t part of the same mental paradigm I was using, but given that the same was true for Mind Magic, maybe I shouldn¡¯t have been surprised.


    Furthermore, even if we knew the elements involved, it didn¡¯t mean we automatically knew how they combined. The Haemorrhaging Grass for example held Blood Magic, Life Magic and Death Magic, all mixing and combining, with a little bit of Mind Magic thrown in for good measure. Now, given that we could channel all these forces, we decided to try and see what would happen if we tried to replicate the grass, just to see if we could.


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    While I had expected the attempt to fail, especially on the first try, nothing could have prepared me for the mechanism with which it did. The plants somehow ripped the life from everything around it, similar to the way our first experiment had ended, but as it did, it also blasted us with a headache that, if I understood the effect correctly, tried to give us aneurysms and kill us that way. Luckily, we had been fairly cautious, greatly limiting the amount of power we actually gave the thing, so things ended with a light nosebleed and a small headache, but the result had been unexpected.


    Maybe I should begin to expect that any attempt at Soul Magic that also involved opposed magical forces to end up with some sort of deadly abomination that tried to kill everything and everyone around it. Amusingly, that might fit well with the idea of Frankenstein¡¯s Monster, an abomination of Life and Death Magic, brought back from the dead only to turn insane and kill its creator.


    A fitting lesson, even if my recollection of the story was limited to second or even third-hand accounts. Still, a lesson worth learning and remembering, maybe doubly worth it, given that it came from a time before its worth had been as literal as it was now.


    Another interesting experience came with our ever-continuing attempts to create more viable, magical plants. So far, we hadn¡¯t managed anything really complex, a few spongy fungi, and some more grasses, but nothing ground-breaking. It netted me a point each in Blood, Ice, Darkness, Water, and Wind Magic while Lightning Magic got three, as it worked surprisingly well when creating new Life. Or maybe Lighting Magic got the extra points because it was only level four when we started, I had barely been using the skill.


    Still, working on these fascinating new plants was great and while my lessons in the strange runic algebra of Lady Hecate were slow and incredibly frustrating, the few things I could currently understand made up for their difficulty.


    But these were the interesting and fascinating experiences in the forest of deadly plants. the good parts. The bad parts were what sent shivers down my spine and made me want to soar into the sky and never get back to this green hell, unless it was with the forces of Death and Winter at my back, ready to throw everything into a never-ending Ice Age, so the horrors would be sealed under an eternal glacier.


    To make matters worse, over half of the horrifying parts were direct results of either my own experiments, but at least I was responsible for those, or the experimentation of either of my two daughters. Lia was happily experimenting with Vampirism, trying to figure out how to create stable, and hopefully obedient, vampiric creatures. So far, she hadn¡¯t been successful to the best of my knowledge but I had helped with the disposal of some of her subjects when they were unstable. I had no idea how she came to the idea that the world needed blood-sucking squirrels and I had a feeling I shouldn¡¯t ask. But when the result turned into something between a flying squirrel and a bat, only with massive teeth, a screeching cackle and trapped in a murderous frenzy, I made her promise to never repeat the experiment.


    Similarly horrifying were Luna¡¯s attempts to control the plants in the forest or, even worse, use their seeds and her Life Magic to rapidly grow new ones while trying to control them. Sure, part of the horror with these attempts was watching my dearly beloved daughter try and touch a vine we knew to be fond of strangling everything it could grasp, only for the expected to occur but I could help with the way these experiments failed. Staying nearby and destroying the plants was well within my capacities and after the strangler incident, I made her use a freshly grown vine to channel her powers through in these attempts.


    No, the bigger horror came with her success. While I loved my daughter, watching her try to cross the deadly poison of the Haemorrhaging Grass with the delivery mechanism of the Stalkng Seed wasn¡¯t something I wanted to watch. Far too indiscriminate and uncontrollable, as Luna had yet to learn how to control her creatures outside of her immediate area. No, the world really didn¡¯t need plants that seeded the world with the equivalent of tactical chemical weapons. Luckily, I managed to contain that particular experiment but it gave me a healthy respect for the mayhem my younger daughter could create. Alongside a dose of fear.

 Chapter 966

    For all the negatives of exploring the strange forest of deadly plants, there was one major positive point. The plants that had changed to become the forest used to be crops, mostly corn and some sort of grain, with a few potatoes and such thrown in for good measure. That meant, even after their change, they had parts that could be edible, at least some of them. Granted, other plants had changed to the point that they were far from what they used to be, their edible parts replaced with insanity, but that didn¡¯t change the fact that we could harvest some of them.


    The Stalking Stalks might be the best example of that. From what I could tell, they used to be some sort of grain, not that I knew enough about grains to recognise the plant even before it had been turned into a stalk the height of a house with an unrealistically large ear on top that could launch the stalkers the stalk was named for. Curiously, the launched stalks were constructs made of Astral Power, mainly Earth and Life, with some Water thrown in for good measure, but when we felled one of the stalks, the ear turned out to be composed of actual grains, only grains the size of footballs. From everything we could tell about them, they were edible and safe, though we made sure to have a few of the oversized squirrels that inhabited the area test the grains first.


    When they could eat the grain just fine, we decided it was good enough and we¡¯d try it ourselves, only that I had no idea how to prepare the grains. Using Hard Ice to create a millstone worked surprisingly well, especially as what little liquid was ground off the stone was still composed of my Astral Power and thus under my control. That allowed us to make some fairly good flour, even if it had a slightly strange taste. Amusingly, Death Magic was an excellent tool to sterilise food, making sure that there were no parasites or insects in the flour, even eggs or larvae would instantly perish. It wouldn¡¯t work with something like yeast or any other cultured produce, but it worked incredibly well for the flour.


    Adding a bit of water and salt to turn it into the simplest of doughs worked quite well and once it was roasted we had one of the original dishes humans had come up with. There were countless varieties of it, as any culture that had access to some sort of grain had ground that grain, added water and roasted the result, with names ranging from Naan to Tortilla, flatbread or hundreds of other names, depending on the grain used and what additives were available.


    Other experiments included simply roasting the grain, though that didn¡¯t work as well, grinding it into large, slightly flaky chunks that could be cooked in soup alongside vegetables and even boiling those flakes as if they were rice. Some of these experiments worked quite well, others were sadly less successful. But either way, we didn¡¯t have to worry about our food situation for the foreseeable future. While wild vegetables or salad weren¡¯t overly abundant, turning some leafy greens into a serviceable side-dish was always possible, especially if taste wasn¡¯t the deciding factor. Similarly, finding some wild game was comparatively easy, too, the change had done wonders for the population of wild animals, be they squirrels, rodents or those preying on them, like cats, dogs or other small- to mid-sized predators. Again, as long as taste wasn¡¯t the primary criterion, they were fairly edible, as were the various oversized insects that were crawling in the similarly oversized forest.


    What made things even better was Luna¡¯s success at reducing some of the grains to seeds and growing a medium-sized Stalking Stalk, reducing its size from some eight to ten metres in height with a three-metre ear on top that had a diameter of almost a metre, to something only two metres high, with an ear a little under a metre in height and maybe ten centimetres in radius. That, in turn, reduced the size of the grains we could harvest from the size of a football to the size of a tennis ball, but I really didn¡¯t mind, especially as it got rid of the plant¡¯s ability to launch its stalkers.


    Thanks to that development, I was confident that we could survive long-term. We might not be able to have a luxurious and tasty diet, but we wouldn¡¯t starve, of that I was certain. Adding to that my ability to conjure Water and create shelter either within the Earth or by drawing up rocks and turning them into sturdy buildings, either way, we wouldn¡¯t be exposed to the elements. We had our necessities covered.


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    With that realisation and the assurance that came with it, I felt a weight lifting from my shoulders. Amusingly, it was a weight I hadn¡¯t even noticed before. Now that it was gone, I felt as if I could breathe freely for the first time since things had changed, no longer weighed down by the burden of ensuring the survival of not only myself but also the children I had adopted. My daughters wouldn¡¯t starve. It was a strangely simple, yet profound understanding. We might not always be comfortable, but we could continue, no matter what.


    Amusingly, even with the realisation and the contentment that came with it, our actual activities didn¡¯t change from day to night. We continued to travel during the night, looking for interesting supplies and specimens for later experimentation, we avoided nasty weather by hiding in hastily dug shelters and experimented with the things we had found and spent our days hiding from the sun.


    That is, until Luna and I noticed a strange change in the forest around us, a subtle shift in the magic that confounded us as we observed it. There wasn¡¯t any obvious reason why the Astral River should flow the way it did in the area, no cause we could observe or circumstance that would explain it. It took me an embarrassingly long time to realise that I had seen similar effects and had even studied them for an extended period of time.


    Not only was the effect greatly similar to the way the elves had hidden their presence in their forest on Arbortoma, but it also shared similarities with the way the revels of Aletoma had hidden themself. Furthermore, and most importantly, it was almost identical to the way Adra had hidden our camp night after night while we travelled on Mundus.


    I really shouldn¡¯t have needed multiple minutes to recognise the effect, even if I only counted the times Adra had used it, I had probably seen the effect, or the mobile version Adra had called Pass without a Trace, hundreds of times if not a thousand times. And yet, I had been fooled by it, even if only for a bit.


    Shaking my head, I focused on the effect and followed the tendrils, observing how the magic merged with the vegetation and used the plants to conceal itself from observation while misdirecting and concealing effects prevented us from finding the path that was concealed by the formation here. Now that I knew what to look for, I could begin to trace it, noticing that multiple layers were trying to keep anything from moving in a certain direction, by simple virtue of subtle misdirection. It wasn¡¯t so much forcing the approaching person away but encouraging them to take another path by repeatedly making the other path the easier one to tread. Not a tremendously powerful individual effect but the many, many layers I could feel were enough to create a powerful result.


    ¡°Quite impressive, do you feel it, Luna?¡± I asked once I was fairly confident that I¡¯d be able to ignore the effect if needed and completely certain I¡¯d find any approaching enemy, if only because the ward was focused on keeping people out instead of concealing people inside.


    ¡°There¡¯s something,¡± my munchkin muttered, her eyes narrowing as her eyes began to glow with the familiar silver hue.


    Nearby, Lia, Alex and Silva looked a little confused, having failed to notice the neatly concealed and incredibly subtle effect but now that they heard Luna and me, they began to search as well. Not that I was confident that they¡¯d find it, Silva¡¯s traits focused her on perceiving the physical, while Lia didn¡¯t have the Intuition to find this or the traits to make up for them. If anything, Alex had the best chance as their focus on Alchemy gave them some surprisingly versatile skills but by the looks of it, they couldn¡¯t find what we had noticed, either.


    ¡°We should investigate!¡± Luna enthused, having deciphered the warding herself, ¡°There¡¯s clearly someone interested in keeping people away, that has to have a reason.¡±


    Grinning at my munchkin¡¯s enthusiasm, I could only nod. There was no way we wouldn¡¯t be drawn in by an active, magical concealment ward, just the ward¡¯s presence was like a red flag to a bull. At least a bull that wasn¡¯t colourblind and all that.

 Chapter 967

    Subtle wards were something truly great. Even without a great deal of power, they could create an incredibly potent effect, simply because they worked with the world around them, allowing them to leverage what was already there. It might be nothing more than a few roots sticking out of the ground, making somebody walk around a tree on the other side, it might be a shrub being extra spiky on one side, making one avoid it, or similar effects. Nothing overtly powerful, nothing intensive that would arouse suspicion but multiple layers of these subtly misdirecting effects were enough to keep people away from whatever the ward was protecting.


    That is until the ward was discovered, once that happened, the subtle effects didn¡¯t remain effective any longer. They were still there but given that they only caused minor nuisances or small problems, they could easily be ignored and overcome with a bit of stubbornness. Sure, one needed to be aware that there was something to overcome in order to do so, but once that happened, it was easy.


    In this case, once Luna and I had noticed the ward, we had multiple ways to deal with it. We both had enough magical ability to simply shred the magic woven into the many layers of plants, Luna by saturating the plants with her own Life Magic, effectively taking control of them. In contrast, I would have to destroy the plants to unravel the effect. Alternatively, I could use my Darkness Magic, channelled through a combination of Devour and Magic runes, to rip away the magic holding the ward together. Either way would work but doing so wouldn¡¯t just allow us to enter the area, it would render whoever lived here vulnerable. Plus, it would be incredibly rude, akin to kicking down the door when one wanted to meet the new neighbours.


    Luckily, the force needed to overwhelm the subtle effects of the ward wasn¡¯t limited to magical might. Instead, physical force worked just as well, or in this case, nothing but sheer, overwhelming stubbornness.


    The, annoyingly simple, way to overcome the ward was by taking the hard road - literally.


    So, instead of ripping through the layers upon layers of subtle magical misdirection, we barrelled right through. Across the large, annoyingly uneven roots, past the sharp-thorned bushes and over the few, deep crevices in the land. Luckily, those crevices were quite narrow, but enough to make one want to move around them instead of across, just in case one stumbled.


    Less pleasant than these fairly generic attempts to misdirect us were those where the ward had incorporated the less-than-friendly flora of the area. There, we had to employ a bit of magical force to rip through a patch of Haemorhaging Grass and a little later I had to conjure a shield of Ice to block the impact of the thorns from a Razorshrub. Nothing we hadn¡¯t faced in this forest before but now, they happened to be right in our path, by sheer coincidence. Not.


    Finally, after a surprisingly long hour of ignoring the easy path and consistently taking the harder and more annoying way, we came upon something different. Instead of the constant layers of subtle misdirection, this was a hard layer, a magically connected wall of thorny vines. I had no easy way to get through it, at least not without destroying what was blocking our path but luckily, I wasn¡¯t the only one capable of impressive magical feats.


    My dear munchkin let one of the vines she had cultivated for just this purpose stretch across a few metres, making sure to remain hidden behind a tree as she did, and made contact with the thorny vines of the barrier.


    For a moment, I could see her close her eyes in contemplation and feel the magic within her surge and travel through the vine and into the barrier. Then, after a little under a minute, the barrier unravelled in a surprisingly easy and peaceful manner, making me think that it was supposed to work that way.


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    Luna immediately took the lead with Silva by her side and moved into the newly opened gap. Lia, carrying Alex around her neck like a tired, furry scarf, and I followed after, feeling just a little bit amused by Luna¡¯s take-no-prisoners attitude. She truly was my daughter, if something caught her interest, there just was no stopping her, even if things might be dangerous.


    It was a good thing they weren¡¯t in this case. After stepping through the barrier, I needed a moment to allow my mind to accept the fairytale-like environment before us as real and even after that moment, I could only gawp like an idiot at the natural beauty before us.


    While the plants everywhere in the area had grown wildly out of size, to the point that there had to be magic involved to keep things working, both from a physical and a biological perspective, this was something more. Houses were growing inside trees, with small chimneys growing out of the bark and happily spewing forth smoke in a way that I could only call magical, vines grown to look just like fences, even including white leaves to give them that distinct white-picket-fence aesthetic, this place had everything. Water was flowing through leaves likely consciously shaped for just this purpose, creating small public fountains and reservoirs while I could see other of these leaf pipes supply small vegetable gardens.


    Nearby, there were a few people, two of whom greatly reminded me of Adra and the other dryads I had met, at least physically. The others appeared to be somewhere between human and elf, the similarity to those who had taken my Sigmir from me strong enough to raise my hackles.


    ¡°Calm yourself, Mother,¡± Lia quietly reminded me, making me realise that my agitation was leaking out, causing the air around me to chill and the light to dampen. Closing my eyes, I managed to get my emotions under control, at least to the point that I wasn¡¯t looking like I was about to start a massacre.


    ¡°Thank you, dear,¡± I replied, speaking just as softly, while the people who had originally noticed our arrival had notified the others and now, everyone was watching us, clearly uncertain how to react to us.


    ¡°Luna, can you do the talking?¡± I asked after thinking about it for a moment. These were people aligned with Nature and Life, meaning that Lia wasn¡¯t a good match if they were perceptive enough to notice her magical nature. She was, at the end of the night, a creature of Death, Darkness and Blood, not quite what a group like this would likely be comfortable with. Similarly, I wasn¡¯t suited, not so much because of my magical bias, by now I had a strong enough alignment to all types of magic to fake it till I made it, but because of my reaction to them. Hating somebody on sight, simply because of their innate physical and magical nature, wasn¡¯t a good thing, nor one I was proud of, but the way they reminded me of my loss was too painful.


    ¡°Greetings,¡± Luna called out quietly, pitching her voice carefully to carry the distance but not loud enough to wake people if they were sleeping. No need to annoy people by disturbing their rest, just because we had to travel at night. Not that it was a real requirement in the dense forest but habit had taken hold, so we stuck to our nocturnal lifestyle even while under the cover of the dense foliage.


    I could see the two dryads exchange looks before one of them, alongside one of the not-quite-elves, joined that one, the others hanging back. Once they were in casual conversation distance, they started to talk with Luna, though their eyes glanced at Luna all of us in turn, obviously uncertain who was actually in charge.


    Amusingly, Luna didn¡¯t go into too many details, her answers incredibly vague and open-ended in a way that wasn¡¯t evasive but also not terribly helpful. Granted, I could tell that a lot of that evasiveness was because Luna didn¡¯t know the actual answer, like where we came from, or because there wasn¡¯t a definitive answer. We simply didn¡¯t have one overarching goal, I had one, sure, but Luna had her own goals and desires, just like Lia, Silva and Alex. Only that we were a family and thus helped one another to reach those goals but that didn¡¯t make the goals of the individual into the goals of the whole.


    On the other hand, listening to these people made me wonder what had happened. I was fairly certain that they hadn¡¯t been beta-testers and gained a legacy that way, not with this many of them in the same place and all following the same template. No, there was something else going on but so far, they hadn¡¯t shed light on that ¡®something¡¯.


    Finding out would be quite interesting and possibly very important for the future.

 Chapter 968

    Luckily, the initial conversation between the dryad, the not-quite-elf and Luna didn¡¯t take all that long. Essentially, they exchanged greetings and batted about a few simple questions neither side fully answered before Luna asked whether we would be allowed to make our own shelter in their area. That, in turn, caused further glances towards Lia, Alex and me and I could almost smell the mixture of fear, caution and distrust in the air. I had to stop myself from letting my tongue flicker out in an attempt to actually find these scents, but I had no doubt that they were there. Or would be, if my senses were good enough.


    However, even with the distrust in the air, there was something else, too. A different sort of caution, the difference between wanting a possible danger to be as far away as possible from everything important while also wanting that possible danger to be controlled or, failing that, watched and hopefully contained if the possibility turned into an actuality.


    Not that they¡¯d be able to contain me without bringing in some seriously powerful help, the people I could feel in the area were comparatively weak. Nothing beyond level thirty, though given that I hadn¡¯t been using Observe but only gauged their powers with a combination of Soul Sight and Magical Sight, my estimation might be off. I doubted it was unless there was some sort of physical powerhouse in the area that fought without any way to enhance their physical body with magic, somebody like Sigmir if one took away her bond with Ylva for example. A straight-forward brute but given that I could teleport away and had a wide variety of magic at my disposal, such a brute would have to be unrealistically high-levelled to be a threat to me. No, the only remotely realistic option was some sort of rogue, the sneaky scout or assassin-type, though, again, my high level and high Intuition made that fairly unlikely, especially with my highly unusual extra senses. An enemy trying to hide from me would have to do so while concealing their Mind, thanks to ESP-Mind, their Soul, thanks to my Soul Sight, their Magic and all that without using Darkness Magic, unless they managed to surpass me in that discipline. Not impossible but I felt it was highly unlikely. Not unlikely enough to completely lower my guard but that was because I was just a little bit paranoid.


    As they continued talking, I had to hide the amusement that had suddenly started to bubble up. The Dryad had, almost in sync with Luna, begun to incant a somewhat formulaic promise of guest rights. The one spoken by Luna was verbatim the one I had taught to her, after my little encounter with Lady Hestia, essentially promising that we would do no harm while within their community unless harm was done to us. It was fairly simple and not quite as inclusive as the one the Dryad was using but given that they offered to defend us while we were their guests. In turn, they were asking us to defend their community as long as we were here, something that felt quite equitable to me.


    Not that I was planning to spend all that much time here and if an enemy managed to overcome the barriers we had faced on the way here, that sort of enemy might be worth hunting, meaning I¡¯d be fighting it anyway for those sweet, sweet EXP.


    Together, the promises spoken meant I was remarkably confident we would be safe here, there even had been an incredibly faint surge of divine power, just at the edge of my perception, making me think that the promises had divine backing. Granted, that meant that I¡¯d be in deep, deep trouble if I attacked these people from within but I wasn¡¯t planning to.


    If I ever made plans to do so, I would have to leave first and it might be best to remain away from them for a season or two. Just to make sure the divines didn¡¯t get their underwear all bunched up, at least until I had the power to withstand their curses or avoid them in some way. Not a realistic short-term goal, but maybe I could manage in the long term.


    As I was watching the two who had been talking to me, I noticed that they were almost shaking in relief, almost like a small, furry animal that was being stared at by a large, hungry predator. I almost felt bad about their distress but given that I hadn¡¯t actually done anything to make them feel threatened, the guilt faded just as quickly as it had appeared. These people would have to come to terms with danger, this was now a dangerous world. Sure, I might be the most dangerous being in a fairly wide area but that didn¡¯t mean I was automatically malicious.


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    For the most part, I was simply curious and wanted to learn everything there was to learn about magic, no need to be afraid of me. Sadly, I also knew that there¡¯d always be people who would default to fear and, even more annoying, there would be many who would either try to control me or, foolishly, try to destroy me. It had been human nature and I was fairly certain that humans weren¡¯t the only creatures with such desires. To destroy what might threaten them, even if it was only a possible threat.


    After the promises were exchanged, the conversation started to wind down fairly quickly, focusing on the question of where we would be resting. The locals had taken our arrival deep in the night as something unintentional by us, as if we were on a daytime schedule and had just kept pressing on far, far longer than usually planned. The almost entirely empty settlement was a strong indication that these people weren¡¯t nocturnal, making me wonder how Luna would deal with it. I had a feeling she¡¯d want to stay as long as possible, as these people were obviously able to work living plants in ways I couldn¡¯t even begin to understand, something Luna undoubtedly would want to learn.


    Maybe Lia and I would have to look for something to keep us entertained during the nights. There had to be something, maybe I should delve into the Astral River later but first, our accommodations.


    The locals offered us shelter beneath the bough of a tree but just looking at the narrow structure made me want to decline. Luckily, Luna picked up on my dislike and asked for a simple, open area where I could dig us a nice burrow.


    The look on their faces was quite amusing, at least until I realised that I actually couldn¡¯t work like I usually did here. The earth was filled with dense root systems from the dozens of trees nearby, the roots interwoven to the point that I had no idea where those of one tree started or ended. The roots might even have interconnected, with multiple trees sharing the same roots but I wasn¡¯t sure, the entire thing was one massively complex and confusing mess.


    Shaking my head, I realised that the only way for me to dig would be to shred through the roots, causing untold damage in the process. Right after promising not to cause harm to the locals. Yeah, that would never fly. The punishment for that kind of gross negligence might be more lenient than the punishment for outright treachery but either punishment was something to avoid.


    ¡°I¡¯m afraid I won¡¯t be able to go down, the roots below are too dense,¡± I explained, centring my mind and considering what other ways I could use. The bough of the tree was right out, especially after Luna had already declined its use but there were other options.


    Looking around, I noticed that there were multiple haphazard piles of rocks nearby, not used for anything. Taking another look, I realised that every deliberately created structure in the area was made from living plants, meaning the rocks were most likely discarded. My thoughts were confirmed when I asked about them and without many questions asked, I was given permission to use them.


    Now I had enough resources to work with and make something for our own use. Luna, obviously, added her own magical abilities to the mix, mostly when it came to pushing the roots aside just a little so I could anchor a few pillars into the soil to act as foundation, but her supportive abilities were quite useful, too.


    Together, we used the few hours we had until dawn broke to shape the discarded rocks into a fairly sturdy, if a little strange-looking, structure. Granted, the strange appearance mostly came from the way we had shaped the stones into utterly unnatural flat and thin panes but we only had so much stone to work with, so efficiency was important and if that meant the house looked almost as if it was made from gingerbread, so be it. Anyone trying to take a bite would learn that an evil witch lived in the gingerbread house.


    With that thought and a small smile, I retreated to prepare for bed. The night had been long and I, for one, was tired.

 Chapter 969

    These people were better grateful that we had given our word not to harm them while staying here. Without that promise, I might have started a murderous rampage when things got¡­ loud first thing in the morning. People chatting between the trees, some noticing the gingerstone house and questioning its existence in addition to incessantly tweeting birds and, for some unknown and likely unknowable reason people singing, it all combined into a deeply uncomfortable and highly disturbing din. Far too loud, especially if one wanted to sleep for a few more hours, before emerging rested and relaxed into the sweet embrace of the night.


    Alas, it was not to be. People were interested in the gingerstone house, so they decided to investigate its existence. As they did, I could feel their magic and, thanks to my extra-sensory perception of minds,  I could even feel their interest itself intruding upon me. There was a faint temptation to conjure something suitably annoying around the house but not outright harmful, something to make these people go away and keep them from disturbing me.


    Sadly, I quickly noticed that Luna had woken up, too, and seemed to be planning to go out and meet these people, something I wasn¡¯t too enthused about. Sure, she wanted to learn how to shape living beings from them, I could empathise, but that didn¡¯t mean it had to be this early. And if she was out there, I couldn¡¯t just go back to sleep, I¡¯d want to keep an eye on her in some way, at least until I knew I could trust these people. Who knew what foolishness they¡¯d fill my munchkin¡¯s head with otherwise?


    So, with a soft, stifled groan, I pushed myself up from my comfortable bedding, feeling my muscles groan just a little as I stretched. Creating a decent bed would be a suitable task to accomplish during the day, I was certain I¡¯d be forced to rest inside at some point, if only to escape from the Sun.


    ¡°Breakfast first,¡± I told Luna, who looked like she was about to run out and meet these people head-on, right after she had dressed herself. Well, mostly dressed herself, she had managed to twist her socks something fierce, amusing me just a little.


    Sadly, Luna had to wait for breakfast so I could create the actual utilities we needed to prepare food. Luckily, the gingerstone house had enough space, otherwise I might have been forced to get creative with things. As it was, I only had to morph some stone, add some Ice and carve a few simple runes to set up a fairly simple kitchen that I could readily use to turn some of our supplies into the usual breakfast fare, noticing that we might want to look for more berries and fruits, we were starting to run low. Or we might be able to trade with these people, depending on their needs and interests.


    ¡°Sit, munchkin,¡± I pointed Luna to the table I had raised from the stone, setting her breakfast before her. ¡°Think Lady Hecate will be interested in this place?¡± I asked, curious if Luna had some indication of the deity¡¯s interest.


    ¡°Don¡¯t think so,¡± she shook her head, surprising me just a little. Compared to the Charland, this place seemed to be at least of similar interest, or so I would have thought. The way I saw it, the strange proto-elves that likely used to be humans were changing their race, their entire existence, while I still struggled with the question of where the dryads came from, we had seen two, in the middle of the night, so there most likely were more. Unless there was some fairly outlandish coincidence involved, I wasn¡¯t about to believe that a bushel of dryads just happened to spring into existence from nothingness, nor did I believe that they all used to be Travellers and had embraced their legacy. No, they came from some other effect and I was fairly interested in the source of that effect, an interest I had thought the Lady Hecate would share. But apparently not.


    ¡°There¡¯s nothing really arcane here, you know? Just people doing their thing, nothing special or exciting,¡± she elaborated with a small shrug, looking fairly unconcerned with the whole thing.


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    Considering her words, I could only frown and wonder what she meant by that. From the obvious signs of civilisation and intelligence, I had concluded that these people used to be human, as their looks still indicated, so might this mean that dryads were an aberrant result of Shattering and that these dryads had, in turn, used an effect similar to the symbiosis employed in the forests of Arbotoma to change the people in turn while sheltering them? If so, it might be the kindest result of the change possible, at least that with the least harm done. Sure, their homes and previous culture were completely gone but they were still alive for the most part and got to live for a long, long time if the effect was equivalent to that employed on Mundus.


    But that left the ultimate source of it all, why things had turned out differently here compared to elsewhere. Why did these people get dryads, if that was what really had happened, there had to be a reason for it, unless it was a simple happenstance, a stroke of fate of some kind that made this place special.


    For a moment, I closed my eyes and felt out the Astral River, noticing that there was a massive amount of Life flowing through the area. More than I would have expected, even with the forest, it was more like the power near a node in the Charland, only less localised. It was diffused in the entire area, making me, again, wonder how that had happened. Maybe the root system of the trees, I had noticed that the roots were connected in ways I hadn¡¯t expected, so maybe that also influenced the Astral River in some way. It was possible, but the mechanism? That remained a mystery.


    But, at least according to Luna, not a mystery the Lady Hecate was interested in. Maybe because it was, as contradictory as that sounded, an ordinary mystery, something mundane in the grand scheme of things. But mundane and ordinary to a Goddess didn¡¯t mean it was mundane and ordinary to me, in fact, it might be particularly interesting to me, simply because it wasn¡¯t of interest to Lady Hecate. That, in turn, might mean it was something I could understand by myself and use it to build my understanding of the greater and deeper mysteries of magic.


    ¡°Did she tell you anything? Or is it merely a lack of communicated interest from her that makes you think so?¡± I asked, thinking that maybe Luna had her usual lessons with Lady Hecate during the night.


    ¡°A bit of both, she just chuckled about the tree-dwellers, suggesting that we should get some nuts if we so desired. Apparently, their nuts are really tasty?¡± Luna¡¯s voice rose in question at the end, making me wonder if Lady Hecate had made some fairly tasteless joke, considering that Luna was still a child, or if there really were some special nuts somewhere in this commune. Possibly both, which didn¡¯t help my mood.


    ¡°We shall see,¡± I allowed, feeling the Astral River around us once more, ¡°Have you considered what you want to learn first? These people are certainly great at shaping living wood but I would think doing so takes a lot of time. They might be able to use their techniques to craft items like my Frozen Shuttles, only made of wood, obviously, kept alive by your magic. A friend of mine, back on Mundus, had something like that. The weapon¡¯s usual form was a nearly unbreakable staff but it could easily manifest a tip, turning it into a sharp spear, or use her hairs to string itself and turn into a bow, allowing her to launch magical arrows with incredible precision,¡± I explained, hoping that Luna would learn something more useful than building white picket fences.


    ¡°Living wood, kept permanently alive by my magic?¡± Luna asked, clearly intrigued by the idea. The plants she grew were always temporary constructs, only living long enough for the task at hand before shedding a few seeds that Luna could use in the future and crumbling back into dust and dirt once her Astral Power was spent.


    When I nodded, I let myself drift back to memories of Adra and the way she had wielded her magic. If these dryads were using their magic in a similar fashion, it would help Luna to have some idea what was possible if she wanted to learn. Sure, Adra hadn¡¯t been focused on magic, she had been a magical archer with a lot of skill in woodcraft and tracking, something I made sure to impress upon Luna. To drive the contrast home, I made sure to tell Luna about my encounters with the dryad Tegi and the folly she had undertaken in an attempt to make herself more powerful. Hopefully, Luna would never make that sort of foolish mistake.


    Gathering power, sure, letting it consume and control you? That was just stupid.

 Chapter 970

    Once the people outside became impossible to ignore, we decided to go and meet them. Well, my plan was to let Luna do most of the socialising while I remained behind and kept an eye on things but I wasn¡¯t quite sure if that would work. Sure, thanks to Luna¡¯s rapid maturation and my hated, perpetual baby-face it wasn¡¯t as easy to see that I was supposed to be the adult between us but the locals might notice regardless. The few subtle spells I used to keep my less-pleasant traits concealed increased the chance that I¡¯d be overlooked but even with them, it was far from absolute. At least unless I completely concealed myself, in that case, I would be hidden but it wouldn¡¯t be really polite.


    Luckily, the forest was dense enough to block almost all light. At the beginning of my journey on Terra, I might have needed some additional precautions to protect myself from the Sun but by now, I was resilient enough that I could easily withstand a stray ray. And if there were more, I could quickly conjure a patch of Darkness to enshade me, giving me enough time to come up with something more substantial. And yet, despite knowing all that, I noticed that I instinctively stayed near the house, keeping myself in the dim shadow the solid stone was casting.


    Studying the people around our house, I quickly realised that the locals weren¡¯t interested in me. No, their interest was firmly fixated on Luna, to a point that was just a tad creepy, especially in the two male teenagers who apparently didn¡¯t realise that Luna was still a child. Sure, a child with a body that had grown almost to the size of a teenager with a sharp mind hiding inside, but still a child. If they thought they could harbour any strange thoughts, I was quite willing to make sure those thoughts left them. Along with all other thoughts, anybody willing to entertain such thoughts about a child wasn¡¯t worth the privilege of thinking in the first place. Or breathing.


    But while some of the interest was a little too intense to let me be completely at ease, their overall focus on Luna wasn¡¯t too bad and I quickly realised where it came from. The charge, and the discussion, was clearly led by two dryads, neither of them those we had seen in the night, further reinforcing the idea that there was something strange going on here, and their discussion was firmly focused on Nature Magic. Well, Life Magic in Luna¡¯s case but at their level, there wasn¡¯t a whole lot of difference. Nature Magic would allow them to get a deeper understanding of the interaction between living beings, predator and prey, that sort of thing, while Luna would stay above the usual squabbles of those living the Life her magic was focused on.


    Essentially, they were exchanging ideas and tips about plants and their growth, making me wonder why neither of them was using animals or even something like a fungus. Maybe not something like the Withering Fungus we had encountered back home but I could easily imagine harnessing the unstructured growth of a fungus to create nearly any shape desired. Instead, it seemed that these people were focusing on normal, complex plants like trees, shrubs and grass while gently twisting them into shapes that they could work with. I couldn¡¯t help but think that there were easier ways to go about doing things but maybe there was some logic to their actions. Maybe I should ask them later when there wasn¡¯t a large crowd watching them and listening in.


    ¡°And who might you be?¡± one of the locals, a vaguely middle-aged man who had been listening to their discussion, had apparently noticed that I was watching and had decided to investigate. Amusingly, that first contact brought even more attention to me, and with attention came people who wanted to talk with me.


    ¡°Her mother, I decided to stay in the background and watch as the munchkin makes new friends,¡± I replied, my eyes never straying from Luna for too long. The look on the guy¡¯s face was well worth the slightly glib response, it likely came far out of the left field for him.


    ¡°You don¡¯t feel like her,¡± one of the others threw in, making me frown with disdain. Who were they to judge Luna and me?


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    ¡°And yet, I¡¯m the Mother,¡± I repeated myself, never noticing the bit of magic that escaped as I made my declaration. What I did notice was that the attention of both dryads suddenly shifted to me with a fair bit of intensity, while Luna stepped over to me, grabbing my hand.


    ¡°And I wouldn¡¯t want it to be any different,¡± Luna added, her eyes almost daring those around us to say anything.


    ¡°Indeed,¡± I simply nodded, before focusing on the dryads, briefly going over the latest bit of their conversation so I could add my own thoughts. Sure, I was no Nature Mage but I had extensively travelled with a dryad using some of their unique skills, I had crushed the dryads of Tegi twice and I even had tried to enslave a pair of dryads. That last bit hadn¡¯t quite worked out but I had a decent understanding of thier abilities, even before drawing on my own Death Magic to compare and contrast.


    Their reactions to my obvious knowledge, despite the fact that my aura was about as far from Nature as one could get while remaining alive. That I was partially concealing myself had to make matters even worse, as they might feel the Darkness enshrouding me instead of what was hidden beneath that darkness. To them, it must feel almost as if there was a zombie amongst them, happily discussing the nature of Life, the Universe and all the rest.


    Maybe it was a good thing that we had given our solemn promise to harm nobody unless we had to defend ourselves. These people seemed to have been told about that promise, or they naturally had a very passive and pacifist mindset, otherwise, I was fairly certain they would have attacked me. Maybe even Luna, but I doubted that one.


    Soon, I managed to redirect the discussion from Nature and Life Magic to their circumstances, trying to figure out how they had ended up with multiple dryads and the people who were slowly transforming from humans to elves. Sadly, when my intent became obvious, the dryads seemed to shut down just a little, as if they were uncertain whether they should answer my questions.


    Instead, they began to redirect the discussion but with both sides actively stalling the conversation we didn¡¯t get all that far. Instead, I could feel a slightly strange presence approach us and just a little later, I could see the figure that presence belonged to.


    It was almost amusing, once again, I could compare the figure to beings I had met on Mundus and quickly realise who, or rather what, I was dealing with. The most obvious similarity was to Adra and Callista, the two dryads we had met for a little longer, but the bigger similarity was to Callista. Where Adra had a certain lightness and liberty in her aura, this one was a lot more settled and staid. A bound dryad, then, somebody who had already found their tree and exchanged her essence with it, the dryad protecting the tree and the tree sheltering the dryad, a symbiosis that greatly increased a dryad¡¯s power in exchange for her mobility. She could never move far from her tree and once the tree fell, she would have to take some incredibly radical actions to stay alive, to say nothing about preserving her power. In addition to those two, the presence reminded me of something else. It was a little strange when I had felt a similar presence, it had come from a massive sapling, right before we had destroyed it on Aletoma. Later I had learned that it hadn¡¯t been just any old, overgrown tree but that it was a sapling of the World Tree, an attempt by the elves to expand their forest northward. It hadn¡¯t worked but it was quite interesting that this dryad carried a similar aura. Sadly, or maybe luckily, I had only felt the actual World Tree through the Astral River while riding a high coming from Nidh?g. otherwise, I might be able to understand more.


    ¡°Why, good afternoon. I have a feeling you are a lot more than you seem, could you enlighten a Traveller from far afield?¡± I asked, gently prodding to see if she was some sort of dryad Traveller who had taken on her legacy and used it in a fairly fascinating way.


    ¡°A Traveller you once were, now, you are so much more, oh Mother of Dragons. One day, you will be the one to bring down my tree. I would ask you to make it so that day is far, far in the future,¡± she replied, her voice strangely resonant in a way that didn¡¯t seem to come from her body but from somewhere deeper within her. And where her voice was mildly odd, her words were completely strange, leaving me blinking in confusion as I tried to make sense of her words. Trying, being the operative word, trying and failing.

 Chapter 971

    ¡°Am I a Dragon, Mom?¡± Luna asked before I had time to properly process what the strange dryad had told me. That question, alongside Luna''s amusingly excited tone when asking and her devastatingly adorable expression, was enough to confuse me even further, my eyes flickering between my daughter and the dryad.


    ¡°I¡¯ve got to admit I¡¯m uncertain what you are referring to?¡± I responded, wondering just what was going on here. Mother of Dragons, it sounded like some sort of strange conglomerate title between that of Mother, given by Hecate, or maybe the Primordial Mother Title I had gained for creating Lia¡¯s race, and the Dragon-Touched Trait I had. Or maybe my Draconic Sorceress class was added into that mix, too, though I wasn¡¯t sure where it might come from. It could be any, or all, of these, or even something completely different, it wasn¡¯t as if the strange dryad had given me a lot to work with. Other than the declaration that I would eventually kill her or something like that. Destroy her tree, which was a death sentence for a dryad.


    ¡°So you do not know, fascinating,¡± the dryad cocked her head to the side, studying me closely, to the point that I almost felt as exposed as if I had been examined with the Observe-skill. It wasn¡¯t that skill, of that I was fairly certain, but it felt strangely similar. As if I had no secrets under the piercing gaze of her oddly luminous, moss-green eyes.


    ¡°No, I do not know what you are referring to but maybe you would be so kind and explain yourself? For what it¡¯s worth, I can tell you that I currently have no plans to destroy your tree, or you for that matter. We have given our word that we would do no harm while we are guests here and I have no plans to break that promise,¡± I prodded a little, hoping that the strange dryad would shed some light on this odd conversation.


    ¡°All things in the World are held in balance, you see. Sides of a coin, if you will, and for every beginning that comes into existence, there has to be an end, too. Either you have been born to be the End of my Tree or my Tree has been born to be ended by you. I do not know which and, quite honestly, it does not truly matter. One day, my tree will have to fall and I believe it will be up to you to bring it down,¡± the dryad explained, her voice completely dispassionate, as if she wasn¡¯t discussing anything more exciting than the weather or maybe the dressing for a properly prepared salad. As if her declaration was mundane and boring.


    ¡°That is an interesting way to view the World, I have to admit. Not one I share, but an interesting way nonetheless. How did you come to that conclusion, it certainly holds with a Cyclic view of the World but is the World truly cyclic? Is each extreme we experience merely part of a larger cycle, or are the cycles we can observe resonating, slowly working towards one final, ultimate extreme that will end it all?¡± I couldn¡¯t help myself but be fascinated by the calm and composed way the dryad spoke and decided to question her a little if only to see how deep her composure went.


    ¡°Does it matter?¡± she replied, a small grin curling her lips, ¡°We both are part of the cycle, even if we are individually extremes. You will continue on your path and someday, hopefully in the far future, your path will come across mine once more and my tree shall end. You might call it an extreme but to me, it is simply part of my journey.¡±


    ¡°But how does that make me a dragon?¡± Luna interrupted, apparently feeling a little peeved at being ignored.


    ¡°It doesn¡¯t,¡± I told her, before focusing on the dryad once more, ¡°But yes, I would like to know why you called me Mother of Dragons. As far as I know, neither Luna nor Lia is a dragon, stars, not even I¡¯d call myself a dragon, even if I might hold a trait or two of theirs.¡±


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    My question caused the dryad to look from Luna to me and back before turning and focusing on the gingerstone house for a moment.


    ¡°Well, if Lia is the one in there, calling her Daughter of the Dragon wouldn¡¯t be too far off now, would it? I believe the title would be Dracula or something along those lines?¡± the dryad grinned and now I could only hope that she was joking. Or maybe that it was more along the lines of some sort of cosmic joke, I wasn¡¯t quite sure if I was ready to accept the logic she presented here.


    ¡°Some might, but really, it would be a bit of a stretch. Carnelia is most certainly not a Wallachian Countess, nor does she have any aspirations of nobility that I¡¯m aware of. And, again, I¡¯m not a Dragon, even if I share some of their traits. My Legacy was touched by one, yes, but I remain Elven,¡± I shook my head, unwilling to simply accept her odd conclusions and logic.


    ¡°You might not be one yet but are you certain that you won¡¯t become one? Just like my tree and I have yet to reach our full size, we are growing, just like you are. Growing in different ways maybe but we both are growing,¡± she grinned just a little wider, maybe noticing something in my eyes as my mind flickered through some of the traits I had and notifications I had received in the past. Like the one right after crossing the first Divide, the one that told me I had found the Dragon within myself and accepted the Touch of my Elder Brother causing the change of my body to be accelerated. Meaning that the dryad might have an even bigger point than I thought.


    ¡°But that doesn¡¯t mean I¡¯d want to kill you!¡± I insisted a small part of me amused that the one apparently thinking I was destined to kill her was far more at ease with that fate than the destined killer. It wasn¡¯t that the killing part disturbed me as much as it did but the idea of fate, that there was some force that would make me do something, regardless of my own desires and plans.


    ¡°Nor do I accept that there is some nebulous fate holding dominion over me, I follow my own path and where there is no path for me to follow, I make my own path!¡± I insisted, feeling a bit of my magic leak out due to my agitation. The idea that there might be some way to completely control my actions and my path did not sit right with me.


    ¡°That is nice to know,¡± the dryad simply grinned, no more concerned with my rejection than she had been with the idea that I would kill her some day. It was utterly maddening and a part of me was tempted to do something strange, simply because it would hopefully be outside of her expectations and break that composed facade of hers.


    ¡°How can I become a dragon?¡± Luna prodded once more, the complete and utter lack of guile on her face enough to make me laugh.


    ¡°Honestly, I don¡¯t know. I was given the blessing of one and things happened from there but I don¡¯t know how you could get the same. I don¡¯t think there are any dragons on Terra at the moment,¡± I explained, only for the dryad, whose name I still didn¡¯t know, to chuckle and point at me.


    ¡°Of course, there are no other dragons in this world. You have yet to give birth to them,¡± she added, making me groan at both the idea and the image. While I was happy to have my daughters, the idea of giving birth, to say nothing of the idea of either laying eggs or giving birth to fire-breathing, flying lizards, managed to creep me out like almost nothing else. It was up there with the idea of exposure to something like the Withering Fungus, turning my body into a puppet controlled by some parasite. One of those, ¡®Just, NO!¡¯, things.


    ¡°How does that work? Where do baby dragons come from?¡± Luna asked, sounding as innocent as her actual age would suggest. Sadly, that didn¡¯t mean I had a good, factual answer, nor did I have any idea how to answer the question without taking the whole ¡®dragon¡¯ part of it into account. At least not without traumatising my daughter with information she was too young to have.


    ¡°Well, normally you have a mama-dragon and a papa-dragon,¡± the dryad began to explain, only for me to let out a loud growl, silencing her. ¡°But apparently the mama-dragon doesn¡¯t want to discuss that right now,¡± she stopped herself, hopefully, silenced by my glare.


    ¡°There will be no baby dragons,¡± I said with finality, before trying to redirect the entire conversation back onto simpler territory. Maybe introductions would help with that.

 Chapter 972

    After letting myself sink to the ground, I started to massage my temples, trying to get rid of the persistent headache I had been suffering from since talking to Mima, as the weird dryad was called. There was something about the leaps in her logic and her infuriatingly calm and collected demeanour that rubbed me utterly wrong, that made me want to tear her mind apart if only to make it stop. Or maybe to see if I could elicit some sort of reaction beyond mild interest from her, something, anything, to break her composure.


    It was an utterly childish desire, one I could intellectually understand as beneath me, but somewhere deep within me, the cruel idea remained. Maybe there was something to her words, if I was this tempted to hurt her after just half an hour of mostly casual conversation, I had no idea what I would want to do after being in contact with her for a few days, let alone months, years or centuries. No, I had a strong feeling that I would soon conjure up winter, hoping that she would fall into some sort of hibernation, something to keep her quiet for as long as possible.


    The strength of these desires was quite surprising, to the point that I made a mental note to try and analyse my mind a little more, just to make sure the desire wasn¡¯t coming from outside. I doubted it, simply because I was fairly confident in my mental attributes and overall superiority, but it was possible. Not really likely, for a variety of reasons, but possible and something to be investigated. Sadly, trying to find out if there was an outside force manipulating my thoughts using nothing but my thoughts was one of those fairly problematic things. Without a control group or any objective ways to detect such intrusion, I could only try and meditate, hoping to stumble across something within my thought process that didn¡¯t fit but in doing so, I felt as if I had about an equal chance of inventing a justification for possibly manipulated thoughts, thus creating a false-negative or failing to find a justification for something caused by instinct or a gut-feeling, giving me a false-positive, making the whole prospect difficult. Alas, I could only try and experiment, maybe I would find something or would come to understand myself a little better. Knowing oneself and knowing one¡¯s enemy and all that. If I could get to know myself, I would be happy with it.


    An additional source of my headache came from the people around us, of that I was quite confident. The locals had, obviously, heard the dryad speak to me, they hadn¡¯t felt a need to take a distance and I hadn¡¯t put up measures to prevent eavesdropping, as Mima¡¯s initial words had been the biggest cause of concern so setting up measures after she had spoken would be akin to locking the door after the horse had bolted. Useless and, in this case, even counterproductive as such preventive measures could be seen as an admission of guilt or an indication of malintent. Not a good look and while I was confident that we could fight our way out of the settlement if necessary, I didn¡¯t want to cause damage to this community.


    Not only were these people peaceful and welcoming, but they also lacked divine influence I could detect, meaning they might eventually become a bastion against religious fanatics, though I had a feeling their resistance would be more a passive resistance of obscurity once the wards around their settlement had time to grow in power. Currently, they were subtle and comparatively weak but when looking at the power I could feel from the dryads and comparing it to the power of the wards, I could get an idea of how strong those wards could become.


    And that idea was fairly impressive, though it obviously depended on the dryads¡¯ growth rate and how far they¡¯d push themselves. If they managed to reach a respectable level, their wards would likely stand up to nearly everything, just like the protective wards around the elven forests on Arbotoma had. Those had only fallen when the unleashed Nidh?gg had put his complete power against them while I added the fairly insane power of the Frozen Citadel to the mix, channelling the power of a Nexus directly through a specifically prepared focus. In modern terms, nothing below a nuke would get through those wards, though I had no real idea how a nuke would match up against powerful magic. Maybe the fallout of one would be comparable to the strangely poisonous aura in the Charland but that might simply be an idea born from two effects I couldn¡¯t really imagine, let alone quantify.


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    Sadly, their impressive wards weren¡¯t really important, now that I was deep within those wards. What was important was that they had heard their primary protector, Mima, say that I would destroy her tree one day. Living with dryads, the people here already knew what that meant to a dryad and, obviously, they were not pleased with that idea. What made things slightly awkward was that Mima, the one I was supposedly destined to murder, didn¡¯t care but the others? Well, harsh looks and a lot of quiet muttering were the extent to which they dared to express their displeasure but I wasn¡¯t confident it would remain that way.


    But at least the conversation with Mima had shed some light on the people here, especially their origin. While it was difficult to parse the somewhat disjointed information Mima gave, the conclusion I was drawing thus far was that the dryads were people who would have shattered in the town that used to be in this area but by getting connected to the closest tree to them, that fate had been averted. Being Shattered meant that the Soul, or maybe the connection between Soul and Body, was unable to withstand the sudden influx of Astral Power that came with the Change but by getting connected to a tree, that burden was off-loaded. Why it only worked here, I wasn¡¯t sure but I had a feeling it had to do with Mima.


    She wasn¡¯t like the other dryads, that much I could tell, but the exact difference was a lot harder to pin down. Maybe she was something akin to a Scorched, who had been altered in the moment of Change, only altered to accept Nature Magic, though I had no idea how that might have worked. Or she had never been human in the first place but come into existence as a dryad. There were some hints in her diction, the way she was phrasing things, that gave me the impression she hadn¡¯t been raised a human. There was no evidence unless I counted her confusing testimony, but it was the impression I got. Maybe I could take a look at her tree at some point, it might yield the evidence I was looking for, though I would have to be somewhat covert, given the declaration Mima had made. Getting caught studying the tree I was supposed to destroy at some point in the future would make things seriously troublesome.


    With the existence of the dryads somewhat explained, the existence of the not-quite-elves was easily explained, too. They were just like the wood elves on Mundus, or they eventually would be. Symbiotically linked to the forest they called home, with dryads helping to sustain the forest and regulate the elvish numbers, making sure that the forest could sustain their immortality. Or agelessness, as elves could be killed like any other race.


    As for how the people had been enticed into giving up their humanity, that was easily explained. Even during normal times, if the offer was to trade in an ordinary human body for one with pointy ears, an essentially infinite lifespan and a few other benefits in exchange for protecting and tending a forest, a lot of people would have accepted that offer. Especially since the tending wasn¡¯t a complete full-time job, they could take extended vacations and travel beyond the borders of their forest, they just couldn¡¯t live outside of it. That would be a bit of a downer for many, but I didn¡¯t think enough of one to make people reject the offer out of hand. And that was during normal times.


    At a time when civilisation was rapidly breaking apart, when the world had been on literal fire just a few days before and monsters were starting to roam the streets? Yeah, people would take almost any offer, so one that didn¡¯t have any obvious downsides but enormous upsides and came with implicit and explicit protections? People would take it, without concern for the future, simply because taking the offer meant they had a future to be concerned about. It was similar to the considerations and concerns I had in regards to having Luna gain levels, she was losing out on her childhood by rapidly maturing but in turn, it made sure that she would have an adulthood in the future.


    Hopefully, these people won¡¯t come to regret their decision. And, even more importantly, the world wouldn¡¯t come to regret it or would be forced to burn their forest because the elves became some sort of oppressive monsters.

 Chapter 973

    Sneaking out at night shouldn¡¯t be necessary and yet, moving through the darkness of the forest felt so much better than it had been while accompanying Luna during the day. The night was, quite frankly, more comfortable and relaxing, not only due to the darkness but also thanks to the lower temperature. Sure, the days had been getting colder as September had rolled around, bringing with it enough rain to drown a fish, and I had traits that made me more comfortable regardless of temperature but the fact remained, I was a creature of Ice, of the Cold and Darkness. Heat and Sun simply didn¡¯t sit well with me, and the Divine Curse I was suffering under only exacerbated that.


    In this case, the lack of scrutiny from both proto-elves and dryads only made me more comfortable, especially as I was planning to get a look at Mima¡¯s tree. I wanted to know if my previous perception was correct, that she had something to do with World Tree, or a similarly grande structure, though I wasn¡¯t sure what it might mean in the long run.


    If she was bound to the World Tree, or maybe born from it, as the tree came into existence, the implications were quite fascinating. She had claimed that I would eventually destroy her tree and she had named me Dragon, two statements that, if true, had some rather large implications. One might even call them massive or world-shattering, especially the latter, but only if they actually held true.


    Thinking back about the myths surrounding Yggdrasil, the Norse World Tree and the place of the dragon, of Nidh?gg, in those myths, the implications painted a fascinating picture, one that essentially equated me to Nidh?gg and his gnawing on the roots of the World Tree. What¡¯s more, the implication gained some supporting evidence when looking at some of the notifications I had received, those that labelled the dragon whose touch was influencing me as my Elder Brother and claimed that my body was changing, the implication being that I was turning into an actual Dragon.


    Or something along those lines, who knew what the system classified as ¡®Dragon¡¯ and how the changes to my body would occur? Did ¡®Dragon¡¯ only refer to the medieval, European idea of a dragon, a large, scaled reptile, often winged and capable of breathing fire or was the term more inclusive? Asia had its own idea of dragons, long, sinuous creatures capable of manipulating water or the weather to a degree, sometimes wise and noble advisors, other times greedy monsters. Even in the Americas, there was the idea of the Quetzalcoatl, the feathered Serpent, granted, it was worshipped as a deity but a feathered, possibly winged, Serpent able to soar through the sky certainly worked as ¡®dragon¡¯. And then there was yet another myth, a lot more recent but somehow even more poignant, talking about Dracula, the Son of the Dragon or the Son of Evil, depending on the way you translated the name, who could easily be considered the most famous Vampire. Those were only the images and ideas associated with the concept of the ¡®dragon¡¯ that I could remember off the top of my head and depending on how far one was willing to stretch the concept, there were countless more. So many ways to interpret that simple, single word and so little certainty of what it would mean for me in the future.


    Hopefully, I wouldn¡¯t get trapped in an egg or cocoon or something along those lines, that sounded rather unpleasant as things went. But, if nothing else, getting wings would be awesome and scales wouldn¡¯t be too bad, either. Or so I hoped, having feathers had been a little weird while on Mundus, so scales shouldn¡¯t be too much of a difference, right? Wasn¡¯t there something about dinosaurs having feathers and scales, just like that feathered Serpent? So, maybe I¡¯d get feathers, scales, teeth, claws and a little bit of everything?


    But before I could drive myself mad with the possibilities, I should focus on the task at hand, namely to investigate Mima¡¯s tree and find out if it truly is the World Tree or some sort of precursor to it. A fairly simple task, now that I could relax and follow the draw within the Astral River to find the most potent source of Nature Magic in the area. Luckily, the way trees rooted in the ground rooted them into the Astral River, too, gave them a direct connection that was a lot easier to detect than the floating, flowing connection of an animal.


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    Soon, I reached a wide-open clearing, far too perfect and open for me to consider it naturally occurring. Even from the ground, the area appeared to be completely round, with a single tree in the middle, the tree comparatively small but radiating undeniable power. Not enough to make me feel threatened but given that it should be a tree, just the sensation of a being that had crossed over the first Divide was surprising. It wasn¡¯t like the tree could go out there and bash Undead or Shattered, nor could a tree easily teach people magic. Well, maybe this tree actually could do either of those things, but the tree had a fairly peaceful feeling to it, completely unlike the few actively dangerous trees I had seen on Mundus.


    No, this tree was far more like the giant trees in the forests of Arbotoma than the few dangerous trees I had seen. Still, the similarities weren¡¯t enough to prove that I was looking at a sapling that would eventually grow into the World Tree, but they were yet another mark that pushed the possibility into the realm of probability.


    Closing my eyes for a moment, I stretched my other senses, looking for any trace of magic in the area, only to realise that I would have to take a lot of time to parse everything here, as there was a lot of magic around. Nature and Life were the most obvious but there were traces of almost all the elements in the air around me, wafting out from the clearing. Most of it didn¡¯t feel as if it had a purpose to it, simply emanating from the tree but I couldn¡¯t be confident that it was true for all of the magic. The sheer volume made it difficult to detect possible detection wards so I had to be careful.


    Without ever stepping out from the trees, I slowly parsed the magic, using both my Magical Sight as well as my sense of taste and smell, taking note of the various things I could detect. It was quite fascinating, the more I untangled the mixture of magic, the more I realised that it wasn¡¯t, as I had first assumed, a case of the tree simply pumping Astral Powet through itself, releasing the wild magic back out with just a little Life and Nature added for flavour but that the tree seemed to only release Nature Magic but the Nature Magic was, for lack of a better word, unravelling into different elements. It was fascinating and so very different from the way I had been understanding and conceptualising magic that I doubted what I was perceiving.


    But, I had managed to twist together Air and Fire, getting Lightning, just like I had managed to discover Crystal Magic by twisting together two elements. So, why couldn¡¯t it be possible that Nature Magic was somehow composed of all the elements I could feel, all of them and maybe even more? Everything could be considered part of Nature, depending on how far one wanted to stretch its concept. Well, maybe not the system itself, at least to my sensibilities that was artificially created. But even something like the Gods could be considered ¡®naturally occurring¡¯, as amusing as that idea sounded, so why shouldn¡¯t Nature Magic encompass the Divine in some way?


    Shaking my head, I focused back on the magic around me, detecting a few fairly detection wards but nothing too exotic. Granted, the wards weren¡¯t exotic but they didn¡¯t need to be, they were woven into the soft, far-too-perfect lawn around the tree, meaning anyone walking on the grass would be discovered. And with the almost two-hundred metres radius of the clearing, very few beings would be able to reach the tree without touching the grass.


    Luckily, I was one of those few, thanks to my trusty cloak, but given that there obviously were defences, I wasn¡¯t about to blindly bumble forward. Instead, I once again focused inward, trying to get a read of the tree, now that I was closer. It wouldn¡¯t be as revealing as a direct, close observation would be, but I was fairly confident that I could keep myself hidden as I did.


    It didn¡¯t take long and soon, I was back on my feet, moving away from the clearing. Through the Astral River, the tree felt even more like the forest in Arbotoma, to the point that I, for a brief moment, had a flashback to the destruction of their tree and my subsequent death.


    Still, not concrete evidence that this was a World Tree Sapling but by now, I was confident beyond a reasonable doubt. Which left the question of what I was to do about it.

 Interlude: Survivors 701

    No matter how often it happened, waking up within a tree would never cease to be weird. Or maybe it would, one day, but in the hundred-odd days since the world stopped making sense, it hadn¡¯t stopped yet. It might happen once the nightmares of burning skies and the brutal, gut-wrenching and soul-searing pain that came with them faded, swallowed by the deep darkness of oblivion but as things were, waking up within a tree remained weird.


    Especially when it happened after one of the frequent nightmares he was suffering under since it had happened. Dreams of a party, of drinking just a little too much, of walking home because there was no cab to be found until the world suddenly shifted on its axis.


    There had been conspiracy theories about the magnetic poles flipping, of aliens and all kinds of madness abound, many of which had a minuscule grain of truth in them if one just looked at them from just the right, or wrong, angle. A grain that was often spun into an insane fantasy, perfect to amuse the masses and appease the desire of those spinning these tales to be special but there had, to the best of his knowledge, been no conspiracy theory about burning skies, certainly not with strange, translucent blue fire. And yet, that was exactly what had happened.


    Burning skies, blue fire and, stronger than any other sensation he had ever experienced, pain. Searing pain ripped through his body, tearing screams of agony from his throat and leaving him breathless, mindless, numb from the pain.


    And that was where things had started to get weird. As in, really weird, to the point that the memories had a strange, dream-like quality to them, making him wonder if they were truth, elaborate fantasy or simply a figment of his imagination, a refuge in which his mind hid to escape the pain. Maybe this was all some strange dream and his body was lying somewhere in a hospital, catatonic from the pain he had experienced. The tragic thing was, he wasn¡¯t sure if such an existence, a body kept alive through the miracles of modern medicine but devoid of a mind, wouldn¡¯t be the better option, compared to the reality around him. Well, maybe not better for him, to him, it was insanity either way, but to the rest of the world. If this was merely a figment of his imagination, then the rest of the world was still turning as it used to.


    But regardless of whether it was fantasy or not, imagination or not, the only way to endure this existence was to treat it as if it was real, at least until there was an indication that he might be able to escape and return to the world as he knew it. As it used to be.


    So, he had accepted the strange, blue windows, he had accepted that his body was completely different from what it used to be, he had even accepted that he was now bound to a large oak tree, maybe the tree he had leaned against as the pain had tried to tear him apart. He had accepted all of that, he even managed to force himself to accept that he was apparently now a dryad and, according to the strange blue windows, thus a girl because dryads only came in one gender. Amusingly, it wasn¡¯t even a question of sex for dryads, they were like trees in that regard, but one of mentality and he had noticed a shift in his.


    Not a rapid shift but a gradual one, as things that he remembered from his old life ceased to make sense while other things, mostly those to do with the greenery around him and his tree, started to become easy and instinctive. Just as instinctive as the desire to protect his tree, as he knew that the tree was just as much part of him as his body, two sides of a coin or something like that. The body he now primarily identified with and used to move around was important but so was the tree. Just that the tree body was limited in the ways it could defend itself.


    Another part of that shift was an instinctive knowledge that there was someone, or maybe something, nearby that he should protect. Not as important as his tree but important in its own right, more important on a large scale but for him, as an individual, his tree was more important.


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    Knowing that his mobile body had started to explore the area around the tree, both amused and amazed at how much the world had changed. Initially, he hadn¡¯t been sure how long he had slept within the trunk of his tree before emerging for the first time, it might have been hours, maybe a few days but, from the state of the architecture he could see in the distance, it might have been centuries. Later, he learned that it had been three days, a number that caused strange memories to flicker in his mind, memories of a different time, but the memories weren¡¯t important. What was important was that he, alongside a few others who apparently had undergone a change similar to his, had begun working together to help those who couldn¡¯t help themself. More bodies for the community meant more help in the garden and, later, more hands to protect their trees.


    Soon, he also found something that had driven him to explore. Or, again, the one whom he was drawn to protect, a sensation shared by all the people who had changed like he had but, curiously, one that wasn¡¯t instinctively understood by the people they had taken into their garden and inducted into their community. It was another dryad but there was something different about her, something that he, and the other dryads, could immediately sense but were unable to make sense of. Mima, as she was called, was important and quite powerful in her own right, but, strangely, she was completely lacking in other ways.


    One of which was knowledge, she knew some things but was completely ignorant in others, making him and a few of the other dryads wonder what had happened to her. Not that it ultimately mattered, all of them wanted to protect her, needed to protect her, the instinctive drive was, as one of the others who apparently used to be a mother joked, as strong as the drive of a mother to protect her children. Whatever that meant in context, he wasn¡¯t sure but he knew that little Mima was important to him.


    And so, the dryads started to work together, slowly shifting their trees, a seemingly impossible task that had taken weeks for him and for others was still ongoing, moving the trees they were bound to closer together, allowing them to concentrate their efforts and powers. While making it so that Mima¡¯s tree was in the centre, and thus the best-protected spot within the cluster, was the primary purpose of their slow migration, the side benefits were not to be underestimated.


    With so many of them moving into the same area, some coming from far away, others from nearby, they passively changed the world. As more of them joined their community and made their way to them, the trees and plants in the area started to become more powerful, adding yet another element to their defence. The change to the flora was further exploited when Mima started to direct the various dryads in strange ways, having them shift and morph things at her direction but they could see and feel that it worked. They were creating something that would protect them and their community, even if they didn¡¯t really understand what it was or how it worked.


    But with these lessons, especially those in shaping wood and plants to their desire, the dryads had another arrow in their quiver to help their community. They began to shape some of the trees so they would give shelter to the people while making sure that the trees they were altering weren¡¯t harmed. Instead, they began to incorporate the faint amount of power the people were constantly giving off, like body heat, into the trees, allowing their arboreous friends to draw power from those they were sheltering.


    That power, in turn, allowed the trees to grow larger and stronger, making some of the dryads wonder if they should accept a mortal or two into their trees. None of them had gone that far but the idea was there. So, for now, they kept subtly altering the people they were living with while working to make their community better.


    It was a fascinating process, especially once Mima noticed and started to help and it was a process that also changed the people themself. It was quite interesting to watch, especially when they began to change physically. Slowly and not a whole lot in the grand scheme of things, but change they did. Luckily, they all changed at the same time and in the same way, preventing ostracisation of those who were changing and different, as they all were.


    All in all, life was good. Strange but quite good for the circumstances they all were in.

 Chapter 974

    Even after sleeping for most of the morning, I hadn¡¯t made a decision about what I wanted to do about the World Tree and the claim that I was connected to it by Fate. The biggest question was, did I believe in Fate, as Mima so obviously did and if I decided that I believed in it, did I accept her words as genuine and prophetic instead of something muttered by somebody who had too much to drink? Or maybe too little to drink, depending on what the drink in question was, the dryad might simply be insane. Or she might feel the connection I had to Nidh?gg, thanks to the Dragon-Touched Trait and my Draconic Sorceress Class, and that connection might make her think I was somehow destined to destroy the World Tree.


    Either was possible and I doubted anyone could actually tell locally. The Gods might have an idea but I doubted even Lady Hecate would share that kind of information, simply because it wasn¡¯t a lesson of some type. I had noticed that in our communications, the Lady Hecate had openly given me lessons, both when it came to child rearing and when it came to magic, but She had only once given me a straight answer, and that was when the answer to my question was a boon given to me by Her. Her lessons always focused on having me discover the information I was searching for, mostly by showing me examples and letting me work them out myself. If I asked Her about the possibility of Fate being real and a potential connection to the World Tree, I¡¯d most likely get a lesson on looking into the Astral River so I¡¯d eventually find the information myself.


    So, instead of worrying about the plausibility of there being some sort of predetermined Fate, I would simply go about my life and live it. If I eventually happened to be in a situation where destroying the World Tree was advantageous to me, I would do so and not worry about the words said by Mima, but I wouldn¡¯t deliberately go out of my way to destroy the tree. In essence, I would treat it as if I had never heard her words, or at least I would try to do so. Prophecy, especially of the self-fulfilling kind, could really be a pain in the rear.


    Regardless of that decision, I still wanted to know more about the World Tree. Amusingly, I had disregarded one fact, namely that Mima was completely and utterly unconcerned, to the point that her attitude, if bottled, would most likely be considered a controlled substance, simply because it made people so mellow. Maybe I should try to see if I could either get some leaves off her tree or hairs off her head, I had a feeling that the attitude was at least partially caused by her magical nature, nothing else made sense to me. If that were the case, it might actually be possible to extract the effect and turn it into some sort of magical drug.


    The idea brought a grin to my face, remembering old jokes about druids in Craft of War and that their utterly chill nature came from smoking their own leaves, giving them the perfect, mellow buzz. If that was true for dryads in general, or maybe only for Mima, it might explain why the entire community was comparatively chill, they were getting habitually drugged.


    Now, keeping the knowledge that Mima was this chill in mind, I made the decision to go with the easiest and most direct approach to getting information on the supposed World Tree Sapling. I went to ask her.


    Finding her was quite simple, a few questions to the locals and I knew where to go, demonstrating to me just how strangely calm and mellow these people were. Normally, if somebody, anybody, were to ask about one¡¯s leader, there would be a degree of caution but here? Here, I was given directions and that was despite a few suspicious looks that most likely came due to that prophecy Mima had given.


    ¡°Good Afternoon, Mima,¡± I greeted her, after finding her as she was walking along the inner ward line, likely inspecting the subtle wards we had overcome on our way here.


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    ¡°Good Afternoon, Jade. Why do you seek me out?¡± she asked, her tone as calm as always, bringing with it the temptation to do something to break that calm.


    ¡°A request. As you know, I am deeply interested in learning all sorts of magic and to further that quest, I would like to inspect the tree you are bound to. If you need additional promises, beyond the one that I do no harm except in self-defence or the defence of others while in the village, we can discuss them,¡± I explained and for once, the pleasant smile faded just a little. Not enough to make her look concerned but it went from the smile one would show to a friend to one that a sales-person would use on the job. It was lacking sincerity, even if it remained polite.


    ¡°What it is that you want to understand?¡± she asked in return, her eyes trying to weigh and judge me. Somehow, after being judged by the eyes of Hestia and weighed by Lady Hecate, the stare of a somewhat strange dryad lacked the intensity to bore into my soul, leaving me just a little amused at the attempt.


    ¡°Now or in general?¡± I didn¡¯t even try to hide my grin, borrowing her previous expression of amused calm, ¡°In general, I want to understand Magic. To put it in Faustian Terms, I seek to understand what ties the foundations of the world together. Alas, discovering those secrets will be the work of an immortal¡¯s lifetime but you¡¯ve got to start somewhere, both when it comes to immortality and when it comes to general knowledge,¡± I explained, giving a truthful and even fairly complete explanation while concealing the actually important parts. Luckily, neither my short-term nor my long-term goals were anything that would throw up red flags, it was the mid-term goals that could be considered problematic.


    ¡°And now?¡± she prodded, one of her eyes twitching just a little, allowing me to notice a faint annoyance in her expression.


    ¡°Well, I can feel a,¡± I paused for a moment, trying to find the best word to use, ¡°A weight to your existence, for lack of a better term, a significance beyond that of a Bound Dryad. I would like to investigate the reason and, if I¡¯m being honest, I¡¯d like to know more about that bond you claimed to exist between us. Why I would destroy your tree, as I have no reason to. I would like to know if there is such a thing as Fate and if there is, I would like to understand how it binds us,¡± I shook my head, looking past Mima and letting the magical concealment I usually used to keep some of my more problematic traits under wraps fade just a little.


    ¡°I detest the idea of being bound and forced to act in certain ways. For you to say that I would destroy your tree can have two meanings, at least to me. One is that you are planning to act in a way that would make me hate you to the point that I would seek you out to destroy you. The most obvious way would be harming Luna or trying to take her from me but we have exchanged rites of hospitality with your people. If you tried to act against Luna, there¡¯d be a Divine Judgement without any need for me to act.


    ¡°Or, the other meaning, is that there is some sort of twisted Fate that you think will force me to act against you, without any additional interactions between us. That, to me, is tantamount to saying that I¡¯m a slave of that Fate, bound to whatever mystical decree there is and that, as I said, is an idea I just cannot accept. I would rail and rave, trying everything in my power to destroy that idea of Fate, simply because it is so tied to the idea of slavery,¡± I finished my explanation and quickly drew the concealment around me again. There was no need to frighten Mima and I had a feeling that Titanic Ambition would be a frightening trait, as would be my Ruthless and possibly Dragon Touched Traits, I wasn¡¯t sure how much she had been able to perceive past my concealment.


    ¡°I think I understand,¡± she nodded, suddenly looking incredibly young, her calm and collected mask shattered as inexperience and worry shone through. The shift was quite profound, making me wonder if she had used some magical skill to pretend before and was now letting me see what was hidden underneath.


    ¡°Give me a few hours to think, I cannot make a decision on the spot,¡± she added before turning away, moving towards the clearing I had visited during the night, walking quite fast.


    Now, I would have to wait and see.

 Chapter 975

    ¡°Mother, when can we move on?¡± Lia asked me, once I stepped back into our gingerstone house after my talk with Mima. Her voice carried a fairly interesting mix of disgust and longing, strong enough to be easily heard, giving me the impression that she wanted to be anywhere but here.


    ¡°What brings this on?¡± I had to ask in return, wondering if she was affected by the amount of magic in the air, as Nature and Life Magic were completely dominant in this area due to the dryads and their forest. The magic didn¡¯t have time to seep into the soil yet, but the air was thick with it, so it couldn''t be too comfortable for a creature of Darkness like Lia.


    ¡°There¡¯s nothing to do here,¡± she admitted, glancing at Alex, ¡°We¡¯ve done a few experiments during the day and looked around earlier while it was dark, but there¡¯s nothing really we can do, not without risking breaking the promise we have given. These people live in symbiosis with their plants, so what counts as ¡®harming¡¯ them? Taking a single leaf could count, as it takes away resources from a plant they have bonded with, thus taking away resources from them, thus causing them harm, even if it is only the most minor harm possible. But it could count if the one judging such things wishes us ill,¡± she explained and now, I had to pause and consider her reasoning.


    And, as I considered it, I realised that she had a point, there was no mentioned severity of ¡®harm¡¯ nor an actual definition of it. Sure, it could be all about the intent but when I was last confronted by Hestia, after causing the attack on the apartment building, my intention had been to harden the survivors there and help them in the long run. Not to cause them harm, even if I had accepted that some might be injured during the attack, I had considered them acceptable losses if it meant the community would survive long-term.


    At least to my own cognisance, I had good intentions and yet, given that Hestia had given me that slap on the wrist, it might not have been good enough. So, how pure did the intentions have to be, if trying to ascertain the long-term survival of the community you were with didn¡¯t count? What would happen if a guest discovered a traitor or some nefarious plot, acted to prevent or stop the plot but was accused of breaking guest rights as the person plotting was part of the community the guest had been taken in by?


    It was a bit of a morass, the idea of guest rights was wonderful and incredibly important but also murky and fairly nebulous. If inaction caused harm, did that break the promise of not causing harm or would it depend on deliberate inaction compared to inaction due to ignorance?


    There were so many nuances and possible interpretations, just stepping out of the gingerstone house could count as breaking guest rights, because our breathing took away the oxygen in the area, our steps crushed some grass and so on. If somebody wanted to find a reason to claim we caused harm, a reason could be found, even if the damage done could be incredibly minor.


    ¡°I see what you mean,¡± I had to admit, leaping out of the rabbit hole my thoughts had fallen into. ¡°We¡¯ll have to see how much Luna can learn from these people, they are, to my knowledge, the masters of the discipline of magic she is currently working on and you have to admit, their mastery over plants and the manipulation of them is fairly impressive,¡± I added with a grin, getting a begrudging nod at the second point.


    ¡°Can you expand the house somewhat? Just so we have some extra space for our experiments? Maybe some safety measures, too, we have some¡­¡± she paused, her grin turning quite wicked, ¡°interesting experiments we wanted to do but we never had the space or leisure to try them,¡± she finished and all of a sudden, I could feel my gut clench nervously. ¡°Please make sure that the house itself isn¡¯t damaged and that nothing escapes into the surrounding area,¡± I studied Lia for a moment, before my eyes flickered over to Alex, trying to get a read on them, too. Not that reading their body language was easy, the only thing I managed to see was eagerness regarding these experiments.


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    ¡°We¡¯ll be careful, promise. But you might want to make sure that the experimentation space is fairly solid and secure,¡± Lia nodded, somehow failing to assuage the nervous feeling at all. And yet, I could see that both of them wanted to make something of the time spent here, something beyond being bored and sitting around in a house.


    Letting out a deep sigh, I went to work, adding as many safety or protective measures to the extra story I created on top of our current living space. Magic was truly wondrous, though I might have to figure out if there was a way to expand space if only to make better magical bags. My current Shadow bags were awesome and incredibly useful but they had their clear drawbacks and might have additional problems we hadn¡¯t discovered yet.


    A few hours later, I stepped out of the newly expanded house, a wide grin on my face. It must have looked incredible to the locals watching from outside, the house suddenly growing upwards as it stretched like taffy, but then, some of them had seen how I had literally moulded solid rocks like clay as I made the house, so it might not come as a surprise. Not that it really mattered, they had seen dryads shape wood to their desire, so somebody who could do the same to stone could be seen as something to be expected.


    Now, I only had to find out if Mima was accepting my request or if she was unwilling to allow me access to her tree. If it was the second, I had a feeling that our stay wouldn¡¯t last much longer, something Lia and Alex would likely welcome with open arms and paws.


    Again, it didn¡¯t take me long to find her, mostly because she was sitting on the ground near the gingerstone house, her back leaning against one of the trees while her eyes were closed, as if meditating or sleeping. I couldn¡¯t be sure which, the difference could be quite subtle from the outside but whatever the case I wasn¡¯t about to disturb her. Instead, I plopped down nearby, letting the eddies and current of the Astral River flow around me, most of my focus drawn inwards. Not a real state of meditation but it was close enough to give me some much-needed relaxation.


    ¡°I have considered your request,¡± Mima spoke up after a little while of sitting there in each other¡¯s general vicinity, ¡°I would be willing to grant it but I would like to have something in return. You travelled Mundus, something I could never do, so in return for the information you can learn from studying and observing my Tree, I would like to have information on the dryads you encountered on your journeys there. I wish to know myself,¡± she explained, cementing what I had thought before, she was no Traveller, she was something else, making me wonder just where her general knowledge came from. She knew too much specialised knowledge to be a normal person and was turned into a dryad but she also knew too little to be a Traveller. So, what was she? Or what had she been before she became Mima?


    ¡°I have travelled for almost two years with a Dryad on Mundus, I doubt I could tell you all my experiences with her in the time my companions and I plan to spend with you and your people. But I can tell you a few stories about encounters with Dryads, Nymphs and such I had there. I¡¯ll also answer your questions truthfully or I will not answer at all, if the answer to your question is a secret I cannot share,¡± I offered, getting a wide, happy smile in response.


    ¡°I would like that very much. Maybe your experience will help me understand the knowledge I hold,¡± she nodded, her body unfolding gracefully as she stood, apparently planning to take me to her tree, right now.


    Standing up myself, I considered her words for a moment, taking note of the difference she spoke of, knowledge and experience. She seemed to have knowledge but if she lacked the experience to put that knowledge into context, she wouldn¡¯t be able to understand that knowledge. In a way, it was the opposite of a Legacy. Mundus had given me a fair amount of experience but even with my studies there, I didn¡¯t know all that much, especially when taking into account that some of the rules I thought I had learned on Mundus didn¡¯t apply now.


    ¡°Lead on while I tell you about the first dryad I¡¯ve met, Callista,¡± I suggested, my mind already considering what stories I should tell Mima and which stories might be better forgotten.

 Chapter 976

    If there was one thing that drove home just how inexperienced Mima was, it was the way her face morphed and moved as I spoke about my various experiences with dryads on Mundus. Where before, when she had essentially been in control of the conversation, her face had kept up the placidly calm and pleasant mask, now that the control wasn¡¯t with her, the mask was gone, too. Instead, I could easily interpret her expressions to let me read her mind unless she was an incredibly gifted actress, which I doubted. No, I was fairly certain that she truly was completely disgusted by my tales of Tegi and her desire to have endless spring in a land of ice and snow, amused by some of the tales I told of Adra and her behaviour and saddened by the story about Callista and her eternal wait for her lost lover. I didn¡¯t go into the entire thing where the Grandmother was convinced that Adra was said lost lover, only reborn in a new body and without memories. Still, given that Adra had taken a different path in life than the one that would reunite her with Callista, maybe that was for the best.


    Thinking of my old friends, I began to wonder how they were doing, since the Travellers had vanished from their planet. And just how devastating the after-effects of my actions alongside Nidh?gg would turn out to be. Unless an incredibly powerful entity intervened, I was confident that there would be some devastation, a massive shift in climate with the expected results, like failing crops, changes in flora and fauna and so on, likely causing famine, disease and so on. But what I couldn¡¯t estimate was the upper end of the changes. Just how far would things go, how badly would the world of Mundus be affected? I doubted my actions had been enough to trigger a global collapse, leading to a new Ice Age, but that was about the greatest effect I could plausibly imagine. Unless the Nidh?gg added his power behind my working, if that happened, I couldn¡¯t even try to estimate how things would turn out, other than ¡®badly¡¯.


    A part of me felt bad for my actions, even if I hadn¡¯t been aware that Mundus was more than a game. Given just how far-reaching the devastation I had likely caused was, the diminutive size of that part would likely worry a few people, but it was something I kept strictly private. Nobody needed to know that I had largely destroyed a world and, what might be worse to some, that I didn¡¯t feel too bad about it. Sure, I would prefer if it had never happened but if I had to weigh which event I¡¯d theoretically prefer to undo, Sigmir¡¯s death ranked above the destruction I wrought on Mundus, it wasn¡¯t even a competition.


    That thought left me wondering if I would do the same here, on Terra. I had managed to avoid killing thus far, mostly because there simply hadn¡¯t been a need or any real advantage to do so, but if I looked into myself, I knew that my vengeance would be devastating if Lia, Silva or Luna were hurt. Especially Luna, somehow my little munchkin had wormed her way deep into my heart, filling a different niche compared to the one Sigmir had built for herself but it was an important niche nonetheless. Similarly, Lia had her own place but hers, like Silva¡¯s was different again, each relationship unique and important. Strangely, Alex took up the least space within my heart, sure, the furry critter was fairly cute and frighteningly intelligent but their place was with Lia, not with me. I liked them well enough but the connection went through the one I had with my daughter, the indirectness of it somehow blunting the emotional aspect of it. Or it might simply be a question of time spent together, or rather a lack of it. Who knew, I certainly did not, nor was I able to analyse my own mind successfully in that regard.


    My musing, and the story I had been absentmindedly telling to Mima, ended when we reached the clearing holding her tree. Now, as dusk covered the area in the deep shadows of twilight, the clearing and the tree in the middle were strangely more impressive than at night. I had a strong feeling that the magic radiating out from the tree was bound to the cycles of day and night, maybe to the seasonal cycles, too. More Sun, more light, would likely mean more power to the tree and thus more magic, or something along those lines. At least as long as the tree wasn¡¯t starved of nutrients and water, making me wonder if I might be able to teach Mima, or any of the people here, a bit of Water Magic, allowing them to conjure water for their trees. And how this particular tree, that seemed to be so deeply rooted in the Astral River and was constantly drinking in magic from beneath and absorbing sun from above, would react to an infusion of magically conjured water. Would the water simply be broken down into Astral Power or would it be absorbed as water? I wasn¡¯t sure but was interested to find out.


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    Even ignoring possibly interesting interactions between Astral Power channelled through people and the tree, the experience of walking across the amusingly well-maintained lawn that covered the clearing was fascinating. Not just because of the lawn itself but mostly due to the magic radiating out from the tree. The closer I got to it, the more I could feel, though trying to make sense of it was difficult.


    Sure, when just looking at it with my magical sight, it was a mix of Nature and Life Magic, but that only told half the story. When tasting the magic, I could make out some subtle undertones, different types of magic all wrapped up in the greater whole of Nature or Life Magic. If Nature Magic had a sweet taste, the different sub-flavours would be akin to differentiating between the sweetness of different fruits. They were all sweet and contained sugar but they also contained countless other things, all moderating and adjusting the sweet taste. This was somewhat similar, though I couldn¡¯t easily parse out what these many sub-flavours denoted. Different types of magic, obviously, but the exact composition was impossible to describe, especially as the flavours seemed to slowly and subtly shift as I moved across the lawn.


    ¡°It¡¯s fascinating,¡± I admitted, once Mima and I reached the tree. There, I used as much of my Darkness Magic as possible to conceal the use of Observe, only to be subtly disappointed by the ability. Sure, I learned that I was dealing with a World Tree Sapling but that wasn¡¯t really useful. There was no level, no nothing, only that useless name I had already deduced. Confirmation was nice but ultimately useless.


    ¡°Could you tell me about the magic your tree takes in? I can feel it but I can¡¯t make sense of it. Can you use the power it takes in or are you limited to the elements it radiates outwards?¡± I asked, looking at Mima with some curiosity in my eyes. Hopefully, she¡¯d be able to shed some light on the processes of the World Tree.


    ¡°I¡¯m not really sure,¡± she admitted, looking at me with a bit of confusion in her eyes, ¡°I just do things that feel right and they work,¡± she shrugged, making me nod thanks to a sudden realisation. If she was as inexperienced as I was convinced she was, she¡¯d be like a child and I was asking a child how their equivalent to a digestive system worked. At best, I might get an answer about using the bathroom and eating in general but to find out details would be completely impossible.


    Deciding that Mima wouldn¡¯t be a good source of knowledge, I focused my mind and eyes on the tree itself, trying to see more than the physical. I even let myself partially drop into the Astral River so I could see more, stretching my mind and senses as far as I could.


    For a minute, or maybe five, I wasn¡¯t quite sure how long my mind was staring at the maddening complexity that was the World Tree, I kept observing the processes, only to realise that there was even more going on than I had thought. The World Tree was pulling in everything from the Astral River, almost as if it was regenerating Astral Power at an alarming rate, but at the same time, the Astral Power it radiated back out was rapidly returning to the Astral River, subtly changed and empowered, for lack of a better word. It was filled with vitality and life, making me wonder just how it would interact with living beings. It felt refreshing, like a pleasantly warm shower or a wonderful cup of tea, only on a spiritual level.


    However, as I looked around, I quickly noticed the flip side of the process. Where the World Tree was radiating purified and energised Astral Power outwards, the Astral River wasn¡¯t carrying that sort of power. And so, almost like a water filter or something along those lines, the World Tree seemed to strip away some impurities, unhealthy elements that would prevent the pleasant effect I was feeling. The problem came with the question of what the tree did with these elements because from what I could currently tell, it was simply letting them sit there, in the soil beneath its roots.

 Chapter 977

    Even after leaving the grassy area around the World Tree Sapling behind, I couldn¡¯t get the images my mind used to conceptualise what my magical senses were telling me out of my mind. Death, Rot, Poison, all these words came to mind when I had sensed the remnants of power that were starting to accumulate beneath the World Tree. So far, it was next to nothing, I had only sensed it because I was right on top of it and had been looking for something interesting but then, the World Tree had only stood in that position for a little over half a year. That wasn¡¯t a whole lot of time for it to grow and filter Astral Power, leaving the dregs to accumulate around its roots. If I tried to estimate the growth of these accumulations, things looked fairly dire, sure, the tree would continue to grow and thus spread them out over a much larger area but that wasn¡¯t a real reprieve, it only delayed that these accumulations would have trouble for the tree.


    Sitting in the Gingerstone House, I started to wonder if there was a way to use these accumulations. They, too, were Astral Power, only with a strong bias towards certain elements generally inimical to the elements that made up Life and Nature but that didn¡¯t mean these elements were automatically bad or evil. Just that one had to be cautious in one¡¯s dealing with them but that was somewhat true for Ice and Darkness, too.


    Granted, some people would think that both Ice and Darkness should be part of these bad elements but it didn¡¯t look like the World Tree filtered them out, at least from what I had been able to sense. It might be because I hadn¡¯t been able to make out any real details of these accumulations or it might be because both Darkness and Ice are inextricable parts of Nature but so are Death, Poison and Rot. Death is just as necessary as Life while Poison is the weapon of choice for numerous predators and a defensive tool for countless other beings, both plants and animals. Rot, on the other hand, is in many ways a living process, similar to the digestive processes of animals, only that the digestion happens without the digested thing being enveloped as the digesting beings are far smaller than what they eat. Nature at its finest but somehow, the World Tree didn¡¯t seem to agree with my reasoning and, similarly, my senses didn¡¯t seem to agree with my mind¡¯s conclusions. They, too, had considered the Astral Power released by the World Tree a lot more pleasant and pure than what I could normally take it, which was a slightly weird sensation. Was there something inherently ¡®off¡¯ about these elements or was it some sort of weird, magical pretty privilege, where elements that could be considered predatory, for lack of a better word, were automatically deemed dangerous?


    If so, shouldn¡¯t Nature, or maybe Life in general, be considered the most predatory and dangerous? Before the change, every predator was a living being and while there were Undead now, that didn¡¯t change the primary dynamic as they, too, were mimicking the behaviour of living beings. Sure, they were powered by a different type of energy but did that fundamentally change things? Intellectually, I wanted to say no, it didn¡¯t but at this point, my mind was getting into conflict with what my senses told me about the world. Should I try sticking to logic, trying to make it override my senses or should I go with what my senses told me and try to adjust my thinking? Was this distaste akin to the distaste one initially had for anything other than sweetness, something that had to be overcome as one acquired new tastes or was it something different?


    The question gave me a bit of a headache but, amusingly, it also answered why I might want to destroy the World Tree. As it was, the World Tree was accumulating power below its roots, letting the storage grow as it seeped into the soil. Eventually, I could use that accumulated power for myself, maybe to cross a Divide, as Adra had when she had torn down the tree of Tegi, using the power stored within for herself. Or maybe I could use the accumulated Death Astral Power to improve my own affinity to the element, another worthwhile endeavour. Sure, I¡¯d need to let the tree filter a lot more power but someday, the accumulation would be quite¡­ significant.


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    Sadly, I doubted it would be useful to bring Sigmir back to life, the elements simply didn¡¯t match, but for other projects? For those, it could be invaluable. One day.


    Shaking off my somewhat covetous and hungry thoughts, I focused on the present and what opportunities staying in this place might have. The sad part was, that there were quite few. The dryads had their Nature Magic, so they had little to no interest in different elements, not even those I¡¯d consider natural and adjacent to Nature. Water or Earth Magic didn¡¯t hold any real attraction to them and the less said about Fire, Ice and Wind the better. To them, these forces represented destruction and something to be left alone, while Water and Earth were deemed lacking. I didn¡¯t understand their logic, mostly because there didn¡¯t seem to be any, but I doubted I¡¯d be able to spend productive time teaching here.


    Similarly, there was no divine presence in the area, something that Luna had already remarked on, meaning it was unlikely we would be allowed, or able, to build a shrine here. On one hand, I greatly enjoyed the idea that the Gods were limited by the World Tree¡¯s presence, on the other hand, it meant that another avenue to get EXP was blocked from us, even if I was uncertain if Lady Hecate would give me any for helping Luna build a shrine here. She didn¡¯t seem to care about the dryads or the World Tree, and the more I learned about them, the more I understood.


    Lady Hecate was all about discovery, about pushing boundaries and learning more, while the dryads were complacent and seemed to prefer letting their powers grow naturally without any pushing at all, the exact opposite.


    With the usual avenues to grow my power closed, I decided to try moving in a different direction. These last few months, I had neglected my Mind Magic a little and my Astral Meditation as well. The latter, I had mostly used to keep track of the direction I thought the Nexus was in, without actually pushing what I could do, simply because the unsettled nature of the Astral River made things difficult. Maybe it was time to push past that difficulty, or at least try to.


    Mind Magic was in a similar vein, there simply were few times I could employ the skill. Shattered and Undead were quite unsatisfactory, even if using the skill on them worked and had some weird results. Maybe because their minds were fairly static, more akin to a computer than to an actual living mind, meaning anything I learned while manipulating them would be worthless when manipulating others.


    Sadly, I couldn¡¯t use my Mind Magic on the locals without their consent, as it would be classified as a hostile action, at least to me, which seemed to be a good test of what counted as one and what didn¡¯t, the good, old Golden Rule. If I would consider an action as hostile, I wouldn¡¯t perform said action here, that way, I should be relatively safe.


    But there were other ways to work on both skills or at least work on one and try to put that work to use when employing the other skill. For that, I needed to recreate my throne, as it allowed me to leave my body mostly unattended and yet find my way back to it fairly easily. The runes I had used on Mundus wouldn¡¯t work any longer, I wasn¡¯t Morgana any longer, or rather, I wasn¡¯t just Morgana any longer. Now, I was more than Morgana, I was growing in ways Morgana never had and likely never could.


    Still, the throne I conjured from Hard Ice had large similarities with the one Morgana had sat one but, at the same time, there were major differences. Other elements were worked into the Ice, giving the Ice an unearthly sheen and glow from the powers I channelled into the Ice. There was a great deal of experimentation involved, mostly using Crystal Magic as a base to bind other elements into the Ice without having the Astral Power interact with it, but the effort was well-worth it. Not only did I gain a slew of different skill-points, but I also learned something entirely new and the final result, my throne, was more than just a seat to rest my behind. It was a spell-focus and while it was far from the sheer magnitude of the Frozen Citadel, it was beyond the citadel in versatility.


    Now, some three days after I had started to work on it, I was finished and could send my gaze elsewhere.

 Chapter 978

    Once I was comfortably sitting down on my new Throne, I let my mind drift into the Astral River, letting its ebb and flow pull and push me hither and yon. I wasn¡¯t trying to go somewhere, I simply let the current take me away from the World Tree, making navigation, the biggest problem on the ever-shifting currents irrelevant. With my Throne acting as a beacon within the Astral River, I would find my way back to my body, no matter what, so I didn¡¯t have to worry about getting lost.


    That confidence allowed me to float with the currents, going further than I¡¯d normally dare, beyond the reach of the World Tree and beyond the forest around it. I had no idea where the currents had taken me, only that there was a fair amount of physical distance between my Throne and the location the Astral River had taken me to. But whether that distance would be measured in tens of kilometres, in hundreds or maybe even in thousands, I wasn¡¯t sure. I might have let my mind drift halfway around the world and I wouldn¡¯t know, distances in the Astral could readily shift and warp, making the navigation within such a pain. That the Astral River sill wasn¡¯t settled didn¡¯t help matters, sure, it was less agitated than it had been in the days after the change but that was more akin to the difference between a high-pressure hose and a waterfall, neither could be swum up easily. In a similar vein, correlating a position within the Astral River to a position in the physical world was difficult.


    Delving into the Astral River was simple but the further you moved from the position you entered from, the more difficult it became to keep track of things. Previously, I had managed to find the strangely altered sewage treatment plant by delving into the Astral and correlating its influx within the Astral River to directions in the real world but that had only worked thanks to its proximity and magnitude. Similarly, finding the World Tree would be easy as long as I was nearby but the wards, while subtle in the physical world, had quite the effect within the Astral, maybe because the warding was linked with living plants that had their own connection. I wasn¡¯t sure but it was something I would have to look into at some point.


    Sadly, what I was trying to do now was a lot more difficult and less straightforward compared to finding a particularly strong enemy. Sure, I would take one of those but my plan wasn¡¯t to look for one, it was almost the opposite. I wanted to find a fairly ordinary foe, nothing that would challenge me if I was close to it, to see how much I could do from afar.


    Finding such a foe from within the Astral River was the obvious first step. If I couldn¡¯t even find a target, the rest would be impossible and I¡¯d have to look for my fun elsewhere. But if I managed to find a suitable test subject, I wanted to see if I could glean information from its mind. Further tests were aimed at finding out if the target noticed the intrusion, if they could resist better after noticing and if there were side effects from drawing information from their mind. Some of these might be better to be performed directly, so I could see any complications with my own eyes, but given that I was in a place where I had promised to do no harm, these first tests would have to be done remotely.


    If I managed to draw out information from my target, the real fun would start, namely, the question of whether I could accomplish the opposite. Could I project information into the mind of a target and could my targets notice if I did so? Or rather, how much could I project without their notice, if I started to mess with something critical to their fundamental reality or character, they would notice. They might not immediately understand what was going on, but they would notice.


    Soon, as I was drifting through the Astral, I noticed a small siphon, just large enough for me to notice. Part of me was curious to find out how much power one had to draw from the Astral River to let me notice their presence, so I tried to lock onto the physical realm around the presence, only to fail. I just couldn¡¯t get a grip on things as I had done while on Mundus, so I couldn¡¯t cast a scrying construct out into the world so I could see.


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    Still, I had a hold on the Astral, so I wasn¡¯t drifting away and I knew I would be able to learn more if the entity I was observing tried to delve into the Astral, it was the method I had used to commune with the Grandmother while on Mundus. But that sadly didn¡¯t help me, unless there was a reason for the entity to enter the Astral, I might wait for days, weeks or even forever, there were many beings that never consciously entered the Astral River after all. No, if I wanted to learn more, I would have to do something.


    Sadly, I couldn¡¯t sense the mind linked to the draw, maybe because my extra-sensory perception of minds was linked to the physical distance between my body and the target or maybe there simply wasn¡¯t a mind there, at least not one bright enough for me to notice. If it was a plant, or an ordinary, if powerful, animal, I wouldn¡¯t be able to notice the mind, or it might have some sort of concealment. There were multiple options and sadly, I had no idea which was the correct one.


    But I could experiment some more, I only had to be careful. Using my Soul Sense would be an option but one I was hesitant of, if I pushed even more of myself into the Astral, going beyond pushing my mind into it, I might get stuck, even with my Throne acting as a beacon. And my Soul Sense was dependant on proximity to my actual soul, anchored to my body as it was, it was a major part of how Lady Hecate had taught me how to use it. So, that was out, too.


    Instead, I subtly channelled some Mind Magic, letting it drift into the power that was drawn from the Astral River, holding little intent but a small compulsion to stop, to pause. A moment¡¯s hesitation, embedded in a decently sized spark of Astral Power, hopefully, subtle and simple enough to slip through. I wasn¡¯t sure if it would work, or if I would be able to get any feedback but it was worth the try.


    The result was¡­ something. There was a tiny change in the power flowing from the Astral River into whatever entity I was observing from afar but just what that change meant, I had no idea. I might have pressed the pause button for the biological processes of some plant, only for them to resume moments later or I might have managed to make some poor animal stumble. Hel, I might even have managed to wake up some poor sod who was just trying to sleep, I had no real idea and wasn¡¯t sure if I could find out.


    To get some more information, I tried to vary the commands I embedded into the sparks of Mind Magic I sent into the flow of power to the entity I was observing but sadly, there seemed to be no telling reactions. Roughly the change I observed when I sent the power the first time occurred again, with only minor variations that I could detect but, again, I couldn¡¯t really tell what these variations meant.


    So, I decided to try something else and began studying the power that was flowing into the entity. There didn¡¯t seem to be any obvious elemental bias, so I decided to see what would happen if I tried introducing one by pushing away all elements but one from the point where I could feel the Astral Power leave the Astral River and flow into this entity. Now, if things worked as I hoped they did, the entity drawing in power from the Astral River would only get Ice Astral Power, hopefully giving me some interesting results.


    For a few minutes, nothing seemed to happen. The flow of power increased a little, then a lot more, until suddenly, the entire flow disappeared, leaving me wondering just what had happened. Sadly, without a test-subject, I couldn¡¯t really continue testing, so I decided to pull myself back towards my body, following the beacon that was my throne.


    After a while of diligent moving through the Astral, I reunited with my body, finding myself just a little bit stiff from sitting still too long, but nothing bad.


    However, I did get a bit of a surprise when I checked my notifications, apparently, I had managed to kill a level thirty-seven Horned Deer, whatever that was, while gaining four points in Astral Meditation and two in Mind Magic, bringing the skills to forty-two and sixty, respectively.


    At least now I knew why the entity I had noticed had vanished.

 Chapter 979

    Further experimentation with my Throne and the Astral River sadly failed to produce additional insights, only repeats of that first experiment. I could find entities drawing Astral Power from the Astral River if they drew in enough power. Though even that was odd. I was fairly certain that the Horned Deer I had killed during my first experiment hadn¡¯t a greater magical inclination than one of my companions, one of the dryads or, Hel, even one of the Stalking Stalks outside their home. Those were magically quite potent, and yet, I wasn¡¯t able to detect them, or any of the critters out there. Only that deer, an animal I hadn¡¯t seen before, meaning it might be some distance away from our current presence but it had been the first I spotted. Where were the others, was it a simple coincidence that I hadn¡¯t spotted anything before that deer or was there something else? Some correlation between their ability to conceal themself, maybe, combined with the magnitude of the draw?


    Either way, I was now able to detect beings at a distance, but what I couldn¡¯t do was correlate their presence and existence within to anything outside of it. In other words, I could get information on the existence of some being that was somewhere out there, but I couldn¡¯t find out where that being was, what it was or anything beyond the fact that there was something out there. Not terribly useful, but better than nothing.


    The slightly more interesting, and infinitely more indiscriminate, thing I could do was try and flood these beings with elementally biased Astral Power, causing adverse reactions if they lacked the correct bias within themself, as evidenced by the dying deer. Not that I was about to go and start killing random critters somewhere out there, especially not as their levels were far too low to provide any profit, but a few might have expired during my experimentation. Not all, some had reacted in weird ways, but without having any information beyond the knowledge that they existed, it was difficult to find out what made them special and what happened to them.


    My attempts to get feedback from them by using Mind Magic continued to fail. I simply couldn¡¯t get into their minds, not beyond anything I had achieved in that first experiment but wrapping a simple command in a shell of mentally biased Astral Power wasn¡¯t all that useful. Especially not as I didn¡¯t know just how effective the command was carried out, it might be that the slight change in their Astral Power draw could come from the effect mentally biased Astral Power had on their bodies or minds, just like the Ice biased Astral Power I had used in my first experiment had a thoroughly negative effect on that first deer. No, if I wanted to learn more, I¡¯d have to figure out a way to perform these experiments point-blank, or at least across a short distance, so I could evaluate their effect directly, not just through the Astral River.


    But for that, we¡¯d have to continue onwards, something Lia and Alex were highly interested in. Sure, they had their experimentation, even if it occasionally filled the Gingerstone House with smells that ranged from oddly pleasant to nauseatingly bad, and had been allowed to gather a few interesting plants from around town but that only kept the two of them occupied for so long. They needed something to sink their teeth in, both literally and figuratively, or they would get seriously bored. Knowing where my mind went when I got seriously bored, I wasn¡¯t sure if I wanted Alex to get into that state. Sure, they lacked the magical means of mass destruction but that didn¡¯t make the alchemicals ways they could cause mass destruction any less dangerous. And I was quite certain that they could come up with a couple of ways to cause massive damage.


    Luckily, the lessons Luna was receiving from the dryads seemed to be slowing down. Sure, the dryads and some of the proto-elves were masters of plant manipulation but they aimed for slow changes to create a permanent effect. While Luna was doing that, mostly to optimise plants for later combat, she primarily used rapid changes that created highly temporary and mobile effects, almost the exact opposite of what the people here sought. Thus, a lot of the lessons and things they had understood and taken for granted were completely shattered by Luna, who happily broke the paradigm they had operated under.


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    Sure, Luna learned some things but ultimately, the dryads were instinctive spellcasters, they used Nature Magic as easily as others could breathe, simply because of their nature. Teaching didn¡¯t come to them easily, especially not when the one they were supposed to teach used such a different paradigm compared to them. Similarly, trying to teach the locals my own brand of magic was largely a failure, they seemed to always fall back on their Nature Magic, though they did manage to perform a few new tricks with it.


    And so, just a week after we had arrived in the dryads¡¯ enclave, we decided to continue on our path. I had no doubt I¡¯d eventually return, if only to take advantage of the accumulating power beneath the World Tree, but the dryads didn¡¯t need to know that. No, it was much better if they thought I was planning to leave and continue our journey and we¡¯d never return.


    Amusingly, we had been asked to make some small adjustments to the Gingerstone House, after I removed my throne, of course, to make it a permanent structure within their community, allowing visitors to spend the night without intruding in individual homes. The dryads had helped a bit by shaping some wood into furniture and adding it to give the home a more homely feeling but overall, it was my effort.


    Granted, it was an effort I was well-rewarded for. The system itself rewarded the achievement of using Crystal, Fire and Earth Magic to turn soil into sand and then into clear glass, giving me two skill points in Fire and Earth Magic alongside three in Crystal Magic, bringing them to eighteen, forty and thirty-seven, respectively. In addition, the dryads added a nice bounty of fresh produce, in addition to some seeds and cuttings for Luna, though we¡¯d have to be a little creative in their storage, I had a feeling that trying to store fresh, still-living cuttings within the Shadow Realm would rapidly render them into dead branches. Alas, it was an interesting challenge for Luna to puzzle out.


    Less amusing, and more interesting, was that Luna¡¯s request to build a small Shrine and Library to Lady Hecate within the boundaries of their village was rejected. They didn¡¯t want to have any direct and overt divine influence within their community. It was a desire that made them incredibly appealing to me, to the point that I offered to create a small library with a few tomes on simple magic without the need for a connection to Lady Hecate. They rejected the offer, maybe because it felt too similar to the one from Luna, annoying me just a little.


    I could understand trying to keep divine influence out of your community, even if the Lady Hecate seemed to be incredibly benign, primarily interested in spreading magic by teaching it to mortals, though that also advanced Her domain, as I understood it. She was the Goddess of Magic after all, so more mortal spellcasters meant more influence for Her, even if the influence was only passive. Or, maybe She was simply hoping to find a few mortals that could reach a point at which they could advance the overall state of magical development and eventually each Her a trick or two. Before the change, science had advanced through the countless contributions, both big and small, of numerous scientists, each contribution a tiny brick that allowed the tower of knowledge to rise into the sky.


    Magic had a greater reliance on individual ability but at the higher levels, sharing became important, something I realised more and more as I taught Luna but also before, when I had taught my students. But to get a few people to those higher levels, a lot of people had to be introduced to magic in general before those with potential could begin to grow.


    Alas, the dryads weren¡¯t interested and so, they wouldn¡¯t get the chance. Instead, they wanted to rely on their innate talents, a foolish idea in my opinion but who was I to criticise them if they wanted to weaken themself? Hopefully, they wouldn¡¯t fail to protect the World Tree before I came to harvest it, that would be a real shame.


    Either way, the five of us happily continued our journey, quite refreshed after the week spent in the safe haven built by the dryad community, wondering where our journey would take us next. There was still a huge amount of world to explore and, more importantly, somewhere in the northwest, the Nexus of Ice was slowly forming, a place I desired to control.

 Chapter 980

    As I was studying the rabbit Luna and I were experimenting on, I was whistling softly to myself. These last few days since leaving the Dryad commune had been fairly interesting, filled with travel, exploration and, most importantly, experimentation as Luna and I were continuing to work on our latest project, namely to infuse other living beings with magical power, altering them to make them into something special.


    The grass we had worked with before, near the Charland, had been an interesting and fascinating proof of concept but now, we wanted to get something bigger. Now, we wanted to alter a complex animal, while the ultimate goal was to understand how sapient beings like humans could wield magic, how affinities worked and maybe even bestow them upon others. Theoretically, granting affinities was possible, I was living proof that the system could increase the affinity one had for certain types of magic, or even for all types of magic, but whether we could create a similar effect ourselves was questionable.


    But before we should even consider working on humans, we wanted to make things work with less complex beings. Both basic animals and complex plants were on our list, with both options presenting their own difficulties we had to overcome. For animals, the biggest problem I expected was within their minds, that the powers we wanted to bestow upon them had to link into it without disrupting things. Sure, we could fill an animal''s Soul with power, and even keep it somewhat stabilised with Luna¡¯s Life Magic, but, so far, we hadn¡¯t been able to keep things stable. Our best result had been a stabilisation for a little over a minute before the magic we had infused into our test-squirrel had destabilised with¡­ explosive effects, turning the critter inside-out. Or rather, insides everywhere, as the poor thing exploded.


    Alas, such a setback wasn¡¯t enough to stop us and now, we had yet another experimental subject, namely the rabbit I was currently studying.


    ¡°Maybe we should try a different way,¡± Luna suggested, making me raise an eyebrow in question, uncertain what exactly she had in mind, ¡°You told me that you could alter what types of Astral Power a being connected to the Astral River draws from it, right? What if we use that, you fill their bodies with one type of power and I keep things stable with my Life Magic? Maybe that¡¯d allow their minds and bodies to adjust to the power within, even after I don¡¯t keep them contained,¡± she reasoned, making me shrug as I wasn¡¯t sure it would work as she hoped it would. Maybe it would, maybe it wouldn¡¯t, but it certainly was worth the experiment.


    ¡°Why don¡¯t we try it like this? First, you use your Life Magic and infuse the rabbit¡¯s soul, then I¡¯ll try and see if I can even find the silly thing in the Astral. So far, I¡¯ve been unsuccessful with that part of things, I can find some critter, somewhere but I haven¡¯t been able to find one that I could correlate to things in reality. But maybe it¡¯ll work if the thing is right in front of me and you use your Life Magic to make it stand out, so to speak,¡± I suggested before continuing. ¡°If that works out, I can infuse the critter with one type of Astral Power, before dropping out of the Astral River and trying to adjust the critter¡¯s soul so it is compatible with the type of Astral Power that¡¯s already running through its body;¡± I finished, even as I considered if trying to do things the opposite way around wouldn¡¯t maybe work better.


    Adjusting the soul first and then infusing the body but the problem was, we had already tried to adust the soul, it was all we had done so far, but the experiments had never worked. Maybe Luna could keep them stable to give me enough time to infuse their body before things destabilised to the point that the experiment ended, but I wasn¡¯t sure if that would work. We¡¯d have to try and see, likely trying both ways, if only to see what difference the order made.


    Our test started just as planned, with Luna carefully infusing the Life Magic into the rabbit¡¯s soul. It was a step we had performed a few times already, though it had never stabilised satisfactorily, leaving us with quite a few dead critters, all of which had died when the magic we used unravelled, leaving their bodies unable to cope with the influx of foreign power. Even pure Life Magic, without any additional elemental bias, was too much for them. We had done a few experiments, simply to see if they could cope if we kept the influx of power at a minuscule level but so far, we hadn¡¯t found any way to keep things stable.


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    But maybe this would work, letting the body adjust first before altering the Soul. After closing my eyes, I let myself dip into the Astral River, my mind searching for that peculiar sensation of something drawing power from the Astral River. It wasn¡¯t something that stood out, not even with my fairly high Intuition, but I knew that something was there and was hoping that I¡¯d be able to detect the draw I was looking for.


    Sadly, I quickly realised that my idea was far more difficult than I had been hoping for, the Astral River wasn¡¯t placid enough to let me perceive my surroundings easily, instead, I had to try and keep myself from getting swept away as I was delving into its depths. I couldn¡¯t even find Luna, despite her presence being many times more powerful than that of the rabbit, leaving me at a loss. If I couldn¡¯t find the rabbit within the river, I couldn¡¯t even try to infuse its body.


    So, I pulled myself back into my own body, considering an alternative way to approach the problem. I had been able to pull my students into the Astral River with Mind Magic, hopefully, I¡¯d be able to do something similar to the rabbit. Then, it would be right with me, within the reference frame I was projecting into the Astral River, and finding it should be trivial.


    Nodding to myself, I did just that, opening my eyes and staring at the rabbit, reaching out with my Mind Magic and pulling at its frantic thoughts. Given that the rabbit was frozen in fear, and had been for quite some time, it was strange to realise that its mind was going a mile a minute, even as its body did nothing but quiver. A part of me felt just a little bad for the critter but at the end of the day, its fate had been sealed once we caught it, its destiny had been to either end up as our dinner or as part of this experiment. And maybe becoming dinner afterwards.


    Still, even with its panic, or maybe especially because of its panic, I could easily guide its mind towards the Astral River. I only had to project the impression of an escape and it eagerly took that path, delving into the river without hesitation, though also without any understanding.


    Following after, I was immediately met with a complex of primal instincts, where I¡¯d normally meet the mind of the one I pulled under. There was little organisation within the instinct-driven mind of the rabbit, what thoughts there were completely dominated by the need to flee from the predators that had cornered it. This pure, panic-driven need made things a little harder though it could be much worse. At least the rabbit was stuck in flight-mode, if it was another animal, or one that was more inclined to fight, I might have to defend myself, not something I had experience with, at least not within the Astral River.


    But in this case, I could use the need to flee and infuse the concept of running and escaping into Wind Astral Power before funnelling it towards the rabbit, feeling the power infuse the rabbit¡¯s body and mind.


    As it did, I let myself drift out of the Astral River, using my Soul Sight to observe the rabbit for a moment before infusing its Soul with the same Wind Magic, working slowly and gently, keeping the intensity consciously low. I didn¡¯t want the rabbit to be overwhelmed by the power I was adding to its being, it would only backfire. But a gentle stream of Wind to infuse its weary soul was quite useful and seemed to work out quite well.


    Nearby, Luna was watching, looking elated as she made sure the rabbit wasn¡¯t torn apart by the power we infused into it. Nodding to myself, I moved back into the Astral River, noticing that the rabbit was now drawing power by itself, so it was hopefully stabilising. With a gentle tug, I pulled the rabbit¡¯s simple mind back out of the Astral River, so it could focus back on the world around us. For a moment, the rabbit did just that but as I was studying how the magic we had infused into its body and soul was moving through it, I got a surprise. Suddenly, the rabbit managed to leap through the bars of the cage we used in a swirl of Wind Magic, before dashing off into the undergrowth with speed that none of us would be able to match.


    ¡°I guess that worked a little too well,¡± I muttered, glancing over to Luna who grinned happy about our success. A look into my notifications told me that I had gained a point in Wind Magic, alongside two points in Mind Magic and a point in Enchanting, bringing them to thirty-five, sixty-two and twenty-four respectively.


    Lastly, there was a notification I was incredibly pleased with. I had gained a single level in a new skill, namely Soul Magic.


    One more step towards my goal was completed.

 Chapter 981

    Soul Magic was¡­ something. Even with the skill, it was as confusing and illogical as ever. Before, I had thought that I was unable to notice the Soul in some plants or even some smaller animals because I was inexperienced with the skill and would need some time to get used to it, just as I had needed time to learn the skill in the first place but now, with the ability to, at least in theory, manipulate souls using the newly acquired Soul Magic skill I started to wonder. So far, I had only been able to manipulate souls I had previously observed with my Soul Sight, otherwise, nothing seemed to happen, at least I was unable to perceive anything. That made me wonder, was I unable to perceive souls in these things because they didn¡¯t have one and I was failing to manipulate them because there simply wasn¡¯t anything there or was the problem that I could only manipulate what I could perceive?


    The question started me down on a path of reflection, trying to ascertain more about my unusual senses and their utility especially those that tied into my magical abilities and affinities. For example, I was slowly developing an Earth Sense, an ability that was obviously part of Earth Magic and I had learned to perceive Shadows and what was hidden within using my Darkness Magic. That brought up the question, did I rely on general knowledge that the ground was made up of earth and rocks when I used my magic to manipulate it or did I subconsciously sense what I was manipulating before doing so? If so, just how far could I stretch those senses if I focused on them and how easy would it be to push the information I gathered into my conscious mind?


    I didn¡¯t need to focus on my ears or eyes to hear and see but I needed to immerse myself in my mind to feel what my magic was telling me, something that might be useful to change. If I could sense the air around me, using my Wind Magic, or detect the slightest tremors in the ground with my Earth Magic, it would be night impossible to sneak up on me. Similarly, while I doubted I¡¯d ever be able to sense the light all around me and use the countless reflections and refractions to sense things that were hidden from me, I might be able to use the Darkness, especially if I learned to sense the darkness that was hidden within all matter. Sadly, the biggest problem would likely be information overload because my mind just wasn¡¯t built to filter that sort of information, meaning I would lack any supportive instinct but maybe I would be able to learn regardless. But it would take a lot of experimentation and time, luckily something I had in abundance.


    Earth Magic was, unsurprisingly, the easiest to begin working on, simply because there was always ground nearby, unless I was using my cloak to fly, and the earth was quite patient, allowing me to spread my senses and contemplate what they were telling me. Sadly, just because I could spread my senses didn¡¯t mean I could immediately figure out what they were telling me. Learning to differentiate between the density in materials I was feeling below was slow-going, meaning I could barely tell the difference between soggy, swampy ground and the rocks embedded within but it was a start.


    Luckily, telling if something wasn¡¯t something that I could manipulate with my Earth Magic was a lot easier, allowing me to sense things like roots but also air, if there was a small animal tunnel in the ground below.


    Similarly, my reach was incredibly limited, just a few metres if I focused on the sensation but at least I didn¡¯t have to let myself drift into a full meditative trance to sense anything at all. So, I was taking it as a form of success and slowly working my way upwards to more difficult and bigger things as we continued to travel.


    But I wasn¡¯t just focusing on sensing with my Earth Magic, I was also working to sense the air around me using Wind Magic and to be conscious of the Shadows in my vicinity with my Darkness Magic.


    Sensing the Shadows was quite simple, something I realised I had been doing without even noticing, at least to a point. While I couldn¡¯t instantly tell what was hidden in the darkness, I could easily find my way even without relying on my sight, simply because I could feel the cast shadows and, from that, sense the objects themself. It was quite interesting and allowed me to perceive a fair area but if I tried to push myself too hard, it only took a few seconds to develop a severe headache. Sure, in those seconds I was aware of everything within a radius of almost thirty metres but that didn¡¯t help me much if the headache debilitated me the moment I was aware of things.


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    Getting a feel for the air around me was the most interesting in its own way. At first, I tried to sense the air around me as I stood on the ground but given that we were still in the forest, there was just too much going on. There was turbulence everywhere, making it nigh impossible to tell what was going on in a specific spot and no matter what I tried, I only succeeded in getting a severe headache, often with a nosebleed added in for good measure.


    So, my next step was to climb as high into a tree as I could, setting myself up on a fairly isolated branch in an attempt to get as close to the sky as possible and eliminate the clutter I was suffering from closer to the ground. It helped but only a little and my precarious position meant I had to tie myself down or would fall to the ground.


    After almost dropping off the branch for the second time, I decided to try something entirely different and likely incredibly risky. Instead of sitting on a branch or the ground, I let myself rise into the sky using my cloak, letting the winds carry me. If I managed to overdo it, I might just fall out of the sky but the big advantage was that I had my own wind that I could focus on. Instead of trying to generally sense the air and let myself get inundated with the wind, I could solely focus on the wind I controlled and how it interacted with the empty air around me. That way, there were no objects cluttering the airstream, only the wind I was creating and the air that was flowing around me, nothing else, at least in my vicinity.


    The difference between the ground, the branch and the open sky was remarkable. The wind allowed me to feel a lot further, at least when directing my senses in the direction the wind was blowing from, to the point that I could briefly sense the turbulence a far-distant mountain range was causing, one that I could barely make out on the horizon. Sure, the sensation was incredibly faint and I couldn¡¯t make out any details or if anything was influencing the wind between the mountains and myself but I could get that brief glimpse. It was remarkable and incredibly fascinating, though I quickly realised that the general sense I was developing wasn¡¯t too useful as it primarily worked with the wind that had passed something and was now moving around me. If I wanted to get an understanding of the area around me, I¡¯d have to work out something else, this was more akin to smelling what the wind had touched than it was to sensing the world. But, as with Darkness and the Earth, it was an excellent first step, one that I wanted to expand upon as we travelled.


    Equally fascinating as the experiments with my magically enhanced senses were the experiments Luna and I conducted with my Soul Magic. Since gaining the skill, things had started to get a little easier, though we still needed to be excessively careful and had to rely on trial and error a lot. Luckily, the trial and error meant I was getting a few skill points in Soul Magic and had managed to level the skill to three.


    After the initial success we had with what I had dubbed a Wind Rabbit, we tried a few different critters and soon realised that there had to be some sort of association or connection between the element we wanted to infuse and the creature. Just like with people, the creature needed the right affinity and trying to infuse the wrong element was a recipe for failure. Sadly, finding out what the right affinity was turned out to be quite difficult, at least with critters. I was considering whether we should try to infuse an element into volunteers drawn from the next group of survivors but I was a little leery of that idea. Turning some poor schmuck into a smear on the wall would be traumatising for Luna, it was bad enough when some poor critter was torn apart, and I had no doubt that the people of that hypothetical community would be quite put-out.


    So, we continued to experiment on critters, trying to find a way to tell their affinity in advance while creating a few new and interesting species of magical critters by releasing the survivors of our little experiments into the wild.

 Interlude: Survivors 603

    If there was one positive thing to be said about the life she had lived, it was that contact with children, especially teenagers, had been fairly limited. Sure, there had been some who joined the gym she had run with her husband, but her husband had dealt with them and even if she had been forced to step up, there¡¯d been interesting options for punishment if they were being stupid. Or, in other words, if they were being teenagers, she considered the two concepts synonymous. Sadly, she couldn¡¯t send Kevin to perform callisthenics for a few hours, hoping that the sweat he¡¯d shed would wash off the stupid, it sadly never worked like that. But back when they¡¯d been running the gym, she at least had been able to try.


    Looking at Kevin, she could only shake her head in disbelief, still trying to wrap her head around the foolishness the silly child had concocted now and failing, it was simply too stupid. Who¡¯d think that exploring the lake inhabited by some strange, tentacle-vine monstrosity was a good idea? Especially without backup and with some magical ability he barely understood? Just thinking about his actions, she felt a headache set in and that his stupidity had cost them their easy source of fresh water made matters so much worse. She could guide people across almost any terrain and was able to facilitate survival in almost any situation but losing access to effectively unlimited drinkable water was a harsh blow, greatly limiting their options.


    Granted, by the looks of it, Kevin himself knew that he had done something stupid, the fact that he had strange plant-like growth sprouting amongst his hair was not something anyone could easily dismiss. Teenagers were always so anxious about their hair, even dear Samantha had been like that, so proud of her long hair and almost excessively careful in regards to everything to do with it. Sure, it had looked quite good but that didn¡¯t change the sheer impracticality of hair hanging down to a person¡¯s hips.


    ¡°Do you have an idea what has changed with you beyond the obvious?¡± Oliver asked, having tried his best to figure out the changes to their Water Mage earlier, only to come up fairly short. Granted, that might be because his original medical training had been in the military, with a focus on the obvious injuries that came with combat and not whatever this was, but he had been trying to get a grip on the strange new world they were now living in. While it was fascinating to realise how the old herbal remedies and homemade cures had changed into something as effective or, in many cases, far more effective than anything he had worked with before, that didn¡¯t help when it came to figuring out this.


    As far as he could perceive, Kevin had changed in a way he couldn¡¯t even begin to describe. To his senses, the boy had more in common with the grass he was lying on and the plants nearby than he had with Wu Chenhua and himself. The changes went far beyond the obvious surface alterations, the slightly changed skin tone and texture, some decreased muscle mass, increased height and the weird growths in his hair but those deeper changes weren¡¯t anything he could make heads or tails of. Hell, the boy might even grow an actual tail and Oliver had no idea what to do about it, or with it. Hopefully, the boy had a better understanding of his altered body or they would have to trundle onwards and hope nothing too problematic came with the changes.


    ¡°Well, I got a notification that my race changed and I¡¯m now an Aquandros, a creature of water and nature, whatever that means. The notification had a small blurb, telling me that their nature was generally benevolent but they were protectors of lakes and waterways, so make of that what you will,¡± Kevin shrugged, obviously trying to put on a brave face despite feeling anything but.


    All four of his companions exchanged some knowing glances, they had all seen enough of the world to catch the fib but at the same time, they were all aware that bringing attention to it wouldn¡¯t help while they were in the group. At the same time, it was also obvious that chiding the boy for his foolishness in approaching the lake and getting dragged into this strange situation wouldn¡¯t help, either. It might make them feel better but it could easily destroy the last vestiges of confidence the boy had left and leave him a quivering mess. Still, they needed information, so the boy would have to talk.


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    ¡°Can you tell us what exactly happened? We only know that you went to the lake and something strange happened to you before we found you on the shore, later. Beyond that, we have no real idea,¡± Mrs Wu prodded, her voice gentle but laced with enough steel to make answering mandatory.


    ¡°I¡¯ve been trying to immerse myself in Nature, in the Astral River. It¡¯s so fascinating, I can feel the world move around me, even if everything is still, I can sense things but I don¡¯t yet understand what and in this case, I could feel something strangely similar to myself, inviting me and calling out to me. So, I let myself drift through the Astral and even when I returned to my body, the call remained. And then I followed that call, without even thinking about it,¡± Kevin flushed, looking quite embarrassed at the way he had been caught.


    ¡°It was almost as if I was in a trance, and even now, if I try to remember, my head feels fuzzy, as if it¡¯s filled with wool and cotton,¡± he shook his head, apparently trying to get rid of whatever was in there, ¡°It''s blurry but I remember reaching the lake and putting a hand into the water, I remember something touching my hand and looking back, I realise how creepy the sensation should have been but even now, thinking about the vines that wrapped around my hand, I feel no more repulsed than I¡¯d feel if somebody shook my hand,¡± as Kevin admitted that, he started to shiver, his body rocking forward and backwards as his breathing sped up and panic started to set in.


    Without further conversation between the adults of the group, they dispersed. Oliver remained with Kevin, trying to keep him from spiralling into a complete panic attack, using exercises taught to him to work with soldiers after combat to keep the teenager grounded. Realising that, Oliver felt himself soften up just a little, realising that Kevin was just a teenager at the end of the day and he, himself, had done some dumb shit at that age, only that Kevin didn¡¯t have the luxury he had back then. Sadly, the realisation didn¡¯t make things better, as Oliver didn¡¯t have the ability to give Kevin a safe environment to do the rest of his maturing, he could only do his best to help the kid mature before he got himself killed.


    Though, even with all the maturity in the world, he wasn¡¯t sure what that strange call Kevin had described might have been. The Astral River, as the Pale Lady had described it, seemed to be incredibly weird in the first place, so who knew what had happened to the boy? Thinking back, there were countless folk tales of spirits luring people into the river to drown, maybe there was more to those tales than one would expect. Or maybe as one would hope, as expecting the unexpected had become the norm since the world stopped making sense.


    ¡°I wanna try and see if my skills still work,¡± Kevin declared once the panic faded. Oliver was torn for a moment, realising that the idea could very well stem from a desire to prove that he remained useful, despite the change he had undergone. Maybe to prove it to Oliver and the group, maybe to prove it to himself, Oliver couldn¡¯t be certain. But he could be certain that it could backfire horribly, especially if that proof didn¡¯t manifest, it might push the boy to do something ill-advised.


    ¡°Take it easy, you¡¯ve undergone some tremendous trauma. One step at a time, or you might stumble,¡± Oliver gently warned him, trying to soften the possible impact of failure but, sadly, there was no real way to stop Kevin from acting as he deemed necessary.


    Watching, as the boy placed one hand on the ground, Oliver wondered what would happen next, only for a spout of water to erupt from the ground, just a few metres in front of Kevin. The volume of water wasn¡¯t too amazing, nothing that Kevin hadn¡¯t been able to conjure before he had changed, but there was quite a bit of force behind it, the water shooting high into the sky.


    ¡°It still works,¡± Kevin whispered, his voice barely carrying over to Oliver who let out a soft, inaudible, sigh of relief. Hopefully, the teenager would overcome this strange change, maybe even thrive with it.

 Chapter 982

    ¡°That¡¯s not one of ours, is it?¡± I had to ask Luna, looking at the small, furry critter in the clearing ahead. Normally, the question wouldn¡¯t have been necessary but given that said critter looked like a rabbit but where a rabbit should have fur, this one had an arguably better camouflage, being covered in a dense-looking shell of brown rocks. Given that our experiments had involved more than a few rabbits, the silly things were fairly easy to catch and had managed to spread at an incredible speed in the months since the change, I couldn¡¯t discard the possibility that we had successfully inundated one of these experimental subjects with Earth Magic. If so, we might get something looking like the rabbit in the clearing ahead, though I was almost certain that the Earth Rabbits hadn¡¯t looked like that.


    ¡°I don¡¯t think so, it looks a little weird. And too powerful for something we made in these last two weeks,¡± Luna admitted, her eyes flickering with the silvery light of the moon for a moment as she studied the creature.


    ¡°Want to find out if we can make it better?¡± I asked, curious what might happen if we magically infused an already elementally biased creature with more of that element. Or maybe a different element, would we get a Magma Rabbit if we infused it with Fire, or maybe a Crystal Rabbit or something like that? Or maybe we could use Water and get a Mud Rabbit, the visually closest thing to a chocolate bunny we could find during the apocalypse. The boring thing to try would be to use extra Earth, though it might be a good, first test, just to see what would happen. Would the flesh of the rabbit turn into earth, or would its claws become stone? There were quite a few possibilities and I was quite curious which was true, even while knowing that it was likely the rabbit would simply perish.


    ¡°Maybe we should find out where it comes from first, there might be more of them,¡± Luna argued, making me realise that she was right, where there was one rabbit, there likely were many more. The silly things bred like, well, rabbits. A moment later, another realisation struck me, making me frown for a moment. As her Mother, I was supposed to teach Luna how to be a productive and responsible adult, a task that was made even more important by the rate at which she matured in body and mind. In a way, I had succeeded in teaching her to indulge her natural curiosity and constantly further her knowledge but I had a feeling that some people would consider the means she employed to be morally reprehensible. Did that make me a good mother, or an atrocious one?


    It took me but a moment to shake off the question, it was ultimately unimportant. There was no society these days unless I counted the group we were travelling in. Given that moral standards were formed by the perception of the society forming them, it meant that without society, there couldn¡¯t really be morality. So, given that Lia and Alex were performing similar experiments, just that they were working with various alchemical materials and creating strange substances, I doubted that they¡¯d see our research as wrong. That left Silva as the only one who might have a moral objection to our actions but given that she was happily sniffing out additional test subjects for us, she didn¡¯t seem to mind.


    As if reading my mind, Silva let out an incredibly soft huff, as if insulted by Luna¡¯s insinuation that she wouldn¡¯t be able to track down the rabbit¡¯s burrow and origin if we decided to take it down here and now, bringing a grin to my face. With our trusty hound on the trace, we would be able to have our experimental subject and find more like it, giving us the best of both worlds.


    Focusing on the stupid critter that hadn¡¯t noticed us yet, I connected myself to the shadows of the forest, sneaking a tendril of darkness from my own shadow to one that was right next to the rabbit, allowing me to strike it with Mind Magic from point-blank range.


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    The moment I struck, it looked almost as if the rabbit¡¯s head was surrounded by a cloud of inky blackness, the combination of Darkness Magic and Mind Magic a fairly powerful sleeping spell, allowing us to capture our subjects without any hassle. Sadly, this wasn¡¯t the case with this subject, as the earthen coat of the rabbit suddenly developed cracks, as if struck by tremendous force, before crumbling away, leaving the rabbit completely unharmed and already running for its life.


    Somewhat surprised at my failure, I quickly sent another blast of Mind Magic at it, this one a lot less focused but as I didn¡¯t have the shadowy connection to the fleeing critter, brute force had to suffice. Only, it didn¡¯t, maybe it was due to the distance, maybe it was due to the rabbit¡¯s highly agitated state, or maybe it was because the rabbit was simply hardier than expected, whatever the case, the fleeing rabbit managed to shrug off my magical blast with merely a stumble, bolting into the undergrowth before anyone of us managed to do more than glare at it. The thing was incredibly fast for a creature of Earth, almost as swift as the Wind Rabbit we had created before.


    ¡°Impressive,¡± I muttered as we walked the rest of the distance to the clearing, curious if the crumbled shell the rabbit had left behind was something interesting or not. Either way, investigating and following its tracks started where it had just sat.


    Looking at the broken shell with my magical sight, I was fairly impressed. I had used Ice Magic to cover myself in a solid layer of Astral Power before, and it had been the primary fighting style of a previous student but seeing that a rabbit had managed to create a shell that wasn¡¯t just a layer of physical armour but also worked to block hostile, non-physical magic was a sight to behold. There were some traces of my own Mind Magic interlaced with the Earth Astral Power the shell was composed of, making me wonder how exactly this sort of protection worked and making a mental note to find out if I could create something similar. Protecting myself from hostile magic that didn¡¯t need a physical component to affect its target sounded like an excellent idea and if I could make the protection passive, or even incorporate it into a secondary effect, I would be incredibly pleased.


    Maybe I could rework the magical cloak of shadows I had used before making the physical variant into something like a thin layer of magical Ice, keeping me nicely cool, maybe block some physical damage and block magical attacks, like the earthen coat of the rabbit. Thickness might be a problem but given that I was looking at almost half a centimetre of earthen shell, there had to be a way around it, the rabbit certainly had found one. Something to try figuring out later, for now, I had to study the fragments as much as possible, given that they were already fading back into the Astral River.


    Finishing my investigation with a shrug, I expectantly looked over to Silva, nodding for her to proceed. She happily started towards the shrub the rabbit had disappeared under, her nose on the ground, making me quite happy at her canine abilities. My high Intuition and correspondingly high sensory abilities might have allowed me to follow the scent but I was far less adept at keeping my nose on the ground. And less experienced when it came to non-magical scents, I had no idea what to really look for. Another thing I should put on my list of things to figure out, train myself to take in all the information my nose and ears were giving me. I should be more perceptive than Silva, even with the boosts she received for being a canine but when it came to sound we were roughly even but she had a better perception of mundane scents.


    In this case, we were following the rabbit¡¯s trace across stick and stone, past various trees and shrubs, always trying to make sure it was the actual trace we were following and not some sort of distraction. The rabbit was apparently quite adept at those, as we noticed when we reached a second large and thorny shrub the trail led under, only for two different trails to lead back out. Whether the rabbit had run out from beneath the shrub and doubled back, creating a stronger trail to follow or if there was some magic involved, we didn¡¯t know but we had to pick one of them and it turned out to be the wrong one, ending just a couple dozen metres further, next to yet another shrub we had to investigate, before we moved back to the first one and followed after the other track, looking for the crafty rabbit.

 Chapter 983

    It turned out, if there was one thing rabbits were really good at, it was escaping. Maybe it should have been obvious from the start but considering that we hadn¡¯t been close enough to the stupid bunny to Observe it and learn its level, maybe it couldn¡¯t have been. Or maybe we simply assumed that our levels would be sufficient to overcome any natural advantage the rabbit had thanks to having its fight-or-flight instincts firmly rooted on the flight side of things but now, after following its tracks and multiple false trails it had somehow created for almost twenty minutes, that assumption turned out to be erroneous.


    Alas, no matter how impressive the rabbit¡¯s abilities were, with enough stubborn determination and enough power to barrel through the bit of dangerous flora the false trails had led us into, we managed to get to the rabbit¡¯s burrow. The stupid thing itself had long since vanished underground but given that I had been training my Earth Magic for quite some time, the ground wasn¡¯t really the shelter it should be, even if the rabbit had Earth Magic itself. There was no reasonably realistic way for a stupid rabbit to have higher Earth Magic abilities than I had.


    Upon realising that that thought was quite similar to the one that I had when we started the chase, I quickly banished it, just to make sure I hadn¡¯t invited Fate to have a laugh at my expense and started to feel out the burrow underneath. I wanted to know what we were dealing with before I started to dig if only to make sure that it wasn¡¯t another distraction and the rabbit had long since evacuated the place through the backdoor or something like that. Given that it had somehow managed to lay multiple false trails in ways that¡¯d be impossible without some sort of special ability, I wasn¡¯t taking any chances.


    The more my senses told me about the burrow, the more my eyes widened. I had expected a burrow a few metres in length and maybe going a metre deep, something reasonable for a critter the size of a rabbit but what I got was more. After spreading my senses outwards as far as I could, I still hadn¡¯t found its maximum extent with my Earth Magic, meaning that it was spread further than ten metres in the horizontal plane which made it a lot larger than expected but when I realised that there were tunnels extending out of my range downwards, I could only gawp in disbelief. These silly rabbits had dug deep enough to get a contract for subway tunnels.


    ¡°This is insane,¡± I muttered, before glancing over to the others and telling them what I had found. ¡°You know what this means, right?¡± I asked, a grin starting to replace the expression of disbelief I had worn before.


    ¡°We¡¯ll find out how they managed to do this. I mean, that sounds like some fairly major shenanigans, though not quite on the level of the Charlands,¡± Luna suggested, getting a nod from both Lia and myself. We all wanted to figure out how this worked and the only way to really do so was to go digging up some rabbits.


    For a moment, I considered sending Alex in first, their small size would easily fit into the tunnel but given the dimensions of the warren we were facing, that was just not feasible. Sure, they could move through the tunnels but finding out which tunnel was the correct one would be nigh impossible. Everything down there would smell of rabbit, making their nose nearly useless, and even if they did manage to chase one or two of these rabbits down, I wasn¡¯t completely convinced that Alex could subdue them on their own. These beasts were a lot more resourceful and crafty than I had expected, not to mention more powerful.


    No, if we wanted to catch them, we¡¯d have to dig them up and knock them out, not necessarily in that order.


    With a wide grin on my face, I reached out with my Earth Magic, feeling a momentary resistance from the ground as I asserted my will. The resistance likely came from a different magical effect worked into the tunnel but at the end of the day, I wasn¡¯t really bothered by it, it didn¡¯t have the power to do more than briefly inconvenience me.


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    Moved by the power of my will and magic, the ground moved to the sides, compacting into something strong enough to support the structure I was creating on the fly, Crystal Magic helping to form the lattices that carried the weight so much better than the haphazard nature of compacted dirt. As we moved, I briefly used my Darkness Magic to feel out the shadows all around us, managing to spot the fleeing rabbits so I knew which tunnel to follow. Otherwise, I might as well have started to excavate the entire area, as there were dozens of tunnels, all of which could hold our running rabbit alongside its family.


    Progress was both incredibly fast and terribly slow, depending on the comparison used. Compared to any other way of digging a tunnel through the ground, the speed at which I was moving the earth to the side and creating my tunnel was blazing fast, as I was moving around a metre every minute. But when compared to a drove of rabbits that was fleeing through familiar tunnels, it was glacially slow. Sure, we¡¯d eventually catch up to them, especially as the tunnel they were in wasn¡¯t showing any signs of leading back to the surface, but it would take some time. Luckily, we had that time, especially as the tunnel I was digging could easily double as shelter from the Sun for a day or two.


    After digging for quite some time, I felt myself freeze, flabbergasted what my senses were telling me. There was a dark and fairly large space ahead, the ceiling almost twice the height of the tunnel I was digging. The tunnel we were following terminated in that space, making me wonder just what we were heading into but at the same time, I wanted to learn more. This might be the rabbit¡¯s secret, the space that gave them their abilities, and I was determined to find out.


    With renewed vigour, I continued to push the tunnel forward after warning my companions that we were heading into something interesting. Spreading my shadow sense through the tunnel told me that there were things in that tunnel but whether these were somewhat soft rocks, animals, plants or something else entirely, I wasn¡¯t too sure. The Shadow Sense was fairly good at figuring out if the space I was sensing was transparent to light or not but beyond that, I could only gleam limited information at this range.


    It didn¡¯t take long for me to breach the cavern, though the last bit was a lot harder than the rest, the area around the cavern had many more rocks than the soil I had been digging through before and a part of me was wondering how that came to be. If the cave was within the bedrock, I could understand but this was weird. From what I could tell, the surroundings of the cavern were almost completely made up of stone but only the direct surroundings. I wasn¡¯t sure to spread my senses much further, but it felt almost as if the cavern had been deliberately dug into the rock, using something quite similar to my Earth sense to make sure the sturdy shell wasn¡¯t pierced. If that was the case, it was a fairly impressive piece of Earth Magic, though whether it was mostly due to time spent working on it or raw power, I couldn¡¯t tell.


    But even if it had been dug by somebody, that somebody was incredibly strange. Upon breaching the cavern, I had taken a quick look around, combining my normal sight with my magical sight, my soul sense and even my Shadow Sense to get an accurate picture of our surroundings and what I saw was incredibly basic and boring. A simple, roughly round cavern, maybe three metres high at the centre, with rock-lined walls that make me think they were washed smooth by water or maybe sand, with a wide variety of mushrooms growing from small, loamy patches as water was dripping into the space from above. The various fungi had only trace amounts of magic and my soul sense came up completely empty, meaning that the most interesting thing was that the cavern was continuing in either direction.


    ¡°Silva, can you start tracking down the rabbits? I¡¯m no longer able to sense them,¡± I asked my companion, my mind still trying to figure out just what this space was. Or rather, how natural or unnatural it was, there was no indication of magic in the walls, nothing that gave the impression it wasn¡¯t what it appeared to be at first glance. Nothing but the fact that the cavern seemed to fit almost perfectly into the rock it was dug into, while everything else I could sense was simple soil.

 Chapter 984

    Silva started to sniff around the area before starting down one direction of the tunnel, with the rest of us following after her. At the same time, I made sure to taste the air around us, trying to keep us from wandering into any dangerous areas, be they magically created or mundane. Knowing that there were mushrooms around made me a little leary, still remembering the Withering Fungus and its countless servitors. Hopefully, I¡¯d be able to find anything strong enough to influence us before it could do so, either with my Soul Sight, magical detection or using some other way or if I failed, maybe Luna or one of the others could cover my failure.


    I still wasn¡¯t sure what was actually going on in this odd cavern but maybe I would find some indication of it while we were hunting the rabbits. If nothing else, they would probably go to the place they considered safest as they were being chased and that safest place could be what made this place so peculiar. Out of curiosity, and to make sure we didn¡¯t miss anything because we focused on our various night-vision abilities, I raised a hand and conjured a small, crackling fireball above my palm, the flame shedding light on the environment in a way that was somewhat comforting.


    Now, in the light of my fire, I could see the colours in this cave or the lack thereof. The mushrooms were the most colourful and that wasn¡¯t saying much, they were simple, white stalks with caps that ranged in colour from white to reddish-brown. Nothing special, nothing exciting and the walls of the cave were much the same. Fairly smooth, slate-grey rocks with a few discolourations and inclusions, nothing that I could use to tell me what happened here. There was neither the uniformity I would have expected if somebody had conjured this, or used magic to compress dirt into stone nor was there any other indication of magical influence on these walls, though when I touched one of them, I noticed there was something there, almost akin to an echo of magic that had moved through them a while back. A long while, at least that was what my senses were telling me, but given that the Change had only happened a few months back, it couldn¡¯t have been all that long, unless I was faced with some serious weirdness.


    As we moved, the mushrooms became a little bigger while there was more water dripping from above, not enough to be relevant but it was a noticeable increase and yet, the ground seemed to be quite dry. Deciding that I wanted to see if there was anything interesting about the shrooms, I conjured a shell of Ice around one of the bigger ones before forming blades inside to cut the stalk after we all got some distance. That way, if the defensive mechanism of the mushrooms was to release toxic spores of some kind, the spores would be trapped in the conjured shell, giving us ample time to escape. The only danger was that the shrooms were somehow linked and would all release spores if one was damaged but that was why we had moved away, just in case. If all the mushrooms released spores, regardless of distance, I would have to use Wind Magic to keep us safe as we fled the cave.


    When the Ice cut off the stalk and sealed the sell around it, the mushroom simply fell over, the movement causing some spores to be released but it didn¡¯t feel like they were part of the defensive mechanism, only part of the mushroom that had been jostled loose. Hopefully, not dangerous, I certainly couldn¡¯t feel anything special about them, and neither could Luna or Lia.


    Once the mushroom was secured, I conjured Ice inside the shell and rapidly dissected it, while Lia and Alex were watching carefully and, in Alex¡¯s case, with a strange monocle. It was one of their numerous creations and by now, I had learned not to ask. They were happy to explain what they were doing but their explanations weren¡¯t something I could understand without a lot of background research, as they had either learned or created their own alchemical jargon that I wasn¡¯t familiar with, a jargon needed to understand their designs. Alchemy was weird, in a way that pure magic just wasn¡¯t, where they used the strangest ingredients and somehow managed to draw supernatural effects from those combinations and actions, without any involvement of what I¡¯d consider magic. Case in point, the monocle that allowed Alex to perceive something in regards to materials on a deeper level, somewhat similar to my magical sight, only for the strange, alchemical properties. I had looked through it once, only to lose my breakfast from the riot of colours that intruded on my senses, bringing with it a headache that lasted for days afterwards.


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    To me, the mushroom was nothing special. There were some faint traces of Astral Power that gave me a bit of an idea that it likely wasn¡¯t edible, as the traces were mostly Poison Astral Power, but beyond that, I couldn¡¯t tell it from any other shroom I might come across.


    Alex and Lia, on the other hand, were somewhat excited by the shroom and were planning to collect a load of them on the way out, but before we could pick shrooms, we had some rabbits to catch, so we continued onwards.


    ¡°Stop,¡± a voice cut through the cave¡¯s darkness and it took me a moment to realise it had been my voice, the command issued by reflex when my senses told me that there was something incredibly strange ahead. I could feel the stone continuing onwards, going around a bend, but at the same time, I couldn¡¯t perceive the cave any further, as if something was blocking my Earth Sense. This might be incredibly bad, so I doused the flame on my hand as I told the others what I was sensing. Silva, in turn, let out a soft growl and we all readied ourselves for combat, just in case it was needed.


    Moving through the restored Darkness, we stepped around the bend and stopped once more. The previously incredibly boring mushrooms had been replaced by something a lot more colourful. Mushrooms, lichen and some other plants were covering the walls and part of the ceiling and floor, all of them glowing in a riot of colours, giving off a faint, floral scent and I could feel faint magical emanations, despite being a few metres away. It wasn¡¯t enough power to be dangerous, nor could I feel any active magic, but these were, quite literally, magic mushrooms. I doubted they were on the level of the Withered Fungi but I wasn¡¯t willing to take a risk, even surrounded by a bubble of Wind Magic.


    ¡°It¡¯s a Dungeon,¡± Luna quietly whispered, her eyes glowing with silver light as she stared ahead, causing me to sigh softly. Of course it was, now we only had to risk moving through a forest of magical mushrooms that might turn us into something strange or we would have to turn around and look for another path.


    ¡°Can anyone sense anything dangerous about the mushrooms?¡± I asked my companions, wondering if I should simply sterilise the area with Death Magic. It would likely solve the issue but leave me weakened from the drain channelling the necrotic energy caused, something I wanted to avoid as I had no idea what might wait for us further inside.


    There was a round of negative replies and I decided that continuing on didn¡¯t carry any prohibitive danger, at least if we remained cautious. In this case, that meant I quickly conjured a combination of Wind and Ice and sent a blast of frigid air down the cave, causing the mushrooms to visibly dim and wither. They wouldn¡¯t die, at least not all of them, but the cold forced them to focus their powers internally, hopefully keeping them from becoming a danger to us as we moved past.


    One after the other, we moved forward and now, I could feel the energy of the Dungeon Entrance in the air, just in front of us. It was weird, the energy was clearly there but it wasn¡¯t magical, at least it wasn¡¯t based on Astral Power. Even back on Mundus, when faced with the workings of the Divine, I had been able to tell more about it than I could perceive here, making me wonder what exactly that meant.


    Shaking my head, I pushed away the questions and continued forward, bringing up the rear so Alex and Luna were protected in the middle of the group, while Silva and Lia led the way. Hopefully, the dungeon would be suitable for our level, though it was a faint hope, I doubted there were many dungeons at our level already. Either way, we should get something out of it, with the worst case being a few interesting materials.

 Chapter 985

    My eyes widened just a little when, as we entered the dungeon, an unexpected notification popped up. A part of me had wondered whether I¡¯d get the Dungeon Explorer message for being part of the first group entering this particular dungeon and considered it an interesting test whether the rabbits we had chased into it were counted as intelligent creatures trying to complete it or something else. After all, Silva was considered a challenger, or at least so I had hoped, not some sort of monster, making me wonder where the system drew the lines in that regard. Curiously, the notification I received muddled things up a little more, as it wasn¡¯t the Dungeon Explorer one but one I hadn¡¯t seen before, prompting me to choose whether we were seeking shelter or hunting prey.


    After a moment¡¯s consideration, I selected the hunting option and received yet another notification, this one telling me that we were the first to enter this dungeon, apparently having the fairly simple name the Burrow, and would receive additional EXP thanks to the first explorer buff.


    A noise I hadn¡¯t really heard from Silva caught my attention and wrenched my thoughts away from the curious combination of notifications, a growl that I could only describe as fury mixed with a bit of disdain and disappointment. A quick glance told me that she wasn¡¯t directing those emotions in my direction, something I was fairly grateful for, but that she stared deeper into the dungeon, her nose flaring and her tail sticking out as the fur all along her spine was raised. I didn¡¯t even need to look at Luna, who was somehow better at understanding Silva, maybe thanks to their shared connection to Hecate, to understand that our companion did not like this dungeon. Sadly, I didn¡¯t know the reasons but as I thought about it for a moment, I realised what it might be.


    The dungeon might very well be like the one in the windswept steppes, where the wolves had essentially sacrificed their entire pack to become part of the dungeon in order to survive the centaurs¡¯ incursion. There had been some additional implications, both magical and mental, that I only understood superficially but if something similar had happened here, things could be strange.


    ¡°The rabbits are monsters in this dungeon, aren¡¯t they?¡± I quietly asked Silva, trying to get a better idea of what we would have to expect in this place. If anything, the growl she let out became even more furious and menacing, making me wonder if she knew something we did not. Realising that there was a possibility she was considered a beast for the dungeon¡¯s logic and might be affected by being inside, I glanced over to Alex, trying to see if they were affected, too. But no, Alex looked just like they always did, if a little concerned at Silva¡¯s display of anger, certainly not like the dungeon was trying to control them.


    My next step was to briefly glance at the two with Soul Sight and magical sight and upon observation with Soul Sight, I noticed something odd. The environment was interacting strangely with Silva, and only Silva. It wasn¡¯t as if she was being pushed or controlled but there was an interaction I hadn¡¯t seen before. Sadly, I doubted I¡¯d be able to figure out what was going on, as I heard a strange sound coming towards us from deeper within the Dungeon.


    After warning the others, I readied myself for combat, even conjuring a few barriers of Ice to act as cover if the enemies currently moving towards us had some sort of ranged attacks or were a large swarm. In either case, having barriers that also served as obstacles was a good thing to have and it didn¡¯t take all that much Astral Power either way. Granted, I had spent quite a bit on the way in and while I had recovered most of it, the mental and physical exhaustion would linger and eventually, I¡¯d become unable to continue.


    The appearance of the first wave of enemies came as a fairly unpleasant surprise, despite my earlier warning. I had heard them, sure, but it turned out that the dungeon tunnels didn¡¯t reflect sound quite like they should and, to make matters worse, I couldn¡¯t rely on my magical senses, neither my Shadow Sense nor my Earth Sense worked within the dungeon¡¯s boundaries as they normally would. So, when a swarm of giant rats came out of a well-concealed hole just in front of us, we had been staring down the tunnel, waiting for the enemies to come from there.


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    Luckily, Silva had been in need of a target to release her anger on for the last few minutes and the rats made the perfect target for that. She leapt forward, barely bothering with her usual combat tactics and started to make a mess of the rats, biting them, using her paws to swat them into the wall with bone-crushing force and even jumping on them with her full weight, breaking spines and legs as she did. It was a ferocious display of brutal savagery, far removed from her usually calm and controlled style.


    When I realised that there were even more rats coming out of the hole, to the point that Lia had to help Silva so the two could keep the rats from getting past them, unless they were crippled, I decided to add my own bit to the fight.


    Given that the rats were coming out of a hole the size of a soccer ball, just big enough to fit two of them if they were squeezing, I conjured a few Ice Spikes, intent on setting them into the hole to make things¡­ interesting. Only for the spikes to leave my control, despite multiple traits that should allow me to keep controlling them, or at least retain control over the Astral Power but no, the magic was wrenched from my control the moment they entered the hole. My next step, trying to block the hole outright, failed in a similar fashion, the plug I had conjured was somehow sucked into it and immediately dispelled, making me incredibly annoyed.


    Luckily, between Silva, Lia and a conjured plant from Luna, I wasn¡¯t really needed, though I did send my frozen shuttles into the fray, mostly finishing off crippled rats while I considered my next actions. More information was needed to formulate a good plan.


    A quick Observe on the rats was my first step and also the first step that came back with a weird result. Normally, I¡¯d expect to learn some sort of descriptive name, maybe Giant Rat in this case, and their level. Instead, I got a brief, stinging pain between my brows but nothing else, as if the Observe had been rejected in some way. I knew it was possible, had even done so myself, but I hadn¡¯t experienced it like this and certainly not from the first monsters in a dungeon. This might turn out more interesting than expected. Just figuring out how the walls worked might be worth the annoyance but it might just be part of the package I currently labelled ¡®Dungeon Weirdness¡¯ and couldn¡¯t do anything about.


    There was a small moment of vindication when Alex decided to do more than watch from their perch on Luna¡¯s shoulder and lob one of their alchemical orbs into the hole, only for the small orb to break apart mid-air after it entered the hole, without any of its contents reaching the ground or inconveniencing any of the rats in any way, shape or form. It looked like the dungeon forced us to deal with them outside of their hole, though the choke point made bottling them up fairly easy. Fighting such a swarm without that choke point would be a lot more difficult, though the rats didn¡¯t stand a chance between my three companions.


    Realising that the three of them had things well in hand, I decided that covering their backs was a lot more important than finishing off the few crippled rats I had been killing and fully focused on that, carefully studying the walls to spot any other holes that might suddenly disgorge a tide of rats.


    No other holes were visible, nor did any spontaneously open and just as suddenly as they had originally appeared, the rats stopped coming out of the hole, leaving a strangely small amount of blood, bodies and viscera behind and even that small amount turned into that strange black sludge I had seen on Mundus and seeped into the wall and floor, disappearing from sight.


    The moment it was completely gone, a blue box appeared, telling me that we had overcome the Giant Rat Swarm and killed two-hundred forty-six members in the process getting a chunk of EXP for the achievement. Given that the fight had only taken a few minutes, the number felt utterly ludicrous.


    ¡°So, five minutes to kill as many rats as possible?¡± Lia asked, getting an angry but acknowledging growl from Silva and a nod from Luna while I picked up a few bones and teeth that hadn¡¯t disappeared back into the ground, hoping that they¡¯d be useful in some fashion. If not, we could always discard them but for now, I had to hurry after Silva who seemed to have more anger to take out on the local critters.

 Chapter 986

    The dungeon turned out to be an oddity. The biggest thing was that the enemies we faced always came in these un-Observe-able linked groups, even if a group might only be composed of five monsters, it was just as impossible to Observe as the tide of giant rats we had faced in the first place. Similarly, the walls looked like stone, felt like stone when I touched them, it even smelled like stone and while I didn¡¯t try tasting them, I had no doubt that they would taste like stone, too. But, when I tried to use my Earth Magic to manipulate them, or even to sense them with my Earth Sense, I was getting nothing, less than I¡¯d get when I tried to use Earth Magic on the air.


    Lastly, and in an amusing twist the least odd of the dungeon¡¯s oddities so far, were the floral dangers lining the walls. Sure, the vast majority of the fungi, vines and even flowers lining the wall were perfectly harmless, the few that were not were a bit of a problem. Mostly because they didn¡¯t appear to be magical to my senses, didn¡¯t have an apparent soul nor anything that readily distinguished them from the rest until we were right next to them and they let out a puff of pollen, a cloud of spores or some other unpleasant effect. Most were fairly easy to defend against by controlling the air carrying the crap the plants poofed out away from us, but when one of the flowers suddenly decided to spit a stream of some acidic compound in Silva¡¯s general direction, I realised that things in this place were truly weird.


    Nothing was clearer evidence of that than Silva¡¯s utter brutality and ruthless savagery as we tore through the place. I hadn¡¯t seen her this incensed, ever. She had always been calm and controlled, rarely doing worse than growling at people who annoyed her and in combat, her focus had initially been to keep me safe until her web of protection expanded to cover Lia, Alex and, to a much greater extent, Luna. Always protective, guarding, with a quick snuffle and snuggle if one of us felt down. Never like this, which really made me wonder what brought this on.


    Forming theories, between destroying various critters swarming out of the walls, was easy though I had no real way beyond asking her which of my theories might be the correct one. And asking her, while she was in this mood, didn¡¯t seem to be the right call, instead, we all wandered after her, protecting her back and making sure that none of the dungeon¡¯s monsters got by her.


    On the positive side, I had a feeling that the dungeon wasn¡¯t quite like the others I had encountered thus far. The enemies always came in numbers, either swarming out of some nook or crevice or popping out in some other way, their numbers turning fairly simple and basic foes into challenges. But that wasn¡¯t even the weirdest if it all. No, that particular crown went to the egg that remained behind after the group with the least numbers we had faced thus far, a group of five giant spiders, faded back into the dungeon, just sitting there in its pristine, off-white glory.


    Only to crack when lightly touched, revealing some spider silk, a web-shaped pendant made of some chitinous material and a few spider stingers, complete with attached venom sacks. It was about as close to the old trope of a dungeon¡¯s treasure chest as I had ever seen on the Road to Purgatory, making me wonder just what was going on here. Did the Dungeon somehow scale its difficulty, trying to make things challenging for us by way of numbers and the spiders had been a mini-boss, scaled up to be challenging by multiplying it by five? It sounded fairly ludicrous but I couldn¡¯t really see an alternative unless this was all some sort of spore-induced hallucination.


    To make matters worse, the dungeon was just a single, simple cavern, without any additional features. Thanks to its strange immunity to Earth Magic, I couldn¡¯t even keep track of the path we were taking, or even sense the soil the rock must have been embedded in. To my senses, it was almost as if we were walking through a passage surrounded by nothing, a space that I couldn¡¯t sense in any way, shape or form. Given how much I had recently been working on my magical senses, their absence was disturbing. To make matters worse, the cave was winding in fairly unpredictable ways, ascending and descending randomly, making me feel as if I was utterly lost - despite only walking down what amounted to a single corridor.


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    The only things breaking up the monotony of slate-grey stone were the monsters jumping out of random, often seemingly too small, crevices and the flowers. Oh, the impossible flowers, they started to give me a headache just thinking about them. Why would plants that grew deep underground, without any of the ordinary pollinating insects around or even without any light at all, have large, green leaves and these beautiful and incredibly aromatic blossoms? The few times I had allowed myself to scent the air for magic, their supposedly mundane smell made me just a little light-headed, inviting me to relax and just admire the flowers.


    It had to be a trap but neither Alex nor Luna or I could find anything supernatural about these flowers, they didn¡¯t appear to be magical, Alex couldn¡¯t find anything of alchemical and even Luna could only shrug her shoulders after looking at them with her Eyes of the Lunar Maiden. Supposedly mundane and yet, very clearly not.


    To make matters worse, when Luna tried to use her magic on one of the flowers growing here, she failed. The flower, despite looking like an ordinary thing that wasn¡¯t special at all, didn¡¯t even register to her Life Magic, meaning that the flower wasn¡¯t alive in a magical sense. Instead, Luna told me that the flower felt and reacted to her magic just like the stone beneath us, not giving any feedback at all. By this point, I was starting to consider the entire dungeon as an oddity and only wanted to find out what was waiting for us at the end.


    Even my earlier idea to catch a few of the local monsters and use them for our experiments had died a quiet death, mostly when I managed to get my hands on a giant rat crippled by our furious canine. Whether I was using Blood Magic or Mind Magic, there was little I could do to interact with the creature. On the other hand, when I experimentally tried to rip the blood from its body with my Blood Magic, it worked without issue. Similarly, when I simply struck another one with a blast of Mind Magic, the thing slumped over and stopped moving.


    The biggest oddity, at least to my mind, occurred when I tried using Death Magic on one, once focusing on its body, once using Soul Sight in an attempt to get at the thing¡¯s soul, even if I couldn¡¯t really perceive it. I knew where to channel my magic and by that point, I wanted to get some sort of result, so I didn¡¯t even care that I would feel the backlash from the Death Magic for an hour or two. I just wanted the thing¡¯s soul to fade from this world.


    Alas, Death Magic targetting the body worked reasonably well, the thing died readily enough, though I had a feeling that was primarily because I had put enough power into the attack to harm a creature around level sixty seriously. While I couldn¡¯t be certain about the level of power one of these rats had, I would put them around level thirty, maybe forty, making up for their lacking individual qualities by sheer weight of numbers. Still, the thing had died easily enough.


    However, the one I tried to kill by channelling Death Magic into its Soul was different. It simply took the attack without even a flinch and didn¡¯t react to the two follow-up strikes either, despite there being enough power involved to make me woozy. Either my attacks never got close to the things Soul or it was immune to Death Magic in some strange way. The first felt unlikely, as the Soul should be anchored to its body and I had used enough power to flood the entirety of it, so I should have hit if it was there, the other was just as unlikely, as the Death Magic I had used had been enough to harm its body, I could see the disruptive effects on it, mostly because I was feeling them myself.


    This whole dungeon was strange but at least its strangeness meant that we received a decent chunk of EXP, enough to push me up to level eighty-six. It didn¡¯t make up for its sheer weirdness but it was a nice consolation gift.

 Chapter 987

    If there was one good thing about this dungeon¡¯s weirdness, it was the ideas it gave me. Almost every swarm we faced was composed of a different foe, mostly different critters but if a type repeated itself, the powers they had were different. There were the ordinary giant rats, sure, but there also were smaller rats that were infused with Lightning in a way that made me want to try replicating it, or the spiders using Darkness Magic to hide. Those were exterminated with the greatest of prejudices, that was my trick, but still, ideas were ideas.


    I couldn¡¯t wait to get out of the dungeon, where the beasts weren¡¯t just dungeon-created constructs that I couldn¡¯t really interact with, I wanted to try for myself what the dungeon was creating.


    As I channelled a combination of Air and Fire magic, creating a fairly intense cone of burning air to scorch a swarm of skittering ants made of wood and vines, pl-ants so to speak, I was wondering where the dungeon was getting the blueprints from. Or at least the ideas, I couldn¡¯t believe that an inanimate object could design something like that but that might just be due to my ignorance regarding the actual nature of dungeons. I had no real idea how they functioned, the best information I had in that regard came from the Grandmother who had, somehow, managed to create one for herself. Sadly, she hadn¡¯t explained the process to me, for the obvious reasons that, at the time, I didn¡¯t have the foundations to understand it. Even now, I was only working at understanding those foundations, with a long way to go.


    But while dungeons were far beyond my current understanding, the creatures the dungeon produced didn¡¯t have to be. The pl-ants might be, simply because I had no access to Nature Magic, but the Lightning Rats, the Fire Bugs and even the Water Spiders, those were all things I might be able to replicate with Luna¡¯s help.


    And so, even as we destroyed the various monsters with utmost efficiency, looting a fairly wide variety of weird things that remained behind after the bodies faded back into the dungeon¡¯s walls, I was studying the critters, trying my best to catalogue their features, abilities and ways they might possibly function within my mind. I doubted I¡¯d be able to recreate them all, but I was willing to try. Well, not for the Darkness Spiders, that was my trick and I wasn¡¯t about to let some spidery critter have that trick, I might try making some ravens with the ability, or crows, but spiders? No, I had no desire to make such a thing.


    During the time we were massacring our way through the dungeon, with a few breaks to recuperate our spent stamina and regenerate the wounds we inevitably suffered during the near-constant battles, we even came across the family of earthen rabbits that triggered the whole thing.


    Curiously, it turned out they were some sort of mini-boss, at least that was what I had started to think of the encounters with less than ten enemies, simply due to their rarity and the interesting loot they left behind, though maybe I should have expected that. Any enemy that had the ability to block direct, magical attacks like my Mind Magic should be considered at least somewhat capable and given that the blocking was part of what was likely an even greater defensive ability, it only made sense.


    There were six of these rabbits, all moving with the same, bounding leaps and all encased in the same earthen armour. Their movements, and especially the sound they made upon landing, gave away that they had far more mass than any creature their size should have, making the way they launched themself at us all the more threatening. It was one thing to get tackled by a rabbit the size of a dog, it was an entirely different thing if that rabbit was the size of a dog but had the weight of a small car. What¡¯s more, when I launched an explorative attack, just a simple frozen Javelin to get an idea of what they could do, the spear shattered against their armour, driving home the point that it was quite effective against physical threats.


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    At that point, the battle dissolved into pure chaos, the rabbits were bounding around like balls in a particularly demented bouncy. castle, trying to squash, crush or tackle us in any way possible and the combination of weight and speed meant that we couldn¡¯t even try to block. Sure, Silva might have been able to withstand the impact of one, if she went into her two-legged form and braced herself, but that¡¯d only help against one, while there were six of them. Similarly, I might have been able to stop them if I had access to the Earth around me, or if the fight had happened on a convenient glacier, but limited to the material I could conjure? Dodging was the only viable way to deal with this battle, at least until we could whittle down their number to something manageable.


    When I tried to shatter the earthen armour of a rabbit with a blast of Mind Magic, just as I had earlier, I was severely disappointed. Instead of cracking the shell like an egg, my attack only managed to shatter the outer layer, leaving the bunny still hopping, though with less mass than before. It was a success but not the one I had hoped for, so I had to keep going. Sadly, the success meant that suddenly, I was the priority target for the rabbits and they tried to crush me with abandon, forcing me to focus on dodging, shadow-stepping out of the way and generally simply surviving.


    Their single-minded focus allowed the others a better shot at hurting them and a combination of an alchemical grenade from Alex, followed up with Lia¡¯s trusty meat-hook sent one of them flying, its shell cracked and apparently brittle. As it was in the air, I realised that Lia hadn¡¯t just sent it flying, she had pulled it towards her while launching herself at the rabbit, her cleaver already swinging forward. The result was a stumbling, spinning Lia, who had pushed all her weight and momentum into the strike and a dead rabbit, the shell shattered as blood was pouring from a massive wound.


    With that, only five of them remained and as I had to dodge, I noticed that the one I had initially struck had its shell back to the original size, causing me to frown until I briefly blinked on my magical sight and felt my eyes widen. During the chaotic fight, Luna had somehow managed to get a few of her seeds on the rabbit and now, those seeds were within the armour and germinating, digging into the earthen shell and doing something. Suddenly, without any additional warning, the seeds exploded into plants, before crumbling away just as fast, making me blink in disbelief as the rabbit crumbled, somehow broken within its protective shell. I would have to ask Luna how she managed that, but later. For now, dodging remained the way to go but, thankfully, with only four rabbits remaining, I had a lot more space to move.


    The next rabbit to fall went down to repeated blasts of Mind Magic, interspersed with physical attacks from Silva, the combined force enough to shatter its shell and let Silva sink her teeth into its neck and break it with a brutal shake of her head. At that point, I was fairly bruised from near-misses and tumbles I had to take during the fight but things were starting to look up, especially when Alex managed to get one of their explosives into the mouth of a rabbit. How they had done that, I had no idea but I wasn¡¯t about to look an exploded rabbit in the mouth, the thing was as dead as dead could be and we only had two more to worry about.


    Two of them, against five of us meant that we didn¡¯t have to fight as defensively any longer. Instead, Silva went on her hind-legs, her entire body shifting, and she leapt forward, meeting one of the rabbits mid-air and stopping its momentum. Their entire strength was in the combination of weight and speed, so with it stopped, Silva started to go to town, her claws savaging the shell and repeated blows cracking it, while the rest of us focused on the other rabbit, using a combination of physical strikes and magical attacks to keep it off-balance and unable to help its compatriot.


    As we were about to kill the rabbit, Silva let out a howl of triumph and suddenly, the rabbit we had been attacking shattered its shell, its entire body shivering and shifting in an ominous manner. Uncertain what it might try, I twisted the simple Mind Magic blow into something different, adding a dollop of Death Magic and activating Overflow to make the attack supremely powerful, strong enough to make it a visible beam of ominous, grey energy. The attack struck the rabbit and even as it tried leaping forward, its body crumbled, turning the deadly leap into a graceless tumble and ending the battle.

 Chapter 988

    ¡°There¡¯s something ahead,¡± Luna whispered, while Silva let out an angry, menacing growl, her temper still going strong, despite the many hours of combat and the, quite literally, countless critters we had destroyed during them. By now, I even gained another level, bringing me to eighty-seven, and multiple of my magical skills had levelled. Ice Magic, Blood Magic, Blood Rune Mastery, Water Magic, Wind Magic, Fire Magic and even Lightning Magic, they all had gone up by a point or two, even three in the case of Lightning Magic, as those skills were the ones I used to destroy groups of sudden enemies or heal my allies after the battle was done.


    The battles had all been against swarms of foes and for that kind of enemy, I didn¡¯t even try to work with precision strikes. Instead, clouds of freezing mist, burning winds or water sizzling with electricity were the weapon of choice, destroying the biggest number of foes for the least expenditure of Astral Power. Efficiency, but in a different manner. Sadly, I hadn¡¯t been able to utilise Runes for most of it, partially because I lacked those runes and the enemies appeared with the same, annoying suddenness that had annoyed me since the first encounter. While I was able to form my runes fast, I needed a second or five, depending on the complexity and number of the runes, and that was time I just didn¡¯t have in this sort of fight. So, simple, magical manipulation it was, literally willing the elements to do my bidding, costing me quite a bit of Astral Power in the process. Luckily, it didn¡¯t look like anything would happen to us in the dungeon if we stopped, so we were able to take quite a few breaks for rest and recovery, leaving us in fair overall shape.


    Now, with Luna¡¯s declaration and Silva¡¯s continued fury warning us, we moved around yet another bend in the single, impossibly long, winding cave and for a moment, I was stunned by what I saw. The first thing that inevitably came to my attention was the massive, slightly grotesque form moving in the back of the open area we were looking at. Despite its grotesque nature, I took a moment to look around the area to see if there was anything else nearby but no, only the usual fungi, flowers and other weird plants, in addition to that monstrous creature. And, maybe just as important as the monster, there were no further paths, only the huge, vaguely circular room we were now in, leading me to the conclusion that we were looking at the end boss of the dungeon.


    And what a boss it was, its body a strange mixture between a serpent, maybe a crocodile and possibly a hippopotamus, it was massively long, with fairly stubby legs that shouldn¡¯t be able to support its mass, especially not with the distance between them. To make matters worse, at the front, where a crocodile would have its maw, the thing arched upwards, like some sort of strange centaur, and formed a roughly humanoid body. Only, the body looked like somebody had heard what a human might look like, gone on a massive bender to get utterly drunk, and started painting while still hungover and confused, leading to an appearance that only a mother¡¯s blindness could love. Pale, saggy skin that was partially covered in black fur where the rest of the body was covered in mottled grey scales and arms that hung down so far its elbows were around the place where its hips would be, a wide, almost frog-like mouth and a set of four sizable eyes, two where the eyes would normally be and two set in its cheeks, all four gleaming with palpable malevolence.


    As we entered the room, which was still about a hundred meters away from the monster, the battle began. To our surprise, it wasn''t us who started it, but the monster itself. It gathered energy into its long arms and placed them on its underbelly, behind the front legs. The energy lit up its scales before forming an egg-shaped object, which fell to the ground and shattered. Two snakes emerged from the broken shell and started slithering towards us. As they moved, they grew rapidly and turned into creatures twice as tall as I was. However, they stopped growing halfway across the cave and Lia took care of them while Silva aimed for the monster. We all moved towards the middle of the cave, spreading out to avoid any potential area-of-effect attacks from the monster.


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    Once I was in range to Observe the thing, I did and received yet another fascinating result. While the monster was called Broodmother, it didn¡¯t have a defined level, making me wonder just how that worked. Maybe another scaling mechanism, like I suspected the entire dungeon had been formed around? It was possible but without any additional information, impossible to find out.


    Not that it truly mattered, at the end of the day, its level only changed the rewards at the end or the danger we were in if we had to retreat. Thanks to looking at it with my Magical Sight, I could easily tell that it was magically powerful, its Astral Power reserves were comparable to mine, which was incredible. I had multiple traits that increased my Astral Power, in addition to a massive amount of Intelligence and Insight, and yet, when it came to raw power, the thing could match me. Even its elemental versatility was impressive, I could easily identify the four primary elements, Fire, Water, Earth and Wind in the monster¡¯s elemental composition and the overpowering influence of Life, alongside a few minor elements. Curiously there didn¡¯t seem to be Nature Magic, at least from what I could tell, but that might just be a coincidence.


    Truly a boss, though I could also see why it needed such incredible amounts of power. The snakes it had created were magical constructs, conjured just like I could conjure spikes of Ice or orbs of Fire but where my creations were elementally fairly simple, these were anything but. They appeared to be fully functioning living beings, though I¡¯d have to check if they had a soul. Even on Mundus, with the power of the Nexus, I had only been able to create a semblance of Life, shells for the restless spirits to inhabit or for me to puppet, nothing like this. Granted, back then, I didn¡¯t have the necessary magical elements but even so, it was impressive.


    To further test the situation, I initiated a few probing attacks with Icicles, while Luna assisted Lia in dealing with the snakes. Although my attacks had little effect, Silva managed to approach the beast and distract it so we could attack it. However, the creature was quite agile and used its four legs to spin rapidly, while its tail moved like a whip, forcing Silva back. I attempted to attack it with different elements, but nothing seemed to work effectively.


    Suddenly, the creature emitted another burst of energy and another egg fell and shattered, releasing a few tiny rats. Unfortunately, these rats grew as quickly as the snakes, and Silva could only squash one of them before they ran away. We needed to keep the number of enemies down, but Lia and Luna were preoccupied with the snakes. Therefore, I used my Frozen Shuttles to hunt down and dispatch the rats.


    This set the tone of the battle - the Broodmother''s primary ability was to continually create these creatures, and they became more dangerous as time went on. If we didn''t destroy them quickly, they would gain elemental abilities, which we did not want to deal with. So, while Silva focused on the boss, the rest of us hunted down the creatures as quickly as possible. Sometimes, Alex managed to take out the entire brood with an alchemical grenade, while I could dispatch them before they grew to size.


    Overall, the battle was a long and arduous slog, much like the entire dungeon. Luckily, there also wasn¡¯t anything overly special going on, just a lot of death and destruction, until Silva managed to carve her way through the monster¡¯s regenerating hide and into its soft organs. Once that was done, the battle didn¡¯t last very long, while the thing had monstrous endurance and vitality, the moment Silva demonstrated that the fastest way to the heart was to go through the stomach, the battle was over, leaving all of us sweaty, tired and covered in blood. Luckily, most of that blood didn¡¯t come from us, but from the various monsters but still, it wasn¡¯t pleasant.


    But at least the rewards were nice. I gained enough EXP to push me up yet another level and there were a few interesting items on the ground after the Broodmother turned into black sludge and was absorbed by the dungeon, amongst them a short sword and a bracelet that we¡¯d have to take a closer look at, later.


    Now, we only had to walk the entire way back out¡­

 Chapter 989

    After resting up just a little, we started walking out of the boss¡¯ room. During our rest, I had taken a closer look at the items we had found while in the dungeon and came across a few actually interesting items. Not so much for their practical use, though a bracelet that increased Dexterity, a diadem that increased Intuition and a necklace that increased Courage were useful items, their real use was in allowing me to figure out the enchantments that made them into what they were. If I managed that, we wouldn¡¯t have just one of these but I might be able to create similar items for all of us, or maybe improvise enchantments that increased those attributes on other items, for example, a bracelet increasing Intuition, Rings that increased Dexterity, that sort of thing. It wouldn¡¯t be easy but with enough time? I should be able to manage.


    The item I considered seriously interesting was the blade Lia had picked up. It was a fairly primitive design, looking almost like some sort of claw or mandible fashioned with a handle and turned into a weapon but while it looked crude, the quality was amusingly high. The weapon was incredibly sharp, excellent for slashing and stabbing, but sadly it looked a little brittle. However, the biggest, and most interesting, quality of the blade was that it was labelled a living weapon, able to devour Blood to repair itself. It would be interesting to see how that looked and worked, to the point that I was looking forward to studying this particular enchantment. Hopefully, it would give me an idea on something that could help Lia with her feeding, so she wasn¡¯t primarily relying on me or on actually biting into our enemies. If she had a weapon enchanted to drain the blood she shed with it and feed her with that blood, she would be an unstoppable force, especially if she managed to figure out how to heal her wounds and restore her stamina with her Blood Magic.


    Many things to work on in the coming days but for now, we had to walk all the way back through the tunnel. Or so we thought¡­


    When we walked out of the room we had fought the boss in, I paused, looking around the cave in confusion. There were fungi, ferns and flowers growing all around us, but in an arrangement that hadn¡¯t been here when we entered the room. While it was possible that these flowers had spontaneously grown here, just to congratulate us on our victory, I doubted that this was the case. No, the plants looked just like those we had encountered right before we entered the dungeon but that had been a long way from where we should be, unless the dungeon was even stranger than I had originally thought.


    ¡°These look familiar, don¡¯t they?¡± I asked, glancing at the unexpectedly calm Silva. She had been going around in a state of agitation since we entered the dungeon but now? Now, she looked completely calm and normal, without a single raised hair in evidence.


    ¡°Looks like the dungeon¡¯s entrance,¡± LIa commented, picking up the same thing I had seen. In turn, Luna¡¯s eyes started to glow with silvery light and she looked around, especially focusing on the area behind us.


    ¡°But the dungeon¡¯s gone,¡± she commented, making me turn around, too, and stare in the area behind us, focusing on my magical senses as I did. She was right, the dungeon and the weird behaviour of the stones within was gone and I could sense the area around us once more. Shaking my head, I walked back a few metres, so I could look around the corner that should have contained the boss¡¯ room we had just fought in but instead of the massive room, I was looking at a small, rocky cave, barely a few metres across and without any strange plants in sight. Certainly no dungeon or anything like that.


    ¡°Okay, any idea what happened here?¡± I asked, trying to make sense of things. To make matters even more confusing, I was fairly certain that the area we were now in wasn¡¯t the same we had entered the dungeon from. It looked somewhat similar, and with the identical plants it wasn¡¯t immediately obvious, but the rock formation wasn¡¯t the same. There was far less earth around and I could faintly feel the transition from Earth into something I couldn¡¯t sense at this distance, either water or air. If I had to guess, from the feeling I was getting and the rugged surface I could sense, I would bet it was air as water would lead to a smoother surface. So, we were beneath a hill or mountain, almost at the surface instead of a few dozen metres beneath the surface in a fairly flat, forested area.


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    ¡°We¡¯re not where we entered the dungeon, so we need to be cautious. No idea what might wait for us out there,¡± I warned the others when I realised that I might be able to get a better idea of our location by using the sensation I had used to guide us this whole time, trying to sense the forming Nexus and compare the sensation to the one I had previously.


    ¡°Give me a moment, I have an idea,¡± I added, closing my eyes to focus inwards. For a few minutes, I simply attuned myself to the Astral River around us, getting a sense of the area and letting the soothing flow of Power all around me wash away the lingering exhaustion from the previous days. No matter where we ended up, we could continue our path. At worst, it might be a bit of a detour but other than changing how far we had to go, it changed nothing.


    Knowing the sensation I was looking for, I quickly spotted it, once I searched deliberately. Curiously, it was about as strong as before, meaning the distance shouldn¡¯t have changed by too much, but instead of pulling me to the northwest, it almost pointed directly north, though there was still some westward inclination. So, we had moved but the movement was fairly limited in scale, maybe a couple days travel, if that. Not that the precise distance actually mattered, I had no plans to return to the place we had been in before, but it was interesting.


    ¡°Let¡¯s go, I¡¯ll tell you what I found,¡± I told the others as my eyes opened back up and we all started to walk out of the cave.


    We didn¡¯t have to go all that far, the cave was fairly small, making the whole thing even more confusing and soon, we all collectively stopped in annoyance. Underground, especially in an isolated space like the Dungeon, it was completely impossible to tell the time. We had been fighting until we needed rest before continuing onwards, meaning even the intervals between food and sleep was unreliable for time-keeping purposes and now, the Sun was high and bright in the sky, with nary a cloud in sight.


    ¡°Guess we¡¯ll stay here for now,¡± Lia quipped, looking back into the cave. There were a lot worse places to sleep in, ¨¹laces like the dungeon we had spent the last, what, two, maybe three, days in.


    ¡°Yeah, let¡¯s get comfortable and we can rest for the rest of the day, maybe even spend the night and another day. Not sure about all of you, but I¡¯m somewhat exhausted,¡± I admitted, while Silva let out a tired huff and sank to the ground, showing just how tired she was now. Maybe I should have realised that our canine friend was completely exhausted, given the way she had pushed herself in the dungeon, driven by that furious agitation. I wondered what had caused it, other than the dungeon, that much was obvious. What I wanted to know was why this particular dungeon had affected her in this way, we had been in dungeons before but she never really cared, she certainly hadn¡¯t reacted with such agitation.


    Shaking my head, I went back into the cave and started the usual spiel of creating our shelter. The rocky cavern made parts of that a lot easier than normal while other parts were more difficult but it was nothing I couldn¡¯t handle.


    Soon, I was sitting fairly comfortably on something resembling a couch, if one made a couch out of stone and upholstered it with a mix of Ice, Earth and Water, creating a fairly soft cushion that wasn¡¯t too cold and didn¡¯t stick to people. Luna was stretched out next to me, her head in my lap and already fast asleep while I was trying to figure out where we were by sensing the earth around me. It felt as if this wasn¡¯t just a hill but an actual mountain, leaving me a little confused about our location unless the Change had altered the geography to the point that mountains had risen. It sounded absurd to the point of impossibility but at the same time, so did many things we had observed since the Change had happened.

 Chapter 990

    Somehow, I had a feeling that my list of things I wanted to figure out would never get any smaller. Instead, it would always continue to grow, until the list was so expansive and vast, it started to generate its own gravity and ignited into a star. But even that wouldn¡¯t actually allow me to work through it, no, even that stellar list would only continue to expand as I learned more and more, following the old adage that I could barely comprehend my own ignorance. until finally, the list to end all lists and knowledge would collapse into a black hole, sucking in all information of the Universe before devouring the Astral River itself. Only then could understanding rise from a singularity of infinite mass, energy and information, bringing a new reality into existence in a big bang, while everything before would be referred to as the great foreplay. Alas, it would take some time to reach that state.


    For now, I had to be content in the knowledge that, while I found more and more things I had yet to learn about and understand, I also occasionally ticked off things from my list as the unknown became known and the veil of ignorance was pushed back just a little further.


    Sadly, this was not the case here. Instead, i had come across something I didn¡¯t understand and could only vaguely relate to things I currently understood, though at least those things I understood were part of a topic I was actually fairly good at. In other words, studying the place where we had emerged from the Dungeon and entered the cave was a fascinating puzzle. While I was completely unable to make sense of the entire thing, I could glimpse some tiny parts of the whole and relate them to my own Darkness Magic.


    Sure, there were massive differences between the Realm of Shadows and the Dungeon and whatever dimension or spatial pocket it resided in but there were similarities. Here, in this cave, I could detect a few spaces where the Darkness between particles was disturbed, a little wider than it should be and I could even faintly sense that disruption fading away. Trying to understand what was happening didn¡¯t sound too promising but I could use my observations and the understanding I gained while pushing and prodding these disruptions to further my understanding of the void between particles and, through that, my Darkness Magic.


    Curiously, as I was pushing and prodding things, I realised that the process was somewhat resembling troubles I had with my Shadow Bags and began to push and prod one of those, an empty one of course, working to further my understanding and make things more stable. It was quite infuriating to lose a few days'' worth of rations because one of the bags didn¡¯t work as intended, though luckily that had only happened once so far. Still, one time was one time too many, especially when we already had limited resources and it was doubtful that getting additional resources would be easy.


    Even now, our supplies were somewhat stretched, only sufficient because we could supplement our food by hunting and foraging, but even with those measures, there were things we couldn¡¯t replenish. My tea, for one, would soon be gone and while a nice cup of hot tea was an indulgence, one of the few I allowed me, it was one I loathed to give up. But sadly, there¡¯d soon be no choice, the tea would run out and, unlike the British in bygone days, I couldn¡¯t just sail to India to get more tea. Once it was gone, I could only try looking for additional stashes from before the Change or I would have to accept that there would be no more tea. The thought sent a shiver of displeasure down my spine and served to focus my mind further on my attempt at making a better Shadow Bag, if only to keep what tea I might be able to find and secure safely stored until it was time to sacrifice the leaves in a bath of boiling water.


    ¡°For the tea,¡± I heard a voice quietly mutter and only after a moment, I realised that the voice had been mine, a subconscious utterance as my conscious mind was completely focused on the creation of a new and improved Shadow Bag. No longer was I content to let an ordinary bag hang within the realm of Shadows, connected to the physical world by a thread made from my own hair, infused with my Blood and Magic, no, I wanted something a little more stable. So, with the aftermath of the collapse of an opening into the open, physical world right in front of me, I began to design something better.


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    The idea that a Dungeon could, at least to my understanding, exist outside of our physical world yet remain part of it was a fascinating realisation, especially as I also noticed just how decoupled the Dungeon had been. I had a feeling that my inability to feel the earth and stone around the Dungeon had less to do with my abilities and affinities and a lot more with a simple lack of earth and stone around it. It was as if the pocket reality the Dungeon resided in, the Instance of it to use the system¡¯s term, only contained the Dungeon, with inviolable walls to keep the physical world contained in that bubble.


    If that hypothesis was correct, I was quite glad that I hadn¡¯t been able to alter the Dungeon¡¯s walls in any way, I wasn¡¯t sure what a lack of physical world would look like, what raw reality, or even the lack of raw reality, would look like, but I doubted my mind was prepared to see that. The Cthulu Mythos came to mind and what happened to people who saw more than their minds could comprehend, not something I wanted to emulate just yet.


    But, with that concept as the base and the remnants of it as an example, I was trying to get a small, contained pocket of shadows within the bag, so that the internal size of it would effectively be a lot bigger than the external size suggested. If I managed to create that pocket as I currently hoped I could, it would also negate the weight while making it impossible for any outside influence to get access to the goods stored within, unless they used the bag¡¯s opening.


    I wasn¡¯t certain whether I¡¯d be able to negate the need for a user to have Darkness Magic and an understanding of the shadows alongside working knowledge of how I had created the bag but that was quite alright with me. If only Lia understood how the thing worked it would be quite secure, though I was planning to teach Luna that particular trick, even if she couldn¡¯t access the Shadows in any meaningful way.


    And so, I was slowly stretching and stitching the Darkness within the bag into a coherent whole, using processes quite similar to those I had employed while preparing the cloth for my Cloak, only that I didn¡¯t have the Void Crystal from the Dungeon to use as a core but was instead using Runes stitched into the fabric using my hair as thread. Hair that was, again, soaked in Blood infused with Darkness Magic, it looked like I wasn¡¯t able to get away from that particular trick, simply because of its convenience. Otherwise, I¡¯d have to find some other material attuned to Darkness and my own Astral Power to work with, something I considered fairly difficult, if only because I needed it to be attuned to myself. So, my own body parts had to suffice, luckily it wasn¡¯t anything that wouldn¡¯t regrow eventually. It would be a lot worse if my enchantments needed bone or teeth, having to use my own would be incredibly awkward and annoying. No, Blood and Hair was quite alright in that regard.


    I had no idea how long the process of stretching and stitching ultimately took, the world had long since faded away from my awareness, my focus completely consumed by that simple, repetitive process. Strangely, the longer I was working, the easier it became as it the Shadow within the bag started to actually coalesce into the shape I wanted it to be instead of me having to pull it away from a greater whole, or maybe I was imagining things and I simply was getting used to the process.


    Either way, eventually I was done with the process and held a completed and completely new Shadow Bag in my hands. The moment I did, I could let myself relax and sink against the backrest of my seat, mental exhaustion battering against my mind. Creating the bag had been a chore and a half but it was done and a quick glance at my notifications showed me that it had been well worth it.


    A point in Darkness Magic and Darkness Rune Mastery, two points in Astral Meditation and, most importantly, three points in Enchanting, bringing the four skills to sixty-three, fifty-eight, forty-four and twenty-seven. An excellent result for an afternoon of hard work and research. Now, we only had to fill the bag with supplies and we¡¯d be golden.

 Chapter 991

    Filling the new bag, or any of our bags, turned out to be a lot harder than expected. While the Dungeon hadn¡¯t displaced us all that far, just a few hundred kilometres, the location we had been displaced to was a little problematic. Unless I completely missed my estimations and the Change had altered the world far more than I thought, we were now in the Rocky Mountains, somewhere in the southern part from what I could tell. Normally, we would have looked for a store or two and tried to find something inside that we could loot but without stores, there was nothing to loot.


    Sure, we could hunt, so meat was, amusingly, not that much of a problem, but a diet solely composed of meat wasn¡¯t all that pleasant. There might be people who enjoyed to sustain themself on nothing but meat, but I needed my vegetables, my fruits and grains. Part of that need was psychological but there was a clear physical component to my need, as my guts told me repeatedly.


    Finding wild vegetables helped but looking for them took a lot of time and effort, meaning we hadn¡¯t been able to make progress on our journey, instead we had stuck around the area the Dungeon had deposited us in, venturing out to hunt and forage from here.


    The one positive thing about our location was that, curiously, the animals in the mountains had a much higher average level than their counterparts in the forests and plains we had wandered through before. There were exceptions, or rather, there had been some exceptionally powerful and troublesome creatures in the forests and plains, but here, the average deer was around level fifty to sixty, while we had come across a few wolves above level sixty and even seen a bear that was pushing level seventy. Maybe not enough to provide a true challenge but it was far closer to one than what we had come across recently, other than the Dungeon.


    Once again, it made me wonder how the levelling for animals and similar simple creatures worked, as I was quite confident that it wasn¡¯t just the simple paradigm of ¡®kill foes to become stronger¡¯ that humanoids operated under. Granted, even humanoids didn¡¯t solely operate under that paradigm, I was an excellent example of somebody who could gain EXP by teaching magic to other people, but the mechanism involved wasn¡¯t one I actually understood. It might simply be that Lady Hecate wanted magic to be taught so she donated EXP in some way, or it might be that I was somehow chosen to be a magic teacher by the system. Maybe I would have gained EXP by teaching while on Mundus, but I wasn¡¯t sure as I had barely tried. Just a little with Rai, but there, the teaching had primarily focused on martial arts, with only a little bit of magic thrown in before letting him explore his magic on his own.


    In hindsight, there were so many things I wanted to have tried on Mundus, with the confidence that death would only be a momentary setback, but as they said, hindsight was 20/20. Now, every risky experiment was performed with my single, unique life on the line, making me just a little more cautious, at least most of the time.


    ¡°There¡¯s smoke rising further down the mountain,¡± Luna told me, her words bringing a grin to my face. Silva and Luna had been out and about during the early evening, enjoying some sun and exploring in the light of day, something they were uniquely suited for in our group. Sure, I could move during the day but I always needed to protect myself from the Sun, occupying some of my attention and draining some of my resources while the two of them could simply enjoy. Granted, Lia and Alex were even worse of than I was, but they, too, were used to it now.


    ¡°Was there now?¡± I asked with a grin, knowing that Fire, especially small fires, generally meant humanoid involvement, outside of a few fairly special circumstances. Sure, it was possible that the fire was caused by some sort of salamander or another elementally biased creature but it was a lot less likely. Such creatures were more likely to simply start burning down the landscape wholesale or made their lair in areas that were already burned or biased towards their element. No, a simple, apparently fairly small, fire was likely man-made.


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    ¡°We should investigate once the Sun has fully set, those people might need help, or we might be able to trade with them,¡± I suggested, getting agreement all around. Hopefully, we¡¯d be able to trade some simple, enchanted items for some supplies, so we could continue on our journey. Though, I¡¯d have to make sure that the trade was done in a way that didn¡¯t put any large risks on my group. I had no doubt that any large and organised group would love to have an enchanter at their disposal, be it for the Shadow Bags I was currently trying to perfect or the basic, enchanted items I was experimenting with, either would be a massive boon to any group.


    I had no illusions about the possible measures ruthless groups would take to get access to such a boon, Hel, I was fairly confident that there were quite a few people out there who¡¯d do anything they could to have it. No matter how vile, no matter how ruthless, if it allowed them to protect themself and their loved ones in this dangerous, new world, they would use any way they could.


    Maybe I should look into possibilities of protecting myself from hostile Mind Magic, from illusions and such. That sort of thing sounded like the easiest way to ensnare the unwilling while keeping them predisposed to work for you. Otherwise, the classical ploys of bribery and seduction sprang to mind but I had my own purpose, a goal that I was pursuing.


    But that was assuming they didn¡¯t resort to simple, brute force or threats of it. Threatening Lia or Luna to motivate me, trying to keep them captive, there were various ways to menace somebody and while I was quite confident that I would ultimately win in a confrontation of brute force and violence, I couldn¡¯t be confident about the collateral damage. So, vigilance and caution were the watchwords and to be employed constantly.


    We set out shortly after the Sun had fully set, letting Luna and Silva lead the way as the two of them had seen the smoke and could estimate where the corresponding fire was. Sadly, that estimation was easier said than done, the terrain wasn¡¯t particularly friendly or simple to traverse and instead of the hour I originally estimated by Luna¡¯s description, it took us closer to five hours to cover the distance.


    Crags, narrow valleys and even a small river had to be overcome on our way. Nothing we couldn¡¯t deal with but every obstacle took time and concentration, or one might end up like Lia, who stepped on a small, loose pebble and found herself stumbling, barely managing to keep upright thanks to her high attributes. It was just a little amusing to us all that the one with the highest agility was the one who almost landed on her face but sometimes chance was just that, random.


    Either way, we managed to cover the distance without any serious incident, reaching a ridge to look down into the valley the smoke had come from. We had been able to smell the fire for quite some time, giving us another datapoint to pursue and now, we could even see the group that had made it.


    Looking down at them allowed us to see quite a bit of detail about them, it was a group of five, all of them male and all of them looking quite rugged. They all had some equipment from before the Change, the sleeping bags were quite obvious, but their weapons and, from what I could tell, their armour were all made after the Change.


    What surprised me was the apparent quality, worked leather was one thing but these people had actual metal weapons, something Alex had only managed to create thanks to the Charland and its endless supply of magical fire. Without that, I doubted they¡¯d have been able to craft something like my Athame, to say nothing of the spears and blades we could see on the people in the valley.


    A part of me wanted to retreat outright, knowing that the further a group was advanced, the bigger their interest and incentive to get an enchanter under their control but at the same time, I was aware that a bigger group would have more supplies and would be more likely to trade some of them. There were risks but now, I had to figure out whether the risks were worth the potential reward. And to do that, the first necessary step was to find out how powerful these people actually were.

 Chapter 992

    Leaving the others up on the ridge, I ghosted down into the valley. My cloak was the perfect piece of equipment to sneak around in the dark, especially across rough terrain, and I was making great use of it. While the people down in the valley had posted a guard, that guard was focusing on the obvious paths of approach, up and down the valley, so coming down the ridge on a silent whisper of wind wasn¡¯t what they expected at all. Furthermore, I was about as invisible as a shadow in the dark, meaning even if he had looked my way, he wouldn¡¯t have spotted me, unless he had some seriously powerful traits and abilities and was using them at the time.


    Which might be the biggest problem, even I¡¯d be hard-pressed to find Lia, to say nothing of myself, when hiding without the awareness that there was something to find. Sure, I could use my Magical Sight, Soul Sight and the methods of elemental perception to scan an area and, by now, I was fairly certain I¡¯d find anything trying to hide within that area but to even start the initial scan, I¡¯d need to know that something was wrong. Constant Vigilance was a wonderful watchword but nobody could be constantly on full alert, just the attempt would automatically dull the senses and make them much less efficient when it counted.


    Sadly, there was no easy or obvious answer to the problem but given that I was currently benefitting from it, I wasn¡¯t about to complain. Instead, I was drifting down, towards the group and could soon land silently on a nearby rock, making sure that there¡¯d be no trace of my presence, even after I left later. It would be quite annoying to leave a footprint in some unlikely place, allowing these people to discern more about my capabilities than I wanted, or even realise that I knew about them unless I wanted them to know about me.


    My initial observations were completely passive, not even activating my Magical or Soul Sight, instead, I simply let the air carry the scent of these people past me, my mind trying to categorise the scents according to individuals and differentiating between magical and mundane scents. It wasn¡¯t easy and I quickly realised I¡¯d need a lot more practice to get useful information from mundane scents. The only thing I could readily discern was that they had a dinner of grilled meat and bread but other than that? I could perceive the scents but their meaning eluded me. However, I began to make mental notes, so I¡¯d hopefully be able to get started on that practice.


    Luckily, I had a lot more practice on the magical side of things and could readily understand the scents I could perceive there, at least to a point. The most obvious thing I could detect was that none of them had a particularly powerful scent, indicating that they either had impressive magical control or lacked magical power in the first place. My initial estimation was that the second possibility was the truth, as I could smell a bit of weak magic from each of them and letting just enough magic leak out to give that impression sounded like a fairly difficult thing to do. I might be capable of doing so, but only with practice and likely only while I was aware and awake, so the fact that I remained undetected should protect me from such deception.


    Visually, I couldn¡¯t make out a whole lot about the people, other than the fact that they were all guys, all somewhere in their twenties or thirties and all quite physically fit, though not excessively so. Sadly, after the Chagne and with the System in play, their physical looks were a lot less indicative of their physical prowess. I was a perfect example of that, I didn¡¯t look all that powerful but thanks to the Dragon Touched Trait, I was superhumanly strong and fast. Both my Strength and Agility were at a level that somebody without beneficial traits would reach around level fifty if they solely focused on one of those attributes.


    Looking at the gear strewn around the camp, I could conclude that they had two people primarily using bows, while the other three had spears and shields. They all seemed to have fairly long knives in addition to that and I could also see a hatchet that could be used as a weapon and a shovel. The last two were from before the change, so I doubted they¡¯d be actually used, but the possibility was there and, for just a moment, I wondered how it would feel to get struck by one of them, the momentary consideration about my attributes having reminded me just how far from human I now was. Well, the ears certainly gave it away, as did the night vision, but now, I started to wonder. And quickly discarded that curiosity, I didn¡¯t need to know everything and this might just be one of those things.


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    Looking at the single guy keeping watch, I could discern that they had some fairly simple leather armour, nothing seriously fancy or sturdy, just very thick and heavy leather jackets and pants. Not strong enough to provide protection against serious weapons and attacks but likely enough to at least blunt the bite from a canine, or maybe stop a bear from ripping their arms off.


    Finishing my visual inspection of the group, I started to open myself up a little, activating my magical sight and quickly noticing something peculiar. One of these people had a magical amulet of some kind, I couldn¡¯t tell what it looked like or what it did, but I could tell that it was enchanted with a kind of Divine Magic that gave me unpleasant vibes. Without getting a closer look, I wouldn¡¯t be able to determine anything about it and a part of me was questioning whether I ever wanted to take that look. Even from a distance, I was feeling repulsed by it, a fairly strange sensation that I couldn¡¯t quite place.


    Now, I only needed to figure out what these guys were and maybe take a closer look at the mundane gear they were lugging around. Maybe I¡¯d be able to discern something from the craftsmanship, though I wasn¡¯t quite confident I had the foundational knowledge. Maybe Identify would give me something to work with, or I might be forced to bring in Alex, who had a much greater knowledge when it came to non-magical materials. I wasn¡¯t about to call what they could do with their Alchemy ¡®mundane¡¯, even if it wasn¡¯t ¡®magical¡¯ by my understanding of magic.


    After a quick check to make sure that the guy on watch was looking in the other direction, I drew the Concealment Rune into the air, maintaining it so I could push the Observe-ability through the Rune. Even now, I wasn¡¯t certain if the process was actually necessary or if I simply believed that it was and I was subconsciously dependant on it, not that it truly mattered for me. Maybe I¡¯d be able to have Lia try it without this process but for now, this was what I had to do to keep use of the Observe-ability hidden.


    Moments later, without disturbing the sleeping man, a blue window opened, letting me know that the guy was a level fifty-eight human, the level enough to make my eyes open in surprise. To see if this was a coincidence or if they all had such high levels, I checked the others and received similar results, ranging from fifty-six on the low side to sixty-one on the high side. Quite a bit stronger than I had expected, mostly because there were very few beasts with such a high level. Unless these people were, somehow, the strongest of elite warriors, the group who took care of all the truly dangerous nasties, the community they called home might be quite dangerous. Hopefully, they were at least somewhat above average amongst their people, or I couldn¡¯t be confident that, no matter how many there were, my group would remain victorious. Even if I was able to kill them all, they might be able to take one of my companions with them.


    After another moment of consideration, I decided to take a closer look at their gear and snuck my way over, using all my abilities to remain concealed. When I used Identify on one of their spears, I didn¡¯t get a whole lot of information, but what I got, told me that it was a weapon of above-average quality, though without any magical reinforcement, something I had already known. However, an interesting tidbit was found in the item description, labelling the material as unrefined, making me wonder if they had simply used metal from before the Change, somehow managed to smelt it and poured it all together into ingots, without having an understanding of what the Change had done to it.


    Or maybe they had some other, sub-optimal method to procure the metal, which made the fact that the weapon was described as ¡®above-average¡¯ all the more impressive.


    Pleased with the information I had managed to gather, I took back to the sky, letting my cloak carry me back to my companions, where we could decide what to do next.

 Chapter 993

    After sharing the information I had gained with the others, we had to consider our next step. Our objective was fairly simple, find out where these people come from, get there and trade some supplies with the locals, hopefully getting enough food to sustain the continuation of our journey. Thanks to the dungeon and our previous explorations, we had quite a few things we could trade, from weapons to enchanted trinkets or even some of the alchemical concoctions made by Alex, all of these things weren¡¯t of much use to us but they could be incredibly valuable to others. Especially the enchanted items, by now, I had almost universally made better versions for us but for somebody like these guys, who didn¡¯t have anything enchanted? It would be a major game-changer.


    Unless they had been incredibly fortunate when crossing the first divide, if they had managed that yet, they had gained about twenty free attribute points, so if they had split those to one primary attribute and the rest distributed across secondary attributes, their primary attribute would be around thirty, with the five points from crossing the first divide taken into account. Adding somewhere between five and ten points to that would be massive to them, even if it was fairly minor to me. Thanks to the benefits of the Dragon-Touched trait, showing how massively powerful it was.


    ¡°How do you think we should introduce ourselves?¡± Lia asked, glancing in the direction of the valley the people were sleeping in.


    ¡°Not sure,¡± I admitted, thinking about our options once more, ¡°The biggest problem is that anyone approaching after dark will likely be seen with suspicion. Sure, the days are getting shorter, so our options increase, but even so, the darkness is always suspicious,¡± I mused, glancing towards Luna and Silva, neither of whom were inconvenienced by the Sun. If only Luna were an adult, she¡¯d be able to approach them and trade for us, but with her having only her short lived experience and the body of a teenager, I wasn¡¯t about to send her in. Sure, Silva would do her best to protect Luna, but that wasn¡¯t too useful for trade and negotiations.


    ¡°Even if I could approach during the day by using a parasol or tightly cloaking myself, I would still arouse suspicion, though not as much as we would by appearing in the darkness,¡± I shrugged, having already discarded the possibility of having these people escort us to their home. They¡¯d want to move during the day and explaining why Lia and Alex don¡¯t travel during the day would raise some problematic questions, to say nothing of the trouble that would erupt if anybody managed to Observe her successfully. Vampires had been part of human myths and folklore for so much time, there¡¯d be somebody jumping to the correct conclusion if they watched her, even if they never noticed her drinking my blood.


    ¡°The last few days have been quite overcast,¡± Luna threw into the conversation, reminding me of another possible way to deal with things.


    ¡°You mean that Silva, you and I could go to their settlement on an overcast day and introduce ourselves? Unless the weather suddenly changes, I¡¯d be able to handle that, sure. Maybe Lia and Alex could sneak in during the night or something like that, giving us some backup if things become troublesome,¡± I nodded, feeling that the idea had some potential. It would keep each of us safe while allowing for the needed trade, though I was still considering how to keep the people of their community from becoming acquisitive. Maybe it would be for the best to leave Luna, and likely Silva, behind, just in case these people had some smart ideas to coerce my cooperation.


    ¡°That only leaves that magical amulet you mentioned, the one you described as repulsive. If that guy is the only one of their people worshipping that particular deity, you are good but you said that they didn¡¯t look like spellcasters, meaning it¡¯s likely that he was given the thing from another in their community. And if a simple token is enough to make you feel repulsed, what happens if there¡¯s more than one? Or some sort of congregation?¡± Lia asked, making me grimace at the implications.


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    ¡°True, we might need more information. Maybe I should go back, knock the guy out and get a better look. That way, we have an idea of what we are dealing with and can decide on the methods used. Either way, we need to visit their community, or we¡¯ll be eating grass and meat soon, not really the diet of champions,¡± I grinned, despite knowing just how troublesome the situation was. Without a good idea of the area, we were fairly clueless about where we¡¯d be able to look for some extra food, especially as it looked like the Change had, somehow, demolished the roads here in the mountains. Otherwise, we would have come across one during the last few days but no, the terrain was about as pristine and untouched as it had been on Mundus. Which made no sense but then, a lot of things regarding the Change made no sense, so what was one additional thing?


    ¡°You should be careful and make sure you¡¯re not seen,¡± Luna reminded me, a small grin on her face that turned wider when I only glowered at her, not dignifying the statement with any other response.


    Soon after, I ghosted back over the ridge and drifted into the camp once more. Curiously, they were just in the process of switching guards, making me slow down a little and listen, hoping that I might hear something of value.


    Sadly, the only thing I was able to learn was that the guy who was woken up didn¡¯t enjoy keeping watch, a sentiment the other guy shared, to nobody¡¯s surprise. Granted, their conversation was mostly composed of a few words, some grunts and the occasional yawn, so it wasn¡¯t as if there was a lot of opportunity to give sensitive information and yet, it was a little disappointing. Why couldn¡¯t they share their evil, secret plants out in the open, just for me to overhear?


    Shaking my head, I waited a few extra minutes, making sure that the guy not keeping watch was asleep before I made my move.


    Mind Magic was truly a useful tool, especially when used with the requisite subtlety, slowly increasing the drowsiness of the guy keeping watch. It took a lot longer than I was comfortable with, he even stood and walked a few rounds around the camp to stay awake but eventually, just as he rose once more, maybe to take another walk around the camp or rouse his companions because he just couldn¡¯t keep awake any longer, I used one slightly stronger burst of magic and sent him into the realm of dreams.


    With the way free, I ghosted over to the sleeping people once more, my mind focused on the guy wearing the pendant and started to tug on his sleeping bag, working slowly to avoid disturbing him. If I did, I would have to blast him, too, leaving more indications of my presence than I was comfortable with, the less I actively did to them, the better.


    It took me a little longer than I was comfortable with to uncover the pendant and when I did, I had to keep tight control of my temper, as I immediately recognised the symbol. Just its touch was enough to burn my hand, making me twitch back in disgust. Keeping myself from hissing, I quietly rightened the guy¡¯s clothes and sleeping bag, before quickly moving away while making sure to leave no traces of my presence.


    The symbol, and what it implied, made things a lot more difficult and incredibly annoying. It was such a simple pendant, a wooden wheel with red-golden flames surrounding it but given that it symbolised the Goddess Sunna, the one who had cursed my very being and whose curse I had passed on to Lia and, eventually, to Alex, I wasn¡¯t feeling overly charitable in regards to anyone wearing it.


    But what to do about them and their people in general? My initial thought was to see if we could smother the faith of Sunna in the womb without killing too many people. Otherwise, we might have to go all genocidal and kill far more people than I was fully comfortable with, especially as it looked like these people were one of the few groups we had come across who were making progress on the path to rebuilding a society.


    Sadly, a society that wouldn¡¯t want anything to do with me, or I with them, but a society nonetheless. Now, with the winter soon falling across the land, I wasn¡¯t sure if humanity could take the loss of such a group, as I had a feeling that winter would reap a deadly toll and devastate a lot of the less organised groups out there.


    Decisions, decisions, both for me as an individual and for the future of Humanity.

 Chapter 994

    It would be so much easier to decide what to do back on Mundus. There, I always had the idea that it was just a game in the back of my mind, that nothing I did to the world at large would have any real consequences. Sigmir, and my companions to a lesser degree, had turned into something real, something that often made me wonder if the difference between a biologically born lifeform and a synthetical was truly important, though now I knew those questions had been pretty pointless. Either way, the world of Mundus itself hadn¡¯t been truly real to me, until the astral fire swept across the world and Change¡¯d it. But I couldn¡¯t even pretend that the world around me wasn¡¯t real and I didn¡¯t have any intention to try, so anything I did could and would have wide-ranging consequences that I needed to consider.


    If there was a budding town of Sunna-worshipping people out there, the smart, but ruthless, thing to do was to nip it in the bud, to conjure up a storm of Ice, or maybe one of Fire, and wipe it all out. Sure, I wasn¡¯t as powerful now as I had been on Mundus, but I was getting there and even advancing on a much broader front. As I was now, I might be unable to conjure up a storm like the one I had conjured on Mundus to sweep Hatterion but I¡¯d get fairly close, especially if I was willing to sacrifice a few dozen people again.


    So, the real question was, how many people was I willing to kill? Not just in self-defence or to defend my family but preemptively, simply because they might become a danger in the future. The simple answer was obvious. If they were affiliated with anything I considered a threat, they were a valid target to be destroyed. Straight, simple but now, in a real world with real people on the line, I wasn¡¯t quite so certain it was a path I wanted to travel down.


    What would my mother think if I decided to murder anybody I considered troublesome, not for anything they had done but for something they might do in the future? Especially as I knew myself and had, looking back at my actions on Mundus, acquired a mindset of vigilance that bordered on paranoid, meaning I could see myself starting to consider everyone and everything not directly in my group to be troublesome and thus, if I followed that mindset, a valid target.


    My efforts on Mundus, even if largely taken in ignorance of the real circumstances, had destroyed a world already, was I willing to make that two, simply because the people might become hostile at some point in the future? Because, considering things realistically, that was what the world would end up as, covered in Ice, with only the people of my group still around.


    Was that the sort of world I wanted for my daughters? One where I¡¯d likely be able to thrive and be content, even if I¡¯d have to be creative when it came to getting food, but could my daughters be happy in a world of Ice? Lia wouldn¡¯t be able to thrive, I had noticed that she enjoyed observing people and I knew that she either needed to rely on me for food or hunt humans and similar prey. Similarly, Luna enjoyed discussing magic with different people and guiding them on the Arcane Path gently pushing Lady Hecate onto them as a side-effect. To do that, she needed people and if I went all frozen Queen, there¡¯d be nothing left.


    So, ultimately, I needed to find a path where I¡¯d only destroy those who attack me and mine, without risking traversing down the slippery slope of my paranoia and taking out people who might become enemies in the future. Because I would slide down that slope like a slick sheet of Ice, never looking back until I was safe. Safe and sound, with nobody around. Or maybe with a lot of bodies, because there would be, if I ever went down that route. Maybe not directly around me, but there would be bodies. Dead bodies.


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    Closing my eyes, I pushed away images of a world covered in Ice, with a few of the more visually pleasing specimen of humanity preserved in all their frozen glory for eternity and focused on possible paths I could take. Paths that wouldn¡¯t take me down in this particular direction while also keeping myself and my companions safe.


    Snorting to myself, I realised that I still needed more information. Was the society these people were from aggressive, was it focused on the Faith of Sunna or was Sunna simply one of many deities they worshipped and it was simply bad luck that I had stumbled across the symbol that started all of this? In addition, I should find out how many people were in their community and if their overall structure was secular or religious, not just what deities were worshipped there. Stars, I needed a complete list of things I didn¡¯t know about them and needed to know, or I could sit here and bumble around forever.


    For now, I needed to find that community, and get information and food, once I had those, I could make a relatively informed decision on how to proceed.


    Finding the community should have been fairly simple. Silva could sniff out their tracks, allowing us to trace them back until we got to where they started at. Or so I thought, sadly, when we started down the valley, it didn¡¯t take long for us to realise that these people were just a little smarter than I had hoped and had employed at least some measure of obfuscation. Or maybe it had been a coincidence that their path had taken them across a lot of rocky ground where they left little to no physical tracks or that they had travelled through a river for some time, making things even harder.


    By the end of the night, I was fairly certain that we wouldn¡¯t be able to follow their tracks backwards but that didn¡¯t mean we couldn¡¯t follow them. Which is what we started to do, move back towards their camp and keep an eye on them while they packed things up to head further into the mountains. Once they were gone, we remained behind, snug in a small cave I dug from the rocks around us, keeping Lia, Alex and myself out of the Sun.


    Sadly, having to hide from the Sun meant actually following them was fairly difficult. We couldn¡¯t move at the same time they did and if the obfuscation we had noticed while trying to backtrace their steps were actually deliberate, they might manage to shake us off, even if I doubted they would manage over the course of a single day. Silva was an excellent tracker and I had a few tricks that helped, though as demonstrated by our failure to find their origin, neither of us was perfect.


    Luckily, while following them physically was a problem for Lia and me, I wasn¡¯t limited to the physical, I had other methods to keep track of somebody. On Mundus, my scrying constructs had been incredibly useful and while I hadn¡¯t used them much on Terra, I could get back into the habit, even if the lack of Lenore made it a little awkward. She had been the one to handle mobility and movement of the constructs, something her avian mind was a lot more adept at than my humanoid one.


    But that didn¡¯t mean I couldn¡¯t learn. I had learned to fly with my cloak eventually. Well, mostly, as things were now, I wasn¡¯t truly flying, maybe calling it hovering with an attitude would be more appropriate. Either way, I could move within three dimensions without too much trouble, so I should be able to create a scrying construct and have it follow these people.


    For that, the first step was, as so often, to conjure up my throne, allowing me to anchor myself a lot easier and thus freeing up mental resources to use on my magic. Once the throne was up and I was sitting comfortably, I wove the shadows in our cave into something solid, using the shape of a Raven in memory of my dear friend, before sending it into the sky, my physical eyes closed as my mind was soaring through the air.


    From the air, it was fairly simple to find the people who had been camping here, despite the time I had needed to conjure my throne and prepare myself. They had simply followed the valley uphill, taking their time and moving in a practical and cautious way.


    This might take some time, but maybe I would be able to get some additional information if I twisted things just right. And even if I didn¡¯t get any information, this was excellent training for both my physical flying and for future scrying.

 Interlude: Soaring Shadows

    ¡°Up and at them, boys,¡± a far too cheerful voice ruthlessly ripped four people from the blessed embrace of Hypnos, forcing them to face the reality of a new day. A new day and new challenges that came with it, in this case, the continuation of their climb into the mountains above their hometown, only that the mountains had changed far more than reasonably possible. But reason, logic and the apparent laws of nature had been thrown out months ago, exactly as the world had ended in fire, burning the familiar concepts with it.


    Even now, a few people in their newly established settlement creatively named New Dawn, liked to theorise what had happened back then, some of their theories a lot more creative than others. More creative than even the accepted narrative, pushed by those lucky few who had been granted a legacy, thanks to their efforts in a video game of all things. Complete and utter lunacy but then, the entire world had gone mad, so it seemed to fit in perfectly.


    However, that particular bit of lunacy was something they all were incredibly grateful for, as those few with their legacies had been invaluable in the early days, first when the Shattered roamed the streets, killing people if they managed to catch them and later when the dead had risen, trying to drag those who had avoided the grave into it with them. Without the groups crystallising around those with the knowledge and their advantages, many more would have died. Maybe everyone, it was quite difficult to guess and not something anyone sane wanted to really thing about.


    But the Legacies had managed to pull people together, helped those with the motivation to act to find their paths and got them started. They even guided some of their more promising students down especially promising paths, trying to let them become as powerful as possible. And, maybe with a little guidance of the gods, they had managed to push through and establish a new town, a new hope and home for the survivors.


    Now, with their town established and slowly growing into something that might, someday in the far future, regain the thriving culture of yesteryear, they were starting to strike out and explore the unknown around them, trying to gain as many levels and as much power as possible. The Legacies had helped them to find their footing but now, it was on the various individuals to walk their paths on their own. there was danger, obviously, but with danger came opportunities, or so they hoped.


    These mountains had held silver, copper and coal in bygone days, and according to the legacies, that could translate into valuable resources coming into existence as the world had gone mad. Nobody truly knew but they had decided to find out, partially because they had known the mountains quite well and had hiked through them repeatedly. Not that their experience was all that valuable, given that their physical capabilities had increased greatly, though the same was true for the danger in the mountains. Before, the worst animals they might have run into had been snakes, large cats and the occasional bear, nothing that actively hunted humans. Before the world had gone mad, humans had been the most dangerous thing around and the animals had generally known that. The only way to get attacked was to seriously provoke an animal, though the seriousness of the provocation could vary with the circumstances. Either way, the most dangerous creatures around had been humans, by a large margin.


    Sadly, with the Change, their spot at the top of the food chain had come undone and now, there were various beasts out there that would gleefully make a meal out of people or might attack simply because somebody had wandered into their territory. To make matters worse, the tools of war humans had relied on for so long no longer worked as well as they once had. Guns, so beloved by their people, were no longer useful, something fundamentally had changed, causing them to be utterly unreliable and as dangerous to the user as to the target. Maybe even more dangerous to the user.


    So, the old tools of war had returned, bows, previously the domain of hunters with particular passions, were once again the weapon of choice if you wanted to stay at a distance, while swords, spears and shields were favoured if you wanted to fight up close and personal. To make matters worse, the old tools, the few suitable ones that had been found, were almost as useless as guns and new weapons had to be forged. Luckily, one of the Legacies had been able to help them, forging the weapons they all needed and more. He even managed to train people to make bows and some fairly sturdy armour, allowing them to make their way into the mountains, scouting the dangers and hopefully finding something useful up here.


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    The day dragged on as the group of five travelled further uphill, following a fairly narrow valley to avoid some of the dangers lurking in the mountains. Sadly, it was only some of them, not all, and shortly after their lunch break, they stumbled across some trouble in the form of a badger-like creature.


    Only, these badgers were the size of a small calf, with claws powerful enough to shatter stone and jaws to match. Similarly, their temperament hadn¡¯t changed much, if anything, it had gotten worse, making the creatures attack their group without fear, hesitation or mercy. Their three frontliners managed to do their job, using a combination of physical training and the slightly strange abilities Jake, their group leader, had picked up from Clive, one of the legacies. The stuff was weird, seemingly magical but according to the legacies it wasn¡¯t magic, not that anybody but the legacies truly appreciated the difference. What else to call it but magic if a guy shouting at you suddenly resulted in a golden glow around your body, a glow that was durable enough to withstand the equivalent of small arms fire?


    In this case, Jake and his fellow spearman formed a shield wall, holding the badgers back while their two archers went ahead and shot them full of arrows, using the terrain to their advantage. It turned into a brutal slog of blood and violence but eventually, the managed to overcome the beasts.


    After combat, the bloody work was far from done. While the three spearmen bandaged their wounds, applying some of the medicine concocted by the craftspeople back in New Dawn, the two archers had a different, even bloodier job to do. The giant badgers they had fought and slain were valuable in their own right, the claws and teeth useful for some, the fur and skin for others, while the meat could be used to expand their rations up in the mountains.


    ¡°That thing¡¯s weird,¡± Marrik, one of the two archers, grumbled as he worked with his partner, nodding towards a large, black bird sitting on a nearby ledge, looking down at their group. The thing looked like a crow or raven, only quite a bit larger, with a wicked beak and claws that seemed to shimmer in what little light reached the creature.


    ¡°What do you mean?¡± Big Al, the other archer, asked, noticing the strange bird for the first time.


    ¡°There¡¯s been one of those things nearby all day, sometimes up in the sky, sometimes sitting somewhere close, watching us,¡± Marrik explained, picking up a rock and launching it towards the bird but falling short. Curiously, the bird only responded with a few, mocking caws that sounded far too close to laughter to make anyone comfortable.


    ¡°Okay, that thing¡¯s weird. But are you sure, I didn¡¯t notice a thing and I think I would have. Maybe it¡¯s just hungry or something,¡± Al prodded, looking somewhat discomforted by the strange creature.


    ¡°Damn right I¡¯m sure,¡± Marrik grumbled, picking up his bow, only to notice that the bird had vanished without a trace, quite the feat in the fairly sparse landscape. Unless the thing immediately took flight and used the walls of the valley to hide behind, they should have seen it.


    ¡°Really weird,¡± Al admitted, a shudder running down his spine, one that was only in part caused by a sudden, cold gust of wind.


    ¡°We¡¯ll keep an eye out, no idea what sort of thing that creature was. Too far for that Observe stuff, so I¡¯m not sure,¡± Marrik admitted, looking around once more, before returning to the bloody task at hand.


    ¡°And we¡¯ve been told to use that only when combat already started, or we¡¯re sure it¡¯s about to start. Cause, if you use it, combat will start,¡± Al reminded him, only to get more grumbling in return. The rules of the strange system were not something anybody understood, even with the explanations the Legacies had given them. Maybe because they, too, didn¡¯t understand it, nor did the people who had explained it to them.


    But, the system and the weirdness were things they had to accept, simply because they lacked the ability to change them. And it looked like the same was true for giant ravens that liked to stalk them with mocking laughter, at least until they managed to shoot the bird down. Something both Marrik and Al now wanted with quite a bit of passion.

 Chapter 995

    Following the five guys was unexpectedly amusing. Well, once I managed to make the construct look and behave as a bird would, drawing on memories originally shared with me by Lenore, the entire thing became amusing. Luckily, it only took me a few hours of concentrated work to get from a somewhat static construct that only moved because it was purely magical and directed by my magic as my frozen Shuttles would be to a fluidly moving construct that would pass muster, at least at a distance. Once that was achieved, my surveillance shifted from the long-distance observation I had used at first, with the construct high enough in the sky to make it difficult to recognise its unnatural behaviour to something a lot more up-close and intimate.


    Doing so came with the added benefit that I could use a bit of Wind Magic, especially the sound concept, to let me listen to these people, though their conversation wasn¡¯t too interesting if they talked at all. Most of the time, they simply wandered quietly through the valley, exchanging only the bare minimum needed to coordinate, but maybe that was to be expected. Unless one of my daughters was receiving a lesson from me, my own group moved in silence, too, focus directed at our environment, making sure that we weren¡¯t running into something nasty.


    For these people, it had to be even worse. From what I could tell, they didn¡¯t have anyone fully focused on Intuition, meaning they had nobody with truly superhuman senses, nothing like my own greatly enhanced senses or Silva¡¯s canine nose and ears, all of which were incredibly good at detecting hazards and enemies long before they became dangerous to us. No, these people could only be vigilant and hope that their reactions were swift enough to protect them, once they stumbled into a dangerous area. A part of me was reminded of an old joke about traps that were either found with perception or with your health bar.


    These people were an example of finding traps with their health bar, though I had a feeling that one of the archers was working on becoming more inclined towards the tracking and detection track. Still, he hadn¡¯t managed to get very far on it. He was intuitive enough to notice that my construct was following them, though he failed to realise just what was strange about it and made the fairly grave error of demonstrating hostility towards something he didn¡¯t understand. If the construct wasn¡¯t one but an actual creature of Wind and Darkness, his actions might have spelled serious for their group but as I was intelligent enough to know holding a grudge wouldn¡¯t serve me well, he was lucky. Or maybe not, as his actions and fundamentally aggressive behaviour had put him on my list.


    The entertainment factor that came from the observation of these people shot up even further when a few of the local crows and ravens decided my construct was one of them on the third day of my watch. From then on, it wasn¡¯t just one feathered shape following the group of five, the local birds gathered around and followed. Where before, one bird had followed them, now, there was an entire unkindness of ravens alongside a murder of crows, some twenty, maybe thirty birds total. The entire feathered mob was either sitting on the rocks and cliffs to watch them, resting on trees or simply gliding above them in the wind, observing and, at times, showing their amusement with loud, mocking caws.


    Even for me, who was inhabiting a shell quite similar to theirs, it was a little spooky, though I readily joined in on the cawing laughter, letting my own amusement bleed into the construct. That part of the experience was quite fascinating. The construct was, obviously, based on Lenore, as had those we used back on Mundus, but now, I wasn¡¯t just driving it, I had let myself fall completely into the construct and was living it, leaning on the memories Lenore had shared with me.


    Amusingly, channelling those memories and letting myself be the raven caused some complications when it was time to stop for the day, especially when it came to walking and moving in general. The bird was flapping its wings and hopping but trying to stand up from my throne by waving my arms and hopping from my ankles turned out to be¡­ problematic.


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    Luckily, I had been wearing my cloak, allowing me to reflexively channel some magic to turn an incredibly awkward and likely painful fall into a strange glide and land on my feet, without bruising anything but my dignity. A few stretches and deliberate movement helped to get my mind accustomed to my body, so it wasn¡¯t a real problem, just an annoyance, especially as we had to travel most of the night, catching up to the people we were pursuing and using the rest of the night to train.


    That training also took a slightly different tone after the local birds started to view the construct as one of their own, especially when they showed that they were far, far more intelligent than one would think. They not only noticed that the construct wasn¡¯t just a raven, they also realised that the construct and I were one and the same. After we left our cave during the evening, one of the ravens I had seen during the day from my construct approached the five of us and began to guide us.


    Luckily, I had seen and experienced more than enough corvid body language to understand it and realise that it wanted us to follow and was promising something useful in exchange.


    When we did, it turned out that the raven was guiding us to eliminate dangerous predators, especially giant owls and other raptors. Afterwards, the raven consistently guided us towards useful resources, mostly things that ravens couldn¡¯t fully exploit. Places where Alex managed to collect some interesting rocks or gems, a few small deposits of ore, sulfur, salt, and things like that. All in all, it was an incredibly beneficial relationship between the local ravens and us, especially as it allowed us to make use of the nights, without losing the group we were following. What made the whole thing even better was that the ravens seemed to actively discourage the group of five from finding the deposits the ravens used to pay us, without those five ever noticing it. The realisation only drove home just how clever these birds were and I made a mental note to keep amicable relations with them, or we might find ourselves with bigger troubles than one would think. They would undoubtedly find a way to pay us back, likely when we least expected it.


    All in all, we spent a week following the five people through the mountains, moving in a fairly large circle until they returned to their community. Without following them, finding the place would have been fairly difficult, whoever had decided on the place had been quite cognisant of natural defences and used them to the fullest. The village was set in a natural bowl with a single entrance carved by a small brook coming down from the hills above, making detection difficult. Furthermore, it was quite clear that the place had been built after the change, from recently harvested timber, roughly hewn rocks, clay and similar crude materials.


    Why they had chosen to forgo the remnants of the old civilisation, I wasn¡¯t sure but even while observing from my construct, I could see that it had done them a lot of good. Maybe it was due to the complete and deliberate disconnect, maybe it was due to the local leadership, but the people acted a lot more like the locals I had seen and met on Mundus than the people I had seen here since the change.


    This community had accepted that the world was changed and simply moved within the changed world, without trying to bring back what was gone. It was, quite frankly, impressive and, in a way, it reminded me of my own actions, courageously moving forward without looking back, or something like that. Amongst all the communities I had seen so far, these people had the best chance to withstand the dangers of this new world and from the fairly expansive and flourishing fields I could see, they didn¡¯t appear to have trouble feeding their people, either. The only fly in the ointment, so to speak, was the visible temple, right in the middle of the bustling and growing village. I couldn¡¯t readily identify which gods it was dedicated to, but even from a distance and through the construct, I could feel a faint, divine presence.


    Now, I only needed to figure out how to get these people to trade with me, or, if the possibility of trading with them didn¡¯t work, how I could steal from them what we needed, as unpalatable as that was.

 Chapter 996

    Finding the town of New Dawn, as the community was called, was only the first step that needed to be taken. Next, we were planning to figure out if the community was limited to the roughly five hundred, maybe five-hundred and fifty, people who were living in that bowl or if there were more around. For that, we checked for tracks and freshly trod paths, finding that the people hadn¡¯t just settled that one bowl but that there were multiple farmsteads in the area, all built recently and connected to the main village.


    It took us most of the night to check these places and by the time dawn was starting to light up the clouds, I had a fair idea how many people actually lived here, a number that came a lot closer to a thousand people than I had anticipated. These people might truly be the ones who had the best chance to withstand anything this new world was throwing at them, making me just a little apprehensive about the obvious and easily visible temple in the middle of their town. But then, maybe I shouldn¡¯t be so surprised, the Gods had a vested interest in making sure that their devouts were well-placed to establish communities and order after the change, allowing them to have their worship become a cornerstone of the newly established society.


    That was doubly true if something I hadn¡¯t fully considered before held true, namely that the EXP I had gained for teaching magic in the past came from Lady Hecate or were granted due to Her blessing. If that was the case, any blessed or anyone connected to a deity might get EXP for teaching something within that deity¡¯s domain, meaning somebody with the right divine connection and a large community to teach might get more EXP than even I did. While I wasn¡¯t sure about the scaling and what diminishing returns might do to that calculation, I couldn¡¯t automatically assume that I¡¯d be the most powerful, it might serve me very well to remain cautious. Sure, levels weren¡¯t the biggest indicator of power, my vast array of elemental affinities and the effects of the Dragon-Touched Trait added a lot to my strength beyond anything I had on Mundus, but that didn¡¯t mean I was invincible, not by a long shot. Cautious paranoia would have to be my constant companion, especially if I decided to visit the village.


    It was a bit of good fortune that the dawning day was cloudy and overcast, with little sunlight managing to force its way through the clouds. So little, in fact, that I could easily move around without getting my body roasted by the hostile rays of its light, meaning it was about the perfect opportunity to visit the town, offering to trade with them.


    After discussing our options, I had decided that I would make the initial contact all on my own, while the other four waited in a nearby cave. The simple fact was, if I was alone, I had the most options to escape, either by stepping into the shadows, by taking to the air or by pushing my body beyond what would normally be possible and outrunning most foes. Sure, some of these tricks could be duplicated by one of the others, but I was the only one who could perform all of them.


    Due to all these considerations, I made sure to move in a wide circle, avoiding to come down directly from the mountains and instead travelled laterally alongside the slope, using the remains of an old hiking trail. It wouldn¡¯t get me to the town, whoever had picked the location had chosen one that wasn¡¯t near any of the old roads or trails, but the trail I was on was close enough to give any traveller a good chance to spot the village, at least if they were fairly perceptive.


    Taking my time, I simply kept walking, before making a show of looking up and sniffing the air, frowning when I noticed the distinct scent of smoke in the wind. If anybody happened to be watching me, they would be able to see that I followed the scent until I came across one of the footpaths connecting the outer farms to the village and decided to follow that path. The whole thing was a bit of play-acting, sure, but while I was relatively confident that nobody was watching, I wasn¡¯t completely certain, thus, I played my role, just in case.


    Maybe it was for the best that I had acted in that way, as the first contact with the villagers didn¡¯t come, as I had expected from my previous observations after I moved through the relatively narrow gap carved by the small river but before that when a shepherd noticed my approach. Sure, I had noticed him and his flock before he noticed me and I¡¯d have been able to avoid them without too much trouble but maybe this was for the best. To my surprise, the guy didn¡¯t even blink an eye at my decidedly non-human looks, something that was fairly obvious thanks to my pale, blue skin, the long ears that peeked out of my hair and said hair, with its veritable rainbow of glimmering sparks, courtesy of my vastly expanded elemental affinities. And yet, he looked at me as if meeting somebody non-human was an everyday occurrence.


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    Soon, greetings between the shepherd and me were exchanged and soon, I could begin to put my story to the test when the guy asked what I was doing in the area, and why I was travelling in general. Maybe it was a good thing that my story wasn¡¯t too complicated or too far from the reality of my experience, namely that I had started travelling after the Change hit and was essentially looking for a place to settle down but no place had called to me yet.


    For once, my usual taciturn manner was quite useful, allowing me to answer questions with very few words and obfuscate things I didn¡¯t want to share without alienating the guy, doubly so when I admitted that I hadn¡¯t talked to anyone for almost two weeks, allowing me to blame my lack of communication on disuse instead of secrecy.


    At that point, the guy, a not-quite adult named Marik, was almost desperate to guide me towards their village but the sheep he was watching couldn¡¯t be brought back just yet, so he could only give me directions. Those sheep were a curiosity in and of themself, back at Apple Gate Farm, all the animals in the vicinity had turned feral but here, an entire flock of sheep was guarded by a single man, with only a stick to guide them and ostensibly to protect them from predators. A quiet and well-concealed Observe told me that Marik was far from able to protect anyone from anything serious, he was barely level twenty, while, to my amusement, the ram was level twenty-two. Granted, when I Observe¡¯d two random sheep for confirmation, I learned that these were only level ten and twelve respectively, meaning the ram was simply an outlier.


    But, regardless of fairly powerful sheep and weak shepherds, I wasn¡¯t here to meet with random people, I was here to trade and so, I continued on my way and soon, I was walking alongside the small river and into the valley the village was in.


    There were no real guards but more than enough people were out and about to notice my approach and one of them came to meet me before I could get into the actual bowl the village was in, let alone close to any of the buildings.


    ¡°Greetings,¡± the middle-aged guy nodded, looking at me with a frown on his face. In turn, I got more than enough time to give him, and the other villagers I could see, a close look, taking note of their clothes and, more importantly, their weapons. None of the clothes I could see was particularly high-quality and I could easily see that it was a mix of old clothes from before the change, often mended, and some new clothes, made from simple homespun fabric. Their weapons, on the other hand, were all made after the change, of that I was fairly confident, but not purely as weapons. Sure, if a hammer or hatchet struck somebody, that body would be in a lot of pain, but they were carrying tools that could be used as weapons, not weapons that also served as tools. The distinction felt important, though I couldn¡¯t quite pin down why.


    ¡°Greetings,¡± I returned the nod before continuing, ¡°I am a traveller, looking to exchange some of my wares and would ask for the protection of guest-right while within your village.¡±


    I had considered the best way to get access to the village for quite some time and decided that, ultimately, acting in an open and upfront manner was the option with the highest chance of success. The temple in the middle of their village spoke of a divine connection and with guest rights upheld by that authority, I wouldn¡¯t have to worry too much, I would be protected. Sadly, from the looks of it the guy who had approached me first didn¡¯t know what to make of me, or my question, looking at me with confusion and a clear inability to answer my request.


    Luckily, he wasn¡¯t the only one to approach me, behind him came a younger man, maybe in his early thirties, wearing similar clothes as the first man but the clothes were their only similarity. The younger man had a clear air of authority and, maybe more importantly, he could easily be the reason why my non-human appearance hadn¡¯t raised any eyebrows, as he had a sizable pair of wings on his back and was radiating a faint air of divine power, underpinning his personal aura that marked him as somebody who had crossed the first divide. And yet, despite all that, he looked at me with friendly, welcoming eyes and a smile on his face.


    ¡°Enter New Dawn without malice and you may leave without hindrance, this I promise on Lady Frigga¡¯s name,¡± he intoned and for a moment, I could feel a smidgen of divine power bind him to his promise, a binding that echoed around me when I accepted his offer in the spirit it was given. For as long as I held the peace within these parts, I would be safe. Somehow, that gave me a great deal of additional confidence.

 Chapter 997

    ¡°You travelled Mundus, didn¡¯t you?¡± the guy asked with a grin on his face, before shaking his head as the grin turned wry. He preempted my response by continuing, ¡°But where are my manners, you may call me Joshua, formerly known as Kelrig,¡± he introduced himself. The way he formulated his introduction made me think that Joshua was his original and currently used first name. In contrast, Kelrig used to be his character-name.


    ¡°Well met, Joshua, you may call me Jade, formerly known as Morgana,¡± I decided to go with complete honesty, the promise on Frigga¡¯s name making me confident enough to be truthful. This way, if I was recognised, I couldn¡¯t be accused of entering under false pretences or with malicious deception and, sadly, recognition wasn¡¯t impossible. By now, what little difference there had been between the face of Morgana and my original face had been washed away, leaving only the height and muscle I had gained after crossing the first divide to differentiate my current form from the form of Morgana.


    ¡°I thought I recognised you,¡± his smile didn¡¯t fade, confusing me just a little as a great deal of coverage about my antics on Mundus had painted me as something of a villain. Quite a bit of that had been deliberate, sure, but that didn¡¯t change the fact that I had pushed the boundaries of what I had considered a game quite a bit and had been impressed by how far they could be pushed. Now, with the benefits of hindsight, I knew that there hadn¡¯t been any artificial boundaries outside of those placed in regards to resurrection, making me wonder just how that part had functioned. Maybe something to do with the method used to create the Avatar bodies in the first place and project the Traveller¡¯s mind into them, but unless and until I understood that original method, I couldn¡¯t even begin to speculate. Anyway, if I was confident in one thing, it was that the method relied on Divine Magic, so not something I could access anyway.


    ¡°Just remember, this isn¡¯t a game any longer, so don¡¯t go all evuuuuuul on us,¡± he grinned, waving his hands around as he stretched the word far beyond what was reasonable. His obvious amusement did a great deal to ease the trepidation I had felt, knowing that he recognised me and knew what I had done.


    ¡°What are you talking about?¡± the guy who had approached me originally asked, looking equally confused and worried.


    ¡°Well, meet Jade, a former Traveller of Mundus and holder of a Legacy, just like me. Only, where my legacy is that of a decently powerful cleric who focused on helping a fairly small village, hers is likely the legacy of the strongest spellcaster, so make of that what you will,¡± Joshua explained and I noticed that the worry only became more pronounced on the other guy¡¯s face.


    ¡°And Jade, this is Garry, not a traveller but a decently skilled farmer now. But you mentioned trade earlier, didn¡¯t you? What did you have in mind, both when it comes to things you are offering and things you would like to have in trade?¡± he asked, returning his focus to me.


    ¡°Well met, Garry,¡± I gave the guy a nod, hiding my amusement at his discomfort, ¡°You said it, I most likely was the most powerful Spellcaster amongst us Travellers and I¡¯d like to believe that I have been able to regain some of that power. A part of it is focused on the incredibly useful skill of Enchantment, allowing me to create magical items with beneficial effects, especially if you don¡¯t have access to a dungeon or some other ready source of such items,¡± I explained, noticing that even more people in the vicinity suddenly seemed to perk up with interest.


    ¡°Permanent enchantments? What sort of things can you do?¡± Joshua immediately asked, not even trying to hide his interest.


    ¡°Depends, obviously. Generally, I¡¯d argue that the most interesting are the classical attribute increases, especially on jewellery, and a nifty enchantment for bladed weapons, causing the wounds caused by them to bleed a lot more than normal and become more difficult to heal. I might be able to fit that particular enchantment on an arrowhead, too, but I doubt it would work all that well, arrows are difficult to enchant permanently. So, yeah, bladed weapons that cause deadly wounds and jewellery that increases attributes,¡± I shrugged, not explaining about my Shadow Bags. Sure, those were incredibly useful and interesting, but they also needed somebody to have Darkness Magic and a decent understanding of its use, meaning it wasn¡¯t something I wanted to just hand out.


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    ¡°I can tell you, that does sound like something we¡¯d be interested in. The weapon-enchantment, do you think that it¡¯d work on a spearhead?¡± he prodded, trying to get a better idea of the utility they¡¯d get out of my skills.


    ¡°It should, but I¡¯d have to experiment. Depends on materials and a few other things. In turn, I need supplies, grains and such, tea, if you have it,¡± I explained, looking around the area and letting my gaze linger on the various well-tended fields. Unless they were utterly incompetent, they should have a decent supply of food, meaning they¡¯d hopefully trade some for enchanted items.


    ¡°That does sound doable. We¡¯ll have to discuss amounts and such, it¡¯s the first time anybody has come to ask for trade like this, especially as you have no plans to remain here if I understand you correctly,¡± Joshua nodded, before looking over to the various buildings set up in the valley.


    ¡°We¡¯ll have to figure out how to house you while you are here, too. So far, we don¡¯t have an inn or guesthouse or anything like that,¡± he continued, his mind obviously considering the logistics of this and not finding an easy or obvious answer.


    ¡°Do you have a quarry or something like that, a rocky area or even just a large stockpile of stone somewhere? Even a fieldstone wall would do, if you don¡¯t mind the wall being destroyed,¡± I asked, thinking back to the gingerstone house I had built when meeting the dryads. Setting one up here would work quite well and the others didn¡¯t expect me back for the next few days, though I had promised to send word if I needed more than three days.


    ¡°There¡¯s a bunch of random stones we discarded when preparing the fields, yes,¡± Garry confirmed, looking quite confused at the question, ¡°What are you going to do with them?¡±


    ¡°As I said, I hold the legacy of the magically most powerful Traveller. Since I have taken it on, I have learned a lot and my power now is far greater than it has been at this level while on Mundus,¡± I explained, my lips twisting into a grin, ¡°While I could conjure stone outright or pull it from the Earth with nothing but a flexing of my mind, I would prefer to keep the disturbance to the foundation of your village to a minimum. So, I would prefer to make use of stone that is already here and not in use.¡±


    By now, I had managed to make even Joshua¡¯s relaxed grin falter, though it wasn¡¯t gone just yet, he just looked like he was holding the smile with nothing but his will and maybe force of habit.


    ¡°If you say so, sure, you can use those stones. It¡¯d make things easier and maybe give you something to do while I ask around and try to figure out how we can do that trading you are interested in,¡± Joshua suggested, driving home just how much he was doing this by the seat of his pants. But then, these people were living deliberately separate from the ruins of our former world, making it no surprise that I¡¯d likely been the first to stumble upon them. Their groups had likely collected all the survivors in the general area, but coming across somebody who was deliberately travelling and not in need of rescue? I had a feeling there were few people like this, like me, wandering around the ruins of our world.


    ¡°That is acceptable, yes,¡± I nodded, turning to Garry, who looked still a little confused, making me think he was regretting that he hadn¡¯t excused himself at the start of the conversation. Alas, he had been curious and now he had been dragged into the situation. Luckily, it had not become a mess just yet and, thanks to Joshua¡¯s promise, I doubted it would turn into one.


    ¡°Garry, why don¡¯t you show her the way? I¡¯ll have to talk to the others, we¡¯ll figure out how to do this. Jade, we¡¯ll talk later,¡± he bowed his head just a little before moving off, back towards the other houses, leaving me with a slightly apprehensive Garry.


    ¡°If you would?¡± I prodded the guy, ¡°And maybe tell me something about this place, I just stumbled across it and thought I¡¯d check it out. He mentioned legacies, so are there others around or just him?¡±


    My prodding was enough to get Garry going and as he walked, he also started to talk, apparently without even considering to censor himself.

 Chapter 998

    Garry turned out to be amazingly accommodating, happily telling me all about their community. I wasn¡¯t quite sure why that was, maybe he was just trying to fill the air with noise to keep himself from getting nervous, or he might be one of those people who babbled when they were feeling stressed, whatever the reason, I was happily listening to him talk and took note of what he was saying.


    It turned out that, yes, there were more legacies around, at least eight of them, not that he admitted to his ignorance of the actual number but from what I could tell, he was mostly relaying rumours and such. But the eight he mentioned and described were clearly legacies, as none of them remained human, while I suspected there were at least two more, simply because the village was composed of ten groups who had found their way to this small valley. And for ten different groups, from different towns and cities, to collectively make their way to a fairly remote and almost hidden valley, without there being any obvious connection?


    Yeah, if that was a coincidence, I¡¯d start worshipping the Sun and solely use Fire Magic in the future. The only question was, were all of these groups led by Legacies, was there only one legacy per group and, maybe the most important question, what did all these people, united by an outside influence plan for the future? If the outside influence was divine, how deeply did it penetrate into the minds of the locals, had it only pushed them to gather and guided them together or was there some sort of implanted effect that would push them to form a theocracy or something like that? And, if there was such an influence, could I risk trying to remove it, while staying within their community? Was trying to break the outside influence on them malicious, if the outside influence came from the deities at least some of them worshipped?


    There wasn¡¯t an easy and obvious answer to that, it came down to the question of how deeply the deities, and the system, had influenced their minds. For many people in our country, even the idea of living in a theocracy would be abhorrent and those who would be willing to accept one would only accept it if it followed their specific religion. Given that I doubted everyone in New Dawn used to be a follower of the Asgardian Gods, I was fairly confident that they wouldn¡¯t just accept a divinely bestowed right to rule. Though, the entire Change might have thrown that out of the window, the need to survive trumped many previously held strong beliefs.


    Shaking my head, I pushed the entire line of thought away, it didn¡¯t really matter. I couldn¡¯t easily start going against the locals, partially due to my oath but mainly because I would have to step in and provide the protection and guidance currently given by the clerics and their divine patrons. This wasn¡¯t like the community at the apartment block, merely hanging on and trying their best without any prospect, they had managed to build a thriving community that outstripped Apple Gate Farm by a large margin. Furthermore, after meeting Joshua, I wasn¡¯t completely confident I¡¯d be able to overcome the local defenders, not without a lot of preparation and large-scale magic. The only way to take down the local powerhouses would be to devastate the entire community, something I wasn¡¯t quite willing to do, even with the obvious divine influence.


    ¡°There we are,¡± Garry interrupted himself, waving towards an area filled with fieldstones, in a fairly narrow patch close to the brook. ¡°What did you have in mind?¡±


    ¡°Nothing much,¡± I grinned and stretched my Earth Sense, trying to get a good idea of the soil situation here, so I knew what I was working with. The immediate feedback told me that there was only a thin layer of soil, and the rest was predominately rock, meaning I had no doubt nobody would want to farm here. Maybe the actual soil had been carried off by the water, I wasn¡¯t sure and not about to investigate but what I could do was reach out with my magic and infuse the rocks.


    ¡°But I can do this,¡± I continued, slowly waving my hands to direct my magic as the rocks started to move and flow, their behaviour a lot closer to a strange, viscous liquid than the solid stones they had been moments before. The method I was employing wasn¡¯t the most efficient way to do what I did, but it worked exceptionally well to reshape the rocks and, just as importantly, it allowed me to show off. If these people wanted to believe in the superiority of the Gods, showing them just how much a mortal spellcaster, though one with Titanic Ambitions, could do might lessen the divine hold.


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    Under the disbelieving gaze of Garry, and a few others who had been nearby and were watching the show from afar, I parted the soil to allow the flowing rock to move down before binding it to the deeper rocks and letting it solidify, giving me a firm foundation to continue my work. Next, I created a smooth floor on that foundation and let walls grow up from there, the rock moving according to my will, complete with holes for the windows and door.


    It was a fairly sizable exertion of my magic but within twenty minutes, I had a solid shelter, complete with walls, a nicely tiled roof and even a door set on stone joints, allowing it to swing open without any problems. Granted, that only worked thanks to a bit of magical lubrication, but the people around me didn¡¯t need to know that.


    They had only seen me create a sturdy, if a little odd-looking, house from nothing but a bunch of loose rocks and take less than half an hour for that feat. It wasn¡¯t big, sure, just about five on ten metres, but it was more than enough for a single person and even a family would be able to make do. Trying to construct anything like that with conventional methods would have taken days, as the only way to get the liquid, flowing rock I had used would be concrete, and even then, you¡¯d have to use metal for the internals. I could get around that by changing some of the stone with my Crystal Magic, allowing me to construct fairly impressive geometry without the need for special materials. I made my own.


    ¡°It looks good, doesn¡¯t it?¡± I asked, giving the stunned Garry a grin. He hadn¡¯t been able to tear his eyes off my construction the entire time and even now, his eyes were wide with disbelief.


    ¡°How?¡± he could only gasp out, his eyes flickering between the house and me.


    ¡°Magic. I¡¯ll have to do some internals, do you want to keep watching?¡± I couldn¡¯t help but grin when I walked in, even as I considered whether I¡¯d be able to make glass. Theoretically, it was nothing but sand, well, silica, fused into a crystal lattice. With my Crystal Magic, I should be able to make some from sand, if I could get it pure enough and for that, I had my Earth Magic. But first, there were more walls to raise and a few other things to finish.


    Once the inside of my small cabin was done, complete with indoor plumbing and central heating. Granted, both only looked like the real thing and I was faking the rest with my personal magic but I wasn¡¯t about to tell the onlookers that. Instead, I moved back out of the house, with Garry still following after me while looking utterly confused in a way that made me think he was doubting his senses. Luckily, that wasn¡¯t my problem and a closer look at the brook revealed that there was quite a bit of sand and gravel sitting at the bottom, materials I could acquire with a bit of Water and Earth Magic.


    Once I had the sand, I could use Earth Magic to separate out the usable material and discard the rest. Then, I had to carefully fuse the sand into glass, using a combination of Crystal Magic and Fire Magic, allowing me to create smooth and clear sheets of glass. It also cost a lot more Astral Power than I had expected but it worked quite well, as did the transformation of window-frames. For a moment, I considered trying to make double-paned glass but decided against it as a waste of time and effort, even if it would have been an excellent demonstration of my superiority, and the superiority of magic.


    Alas, once I placed the magically constructed window frames into the prepared holes and sealed things up, I had an actual house. The final touch, in my eyes, was to smooth out the path towards the front door and add a small sign reading, ¡®The Witch is In¡¯ on one side, while the other told people that the witch was out. Finally, I cast an alarm ward to the path, allowing me to greet people at the door, adding to the image I wanted to portray.


    All of a sudden, I realised that my creation had quite a few parallels with the Grandmother¡¯s abode in Neyto, the thought bringing a wide smile to my face. With a few words of thanks to Garry, I retreated into my new house and closed the door, hoping that the message my image was sending was received as I intended.

 Chapter 999

    Sitting within my newly created shelter, I considered if there were ways to make things more comfortable. After meditating to regenerate the Astral Power I had used to create the shelter, there were no pressing tasks at hand. Here, without knowing who might be nearby, I didn¡¯t want to start any serious experimentation, putting me at a loss of what to do. Exploration would be a possibility but I had a feeling that I¡¯d have visitors sooner rather than later, visitors I wanted to receive on my turf, so to speak. Sadly, as things were, my house was nothing but a shell of bare stone with a bit of glass in the windows and a few added touches that mimicked porcelain. There was nothing warm or homely, making the entire thing give off a fairly uncomfortable aura.


    No, if I wanted to truly impress these people, I needed to demonstrate just how versatile magic was and what better way to drive that point home than to show off the ability to create a home from nothing but some bare rocks?


    At first, I decided to use a bit of blank stone to start experimenting, just using a bit of Earth Magic to accomplish my will but I quickly realised that what I was trying was far beyond simple Earth Magic and opened myself up further, letting more Astral Power flow out of my in an attempt to accomplish what I had set out to do. For once, I didn¡¯t focus on the process, I didn¡¯t even try to consider what Elements or Runes might be needed to fulfil my tasks, I simply let the magic flow and focused on the outcome, in this case, I focused on the appearance I wanted the stone to take.


    As the stone started to shift and morph, I realised that I was channelling far more than just Earth Magic, or even the combination of Earth and Crystal Magic I had used multiple times before. Instead, there was also Lightning, Fire and even Ice Magic in the mix, all moving to fulfil my desire. It wasn¡¯t efficient, far from it, nor did the magic behave as it normally did, making me briefly wonder if I was moving on a different part of the Arcane Path than I normally did. At the same time, I realised that I was already changing my previous decision to start no serious experimentation because what I was doing now, was most certainly that. Not only did it take a large amount of magical power, it was also something completely new.


    But, despite my inexperience with this strange way of using magic, I had enough power to carry through thanks to the Titanic Ambition and Dragon-Touched Traits. It took a bit of time and a lot of power but soon, the process I had only vaguely imagined was completed, leaving me with a curiously changed rock.


    It had started out as an ordinary, round rock from the river, maybe half the size of my fist, washed smooth by water and sand and of a light grey colour, likely lightened by the sun. Now, after my magic was done with it, the rock was stretched out a little, turning it from a roughly egg-shaped object into one that looked almost like a saucer but that could have been done with nothing but Earth Magic. More important was that the surface looked as if it was covered with wallpaper, lightly textured and just a little off-white. It also had a strange warmth to it, making me wonder if I had accidentally changed the thermal properties of the stone, so it would reflect more of my hand¡¯s warmth back instead of transporting it away.


    Fascinated by the change, I started to gently poke and prod the stone, noticing that the internal composition had greatly changed, to the point that I barely recognised the result as stone. It was something I¡¯d have to study for days, maybe even weeks, until I had even the vaguest idea of what I had wrought here, or why it had taken almost as much Astral Power as the construction of my house had taken.


    But this was not something I¡¯d be able to do with the entire house, especially if I tried to use the same method as Titanic Ambition wouldn¡¯t kick in a second time, leaving me without options. Instead, I decided to use a much simpler method, though one with far worse results, and began to construct some furniture from stone, before adding pillows of spongy snow to them. This was a lot less comfortable, especially for people who lacked my affinity for Ice Magic, and wouldn¡¯t nearly last as long as the earthen alternative but it was something I knew how to do which was more important at the moment.


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    Soon, I had a fully furnished house and while the furniture looked a little weird, it was of decently comfortable and would easily last until I decided to move on. The cushions wouldn¡¯t last much longer than that, I¡¯d even have to maintain them with my Astral Power, but it was a minor expenditure that I was ready to accept.


    My musings were, once again, interrupted when the alert-ward I had placed over the path to my house was triggered, informing me that somebody was approaching. It took me a moment to consider how I wanted to act before I stood and went to open the door, revealing a fairly young woman, maybe a year or two younger than I was, looking just a little confused.


    ¡°Greetings,¡± I greeted the young woman, breaking the moment of confusion caused by opening the door before she had a chance to knock, ¡°What brings you to my door?¡±


    ¡°Er, hi,¡± she returned, the confusion on her face remaining strong. A glance at her hands and clothes revealed some streaked dirt, and a bit of grime while her hair looked fairly messy, speaking of the needed labour to make a community work. Out of curiosity, I used a tightly focused and completely concealed Observe, learning that the young woman was only level four, showing just how protected she had been since the Change.


    ¡°I, How did you do this?¡± she stuttered for a moment, before blurting out her question, hands gesticulating at the house I was standing in.


    ¡°This, you ask?¡± I waved a hand, almost mirroring her gesticulating, only that I used a bit of magic to conjure some snow and let it flutter around in the wind I also conjured. ¡°Or maybe this?¡± I waved my hand again, this time channelling a bit of Earth Magic, making the earth tremor right beneath her feet, making her stumble just a little. ¡°Or is it this you seek?¡± I asked a third time, again waving my hand but this time, we were briefly shrouded in Darkness, with some tiny sparks of flame glowing around us, giving the impression that the darkness was stretching far further than it actually did.


    ¡°What is it you seek, I ask again?¡± I pushed, noticing the wide-eyed look on her face and savouring it just a little. Maybe there was a really good reason why the Grandmother, back when she had greeted us that first time, used a Yoda impression, completely confusing me at the time. It was quite amusing, though now I wondered just how on Mundus the Grandmother had known about Star Wars.


    ¡°How do you do this?¡± she blurted out, her voice demanding but moments later, her hand covered her mouth as if she couldn¡¯t believe that she was demanding answers from me.


    ¡°Well, I could answer ¡®Magic¡¯ and be completely truthful. Not useful to you, but truthful. Sadly, it is also the answer easiest to understand, as a better and more complete answer would take a lot of time and probably go over your head,¡± I replied, wondering just what she had in mind.


    ¡°I¡¯m not stupid,¡± she quietly grumbled, before continuing in a normal voice, ¡°Is it something you can teach?¡±


    ¡°Some of it, yes. This doesn¡¯t mean you have the ability to learn, at least not necessarily in a short amount of time. As you might expect, Magic is an expansive field of study,¡± I explained, considering what to teach this young woman. That I would teach her was a given, if only to make sure that there were arcane spellcasters as a counterpoint to the divine spellcasters, lessening the divine hold on the supernatural.


    ¡°Will you teach me?¡± she immediately asked, making me wonder just why she was so desperate to learn magic, or maybe she was simply seeking power and wasn¡¯t interested in the martial path. Either way, she might be a suitable first student in this village. Hopefully, there¡¯d be more, I wasn¡¯t certain that a student this impetuous would be a good thing overall. But first, I needed to figure out what she could be taught easily, and where her affinities lay.


    ¡°We shall see. Enter, and we can discuss your interest in detail,¡± I offered, stepping back from the door.

 Chapter 1000

    With the somewhat disquieted young woman following after me, I walked into what I had designated as my living room, considering for just a moment how I wanted to play this. A part of me wanted nothing more but to channel the Grandmother for all I was worth, acting as a wise, but not necessarily benevolent, entity able to guide this young woman on whatever path she sought to tread. But, if I wanted to act that way, the props all around me didn¡¯t quite fit that role, if anything, I had set the house up in an as homely fashion as possible, projecting a simple, if powerful, image, not that of a mysterious witch. Unless I was careful, the image I projected would be one of the wicked witch living in her gingerbread house and waiting to bake children into pies instead of the image of wise Galadriel, living in an immortal forest and watching the world through a scrying pond.


    ¡°Now, have a seat, introduce yourself and tell me why you have sought me out,¡± I ordered the young woman, after taking a seat myself, briefly rueing that I didn¡¯t have any decent tea to serve, or any tea at all. Alas, the tea was gone and as of yet, I hadn¡¯t been able to find any new tea. But what I could do was form a pair of stone cups and fill them with water, giving each of us something to hold and, if desired, drink.


    Still wide-eyed, the young woman took a seat, studying me for a moment before speaking. In turn, I had more than enough time to study her myself, not that her appearance told me all that much about her. Sure, the dirt smudges and stains on her hands and clothes spoke of manual labour, gardening or something like that, but the overall lack of muscles made me think it was something recent. All in all, if not for the dirty clothes and generally dishevelled appearance, I would have thought her to be a young professional in some sort of office-job, or maybe a college student. Similarly, I could almost see where her olive skin was carrying the marks of recent, hard labour while the rest of the visible skin lacked those marks and even her wavy, black hair spoke of the difference in circumstances, something I would have suffered under, too, if not for my magic.


    ¡°My name is Maria Perez, I¡¯m twenty-four and have been working on my media management master¡¯s degree until this all happened,¡± she introduced herself, though I wasn¡¯t quite sure about her chosen career. Media Management meant working with people, who would voluntarily do that? Certainly not me, but if it was good for her, I wouldn¡¯t judge her too harshly. However, what I considered curious was that her introduction focused on the world before it had changed, now, her degree, or almost any degree, really, wouldn¡¯t be worth the material it was printed on.


    ¡°As for what I want,¡± she continued, only to falter, obviously uncertain how to put her desires into words. Or maybe embarrassed, it wasn¡¯t easy to tell. ¡°I don¡¯t know, but I know what I don¡¯t want. I don¡¯t want to be reduced to a farmer, scrabbling in the dirt and mud, I don¡¯t want to be pushed into the role of housewife, serving some husband,¡± she growled, a sneer forming on her face as frustrations bubbled up within her.


    A part of me could empathise somewhat but at the same time, I knew just how good she had it since the change. The alternative to being a farmer and working the fields would be to fight and hope to survive, or to simply die. There weren¡¯t any cushy office jobs, at least not that I knew of, so I wasn¡¯t sure what I could do to help her there.


    Studying her for a moment, I opened myself up, looking at what little Astral Power was flowing through her body and what elements her soul was attuned to, getting a better sense for her as an individual. There was no obvious standout element in her soul, nothing that screamed to me she¡¯d be able to become a powerful spellcaster and the volume of Astral Power wasn¡¯t anything to write home about, either, even for her level.


    ¡°Difficult,¡± I admitted, considering what I might be able to do for her when I had an idea. Lia had been planning to experiment with the vampire transformation some more and while I had no interest in having Maria join us on our travels, we might be able to give her that little, initial push to become something more. ¡°You seek individual independence but to become independent, you need to be strong enough to stand on your own, alone, if necessary. You saw what I could do, create a living space for myself within a short amount of time, that is one reason why I can be independent, living and wandering according to my will and whim. Another way would be to hold the strength to fight and overcome all those who would chain you. That is what it all comes down to at the end, Power. And right now, you don¡¯t have that power, you are far from it,¡± I explained, noticing that there was anger, greed and a bit of defiance in her eyes.


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    ¡°How do I get that power?¡± she immediately asked, forcing me to hide a grin that wanted to form on my face.


    ¡°Depends. You can train your body, learn how to fight and walk down the Martial Path, the Path of the Warrior. It will take some time and a lot of effort but there is no reason why you wouldn¡¯t be able to become something more than you are right now. Maybe not strong enough to stand at the top of the world and able to take on anyone who would want to chain you, but more than right now? That would certainly be possible if you put in enough effort,¡± I told her, noticing the look of distaste that flickered across her face at the idea.


    ¡°My own path, the Arcane Path, the Path of Magic, will be a difficult one for you. As you are right now, you lack some crucial qualities needed to tread that path, meaning it would be slow and you will likely never reach anything even close to a summit,¡± I shrugged, shattering some of her hopes.


    ¡°As I am right now?¡± she jumped on the small trap I had placed in my words, the grin I had suppressed earlier threatening to become a full-blown smirk.


    ¡°Indeed, there are some qualities you either have to be born with or acquire them with other methods. You haven''t been born with them and the other methods are somewhat troublesome,¡± I continued to bait my trap, even while realising that I would have to tread carefully myself, so I didn¡¯t accidentally go too far and run afoul of my promise to do no harm while within their community. Not that I considered allowing a young woman to make her own path to be harmful but some might feel that I was offering her a bad deal.


    ¡°What do you mean, acquire them? And what sort of qualities are you talking about?¡± she pressed, her previously subdued demeanour washed away by her desire to become something more.


    ¡°Different people have different affinities for different types of magic, allowing them to wield these types of magic with far greater ease than others. If you wish to become truly great, or lack the innate power to make do without an affinity, you need to play to your affinities. Sadly, you do not have an affinity to any type of magic, at least not to any I can detect,¡± I shrugged, noticing how her eyes narrowed for a moment.


    ¡°But there are ways to acquire these affinities? Or at least one of them? And what do you mean by lacking the innate power?¡± she continued to push forward, apparently completely convinced in her course of action.


    ¡°There are indeed ways to gain affinities you do not currently have and there also are ways to improve your innate powers. With magic, anything is possible, if one has enough power. Magic, in and of itself, it the impossible made manifest,¡± I continued to tempt her, watching her desires flare to the point that I could almost smell them on her soul.


    ¡°What do I need to do?¡± she asked and now, I only had to give her the right directions and allow her to walk the path forward herself, telling her to approach a place higher up in the mountains a few nights later. Getting there and gathering the supplies she needed would be left up to her, a test, as I phrased it.


    In a way, it was a test. Either she would show and Lia, Luna and I had a voluntary test subject or she would not, in which case we could simply move on. And if she showed up and our test was successful? Well, in that case, a newly created vampire, hopefully imbued with a bit of magical talent, would need supplies. However. if the experiment failed, I would gladly take her supplies as a donation for my group.


    Regardless of the outcome, if she showed, I would benefit.

 Chapter 1001

    Maria might have been the first to approach me, but she was far from the only one. After she left, I didn¡¯t have to wait all that long for the next soul to approach me, drawn by the lure that was my house. Or maybe the lure was power and the house was simply an easily visible representation of that power, either way, it worked out like honey to lure flies. Maybe it even worked a little too well, as people seemed to wear out the rocky path to my home, though, amusingly, they made sure that nobody ever tried to enter while another was in.


    One after another, all of them searching to become something more, to regain some of the freedom and comfort they had enjoyed before the world had Changed. Not that I could supply that sort of power but it was obvious that I had the power and they wanted to understand how I got it, or wanted to acquire it outright.


    In some cases, I helped them to step onto the Arcane Path, guided them into the Astral River and even quietly spoke about Lady Hecate. The last was mainly to provide a counterpoint to the currently represented deities but given that I somehow received a not insignificant EXP boost whenever I managed to convert somebody was a convenient bonus. Almost as if a certain higher power had an interest in getting converts, or maybe getting converts in this place, I wasn¡¯t sure and didn¡¯t really care. I got my EXP, both for teaching and for converting and, amusingly, it was enough to push me up to level eighty-nine. I also gained a few skill points, Earth and Crystal for the work on the house, Astral Meditation and Mind Magic for the teaching and a few in Enchanting, though some of those had been from my earlier work.


    And that was only for those who had an innate talent for magic. They needed another path but, as their lack of effort clearly demonstrated, they didn¡¯t have an interest, or the fortitude, to traverse the Martial Path, or they would have already started their journey. It didn¡¯t take a lot of direction to take a suitably heavy object and start bludgeoning your foes with it and that, at the end of the day, was the foundation of the Martial Path. Hit things, hard.


    Similarly, they didn¡¯t have what it took to draw divine attention. As things were, you either had to be innately gifted for divine magic, like Luna was, or you had to hold a legacy, otherwise, the deities didn¡¯t actively show an interest in you. The local clerics might have inducted a few people but even they understood that taking in those with the best innate qualities would, ultimately, give them the best results.


    So, they needed a different path. A path I was quite willing to help them on, though I wasn¡¯t quite certain if I should consider it part of the Arcane Path or if it was a different path altogether, the Path of Monsters. While I didn¡¯t tell them what they were signing up for, I gave them enough direction and instruction to make their way towards predetermined sides, where I would meet them. There, they would serve as test subjects for a few of my more interesting abilities and, if things went well, would become something more.


    The experiments Luna and I performed on animals had worked out quite well and now, with a group of suitable human resources just stumbling into my grasp, I could see other, even more interesting, experiments in the future. What would happen if we incorporated the wildness of Lightning Magic into a human while keeping them somewhat stable with Life Magic? Could we induce affinities or, if not, would it be possible to take the smallest affinity within a human and grow it into something more? Because every human had some Astral Power, the problem was that most didn¡¯t have enough to make something worthwhile of it. But what if I could take what they had and grow their predominant affinity, no matter how miniscule it currently was, into something powerful?


    So many questions, so many experiments and so few test subjects. Hopefully, they would prove viable, just like I hoped that at least some of the experiments I had cooked up with Lia would work out. There were enough people here that losing a few of their lowest wouldn¡¯t impair them, especially if there was a chance, though maybe a small one, that they would receive something special in return. I doubted that those in charge would agree, but they didn¡¯t need to know what individuals came to me for.


    Not that they didn¡¯t visit, too. It seemed that, thanks to the prevalence of Divine Magic, there was a certain curiosity in regards to the Arcane, primarily elemental, Magic I wielded. Some of the tales told by the Legacies about Mundus, their personal experiences there and, maybe most importantly, the numerous threads on the forum, some of which had featured my deeds, all those diverse stories roused their interest, to say nothing of my original offer to trade enchanted goods for food.


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    Joshua was the first of those in charge who approached me, alongside their primary quartermaster, the one who kept track of their food supply. To my surprise, the Quartermaster, Hauke, wasn¡¯t really interested in any of the enchanted items I had prepared but asked questions about the house and what I could do with stone, how long it would last, how hard I could make the stones, things like that. When I inquired about his reasons, he explained that one of their biggest problems at the moment was a need to grind their grains into flour. While the physical effort wasn¡¯t difficult to produce, thanks to a plethora of system-enhanced physiques and attributes, getting the mill-mechanism to work was difficult, due to the tolerances and the material involved.


    I didn¡¯t see a problem helping with that and offered that I could shape the millstone as easily as I had shaped the house and would likely be able to make it far harder than natural rock had any right to be, though it would take a bit of time and effort, both of which I¡¯d expect to be compensated for. From there, the negotiations began, not just for my time and effort but also for the expertise needed to create and enchant the different items they were interested in.


    It took a bit of negotiating, but they eagerly traded their food and, from what I could tell, considered it a good deal. In turn, I soon noticed the fairly obvious scheme they had concocted, namely to primarily offer me fairly heavy and unwieldy supplies, like pumpkin, squash, sweet potatoes and similar crops, instead of easily storable grains like rice or corn. If I couldn¡¯t carry off my traded goods, I¡¯d either have to leave behind what I couldn¡¯t carry, and trying to carry off a pumpkin the size of my torso sounded like a massive hassle, or I¡¯d have to stay until I consumed the food they traded me. Either way, they¡¯d win, by either reducing the price they had to pay or by slowly integrating me into their community.


    Thankfully, I had my magical bags, meaning their scheme was doomed from the start but as they offered an excellent deal, ostensibly to make up for the unwieldy nature of their goods, I was happily going along with them. It truly was the essence of trade, both parties shamelessly cheating each other and taking advantage as much as possible, without stooping to truly immoral acts. Not that such acts would be all that easy, Identify was readily used on the items I offered and, in turn, on the goods they put out, allowing both parties to see exactly what they¡¯d get.


    Other than trading with them, I also learned a great deal about the community itself and quickly realised that I¡¯d been right, there had been no coincidence involved in its formation. Well, at least not on a macro scale, there had been numerous coincidences involved on individual levels, but the reason they had all gathered in this area? That had been no coincidence, that was divinely inspired.


    The initial groups moving into the area had all been led by somebody holding a legacy and travelling down the Divine Path, all of them inspired to gather as many people and supplies in their home-town as they could before moving. Those fairly large groups attracted attention from other groups, some of which had been led by other legacies, leading to them banding together and forming what was now New Dawn.


    Once the village was founded, it flourished rapidly, thanks to multiple events that were just too convenient not to have been meddled with. Finding a small herd of sheep that hadn¡¯t broken their domestication, a convenient source of water that just happened to dig its way through the mountain in a location that allowed them to irrigate their fields with ease? Those were just two out of many coincidences that allowed them to flourish as they had.


    Knowing that the gods had put this settlement here, I started to look for the reason, as I doubted the gods would pick a spot on a whim. Sure, there might be some mundane reason, something as simple as that it was roughly equidistant from the various towns these people had started at, or that it had particularly fertile farmland, was easy to defend or a number of different reasons, but I doubted it was anything so mundane.


    Or rather, I doubted that mundane circumstances were completely disconnected from supernatural influences, one was caused by the other. Though, whether a glacier above an Ice Nexus was caused by the Nexus or if the Nexus formed in that particular spot because of the glacier, I wasn¡¯t sure. And, with the current state of the Change¡¯d world, I doubted that it truly mattered, the supernatural had been dug into our world and now, we had to deal with it.


    So, trying to figure out why this spot was so special and the way it was, I started to investigate the Astral River, delving deeply into it and analysing its currents, searching for meaning.

 Chapter 1002

    Working with Hauke to produce a grindstone was quite an interesting experience. While I had something of an idea of how a simple mill would look like, I had never really thought about how it all worked and fit together. Luckily, the locals had collected some books on the subject and we went from there. The initial, simple handmills I created were for personal use and mostly helped me to start working on the solidity of my stones.


    Taking a simple rock and shaping it into a convex wheel wasn¡¯t too hard, nor was taking a second rock and shaping it into the counterpart. Creating what could be called ball bearings to place them into the middle of the wheel and furrows to guide the grain from the centre outwards, as the moving upper part ground it was similarly easy, though it took a bit more care, especially as it needed some fairly tight tolerances. The distance between the two wheels needed to be small enough to grind the grain without being so tight that the wheels got stuck. Luckily, I could manipulate the shaft directly and lengthen it just enough to create a gap between the two parts, though I would have to make sure the ball bearings that allowed the upper wheel to rotate with minimal resistance would be strong enough to withstand the stress.


    But that was the biggest difficulty anyway, to make a material strong enough to withstand the constant grind without getting worn down. For that, I started with simple rock and began to compress it with Runic Magic. Before, I had used the Compress Earth Rune primarily when pushing aside earth, compressing it into the soil around the tunnel I was creating to make my construction stronger but now, I was working directly with stone. Higher density could translate into a higher hardness if I changed the stone¡¯s internal structure, something I could do fairly well with Crystal Magic. But it needed serious and constant effort, alongside far more Astral Power than I was fully comfortable with.


    Just as I finished the first ball bearing, now smaller than the rock I had started with, a notification caught my eye and I felt a smile form on my lips. My Earth Rune Mastery had just hit level thirty and I had just the Rune I wanted to search for. Immediately, I let my mind drop into the Astral River, searching out the strands filled with Earth Magic and letting their slow, thumbing rhythm carry my mind for a moment, before drawing the power into myself as I focused on my purpose.


    Within the Earth, constant pressure and various processes created stone, either by compressing and calcifying organic material or when the molten blood of the Earth cooled and hardened, there were multiple processes that could create stone, the bones of the Earth. But they all had something in common, the material hardened. And that commonality was what I was after, the simple concept that separated the Earth from the Stone. Hardness.


    Lines started to form within my mind¡¯s eye and as the slow, thumbing beat of the earth drummed into my mind, those lines formed into a symbol, a rune I immediately recognised. Harden, to solidify and strengthen, it was a rune that spoke of the enduring nature of rock, even as it amplified the disadvantage, the harder a material was, the more difficult it would be to bend and accept change, the harder it was, the more likely it was to break when sufficiently stressed. There was no compromise with the enduring stone, it would endure until it would break.


    Blinking my eyes back open, I felt a wide grin play across my lips, even as my mind started to wonder. Was rock really the only concept I could use, at least when it came to a primary material? There also was the adjacent Crystal Magic and now, after letting myself be immersed in the Astral River and that deceptively simple concept, I began to get ideas.


    Ideas could be wonderful, especially if things worked out as I thought they might and if so, I may have had the most fascinating breakthrough and something I wanted to experiment with.


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    Asking the locals for some Charcoal was easily accomplished but from that point, things started to get a little dicey. The Charcoal itself didn¡¯t register to my Crystal Magic, nor could I readily sense it with my Earth Magic, it felt like wood or roots. Something that was there but akin to a blank space, it existed but was outside of Earth Magic¡¯s purview.


    Where direct magic failed, I began to work indirectly. I needed intense concentration but I had worked with multiple formations in the past, while on Mundus, and now, I was doing the same once more, forming one five Rune Formation at the top, a construct of nothing but Compress runes, and a second formation on the bottom, again, nothing but Compress runes, all pushing in the same direction. All pushing against that single, simple piece of Charcoal I had placed in the middle.


    My first try was utter failure, the runes didn¡¯t sync up perfectly, crumbling the charcoal and spreading it across the ground as the forces that should have cancelled out didn¡¯t cancel out, so I needed another way to accomplish my goal. But it would have to be done later, this wouldn¡¯t be something I could do with a single experiment, I¡¯d need a lot more time. Now, I had something else to do, namely, I had a millstone to make. Or rather, I had a mill to make.


    With the Harden Rune, making small handmills was a piece of cake. Runic Formation of Compression, Hardness and Stone allowed me to remake the normal stones with ease, forming them into precise shapes with incredible hardness. It took some Astral Power, sure, and I needed to make sure that the stability didn¡¯t come from magic running through it, magic that would soon fade back into the Astral River, like the Astral Power shaped into conjured objects did, but once I figured that particular trick out, I could make a working mill within minutes.


    When I tried to turn the mill initially, it went incredibly smoothly, surprising me a great deal. Sure, it took a bit of force to get it going, the upper millstone was almost twice my weight despite its relatively small radius and thickness, but once the millstone was moving, it was moving with ease, thanks to the perfectly round ballbearings I had placed under the shaft. The best thing was that the entire assembly was made from non-corrosive rock, making it as resilient to water as ceramics were, so using water as a lubricant was absolutely no problem.


    When I showed the result to Hauke, he immediately got some grain and poured it into the receiver, watching as the millstone slowed down from the grinding. We needed to apply some extra force to keep it going but not too much and soon, there was slightly coarse flower coming out of the mill. Maybe it wasn¡¯t perfect but it most certainly was a step in the right direction and from the looks of it, Hauke was enamoured.


    Not that he was the only one. When others caught sight of the mill and the ground flour, multiple people looked at me with covetous eyes, while their hands flexed, making me think they had been forced to grind flour between rocks or with similarly labour-intensive methods.


    The small handmill was only a proof of concept. Once it was done, and working well, I was asked to make a few more, which was done quite easily, but then, Hauke presented me with his real plan. A water-driven mill, using the river that ran through the village to provide the physical power needed, letting them grind their flour without the effort it had required thus far. Amusingly, he already had a plan for one prepared, though we needed to adjust it to the differences in material, as I wasn¡¯t working with wood, just stone and crystal.


    Not that it stopped me, I could shape my materials in ways completely impossible by ordinary means, allowing me to form stones into shafts and gears, reinforcing the material so it would withstand the torsion forces stone normally didn¡¯t take very well. But it worked, even if I felt as if I was earning my keep while building quite well.


    Sadly, not everyone was as enthused as Hauke, Joshua and the various people who had come to me for advice and looking for power. No, during the evening, after I had completed the water mill and even received a bag of freshly ground flour to reward my efforts, things took a turn for the annoying.


    The local Sunna worshipper, who apparently had been out of town for the last few days, had returned and he was not happy with me. And he wanted me to know that.

 Chapter 1003

    The first sign of trouble was the sound of raised voices, a little too faint for me to make out individual words but loud enough to penetrate the sturdy stone walls of my house. At first, I didn¡¯t think it would be of concern to me, people argued at times and often those arguments resulted in raised voices. Or in bloodshed, but it seemed that New Dawn managed to avoid that, at least for now. Eventually, that would change but I hoped it wouldn¡¯t happen too soon, the Change had forced society to be rebuilt and a small, idealistic part of me wished for a peaceful society, without any pain or trouble. It would never happen, realistically I doubted it could ever happen, sapience brought with it ego and with ego came conflict, it was unavoidable.


    Alas, in this case, the trouble wasn¡¯t as benign as some argument over dishes, work or passion and far too soon, I could hear that the voices became clearer, clear enough to let me recognise Joshua¡¯s voice in the noise. That realisation was enough to bring me to my feet and towards the front of my house so I could look out of the window.


    There, coming from the village and along the small path along the river, was a group of locals, clearly coming towards my house. I could recognise Joshua and Hauke in their group but from the looks of it, the group wasn¡¯t homogenous, it looked as if the two of them were arguing with the four others, especially the fairly impressive leader.


    It was a massive centaur, the equine part level with the heads of those around him, while the humanoid torso towered above them, making me wonder just where that guy slept, he couldn¡¯t fit into any of the buildings I had seen thus far. His existence also added to the explanation why the locals hadn¡¯t been bothered with my clearly non-human appearance, between the winged Joshua, a pair of elves I had seen from a distance, somebody who had, back when Road to Purgatory started, decided to indulge their wish to become a cat-person and now the centaur, they had been exposed to multiple obvious non-humans, most of whom had a far more alien appearance than I. Compared to the centaur the size of a house, a slightly different skin tone, some glittery hair and pointy ears were negligible.


    But it wasn¡¯t just the size that made the figure so imposing, he was also carrying a massive spear and a shield in his hands. Additionally, he was clad in armour, mostly leather from what I could tell but reinforced with metal. The biggest indication of the coming trouble and the headaches it would bring with it came from the symbol of Sunna he had somehow made on his shield, the golden wheel of fire glinting proudly in the dying light of the day.


    The group behind him only added to the impression of coming trouble, they were all armed and armoured, something one would normally consider unnecessary in their hometown, but maybe they had just returned from some excursion and hadn¡¯t had time to change and store their gear. I doubted it but I wouldn¡¯t be the one to launch the first attack, that would make me the bad guy. Instead, I quickly considered my options and decided to trust the protection given by guest-rights but make sure that even if they decided to violate those rights, I wouldn¡¯t be inconvenienced.


    A quick move through my house made sure I had all the supplies I had traded for and the items I hadn¡¯t given away yet, storing everything in my magical bags, before moving towards the front of the house. By now, the voices were close enough to let me hear their argument, it sounded as if the centaur wasn¡¯t happy about my presence in their village while Hauke and Joshua were defending me, pushing back against the angry centaur.


    Channelling some magic into the structure around me, I reinforced the door, turning it into just another piece of the wall, while removing the glass from one of the windows. This way, the glass couldn¡¯t be shattered and the shards used against me, my Ice Magic had made me well aware of the dangers posed by shards, even if they were fairly small. They could seriously injure somebody and their sharp edges meant they could cause serious harm by accidentally striking weak spots. I had no desire to find out if my endurance was high enough to withstand a shard of glass hitting my eyes, as I was fairly certain the answer would be no.


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    ¡°Joshua, what brings you by?¡± I asked, breaking the concealment granted to me by my cloak and catching the attention of the entire group, just as they were moving on the last bit of path towards my house. There were still some five metres between us but they were close enough for me, especially as their arguing distracted them further. Like this, I was able to catch them off guard just a little and take the initiative, allowing me to set the tone and turn a confrontation into a conversation. At least that was what I hoped.


    ¡°Jade, I hope the evening finds you well,¡± Joshua responded, while the centaur was a bit out of sorts. He likely had imagined a plan for the confrontation and that plan had gone off the rails already. ¡°Meet Lorgar, yes, that¡¯s what he wants to be called,¡± Joshua continued, introducing the Centaur, only to be interrupted by the rude equine.


    ¡°What are you cursed monster doing here?¡± the centaur bellowed, his voice loud enough to make Hauke flinch while I felt a frown form.


    ¡°Right now or in general?¡± I asked, carefully keeping my voice as bland and unimpressed as possible. At the same time, I used a concealed Observe to get a better idea of what I was dealing with and couldn¡¯t help but feel my eyes widen when I learned that their entire group was above level seventy, while Lorgar had an impressive level seventy-nine. Not quite my equal but the five of them were easily the strongest people I had seen thus far who weren¡¯t in my party.


    ¡°Why are you defiling our town with your presence?¡± he yelled, making me shake my head just a little while poking my ear with my little finger as if trying to get rid of the ringing. Not that he had been able to actually damage my hearing but he certainly was getting on my nerves with his attitude and loud voice. Maybe due to the mocking gesture, maybe because his anger was getting the better of him, his shield started to shine with a golden glow that made my skin prickle, just like sunlight did.


    Just as I was about to blast him for the attack on my person, a massive presence settled over the area, so powerful that it didn¡¯t even need to try to overwhelm me, its mere existence did. However, the presence was clearly not aimed towards me, if anything it was shielding me, making the prickling sensation cease immediately.


    Following the draw of that presence, my eyes found Joshua, only that he didn¡¯t look like he normally did. His wings, normally adorned with tan feathers similar in colour to the hair on his head, were on fire but the flames obviously didn¡¯t hurt him and from those flames, I could feel the presence. Similarly, his eyes were alight with golden flames as he stared at the five who had come to confront me, especially at Lorgar.


    Those five, in turn, didn¡¯t fare quite so well. Four of them were on the ground, either kneeling or lying flat, while Lorgar was the only one remaining on his hooves, even if he looked as if he was carrying a millstone on his back.


    ¡°Enough,¡± an alien voice coming from Joshua¡¯s mouth commanded. It sounded mostly female and I was instantly reminded of Lady Hecate¡¯s voice. Both voices had an overwhelming resonance to them, but where Lady Hecate was speaking with three distinct voices and tones, this voice sounded almost like a chorus, countless slightly different voices speaking in perfect harmony.


    ¡°A promise was made in my name and you will keep that promise,¡± the voice declared, with the obvious ¡®or else¡¯ remaining unspoken. But, given the way Lorgar sank to his knees under the weight of Frigga¡¯s presence, I had no doubt that the command would be heeded. Though, at the same time, I was fairly certain that this wasn¡¯t the end of it, not by a long shot. Frigga¡¯s declaration meant I wouldn¡¯t be harmed while I was in town, it said nothing about shielding me after I left.


    Moments later, the presence faded and Joshua¡¯s body was freed, causing him to stumble but Hauke was kind enough to catch him, leaving all eight of us discombobulated and uncertain of what would happen next. Well, not quite uncertain, there was one thing we all knew wouldn¡¯t be done, namely, the conflict was over. Or else.

 Interlude: Burning Sun

    The question of how things could have gone so wrong in just a few short days was one that Lorgar pondered incessantly. He and his boys, as he liked to call the rest of his group in the privacy of his mind, regardless of the fact that he was the youngest by almost a decade, had been out, hunting monsters and trying to understand the insanity of this changed world a little better, letting their home, the recently established town of New Dawn, to the defended by the other Legacies. Nothing bad should have happened, not while six people who had experienced Mundus and regained some of their powers from before kept watch over the town. Even without those six, there were multiple groups who had taken to exploring and levelling without the guidance of a Legacy and while those groups were generally weaker than one led by somebody with experience, that didn¡¯t mean they were actually weak. No, they could face most things out in the wild, especially after the Legacies holding a connection to the divine had begun to convert people. Talking about their Gods, leading the people in prayer as they had learned on Mundus, condensing the faith of the community into pendants that could create miracles in times of dire need, acting as a conduit between the mortal realm and the divine was not an easy task. It was far easier to just go out with his boys and hunt monsters, where nothing was important but his spear, his shield, his faith and the comrades at his side. Sure, it was dangerous but it was also straight-forward and simple.


    It was strange, to have faith and trust in something he couldn¡¯t explain, something he doubted anyone could explain. At first, back on Mundus, he had considered Sunna to be just another part of Road to Purgatory, some incredibly clever trick of programming and story-telling but as he had travelled through Mundus and seen more and more of the land and its people something had shifted, leaving him confused. Did people have to be composed of carbon and be born of human parents? Were humans to only ones deserving to be considered people or should anything smart enough be considered a person and treated with the respect that label deserved? There had never been a good answer, neither within his own mind nor in the talks within the Crusade of Light or anywhere else, and the topic had been discussed. With the benefit of hindsight, there were many points at which people could have realised that Road to Purgatory had been more than a game, but at the time, it had been a lot easier to believe that it was just clever programming and story-telling, not that they literally visited a different world. One with monsters in it.


    Just like their own world now had monsters in it and, when he and the boys had returned to New Dawn, he had noticed a strange sensation in the air, almost like a static charge or that strange, tingling feeling one might get right before a thunderstorm hit. There was something strange going on, and he needed to find out what, so he had given the boys the usual signal to prepare for combat and started to investigate. There had been a moment of hesitation, the town was supposed to be safe, but after months of regular combat and a variety of strange situations, there was an automatic trust, accompanied by the knowledge that it was better to err on the side of caution. If they went in prepared to defend themself and there was no attack, nobody would be hurt. If they went in trusting that nothing bad would happen and something did? Well, then they¡¯d be in serious trouble.


    Looking around the village, nothing stood out, there was no obvious source for the strange sensation he was feeling until he noticed something near the river, something new. It was a simple building, the waterwheel indicated a mill, but the construction was completely different from the simple, sturdy buildings that dominated the rest of the village. This building looked like it was made from singular, large pieces of stone, stacked together like something he had built years ago from legos, only that these legos were far larger than they realistically should be. It looked completely impossible but here the building was, defying his sense of realism.


    However, while the building was strange it wasn¡¯t the source of his strange feeling. But it was new, so it might be connected and he approached, immediately recognising Hauke who was doing something inside. What he learned from the man managed to fill him with trepidation. A newly arrived legacy, some sort of blue-skinned elf, able to shape stone with her magic and trade enchanted goods for food, that didn¡¯t sound too bad on its face but connecting the strange, unpleasant sensation he was feeling with that new arrival? That spoke of bad news and bad news in town was seriously bad news. Who knew what this new arrival might have already done to the town, without them here to ward things off?


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    Sure, Kelrig, or Joshua as the guy had been called before things had changed, was here as were a few of the others, but if they had allowed this situation to occur, they might already be compromised. Couldn¡¯t they feel the wrongness in the air?


    With a new avenue to investigate, Lorgar continued, his search focused on the other Legacies, trying to find out what they knew. And the more he learned, the worse the clenching sensation in his gut became, this wasn¡¯t just bad news, this might well be catastrophic. Morgana, the name had been bandied around the chat servers used by the Crusade of Light on a regular basis, mainly because Morgana had been a regular topic on the forum and in trailers, teasers and similar promotional material released by Pantheon Entertainment, making the face and name a recognisable one. A target, a foe, somebody they could define themself against, as every hero needed their villain and Morgana was an excellent one, visible, powerful, but also singular and unlikely to ever be met in a direct confrontation until the beta ended. Afterwards, they could have looked for another foe, but during the beta, Morgana had been the one.


    At least until Morgana and her actions started to turn insane. Life dissections? Cursing people in some strange way that lingered even after they had been sent to respawn? Destroying small villages and raising the inhabitants as undead? Wiping out entire towns?


    There was an obvious escalation in Morgana¡¯s actions and those were only the ones that had been publicised, nobody knew what horrors the diseased mind guiding the avatar came up with when nobody was watching. And now, that mind was here, in their town, doing something that made him feel like disaster was about to happen.


    By the time he came across Kelrig, Lorgar was almost beyond rationality, his worry had pushed him to the point that he was sweating, his tail, still a slightly foreign concept to him, lashing about in agitation and his mind focused on a single, fairly simple, concept. He had to protect New Dawn, the light of their town couldn¡¯t be extinguished like so many lights on Mundus had been. So many lights, so many lives.


    Even as Kelrig tried to reason with him, he pushed on, especially once he was told where to find Morgana, or whatever she called herself now. Some distance outside of their town but still within the valley they were occupying, he saw another of these strange, impossible lego-like buildings and immediately knew that it was his destination, maybe his destiny. There was something that drove him to push harder as they marched towards the building, even as he tried to reason with Kelrig and Hauke, neither of whom seemed to understand the danger.


    This wasn¡¯t just somebody who had played a game, this was somebody who had taken delight in the pain and suffering she had caused, somebody who had slaughtered numerous people and incredibly caused the death of countless more. How could they be so blind? Was it that they lacked the light, that they just couldn¡¯t see the darkness around Morgana?


    When the wretched woman started to talk to them in that mocking voice, as if nothing was wrong, while her influence lingered all over the town, something within Lorgar started to snap. This mockery just couldn¡¯t be borne, he couldn¡¯t allow her to destroy New Dawn. He felt righteous fury fill up his entire body as he bellowed out, only to find himself standing against something entirely different. A weight that pushed him down, forcing his anger to flee and leave him panting, almost on his knees.


    But this was merely a setback, he and his boys would make sure that Morgana wouldn¡¯t destroy this world, as she had destroyed the World of Mundus. They had a duty to accomplish and he would not falter.

 Chapter 1004

    The silence settling over the little tableau was a confused one. Well, Joshua looked like he was pretty much out of it, having a deity use you as a sockpuppet to speak into the mortal realm must be quite exhausting, but the five guys who had come to confront me looked almost as stunned. Granted, they were still on the ground, while Lorgar was swaying as if he had been punched in the face a few times.


    As for myself, I was both amused, amazed, intrigued and a little confused, all at the same time. My confusion came from the sheer impact the divine manifestation had, while also wondering just what would happen next. I highly doubted that Lorgar and his group would dare threaten me in the short term, but long term? That would depend on circumstances, they would try to harm me if we met, but the question became, how far would they go to hunt me? If they remained in the area around New Dawn while I continued my travels north, this would be it, but who knew, they might decide that they were on a mission from god or some foolishness like that. Or I might decide that prudence can be better than vigilance and take care of that problem before we leave the area. As long as I didn¡¯t act while under the protection of guest rights, I would be good.


    The intrigue came from a realisation, namely that I recognised parts of Frigga¡¯s presence within myself. Mother, it wasn¡¯t just a name or title, there was a lot more to the concept and while the way I was starting to understand it was completely different from the way Frigga embodied it, we shared the concept. Just what that meant, I had no idea but it was an interesting realisation, one that made me wonder just how far I could delve into that particular topic.


    ¡°What¡¯s going to happen now?¡± Hauke asked, looking around and verbalising what all of us had to think on some level.


    ¡°I believe the five of them will return to their home and start thinking about the importance of guest rights and, maybe even more importantly, the necessity to keep promises spoken in the name of the Gods. It turns out, Gods don¡¯t like it if somebody tries to break an oath given in their name, who would have thought?¡± I chuckled, especially when I noticed the way Lorgar turned pale.


    ¡°As for myself, I believe I have overstayed my welcome. Tomorrow, I will leave this place and I doubt I¡¯ll return,¡± I added, keeping quiet about the fact that I wouldn¡¯t really wait for the next morrow, but that I¡¯d make sure I¡¯d be gone before that, some time in the middle of the night.


    For a moment, I wondered if I should shatter the millstones I had made for the village but I quickly decided against it. Doing so would mean I had broken my word, something I was loath to do. But that didn¡¯t mean I couldn¡¯t have some fun before I left, there were things I could do that couldn¡¯t be easily undone.


    ¡°Might be for the best,¡± Hauka agreed, while Joshua started to come around and was nodding.


    ¡°Indeed,¡± he nodded, ¡°I would have liked for you to stay in town, the things you make are quite amazing, but by the looks of it, that¡¯d be impossible.¡±


    While the three of us talked, Lorgar managed to push himself back to his feet and for a brief moment, the glare on his face made me wonder if I would see what a divine ¡®or else¡¯ looked like. Sadly, my curiosity wasn¡¯t sated as sanity prevailed. He simply collected his friends, letting them use his massive equine body as a crutch, and walked away without another word, only stumbling a little as he went. A part of me wanted to taunt him, just a little, or maybe place a curse or five on him but that would have put me on the receiving end of the divine ¡®or else¡¯, not a place I wanted to be at.


    ¡°All the best, I guess,¡± Hauke shrugged, now that the confrontation was over, he didn¡¯t seem to have an idea how to act so he simply helped Joshua back to the village. The entire sequence of events made me snigger, though I took a moment to check the place where Lorgar and his buddies had been knocked around, hoping to find a few traces of blood or something like that. Sadly, I wasn¡¯t that lucky, having some of their blood would have allowed me to weave curses over them, regardless of distance, something that¡¯d make dealing with them a great deal easier. Even if I had only enough to track their positions, knowing where they were could have been useful on its own.


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    Once back in the house, I considered my next steps. If I wanted to leave during the darkest part of the night, I had about eight hours to kill, time I could use to cause some mischief. A part of me wanted to destroy the house I had created, simply to deny these people its use, but then I had an amusing idea.


    ¡°Lady Hecate, I offer You this house, built by my own hands and with my own magic, as Your shrine and temple so that all who visit may learn about the mysteries of the Arcane and the gift bestowed upon us mortals,¡± I intoned, deliberately channelling some power into the Blessing of Hecate I held in an attempt to get the deities attention. For a moment, nothing seemed to happen but after that moment, I felt a strange sensation, as if my head was detached from my body and just floating in space.


    ¡°A dedication, to me,¡± the familiar tritonal voice of Hecate spoke within my head, just loud and reverberant enough to make me feel awe without giving me a headache. ¡°Surprising, show me your reasons,¡± she prodded and after a moment of consideration, I tried to encompass the memories and ideas leading to the offering with my Mind Magic and channel it towards the voice in my head. It was a weird sensation, even worse than the feeling of being a disembodied, floating head, but I felt something reach back and accept the package. The connection to a far greater mind than mine, even if it was incredibly brief, gave me a few ideas to try with my Mind Magic, but those were things I could work on later.


    My musings were interrupted when bright laughter echoed in my head, this coming from only one of Hecate¡¯s voices, the voice of the Maiden. A little later, a soft chuckle that could only belong to the Mother joined the laughter accompanied by an amused snort from the crone.


    ¡°A fascinating idea,¡± the three voices spoke in unison, ¡°You will have to add some of the usual reading materials yourself, but I have no doubt that you can accomplish that. So be it, I accept the labour of your hands and magic. It shall be a shrine to the Arcane.¡± The last two sentences were spoken with authority, similar to the declaration from Frigga I had heard earlier.


    Suddenly, Lady Hecate¡¯s magic flooded the area for a moment, settling in the stones I had formed and blessing the house. Thanks to my presence at ground zero, I could tell that anyone who was studying the arcane within the small building would have an easier time and sometimes be inspired by Lady Hecate Herself. Then, her presence faded from the area and my mind, leaving me a little out of sorts but also quite amused.


    My amusement was only amplified when I noticed that I had gained two points in Mind Magic and a single point in Astral Meditation for some reason, bringing the two skills to sixty-five and forty-seven respectively.


    Chuckling to myself, I used the remaining time to write some instructions in regards to Arcane Magic while also adding the usual trappings of the shrines Luna and I had created for Lady Hecate, including the statues which immediately were infused by Her blessing, only adding to the grin on my face. Curiously, when Her blessing settled over the statues, only the statue of the Mother remained the usual size while the statues representing the Maiden and the Crone shrunk and took a lesser role. I wasn¡¯t certain why, but given that it was done by divine intervention, there had to be a reason for it. Either way, I was quite happy with it, by making the statue wearing Luna¡¯s face smaller, it took attention away from her and would make it less likely she¡¯d be targeted.


    All in all, the entire thing was hard work but as the blessing from Lady Hecate was helping me, both the one on the building and the one on me, I could finish about an hour after midnight.


    Once I was done, I grabbed my bags, making sure I had everything I wanted to take packed up and stepped out of the reformed door. Outside, I pulled my cloak around me and started channelling magic into it, letting myself take to the sky and vanish in the darkness above. Let the locals try to figure out what happened and, maybe more importantly, how they were going to deal with a blessed shrine to Lady Hecate in the middle of their town. I had a feeling if they tried to tear it down, bad things would happen.

 Chapter 1005

    Finding Luna and the others was trivial. During the previous night, I had used a scrying construct to send them a message, little more than a simple confirmation of my ongoing well-being, allowing me to ascertain their position. Thanks to my cloak, I could easily overcome difficult terrain and make following my tracks just about impossible, so I didn¡¯t have to worry too much in that regard. While I didn¡¯t try to fly the entire way, running on the ground allowed me to move a great deal faster than flying did, I made sure to avoid any areas that might leave easily identifiable tracks. If they managed to follow a trail that was repeatedly interrupted by areas and obstacles I had flown over and was partially arboreal, as I had been jumping from branch to branch, they deserved to catch me. Not that I wouldn¡¯t fight them if that happened, but if they managed such an impossible feat, they deserved the fight they¡¯d get. I doubted it would happen, but if it did, I would be suitably impressed. And kill them, but that was a different problem.


    No, if they managed to follow anyone, it would be the people I had given directions to different locations up here, alongside different times to meet up. Following one of them, or even convincing one of them to tell them about my offer and the time and location of the meeting would be a lot easier than trying to follow the disjointed trail I had left while moving back up and into the mountains.


    It took a little over two hours until I reached the cave the others were using as shelter, taking advantage of a small brook that made its way down the mountain nearby, even if Luna had learned to conjure water by now. She wasn¡¯t really good at it, nor particularly fast, but with enough time and effort, she could provide enough to sustain herself and the other. Maybe not enough to give everyone a daily shower but enough to keep everyone hydrated.


    To my surprise, neither Lia nor Alex had a desperate need to replenish their Astral Power, they had been out hunting and sustained themself by draining their prey before killing it. It wasn¡¯t a particularly pleasant method according to what they had told me before, with Lia likening it to a human surviving on raw fruits and vegetables, but it worked, at least in the medium term. They might need to drain power from sapients on occasion but we hadn¡¯t experimented with that yet, it might be possible for them to survive on a diet of beast-blood.


    However, where exactly the boundary between beast-blood and sapient blood was for that calculus was an interesting question. I certainly didn¡¯t regard Silva as any less intelligent or sapient than any of us, nor would I ever suggest that Ylva or Lenore had been anything but highly intelligent beings. And yet, when simply looking at them, all three of them would be considered animals, leaving me with a bit of uncertainty. It might simply be decided by attributes, that the donor, unwilling or not, needed to have a certain level of Intelligence, Intuition and Charisma or something like that. Or maybe it came with a concentration of Astral Power, but that would make a magical animal a better source than a human on the martial path, which didn¡¯t feel right. I couldn¡¯t explain why I had that feeling but thinking that some powerful fighter would be worse than one of the experiments created by Luna and me didn¡¯t sit right within my mind.


    Maybe that was something we could test at some point, how the infusion of elementally biased Astral Power into an animal changed the sensation of a vampire drinking that animal¡¯s blood. An interesting experiment, if nothing else, and it might even allow us further insight into the creation and reproduction of Vampires. For now, Lia could create new vampires with a bit of effort but that was at least partially thanks to her traits and class, not something we truly understood.


    The rest of the night was spent cuddling Luna, quietly talking to all of them and discussing our next steps. They agreed with me that getting some test subjects was a good thing, both Lia and Luna shared my interest in trying to see what would happen if we used some of our refined techniques to improve a being on a human, though the glimmer in Luna¡¯s eyes made a familiar worry resurface within my mind. Was I teaching my daughter the right path or was I guiding her down a path that would bring her pain and suffering later in life? I wasn¡¯t sure and I doubted that there was an informed answer out there, so I could only go with what I considered right. And, in this case, the right thing to do was to give Luna the tools to deal with the changed world we found ourselves in, allowing her to thrive no matter what happened. Part of that was helping her to develop and ultimately master her magical powers, even if that meant she would see a few people die.


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    Seeing human bodies die was, sadly, something all of us had long since grown used to, at least if one considered the destruction of a Shattered or Undead their death. Arguable but not really important, especially as our experiments would almost certainly kill somebody. The number of critters we had killed during our experiments was quite large and there was no reason to think that a more complex being would be easier. No, if anything, I had a feeling turning a person into a magical being like the critters we had changed would be a great deal harder, if not outright impossible.


    Thinking back, the first person we were expecting would be somebody I was planning to turn together with Lia, so Luna¡¯s input would mostly be to stabilise our experiment so the person wouldn¡¯t expire before we were done. But even that was something I wanted to avoid if at all possible, the additional Life Magic introduced if we had to go down that route would make the experiment harder, though having a more difficult experiment compared to one that ended prematurely wasn¡¯t that much of a loss.


    Another thing I did during the night was to check the various places I had told the test subjects about. Originally, I had discovered them when scrying the environment around New Dawn but now, I was looking for escape routes, possible ambush positions and similar potentially problematic locations. The people here had to have certain information about the general area and I had no desire to get caught in a trap because I hadn¡¯t done my due diligence.


    Finally, just before the sun was coming up, I sent one of my scrying constructs back towards New Dawn. My plan was to stash it in the shrine I had set up there, so I would be able to see, and maybe hear, their reaction. I had a feeling that Lorgar would throw a most amusing tantrum, the guy gave me the impression of being quite high-strung and convinced in the superiority of his own Goddess, which, in hindsight, made the fact that he had been smacked down by an ostensible ally all the more amusing.


    Even now, a part of me wondered what would have happened if Lorgar hadn¡¯t done the intelligent thing and backed off but kept pushing. While I might not have been able to strike him down, not during the day and with his entire party present to defend him, I had no doubt that Frigga would have given him something to think about for the rest of his life. Guest Rights were serious business, especially when they had been promised in her name by one of her priests.


    Getting into the building was surprisingly simple. The scrying construct was made of nothing but shadows and magic, merely held in its shape by my will. The shape was a feature that allowed me it move it with a lot less effort than I¡¯d need otherwise while also providing a great deal of stealth, it wasn¡¯t an actual necessity. So, shifting its shape into a formless blob of shadows meant I needed to expend additional effort to move the construct but it also meant I could slide it through the gap under the door.


    As soon as my construct breached the shrine, I realised that I should never, ever, try to do something similar with a shrine of another deity. Hel, even a different shrine of Hecate might cause my construct to unravel and the shrine would absorb the power as a sacrifice. It would be even worse if I tried it with the shrine of a hostile deity. In that case, I¡¯d open myself up to some form of retribution, something I would prefer to avoid, especially for something this unnecessary.


    Another surprise came when I reformed the scrying construct as a bird and flapped its wings, looking for a place to land. The statue of the Mother, the one wearing my own face, started to move, raising its arm and providing a place for my construct to land but as soon as it did, I felt the power it was composed of shift, turning rigid. I could still see through its eyes, still hear what happened in the area around it, but I no longer controlled the construct. It had become part of the Shrine, likely controlled by Lady Hecate.

 Chapter 1006

    It was a strange sensation, seeing the world through a scrying construct no longer completely under my control. It wasn¡¯t truly unpleasant, if anything it was somewhat reminiscent of my experiences in Lady Hecate¡¯s realm, but that didn¡¯t make it any less confining.


    Luckily, I didn¡¯t have to wait all that long, maybe half an hour, it was difficult to tell the time while embodying a scrying construct, for something to happen. There had been a few things I had been expecting, mostly anger or rage coming from Lorgar and his allies when they found out that I had consecrated the house I had built as a shrine of Hecate, but sitting there, on the statue, I realised that their reaction would likely come later. To the best of their knowledge, I had been sleeping peacefully through the night and would now make my exit from the village, unhindered, as promised by Joshua. They might have made plans to make a ruckus, trying to annoy me, but intruding into the house would break the guest rights, sending them into deep trouble.


    Thus, I was quite surprised when the door opened slowly, while Joshua¡¯s voice was calling out for me, as if making sure that I was up and about. Even without a response, Joshua made his way into the building, softly muttering under his breath. I couldn¡¯t tell what he was saying, at least not at first, but I could make out a few words, hearing something about a dream, Queen Frigga and it being strange. Without context, I could only guess what he might be talking about, but there wasn¡¯t a lot of time to think, so I focused on watching him as he stepped into the main room of the house, now shrine.


    His eyes widened in an almost comical fashion when he saw the statues, especially the one of the Mother, as it wore my image, just formed from solid stone. I had no idea what he might think, but the whispered question of whether I had been petrified gave me a fairly good idea about his thoughts. If I could have, I might have laughed but the construct I was inhabiting didn¡¯t have vocal cords so laughing took a surprising amount of focus as I needed to use Wind Magic to create the correct sounds. Not a really useful method for spontaneous utterances but it worked reasonably well for deliberate communication.


    However, in this case, I had no interest in communicating. so I remained quiet, watching his confusion to my amusement. Sadly, the confusion didn¡¯t last as long as I had hoped it would, just a few minutes of quiet muttering and inspection of the statues, until he apparently decided to do what he had come for.


    To my surprise, he fell to his knees, not facing towards the statues of Hecate but the other direction, towards a conspicuously empty wall. Strangely, I remembered that I had placed a few of the lore tablets against that wall, allowing people to read them with ease, but now I could see that the tablets had been moved away, including the shelving I had made for them, leaving me a little confused. I was fairly certain that nobody had entered the shrine, nor had it been desecrated, so I guessed that Lady Hecate had altered the shrine to her specifications, though I had little idea of her motivation. Other than maybe that it had something to do with the actions I was watching right now.


    My surprise only grew when he started to pray, his voice clear and quite strong as he called upon his deity. Calling upon a deity while within a shrine consecrated to a different deity, especially one that belonged to a different Pantheon sounded like a horrible idea and yet, it was exactly what he was doing. For a moment, I wondered if I was supposed to attack him, even if it would be incredibly difficult due to the distance between us, but before I could really consider my options, the warm, fiery glow around Joshua was met with an equally warm, welcome glow coming from the Mother¡¯s statue the raven construct was sitting on.


    Looking around, I could see the glow coming from a pair of crossed torches engraved on a stone tablet held in the statue¡¯s other arm, while the one my raven was sitting on was now holding a pair of keys. The light came from the torches, ignoring the fact that they were made of stone and, well, just an engraving. Magic, obviously, and by every metric I could understand, divine magic, directly used by Lady Hecate, welcoming whatever Joshua was doing into Her shrine.


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    It was fascinating to watch the light around Joshua coalesce into something physical before slowly shifting towards the wall and morphing into something else, namely, into a statue, similar in size to the one the raven construct was resting on. But where the statue of the Mother, created in my image, depicted the image of the Mother as that of a teacher, a guiding light at the crossroads of life that eventually unlocked the path of knowledge, this statue was different. It also depicted an image of the Mother but with a very different focus. Wide hips and a bosom that would look utterly ridiculous on my own slender frame, carrying a sheaf of crops in one arm while her other hand was stretched forward, a golden ring visible on the stone grey fingers. This wasn¡¯t a teacher, it was both a symbol of fertility and a good harvest but also a mother of nations. Not just giving birth to people and guiding them but also giving birth to nations and she would guide her children into the future.


    For a moment, I could feel another presence within the shrine, settling into the stones and rocks just like the divine presence of Hecate had, making me wonder just what was going on here. To the best of my knowledge deites didn¡¯t share shrines, especially not if they weren¡¯t closely aligned. And yet, Hecate was obviously accepting Frigga into her shrine, presenting the same concept in two different variations and with a different focus.


    My earlier amusement was soon rekindled when Joshua finished his prayer and opened his eyes, taking in the statue he had formed. Involuntarily, a single word escaped his lips, an utterance of ¡®Mother¡¯ that would have had me in stitches if I had lungs to laugh. It looked like, where Lady Hecate was using my face and physique for Her statues, Frigga was, at least partially, using that of Joshua¡¯s mother, or at least enough of his mother¡¯s appearance that he felt the recognition.


    I remained a little longer, watching as Joshua put a few more of Frigga¡¯s touches on the shrine, while also making sure that none of the parts I had prepared with Hecate¡¯s blessing were disturbed. It truly was a shrine to both of them, or maybe to motherhood in general, though if it was that, I wondered if there¡¯d eventually be a statue of Hestia in here, too, and whatever other goddesses embodying different aspects of motherhood. Though maybe Hestia would be too close to Frigga, I wasn¡¯t sure how that would work as both had, to the best of my knowledge, very similar domains.


    Luckily, I didn¡¯t need to bother with those parts of divine politics, the closest the Asgardians had to Lady Hecate was Hel, sharing a few of Hecate¡¯s less pleasant domains, especially the domain of necromancy. So, not my circus, not my monkeys, as the saying went.


    An angry shout caught my attention and now, I was truly sad that I couldn¡¯t watch what was going on outside, though I could hear enough to know Lorgar had been taking a look at the house again, running into Joshua as he was just leaving.


    I wasn¡¯t sure what had set Lorgar off, but from the shouting I could hear, I knew he was accusing Joshua of some rather unpleasant things, mainly suggesting that I had been seducing the Valkyr, the mere idea sending a shiver of distaste through my mind but the shouting didn¡¯t stop there. It continued on and at some point, Lorgar seemed to have noticed the divine magic shrouding the building and that was the moment he lost it completely. His shouting made an incredible amount of noise until it cut off, leaving only silence in its wake.


    Uncertain of what had just happened, I lingered for a little longer until I decided that I likely had heard everything there was to hear. Lorgar was, quite obviously, incredibly angry but whether his anger would focus on Joshua and the shrine or whether he was planning to try hunting me down, I had no idea.


    Either way, I was quite some distance away and wouldn¡¯t get close to New Dawn again, so the only way he could realistically find me was through the people I had given directions to, so I could meet them in the mountains. I would have to make sure that those meetings didn¡¯t go sideways.

 Chapter 1007

    I had to give it to Ms. Maria Perez, she was showing some grit and determination. When I first met her in New Dawn, I had thought she was fairly soft, looking for cheap power to get herself set up comfortably but when she managed to make the trek to the meeting area I had designated for her, despite the brutal thunderstorm that was raging across the mountains, she showed me that she was willing to make some effort. Or maybe she had simply started her trek too early and gotten lost, the jury was out in that regard.


    Regardless of the reasons, she had managed to reach the meeting area and, unless there was an impressive stealth-user in New Dawn, she had done so without bringing trouble with her. Well, trouble, other than the thunderstorm but I was confident she had nothing to do with that particular annoyance and luckily, I could use Water Magic to create an umbrella above us, keeping the torrential rain from drenching us.


    ¡°Good Evening,¡± I politely greeted her, speaking as if we were just meeting on the street instead of standing in the middle of a mountainous forest while the sky was doing its best ¡®Great Flood¡¯ impression and trying to drown the world.


    She mustn¡¯t have noticed our approach, causing her to let out a noise that was between a squeak and a gasp as she was whirling around, only to lose her footing and have her legs slide out from beneath her and dump her in the soggy mud. I managed to keep myself from snickering but neither Lia nor Luna were as polite, sniggering and giggling as the drenched figure tried to get back up only to slide around a little. She made for a sorry sight, hair plastered against her skull, clothes caked with mud and dripping water as they were hanging off her frame and even her face was muddy, thanks to her attempts at getting up.


    And yet, despite the sorry sight she was presenting, her eyes told a different story, despite the indignity of being laughed at by my two companions her determination was unbroken.


    ¡°Good Evening,¡± she returned my greeting, once she was back on her feet, valiantly ignoring the state she was in. She didn¡¯t quite manage to feign indifference to her condition, her body simply didn¡¯t allow that and the shaking of her limbs and chattering of her teeth gave away just how miserable she was. In contrast, my group was completely dry, thanks to a wide, but thin, layer of water I was holding above our heads, the liquid umbrella keeping all the rain from falling on us with ease. Similarly, our clothes were unsullied, only our boots had any evidence of the terrible conditions on them.


    ¡°Let¡¯s get the important question out of the way first,¡± I began, stretching my Mind Magic and trying to encompass Ms Perez as much as I could in an attempt to catch any fluctuations a deception would cause. ¡°Have you told anybody where you were going or who you were planning to meet?¡± I asked, staring into her eyes, searching for guilt while daring her to deceive me.


    ¡°No!¡± came her instant and quite obviously reflexive response. Similarly, her mind flared with urgency, maybe fear, maybe indignity, I couldn¡¯t quite tell, but from what I could sense, it didn¡¯t feel like duplicity to me. Of course, I would have to test more and train my senses further so I could reliably discern somebody¡¯s mental state magically, but for that, I needed to use the sense and get experience with it.


    ¡°Hm, is that so?¡± I mused, slowly walking forward, taking great care not to slip in the mud as I circled her, the shield of water I held above our heads stretching to protect Maria as well. ¡°What do you think, Carnelia, is she telling the truth?¡± I asked, retaining the seriousness I had shown before.


    Lia, to her credit, didn¡¯t even blink but move forward, too, circling the woman herself but moving in the opposite direction I had moved. To play up the intimidation further, Lia let her eyes flare with crimson light, something I hadn¡¯t seen before but I quickly decided to copy it, activating Overflow and channelling a bit of Blood Magic to get the right effect.


    ¡°She looks like a scared rabbit, ready to bolt, only now realising that it might have wandered into the wolves¡¯ den. She stinks of fear, of uncertainty but also of greed,¡± as I was behind Maria at that moment, I couldn¡¯t tell what sort of expression she had on her face but given the way Lia¡¯s smile widened, turning into something with far too many and far too sharp teeth to be anything but scary, it seemed to make the right impression on my daughter.


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    ¡°Ah, there¡¯s a bit of determination in there, I was afraid I¡¯d have to rip apart your back to see if you had a spine,¡± Lia nodded and kept talking to herself as she scrutinised the shivering female.


    ¡°A spine, maybe,¡± now Luna was getting in on the act, too, her eyes shining with the silvery light of the moon while she joined Lia and me in circling our test subject. Or maybe calling her our prey would be more appropriate in the situation we were in. ¡°But what else does she have? She seems quite weak and worthless, does she not, Mother?¡±


    ¡°She certainly is weak,¡± I agreed to Luna, a smile starting to form on my lips as the next step of my plan took form in my mind. A quick burst of Ice Magic turned the water on her clothes into Ice, allowing me to magically take hold of them with ease and shred them apart, leaving an even more terrified, utterly naked woman in the middle of our circle. But I was a generous mistress, so while I tore away the trappings of civilisation, I granted Maria a boon as well, ridding her of the clinging mud while drying her off.


    ¡°Her worth, on the other hand, well, her talent is certainly lacking, especially when it comes to the arcane. It would take a lifetime or more for her to become a powerful spellcaster unless she received some special aid,¡± I judged Maria once again, my eyes piercing her soul to weigh her potential. ¡°But she looks determined and for some paths, that is all that is needed,¡± I added, glancing at Lia, who had begun her path with less than Maria had right now. And yet, despite her Shattered beginnings, Lia had grown powerful and I could only take partial credit for that. Lia had taken whatever I could give her but made it her own, her determination and willingness to push and punish herself turning her into what she was now.


    Amusingly, Lia made a soft noise of agreement, while Luna looked sceptical. Maybe that was due to their different individual paths, Lia¡¯s was one walked with determination, Luna¡¯s one that could only be walked thanks to her raw talent.


    Sadly, there was no real arcane talent found in Ms Perez, to the point that I doubted she¡¯d amount to much, even if Luna and I managed to push enough elemental energy into her to turn her into some sort of elemental creature if that was even possible for humans.


    ¡°She might need that special push first,¡± Lia mused, her grin growing a little wider, as impossible as that seemed. It looked like the determination of which Path Maria Perez would walk was made, or at least it was decided who would get the chance to push her onto a Path.


    The slow circling from all three of us stopped, forming a roughly equidistant triangle around her, forcing Maria to twist and turn as she was trying to keep all three of us in her sight at the same time. It obviously didn¡¯t work and Lia timed her move perfectly, surging forward just as Maria was looking in the other direction.


    The only sound escaping Maria when Lia sunk her elongated canines into her neck was a soft gasp, followed by pained whimpers while her arms flailed uselessly, as Lia held her body upright, draining both Astral Power and blood from her body. Normally, the blood I was giving Lia was deliberately enriched with Astral Power but now, she had to drain all the blood from Maria¡¯s body, a feat only possible thanks to Blood Magic, so Lia would get all the Astral Power the woman had.


    At the same time, as Lia was ripping the life from her very veins, I was using my Soul Magic to shelter her Soul, keeping it tethered to her body. Otherwise, it was very likely her soul would simply fade, as it was too weak to endure the change she was forced to undergo. Studying the effect, I made a mental note to investigate the influence a person¡¯s level had on their soul. It might be that we had to find more powerful people, or I¡¯d have to continue tethering them, meaning Lia would never be able to create new vampires on her own.


    The entire process didn¡¯t take all that long and soon, Maria¡¯s body gave out, causing Lia to take the next step and introduce some of her blood into the body that was, for all intents and purposes, dead. The moment Lia¡¯s blood was flowing down Maria¡¯s throat, I could see an instant and incredibly fascinating shift within Maria¡¯s soul, where before, I had sheltered a fairly bright ball of glowing Light and Life, now, it was inverted, no longer glowing outwards but draining inwards and, maybe more importantly, no longer awash with Light and Life but Darkness and Death.


    A shuddering, pained gasp coming from Maria¡¯s throat told me that we had been successful and a quick Observe on the prone person confirmed my thinking. We had created a new Vampire.

 Chapter 1008

    A swift wave of my hand produced a block of Ice behind the newly created creature, allowing Lia to put her down without dropping her into the mud and muck beneath us. Given that this was no longer the same Maria we had welcomed onto this clearing, it felt appropriate, she was no longer the worthless and weak thing who had struggled to make it up the mountain, she had become something more.


    Now, she only needed to prove to the world that she deserved to be something better by surviving, if she was so weak that she would squander the gift we had given her, well, in that case, I could only say, too bad.


    Studying the collapsed body with my soul sight, I noticed that there was a quite remarkable difference between Lia and the new vampire, not only in the magnitude of their power but also in the quality. It looked as if the new vampire had only a shadow of Lia¡¯s magical powers, making me wonder just how that worked.


    Could it be that the powers a new vampire gained were tied to the blood used to create them? It made a certain amount of sense, the process of making a new vampire was essentially a ritual that killed the person but didn¡¯t allow their soul to pass on, instead the soul was altered in the process, changed to become something antithetical to what it had been. We still didn¡¯t understand the mechanics of that process, though I had a few fairly wild ideas but nothing I could currently substantiate, just some guesses from current observations, a few theories adapted from myths and similarly wild conjectures. Nothing I was willing to entertain as a serious possibility until we managed to gather more information.


    However, this might give me a further piece of the puzzle, so, before the new vampire had time to wake up, I quickly cut my hand, using Blood Magic to infuse the blood exiting the wound with as much Darkness Magic as I could and let it drop into her mouth. The Blood looked fascinating, the sheer concentration of Darkness Magic made it into something reminiscent of the Void Crystal we had found a while back, but the effect it had on the Vamprie was even more impressive.


    Where before, she had looked just like she had before being turned, now, there were veins of black running all across her body, standing out starkly despite her tanned skin. It was quite a fascinating sight as if the major blood vessels had been filled with tar without intruding into all the smaller blood vessels that gave the skin its blush. I had no idea how that might work, so I focused on my magical sight, taking the process in that way.


    What I found was even more impressive, it looked almost as if the vampire¡¯s body was trying to take in this new power but it was simply too much. The altered Soul was akin to a dam filled beyond capacity and the overflow was flooding into the body, changing it on a fundamental level, even beyond the change into a Vampire.


    I had no idea what this might result in, but from the silent scream on the vampire¡¯s lips, it didn¡¯t appear to be pleasant, an observation a brief use of my Mind Magic confirmed. If I could bottle the agony this new vampire was in and use it as a weapon, I would have a formidable tool. Alas, I doubted it would be really effective unless I could make their body provide the energy for their suffering, if I simply tried to replicate the agony with Mind Magic, I¡¯d have to provide the power for it.


    Shaking my head, I focused on the vampire¡¯s mind once more, trying to understand how her body managed to send this much pain into her mind, so I could replicate it at a later date. Watching how the power I had infused her with tore through her flesh, reshaping it in ways I could barely perceive, much less understand, was incredibly fascinating. It was almost as if the flesh was remade from the ground up as something new.


    It went beyond the transformation into a vampire, though that, too, reshaped the flesh. The, still partially ongoing, vampire was turning the old flesh into something visually similar but fundamentally different. The differences between alcohol and water, both were clear liquids, both had a similar density and fairly similar boiling points, one was soluble in the other but one would burn while the other would extinguish fire. Well, up to a point, I might have to look into some of the more interesting interactions in that regard, but the fundamental point remained. No matter how similar they might look, they were not the same.


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    The difference between the original flesh and the vampiric flesh was the same. They might look similar enough at first glance but one was powered by Life and Vitality, the other by Death and its necrotic energies.


    And into that ongoing transformation, I had poured an additional power that was now tearing through both the mortal and the vampiric parts of the new vampire, making something new.


    ¡°Was that supposed to happen?¡± Luna asked quietly, studying the new vampire with wide, fascinated eyes. Following her line of sight, I felt my eyes widen, trying to make sense of what I was looking at. It was almost as if part of her hand was dissolving into shadow, merging with the darkness around her into some half-way state between the physical and the realm of shadows.


    ¡°We might want to step back a little,¡± I admitted, not quite sure what was going to happen next, but I wanted to watch as it was truly fascinating.


    Sadly, when I took another look with my Mind Magic, I realised that neither a mortal nor a vampiric mind was capable of withstanding that much agony, especially not when ti was part of a fundamental change, causing the new vampire¡¯s mind to start fraying. It was slowly coming apart and I doubted I¡¯d be able to stitch it together in any meaningful way, though the fragments should remain within the new vampire. Likely not in an ordered state, but they would be still within it.


    While it wasn¡¯t as easy to observe the strange transformation from afar, it was almost certainly a great deal safer. Just watching how some of the rain pouring on the still form from above was torn apart in a strange, shadowy haze was a little disconcerting, a reminder that Darkness could also be hungry. And the Darkness now inherent to the newly created Vampire most certainly was but not in a way I actually understood.


    After some time, the process came to a stop and the creature lying on the slab of Ice stilled for a moment, its mouth, previously opened in a silent scream, snapped close and all other movement ceased. No breath, no twitching or fidgeting muscles, nothing, it was lying still as a corpse.


    But the moment didn¡¯t last, the magic within the creature coiled up and suddenly, it shot forward, surging towards us in an explosion of movement and shadows. For a creature beneath level five, the attack was incredibly impressive, strong enough to overwhelm an enemy three times its level but trying to use Darkness to attack me? Especially Darkness of the level the creature was wielding?


    The explosion of movement and violence was halted in its path, its fury completely unable to make a dent in the far superior control I had over the Darkness around us, to say nothing of the sheer weight of power I could put behind my will. No, this attack wasn¡¯t coming anywhere near us, no matter how the creature raged.


    ¡°Foolish creature,¡± I shook my head, sending out a blast of Mind Magic, causing the new vampire to stumble back, allowing us to see it in its new form for the first time. And Hel, was that thing ugly. Parts of the body had been eaten away and replaced by the Darkness, leaving some odd rends and tears in its mangled flesh where a black, oily substance was leaking out. Her face, on the other hand, was still disconcertingly human, framed in a cloud of inky blackness, the eyes completely black while the mouth had turned into a gaping maw filled with sharp, startlingly white, teeth.


    ¡°Can you understand me?¡± I asked, trying to use my Mind Magic to see if there was anything left within that mind to communicate. Sadly, the only response I received was a strange, incredibly high-pitched shriek that almost made me blast the creature again.


    ¡°Not quite what I had in mind, Mother,¡± Lia quietly complained, studying the bestial creature before us intently. Maybe it was the tone in which Lia was speaking, maybe it was simple fear before a superior predator, but the creature tried attacking again and again, I blasted it back. Only this time, the creature didn¡¯t remain nearby, instead, it immediately scurried off, fleeing into the dark forest around us.


    ¡°Alas, I think that can be counted as a failure,¡± I sighed, looking at the trail for a moment before pulling on the shadows around us, making us all disappear. Time would tell what could become of the creature that once was Maria Perez.

 Chapter 1009

    Maria, the newly created Shadow Vampire Monster was only a first attempt to make something interesting, an attempt I tentatively declared a success. I had no idea what had happened with the creature after we left the clearing, but given its raw power, its Darkness affinity and general potential, I was fairly positive it wouldn¡¯t just die in some ditch. No, if it was anything like Lia had been initially, just without her intelligence, the creature would likely hunt in the forest for a bit, getting a few levels or something, and live its best life. Maybe catch a human or two, I wasn¡¯t sure how its instincts had turned out, but it didn¡¯t really matter, even if a part of me wanted to stalk the thing and make some sort of documentary about it. If only I could summon David Attenborough to voice it. Alas, I doubted that¡¯d be possible, so I had to be content with creating more interesting creatures that would never happen naturally.


    For example, the second person turning up at a meeting point, after another had either gotten cold feet or lost, had a small, innate bias for Earth Magic, not enough to give him any real advantage, let alone the magical affinity, but it was something we could build upon.


    The result was quite interesting and one I could readily classify as a complete success. Sure, the screaming as I had infused the guy¡¯s very soul with Earth Magic had been a little painful, fellah had a real set of lungs on him, but thanks to Luna, and a bit of help from Lia, we managed to keep the guy alive throughout the procedure, resulting in a being a lot more durable than an ordinary human.


    By the time we were finished, the guy looked more like the Thing from a popular comic, only not quite as orange. Maybe that was for the best, people had come to associate the orange man with evil and I doubted even the apocalypse had changed that. No, instead, our newly infused experiment had brown skin, covered in rocky plates that increased his durability even further. And it was an impressive durability, at least against physical attacks. Now, he was sturdy enough that I¡¯d need a weapon to harm him physically, despite the fact that I had enough strength to moonlight as a physical fighter around level forty, maybe forty-five and the guy had a pitiful level of eight. His strength was increased as well, though it was a little lacking compared to his endurance, though clearly superhuman. If he managed to get a couple of levels under his belt, he¡¯d be quite the monster, especially as he had managed to keep his human mind, though I had been forced to use a bit of Mind Magic on him, so he wouldn¡¯t spoil the other experiments I had planned. He¡¯d sleep for a few days and be somewhat disoriented, but I was fairly confident he would be fine. Maybe. Eventually. Hopefully¡­


    Another of the experiments was similar to the one performed on Maria, another vampire. But this time, I didn¡¯t try to augment their magical affinity right off the bat, instead, I waited until the transformation was over so Lia and I could evaluate the success of our experiment. The results were quite fascinating, while the subject¡¯s memories hadn¡¯t been damaged, there was a clear disconnect between their lived experience and their current state of mind. It was eerily similar to Lia¡¯s awakening, making me think that the disconnect between her memories and her personality hadn¡¯t been due to her being Shattered beforehand but due to the transformation.


    That, in turn, brought up quite a few questions about Shattered in general, making me wonder if there could be a way to actually help them, but I just didn¡¯t know. Maybe I could perform a few experiments, there might still be some Shattered left but I had a feeling they were a dying breed. Though, given that there¡¯d likely be no more Shattered coming into existence, they always had been, just a limited, if large, number of creatures that would exist for a while before dying out.


    After the evaluation was done, I decided that I could perform another experiment on the newly created Vampire and if it perished, so be it. It wasn¡¯t as if Lia and I would continue studying the result of our experiment, we just wouldn¡¯t be around to see what happened further. Maybe I could occasionally look in on them with scrying constructs but really, there wouldn¡¯t be any further investigation. So, if I broke the subject, we wouldn¡¯t lose out.


    Similar to the experiments done on mortals, just without Luna to stabilise their Bodies and Souls with her Life Magic, I channelled Blood Magic, the strongest magical affinity of the newly created Vampire directly into its Soul. The results were thoroughly fascinating. Instead of influencing and altering the Soul, it looked almost as if the power was absorbed into the devouring darkness at the centre of vampiric Souls, As I continued channelling power, trying to find out what was going on, I eventually reached a point of saturation, or some strange limit was breached and, all of a sudden, the Soul started to twist in on itself and flickered out of existence in an instant. I had no idea what exactly had happened but the body simply stilled, after having thrashed around in pain moments earlier, lying completely still. There was no breath, though given that it was a vampire that was no surprise. But there was nothing visible that suggested the shell had ever been animated, only some trace Blood Magic still holding strong within the flesh. Out of curiosity, I tried to use my MInd Magic to detect if there was anything remaining but I could only sense a dying flicker, some remnant impulses maybe, or memories just fading away. If nothing else, the experience proved just how complicated and interconnected the relationship between Body, Mind and Soul was.


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    Both Lia and Luna were quite pleased with the progress we were making. Luna considered the entire thing a fascinating challenge, to keep creatures alive even if they didn¡¯t have any business to remain alive while Lia was inordinately happy that we managed to create a few vampires. Curiously, she didn¡¯t develop maternal feelings towards our creations, demonstrating a marked difference between the two of us. To me, Lia and Luna were my daughters but Lia had no problem to proverbially push the newly created vampires out of the nest, forcing them to fly or fall on their own.


    Those were just some of the experiments we managed to carry out in the mountains above New Dawn. Sadly, not all the appointments could be kept. Two people got cold feet and decided that making the trek would be a bad idea, or maybe they got sick, I wasn¡¯t certain. Either way, they never left New Dawn in order to get to us, so they¡¯d never receive powers. Another person managed to get lost, though luckily I managed to discover them while using a scrying construct to observe the area and the experiment could be performed regardless of their lack of orientation. Sadly, the experiment failed but even failures could yield a lot of good information, so was it really a failure just because the test subject died?


    Lastly, there were those who were followed by Largar and his merry men, either voluntarily or not. In both cases, my response was the same, namely, I combined experiments with Scrying Constructs and experiments with Mind Magic, seeking to make Lorgar and his buddies lose their way. Whether that was with the test subjects at their side or not, it was a fascinating challenge, one that forced me to get quite creative with magical concepts, especially those rooted in Darkness Magic. But, at the same time, it was an incredible challenge and I even began to wonder if I should stick around even longer, just to see how far I might be able to twist Lorgar. The guy was quite messed up from the start, so adding Mind Magic in the mix might have some unforeseen side effects, but what were experiments without those, if everything came out just as planned? We¡¯d never learn anything.


    Luckily, that wasn¡¯t the case and we learned plenty in the time we spent above New Dawn, both when it came to the malleability of Souls, but also in regards to the connection between the Mind, the Body and the Soul. Not enough to fully understand any of them but I was starting to get a faint idea of how the Soul influenced the Body, though I was fairly certain the reverse was true, too. I didn¡¯t have any experimental evidence to back that idea up, other than my own experience, but I was slowly getting there. It was only a matter of time until I could unravel those mysteries, well, a matter of time and many, many experiments.


    The massive strides in understanding were reflected by similarly massive strides in skill levels, mainly when it came to Soul Magic, Mind Magic and Astral Meditation. All three of those levelled multiple times over the three weeks we were up there, with Mind Magic reaching level sixty-eight, Astral Meditation reaching level fifty-two and Soul Magic reaching a whopping level eighteen, pleasing me greatly. Knowing that I was steadily getting closer to reviving my Sigmir pleased me greatly.


    I even gained two normal levels, bringing me to ninety-one. Before levelling up to ninety, I put my open points into Intelligence, pushing the attribute to eighty and giving me a new trait, as usual. It wasn¡¯t a terribly exciting trait on the face of things but I had a feeling it might be highly useful. Astral Solidity decreased the rate at which my Astral Power was returning to the Astral River, meaning all magic I used would last longer.


    All in all, the time above New Dawn was very well spent, but eventually, there wouldn¡¯t be more test subjects coming up into the mountains and Lorgar had started to use Divine Magic to protect his Mind, making it more and more difficult to avoid him. I considered trying to attack his group directly but given the levels involved, I was hesitant. Sure, if things worked out well, we should be able to overcome them, but I wasn¡¯t about to risk either of my daughters on ¡®should¡¯. So, we simply packed up our things and started to travel north, away from New Dawn.

 Interlude: Survivors 604

    Sometimes, Wu Chenhua, oftentimes simply known as Mrs Wu, mused there really was no point in getting up in the morning. Things generally went downhill after getting up and leaving the warm comfort of one''s bed, or sleeping bag in her current situation. And really, why would it be so bad to stay in bed and ignore the harsh reality all around, at least for a day or five? Sure, food and drink would quickly become a problem, both incoming and outgoing, but it might be possible to find a solution for that, right? Or maybe not, maybe staying in bed all day would be akin to lying in a coffin, just a little less final.


    For the small group she was travelling with, this was one of those days. It had been weeks since Kevin managed to stumble into a mess that left him fundamentally changed in a way very reminiscent of the way her dear student Samantha and Cassie Grim, the self-proclaimed cleric, had been changed, only that Kevin didn¡¯t appear to have any additional skills, just the changed biology. Now, even after weeks of trying to understand that biology, it did nothing but give Oliver, their medic, and herself an ever-growing headache, each time they thought they came across something they recognised or that made sense to them.


    At least the strange concoctions Oliver had been brewing continued to work on Kevin, just like they worked on all of them, even if nobody could truly explain why, not even Oliver. Oh, sure, he could give an explanation but when pressed, he quickly lost himself, trying to put his thoughts into words other people could understand. It came down to, as they all liked to joke, trying to explain the colour blue to a blind person, there was simply no reference frame and one had to resort to similies and comparisons but again, without a shared reference frame, that didn¡¯t work too well. One could describe the colour blue as the wide, open sky, compare it to the sensation of the wind on your face or some other comparison that hinted at freedom and openness. Or one might compare it to a heavy blanket that covered a person, pressing them down and making them feel, well, blue. Both similies could be used and neither struck at the essence of the question, what was blue.


    Trying to have Oliver explain his strange concoctions or the ointments he regularly put on bandages to help people heal from wounds that should require weeks of recovery or likely be fatal within minutes or hours, was similar to that, it didn¡¯t make sense for anyone but him. Just like trying to talk to Kevin about magic didn¡¯t seem to make sense to anyone but him. Only, there the comparison broke a little, there was somebody who could talk to Kevin about magic and not only understand what the boy was talking about but teach the boy, had taught the boy initially, so there had to be a logic and a shared reference frame. Just not one that Wu Chenhua or any of them really shared.


    However, while Kevin¡¯s altered biology and the differences in his anatomy made treating problems without resorting to the methods created by Oliver with the help of the system troublesome, the real problem was his altered appearance. Cassie Grim could pass as a human with very strange physiology, at least if the other party didn¡¯t look all that close, and while Samantha had some distinctly inhuman features, they enhanced her appearance, only aided by the power and grace she carried herself with. Glittering hair, slightly blue skin and pointy ears didn¡¯t scream alien to others, especially if the ears were hidden under the waves of her luxurious hair.


    Kevin, on the other hand? If Samantha had managed to hit the jackpot with her inhuman features, Kevin had done the opposite and lost house and home. While his skin had a green tint reminiscent of deep water, that wasn¡¯t too much of a problem. No, the real problem was that his limbs had become long and gangly, his height shooting up from a fairy average metre and seventy centimetres to almost two metres, all of that length added to his legs, making him look strange, even at a distance. Furthermore, the growths that had initially appeared in his hair had turned into stringy vines, adding a slightly unkempt quality to his appearance.


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    And today, that appearance was seriously biting them in the behind. They had been travelling a bit, exploring and generally trying to figure out where to go and what to do, when they saw smoke on the horizon and decided to check it out. What they found wasn¡¯t a real surprise, fires generally didn¡¯t start without a reason and while there were some creatures that did so, they were fairly rare. There had been some tales that these creatures preferred to dwell in places where fire was already present, something like volcanoes or maybe sun-baked deserts and similar places, but there was no such place in the area they were in. Or at least there hadn¡¯t been a place like that before the world went crazy, who knew what had changed since then?


    But in this case, the obvious answer turned out to be the correct one and the smoke they had seen came from simple fires, used by a group of survivors to cook their food, try working metal and similar applications.


    Wu Chenhua made the initial approach by herself, using the various tricks she had been taught many, many years prior to keep hidden, tricks she had augmented and improved with the help of the system. Though, amusingly, she was just as incapable of explaining those tricks to the rest of her group, let alone teaching them. There were times during which they all wondered how Samantha had been able to teach magic to multiple people but there was nothing they could do to understand, only shrug and consider it part of the Pale Lady¡¯s abilities. Just like Samantha had, according to rumour, had put one of the Shattered back together and turned the creature into her daughter. Nobody had dared to ask, especially as that ¡®daughter¡¯ had once been the daughter of Apple Gate Farm¡¯s owners, leaving that entire topic a sore one, though one that was repeatedly talked about nonetheless.


    After Wu Chenhua managed to confirm that these people seemed to be fairly peaceful, with no indication of violence within the group or a few other red flags, they decided to approach as a group, hoping to join up, at least for a time. Since Apple Gate Farm had turned into a massive mess of complacency, bureaucracy and idiocy, they had been trying to find a new home for their group and this place might work.


    Their approach was met with a mix of curiosity and vigilance, at least until the five of them got close enough to be studied in detail. Once that was possible, the curiosity was replaced with a morbid disgust and the vigilance shifted into hostility, all of it directed at poor Kevin. Warnings of ¡®Drowned¡¯ were shouted, leaving the five of them confused and a little bit horrified, especially when the locals readied their weapons, preparing to meet them with violence.


    The situation could only be calmed down a little when their group stopped their movement, neither retreating nor advancing but instead starting to talk, even if the talking had to be done at almost thirty metres and by shouting. The locals didn¡¯t want to go out and kill people, they had all seen enough death already but it quickly became obvious that they also wouldn¡¯t accept the drowned, as they continued to call Kevin, into their midst.


    Slowly, and fairly carefully, Wu Chenhua and John managed to draw out information, learning more about these drowned, which apparently were a type of local monster, occasionally wandering out of a nearby swamp, in addition to some other information about local threats. It quickly became obvious that the locals only told them about those threats in hopes that the five of them might be able to deal with the threats or, if not, the threats would be able to deal with them. Either way, it would be a positive development for the locals, taking care of threats or potential threats without any risk to their own people.


    Overall, no matter what Wu Chenhua, John or anybody else tried to say and argue, the locals showed no mercy and wouldn¡¯t accept Kevin as a person, instead of a monster.


    Eventually, as the day was slowly drawing to a close, their group had to retreat and look for shelter elsewhere. The only thing they managed to accomplish was to get an agreement that Oliver would be allowed to trade medicine for food, though even that was met with a certain distrust. The five of them could only accept defeat and retreat, the sting of distrust setting in deeply and painfully, striking nobody harder than Kevin.

 Chapter 1010

    Travelling north was quite interesting. There was something about the mountains that increased the saturation of Astral Power, making all of us feel more alive but, at the same time, it also seemed to attract stronger monsters. Or maybe the animals naturally grew stronger within the higher saturation of Astral Power and were competing for that natural resource, I wasn¡¯t sure. But it was a fascinating sensation to immerse myself in the flow of the Astral River up here, it was, without a doubt, magical.


    A part of me was deeply intrigued by the differences in the Astral River, making me want to stick around an area up here and spend day and night immersed in the flow of it, trying to figure out just where the differences came from and what they might mean. Alas, I also knew that I would likely need months, maybe years, of study to understand more than the basics of this incredibly complex topic, so I focused on another topic I yearned to understand. Namely, the interaction of Soul, Mind and Body.


    Part of my studies in that regard was to go over the experiments we had performed recently, both on people and on critters, trying to find patterns in the results but also in the experiments themself. There, the biggest problem was repeatability, there simply was no way to eliminate potential complications stemming from the choice of test subject when it came to the experiment¡¯s outcome, not unless we had a far larger pool of test subjects and conducted the same experiment over and over. Thus, it was incredibly difficult to figure out whether one experiment worked because we were applying the correct stimulus to the right subject or if it worked because the stimulus would generally work.


    When I was done going over the completed experiments, I had a long, and fairly dense, list of ideas and observations carved into stone but sadly, there didn¡¯t appear to be a pattern visible. Maybe if we could try the experiments again, a pattern might emerge but as of yet, I couldn¡¯t really predict the outcome of an experiment, at least not outside of fairly crude predictions that were almost as often wrong as they were right. In fact, if we found a magic eight-ball, I wouldn¡¯t be surprised if the predictions from it were just as accurate as my current models, making the whole thing just a little bit incomplete.


    But, what I was beginning to see, was just how deeply interconnected the three parts that made up a person were. Before, I had always considered the Soul to be the most important part, the eternal part that turned a lump of flesh into a person but when we started to tug and pull on it, I realised it wasn¡¯t just the Soul that made the Body but the Body, in turn influenced the Soul. Sure, the spark, so to speak, within a Soul might be eternal, or at least it might come from outside the person, but it wasn¡¯t separate from the mortal world around it.


    Just the fact that Luna, Lia and I could exert influence over it, all in different ways with different outcomes, showed just how easily the Soul could be altered and, to a lesser degree, twisted, causing all sorts of interesting effects to the body it animated. Hel, I had even managed to alter a part of my Soul by accident on Mundus, when I had used the Eternal Ice below the glacier so I could unleash a massive blast of Ice Magic. Back then, the cold had seeped into my Soul and, looking back, I was fairly certain that the massive migraine and physical discomfort I had suffered once I was out of the capsule had been some sort of backlash.


    Following that idea, I sought to delve into the depths of my own Soul, trying to find out if there was any indication of that event if I could find evidence that I had accidentally altered my Soul while my Mind was controlling my Avatar. It was quite interesting to recall the memories of Mundus, there was a stark difference in clarity. When I tried to remember something that happened since the Change, it was simple, the memories were there in incredible clarity and detail but when I tried to remember things from before the change, things got a little cloudy. Sure, I could remember my life, I could remember various events on Mundus, but where the memories after the change were akin to a movie, the memories from before the change were more akin to the summary of a book, with a few direct quotes and pictures thrown in to illustrate.


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    Trying to find out more by turning my Mind Magic on myself was equally difficult. To find my own Mind was like trying to look into my own eyes without using a mirror or other reflective surface. I could meditate and find the flow of Astral Power within my body, I could even follow that flow until I found the place where I¡¯d project my Mind Magic from, but trying to project out and find myself was nigh impossible. Or maybe it straight out was impossible and my attempts were doomed to failure from the start, that was equally possible, though if so, it was a little disappointing.


    Out of curiosity, I decided to expand my experiments and include my companions as non-invasive test-subjects, mostly to train my perceptive abilities. Just looking at them using my different abilities, trying to see where their individual parts connected to form the people they were. If I didn¡¯t try to alter anything about them, there should be no danger, which is why I was willing to try at all.


    What I found was quite interesting. The first thing I noticed was that the differences between Lia and Luna were far, far greater than those between Lia and Alex or Luna and Silva respectively. Part of that was due to the vampiric elements the souls of Lia and Alex had but I was fairly confident that even without those elements, Luna would have more in common with Silva than with them.


    Similarly, their bodies were something I didn¡¯t even try to compare. Sure, there were clear similarities between Lia and Alex, thanks to their shared vampiric traits, but beyond that, there was little that the four of them had in common. I had expected they¡¯d all share a commonality in that they were mammals but to my surprise, there was little to no evidence of that in Lia and Alex. They still had their superficial mammalian parts but when I investigated a little deeper and looked beyond that surface, there was little evidence to show that these parts had ever been used for reproduction. Those elements were simply missing, replaced with organs I couldn¡¯t identify, even with my Blood Magic.


    The discovery of those definitely non-standard organs made me investigate further and check out their bodies in the greatest detail I could and what I found was quite interesting. Vampires, no matter how much they looked like people on the outside, were anything but. I had no idea when it had happened but internally, Lia had about as much in common with a cactus as she had with Luna and myself. None of her organs looked anything like those in us, at least to my Blood Magic, and again, I couldn¡¯t even begin to explain how they might work or what they did, other than keep her alive, for a given value of the word, and moving.


    Now, in hindsight, I regretted that we had left the Vampires we had created near New Dawn behind. These organs looked incredibly interesting and I had a feeling that they were part of what made Vampires as physically formidable as they were but how they did it, I had absolutely no idea, I couldn¡¯t even begin to guess.


    If I had a few freshly created Vampires, I might have been able to observe and learn something but sadly, we didn¡¯t have any of those, so I could only put a pin in that project and focus on different things.


    Things like our continued path north, always following after the pull of the Nexus, so far away but so tantalising close. There was still some instability within the Astral River, enough to make working across long distances impossible but the Astral was settling down.


    A part of me wondered if I was the only one planning to take over that Nexus or if there were others out there, hoping to take control of these natural foci of power so they could make their wishes reality. I wasn¡¯t as arrogant to believe that I was the only one with the desire to change the world, there¡¯d be others. Whether they had the ability or not, I wasn¡¯t sure and, at the end of the day, it didn¡¯t matter whether they could take over the Nexus. It only mattered if they could do so before I could get there and take control.

 Chapter 1011

    Normally, a growl would be cause for alarm, potentially indicating that there was some sort of dangerous beast warning us off while ready to attack. But, when such a growl came from Silva, it indicated something else entirely, depending on the aggression in the growl, the volume of it and a dozen other factors. In this case, the growl was soft, almost cautious, but the fur on her neck was standing up straight and her tail sticking out, telling me that there was something weird going on, something that she wasn¡¯t sure if we should be concerned about or not.


    Closing my eyes and sniffing the air myself, I tried to figure out what she was smelling but, despite my higher Intuition, her canine sense of smell was superior when it came to mundane scents and I didn¡¯t perceive anything extraordinary. Just the usual scents of the mountains, with a little extra mixed in that told me it would rain soon, scents I had tasted repeatedly over the last few weeks. However, knowing that there was something out there to be either concerned about or interested in, I signalled Silva to take the lead, so we could check out whatever was out there.


    We had to walk a lot further than I would have expected, though given that we were walking into the wind, maybe I should have. Furthermore, the rough and craggy terrain made it impossible to walk in a straight line, forcing us to make a detour or two, and slowing us down even more, turning what might have been a trip of half an hour on even ground into an almost two-hour trek.


    By the end of it, we were moving along a stretch of roadway, a few broken cars reminding the world of what it used to be. The road itself showed signs of decay far outstripping what the months since the Change should have caused but then, the entire world had been reshaped and the remnants of the old world were crumbling away at incredible speeds. It made me wonder about things that wouldn¡¯t decay normally, plastics and such, would they decompose now, or would they remain as a trashy relic of a bygone age?


    If so, it would be darkly amusing, if the complementary supermarket plastic bag would be considered an artefact of humanity¡¯s high period, maybe even revered and put into a museum for future generations to marvel at the ingenuity. For a moment, I wondered what it said about our old culture that a plastic bag might become its defining cultural artefact, a bag that people living at the time would readily consider thrash.


    Thanks to the signs along the road we had been walking on, there was little surprise when we saw the largely crumbled remains of buildings in the distance, the shadows of the night doing little to hide them from our sight. Looking at Silva confirmed that the scent was coming from those buildings, or at least from that direction, and now, I could even smell something myself. It wasn¡¯t a very pleasant scent, nor one I had really experienced before, but from the undertones of decay mixed with a strangely earthy scent I couldn¡¯t place, I could tell that whatever gave off these scents, it wasn¡¯t anything nice. Or at least nothing that was living a biological life like we were, these scents spoke of something entirely different. The closest analogue I could think of were the Withered, and those I considered a serious threat.


    They had become dangerous in a very short time and given their adaptive and evolving nature, I had little doubt that they could have become something beyond my ability to wipe out, if given enough time. Time this infection, if there was something similar here, already had, meaning it could be a serious threat in its own right. Not something we would want to bumble in without taking precautions.


    So, to make sure we wouldn¡¯t become fungal food, we veered off, moving into the open area around town and towards one of the smaller hills in the area. There, I once again used my Earth Magic to dig a shelter for us, something I had become incredibly accustomed to. My proficiency in that particular skill wasn¡¯t a real surprise, I had dug a shelter for us every night just before dawn, mostly to make sure we didn¡¯t stumble into a dangerous situation by accident, if we placed ourselves in danger, it was supposed to be by design and on purpose, not because we intruded into some critter¡¯s living room.


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    By now, making a shelter took barely half an hour, and a good part of that time was spent turning the cave solid and sturdy with another chunk used to make it look nice and feel comfortable. There was a part of me that wondered if the numerous caves I had dug over time would eventually be discovered, or maybe turned into some sort of path that connected the different shrines of Hecate we had established. A pilgrim¡¯s path, or maybe calling it Path of the Arcane Seeker would be more appropriate, though for that, we¡¯d eventually have to go back and connect the two parts that had been separated by our trek through the dungeon.


    But that would be a project for some later time, maybe once I managed to reunite with Sigmir we could go on a tour of Terra, exploring all the fascinating sights and visiting the communities that would hopefully spring up all around the world. It would serve to let Sigmir get accustomed to an entirely different world and would allow both of us to figure out where we would want to go in the future. Right now, my long-term plans were wholly focused on getting her back but after that? I didn¡¯t have any idea what I would do with myself, other than be with her. Something to occasionally think about, though part of it would depend on the area around the Ice Nexus, if it was nice enough, I might just settle down there.


    Setting thoughts and dreams of my future with Sigmir aside, I focused on the present and the need to make sure we didn¡¯t run into some sort of dangerous situation. For that, I used my usual scrying construct, a raven formed from Darkness, with a bit of Ice thrown in for physical mass and some Wind Magic so I could make the construct fly without trouble. I might be able to make a construct that could fly without the use of magic as if it was an actual bird, but adding Wind Magic into the construction made it a whole lot easier. Additionally, the presence of Wind Magic allowed a few tricks in regards to sound, letting me hear through the construct or even create sounds, though that was a work in progress. Speaking was quite difficult if you didn¡¯t have vocal cords or the inborn ability to use them.


    When my scrying construct approached the town, I couldn¡¯t see anything suspicious. That, in and of itself, made me quite suspicious, the entire town was far too neat and tidy. Sure, the buildings were crumbling, but that came from the passage of time and fairly little could be done about it without a large and dedicated workforce. But the simple fact that the cars, even those that looked obviously wrecked, were standing at the side of the road, as if parked and left there, made me suspicious. From afar, the entire town looked as if the people had simply decided to leave and walk away, which I couldn¡¯t believe.


    If they had simply decided to leave, where were the Undead and Shattered? Should I believe that the people, after defeating those dangerous enemies, had simply packed up their stuff and left a town filled with completely salvageable buildings and literal tons of material behind, while making sure that everything was neat and tidy?


    It didn¡¯t make any sense but, at the same time, I couldn¡¯t see any sign of active human habitation, no smoke, no fire, no movement outside, nothing but an empty town. The entire situation was as disconcerting as it was confusing, and so far, nothing explained the strange scent Silva had picked up on.


    Given that I couldn¡¯t tell all that much from high up in the sky, I let my scrying construct circle downwards, letting it ride the wind to make it look like nothing but an ordinary bird, no need to give away that it was a lot more than that.


    Sadly, despite the lowered altitude, I wasn¡¯t able to spot anything out of the ordinary, nothing to give any indication of what had happened here. Oh, there were a few more strange traces I could see, spots where I was fairly certain pools of blood had dried on the asphalt, but there were no visible bodies, nothing but this eerily tidy town.


    Suddenly, as my construct was just dipping below the height of the buildings around me, allowing me to see into the windows, I caught a glimpse of movement from the corner of my eyes. At that moment, I fully used the magical nature of the scrying construct, making it stop in mid-air in ways no bird could emulate and turn, so I could fully see what I had discovered but the only things I could see before my scrying construct was shattered were a flash of blue flames and a huge slashing claw.

 Chapter 1012

    Blinking, I sat back up, massaging my temples in an attempt to get rid of the budding headache. Having one of my scrying constructs shattered was a recipe for one, though the effect could be mitigated somewhat if I controlled the construct with a conjured focus. Using one came with its own drawbacks, which is why I hadn¡¯t done so tonight, leaving me with an aching head in addition to the mystery of what had happened.


    Closing my eyes, I brought those last few moments back before my mind¡¯s eye, putting together the images blurry from rapid motion in an attempt to turn the glimpse I had been able to see into a coherent picture. The claw was simple, I could easily estimate its size by comparing it to the known dimension of my scrying construct and conclude that it was on the same scale as my own hands would be, maybe a little larger, meaning it was far from the massive appendage my initial impression suggested. That had simply been a case of perspective, with my viewpoint and mind constrained to the much smaller scale of my scrying construct, the human-sized hand looked massive.


    Looking back at the image, I could also tell that the appendage the claw was attached to seemed to be covered in some mottled grey hide, or it might have been some strange form of leather, it certainly didn¡¯t look like normal skin, far too coarse. It might even be scales, the strange colour made it difficult to tell, but whatever it was, it looked far too inhuman to belong on the vaguely human appendage, giving me yet another clue as to what we were likely dealing with, especially with the last obvious piece of the puzzle, namely the blue flames.


    How could I ever forget that particular hue of blue, I had seen it far too often for comfort, to the point that I even had the occasional dream, or rather nightmare, about flames of that colour. Ever since those flames had covered the sky and burned our old world to ashes, ever since the eyes of so many people had been burned away and replaced with these smouldering fires, I knew that particular hue.


    Shattered, or possibly some advanced variants of them. By now, I could only guess what the basic, bestial Shattered we had faced at the start of this entire mess might have evolved into, there might be a nearly infinite variety of them. What could be true for one Shattered might be entirely false for another and that was without getting into the possibility of fundamentally different variants, like the Scorched. My current understanding was that those had come to be when somebody was in the process of being burned alive while the Change had hit, or maybe right after, creating something fantastically dangerous, but what if there were other variants, depending on the circumstances during the change?


    Drowned, maybe, or some sort of electric variants if the change had hit while they were being electrocuted, either by faulty wiring, power surges or something as unlikely as a lightning bolt? Just because the change had hit my hometown during a fairly clear and pleasant night didn¡¯t mean that it had been the case everywhere, I couldn¡¯t be confident about anything. There were enough people out there to make even the unlikeliest of scenarios plausible, with the only question being whether I¡¯d run into them. Or if the unlikely circumstances of their creation caused them to be equally unlikely outliers in terms of power, eventually forcing me to take care of them?


    But before any of the potential dangers lurking far away mattered, we would have to deal with the danger right before us, unless we decided to turn around and leave the place behind. Not that I was planning to leave. While I didn¡¯t think that there were people around, Shattered could be useful in their own right, allowing us to test Soul Magic in a different way, hopefully shedding some additional light onto the complicated subject.


    Moreover, the fact that the small town looked incredibly tidy was curious, indicating that the Shattered were more than their usual bestial and mindless selves. Well, unless the residents had placed a few destroyed cars at the side of the road, stacked rubble in neat piles, shed large puddles of blood in the streets and generally turned their town into a confusing mess. No, I was fairly certain that the town had been cleaned up after the change, which, in turn, led to the question of who had done the cleaning and so far, the only reasonable answer was that the Shattered had cleaned up. For some reason.


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    Sure, it was plausible that the Shattered had feasted on a few bodies, but that left the question where the remains of those bodies were, as I didn¡¯t believe Shattered would be this tidy. An even bigger question would be why they would have moved the destroyed cars into parking spots or tidied up some of the rubble, actions I didn¡¯t think Shattered would be motivated to do. Unless there was somebody with powerful Mind Magic around, in that case, they might have decided to make use of the Shattered as useful and powerful organic robots, similar to the way I had used the Undead near that apartment complex.


    Whatever the case was, I needed more information so we could make an informed decision. For one, I needed to know how many Shattered there were in this town, how intelligent they were, whether there were any special variants around, if there were humans around as implied by the idea about a Mind Magic user controlling them and a hundred other things.


    Letting out a sigh, I opened my eyes and begun explaining my discovery to the others. Amusingly, the news that the town was at least partially filled with monsters was welcomed by Lia and Luna, while Alex and Silva looked only mildly interested. To my two daughters, monsters in general and Shattered in particular meant there were interesting experiments to be had, especially for Lia.


    Given that she had been created from a Shattered, though one that hadn¡¯t been feral but contained and caged, she had a slightly strange attachment to them. It didn¡¯t stop her from slaughtering them by the dozen if there was a need but she had admitted that a part of her wanted to see if we could turn more Shattered into Vampires and give them a part of their sapience back. It was a bit of a long-shot, especially as a good part of Lia¡¯s creation had been happenstance and luck, but it was an interesting experiment to perform.


    Similarly, Luna saw Shattered as another fairly intelligent base-creature that could be used in our experiments, trying to understand magic and the different affinities. We hadn¡¯t been able to look into their existence too deeply yet, so having a town filled with nothing but Shattered gave us a good opportunity to investigate and learn more.


    Finally, Silva indicated in her usual, slightly growly, fashion that we should ascertain whether the strange scent that had brought us here was coming from the town or if there was something beyond it that we might want to investigate. It was a reasonable point and it didn¡¯t take long for Luna and Silva to decide that they would head out during the day, keep a lot of distance from the town and make their way to its other side, testing where the scent was coming from.


    In the meantime, I was tasked with turning our usual, fairly small, shelter into a base that we could use for a couple of days. Additionally, Lia and Luna felt that a few cells would be a useful addition, something I readily agreed with. It was one thing to perform simple experiments on people coming to us for powers, it was another thing to use a few of the local Shattered in our experiments. Hopefully, there were a lot more Shattered than there had been volunteers, allowing us to repeat the same experiments multiple times, allowing us to gather more foundational information.


    It was one thing to know how channelling power into a soul would alter it but it was an entirely different thing to understand why the channelling of power altered it in that way and how another soul, with different attributes, would be altered if the same thing happened to it. For that, we needed repeated tests and experiments with as little variation in the test subjects as possible, which made Shattered a fairly useful specimen. At least if their souls either remained human or were altered in a consistent fashion, otherwise, we might only learn more about Shattered.


    But even that could give us some information on the foundations of Life, Magic and the Universe. However, at the end of the day, the Answer to all of that would likely turn out to be forty-two.

 Chapter 1013

    Even after spending two days trying to figure out the town, which I had dubbed Queta, as it was the only part of the town¡¯s sign that remained legible, we still didn¡¯t know a whole lot. Sure, we knew that the town was the source of the strange scent, we knew that there was an incredible number of Shattered existing within the town but why these Shattered were different from their counterparts, we didn¡¯t know.


    Remote observation, scrying and spying just wasn¡¯t enough to get more than a glimpse of these creatures, they managed to remain quite covert, taking shelter in the few houses that hadn¡¯t crumbled yet and possibly underground. To make matters worse, it turned out that my first failure to scry them hadn¡¯t been a coincidence, these Shattered were sensitive to Astral Power and could easily find my scrying constructs. As soon as my constructs dropped into their range, they struck with more than enough force to destroy them, preventing me from getting anything but the briefest of glimpses.


    Similarly to my own failures, the others hadn¡¯t been able to learn a whole lot more. Silva might be the one who gathered the most information, her sense of smell allowing her to differentiate between twenty-five different individual scents, giving us the lowest number of Shattered there could be in the town but, obviously, that didn¡¯t mean there couldn¡¯t be more than those twenty-five. She simply was unable to detect more, but given the distance and intermingling of scents, even that was quite impressive.


    Luna managed to get a few glimpses from afar, simply by looking at the town, but those glimpses only revealed that the Shattered were active, regardless of whether it was day or night.


    No, if we wanted to have more information, we¡¯d have to go in personally, making sure to remain quiet and hidden, so we could investigate. And maybe collect a specimen or three, the shelter I had dug was ready to detain a few Shattered, at least for a time. The only possible problem I could see was that the remaining Shattered might consider the collection of a few of their number to be something that couldn¡¯t be tolerated and they might try hunting us down. While I was fairly confident that I could conceal myself from them, the combination of Darkness Magic, Wind Magic, high attributes, my cloak and considerable practice was incredibly useful for that, that confidence went away when bringing a prisoner along. Similarly, while I might be able to drag a Shattered through the Shadows, thus breaking any physical trace, I wasn¡¯t sure about their sense of smell or if they had some other ways of tracking each other.


    So, a way to keep us from being swarmed, put under siege and eventually overrun within our shelter was needed, something to make sure we¡¯d have a way out if the worst happened. At the same time, I wanted that way out to be something only we could use, preventing anyone from getting inside that way.


    Digging an escape tunnel was quite trivial, only that I didn¡¯t dig it all the way through, instead I only dug the tunnel until it was about two metres from the surface, covered by a volume of earth and stone I¡¯d be able to move within a minute or two, depending on my level of exhaustion. At the same time, trying to find the exact spot where a tunnel was hidden beneath the soil would be nigh impossible. There was no trace left on the surface unless the Shattered could somehow detect traces of the passive Earth Magic I used to map the environment but given the nature of that skill, I highly doubted it. Even I would be hard-pressed to find traces if somebody else used a similar skill, even if that skill was based on Darkness or Ice Magic, my highest affinities.


    With all that in place, we decided it was time to investigate directly and find out what it would take to capture a Shattered, as opposed to simply killing one.


    As usual when it came to sneaky operations, I was moving alone, while the others were waiting in a carefully prepared ambush near a prepared overhang that was providing a permanent Shadow. I had carefully studied this particular location, driving the sensation deeply into my mind, to the point that I could Shadow Step to it without needing line of sight. I wasn¡¯t sure how far I could step in total, but we had done a few tests to make sure that the entire town was within my range, so I could be confident in my ability to get away if things got troublesome.


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    Knowing that the Shattered here had at least some skill in detecting magic, I didn¡¯t even try to fly near the town with my cloak, instead, I had covered myself tightly, while weaving a neatly contained web of Wind Magic around my body and Darkness Magic around my Mind. There shouldn¡¯t be anything giving away my presence, even my Soul should be concealed thanks to the effects of my cloak, the darkness of the night making sure of that. While I wasn¡¯t truly invisible, I was the next best thing, a wispy shadow in the darkness of the night, silent, scentless, mindless and soulless.


    Entering the city was quite disconcerting, the moment I stepped between the houses, I could feel an odd twisting in my gut. Without taking another step, I tried to make sense of the sensation, checking if there was some strange magic making me feel uncomfortable or something similar. But, no matter how I tasted the air or how much I looked around with my magical sight or my burgeoning Soul Magic, I couldn¡¯t detect anything. Nor was there anything I could sense with my Mind Magic or the Extrasensory Perception: Mind trait. No matter what I tried, there didn¡¯t seem to be a reason for the uncomfortable sensation.


    But, by now, I had learned to trust my gut, there were moments during which my high Intuition made itself known, even if my mind was unable to quantify the threat or detect where the sensation came from. It was, at its core, an instinctual fear of something that could be a threat, meaning I had to be especially careful.


    Looking around, I decided to move into the deepest shadows I could find, letting myself completely meld with them to the point that I almost stepped into the shadow realm entirely. Not quite, that would have taken too much of my senses out of the physical world, but far enough to vanish.


    For a minute, or maybe five, nothing happened but eventually, I heard a clacking noise. It was incredibly quiet, only loud enough to be heard in the few moments in which the soft breeze faded away and left the night almost perfectly silent, but it was there. And it was coming closer, a realisation that only reinforced my desire to hide and find out what was going on.


    Not long afterwards, a Shattered moved into my line of sight, its ability to move silently and without any abrupt motions that would draw the eye was incredible, and even its eyes, normally burning brightly and making any attempts at stealth impossible, were dim and shrouded in darkness. Despite knowing where to look, thanks to the clacking noise one of its claws made as it moved, I could barely see it. Trying to spot it would have been fairly difficult otherwise, not impossible but certainly not an easy task.


    As I watched, the Shattered moved into the area where I had entered the city, sniffing the air, touching the ground and looking around in a disturbingly intent way, as if the thing knew there was something to find but couldn¡¯t.


    Out of curiosity, I decided to use Observe in combination with my Darkness Magic to keep the ability concealed. Moments later, a blue box told me the Shattered was level sixty-seven, nothing overly worrying, but at the same time, the Shattered suddenly stopped as if somebody had pressed a pause button. Then, a heartbeat or two later, it suddenly moved with far greater urgency, frantically searching the area around it.


    The only conclusion I could draw from its behaviour was that the thing somehow had noticed my entry into the city, though I had no idea how that could work, and been able to deduce the general area I was in. Then, my use of the Observe ability must have been noticed, too, confirming that a target was nearby, prompting its current, frantic activities.


    After taking a moment to watch the thing, waiting for it to turn its back to my concealed position, I decided to strike while the iron was hot, even if some of the surprise factor was lost. In a single, smooth action, I let the active concealment around me fade away, allowing me to focus all my mental and magical energy on my attack. Overflow activated and a simple command escaped my lips, spoken in a quiet voice but reinforced by an overwhelming blast of my Mind Magic.


    Sleep.


    The Shattered had no time to react, it had barely started to turn when my magic hit it, immediately crushing what defences it might have and sending it into a deep state of unconsciousness. Now, I just had to get away with the thing.

 Chapter 1014

    Attacking the one Shattered that had come to check out whatever disturbance had registered with them when I entered the town was a little like poking an anthill. From afar, the anthill is quiescent, just a mound of needles, earth and whatever material the critters had access to but the moment it is seriously disturbed? Suddenly, the entire thing boils over, countless ants crawling out, trying to defend their home from any attacker, no matter the cost to the individual.


    In this case, the Shattered had just barely hit the road when I heard noises behind me. At first, it was only soft noises, muted by distance and thick material between the source and me but by the time I had walked the few steps to the place where the Shattered had fallen and was just about to pick it up, the noise had increased in intensity by an order of magnitude. If I had minutes to make my escape, I would be fairly surprised as I considered it more likely that it was a case of seconds, maybe a good number of seconds, but far too few for comfort.


    Stealth was no longer possible, not while carrying a body. Even my magical abilities could only do so much to keep the second body hidden and if there was some connection between different Shattered, even that bit wouldn¡¯t help. But there was something I could do, something that might give me a few moments of time.


    Remembering how the Shattered back home had reacted to Blood Magic, I cut into my palm and channelled a descent amount of Astral Power into the blood that instantly welled up before swiping my arm through the air, scattering the magically infused liquid in the air and on the ground nearby. Hopefully, the literal scent of Blood would drive the approaching Shattered to distraction, or send them into a feeding frenzy so they¡¯d turn on each other, allowing me an easy escape. That done, I began to run as quickly as I could while carrying the heavy load.


    Without turning around, I couldn¡¯t see whether my ploy had worked or not but from what I did hear, there was a massive mess going on. It was an absolute cacophony, snarls, growls, the slapping sounds of flesh hitting flesh or stone, crashing sounds of property destruction, clanking, I couldn¡¯t even begin to name the variety of sounds behind me, let alone build a coherent picture of the events from them. Well, other than the picture of a complete and utter mess.


    Knowing that I had only so much time before they¡¯d sort out the mess they were in, I continued running as quickly as I could, until I reached a suitable tree. There, I pushed my Wind Magic as much as possible, jumping upwards and accelerating even further with the help of my cloak, the combination enough to let me land near the crown of the sturdy tree.


    Hidden between the reddening leaves, I stuck the still-comatose Shattered between a couple of branches, wedging it in to make sure it wouldn¡¯t fall before wrapping some Darkness Magic around it, concealing its presence as much as possible.


    Once that was done, I let myself drop back down to the ground and kept running, trying to make it look like I had merely taken a leap instead of dropping off the Shattered. At that point, I could barely hear the commotion behind me and wasn¡¯t confident that any of the Shattered were still following me, but I wasn¡¯t about to take a silly risk, I had done so earlier. Now, I just wanted to break all contact between myself and the Shattered before returning to the one I had stashed away, hopefully before it woke back up. But given the amount of power I had put into my magical command, I doubted it would wake before noon, maybe it wouldn¡¯t even wake by the time night would roll around again.


    After laying a trail for about half an hour, never getting close to the few Shattered that had swarmed out of the town and into the surrounding area, I decided it was good enough. There were traces of my presence all around town, never leading in the same direction thanks to my ability to fly and step through the shadows, both of which I had used to break up the trail. if the Shattered could follow that, they¡¯d have already found the one I had knocked out and stashed away but the few times I had been in viewing distance of that tree, it hadn¡¯t looked disturbed. Unless the Shattered were a lot more subtle and careful than I gave them credit for, they hadn¡¯t been able to find their lost fellow.


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    Using my cloak and Darkness Magic to conceal myself once more, I stepped into the shadows, appearing some distance away above the treetops. From there, I quietly stepped onto the highest branches, using my cloak to lessen my weight just enough to keep them from breaking. It took a lot less Astral Power to move like this, which, in turn, would hopefully mean that there¡¯d be less of a trace but by this point, I was fairly confident that I wouldn¡¯t be detected. Not unless the Shattered had some very special senses in addition to whatever alarm that had allowed them to detect my presence when I initially entered the city.


    In the time I had spent running around and muddying my tracks, I had thought about that trick quite a bit. The only thing I was willing to believe was that they somehow could detect the pressure my feet put on the ground while walking. Wind Magic controlled the air around me, keeping my scent and any other gasses that might give away my presence contained. Sure, there was a minor gas exchange to keep the air in my personable bubble breathable, but I highly doubted the Shattered could detect the increase of carbon dioxide caused by my breathing. That seemed to be a bit of a stretch. Additionally, the Wind Magic also kept sound waves inside, muffling what little noise I made while sneaking.


    Similarly, Darkness Magic should conceal me from sight and I thought it would also conceal me from ways to detect my temperature, but I hadn¡¯t been able to test that as thoroughly as I would like.


    So, unless the Shattered were capable of tracking the magic I emitted to keep myself concealed, which would imply that they had incredible magical senses, greater than any Luna, Lia or I had access to. That, I considered doubtful. Additionally, they¡¯d also need a fair amount of skill in Darkness Magic to overcome the effects of the concealment concept woven into the spells I used, something I considered to be, again, doubtful.


    But pressure? That might very well be the answer, especially if the Shattered were as active underground as their reaction made it look like. I could easily see creatures able to dig tunnels gain the ability to sense spikes of pressure, allowing them to evade collapsing ceilings and similar disasters. Applying such a sense as an early warning system could be a way to find my presence unless I used my cloak to fly. Something I should test later.


    For now, I only checked if there were any Shattered anywhere near the one I had stashed away or the path I would need to take to meet the others and when I didn¡¯t find anything, I picked up the acquired test subject and made my way towards them.


    While I kept my senses wide open during the trip, nothing jumped out at me, the only noises in the night coming from the forest around me, the rustling leaves, the occasional creak as the wind shifted one of them, nothing that¡¯d indicate danger.


    ¡°Did your plan change, Mother?¡± Lia asked stepping out of the concealment they had been waiting in, just in case I needed support to make my escape.


    ¡°Well, somewhat,¡± I admitted, feeling a little embarrassed that I had been caught by the Shattered. Sure, I had caught one of them in return, but I had been utterly confident in my ability to hide myself and scout out the town, only to be caught moments after entering.


    ¡°They have some way to notice if somebody enters their domain, they certainly noticed me. This one came looking as soon as I got in, so I decided to get us our first test subject. We can run an experiment or two on it and tomorrow night, I can try and find out how they were able to find me,¡± I explained, shrugging while shifting the unconscious Shattered to Silva who easily took care of the weight.


    While there were a few looks of surprised disbelief at the fact that I had been detected, they didn¡¯t object to my plan and we started out way back to our base. There was science to be done.

 Chapter 1015

    ¡°That thing is loud,¡± Luna complained, glancing towards the deeper parts of our shelter, towards the piece of rock I used as a door to contain the captured Shattered. And she was right, the thing was incredibly noisy, trying to bash its way through a wall even if the wall had been reinforced to the point that it would take a stupid amount of force to break. Even worse, the thing was stupid enough to try breaking through the back of the cell, where the wall was backed by metres of soil, depending in which direction you went. The only wall it could try to break through and have less success in getting out of the cell would be trying to go down, in there, it would have to dig through the entire planet, or something like that. Not that those circumstances stopped the stupid thing, it just kept bashing.


    Curiously, it was smart enough to keep its efforts contained enough for its regeneration to heal the damage repeatedly striking rock caused its hands, and skull if it used its head, but that was the only indication that the thing had any intelligence at all. In every other regard, it was nothing more but a ball of instincts, maybe with some emotion thrown in for good measure. Emotions like hunger, anger and likely some stubborn determination, a determination that fueled its continued attempts to break through the stone.


    ¡°Loud, and an utterly confusing case, magically speaking,¡± I grumbled in return, thinking of the different experiments I had performed on it during the day, even forgoing a bit of sleep to keep testing things. The problem was, Mind Magic didn¡¯t work on it in any predictable fashion, it was as if the magic worked in one way on one occasion and in a completely different way on another. There didn¡¯t seem to be any rhyme or reason to predict which mechanism would be in play, leaving me utterly confused and incredibly annoyed.


    How was I supposed to start understanding the Mind and its connection to Body and Soul when my test subjects lacked the common decency to react in a consistent manner? Poke them once, get a twitch, poke them again and get a temper tantrum that leaves more blood on the wall than seemingly possible. If there was some sort of build-up, I could get their irritation but as of yet, I hadn¡¯t been able to find any patterns.


    Nor had I been able to read their emotions with my Mind Magic, something I had been training myself to do. The idea was somewhat similar to the Observe ability, something  that would give me information I¡¯d normally not have, maybe even an ability that¡¯d eventually allow me to read their actual surface thoughts or deeper memories. Sure, those ideas were far, far off, but for now I was content to start slow and small.


    Only, the Shattered didn¡¯t work as a target for that, at least not in a consistent matter. Testing things with Luna and Lia, I had been able to get flashes of emotion from Luna and some strange sensations from Lia, with similar results when I tried it on Sigmir and Alex. But with the Shattered, I got mixed results, in some cases, it was as if I was working on Luna, only for that to suddenly change, and it was as if I was trying to read Lia. There were similarities, but there also was a fundamental difference. Not quite alcohol and water but somewhat similar.


    My initial idea was that there might be something within the Shattered¡¯s soul that might cause those fluctuations and, when I checked on its soul, I immediately got a huge headache and understood the term ¡®Shattered¡¯ a whole lot better. Where a normal soul appeared to be somewhat spherical in my sight, with coloured light radiating from it that gave me an idea of its elemental alignment and a few other things, depending on the intensity, the clarity and so on, and a vampiric soul was trying to draw in light, allowing me to get some idea of its alignment by the vortex, the Shattered had neither of those. Instead, it looked as if the ball I usually saw had been Shattered into countless fragments, all of them radiating or drawing in light in a chaotic dance of oscillating powers. It was as if a disco ball had been shattered, while hundreds of floodlights were illuminating the area from all directions, creating an utterly headache-inducing display of light and colours.


    That, in turn, shed some light on my problems but it didn¡¯t really help. With a Soul in a state like this, the connection between Body, Mind and Soul wouldn¡¯t be stable, let alone allow for predictable results, unless I managed to take the entirety of this Shattered mess into account.


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    ¡°Say, Luna, what do you see when you focus on the Shattered and their souls?¡± I asked, hoping that maybe her divinely given eyes would see something that I couldn¡¯t, or make sense of the mess I could see.


    ¡°They are sparkly, it looks pretty cool,¡± she explained, before trying to elaborate when I raised an eyebrow. Sadly, the more she tried to elaborate and put the impressions she got into words we both could understand, the less sense I managed to make of her explanation. Most likely, this was another of those subjective experiences that could barely be shared between people who used the same base comparison and in this case, my Soul Sight worked with a different mechanism than her Eyes of the Moon.


    ¡°So, do you think we can put these grains of sand back together?¡± I asked, using her metaphor for the scattered shards I had seen.


    ¡°Maybe?¡± she shrugged, obviously uncertain, ¡°It might work, but wasn¡¯t this one supposed to be Lia¡¯s?¡± she asked, reminding me of my other daughter who was currently resting.


    ¡°We can always get more of them,¡± I grinned, already curious about the effects this experiment would have. ¡°But I¡¯ll ask her anyway.¡±


    As hoped, Lia didn¡¯t really mind letting Luna and me go first, she just wanted to watch what we were doing. By now, she, too, understood that the transformation into Vampires was partially Soul Magic, so she tried to learn as much as possible about the skill and these experiments were part of that.


    Given the Shattered¡¯s hostile disposition, we didn¡¯t try to enter its cell, instead, I opened a small gap in the rock, allowing us to observe it directly as we were working.


    And work, it was. Hard work, complicated work and, quite frankly, messy work. Trying to fit the Shattered Soul back together was akin to assembling a puzzle. Only, it was a puzzle made up of magnets, with fiddly and completely randomly sized pieces and in zero-gravity. Additionally, while trying to assemble it you had to wear thick work gloves, making any kind of fine manipulation impossible, to say nothing of trying to feel the size and shapes of your pieces.


    The shards didn¡¯t stay where we tried to put them, moving them magically was both incredibly difficult and illogical and they seemed to randomly repel or attract each other, sometimes at the same time.


    But, as we worked, I had a feeling we were making progress, or maybe I was simply projecting my own perceptions on the work we were doing. It might be working, or I might be turning insane, until finally, I decided that I had enough and stopped trying to finagle things. If the problem was one that could be solved, maybe it could be solved with good, old brute force.


    The moment I decided, I activated Overflow, putting all the considerable weight of my magical power behind the simple actions I was trying to perform. Instead of putting one piece next to another and trying to make them fit seamlessly, I simply grabbed all the pieces I could and pushed them together, irregardless of shape and size.


    I could feel the Astral Power rushing out of me and into the Shattered. Somewhere at the edge of my consciousness, I noticed that the Shattered¡¯s body was completely stiff and unmoving, in comparison to its earlier pacing and attempts to break out of the cell to get at us but I didn¡¯t really care. I wanted to put this Soul back together and into the right shape, so I simply pushed and prodded, as if I was trying to form a ball out of wet sand.


    Finally, after I had spent far more Astral Power than I had anticipated, enough to drain me almost entirely, the Soul shifted one final time and something strange changed. It stopped fighting me and fit together in a roughly spherical shape, just as I had planned.


    But that wasn¡¯t all. Moments later, just as I was about to let out a content sigh of success, I could feel Astral Power from all around us rush into the cell and the Shattered, the surge big enough to be perceived as a slight moving of the wind, despite Astral Power being supposedly non-physical.


    And then, just as the surge seemed to peak, the Shattered within the cell let out a howl of agony, only to be cut off when its entire body burst apart, painting the cell gory red, with a few chunks of bone and other pieces strewn in for good measure.


    ¡°Oops,¡± I muttered, uncertain what had caused this particular reaction.

 Chapter 1016

    After the first Shattered exploded on us, procurement of additional Shattered started to become a priority. Luckily, my first venture into their town to capture one had given me enough information to let me go back there without too much trouble. Flying prevented them from detecting my presence on the ground, while my magic was enough to conceal me, even while I was using my cloak to fly. Additionally, I noticed that I could carry the weight of a Shattered if I put enough power into the levitation effect of my cloak, though it took a lot out of me.


    Those factors combined meant that I could capture Shattered by using Mind Magic to stun them, quickly rope them up and disappear into the sky before the other Shattered could come out from underground, the aerial extraction taking away the tracks they¡¯d normally follow. While I still exercised due diligence and made sure to fly over rough and difficult terrain to make the possibility of pursuit even less of an issue, I hadn¡¯t noticed any trouble while capturing five Shattered, taking one each night.


    Experimenting on these five was what kept us busy during our days. There were a lot of fascinating similarities between the different Shattered, especially when it came to their, well, shattered Souls but there were just as many differences. My continued attempts to improve my Mind Magic had cost us one of our test subjects when I decided to try and see if more power would allow me to get a better idea of what was going on within their brain. The results had been a very mixed bag, on one hand, I had managed to read a slew of strange, fairly unconnected images from their Mind, images I was still trying to figure out and understand, but on the other hand, I had received a blue box, notifying me that I had killed a Shattered.


    Not just put it into a coma, the usual result of pure Mind Magic attacks, but actually killed it. Out of curiosity, I had decided to dissect the thing and had been quite surprised when its brain wasn¡¯t just damaged but it looked almost as if it had been boiled in the blood flowing through it. A small part of me wondered why the overpowered Mind Magic had seemingly manifested as heat while another part was curious if there was a way to overpower Mind Magic to such a degree that a head would literally explode but disregarding those questions, there was little the Shattered¡¯s body could tell me. Just that Mind Magic could cause physical damage if overpowered far enough, something I hadn¡¯t known before. The more you know, the more you can learn.


    Another Shattered had been fed a concoction from Alex before Lia attempted to turn the Shattered into a Vampire without my assistance. The concoction was something the pair had worked on together, hoping that it would allow them to make more Vampires without my aid, and the Shattered was simply a useful first test. Only, the result was about as problematic as it could get. The Shattered expired from the concoction while Lia was still draining its blood, forcing us to question whether it had expired because of the drain or because of the concoction.


    Our follow-up experiment came when Alex joined me in town the next night, hitching a ride on my shoulder. There, we brought down another Shattered and instead of roping this one, Alex fed it the concoction they had used on the one at our base, just without Lia draining its blood at the same time. This time, the Shattered didn¡¯t die from the concoction, but that might have been because it was ripped apart as soon as its fellow Shattered came across it.


    Now, we only needed to decide if these results should be considered a positive thing and if Alex could manage to aerosolise their concoction. If they could, it might be a quite potent weapon against the Shattered, if we ever needed one. However, more testing was required to see if the results were consistent.


    The third of our Shattered was used as a control. Did they always explode when their Souls were forcibly repaired or was it a coincidence? As it turned out, yet another cell was painted red and we learned that, at least with a sample size of two, Shattered explode when their Souls are repaired with brute force.


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    That, in turn, led us to wonder what would happen if we didn¡¯t use brute force to repair the Soul which gave Luna and me our next project. Slowly and gently repair a Shattered¡¯s Soul without having their Bodies explode on us. Especially as the smell of exploded Shattered was quite nauseating, part rotten corpse, part fresh blood and a hundred per cent nasty.


    The slow approach was somewhat similar to my initial attempts at repairing a Shattered¡¯s Soul, only that instead of trying to work alone, I had Luna add her own Life Magic into the Shattered¡¯s Soul, infusing it with enough vitality to withstand nearly everything and, maybe more importantly, to reduce the problem I had with different pieces repelling each other. The idea was that by overpowering their natural affinities and biases with Life Magic, we¡¯d be able to complete the puzzle slowly and piece by piece.


    It took quite a lot of time and even more focus, but after a few hours of slow and methodical puzzling, we managed to get the Shattered¡¯s Soul put back together. Well, we managed to put the biggest pieces back together and get something roughly spherical before pushing the remaining pieces into the gaps and sprinkled the smallest pieces across the result. Sadly, that was about as far as we could go, as the effort of keeping the Soul attuned to Life Magic was enough to drain Luna of Astral Power.


    Curious about the result of our experiment, I woke the Shattered back up, after I had put it out earlier. Its constant movement, the attempts to break through the wall land its general agitation had been quite annoying and made an already difficult piece of magic even harder, so putting it to sleep had been a good solution. And now, I was curious what a healed Shattered would look and act like.


    ¡°Good Afternoon,¡± I spoke, as the Shattered was slowly blinking its eyes, trying to gather its scrambled bearings.


    ¡°Where am I?¡± it asked, its voice rough from disuse to the point that it barely sounded human, ¡°What was this nightmare?¡±


    ¡°How curious,¡± I muttered, wondering how much it remembered, ¡°Could you please ask for your status?¡± I prodded, watching as the Shattered in the cell started to look around frantically, almost as if it hadn¡¯t been able to hear me. Or maybe it had heard but was ignoring me, the stupid thing. I only wanted to know if it still had access to the system.


    Still, I could see its mouth work for a moment, mouthing the word, even as its agitation was rapidly rising, especially when it was taking stock of its body and saw the thick, leathery skin on its arms, the claw-like hands and its general, naked appearance.


    Sadly, I couldn¡¯t tell if the Shattered was seeing anything, there were no useful pupils or anything the like to go by, only two pits filled with fire. However, where before the fire had been a cold, blue colour, now it was cyan, giving it a slightly warmer appearance. Still ominous, but the change was interesting. Out of curiosity, I decided to use Observe, getting a strange notification that flickered between Shattered with its original high level and a bunch of question marks, leaving me with a few more questions and little new information.


    Sadly, it ignored everything I tried telling it, instead mumbling to itself while its hands were clawing at every piece of exposed skin, which was all skin, leaving deep gouges, only for those wounds to heal thanks to the Life Magic still filling its Soul.


    Out of curiosity, I glanced at the Soul and noticed that now that Luna wasn¡¯t constantly filling it with more Life Magic, the power drained rapidly and even faster as the thing was clawing at itself.


    Within less than a minute of that, even after I decided to knock it out again, the Life Magic faded completely and I could watch as the Soul Shattered once more, only now, there was a strange surge of Astral Power at the same time, leaving the Shattered burned to a crip from azure flames that spontaneously erupted all over its body.


    These were interesting results which ultimately led us to the fifth Shattered and yet another experiment, this one a collaboration between Lia and myself. An attempt to repeat the original creation of Lia, to turn a Shattered into a Vampire. We had a few ideas, as demonstrated by the experiments Lia and Alex had performed together, but as of yet, we didn¡¯t have a whole lot of success. Not that the lack of success was stopping us, even a failed experiment could teach us a lot. We only needed to try again, with a slightly different method.

 Chapter 1017

    Lia and I were sitting in front of the last currently occupied cell, going over our plans one more time. The Shattered within was restless, still trying to bash its way through the solid walls, and I was planning to put it to sleep soon.


    ¡°Can you shackle the thing instead of putting it out? I believe that their mental state right before the transformation, the desire to, well, live even as their blood is taken from them plays a large part in the success of the ritual,¡± Lia asked, making me grimace even as I nodded. This experiment was largely her show, I was just helping and gathering information for my own purposes, if she felt that a conscious test subject was needed, I¡¯d have to get creative.


    ¡°Best to put it out for a bit, shackle it while unconscious and just wait for it to wake back up,¡± I allowed, as I had no interest in trying to wrap shackles around a struggling Shattered, that sounded like a massive annoyance. Now, it was Lia¡¯s turn to nod in acceptance and moments later, after a concentrated burst of Mind Magic, the Shattered was out like a light and I stepped into the cell, quickly forming the required bindings around the thing¡¯s body.


    ¡°It¡¯s quite interesting,¡± I mused, placing a hand on the Shattered¡¯s leg so I could use my Blood Magic to get a better idea of its body¡¯s composition. ¡°Outside their overall body shape, they have little linking them to humanity any longer. Their brains, for one, but even that has changed, not quite shrivelled up but something similar,¡± I sighed, before focusing on the rest of its body, trying to understand what I was detecting.


    ¡°The rest of its body is just weird,¡± I shook my head, remembering different Shattered I had studied ever since the Change had happened. There was a clear progression in their forms and internal structure, from the original Shattered, nothing but humans with burning eyes and slowly emerging monstrous features, to what I was seeing now. Internally, these things had nothing that remained from their former humanity, their organs were completely and utterly foreign to me, forcing me to guess at their functions. There might be an analogue to a human heart, but their circulatory system was strange, to say nothing about a few dense, bony structures I could only feel thanks to the blood moving around them. The respiratory system was greatly reduced, too, while the remains of their reproductive systems were just weird, to the point that I could only guess at the thing¡¯s original sex by the width of their hips, though they, too, had changed.


    ¡°Makes me wonder what would happen if we actually manage to turn a Shattered back into a human,¡± I mused, glancing at Lia who was watching me with interest.


    ¡°You mean, would they cope as I did or just kill themself?¡± my daughter asked, gesturing towards her own body, reminding me that her internal structures were just as inhuman as the ones of a Shattered. Granted, she retained a lot more of a human¡¯s outward appearance and, amusingly, remained fairly attractive by human standards, despite the uselessness of these outward features. After all, there was no way that Lia would ever nurse a babe, and yet, she had more than I did in that regard. Not a lot more, we were both fairly disadvantaged in that regard, but more nonetheless.


    ¡°Something like that, yes,¡± I nodded, despite knowing that Lia hadn¡¯t so much coped with the transformation she had undergone but had discarded her entire existence before the change, relegated it to knowledge with no emotional attachment to it. Thus, the new name she had asked for, the willingness, or maybe even wish, to leave her original family and travel with me and her wholehearted embrace of her role as my daughter. Would a repaired Shattered do the same, discard their entire existence or would they try clinging to it, only to be forced to accept that that existence had been, well, shattered by the Change, just like they had been?


    To say nothing of the body horror any human would experience when realising their bodies had turned into something that could only be described as monstrous, especially while trying to regain their already damaged humanity.


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    The kindest thing to do, if we managed to repair a Shattered¡¯s Soul and return their mind to a human state, might be to send them into a deep sleep and let them pass away peacefully, without ever waking up and experiencing the horror they had become. But would I want to have that happen to me, or would I want to have the minuscule chance to overcome the trauma and damage? I would have to meditate on that question because I didn¡¯t think there was an easy answer, especially not one we could actually accomplish with our limited resources.


    ¡°Let¡¯s do this;¡± Lia pulled me from my thoughts when the bound Shattered started to stir, quickly returning to the waking world. Now, it was time to see if we could make the Shattered into a Vampire, as I had done with Lia, all those months ago. We had tried something similar before but didn¡¯t have any success with it, despite our successes with actual people. Something about the Shattered, most likely their broken souls, made it difficult.


    This time, our idea was that I would pull the Soul into a roughly spherical shape, not trying to put it back together, while Lia would drain the Shattered¡¯s blood in an attempt to turn it into a Vampire. Hopefully, the transformation would pull the shattered pieces of its Soul back together, turning them vampiric but also stabilising them in the process.


    For the third time, I started to puzzle a Soul back together, though for once, I wasn¡¯t trying to make it fit or anything like that. No, I was just trying to get a roughly spherical construct of soul shards, something for the vampiric transformation to latch onto.


    At the same time, Lia was sinking her teeth into the leathery skin of the Shattered, making me wonder if we should try to find a way that¡¯d let her trigger the transformation without a bite, just like she was able to drain Blood and Astral Power using her Blood Magic. Sure, it would likely take longer but I doubted Lia wanted to have a mouth full of dirty, leathery skin.


    Despite the shackles, the Shattered tried to struggle, twisting and wriggling as much as it could but there was nothing it could actually do to dislodge Lia from its neck. She just kept drinking and I could see the fire in the Shattered¡¯s eyes start to die down, while I could feel the Soul shudder within my magical grasp as if the pieces were about to disperse.


    Finally, Lia was done drinking and the vibrations of the Shattered¡¯s Soul were starting to give me trouble, even after I activated Overflow to bring more of my power to bear. A single moment of carelessness, and the Soul would immediately disperse, though I hoped it wouldn¡¯t cause the same kind of damage as a repaired Soul did, I had no interest in getting covered in mangled flesh. Maybe it was a good thing Lia had already drained the thing¡¯s blood, at least we wouldn¡¯t be coated in that if things went wrong.


    Even without looking, I could feel the moment Lia put the first drop of her Blood into the Shattered¡¯s mouth. Suddenly, the shaking and vibrating of the Soul changed, no longer was it trying to fly apart, but it was drawing together, drawing inwards, and taking all the power I had invested in keeping it together with the various pieces. The sudden drain was even trying to take the power within me, forcing me to violently rip away from the sensation, causing me to stagger back and endure a spike of pain ripping into my brain.


    ¡°Shit,¡± I couldn¡¯t help but curse, leaning against the wall to stabilise myself so I wouldn¡¯t keel over. Taking deep breaths, I started to regain my equilibrium while watching the Shattered transform. Outwardly, there was fairly little change. Its skin retained the leathery quality, its claws were still there, maybe even a little sharper than they had been, and the teeth in its maw had grown, turning slightly jagged but visibly sharp in the process. Additionally, the empty holes that once held its flames were rapidly filling with a solid, almost gemlike substance, just like Lia¡¯s eyes had. Only for this Vampire, the substance wasn¡¯t the deep, carnelian red of Lia¡¯s eyes, it was a lot darker, to the point that it looked more black than red. Carefully glancing beneath the surface, trying not to agitate my headache even further, I could see that the transformation of the thing¡¯s soul had been a success and I was looking at the familiar shape of a vampiric soul.


    Now, we only had to figure out how much of the Mind remained, whether it was that of a Shattered or that of the original human.

 Chapter 1018

    Maybe the plan to dispose of repaired Shattered should also include Shattered we turned into Vampires. Trying to ascertain the mental state of the newly created Vampire proved to be an exercise in frustration and gave me an ever-growing headache. Part of the problem was that the thing had the memories of their human progenitor but also the memories of their existence as a Shattered, with instincts that matched neither, turning them into a wildly unpredictable and incredibly annoying being. One moment, they were bitching and moaning as if the world owed them money, the next moment they became driven by a homicidal rage only to fall into a deep depression, crying that they were a monster. Only to start demanding that we helped them, or screaming that we turned them into a monster before falling back into the bitching and moaning. Over and over again, an endless cycle of noise.


    Granted, they weren¡¯t really wrong about the part where they labelled themself a monster. Maybe it was due to the broken state of their soul, maybe it was for some other reason but whatever the cause, the Vampric transformation had left them in a wretched state. Sure, Lia wasn¡¯t the poster child for good looks from a human¡¯s perspective but her predatory grace, symmetrical body features and primal strength gave her a savage, intimidating beauty. The newly created Vampire lacked most of those features. Yes, their body was roughly symmetrical but the jagged teeth in their maw took away any sort of beauty their face could project, while the claws and the mottled, grey skin took away even more, especially once the dry, leathery texture became apparent.


    ¡°What are your plans for our¡­ guest?¡± I asked Lia, as the endless noise was in a fairly quiet part of its cycle.


    ¡°We could try and see if Luna and you have some cure for vampirism. We can turn Souls into that draining, vampiric state you described, but can we do the opposite?¡± Lia mused, sounding genuinely curious.


    ¡°Maybe,¡± I started tapping my lips, starting to consider what might be necessary to accomplish this, ¡°Are you thinking of trying to become human once more?¡± I had to ask, curious what prompted the idea.


    ¡°Never,¡± she shook her head, grinning in a way that showed off her wicked canines, ¡°I¡¯m happy to be the first of my kind, especially as, in hindsight, I don¡¯t really like who I used to be. Why would I want to return to being a useless chit, obsessed with all sorts of inane entertainment when I could remain as I am now? To say nothing of the simple fact that Chantalle wouldn¡¯t have lasted a day after the Change, I doubt she would last any longer now, after the monsters out there had time to grow stronger,¡± she paused, shaking her head once more, ¡°No, I much prefer to remain a monster and alive than return to being a human and end up dead.¡±


    ¡°Monsters to the end,¡± I nodded, ruffling her hair affectionately, as I knew there were people out there who¡¯d consider me a monster, too. Not that my actions didn¡¯t earn me the appellation, especially if one took the things I had done on Mundus into account. Not that I did, as those actions had been taken with the understanding that Mundus was nothing but a fictional world, in which nothing I did had any lasting consequences. No matter what one did in a game, the game itself, and thus the characters inhabiting it, wouldn¡¯t be fundamentally damaged outside of the game¡¯s parameters. Unless something went fundamentally wrong, or, as the case with Mundus, the world hadn¡¯t been fictional in the first place.


    After agreeing with Lia on the next experiment for our Shattered Vampire, I joined Luna and together we started to discuss ways to make Lia¡¯s idea a reality. While we had only limited knowledge of Souls, we were starting to understand more and more, though a part of me was wondering about the vampiric Soul. Was it truly a Soul, there were multiple, fundamental differences that made me wonder. And if not, would we have to bring back a Soul from the next great adventure, as one novel described it, something I wouldn¡¯t consider possible with our current abilities? It would need a whole lot more, both knowledge and power, to have a chance of returning a Soul from the afterlife, as that was something even the Grandmother couldn¡¯t accomplish. Or maybe it wasn¡¯t a question of ability but price, I vaguely remembered the Grandmother telling me that the existence of Neyto was partially based on compromise and that even she wasn¡¯t willing to annoy the Gods more than necessary.


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    Regardless, it was something I wanted to try, especially if it turned out that the Vampiric Souls weren¡¯t actually Souls but something else, some strange reflection of a Soul which couldn¡¯t be returned to its original state. If that were the case, trying to return a Vampire to its original state would be a good, first step on the path of trying to revive Sigmir, my ultimate goal.


    Together, Luna and I formed an idea how to go about our attempt to return a Vampiric Soul to its original state. Part of it was based on the original transformation into a Vampire, during which the host was essentially brought to a near-dead state before the transforming agent, in this case, the Blood of a Vampire, was introduced, giving them a path to an alternate state of existence. The reversal of that would require us to bring a Vampire into a near-dead state, before introducing a transforming agent to give them yet another path to continue their existence. The transforming agent, in this case, had to be something that was far from the magically infused Blood we used for the original transformation and here, Luna had an idea.


    She had been experimenting with ways to infuse materials with a combination of the Divine Power she gained from Lady Hecate and the Life Magic she had inherited from the Grandmother. The original idea was that it would hopefully give her access to a potent healing agent and, following some old lore about the healing tears of a phoenix, she decided to try infusing the power into her own tears. Apparently, Lady Hecate was quite amused at the idea and helped Luna out during a few of their dream lessons, though Luna hadn¡¯t been able to perfect the process just yet, making it fairly inefficient, especially as the amount of power ending up in the tears fluctuated wildly. It sounded better than her original instant-cancer ¡®healing¡¯ magic, but not by much.


    Still, if we managed to turn a Vampire back into their human state, giving them cancer would only mean that we didn¡¯t have to worry about the human¡¯s future, as they simply didn¡¯t have one. We would have to find a way to perfect these healing tears for future attempts but for this proof of concept, it sounded like a workable solution.


    Given that our test subject was still trapped in the endless cycle of noise, I decided to give us some peace and quiet by knocking them out. This way, we could hear each other think while we performed the experiment, as especially the first part was largely based on vague ideas.


    Namely, how can we bring a Vampire into a death-like state while having their body remain in a state that would allow them to accept the different path we were planning to offer? It needed to be something that could be fixed with relative ease, but at the same time, it couldn¡¯t be fully physical. So, the idea was that I would use Death Magic to push the body beyond its ability to cope, essentially flooding the draining effect caused by the Vampiric Soul with the necrotic power. Hopefully, that would force the Soul to shut down and, in turn, give us the opportunity to twist the vampiric parts back into human parts.


    Not that doing so would solve all our problems, the body would remain monstrous, even if we managed to bring the human Soul back, but this could be a valuable, first step. Or it could be utter failure and we would decorate yet another room with an explosion of blood and meat, there was no way to find out, but to try.


    The first step of the experiment, flooding the Vampire with Death Magic, worked out fairly well. Sure, using Death Magic remained a painful experience for me, but watching how the Soul started to take the necrotic power in, swelling up as it drained into the darkly glowing orb, was truly fascinating. There was some interplay between these forces but I wasn¡¯t really able to understand what was going on.


    The swelling up continued until the dark mass suddenly collapsed in on itself and stopped draining. At that exact moment, Luna let the prepared tears, shining with the silvery light of the moon, and Lady Hecate¡¯s power, drop into the Vampire¡¯s mouth, infusing its body with the Divine Energy of Lady Hecate and Astral Power filled with Life Magic.


    According to our ideas, this should allow them a different path forward, just as the vampiric transformation did. Sadly, our ideas weren¡¯t matched by reality and the body crumbled to dist within moments.


    Our experiment had, quite obviously, failed.

 Chapter 1019

    Floating above Queta, I could feel a strange, nervous energy emanating from the broken town below. There was something going on, I wasn¡¯t quite certain what it was, but I had learned not to dismiss the warnings of my instincts outright. Given the number of Shattered I had seen in the broken buildings and hidden underground, it wasn¡¯t all that hard to make a connection between them and the feeling, there weren¡¯t any other foes around the area that the Shattered hadn¡¯t destroyed after all. Plus, given that I had abducted a Shattered each night over the previous week, they had a good reason to be worried, at least if they had the capacity to reason things out to that extent.


    Still, we needed more Shattered, I wanted to do some more experiments with my Mind Magic, Lia had some ideas of her own and Luna was cooking something up together with Alex, a combination that filled me with a strange worry. These two could get quite creative and by now, Luna had a lot of experience in creating abominations against Nature, even if only second-hand, to the best of my knowledge she wasn¡¯t at the point that she could make them on her own, just assist me with their creation. Though, was she at the point that she could make some of her own if she had Alex¡¯ help? That, I didn¡¯t know and that ignorance worried me. Maybe I should keep an extra-close eye on those two, and any Shattered I turned over to them for experimentation.


    But first, there was the town I had to deal with and the nervous energy I was sensing. There were no Shattered visible anywhere, meaning they were hiding as they usually did before their ability to sense the tremors of a being moving across their turf was triggered. As soon as they sensed these tremors, they had sent one of their number to investigate and if that triggered additional action, they came out in force.


    So, the obvious solution was to trigger their tremor sense from afar and make one of them come out, just as I had done the last few nights if I couldn¡¯t find a Shattered out on the streets. Only, this time, I wouldn¡¯t move in directly, but stay away, maybe knock the Shattered out as before but I wouldn¡¯t even try to move in, not unless I was completely confident that I wasn¡¯t bumbling into a trap of some sort.


    Maybe I could use some Ice Magic to conjure up a rope, or some sort of frame to carry away the Shattered I was planning to knock out. I needed to get at the Shattered without lowering myself into the streets to make sure the Shattered wouldn¡¯t be able to pounce on me from above. They were fast and capable of intercepting flying targets, something I had learned when scrying on the city, I had little doubt that they¡¯d be able to intercept me if I bumbled around. My stealth, especially when augmented by my cloak, was an excellent form of protection but if that protection failed, I was an easy target.


    But first, I wanted to see what would happen if I used the usual stimulus and what reaction I would garner. So, I quietly conjured up two chunks of Ice, nothing grand or special, just two fist-sized blocks I could control with my Ice Magic. Those two blocks were lowered into the streets at the edge of town and dropped onto the ground, one after the other. Then, I lifted them back up and dropped the first about sixty centimetres deeper into town, followed by the other one, a similar distance to the spot it first dropped on. And again, with the first, creating an approximation of footsteps for their tremor sense.


    Curiously, the usual reaction of a single Shattered checking out what was moving around didn¡¯t occur. There was some faint noise, indicating movement somewhere below me, but nothing else and that movement was made quietly and in some sort of concealed position. Finally the lone Shattered I had been waiting for came wandering out, just as one had done the last few nights. Still, something felt off to me but I wasn¡¯t sure what.


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    A quick blast of Mind Magic knocked the Shattered out and normally, that would have been the moment at which the other Shattered came crashing into the streets while I would quickly nab the Shattered I had knocked out and carry it back to my lair. But for once, there was no noise of moving Shattered, just the same, incredibly faint noise of movement somewhere below. The Shattered were clearly trying something different.


    But I could do different, too. First, I dismissed the two blocks of Ice, letting them fade back into the Astral River. They had served their purpose, no need to keep them anchored to reality. Then, I conjured a veil of Shadows around myself, hiding a patch of space from outside observation. Into that patch, I conjured Ice Magic, forming a somewhat crude, humanoid shape. It wasn¡¯t perfect but it had the right proportions, which was enough. Next, I opened a small gash in one of my fingers, infusing a drop of blood with my Astral Power and smearing it on the construct, making it radiate the right elemental energies and also spread a faint scent of blood.


    Once that was done, I lowered the veil of Shadows into the streets, the construct still concealed within. It landed just a few steps away from the Shattered, giving the appearance of standing there in the street thanks to my Ice Magic. By that point, I was starting to get a headache, thanks to the vastly different things I had to focus on, even with my prodigious attributes, flying, keeping myself hidden, creating a concealed patch of space and a humanoid construct within that space was a serious challenge, both to my ability to multi-task and to my ability to focus.


    Luckily, I didn¡¯t need to keep up everything for too long. I only needed to have the construct take a few more steps towards the downed Shattered and have the concealment around it waver for a split-second to get the reaction I had been looking for the entire time. And what a reaction it was.


    I was used to Shattered boiling out from underground or charging out of houses but having a whole bunch of them come flying from upper windows, dropping on the construct I had made with bone-crushing force was a bit of a surprise. And not necessarily a good one, if I hadn¡¯t been paranoid and listened to my gut, I might have been down in the streets, trying to figure out what was going on, instead of up here, safe from harm.


    There was no way for my construct to withstand the impact of five Shattered dropping onto it, to say nothing of the savagery that was sure to follow their initial attack. So, instead of letting them tear it to pieces, I decided to do so myself and let a surge of power flow into it, causing it to burst apart in a rain of razor-sharp icicles. The attacking Shattered got cut up, the Ice tearing rends into their limbs and ripping through their flesh but, moments later, I realised that these five were only the first wave.


    When I had pushed out a surge of power, it apparently was enough to let the Shattered break my stealth and even if I was floating a few metres above the roofs, they had managed to locate me. And now, there were a few Shattered leaping towards me, their movement as nimble as I had ever seen and propelled by their inhuman strength.


    The world slowed down around me as Bullet Time came into effect, allowing me to react to their attack at all. My concealing Darkness Magic fell away, my focus needed for other things but the Wind Magic I used to keep my scent contained could be used for other things. Overflow activated, allowing me to push another surge of Astral Power into the Wind Magic while twisting it into something fairly simple, a massive gust to push the Shattered off course, as they didn¡¯t have the means to direct their trajectory, only their initial leap.


    The Wind gave me the moments to move out of their path, but even so, one of them managed to lash out with a clawed hand, striking my leg as I frantically tried to get away, It wasn¡¯t enough to make me bleed, but I could already feel a massive bruise forming, the pain making me wince just a little.


    Shaking my head, I pushed myself further up, feeling exhaustion clawing at my limbs, trying to drag me down. Both my mind and my magic needed rest, throwing out massive bursts of power was about the most inefficient way I could use my magic. But, it was also the fastest way to get results and sometimes that mattered a great deal more.


    Letting out a yawn, I began to fly back to our shelter, making sure I concealed myself as much as possible. We¡¯d have to find a new way to capture Shattered.

 Chapter 1020

    Sitting comfortably in our lair, after I had returned without the Shattered I had planned to bring back as a test subject, I was thinking about my earlier failure. The behaviour of the Shattered and, more importantly, its meaning, was something surprising, I hadn¡¯t thought they had the ability to work at that level. It was easily comparable to the Withered and their structured hive-mind, though with some additional cunning thrown in.


    Before, I had thought Shattered to be at the same intellectual level as simple animals, able to chase prey if they discovered it, maybe even capable of lying in ambush in a concealed position but nothing more. Animals, driven by instinct, unable to truly scheme and plan. Sure, the detection area around the town was something fairly impressive, as were the tunnels they used to get around without having to traverse the surface, but both of those were something certain insects could accomplish, like ants or maybe termites.


    But to lie in wait, to study my tactics in order to prepare an ambush that used my previously recognised patterns against me? If not for my instinctual unease, it was likely that they¡¯d have managed to catch me. Just imagining the situation sent a shiver down my spine, there was no way I could delude myself into thinking that I¡¯d have been able to survive if they caught me in their initial trap, let alone evade their follow-up. Even just the follow-up had almost succeeded in tearing me from the sky and if that happened, I¡¯d be dead, no question about it. Even a single Shattered at their level would be a formidable foe to face in close combat unless I could use my Mind or Death Magic to take them out instantly. However, that needed a moment or two of focus, even while using Bullet Time.


    The big question remained, what was the right path to take in the future? Should I consider treating Shattered differently, now that they demonstrated intelligence beyond what I had considered possible or should we continue as we had and use them as readily available test subjects, their lack of consent be damned? Was there a way to communicate with the Shattered or had the damage of their Souls rendered them into something alien to us, something unable to communicate unless or until their Souls were restored or replaced by the vampiric version? There were so many questions I couldn¡¯t even begin to answer and, there was an additional problem I would have to consider.


    If I decided that Shattered couldn¡¯t be used for experiments unless the Shattered gave their consent, would we be able to continue our testing and eventually get Sigmir back? The last few weeks, especially the somewhat questionable experiments we had performed on the willing volunteers from New Dawn had pushed my understanding of the Soul a great deal and now, the experiments on the Shattered had pushed that even further. If I decided that Shattered couldn¡¯t be used, what was I supposed to use to experiment and further my understanding?


    For the first time since coming to this area, I took a glimpse at my recent skill and experience gains, grinning when I saw that I had gained points in Mind Magic, bringing it to seventy-two, Soul Magic, bringing it to twenty-three, two points in Astral Mediation, a point in Darkness Magic, which was now sixty-five, while Blood Magic had gained a point and was now fifty. Also, I had gained some EXP, either from the Shattered I had killed or for the experiments we had performed, I wasn¡¯t quite sure, but the combination had been enough to push me to level ninety-one. Last, but certainly not least, there was a point in Darkness Rune Mastery and the skill was now at sixty, giving me access to yet another Rune.


    Grinning to myself, I decided to delve into the Astral River and try getting that Rune. There were a few concepts I wanted to get a better understanding of and having the appropriate Rune was the best way to further my knowledge.


    At first, I simply let myself drift in the Astral River, feeling the stolid, solemn Earth all around me, the traces of Life springing into the Astral River but also the eternal, unending Darkness of the underground. This Darkness was what I let myself float towards, my mind starting to focus on the concept I wanted to understand, the imperceivable darkness between matter. The emptiness, the endless and perfect void, the epitome of Darkness, where the absence of light doesn¡¯t matter because there is nothing for the light to reflect off of.


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    I could feel my focus narrow down, lines of dark fire starting to sear through my mind as a rune took shape and within moments, I realised the rune was part of something greater. Sure, it was a complete rune in and of itself, a rune meaning Space, but it was also part of something greater, something I hadn¡¯t been able to grasp just yet. What that ¡®something¡¯ was, I couldn¡¯t be certain but I had a strong inclination that it had something to do with that emptiness or the void I had been focused on. Alas, I would have to investigate and, eventually, I¡¯d be able to understand.


    Still, the Rune was an interesting one, though I would need some time to figure out how to use it in my spellcraft. Space, while deceptively simple in meaning, was terrifyingly complicated as a concept. Everything was within space but nothing could alter space, at least not on a scale I could understand. Sure, there was that theory about incredible masses impacting the fabric of space-time or something along those lines, but I could barely remember that such a thing existed, to say nothing of any details. So, how was I supposed to make use of this rune? The obvious answer was that I could use it to improve my magical bags, they were creating a contained Space that I could carry with me, but beyond that? Maybe I¡¯d be able to use it to strengthen my area of effect spells, or maybe I would be able to use space itself as a medium for my spells, just like I had used Mist to carry effects. I would have to experiment with that and see what else I could do with it.


    ¡°Mom, I did it,¡± Luna¡¯s excited voice broke me out of my contemplative reverie, pulling me back into the material world. For a moment, I had to process her words and immediately, I felt a smile curling my lips. So often, little Luna was trying to act like a teenager, thanks to the levels accelerating her physical and mental growth but then, there were times like this when she partially reverted to a giddy child.


    ¡°And what did you do, munchkin?¡± I asked, my grin only widening when she decided to hop onto my lap and snuggle in for a moment.


    ¡°Alex and I made a flower,¡± she explained, before hopping back off my lap, an almost visible aura of excitement manifesting around her.


    ¡°A flower?¡± I asked, not quite sure what to make of this. Luna could make flowers grow with her magic, that was nothing new, but the declaration that Alex was involved made me a little apprehensive. Either of these two on their own could come up with¡­ interesting things, and that was coming from me, but when they combined their ideas, I was growing just a little cautious.


    ¡°Mhm,¡± she nodded, ¡°Remember those ashes we made? We used them as a base and I think I made something that¡¯s truly alive,¡± she explained, as she pulled me behind her, towards the cell area. Now, my interest was well and truly roused. Normally, Luna had two options when exerting her Life Magic on vegetation, she could either grow something rapidly, to the point that a normal vine could be grown within seconds but those creations were always temporary, lasting a few minutes or maybe an hour if she continuously supplied the construct with magic. Or she could plant a seed in the ground and speed up the growth with her magic, taking hours to grow a plant but the result wasn¡¯t truly permanent, either. Sure, the plant would last for weeks, maybe even months, it was difficult to say without staying in an area, but it wasn¡¯t truly permanent, nor was it really alive. It wouldn¡¯t grow any further after her magic stopped supplying the initial growth, nor did it sprout seeds. Curiously, she could have the plants she grew with her magic sprout fruits and those lasted about as long as they would normally, but even then, there were no seeds inside, resulting in a few somewhat strange growths. Apricots without seeds were.. . weird.


    Luckily, I didn¡¯t have to wait long and soon, I was standing in the same room we had used for the last experiment. Now, there were a bunch of fresh earth on the ground, the strange ash-like dust was gone and from the earth, an otherworldly flower was sprouting, unlike anything I had seen before. Somewhat like a tulip, but with a very different blossom, far wider and black as night, with a few slivery markings shaped like tears. Additionally, there were a few slightly odd, crimson seeds sprouting in the middle of the blossom, unlike anything I had seen from Luna¡¯s creations. I had no idea what to make of this, but I was curious what might be going on.

 Interlude: Sheeping Troubles

    ¡°What the hell could have done this?¡± the man now only known as Helos asked his leader, Lorgar, or, as they had started to call him, Legate Lorgar. He had been the one to forge the original, disparate group of people, none of whom had a real idea of what was going on, into a somewhat cohesive unit, guiding them to the place that later became New Dawn. Sure, there were other legacies in the burgeoning town but Lorgar and his courageous nature helped many to push past the initial horror, a shining light in the darkest of times. Now though, they were all looking at something that shouldn¡¯t be, far too close to town for comfort.


    On the face of it, a dead sheep wasn¡¯t too big a problem, sure, it was annoying that some predator managed to get one of the flock and make off with it, but it happened¡ªnature and natural selection at work, or something like that. No, the problem was that the sheep, while dead, hadn¡¯t been eaten beyond a little damage from avian scavengers. But even that damage, primarily focused on the sheep¡¯s eyes and other exposed parts, didn¡¯t look like it should be enough to kill the animal, not that any animal would lie still and let some raven or crow peck out their eyes. And yet, by all appearances, that was exactly what had happened here, no sign of struggle, no trampled grass or disturbed earth, only the dead sheep. Not even blood had seeped into the soil, or even out of the sheep¡¯s wounds, leaving an eerie sight for their group to discover.


    ¡°I am uncertain,¡± Lorgar quietly admitted, carefully taking a knee, a fairly challenging task with his centaur body. Even now, months after he received his legacy and with about two years of experience moving on equine feet, some actions didn¡¯t come naturally. Granted, the centaurs he had met on Mundus had similar limitations, their bodies were made to stand tall, to run and to fight, not to kneel in supplication, but sometimes, you just had to get a closer look. As was the case with the remains of the sheep, something had killed it, but not for any reason they could recognise. That, in turn, meant it might be some monster killing for pleasure or it could be something even worse. What, though, that had to be ascertained.


    ¡°But I intend to find out,¡± he continued, reaching under his tunic to pull out his Fiery Wheel, the symbol of Lady Sunna, may Her light illuminate the Earth and guide all people towards a bright future. While the words of his prayer to His Lady were simple, nothing but an invocation praising Her name and beseeching Her to illuminate the truth for him to see, the fervour and devotion in those words were far from it. And it was that fervour, that strength of will and devotion to his chosen Lady that echoed and empowered the simple ceremony beyond what his usual prayers could accomplish. The symbol in his hand started to burn with a bright, golden fire, mirroring the sun far above them and yet, despite holding a burning piece of metal right in his hand, he could feel no heat even if his companions could see the air distort above the flames.


    For Lorgar, the distortion showed something else entirely, His Lady was illuminating the truth for him to see, allowing him to pierce the veil of time and witness creeping shadows, hidden from the gaze of the setting sun by the trees of the nearby forest, envelop the sheep, hiding it from His Lady¡¯s sight and disorienting it until the darkness of the night had enshrouded the world. Once the darkness had settled, more shadows came oozing out of the woodwork, forming a grotesque caricature of a human before enveloping the disoriented sheep in a cloud of inky blackness. Soon, the sheep was still, unmoving on the ground, while the shadowed monster disappeared once more, fleeing into the dark forest, where no light could reach the thing.


    ¡°What did you see, boss?¡± Jarulek, another of Lorgar¡¯s faithful companions asked, noticing the way his leader¡¯s face was twisting in disgust.


    ¡°Abomination,¡± the centaur ground out, his voice filled with venom. ¡°Some disgusting monstrosity of shadow and evil came from the trees and killed the sheep, leaving the carcass to rot,¡± he explained, his eyes trying to find traces of the thing, a difficult task given its immaterial nature. But, illuminated by the light of his Lady, there was something, a strange trace he could pick up as if the Lady Herself was guiding his steps.


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    ¡°We shall hunt,¡± Lorgar decided, a small part of him was pleased that the Lady was blessing his purpose. But, more importantly, there was a monster out there, another monster, not just Morgana who had somehow managed to slip the net. Maybe the monster had spawned, and now they had to hunt down her abominable creations. Or maybe Morgana wasn¡¯t just two-faced in her dealings but had two forms, it might explain why multiple people had vanished from New Dawn since Morgana¡¯s visit. Not that anybody had listened to him when he tried to get people to hunt for the monster¡¯s head, especially when Kelrig reminded him, and everyone else in New Dawn, that Morgana had given her word before the Gods that she would do no harm while within New Dawn. Additionally, both Kelrig and that minion of his liked to remind everyone that the fine flour they were all enjoying could only be ground thanks to the help given to them by Morgana, as the construction of a mill with tolerances as fine as what she had created was beyond them.


    Just thinking about it enraged Lorgar, to think that his fellow people could be bought so easily, bribed with nothing but flour. Not even that, they had to use their own grain, their own labour, the only thing Morgana had done for them was make them a simple tool, one that humans had used for millennia. And in turn, everyone seemed to forget just what sort of monster Morgana was, how many people she had killed and the horrifying atrocities she had committed, for nothing but her own, sick pleasure. Only a very sick person would decide to start cutting people apart while they were still alive in some insane effort to figure out what made them tick.


    Letting out yet another growl at the fickle nature of his fellow survivors, Lorgar briefly wondered if that fickle nature was simply part of the human condition. An inborn failing, just like his inability to kneel, or use ladders for that part, was part of his existence as a Centaur, something that only a lot of dedicated training could ever solve if he had the time and interest to pursue such an endeavour. Maybe humans were the same, they needed to train themself, to dedicate themself, in order to shed the fickle, sheep-like nature of following the most convenient path, no matter what wolves might lurk in the shadows they were using to hide from the bright light of truth.


    He would have to see whether he could help them find their purpose and guide them on the path of dedication. He had found his purpose in service of his Lady and hopefully, they would, too. But first, there was a monster to hunt down and hopefully, that monster would be the accursed Morgana in a shadowy guise, as ugly on the outside as she was monstrous on the inside.


    Guided by the light shed by the Fiery Wheel, Lorgar made his way forward, into the forest. The trail was almost cold, but he could follow it, at least for a time. His companions were trailing him, giving him the time and space he needed to work his Lady¡¯s gift but the further he went, the more difficult it became. The shadows of the forest around him, despite it being the middle of the day, were cutting him off from the Lady¡¯s light, forcing him to sustain Her gift with his own reserves.


    They continued onwards, but his reserves soon started to strain until they finally ran out and with them empty, the flames burning on his Fiery Wheel were extinguished, leaving them deep within the forest without a clear path forward.


    Letting out a soft curse, followed by a quick prayer to his Lady, begging forgiveness for his weakness, Lorgar started to look around, now only seeing with his eyes instead of using Her gift. And there was nothing around him that gave any clue of the wretched monster¡¯s whereabouts, no tracks, no trails, nothing but a gloomy forest. For a moment, he felt as if he was being watched but there was nothing around to cause that feeling.


    ¡°Let us return to New Dawn. Everyone needs to know that there are monsters roaming this forest. They need to be warned and we need to prepare to hunt the beasts down. May the Lady¡¯s light illuminate the Earth and guide us all towards a bright future,¡± he declared, briefly looking over his companions. There was a lot of work to be done.

 Chapter 1021

    ¡°Fascinating,¡± I couldn¡¯t help but mutter, as my eyes scanned the strange plant Luna and Alex had made. It was unlike anything I had ever seen before, both from a purely optical point of view and on a deeper, arcane level. Sure, there were plants I had never seen before, I was hardly a gardener or botanist, but the deep, almost light-absorbently black petals with silvery teardrops decorating them, just didn¡¯t seem natural to me. What¡¯s more, the seeds sitting in the middle of the blossom had the same, deeply crimson shade of red I recognised from my Blood Magic and when I looked very closely, I could see a faint pulsing within them, only strengthening the association in my mind.


    Similarly, the view with my magical sight was something to behold. The blossom was, as expected, deeply infused with Darkness Magic, while the teardrop marks were something distinctly different, a flavour of magic I only knew from observation, not personal experience. The marks were made by Lady Hecate¡¯s magic, though how a plant could have something artificial like that was beyond me. Divine Magic wasn¡¯t something that existed in nature, it only came from the associated deity, so either the plant was somehow blessed by Lady Hecate or the marks would eventually fade when the power originally bestowed from Luna ran out. The seeds, as their colour indicated, were filled with Blood Magic and a part of me was curious what would happen if we planted one of them, would we get some sort of blood plant or something entirely different?


    Lastly, there was the stem with a few leaves I had ignored so far. It didn¡¯t look like anything special visually, just a green flower stem and some green leaves, about as interesting as any other plant out there, which is to say not really. The blossom was where the action was concentrated, or so I thought. Now, with my magical sight, I could see that the stem was, quite literally, the foundation keeping the entire thing together, it was filled with Life Magic, strong enough to balance the fairly dangerous magical aspects of the blossom and making the entire thing viable.


    Out of curiosity, I used Observe on the plant but didn¡¯t get a result, however, when I used Identify, I learned that the thing was called an Umbral Tulip, not that the name told me a whole lot. Well, it told me that the thing was viable enough to be recognised by the System, something normally reserved for things that were made to be permanent, not some temporary constructs. The distinction was fairly fascinating, but also greatly influenced by the intent of the object¡¯s maker, otherwise, there¡¯d be little difference between some of my conjured Icicles, made to last only as long as it took them to strike an enemy, and the Frozen Shuttles I had created shortly after the Change and maintained ever since. The initial creation was similar and yet, the Shuttles had received their label right after their creation. Maybe it was due to the difference in effort but who knew with something as obscure as the system, by now, I was simply accepting that the system had its rules and figuring them out would be a long-term task, if not the task of a lifetime. Or an impossibility in its own right, i hadn¡¯t ruled that one out, but it wouldn¡¯t stop me from trying, once I had the time and leisure to pursue such a project.


    ¡°Truly fascinating,¡± I repeated my earlier statement, now looking at Luna and Alex, both looking pleased and proud of themselves. ¡°Might I ask what you were seeking to accomplish?¡±


    ¡°Well, I noticed that the dust that remained after we tried to restore the Vampire was still infused with power. So I wanted to see if I could use that power, especially as I could feel some of Lady Hecate¡¯s power in there, too. Not something you want to let go to waste, right?¡± Luna started and I could only nod in return, everything I had learned told me that divine power was something the deities only gave out sparingly unless they sought to accomplish something big.


    ¡°Alex helped me to mix the dust with the soil, so the power within the dust could be absorbed and then, I tried to grow a flower inside, a tulip as you can likely guess. Turned out quite differently from everything I have done before,¡± she explained, a wide grin on her face and for once, I had to agree. The flower was inherently different to anything she had created before, but I couldn¡¯t really tell where that inherent difference stemmed from. It might be due to some special property of the dust, the stuff had been created in fairly arcane circumstances after all, or it might be due to some other reason. The process used by Alex was a possible reason, the sheer amount of power, maybe even something inherent to the earth they used, there were countless possibilities and I wanted to know more. After all, if she could create something living like this, wouldn¡¯t that mean that she was getting close to reaching a ¡®Mastery over Life¡¯?


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    ¡°We¡¯ll have to experiment some more,¡± I suggested, already trying to come up with ways to prove or disprove factors that had influenced the creation of this tulip. especially if it was something that desperately needed the power of Lady Hecate or if that was just a coincidence in this particular case. Additionally, I really wanted to see if there was a possibility of growing something more complex than a plant from its seed, something like an animal. Something like a tulip would normally grow in a few months, but what about something that took years to grow? Something like a tree, or, once we understood more about the process, an animal and ultimately a humanoid body.


    How much of animal behaviour was trained by their parents and how much of it was inherent? I had no real idea, I knew that some animals never received training from their parents, be it because the parents simply laid their eggs and left the rest up to chance or because the parents didn¡¯t survive the birthing process, in either case, the animal¡¯s behaviour had to be entirely inherent, shaped only by environmental pressures. A similar question could be asked about people, a question asked by various writers and philosophers over the years, one I had even asked myself while growing up and having to learn what others could do instinctively.


    So, what would happen if we could grow a body, would there be some form of rudimentary mind inside? Would it be the mind of an infant, essentially working with the mental capacities of an adult? Luna, in some ways, was a similar case, her body had matured rapidly thanks to her high level and attributes, but so had her mind, though that was at least in part due to Lady Hecate having her experience additional time and training in her sleep.


    The mysteries of the mind might hold the answer to this particular conundrum. The mind needed time and experiences to mature, so maybe the answer was that somebody else had to help the newly formed mind, similar to the way Luna was trained and educated by Lady Hecate, some form of mental construct that allowed the forming mind to experience days and years in minutes and hours of actual time. For a moment, my mind went back to the capsules and their supposed time dilation, allowing the user to experience days within hours.


    Wouldn¡¯t that mature the mind at a pace equivalent to the experienced time, not the time their body spent lying in a capsule?


    Nodding to myself, I made a mental note to find one of these capsules, there had to be a few out there, and I really wanted to learn more about them. Sadly, the one I had used had been buried in the Change, but there were others out there. Maybe they were destroyed now, or they might need some sort of divine connection to work, to say nothing about the difficulty of reverse engineering them. But even if I wasn¡¯t able to wrest all their secrets from them, I was fairly confident that I would learn something, either in regards to Mind Magic or, maybe just as interesting, something regarding different dimensions and worlds.


    Similar to the question about the Mind, what about the Soul? Looking at the tulip, I could see something fairly similar to what I had seen in other plants, but at the same time, I could see that there was something fundamentally different about this ¡®soul¡¯. It wasn¡¯t as, well, spherical, looking more like a squashed ball. Curiously, the colours within the ¡®soul¡¯ didn¡¯t quite match the elements I could see in the tulip, provoking even more questions. And requiring even more experiments.


    ¡°We¡¯ll have to find a good way to get more Shattered,¡± I sighed, thinking back to my earlier considerations in regards to the necessary test subjects. Now, there was an even greater impetus and need for them but I hadn¡¯t found a good answer. However, regardless of their morality, I knew that we needed to continue to expand our knowledge.

 Chapter 1022

    Capturing more Shattered for experimentation turned out to be an ongoing challenge, as they adapted to the different methods I could employ to capture one of their number. Soon, the only way to get more test subjects would be by wiping out groups of them, keeping only one or two of them alive for later testing. The problem with that was twofold, one was a lack of speed, meaning that while we fought with the group, more Shattered would arrive, making the whole thing incredibly risky and the other was an even faster depletion of the limited number of Shattered we had access to. Sure, there were a lot of Shattered in town, easily a few hundred, maybe even a thousand, but if we had to wipe out twenty Shattered to capture one of them, that number wouldn¡¯t last all that long.


    So, creativity was needed. The initial acquisition of Shattered, once they had started to lay traps and ambushes for me while I was flying over, was fairly simple. Knowing that I could influence them with my Mind Magic and even give limited commands, as evidenced by the fact that I could send them into a comatose state, I decided to roll with that. Commanding a single, lone Shattered to leave town wasn¡¯t as simple as sending one to sleep was but with a few tries, the Shattered marched out of town, allowing us to capture it a little later. The rest of their pod, or whatever a group of Shattered should be called, noticed the magical energy I couldn¡¯t hide while using that much Astral Power but they didn¡¯t stop that first Shattered. Sadly, when I tried to repeat the feat the next day, I wasn¡¯t as lucky and the enthralled Shattered was stopped and dragged back underground. As they dragged it back, I did my best to purge as much of my power from it as I could in an attempt to make it more difficult for them to find out what I was doing, or, even worse, get some sort of lock on me that might allow them to trace me. I had no idea if that was even possible but I wasn¡¯t about to let the Shattered find out, they had some abilities I didn¡¯t have and had no real idea how to replicate, at least not on the scale they could employ them.


    The next Shattered we captured was, amusingly, not done by myself, at least not alone. Instead, Alex teamed up with Lia and together, they did something to capture a pair of them while I was distracting the rest on the other side of town. How they managed to get past their tremor sense or how they could knock out the Shattered wasn¡¯t something I understood, though not for lack of trying to explain on their part. The problem was that, as so often when trying to discuss one of the more arcane and complicated topics of magic or alchemy, the explanation only made sense for those with a decent understanding and a solid foundation in the topic. Without those, the only way was to resort to comparisons and metaphors, neither of which could convey the truth of the matter in a way conducive to understanding. And so, I simply accepted that they did ¡®alchemy¡¯ to capture their pair, just as they had to accept the next day that the Shattered did ¡®magic¡¯ to make a repeat of their success impossible. Not that it stopped them from trying but the next successful capture came from me.


    That success was borne from a bit of thinking I had done and a lot of experimenting. Back on Mundus, I had managed to make Ice statues and animate them magically, essentially using them as a body double to fight attackers while I remained safe and sound on my frozen throne. Using that idea, I decided to try and see if I could make a scrying construct from solid materials, in this case, a large bird of prey, carved from the lightest Ice I could manage with a few Hard Ice additions to make grabbing a foe possible.


    Making the construct was the easy part, though having the conflicting design goals of having it be as light as possible while also as durable as possible was quite the challenge. Instead of being able to simply increase the density of the Ice and pack more Astral Power into the same volume, I had to try something else, altering the structure within the Ice, adding empty spaces and creating lattice structures that would distribute the forces acting upon the construct as much as possible. The result was quite impressive, with an almost three-metre wingspan and an almost translucent body made of Ice and crystals that glittered even in the darkness. The physique was reminiscent of a raptor, only with longer legs, allowing it to swoop down and grab a Shattered before lifting the body back up. Additionally, there were multiple Runes engraved in the body, making it somewhat sturdier than it had any right to be while allowing the most important process of them all, the runes allowed it to fly. At least as long as I charged them with infused Blood, otherwise, they would merely be pretty but also pretty useless.


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    Controlling the thing was fairly straight-forward, it functioned the same way the scrying constructs did. The problem came with letting it fly. Even with the runes and the magic I had woven into the construct, it wasn¡¯t as convenient as the construct made from shadows was, simply because the raptor had mass and was subject to aerodynamics. During more than one test flight, I also included an involuntary durability test when the construct crashed but after a few days of trying, during which we also unsuccessfully tested different ways to capture Shattered, I was finally able to let it soar.


    Knowing how easily the Shattered could strike down flying targets, they had managed to tear apart a construct made from nothing but shadow after all, I decided that I didn¡¯t want add additional risk by letting my flyer move through the streets, so I needed a way to get a Shattered up on a rooftop. Remembering how the miasma spread from Blood Magic could attract Shattered, I filled some blood infused with Astral Power into a thin shell made from ice and put it into the construct¡¯s talons, letting it drop onto a roof from high above as the construct was flying over.


    It didn¡¯t take long for a Shattered to be attracted to the scent of power coming from the broken shell and as it bent down to lap the blood up, the Raptor came swooping in from above, grabbing its chest and making off with it. The Shattered tried to free itself but given the speed of the construct, it didn¡¯t manage to get free before I could drop the Shattered into a prepared position between the others who were standing by to subdue it.


    With the first Shattered captured fairly easily, I decided to try for a few more. When the construct returned to town, it looked like a kicked-over anthill, with dozens of Shattered swarming around the area where I had dropped the vial. The image made me grin back on my throne, as the sheer number of them meant that some of them were at the edge of the group, scouting nearby roofs and generally keeping watch. But they mainly kept watch on the ground, allowing me to let my construct swoop in and grab another Shattered, though when I looked back down after grabbing it, I noticed that there were multiple Shattered picking themself up in the street, as if they had fallen from the nearby roofs. Most likely, they had tried to catch the swooping construct but had failed, as the added weight of a Shattered hadn¡¯t slowed it down enough for them to leap onto it.


    Still, their rapid reactions and adaptions spelt bad news for further attempts to capture Shattered from the air, at least without additional traps and distractions. Maybe I would be able to add some sort of knock-out poison or magic to the construct¡¯s talons, allowing me to grab up Shattered without risking my construct every time, or the need to have the others lay in wait for me to drop off the Shattered, meaning they could head out and act as distractions.


    Another option would be to see if I could create some wide-area knock-out spell, allowing me to disable an entire group of Shattered so the others could move in and grab one or two before immediately leaving. Or maybe a construct able to walk, shaped like a human, so I could have something I was ready to discard act as bait. Or experiment with the realm of Shadows, trying to see if I could step in, grab a Shattered and step out.


    There were so many possibilities and I was quite curious how the Shattered would adapt, forcing us to adapt to them in turn. It was truly an arms race of innovation, something I greatly enjoyed. But now, I was steering my construct back towards town, planning to observe the Shattered a little more. Part of science was to observe the results of an experiment and there was always science to be done.

 Chapter 1023

    ¡°Maybe we should try going in hard,¡± Lia suggested after we had tried to scare up a Shattered or two without completely exposing us in the process. By now, after a little over a month of repeated acquisitions, the Shattered didn¡¯t dare to leave their underground lairs, though I wasn¡¯t willing to trust their behaviour just yet. They had acted like this before but when I used a humanoid Ice construct to investigate, the construct had been torn apart in an ambush, The sheer speed and ferocity of that attack made me leery to investigate the town with the group, far too big a chance to get ambushed. Hel, an ambush was even possible if I moved alone, their tremor sense was that formidable, as was their ability to detect magical emanations. No, the only way I could imagine going into town was by going in hard, as Lia was suggesting, by using my formidable magic to clear out all the nooks and crannies. Or, in other words, to conjure up as much of my deadly mist as I could and have it roll over town, letting it seep into the underground lair the Shattered had built so it could tear away their lives.


    ¡°We wouldn¡¯t get any additional test subjects,¡± I groused, as previous tests had shown that trying to knock out larger groups of Shattered was nearly impossible. Something about their nature made them resistant to the effect, or maybe the effect weakened when applied to a large number of targets, I wasn¡¯t quite sure and it didn¡¯t really matter at the moment. Either way, I couldn¡¯t just send them to sleep for disposal, at best, I could use the deadly mist I could conjure to kill them all. Or at least a large number of them.


    ¡°But we might be able to find out why these Shattered are so much more advanced,¡± Lia argued, getting a nod in return. She was right, I had been wondering why these Shattered had their high levels and, maybe even more importantly, why they were as smart as they were. There didn¡¯t appear to be a hive mind at work, at least not one that remained linked up if a Shattered was separated from the hive, but they were far too smart to be simple beasts. And that was without going into the somewhat strange effects our experiments had produced, especially those Lia, Luna and I had used to alter their Souls and Minds.


    There were so many different results, it was almost maddening, to the point that we started to wonder if these experiments had any real point, other than to increase our skills. Because if there was no reproducible result, what use did the experiments have?


    The only real result we had managed to get was the creation of the Soul Dust, as we had started to call it, the result of a Soul discharging its energy into the host body as it passed on. At least that was what we thought was happening when we tried to remove the Vampirism from a previously Shattered and their mishappen vampiric Souls went wonky, resulting in a body turning to strongly infused dust. The resulting Soul Dust had some fascinating properties, both magical and alchemical in nature, meaning both Luna and Alex were fascinated with it.


    While I had no idea what Alex was doing with it, I knew that Luna had managed to create permanent magical plants with it, but lately, she had been trying to use the dust to create living creatures, greatly stretching her abilities. So far, she hadn¡¯t been able to succeed but I had a feeling that part of that lack of success was her fundamental process. She had been trying to use Blood as a starting point and while Blood was vital to life, at least for the usual animals she was using, it wasn¡¯t really part of the reproductive process. Maybe she needed to use something that would, eventually, grow into a living being, something like an egg or maybe even an embryo. So far, I had not talked to her about my ideas but if I ever came across a suitable test subject, I was planning to pass it on.


    ¡°It could work,¡± I mused as I stared into the distance, towards the town, trying to guess how many Shattered could still be there. It was quite odd, the town seemed to have a disproportionate number of them, given that, as far as I knew, Shattered had only come into existence during the Change, from souls unable to adjust to the influx of Astral Power and, well, shattering in the process. There shouldn¡¯t really be any environmental factors influencing the strength of a Soul before the Change. To the best of my knowledge, there hadn¡¯t been any awareness of Magic and Souls before the Change, at least not as a serious consideration. And yet, it looked like this town had, somehow, produced more than twice the number of Shattered I¡¯d have expected from a town of this size unless the town had a far higher population than the number of houses suggested.


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    ¡°We¡¯d have to go slow, make sure every step of the way is cleared and that we always have a path to retreat,¡± I continued, going over potential situations in town and ways to resolve them, without paying a price I wasn¡¯t willing to pay. Because at the end of the day, there was no way I could accept to lose any of my companions, just to clear out the town. Sure, I wanted to find out why these Shattered were special, there might be something interesting hidden within, or beneath, the town but ultimately, it didn¡¯t matter. Not compared to the life and well-being of my family, compared to that, nothing really mattered.


    If we decided to move on, to forgo the chance to find out what lurked in this town, there¡¯d be another mystery we could try to figure out somewhere else, especially given the limited time that had passed since the Change. Sure, back in the day, it had taken centuries, or millennia, depending on how you were counting the time, for the many, disparate communities to link up globally but part of that was ignorance, part of that was ability and part of that was necessity. Now, pretty much everyone knew the rough layout of the globe, or at least they did before the change.


    For a moment, I was gripped by a scary thought, wondering just how much the world had been changed geologically, did the continents look as they did before? Going by a mundane understanding of physics, the continents couldn¡¯t have changed all that much, the amount of energy had to go somewhere and dissipate after the movement was done, so any continental movement beyond a few dozen centimetres within a year, if that, would cause catastrophic earthquakes and destruction on a global scale. But with magic in play, I suddenly had no real idea how that might work or what the limits were.


    Had the mountains we were travelling through now changed, grown, shrunk or moved about? It was such a ridiculous thought and yet, with the way the old infrastructure had been affected by the change, I couldn¡¯t be certain. The roads and the signs decorating them, which I would have used as an easy guidepost to compare the old landscape to the new, had largely disappeared but had they disappeared because of the change making them erode at insane speeds or had they disappeared because the land they had been build on had shifted around in some insane game of continental twister?


    Shaking off these disturbing thoughts, I focused back on the conversation between my companions and the potential plans to attack the town, slightly amused that an assault on what could easily be compared to a horror movie setting was less disturbing than the thoughts in my head. What did that say about me, compared to the situations we found ourselves in? I wasn¡¯t quite sure, but at the same time, hearing my dear, chronologically six-year-old adopted daughter suggest the use of the equivalent of a chemical weapon on the town made me wonder. Alas, the old world had been changed and in this new world, a new morality and new norms were needed.


    After all, now, after the change, there weren¡¯t just humans who were able to think and use tools. While I didn¡¯t think that the number of legacies was enough to introduce a stable population of the different races that had populated the world of Mundus, some of the different biologies would take hold and who knew what those influences might evolve into, given enough time. Or what the Shattered might become, or something like the Withered. There were so many possibilities I could imagine and, undoubtedly, many more that I could not, the old rules simply didn¡¯t apply any longer.


    Sadly, I had no idea what rules the rest of the world would find acceptable, especially as I doubted that those rules would be the same everywhere. So, for now, I would have to simply go with what my mind, heart and gut told me, especially in regards to teaching my children. Who, again, had claimed that being a mother was a simple thing?

 Chapter 1024

    The biggest problem with the plan to take out the Shattered in town and investigate what made them special was that we needed to know where they actually hid. Currently, we only knew that they could rapidly appear in the streets, on rooftops and within buildings, with the assumption that they had some sort of large-scale tunnel network under the streets, maybe an expansion of the existing sewer system or something along those lines. But that was all an assumption and relying on it could easily come to bite us in the ass of our ass-umption. It would be quite troublesome if the Shattered had some way to escape the attack or, even worse, attack the point from which we were attacking in large numbers.


    If they evaded, possibly by simply moving into a different part of their tunnel system, nothing about the current status quo would change but if they attacked us we would likely face disaster. Their levels were high enough to be dangerous and with a sufficient number, the situation would go from troublesome to utterly deadly in a matter of moments. Not something I was willing to take a chance on, not without extensive preparations and precautions.


    So, more information was needed, information I couldn¡¯t easily get my hands on. My usual method would be to either sneak in, which they made merely impossible thanks to their tremor sense, or to use scrying constructs to investigate more. Sadly, the Shattered could, somehow, use physical attacks with their claws to disrupt my constructs, even if they were only made from shadows. How that worked, I had no idea but my best guess was that something about my method of creating the constructs gave them a faint coporality, for lack of a better word, that could be disrupted. Or their claws had an innate disruption effect, capable of shredding magical constructs or a dozen other possibilities we could imagine and many more we couldn¡¯t. Either way, they could, and readily had, destroyed my constructs, rendering my preferred options moot.


    To make matters worse, I wasn¡¯t really sure I could test things as I normally would have. The Shattered had already demonstrated excellent adaptability, meaning they might very well come up with counter-measures against my preferred magical tricks if they saw them, in the worst case, if they saw them only once. Sure, there were some things that couldn¡¯t be easily adapted against, mainly in the brute-force department, but trying to brute-force an entire colony of Shattered wasn¡¯t really an approach I was willing to take. No, if I wanted to deal with their entire number, I had to be smart about it.


    The most obvious experiment, given that the Shattered had largely ceased to react to our attempts to draw them out was to use the humanoid scrying construct I had made from Ice and have it walk into town. Either the Shattered would be drawn out and we might be able to nab one or two more, or I could use it to find the openings of their lair, giving us additional information. Alternatively, I wanted to see if they kept reacting to my incoporeal scrying constructs, if they did, Lia would hopefully be able to grab one, if not, again, more information.


    Another idea I had in mind was to see if they could react to my presence if I was within the Realm of Shadows and stayed there. Normally, the realm wasn¡¯t really useful for scouting as distances could twist and morph, depending on your position, just like shadows did, but if I merely wanted to find out how many openings into their tunnels the Shattered had and their rough locations, it should be sufficient. Assuming, of course, that they couldn¡¯t just reach into the shadows and drag me out, but I doubted that their capabilities were that evolved.


    Sadly, given that I wanted to try moving through the shadows I had to perform the test myself. While Lia could reach into the shadows, her abilities to move through them were severely limited, to the point that she could barely Shadow Step a dozen metres, to say nothing of the extended exploration I had in mind.


    If I made sure to do my shadow scouting right after using the humanoid construct, the Shattered would hopefully consider any tremors to be a repeat of the attempt with the construct, giving me additional leeway in my actions. But if not, I would step away the moment I noticed a Shattered approaching. Maybe I should also wrap myself into the armour of Ice I had previously experimented with, sure, it took a lot of Astral Power but I wasn¡¯t planning to fight, I wanted to make sure that I wouldn¡¯t be caught in a trap and taken out before I could react. Sure, it was unlikely that they could get me in the shadows but better to be over-prepared than dead.


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    Another thing I could try was to see if I could maybe use different constructs to scry. Maybe I could make something smaller, a shadow version of a mouse or something even smaller, though the difficulty might be movement. I wasn¡¯t quite certain just how the shape of a shadow construct influenced its ability to be moved by my magic, so I might be able to make something so small that the Shattered would have difficulty finding it, something the size of a fly maybe. If that worked, I might be able to spy on them with ease.


    Alternatively, with my two constructs made from Ice, I had proven, if only to myself, that I wasn¡¯t limited to constructs made from shadows. Sure, my other primary affinity, Blood, wasn¡¯t really suitable to make constructs, but I might have some success if I decided to experiment with pure air constructs, or maybe water. If it rained, I might be able to use the rain as a medium for my Water Magic, giving me some fairly interesting options, but that was a bit conditional and highly experimental. Not that the experimental status was a bad thing, having my Titanic Ambition active made things a lot easier.


    Luna, too, had brought up an intriguing possibility, though not one I could use to find out more about the Shattered and their lair directly but to investigate what made them more intelligent. It was possible, maybe even likely, that the Shattered¡¯s intelligence was influenced by the Astral River or, in a less likely event, that their intelligence had influenced the river due to their presence. Their possible influence would be based on their number and their affinities to the different magical elements, as well as their actual intelligence, which made the idea fairly intriguing in and of itself. And, the biggest advantage this avenue of investigation had was that it was nearly risk-free. The possibility that the Shattered could strike into the Astral River was minuscule to the point of near impossibility.


    Given the security of that last option, it was the one I decided to try first. If I could get the information I wanted to find without risking life and limb, I wasn¡¯t about to hesitate. By now, I had a comfortable throne sitting in our lair, mostly because I regularly used it while anchoring myself into the scrying constructs and the throne helped with that. Maybe part of the effect was psychological in nature, something about feeling like a ruler or master while sitting on it and controlling a ¡®subject¡¯ but given the runes I had carved into it, there were some tangible, magical benefits, too. One of which was a boost to my presence within the Astral River, increasing the amount of Astral Power I passively regenerated while sitting on it. Normally, that was merely a neat benefit but now, it would help anchor my Mind to my Body while I explored some nearby strands of the Astral River.


    After warning the others, I let myself fade into the River, allowing its streams to take me along after making sure that these strands were flowing towards the town. Not that I could readily link locations on the physical plane and their counterparts within the Astral River but thanks to the vague, distant pull of the forming Nexus we had been following for quite some time, I had a rough reference frame. Thanks to that, I could roughly navigate within the Astral, though it still wasn¡¯t easy.


    It was strange, speed and direction within the Astral River weren¡¯t always as I would expect and despite the fairly short distance between town and our lair, it took me almost an hour of patiently navigating some of the smaller strands, mentally crawling towards town.


    To make matters worse, the closer I got, the thinner the strands got, to the point that I could barely traverse them, partially due to their minuscule size and partially because of the incredible pressure the power within was under. I had never experienced anything like this, to the point that I soon had to give up on this particular attempt, though, even as I started to make my way back towards my body, I began to wonder if this particular oddity might actually be the answer to the question regarding the large number of Shattered. Maybe not a useful answer, but an answer nonetheless.

 Chapter 1025

    With one of my plans to gather information shot, I focused on other options. Sadly, when I began to work in different mediums to create my scrying constructs, I quickly began to run into trouble. The biggest problem, at least to my understanding, was that I lacked the affinity for the other materials. Sure, I had managed to gain some affinity for them, thanks to a few of my traits, but compared to my affinity and understanding of Darkness and Ice, these were greatly lacking. That, in turn, made the cost of operating these constructs prohibitively high, while also limiting the fluidity with which I could control them and that lack of ability translated into even higher cost. To make matters worse, that was only the biggest problem, there were dozens of other, smaller, troubles that cropped up as I began to experiment, to the point that I soon pushed the idea into the long-term project part of my mind. It would take a great deal of effort to make anything useful of it, so the experimentation would be pushed back until I needed something to occupy my mind and time. For now, I had no trouble keeping busy, so I focused on more immediately productive areas of mental pursuit.


    So, when the idea to use different mediums to scry on the Shattered didn¡¯t pan out, I decided to try sneaking in while hiding in the Shadow Realm. Sure, it meant I wouldn¡¯t be able to get as many of the details as I would like to have, simply because of the realm¡¯s twisting and morphing nature, but I could get something. Unless the Shattered, somehow, could sense my presence and present a threat, in that case, I would immediately retreat.


    By now, I had a fairly good idea about the town¡¯s layout and, even more importantly, knew where the Shattered came boiling out. Using a nicely dark night, a bare sliver of the moon hidden behind a layer of clouds, I made my way into town, physically wrapped into my cloak and magically hidden in the Shadows.


    The Shadow Realm was a fascinating place, both for its strange and twisting physical dimensions but also for some of its magical properties. On Mundus, there had always been that sensation of being watched, something I had never quite understood but had always been unnerved by, but now, on Terra, the sensation was different. There was still that underlying sense of a presence but the presence wasn¡¯t watching, at least it didn¡¯t quite feel the same. If I had to attribute a sensation to the presence, it would probably be something along the lines of ¡®hungry¡¯, which wasn¡¯t a pleasant thought. Though, despite that odd sensation, I had yet to encounter anything in the shadows but that might have been because I rarely remained within them for long.


    My intangible jaunt into town might actually be the longest time I continuously spent in the shadows, meaning I would have to be extra vigilant, both in regards to the Shattered and to that mysterious presence.


    Luckily, I was fairly competent when it came to moving within the Shadows, mostly because I could apply some of the experience I had gained while flying with my cloak to moving within this space that wasn¡¯t as solid as the physical world but also not as conceptual and intangible as the Astral River. There, obviously, were numerous differences but by now, I could readily navigate it, allowing me to reach the town undetected and even move towards the closest of the Shattereds¡¯ hidey-holes.


    It was the same area I had originally entered, back when I was just sneaking around, ignorant of the dangers hidden within the town. Thankfully, my vigilance, what some might slander as paranoia, had carried me through, allowing me to get the information I needed to avoid future danger. Or at least as much future danger as one could avoid, while within a hive of ravenous monsters all linked together in some strange fashion.


    Even while knowing where I had to look as I knew where the Shattered came boiling out from, it was difficult to spot the holes they used while within the Shadow Realm. There were two major problems, one I had anticipated, the other I had not. The anticipated problem was the Shadow Realm itself, looking for the right hole in a largely devastated town sounded easy, until you realised that the hole, when viewed from within the Shadow Realm, might look anywhere between the size of a pinky finger or stretch into infinity and beyond, depending on the perspective it is viewed from and the shadows cast into the area in the physical world. Those difficulties were why I had made sure to visit during a night with very consistent shadows, where the only relevant shadow was that of the Earth, blocking the light from the Sun, while the thick clouds made sure that no additional light could cause additional shadows that might warp things. Sadly, while the Earth-Shadow was one of the most consistent sources of Shadow, it was also massive, causing a few troubles for me while I was within the Shadows.


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    The problem I hadn¡¯t anticipated was one I hadn¡¯t encountered before. Normally, the Shadows were just that, a realm filled with Shadows and Darkness, but when I tried to poke and prod the hole I had decided was the one leading into the underground warren of the Shattered, things started to get strange. Normally, the Shadows were everywhere, unless there was light and the more light entered an area, the thinner the Shadows became. Now, in the darkness of the night, the Shadows should have been just as ubiquitous in the hidden nook the Shattered used for their tunnel as they were outside, while their underground lair should be filled with darkness unless they had been setting up torches or some other source of light. But even if they had, there should be some indication of it, a shifting and twisting in the Shadows but I couldn¡¯t detect anything of that sort.


    Instead, my probes were somehow swallowed up, leaving me confused and a little annoyed that my grand idea to scout the Shattered from within the Shadows died such an ignominious death. If I couldn¡¯t even prod and probe the strange area before me, I certainly wouldn¡¯t try to find out what it was by poking my hand, or an even more important part of my body, into it. Instead, I decided to run a few more tests, trying to figure out what was going on until I felt a faint change in the area around me and immediately retreated.


    Trying to figure out what had caused the change, from a reasonably safe distance, wasn¡¯t easy. If solid, permanent objects cast deep Shadows, moving beings had a much smaller impact. In this case, I could discern fairly easily that the change was caused by Shattered moving into the area, mostly because I had been expecting that they might notice me when I started to poke. What surprised me just a little was that there seemed to be some interference with the Shadows. Not a lot, certainly not enough to hinder me, let alone eject me by force, but enough to make that strange sensation I was usually feeling just a little bit stronger. Given that I had no idea what this might built up to, or how I could venture into their underground lair without getting around the interference they had set up, I decided to try my luck elsewhere, hoping against hope that another tunnel exit could allow me to enter their tunnels while safely hidden away in the darkness.


    As I was checking tunnel after tunnel, it quickly became obvious that the Shattered had, somehow, managed to fill their tunnels with something that wasn¡¯t Shadow, though I wasn¡¯t sure what that could mean. Somehow, it felt solid, slightly like my Ice Magic, but at the same time, it was the exact opposite of my slightly chaotic, ever-changing Darkness Magic. If I had to use a single word to encompass it, I might use something along the lines of Stagnation or maybe Stasis. There wasn¡¯t a whole lot of change down there, though somehow, the Shattered managed to constantly adapt to our kidnappings.


    Finally, I decided that I had enough and started to retreat, using the Shadows to step into the sky so I could spread my wings. I was curious if there was some physical indication of the activities I had felt in the shadows and the easiest and safest way to see that was to take an aerial view.


    The moment I stepped out of the Shadows, I wrapped myself in my cloak, making sure I was completely hidden while looking at the various groups of Shattered milling around the tunnels I had poked as if they were looking for something. Or, more likely, for someone, namely, me.


    Shaking my head, I let myself glide away from town, knowing that even trying to get the information I needed was impossible. Now, we either had to strike without the knowledge or take the easy route and leave to look for interesting things to explore elsewhere.

 Chapter 1026

    Ultimately, I decided that I would take a single shot at taking out the Shattered in town and if that shot didn¡¯t work, or rather, if it missed, we would move on and try to find another place to explore. There was a whole world out there, just waiting for us, or maybe some other enterprising explorer, to discover and exploit its mysteries and I wasn¡¯t about to wait for weeks and months on end to finally figure out a way to overcome the local troubles. There might be a great reward if we persisted but we had no actual indication of such a reward, well, unless I counted the powerful enemies.


    If this were a video game, I would be fairly confident that there¡¯d be a reward, or that I had stumbled across an unfinished area, but without an intelligent designer, the presence of enemies couldn¡¯t be taken as evidence of treasure. Though, thinking back, there had been some instances on Mundus that had given the appearance of design and, in some cases, even sounded very much as if they were referencing some contemporary art or culture, things like plays, songs or movies. Things even I noticed and recognised, meaning it was likely there were many more that I hadn¡¯t noticed, thanks to the lack of interest I held in such things.


    This made me wonder, how could that work? Mere coincidence? Some strange form of divine intervention, but why would there be any in the first place, what was the reason, let alone why would some deity choose to create these seemingly inconspicuous jokes if the only people who would recognise them were the Travellers from Terra? Maybe some sort of trickster could have done it and considered it amusing but all that, for a joke almost nobody understood? Maybe it made sense to a god but to my feeble, mortal mind, it was utterly idiotic, though I couldn¡¯t, shouldn¡¯t, assume that I had all the facts. So, the best way to deal with the conundrum was to push it back into the ever-growing mental file labelled ¡®need more information¡¯. For all I knew, it might be some part of the system that tried to propagate through the various dimensions it connected and these pieces of culture I remembered were some sort of precursor. It might explain why some of the horrible pop music had come into existence, it was actually a sign, a warning, of the coming apocalypse. The conspiracy nuts might have been right, the idea making me shake my head in amusement, even if I was somewhat disconcerted by it, too.


    Pushing these thoughts away, I focused on a much more practical idea, namely my plan to take out some, maybe all, of the Shattered. Obviously, if I wanted to destroy them all, I needed a medium that would spread all across town, seep into every nook and cranny so it could get them all and into that medium, I would need to imbue a powerful effect to take care of them.


    After my last trip into town, I had a fair idea of what I could use as the medium to carry my magic, even if it wasn¡¯t my favourite element. On the way back, the thick rain clouds had given way to an annoyingly cold drizzle, the cold and damp wetness enough to make even me uncomfortable, though not so much because of the cold but because my clothes started to become heavy and stick to my frame- Even more annoying, and much more uncomfortable, was that my concealment was a lot less effective in the rain. Part of that was due to the better transmission of scents in moist air but mainly because I wasn¡¯t yet at the point where I could make rain fall through me unless I retreated into the Shadows. So, while I was sneaking and moving about, there was an area where no rain was falling through, something a vigilant observer would easily detect, allowing them to detect me in turn. Or at least detect a suspiciously person-shaped area, giving the game away.


    However, while rain was annoying for me, the rain and the subsequent moisture and mist in the air could be used by me. It would take some doing, especially if I wanted to imbue the rain as it was falling down so I could use a natural medium to carry my magic, I would have to work in, or rather on, the clouds from the start. Luckily, I had my cloak so I could fly, allowing me to experiment with my idea, if only to see if it could work. And if it worked, I might have a way to create massive attacks, though they would be highly indiscriminate.


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    With that in mind, I made my way up into the clouds during a night that threatened rain. I had no desire to use massive amounts of magical power to create that much water but given that it was already here, just hanging in the sky as large, foreboding clouds, I had no problem with making my way up there, trying to find the clouds. Not necessarily an easy task, as clouds weren¡¯t as distinct and solid as they appeared from below but by going up until things got very wet and clammy, I could make my way around and mark the right spots.


    Given that I wanted to channel massive amounts of Astral Power into the clouds, I had no desire to remain up here, in the cold, damp mist, having to focus on my levitation while also paying attention to my Astral Power reserves and hope that I didn¡¯t exhaust myself in the channelling process and drop from the sky like a rock. No, trying to do the whole thing in flight was a fairly dumb idea but what I could do was use my cloak to create a formation and channel a faint amount of power into it while I made my way back down and into our base. There, I had prepared my throne and the same runic formation I wanted to use in the sky around it. If I linked the runic formation on the ground with one I prepared in the sky, I should be able to channel Astral Power into one and get the effect out of the other, with only a bit of transmission loss in the process.


    So, I began to carve runes into the clouds, using tiny droplets of Blood infused with Astral Power as my medium. It was an incredibly fiddly process but also a highly interesting one, requiring me to put a great deal of focus on my creations as I wanted to make the runes part of the floating clouds, meaning I had to make the drops of blood incredibly minuscule while creating the shapes I wanted them to be in. Thankfully, I had my Titanic Ambition, giving me the attributes I needed to make my vision a reality, and allowing me to create my largest runic formation. For once, it wasn¡¯t a simple formation made out of the few runes I wanted to combine, it was a chain of runic formations, all of them built from runes of Water, Ice, Blood and Darkness, all linked together into one singular formation big enough to encompass the entire town. It was massive, big enough that I needed hours to create it in the first place and a tremendous amount of Astral Power. Maybe I was overdoing things, but I wanted to see if it was possible. And, by the looks of it, I was succeeding in my endeavour.


    Finally, just as the clouds started to slowly drop their rainy load on the town, I was finished and quickly made my way back into our lair, easily landing on my throne while Lia was closing things down, aware that I was trying something incredibly grand that might just get all the Shattered riled up while channelling stupendous amounts of power, enough that they might be able to track us down.


    Luna bestowed one of her Blessings on me as I landed, an actual benediction powered by Divine Power, granted by Lady Hecate Herself, not just an almost automatic reaction to the invocation of Her cleric. It was a fascinating experience, one that I hadn¡¯t had all that often yet as if I had been looking at simple, maybe even cheap, prints and copies from famous artwork before and now, I was allowed to study a masterwork, made by the master Herself, while that master was looking over my shoulder with a faint smile on Her face. Or something like that.


    Whatever the case, I could feel my Astral Power return far quicker than normal and I could even feel that faint presence in the air, similar to the presence I had felt in the temple near the Charlands, right after we created it.


    With the realisation that I might have an actual divine observer interested in my attempt at large-scale magic, I knew I wouldn¡¯t back out. No, I wanted to show Lady Hecate and all the other Gods who might be watching, just what I was made of, to let them see my ambition and the lengths I was willing to go to achieve them. Hopefully, they would know not to try to block my path to achieving my ultimate ambition.

 Chapter 1027

    The biggest disadvantage of the method I used to attack the Shattered was my complete and utter ignorance of the progress I was making. I had no idea whether my spell was actually achieving anything. Sure, I knew that the clouds were dumping a few thousand tons of water on the town each hour, all of it holding a faint trace of my Astral Power. By itself, a single drop would do just about nothing, but with each drop holding that faint trace, things were rapidly adding up to an absurd amount of power I was projecting and shaping. Without my throne, Luna¡¯s blessing and the support from my Titanic Ambition, I wouldn¡¯t be able to channel such massive amounts of power, certainly not over such a long time.


    A part of me considered sending out Lia to check if I was actually getting anything done but without a way to provide backup to my daughter, I wasn¡¯t about to take that risk. Especially as my indirect method meant I had no control over the attack or where the rain fell. Sure, the area in which the clouds were affected was defined by the runes I had prepared earlier but once the raindrops were infused with my power, they simply fell, landing where they would, the power inside them flowing into the physical world to form the deadly mist I wanted to spread. Most of the rain would fall on the city, but the attack itself was indiscriminate and would harm Lia just as it would a Shattered, though Lia would likely be a lot more resilient to the effects, thanks to her vampiric traits and generally high attributes.


    So, given that I had no idea about the effect of my attack, I simply kept going. Breathing in while drawing in power from the Astral River before breathing out and pushing the Astral Power I had drawn from the Astral River into the runic formation around me. Over and over, again and again, each breath following the same cycle. It was, in a way, relaxing but at the same time, I could feel a part of my Body, Mind and Soul tiring, even if the cycle itself wasn¡¯t particularly strenuous. The exhaustion was more along the lines of that ache you got when repeating the same movement again and again, no matter how simple and easy a single repetition would be. Doing the same repetition a few thousand times over a couple of hours would tire anybody out, even if the movement was nothing more than a wave.


    But regardless of my slowly mounting exhaustion, I kept waving, kept breathing in and out, drawing power in and fueling the formation, just to keep the rain going. If the rain was still there, that part, too, I had no feedback of, by now, the clouds I had originally used to anchor my runic formation might have dissipated without new clouds entering the area, leaving my magic with no target to affect. Idly, while continuing my exhausting cycle, I began to wonder what might happen if the clouds dissipated. Would the magic I kept channelling form into some sort of mist, as it was supposed to once the rain hit the ground? If so, what was the difference between banks of mist, high in the sky, and clouds? Was there actually a difference between the forms of atmospheric water, or should the mist be considered a cloud once it rose high enough? And if so, why did people differentiate between mist and low-hanging clouds, especially if the clouds were hanging low enough that they touched the ground?


    For a bit, my mind was chasing its own tail. There was no focus, no direction, simply thoughts going where they went, scattered by exhaustion and my drifting thoughts. Ideas started to pop in and out of my mind; some of them were reasonable and possible while others were complete and utter fantasies, impractical and impossible in equal measures. Amusingly, some of these ideas were both, practical and possible despite being a complete fantasy while others, seemingly reasonable, likely suffered some fatal, impractical flaw.


    One of those ideas was the idle thought that the spellwork I was currently using was quite familiar, at least in concept. Part of it was a simple, scaled-up version of the spell I had used to destroy the Withered, well, scaled-up and altered to fit a new purpose. Would that mean it was still close enough to count or had the alterations, both in concept and in scale, changed it on some fundamental level and made it something new?


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    Not that it really mattered, as the much bigger, both in similarity and in scale, comparison was with the Fimbulwinter summoned by Nidh?gg. Just like I was using the clouds to spread my magical rain, the Dark Striker had used the jetstream that surged around the world to spread his influence, allowing him to project power without using his own energy to propel it across the distance. The further you had to send your power, the more you would lose in transit, unless you had some medium to carry that power. That much I had realised early in my magical career, the need for a medium to carry your effects.


    Sure, you could also use a pure medium, as I did when conjuring Icicles, Hailstones and similar weapons made from Ice to strike my foes, but that was, in essence, simply projecting a physical force using a conjured material as the medium. But if I wanted to project something like the effect of the Cold Rune, I needed to use a medium, and more often than not I had to conjure that medium first, using valuable Astral Power in the process. That problem was one of the biggest advantages Runic Magic had, the possibility to tie the conjuration of the medium directly into the effect, making things seamless and a lot more efficient.


    Using natural phenomena as the medium allowed for more magic to be used on the actual effect but, in turn, it sacrificed control. The rain fell where it would but as long as it started its journey to the ground within the area of my runic formation, it carried with it a deadly payload. The jetstream blew where it would but as it was surging around the globe, it carried with it a deadly power. Natural means, imprecise but allowing for such incredible effects. It was something to keep in mind for the future, especially when thinking about ways to imbue magic into the shadows. After all, shadows were, amusingly, faster than light, unbound by the supposed limit its speed imposed on reality.


    Visions of runes, carved into monuments all around the world, allowing me to influence the shadow cast by Earth itself as half of it turned away from the Sun, a veil of influence spreading across the globe as the world kept spinning and moving around the Sun. Sure, I would need some way to power the grandiose, and likely insane and impossible, spellwork I imagined in my mind, but just the idea held a great deal of attraction to my tired mind. Nobody would be able to escape. People could hide from the Sun, I was an excellent example of that principle, but to hide from the Darkness, to evade the shadow one cast? That was impossible, there could be no light without shadows but there certainly was darkness without light.


    Grinning, I pushed the thought aside, forcing my mind back into a semblance of order, as difficult as it was. I had lost all sense of time as I kept channelling Astral Power into the formation beneath my feet and by now, my stomach was loudly complaining, reminding me that I needed more than Astral Power to fuel my body.


    For a moment, my mind drifted again, questioning whether there was a way to use Blood Magic to sustain myself, to use the Astral Power within my blood to fuel the body my blood was flowing through. It wouldn¡¯t, couldn¡¯t, work completely, there was a need to introduce the fundamental building blocks to the body, the nutrients the digestive system used to produce the various parts but did the energy needed to keep it all fueled have to come from that same source? Lia and Alex didn¡¯t need to feed on regular food, though they needed to imbibe these same raw materials in addition to the infused Blood that supplied them with Astral Power and, likely, energy. So there had to be a way, right?


    Noticing my drifting thoughts, I quickly marshalled them again and started to disengage myself from the constant cycle of power I had been caught in for some unknown amount of time. Not too fast, not too slowly and soon, my breathing wasn¡¯t matching the cycle of power, the runic formation around me started to die down, its glow fading away as my power stopped infusing it.


    Finally, once I was completely disengaged, I noticed just how tired I was. Without rising from my throne, I reached into my bag and pulled one of the few energy bars we had looted and carried with us, starting to eat, but before I managed to finish the precious morsel of the old world, exhaustion caught up with me and my mind faded away as my body snored softly.

 Chapter 1028

    Waking up after falling asleep from exhaustion, be it magically caused or not, was not a fun experience. Maybe I should consider redesigning my throne into some sort of lounger or maybe turn it into a straight-up bed, just so I could rest comfortably after pushing my body beyond what was reasonable and falling asleep afterwards.


    Now, I had to deal with a body that was sore all over, even in places where I wouldn¡¯t think I ever would be sore and I could easily feel that my seated position was partially to blame for that. Or rather, it was to blame for it being as bad as it was, due to the position adding a physical soreness to the magically induced soreness, the two sensations combining into one that made me feel incredibly grumpy. To make matters worse, just considering using my Blood Magic to soothe the physical sensation made me cringe and I realised I would have to be somewhat careful with my magic. At the moment, it was simply strained and sore but if I forced things, I might actually manage to cause damage to some fundamental part of me. Not something I wanted to risk and, luckily, there was no emergency forcing me to exert myself. Well, not unless the others were readily sleeping through that emergency, as Silva and Luna did on the other side of the room.


    The two of them were curled up together on one of our sleeping mats, looking quite comfortable and incredibly adorable, so I had no problem with taking my time, especially as I could hear some faint sounds that indicated Lia and Alex were doing something. What, I had no idea but I could hear Lia talking, an occasional chitter from Alex and the clinking of glass, making me think they were doing some sort of experiment.


    Whatever the case, there was no indication that I needed to worry, so I took my time, slowly stretching out my limbs to get rid of the tightness before rising from my throne and continuing to get my body back into working order. At the same time, I opened up the system and quickly checked my notifications, the earlier grin returning with full force as I looked over the numerous messages telling me I had killed a Shattered. Sure, the vast majority of those notifications spoke of kills too low in level to give me EXP but not all of them were. And even if I hadn¡¯t received any EXP, just knowing that I could weave my magic into natural phenomena was incredible. So many things I might be able to do with that, not just in regard to destructive magic but also for beneficial magic. The EXP were just gravy, though very tasty gravy, as it was enough to get me a level, so I was now level ninety-three. Soon, I could attempt to cross the next divide, a challenge I was looking forward to.


    Additionally, the Rune Masteries involved in the grand runic formation had all gone up by a point or three, Ice Rune Mastery getting to sixty-two, meaning I could glean a new rune from the Astral River, Darkness Rune Mastery got to sixty-one, Blood Rune Mastery got to forty-seven and last, and amusingly least, Water Rune Mastery reached thirty, opening up a new rune, too. And it wasn¡¯t just the Rune Masteries that received a boost. Astral Meditation got one, too, two points, pushing it to fifty-six, while Blood Magic and Enchanting received a point each, bringing them to fifty-one and twenty-nine respectively. All in all, an excellent harvest, even if I had yet to find out just how successful the culling of Shattered was.


    Depending on that, we might be able to explore the town, especially if it was now empty of enemies and find out what caused it to be as different from the rest as it was, why there were so many Shattered and not a single Undead in sight. Though the lack of Undead might have to do with the sheer number of Shattered, they might have eaten the bodies or something like that. Not a pleasant thing to consider, but a plausible one.


    After getting some food into my body, I realised I was still tired and decided to curl up with my dear daughter and Silva. It didn¡¯t take long for me to fall back asleep, though compared to sleeping on my throne, this was a lot more comfortable.


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    When I woke next, my body was a lot better compared to earlier. After comparing notes with Lia and Luna, I realised that I had spent almost eighteen hours channelling power into the runic formation and afterwards, I had slept for about as long, if one discounted the short break I had taken to switch from my throne to Luna. After sleeping for that long, I was a little groggy but that faded soon and we could take a look at the town and find out just how successful my spellwork was.


    Together, we set out to find out just how much damage my marathon spellcasting had caused and what we found was enough to make my eyes go wide. Even before we got close to the city, I could smell the results. There was an obvious scent of moisture in the air, indicating that the rain hadn¡¯t been gone for all that long, but what stuck out to me a lot more were the magical scents in the air. There were the obvious ones, Ice, Water, Darkness, Blood, the types of magic I had used in my runic formation but the air wasn¡¯t just filled with them. There was also Death, a whole lot of it, alongside a veritable smorgasbord of scents, diverse and intermixed to the point that I needed a moment to try making sense of them. Not that I had a whole lot of success, the scents were too continuous to try differentiating them all but all primary elements were present, with a whole lot of sub-elements mixed in.


    When we saw the results of my spell, I couldn¡¯t help but shake my head in disbelief. The town was no longer visible, instead, the entire area was filled with a dense fog, the clouds thick enough to make any visual identification impossible. When I stretched out my magical senses, I could feel the deadly magic I had wrought but due to the degree of separation between the original magic I had channelled into the clouds, I lacked any control over these mists. Instead, it almost felt as if the magic I had wrought had taken on a life of its own, somewhat similar to Wild Magic, but also different.


    The part where the powerful magic lingered, even if it was divorced from its original user, was similar to Wild Magic. But where Wild Magic was just that, a wild, untamed expression of primal power, the mists here felt a lot more alive, for lack of a better word, alive and hungry. Maybe even malevolent but if there was malevolence, it wasn¡¯t the malevolence of a sadist who took pleasure in the pain they inflicted but more along the lines of a ravenous beast, looking for its next meal.


    The sheer volume of mist and the discomforting feeling it radiated made approaching the town an impossibility. Looking around, I noticed that the vegetation around town, even beyond the area covered in mist, was gone. The grass had died, trees looked withered and I couldn¡¯t hear a single animal, nothing but the dead and quiet night. When we continued investigating, keeping a good distance to the mist just in case the hungry vapours decided that we made for a good snack, we came across a couple of rainwater runoffs and there, too, the vegetation was dead or dying.


    Out of curiosity, I began to analyse the water in a few puddles and the small rivulets of water around town and noticed a strange difference. The mist seemed to be composed out of the remnants of my magic and while it was deadly, the original intent of wiping out live within the town remained. In the runoff water, the diverse magic I had noticed earlier, with that strong, almost overpowering, undertone of Death was the primary magical contaminant, making me wonder where it had come from. It wasn¡¯t part of the magic I had wrought, that much was certain, but otherwise? I had no idea, not even speculation.


    Maybe I would have to look into Death Runes once again, though I wasn¡¯t exactly looking forward to that chore, just trying to delve into them in the Astral River had left me aching and in discomfort, trying again didn¡¯t sound like a fun time.


    But before I would consider that, there were other things I wanted to investigate, even if it very much looked like we had managed to seal off the town from anybody trying to learn more. Maybe there still were Shattered inside, somehow adapted to the mist, but unless I was interested in trying to subdue the deadly fog, there was little we could do. Well, little, other than continuing on our journey northwards.

 Chapter 1029

    Contrary to my original intention, we didn¡¯t leave the area right away. Once again, my daughter¡¯s curiosity mirrored my own but, for once, her tools were better suited to sate that curiosity. Where my mind was completely boggled by the amount of magic that lingered around the town and had turned into Wild Magic, Luna could use her connection to Hecate to gather some information. Sure, I could poke and prod the Wild Magic but my experiences on Mundus made me incredibly cautious around this kind of power, especially as I had originally unleashed it.


    The tale of Ice Queen Sally sprung to mind. She was one of the entities locked up by the Grandmother, imprisoned in her personal dungeon, and turned into a boss. Or maybe saying that she was buried in the dungeon would be more apt. However one described Sally¡¯s fate, the path that led her to it was what I was concerned with. According to the Grandmother, and corroborated by some tales I had stumbled across later, Sally had unleashed powerful magic, turning the capital city of her kingdom into a place of Wild Magic that eventually morphed into a dungeon. The people within the capital were turned into Undead of some kind, seeking to subdue the world for their Queen. Their crusade had only ended when the Queen, the Ice Queen Sally, had disappeared, likely because the Grandmother dropped by and imprisoned the somewhat immortal queen and limited the Undead to the area around the dungeon. Or one could be a consequence of the other, I wasn¡¯t sure. But whatever the case may be, I had no interest in getting trapped by the magic I had unleashed.


    There was too much for me to control, mostly because I had channelled a vast amount of power for hours on end, power that didn¡¯t fade back into the Astral River as I would normally expect but that was now lingering here, with enough intelligence that I was considering whether I might be able to use Mind Magic on it. It certainly sounded like an interesting idea, though given the circumstances, I was a little scared of the possible effects.


    On the other hand, Luna could, just like she had when we investigated the Charlands, channel the power of Hecate. Only this time, the Goddess hadn¡¯t given us direct quests to investigate, so Luna couldn¡¯t simply go to a nearby location and let Her deal with the rest. Instead, Luna herself needed to guide and channel the Divine Power she was employing, though there was still some interplay because Lady Hecate was the Goddess of Magic after all. So, where a normal cleric or priest would have been completely out of their depth, Luna could get a start, though even for her the entire thing was a difficult challenge. One I couldn¡¯t help her all that much, though we did team up to interpret some of the readings she managed to take. The concepts and methods used to gather the current data were similar enough to those used around the Charlands to let me understand some of it and, luckily, Luna understood other parts, meaning we could mix and match our understanding and draw some plausible conclusions.


    And what we found was fairly fascinating. There were some similarities between the readings we had taken near the Charlands and here, allowing us to compare and contrast to the point that we noticed some similarities. Sure, these similarities were mostly conceptual, along the lines of the similarities between the Great Lakes and an ordinary puddle, but they allowed us to draw some fascinating conclusions about the nature of magic. Just like somebody studying the Great Lakes and a puddle would realise that water follows the pull of gravity, how ripples spread across the surface and get reflected by the ground below, we managed to observe some fairly foundational aspects of magic.


    Amusingly, we even received confirmation that we had observed something important by way of a divine revelation, or something along those lines. At one point, as we were trying to make sense of the data we had gathered, just as Luna and I were rambling along, our words slowly starting to mesh as an idea was starting to coalesce, Luna stopped speaking and, a minute later, told me that she had received a new trait called Curiosity of Innocents. The name was enough to make me laugh and hug my daughter, partially because the trait was somewhat similar to the Mortal Hubris trait I had received on Mundus, only somewhat less powerful but also without the detriments that trait had but also because the System continued to regard my daughter as ¡®innocent¡¯. Just that confirmation was enough to take a weight off my heart, as I had been worried that my actions were corrupting her in some fundamental way that I didn¡¯t understand. After all, before the Change, there had been stories, fantasy stories, sure, about the corruption of innocents. In those stories, searching for forbidden knowledge or learning things that mankind wasn¡¯t supposed to understand was frequently the source of that corruption, quite possibly to keep people from questioning common cultural narratives. Now, I could rest somewhat easy in the knowledge that the System didn¡¯t consider Luna corrupted, which was good enough for me, the System was about as objective an evaluator as I could imagine.


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    The next step, once we had a whole lot of readings taken and information gathered, was to set up yet another shrine. By now, the process of building these neat little caves of knowledge for Lady Hecate was, amusingly, turning into a routine operation. There were some alterations to make the shrine fit the local geography or to adapt already existing features like the caves we had used to house our captives and experiment on them but the overall theme was one I almost knew in my sleep.


    I wouldn¡¯t even try to set one up while sleeping, that would be quite disrespectful to a being who had demonstrated that She was willing to give the occasional hand and who I actually wanted to emulate. To the best of my understanding, Lady Hecate had become a deity due to Her immense knowledge of the Arcane, not because She had a large following of mortals who were donating power to Her. Where some other deities became Gods in a process I considered amusingly similar to the political elections before the change, Lady Hecate had gained Her status by reaching the top of the Arcane Path. Though, I had no idea how that achievement turned into a divinity. If I followed the mental path that likened most Gods to politicians elected in a large-scale popularity contest, it would follow that Lady Hecate was akin to a scientist who somehow managed to become popular due to their scientific work. Hopefully, She would never need to use a speech synthesizer or something like that.


    Curiously, as we were building the temple and filling it with the research we had conducted alongside a basic primer for magic, the Astral River and the elements, there were moments during which I briefly felt as if somebody else was there. Somebody reading over my shoulder and while I wasn¡¯t able to accurately sense the presence, there was the faint, by now fairly familiar impression of Lady Hecate¡¯s power. The realisation that the Goddess, despite having walked so far on the Arcane Path, retained her curiosity was an uplifting one. It indicated that, no matter how far one reached, there would always be more to learn, more to study on my path.


    In the meantime, while Luna and I were building yet another temple, Lia and Alex were out there, committing a few more crimes against the natural order. They were roaming the area, mostly looking for critters that might wander into the Mists of Oblivion, as we had dubbed the Wild Magic effect, trying to study their effects that way. Sadly, it seemed that no critter was willing to go in there and when they decided to throw one in after capturing it, the rabbit never made its way back out.


    Additionally, they were looking for Shattered that might have managed to leave the area during the rain or that might have been out at the time. Sadly, there didn¡¯t seem to be any such subjects, it looked very much as if all Shattered that had been out and exposed had died, while the rest was missing, maybe forced to hide in their tunnels, though those should be filled with deadly mist.


    There was a small, somewhat niggling, voice that suggested I might have accidentally given them the perfect shelter, once they managed to adapt to the deadly effects of the mist, but if the Shattered were that adaptable, maybe they deserved the shelter. Finally, after a little over an additional week of work and studying, the shrine of Lady Hecate was done and there were no more crimes against nature to be committed in the area. It was finally time to move on, reaching for the second divide. Luckily, helping Luna with her research and the building of the Shrine had been enough to grant me yet another level, bringing me to level ninety-four.

 Interlude: Suvivors 605

    The more things change, the more they stay the same. At least that held true for trudging through the muck and mud of the swamp their group was exploring. The world had changed, their bodies had changed, everything had changed and yet, exploring a muddy swamp was just as annoying as it had been some forty-odd years before, when Mrs Wu had been trained to navigate terrain like this. Sure, some things were different, her body, for example, was a lot more capable, despite the many years that had passed since her youth but, as if to make up for that, the beasts inhabiting the swamp were more dangerous now than they had been back then. All in all, the tension and danger remained the same but, more importantly, the mud was just as annoying as it always had been, trying to drag people into it, to make them stumble and fall, so they would get lost in the mud and the muck until they literally became one with the swamp. That part, too, was just the same. And, just as she had back then, she hated it now with the passion of a thousand burning suns, to the point that she was sending the occasional prayer to the Golden Crows to descend and scorch the entire area. Alas, no Golden Crow was descending and there was no miraculous drying of the swamp.


    To make matters worse, or at least to make her mood worse, Kevin seemed to enjoy the mud and the muck. Well, at the very least, he was enjoying the humidity and the sheer ubiquity of water in the environment, allowing him to wield his magic with incredible ease. There were moments during which she wondered what would happen if the boy ever got to the ocean, would he just jump into the water, maybe grow a set of flippers, and never be seen again? Drifted off as sea foam, or something along those lines?


    But no, thanks to his own inquisitive nature, the boy had sprouted some leafy appendages, making him eerily similar to some of the native swamp creatures, the Drowned, while also indicating that his recent racial change had given him an additional affinity for nature, not something you would find at the surface of the ocean. However, there was a lot of greenery at the bottom of the ocean, so maybe he actually would be lost to the sea, as the old saying went. Only, back then, the desire for adventure on the high seas had been what had taken the young people, now, it might be a lot more literal.


    Shaking her head, Wu Chenhua focused her mind back on her current task, to explore a path through the swamp and find the area where a bunch of large crocodiles were breeding. Their quest, acquired by Kevin from some unknown source, was to decimate the crocodiles by killing two dozen of them while gathering a dozen of their eggs, undamaged if at all possible.


    A part of her mind was incredibly dissatisfied with her ignorance about these strange concepts from the system. She knew about computer games and considered them an amusing pastime but for games, there was always a designer, a man behind the curtain so to speak, who set the tasks and gave the narration, making them little more than a story delivered with a different medium. Fundamentally, there was little difference between a story told around a campfire, as humans had done for millennia, and a story told through the screen of a computer, in both cases, it was a tale coming from another mind. In that context, some strange side-quests might make sense, allowing the designer to present reasons for the audience to engage with their story. But now, with quests being a part of the real world, there was no designer, nobody had decided that they, as a group, needed to engage with the swamp, or was there?


    It was an incredibly discombobulating idea, to question whether their reality remained as free and open as it had been before the change, where the only shackles came from the laws of nature, like gravity holding everyone down, and the far less rigorous laws of society. But the laws of the system? On some level, they were similar to the laws of nature, the system simply was, just like nature simply was. There was no arguing with gravity, you could not try to bribe the laws of motion, you had to accept them, study them and search for ways to get around them. In that regard, the laws of nature and the laws of society were quite similar, they could be circumvented, if one used the right approach. But the laws of the system, the rules it operated under, were both more and less constraining. Or maybe they simply didn¡¯t know enough about the system to bend its laws and rules, to circumvent its operation. However, given just how deeply the system seemed to be embedded in this new and changed reality, maybe it wasn¡¯t a good idea to try bending its laws. How knew what might bend with them?


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    The rules of nature had already become uncertain enough, what with people being able to make it rain, only that it was now a lot more literal than it had been before the change. A single youth, granted, a single youth with some fairly strange and esoteric knowledge and abilities, could somehow conjure up enough water to supply a village or, if he so desired, to make it rain for a day, wherever he wanted. Drought? Deserts? A thing of the past, if somebody like Kevin was around, at least once he got some additional power under his belt. Who knew what Samantha, the woman who had originally taught Kevin how to wield his magic, could do now? Given her predilections, that thought was quite scary, Samantha had been a wonderful and attentive student but it took a special kind of person to learn what Mrs Wu had been teaching her back then. Now, with the world changed as it had, was that a good thing or a bad thing? She just didn¡¯t know.


    The comparatively relaxing part of their trip ended suddenly and violently. There was just about half a second between the moment Mrs Wu noticed the lurking threat and the lurking threat stopped lurking and became an active threat that tried to get its teeth into her limbs. One of the crocodiles had managed to make like a stump and blend in with the environment to the point that Mrs Wu, even with her impressive abilities as a scout and tracker, hadn¡¯t noticed its presence until it was almost too late.


    She managed to step back and avoid the snapping jaws but that only bought her a few moments of reprieve as the thing was still rushing towards her only that now her footing was also compromised thanks to the thick mud. Instead of trying to step aside, an action impossible thanks to the muck, she leaned, bringing her centre of mass out of the charging crocodile¡¯s way while crossing her arms in an attempt to take some of the punishment. It would her, sure, likely even break her arms, but comparing broken arms and getting brutally tossed aside to getting your torso shattered while your body was crushed under a few hundred kilos of crocodile? Well, the choice was a simple one.


    Sadly, the choice being simple didn¡¯t stop it from being incredibly painful and only thanks to extensive training, Mrs Wu managed to stay awake for the rest of the fight. Not that the fight was a terribly long one, not with the element of surprise gone. Just after the crocodile pushed her aside, Wendy used her staff to buttress her shield, giving it enough stability to stop the heavy crocodile in its tracks. The thing looked quite surprised when it crashed into the suddenly immovable object, the impact stunning it long enough to let Kevin work his magic and conjure up some roots from the soggy soil and use them to tie down the croc¡¯s limbs. Once it was tied down, there was relatively little it could do but try to break free, a task that gave John and Oliver ample opportunity to get their weapons into the beast¡¯s body.


    As bright, red blood added to the moisture already in the soil, the struggles of the crocodile quickly lessened and by the time the muck was more red than brown, they stopped entirely. That, in turn, allowed Oliver, their medic, to start taking care of Mrs Wu. To her pleasant surprise, her arms weren¡¯t broken, only badly bruised but a bruise was a lot easier for Oliver to treat than broken bones were. It only took a bandage with some strange goop smeared on it and some fifteen minutes to work for her to be as good as new, with only her memories acting as a lesson to keep her out of future trouble.


    Magic, or alchemy in this case, could be amazing but she still wasn¡¯t sure if she enjoyed this new, strange world. If only her husband could be with her and guard her back. But if wishes were fishes and all that. For now, they had more crocodiles to hunt.

 Chapter 1030

    As our journey continued north, we could cover more ground every night. The days were rapidly getting shorter, meaning that the nights were getting longer in turn. Additionally, the weather was incredibly bad, with a thick layer of clouds blocking the sun almost entirely out while repeated rain made the ground a slippery and soggy mess. We managed to stick to the decayed remains of the old roads for most of the time but those remains were only helping so much, partially because of their decayed state, partially because they didn¡¯t quite fit together any longer.


    A part of me wondered just how the old Interstate system looked like now, had the complex marvel of engineering become an equally complex puzzle, with its numerous parts scrambled and scattered across the land by some strange element of the change? I could easily imagine it, especially when we noticed that some of the road signs most emphatically didn¡¯t match their original locations, both when it came to directions and when it came to distances. Posts that, according to their signage, were a mile from one another were sitting side by side and signs that spoke of crossings or other artificial features, they were all scrambled and scattered. There had been highway markers in the middle of the wilderness and trees growing in gaps that looked like the highway had been cut away with some sort of real version of the good, old copy&paste tool. Or maybe the old eraser for image editing, leaving nothing but the smooth layer below. It should all be utterly impossible and yet, reality obviously thought differently.


    Curiously, the more time passed, the worse the scrambling of the artefacts from before the change was. Back, right after the change, there had been some damage to them, but not more than could be accounted for by the earthquakes and the fires. Sure, the earthquakes themselves were an abnormality of the highest order, at least where I had lived, but they weren¡¯t an impossibility. They could have happened, if somebody just put enough energy into the tectonic plates. Granted, doing so ¡®manually¡¯ would almost certainly cause about as much destruction as the earthquakes would but that was an entirely different thing. It was somewhat plausible, at least if one employed enough nuclear weapons.


    On the other hand, the scrambling that was happening now was not plausible, unless one took magic on a scale far beyond anything I had seen in account. Compared to the scrambling, even the destruction of the Elder Tree by Nidh?gg and the subsequent devastation of Mundus paled in comparison. The powers invoked might have been on a similar scale, it was difficult to tell, but the finesse and control of the scrambling were far beyond the Nidh?gg¡¯s actions. Maybe by design, the dragon hadn¡¯t been concerned with controlling the powers unleashed, merely with the destruction he could cause, but even so, to scramble and disrupt a system as large and widespread as the highway system without causing as much collateral damage as the Nidh?gg had caused on purpose? It sounded so incredibly unlikely, yet it seemed to be exactly what was happening.


    ¡°Mum, how long do you think we¡¯ll be able to travel? If the weather gets any worse, we¡¯ll be in trouble, magic or no magic,¡± Luna asked after slipping on the muddy path once again. Only Silva¡¯s care had prevented her from taking a dive into the muck and I had a fairly good idea that the poor dear was suffering. Her endurance was the lowest among us all, with only Alex having similarly low attributes, but Alex had the advantage of fur and their diminutive size that allowed them to hide in Lia¡¯s clothes occasionally. Luna, on the other hand, didn¡¯t have those advantages and while I had tried to enchant her clothes with some Fire and Wind Magic so she¡¯d be kept warm, those didn¡¯t work quite as well as I had hoped.


    ¡°We¡¯ll keep our eyes open. Hopefully, we can find a good place, maybe somewhere with a nice community or something like that,¡± I told her, knowing that winter was coming. While I had no problems with the cold and had enough magical tricks to travel in almost any weather conditions, the others were less fortunate.


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    ¡°You could use your ravens, couldn¡¯t you?¡± Lia suggested and as she spoke, I noticed that she, too, shivered a little, likely from the wet cold. Or maybe it was disgust for the conditions of our path, it was bad enough that only preternatural agility and a dollop of magic made it somewhat traverseable.


    ¡°I can try, sure. But we¡¯ll need some sort of shelter for that, I have no desire to leave my body in the mud while my mind is flying about,¡± I shook my head in disgust at the idea. The cold, wet rain was bad enough, but adding the clinging mud to that, I wouldn¡¯t feel clean again. Even as things were, I had to take an hour every day to carefully launder our clothes, a chore that now needed all elements, wielded in harmony. Sometimes, magic wasn¡¯t about the great works, the storms to destroy cities, the cleansing of an entire river or the restoration of life to those who had it. Sometimes, magic was just about the clean clothes, the warm shower and, thanks to Luna¡¯s practice with her Life Magic, the freshly grown food.


    We didn¡¯t have to go far to find a suitably intact building, though intact was stretching it. The house was partially crumbled, multiple rooms exposed to the elements but other parts were still fairly solid, allowing us to rest in comfort without having to dig a shelter, something the soggy ground made a lot harder than I would have liked. Drying, solidifying, hardening, there were a dozen steps I needed to take so a freshly dug shelter wouldn¡¯t collapse on us. If I was even a little careless, water would drip in during the day, making the entire thing fairly miserable. Luckily, making sure that the damaged house didn¡¯t collapse any further was a lot easier.


    Later, while Lia prepared some food together with Luna, I made myself comfortable and sent out a raven, the scrying construct allowing me to explore without endangering myself or leaving my daughters behind. Additionally, I was a lot more comfortable sitting on my throne than I would have been if I used my cloak to fly. While there was no mud in the sky, there was more than enough rain, and even a bit of hail on occasion, to make things uncomfortable.


    Looking for a place that would make a suitable spot to spend the winter wasn¡¯t an easy thing to do. I needed to cover as much space as possible, so the scrying construct needed to fly high into the sky but, sadly, the sky was filled with thick clouds. Sure, that meant there was no Sun to trouble my construct but at the same time, it meant I had a very clear maximum altitude, limiting the distance I could see.


    To make matters worse, the mountains acted as obstacles, greatly limiting what I could see. From their outlines, I could easily see that there was space between the peaks but whether those areas were filled with trees, lakes or the remnants of the old world I couldn¡¯t see unless I moved my scrying construct there. Overall, I couldn¡¯t observe as much of the world as I would have liked, though that was only compared to the world before the change. Back then, I could have pulled up a map on the computer and gotten as much information as I wanted.


    Finally, after my construct was drifting along the mountains, following their outlines and the wind, I noticed a large area covered in concrete. Pushing my construct towards that direction, I soon recognised the area as part of an airport of some sort and by the time I could see that much, I could also see a fairly large city, just sitting at the foot of the mountains.


    Keeping my construct high in the sky, I started to take in a few more details. The city itself didn¡¯t look all that special but even from up high, I could see that there was some movement in the streets. Whether it was survivors, undead, Shattered or something else entirely, I had no idea but at the end of the day, it didn¡¯t matter all that much. This might be a good spot to explore, so it would be a good idea to head in that direction, not that we had to change our direction all that much, the place was almost on our path. Well, almost, on a geographical scale, meaning it might be a detour of a few dozen kilometres, so a couple of days extra. As always, it was a matter of scale and perspective.


    Shaking my head, I decided to do what I always did. Get more information.

 Chapter 1031

    Over the next few days, I kept trying to find a different spot to prepare our winter quarters. There were a few possible options but they all had something that made me a little leery about them. In one case, I considered the spot due to the powerful emanations from the Astral River, making me think that the location was host to a particularly dense intersection of streams within the Astral River, a place just below a Nexus in regards to the powers one could wield there. However, while that was a massive draw, the downside was that the place was otherwise in the middle of nowhere, with nothing but pine forests, rocks and a few creeks within a fairly large area around it. While I could keep myself busy by studying the intersection, the others lacked that stimulus, meaning if the winter got really bad, I would have to deal with a combination of bored Lia and bored Alex. Either of those would be a headache but when combined, I feared for life, limb and sanity. Mostly for sanity, but I had no doubt that their experimentation could easily become dangerous. What¡¯s more, the power within the intersection seemed to be strongly aligned with Earth and Fire, not something I was tremendously interested in. So, the place was a possibility but I wasn¡¯t too keen on it.


    The other options suffered from similar problems, in some cases they lacked something I¡¯d consider vital, in others they had the things I considered vital but not in large enough quantities to make the spot attractive or they had the vital things but had some large flaw, too. I made note of a few of them, simply because they were places I wanted to visit at some point, even if we didn¡¯t spend the winter there and by spending the winter in this general area, I would have the opportunity. My cloak meant I could cover a fairly large area without too much trouble, especially once the rain and hail gave way to snow.


    When we finally reached the mountains above the city, I could take a better look, just like the others could. The city was quite large, easily twice the size of my already sizeable hometown but what stood out even more to me was that I could see multiple large and empty areas, none of which looked as if they had been used as fields. Instead, they were all covered in concrete and the sheer size made it unlikely for them to be parking lots or something along those lines. Judging from the destroyed objects, at least four of these empty areas used to be airports, making me wonder why any city on Earth needed to have four of them this close together, or why there was another fairly empty area on the other side of town, too. Maybe some other weirdness stemming from the change had moved the airports here, just like some weirdness had created additional roads and buildings in the Charlands. By now, I should be able to accept any sort of oddity but somehow, my brain hadn¡¯t become accustomed to this strange, new world of anything goes.


    ¡°Where do you think we should set up?¡± I asked Lia and Luna, looking down from the ridge we were standing on. Between the city and us, there was only a long, gentle slope, filled with countless pines, a slight contrast to some of the other, much steeper slopes and their occasional cliff.


    ¡°Not too central, somewhere on the outskirts, maybe with a possible escape into the mountains,¡± Lia argued, her eyes scanning the horizon, ¡°If it were possible, I¡¯d prefer a northern slope, but we don¡¯t really have that option, do we?¡±


    ¡°Look at that fairly high mountain,¡± I pointed to one of the mountains further to the north-west of us, rising high into the sky, right at the edge of the city, ¡°We could try and look what the northern slope looks like, depending on the details, we might get a place that is shaded most of the day,¡± I reasoned, knowing why she was so interested in that side of a mountain. We might get some trouble with snow if we build our shelter too deep into a valley, as such a place could easily become buried under a snowdrift but I was fairly confident that I¡¯d be able to dig us out if something like that happened.


    Luckily, we didn¡¯t need to bother with the usual primary needs one had to address. Water was something I could conjure readily and I could easily construct a shelter, no matter where. Given that we wanted to stay for a few months in this area, I was willing to put in extra effort and go that extra mile to make sure the shelter we had was as suitable as I could make it, with all the bells and whistles. Or, in our case, with all the shrines, ritual rooms and laboratories, allowing us to perform our various services, experiments and crimes against nature and reality.


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    ¡°Would you mind if I try and see if there¡¯s a special spot for Lady Hecate in the area? Knowing us, we¡¯ll turn the shelter into a library and shrine anyway, so making it extra special should be good, right?¡± Luna asked, an impish grin on her face. Chuckling a little, I had to agree with her reasoning, we had the habit of setting up shrines for Lady Hecate but at the end of the day, we were getting paid quite well for that. Maybe not in coin or currency but in EXP, information and the occasional boon, on top of the various benefits Luna reaped as Her Chosen Child. Hel, even I was receiving a great deal of benefit from the association with Her, not only the powerful blessing I had received originally but also the connection between Luna, the Grandmother and myself.


    Thinking of that connection made me realise that I should try and see if I had grown enough to contact the Grandmother beyond the few, simple attempts I had made thus far or the occasional communication in a dream that might be real or it might be just a figment of my imagination. With dreams, it was often quite difficult to tell, though the dreams connecting me to Lady Hecate were an exception to that rule. Somehow, I knew deep within myself that those had always been real.


    Together, we made our way northwards. For a moment, I considered heading down the slope and through the city but given that I had seen movement down there before and I knew just how dangerous the Shattered had become, I wasn¡¯t about to blunder into an area like that. These mountains, in comparison, were something we had been trudging through for almost a month by now, so all of us were fairly well acquainted with the dangers they could pose.


    So, we stuck on the ridge, circumventing the western side of the large mountain towering above the city, even if it meant a fairly long detour and some rough terrain making our path even harder. But compared to moving through an unknown city filled with potentially lethal enemies, I was taking the longer route any day of the week, especially as there was more than enough time to explore the city if we really stayed in the area the entire winter. Months of time, just to explore the area and experiment, until travelling further north wasn¡¯t the chore it was at the moment.


    Still, chore or not, we continued onwards, knowing that we would soon be able to set up our shelter. Over the last few days, travelling had become harder and harder, thanks to the weather and the continuously worsening paths but hopefully, this would be it for the rest of the year.


    As we walked around the large mountain, I noticed a strange sensation coming from below us, somewhat offset into the direction of the city. It was weird, not something I could readily recognise but there was a faint familiarity to it. Not enough to put a name to the sensation, other than the faint feelings of cautious dread it evoked, but I could sense enough to make me curious. Whatever was in that direction, possibly in the city on the other side of the mountain, possibly in the mountain itself, it was powerful and there was something about it I had encountered before. Maybe something similar to the Withered, or to the super Shattered we had encountered recently, or something else entirely. Whatever the case, it would be well worth it to explore and figure out what was going on there.


    Finally, about an hour before dawn would break we managed to make our way around the mountain. We had been following a rocky creek for quite a bit of time, until we had to climb once more, moving through a saddle between the large mountain to our east and a somewhat smaller mountain to our west. Now, we were past that saddle and could see the city to our east and the flat plains behind it. Below, heading towards the city, was yet another creek and numerous large rocks, cliffs and dips, all of which could be used to provide us with a bit of shelter from the elements until we found a suitable spot to make something to last us through the winter. I¡¯d have to think about what sort of shelter would be suitable for to house us for such a long time. A cave, as I was usually digging for a night, just wasn¡¯t good enough to house us for months.

 Chapter 1032

    Our hunt for the perfect location to make our temporary home ended quite abruptly as if it had fallen off a cliff. And, to be fair, a cliff was involved at the end of our search, mostly because we almost ended up falling down said cliff when we stumbled upon it, making our way along the slopes of the mountains above the city. We didn¡¯t want to get into the city proper, not with the unknown dangers lurking in the streets and we didn¡¯t want to use some open area, where we were exposed to the weather and all sorts of dangers.


    So, when we happened upon the cliff that may have been part of an old quarry at some point, we quickly realised that this might be the perfect spot for us. The cliffs formed a rough crescent, opening towards the north, while the area between the cliffs was partially flooded, creating a natural pond. Depending on the terrain¡¯s features, I¡¯d be able to dig our shelter into the cliff while reshaping the pond into a moat, though it wouldn¡¯t be too useful once winter truly hit. A frozen moat could be traversed quite easily but even if the water wasn¡¯t useful as a moat, it would give me plenty of ammunition to use with my Ice Magic, or I could instantly reshape it into a sturdy defensive fortification. Maybe I¡¯d even take the time and infuse the water or ice with my Astral Power beforehand, making it even more responsive. It all depended on the exact terrain down in the quarry and the shape I ultimately used for our shelter.


    Whatever the case, the quarry¡¯s shape meant that there were multiple spots that would never see the light of day, certainly not during the winter. Those spots could easily be used to give Lia and Alex an area where they could experiment to their hearts'' content, without having to be indoors or underground. The only risk was that the sun reflected off the water or, once it had fallen, the snow but such indirect light shouldn¡¯t be able to kill them, no matter how long the exposure. It¡¯d be painful, sure, but it wouldn¡¯t cause permanent harm, of that I was fairly certain.


    Additionally, the high cliffs around the area would be incredibly difficult to traverse in winter, meaning the only way into the quarry was by rappelling down, which carried a massive risk, through the open face of the crescent and through the air. The open face of the crescent could be trapped, walled off or generally guarded and an approach through the air was always possible unless we were underground or I managed to figure out a good way to ward against such attacks. Maybe some sort of Wind Magic, or an application of the recently discovered Space Rune, both should hold solutions to this particular problem. Maybe if I combined them with the wards written down in the Zevarra Agha, that should give me a suitable starting point.


    Sadly, the book wasn¡¯t as useful on Terra as it had been on Mundus. Sure, I was able to use a far greater variety of magic here but large parts of the book relied on some fundamental traits of Mundus, traits that Terra didn¡¯t share. By now, I was fairly certain that the difference in style, for lack of a better word, between my Ice, Blood and Darkness runes and the other Runic Masteries stemmed from a similar cause, the three Runic Masteries I had inherited from my legacy worked in a slightly different way. Curiously, Lia had been able to learn a bit of them, albeit very slowly, making me wonder just why that was. Regardless, even if the detailed spells didn¡¯t work, I could use them as a basis and work from there.


    ¡°What kind of home would you like for the next few months?¡± I asked as we started to make our way around the old quarry, so we could get to the opening and look at the area in detail and from a ground level.


    My question was answered in something approaching stereo, with all four of my companions giving their own ideas, all at the same time. Sadly, while I had excellent ears, I could only focus on understanding one language, especially if two of these languages were the kind of language that didn¡¯t use words but concepts. So, the only replies I understood were those coming from Lia and Luna, while the opinions of Alex and Silva remained unheard for now.


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    Even more interesting than the cacophony around me were the words I could make out. Luna¡¯s interest was obviously inspired by her connection to Lady Hecate, something readily recognisable by the descriptions and the terms she used. Where else would she have heard of Dorian and Ionic columns and have formed a clear preference for the Ionic variant? I was fairly certain that normal six, or rather seven by now,-year-old children didn¡¯t know those words and certainly lacked the preference. Or I might be wrong, there might be some kindergarten architect out there, ready to conquer the world, one sandcastle at a time.


    Needless to say, Luna¡¯s image of the perfect shelter was almost indistinguishable from a shrine to Lady Hecate, something quite similar to the building I had set up near the Charlands. The problem with that idea was fairly simple. Such designs were great if the goal of the design was to dissipate as much of the Mediterranean heat as possible during a time when climate control was nothing but a divinely inspired dream. Comparatively, trying to set up a design like that and expect it to remain comfortable in the winter was nothing but a pipedream. As I had no idea just how bad the winter would be here, I wasn¡¯t about to chance it. Given our elevation, the position right at the edge of a major mountain range and the Change itself, I couldn¡¯t even try to guess how cold it would be or how much snow we¡¯d get.


    Lia, on the other hand, lacked the obvious Greek inspiration Luna was using. However, she had some quite interesting ideas inspired by the time before the Change, something fitting for a vampire or a dark witch. The image I got from her description was that of a castle, with bells, towers, high walls and far too many spikes to be practical in any way, shape or form. But, at the same time, there was a part of me that had designed the Frozen Citadel, a building about as far from practical as anything Lia described. So, those who live in an ice house shouldn¡¯t throw stones?


    Sadly, while Lia¡¯s idea had more practicability in the local climate, it was utterly impractical in another way. The sheer size and scale of the grand fortress she described was so large that it wouldn¡¯t fit the quarry we had decided on. Nor would it be practical for three people, a dog and a vampiric racoon, not unless we wanted to spend hours and hours on end, just looking for one another or getting lost in the massive edifice she was describing. Construction alone, even with all my magic, would take multiple weeks, if not months, all of which I would do nothing but draw stones from the ground and shape them. I could barely imagine a less interesting use of my magic, especially when it came to a long-term project. So, that idea was also denied, though imagining parts of the Frozen Citadel sitting in the old quarry was a pleasant and quite interesting idea.


    ¡°Please, one at a time, I can hardly understand what you are trying to tell me,¡± I interrupted the excitement, wondering whether the three of them would have continued forever. Luckily, Silva had been smart, or maybe mature, enough to fall silent once it was obvious that they were all talking over one another. Thus, I directed our canine companion to give her reply first, after I made them all fall silent.


    Parsing the images and concepts of her speech remained a little difficult, especially when it came to abstract or fairly complex topics. What I got from her wasn¡¯t so much a specific design but more a focus on two things, security and comfort, both topics I valued, too. So, once her explanation was finished, I had Lia go, who reiterated the ideas I had managed to pick out of the noise earlier, though she was quite willing to see my point about scale.


    Then there was Alex and, for once, their desire was completely different from that of the others. Maybe it was due to their species, maybe it was for some other reason, but their desire was to have a burrow, similar to what I usually dug. Only bigger, with more escape routes, more comforts and a few other things but ultimately, Alex wanted to live in a cave. Not something I wanted, certainly not long term, but maybe I would be able to put in something to accommodate their interest.


    Finally, Luna got to give her description and again, it matched what she had desired earlier. Now, I only needed to figure out a way to get all of their interests and ideas merged into something we could all happily live with. And something that wouldn¡¯t fall over due to shoddy construction but that was my job.

 Chapter 1033

    As so often, reality was sadly a far cry from my imagination. Instead of starting out right away and pulling whatever building I desired from the ground below, I had to stay realistic and ascertain the conditions around our chosen location. Not only did I have to make sure the ground was solid enough to support the building that was slowly crystallising in my mind, but we also needed some sort of temporary shelter, or Lia and Alex would be in trouble quite soon. Furthermore, there was the question of our surroundings, I had no desire to invest multiple days of hard work into this spot, only to realise that it was flawed in some way and we had to move.


    So, my first order of business was to start digging a cave into the quarry, much to Alex¡¯ delight. Not that I was planning to use this one long-term, but they had yet to learn that. Before they could, I decided that Alex, Silva, and Luna would scout the area around us to try to find out if there was anything we should know. Lia, on the other hand, would stay behind with me, covering my back while my mind was otherwise occupied. I had no desire to get chomped on by some random critter while I was using my Earth Magic to scan the ground beneath us. Sure, I would feel the vibrations of any walking creature that wasn¡¯t extraordinarily stealthy, but given that there were such monsters as the Shadow Hounds we had met months before or even something much more mundane, like some sort of large, flying insects or any number of raptors, I wasn¡¯t about to take a chance and get caught out.


    And it wasn¡¯t like the other three desperately needed Lia to scout the area. By now, Luna was quite competent in mid-range combat, using her Life Magic to rapidly grow and control plants, making her an utter terror in any kind of vegetated area like a forest, while Alex and Silva were competent in their own right. Plus, all three of them brought their own area of expertise to the table when it came to special senses. Alex was knowledgeable about alchemical substances and what strange conditions they might cause, Luna had her divinely granted magical senses while also being able to sense souls and Silva had her canine senses, bolstered by a solid Intuition. Sure, the group wasn¡¯t perfectly suited, but then, none of us was a truly competent scout. Either Silva or I were the closest, Silva thanks to her innate abilities while I had some experience and training from Mundus to fall back on, in addition to some lessons from Mrs Wu. Those hadn¡¯t really been focused on wilderness survival but the topic had come up, simply because it could be necessary. In what context, I had no idea but then, I had little actual context to her abilities, only a lot of speculation.


    Once the cave was dug, I planted myself in the middle of the quarry, simply sitting on the ground and letting my magic spread out to seep into the ground below. I needed to know what sort of material was below us, had the people who once quarried rock here managed to dig all the good stuff out or was there a solid layer below us, just hidden beneath a thin layer of earth? I didn¡¯t know but I needed to, or the foundations of the building I wanted to make might crumble and the building fall.


    Given that the current image in my mind was strongly reminiscent of the Frozen Citadel, only constructed from rock and not from Ice, having the tower fall over would be quite devastating. So, a solid foundation would be needed, which meant I had to learn the ground¡¯s composition before solidifying certain parts, making sure that all the weight I wanted to put on top of it could be distributed downward. Additionally, I had to figure out the best way to get the rocks I needed for construction. Pulling them upwards from the ground was an option but I didn¡¯t think it was a good one, as doing so would destabilise the foundations I was just checking.


    Instead, I would likely have to harvest stone from the quarry walls around me, hoping that the quarry wasn¡¯t too depleted, or rather, I would have to check before I started to work. Luckily, the foundations appeared to be incredibly solid, with sturdy rock going down as far as my magic could reach. Furthermore, as I delved into the magic I had spread out, I noticed that the Astral River was just a little thicker here than it normally was, possibly a side-effect of the nearby town, or from the strange sensation I had felt under the mountain or maybe even due to the intersection within the Astral River I had felt nearby. There were multiple possible reasons and I made a note to investigate but, for now, I only needed to know that I could wield my Earth Magic here a tad easier than I normally could. A small advantage but a welcome one.


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    Especially when I noticed that yes, the quarry wasn¡¯t as depleted as I had feared, making me wonder why people had stopped using it. There had to be a reason but whatever that reason was, I didn¡¯t think it applied to me right now. After all, some sort of well-meaning government regulation to preserve the habitat of some critter or another, or some other need, wasn¡¯t all that relevant any longer. The only danger I had to be wary of was that I might destabilise the cliffs, causing them to crumble down and bury me. Not something I wanted to risk but, luckily, I was using my magic to quarry the rock so I could sense the conditions around the rock I was taking fairly well.


    Like that, two days passed. The others were scouting our immediate surroundings in ever-widening circles, while I was primarily concerned with the conditions of our chosen home. The longer I worked, the more I realised just how suitable our spot was. The rock was incredibly solid, to the point that I realised it had been subtly altered by the strong presence of the Astral River here and there was no reason to fear it crumbling unless we were hit by a major earthquake. Not impossible, at least when going by the conditions known from before the Change but also not terribly likely.


    There was nothing speaking against the spot, or the area in general, and there were multiple things speaking for it. The others had told me about a few small discoveries they had made in the area and, more importantly, about the small shapes they had spotted in the town about four kilometres from our spot. All in all, this was it.


    And so, I started to build. At first, I used my magic to harvest rocks from the cliffs around me. It was an incredibly interesting process, I had no idea if it was the smart thing to do or if I was simply enamoured with the destructive potential of my magic and, at the end of the day, it didn¡¯t really matter. I enjoyed sitting up high on the cliff, driving my magic into the soil in focused spikes and carving away chunks of rock that then followed the pull of gravity and heavily crashed into the quarry below.


    It was incredibly loud, destructive and fun, something I enjoyed greatly, especially when I realised that I could subtly reshape the quarry¡¯s walls, making them a little stronger and, more importantly, as smooth as I could casually make them. It wasn¡¯t a mirror finish but anyone trying to climb them would be in trouble, as I learned when I tested things. Even rappelling down turned out to be a challenge, as I had managed to make the walls smooth enough that trying to push off them resulted in sliding away and crashing into them. Without my cloak, I would have been in trouble but the cloak, or flight in general, wasn¡¯t something I could currently defend against.


    By the time I decided that I had quarried enough rock, the ground below the cliffs looked quite interesting. The rocks, mostly dark grey granite but with some other, mostly even darker, rocks mixed in, covered large parts of the previously empty area, the sharp, broken edges of the fallen rocks giving the area an appearance of utter devastation. As if hundreds of bombs had gone off and reduced an area to rubble. Despite knowing what had happened, a small part of me wondered just how much damage I could do if I focused on actual buildings. Was I already at the level of an earthquake, similar to the way I had managed to conjure up storms on Mundus, powerful enough to devastate cities?


    It was humbling, in a way, but also frightening. If I could get this much power, wouldn¡¯t anyone be able to? They might take longer and a certain percentage would certainly die or give up, but some would make it. And that frightened me more than I cared to admit.

 Chapter 1034

    There was something poetic about the way my new construction rose from the field of stone and rubble. Slowly, step by step, the devastation was pushed back and the chaos was turned into something orderly as I used the quarried rocks one after another.


    At first, I simply prepared the foundations, letting some of the new rock push away the soil covering the stone beneath, fusing these new rocks into the old bedrock to create a solid foundation for the tower I was planning to build. Parts of the shape were solely inspired by the Frozen Citadel, though there were clear differences, but I was planning to add some of the ideas Lia and Luna had proposed. Sure, it wouldn¡¯t be the pure, open Greek design Luna had imagined, at least not for most of the tower, but there would be a few open parts, allowing rituals that needed to be performed under the open sky, just as there would be a massive library that could serve as a Shrine to Lady Hecate, too. For Lia, I was happily adding some gothic influences to the design, even a couple of stone statues to enchant so they would act as guardians if I could get that to work. I might be unable to, but I was certainly planning to try.


    Lastly, even if it was among the first things I had to construct, was the underground area for Alex. It wouldn¡¯t be a real cave, but it would be fairly close, especially as I was planning to connect the eventual basement to the cave I had dug into the cliffs as a temporary shelter. This way, Alex had their preferred environment while the rest of us were able to live in a comfortable building. Well, it would hopefully be a comfortable building. For now, it was merely an idea floating through my mind and a bunch of rocks that I slowly transformed so they would realise their potential.


    Once the foundation was placed, I had to create the core of the tower. The core itself was fairly simple, nothing but a thick pillar of solid rock, interlaced with veins of crystal. It rose into the sky for some forty metres, jutting just above the cliffs of the quarry and ending up a little below the trees growing on the hills above it. The idea was that our line of sight, once the entire tower was finished, would be above the treetops, allowing us to see far into the distance. That way, we¡¯d be able to observe the distant town and even the plains beyond, though observations in the other direction would be a lot more difficult thanks to the rolling, mountainous terrain there.


    With the planned height of the tower, I realised I needed something to keep the base stable and stave off the force of wind leveraging against its height. Even now, with just the central pillar, I could feel the wind try to push it over, its length working against it. I needed something to stabilise the entire construction, something to absorb the forces caused by high winds.


    Suppose I had better materials, something like steel or similar metals. In that case, I might have been able to have the actual walls of the tower absorb these forces, or maybe build some sort of steel support structure into the tower to take care of them, similar to the way actual skyscrapers had done so, but I didn¡¯t have the right materials. Sure, I could alter stone with my magic, in particular Earth and Crystal, making it a little more malleable but there were limits. For a small building, the altered stones were enough but to build a decently high tower, I needed something else. There might be a way to use different materials, but I couldn¡¯t come up with a good one, at least not without tremendous effort in trying to look for the right metals and slowly refine them together with Alex. There were possibilities in Crystal, Earth and Fire Magic, especially if we combined them with Alchemy, but it would require a reinvention of metallurgy on a level that would likely take months, maybe years.


    Because of that, I added a set of four stabilisers around the central core, solid walls that jutted outwards like the spokes of a wheel, one in each cardinal direction. The idea was to have these four stabilising walls rise up to a height of about thirty metres and slope down to the ground at an angle, allowing them to absorb the forces working on the top of the tower a lot easier than normally possible. The slopes were similar in angle to that found on a mountain of sand, or the great pyramids for that matter, too steep to easily climb but just right to absorb the incoming forces.


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    I considered whether I should make these walls into something more, something akin to the wings of a building, allowing each of my companions their own space but I soon decided against it. The tower itself had enough space to let each of us set up individual working areas, so building out the spokes was simply unneeded. No, they would be thick enough to absorb the forces they were meant to take and otherwise, they¡¯d be solid rock. Maybe with an escape tunnel or something, I would have to consider that idea. Having additional, magically secured exits sounded like a prudent thing to have.


    With the skeleton of the tower, the central pillar and the four spokes jutting out from it, done, I could start on the actual building. As things were, we still had to live in the temporary cave I had dug out, not terribly comfortable as the weather was getting nastier by the day. By now, I had been forced to carefully enchant Luna¡¯s clothes and sleeping bag with Fire Magic, so she could be warm and cosy, even with the horrible weather. Even Alex, Silva and Lia were feeling the cold, and two of them weren¡¯t even completely alive any longer. And yet, they still felt the chill.


    Luckily, I was able to use Fire Magic, something I hadn¡¯t been able to wield on Mundus, and practising to enchant their stuff actually gave me two points in my Fire Rune Mastery, bringing the skill to level seventeen. Similarly, Enchanting went up by a point, reaching thirty, but those were only two of the various skill-gains I received during the construction of the tower, to say nothing of the weeks before. Sure, I hadn¡¯t been able to do a lot of experimenting while travelling, especially not the kind of experiment Lia was interested in, but Luna and I had performed the occasional experiment, creating new magical creatures and plants, while trying to further our understanding of magic and how it interacted with basic biology. A part of me was saddened that I wouldn¡¯t be able to watch these new creations grow, maybe even thrive, but there was just no time to sit and watch.


    Maybe now, with the tower I was building, I would be able to take my time and study how a few of these creatures developed after their initial creation. Not for a significant time, at least not when judged against the usual life-span of them, to say nothing about their reproductive cycles, but it would give me an initial idea. More would have to wait until after I had managed to get my Sigmir back and we had found a place to call home.


    But first, I had to turn the skeleton of my tower into an actual building. Walls started to rise quite quickly, connecting the spokes jutting out from the central column to form a circular floor plan and on top of these walls, I could soon set the different levels of the tower, for each of them held up by a few columns within the rooms that they formed. It wasn¡¯t fancy, not yet, but it was nicely done, at least in my opinion.


    Each floor was some four metres high, giving us ten floors with four relatively large rooms each, as separated by the spokes. The top of the tower would, later, serve as both an observatory for the surrounding land and ritual space, maybe even a place of worship for Lady Hecate, but it would depend on Her wishes. I was planning to add Shrine to the tower but the details would depend on the Lady.


    However, the idea to set up a shrine in the tower came with one fairly massive downside. A shrine, if it was supposed to be used as a place of worship, needed to be accessible. Not just for Luna and myself but for anyone who might be interested in worshipping Lady Hecate, anyone She might call to Her shrine.


    But I didn¡¯t want to have just anyone casually trudge through my tower, even if it was fairly unlikely that there¡¯d be worshippers in the next few months. I didn¡¯t want to take that risk, so I decided there¡¯d be a separation between an open section of the tower, which could be used for the Shrine and maybe even to access the roof, and a closed section. The closed section would be hidden and only accessible to the five of us, though I wasn¡¯t sure how exactly I could make it that way.


    Still, it was something to think about as I was forming the walls and floors out of rock, our tower growing steadily as I did.

 Chapter 1035

    Standing atop the tower, I couldn¡¯t help but smile as my eyes gazed into the distance. It was finished and, if I admitted that little bit of pride, it was excellent work. The tower itself was just forty metres high, with three spires jutting out at the top, almost like a crown but in reality, these three spires held three statues, one of Luna in her guise of the Child, one of myself in the role of the Mother and, lastly, one of the Grandmother, taking her place as the Grandmother. In the middle, there was a stone Altar, consecrated to Lady Hecate by Luna¡¯s efforts, while I had placed my throne between the statue of the Mother and the Crone, allowing me to use the space for my own rituals. The stairs came up across the platform from my throne, next to the statue of the Child, and high above the tower¡¯s main gate.


    Aesthetically, the tower had turned out quite pleasing, at least when judged by Lia¡¯s tastes. Not that I could complain. When given a choice between making the tower some mottled grey by mixing the natural granite and the other, darker rocks or making sure the tower was all in one colour, I decided to make most of the inner surfaces from the grey granite, while giving the outside a uniform black appearance. However, that was only if there was no light, when the light illuminated the outside, the black tower sparkled and shimmered just a little, an effect I was planning to enhance, so it would mirror my hair at least a little. I wasn¡¯t certain if I could manage to make the tower glimmer in the various colours the sparkles in my hair had thanks to my varied elemental affinities but I had a faint hope that I could give it some of the effect. Maybe by adding some light from within the outer layer of the tower but I hadn¡¯t considered that particular detail.


    The inner parts of the tower remained fairly bare, at least for now. For now, I had only vague plans for the different floors. For example, I was planning to make the fourth and fifth floors, nicely in the middle of the construction, into a family area. The fourth floor would hold a common area for all five of us, maybe the kitchen and possibly a dining area, we¡¯d have to see how much would fit nicely. On the fifth floor, I was planning to set up the individual living quarters, maybe a shared bath, or maybe that shared bath could go up to the sixth floor, we¡¯d have to see. Either way, the idea was that the living area was in the centre of the tower, making it furthest from potential intrusion points, which I considered important. That distance could help buy us some time if we ever were to be attacked.


    The first floor could serve as some sort of open area, which might even be used by people who weren¡¯t us if there were any in the vicinity. Maybe set up something similar to the shrines we had set up before, add a couple of simple instructions for magical neophytes, give some direction in regards to the worship of Lady Hecate, and things like that. Nothing too much, not without some form of test to show that the one seeking knowledge was at least somewhat worthy but we¡¯d have to see.


    Above that, on the second and third floors, I was planning to have some experimental chambers set up. Having them close to the ground would hopefully make it easier to move test subjects into the space, or clean up failed experiments, things like that, but it would also mean we didn¡¯t have to move the test subjects through our living spaces. Alternatively, I considered setting up some experimental space outside the tower, maybe in the cave we had been using as living space while I had been busy building the tower.


    Lastly, the upper floors. I didn¡¯t have any real firm plans for them just yet, only the idea that one of them would become a serious library, allowing us to write down a small legacy, maybe something for us if we returned at some point in the future, maybe something for a worthy seeker of knowledge to find. We¡¯d have to see, both when it came to possible tests to show that the seeker was worthy and the reward they¡¯d gain when reaching that level. Maybe Lady Hecate had some ideas in that regard, or the Grandmother, if I managed to communicate with her at a level that allowed such complex exchanges.


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    While I was working on the primary parts of the tower, Luna, Lia and Alex were planning to add their own touches to it, using their own abilities. I wasn¡¯t sure what Lia and Alex had in mind, but Luna had already asked me if Silva and I could help her drag some living wood into the living area, which she was planning to shape using her Live Magic. The idea was that she would shape the living wood into the furniture we were interested in before it was allowed to die off, causing it to be stuck in the shape Luna wanted. If that part worked, she hoped I would be able to make the finished product somewhat resistant to the ravages of time, but I was a little uncertain how I was supposed to do that. An interesting project for sure, especially as Ice Magic held an element of eternity and timelessness, as I knew from my travels on Mundus. It was a project I was already looking forward to, even if I wasn¡¯t certain where to start.


    Lia and Alex had mentioned something about glass, offering a replacement to the fairly opaque glass I could magically create from sand, though they had yet to give me any details. Maybe we could use their glass for some areas we wanted to look through and my glass through those where we¡¯d normally use frosted glass or something like that. I wasn¡¯t sure and, quite frankly, this wasn¡¯t really a priority for me.


    Priorities were things like solid doors and ways to keep them shut to anyone who wasn¡¯t us, especially if we went down the path of having part of the tower accessible to anyone. Similarly, I had been worried about potential attacks, so one of the things I had set up was a narrow tunnel through one of the spokes around the tower, starting at the fifth floor, our planned residential area, and leading towards the caves dug into the cliffs. Getting in from that direction would be difficult, getting out would be fairly easy, at least if you knew where to start and where to go from your end-point. Otherwise, you might find yourself trapped, so I would have to make sure that the entire family knew these plans. Just in case.


    Later, as I was working on the bathing area on the residential floor, Luna called out to me, asking me to join her in the observatory, also known as the roof shrine. Curious, I heeded her call once I managed to get to a good stopping point and when I got up there, my eyes widened in surprise.


    Where before, the observatory had been fairly plain, not counting the statues, the throne and the altar to Hecate, it had now been turned into something extraordinary on a level I couldn¡¯t fully understand. The three statues had been altered, though their features remained as they had been, showing Luna as the Child, me as the Mother and the Grandmother as the Crone. What had been altered was their pose. When I made them, their arms had been fairly boring, sitting at their side or on their hips, the most intricate pose had been of the Child, with hands held at chest height in a pose of idle curiosity.


    Now, that was all gone, the arms of the three statues were raised and stretched towards the sky as if they were holding something aloft. When following the direction these raised arms were pointing towards, the real surprise kicked in.


    There, hanging in the air above the tower, was a massive magical orb, a construct of pure Astral Power, shaped from a wide variety of elements by divine magic. Even at a cursory glance, I could sense some Darkness and Air Magic, but there was much, much more that I couldn¡¯t readily categorise. All in all, the thing looked faintly like a huge eyeball composed of black and red flames, giving it a somewhat dangerous and sinister appearance.


    ¡°Care to share?¡± I asked Luna, knowing that she was responsible for this but uncertain what it actually did.


    ¡°Well, you wanted something to observe the surrounding area, didn''t you?¡± Luna asked cheekily, making me raise an eyebrow so she would tell me what this actually was.


    ¡°Lady Hecate showed me how to make it, when somebody stands before the altar or when you sit upon your throne, you can direct it and see things that are far, far away,¡± she continued a wide smile on her face. I couldn¡¯t help but be impressed, though I was curious how exactly this thing worked. But if it was divinely gifted, I wasn¡¯t about to insult Lady Hecate by rejecting her gift, especially as it looked quite useful. And very impressive.

 Chapter 1036

    The Oculus, as I had dubbed the addition Lady Hecate had put atop my tower, was an incredible construction. Even knowing that Luna had only been an instrument for Lady Hecate to work through, I was incredibly impressed by the sheer complexity of the magical construct. Once again, I was reminded that divine magic was complete and utter bullshit, as it wasn¡¯t really the mortal who actually used the spellwork. They merely ordered something from a menu provided by their deity and the deity was the one providing the spell, as if ordering at a restaurant. Sure, a lot of people could only order at fast food places, or generally order delivery, so the quality of the magic they received wasn¡¯t all that much better than the quality a mortal could produce, but then there were those who received their magic from a five-star chef or something along those lines. Stupendously complex and incredibly intricate, to the point of making a poor mortal like me gape in awe. Before sitting down on my throne and starting to try out the new toy we had been given.


    Controlling the Oculus was amusingly similar to the way I had been controlling my scrying constructs and, similar to my constructs, the Oculus allowed me to perceive visual information through its lens, quite literally. The thing functioned similarly to a giant telescope, somehow capturing and magnifying images from far away, even in the near complete darkness of the night. By now, I was starting to get tempted to set up a roof over my throne so it would be in constant shade and I could use this fascinating device during the day, too, though given that the days were getting progressively shorter, I¡¯d spent the entire time the sun was up sleeping. There couldn¡¯t be a better way to spend my days, really.


    For now, I simply used the Oculus and marvelled at the resolution it could produce and the clarity of the images I could see with it. The edge of the city, some five, maybe six, kilometres away from my tower, could be viewed with enough clarity to read what little signage still remained. What¡¯s more, I was fairly certain that the only thing stopping me from reading a newspaper, even at this distance, was the simple fact that no newspapers had survived the Change. If there was one lying about, I would be able to read it.


    And that remained through for every location I could see within the city, even those some twenty or so kilometres away from me. It was difficult to estimate those distances, but it felt roughly right. The only things keeping me from observing those remote objects were the buildings that blocked my line of sight. Their roofs and the facades of the higher buildings were easily visible.


    When testing further, and trying to observe objects near the horizon, across the plains east of the city, I remained able to see extremely far and still retained the ability to zoom in with incredible clarity. Reading the license plates on cars stuck below a bridge so far from me that I couldn¡¯t even see the bridge or the buildings nearby? No problem. By now, I was trying to find the limits of the Oculus and it looked like the only thing actually blocking its observations was, well, objects blocking it. As long as there was an unobstructed line, I could see it remarkably well.


    So, with that realisation, I started to point my new toy up, into the sky. What better way to test the remote viewing capabilities of this magical construct than to point it towards objects at a known distance and try to see how well it worked?


    The Moon, for one, was an object at a known distance and there were even a few manmade objects on it, giving me a reference for the size of things I was observing. It wouldn¡¯t do to look at a mountain and think I was viewing a pebble after all. Scale mattered, even if I was just trying to find out how impressive Lady Hecate¡¯s creation actually was.


    There was only one tiny problem with my idea. Or rather, a fairly massive one, namely, the sheer difficulty of finding an object the size of a car on a planetary, or at least lunar, scale. Zooming in on the Moon was easy, almost too easy. I had no idea just how much the atmosphere should disturb the image but it felt a little weird to have the ability to observe objects on the Moon in a visual clarity similar to that I enjoyed when observing objects across town. How big the objects on the Moon were, I wasn¡¯t sure, but from my perspective, they didn¡¯t look all that big. Just, similar in size to the buildings I could observe here but without some objects of known size to give me an idea about their scale, I just couldn¡¯t know.


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    And finding those objects of known size was the problem.


    Sure, I knew that there were a few dozen objects mankind had sent to the moon and left there, some intentionally, some because they had crashed. Finding them, however, without any idea where to even start looking was a bit of a problem. There were countless craters, mountains and rocks strewn all across the lunar surface, so I couldn¡¯t really use a wide-angle view with little magnification to find spots that stood out, at a usable scale, there was little visual difference between a rock and one of these objects. Despite that, I kept trying for some thirty minutes until my view was disrupted for a split-second by a rapidly moving object and I was left with a headache and the realisation that I had been telescope-bombed by a satellite, unintentional as it had been.


    Upon that realisation, I began to wonder, what had happened to the few people living on the international space station. Sure, the most likely, by far, possibility was that the station had been damaged by the surging energies of the Change, leaving them dead or dying in space, to say nothing of the sheer insanity that would have happened if one or more of the astronauts had turned into Shattered. As amusing the idea of zombies, or something fairly close to them, in space was, it was only amusing when safe in the atmosphere. Out there, stuck in a pressurised tin can with very limited space and air but an endless amount of vacuum all around you, ready to kill you in a fairly grotesque manner, the amusement would die just as fast as anybody else.


    Shaking my head, I began trying to find other celestial objects. That was also when I came across the first limitation of the Oculus, I couldn¡¯t use it to zoom in on other stars. It wasn¡¯t a real surprise, the difference between the moon, or even other planets orbiting our Sun and other stars was, quite literally, one of lightyears. Still, I wanted to try but when I did, I only succeeded in turning small pinpricks of light into bigger pinpricks of light. Not unexpected and, amusingly, a bit of a relief. The Oculus had limits, as cosmically vast as they might be.


    Trying to find other planets was similar in difficulty to finding the man-made objects on the Moon. Sure, I knew they were there, I knew they orbited the Sun, and I even knew that I only had to find the pinpricks of light that moved compared to the stationary stars but putting that information into practice wasn¡¯t as simple as that. I would have to make an astronomical chart to track the movement of celestial objects to find the other planets by comparing the observed movement to the known movement of Terra and finding the miss-match.


    That idea, in turn, made me wonder. Did Terra move differently compared to Earth? It sounded so utterly absurd but the idea was as intriguing as it was frightening. On a macro-scale, I could be quite confident that the movement hadn¡¯t changed all that much, a day remained roughly twenty-four hours and the observed seasons matched what they had been before the Change, even if the weather had turned a little less capricious. This might be sheer coincidence and observer bias, I might have to make an effort to note these things down and study the data, just to see if there was a pattern.


    But for now, I had a wonderful new toy to play with and miles upon miles of terrestrial terrain to observe, looking for movement. Hopefully, if I found something moving around in the plains or in the city, I would find something interesting. Or at least something living.


    When the Oculus¡¯ gaze swept across the city, it wasn¡¯t movement that drew my interest. Instead, I came across something I had been looking at for the last hour or so, a small pinprick of light in the otherwise dark city. Only, this pinprick wasn¡¯t a far-distant star, burning up itself as it turned hydrogen into helium. No, this was something far closer and, at least to me, far more interesting.


    It was a small, fairly simple, torch. And those didn¡¯t spontaneously come into existence, nor did they ignite themself. Somebody was living in the city.

 Chapter 1037

    Sadly, just detecting that torch in the night didn¡¯t help me much. At a vague guess, there were some twenty kilometres between my tower and that torch, so while I could observe it easily, thanks to the Oculus, doing anything about the torch was an entirely different challenge. For a few minutes, I used the Oculus to scan the area around the torch and noticed a few more flickers of light against some of the walls, most likely caused by other torches, only that those were mostly hidden from my sight by buildings and other obstacles. But their presence and number told me that this likely wasn¡¯t the work of one person but that there were multiple people over there, setting up torches to provide light in the night.


    There might be people around the area, keeping a night watch, but just as it had been difficult to find objects on the moon, it was difficult to spot anyone in that area. There were a lot of objects cluttering the environment, so nothing stood out when looking at it with low magnification but if I increased the magnification, allowing me to distinguish what was a crate and what might be a person, I couldn¡¯t search a large enough area. Thus, I didn¡¯t spend too much time looking around the area, instead, I decided I would take another look around the time dawn would break, hopefully, the people living there would extinguish their torches in the morning, giving me a glance at their appearance. Not that I¡¯d be able to tell all that much from purely visual information, but it was better than nothing.


    For now, I decided to expand the tower a little, giving me permanent cover for my throne before turning my mind, and the Oculus, to other things.


    By the time dawn rolled around, I was even more fascinated with the Oculus and its sheer utility. Sure, it suffered from some drawbacks but those were fairly minor and mostly in the realm of it being too powerful and giving me access to too much information, to the point that I couldn¡¯t process it all. The limitation was on the user, not on the tool. The Oculus allowed me to view a huge area of land, up to the horizon, with clarity as if I were right next to the observed object. The downside of that focus was a narrowing of my point of view, just as I had stumbled across earlier when observing the moon.


    Regardless of those limitations, I had managed to discover a few Undead shambling around in the nearby city and even in a few towns further in the plains, in addition to some Shattered scattered around the area. There was no indication of the intelligence or hive-thinking we had observed in Shattered before, but without stimulus, that was only a casual observation, not something I was willing to rely on.


    Furthermore, I had stumbled across something incredibly strange. When studying the city, I came across a few signs and made note of them. There was only one problem, the signs disagreed with one another.


    One sign, partially broken, announced that one was approaching the r Force Acad, the lettering making me complete it to mean the Air Force Academy, an institution located in Colorado Springs. A few other signs confirmed that the city we had settled above used to be Colorado Springs, though there were a few other signs that welcomed visitors to Denver, Colorado, and I could even see one giving directions to parking at Denver International Airport.


    While I wasn¡¯t the greatest geography buff, even I was aware that there were some hundred kilometres between Colorado Springs and Denver, but somehow, these kilometres were gone. Whether the towns and roads in that area were gone or shifted somewhere else, I had no idea but this was getting seriously weird. Hopefully, the torch-setting survivors I had discovered had more information on this phenomenon, though I doubted I¡¯d be able to make much sense of it.


    As I was thinking about those people, I focused the Oculus back on the area where I had seen the torches, hoping to discover the people who had put them up, now that the sun was rising.


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    Watching the area was fairly boring and I noticed my mind drifting off a little, at least until I noticed movement near my field of vision. Soon, I recognised that the faint light I could barely make out thanks to the rising sun was vanishing, one spot at a time, and I focused the Oculus on that one visible torch, waiting for it to be extinguished, too.


    When that finally happened, it was incredibly unspectacular, just a guy carrying an old bucket, taking the torch off the simple mounting and stuffing it into the bucket. Given that there was no steam rising from the bucket, I could only guess that it wasn¡¯t filled with water but likely sand, or maybe they had some sort of enchantment on that bucket to extinguish fires. Otherwise, the guy looked incredibly mundane, wearing a mix of rough, likely handmade, clothes and fraying clothes from before the change. Additionally, there was a simple blade fastened to his belt, a machete of some sort, but, again, it didn¡¯t look terribly special. Just some ordinary guy who was forced to adapt to the insanity that was the change.


    His behaviour didn¡¯t indicate any real combat experience, nor did I recognise his actions as truly vigilant. He was looking around, sure, but he didn¡¯t look up, nor did he demonstrate any real situational awareness. All in all, he looked somewhat lost but, evidenced by the fact that he was still alive, it looked like things were working out for him. Or he had some help around, maybe magically hidden, I doubted I¡¯d be able to pierce magical concealment at this distance. Something I might want to test with Lia at some point, so I knew how the Oculus interacted with magical concealment.


    Knowing that there were people in that area, I did my best to find their fields, hoping that they were smart enough to set up a stable food supply. Otherwise, it would be incredibly difficult to trade my services as a teacher and magical craftsperson for food, meaning we would be completely reliant on Luna and her experiments with magically grown food.


    It wasn¡¯t that I distrusted Luna but I was aware that our experiments were just that, experiments, not something we could rely on constantly. Sure, they worked most of the time and, by now, I was somewhat confident that she¡¯d be able to reproduce her successes, but I preferred to have alternative measures in place, just in case.


    Scanning the fields around the area wasn¡¯t an easy thing to do. While the tower was built elevated in comparison to the city, there were a lot of buildings between the Oculus and what I wanted to see, leaving me with little to go on. Additionally, I wasn¡¯t certain if some particular patch of greenery was purposely planted or simply wild growth, leaving me uncertain if these people had set up farms or if they simply subsisted on supplies recovered from before the change, supplies that would eventually run out.


    However, given that my previous scans had shown at least one place that looked like a military base, which might have a large store of non-perishable rations, I had no idea if these people had recovered them. Maybe I should go with the others to loot the base, even if there were no rations, there might be other things. Similarly, the Air Force Academy might have something useful, though given that it was a lot closer to the survivors I had spotted, it was also more likely to have been looted already.


    Either way, it looked like there was quite a lot to explore in the area, to say nothing of that strange sensation I had felt when past the large mountain above the city. Scanning that mountain with the Oculus hadn¡¯t yielded any results, nothing stood out at the surface. Just countless pines, a few animals moving about, nothing that explained the strange sensation. So, most likely, the sensation either came from the town or from some underground location. Whatever the case, it was worth investigating at some point. For now, I merely kept it in mind and focused my interest on the places I could see in town, spots where we might be able to gather worthwhile supplies or, possibly even more important, information.


    Sure, the change had invalidated a lot of knowledge about our world but I had some hopes that it wasn¡¯t so much a complete change to the fundamental forces that held our world together but that the Astral River was simply added on top of things. Or maybe they worked in parallel, I wasn¡¯t sure. But whatever the case, a better understanding of the way physics used to work might allow me to understand magic better, too.


    And if not, I was fairly certain that I might be able to find books on humans and human nature, something along the lines of psychology. I had read some of those before, trying to understand myself and my interactions with other people, but maybe I would be able to understand them better now. Either way, having access to more information was seldom a bad thing.

 Chapter 1038

    Approaching Denver Springs, or whatever name I was supposed to use for this strange amalgamation of cities, was a little weird. Given our recent experience with hive-minded Shattered, we moved towards the town with an abundance of caution and vigilance bordering on a serious case of paranoia, even if my observations with the Oculus hadn¡¯t shown a real need for that vigilance. Similarly, scrying with magical constructs had been fairly successful, though I could cover only so much ground that way. On a positive note, there hadn¡¯t been a case of my constructs getting destroyed. And yet, it was still there and all of us had a weapon in hand and our minds filled with magic and ready for combat.


    When I didn¡¯t spot any magical emanations that might indicate opposition or ambushes, my nerves got a little taunter, my caution ratcheting up as a tiny voice in my mind warned me that it wasn¡¯t the detected ambush that got you, it was the one you didn¡¯t notice. Finding nothing was, strangely, even more stressful than finding some sort of trap would be.


    It didn¡¯t take long for Alex to confirm my findings, that there was nothing we would be detected by, but again, their confirmation didn¡¯t manage to assuage my fears. There might be something here, just like there had been something lurking underneath Queta, ready to pounce on me. This much bigger city, warped by the strange effects of the Change, was a much more likely place for serious dangers, which is why we approached an area that looked fairly boring and ordinary. Not the area around what I thought was a military base, the Air Force Academy or near the strange mountain. Nor did we try to get close to one of the larger warehouses on the outskirts of town or one of the shopping malls. No, we decided to move into a fairly ordinary residential neighbourhood, hoping that its ordinary and boring nature had endured the change. Though, given just how much the buildings had decayed, it was a lot less boring than it had been before, the buildings were now completely distinct from one another. Sure, mostly because they were broken in different ways, but distinct nonetheless.


    There was some noise in the air, as we left the forested area and entered the suburban area we had chosen. The noise was partially from the wind playing with the leaves on the ground and in the various trees nearby but that wasn¡¯t all of it. A different sort of noise, cracks and groans, came from the houses. Whether the houses were moving just a little in the wind or whether something was living in the ruins, I couldn¡¯t tell but all my senses, the mundane and the magical, reassured me that there wasn¡¯t anything to worry about.


    I couldn¡¯t sense any souls or concentrations of magical power and Luna, using her own divinely granted sight, confirmed that there was nothing to worry about. My taunt nerves started to slowly relax, just a little because maybe the reason why we failed to detect a threat was that there was no threat at all. While absence of evidence wasn¡¯t evidence of absence, it also wasn¡¯t evidence of a trap, though it could be. Vigilance was a good thing, but when I tripped from vigilance into paranoia, it was not.


    Still, I couldn¡¯t relax, not out here, not until we knew that we weren¡¯t in danger. And even then, I¡¯d probably keep cautious nonetheless, simply because the situation could change at any time.


    The first actual animals we managed to spot were, unsurprisingly, a bunch of rats. Ordinary, grey rats, scuttling away as fast as their small legs could carry them. A quick Observe caused some squeaks and managed to increase their speed just a little, while telling me that these creatures were nothing impressive, between level five and eight. No threat, unless we managed to fall asleep or something, in that case, they might somehow manage to find an important vein and bite through it. Incredibly unlikely, especially with the precautions I generally set up before going to sleep, but it wasn¡¯t impossible. Back on Mundus, Sigmir and I had managed to kill her former chieftain, by breaking into his residence at night and stabbing him in his sleep. It wasn¡¯t impossible and I wasn¡¯t about to discard the possibility, just in case.


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    But the rats¡¯ presence meant there weren¡¯t any serious predators looking for food in the area. If there was, the rats would make a much easier meal than the five of us and if there was one thing predators were generally smart about, it was target selection. They didn¡¯t go for the biggest, strongest prey they might be able to take down, they went for the weakest they could catch, simply because weaker prey still gave good calories and meant a lot less risk. Why try going after the elephant or bull-moose and end up gored, trampled or otherwise mutilated if you could take down some wounded youngster and eat just as well?


    My considerations ground to a halt when I realised that now, after the Change, there was an actual reason to go after the bigger prey. The system and the EXP it could bestow changed the entire predator-prey dynamic from a pure effort to get calories and avoid being turned into calories into one where both parties had something else to gain from the demise of the other. Given that the general life goal of all animals was to survive until they had offspring and have as many offspring as possible, a higher level would be an advantage. At least until the higher level was balanced against the greater threat of being turned into EXP by a stronger foe.


    Additionally, I was fairly certain that animals had some additional way of gaining EXP, not just violent conflict, just as I was gaining EXP for teaching others about magic. Only, I had no idea how their mechanic might work, or if it functioned along the same lines. I just couldn¡¯t believe that some mountain goats had managed to murder their way to level forty-five already but just a week earlier, we had come across a mountain goat at that level. It had been fairly far away and dashed up a near-vertical wall before we decided what to do about it, but its existence indicated that they got EXP somehow, other than killing.


    Something to look into, and maybe ask Lady Hecate about. It might not be Her blessing that granted me EXP for teaching others about magic, or it might not solely be Her blessing. Though, if I asked, She might take it as an insult, so maybe it would be best to be somewhat circumspect, or maybe to investigate if others gained EXP in distinct ways.


    Thinking back, I tried to remember if there had been people at Apple Gate Farm who gained EXP by farming or something along those lines. Sadly, I hadn¡¯t been too interested back then, my focus had been on Lia, Silva and the army of dogs. Maybe I could investigate some more after we met the people here, I¡¯d have to wait and see.


    Shaking off the sudden headache that came with the question of how the dynamics between essentially all living beings would change and had changed with the advent of the system, I focused back on our environment. There might still be predators around but at least I was now fairly certain that they weren¡¯t the stealthy type. Anything that could ambush us would easily be able to hunt down the rats, so we should be fairly safe to continue looking around.


    So, we began to explore the area, inspecting the buildings and how they were broken and once again, I was reminded of the unnatural decay that had gripped everything since the change. Normally, one would expect that things would start to decay slowly, after maintenance ceased, with delicate systems like the power grid being the first to go, while robust systems, like roads, would last for a much longer time, especially as there wasn¡¯t anything using the roads. Not like there were hundreds of trucks rolling down the highway, causing a constant strain on it.


    But, while delicate systems had broken immediately, so had everything else. It was as if everything had decayed into a broken state, whatever broken meant for different parts of the old infrastructure, and once it was broken, the normal rate of decay started to set it.


    Almost as if the system didn¡¯t want people to rely on their old homes and the old cities. Why else would things break this far, I doubted it was some sort of magical coincidence. I couldn¡¯t positively eliminate such coincidences but it felt strange. And, in turn, this was another indication that there was an actual intelligence governing the system not just some sort of automatic algorithm or something along those lines.


    And what a wonderful realisation that was, I had only recently accepted that Gods were real and now, there was some sort of Super-God out there, governing the thing that governed Gods and everything else. What a headache.

 Chapter 1039

    Careful exploration of Denver Springs¡¯ outskirts failed to reveal any serious or organised threat. What we managed to explore during the night, I repeatedly scanned with the Oculus, adding visual observation to the scouting we performed. The range I could cover thanks to the Oculus was simply too good to pass up, it allowed me to scan wide swathes of the city without any danger to myself or to one of my companions. In some ways, it was even better than my scrying constructs, though those had their own advantages. All in all, we had multiple ways to gather information and I was using them as much as possible to learn everything I could before we¡¯d get into trouble.


    There were Undead and Shattered in evidence and it appeared as if they were keeping to certain, distinct parts of the city as if they were defending those areas but we had yet to investigate just what was going on with them. Furthermore, we stumbled across an incredible variety of strange beasts, from something that looked like a woolly mammoth to wolves, bears and the ubiquitous rats, there was a little bit of everything in an area I later discovered to have once held the zoo.


    The biggest point of interest, however, was the area where I had discovered other humans. We hadn¡¯t managed to venture there just yet, the distance was a little bit too far to casually stroll over, but I had used scrying constructs and the Oculus to investigate. From what I could tell, these people were somewhere between Apple Gate Farm and New Dawn in terms of refinement, they had managed to set up a fairly well-defended community, largely using broken parts of old houses and infrastructure to provide materials, and were actively farming. Well, not quite actively at the moment, their fields had suffered from the weather, but I had been able to recognise some areas that seemed too organised for random vegetation. Sadly, I had no idea how their food stores looked, so I couldn¡¯t really tell just how secure these people were for the winter. Maybe once we made contact, we could learn something about them.


    Other than that, I had been able to observe their static defences, mostly based around improvised walls between some of the ruins but given that my observations were primarily done during the night, I couldn¡¯t tell too much. Sure, they had their torches and I could observe the occasional guard making their rounds, but that was it, especially as I wasn¡¯t able to witness their reaction to a threat. If there was some sort of assault on their settlement, I might have been able to see if they had made any special preparations or if the people I could see were anything but simple fighters. For all I knew, they might have powerful magical skills or they might be wearing holy symbols under their clothes, ready to unleash a divine smackdown when threatened. Without being there in person, I just couldn¡¯t tell.


    Another curiosity I had noticed during my use of the scrying constructs was just how massive the combined city actually was. While exact dimensions were impossible to tell, I had a feeling it would be hard to walk from the southern edge of the city to the northern edge within a day, at least for somebody with a normal, human body. Enhanced attributes could change that, but still, if I had to guess, I would put the length of the town at some sixty kilometres, which was quite insane. Its width, on the other hand, was a lot more manageable at less than a quarter of the length, though again, it was hard to tell as most of the town¡¯s western border followed the mountains, making it anything but straight.


    At some points, the town sprawled up into some smaller valleys, like the one we had built our tower above, and from scouting those areas with scrying constructs, they were currently inhabited. One held a fairly large group of Undead and another was filled with canines of unusual sizes. The canines, as there were more than dogs living in the ruins within the valley ranged from medium-sized dogs to something that looked like it was hunting horses for sport, reaching just about my own height at the withers, while coming equipped with a head the size of my torso. The thing was absolutely massive and my only hope was that it wouldn¡¯t be all that fast, it looked more like a strong creature than an agile one. Those were the extremes but they were far from the only ones, the vast majority looked like dogs, wolves or maybe even coyotes, not that I could readily tell the difference. Maybe, if we were really lucky, this might become another chapter of the Army of Dog, though I wasn¡¯t about to have Silva and Luna put that to the test. Not without some serious plans to make sure we could get out of there alive, the sheer number and physicality of these dogs was quite intimidating.


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    Another thing I noticed during my remote exploration of the city was that the former military bases seemed to have become something special during the change. I didn¡¯t think they were dungeons, they could be explored with a scrying construct, but they were strange nonetheless. There were Shattered living in both areas, a lot of them, and, for some reason, the flames making up their eyes were weird. Just like the Withered I had encountered back home, these Shattered didn¡¯t have the usual, light-blue flames within their eyes. Instead, their eyes had different colours, the one inhabiting the former Air Force Academy had blue flames but with a deeper blue while those in the other area had flames of a dark forest green. I had no idea what the flames might mean, but what I could tell, even from nothing but my remote observation, was that these Shattered seemed to work together, similar to those we had seen before. Hopefully, they wouldn¡¯t have the same early warning system, or getting into these areas would be difficult.


    While exploring the southern military base, I decided to try finding out where the strange sensation I had felt while hiking came from, the one I had located either below the mountain or in town. Given that the southern base was roughly in line with the area the sensation might have come from, I decided to take a closer look but when I failed to find anything obvious, I decided to check the mountain and there, I came across something interesting.


    A massive metal gate, easily big enough to grant entrance to large trucks or even houses if they could be moved, was sealing a tunnel shut. From the signage near the gate, I could tell that it was the entrance to the North American Aerosomething, the rest of the sign was, as so many others in the area, broken. Some parts of the signs warned that one would get shot for trespassing, but given the state of the world, I wasn¡¯t worried about that. Only intrigued by what might be hidden under the mountain, though getting in would be a challenge. That gate didn¡¯t look like it was supposed to move without some serious mechanical assistance, assistance I doubted would be forthcoming. Still, it looked like there were smaller doors set into the gate, so it wasn¡¯t as if all hope was lost and I gleefully added the thing to my list of targets to explore once we felt confident of the area.


    To increase our experience, we made sure to visit the various stores in the combined town. It was quite fascinating at times, especially when we realised that some of the stores were most certainly not as they had been before the change. One, in particular, was a Seven-Target, the building looking like it had been two buildings before the change, only to be fused right in the middle, creating this amalgamation store. Our curiosity roused, we checked it out with a lot more attention than we would normally spare a destroyed store and came across a few aisles where the fusion was even more obvious, with different shelves having been fused.


    Alex was utterly intrigued by these fused shelves and even I tried to figure out how that came about but I couldn¡¯t tell a whole lot. The metal was different enough on the shelves to tell but beyond that, I couldn¡¯t find anything, it was as if the two, visibly quite distinct, shelves had always been fused, even if my mind was rebelling at the idea. Magically, there was no difference, which started to give me a headache. Luckily, it looked like Alex and their alchemical understanding could make more sense of the situation and soon, we were back on our way.


    All in all, the massive city was filled with enough oddities, enemies and curiosities to keep us interested for the entire winter, meaning we wouldn¡¯t get bored. Nobody wanted to be bored.

 Interlude: Eye of Sauron?

    Walking along one of the walkways they had installed between the partially crumbled buildings, Jack was staring into the distance. Something, a small part of his mind insisted, had changed about the mountains and the forest covering them. Something beyond the original weirdness, where the very mountains themself had shifted in an impossible manner. Mountains didn¡¯t just move around, shrink or rise, at least not within a humanly appreciable timescale. And yet, after the Night of Insanity and Fire as some had taken to call the end of the world as they knew it, the mountains had done just that, their very outline altered along with the rest of the world. Roads he had known, had walked along just the day before, suddenly led elsewhere, street signs couldn¡¯t be relied upon any longer and buildings were crumbling left, right and centre, as the world was trying to cope with that insanity.


    And the people had to try to cope alongside the world, trying to survive in a reality that now included zombies, both the slow and the fast variant, blue boxes appearing out of nowhere, a system apparently classifying everything with numbers and, last but not least, the complete and utter collapse of society. Yeah, people had to cope but at the end of the day, it was either to cope or to curl up and die. Some had done just that, either in suicidal charges into an enemy far too numerous and powerful to overcome and others had chosen a different way to end their lives. Luckily, enough people had managed to cope with the changes to form a somewhat stable society in their corner of the insanely large field of ruins Colorado Springs had somehow become and in the last few months, they had come across other survivors, eeking out their existence in other parts of the ruined city.


    Contact with those people had been somewhat furtive, the ruins weren¡¯t all that safe, but the survivors had learned that somehow, their city now composed of what used to be multiple cities, snatched up from an area more than a hundred miles across, and smooched together into this conglomerate of ruins. How that worked, how anything like this could work, nobody had an idea and so far, nobody could even pretend to understand. It was a case of accepting this insanity as part of their new reality, just like all the other insane and inexplicable occurrences. Jack had accepted the insanity and yet, there was the conviction something else had changed with the mountains. He just had to figure out what.


    It took him a bit of time, studying the distant treetops and trying to place the source of his feeling but finally, he managed to find it, unobtrusive as it was. If not for his nagging feeling, he wouldn¡¯t have managed to spot the small, thanks to the distance between them, alteration, the glinting protrusion of black material just barely sticking out above the treetops. Even now, knowing where to look, it was hard to see, the black thing somewhat blending in with the mountains further back, it wasn¡¯t tall enough to stick out above the distant mountains, just to stick out above the trees.


    Sadly, spotting it was only half the battle, figuring out what the thing might be as an entirely different subject, which is why Jack decided to get help from one of the people he trusted most, the one who had established herself as second in command to the group he usually led out into the field. Samantha, or Sam most of the time, was a brilliant woman with a mind sharper than any blade and about as tough as hardened steel, so if anyone would figure out what the thing that might look like a crown if one squinted just a little, could be.


    Getting Sam was the easy part, getting her to see what he had spotted was a little more difficult. Despite him pointing out where the thing was, it was difficult to make out and for a bit, Sam had been convinced it was just three particularly strange trees sticking out above the rest. They had argued for a bit until the Sun started to set and it was time for another group to take over their guard duty before they would have to guard again during the day. Afterwards, their group would be free of that tedious chore for a few days and able to venture out to explore once again. They all followed a solid schedule, allowing every group time in the field, while all shared the vital duty of guarding their small settlement, as advised by some of the military people who had made their home among them.


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    ¡°Jack,¡± Sam¡¯s voice caught his attention as he moved along the walkways once again. Her voice had a touch of alarm to it but luckily, it wasn¡¯t an actual call to arms, so he didn¡¯t have to worry just yet. But he had to quickly finish the rest of his round and find out what was going on. Thanks to the military people, their rounds were spaced out randomly and they had to try and keep every direction under observation, a difficult challenge with only five people. Granted, their job wasn¡¯t acting as the primary line of defence, it was to act as an early warning system and give the teams on break a chance to assemble and join them, so five people was sufficient but, at the same time, it didn¡¯t feel like it was enough.


    ¡°What¡¯s wrong,¡± he asked the moment he caught up to Sam, his eyes roaming across the ruined city around them, frantically trying to spot what had alarmed his second.


    ¡°Over there,¡± now it was Sam¡¯s turn to point into the distance, just like he had the day before, but luckily, it was a lot easier to spot the thing now than it had been before. For a moment, Jack could only stare, his mind once again playing catch-up with an impossible reality, to the point that he took the time to rub his eyes and even asked Sam to pinch him in an attempt to dispel the insanity. Sadly, the pain shooting through his arm from her vicious pinch was all too real and the thing didn¡¯t disappear in a puff of logic.


    ¡°Am I going insane?¡± he quietly asked, staring at the orb of orange and black something that hovered above the three spires he had seen the day before. ¡°Am I going insane, or is that the Eye of Sauron, staring in our general direction? I mean, I have been tempted to cast the One Ring that enslaved me into the pit of Mount Doom after the divorce but I didn¡¯t think Sauron would take it this literally. Do you think my feet will turn furry?¡± He muttered, babbling a little at the strange sight. It was almost as if the distant eye was staring right into his soul.


    ¡°Wasn¡¯t her name Sharon?¡± his old friend asked, her mind apparently struggling just as much as his with the sight presented to them.


    ¡°Same difference,¡± Jack shrugged, ¡°But what on earth is that thing?¡± he couldn¡¯t help but ask, his mind inexorably pulled back to the staring eye. Why was it staring at him?


    ¡°My guess is as good as yours, but with the last few months, it could really be anything,¡± Sam shook her head, as flabbergasted as Jack.


    ¡°Is that the Eye of Sauron?¡± Daniel, another member of their group asked, joining his two leaders as they stared at the thing in confusion.


    ¡°Looks like it. I noticed something stuck out of the forest yesterday and now that eye hangs between those sticks, or whatever they were,¡± Jack explained, shaking his head once again, hoping that the world would make sense once more if he kept doing that.


    ¡°So, it¡¯s a building?¡± Daniel asked, only to receive shrugs of ignorance, as neither Jack nor Sam had any real idea what they might be dealing with. Other than, something strange. But, sadly, that answer applied to far too many things in this strange, new world of theirs, so the conviction that an occurrence was strange was starting to become normal, as mind-bending as that was.


    Sadly, despite their best efforts, nobody was able to explain just what the hell the strange, burning eye sitting in the mountains actually was. Theories were exchanged, explanations proposed and while some of them made the smallest amount of sense, none of them came even close to being reasonable. Instead, the five members of Search Group One decided that they would head in that direction during their exploration shift and try finding out what the thing might be. Their job was to explore and bring back information and resources while improving their own combat capabilities, so exploring a strange occurrence was par for the course. They would just have to be careful while trying to get there. For some reason, the central area between them and Sauron¡¯s Tower was filled with a lot of powerful zombies.

 Chapter 1040

    After yet another exciting night of careful exploration, we were heading back to our tower. It was quite fascinating just how diverse the conglomerate city was and how many different parts there were to discover. By now, I had noticed that it wasn¡¯t just the cities of Denver and Colorado Springs which had been combined, there were other, much smaller, places in the mix, too. Sadly, my geographical awareness was lacking and I wasn¡¯t able to place the few names we had come across, so I had no real idea where Simla or Wigwam were located and the only places named Windsor and Strasburg I knew about had been in Europe, placing them a little too far afield. Right?


    Sure, the signage I came across might have come from there but I was quite doubtful about that, it fit too well with the rest of the signs we had seen. While a place in France might have English signs, and one in England most definitely would have them, I doubted they would look like the ones we had seen here, nor did I think the buildings would be in the same style. But then, the only images I could picture relating to Windsor were of the Castle carrying the same name and in regards to Strasburg, I knew even less. I just had that vague image of a large Cathedral with a high tower but even there, I might be mistaken. It wasn¡¯t as if there was only one large Cathedral in the world and a lot of them had some fairly similar silhouettes. So, without those landmarks, I had little idea if Windsor and Strasburg had been transplanted halfway around the world or if these were other places with the same name, it wasn¡¯t as if we humans were terribly creative when naming things. One just had to ask the Koreans and all the people named Kim. Sure, there was some cultural significance to the name that I didn¡¯t remember but it was an excellent example, as were the many towns named Springfield. So far, I hadn¡¯t come across one of those but I wasn¡¯t about to rule it out.


    Maybe once we came across a few of the locals, they could shed some light on the insanity that had resulted in a ruined city some hundred or so square kilometres in size. Whatever the case, the large area was teeming with interesting creatures, both of the bestial and of the humanoid variant, with a good number of Undead thrown in for good measure.


    An excellent example of that variety was the area we had come across tonight. A graveyard, just as outsized as the city itself, with signs indicating that it was combined from multiple sources, including at least one animal graveyard. As with so many things, the Change hadn¡¯t been kind to the resting dead, mostly because it hadn¡¯t allowed them to keep resting peacefully. The graveyard was filled with walking skeletons, both humanoid and otherwise.


    There were the usual, simple skeletons, humanoid remains, reanimated in some way, likely by some side-effect of the Change, alongside their bestial counterparts. Curiously, they even combined in some cases, like the skeletal horse and its bony rider, or worked together in a complex fashion, like the avian skeleton guiding and directing a pack of skeletal dogs. It was a fascinating process and if not for the sheer number of skeletons, the complexity of their behaviour and the lack of time since the Change, I might have speculated whether an actual person had animated all of them, but with conditions as they were, I was almost certain it wasn¡¯t the case. Especially as the skeletons lacked a crucial thing I would always want to include if I were to create an rmy like this, a link to make sure nobody could pick up my valuable creations one by one.


    Which is exactly what we had been doing in our probing exploration, strike down a few of the skeletons, either by using magic from afar or by sneaking up on them and crushing them with brutal attacks, and move back into the shadows. It was fairly easy, the skeletons were only in the upper fifties, but there might be more interesting targets further in, the graveyard was massive after all. Despite prior observation with the Oculus I couldn¡¯t put numbers on its size, just a guess that it was about eight square skilometres, but even that was vague. Luckily, I had been able to scry the area with my constructs, looking for anything interesting, and noticed a few open crips, with Skeletons moving in and out of them. That these open crypts were also blocked from the scrying construct made them even more interesting, though we would have to be careful during our assault.


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    But for now, we were moving back to our tower, Luna and I quietly contemplating the presented intelligence of the skeletons, while Alex and Lia were chattering about some strange application of Bone Dust, of which they had gathered a sizable amount. It was a good thing that my study of the Space Rune had allowed me to partially morph my shadow bags into actual, magical bags with an expanded size. The curious downside of them was that the weight stored in the expanded bags didn¡¯t change, giving the Shadow Bags that stored items outside reality, and htus negated their weight, a major advantage to go with their downsides. Luckily, bones and Bone Dust weren¡¯t all that heavy, at least for physically powerful beings like Lia or Silva.


    The discussion about skeletal intelligence was fascinating. We both agreed that the skeletons couldn¡¯t be naturally intelligent, they simply lacked the hard-, or rather the wet-, ware to think. No brains, no nervous system, nothing guiding them but the energy, the magic, that held them together. Even more interesting was that the skeletons had some faint traces of Astral Power, not enough to explain their animation or intelligence but enough to give some hints, indicating that the Astral Power was only part of the puzzle. The problem came with the question of origin.


    Luna and I were uncertain whehter the Skeletons had simply been animated like the various Undead we had come across before, as these Skeletons didn¡¯t share some of their mental and magical traits, or if the Graveyard was some sort of special zone, like the Charland was. If so, I was fairly confident that I should have felt the Death Magic in the air but I hadn¡¯t been able to sense anything. And if there was enough Death Magic in the area to animate hundreds, if not thousands, of skeletons, I should have felt the it.


    Luna, on the other hand, was more interested in the question of what made these Skeletons special and what made the Graveyard so special. There might be a reason why it had been brought together in the first place, though I argued it was simply part of the effect on the greater area.


    Neither of us had an idea what truly made the Skeletons tick, we only knew it had to do with the magic holding htem together. To figure out the details, we would have to perform some tests and experiments. Maybe, if we came across a suitably small one, we could pack it up and take it with us, so we could work undisturbed. Sadly, the magic animating them faded the moment one took the head off one of them, otherwise it would make transport and containment a lot easier. And it might make for an awesome prop, especially if I could manage to give one the ability to speak and find a method to inscribe information into the magic animating a skull. It would make for a fairly interesting recording device. Why drink from the skull of your enemies if you could turn them into part of your library?


    When a strange scent tickled my nose for just a moment, I froze, noticing that Silva was frozen in a similar way, her fur standing up and a soft, warning growl admonishing us all to be cautious. Once the scent I had noticed trickled through my nose and was identified as wood smoke from a fire by my mind, I had to agree with her assessment, we should be cautious. Fire should always be handled with caution, it always indicated potential danger. Either from the fire itself, if it was running wild, or from the people who made and contained the fire. Both could be dangerous in their own right.


    When we continued to move, we acted as if we were back in hostile territory, with enemies waiting around every corner. No sound escaped, even the wind wasn¡¯t disturbed by our passage, we were nothing but shadows in the darkness of night.


    Finding the fire was trivial, even if we hadn¡¯t noticed it by the scent it gave off, we would have seen the light long before we reached it. What we found when we did was quite curious, there was one guy, roughly my age and blonde, on watch while four other forms were on the ground, huddled in sleeping bags.


    But, the truly interesting part was that their camp was almost perfectly on the path between our tower and the town. Either that was a pure coincidence or somebody had noticed the giant, glowing orb sitting above our tower. Both possible and ether would be highly amusing.

 Chapter 1041

    Instead of taking a closer look at the camping party, we quietly decided to continue onwards to our tower. From there, I could use a scrying construct to covertly observe these people, without taking any risks, just in case they were a lot more powerful than they appeared. Or incredibly sneaky, cunning and deviousness could easily compensate for raw power, especially in a situation where the cunning party had time to set up and prepare. Alex was an excellent example of that, their traps and constructs were becoming a force one had to seriously reckon with, or they could decimate almost any foe.


    Amusingly, Lia and I had decided to ask Alex to tone their traps down a little when it came to protecting our tower. Having traps that would kill or maim anyone approaching didn¡¯t seem like the right idea, especially as we were planning to set up a Shrine to Lady Hecate on the ground floor. Dead pilgrims were something the Gods took somewhat seriously, it was bad for their image if their people got killed on the way to worship them. Instead, the traps around the tower came in two varieties, deterrence and deadly. The deterrence was primarily in the forest, encouraging people to take the path to the quarry while the deadly variant was only activated when we felt endangered, hopefully giving us enough time to retreat or prepare a defence. Additionally, I had put up a few wards, mainly of the warning variety, though I was also planning to add a few that had teeth of their own. I just had to figure out how to do that.


    But before we could consider how to deal with intruding enemies, we had to decide what to do with the party nearly camped out on our doorstep. Sure, we could wait and hope that their goal wasn¡¯t the giant ball of energy floating above our tower but that wasn¡¯t a realistic hope. Plus, even if these people weren¡¯t here for it, somebody would come calling, it was just a matter of time.


    For now, the obvious answer was to, as always, gather information. For that, I plopped myself in one of the fairly comfortable armchairs Luna had created with Alex¡¯s help, leaning back as I created a scrying construct. Once again, my preferred choice of a raven came out and soon took flight through one of the windows, my body remaining in the tower while my mind was occupied.


    Having my construct sit in a tree and observe was an interesting experience. I rarely observed fixed positions for long stretches of time, more often than not, I took a quick look before letting my construct continue on, or I was trying to figure out some oddity, which usually required movement and a good amount of vigilance.


    Here, I was merely having the construct sit in the tree, watching as the blonde guy kept watch, occasionally walking around the camp in an attempt to remain awake and vigilant. The lack of activity on my part let me fall into a bit of a trance, with snippets and fragments of foreign memories occasionally flashing through my mind. They were remnants from my time with Lenore, memories she had shared with me in an effort to show me something or to get a second opinion on something. Now, these memories, or rather, my memories of sharing her memories, came back to mind, likely because I strongly associated the shape of a raven with my dear avian friend. Maybe I should look into some way to transform my body, so I could physically feel the wings. It would certainly be another long-term project but that hardly mattered, for now, I could create scrying constructs or fly with my cloak, both excellent substitutes.


    My vigil was interrupted when the party down there changed guards a little before the sun started to rise. After waking up one of his compatriots, a brown-haired guy he called Daniel, the blonde guy, whose name apparently was Jonas, got to sleep, with me continuing to keep watch. Neither of the guys had been terribly observant, I felt they should have noticed the raven sitting still in a nearby tree but apparently, they didn¡¯t know that animals rarely just hung around. Granted, birds did it more often than other animals, but to have a single animal keep watch on your camp should ring alarm bells, even if you didn¡¯t know what was going on. Alas, their failure was to my benefit in this case, so I wasn¡¯t about to complain. Instead, I simply kept watch as Daniel occasionally moved around camp, looking just a little uncertain and lost. It was quite amusing to watch, really, though I felt bad at the same time. There was no doubt in my mind that the guy would have preferred to be elsewhere but felt a need to help his friends.


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    That conviction was confirmed a little later when he used Water Magic to fill a kettle and Fire Magic to stoke the flames of their campfire as he started to prepare food. Just from that, I could recognise that Daniel had some magical ability, though I would have to meet him in person to learn more about his affinities. Either way, this might be somebody I would want to teach, especially if it wasn¡¯t a case of somebody having conflicting affinities but a case of somebody learning to use a type of magic without the appropriate affinity. The second was a lot more impressive from a talent point-of-view and I really wanted to foster such talent.


    The scent of food combined with the noise of cooking was enough to wake the rest of their party and I now got a better look at them. Four guys, one gal, all of them somewhere between their late twenties, Jonas, and maybe their early forties, it was hard to tell with their leader, a guy named Jack. That guy had dark hair but was going grey at his temples, while his body was fairly fit. Though, that was only relative, when it came to physicality, none of them could hold a candle to the last guy on their team, a bald black guy called Murray, who was built like the proverbial brick shit house. Easily two metres tall, with enough muscles for two people and a fairly calm, yet intimidating demeanour. Even if I was likely stronger than him, simply from my stupendous attributes, there was something threatening about him.


    The lone female of the group was also quite interesting. Somewhere in the middle when it came to age, with shoulder-length blonde hair she didn¡¯t pose the obvious, physical threat somebody like Murray did but the way her eyes moved and the immediate caution when she noticed my scrying construct told me that she was not somebody to be underestimated, which likely was why all but Jack, their leader deferred to her. And even Jack quite obviously showed that he valued her advice, the moment she brought up the presence of my scrying construct, they all demonstrated increased vigilance.


    For a few moments, I considered whether I should do something to reveal myself. The distance between the tower and my construct was short enough to keep my connection to the Astral Power it was composed of directly, without having to merge into the Astral River, so I could alter the construct fairly easily and change it into a humanoid shape and initiate contact. But I had a feeling these people wouldn¡¯t react well to that, so, instead, I had my construct take flight and retreated a little before moving into the shadow of a tree and making the construct disappear. Scrying without using a construct was a little harder, and it was a lot harder to move the focal point, but it was well within my capabilities and I kept watch on the party.


    Sadly, they didn¡¯t give me any real indication about their long-term plans, the conversation I managed to overhear was focused on their immediate plans, mostly their continued track to my tower and speculation about the discoveries they might be able to make there. All in all, it wasn¡¯t anything threatening, though I wasn¡¯t about to underestimate these people, they seemed to be remarkably competent, especially given that they lacked an obvious Legacy.


    Once they got going, it didn¡¯t take long for them to reach our tower. I continued to shadow them, quite literally and kept watch, amused at their reaction. It was quite glorious, with multiple chins dropping and more than a single request to be pinched in an effort to confirm that they were, in fact, not dreaming.


    But then, I had to admit that the tower was quite the structure, with its black, glinting walls and intimidating height, especially as it should be obvious that the tower had been constructed after the Change.


    Finally, as they started to move towards the large, open doors on the ground floor, I disengaged my scrying construct and started to move downstairs. It would be interesting to meet these people in person.

 Chapter 1042

    Knowing that there was a group of survivors moving into our tower, I made my way downstairs, moving as fast as I could while remaining quiet. I didn¡¯t want to appear hurried, I wanted to project an image of control and command, not one of urgency. Just as I made my way down the last set of stairs, a familiar voice reached my ears.


    ¡°Now, who might you be?¡± Luna¡¯s voice was filled with a calm, curious tone, making it obvious that there was nothing bothering her, projecting just the air I wanted to project myself. So, with that in mind, I paused, made sure I looked properly put together, pulled the shadows around myself so I was nearly invisible and continued onwards, planning to observe what was going on between Luna and these visitors.


    ¡°Just a few curious people, looking for interesting things,¡± their leader, the guy named Jack, told Luna, his voice trying to be as calm and casual as hers had been, but there was a small, yet audible, bit of confusion in his voice.


    ¡°Curious people are wonderful and we have many interesting things here, things one might want to know and, even more important, things one might want to understand,¡± Luna continued with her spiel and I moved into the shadows of the room, so I could get a good look.


    What I saw was almost enough to crack my composure and make me laugh, it was just such a wonderful image. Luna was dressed in simple, flowing attire, I had no idea where she had got it, but it looked like something out of a fantasy novel, or maybe as if somebody had stolen the sheets and made a gown out of them. Yet, despite the utter simplicity of her flowing garment, she managed to pull off the diaphanous, white sheet with a casual grace that belied her age, though her body did that, too.


    Opposite of her, standing in the open portal of our tower, was the party of five, with Jack obviously in the lead, while the other four were guarding his sides and back, all of them visibly armed but not ready for combat. The contrast between the two sides, one side cautious and vigilant, the other side calm and casual was quite amusing, especially as the calm side was numerically and physically inferior. It wasn¡¯t as if Luna was about to jump on them, though they couldn¡¯t know that, yet.


    ¡°And what is this place?¡± the guy I had seen using magic earlier, Daniel, asked, stepping forward a little as his interest was clearly roused. From the brief look of consternation I noticed on the faces of Jack and Murray, he wasn¡¯t supposed to leave their formation but their positioning hardly mattered if we wanted to do them harm. Alas, they didn¡¯t know that just yet.


    ¡°There are many names you could call it, a shrine, an observatory, a laboratory or a library, all would be suitable. But to me, it simply is home, at least for the next few months,¡± Luna told them, her voice becoming whimsical and I noticed her eyes flare with a small amount of power, making me think she was using her special sight to learn more about these people.


    Mirroring her curiosity, I pushed my concealment to the maximum, wrapped it around the Observe-ability and quickly checked these people out. My grin only deepened when they didn¡¯t react to my actions, only to fade a little when I considered their levels. Sure, being around level fifty-five wasn¡¯t all that terrible, all things considered, but if levels around fifty-five meant one could venture through the city unmolested, we might be a little bored in the area. We¡¯d have to see if their successful travels were due to luck or skill, or maybe both.


    ¡°So you made it? And what sort of laboratory?¡± Sam, the lone female of the fivesome, mirrored her companion and also left their formation, making me shake my head. It was quite interesting, the five of them had essentially been in a triangle formation, with Jack, Murray and Jonas acting as the corners, while Sam and Daniel had been between them, giving them a fair measure of protection, without blocking any of the more physically inclined people. But now, with the two of them moving forward, their formation fell apart, leaving them somewhat exposed. Alas, it was a good thing that I wasn¡¯t planning to attack.


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    ¡°No, it was my mother who raised the tower. And the laboratory is for all of us to work in, big sis, mom and myself, we all like to test things and figure them out,¡± Luna explained and I saw the fivesome exchange quick glances, while Daniel and Sam moved even further out of formation in a quest to look around the room and take in the decorations we had carved into the walls.


    ¡°Your mother? She built all this?¡± Jack asked his tone one of utter disbelief.


    ¡°Well, not all of it, I made some of the parts, as did Alex and Carnelia, but the stonework was all mom¡¯s doing. She¡¯s quite good at that,¡± Luna confirmed, just a hint of pride in her voice, while she watched Daniel and Sam as they moved through the room, entranced by the decorations we had put in. Given that we were planning to set up the open library down here, there were a few fairly nice graphics and descriptions. I had even started on my primers for runic magic, though it was quite difficult to carve it into the walls due to the complexity of the subject.


    ¡°You built parts of this? It¡¯s fascinating,¡± Daniel spoke up, after tearing his eyes off parts of my graphic explanation of runic magic. There was no way I was willing to write it out in English simply because it was getting harder and harder to use the language as if it was turning into a foreign language, and I just happened to speak it fluently.


    ¡°Why, thank you. But no, the descriptions you are staring at were made by Mom,¡± Luna told him, before turning back to Samantha, who was studying a different part of the wall, one used by Alex and Lia to engrave some of the alchemical basics, the tenant of perfection or something like that. Apparently, a basic principle of alchemy was that one had to hunt for perfection, though what ¡®perfect¡¯ meant was subject to interpretation and change.


    ¡°Do you think we could meet your mother?¡± Jack spoke up again, maybe he had decided that he wanted to meet the one in charge. His tone certainly spoke of impatience and a bit of confusion. Regardless, his request made for a perfect opening to let me step in.


    ¡°Why, yes, you could meet me. Well met, and all that,¡± I stepped up next to Luna, keeping myself well hidden until I spoke up at the same moment I let the concealment drop, making it appear as if I had materialised from thin air. ¡°Enter without malice and leave without hindrance. Do harm to any within my tower and the harm will be reflected a thousandfold on yourself,¡± I warned them, my voice calm and cold as a glacier, trying to project power and intimidate without acting outright hostile. Not that I needed to act hostile, my whole ¡®appearing from thin air¡¯ was enough to have Sam whirl around and make Daniel jump, while the three still at the door startled and almost moved into combat readiness.


    ¡°You are the mother?¡± Jack focused on me, his eyes flickering between Luna and me as if trying to decide if we were actually related. Not that I begrudged him the confusion, but with the specks of light in my hair, the blue skin and the pointy ears peaking through my hair, I was obviously not fully human, white Luna only had the slightly glowing, silver eyes to give away her special circumstances.


    ¡°That, I am,¡± I confirmed, faintly amused at the fact that he used the same moniker Lady Hecate habitually used for me, not that he could know that. ¡°Jade Morgana, sometimes known as the Mother or even the Pale Lady, all of those fit,¡± I introduced myself, letting a bit of the amusement out, alongside some of my power. ¡°And who might you be?¡±


    The fivesome introduced themself, while Luna added her own name, only that she also added her moniker of the Maiden, causing a few strange expressions, much to my amusement. Still, the introductions were over and these people looked to be suitably impressed and intimidated, so it might be a good thing to find out what they actually wanted.


    ¡°Now, why don¡¯t you tell us what brought you to our doorstep? After all, it¡¯s not as if people are travelling for leisure during times like these, is it?¡± I asked, making sure to hide the amusement about my hypocritical words. Sure, we weren¡¯t travelling purely for leisure but we also weren¡¯t particularly pressed for time.


    ¡°No, we saw the giant, glowing eye and wanted to learn more,¡± Jack admitted, looking a bit uncomfortable, likely because I put him on the spot.


    ¡°Mhm, learn more, you say. There might be a few things we can teach some of you if you are interested,¡± I offered, fighting to keep a straight face. This might be fun.

 Chapter 1043

    Just the idea of getting lessons was enough to thoroughly intrigue Daniel, to the point that he suddenly resembled Silva when the last piece of roasted meat was up for grabs. Just his transition from a somewhat serious student of the writings I had put on the wall into an eager puppy, begging for a special treat managed to break my usually solid poker face and made me chuckle.


    ¡°What would those lessons be about?¡± Samantha asked, turning away from Alex¡¯s scribbles about foundational alchemy.


    ¡°While I have a few martial accomplishments, my lessons will be on some foundational magical concepts. I believe young Daniel here has managed to figure out a few tricks of his own, didn¡¯t he?¡± I told her, before studying Daniel some more, noticing that I couldn¡¯t really tell the affinity his soul had, none of them stood out. In fact, while his overall affinity for magic seemed to be fairly high, his elemental affinities were only at the level of my own affinity for Earth Magic. Not terribly high but high enough to make the elements usable, if one put in enough effort. But, where I only had the affinity thanks to some of the special traits I had gained thanks to my high attributes, Daniel came to it naturally, making him somewhat suitable to learn any elemental magic I could think of. It would be interesting to see how much he could do if I managed to train him properly.


    ¡°And why do you think you can teach him?¡± Jack prodded, making me laugh outright at his question.


    ¡°Look around, will you?¡± I gestured towards the walls all around us, turning as I did, ¡°Just some ten days ago, this was nothing but an empty quarry, partially filled with water and gravel. I broke the rocks from the cliffs, I laid the foundations and I raised this tower, all on my own. All with my magic,¡± I paused, letting the information sink in deeply before continuing, ¡°All with my Earth Magic. A magical element that isn¡¯t even among my top five elements. I merely used it because Earth, or more precisely rock, is an excellent building material. So yes, I believe I can teach him a fair amount,¡± I finished my short explanation, staring into Jack¡¯s eyes, somewhat pleased at the realisation I could see in them and the fear stemming from it.


    ¡°Incredible,¡± Daniel whispered as if talking to himself, as he stared at the tower around us again. Maybe it had only now sunk in that this was all constructed magically, or they had partially denied the reality of it all, I wasn¡¯t sure. But whatever the case, all five of them seemed to be suitably cowed at the moment.


    ¡°Can you teach me more about these diagrams?¡± Samantha asked from the other wall, her mind apparently still somewhat engrossed by them.


    ¡°No, I¡¯m afraid not, they are not made by my hand. You would have to ask my older daughter about them, alongside her companion, Alex,¡± I explained, just as I noticed another disturbance move through the room unseen, just as I had earlier. Lia was getting quite good with the Shadow Cloak, though she wasn¡¯t as proficient as I was, even without my physical Cloak.


    ¡°Could she teach me, too?¡± Samantha pleaded, her eyes going from me to the wall and back. I had to hide my grin when the woman didn¡¯t notice the presence right next to her, still hidden in the shadows.


    ¡°What¡¯s in it for me?¡± Lia asked, letting her cloak fall while she was in Samantha¡¯s blind spot, making the woman squeal and jump surprisingly high. She didn¡¯t quite get to the ceiling but for a vertical leap without any running start or preparation, it was an excellent height, good enough to make Luna applaud with a grin on her face. The rest of their party didn¡¯t take Lia¡¯s appearance with as much humour as Luna did, at least Murray, Jonas and Jack looked quite put out by the fact that both Lia and I had managed to seemingly appear from thin air. Or maybe they were simply afraid of what else we might be able to do. Luckily, the lighting on the ground floor was bad enough to partially conceal Lia¡¯s solidly crimson eyes, those would only add to the discomfort these people would feel.


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    I wanted them to be intimidated by the power we could bring to bear but I didn¡¯t want them to regard us as monsters and come after us with torches and pitchforks. We would likely win, even against a large number of enemies, but there were no guarantees.


    ¡°Don¡¯t do that?¡± Samantha screamed, her voice filled with a mix of anger and shame, making me think she was feeling utterly humiliated.


    ¡°Screaming at your teacher, that¡¯s not a good thing for a pupil, is it?¡± Lia chuckled, gently caressing Samantha¡¯s face in a somewhat inappropriate manner. ¡°I might have to chastise you, so you can learn to behave.¡±


    Lia¡¯s words and actions were somewhat out of character for her, making me wonder what my daughter had in mind. I doubted she was just messing with the woman for the fun of it, though I couldn¡¯t rule it out, so she was planning something. What, I had no idea, but I was looking forward to finding it out, especially given just how badly Samantha was now blushing and stuttering.


    ¡°Sam, everything okay over there?¡± Jack prompted, looking very much as if he was about to pull Lia away from his teammate, an expression mirrored on Jonas¡¯ face. Curiously, Murray looked on with a stoic and placid expression, as if he would only move if there was a real need.


    ¡°I¡¯m fine,¡± Samantha managed to blurt out, while Lia was pushing even further into her personal space. Quite the accomplishment given just how close to her Lia had appeared, though given that it looked like Lia was quietly whispering into Samantha¡¯s ears while gesturing to specific parts of the diagrams on the wall, there might be a reason for the proximity. Or Lia just wanted to mess with Samantha, either, or even both, were valid possibilities.


    ¡°Don¡¯t expect me to provide such close instruction,¡± I grinned, looking at Daniel whose eyes had been travelling between Samantha and Lia, myself, the wall with the arcane writing and back as if he was trying to figure out what sort of lessons I would provide. Granted, my words were a bit of a lie, depending on his abilities I might have to use Mind Magic on him to pull him into the Astral River which could be considered close and intimate but compared to Lia¡¯s flirting, it was a different type of intimacy.


    ¡°The question remains, are you interested in lessons? And if yes, what will the three muscle heads over there do while we teach you? Lessons won¡¯t happen in a day, at least not if you want to actually learn something,¡± I warned Daniel, curious about what arrangements they would propose.


    ¡°I don¡¯t suppose you would put us up in your tower?¡± Jonas asked, after tearing his eyes away from Lia and Samantha. By now, I started to wonder if my influence on my daughter was stronger than I had expected, some of the things Lia did wouldn¡¯t have been out of place between Sigmir and myself. Only that Lia was trying them on somebody she had met a few minutes ago, not that I could really throw shade in that regard, Sigmir and I had been drawn together shortly after our initial meeting, too. Granted, there was the connection and link between our souls, something I couldn¡¯t detect between Samantha and Lia, so who knew, maybe Lia was simply trying to move fast.


    ¡°That depends, I might be willing to let the five of you sleep down here, or I might even set up something simple outside if your companions show themself to be worthy pupils,¡± I paused for a moment, considering the best way to set things up for our benefit. If this Daniel had as much potential as I currently thought, I would likely get multiple levels out of teaching him, something I wanted quite a bit, as they would help a great deal on my path to level hundred and the second divide. Given the low levels of these people, I wasn¡¯t about to bet on finding suitable enemies anywhere nearby, if there were, these people wouldn¡¯t travel about as confidently.


    ¡°But why don¡¯t you make us an offer? I can teach Daniel here a great deal about elemental magic, I might even be willing to give him a few simple lessons on Enchanting, something I doubt he¡¯d figure out by himself. However, as you might have heard, there ain¡¯t such a thing as a free lunch. Nor is there such a thing as free education;¡± I challenged, curious with what sort of offer they would come up with. Hopefully, it would be a good one.

 Chapter 1044

    Maybe eavesdropping was a bad habit but at the end of the day, could anyone blame me if I kept vigilant about the new people within my domain and wanted to know what they were up to? So, if they started to talk just outside the tower after we had just hashed out the deal that would have us give lessons to Samantha and Daniel, it wasn¡¯t really my fault, was it?


    Whatever the case may be, given that we made a deal in which they, meaning Jack, Jonas and Murray, would hunt in the area around the tower and provide meat for all of us, while Daniel and Samantha got their lessons, I wasn¡¯t feeling too bad. They would have to get used to having somebody keep an eye on them, especially as the deal also included accommodation. Not in the tower itself, mind you, but within a small cottage I would set up for them within the quarry, it wasn¡¯t a difficult thing to do for me, but it would give them a bit of perceived privacy and keep them out of our private spaces. Additionally, it would allow me to show off some of my abilities by making the cottage as impressive as possible, especially when it came to the enchantments to mimic modern conveniences.


    However, given that this party of five was only part of a larger community, Jack felt that he couldn¡¯t just stay out here without people knowing about it. I could understand his desire, as the rest of their community would likely be rather annoyed if they stayed away for a few months and only returned after the winter was over and my party was moving on. To prevent that from happening, Jack felt they needed to report in, something I didn¡¯t mind too much. Sure, I would make sure that any attempt to attack the tower would result in abject failure and a horrifying loss of life, but that was an entirely different topic.


    But back to my eavesdropping on the people walking away from my tower, especially Daniel and Jonas. It sounded as if Jonas was a little annoyed at the prospect of having to stick to this area, something I didn¡¯t quite understand. An additional base far from their usual one was a valuable resource, not something to be annoyed about. Sure, there was a certain expectation for them to hunt and provide supplies for me, but it wasn¡¯t as if they got nothing out of it, even without the lessons. And yet, Jonas was complaining and Jack was, so far, not stepping in, despite his status as their leader.


    ¡°No, Jonas, you just don¡¯t get it, do you?¡± Daniel¡¯s voice came clearly through the spell I used to listen in. It was an interesting application of Wind Magic, somewhat similar to my usual scrying construct but, at the same time, entirely different. Far shorter range, for one, and it didn¡¯t take my entire attention, so I could use it fairly causally.


    ¡°For you, training is easy,¡± he continued on, ¡°Or maybe not easy but it¡¯s at least possible, you have some idea what you need to do to continue on your path,¡± I could easily hear the annoyance, especially when Daniel let out an almost defeated sigh at the end. ¡°I don¡¯t have that. I have no idea where to go next with my magic, other than to muddle along as I have so far. Hammond tried to help me but the way he does things is different from the way I do and the less is said about Weir, the better. It often feels as if she is just going through the motions and things work out that way but she has no real idea why they do or what will happen next. She can do stuff but she can¡¯t teach unless you happen to have the right traits. And I don¡¯t have them!¡± he continued to rant, his voice getting more passionate with each word.


    Hearing new names, I made sure to mentally note them down, as it sounded as if these might be legacies, or at least somewhat competent spellcasters in their community. That they weren¡¯t able to help Daniel wasn¡¯t a big deal, if I had only the magical understanding I had gained on Mundus, I wouldn¡¯t really be able to help him, either, so I wasn¡¯t about to judge. There were distinct boni to having Lady Hecate¡¯s favour, even if having the connection occasionally chafed. Not because I disliked Lady Hecate in particular but because I wasn¡¯t too fond of the concept of Divinity in and of itself. Sure, it seemed like the Gods were nothing more but people who were a lot further along their path, so nothing fundamentally different to us, but there was a part of me that felt inferior, a sensation I didn¡¯t like one bit.


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    Shaking off those thoughts I focused back on Daniel and Jonas, though now the rest of their party started to get involved and things became interesting. It sounded as if none of the other four felt that Daniel needed to prove himself, that he was doing fine just as he was, but it wasn¡¯t a view Daniel seemed to share, given that he continued to rant, though it was an amusingly complimentary rant. I certainly wouldn¡¯t be insulted if somebody wanted to call me a bloody genius, smart enough to make me feel like a toddler or if that same person described me as built like a tank and strong enough to give Rambo an inferiority complex. Those were, incidentally, the descriptions he used for Samantha and Murray, though his comparisons for Jack and Jonas were similarly flowery.


    At that point, Jack started to add his own two cents and the points he was making were fairly interesting. By his own admission, the three of them, meaning Jack himself, Jonas and Murray, were only good at one thing, fighting, with a few other small tricks thrown in. But ultimately, they could only fight and every fight had a chance to be their last fight. Daniel, on the other hand, could provide utility matched by only a few others. His ability to conjure Water allowed them to remain in the field far longer than they normally could and his ability to make Fire, nearly regardless of the circumstances and the fuel used was invaluable, too. Sure, Daniel couldn¡¯t burn up hordes of enemies, a declaration to which I mentally added, ¡®yet¡¯, but Daniel could let the others work a lot more efficiently. And now, he, Daniel, was getting lessons, so who knew what the future would bring?


    ¡°What do you think about our visitors, Mom?¡± Luna asked, distracting me from my scheduled entertainment. Though the entertainment value was steadily declining, now that Jack quelled their quarrel.


    ¡°They might be interesting. You talked to Murray and Jonas while I negotiated with Jack, didn¡¯t you?¡± I asked Luna, curious what she thought about those two, especially Murray. I wasn¡¯t sure if I had heard more than a handful of words from him, the guy was incredibly quiet for his size. Or maybe he was just shy, an idea so wonderfully contrary to his massively powerful appearance, I just wanted it to be true.


    ¡°Jonas was interested in the Oculus, wanted to know what it could do, who made it, things like that. I think the big, shiny object caught his attention;¡± Luna explained with a grin, making me nod thoughtfully. She was right, the Oculus was an incredible way to get the attention of everyone in a large area, simply because there was nothing alike, at least not within some hundred kilometres. Probably not beyond that, either, unless other Gods noticed Lady Hecate¡¯s flexing and decided to copy it, maybe put on their own touch.


    ¡°What do you think about our visitors yourself? Can we have them in close proximity without problems?¡± I had to ask while considering my own impressions. I didn¡¯t think Jack would make problems unprovoked, the guy seemed to have a fairly level head on his shoulders, but at the same time, I had the impression that if he felt it was needed, he would do absolutely anything to make sure his people got out of any mess they might find themself in. An excellent quality to have in a leader and a horrible one to have in an enemy.


    ¡°Jonas is quite smart, though I don¡¯t think he¡¯s interested in the Arcane, be it purely magical or alchemical. Mechanics, on the other hand, those are what fascinates him. If you can make him a slingshot or something you might have a friend for life,¡± Luna grinned, before continuing on, ¡°Murray, on the other hand, I¡¯m not sure about. I think he prefers to have somebody tell him what to do, but with the right direction, he¡¯s a force to be reckoned with.¡±


    After listening to my daughter, I considered the last person in their group and the slightly strange way my older child had reacted to her. It seemed as if I would have to have that¡­ talk with Lia. And I had no idea how to go about that. Why didn¡¯t parenting come with some sort of instruction manual? Or maybe a tutorial?

 Chapter 1045

    I had no real idea how to approach the conversation with Lia. It was a somewhat strange situation and I wasn¡¯t sure how to deal with it. Normally, if somebody more than ten years older than my daughter tried to flirt with her, I would readily dismember them, no matter who they were. Stars, if anyone tried to flirt with Luna, my reaction would likely be a violent one, but that was due to the discrepancy between Luna¡¯s chronological, biological and mental ages, making it difficult to come to a clear and simple conclusion. With a little luck, that problem wouldn¡¯t occur before I was ready for it. Well, make that an infinite amount of luck, as I had no doubt my brilliant daughter would attract that sort of attention far before I was ready for it, no matter how much I hoped to be wrong.


    But in the case of Lia and Samantha, I couldn¡¯t really put the blame on Samantha. She had done absolutely nothing, other than failing to dissuade my daughter in her advances and even there, she had tried. Only verbally, sure, and in a manner that made her look more adorable than anything else, so she hadn¡¯t tried too hard, but she had tried. Thus, I needed to talk with Lia, if only to make sure that my daughter understood what she was initiating, how far it could go and how she should be aware of what could happen, so she could come to a conclusion about how far and how fast she wanted to push things.


    Laughing to myself, I thought about the various books on parenthood I had collected since the change in an effort to help my two daughters with their unique needs. This might actually be a case in which the books had some advice, all the other problems we had come across hadn¡¯t been anything covered in those books. After all, before the change, there hadn¡¯t been cases of children growing from the body of a young child into the body of a teenager, or maybe even of a young adult, as had been the case with Luna. Nor did their minds get drawn into magical spaces by a Goddess who gave the child lessons and helped their mind to grow at a similar speed as their body.


    Those books certainly didn¡¯t have any ideas on how to deal with a teenager who needed to drink blood to survive or one who could readily dismember a small army with enough time. In comparison, an inappropriate age difference, especially between student and teacher, was an almost mundane problem, even if the idea that the student was the older one and the teacher younger put a slightly different spin on things but the overall problem remained roughly the same. How could one make sure that neither party took advantage of the other or suffered for their involvement?


    In this case, it wasn¡¯t just my desire to protect Lia directly, I also felt a need to protect her indirectly and from the consequences of her actions. If things initially worked out but not in the medium term, if they formed a relationship but crashed and burned brutally, what would happen then? Lia would be hurt, yes, but we, as a group, could also get in trouble. At the same time, I didn¡¯t want to try and dissuade Lia too much, if she was interested in exploring her sexuality, I should want to be supportive, or something along those lines.


    Finding her was surprisingly difficult, given that she was limited to the tower as it was bright outside. However, she was in the last place I looked, on the roof of our tower, leaning comfortably against my throne and using it to access the Oculus. Seeing her like this, apparently aware that she shouldn¡¯t use my throne to sit but still using its magical properties was somewhat amusing to me and I took note of the strange sensations the idea of her on my throne brought forth. There was something within me rejecting the idea strongly, though not quite to the point of violence. Other people, I felt ready to kill for the crime of sitting on my throne but Lia and Luna were different. I¡¯d still mind but the punishment would be far less violent.


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    When Lia didn¡¯t react to my appearance on the roof, I decided to use the alter and see what she was observing with the Oculus, even if I had a fairly good idea already. It was as I expected when I used the altar to see through the Oculus without taking control of it, I immediately saw the five who had just left us, walking through the forest. They were again in formation, protecting Samantha and Daniel in the centre and talking animatedly. A part of me wanted to conjure a scrying construct and find out what they were talking about but it didn¡¯t matter too much, Lia mattered far more.


    ¡°Do you want to talk about it?¡± I quietly asked, curious just how deep in her observation Lia was.


    ¡°No,¡± came her immediate answer, only to be corrected a few moments later with a ¡°Yes,¡± before she settled her mind and gave me her definitive answer, with a ¡°Maybe.¡±


    ¡°Glad that you have decided already,¡± I snarked, feeling amused at her rapidly switching thoughts.


    ¡°I just don¡¯t know,¡± she admitted and I felt her control over the Oculus fade as she looked at me directly, ¡°She¡¯s brilliant, you know?¡± she asked, before launching into an explanation about some fundamental, alchemical principle I barely understood, as I hadn¡¯t spent a lot of time or effort on Alchemy while using it to show just how smart that Samantha was. Privately, I was quite curious what her Intelligence sat as and how high it had been natively but that would be something to investigate later.


    Curiously, Lia¡¯s explanation failed to cover one fairly crucial point, namely, why Lia¡¯s interest had started before Samantha ever talked to her when the woman had only been studying the writing on the wall, something anyone could do. Even a caveman would be able to look at the pretty pictures and be amazed by them, there had been no indication of extraordinary intelligence in sight at that point. And yet, Lia was fascinated by Samantha.


    Still uncertain how to approach the topic, I decided to let Lia ramble on before finally prodding a little, curious about the result. And what a result it was, I had seen Lia in a variety of mental and physical states but the state she ended up in was one I hadn¡¯t seen before. There was some resemblance to the face she made when feeding but at the same time, it reminded me a little of her birth, for lack of a better word. There was a fearful skittishness to her, alongside an appearance of deep, enduring hunger and I began to wonder just what was going on with Samantha.


    Luckily, I didn¡¯t need to wonder for long and Lia started to describe Samantha¡¯s scent, a scent that apparently evoked the hunger of Lia, a slightly different hunger compared to the one she felt sated when taking in the Blood I infused with Astral Power for her. Maybe we should study the differences at some point, whether there was something special with Samantha¡¯s Astral Power or if the attraction came from something else but regardless, I could easily hear just how confused and torn my dear daughter was, especially as we continued to talk.


    There was her primal side, the vampire, craving Samantha¡¯s blood and lusting for her scent. But at the same time, a side of her more in tune with her original, human mentality had a vastly different interest and then it sounded as if there also was some purely platonic, intellectual admiration going on. All those emotions and sensations were completely new to Lia, just like they had been new to me when I first started up Road to Purgatory. Sure, in Lia¡¯s case, it was because she had never experienced that sort of situation, for me, it had been because of my old mental problems but the end result was fairly similar, a confusing situation that could sweep one away rapidly.


    Knowing that there was no simple, obvious fix, I sat down next to Lia and started talking, explaining, trying to convey my old situation to her and how I had ended up in a similar situation to her current one and what I thought might happen, depending on her actions. What could happen, what consequences potential actions might have, though at the end of the day, what I emphasised most was that she was my daughter and nothing would change that. I needed her to know that I¡¯d support her and try to get her through this situation in the best condition possible, even if neither of us knew what exactly this situation was or how it would turn out. But that was just life.

 Chapter 1046

    Given the uncertainty with the group around Jack, I decided that a bit of a distraction would be a good idea. According to the plans they had given us, it would be about a week until they¡¯d be able to return, so after creating a fairly simple cottage with a few prepared runes to provide heat and water for them, we headed out ourselves, leaving a short message in the open part of our tower. They would easily be able to enter the ground level, as they had been before, where they would find directions and a brief explanation in regards to their cottage.


    Parts of that explanation were, amusingly, a bit of a challenge directed at Daniel and Samantha. There were brief, and fairly simple, explanations regarding the set-up, especially when it came to sanitation, with only cursory information in regards to their usage. Instead, there was a simple guide to runes and their functions, giving them just enough knowledge to puzzle together how they could activate the different runic formations in the cottage and how they could power them. If they managed to puzzle it out, they would have a wonderful place to stay but if not, they¡¯d be a little miserable. A challenge, mixed with a lesson and its own reward, it was the perfect set-up, at least if we didn¡¯t come back before them. And even if we did, I had a feeling that I wouldn¡¯t give them additional help, only the guidance I left behind.


    Another challenge, but one that I considered nearly impossible, was climbing the tower itself. I had taken just as much time to prepare security as I had taken to prepare their cottage, so the tower was fairly secure.


    The first obstacle to gaining entry was as simple as it was complicated. The door to the stairs, or rather, the lack of it. Where the door had once been, there now was nothing but the wall and beyond it, where the stairs used to be, the walls were somewhat thicker as I had fused the stairs into them.


    If somebody decided to forgo the ground floor and tried to climb, or maybe fly up the tower, and enter through a window, they¡¯d find trouble there, too. Just as I had done with the door, I had shifted some of the stone making up the other wall and covered the windows, leaving nothing but a smooth and uniform surface. Sure, it made the interior completely dark but with nobody there, I didn¡¯t care at all.


    Lastly, there was the top of the tower, if somebody managed to climb or fly up to it. There just like everywhere else, the entrance into the tower was gone, as was my throne. Only the altar and the statues remained but anybody who decided that flying atop a tower to desecrate a shrine to Lady Hecate was a good idea would likely find the error of their ways shortly after. There was little doubt in my mind that Lady Hecate would register her displeasure immediately, maybe by turning off the magic that allowed the person to fly, therefore damming them to a long fall with a sudden stop at the end.


    To make matters even more secure, I decided to add a few strategically placed Darkness Runic formations that would devour any Astral Power coming into contact with them unless the person doing the manipulation was aware of them and deactivated them first before erasing them with Earth Magic. Both processes needed to occur in quick succession or they would fail, meaning it would be incredibly difficult, if not impossible, for anybody unable to perform Earth and Darkness Magic at a fairly high level. Furthermore, the task was even harder as my Darkness Runes used the different runic script I had picked up on Mundus, making them different from the ones somebody who gained Darkness Magic on Earth would use. All in all, I was fairly certain that the tower was safe, though there obviously were no guarantees¡ªonly a high degree of confidence.


    With the tower suitably secured, we could find ourselves a nice distraction. There were the graveyards to explore, the various military bases and numerous other fascinating locations, all of which might hold some valuable loot, a bit of experience or some other useful goodies we could acquire, depending on the foes we had to face.


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    After a bit of careful deliberation and a few flips of a coin, we decided that the place we wanted to explore was the strange metal gate in the mountain, in other words, the old NORAD complex. Given that it used to be a fairly important military base, in addition to it being a literal underground complex from which I could feel a strange sensation, I was confident that something interesting was going on there. Maybe it was a dungeon, maybe some unique monsters had spawned in the extraordinary complex, with its inherent importance and various surveillance computers, there were almost limitless possibilities and I was curious which one had manifested. Sure, it was also possible that nothing had happened there but, amusingly, I considered that to be the least likely possibility.


    Getting to the complex was straightforward and simple, the pine forests around our tower held nothing that we considered a threat, though we remained vigilant, even if we moved a lot faster than we usually did. That way, we only needed about an hour to get to the gate and could take a closer look at it, after we dispatched a few Undead who had risen after falling at the gatehouse. Luckily, the fence was only covered in barbed wire and used to have some voltage on it but by now, these defences were basically worthless. They stopped us for a few seconds but my magic was easily able to slice through them with ease. With the base being this close to a major city, there were no mines or any other active defences, though even if there had been some sort of automatic gun turrets or something like that, the lack of electricity would have spelt their death knell.


    So, the only thing stopping us from intruding into the facility was the massive gate. And what an obstacle it was, the thing had to weigh a ton, or rather, many tons. Thanks to the Change, it was difficult to tell how heavy they had once been, their density had been radically shifted as different parts of the gate had been altered in different ways, turning what once was a precisely calibrated piece of engineering into a mess of ores, crystals and alloys. The way Alex was staring at the massive hunk of metal was quite amusing as if they were about to take a bite from the metal, but ultimately, we simply cracked open the small door and made our way inside.


    Only to enter an almost empty tunnel, with nothing but a few more dead and Undead airmen to entertain us as we continued to the next blast door, a couple dozen metres further in. The complex was built to withstand everything humanity could throw at it, only to fall to a force nobody had expected, not even the Spanish Inquisition. But then, they were the ones nobody expected, so maybe getting caught off-guard was fair.


    Either way, our advance ended before another massive door and this one held a surprise. Where the first door had been essentially normal, for a piece of metal exposed to the Change and the elements for months afterwards, this one most definitely was not. Instead, I quickly recognised the sensation I felt when trying to stretch my magic into the door and the area beyond. Just as I had sensed with other dungeons before, my senses couldn¡¯t penetrate beyond the door but what we could do, was open the smaller door set within the blast door and pull it open, allowing us entry into the old complex.


    Immediately, a blue box appeared, informing us that we were the first to enter ¡®The Foothold¡¯, as this particular dungeon was called, and would be getting bonus EXP for some time. With our repeated efforts in clearing dungeons nobody had entered before, it would likely be very worthwhile, even if the enemies proved themself to be disappointing in level. But, if they didn¡¯t, this might just be the ticket to the second divide.


    With that in mind, I made sure that all my points were spent, as I had a bad habit of letting them sit and ponder whether to put them into Intelligence as usual or round out some other attribute. Alas, once again, I put my points into Intelligence, taking the trait for having eighty-five Intelligence at level ninety-five instead of putting one into Intuition and one into something like Endurance and getting traits for having Intuition at fifty-five. Endurance at thirty-five wouldn¡¯t be worth a trait at my level, that ship had sadly sailed.


    Regardless, I took the Intelligence and got the trait, namely, Astral Resilience, a trait somewhat similar to the last one I got. This one made it harder for outside Astral Power to influence my magical constructs, so it would be harder for others to alter or remove things I conjured or disrupt my magical formations. Quite neat and useful, though I wasn¡¯t sure if it would be useful in the dungeon ahead.

 Chapter 1047

    Looking around the tunnel leading deeper into the mountain, I needed a moment to figure out why our surroundings looked so strange to me. It should have occurred to me that it wasn¡¯t so much a strange appearance but rather the lack of one that was throwing me off. The tunnel looked plain, with solid concrete walls, coloured lines on the ground to give directions to those knowing how to read them and an endless row of yellow lightbulbs set in steel cages to illuminate this example of utility to the world. Nothing to write home about, absolutely nothing I should be interested in, at least until that moment of confusion passed and I was reminded that the Change had happened and this area shouldn¡¯t look like this.


    Sure, it was a dungeon and different rules applied but should a dungeon look this, well, ordinary? Would the airmen usually working here come through the next moment for one reason or another? Maybe because the coffee was gone or something like that, some sort of major tragedy.


    My confusion was further reinforced when I heard the movement of hard-soled feet further ahead and we all readied ourselves for combat. This was a dungeon after all, even if it looked like the Change had bypassed the mountain for some reason. The expectation was that we would have to fight something, or that there was some challenge involved, though that challenge could change in form and appearance greatly, depending on the circumstances. But, in every case, the challenge would be dangerous.


    In this case, we were met with something somewhat unexpected. A group of four guys clad in green-grey uniforms came jogging around the next corner, all four of them carrying some form of firearm. Two had long rifles, the other two were carrying pistols and all four were shouting their challenges at us. How we were supposed to freeze and get on the ground at the same time, I wasn¡¯t sure, but I knew I wasn¡¯t about to listen to their demands, especially when one of them looked at Lia and let out something about her eyes while starting to raise his gun. Given the short distance, their obvious firearms and the danger involved, I decided it would be prudent to strike first and ask questions later, so I activated overflow, giving me a massive boost to the power I could channel at once, and struck with my Mind Magic.


    As I did, another shout about eyes was raised and aborted when my magic blasted them, sending their minds into the sweet oblivion of unconsciousness. Doing so took a lot more out of me than I had expected, to the point that one of the two in the back was only knocked down, not knocked out and was already raising his gun again when my mind recovered from the moment I needed to channel such absurd amount of power. Whatever the case here may be, these four guys were a lot stronger than expected, though the exact level of the guy didn¡¯t matter so much when Lia leapt forward and made sure that none of us would be shot by tearing the gun from the guys hand with a swift jerk, breaking the hand in the process.


    Sadly, even that wasn¡¯t enough to keep the guy down. Instead, he forced himself back on his feet with a surprisingly smooth move and tried to pull a knife with his off-hand, only for Lia to knock him down again with a vicious punch. When he still wasn¡¯t done, I struck again with my Mind Magic, finally sending him into unconsciousness.


    ¡°Fascinating,¡± I muttered, as I was using Observe to get an idea of what we were facing. My eyes went wide when I realised that the four guys were in the early nineties, just as my own party was. This, undoubtedly, was the highest-level dungeon we had come across just yet, high level enough to challenge us seriously. ¡°Let¡¯s try finding out what they know,¡± I decided and helped Lia and Luna to bind them, making sure that they couldn¡¯t try to harm us or themself.


    Once the four were bound, I decided to wake one of them up, curious about their reaction. This might be a case similar to the one of the Winter Wolves, where the people in this base had somehow managed to turn their base into a dungeon and bound themself to it, evading the change that way, though I was doubting the possibility of that. The only way I could imagine it happening was that a high-ranking officer, somebody with authority over the people here, had been playing Road to Purgatory and when the change hit, they had somehow managed to dungeonify the base and their authority over the personnel in their care somehow transferred the people over, too. It was an incredible stretch but it at least sounded somewhat plausible, though with far too many ¡®somehow¡¯ thrown in.


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    Upon waking, the guy was briefly confused, muttering under his breath, before his eyes focused on me and I could almost feel the distrust and hate radiate from his entire being. Still somewhat slurred from the forced nap, he spat at me that he would not serve us monsters and, no matter which of us tried to talk to him, that was the only thing he told us. That he would not serve us.


    In an attempt to learn more, I tried to use my Mind Magic to compel him to speak truthfully and answer our questions but the only result of that attempt was to have him scream in agony as he tried to break the shackles holding him. He failed, but it looked like the guy had some training in resisting mental control or something like that and was completely focused on evading it. I might have been able to overwhelm his mind but the result wouldn¡¯t have been pretty. The mind was a delicate construct and using overwhelming force had a good chance of ending up with a vegetable, unable to give us more information.


    So, I went even subtler, using techniques similar to those I employed when helping somebody learn magic by pulling them into the Astral River. If I could separate his mind from his body, I had a chance to get the information in a setting he was comfortable with, if the guy was a person at all. By now, and due to his extreme focus and mental resistance, I began to wonder if the guy was simply a construct of a dungeon, without any personality or ego at all. In that case, I doubted he would have useful information, though given that Dungeons were generally all about the challenge, he might have but they would be buried deep within his mind, making it ¡®challenging¡¯ to dig them out.


    Given that dropping the guy into the Astral River wouldn¡¯t help, I decided to take a different approach. We were within a mind after all, so it should be possible to create any environment I wanted, even without the use of Astral Power. In the Astral River, I had mainly created platforms and similar constructs to act as a reference frame for the one dragged in but now, I had to go a lot further. Luckily, my mind was a lot stronger than it had been when I first used the original technique and I managed to prod the guy¡¯s mind into providing the environment, allowing me to insert something of myself to glean information.


    Looking at the environment I was in from the outside, as I was both providing the framing for the environment and interacting with it, was utterly bizarre as if I was looking into a dollhouse while also acting as a doll within that house. In this case, the dollhouse was shaped like a briefing or interrogation-, room here in the base, the image provided by the guy when I used a mental prompt of ¡®debriefing¡¯. However, while that first step worked out quite well, the next didn¡¯t work, despite my success in inserting a copy of myself into the environment, dressed in appropriate apparel to interrogate the guy.


    The moment my copy began talking, the guy noticed that something was up and returned to his chant of ¡®you monsters will not take me¡¯, his conviction strong enough to distort the environment and ultimately overcome my magic, leaving me with a blinding headache. Getting kicked out of another¡¯s mind was never a pleasant experience and having it happen forcefully only made things worse.


    Sitting back, I looked at the pair of bloodshot eyes glaring at me, trying to burn a hole through my skull with pure loathing and hatred.


    ¡°Incoming,¡± Lia¡¯s warning pulled my attention away from our prisoners and towards the corridor, from where I could hear more footsteps now that I was paying attention. Knowing that we¡¯d likely be attacked the moment we were spotted, I readied myself to fight once again.


    Only for my mind to stumble for a second when it wasn¡¯t guys in camouflage uniforms running around the corner to save their fellow airmen but a pair of metal-clad figures, their heads concealed by massive bronze snake-heads.

 Chapter 1048

    There was an aura of menace around the two snakeheads, one that only grew more pronounced when they barked out a word in an unknown language before pointing the two metallic staves they carried at us. Even without the sudden appearance of a glow around the tip of their staves, I could recognise the gesture as one of malice and immediately conjured up a barrier of Ice, unwilling to let whatever they were trying to do hit us.


    And it was a good thing I did. There was an electric buzzing for a moment before a red projectile burst from the staff with a sharp, whistling sound, only to impact the barrier I had conjured and shatter it while unleashing a burst of steam. Most likely, the projectile was incredibly hot but I didn¡¯t have the time to think about it, as the other projectile had bypassed the remains of my barrier and struck one of the bound humans we had just captured.


    With that, the battle was immediately started, the two snakeheads kept shooting, even as Lia and Silva moved into melee with them and they were soon joined by another four of their brethren, all wearing the same metal armour and these incredibly cumbersome heads. I just couldn¡¯t fathom why anyone would willingly wear a headpiece the size of one¡¯s torso into battle. If it was for ceremonial purposes, sure, I could see the use of elaborate crowns and heads but in battle? Foolish, though even as I launched more attacks on these guys, I quickly realised that there had to be more to these helmets. Maybe it was only their bodies that were human and they actually had a snakehead, something of a weird reflection of a centaur, only instead of an entire human torso, they only had the head of a snake.


    Whatever the case may be, these warriors were certainly tough and their staves proved capable of tremendous damage, as I learned when I was glanced by one of the projectiles I was too slow to dodge. It felt as if a burning coal was dragged across my skin and I had no doubt I had been burned by it but luckily, I was the only one in my party who was hit. The others, especially Lia and Sivla, exploited the fairly awkward length of these staves to great effect, carefully keeping track of the tip of them and turning them into nothing but cumbersome melee weapons. It was similar to facing a gun, if the barrel couldn¡¯t be brought to bear on you, the gun was nothing but a badly balanced club with an awkward grip. Unless somebody decided to grab a rifle by the barrel and club somebody with the stock, in that case, it might work as a melee weapon. Until it went off, pointing right back at the user.


    But while their staves were both powerful and useless, their unnatural toughness was a pain to deal with. After their first attack, I tried to stun one of them with my Mind Magic, as it had worked fairly well with the four humans earlier, only for my attack to do nothing but stagger him for a moment as if he had been lightly shoved. Given that I had put enough Astral Power behind the strike to send four people to the ground, having it essentially glance off a single enemy was an unwelcome surprise.


    Similarly, when Lia managed to sever the arm of another, the guy just let out a grunt of pain and kept fighting with his other arm. Sure, using a staff one-handed was ineffective but watching an armless guy be anything but harmless was somewhat disconcerting. Especially when he decided to drop the stick, draw a knife and try gutting Silva.


    Luckily, what their bodies had in toughness and their staves in offensive power were all the advantages they had. They were clearly lacking in training and tactics, otherwise, they wouldn¡¯t have let Lia and Silva cluster them up and force them to fight in melee, allowing Luna and myself to be fairly unthreatened, if not for the repeated staff blasts flying our way, mostly when the guys missed Lia and Silva. But, for all the power these blasts had, they were comparatively slow, just about as fast as a casually launched Icicle and with the glowing staff-tips, they were incredibly telegraphed, making it relatively easy to dodge, at least as long as one was able to move.


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    So, it only took some time and effort to wear down the six snakeheads, the biggest problem was simply the amount of damage we had to do to them to keep them down. Wounds to their limbs were completely ignored, similarly, when Lia stabbed one of them through the chest, it barely slowed the guy down. Their oversized helmets provided fair protection to their heads, so we hadn¡¯t been able to tell if their heads were weak points but when I managed to send an Icicle straight through the armour on one of the guy¡¯s guts, it sent him to the ground and he didn¡¯t get back up. From that point on, we knew what to target and the fight turned out a lot easier.


    When they were finally down, we had a moment to take stock of our situation and realised that it wasn¡¯t just the Snakeheads who had died, but the guys we had bound earlier were just as dead, thanks to stray staff blasts striking them. A quick glance at the notifications revealed that the Snakeheads were officially called Serpent Guards and uniformly level ninety, each of them giving a nice chunk of EXP. If there were any more of them, I would soon reach level ninety-five and if we came across a lot more of them, I might even get to level hundred. Unlikely but it wasn¡¯t impossible if there were enough.


    Before we continued onwards into the strange dungeon, I decided to sate my curiosity and test the guns carried by the four dead airmen. Given that I knew guns had a tendency to explode since the change, I conjured some cover for us to hide behind and a simple stand for the gun, allowing me to trigger it magically, by pushing a bit of Ice against the trigger.


    To my surprise, the result was a resounding bang and a bullet crashing into the backstop I had prepared but when I tried again, the bang sounded different. When I checked, I could only count the gun as a loss, the entire barrel was split and the mechanism was completely broken. I could only shake my head in disappointment, the guns might have been useful, an opinion shared by Alex, who had Lia pack the three remaining guns up, hoping that they could be made useful again.


    Similarly, we decided to check out the Serpent Guards and their weapons. The staves were tested, just like we had tested the guns, but the stick didn¡¯t even fire when I pushed Ice against the trigger. Maybe there was something in the gloves, maybe it had to do with the guard holding it or what we thought of as the trigger really wasn¡¯t and the weapon was wielded with some sort of magical connection. Whatever the case, we were unable to figure it out easily, so we boxed the sticks up, just like we had done with the guns. Curiously, when we used Inspect on the weapons, they came back as M-16 for the rifle, M-17 for the two pistols and Ma¡¯Tok for the staff. But only that, there was no information on damage, nothing but the name, similar to the way it had been when inspecting weapons from before the Change.


    Now having more questions than before, we decided to check out the Serpent Guard¡¯s bodies, curious what we were faced with. At first, we quickly removed the helmets and were faced with fairly ordinary-looking humans, making the strange helmets a pure affectation but when we stripped off the rest of their armour, things started to get strange.


    For some reason, these guys had a cross-shaped incision on their stomach, right where we had discovered their strange weak points and when we investigated, we came across a weird, worm-like thing within that incision. These alien creatures were now dead, likely due to our attacks, but I had no idea what to make of them. Why would anyone run around with a worm in their stomach, or why would people cut open their gut to make room for it? That being said, where did these guys have their intestines and all the usual, squishy stuff housed in a person¡¯s gut? A part of me wanted to start cutting to find out but given that we essentially were on a timer, as the Dungeon Explorer Buff lasted only so long, we decided to push further investigation back and continue on our merry way, curious what other insanities we might find in this dungeon. So far, it was incredibly interesting and I wanted to see the rest of it.

 Chapter 1049

    There were more of the snakeheads. A lot more.


    The further we intruded into the massive mountain complex, the more snakeheads we encountered. Curiously, they were doing something fairly similar to us, clearing and searching the base. From the way we encountered them, I was fairly certain that they had started somewhere far below us, roughly in the direction I could still feel that weird sensation that had originally pointed me towards the mountain, and sent out groups to secure the primary passageways and the exit of the mountain before starting to check individual rooms.


    So, at first, we only had to deal with teams of six, sometimes with a seventh who seemed to be in charge and was somewhat tougher and wearing a golden helmet, instead of the metallic grey helmets the rest of their buddies were wearing. Equipment-wise, they generally had the blasting staves, the Ma¡¯Tok, and sometimes knives or a hand-held, pistol-sized device that sent out electric-blue projectiles, capable of shocking the target. It was painful, almost debilitatingly so, and I had no doubt that getting hit repeatedly would cause serious damage incredibly fast, but a singular hit was¡­ survivable. Which was good, as the charge of these projectiles spread across the entire body, regardless of the location hit. The pain ebbed off somewhat, but even a hit in the foot or hand could be enough to send a person to the ground, at least for a few moments. Sadly, when we Inspect¡¯ed these guns after encountering them for the first time, we only learned that they were called Zet¡¯nik¡¯tel, nothing else. Like the staves, we bagged samples to study later and continued on our merry way, heading deeper into the facility, killing snakeheads by the bushel.


    Curiously, the snakeheads were all level ninety while the gold-headed snakes were all level ninety-five, so if there was one positive thing about this place, it was that we gained a load of experience, especially as we quickly got better at killing snakeheads. It was quite interesting, after those first six, when we discovered that the snakeheads had a major weak spot in their abdomen without any particularly special protection over it, killing them became an interesting exercise.


    With the knowledge about these strange worms hidden in their gut, I started to experiment. Questions I wanted to have answers for were things like, could I use Mind or Death Magic to deal with the worm and if yes, what happened to the snakehead it was hidden within?


    After a few tests, I soon learned that Mind Magic had only inconsistent results. I could use my usual stunning blasts to limited effect when focused on the snakeheads¡¯ guts and in doing so, I shut down part of their impressive resilience but there was no actual damage. However, when I tried some other mental effects, the results greatly varied. Trying to make the worms go berserk generally caused the snakeheads to start screaming in pain and dying soon after but the worms came bursting out of their guts afterwards, trying to bite anything too close to them. Otherwise, if the snakeheads didn¡¯t die, they suddenly became a lot more aggressive, making me think that the berserk-effect had somehow affected them instead of the worms. That, in turn, made the fights a lot harder and I generally had to work with Luna afterwards to heal the various wounds we suffered from them, making me think that the effect wasn¡¯t the brightest idea.


    Death Magic, on the other hand, had a fairly consistent effect when applied to the snakeheads¡¯ guts. If I channelled enough of it, their regeneration shut down and their bodies did soon after, making me think that killing a worm inside of them was deadly to the snakehead, too. Which is exactly what we tried to do, kill as many of these worms as possible, especially as I had no desire to find out what would happen if the worms managed to bite one of us. It was creepy enough to watch them burst from the snakeheads¡¯ guts and try to worm their way into a fellow snakehead, so having one try to bury into one of us was not an option.


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    However, with the plentiful targets, it didn¡¯t take long for me to hit level ninety-five, the level bringing with it some very welcome attribute points. Intuition was brought to fifty-six by the attribute points from Dragon-Touched and my class, granting me yet another trait, namely, Farsight. It improved what I had been doing a lot of, which is magical scrying, by ¡®making it easier to use magical means to observe from a distance¡¯. I wasn¡¯t sure if I liked the description, it made me sound like some sort of voyeur, but I had a feeling it would be useless regardless of the name. Additionally, I decided to drop my points into Intelligence, bringing me to ninety and giving me the Magical Might trait. For once, that one was incredibly straightforward, it simply increased the damage I could deal with my magic greatly. A little boring and limited to combat applications but when fighting, it was incredibly useful.


    Additionally, I got a couple of skill increases but nothing tremendously interesting, as I was mostly using tried and true tricks. Sure, two points in Mind Magic were nice, maybe because I was trying to influence something so completely alien like these strange parasitic worms and three points in Death Magic, as the skill was fairly low at now twenty-seven were awesome but I would much rather increase my understanding of Ice Magic or its Rune Mastery. Sadly, combat with powerful foes was a fairly bad time to experiment, as much as I wanted to. I tried a few things, mostly when it came to redirecting or blocking these staff-blasts with Darkness Magic, especially the Space-Aspect I had recently discovered and that netted me a point but that was it. Maybe I would have to get into the far north and the eternal Ice up there to further my understanding of that particular element.


    Level after level, we continued down and the further we went, the more snakeheads we encountered. Additionally, I began to wonder just how large this base was or if the Change had somehow added additional levels in some way. I wasn¡¯t sure but after we made it down fifteen levels, we encountered something different.


    Well, somewhat different, it was another snakehead but where the usual grunts had armour completely metallic-grey, with their leads having golden helmets instead of grey ones, this guy was completely clad in sparkly gold. Additionally, he was set up in a fairly large chamber, maybe some sort of laboratory, and instead of the usual six friends, he had three times that, making the encounter a massive pain. Having to dodge blasts from six staves was difficult, having to try and get around three times that, with a guy who was a lot better trained than the rest and made his troops use cover and fight tactically?


    A lot harder.


    Maybe even impossible, unless one was willing to cheat.


    Something I was ready to do and these guys really made it a little too easy. They were holed up in a singular, large space and the brief looks we had managed to get made it relatively obvious that there was only one entrance. Sure, that meant trying to charge in was about as suicidal as it could get but the choke point hurt them out just as much as it did us.


    We only needed to motivate them to leave their happy little hideout, and what better way to do that than magical mayhem? I certainly didn¡¯t know of a better way, though I was certain Alex would have some ideas, too, maybe some sort of alchemical grenade or something along those lines. They certainly tossed a few into the room, after I swiftly drew up a runic formation next to the door, allowing me to conjure as much deadly mist as I wanted and redirect it into the room with my Ice Magic.


    It didn¡¯t take long for the golden snake in charge to realise that their position was suddenly completely untenable. They could stick inside and wait until they all died in the mist I conjured or they could charge and try to overwhelm us.


    With those options, it didn¡¯t take long for them to charge, forcing Lia and Silva to fight in close quarters in a futile attempt to keep them boxed in and once that failed, things got really chaotic, really fast.


    Despite all my training, despite all my attributes, I got lost in the chaos, barely able to keep myself safe, to say nothing of helping my friend. Once again, I received a stark reminder of Sigmir¡¯s importance to me and how much the link between our minds had helped me. How two minds working together were so much more than one.


    But before I could get her back, we had to keep fighting.

 Chapter 1050

    By the end of the chaotic melee, I was utterly drained. Losing track of one¡¯s allies, and having to constantly move, dodge and weave to avoid getting shot, stabbed or punched was incredibly stressful, to say nothing of the need to strike back and make sure that it wasn¡¯t my family that was doing the dying but the other guys.


    Only after the numbers had greatly lightened, I could start to make sense of things again and what I perceived at that point was not pleasant. Lia and Silva were both sporting massive bruises and lacerations and the scent of burned hair was hanging thick in the air, indicating that at least one of my furry companions had been struck with one of their energy weapons. Luna, too, looked worse for wear, while the plants she routinely conjured were charred and burned from the blasts sent her way. Without the hyperfocus on staying alive, I became conscious of the signals sent by my own body, telling me that I hadn¡¯t been able to dodge everything either, something truly punctuated by the fact that one of their knives was stuck in my side, like a slightly macabre exclamation mark.


    The further their numbers dwindled, the easier things got until finally the last of the snakeheads was on the ground and I could let myself sink against the wall, my body screaming in pain.


    ¡°We need to hole up and recover,¡± I decided after taking another look at my companions. Their state only drove that need home, so we backed up a bit before breaking into one of the side rooms. Luckily, it was a simple briefing room, nothing special, and we could make ourselves at home for a bit, eating, drinking and, most important of all, recuperating our wounds, restoring our magic and generally coming down from the incredibly brutal fight. We even managed to sleep for a bit, taking turns to keep watch, but we all managed to get some shuteye, which we all desperately needed.


    When we were all recovered, we continued on our path, but only after we checked the bodies of our fallen foes and the room they had been holed up in. Their bodies didn¡¯t yield a lot, only more of the usual stuff we had found before, but the gold-armoured guy, titled Prime by the system, had a few curious artefacts. One was a serpent armlet, another a thick, metal choker while the third was a knife, only this knife had a slit right through the blade, separating it for over half the blade¡¯s length for some reason. I couldn¡¯t come up with any distinct advantage of such a geometry but maybe there was some cultural significance or there might be foes that needed to be stabbed twice at the same time or something like that. There could be a reason, I just couldn¡¯t see it.


    But that wasn¡¯t the reason why these items were so curious. No, that reason came from the simple fact that these items, contrary to all the other stuff we had found so far, were considered items by the system. The blade was labelled a ceremonial dagger, though it was also a highly practical weapon that Lia immediately snapped up and planned on using, while the serpent armlet increased Courage, Charisma and Intuition. In addition, it could be mechanically triggered to snap forward, striking a point in front of the wearer¡¯s hand, right where the arm of a person the wearer was shaking hands with would be, making it an effective tool to attack from ambush during negotiations or greetings. We would have to check out the liquid the serpent¡¯s teeth were releasing but I was about as certain I had ever been of anything that it would be poison of some sort. While I wasn¡¯t certain Luna would ever use the poisonous handshake, the attributes of the thing made it good enough for her to wear. And, in the privacy of my own mind, I was quite happy that my daughter had a hidden weapon, just in case she needed it to protect herself.


    Lastly, there was the chocker, providing solid protection for the wearer¡¯s neck with incredibly fine and intricate metal plates. It was somewhere between scale and chain-mail, but better than either. As long as the choker wasn¡¯t stressed, it was moving smoothly, almost like cloth, but the moment a force was acting on it, the choker solidified, spreading the force across its entire surface, making it incredibly useful as armour. Additionally, it increased the Endurance of the wearer by multiple points. This item, too, was immediately snapped up by Lia who asked me to put it around her neck, looking quite happy to have it. She admitted that these strange worms had come close to burying into her neck during the last fight, far too close for comfort.


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    The room, on the other hand, was fairly bare. The only thing of interest we came across was a first aid kit, containing some medication from before the change. Normally, those wouldn¡¯t be interesting as the change altered them too much and too randomly to be of any use but, according to Alex, these were fairly unaltered. If anything, the medication had been improved by an order of magnitude, to the point that simple bandages could stem even the worst of bleeds and heal deep wounds that would have needed sutures before. It made little sense but given the things we had encountered thus far, the improved bandages didn¡¯t register as overly weird.


    Finally, rested and with our new jewellery equipped, we continued our way downwards, wondering once again just how many levels this base had. More and more snakeheads tried to bar our way, offering up more and more EXP, to the point that I was grinning madly as we continued to battle. Heading down level after level of the base made me go up level by level, something mirrored by my companions. By the time we reached level twenty-seven, I had gained enough EXP to reach level ninety-nine, with only a fairly limited amount needed to reach level hundred.


    But that was when things got¡­ interesting.


    When we opened yet another set of doors, trying to make sure we didn¡¯t accidentally bypass a group of snakeheads who¡¯d gladly shoot us in the back, we saw that one of the walls in the conference room was replaced with windows. Given that we were underground, that didn¡¯t make a whole lot of sense to me, but it was interesting enough to investigate.


    When we stepped up, I was even more surprised as what I saw was far different from what I had expected. My expectation had been that it was an interrogation room, or maybe another briefing room, set up to allow people in one room to observe those in the other room unseen. That wasn¡¯t what they had set up here.


    Instead, the windows allowed the observation of a massive room below us, the room itself easily three stories high and big enough to play basketball or something down there, an insane size for an underground room, especially as it had no load-bearing columns.


    What made the room even more fascinating was that down there, some ten metres below us, was a massive, metallic ring, standing upright, and in that ring was some strange blue thing, it looked almost like some glowing liquid. But given that it was floating in an upright ring, it couldn¡¯t be, unless there was some sort of magical force-field keeping it in. Curiously, there was a metal ramp leading up to the ring, as if people had been jumping through it like circus lions, though why anyone would set up a massive military base with a metallic circus ring at the bottom, I had no idea. If that even was the bottom, we would have to see.


    Last, but certainly not least when it came to strangeness in that room was the guy standing in front of the metallic ring. His pose and entire bearing screamed importance and arrogance, though I couldn¡¯t pin down why I got that impression from this far away. Maybe it was the way he had his arms crossed before his chest, maybe the look on his face, I wasn¡¯t sure.


    His equipment, what we could see from our perch, was curiously similar to the golden prime, only more intricate and elaborate. Where the prime only had golden armour, this guy also had adornments around his arms, intricate, golden jewellery somewhat similar to the serpent armlet Luna was now wearing but, in contrast to all the other snakeheads, he didn¡¯t have a snakehead, simply a golden cap on his head, making me wonder about the differences.


    Whatever the case, this guy was important and his bearing strongly suggested that he was powerful. In other words, this was almost certainly the boss of this dungeon. Now, we only had to figure out the best way to fight him, unless we wanted to simply go down there and brawl it out with him in melee.

 Chapter 1051

    There were many ways with which one could begin an interaction. There were the simple, nonverbal ones, without the need to share a language. A friendly smile, a polite nod or even something more elaborate, like a salute or bow, depending on the circumstances and cultures involved. Sure, they could be misunderstood but generally, they would roughly communicate what one wanted to convey. And then there were the many verbal ways to greet another, from the simplest ¡®Hi¡¯, to more formulaic greetings like a ¡®Well met¡¯ or some sort of ¡®Greetings and salutations¡¯, which was more likely to be used in correspondence but could be used in verbal interactions.


    Of course, those required peaceful intent on the party doing the greeting, otherwise, the greeting could be performed with a weapon and the introduction wasn¡¯t done using one¡¯s name but one¡¯s blade.


    With the guy standing in front of that weird pool of liquid energy, the interaction started with neither of those. It had taken us a bit of time but curiously, there were only a handful of snakeheads between us and the level we had seen from above, allowing us to progress relatively quickly. So, we were somewhat tense when entering the room with him, uncertain if we should attack first, simply because all the snakeheads we had encountered thus far attacked as soon as they became aware of us, or if we should try to see if conversation was possible.


    Given that the guy¡¯s eyes immediately focused on us when we entered the room, though his posture didn¡¯t change one bit, as if he was aggressively ignoring us, I decided that we could try and talk, simply to see if we could learn more. Information could always be useful and if it was a case where the information was superfluous, it could always be recorded down and forgotten.


    However, even if we wanted to see if talking was an option, there was no need to be reckless about it, so we spread out, making sure that we had plenty of room to dodge out of the way of attacks, with Lia and Silva taking up flanking positions while I remained roughly in the centre of our formation, moving to be right in front of the guy. He kept staring at me and while his face didn¡¯t twitch or give away his thoughts, I could feel a faint echo of annoyance seep out of him, though I couldn¡¯t pin down why that might be.


    For a moment, neither party spoke or moved, waiting for the other to make the first move. There was a temptation to make funny faces at the guy, simply make him react and to test the way he did but I managed to smother that temptation and kept staring at him until he acted.


    And acting he did. Suddenly, his eyes flashed with silvery light, faintly reminiscent of my own eyes when I used Overflow and I immediately brought my own Astral Power to bear, ready to break whatever he threw at me but the only thing he did at that moment was bark out a command.


    ¡°Kneel before your God!¡± his voice was strange, inhumanly deep and echoing in a way that I couldn¡¯t make sense of, almost as if the voice didn¡¯t come from his throat at all but from somewhere else. It didn¡¯t really matter where it came from, his command was enough to make Silva bound forward, intent on ripping out the guy¡¯s throat for the blasphemy. Silva wasn¡¯t the most outwardly devout but she was loyal to Lady Hecate and having somebody try to make her submit to a God that wasn¡¯t her Lady? That was a good way to earn yourself a mauling.


    Despite the short distance between them, the guy readily reacted, turning and bringing the golden ornament on his right arm to bear. There was a crimson jewel set in the palm and I could see a visible distortion ripple through the air before it struck Silva, sending her tumbling back. However, while the guy was dealing with Silva, the rest of us were moving, too.


    Luna started slow, her plants growing rapidly to give us cover and support, while Alex lobbed something to the place where Silva was about to land, providing some sort of cushion. Lia and I, on the other hand, moved to strike back while the guy was occupied, with Lia trying to stab him in the side and I sent out a flurry of deadly Icicles, trying to tear through his body.


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    The result of our attacks left a lot to be desired- Lia¡¯s attack was simply dodged, the guy demonstrating an inhuman amount of speed and grace but mine was handled even easier when his left hand went up, this one holding an emerald stone in the middle. However, there was no wave of energy rolling through the air, instead, the guy was enveloped in a glow mirroring the gem and all my Icicels shattered against it, leaving him unharmed.


    At that point, things started to devolve into chaos at a rapid pace, as a group of six snakeheads came barrelling out of the pool of standing energy, briefly glancing at the guy and us before they started to unload their staves in our general direction.


    All of us started to dodge and Luna was the first to take offensive action against the newcomers, using one of her vines to bash them in the chest, sending one of them stumbling back, right into the pool of standing energy. The result was far from anything I could have imagined, instead of being pushed through the veil, as I had expected, the guy dissolved where he touched the energy, causing him to drop with about half his body missing. However that veil worked, touching it was obviously a bad idea, Which was exactly why Lia went on the offensive, trying to shove our additional foes back into it, with Luna¡¯s plants helping her.


    Silva and I, on the other hand, went after the original guy. With physical attacks seemingly impossible, I tried to use Mind and Death Magic, both having some effect, though not as much as I would have liked. Given previous interactions I tried to aim for his stomach but contrary to my hopes, the guy didn¡¯t seem to share the weak point of the snakeheads, leaving me with far too little information to go on.


    But, what I noticed, was that my Mind Magic made him flinch, if only for a moment. With that in mind, I focused on supporting Silva, trying to have her get past his increasingly frantic defence with the device on his right hand. It seemed that those were purposebound, left for the defensive shield while the right had multiple attacking options, though only the kinetic wave seemed to be truly dangerous as it was almost impossible to dodge, thanks to its wide arc.


    He also was able to send out a ray of orange energy that managed to scour a line into the concrete we were standing on when I dodged aside or some sort of blue energy arc Silva couldn¡¯t get completely out of, but she remained standing and fighting, making me wonder what it had done. If anything, the weapon might be designed to affect humans, or even these strange worms the snakeheads were apparently reliant on. It didn¡¯t really matter, though it allowed me to get an attack in, finally drawing some blood from the supposed god. Not that the shallow wound mattered, especially not given that it healed at a visible rate, but it was a start.


    And, given that Lia and Luna were sending more and more Snakeheads back into the blue pool of death, a start was a good thing, these two wouldn¡¯t be able to last forever.


    Amusingly, it was Alex who managed to create the necessary opening, by lobbing one of their curious concoctions at the guy. It didn¡¯t penetrate the shield around him but I had a feeling it wasn¡¯t supposed to. Instead, the gooey liquid the grenade contained splashed all over it, liberally coating it with whatever it was, forcing him to keep the shield raised. That, in turn, allowed me to shield Silva¡¯s approach and she could finally go low and break through the shield, her teeth and the pike on her head joining together to open a hole.


    With that, the guy had a serious problem. It didn¡¯t matter that he had an incredibly potent defence with his personal shield, it didn¡¯t matter that his attacks had been able to keep us off him. Now, Silva was atop of him and some hundred-twenty kilogram of armoured canine wasn¡¯t something you easily dislodged. Her teeth were enough to tear through his armour and more blood was spouting from his body until he managed to push her away with a desperate blast from his hand-device. Which only opened him up to my own attack, as I hadn¡¯t been idle.


    While Silva had been mauling him, I had carefully conjured up a frozen javelin, packing a massive amount of power into the projectile until Silva was pushed away and I could launch it. The moment the path was clear, my spear crashed through his gut, pinning him to the ground like some sort of macabre butterfly. With that, the fight was over¡­ right?

 Chapter 1052

    With the guy¡¯s body pinned to the floor, the fight should have been over. Sure, he was still able to wave his arms and attack with the device on his right arm but really, with the massive hole in his guts, he should have different things to consider. That was made doubly true when one of Luna¡¯s vines came down and thoroughly mangled that arm, leaving him fairly harmless.


    However, contrary to expectations, the fight wasn¡¯t over. Just the fight with the guy. With Silva moving back and Alex helping her to get the goop she had gotten in her fur from the last attack out of said fur, I moved forward a little to assist Lia with the last few snakeheads. Curiously, those snakeheads had turned utterly berserk when their boss fell, leaving me curious why they would fight to die with their leader but given that the leader had claimed to be some sort of God in the beginning and repeated that claim multiple times throughout the fight, maybe I shouldn¡¯t be surprised. Who knew what their religion and mythology said about those who joined their God in death, it might be their ticket to paradise. So, obviously, we readily helped them to punch that ticket.


    Suddenly, I noticed movement out of the corner of my eyes, coming from the broken body of our adversary. There, a worm similar to the ones we had seen crawl from the snakeheads¡¯ guts came slithering out of the mouth of our downed foe, launching itself in my direction with incredible speed. It might have been a little larger than the others, maybe two feet in length and twice as thick as my thumb but other than that, the only distinguishable feature was the frilly head with its fairly massive jaws. At the same time, I felt a Mind Magic attack powerful enough to double as a sledgehammer trying to cave in my skull, or maybe just stun me until the worm could get to me and do whatever it was that these things did.


    Given that I had no interest in getting a first-hand demonstration of the reason the worm came from the guy¡¯s mouth, I had no interest in deep-throating anybody¡¯s worm, I managed to twist away and slap the thing aside with a bit of Ice. Still, the attack left me staggered while the worm was now moving towards Luna, a little further back. Luckily, my companions had heard my distress and noticed the slithering worm. All of us started to move, trying to intercept the worm and pin it to the ground just like we had done with the original guy.


    One of Alex¡¯s grenades spread some sort of goop around, slowing the thing down and giving both Luna and myself more time to strike with our magic. Nobody wanted to get too close to the thing, given that it could stun somebody and given what we had seen, having one of these worms bite you might allow them to crawl into your body. Sure, I might be able to use Blood, Mind or Death Magic to force them out but I wasn¡¯t about to test that until we had no other choice.


    Finally, it was Lia who managed to pin the creature down, quite literally. She had kicked the last snakehead into the standing pool and sneakily launched her knife at the thing, hitting it with enough force to skewer it and even penetrate into the concrete a little. The worm continued to screech in a sharp voice, giving all of us a quickly growing headache but luckily, it didn¡¯t last for long. The wound it had taken was a mortal one, obviously, and finally, the worm stopped moving and screeching. At the same time, the pool of standing energy disappeared with a soothingly soft sound, leaving us in complete and utter silence.


    ¡°That was something,¡± I muttered, letting a bit of tension drain from my body, a sensation that was doubled when I noticed the notification that we had completed the Foothold Dungeon. So, there shouldn¡¯t be any more enemies waiting to attack us, unless they had managed to evade us on our way down. Unlikely but not impossible, though what they would do now, with the strange pool gone and their leader dead, I wasn¡¯t sure. Likely fight to the death, as the others had but who knew?


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    Out of curiosity, I checked what the notification labelled the worm as and was briefly confused that we received EXP twice. Once for killing a host, once for killing what the system labelled as a Goa¡¯uld, though why that was only true for the last guy, I had no idea. Maybe it didn¡¯t really matter, though given their previous behaviour, I wondered if they had been some sort of partnership, similar to the one between Lenore and myself, only without the useful spatial domain into which the other could disappear. Or maybe the connection was less savoury, with the worm driving the body but if that had been the case, what about the numerous snakeheads we had killed on the way down? For them, we only received EXP once, so there might be a difference. Who knew?


    ¡°Any idea what that thing might have been?¡± Lia asked, looking at the worm, unwilling to get too close to it, partially out of caution partially because the slimy thing was utterly disgusting.


    ¡°A more mature version of the worms but why it came from the mouth, I don¡¯t know. We might find some answers when checking the guy¡¯s gut but given that I skewered him, I doubt we¡¯ll be able to figure out the details. But we might want to see if we can use the things on his arms, those might be useful if they aren¡¯t broken,¡± I suggested, moving over cautiously, using a bit of magic to try and see if I could spot any further life signs. Who knew, maybe the guy had multiple of these worms in his body, just waiting to burst out and try to burrow into our bodies. Just the thought made me shiver in disgust and I quickly decided to scan the area multiple times, so I was as certain as I could be that there were no more.


    Then, I checked the fairly delicate devices on his arms. It was a pleasant surprise when they came off easily, allowing for a closer inspection, both visually and using the Inspect ability. Curiously, both items had the same name, Kara¡¯Kesh, whatever that meant, but their usage was entirely different, as we had observed. The one the guy had on his left arm, the shield, could only do that, project a shield to absorb attacks to a certain point. Additionally, it bestowed a slight increase in Vitality to the user, making them just a little hardier. The other was used to attack by converting Astral Power into either the wave of kinetic force we had seen repeatedly, an attack described by the system as a ¡®Plasma Lance¡¯ and one called ¡®Mental Shock¡¯. There was no attribute increase on it, though given its versatility, that was okay with me. We would have to test things a little, see who could use it best and all that.


    Other than those two devices, the guy had a little more bling on him but nothing we recognised as useful. Still, it was bagged before we focused on the now stripped body. Curiously, the guy didn¡¯t have that pouch in his gut, making me wonder where he kept his worm.


    Not that it truly mattered where the worm had been, not unless we came across these things again in the future. For now, we could focus on the area around us and the ring that previously held the pool of energy. But before I was willing to investigate that and start our way back to the surface, I checked my notifications and got a wide, wide grin. Level hundred had been reached and breached, meaning I could soon try to cross the second divide, leaving me quite ecstatic.


    Furthermore, the level-up meant I received another chunk of attribute points but sadly not enough to gain a trait, disappointing me a little. I had hoped I¡¯d get one for reaching forty agility at level ninety but apparently that wasn¡¯t the case, maybe the difference in level and attribute was too big. Hopefully, once I gained the attribute points for crossing the divide, I would get another trait.


    But first, we had things to explore, like that giant ring and the entire complex we were in. Who knew what the system had left for us to find and what had been here before the system changed the world? This was clearly designed after a military base and given that we still had electric lights, it wasn¡¯t a stretch to hope that they had some decent food stores which we could loot. We only had to find the mess and maybe look around to see if they had some sort of supply depot, there could be countless treasures hidden down here in this wonderful dungeon. We just had to go and explore some more now that the worm infection was dealt with.

 Interlude: Shining Beacon on a Hill

    ¡°Jonas, Murray, what do you two think about those three? And their tower?¡± Jack asked his two comrades, uncertain if he should include their other two team members. Usually, he would have asked Sam for her opinion, as he greatly respected the woman¡¯s toughness and incredible brilliance, to say nothing about her other wonderful attributes, but this once, he wasn¡¯t sure if he could trust her to be objective. Both she and Daniel had been drawn in far too quickly for comfort, the lure of lessons in their chosen crafts apparently a siren¡¯s song they just could not resist. And whether that song would lure them into their demise was questionable, Jack certainly wasn¡¯t about to unquestioningly trust those three people whose power was only equalled by their peculiarity.


    That was why he had negotiated an agreement that would place Jonas, Murray and himself in close proximity to their tower, allowing them to keep an eye on their two companions and hopefully intervene if the relationship between them and the three weirdos deteriorated. Or turned into something more predatory, though that seemed to be already happening if the interactions between Sam and that Carnelia were any indication. A small voice, somewhere deep within the back of his mind, questioned if his motives were truly as altruistic and borne from worry for his friend and not from something more possessive. If the reason why he didn¡¯t want to have the young, and admittedly powerful, woman be near Sam was because he, himself, wanted to be in that close, maybe even intimate, position with Sam. Only, he couldn¡¯t teach Sam about Alchemy, he barely understood what it was in the first place and even if he knew more, he had long accepted that Sam was smarter than him. Even if it occasionally burned his ego.


    ¡°They seem to be¡­ interesting,¡± Jonas admitted, ¡°I¡¯m not sure what to make of them, they certainly have power in spades but I¡¯m uncertain about the usage of that power. So far, we have seen that they readily built themself a monument, a symbol of their own power and maybe even superiority, though the tower might stem from some other impulse. If that Jade was a guy, I would call the tower a giant phallic symbol and make jokes about the need to compensate but given that she¡¯s not¡­¡± he paused, shrugging in uncertainty, ¡°I just don¡¯t know. We¡¯ll have to see what else they do and what they¡¯re willing to teach Sam and Daniel.¡±


    ¡°Indeed,¡± Murray spoke, his voice stoic as usual, ¡°Their power is unquestionable, something we simply cannot contend with easily. And the only things we have seen thus far are those they want us to see. I doubt they were unaware that their tower would be akin to a beacon, allowing all those in a large area to see it and be drawn. The bright, shining light made sure of it. You might say, they built a shining city upon a hill, even if their city is only composed of one building.¡±


    ¡°You mean to say that they didn¡¯t build that tower for themselves but for other people? To see what is possible and aspire to become something more and take back the world or something along those lines? An example and a beacon to guide the way of those watching, in a fairly literal sense?¡± Jonas asked, his mind racing at the implications. There was a certain logic to it and it would explain why the walls on the ground floor were apparently the equivalent of a library, allowing Sam and Daniel to recognise important lessons in their respective arcane crafts immediately. In some ways, it fit with their other information, especially if one considered that one of them, most likely Jade, had to hold a legacy, though that didn¡¯t explain why the two daughters had their own inhumane features.


    So far, the only people with such features were those who had a legacy, though there was an incredibly remote possibility that Luna, the younger of the two teenagers, was human. Only those silver eyes, alight with an internal glow, spoke of something else but those might come from some ability or trait or something like that. Not necessarily the sign of a legacy.


    Carnelia, on the other hand, couldn¡¯t be considered human. The solidly red orbs of her eyes, the strangely leathery skin, visible even from a distance, to say nothing of the sharp claws and wicked teeth, all of those spoke of some form of predator, certainly not of a human.


    Jack, hearing that idea, was even more conflicted. On one hand, it was a good thing if these people were only interested in the continued advancement of the people around them by giving them a, literally, shining example of what was possible. On the other hand, it didn¡¯t fit with the behaviour exhibited by Carnelia. Additionally, there was that uncomfortably, squirming sensation sitting deep within his gut, warning him of what might be happening here. It might be nothing, just a figment of his imagination, but his instincts had saved his life before, he wasn¡¯t about to discard them without need.


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    ¡°We should talk to Weir and Hammond, they might have heard something about those three before this mess started,¡± Jonas suggested, knowing that Jack was prone to striking out on his own, without concerning himself with the opinions of others. Hopefully, the two legacies would be able to give them some additional information about the people they were dealing with.


    It didn¡¯t take long to find Weir. As almost always, the older redhead was working on one of her projects, directing people and using her abilities to bolster their efforts. It was a fascinating process to observe, those receiving the benefit of her tricks had a certain grace and, for lack of a better term, a smoothness to their actions that made it a joy to watch. It also didn¡¯t hurt that they were accomplishing double the work those without the benefits did in the same time while expending less energy. All in all, there was a reason why nobody complained about the slight discomfort that came with allowing somebody to influence their minds and bodies, if only in a coordinating fashion as Weir did.


    ¡°Jack, what ails your spirit?¡± the older woman asked, her voice calm but with a melodic quality that made listening to her a joy. ¡°And where are your other two companions, I doubt you left them behind somewhere.¡±


    ¡°No, they¡¯re getting some additional supplies and talk to Madison in scheduling. We came across¡­ something,¡± he paused, gathering his thoughts to explain while Weir was waiting patiently, knowing that trying to hurry him up would only backfire. ¡°An opportunity, that¡¯s for sure, but, you know that proverb about a crisis being a mix of danger with an opportunity?¡± he started to ramble, getting an amused smile from her, ¡°Well, it feels like that, it might be an incredible opportunity or it might be lethal danger and I¡¯m not sure which it is.¡±


    ¡°Maybe you should give me some details. That way, I can give you my opinion and we go from there, what do you think?¡± Weir asked, the smile getting just a little wider as her amusement became more genuine.


    ¡°Well, you¡¯ve seen that glowing eye across the mountain, right?¡± Jack asked, getting a nod. Everybody had seen the thing, it was nearly impossible to miss. If not for the fairly strict scheduling, more than his own group would have gone there but thankfully, the schedule prohibited some of that.


    ¡°We went there, checked it out. And we met Jade,¡± he explained, getting a look of incomprehension from her, until he recalled the full introduction the woman had given, ¡°Jade Morgana, I think she called herself, or The Pale Lady, you could easily hear the capital letters in that title,¡± he added, and those words had a remarkable effect on the usually completely composed Weir.


    ¡°Oh, dear,¡± she muttered, barely keeping enough focus to retain the technique used to support the workers, ¡°If it is the Morgana I¡¯m thinking about you are right, danger and opportunity describe it perfectly. Tell me, was she incredibly petite, with pale, blue skin, occasionally glowing eyes and black hair that held countless glimmering motes of multi-coloured light?¡± she asked, getting nods from all three men.


    ¡°Well, damn,¡± she muttered, ignorant of the wide eyes the soft curse coming from the usually perfectly composed woman drew, ¡°Morgana, as she was known during Road to Purgatory, might have been the most divisive player, Traveller, of us all. Barely a week went by without Pantheon Entertainment showing off some of her actions, even if most of what she did was seen as an example of the freedoms, or rather the lack of limits, we all enjoyed. After all, who is insane enough to dissect people while they are still alive, or experiment with some strange magic on them, only to cause them to explode in a shower of gore? If it was some game where you are sitting behind a screen and press a button to experiment, okay, I could see it. But you need to remember, Road to Purgatory was as immersive as our new real world is,¡± she paused, looking at the three in turn, ¡°You need to remember that Morgana was perfectly willing to have rivers of warm blood run down her hands as she cut people apart. But you should also remember that she was, by far, the strongest spellcaster amongst the Travellers, with nobody coming close to the magnitude of power she managed to achieve,¡± she let out a sigh, looking into the distance, ¡°I¡¯ll have to talk with Maggy, she¡¯ll want to know about this.¡±

 Chapter 1053

    The way back to the surface took, amusingly, a lot longer than the way down. Sure, on the way down there had been numerous foes waiting for us to appear and fight us to the death but on the way up, there were even more rooms, waiting for us to check them out. One of the things to check out was the strange standing ring, though nothing we did seemed to have any effect on it at all. To all appearances, it was completely inert, though incredibly hard, possibly impervious to all sorts of magic. Or it might simply be part of the dungeon, not something we were supposed to interact with at all, or it could lead to an entirely different part of the dungeon as some sort of portal, though one only accessible if the right conditions were met. Whatever the case may be, as we currently were, none of us had an idea how we might be able to interact with the thing.


    But there were other interesting things to investigate on our way back to the top. And, as we learned early during our ascent, it paid to be thorough. That lesson was taught to us by a hidden safe I had to carefully crack open with my magic in what appeared to have been the office of the base¡¯s second-in-command. Within, we found a total of ten metal bars, each the size of a loaf of bread and a lot heavier than one would think at first glance.


    Five of these bars, each stamped with their weight at four-hundred and thirty ounces, a serial number and a seal I couldn¡¯t place, were made of gold, while the others, stamped with similar specifications, were made of silver. At least according to identify, otherwise, I would have been hard-pressed to differentiate the metals from other materials. Sure, I knew that gold was incredibly dense, explaining the weight of the bar, but without some sort of encyclopedia and a well-calibrated scale, I couldn¡¯t do anything with that information. Similarly, I knew that silver was heavier than, say, aluminium but the exact factors had been forgotten as unimportant. Curiously, I noticed that their interior, when analysed with Earth Magic, was incredibly uniform, making me wonder if the dungeon had blocked the material-altering effects of the change or if the metal had been generated by it in the condition we found it.


    And those bars were only the first interesting find which we happily stored in our magically expanded bags. Another similar find was made in their machine shop, where we came across their CNC milling machine and its numerous blanks. Sure, those blanks lacked the sheer dignified class the gold bars were radiating but they were just as useful, if not more so. Sure, the gold and silver would likely be useful for my enchanting but the blanks, made of steel, aluminium, brass and a couple of other alloys could be used by Alex for their alchemy. Neither the blanks nor the bars were something we could readily make more of, nor could we hope to stumble across similarly pure materials in the outside world, thanks to the change. Thus, these finds, represented a unique opportunity we wouldn¡¯t want to squander. An opportunity to push my ability to enchant items and Alex¡¯s ability to make new and interesting things with their alchemy to the limit and allow us to make something entirely new.


    Compared to the metals, the fully stocked mess was almost an afterthought. Sure, getting fresh food in a fairly wide variety was awesome, especially as the place retained its electricity, preventing spoilage. Amusingly, the mess also answered the question I had before, whether the dungeon created the metals or simply relics from before the change by giving us meals-ready-to-eat, alongside a few diary products. Those, by themself, weren¡¯t all too interesting, though I was somewhat curious how they¡¯d taste. No, the interesting parts, especially when it came to the dairy products, were the expiration dates. While I had no idea how long the MREs would keep, and thus what their expiration dates should be, I was fairly confident that no jug of milk bought before the change should have an expiration date in December of our current year. If that were the case, the milk would have had to have an expiration date almost a year in the future when it was packaged, not something I could believe. Thus, the milk, and likely the rest of the things we found in the dungeon, had been created by the dungeon in some inexplicable way.


    Maybe that also explained what we found in one of the laboratories. There, placed within a heavy metallic box, we came across a metal I had never even heard of. Naquadah, the label called it, a description confirmed by Inspect, but other than that, we got nothing. Just from its weight, it might be some strange alloy of gold and tungsten or something like that, or specially treated tungsten with Naquadah being some sort of brand name, like Aspirin being a brand name for a specific organic acid the name of which I couldn¡¯t quite recall, something starting with an A in any case. But people didn¡¯t know the chemical name, they knew the brand name, even if they used an off-brand product, they¡¯d call it Aspirin. Maybe this was the same. Or it might be an alien supermetal, secreted by these strange stomach worms we had found in the various people here. Who knew, I certainly didn¡¯t and wasn¡¯t too interested in finding out. Dissecting worms, or frogs, was far too close to biology-lab in high school for comfort. Not that the dissection was the problem but the high school part.


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    Maybe I could figure it out in the future, or Alex could make something with it. It certainly wasn¡¯t going to stay here, not if it might be something completely unique. Plus, we had some space remaining in our bags, even if things started to get a little tight, especially after our visit to the mess and the electrician''s workshop. In that workshop, we had come across another fairly wide variety of metals drawn into spools of wire. The largest was copper, unsurprisingly, drawn into spools bigger than the size of my waist but it wasn¡¯t the only one. We also found silver, gold and platinum-wires, alongside different alloys, all of which might be useful for some future enchanting project. Or to make jewellery, there, we most certainly could use the wires, if we wanted to.


    And it wasn¡¯t just a wealth of material items we came across. We stumbled across another confirmation of the idea that the dungeon was making the stuff we found down here when Luna found a couple of papers in one of the laboratories that partially described the Kara¡¯Kesh we had looted from the head-snake. While the documents didn¡¯t have any details on the construction, there was quite a bit about the fundamental usage, though large parts of it went over my head. Those papers added another objective to our investigation, namely, checking out the various laboratories and papers in the hope of finding something useful, adding even more rooms to search to our trek up the seemingly endless stairs.


    Amusingly, I started to wish for one of the snakeheads to have hidden somewhere, just so we had something else to do, other than check out the countless storage rooms, laboratories and barracks. Alas, we had no such luck, be it good or bad, and didn¡¯t find any foes on our way. Just the wealth of material items and information, both of which should be considered a treasure in and of itself.


    When we finally got back to the surface, the sun was already peeking out from beneath the horizon, making us briefly consider if we should try and make haste back but the few pink clouds in the otherwise bright, blue sky quickly put that idea to rest. We wouldn¡¯t make it, so we should just stay here, in one of the remaining shacks and wait out the day. Which was exactly what we did, sleep in shifts for a few hours, until we were able to get back to our tower during the night.


    Once there, I quickly put things back in order, wondering who had visited the tower in our absence. There were a few things out of place but nothing had been damaged, or even truly changed. Whoever it had been, they had been fairly respectful, though curious. I might have to take a closer look at some later point but, for now, I had other things to do. Namely, retread to the top of my tower and get comfortable on my throne.


    The divide was beckoning and I truly wanted to challenge it, at least after putting the last two points I had open into Intelligence, pushing the attribute to ninety-five- I briefly considered whether I should put them into Intuition, just as I always did, but decided against it. Having my primary attribute at ninety-five, hopefully, one-hundred and five after crossing the divide, bringing the attribute higher than my level, was too big a temptation to pass up on. Sure, sixty Intuition sounded great, as did seventy after crossing the divide, but it lacked the same magnitude.


    The trait I received, Improved Recall, wasn¡¯t all that impressive, at least on the face of it. Improving my ability to recall new memories sounded good, but I wasn¡¯t sure just how effective it actually would be. I already had a fairly good memory, even if the occasional detail slipped from my mind, and now, my memory was supposedly even better. I¡¯d have to wait and see.


    But regardless of my newly improved memory, now, it was time to challenge the second divide. To reach for even more power and break through the obstacles placed on my path by the system. It was a hurdle but only by leaping across it could I reach the higher path I wanted to tread on. A challenge and an opportunity rolled into one.


    And I could hardly wait. Taking another deep breath, I drew out the power I held deep within me as I leaned back on my throne and sought to become something new. Something MORE.

 Chapter 1054

    As with so many things, drawing upon the draconic power deep within me to challenge the second divide started slowly. At first, I could barely feel anything, only my finely honed senses to recognise arcane phenomena and Astral Power allowed me to sense any change at all but with each passing minute, the effect became more pronounced. With each beat of my heart, I could feel the blood rush through my body, carrying with it such mundane, but utterly necessary, resources like oxygen and energy but also the magical elements present within my body, like the powerful Astral Power I could wield. Drawn from the Astral River by my soul through the lens of my mind, it was infused in every part of my body but nowhere was it as present as it was in my Blood. Well, maybe in my hair, thanks to the Magical Hair trait, but the power within my Blood was so much more vibrant than the one in my hair, linked to my vitality as it was.


    And now, as I was drawing upon something deep within me, I could feel another energy flowing through me, an energy which had already been present but far less prevalent and obvious than it was now. The same energy that made my body so much more powerful than it should be also sharpened my mind and bolstered my soul to an utterly inhuman degree by giving me attributes far beyond what I should be able to have. It also had a faint presence within every magical spell I used, every bit of my Astral Power had that other energy attached to it, making my Astral Power more potent and domineering than it would normally be. The power of a dragon, first infused into my being when the Nidh?gg had touched me and later nourished as I gained levels here on Terra before being added to the foundations of my Arcane Path. It was just as much a part of me as my Astral Power was, maybe even more so, and now, it would form my gateway to cross the second divide.


    That power first manifested in a slowly rising thudding sound, a slow and steady counterpoint to the beating of my heart, much akin to drums, calling the brave warriors to war. The further the beating sounds rose, the louder I could feel my heart beat in response and the more power I could sense.


    Soon, the drumming beats of war were joined with another sound, one amusingly familiar to me, especially here, at the top of my tower. Even now, with the magical sounds filling my ears and drawing out some of the noise coming from the real world, I could feel and hear the wind billowing around the top of my tower, bringing with it a first taste of winter. It wasn¡¯t cold enough to start snowing, at least not at the altitude we were currently at, but there was a faint hint of ice and frost in the air, one I was enjoying greatly.


    At the end of the day, no matter how far I improved the various affinities I had picked up on, I was a creature of Darkness and Ice, someone who enjoyed the freezing cold of winter and the enveloping, oppressive darkness of the night. It was where I had been born and, if I had anything to say about it, it was the conditions I would die in, slipping away to rest endlessly beneath the eternal ice.


    Darkness, as so often, was primarily linked to emptiness and the void, which was what I could sense shortly after the wind from within me joined with the wind around me, forming a rapidly cooling cocoon around me and my throne, a shell of freezingly cold wind, now heavy with snow as my Astral Power started to manifest around me, taking on my primary elements. Before, there had been a faint light coming from a partially obscured moon and countless stars in the sky far above me. But now, I could almost feel the oppressive darkness, that which could not be set alight, even by the raging fires of a star, close in on me, shrouding the cocoon and turning the winds around me into a deep, pitch-black scar in the world. Within my shell, I was perfectly isolated, listening to the howling winds and the beating drum within me, calling me to rise above.


    Once I felt that sensation, I started to follow it, drawing on the draconic power welling up from within my body alongside the Astral Power I habitually used. The floating sensation I experienced thanks to the power radiating out from me was somewhat different compared to the sensation I felt when using my cloak to fly but there were similarities.


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    Maybe the biggest difference was that the cloak was drifting with the wind, using it to overcome the pull of gravity, while this sensation was more one of dominating the world, to the point that it simply could not hold me down. Directed levitation instead of riding the wind, though I wasn¡¯t quite certain which I would consider more pleasurable.


    The higher I rose, the more of the world I was aware of, until I reached the edge of the endless darkness, where the frozen winds of the sky and the endless night of the void touched. There, in the furthest reaches of the bleak, black sky, I could let myself soar, swimming through the air and riding atop the wind, no longer in need of domination after escaping the tenuous grasp of the earth.


    Far in the distance, I could see a glimpse of a familiar outline, that of a massive mountain piercing the sky. Even now, after my mind had drifted far from conscious thought, I could remember that mountain, I could remember soaring above it until I laid my head down on it to rest. It was my home, it would always be where I would belong, it was the place I yearned for and wished to return to. It sang to me, calling my name in the wind, despite the seemingly infinite distance between us.


    Knowing where my mountain was, seeing the place I yearned for and dreamed about, I pushed myself, my wings starting to beat the air into submission in order to push my body towards it. Astral Power surged within my body, infusing my Blood with purpose and strength, allowing me to push my body further than it would naturally go. Making me stronger, allowing my wings to pummel the air and push my sinuous form towards my mountain.


    As I soared towards my destiny and destination, I let a thunderous roar emerge from my maw. It was a warning to the heavens, daring them to get between me and my mountain. Moments after the roar ripped through the endless beyond, into the clouds far below and the void above, I let out a very different sort of roar, this one not a mere sound but a threat far beyond anything my voice could speak into existence. With a sound much akin to that of the freezing wind, a billow of snow and ice spilt forth, interlaced with tendrils of the infinite void, greedily devouring what little warmth was up here. Anything touched by this breath would be frozen for all eternity, unable to die, unable to live, eternally preserved in its temerity, a warning to all those who dared defy me, trying to block my path. Nothing would stand between me and my mountain, nothing in this world or the next. I would reach it, nothing else was acceptable.


    There was resistance all around me, trying to hold me back, even after the breath of frost, cold enough to freeze the air below me. Maybe staying pure to the eternally freezing void was not the right call, maybe drawing upon more than merely the elements I was naturally strong with was necessary. Sure, my soul was primarily infused with the cold of the void, while my body was thrumming with primordial power but I was more than my body.


    My mind was just as important a part of me as my body and soul were, my infinitely creative mind, capable of drawing upon the vast diversity of powers encompassed within the Astral River. Each beat of my wings pushed Astral Power outwards, and each swipe of my tail sent out streamers of power. My flight was cloaked in eldritch lightning as the powers I called upon became manifest and the sky was shrouded in an aurora of arcane power, seeking to reach my mountain.


    For a moment, I felt that strange resistance weaken under my power, making me push further and further, as hard as I possibly could until, finally, I felt the resistance give way with an utterly silent and yet deeply resounding crack. The sound wasn¡¯t one transmitted through the air, it was something deeper, something more meaningful. And yet, despite the shattering of that barrier blocking my way, the distance between myself and my mountain remained, I was unable to get any closer as if the world was expanding just as fast, if not faster, than the thrumming beats of my wings could carry me.


    Suddenly, I could feel the sky around me fade, the cocoon I had been enshrouded by fade away, leaving my body sitting upon my throne, my mind reeling and my soul filled with longing for my mountain. For a moment, as I sat there, feeling both elated and utterly disappointed at the same time, I realised that I was not ready yet.


    But I would be. Maybe not soon, but I would return to my mountain.

 Chapter 1055

    With my mind back in my body, I began to take stock of what had changed with me, as I was now becoming cognisant of the fact that the shattering sensation I had experienced was the breaking of the divide. I had overcome the challenge but I had not yet reached my destination, my mountain, but I would. For a moment, I could easily see Sigmir before me, sitting comfortably and inviting me to rest my head in her lap, to make myself comfortable as she welcomed me home but, sadly, no matter how much my heart yearned for her, no matter how deeply etched into my mind her image was, it was just a memory, powerful but ultimately ephemeral.


    On the other hand, while my mind was refreshed by memories of my love, my body felt strangely worn and exhausted, reminding me that crossing the divide was not an easy feat. However, compared to crossing the first divide, the second had been less disrupting on my body, mainly because I didn¡¯t get the same sort of adult growth spurt. Sure, I had gained an inch or three, making me just a little taller than average, but it wasn¡¯t as extreme as it could have been. Maybe that was for the best, getting used to my different body had been fairly annoying and somewhat time-consuming.


    Other than the slight increase in height, there was no obvious difference with my body and while I felt a little more aware, that may stem from the attention I paid to my body at the moment, not from any actual change.


    So, unable to pin down any major changes with ease, I decided to look at the notifications I had gained from the system, curious what those would tell me.


    <table style="border-collapse: collapse; width: 99.9983%" border="1">


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 99.0065%">You have crossed the Second Divide.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 99.0065%">By crossing the second Divide, your body was strengthened by the Astral River and the draconic Power flowing within you. You gain +10 to all Attributes.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table style="border-collapse: collapse; width: 99.9983%" border="1">


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 99.0065%">Class Change</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>By crossing the second Divide, your class has changed. The Dragon has taken to the skies and bellowed a challenge at the world. You are now a Draconic Sorceress of the Frozen Sky, granting you the ability to find your Wings and Breath.</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 99.0065%">Your new class grants you an attribute bonus of three Intelligence, two Intuition, one Vitality and one Endurance every five levels.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table style="border-collapse: collapse; width: 99.9983%" border="1">


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 99.0065%">Trait gained</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You gained the trait: Aerial Grace</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 99.0065%">For having 50 Agility at your level, you gained a fitting Trait. The Trait Aerial Grace grants you the natural grace of a flyer while in the air. It also lets you control your landings, so you may land on your feet every time.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table style="border-collapse: collapse; width: 99.9983%" border="1">


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 99.0065%">Special Ability gained</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td>You gained the Special Ability: Mind over Matter</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 99.0065%">For having 100 Intelligence at your level, you gained a fitting Special Ability. The Special Ability Mind over Matter allows you to influence all matter within a small radius around yourself, using nothing but your Mind and Magic.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table style="border-collapse: collapse; width: 99.9983%" border="1">


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 99.0065%">Trait gained</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 99.0065%">


    You gained the trait: Mental Alacrity


    </td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 99.0065%">For having 105 Intelligence at your level, you gained a fitting Trait. The Trait Mental Alacrity increases the speed of all your mental processes by a small amount.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table style="border-collapse: collapse; width: 99.9983%" border="1">


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 99.0065%">Trait gained</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 99.0065%">You gained the trait: Arcane Perception</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 99.0065%">For having 65 Intuition at your level, you gained a fitting Trait. The Trait Arcane Perception improves all your senses, especially those focused on arcane matters.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


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    All in all, the gains from crossing the second Divide were interesting and most certainly useful but not world-changing. Sure, the massively increased Attributes I¡¯d gain every five levels were great, while the traits and the Special Ability I gained for reaching attribute milestones were very welcome but there were no traits I gained specifically for gaining my new class. Maybe I would have to find, or make, those traits on my own. It would make sense, given that the notification told me that I had been ¡®granted the ability to find my breath and wings¡¯, implying that I didn¡¯t have it before but had it now.


    Given the dream, or maybe calling it a vision would be more appropriate, I experienced while crossing the divide, I could readily assume that the breath was a dragon¡¯s breath, maybe something similar to the flame I had experimented with back on Mundus, while the wings would most likely be the wings of a dragon. That, in turn, made me wonder about an entirely different question, one I hadn¡¯t consciously focused on before.


    In the dreams and visions I had experienced during my time on Mundus and since the change, there often was a component of flying, which somewhat linked to my preference for high places, something I had for about as long as I could remember. But, at the same time, there also had been elements of claws and that breath, elements I would usually associate with dragons. If those elements had been new, I might have considered them to be linked with the Dragon-Touched trait I gained on Mundus, but thinking back, those elements had been present in these strange visions since coming to Mundus, maybe even before.


    Closing my eyes once more, I tried to remember dreams from my past and youth, trying to find anything that stood out. There was one where I had been jumping and bouncing like some bouncy-ball, trying to reach the sky. I couldn¡¯t have been older than five or six, and yet, the element of flying was present in the dream, if in a somewhat odd fashion. Similarly, I had a vague memory of a dream in which I shot out of some cave or whole, it might have been underwater or something, propelling myself forward with claws and a long, sinuous tail but the dream was otherwise completely vague. Could those dreams, now many, many years in the past, have been some sort of omen for the future? Had there been some sort of fundamental part of me that was a dragon all along, as ridiculous as that sounded, and now, with the system, Mundus and the Astral River coming into my life those traits could take shape?


    Letting out a tired huff, I tried to make sense of the idea, only to discard it after some consideration. The past didn¡¯t truly matter, there were no lessons to be learned, nor did I feel as if there was some great mystery to be found there. I might have been a dragon all along, as ludicrous as that sounded, but without magic, I was limited to a human, or elven, shape. Or maybe my Soul was that of a dragon, which would mean far less to me, as backwards as that felt.


    My body, after all, had changed quite a bit over my lifetime. Growing up, training, occasionally getting injured, and even things as minor as a haircut could alter one¡¯s body and, maybe more importantly, one¡¯s perception of it. However, could one¡¯s soul truly change? It was difficult to say, there were some parts of one¡¯s soul that I felt could change, especially when it came to magical affinities. But could the fundamental aspects of it be changed? That, I doubted but at the same time, there were numerous fundamental aspects of a body that couldn¡¯t be changed, they were decided at conception and remained unalterable from then on. They might be covered up, like putting in coloured contact lenses but fundamentally, some parts of one¡¯s body were innately defined at a genetic level. Maybe the soul was similar to this idea, some parts of it were changing as the soul matured, whatever that meant for souls, while others remained as they always had been.


    Which made me wonder about the mind and its connection to body and soul, but that was a question I had been fighting with ever since I started to consider this whole complex interplay. Mind, Body and Soul, the three fundamental aspects that made a person who they were, but how they interacted with each other, how they could be interacted with and acted on, those questions were mysteries, even if I had magical abilities that could interact with each aspect in some way.


    Mind Magic, Blood Magic and Soul Magic, they all worked in fundamentally different ways but there were some similarities between all three of them. Maybe I should try and see if I could find more commonalities between them, hoping that those would allow me to draw conclusions about the interactions of the other three.


    Or maybe I should try and focus on understanding the different magic abilities first, before trying to use them to understand the fundamental aspects of a person. Whatever I decided, there was a lot of work to do before I could consider myself a master of this particular aspect of magic. Maybe I should stick with elemental magic, at least for a time, and take a bit of a vacation from these deep topics.


    Nodding to myself, opened my eyes and decided to experiment a little with that new special ability I had gained, now that my Mind had gained mastery over Matter.

 Chapter 1056

    Mind over Matter was an interesting ability. Its most basic and obvious function was to give me telekinetic control over anything within a metre of myself, though the acceleration I could impart was fairly limited. It was difficult to estimate, but after a few simple experiments, I thought it was roughly one and a half times as strong as gravity. Meaning I could lift things at about half the speed they would have when falling down, as I needed to overcome gravity¡¯s pull first. That part was somewhat boring, though there were some fascinating possibilities, as it wasn¡¯t limited by a bootstrap-paradox as my other magic was.


    In other words, I would be able to use my telekineses to pull myself out of a swamp by my own bootstraps or levitate an object I was standing on, at least if the object wasn¡¯t too big. In regards to size, once an object left the one-metre radius, my control deteriorated until it suddenly faded completely, making me think that I needed to keep the object¡¯s centre of mass within my radius of control. A few quick tests confirmed that hypothesis, giving me a little more to work with, though I quickly realised that controlling macroscopic objects wasn¡¯t the best use of the ability, it worked best in the other direction as it was only limited by my mind.


    That discovery came when I began to wonder what the definition of an object was, only to realise that my ability wasn¡¯t ¡®Mind over Object¡¯, it was ¡®Mind over Matter¡¯, making the question of what objects I could control irrelevant. It was entirely a question of focus and perception, meaning as long as I could narrow down my focus, I could pull two parts of an object in two different directions, neatly separating it with a fine, smooth line.


    Telekinetically cutting through objects was a lot harder than I would have thought as I needed to focus on the object¡¯s internal structure, not just the outside, unless I wanted to slowly pull parts away from the surface, carving my way through the object bit by bit, but the possible ways to use the ability were already looking incredibly promising. It would take time and effort to master it, as it took a sizable amount of focus and magic at the moment, but if I managed, I could see it as one of the strongest abilities possible. After all, magic and non-physical forces were the domain of my magic and now, I could use my Mind over Matter to give me mastery over all physical matter, giving me protection from all physical threats. At the end of the day, what couldn¡¯t touch me couldn¡¯t hurt me.


    Sadly, while a part of me wanted nothing but to play around with the new trick some more, exhaustion was making itself known and soon, I realised, dawn would come and make my position on my tower somewhat uncomfortable, if only due to reflections. Maybe polishing the top of my tower to a mirror finish and shine had been a dumb idea, even if it looked pretty.


    Down in the tower, I made myself comfortable and started to look inward, trying to get a better idea about the process of finding my breath and wings. It might be some sort of physical transformation, at least for the wings, or maybe some magical trick I needed to figure out to make the breath, though I was somewhat at a loss about where to start, especially with the wings. Well, unless I managed to find an old can of RedBull or something like that. I highly doubted it would work, but at the same time, it might be the kind of thing the system would do, simply because it would be amusing to some strange, higher power.


    So, instead of flailing around with Blood Magic and trying to somehow give me wings, however those would look like, I decided to focus on the breath and how I wanted it to work in both form and function.


    The obvious clue came from the vision I experienced and the images it contained. A combination of Ice and Darkness, combined into a breath that wasn¡¯t just cold, but that was actively devouring the heat from its environment, making it even colder. Maybe, if I studied the interaction between the concept of Heat, its removal via the concept of Devour and, lastly, how that could lead to the concept of Stillness, I might be able to create a breath attack that was more than cold, one that literally froze everything it touched in a conceptual stillness, making it as if time itself had frozen for them.


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    I doubted that I would be able to actively influence time like that, at least not easily, but there was a distinct difference between freezing somebody or something to a point where time didn¡¯t pass for them and making it so time actually didn¡¯t pass. Sure, it was a distinction more important to an outside observer, but it was an important one, at least when dealing with concepts.


    Thinking back to my magical work on Mundus, I remembered the flame I had created there, the Ice Magic construct that actively froze the world around it. Opening my hand, and thinking of that cold flame, I tried to conjure it, only to find my efforts somewhat stifled. I remembered how the flame had looked but when I tried to recreate it, I realised that the Astral River here on Terra was subtly different, making a direct recreation difficult, maybe even impossible. What I needed to do was recreate the result, though the process to get there had to be different from what I used on Munus. Not really a problem, reshaping the process would allow me to incorporate the various new affinities and magical abilities I had learned, but it would take time, as everything did.


    After a few hours of experimentation, relaxation and sleep, I decided that it was time to catch up with the others. Show them my new trick and maybe ask if one of them had an idea how to utilise it best. While neither Luna nor Lia had the same breadth of experience when it came to magic, both of them had their own strengths and perspectives, giving me something else to think about. Additionally, there was no telling what Luna might have learned from Lady Hecate, who was an entity worthy of my respect.


    Not solely because She was a deity but because She was an incredibly experienced spellweaver and an excellent teacher. Maybe Her divine domain or portfolio helped to make Her the masterful spellcaster She was or it was the other way around and She was only a deity because of her mastery over the Arcane Path. Both were viable options and, amusingly, it hardly mattered which one was true. At the end of the night, Her mastery over the arcane arts was incredible and I could only hope to match Her some day. Maybe surpass Her in a few specific areas but those were dreams for the future. The far future, most likely, but dreams nonetheless. Once I revived Sigmir, I would have something else to focus on and obsess over.


    Finding Lia and Alex was, as so often, trivially easy. I only had to follow the strange scents and the occasional bang from one of their experiments and there they were. Granted, now that we had dedicated laboratories that was even easier, but the scent gave it away every time.


    To my amusement, it wasn¡¯t only the two of them, for once, Luna and Silva were inside, too, both of them looking fairly irate at our mad-alchemy pair. It only took me a moment to realise just why they were angry, it looked very much as if some of the gunk Alex had used to overwhelm the shield generator in the Foothold splashed onto Silva, causing some complications with her fur, despite their best efforts to get it out right afterwards.


    Now, Silva¡¯s normally pristine coat, which she took quite a bit of pride in and which she had Luna or myself brush and wash regularly, wasn¡¯t quite as pristine any longer. Now, numerous tufts of hair were stuck together, giving her a look faintly resembling a plucked chicken, with spots of skin showing where the fur had been pulled away. To make matters worse, the fur still there was now a sickly, almost neon-green colour, making her look awful.


    Quickly pushing away my amusement, knowing that neither Luna nor Silva were currently able to see the humour in the situation, I stepped up, offering my help, even if I wasn¡¯t quite sure how I might be able to. Alchemy was, as I had long since realised, an entirely different field compared to my magic, based on the Astral River as it was. Still, what I could do was conjure water and train the precision of my newly discovered Mind over Matter skill, giving it an incredible workout. Who would have expected that the first, somewhat serious, use of an ability that powerful was to clean the gunk out of my canine companion¡¯s fur?

 Chapter 1057

    Picking alchemical gunk out of Silva¡¯s fur and helping her wash up afterwards provided an adequate method of keeping my hands, and parts of my mind, busy and occupied while we talked about my experience crossing the second divide. Given that it would come up fairly soon for the others, with different magnitudes of ¡®soon¡¯, I felt letting them know in advance how the process had played out for me was a good thing, especially once I began to include descriptions of the way I had seen crossings of that divide on Mundus as I wasn¡¯t completely certain my own experience was all that representative. Somehow, I doubted it was, at least when it came to the larger scale of things, but then, I also had a feeling that none of the others was operating on an average level.


    Once that part of the conversation wound down, it seamlessly switched into questions and ideas regarding the idea I could create my own wings and breath, even if we all bemoaned a distinct lack of hard information. What were the boundaries within which my wings had to exist and what conditions did an attack have to meet to be considered my breath? Or was there some sort of predetermination going on, which had already decided what those draconic features would look like and I was now challenged to ¡®find¡¯ them, maybe quite literally? If so, would I have to search the sky to find my wings and maybe try to create a maximally destructive magical attack to find my breath? Or maybe face a foe guarding my breath and destroy it with such a maximally destructive attack?


    The longer we all talked, the less confident I became in my original idea that I needed to design the specific attacks. Not because I felt it became less plausible but because with each additional idea, I felt like the probability of my initial assumption being correct lessened, though I wasn¡¯t sure if that sensation simply came because of some sort of ingrained idea that all hypothesis without any actual supporting evidence were equally unlikely or if there was something else going on.


    Luckily, there was no need to come up with a conclusion at this point in time, especially as it was entirely possible there was no such conclusion to be found. It might simply be a case of any result I ended up finding to be ¡®good enough¡¯ to satisfy the current status of my class but, depending on the result I found, I might find myself curtailed in the future. As in, if I didn¡¯t find a breath suitable for a powerful dragon, I might be unable to become that powerful dragon or if I failed to find my wings, I might become nothing more than a lindworm or something along those lines, a terrestrial dragon, unable to soar into the sky.


    The mere idea of becoming landbound sent an unpleasant shiver down my spine, memories of soaring through the sky within the safety of my Hallow, back on Mundus, of the few visions I had experienced in which I had been a dragon and flying around, even of my current ability to fly thanks to my cloak all swam through my mind, beckoning me to return to the sky. Maybe to conquer the skies for myself, to rule them as the Dragon of the Frozen Sky, bringing the northern wind with me wherever I may roam. It was quite the pleasant image and generally a wonderful idea, one I could see myself pursuing, though I would have to make sure to find some way to allow Sigmir to join me, once I managed to bring her back. Maybe have her ride me, as deliciously naughty as that sounded.


    But before I could consider anything of that sort, we had things to deal with in the present, which, presently, were the people who had entered the area around the tower. My abilities to create alarm wards were getting better and better, ever since I had learned the Rune for Space, allowing me to incorporate the runic magic into the original, fairly arcane, wards I had taken from the Grandmother¡¯s Grimoire. It was quite interesting just how different the magical styles were, to the point that I needed a lot of time to try to figure out how the protections actually worked. If I wanted to try altering their function or make my own versions of them, I would have to resort to starting from first principles, likely getting something fundamentally different from what I now had.


    This would probably be a good thing, depending on how widespread the style of wards in the grimoire actually was. If it was considered common, there¡¯d likely be numerous ways of circumventing these types of wards out there, granted, they would be widespread in a different world, but I wasn¡¯t confident how many legacies were out there and how many of those would be able to recreate the magic they had experienced on Mundus, especially when it came to teaching others. It might be that there was little to no transference of knowledge, with people learning to make their own way from the legacies who had experienced Mundus or it might be that the other legacies taught the locals exactly what they had learned, with little deviation from their inherited style. Or, more likely, that there was a mix of both, with some people teaching from first principles, as I was trying to, and others teaching them exactly what they, themself, knew, without any deviation. Both styles had their advantages and disadvantages, but I was fairly confident that using first principles to teach others to find their own path would be the better solution. It was not that I could use the other style simply because my path was my own and utterly dependent on my affinities, some of my traits, and even my attributes, but that was an entirely different story. It hadn¡¯t been taught to me, so I doubted I¡¯d be able to teach anybody else how to tread my path.


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    Either way, I had a feeling our new students might have arrived, so we should go downstairs, into the library with its attached shrine and greet them. Amusingly, Lia immediately jumped up the moment I told her that my wards had been tripped, quickly moving over to the stairs as if she was completely unable to pace herself.


    Tragically, at least for dear Lia, there was no sign of our original visitors. No Samantha, no Daniel, none of them, instead, there was a different group of five, all of them male, all of them lightly armoured and sufficiently well-armed to deal with anything that might crop up in the immediate area. A quick, and very well-concealed Observe informed me that these five were all fairly low-level, at least for explorative groups who might run into unexpected trouble, especially further up in the mountains where the foes were generally tougher. Down here, in the city, the five people in their forties could roam fairly unimpeded, at least as long as they were cautious and carefully circumvented some of the hot-spots we had come across, but up in the mountains, they¡¯d likely be turned into food for some critter they didn¡¯t even see coming in short order.


    Maybe giving them a little scare to drive that point home would be a good idea, but from the looks of it, Lia was already considering just that, or maybe my dear daughter was simply annoyed that her high spirits had been shattered by an acute lack of Samantha.


    ¡°And who might you be?¡± I asked, letting myself fade into easy visibility in the middle of the library, getting a few amusing exclamations of surprise when I did.


    ¡°I¡¯m Trevor, we were just looking around the area,¡± one of them introduced himself after their initial surprise had worn off, ¡°Care telling us what this is?¡± he prodded, while two of his companions started to move around the room, staying near the walls.


    ¡°This, as in, ¡®this world¡¯, this, as in, ¡®this tower¡¯ or this, as in, ¡®this situation¡¯,¡± I asked, not completely at ease with their behaviour. It felt slightly predatory, making me reach for my Mind Magic, just in case I needed an immediate way to take all five of them down at once. Mind Magic, while lacking in lethality when used on its own, was incredible when it came to incapacitating foes, which worked just as well as killing them. Maybe even better, as an incapacitated foe could be killed easily while getting information from a dead foe could be a serious hassle.


    ¡°This shit, why is some blue bird sitting in some giant ass tower,¡± one of the leader¡¯s companions growled, moving around the room, too, joining his buddies in what I could only call an encirclement. That was the moment in which I decided that enough was enough and lashed out with my Mind Magic, sending four of the five into immediate unconsciousness. To my surprise, the last one was only staggered, making me wonder just how he had managed that. A moment later, before my own surprise had fully worn off or he could recover from my attack, Lia appeared behind him, an arm wrapped around his neck and choked him out, leaving him absolutely no chance to fight back.


    ¡°Well, I guess this happened,¡± I shook my head, already considering how to deal with these fools. Killing them would be so incredibly easy, as would using them as test subjects. But maybe there was a better way, I would have to think about it. For now, we had a few nicely appointed cells, complete with bare stone furniture and soundproof walls. Sitting in those with nothing but water for a day or three wouldn¡¯t kill these five and it gave me more than enough time to make a decision.

 Chapter 1058

    After putting the nice people who had decided to visit us into our holding cells, I had to decide what to do with them. Normally, I would readily use them as test subjects, or even kill them outright after making sure that their actions had been what they appeared to be, but in our current situation, I wasn¡¯t confident that it would be the best step.


    Sure, it would deal with them, meaning they wouldn¡¯t be able to attack us again, but at the same time, there might be others like them, waiting for the group to come home. If they knew that these five had made it into the tower, or even near the tower, but hadn¡¯t managed to get back out of the tower, it would point at us as aggressors. That, in turn, could cause their community to see us as hostile and attack, forcing us to kill numerous humans, as I had no interest in leaving this area. Thus, I ended up in a familiar situation, one where I needed to know more to make an informed decision. Funny how that happened, endlessly gathering information only to come across yet another gap in my knowledge.


    Maybe once Jack and his group were back I could ask them about the local survivor groups and gather some information that way, or I could use a scrying construct or the Oculus, both would likely be able to let me learn more, though not necessarily about the needed details. It wasn¡¯t as if these five had been wearing identification badges or something, letting me know where they came from or what I would have to expect from their community. I couldn¡¯t even rely on their behaviour being some sort of indication of what type of community they came from, they might simply keep their ill behaviour away from home, following the old adage about not spoiling one¡¯s own nest. In that case, these five could be seen as trusted pillars of the community back home, only to abuse their power in the worst sort of ways while out and about.


    In regards to their powers, I had done my best to learn as much as possible about them, without waking them, that is. I had no intention of letting foes into my tower unless I was in complete control of these foes but, sadly, the cells we had built had their limits. I couldn¡¯t be completely confident that they could stand up to everything and anything these people could throw at them unless I learned as much as I could.


    And so, I started with using my Soul Sight in an effort to learn their affinities if only to make sure that they wouldn¡¯t be able to open their cells with some magical trickery I wasn¡¯t aware of and using Blood Magic to gather information from their physical state. We even stripped their bodies down to nothing, just to make sure they didn¡¯t have additional gear secreted, or rather stuffed, away, waiting for us to let our guards down so they could stab us in the back. I even considered using Mind Magic to figure out something about their intentions but for that, I would need them to be awake.


    Alternatively, I really wanted to try a few things using my Mind Magic, mainly the sort of mind-reading the ability¡¯s name seemed to imply. So far, I had mainly used it to strike with fairly blunt force or to impart simple commands the opposition couldn¡¯t resist when in combat or to draw voluntary subjects into a mindscape, allowing me to direct and guide them. Now, what I had in mind was something similar to the second application, only that I didn¡¯t care about the subject¡¯s willingness, nor did I seek to guide them, I wanted to draw information directly from their mind. If nothing else, it would allow me to ascertain their intentions, they might have been planning to do nothing more than pressure and intimidate me. Not the most pleasant thing to do, certainly something I would condemn but, at the same time, I had used my own power to do so before and shouldn¡¯t judge too harshly.


    Of course, if their intentions had been to rape, pillage and burn, my response to them would inevitably become harsher, even if I had pillaged before. Burning, not so much, mostly because I still wasn¡¯t comfortable with Fire Magic and raping, well, that didn¡¯t fit my style. I could recognise the utility of the act as a tool of terror but there were better ways to sow fear, at least in my opinion. Maybe I would have to test some of those ways on these five if their intentions had been malevolent enough to warrant such tests. Time would tell but, for now, time told me something else entirely, namely, that there were even more people approaching my tower.


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    Again, I moved to welcome these visitors down in the library and, again, Lia joined me with gleeful anticipation, hoping that these visitors would be more palatable than the previous ones. Apparently, she had taken a brief sip from the guy she had chocked out but the blood had not been to her taste, whatever that meant in this context. Too little Astral Power in the guy¡¯s body, maybe, or too much Vitality, maybe? Or there might be some sort of Light Affinity that made the blood taste foul to her vampiric sensibilities, I wasn¡¯t sure. It might even be something along the lines of virgin blood tasting better, which I considered to be a fairly strange idea, and yet, it had also been prevalent in various stories from before the change. Either way, her primary, and almost sole, source of blood so far had been me and she had never complained about the taste. It might simply be that she was used to the taste of my blood and power, given that she had never really known anything else. Maybe I would find out in time, as Lia herself learned more but at the end of the night, it didn¡¯t really matter.


    With a small, mental exertion, I opened the doors of the tower, just as I felt the people outside move towards them, allowing them entry. This time, I didn¡¯t conceal myself, I simply waited in the middle of the room, curious about who these visitors might be.


    The slight tension within my body faded when I recognised Jack at the front of the group, with the rest of his people following behind. While I didn¡¯t trust these five, they were a lot less problematic than the fools we had put into the cells upstairs, if only because we already had an agreement made. They might break it but the agreement offered them distinct advantages, meaning they would be fools to casually break it.


    Though, given the apprehensive look in Jack¡¯s eyes, I had a feeling that they had talked to one or more of the legacies, not that I begrudged them the action. Gathering more information was always a valid course of action, especially if you didn''t know enough about your potential opponent, not even if they were a friend, foe or neutral competitor.


    ¡°It is good to have you back,¡± I greeted them, just as Lia approached Samantha, getting an amusingly mixed look of apprehension and curiosity from the older woman, at least older in comparison to Lia. She truly didn¡¯t know what to do with Lia and her enthusiasm but I had a feeling she wasn¡¯t all that opposed to it, or she might simply felt swept away and off her feet by Lia¡¯s charisma. Just another thing I might want to study in the future, just how strong the influence of traits and attributes in interpersonal relations was. And, in comparison, how strong had it been before the change? Sadly, when it came to data from before the change, I doubted I would be able to get any decent information, simply due to a lack of objectivity.


    People had charisma and certain internal traits that made them more or less attractive to certain individuals, some of those traits had even been fairly universal but it wasn¡¯t as if there was a databank somewhere, listing just what made a person attractive to which sort of people. Sure, there were primitive attributes, traits that might indicate that a person would be advantageous as a mate to give advantages to future children but, luckily, humans were a little more complex than other animals. Or maybe we simply liked to make things complicated, either could be the case.


    Sure, now, with the system, one could likely make a list of traits and attributes, allowing one to form comparisons and contrast between the aggressor in the relationship and the pursued but without a chance to compare it to the days before the system, such a list would be fairly worthless. And I had a feeling that there wasn¡¯t a real need for one, not if the positive traits were as straightforward as the negatives, like my own Ruthless trait.


    Even as my mind was pondering these questions, I went through the usual dance of greeting and recognition with Jack and the rest of his group, before offering them a brief tour through the shelter I had prepared for them. Afterwards, we could get to the meat and potatoes of the exchange, lessons and, hopefully, information on the local conditions.

 Chapter 1059

    ¡°So, Jack, what can you tell me about the local survivors? Hopefully, there are some, even with the oddity of the city,¡± I paused, realising that Jack and his merry band might actually know what happened here during the change, how two cities that should be some hundred-odd kilometres away from one another came to be in roughly the same place. And, maybe more importantly, what else had changed with the cities? Was it only the buildings that were moved, the man-made structures and such, or was it everything, including the mountains, forest and whatnot? By now, I had almost given up trying to make sense of the geographic alterations to our world, at least in the short term, but maybe there was some rhyme or reason to them that I just couldn¡¯t see because I hadn¡¯t observed them. But maybe Jack, or one of his more intelligent companions, had seen something that could shed some light on his. However, instead of adding yet another question before Jack could answer my first one, I decided to wait.


    ¡°Well, sure, there are more of us,¡± Jack began, apparently uncertain just how much detail he wanted to give me, or maybe just trying to put their situation into concise terms. After a moment, he began to explain in relatively general and almost vague terms that their group had coalesced mostly from survivors of Colorado Springs who had gathered in one of the formerly wealthy neighbourhoods and fortified the area, a task made easier by the fact that it used to be a gated community. Sure, there was some damage to the gates and walls but with those already in place, creating fortifications was fairly simple.


    From the sound of it, the place was run on something resembling a military hierarchy, with a guy named Hammond, a former Air Force officer of some sort, providing the leadership and letting those under his command. Not a terrible system, if the guy in charge was as capable and benevolent as it sounded but unchecked power could easily corrupt, not that I was a good example of uncorrupted power. Luckily, it sounded as if their system was currently in a stable state and it likely would take time for that to change. Time measured in months, if not years, at least as long as that Hammond remained alive.


    Curiously, it turned out that Hammond was not actually a legacy, though he seemed to have teamed up with one early on, giving him some advantages but his advance was his own. Impressive, though ultimately meaningless. What made him special was the fact that he managed to gather and lead a fairly large group of people to the point that it sounded as if they¡¯d be easily able to make it through the coming winter.


    It was somewhat amusing to watch Jack and the others become more and more disbelieving as they saw the cottage I had built for them, especially when I demonstrated my recreations of modern amenities. Things we had all once taken for granted, like running water or a flushable toilet, had been cruelly taken from us by the change, those little things that were what made almost all modern people live lives the kings and queens of old would have envied. Sadly, while these modern conveniences increased and enhanced the quality of life one enjoyed, they were far from vital so I doubted a group focused on pure survival would take the time to recreate them. Hel, even I had only recreated those on a whim while working on an entirely different project. Otherwise, I would¡¯ve continued to magically clean myself, not mess around with conjured water, as pleasant as a shower could be.


    During the show and tell, their explanation about the other survivor groups in the region continued and there were quite a few of those groups around. Most of them sounded as if somebody with a modicum of skill and charisma, in some cases more of one than the other, had taken charge to give the necessary leadership and guidance. Or rather, those were the groups that had, well, survived without disintegrating or simply dying off, the groups with somewhat effective leadership. Truly, a classic survival of the fittest, at least on an organisational level. On an individual level, luck and connections could easily play a role, as evidenced by somebody like Daniel who had been lucky to become part of the group I was now introduced to as Search Group One. Numbered by random chance, as it turned out, not by some perceived order of ability or competence, as disappointing as that was.


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    Regardless, while they didn¡¯t have meaningful information on all the various groups in the region, as there were some twenty-odd groups of various vastly differing sizes around, I learned enough to realise that there was no true cohesion. The people might unite under some truly competent and powerful leader who gave them a vision of something better, a role might be able to take if I were so inclined, or they might unite if faced with an outside for, some organised force that necessitated unity to survive. Again, a role I could take, if I were so inclined but, just as I had no interest in becoming some sort of messianic figure to lead the downtrodden into a glorious future, I had no interest in becoming the opposite and force them to fight against some sort of magically rased army, similar to what I had created near the frozen citadel. Not that I could create such an army in this area, I lacked both the power and the necessary spirits to bind, but that didn¡¯t mean I couldn¡¯t create something interesting if I were to put in the effort. Alas, I had better things to do with my time and, maybe, that was for the best.


    For a moment, I considered how to best incentivise the five of them to give me more information about the region and what had happened during, or maybe right after, the change. How the geography had been altered and their experience with it, because I simply couldn¡¯t accept that an alteration of the level of shifting cities around wasn¡¯t a mind-bending experience. So, given that I wanted them to continue talking, I decided to continue the tour, even if doing so exposed more of my tower than I had originally planned. Not that I would show them everything, especially not the currently filled cells, but to show them some of it so they kept talking? That, I was quite willing to do.


    As we walked up the stairs, after I had to magically undo a lock or three, I brought up the question and got fascinating responses. It turned out, that each of their responses was somewhat different, though it sounded as if the differences were, at least partially, based on geography.


    Jack, for example, had been at his cabin to fish when the change hit, not even noticing the initial change. Apparently, he had been somewhat drunk during that particular night and only realised that something utterly bizarre was going on when going out of his cabin in the morning and finding that his fishing hole was gone, replaced by the back garden of a fairly nice mansion. Given that his cabin was some thirty miles up in the mountains, fairly remote and isolated, his confusion was quite warranted, especially when he later explained that the entire mountain range had shifted. And not in some subtle, small manner, some of the peaks he recognised from hiking trips should be dozens of miles from here. To make matters worse, he had no idea what happened to the place these mountains had been taken from, or what had happened to the things that used to be where the mountains now stood. To my faint amusement, he readily admitted that even trying to figure that out was just giving him a serious headache, so he focused on more important things, namely his daily survival until he managed to meet up with and join a group of survivors, one of whom was Sam.


    Who readily picked up the tale, giving me her own impression of the change, this one as seen from within the city. Most of it sounded very similar to my own experience, with blue flames and fires breaking out all over, but where the blue flames in my home town had been somewhat subdued, the flames here seemed to have been a mechanism for the insane level of geographical alteration we could see.


    Space itself, as described by Samantha, had burned away, only to be replaced with something else as the flames faded away, the description enough to give me a small headache, one that wasn¡¯t alleviated when Daniel, Murray and Jonas told me about the things they had seen. It was all, quite frankly, a massive mess, one that even I couldn''t make much sense of, especially with only a few eye-witness reports to go by. Maybe if I visited some of the local mountains in the coming days I could find something interesting, or in the city, if I managed to find more spots where reality had shifted around to bring the two distant towns together.

 Interlude: This is Halloween

    The Bearers of Lady Sunna¡¯s Word were hunting the Arch-Heretic, seeking to purify her with their Lady¡¯s light. It was their solemn duty, to prevent humanity from falling into the darkness, they needed to cleanse them with the blessed Light of Sunna. They had chosen to leave their New Dawn, despite knowing that the good people there might fall from the Lady¡¯s grace in their absence but given that their Lady had bestowed a Divine Quest upon them, there was nothing that could be done.


    To Legate Lorgar, their leader, it was also a case of pride to hunt down the Arch-Heretic, especially after he had realised just how rapidly even a brief visit from that monster could spread its corruption. The Arch-Heretic had only visited New Dawn for a few days but those few days had caused over a dozen people to reject Sunna¡¯s light before it could ever reach them and instead grasp for the fel powers of the Arcane in some vain attempt to make themself feel safe. They gave up the liberty of being within Sunna¡¯s light to embrace the perceived safety of arcane powers, ignorant, or maybe simply indifferent, to the fact that those who gave up their liberty for safety deserve neither.


    Sadly, he and his small group weren¡¯t enough to guide the fools back onto the righteous path, even after they managed to hunt down some of the dark abominations created by the Arch-Herectic, the foolish people of New Dawn hadn¡¯t agreed to tear down the den of heresy the Arch-Heretic had raised, claiming it to be a shrine and thus protected like any consecrated shrine within New Dawn. The audacity of these people, to compare that thing raised by the Arch-Heretic to the blessed shrine of Lady Sunna was almost physically painful to Lorgar and it was only due to the restraining influence of his companions that he hadn¡¯t tried to strike down the blasphemers. These children didn¡¯t know any better, they were simply misguided by the Arch-Heretic, making their solemn duty even more important, to hunt that thing down and prevent it from spreading its creed even further, to cleanse the world from this filth. It was necessary, even if it meant to leave the people of New Dawn behind. Fiat Lux, they would bring the light.


    They had been pushing hard, trying to follow the cold trail of the Arch-Heretic, a feat only possible thanks to the light of Lady Sunna guiding them but even with that light, it was no an easy task. But the harder the task for their Lady, the sweeter it would be to bathe in the Lady¡¯s light at the end, letting the burning light cleansing the heretic they were hunting wash away the hardship they were enduring on their path.


    But now, there was something strange in the air as they approached a wide-open valley. There was mist everywhere, even during the day, making it hard to see and even blocking Sunna¡¯s blessed light from above. It was damp, cold and thoroughly unpleasant in a purely physical sense the true hardship was something entirely different. That came from the cloying scent of heretic arcane magic in the air, a scent they had all come to loathe and associate with the Arch-Heretic, the greatest source of this disgusting power in this world, as had been revealed by Lady Sunna. Burning that foul creature away would stem the tide, even if it wouldn¡¯t cleanse the spiritual filth spread by it on its path through the world. If they couldn¡¯t take that first step, they would be fighting a perpetual crusade, only able to treat the symptoms instead of curing the disease at its source.


    However, even if treating the symptoms wasn¡¯t as satisfying as curing the disease would be, didn¡¯t mean they would ignore the symptoms when they were severe enough, as was the case in this accursed valley. Or rather, this corrupted valley filled with its infernal mist. Prayers to Lady Sunna had revealed that the cleansing of this valley wouldn¡¯t be an easy task, it would require to reach the source of the corruption and burn it away. Only then would the mist fade away, allowing nature and life to return to this valley.


    And so, with duty in their heart, their group of five made their way through the mist, calling upon their Lady¡¯s power to remain comfortable, even if the mist tried to sap their spirits and drain what hope remained. Regardless, they would prevail and continue on, even if they couldn¡¯t see the light right now.


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    ¡°By the Light!¡± Helos growled, his face taking a slightly unhealthy pallor as he spotted something in the mist, a strange face grinning at their group with a grotesque smile. At his exclamation, all five of them readied themself for combat, only for nothing to happen. Moments passed as they waited with bated breaths, when an eerie laughter passed by their ears, carried by a cold, otherworldly wind. The mists seemed to be content to ignore the wind, not moving beyond their constant, unnatural billowing but to their group of five, the wind felt like the precursor to an inevitable attack. But nothing happened, nothing, but the continued laughter mocking them.


    When another of these faces appeared, Garand let out an angry growl of Fiat Lux and a ray of light shot from the fiery wheel they were all bearing, scouring a line through the mist, only to reveal that there was nothing there, nothing but shadows and illusions. Speaking yet another prayer to Lady Sunna to thank Her for the gift of power they had received, they started to spread the light, seeking to drive away the mist and reveal what foul creature had attacked them. As their voices became louder, the light around them intensified, shining like a beacon and burning away the mist around them but no matter how much power they poured into the attempt, no assailant became visible.


    ¡°They fled,¡± Lorgar growled, righteous fury filling him as he realised that their assailant had achieved their goal, delaying them and making them waste their divine power while their unseen assailant had cowardly fled. They might have won the battle, but in concerns to the greater war, they had lost. ¡°We need to continue. Fiat Lux!¡±


    The other four echoed his exclamation and they continued onwards, deeper into the valley and the mist. At times on their way, they saw more of these strange, grotesquely grinning faces in the mist but after that first time, they weren¡¯t foolish enough to waste power, instead they launched simple projectiles at the faces, nothing beyond some rocks they could pick up everywhere. If their stones hit, they would finally have a chance to see their hidden assailant but until that happened, they would press forward.


    Until Jarulek crashed to the ground, letting out a yelp of anger at the sudden attack. Again, they all moved in unison, one checking on their fallen comrade, the others preparing to repel attackers, as difficult as that would be in the otherworldly gloom. Despite the repeated curses coming from Jarulek, Marduk didn¡¯t take any chance with his comrade, checking him over and helping him back to his feet. However, despite the quite audible crash, the only lingering damage was cosmetic, a strange mixture of black and green slime covering Jarulek¡¯s armour and spreading a disgusting odour. Again, there was that strange wind that wasn¡¯t and its accompanying, mocking laughter, making all five of them burn whatever creature was heckling them in the blessed light of Lady Sunna.


    ¡°Leave it, these heretics only want to delay us further,¡± Jarulek growled, getting a nod of acceptance from the others, aware that this wasn¡¯t ordinary bad luck, there was something foul going on here, even if nothing was visible, nothing but a patch of muddy ground where his boot had slipped away and sent him sprawling.


    Suddenly, the laughter in the air changed, becoming more menacing, no longer as mocking and airy but harder, harsher. And coming from the other direction, from behind them.


    Four of them turned around, checking where the laughter was coming from while the last one was watching the other direction, making sure that it wasn¡¯t some sort of ploy to distract them and attack while their backs were turned. But, as far as Helos could see, there was no ambush of that sort waiting here, nothing but that endless, cloying mist.


    On the other hand, Lorgar, staring in the other direction, could make out a shape in the mist, something more than the usual grotesquely smiling faces carved in round shapes, something solid and distinct. Skeletal, sure, but something physical.


    Sharpening his eyes and drawing on some of Lady Sunna¡¯s divine power, he could finally make out their assailant, a large skeleton, almost as tall as he was, with a strangely bulbous head holding the same, grotesquely smiling expression as they had been seeing in the mist the entire time. But this one was different, atop the thing¡¯s strangely orange head sat a crown of some dark metal, proclaiming this one to be the king of this accursed place.


    ¡°For Lady Sunna!¡± He shouted, drawing upon the Light of his Goddess while the skeletal figure only laughed with derision while a voice filled the mist, sending a small shiver down the spine of every living being in the mist, ¡°Everyone hail to the Pumpkin King!¡±

 Chapter 1060

    After sending off the fivesome to make themselves comfortable in their new accommodations, I decided to start checking out the group we had captured. There was quite a bit I wanted to know before focusing my efforts on teaching Daniel how to do magic so I had to start somewhere. Especially as I wanted to see how much I could push my Mind Magic into the territory of mind reading, as depicted in popular fiction. I doubted I¡¯d ever be able to simply scan somebody¡¯s memories as if I was reading a book, but pushing them into thinking about something and possibly observing their mental processes in real-time. That sounded a lot more possible and plausible, both in regards to the cognitive processing speed required and from a purely logical point of view.


    Though I would have to be cautious about changing their memories, I vaguely remembered reading some articles, long before the change, about how memories were overwritten every time they were recalled, which was part of the reason why eyewitness testimony was so unreliable, or something like that. But it had been a long time since reading that particular tidbit and I hadn¡¯t been that interested, back then. Now, I would love to read some of those articles, even if I doubted they¡¯d actually remain current with the system and the sheer breadth of influence it had on people¡¯s minds.


    The old question, was naming something and thus making people cognisant of that condition enough to alter their perception or could the system only name what the person had already been cognisant of? It was said that recognition of a problem was the first step to solving it, which made sense, but how about a mental condition, and not in the medical sense? My Ruthless trait for once, could be seen as a problematic condition, though maybe only by people who were not ruthless in the first place and thus didn¡¯t have the trait. I certainly didn¡¯t think that my ruthlessness was inherently problematic, I only thought that other people knowing about it could be problematic as it would make them biased. To me, ruthlessness on my part was sometimes a simple necessity, especially now that I wanted to keep the people around me safe and sound. Which, once again, made me wonder about other traits, even if I was fairly certain that the system was even more complex and complicated than I assumed it to be, simply because I lacked information on its sheer scope. But, for now, I had some proper ruthlessness to demonstrate, all in the name of keeping my little family safe. And in the same of science, but that was an entirely different angle.


    And so, I found myself on top of the smooth stone floor hiding the cells I had put my prisoners into. If there was one simple way to keep a lock from being picked or an enchantment from being broken, it was to make fiddling with it difficult. In this case, the cells were designed to open at the top, with the inmates some four metres below the ceiling, making it seriously difficult to get to the stone sealing them in. The walls around them, and the floor below, were inscribed with the same magic-devouring formation I had placed on some of the key structures before we left to scout the anomaly that turned out to be a dungeon, making it nigh impossible to affect them with magic unless one had some serious skills, especially in Darkness Magic, something these people didn¡¯t have.


    All in all, the cells were as secure as I could make them and I was already trying to make them even better, as soon as I found ways to do so. But for now, a complete and utter lack of an entrance for normal people was an excellent way, which also added a certain intimidation factor. Plus, there was a certain powerplay in the fact that their interrogator would always be above them, forcing them to crane their neck if they wanted to see them, which just added to it all.


    ¡°Help¡­¡± the first prisoner started to moan, the moment I opened the ceiling up, allowing some light into their small cell. It looked as if the guy had not been happy in his captivity, not that I could blame him, the cells were sparse and unpleasant, exactly as designed.


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    ¡°I could help you, yes,¡± I spoke, my voice calm, cold and measured, as I floated in the air above him. For a moment, I wished I had access to light magic, simply to give myself some backlighting, making me appear to be some angelic, illuminated figure, as that would likely add some serious mental pressure. Maybe I could come up with something suitably dramatic using Fire Magic, but for now, having him in my shadow had to suffice.


    ¡°But why would I want to do so? You and your companions came into my home, acting as if you owned the place, trying to intimidate and encircle me, like some pack of wolves,¡± I continued, noticing him flinching as if struck at the insinuation, especially when I mentioned his companions.


    ¡°Sit down,¡± I ordered him, cutting through his attempts at talking back. Not that the strange mixture of pleading, threatening, begging and pure snivelling would have accomplished a lot but even listening to his whining was annoying me. So, instead, I created a seat of Ice and gave him that order, watching as he immediately sat down, even if the chair couldn¡¯t be all that comfortable for somebody not immune to essentially all levels of environmental cold. I might have to actually test how far down I could push things now before getting uncomfortable, it might be quite interesting.


    Once the guy was in his chair, I had the chair sprout solid bindings, tying him down without a whole lot of wiggle room, making sure that he wouldn¡¯t try anything silly like attacking me. Then, I lowered myself into the room, noticing that the runes in the walls actually reduced the amount of Astral Power I was regenerating and measurably drained the power I put into the Ice to make the chair, making me realise that I had accidentally created a cell that drained Astral Power within. An excellent way to hold all manner of spellcasters, though I had a feeling it would give people inside a literal headache due to the drain. Nothing lethal, just a lot of pain, making me wonder if I should consider that a bug or a feature.


    ¡°Now, you will tell me what I want to know or I might have to rip the information from your mind. You would not like that,¡± I warned the guy, before giving him a chance to tell me what I wanted to know about him and his buddies.


    He couldn¡¯t wait to answer all my questions, though I sadly couldn¡¯t ascertain that he was truthful. Sure, I could use Mind Magic to get a vague idea but the strongest emotion I could feel within his mind was desperation, almost overshadowing everything else. But was it desperation because he feared getting caught or because he was trapped in a fairly comprehensive cell? Or even because he was afraid I wouldn¡¯t believe him and the torture would start? There was some underlying duplicity but I just couldn¡¯t tell if he was trying to hold something back or deceive me outright, making the deluge of information spewing from his mouth relatively worthless. Well, unless I put his buddies through the same treatment and compared their stories, as one had to do when unable to read minds.


    After thinking about it for a moment, I decided that a gentle attempt at getting into the guy¡¯s mind wouldn¡¯t do any serious harm. I would have to be careful and somewhat subtle but it was worth the hassle.


    Looking into the guy¡¯s mind, I used a similar approach to the one I employed when pulling people into the Astral River. However, the difference was that instead of trying to pull us both into the Astral River, I sought to push us both into his mind. Or what I could conceptualise as such, while I could feel something with my Mind Magic and my Extrasensory Perception: Mind, it wasn¡¯t as if I had a proper image of where I was seeking to go. Just those pinpricks of sensation coming from my extra senses but it seemed to be good enough and I arrived¡­ somewhere.


    There was no proper structure I could recognise, just countless flashes of colour in all sorts of tastes, scents and sounds overlapping in maddening intensity, flaring to life before dying down moments later. Nothing I could readily interpret, no order or reason. Focusing on one of those flashes, I was briefly inundated with a whirling mix of emotion, foreign and far too muddled for me to decipher at the moment, though I would try later.


    For a moment, I tried to come up with a way to push his mind in the direction I wanted it to go but even if I managed, I doubted I would be able to interpret what I got. So, I decided to pull back and study the strange sensations I had managed to glean, at least after talking to his friends and seeing if they had something more interesting to tell me. So far, these guys were quite boring and, sadly, fairly dumb.

 Chapter 1061

    Idiots¡­ While I was certain that there were many other, yes similar or synonymous, words to describe these people adequately, idiots would have to do for now. Morons, mentally challenged or the fairly old-fashioned retarded could also be used but two of those were something I didn¡¯t want to use due to their other connotations. Ultimately, it didn¡¯t really matter what word or words were used in the description, as long as their terminal, almost suicidal, lack of planning, prudence and general caution was represented to its full extent. Not that I thought putting that much idiocy into words was actually possible without a fairly long rant but one could try and I had a feeling I actually would try when telling the others what our visitors had been planning. Damn idiots.


    It turned out, their plan hadn¡¯t been a bad one, as one can¡¯t ascribe quality to something nonexistent. It would be akin to telling somebody that the cookies they didn¡¯t make had tasted bad, they hadn¡¯t, nor had they tasted good, they never existed in the first place. As was the case with their plan, they had moved into the mysterious tower, recognised me as a person without even considering the, by now, fairly obvious non-human features of my body and decided that a lone female without any obvious weapons couldn¡¯t be a threat. Granted, I now realised that I had reflexively blocked the use of Observe without even noticing I had done so and I might have been overcompensating a little in regards to the concealment and control of my Aura so close to crossing the second divide, masking my power even further than I normally did but that didn¡¯t change the fact that these people had no plan whatsoever. No plan, no real idea what they were going to do, just some instinct-driven aggression and a vague notion of making me like ¡®it¡¯ so they could do what they wanted afterwards.


    On the bright side, their lack of a plan meant that there was no backup for it either, or in other words, now that they were caught, they lacked direction. There¡¯d be no coordinated effort to escape, nor did I get the impression that they were concealing some sort of trump card that might allow them to escape, either together or one of them on his own. Sure, I would still remain cautious and make sure that there was no such thing, even if my impression was wrong, but their lack of planning and prudence meant I had a lot less problems to consider than I feared. Nobody knew where these people had gone to, other than into the city, looking for supplies, so I didn¡¯t have to worry about their buddies back home, not that their description of their community sounded like a group I wanted to have anything to do with.


    From what I could tell, their group was somewhat similar to a gang or a band of thieves and robbers, held together by a somewhat powerful leader who gave them a modicum of protection and direction, but nothing I would consider troublesome. If the information they had given me was correct, something I considered likely due to its consistency across five separate interrogations, their group would break up before long, likely when the supplies they stole started to run out. How long that would take was hard to guess, there were a couple of inconsistencies in their statements which I chalked up to a mix of guesswork on their part and possible attempts to make themself appear sympathetic to me, but I doubted it would take more than a month or two. If they were lucky, some of them would be accepted into other groups, or maybe they¡¯d manage to find some warehouse filled with nonperishable food to stretch their supplies far enough but at the end of the day, their group was doomed unless they started to farm. Because that was a condition shared across all groups, unless they managed to get a sustainable source of food going, something Luna was constantly experimenting with and working on, the group had no future. No matter how many storehouses one managed to find, no matter how many supplies one managed to hoard, they would run out eventually. It was just a question of time.


    But maybe ignoring that inevitably was just another part of the human condition, after all, we had collectively built a massive part of our civilisation on limited resources, oil being a prime example, and ignored that it would run out, no matter how many new tricks we came up with to drill or frack for more, it would run out. Inevitably.


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    Or, as it had turned out, the apocalypse could come from an entirely different direction, one nobody had expected, but I wasn¡¯t certain I would call that a benefit, not with billions of dead and humanity a broken shadow of its former self, inhabiting a world far from the one we had been born into. But that was an entirely different topic for another day.


    For now, I decided that I had learned as much as I could hope with the benign interrogations, so it was time to see if I could get something else with a bit of magical enhancement. Simply reading through their minds and picking up every scheme and thought they ever had was still far out, though I had made some efforts to get into their heads. Those efforts had been rewarded with two points in the skill, pushing it to a fairly impressive seventy-four, making me wonder if I was almost there. Or maybe I was already at the point where I could read minds, the problem was simply that I couldn¡¯t interpret the data just yet, which might be a problem of experience, not of skill.


    If nothing else, I was fairly confident that the ability to pull somebody into a mindscape I controlled would be the ultimate tool to torture somebody. Controlling their every sense allowed for perfect sensory deprivation, I might even be able to alter the perceived flow of time, allowing me to disorientate them even further. Plus, pain was just another stimulus, usually used by the body to tell the mind something was wrong but there was no reason why I wouldn¡¯t be able to induce that stimulus without needing to damage the body. But those were experiments I would only begin once the test subjects were no longer of any other use, for now, experimenting with subtle mind reading was the order of the day.


    Thus, I decided to continue my experiments, using my captives as, well, captive audience and bored into their minds, not trying to push the power up but working subtly. Curiously, there was a sweet spot between the power needed to get into their heads and the point where the power was too much, rapidly giving them a headache serious enough to make me stop as I didn¡¯t want my test subjects to expire, especially not while I was within their minds. Maybe I would try to get some second-hand experience of death at some point if only to help me further my understanding of Death Magic, but that was an entirely different experiment. For now, having my captives bleed from their nose or eyes was a bad thing and to be avoided, or at least the experiments stopped once I got to that point.


    Still, with each attempt, I was getting a little better, the streaming colours were no longer an utterly confusing mess but something I was finding patterns in. Following those patterns, allowed me to start decoding their thoughts into something I could understand, though trying to combine words, flashing images and a multitude of other sensations into a coherent picture was a challenge. One I relished, at least until I started to get a headache of my own and decided to pack things up for the day, somewhat fascinated by the information I had managed to get. Not because the information was worth anything, most of what I had seen hadn¡¯t been recent or relevant, but because of the strange details these people had been focused on in their memories, making me wonder just how the human mind worked.


    Maybe I was now at the point where I dared try to experiment somewhat intrusively with my dear daughters, allowing me to work with a test subject who would willingly bring up distinct memories repeatedly and even tell me what I was actually looking at, further helping me to decode the bubbling mess I had seen in these minds.


    At least with the experience I had now accumulated I was fairly confident I wouldn¡¯t burn out one of their brains on accident, if anything, I considered it more likely that I would hurt myself trying but, somehow, I was okay with that option. Or maybe not okay but I considered getting a headache myself the better possibility compared to giving one of my daughters a headache. Curious how that worked.


    Shaking my head, I made sure that all the security measures I had woven into the area holding the cells were active, the cells themself sealed, though no longer in complete darkness in repayment of their cooperation with my interrogation, and the prisoners all accounted for. Now, I could start working with Daniel on his magical education, using, amusingly, some of the same tricks I was using on the prisoners.

 Interlude: Whispers in the Dark

    ¡°Maggy, there¡¯s somebody here to see you,¡± one of the guys who had been helping the legacy commonly known as Maggy get their community up and running called out, pulling her attention away from the lists she had been pouring over in an attempt to improve their current food situation. Not that the supplies they had would run out soon, unless something seriously went wrong they should have enough to get over the winter with a bit to spare, but if she had learned one thing since the world went to shit, it was that you could never have enough food. Or water or a large number of different resources, having them was always preferable to not having them.


    For a moment, her stomach clenched as she remembered the days right after things changed and the gnawing hunger as everyone and their grandmother tried to figure out just what the hell had happened, why their homes were on fire and where the massive alterations to their surroundings had come from. The comparison to chickens running around with their heads cut off came to mind. Going from a small community on the outskirts of Denver, with quite a few chickens in the area, to a strange amalgamation of towns and cities drawn together from a roughly hundred-mile radius was utterly discombobulating, and that was ignoring the rest of the apocalypse if such a thing was possible. To say nothing of mountains suddenly appearing, making some creationists¡¯ dreams come true, though it was better to say nothing about those, mountains shouldn¡¯t grow faster than bamboo.


    Looking up from the bane of her existence, something she hadn¡¯t been able to escape even after the world had burned and was born anew, she saw Weir, or as Maggy liked to call her the Weirdo, enter, looking slightly out of sorts. Which was strange, normally, there needed to be some serious shit going on to shake her, so unless the place was on fire, again, she shouldn¡¯t be disturbed.


    ¡°So, Weirdo, what¡¯s going on?¡± Maggy asked, both intrigued about and somewhat frightened of the news that had not only sent her normally unflappable acquaintance into such a state but was also important enough to make the two-hour trip between their communities. Sure, the Weirdo was strong enough to keep herself fairly safe but trips were never completely safe, just mostly. So, something must have happened, something serious.


    ¡°Maggy, do you remember Morgana?¡± Weir asked, the question almost certainly rhetorical given that there likely wasn¡¯t a single legacy who didn¡¯t remember Morgana, at least not one who had been somewhat active in Road to Purgatory. This was exactly the sentiment she expressed with an unamused look, even as Maggy¡¯s mind was whirling about why Morgana would be relevant right now and the answer was already staring in her face, Morgana was relevant because Weir had learned that Morgana was in the area. Most likely, sitting in that giant tower with the big-ass ball of magical weirdness sitting on top. It made sense, a massive tower appearing out of nowhere and a powerful spellcaster arriving in the area? A connection was quite plausible.


    ¡°So, everyone¡¯s favourite Wicked Witch is in that tower?¡± Maggy asked, confident enough in her deduction to make herself seem more knowledgeable than she actually was.


    ¡°Apparently,¡± Weir nodded, not even phased by the attempt, she had interacted with Maggy multiple times in the past, both online and offline, meaning she was somewhat desensitised to her shenanigans. This was why Maggy had long-since given up on trying to play the clueless blabbermouth she liked to affect in order to make people let down their guard.


    ¡°Well, that could be awesome or horrible, I¡¯m not sure which,¡± Maggy admitted, thinking back to her interactions with Morgana during Road to Purgatory and what little she had heard about the person behind the screen, or, well, in the capsule. That disconnect made trying to predict Morgana¡¯s actions difficult, you could never know just how much of the Morgana you had experienced in Road to Purgatory was just that, a role affected to play a game.


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    Howie was similar in that regard, only that one had chosen the role of the righteous crusader, the other of the insane witch. But, to make matters worse, Maggie was fairly certain that there¡¯d be a reverse-imprinting going on, too, where the role those two, and others like them, had affected was in turn having an effect on them. There was a lot of truth to the saying that a mask could become reality, if one wasn¡¯t careful and after almost two years during which they had worn the mask on Mundus, they had been put into a situation in which they had to use the skills their minds associated with the mask, it was likely that the two of them would also take on some of the mannerisms, the only question was which.


    ¡°Have you met her? She seemed to have a fairly good head on her shoulders, maybe a little too invested in playing up the whole Witch Queen thing, but overall an intelligent woman we could work with,¡± Maggy asked, hoping that Morgana would be reasonable and not somehow swallowed up by the insane and insanely dangerous persona she had affected on Mundus.


    ¡°No, I haven''t had the pleasure,¡± Maggy could almost see the shudder running down Weir¡¯s back as she said the last word, ¡°But a few of the people in Aver¡¯s Park have, two of them were even offered magic lessons. Though, she calls herself Jade now,¡± she continued, making Maggy frown for a moment. That sounded like an incredible deal, at least if Morgana was able to communicate what she could do. Maggy, herself, had tried to teach a few of the people around some of the Darkness Magic she had learned to conceal herself but it had been an abysmal failure. Maybe she just sucked as a teacher or there was something else going on, but if Morgana, or Jade, was willing and able to teach others magic, it could be a huge thing.


    ¡°Not her original name, I think,¡± Maggy frowned, trying to remember the details she had read a while back on the forum. Something about Morgana having been Titania but some dispute over advertising, marketing or some other non-gaming-related detail having forced her out of her original team, it had been a while and not a terribly interesting thing unless one was a fan. Shaking her head, Maggy discarded the line of thought as irrelevant, if Morgana wanted to be known as Jade, all power to her, as long as she didn¡¯t start going around and cutting people apart to become the Morgana she had been on Mundus.


    ¡°Doesn¡¯t matter, what matters is that the probably most advanced magic user we had amongst the Travellers is willing to teach,¡± she paused for a moment as realisation struck her, ¡°And apparently incredibly good at it, now that I think about it. Morgana was Darkness, Ice, Death and Blood or something along those lines, at least that¡¯s what we have seen, though that might be muddled by that bird of hers, not sure,¡± making another pause, Maggy mentally went over the things Morgana had posted or been featured in, ¡°Yeah, sounds about right,¡± she nodded to herself, ¡°But the tower, that¡¯s not Ice, at least not looking at it from a distance, that looks like rock. The magical ball on top could be anything, but the tower, that doesn¡¯t look like something the Morgana on Mundus could have made.¡±


    At least not from stone, there had been that video of Morgana making a giant fortress out of Ice but that wasn¡¯t what had happened here, at least it didn¡¯t look like that.


    ¡°So you think she already taught somebody and that person made the tower? Or she managed to teach herself, without any guidance from somebody knowing how things work, and got to the point where she could make something like that?¡± Weir followed the train of thought, arriving at a similar destination.


    ¡°Ayup,¡± Maggy nodded, ¡°And she is offering to teach. Everyone with even the slightest aptitude should be willing to take the lessons if she is offering them freely, this could be huge.¡±


    ¡°You are already plotting something, aren¡¯t you?¡± Weir asked, noticing a slightly strange sheen in Maggy¡¯s eyes.


    ¡°You call it plotting, I call it planning,¡± Maggy shrugged, not even the slightest bit embarrassed, ¡°It¡¯s a huge opportunity for everyone involved, just think about it. If Morgana managed to teach somebody how to build a big-ass tower, what else can she teach? Give it a year, two at most, and we might have our standard of living back where it used to be, just instead of technology, it¡¯ll be some sort of magitech or magic or something,¡± Maggy grinned, already dreaming of the many comforts ripped from her by the apocalypse. Sure, it all hinged on Morgana and what she was able and willing to teach but Maggy was willing to go quite far to motivate her. All the way, if necessary.

 Chapter 1062

    Daniel was a fascinating student. He lacked any distinct elemental affinity, his soul incredibly balanced and in harmony with itself but, as if to make up for that lack of elemental affinity, his general magical talent was through the roof, far beyond what his intelligence should have allowed him. And that was not to call him stupid, far from it. While I wasn¡¯t sure what his original intelligence score had been, or how exactly the attribute influenced worked in regards to, well, the way one thought, it was easy to recognise the intelligence in him when talking with him. Plus, I learned that he had written multiple papers and even a book or two on ancient languages and cultures, something I doubted a stupid person would be able to.


    Or they might be capable of it but not of having their work peer-reviewed and published in serious journals, after all, there was that one guy who claimed the pyramids were landing devices for ancient aliens or something outlandish like that. Though, given the change and everything that came with it, I had to reevaluate just what ¡®outlandish¡¯ was. Because, before the change, I would have seen our current everyday situation as somewhere between outlandish and outright impossible and yet, it was exactly where we found ourselves now. Hopefully, there wouldn¡¯t be aliens landing on pyramids around the world right now, or if there were, maybe we would be lucky enough to have those aliens be nice aliens, we already had enough problems.


    Shaking my head, I focused on the situation around me, especially on the mental representation of Daniel and the way he was intently focusing on the Astral River, tempting me to give him that little push and have him tumble into the teeming streams of power instead of merely watching them from the safety of the platform I had established. The hesitation I was observing might be what was holding him back, a desire to play things safe and remain cautious and prudent, even if he would be better served to make the leap of faith, trusting his inherent abilities and the things he had learned to keep him safe.


    ¡°Why is it so important for me to decide which element I want to focus on? You said I had an equal affinity to them all, so why pick one at all?¡± he asked, his voice sounding slightly weird as he wasn¡¯t really speaking but transmitting his thoughts into the mindscape I had drawn him into.


    ¡°You started out studying history, right?¡± I asked, already knowing the answer, ¡°But there¡¯s just too much for a single human to understand in a reasonable amount of time, especially if you try to go in-depth, so you have to specialise,¡± I continued, letting him realise on his own why specialisation was important.


    ¡°Also, it¡¯s not as if you pick one element and ignore all the others, you already know that I have a few primary elements but, at the same time, I seek to further my understanding in all of them, simply because they give me insight into aspects of reality my primary elements would not. Reality, and the Astral River digging into its foundations, are made up of all the elements, or rather it¡¯s the other way around, all the elements are parts of the Astral River and reality. So, improving my understanding of a segment will allow me to understand other parts more easily. But you need to start somewhere and that somewhere is the element you decide upon,¡± I explained once more, finally getting a nod of acceptance. As I started to get to know my student, I realised that he was just as stubborn as he was smart. Usually, that was a good combination, indicating that he would go far in his studies, but it could also be a pain in the neck.


    After hesitating just a little longer while Daniel dithered back and forth, mentally debating just which element he wanted to focus on first, I had enough. Given that I had pulled us both into the Astral River and was using my Mind Magic to stabilise his own position until he deliberately broke that stabilisation, I gave him just a little push, or, in terms of the mental reference frame we were using, I let the platform he had been standing on crumble away, causing him to tumble into the streams of power below. Well, at least below in the mental model we were using, it was difficult to relate physical dimensions to a non-physical space like the Astral River.


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    Daniel¡¯s scream filled the space we were in for a moment, only to cut off as his mind was slightly overwhelmed by the inundation of power all around him, trying to swim, for lack of a better term. He wasn¡¯t drowning but he was clearly getting overwhelmed at first and I readied myself to pull him out until I recognised his attempts to overcome the situation and take shelter within one of the streams of power, using that singular stream to insulate his mind from all the rest, exactly as I had hoped he would. Now, I could easily see what element his mind had taken refuge in during a moment of fear, which element was the one his instincts preferred, something I hadn¡¯t been able to figure out before, his conscious mind had continued to overwhelm those instincts. Until now, where he had been forced to pick in a moment of panic.


    ¡°You pushed me?!¡± his mental voice echoed through the mindscape, filled with equal parts anger and disbelief, making me grin just a little as there was also some serious squeaking going on, likely a remnant of his earlier panic.


    ¡°In a way, yes,¡± I calmly replied using the same method, ¡°You were dithering back and forth, trapped in analysis paralysis, so I gave you that little push you needed. Now, you made a choice, or rather, your subconscious made a choice, and I believe it will be suitable to you. Why don¡¯t you tell me what element you instinctively choose to take refuge in while in an almost blind panic? You should feel it all around you;¡± I told him, barely managing to keep my voice perfectly calm and level.


    ¡°It¡¯s¡­¡± he petered off, taking in the enormity encompassed in the stream of power all around him. It was so easy to assign a single word to an element but when feeling them, they were so much more. Ice, a single, simple word but when I immersed myself in the element, I could feel it all, the cold, the crystalline structure of the most common water Ice but also more metaphysical concepts like the sheer weight of unchanging eternity that were part of the element. Similarly, Daniel was now knowing the single word to describe his element but he was getting overwhelmed by what it all meant.


    For a moment, I realised that maybe that was what runes truly were. You had a single superset Rune, encompassing all the numerous runes below it within itself and while one was learning more about Rune Magic, one managed to unearth more and more pieces of that singular superset Rune. It was something to look into at some point in the future, especially as I had already experienced that some Runes were composed of multiple other runes, just like one could say that the letter double-u on a keyboard was composed of two letters v, as silly as that sounded.


    ¡°It¡¯s Earth,¡± Daniel finally managed to verbalise, after tearing his mind from the sheer enormity of the element all around him.


    ¡°And now, you can show me that you can leave the Astral River on your own, either by joining me on the platform up here or by, well, leaving it all together and returning to reality,¡± I told him, letting him make the decision on where to continue. Staying within the Astral River had its advantages, one of them was the fact that time could behave funny here, but those could also be serious disadvantages for all the same reasons. Moments later, his mental representation disappeared and I took a moment to gather my thoughts before pulling myself out, too.


    Looking at my pupil, sitting in front of me on a fairly comfortable chair made by Luna, I gave him a moment to readjust his mind to the reality around us before I continued to teach him, now focusing on the general concepts of Earth Magic, as I understood them before we could continue on to the intricacies. Luckily, we were in an excellent place for that lesson, given that we were literally surrounded by a giant construct created by the very magic I wanted to teach him, giving me ample examples to show him and demonstrate.


    ¡°Now, I want you to look around, to feel the stone of the tower and the power I have imbued into these rocks,¡± I started, my voice calm and collected, even as I felt a bit of amusement at the way he was glued to my lips. If nothing else, he was an attentive student.

 Chapter 1063

    Watching Daniel work with the first few exercises I had come up with to help him with his Earth Magic was quite fascinating. He had been able to figure out some Fire and Water Magic on his own, and I kept working with him on those elements, but his instinctive reaction to reach for Earth Magic was what made me push him in this direction. And, from what I could tell, it looked as if the idea was correct, he was getting the point of the exercises fairly quickly and advancing through them at a satisfactory pace. Not as quickly as somebody with similar attributes and an affinity for Earth Magic would have but far quicker than I would have expected for somebody without the affinity.


    Curiously, when I decided to have him try and apply the lessons he should have learned from the exercises to other elements, it took him less time than expected, making me think that the lack of affinity helped him in a way. He wasn¡¯t just learning a specific element of magic, he seemed to instinctively draw on some lessons I had only learned thanks to Rune Magic. Maybe that meant he would be incredibly good at Rune Magic, or it might mean he would be an abject failure at it, I would have to test him and see where he went. The question was whether he was subconsciously drawing on the power of the Runes due to his brief submersion in the Astral River or if his affinity to magic was strong enough to allow him to wield it with such ease. If I had to guess, I would think the second possibility was the correct one, but more investigation was needed.


    And so, more investigation was performed. Showing him a few Earth Runes and having him feel the effect as I activated them was an obvious test and one that immediately showed us that he didn¡¯t have some insane affinity for Runes, as he couldn¡¯t make heads or tails of the symbols I showed him. He also wasn¡¯t able to understand the Runes¡¯ meaning and even after I explained it to him, he continued to have trouble wrapping his head around it. It seemed that, to him, magic was dictated by direct effects guided by his will, not the more scientific mental processes needed for Rune Magic and enchanting. A shame but maybe that was the trade-off for his impressive affinity to more artistic forms of magic he excelled in.


    Those forms were exactly what I decided to focus on, as should be obvious. Sensing the different elements was the first step, followed by simple manipulations and working our way up from there. It would take some time, depending on his talent and, more importantly, the dedication he had to the craft and the amount of time he could invest but I had a feeling he would get there fairly fast. It would be interesting to see just how far he could come over the winter. And, maybe more importantly, how much EXP I would get for the teaching, I had already noticed a faint but constant trickle slowly filling that invisible bar until I¡¯d reach level hundred-one. Which was quite impressive at my level, it made me realise why I hadn¡¯t received a trait or title for being the one to first breach the second divide, somebody else had beaten me to it. Most likely, somebody who was constantly teaching a large number of people, if the EXP I received from teaching Daniel, and some of my former pupils, were any indication. But, while the EXP gained from teaching was excellent, gaining skills that way was a lot harder unless the skill was actively used to teach like my Mind Magic was. So I might not be the highest level on the Arcane Path, or I might be, depending on how many people had breached the second divide before me, but I was fairly confident that I was the one with the highest and most diverse set of magical skills. Which I considered good enough, I would have loved to get the trait for being the first to breach the second divide, but that just didn¡¯t come to pass with our lifestyle of constant travels.


    But it wasn¡¯t all teaching Daniel and watching him get better with his magic. Out of curiosity, I decided to occasionally look in on Lia and her progress with Samantha, mainly because I wanted to see if I could manage to pick up some of the lessons and get a better understanding of Alchemy. It was utterly vexing, I was confident that I should be intelligent enough, both in terms of native understanding and attributes from the system, to understand the discipline but every time I had tried so far, I wasn¡¯t getting far. Not beyond a basic understanding and essentially limited to the mundane aspects of the discipline, mixing the right ingredients together in a bizarre approximation of cooking or chemistry.You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.


    But beyond that, where things got actually interesting and the bizarre things I had seen from Alex and Lia started to happen? There, I simply started to get a headache, one that rapidly intensified if I ever tried to compare and contrast the way the alchemical process worked with my understanding of magic. My current hypothesis, at least in that regard, was that Alchemy and my type of magic simply didn¡¯t mix, which was why I had so big problems with it. Still, I wanted to learn and what better way than to listen in on Lia when she was teaching Sam?


    As it turned out, any way would probably be better than eavesdropping on them. Or maybe I simply underestimated just how interested in Samantha my dear daughter actually was, because their lessons were¡­ something. If any teacher in any school I had ever heard of had acted towards their students like Lia was acting towards Samantha, the teacher would have been fired post-haste. Though, to be fair, I was fairly confident that if any student had acted towards their teacher as Samantha did with Lia, they would have been expelled just as quickly, or at least have received a stern talking to.


    Lia was the aggressor, no question about it, but Samantha eagerly accepted her advances, at least when it was only the two of them. As soon as others were in earshot, or rather, when Samantha noticed that others were in earshot, she turned back to a fairly proper lady, filled with embarrassment at Lia¡¯s eager flirting and acting somewhat skittish. I had a feeling it was all a game between the two of them, so I mostly left them to their games, hoping that they wouldn¡¯t traumatise poor Luna. And poor me, I was not all that enthused about watching Lia suck on Samantha¡¯s neck, drinking deeply from her blood, while Samantha moaned in clear pleasure. Lia was my daughter and there were things I just didn¡¯t want to see.


    Luckily, I didn¡¯t have to see them when I didn¡¯t want to. By now, I was quite capable of sticking a scrying construct into the area they were using for their lessons and tune out what the construct was observing when I didn¡¯t want to know. In that case, I¡¯d simply focus on my physical environment or sink my mind into some complicated magical problem, letting the Astral River wash away the information I was getting from the construct. Sure, I would have to glimpse through it to see if they had stopped, but I wasn¡¯t seeing too much, at least most of the time.


    It would be interesting to see how the relationship between the two would develop in the future, as it seemed to me that, at least at the moment, it was largely physical. A way for two people to make each other feel good might be a good way to release stress but would it work as a foundation for a long-term relationship, especially given that I was planning to move on come spring? Hopefully, Lia would continue with Luna, Silva and me but what if she didn¡¯t want to come? That question was one I hadn¡¯t been able to answer to my own satisfaction, was I willing to push Lia, try to make her come with me? How far would I be willing to go, and what would the consequences of my actions be?


    There was no easy answer, maybe there wasn¡¯t any answer in the first place, so I was happy to see yet another group of people move towards the tower. From what I could see with the Oculus and my scrying constructs, it wasn¡¯t a group out to make trouble for us but it also wasn¡¯t a group out on a hunt. Too big for the second, not well-equipped enough fro the first. Maybe people who wanted to have a better living and recognised that somebody able to create a tower like mine could help them to get better conditions, we would have to see. Either way, more people likely meant more annoyances but it also meant more opportunities and ways to distract myself from the coming troubles. The good with the bad, I¡¯d have to see which was more prevalent.

 Chapter 1064

    After finishing up the lesson I had been giving to Daniel, I moved towards the doors, taking up my position in the middle of the room and conjuring up a seat for myself. Not quite my full throne but something good enough to give me a comfortable position to speak to these visitors from a position of strength. If they wanted to sit, they could make their own seats, something Daniel actually tried, albeit a bit behind me. It didn¡¯t quite work, mostly because the stone of the tower was still imbued with my own power and resisted his attempts, but he made do by using the dirt we had used for his lesson. Thus, he had his own seat, though where mine was almost good enough to work as a throne, his was a glorified heap of dirt, the difference enough to make me grin just a little.


    Thanks to a discreet scrying construct placed above the door, I could see the group of twelve approach and readily opened the door for them, ready to react if they decided to become hostile but given that two of the people approaching looked younger than Luna¡¯s physical appearance suggested, I doubted they were here to fight. But if they were, I was fairly confident that I¡¯d be able to squash them, the powers imbued in the tower around me were mine to command and the shrine we were sitting in only added to my magical abilities.


    ¡°Greetings,¡± I spoke up, just as the door fully opened and they could see into the dim room, ¡°Enter without malice and leave without hindrance. Bear malice towards those within these halls and they shall be your grave,¡± I warned them, looking at them with a serious expression and a slight glow in my eyes. Overflow was quite useful for intimidation purposes, even if there, amusingly, was no official system description of that effect. Maybe because humans were still too new to the whole supernatural, magic thing, so something as alien as glowing eyes had an effect on people. Or it might be due to the way my power radiated outwards, literally overflowing from my body, driving home the point that I could kill them all if I so wished.


    ¡°Heya, birdie, still oh-so-serious?¡± a faintly familiar voice asked and the person in the lead was moving towards me rapidly, not threatening but aggressively cheerful. Moments later, I was engulfed in a warm, friendly hug, still trying just what had happened to get me into this strange situation. Moments later, something deep within my memory clicked and I realised that the voice belonged to Maggy, one of the Travellers I had conversed with during the beta, trying to make plans for the official release and create some additional hype. Well, at the end of what we had considered the ¡®beta¡¯, there certainly had been a lot of hype around my actions, though now, with the power of hindsight, those actions looked a lot less benign than they would have if the world of Mundus had been a computer-generated one and could be reset with the press of a few buttons.


    Granted, in my heart of hearts I had to admit I¡¯d probably have acted exactly the same way if  had known that my vengeance would doom countless unrelated beings to death, especially given the advantages I gained from the Dragon Touched Trait and how much closer they brought me to bringing Sigmir back, but that was something I wasn¡¯t about to share with anyone.


    ¡°Maggy, right?¡± I had to ask, just to make sure that I wasn¡¯t misremembering things but her happy nod dispelled all doubts. For a moment, I considered trying to Observe her sneakily but decided against it, there had always been something about Maggy that hinted at her being a lot more informed and, well, clued-in than her somewhat ditzy behaviour would suggest. No need to prod her rudely, especially after my earlier invitation. Even without the Observe, I could be confident that she hadn¡¯t passed the second Divide, especially with the close contact she had initiated.


    ¡°What brings you to my tower? And who have you brought with you?¡± I continued, happy that she had pushed herself back to her feet and taken a step back, so I could actually ee those with her. Introductions followed, though I needed to clarify that my name was now Jade, with Morgana having turned into something of a family-name, thanks to two orphaned kids I had essentially adopted. That apparently brought me some brownie points judging by the looks and smiles I received, making me briefly wonder what they¡¯d think if they met Lia and Luna, especially if they learned Luna¡¯s actual, chronological age.This novel''s true home is a different platform. Support the author by finding it there.


    Then, we got to the question of why they were visiting and had to smother a grin when Daniel let out a soft grumble of protest when nine of the people Maggy had brought with her, plus Maggy herself, were all interested in learning magic. They, as Maggy put it, had taken everyone from their community who wanted to learn and made the trek, hoping that I was willing to give guidance at my leisure.


    It was an interesting idea. The biggest benefit for me would be the EXP I could gain, no questions asked. But there was potential for more, if I decided to negotiate a little, have them pay me in food or other supplies they might have looted after everything changed. Additionally, there was an option of using the whole teaching-thing to give Lady Hecate an in with these communities, something that could easily lead to benefits, boons and maybe even outright blessings in the future, to say nothing of the fact that making nice with the deity that literally empowered my daughter was a sound tactical idea anyway.


    On the other hand, it would take time and with an ever-growing number of students, I would have less time to use on my own studies and experiments, partially limiting the growth of my own power, or at least the growth of my skills.


    ¡°The possibility to teach those who wish to learn certainly exists,¡± I began my reply, trying to return to my earlier dignified demeanour that Maggy had shattered with such apparently guileless positivity. For a moment, I wondered if that had been on purpose and I couldn¡¯t really answer my own question, I simply didn¡¯t know. It certainly was possible that Maggy had pushed the positivity to such a degree to disarm any possible hostility but I couldn¡¯t be certain. Maybe it simply didn¡¯t matter, though it was a tactic I might have to keep in mind, even if I was aware it was incredibly unsuited for me. I simply wasn¡¯t as effortlessly cuddly as Maggy was, able to act as if somebody was a dear friend at the drop of a head, certainly not without it coming off as trying far too hard and being incredibly awkward.


    ¡°What would you be willing to exchange for the time I use to teach you? I dare to make the claim that I am the most powerful arcane spellcaster around, maybe even across the entire world, so my time and tutelage are valuable,¡± I asked, starting the negotiations.


    As the negotiations started to pick up steam, I was quickly reminded why I had let Adra deal with these kinds of talks on Mundus. Partially due to the traits that made me creepy, something the survivors on Terra apparently hadn¡¯t learned to sense just yet but the more important part, at least to me, was that Adra had been a lot better at negotiating than I was. Better with people in general, and negotiation was all about the art of the compromise.


    If not for my position of strength at the start of the negotiation and the simple fact that they wanted something from me, while offering fairly little I couldn¡¯t get with a bit of effort elsewhere, I had a feeling Maggy would have managed to make me sell my tower to her, before paying rent so I could keep living in it. Luckily, she seemed to be well-aware that I had a hard bottom line and wasn¡¯t pushing things too far, instead offering some fairly interesting benefits, especially those coming from labour-intensive tasks that required precision. Things like turning fleece into yarn and weaving that yarn into cloth for example. I certainly wasn¡¯t able to do that but from previous experiments, I was fairly confident that I¡¯d need some sturdy, hand-made cloth if I wanted to improve the quality of my magical bags, simply because the bags I was currently using weren¡¯t considered to be part of the system, forcing me to use workarounds with my magical hair and some of my blood, nothing I was willing to hand over to just anyone. But if I had the right sort of cloth, maybe created by using fleece from a particular kind of sheep or by treating the yarn with some sort of alchemical concoction, I would be able to make something better.


    Still, by the end of the negotiations, I realised just how good Maggy truly was. She had pushed me to the limit and yet, if I thought about it, I didn¡¯t feel like she had actually taken advantage. It was quite impressive.

 Chapter 1065

    As it turned out, negotiations were not the only thing Maggy was quite good at. After coming to an agreement in regards to the magic lessons, I decided to set up an actual small annexe, something bigger than the simple cottage I had prepared for Jack and his Search Group One and as I was working my, literal, magic, I got to talk to my prospective students for a bit, one of whom was Maggy.


    Contrary to expectations, Maggy hadn¡¯t just joined their group as a negotiator, leader and the possible utility of our prior acquaintance, she had come here just as the others, to learn. Darkness Magic, to be precise, with a massive focus on Shadows and concealment, making me wonder just what her class was. It sounded like some sort of spy, which made a bit of sense now that I was thinking about it. I hadn¡¯t even learned the name she had been using as a Traveller, nor had I seen anything on the forum about her exploits, the only interactions we did have were thanks to introductions from others. It could also explain why she was acting so forward, it could easily be a mask to conceal a conniving and cunning woman beneath, a spy nobody would suspect. Which likely were the best spies.


    Few would instinctively suspect a somewhat loud, slightly obnoxious and almost infuriatingly cheerful woman to be some sort of spy, at least not in areas influenced by Western media. The conditioning was that spies should be suave, drink Martini, shaken, not stirred, and ready to seduce people at the drop of a hat, or that they were utterly ordinary and boring, not standing out in the slightest. Contrary to that, she projected that slightly ditzy facade to keep people from trying to look underneath it, at least that was my current thought. I might be utterly wrong about it and simply imagine things where there were none, but given that this obnoxiously cheerful woman wanted to learn Darkness Magic? It was suspicious and my suspicions were partially confirmed when I used my Soul Magic to get an idea of her affinities. Darkness Magic was her strongest affinity, standing out by a lot, while the rest was far below par.


    The rest of her group was an interesting mixed bag. Their levels ranged from non-existent for the two kids to a guy who was already in the high sixties with a fairly even spread between those. Granted, only the children were below level twenty, so not a truly even spread, but it was close enough to one. Curiously, the two fighters who had come along with their group also wanted to learn magic, though they admitted it was of a lesser priority to them, they simply wanted to increase their repertoire. Not a bad idea, though I made a mental note to focus on the actual pupils, as I only had so much time in the day.


    ¡°The two children, how old are they?¡± I asked Maggy after I had put up the shell of a teaching building, complete with a couple of rooms for the students.


    ¡°Liam is twelve and Sandy is thirteen, why? Both have a good head on their shoulders, some decent attributes and, most importantly, they have an affinity for magic. I¡¯d rather they learn and experiment here, hopefully under your guidance, than to have them try things on their own and get in over their head,¡± she explained, her tone and demeanour complete and utterly serious, making me nod in faint approval. She was probably right, somebody with the talent would want to experiment, I certainly was experimenting all the time, even if, at times, I should know better. And getting in trouble due to experiments, well, that was an old hat to me, both here on Terra and on Mundus, I had managed to get myself into a wide variety of trouble, thanks to my drive to figure things out.


    ¡°Which is a wise thing to say, but that¡¯s not really what I was asking about, or rather, what I¡¯m worried about,¡± I admitted, letting out a sigh, ¡°For the next part to make sense, I¡¯d like you to answer something for me. How old do you think Luna is?¡± I asked, knowing that Maggy and her people needed to know the truth to be able to make informed decisions in the future. Luckily, I had already discussed what to reveal with Luna, meaning I wasn¡¯t breaking any trust by telling them. This story originates from a different website. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.


    For a moment, Maggy looked at me with a bit of confusion in her eyes, before thinking about it until she answered, ¡°I¡¯d think she¡¯s a young teenager, so somewhere between thirteen and sixteen at the most.¡±


    ¡°Not quite. You see, I met her a little over a month after the Change when things were getting really bad. The dead had risen, most supplies had been scavenged and it was obvious that this was our new normal now. Hope that the world would return to the way it used to be had died, leaving many adrift,¡± I paused for a moment when I noticed that Maggy¡¯s eyes had turned distant, making me think she was remembering those bad times.


    ¡°We, that is, Silva, Lia and I, stumbled across a group of survivors on the brink of collapse. Limited food, no water supply, they were in serious trouble, and yet, despite that trouble, they did their best to protect a few children who had survived the Change and everything else, although most of the children had become orphans. One of those children was a scant six-year-old, far too young to be on her own, let alone in the situation we found ourselves in.¡±


    Now, Maggy¡¯s eyes were going wide, already anticipating where the story was going, ¡°I took that child in, especially as I noticed a distinct talent within her, a talent I wished to nurture. The child, in turn, wanted to be strong and stay with me, something I accepted, so I decided to see if we could get her some levels, hoping that the attributes from the system would help her survive,¡± there was another pause, as I thought back to those days.


    ¡°It worked, though not in the way I had anticipated or hoped. Instead of having her body grow up normally and naturally, the system accelerated the process to an untold degree, making it mature within weeks instead of years. Her mind kept pace, though I believe that¡¯s only partially thanks to the system, the rest is thanks to her patron Goddess, Lady Hecate, who taught the child in her dreams, using the fact that dreams are not bound by the normal flow of time to her advantage,¡± I finished my explanation to a now truly flabbergasted Maggy. Though, given that the story involved Deities, time-dilation and a whole lot of death and bad memories, I shouldn¡¯t be surprised at her discombobulation.


    ¡°So, levels force people to grow up?¡± she asked, reducing the lesson to its bare minimum.


    Waving my hand in a so-and-so motion, I tried to clarify, ¡°I don¡¯t think it¡¯s growing up, necessarily, but more a case of attributes being bound to your physique, at least in part. Sure, some of the attributes are purely systemagical, I certainly don¡¯t have the muscles to lift as much as I currently can, at least assuming my muscles work like those of humans. Not actually sure, I never studied these fibres in depth and I certainly won¡¯t cut myself apart to see if elven muscles are more like those of chimps or something,¡± I shrugged before continuing.


    ¡°But there also is an actual physical component, as in, higher attributes change your physical body. Or, in this case, mature the physical body so it can accept the power imparted to it by the system.¡± I could see that Maggy was thinking about its implications, especially in the long term, at a societal level.


    ¡°What do you think this will do to Luna? I mean, she turned from a child into a teen, without any time to get used to the changes or learn or anything?¡± she asked, obviously not having thought it fully through.


    ¡°She learned, thanks to Lady Hecate,¡± I reminded her, ¡°But that¡¯s an utterly special case. I don¡¯t think it would be healthy to have children gain any levels unless the situation is of a kind where they either fight and gain levels or die. Because if they are dead, the entire question becomes meaningless.¡±


    ¡°True, children shouldn¡¯t be involved in fighting anyway,¡± Maggy groused, though I could see that it was partially thanks to the lingering morals from a different time. ¡°I¡¯ll talk about the problem with others, though I hope you¡¯ll still be willing to guide the two kids, I¡¯m a little scared of what they might do otherwise,¡± she admitted, a small grin on her face.


    ¡°Please don¡¯t mention Luna¡¯s name in your explanation if you can. I¡¯d prefer to keep her details under wraps but I felt it necessary to warn you, so you can avoid running into that kind of trouble,¡± I asked, getting a nod of acceptance in turn. Hopefully, this would help their society in the long run.

 Chapter 1066

    Did stupidity warrant capital punishment?


    It was a fairly ridiculous question on its face, one that screamed for context, though even with context, it didn¡¯t make all that much sense when the values of the old world were applied to it. There, stupidity was essentially part of daily life and the stakes had generally been a lot lower, at least in the Western world. People rarely had to starve to death and mistakes could, most of the time, be rectified or insured against, making personal risk somewhat reduced. Sure, accidents could, and regularly did, happen but society had gone a long way to make the result of those unavoidable accidents as benign as possible.


    Until the change had hit and everything went to crap, that is. Now, the stakes were as high as they could go, a single mistake could spell doom for a community, possibly causing them all to starve to death in the winter. Or, as was the case with my troublesome prisoners, there was always a bigger fish in the sea, just that size wasn¡¯t necessarily indicative of strength, a lesson not everyone had learned just yet. Judging a book by its cover had been a common failure for a long time, but now, that failure could lead to serious consequences if the book took offence.


    That was the big question I was pondering while watching my students go through one of the first lessons to get in touch with their own magic. I still wasn¡¯t sure what I should do with the five idiots I had captured, possibly because I had captured them before they ever had the chance to act against me, leaving me a little at a loss about the appropriate punishment. The easiest way, and the one I was most likely to pursue, was to use them for testing until they either succumbed to a test or died of starvation. A simple, straight-forward way that was unlikely to give us further troubles down the road, as the five of them were fairly certain nobody actually knew where they had gone. The only downside I could see was the questionable morality it would teach my daughters, though that could easily be ameliorated by a few additional lessons and an explanation of my reasoning.


    Another possible path was to keep them imprisoned until we decided to leave the area. It was, in my opinion, the worst possible path, as we¡¯d need to feed and care for them until then, eating up our time and supplies without giving us any actual advantage. Plus, there was no guarantee that they¡¯d actually be grateful and considerate after we set them free and not decide to spread lies about us or even try to pursue revenge outright. People could be quite dumb and these five had already demonstrated that they had the capability to make incredibly bad decisions.


    Or we could let them go free right now, maybe with a bit of a painful or shameful punishment, though that would open us up to the same type of retribution as imprisoning them. They might smear us or try to get people to attack us, adding additional annoyance to the entire deal. Again, there was little benefit, as I wasn¡¯t out to become some sort of just ruler, hel, I wasn¡¯t even trying to rule anything beyond the quarry we were using as our base. Anything beyond those walls wasn¡¯t my problem, I simply wanted to keep my family safe. And it looked like that required to kill the five idiots. Luckily, nothing of actual value would be lost with their death.


    Shaking off these intrusive thoughts and looking at my students, I felt myself beam with pride. Sure, some of them had already been fairly accomplished before coming here, they had been forced to learn and adapt to survive, but I was quite happy that I was able to teach each of them some fundamental lessons.


    Sure, a good chunk of those fundamental ideas came from my contact with the Grandmother and the grimoire she had given me while others came from lessons and explanations I had been given from Lady Hecate but that didn¡¯t change the fact that I was the most accomplished Spellcaster around by a long shot. Adding my magical sight and my ability to perceive souls atop my already superior knowledge and I could easily demonstrate why I was the teacher and they the students, even if that one guy was at a fairly high level already.This book is hosted on another platform. Read the official version and support the author''s work.


    Curiously, when it came to levels, Maggy was only somewhat above average, not at all special when considering that she held a legacy and had accomplished quite a lot during our time on Mundus. It, once again, made me wonder just who she had been on Mundus and what her speciality used to be. Some type of rogue, of that I was fairly confident, focused on operating within a civilised society, something the change had largely wiped away, leaving her with comparatively few skills to fall back upon. Knowing how to pick a lock, crack a safe or operate within a societal party without discovery were all useful skills, but only if there were locks, safes or parties to use them on, otherwise, they quickly fell to the wayside.


    However, just because she was only level fifty-seven didn¡¯t mean she was weak or incompetent. If anything, she was one of the more dangerous beings around thanks to her ability to conceal herself. Sure, I could detect her, at least when I was actively looking for her, but that didn¡¯t mean all that much. At the end of the day, Darkness Magic was one of my strongest abilities and I had put a lot of effort into my ability to perceive things, so just because I could find her, didn¡¯t mean she was bad at it. No, if anything, the fact that I had to actively look for her put her at the same level of concealment Lia had achieved, making it quite amusing to set up exercises between the pair. Neither of them could detect the other, making the game of tag I had them play a wonderful comedy show, at least for me who could detect both of them.


    Plus, as they were trying to spot the other, both were actively improving their ability to conceal themself and their ability to spot hidden entities, elevating their already excellent abilities to a higher level. Granted, I regularly inserted myself into their exercise, to make sure I kept my skills superior to theirs, but they hadn¡¯t caught onto that just yet. It was good training and served as a stark reminder to Lia that we should never let ourselves become complacent. There were capable beings out there and if we grew arrogant, we might end up with a knife jammed somewhere sensitive.


    On the other hand, when it came to different ways to wield Darkness Magic, Maggy was a lot less competent. Curses, something I had only dabbled in, were foreign to her as was anything meta-magical, meaning anything using Darkness Magic to influence or disrupt other magical abilities. It was a curious blindspot, one I idly wondered about as I couldn¡¯t believe that a rogue or thief wouldn¡¯t look into ways to disrupt magical wards and crack magical locks but she didn¡¯t seem to have those abilities. Not that I was teaching her everything I knew about them either, I had no desire to see a student of mine disrupt the protections I had placed on my tower, but I was planning to give her a good foundation by the end of winter. That way, she¡¯d be able to learn on her own after we left the area and she wouldn¡¯t be a problem for me. Though, even if she managed to crack the magical protections, I also had some physical protections that would need a competent and powerful Earth Mage to overcome. Somebody like Daniel, which made me realise I should increase the protections and have them branch out even further, to the point that even if all my students were working together, they wouldn¡¯t be able to overcome them.


    Amusingly, Lia was also somewhat fond of Maggy, often taking the time to work with her while Samantha, Lia¡¯s own student, was busy with one of the exercises Lia gave her. The pair worked in different ways to kill people stealthily, trying to find ways that would allow them to engage in violence without breaking the concealment magic usually keeping them hidden. It was incredibly fiddly work and not something I had ever really looked into, mostly because I rarely used knives as they did, so if I wanted to engage in violence, I almost always used magic. That, sadly, shredded the cloak like nobody''s business, forcing me to either recast the spell, which had limited results when your foes were already focused on you, or drop any attempts at stealth after that first strike.


    Either way, it was a good thing to have these students, their presence, and the lessons I taught to them, forced me to question what I knew about magic and continue to further my own studies in its fundamental aspects. There¡¯d always be more to learn and knowing that I was broadening my own path was a wonderful feeling.

 Chapter 1067

    Obviously, I couldn¡¯t spend all my time teaching my students. Well, I probably could, but there were things in the area I wanted to explore and understand, which meant I had to investigate. That, in turn, meant I had to use my scrying constructs and the Oculus to gather information or I had to physically go to whatever curiosity I was investigating and check it out. The obvious advantage of the constructs was that there was no danger. Nothing local would be able to harm me if I wasn¡¯t there to be harmed and while there were ways to use the connection between one of my constructs and my magic to strike at my person, I doubted that anyone could manage that just yet. It was, after all, a fairly complex piece of magic, nothing I¡¯d be able to pull off at a whim, which I was using as a benchmark to judge risks against. Sadly, I hadn¡¯t been able to replicate all my senses into a scrying construct just yet, I could manage touch, hearing and sight, but nothing more, which made the constructs somewhat awkward. Proprioception wasn¡¯t a terribly obvious sense but it was incredibly important, as was the somewhat related vestibular sense, neither of which I could replicate, to say nothing of things like my Soul Sense or the senses related to my Mind Magic. Curiously, I could occasionally manage to use my magical sight through a construct but that was far from reliable, making it a bit problematic.


    Thus, more often than not, a combination of the two methods was the winning formula, where I used my constructs and the Oculus for a preliminary investigation and to make sure there was no serious danger before taking my companions and heading there in person.


    As was the case right now. The curiosity in question was, amusingly, a mountaintop. Ordinarily, a completely mundane and faintly boring location but in this case, it was a little more interesting, as this wasn¡¯t any old mountaintop, it was in actual fact a new mountain. Just that would make it interesting, new mountains weren¡¯t born every day after all, but this mountain had been born during the change, when two different mountains amalgamated. Normally, I might make a joke about Mama Mountain and Daddy Mountain loving each other a whole lot, but this was a slightly different case. The mountains had, quite literally, fused together and formed something new, never mind that one of the mountains used to be a dozen-odd metres higher than the other, a difference that was no longer there, at least from what I had been able to tell with the scrying construct.


    It was, quite frankly, bizarre, though maybe I should be getting used to the fact that the change had, at least temporarily, suspended the laws of physics. Or at least warped them sufficiently to make what would usually be utterly impossible into a possible explanation, otherwise, there was just no way for a mountain to grow, or shrink, a dozen metres without some massive landslides or earthquakes involved. And yet, it was exactly what had happened here, and that was ignoring that these two mountains should have been some sixty miles away from each other. Bizarre, there was just no other word to adequately describe the situation, though even that word felt a little flat. Sadly, I wasn¡¯t sure there was a better word and, hopefully, the situation wouldn¡¯t come up during anyone¡¯s lifetime, meaning there was no real need to invent new words for an occurrence that would never come again.


    Even just the approach was quite interesting. There were some differences between the two different mountains, some stark, some rather subtle, making it possible to trace the boundary between the two that became one. In a few places, it was utterly simple, with fairly straight lies separating formations of rock or similar landmarks making it completely and readily obvious that something abnormal had happened here. Sure, there were natural processes that resulted in straight lines, mostly geological in nature like subsequent layers of sediment that later turned into rock, but the jagged lines we could observe here were different.


    But nothing compared to the most obvious sign of them all, something Luna and I were utterly flabbergasted to find. It was a tree that, just like the mountain, used to be two different trees. Not in some simple way where two trees had grown too close together and intertwined or something like that, but these two trees had been fused together on a much more fundamental level.This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.


    The leaves, for example, were in a state of flux, not just because it was fall and they had turned red already, but their shape and size. There were no two leaves on the tree that shared their shape, they were all in various states of mixture between the original oak leaves and the much broader, jagged plane tree leaves. Similarly, the bark of the tree showed a clear demarcation between the different textures but the most obvious and impressive part was the tree¡¯s merged essence.


    Even now, almost three-quarters of a year after its initial merge, there were some remaining differences within, showing the two original trees. Sure, most of the essence was blended already but it wasn¡¯t a complete mix just yet, the process was ongoing. Sadly, the two trees seemed to be elementally quite similar, leading to a few complications, but it was an interesting thing to see. It would be even better if the essence of these trees was more developed, something more akin to a real soul with a mind and everything but sadly, that was not to be.


    Regardless of the simplicity, it was a fascinating thing to observe, something both Luna and I wanted to poke and prod a little, though we both were sure to be careful. It would be tragic to accidentally destroy this natural wonder, especially before we had managed to glean all possible information from its study. We spent a day gently prodding the trunk and taking a few leaves to test with more invasive measures, though the ultimate test would occur in the spring when it would hopefully sprout some seeds and pass on its unique traits. Maybe it would be wise to wait until then and gather some of those seeds, this tree might be as unique as the World Tree we had seen the month before last, just unique in a very different way.


    Uncertain if that tree was the most interesting thing we would find along this line of alteration, we continued further upwards, looking for unique features we might want to explore. Our investigation wasn¡¯t limited to the surface, which would be too easy and superficial, I also used my Earth Magic to scan deeper into the mountain, curious what we might find there.


    With the unique, magically highly charged circumstances of the Change, there was no telling what might have formed, especially if the right conditions were met. As was the case with one odd geological formation some distance beneath the surface, where two distinct formations of rock had intersected in an impossible way, neither pushing the other aside but joining together into something else. I wasn¡¯t able to discern just what it was from the surface, though I could feel enough magic to make me curious about it. Given that we had discovered some impossible materials before, though mostly in dungeons, this might be a natural occurrence of something impossible. Or maybe calling it implausible was a better description, a material that could only form under the most unlikely of circumstances.


    Digging it out would take a lot of time and effort though, so we initially only marked down the location so we could return at a later time, with some additional supplies. Furthermore, we hadn¡¯t warned the others that we would stay out for all that long, just a few days, far too short for us to dig this out.


    When we reached the peak of the mountain, I was almost disappointed when we didn¡¯t immediately notice anything outstandingly interesting to celebrate the occasion. No treasure chest waiting for us, no ray of light from above to guide us further on our quest, not even a ring of toadstools to allow entrance into some sacred grove. Nothing, but a fairly flat area, with a couple of rocks lying around, some trees, shrubs and an old bench from before the change. It was, quite frankly, extraordinarily boring, though that didn¡¯t stop me from investigating to the best of my ability.


    Alas, while it would have been wonderful to find something interesting up here, the only outstanding thing we found up here was the view. The height allowed us to see a little further than we usually could, though even that had to compete with the unparalleled sight we could experience through the Oculus.


    Still, there was something nice about a hike with my daughter and our canine friend, it felt almost mundane and normal, something we could experience far too rarely in this changed world.

 Chapter 1068

    After yet another session of testing the prisoners, I had to let out a soft sigh. This wasn¡¯t working as well as I had hoped it would. Sure, I was steadily getting better at reading the prisoners¡¯ minds but I was still far from getting to a point where I could scan their minds at will. At the moment, the best I could do was try to prod them into recalling a memory and essentially watch the memory as they recalled it, though there were a lot of limitations to the trick. The biggest was that memories weren¡¯t fixed, at least not at the levels of Intelligence these people were operating at, thus, the memories could easily be distorted, either by the one doing the remembering or by the observer.


    To make matters worse, if the memory was distorted by the observer, it could lead to a permanent corruption of said memory, essentially modifying what the person remembered. There were limitations to that thanks to a certain amount of self-correcting within the human mind, but that worked only to a point. Once enough of the subject¡¯s memories were altered, especially if it happened with a purpose, to provide a new, coherent picture within that subject¡¯s mind, then what used to be a self-correcting mechanism would likely turn into the opposite, completing the subject¡¯s memory distortion to the point that they wouldn¡¯t be able to tell that their mind had been messed with.


    It was, in many ways, a horrible ability to have. Killing somebody was simple enough, with or without magic, but what Mind Magic allowed me to do was so much more. With enough time and effort, I could rewrite the Mind of a person to the point that they weren¡¯t who they started out as, turning them into an entirely new being. In a way, it was even more intrusive and altering than what I had accomplished with Lia, the creation of a wholly new being, only with Mind Magic and the skills I was currently developing, it would be an entirely new being shaped by my mind.


    Well, it would be a new being to a point. As of yet, I could only influence the Mind in this way, I could distort memories and might be able to make up new ones from whole cloth but the interpretation of those memories, the lens through which the person having them would view them, was an entirely different thing. To distort that lens, I would need Soul Magic, for that was what the lens actually was, the Soul. The Mind held a record of who the person was, it held information and nothing more. The Soul, on the other hand, interpreted that information and turned it from something that could also be written down in a book into something more. Or rather, it turned that information into a person.


    At least that was my current interpretation of the available data. There might, and likely was, even more to the Mind, Body, Soul complex than I currently understood but the only way to learn just what that ¡®more¡¯ was to continue investigating. Eventually, I¡¯d hopefully be able to understand it all but that day was fairly far in the future.


    For now, I was comfortable with the fact that my understanding of Mind Magic and its application on sapient minds was rapidly increasing, hopefully to the point where I¡¯d be able to implant Sigmir¡¯s memories into her body if I got my hands on them.


    Which might just be the most difficult thing to do. Sure, I had my own memories of her but those were obviously from my perspective and limited in scope. Her personality had been shaped over the years of her childhood and while I was confident that my presence had influenced her character, that influence was limited. I certainly had been influenced by her and continued to be.


    There were two possibilities I currently knew about and considered worth exploring. The first was in regards to a question I had never quite thought about before. The system was using ExP or Experience Points to track our progress, as many video-games had in the past. But Mundus and the system weren¡¯t like that, so was there a link between our experiences and the experience points? Did the system maybe track our experiences in life and reward points for them? It was incredibly far-fetched, going by a single word and its connotations but it might be worth looking into. Because if there was a link, then Sigmir¡¯s experiences on Mundus and her experience points might be within my grasp, as her sacrifice had added her ExP to my own, right before she died. Thus, they had later become part of the Legacy I had accepted right after the change and thus of me. Maybe, hopefully, I could somehow find them within the legacy and extract them. It would require a fairly substantial sacrifice of EXP on my part but that was a price I was willing to pay. You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.


    The other possibility was a lot more straightforward but a lot harder to reach. The Mind, and thus memories, were an emergent property of the brain, a structure within the body. If I could lay claim to Sigmir¡¯s body, I might be able to somehow decode the connections and lingering patterns within her brain to extract her memories that way. There were fewer philosophical questions involved and I didn¡¯t have to worry about dealing with the system and its inherent obscurity but I would have to solve some fairly serious problems, ranging from the question of how to retrieve a body I had buried a world away to learning how to extract memories from a half-decomposed brain, because by now, about a year and a half would have passed on Mundus. Even with the coffin of Ice I had made for Sigmir and the magic layered on top of the already cold environment, I doubted that much of her brain would still be intact. Still, I refused to give up and continued with my training and testing.


    Sadly, I knew I was on a fairly strict timer with my test subjects. Given that I wasn¡¯t about to waste a full portion of food on these guys, their rations were fairly limited, one might even say non-existent. They got as much water as they wanted, it was easy enough to conjure fresh water after all but their food came from Luna¡¯s experimentation with rapidly growing plants. As it turned out, those plants had some of the necessary nutrients, though there was something vital missing, leaving these guys to slowly starve.


    One of them, after realising that he wouldn¡¯t get out of the cell he was in alive, tried to attack me in an attempt to escape. He was put down easily, Mind Magic had a lot of wonderfully non-lethal but supremely painful options for that, but it only delayed the problem. After his next attempt and an increasingly painful punishment, he resorted to killing himself, costing me a test subject and forcing me to dispose of the body


    Doing so was an interesting experiment in and of itself. I had been wondering about a few effects, mainly in regards to the dead and Death Magic, so I took the dead body out in a magical bag and placed it in a small, somewhat isolated cave before partially sealing the cave. That way, the body wouldn¡¯t be disposed of by wild animals, especially with a few subtle but deadly magical formations I placed around it, trying to keep bugs and such from it. It wasn¡¯t a perfect solution but it would have to do.


    The thing I was curious about was whether the body would rise by itself if left alone, as the countless bodies rotting in the streets had after the Change. I vaguely remembered that there was a need to bury bodies on consecrated ground on Mundus, the reason being that the bodies might start walking around again if that didn¡¯t happen. There had been a video about a cleric or something renewing the consecration and having to fight numerous undead to do so.


    Thus, the question I wanted to have answered was whether that would happen here, too, and if it did, I wanted to know if there was a way to take advantage of it. Energy, mystical or otherwise, always came from somewhere. Granted, I had no idea where the actual Astral River, the local source of the mystical energy I used, took its energy from but it came from somewhere. Elsewhere, or something along those lines, some place upstream in the great universal something, likely a place beyond Mundus on some grand cosmic map. Though how that beyond worked was another question, there were undoubtedly dimensions involved I had no idea of.


    Not that it truly mattered, I didn¡¯t want to find the ultimate source, I only wanted to understand more about the local sources. Thus, leaving an unburied dead out to rise, like some strange science experiment involving yeast.

 Chapter 1069

    ¡°Jade?¡± Maggy¡¯s voice interrupted my musings as I sat in the middle of the shrine, contemplating the progress my students had made since they started their work. It was quite impressive, all of them had made some progress, though the exact amount varied greatly. Maggy and Leonard, the most powerful of them all, had amusingly made the least amount of progress. In Maggy¡¯s case, it was because her class wasn¡¯t focused on magic, it used magic as a supplemental art, allowing her to accomplish a variety of normally impossible effects. Calling her primarily a rogue focused on social and societal manipulation would most likely be the best way to describe her, which made me somewhat curious about the things she had managed on Mundus, where she would have been able to take advantage of an already existing society. Now, after the change, Terra simply didn¡¯t have enough people to accomplish a whole lot of manipulation and theft would be far too obvious, at least theft from the community you were a part of.


    Leonard, on the other hand, was an entirely different problem. His class was focused on magic alright, but he had started down his own path, working with verbal invocations and focusing his magic through rhyme, verse and rhythm. It was an entirely different method and while we might arrive at similar effects, the paths we were taking to get there were utterly different. Not that his magic was weak, it was quite formidable within the limitations he was working under, but that didn¡¯t mean it was something I could readily help him with. Even understanding what he was doing could be fairly challenging to the point that I considered it only possible thanks to my high attributes and my magical senses. Otherwise, I¡¯d be quite lost without a real point of comparison. This was the biggest problem he was labouring under when trying to comprehend my lessons, he was working from an entirely different base, though I had noticed that there were occasional flashes and flares of power from the shrine, likely coming from Lady Hecate to offer some subtle guidance, maybe in his dreams. Or through Luna, at times, she was slipping into the role of a teacher, much to my amusement.


    On the other end of the advancement spectrum were the two kids, Liam and Sandy, both of whom had taken to magic like ducklings to the water and were constantly pushing their boundaries. Curiously, the pair had a certain level of compatibility in their magic, with Liam favouring Fire Magic, while Sandy had an innate affinity for Wind Magic. Together, they had managed something I hadn¡¯t expected, namely, they had managed to combine a few simple exercises on elemental manipulation into an actual lightning spell, allowing them to wield power far beyond their level. It was fairly impressive what they could do and I had a feeling they would continue to push their skills as they had been forbidden from venturing out to push their level. I had my doubts about the efficiency of that restriction, mostly because the kids would break it as soon as they found a good way, but that wasn¡¯t really my problem.


    Similarly, Daniel had taken his advanced level and used it to build a solid foundation, letting him wield magic comfortably far beyond the level he originally had used it on. He wasn¡¯t as powerful as I had been at his level, far from it, but I had a feeling that he would soon reach an impressive level of versatility. If nothing else, he was an excellent example of what a person with a lacking elemental affinity could accomplish, even if his general magical affinity and high innate Intelligence were distorting things a little.


    ¡°What is it, Maggy?¡± I asked, shaking off the thoughts about my various other students and their individual advancement.


    ¡°I wanted to ask your advice and opinion,¡± she admitted, sitting down across from me when I nodded, looking slightly pensive and taking a moment to organise her thoughts, making me think that talking to me had been a spontaneous decision.


    ¡°Do you think I¡¯ll make a lot of progress with my magic if I stay here?¡± she asked, sounding just a little bit despondent.Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.


    ¡°You are dissatisfied, aren¡¯t you? The others are generally making a lot more progress or can wield their magic in ways you can¡¯t even imagine, leaving you in the dust, or something along those lines?¡± I asked in return, getting a slight glare and a nod moments later.


    ¡°Would you be okay with telling me about your time on Mundus? What you were doing, where your focus was, things like that?¡± I prodded, just to see if my previous ideas in regards to her class held water.


    Again, she nodded before starting to explain to me that she had focused on gathering information from the shadows, using gossip and rumour to her advantage in finding and cementing her position as a part of a criminal underworld. An information broker and thief, avoiding combat as much as possible. The more I heard, the more I realised just how ill-suited for the current situation her class and legacy were but there was little she could do to fix that in the short term. In the long-term, her best bet, at least in my opinion, was to emulate Lia, at least to some degree, as she had been doing. Both of them had a certain amount of athleticism, though Lia was a fair bit stronger and faster thanks to her vampiric traits, and both had excellent stealth abilities, second only to my own. Sure, she could put all her focus on her Darkness Magic, but I had a feeling it wouldn¡¯t do her much good, partially due to her attributes, partially due to her class and partially due to her innate disposition. Maybe she¡¯d be able to learn some sort of illusion magic, maybe using Mind Magic as a base, though we¡¯d have to test that.


    ¡°Maybe,¡± I admitted, considering how we might be able to test my latest idea, ¡°I doubt you¡¯ll ever be comfortable wielding purely offensive magic, you don¡¯t really have the mindset for them from what I can tell. However, what you might be able to learn and do well are illusions, though we¡¯ll have to be somewhat creative with the lessons there, especially as I¡¯m not really well-versed in them myself,¡± I explained, readily downplaying just how ignorant of the discipline I was. Sure, I could push a Mind to see or experience something but that was all internal to them, real illusions, capable of affecting multiple people? I wasn¡¯t sure where to start, other than to work my way up from my concealment magic, which was something of an illusion, maybe. I¡¯d have to test things and see but Maggy didn¡¯t have to know that.


    Maggy, on the other hand, seemed to be highly interested all of a sudden, making me grin just a little, especially when she began speaking again.


    ¡°Not what I had expected, if I¡¯m honest. I had thought I was hopeless when it came to magic, though I also wasn¡¯t sure I really needed to learn. Sure, it¡¯s incredibly useful for a lot of things but when do I need those in my everyday life?¡± she shrugged, making me realise that she had managed to found her community early on and largely focused on building and leading her people, making me wonder where her levels came from. Maybe from teaching, or there were other ways to gain levels, though I wasn¡¯t sure how.


    ¡°Though I¡¯m afraid those lessons will have to wait unless you can give them to me within a day or two. That¡¯s what I originally wanted to talk to you about, I need to get back home, make sure everything¡¯s still going as planned and talk to a few people about the resources I promised in payment,¡± she admitted, looking somewhat disappointed that she now had an actually good reason to stay but also a certain need to head back.


    ¡°Fair, I guess. And no, it¡¯s not something you can learn in a day, I¡¯ll have to figure out the best way to start anyway, what I can currently do is a fairly minor outcropping of a far more complex skill, one that takes a lot of time, effort and special resources to develop. Not something you can dive into without any idea or preparation,¡± I told her, accepting that I¡¯d have some time to figure out the best way to teach her illusion magic without delving too deep into the far-too-easily abusable Mind Magic. As of yet, I wasn¡¯t comfortable teaching that to her, I didn¡¯t know her well enough, despite the time she had spent here as my student.


    ¡°Fair, I guess. I¡¯ll try and see what I can come up with on my own. Hopefully, I¡¯ll be able to get back in a week or two, maybe with a few extra students and the resources I had promised,¡± she grinned, getting a nod from me in return. But before she could stand up and walk away, I decided to ask her about her relatively high level and how she had managed that, without serious combat skills, especially as her earlier explanation had sounded very much as if she hadn¡¯t been much of a fighter on Mundus either.

 Chapter 1070

    As it turned out, Maggy¡¯s explanation didn¡¯t shed any real light on the matter of levels, if anything, it made the entire thing even more convoluted and incomprehensible. Mainly because there didn¡¯t seem to be any connection between the things she received EXP for, mainly centred around organisation and information, and the things I received EXP for. The only similarity between my teaching and the things she described was that a certain level of information exchange was involved but if that was all that was needed to generate EXP, almost anything should do so. However, it was only these two fairly specific activities that generated EXP, making me wonder if other people had their own specific ways of generating EXP outside of combat. And, if they did, how these ways were decided or where they came from?


    For me and the teaching of magic, I could make a case for it being caused by Lady Hecate who might want to spread arcane magic as fast and far as possible, maybe to limit the influence divine magic would have in the long term. After all, if the divine didn¡¯t have a monopoly on magical gifts, especially when it came to healing, their influence would be limited. Sure, I had a feeling that even without the monopoly, divine healing would spread further than arcane or alchemical healing, simply because it was a lot easier, both when it came to using it but also in regards to learning it in the first place. You just needed to be consecrated to the right deity and use the correct macro, the rest was all done by the deity in question, at least according to the things I had heard from Olivia, back on Mundus. I doubted the gods would change anything about that particular system, as it worked quite well.


    But why would any of the gods deign to reward Maggy, and apparently only Maggy, for her efforts in organising her community? Why would any of the gods have rewarded her for acting as an information broker, and possibly a thief, on Mundus? Sure, there might have been a few quests involved from what I could tell about her adventures on Munuds, but where the majority of her EXP came from, I had no idea. It didn¡¯t make all that much sense when judged by my current knowledge, meaning there had to be some other mechanism involved, something I had yet to learn about.


    Yet another topic to be put on the ever-growing pile of things to research and investigate, not like that pile was ever going to shrink, given that I wasn¡¯t even cognisant of the things I didn¡¯t know. There was simply too much to learn out there for a lifetime to be sufficient to make a dent in it all, though maybe, given the draconic traits I was accumulating and the lore behind dragons, my lifetime might just be sufficient. Or it might not, who knew which of the old myths and tales turned out to be true, the elves of Mundus certainly didn¡¯t have an innately long lifespan, they had a long lifespan thanks to their connection to their forest - Until I managed to have winter claim it all, that is. They cut short the life of my beloved, I cut short the lives of all their beloved. If they could, they might be able to reclaim that lost life, just like I had to quest and strove to reclaim my lost love. Some would call it Justice, others likely something else. No matter what, it was in my past and I had other things to work towards.


    Sadly, my musings, and the remaining discussion with Maggy, were cut short when Jeremiah, one of the other students approached us, looking quite distraught.


    ¡°Maggy, do you know where Liam and Sandy are?¡± he asked, making me recall the apprehension I had felt just earlier, that premonition that these two kids would find a way to roam around the countryside and get into trouble. Immediately, I drew upon the magic of my tower, quickly checking if they were anywhere in the vicinity, the area I had worked over still saturated with enough of my magic to respond to my demand.


    ¡°No, I thought they were working with Jamie,¡± Maggy replied, while my mind was racing across the area and through the tower, checking one person after the other, only to come up short a few people. Namely, Liam, Sandy and, to my swiftly growing horror, Luna.This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.


    ¡°They are not,¡± I spoke up, causing both of them to frown as I continued speaking, ¡°I just checked, the tower and the quarry around it are saturated with enough of my power to let me do a few fairly unusual things. Like find out who is present and who is absent, unless somebody is using a fairly advanced concealment technique. Lia might be able to hide from that detection and you, too, Maggy. But I doubt that Liam and Sandy have learned how to hide from me within my domain,¡± I explained, receiving nods of acceptance even if I doubted that they truly understood what I was talking about.


    ¡°Do you know where they are?¡± Maggy asked, though her voice didn¡¯t betray much hope, maybe because my tone had been slightly grim.


    ¡°No, I do not. But given that Luna is absent, too, I¡¯d be willing to help you search,¡± I admitted, trying to figure out the best way to find them. Well, to find Luna, as that was my priority and the easiest way to accomplish that was fairly simple. It was to ask Silva for help, her canine nose, in addition to her protective instinct in regards to Luna, were off the charts, making her incredibly adept at finding her.


    ¡°Let¡¯s go then;¡± Maggy stood, as did I. ¡°Jerry, can you check what Jamie is doing, just in case there¡¯s something else going on?¡±


    I didn¡¯t tell her that Jamie wasn¡¯t doing much of anything, though you could say she was being done. Thanks to using the magic infused in the area to survey, I had learned a lot more about the relationship between Jamie and Murray than I ever wanted to know, maybe more than anyone not involved should know. Eh, if the pair was caught by Jeremiah, it wouldn¡¯t be my problem, unless they decided to ask me about her location.


    After a quick whistle, Silva came bounding down the stairs, looking somewhat concerned. When I explained to her that Luna wasn¡¯t in the tower and might have done something ill-advised, she happily put her nose down and swiftly moved, sniffing the ground to pick up the right scent.


    Sadly, despite Silva¡¯s incredible nose, I could already tell it wouldn¡¯t be an easy task, mainly because Luna¡¯s scent was all around the place thanks to our fairly frequent wanderings. Which track was the correct one would likely be hard to tell, so Silva had to sniff around a lot, while I had to deal with the sunlight streaming down from above. It was an annoyance, though I began to notice that I was a lot less vulnerable to it than I had been. Now, I could simply use my magic to protect myself without the risk of running dry within minutes, I didn¡¯t even need to conjure a physical shield, a simple, somewhat concealed barrier of Darkness Magic was sufficient. For a moment, I even wondered if I might be able to pick up a bit of Light Magic, it would allow me to delve deeper into my understanding of magic in general and maybe even unlock a few additional elements, though I would have to see later.


    For now, I had to focus on the environment around me and on Silva, to make sure that nothing was sneaking up on us while we were following Luna¡¯s trail, hopefully letting us find Liam and Sandy, too.


    Finally, after a few far too long minutes of searching, Silva let out a soft, somewhat familiar growl, telling me that she had found what we were looking for. Moments later, she started moving down a slightly trodden path, making it obvious that this was a route somebody had been following repeatedly, a realisation that gave me a great deal of relief. If Luna, or somebody, was coming here habitually, I doubted she was in some sort of grave danger, though having two kids with her might change that.


    So, forward, we went, following the path to wherever it might lead. Not that we had to go all that far, the path soon turned upwards, into the mountains and around the quarry we had made our home in. A few minutes later, I could hear some movement up ahead, the rustling of cloth from a person but little else. Then, as we hurried up even more, the three of us came into an open area, where Luna was currently crouched before a small sapling, her magic streaming out of her as she was doing something. What, I had no idea but, to my alarm, neither of the two missing children were with my experimenting daughter.


    We might have harried after the wrong trail.

 Chapter 1071

    ¡°Luna, do you know where Liam and Sandy are?¡± I immediately asked, ignoring the not-so-small voice somewhere in the back of my mind that was intensely curious about my daughter¡¯s latest experiment. From the look of the clearing, she was using the area as a personal training ground, trying things out that needed soil and light instead of the unforgiving rock of the tower. But, for now, my curiosity had to wait, while we were looking for those two stupid kids.


    ¡°The kids?¡± She asked in response and for a moment, I had to control myself or I¡¯d have started to laugh, given that Luna, despite her artificially enhanced maturity, was half their age. And yet, she called them kids and would likely be quite insulted if the pair of them called her a kid or, really, anything but a young adult and treated her with the respect she felt deserving of. Not that I could really criticise her there, Luna had the maturity and, maybe more importantly, the power of an adult, was taking on the responsibilities of one and largely acting like one, so she should be treated like one, at least in most regards.


    ¡°Haven¡¯t seen them in a while, certainly not out here,¡± she assured us, her face twisting into a frown, something mirrored by the vegetation she was still controlling with her magic. It was an interesting effect, a lot more fluid than the way she usually controlled them, though it made me wonder if that was on purpose, forced control could be a lot more precise than the organic movement I was seeing now. Something to ask about later, for now, we needed to figure out where the stupid kids had gone and it sounded like Luna¡¯s disappearance alongside theirs was simply a coincidence.


    ¡°You are closest to them in age, any idea where they might have gone?¡± I asked, hoping that there might be some sort of friendship between the three, they had been talking on occasion, though I wasn¡¯t sure what they had been talking about.


    ¡°No, sorry,¡± she admitted, ¡°They¡¯ve mostly wanted to know how I managed to make you let me travel and fight and stuff. Didn¡¯t really get that it was less of a let me do something and more of a case that I had to fight to survive, especially as we travelled,¡± she sighed, a sentiment I returned. To outsiders, having the power Luna wielded might sound awesome, and there were many cases in which it truly was, but the flip side was the countless fights and the endless death needed to get to our level of power. A part of me wanted to return to the mindset I had on Mundus, where I considered only those closest to me as important, while happily letting the rest of the world burn, or rather freeze in my case, but I was somewhat aware that the mindset hadn¡¯t been a healthy one, at least not in the long run.


    ¡°Tracks with what I thought happened, they want to test their powers in real combat, stupid kids,¡± I growled, trying to come up with a way to track them other than Silva¡¯s nose. Sure, if she had an idea what the kids individually smelled like, she¡¯d likely be able to track them but finding that sample and the right spot to start wouldn¡¯t be easy.


    On the other hand, I had a faint idea of how their magic felt, I had helped them get comfortable with the Astral River, there might be a way for me to track their movement through the river and get an idea of where they were in the real world. Both ideas had merit, but I wouldn¡¯t be able to pursue both paths at the same time.


    ¡°Silva, Maggy, the two of you go back to the tower, get a sample of their scent and track them that way. Maybe grab a few extra guys, just in case the kids have managed to find more trouble than you can handle and follow them,¡± I ordered, not even bothering to phrase it as a question, simply giving them directions to obey.


    ¡°What are you going to do?¡± Maggy asked, sounding a little bit annoyed but mostly curious about what I had in mind now. If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. Please report it.


    ¡°Got another idea how to find them but it¡¯s something only I can do,¡± I replied before looking at the pair with an intent gaze, ¡°Go now, I don¡¯t want those silly kids to die,¡± I repeated my order sternly and now, Silva and Maggy were off, swiftly heading back to the tower.


    ¡°So, what are you going to do?¡± Luna repeated the question Maggy had asked just moments before, getting a slightly annoyed look from me while I was checking the sun and deciding which of the nearby trees would give me the right amount of shadow to get comfortable. ¡°And why are you so intent on keeping those two safe?¡± she asked, her tone making me wonder if she was worried about getting replaced.


    ¡°They might become quite powerful spellcasters in the future, I don¡¯t want to see their path cut short before they manage to accomplish their potential. Though, if they insist on being stupid, I don¡¯t think I¡¯ll be able to keep them from ending their path,¡± I admitted, stepping over to Luna and pulling my daughter into a hug. ¡°Think about it like this, would Lady Hecate want them to fall or would she want them to grow and learn?¡±


    ¡°She¡¯d want them to find their own path, but if they insist on walking off a cliff, she¡¯d readily let them fall. Whether they¡¯d survive is on them, if they can¡¯t use enough magic to get out of the trouble they get themself in, that¡¯s on them;¡± Luna argued, though I had a feeling her heart wasn¡¯t entirely in it.


    ¡°Maybe but at the end of the day, they are my students and I don¡¯t want them to die,¡± I told her, giving her another squeeze before stepping back, towards the shadows, ¡°Plus, those two are interesting and I want to see whether I might be able to learn a thing or two about the way they combine their magic to create an entirely new element between the two of them. I managed to make lightning on my own but I¡¯m really not good with it,¡± I added, now noticing a grin on Luna¡¯s face when she accepted my reasoning.


    Sitting down in the shade, I let myself drift into the Astral River. There, I could feel the elements swirl around me, the slightly painful abundance of Light all around the area already starting to give me a headache. But, just as I could feel the magical elements all around me, I could also feel a slight anomaly where their composition changed just a little, the spot where Luna¡¯s presence in the real world had an effect on the Astral River. She was drawing power from the river and that had an effect, not a large one but I could feel and even identify it, as I knew my daughter well.


    Now, I only needed to translate the ability to find my daughter into a trick to find the two stupid kids, hopefully before they managed to find a way to get themself into some sort of terminal trouble.


    Following individual threads within the Astral River wouldn¡¯t work, there were simply too many of those and even following major veins wouldn¡¯t help me, as the kids didn¡¯t have enough of a magical weight to draw power from a large area, they would have to be right on top of a major vein for me to notice their draw from it. If that, I wasn¡¯t even sure if their draw would register on the sheer scale of a major vein.


    So, I needed to spread my own presence out, something I could only accomplish thanks to my prodigious attributes, further enhanced by my Titanic Ambition and the boost the trait was giving me, after all, this was something I had never tried before and it was most certainly a magical undertaking.


    For a moment, I lost myself in the deluge of impressions, my mind unable to cope with the sheer scale of my undertaking. I was, quite literally, trying to look at an area some two square kilometres in size at the same time, while getting enough detail to identify a person by their hair colour. It was just about impossible and I felt my previous headache grow rapidly into a full-fledged migraine. Every moment was incredibly exhausting and would soon turn to agony but I held on for as long as I could, my mind wrestling with it all until I noticed a flare, for lack of a better word. For a moment, the relatively consistent tapestry of the Astral River changed, the alteration enough to draw my metaphysical eye.


    My focus now rapidly shrinking, I could spare enough mental capacity to realise what I had seen, what that change had been. Liam and Sandy had joined their magic to create lightning, the combination enough to alter their weight within the Astral River and, in this case, catch my attention.


    Now, I only had to figure out how to get to them.

 Chapter 1072

    It was fascinating. As I was reaching through the Astral River to find the two kids who were channelling Lightning together, I noticed something else, a strange sensation through the feedback. It was vague, incredibly so, but intense at the same time, as if I was seeing the sun through thick, tinted glass, only discernable because it was so incredibly powerful. If I had to put a word to it, I would have called it desperation, or maybe terror, two emotions I had become somewhat familiar with, thanks to my experiments with Mind Magic. The test subjects I had back at the tower frequently felt those emotions, so I could put a name to them, though in this case, that didn¡¯t help me much.


    I still needed a way to get to the kids and, if anything, the emotions only underscored the need to get to them right now. The only way I could think of that had a chance of success, given that I still hadn¡¯t figured out how to correlate positions within the Astral River and the real world on a whim, was to use the Shadows. Darkness was everywhere, in one form or another and I could sense some Darkness Astral Power within the Astral River, just a lot less than Light, as it was daytime at the moment.


    For another moment, I considered the risks I was taking. Stepping into the shadows was easy, as was travelling through them. The only actual risk I was taking was that I would get a little lost, ending up somewhere else. But it was a fairly small risk, at least for me. If I failed, I wouldn¡¯t get to the kids, I might end up on the other side of the mountain, or in some nearby cave. Sure, that¡¯d be annoying and the kids would be in just as much trouble as they were right now, but if I did nothing, well, nothing would change. So, unless the kids managed to scare up something that would give me trouble, everything would be fine.


    Nodding to myself, if only within the back of my mind, I took action. The shadows were everywhere, Darkness was everywhere. Pulling on the shadows around me, I let myself drop into their realm without leaving the Astral River, following the connection between the Darkness Astral Power within the Astral River and the shadows in the world. Curiously, there was more to the shadows than just their connection to the Astral River, something deeper and more primal but now wasn¡¯t the time to investigate strange curiosities about the unfathomable depths of darkness. No, now was the time to follow the strands of power all throughout the Astralr River, use them to flow through it towards the kids, their presence no even stronger as their desperation allowed them to draw in just a little more power than they¡¯d normally be able to. Maybe that was why I could sense the emotion, I wasn¡¯t sure.


    But it didn¡¯t matter why I could, the only thing that mattered was that I did and that it had guided me here. Pushing outwards from the strand of darkness closest to the kids, I felt a strange resistance for a moment, before finding myself sitting in the shade of yet another tree, feeling somewhat disoriented. I had no idea where I was now but I could hear the crackle of lightning nearby, the sound familiar enough to push me into action.


    Rising, and only stumbling a little bit, I walked forward, mindful of the uneven ground. Normally, I could have walked across the various roots, crags and rocks without even thinking, my agility and a few traits enough to let me move with preternatural grace, but now, still somewhat shaken from the trip through the shadows and the Astral River at the same time, I wasn¡¯t as steady as I normally would be. Additionally, I idly noticed that it had taken a lot more Astral Power than a normal trip through the shadows would but given that I had managed to move in an entirely different way, I couldn¡¯t complain too badly.


    I could only move forward and soon, I saw the flashes of lightning through the trees, the two kids becoming visible moments later. And the reason for the lightning and their desperation, can¡¯t forget about that, certainly not now that I could see it.Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.


    In this case, it was a decently sized mountain lion of some sort, or maybe it was a cat which had undergone a greater alteration than usual, I wasn¡¯t quite sure. And, at the end of the day, it didn¡¯t matter what had spawned the thing, what mattered was that it was still trying to get close to the two kids who managed to dissuade it with sparks, flashes of lightning and the rolling rumble of thunder. A small, curious, part of me used Observe to find out what we were dealing with and almost had to laugh. Sure, to me, a level twenty-five Big Cat, as the thing was called, was little more than a joke but to two kids, barely in their teens in age and below level ten? It was a deadly threat, though one that suddenly shifted focus to me and instantly turned to flee.


    Not that I could blame it, I had barely hidden my use of Observe and my control over my aura was somewhat frayed, meaning it could easily sense that I was stronger than it by a long shot. And I let the thing run, unwilling to kill it and shunt EXP to the two kids. Sure, it would be a meagre amount if I did but I didn¡¯t want them to get any EXP and levels, not while knowing what it would do to their bodies. What it had done to Luna, something I still was incredibly torn about.


    If the elders of their community, or whoever considered themself to be responsible for them wanted them to take that step, it was on them. But while I could shield them from the responsibility that came with that kind of power, I felt it was the moral thing to do. At least as long as there was no pressing need as there had been for Luna, if it became a question of survival, well, the dead didn¡¯t have to worry about accelerated maturity, only about accelerated decay. And even that wasn¡¯t really a worry, it was simply something that happened to them.


    ¡°Miss Jade,¡± Liam gasped out as he noticed my approach when the cat fled into the trees. He sounded winded and I could see some sweat beading on his head, showing that he had pushed himself quite hard. Similarly, Sandy looked equally relieved and exhausted, moving towards me until she stumbled against me, her arms hugging me tight. It was a surprising display of childish need for comfort, not something I would have expected from the girl who had tried to be seen as an adult as much as possible but it might have something to do with the stark reminder of their mortality. That cat could, and would, have killed them if they had run out of Astral Power, or even if it overcame an instinctual avoidance of flashing lights and loud noises.


    Moments later, as I was wrapping an arm around her to give her some comfort, she was joined by Liam, in a fairly similar situation. Uncertain how to handle the pair, I decided to act similar to the way I would act with Luna, though I wasn¡¯t quite sure what that would look like. Luna was, luckily, by now not as foolish as that, though if she was, I would have to scold her for it, but only after making sure that she was actually alright.


    So, I let the pair cry on my shoulders, even if I had a feeling Liam would claim there was pollen in the air or something along those lines. Or maybe not, I didn¡¯t know the pair all that well, mainly from my lessons and from a few conversations, some they had with me, some I had overheard. either way, first came the support for them.


    And then, once the tears ran out and they didn¡¯t shake like leaves in the wind, came the scolding. Or rather, came the lesson, held on comfortable, for me, chairs of Ice, sitting right there on the path they had taken away from the tower. I was curious how long it would take Maggy and Silva to find them and maybe, out here, the lesson would sink in in ways it couldn¡¯t back at the tower.


    It was almost amusing how much they cringed and tried to whine, though luckily without tears. The fact that they could still see the spot where they had almost been mauled by a literal Big Cat helped to drive the fact that the world was dangerous home in ways few tales and dire warnings could.


    Like this, Silva and Maggy found us, with me lecturing the kids who looked as if they wanted to be almost anywhere but here. Or maybe there was no ¡®almost¡¯ about it, though that was mostly due to their lack of experience. Either way, the pair was safe and I had learned an interesting new trick and got a few skill points in the process.

 Chapter 1073

    Amusingly, the aftermath of the search for two children, too caught up with the power they had gained thanks to their magic, was just as exhausting as the search itself had been. Just a very different kind of exhausting, where the search had been slightly exhausting physically and a little worse when it came to magical and mental exhaustion, the aftermath was a thing of emotions, which could be incredibly exhausting in its own right, even if there shouldn¡¯t be any real investment on my part. Sure, I had met them and considered them quite talented when it came to magic, but other than that, there were a few hundred children of similar age living in the Denver-Springs area and the number of children who had perished in the change was mindboggling enough to avoid thinking about it. Well, the number of people who had perished in and shortly after the change was something nobody wanted to think about, with children sadly being a statistically overrepresented subset of that number. Adults, even untrained ones, had an okay chance to evade and escape the Shattered but a child, especially one trapped in a home with the Shattered who used to be their parents? None of them would make it out alive.


    Maybe my desire to protect these two children came from some sort of subconscious need to protect the young of the species, triggered by the knowledge that literal millions of children had died that pushed me to find and help them, maybe it was a need to demonstrate my ability, maybe one of the reasons I had given Luna had been compelling me, I wasn¡¯t sure and now, in hindsight, I couldn¡¯t really tell why I had pushed myself as I had.


    Not that it truly mattered, I merely noticed an interesting data point and promised myself to look into my own behaviour some more, especially as I sought to understand the mysteries of the mind. After all, if I wasn¡¯t able to understand my own mind, how would I ever be able to understand the mind of another person? Let alone extract the memories of Sigmir which might possibly, with a lot of hope, be encoded in some way into the Legacy of Morgana thanks to the EXP she had gifted me in her last moment? No, I needed to understand my own mind, just as much as I needed to understand how other people functioned, though given just how important my mind was to me, I would be a lot more cautious when it came to the exploration of my self.


    But that was something for later, first, there was the aftermath of two dumb kids to deal with. The first part of that came when Maggy caught up to us with Silva and Jack, all of them looking slightly harried, only to spot me, sitting on a comfortable seat of Ice and the two kids who had become very introspective and quiet during my lecture. The sheer incredulity on their faces was something I would savour for some time, especially the canine expression of disbelief on Silva¡¯s face was one for the ages.


    Jack was the one breaking through his stupor first, looking at Maggy with a bit of annoyance and confusion, asking why the hurry had been necessary, only for Maggy to shush him and grab the two kids into a hug, barely looking at me for the moment. Then, once she had hugged the stuffing out of them, possibility breaking a bone or two in the process given how much Liam had groaned as he was hugged, she tried to do the same with me and it was only thanks to my supernatural resilience that I escaped crippling injuries. Maybe the woman wasn¡¯t some sort of thief and spy, maybe she had missed her calling as an assassin, capable of killing people in a single hug. Bewear of the Maggy, for she is a hugger.


    Once the hugging was done to Maggy¡¯s satisfaction, or maybe because she realised us puny mortals needed to breathe, she demonstrated that she most certainly did not. There was no other explanation for how she could be able to deliver an impassioned scolding, lasting for multiple minutes without pausing long enough to draw a single breath, at least not one I noticed. Sure, there was the possibility that she had excellent breath control but given the volume and vigour of her address, I was personally leaning more towards some sort of ability that allowed her to absorb oxygen through her skin.Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.


    Once that was done, and a short apology from Liam, Sandy and Maggy was delivered to a now fairly bemused-looking Jack, we returned to the tower and to the other part of the aftermath, the slightly unexpected part.


    But I should have expected the situation, I certainly had seen a sign of it before. The second part of the aftermath came from Luna, who I now realised was deeply unhappy about the current situation and feeling more than just a little neglected. As such, she barely looked at me when we returned to the tower, though she was present and her entire body-language and expression screamed that she was unhappy with me, almost louder than any words could.


    It only took me a moment to realise where the problem was. Just earlier, I had promised her that she, Luna, was my priority, only to disappear from the spot I had been sitting on, leaving her behind. No matter how mentally mature she was, thanks to the effect of her system on her mind, there seemed to be a component of emotional maturity and stability she hadn¡¯t attained yet. The situation also drove home that Luna had gone from what was essentially an only child to somebody who had to share their parental figure. Before, we had been spending numerous hours every day together, only interrupted by my experiments, which she occasionally joined, her own interests or certain basic necessities. And if I wasn¡¯t with her, Silva made usually sure that Luna wasn¡¯t left alone and endangered, acting as companion and protector at the same time.


    But now, with the amount of teaching I was doing and the fairly high security in the area, especially within the tower itself, Luna was left alone a lot more than she had been. Granted, she also had additional responsibilities, mainly when it came to teaching and guiding the students we had collected, but I had a feeling that those weren¡¯t enough to make my daughter happy.


    Walking over, consciously separating myself from Jack, Maggy and the two kids, I briefly tried to find the right words to say, only to come up empty. So, instead of trying to speak, I simply placed a hand on Luna¡¯s shoulder, even as she demonstratively looked away from me, studying some object nearby intently.


    ¡°Would you like to show me how much you have managed to accomplish with the Kara¡¯kesh we found in the dungeon? You had it for quite some time now and I¡¯m curious if you found out something we didn¡¯t know before,¡± I asked her, my voice quiet so nobody else could hear. Well, maybe Silva would manage with her canine ears, but nobody else.


    For a moment, Luna continued to look away from me before starting to walk, heading roughly in the same direction Maggy and I had used earlier, when looking for her, thinking the two kids were with her. After taking a few steps, she looked over her shoulder and made a brief, almost curt, motion with her head, indicating I should follow.


    If it was anybody but Luna, I would have utterly ignored the implied insult, the gesture that she had a right to command me but for my dear daughter, especially in this particular case, I wasn¡¯t about to chastise her for it, at least not harshly. We would talk, and I would make my displeasure at her behaviour quietly known, but I wasn¡¯t about to throw away a chance to soothe the hurt I had inadvertently caused her.


    So, I followed after her, waiting for her to talk if she wanted to. If now, I was perfectly content to wait until we reached her clearing, the place we were most likely headed to, and I had seen her recent accomplishments with the curious device we had recovered in the nearby dungeon.


    Thinking of that place, we might want to go there again at some point, get some extra EXP, maybe find out if the supplies we found there continued to be generated or if that had been some sort of one-time thing.


    Either way, that was for later, for now, I had some accomplishments to observe and to assure my daughter that she was, and would remain, important to me, not somebody I would leave behind for any real amount of time. As long as she wanted to remain by my side, she would have her spot, just like I wouldn¡¯t send Lia away, though that was an entirely different topic. One that might come up somewhat soon, depending on how her continued relationship with Samantha developed and what priorities she decided to set for herself.

 Chapter 1074

    While every day since the change was one showing people that the world wasn¡¯t as it had been before, winter might be the time that drove that idea home the strongest. People were confined indoors, especially when the world showed everyone that it wasn¡¯t just humans who could drive climate change and the world was covered in snow, and that confinement drove introspection, conversation and conflict. And boredom, which might be the worst of all.


    It got to the point that I made the effort to escort two groups of my students back to their original homes, simply to lessen the amount of people in and around my tower. Sure, they ate their own food, supplemented with some of the things Luna was growing with her ever-increasing ability in Life Magic and almost all of my students had picked up the trick to conjure water readily enough, completely negating that particular need, but it wasn¡¯t just the supplies that made their stay problematic.


    The bigger problem was, as mentioned, boredom. We, as people, had grown up immersed in information, with countless ways to kill time and entertain ourselves, making boredom something we barely experienced. At worst, we might have experienced something akin to boredom in school, while sitting in a class we weren¡¯t interested in but even that wasn¡¯t truly boredom, as there was always the option to pay attention or do some other work. Now, in the middle of winter, with snow piling up high, thus the need for me to escort people to and from my tower, there was very little to do.


    Going out, unless the person was adept at Ice Magic, could easily become a death sentence, as evidenced by the fact I had been needed to save a couple of people who decided they were hard and hardy enough to wade through over a metre of snow piling up on the ground. Granted, a lot of that was due to the shape of the quarry I had built my tower in, but not all of it. The winter was incredibly cold and snowy, in ways I hadn¡¯t experienced before. Sure, the locals had mentioned that their winters were fairly harsh, thanks to the increased elevation of the area but even they were surprised at the ferocity of the winter we experienced.


    The few books we had for entertainment were passed around readily and I did my very best to add interesting exercises my students could use to entertain themselves after the lessons were done but even that only helped so much. All in all, the winter was a dreadfully boring time for everyone too frail to move around outside, which was essentially everyone but me. Other people could venture out, at least for a time depending on their level and Endurance, but the only one to thrive was me, something I privately relished.


    Wandering around the frozen forests was incredible, the air clear, crisp and refreshingly cold, the wind occasionally howling like an angry wolf and the night sky resplendent in all its starry glory, it was an experience I would treasure. For once, I didn¡¯t even think about taking to the sky, instead, I let my feet carry me across the snow, using only the slightest bit of magic to keep myself from sinking in as I walked, letting my feet carry me where they would.


    For once, I could be confident in myself, in this world covered in Ice, I was as safe as I could be. The world was suffused with freezingly cold Ice Astral Power, energy I could sense readily and that sense gave me incredible environmental awareness, making it near impossible to sneak up on me, at least within a close radius around myself.


    Attacking from a distance would be possible but given that I was quietly moving through a dark forest, wrapped in my dark cloak and using its passive effects to conceal myself? It would take an incredibly powerful and skilled archer to get me, and that was assuming there was somebody nearby to desire my demise. Sure, there were beings who would prefer if I stopped doing that breathing thing I was so attached to but those beings were not necessarily nearby, nor did they have the means to readily dispatch assassins to hunt me down. This wasn¡¯t Mundus, where the Gods could casually cause a crusade to chase after me or to send a small army of Valkyr to hunt me down. This was Terra, just a few months after the change, meaning the vast majority of people had more important things to do, things like making sure they and their brethren weren¡¯t dying of starvation or the cold.The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.


    So, I could easily wander the nightly forest, letting my mind relax as the cold and the wind surrounded me in the night¡¯s embrace. It was a fascinating sensation and the more I let my feet carry me forward, the more I could truly relax and let go of the various concerns bothering me. Fear, caution, obligation, there were so many things I had to keep aware of, to make sure I wasn¡¯t hurt in the chaotic times since the change, to make sure my slowly growing family could thrive, and that my daughters were healthy. What a strange thought that was, daughters, or children in general, even if they were not truly born from my body, I had never thought I would partake in that particular experience. And yet, here I was, with two people who readily called me mother and, somehow, bound into what might eventually become a true triad deity, with me as the Mother.


    It was a strange fate and I couldn¡¯t help but wonder if one of the deities had influenced me into it. Not with any real sort of true manipulation but I couldn¡¯t help but wonder if I had received a little nudge here and there. Maybe a bit of assistance in the ritual to help Lia, maybe a bit of gentle guidance so I would stumble across Luna and empathise with the young, lost child. Was Hecate¡¯s interest in Luna part of that plan or was I starting to embrace conspiracy theories? It also might be a combination of both, though, as I walked, I realised just how little that really mattered. Would I be willing to abandon Luna if Lady Hecate materialised right this moment, telling me that she had pushed me into taking in my daughter? No, I would not, at least I didn¡¯t think I would. Emotions remained a tricky thing for me, or maybe they had always been tricky and now, since the change, they had become a different kind of tricky.


    Shaking my head, I pushed those stray thoughts away, taking a deep breath of cold, fresh air and letting my mind roam in a different direction. I wasn¡¯t here to let my mind be plagued by doubts, I was here to relax and embrace the cold, the night and the wind.


    Cold, Darkness and the Wind, the three elements I was fairly certain would become the core of my draconic aspect. Cold, because Ice and Snow were, and would always be, a primary elemental characteristic of me. Darkness, standing for Change and Magic, another part that I would forever embrace, partially to balance the static and stoic nature of Ice, partially because I felt at home in the dark. Darkness was beyond the physical, maybe that was why I enjoyed it so much, the mystery of the unknown and unknowable, of hidden and forbidden knowledge. Yes, I would always prefer the Darkness, even if the Curse of Sunna hadn¡¯t forced me to abandon the day, I would still roam the night.


    And, finally, the Wind, the element I embraced of my own volition, not because it was deeply ingrained in my being. To fly, to roam the sky and be free, if there was anything I wished to embrace about being a dragon, it would be that freedom. For a moment, an old song flickered through my head, reminding me that they couldn¡¯t take the skies from me, since I found serenity, the idea bringing a smile to my face.


    Ahead of me, the forest grew lighter and I realised that my aimless wandering had carried me to one of the cliffs in the area, allowing me to look far into the snow-covered land. Reaching out with my Ice Magic, I drew in snow and ice in vast quantities, wrapping it around me to form the body, not really thinking about my actions, simply letting intuition and my magic guide me. I didn¡¯t need to control my elven body piece by piece, cell by cell, it simply was. And just like that, I didn¡¯t need to control the dragon¡¯s body I was creating, the Ice infused by Darkness and Wind, so I could fly out into the night.


    For a moment, I could feel my serpentine shape, the long and sinuous body, the wide wings, the short, yet utterly lethal, claws and the devastating stinger at the tip of my tail, a curious appendage I hadn¡¯t consciously created. Alas, the sensation only lasted for a moment and then, just as quickly as the body had formed, it exploded outwards again, stripping a few trees of their bark, shredding countless needles and creating a scene of devastation atop this cliff.


    Failure, but a failure I could learn from. With that thought, I took yet another step, out, into the endless black of the night, letting my cloak carry me with the wind and back towards my tower. Failure, I had suffered but eventually, failure would lead to success, I only needed to try again.

 Interlude: Life at Jademoon Tower

    If anybody had suggested that they¡¯d be living in a nice cottage next to a newly constructed high-rise building just six months before, that person would have been deemed insane. The world had just broken, burned in impossible flames, and everything was turned on its head, technology failing, people changing and dying, nobody would have deemed the construction of anything beyond simple shelters a possibility.


    And yet, they were now living next to the impossible tower, going to literal magic school, as insane as that sounded and learning a great deal. For Jack, that last part, the school part, might just be the most insane part of it all, something straight out of a fantasy novel of some kind. But regardless of whether he deemed the situation to be impossible or at the very least incredibly implausible, it was the situation they had found themself in, holding up a deal made in fairly good faith.


    He couldn¡¯t even complain that the deal was unfair, their group received as much water as they could ever want and had the aforementioned nice cottage to live in, though they had to hunt for their food while getting some additional supplies from the nice teenager who was apparently able to magically multiply their supplies. He wasn¡¯t quite certain how the mechanics of that worked, but the girl seemed to be able to plant a small garden one day, do some of that magical stuff around the area for a week and then bring in a full harvest, regardless of the weather. It was, just like the rest, utterly insane, so completely outside of his common sense and experience that he could only boggle at the possibilities and yet, he couldn¡¯t deny what his eyes were telling him.


    Well, he could, and he might be tempted to if it only happened once, but at some point, a man had to accept that the reality he had become accustomed to for some thirty-odd years had shifted and was no longer as he liked it to be. Otherwise, the last resort was to consume enough drugs to stop caring about the altered reality, which would be a death sentence because now, the reality was a lot more dangerous than it had been before.


    Not that the area around Jademoon Tower, as they had dubbed the large stone edifice with the glowing eye on top, was particularly dangerous. The vast majority of predators had apparently learned to stay away which, amusingly, pushed the various prey animals into the area, making it easy to occasionally hunt one down. Refrigeration, provided by some magical contraption put together by the boss-lady, made it so the meat could be frozen and kept readily, without the need to smoke, salt or otherwise preserve it, just like it had been before the world went to shit. That might be what drove the mental incongruence he suffered from the hardest, the restoration of many modern conveniences created an oasis of the old normalcy but, at the same time, that oasis was only a Fata Morgana. A phantasm created by Morgana, quite literally, making it harder to retain the previous acceptance of the way things were, at least without getting a headache.


    At the same time, the current situation was a little humiliating and it would be a lot worse if he was alone in it. A single woman, easily ten years his junior, had somehow managed to gain enough power to reshape the world while he, over the same span of time, had become a fairly accomplished fighter and hunter. The comparison was just humbling and humiliating, though his pride was assuaged a little when watching that same woman teach her students. It wasn¡¯t just him who didn¡¯t measure up, nobody could.


    Plus, there were a few tales about that same woman, coming from those who held legacies, that Jade, back then known as Morgana, had quite literally reshaped, or destroyed, a world, gaining the power to do so within the span of two years. So who cared that she could reshape a small valley after a little over half a year, she had done worse before.


    No, feeling humiliated by Jade Morgana¡¯s accomplishments was just foolish and a path not to be travelled down. What stung a lot worse was that, somehow, Samantha, beautiful and smart Samantha, was receiving a lot of personal attention and lessons from Carnelia, Jade''s older daughter. Attention Samantha was apparently reciprocating in ways Jack could only dream about, leaving a deep, annoying ache within his chest.If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.


    Intellectually, he knew there was nothing he could do, nothing he should do, but accept the situation and move on. His mind knew that and yet, his heart hadn¡¯t received the message, his dreams turning torturing him with images as the green-eyed beast reared its ugly head. And the head was his, a situation making him feel even worse as days turned into weeks and finally months. There was nothing to act upon, nothing he could do about it but endure and try to get past these emotions. Well, he could just leave, and go back to Weir, Hammond and all the others, but that wouldn¡¯t feel right. It would feel like cowardice, like he was running away because he was too weak.


    Outside, in the snow, Daniel could only boggle at the sheer difference in scope and scale. He was well aware that his teacher was more powerful than he was, and likely would always be more powerful. A lot more powerful. But that didn¡¯t change the fact that getting it shoved in his face, quite literally, wasn¡¯t a humbling experience, watching how the woman he had come to regard with a mix of awe, fear and appreciation was wielding her magic, weaving it into an impossibly complex construct of fractal forms and streams, something he could barely sense, let alone comprehend. Creating anything like it would be a pipedream, something he couldn¡¯t even think about, and yet, here he was, watching as she was trying something.


    He, just like all the other students who were watching their teacher experiment in the gloomy twilight of the coming night, was staring in fascination and awe as snow flurried all around the floating form, rising from the ground and joining the magic in an impossible dance, the physical and the astral joining together. He could feel one infusing the other, or at least he thought he could, his head was rapidly starting to ache from the effort needed to witness the event to the best of his ability, simply because the experience was that inspiring.


    It showed him what was possible, just as the tower he was standing in front of did, an edifice to the strength of Arcane Magic, while also acting as a gateway to commune with the Lady Hecate, the distant but inspiring presence venerated on the public floor of the tower. In a way, the Lady Hecate was to them, as the tower was to the rest of the world. A distant beacon, awe-inspiring but also a little frightening, showing them how small they were but, at the same time, what might be possible in the future. Or maybe he was imagining things, just as he might be imagining things within the flurry of Ice and Magic drawn together by Jade, there certainly seemed to be a lot of impossible twisting and turning going on. But whether that was simply happening in his mind or if her working had layers he couldn¡¯t comprehend, well, that he couldn¡¯t tell. Well, he knew that there¡¯d be layers he couldn¡¯t sense or understand but whether that was the source of these sensory artefacts, he couldn¡¯t tell.


    Maybe that ignorance was for the best. By now, he was a firm believer in the idea that there were things man wasn¡¯t supposed to see, that a certain kind of mental strength and resilience was necessary, a strength he hadn¡¯t gained just yet.


    Otherwise, why would he feel the occasional echo of torment run through the uncaring stone of the tower as if a tortured soul was reaching out for him? The sensation had been especially common and prevalent at the beginning of his tutelage but now, a little over two months into his training, it had largely faded. Somehow, he was a little uncomfortable with the sensation and had never dared to ask his teacher about it, mainly because he feared that she might deny him further tutelage. And that was something he desperately wanted to avoid, the teaching he was getting here would give him the power to raise his own tower, take his own students. Eventually, he would be the teacher, though whether he would ever be able to float in the sky and twist snow and ice into the same sort of magical construct as Jade was doing now, he wasn¡¯t sure.


    Somehow, even just the idea of wrapping himself into this strange, serpentine form with large wings was sending a shiver of fear down his spine, as if he was treading where he really should not. No, that was for braver people to do, he would remain firmly grounded.

 Chapter 1075

    Looking back at the work I had managed in the last two months, I could only feel pride. Sure, I hadn¡¯t done all that much when it came to levels, only gaining six thanks to teaching various people magic and managing to make a few breakthroughs when it came to enchanting, but the levels hadn¡¯t been what I had focused on. However, I received a pleasant surprise at level one-hundred-five when I didn¡¯t just gain a single point in each attribute from my Dragon-Touched Trait but two of each. That, together with the attributes I received from my recently elevated class gave me utterly insane increases of twenty-seven attribute points every five levels, two of which were unassigned. Compared to the six pitiful points I had gained at the same level while on Mundus, the difference was between night and day.


    When I quietly asked about the attributes of other people, I had to carefully hide my smug sense of self-satisfaction or jealousy would have been the inevitable outcome. Jonas, one of Daniel¡¯s companions, acted as a mixture between frontline fighter and scout and was all too happy to explain how he had decided to work on a fairly balanced distribution of attributes. In reality, that meant he had a whopping thirty Strength and Agility, alongside a slightly less impressive twenty-five in Vitality and Endurance, alongside a few other, slightly elevated attributes, mostly thanks to crossing the first divide. Realising that, unless somebody was purely focused on a single attribute or had some fairly impressive traits, I could compete with essentially everyone in their strongest attribute was just a little sobering. Also, incredibly awesome, but it drove home just how incredible the Dragon-Touched Trait was, with the sheer breadth of attributes it bestowed upon me.


    The attribute points I gained, in turn, resulted in traits further improving my magical and sensory abilities, as both Intelligence and Intuition were pushed beyond the thresholds they both required, something I realised would continue every five levels, as long as I occasionally put a point into Intuition. However given that I realised I was starting to reach a point where my lacking perception was holding me back in my magical studies, I decided to start putting my free points into Intuition in an effort to have it catch up with my Intelligence a little. It would take an almost comically long time to close the thirty-six-point gap between the two attributes but if I didn¡¯t start somewhere, I¡¯d never get it done. And it wasn¡¯t as if the two attributes would stop growing, it was just that I¡¯d get to almost three hundred Intelligence before Intuition would catch up, using the assumption I wouldn¡¯t get some other traits as I continued to work my way up the levels. This would take a while¡­


    For Intelligence, the trait was fairly unspectacular. Sure, increasing the amount of Astral Power I was passively drawing from the Astral River once more was neat and I certainly could use it but it was far from the sheer breadth of utility I received from the Mind over Matter ability. Alas, not every Trait could give me more reality-shattering tricks or I would manage to get myself into even more trouble than I already did.


    The Intuition-Trait further improved my senses, allowing me to narrow the scope of my senses but increasing their sensibility in turn. Using that within the Astral allowed me to, for lack of a better word, zoom in on specific parts, similar to the way I had managed to locate the kids and use the information discovered that way to travel to that location, at least if there was some sort of beacon I could focus on or something that stood out to my senses in the first place. My tower, for example, and the eye atop of it, was an excellent marker, something I could find swiftly and, so far, from any distance I had tried it out. That alone made for an interesting discovery, though its utility was somewhat limited, as I could only travel through the shadows on my own.


    But the attributes and the levels were only a minor part of my recent achievements, the primary part came from the time I had spent experimenting with my magic and the results of that. Such as the testing for the aforementioned Shadow Stepping, it was the primary contributor to my Astral Meditation skill going up by two points and reaching level fifty-eight, but that was only a minor part of my testing. Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.


    Mind and Soul, on the other hand, were one topic I focused on, initially using the prisoners I had taken until they expired and had to be disposed of. Afterwards, I could do some experimentation on consenting volunteers, but only using Mind Magic, with some limited and very careful tests. As of yet, I was not trying to manipulate, instead, I was primarily trying to read and understand, with the occasional test to see if I might be able to transfer memories from me to others. That part was largely limited to people I trusted, in other words to Luna and Lia, and using only minor and brief memories, giving us mixed results. The limited results might be because we were using minor memories, memories like one of a shared breakfast the day before, or they might stem from a lacking methodology, we just didn¡¯t know. because the methodology was lacking. Either way, any manipulation of the Mind was something I remained very careful with, at least when the mind in question was one I cared about. Sadly, the progress had stalled a little when it came to skill points, the experiments only granted me two of them, bringing the skill to seventy-six.


    Soul Magic remained difficult to control and even harder to implement practically, mostly because it was difficult to visualise the Soul and conceptualise its manipulation. Affinities were, at the end of the day, only a very minor part of a soul, with far more complex and complicated layers hidden beyond my current perception To make matters worse, the entire process was incredibly tricky and delicate, with even small mistakes causing major, and often fatal, problems. Again, not something I could test on people I cared about, or anything I actually cared about. But the creation of different magical plants and animals worked fairly well for now, which, in turn, had resulted in a few extra points in the Soul Magic skill. It only reached twenty-six but it was better than nothing.


    Another element I had dabbled in, with some success, was Enchanting, especially now that I had access to cloth spun under the auspices of the system. Cloth and thread, allowing the creation of simple bags and even a backpack, all recognised as such under the system, not the usual grey notifications marking them as things made before the change. The difference was quite extreme, allowing me to imbue the cloth with actual enchantments and even weave magic directly into them in a stable fashion, especially using the Darkness Runes of Space I had learned not that long ago. By now, the bags I was creating were actual, magical bags, recognised by the system as such and allowing for some marvellous storage capacity. The creation of those bags and the enchanting of a fairly wide variety of clothes to improve attributes or the comfort of the wearer turned out to be excellent training and my Enchanting skill rose accordingly, as did a few of my Rune Magic skills, though those only went up by one each.


    Last of the things I had focused on, but certainly not least, was what started as an attempt to create a draconic form, an idea soon discarded as too ambitious and downgraded into what the notification after levelling up suggested, finding my Wings and Breath.


    The Wings followed the idea I had to create the entire draconic form, using Ice and Snow to carve them, Darkness to bind them together and give the usually hard and inflexible Ice the needed malleability to let the wings move and, lastly, Wind to let me soar, regardless of aerodynamics.


    It was a great idea, at least in my opinion, and I was slowly getting better at creating the wings, though I was fairly certain I was missing something. My current brute force approach was working, though I doubted it was the intended process if there even was such a thing. Maybe it was the opposite, the process I took decided what sort of dragon I would eventually be, meaning while there was no way to fail the implied test of the system, I was fairly certain this wasn¡¯t the way I wanted to succeed, not by bashing my head against the proverbial wall until it broke. So, even if I had managed to get two points in Ice Magic for my troubles, one in Darkness Magic and a neat three points in Wind Magic, I might want to examine different paths to achieve my goal, or I might become some caricature of a stupid dragon.


    Regardless, my work had only begun and I still had a good deal of time this winter, more than enough to test around and find some other avenue to pursue. Maybe I should start working on my breath, just to see if that was enough to give me an idea or five.

 Chapter 1076

    ¡°Mom, when¡¯s Christmas?¡± Luna¡¯s oh-so-innocent question threw me for a momentary loop, as I tried to come up with a good, satisfying answer. By now, thanks to the chaos after the Change, I had lost any real grasp of the date, mostly because it had simply ceased to matter. Dates were only needed to coordinate with other people and now, after the change? Who would we coordinate with in order to need long-term plans that required specific dates to work out? Even the other survivors suffered from this, they, too, were focused on day-to-day survival, while their long-term plans weren¡¯t bound to specific dates but worked with the seasons. For them, it didn¡¯t matter that the supplies for the winter were gathered before some arbitrarily chosen date, it mattered that they were gathered before the snow started to fall. Similarly, keeping track of weeks, or even the days within the week, had largely ceased, it didn¡¯t matter whether it was Sunday or Wednesday, you did the work you could do on the days best suited to it and everything else was secondary. Plus, it wasn¡¯t as if there was a Sunday service to attend, at least not that I had heard of. Which might be for the best, I still remembered my misuse of Astral Power unleashed by prayer to a God who didn¡¯t listen, so who knew who or what might be able to use the power unleashed arbitrarily in a similar fashion?


    ¡°You know, I don¡¯t really know,¡± I admitted, realising that there wasn¡¯t a real way to change my current ignorance, ¡°But I don¡¯t think it really matters, I certainly don¡¯t want to celebrate a holiday focused on a God I can¡¯t even name.¡±


    She looked pensively for a moment, with a lot of disappointment in her gaze, before shrugging, ¡°What are we going to celebrate instead?¡±


    ¡°Well, did Lady Hecate tell you what her preferred celebration would be? If not, we could celebrate the Longest Night, though I¡¯ll have to try and see if I can figure out a way to sense which night it would be. Though we might have to find a nice theme to celebrate, there are still far too many people who think that Darkness and the Night are things to be afraid of, silly as they are,¡± I suggested and while the pensive look remained, the disappointment rapidly faded away.


    ¡°How would that celebration look like?¡± she asked, now getting interested, as evidenced by the growing smile on her face.


    ¡°Whatever we want, obviously,¡± I grinned in return, ¡°Traditions have to start at some point, though I honestly doubt that we would start one. The problem we¡¯d face is, any celebration comfortable for us, or rather, comfortable for Lia and myself, would be fairly uncomfortable for the average person. While my dislike for all things Fire has largely been diminished, there¡¯s still a part of me that disdains it. Similarly, the Sun is something neither Lia nor I will ever be fully comfortable under unless we manage to perform deicide,¡± I explained, my grin growing even wider at the idea, if that was at all possible.


    ¡°You know that there are easier ways to get rid of divine curses?¡± Luna asked in response, her eyes narrowing with a mix of suspicion and amusement. ¡°You could try sincere and humble penance, a quest to restore the Light of Lady Sunna to the World,¡± she suggested, her voice dripping fake sincerity, though she didn¡¯t manage to keep up the act and started giggling before she managed to get it all out.


    ¡°Certainly, I¡¯m sure Sunna would love nothing but to return me to her oh-so-loving embrace by way of a pyre,¡± I responded, turning Luna¡¯s giggles into outright laughter.


    ¡°Mhm, maybe deicide would really be the easier option,¡± she considered for a moment, before shaking her head and returning to the original topic, namely, how would we want to celebrate the Longest Night?


    A few ideas were thrown around, though the problem was, how did one celebrate the night and the Darkness in an, at least somewhat, communal fashion? All the ideas we came up with, or rather that we borrowed from our previous experience in regards to celebrations, had elements of light or fire in them, be it a bonfire lasting through the night, candles or even fireworks, there was always that accursed fire in the concept. Similarly, communal activities as developed by humans needed to be performed in the light, simply because human eyes were fairly bad, leaving them utterly blind while in the dark.Love this story? Find the genuine version on the author''s preferred platform and support their work!


    So, new ideas were needed, ideas based on Darkness and Magic, though we might involve a torch or two, simply because Lady Hecate¡¯s symbols included torches to guide the way, even if they could readily be considered metaphorical. Maybe there was a way to include moonlight if we desperately needed some sort of illumination, or maybe I could find a way to copy the lightless illumination, as contradictory as that sounded, of the Astral River and put it into physical reality. That idea sounded like an interesting one and something I might want to discuss with Lady Hecate because this might turn into some sort of celebration at least partially within Her sphere of influence and thus associated with Her name.


    Amusingly, the conversation didn¡¯t stay between Luna and me, though that was mostly because we had started to talk as we were walking back from one of our experimentation sites and reached the tower without bothering to lower our voices or make an effort to keep people from overhearing, which was exactly what happened. Then, when realising what we were talking about, Maggy was her usual, unapologetically enthusiastic self and joined in, which caused a chain reaction.


    Soon, the discussion that had started between two people had grown to involve some twenty-odd people, which, curiously, was also about the entire population of the tower and the annexe I had created to house our students. Truly, a marvellous coincidence that everyone had their own ideas of what the ideal celebration would look like, though few of those ideas were even remotely realistic.


    Still, I could see that both Lia and Luna were getting into it with a surprising amount of enthusiasm, their happiness enough to bring a smile to my face. The only real problem I could see was that I¡¯d have to find a way to determine which the longest night would be so we¡¯d be able to properly celebrate it.


    Just as I was contemplating how that problem could be solved, a notification window opened up in the middle of my view, causing my eyes to widen as I read.


    Quest Alert!


    The Longest Night


    Difficulty - Indeterminate


    Lady Hecate took notice of your plans and decided to sponsor them. Hold a celebration worthy of Her name and you shall be rewarded.


    Reward - Favour of Lady Hecate, depending on the worthiness of your celebration.


    Looking around the room, it didn¡¯t take a genius to guess that I wasn¡¯t the only one who had received the quest. Apparently, having a loud and enthusiastic discussion within Lady Hecate¡¯s shrine could cause the deity to take an interest and, as nobody with any sense would have thought, celebrations, especially those of a regular nature, could be turned into religious observations, what a genuine shock. Or rather, I should have seen that one coming a mile away and yet, I didn¡¯t really mind, especially as it meant Lady Hecate might be willing to lend a hand with a few of the more arcane ideas I had in mind, given that She was sponsoring the thing.


    Still, a sudden quest, especially one with such a wide-ranging and potentially ominous reward being given out without warning needed to be handled. Luckily, it looked like Maggy was already on the ball with that one, happily restoring the semblance of order we had enjoyed before the blue window of information had ambushed us, allowing me to remain in the shadows, right where I wanted to be.


    Watching how the mix of consternation, excitement and a bit of fear was addressed and gently handled until only the excitement remained was quite impressive, reminding me that Maggy, while a bit of a magical dunce, was an incredibly competent social operator, far beyond anything I could readily accomplish. Sure, I could be a lot more intimidating than she was, but that was only by virtue of my far-greater magical might, something the locals hadn¡¯t grown accustomed to yet. At some point, people would grow used to magical displays and I wouldn¡¯t be as intimidating as I currently was. Or maybe I¡¯d remain as intimidating, simply because I had no plans to become an average magic user, my plan was to remain at the top and that would mean I would always remain intimidating. Especially if I managed to create that dragon form, but that was a problem for some other time.


    For now, we had a celebration for the Longest Night to plan.

 Chapter 1077

    Finding out the actual date of the ¡®Longest Night¡¯ to celebrate turned out a lot more complicated than expected, though by the time I ran down my list of ideas, the solution was a lot easier than anyone would think.


    My first idea was to look at the length of each day, though I quickly realised that doing so would need accurate clocks for one and would only tell me that the longest night had come and gone when the days started to become longer again. So, simply using the length of each day and night wouldn¡¯t work, so another way had to be found.


    My next idea was to inspect the Astral River, as I had noticed that there was a faint ascendance in the abundance of Darkness Magic, the umbral energy of the night slowly eclipsing the radiant energy of the day, which I interpreted as a magical representation of the seasonal cycle. From solstice to solstice, one of the two energies was waxing, the other waning, while both would be in equilibrium on the day of the equinox, at least that was what I had been observing thus far. Sadly, the problem with that idea was the same as it had been with my first idea, I would only know that the longest night had happened after the fact. So, this, too, was useless for organising a celebration.


    There probably were a myriad of other ways to discover the solstice but, without a quick check on the internet, I wasn¡¯t able to think of any good ones. Maybe something with the angle of the Sun, either during Sunrise, Sunset or at high noon, not that we could easily tell when that was, but I neither had a good way to measure that angle nor did I have any way to compare and contrast it to actually tell what my measurements would mean.


    So, my ultimate, and utterly disappointing, solution was to pray to Lady Hecate and ask Her for help, as annoying as that was. I didn¡¯t want to become some cleric, only able to have their God do things for them instead of having the ability to figure things out myself but I felt that this might be a case where I had to swallow my pride and ask for help.


    So, during an early hour in the night, around midnight if I had to take a guess, I made myself comfortable in the empty shrine and sent out a prayer into the void. Given that it was incredibly strange to pray in the direction of a statue with your own face, or that of your daughter, my head, and thus possibly my prayer, was directed in the direction of the Crone¡¯s statue, carved in the image of the Grandmother.


    Maybe I should have been a little more cautious, or maybe cognisant, of this, as the next moment, I could feel a brief but incredibly intense connection. Not one that would transmit images or words but one that transmitted concepts and ideas wholesale and the recipient of that connection was, without a doubt, the Grandmother. Amusement, flavoured with a bit of annoyance, came across the connection, giving me a fair idea of what the Grandmother currently thought of the situation. It also drove home that Luna, the Grandmother and I might be on the path of becoming a triad-deity, but the only one of us who could lay claim to any divine status was the Grandmother, who could be considered a somewhat weak demi-god now. But a demi-god with an apparently growing religion, as there were actually people who had found the shrines I set up and started praying towards the statues.


    And wasn¡¯t that an incredibly weird thought, people praying towards me? Even if it was somewhat similar to what I was doing right now, though my prayer was directed towards Lady Hecate, with the statues She had made me carve acting as an intermediary. Still, a very weird thought and I was more than happy that it seemed prayer could only act across dimensional boundaries, or maybe I was simply too weak to acknowledge the prayers flowing in my direction. It also didn¡¯t explain why Lady Hecate had pushed and prodded to make things set up as they were now, but I had a feeling it would be one of those questions the Lady wouldn¡¯t answer in anything but the most cryptic of fashions, if at all.


    Luckily, the strange communion with the Grandmother lasted for but a moment, though that moment was a lot longer than any moment had a right to be. Time could become very strange with high amounts of magic and mental ability involved, allowing me to digest information at speeds far higher than any human had a right to perceive it. With an intelligence as high as mine currently was, I might have been able to set a computer to simply scroll downwards while reading an article and my mind and eyes should have been quick enough to keep up. Now, I wasn¡¯t able to test that particular trick any longer, but from what I had experienced while reading a book or two, I was fairly confident it would work. You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.


    Not that it truly mattered any longer, sure, reading faster was nice and all but when it came to magic, it helped very little. There just weren¡¯t any books written on the subject yet, the closest thing to those were the ones written by myself and Luna. The Zevharra Agha might count but due to the enchantments placed upon that book by the Grandmother, I couldn¡¯t just read through it, I had to take my time and additional pages were unlocked subsequently due to increases in my magical ability or maybe my attributes. Though, if I ever managed to convince Lady Hecate to let me into her library, I might be able to read as much about magic as I could ever want and more, but I doubted that would happen easily. At the end of the day, Lady Hecate wanted people to figure out things themself, a stance I usually supported completely but there were times it was a nuisance.


    Just as I was thinking about that, the world around me changed and I found myself in the familiar, white-grey environment of Lady Hecate¡¯s realm, with the tinkling laughter of the Goddess echoing through the void. Well, not a real echo, it simply came from multiple directions at the same time, creating an echoing effect, even if there was nothing to reflect the soundwaves in this endlessly grey expanse.


    ¡°Good Evening, Lady Hecate,¡± I politely greeted Her, curious why she had pulled me here instead of responding to my request while I was still within the shrine.


    ¡°Good Evening, Jade,¡± She returned the greeting, now no longer laughing by studying me with those piercing, oh-so-familiar eyes. The same shade as Luna¡¯s eyes, only so much more intense in ways I could hardly describe, it was both sobering and a little frightening that my daughter had been gifted with eyes identical to those of a deity.


    ¡°It is quite amusing, to have a celebration but be unaware of the date that celebration is supposed to occur,¡± She grinned, that usual teasing tone once again strong in Her voice, ¡°But given that I decided to throw my hat in the ring, I think I should give you the information you need, otherwise, it might be a little embarrassing,¡± She continued, before raising one of Her hands to Her chin in a pensive gesture, Her grin turning wicked as She considered for a moment.


    ¡°On the other hand, my dear Child Luna had me help her to make that Oculus on your tower, you could actually use that to figure out the solstice, you know?¡± She asked and now I was starting to get a headache, as I had no real idea how to use the state and course of the sun to calculate the solstice. Maybe there were some books in some college library, but to find them and do the calculations without error? That wasn¡¯t something I was confident in doing, at least not in the unknown, but limited, amount of time we had until the solstice actually occurred.


    I was just about to explain that to Lady Hecate when She continued speaking, making me realise that I didn¡¯t really need to answer Her, she could read me well enough to know what I wanted to say. Or, She could read my mind, not just my body, a possibility I couldn¡¯t confidently exclude, especially not within Her domain. Who knew what powers the Gods had while you were on their literal front porch?


    ¡°I guess I¡¯ll be able to help you for this year but remember the lesson for the future, for I shall only teach it to you once,¡± the deity explained and moments later, I felt a strange sensation around me, one strikingly familiar to the sensation of the Astral River but not, making me think that Lady Hecate was recreating the sensation using the magic of her own realm. Then, just after I realised what I was feeling, I could sense the power representing Dark Magic crest in a fascinating way, reaching a crescendo while the other power faded to nary a whisper but it was a whisper that purported a future waxing, while the Darkness would wane. With this as an example, I was convinced I¡¯d be able to recognise the signs within the Astral River and read the progression to the point where I¡¯d be able to divine the time of this crescendo.


    ¡°Thank you, Lady Hecate,¡± I bowed, knowing that Her lesson would allow me to sense what I needed in reality. Moments later, I was back in the shrine, my mind still awash with the knowledge I had just gained, though I also wondered if the lesson would cost me something in the future. We¡¯d have to see.

 Chapter 1078

    It was fascinating just how focused people could become when they had something new and exciting to work on. Leaning magic had, in an odd twist of fate, lost some of its lustre during the time everyone had spent at the tower, a jaded sense of normality soon replaced the initial excitement as it became just that, the norm. For many people, it was hard to remain excited at something that happened every other day and so, day after day, the incredible slowly turned mundane. Though, in defence of my student, I had to say that they never took my instruction for granted and continued to work hard to prove themself worthy of it, so the situation could have been a lot worse. If my students were as invested and motivated as some students back in high school had been, I¡¯d probably have chucked the entire batch out as a bad batch and either shuttered the entire teaching-idea or looked for a new set of students. Luckily, that never happened, though comparing their joy at the idea of organising a celebration with the motivation for their lessons was somewhat disheartening. None of them shared the enduring love I had for magic, the motivation to try another experiment day after day, only for most of them to fail in a wide variety of ways. Most likely, the people I had here wouldn¡¯t go far on the Arcane Path because of that, they simply lacked the tenacity to stick things out.


    Maybe it was for the best that Maggy had returned to the tower a little over a week ago, apparently fed up with the organisational details of running their community and looking for a bit of a working vacation. I wasn¡¯t quite sure how I was supposed to take the knowledge that the woman saw my tower as a retreat from her duties but I couldn¡¯t fault her too much for it, the things she had shared about keeping a community of a little over a thousand people running sounded like utter torture to me. So much paperwork and organisation, so many people who needed to be pushed and prodded to move in roughly the same direction, I doubted I¡¯d be able to do the same without either massive threats or magical compulsions. Maybe both, I wasn¡¯t sure.


    Amusingly, organising people for the party seemed to be something Maggy actually enjoyed, making me wonder if there was something wrong in her head but given my own mental state, I wasn¡¯t one to throw stones. But, insane or not, she managed to get together with Luna, who had the best working knowledge of rituals pleasing to Lady Hecate, and was setting something up that should be educational, relaxing and pious enough to please the Goddess and the people. Even I had been given a part to play beyond figuring out the date and it was quite an interesting project to figure out, too.


    So far, I hadn¡¯t completely managed to accomplish it but I felt I was on the right way. Amusingly, the project might even filter into the creation of my draconic breath but I hadn¡¯t got that far just yet. It also served as a good project to further my studies into Illusions, a topic I had neglected just a little while Maggy had been gone but this idea was a good one to work on them, especially as I was trying to use the Twilight aspect inherent to Darkness Magic, even if I had yet to rediscover its Rune here on Terra. In comparison, purely mental illusions, where I used Mind Magic to trick an opponent into seeing and experiencing what I wanted them to was a lot easier and harder at the same time, depending on the severity of the illusion and the number of targets I wanted to influence. The second part was the major difficulty, though that might be because people had yet to learn what was possible with magic and what was not, making it a lot easier to make them believe things that they would usually have immediately deemed impossible. Their mental resilience was still shaken from the Change and I doubted it would completely recover within this generation.


    Visual Illusions, as created with the Twilight aspect of Darkness Magic, the suspected Refraction aspect of Water Magic or, at least for other people, a fairly wide variety of Light Magic, wouldn¡¯t have that advantage but on the other hand, they also didn¡¯t suffer the same drawbacks. The question of which method was better was, as with almost everything in life, a question of priorities and focus, which element was deemed more important by the evaluator and that it was impossible to answer the question in a general fashion. Unless one decided that the availability of the skill was what made a skill better and in that case, Visual Illusions would be deemed better as it was possible to make them with a wide variety of skills, some of which I probably hadn¡¯t even thought about. Mental Illusions, on the other hand, needed Mind Magic, meaning the pool of people who could use them was incredibly limited. Which, in turn, some people might deem an advantage as the limited availability meant that counter would be just as unusual, as were people who put in the effort to ward and defend against such an intrusion.The author''s tale has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.


    And so, during the week as Darkness Magic was reaching its crescendo leading up to the solstice and the Longest Night, the tower was a hotbed of activity, straining my nerves repeatedly, even if the activity was confined to the lowest level and the annexe. How so few people managed to be so noisy, I had no idea but it seemed that excitement and exuberation could make up for numbers easily. Thus, I reworked some of the magic I usually used to keep the noise I made from getting away from me and alerting foes in my surroundings to my presence to something doing the opposite, namely to keep the noise made by others away from me and allow me some peace and quiet. And yet, despite that newly discovered trick, I retreated into the mountains on many occasions, partially because I needed a bit of focus to silence my surroundings and while working on my project I didn¡¯t have that focus to spare, partially because my experiments were quite visual and I wanted people to see the project in its entirety once it was done.


    So, the mountains and the snow it was, especially as my work was a lot easier surrounded by the twilight of dusk or dawn, when that particular aspect naturally strongest. By now, I was starting to figure out how to decouple what I wanted to project from the environment and was turning it from a pure illusion into a mix of illusion and projection, partially powered by my own, internal magic, partially powered by the very thing I wanted to project into the physical world.


    Luckily, what I sought to project was already part of the world, only not of the physical one. It made me wonder if I could do something similar with the Realm of Shadows, drawing parts of it into the physical world and having them interact with it, maybe as a defence, allowing me to deflect troublesome attacks into the Realm of Shadows while remaining with the physical where those attacks wouldn¡¯t be able to harm me or maybe even as an offensive tool. I doubted many people could defend against being swallowed up by their own shadow and dragged into an endless, lightless realm where nothing but your will and magic bolstered by your affinity to Darkness and Shadow mattered. Once inside, I would be able to take my time or even make them surrender outright if only to leave the realm once more.


    Plus, there was that sensation of being watched I occasionally felt within that realm, though it had been far more prevalent on Mundus, making me wonder just what had been hiding in the shadows over there. Or if there was something hiding deeper within them here on Terra, just unable to come close to the surface due to the remaining turbulence within the Astral. Either way, I knew it could feel discombobulating from personal experience and somebody without my affinity and exposure to that realm. They would be about as helpless as I could ever want them to be, making the idea an interesting one. If I could pull it off, that is.


    But before I could start down the path to modify the technique, I would have to complete it first and in this case, it meant I would have to find a way to project the Astral River into a visual form, allowing everyone to see, feel and experience it when Darkness, and thus Magic and Change, were at their strongest, during the Longest Night. I couldn¡¯t think of a better way to celebrate Magic and Lady Hecate than to let people see the Astral River in all its glory.

 Chapter 1079

    Even without actual, active magic, there was something deeply magical about the enthusiastic fervour everyone displayed during the shortest day as the final preparations for the longest night were made. Food was prepared, some of it special, like the hog Murray and Jack had brought back to roast for the night, others were fairly ordinary, like the flatbread to use as a combination of food and eating utensils, some decorations were prepared and a few people even decided to repurpose Christmas Carols and Winter Songs, though any mention of God or Jesus was deliberately stripped from them, or songs mentioning them were avoided entirely. If anything religious was mentioned, it was done by Luna who was leading the preparations to worship Lady Hecate, though it had been decided that the festival wouldn¡¯t be purely dedicated to the Lady.


    The worship would be a distinct part of it, but more directed towards magic itself and the act of studying it, which was a large part that held the community together. It also helped that the comforts we had all come to enjoy were largely magical, comforts especially nice during the longest, and quite possibly the coldest, night of the year. Sure, the cold didn¡¯t bother me anyway, nor did the dark, but I could easily see how the other people gathered around the enchantments providing them warmth and keeping out the bitter cold of winter.


    Finally, in the late afternoon, Night started to fall and the world was cast into a dim twilight. As it turned out, we were incredibly lucky and the weather was playing along with us. After a lot of snow, clouds and wind during the previous days and even earlier in the day, the sky had cleared up, giving us an incredible view of the stars above. The only thing to make the view even better would have been a full moon, but that wasn¡¯t to be, we would have to make do with the waning crescent we had high above us. Not that it took a lot from the starry view that emerged as the light was fading from the world but it might have been even better with the full moon. Or maybe not, without it, we might be able to see a few stars we¡¯d normally not see, though I doubted anyone would notice.


    Not with the sheer amount of stars in the sky and memories of the sky from before the change, when the polluting light of humanity had overshadowed the light of these countless distant stars. Looking up into the sky, I tried to compare the sky I could see here and the sky I remembered from Mundus and soon noticed that there were a few differences, as well as a few similarities. But given that I was working from memory and I hadn¡¯t taken all that much care to memorise the stars above Mundus, I couldn¡¯t be certain if the patterns I thought to see existed or were imagined, nor could I be confident that the stars I thought were the same actually were, leaving me with little confidence. Alas, if I couldn¡¯t tell anything about the two worlds that might be the same, or might be at different points in their cosmic timeline, so I soon decided to leave that part be and focused on the simple things in life, which, in this case, was the utterly amazing view I could enjoy.


    A part of me was tempted to head up to the Oculus and use it to see the stars even better but I quickly decided against it, this was a celebration and I shouldn¡¯t miss it, even if I usually wasn¡¯t a real fan of parties. Luckily, the overall atmosphere was filled with a sense of awe at the natural wonder above us and a quickly growing sense of hunger, fueled by the scents coming from the wide variety of food waiting for us all.


    Soon, the feast started and there was no other word to adequately describe it, it was a feast. We might have lacked some of the exotic produce we all had taken for granted just a year before and, back then, the food would have been considered fairly rustic, maybe even simple, but now, in this changed world, the food was wonderful, filling both bellies and making people comfortable.


    But, even the best food couldn¡¯t last forever, or if it did, people would soon be filled to bursting and continuing to feast would be a waste, something none of us were willing to do. While we had enough food, thanks to our special abilities and magic, all of us were aware that there were numerous people out there who didn¡¯t have that advantage and would starve before spring came around, or might already have starved. A part of me regretted that, though I was aware that I couldn¡¯t help people beyond my immediate reach, this changed world didn¡¯t have the connectivity the world used to have, to say nothing of the absence of large-scale social security. The best we all could do to make sure sapient life could continue on was to make sure that the various pockets of civilisation continued to endure, hoping that a large-scale society would eventually form again. Help support creative writers by finding and reading their stories on the original site.


    Or maybe multiple societies, all in contact with one another but not truly connected, due to the possible emergence of different races. However, who knew how many races would actually emerge from the various legacies? I certainly wouldn¡¯t become some sort of broodmare to pop out an entire viable race of Firn Elves and even if I had that inclination, the race would start with half-elves at best, unless I managed to find another Firn Elf, in which case the race would start with a heavy genetic bottleneck, somewhat similar to the Christian story of Adam and Eve, where an entire population would stem from incest on an insane scale. This, incidentally, was the moment at which I decided that this line of thinking would be discontinued until I had either resurrected Sigmir or found some way to decouple the entire birthing process from the biological reality that was reproduction. Maybe if I found some way to utilise that divine domain of ¡®The Mother¡¯ to my advantage but given the circumstances and my personal stance on the matter, I doubted I would invest any time into this particular topic.


    It was a good thing that I discarded these useless musings of mine, as the celebration quickly started to reach the point at which I was responsible for the continuation. For that, I had to sink myself into the Astral River, letting the ethereal streams of power surge around, and through, me while feeling them all. On most other days of the year, that would have been fairly painful, even with the various traits and the high attributes that increased my Resilience, I was still vulnerable to Light Astral Power but today, during the Longest Night, that power was as its weakest, allowing me to do what I did.


    Namely, I could channel a small part of every flow within the Astral River through myself and project the raw power into reality, something I could only accomplish thanks to my adequate affinity to all types of magic. While I couldn¡¯t see the spectacle I was creating, a myriad of different streams of primordial power were surging through the tower, I could hear the people around me sigh in awe and, maybe more importantly, I could hear Luna extoll the importance of Magic, its teachings and the Lady Hecate who could be a teacher of us all. Additionally, I could feel the different people reach out and touch the different streams of power, seeking understanding and, to a lesser degree, divine guidance. I had no idea if Lady Hecate intervened, but there were a few moments when I felt something strange. What, I had no idea but it might be something to investigate in the future if I encountered that sort of sensation again.


    Other than these strange flashes of sensation, I focused on Luna¡¯s voice as a means to ground me while deep within the Astral. It was an interesting sermon, one that didn¡¯t put any stock in what the Lady Hecate could actually do for us but instead focused on the individual and their abilities to learn magic and seek guidance from a teacher, with Lady Hecate being the last teacher one should seek guidance from when all other avenues of inquiry have been sought out and found lacking. It sounded quite good, though I also realised fairly quickly that it could also be seen as some sort of hierarchy, where those with more knowledge and ability were automatically placed upon a pedestal.


    Not the worst thing to do, especially compared to a myriad of other ways to determine leadership and importance, but also not the best. I personally was an excellent example of a person with a lot of advanced arcane knowledge but I also knew that I could only be considered a good leader thanks to my access to that knowledge and the resulting advantages. Otherwise, I doubted any of the people around, other than Lia and maybe Luna, would be here and learn magic, they would be back at their different homes and do their best to get over the winter.


    Knowing that I had no interest in remaining in this area, I kept my thoughts to myself, letting myself sink deeper into the Astral River while keeping the show going throughout the Longest Night of the Year, enjoying just how endless its embrace felt.

 Chapter 1080

    By the time dawn announced itself by sending a painful spark of Light Magic through the window I used to project the Astral River into reality, I was quite exhausted. Staying awake throughout the night wasn''t all that bad; not only was I used to it, but I was superhumanly tough to boot. That didn¡¯t mean channelling that much power for that long simply passed me by. No, at the end of it, I was exhausted, and the painful jolt I received from channelling magic that was deeply inimical to my existence only made things worse. Still, I managed to let the projection fade away slowly while Luna spoke one last prayer of gratitude towards Lady Hecate, helping everyone to gather their bearing after being immersed in the Astral for so long. Or, rather, being immersed in an ocean of Astral Power while not being in the Astral River itself, as the exact metaphysical implications of my accomplishment were something I hadn¡¯t been able to consider in their entirety. Something to think about later when I was rested and recovered.


    Just as I was thinking that I felt a familiar power fill the shrine, an ocean of silvery power infusing me and washing away the exhaustion I felt. Not just the exhaustion from a sleepless night but all the aches, pains and little inconveniences stemming from months of travelling, countless hours of magical work and all the other challenges of living in a Changed world, it felt as if I was born anew.


    At the same time, a notification popped up in front of me, telling me that we had accomplished the ¡®Longest Night¡¯ quest set by Lady Hecate and performed a ritual pleasing the lady greatly. Quite flattering, especially as the next notification told me I received enough EXP to reach level one-hundred and seven and another informed me that we had all received Lady Hecate¡¯s blessing, lasting from now until the next ¡®Longest Night¡¯, so for the entire year. The blessing did nothing but slightly increase the pace at which we would be able to learn arcane magic. Not a huge deal in and of itself but given that it would last for an entire year? It was an incredible boon, one I would gladly take. Additionally, I realised that the channelling I had done further increased my Astral Meditation skill by four, bringing it to sixty-two and my Mind Magic skill went up by another point, to seventy-seven. All in all, excellent results for such a safe quest.


    All around me, there were exultations of joy, some of which were in reference to the EXP people had gained, a few others in regards to the blessing, and, lastly, the vast majority stemmed from raised magical skills. It sounded as if getting immersed in Astral Power for as long as they had been, thanks to the projection I created, which helped the various people a great deal, pushing their skills just that little bit further. Granted, I doubted I¡¯d be able to repeat the performance I had just accomplished for about a year, but even so, I was quite proud of myself.


    As I was feeling quite content and considered what I would want to do with the time I¡¯d normally spend sleeping to ready myself for the next night, I felt the most curious tugging sensation, one stemming from the two blessings of Lady Hecate upon me. Taking it as an invitation to talk, I focused inwards once more, following the sensation to see where it would lead me.


    Doing so felt curiously similar to the Astral River, only that instead of the fundamental force deeply embedded into the bedrock of reality, I was now moving through something less dense, a uniform stream of power all attuned to a single concept. It only took me a moment to realise that this was almost certainly the power of prayer, essentially processed Astral Power donated by a fair amount of mortals towards the Lady Hecate. With that realisation, I started to spread my senses and quickly realised that it wasn¡¯t all that much. Sure, on a human scale, it was an overwhelming stream of power, but it was more along the lines of a wide river compared to an immeasurable ocean. Fascinating, though I doubted it would be all that relevant to my personal existence. At least not for quite some time if I chose to go down that route at all.The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.


    For a moment, I had to pause my thoughts and chuckle at my own confidence. Or maybe my hubris, but then, I did have the trait Titanic Ambition, an outgrowth of my old Mortal Hubris trait, so maybe this was completely on-brand, and I simply took that part of my mind for granted by now. As often as I was introspective regarding my magic, trying to do the same thing with my core personality and behaviour was a less common thing. Maybe my studies into Mind Magic could be furthered by trying to understand my own mind, as atypical as it was. It might also help with the problem of retrieving Sigmir¡¯s memories from my Legacy if there was any chance of doing so.


    But for now, I had a path to follow and after an indeterminate amount of time, I reached a familiar place by an unfamiliar route and found myself on the endless grey expanse of Lady Hecate¡¯s realm, only now, I could sense something faintly different.


    Where before, the realm was just that, something I could see superficially; I could now perceive a whole lot more, though I soon had to avert my senses to avoid getting overwhelmed. The entire realm was a thing of magic, soaked with Astral and Divine power to an extent that made the Astral River I was accustomed to seem like a mundane brook filled with nothing but water.


    ¡°Greetings, young Jade,¡± Lady Hecate¡¯s voice came from all around me and moments later, her tree-faced form appeared as if growing from the very ground. It took me a second to realise that the form I was looking at was nothing but an outgrowth, quite literally in this case, of the realm, making me think that the realm was Lady Hecate and Lady Hecate was Her realm, at least on a conceptual level.


    ¡°Not bad, your senses and understanding are growing, as is your power,¡± the Lady complimented me and I couldn¡¯t help but feel a sense of satisfaction flow through me, if there was one thing I had learned about Lady Hecate, it was that She wasn¡¯t giving compliments just to say the words and influence people.


    ¡°I hope the performance we put on was to your taste, Lady Hecate?¡± I asked, doing my best to act with the right decorum, which was somewhat difficult as I still wasn¡¯t sure what that would mean. I knew how to treat a superior at work, and I knew how to treat a teacher, but I had no real idea how to treat a Goddess, especially not one who decided that your face, and that of your daughter, was the right face to represent Her in the mortal world.


    ¡°That it was,¡± the figure I was speaking to nodded, ¡°And it is the reason why I invited you here.¡± She paused for a moment, taking on an amused expression, ¡°What you did was quite impressive and something somewhat new. Not completely, just that particular execution was something I hadn¡¯t seen as part of a religious ceremony in my name, so I wanted to ask you if you would want to observe how I turn what you came up with into a ritual I can spread to those following me in the future. It would give you some additional insight into divine magic and our works, something I believe would interest you,¡± she offered, striking me dumb for a moment.


    While I had been confident that the projection I came up with was something new on Terra, to hear that it was something new to an ancient deity was something else entirely. Her offer, on the other hand, was something I didn¡¯t need to consider; it was something I immediately knew to accept; after all, how often did a mortal get the chance to look under the divine hood, so to speak? I doubted it happened all that often, if it happened at all outside of Lady Hecate¡¯s realm.


    So, with a nod of acceptance, I opened myself as Lady Hecate instructed, only to realise that even the act of observing her actions would be a challenge. Lady Hecate worked on an entirely different level, as I quickly realised while sensing the streams of power all around me, some of which I recognised as parts of my project, others were beyond my current understanding. But, even if I couldn¡¯t understand what was going on just yet, I recognised some of the techniques used as versions of tricks I had picked up during my magical studies, only far more advanced.


    On one hand, watching Lady Hecate drove home just how far I still had to go on my Arcane Path. On the other hand, I could see where I might end up eventually, like a far-distant ray of light on the horizon. Now, I only had to make sure that I saw that as an inspiration to guide my path, not something that would crush my spirit due to the vast distance I still had to walk.

 Chapter 1081

    After the celebration of the Longest Night was over, regular life at Jademoon Tower resumed. By now, the name for my tower had stuck to the point that even I, the ¡®Jade¡¯ in the name had started to think of it by that name, a development I wasn¡¯t quite sure how to take. There was something about the name that made me just a little giddy, likely the fact that it made the close bond with my daughter all that more obvious, but at the same time, there was a bit of apprehension within me about it. I wasn¡¯t sure I wanted to have things named after me, if only because I was well aware that there were beings out there who wanted nothing but my head on a stake, or my body bound to a pyre ready to be lit, or some other way to make me die in as much pain as they could manage. Though maybe I wasn¡¯t giving Sunna enough credit, maybe she would be just as happy to have me die without any pain, but I wasn¡¯t quite confident about that part. Only about the part where she wished for my demise, both the curse placed upon me and the treatment I had received from those worshipping her made that quite obvious.


    So, having the tower named after me was both a blessing and a bit of a curse, even if I was fairly certain that nobody would travel in the area during the winter. Not with the amount of snow in the mountains, it was enough to make me happy and content, which said quite a lot considering that the Firn Elves I knew about came from places that could only be described as arctic, so giving me that instinctual feeling of home and contentment had taken almost a metre of snow on the ground with snow-drifts large enough to cover the average house.


    Other than those small considerations, I continued to teach and made sure to help people travel between my tower, Maggy¡¯s enclave near a park called Riverside Park and, lastly, the community Jack and his group had come from. Those treks weren¡¯t completely painless, especially as they necessarily took place during the day, but making sure that there was a certain amount of rotation amongst the people learning at my tower helped a great deal when it came to quelling any sort of conflict. If people couldn¡¯t get along or disrupted the learning environment, they were simply sent home and wouldn¡¯t be able to return, a threat excellent at keeping the peace. By now, after some two months of studies, all students had learned that learning under my guidance was their best bet at getting stronger, not only to make sure they were safe and secure in this insane world but also to make sure they were comfortable.


    After all, physical danger was only one aspect of this changed world. We all had been living an incredibly comfortable life with easy access to running water, food, shelter, and a wide variety of comfort and entertainment that even the kings and emperors of old couldn¡¯t even dream of. From that blessed existence, we had gone back to a simple, some might say primitive, existence, trying to eke out the bare minimum to survive in this changed world. Magic was a fairly easy way to regain the comforts of old, at least on an individual level.


    Compared to classical science, and alchemy to some extent, magic was a far more individualistic approach, advancing at a personal level with only limited impact on a larger scale, at least until there were enough magic users to spread their personal level around. Science, on the other hand, relied on a large number of individuals contributing to the same cause, all creating a very limited personal impact on their immediate surroundings but once the impact was achieved, it could spread daily easily, at least that had been the case before the change. It would be interesting to see how long it would take for a similar system of knowledge transfer to arise, though given that Lady Hecate had been pushing Luna and me to create the foundation of one, I doubted it would take all that much time. But we¡¯d have to see.


    In addition to the continued progress of my students, I had been making some progress myself. Sadly, not so much when it came to Mind Magic, I was, once again, a bit stuck with that particular subject, but when it came to Ice Magic, or rather, when it came to the project of creating my Wings and Breath.This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.


    The session with Lady Hecate during which I was allowed to observe her turning the combination of Astral Meditation, Mind Magic and a bit of Darkness Magic I had used to project the Astral River into reality in a semi-illusionary way into a ritual with far less strident requirements for the user had been a bit of an eye-opening experience. The sheer confidence and the complete and utter ease with which Lady Hecate manipulated reality on a level I hadn¡¯t even considered to be existent was stunning and while I was well aware that I¡¯d need a lot more experience to reach Her level of ability, I could tell I was a little too focused on the senses I was accustomed to.


    As a human, the primary sense I used to explore the world around me was my sight, with my sense of hearing a close second after which all the other senses followed. Even now, after I had shed my humanity, I still focused on what I could see first, even if my senses had expanded so much, to the point that I¡¯d be able to glean more information about something by using my magical senses or my soul sight. The world was so much greater than I had ever experienced before but due to my old experience, I still focused on the world as I knew it, unless the task at hand was something explicitly focused on another sense.


    Additionally, I realised that I might have been overambitious. Trying to form an entire dragon¡¯s body from Ice and have it act like an actual body while remaining in the centre of the body and controlling it might just be a little too ambitious, maybe it would be a smarter idea to start with what I knew I could currently achieve, namely, getting the Wings and the Breath and go from there.


    So, what did the wings I was seeking were supposed to do and be? Obviously, the answer was that the wings should grant me the ability to soar through the skies, hopefully better than I currently could fly with my cloak. In addition, the wings should scale to the point that even if I managed to achieve a full draconic form, the wings would be powerful enough to carry it through the sky, meaning they needed to have some magical component. I might be able to create a construct strong enough to lift my body with purely physical means but achieving the same for a draconic form likely having multiple times my mass? That would be a lot more difficult and would need absurdly large wings if it were possible at all.


    With my previous experiments trying to create the entire dragon, I was well-equpied to start working on nothing but the wings, though, as I had learned from my experiences, I made sure that my tests were done in a suitable place. Usually, that¡¯d mean somewhere in or on top of my tower but given that this wasn¡¯t a sedentary activity, nor one that I necessarily associated with Lady Hecate, the teaching of magic and Her growing over my activities and group, I decided that the tower wasn¡¯t a suitable location.


    Given my needs, the obvious answer was that I needed a mountain top, as remote as locally possible, with at least one sheer cliffside and as much snow and ice as possible. Seeking for such a location was fairly simple, though during my search I decided that it wasn¡¯t quite what I was looking for and used another location I stumbled across.


    It, too, was on top of a cliff, but a cliff that cut off a valley with a river running through it, only the river was now covered in ice. Curiously, even the waterfall supposedly crashing down the cliff was frozen over, which was the reason I decided to investigate as it wasn¡¯t something I had seen before. Plus, there was an entire valley filled with incredible amounts of snow, thanks to the mountains on either side sending a sizable amount downhill. Compared to using a mountaintop, this area had a lot more to offer, which was all the reason I needed to make the decision. It helped that there was a small, nagging voice reminding me of the dreams I had of Sigmir and the fact that in the various I had she was always represented by a mountain so would making another mountain emotionally significant to me count as cheating? It wasn¡¯t a question I could easily answer, so I decided to avoid it and simply set up my small camp on one of the slopes and get ready to work some serious magic the next evening.

 Chapter 1082

    It was about an hour after dusk that I started my work, sitting in the middle of the frozen stream, right where it originally tumbled across the edge and down the cliff, though given its frozen state, there was very little tumbling right now. Just a cliff of ice, sculpted in a flowing and natural fashion where water sticking to the rocks below had frozen before starting to accumulate layer after layer of ice until the entire waterfall was frozen. It looked quite fascinating, especially when the light was hitting it just right, reflecting and refracting off the ice to create a myriad of colours and patterns. Even I, who disliked anything relating to light on general principles, could see the beauty in this, though that didn¡¯t change the fact that I welcomed dusk a great deal.


    Now, I was trying to form the right wings for me. Not just wings, that would be trivial, but the correct wings, the wings that could carry me through the sky and into the future, towards whatever came next. This wasn¡¯t just about flying, as I now realised, it was also about a certain need to self-define and self-identify, otherwise, the wings I created would be wings, they might even work as I intended, but they wouldn¡¯t be ¡®my¡¯ wings.


    And so, instead of simply going ahead and creating a simply set of wings, I decided to go inwards and start with an observation of what I knew about ¡®my¡¯ wings. Given that, to my understanding, a few of the visions I had experienced in the past, especially those concerned with the crossing of divides, worked on a level beyond the physical, essentially examining some sort of combination of my Mind and Soul, understanding them should give me something to go on. Dreams, those visions, memories, all of them could, and maybe should, be part of what made the wings I would create mine, as would my aspirations for the future.


    There were the strange, yet mostly mundane dreams I faintly remembered from my childhood. Dreams of bouncing, of flying and other assorted strangeness, though as I went through what memories still remained, I quickly realised I wouldn¡¯t be able to get all that much from them. They were too old and distorted by time to find any coherence within them, especially as I couldn¡¯t be certain what might be relevant and what was just a dream and nothing more. If there even was such a thing, at this point, I was essentially flying blind and without wings to soar with, leaving me little more than a ballistic object hoping that gravity wouldn¡¯t make the landing too painful. Or something like that, metaphors could be quite hard but it was the only thing I had to try and make sense of the kaleidoscope of images running through my head.


    Other things were easier to put into perspective, though, given the general nature of those realisations didn¡¯t help me much. Sure, it was fairly easy to see that my prevailing love for high places had some weird, metaphysical relation to avians like Lenore, as their perching behaviour was a potent survival strategy. But how that might relate to dragons was an entirely different question. Would it mean that the best places for me were similar to the one I was currently occupying, a place from where I could take flight and gain a lot of speed with very little effort as I dove down the waterfall and along the valley below? Did that say something about the shape of ¡®my¡¯ wings and if it did, what did it mean?


    Should I try modelling ¡®my¡¯ wings after those of a hawk or some other perching raptor, optimised to give me speed and control after jumping off a ledge while trying to catch some elusive prey? From a certain point of view, the idea had merit but at the same time, I couldn¡¯t help but shake my head at it. If there was one thing I was not, it was a physical predator, if anything, I could imagine myself closer to an owl, still a perching raptor but one focused on stealth and the silent takedown in the night instead of speed and power. Still not what I considered to be my primary pursuit but closer to what I considered my true self, or something like that.Unauthorized usage: this narrative is on Amazon without the author''s consent. Report any sightings.


    Or was I going at the entire idea from the wrong direction by likening my behaviour to that of mundane creatures from before the change? If there was anything I considered myself not to be, it was mundane. Arcane Magic had become such a cornerstone of everything I did, so obviously there had to be an element of arcane magic immortalised in my wings, not just from a practical standpoint but also from a conceptual standpoint. It wasn¡¯t that I had to use magic to create my wings because I lacked other means, it was that my wings had to be magical to be ¡®my¡¯ wings.


    Sadly, that realisation didn¡¯t help as much I would have hoped, if anything, it meant I had to discard a few of my earlier ideas and go back to the proverbial drawing board.


    Luckily, there were other ideas and memories for me to draw from and these few actually held things I considered to be viable. These came from the few memories I had of actually being a dragon, be it the ritual the Grandmother had used to allow me to help Sigmir get rid of the corrupting curse she had laboured under when we first met as the first distinct memory of that or the crossing of the second divide here on Terra just a few months ago when I had started the quest for my wings.


    All these memories had some similarities, especially as there seemed to be some fluid aspects to them, making me wonder if there was a certain fluidity when it came to what would become ¡®my¡¯ wings but that was merely idle speculation. One of these somewhat fluid elements was the colour of my scales, they had been subtly shifting from vision to vision, though it was always some form of silver or blue, similar to the Ice I conjured, but often with different accents. In some of them, the colour was a lot more on the blue side of things, with silver aspects, apparently focused on nothing but Ice, while in others the colours were a lot more varied, with a silver base before shifting in an almost rainbow-like fashion until ending in a black border, outlining each of my individual scales in a fairly fascinating effect.


    Similarly, even the basic body plan seemed to be somewhat fluid in those visions. I distinctly remembered tearing the curse out of Sigmir with my claws but in the latest vision, those claws appeared to be a lot smaller, making me wonder if that came from the shift in my mentality over time as I started to step away from the martial training I had received on Earth before the change and towards a purely magical mindset. Maybe there was even some sort of subconscious awareness going on, telling me that Sigmir was more than just a character in a video game, which might explain some of my behaviour. Or I might simply be more broken than I knew, to the point that I didn¡¯t consider a romantic relationship with what I should have considered as little more than a work of fiction as strange. Maybe because I had never thought I could develop a romantic attraction to anybody, so a fixation on something fictional might have appealed to my subconsciousness because it was better than nothing. Or I might be trying to psychoanalyse myself without proper training and understanding, or even access to all the facts, which was probably the most likely scenario. After all, who could claim that they truly knew themself? I certainly could not.


    That realisation made me focus on that last memory, the one from crossing the second divide. If I was continuing to develop, this would likely be the state closest to the one I was currently in, meaning it would be a good first step to create and, more importantly, understand this pair of wings before making something that would continue to develop and change as I did.


    They would need to be directly linked with my magic, not just created by it, as if they were part of my body, not just a shell created around me, which might be part of the reason why my previous experiments had continuously failed, I had tried to create something external to my body, not additional parts of my body, even if they were made from Ice, Snow and a whole lot of magic.


    Finally, after thinking for most of the night, as I sat there in the amazingly cold wind howling up the valley and bursting across the frozen waterfall, I made a decision, hoping it was the correct one. Sadly, I also realised that I wouldn¡¯t be able to try just yet, not with dawn lurking just beyond the horizon, waiting to set the world alight and disrupt my concentration at the most inopportune time.


    But that was okay, there would always be a next night and I wasn¡¯t in that much of a hurry.

 Chapter 1083

    After a fairly short day filled with sleeping, meditation and contemplation, I was back on the frozen river, sitting near the edge of the waterfall. Down below, the valley opened into a basin with a fairly sizable open area in the middle, most likely a frozen lake, currently covered in snow. Thanks to the open geography of the basin and the far narrower one of the valley the river I was sitting in was winding itself through, the cliff I was sitting on was currently the target of some seriously cold wind, the temperature low enough to make even me shiver. Out of curiosity, I conjured a bit of water and launched it in the air, only for it to turn into a misty dust of snow and ice long before it could ever come near the ground. Impressive in its own right, to the point that I even tried spitting on the ground just to see if my spit would freeze before it hit. It sadly didn¡¯t work, at least not with a cartoonish ¡®clink¡¯-sound of the spit hitting the ground but that was mostly because it never did. The wind was strong enough to carry the droplets off fast enough.


    Laughing about my childish antics, I focused my thoughts back to the reason why I had come here and wasn¡¯t back at my tower with the kids, namely, project Wings, or how to become a dragon in five easy steps, or something like that.


    One of the things I had realised over the day was that I¡¯d need a way to directly incorporate my magic into them, essentially binding them into the magical analogue to my circulatory system, or even directly into the said system as magical energy was transported within the blood, as demonstrated by Blood Magic. However, that¡¯d mean I¡¯d have to cut into the place where I wanted my wings to sprout from, or even make them entirely biological, which would come with some serious challenges. I didn¡¯t want them to be flesh and blood, so I needed a different path to get that connection. Luckily, there was another part of me completely infused by my magic, already external to my primary body and circulatory system, meaning no blood had to be spilt to externally access my magic.


    Namely, my hair was constantly infused by my magic, thanks to the Magical Hair trait I had selected almost three years of experienced time ago. My hair and its connection to my magic allowed some interesting things and hopefully, this would be yet another of those things.


    Closing my eyes after taking yet another look into the valley, I stepped forward until I stood right at the edge of the waterfall, feeling the wind blow hard against my face and making my hair stream behind me, the added chill making my skin turn even bluer than it normally was. It was an interesting aspect of my biology that the cold turned my usually pale blue skin into a deeper, almost purplish hue. It was an interesting effect that I experienced far too rarely, as I liked it quite a bit, though part of that liking came from the enjoyment the cold brought me. Despite knowing that the cold, if it ever got extreme enough, would be harmful to me, I couldn¡¯t help but realise that my shivering wasn¡¯t just from the cold. A good part of it was pure pleasure, making me wonder about a few things within my physique. Maybe doing the entire thing completely naked was a silly idea but I didn¡¯t have enough clothes to risk any if things went differently than I hoped. Even if everything went right, having wings of magic sprout from my back could easily destroy any clothes I might want to wear.


    And so, after pushing all those thoughts to the back of my mind, I let my mind be filled with memories, dreams and ideas. For once, I didn¡¯t try to structure my magic in a minute fashion; I simply gave direction and guidance while observing its effects as I let an absurd amount of power flow through me.


    The valley I had chosen hadn¡¯t been completely on a whim or for the gorgeous environment, though I had a suspicion that the environment was a function of my actual reason. Or maybe my actual reason was a result of the environment; I couldn¡¯t be completely certain. Not that it truly mattered whether the chicken or the egg came first in this particular conundrum; the only thing that mattered was that I had a chicken, or, as it was in this case, an area filled with enough magic to almost push into wild magic territory.


    The sheer amount of Ice, Wind and Darkness Magic in the air might have suffocated a lesser practitioner, or one without my affinity to those elements, but to me, the air was filled with nothing but power, tremendous amounts of it. I couldn¡¯t channel all of it, not all at once, but I could channel a lot of it and with every passing moment, more and more of that power was passing through me, funnelled into the conceptual magic I was channelling.If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.


    At first, nothing much happened. I could feel some of the magic build up in my body, mostly around my shoulders, but the vast majority of it was coalescing behind me, somewhat similar to the process used when conjuring materials but not quite like it. Still, I could feel it start to take shape and connect the not-yet-corporeal structure behind me with the build-up within my body. Amusingly, I could also feel my hair start to move independently from the wind, some of it starting to lengthen just a little and wind into the magical construct behind me, some of it shortening but starting to curl into my shoulders in a distinctly weird way. It didn¡¯t hurt much, but it gave me an itch in my magic I wouldn¡¯t ever be able to scratch. Incredibly weird, but given that the entire situation was experimental, weird should be expected.


    This was the reason why the next sensation wasn¡¯t able to shake my resolve or concentration, as I had been expecting something odd to happen. Maybe not to have my wings start to coalesce into reality starting at their tips, some two metres beyond the reach of my arm if I were to stretch it in that direction, but it wasn¡¯t enough to upset me. Neither was the itch that started at those two tips of sharp, almost claw-like ice or when the itch started to spread towards my back, slowly and through structures that weren¡¯t quite there yet. And if an itch in an appendage I didn¡¯t have yet wasn¡¯t enough to break my concentration, nothing would.


    A small part of my mind started to wonder if that was something analogue to phantom pains or itches after somebody lost a limb, though I wasn¡¯t sure as I knew something beyond misfiring nerves were there, I could feel enough of my magic to know that. And now, focused on my magic as I was, I could even feel my hair stretch out, almost like a nervous system. It was an incredibly strange sensation to feel my hair like that, beyond its considerable weight hanging off my head, but, just like all the other oddities, it wasn¡¯t enough to stop me.


    Neither were the continuing sensations when the magic started to take a physical shape, forming into matter composed of Ice, Wind and Darkness Astral Power, all meshed together to form something I couldn¡¯t name, let alone describe. Hard, yet brittle, parts made from Ice, somewhat pliable but sturdy parts made of Wind Magic and, last but not least, Darkness winding through the entire thing, binding it all together around the strands of hair stretched out behind my back.


    Finally, the wings started to fuse to my back, curiously not breaking the skin in the slightest, simply connecting to it, the connection running down my naked side and ending just above my hip. Compared to the rest of the experience, this part felt almost mundane, at least after the strange itching sensation had died down, and I could focus on feeling the wind on my wings, quite literally.


    Looking over my shoulder, I could take them in in their full glory. Their tips remained clawed, and their overall shape made me think of a bat¡¯s wing, but I faintly remembered that bat¡¯s wings were essentially their hands, just with skin stretched between the ¡®fingers¡¯, my wings didn¡¯t have those fingers; they were a solid whole and yet, despite that, they could flex and move in tune with my magic. Their colour was a curious one, somewhat translucent, with a cold, silvery light shining from their centre and illuminating countless thin, black tendrils running through them, most likely my hairs or an analogue to them. Around the edges, the silver came to the surface, making their scaly appearance quite obvious while also showing that the translucent area was in actuality, a very faint blue, nearly impossible to see in the darkness of the night. All in all, they looked quite beautiful, making me nod with approval. But, the most important thing had yet to be tested.


    Experimentally beating them once, I felt myself lift off the ground far too easily, as if the wings had gripped the wind already present and made use of it. Sadly, I hadn¡¯t expected the movement, and with two fairly sizable wings spread in the wind and some additional magic helping them to get me aloft, I immediately started to make like a kite and soar.


    At first, I wanted nothing but to get back down to the ground but with each beat of my wings, with each moment they caught the wind as I was gliding, I started to feel more and more at ease. With ease came comfort and enjoyment, and with enjoyment came a desire to continue.


    And so I continued to soar, forgetting the world beneath me as I could finally take to the sky without the need for enchanted equipment. Before, I had been floating, but now, I am flying.

 Chapter 1084

    Flying was, without any doubts about it, one of the most enjoyable things out there, especially when it came to activities I could perform without Sigmir. Once she was back in the mix, things would shift a bit, but until then, it ranked at the very top of my list, alongside delving deeper into the arcane mysteries of the world.


    Sadly, even with my insane affinity for Ice and Snow, the wind high up in the air was enough to chill my naked form to the bone, not that I let that stop me immediately, and after some thirty minutes, maybe an hour, I was starting to experience some serious shivers, strong enough that my stability in flight was getting threatened. Unwilling to drop from the sky due to utter foolishness, I reoriented myself and began my descent into the valley with the frozen waterfall. The wind battered me a little, but not enough to stop me, though I did make a note about the unusual amount of wind in the area and the Astral Power corresponding to it. This might be a place I would want to study even further; there might be something more going on here. Or, if not, I might be able to make something go on, possibly turning it into a place of Wild Magic that I could study for the next month or two while we waited for the snow to thaw so we could continue our journey further north.


    It was odd; if I were to consider the next step of our journey purely on the merits of our current situation, I wouldn¡¯t want to move on. Here, we had our students drawing from a fairly large pool of people despite having met only two of the local communities. Two out of seven, maybe even eight communities, depending on how far afield one decided to travel, and yet, I knew we could decide to stay in the area and establish ourselves as a somewhat independent organisation. It would be incredibly easy; the people we had met were all fairly friendly, very courteous and generally as welcoming as one could hope so staying here was somewhat tempting. Especially for Lia, as her romance with Samantha had turned into quite the thing, to the point that Lia hadn¡¯t fed off me for a while, the last time being about a month before the longest night. Similarly, Alex had found some other sources of blood and nourishment, though I was fairly certain that they were taking their meals outside, though whether that meant they found some friendly racoon and had settled down with it or something else entirely I wasn¡¯t sure. Either way, they hadn¡¯t fed from me in a while, in fact, I had rarely seen them at all, spending their time either with Lia or outside the tower.


    But, and that was the big thing, if we decided to stay in the area, I wouldn¡¯t be able to revive Sigmir, at least not within an acceptable timeframe. Without a Nexus, and some serious additional shenanigans, I would need a lot more power than the Grandmother, given that she hadn¡¯t revived Kallista¡¯s mate. Instead, she had made Kallista wait until the natural cycle of the world brought her soul back around. And even then, the Grandmother hadn¡¯t sought to draw out the memories from Adra¡¯s soul, bringing the person who used to be Kallista¡¯s mate back, though that might have been because it would essentially have killed Adra. Who knew if she could have drawn out those memories or even if she could have brought that soul back earlier if she had been willing to pay the price? Either way, she had, for whatever reason, decided to abstain from such spellcraft, though I was fairly confident that she had studied it. Maybe trying to create a better way of contacting her would be a good idea if only to figure out how Mundus fared and a general overview of things.


    My contemplations had to end when the ground was getting a little too close to have my mind wander around, and I had to focus on the hardest part of flying, the landing. Though, at the end of the day, you¡¯d always get to the ground, the difficult part was to make the transition as smooth and painless as possible. Luckily, I had previously gained the Aerial Grace trait, allowing me to accurately judge the moment when I had to flare my wings in order to bleed of the remaining velocity so I could land as if I had merely jumped off a ledge maybe a metre in height. Such a jump was nothing to me, thanks to my increased attributes, and I easily absorbed the impact with my knees before rising to walk over to the pack I had previously left here.Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on the original website.


    As I walked, I focused on my wings, trying to figure out if there was a way to make them disappear without having to dispel or destroy them in some fashion, which I was incredibly uncomfortable with. I only had these limbs for about an hour, but they already felt part of me, just like my arms and legs did. Cutting them off would be cripplingly painful, especially as I realised that I felt these wings naturally, just like every other part of my body. They might have been created with magic but by now, they were truly a part of me. Sure, it felt a little strange how they incorporated my hair, turning it into something almost like the hood of a cobra, but it worked without issues. I could look around and move my head without the connection hindering or hurting me, something I had briefly been worried about when my hair became part of my wings.


    Luckily, the faft that the wings were magical in nature meant they were incredibly malleable, at least compared to biological wings. It only took me a few tries to fold them in, not just lying against my back like some strange cloak hanging down to just above the ground but completely, having them disappear into my back and freeing up my hair. Two slightly strange ridges remained on my back, but unless somebody saw far too much of my body to make me comfortable, that was no problem. If anybody saw that much, they would have a much bigger problem than those two ridges.


    Sadly, without my body in them, my clothes suffered from the incredibly cold air; what little moisture had been in them, freezing them into a gritty layer of ice. They would keep off the wind, but little more, so I needed something better if I wanted to get comfortable in a reasonable amount of time.


    A quick thought and flex of my magic compressed some of the snow and ice all around me into a set of solid walls, arrayed into a simple box, perfect to keep off the wind and trap some of the heat I was planning to generate. Sure, the Ice would melt from the heat but it would take some time, especially if I enhanced it with some extra Astral Power. Then, once I had my box, I stood inside and started to conjure water above me, just as I had for my showers. At first, I kept the water somewhat chilly so I wouldn¡¯t shock my system too hard, and then I slowly started to increase the temperature until I was feeling comfortable. It was strange; I had almost forgotten what it felt like to be cold, so this was a slightly strange sensation.


    Still, I didn¡¯t just luxuriate under my improvised shower; I also checked my notifications and had to grin when I noticed I had gained multiple traits.


    The first one was probably the most important, telling me I had gained my Wings. A part of me wanted to snark at the system, telling it that I had noticed those two sails on my backs but at the end of the day, the system was only doing its job, though given that the notification also increased my Strength, Agility and Dexterity by five each, I wasn¡¯t about to complain.


    My Strength sadly remained below the threshold for traits but my Agility and Dexterity both gave me one, though both traits were fairly specialised. Improved Proprioception, the one I gained for having fifty-five Agility, gave me increased proprioception, with an added note that it worked especially well for any additional limbs I might gain. If that wasn¡¯t a giant hint, I hadn¡¯t seen one, and it might explain why I had been able to fly as easily as I had.


    The other trait, for having fifty-five Dexterity, was similar in nature, improving my dexterous precision, with a special increase for any additional limbs I might gain. Again, a giant hint, though I wasn¡¯t about to complain about it, especially not as there was likely a tail in my future, too. Maybe even more limbs. I wasn¡¯t about to discard that possibility, and any help I could get to shorten the learning curve was welcome.


    Soon, I was finished with my shower, and after a brief application of Water and Fire Magic, I was dry, my clothes were dry and warm, and I could start my way back to the tower. Now, I only had to figure out a good way to use my wings while being at least somewhat clothed, which might be almost as hard as getting them in the first place.

 Chapter 1085

    A part of me wanted to use my wings to fly back to my tower, though given that I¡¯d have to land up top unless I wanted to show anyone who might be looking far more than I wanted them to see, I wasn¡¯t certain if that was a good idea. Even without the possibility of giving an intimate show, there were a few practical considerations, as well as the question of whether I wanted to scare the people living there by letting them see a strange, almost monstrous, creature land on top of the tower. If my wings¡¯ appearance had turned out feathered and somewhat angelic, I might have considered it but given that my wings looked like a cross between those of a bat, some strange reptilian creature from before time and a stingray with legs, that didn¡¯t quite work. Sure, the wings were beautiful but it was an alien beauty, something that strongly spoke of something ¡®other¡¯, without any connection to myths or legends from before the change, at least not to any famous enough for me to be aware of.


    So, instead of letting my wings carry me back, I had to resort to floating with my cloak. Somehow, a method of travel I had loved deeply and seen as an incredible marvel had suddenly grown stale, leaving me utterly unsatisfied instead of content and happy. Maybe that was just the way it was. If you had been used to eating only tasteless cold gruel but were then given some hearty stew, you¡¯d see the stew as an utter delicacy but if that stew was then replaced with something even better, something like pizza, lasagna or whatever your personal example of the perfect meal might be? In that case, the stew might turn unappealing, something only eaten to sate the basic necessities of life while yearning for that pizza you can¡¯t have.


    It was the same with locomotion. At first, I could only walk and run, but my strength and agility gave me the mobility to parkour my way around before I learned to shadow step, which added an entirely different dimension to that. Then, I had managed to enchant my cloak in a way that let me fly, or as I now thought of it, let me float, allowing me to take to the skies where I largely felt at home. But now, with the wings in play? It was an entirely different experience, as if I had merely been a visitor of the skies but now, I was a creature of them, entirely at home. Which would, sadly, mean I wasn¡¯t at home on the ground any longer, though I hadn¡¯t noticed a shift in that, so maybe I was the avian equivalent of an amphibian, equally at home in the sky and on land.


    So, I used my cloak to return, pondering the best way to deal with the problem of needing open-backed clothes to let my wings out, something I usually wasn¡¯t too keen on. Maybe I could use something akin to a swimsuit, with a single strap going up between my shoulder blades, though I¡¯d have to find a way to make sleeves work with that. Or I would have to go sleeveless, maybe throw on a cloak to conceal that fact a little and let my wings bunch that cloak up in the middle, maybe even use my cloak of levitation for that.


    In that sense, the wings were a little annoying, any garment or armour I could wear while allowing for the wings to be used needed to have an open back, leaving preciously few ways to have that garment encircle my torso unless it was something with an included belt. That, in turn, meant any kind of armour was essentially impossible and, to make matters worse, I had no idea just how durable the slightly raised ridges my wings had retreated into were. Sure, they might be strong enough to withstand abuse but I might have to test that, just as I might have to test how sturdy the wings were in the first place and what I could do to restore them if they got injured. Or, more likely, when they got injured, I was fairly confident that it would happen at some point, I got in too many fights for anything else.


    For a moment, I had the amusing image of using the wings like some sort of poncho, wrapping them around me as a substitute for armour, especially if it turned out they were solid enough. They might even work as weapons, the claws at their tips looked to be fairly sharp and quite nasty. More importantly, the wings were constructs of my magic, meaning there wouldn¡¯t be any muscle strength involved, instead, their power came from my magic or, when speaking in terms of the system, any calculations in regard to their power should draw on my Intelligence, not my Strength. It would be interesting to test just how true that was and how it worked out, to say nothing of the question of which the various traits I had would apply if they were classified as parts of my magic, constructs of my Astral Power as opposed to actual parts of my body. This story has been unlawfully obtained without the author''s consent. Report any appearances on Amazon.


    After landing at the top of my tower, I started to make my way downstairs, intent on doing a few tests. For that, I moved into one of the chambers I had set aside for such experimentation, mainly by adding a lot of reinforcement with my magic, mainly Earth, Crystal, Darkness and even Ice and Wind, so that any mistakes could be kept contained. Sure, I had made the room, meaning I¡¯d be able to unmake it but with the structures in place, I was fairly confident that nothing would accidentally get through and even any loud noise would be contained thanks to the Wind Magic, so nobody would be disturbed.


    To start, I conjured a chunk of normal Ice and formed it into a roughly humanoid shape before taking off my top so I could let my wings out without causing any damage to my clothes. Then, after taking a deep breath, I struck out with my wing, letting the clawed tip whip forward only to stumble as the wing acted like it was supposed to and put a lot of pressure on the air it was beating against. The wings were made to easily lift me into the sky and carry me, even without rapid flapping so a simply swiping strike like I had tried would always cause me to stumble unless I managed to brace myself.


    Still, I had managed a glancing blow on the dummy, cracking some of the Ice and when looking at the clawed tip, there wasn¡¯t any visible damage, nor did I feel any pain, making this a good start. It also looked like the movement of my wings was determined by my magic, not any muscles I may have or eventually develop, at least I couldn¡¯t feel any strain on any of my muscles, though that might be because I had only struck once. But even earlier, after flying around for some time, the limiting factor had been mental and the rest of my body, my legs, arms and the lack of warmth, not exhaustion in my wings.


    But it was only a start, so now I needed to find ways in which I could use my wings to strike without having them act like the wings they were and pull me off balance. For that, I started with simple movements, slow and steady, while assessing how much air resistance the wings met with the different strokes, soon finding that any swing was essentially out of the question. Unless I wanted to strike somebody behind me by bending over and slashing them down, swinging them wouldn¡¯t work, not with the way they were anchored to my body.


    What had some promise was trying to stab with them, essentially moving my upper body back and forth, allowing one wing to stab forward easily while the other wing pulled back. I needed to brace myself quite a bit, but after some thirty minutes of testing that particular movement, I was starting to get the hang of it and began testing the method on conjured Ice targets.


    Luckily, the claws on my wings worked fairly well for that kind of movement, even if they didn¡¯t look like they were optimised for it. Soon, as I started to shatter the brittle Ice targets, I began to work on my speed, trying to make each strike faster than the last. At that point, I realised three things. One, the wings were quite sturdy, providing more protection against outside force than my flesh, though I wasn¡¯t about to test what fire would do to them. The second thing was that this kind of fighting was highly limited and not really practical. The wings, while a working weapon, limited my movement on the ground a great deal, simply because their very presence altered my centre of gravity and their added drag pulled me off-balance, almost no matter what I did. As long as I was just standing and stabbing, everything was fine but the moment I tried to move at the pace I would usually use in combat? I started to stumble around with as much grace as a drunken bull and given that grace and agility were major parts of my defensive strategy, it didn¡¯t look like the wings would be part of this, at least not when I could avoid it.


    Lastly, the power of these claws was somewhat underwhelming, they seemed to lack any distinct power, there was nothing that made them ¡®Dragon Claws¡¯ other than the fact that they were at the tip of my ¡®Dragon¡¯s Wings¡¯. From my understanding, a Dragon¡¯s Claws were weapons capable of rending anything, ripping through protections with laughing ease to utterly destroy what had roused the Dragon¡¯s ire. But these claws, they were, well, they were just claws, without any special characteristics and even their shape wasn¡¯t really optimised for striking, piercing or any other type of swift attacking movement, if anything, I would think the claws were made to grip something and make sure whatever I had a grip on wouldn¡¯t get away. That realisation brought with it a few, somewhat unsatisfying, answers and a lot more questions. Maybe I would understand later, or when I managed to fully transform into a dragon, once that form was finalised.

 Interlude: A tale of two Sams

    In a few of the quiet moments of the day, while Carnelia was in such a deep sleep she could easily be mistaken for a corpse, especially with her pale pallor, Samantha had to admit to herself that she had no idea what she was doing. Or, really, what anyone was doing, the world had gone insane in a way nobody could have predicted outside of some fairly strange stories. It said quite a lot about the state of the world when even the absurdist scenarios designed to test unconventional thinking in impossible situations had been too mild and far too optimistic nor could anyone have predicted the outside influence, for there was no way the System could be terrestrial in origin, that made things even more insane. Though, to be fair, the system also gave them a realistic chance to survive, especially when assuming that Astral Power was only available in combination with the system. Without it, there was a better-than-even chance humanity would have perished shortly after the initial change that killed off a third of the population, with many more people dying from the freshly risen Shattered.


    Still, if anyone had told her, at any point before entering Jademoon Tower, that she¡¯d be learning Alchemy from one of those very Shattered who had somehow been turned into a Vampire by their Elvin host, she would have called that person insane. And looked for a way to get some distance between them as insane people could be utterly unpredictable and dangerous, no need to invite injury just because somebody had taken leave of their senses. And yet, after she had seen the first descriptions of Alchemy on the walls in the Shrine she had been hooked, her interest grabbed in a way even the most fascinating engineering class at college had failed to do.


    With that demonstrated interest in Alchemy, she became the focus of a pair of terrifying, yet utterly captivating, crimson eyes of Carnelia, the local vampire and from there, things happened in a slightly strange, yet both predictable and unpredictable fashion. Guessing that a teacher might develop an interest in their student, even if there is a significant age difference? It happens, there were reasons for the various laws put into place to prevent abuse of power in that situation and even with those laws, it continued to happen. Sure, it was usually an older teacher going after younger students, not the younger teacher putting the moves on an older student but given the situation, age was fairly irrelevant. As were all the laws from before the change, if anyone could be considered the law in their situation, it was Jade Morgana, the creator of the tower and mother of said vampire, as strange as that was.


    Granted, while Carnelia had pushed and prodded her, Sam would be the first to admit that she had been quite receptive to the flirting and eagerly reciprocated once she managed to gather her bearings, fond memories of her days in college playing in her head. Sure, those encounters had been with humans but they had been both relaxing and enjoyable, something she was desperately craving in their insane world. The various creature comforts she could enjoy with Carnelia at her side, thanks to the apparently infinitely adaptive magical ability wielded by Lia¡¯s mother were a mere benefit. A wonderful benefit sure, but even without those, Lia had an animal magnetism Samantha wouldn¡¯t have wanted to deny, she knew herself that well at least.


    And if Sam had to sacrifice the occasional bit of blood every so often, she wasn¡¯t about to complain, especially as the sensation of having her blood gently drained from her body by way of an incredibly intimate and, as she soon found out, orgasmic kiss was one she would have welcomed, even without the rest of their relationship. Just those kisses would have her come back asking for more, making her occasionally wonder how they had handled things before, only to realise that there were things she really didn¡¯t want to know. Even if there was no biological relationship between Mother and Daughter, some things just shouldn¡¯t happen and if they had happened, she had no interest in learning about the circumstances. In this case, ignorance was truly bliss and she wanted to continue her blissful experience. Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.


    But it wasn¡¯t all kinky kisses, weird humour and slightly odd flirting with Lia, no, the vast majority of their time was spent learning and later working on alchemical projects as a team of three, Lia, Samantha herself and Alex, the vampiric racoon. The vampiric racoon, capable of chittering in a way that normal people could vaguely understand, however that worked. Just another of those insanities Sam had been forced to live with, blood-sucking trash-pandas smart enough to rival any human, with an incredible ability to create stupidly dangerous ordnance from seemingly ordinary items.


    Why couldn¡¯t the world go back to making sense, a cry often repeated before the change ever happened but now, Sam had a feeling the cry would be on everyone¡¯s lips. Well, maybe not on Jade¡¯s, that one seemed to thrive in the insanity, which implied some rather problematic things about her sanity, but given the sheer power Jade had, any such implications should be uttered far from her, just in case. Maybe only while hidden within a copper dome, or with some very advanced insulation to protect from sudden cold snaps, one could never be cautious enough, a lesson she had learned the hard way while working with Lia. It was not paranoia if they were out to get you, and if ¡®they¡¯ were the incomprehensible laws governing the weird science of Alchemy, it was doubly true. There was a reason why the arcane path was named thusly and it had nothing to do with the recent, popular definition of ¡®arcane¡¯ and everything with the older.


    ¡°Hey, Sam,¡± Jack, the leader of the team she nominally remained a part of called out to her, pulling her from the strange, contemplative mindset she had been trapped in.


    ¡°Jack, hello, what¡¯s going on?¡± she asked, trying to gather her scattered bearings.


    ¡°Just wanted to ask you if you want to make the trek back home, Daniel agreed to go with us and do some magic for the people back there, you know, provide some water, spruce up the infrastructure, that kind of stuff. Want to go with, remember what normal people like to do and maybe put your recently found skills to work?¡± he asked, making Sam consider her options for a moment. On one hand, she wanted to help the people who she had worked with to overcome the initial insanity, they all had saved each other''s lives in a myriad of ways, forging a camaraderie she wasn¡¯t about to abandon. On the other hand, she wanted to stick with Lia and keep learning, to say nothing of the relationship the two had been forging over the weeks that turned into months, that, too she didn¡¯t want to abandon.


    ¡°I¡¯d like to ask Carnelia if she¡¯d want to join us, maybe Alex, too,¡± Sam replied after a moment of quiet consideration, hoping that this might give her the best of both worlds. And, maybe, it would allow her to lure Lia into staying in the area, even after the snow had melted and their group could continue their journey north, wherever they actually wanted to go. Apparently, none of the actually knew their destination, just a somewhat vague direction. Not even how far they had to go, meaning they might arrive at their destination the next day, maybe they still had a few thousand miles to walk.


    ¡°Ah..:¡± Jack mumbled, his usually easy smile fading away like mist in the morning sun, ¡°You do that, if you think that one would be interested in helping a few people out, other than teaching those they are interested in,¡± he grumbled before walking away without any further words. A part of Samantha was well-aware of his interest, she had even considered reciprocating, if only for the added security it would provide. Maybe not the most romantic reason to pursue a relationship but, historically, likely the most common, so it couldn¡¯t be all that bad. Luckily, she didn¡¯t need to consider that path any longer and, if she could manage her vague plan to entice Lia to stay, she wouldn¡¯t need it in the future.


    But first, she had to convince the crimson-eyed vampire to remain with her, maybe even add the racoon to the mix, the critter had some skills and could be surprisingly amusing for a being she could only vaguely understand. And she had to do so in a manner that wouldn¡¯t have the quite scary Jade decide to deal with Samantha in a permanent fashion for luring her daughter away from the woman. One step at the time, as they said, one step at the time while going slow and steady.

 Chapter 1086

    Sadly, the creation of my wings was the last major accomplishment I achieved in regards to my draconic body during the winter. Trying to create my breath was met with repeated failure, despite the faint glimpse at the deeper truths of magic I had managed to take while observing Lady Hecate at work. Even now, almost two months after the Longest Night, that experience was something I hadn¡¯t completely digested and continue to go over the memory. There was so much going on, processes I could only comprehend by likening them to concepts I already knew. For example, she twisted the experience of moving into the Astral River and the sensation of immersion one felt while within it and turned it into a simple, singular glyph. Not a rune as I knew them but something similar, close enough to make me wonder if the Runes I was usually using were something similar, an experience, or maybe a concept or idea, folded in on itself like a sheet of paper. Once the sheet was folded, the text written on it could no longer be read but by putting the correct label on it, somebody in the know would be able to discern what the paper contained with nary a glance.


    Just turning what I could only do thanks to a mix of instinct, experience and my physical presence into a spell that could be used by others who lacked those things was beyond me, especially given that the spell had to connect to the Astral River independently from its caster. But to turn said spell into a glyph like she did, allowing people to cast it without any real understanding of what they were doing was just¡­ There were no words and I began to wonder just how far I¡¯d have to go if I wanted to lay claim to the title of deity. if I wanted to go down that path.


    And those were only two of the incredible things she did, in other cases, she readily transformed one elemental aspect into another, twisting and morphing the very fabric of reality so people would get the full experience of the Astral River, regardless of the actual state of it. So, even if somebody were to use the spell at sea or in the middle of the desert, places where the elemental bias was so strong that some of the other elements would be drowned out completely, Lady Hecate managed to manipulate the spellwork in such a way that it would still give those present and involved in the ceremony a somewhat balanced experience. Not completely balanced, that would lead to a disconnect between their usual experience within the Astral River, but it would be good enough to make everyone comfortable, even if they were suffering from elemental intolerance, like I was intolerant to Light and, now to a much lesser degree, Fire.


    Sadly, while I was slowly beginning to understand part of what she had done, and maybe more importantly why she had done it and possibly even the reason why she used that specific way, though that last part was pure speculation on my part, I was far from able to put that faint understanding into practice. Sure, I tried but, so far, it mostly blew up in my face, in some cases quite literally as trying to create a Dragon¡¯s Breath from any place but your mouth would be a bit odd. It might be possible to expel one from the other end, but doing so would likely have¡­ strange consequences for the eventual Dragon Form I was hoping to gain at some point in the future.


    Outside of my attempts to work out my breath, we also did a few other things. The amalgamation of Denver and Colorado Springs was a massive, sprawling city, even if it was now mostly in ruins, and there were numerous locations to visit and explore. Even after months of exploration, we hadn¡¯t managed to visit them all, though we had a fairly good idea of which were worthwhile and which we could readily leave for others to explore and cut their teeth on.


    Sure, if the five of us were working together the likelihood of encountering an enemy we couldn¡¯t deal with was fairly slim and if we ever encountered something we couldn¡¯t deal with, escape was always an option, especially with two people capable of teleporting and my ever-growing ability to create illusions and manipulate the minds of my enemies. While I wasn¡¯t about to go around announcing our superiority and power to the world, I was certain that any enemy capable of forcing us into a corner could kill anyone in the wider area with a fairly large degree of ease. This was why we left the weaker zones and the enemies within to others, we simply wouldn¡¯t gain anything from it but the warm and fuzzy feelings generated by massacring your enemies. This way, the people currently much weaker than us could catch up a little in level, giving them a bit of a headstart and additional security after we left the area.If you encounter this narrative on Amazon, note that it''s taken without the author''s consent. Report it.


    It helped that the locations we decided to explore were often quite fascinating. The zoo, for one, had been turned into something similar to an outdoor dungeon and I wasn¡¯t convinced it wouldn¡¯t do so in the future, possibly depending on outside influences. For now, it was an area covered in far too much greenery for the time of the year, noticeably warmer than the rest of the city as evidenced by the visibly lower amount of snow within its confines and filled with a ton of animals, some of which ventured out to hunt down any meaty snack that might wander too close to it.


    The massive amount of greenery might actually have been the most interesting part about it, as it was able to sustain a number of herbivores far bigger than the area would suggest, creating some fairly odd effects on the inhabitants. That, in turn, led to a larger number of carnivores, creating the aforementioned ton of animals, some of which had already learned to channel Astral Power to create some interesting effects. While we didn¡¯t aim to kill off all the animals, we explored the area thoroughly, with Luna gathering some interesting seeds from plants already altered by the environment, which we were planning to use in further experiments. We even provided an addition to the dungeon ourselves, a cross between a large shrub and ivy vines, augmented to have a high affinity of Life and Earth, with some Darkness attuned to Magic itself thrown in. How the thing would grow and mature, we had no idea but it was an utterly fascinating experiment which we sadly wouldn¡¯t be able to see to its conclusion, simply due to the time needed for it to grow. Maybe we could return someday, in a year or five, and check on it but for now, we would have to make do with the initial impressions and a few checks before we left.


    Then there were the churches, some of which remained conspicuously intact despite the devastation surrounding them. Sure, the churches might have been built better but given the fairly obvious pattern, I didn¡¯t think that was the primary cause. After all, if all buildings in the area are little better than rubble and a single building still has its stained glass windows, something odd is going on.


    Some investigation revealed a strange magical resonance, almost as if an echo of prayers spoken in the church before the change still lingered, though that might have simply been my imagination. Luna and I tried to fiddle around and figure out just what we were sensing but, sadly, we didn¡¯t get all that far. It was some weird magic, not quite natural, not quite divine but certainly not anything man-made, it was too odd for that. And far too pointless, it didn¡¯t do all that much, it just seemed to linger and make the area linger, alongside everyone within it.


    A similar curiosity was the boneyard, which we had discovered during our initial explorations, a massive area where just about every graveyard had been amalgamated, creating an outdoor dungeon filled with different undead. Sadly, the vast majority of those undead were far too weak to give us any EXP, let alone pose a challenge to us and the few that might have given a few EXP weren¡¯t all that interesting, so we left them alone. Instead, we trained our stealth and explored the boneyard without anyone being the wiser. We checked various crypts and broken graves, curious about the effects caused by the dungeonification of the area.


    While a few things stood out, nothing we came across reached our agreed-upon level to intervene. This area would remain for future adventurers, looking for EXP, treasure and general, well, adventure. Hopefully, it would serve them well and we made sure to provide the local survivor groups we had gotten to know maps about the area and what we had observed within. Maybe that way they¡¯d be able to explore without sacrificing far too many people but the choice would be theirs. The best we could do to help them was to provide the tools they needed to succeed, after all, as the old saying went, if you give a man a fish, you fed him for the day, if you teach him to fish, you feed him for a lifetime.

 Interlude: A divine Solstice

    If there was one place she would consider herself to be completely relaxed, it was her library. Sure, the empty lunar void she used to impress the odd mortal who could get a vague understanding of the location¡¯s essence was a nice place, too. Oddly soothing and completely free of distractions, it was perfect for all sorts of magical experimentation thanks to the abundance of Astral Power and the complete lack of anything important or fragile, but neither of those had the comforts she had grown to enjoy. Additionally, being surrounded by the crystallised, or rather recorded, essence of a nigh endless bounty of arcane knowledge, all of it contained within her domain, was utterly pleasant. A warm bath, always sitting at the perfect temperature, only a bath not for her body but for her soul, her very essence.


    Sure, there was more to her domain than just arcane magic and the knowledge it could uncover but that was what she had built her power-base on, sharing it with mortals and collecting their own research in turn. Granted, it was a rare pleasure that one of those mortals found anything truly new, something which wasn¡¯t just a small derivative of some already known technique, but after countless millennia, that wasn¡¯t too much of a surprise. Most mortals simply didn¡¯t have the time to get beyond what she considered a basic understanding of the arcane and those fundamental basics had been thoroughly researched over the years and the secrets uncovered.


    Still, some mortals had the ability to uncover fascinating facets of the gem that was arcane magic and some of those mortals even had the ability to become more than mortal. To gain the time needed to reach a decent understanding of magic and go from there, rearing off on paths she, herself, couldn¡¯t even conceive, simply because her view of the world was fairly settled, her ideas and a lot of her creativity having run dry aeons ago.


    It was the hardest part about immortality, the lack of stimulus. Sure, she could run down an avenue of research that would take a mortal in a few moments but to have fresh ideas was something that didn¡¯t come easy to her. Making things even harder was that some of those new ideas replaced things she had considered fact and simply stopped questioning over time, as they had held true at the time of her research or under the specific conditions she had applied but with a different perspective and in a different direction, those facts suddenly stopped holding true, opening up wholly new avenues to pursue.


    Few of her peers would ever admit fallibility, let alone consider that mortals might find different paths to pursue that they couldn¡¯t find but then, there was a reason why she held the position in the Pantheon she had, and it wasn¡¯t because her church granted her an excessive amount of power.


    Looking on the latest realm under the authority of the Pantheon, she glimpsed one of her current favourite mortals, the young Firn-elf going by Jade. She was such a curious specimen, and she might become truly interesting if she continued on her path. Maybe even more than interesting, though that would depend on her, whether she could manage to straddle the two divergent paths she was currently on, somehow manage to tie the divine and titanic together in a way few could. Time would tell, though even now, said mortal was doing something interesting, and, amusingly, it was all to make her adopted daughter happy.


    For a moment, a bell-like tinkling sound filled the space, a truly divine giggle, all because of a clumsy mortal trying her best to take on a duty she barely understood and had originally been ill-equipped to perform but, with only a bit of prodding, she had tried. And, surprising even the prodding goddess a little more than usual, she had succeeded, not just in keeping the girl, who could have died dozens of times in the mess after their world had changed, alive but in turning said girl¡¯s potential into something truly astounding. It was something worth nourishing even further, to the point that Hecate herself had expended a bit of effort to help the girl¡¯s mind keep up with the rapid maturation forced upon her body by her inflated attributes and levels. The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.


    That sort of condition was fairly rare, mostly due to the actual danger the young person had to be placed in for the system to grant levels and attributes. If not for that, if there was a truly safe way to level, people would have used it, but as things were, it was generally considered too big a risk, to say nothing of the inherent dangers of a toddler in an adult''s body. Or a toddler capable of blowing up sizable chunks of its surroundings, by virtue of toddlers, and even teenagers for that matter, having some troubles with impulse control. So, having an example with quite a bit of innate potential and somebody on the mortal side actively trying to nourish that potential was quite the fascinating subject for study, which Hecate had done with a fair amount of glee.


    And now, that pair had quite a fascinating idea. Sure, celebrations on the night of the Winter Solstice were something common, often involving fires, light, and all that stuff. People were hiding away from the darkness and trying to chase it away as the longest night fell around them. It was a common idea, especially amongst diurnal races who didn¡¯t get along well with the night.


    Given that nasty divine curse Jade had been placed under, even if it was ameliorated by the blessing placed by Hecate and a few of the traits Jade had acquired later, that wasn¡¯t the case here. Instead, their celebration focused primarily, almost solely, on magic, with the darkness simply being a part of the endless cycle. Interesting, especially for a largely diurnal group, and even better was the part where Jade was attempting to project the Astral River into reality.


    Over the next few days, as Jade was slowly making progress on her project, she was occasionally watched by a curious deity who was quite impressed at the difficult path Jade had chosen to pursue. Illusion would have been the easiest medium to use; simply have people see what Jade could see in the Astral River, but it wouldn¡¯t be the best medium. No, what Jade was trying to accomplish was to use a combination of Darkness and Mind Magic to project the Astral River into reality by subtly manipulating the minds of everyone involved to slip into a shallow delve. It would only work when a singular stream of the Astral River was in primacy, so essentially only during the solstices, using Darkness in the winter and Light in the summer, but otherwise, it was an interesting piece of magic.


    Somewhat novel, a way to communalise something usually reserved for individuals and an experience difficult to share as everyone interpreted the Astral River somewhat differently. Not just due to the differences in the way people sensed magic but also due to the difference in affinities and the willpower to withstand the magical currents involved. But this was something that could be shared, as it used the caster¡¯s understanding to underpin the projection, sharing what they knew while the people experiencing it could fill in the blanks while comparing and contrasting what they were shown with what they were experiencing themself. Truly, it was a curious bit of magic.


    It was one that Hecate wanted to gain for herself, partially to study it a little more and partially to turn it into something she could bestow on the few people she actively supported. Though ¡®few¡¯ was always a matter of perspective, as was the question how widely this particular bit of arcane art would be shared. It was, at its core, an incredibly useful spell to further her own goals, namely, to further the spread and the development of arcane magic, simply by guiding a few more souls towards that particular path.


    Maybe she would even gift the spell to a few of the other gods, especially if it worked as well as she was currently hoping. If so, she might have to grant the amusing mortal Jade a few additional benefits, maybe couched as ¡®Gifts¡¯ as was the mortal tradition for the festivity usually taking place on the solstice.


    But first, she would have to see if Jade was interested in sharing the spell, and if she was, the first boon granted in exchange could be a lesson on the highest level of spell crafting. This was not something Jade could perform just yet, but unless she completely missed her guess, it might be useful for Jade in the future. After all, thanks to a few subtle, and a couple of not-so-subtle, prods by Hecate, Jade was currently developing that curious divinity and she managed to grow it almost in parallel with the Titanic Authority she was so ambitious about. Truly, mortals could be so endlessly fascinating and curious, sometimes even completely by accident. Or maybe it was that ephemeral force nobody had managed to pin down just yet, the one even the Gods had to bow to, sometimes described with a simple four-letter word.

 Chapter 1087

    Another location we decided to explore further was the Foothold, the dungeon beneath Cheyenne Mountain. Once again, we were moving as a group of five, first to see if the dungeon was replenished between subsequent explorations, and if it was, we had a bit of hope of getting additional materials from it. The big thing, at least to Lia and Alex, were the various metals they had found inside, all of which they had used in their Alchemy to refine some interesting alloys. At least, that was what they told me. They hadn¡¯t given me any of their products, mostly because they had been focused on setting up their laboratory and making better equipment. By now, they were starting to create poultices, potions and poisons alongside the usual grenades and explosives. They had shared some of that stuff with us, and I had to give it to them. When it came to bottling mayhem, they were far beyond anything I could do.


    However, regardless of the reasons, our return to the Foothold was met with mixed results, very mixed results. It turned out that the dungeon could apparently only be attempted every two months, maybe every month, we didn¡¯t have all that accurate information on that, but it changed. After our initial foray into it, when we were met with the strange snake guts and their alien technology, we expected something similar on our second run, only to be met with something completely different. Up top, we were met with a completely bald child, simply telling us that we should turn back but not engaging us in any other way, so we let the kid be given that there seemed to be no danger and the boy was a measly level ten, nothing to be concerned about. Additionally, given that we had met those soldiers before but failed to rescue them, I was a little curious about how human this boy was beneath the surface and was planning to investigate deeper into it once we were done here.


    So, we ventured deeper into the facility, this time without any initial resistance, until we were attacked from ambush, one we hadn¡¯t seen coming. Now, instead of being met with humanoid soldiers, we were met with fairly large insects that might come straight out of some sci-fi novel or film, some off-brand Zerg or maybe a close relative of the Aliens from the movie carrying their name. Some six feet tall, stocky, with sharp, scythe-like claws and, maybe most important and annoyingly, the ability to turn invisible and move through walls. Because, if there was one thing any respectable alien ambush predator must be able to do, it was get at people even if they were careful.


    On the bright side, while their ability to ambush and strike from the shadows was incredibly dangerous, it was their only truly dangerous ability. Sure, it allowed them to avoid physical attacks with ease, unless the attack was made with an enchanted weapon, making them similar to the Shadow Hounds we had faced before, but that was all there was to them. As it turned out, being able to turn incorporeal didn¡¯t do a whole lot when faced with an opponent who was able to perceive their Minds and Souls, allowing me to wreak havoc on them even if they were able to protect their bodies.


    And wreak havoc, I did. With ease and slightly malicious glee, I continued to turn their minds to mush, slaying them by the dozen as their individual minds were incredibly weak. Most likely, from the way they collectively reared back when I singled one of them out to destroy, their minds were all connected in a hive-mind, giving them collectively somewhat impressive abilities but those didn¡¯t help when I went after a singular one, they couldn¡¯t stop me.


    Thus, one Re¡¯etu, as the system told us they were called, after the other fell, slowly but surely donating their lives to the Morgana-Family EXP-Fund and when we arrived at the bottom of the facility, where we were met once again with a special kind of enemy standing in front of a glowing portal, I managed to massacre my way up to level hundred-nine with just a little bit to go until I reached the big one-ten.


    That little bit came courtesy of the big alien, and compared to the rest of the facility, that one was a doozy. Physically, it wasn¡¯t all that different from the other aliens we had encountered on the way down, but mentally, the difference was night and day. The other aliens were candles, while their boss was a wildfire.Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road.


    With the previously used way to deal with them, namely brutal mental assault, largely neutered as the alien was strong enough to withstand repeated blows while showing only minor signs of inconvenience, things devolved into a frenzied melee, where claws, blades and scythe-arms clashed. I tried to use other forms of magic, especially my Death Magic was something I put some hope in, but I quickly realised that supporting my allies, especially Lia and Silva with Blood Magic so they were faster and stronger was the better option. Otherwise, the alien might have been able to overcome and kill them before I managed to burn through its prodigious vitality with my Death Magic.


    Luckily, their phasing effect turned out to be an all-or-nothing effect, meaning they either phased everything or nothing, allowing us to work together so we could get swift counters in while the thing tried to kill one of us. It was brutal, painful and utterly exhausting but by the end of our battle, the thing was lying dead and we were alive. Wounded but alive. And I reached level hundred-ten off it. So, maybe it wasn¡¯t all that bad.


    Once we had completed a quick check of the remaining area to the best of our ability, which didn¡¯t say much given that we were dealing with alien bugs capable of phasing through solid matter and turning invisible, we dealt with the various wounds we had and generally relaxed a little. The fight had been incredibly stressful, partially because we had dealt with the other insects using Mind Magic. This meant we all had little exposure to their tactics and physical capabilities, leading to a few far-too-close calls.


    Luckily, things had worked out and now it was time for me to check my notifications, especially those regarding the level-up.


    With level hundred-ten came the usual attribute points and with them came new traits for reaching attribute milestones, namely, one hundred-fifteen points in Intelligence, seventy-five points in Intuition and, once I put the two free attribute points I gained every five levels into Intuition, I reached eighty Intuition, giving me yet another trait.


    The Intelligence trait was a little boring. It was just another iteration of the Astral Potency trait, adding yet another multiplier to the strength of my magic. At that thought, I had to grin to myself, realising that I had become a little spoiled. Once upon a time, I would have seen the trait as an incredible gift, allowing me to push everything I could do with my magic up another notch. Now, I could only shrug at it, somewhat inured by the things I had accomplished.


    Similarly, the trait I gained for eighty Intuition was a little boring, too. Mundane Perception did exactly what it said on the tin, improving my natural senses, though given that I was a Firn Elf, that should also improve my dark vision. It''s not too bad and most certainly useful, but sadly, nothing truly interesting.


    The trait gained for seventy-five Intuition, on the other hand, was a fascinating one. What Filtered Perception lacked in its somewhat boring name, it made up for in the sheer utility it provided, allowing me to filter out strong sensations so I could focus on the rest. So, even while standing next to a jet engine, I should be able to filter out its noise and be able to hear the ticking of a nearby clock or something along those lines. When staring at some powerful source of magic, I would now be able to ignore the powerful source and find out if there was another one nearby.


    Additionally, if I wasn¡¯t mistaken, that wasn¡¯t all the trait should be able to do. After all, pain was just another sensation, so if I read the trait correctly, I should be able to filter out my pain and possibly improve another sense at the same time, though that would need some testing I wasn¡¯t looking forward to.


    While I was looking at my traits, the others checked the bodies we had created, only to come away with stuff only Alex and Lia would want to use in their Alchemy: insect eyes, some strange glands and things like that, nothing I wanted to actively touch.


    Regardless of the lack of loot from our enemies, we explored the rest of the dungeon, hoping for some fancy metals as we had found on our first trip, only to come up disappointed. Maybe those had been a first-time bonus or something like that. Either way, we only found a few golden coins of indeterminate origin, which was nothing we could actively make use of. Still, it had been worth our time, if only for the large amount of EXP we gained.

 Chapter 1088

    For once, Lia and I weren¡¯t trying to accomplish anything of our own. Instead, the two of us were out and about, keeping an eye on our respective students as they were trying to raid one of the higher-levelled areas we had previously explored but decided to ignore. In a way, it was supposed to be an exam, allowing Lia and myself to judge their progress and possibly add something to the lessons we were planning on teaching them this next few weeks, as we were waiting for the rest of the snow to thaw, plus maybe a week or two extra, so we wouldn¡¯t have to travel through the muck and mud left after the thawing. The details would have to be worked out once we had some more information and a slightly better prediction regarding the weather.


    ¡°They are doing quite well,¡± I admitted, watching as Daniel rapidly prepared sturdy cover for his companions, forcing the enemies attacking them into a narrow space where they could be dealt with easily. Instead of having to fear being overrun, the fivesome only had to face a few enemies at a time, enemies who, more often than not, were pushing into that narrow gap and hindering one another instead of fighting to the best of their ability.


    Sure, the enemies they were currently facing were only simple undead but their numbers were large enough to threaten unprepared foes, simply because few people could destroy them fast enough to stop them from swarming their group. In fact, if Daniel had only conjured a simple wall, the Undead might have been capable of bypassing that wall and swarming them regardless of it but Daniel had added a few spikes and overhangs to the wall while actively controlling his construct to keep the Unead from climbing it, either by manifesting additional spikes and pushing the climbing Unead off or by removing their handholds, so they would fall that way.


    ¡°That they are,¡± Lia nodded, a grin splitting her face while Samantha was lobbing something into the teeming mass of Undead. When the grinning Lia hid her face while the object was still in flight, I copied her, fairly confident that I wouldn¡¯t want to get caught by whatever the object might be. I knew enough about the shenanigans perpetrated by Lia, Alex and Sam to know they just loved their explosions, though when I felt the warmth wash over me despite our distance from the fighting, I felt a little surprised regardless of my prior knowledge. For a grenade to make us feel warm over two-hundred metres away, without being fatal to the people fighting right next to it was fairly impressive, especially given that there had been no explosion involved.


    Instead, as I could now see, the object had been some sort of incendiary device, spreading some burning goop similar to a few things I had seen Lia use in the past all across the Undead, causing more than a few of them to writhe in apparent agony. Quite impressive given that, to the best of my knowledge, these Undead couldn¡¯t feel pain and yet, Sam¡¯s grenade managed to do exactly that. Or it worked on some other principle beyond mere combustion, and that other principle was utterly devastating to these Undead. A combination of factors was also possible, or something I hadn¡¯t even heard of, quite likely given my lack of education in Alchemy.


    ¡°Their three meat shields will feel just a tad useless, I guess,¡± I shook my head, wondering just how dangerous Lia actually was once she was prepared. Sure, when it came to stealth, I still had the edge, but thanks to the lessons I had given Maggy and Lia, the advantage was fairly slim. And once stealth was combined with stupidly dangerous bombs like the one Samantha had just used, the danger went up dramatically, especially as I wasn¡¯t certain how easy it would be to detect the devices used by the three Alchemists. The magic within them was fairly well concealed, with little betraying their devastating nature.


    ¡°They¡¯ll have to deal with it,¡± Lia shrugged before continuing, ¡°And honestly, we might want to offer them a bit of extra oomph, if you know what I mean.¡±


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    ¡°What do you have in mind?¡± I asked after thinking about it for a bit while watching as the three fighters in their group made short work of the remaining Undead, with very limited support from our students who were preparing something else.


    ¡°Well, your Blood Magic can change somebody''s physical characteristics fairly easily, while Samantha and I have stumbled across a few alchemical substances to boost a person¡¯s body beyond their current limits. If we combine the two methods, we should be able to create some lasting effects, something along the lines of a full-body boosting enchantment, at least if I understand what you have told me about Blood Magic and enchanting correctly,¡± Lia explained, stunning me for a moment. The idea was something similar to experiments I had done on Mundus, most of which had been met with some failure. Trying to recreate those experiments here, especially if they were made even more complicated by the addition of alchemical ingredients, was a fascinating idea, though one I could see go wrong fairly quickly.


    After a few minutes, I explained to Lia what had happened on Mundus and what failure I had encountered. Meanwhile, the group of five was fighting one of the curious roaming bosses in this area. This one was a strange amalgamation of bodies shaped into a massive, vaguely humanoid creature of flesh, bone and decay.


    The thing was too massive for any of the fighters to block it directly; they¡¯d be simply overrun, but it turned out, Daniel had paid close attention to a few of my lessons regarding redirecting force and made good use of that. Instead of trying to block the thing head-on, he used cleverly placed obstacles, most of which were fairly small, to trip and hinder the thing, keeping it from applying the insane amounts of strength it had. Once the thing was off-balance, the three fighters could chop into it, or Sam could launch one of her grenades, though I soon realised that the grenades weren¡¯t just things she could prepare back home and take as many into battle as she could carry, there was some sort of priming process going on, requiring her to spend some personal power when readying them.


    ¡°We¡¯d have to do a few tests, right?¡± Lia reasoned and I glanced over to her, realising just how important that seemed to be to her. She wanted these five to have the best chances they could have, not just to live but to thrive in this new world. Most likely, that desire stemmed from Lia¡¯s burgeoning romance and relationship with Samantha, which was something I wasn¡¯t quite sure how to feel about.


    On the one hand, I knew just how important Sigmir was to me, so I was happy that my daughter had found someone she cared for, on the other hand, I knew how important Sigmir was to me, so I couldn¡¯t help but realise that my daughter would go to similar lengths to stay with Samantha. By now, I was fairly certain Lia wouldn¡¯t continue onwards when Luna and I left, not unless something happened between Samantha and her in the meantime. And even if something happened, Lia was my daughter, and a lot of her core values were directly imparted by the magic I had used to make her from the flesh of her Shattered soul. Thus, her reactions would likely be somewhat similar to those I would have if put into her situation.


    ¡°You know that we can¡¯t test that on normal animals, right?¡± I asked, already knowing that Lia would know but wanting her to admit it.


    ¡°We¡¯d need some humans, yes. But why don¡¯t we visit the idiots¡¯ lair, offer a few of them power and watch how many take the offer?¡± she asked, using the name I had given one of the local communities, mostly because the organisation there was incredibly haphazard, to the point that I was honestly surprised they hadn¡¯t starved yet. Unless I missed my guess, that was down to dumb luck and multiple large warehouses filled with non-perishable food they had found early on but I wasn¡¯t all that certain. Still, their luck would soon run out, just as the few supplies they had left would.


    ¡°You know, that has some potential,¡± I admitted, already considering how to word such an offer and where to perform the experiments. As I did that, we were treated to a quite impressive show, as Jack and Daniel performed a slightly insane combination attack, where Daniel used his Earth Magic to catapult Jack upwards, allowing him to take an incredible leap and deliver a crushing strike to their massive foe, managing to sever the spine and, somehow, disrupt the necrotic energy animating the amalgamation of flesh and bone, ending its existence.


    ¡°Truly, they have some potential,¡± I muttered, now mostly speaking to myself and wondering just how far we could push that potential. It might just be utterly glorious.

 Chapter 1089

    ¡°Now, Mother, to summarise your explanation, the problem with placing these Blood Rune enchantments on others is that they essentially run out of control, draining the bearer of Astral Power until they have nothing more to give and at that point, they drain away their vitality to power it a little longer, any glaring mistakes in that?¡± Lia asked, opening the discussion between Luna, herself and me, trying to come up with a way to empower normal people who wished to travel down the martial path.


    ¡°No, that¡¯s the long and short of it. When I place such runes on myself, I can control the amount of power they use up and, in turn, how much they amplify my physical capabilities. But even then, I never dared to use permanent runes of that sort on my body, simply because I couldn¡¯t be certain it would work. If it didn¡¯t, the runes would have crippled or killed me, not something I wanted to risk if I¡¯m honest,¡± I replied, thinking back to the tricks I had picked up on Mundus.


    ¡°There might be a solution to a part of the problem,¡± Lia told me, looking quite proud of herself, ¡°You know that part of my vampiric characteristics is that I need a lot less Astral Power for techniques internal to my body, and even when casting normally, I¡¯m more efficient,¡± she began her explanation, getting nods from Luna and me, we had discussed that before, though never in a whole lot of detail. It was the primary reason why she could sustain herself with just a bit of blood from me, her incredibly efficient way of casting spells, though the drawback was that Lia couldn¡¯t regenerate Astral Power the usual way.


    ¡°I¡¯ve been studying that effect, trying to understand how it works, especially the part where the Astral Power within me is barely used up, almost acting as a catalyst for a different kind of power. If we could figure that out and make use of it, especially if we manage to eliminate the drawback, or maybe replace it with a different one, it could work to power the enchantment, right?¡± she asked, making me stare at her for a moment, it was an idea so far out, I hadn¡¯t seen it coming.


    ¡°Many ¡®ifs¡¯ there, you know,¡± I told her, a grin replacing my briefly gaping mouth. ¡°But even if that would work, how could they control the input? Or would you want them to have it permanently active, if so, I have a feeling it would be a bit of a pain, quite literally in some cases. The Blood Magic enchantments are detrimental to the muscles, they push them beyond their usual capacity by design, allowing the bearer to perform feats usually impossible for them but if they are running the entire time, the muscles would get torn to shreds in short order,¡± I sadly had to throw another wrench in her idea, but Lia got support from an unexpected source.


    ¡°There might be a way around that, I¡¯m pretty sure there are ways to limit these enchantments, even if the bearer doesn¡¯t know Blood Magic. They might have to accept a minor role within Lady Hecate¡¯s church, but there are ways to turn the enchantments on and off,¡± Luna threw in, making me raise an eyebrow at the implications there.


    ¡°So we wouldn¡¯t need to use Lia¡¯s idea to increase efficiency?¡± I asked, curious if Luna¡¯s way would work that well.


    ¡°No, I¡¯m fairly certain on somebody without a decent ability with Blood Runes, the drain on their Astral Power would be prohibitive, especially if the runes are on somebody focusing on the martial path. They aren¡¯t known for their high investment in Intelligence and Intuition, you know?¡± she returned my earlier grin, making me nod in agreement. It was true, thanks to my various traits and incredibly high Intelligence, I could use fairly insane amounts of Astral Power, especially once I activated Overflow. Other people would run dry far before I would even notice the drain which might put a few things into perspective.


    ¡°But if we combine the work I put into the idea to seal the Astral Power of somebody within them, making it impossible for them to use any external magic but in turn making their magic about as efficient as the one used by a Vampire with the runes and Luna¡¯s divine work-around, we would likely get what we are interested in?¡± Lia asked, her earlier enthusiasm returning with a vengeance.This novel is published on a different platform. Support the original author by finding the official source.


    ¡°Well, it at least sounds somewhat plausible. We¡¯ve tried experiments with worse chances of success,¡± I admitted, already considering how the runes might have to be altered to make them more efficient while interfacing with whatever Lia and Luna had in mind.


    ¡°Do you want to add some sort of effect to prevent them from attacking you, or maybe from attacking Vampires in general, possibly adding something to keep them from going after Shrines of Lady Hecate?¡± I asked, knowing that the kind of magic we were talking about would allow for some fairly nasty contingencies, though I wasn¡¯t sure how we might tie such contingencies into an active effect. But I was fairly certain it was possible.


    The look on Lia¡¯s face was a conflicted one. Not terribly surprising, as she shared some of my vigilance, what some might call paranoia, but at the same time, she wanted to trust those she blessed this way. Before she could come to a decision, Luna spoke up and added some wisdom of her own.


    ¡°I don¡¯t believe it would be necessary. The mechanism you, Lia, had in mind would use your blood to create the runes, at least in part, wouldn¡¯t it?¡± she asked, making me wonder where she got the idea. Maybe Luna had learned more about alchemy than I had managed, which was not a huge surprise given just how confusing I found the subject. Its nature was almost contradictory to the Rune Magic I practised, though somewhat compatible with the direct manipulation of magical forces.


    ¡°Well, yeah, there are a few catalysts that should change the way Astral Power moves within the blood and spread it onto the host body, at least if a few of my ideas pan out,¡± Lia agreed and for a few minutes, Luna and Lia continued to discuss the specifics of this mixture of ink and blood, how it might be possible to create it and how it could function. It was largely theoretical, though I was fairly certain Lia had already performed some of the experiments, though obviously not all of them.


    Finally, the pair wound down their discussion about Alchemy, dousing the slowly rising flames of envy I felt. Being ignorant about an arcane discipline didn¡¯t sit easily with me, even if the discipline was less magical and more in the realm of cooking with pretensions of grandeur.


    ¡°What sort of experiments do you think are needed?¡± I asked, ¡°I mean, once you have that blood-based ink, I¡¯d guess you¡¯d want to test the enchantments on creatures we wouldn¡¯t miss too much before moving on to people we wouldn¡¯t miss and only once that worked out reasonably well you¡¯d offer the procedure to Jack, Murray and Jonas, right?¡±


    ¡°We might want to ask Silva; she managed to beat a few of the local dogs and wolves into shape; those might work as secondary test subjects after we tried it on something lesser, a few cats or something like that,¡± Luna suggested, getting a thoughtful nod in response. Sadly, we wouldn¡¯t be able to use Shattered or Undead; their fundamental nature was too different from that of humans, meaning we needed living beings.


    ¡°That has potential. I¡¯ll also look over the various Runes I currently know and try to design a suitable enchantment, something to give the wearer Strength, Speed and Regeneration, if at all possible. That way, the bearer gets a boost in power and longevity, though I don¡¯t think durability would be easy to accomplish. I¡¯ll have to see, especially as I don¡¯t think I could add any Runes that aren¡¯t Blood Runes into the mix, doing so would likely destabilise the entire thing, leaving the bearer with what amounts to a serious Blood Curse,¡± I let a few of my thoughts flow out, not really caring that I was speaking mostly to myself. Sometimes, doing so helped, especially with a few of the more complex concepts, putting them into spoken words allowed me to simplify my racing thoughts.


    At the same time, I realised that these runes and the work I was currently doing might also work for a different purpose if I combined them with Darkness Magic, especially the Curse-concept. Nodding to myself, I conjured up a pair of stone tablets so I could start writing things down. This might give me access to a few new tricks, things I could place upon my enemy and watch as their own magic tore them asunder, somewhat similar to the Curse placed upon Sigmir all the way back when we met. Hopefully not as slow, certainly not targeting EXP and levels, but just as debilitating and deadly, unless the target managed to find a master of the arcane to dispel it.


    And the best part of such a curse? All I¡¯d need is a single drop of blood.

 Chapter 1090

    Looking at the crimson substance Lia had delivered to me, I couldn¡¯t help but be impressed. I could easily sense the power held within the liquid, similar to the way I had started to sense places where Divine Power was concentrated, places where dungeons might form and even areas where the air was saturated with Astral Power and could easily turn into Wild Magic but classifying and understanding said power was a difficult, if not impossible challenge.


    Either due to knowing what it was supposed to be, by simple colour association or thanks to my fairly acute senses I could feel a connection to Blood Magic but that was about everything I could tell without interacting with the substance. Out of curiosity, I tried to use Identify and got a notification telling me it was called Crimson Ink and, for once, there even was a description, adding the information that it was a Blood Magic Reagent. Which, in and of itself, was curious, the system didn¡¯t add information like that all that often, making me wonder if it was because I could use the Blood Magic skill at a high enough level to make full use of the Ink, thus getting the information without too much trouble. Or the information might be visible because Lia had made the stuff and I was her Mother, possibly giving me the information my daughter would usually share. Or there might be a dozen other reasons. For all the time I spent traversing the Arcane Path, the system remained an utter mystery to me, arcane in a very different sense than the usual one.


    However, with nothing but the words ¡®Blood Magic Reagent¡¯ I couldn¡¯t do all that much. I needed to know more, so experiments were needed. Those, in turn, needed test subjects and given that I was far from knowing what might happen to those subjects, humans were too precious a resource to use, as were canines due to Silva¡¯s continued presence.


    However, there were a lot of squirrels in the forest around us, most of them lethargic and slow thanks to the reduced food they could get in the winter. That, in turn, allowed me to scoop up a few with relative ease, though that was ease for me, not for them. The moment they came out of the Mind Magically enforced stupor, they frantically tried to escape, only to realise that the cage they were in was wrought from stone and crystal, strong enough to contain creatures multiple times their strength. They were, at the end of the day, only between levels two and ten, with the vast majority sitting below level five.


    A part of me wondered if I should look for stronger, sturdier creatures, just to make it easier on myself. With these, if I pushed the Blood Magic just a fraction too far, it wouldn¡¯t matter how good the Crimson Ink was in making it more efficient, the power would be enough to tear these fragile creatures apart. Hel, even something as simple as Regernation could become something along the lines of super-cancer, while the simplest Blood Magic approach to healing, namely increasing the ability of their blood to clot and thus seal wounds, would become an instant heart-attack or stroke, or an infarct wherever the blood decided to clot and block circulation.


    Alas, sturdier creatures were harder to find and, maybe more importantly, something that often ended up on our dinner table, so if I took a few too many, we might go hungry. Not something I fancied, meaning I would have to be cautious instead.


    Whistling to myself, I started the first, somewhat amusing task I had to accomplish in order to experiment on the squirrels. Namely, I had to shave them, otherwise drawing Blood Runes on them, or carving them into their flesh, would be quite difficult. I didn¡¯t even try to do so while they were conscious, instead knocking them out one at a time and getting rid of the fur. Once that was done, I picked one at random and carefully painted a pair of simple runes on the naked skin, using a mix of the squirrel¡¯s blood and the Crimson Ink.


    When that didn¡¯t yield the results I wanted, I continued to try different methods and even runes, going away from the simple runes to Strengthen the squirrel and working on means to improve it without damaging the thing.Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.


    Soon, I decided to call in Luna for help, hoping that her Life Magic would allow a few of the squirrels to live through the procedures I was putting them through and not end up as broken bodies. However, even if I didn¡¯t manage to figure out how to do these particular Blood Runes, I was getting a few interesting ideas in regard to curses. Not necessarily efficient or practical ideas but interesting ideas nonetheless. If only I could figure out why a particular rune cluster, placed in that spot managed to turn the squirrel¡¯s internal organs into a bloody pulp I might be able to replicate it in a useful fashion, by making it applicable to humans and usable from a distance. That way, if I ever wanted somebody to die in what looked like horrifying pain, I would have a good method to accomplish it. Curiously, it seemed that the brain, for whatever reason, had been unaffected, only the organs in the squirrel¡¯s rump, likely due to the runes¡¯ placement.


    Sadly, despite the numerous fascinating ways of killing squirrels, I discovered, fairly little progress was made in regard to the efficiency of the Crimson Ink. Sure, I could tell that it contained and regulated the effects of Blood Runes but not by what amount, meaning I would have to do some testing on sturdier animals, even Luna¡¯s help didn¡¯t change that. Maybe it was a problem with the runes themself or maybe I lacked the precision to tune them low enough so they wouldn¡¯t tear a squirrel below level ten apart in seconds, either way, they didn¡¯t work as intended.


    Finding bigger test subjects was a bit of a pain. Sure, getting a cat or two was simple, as was catching a few foxes and similarly sized critters but their levels and different physiques made comparative testing fairly difficult. But maybe that was for the best, I wanted my solutions to work on as many beings as possible, so testing them on a wide variety of beings was necessary.


    After shaving another batch of critters, I had Luna assist me from the start, just so I could get a successful experiment and work from there, hopefully reducing the need for her healing as I went.


    Again, runes were drawn on skin or carved into flesh and once they were prepared, a bit of Crimson Ink was added before magic was infused into the mix. The results, again, varied but by keeping control of the initial amount of magic infused into the runes, I started to get controllable results.


    At that point, I realised there was another problem.


    While I managed to carve runes into one of the felines and not have the creature die a fairly violent death immediately, partially thanks to Luna¡¯s Life Magic, I wasn¡¯t certain how to test just how effective the result was. Sure, I had a fairly good idea of how agile and strong the cat had been beforehand, but that didn¡¯t tell me if the cat could influence how much of its power fueled the runes, now that the initial power I had invested to jumpstart them had run its course.


    For a simple test, I isolated the runed feline in a box of its own, setting a few targets into the enclosure before pushing and prodding with my Mind Magic, trying to trigger a violent frenzy. It wasn¡¯t something I had experimented a lot with but at the end of the day, the cat was already frantic after getting captured, having its fur shaved before enduring a, most likely, incredibly painful procedure, so there might have been little need to magically trigger the frenzy, it might have been enough to let the cat be a cat. Though that might have involved more pushing fragile off ledges than going insane and attacking everything in sight.


    Whatever the cause for the frenzy, things worked out beautifully when the cat started to tear around the enclosure I had put it in, the newly added runes dimly glowing with ethereal light while a measurable increase in the cat¡¯s power and speed quickly became apparent.


    With that increase, the downside soon became apparent, too. At least Luna and I could already detect the problem and I had little doubt that Lia would realise soon, too. While the current rune cluster on the feline increased its Strength and Agility, it did nothing to make sure the body could keep up with it. Without the constant influx of Luna¡¯s power, the cat would have already died, though I had a feeling it could have caused some serious damage, a feeling soon confirmed when I noticed the gouges it had somehow carved into the rock. Sure, it had lost its claws in the process, but there were lines in the stone. Quite impressive, and, despite the cat¡¯s demise soon after the frenzy started, a step in the right direction. Only many more to go before we can start enhancing humans.

 Chapter 1091

    There was something slightly surreal about realising just how much one¡¯s actions managed to influence the local creatures. It was one thing to notice they reacted to the tower and the Oculus to a lesser degree, but it was an entirely different beast to realise how their population shifted and moved because of our test-subject acquisition. We had managed to capture so many of the local critters, especially the cats, that the Undead and Shattered deeper in the city moved into the freshly vacated area, now that no beasts were willing to give them some trouble.


    The ecological balance, if one could still call it that, now that it wasn¡¯t just about finding food and avoiding being turned into food, was an incredibly curious thing. A part of me wanted to put some time into studying the effect, especially the part where it seemed as if creatures deliberately congregated in areas with others of similar levels, rarely venturing far out of them. It didn¡¯t make all that much sense to me. Why wouldn¡¯t a stronger creature move into the area of somewhat weaker creatures and slaughter them to gather EXP? Instead, the creatures generally fought others at roughly the same level, or even a higher level, despite the increased risk of injury and death, completely contrary to anything I knew about animal behaviour.


    No lion, at least pre-change, would have decided to go after an uninjured elephant or buffalo unless the lion was forced to by desperation. Instead, they would go after the easy calories, taking what food put up the least resistance, to the point that they would rather give up their kill to other predators instead of risking death or injury leading to death later by fighting back.


    Now, after the change, a fairly wide variety of creatures was very willing to risk injury in order to fight an opponent at roughly the same level, at times fighting with an almost suicidal fervour, making me wonder just how much of that came from the system and, once again, how deeply the system influenced the decisions beings made. It was obvious that it could influence anyone at every conceivable level, so there was nothing stopping the system from doing anything it wanted to anyone under its influence. But how much influence it exerted? That was a question I couldn¡¯t answer yet, maybe one that couldn¡¯t be answered at all.


    However, while these changes to the local ecosystem were somewhat detrimental, the benefits of testing the Blood Runes and the permanent enchantments we could place on creatures with them worked quite well. We had yet to perfect the technique but, by now, we believed that it was as good as it would get without willing and intelligent test subjects. By now, we were able to reliably carve the runes into flesh without losing the test subject and when properly motivated, the various test subjects all managed to perform beyond their previous capacity. I even added a moderate regeneration factor to the enchantment, allowing them to heal from the strain the runes put their body under and also from perfectly ordinary wounds. Whether the system recognised these runes and would assign special abilities or traits for them, we couldn¡¯t yet tell but we had a bit of hope that it would work.


    Another thing we added, though that was primarily to the Crimson Ink, was a bit of blood from Luna, myself and Lia, all of it treated by Luna in an attempt to make the subject who later received the enchantment more vulnerable to Mind Magic from any of us three. Whether it would be needed, we didn¡¯t know but if things got problematic, it would be a nice fail-safe. It also helped with the tests, allowing me to push and prod our test subjects into specific actions in order to better test the enchantment, though the problem of getting feedback from them remained. There was only so much you could tell without some serious in-depth dissection, which we could only perform within the limit of our tools, specifically my Blood Magic.


    Thus, the next step in our procedure was to work with Silva and get a few of the local canines to buy in and get their bodies enhanced. There was a bit of irony there, we happily discussed the details of the procedure, as well as the fact that it was experimental and somewhat risky, with the canines but when it came to later human testing, we didn¡¯t have plans to disclose the procedure, just to tell them it would give them additional power. Unauthorized usage: this narrative is on Amazon without the author''s consent. Report any sightings.


    As for our canine test subjects, the biggest ask, so to speak, was actually the requirement to shave their fur. They didn¡¯t like that in the least, though a big part of that was most likely due to it being winter and bitterly cold outside. With a bit of negotiation performed by Silva, we managed to get their agreement in return for shelter and some magical assistance while their fur grew back. A part of me wondered if Silva had tried to negotiate these terms all that hard, I had a feeling our canine companion was angling to have the local dogs make the shrine their den, adding to the magical protection already in place with some physical protection. It helped that dogs were considered sacred animals of Hecate, to the point that I noticed they received a faint empowering effect coming from the shrine, almost like my own blessing.


    Due to that, I decided to send a prayer Lady Hecate¡¯s way, just to make sure we didn¡¯t step on any toes by experimenting on Her sacred animals within the confines of Her shrine, especially when not completely certain the procedure would work. Getting struck by a divine curse would suck, especially for Luna, though I had a feeling that the loss of Her blessing wouldn¡¯t be a walk in the park for me either. To say nothing of the question of whether I would continue to receive EXP for teaching magic if Lady Hecate cursed me, leaving me without one of my primary sources of EXP and the best long-term source I had discovered so far. So, consent was required, not only from the dogs but also from their boss-lady.


    Luckily, Lady Hecate was quite alright with the procedure, one might call Her demeanour even eager. It made me wonder if this was another first, though I doubted it. Enhancing the guardians of a shrine made sense, enhancing people in general did, and Blood Magic was a fairly obvious way to do so. It was one of the major disciplines governing the physical body, after all, and was capable of influencing essentially every part of the body that had blood flowing through it. Even bones could be influenced, though the efficiency was lowered, simply because bone marrow generated blood, providing the necessary conceptual link. Still, I had a feeling that the Lady would be watching, hopefully, things would work out as planned.


    With the dogs, we largely followed the same procedure we had used for the cats, just with a lot more caution involved. We only had three volunteers, unsurprisingly the weakest of the pack, the dogs who hadn¡¯t managed to develop their strange, primal pack magic or had the physiques to act as powerful physical fighters. To them, this procedure was a way to give the pack something back, which was a powerful motivation for these creatures, especially as they realised regardless of success or failure, the pack would be better off, thanks to the negotiations with Silva.


    After we finished with the first dog, the results were just as expected, maybe even a little better. According to Silva, who acted as interpreter, the dog had gained a new special ability similar to my Overload, allowing it to greatly increase its physical attributes by burning up Astral Power and two new traits. One increased its health regeneration, though at the cost of some of its Astral Power regeneration, while the other was somewhat curious. It greatly decreased all of its Astral Power costs by eighty per cent, effectively quintupling the amount of Astral Power the dog could use but the downside was that the dog couldn¡¯t manifest Astral Power outward of itself.


    Urged on by Luna and Silva, the dog tested if that included prayer or if that didn¡¯t count and after a quick test, it turned out that the dog could pray, at least if the prayer was directed to Lady Hecate and performed in Her shrine. Given Luna¡¯s wide grin at that, I had a feeling it wasn¡¯t a coincidence but a deliberate feature, making me chuckle in amusement, proud that my daughter had managed to put that part into this project. Now, we just had to repeat the experiment with the other two dogs, maybe see if we could push things a little further, and then, it would be off to see if we could find a few useful idiots. Or test subjects, not that there was all that much of a difference.

 Chapter 1092

    Somehow, we were met with only very mild suspicion when we offered the people in idiot-village, as we had come to call the community of lucky fools who had been hanging on despite their, objectively, horrible decisions, complete lack of planning and general incompetence. It was as if these people had some sort of divine blessing of luck, but only applicable in such a way that it ensured their survival without adding anything to their quality of life. Thus, they were living in a state of squalor, their shelters barely livable and giving the impression that a stiff gust of wind could spell disaster for them, to say nothing of their food storage. That, too, was kept in a poorly enclosed space, though that might have been partially on purpose, as I had a feeling they were using the various scavengers caught in the traps set around their storage to supplement their supplies.


    And yet, despite these horrible conditions they were in, they managed to hang on, without even contemplating leaving and trying to join one of the other groups. Instead, they just continued onwards, like some stubborn fraternity who kept failing their exams but, somehow, managed to pay the bills on time every week, thanks to some ill-timed lottery win or something along those lines. It felt like this place shouldn¡¯t be possible and yet, here it was, defying my considerations about reality. A part of me wanted to test these people to see if there was some sort of divine magic in play, keeping their conditions as they were, or if one of them was suffering from some sort of cursed blessing or something like that. The results were incredibly interesting, though during the few times I had been in the area, I had been unable to find anything that indicated a supernatural cause unless one wanted to count supernatural amounts of stubbornness.


    Regardless of the reasons for the odd conditions these people were living in and their weird behaviour, it came as a benefit to me. They accepted my offer quite readily, without asking too many questions and what few questions they asked were fairly pointless. Who cared how the enchantment would look like on their bodies, it would primarily be placed on their torso, shoulders and thighs, all areas that clothes could easily cover, it wasn¡¯t as if I was planning to carve runes into their faces.


    Similarly, did it truly matter if the procedure would hurt when I offered them an opportunity to multiply their individual strength and power, thus greatly increasing their continued chances of survival? Maybe they believed that their state of continuously just hanging on would last forever, though I couldn¡¯t fathom why they didn¡¯t try to improve their state, it was utter madness. A useful case of insanity in this particular instance but insanity nonetheless. After a moment of consideration, I decided to add a note to check if I could detect some mental abnormalities, maybe try to use some Mind Magic and look if something stood out, alongside a complete scan with Blood Magic, just in case the situation was somewhat analogous to that of the Withered, where a strange magical fungus had taken over Undead, Shattered and even normal animals alike, turning them into fungoid husks of their former selves.


    Soon after we gave the initial offer to empower one of them, we were ready to proceed. The guy in question, a roughly thirty-year-old, fairly fit male named Joshua, sat at level twenty-five and was, quite frankly, utterly unremarkable. Average in too many ways to count, to the point that I doubted I would have been able to pick him out of a line-up, simply because he was so ordinary. The most interesting thing about him was his receding hairline, but other than that, there was nothing I could see as a truly unique feature.


    Hopefully, that unremarkable status would change with the enchantment, giving him something special, even if that might only be a special demise, teaching us something new about magic.


    The tests, performed by Luna and myself, were quite thorough, trying to see if there was anything special about Joshua as an individual or as part of the idiot village. The more we looked and searched, the more our disappointment grew. His elemental affinities were moderately low, with Earth being the strongest of them all at a level that meant he would need years of dedicated practise and study to externalise the gift, while the others were even lower, to the point that I doubted any amount of practice would allow usage of these elements. His original attributes, as best as we could determine, sat pretty much at ten, with a few outliers at nine and eleven, respectively and when it came to traits, which we determined with a combination of Mind Magic, Observe, Inspect and a plain old interview were a small surprise.Support creative writers by reading their stories on Royal Road, not stolen versions.


    Namely, he actually possessed a trait called ¡®Average Joe¡¯, essentially pushing all his attributes and inherent abilities towards some mythical average, which might explain why the guy was so screwed. If the system used the average at the time of the change, he might have been cheated out of a few interesting things he could have received in those early days, when the Astral was still settling. Now, getting such a trait or ability would require a whole lot more work and exposure, though given our current plans, the trait might be an enormous boon to us. With nothing special about him, we didn¡¯t have to worry about something special interfering with our work. We would have to wait and see.


    A part of me wondered just how gullible and relaxed this guy truly was. I certainly wouldn¡¯t have gone into the forest with a group I knew little about other than the fact that they were far more powerful than me but he didn¡¯t seem to mind. Curious, I subtly tried to use my Mind Magic to get an idea of why he was so accommodating and what I found surprised me.


    While he truly wasn¡¯t the sharpest knife in the drawer, he also wasn¡¯t as dumb as I had thought; he had simply realised that there was little he could do if we wanted to do him an injury. He was aware of the fact that I had created Jademoon Tower, even if he had never been to it, meaning if we wanted to destroy their community, it would be trivial. I even stumbled across a few things that indicated that their community wasn¡¯t as homogenously idiotic as I had thought but I was still learning how to read minds and didn¡¯t get all that much on that particular topic.


    His self-control was tested quite a bit when we reached the ritual chamber I had prepared just for this, a simple, yet incredibly sturdy, building with little more than its four stone walls, the roof and a slab of stone in the middle, acting as a mix between altar and hospital bed. Certainly not comfortable but I was a little limited in that regard, unless I was working in snow and ice, which brought its own problems. Luna could make things cushy and comfortable but it required a lot of effort, which we hadn¡¯t put into this chamber.


    ¡°Now, please strip down to your underwear and get on the table,¡± I ordered him, noticing the deep, calming breath he took before obeying with a rapidly reddening face. I considered giving him a few words of comfort, telling him that he had nothing physical I was interested in but I decided against it. He didn¡¯t need the comfort, he merely needed to obey.


    ¡°As you were warned, if you move during the procedure, it could easily fail. We also can¡¯t use anaesthesia of any kind, part of the procedure involves giving you a regeneration factor, which uses your current physical state as its basis, so if we put you under, the regeneration would try to put you under, too, leaving you in what amounts to a comatose state. Thus, you will now be immobilised until the procedure is finished,¡± I explained and the table he was lying on suddenly extruded bands of solid stone while letting his body sink in a little as the table moulded itself to his form. His face remained uncovered, allowing him to breathe, but he wouldn¡¯t be able to do more than twitch a little.


    ¡°We will begin now,¡± I told him, before pulling out the tools Lia and I had prepared for this, the small knife, the subtly different versions of Crimson Ink and the exacting plans we had written down, just to make sure I didn¡¯t miss anything or made mistakes. This wasn¡¯t just another cat, nor was it one of our volunteer dogs, this was the first of our last series of tests, if it succeeded, we would have something truly remarkable, especially if the mental alterations and vulnerabilities we had added worked out.


    Taking a deep breath, I made the first incision, ignoring the pained whimper coming from Joshua. This would take a while.

 Chapter 1093

    The procedure used to put the enchantment on Joshua was incredibly exhausting for everyone involved. For Joshua, it meant lying down, completely immobilised and in terrible pain as I literally carved the runes into his flesh while he had to endure. For Luna, it meant keeping the person I was working on, or torturing as some might describe it, alive with her Life Magic, making sure that they didn¡¯t expire from pain or blood loss. Lia might have had it the easiest. All she needed to do was treat the runes I carved with the Crimson Ink, making sure that the Ink took and was incorporated into the body while Luna healed them up, making the newly established marks truly a part of the person. She also used her Blood Magic to keep the blood loss down as much as possible, making it easier on everyone involved.


    And lastly, there was my job. Carving the runes while making sure that they aligned with the biological and magical systems within Joshua¡¯s body; otherwise, things might get quite spicy or not work as intended; slowly nudging his Blood and Magic to connect to them so they would be powered and even giving his mind a few subtle pushes so he would be aware of the Runes and could power them, even if I doubted he¡¯d be able to understand, not for a long time if he ever managed. It also allowed me to add a few small hooks into his mind so the other alterations provided by the Crimson Ink would take hold, just in case we needed them.


    The procedure itself didn¡¯t last all that long, just about two hours, but by the end of it, I was completely exhausted, the mental strain quite severe, especially as I wanted this first procedure to work out so we could continue testing. Even in Idiot-Ville, there¡¯d be questions if we returned without our first test subject; at least I expected there would be. Sure, given their general mental state, they might accept if I told them that Joshua, if he succumbed to the experiment, had run off or something but I would prefer to have him with us as a successful example of the procedure.


    Given that Joshua was still breathing when I carved the last rune, and Lia applied the Crimson Ink, we would have that example. Now, the only question remaining was just how powerful the effect would be on him.


    Shaking off my curiosity, I gently tugged on the bindings securing him on the table, letting them unravel while stepping back. At the same time, Luna opened the door to the outside, allowing Silva in, just as a precaution if the pain had driven him insane, making him lash out, or if he decided that killing us to make sure he would be the only one having runes like this, giving him a unique advantage. While he was far weaker than us, I hadn¡¯t been entirely certain how much the procedure would take out of me in comparison to him, which is why Silva was present as a precaution. Not that it looked like we truly needed it. The way Joshua was groaning in pain as I told him we were done firmly indicated that the pain had ground him down worse than the intense focus had exhausted me.


    ¡°It looks like the regeneration already works,¡± Luna remarked, making me close my eyes for a moment before I forced the exhaustion away and employed my own magical senses, these born from my Blood Magic practice, and took a closer look myself.


    What I saw made me now my head, there were clear indications of ongoing reparation, negating the damage caused as he had tried to escape the bindings during the procedure, just as they were repairing some older damage. That part was quite curious, my understanding had been that the regeneration would take his current state as the optimal target to be regained, so pre-existing conditions should have been part of that, too. But apparently, the regeneration he had gained was all-encompassing, trying to restore him to some sort of ideal state. The realisation brought me up short, as it opened up a lot of somewhat theoretical questions, such as, ¡®What was the ideal state of a human?¡¯. Would regeneration like that turn me back into a human and take away what made me a Firn-Elf? Or what about something more mundane, like tanned skin? Not dark due to genetics but darkened due to personal exposure to the Sun and its radiation? Would it be considered a detriment, as it technically was an ailment, increasing the chance of skin cancer, or at least it had before the world changed, or would it be seen as a benefit, given that tanned skin was widely considered an attractive feature? At least in mainstream culture, different standards were applied at different times and cultures.This book''s true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.


    There were so many fascinating questions, but sadly, I doubted I¡¯d get any satisfying answers.


    ¡°Can you stand up?¡± I asked, noticing the regeneration slowing down, shifting into something in the background, working over days, maybe weeks, to turn Joshua¡¯s body into a better version of itself.


    At first, I only received a groan in response, but after a bit of time passed, Joshua started to move slowly and carefully until he pushed himself into a sitting position, looking quite pale from the ordeal he had undergone.


    ¡°Excellent. Can you tell us if you received notifications for completing this procedure and, if yes, what they say?¡± I prodded, briefly considering whether I should push him with my Mind Magic, testing if the hooks set into his psyche worked. I decided against it, wanting him to answer me on his own first. If it didn''t work, I could still use Mind Magic and try forcing him.


    ¡°A¡­¡± his voice broke off at first, the constant strain on his vocal cords during the procedure taking its toll. In response, I conjured an earthware cup and filled it with water, giving him something to drink and settle himself before we continued with the evaluation.


    ¡°Thank you,¡± I only nodded in response, allowing him to continue, ¡°A few of them, yes. A trait, granting me regeneration, another trait greatly increasing the efficiency of my Astral Power but locking it within myself and a special ability, allowing me to use some of my Astral Power to boost my Strength and Agility greatly,¡± he explained, his voice getting steadier as he drank the water. As he was speaking, I subtly used my Mind Magic just to try and see if I could spot any deceit but by the looks of it, the guy was honest. Still, I wanted to know more, so I asked, verbally prodding him until I got the entire text of each notification he had received.


    At that point, I was confident that the mental hooks I had created weren¡¯t enough to create a trait, which I considered a good thing. Being told that his mental defence was drastically weakened against the people who had just worked on him could easily push him to warn his cohorts. Now, we only had to see just how strong the boost truly was, the regeneration had already proven to be formidable, getting him back on his feet within a short amount of time after a procedure that could alternatively be described as horrifying torture easily able to kill the one forced to endure it.


    To test his improvements, we went outside after getting dressed, mainly to ensure he wouldn¡¯t be too cold. While I could have added something to make him resistant to cold, other things were more important.


    First, I conjured a few simple obstacles to test his performance without the enhancement and then we set him to work, lifting weights, jumping across bars, moving through the conjured obstacles, and else everything I could think of to put his performance into measurements we could work with. After all, what did it mean if a person had twenty Strength? Annoyingly, it varied quite a bit, roughly following the physique of the person in question, meaning somebody with Sigmir¡¯s physique and twenty Strength would be able to lift more than a person with the physique of my original body and twenty Strength. The difference wasn¡¯t huge, at least not for any movement where leverage didn¡¯t apply, but it was there, making objective analysis a lot harder than necessary.


    Regardless of that problem, we soon had a good idea of what he was capable of when not using the enchantment, his performance hadn¡¯t changed from before the test, and then we did the same, only now with the enchantment active. And the difference was remarkable, especially when he pushed the enchantment to the limit, almost doubling his strength and speed. He couldn¡¯t go much further at the moment, simply because his body would tear itself apart if he tried, but with the regeneration we had bestowed, short bursts were perfectly acceptable.


    All in all, I could only nod and declare the experiment a splendid success. Now, we just had to do it a few more times, making sure it wasn¡¯t a fluke, and then we could offer it to Jack and a few others we had started to like.

 Chapter 1094

    After the first attempt worked out just about as well as anyone could hope, we didn¡¯t have trouble getting the next person to agree. Hel, there was a queue of them, all interested in getting the enchantment once Joshua aptly demonstrated the tangible benefits. Everyone wanted it, and they wanted it as soon as possible, even after Joshua described the painful part of the procedure. At that point, I wasn¡¯t quite sure if the people in idiot-ville were desperate or dumb, but did it truly matter? Not to me, not really, so we decided on the next test subject and made an appointment for the next day, just to give us all a chance to settle down and relax.


    On that next day, the procedure worked out similarly well, though not quite as well as it had with Joshua. We had no idea why the difference came about but the amplification our second test subject could achieve was markedly lower than the one Joshua managed and even his regeneration was lowered. There were no obvious reasons why the difference came about, though we did take copious notes so we would be able to look for a pattern if the occurrence repeated itself during later experiments.


    Persons number three and four were similarly successful, their amplification and regeneration landing between Josuha and number two but after those two, with our fifth test-subject, things went a little wrong. Not terribly so, just a bit but it was enough to be annoying.


    The problem with number five was two-fold. His regeneration was lower than that of our second test subject, far below that of Joshua, but his amplification was far beyond Joshua¡¯s, and that was where the trouble started. Even pushing himself moderately hard, not even trying to go for his limits, was enough to severely injure him, his muscles able to break his own bones and easily snap his sinews to the point that it required treatment by Luna and myself to avoid permanent injury. More notes were taken, and we went over everything one more time, searching for a reason why the performance differed so much, but so far, we came up blank. There didn¡¯t seem to be any data points correlating, though I had a feeling that the reason wasn¡¯t just a single data point but a whole number of factors we would have to figure out.


    For that, we¡¯d have to find more test subjects and collect data, which is exactly what we did with our next three test subjects, all of which worked out fairly well, with one of them getting a fairly insane regeneration out of the deal, compensated by his very moderate amplification, possibly because so much of his magical potential was tied up with the regeneration.


    Sadly, while there seemed to be some correlation between the total magical potential, which I currently interpreted as an additional hidden attribute composed of the person¡¯s Courage, Charisma, Intelligence and Intuition, each included with its own weight, though I couldn¡¯t be certain, it was just an assumption. An individual¡¯s affinity to Blood Magic might also play a role, alongside a dozen other factors that could all play into it, but without a lot more test subjects, who could say?


    Things went seriously wrong with our next test subject, the ninth in total. The procedure itself worked out quite well, though as soon as we stepped back and watched the regeneration kick in, things went immediately wrong. Where all the others had slowly started to be optimied, this one did not. Or maybe it was an optimisation, just not in the right direction, we hadn¡¯t been able to figure out why things went so seriously wrong, just that they did.


    Somehow, the Life Magic Luna had used to keep the subject alive during the procedure had been incorporated into the regeneration, pushing things in a deadly direction. Instead of the usual regeneration, this person¡¯s body started to grow in a somewhat unorganised fashion, his cells rapidly splitting to the point that the growth became visible on the outside. Not that the outside growth was the problem, sure, his hair was growing almost a centimetre in the minute we managed to keep him alive, and he gained multiple warts and strange growths, but those were all manageable. Or they would have been if the uncontrolled growth had been limited to the surface of his body.Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author.


    Sadly, the growth was everywhere, essentially giving him the equivalent of super-cancer, similar to the countless small animals which had died while Luna was learning how to use her powers. There were growths in his brain, pushing the intracranial pressure to the point that it almost leaked out of his ears. Just about every blood vessel in his body had blockages, and his lungs started to fill up, too. Luna tried to keep him alive while I was to remove the enchantment, but it didn¡¯t work out. There were just too many problems, all of which were deadly in their own right, and even Luna couldn¡¯t keep up with them. I might have been able to help, but given that I needed to get rid of the enchantment, I didn¡¯t have time. Ultimately, the guy lost his life in a fairly peaceful manner, his brain shutting down just as his heart was blocked off completely, his life ending and, with it, the enchantment.


    With his death came the questions of what to do with the body and what to tell the rest of the idiot village. Of those, the body-disposal question was actually the easier one. I had a few ideas I wanted to test in regards to Death Magic, especially when combining it with Mind Magic, so I could use the body quite well.


    But what to tell the people? The truth might hurt further experiments, and given their gullibility, or maybe desperation was a better word to use, they would likely swallow even the most outrageous lie simply because they didn¡¯t want to know the truth. Quite a few of them, at least every one of the guys I had worked on, had seen the proverbial writing on the wall. They simply didn¡¯t know what to do about it. They could see that their little settlement was a burning dumpster rolling towards a cliff, but they, somehow, didn¡¯t see a need to abandon ship and bail out, joining another community in the process. Or, maybe, they were simply suicidally stubborn, ready to take part in a dangerous experiment if it meant they wouldn¡¯t be proven wrong. Either was a possible explanation, but I wasn¡¯t sure I wanted to understand their reasoning.


    After discussing it with Lia, we made the decision to tell them nothing unless asked. If they asked about number nine, we would tell them that he ran into some trouble and wouldn¡¯t make it back. Not necessarily that the experiment killed him, but if they pressed, I might imply that he tried something stupid and paid the price for it. Either way, the important things to remember were that he died due to no fault of us and that his name was Kevin. If I reduced his existence to a mere number, even if it was a fairly low number like nine, the people might get annoyed.


    The acquisition of test subject number ten went about as well as it could have gone. They did ask about Kevin, but we managed to insinuate that he had insisted on making his own way back to their little village, and we accepted his desire. If he didn¡¯t make it, that wasn¡¯t on us, or so we claimed, and they could only shrug and carry on, even if a few of them gave us suspicious looks.


    But regardless of those looks, number ten, and the first female, not that we immediately noticed that Blaise was actually female, it wasn¡¯t something one could readily tell from her looks. Or their looks, as they apparently preferred; I truly didn¡¯t care; I only cared about the underlying biological reality. And those fundamental parts were fixed, with no amount of pre-change surgery able to alter them. Maybe something could be done with a combination of Life, Blood and maybe Mind Magic, possibly with some sort of Darkness Magic imbued into it to embody the change, but that was an entirely different question and not one I cared to invest too much time in. I had other things to do. Namely, I had to make sure that we didn¡¯t lose this one, too; otherwise, the villagers¡¯ distrust might turn into something more annoying. Sure, Jademoon Tower wouldn¡¯t fall to some angry mob, no matter how many torches and pitchforks they brought, but having a hostile force camped out on my doorstep would be a pain, while slaughtering them would be bad PR. Doing either would be simple, but accepting the consequences would be annoying.


    So, I¡¯d better not kill random person number ten just to prevent some future headaches.

 Chapter 1095

    When we returned to the Idiot-ville with Blaise, now a successfully enhanced human, though one with far more empowerment than regeneration, I could only shake my head in disbelief. Two of our earlier experiments either had a grudge match or were sparring in a way seriously detrimental to their environment, their strength enough to break rock and shatter some of the houses they had been using.


    For a moment, I considered if I wanted to intervene, but while I contemplated, more people, two of our experiments and three normal people jumped in, throwing hands and waving sticks and clubs around in a somewhat hazardous fashion. Next to me, I felt Blaise start pushing her empowerment, though not as much as she could have, before jumping forward, covering the distance in seconds. At least the improved speed worked out fine, though I wasn¡¯t sure if throwing down without a good understanding of one¡¯s own strength was a good idea.


    When I noticed that the brawl was growing even further and now threatened the food stores of these people, I could only shake my head and confirm to myself that these guys were generally idiots. Then, I walked forward, readying my Mind Magic as I went. Just before they could deal actual damage to important buildings, I struck; I even activated Overflow so I could be certain of my success, even if it took a little more Astral Power than strictly necessary. Hopefully, the extra power would turn into a headache for these idiots; they were too stupid for their own good. Maybe some pain would teach them restraint, but I doubted I was so lucky.


    ¡°What do you think we should do with them?¡± I asked Luna while we were quickly checking if any of these idiots were seriously injured or might have managed to land in a way that would lead to serious injury later. At the same time, I was quietly asking myself whether the alterations we had performed on these people were the cause of this brawl. But if they were, why would three unenhanced people have joined in unless they were confident enough to think they¡¯d be able to take down all four of the enhanced who had been brawling at the time, which was a bit of a stretch?


    ¡°Wake them up one by one, starting with Blaise cause I doubt she was involved in the original grudge. Once they are awake, you can decide if you want to play judge or something. I don¡¯t want to get involved more than I have to,¡± she admitted. In response, I raised a questioning eyebrow, wondering why these people were so beneath her notice, given that she had spent numerous hours helping people at Jademoon Tower and even in the settlements we had visited, she regularly took time to speak and listen to people in an attempt to help. Not that all that many immediately trusted or listened to her; she still had the look of a teenager, even if that, too, had been fading quite a bit over the winter, making me wonder just when her accelerated growth and the maturity to go with it would stop.


    Soon, we¡¯d get very strange looks when she addressed me as ¡®Mother¡¯, simply because I was starting to look a little younger than I chronologically should, possibly due to the Elven heritage I had gained, while Luna looked a lot older, making her look maybe six to eight years younger than me. Not quite what people would imagine when they heard about mother and daughter, to say nothing about our obviously different races.


    When she didn¡¯t elaborate on her disinterest, I shrugged and reached out with my Mind Magic, pushing Blaise into consciousness. She groaned for a bit before rising to her feet, only to start swaying and sink back to her knees.


    ¡°My head,¡± she quietly moaned, her eyes squeezed tightly shut.


    ¡°I would say this was a case of playing stupid games and winning stupid prices,¡± I scolded, fairly annoyed that these idiots had risked my test subjects. ¡°Care to explain why you jumped into this mess and what the mess was about in the first place?¡± I prodded, curiously if there was an actual reason or just some people being dumb.


    By now, a few of the other locals had moved out of their haphazard shelters, looking at the people lying in the snow, though curiously nobody made a move to help them or wake them up. Unauthorized use of content: if you find this story on Amazon, report the violation.


    ¡°No, I just saw them brawling and wanted them to stop,¡± Blaise replied, blushing a little, ¡°It didn¡¯t quite work as I had hoped,¡± she admitted, her blush deepening. For a moment, I was tempted to facepalm, but I managed to stop myself. This sounded like such an idiotic sentiment that I wasn¡¯t sure what to say. Granted, I had contemplated intervening, too, so maybe it wasn¡¯t truly idiotic; she merely had overestimated her personal strength, as the others had possibly done, too.


    ¡°Does that happen often?¡± Luna asked, not quite certain just how stupid these people were. There was nothing like that near Jademoon Tower. If anybody were to dare try it, I would kick them out so fast their heads would spin, and their bodies would need a few days to catch up to their behinds, just due to the force of my kick.


    ¡°Well, no, not often,¡± Blaise admitted, the blush deepening even further, ¡°Just once or twice a week, you know?¡±


    At her confession, I needed a second to consider if I¡¯d see that as ¡®often¡¯ but concluded that it depended on the severity of the brawl and the damage it caused, meaning there was no real answer. But, off the cuff, I decided that weekly brawls with the potential for serious property damage were too annoying to be allowed as common practice.


    ¡°Foolishness,¡± I muttered, not trying too hard to lower my voice, ¡°I¡¯ll wake the others. Is there anybody willing to play arbitrator or something like that? Or will they start beating on one another again and possibly trash your food stores, leaving you in some serious shit?¡± I asked the assembled people, none of which looked like they were about to step forward.


    Letting out a soft sigh, I wiggled my fingers a little, pointing at each of the fallen bodies in turn while pushing my Mind Magic. The gesturing was wholly unnecessary, given that Mind Magic was trivially easy to cast without any gestures, but it made for a good show. The fallen started to move, all groaning and I noticed that their regeneration wasn¡¯t dealing with the obvious headache they had, possibly because it was considered damage to the Mind but the regeneration worked on the body. Where the boundaries between those were was a little fluid, but it was a reasonable explanation, so I mentally ran with it.


    ¡°Anybody willing to take responsibility here?¡± I asked again, and just like before, I didn¡¯t get any volunteers, making me grumble just a little and wonder if this was why these people were in the state they were in. Stubbornness and nobody willing to stand up and take charge? It was a bad combination, especially with people getting annoyed at being cooped up but remaining unwilling to do anything about their situation unless brawling to get rid of frustration was considered ¡®doing something¡¯.


    ¡°Maybe we should leave these people be and give them some time to handle their differences, debate their difficulties and come to a reasoned decision about what they wish to do with their future,¡± Luna suggested, her tone just overly sincere enough to make me realise she was mocking them.


    ¡°It might be a wise idea,¡± I agreed, not wanting to deal with them any longer than I had to and by now, the kinks in our enchantment seemed to have been worked out for the most part. Sure, there likely were people around who didn¡¯t react well to it. We would have people die horrible deaths from it, but I could live with that; at least, I hoped so. I doubted I¡¯d use it on any of my loved ones, mostly because it came with those incredibly confining drawbacks, and I was confident I could teach anybody at least some magic if I took enough time. Maybe I should look into removing the enchantment, but that, just like creating it, would take a lot of time and effort, especially as I doubted that anybody would volunteer to forfeit a benefit they had acquired through serious pain.


    Looking around once more, hoping against hope that somebody would stand up and take charge, Luna and I started to walk away, slightly disappointed that the idiots of Idiotsville had lived up to their name.


    ¡°You know, we should consider if we want to continue supplying these people with the means to destroy more and get better if they get beaten down. It takes away some of the incentive they have to remain somewhat peaceful. Can you imagine them starting to branch out and cause trouble elsewhere?¡± Luna asked, making me sigh in agreement. Maybe there were people who should get left behind in the change and everything that came after it. In a way, it was natural selection in action; at least, I hoped that they wouldn¡¯t pass on their genes. This had me considering how the enchantment would deal with reproduction, how it might influence the different processes, and whether I needed to include more warnings if I decided that I¡¯d be far away when it could become an issue so their issues wouldn¡¯t be my problem. Moral questions: they were so fun.

 Chapter 1096

    ¡°Other than possible mental influences, the enchantment works fine, doesn¡¯t it?¡± Lia asked, looking at the various notes we had taken during our experiments with a curious eye.


    ¡°There are probably some edge cases in which the enchantment will fail, some people who are incompatible with it or something like that, but generally, it works as well as any piece of new magic can be expected to work. It¡¯s no longer purely experimental but it¡¯s still something new and not tested by hundreds of generations over thousands of years,¡± I shrugged, uncertain if there was anything we could do on an individual level to improve the enchantment further. We all had done some tweaking over the development process, with Lia changing the exact formula of the Crimson Ink, while I altered the runes, and Luna added her own spin on things, making the final version something only possible thanks to our cooperation. Eventually, we might be able to use it individually but for now, we could only apply it while working together, too. This, truly, was a piece of magic made by our family.


    The question we had yet to answer was whether the enchantment altered the recipients'' mental state but given what we had heard about the people of idiot-ville before they had received our enchantment, I couldn¡¯t see any real correlation. The only thing I could imagine was that the improved regeneration reduced the direct, personal consequences, thus taking away part of the usual incentive to keep the peace. If getting punched didn¡¯t hurt after a few minutes, then it became much less of a problem, though I didn¡¯t want to believe that adults were that simple and stupid. I knew they could be, but at the same time, I didn¡¯t want that knowledge to be true, even if it was a bit of self-deception.


    ¡°Lady Hecate might commune with you, I think she knows a few things about that type of enchantment,¡± Luna added her own two cents to our discussion, making me curious. She had a few interesting points during the creation, some of which spoke of information sourced beyond our usual means, indicating that Lady Hecate had Her fingers in the pie, though I couldn¡¯t be sure to what end.


    ¡°I¡¯ll spend the night praying,¡± I promised, even if it continued to feel a little strange to pray in a temple holding my own image, as if I was performing the ultimate act of arrogance and hubris, worshipping an image of myself as my god.


    ¡°Unless something big comes up, do you think we can offer Jack, Murray and Jonas the procedure tomorrow?¡± Lia pushed, her tone telling me just as much as her words did. She wanted these three to be as strong as possible, likely because she was still dithering on the decision whether she wanted to remain here or continue onwards with Luna and me. I couldn¡¯t help but be happy about her hesitation, especially given that I knew I had imparted a large part of my own mental makeup to her during her creation. Thus, if I imagined myself in her role, having to pick between Sigmir and continuing onwards with my family or something along those lines, I knew that I¡¯d leave my family behind without hesitating even a moment. Sigmir was just more important than anything and everything else; it was that simple.


    ¡°Yes, you can make the offer. Though you maybe should keep quiet about the details of the enchantment¡¯s creation, we don¡¯t need those five to get pissy about our methods. But the choice is yours; we¡¯ll be able to continue onwards in a week or two anyway,¡± I told her, getting a nod from Luna in confirmation. The snow had largely thawed away while we were working on the enchantment, and while it wasn¡¯t completely spring yet, the weather was getting there quickly.


    ¡°I¡¯ll think about it,¡± Lia promised, and again, I heard a little more in her tone than what she said in words. She was considering whether the ¡®we¡¯ who continued onwards would contain her and Alex, as I was confident that Alex would remain with Lia, just as I was certain Silva would remain with Luna and me. Who she would pick between the two of us, I wasn¡¯t as certain, but, hopefully, that question wouldn¡¯t come up soon. Reading on this site? This novel is published elsewhere. Support the author by seeking out the original.


    During the night, I spent some time in quiet contemplation, marvelling at the calm atmosphere of the shrine and the easy way I could meditate inside of it. There was something that made me feel safe and secure as if nothing from the outside could get to me. Not just due to the thick and sturdy walls of the tower but due to the wards Luna had placed on the room, preventing enemies from entering easily, or while concealed; though how the ward could detect who was an ¡®enemy¡¯, I wasn¡¯t sure.


    Soon, I felt myself sink into the sea of my consciousness, simply drifting along where any idle thought might take me. It wasn¡¯t the Astral River, it was just my own head, and after a bit of drifting around my ponderous mind, I imposed direction, sending my thoughts in the direction they needed to go.


    An instant later, I found myself in a familiar environment, able to see it clearly despite the fact that my eyes remained firmly shut. It wasn¡¯t a physical place after all, so why would I need my eyes to see or my ears to hear? My body hadn¡¯t moved; after all, it was still in the shrine. And yet, I was undeniably here, too, standing in the endless expanse of Lady Hecate¡¯s realm.


    ¡°Good evening, young one,¡± Lady Hecate greeted me, a bit of amusement in Her harmonious voice. ¡°Luna told me about that project of yours. Why don¡¯t you show me what you came up with? I might give you a hint or two. And some homework; it¡¯s fascinating what you come up with on your own,¡± She chuckled while I had to keep myself from grinning and frowning at the same time. A part of me was annoyed that Luna had told Her about our endeavour but at the same time, I knew that Luna drew power and information from Her, so Luna needed to communicate what she needed to receive it. However, I was also self-aware enough to know any compliment given by Lady Hecate, especially in the area of magic, was one to be treasured; I had no doubt that She was amongst the best and most skilled travellers on the Arcane Path in existence, being the literal Goddess and all that.


    ¡°Certainly,¡± I agreed, trying to come up with the best way to communicate what usually needed a ritual done by three people. Not quite sure whether it would work, I pulled on the various memories I had of doing the ritual and discussing what we were doing with the others and tried projecting all that into Lady Hecate¡¯s mind, trusting that the deity would easily be able to process what my mind could handle.


    There was a brief frown on her face, but it vanished seconds later, and the Lady nodded, maybe to Herself, maybe in acknowledgement, but I wasn¡¯t sure.


    ¡°Interesting application of Mind Magic. Don¡¯t try it with your average mortal; you might just make their heads explode,¡± Lady Hecate warned me, and now it was my turn to nod in acknowledgement. At the same time, I wondered if I could do something interesting with that trick, maybe pack up memories of pain or despair and use them in an offensive fashion. Or maybe something more positive; I would have to look into that particular idea but later.


    ¡°It¡¯s somewhat simple, as you probably realise. You can do a whole lot more with the basic idea you already had; you just need to try and experiment and maybe draw on some inspiration from something other than humans. Humans aren¡¯t the strongest animals out there, after all, the smartest and one of the animals with the best stamina, yes, but fairly unremarkable otherwise,¡± she suggested, though I soon realised that what she suggested was a lot more invasive than the runic markings placed upon a person. This would be an incorporation of animal elements, both biological and magical, into a person, turning them into something else. It would have some vague resemblance to the procedure I had used to create Lia, just with parts from an animal to be used to alter a human instead of using part of myself to alter a Shattered.


    ¡°Now, as I said, you¡¯ve done some interesting things here,¡± She grinned, and for a moment, I regretted coming here, ¡°And in turn, I¡¯ll show you something I have been using; it¡¯s something one of my priests came up on another world, they use it to guard my temples there,¡± she explained, and moments later, I felt something brush against my mind and I immediately realised it was the same thing I had sent at Lady Hecate earlier, a package of information put together with Mind Magic. Only that Lady Hecate obviously had a lot more brain power, allowing her to process a lot more information.


    Struggling to contain the headache trying to rip my head apart, I forced my mind into overdrive, sifting through the dense package and storing it within the depths of my consciousness. The Lady truly had given me something to think about.

 Chapter 1097

    For two days, I remained in the shrine, sorting through the dense package of information I had received from Lady Hecate. As with so many things with Her, the entire thing was a remarkable combination of homework, headache and boon, all mixed into a painful delight. If it wasn¡¯t so useful, I would reconsider setting up shrines in Her name, and I¡¯d certainly not allow the use of my image if I could help it, but given the benefits I was reaping, I couldn¡¯t complain all that much.


    In this particular case, I could see just how much more advanced the working She had shared with me was. I doubted it was of Her design; it lacked the amazingly complex simplicity I had seen in other things She had shown me, simplifications added to the spellwork so mortals could use the spells, even if they didn¡¯t understand just what they were doing, but here, these simplifications were missing. This meant that the spellwork was mindbogglingly complex, to the point that I doubted I¡¯d be able to perform it on my own or even with my daughters to help me. This looked like it would require a team of trained spellcasters, all working together to imbue a person with the essence of another being. An animal of some sort, most likely a canine, though that was mostly based on my understanding of Lady Hecate. The spellwork itself should work with any donor animal, though results would greatly vary.


    The parts where the elements of an animal were worked into the physiology of a human, or likely near-human, being were incredibly fascinating. Complex beyond measure, yes, but deeply intriguing and affecting the person on such a fundamental level, the only things I could think would come close to it was the transformation into a vampire or something similar. This spellwork couldn¡¯t just enhance a person¡¯s body and allow them to channel their magic into it directly to empower themself; it was much more. The process, at least as far as I could understand it from the information I had been given, could completely reshape a person¡¯s body, altering what the system would describe as their race.


    With that reshaping came a variety of traits and affinities, though as was so often the case with the system, nothing was truly for free. Some of the traits, at least from what I could glean, would be negative, limiting the target¡¯s external magic, in addition to something quite similar to the vulnerability to certain mental magics I had put into my enchantment, only that this would likely make the target loyal to an organisation, namely the Temple of Hecate. Or rather, the temple where they had received the enchantment, essentially binding them as guard dogs to the temple.


    A huge trade-off, but I had a feeling there¡¯d be a lot of people who¡¯d happily take the chance and become some sort of canine therianthrope, similar to enlisting in the military to escape poverty, which had been a chance many had taken before the change. This was just a little more binding and life-altering, quite literally.


    In the meantime, while a large part of my mind was occupied with the process of decoding, dissecting and analysing the knowledge transferred to me by Lady Hecate, Lia and Luna had decided to meet with Jack, Murray and Jonas. Amusingly, they had decided to hold their meeting in the shrine, completely missing the fact that I was kneeling on the other side of the altar, hidden by the perpetual darkness, only broken up by the flickering lights we had installed. That I was wearing my cloak might have added to my concealment, but that was hardly my problem.


    ¡°So, you¡¯ve got us here; now, why don¡¯t you explain why you deliberately excluded the two who study this sh¡­ stuff?¡± Jack asked, sounding equally curious and annoyed, even as he deliberately censored his crude language, likely because Luna looked like a teenager. A part of me was curious how he would react if he knew she was, in actual chronological age, nothing but a child. Though, by now, I wasn¡¯t quite certain how one should measure age and maturity, did the time I spent on Mundus count as a single year, the time I had lived on Earth, or as two, the time I spent on Mundus and in the capsule? Similarly, should the time Luna spent since I had adopted her only count as about a year, or should the time she spent in Lady Hecate¡¯s realm be counted differently? If it should, at what rate? As far as I was aware, Lady Hecate didn¡¯t bother with a constant flow of time within Her realm; Her lessons took as long as they needed while within her realm and the span of a dream for the body outside of it. Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.


    ¡°We, that is, Jade and I, have been keeping the occasional eye on you and your group just to see if we need to change the lessons Daniel and Samantha received from us. We noticed that the more the two of them learn and the further they advance, the greater the difference between your abilities and theirs become,¡± Lia explained, her voice calm and dispassionate. Maybe it was because of that calm voice, but none of the three men reacted negatively, even if she had effectively just told them that they weren¡¯t pulling their weight, even if she hadn¡¯t stated it outright.


    ¡°Indeed,¡± Murray spoke, his voice equally placid, ¡°But you would not mention that simply to amuse yourself. You most likely have a reason why you did so.¡±


    ¡°Indeed,¡± she echoed his apparently favourite word back at him, ¡°We do have a way to attenuate the problem, but, as with most things, it is not something that can be done without cost,¡± she told them, pausing for a moment, likely to try and find the right words to describe what we had been doing without it sounding utterly immoral.


    ¡°Well, not like we can pay you, there¡¯s no cash around,¡± Jack snarked but I had a feeling he knew it wasn¡¯t money we were after, even if such a thing was currently issued.


    ¡°No, of course not,¡± Luna spoke up for the first time since they had started to talk, ¡°Money wouldn¡¯t be an issue anyway, no, the price you would have to pay is two-fold.¡±


    ¡°The first part of it is the simple part,¡± Lia took over again, ¡°It¡¯s not so much a price you¡¯d have to pay us but one the system requires for some reason. We have tried a few things, but regardless of what we did, if that particular price isn¡¯t paid, the process we came up with doesn¡¯t work.¡± I could almost hear Lia shrug, even if I couldn¡¯t see her due to my closed eyes.


    ¡°It annoys mother something feirce, she knows why the price was initially necessary, she understands how the necessity could be changed but if she does, the process turns out wrong, and often times in fairly troublesome ways,¡± Lia explained, sounding both amused and helpless at the same time.


    I knew which price she meant; the pain caused by the procedure was that price. After we noticed that the bodies seemed to try and reach some sort of ideal state, we tried to see if that would work to undo the problems we¡¯d face if we did the procedure on an unconscious person. As it turned out, it didn¡¯t work. For some unfathomable reason, that regeneration towards an ideal state could only occur if the patient underwent the procedure while conscious or unable to feel pain. One of the animals we had tried it out on had fallen unconscious from the pain, and that, too, hadn¡¯t worked, with a similar effect if we had numbed the pain after we started our work. Thus, we decided the pain was some sort of price demanded by the system and left it at that, at least for now. Maybe Lady Hecate¡¯s information could shed some light on the issue.


    ¡°That first price is one of pain. The procedure we came up with is painful and we are unable to remove it, believe me, we have tried,¡± Lia explained and I heard a soft curse from Jonas, quickly suppressed and silence reigned again.


    ¡°The second price is that you would be asked to defend any Shrines of Lady Hecate if you are nearby and a shrine of Her¡¯s is threatened. I have a feeling the Lady would encourage such behaviour with quests anyway, but that would be between you and Her,¡± now it was Luna¡¯s turn to explain, and, again, silence followed in the wake of her words.


    ¡°That¡¯s all nice and dandy, but what is that thing you are offering?¡± Jack asked, his voice unchanged from earlier, curiosity and annoyance warring with each other. It made me wonder if he deliberately talked like that, maybe to conceal what he was truly feeling.


    ¡°True,¡± Lia allowed, ¡°What we came up with is essentially an enchantment on your person. It allows you to use your Astral Power at much greater efficiency than you currently can, but, in turn, you are limited to its internal applications. Basically, you can¡¯t cast spells and such, but you can use the Astral Power you have to boost your body, and you get a fairly decent regeneration-factor out of it,¡± Lia explained, speaking quickly enough to keep the three from interrupting.


    Moments later, after they had a second to think, they immediately bombarded her with questions, which Lia tried to answer to the best of her ability.

 Interlude: The Price of Power

    ¡°What do you think about the offer?¡± Jack asked, looking at his two companions as they were walking away from Jademoon Tower, having just received an offer to have their bodies permanently augmented by the somewhat weird Morgana family who had built said tower.


    ¡°It¡¯s tempting, I¡¯ve got to admit it,¡± Jonas shrugged, ¡°And they are right about the growing difference between what Daniel and Sam can do and what we can accomplish. Before the two of them got the training here, they were somewhat harmless,¡± he let out a soft chuckle, ¡°Nothing of that left now, they¡¯ve become seriously scary, either of them, each in their own ways.¡± He paused for a second, waiting to see if either of his companions wanted to interject before continuing.


    ¡°But the drawbacks are just as daunting as the benefits; sure, we can¡¯t use magic at the moment, but who says the same remains true in a year? Or, in five years, we¡¯ve barely scratched the surface of the system, so closing a door to gain a momentary advantage sounds a little short-sighted. I just don¡¯t know if we truly need this boost now, though I have a feeling if we don¡¯t take the chance to get it now, we won¡¯t get it at all,¡± he let out a sigh, making his indecision obvious.


    ¡°I believe the problem is that we lack a dedicated instructor,¡± Murray suggested, his voice stoic as usual, ¡°We are, at the end of the day, muddling our way through the system, only able to use what we know we can use if that makes sense. If we don¡¯t know something is possible, we wouldn¡¯t know to try simply because we still think within the scope of our pre-change bodies, with few exceptions.¡±


    ¡°You mean we wouldn¡¯t dare to try things like that jump-attack I used against the Abomination last month? When I had Daniel send me up in the air so I can strike from above?¡± Jack suggested, a grin playing on his lips as he remembered the moment and the sheer audacity needed to make that literal leap of faith.


    ¡°Indeed, that was one moment in which one of us did something impossible before the change. Otherwise, we generally fight in ways a person could have fought before the change, only that we are stronger and faster in our movements. But our tactics and abilities are confined to things we would usually deem ¡®possible¡¯¡± Murray paused for a moment, looking at one of the trees they were walking beneath. ¡°I wonder¡­¡± he muttered before taking a few quick steps towards the tree and pushing off, sending his body in an inhumanly high arc towards the tree before trying to land with his feet on the bark to push off again.


    It worked, at least partially, and he managed to get that second push, only to careen out of control, his agility clearly not a match for his imagination. For a moment, Jack and Jonas could only stare in horror as Murray crashed through a few branches on neighbouring trees before landing with a solid thud, his fall only partially broken by his arms.


    To their surprise, Murray was back on his feet before they managed to completely shake themself from their stupor, staring at him in disbelief.


    ¡°A curious experience,¡± Murray mused, looking up at the tree he had kicked against and, especially, against the easily visible marks his dirty boots had left on the bark. Marks over two metres up on the trunk, making the height of his leap obvious. And making it obvious that he had casually reached a height nobody would have considered plausible without some serious training, a perfect form and a long run-up. Even with all those, nobody would have considered a jump like the one he just casually did a possibility.


    ¡°You see what I mean, do you not?¡± Murray asked, looking at his two companions, who were still staring at him; maybe because of the jump he performed or because he thought jumping against a tree was a good idea. If you come across this story on Amazon, it''s taken without permission from the author. Report it.


    ¡°Yeah, I think I do. But I don¡¯t think that getting that enchantment or whatever it is would really help us. If anything, it¡¯ll limit what we can possibly accomplish, even if it allows us to do some things we currently can¡¯t do,¡± Jonas argued, even as his eyes flickered from the marks high above them and Murray, who was in the process of brushing off some debris and dirt from his landing, which was, if anything, almost as impressive as the jump had been. He had, after all, crashed into the partially frozen ground from a height of some three metres, thanks to the second push-off he had performed, only to stand back up and walk it off as if nothing had happened.


    ¡°Well, we¡¯d need somebody to train us, just like Jade trained Daniel and Carnelia trained Sam, don¡¯t we?¡± Jack suggested after shaking off his stupefaction at Murray¡¯s sudden leap.


    ¡°Do you know anybody who could? It would take a legacy with the right skill set, likely a different one for each of us. Or we¡¯d have to muddle through for ourselves, just without the blinders we seem to have put on,¡± Jonas grumbled, already knowing that there was nobody who could truly help them with their individual skill sets, none of the legacies they had met so far fit the type they needed.


    ¡°We should seek out those who had this procedure done already. It most likely will help us come to a decision, though I have an inclination to my decision already,¡± Murray suggested, his mind already considering what he had thought impossible before and what might now be possible. His capabilities were no longer what he considered human, and that enchantment offered to them would further remove the similarities, making him wonder what could be done. Or what should be done. It was one thing to dream of abilities straight out of movies or comic books; it was an entirely different thing to turn those ideas into functional reality, as his earlier leap had demonstrated.


    Out of curiosity, he decided to stomp the earth as hard as he could, just to see if he could produce some small-scale quake, despite his mind insisting it would be impossible. Sadly, the result was quite underwhelming; he merely unbalanced himself due to the force he used to stomp being transmitted into the opposite direction when the ground didn¡¯t move all that much, merely leaving a deep footprint in the frozen ground. Maybe he¡¯d need some magic to accomplish something like that, though it wouldn¡¯t work if he had that procedure done.


    ¡°You think? I mean, Carnelia told us that they offered it to a couple of people living in Coldcreek Park or thereabout, right?¡± Jack asked, knowing full well that the three Morganas had used the procedure on those people, something he had a split opinion on already. On the one hand, offering a chance to a group of people who were only scraping by was a good thing, giving them opportunities they lacked. But it also gave more power to a group that had proven unreliable and prone to causing havoc, meaning if they caused trouble again, the trouble would be a lot more serious.


    ¡°Indeed. I would like to see what the people who have received this benefit have done with it and what might be possible if I were to receive it. For that, observing the beneficiaries first-hand would be the most prudent, followed by a conversation with one or more of them,¡± Murray explained, having mostly made up his mind that he needed more information. He needed to know what might be possible so he could try it out if it was possible for him. This might be his opportunity to get a power for himself, something to make him unique in ways beyond his powerful physique.


    Next to him, Jack was similarly trying to make up his mind. He could admit to himself that he was interested in Samantha, interested in seeing if a closer relationship between them was possible. That interest had been a big reason why he pushed to have her in their group, beyond her prodigious mind and fair abilities in combat. But after Samantha gained the teaching and training at Jademoon Tower, he noticed that it was no longer a case of their group accepting Samantha, and Daniel for that matter, but it was a case of Samantha and Daniel remaining with them out of loyalty, making him feel like a charity case, not something he wanted to be for the woman he was interested in.


    However, trying to get the power to keep up with Samantha and catch her romantic interest by asking the person who was currently in a strange relationship with Samantha for a favour didn¡¯t sit right with him. He could admit that to himself; it was a bit of a mess, a mess he had no idea how to solve. Other than taking a look at these people, maybe he would have an incredible moment of inspiration, gain enlightenment and ride off with Samantha into the sunset. Incredibly unlikely, but it was not impossible, or at least he hoped it wasn¡¯t.

 Chapter 1098

    It took Jack, Jonas and Murray a few days to return with their decision. They had gone and met with the idiots in their village, a meeting I had decided to observe using the Oculus and a scrying construct or three, allowing me a front-row seat for the entertainment. It turned out that neither Jonas nor Murray were good at talking to the people there. There was a certain clash in personalities between them, made only worse by the fact that the majority of the idiots had the same stubborn streak. Granted, it was only due to that stubborn streak that they remained in their village; otherwise, they¡¯d have left already and joined a different, better-organised community.


    Jack, on the other hand, was amusingly irreverent, with a mischievous streak a mile wide and almost pathologically unable to take things as seriously as they should be taken. The kind of guy who would crack a joke as the hangman placed the noose around his neck, ready to pull the lever sending him to his death, the kind of guy who would look at a nuke, ready to end the world, and make light of it, maybe with a joke likening the effect to a severe sunburn. That irreverence gave him the ability to talk with them without either side getting offended or annoyed; they simply started joking around, mocking one another without a care in the world. It was quite amusing, and their interactions were a major reason for the scrying constructs I had used to observe; otherwise, I would have stuck with the Oculus, but that didn¡¯t allow me to listen, only to see what they were doing. It was one of the artefact''s major downsides, but given that I regularly used it to observe the sky and the other planets in the solar system and even tried to map the stars, it wasn¡¯t always a major downside, just occasionally.


    Either way, I learned quite a bit about Jack and even added a couple of points to my research regarding the enchantments. Their conversations had a certain flow to them, allowing me to see and hear things I normally wouldn¡¯t have been told. Simply because I wouldn¡¯t have thought to ask about them and because the people experiencing the effect wouldn¡¯t want to talk about it. Things like a sudden increase in certain urges, stronger instincts, things like that, nothing a male would want to talk about with a female, making me wonder if I had missed other things due to certain blinders we all habitually put on ourselves.


    Intellectually, I knew that it was almost inevitable that I had missed things due to that, simply because our minds all had a certain cultural conditioning to accept certain things as normal.


    It would take a long while for that conditioning to be replaced if only because people weren¡¯t actively aware of that conditioning. They simply followed their experience and later used that experience to teach their children. Even the Change, as extreme an event as it had been, wasn¡¯t enough to completely change people¡¯s perspectives and the way they thought, it forced them to adapt to new situations but their fundamental characters weren¡¯t changed.


    Alas, while such observations were fascinating in their own right, they weren¡¯t truly important, at least no in the short term. Those observations would become important once cultures formed again, especially if I wanted to become part of one such culture at some point but for now, they were simply interesting things to ponder, not something I needed to solve. Not that I believed I¡¯d be able to solve the issue, I was well aware that I was still far from a capable social operator, which would be needed for this problem.


    I could readily operate as a teacher, at least with a class interested in learning a subject I was fascinated by and knew a lot about. It would almost certainly be a different situation if the education I provided was mandated by some government or something like that, creating an environment in which students didn¡¯t want to learn but had to attend anyway. If there were such a case in one of my classes, they¡¯d be asked to leave the tower after interrupting class once or twice, meaning my students knew it was a privilege to learn from me, that the lessons weren¡¯t provided because I was paid or because I had to but because I wanted to help them, giving them a motivation very few students would have been able to match before the change. Survival was a strong motivator, and gaining abilities to survive and do so in a modicum of comfort was even better.A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.


    Either way, the current situation didn¡¯t require me to solve anything; I only had to listen to Jack, Jonas, and Murray discuss their options. It turned out, Murray wanted to have the procedure and, by now, he didn¡¯t have all that many questions. He was interested in possible ways to train as a warrior, and, as I soon realised, his physique and fighting-style seemed to be a decent match for the original style used by Sigmir, which was a bitter-sweet realisation.


    From the various training fights I had enjoyed with my beloved, some of which had ended in a very different sort of wrestling, I had a fair idea of how her style worked and how one would have to train in order to use it. I even had a bit of knowledge in regards to the initial training, but it was not that Murray truly needed that part; he already had a modicum of training. He just wasn¡¯t quite on the right path if he wanted to reach a similar destination to Sigmir¡¯s. Or at least the destination Sigmir might have reached if we had never met, as our meeting had changed her style and what she felt necessary in her life quite a bit. Her protective instincts had taken a much greater role, morphing her original style of brutally effective and offensive combat into something more cautious, allowing her to protect those behind her instead of cleaving her way through every obstacle in her path.


    As I considered the issue, I realised that I might want to try enchanting a statue to fight with her style. It would be an interesting intellectual challenge and it would be quite useful to teach people how she had fought, giving Murray and people like him an opportunity to learn while immortalising my beloved. It might even be enough to add a bit of divinity to Sigmir, though that part was a bit of a stretch, not something I considered truly possible. It might work, and if it did, the task of reviving her would be a lot easier, as it would change the issue from the resurrection of a mortal to the incarnation of a minor deity.


    Nodding to myself, I decided to extend that sort of support to Murray simply to see how far he could go with it. Additionally, it would serve as a test-case, potentially opening things up in the future.


    Jonas, on the other hand, was a little more difficult. He was quite ambitious, in a way neither Jack nor Murray were. While he was currently uncertain of his path for the future, it seemed that he was unwilling to put any limits on what paths he might be able to take, something I could respect even if I knew it would slow his path to power down greatly. But if he managed to survive this initial period of seeking his path, he might just become someone great. Only time would tell, and unless things went seriously wrong, he would be protected in that time, thanks to his connection to Murray, Daniel and Samantha. Jack, too, though he was still dithering with his decision regarding the enchantment.


    That part was fairly amusing, in my opinion. Jack had changed his mind about whether he wanted the enchantment or not at least five times. Well, I had observed him changing his mind five times. How often he changed his mind without verbalising his thoughts was anyone¡¯s guess, so it might be a lot more often.


    The main bone of contention was one I couldn¡¯t quite empathise with. It seemed as if he wanted to be seen as a capable leader and protector by Samantha, but if he could only be that capable protector thanks to the power given to him by Lia, he wasn¡¯t willing to take it. Almost as if he believed himself to be in competition with Lia and wasn¡¯t willing to accept help from that competition, as illogical as that was. To say nothing about the idiocy of thinking that a fairly intelligent woman like Samantha would accept to be the price in a competition, but that was an entirely different topic.


    A part of me wanted to give Lia a small push to make her own decision, whether she wanted to remain here, maybe take over the tower as its Mistress or something like that, or continue to journey with Luna, Silva and myself. So far, she hadn¡¯t even verbalised her conflict, though I could easily see it brew within her mind.


    It would be interesting to see their decision and the results of them.

 Chapter 1099

    Sadly, while the process of imbuing the attributes of an animal into a human shared by Lady Hecate was an incredibly interesting one, I also knew I was far from capable of pulling off the feat on my own. There simply were too many variables to keep track of and too many different functions to perform at the same time. It was clearly something meant to be used by a group working in concert, leaving me with a curious mix of ambition and regret. I could marvel at the work done by those who had come before me, but, at this point in time, I couldn¡¯t use it for anything beyond inspiration.


    Additionally, there were some parts I considered to be somewhat sketchy, especially on the mental side of things. While the process was designed to create loyal guardians of a location, essentially giving the clerics of Hecate in that other world where it originated an easy source of highly capable and utterly local guards, I could see multiple points where things could easily go wrong, focusing the loyalty into something different. Unless I misunderstood how the imbued mind would work, I could imagine the process resulting in something fairly similar to a werewolf, just without the contagious aspect usually associated with the condition. In essence, it might create a partially canine being with incredible strength, though one influenced by certain parts of Lady Hecate¡¯s portfolio. In the case of a classical werewolf, that part would be the phases of the moon but I could readily imagine other parts of Her portfolio becoming the influencing aspect, from crossroads to graveyards or even magic itself. The process was so delicate, and I could see so many potential failure points, I wasn¡¯t about to play around with this without a care in the world, even if I could try going at it alone.


    So, at least for now, the only process I could offer others to increase their physical prowess was the one I had designed, though I did find a few areas where I could decrease the effort needed with a few small modifications, thanks to the things Lady Hecate had shared. It''s not enough to make the whole thing easy for anyone involved; it''s just a little easier for me and possibly for the one getting the enchantment.


    And yet, despite the things Lady Hecate had shared, I couldn¡¯t find a way to get rid of the pain involved, as vexing as that was. By now, I was confident that my original assumption, that the enchantment used the state of the subject¡¯s body at the time of the enchanting to create some sort of image, thus putting them under would permanently put them under, was false. Or at least incomplete; we had seen creatures be rendered permanently comatose or entirely without pain signals, so there was some imprinting going on, but we had also seen the bestowed regeneration fix problems present at the time of the enchanting, which shouldn¡¯t be possible if it was focused on such an imprinted image. So, I was either wrong or there was more going on that I hadn¡¯t yet figured out, or it was a mixture of both. Maybe even something I hadn¡¯t yet thought of at all, making even the famous idea about eliminating the impossible until only one conclusion was left, and that being the truth, entirely irrelevant, simply because I could never be confident that the improbable conclusion I had deemed the only one left was that, there could always be things I hadn¡¯t considered in the first place.


    There was only one part of the procedure we were planning for Murray, the only one of the three who had taken our offer outright, that was new. The location. Before, we had always performed the ritual in a fairly neutral location, a purposely built temporary shelter holding nothing but the bare necessities.


    Now, the plan was to perform the procedure, though by now it could easily be considered a ritual in Lady Hecate¡¯s shrine, as requested by Luna. Given that the original reasons to conceal the procedure weren¡¯t really important any longer, namely the worry that we¡¯d kill a few people, causing the rest of the region to rally against us, I had no problem with acquiescing to her request. It wasn¡¯t as if there was a real downside. If anything, there were plenty of upsides, mainly the consecrated ground within the shrine, which made it easier to perform magic. Sure, it also meant Lady Hecate would get a front-row seat to the ritual, allowing Her to closely observe whatever we were doing but given that Luna was directly channelling Her power, I doubted it made that much of a difference. To say nothing about the information I had provided Her, or that I would readily exchange knowledge with Her, simply because it was so damn worth it for me. She, by virtue of her incredible experience and divine domain, simply had a lot more to offer and while the exchange might mean my accomplishments would be replicated on different worlds, I didn¡¯t care all that much about it, not if I received benefits like that vastly more encompassing procedure she had shared. This narrative has been purloined without the author''s approval. Report any appearances on Amazon.


    Another change to the usual procedure was that we had an audience. Not only were Jack and Jonas in attendance, but Daniel and Samantha were also invited. The looks on their faces when they were told the details of the procedure we were planning were quite amusing. Neither Daniel nor Sam could fully understand the procedure, but they were educated enough to get a fair idea about its complexity. That alone was enough to drive home the fact that Luna, Lia and I were vastly more capable than they were, even if they had managed to partially catch up in levels, though likely not in abilities.


    Soon, Murray was lying face-down on the altar, completely devoid of his clothes and pinned down by bands of crystal and stone, immobilising him completely. Then, as Luna was working her magic, I started to carve into his flesh, noticing that it wasn¡¯t just his voice that was stoic and controlled at all times; he, himself, managed to keep his body from twitching or making sounds of pain, something none of the subjects had managed before. It was quite impressive, making it obvious that he had a strong will and composure, something I could appreciate. Allowing him to learn some of my beloved¡¯s secrets and arts wouldn¡¯t bring shame to her name or memory; if anything, doing so would enhance her image.


    Lia followed up with the Crimson Ink, letting the blood-red substance mingle with Murray¡¯s blood as I slowly carved the runes into his flesh. As the ink seeped in, Luna healed the wounds, fusing the blood and the ink into the runic markings which made up the enchantment while I made sure that enough magic was infusing them so they could be absorbed into his magic. It was a delicate and infinitely fascinating process, one that I found intriguing despite the fact I had seen it multiple times before.


    There was a subtle interplay between the physical body, the mind housed within the brain and even the soul that tied it all together; changes originating in one aspect of the three could readily influence the other two, even if they weren¡¯t intended for it.


    A part of me wondered if I was getting a faint glimpse at the mechanisms underpinning the system as I was bestowing traits upon another human, and, for a moment, I could see how some of the deeper processes of the ritual Lady Hecate had given me would work. Whoever had designed that thing was either a true genius or it had been their life''s work. I couldn¡¯t really tell, but it was an utterly fascinating thing. Sadly, I couldn¡¯t focus on those stray thoughts; instead, I had to put my focus back where it was needed, namely on the runes I was slowly carving into Murray, starting at his shoulders before trailing down his back and sides until they reached his legs.


    Finally, after another quite exhausting procedure, I could finally step back, sweat beading on my face. To his credit, Murray had been able to endure the entire thing without a single sound, something I couldn¡¯t say about his companions. Amusingly, Jonas was the most vocal, followed by Daniel and Samantha, though none of them tried to intervene, though that was likely because all of them had been warned that stopping the ritual would have serious consequences.


    As the bands of crystal and stone were withdrawn, Murray let out a soft groan, signifying that he actually was a human, not some golem carved from obsidian or something like that, and slowly began to push himself up. Meanwhile, I activated my special senses and made sure that the enchantment worked as intended, which it did, thus bringing a pleased smile to my face. Now, we only had to figure out what to do with Jack, and Lia needed to decide whether she wanted to continue with us or stay. Essentially, we were done in this region, and thanks to a few days of fairly dry and windy weather, the ground was no longer a muddy mess, threatening to suck in anyone stupid enough to travel.

 Chapter 1100

    The ritual to transform Murray could only be classified as a great success. I wasn¡¯t sure if it was because the guy was a superior specimen compared to the somewhat mediocre examples of humanity we had access to in Idiot-ville or thanks to the modifications inspired by the ritual I had been given by Lady Hecate and without additional tests, it would be difficult to say. But, at the end of the day, it didn¡¯t really matter whether he was special or if the ritual was special; either way, he was quite formidable. So formidable, in fact, that I felt somewhat compelled to make use of him, if only in a somewhat roundabout fashion.


    A formidable specimen of a warrior like he was could be incredibly useful, though I doubted I¡¯d be able to convince him to join my group, even if Lia remained behind. He seemed to be quite loyal to Jack, with Daniel and Samantha commanding his loyalty to a slightly lesser degree, meaning I would need to mentally coerce or manipulate him to take him in, so a different use had to be found. The simplest, or at least easiest to accomplish, way to make use of him was to follow an idea I had a few days prior and pass Sigmir¡¯s fighting style onto him. That way, Sigmir¡¯s name, her face and even her weapon and fighting style would take root in this world, hopefully forming a sympathetic connection to her soul, making the summoning of said soul easier, even if my idea didn¡¯t result in her apotheosis. For that, I would have to do much more than just spread her name and teachings across the world; I would have to actively proselytise, which I was unwilling to try.


    The only question was how to pass on the style to him and, maybe more importantly, how to make sure it wasn¡¯t just he who would use it but as many people as possible. All of whom would have to be made aware that they were using a fighting style bestowed upon them by the grace of Sigmir of Mundus, though maybe calling her something else might be better, maybe Mountainbreaker Sigmir or possibly something referencing her bond with Ylva. Those were details I¡¯d have to work out at some point, as they would define who my beloved would be known as in the future after I revived her. Those names and the reputation coming with them would be the first impression anyone would have, so I needed to be cautious, or I might turn my beloved into some sort of caricature.


    ¡°Say, Murray, do you want to try your new modifications out?¡± I asked after I was as certain as I could be that the procedure was completely successful.


    ¡°That would be a good idea, indeed¡± he nodded, his usual stoic mannerism completely unchanged by the ritual and the pain he had undergone. ¡°Do you have a good way to accomplish that?¡±


    ¡°Why, yes, I do have an idea,¡± I gave him a grin before stepping towards my tower¡¯s portal to the outside, ¡°You will fight somebody you will be completely unable to harm, so don¡¯t worry about holding back, no matter what you do to the body, it¡¯ll be okay,¡± I assured him, already knowing the risk of having him fight some other person. On the other hand, fighting a person would be the best way to get used to his new powers, so the only thing I needed to do was to make the body that would do the fighting.


    A quick channelling of Overflow, a bit of drawing on the power continuously accumulating in the tower and Lady Hecate¡¯s shrine and the next moment, I could conjure a throne for myself with a wave of my hand before waving towards the open area in front of my tower. There, a large mass of Snow, Ice and Mist burst into existence, only to coalesce into a humanoid figure some eight feet tall, holding a massive weapon in hand. It was also clad in armour exactly as Sigmir had been after our visit with the dwarves, adding a bit of menace, even if the armour wasn¡¯t as strong as hers had been. This was just Hard Ice, with some normal Ice and Snow making up the body, all held together by copious amounts of Ice Magic.


    For a moment, I had to clamp down on my emotions to keep them from flailing out of control as Sigmir¡¯s form, as it was carved into my heart, was created on Terra for the first time, crafted from Ice, Snow and a large amount of my magic. Sadly, there was no innate spark of life within her, no soul, nothing but an empty shell made of Ice, a figure depicting my beloved, but my beloved remained as far away and untouchable as she had always been. Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road.


    Keeping my emotions firmly under control, I used Ice Magic to animate and control the statue. An experimental mix of Darkness and Mind Magic modelled after the magic I usually used to control my scrying constructs shifted my senses to the area around the statue.


    ¡°Now, let us fight,¡± Sigmir¡¯s voice, generated by Wind Magic, came from the statue, giving a fairly convincing illusion that it was speaking. At the same time, it levelled the Lok¡¯nar in its hand towards Murray in challenge, making it fairly obvious what was going on.


    Murray, to his credit, only raised a single eyebrow before moving towards the statute with his weapon in hand, ready to fight. In turn, I controlled the statue to advance, the Lok¡¯nar spinning in its hands as I quickly familiarised myself with the operation, drawing upon literally hundreds of hours I spent in training and battle with Sigmir. I knew her fighting style and, beyond everything else, I knew her body, maybe better than she knew it herself. I certainly had managed to make it sing in ways I doubted she had ever dreamed about.


    Pushing my raging emotions back under control, I focused on the statue, making sure that the outermost layer of it would be roughly as vulnerable as the flesh it represented would be, while the armoured parts roughly mirrored the strength of somewhat crude armour, giving Murray a fairly realistic target to fight. Similarly, the statue¡¯s movements, despite it being essentially a puppet controlled by my Ice Magic, were made to imitate Sigmir¡¯s movements as closely as possible without veering into some impossible acrobatics and stunts so Murray would be able to witness my beloved¡¯s style. Hopefully, he¡¯d ask about it later, allowing me to push him in the direction I wanted him to jump.


    For the first few minutes of the bout between the Sigmir statue and Murray, I kept things fairly simple, using the Lok¡¯nar as one would a normal axe without pushing anything or using any of the fancier tricks I had seen Sigmir use. It was a warm-up, plain and simple, though for me, it was more of an exercise to perfect the control I was using.


    Murray was the one kicking things up a notch, drawing upon his new enchantment to increase his speed and power, to which I reacted somewhat cheekily by surrounding the statue in a shimmering field of magic while using more power to control it, making its movements faster and stronger in turn. It was fairly similar to what Sigmir could have done around level fifty, using one of her boosting moves that drew upon her bond with Ylva, keeping Murray and the statue fairly equally matched when it came to attributes.


    Only, I didn¡¯t just match him in attributes; I decided to let him see just how the heavy weapon in the statue¡¯s hands could be used and swiftly shifted the grip from an end one, holding the Lok¡¯nar as one would an axe, to a middle one, where both blades of the axe could be used, sacrificing range for versatility.


    The moment I did that, Murray was completely on the back foot. He had no real idea how to cope with the unpredictable movements of the Lok¡¯nar. The two blades came at him from odd angles and with incredibly varied speeds, forcing him to react on instinct instead of understanding the flow of battle.


    Within moments, the blunted edges of the Lok¡¯nar scored one hit after another, not hard enough to bruise but with enough force to make him feel the impact and know that the strikes could have been crippling if not for my restraint and the blunted weapon. He quickly became desperate, trying to force the statue on the defensive by pushing his enchantment to the maximum, and I decided to let him have the attribute advantage. Instead of matching him, I focused purely on technique, parrying his blows away or catching them and letting their force be wasted. It was quite challenging; the enchantment gave him a fair advantage in raw power, but it didn¡¯t last all that long and soon he wasn¡¯t able to continue, his breathing laboured and his muscles shaking. In contrast, the statue had only a few minor chips, looking fairly pristine and making it obvious that Murray had lost.


    Not on attributes but purely on technique. Now, I just had to sell him the idea of learning that style. And create some way to have him learn while I wasn¡¯t present.

 Chapter 1101

    Convincing Murray to learn the style I had demonstrated took very little effort. One might even say no effort at all other than the offer was needed. He immediately agreed, though I still wasn¡¯t sure how I could let him learn without my presence.


    Controlling the statue directly, as I had for the demonstration, was fairly straightforward. As long as I was close enough, it worked just like one of my scrying constructs would, only that the material was Ice instead of Darkness, with a few other elements mixed in for utility. But to make the entire process automatic was an entirely different thing, for that, I would need something permanent. Some of it could be accomplished with texts, graphic descriptions and such, but a trainer was still needed. An enchanted statue of some sort, but one capable of moving independently, sentient to a degree, maybe even able to speak, though the last part was optional, just as remembering its students would be a bonus.


    Even one of those would be a fairly major feat of magic, but all of them? It was unlikely I would succeed in the time I was willing to spend. Hopefully, I will get somewhere with my idea. For that, I would have to jump fairly deeply into the nigh-endless lists of ¡®Ideas for Later¡¯ and make some of them a reality. The solution would, most likely, be a mixture of multiple different ideas I currently had, though which of my numerous and highly varied ideas would be the ones to give me success was a very good question. One I would have to answer if I wanted to make this work.


    Either way, creating an enchanted statue capable of teaching people a specific fighting style was be a major challenge, though the trick I had used to give Lady Hecate access to my memories and ideas about the ritual could be a good first step to accomplishing it. The only problem would be to weave a personality around the information; maybe I would be able to use some of the processes I had experimented with in the past when controlling Undead to create something like that. I doubted I would be able to make it actually intelligent, at least not at the level of a living being, but I was fairly confident I would be able to get something capable of moving on its own.


    Though sustaining said statue might be an entirely different challenge, I might have to bind it to the tower itself in an attempt to use the tower to fuel the statue and its animating enchantments. The spellwork used to tie the Oculus to the tower would be a good place to start. The thing was an incredible artefact, and after all, it was capable of impressive feats I would be hard-pressed to emulate, let alone replicate the entire thing. But maybe I would be able to copy some of it, even if the divine spellcasting used by Luna and Lady Hecate wasn¡¯t something I could casually make use of. However, no matter whether it worked or not, it would be an incredibly interesting challenge, one I was willing to delay our departure for a bit.


    Delaying would also allow Lia a little more time to come to a decision regarding her own plans. I had carefully prodded her a little, trying to get her to think about her options and plans, but from what I could see, she was torn by her own indecision. On the one hand, she felt a tremendous loyalty towards me and the rest of our little family. Luna was her dear little sister. Silva was a wonderful companion and an even better pillow on the occasion that either of them wanted to cuddle, and then there was Alex. Though, I didn¡¯t think Alex should count as I had little doubt that they would remain here, if Lia decided to stay.


    Lastly, there was her connection to me. There were so many layers to that particular bond it was somewhat difficult to insulate, which could be considered the most important. I had, quite literally, given a part of myself to create her current incarnation, used part of my Blood, Mind and even a bit of my Soul to turn the Shattered creature she had been back into what she was now. Just that alone would represent a tremendously strong bond but I had cemented that bond later by feeding her my own blood and magical essence before even that was strengthened further by the mantle of the ¡®Mother¡¯ thrust onto me.The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.


    Plus, the training, travelling and countless hours of conversation all made for a strong and powerful bond, not something easily discarded.


    And yet, I knew myself. I knew just how deeply my own relationship with Sigmir had affected me, how I had willingly ignored things simply because they were inconvenient and focused on every minute possibility, just so I would be able to keep my relationship with her. Now, I had no idea if Lia was the same as me in that regard, nor did I truly know how deeply she felt for Samantha, but I couldn¡¯t discard the possibility that Lia was like me, especially not given just how much of ¡®me¡¯ was in her. Intellectually, I knew all that. I knew that if it was me in Lia¡¯s shoes, having to decide between essentially anything and staying with Sigmir, I wouldn¡¯t hesitate to stay with Sigmir. And yet, despite knowing that, a strange, emotional part of me wanted Lia to decide she wanted to stay with me. It was selfish and not something I was proud of, but I could, or rather I had to, acknowledge that this part was a part of myself.


    However, regardless of my own feelings, I knew I had to make sure Lia would make the best decision she could, one as untainted as possible, so she would be able to live with whatever decision she ultimately made.


    Amusingly, I really recognised some of Lia¡¯s actions as mirrors of my own prior to the end of the Road to Purgatory. How I had pushed things aside, such as Silva¡¯s supposed status as an NPC, something not truly alive to the best of my knowledge, and simply acted as if it didn¡¯t matter. It hadn¡¯t mattered, not with the knowledge I now held, but back then, I had happily ignored such inconvenient truths and remained stubborn.


    Giving her that extra time would, hopefully, let her come to a decision she could live with because that was the most important part. She, herself, needed to be content with her decision. The rest of the world, including myself, would just have to deal with it.


    Additionally, something I hadn¡¯t told her just yet, I was fairly confident I would be able to return to the tower whenever I wished, simply because I knew it so well and had spent so much time in this area linked to the Astral here. I would be able to recognise it even at a great distance, allowing me to step through the shadows and appear here. A few runes I was planning to add to strategic places within the structure would make that even easier, though stepping back to the place where I had come from would be harder. It was not impossible, especially if I managed to come up with a solid mark and a runic formation to support that mark, so it wasn¡¯t as if any parting would be permanent.


    But all that was out of my hands. Advising Lia would be fine, but trying to control her wouldn¡¯t work. I knew my own mind that much, so why would a mind as influenced by mine as Lia¡¯s be any different?


    Instead, I should probably focus on the runes and enchantments needed to make the statue of Sigmir into a worthy trainer, able to spread the style of my beloved to those willing to learn so that those would later go out into the world and laud Sigmir¡¯s name.


    But how to make enchantments like that? Amusingly, the most obvious answer was to look where facsimiles of Life were part and parcel of the craft, in other words, necromancy. While I wasn¡¯t an actual necromancer, my focus when it came to Death Magic was its immediate and indiscriminate lethality. I had some experience, even if most of it was second-hand, stemming from Lenore and some of the things she had done and I had seen within her mind.


    Those ideas from my avian friend were somewhat beyond me. Lenore did have a pretty hefty affinity for all things death, after all, but I could use them to guide me.


    Just as I could look at the countless examples of Undead, I had seen shambling around here and use what animated them, just as I could use their minds to inspire the one I wanted to work into my statue. The difference, at the end of the day, was merely one of material.


    Smiling to myself, I started to work, pushing away all other thoughts and considerations as I was wont to do just like my daughter was.

 Chapter 1102

    Grinning to myself, I watched as a statue made from enchanted stone moved slowly but quite smoothly through a series of movements, emulating some of the training I had been given what felt like ages ago by Mrs. Wu. It wasn¡¯t anything tremendously complicated but given that the figure was nothing but stone, with a bit of crystal to improve magical transmission and reception, it was quite the feat. Good enough, even to be considered worthwhile to use in combat, at least if I managed to reduce the time I needed to create such a statue by a few orders of magnitude; otherwise, I would have to store them in my magical bag and pull out when needed, which might work. But, at least for now, conjuring and enchanting one of them in the heat of the moment was utterly impossible.


    This one, for example, shaped like a fairly generic humanoid figure without any real facial features, had taken me some thirty minutes to conjure before I had needed multiple sessions, altogether some thirty hours, to enchant it so it would move. The entire process required a tremendous amount of Astral Power, plus some of my vitality used for both Blood and Death Magic. It was, quite frankly, one of the hardest pieces of magic I had ever used, but coming up with it had been so incredibly worthwhile, even if it had taken time I had originally planned to use otherwise.


    If not for this particular project, we would have left this area almost a month ago, travelling north again. Though, in hindsight, I was quite happy that we hadn¡¯t left as soon as the ground was somewhat free of snow and mostly dried out, simply because it had only been somewhat dry and sunny for a few days before winter decided to return around the beginning of April, bringing with it a wonderful mixture of snow, rain and enough hail to make a Nazi parade happy. After all, calling for hail was practically their unique selling point. Well, calling for hail and rampant bigotry and racism, maybe there was some strange connection between shitty weather and shitty people.


    While I was confident that we could have weathered that particular nastiness, there was no doubt in my mind that it would have been incredibly uncomfortable. Instead, we stuck around in my comfortable tower, content to watch the wind uproot a tree or two in the forest around it, and the sheer amount of water coming from above had the creeks and brooks abandon their beds and spread all over the countryside. It was quite dramatic, really, though compared to the flooding we had witnessed in places as the snow further up in the mountains had thawed, it was fairly limited.


    Either way, with my project to analyse an Undead or five while trying to figure out what made them tick, I could easily occupy my time, and Lia had more than enough time to dither back and forth, never coming to a conclusion. If it wasn¡¯t such a serious topic, I might have suggested that she could use some form of randomisation, like a set of dice, and decide like that, but I kept that particular joke to myself. Even if leaving things up to chance was a legitimate means of decision. Or would it leave things up to fate if there was such a thing?


    Before the change, I would have immediately said there was no fate, but then, I would have said the same thing about magic. So, with an absurdly improbable thing as the system existing and interpreting the entire world in numbers, who was to say there was no way to use those numbers in some way to predict the future? And who was to say that there was no automatic process already doing so while possibly nudging things to create a desired outcome, though I had no clue what that outcome might be? It was a thought both interesting and incredibly scary, so I soon discarded the line of reasoning as unprovable and focused on other things. Like the statue I had planned and the enchantments I was pondering.


    ¡°Lia, my dear, would you like to test my newest creation?¡± I asked my daughter, who had been working on her own physical training, something we all had neglected somewhat during our time at the tower. Compared to our time travelling, the tower was a lot more suited to mental pursuits, allowing us to indulge a lot more than we could on the road, so a few things had fallen by the wayside. Not enough to hinder any of us, let alone ruin our physiques, but enough to dull some of the edge we usually had. If you stumble upon this tale on Amazon, it''s taken without the author''s consent. Report it.


    ¡°Sure, what did you make?¡± she asked, looking at me with curiosity in her eyes.


    Showing her to the room in which I had set up the enchanted statue, I gestured that she should enter the ring drawn around it while I was watching, hoping that things would work. The statue should, hopefully, recognise anyone stepping into the ring as an enemy and use the skills I had projected into its construction to attack them.


    Sadly, when I tried stepping into the ring, the statue didn¡¯t recognise me, possibly because its animating force was my own magic, preventing it from attacking me. Or maybe I had messed up that part of the enchantments, thus my experiment with Lia.


    Lia simply nodded, stepping across the line of crystal, and the statue started to move in response. Its initial attack was a little stiff, lacking the fluidity I would have hoped to see, and things didn¡¯t get much better from there. While the movements worked, it was quite obvious that the statue was a mere mimicry of life, lacking the spark of creativity that turned a mechanical routine into something worthwhile.


    To challenge someone like Lia, the statue would need a whole lot more power, something I wouldn¡¯t be able to impart continuously, not if I wanted it to draw power from the formations I had set up within the tower. Still, from the way Lia was moving and adapting, I could see the statue working as an initial training aid, allowing someone to reach the level of a novice in relatively short order.


    If I wanted the statue to be able to actually teach and not just provide an example, I would have to improve the enchantments I was currently using by a lot, especially when it came to adaptability, something the statue currently lacked entirely. It was merely able to recognise a foe and attack using the patterns I had imparted into the spells animating the stone. It could also react to a somewhat wide variety of physical attacks and block them, but, as I could see from the way Lia was readily toying with it, even that was incredibly limited. For now, it was merely a very advanced training dummy, not something able to teach people outright.


    Given the amount of work I had needed to get even this far, I doubted I would be able to create a satisfying version of this in the time I was willing to spend in the area, so a different solution was needed. Luckily, I already had a fairly good idea what I might be able to do, namely to set up an area similar to the shrine downstairs, only with writing regarding martial arts. There, I could add a few of these training dummies; that way, people should be able to train and get used to the things depicted on the walls, hopefully allowing them to understand the basics of the styles depicted and make them their own, thus carrying the name of Sigmir, and my own name for that matter, forward into this world.


    ¡°It needs some work,¡± Lia stated after stepping back out of the circle. She had been able to easily overcome the statue and only stepped back when it became obvious that the only way to stop it was to destroy it, something she luckily didn¡¯t do. Not because she was unable to, even if the statue was made from stone, Lia was more than able to destroy the material, to say nothing of her ability to erase the somewhat delicate runes carved on and into the material.


    ¡°If I wanted to use it for combat or to protect the tower, yes, it would need a lot of work,¡± I readily agreed with a nod, ¡°But that¡¯s not its purpose; it¡¯s supposed to serve as a training aid, helping those without a magical inclination to find their path forward. I doubt what I have in mind will be as useful as the various writings and teachings we have prepared below, but it might help close the distance.¡±


    Now it was Lia¡¯s turn to look somewhat pensive before she nodded, acknowledging the use of it before she spoke.


    ¡°Then you might want to start with something even simpler, just to make sure people have the basic motions down. If you start them at that level, I have a feeling there would be a lot of failing and flailing.¡±


    With a nod, I accepted her point and began to make a lesson plan. Multiple statues would be engaged in sequence and the writing accompanying those statues would hopefully give people a good chance to follow the martial path if they lacked the intelligence for the arcane path. If doing so happened to keep people from heading down the divine path, well, that would be a true tragedy.

 Chapter 1103

    Finally, there was nothing more to do. The gym I had set up worked as well as I could have hoped, even if I had been forced to add an entirely new building to Jademoon Tower, simply so I would have the space needed to set up. The enchanted statues were acting as demonstration dummies, allowing people to see the movements they were supposed to learn and, maybe more importantly, experience how they could be countered in an unthreatening situation; the writing had all been scribed, and I even had time to make things look fairly pretty, even if it was a utilitarian beauty.


    Now, the only thing needed was to finally have Lia decide whether she wanted to stay or go, something she had continued to dither about. But if Luna and I wanted to start moving, she couldn¡¯t postpone the decision any longer; she just had to come to a firm conclusion.


    ¡°Have you decided?¡± I asked, looking her straight in the eyes.


    For a moment, she hesitated and I saw her eyes flicker towards the wall of the tower as if to pierce through the rocks into the direction of the cottage I had set up for Samantha and her group, but then, she took a deep breath and nodded in affirmation. She had decided; now, she only needed to inform me of her decision.


    ¡°I want to stay,¡± she quietly declared, her voice soft but with an underlying strength, making it clear that she wouldn¡¯t be dissuaded.


    ¡°I wasn¡¯t sure which way you¡¯d jump,¡± I accepted her decision with a sad smile on my face, partially disappointed, but I had more than enough time to mentally prepare myself, so it wasn¡¯t as if I had been ambushed in some way.


    ¡°Has Alex decided as well?¡± Luna asked the question I didn¡¯t think needed to be asked, Alex had always shared a stronger connection with Lia than with anyone else, something I was mildly disappointed by. But then, it had been Lia¡¯s blood that had helped it to regain their mind from the infection of the Withered, so maybe it shouldn¡¯t be a surprise.


    ¡°They wish to stay in the area, too. It seems as if they managed to round up a bunch of others and form a group, something they don¡¯t want to leave behind,¡± Lia explained, getting accepting nods from Luna and me.


    ¡°Disappointing but not entirely unexpected,¡± I admitted, ¡°We¡¯ll have to see just how deeply I can embed your being into the tower; I have a few ideas that might allow you to siphon off Astral Power from the Astral River directly while you are within the tower as if you were drinking from a living being. It should give you a major edge in any confrontation, to say nothing about the utility coming with such a connection; I believe I might even be able to grant you parietal control over the work I have done here.¡±


    Lia was quite wide-eyed when I finished my explanation, a look shared on Luna¡¯s face, something I deeply relished. Luna had, thanks to the continued education of Lady Hecate, become quite the theorist, even if her practical knowledge remained quite a bit behind my own, mainly because Lady Hecate taught her nothing but theory. If Luna wanted to have more arcane combat magic, she had to come up with it on her own unless she wanted to draw on some of Lady Hecate¡¯s power, an act she would be punished for by her ¡®boss¡¯ outside of emergencies.


    ¡°How would that work?¡± Luna couldn¡¯t help but ask, a lot more interested in the arcane properties than Lia was, as was to be expected of Lady Hecate¡¯s chosen.


    For the next thirty minutes, I was busy explaining the exact details to Luna, especially the part where I had allowed myself to be inspired by the shrine, just with a different focus. Instead of connecting a local space and having it interact with Lady Hecate and Her power, I was using a local space and a limited overlap with the Astral River to draw power into the local area, essentially forming a very localised and fairly controlled area of Wild Magic. It was another outcropping of the work I had done to animate the statues, just turned towards another direction. It was quite the feat if I were to say so myself, though I doubted it would allow Lia to completely abstain from drinking blood. Not that I thought my daughter wanted to, but from what I had covertly observed, it was something both Lia and Samantha enjoyed a great deal, making me feel more than a little complicated.Unauthorized tale usage: if you spot this story on Amazon, report the violation.


    Maybe it was for the best that Lia stayed behind with Samantha; after witnessing just how¡­ invested the pair was when Lia drank Samantha¡¯s blood, I wasn¡¯t quite sure I would be comfortable with the process, especially not immediately after leaving the area.


    There had always been an interesting component to the entire ritual, and it was not always comfortable for me. Now, after seeing them go at it and knowing that they would go at ¡®it¡¯ afterwards, too, that component would likely be even stronger. Luckily, it didn¡¯t seem as if my dear daughter would be trying to kill me with embarrassment.


    ¡°Erm, Mother?¡± Lia interrupted the discussion between Luna and me, returning focus to the dinner table and our food. Both Luna and I immediately blushed, realising that we had gotten quite far off track and derailed the original discussion so far that it couldn¡¯t even be seen.


    ¡°Yes, Carnelia,¡± I had to hide the grin that threatened to break the innocent mien I had forcibly adopted, acting as if nothing had happened, ¡°You know, we never managed to nail Jack down and have him make a decision in regards to the empowerment ritual. Or did you manage at some point?¡± I asked, derailing whatever train of thought she might have just established.


    ¡°No, he never said, but, honestly, I think that¡¯s just as much of a decision as saying something would be. If he doesn¡¯t want the ritual, it¡¯s on him. I doubt he¡¯d get all that far on the Arcane Path anyway, but he¡¯s almost an adult and can make his own choices,¡± Lia snarked, making us all chuckle for a moment over her dig at Jack¡¯s maturity or lack thereof, something we all had experienced at some point. The guy could be incredibly, and annoyingly, childish if he wanted to be, which was far too often for everybody¡¯s taste. Still, he was a competent leader and hunter, so there was that. If I had to guess, I would say he knew that the tower was a safe area, allowing him to lay down the burden of leadership and the responsibility inherent to it, letting him relax.


    ¡°Agreed, though I think I¡¯ll still offer it one last time; maybe he¡¯ll bite knowing that you¡¯ll stay in the area,¡± I grinned, curious just how Jack would react to that tidbit of information.


    ¡°Do what you want,¡± Lia sulked before shaking her head and continuing her original train of thought, ¡°And speaking of things we want, would you be willing to redecorate the tower a little, change a few things, make it easier to use for people who aren¡¯t as dedicated to the Arcane Path as Luna and you are?¡± Lia asked, her sulky expression replaced with a cheeky grin as if it had never been there.


    ¡°Depends on what you have in mind?¡± I shrugged, ¡°Though, you should be aware that you will only be the one living here. I¡¯ll still be the owner, kind of as if I was your landlord,¡± I told her, and now it was my turn to grin cheekily.


    ¡°But why? It¡¯s not like you¡¯ll be around the area in the future, right? You wanted to head north until you get to wherever that Nexus is,¡± she paused, ¡°Has that thing formed by now anyway?¡±


    ¡°It has formed but not stabilised. If I were to guess, I¡¯d say that the Nexus are currently areas of Wild Magic, where Astral Power surges into the world in waves but they have not yet settled and become the pools of power I have seen on Mundus. They might not turn into those naturally anyway, it¡¯s not as if there were a lot of people around to study their generation. Or would that be gestation, I¡¯m not sure,¡± I explained with a frown before returning to her other question.


    ¡°And for the question of whether I¡¯ll be around or now, you know I can step through the shadows, right?¡± I asked, now with the earlier grin back on my face, ¡°There¡¯s no reason why I wouldn¡¯t be able to prepare an anchor here, allowing me to step back whenever I want, so I¡¯ll still be able to occasionally look in on you, make sure everything¡¯s alright, things like that,¡± I explained and for a moment, Lia looked thoughtful before accepting my explanation with a nod.


    ¡°Could be worse, I guess,¡± she had a smirk on her face, making the joke obvious. Soon, the serious discussion ended in jokes and laughter, as they sometimes did. There were a lot worse endings to any evening.

 Interlude: Let it be...

    There were days during which Jenn had to ask herself, just when did things go this wrong? Was it the original day when reality suddenly flipped its lid, the axle came off, and everything went off the rails or was that merely the first of many steps on the long, drawn-out path ultimately leading to the shitty situation she now found herself in?


    Sure, that first day had been bad, when the world literally caught on fire and her only desire had been to get out of the suddenly burning house, her mind frantic with worry for her child with little comprehension of anything else. Nothing had mattered; it was just that tiny little life she needed to shelter, the one all too dependent on her for warmth, comfort, and sustenance.


    They had managed, with more than a little luck, to survive and even find shelter, the group around them growing during those initial days as some of the braver people ventured out to collect food, holding out hope that somebody would come to rescue them.


    And, to their luck, eventually, somebody actually came, though not the military or any sort of governmental authority as some had expected and hoped for, but a single, possibly insane woman with her dog and daughter. And what a serious mental challenge accepting that image had been, not just because those three had gone through the monsters quite literally scratching at their doors like threshers through grain but because the only somewhat normal-looking being of those three was the dog. Not the pale, blue woman, with her crazy, glowing eyes and sparkling highlights in her hair, and certainly not the inhumanely pale daughter, with eyes of solid crimson, looking as if somebody had put gems into the sockets of her eyes. Maybe to hide the fire burning within them, but at that point, as desperate as they all had been, nobody had really cared.


    All anyone in their little group had cared about was that this insane woman was offering them a path to safety, a path she was willing and obviously able to deliver. When said insane woman even decided to adopt, for lack of a better word, one of the children sheltering with the adults as her second daughter, it only added to their acceptance.


    Not that Jenn wasn¡¯t faintly amused at the entire situation, especially after her husband recognised the insane woman as his former friend, gaming buddy and teammate from school, with whom he had reconnected just months earlier. Reconnected to the point that Jenn had met the woman, largely due to her own insistence, prodded by some shifty and shady behaviour of her husband, a few things that didn¡¯t quite add up, or rather, a few things that added up to something she wasn¡¯t happy with. So, meeting Samantha and getting to know her, only to realise that a few things Samantha admitted only added to her earlier calculus and made her husband look even worse.


    Normally, she might have suspected some guile or trickery; after all, Chris was supposedly an excellent catch with everything a woman would want in a husband. Handsome, stable job, financial security and all the right ingredients, if not for that bit of infidelity rearing its ugly head in the whole Samantha situation. Still, from what she had been able to observe, Samantha was about as much of a danger to her relationship as the dog next door, though Chris might have been able to lure the dog with treats. Samantha, not so much, especially when Jenn realised that Sam was very much taken and very much interested in the female persuasion. So, she was not a threat, and their meeting only resulted in a fair bit of amusement for Jenn, especially when she handed Sam their baby; that look on the woman¡¯s face was just such a joy to behold. A complete mix of flabbergasted, disgusted, confused and utterly lost; if she had been able to take a picture, she might have been able to sell it only as the face of ¡®WTF¡¯. Alas, any picture of Sam would also have had Sebastian, their baby in it, so no pictures could be taken or sold, as tragic as that was.


    But while taking a picture of the moment was impossible, it was readily obvious that Samantha had about as much experience with children as she had with something outlandish as aeroplane mechanics or underwater basket weaving¡ªthat is, none at all.


    And yet, that same woman who had just a few months prior looked at a baby as if she was holding a mix between a nuclear bomb and a bag of rotten fish, but now, just a little later, had a teenager calling her ¡®mother¡¯ and was making an obvious effort to in another child? Something didn¡¯t quite add up, but at the end of the day, Jenn didn¡¯t see a need to make waves. Instead, she simply accepted the safety offered by Samantha and those people she knew at that old apple orchard. Maybe that was the day she made the wrong choice; maybe she should have tried sticking with Samantha and her strange but growing family.The author''s narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.


    Sadly, the safety and comfort hadn¡¯t lasted all that long, and, to Jenn¡¯s everlasting shame, she was cognizant of the part Chris had planned to end the precious haven for her child and her. How he had been part of a group trying to manage the farm and the people living there, how they had applied all the wonderful lessons of the time before the world had shifted to that thriving little community, only for the world to remind them that those lessons required certain preconditions to apply. Things like the import of cheap labour or the shifting of production abroad to keep up with the ever-rising demand for growth. Without those conditions, Apple Gate Farm, as the community continued to be called, didn¡¯t thrive and grow as their models and prognostics suggested it should if people just listened to them. Instead, things quickly fell apart.


    Amusingly, it wasn¡¯t all that obvious when things started to go wrong. Maybe that was the biggest problem. Nobody had the means, experience, and will to make the people listen to them, unlike the people who spoke in a calm and measured voice, who only lacked the good suit and tie as symbols of their success and authority. Instead, those people who were listened to because people had grown accustomed to listening to them and people like them managed to chart a course, using a mix of fancy language, actual planning and their so-called statistical prognostics, not that those prognostics were worth the air needed to say them, let alone the paper to compute them. Statistical prognostics worked, obviously, with statistics, trying to see trends from history and use those trends to predict tomorrow. How was that supposed to work with the changed world, with people being able to work literal magic and strange zombies roaming the streets? Jenn wasn¡¯t sure, but she had a feeling that neither was anyone else. But they managed to paint a wonderful picture with their words and convince a vast majority that their way was the only way real Americans would walk.


    The few dissidents were the first to leave. Maybe she should have tried leaving with them, even if it would have meant serious hardship for her and Sebastian. Alas, she had decided to stay, maybe allowing herself to be convinced by Chris and his honeyed words.


    Sadly, those dissidents weren¡¯t just the dirty labourers Chris and his buddies portrayed them to be, they were, quite literally, the cogs keeping things running, their newly developed skills and magical abilities utterly pivotal to the entire community.


    And yet, they managed to trudge on, one compromise, one sacrifice and one mistake at a time, until winter came and forced them to confront their situation head-on. They didn¡¯t have the supplies, even with the strict rationing, not if they needed to survive until they could harvest new crops. There simply wasn¡¯t enough food.


    Starving people were desperate people and as desperation set in, what was left of their shared humanity was soon abandoned on the altar of compromise and survival. Things like the care of their young, of the mothers and children, died a cruel death alongside the wonderful notion of chivalry.


    At that moment, when Jenn realised she had to choose between surviving on her own, with nobody but herself to rely on to keep herself and her precious toddler alive or staying with that group and being forced to see her child die, at that moment Jenn made a choice.


    Even if she knew it, the only choice a mother could make was most likely a futile gesture of defiance. But, futile or not, she was not willing to remain in a world that sacrificed her baby. In leaving, she had taken what little she could, even knowing that it would force others to endure hunger; she needed to keep what little strength she had to protect her baby. Unbidden, old memories came to her: memories of her childhood and lessons about religion. Even songs played in her mind, speaking of finding oneself in times of trouble.


    Without any other options, and knowing that it might just keep her mind occupied, she decided to pray, addressing her prayer to Mother Mary, hoping that she might keep a desperate mother and her child safe.


    Strangely, the image playing in her mind as sleep started to take her wasn¡¯t that of Mother Mary and her Son but that of Samantha, holding the little girl she had adopted while she was holding Sebastian. Finally, sleep took her, but somehow, in the embrace of the night and the Mother, Jenn was sleeping safely and soundly for the first time in many, many months.

 Chapter 1104

    Looking at my character sheet, I wasn¡¯t sure if I was supposed to be pleased or disappointed. Over the last few months, almost five of them, we had spent in and around Jademoon Tower; I had made some progress with levels and skills but far less than I would have liked. The lack of danger undoubtedly made itself felt, leaving me with a level of hundred and fourteen, almost entirely thanks to the nearby dungeon and the EXP gained from teaching. But even that dungeon had only given me any real EXP the first time we ventured through it, and the subsequent runs had given a fairly limited amount.


    When it came to skills, the biggest stand-outs were in the realm of Blood Magic. The skill itself had gained a good dozen levels or so, reaching level sixty-four, while the Rune Mastery had also gained ten or so skill points, getting to level fifty-nine and giving me access to the Imbue-Rune. The rune was quite interesting, especially in its enchanting utility, but it came with its limitations, as everything did. Still, it was nice to have and played a significant role in developing the enchantment used on the training statues. Also, I could have used it a lot for the empowering enchantment if only I had received it beforehand, but this might just be a chicken-vs-egg problem. Did I learn the rune because I had used something essentially represented by the rune, or did the rune represent something I had worked a lot with?


    Other skills with significant gains were Death Magic, Mind Magic, Astral Meditation, both types of Earth Magic, Crystal Magic and Enchanting, all of which had gained some points, though none had accomplished any significant milestones. Still, it was nice to see some of my more obscure skills grow, especially as their generally lower numerical values meant I received more growth for the same effort. Well, outside of Mind Magic, but given the amount of work I had put into the enchantments on the statues and my general research on the Mind, I could expect some decent pay-out, so getting four points and jumping from seventy-eight to eighty-two wasn¡¯t too bad. At least when comparing those to the paltry point or two I had gained in my other primary magic. Granted, I had barely used Ice or Darkness Magic to make anything during the last few months, nor had there been any fights forcing me to push those skills to their limits and beyond, but still, a single point? Maybe two? It was just a little disappointing.


    Still, overall, I couldn¡¯t complain all that much; these last few months had been interesting and peaceful, not necessarily the desperate and brutal environment needed to foster significant skill growth. Even with the system, the old saying about necessity being the mother of innovation held true, so comfort could be considered the killer of innovation and growth.


    On the morning before our planned departure, I made the various students assemble, though quite a few of those we had been teaching couldn¡¯t make it; some didn¡¯t even know about the assembly. While I had taken two days before, or rather two nights, to fly around with my draconic wings to spread the word, a few of our students had been out and about, preventing me from finding them and spreading the word. Regardless, it was a fairly impressive number of people waiting for me to speak. Hopefully, I wouldn¡¯t disappoint them all that much.


    ¡°Good Afternoon,¡± I greeted the various students who had come to Jademoon Tower to train their bodies now that the gym was ready or learn more magic, something easily possible thanks to the ever-growing library. Luna even managed to create an enchanted stone that let people add to the library, courtesy of Lady Hecate. Now, the only thing left was to bestow the title of tower master on Lia, hopefully giving her the respect she needed to continue my work here, especially those parts that might eventually add to the emerging divinity Luna and I held.


    ¡°As you undoubtedly have heard, my group is planning to continue our journey on the morrow. We have collected what we needed and made sure everything will continue to work here, even after we left,¡± I began and immediately noticed a brief flash of glee on Jack¡¯s face, as if this was confirmation Lia wouldn¡¯t be around much longer.A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.


    ¡°However, given the effort we have put into the tower and the area, my daughter Carnelia and her companion Alex have decided to stick around and protect the tower, just in case somebody wants to destroy what we have created here. She obviously has my full trust and while she is a little lacking when it comes to arcane knowledge, she is a formidable alchemist and will continue to teach that here, just like the library and gym will allow everyone to improve their martial and magical arts,¡± I finished my explanation and noticed quite a few mixed expressions on different faces. Some of the locals didn¡¯t want me to leave; others might want us all to leave, and, again, others might only want Lia to leave while Luna and I remained behind. It was an interesting exercise to try and read just what everyone had in mind, but without Mind Magic, it sadly was one I had no chance to succeed in. Not that I truly wanted to; I had no doubt that the human, or rather sapient, mind was a cesspool of filth and deviancy, not something any sane being would want to dive into.


    ¡°Either way, the library and gym will continue to grow, especially if various people add their own experiences to them. Additionally, I¡¯m planning to drop in from time to time, though the frequency and duration of such visits are obviously tied to my own travels, as you likely can imagine,¡± I paused before giving a light bow to the assembled audience.


    ¡°To all of you students, I hope that you all can tread proudly on the Path you have chosen, and I bid you farewell,¡± I ended my small speech by literally fading into the shadows and disappearing, a small smile playing on my face. The assembled crowd was briefly confused, but Lia appeared from the shadows, just as I had discussed with her, driving home the image of her replacing me we had been playing with.


    As Lia continued the speech, only now with her own drift, I appeared with Luna, who was joined by Daniel and Maggy; both looked quite amused at our antics.


    ¡°Quite the speech there, Jade,¡± Maggy complimented me, a wry grin on her face, ¡°I¡¯d give it seven out of ten, thanks to an extra point or two for the special effects. Otherwise, it was, eh, mediocre, don¡¯t give up your day job to become a speech-writer,¡± she advised, her mirth only growing as she spoke.


    ¡°Everyone¡¯s a critic,¡± I chuffed, simultaneously amused by her words but also just a little bit insulted. Sure, I knew I wasn¡¯t the best when it came to words, but that didn¡¯t mean I wanted to have that pointed out.


    ¡°I don¡¯t think it was that bad. She managed to convey her message quite clearly, and everyone knows she¡¯s still around, even if Lia has the day-to-day reins,¡± Daniel pointed out, to which Maggy nodded.


    ¡°Well, yeah, that¡¯s why she¡¯d get a five, maybe even six, for the words and delivery, but that¡¯s just about the bare minimum. What¡¯s next? Do you want her to get points for her ability to speak clearly and with proper elocution?¡± Daniel looked a little bit embarrassed by that, though by now, I started to chuckle at their antics. It was obvious that Maggy had some slightly elevated standards, so maybe getting a five out of ten for my words alone was better than nothing; the only way to find out would be to ask her for comparisons. But that would be far too much effort for something I had limited interest in the first place, so I only shook my head and changed the topic.


    ¡°What do you think Jack will make of this?¡± I asked Daniel, ending the slight bickering between Maggy and him.


    ¡°Good question; he might be a little bit annoyed, especially after he didn¡¯t take you up on that offer you gave him,¡± Daniel admitted with a shrug of his shoulders.


    ¡°Hopefully, he¡¯ll be able to find his own path. I do like him, at least a little. It would be a shame if his pride, or whatever foolishness is driving him, managed to get him killed before he could even take the first step, let alone make significant progress on his path,¡± I admitted, briefly shaking my head.


    ¡°Eh, he¡¯s got all the tools to succeed; if he doesn¡¯t, it¡¯s all on him, nothing anybody can do about it,¡± Maggy reminded me, getting a nod of acceptance in return. The only one responsible for one¡¯s success was oneself, at least now, after the world had Change¡¯d

 Chapter 1105

    Being back on the road, or rather the rugged, still slightly soggy path through the mountains, was strangely liberating. Sure, we had travelled extensively in the area around the tower, often making trips lasting multiple days and covering more distance than we currently had made from it, but now, knowing that we wouldn¡¯t turn around at some point made the entire experience different. The path might be one we had walked before, but we, the people walking it, had changed, or something along those lines.


    Another thing making it somewhat weird was the knowledge that we had said farewell to Lia, possibly farewell for a fairly long time if I wasn¡¯t able to create some sort of beacon, allowing me to step back and forth without the extensive time I had spent immersed in the Astral River and the realm of Shadows around the tower, learning their details intimately and thus getting a feel for the area. Given that it had taken me multiple months, and I wasn¡¯t certain across what sort of distances I would be able to detect that familiar area, I wasn¡¯t sure I could make something similar easily. Maybe once we eventually reached our destination, I might be able to step back and forth between there and the tower, but again, it would take some time and experimentation. For now, it had been farewell, though a slightly odd one.


    The farewell had been a weird mix of subdued emotions and casual affection; none of us truly knew how to say farewell in a meaningful way, so we ended up with a brief embrace before we simply walked away. A part of me felt there was supposed to be some sort of gravitas, maybe dramatic music playing in the background or wide, panning shots of the valley we had shaped over the last few days, possibly a crowd of people, all waving and cheering. Granted, the lack of people might have been due to our departure being just after dusk, not around dawn when one would expect, but still, it felt as if something had been missing. I just couldn¡¯t pin down what that ephemeral ¡®something¡¯ was.


    ¡°What do you think? How did other groups out there fare over the winter?¡± Luna asked, simply talking to pass the time as we continued to set one foot before the other. Silva was a little ahead of us, scouting and remaining vigilant, allowing us to relax just a little. Comparatively, I was well aware that missing Lia and, to a lesser degree, Alex made our group weaker than it had been, though not to the point that I would have been willing to recruit any of the locals we had encountered. They were all either lacking in the strength department, even if the enchantment had assuaged that to a certain degree or in the brains department, in some cases, even both. Additionally, a few people were simply assholes, no two ways about it, and certainly not people I would be willing to travel with for any length of time. So, now that it was only the three of us, we would have to be a little more cautious and vigilant, maybe keep an eye out to see if we could find somebody to take Lia¡¯s place, as unlikely as that was. And as disloyal as it felt, having a fourth and fifth person could be useful.


    ¡°Some will have died, others will have endured,¡± I shrugged, shaking myself out of my contemplative thoughts, ¡°Overall, I don¡¯t think the impact we had on the area around the tower was all that profound, at least not on the lowest level. I¡¯d bet that people managed to figure out how to conjure water on their own. It¡¯s not like it¡¯s a terribly complicated concept. As long as the one in question has at least some affinity to Water, simply wishing for water hard enough would work and once that first step is taken, things get a lot easier. And a drowning person will wish for water and gladly take it wherever it comes from.¡±


    ¡°Mh, probably true,¡± she nodded, ¡°And there are enough Gods out there who¡¯d lend a hand, too. Maybe not exactly in the way people would expect, or with a price they don¡¯t enjoy paying, but they would lend a hand to grow their flock.¡± This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.


    ¡°Always remember, the shepherd doesn¡¯t tend the flock because he likes sheep, even if some of them might. The shepherd tends his flock so he can shear them for their wool and slaughter some of them for their meat,¡± I reminded her, though the relationship we had with Hecate was strange in that regard. I couldn¡¯t see the usual give-and-take between deity and devout, though whether that meant I was blind to that particular truth or if Lady Hecate¡¯s game was an entirely different one, I couldn¡¯t tell.


    The only real exchange we had engaged in was one of knowledge and ideas, not the usual power, making the relationship more akin to one between students and teacher or maybe fellow researchers at some sort of symposium, both sides contributing to a greater body of knowledge. Sure, Lady Hecate had a great deal more knowledge and nigh-infinitely more experience, but we were only starting out. Maybe, depending on our individual lifespans, we might eventually reach a point where we could give actual contributions to that greater body of knowledge and even advance Lady Hecate¡¯s understanding.


    For a moment, I had to grin at the idea of Lady Hecate carefully nurturing students across dozens, or maybe hundreds, of worlds, who know how many there might be. If even a fraction of those students reached a level at which they could contribute to Her understanding and thus further Her domain, it might just make up for the lack of an organised church. Plus, the lack of an organised church also meant Lady Hecate didn¡¯t need to spend whatever divine resources the other gods had to spend on their followers, possibly giving Her another advantage. It was an interesting idea, though I doubted I¡¯d be able to learn whether it was truth or just a wild figment of my imagination soon. This sounded like something the Lady would only tell those who had gained enough power to be considered Her peers.


    ¡°It¡¯ll be cool to meet new people again,¡± Luna mused a few minutes later, breaking me out of my thoughts once more.


    ¡°We hardly met everyone around Denver Springs, you know? Just those with an interest in meeting us or coming to the tower. And even of those we met, I know I hardly know any of them. Outside of my students, I¡¯d say I know a bare handful back there and with my students, the topics were mostly focused on magic. Again, I wouldn¡¯t claim to know them,¡± I shrugged, getting a grin in return.


    ¡°That¡¯s because you can be just a little bit intimidating, Mom,¡± she stretched the ¡®little out while holding up her hands, indicating a distance of maybe two inches between her fingers, while the other hand showed a much, much greater length, making the joke fairly obvious. ¡°And not terribly social to boot, you don¡¯t want to talk with most people and, believe me, they noticed fairly quickly. You are many things, Mom, and I love you deeply, but ¡®subtle¡¯ is not one of those things you are. You either remain entirely unnoticed thanks to your magic, or you command the attention of the room.¡±


    There was no answer I could give but a slightly annoyed snort, especially as I knew her words to be true. Granted, a bit part of that was thanks to the relative inexperience everyone had with the more arcane parts of the system, meaning some of the markings of power on my body were seen as more extraordinary than they actually were, but that didn¡¯t change the fact that I wasn¡¯t a social operator and couldn¡¯t be bothered to try learning.


    ¡°Well, I¡¯m sure wherever we go next, you¡¯ll find a few people somewhere around. It''s not like humans didn¡¯t spread across the globe before the change, though I¡¯m fairly certain that many communities died due to it. It would be interesting to see just how many of the older communities did, like some of the remote tribes. On the one hand, they might not rely on modern technology as everyone else did, but on the other hand, even a few Shattered amongst them might be enough to tip the balance,¡± I thought out loud, wondering how much of their heritage those tribes would have preserved. It likely depended on local circumstances, with no simple, general answer being possible. Especially in the north, where we were heading, the various tribes had likely adopted modern technology and the doom that came with it during the change simply out of a combination of necessity and convenience. Still, it would be interesting to see how the various groups out there had adapted and managed to overcome the challenges posed to them.

 Chapter 1106

    ¡°This is fascinating,¡± I had to admit, watching as the latest experiment Luna and I had conducted together was getting just a tiny bit out of hand. Given that it was spring and thus the season of, well, reproduction, we decided to get in on the ground floor and see what might happen if we altered the seed of some plants just a little. Or maybe more than a little, as we could now see after we had spread those altered seeds across a small mountain valley the day before. Now, within a little over twenty-four hours, the seeds had started to sprout and done so with an unholy vengeance, filling the small valley with a number of plants that seemed to outstrip the number of seeds we had originally altered.


    ¡°We could call them Windchimes; it¡¯s a nice name, don¡¯t you think?¡± Luna asked, listening to the fascinating sounds our creations made. The seeds had originally come from sunflowers, simply because getting those seeds was fairly simple, and from there, we had added just a bit of elemental manipulation, alongside a good boost with Life Magic from Luna and a bit of, well, chaos, courtesy of my Darkness Magic. Adaptability was a wonderful thing, though the entire combination might have overdone it just a little bit.


    The plants now looked like a cross between a leek and a reed, a single, long and green leaf, sticking straight up, almost a metre in height, with a tiny flowering bulb sitting roughly in the middle, making them just a little odd. These singular leaves were part of the plants¡¯ magical organ, allowing them to use Wind Magic and chime with a fairly pleasant sound. Maybe a little too pleasant.


    Somehow, the seeds had taken the Chaos and Life as their foundation and built a sturdy magical function from there, using the Wind Magic we had included to improve their propagation to make something entirely new and unexpected. Namely, a plant able to make sounds and use those sounds to lure and possibly kill, though we had yet to observe that, its prey. It was quite ingenious, though I began to wonder just why so many plants went in a carnivorous direction, trying to lure and kill their prey instead of allowing some poor herbivore to eat the plant and regrow at a later point, possibly using the nutrients said herbivore excreted later to start anew. If the plants continued as they seemed to be inclined to, herbivore behaviour would change as the normally fairly harmless plants became just as much, if not a bigger, of a danger than the predators normally hunting them.


    It was just a little bit disconcerting, though also incredibly fascinating to observe, and it gave me more than a few ideas. Individually, the magic these plants used wasn¡¯t all that sophisticated, at least not according to my current understanding, but when some five-hundred-odd plants layered the same beguiling effect, things got quite potent fairly fast. Even now, despite knowing of the effect and having a fairly strong and resilient mind, I could feel a small temptation to go down there and check the plants out up close. Only, I wasn¡¯t sure if that idea was a natural one, born from my incessant curiosity, which had caused me to stumble into danger more than once or if it was induced by the soft, chiming noises the numerous plants made as they caused a soft breeze to swirl in the valley.


    ¡°It¡¯s a nice name, yes, though we might want to see if the system has already named them; otherwise, trying to give them a different name would be just silly. We should also try to find out how these plants go about killing their prey once they managed to lure it in, just so we know if it is something we should include in the name,¡± I suggested, letting my eyes drift across the lower valley, where the noise was likely the loudest.


    As we were watching, a curious deer of some sort must have wandered just a little bit too close to the lower valley, falling into the thrall of the as-of-yet unnamed plants. It started to make its way closer, moving slowly and with a lot less caution than I would expect from a wild animal, but that might be due to the enthralling effect of the chimes. Whatever the reason, it didn¡¯t take all that long for it to come close to the chimes and once it stepped past a somewhat arbitrary line, the entire situation shifted in moments.Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.


    Suddenly, the air was filled with the chiming noises, and I could faintly see the wind in the valley below pick up, blowing past the entire field of wind chimes and, once I activated my magical sight, I could see the wind carry a fairly sizable load of magically charged objects. Immediately, I began to worry if Luna and I had accidentally created something like the Withered Fungus we had encountered back home but the elements didn¡¯t match what I would have expected for one, nor did it give me the same overall impression. Plus, there was the lack of a hivemind here, which had been the greatest danger from the Withered Fungi, their collective power, not the way an individual mushroom could control something.


    Then, the small particles covered the briefly confused and stunned deer, only for the thing to bolt moments later, running down the valley, its coat covered in seeds.


    ¡°It might be a strategy to spread their seed around,¡± I mused before pushing myself into the air so I could keep an eye on the bolting deer, just to make sure the thing wasn¡¯t infected with some horrifying magical disease. If it was only a case of the plants using other animals to carry their seed, I wasn¡¯t too bothered by it; that had always been a fairly usual adaption for them. If it was something more sinister, I might have to make sure Luna and I hadn¡¯t accidentally created something that could threaten the world if it wasn¡¯t nipped in the literal bud.


    While the deer was quite adept at fleeing on land, it wasn¡¯t really able to escape from aerial pursuit, at least not in an open area as the valley was. Once it was further down the mountain, it could disappear into the forest, but up here, without any cover, the silly thing was fairly screwed. Luckily for it, I wasn¡¯t a raptor looking for a snack; I was just interested in observing. As it ran, I focused my sight on it, trying to determine if the seeds it was covered in were digging in and infecting it in some fashion or if they were just hanging on until they would eventually drop and try to germinate in a new area.


    By the looks of it, this was a case of merely hanging on; the silly deer wasn¡¯t suffering any ill effects I could see, though, after a few moments of contemplation, I decided to make sure and knocked the thing out with a somewhat gentle burst of Mind Magic. It shouldn¡¯t cause permanent harm, and I even timed it right so the stupid animal wouldn¡¯t hurt itself as it crumbled.


    Once it was down, I let myself drop, carefully shielding myself from the seeds with a layer of Wind and Death Magic, just in case these seeds had some fancy way of jumping from host to host. It didn¡¯t look like it, but I wasn¡¯t about to be completely careless, even just getting close enough to examine the deer with my Blood Magic was a risk but a calculated one.


    But also, as it turned out, a needless one, the seeds were just that, seeds, and what we had seen wasn¡¯t an attempt to kill some sort of prey or turn it into a zombified monster to spread some sort of disease, it was just akin to a bee getting covered in pollen or a bird swallowing the seeds as it ate some berries, which would be excreted at a later time. These plants were just a little more proactive by the looks of it.


    Shaking my head, I decided to heal the silly deer back up, making sure that no damage had come from its tumble while also adding a small service and curing it of a few small problems it had. These were just the usual ailments that could crop up in wild animals, but I felt generous.


    Then, I rose back up into the air, erasing any trace of my passing, just in case the thing got paranoid or something, before checking myself again, just in case I had missed something while treating the deer.


    But no, I was just as unaffected by any potential contamination as I had been minutes before and soon, I returned to Luna, who had continued to watch the field with Silva. Only now, there was a dead goat lying near the plants, making me wonder just how that had happened.

 Chapter 1107

    Looking at the goat the Windchime Grass, as I was currently calling it in my head, had killed, I could only wonder just how that had worked. The deer I had examined just minutes earlier had been in perfect condition as it fled, only covered in the seeds spread by the grass, carrying them down the mountain so they could germinate elsewhere, but the goat was undoubtedly dead. Very dead, so dead, in fact, that it had somehow managed to spread a fair amount of its blood, alongside a few shreds I thought used to be parts of the goat¡¯s innards, but with the way they had been shredded and spread out, I just couldn¡¯t tell.


    Landing next to Luna, I raised an eyebrow in question, curious what my daughter might have observed from the events.


    ¡°Well, I wouldn¡¯t get too close to the grass,¡± she suggested, her face remaining perfectly straight and serious as she spoke, ¡°It might have something to do with the roots it spread, I think I can feel them beneath the soil where the goat started to dig, but as it turns out, the grass not only has a mechanism to lure things close so they can be covered in seed,¡± at that she giggled for a moment, a small blush on my face that managed to cause a budding headache somewhere deep in my brain, ¡°But also one to defend itself if the thing they lured too close doesn¡¯t want to leave once it¡¯s been seeded.¡±


    ¡°What did that mechanism look like? I think I can see its effect.¡± I nodded toward the shredded animal, curious about what had caused wounds like that.


    ¡°Different kind of noise; I think the grass can work together as a colony to cause some sort of resonance effect,¡± she shrugged again, making it obvious it wasn¡¯t an easily understood effect. Some effects were like that, especially if you didn¡¯t have the right senses or weren¡¯t focused on what they were sensing at that moment. In that case, you might not be able to observe more than a brief flash of radiance as a bit of Astral Power escaped a spell and turned into something visible to the naked eye before fading but I doubted many would be able to do more than guess what element the spell had used, based on the colour of the escaping radiance, though even that was somewhat vague as many spells combined elements, causing a fair bit of variation in the Astral Power involved.


    ¡°Let¡¯s see if I can provoke things a little,¡± I grinned, quickly waving my hand and conjuring up a simple figure made from Ice, barely humanoid and lacking any kind of sophisticated features, but it was enough. I didn¡¯t need anything fancy, I merely needed a sacrificial body we could use to trigger the response, though it would be interesting to see if the figure did.


    Taking control of it and partially shifting my sight into the scrying construct I quickly created in the figure¡¯s head, I used my Ice Magic to move the statue down the hill and closer to the Windchime Grass, trying to trigger its defences. Or even the lure mechanism would work, though I quickly realised that the figure didn¡¯t work.


    Obviously, the grass wasn¡¯t using sight to sense the world around it. Given that the figure was many things, but quiet wasn¡¯t one of them, I didn¡¯t think they were using sound or something like the displacement of air or moving air currents. If the grass did, the statue should have triggered a reaction.


    My next try was to add a bit of my Blood, infused with Astral Power, to the statue, giving it a faint life signature, strong enough to be perceivable to Luna, and even I could get the vaguest glimpse of its signature using my Soul Sight, despite it being already separate from me. Still, just that glimpse served as a powerful reminder of just how dangerous it could be to have any of my Blood leave my immediate control and for a moment, I began to worry about Lia, who had fed on my blood for months. Who knew how that connection might work as a link to myself? It was a somewhat scary idea, though one I couldn¡¯t do anything about right now.This content has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.


    Just as the figure, now with some blood as enhancement, moved into the area around the grass, the earlier chiming started back up and, for a moment, I was tempted to call it a success and move on, only to realise that the chiming wasn¡¯t for the figurine but to lure in a fox that had been drawn in by the smell of blood from the dismembered goat.


    Given that this might be even better than triggering the mechanism myself, I mentally settled in, keeping the controlled Ice Figure motionless so I wouldn¡¯t spook the fox and waited. Only to be disappointed shortly after it seemed that the defensive mechanism didn¡¯t kick in if the target wasn¡¯t performing some specific action. Like digging for roots, which is why I used the figurine to disturb the earth somewhat close to the plants and that, finally, was enough to make them react.


    And react, they did with a vengeance. In moments, the chiming sound changed from the one drawing in their targets, like the fox, and exploded with a cacophony of noise, strong enough to give me a small headache despite the vast difference. It also made Silva howl in response, clearly registering her dislike of this particular type of noise. But compared to the effect of the noise, which was nothing but noise, with no additional magic carried by the sound whatsoever on the fox and my figurine, the effect it had on us was negligible. Nothing, really.


    On the other hand, my figurine, despite its construction from somewhat sturdy Ice, only lasted for a second or two before it shattered. Sure, I was fairly cognisant that objects conjured from ice were generally fairly brittle, but this was a little more than I had expected. Similarly, the fox suffered greatly, to the point that the initial moment of noise was enough to incapacitate it as it stumbled around for a few moments as if drunk or concussed, which I considered more likely, but it didn¡¯t last long. Longer than my figurine, yes, but then it started to bleed from every orifice of its body until it started to expel bits of its shredded organs from both ends. Moments later, it succumbed to the damage caused by the strange noise, and I felt that it was a bit of a mercy.


    ¡°This time, it was a lot louder,¡± Luna told me after I used a bit of Blood Magic to get rid of the light damage our ears were suffering from.


    ¡°Maybe because there was an additional disturbance, the one I caused with my figurine and the digging fox,¡± I suggested, getting a shrug and a nod in response as Luna admitted it was possible.


    ¡°I also think they are only as powerful and dangerous as they are here because of their number,¡± I continued, quite intrigued by the sheer power displayed here. With the entire valley of Windchime Grass working together, or rather, resonating in harmony, they could cause some serious damage. But I doubted this would be a long-term effect, the grass closer to the middle wouldn¡¯t be able to receive the nourishment the grass on the outskirts was absorbing, meaning it would soon wither and die.


    Just to make sure they hadn¡¯t managed to combine their root systems or something like that, I checked with my Soul Sight and could discern different organisms, though they were fairly similar. No, this was a temporary curiosity caused by the experiment Luna and I had performed here, not something that would spread and retain its current dominant power.


    Still, this grass had an interesting effect, something to keep in mind for later, though I doubted I¡¯d settle anywhere where it would be able to thrive.


    ¡°Do you want to check if this stuff has its own name or if it has accepted the Windchime Grass designation?¡± Luna asked, and after a moment of consideration, I decided to shake my head. Sure, I was fairly confident that the grass wouldn¡¯t react to a cautious, especially an aerial, approach, but I wasn¡¯t about to risk it, not for something this meaningless. Maybe we could cultivate a few additional stems in the coming days and check those, but this grass wasn¡¯t something I wanted to mess with. At least not if it had grown in these absurd numbers, making me wonder if Luna and I had been a little too successful.


    ¡°We should continue,¡± I told her, already turning away from the valley filled with deadly grass and the bones of two animals, ¡°I have a feeling this will be quite the sight for a bit but it won¡¯t last. Not something we need to be concerned about long term and in the short term, it¡¯s trivial to simply move away.¡±


    With that, Luna and I continued on our path, travelling further north while Silva followed a little after us once she had placed a marking and, possibly, demonstrated what she thought about this noisy, annoying grass.

 Chapter 1108

    One aspect of Lia¡¯s absence I hadn¡¯t expected was the effect it had on Luna, or rather, how her absence essentially forced Luna to focus her attention on Silva or me. Sure, we had always been her primary caretaker, while Lia often focused on Alex and their shared love for Alchemy and explosions, but regardless of that primary focus, Lia had acted as Luna¡¯s older sister, always ready to listen, talk or just entertain the younger girl.


    Now, without her presence, that entertainment fell to me, especially as Silva acted as scout and literal watchdog, a role we needed to fill, just to make sure nothing tried to make a snack out of us. Something far too many creatures were willing to try, some of which were quite fascinating and prompted the odd idea for further experiments, or what our critics would call crimes against nature, good sense and humanity. Not that I truly cared about any of those, well, other than nature as I considered myself part of the natural order, but good sense and humanity? Well, I didn¡¯t have all that much to do with either of those, especially as the idea of good sense was profoundly influenced by the opinion held by the average person and why would I ever want to be average? Alas, despite the ideas we got from observing the fascinating creatures that had sprung up over winter, possibly in response to the changing seasons and their reflection on the elemental composition of the Astral River, these creatures were generally not friendly, meaning Silva wasn¡¯t able to entertain my daughter, leaving that task to me.


    Sadly, while I could talk to her about magic and discuss a fairly wide variety of arcane topics or provide some of the necessary general education and a bit of scientific literacy from my own lessons in high school and later college, those couldn¡¯t fill the entire night, Luna needed something to relax her mind, something simple and silly.


    I considered trying to tell her tales of my adventures on Mundus, but most of those didn¡¯t work. They were too close to the lessons I usually gave her, so something else was needed.


    One morning, as we were getting ready to turn in for the day, keeping our nocturnal pattern, if only to let me relax as we walked instead of forcing me to constantly protect myself from the despicable rays of the Sun, I heard a bird singing nearby, giving me an idea.


    Now, I wasn¡¯t some great songstress or bard; I barely could carry a tune in a bucket, but given the dearth of entertainment we were generally suffering under, my performance was easily the best Luna would hear all day. Adding a bit of Wind Magic to replace some of the usual instruments to the best of my ability and a bit of Mind Magic to project some of my memories into something resembling an auditory illusion to add to the performance allowed me to make music instead of generating noise.


    Finding the right songs to sing, especially some Luna could learn and join me in singing, was a little more difficult. Complex pieces of music, mostly classical, had always been my favourites, their changing and repeating patterns gave them a fascinating complexity. Some of those even had lyrics, like the Ode to Joy, but they either needed their instrumental accompaniment, something I couldn¡¯t replicate magically just yet, or they required a far better voice than mine, both in range and volume.


    Obviously, those just didn¡¯t work for to accompany our march. Similarly, while it wouldn¡¯t be all that difficult to piece some fairly simple pop songs together from a fairly wide array of memories, the kind of song that wormed its way into your head and stuck around for hours, days or even weeks, I wasn¡¯t about to subject myself or Luna to that particular brand of torture. I had no desire to hear the Mambo No. 5 for days on end, nor did I think it was time to start the final countdown. Stolen story; please report.


    Luckily, there was a compromise, a mix between good music and music memorable enough to be stuck in my head years after I had heard the songs and their melody. Songs about a guy named Jude, about living in a yellow submarine, whyever anyone would paint a submarine yellow was a question for the ages, even songs about letting it be or letting it go, they all worked out fairly well. Sure, a few lines had to be improvised as I couldn¡¯t quite recall them, but I certainly could imagine them, even if I couldn¡¯t imagine all the people living life in peace. Maybe I was mixing genres there just a little, but it worked well enough to amuse us. Occasionally, either of us decided to improvise, adding or taking parts from one song and adding them to another, sometimes for added amusement, sometimes to see if it would sound better, and sometimes just to annoy the other; it was all in good fun.


    During one of our nightly sing-alongs, I found myself mentally adrift. Instead of just letting it be, I felt strangely vulnerable. The usually comforting darkness of the night felt slightly oppressive as if there was something in the darkness around us. I was not accustomed to this kind of sensation; the only time I had felt something similar in years was when I delved too deep into the Shadows and was disturbed by the sheer, infinite void of the unknown and unknowable around me.


    Marshalling a bit of my magic, I gently twisted it into the cloak of shadows I was so fond of using, the familiar sensation swiftly banishing the strange sensation. For a moment, I wondered where it had come from and cast my senses out into the night, trying to find what had disturbed my mental equilibrium, but there was nothing out there, at least nothing I considered a plausible source of the strange sensation. A few birds sat in the trees, awake due to our singing, a couple of small rodents scurried deeper into the underbrush, and a fox lurked near a narrow burrow, waiting for the creatures inside to come out and be turned into a meal. There was nothing mystical, nothing extraordinary, just the usual creatures of the forest living their life.


    Shaking my head, I pushed the sensation away and focused on my singing, grinning just a little as I improvised a bit of the song, adding some additional ethereal sound with my Wind Magic before transitioning it into a different, more energetic song. It was all in good fun, and we continued our singing for a little longer before starting to drift into a normal conversation, which quickly turned into a lesson, this one on simple statistics and how one could deceive people with nothing but the truth.


    It was not a topic I truly enjoyed, especially as it dealt with statistics, numbers and patterns, things I usually liked but twisted into something manipulative to serve one¡¯s own needs. It was far too easy to accomplish, to the point that I had heard an alleged quote about people being only able to trust statistics; they had manipulated themselves, but its simplicity made it even more important to be cognisant of such things. Maybe not as important now, given just how fragmented and separated society had become, but valuable nonetheless.


    If only I could perfect a few additional tricks of Mind Magic and teach them to Luna. For example, I was certain there were ways to detect deceptions and lies, but so far, I had been unable to find an easy way. The best I could do was use what I had developed when interrogating my prisoners, but that wasn¡¯t quite as subtle as I wanted it to be. To say nothing of the involved violations of privacy, unless I was confident I wouldn¡¯t be caught I was fairly hesitant to use something like that outside of an area I was in complete control of.


    No, dealing with people would always be something I had my troubles with, at least if there wasn¡¯t the roles we were supposed to take up weren¡¯t already established. Teaching, sure, I could do that, as long as the students were willing to learn. Acting as ¡®Mother¡¯ for Jade was something I had grown into, using memories of my own mother to guide me but having to find my own position and role in a societal exchange wasn¡¯t something I was good at or comfortalbe with.


    Maybe that was why I enjoyed travelling so much, it allowed me to simply take on the role of an outsider, to remain near people as long as I felt comfortable with and once I didn¡¯t enjoy their presence, I could simply leave. There was no need to adjust to them or adapt to their norms, they could either accept me or not, it barely mattered to me.


    Though, that idea made me wonder about the future and what I would do once I had my Sigmir back. Hopefully, we¡¯d be able to come up with a good plan together.

 Chapter 1109

    For all my incredible magical power, there were some things I was unable to influence, at least when it came to a meaningful scale. Chief amongst those things was, quite obviously, the weather with its incredibly capricious nature. While I was powerful enough to have a local effect on the weather, to briefly shift the direction of the wind around me or to lower the temperature in the clouds above, at least if the clouds were hanging low, such effects were always temporary. As soon as I stopped redirecting the wind, it would continue to blow as it had before I tried to intervene and while I might be able to drop the temperature in the clouds, causing some of the moisture within to fall as snow or rain, there always were other clouds, ready to make my life miserable.


    The weather was, quite frankly, beyond my ability to meaningfully manipulate, especially if I wanted to have good weather. If I merely wanted to have localised bad weather, I could do a lot more, especially when the weather was already capricious and cloudy as it currently was, with a seemingly endless supply of clouds and enough rain to start building boats. As things were right now, using my cloak or my wings to fly up towards the clouds and have them dump a load of rain was trivially easy, but given that the clouds were ready to go again just a few minutes later, I couldn¡¯t really use this.


    ¡°Say, Mom, is that smoke or are those some strange clouds?¡± Luna asked me, gesturing along the hillside on which we had made camp, hoping to avoid some of the annoyingly heavy rain.


    ¡°Pretty sure that¡¯s smoke, so there¡¯s likely a village down there somewhere,¡± I replied after a quick glance to make sure it wasn¡¯t just a strange formation of clouds and mist.


    ¡°Want to take a look? It¡¯s been a few days since we met people,¡± Luna suggested and I agreed with a shrug, not really caring one way or the other. Meeting people was something that occasionally happened, at least as long we were making our way through the mountains. There had been few communities up here before the change, most of them somewhat small and isolated, and now, after the world had fallen apart, those communities had been largely abandoned, with people moving downhill to seek better farmland, to avoid some of the treacherous weather up in the mountains and to generally find other people. As things were now, the mountains were largely left to the animals, some Undead, a few Shattered and the rapidly rising population of magically changed beasts, alongside a few people who made their way up here to hunt or gather some of the interesting plants that had started to grow. It was quite a fascinating process, one I was partially documenting, though I wasn¡¯t the right person to study people and their motivations, that would only serve to annoy me.


    ¡°I can take a look, I guess,¡± I agreed, with a shrug. I wasn¡¯t completely willing to go down there, if only because going down meant we would have to climb back up or take a major detour on our path north. Plus, I simply preferred the higher altitude in the mountains. There was something incredibly liberating about the feeling of being on top of the world and looking down on everything in a vast radius. Maybe that was why I loved to fly so much, that feeling of superiority and liberty. Either way, taking a quick glance to gather information before making a decision would be a good idea.


    With that in mind, I conjured up one of my trusty scrying constructs and had the shadowy raven take wing. Letting it glide down the valley, I was happy that the conjured, solidified shadow wasn¡¯t afflicted by something as mundane as bad weather. For any real bird, flying in the mess out there would have been somewhere between annoying, dangerous and suicidal, depending on the individual specimen. Most intelligent birds would greatly prefer to remain under some sort of shelter, just like any other being.Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.


    But in this case, the construct had no will, no mind of its own; it was just a vehicle to anchor my senses to, an extension of my will and magic, so the danger was entirely irrelevant. Even if the construct was struck by lightning, a fairly unlikely event, the only thing I would suffer was a serious headache, as the exploding air would strike my senses with fairly unmitigated force. Maybe I should add a way to prevent my senses from being overloaded like that or include a few protections, just as a matter of prudence, but that was something to consider later. For now, the construct was a simple, avian shape, which I generally preferred to use.


    Thanks to a bit of Wind Magic, the avian construct made good time despite the brutal wind, which was continuously getting stronger, and the rain, which made me start to worry just a little.


    Soon, the raven was in the area from which we had seen the smoke rise and, as expected, there were a few houses down there, some of them old, from before the change, others newer, clearly constructed after the change, with fairly simple methods and materials. It looked like this had been either a huge farm with a few additional buildings, maybe for guests, before the change and had turned into a nice village since the change had happened, likely due to people seeking shelter. Additionally, I could see the crops sprout on multiple fields and was fairly certain I could see a couple of farm animals, goat and sheep to be precise, take shelter under an open roof. Going by what I could see from above, I would think this was a thriving little community, well on its way to turning the small village they currently had into a small town.


    The smoke we had seen from the hills mainly came from a fairly large, almost barn-like building. It was quite similar in shape and style to some of the large, communal houses the people at Apple Gate Farm had built to provide everyone with the shelter they needed.


    A fairly uncomfortable realisation disrupted my observation of the village, hitting me almost like a punch to the gut. While I generally liked what I saw, there was one thing I hadn¡¯t considered but had to consider now. Namely, the small river that had carved the valley and which was visibly used by the villagers as their primary source of water was suddenly becoming a liability.


    It had risen about as high as its bed would allow, meaning any additional volume of water could spell disaster. And one such large, additional volume of water was currently falling into the mountains above the valley, dumped there by the incessant, and still worsening, rain. Some of that water would find its way into the valley and the river, making the river swell even further, likely to a dangerous degree. This might be seriously bad, at least if I wanted to meet the people in that small village. Having their village destroyed would put anyone in a bad mood, especially if a few people died due to it. Even just losing their entire crop could spell disaster for these people, depending on their number and the state of their supplies, but given that winter had only recently ended, after they had been forced to start this entire way of life, I wasn¡¯t too optimistic in regards to their supplies.


    Dismissing the construct I had used to scry, I pulled my mind back into my body, looking at Luna who was observing me with a somewhat bored expression on her face.


    ¡°Well, there are people down there, no surprise, but they might be in some serious trouble. Or rather, they will be in a few hours unless they have access to some fairly powerful magic,¡± I told her, getting a look of interest and a raised eyebrow in response. Sometimes, we could have conversations without the need for a single spoken word, just from reading the other¡¯s expressions, but such conversations could be somewhat imprecise. Now, precision and speed were required, especially if we wanted to help the village.


    Quickly, I explained what I had observed, and it didn¡¯t take long for Luna to agree that this could be quite bad for the village and that we should help if only to meet a few new people. So, despite the annoyed and long-suffering glances Silva gave us, we packed our stuff and started the somewhat treacherous trail down the valley, keeping our distance from the river, especially as it was already starting to leave its bed and flood the area around it. Unless the rain higher up in the mountains was a lot less severe than what we could observe here, the villagers would be in some serious trouble soon, so we needed to hurry up as much as the uneven, ever-worsening ground would allow us.

 Chapter 1110

    Without the superhuman grace and agility bestowed upon us all, the only one with the slightest chance to get down the valley and to the village in one piece would have been Silva. Her lower centre of gravity and quadrupedal gait gave her a lot more stability, though even that might not have been enough, at least not while moving at speed. The terrain was incredibly rough, the ground completely sodden and slippery and the wind was strong enough to break off branches and even knock over the odd tree, adding to the danger we were facing. A part of me wanted to hide in some cave and let the furious storm break before continuing our journey, but doing so would almost certainly condemn the people we were moving to help either to outright drown or to starve after the storm had completely destroyed their crops.


    Despite the horrible weather, we made fairly good speed, even if there was more than one moment in which I had to exploit the enchantment on my cloak to regain my balance or to keep Luna from slipping and tumbling down the slope we were running across. Thanks to that, it didn¡¯t take all that long until we were in sight of the village and from what I could see, it was a good thing we had hurried as we did.


    A few people were outside, braving the weather, covered in tarps, rain cloaks and whatever equipment they had to keep themself from getting utterly drenched, not that any equipment could accomplish that for long. The wind and rain were strong enough to breach almost any protection, and from what I could tell, the people didn''t mind all that much. Their focus was on the river and the rising water, while their efforts were completely focused on keeping the river within the confines of its bed, though their success was quite limited.


    Their best bet seemed to be a woman, maybe a little older than I was, wielding an incredibly familiar magic, though with limited success. She tried to freeze the water with Ice Magic, attempting to form a rampant or dyke with the frozen ice, but her power was too limited to have all that much success. She could freeze some water to create chunks of Ice roughly the size of my head, but by the time she could create another of those chunks, the first had already been washed away by the water, regardless of her efforts. She was just too weak as things were, her ability too limited.


    Others around her tried to help, some by trying to drag the frozen blocks to shore before they could be destroyed or carried off by the rushing water, others had their own ideas to keep their village safe. Some of those were using shovels in a futile attempt to raise a wall, and others were trying to accomplish something with wood. It was all fairly disparate and desperate, their leadership apparently unable to form a coherent plan. Or maybe they simply didn¡¯t have any plan with a chance of success they considered adequate, so they were simply throwing ideas in the water to see which might float.


    I paused for a few moments to take this all in, but a strange, rushing sound pushed me into action and out of the forest. A surge of water came down from the mountains, more than enough water to break the confines of the riverbed and start swamping the banks, washing away all who were not prepared. Sure, it was only a few centimetres of water at the moment but I had no doubt that it would be more soon, thanks to the incessant rain. The water higher up in the mountains and along the valley had to go somewhere, and I doubted that it could drain into the already water-logged ground.


    ¡°Watch out,¡± I called out, drawing the attention of a few people and directing their attention to the onrushing water. Where before, the water had been flowing swiftly but fairly placidly; the onrushing tide was anything but. It looked like a mixture of mud, debris and water, all mixed together into a frothing mess, ready to sweep people off their feet. Some of it was already spilling over the riverbank; the rest was currently contained, but that would soon change. My call made a few people step back upon realising what sort of danger they were in, but not all. Some of them tried desperately to do something, anything, to stem the onrushing tide, but the looks on their faces made it obvious they knew it wouldn¡¯t work.Support creative writers by reading their stories on Royal Road, not stolen versions.


    Stopping some distance away from the river, I drew a formation of Ice Runes into the air, knowing that it was my best bet. Sure, Earth might be superior as a construction material, but what I needed now wasn¡¯t just strength; it was speed. I needed to secure the bank before the flood hit, or even I would be hard-pressed to keep the river from drowning the village and their fields.


    My eyes flashed an icy blue as I activated Overflow to direct a surge of power into the formation. Immediately, a silvery beam of cryo-magical energy covered the distance between me and the river, striking the water and freezing massive chunks of Ice. Before those chunks could start to be carried down the river, I reached out with my Ice Magic, shaping them according to my needs before linking them together and anchoring them into the soil of the river bank.


    Not a moment too soon, I was only done with the area of the riverbank facing towards the mountains when the flood hit, its power strong enough to push the entire Ice construct I had created back and into the mud of the river. But, with a bit of additional reinforcement I provided, the barrier held despite the rocks, mud and even the odd tree striking it. But my work wasn¡¯t done; just because the area facing the mountain was secure didn¡¯t mean the water wouldn¡¯t flow around the barrier, so I continued, ignoring the awed stares of the locals for the moment. I was vaguely aware that Luna was nearby, talking to one of them, but my entire focus was directed towards the frozen barriers I was raising and the water that tried to tear them down.


    Despite my focus, I could feel a momentary surge of discomfort when my natural layers of privacy were stripped away by some rude moron and their Observe ability, but as busy as I currently was, there was little I could do to counteract them. Quite frankly, I couldn¡¯t spare the attention and even just the distraction inherent to the discomfort was almost enough to break the cycle of freezing, shaping and reinforcing I was in.


    As I was working, I soon realised I would have to come up with a better solution. As things were, I could reinforce the Ice, but the rushing water, roughly eight degrees centigrade warm and the debris the water carried were excellent to destroy my barriers. If I wanted the Ice to last, I would have to continuously reinforce it, something that would leave me drained long before the water could drain away, meaning I would have to find a different solution. But first, I had to finish the barriers along the river and add some to the forest on the side of the mountain. It was only a matter of time until the forest would be swamped, and then water would do what it always did: flow downhill and destroy the fields I was currently protecting.


    Under my direction, walls of Ice rose along the river until I could finally take a deep breath and relax for a bit of time. The work had taken only some fifteen minutes, but fifteen minutes of continuous spellcasting, all while Overflow was active, was hard work and represented more power than some spellcaster could utilise in a day. The water, while still rising far too quickly for anyone¡¯s peace of mind, was no longer threatening to wash away everything these people had worked for and judging by the looks of sheer awe I was subjected to, they knew just how desperate their situation had been.


    ¡°Well, Mom, looks like we did it,¡± Luna grinned, stepping up next to me and lending me her shoulder to lean on, something I did despite my internal reluctance. I didn''t want to be seen as weak but compared to collapsing in the fields, leaning on my daughter was far less of a sign of weakness.


    ¡°That we did. The barriers I created will last for a bit of time, long enough to devise a less temporary solution.¡± I nodded before continuing to speak. ¡°But why don¡¯t you introduce these people? I think I heard you talking to them, didn¡¯t I?¡±


    ¡°Why, yes, you did. Now, why don¡¯t we start with the one most interested in meeting you, at least after your demonstration on Ice Magic?¡± Luna grinned before gesturing to the woman I had seen wield Ice Magic on a much lesser scale than I to step forward. ¡°Meet Sylvia; I¡¯ve got a feeling she would love to pick your brain. But maybe later, there are other people who wish to meet you.¡±

 Chapter 1111

    Over the next few minutes, numerous names were introduced to me. However, if I were to be honest, most of those names were assigned to a face and promptly relegated to a part of my mind where I stored information I didn¡¯t care about. While there were things I cared less about, whether somebody was called Wynter with a Y, Summer or even Spring ranked fairly low on the list of things I was interested in. If a person didn¡¯t have the power or potential to become more than a person we passed by in a random village, I simply wasn¡¯t interested. Here, the only one I could see myself caring about in the slightest, beyond my interest in the general survival of humanity, as the world would be fairly boring if there were no humans or other sapients around, was Sylvia.


    And even that was only in part due to her ability to wield Ice Magic; another part came from the somewhat amusing similarity in naming between Silva and her. That second reasoning was strengthened even more when Luna decided to introduce Silva to Sylvia; the looks the pair exchanged were infinitely amusing, as if neither of them knew what to do with this person who almost had the same name.


    Just as I was watching the pair, I felt the veil of privacy, layered around my person like my clothes, be attacked again, another attempt to strip it off and allow some random person to Observe as much about me as they could comprehend. But compared to earlier, when I had been completely focused on building the dyke to keep the river from flooding this area, I was now fairly idle, my mind not occupied in the slightest, so instead of allowing the stripping to occur, I could intervene and smack the probing back to its originator. I even managed to attach a mild curse to it, nothing serious, just enough to give the person trying to violate my privacy a nasty headache, but it would tell me who had tried.


    When one of the women who had been trying to help groaned in pain moments later, a tell-tale flare of Darkness Magic coursing around her head, I knew the culprit. Pulling the names I had already relegated to irrelevancy back to the forefront of my mind, I could name her as Dana, just another face in the crowd. Not particularly good-looking, though that was likely due to the soaking rain, the brutal work she had been doing and the general state of the world. Nobody looked their best, not unless they had some serious Charisma with a few traits to amplify the effect it had on one¡¯s looks, but this woman didn¡¯t have those. Just another fairly average, fair blonde without any truly outstanding features.


    ¡°Care to share why you believe you are entitled to know intimate details about me?¡± I snarled, the anger about the earlier violation returning in full. ¡°Or should I just banish the protections I set up here? Luna and I would have no troubles escaping the water, though I doubt you could say the same, to say nothing of the crops and your houses.¡±


    ¡°What¡¯s going on?¡± came from more than one of the others, alongside similar questions and confused exclamations.


    ¡°Earlier, when I was working, somebody violated the privacy of my person by using the Observe ability on me, an incredibly uncomfortable experience as you might know,¡± I explained before letting some additional power flow into the curse I had placed on Dana, making her moan in pain, ¡°As I was thoroughly occupied, I was unable to prevent the ability from succeeding, though the discomfort was almost enough to interrupt the delicate juggling act I had to perform in order to keep expanding the protections around us. You can guess what would have happened in that scenario, though I doubt anyone truly wants to consider that,¡± I paused again, sending yet another flare of power into the curse.


    ¡°Just now, I sensed the same violation, only this time, I had the mental capacity to do something about it, which is why Ms Dana is currently suffering a fairly severe headache and will continue to suffer from it until I feel satisfied with her explanations and excuses,¡± I finished my explanation while continuing to glare at the woman who had now dropped to the ground, writhing in the mud from the pain. Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.


    ¡°Stop it,¡± one of the guys demanded, his voice tinged with a curious mix of anger, embarrassment and fear. Sadly, I was uninterested in his demands and simply glared at him, daring him to do more than bark around.


    ¡°I¡¯m sorry I used Observe on you. Normally, I can keep people from noticing. She just did it ''cause I told her your level, and she didn¡¯t believe me,¡± he admitted, his eyes flickering from me to the woman writhing on the ground, now whimpering softly.


    ¡°Curious,¡± I briefly wondered how he could conceal the usage of Observe, as the only way I knew of was to use Darkness Magic, though if that was his usual way, it would explain why it had no effect whatsoever on me.


    ¡°Given that you apparently have no concept of privacy, the punishment should fit the crime. For one, you will suffer just as your little friend does,¡± I declared, casting the curse just as I pushed the entirety of my power outwards, my magic manifesting in a halo of power around me, intimidating his fellow villagers to accept the punishment I set.


    When both offenders were writing in the mud, clinging to one another in an attempt to anchor themselves in an ocean of pain, I added the second part of the punishment, the fitting one. Namely, I decided to experiment a little and opened up my senses as much as possible, adding each of my unusual sensory abilities to the mix before trying to channel Observe through those abilities, just as I would usually channel it through the concealment aspect of my Darkness Magic. I wanted to know all there was to know about them, to have every aspect of who they were laid bare before me.


    To my excitement, it worked exactly as I had hoped, and two blue notifications popped up before me, which were far more detailed than they would normally be. While I didn¡¯t get their exact attributes, I managed to learn that Dana¡¯s strongest attribute was her Dexterity and her weakest Intelligence. In contrast, the strongest for Enzo, the guy, was Courage and the weakest, to my amusement, Intuition. Furthermore, I was able to learn that Dana was level seventeen to Enzo¡¯s level twenty-three, making me briefly wonder just how safe this area actually was. These levels were either incredibly pathetic, or this place was blessed with very few enemies. Finally, I managed to find some truly interesting details hidden in a tab called Relationships.


    There, I found a somewhat superficial description of their relationships, as the tab suggested, but the gold was that Dana¡¯s tab described her relationship with Enzo as a committed one, but Enzo¡¯s tab, on the other hand, only labelled her as a friend with benefits. A label she shared with multiple two women.


    Additionally, there were their titles, or rather, a title amongst the two of them. As it turned out, the system knew quite a bit about people and had saddled Enzo with the Lotharia title, which apparently helped him conceal his activities with the fairer sex. When digging a little deeper, I came across his magical affinities, namely a moderate affinity for Darkness Magic, though one with a curious modifier. Instead of a generally moderate affinity, his affinity to everything under the domain of Subterfuge and Concealment was high, almost as high as that of Maggy had been at a guess; his affinity for the other aspects of Darkness was just a little above average, giving him an overall moderate affinity.


    Grinning to myself, I made the two notifications visible to everyone, allowing them to see just what they were. I had a feeling the fallout would be a lot worse for Enzo than for Dana. The worst one could say about Dana was that she was a little gullible, but Enzo? Well, I doubted many would continue to trust him. I knew I wouldn¡¯t, but then, I doubted I would have trusted him in the first place.


    At the same time as I made these things visible, I ended the curse on the pair, allowing their minds to clear so they could see everything my Observe had uncovered about them. I especially wanted Dana to see what was going on with Enzo, giving both of them an additional punishment, though it might even turn into a boon for Dana in the long run, allowing her to see Enzo''s deception.


    ¡°Now that this has been dealt with, I will resume my earlier activities and finish the protections around this place,¡± I announced, leaving the two blue windows open for everyone to see, ¡°Sylvia, if you are interested in learning, you can accompany me, and I will give you a small lesson as I¡¯m working.¡±


    With those words, I turned away, taking note of Enzo''s glare as I turned my back. I would have to keep an eye on that one, just in case his grudge managed to override his common sense.

 Chapter 1112

    After that initial confrontation, I could easily return to my work, with Sylvia plodding along behind me, watching with awed eyes as I was reshaping the world around me. The rest of the people who had been working remained behind, speaking with Luna under Silva¡¯s watchful gaze. We really should look for somebody focused on negotiation and social judo. While my current power was enough to humble and intimidate people into letting me do whatever I wanted, within certain boundaries, I doubted I would always be the most powerful being in the area; there were bound to be people who could match me, maybe even suppress me as I suppressed the people here. But those were considerations for later, now, it was construction time.


    Finishing the protections around the house and field was, amusingly, easier than setting up the initial layer. Mostly because I only needed to raise the area behind my frozen rampart into a dyke, leaving a ditch on the other side where I had pulled the earth from, and then use a combination of Crystal and Earth Magic to transmute the outer layer, the one towards the water, into a singular, fairly solid piece of crystal. That way, the rushing water wouldn¡¯t be able to carry away the soil; even the abrasive mix of earth and stone the water carried with it wouldn¡¯t be able to scratch the crystal. The only possible danger came from the few trees the water carried with it; those might have the sheer mass to crack the crystal, though I doubted it. And even if that happened, after I made the initial pass to have that first layer of crystal, I could easily make another pass and add a second layer a few centimetres deeper. That way, even if the initial layer was broken, there would be a second layer with a cushioning layer of earth in between.


    ¡°Can you explain what you¡¯ve been doing here?¡± Sylvia finally asked as I was pausing to consider what the best next step would be.


    ¡°Which part are you curious about?¡± I asked in return, a smile spreading over my face as I casually wove three different elements together to accomplish a fairly simple task just because I could. My actions didn¡¯t help her initial understanding of magic, so I began to lecture, starting at the obvious foundation of magic, the Astral River and how it influenced our reality. From there, I began to describe different elements, demonstrating their utility and even letting her have a feel of the raw Astral Power, though that was only done very carefully as all elements were dangerous in their own way.


    It didn¡¯t matter if it was a supposedly nice element, as the uninitiated would consider Water or Life; they all had their own innate dangers, whether it was the erosive effect of Water, the calcifying effect of Earth or the subtle mutating influence of Life, if one wasn¡¯t careful while handling them, they could all be deadly in their own ways.


    Luckily, I had a lot of experience when it came to lecturing about the foundations of magic and the place of the elements within the world, allowing me to continue talking and working as I went, making the entire process look a lot easier than it actually was and soon, I managed to get around the entire area, protecting it with a dyke so that no matter how much water was dumped into the river, this place would be protected.


    As things currently were, my solution wasn¡¯t perfect, but it was easily good enough. To make it better, I would have to transmute the entire dyke into crystal or stone and anchor it deeply into the ground; it was good enough and would keep the fields of these people nice and dry. And all through my work, I was teaching Sylvia to the point that she even used her Ice Magic a few times in an attempt to help. Her actions were quite clumsy, almost more of a hindrance than a help, but looking at her face scrunched up in concentration, I couldn¡¯t bring myself to chide her, especially as she was eagerly enduring the cold and unpleasant rain next to me, while almost everyone else had long-since retreated into the comfort of their houses.


    Once I was done with the protection from water rushing in from the river and the forest above the farm, one of the local farmers, a guy named Jeff, approached me with a request. He asked, or rather pleaded with me, to add some drainage to their fields. Otherwise, they would drown due to the incessant rain. Luckily, he knew what was needed, as I had an extremely limited idea of drainage, mostly from what I had seen on Apple Gate Farm. But he could easily guide me, and he even managed to talk me into creating a cistern for them so they could store some of the rainwater for later usage. Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author.


    Once that was done, he started to hint that maybe, if I were ever so kind, I could connect the cistern to the river later so it would automatically fill. Cheeky as he was, he challenged me to add a filter to that connection so the water in the cistern would be cleansed automatically, though he made it sound like he doubted I could do it, prodding my pride.


    Amusingly, despite knowing that I was being manipulated, the manipulation worked. I wanted to see if I could create something that would automatically cleanse water of all impurities; even if that wasn¡¯t really the healthiest thing to do, the minerals were important. But to create a magical filter able to distinguish between good minerals and bad minerals sounded even more difficult. At least rendering all biological contaminants harmless would be fairly simple. All bacteria, viruses and other microscopic life forms were susceptible to Death Magic, robbing them of even the faintest sparks of life. Theoretically simple, really, though setting it up in practice was something I would have to figure out. A wonderful challenge and something to keep me occupied during my meditations.


    The challenge of creating a theoretical framework was passed on to Sylvia, though I doubted she would be able to come up with anything usable; she simply lacked too much foundational understanding.


    But, as we were talking, I learned that there was a local Legacy, a warrior-type named Ned, though the name did not mean anything to me. Apparently, he remained human and had been heard grousing about the lack of proper weapons. The image managed to bring a grin to my face, and I had to admit that magic was quite superior in that regard, at least magic used in the style I was employing. I didn¡¯t need anything to be reasonably effective, just my body and mind working in conjunction. But a warrior without their weapon, or maybe their weapon and armour, was a lot less effective, turning them into a wrestler who might not even know how to wrestle, a simple brute and brawler in effect. And, given that it very much sounded as if this guy had only the most superficial idea about the Arcane and Divine, I doubted he¡¯d be able to help any of the burgeoning spellcasters.


    To make matters worse, the guy had decided to lead his party into the mountains a few days ago, meaning he wasn¡¯t even here to assist the villagers, as I had begun to think of them in their current plight, leaving them with very limited defences from any roaming monsters and none from their current watery predicament.


    Though, even if he was here, I doubted he¡¯d be able to do all that much. From the descriptions I was getting, he sounded as if he had played some sort of knight, a soldier or something similar. Somebody who was part of some sort of hierarchical structure, something like an army. He also sounded as if he was accustomed to a certain standard of equipment, used to fight with comrades at his side and, to some degree, have a plan dictated from up high. Depending on the role he had filled within that structure, he might have some influence on the strategic goals but it was more likely that he had been limited to tactical decisions unless he had eschewed even those and acted as a simple soldier, a follower.


    Certainly somebody competent but as I realised more and more, the level of magic I was wielding would be fairly uncommon on Mundus and here, on Terra, after the Change and the cataclysmic scale of death and destruction that came with it, I was almost certainly the most powerful and versatile spellcaster around. And even with all that power, protecting the town and its fields had been quite challenging.


    Finally, I felt that my work outside was done, and it was time to find shelter. So, I asked Sylvia to show me where my daughter would likely be and where I could take my load off. After all the hard work, I really didn¡¯t feel like setting up a shelter.


    In response, she immediately showed me to the largest house. The moment she opened the door, a wall of warm, stuffy air hit my face, making me wonder if setting up my own shelter would be all that difficult, regardless of my exhaustion.

 Interlude: Times of Trouble

    It had taken Jenn two days to acknowledge that something strange was going on. She had seen magic in action, from the awe-inspiring feats of Jade to the somewhat pathetic efforts of some neophyte spellcasters, and there were undeniable, fundamental similarities between those abilities. The spellcaster, at least according to Jade, had to know what they wanted to accomplish and have a vague idea of how that goal was to be accomplished as defined by certain concepts depending on the elements used for the effort. So, if you wanted to simply conjure water, it was easy; the concept of Rain was within the domain of Water, the concept of a wellspring was within the domain of Water, as were the concepts of rivers, tides and a dozen other concepts that could end up with a certain volume of water when the required Astral Power was applied. At least, that was how Jade had explained it, who almost certainly knew what she was talking about; the results of her teaching and abilities were undeniable.


    With all that in mind, there was no real way for Jenn, who didn¡¯t have any real magical abilities or one of those affinities, to do what she had been doing these last two days and conjure up something to hide herself and little Sebastian. It should be completely impossible; she only had the vaguest idea that Darkness could be used to hide from sight, but beyond that, she was clueless. Maybe Air to conceal smells or something entirely different; she had only superficially listened to Jade¡¯s lessons simply because she didn¡¯t think she¡¯d be able to use any of it. The only reason she had listened at all was that maybe, if he was lucky, Sebastian might be able to use magic in the future, and if that were to be the case, she wanted to have some idea of what might be going on.


    But now, she had managed to hide herself while out in the open and had been able to remain undetected even when Sebastian had let out a few far-too-loud whimpers, something that should have attracted the strange, shambling figures roaming the area she had been in. And yet, nothing bad had happened to her, as impossible as that sounded.


    It was only late at night when Jenn had made a simple camp, little more than a sleeping bag with a simple mat beneath it that she shared with her baby, that she felt ready to mentally confront the strangeness she had experienced earlier. The impossibility of it all, or maybe calling it a miracle, would be a better description.


    But a miracle from whom or what?


    There had been people at the farm who had remained devoutly Christian, had even preached to people and tried to convert them, and in a surprising number of cases, successfully so. Maybe the feeling of community had been what called to those, or a hope for deliverance from the utter mess they all had been in but no such hope was fulfilled, and the community, under the leadership of her oh-so-wonderful husband, had fallen apart. If she could even consider Chris her husband any longer, she certainly didn¡¯t feel like it out here, in the darkness of the night. For better or worse, in good times and in bad times, well, it didn¡¯t get any worse than what she had been in. And in those bad times, she knew what choice she had to make: to abandon the sinking ship and get her child to the safest place she could find, maybe seek out one of the many groups who had abandoned the farm before her, as the demands of the Council had become more and more strenuous and unrealistic.


    What little she had heard from Chris about their plans and predictions was still enough, now, weeks or months later, to make her scoff in disbelief. They had neglected to keep the size of their economy in mind, or rather the lack thereof, and its inability to absorb even small troubles by shifting work around. There were no additional people searching for a job, and there was no foreign talent who could be lured in with promises of a better life and additional money; there had only been those already working, and many of them had fulfilled roles nobody else could fill thanks to their individual talents.


    Even if she wanted to scoff now, with the benefit of hindsight, she might have had doubts at the time. And yet, despite those doubts, she had accepted the lofty explanations and reasoning of the people who supposedly knew better simply because, like so many others, she was used to listening to people who spoke in certain ways, wore certain clothes and displayed a specific set of mannerisms.


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    She needed to improve if she wanted Sebastian to survive. Surviving by herself would be difficult enough while trying to cling to those old ideas, but to keep a baby alive in these circumstances was even more difficult. And yet, she was unwilling to leave him behind; she was his mother, and she would be damned to whatever hell could be worse than the mess the world had become if she abandoned her baby.


    With those thoughts running through her head, she eventually fell into a troubled sleep, her mind still going hundreds of miles each minute, but her body simply gave out. Not that she immediately noticed; she only realised that something seriously strange was going on when she heard a soft but incredibly familiar voice sing a faintly familiar song. Though while she knew the song, or rather, the songs, she was left wondering why on Earth somebody would make a medley out of ¡®Let it be¡¯ and ¡®Let it go¡¯, even with the two near-identical song titles.


    Hearing the strange song brought part of her mind into a state of awareness. However, the awareness did little to reduce her confusion. Instead of sleeping within a partially ruined industrial building, she was now standing in the snow in a pristine forest. Well, pristine but fantastic; the trees all around her were incredibly weird. Beautiful, but utterly weird; whoever had heard of trees made of glass, or maybe crystal, outside of fantasy novels? Or maybe dreams, which this might well be.


    Just as she was about to ignore the sights around her and let herself drift with the dream, the song gained a secondary melody, one she recognised but in a different way. This one she didn¡¯t recognise with her ears, but somewhere deeper, it was almost as if she was feeling the melody on her skin, the soft sound becoming incredibly familiar and comforting, like the loving and safe embrace of her own mother. The same feeling, as she now realised, she had experienced when hiding in the dark and praying that the monsters out there wouldn¡¯t be able to find her, but what she was supposed to do with that realisation, she had no idea.


    But given that this was a dream, following the sound and song might be the best option if she wanted answers. Thus, convinced that she was dreaming, she decided to be brave and investigate.


    Following the sound of music was trivially easy, especially as the snow was strange to walk across. It was almost as if she was walking on clouds between those trees; there was no cold, nothing threatening to make her stumble or slip, just the endless white and the strange trees all around her.


    Soon, she arrived at a still pool of water, the light of the full moon above her reflecting off the surface and somehow illuminating the entire clearing and even the crystal trees around it despite the impossibility of it all.


    A waiting figure was next to the water, resting on a small wooden seat. From afar, it looked like a young woman, but as she got closer, she noticed that each step revealed details that made the figure look older and older until Jenn was right in front of it and noticed the woman¡¯s ancient eyes. Behind the figure, strangely hidden in the mist, were two different figures: one somewhat small, almost child-like in proportion, and the other taller, almost certainly female, but otherwise concealed.


    ¡°Greetings, young mother,¡± the ancient figure in front of Jenn said, startling the woman who had thought this was all a dream. The voice was completely unfamiliar but filled with that familiar sensation of comfort.


    ¡°You are one of the first to come here, and maybe the first to come here in the way you did,¡± the ancient woman continued, ¡°You may think of me as the Crone, the Grandmother of all,¡± the crone paused, ¡°I¡¯m here because, sadly, the Mother who you should have met is, well, let¡¯s just say she¡¯s unavailable at the moment. But even unavailable, she managed to give you a sliver of her power. Not enough to be considered a true blessing, too much to be a simple spell; it¡¯s quite fascinating,¡± the crone mused, her voice slightly distant.


    ¡°But be that as it may, you are here because you sought protection in the night, something the Mother¡¯s domain resonates with. So you may find help here if you are willing to take it,¡± the crone¡¯s voice explained, her tone both caring and serious at the same time, making Jenn swallow with trepidation. By now, she had completely lost any confidence in the idea of this being a mere dream, but she didn''t know what she had managed to get involved with. But she really liked the idea of finding protection.

 Chapter 1113

    The building I entered was quite an interesting construction. It greatly reminded me of the long houses constructed by the people at Apple Gate Farm, to the point that I wasn¡¯t sure if I would be able to pick out large structural differences, but then, there were only so many ways one could build such large buildings with the simple materials and unrefined techniques both groups had access to. Wooden frames to carry the weight of the structure, beams, whatever insulating material they could get their hands on to keep the building warm, and, finally, some form of waterproofing, in this case, made with a mixture of mud and clay from the river. About as simple as wooden construction could be, but there was a reason why such techniques had served humanity for thousands of years: they worked. Maybe not as well as the modern techniques developed later, which was why those techniques had been developed in the first place, but this one worked and once the large, open space was created within the wooden hall, people could divvy off their individual or familial spaces with whatever material they had at hand, be it cloth or some old wooden boards or whatever. It didn¡¯t make for truly private spaces, but it greatly lessened the need for heating, especially as the cooking area was in the centre of the large hall, and the simple oven gave off a good amount of heat.


    My entrance into the structure wasn¡¯t noticed right away; it took a moment for the first person to see me, and once they did, the realisation spread throughout the hall like a wave of silence and stares. It seemed that my earlier actions had been somewhat ill-advised. Intimidation could be quite useful, but it would always be feelings of resentment, even if these people wouldn¡¯t act on them. At least not those who had seen me outside; they were well aware that I couldn¡¯t be taken down by them, at least unless there was someone a lot more powerful than the rest hidden away. Still, that didn¡¯t mean they wouldn¡¯t be able to return the resentment they felt, possibly with interest, though it looked like Luna had been on the ball and was trying to assuage the feelings I had hurt.


    ¡°Hello, Mother,¡± Luna greeted me. I only needed a moment to notice that she and a few people around her were completely dry, something usually impossible given the time I had been outside and the sheer amount of water her clothes would have absorbed. It wasn¡¯t a terribly complicated riddle; I knew Water Magic could remove moisture from clothes, something I had done without really thinking about it when I entered the house, and it looked like Luna had trained herself to use simple Water Magic, possibly limited to the level used for chores at the moment. If so, I fully supported the idea and would try to add that level of ability with the other basic elements simply because those were so incredibly useful. Never needing a source of Water could be a lifesaver, as could the ability to generate warmth or start fires. Or maybe she already did so, so we would have to talk about it later.


    ¡°Luna,¡± I nodded. ¡°Is there anything I should know?¡± I asked, curious if she had made any plans for us.


    ¡°Well, Mother, it seems that while these people are incredibly grateful for our help, they are unable to offer a proper reward. Even just a bed for the night is beyond their capacity, and their food is, as they described it, lacking,¡± she explained with a shrug and I quickly realised that I might be experiencing their retribution for my earlier intimidation. However, it was just as likely that they had extremely limited supplies and were trying to avoid cutting them even further so they wouldn¡¯t suffer in the future. Both were possible, as was a combination of the two, and, sadly, there was fairly little I could do without resorting to outright robbery. Sure, I was powerful enough to simply decide on a suitable reward and take it, but doing so felt wrong.


    ¡°That is regrettable,¡± I admitted, taking a deep breath and almost choking on it, thanks to the stuffy air in the large house, ¡°It appears we will have to make our own camp outside then and continue our travels once the storm has exhausted itself.¡±


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    ¡°It certainly sounds like that, yes,¡± Luna nodded again, and I decided that a little bit of retribution would serve these people right. Well, maybe not actual retribution, but a bit of pettiness could be just as grating, especially in the long term.


    Without talking to any of them beyond a few nods and greetings, I walked right back out into the rain, Luna and Silva following behind me. Looking around for a moment, I decided on one of the open spaces right next to the wall I had made to keep the water slowly flooding the forest out of the fields and went to work. Luna channelled her own power, augmenting and replenishing me as I worked, allowing me to quickly transform the area into a simple dwelling despite my exhaustion.


    ¡°This won¡¯t do,¡± I grumbled, looking at the plain box made of stone I had pulled up. There weren¡¯t even any windows, just a few narrow openings right beneath the roof to allow for some circulation without allowing in any rain, but otherwise, the room was bare. A part of me wanted to call it pathetic, but given that I had raised a fairly sturdy wall right beforehand, I knew it wasn¡¯t skill or power stopping me; it was simple exhaustion. Even Luna¡¯s assistance wasn¡¯t able to erase the strain from that, but a few hours of sleep would be enough to refresh me.


    ¡°Could you keep watch? I want to rest as soon as possible and make this something these people will only be able to envy,¡± I griped, noticing an amused grin on Luna¡¯s face as I spoke.


    ¡°Certainly, Mother,¡± she replied, her grin deepening, ¡°If you like, I could also begin to consecrate the area in Lady Hecate¡¯s name; that way, these villagers won¡¯t be able to tear this place down unless they want to earn Lady Hecate¡¯s ire. I have a feeling She would be quite amused by it.¡±


    I couldn¡¯t help but laugh at the idea of having the house I was planning to build be made into a shrine, similar to the one I had set up in New Dawn. It wasn¡¯t outright malicious; it even gave them some very tangible benefits, but it would be incredibly galling to see such a place and know it wasn¡¯t their achievement but somebody else''s.


    ¡°I doubt the consecration could be stretched to include the wall, could it?¡± I chuckled, already knowing the answer. Lady Hecate¡¯s domain was broad, with some very deep elements to it, but Walls and Architecture in general were not part of it. Which probably was for the best; I doubted a deity of Architecture and Building would be impressed by the constructions we had set up as Her shrines; they were marvels of magic and quite sturdy, but it was due to the magic that they stood, not any grand architectural achievements.


    Soon, while my body was asleep, I found myself wandering a familiar, misty forest made of crystals and snow and started to wonder why I was dreaming about Neyto. Strangely, I was unable to identify which direction the village was in; it was almost as if there was something disorienting me within the mist. Not quite unlike the experience we had back on Mundus, in the valley of the bound titan, but here, in what might be a dream of mine, I was unable to use magic to regain my bearings, so I simply kept wandering, humming, singing and relaxing at the same time. For that, the peaceful forest was perfect; the air was clean, crisp and cold, the snow was pristine and untouched by any pollution, and nothing seemed to disturb the peace. Well, nothing but my singing, but that hardly counted.


    Far too soon for my tastes, I was woken from my slumber by Luna, but given that I had asked her to do it, I couldn¡¯t complain. Instead, I set to work and swiftly turned the simple, boxy building I had pulled from the earth into a proper dwelling. Two stories, just because I could, with a nice, slanted roof to keep out the rain and get rid of the snow, proper, sturdy walls and a few windows to enjoy the view. Internally, downstairs was a living room, still somewhat bare, a kitchen, a bath and a large room which would become the shrine and library, while the upstairs had a few rooms to be used as sleeping quarters, a second bath, again, just because I could and some rooms set aside for experimentation. It was, or rather it would be, quite cosy and, maybe more importantly, it was completely unlike anything these people could have built on their own, a testament to my powers and a giant middle finger pointing in their direction. It was glorious; maybe we could even get Lady Hecate to seal the building, or at least the area upstairs, to anyone but those deemed worthy by Her.

 Chapter 1114

    By the time morning rolled around, the house was nicely furnished by the combined efforts of Luna and myself. Stone and anything related was solidly in my domain, while Luna had learned to manipulate wood into any shape she wanted, at least if the wood was fresh off the tree, and once it had the desired shape, I could gently draw out the moisture while preventing any further warping. That way, we could add some pleasant, sometimes artistic, touches to the otherwise somewhat boring and heavy stone furniture I could easily create, making the entire thing feel less like a mausoleum and more like, well, a home.


    In this case, we both were driven by a shared desire to flex on the locals, mine born from petty pride, Luna¡¯s partially from her desire to make the Shrine to Lady Hecate as impressive as possible, though I was willing to bet that part of her desire came from the same place as mine. While she wasn¡¯t biologically related to me, nor had she been born from my Body, Mind and Soul as Carnelia had been, there was no question whether Luna was my daughter; we shared far too many personality traits and quirks for anyone to deny the relation.


    Here, those similarities manifested in a desire to have the house be as perfect and unattainable as possible in the eyes of these people, a monument to all the things they had lost and couldn¡¯t regain, protected by Lady Hecate¡¯s power and thus beyond their grasp.


    The first victim of our petty pride came right as the sun rose somewhere beyond the dreary clouds above, which were still making a valorous attempt at drowning the world with endless torrents of water.


    I was standing in the kitchen, using one of the appliances I had created to make the preparation of food easier by having a smooth, solid stone as dense and heat-resistant that I could heat to a cherry red glow before using the emanating heat for cooking. It was a lot more comfortable than using Fire Magic directly, and it easily beat an actual fire in terms of convenience, though I was pretty certain there were better ways. Maybe I should make another attempt at learning FIre Rune Mastery, the only Rune Mastery of the basic elements I had yet to attain. Still, it had eluded me so far despite witnessing multiple people learn the actual runes. It just didn¡¯t click with me; either my affinity for Fire was still lacking, despite multiple traits granting me some affinity to all types of magic, or there might be a mental block holding me back, the intense dislike I had for the Sun transferring to fire or something along those lines.


    Either way, what caught my attention was that I could hear voices outside despite the storm making a valiant attempt at literally drowning out all other noise outside. It was only thanks to one of my traits that I could hear the people outside talk, and what I heard brought a wide grin to my face. They were, quite frankly, completely taken aback by what they saw; the house we had built overnight looked fairly modern, to the point that it wouldn¡¯t have been out of place in a normal city before the change. Maybe seen as a little odd, the facade was bare, grey stone after all, and the roof didn¡¯t differ in colour from the rest of it, but other than the colour and lack of a few modern conveniences like a doorbell, outside lighting and things like that, the house could easily pass as a modern house.


    Which had sprung up overnight, something both people outside couldn¡¯t believe. Well, Sylvia was torn between sheer, unadulterated awe while the other person, I think he had been introduced as Larry or something like that, just couldn¡¯t believe his eyes, to the point that he had pinched himself multiple times and even asked Sylvia to pinch him. Still, despite the pain, he was unwilling, or maybe unable, to accept the reality before him.


    They needed a moment to figure out the best way to announce their arrival, as trying to knock on a door made of solid stone wouldn¡¯t produce any audible results but they tried anyway, much to my amusement. After a few moments of deliberation, I decided to simply open the door manually instead of doing something fancy, like using my magic to have it swing open without a sound or anyone in sight. It might have been amusing to confuse and possibly frighten the pair even more, but I was curious what brought them to my door, especially as agitated as they seemed to be. Well, agitated beyond what would be expected from the impossible house they were faced with.


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    ¡°Good morning,¡± I greeted them, ¡°You can place your shoes over there; the house is warm enough that you don¡¯t need them, so don¡¯t go dragging dirt through my living room,¡± I ordered them, turning and walking back inside, leaving them to take off their shoes like civilised people.


    ¡°Luna, breakfast is ready,¡± I called out, putting the fairly simple food I had prepared on plates. I deliberately made the entire scene look like the change had never happened and worked surprisingly well. Sure, there were differences, especially in the details, but I was confident the message was getting across.


    ¡°Now, would you like a cup of tea? I¡¯m afraid we are all out of the really good blend, but we managed to acquire quite a lot of the mediocre stuff, so we shouldn¡¯t run out for a while,¡± I offered, keeping my voice perfectly even as if nothing out of the ordinary was going on here, presenting a perfect picture of mundanity.


    ¡°Yes, thank you,¡± Sylvia was the first to recover, and she managed splendidly, ¡°Do you happen to have some sliced lemon? I so love them to tea, or maybe some honey?¡± she asked, and it was only thanks to superhuman resilience that I managed to keep from laughing.


    ¡°We should have some hone, but I¡¯m afraid we are all out of lemon. The supply situation is horrid, you know?¡± I joked before gesturing for the pair to sit just as Luna entered the living room from above, looking so very much like the stereotypical teenager who had just fallen out of bed on a Sunday morning that I barely managed to hold on to my facade of calm.


    ¡°Mhm, pancakes,¡± Luna cheered before sitting down across the table and quickly starting on her portion of breakfast, playing along splendidly as I prepared some tea for the pair; I even managed to find some honey in one of our magical bags.


    ¡°Sit, drink your tea, and allow us to enjoy our breakfast,¡± I told them, cutting off an attempt of Larry to speak, likely to explain why they were visiting us despite the pouring rain.


    For a few minutes, Luna and I could eat in peace while Sylvia and Larry were sipping their tea, Sylvia with an expression of amusement on her face, Larry fluctuating between disbelief, uncertainty and hilarity as if he couldn¡¯t make up his mind whether he was going insane or not. Quite amusing, at least for an outside observer; I doubted he would be as amused by my observations as I was.


    ¡°Now, why don¡¯t you tell us why you are here?¡± I asked after I had drained my first cup of tea and enjoyed a pancake with some fresh berries we had found a few days prior.


    ¡°You have heard of Ned, the strongest fighter in our community and the one who helped us to make sense of the weirdness that is the system, right?¡± Sylvia asked, keeping things calm and conversational as if we were discussing nothing more than the bad weather outside.


    ¡°This morning, one of their group returned, looking a lot worse for wear, but he wasn¡¯t actually injured. However, the message he brought was a dire one; their group was caught up in a landslide, leaving two of them fairly injured, to the point that they can¡¯t make it down the mountain on their own,¡± Sylvia explained, and once she was done, Larry spoke up.


    ¡°Would you be willing to head into the mountains and help them? Can you get them back here so the wounds can be treated and the injuries have a chance to heal? We need those people, especially if some critters decide that the food we manage to grow and store would make for a nice snack,¡± he asked, his voice pleading.


    ¡°Well, we certainly could help. The question would be, what¡¯s in it for us?¡± I asked in return. Soon, we were engaged in a bit of haggling, both sides looking for a good deal. In truth, I was reasonably sure they didn¡¯t have as much as I would have liked, so I didn¡¯t try all that hard and kept things relatively light.


    Eventually, we reached an agreement, and to my surprise, a blue window opened before me. It told me that we had been given a quest with a fairly tight time limit: to head into the mountains and rescue the trapped party. Curiously, the quest had multiple timers and bonus objectives for rescuing different numbers of them. How fascinating.


    Now, we just had to to and get these people.

 Chapter 1115

    After a brief interrogation of Cy, as the guy who had returned to get help was called, I realised that the situation was a little more troublesome than expected. Thanks to the time Cy had needed to get back and the time I had wasted on playing with Lenny and Sylvia, there were only a little under two hours left on the first timer. I had no idea what it meant when the timer ran out, but given the quest¡¯s objectives, I was fairly certain that the timer symbolised the life of a party member running out. It would explain why the timer didn¡¯t reduce at a steady rate but occasionally jumped a few numbers or paused for a bit, it simply represented an estimated time until the party member died. Or maybe until they were so far gone that we wouldn¡¯t be able to help, though even that relied on a few assumptions, so who knew what it exactly meant? I certainly didn¡¯t, other than giving us a time until we should get to that trapped party.


    The problem with that was that, again, according to Cy, the party was roughly twelve kilometres from the farm, a distance we could easily cover in those two hours, at least in theory. Practically, it was a little more difficult, as the path to them took quite a few detours, and even the direct line had obstacles we couldn¡¯t easily overcome, especially not in the weather we currently had. That weather might just be the biggest obstacle; the constant, pouring rain made any footing we might try to find treacherous and unsteady; the mud and muck would slow us down and sap our strength, to say nothing of the chilling effect the rain had on Luna and Silva, neither of whom would be able to function at their best. Additionally, the storm was still raging, bringing down trees, causing branches to drop and generally making the forest a dangerous place to be in, even for people with our attributes.


    All in all, the quest was quite challenging, though I did have an idea which might allow me to get there in time and save those people. After all, I had learned to fly, even if I had never tried to fly in a storm like this. It would be easy to call it a sink-or-swim situation, though it wouldn¡¯t be me who was doomed to sink if I failed.


    With that in mind, I quickly got ready, using what was essentially a towel and tying it behind my neck before letting it drop to my waist and tying it there, too. It was about as crude as clothing could be, leaving my entire back open to the elements and allowing far too much potential view to my upper assets, but it allowed me to spread my wings without trouble, so I couldn¡¯t complain too much. The only problem with the idea of flying there was that I wouldn¡¯t be able to take Luna or Silva with me, which was just a little bit annoying.


    Sylvia and Lenny, who had continued to follow me as I got ready, looked fairly confused at my attire, to say nothing of the looks of disbelief they had displayed when Luna remained behind and helped heal Cy, shortening his recovery time from a week or two, if there were no complications, to a single night of rest.


    ¡°I will be going now,¡± I announced, projecting more confidence than I truly felt. The storm and the brutal gusts of wind were not filling me with confidence, but if I wanted to get there in time, I would have to fly; there was no other way. Crouching down, I called upon my wings, letting them flare out and causing gasps of surprise from the two watching people. Then, after a deep breath and a muttered, ¡®Up and at¡¯em¡¯ I did just that, jumping as high up in the air as my legs, supported by the Draconic Leap skill, could carry be before flapping my wings in an attempt to stabilise myself.


    Not that it worked all that well, I quickly learned what a kite felt like if some stupid kid decided that flying a kite in a tornado was a good idea, just that I had no cord to tie me to the ground and so, I was quickly ripped upwards by the gusting winds, desperately trying to retain some level of control.


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    My Wind Magic helped a great deal, lessening some of the effects of the gusting wind around me, but even with all my power, I wasn¡¯t strong enough to completely neutralise the wind. I could reshape it, blunt its impact and even cut through some of the strongest gusts, but I couldn¡¯t fight the wind. I had to ride them, work with and through them if I wanted to get to the place I needed to be in time.


    Additionally, I realised fairly quickly that my legs needed additional support. I could easily keep my arms tightly tucked in, but my legs made things a little more difficult, especially as they tended to dangle just a bit. So, with a brief effort of magic and will, I drew upon the cold moisture in the air and encased my legs in a thin, stabilising sheet of Ice, even adding some ridges and fins to act as stabilisers like the rudder and aileron on an aeroplane. With those moving parts removed and my centre of gravity shifted just a little, my flight stabilised to some degree, but the entire thing remained incredibly difficult and fairly annoying. Good training, sure, but I had a feeling I would be quite sore the next day, to say nothing of the exhaustion I could foresee for later.


    Luckily, the place where the party had gotten into trouble was easy to find, especially when looking at it from above. While the storm and the torrents of water had caused more than one landslide, I hoped this was the only place where just about half the hillside had decided that being part of a mountain was just such a boring drag, so the ground had performed a simultaneous walk-off and rushed towards the bottom of the valley, taking hundreds of trees and growth with it. It looked quite brutal from above, making me wonder if the trees had been healthy or not or if there was some other cause for the landslide. Whatever the case, I could easily find the landslide, and from there, it was only a short distance to the area in which the party had found shelter and was hopefully waiting for help.


    Looking around, still fighting the wind as it tried to toss me hither and thither, I managed to spot the landmarks Cy had described earlier and could follow his directions, at least to a point. Realising that staying in the air was no longer providing a real benefit, I let myself drop, shattering the Ice that turned my legs into a strange mixture between a dragon¡¯s tail and the back of an aircraft. Once that was done, I used my wings to turn my fall into a somewhat controlled tumble until I had to flare them to bleed off the last velocity so I could land in a somewhat controlled fashion. Even with all that, I barely managed to keep my feet under me, thanks to the muddy ground and its attempt to evade my legs. Whoever had taught the ground to dodge away from kicks was somebody I wanted to kick myself.


    Grumbling, I righted myself and drew my wings back into my, keeping just a small ridge outside and stretching the shirt I was wearing across them so I wouldn¡¯t accidentally expose myself.


    A quick glance at the timer told me that I still had a little over an hour to find the people I was looking for, so I began to search, still following directions from Cy. Thanks to those, it didn¡¯t take all that long to spot the area where they had gone to ground, taking shelter beneath some rocks and a tarp, hoping that the ancient stone wouldn¡¯t move, even with the wind and the rain. If it did, they wouldn¡¯t have to worry about any current injuries; they would get crushed immediately.


    ¡°Hello, the camp,¡± I called out, shouting loudly enough to be heard over the raging storm, just so the people there wouldn¡¯t attack in surprise if I suddenly appeared. While I wasn¡¯t too worried about getting hurt, I didn¡¯t want them to get hurt in some silly attempt to defend themselves.


    For a few seconds, nobody acknowledged my call, so I simply continued onwards, stepping carefully to avoid slipping and getting even muddier than I was. Finally, there was movement, and a slightly bloody and incredibly tired head poked out from between the stones and the tarp, looking at me with utter disbelief written all over his features.


    ¡°Good day to you,¡± I greeted, ¡°I¡¯m Jade Morgana; I¡¯m here to rescue you.¡±

 Chapter 1116

    ¡°You¡¯re who?¡± the guy asked, looking utterly confused. Not that my identity truly mattered, at least it shouldn¡¯t matter in the slightest, given that these people were in a situation which would almost certainly end in their death if they didn¡¯t get the help they needed, help that only very few people in the area could supply. So, questioning the person showing up out of nowhere in the middle of a powerful storm with a stated desire to help might not be the smartest thing to do. But, alas, if one relied on people reacting logically and with a modicum of intelligent thought to any given situation, the only thing one would reliably experience was disappointment.


    ¡°Jade Morgana, not that it truly matters,¡± I shrugged, ¡°You are in a situation that requires rescue; Cy managed to get himself back to the farm and given that I happened to be in attendance, I was asked to go and help you.¡±


    ¡°Aren¡¯t you a little tall to be Morgana?¡± another voice, one strangely filled with mirth, asked, causing me to frown for a moment. This was most likely Ned, the local legacy, so he might have seen some of my exploits on Mundus, but why would my physical size matter? Shaking my head to clear away the confusion, I stepped past the confused guy at the entrance and shouldered my way into their somewhat protected space.


    Inside, I was greeted with a fairly intense smell of blood, thick enough to be noticeable despite the fact that the space was well-ventilated¡ªor rather, that it was only partially enclosed, allowing the wind to bring in a constant stream of fresh air. Despite that, the scent was strong enough to make a weaker person nauseous, indicating just how bad the situation was.


    ¡°Now, as I¡¯ve said, I¡¯ve been asked to rescue you and to accomplish that task, I¡¯ll first have to make sure you don¡¯t die from the mess you managed to get yourself in,¡± I explained while taking a moment to assess the situation.


    The scent of blood mainly came from one guy who appeared to be unconscious; his shirt was drenched in it, and the bandages I managed to spy through some tears didn¡¯t look much better. Another guy, the one I assumed to be Ned, might have managed to break his leg; at least it was bandaged, and the way he was positioned indicated that he was trying to protect the leg from any movement. A serious injury, especially in the situation they were in as it essentially eliminated any mobility he might have, but not necessarily a fatal one in the short term. Sure, sepsis could kill him, but that held true for any wound. The guy next to me, at the entrance of the tent, had a few dings and scrapes, again, nothing overtly serious, while the last guy had his left arm tied across his chest, with some bloody bandages wrapped around the limb. Again, I couldn¡¯t tell at a glance just how problematic the wound was. Still, at the very least, it limited his mobility and reduced his combat effectiveness to next to nothing unless the guy was, by some miracle, a spellcaster, something I highly doubted with the meagre amount of Astral Power I felt from him. At worst, the guy would soon die, just like the rest of them, if their wounds weren¡¯t treated properly.


    ¡°Unless you prefer to die in this place, I¡¯ll start with that guy,¡± I gestured, ¡°If you have a deathwish, tell me now, and I¡¯ll see that your body is taken care of,¡± I offered but I only received strange looks in response.


    ¡°What do you mean, start with that guy? And taken care of?¡± the one with the bandaged arm asked, looking at me with an amusing mixture of anger and fear in his eyes, apparently completely ignorant of my identity. Ned, on the other hand, seemed to have heard enough about me to know I shouldn¡¯t be interrupted. Curiously, none of these people tried to Observe me, likely aware of the hostility such an act could generate.


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    ¡°He appears to be the one with the worst injuries, so logic dictates to make sure he doesn¡¯t die while working on you and, well, I have no desire for the local critters to develop a taste for human flesh, so to take care of the bodies, I might incinerate them,¡± I explained, ignoring the fact that I might try to see if I could craft a golem of some sort from a fresh body. ¡°Now, do you mind if I start saving lives?¡± I prodded, and now, I only received nods in acceptance, though I could see all three of the conscious people in the small space remained quite confused. I thought I heard Ned say something about having no respect for the classics, but given that I had bigger fish to fry, I decided to ignore him. I might inquire what he was talking about at a later time, but for now, it was simply irrelevant.


    Stepping up next to the crumbled form, I knelt down to easily reach the body and placed a hand on one of the bruised patches of skin I could see. With that contact, sending my power into the body to get a good idea of its condition was trivial, though what I saw made it obvious that the next step would be anything but.


    While I had never seen a body after one was hit by a bus or a similar conveyance, I could easily imagine that the damage would look somewhat similar: massive bruises everywhere, multiple broken bones, and, to top it all off, a deep laceration with the broken branch still sticking in the body. Granted, without that branch sealing some of the lacerated blood vessels, the guy would have bled out a while ago, but all in all, it was a minor miracle that he remained alive in the first place.


    Thinking for a moment, I began to work, starting with the most troublesome wound, the broken and somewhat splintered branch. Even with a high level of regeneration, the wound would likely have healed with some of the pieces still stuck inside, causing infection and death, to say nothing of the potential hazard these pieces posed, especially as they were far too close to the intestines for comfort. Working from the inside out, I began to push the smallest pieces back to the main piece, making sure I wasn¡¯t taxing the already broken body beyond its ability to cope and using a fair amount of Astral Power to make sure the guy wasn¡¯t stressed overly hard.


    As I was working, the other guys tried to talk to me, but given my continued concentration on the task at hand, I told them off once and afterwards, I simply ignored them. It didn¡¯t take long for them to realise that I was actually doing something, especially when the pieces of wood started to push out of the wound and drop to the ground with an almost inaudible sound.


    Still, it was one of the most difficult pieces of healing I had ever performed, both in complexity and in scope. The damage was bad enough to make the quest I had received seem almost impossible, but I was quite proud to see the timer tick up quite quickly, giving me some confidence in my ability to complete the quest and help these people get out of this mess. If not for me, they would have needed a miracle to survive, and I doubted anyone capable of performing miracles on that scale would be close enough to do so.


    However, even with my abilities, I wasn¡¯t able to heal all the damage in one fell swoop, at least not without overtaxing the body in question and leaving a pristine corpse at the end of my healing. So, after I had dealt with the most egregious damage to this guy, I decided to do something entirely different and reshape the small hideout they had made for themselves just to improve the overall situation.


    Granted, shaping earth and stone was also a lot more relaxing on my mind, simply because nobody would die if I shaped the stone too quickly unless I was clumsy enough to cause a collapse or have the rocks they used as the basis of their shelter to crash down the hill, but I had enough control to avoid such events.


    So, using a similar process to the one I had used to create the house at the farm these people called home, and any number of shelters and huts before that one, I quickly reshaped the stones. The narrow space wedged between multiple rocks and covered with a simple tarp quickly became a somewhat habitable area, protected from wind, rain and the occasional object carried by the storm.


    After that, I glanced at the timers counting down in my quest and decided it would be a good idea to gather some information now that we were all in decent enough condition, both medically and in terms of comfort.

 Chapter 1117

    ¡°Now that things are a little more stable and controlled, care to share what happened to you while I check the rest of your injuries? Unless there¡¯s something very wrong with one of them, I shouldn¡¯t have to concentrate as hard on them as I had with his,¡± I nodded towards the still-unconscious form on the ground.


    ¡°Why don¡¯t you explain who you are and why you are here?¡± the guy who I had moved past to enter their shelter asked, still suspicious of me despite my earlier actions. Or maybe because of them, or because I had just demonstrated abilities he couldn¡¯t hope to match.


    ¡°If you like,¡± I shrugged before turning to the guy with the broken arm. Can I check on your arm while I talk? I don¡¯t want to waste time.¡±


    The guy¡¯s eyes flickered from Ned to the guy at the entrance and back before returning to me, confusion and pain written all over his face.


    ¡°Sure, I guess,¡± he accepted, though without any enthusiasm. A part of me wanted to return his attitude to the fullest; if he didn¡¯t want my help, I didn¡¯t need to heal him to the best of my ability; I could just put in the least amount of effort necessary to make it so he wouldn¡¯t die before getting back to their farm and my quest would complete just the same. Doing so would mean this guy could likely never use his arm again, but that was hardly my problem, was it?


    Placing a hand on his flesh, I sent my senses into his body, quickly finding what ailed him and nodding to myself. His arm was broken, with a few shards piercing the flesh, one of them incredibly close to one of the major blood vessels, close enough that any somewhat serious impact could be enough to have the shard pierce the vessel and cause a fatal complication. Without surgery or magical healing, the arm would never fully heal, not with the way the shards had splintered off the bone.


    At the same time, as I was observing all that, I was also talking quietly, explaining that I was a legacy who didn¡¯t want to stick around a single point but wanted to wander and explore, just as I had on Mundus.


    That, in turn, caused Ned to chuckle with amusement and elaborate on my exploits on Mundus. It was not that he knew about all of them; he had apparently just seen a few of the videos and read some of the drama on the forum. Still, what little he had heard was enough to paint me as a mixture between an adventurer driven by wanderlust and a bloodthirsty monster, out to devour the world, a description not suited to make the guy near the entrance any calmer. Nor, for that matter, the one I was still working on, allowing me to observe the physiological changes caused by his mental state, which was fascinating in its own right. Subtle changes in the blood¡¯s chemical composition as various hormones were released, his pulse jumping as his heart started to beat faster, his blood pressure going up, it was quite obvious that his body was readying itself for action, be it fight or flight. In turn, I became curious if I would be able to reverse those changes, allowing me to essentially calm him or at least remove the state of readiness his body was in.


    A few subtle nudges and his heartbeat slowed back down while his blood pressure returned to the original level, which, in turn, caused the chemical balance in his blood to shift as well, allowing me to observe that part of the process, too, something I took careful note of. This was an incredibly interesting observation and I wanted to study it for the future, as it might become a powerful tool to manipulate biological systems, either to their advantage or to their detriment. Maybe it was possible to make somebody more reckless or to drive them into a literal berserker frenzy, especially if I combined these observations with those I had made near Jademoon Tower, with the runic empowerment I used on a few people with Lia¡¯s help.


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    ¡°How can you be so calm around her?!¡± the guy near the entrance asked, his voice filled with anger. By now, that guy had been introduced as Jacob, while the one I was working on was named Lars. Last and currently least, the guy who was still passed out was named Geralt.


    ¡°For one, you need to remember that we all thought Road to Purgatory was a game, not an actual world,¡± I spoke, noticing how the earlier indicators of stress and fear came back, making me wonder if I should renew my efforts.


    ¡°It turned out to be a lot more real than we thought, but nobody knew. Well, at least nobody here and while some might have felt that something was off, that the world was too realistic or something like that, I don¡¯t think anyone even suggested we were essentially visiting an alien world; that would be just insane, wouldn¡¯t it?¡± I asked, just a little bit annoyed, though I wasn¡¯t completely certain about the cause of my annoyance. Was it due to the accusations, or was it something lingering from my ignorance in regards to the nature of Road to Purgatory and Mundus, which might have contributed to the decisions that ultimately got Sigmir killed?


    ¡°Why am I so calm about all this?¡± Lars asked, his body trying to change the chemical balance in his blood so it was ready to fight or flee, but with my influence, that didn¡¯t work, which, in turn, made his body work even harder to ready itself. I quickly realised that this was essentially an escalating spiral, but I wasn¡¯t sure what to do about it. The only sensible option I could see was to lessen my efforts and let his body go into a panic attack, one he would hopefully recover from.


    Moments later, after I reduced my efforts to the point that his body was deeply in the grips of a panic attack, he shook me off, removing the last of my efforts with the loss of physical contact, causing the hormones his body had released to take full effect, sending him into a fairly vicious frenzy. Realising that he was no longer coherent, I moved back and out of the way, ready to dodge or defend myself, but Lars¡¯ eyes locked onto Jacob as the biggest threat. Granted, Jacob was the only one standing, and he was blocking the exit, so it wasn¡¯t a huge surprise. However, that Lars would charge at him with reckless abandon was a surprise.


    As was his brilliant idea to try hitting him with the broken arm, that couldn¡¯t end in anything but tears.


    Two frantic strikes later, that was exactly what happened, though the ending part was mostly because I used Mind Magic to render Lars unconscious to end this insanity. Curiously, one of the timers in my quest suddenly jumped from some fifteen hours to a mere ninety seconds, making it obvious that something was seriously wrong. This is where the tears came in, namely, a fairly large tear in the vein I had noticed earlier, courtesy of the bone fragment.


    ¡°Crud,¡± I softly cursed and stepped past Jacob, who tried to figure out just what had happened. ¡°His idiocy managed to tear a major blood vessel; he¡¯s got less than a minute until he bleeds out,¡± I explained as I started to work on Lars, grumbling under my breath. It was a good thing that I was a Blood Mage; otherwise, the fool might have been beyond help, even with Divine Magic. That sort of healing was a lot more generalised and focused on the major damage first before working its way down. In this case, that could easily mean that the broken bone was fixed, but the vein continued to leak, causing massive trouble in the long run. Luckily, I could fix the problem, as shown by the timer in my quest, but when I did, I noticed something else.


    Two of those timers were showing the same numbers, indicating that something bad would happen in fifteen hours, but how the system could know that, I had no idea. Regardless of that, however, I needed to focus on the other timers, still counting down with less than fifteen hours on the clock, so I really should make sure that Ned and Geralt were on the mend and wouldn¡¯t die from some unforeseen and troublesome complication. Well, I should also make sure that Jacob was alright, but given that the guy was standing and arguing, I wasn¡¯t too worried about him.


    ¡°Now, you¡¯ve got some idea about me and what I do,¡± I told them after making sure Lars was in a reasonably comfortable position. ¡°Care to share how you gentlemen managed to get into this particular mess?¡±

 Chapter 1118

    Their explanation, which they reluctantly gave while I made sure their wounds were treated to the point that they wouldn¡¯t cripple them while we made our way down the mountain and back to the farm, was fairly simple. It all boiled down to being in the wrong place at the wrong time and unable to cope with a fairly large landslide. Granted, for the bad luck they had to be in that place when the hillside decided to make for the valley, they got out of the situation remarkably intact, something I attributed to a mixture of luck, their superhuman attributes and some athletic skill. Without any of those three, at least one of their group would have been killed outright, likely by getting pulled into the avalanche of mud, rocks and wood, or maybe in some other manner. Landslides, especially those covering as much ground as the one here, which I had seen from above, were no joke. Sure, they might not break any land speed records unless one was thinking of the speed with which the land moved, but when talking about hundreds of tons of material on the move, any speed was dangerous.


    At the same time, I was once again curious about the system and its mechanics. How did quests get created, and which prerequisites had to be met to allow a person to give another a task and have it turned into a system-administrated quest? I vaguely remembered Sigmir telling me about certain people having some sort of authority over their community, allowing them to promise the resources of that community as a reward for a quest, something I was fairly confident that something similar applied here, at least that was indicated by a conversation I had with Mrs Wu a while back. However, just how the system decided which tasks were worthy of becoming one? That, I had no idea about.


    Maybe I would have to become a local authority for some time, so I would be able to create quests of my own and have people do them so I could research this a little more. Or a lot more, this was an aspect of the system I could actually see myself actively interacting with, meaning I could perform actual tests and not just draw conclusions from reactions of the system, as I could with the skill system and such. Sadly, to become a local authority meant I needed permanent subjects of some sort; otherwise, the people around Jademoon Tower should have given me such authority. Or maybe I had that authority at that time and simply never used it; that was a distinct possibility, too.


    Still, as interesting as that all was, I had other fish to fry at the moment, fish that might get swept up by a wave at any moment. The system and its timers certainly indicated that the area we were in wasn¡¯t as safe and secure as I would have liked it to be; it still gave a timer of thirteen hours to complete the quest, which could mean that this area would be destroyed in twelve hours or it might mean that the farm these people lived at would be destroyed at that time.


    ¡°Your wounds shouldn¡¯t worsen if we start making our way back to your village; I don¡¯t trust the weather not to throw another mess in our general direction. And if the mountain decides to head for the valley, I¡¯ll only be able to save myself; I don¡¯t think I¡¯d be able to do you any good,¡± I admitted, just a little bit annoyed at my impotence. Intellectually, I knew that the full force of nature was beyond my ability to withstand, but that didn¡¯t mean I enjoyed being reminded of it twice in as many days.


    ¡°You want us to go back out there?¡± Jacob asked, his unwillingness mixing with his dislike for me to form something fairly unpleasant.


    ¡°Want to?¡± I let out a derisive snort at the idea, ¡°Hel no! I don¡¯t want to go out into that mess. But given what I feel from the ground below us, I don¡¯t think this position will be here for all that long. And if these rocks start their journey into the valley alongside a chunk of the mountain, I don¡¯t want to experience it with my body. Watching from a safe place, maybe, but being caught up in the mess? Hel no!¡± I shook my head while stretching my Earth Magic sense out a bit to confirm whether my spontaneous argument was actually the truth or just a lie.


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    To my slight surprise, I could feel some instability in the ground, especially uphill from our position. A lot of water was moving through one of the deeper layers, loosening the soil a little and removing its cohesion. While I couldn¡¯t readily tell how long it would take for things to move, I was fairly confident that they would, lending credence to the timers displayed in my quest.


    For a moment, I wondered if there was a way for me to prevent such a landslide, but given the amount of force involved on the side of the mountain and the mass of material, I doubted it was possible. Similarly, trying to evade the mess by digging down would only destabilise the area further, meaning we would have to move or we would be caught in it, something I doubted anyone would enjoy.


    ¡°Shit,¡± Ned muttered, carefully moving to stand and test his recently healed leg. ¡°You sure about that?¡± he asked, apparently more to confirm his own thoughts than to have me repeat myself. When I nodded, he swore again and started testing his leg before looking over to the downed Geralt. ¡°Can you get him up?¡±


    ¡°Probably,¡± I nodded, placing a hand on Geralt¡¯s arm and ensuring there were no further wounds to cause trouble later. When I found nothing, I decided to test an idea I had earlier, when working on Lars. With a small exertion of Blood and Mind Magic, his body was teeming with adrenaline, his heart beating fast and his blood pressure shooting up, while an impulse to move shot through his unconscious mind, jolting him awake. He quite literally shot up as if stung by something unpleasant, looking around with wide, frantic eyes. Maybe I had overdone it a little, it was possible that the physical effect would have been enough, though it could have triggered a nightmare instead. Similarly, the impulse to move could have caused purely mental effects, making it not perfectly suited either.


    ¡°What the hell happened?!¡± he demanded, trying to make sense of his situation.


    ¡°Not the most pleasant way to wake somebody; I¡¯ll make a note of that,¡± I calmly muttered while the rest of his party tried to calm him and explain what had happened. Truly, more research was required on this, especially the combination of Blood Magic to cause a physiological effect to reinforce the psychological effects caused by Mind Magic. Or vice-versa, the interplay between body and mind was quite fascinating. Maybe I could even tie some sort of Soul Magic into this to drive the effects deeply into a person, altering their entire existence. This had¡­ potential.


    Luckily, without the continued stimulation and cognitive dissonance Lars had experienced earlier, the fight-or-flight state quickly abated, leaving a wholly awake but quite confused Geralt in its wake.


    ¡°Don¡¯t think I should wake Lars the same way as I did Geralt,¡± I admitted, remembering how Lars had almost killed himself in a panic earlier. It might be best if I wasn¡¯t in the shelter with them at all when they woke him up, just in case. ¡°I¡¯ll be outside.¡±


    Once outside, I quickly moulded some stone to give me a secure place to stand and some more to block out the rain while waiting. While I couldn¡¯t be sure, I was fairly certain that the storm had gotten even worse than it had been, with some additional rain. I had a feeling the wind was a little calmer, though that had helped us only so far.


    I would have to keep an eye on the timers; maybe we could find a secure shelter or a place I could make secure for us. Otherwise, our only option was to get back to the farm, an idea I favoured, if only to get rid of the fairly annoying four, especially Jacob.


    Within the shelter, I could hear Lars moaning and groaning. He seemed to have had a bit of a blackout about the events right before he went nuts, meaning he was completely confused. Maybe that was for the best, though I could hear Jacob tell him what happened. Annoyingly, he was even quite truthful, making it difficult to refute his words, especially as Jacob was a trusted friend and I was just somebody who had come out here to help them.


    Regardless, Ned was quite convinced by my words, or maybe he was simply scared of what might happen if I decided to leave them to hang here and things got worse. Whatever his reasons, they served me quite well, so I was determined to accept them and escort them back into the valley, which might just be the most challenging part of this entire quest.

 Chapter 1119

    Once upon a time, back before Road to Purgatory, when video gaming involved a computer or a dedicated console, escort quests in role-playing games had been widely considered to be the worst of all types of quests, as far too often, the success or failure of such quests was utterly dependant on an oftentimes wonky artificial intelligence. The non-player character you were supposed to escort might glitch out and float off into the sky, run off a cliff or get stuck because some sort of waypoint couldn¡¯t be triggered, leaving you stuck with few ways to solve the situation other than trying again. This could be quite frustrating, especially if the situation repeated itself a few times, as you were forced to try over and over again to figure out where the problem was caused and how it might be avoidable. Back then, I had utterly despised those quests, viewed them as a waste of time and avoided them whenever possible.


    And yet, now, with the four people I was supposed to escort down the mountain and back to the farm they called home, I somehow yearned for that type of quest. At least the non-player characters rarely complained, or, if they did, there was some sort of trigger, and I could turn down the volume if necessary. With these four, I couldn¡¯t easily turn down the volume; their complaining was incessant and, maybe worst of all, they were just as stupid as the non-player characters of old. Maybe even dumber, it was hard to tell which of their troubles were caused by general ineptitude and which were caused by exhaustion. But regardless of the cause of their troubles, the complaints never stopped, as these four fools kept slipping and occasionally sliding in the mud; they kept groaning, moaning and complaining all the time.


    A part of me wondered if they were doing it just because they could because they were confident I would protect them if something seriously troublesome happened, so they didn¡¯t feel a need to be cautious and vigilant. Or maybe they were confident that no predator worth worrying about would venture out of their cave or burrow willingly with the incredibly bad weather we were suffering under. Granted, that idea might even be somewhat plausible. If I were some sort of wolf or bear, I wouldn¡¯t want to trek through the forest right now, either, especially with the constant danger of landslides or falling branches. Well, even without being a wolf or bear, I wasn¡¯t all that happy to be out in the pouring rain, but given that the original location was under threat of getting caught in a landslide, this was the better option, no matter how unpleasant.


    Now, if we came across a suitable location to hunker down for a few hours, I would be seriously tempted, but given the dearth of nicely dry places up here, that didn¡¯t seem to be an option. And so, we continued to make our trek alongside the mountain, making sure we didn¡¯t need to completely descend into the valley where the small creek usually flowing there had turned into a fairly serious river, complete with standing waves, the occasional log floating by and enough mud to build a few houses- or destroy an equal number of them, if they happened to get in the way of the rushing water. No, the valley was closed to us unless we wanted to commit suicide or murder. And as tempting as that might be, I wasn¡¯t willing to throw the quest away for the brief pleasure of throwing the complaining fools into the water and watching as the river washed away their sins- alongside their lives.


    Luckily, despite my annoyance at their behaviour, these four were not completely incompetent. While they were bitching up a storm about everything and had some trouble keeping their footing thanks to the slippery mud, they managed to make fairly good time. To make matters even better, we didn¡¯t encounter any dangerous wildlife, it seemed as if the local beasts were just as annoyed at the weather as I was, so we made overall fairly good time.


    Thus, we managed to get into the area above their farm sometime in the late afternoon, some four, maybe five hours after we set out at the shelter they had originally used. During that time, the weather took a surprising turn for the even worse, adding the occasional lightning and some hail to the mix. While I hadn¡¯t believed the situation could become more uncomfortable, the weather sadly proved me wrong and a part of me remembered Ling, one of my first students with her affinity to Weather Magic.


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    It made me wonder just how strong said student was now, would she be able to nudge the weather system giving us this wonderful storm a little or could she replicate its effects on a small scale? What did her affinity mean for the development of her magical abilities and how far had she pushed them?


    Sadly, I wouldn¡¯t be able to find out. As far as I was aware, Ling was back at Apple Gate Farm, or maybe she had decided to look for greener pastures. Something else might have driven her from the farm, or she might have died. All were valid possibilities, but as things were right now, I wasn¡¯t in a position to find out, as curious as I was. Maybe I could try scrying on her through the Astral River but for that, I¡¯d have to set up a somewhat permanent base with multiple dedicated runic circles and a prepared throne to anchor myself while my mind was busy exploring the Astral River.


    Something I might want to consider setting up anyway if only to see how far the deeper layers of the Astral River have calmed down over the last few months. Maybe doing so would allow me to get a better idea of what our ultimate destination looked like beyond the fact that it would be a freezingly cold place, possibly with some link to Darkness. Otherwise, I might have to slowly twist the Nexus a little, adding a slight amount of Darkness to the streams so I could be completely comfortable. However, that would be a task to accomplish over decades, likely taking a lot longer than I had lived thus far, so it wasn¡¯t a short-term goal, but at least in the category of medium-term, depending on how long my lifespan would actually turn out to be.


    However, those were concerns for another day. For now, getting the four fools to the farm was more important. Luckily, it looked like there were no stoppages further down the valley and with the amount of water running through the area, it was draining roughly at the same speed as it was flooding in from deeper in the mountains, meaning there was an equilibrium, though not a terribly comfortable one. The dykes I had created earlier were still holding strong, but even my magical construction wasn¡¯t immune to the ravages of time or even to the mundane forces that tons of water and the dirt it carried brought to bear.


    ¡°That¡¯s insane,¡± Ned muttered, staring at the area that, just yesterday, had been perfectly dry land, with a docile creek running nearby. Now, it was a frothing mess of water and mud, uncomfortable to even look at, something I especially noticed when their eyes started to wander from the dry area protected by the dyke I had set up and the waters around it.


    ¡°Nature is quite powerful, you know?¡± I asked, just barely keeping my voice under control. It wouldn¡¯t do to show these people that nature was awing me, too, and I certainly couldn¡¯t allow them to see my¡­ not fear but concern. I certainly wasn¡¯t afraid.


    Getting to the farm itself posed to be a bit of a challenge, to the point that I ultimately decided carrying them across the frothing water was the easiest solution. Thankfully, my cloak was up to the task, as I wasn¡¯t sure I would be able to use my wings to fly stably in the messy weather while carrying an adult.


    Amusingly, the weight wouldn¡¯t be the problem; my attributes were high enough for that, but shifting my centre of gravity would undoubtedly mess with my ability to keep things stable. And in these conditions, anything that messed with my ability to keep things stable was an invitation to take a dip in the wonderful, churning mess of water and mud.


    One by one, I carried them across and with each person, more and more spectators showed themself, watching as I was working. Finally, when the last guy, Ned, was set down, I could relax, allowing the annoyance and exhaustion to wash away as I felt the influx of EXP for completing the quest, granting me a level-up. Now, I was level one hundred and fifteen, and with that, I received additional stats and a few traits. But I would take a look at those later. First, I needed to rest.

 Chapter 1120

    As it turned out, Luna hadn¡¯t been idle while I was away. When I left, the house had been somewhat bare, but now, it was nicely appointed with the various fabrics and furniture we had stored in our magical bags, giving it the appearance and feel of an actual home. Maybe we should go and see if we could find a somewhat intact furniture store in the next town we came across, if the building wasn¡¯t broken, something like a mattress should still be in good condition and now, with the magical bags, we could easily take one or two with us, allowing a much more comfortable rest.


    However, until we could accomplish that, all we had were piles of fabric, sleeping bags and pillows, which made for a fairly comfortable resting place, even if there was something strangely animalistic about it. Using these piles of fabric made me regularly feel as if we were making a small nest, den or something along those lines for ourselves whenever we could make a comfortable camp like this instead of simply rolling out a sleeping bag on a prepared surface. Still, it was comfortable, and after the messy, cold, and thoroughly unpleasant time I had spent trudging through the rain, I felt that it was just what the doctor had ordered right after a hot shower. Well, it was hot for me, barely above frigid for anyone else.


    A few hours later, after a long and comfortable nap, it was time to go over the notifications I had received and assign the additional points I gained, thus unlocking another pair of traits.


    The intelligence was actually something interesting. The trait was called Astral Transformation, which improved my ability to reshape material infused with my Astral Power, though I would have to do a few tests to see its extent. Depending on that, it might be almost as interesting and powerful as the Mind over Matter trait, just directed in a slightly different direction.


    The Intuition Trait was somewhat similar. The Sense Infusion trait increased the distance across which I could sense objects infused with my Astral Power, though, just as with the other trait, it would be important to determine what I could accomplish with the information. Did it mean I would be able to influence the Astral Power I could sense over an increased distance, or did it mean I might learn how to use my own Astral Power as a marker to step through the shadows and effectively teleport to anything I marked beforehand? Either way, additional ways to sense things and gain information were always a good thing to have, so I wasn¡¯t going to complain about the trait.


    Last, and in this case least, was the Dexterity trait, amusingly called Dexterous Artist (Carving). It took me a moment to realise why I had gained the trait, as it simply improved my dexterity when carving complex shapes. However, it soon dawned on me that it was essentially an improvement to my ability to carve runes into people. Given that one of the last large projects I had pursued had been the creation of that runic enhancement for other people, it made sense. At the same time, I idly wondered if the trait would apply to tattoos, so I made a note to try that out; it might yield some amusing and interesting results.


    Once I was out of bed, I looked out of the window, marvelling at my ability to make clear glass from normal sand, especially thanks to my Mind over Matter ability. It allowed me to sense things in minute detail and manipulate anything I could sense within the limited range of my ability. There were times in which I wondered if I would eventually be able to sense and split individual atoms with it but given that I had only a somewhat vague idea of how an individual atom would look like, I doubted it. Maybe one day I would learn enough about the natural world to understand even those minute details, and once I could understand them, I would be able to manipulate them.


    In this case, the Mind over Matter ability allowed me to smooth out the crystals that made up the glass, in addition to letting me filter out the various impurities. Sure, it took hours of my time and would take even longer if my Earth Magic didn¡¯t allow me to get fairly close to the desired result in the first place, but it was so very worth it. Just standing at my window and looking out into the rain was a wonderful feeling, made only better by the knowledge I was enjoying something few, if any, could, at least not with windows made after the change.


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    After all, how many people had that level of magical ability, and of those, how many would use it as frivolously as I did at times? Probably a lot more for the second category than the first, but I doubted I would ever get any real numbers, even if Hecate might actually know those numbers. It would only make sense if she kept an eye on every powerful and capable arcane spellcaster, especially if my theory about her desire to acquire all possible magical knowledge held true.


    Letting out a yawn, I continued to stare out into the rain, noticing that the amount of water coming from the sky had lessened, meaning the water might soon drain away in the area around the farm, depending on the circumstances further down the valley. It would be interesting to observe that part, though I wasn¡¯t sure how pleasant it would be to try and clean the area around their farm up once the water receded. Luckily, the weather was still too cold for mosquitoes and similar insects. Otherwise, their population would likely explode in the various leftover puddles where the eggs could hatch without the threat of getting eaten by whatever fish lived in their usual breeding areas. If there was one massive argument for living in an area of permafrost, it was that there would be no mosquitoes and similar insects around. I had a feeling that no matter how powerful I was and would become, those pesky pests would always and perpetually be a thorn, or rather stinger, in my side.


    ¡°Mom,¡± Luna¡¯s voice brought me out of my musings, likely because she had heard me moving around, ¡°Do you want to have some dinner?¡± she asked, making me smile.


    ¡°Sure,¡± I agreed, putting on some fresh clothes and making my way downstairs, ¡°Want to tell me what happened since this morning? I got some interesting looks when I brought those four back.¡±


    ¡°Well, you left me to heal Cy, remember?¡± When I nodded, she continued, ¡°That part was easy enough, though it wasn¡¯t all. It turned out, some of the locals weren¡¯t all that happy with the idea of having you look for those four, not quite sure why. Something about depending on the monster or something along those lines; I don¡¯t think they like you very much. Enzo spent the entire time yesterday badmouthing you, and today, that didn¡¯t change much.¡±


    It took me a moment to remember just who Enzo was, not because it had been so long since we met the guy but because he was, ultimately, utterly irrelevant, a gnat I crushed because it had the temerity to sting me. Or rather, a pervert I crushed because he had the temerity to peek at me, which was ultimately the same, an insect seeking something that didn¡¯t belong to it.


    ¡°So the criminal cried out for getting the punishment he deserved? How quaint,¡± I grumbled, though if I was honest with myself, I had a fairly good idea why these people would side with him. He was part of their community, and no matter how he violated an outsider, they would instinctively side with their own group; it was just human nature. Or rather, it was likely natural for all societal species to join with their in-group to oppose an outsider, that was why they formed societies in the first place.


    ¡°Well, a few of those who saw what you did were not all that happy with the things he said, or maybe they weren¡¯t happy with the traits you revealed; there was quite a bit of shouting, but it all went ultimately nowhere,¡± Luna shrugged, making me nod in understanding while I took some of the food she had prepared.


    ¡°So, the usual social dynamics, nothing truly new there. What happened after I got those guys back?¡± I prodded, curious if the successful rescue of their strongest fighting force changed anything.


    ¡°Eh, a few complained that they would have to pay you, and some suggested that only Larry and Sylvia, who promised you a reward, so the two of them would have to supply it. At that point, they realised I was there and politely asked me to leave, so I don¡¯t know just where their discussion went,¡± she shrugged and, somehow, I started to get a bad premonition. Somebody was going to do something stupid, I was almost willing to bet on it. Now, I only needed to figure out what form their stupidity would take and how I would react to various possibilities.

 Chapter 1121

    ¡°You know, I¡¯m curious if any of those complaining about giving me what I¡¯m due remember a fairly simple but incredibly important thing,¡± I mused, shaking my head at the various possibilities the locals could do something dumb. ¡°At the moment, I¡¯m their boat, I¡¯m keeping them, quite literally, afloat and out of the water, so annoying me to the point that I might be tempted to break the walls I erected would be¡­¡± I tried to come up with a suitable word but, sadly, there were none I could think of to adequately describe that sort of stupidity.


    ¡°They might hope to wait until the water recedes; that way, you couldn¡¯t just take away the walls,¡± Luna suggested in an almost hopeful voice as if I needed the water to devastate the locals if they annoyed me badly enough, something I readily communicated with a mockingly raised eyebrow.


    ¡°Okay, I know. If you can protect them from something they have no chance of defying, you can destroy them just as easily, I know. But I doubt many of the locals have such a mindset, I think they are still partially stuck with the mindset from before the change, bound by the common sense and, to a degree, the laws and customs of that time,¡± she argued, making me consider her point for a moment. And I had to grant her that point: in a fairly remote and protected area like this, the now commonly accepted sense of danger hadn¡¯t taken hold as strongly as elsewhere. To the majority here, the world remained a relatively safe place; sure, there was no more internet or television, nor the modern convenience they had been accustomed to, but I had a feeling that deep down, they still felt safe in this world.


    If the worst threat they had experienced after the initial madness of the change when people Shattered and the dead started to walk the Earth had been the storm and subsequent flooding, they couldn¡¯t instinctively recognise that I didn¡¯t need to bother with trying to get justice from some external source like the government if they forced me to, I was readily able to enforce my own justice. A justice without an easy mechanism of appeal and without the usual restraints of justifiable punishments, so if they made me enact my own justice, it could easily become vengeance.


    ¡°Maybe I should hope that they try to withhold payment for the quest I completed for them,¡± I mused, softly chuckling to myself. ¡°I never managed to find out what the system does in that case. Would it somehow transport the materials we were promised into our magical bags, or would there be some sort of punishment for those withholding payment? And if there was a punishment, what form would it take, how many of them would be afflicted, and so on? There are so many questions this could answer, especially with regard to the intelligence of the system. The mechanisms and such,¡± I explained, getting Luna to join in with soft laughter.


    ¡°Maybe we should wait for a few days until the water recedes somewhat before collecting the reward; that might give them the courage to try and keep it to themselves or maybe renegotiate. That way, you would get those answers, even if some fresh supplies would be nice,¡± Luna giggled, and I had to admit, the idea had a bit of amusing merit, even if it felt a little odd to deliberately wait for the locals to gather their courage so they could, in their minds, screw us over.


    ¡°You think they might be that dumb?¡± I asked, even as a small voice in my mind reminded me that people could always be that dumb. Human stupidity was essentially unlimited, especially when they gathered in groups. I was faintly reminded of some sci-fi novel I had read ages ago. In it, there was a species that gained greater intelligence if its members gathered and connected their minds into a gestalt. With humans, it was the opposite; the larger the group, the greater the mental degradation and the less intelligence the group as a whole could display.


    The look on Luna¡¯s face confirmed my thoughts quickly; she had no doubt that people could be that dumb, so maybe this would be worth waiting for. There had to be a reason why the people on Mundus generally trusted the System, and I doubted that it was because the people there were all nice, polite and law-abiding people. If there were an easy way to circumvent the system and its quest rewards, it would be used, especially on a group literally called Travellers, who were most certainly not in the ¡®tribe¡¯ of the people giving out the quest. And yet, I had never heard about such a case on the forum. For that to be the case, the system had to have some sort of enforcement or punishment mechanism in place.


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    With those ideas in mind, Luna and I remained indoors for the rest of the evening, relaxing and putting some additional effort into the Shrine to Lady Hecate, making it nice and even adding some literature to it. Nobody should be able to claim the shrines we set up were only for our self-gratification. Every shrine had at least the basic guide to elemental and divine magic but the vast majority of them had more, though the additional texts weren¡¯t as standardised as the basic guide. It generally depended on what we had been working on at the time we set the shrine up, leaving behind what essentially was an edited version of the development notes of the current project. Not enough to fully replicate what we had been working on, especially if the project was innately dangerous or had great potential for abuse, but enough to give them a path to start walking on.


    Here, those additional lessons were once again focused on what could be called material magic, or maybe physical transmutation. Notes on how to best shape materials, even if one didn¡¯t have the requisite knowledge to create stable structures but also notes on the best ways to analyse materials, though I had some fairly large advantages there, thanks to some of my traits. Either way, the idea was that this might allow me to slowly bridge the gap between Alchemy and the elemental magic I practised, though I doubted it would be that easy. Alchemy was, and likely would remain, a bit of a headache for me, simply because it seemed to be almost parallel to my style of magic, and the problem with parallel lines was, that they would never meet.


    Soon, the evening turned into night, and I realised that, finally, the rain outside seemed to have stopped, at least for now. Maybe it was temporary maybe the storm had actually moved on. Hopefully, the water would soon drain further down the valley and make a mess of things downstream.


    Given my earlier nap, I remained awake for quite some time, using my Mind over Matter ability to play around with a bit of stone. The current project was to see if I could detect and separate the different minerals in the rock. It was quite challenging, especially as I needed to completely rely on my magical sense;r my mundane sensescould noto register the differences inthe material.


    Still, it was a fascinating project¡ªso fascinating that I almost missed the sounds coming from outside. They were not the sounds of the storm returning but a different kind of sound: the sound of people up to no good.


    Out of curiosity, I peeked through one of the windows and could easily see four people move towards and around the house, all of them carrying some stuff. They split into pairs, one of them holding a pair of bottles each, the other a torch and what appeared to be stones. Then, as if by arranged signal, they all tried to light some cloth stuck in those bottles, three of the four readily catching fire. The last bottle didn¡¯t catch, while one of the already lit ones burned far quicker than it had any right to, though those bottles were only part of their attack. Given the speed with which that one bottle burned, it joined a pair of rocks thrown by the guys with the torches, aiming to shatter the windows so the bottles could easily make their way inside, though that one bottle shattered against the wall as it had been thrown too quickly. Still, the liquid inside splashed across the house, immediately catching fire, just as the liquid in the bottles flying through the window moments later did.


    It seemed that the locals were so unhappy with our presence that they tried to burn us out. Not that they had a chance to succeed; smothering the fire was child¡¯s play for me; though it was a little harder than I had expected, the liquid they used for their devices seemed to be somewhat magical in nature. More importantly, however, was the question of what sort of punishment these people deserved for their unprovoked attempt to murder their benefactor and whether it should include the other locals.

 Chapter 1122

    The noise from the attack and the light of the fire outside were enough to wake Luna and Silva up, and both were only briefly confused before they recognised what was happening. Not that a whole lot was going on other than the throwing of a few more improvised incendiary devices, none of which accomplished all that much. It was almost as if trying to set a building entirely made of stone on fire was an incredibly foolish thing to do, even if the attempt contained its own fuel. The best result our attackers could hope for was that burning fuel splashed onto Luna or me, which might give us some fairly nasty burns. Maybe set our hair on fire but given the amount of Astral Power contained within my hair, I wasn¡¯t certain it would burn, even if it were to be drenched in gasoline or whatever their bottles had contained. With me awake and aware, the entire thing was completely doomed to failure, as the fire they used, despite its partially magical nature, was no match for my own elemental abilities, allowing me to control and smother it with little effort.


    ¡°Now, what to do with them?¡± I muttered to myself as I stepped up to the window and focused on the four attackers. The first response was fairly simple: a series of stunning blows with Mind Magic, supported by Overflow, sending all of them into deep unconsciousness so I could easily collect the four for later judgment.


    ¡°Mom, please don¡¯t kill them,¡± Luna asked me as I walked downstairs to the door, the request surprising me to the point that I paused. It wasn¡¯t as if death was something completely foreign to Luna. We had performed more than enough experiments that ended with our test subjects dying a messy death, though we only performed those experiments on animals or undead, so why was she worried about those four?


    ¡°They tried to burn down a Shrine of Lady Hecate and the Lady wants to render Her own judgement. That only works as long as they are alive; once they are dead, Her options are somewhat limited. Not that punishing them in the afterlife is impossible. She just wants to keep Her options as open as possible, you know?¡± Luna asked, making me giggle just a little at the idea of death being the kindest option these four had to look forward to.


    ¡°I believe that is possible, yes,¡± I nodded, stepping outside to collect the idiots. On the other side of the farm, another door opened, making it obvious that somebody had noticed the flames and was investigating. Now, I was somewhat glad that I didn¡¯t put out the irrelevant fire burning on the outside walls, as it was irrefutable evidence, alongside the broken windows, that these four had attacked my home.


    Upon reaching the first pair, I used my Mind over Matter ability to see if I could carry them that way. However, I quickly noticed that their weight was a little beyond what I could easily lift. What I could do, on the other hand, was use the soil beneath them to shift the bodies, so the two bodies started to slide across the ground on a small earthwave as I went to get the other pair.


    While I was doing that, one of the people checking out what had happened came across the open area, looking confused and frightened as she approached me. This was not a terrible surprise, given that the area was only dimly lit by the dying light of the fire on my wall and the torches the attackers had dropped when I knocked them out.


    ¡°What happened?¡± the woman asked. I had seen her earlier when checking on Cy, but she had never been introduced to me, so I had no idea what her name might be.


    ¡°These four seemed to have something against me and decided that fire would be the best tool to solve their issues. That issue being my continued existence,¡± I explained, my voice remaining calm, maybe even bored, as I wasn¡¯t all that excited by the foolish attempt on my life. If they had been more competent, I might have considered it a problem, but given their incredible ineptitude, I couldn¡¯t be bothered to get too excited.


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    Well, not by the attack itself, but knowing that Lady Hecate wanted to enact a punishment of Her own was enough to make me curious. I wanted to see what a deity would come up with to punish those who had tried to set one of Her shrines on fire. Hopefully, it would be suitably ironic and painful while serving as a clear warning to anyone hearing that one should leave Lady Hecate¡¯s shrines alone. That warning would likely also be applied to Luna and myself, adding that bit of extra security to us, which I considered just another benefit.


    ¡°They tried to kill you?¡± she asked, her voice rising in pitch to the point that I wondered if Silva would start to howl soon.


    ¡°Given that they tried to set my house on fire, I would assume so, yes. Maybe they wanted to have a nice midnight barbeque with me and my daughter as the main dish; I truly don¡¯t care for their motivation. Only that they will be punished for their actions,¡± I explained, my voice darkening a little as I imagined what these people had hoped to accomplish. Incompetent or not, maybe I was not as calm about it as I would have liked. Given the queasy look on the woman¡¯s face, she wasn¡¯t feeling calm either and I had a feeling she wouldn¡¯t ask any more questions.


    ¡°What are you going to do with them?¡± she asked, proving my feeling wrong just moments after I had it.


    ¡°We shall see, I have yet to decide, especially as it was not just I who was wronged. The house my daughter and I are using is also a Shrine to Lady Hecate, Goddess of Magic and a few other domains, which means these four morons attempted to destroy a divine shrine. As you might imagine, the Gods are somewhat displeased with those who try to destroy or defile their shrines,¡± I explained, getting a slightly strange look in response.


    ¡°It¡¯s so weird to think that there are Gods out there,¡± the woman said, her voice betraying how shaken she was by the whole situation. Admirably, she didn¡¯t just scurry back into their house but stuck around despite the cold and still somewhat wet night.


    ¡°I mean, I¡¯ve been to church and stuff, but I never really believed that there was some God out there, watching me. It was always about the people at church and around me, you know?¡± she asked, and I could only nod my head in understanding. While I hadn¡¯t been raised that way, I could intellectually understand the desire to belong to a community and, for a moment, I wondered how many religions before the change had formed due to that desire. How many gatherings had simply sought something they all shared, something that others didn¡¯t have, to unite them under that single idea or ideal? It was a curious, though now fairly irrelevant, question.


    ¡°Now, there isn¡¯t just one God. There are quite a few of them. And anyone with the right abilities can gain access to their powers, which neatly serves as evidence that they exist, something no church before the change could accomplish, at least to the best of my knowledge,¡± I told her, wondering if she would become interested in one of the deities out there.


    ¡°What do you think that Lady Hecate will do to them?¡± she asked, returning to the topic of the foursome I was now dragging towards the house after gathering up the second pair.


    ¡°That, I don¡¯t know but I¡¯m certain they will not enjoy it, not at all. Divine Curses can range from the unpleasant to the utterly debilitating, with essentially everything in between covered. Will She judge them on their limited success, or will She take into account that these four idiots weren¡¯t really targeting Her shrine but Luna and me? I can¡¯t answer those questions and won¡¯t even try; I have no intention of getting on a deity''s bad side if I can avoid it, especially not on Lady Hecate¡¯s, as she has been quite generous to me. But regardless of deity, their bad side is not a place you would want to be,¡± I explained, a small chuckle escaping me.


    ¡°Yeah, even if I have no idea what a deity can do, I doubt they get that title just because they want to have it,¡± she nodded just as I opened the door. I had to briefly consider how to get the four fools into the altar room for judgment, but the question was taken from my hand when Silva came running, grabbing the first by the leg and starting to drag him across the floor. As she did, I made sure to use my magic to keep the dirt out; there was no need to drag it all across the floor.


    ¡°Do you think I can watch?¡± the woman asked, and after a moment of consideration, I simply nodded. She would serve as a witness that it wasn¡¯t me who punished these fools but a higher power. It would be interesting to see what the locals did with that information.

 Chapter 1123

    ¡°What¡¯s going to happen now?¡± the woman asked, even as her eyes darted all around my house, taking in the impossibly modern ambience. With a brief wave of my hand, I placed flames on a few strategically placed scones on the wall, bringing light into the dark building. That allowed her to see the place in all its considerable glory, making it especially impressive for somebody who hadn¡¯t been able to enjoy anything like this in over a year.


    ¡°Would you believe me if I were to tell you that I do not know?¡± I asked, barely hiding a grin when admitting my ignorance, ¡°It¡¯s not all that often that somebody is this stupid; people generally have better sense than trying to set divine shrines on fire or defile them in some other manner.¡±


    I paused for a moment before deciding that the only way to get the woman¡¯s name, just so I wouldn¡¯t have to think of her as ¡®that woman¡¯ any longer, was to ask her. Which is exactly what I did and she told me her name was Stephanie, a name I filed away somewhere in my mind.


    ¡°Anyway, the plan, as you can see, is to bring these four into the Shrine proper and from there, Lady Hecate will take things away.¡± I shrugged as Silva dragged the first guy into the room, holding the altar and the statues of Lady Hecate, even though the three were wearing the faces of Luna, myself and the Grandmother. It would be interesting to see if Stephanie would notice and, if she did, what she would make of it.


    Luna joined the two of us in the altar room, giving Stepanie and me a nod in greeting while Silva continued her work. Curiously, I noticed that despite the flames I had conjured, the faces of the three statues remained in supernatural shadow, a darkness even I couldn¡¯t pierce with my incredibly high affinity to Darkness Magic and my usually impeccable dark vision. I had no doubt that Lady Hecate had Her hand in that, though I wasn¡¯t completely certain why. Maybe She wanted to preserve some mystery, but it could be anything. If I had learned one thing, it was to never assume with Her, and maybe with any deity, they might always come up with a way to surprise you. Then, As soon as Silva finished dragging all four of our attackers up to the altar, things immediately got interesting.


    Even the least perceptive person would have noticed the change in the air; the flames I had ignited earlier, their fire a relatively normal orange-red, suddenly turned into a deep green colour, giving the room an eerie ambience, especially when the flames started to move along the walls, causing the shadows to shift wildly. At the same time, the air quickly grew thick with power, and the statues behind the altar started to slowly move, their eyes alight with an unearthly glow. Curiously, despite the glowing eyes, the rest of their faces remained shrouded in a strange, highly ominous gloom. Even I, who usually felt right at home in any sort of darkness, was somewhat uncomfortable with it, as if something within my mind was screaming at me that this should not be. From the looks on my companions'' faces, they were similarly afflicted.


    ¡°Awaken!¡± a voice composed of three different voices commanded. It wasn¡¯t quite the usual voice of Lady Hecate; even if it held all its usual theatrics, something was subtly different. I couldn''t tell the difference, just that it wasn¡¯t how She usually sounded. The literal divine command, spoken in a place consecrated to Her, was enough to shatter the Mind Magic I had used to keep the four unconscious, even with the somewhat rough treatment Silva and I had used to drag them into the shrine, and all four awoke immediately.


    Just as immediately, they tried to get to their feet, likely in an attempt to run away, if their panicked behaviour was any indication. However, despite their frantic scrambling and wiggling, they didn¡¯t move anywhere, almost as if they were bound in invisible ropes, just without the distinct areas of pressure. Maybe She had somehow limited their possible spatial displacement by a certain amount, meaning they couldn¡¯t move any further than that discrete distance. Or it was some other effect; even with my advanced magical senses, I was unable to discern that anything out of the ordinary was going on there. Somehow, that disconnect between what my mundane senses combined with my experience told me and what my magical senses were telling me made the entire scene even more surreal and intimidating.


    ¡°Jacob, Enzo, Marcus and Detlef,¡± the voice addressed each of the four in turn, the focus of those glowing eyes as disturbing as it was obvious. ¡°You have attempted to destroy Our shrine! To defile what was erected in OUR name!¡± The accusation was obvious and it, combined with the sheer intimidation created by the voice, the location and those glowing eyes, was enough to make one of them, I believe the guy named Detlef, lose control of his bladder.


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    ¡°You have done so out of greed and arrogance, ignoring the debts you owe to those We have blessed in your realm. Debts of Life,¡± at that, the eyes focused on Jacob, ¡°Debts of honour,¡± the eyes focused on Enzo, ¡°and material debts,¡± this time, all four of them got their moment under the freezing glare of those eyes.


    ¡°We have seen your minds, We have seen your hearts and what We have seen, We have found wanting. You are,¡± here, the voice paused again, letting the anticipation chill the hearts of the accused even further. Or maybe they should be called convicted, as there didn¡¯t seem to be any actual trial happening.


    ¡°Pathetic,¡± the voice finally stated, the word hanging in the air for a moment, impossibly reverberating within the small, fairly filled space.


    ¡°For your actions, a curse upon you all,¡± the voice declared, and for a moment, I waited, wondering if Lady Hecate would explain what the curse did. But no such explanation was forthcoming, only a surge of magic, strangely slow and deliberate, allowing me to follow along with the effect and its mechanisms.


    Quite frankly, the entire curse was a thing of beauty. The first, striking all four of them, was somewhat similar to an idea I had just the day before, binding together a mental effect and a physical effect before anchoring the entire thing to the target¡¯s soul, making it incredibly potent despite the strangely limited power She employed. Assuming one had the ability to meddle in a divine curse, if I used it with my own abilities and without simply copying what Lady Hecate was weaving together, it would be difficult to remove but with the precision and, for lack of a better word, tightness, Lady Hecate used in Her weave? I doubted anyone could unravel that, especially not without causing tremendous harm to the target¡¯s soul.


    Amusingly, the effect itself was fairly simple: nothing but a fear effect afflicting the target with an incredible fear of fire and dogs. However, despite the effect''s simplicity, I had a feeling that its consequences would be utterly devastating. Any canine would cause these four to fear for their lives, and I doubted they would be able to handle anything burning or get close to any open flames without starting to tremble in mortal terror. Given that canines would likely soon regain their status as man¡¯s best friend and most important partner for every hunter out there, it shut a door to them and any group they might be part of, simply because these four would be useless when a dog was near.


    And yet, despite the debilitating effect the fear of canines would have, the fear of fire would be worse. They would be unable to cook or relax near a warm fire; even a candle would send their hearts into palpitations if they could find one. Nights would be utterly dark and cold unless they managed to find somebody to help them at all times.


    Then, a second curse was woven, this one only striking Jacob, the guy whose life I had saved during the quest. Compared to the first, it was much more powerful, but it lacked subtlety. If I understood the mechanisms I observed correctly, it would be impossible to heal Jacob magically in the future; any attempts would fail or be turned into something harmful.


    ¡°All who look at you will know of your perfidy and the punishment We levelled upon you. Now, be gone from Our sacred space!¡± the voice commanded, and with the command, the magic that kept the four in their place, despite their obvious panic, dissipated. Given that they had been cursed with a mortal fear of fire and they were all held in a room filled with numerous floating flames, the speed with which they fled couldn¡¯t have increased all that much if the flames had set their behinds on fire; they were that quick.


    ¡°The lesson you could watch today, Jade, is a small reward for you,¡± Lady Hecate told me, now speaking in her usual voice, and I could almost see the grin on her face despite the fact that all three statues remained shrouded in darkness.


    ¡°We shall speak again, Daughter and Mother.¡± With those words, the glow faded from the statues¡¯ eyes, the flames returned to their scones and regained their normal colours, and the entire ominous atmosphere faded like a dreadful nightmare upon waking.


    ¡°Wow,¡± it was only a whisper from Stephanie but somehow, it encapsulated my feelings quite well.

 Chapter 1124

    The state Stephanie was left in after witnessing Lady Hecate''s judgement was quite amusing. For almost a minute after it ended, she just stood there, her eyes flickering from the statues, now no longer concealed in shadow, to the rest of the room before finally settling on Luna and me. Then, she realised she was staring at us and looked away, causing the cycle to start anew.


    ¡°Did you notice?¡± Luna asked quietly at one point, making me look at her with a raised eyebrow, inquiring what she meant. ¡°Those four, when I looked at them as they ran away, I could somehow tell that Lady Hecate had punished them. It was as if they are constantly wearing a big sign, saying, ¡®I was naughty and have been punished for it,¡¯ with Lady Hecate¡¯s signature at the bottom of the sign,¡± she explained, making me frown. I hadn¡¯t noticed anything along those lines, but I had been completely focused on my magical senses to the exclusion of all else.


    ¡°No, I did not,¡± I admitted. Did you notice that phenomenon, Stephanie?¡± I asked the other witness, which caused her to flinch.


    ¡°Yes, I noticed,¡± she quickly replied. It was quite obvious, though I have no idea how I knew it was Lady Hecate. "


    ¡°Curious,¡± I muttered, turning to get to the front of the house, hopefully allowing me to experience the effect for myself.


    Luckily, the frantic flight of the foursome hadn¡¯t brought them all that far; the slick, muddy ground had caused all of them to slip and fall, draining some more of their remaining strength. Otherwise, they would probably have made it to the house, though whether they could have gone in or not, I wasn¡¯t sure. There seemed to be fires burning inside, so they would have to weigh their newly acquired instinctual terror in the presence of a fire with their desire to stay warm, a conundrum I found deeply amusing.


    Now, looking at them without the utmost focus on my magical senses, I could feel the effect the others had described, and for a moment, I had to stop myself from giggling when I realised that I had seen a similar effect before. Hel, even now, I was exuding a similar effect myself, though in my case, that effect would tell everyone looking at me that I carried a Titanic Ambition but luckily, I had learned to conceal the effect with my Darkness Magic. Granted, there were some differences, especially as this effect was a lot more understandable for the average person, but other than that, the similarities were striking.


    Fascinating, too.


    Still, thanks to this effect, nobody would be able to claim that I had wronged these guys in some fashion unless the person doing the thinking was so uninformed that they believed I had the power to enact divine judgment. But if somebody believed that, I was somewhat confident that they would be too scared to try and annoy me for enacting said divine judgment. I was not completely confident; there was always human idiocy to consider, but few normal humans would be foolish enough to annoy a being they believed to be divine, at least I hoped so.


    Either way, with the effect in play and with Stephanie acting as a witness, I doubted there¡¯d be trouble for this.


    As I was standing there, considering that, Stephanie quickly made her way past me, looking somewhat frantic, and retreated into the primary house, largely ignoring the four guys who had just managed to get out of the mud, as they had been slipping and sliding a little, causing them to be completely covered. It looked quite amusing, at least for anyone observing from the outside; I had no doubt that these four didn¡¯t think this was funny in any way, shape or form.


    ¡°What do you think would happen if we decide that the attack was meant to drive us off?¡± I asked Luna, curious what she would think. We had completed the quest, well, I had completed it while Luna remained behind and gained a share of the EXP for it, but we had yet to receive the reward. So, if we left, ostensibly due to the attack, would the system deem that we had abandoned our reward, or would it be considered a case in which the quest-giver, meaning the locals, had driven us off with the attempted assassination?


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    It would be fairly interesting to see, just from an experimental standpoint, so I was quite willing to potentially abandon the reward in order to see what would happen. Even if I had a sinking feeling that the system might be intelligent enough to discern my intent, making any observations I made of the system suspect at best or deliberate misinformation from it at worst. But then, trying to judge the intent and abilities of what might just be a computer program observing a bunch of mice in a lab by acting in specific ways while the computer had at least some access to my mind was questionable. Still, this might just be a fairly unique opportunity to gather data on this.


    ¡°Good question,¡± Luna had to admit, ¡°The system would have to judge whether we were driven off, fearful for our lives, or at least in an abundance of caution, compared to leaving for some other reason. It all comes down to a question of whether the system is able to accurately discern our mental states and motivations,¡± she paused for a moment, her face turning serious, ¡°On a less humorous note, how confident are you that the fuel they used is the best stuff they have? I noticed there was something weird in the stuff, not quite sure what it actually was; maybe alchemical in nature, so how likely do you think it is that they have something worse? And, if they do, how confident are you to deal with it when surprised in your sleep?¡±


    Luna¡¯s questions were quite unsettling. Sure, I had managed to deal with their firebombs without trouble, but if I hadn¡¯t noticed them before they started, could I have dealt with it just as easily? Or if the fuel they used burned harder, hotter or stronger in some other form? There were ways to set fire to stone and burn through the material; I was even somewhat confident that there were ways to ignite the Astral Power itself, though I was quite confident nobody here could accomplish that. And yet, Luna¡¯s questions began to make me wonder and worry; maybe leaving wasn¡¯t just for the sake of an experiment but simply a wise and cautious idea.


    ¡°You might be right,¡± I admitted, ¡°How long would you need to pack? And how many protections should we install, just to make sure Lady Hecate¡¯s Shrine isn¡¯t vandalised after we leave, you know, just in case?¡± I asked my daughter, her expression mirroring the grave concern I was likely showing on my own face.


    ¡°Give me fifteen to pack, then I¡¯ll commune with the Lady while you continue packing the rest. Thirty minutes from now, we can be on the road, at least if you don¡¯t want to tear down the walls or something,¡± she told me, and I nodded in agreement. If the Lady wanted extra protection for the place, a quick communion would give us the necessary information, especially if she decided to put her hand in.


    Working as fast as possible without sacrificing caution, as I didn¡¯t want to break any of our possessions, I stuffed the various things we had into the magical bags, inordinately happy about that particular project. Thanks to it we could literally carry everything we wanted with us, without having to worry about the weight or size of the different items. Soon, even something as sinfully comfortable and impossible to transport as proper mattresses would join the items we carried and I might even make a magical bag just to fill with those once we found a proper store to raid.


    Shaking my head, I cleared my mind of these distractions and, once everything we needed to take was packed, made my way into the shrine, where my dear Luna was radiating an unearthly glow, making it obvious that she was channelling a great deal of Lady Hecate¡¯s power.


    Soon, I could feel the enchantments and protections settle in the stone all around us, though this time, I had no idea what was happening, making it obvious that allowing me to observe the earlier cursing had been deliberate on Lady Hecate¡¯s part, maybe as a reward to me.


    Whatever the case, once Luna was finished, the three of us quietly made our way out of the enclosure I had created, a fairly large, spiteful part of me clamouring that I should shatter these walls and let the idiots suffer. But I decided against it, especially as another, even larger, part of me was curious if the system would enact a punishment for the outcome of the quest I had performed. For that, altering the conditions would be foolish, and I wanted the observation to be as undisturbed as possible. Thus, I only left a few scrying constructs sitting in various nearby trees, an ominous murder of crows, gazing at the farm we were leaving.

 Interlude: Consequences

    Sylvia was dragged from the blessed unconsciousness of sleep by the sound of arguing voices. That, in and of itself, was nothing new; arguments were tragically common, an almost inevitable consequence of having too many people in too little space with almost nothing to do all day, leading to boredom and eventually to arguments. It was even worse since the storm had made going outside an unpleasant prospect at best, so people stuck inside and tried to find something to entertain themselves until tempers started to rise. As they apparently did now.


    Though it didn¡¯t sound like a normal argument, the entire thing was too loud and passionate, causing her to crinkle her forehead into a frown. Blinking open her eyes, the first thing she noticed was a blue box, a notification from the system. After a moment or two of blankly staring, she blinked again before wiping a bit of grit from her eyes to read it. And what she read made her blood run cold and caused anger to rise in her soul. The first blue box in her vision was a notification telling her that she had been assigned the title of Oathbreaker.


    The name alone would be ominous, and the description only managed to make it worse. An Oathbreaker, as the box informed her, was somebody who had been part of breaking a solemn Oath, giving the example of abandoning one¡¯s sworn duty or reneging on a promised reward for a completed quest. Furthermore, anyone seeing her would know of the title, and the only way to get rid of it was to undergo a fair penance, depending on the level of involvement.


    The next box described her as a Silent Enabler, somebody who looked on but did nothing. At first glance, that didn¡¯t sound too bad, but Sylvia quickly realised that, while it might not sound too bad, the connotations were still painful. Memories of history classes sprung up unbidden, of large groups who all claimed that they just did not know. Silent enabler, they had been called, a label she now carried as well. And at .east until they managed to figure out what the fair penance was, she would be forced to continue to doing so. Whatever ¡®fair penance¡¯ meant in practice, there wasn¡¯t really a guideline here.


    Rising from her mattress, she quickly dressed before leaving her small private area. Given the continuing argument, she considered it likely that it was about those very boxes and what might have caused them. When she saw Serene, somebody she considered something of a friend, she instinctively paused, the sudden knowledge that she was looking at an Oathbreaker and a silent enabler flashing through her mind. It wasn¡¯t like the boxes from the system, something easily ignored and pushed away until one had time to deal with it, it was something a lot more intrusive. Just looking at her friend, who flinched when looking at her, suggesting that she was experiencing something similar, made her uneasy. The continued barrage of knowledge told her that she needed to be cautious, that she couldn¡¯t trust that woman. It was almost maddening, not due to some great, singular impact but because it was continuous; as long as she was looking at Serene, the thought just didn¡¯t go away.


    ¡°That¡¯s some punishment, isn¡¯t it?¡± Serene asked, deliberately looking past Sylvia as she spoke.


    ¡°Given that I have no idea what I actually did, or supposedly have done, yeah, it¡¯s some heavy shit,¡± Sylvia replied, deciding that looking at the wall was better than having the fact that Serene was an Oathbreaker hammered into her head.


    ¡°Well, you know that woman who made the wall outside, Jade or whatever?¡± When Sylvia nodded in response, Serene continued, ¡°Apparently, Jacob and a couple of others had the glorious idea to keep her from spreading some undefined evil here, so they decided to take some of Detlef¡¯s moonshine, or whatever that stuff is, mix some Molotov''s and try to burn the witch, or something along those lines,¡±


    Syliva could only stare in abject horror. Sure, the words individually made sense, but when taken together, it sounded as if Jacob and his merry men had tried to murder the woman who had, amongst other things, pulled an almost modern house, completely furnished, from the ground with little effort. Who had protected their fields and houses from the flooding and even saved Jacob¡¯s life.


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    ¡°They tried to kill her?¡± Sylvia had to ask, not wanting to believe that idiotic idea, ¡°Wait, we gave them a quest yesterday. Did that ever get paid out?¡± she continued, realising what might have happened. After all, giving out quests underpinned by the system and then killing the people who helped you would be quite problematic, so it was eminently possible that this was the broken Oath.


    ¡°No idea,¡± Serene admitted with a shrug, ¡°But anyway, they failed, quite spectacularly, and that got them, and apparently us all, into hot water. They are just in a lot deeper than the rest of us.¡±


    ¡°Now I¡¯m almost scared to ask what happened to them?¡± Sylvia had to ask, despite feeling deep down that she would regret it.


    ¡°Take a look,¡± Serene suggested, nodding towards the front and the arguing voices. Despite knowing that curiosity was an evil cat-killer, Sylvia couldn¡¯t help herself and moved in that direction. As soon as she could see the arguing people, information slammed into her mind, just as it had earlier with Serene. Only, when looking at the various people here, it wasn¡¯t just the knowledge that they were Oathbreakers. She also knew that four of them, including Jacob, were labelled as Perpetrators, while the others were a mix of Silent Enablers and Malevolent Cheerleaders. Only two carried the label of Active Objector and curiously, they invoked the weakest feeling of distrust. On the other hand, the feeling she got when looking at Jacob and his perpetrators made her reach for a weapon; it was that strong.


    She also knew that they were perpetrators and had been struck by Divine Punishment for desecrating a shrine to Lady Hecate. The punishment was not detailed, but the message was very, very obvious.


    ¡°That¡¯s¡­ something,¡± Sylvia muttered when Serene stepped up next to her, listening to the continuing argument between Jacob and his perpetrators and Stephanie, who was joined by a few people, including the pair of active objectors. It didn¡¯t take long for the gist of the argument to become obvious: the question of what would constitute Just Punishment, according to the system, and whether they all should bow to it.


    Amusingly, the second part was discussed with much less fervour, even though Jacob was quite passionate about it. That might be because he was one of the primary perpetrators, so any punishment would seriously hit him.


    ¡°I believe we have to bow to this,¡± Sylvia joined into the argument, only to quickly realise that she couldn¡¯t make any new argument. The problem was fairly obvious. As long as the punishment persisted, even something as simple as looking at each other was disturbing and faintly painful, though given the persistent nature of the mental bombardment, it was doubtful whether the pain would remain faint. Most likely, it would quickly mount, like some sort of water drop torture, and that was ignoring the side-effect such a persistent barrage would have.


    Just having her brain bombarded with the knowledge that somebody she called friend was untrustworthy and had to be guarded against was somewhat disturbing, but what if that bombardment was describing a loved one, a spouse or, maybe worst of all, a child? Or vice versa, what would happen to the mental and emotional development of a child brought up with a constant barrage telling them that their parents were untrustworthy?


    No, this punishment needed to end,and it needed to end soon. Otherwise, their community would shatter. Hell, it might shatter anyway, just because people were disturbed by the connotations this event had. Maybe the discussion shouldn¡¯t just focus on how to punish these fools for causing it but also how to keep such an event from occurring again.


    As the discussion continued, more and more people joined in, drawn by the occasionally raised voices and the arguing. Only, thanks to the negative title, even usually pleasant people were getting aggressive, mistrust and a faint disdain soon joining the general annoyance, and things were heating up quickly.


    All it would take for the entire situation to escalate in some rather brutal fashion was a spark, a spark that was struck just as Ned, the usually oh-so-calm and somewhat stern Legacy, the best fighter of their entire village, struck Jacob, yelling at him that annoying a Sorceress capable of powerful magic as Jade undoubtedly was could be considered foolish, attacking a Shrine without having some sort of divine patronage and backing was a lot worse.


    From that small spark, things escalated. And escalated quickly¡­

 Chapter 1125

    As we were marching away from the small farm-turned-village, I was just a little less attentive and vigilant than I usually would have been. Luna and Silva had to pick up the slack but given that I had warned them beforehand, that wasn¡¯t all that problematic. They knew my mind was, quite literally, a few miles away and getting further from us with every step we took, as my mind was largely focused on the scrying constructs I had placed around the farm. Those would hopefully give me a bit of insight into the consequences the locals had to endure for driving us away without giving us the agreed-upon reward for the quest we performed for them. After all, how could anyone trust the system if some random guy might give you a quest and, after you completed it, they tried to murder you so that they didn¡¯t have to pay you? The entire thing would unravel, and once a part of the whole unravelled, who knew what would happen to the rest?


    At least, that was my current thinking; I wanted to see how close to the truth I was and for that, I needed to see the effects of our departure. Now, with the sun slowly rising over the mountains, I was quite hopeful I would see the first effects soon.


    It was quite fascinating to watch, even if I felt a little sketchy, because I had to place one of my scrying constructs right next to a window so I could observe the events. However, that slight discomfort was one I was quite willing to disregard to satisfy my curiosity. And satisfy my curiosity, I did.


    The moment one of the locals woke up, I could immediately see the change through the window. The guy looked briefly confused, and at the same time, I suddenly knew I was looking at an Oathbreaker and a Silent Enabler. As an Oathbreaker, they couldn¡¯t be trusted, and as a Silent Enabler, I knew that they wouldn¡¯t care to act in order to prevent injustice as long as it didn¡¯t directly impact them.


    How I knew that, I couldn¡¯t discern; it was as if the moment the guy awoke, the information was transmitted into my brain, alongside an instinctual caution, as I just knew the guy couldn¡¯t be trusted. It didn¡¯t take a tremendous intellectual effort to connect their betrayal and attempted murder of me with the fact that they were now branded as Oathbreakers; I was more curious about the fact that it apparently only applied to those who were awake. Or maybe only once the person awoke for the first time and was informed by the system of their new status. At least, I assumed that the system informed them, but I couldn¡¯t be certain.


    What I could be certain of was that the effect that branded them as Oathbreakers was a lot louder, for lack of a better expression than the effect that informed people about the divine punishment Jacob had been subjected to. This was something I doubted anyone would be able to conceal, even if some people would probably want them to, simply because the effect was almost painful in its intensity. Like some sort of constantly wailing siren, only the sound went off directly in your head the moment your sight focused on one of those guys. It was quite the perplexing effect, working through sight even though my eyes were currently far from them, making me wonder if I could replicate something like that. Or something like that; it was a fairly fascinating effect. I couldn¡¯t detect any medium it was travelling through; there was no magic, no Astral or Divine Power I could detect; it was simply the most pervasive and, at the same time, the subtlest effect I had ever come across. Somewhat maddening, yes, but also incredibly fascinating.


    Out of curiosity, I moved another scrying crow over to another window, looking at a different person, waiting for them to wake, too. And, again, as soon as they awoke, I just knew them to be an Oathbreaker, but with this one, it was accompanied by the information that they were a Malevolent Cheerleader, egging on others for nothing but their own amusement without any regard for the suffering they would cause others. Here, the knowledge that they couldn¡¯t be trusted was also joined by a faint disdain, a simmering sense of anger and annoyance directed at them, making me more likely to lash out if I were to encounter them.


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    Slightly discomforted by the outside influence exerted over my mind, I largely retreated from the scrying constructs, just keeping enough of a connection so they wouldn¡¯t dispel and instead focused inwards on my own mental processes. There was no trace of the influence I had felt just moments earlier, nor was there any indication that I had received a transfer of information beyond the streams coming from the scrying constructs. This lack of any evidence only drove home that the effects they were under came directly from the system, meaning it might use some form of system-internal effect beyond the magical arts I knew about. While I desperately wanted to study it, the problem was that I just couldn¡¯t detect ¡®it¡¯, just infer ¡®its¡¯ existence thanks to the currently available information.


    Shaking my head, I focused back on my scrying constructs, hoping to learn a little more. But what I saw made me pause in surprise; things had escalated quickly. Before, a few people had been walking around; now, a number of them were arguing, and that number was growing fairly quickly. Just as I thought things might calm down a little, as Ned had joined the argument and the guy was, to the best of my knowledge, the strongest person in town, things escalated even further when the first punch was thrown.


    I could only gawk in disbelief as the argument turned into a full-out brawl, with shouting, screaming, and even a bit of hair-pulling and scratching, all interspersed with punches, kicks and bites. It was quite brutal, and I could already see a lot of blood splatter around, but then it got even worse when one guy pulled a knife.


    ¡°Wow,¡± I couldn¡¯t help but mutter, my attention partially returning to my body.


    ¡°What¡¯s going on, mom?¡± Luna asked; my muttering had caught her attention.


    ¡°The people back at the farm started to fight,¡± I replied, pausing my slow walk to fully focus on the fight back at the farm while narrating a bit of what I could see to my daughter.


    ¡°From what I can tell, they were all branded as Oathbreakers, I would guess, because they drove us away without paying us our promised reward,¡± I explained. ¡°I think the branding makes them distrust each other, plus, they also have an effect labelling them as enablers, cheerleaders or perpetrators, dividing them even further. That division, alongside some anger from those who consider themselves innocent, riled up the collective temper until it exploded violently. Once violence had started, it only got worse, as such things sadly often are,¡± I finished, just as the first guy at the farm went down with a knife stuck in his gut.


    ¡°Yikes,¡± Luna sounded appropriately horrified by the image I was describing of people who turned on their friends and caused a massive mess, though I wasn¡¯t quite as sympathetic to them as she was. Maybe because she had spent more time with them, I wasn¡¯t sure.


    ¡°I wonder why they were all subjected to that Oathbreaker and not just the one giving us the quest,¡± Luna mused, making me consider the question as well.


    ¡°As I understand it, only the leaders of a community can assign quests. That¡¯s how Mrs Wu explained it to me when she reached that status. But what if there is no elected leader, just some strange sort of general consensus they follow?¡± I paused, trying to find the right words, ¡°I mean, they probably all agreed that somebody should go and help Ned and his group, right? So they all supported the quest, at least subconsciously. Or maybe the somewhat anarchic structure they had meant that everyone could assign a quest if the need was there. But, in turn, they were all on the hook for the quest they didn¡¯t reward, and now, they are all being punished for it.¡±


    ¡°Harsh,¡± Luna paused for a moment, ¡°We should make sure that we are never part of such a group. I don¡¯t know what the Oathbreaker thing actually does other than tell everyone that this person is an Oathbreaker, but I don¡¯t want to be subjected to it.¡±


    ¡°Agreed, we might want to ask Lady Hecate at some point; she undoubtedly knows more; we just have to figure out how much it would cost us to obtain the information,¡± I nodded, just as unwilling to experiment with that particular mechanic as Luna was.


    ¡°Maybe, though you still have that demonstration from earlier to digest, don¡¯t you, Mom?¡± Luna asked, chuckling just a little at the fact that Lady Hecate had turned cursing of those four into a demonstration on proper curses for me. Maybe to reward me for catching them and bringing them into her shrine for judgement, or because I had left the punishment to her, who other than Lady Hecate knew?

 Chapter 1126

    ¡°Well, that escalated really far, really fast,¡± I couldn¡¯t help but mutter once I took another glance through my scrying constructs. I hadn¡¯t focused on Luna all that long, just long enough to explain what I had seen, heard and felt, but that bit of time had been enough to bring the entire brawl to an end, leaving three people on the ground, grievously wounded, while the rest looked worse for wear. Given that one of those three guys still had a knife sticking from his chest, I wasn¡¯t about to bet on his chances of survival. Unless they had a magical healer of some sort, but given that I had been asked to help Cy the day before, well, I doubted they had somebody for this.


    As I continued to watch, I realised that nobody seemed to be willing to help the downed people. It took far longer than I would have thought, especially in a community which had to be as close-knit as this one, for anyone to check on them and by that point, the one with the knife in his chest had stopped moving completely. Additionally, when looking at the body, there was no knowledge slamming into my head, reminding me that he was an Oathbreaker; it was as if he was just part of the scenery. Or rather, I was fairly certain he was no longer there, just his body. Death seemed to have washed away the shame of breaking an Oath.


    And even once they started checking the bodies, they lacked any sort of gentle care, making me wonder just how great the impact of that Oathbreaker effect was when viewed directly. I couldn¡¯t quite fathom that people, after living together in close quarters for months, could be so callous to treat others in their group like this. It was rougher than I would treat a stranger unless I already knew and didn¡¯t like them, but for everyone to be like this? It boggled my mind, driving home the lesson we had learned: be careful around Oaths, be mindful of your obligations and, most of all, don¡¯t mess around with effects you don¡¯t understand.


    ¡°That¡¯s just a little bit insane,¡± I told Luna as I was describing the events I had witnessed once the two injured people had been taken away and the body carried out for a later burial.


    As I was saying that, Luna let out a long, drawn-out yawn, reminding me that our rest had been short and our days quite long, so looking for a temporary shelter to get some additional shut-eye sounded like a wonderful idea. It would also allow me to get a better look at the events back at the farm. Without the continued travel to occupy my mind, it would be a lot easier to focus there. I might even be able to channel some magic through one of my scrying constructs if I were to be so inclined. There were a few fairly amusing ways I might be able to use such an effect, especially if they managed to start another brawl.


    Finding a suitable spot to camp for a few hours was easy, even with the ongoing rain. It just took a bit of magic and we had a roof to keep out the rain, walls to avoid the wind and dry space to lay down our sleeping bags. Once again, I was reminded just how much we relied on these powers, and I was incredibly grateful for my ability to use the different elements. Otherwise, we would have been forced to improvise a lot, or the travel would have been completely impossible. I briefly wondered how many people could travel like this but didn¡¯t think there were all that many, simply due to the wide array of abilities needed. Maybe if some group of Travellers had been living together before the change, but given that the capsules had allegedly been assigned randomly, that wasn¡¯t all that likely.


    Shaking my head, I made sure that Luna was comfortable and Silva was willing to keep an open ear before focusing back through my scrying constructs. There were a few things I wanted to try out, especially in regards to channelling magic across this distance. I already knew it was possible, or at least it had been on Mundus, so it should also be possible here. For a moment, I wondered if using constructs to battle foes across vast distances, somewhat similar to a drone pilot controlling a drone from hundreds of kilometres away, would allow to engage in perfectly safe combat, allowing me to gain a tremendous amount of levels. But just as quickly as that idea came, I had to ask myself a different question. Namely, was it the killing that gave EXP and increased the skills one had, or was it the risk one had to endure? Sigmir, back on Mundus, had told me it had something to do with the opponents¡¯ souls leaving the body, that this process gave a portion of the power that being had in life to its conqueror, but that didn¡¯t make all that much sense if I were, to be honest. It didn¡¯t account for herbivores, nor did it explain why the levels of creatures remained largely constant in an area; at least, it had been that way on Mundus. Maybe Terra hadn¡¯t settled down in that regard yet, just as the Astral hadn¡¯t settled, I wasn¡¯t sure.


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    Something to test later, for now, I just wanted to see if I could cast through my scrying constructs. For that, I needed to project my magic to the area I could see through them through the Astral, meaning I had to partially keep track of the visual connection channelled through my scrying construct and a different connection for my magic, working through the Astral.


    It was a good thing I hadn¡¯t tried that while moving; I would have walked into a tree or something like that or simply fallen on my face. But while sitting on a conjured throne of ice, with my eyes tightly closed and my mind focused on a single scrying construct, it worked out somewhat well. There was some resistance, requiring me to spend additional Astral Power, thus lowering my efficiency, but it worked, at least for small spells.


    Curious, I started testing around a little with a scrying construct some distance from the farm, just so I wouldn¡¯t needlessly alert them and quickly came to a few conclusions. Firstly, the more power I channelled through the connection at once, the worse the resistance became, making it impossible to cast any truly powerful spells. The only way to accomplish anything great would be to work slowly, carefully channelling what power I needed while keeping things under tight control, essentially the opposite of all combat casting. Healing would be possible, but, again, only when done in a slow and steady way.


    To celebrate my successful experiment, I used one of the scrying constructs sitting on the shrine of Lady Hecate next to the farm to conjure a few more scrying constructs, essentially creating a large murder of crows or conspiracy of ravens; my scrying constructs weren¡¯t quite detailed enough to fit neatly into either category. Granted, I wasn¡¯t even completely certain what the detailed differences were, other than the size and, as far as I remembered, the shape of the beak, but even if I were certain, I wouldn¡¯t try to make them perfect, there was just no need.


    Regardless of whether it was ravens or crows that Stephanie saw when she walked towards the shrine, the look on her face was quite amusing, though it also made me realise that I might have overdone it a little. There were, easily, some fifty constructs sitting on that roof, maybe even a hundred, which must have given her some serious creeps. Even worse, given that I only controlled one construct actively, the rest were sitting eerily still, adding to the intimidating atmosphere. However, despite the clearly visible trepidation on her face, she steeled herself and moved across the soggy ground until she reached the door, knocking on it.


    For a moment, I considered what to do, but then I decided to have just that little bit of fun. One of my constructs hopped down, sitting right above her head as she was knocking on the door when I used Wind Magic to speak.


    ¡°Here I¡¯m sitting, nearly napping, and suddenly there is a tapping


    as of some gentle rapping, rapping at my shrine¡¯s door¡­¡±


    Due to the magic I used to make the sounds, my voice sounded completely different; though I wasn¡¯t certain she would even recognise my voice, it wasn¡¯t as if we had talked all that much. Regardless of that, however, the experience of having a completely black raven cite poetry to her was a little too much for Stephanie and after staring at the construct¡¯s beady eyes for half a second, she bolted with surprising alacrity. Sadly, her balance wasn¡¯t up to par, causing her to slip and slide, just as the four fools had done the night before, leaving her in the mud.


    It would be interesting to see if she was willing to return at some point.

 Chapter 1127

    Continuing to observe the people at the farm was a somewhat surreal experience but also a deeply fascinating one. The surreal part came with the continued exposure to the Oathbreaker effect hammering my brain with the knowledge that these people were not trustworthy, making me wonder what long-time exposure would do to a person. It also made me wonder whether this hammering was the only aspect of the effect or if there was more, as I couldn¡¯t really tell whether my continuously rising disdain for them was artificially induced beyond what I had noticed. Regardless, the entire thing drove home just how important it was to avoid breaking my oaths, ever, especially in a way that would have me labelled such. It also sent a shiver of anxiety down my spine when I remembered the group I sought to harden and push onto a path of somewhat authoritarian leadership by giving them an external foe and the divine scolding I had received back then. Luckily, I had never given my Oath or some sort of promise, so I had been safe, but the effect I was observing here drove home just how harsh the consequences could be if the punishment was assigned by the system.


    Maybe it would be best to be very, very cautious with any research and experimentation on any part of the system if this was what the system could do if its rules were broken in a manner egregious enough to trigger these punishment effects. Compared to this, the Divine Curse I had seen earlier, or the effects of Mortal Hubris and Titanic Ambition I had observed on myself, were completely harmless but then, those effects hadn¡¯t been a punishment for messing with the system but one for messing with powerful entities within the system, a somewhat important difference.


    On the other hand, the fascinating part of my observation was the social dynamics I could observe. By now, Luna and I had essentially agreed that the people there didn¡¯t have any real, formal leadership beyond what Ned might have brought to the table as a legacy, but from what I had seen, the guy hadn¡¯t been interested in acting as a community leader, at most, he had been the leader of his party. That might be why the effects I was observing were as pervasive as they were. If the community had essentially been anarchic, with everyone discussing things without a formal, or even subconscious, organisation in place, anyone was essentially a leader. And, as it looked like, the leader could obligate their community, meaning that anyone could assign quests, though possibly only to those from outside the community, and everyone could acknowledge their completion, making this incredibly volatile.


    Now, they were trying to establish some sort of hierarchy or organise something while under the Oathbreaker effect and getting hammered by it if the way they avoided looking at one another was any indication. It had to be quite hard to have that kind of knowledge get hammered into your mind whenever you looked at a friend.


    Mercifully, the children didn¡¯t seem to be affected by the effect; the few that I could see were moving around normally, and I didn¡¯t get any mental feedback from looking at them. However, it made me wonder when the transition from child to adult was according to the system. Was it based on age or level? Going by chronological age, Luna would almost certainly be considered a child, but going by levels, mental and physical maturity and power? Most would see her as an adult, with a few considering her a mature teenager, readily able to step up to take their role in society.


    But that was only a side observation; the really interesting part was watching a few individuals move between small, slowly congregating groups, obviously trying to get some semblance of a democratically chosen council or something like that. From what I could hear through my constructs, they needed to judge those responsible for the Oathbreaker effect or it would persist, something they obviously wanted to avoid. It would be interesting to see how exactly that would work and if there would be lingering effects of the mental hammering, like some sort of conditioned reflex. Maybe keeping a scrying construct or five in the area and taking the occasional look would be a good idea.


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    But as strange and interesting as this hitherto unseen influence of the system was, I was more interested in the effects Lady Hecate had demonstrated during her divine punishment. The curses She had used were quite fascinating, especially given that She had worked as slowly and openly as She had, allowing me to observe with a fair amount of clarity. I had no doubt that this had been deliberate, and Luna¡¯s comments later only confirmed that for me, though I wasn¡¯t completely certain why Lady Hecate had acted as She did.


    Maybe to compensate me for taking over what some might consider my vengeance but I wasn¡¯t too bothered by that. Her actions punished those I wanted to be punished and, if I was honest with myself, there was no way I could have topped what She did without a great of research and experimentation. And even if I had managed, I doubted they would have come close to the tight and neat effects She had created. Those had been a work of art combined with a marvel of magic, both aspects pushed beyond what I could accomplish and, likely, would be able to accomplish for a long time.


    A part of me wondered if I had accidentally undermined Lady Hecate with my actions, as the Oathbreaker effect now in play easily overshadowed Her punishment, taking some of the sting out of it and, if I were reading the situation correctly, would see those She had punished either executed or banished from the community, rendering the punishment somewhat moot. After all, if people didn¡¯t know that somebody had been punished for a certain act, there was no deterrence effect from that punishment, though I doubted that people would willingly desecrate shrines without having proper divine backing in place, making sure that the Gods they were attacking couldn¡¯t just retaliate as Lady Hecate had.


    Regardless of whether my actions were to Her liking or not, I happily parsed out the curse She had used, and while I was well aware that replicating it was beyond me, I could take inspiration from it. There were some fascinating links between Blood Magic and its effects on the Body, Mind Magic and its obvious effects on the Mind, and, lastly, the effects of either were, in turn, influenced by the Soul. Which could be manipulated using Soul Magic, though getting to the point at which I could manipulate a soul in a delicate enough manner to have the changes I made to the Soul had the exact and predicted reflections on Body and Mind would be a long and arduous process. A little like trying to play an instrument from across the room, blindfolded and while using fans or something like that: incredibly indirect, highly dependant on the individual in question and, quite frankly, highly impractical. This wasn¡¯t to say that I wouldn¡¯t be researching how a manipulation of the Soul would reflect on Body and Mind, but I would likely stay with simple changes to the soul and their effects, not trying anything truly delicate for a while.


    Once again, I was reminded just how incredibly complex sapience is and how deeply the different aspects of what makes a being sapient and a person are connected. Sadly, that also reminded me just how difficult it would be to get Sigmir back and into a proper body, how many things could go wrong with that process and how horrible the consequences of things going wrong could be.


    The Body was the most flexible aspect in regards to my plans. As long as the fundamentals were there, it could be adjusted to fit the Mind, and the Soul would hopefully attach to it. However, I had a feeling that a disjunction between the Body and the other two aspects could be debilitating. Still, I felt as if the body was the least problematic aspect, simply because bodies were changing throughout the course of a lifetime anyway, so the Mind and Soul had to be able to cope with a changing body. To what degree and just how that coping would play out? I had no idea.


    My current understanding was that the Mind was of lesser importance. While it stored all memories, memories were, if I remembered correctly, constantly evaluated and partially overwritten as a person grew and reexamined their life. This was why the Soul was the most important aspect, as it had to be responsible for that process and was, quite literally, the thing that made a person into who they were. It decided how experiences were interpreted while also defining a person¡¯s core characteristics. In some ways, the Soul was the essence of a person, so messing with it fundamentally changed who that person was. And I knew I had to mess with Sigmir¡¯s to get my beloved back. And wasn¡¯t that a cheery thought?

 Chapter 1128

    Over the next few days, Luna and I continued to travel north while I observed the ongoing events back at the farm. Luckily, the paths Luna and I were walking on were fairly nice, almost certainly old hiking trails and strangely untouched by the change and subsequent events, making me once again wonder about the rhyme and reason there. Why did some roads deteriorate at a pace that made one think it hadn¡¯t been months but decades since their maintenance stopped while this path was essentially intact? Admittedly, I had no idea how often hiking trails needed to be maintained to remain in a good state, but I was quite certain they needed some maintenance. After all, in the middle of a forest, it was inevitable that leaves and other detritus would land on them before decomposing and forming new soil, therefore slowly burying the path until new growth sprouted in that area.


    Hel, back home, the paths in that forest in which we had set up our first shrine had already deteriorated when we got there a scant few months after the change, leaving the forest in an almost primal state as if humans had never touched it. At least when ignoring the hotel-turned-dungeon in the middle of it. And even there, I wondered if the hotel had been there before the change or if it was some sort of artefact created by it. Here, on the other hand, the paths remained but nothing else, no roads leading to the paths, no parking lots, no signs, nothing but the neatly maintained paths. Maybe Luna and I should keep an eye out for some elves or fey or something like that, but given that we kept an eye out for danger anyway, it shouldn¡¯t be a problem.


    Another aspect of our continued travels was that we had slowly shifted from the completely nocturnal lifestyle we had used to a somewhat less odd one. Since Lia had stayed behind at Jademoon Tower, we had mostly travelled during the night out of habit, not necessarily out of necessity. Sure, I was more comfortable at night, but I still despised the day and was weakened by the sun, but I could deal with it. Solid clothes, portable shade, a bit of Darkness Magic if all else failed, there were ways to keep comfortable, at least as long as I wasn¡¯t running around outside in the bright summer sun. But then, even humans were uncomfortable in those conditions, so I wasn¡¯t overly bothered by this.


    For Luna, on the other hand, travelling during the day was, at least to my somewhat limited knowledge of medicine, simply a better option. Humans had, by and large, evolved as diurnal creatures and needed a certain amount of light and sun. Luna was, even with the alterations done to her body by Lady Hecate, especially those gorgeous eyes of hers, a human and a growing one at that, even if her growth was likely coming to an end, leaving her in a body at the cusp of adulthood.


    Which was an entirely different headache but, luckily, one I didn¡¯t have to deal with at the moment, even if I had been wrestling with it for a while. How was one supposed to treat a person who was chronologically aged seven, as in, it had been about seven years since she had been born, mentally aged closer to thirteen or fourteen, thanks to the lessons Lady Hecate had given her, and physically around seventeen or eighteen thanks to the boost given to her by her attributes and the increased level? I didn¡¯t have an answer and was, slightly unrealistically, hoping that I wouldn¡¯t need one. This was, amusingly, one of the things I would even be willing to pray for, but who was I supposed to pray to? The Mother?


    Regardless of that, travelling during the day had some advantages, which made up for the slight discomfort I occasionally had to endure. This is why we had switched over and were now moving during the day, with the added benefit that it was a lot easier to observe the people at the farm when my sleep schedule was roughly the same as theirs.


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    My observations regarding the farm, however, occasionally made me shiver at the crude way the system implemented the punishment and what apparently needed to be done to overcome its effect. From what I could observe, they were trying to form some sort of consensus from which to judge those who attacked me and those who had egged them on in some way, but nobody trusted one another due to the Oathbreaker effect. As soon as people were talking while looking at each other, they were pushed to argue until they looked away. It was almost like in some of the oldest games I had ever played, where you were forced to battle if you looked another trainer in the eye, just with actual people. All thanks to the brutal mental beating caused by the Oathbreaker effect.


    But the people back at the farm were actually making progress, slowly but surely. Part of that might be because they had started to use Lady Hecate¡¯s Shrine, which seemed to partially shield them from the effect. It turned out that Lady Hecate, mostly in her guise as the Grandmother, was giving them some advice and taking a far more active role than I would have expected her to, which was another curiosity.


    As was the fact that Sylvia was chosen to be the caretaker of the Shrine by Lady Hecate and essentially inducted as a cleric, though I could see that her education was focused on arcane magic given to her by the statue of the mother in a guise very much resembling yours truly. Watching the lessons was somewhat eye-opening, especially when I compared what I was observing to my memories of lessons I had given in the past and quickly realised that they matched to an almost frightening degree. I could only guess at the reasons why Lady Hecate was recycling my old lessons. Maybe She wanted the source of arcane development on Terra to be of Terran origin, not something given to the people ex machina as Divine Magic was, or maybe She wanted to strengthen the association between the Mother and lessons on Arcane Magic; both were somewhat plausible possibilities.


    Regardless of Her reasons, it was quite interesting to see my own lessons from an outsider¡¯s perspective. At the same time, I could marvel at the fascinating effect surrounding the Mother¡¯s statue; it seemed to be a mix of Darkness and Mind Magic, effectively concealing any association between the statue, which looked like me, and my own identity. The statue was of the Mother, not of Jade Morgana, even if the Mother and Jade Morgana looked exactly alike. This made me wonder why Lady Hecate was acting like this here but differently elsewhere, like at Jademoon Tower. Maybe it was just Her mood, maybe She had actual reasons, or it might even be caused by the simple roll of a dice; by now, I wasn¡¯t about to assume anything.


    One midday, as Luna and I were comfortably enjoying one of the many gorgeous views we had from up here in the mountains, I realised that the landscape below wasn¡¯t what it should be. Sure, it was gorgeous, but as far as my eyes could see, which was quite far from up here in the mountains, I could barely see any remains of human civilisation. Sure, this used to be one of the Dakotas or maybe Montana, so one of the less populated places, but still, in the hundred-odd kilometres I could see, there should be more than the handful of broken towns and shattered roads.


    And yet, there were no regular shapes, nothing that hinted at fields and such, just the endless, fairly flat land, filled with slowly growing grass, a few trees, hedges and a bit of wildlife. A part of me wondered if there would soon be herds of bison or buffalo, maybe changed by the system from wild cattle. At the moment, those sorts of beasts would find these endless lands probably close to heaven. At least until their natural predators returned or humans regained their footing and started to systematically hunt them, time would tell how that would turn out.


    It would probably not turn out as it had in the past, but if the system boosted animals just as it boosted humans, improving their bodies and, maybe more importantly, their intelligence, possibly giving them magical abilities to fight back, it would be fascinating to see. And given that the system seemed to be returning large pieces of land to a primal state, with only minimal, if any, remnants of human civilisation, I had a feeling the system would be, at best, neutral in regards to humans, not giving them any additional boosts over the many other animals. But, again, only time would tell.